Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  Lord Julian stared at him, realizing exactly what he had refused.

  “You’ll think better of it now that ye understand?” quoth Blood.

  “Aye, in God’s name, go, my lord,” spluttered Bishop, “and make yourself obeyed. This damned pirate has me by the throat.”

  His lordship surveyed him with an eye that was not by any means admiring. “Why, if that is your wish...” he began. Then he shrugged, and turned again to Blood.

  “I suppose I can trust you that no harm will come to Colonel Bishop if you are allowed to sail?”

  “You have my word for it,” said Blood. “And also that I shall put him safely ashore again without delay.”

  Lord Julian bowed stiffly to the cowering Deputy-Governor. “You understand, sir, that I do as you desire,” he said coldly.

  “Aye, man, aye!” Bishop assented hastily.

  “Very well.” Lord Julian bowed again and took his departure. Blood escorted him to the entrance ladder at the foot of which still swung the Arabella’s own cock-boat.

  “It’s good-bye, my lord,” said Blood. “And there’s another thing.” He proffered a parchment that he had drawn from his pocket. “It’s the commission. Bishop was right when he said it was a mistake.”

  Lord Julian considered him, and considering him his expression softened.

  “I am sorry,” he said sincerely.

  “In other circumstances...” began Blood. “Oh, but there! Ye’ll understand. The boat’s waiting.”

  Yet with his foot on the first rung of the ladder, Lord Julian hesitated.

  “I still do not perceive — blister me if I do! — why you should not have found some one else to carry your message to the Commandant, and kept me aboard as an added hostage for his obedience to your wishes.”

  Blood’s vivid eyes looked into the other’s that were clear and honest, and he smiled, a little wistfully. A moment he seemed to hesitate. Then he explained himself quite fully.

  “Why shouldn’t I tell you? It’s the same reason that’s been urging me to pick a quarrel with you so that I might have the satisfaction of slipping a couple of feet of steel into your vitals. When I accepted your commission, I was moved to think it might redeem me in the eyes of Miss Bishop — for whose sake, as you may have guessed, I took it. But I have discovered that such a thing is beyond accomplishment. I should have known it for a sick man’s dream. I have discovered also that if she’s choosing you, as I believe she is, she’s choosing wisely between us, and that’s why I’ll not have your life risked by keeping you aboard whilst the message goes by another who might bungle it. And now perhaps ye’ll understand.”

  Lord Julian stared at him bewildered. His long, aristocratic face was very pale.

  “My God!” he said. “And you tell me this?”

  “I tell you because... Oh, plague on it! — so that ye may tell her; so that she may be made to realize that there’s something of the unfortunate gentleman left under the thief and pirate she accounts me, and that her own good is my supreme desire. Knowing that, she may... faith, she may remember me more kindly — if It’s only in her prayers. That’s all, my lord.”

  Lord Julian continued to look at the buccaneer in silence. In silence, at last, he held out his hand; and in silence Blood took it.

  “I wonder whether you are right,” said his lordship, “and whether you are not the better man.”

  “Where she is concerned see that you make sure that I am right. Good-bye to you.”

  Lord Julian wrung his hand in silence, went down the ladder, and was pulled ashore. From the distance he waved to Blood, who stood leaning on the bulwarks watching the receding cock-boat.

  The Arabella sailed within the hour, moving lazily before a sluggish breeze. The fort remained silent and there was no movement from the fleet to hinder her departure. Lord Julian had carried the message effectively, and had added to it his own personal commands.

  CHAPTER XXIV. WAR

  Five miles out at sea from Port Royal, whence the details of the coast of Jamaica were losing their sharpness, the Arabella hove to, and the sloop she had been towing was warped alongside.

  Captain Blood escorted his compulsory guest to the head of the ladder. Colonel Bishop, who for two hours and more had been in a state of mortal anxiety, breathed freely at last; and as the tide of his fears receded, so that of his deep-rooted hate of this audacious buccaneer resumed its normal flow. But he practised circumspection. If in his heart he vowed that once back in Port Royal there was no effort he would spare, no nerve he would not strain, to bring Peter Blood to final moorings in Execution Dock, at least he kept that vow strictly to himself.

  Peter Blood had no illusions. He was not, and never would be, the complete pirate. There was not another buccaneer in all the Caribbean who would have denied himself the pleasure of stringing Colonel Bishop from the yardarm, and by thus finally stifling the vindictive planter’s hatred have increased his own security. But Blood was not of these. Moreover, in the case of Colonel Bishop there was a particular reason for restraint. Because he was Arabella Bishop’s uncle, his life must remain sacred to Captain Blood.

  And so the Captain smiled into the sallow, bloated face and the little eyes that fixed him with a malevolence not to be dissembled.

  “A safe voyage home to you, Colonel, darling,” said he in valediction, and from his easy, smiling manner you would never have dreamt of the pain he carried in his breast. “It’s the second time ye’ve served me for a hostage. Ye’ll be well advised to avoid a third. I’m not lucky to you, Colonel, as you should be perceiving.”

  Jeremy Pitt, the master, lounging at Blood’s elbow, looked darkly upon the departure of the Deputy-Governor. Behind them a little mob of grim, stalwart, sun-tanned buccaneers were restrained from cracking Bishop like a flea only by their submission to the dominant will of their leader. They had learnt from Pitt while yet in Port Royal of their Captain’s danger, and whilst as ready as he to throw over the King’s service which had been thrust upon them, yet they resented the manner in which this had been rendered necessary, and they marvelled now at Blood’s restraint where Bishop was concerned. The Deputy-Governor looked round and met the lowering hostile glances of those fierce eyes. Instinct warned him that his life at that moment was held precariously, that an injudicious word might precipitate an explosion of hatred from which no human power could save him. Therefore he said nothing. He inclined his head in silence to the Captain, and went blundering and stumbling in his haste down that ladder to the sloop and its waiting negro crew.

  They pushed off the craft from the red hull of the Arabella, bent to their sweeps, then, hoisting sail, headed back for Port Royal, intent upon reaching it before darkness should come down upon them. And Bishop, the great bulk of him huddled in the stem sheets, sat silent, his black brows knitted, his coarse lips pursed, malevolence and vindictiveness so whelming now his recent panic that he forgot his near escape of the yardarm and the running noose.

  On the mole at Port Royal, under the low, embattled wall of the fort, Major Mallard and Lord Julian waited to receive him, and it was with infinite relief that they assisted him from the sloop.

  Major Mallard was disposed to be apologetic.

  “Glad to see you safe, sir,” said he. “I’d have sunk Blood’s ship in spite of your excellency’s being aboard but for your own orders by Lord Julian, and his lordship’s assurance that he had Blood’s word for it that no harm should come to you so that no harm came to him. I’ll confess I thought it rash of his lordship to accept the word of a damned pirate....”

  “I have found it as good as another’s,” said his lordship, cropping the Major’s too eager eloquence. He spoke with an unusual degree of that frosty dignity he could assume upon occasion. The fact is that his lordship was in an exceedingly bad humour. Having written jubilantly home to the Secretary of State that his mission had succeeded, he was now faced with the necessity of writing again to confess that this success had been ephemeral. And because Major M
allard’s crisp mostachios were lifted by a sneer at the notion of a buccaneer’s word being acceptable, he added still more sharply: “My justification is here in the person of Colonel Bishop safely returned. As against that, sir, your opinion does not weigh for very much. You should realize it.”

  “Oh, as your lordship says.” Major Mallard’s manner was tinged with irony. “To be sure, here is the Colonel safe and sound. And out yonder is Captain Blood, also safe and sound, to begin his piratical ravages all over again.”

  “I do not propose to discuss the reasons with you, Major Mallard.”

  “And, anyway, it’s not for long,” growled the Colonel, finding speech at last. “No, by.....” He emphasized the assurance by an unprintable oath. “If I spend the last shilling of my fortune and the last ship of the Jamaica fleet, I’ll have that rascal in a hempen necktie before I rest. And I’ll not be long about it.” He had empurpled in his angry vehemence, and the veins of his forehead stood out like whipcord. Then he checked.

  “You did well to follow Lord Julian’s instructions,” he commended the Major. With that he turned from him, and took his lordship by the arm. “Come, my lord. We must take order about this, you and I.”

  They went off together, skirting the redoubt, and so through courtyard and garden to the house where Arabella waited anxiously. The sight of her uncle brought her infinite relief, not only on his own account, but on account also of Captain Blood.

  “You took a great risk, sir,” she gravely told Lord Julian after the ordinary greetings had been exchanged.

  But Lord Julian answered her as he had answered Major Mallard. “There was no risk, ma’am.”

  She looked at him in some astonishment. His long, aristocratic face wore a more melancholy, pensive air than usual. He answered the enquiry in her glance:

  “So that Blood’s ship were allowed to pass the fort, no harm could come to Colonel Bishop. Blood pledged me his word for that.”

  A faint smile broke the set of her lips, which hitherto had been wistful, and a little colour tinged her cheeks. She would have pursued the subject, but the Deputy-Governor’s mood did not permit it. He sneered and snorted at the notion of Blood’s word being good for anything, forgetting that he owed to it his own preservation at that moment.

  At supper, and for long thereafter he talked of nothing but Blood — of how he would lay him by the heels, and what hideous things he would perform upon his body. And as he drank heavily the while, his speech became increasingly gross and his threats increasingly horrible; until in the end Arabella withdrew, white-faced and almost on the verge of tears. It was not often that Bishop revealed himself to his niece. Oddly enough, this coarse, overbearing planter went in a certain awe of that slim girl. It was as if she had inherited from her father the respect in which he had always been held by his brother.

  Lord Julian, who began to find Bishop disgusting beyond endurance, excused himself soon after, and went in quest of the lady. He had yet to deliver the message from Captain Blood, and this, he thought, would be his opportunity. But Miss Bishop had retired for the night, and Lord Julian must curb his impatience — it amounted by now to nothing less — until the morrow.

  Very early next morning, before the heat of the day came to render the open intolerable to his lordship, he espied her from his window moving amid the azaleas in the garden. It was a fitting setting for one who was still as much a delightful novelty to him in womanhood as was the azalea among flowers. He hurried forth to join her, and when, aroused from her pensiveness, she had given him a good-morrow, smiling and frank, he explained himself by the announcement that he bore her a message from Captain Blood.

  He observed her little start and the slight quiver of her lips, and observed thereafter not only her pallor and the shadowy rings about her eyes, but also that unusually wistful air which last night had escaped his notice.

  They moved out of the open to one of the terraces, where a pergola of orange-trees provided a shaded sauntering space that was at once cool and fragrant. As they went, he considered her admiringly, and marvelled at himself that it should have taken him so long fully to realize her slim, unusual grace, and to find her, as he now did, so entirely desirable, a woman whose charm must irradiate all the life of a man, and touch its commonplaces into magic.

  He noted the sheen of her red-brown hair, and how gracefully one of its heavy ringlets coiled upon her slender, milk-white neck. She wore a gown of shimmering grey silk, and a scarlet rose, fresh-gathered, was pinned at her breast like a splash of blood. Always thereafter when he thought of her it was as he saw her at that moment, as never, I think, until that moment had he seen her.

  In silence they paced on a little way into the green shade. Then she paused and faced him.

  “You said something of a message, sir,” she reminded him, thus betraying some of her impatience.

  He fingered the ringlets of his periwig, a little embarrassed how to deliver himself, considering how he should begin. “He desired me,” he said at last, “to give you a message that should prove to you that there is still something left in him of the unfortunate gentleman that... that.., for which once you knew him.”

  “That is not now necessary,” said she very gravely. He misunderstood her, of course, knowing nothing of the enlightenment that yesterday had come to her.

  “I think..., nay, I know that you do him an injustice,” said he.

  Her hazel eyes continued to regard him.

  “If you will deliver the message, it may enable me to judge.”

  To him, this was confusing. He did not immediately answer. He found that he had not sufficiently considered the terms he should employ, and the matter, after all, was of an exceeding delicacy, demanding delicate handling. It was not so much that he was concerned to deliver a message as to render it a vehicle by which to plead his own cause. Lord Julian, well versed in the lore of womankind and usually at his ease with ladies of the beau-monde, found himself oddly constrained before this frank and unsophisticated niece of a colonial planter.

  They moved on in silence and as if by common consent towards the brilliant sunshine where the pergola was intersected by the avenue leading upwards to the house. Across this patch of light fluttered a gorgeous butterfly, that was like black and scarlet velvet and large as a man’s hand. His lordship’s brooding eyes followed it out of sight before he answered.

  “It is not easy. Stab me, it is not. He was a man who deserved well. And amongst us we have marred his chances: your uncle, because he could not forget his rancour; you, because... because having told him that in the King’s service he would find his redemption of what was past, you would not afterwards admit to him that he was so redeemed. And this, although concern to rescue you was the chief motive of his embracing that same service.”

  She had turned her shoulder to him so that he should not see her face.

  “I know. I know now,” she said softly. Then after a pause she added the question: “And you? What part has your lordship had in this — that you should incriminate yourself with us?”

  “My part?” Again he hesitated, then plunged recklessly on, as men do when determined to perform a thing they fear. “If I understood him aright, if he understood aright, himself, my part, though entirely passive, was none the less effective. I implore you to observe that I but report his own words. I say nothing for myself.” His lordship’s unusual nervousness was steadily increasing. “He thought, then — so he told me — that my presence here had contributed to his inability to redeem himself in your sight; and unless he were so redeemed, then was redemption nothing.”

  She faced him fully, a frown of perplexity bringing her brows together above her troubled eyes.

  “He thought that you had contributed?” she echoed. It was clear she asked for enlightenment. He plunged on to afford it her, his glance a little scared, his cheeks flushing.

  “Aye, and he said so in terms which told me something that I hope above all things, and yet dare not believe, for, God knows, I
am no coxcomb, Arabella. He said... but first let me tell you how I was placed. I had gone aboard his ship to demand the instant surrender of your uncle whom he held captive. He laughed at me. Colonel Bishop should be a hostage for his safety. By rashly venturing aboard his ship, I afforded him in my own person yet another hostage as valuable at least as Colonel Bishop. Yet he bade me depart; not from the fear of consequences, for he is above fear, nor from any personal esteem for me whom he confessed that he had come to find detestable; and this for the very reason that made him concerned for my safety.”

  “I do not understand,” she said, as he paused. “Is not that a contradiction in itself?”

  “It seems so only. The fact is, Arabella, this unfortunate man has the... the temerity to love you.”

  She cried out at that, and clutched her breast whose calm was suddenly disturbed. Her eyes dilated as she stared at him.

  “I... I’ve startled you,” said he, with concern. “I feared I should. But it was necessary so that you may understand.”

  “Go on,” she bade him.

  “Well, then: he saw in me one who made it impossible that he should win you — so he said. Therefore he could with satisfaction have killed me. But because my death might cause you pain, because your happiness was the thing that above all things he desired, he surrendered that part of his guarantee of safety which my person afforded him. If his departure should be hindered, and I should lose my life in what might follow, there was the risk that... that you might mourn me. That risk he would not take. Him you deemed a thief and a pirate, he said, and added that — I am giving you his own words always — if in choosing between us two, your choice, as he believed, would fall on me, then were you in his opinion choosing wisely. Because of that he bade me leave his ship, and had me put ashore.”

  She looked at him with eyes that were aswim with tears. He took a step towards her, a catch in his breath, his hand held out.

  “Was he right, Arabella? My life’s happiness hangs upon your answer.”