Captain Blood

by SABATINI, RAFAEL

  “England’s,” she corrected him in reproof. “The country is all, sir; the sovereign naught. King James will pass; others will come and pass; England remains, to be honorably served by her sons, whatever rancor they may hold against the man who rules her in their time.”

  He showed some surprise. Then he smiled a little. “Shrewd advocacy,” he approved it. “You should have spoken to the crew.”

  And then, the note of irony deepening in his voice: “Do you suppose now that this honorable service might redeem one who was a pirate and a thief?”

  Her glance fell away. Her voice faltered a little in replying. “If he . . . needs redeeming. Perhaps . . . perhaps he has been judged too harshly.”

  The blue eyes flashed, and the firm lips relaxed their grim set.

  “Why . . . if ye think that,” he said, considering her, an odd hunger in his glance, “life might have its uses, after all, and even the service of King James might become tolerable.”

  Looking beyond her, across the water, he observed a boat putting off from one of the great ships, which, hove to now, were rocking gently some three hundred yards away. Abruptly his manner changed. He was like one recovering, taking himself in hand again. “If you will go below, and get your gear and your woman, you shall presently be sent aboard one of the ships of the fleet.” He pointed to the boat as he spoke.

  She left him, and thereafter with Wolverstone, leaning upon the rail, he watched the approach of that boat, manned by a dozen sailors, and commanded by a scarlet figure seated stiffly in the stern sheets. He leveled his telescope upon that figure.

  “It’ll not be Bishop himself,” said Wolverstone, between question and assertion.

  “No.” Blood closed his telescope. “I don’t know who it is.”

  “Ha!” Wolverstone vented an ejaculation of sneering mirth. “For all his eagerness, Bishop’d be none so willing to come, hisself. He’s been aboard this hulk afore, and we made him swim for it that time. He’ll have his memories. So he sends a deputy.”

  This deputy proved to be an officer named Calverley, a vigorous, self-sufficient fellow, comparatively fresh from England, whose manner made it clear that he came fully instructed by Colonel Bishop upon the matter of how to handle the pirates.

  His air, as he stepped into the waist of the Arabella, was haughty, truculent, and disdainful.

  Blood, the King’s commission now in his pocket, and Lord Julian standing beside him, waited to receive him, and Captain Calverley was a little taken back at finding himself confronted by two men so very different outwardly from anything that he had expected. But he lost none of his haughty poise, and scarcely deigned a glance at the swarm of fierce, half-naked fellows lounging in a semicircle to form a background.

  “Good day to you, sir,” Blood hailed him pleasantly. “I have the honor to give you welcome aboard the Arabella. My name is Blood—Captain Blood, at your service. You may have heard of me.”

  Captain Calverley stared hard. The airy manner of this redoubtable buccaneer was hardly what he had looked for in a desperate fellow, compelled to ignominious surrender. A thin, sour smile broke on the officer’s haughty lips.

  “You’ll ruffle it to the gallows, no doubt,” he said contemptuously. “I suppose that is after the fashion of your kind. Meanwhile it’s your surrender I require, my man, not your impudence.”

  Captain Blood appeared surprised, pained. He turned in appeal to Lord Julian.

  “D’ ye hear that now? And did ye ever hear the like? But what did I tell ye? Ye see, the young gentleman’s under a misapprehension entirely. Perhaps it’ll save broken bones if your lordship explains just who and what I am.”

  Lord Julian advanced a step and bowed perfunctorily and rather disdainfully to that very disdainful but now dumbfounded officer. Pitt, who watched the scene from the quarter-deck rail, tells us that his lordship was as grave as a parson at a hanging. But I suspect this gravity for a mask under which Lord Julian was secretly amused.

  “I have the honor to inform you, sir,” he said stiffly, “that Captain Blood holds a commission in the King’s service under the seal of my Lord Sunderland, His Majesty’s Secretary of State.”

  Captain Calverley’s face empurpled; his eyes bulged. The buccaneers in the background chuckled and crowed and swore among themselves in their relish of this comedy. For a long moment Calverley stared in silence at his lordship, observing the costly elegance of his dress, his air of calm assurance, and his cold, fastidious speech, all of which savored distinctly of the great world to which he belonged.

  “And who the devil may you be?” he exploded at last.

  Colder still and more distant than ever grew his lordship’s voice.

  “You’re not very civil, sir, as I have already noticed. My name is Wade—Lord Julian Wade. I am His Majesty’s envoy to these barbarous parts, and my Lord Sunderland’s near kinsman. Colonel Bishop has been notified of my coming.”

  The sudden change in Calverley’s manner at Lord Julian’s mention of his name showed that the notification had been received, and that he had knowledge of it.

  “I . . . I believe that he has,” said Calverley, between doubt and suspicion. “That is: that he has been notified of the coming of Lord Julian Wade. But . . . but . . . aboard this ship . . . ?” The officer made a gesture of helplessness, and, surrendering to his bewilderment, fell abruptly silent.

  “I was coming out on the Royal Mary . . .”

  “That is what we were advised.”

  “But the Royal Mary fell a victim to a Spanish privateer, and I might never have arrived at all but for the gallantry of Captain Blood, who rescued me.”

  Light broke upon the darkness of Calverley’s mind. “I see. I understand.”

  “I will take leave to doubt it.” His lordship’s tone abated nothing of its asperity. “But that can wait. If Captain Blood will show you his commission, perhaps that will set all doubts at rest, and we may proceed. I shall be glad to reach Port Royal.”

  Captain Blood thrust a parchment under Calverley’s bulging eyes. The officer scanned it, particularly the seals and signature. He stepped back, a baffled, impotent man. He bowed helplessly.

  “I must return to Colonel Bishop for my orders,” he informed them.

  At that moment a lane was opened in the ranks of the men, and through this came Miss Bishop followed by her octoroon woman. Over his shoulder Captain Blood observed her approach.

  “Perhaps, since Colonel Bishop is with you, you will convey his niece to him. Miss Bishop was aboard the Royal Mary also, and I rescued her together with his lordship. She will be able to acquaint her uncle with the details of that and of the present state of affairs.”

  Swept thus from surprise to surprise, Captain Calverley could do no more than bow again.

  “As for me,” said Lord Julian, with intent to make Miss Bishop’s departure free from all interference on the part of the buccaneers, “I shall remain aboard the Arabella until we reach Port Royal. My compliments to Colonel Bishop. Say that I look forward to making his acquaintance there.”

  CHAPTER XXII

  HOSTILITIES

  In the great harbor of Port Royal, spacious enough to have given moorings to all the ships of all the navies of the world, the Arabella rode at anchor. Almost she had the air of a prisoner, for a quarter of a mile ahead, to starboard, rose the lofty, massive single round tower of the fort, whilst a couple of cables’-length astern, and to larboard, rode the six men-of-war that composed the Jamaican squadron.

  Abeam with the Arabella, across the harbor, were the flat-fronted white buildings of that imposing city that came down to the very water’s edge. Behind these the red roofs rose like terraces, marking the gentle slope upon which the city was built, dominated here by a turret, there by a spire, and behind these again a range of green hills with for ultimate background a sky that was like a dome of polished steel.

  On a cane day-bed that had been set for him on the quarter-deck, sheltered from the dazzling, blistering
sunshine by an improvised awning of brown sailcoth, lounged Peter Blood, a calf-bound, well-thumbed copy of Horace’s Odes neglected in his hands.

  From immediately below him came the swish of mops and the gurgle of water in the scuppers, for it was still early morning, and under the directions of Hayton, the bo’sun, the swabbers were at work in the waist and forecastle. Despite the heat and the stagnant air, one of the toilers found breath to croak a ribald buccaneering ditty:

  “For we laid her board and board,

  And we put her to the sword,

  And we sank her in the deep blue sea.

  So it’s heigh-ho, and heave-a-ho!

  Who’ll sail for the Main with me?”

  Blood fetched a sigh, and the ghost of a smile played over his keen, lean, sun-tanned face. Then the black brows came together above the vivid blue eyes, and thought swiftly closed the door upon his immediate surroundings.

  Things had not sped at all well with him in the past fortnight since his acceptance of the King’s commission. There had been trouble with Bishop from the moment of landing. As Blood and Lord Julian had stepped ashore together, they had been met by a man who took no pains to dissemble his chagrin at the turn of events and his determination to change it. He awaited them on the mole, supported by a group of officers.

  “You are Lord Julian Wade, I understand,” was his truculent greeting. For Blood at the moment he had nothing beyond a malignant glance.

  Lord Julian bowed. “I take it I have the honor to address Colonel Bishop, Deputy-Governor of Jamaica.” It was almost as if his lordship were giving the Colonel a lesson in deportment. The Colonel accepted it, and belatedly bowed, removing his broad hat. Then he plunged on.

  “You have granted, I am told, the King’s commission to this man.” His very tone betrayed the bitterness of his rancor. “Your motives were no doubt worthy . . . your gratitude to him for delivering you from the Spaniards. But the thing itself is unthinkable, my lord. The commission must be canceled.”

  “I don’t think I understand,” said Lord Julian distantly.

  “To be sure you don’t, or you’d never ha’ done it. The fellow’s bubbled you. Why, he’s first a rebel, then an escaped slave, and lastly a bloody pirate. I’ve been hunting him this year past.”

  “I assure you, sir, that I was fully informed of all. I do not grant the King’s commission lightly.”

  “Don’t you, by God! And what else do you call this? But as His Majesty’s Deputy-Governor of Jamaica, I’ll take leave to correct your mistake in my own way.”

  “Ah! And what way may that be?”

  “There’s a gallows waiting for this rascal here in Port Royal.”

  Blood would have intervened at that, but Lord Julian forestalled him.

  “I see, sir, that you do not yet quite apprehend the circumstances. If it is a mistake to grant Captain Blood a commission, the mistake is not mine, I am acting upon the instructions of my Lord Sunderland; and with a full knowledge of all the facts, his lordship expressly designated Captain Blood for this commission if Captain Blood could be persuaded to accept it.”

  Colonel Bishop’s mouth fell open in surprise and dismay.

  “Lord Sunderland designated him?” he asked, amazed.

  “Expressly.”

  His lordship waited a moment for a reply. None coming from the speechless Deputy-Governor, he asked a question: “Would you still venture to describe the matter as a mistake, sir? And dare you take the risk of correcting it?”

  “I . . . I had not dreamed . . .”

  “I understand, sir. Let me present Captain Blood.”

  Perforce Bishop must put on the best face he could command. But that it was no more than a mask for his fury and his venom was plain to all.

  From that unpromising beginning matters had not improved; rather had they grown worse.

  Blood’s thoughts were upon this and other things as he lounged there on the day-bed. He had been a fortnight in Port Royal, his ship virtually a unit now in the Jamaica squadron. And when the news of it reached Tortuga and the buccaneers who awaited his return, the name of Captain Blood, which had stood so high among the Brethren of the Coast, would become a byword, a thing of execration, and before all was done his life might pay forfeit for what would be accounted a treacherous defection. And for what had he placed himself in this position? For the sake of a girl who avoided him so persistently and intentionally that he must assume that she still regarded him with aversion. He had scarcely been vouchsafed a glimpse of her in all this fortnight, although with that in view for his main object he had daily haunted her uncle’s residence, and daily braved the unmasked hostility and baffled rancor in which Colonel Bishop held him. Nor was that the worst of it. He was allowed plainly to perceive that it was the graceful, elegant young trifler from St. James’s, Lord Julian Wade, to whom her every moment was devoted. And what chance had he, a desperate adventurer with a record of outlawry, against such a rival as that, a man of parts, moreover, as he was bound to admit?

  You conceive the bitterness of his soul. He beheld himself to be as the dog in the fable that had dropped the substance to snatch at a delusive shadow.

  He sought comfort in a line on the open page before him:“levius fit patientia quicquid corrigere est nefas.”

  Sought it, but hardly found it.

  A boat that had approached unnoticed from the shore came scraping and bumping against the great red hull of the Arabella, and a raucous voice sent up a hailing shout. From the ship’s belfry two silvery notes rang clear and sharp, and a moment or two later the bo’sun’s whistle shrilled a long wail.

  The sounds disturbed Captain Blood from his disgruntled musings. He rose, tall, active, and arrestingly elegant in a scarlet, gold-laced coat that advertised his new position, and slipping the slender volume into his pocket, advanced to the carved rail of the quarter-deck, just as Jeremy Pitt was setting foot upon the companion.

  “A note for you from the Deputy-Governor,” said the master shortly, as he proffered a folded sheet.

  Blood broke the seal, and read. Pitt, loosely clad in shirt and breeches, leaned against the rail the while and watched him, unmistakable concern imprinted on his fair, frank countenance.

  Blood uttered a short laugh, and curled his lip. “It is a very peremptory summons,” he said, and passed the note to his friend.

  The young master’s gray eyes skimmed it. Thoughtfully, he stroked his golden beard.

  “You’ll not go?” he said, between question and assertion.

  “Why not? Haven’t I been a daily visitor at the fort . . . ?”

  “But it’ll be about the Old Wolf that he wants to see you. It gives him a grievance at last. You know, Peter, that it is Lord Julian alone has stood between Bishop and his hate of you. If now he can show that . . .”

  “What if he can?” Blood interrupted carelessly. “Shall I be in greater danger ashore than aboard, now that we’ve but fifty men left, and they lukewarm rogues who would as soon serve the King as me? Jeremy, dear lad, the Arabella’s a prisoner here, bedad, ’twixt the fort there and the fleet yonder. Don’t be forgetting that.”

  Jeremy clenched his hands. “Why did ye let Wolverstone and the others go?” he cried, with a touch of bitterness. “You should have seen the danger.”

  “How could I in honesty have detained them? It was in the bargain. Besides, how could their staying have helped me?” And as Pitt did not answer him: “Ye see?” he said, and shrugged. “I’ll be getting my hat and cane and sword, and go ashore in the cock-boat. See it manned for me.”

  “Ye’re going to deliver yourself into Bishop’s hands,” Pitt warned him.

  “Well, well, maybe he’ll not find me quite so easy to grasp as he imagines. There’s a thorn or two left on me.” And with a laugh Blood departed to his cabin.

  Jeremy Pitt answered the laugh with an oath. A moment he stood irresolute where Blood had left him. Then slowly, reluctance dragging at his feet, he went down the companion to give the or
der for the cock-boat.

  “If anything should happen to you, Peter,” he said, as Blood was going over the side, “Colonel Bishop had better look to himself. These fifty lads may be lukewarm at present, as you say, but—sink me!—they’ll be anything but lukewarm if there’s a breach of faith.”

  “And what should be happening to me, Jeremy? Sure, now, I’ll be back for dinner, so I will.”

  Blood climbed down into the waiting boat. But laugh though he might, he knew as well as Pitt that in going ashore that morning he carried his life in his hands. Because of this, it may have been that when he stepped on to the narrow mole, in the shadow of the shallow outer wall of that fort through whose crenels were thrust the black noses of its heavy guns, he gave order that the boat should stay for him at that spot. He realized that he might have to retreat in a hurry.

  Walking leisurely, he skirted the embattled wall, and passed through the great gates into the courtyard. Half-a-dozen soldiers lounged there, and in the shadow cast by the wall, Major Mallard, the Commandant, was slowly pacing. He stopped short at sight of Captain Blood, and saluted him, as was his due, but the smile that lifted the officer’s stiff mostachios was grimly sardonic. Peter Blood’s attention, however, was elsewhere.

  On his right stretched a spacious garden, beyond which rose the white house that was the residence of the Deputy-Governor. In that garden’s main avenue, that was fringed with palm and sandalwood, he had caught sight of Miss Bishop alone. He crossed the courtyard with suddenly lengthened stride.

  “Good morning to ye, ma’am,” was his greeting as he overtook her; and hat in hand now, he added on a note of protest: “Sure, it’s nothing less than uncharitable to make me run in this heat.”

  “Why do you run, then?” she asked him coolly, standing slim and straight before him, all in white and very maidenly save in her unnatural composure. “I am pressed,” she informed him. “So you will forgive me if I do not stay.”

  “You were none so pressed until I came,” he protested, and if his thin lips smiled, his blue eyes were oddly hard.