The Milagrosa, with her consort the Hidalga rolling after her, steered a south by westerly course, then veered to the southeast round Cape Tiburon, and thereafter, standing well out to sea, with the land no more than a cloudy outline to larboard, she headed directly east, and so ran straight into the arms of Captain Blood, who was making for the Windward Passage, as we know. That happened early on the following morning. After having systematically hunted his enemy in vain for a year, Don Miguel chanced upon him in this unexpected and entirely fortuitous fashion. But that is the ironic way of Fortune. It was also the way of Fortune that Don Miguel should thus come upon the Arabella at a time when, separated from the rest of the fleet, she was alone and at a disadvantage. It looked to Don Miguel as if the luck which so long had been on Blood’s side had at last veered in his own favour.
Miss Bishop, newly risen, had come out to take the air on the quarter-deck with his lordship in attendance—as you would expect of so gallant a gentleman—when she beheld the big red ship that had once been the Cinco Llagas out of Cadiz. The vessel was bearing down upon them, her mountains of snowy canvas bellying forward, the long pennon with the cross of St. George fluttering from her main truck in the morning breeze, the gilded portholes in her red hull and the gilded beak-head aflash in the morning sun.
Miss Bishop was not to recognize this for that same Cinco Llagas which she had seen once before—on a tragic day in Barbados three years ago. To her it was just a great ship that was heading resolutely, majestically, towards them, and an Englishman to judge by the pennon she was flying. The sight thrilled her curiously; it awoke in her an uplifting sense of pride that took no account of the danger to herself in the encounter that must now be inevitable.
Beside her on the poop, whither they had climbed to obtain a better view, and equally arrested and at gaze, stood Lord Julian. But he shared none of her exultation. He had been in his first sea-fight yesterday, and he felt that the experience would suffice him for a very considerable time. This, I insist, is no reflection upon his courage.
“Look,” said Miss Bishop, pointing; and to his infinite amazement he observed that her eyes were sparkling. Did she realize, he wondered, what was afoot? Her next sentence resolved his doubt. “She is English, and she comes resolutely on. She means to fight.”
“God help her, then,” said his lordship gloomily. “Her captain must be mad. What can he hope to do against two such heavy hulks as these? If they could so easily blow the Royal Mary out of the water, what will they do to this vessel? Look at that devil Don Miguel. He’s utterly disgusting in his glee.”
From the quarter-deck, where he moved amid the frenzy of preparation, the Admiral had turned to flash a backward glance at his prisoners. His eyes were alight, his face transfigured. He flung out an arm to point to the advancing ship, and bawled something in Spanish that was lost to them in the noise of the labouring crew.
They advanced to the poop-rail, and watched the bustle. Telescope in hand on the quarter-deck, Don Miguel was issuing his orders. Already the gunners were kindling their matches; sailors were aloft, taking in sail; others were spreading a stout rope net above the waist, as a protection against falling spars. And meanwhile Don Miguel had been signalling to his consort, in response to which the Hidalga had drawn steadily forward until she was now abeam of the Milagrosa, half cable’s length to starboard, and from the height of the tall poop my lord and Miss Bishop could see her own bustle of preparation. And they could discern signs of it now aboard the advancing English ship as well. She was furling tops and mainsail, stripping in fact to mizzen and sprit for the coming action. Thus, almost silently without challenge or exchange of signals, had action been mutually determined.
Of necessity now, under diminished sail, the advance of the Arabella was slower; but it was none the less steady. She was already within saker shot, and they could make out the figures stirring on her forecastle and the brass guns gleaming on her prow. The gunners of the Milagrosa raised their linstocks and blew upon their smouldering matches, looking up impatiently at the Admiral.
But the Admiral solemnly shook his head.
“Patience,” he exhorted them. “Save your fire until we have him. He is coming straight to his doom—straight to the yardarm and the rope that have been so long waiting for him.”
“Stab me!” said his lordship. “This Englishman may be gallant enough to accept battle against such odds. But there are times when discretion is a better quality than gallantry in a commander.”
“Gallantry will often win through, even against overwhelming strength,” said Miss Bishop. He looked at her, and noted in her bearing only excitement. Of fear he could still discern no trace. His lordship was past amazement. She was not by any means the kind of woman to which life had accustomed him.
“Presently,” he said, “you will suffer me to place you under cover.”
“I can see best from here,” she answered him. And added quietly: “I am praying for this Englishman. He must be very brave.”
Under his breath Lord Julian damned the fellow’s bravery.
The Arabella was advancing now along a course which, if continued, must carry her straight between the two Spanish ships. My lord pointed it out. “He’s crazy surely!” he cried. “He’s driving straight into a death-trap. He’ll be crushed to splinters between the two. No wonder that black-faced Don is holding his fire. In his place, I should do the same.”
But even at that moment the Admiral raised his hand; in the waist, below him, a trumpet blared, and immediately the gunner on the prow touched off his guns. As the thunder of them rolled out, his lordship saw ahead beyond the English ship and to larboard of her two heavy splashes. Almost at once two successive spurts of flame leapt from the brass cannon on the Arabella’s beak-head, and scarcely had the watchers on the poop seen the shower of spray, where one of the shots struck the water near them, then with a rending crash and a shiver that shook the Milagrosa from stem to stern, the other came to lodge in her forecastle. To avenge that blow, the Hidalga blazed at the Englishman with both her forward guns. But even at that short range—between two and three hundred yards—neither shot took effect.
At a hundred yards the Arabella’s forward guns, which had meanwhile been reloaded, fired again at the Milagrosa, and this time smashed her bowsprit into splinters; so that for a moment she yawed wildly to port. Don Miguel swore profanely, and then, as the helm was put over to swing her back to her course, his own prow replied. But the aim was too high, and whilst one of the shots tore through the Arabella’s shrouds and scarred her mainmast, the other again went wide. And when the smoke of that discharge had lifted, the English ship was found almost between the Spaniards, her bows in line with theirs and coming steadily on into what his lordship deemed a death-trap.
Lord Julian held his breath, and Miss Bishop gasped, clutching the rail before her. She had a glimpse of the wickedly grinning face of Don Miguel, and the grinning faces of the men at the guns in the waist.
At last the Arabella was right between the Spanish ships prow to poop and poop to prow. Don Miguel spoke to the trumpeter, who had mounted the quarter-deck and stood now at the Admiral’s elbow. The man raised the silver bugle that was to give the signal for the broadsides of both ships. But even as he placed it to his lips, the Admiral seized his arm, to arrest him. Only then had he perceived what was so obvious—or should have been to an experienced sea-fighter: he had delayed too long and Captain Blood had outmanoeuvred him. In attempting to fire now upon the Englishman, the Milagrosa and her consort would also be firing into each other. Too late he ordered his helmsman to put the tiller hard over and swing the ship to larboard, as a preliminary to manoeuvring for a less impossible position of attack. At that very moment the Arabella seemed to explode as she swept by. Eighteen guns from each of her flanks emptied themselves at that point-blank range into the hulls of the two Spanish vessels.
Half stunned by that reverberating thunder, and thrown off her balance by the sudden lurch of the ship under her feet, Miss Bishop hurtled violently against Lord Julian, who kept his feet only by clutching the rail on which he had been leaning. Billowing clouds of smoke to starboard blotted out everything, and its acrid odour, taking them presently in the throat, set them gasping and coughing.
From the grim confusion and turmoil in the waist below arose a clamour of fierce Spanish blasphemies and the screams of maimed men. The Milagrosa staggered slowly ahead, a gaping rent in her bulwarks; her foremast was shattered, fragments of the yards hanging in the netting spread below. Her beak-head was in splinters, and a shot had smashed through into the great cabin, reducing it to wreckage.
Don Miguel was bawling orders wildly, and peering ever and anon through the curtain of smoke that was drifting slowly astern, in his anxiety to ascertain how it might have fared with the Hidalga.
Suddenly, and ghostly at first through that lifting haze, loomed the outline of a ship; gradually the lines of her red hull became more and more sharply defined as she swept nearer with poles all bare save for the spread of canvas on her sprit.
Instead of holding to her course as Don Miguel had expected she would, the Arabella had gone about under cover of the smoke, and sailing now in the same direction as the Milagrosa, was converging sharply upon her across the wind, so sharply that almost before the frenzied Don Miguel had realized the situation, his vessel staggered under the rending impact with which the other came hurtling alongside. There was a rattle and clank of metal as a dozen grapnels fell, and tore and caught in the timbers of the Milagrosa, and the Spaniard was firmly gripped in the tentacles of the English ship.
Beyond her and now well astern the veil of smoke was rent at last and the Hidalga was revealed in desperate case. She was bilging fast, with an ominous list to larboard, and it could be no more than a question of moments before she settled down. The attention of her hands was being entirely given to a desperate endeavour to launch the boats in time.
Of this Don Miguel’s anguished eyes had no more than a fleeting but comprehensive glimpse before his own decks were invaded by a wild, yelling swarm of boarders from the grappling ship. Never was confidence so quickly changed into despair, never was hunter more swiftly converted into helpless prey. For helpless the Spaniards were. The swiftly executed boarding manoeuvre had caught them almost unawares in the moment of confusion following the punishing broadside they had sustained at such short range. For a moment there was a valiant effort by some of Don Miguel’s officers to rally the men for a stand against these invaders. But the Spaniards, never at their best in close-quarter fighting, were here demoralized by knowledge of the enemies with whom they had to deal. Their hastily formed ranks were smashed before they could be steadied; driven across the waist to the break of the poop on the one side, and up to the forecastle bulkheads on the other, the fighting resolved itself into a series of skirmishes between groups. And whilst this was doing above, another horde of buccaneers swarmed through the hatch to the main deck below to overpower the gun-crews at their stations there.
On the quarter deck, towards which an overwhelming wave of buccaneers was sweeping, led by a one-eyed giant, who was naked to the waist, stood Don Miguel, numbed by despair and rage. Above and behind him on the poop, Lord Julian and Miss Bishop looked on, his lordship aghast at the fury of this cooped-up fighting, the lady’s brave calm conquered at last by horror so that she reeled there sick and faint.
Soon, however, the rage of that brief fight was spent. They saw the banner of Castile come fluttering down from the masthead. A buccaneer had slashed the halyard with his cutlass. The boarders were in possession, and on the upper deck groups of disarmed Spaniards stood huddled now like herded sheep.
Suddenly Miss Bishop recovered from her nausea, to lean forward staring wild-eyed, whilst if possible her cheeks turned yet a deadlier hue than they had been already.
Picking his way daintily through that shambles in the waist came a tall man with a deeply tanned face that was shaded by a Spanish headpiece. He was armed in back-and-breast of black steel beautifully damascened with golden arabesques. Over this, like a stole, he wore a sling of scarlet silk, from each end of which hung a silver-mounted pistol. Up the broad companion to the quarter-deck he came, toying with easy assurance, until he stood before the Spanish Admiral. Then he bowed stiff and formally. A crisp, metallic voice, speaking perfect Spanish, reached those two spectators on the poop, and increased the admiring wonder in which Lord Julian had observed the man’s approach.
“We meet again at last, Don Miguel,” it said. “I hope you are satisfied. Although the meeting may not be exactly as you pictured it, at least it has been very ardently sought and desired by you.”
Speechless, livid of face, his mouth distorted and his breathing laboured, Don Miguel de Espinosa received the irony of that man to whom he attributed his ruin and more beside. Then he uttered an inarticulate cry of rage, and his hand swept to his sword. But even as his fingers closed upon the hilt, the other’s closed upon his wrist to arrest the action.
“Calm, Don Miguel!” he was quietly but firmly enjoined. “Do not recklessly invite the ugly extremes such as you would, yourself, have practised had the situation been reversed.”
A moment they stood looking into each other’s eyes.
“What do you intend by me?” the Spaniard enquired at last, his voice hoarse.
Captain Blood shrugged. The firm lips smiled a little. “All that I intend has been already accomplished. And lest it increase your rancour, I beg you to observe that you have brought it entirely upon yourself. You would have it so.” He turned and pointed to the boats, which his men were heaving from the boom amidships. “Your boats are being launched. You are at liberty to embark in them with your men before we scuttle this ship. Yonder are the shores of Hispaniola. You should make them safely. And if you’ll take my advice, sir, you’ll not hunt me again. I think I am unlucky to you. Get you home to Spain, Don Miguel, and to concerns that you understand better than this trade of the sea.”
For a long moment the defeated Admiral continued to stare his hatred in silence, then, still without speaking, he went down the companion, staggering like a drunken man, his useless rapier clattering behind him. His conqueror, who had not even troubled to disarm him, watched him go, then turned and faced those two immediately above him on the poop. Lord Julian might have observed, had he been less taken up with other things, that the fellow seemed suddenly to stiffen, and that he turned pale under his deep tan. A moment he stood at gaze; then suddenly and swiftly he came up the steps. Lord Julian stood forward to meet him.
“Ye don’t mean, sir, that you’ll let that Spanish scoundrel go free?” he cried.
The gentleman in the black corselet appeared to become aware of his lordship for the first time.
“And who the devil may you be?” he asked, with a marked Irish accent. “And what business may it be of yours, at all?”
His lordship conceived that the fellow’s truculence and utter lack of proper deference must be corrected. “I am Lord Julian Wade,” he announced, with that object.
Apparently the announcement made no impression.
“Are you, indeed! Then perhaps ye’ll explain what the plague you’re doing aboard this ship?”
Lord Julian controlled himself to afford the desired explanation. He did so shortly and impatiently.
“He took you prisoner, did he—along with Miss Bishop there?”
“You are acquainted with Miss Bishop?” cried his lordship, passing from surprise to surprise.
But this mannerless fellow had stepped past him, and was making a leg to the lady, who on her side remained unresponsive and forbidding to the point of scorn. Observing this, he turned to answer Lord Julian’s question.
“I had that honour once,” said he. “But it seems that Miss Bishop has a shorter memory.”
His lips were twisted into a wry smile, and there was pain in the blue eyes that gleamed so vividly under his black brows, pain blending with the mockery of his voice. But of all this it was the mockery alone that was perceived by Miss Bishop; she resented it.
“I do not number thieves and pirates among my acquaintance, Captain Blood,” said she; whereupon his lordship exploded in excitement.
“Captain Blood!” he cried. “Are you Captain Blood?”
“What else were ye supposing?”
Blood asked the question wearily, his mind on other things. “I do not number thieves and pirates among my acquaintance.” The cruel phrase filled his brain, reechoing and reverberating there.
But Lord Julian would not be denied. He caught him by the sleeve with one hand, whilst with the other he pointed after the retreating, dejected figure of Don Miguel.
“Do I understand that ye’re not going to hang that Spanish scoundrel?”
“What for should I be hanging him?”
“Because he’s just a damned pirate, as I can prove, as I have proved already.”
“Ah!” said Blood, and Lord Julian marvelled at the sudden haggardness of a countenance that had been so devil-may-care but a few moments since. “I am a damned pirate, myself; and so I am merciful with my kind. Don Miguel goes free.”
Lord Julian gasped. “After what I’ve told you that he has done? After his sinking of the Royal Mary? After his treatment of me—of us?” Lord Julian protested indignantly.
“I am not in the service of England, or of any nation, sir. And I am not concerned with any wrongs her flag may suffer.”
His lordship recoiled before the furious glance that blazed at him out of Blood’s haggard face. But the passion faded as swiftly as it had arisen. It was in a level voice that the Captain added:
“If you’ll escort Miss Bishop aboard my ship, I shall be obliged to you. I beg that you’ll make haste. We are about to scuttle this hulk.”
He turned slowly to depart. But again Lord Julian interposed. Containing his indignant amazement, his lordship delivered himself coldly. “Captain Blood, you disappoint me. I had hopes of great things for you.”
“Go to the devil,” said Captain Blood, turning on his heel, and so departed.
CHAPTER XX. THIEF AND PIRATE
Captain Blood paced the poop of his ship alone in the tepid dusk, and the growing golden radiance of the great poop lantern in which a seaman had just lighted the three lamps. About him all was peace. The signs of the day’s battle had been effaced, the decks had been swabbed, and order was restored above and below. A group of men squatting about the main hatch were drowsily chanting, their hardened natures softened, perhaps, by the calm and beauty of the night. They were the men of the larboard watch, waiting for eight bells which was imminent.
Captain Blood did not hear them; he did not hear anything save the echo of those cruel words which had dubbed him thief and pirate.
Thief and pirate!
It is an odd fact of human nature that a man may for years possess the knowledge that a certain thing must be of a certain fashion, and yet be shocked to discover through his own senses that the fact is in perfect harmony with his beliefs. When first, three years ago, at Tortuga he had been urged upon the adventurer’s course which he had followed ever since, he had known in what opinion Arabella Bishop must hold him if he succumbed. Only the conviction that already she was for ever lost to him, by introducing a certain desperate recklessness into his soul had supplied the final impulse to drive him upon his rover’s course.
That he should ever meet her again had not entered his calculations, had found no place in his dreams. They were, he conceived, irrevocably and for ever parted. Yet, in spite of this, in spite even of the persuasion that to her this reflection that was his torment could bring no regrets, he had kept the thought of her ever before him in all those wild years of filibustering. He had used it as a curb not only upon himself, but also upon those who followed him. Never had buccaneers been so rigidly held in hand, never had they been so firmly restrained, never so debarred from the excesses of rapine and lust that were usual in their kind as those who sailed with Captain Blood. It was, you will remember, stipulated in their articles that in these as in other matters they must submit to the commands of their leader. And because of the singular good fortune which had attended his leadership, he had been able to impose that stern condition of a discipline unknown before among buccaneers. How would not these men laugh at him now if he were to tell them that this he had done out of respect for a slip of a girl of whom he had fallen romantically enamoured? How would not that laughter swell if he added that this girl had that day informed him that she did not number thieves and pirates among her acquaintance.
Thief and pirate!
How the words clung, how they stung and burnt his brain!
It did not occur to him, being no psychologist, nor learned in the tortuous workings of the feminine mind, that the fact that she should bestow upon him those epithets in the very moment and circumstance of their meeting was in itself curious. He did not perceive the problem thus presented; therefore he could not probe it. Else he might have concluded that if in a moment in which by delivering her from captivity he deserved her gratitude, yet she expressed herself in bitterness, it must be because that bitterness was anterior to the gratitude and deep-seated. She had been moved to it by hearing of the course he had taken. Why? It was what he did not ask himself, or some ray of light might have come to brighten his dark, his utterly evil despondency. Surely she would never have been so moved had she not cared—had she not felt that in what he did there was a personal wrong to herself. Surely, he might have reasoned, nothing short of this could have moved her to such a degree of bitterness and scorn as that which she had displayed.
That is how you will reason. Not so, however, reasoned Captain Blood. Indeed, that night he reasoned not at all. His soul was given up to conflict between the almost sacred love he had borne her in all these years and the evil passion which she had now awakened in him. Extremes touch, and in touching may for a space become confused, indistinguishable. And the extremes of love and hate were to-night so confused in the soul of Captain Blood that in their fusion they made up a monstrous passion.
Thief and pirate!
That was what she deemed him, without qualification, oblivious of the deep wrongs he had suffered, the desperate case in which he found himself after his escape from Barbados, and all the rest that had gone to make him what he was. That he should have conducted his filibustering with hands as clean as were possible to a man engaged in such undertakings had also not occurred to her as a charitable thought with which to mitigate her judgment of a man she had once esteemed. She had no charity for him, no mercy. She had summed him up, convicted him and sentenced him in that one phrase. He was thief and pirate in her eyes; nothing more, nothing less. What, then, was she? What are those who have no charity? he asked the stars.
Well, as she had shaped him hitherto, so let her shape him now. Thief and pirate she had branded him. She should be justified. Thief and pirate should he prove henceforth; no more nor less; as bowelless, as remorseless, as all those others who had deserved those names. He would cast out the maudlin ideals by which he had sought to steer a course; put an end to this idiotic struggle to make the best of two worlds. She had shown him clearly to which world he belonged. Let him now justify her. She was aboard his ship, in his power, and he desired her.
He laughed softly, jeeringly, as he leaned on the taffrail, looking down at the phosphorescent gleam in the ship’s wake, and his own laughter startled him by its evil note. He checked suddenly, and shivered. A sob broke from him to end that ribald burst of mirth. He took his face in his hands and found a chill moisture on his brow.
Meanwhile, Lord Julian, who knew the feminine part of humanity rather better than Captain Blood, was engaged in solving the curious problem that had so completely escaped the buccaneer. He was spurred to it, I suspect, by certain vague stirrings of jealousy. Miss Bishop’s conduct in the perils through which they had come had brought him at last to perceive that a woman may lack the simpering graces of cultured femininity and yet because of that lack be the more admirable. He wondered what precisely might have been her earlier relations with Captain Blood, and was conscious of a certain uneasiness which urged him now to probe the matter.
His lordship’s pale, dreamy eyes had, as I have said, a habit of observing things, and his wits were tolerably acute.
He was blaming himself now for not having observed certain things before, or, at least, for not having studied them more closely, and he was busily connecting them with more recent observations made that very day.
He had observed, for instance, that Blood’s ship was named the Arabella, and he knew that Arabella was Miss Bishop’s name. And he had observed all the odd particulars of the meeting of Captain Blood and Miss Bishop, and the curious change that meeting had wrought in each.
The lady had been monstrously uncivil to the Captain. It was a very foolish attitude for a lady in her circumstances to adopt towards a man in Blood’s; and his lordship could not imagine Miss Bishop as normally foolish. Yet, in spite of her rudeness, in spite of the fact that she was the niece of a man whom Blood must regard as his enemy, Miss Bishop and his lordship had been shown the utmost consideration aboard the Captain’s ship. A cabin had been placed at the disposal of each, to which their scanty remaining belongings and Miss Bishop’s woman had been duly transferred. They were given the freedom of the great cabin, and they had sat down to table with Pitt, the master, and Wolverstone, who was Blood’s lieutenant, both of whom had shown them the utmost courtesy. Also there was the fact that Blood, himself, had kept almost studiously from intruding upon them.
His lordship’s mind went swiftly but carefully down these avenues of thought, observing and connecting. Having exhausted them, he decided to seek additional information from Miss Bishop. For this he must wait until Pitt and Wolverstone should have withdrawn. He was hardly made to wait so long, for as Pitt rose from table to follow Wolverstone, who had already departed, Miss Bishop detained him with a question:
“Mr. Pitt,” she asked, “were you not one of those who escaped from Barbados with Captain Blood?”
“I was. I, too, was one of your uncle’s slaves.”
“And you have been with Captain Blood ever since?”
“His shipmaster always, ma’am.”
She nodded. She was very calm and self-contained; but his lordship observed that she was unusually pale, though considering what she had that day undergone this afforded no matter for wonder.
“Did you ever sail with a Frenchman named Cahusac?”
“Cahusac?” Pitt laughed. The name evoked a ridiculous memory. “Aye. He was with us at Maracaybo.”
“And another Frenchman named Levasseur?”
His lordship marvelled at her memory of these names.
“Aye. Cahusac was Levasseur’s lieutenant, until he died.”
“Until who died?”
“Levasseur. He was killed on one of the Virgin Islands two years ago.”
There was a pause. Then, in an even quieter voice than before, Miss Bishop asked:
“Who killed him?”
Pitt answered readily. There was no reason why he should not, though he began to find the catechism intriguing.
“Captain Blood killed him.”
“Why?”
Pitt hesitated. It was not a tale for a maid’s ears.
“They quarrelled,” he said shortly.
“Was it about a… a lady?” Miss Bishop relentlessly pursued him.
“You might put it that way.”
“What was the lady’s name?”
Pitt’s eyebrows went up; still he answered.
“Miss d’Ogeron. She was the daughter of the Governor of Tortuga. She had gone off with this fellow Levasseur, and… and Peter delivered her out of his dirty clutches. He was a black-hearted scoundrel, and deserved what Peter gave him.”
“I see. And… and yet Captain Blood has not married her?”
“Not yet,” laughed Pitt, who knew the utter groundlessness of the common gossip in Tortuga which pronounced Mdlle. d’Ogeron the Captain’s future wife.
Miss Bishop nodded in silence, and Jeremy Pitt turned to depart, relieved that the catechism was ended. He paused in the doorway to impart a piece of information.
“Maybe it’ll comfort you to know that the Captain has altered our course for your benefit. It’s his intention to put you both ashore on the coast of Jamaica, as near Port Royal as we dare venture. We’ve gone about, and if this wind holds ye’ll soon be home again, mistress.”
“Vastly obliging of him,” drawled his lordship, seeing that Miss Bishop made no shift to answer. Sombre-eyed she sat, staring into vacancy.
“Indeed, ye may say so,” Pitt agreed. “He’s taking risks that few would take in his place. But that’s always been his way.”
He went out, leaving his lordship pensive, those dreamy blue eyes of his intently studying Miss Bishop’s face for all their dreaminess; his mind increasingly uneasy. At length Miss Bishop looked at him, and spoke.
“Your Cahusac told you no more than the truth, it seems.”
“I perceived that you were testing it,” said his lordship. “I am wondering precisely why.”
Receiving no answer, he continued to observe her silently, his long, tapering fingers toying with a ringlet of the golden periwig in which his long face was set.
Miss Bishop sat bemused, her brows knit, her brooding glance seeming to study the fine Spanish point that edged the tablecloth. At last his lordship broke the silence.
“He amazes me, this man,” said he, in his slow, languid voice that never seemed to change its level. “That he should alter his course for us is in itself matter for wonder; but that he should take a risk on our behalf—that he should venture into Jamaica waters…. It amazes me, as I have said.”
Miss Bishop raised her eyes, and looked at him. She appeared to be very thoughtful. Then her lip flickered curiously, almost scornfully, it seemed to him. Her slender fingers drummed the table.
“What is still more amazing is that he does not hold us to ransom,” said she at last.
“It’s what you deserve.”
“Oh, and why, if you please?”
“For speaking to him as you did.”
“I usually call things by their names.”
“Do you? Stab me! I shouldn’t boast of it. It argues either extreme youth or extreme foolishness.” His lordship, you see, belonged to my Lord Sunderland’s school of philosophy. He added after a moment: “So does the display of ingratitude.”
A faint colour stirred in her cheeks. “Your lordship is evidently aggrieved with me. I am disconsolate. I hope your lordship’s grievance is sounder than your views of life. It is news to me that ingratitude is a fault only to be found in the young and the foolish.”
“I didn’t say so, ma’am.” There was a tartness in his tone evoked by the tartness she had used. “If you would do me the honour to listen, you would not misapprehend me. For if unlike you I do not always say precisely what I think, at least I say precisely what I wish to convey. To be ungrateful may be human; but to display it is childish.”
“I… I don’t think I understand.” Her brows were knit. “How have I been ungrateful and to whom?”
“To whom? To Captain Blood. Didn’t he come to our rescue?”
“Did he?” Her manner was frigid. “I wasn’t aware that he knew of our presence aboard the Milagrosa.”
His lordship permitted himself the slightest gesture of impatience.
“You are probably aware that he delivered us,” said he. “And living as you have done in these savage places of the world, you can hardly fail to be aware of what is known even in England: that this fellow Blood strictly confines himself to making war upon the Spaniards. So that to call him thief and pirate as you did was to overstate the case against him at a time when it would have been more prudent to have understated it.”
“Prudence?” Her voice was scornful. “What have I to do with prudence?”
“Nothing—as I perceive. But, at least, study generosity. I tell you frankly, ma’am, that in Blood’s place I should never have been so nice. Sink me! When you consider what he has suffered at the hands of his fellow-countrymen, you may marvel with me that he should trouble to discriminate between Spanish and English. To be sold into slavery! Ugh!” His lordship shuddered. “And to a damned colonial planter!” He checked abruptly. “I beg your pardon, Miss Bishop. For the moment….”
“You were carried away by your heat in defence of this… sea-robber.” Miss Bishop’s scorn was almost fierce.
His lordship stared at her again. Then he half-closed his large, pale eyes, and tilted his head a little. “I wonder why you hate him so,” he said softly.
He saw the sudden scarlet flame upon her cheeks, the heavy frown that descended upon her brow. He had made her very angry, he judged. But there was no explosion. She recovered.
“Hate him? Lord! What a thought! I don’t regard the fellow at all.”
“Then ye should, ma’am.” His lordship spoke his thought frankly. “He’s worth regarding. He’d be an acquisition to the King’s navy—a man that can do the things he did this morning. His service under de Ruyter wasn’t wasted on him. That was a great seaman, and—blister me!—the pupil’s worthy the master if I am a judge of anything. I doubt if the Royal Navy can show his equal. To thrust himself deliberately between those two, at point-blank range, and so turn the tables on them! It asks courage, resource, and invention. And we land-lubbers were not the only ones he tricked by his manoeuvre. That Spanish Admiral never guessed the intent until it was too late and Blood held him in check. A great man, Miss Bishop. A man worth regarding.”
Miss Bishop was moved to sarcasm.
“You should use your influence with my Lord Sunderland to have the King offer him a commission.”
His lordship laughed softly. “Faith, it’s done already. I have his commission in my pocket.” And he increased her amazement by a brief exposition of the circumstances. In that amazement he left her, and went in quest of Blood. But he was still intrigued. If she were a little less uncompromising in her attitude towards Blood, his lordship would have been happier.
He found the Captain pacing the quarter-deck, a man mentally exhausted from wrestling with the Devil, although of this particular occupation his lordship could have no possible suspicion. With the amiable familiarity he used, Lord Julian slipped an arm through one of the Captain’s, and fell into step beside him.
“What’s this?” snapped Blood, whose mood was fierce and raw. His lordship was not disturbed.
“I desire, sir, that we be friends,” said he suavely.
“That’s mighty condescending of you!”
Lord Julian ignored the obvious sarcasm.
“It’s an odd coincidence that we should have been brought together in this fashion, considering that I came out to the Indies especially to seek you.”
“Ye’re not by any means the first to do that,” the other scoffed. “But they’ve mainly been Spaniards, and they hadn’t your luck.”
“You misapprehend me completely,” said Lord Julian. And on that he proceeded to explain himself and his mission.
When he had done, Captain Blood, who until that moment had stood still under the spell of his astonishment, disengaged his arm from his lordship’s, and stood squarely before him.
“Ye’re my guest aboard this ship,” said he, “and I still have some notion of decent behaviour left me from other days, thief and pirate though I may be. So I’ll not be telling you what I think of you for daring to bring me this offer, or of my Lord Sunderland—since he’s your kinsman for having the impudence to send it. But it does not surprise me at all that one who is a minister of James Stuart’s should conceive that every man is to be seduced by bribes into betraying those who trust him.” He flung out an arm in the direction of the waist, whence came the half-melancholy chant of the lounging buccaneers.
“Again you misapprehend me,” cried Lord Julian, between concern and indignation. “That is not intended. Your followers will be included in your commission.”
“And d’ ye think they’ll go with me to hunt their brethren—the Brethren of the Coast? On my soul, Lord Julian, it is yourself does the misapprehending. Are there not even notions of honour left in England? Oh, and there’s more to it than that, even. D’ye think I could take a commission of King James’s? I tell you I wouldn’t be soiling my hands with it—thief and pirate’s hands though they be. Thief and pirate is what you heard Miss Bishop call me to-day—a thing of scorn, an outcast. And who made me that? Who made me thief and pirate?”
“If you were a rebel…?” his lordship was beginning.
“Ye must know that I was no such thing—no rebel at all. It wasn’t even pretended. If it were, I could forgive them. But not even that cloak could they cast upon their foulness. Oh, no; there was no mistake. I was convicted for what I did, neither more nor less. That bloody vampire Jeffreys—bad cess to him!—sentenced me to death, and his worthy master James Stuart afterwards sent me into slavery, because I had performed an act of mercy; because compassionately and without thought for creed or politics I had sought to relieve the sufferings of a fellow-creature; because I had dressed the wounds of a man who was convicted of treason. That was all my offence. You’ll find it in the records. And for that I was sold into slavery: because by the law of England, as administered by James Stuart in violation of the laws of God, who harbours or comforts a rebel is himself adjudged guilty of rebellion. D’ye dream man, what it is to be a slave?”
He checked suddenly at the very height of his passion. A moment he paused, then cast it from him as if it had been a cloak. His voice sank again. He uttered a little laugh of weariness and contempt.
“But there! I grow hot for nothing at all. I explain myself, I think, and God knows, it is not my custom. I am grateful to you, Lord Julian, for your kindly intentions. I am so. But ye’ll understand, perhaps. Ye look as if ye might.”
Lord Julian stood still. He was deeply stricken by the other’s words, the passionate, eloquent outburst that in a few sharp, clear-cut strokes had so convincingly presented the man’s bitter case against humanity, his complete apologia and justification for all that could be laid to his charge. His lordship looked at that keen, intrepid face gleaming lividly in the light of the great poop lantern, and his own eyes were troubled. He was abashed.
He fetched a heavy sigh. “A pity,” he said slowly. “Oh, blister me—a cursed pity!” He held out his hand, moved to it on a sudden generous impulse. “But no offence between us, Captain Blood!”
“Oh, no offence. But… I’m a thief and a pirate.” He laughed without mirth, and, disregarding the proffered hand, swung on his heel.
Lord Julian stood a moment, watching the tall figure as it moved away towards the taffrail. Then letting his arms fall helplessly to his sides in dejection, he departed.
Just within the doorway of the alley leading to the cabin, he ran into Miss Bishop. Yet she had not been coming out, for her back was towards him, and she was moving in the same direction. He followed her, his mind too full of Captain Blood to be concerned just then with her movements.
In the cabin he flung into a chair, and exploded, with a violence altogether foreign to his nature.
“Damme if ever I met a man I liked better, or even a man I liked as well. Yet there’s nothing to be done with him.”
“So I heard,” she admitted in a small voice. She was very white, and she kept her eyes upon her folded hands.
He looked up in surprise, and then sat conning her with brooding glance. “I wonder, now,” he said presently, “if the mischief is of your working. Your words have rankled with him. He threw them at me again and again. He wouldn’t take the King’s commission; he wouldn’t take my hand even. What’s to be done with a fellow like that? He’ll end on a yardarm for all his luck. And the quixotic fool is running into danger at the present moment on our behalf.”
“How?” she asked him with a sudden startled interest.
“How? Have you forgotten that he’s sailing to Jamaica, and that Jamaica is the headquarters of the English fleet? True, your uncle commands it….”
She leaned across the table to interrupt him, and he observed that her breathing had grown labored, that her eyes were dilating in alarm.
“But there is no hope for him in that!” she cried. “Oh, don’t imagine it! He has no bitterer enemy in the world! My uncle is a hard, unforgiving man. I believe that it was nothing but the hope of taking and hanging Captain Blood that made my uncle leave his Barbados plantations to accept the deputy-governorship of Jamaica. Captain Blood doesn’t know that, of course….” She paused with a little gesture of helplessness.
“I can’t think that it would make the least difference if he did,” said his lordship gravely. “A man who can forgive such an enemy as Don Miguel and take up this uncompromising attitude with me isn’t to be judged by ordinary rules. He’s chivalrous to the point of idiocy.”
“And yet he has been what he has been and done what he has done in these last three years,” said she, but she said it sorrowfully now, without any of her earlier scorn.
Lord Julian was sententious, as I gather that he often was. “Life can be infernally complex,” he sighed.
CHAPTER XXI. THE SERVICE OF KING JAMES
Miss Arabella Bishop was aroused very early on the following morning by the brazen voice of a bugle and the insistent clanging of a bell in the ship’s belfry. As she lay awake, idly watching the rippled green water that appeared to be streaming past the heavily glazed porthole, she became gradually aware of the sounds of swift, laboured bustle—the clatter of many feet, the shouts of hoarse voices, and the persistent trundlings of heavy bodies in the ward-room immediately below the deck of the cabin. Conceiving these sounds to portend a more than normal activity, she sat up, pervaded by a vague alarm, and roused her still slumbering woman.
In his cabin on the starboard side Lord Julian, disturbed by the same sounds, was already astir and hurriedly dressing. When presently he emerged under the break of the poop, he found himself staring up into a mountain of canvas. Every foot of sail that she could carry had been crowded to the Arabella’s yards, to catch the morning breeze. Ahead and on either side stretched the limitless expanse of ocean, sparkling golden in the sun, as yet no more than a half-disc of flame upon the horizon straight ahead.
About him in the waist, where all last night had been so peaceful, there was a frenziedly active bustle of some threescore men. By the rail, immediately above and behind Lord Julian, stood Captain Blood in altercation with a one-eyed giant, whose head was swathed in a red cotton kerchief, whose blue shirt hung open at the waist. As his lordship, moving forward, revealed himself, their voices ceased, and Blood turned to greet him.
“Good-morning to you,” he said, and added “I’ve blundered badly, so I have. I should have known better than to come so close to Jamaica by night. But I was in haste to land you. Come up here. I have something to show you.”
Wondering, Lord Julian mounted the companion as he was bidden. Standing beside Captain Blood, he looked astern, following the indication of the Captain’s hand, and cried out in his amazement. There, not more than three miles away, was land—an uneven wall of vivid green that filled the western horizon. And a couple of miles this side of it, bearing after them, came speeding three great white ships.
“They fly no colours, but they’re part of the Jamaica fleet.” Blood spoke without excitement, almost with a certain listlessness. “When dawn broke we found ourselves running to meet them. We went about, and it’s been a race ever since. But the Arabella ‘s been at sea these four months, and her bottom’s too foul for the speed we’re needing.”
Wolverstone hooked his thumbs into his broad leather belt, and from his great height looked down sardonically upon Lord Julian, tall man though his lordship was. “So that you’re like to be in yet another sea-fight afore ye’ve done wi’ ships, my lord.”
“That’s a point we were just arguing,” said Blood. “For I hold that we’re in no case to fight against such odds.”
“The odds be damned!” Wolverstone thrust out his heavy jowl. “We’re used to odds. The odds was heavier at Maracaybo; yet we won out, and took three ships. They was heavier yesterday when we engaged Don Miguel.”
“Aye—but those were Spaniards.”
“And what better are these?—Are ye afeard of a lubberly Barbados planter? Whatever ails you, Peter? I’ve never known ye scared afore.”
A gun boomed out behind them.
“That’ll be the signal to lie to,” said Blood, in the same listless voice; and he fetched a sigh.
Wolverstone squared himself defiantly before his captain
“I’ll see Colonel Bishop in hell or ever I lies to for him.” And he spat, presumably for purposes of emphasis.
His lordship intervened.
“Oh, but—by your leave—surely there is nothing to be apprehended from Colonel Bishop. Considering the service you have rendered to his niece and to me….”
Wolverstone’s horse-laugh interrupted him. “Hark to the gentleman!” he mocked. “Ye don’t know Colonel Bishop, that’s clear. Not for his niece, not for his daughter, not for his own mother, would he forgo the blood what he thinks due to him. A drinker of blood, he is. A nasty beast. We knows, the Cap’n and me. We been his slaves.”
“But there is myself,” said Lord Julian, with great dignity.
Wolverstone laughed again, whereat his lordship flushed. He was moved to raise his voice above its usual languid level.
“I assure you that my word counts for something in England.”
“Oh, aye—in England. But this ain’t England, damme.”
Came the roar of a second gun, and a round shot splashed the water less than half a cable’s-length astern. Blood leaned over the rail to speak to the fair young man immediately below him by the helmsman at the whipstaff.
“Bid them take in sail, Jeremy,” he said quietly. “We lie to.”
But Wolverstone interposed again.
“Hold there a moment, Jeremy!” he roared. “Wait!” He swung back to face the Captain, who had placed a hand on is shoulder and was smiling, a trifle wistfully.
“Steady, Old Wolf! Steady!” Captain Blood admonished him.
“Steady, yourself, Peter. Ye’ve gone mad! Will ye doom us all to hell out of tenderness for that cold slip of a girl?”
“Stop!” cried Blood in sudden fury.
But Wolverstone would not stop. “It’s the truth, you fool. It’s that cursed petticoat’s making a coward of you. It’s for her that ye’re afeard—and she, Colonel Bishop’s niece! My God, man, ye’ll have a mutiny aboard, and I’ll lead it myself sooner than surrender to be hanged in Port Royal.”
Their glances met, sullen defiance braving dull anger, surprise, and pain.
“There is no question,” said Blood, “of surrender for any man aboard save only myself. If Bishop can report to England that I am taken and hanged, he will magnify himself and at the same time gratify his personal rancour against me. That should satisfy him. I’ll send him a message offering to surrender aboard his ship, taking Miss Bishop and Lord Julian with me, but only on condition that the Arabella is allowed to proceed unharmed. It’s a bargain that he’ll accept, if I know him at all.”
“It’s a bargain he’ll never be offered,” retorted Wolverstone, and his earlier vehemence was as nothing to his vehemence now. “Ye’re surely daft even to think of it, Peter!”
“Not so daft as you when you talk of fighting that.” He flung out an arm as he spoke to indicate the pursuing ships, which were slowly but surely creeping nearer. “Before we’ve run another half-mile we shall be within range.”
Wolverstone swore elaborately, then suddenly checked. Out of the tail of his single eye he had espied a trim figure in grey silk that was ascending the companion. So engrossed had they been that they had not seen Miss Bishop come from the door of the passage leading to the cabin. And there was something else that those three men on the poop, and Pitt immediately below them, had failed to observe. Some moments ago Ogle, followed by the main body of his gun-deck crew, had emerged from the booby hatch, to fall into muttered, angrily vehement talk with those who, abandoning the gun-tackles upon which they were labouring, had come to crowd about him.
Even now Blood had no eyes for that. He turned to look at Miss Bishop, marvelling a little, after the manner in which yesterday she had avoided him, that she should now venture upon the quarter-deck. Her presence at this moment, and considering the nature of his altercation with Wolverstone, was embarrassing.
Very sweet and dainty she stood before him in her gown of shimmering grey, a faint excitement tinting her fair cheeks and sparkling in her clear, hazel eyes, that looked so frank and honest. She wore no hat, and the ringlets of her gold-brown hair fluttered distractingly in the morning breeze.
Captain Blood bared his head and bowed silently in a greeting which she returned composedly and formally.
“What is happening, Lord Julian?” she enquired.
As if to answer her a third gun spoke from the ships towards which she was looking intent and wonderingly. A frown rumpled her brow. She looked from one to the other of the men who stood there so glum and obviously ill at ease.
“They are ships of the Jamaica fleet,” his lordship answered her.
It should in any case have been a sufficient explanation. But before more could be added, their attention was drawn at last to Ogle, who came bounding up the broad ladder, and to the men lounging aft in his wake, in all of which, instinctively, they apprehended a vague menace.
At the head of the companion, Ogle found his progress barred by Blood, who confronted him, a sudden sternness in his face and in every line of him.
“What’s this?” the Captain demanded sharply. “Your station is on the gun-deck. Why have you left it?”
Thus challenged, the obvious truculence faded out of Ogle’s bearing, quenched by the old habit of obedience and the natural dominance that was the secret of the Captain’s rule over his wild followers. But it gave no pause to the gunner’s intention. If anything it increased his excitement.
“Captain,” he said, and as he spoke he pointed to the pursuing ships, “Colonel Bishop holds us. We’re in no case either to run or fight.”
Blood’s height seemed to increase, as did his sternness.
“Ogle,” said he, in a voice cold and sharp as steel, “your station is on the gun-deck. You’ll return to it at once, and take your crew with you, or else….”
But Ogle, violent of mien and gesture, interrupted him.
“Threats will not serve, Captain.”
“Will they not?”
It was the first time in his buccaneering career that an order of his had been disregarded, or that a man had failed in the obedience to which he pledged all those who joined him. That this insubordination should proceed from one of those whom he most trusted, one of his old Barbados associates, was in itself a bitterness, and made him reluctant to that which instinct told him must be done. His hand closed over the butt of one of the pistols slung before him.
“Nor will that serve you,” Ogle warned him, still more fiercely. “The men are of my thinking, and they’ll have their way.”
“And what way may that be?”
“The way to make us safe. We’ll neither sink nor hang whiles we can help it.”
From the three or four score men massed below in the waist came a rumble of approval. Captain Blood’s glance raked the ranks of those resolute, fierce-eyed fellows, then it came to rest again on Ogle. There was here quite plainly a vague threat, a mutinous spirit he could not understand. “You come to give advice, then, do you?” quoth he, relenting nothing of his sternness.