Captain Blood (Penguin Classics)

by Rafael Sabatini

  “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 practice 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-colored 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 honor 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, Señor 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.”

  “I see,” said the Spaniard pensively. He swung his legs from the couch, and sat now upon the edge of it, his elbows on his knees. He had taken the measure of his man, and met him with a mock-urbanity and a suave detachment that matched his own. “I confess,” he admitted, “that there is much force in what you say.”

  “You take a load from my mind,” said Captain Blood. “I would not appear unnecessarily harsh, especially since I and my friends owe you so very much. For, whatever it may have been to others, to us your raid upon Barbados was most opportune. I am glad, therefore, that you agree that I have no choice.”

  “But, my friend, I did not agree so much.”

  “If there is any alternative that you can suggest, I shall be most happy to consider it.”

  Don Diego stroked his pointed black beard.

  “Can you give me until morning for reflection? My head aches so damnably that I am incapable of thought. And this, you will admit, is a matter that asks serious thought.”

  Captain Blood stood up. From a shelf he took a half-hour glass, reversed it so that the bulb containing the red sand was uppermost, and stood it on the table.

  “I am sorry to press you in such a matter, Don Diego, but one glass is all that I can give you. If by the time those sands have run out you can propose no acceptable alternative, I shall most reluctantly be driven to ask you to go over the side with your friends.”

  Captain Blood bowed, went out, and locked the door.

  Elbows on his knees and face in his hands, Don Diego sat watching the rusty sands as they filtered from the upper to the lower bulb. And what time he watched, the lines in his lean brown face grew deeper. Punctually as the last grains ran out, the door reopened.

  The Spaniard sighed, and sat upright to face the returning Captain Blood with the answer for which he came.

  “I have thought of an alternative, sir captain; but it depends upon your charity. It is that you put us ashore on one of the islands of this pestilent archipelago, and leave us to shift for ourselves.”

  Captain Blood pursed his lips. “It has its difficulties,” said he slowly.

  “I feared it would be so.” Don Diego sighed again, and stood up. “Let us say no more.”

  The light-blue eyes played over him like points of steel.

  “You are not afraid to die, Don Diego?”

  The Spaniard threw back his head, a frown between his eyes.

  “The question is offensive, sir.”

  “Then let me put it in another way—perhaps more happily: You do not desire to live?”

  “Ah, that I can answer. I do desire to live; and even more do I desire that my son may live. But the desire shall not make a coward of me for your amusement, master mocker.” It was the first sign he had shown of the least heat or resentment.

  Captain Blood did not directly answer. As before he perched himself on the corner of the table.

  “Would you be willing, sir, to earn life and liberty—for yourself, your son, and the other Spaniards who are on board?”

  “To earn it?” said Don Diego, and the watchful blue eyes did not miss the quiver that ran through him. “To earn it, do you say? Why, if the service you would propose is one that cannot hurt my honor . . .”

  “Could I be guilty of that?” protested the Captain. “I realize that even a pirate has his honor.” And forthwith he propounded his offer. “If you will look from those windows, Don Diego, you will see what appears to be a cloud on the horizon. That is the island of Barbados well astern. All day we have been sailing east before the wind with but one intent—to set as great a distance between Barbados and ourselves as possible. But now, almost out of sight of land, we are in a difficulty. The only man among us schooled in the art of navigation is fevered, delirious, in fact, as a result of certain ill-treatment he received ashore before we carried him away with us. I can handle a ship in action, and there are one or two men aboard who can assist me; but of the higher mysteries of seamanship and of the art of finding a way over the trackless wastes of ocean, we know nothing. To hug the land, and go blundering about what you so aptly call this pestilent archipelago, is for us to court disaster, as you can perhaps conceive. And so it comes to this: We desire to make for the Dutch settlement of Curaçao as straightly as possible. Will you pledge me your honor, if I release you upon parole, that you will navigate us thither? If so, we will release you and your surviving men upon arrival there.”

  Don Diego bowed his head upon his breast, and strode away in thought to the stern windows. There he stood looking out upon the sunlit sea and the dead water in the great ship’s wake—his ship, which these English dogs had wrested from him; his ship, which he was asked to bring safely into a port where she would be completely lost to him and refitted perhaps to make war upon his kin. That was in one scale; in the other were the lives of sixteen men. Fourteen of them mattered little to him, but the remaining two were his own and his son’s.

  He turned at length, and his back being to the light, the Captain could not see how pale his face had grown.

  “I accept,” he said.

  CHAPTER XI

  FILIAL PIETY

  By virtue of the pledge he had given, Don Diego de Espinosa enjoyed the freedom of the ship that had been his, and the navigation which he had undertaken was left entirely in his hands. And because those who manned her were new to the seas of the Spanish Main, and because even the things that had happened in Bridgetown were not enough to teach them to regard every Spaniard as a treacherous, cruel dog to be slain at sight, they used him with the civility which his own suave urbanity invited. He took his meals in the great cabin with Blood and the three officers elected to support him: Hagthorpe, Wolverstone, and Dyke.

  They found Don Diego an agreeable, even an amusing companion, and their friendly feeling towards him was fostered by his fortitude and brave equanimity in this adversity.

  That Don Diego was not playing fair it was impossible to suspect. Moreover, there was no conceivable reason why he should not. And he had been of the utmost frankness with them. He had denounced their mistake in sailing before the wind upon leaving Barbados. They should have left the island to leeward, heading into the Caribbean and away from the archipelago. As it was, they would now be forced to pass through this archipelago again so as to make Curaçao, and this passage was not to be accomplished without some measure of risk to themselves. At any point between the islands they might come upon an equal or superior craft; whether she were Spanish or English would be equally bad for them, and being undermanned they were in no case to fight. To lessen this risk as far as possible, Don Diego directed at first a southerly and then a westerly course; and so, taking a line midway between the islands of Tobago and Grenada, they won safely through the danger-zone and came into the comparative security of the Caribbean Sea.

  “If this wind holds,” he told them that night at supper, after he had announced to them their position, “we should reach Curaçao inside three days.”

  For three days the wind held, indeed it freshened a little on the second, and yet when the third night descended upon them they had still made no landfall. The Cinco Llagas was ploughing through a sea contained on every side by the blue
bowl of heaven. Captain Blood uneasily mentioned it to Don Diego.

  “It will be for tomorrow morning,” he was answered with calm conviction.

  “By all the saints, it is always ‘tomorrow morning’ with you Spaniards; and tomorrow never comes, my friend.”

  “But this tomorrow is coming, rest assured. However early you may be astir, you shall see land ahead, Don Pedro.”

  Captain Blood passed on, content, and went to visit Jerry Pitt, his patient, to whose condition Don Diego owed his chance of life. For twenty-four hours now the fever had left the sufferer, and under Peter Blood’s dressings, his lacerated back was beginning to heal satisfactorily. So far, indeed, was he recovered that he complained of his confinement, of the heat in his cabin. To indulge him Captain Blood consented that he should take the air on deck, and so, as the last of the daylight was fading from the sky, Jeremy Pitt came forth upon the Captain’s arm.

  Seated on the hatch-coamings, the Somersetshire lad gratefully filled his lungs with the cool night air, and professed himself revived thereby. Then with the seaman’s instinct his eyes wandered to the darkling vault of heaven, spangled already with a myriad golden points of light. Awhile he scanned it idly, vacantly; then, his attention became sharply fixed. He looked round and up at Captain Blood, who stood beside him.

  “D’ye know anything of astronomy, Peter?” quoth he.

  “Astronomy, is it? Faith, now, I couldn’t tell the Belt of Orion from the Girdle of Venus.”

  “Ah! And I suppose all the others of this lubberly crew share your ignorance.”

  “It would be more amiable of you to suppose that they exceed it.”

  Jeremy pointed ahead to a spot of light in the heavens over the starboard bow. “That is the North Star,” said he.