The Sea-Hawk (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

by Rafael Sabatini

  Sakr-el-Bahr caught his brother's wrist in a grip that was as that of a steel manacle. "We'll have the truth this night if we have to tear it from you with red-hot pincers," he said between his teeth.

  He dragged him forward to the middle of the terraces and held him there before Rosamund, forcing him down upon his knees into a cowering attitude by the violence of that grip upon his wrist.

  "Do you know aught of the ingenuity of Moorish torture?" he asked him. "You may have heard of the rack and the wheel and the thumbscrew at home. They are instruments of voluptuous delight compared with the contrivances of Barbary to loosen stubborn tongues."

  White and tense, her hands clenched, Rosamund seemed to stiffen before him.

  "You coward! You cur! You craven renegade dog!" she branded him.

  Oliver released his brother's wrist and beat his hands together. Without heeding Rosamund he looked down upon Lionel, who cowered shuddering at his feet.

  "What do you say to a match between your fingers? Or do you think a pair of bracelets of living fire would answer better, to begin with?"

  A squat, sandy-bearded, turbaned fellow, rolling slightly in his gait, came—as had been prearranged—to answer the corsair's summons.

  With the toe of his slipper Sakr-el-Bahr stirred his brother.

  "Look up, dog," he bade him. "Consider me that man, and see if you know him again. Look at him, I say!" And Lionel looked, yet since clearly he did so without recognition his brother explained: "His name among Christians was Jasper Leigh. He was the skipper you bribed to carry me into Barbary. He was taken in his own toils when his ship was sunk by Spaniards. Later he fell into my power, and because I forbore from hanging him he is today my faithful follower. I should bid him tell you what he knows," he continued, turning to Rosamund, "if I thought you would believe his tale. But since I am assured you would not, I will take other means." He swung round to Jasper again. "Bid Ali heat me a pair of steel manacles in a brazier and hold them in readiness against my need of them." And he waved his hand.

  Jasper bowed and vanished.

  "The bracelets shall coax confession from your own lips, my brother."

  "I have naught to confess," protested Lionel. "You may force lies from me with your ruffianly tortures."

  Oliver smiled. "Not a doubt but that lies will flow from you more readily than truth. But we shall have truth, too, in the end, never doubt it." He was mocking, and there was a subtle purpose underlying his mockery. "And you shall tell a full story," he continued, "in all its details, so that Mistress Rosamund's last doubt shall vanish. You shall tell her how you lay in wait for him that evening in Godolphin Park; how you took him unawares, and . . ."

  "That is false!" cried Lionel in a passion of sincerity that brought him to his feet.

  It was false, indeed, and Oliver knew it, and deliberately had recourse to falsehood, using it as a fulcrum upon which to lever out the truth. He was cunning as all the fiends, and never perhaps did he better manifest his cunning.

  "False?" he cried with scorn. "Come, now, be reasonable. The truth, ere torture sucks it out of you. Reflect that I know all—exactly as you told it me. How was it, now? Lurking behind a bush you sprang upon him unawares and ran him through before he could so much as lay a hand to his sword, and so . . ."

  "The lie of that is proven by the very facts themselves," was the furious interruption. A subtle judge of tones might have realized that here was truth indeed, angry indignant truth that compelled conviction. "His sword lay beside him when they found him."

  But Oliver was loftily disdainful. "Do I not know? Yourself you drew it after you had slain him."

  The taunt performed its deadly work. For just one instant Lionel was carried off his feet by the luxury of his genuine indignation, and in that one instant he was lost.

  "As God's my witness, that is false!" he cried wildly. "And you know it. I fought him fair . . ." He checked on a long, shuddering, indrawn breath that was horrible to hear.

  Then silence followed, all three remaining motionless as statues: Rosamund white and tense, Oliver grim and sardonic, Lionel limp, and overwhelmed by the consciousness of how he had been lured into self-betrayal.

  At last it was Rosamund who spoke, and her voice shook and shifted from key to key despite her strained attempt to keep it level.

  "What . . . what did you say, Lionel?" she asked.

  Oliver laughed softly. "He was about to add proof of his statement, I think," he jeered. "He was about to mention the wound he took in that fight, which left those tracks in the snow, thus to prove that I lied—as indeed I did—when I said that he took Peter unawares."

  "Lionel!" she cried. She advanced a step and made as if to hold out her arms to him, then let them fall again beside her. He stood stricken, answering nothing. "Lionel!" she cried again, her voice growing suddenly shrill. "Is this true?"

  "Did you not hear him say it?" quoth Oliver.

  She stood swaying a moment, looking at Lionel, her white face distorted into a mask of unutterable pain. Oliver stepped towards her, ready to support her, fearing that she was about to fall. But with an imperious hand she checked his advance, and by a supreme effort controlled her weakness. Yet her knees shook under her, refusing their office. She sank down upon the divan and covered her face with her hands.

  "God pity me!" she moaned, and sat huddled there, shaken with sobs.

  Lionel started at that heart-broken cry. Cowering, he approached her, and Oliver, grim and sardonic, stood back, a spectator of the scene he had precipitated. He knew that given rope Lionel would enmesh himself still further. There must be explanations that would damn him utterly. Oliver was well content to look on.

  "Rosamund!" came Lionel's piteous cry. "Rose! Have mercy! Listen ere you judge me. Listen lest you misjudge me!"

  "Ay, listen to him," Oliver flung in, with his soft hateful laugh. "Listen to him. I doubt he'll be vastly entertaining."

  That sneer was a spur to the wretched Lionel. "Rosamund, all that he has told you of it is false. I . . . I . . . It was done in self-defence. It is a lie that I took him unawares." His words came wildly now. "We had quarrelled about . . . about . . . a certain matter, and as the devil would have it we met that evening in Godolphin Park, he and I. He taunted me; he struck me, and finally he drew upon me and forced me to draw that I might defend my life. That is the truth. I swear to you here on my knees in the sight of Heaven! And . . ."

  "Enough, sir! Enough!" she broke in, controlling herself to check these protests that but heightened her disgust.

  "Nay, hear me yet, I implore you; that knowing all you may be merciful in your judgment."

  "Merciful?" she cried, and almost seemed to laugh.

  "It was an accident that I slew him," Lionel raved on. "I never meant it. I never meant to do more than ward and preserve my life. But when swords are crossed more may happen than a man intends. I take God to witness that his death was an accident resulting from his own fury."

  She had checked her sobs, and she considered him now with eyes that were hard and terrible.

  "Was it also an accident that you left me and all the world in the belief that the deed was your brother's?" she asked him.

  He covered his face, as if unable to endure her glance. "Did you but know how I loved you—even in those days, in secret—you would perhaps pity me a little," he whimpered.

  "Pity?" She leaned forward and seemed to spit the word at him. "'Sdeath, man! Do you sue for pity—you?"

  "Yet you must pity me did you know the greatness of the temptation to which I succumbed."

  "I know the greatness of your infamy, of your falseness, of your cowardice, of your baseness. Oh!"

  He stretched out suppliant hands to her; there were tears now in his eyes. "Of your charity, Rosamund. . ." he was beginning, when at last Oliver intervened.

  "I think you are wearying the lady," he said, and stirred him with his foot. "Relate to us instead some more of your astounding accidents. They are more diverting. Eluc
idate the accident by which you had me kidnapped to be sold into slavery. Tell us of the accident by which you succeeded to my property. Expound to the full the accidental circumstances of which throughout you have been the unfortunate victim. Come, man, ply your wits. 'Twill make a pretty tale."

  And then came Jasper to announce that Ali waited with the brazier and the heated manacles.

  "They are no longer needed," said Oliver. "Take this slave hence with you. Bid Ali to take charge of him, and at dawn to see him chained to one of the oars of my galeasse. Away with him."

  Lionel rose to his feet, his face ashen. "Wait! Ah, wait! Rosamund!" he cried.

  Oliver caught him by the nape of his neck, span him round, and flung him into the arms of Jasper. "Take him away!" he growled, and Jasper took the wretch by the shoulders and urged him out, leaving Rosamund and Oliver alone with the truth under the stars of Barbary.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE SUBTLETY OF FENZILEH

  OLIVER considered the woman for a long moment as she sat half-crouching on the divan, her hands locked, her face set and stony, her eyes lowered. He sighed gently and turned away. He paced to the parapet and looked out upon the city bathed in the white glare of the full risen moon. There arose thence a hum of sound, dominated, however, by the throbbing song of a nightingale somewhere in his garden and the croaking of the frogs by the pool in the valley.

  Now that truth had been dragged from its well, and tossed, as it were, into Rosamund's lap, he felt none of the fierce exultation which he had conceived that such an hour as this must bring him. Rather, indeed, was he saddened and oppressed. To poison the unholy cup of joy which he had imagined himself draining with such thirsty zest there was that discovery of a measure of justification for her attitude towards him in her conviction that his disappearance was explained by flight.

  He was weighed down by a sense that he had put himself entirely in the wrong; that in his vengeance he had overreached himself; and he found the fruits of it, which had seemed so desirably luscious, turning to ashes in his mouth.

  Long he stood there, the silence between them entirely unbroken. Then at length he stirred, turned from the parapet, and paced slowly back until he came to stand beside the divan, looking down upon her from his great height.

  "At last you have heard the truth," he said. And as she made no answer he continued: "I am thankful it was surprised out of him before the torture was applied, else you might have concluded that pain was wringing a false confession from him." He paused, but still she did not speak; indeed, she made no sign that she had heard him. "That," he concluded, "was the man whom you preferred to me. Faith, you did not flatter me, as perhaps you may have learnt."

  At last she was moved from her silence, and her voice came dull and hard. "I have learnt how little there is to choose between you," she said. "It was to have been expected. I might have known that two brothers could not have been so dissimilar in nature. Oh, I am learning a deal, and swiftly!"

  It was a speech that angered him, that cast out entirely the softer mood that had been growing in him.

  "You are learning?" he echoed. "What are you learning?"

  "Knowledge of the ways of men."

  His teeth gleamed in his wry smile. "I hope the knowledge will bring you as much bitterness as the knowledge of women—of one woman—has brought me. To have believed me what you believed me—me whom you conceived yourself to love!" He felt perhaps the need to repeat it that he might keep the grounds of his grievance well before his mind.

  "If I have a mercy to beg of you it is that you will not shame me with the reminder."

  "Of your faithlessness?" he asked. "Of your disloyal readiness to believe the worst evil of me?"

  "Of my ever having believed that I loved you. That is the thought that shames me, as nothing else in life could shame me, as not even the slave-market and all the insult to which you have submitted me could shame me. You taunt me with my readiness to believe evil of you . . ."

  "I do more than taunt you with it," he broke in, his anger mounting under the pitiless lash of her scorn. "I lay to your charge the wasted years of my life, all the evil that has followed out of it, all that I have suffered, all that I have lost, all that I am become."

  She looked up at him coldly, astonishingly mistress of herself. "You lay all this to my charge?" she asked him.

  "I do." He was very vehement. "Had you not used me as you did, had you not lent a ready ear to lies, that whelp my brother would never have gone to such lengths, nor should I ever have afforded him the opportunity."

  She shifted on the cushions of the divan and turned her shoulder to him.

  "All this is very idle," she said coldly. Yet perhaps because she felt that she had need to justify herself she continued: "If, after all, I was so ready to believe evil of you, it is that my instincts must have warned me of the evil that was ever in you. You have proved to me tonight that it was not you who murdered Peter; but to attain that proof you have done a deed that is even fouler and more shameful, a deed that reveals to the full the blackness of your heart. Have you not proved yourself a monster of vengeance and impiety?" She rose and faced him again in her sudden passion. "Are you not—you that were born a Cornish Christian gentleman—become a heathen and a robber, a renegade and a pirate? Have you not sacrificed your very God to your vengeful lust?"

  He met her glance fully, never quailing before her denunciation, and when she had ended on that note of question he counter-questioned her.

  "And your instincts had forewarned you of all this? God's life, woman! can you invent no better tale than that?" He turned aside as two slaves entered bearing an earthenware vessel. "Here comes your supper. I hope your appetite is keener than your logic."

  They set the vessel, from which a savoury smell proceeded upon the little Moorish table by the divan. On the ground beside it they placed a broad dish of baked earth in which there were a couple of loaves and a red, short-necked amphora of water with a drinking-cup placed over the mouth of it to act as a stopper.

  They salaamed profoundly and padded softly out again.

  "Sup," he bade her shortly.

  "I want no supper," she replied, her manner sullen.

  His cold eye played over her. "Henceforth, girl, you will consider not what you want, but what I bid you do. I bid you eat; about it, therefore."

  "I will not."

  "Will not?" he echoed slowly. "Is that a speech from slave to master? Eat, I say."

  "I cannot! I cannot!" she protested.

  "A slave may not live who cannot do her master's bidding."

  "Then kill me," she answered fiercely, leaping up to confront and dare him. "Kill me. You are used to killing, and for that at least I should be grateful."

  "I will kill you if I please," he said in level icy tones. "But not to please you. You don't yet understand. You are my slave, my thing, my property, and I will not suffer you to be damaged save at my own good pleasure. Therefore, eat, or my Nubians shall whip you to quicken appetite."

  For a moment she stood defiant before him, white and resolute. Then quite suddenly, as if her will was being bent and crumpled under the insistent pressure of his own, she drooped and sank down again to the divan. Slowly, reluctantly she drew the dish nearer. Watching her, he laughed quite silently.

  She paused, appearing to seek for something. Failing to find it she looked up at him again, between scorn and intercession.

  "Am I to tear the meat with my fingers?" she demanded.

  His eyes gleamed with understanding, or at least with suspicion. But he answered her quite calmly—

  "It is against the prophet's law to defile meat or bread by the contact of a knife. You must use the hands that God has given you."

  "Do you mock me with the Prophet and his laws? What are the Prophet's laws to me? If eat I must, at least I will not eat like a heathen dog, but in Christian fashion."

  To indulge her, as it seemed, he slowly drew the richly hilted dagger from his girdle. "Let that serve y
ou, then," he said; and carelessly he tossed it down beside her.

  With a quick indrawn breath she pounced upon it. "At last," she said, "you give me something for which I can be grateful to you." And on the words she laid the point of it against her breast.

  Like lightning he had dropped to one knee, and his hand had closed about her wrist with such a grip that all her arm felt limp and powerless. He was smiling into her eyes, his swarthy face close to her own.

  "Did you indeed suppose I trusted you? Did you really think me deceived by your sudden pretence of yielding? When will you learn that I am not a fool? I did it but to test your spirit."

  "Then now you know its temper," she replied. "You know my intention."

  "Forewarned, forearmed," said he.

  She looked at him, with something that would have been mockery but for the contempt that coloured it too deeply. "Is it so difficult a thing," she asked, "to snap the thread of life? Are there no ways of dying save by the knife? You boast yourself my master; that I am your slave; that having bought me in the market-place I belong to you body and soul. How idle is that boast. My body you may bind and confine; but my soul . . . Be very sure that you shall be cheated of your bargain. You boast yourself lord of life and death. A lie! Death is all that you can command."

  Quick steps came pattering up the stairs, and before he could answer her, before he had thought of words in which to do so, Ali confronted him with the astounding announcement that there was a woman below asking urgently to speak with him.

  "A woman?" he questioned, frowning. "A Nasrani woman, do you mean?"

  "No, my lord. A Muslim," was the still more surprising information.

  "A Muslim woman, here? Impossible!"

  But even as he spoke a dark figure glided like a shadow across the threshold on to the terrace. She was in black from head to foot, including the veil that shrouded her, a veil of the proportions of a mantle, serving to dissemble her very shape.

  Ali swung upon her in a rage. "Did I not bid thee wait below, thou daughter of shame?" he stormed. "She has followed me up, my lord, to thrust herself in here upon you. Shall I drive her forth?"