Dorothy greeted me first, and we stood close together at the rail, as the men hoisted the chest on deck, and then fastened the tackle to the boat She said nothing, asked nothing, but her hands clung to my arm, and whenever I turned toward her, our eyes met. I did not find the courage to tell her then what we had found aboard the Namur, although I could not prevent my own eyes from wandering constantly toward the doomed vessel. The rising sea was slapping the submerged stern with increasing violence, the salt spray rising in clouds over the after rail. Watkins approached us, coming from among the group of sailors forward.
“There’s a smart bit of wind in those clouds, sir,” he said respectfully, “an’ I don’t like the look o’ the coast ter leeward. Shall we trim sail?”
“Not quite yet, Watkins. It will be some time before the gale strikes here. The bark is going down, presently.”
“Yes, sir; but the men better stand by.” He glanced from my face to that of the girl, lowering his voice. “Harwood tells me Sanchez was aboard, sir, and refused to leave?”
“Very true; but he was dying; no doubt is dead by now. There was nothing to be done for him.”
“I should say not, Mr. Carlyle. I wouldn’t lift a finger ter save him frum hell.”
There was a sudden cry forward, and a voice shouted.
“There she goes, buckies! That damn Dutchman’s done with. That’s the last o’ the Namur!”
I turned swiftly, my hand grasping her fingers as they clung to the rail. With a rasping sound, clearly distinguished across the intervening water, as though every timber cried out in agony to the strain, the battered hulk slid downward, the deck breaking amidships as the stern splashed into the depths; then that also toppled over, leaving nothing above water except the blunt end of a broken bow-sprit, and a tangle of wreckage, tossed about on the crest of the waves. I watched breathlessly, unable to utter a sound; I could only think of that stricken man in the cabin, those wild eyes which had threatened me. He was gone now—gone! Watkins spoke.
“It’s all over, sir.”
“Yes, there is nothing to keep us here any longer,” I answered still dazed, but realizing I must arouse myself. “Shake out the reef in your mainsail, and we’ll get out to sea. Who is at the wheel?”
“Schmitt, sir—what is the course, Captain Carlyle?”
“Nor’west, by nor’, and hold on as long as you can.”
“Ay, ay, sir; nor’west by nor’ she is.”
I yet held Dorothy’s hand tightly clasped in my own, and the depths of her uplifted eyes questioned me.
“We will go aft, dear, and I will tell you the whole story,” I said gently, “for now we are homeward bound.”
* * * *
I write these few closing lines a year later, in the cabin of the Ocean Spray, a three master, full to the hatches with a cargo of tobacco, bound for London, and a market. Dorothy is on deck, eagerly watching for the first glimpse of the chalk cliffs of old England. I must join her presently, yet linger below to add these final sentences.
There is, after all, little which needs to be said. The voyage of the Santa Marie north proved uneventful, and, after that first night of storm, the weather held pleasant, and the sea fairly smooth. I had some trouble with the men, but nothing serious, as Watkins and Harwood held as I did, and the pledge of Dorothy’s influence brought courage. I refused to open the chest, believing our safety, and chance of pardon, would depend largely on our handing this over in good faith to the authorities. Watkins and I guarded it night and day, until the schooner rounded the Cape and came into the Chesapeake. No attempt was made to find quarters below, the entire crew sleeping on deck, Dorothy comfortable on the flag locker.
It was scarcely sunrise, on the fifth day, when we dropped anchor against the current of the James, our sails furled, and the red English colors flying from the peak. Two hours later the entire company were in the presence of the Governor, where I told my story, gravely listened to, supplemented by the earnest plea of the young woman. I shall never forget that scene, or how breathlessly we awaited the decision of the great man, who so closely watched our faces. They were surely a strange, rough group as they stood thus, hats in hand, waiting to learn their fate, shaggy-haired, unshaven, largely scum of the sea, never before in such presence, shuffling uneasily before his glance, feeling to the full the peril of their position. Their eyes turned to me questioningly.
Opposite us, behind a long table, sat the Governor, dignified, austere, his hair powdered, and face smoothly shaven; while on either side of him were those of his council, many of the faces stern and unforgiving. But for their gracious reception of Dorothy, and their careful attention to her words, I should have lost heart. They questioned me shrewdly, although the Governor spoke but seldom, and then in a kindly tone of sympathy and understanding. One by one the men were called forward, each in turn compelled to tell briefly the story of his life; and when all was done the eyes of the Governor sought those of his council.
“You have all alike heard the tale, gentlemen,” he said. “Nothing like it hath ever before been brought before this Colony. Would you leave decision to me?”
There was a murmur of assent, as though they were thus gladly relieved of responsibility in so serious a matter. The Governor smiled, his kindly eyes surveying us once more; then, with extended hand he bade Dorothy be seated.
“The story is seemingly an honest one,” he said slowly, “and these seamen have done a great service to the Colony. They deserve reward rather than punishment. The fair lady who pleads for them is known to us all, and to even question her word is impossible. Unfortunately I have not the power of pardon in cases of piracy, nor authority to free bond slaves, without the approval of the home government; yet will exercise in this case whatsoever of power I possess. For gallant services rendered to the Colony, and unselfish devotion to Mistress Dorothy Fairfax, I release Geoffry Carlyle from servitude, pending advices from England; I also grant parole to these seamen, on condition they remain within our jurisdiction until this judgment can be confirmed, and full pardons issued. Is this judgment satisfactory, gentlemen?”
The members of the council bowed gravely, without speaking.
“The chest of treasure recovered from the sunken pirate ship,” he went on soberly, “will remain unopened until final decision is made. As I understand, Master Carlyle, no one among you has yet seen its contents, or estimated its value?”
“No, your excellency. Beyond doubt it contains the gold stolen from Roger Fairfax; and possibly the result of other robberies at sea.
“The law of England is that a certain percentage of such recovered treasure belongs to the crown, the remainder, its true ownership undetermined, to be fairly divided among those recovering it.”
“Yet,” spoke up Dorothy quickly, “it must surely be possible to waive all claim in such cases?”
“Certainly; as private property it can be disposed of in any way desired. Was that your thought?”
“A Fairfax always pays his debt,” she said proudly, “and this is mine.”
There was a moment’s silence as though each one present hesitated to speak. She had risen, and yet stood, but with eyes lowered to the floor. Then they were lifted, and met mine, in all frank honesty.
“There is another debt I owe,” she said clearly, “and would pay, your Excellency.”
“What is that, fair mistress?”
She crossed to me, her hand upon my arm.
“To become the wife of Geoffry Carlyle.”
THE IRON PIRATE, by Max Pemberton (Part 1)
CHAPTER I.
THE PERFECT FOOL ASKS A FAVOUR.
“En voiture! En voiture!”
If it has not been your privilege to hear a French guard utter these words, you have lost a lesson in the dignity of elocution which nothing can replace. “En voiture, en voiture; five minutes for Paris.” At the well-delivered warning, the Englishman in the adjoining buffet raises on high the frothing tankard, and vaunts before the world his cap
acity for deep draughts and long; the fair American spills her coffee and looks an exclamation; the Bishop pays for his daughter’s tea, drops the change in the one chink which the buffet boards disclose, and thinks one; the travelled person, disdaining haste, smiles on all with a pitying leer; the foolish man, who has forgotten something, makes public his conviction that he will lose his train. The adamantine official alone is at his ease, and, as the minutes go, the knell of the train-loser sounds the deeper, the horrid jargon is yet more irritating.
I thought all these things, and more, as I waited for the Perfect Fool at the door of my carriage in the harbour station at Calais. He was truly an impossible man, that small-eyed, short-haired, stooping mystery I had met at Cowes a month before, and formed so strange a friendship with. Today he would do this, tomorrow he would not; today he had a theory that the world was egg-shaped, tomorrow he believed it to be round; in one moment he was hot upon a journey to St. Petersburg, in the next he felt that the Pacific Islands offered a better opportunity. If he had a second coat, no man had ever seen it; if he had a purpose in life, no man, I hold, had ever known it. And yet there was a fascination about him you could not resist; in his visible, palpitating, stultifying folly there was something so amazing that you drew to the man as to that unknown something which the world had not yet given to you, as a treasure to be worn daily in the privacy of your own enjoyment. I had, as I have said, picked the Perfect Fool up at Cowes, whither I had taken my yacht, Celsis, for the Regatta Week; and he had clung to me ever since with a dogged obstinacy that was a triumph. He had taken of my bread and eaten of my salt unasked; he was not a man such as the men I knew—he was interested in nothing, not even in himself—and yet I tolerated him. And in return for this toleration he was about to make me lose a train for Paris.
“Will you come on?” I roared for the tenth time, as the cracked bell jangled and the guards hoisted the last stout person into the only carriage where there was not a seat for her. “Don’t you see we shall be left behind? Hurry up! Hang your parcels! Now then—for the last time, Hall, Hill, Hull, whatever your confounded name is, are you coming?”
Many guards gave a hand to the hoist, and the Perfect Fool fell upon his hat-box, which was all the personal property he seemed to possess. He apologised to Mary, who sat in the far corner, with more grace than I had looked for from him, woke Roderick, who was in his fifth sleep since luncheon, and then gathered the remnants of himself into a coherent whole.
“Did anyone use my name?” he asked gravely, and as one offended. “I thought I heard someone call me Hull?”
“Exactly; I think I called you every name in the Directory, but I’m glad you answer to one of them.”
“Yes, and I tell you what,” said Roderick, “I wish you wouldn’t come into a railway carriage on your hands and knees, waking a fellow up every time he tries to get a minute to himself; I don’t speak for myself, but for my sister.”
The Perfect Fool made a profound bow to Mary, who looked very pretty in her dainty yachting dress—she was only sixteen, I had known her all her life—and he said, “I cannot make your sister an apology worthy of her.”
“If that isn’t a shame, Mr. Hall,” replied the blushing girl. “I never go to sleep in railway carriages.”
“No, of course you don’t,” said Roderick, as he made himself comfortable for another nap, “but you may go to sleep in a railway carriage;” then with a grunt, “Wake me up at Amiens, old man,” he sank to slumber.
The train moved slowly over the sandy marsh which lies between Calais and Boulogne, and the vapid talk of the railway carriage held us to Amiens, and after. During the second half of the long journey Roderick was asleep, and Mary’s pretty head had fallen against the cushion as the swing of the carriage gave the direct negative to her words at Calais station. At last, even the maker of commonplaces was silent; and as I reclined at greater length on the cushions of the stuffy compartment, I thought how strange a company we were then being carried over the dull, drear pasture-land of France, to the lights, the music, and the life of the great capital. Of the man Martin Hall—I remembered his true name in the moments of repose—I knew nothing beyond that which I have told you; but of my friends Roderick and Mary, accompanying me on this wildaway journey, I knew all that was to be known. Roderick and I had been at Caius College, Cambridge, together, friends drawn the closer in affection because our conditions in kith and kin, in possession and in purpose, in ambition and in idleness, were so very like. Roderick was an orphan twenty-four years of age, young, rich, desiring to know life before he measured strength with her, caring for no man, not vital enough to realise danger, an Englishman in tenacity of will, a good fellow, a gentleman. His sister was his only care. He gave to her the strength of an undivided love, and just as, in the shallowness of much of his life, there was matter for blame, so in this increasing affection and thought for the one very dear to him was there the strength of a strong manhood and a noble work.
For myself, I was twenty-five when the strange things of which I am about to write happened to me. Like Roderick, I was an orphan. My father had left me £50,000, which I drew upon when I was of age; but, shame that I should write it, I had spent more than £40,000 in four years, and my schooner, the Celsis, with some few thousand pounds, alone remained to me. Of what was my future to be, I knew not. In the senseless purpose of my life, I said only, “It will come, the tide in my affairs which taken at the flood should lead on to fortune.” And in this supreme folly I lived the days, now in the Mediterranean, now cruising round the coast of England, now flying of a sudden to Paris with one they might have called a vulgarian, but one I chose to know. A journey fraught with folly, the child of folly, to end in folly, so might it have been said; but who can foretell the supreme moments of our lives, when unknowingly we stand on the threshold of action? And who should expect me to foresee that the man who was to touch the spring of my life’s action sat before me—mocked of me, dubbed the Perfect Fool—over whose dead body I was to tread the paths of danger and the intricate ways of strange adventure?
But I would not weary you with more of these facts than are absolutely necessary for the understanding of this story, surpassing strange, which I judge it to be as much my duty as my privilege to write. Let us go back to the Gare du Nord, and the compartment wherein Mary and Roderick slept, while the Perfect Fool and I faced each other, surfeited with meteorological observations, sick to weariness with reflections upon the probability of being late or arriving before time. I would well have been silent and dozed as the others were doing; of a truth, I had done so had it not become very evident that the man who had begun to bore me wished at last to say something, relating neither to the weather nor to the speed of our train. His restless manner, the fidgeting of his hands with certain papers which he had taken from his great-coat pocket, the shifting of the small grey eyes, marked that within him which suffered not show except in privacy; and I waited for him, making pretence of interest in the great plain of hedgeless pasture-land which bordered the track on each side. At last he spoke, and, speaking, seemed to be the Perfect Fool no longer.
“They’re both asleep, aren’t they?” he asked suddenly, as he put his hand, which seemed to tremble, upon my arm, and pointed to the sleepers. “Would you mind making sure—quite sure—before I speak?—that is, if you will let me, for I have a favour to ask.”
To see the man grave and evidently concerned was to me so unusual that for a moment I looked at him rather than at Roderick or Mary, and waited to know if the gravity were not of his humour and not of any deeper import. A single glance at him convinced me for the second time that I did him wrong. He was looking at me with a fitful pleading look unlike anything he had shown previously. In answer to his request I assured him at once that he might speak his mind; that, even if Roderick should overhear us, I would pledge my word for his good faith. Then only did he unbosom himself and tell me freely what he had to say.
“I wanted to speak to you some days
ago,” he said earnestly and quickly, as his hands continued to play with the paper, “but we have been so much occupied that I have never found the occasion. It must seem curious in your eyes that I, who am quite a stranger to you, should have been in your company for some weeks, and should not have told you more than my name. As the thing stands, you have been kind enough to make no inquiries; if I am an impostor, you do not care to know it; if I am a rascal hunted by the law, you have not been willing to help the law; you do not know if I have money or no money, a home or no home, people or no people, yet you have made me—shall I say, a friend?”
He asked the question with such a gentle inflexion of the voice that I felt a softer chord was touched, and in response I shook hands with him. After that he continued to speak.
“I am very grateful for all your trust, believe me, for I am a man that has known few friends in life, and I have not cared to go out of my way to seek them. You have given me your friendship unasked, and it is the more prized. What I wanted to say is this, if I should die before three days have passed, will you open this packet of papers I have prepared and sealed for you, and carry out what is written there as well as you are able? It is no idle request, I assure you; it is one that will put you in the place where I now stand, with opportunities greater than I dare to think of. As for the dangers, they are big enough, but you are the man to overcome them as I hope to overcome them—if I live!”
The sun fell over the lifeless scene without as he ceased to speak. I could see a crimson beam glowing upon a crucifix that stood on the wayside by the hill-foot yonder; but the cheerless monotony of plough land and of pasture, stretching away leafless, treeless, without bud or flower, herd or herdsman, church or cottage, to the shadowed horizon, looming dark as the twilight deepened, was in sympathy with the gloom which had come upon me as Martin Hall ceased to speak. I had thought the man a fool and witless, flighty in purpose and shallow in thought, and yet he seemed to speak of great mysteries—and of death. In one moment the jester’s cloak fell from him, and I saw the mail beneath. He had made a great impression upon me, but I concealed it from him, and replied jauntily and with no show of gravity—
The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales Page 215
