Upon this errand — Governor Steed’s condition not permitting him to go in person — went Colonel Bishop as the Governor’s deputy, attended by two officers.
As he stepped from the ladder into the vessel’s waist, the Colonel beheld there, beside the main hatch, the four treasure-chests, the contents of one of which had been contributed almost entirely by himself. It was a gladsome spectacle, and his eyes sparkled in beholding it.
Ranged on either side, athwart the deck, stood a score of men in two well-ordered files, with breasts and backs of steel, polished Spanish morions on their heads, overshadowing their faces, and muskets ordered at their sides.
Colonel Bishop could not be expected to recognize at a glance in these upright, furbished, soldierly figures the ragged, unkempt scarecrows that but yesterday had been toiling in his plantations. Still less could he be expected to recognize at once the courtly gentleman who advanced to greet him — a lean, graceful gentleman, dressed in the Spanish fashion, all in black with silver lace, a gold-hilted sword dangling beside him from a gold embroidered baldrick, a broad castor with a sweeping plume set above carefully curled ringlets of deepest black.
“Be welcome aboard the Cinco Llagas, Colonel, darling,” a voice vaguely familiar addressed the planter. “We’ve made the best of the Spaniards’ wardrobe in honour of this visit, though it was scarcely yourself we had dared hope to expect. You find yourself among friends — old friends of yours, all.” The Colonel stared in stupefaction. Mr. Blood tricked out in all this splendour — indulging therein his natural taste — his face carefully shaven, his hair as carefully dressed, seemed transformed into a younger man. The fact is he looked no more than the thirty-three years he counted to his age.
“Peter Blood!” It was an ejaculation of amazement. Satisfaction followed swiftly. “Was it you, then...?”
“Myself it was — myself and these, my good friends and yours.” Mr. Blood tossed back the fine lace from his wrist, to wave a hand towards the file of men standing to attention there.
The Colonel looked more closely. “Gad’s my life!” he crowed on a note of foolish jubilation. “And it was with these fellows that you took the Spaniard and turned the tables on those dogs! Oddswounds! It was heroic!”
“Heroic, is it? Bedad, it’s epic! Ye begin to perceive the breadth and depth of my genius.”
Colonel Bishop sat himself down on the hatch-coaming, took off his broad hat, and mopped his brow.
“Y’amaze me!” he gasped. “On my soul, y’amaze me! To have recovered the treasure and to have seized this fine ship and all she’ll hold! It will be something to set against the other losses we have suffered. As Gad’s my life, you deserve well for this.”
“I am entirely of your opinion.”
“Damme! You all deserve well, and damme, you shall find me grateful.”
“That’s as it should be,” said Mr. Blood. “The question is how well we deserve, and how grateful shall we find you?”
Colonel Bishop considered him. There was a shadow of surprise in his face.
“Why — his excellency shall write home an account of your exploit, and maybe some portion of your sentences shall be remitted.”
“The generosity of King James is well known,” sneered Nathaniel Hagthorpe, who was standing by, and amongst the ranged rebels-convict some one ventured to laugh.
Colonel Bishop started up. He was pervaded by the first pang of uneasiness. It occurred to him that all here might not be as friendly as appeared.
“And there’s another matter,” Mr. Blood resumed. “There’s a matter of a flogging that’s due to me. Ye’re a man of your word in such matters, Colonel — if not perhaps in others — and ye said, I think, that ye’d not leave a square inch of skin on my back.”
The planter waved the matter aside. Almost it seemed to offend him.
“Tush! Tush! After this splendid deed of yours, do you suppose I can be thinking of such things?”
“I’m glad ye feel like that about it. But I’m thinking it’s mighty lucky for me the Spaniards didn’t come to-day instead of yesterday, or it’s in the same plight as Jeremy Pitt I’d be this minute. And in that case where was the genius that would have turned the tables on these rascally Spaniards?”
“Why speak of it now?”
Mr. Blood resumed: “ye’ll please to understand that I must, Colonel, darling. Ye’ve worked a deal of wickedness and cruelty in your time, and I want this to be a lesson to you, a lesson that ye’ll remember — for the sake of others who may come after us. There’s Jeremy up there in the round-house with a back that’s every colour of the rainbow; and the poor lad’ll not be himself again for a month. And if it hadn’t been for the Spaniards maybe it’s dead he’d be by now, and maybe myself with him.”
Hagthorpe lounged forward. He was a fairly tall, vigorous man with a clear-cut, attractive face which in itself announced his breeding.
“Why will you be wasting words on the hog?” wondered that sometime officer in the Royal Navy. “Fling him overboard and have done with him.”
The Colonel’s eyes bulged in his head. “What the devil do you mean?” he blustered.
“It’s the lucky man ye are entirely, Colonel, though ye don’t guess the source of your good fortune.”
And now another intervened — the brawny, one-eyed Wolverstone, less mercifully disposed than his more gentlemanly fellow-convict.
“String him up from the yardarm,” he cried, his deep voice harsh and angry, and more than one of the slaves standing to their arms made echo.
Colonel Bishop trembled. Mr. Blood turned. He was quite calm.
“If you please, Wolverstone,” said he, “I conduct affairs in my own way. That is the pact. You’ll please to remember it.” His eyes looked along the ranks, making it plain that he addressed them all. “I desire that Colonel Bishop should have his life. One reason is that I require him as a hostage. If ye insist on hanging him, ye’ll have to hang me with him, or in the alternative I’ll go ashore.”
He paused. There was no answer. But they stood hang-dog and half-mutinous before him, save Hagthorpe, who shrugged and smiled wearily.
Mr. Blood resumed: “Ye’ll please to understand that aboard a ship there is one captain. So.” He swung again to the startled Colonel. “Though I promise you your life, I must — as you’ve heard — keep you aboard as a hostage for the good behaviour of Governor Steed and what’s left of the fort until we put to sea.”
“Until you...” Horror prevented Colonel Bishop from echoing the remainder of that incredible speech.
“Just so,” said Peter Blood, and he turned to the officers who had accompanied the Colonel. “The boat is waiting, gentlemen. You’ll have heard what I said. Convey it with my compliments to his excellency.”
“But, sir...” one of them began.
“There is no more to be said, gentlemen. My name is Blood — Captain Blood, if you please, of this ship the Cinco Llagas, taken as a prize of war from Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez, who is my prisoner aboard. You are to understand that I have turned the tables on more than the Spaniards. There’s the ladder. You’ll find it more convenient than being heaved over the side, which is what’ll happen if you linger.”
They went, though not without some hustling, regardless of the bellowings of Colonel Bishop, whose monstrous rage was fanned by terror at finding himself at the mercy of these men of whose cause to hate him he was very fully conscious.
A half-dozen of them, apart from Jeremy Pitt, who was utterly incapacitated for the present, possessed a superficial knowledge of seamanship. Hagthorpe, although he had been a fighting officer, untrained in navigation, knew how to handle a ship, and under his directions they set about getting under way.
The anchor catted, and the mainsail unfurled, they stood out for the open before a gentle breeze, without interference from the fort.
As they were running close to the headland east of the bay, Peter Blood returned to the Colonel, who, under guard and panic-stricken
, had dejectedly resumed his seat on the coamings of the main batch.
“Can ye swim, Colonel?”
Colonel Bishop looked up. His great face was yellow and seemed in that moment of a preternatural flabbiness; his beady eyes were beadier than ever.
“As your doctor, now, I prescribe a swim to cool the excessive heat of your humours.” Blood delivered the explanation pleasantly, and, receiving still no answer from the Colonel, continued: “It’s a mercy for you I’m not by nature as bloodthirsty as some of my friends here. And it’s the devil’s own labour I’ve had to prevail upon them not to be vindictive. I doubt if ye’re worth the pains I’ve taken for you.”
He was lying. He had no doubt at all. Had he followed his own wishes and instincts, he would certainly have strung the Colonel up, and accounted it a meritorious deed. It was the thought of Arabella Bishop that had urged him to mercy, and had led him to oppose the natural vindictiveness of his fellow-slaves until he had been in danger of precipitating a mutiny. It was entirely to the fact that the Colonel was her uncle, although he did not even begin to suspect such a cause, that he owed such mercy as was now being shown him.
“You shall have a chance to swim for it,” Peter Blood continued. “It’s not above a quarter of a mile to the headland yonder, and with ordinary luck ye should manage it. Faith, you’re fat enough to float. Come on! Now, don’t be hesitating or it’s a long voyage ye’ll be going with us, and the devil knows what may happen to you. You’re not loved any more than you deserve.”
Colonel Bishop mastered himself, and rose. A merciless despot, who had never known the need for restraint in all these years, he was doomed by ironic fate to practise restraint in the very moment when his feelings had reached their most violent intensity.
Peter Blood gave an order. A plank was run out over the gunwale, and lashed down.
“If you please, Colonel,” said he, with a graceful flourish of invitation.
The Colonel looked at him, and there was hell in his glance. Then, taking his resolve, and putting the best face upon it, since no other could help him here, he kicked off his shoes, peeled off his fine coat of biscuit-coloured taffetas, and climbed upon the plank.
A moment he paused, steadied by a hand that clutched the ratlines, looking down in terror at the green water rushing past some five-and-twenty feet below.
“Just take a little walk, Colonel, darling,” said a smooth, mocking voice behind him.
Still clinging, Colonel Bishop looked round in hesitation, and saw the bulwarks lined with swarthy faces — the faces of men that as lately as yesterday would have turned pale under his frown, faces that were now all wickedly agrin.
For a moment rage stamped out his fear. He cursed them aloud venomously and incoherently, then loosed his hold and stepped out upon the plank. Three steps he took before he lost his balance and went tumbling into the green depths below.
When he came to the surface again, gasping for air, the Cinco Llagas was already some furlongs to leeward. But the roaring cheer of mocking valediction from the rebels-convict reached him across the water, to drive the iron of impotent rage deeper into his soul.
CHAPTER X. DON DIEGO
Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez awoke, and with languid eyes in aching head, he looked round the cabin, which was flooded with sunlight from the square windows astern. Then he uttered a moan, and closed his eyes again, impelled to this by the monstrous ache in his head. Lying thus, he attempted to think, to locate himself in time and space. But between the pain in his head and the confusion in his mind, he found coherent thought impossible.
An indefinite sense of alarm drove him to open his eyes again, and once more to consider his surroundings.
There could be no doubt that he lay in the great cabin of his own ship, the Cinco Llagas, so that his vague disquiet must be, surely, ill-founded. And yet, stirrings of memory coming now to the assistance of reflection, compelled him uneasily to insist that here something was not as it should be. The low position of the sun, flooding the cabin with golden light from those square ports astern, suggested to him at first that it was early morning, on the assumption that the vessel was headed westward. Then the alternative occurred to him. They might be sailing eastward, in which case the time of day would be late afternoon. That they were sailing he could feel from the gentle forward heave of the vessel under him. But how did they come to be sailing, and he, the master, not to know whether their course lay east or west, not to be able to recollect whither they were bound?
His mind went back over the adventure of yesterday, if of yesterday it was. He was clear on the matter of the easily successful raid upon the Island of Barbados; every detail stood vividly in his memory up to the moment at which, returning aboard, he had stepped on to his own deck again. There memory abruptly and inexplicably ceased.
He was beginning to torture his mind with conjecture, when the door opened, and to Don Diego’s increasing mystification he beheld his best suit of clothes step into the cabin. It was a singularly elegant and characteristically Spanish suit of black taffetas with silver lace that had been made for him a year ago in Cadiz, and he knew each detail of it so well that it was impossible he could now be mistaken.
The suit paused to close the door, then advanced towards the couch on which Don Diego was extended, and inside the suit came a tall, slender gentleman of about Don Diego’s own height and shape. Seeing the wide, startled eyes of the Spaniard upon him, the gentleman lengthened his stride.
“Awake, eh?” said he in Spanish.
The recumbent man looked up bewildered into a pair of light-blue eyes that regarded him out of a tawny, sardonic face set in a cluster of black ringlets. But he was too bewildered to make any answer.
The stranger’s fingers touched the top of Don Diego’s head, whereupon Don Diego winced and cried out in pain.
“Tender, eh?” said the stranger. He took Don Diego’s wrist between thumb and second finger. And then, at last, the intrigued Spaniard spoke.
“Are you a doctor?”
“Among other things.” The swarthy gentleman continued his study of the patient’s pulse. “Firm and regular,” he announced at last, and dropped the wrist. “You’ve taken no great harm.”
Don Diego struggled up into a sitting position on the red velvet couch.
“Who the devil are you?” he asked. “And what the devil are you doing in my clothes and aboard my ship?”
The level black eyebrows went up, a faint smile curled the lips of the long mouth.
“You are still delirious, I fear. This is not your ship. This is my ship, and these are my clothes.”
“Your ship?” quoth the other, aghast, and still more aghast he added: “Your clothes? But... then....” Wildly his eyes looked about him. They scanned the cabin once again, scrutinizing each familiar object. “Am I mad?” he asked at last. “Surely this ship is the Cinco Llagas?”
“The Cinco Llagas it is.”
“Then....” The Spaniard broke off. His glance grew still more troubled. “Valga me Dios!” he cried out, like a man in anguish. “Will you tell me also that you are Don Diego de Espinosa?”
“Oh, no, my name is Blood — Captain Peter Blood. This ship, like this handsome suit of clothes, is mine by right of conquest. Just as you, Don Diego, are my prisoner.”
Startling as was the explanation, yet it proved soothing to Don Diego, being so much less startling than the things he was beginning to imagine.
“But... Are you not Spanish, then?”
“You flatter my Castilian accent. I have the honour to be Irish. You were thinking that a miracle had happened. So it has — a miracle wrought by my genius, which is considerable.”
Succinctly now Captain Blood dispelled the mystery by a relation of the facts. It was a narrative that painted red and white by turns the Spaniard’s countenance. He put a hand to the back of his head, and there discovered, in confirmation of the story, a lump as large as a pigeon’s egg. Lastly, he stared wild-eyed at the sardonic Captain
Blood.
“And my son? What of my son?” he cried out. “He was in the boat that brought me aboard.”
“Your son is safe; he and the boat’s crew together with your gunner and his men are snugly in irons under hatches.”
Don Diego sank back on the couch, his glittering dark eyes fixed upon the tawny face above him. He composed himself. After all, he possessed the stoicism proper to his desperate trade. The dice had fallen against him in this venture. The tables had been turned upon him in the very moment of success. He accepted the situation with the fortitude of a fatalist.
With the utmost calm he enquired:
“And now, Senior Capitan?”
“And now,” said Captain Blood — to give him the title he had assumed— “being a humane man, I am sorry to find that ye’re not dead from the tap we gave you. For it means that you’ll be put to the trouble of dying all over again.”
“Ah!” Don Diego drew a deep breath. “But is that necessary?” he asked, without apparent perturbation.
Captain Blood’s blue eyes approved his bearing. “Ask yourself,” said he. “Tell me, as an experienced and bloody pirate, what in my place would you do, yourself?”
“Ah, but there is a difference.” Don Diego sat up to argue the matter. “It lies in the fact that you boast yourself a humane man.”
Captain Blood perched himself on the edge of the long oak table. “But I am not a fool,” said he, “and I’ll not allow a natural Irish sentimentality to stand in the way of my doing what is necessary and proper. You and your ten surviving scoundrels are a menace on this ship. More than that, she is none so well found in water and provisions. True, we are fortunately a small number, but you and your party inconveniently increase it. So that on every hand, you see, prudence suggests to us that we should deny ourselves the pleasure of your company, and, steeling our soft hearts to the inevitable, invite you to be so obliging as to step over the side.”
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 385
