Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  Pauncefort fronted him a moment, cursing foully; then, exhausted and sobbing, he collapsed into a chair.

  Over him stood the benign Suarez, like a protecting but very proprietary deity.

  It was Sir John who proposed that as the night was wild and the roads becoming difficult the party had best divide itself, since they had two carriages — the one which had brought Damaris and the other in which Captain Gaynor and his friends had come to town. That proposal was well enough, but when in his further proposal for the division of the party he sent Damaris and the Captain ahead in one carriage and himself followed with Sir Richard in another, he showed a very culpable and reckless disregard of the proprieties.

  Said Damaris to her Captain: “You are regretting the intervention of that man,” by which she meant the intervention of Mr Suarez to avert the meeting between the Captain and his lordship.

  “Nay, sweet,” he answered her, “I am glad on’t. It made it easier for me to follow my heart, and do your bidding.”

  “You confess, then, that you hesitated?”

  “If I did ’twas because his life was a menace to me and to others. But gaoled and discredited as he is, his fangs are drawn and we may now be easy on that score. I think we are the more sweetly avenged, and — and my hands are not soiled.”

  “There is much I don’t understand! so much!” she said.

  Thereafter he explained.

  THE END

  THE SEA HAWK

  This adventure novel was first published in 1915. The story is set during the years 1588–1593 and concerns a retired Cornish seafaring gentleman, Sir Oliver Tressilian, who is villainously betrayed by a jealous half-brother. After being forced to serve as a galley slave, Sir Oliver is liberated by Barbary pirates. He joins the pirates, gaining the name “Sakr-el-Bahr” (the hawk of the sea), and swears vengeance against his brother.

  ‘A Sea Fight with Barbary Corsairs’ by Laureys a Castro (c. 1681), which gives a flavour of the kind of seafaring, piratical adventure presented by Sabatini in the novel.

  CONTENTS

  NOTE

  PART I. SIR OLIVER TRESSILIAN

  CHAPTER I. THE HUCKSTER

  CHAPTER II. ROSAMUND

  CHAPTER III. THE FORGE

  CHAPTER IV. THE INTERVENER

  CHAPTER V. THE BUCKLER

  CHAPTER VI. JASPER LEIGH

  CHAPTER VII. TREPANNED

  CHAPTER VIII. THE SPANIARD

  PART II. SAKR-EL-BAHR

  CHAPTER I. THE CAPTIVE

  CHAPTER II. THE RENEGADE

  CHAPTER III. HOMEWARD BOUND

  CHAPTER IV. THE RAID

  CHAPTER V. THE LION OF THE FAITH

  CHAPTER VI. THE CONVERT

  CHAPTER VII. MARZAK-BEN-ASAD

  CHAPTER VIII. MOTHER AND SON

  CHAPTER IX. COMPETITORS

  CHAPTER X. THE SLAVE-MARKET

  CHAPTER XI. THE TRUTH

  CHAPTER XII. THE SUBTLETY OF FENZILEH

  CHAPTER XIII. IN THE SIGHT OF ALLAH

  CHAPTER XIV. THE SIGN

  CHAPTER XV. THE VOYAGE

  CHAPTER XVI. THE PANNIER

  CHAPTER XVII. THE DUPE

  CHAPTER XVIII. SHEIK MAT

  CHAPTER XIX. THE MUTINEERS

  CHAPTER XX. THE MESSENGER

  CHAPTER XXI. MORITURUS

  CHAPTER XXII. THE SURRENDER

  CHAPTER XXIII. THE HEATHEN CREED

  CHAPTER XXIV. THE JUDGES

  CHAPTER XXV. THE ADVOCATE

  CHAPTER XXVI. THE JUDGMENT

  Poster for the 1924 silent film adaptation by Frank Lloyd

  Poster for the 1940 film starring Errol Flynn. This was originally planned as an adaptation of Sabatini’s novel, but ultimately used a completely different plot. Nevertheless, it incorporated some footage directly from the 1924 adaptation.

  NOTE

  Lord Henry Goade, who had, as we shall see, some personal acquaintance with Sir Oliver Tressilian, tells us quite bluntly that he was ill-favoured. But then his lordship is addicted to harsh judgments and his perceptions are not always normal. He says, for instance, of Anne of Cleves, that she was the “ugliest woman that ever I saw.” As far as we can glean from his own voluminous writings it would seem to be extremely doubtful whether he ever saw Anne of Cleves at all, and we suspect him here of being no more than a slavish echo of the common voice, which attributed Cromwell’s downfall to the ugliness of this bride he procured for his Bluebeard master. To the common voice from the brush of Holbein, which permits us to form our own opinions and shows us a lady who is certainly very far from deserving his lordship’s harsh stricture. Similarly, I like to believe that Lord Henry was wrong in his pronouncement upon Sir Oliver, and I am encouraged in this belief by the pen-portrait which he himself appends to it. “He was,” he says, “a tall, powerful fellow of a good shape, if we except that his arms were too long and that his feet and hands were of an uncomely bigness. In face he was swarthy, with black hair and a black forked beard; his nose was big and very high in the bridge, and his eyes sunk deep under beetling eyebrows were very pale-coloured and very cruel and sinister. He had — and this I have ever remarked to be the sign of great virility in a man — a big, deep, rough voice, better suited to, and no doubt oftener employed in, quarter-deck oaths and foulnesses than the worship of his Maker.”

  Thus my Lord Henry Goade, and you observe how he permits his lingering disapproval of the man to intrude upon his description of him. The truth is that — as there is ample testimony in his prolific writings — is lordship was something of a misanthropist. It was, in fact, his misanthropy which drove him, as it has driven many another, to authorship. He takes up the pen, not so much that he may carry out his professed object of writing a chronicle of his own time, but to the end that he may vent the bitterness engendered in him by his fall from favour. As a consequence he has little that is good to say of anyone, and rarely mentions one of his contemporaries but to tap the sources of a picturesque invective. After all, it is possible to make excuses for him. He was at once a man of thought and a man of action — a combination as rare as it is usually deplorable. The man of action in him might have gone far had he not been ruined at the outset by the man of thought. A magnificent seaman, he might have become Lord High Admiral of England but for a certain proneness to intrigue. Fortunately for him — since head where nature had placed it — he came betimes under a cloud of suspicion. His career suffered a check; but it was necessary to afford him some compensation since, after all, the suspicions could not be substantiated.

  Consequently he was removed from his command and appointed by the Queen’s Grace her Lieutenant of Cornwall, a position in which it was judged that he could do little mischief. There, soured by this blighting of his ambitions, and living a life of comparative seclusion, he turned, as so many other men similarly placed have turned, to seek consolation in his pen. He wrote his singularly crabbed, narrow and superficial History of Lord Henry Goade: his own Times — which is a miracle of injuvenations, distortions, misrepresentations, and eccentric spelling. In the eighteen enormous folio volumes, which he filled with his minute and gothic characters, he gives his own version of the story of what he terms his downfall, and, having, notwithstanding his prolixity, exhausted this subject in the first five of the eighteen tomes, he proceeds to deal with so much of the history of his own day as came immediately under his notice in his Cornish retirement.

  For the purposes of English history his chronicles are entirely negligible, which is the reason why they have been allowed to remain unpublished and in oblivion. But to the student who attempts to follow the history of that extraordinary man, Sir Oliver Tressilian, they are entirely invaluable. And, since I have made this history my present task, it is fitting that I should here at the outset acknowledge my extreme indebtedness to those chronicles. Without them, indeed, it were impossible to reconstruct the life of that Cornish gentleman who became a renegade and a Barbary Corsair and might have become Basha of Algiers — or Argire,
as his lordship terms it — but for certain matters which are to be set forth.

  Lord Henry wrote with knowledge and authority, and the tale he has to tell is very complete and full of precious detail. He was, himself, an eyewitness of much that happened; he pursued a personal acquaintance with many of those who were connected with Sir Oliver’s affairs that he might amplify his chronicles, and he considered no scrap of gossip that was to be gleaned along the countryside too trivial to be recorded. I suspect him also of having received no little assistance from Jasper Leigh in the matter of those events that happened out of England, which seem to me to constitute by far the most interesting portion of his narrative.

  R. S.

  PART I. SIR OLIVER TRESSILIAN

  CHAPTER I. THE HUCKSTER

  Sir Oliver Tressilian sat at his ease in the lofty dining-room of the handsome house of Penarrow, which he owed to the enterprise of his father of lamented and lamentable memory and to the skill and invention of an Italian engineer named Bagnolo who had come to England half a century ago as one of the assistants of the famous Torrigiani.

  This house of such a startlingly singular and Italianate grace for so remote a corner of Cornwall deserves, together with the story of its construction, a word in passing.

  The Italian Bagnolo who combined with his salient artistic talents a quarrelsome, volcanic humour had the mischance to kill a man in a brawl in a Southwark tavern. As a result he fled the town, nor paused in his headlong flight from the consequences of that murderous deed until he had all but reached the very ends of England. Under what circumstances he became acquainted with Tressilian the elder I do not know. But certain it is that the meeting was a very timely one for both of them. To the fugitive, Ralph Tressilian — who appears to have been inveterately partial to the company of rascals of all denominations — afforded shelter; and Bagnolo repaid the service by offering to rebuild the decaying half-timbered house of Penarrow. Having taken the task in hand he went about it with all the enthusiasm of your true artist, and achieved for his protector a residence that was a marvel of grace in that crude age and outlandish district. There arose under the supervision of the gifted engineer, worthy associate of Messer Torrigiani, a noble two-storied mansion of mellow red brick, flooded with light and sunshine by the enormously tall mullioned windows that rose almost from base to summit of each pilastered facade. The main doorway was set in a projecting wing and was overhung by a massive balcony, the whole surmounted by a pillared pediment of extraordinary grace, now partly clad in a green mantle of creepers. Above the burnt red tiles of the roof soared massive twisted chimneys in lofty majesty.

  But the glory of Penarrow — that is, of the new Penarrow begotten of the fertile brain of Bagnolo — was the garden fashioned out of the tangled wilderness about the old house that had crowned the heights above Penarrow point. To the labours of Bagnolo, Time and Nature had added their own. Bagnolo had cut those handsome esplanades, had built those noble balustrades bordering the three terraces with their fine connecting flights of steps; himself he had planned the fountain, and with his own hands had carved the granite faun presiding over it and the dozen other statues of nymphs and sylvan gods in a marble that gleamed in white brilliance amid the dusky green. But Time and Nature had smoothed the lawns to a velvet surface, had thickened the handsome boxwood hedges, and thrust up those black spear-like poplars that completed the very Italianate appearance of that Cornish demesne.

  Sir Oliver took his ease in his dining-room considering all this as it was displayed before him in the mellowing September sunshine, and found it all very good to see, and life very good to live. Now no man has ever been known so to find life without some immediate cause, other than that of his environment, for his optimism. Sir Oliver had several causes. The first of these — although it was one which he may have been far from suspecting — was his equipment of youth, wealth, and good digestion; the second was that he had achieved honour and renown both upon the Spanish Main and in the late harrying of the Invincible Armada — or, more aptly perhaps might it be said, in the harrying of the late Invincible Armada — and that he had received in that the twenty-fifth year of his life the honour of knighthood from the Virgin Queen; the third and last contributor to his pleasant mood — and I have reserved it for the end as I account this to be the proper place for the most important factor — was Dan Cupid who for once seemed compounded entirely of benignity and who had so contrived matters that Sir Oliver’s wooing Of Mistress Rosamund Godolphin ran an entirely smooth and happy course.

  So, then, Sir Oliver sat at his ease in his tall, carved chair, his doublet untrussed, his long legs stretched before him, a pensive smile about the firm lips that as yet were darkened by no more than a small black line of moustachios. (Lord Henry’s portrait of him was drawn at a much later period.) It was noon, and our gentleman had just dined, as the platters, the broken meats and the half-empty flagon on the board beside him testified. He pulled thoughtfully at a long pipe — for he had acquired this newly imported habit of tobacco-drinking — and dreamed of his mistress, and was properly and gallantly grateful that fortune had used him so handsomely as to enable him to toss a title and some measure of renown into his Rosamund’s lap.

  By nature Sir Oliver was a shrewd fellow (“cunning as twenty devils,” is my Lord Henry’s phrase) and he was also a man of some not inconsiderable learning. Yet neither his natural wit nor his acquired endowments appear to have taught him that of all the gods that rule the destinies of mankind there is none more ironic and malicious than that same Dan Cupid in whose honour, as it were, he was now burning the incense of that pipe of his. The ancients knew that innocent-seeming boy for a cruel, impish knave, and they mistrusted him. Sir Oliver either did not know or did not heed that sound piece of ancient wisdom. It was to be borne in upon him by grim experience, and even as his light pensive eyes smiled upon the sunshine that flooded the terrace beyond the long mullioned window, a shadow fell athwart it which he little dreamed to be symbolic of the shadow that was even falling across the sunshine of his life.

  After that shadow came the substance — tall and gay of raiment under a broad black Spanish hat decked with blood-red plumes. Swinging a long beribboned cane the figure passed the windows, stalking deliberately as Fate.

  The smile perished on Sir Oliver’s lips. His swarthy face grew thoughtful, his black brows contracted until no more than a single deep furrow stood between them. Then slowly the smile came forth again, but no longer that erstwhile gentle pensive smile. It was transformed into a smile of resolve and determination, a smile that tightened his lips even as his brows relaxed, and invested his brooding eyes with a gleam that was mocking, crafty and almost wicked.

  Came Nicholas his servant to announce Master Peter Godolphin, and close upon the lackey’s heels came Master Godolphin himself, leaning upon his beribboned cane and carrying his broad Spanish hat. He was a tall, slender gentleman, with a shaven, handsome countenance, stamped with an air of haughtiness; like Sir Oliver, he had a high-bridged, intrepid nose, and in age he was the younger by some two or three years. He wore his auburn hair rather longer than was the mode just then, but in his apparel there was no more foppishness than is tolerable in a gentleman of his years.

  Sir Oliver rose and bowed from his great height in welcome. But a wave of tobacco-smoke took his graceful visitor in the throat and set him coughing and grimacing.

  “I see,” he choked, “that ye have acquired that filthy habit.”

  “I have known filthier,” said Sir Oliver composedly.

  “I nothing doubt it,” rejoined Master Godolphin, thus early giving indications of his humour and the object of his visit.

  Sir Oliver checked an answer that must have helped his visitor to his ends, which was no part of the knight’s intent.

  “Therefore,” said he ironically, “I hope you will be patient with my shortcomings. Nick, a chair for Master Godolphin and another cup. I bid you welcome to Penarrow.”

  A sneer flickered o
ver the younger man’s white face. “You pay me a compliment, sir, which I fear me ’tis not mine to return to you.”

  “Time enough for that when I come to seek it,” said Sir Oliver, with easy, if assumed, good humour.

  “When you come to seek it?”

  “The hospitality of your house,” Sir Oliver explained.

  “It is on that very matter I am come to talk with you.”

  “Will you sit?” Sir Oliver invited him, and spread a hand towards the chair which Nicholas had set. In the same gesture he waved the servant away.

  Master Godolphin ignored the invitation. “You were,” he said, “at Godolphin Court but yesterday, I hear.” He paused, and as Sir Oliver offered no denial, he added stiffly: “I am come, sir, to inform you that the honour of your visits is one we shall be happy to forgo.”

  In the effort he made to preserve his self-control before so direct an affront Sir Oliver paled a little under his tan.

  “You will understand, Peter,” he replied slowly, “that you have said too much unless you add something more.” He paused, considering his visitor a moment. “I do not know whether Rosamund has told you that yesterday she did me the honour to consent to become my wife....”

  “She is a child that does not know her mind,” broke in the other.

  “Do you know of any good reason why she should come to change it?” asked Sir Oliver, with a slight air of challenge.

  Master Godolphin sat down, crossed his legs and placed his hat on his knee.

  “I know a dozen,” he answered. “But I need not urge them. Sufficient should it be to remind you that Rosamund is but seventeen and that she is under my guardianship and that of Sir John Killigrew. Neither Sir John nor I can sanction this betrothal.”