The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales

by Robert E. Howard

  Our first business on leaving the Mars was to take passage to Kingston in one of the many sailing-boats which, owned by negro boatmen, are always obtainable at Port Royal, and in her we managed, with the aid of a fine sea-breeze, to make the passage in an hour, being badly beaten, however, in a race with a gig belonging to the frigate Volage which happened to be lying at Port Royal at the time.

  Arrived in Kingston we made our way, in the first instance, to the post-office, where we each found several letters awaiting us. There were nine for me, of which eight were from my father, and one—heaven only knows how it had found its way across in so short a time—from Dona Inez. I ought, I suppose, to have first opened those from my father; but I did not. With the ardour that might have been expected I first tore open the envelope superscribed by Inez. The letter was dated the day after our flight from La Guayra; and the poor girl, who had already learned from the faithful Juan that our plans had somehow been capsized, had written in an agony of apprehension as to our safety. It appeared that Juan—whose arrival at the cove had been delayed about half an hour by the suspicious manoeuvres of a felucca ahead of him, undoubtedly the Pinta—had hung about the spot for something like an hour and a half, at the expiration of which time two Spaniards had presented themselves on the beach and had inquired whether he belonged to the Pinta. On his saying that he did not he had been very sharply cross-questioned as to who he was, and the reasons for his presence there at that hour, which cross-questioning he was sensible enough to evade and cut short by retreating to his felucca and returning to La Guayra, from whence he, the first thing next morning, made his way to the castle to report and to seek further instructions. Having actually witnessed our departure, and knowing from the time at which it had occurred that we must have made our way on board the wrong felucca—which Juan was subsequently able to say with almost absolute certainty must have been the Pinta—my lady-love was painfully anxious as to our fate; for it appeared that the Pinta and her crew bore a somewhat evil reputation among those who professed to know her best at La Guayra; and the only hope or consolation which Dona Inez could find lay in her somewhat too favourable estimate of our ability to take care of ourselves. She most earnestly entreated that I would not lose a moment, after the receipt of her letter, in writing to set her mind at rest. She added that her father had returned home in excellent health; and that, though he had at first betrayed some vexation at the loss of our services, he had soon cooled down, and had then acknowledged that he was glad, for our sakes, that we had succeeded in effecting our escape.

  Having read and re-read this most cherished epistle some half a dozen times over, I refolded and put it carefully into my pocket, next turning to the letters from my father, which I arranged and opened according to the dates of the postmarks.

  The first of these letters—being the third written by my father since the date of my leaving England (I had received the other two on the occasion of our former visit to Port Royal, in the Hermione)—was very similar to all others which had ever reached me from the same writer; brief, cold, and evidently strained and artificial as to the one or two expressions of affection contained therein—altogether a painful and unsatisfactory letter to receive, in fact. The second was somewhat similar, except that therein my father condescended to inform me that he was by no means well; that he thought he had perhaps been overworking himself, and that unless his health speedily mended he feared he should be obliged to call in medical advice. This was sufficiently alarming; but the third letter was even more so, for in it he informed me that he had suffered a complete break-down in health and spirits; that he had placed himself under the care of Doctor Wise, one of the most eminent physicians of the day, and that he had not only been strictly enjoined to entirely lay aside his brush for at least six months, but that he had also been ordered to travel. This, however, was evidently not the worst of it; for the letter, a long, rambling, and somewhat incoherent epistle this time, went on to hint mysteriously at the causes which had brought this lamentable state of affairs about; but so obscurely was the letter worded that, on its first perusal, the only information I could definitely gather from it was that my father was then suffering from the effects of many years of mental anguish resulting from some matter which, if I understood him aright, seemed to be in some way connected with my poor dead mother. The letter concluded with the extraordinary words, “Lionel, the shadow of deception and falsehood rests upon us both, and from no fault of ours.—Yours distractedly, Cuthbert Lascelles.”

  “The shadow of deception and falsehood!—no fault of ours!—yours distractedly!” Whatever could it all mean? The closing words of the letter, “yours distractedly,” puzzled me most of all. Hitherto my father’s communications to me, however lacking in affection they might otherwise have been, had all terminated with the orthodox “your affectionate father.” Why, then, this departure from the rule? Was it intentional, or was it merely to be regarded as an indication of the terribly disturbed state of the writer’s mind?

  I read and re-read this most singular epistle at least half a dozen times without gathering any additional light upon the obscure and mysterious hints which it contained, and I then turned to the remaining letters, thinking I might possibly find in them a solution to the enigma. And at the first reading I imagined I did find it; the conclusion at which I arrived being that my poor unfortunate father must have gone mad! I patiently went through the whole packet a second time, seeking in them some additional evidence of insanity; but no, saving on this one particular matter the writer had evidently been in full possession of all his faculties. The fourth letter contained the information that the news of the mutiny on board the Hermione had reached England, and that it was believed some of the officers had escaped massacre and had been landed at La Guayra. Touching this matter he had written: “I can scarcely say, at this moment, whether I hope you are among the living or among the dead. If the latter, I shall at least enjoy the melancholy satisfaction of knowing that I have seen the last of one who, though I could have dearly loved him, and have been proud of him for his own sake, was, nevertheless, although my own son, almost hateful to me, because of his marked resemblance to one whose duplicity has been the curse of my life. But if, on the other hand, you are living, Lionel—as something whispers to me that you are—I shall perhaps be disposed to accept your preservation as a token from Heaven that I may, after all, have been mistaken, and that your mother could, had I given her the opportunity, have explained those circumstances which, unexplained, completely shattered her own happiness and mine.”

  The next letter, the fifth, was dated from Rome, in which city my father informed me that he had then been staying for about three weeks; but that he was about to leave it again, for what destination he could not then say, as he had derived no benefit whatever from the change—was rather worse, in fact—since the city was so full of associations connected with my mother that his trouble was then harder than ever to bear. He added that he was still strongly impressed with the idea of my being alive, and that this idea, with the excuse it afforded him for continuing to write to me, gave him some small comfort. He said he had been exceedingly gratified at the very favourable report which had reached him of my conduct at Jean Rabel, and he most earnestly besought me, if indeed I were still alive, to comport myself in such a manner that my glorious deeds might in some measure, if not wholly, atone for the suffering my mother had caused him. The remaining letters were dated from Naples. They all dwelt upon the same theme; but the last closed with the request that, if it ever reached me, I would at once write in reply, addressing my letter to his lawyer in London, who would be kept advised of his whereabouts and would forward it on to him. There was also an assurance that he had no desire to visit my mother’s heartless deception of him upon me, since, whatever were her faults, I was his son, and he had no intention of disowning the relationship; so that, if ever in need of money, I was without hesitation to draw upon him for any reasonable amount. “In want of money, indeed!” Luc
kily, I was not; but, as I crushed the letters back into my pocket, I solemnly vowed that, rather than touch a penny of that man’s money, at least whilst his state of mind remained what it then was, I would perish of starvation in a ditch. Then bewildered, stunned, and utterly crushed in spirit, I hastily excused myself to Courtenay upon the plea of having received distressing news from England, and, obeying the same impulse which impels a wounded animal to rush away and hide itself and its suffering in the deepest solitudes, I turned my back upon Kingston, with its busy bustling streets, and hastened to bury myself among the hills. I pushed forward without rest or pause until I found myself on the crest of a lofty eminence overlooking the town and harbour; when, flinging myself down beneath the grateful shade of a gigantic cotton-wood, I gave free vent to my feelings of suspense, indignation, and sorrow, and burying my face in my hands wept as if my heart would break. I will not attempt to describe or enlarge upon the feelings which then harrowed my soul; the words have never yet been coined which could adequately express my anguish. No merely mortal pen could depict it; nor can anyone, save those unfortunates who have passed through such an ordeal, imagine it. Moreover, the subject even now, when I am old and grey-headed, is still so painful to me that I care not to dwell unduly upon it. Let me, therefore, pass on to the moment when, relieved, yet exhausted by the passage of that terrible outburst of tears, I had so far regained composure as to be able to look my position fairly in the face.

  My first act was to draw forth the fatal bundle of letters and reperuse them patiently from beginning to end, still clinging to the desperate hope that I had after all, in some unaccountable way, misunderstood my father’s meaning, and that I was under some hallucination. But no; there were the words all too plainly written for any possibility of mistake. His was the hallucination—not mine. False? A dissimulator? I thrust my hand into my bosom, and dragged forth the velvet case containing my mother’s portrait, which I had worn next my heart throughout all the vicissitudes of fortune encountered by me since the moment it had first been placed in my hands, and, pressing the spring, threw back the cover, and allowed my eyes to rest upon the loveliness it had concealed. Deceitful! If falsehood lurked within the liquid depths of those clear, calm, steadfast eyes, or was hidden behind that smooth and placid brow, then I thought must the very angels be false! If falsehood could shroud itself behind a mask of such surpassing loveliness, such an aspect and personification of all that is pure, and innocent, and faithful, and true, “where,” I asked myself, “oh! where is truth to be found?” That my mother had, all unwittingly, and in some inexplicable manner aroused my father’s suspicions, I could not doubt; but, after all, the matter was manifestly, to my mind, merely one of fancied or implied duplicity or deceit capable of easy explanation; it would probably have had no lasting effect on any but a diseased mind; and, knowing him as well as I did, I could understand how, with his reserved temperament and in his wounded pride, my father would silently withdraw himself from his wife, nor deign to stoop so far as to seek an explanation. I could discern only too clearly that he had taken as proof of dissimulation some circumstance that would only appear suspicious until the opportunity for explanation had passed away for ever—hence the unhappiness of which I had gained an inkling during my nursery days—and that it was probably not until his heart had been softened by bereavement that he had coolly and dispassionately enough reviewed the circumstances to arrive at the conclusion that he might, after all, have been mistaken. My father had written of his “doubts and misgivings,” and I felt confident that it was nothing in the world but the tenacious hold of these doubts and misgivings upon his mind which had in the first instance made him so unfatherly in his treatment of me, and had now reduced him almost to a condition of insanity. It was the horrible uncertainty which was killing him, soul and body—the uncertainty whether, on the one hand, his suspicions had been well founded; or whether, on the other hand, he had been hideously cruel and unjust to the one being who, above all others, ought to have been the object of his most tender solicitude. I had no doubt whatever upon the subject; there was a conviction, amounting to absolute certainty in my mind, that my unhappy father had all too easily allowed himself to be deceived, and I there and then solemnly vowed and resolved that henceforward it should be the great object and aim of my life to demonstrate this to him to the point of positive conviction. “Yes,” I exclaimed, springing to my feet with renewed hope, “I had already one incentive—my love for Inez—to spur me forward to great and noble achievements: I have now another—the justification of my dead mother’s memory; and henceforward these shall be the twin stars to guide me onward in my career. ‘For Love and Honour’ shall be my motto; and, with these two for guerdon, what may a man not dare and do?”

  An hour later saw me back in Kingston and comfortably ensconced in the bay-window of a private room in the — hotel, inditing a long epistle to my father in collective reply to the entire budget I had that morning received from him. In this letter I summarily disposed of the mutiny and my subsequent adventures in half a dozen brief sentences, feeling that such a matter could well wait until my father was in a more congenial mood for the communication of particulars; devoting my entire energies to the combating of those doubts which I now saw had been for years insidiously sapping his happiness, ay, and his very intellect as well I thanked him for taking me into his confidence, fully entered into my reasons for regarding his suspicions as groundless, and besought him first to communicate to me fully all the facts of the case—which, I pointed out to him, I ought to be made acquainted with, in order that I might be enabled to take the fullest advantage of any opportunity which might offer, in my wanderings, to sift the matter to the bottom—and then to dismiss all thought of it from his mind. This letter cost me three or four hours of severe study; but I contrived to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion at last; and then, with a considerably lighter heart, I began and finished a letter to Inez, in which, mingled with the usual lover-like protestations, I gave her full details of our adventure from the parting moment on the beach to our arrival in Port Royal harbour. I further told her that I found myself at that moment possessed of a tidy little sum in prize-money, and that, inspired by my love for her, I had resolved to fight my way to the top of the ladder with the utmost possible expedition, with a great deal more of the same sort, which would no doubt appear the most arrant nonsense to you, dear reader, so I will not inflict it upon you.

  These two important tasks completed, I felt very much more easy in my mind, and was able to sit down to my dinner, which was shortly afterwards served, with a tolerable appetite. Whilst I was engaged in discussing the meal Courtenay came in. He informed me that he had accepted an invitation for himself and me to spend a week with Mr Thomson (the admiral’s, and also our own, agent) at his country house, some fifteen miles off in the heart of the Blue Mountain range; and that, as he had been unable to find me in time for us to go out there that evening, our host had promised to send in a couple of saddle-horses and a negro guide for our accommodation next morning, and that we should find them awaiting us at Mr Thomson’s store at nine o’clock. This was good news, for though I had pulled myself pretty well together after the shock occasioned by the perusal of my father’s letters, I felt that a little change and amusement would be most acceptable under the circumstances.

  On the following morning, punctual to the moment, we presented ourselves at the rendezvous; where we found, as had been promised, a couple of excellent saddle-horses awaiting us in charge of a grinning, happy-looking negro groom, who was mounted on a stout mule. Our guide, who informed us that his name was Pompey, promptly took charge of our valises, which he slung one on each side of his own saddle; we then mounted, and without loss of time got under weigh for our destination. The first six or seven miles of our journey was uninteresting enough, but when we plunged into the mountain road and found ourselves environed on each side by a thick growth of luxuriant tropical vegetation, the foliage and flowers of which bore all an
d more than all the hues of the rainbow, whilst gorgeous butterflies, gaudy insects, and birds of the most brilliant plumage flitted hither and thither about us, with an occasional opening in the dense growth revealing the most enchanting little views of the distant harbour and sea, or perchance a passing glimpse of some quiet vale, with its cane-fields, boiling-house, and residential buildings, our journey became an enjoyable one indeed. We reached our destination—an extensive and somewhat straggling one-storied building, with large lofty rooms shrouded in semi-darkness by the “jalousies” or Venetian shutters which are used to carefully exclude every ray of sunlight—about noon; and received a most cordial and hearty welcome from our host, a most hospitable Scotchman, and his family, and here—not to unnecessarily spin out my yarn—we spent one of the most pleasant and enjoyable weeks I had up to that time passed. The family, in addition to our host and his charming wife, consisted of a son and three daughters, who did everything that was possible to make our visit pleasant, and they were a musical family throughout; so that what with shooting, riding, visiting our somewhat distant neighbours, and receiving visits in return, when singing and dancing became the order of the evening, our short holiday passed all too quickly. These most excellent people were the first, as they were the warmest, friends I ever made in the island; and when, late in the afternoon of the eighth day of our visit, Courtenay and I, with Pompey again for our pilot, mounted to return to Kingston, we received a very warm and evidently sincere invitation from the whole family to make their house our home whenever opportunity would afford. We slept at our hotel that night, and, bright and early next morning, made our way to Port Royal, where almost the first object which met our view was our new ship, the Foam, at anchor close under the stern of the flag-ship, with the hands on board busy bending a new suit of canvas.