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ROMANCE
By Joseph Conrad
and
F.M. Hueffer
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
TO
ELSIE AND JESSIE
"C'est toi qui dors dans Vombre, O sacre Souvenir."
If we could have remembrance now
And see, as in the days to come
We shall, what's venturous in these hours:
The swift, intangible romance of fields at home,
The gleams of sun, the showers,
Our workaday contentments, or our powers
To fare still forward through the uncharted haze
Of present days. . . .
For, looking back when years shall flow
Upon this olden day that's now,
We'll see, romantic in dimm'd hours,
These memories of ours.
CONTENTS
PART FIRST The Quarry and the Beach
PART SECOND The Girl with the Lizard
PART THIRD Casa Riego
PART FOURTH Blade and Guitar
PART FIFTH The Lot of Man
PART FIRST -- THE QUARRY AND THE BEACH
ROMANCE
CHAPTER ONE
To yesterday and to to-day I say my polite "vaya usted con Dios." What
are these days to me? But that far-off day of my romance, when from
between the blue and white bales in Don Ramon's darkened storeroom, at
Kingston, I saw the door open before the figure of an old man with the
tired, long, white face, that day I am not likely to forget. I remember
the chilly smell of the typical West Indian store, the indescribable
smell of damp gloom, of locos, of pimento, of olive oil, of new sugar,
of new rum; the glassy double sheen of Ramon's great spectacles, the
piercing eyes in the mahogany face, while the tap, tap, tap of a cane
on the flags went on behind the inner door; the click of the latch; the
stream of light. The door, petulantly thrust inwards, struck against
some barrels. I remember the rattling of the bolts on that door, and the
tall figure that appeared there, snuffbox in hand. In that land of white
clothes, that precise, ancient, Castilian in black was something to
remember. The black cane that had made the tap, tap, tap dangled by a
silken cord from the hand whose delicate blue-veined, wrinkled wrist ran
back into a foam of lawn ruffles. The other hand paused in the act of
conveying a pinch of snuff to the nostrils of the hooked nose that had,
on the skin stretched tight over the bridge, the polish of old ivory;
the elbow pressing the black cocked-hat against the side; the legs,
one bent, the other bowing a little back--this was the attitude of
Seraphina's father.
Having imperiously thrust the door of the inner room open, he remained
immovable, with no intention of entering, and called in a harsh,
aged voice: "Senor Ramon! Senor Ramon!" and then twice:
"Sera-phina--Seraphina!" turning his head back.
Then for the first time I saw Seraphina, looking over her father's
shoulder. I remember her face on that day; her eyes were gray--the gray
of black, not of blue. For a moment they looked me straight in the face,
reflectively, unconcerned, and then travelled to the spectacles of old
Ramon.
This glance--remember I was young on that day--had been enough to set
me wondering what they were thinking of me; what they could have seen of
me.
"But there he is--your Senor Ramon," she said to her father, as if she
were chiding him for a petulance in calling; "your sight is not very
good, my poor little father--there he is, your Ramon."
The warm reflection of the light behind her, gilding the curve of her
face from ear to chin, lost itself in the shadows of black lace falling
from dark hair that was not quite black. She spoke as if the words clung
to her lips; as if she had to put them forth delicately for fear of
damaging the frail things. She raised her long hand to a white flower
that clung above her ear like the pen of a clerk, and disappeared. Ramon
hurried with a stiffness of immense respect towards the ancient grandee.
The door swung to.
I remained alone. The blue bales and the white, and the great red oil
jars loomed in the dim light filtering through the jalousies out of the
blinding sunlight of Jamaica. A moment after, the door opened once more
and a young man came out to me; tall, slim, with very bright, very large
black eyes aglow in an absolute pallor of face. That was Carlos Riego.
Well, that is my yesterday of romance, for the many things that have
passed between those times and now have become dim or have gone out
of my mind. And my day before yesterday was the day on which I, at
twenty-two, stood looking at myself in the tall glass, the day on which
I left my home in Kent and went, as chance willed it, out to sea with
Carlos Riego.
That day my cousin Rooksby had become engaged to my sister Veronica, and
I had a fit of jealous misery. I was rawboned, with fair hair, I had a
good skin, tanned by the weather, good teeth, and brown eyes. I had not
had a very happy life, and I had lived shut in on myself, thinking
of the wide world beyond my reach, that seemed to hold out infinite
possibilities of romance, of adventure, of love, perhaps, and stores of
gold. In the family my mother counted; my father did not. She was the
daughter of a Scottish earl who had ruined himself again and again. He
had been an inventor, a projector, and my mother had been a poor beauty,
brought up on the farm we still lived on--the last rag of land that had
remained to her father. Then she had married a good man in his way; a
good enough catch; moderately well off, very amiable, easily influenced,
a dilettante, and a bit of a dreamer, too. He had taken her into the
swim of the Regency, and his purse had not held out. So my mother,
asserting herself, had insisted upon a return to our farm, which had
been her dowry. The alternative would have been a shabby, ignominious
life at Calais, in the shadow of Brummel and such.
My father used to sit all day by the fire, inscribing "ideas" every now
and then in a pocket-book. I think he was writing an epic poem, and I
think he was happy in an ineffectual way. He had thin red hair, untidy
for want of a valet, a shining, delicate, hooked nose, narrow-lidded
blue eyes, and a face with the colour and texture of a white-heart
cherry. He used to spend his days in a hooded chair. My mother managed
everything, leading an out-of-door life which gave her face the colour
of a wrinkled pippin. It was the face of a Roman mother, tight-lipped,
brown-eyed, and fierce. You may understand the kind of woman she
was from the hands she employed on the farm. They were smugglers and
night-malefactors to a man--and she liked that. The decent, slow-witted,
gently devious type of rustic could not live under her. The neighbours
round declared that the Lady Mary Kemp's farm was a hotbed of disorder.
I expect it was, too; three of our men were hung up at Canterbury on one
day--for horse-stealing and arson.... Anyhow, that was my mother. As
for me, I was under her, and, since I had my aspirations, I had a rather
bitter childhood. And I had others to contrast myself with. First
there was Rooksby: a pleasant, well-spoken, amiable young squire of the
immediate neighbourhood; young Sir Ralph, a man popular with all sorts,
and in love with my sister Veronica from early days. Veronica was very
beautiful, and very gentle, and very kind; tall, slim, with sloping
white shoulders and long white arms, hair the colour of amber, and
startled blue eyes--a good mate for Rooksby. Rooksby had foreign
relations, too. The uncle from whom he inherited the Priory had married
a Riego, a Castilian, during the Peninsular war. He had been a prisoner
at the time--he had died in Spain, I think. When Ralph made the grand
tour, he had made the acquaintance of his Spanish relations; he used to
talk about them, the Riegos, and Veronica used to talk of what he said
of them until they came to stand for Romance, the romance of the
outer world, to me. One day, a little before Ralph and Veronica became
engaged, these Spaniards descended out of the blue. It was Romance
suddenly dangled right before my eyes. It was Romance; you have no idea
what it meant to me to talk to Carlos Riego.
Rooksby was kind enough. He had me over to the Priory, where I made
the acquaintance of the two maiden ladies, his second cousins, who kept
house for him. Yes, Ralph was kind; but I rather hated him for it,
and was a little glad when he, too, had to suffer some of the pangs of
jealousy--jealousy of Carlos Riego.
Carlos was dark, and of a grace to set Ralph as much in the shade as
Ralph himself set me; and Carlos had seen a deal more of the world than
Ralph. He had a foreign sense of humour that made him forever ready to
sacrifice his personal dignity. It made Veronica laugh, and even drew
a grim smile from my mother; but it gave Ralph bad moments. How he came
into these parts was a little of a mystery. When Ralph was displeased
with this Spanish connection he used to swear that Carlos had cut a
throat or taken a purse. At other times he used to say that it was a
political matter. In fine, Carlos had the hospitality of the Priory, and
the title of Count when he chose to use it. He brought with him a short,
pursy, bearded companion, half friend, half servant, who said he had
served in Napoleon's Spanish contingent, and had a way of striking his
breast with a wooden hand (his arm had suffered in a cavalry charge),
and exclaiming, "I, Tomas Castro! . . ." He was an Andalusian.
For myself, the first shock of his strangeness over-come, I adored
Carlos, and Veronica liked him, and laughed at him, till one day he
said good-by and rode off along the London road, followed by his Tomas
Castro. I had an intense longing to go with him out into the great world
that brooded all round our foothills.
You are to remember that I knew nothing whatever of that great world.
I had never been further away from our farm than just to Canterbury
school, to Hythe market, to Romney market. Our farm nestled down under
the steep, brown downs, just beside the Roman road to Canterbury; Stone
Street--the Street--we called it. Ralph's land was just on the other
side of the Street, and the shepherds on the downs used to see of nights
a dead-and-gone Rooksby, Sir Peter that was, ride upon it past the
quarry with his head under his arm. I don't think I believed in him, but
I believed in the smugglers who shared the highway with that horrible
ghost. It is impossible for any one nowadays-to conceive the effect
these smugglers had upon life thereabouts and then. They were the power
to which everything else deferred. They used to overrun the country in
great bands, and brooked no interference with their business. Not long
before they had defeated regular troops in a pitched battle on the
Marsh, and on the very day I went away I remember we couldn't do our
carting because the smugglers had given us notice they would need our
horses in the evening. They were a power in the land where there was
violence enough without them, God knows! Our position on that Street put
us in the midst of it all. At dusk we shut our doors, pulled down our
blinds, sat round the fire, and knew pretty well what was going on
outside. There would be long whistles in the dark, and when we found men
lurking in our barns we feigned not to see them--it was safer so.
The smugglers--the Free Traders, they called themselves--were as well
organized for helping malefactors out of the country as for running
goods in; so it came about that we used to have comers and forgers,
murderers and French spies--all sorts of malefactors--hiding in our
straw throughout the day, wait-for the whistle to blow from the Street
at dusk. I, born with my century, was familiar with these things; but
my mother forbade my meddling with them. I expect she knew enough
herself--all the resident gentry did. But Ralph--though he was to some
extent of the new school, and used to boast that, if applied to, he
"would grant a warrant against any Free Trader"--never did, as a matter
of fact, or not for many years.
Carlos, then, Rooksby's Spanish kinsman, had come and gone, and I
envied him his going, with his air of mystery, to some far-off lawless
adventures--perhaps over there in Spain, where there were war and
rebellion. Shortly afterwards Rooksby proposed for the hand of Veronica
and was accepted--by my mother. Veronica went about looking happy. That
upset me, too. It seemed unjust that she should go out into the great
world--to Bath, to Brighton, should see the Prince Regent and the great
fights on Hounslow Heath--whilst I was to remain forever a farmer's boy.
That afternoon I was upstairs, looking at the reflection of myself in
the tall glass, wondering miserably why I seemed to be such an oaf.
The voice of Rooksby hailed me suddenly from downstairs. "Hey,
John--John Kemp; come down, I say!"
I started away from the glass as if I had been taken in an act of folly.
Rooksby was flicking his leg with his switch in the doorway, at the
bottom of the narrow flight of stairs.
He wanted to talk to me, he said, and I followed him out through the
yard on to the soft road that climbs the hill to westward. The evening
was falling slowly and mournfully; it was dark already in the folds of
the sombre downs.
We passed the corner of the orchard. "I know what you've got to tell
me," I said. "You're going to marry Veronica. Well, you've no need of my
blessing. Some people have all the luck. Here am I . . . look at me!"
Ralph walked with his head bent down.
"Confound it," I said, "I shall run away to sea! I tell you, I'm
rotting, rotting! There! I say, Ralph, give me Carlos' direction...." I
caught hold of his arm. "I'll go after him. He'd show me a little life.
He said he would."
Ralph remained lost in a kind of gloomy abstraction, while I went on
worrying him for Carlos' address.
"Carlos is the only soul I know outside five miles from here. Besides,
he's friends in the Indies. That's where I want to go, and he could give
me a cast. You remember what Tomas Castro said. . . ."
Rooksby came to a sudden halt, and began furiously to switch his corded
legs.
"Curse Carlos, and his Castro, too. They'll have me in jail betwixt
them. They're both in my red barn, if you want their direction. . . ."
He hurried on suddenly up the hill, leaving me gazing upwards at him.
When I caught him up he was swearing--as one did in those days--and
stamping his foot in the middle of the road.
"I tell you," he said violently, "it's the most accursed business! That
Castro, with his Cuba, is nothing but a blasted buccaneer... and Carlos
is no better. They go to Liverpool for a passage to Jamaica, and see
what comes of it!"
It seems that on Liverpool docks, in the owl-light, they fell in with an
elderly hunks just returned from West Indies, who asks the time at the
door of a shipping agent. Castro pulls out a watch, and the old fellow
jumps on it, vows it's his own, taken from him years before by some
picaroons on his outward voyage. Out from the agent's comes another, and
swears that Castro is one of the self-same crew. He himself purported to
be the master of the very ship. Afterwards--in the solitary dusk among
the ropes and bales--there had evidently been some play with knives, and
it ended with a flight to London, and then down to Rooksby's red barn,
with the runners in full cry after them.
"Think of it," Rooksby said, "and me a justice, and... oh, it drives me
wild, this hole-and-corner work! There's a filthy muddle with the Free
Traders--a whistle to blow after dark at the quarry. To-night of all
nights, and me a justice... and as good as a married man!"
I looked at him wonderingly in the dusk; his high coat collar almost hid
his face, and his hat was pressed down over his eyes. The thing seemed
incredible to me. Here was an adventure, and I was shocked to see that
Rooksby was in a pitiable state about it.
"But, Ralph," I said, "I would help Carlos."
"Oh, you," he said fretfully. "You want to run your head into a noose;
that's what it comes to. Why, I may have to flee the country. There's
the red-breasts poking their noses into every cottage on the Ashford
road." He strode on again. A wisp of mist came stealing down the hill.
"I can't give my cousin up. He could be smuggled out, right enough. But
then I should have to get across salt water, too, for at least a year.
Why----"
He seemed ready to tear his hair, and then I put in my say. He needed a
little persuasion, though, in spite of Veronica.
I should have to meet Carlos Riego and Castro in a little fir-wood above
the quarry, in half an hour's time. All I had to do was to whistle
three bars of "Lillibulero," as a signal. A connection had been already
arranged with the Free Traders on the road beside the quarry, and they
were coming down that night, as we knew well enough, both of us. They
were coming in force from Canterbury way down to the Marsh. It had
cost Ralph a pretty penny; but, once in the hands of the smugglers, his
cousin and Castro would be safe enough from the runners; it would have
needed a troop of horse to take them. The difficulty was that of late
the smugglers themselves had become demoralized. There were ugly rumours
of it; and there was a danger that Castro and Carlos, if not looked
after, might end their days in some marsh-dyke. It was desirable that
someone well known in our parts should see them to the seashore. A boat,
there, was to take them out into the bay, where an outward-bound West
Indiaman would pick them up. But for Ralph's fear for his neck, which
had increased in value since its devotion to Veronica, he would have
squired his cousin. As it was, he fluttered round the idea of letting
me take his place. Finally he settled it; and I embarked on a long
adventure.
CHAPTER TWO
Between moonrise and sunset I was stumbling through the bracken of the
little copse that was like a tuft of hair on the brow of the great white
quarry. It was quite dark, in among the trees. I made the circuit of the
copse, whistling softly my three bars of "Lillibulero." Then I plunged
into it. The bracken underfoot rustled and rustled. I came to a halt.
A little bar of light lay on the horizon in front of me, almost
colourless. It was crossed again and again by the small fir-trunks that
were little more than wands. A woodpigeon rose with a sudden crash of
sound, flapping away against the branches. My pulse was dancing with
delight--my heart, too. It was like a game of hide-and-seek, and yet it
was life at last. Everything grew silent again and I began to think I
had missed my time. Down below in the plain, a great way off, a dog was
barking continuously. I moved forward a few paces and whistled. The
glow of adventure began to die away. There was nothing at all--a little
mystery of light on the tree-trunks.
I moved forward again, getting back towards the road. Against the
glimmer of dead light I thought I caught the outlines of a man's hat
down among the tossing lines of the bracken. I whispered loudly:
"Carlos! Carlos!"
There was a moment of hoarse whispering; a sudden gruff sound. A shaft
of blazing yellow light darted from the level of the ground into my
dazed eyes. A man sprang at me and thrust something cold and knobby
into my neckcloth. The light continued to blaze into my eyes; it moved
upwards and shone on a red waistcoat dashed with gilt buttons. I
was being arrested.... "In the King's name...." It was a most sudden
catastrophe. A hand was clutching my windpipe.
"Don't you so much as squeak, Mr. Castro," a voice whispered in my ear.
The lanthorn light suddenly died out, and I heard whispers.
"Get him out on to the road.... I'll tackle the other . . .
Darbies. . . . Mind his knife."
I was like a confounded rabbit in their hands. One of them had his fist
on my collar and jerked me out upon the hard road. We rolled down the
embankment, but he was on the top. It seemed an abominable episode, a
piece of bad faith on the part of fate. I ought to have been exempt from
these sordid haps, but the man's hot leathery hand on my throat was like
a foretaste of the other collar. And I was horribly afraid--horribly--of
the sort of mysterious potency of the laws that these men represented,
and I could think of nothing to do.
We stood in a little slanting cutting in the shadow. A watery light
before the moon's rising slanted downwards from the hilltop along the
opposite bank. We stood in utter silence.
"If you stir a hair," my captor said coolly, "I'll squeeze the blood out
of your throat, like a rotten orange."
He had the calmness of one dealing with an everyday incident; yet the
incident was--it should have been--tremendous. We stood waiting silently
for an eternity, as one waits for a hare to break covert before the
beaters. From down the long hill came a small sound of horses' hoofs--a
sound like the beating of the heart, intermittent--a muffled thud on
turf, and a faint clink of iron. It seemed to die away unheard by the
runner beside me. Presently there was a crackling of the short pine
branches, a rustle, and a hoarse whisper said from above:
"Other's cleared, Thorns. Got that one safe?"
"All serene."
The man from above dropped down into the road, a clumsy, cloaked figure.
He turned his lanthorn upon me, in a painful yellow glare.
"What! 'Tis the young 'un," he grunted, after a moment. "Read the
warrant, Thorns."
My captor began to fumble in his pocket, pulled out a paper, and bent
down into the light. Suddenly he paused and looked up at me.
"This ain't------ Mr. Lilly white, I don't believe this ain't a
Jack Spaniard."
The clinks of bits and stirrup-irons came down in a waft again.
"That be hanged for a tale, Thorns," the man with the lanthorn said
sharply. "If this here ain't Riego--or the other--I'll . . ."
I began to come out of my stupor.
"My name's John Kemp," I said.
The other grunted. "Hurry up, Thorns."
"But, Mr. Lillywhite," Thorns reasoned, "he don't speak like a Dago.
Split me if he do! And we ain't in a friendly country either, you know
that. We can't afford to rile the gentry!"
I plucked up courage.
"You'll get your heads broke," I said, "if you wait much longer. Hark to
that!"
The approaching horses had turned off the turf on to the hard road; the
steps of first one and then another sounded out down the silent hill.
I knew it was the Free Traders from that; for except between banks they
kept to the soft roadsides as if it were an article of faith. The noise
of hoofs became that of an army.
The runners began to consult. The shadow called Thorns was for bolting
across country; but Lilly white was not built for speed. Besides he did
not know the lie of the land, and believed the Free Traders were mere
bogeys.
"They'll never touch us," Lillywhite grumbled. "We've a warrant...
King's name...." He was flashing his lanthorn aimlessly up the hill.
"Besides," he began again, "we've got this gallus bird. If he's not a
Spaniard, he knows all about them. I heard him. Kemp he may be, but he
spoke Spanish up there... and we've got something for our trouble. He'll
swing, I'll lay you a------"
From far above us came a shout, then a confused noise of voices. The
moon began to get up; above the cutting the clouds had a fringe of
sudden silver. A horseman, cloaked and muffled to the ears, trotted
warily towards us.
"What's up?" he hailed from a matter of ten yards. "What are you showing
that glim for? Anything wrong below?"
The runners kept silence; we heard the click of a pistol lock.
"In the King's name," Lillywhite shouted, "get off that nag and lend a
hand! We've a prisoner."
The horseman gave an incredulous whistle, and then began to shout, his
voice winding mournfully uphill, "Hallo! Hallo--o--o." An echo stole
back, "Hallo! Hallo--o--o"; then a number of voices. The horse stood,
drooping its head, and the man turned in his saddle. "Runners," he
shouted, "Bow Street runners! Come along, come along, boys! We'll roast
'em.... Runners! Runners!"
The sound of heavy horses at a jolting trot came to our ears.
"We're in for it," Lillywhite grunted. "D------n this county of Kent."
Thorns never loosed his hold of my collar. At the steep of the hill the
men and horses came into sight against the white sky, a confused crowd
of ominous things.
"Turn that lanthorn off'n me," the horseman said. "Don't you see you
frighten my horse? Now, boys, get round them. . . ."
The great horses formed an irregular half-circle round us; men descended
clumsily, like sacks of corn. The lanthorn was seized and flashed upon
us; there was a confused hubbub. I caught my own name.
"Yes, I'm Kemp... John Kemp," I called. "I'm true blue."
"Blue be hanged!" a voice shouted back. "What be you a-doing with
runners?"
The riot went on--forty or fifty voices. The runners were seized;
several hands caught at me. It was impossible to make myself heard; a
fist struck me on the cheek.
"Gibbet 'em," somebody shrieked; "they hung my nephew! Gibbet 'em all
the three. Young Kemp's mother's a bad 'un. An informer he is. Up with
'em!"
I was pulled down on my knees, then thrust forward, and then left to
myself while they rushed to bonnet Lillywhite. I stumbled against a
great, quiet farm horse.
A continuous scuffling went on; an imperious voice cried: "Hold your
tongues, you fools! Hold your tongues!..." Someone else called: "Hear to
Jack Rangsley. Hear to him!"
There was a silence. I saw a hand light a torch at the lanthorn, and the
crowd of faces, the muddle of limbs, the horses' heads, and the quiet
trees above, flickered into sight.
"Don't let them hang me, Jack Rangsley," I sobbed. "You know I'm no spy.
Don't let 'em hang me, Jack."
He rode his horse up to me, and caught me by the collar.
"Hold your tongue," he said roughly. He began to make a set speech,
anathematizing runners. He moved to tie our feet, and hang us by our
finger-nails over the quarry edge.
A hubbub of assent and dissent went up; then the crowd became unanimous.
Rangsley slipped from his horse.
"Blindfold 'em, lads," he cried, and turned me sharply round.
"Don't struggle," he whispered in my ear; his silk handkerchief came
cool across my eyelids. I felt hands fumbling with a knot at the back of
my head. "You're all right," he said again. The hubbub of voices ceased
suddenly. "Now, lads, bring 'em along."
A voice I knew said their watchword, "Snuff and enough," loudly, and
then, "What's agate?"
Someone else answered, "It's Rooksby, it's Sir Ralph."
The voice interrupted sharply, "No names, now. I don't want hanging."
The hand left my arm; there was a pause in the motion of the procession.
I caught a moment's sound of whispering. Then a new voice cried, "Strip
the runners to the shirt. Strip 'em. That's it." I heard some groans and
a cry, "You won't murder us." Then a nasal drawl, "We will sure--_ly_."
Someone else, Rangsley, I think, called, "Bring 'em along--this way
now."
After a period of turmoil we seemed to come out of the crowd upon a very
rough, descending path; Rangsley had called out, "Now, then, the rest
of you be off; we've got enough here"; and the hoofs of heavy horses
sounded again. Then we came to a halt, and Rangsley called sharply irom
close to me:
"Now, you runners--and you, John Kemp--here you be on the brink of
eternity, above the old quarry. There's a sheer drop of a hundred feet.
We'll tie your legs and hang you by your fingers. If you hang long
enough, you'll have time to say your prayers. Look alive, lads!"
The voice of one of the runners began to shout, "You'll swing for
this--you------"
As for me I was in a dream. "Jack," I said, "Jack, you won't----"
"Oh, that's all right," the voice said in a whisper. "Mum, now! It's all
_right_."
It withdrew itself a little from my ear and called, "'Now then, ready
with them. When I say three...."
I heard groans and curses, and began to shout for help. My voice came
back in an echo, despairingly. Suddenly I was dragged backward, and the
bandage pulled from my eyes,
"Come along," Rangsley said, leading me gently enough to the road, which
was five steps behind. "It's all a joke," he snarled. "A pretty bad one
for those catchpolls. Hear 'em groan. The drop's not two feet."
We made a few paces down the road; the pitiful voices of the runners
crying for help came plainly to my ears.
"You--they--aren't murdering them?" I asked.
"No, no," he answered. "Can't afford to. Wish we could; but they'd make
it too hot for us."
We began to descend the hill. From the quarry a voice shrieked:
"Help--help--for the love of God--I can't. . . ."
There was a grunt and the sound of a fall; then a precisely similar
sequence of sounds.
"That'll teach 'em," Rangsley said ferociously. "Come along--they've
only rolled down a bank. They weren't over the quarry. It's all right. I
swear it is."
And, as a matter of fact, that was the smugglers' ferocious idea of
humour. They would hang any undesirable man, like these runners, whom it
would make too great a stir to murder outright, over the edge of a low
bank, and swear to him that he was clawing the brink of Shakespeare's
Cliff or any other hundred-foot drop. The wretched creatures suffered
all the tortures of death before they let go, and, as a rule, they never
returned to our parts.
CHAPTER THREE
The spirit of the age has changed; everything has changed so utterly
that one can hardly believe in the existence of one's earlier self. But
I can still remember how, at that moment, I made the acquaintance of
my heart--a thing that bounded and leapt within my chest, a little
sickeningly. The other details I forget.
Jack Rangsley was a tall, big-boned, thin man, with something sinister
in the lines of his horseman's cloak, and something reckless in the way
he set his spurred heel on the ground. He was the son of an old Marsh
squire. Old Rangsley had been head of the last of the Owlers--the
aristocracy of export smugglers--and Jack had sunk a little in becoming
the head of the Old Bourne Tap importers. But he was hard enough,
tyrannical enough, and had nerve enough to keep Free-trading alive in
our parts until long after it had become an anachronism. He ended his
days on the gallows, of course, but that was long afterwards.
"I'd give a dollar to know what's going on in those runners' heads,"
Rangsley said, pointing back with his crop. He laughed gayly. The great
white face of the quarry rose up pale in the moonlight; the dusky red
fires of the limekilns glowed at the base, sending up a blood-red dust
of sullen smoke. "I'll swear they think they've dropped straight into
hell.
"You'll have to cut the country, John," he added suddenly, "they'll have
got your name uncommon pat. I did my best for you." He had had me tied
up like that before the runners' eyes in order to take their suspicions
off me. He had made a pretence to murder me with the same idea. But
he didn't believe they were taken in. "There'll be warrants out before
morning, if they ain't too shaken. But what were you doing in the
business? The two Spaniards were lying in the fern looking on when you
come blundering your clumsy nose in. If it hadn't been for Rooksby you
might have------ Hullo, there!" he broke off.
An answer came from the black shadow of a clump of roadside elms. I
made out the forms of three or four horses standing with their heads
together.
"Come along," Rangsley said; "up with you. We'll talk as we go."
Someone helped me into a saddle; my legs trembled in the stirrups as
if I had ridden a thousand miles on end already. I imagine I must have
fallen into a stupor; for I have only a vague impression of somebody's
exculpating himself to me. As a matter of fact, Ralph, after having
egged me on, in the intention of staying at home, had had qualms of
conscience, and had come to the quarry. It was he who had cried
the watchword, "Snuff and enough," and who had held the whispered
consultation. Carlos and Castro had waited in their hiding-place, having
been spectators of the arrival of the runners and of my capture. I
gathered this long afterwards. At that moment I was conscious only of
the motion of the horse beneath me, of intense weariness, and of the
voice of Ralph, who was lamenting his own cowardice.
"If it had come at any other time!" he kept on repeating. "But now, with
Veronica to think of!------ You take me, Johnny, don't you?"
My companions rode silently. After we had passed the houses of a little
village a heavy mist fell upon us, white, damp, and clogging. Ralph
reined his horse beside mine.
"I'm sorry," he began again, "I'm miserably sorry I got you into this
scrape. I swear I wouldn't have had it happen, not for a thousand
pounds--not for ten."
"It doesn't matter," I said cheerfully.
"Ah, but," Rooksby said, "you'll have to leave the country for a time.
Until I can arrange. I will. You can trust me."
"Oh, he'll have to leave the country, for sure," Rangsley said jovially,
"if he wants to live it down. There's five-and-forty warrants out
against me--but they dursent serve 'em. But he's not me."
"It's a miserable business," Ralph said. He had an air of the
profoundest dejection. In the misty light he looked like a man mortally
wounded, riding from a battle-field.
"Let him come with us," the musical voice of Carlos came through the
mist in front of us. "He shall see the world a little."
"For God's sake hold your tongue!" Ralph answered him. "There's mischief
enough. He shall go to France."
"Oh, let the young blade rip about the world for a year or two, squire,"
Rangsley's voice said from behind us.
In the end Ralph let me go with Carlos--actually across the sea, and to
the West Indies. I begged and implored him; it seemed that now there was
a chance for me to find my world of romance. And Ralph, who, though one
of the most law-respecting of men, was not for the moment one of the
most valorous, was wild to wash his hands of the whole business. He did
his best for me; he borrowed a goodly number of guineas from Rangsley,
who travelled with a bag of them at his saddle-bow, ready to pay his men
their seven shillings a head for the run.
Ralph remembered, too--or I remembered for him--that he had estates and
an agent in Jamaica, and he turned into the big inn at the junction of
the London road to write a letter to his agent bidding him house me and
employ me as an improver. For fear of compromising him we waited in the
shadow of trees a furlong or two down the road. He came at a trot, gave
me the letter, drew me aside, and began upbraiding himself again. The
others rode onwards.
"Oh, it's all right," I said. "It's fine--it's fine. I'd have given
fifty guineas for this chance this morning--and, Ralph, I say, you may
tell Veronica why I'm going, but keep a shut mouth to my mother. Let her
think I've run away--eh? Don't spoil your chance."
He was in such a state of repentance and flutter that he could not let
me take a decent farewell. The sound of the others' horses had long died
away down the hill when he began to tell me what he ought to have done.
"I knew it at once after I'd let you go. I ought to have kept you out
of it. You came near being murdered. And to think of it--you, her
brother--to be------"
"Oh, it's all right," I said gayly, "it's all right. You've to stand by
Veronica. I've no one to my back. Good-night, good-by."
I pulled my horse's head round and galloped down the hill. The main body
had halted before setting out over the shingle to the shore. Rangsley
was waiting to conduct us into the town, where we should find a man to
take us three fugitives out to the expected ship. We rode clattering
aggressively through the silence of the long, narrow main street. Every
now and then Carlos Riego coughed lamentably, but Tomas Castro rode in
gloomy silence. There was a light here and there in a window, but not a
soul stirring abroad. On the blind of an inn the shadow of a bearded man
held the shadow of a rummer to its mouth.
"That'll be my uncle," Rangsley said. "He'll be the man to do your
errand." He called to one of the men behind. "Here, Joe Pilcher, do you
go into the White Hart and drag my Uncle Tom out. Bring 'un up to me--to
the nest."
Three doors further on we came to a halt, and got down from our horses.
Rangsley knocked on a shutter-panel, two hard knocks with the crop and
three with the naked fist. Then a lock clicked, heavy bars rumbled, and
a chain rattled. Rangsley pushed me through the doorway. A side door
opened, and I saw into a lighted room filled with wreaths of smoke. A
paunchy man in a bob wig, with a blue coat and Windsor buttons, holding
a churchwarden pipe in his right hand and a pewter quart in his left,
came towards us.
"Hullo, captain," he said, "you'll be too late with the lights, won't
you?" He had a deprecatory air.
"Your watch is fast, Mr. Mayor," Rangsley answered surlily; "the tide
won't serve for half an hour yet."
"Cht, cht," the other wheezed. "No offence. We respect you. But still,
when one has a stake, one likes to know."
"My stake's all I have, and my neck," Rangsley said impatiently; "what's
yours? A matter of fifty pun ten?... Why don't you make them bring they
lanthorns?"
A couple of dark lanthorns were passed to Rangsley, who half-uncovered
one, and lit the way up steep wooden stairs. We climbed up to a tiny
cock-loft, of which the side towards the sea was all glazed.
"Now you sit there, on the floor," Rangsley commanded; "can't leave
you below; the runners will be coming to the mayor for new warrants
to-morrow, and he'd not like to have spent the night in your company."
He threw a casement open. The moon was hidden from us by clouds, but,
a long way off, over the distant sea, there was an irregular patch of
silver light, against which the chimneys of the opposite houses were
silhouetted. The church clock began muffledly to chime the quarters
behind us; then the hour struck--ten strokes.
Rangsley set one of his lanthorns on the window and twisted the top. He
sent beams of yellow light shooting out to seawards. His hands quivered,
and he was mumbling to himself under the influence of ungovernable
excitement. His stakes were very large, and all depended on the flicker
of those lanthorns out towards the men on the luggers that were hidden
in the black expanse of the sea. Then he waited, and against the light
of the window I could see him mopping his forehead with the sleeve
of his coat; my heart began to beat softly and insistently--out of
sympathy.
Suddenly, from the deep shadow of the cloud above the sea, a yellow
light flashed silently cut--very small, very distant, very short-lived.
Rangsley heaved a deep sigh and slapped me heavily on the shoulder.
"All serene, my buck," he said; "now let's see after you. I've half an
hour. What's the ship?"
I was at a loss, but Carlos said out of the darkness, "The ship the
_Thames_. My friend Senor Ortiz, of the Minories, said you would know."
"Oh, I know, I know," Rangsley said softly; and, indeed, he did know
all that was to be known about smuggling out of the southern counties of
people who could no longer inhabit them. The trade was a survival of the
days of Jacobite plots. "And it's a hanging job, too. But it's no affair
of mine." He stopped and reflected for an instant.
I could feel Carlos' eyes upon us, looking out of the thick darkness. A
slight rustling came from the corner that hid Castro.
"She passes down channel to-night, then?" Rangsley said. "With this wind
you'll want to be well out in the Bay at a quarter after eleven."
An abnormal scuffling, intermingled with snatches of jovial
remonstrance, made itself heard from the bottom of the ladder. A voice
called up through the hatch, "Here's your uncle, Squahre Jack," and a
husky murmur corroborated.
"Be you drunk again, you old sinner?" Rangsley asked. "Listen to me....
Here's three men to be set aboard the _Thames_ at a quarter after
eleven."
A grunt came in reply.
Rangsley repeated slowly.
The grunt answered again.
"Here's three men to be set aboard the _Thames_ at a quarter after
eleven. . . ." Rangsley said again.
"Here's... a-cop... three men to be set aboard _Thames_ at quarter after
eleven," a voice hiccoughed back to us.
"Well, see you do it," Rangsley said. "He's as drunk as a king,"
he commented to us; "but when you've said a thing three times, he
remembers--hark to him."
The drunken voice from below kept up a constant babble of, "Three men to
be set aboard _Thames_... three men to be set . . ."
"He'll not stop saying that till he has you safe aboard," Rangsley
said. He showed a glimmer of light down the ladder--Carlos and Castro
descended. I caught sight below me of the silver head and the deep
red ears of the drunken uncle of Rangsley. He had been one of the most
redoubtable of the family, a man of immense strength and cunning, but a
confirmed habit of consuming a pint and a half of gin a night had made
him disinclined for the more arduous tasks of the trade. He limited his
energies to working the underground passage, to the success of which his
fox-like cunning, and intimate knowledge of the passing shipping, were
indispensable. I was preparing to follow the others down the ladder when
Rangsley touched my arm.
"I don't like your company," he said close behind my ear. "I know who
they are. There were bills out for them this morning. I'd blow them,
and take the reward, but for you and Squahre Rooksby. They're handy with
their knives, too, I fancy. You mind me, and look to yourself with them.
There's something unnatural."
His words had a certain effect upon me, and his manner perhaps more. A
thing that was "unnatural" to Jack Rangsley--the man of darkness, who
lived forever as if in the shadow of the gallows--was a thing to be
avoided. He was for me nearly as romantic a figure as Carlos himself,
but for his forbidding darkness, and he was a person of immense power.
The silent flittings of lights that I had just seen, the answering
signals from the luggers far out to sea, the enforced sleep of the
towns and countryside whilst his plans were working out at night, had
impressed me with a sense of awe. And his words sank into my spirit, and
made me afraid for my future.
We followed the others downwards into a ground-floor room that was
fitted up as a barber's shop. A rushlight was burning on a table.
Rangsley took hold of a piece of wainscotting, part of the frame of
a panel; he pulled it towards him, and, at the same moment, a glazed
show-case full of razors and brushes swung noiselessly forward with an
effect of the supernatural. A small opening, just big enough to take
a man's body, revealed itself. We passed through it and up a sort of
tunnel. The door at the other end, which was formed of panels, had a
manger and straw crib attached to it on the outside, and let us into a
horse's stall. We found ourselves in the stable of the inn.
"We don't use this passage for ourselves," Rangsley said. "Only the most
looked up to need to--the justices and such like. But gallus birds like
you and your company, it's best for us not to be seen in company with.
Follow my uncle now. Good-night."
We went into the yard, under the pillars of the town hall, across
the silent street, through a narrow passage, and down to the sea. Old
Rangsley reeled ahead of us swiftly, muttering, "Three men to be
set aboard the _Thames_... quarter past eleven. Three men to be set
aboard..." and in a few minutes we stood upon the shingle beside the
idle sea, that was nearly at the full.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was, I suppose, what I demanded of Fate--to be gently wafted into the
position of a hero of romance, without rough hands at my throat. It
is what we all ask, I suppose; and we get it sometimes in ten-minute
snatches. I didn't know where I was going. It was enough for me to sail
in and out of the patches of shadow that fell from the moon right above
our heads.
We embarked, and, as we drew further out, the land turned to a shadow,
spotted here and there with little lights. Behind us a cock crowed. The
shingle crashed at intervals beneath the feet of a large body of men. I
remembered the smugglers; but it was as if I had remembered them only
to forget them forever. Old Rangsley, who steered with the sheet in his
hand, kept up an unintelligible babble. Carlos and Castro talked under
their breaths. Along the gunwale there was a constant ripple and gurgle.
Suddenly old Rangsley began to sing; his voice was hoarse and drunken.
"When Harol' war in va--a--ded,
An' fallin', lost his crownd,
An' Normun Willium wa--a--ded."
The water murmured without a pause, as if it had a million tiny facts to
communicate in very little time. And then old Rangsley hove to, to wait
for the ship, and sat half asleep, lurching over the tiller. He was
a very, unreliable scoundrel. The boat leaked like a sieve. The wind
freshened, and we three began to ask ourselves how it was going to end.
There were no lights upon the sea.
At last, well out, a blue gleam caught our eyes; but by this time old
Rangsley was helpless, and it fell to me to manage the boat. Carlos was
of no use--he knew it, and, without saying a word, busied himself in
bailing the water out. But Castro, I was surprised to notice, knew more
than I did about a boat, and, maimed as he was, made himself useful.
"To me it looks as if we should drown," Carlos said at one point, very
quietly. "I am sorry for you, Juan."
"And for yourself, too," I answered, feeling very hopeless, and with a
dogged grimness.
"Just now, my young cousin, I feel as if I should not mind dying under
the water," he remarked with a sigh, but without ceasing to bail for a
moment.
"Ah, you are sorry to be leaving home, and your friends, and Spain, and
your fine adventures," I answered.
The blue flare showed a very little nearer. There was nothing to be done
but talk and wait.
"No; England," he answered in a tone full of meaning--"things in
England--people there. One person at least."
To me his words and his smile seemed to imply a bitter irony; but they
were said very earnestly.
Castro had hauled the helpless form of old Rangsley forward. I caught
him muttering savagely:
"I could kill that old man!"
He did not want to be drowned; neither assuredly did I. But it was not
fear so much as a feeling of dreariness and disappointment that had come
over me, the sudden feeling that I was going not to adventure, but to
death; that here was not romance, but an end--a disenchanted surprise
that it should soon be all over.
We kept a grim silence. Further out in the bay, we were caught in a
heavy squall. Sitting by the tiller, I got as much out of her as I knew
how. We would go as far as we could before the run was over. Carlos
bailed unceasingly, and without a word of complaint, sticking to his
self-appointed task as if in very truth he were careless of life.
A feeling came over me that this, indeed, was the elevated and the
romantic. Perhaps he was tired of his life; perhaps he really regretted
what he left behind him in England, or somewhere else--some association,
some woman. But he, at least, if we went down together, would
go gallantly, and without complaint, at the end of a life with
associations, movements, having lived and regretted. I should disappear
in-gloriously on the very threshold.
Castro, standing up unsteadily, growled, "We may do it yet! See, senor!"
The blue gleam was much larger--it flared smokily up towards the sky. I
made out ghastly parallelograms of a ship's sails high above us, and at
last many faces peering unseeingly over the rail in our direction. We
all shouted together.
I may say that it was thanks to me that we reached the ship. Our boat
went down under us whilst I was tying a rope under Carlos' arms. He
was standing up with the baler still in his hand. On board, the women
passengers were screaming, and as I clung desperately to the rope that
was thrown me, it struck me oddly that I had never before heard so many
women's voices at the same time. Afterwards, when I stood on the deck,
they began laughing at old Rangsley, who held forth in a thunderous
voice, punctuated by hiccoughs:
"They carried I aboard--a cop--theer lugger and sinks I in the cold,
co--old sea."
It mortified me excessively that I should be tacked to his tail and
exhibited to a number of people, and I had a sudden conviction of my
small importance. I had expected something altogether different--an
audience sympathetically interested in my desire for a passage to the
West Indies; instead of which people laughed while I spoke in panting
jerks, and the water dripped out of my clothes. After I had made it
clear that I wanted to go with Carlos, and could pay for my passage,
I was handed down into the steerage, where a tallow candle burnt in
a thick, blue atmosphere. I was stripped and filled with some fiery
liquid, and fell asleep. Old Rangsley was sent ashore with the pilot.
It was a new and strange life to me, opening there suddenly enough. The
_Thames_ was one of the usual West Indiamen; but to me even the very
ropes and spars, the sea, and the unbroken dome of the sky, had a rich
strangeness. Time passed lazily and gliding. I made more fully the
acquaintance of my companions, but seemed to know them no better. I
lived with Carlos in the cabin--Castro in the half-deck; but we were all
three pretty constantly together, and they being the only Spaniards on
board, we were more or less isolated from the other passengers.
Looking at my companions at times, I had vague misgivings. It was as
if these two had fascinated me to the verge of some danger. Sometimes
Castro, looking up, uttered vague ejaculations. Carlos pushed his hat
back and sighed. They had preoccupations, cares, interests in which they
let me have no part.
Castro struck me as absolutely ruffianly. His head was knotted in a red,
white-spotted handkerchief; his grizzled beard was tangled; he wore
a black and rusty cloak, ragged at the edges, and his feet were often
bare; at his side would lie his wooden right hand. As a rule, the place
of his forearm was taken by a long, thin, steel blade, that he was
forever sharpening.
Carlos talked with me, telling me about his former life and his
adventures. The other passengers he discountenanced by a certain
coldness of manner that made me ashamed of talking to them. I respected
him so; he was so wonderful to me then. Castro I detested; but I
accepted their relationship without in the least understanding how
Carlos, with his fine grain, his high soul--I gave him credit for a
high soul--could put up with the squalid ferocity with which I credited
Castro. It seemed to hang in the air round the grotesque ragged-ness of
the saturnine brown man.
Carlos had made Spain too hot to hold him in those tortuous intrigues of
the Army of the Faith and Bourbon troops and Italian legions. From what
I could understand, he must have played fast and loose in an insolent
manner. And there was some woman offended. There was a gayness and
gallantry in that part of it. He had known the very spirit of romance,
and now he was sailing gallantly out to take up his inheritance from
an uncle who was a great noble, owning the greater part of one of the
Intendencias of Cuba.
"He is a very old man, I hear," Carlos said--"a little doting, and
having need of me."
There were all the elements of romance about Carlos' story--except the
actual discomforts of the ship in which we were sailing. He himself had
never been in Cuba or seen his uncle; but he had, as I have indicated,
ruined himself in one way or another in Spain, and it had come as a
God-send to him when his uncle had sent Tomas Castro to bring him to
Cuba, to the town of Rio Medio.
"The town belongs to my uncle. He is very rich; a Grand d'Espagne . . .
everything; but he is now very old, and has left Havana to die in his
palace in his own town. He has an only daughter, a Dona Seraphina, and I
suppose that if I find favour in his eyes I shall marry her, and inherit
my uncle's great riches; I am the only one that is left of the family to
inherit." He waved his hand and smiled a little. "_Vaya_; a little of
that great wealth would be welcome. If I had had a few pence more there
would have been none of this worry, and I should not have been on
this dirty ship in these rags." He looked down good-humouredly at his
clothes.
"But," I said, "how do you come to be in a scrape at all?"
He laughed a little proudly.
"In a scrape?" he said. "I... I am in none. It is Tomas Castro there."
He laughed affectionately. "He is as faithful as he is ugly," he said;
"but I fear he has been a villain, too.... What do I know? Over there in
my uncle's town, there are some villains--you know what I mean, one must
not speak too loudly on this ship. There is a man called O'Brien, who
mismanages my uncle's affairs. What do I know? The good Tomas has been
in some villainy that is no affair of mine. He is a good friend and
a faithful dependent of my family's. He certainly had that man's
watch--the man we met by evil chance at Liverpool, a man who came from
Jamaica. He had bought it--of a bad man, perhaps, I do not ask. It was
Castro your police wished to take. But I, _bon Dieu_, do you think I
would take watches?"
I certainly did not think he had taken a watch; but I did not relinquish
the idea that he, in a glamorous, romantic way, had been a pirate.
Rooksby had certainly hinted as much in his irritation.
He lost none of his romantic charm in my eyes. The fact that he was
sailing in uncomfortable circumstances detracted little; nor did his
clothes, which, at the worst, were better than any I had ever had. And
he wore them with an air and a grace. He had probably been in worse
circumstances when campaigning with the Army of the Faith in Spain.
And there was certainly the uncle with the romantic title and the great
inheritance, and the cousin--the Miss Seraphina, whom he would probably
marry. I imagined him an aristocratic scapegrace, a corsair--it was the
Byronic period then--sailing out to marry a sort of shimmering princess
with hair like Veronica's, bright golden, and a face like that of a
certain keeper's daughter. Carlos, however, knew nothing about his
cousin; he cared little more, as far as I could tell. "What can she
be to me since I have seen your...?" he said once, and then stopped,
looking at me with a certain tender irony. He insisted, though, that his
aged uncle was in need of him. As for Castro--he and his rags came out
of a life of sturt and strife, and I hoped he might die by treachery.
He had undoubtedly been sent by the uncle across the seas to find
Carlos and bring him out of Europe; there was-something romantic in
that mission. He was now a dependent of the Riego family, but there were
unfathomable depths in that tubby little man's past. That he had gone to
Russia at the tail of the Grande Armee, one could not help believing. He
had been most likely in the grand army of sutlers and camp-followers.
He could talk convincingly of the cold, and of the snows and his escape.
And from his allusions one could get glimpses of what he had been
before and afterwards--apparently everything that was questionable in a
secularly disturbed Europe; no doubt somewhat of a bandit; a guerrillero
in the sixes and sevens; with the Army of the Faith near the French
border, later on.
There had been room and to spare for that sort of pike, in the muddy
waters, during the first years of the century. But the waters were
clearing, and now the good Castro had been dodging the gallows in the
Antilles or in Mexico. In his heroic moods he would swear that his
arm had been cut off at Somo Sierra; swear it with a great deal of
asseveration, making one see the Polish lancers charging the gunners,
being cut down, and his own sword arm falling suddenly.
Carlos, however, used to declare with affectionate cynicism that the
arm had been broken by the cudgel of a Polish peasant while Castro was
trying to filch a pig from a stable.... "I cut his throat out, though,"
Castro would grumble darkly; "so, like that, and it matters very
little--it is even an improvement. See, I put on my blade. See, I
transfix you that fly there.... See how astonished he was. He did never
expect that." He had actually impaled a crawling cockroach. He spent
his days cooking extraordinary messes, crouching for hours over a little
charcoal brazier that he lit surreptitiously in the back of his bunk,
making substitutes for eternal _gaspachos_.
All these things, if they deepened the romance of Carlos' career,
enhanced, also, the mystery. I asked him one day, "But why do you go to
Jamaica at all if you are bound for Cuba?"
He looked at me, smiling a little mournfully.
"Ah, Juan mio," he said, "Spain is not like your England, unchanging and
stable. The party who reign to-day do not love me, and they are masters
in Cuba as in Spain. But in his province my uncle rules alone. There I
shall be safe." He was condescending to roll some cigarettes for Tomas,
whose wooden hand incommoded him, and he tossed a fragment of tobacco to
the wind with a laugh. "In Jamaica there is a merchant, a Senor Ramon; I
have letters to him, and he shall find me a conveyance to Rio Medio, my
uncle's town. He is an _quliado_."
He laughed again. "It is not easy to enter that place, Juanino."
There was certainly some mystery about that town of his uncle's. One
night I overheard him say to Castro:
"Tell me, O my Tomas, would it be safe to take this _caballero_, my
cousin, to Rio Medio?"
Castro paused, and then murmured gruffly:
"Senor, unless that Irishman is consulted beforehand, or the English
lord would undertake to join with the picaroons, it is very assuredly
not safe."
Carlos made a little exclamation of mild astonishment.
"_Pero?_ Is it so bad as that in my uncle's own town?"
Tomas muttered something that I did not catch, and then:
"If the English _caballero_ committed indiscretions, or quarrelled--and
all these people quarrel, why, God knows--that Irish devil could hang
many persons, even myself, or take vengeance on your worship."
Carlos was silent as if in a reverie. At last he said:
"But if affairs are like this, it would be well to have one more with
us. The _caballero_, my cousin, is very strong and of great courage."
Castro grunted, "Oh, of a courage! But as the proverb says, 'If you set
an Englishman by a hornets' nest they shall not remain long within.":
After that I avoided any allusion to Cuba, because the thing, think as
I would about it, would not grow clear. It was plain that something
illegal was going on there, or how could "that Irish devil," whoever
he was, have power to hang Tomas and be revenged on Carlos? It did not
affect my love for Carlos, though, in the weariness of this mystery, the
passage seemed to drag a little. And it was obvious enough that Carlos
was unwilling or unable to tell anything about what pre-, occupied him.
I had noticed an intimacy spring up between the ship's second mate and
Tomas, who was, it seemed to me, forever engaged in long confabulations
in the man's cabin, and, as much to make talk as for any other reason,
I asked Carlos if he had noticed his dependent's familiarity. It was
noticeable because Castro held aloof from every other soul on board.
Carlos answered me with one of his nervous and angry smiles.
"Ah, Juan mine, do not ask too many questions! I wish you could come
with me all the way, but I cannot tell you all I know. I do not even
myself know all. It seems that the man is going to leave the ship in
Jamaica, and has letters for that Senor Ramon, the merchant, even as I
have. _Vaya_; more I cannot tell you."
This struck me as curious, and a little of the whole mystery seemed from
that time to attach to the second mate, who before had been no more to
me than a long, sallow Nova Scotian, with a disagreeable intonation and
rather offensive manners. I began to watch him, desultorily, and was
rather startled by something more than a suspicion that he himself was
watching me. On one occasion in particular I seemed to observe this. The
second mate was lankily stalking the deck, his hands in his pockets. As
he paused in his walk to spit into the sea beside me, Carlos said:
"And you, my Juan, what will you do in this Jamaica?"
The sense that we were approaching land was already all over the ship.
The second mate leered at me enigmatically, and moved slowly away.
I said that I was going to the Horton Estates, Rooksby's, to learn
planting under a Mr. Macdonald, the agent. Carlos shrugged his
shoulders. I suppose I had spoken with some animation.
"Ah," he said, with his air of great wisdom and varied experience,
of disillusionment, "it will be much the same as it has been at your
home--after the first days. Hard work and a great sameness." He began to
cough violently.
I said bitterly enough, "Yes. It will be always the same with me. I
shall never see life. You've seen all that there is to see, so I suppose
you do not mind settling down with an old uncle in a palace."
He answered suddenly, with a certain darkness of manner, "That is as God
wills. Who knows? Perhaps life, even in my uncle's palace, will not be
so safe."
The second mate was bearing down on us again.
I said jocularly, "Why, when I get very tired of life at Horton Pen, I
shall come to see you in your uncle's town."
Carlos had another of his fits of coughing.
"After all, we are kinsmen. I dare say you would give me a bed," I went
on.
The second mate was quite close to us then.
Carlos looked at me with an expression of affection that a little shamed
my lightness of tone:
"I love you much more than a kinsman, Juan," he said. "I wish you could
come with me. I try to arrange it. Later, perhaps, I may be dead. I am
very ill."
He was undoubtedly ill. Campaigning in Spain, exposure in England in a
rainy time, and then the ducking when we came on board, had done him no
good. He looked moodily at the sea.
"I wish you could come. I will try------"
The mate had paused, and was listening quite unaffectedly, behind
Carlos' back.
A moment after Carlos half turned and regarded him with a haughty stare.
He whistled and walked away.
Carlos muttered something that I did not catch about "spies of that
pestilent Irishman." Then:
"I will not selfishly take you into any more dangers," he said. "But
life on a sugar plantation is not fit for you."
I felt glad and flattered that a personage so romantic should deem me a
fit companion for himself. He went forward as if with some purpose.
Some days afterwards the second mate sent for me to his cabin. He had
been on the sick list, and he was lying in his bunk, stripped to the
waist, one arm and one leg touching the floor. He raised himself slowly
when I came in, and spat. He had in a pronounced degree the Nova Scotian
peculiarities and accent, and after he had shaved, his face shone like
polished leather.
"Hallo!" he said. "See heeyur, young Kemp, does your neck just _itch_ to
be stretched?"
I looked at him with mouth and eyes agape.
He spat again, and waved a claw towards the forward bulkhead.
"They'll do it for yeh," he said. "You're such a green goose, it makes
me sick a bit. You hevn't reckoned out the chances, not quite. It's a
kind of dead reckoning yeh hevn't had call to make. Eh?"
"What do you mean?" I asked, bewildered.
He looked at me, grinning, half naked, with amused contempt, for quite a
long time, and at last offered sardonically to open my eyes for me.
I said nothing.
"Do you know what will happen to you," he asked, "ef yeh don't get quit
of that Carlos of yours?"
I was surprised into muttering that I didn't know.
"I can tell yeh," he continued. "Yeh will get hanged."
By that time I was too amazed to get angry. I simply suspected the Blue
Nose of being drunk. But he glared at me so soberly that next moment I
felt frightened.
"Hanged by the neck," he repeated; and then added, "Young fellow, you
scoot. Take a fool's advice, and _scoot_. That Castro is a blame fool,
anyhow. Yeh want men for that job. Men, I tell you." He slapped his bony
breast.
I had no idea that he could look so ferocious. His eyes fascinated me,
and he opened his cavernous mouth as if to swallow me. His lantern jaws
snapped without a sound. He seemed to change his mind.
"I am done with yeh," he said, with a sort of sinister restraint. He
rose to his feet, and, turning his back to me, began to shave, squinting
into a broken looking-glass.
I had not the slightest inkling of his meaning. I only knew that going
out of his berth was like escaping from the dark lair of a beast into
a sunlit world. There is no denying that his words, and still more his
manner, had awakened in me a sense of insecurity that had no precise
object, for it was manifestly absurd and impossible to suspect my friend
Carlos. Moreover, hanging was a danger so recondite, and an eventuality
so extravagant, as to make the whole thing ridiculous. And yet I
remembered how unhappy I felt, how inexplicably unhappy. Presently the
reason was made clear. I was homesick. I gave no further thought to the
second mate. I looked at the harbour we were entering, and thought of
the home I had left so eagerly. After all, I was no more than a boy, and
even younger in mind than in body.
Queer-looking boats crawled between the shores like tiny water beetles.
One headed out towards us, then another. I did not want them to reach
us. It was as if I did not wish my solitude to be disturbed, and I was
not pleased with the idea of going ashore. A great ship, floating high
on the water, black and girt with the two broad yellow streaks of her
double tier of guns, glided out slowly from beyond a cluster of shipping
in the bay. She passed without a hail, going out under her topsails with
a flag at the fore. Her lofty spars overtopped our masts immensely, and
I saw the men in her rigging looking down on our decks. The only sounds
that came out of her were the piping of boatswain's calls and the
tramping of feet. Imagining her to be going home, I felt a great desire
to be on board. Ultimately, as it turned out, I went home in that very
ship, but then it was too late. I was another man by that time, with
much queer knowledge and other desires. Whilst I was looking and longing
I heard Carlos' voice behind me asking one of our sailors what ship it
was.
"Don't you know a flagship when you see it?" a voice grumbled surlily.
"Admiral Rowley's," it continued. Then it rumbled out some remarks about
"pirates, vermin, coast of Cuba."
Carlos came to the side, and looked after the man-of-war in the
distance.
"_You_ could help us," I heard him mutter.
CHAPTER FIVE
There was a lad called Barnes, a steerage passenger of about my own age,
a raw, red-headed Northumbrian yokel, going out as a recruit to one of
the West Indian regiments. He was a serious, strenuous youth, and I had
talked a little with him at odd moments. In my great loneliness I went
to say good-by to him after I had definitely parted with Carlos.
I had been in our cabin. A great bustle of shore-going, of leave-taking
had sprung up all over the ship. Carlos and Castro had entered with a
tall, immobile, gold-spectacled Spaniard, dressed all in white, and with
a certain air of noticing and attentive deference, bowing a little as
he entered the cabin in earnest conference with Tomas Castro. Carlos had
preceded them with a certain nonchalance, and the Spaniard--it was
the Senor Ramon, the merchant I had heard of--regarded him as if with
interested curiosity. With Tomas he seemed already familiar. He stood in
the doorway, against the strong light, bowing a little.
With a certain courtesy, touched with indifference, Carlos made him
acquainted with me. Ramon turned his searching, quietly analytic gaze
upon me.
"But is the _caballero_ going over, too?" he asked.
Carlos said, "No. I think not, now."
And at that moment the second mate, shouldering his way through a
white-clothed crowd of shore people, made up behind Senor Ramon. He held
a letter in his hand.
"I am going over," he said, in his high nasal voice, and with a certain
ferocity.
Ramon looked round apprehensively.
Carlos said, "The senor, my cousin, wishes for a Mr. Macdonald. You know
him, senor?"
Ramon made a dry gesture of perfect acquaintance. "I think I have seen
him just now," he said. "I will make inquiries."
All three of them had followed him, and became lost in the crowd. It
was then, not knowing whether I should ever see Carlos again, and with
a desperate, unhappy feeling of loneliness, that I had sought out Barnes
in the dim immensity of the steerage.
In the square of wan light that came down the scuttle he was cording his
hair-trunk--unemotional and very matter-of-fact. He began to talk in an
everyday voice about his plans. An uncle was going to meet him, and to
house him for a day or two before he went to the barracks.
"Mebbe we'll meet again," he said. "I'll be here many years, I think."
He shouldered his trunk and climbed unromantically up the ladder. He
said he would look for Macdonald for me.
It was absurd to suppose that the strange ravings of the second mate had
had an effect on me. "Hanged! Pirates!" Was Carlos really a pirate, or
Castro, his humble friend? It was vile of me to suspect Carlos. A couple
of men, meeting by the scuttle, began to talk loudly, every word coming
plainly to my ears in the stillness of my misery, and the large deserted
steerage. One of them, new from home, was asking questions. Another
answered:
"Oh, I lost half a seroon the last voyage--the old thing."
"Haven't they routed out the scoundrels yet?" the other asked.
The first man lowered his voice. I caught only that "the admiral was an
old fool--no good for this job. He's found out the name of the place the
pirates come from--Rio Medio. That's the place, only he can't get in at
it with his three-deckers. You saw his flagship?"
Rio Medio was the name of the town to which Carlos was going--which his
uncle owned. They moved away from above.
What was I to believe? What could this mean? But the second mate's,
"Scoot, young man," seemed to come to my ears like the blast of a
trumpet. I became suddenly intensely anxious to find Macdonald--to see
no more of Carlos.
From above came suddenly a gruff voice in Spanish. "Senor, it would be a
great folly."
Tomas Castro was descending the ladder gingerly. He was coming to fetch
his bundle. I went hastily into the distance of the vast, dim cavern of
spare room that served for the steerage.
"I want him very much," Carlos said. "I like him. He would be of help to
us."
"It's as your worship wills," Castro said gruffly. They were both at
the bottom of the ladder. "But an Englishman there would work great
mischief. And this youth----"
"I will take him, Tomas," Carlos said, laying a hand on his arm.
"Those others will think he is a spy. I know them," Castro muttered.
"They will hang him, or work some devil's mischief. You do not know that
Irish judge--the _canaille_, the friend of priests."
"He is very brave. He will not fear," Carlos said.
I came suddenly forward. "I will not go with you," I said, before I had
reached them even.
Castro started back as if he had been stung, and caught at the wooden
hand that sheathed his steel blade.
"Ah, it is you, Senor," he said, with an air of relief and dislike.
Carlos, softly and very affectionately, began inviting me to go to his
uncle's town. His uncle, he was sure, would welcome me. Jamaica and a
planter's life were not fit for me.
I had not then spoken very loudly, or had not made my meaning very
clear. I felt a great desire to find Macdonald, and a simple life that I
could understand.
"I am not going with you," I said, very loudly this time.
He stopped at once. Through the scuttle of the half-deck we heard a
hubbub of voices, of people exchanging greetings, of Christian names
called out joyously. A tumultuous shuffling of feet went on continuously
over our heads. The ship was crowded with people from the shore. Perhaps
Macdonald was amongst them, even looking for me.
"Ah, _amigo mio_, but you _must_ now," said Carlos gently--"you
must------" And, looking me straight in the face with a still,
penetrating glance of his big, romantic eyes, "It is a good life," he
whispered seductively, "and I like you, John Kemp. You are young-very
young yet. But I love you very much for your own sake, and for the sake
of one I shall never see again."
He fascinated me. He was all eyes in the dusk, standing in a languid
pose just clear of the shaft of light that fell through the scuttle in a
square patch.
I lowered my voice, too. "What life?" I asked.
"Life in my uncle's palace," he said, so sweetly and persuasively that
the suggestiveness of it caused a thrill in me.
His uncle could nominate me to posts of honour fit for a _caballero_.
I seemed to wake up. "Your uncle the pirate!" I cried, and was amazed at
my own words.
Tomas Castro sprang up, and placed his rough, hot hand over my lips.
"Be quiet, John Kemp, you fool!" he hissed with sudden energy.
He had spruced himself, but I seemed to see the rags still nutter about
him. He had combed out his beard, but I could not forget the knots that
had been in it.
"I told your worship how foolish and wrong-headed these English are," he
said sardonically to Carlos. And then to me, "If the senor speaks loudly
again, I shall kill him."
He was evidently very frightened of something.
Carlos, silent as an apparition at the foot of the ladder, put a finger
to his lips and glanced upwards.
Castro writhed his whole body, and I stepped backwards. "I know what Rio
Medio is," I said, not very loudly. "It is a nest of pirates."
Castro crept towards me again on the points of his toes. "Senor Don Juan
Kemp, child of the devil," he hissed, looking very much frightened, "you
must die!"
I smiled. He was trembling all over. I could hear the talking and
laughing that went on under the break of the poop. Two women were
kissing, with little cries, near the hatchway. I could hear them
distinctly.
Tomas Castro dropped his ragged cloak with a grandiose gesture.
"By my hand!" he added with difficulty.
He was really very much alarmed. Carlos was gazing up the hatch. I was
ready to laugh at the idea of dying by Tomas Castro's hand while, within
five feet of me, people were laughing and kissing. I should have laughed
had I not suddenly felt his hand on my throat. I kicked his shins hard,
and fell backwards over a chest. He went back a step or two, flourished
his arm, beat his chest, and turned furiously upon Carlos.
"He will get us murdered," he said. "Do you think we are safe here? If
these people here heard that name they wouldn't wait to ask who
your worship is. They would tear us to pieces in an instant. I tell
you--_moi_, Tomas Castro--he will ruin us, this white fool-------"
Carlos began to cough, shaken speechless as if by an invisible devil.
Castro's eyes ran furtively all round him, then he looked at me. He made
an extraordinary swift motion with his right hand, and I saw that he was
facing me with a long steel blade displayed. Carlos continued to cough.
The thing seemed odd, laughable still. Castro began to parade round
me: it was as if he were a cock performing its saltatory rites before
attacking. There was the same tenseness of muscle. He stepped with
extraordinary care on the points of his toes, and came to a stop about
four feet from me. I began to wonder what Rooksby would have thought of
this sort of thing, to wonder why Castro himself found it necessary to
crouch for such a long time. Up above, the hum of many people, still
laughing, still talking, faded a little out of mind. I understood,
horribly, how possible it would be to die within those few feet of them.
Castro's eyes were dusky yellow, the pupils a great deal inflated,
the lines of his mouth very hard and drawn immensely tight. It seemed
extraordinary that he should put so much emotion into such a very easy
killing. I had my back against the bulkhead, it felt very hard against
my shoulder-blades. I had no dread, only a sort of shrinking from the
actual contact of the point, as one shrinks from being tickled. I opened
my mouth. I was going to shriek a last, despairing call, to the light
and laughter of meetings above when Carlos, still shaken, with one white
hand pressed very hard upon his chest, started forward and gripped his
hand round Castro's steel. He began to whisper in the other's hairy ear.
I caught:
"You are a fool. He will not make us to be molested, he is my kinsman."
Castro made a reluctant gesture towards Barnes' chest that lay between
us.
"We could cram him into that," he said.
"Oh, bloodthirsty fool," Carlos answered, recovering his breath; "is
it always necessary to wash your hands in blood? Are we not in enough
danger? Up--up! Go see if the boat is yet there. We must go quickly;
up--up-------" He waved his hand towards the scuttle.
"But still," Castro said. He was reluctantly fitting his wooden hand
upon the blue steel. He sent a baleful yellow glare into my eyes, and
stooped to pick up his ragged cloak.
"Up--mount!" Carlos commanded.
Castro muttered, "_Vamos_," and began clumsily to climb the ladder, like
a bale of rags being hauled from above. Carlos placed his foot on the
steps, preparing to follow him. He turned his head round towards me, his
hand extended, a smile upon his lips.
"Juan," he said, "let us not quarrel. You are very young; you cannot
understand these things; you cannot weigh them; you have a foolish idea
in your head. I wished you to come with us because I love you, Juan. Do
you think I wish you evil? You are true and brave, and our families are
united." He sighed suddenly.
"I do not want to quarrel!" I said. "I don't."
I did not want to quarrel; I wanted more to cry. I was very lonely, and
he was going away. Romance was going out of my life.
He added musically, "You even do not understand. There is someone else
who speaks for you to me, always--someone else. But one day you will. I
shall come back for you--one day." He looked at me and smiled. It
stirred unknown depths of emotion in me. I would have gone with him,
then, had he asked me. "One day," he repeated, with an extraordinary
cadence of tone.
His hand was grasping mine; it thrilled me like a woman's; he stood
shaking it very gently.
"One day," he said, "I shall repay what I owe you. I wished you with me,
because I go into some danger. I wanted you. Good-by. _Hasta mas ver_."
He leaned over and kissed me lightly on the cheek, then climbed away. I
felt that the light of Romance was going out of my life. As we reached
the top of the ladder, somebody began to call harshly, startlingly. I
heard my own name and the words, "mahn ye were speerin' after."
The light was obscured, the voice began clamouring insistently.
"John Kemp, Johnnie Kemp, noo. Here's the mahn ye were speerin' after.
Here's Macdonald."
It was the voice of Barnes, and the voice of the every day. I discovered
that I had been tremendously upset. The pulses in my temples were
throbbing, and I wanted to shut my eyes--to sleep! I was tired; Romance
had departed. Barnes and the Macdonald he had found for me represented
all the laborious insects of the world; all the ants who are forever
hauling immensely heavy and immenlsely unimportant burdens up weary
hillocks, down steep places, getting nowhere and doing nothing.
Nevertheless I hurried up, stumbling at the hatchway against a man who
was looking down. He said nothing at all, and I was dazed by the light.
Barnes remarked hurriedly, "This 'll be your Mr. Macdonald"; and,
turning his back on me, forgot my existence. I felt more alone than
ever. The man in front of me held his head low, as if he wished to butt
me.
I began breathlessly to tell him I had a letter from
"my--my--Rooksby--brother-in-law--Ralph Rooks-by"--I was panting as if I
had run a long way. He said nothing at all. I fumbled for the letter in
an inner pocket of my waistcoat, and felt very shy. Macdonald maintained
a portentous silence; his enormous body was enveloped rather than
clothed in a great volume of ill-fitting white stuff; he held in his
hand a great umbrella with a vivid green lining. His face was very pale,
and had the leaden transparency of a boiled artichoke; it was fringed
by a red beard streaked with gray, as brown flood-water is with foam.
I noticed at last that the reason for his presenting his forehead to
me was an incredible squint--a squint that gave the idea that he was
performing some tortuous and defiant feat with the muscles of his neck.
He maintained an air of distrustful inscrutability. The hand which took
my letter was very large, very white, and looked as if it would feel
horribly flabby. With the other he put on his nose a pair of enormous
mother-of-pearl-framed spectacles--things exactly like those of a
cobra's--and began to read. He had said precisely nothing at all. It was
for him and what he represented that I had thrown over Carlos and
what _he_ represented. I felt that I deserved to be received with
acclamation. I was not. He read the letter very deliberately, swaying,
umbrella and all, with the slow movement of a dozing elephant. Once he
crossed his eyes at me, meditatively, above the mother-of-pearl rims. He
was so slow, so deliberate, that I own I began to wonder whether Carlos
and Castro were still on board. It seemed to be at least half an
hour before Macdonald cleared his throat, with a sound resembling the
coughing of a defective pump, and a mere trickle of a voice asked:
"Hwhat evidence have ye of identitee?"
I hadn't any at all, and began to finger my buttonholes as shamefaced
as a pauper before a Board. The certitude dawned upon me suddenly that
Carlos, even if he would consent to swear to me, would prejudice my
chances.
I cannot help thinking that I came very near to being cast adrift upon
the streets of Kingston. To my asseverations Macdonald returned
nothing but a series of minute "humphs." I don't know what overcame his
scruples; he had shown no signs of yielding, but suddenly turning on his
heel made a motion with one of his flabby white hands. I understood it
to mean that I was to follow him aft.
The decks were covered with a jabbering turmoil of negroes with muscular
arms and brawny shoulders. All their shining black faces seem to be
momentarily gashed open to show rows of white teeth, and were spotted
with inlaid eyeballs. The sounds coming from them were a bewildering
noise. They were hauling baggage about aimlessly. A large soft bundle
of bedding nearly took me off my legs. There wasn't room for emotion.
Macdonald laid about him with the handle of the umbrella a few inches
from the deck; but the passage that he made for himself closed behind
him.
Suddenly, in the pushing and hurrying, I came upon a little clear space
beside a pile of boxes. Stooping over them was the angular figure of
Nichols, the second mate. He looked up at me, screwing his yellow eyes
together.
"Going ashore," he asked, "'long of that Puffing Billy?"
"What business is it of yours'" I mumbled sulkily.
Sudden and intense threatening came into his yellow eyes:
"Don't you ever come to you know where," he said; "I don't want no spies
on what I do. There's a man there'll crack your little backbone if he
catches you. Don't yeh come now. Never."
PART SECOND -- THE GIRL WITH THE LIZARD
CHAPTER ONE
"Rio Medio?" Senor Ramon said to me nearly two years afterwards. "The
_caballero_ is pleased to give me credit for a very great knowledge.
What should I know of that town? There are doubtless good men there and
very wicked, as in other towns. Who knows? Your worship must ask the
boats' crews that the admiral has sent to burn the town. They will be
back very soon now."
He looked at me, inscrutably and attentively, through his gold
spectacles.
It was on the arcade before his store in Spanish Town. Long sunblinds
flapped slightly. Before the next door a large sign proclaimed
"Office of the _Buchatoro Journal_" It was, as I have said, after two
years--years which, as Carlos had predicted, I had found to be of hard
work, and long, hot sameness. I had come down from Horton Pen to Spanish
Town, expecting a letter from Veronica, and, the stage not being in,
had dropped in to chat with Ramon over a consignment of Yankee notions,
which he was prepared to sell at an extravagantly cheap price. It was
just at the time when Admiral Rowley was understood to be going to make
an energetic attempt upon the pirates who still infested the Gulf of
Mexico and nearly ruined the Jamaica trade of those days. Naturally
enough, we had talked of the mysterious town in which the pirates were
supposed to have their headquarters.
"I know no more than others," Ramon said, "save, senor, that I lose
much more because my dealings are much greater. But I do not even know
whether those who take my goods are pirates, as you English say, or
Mexican privateers, as the Havana authorities say. I do not very much
care. _Basta_, what I know is that every week some ship with a letter
of marque steals one of my consignments, and I lose many hundreds of
dollars."
Ramon was, indeed, one of the most frequented merchants in Jamaica; he
had stores in both Kingston and Spanish Town; his cargoes came from all
the seas. All the planters and all the official class in the island had
dealings with him.
"It was most natural that the hidalgo, your respected cousin, should
consult me if he wished to go to any town in Cuba. Whom else should
he go to? You yourself, senor, or the excellent Mr. Topnambo, if you
desired to know what ships in a month's time are likely to be sailing
for Havana, for New Orleans, or any Gulf port, you would ask me. What
more natural? It is my business, my trade, to know these things. In that
way I make my bread. But as for Rio Medio, I do not know the place." He
had a touch of irony in his composed voice. "But it is very certain,"
he went on, "that if your Government had not recognized the belligerent
rights of the rebellious colony of Mexico, there would be now no letters
of marque, no accursed Mexican privateers, and I and everyone else in
the island should not now be losing thousands of dollars every year."
That was the eternal grievance of every Spaniard in the island--and of
not a few of the English and Scotch planters. Spain was still in
the throes of losing the Mexican colonies when Great Britain had
acknowledged the existence of a state of war and a Mexican Government.
Mexican letters of marque had immediately filled the Gulf. No kind of
shipping was safe from them, and Spain was quite honestly powerless to
prevent their swarming on the coast of Cuba--the Ever Faithful Island,
itself.
"What can Spain do," said Ramon bitterly, "when even your Admiral
Rowley, with his great ships, cannot rid the sea of them?" He lowered
his voice. "I tell you, young senor, that England will lose this Island
of Jamaica over this business. You yourself are a Separationist, are
you not?... No? You live with Separationists. How could I tell? Many
people say you are."
His words gave me a distinctly disagreeable sensation. I hadn't any idea
of being a Separationist; I was loyal enough. But I understood suddenly,
and for the first time, how very much like one I might look.
"I myself am nothing," Ramon went on impassively; "I am content that the
island should remain English. It will never again be Spanish, nor do I
wish that it should. But our little, waspish friend there"--he lifted
one thin, brown hand to the sign of the _Buckatoro Journal_--"his paper
is doing much mischief. I think the admiral or the governor will commit
him to jail. He is going to run away and take his paper to Kingston; I
myself have bought his office furniture."
I looked at him and wondered, for all his impassivity, what he
knew--what, in the depths of his inscrutable Spanish brain, his dark
eyes concealed.
He bowed to me a little. "There will come a very great trouble," he
said.
Jamaica was in those days--and remained for many years after--in the
throes of a question. The question was, of course, that of the abolition
of slavery. The planters as a rule were immensely rich and overbearing.
They said, "If the Home Government tries to abolish our slavery system,
we will abolish the Home Government, and go to the United States for
protection." That was treason, of course; but there was so much of it
that the governor, the Duke of Manchester, had to close his ears and
pretend not to hear. The planters had another grievance--the pirates in
the Gulf of Mexico. There was one in particular, a certain El Demonio
or Diableto, who practically sealed the Florida passage; it was hardly
possible to get a cargo underwritten, and the planters' pockets felt
it a good deal. Practically, El Demonio had, during the last two
years, gutted a ship once a week, as if he wanted to help the Kingston
Separationist papers. The planters said, "If the Home Government wishes
to meddle with our internal affairs, our slaves, let it first clear our
seas.... Let it hang El Demonio. . . ."
The Government had sent out one of Nelson's old captains, Admiral
Rowley, a good fighting man; but when it came to clearing the Gulf of
Mexico, he was about as useless as a prize-fighter trying to clear a
stable of rats. I don't suppose El Demonio really did more than a tithe
of the mischief attributed to him, but in the peculiar circumstances he
found himself elevated to the rank of an important factor in colonial
politics. The Ministerialist papers used to kill him once a month; the
Separationists made him capture one of old Rowley's sloops five times a
year. They both lied, of course. But obviously Rowley and his frigates
weren't much use against a pirate whom they could not catch at sea, and
who lived at the bottom of a bottle-necked creek with tooth rocks all
over the entrance--that was the sort of place Rio Medio was reported to
be. . . .
I didn't much care about either party--I was looking out for
romance--but I inclined a little to the Separationists, because
Macdonald, with whom I lived for two years at Horton Pen, was himself a
Separationist, in a cool Scotch sort of way. He was an Argyleshire man,
who had come out to the island as a lad in 1786, and had worked his way
up to the position of agent to the Rooksby estate at Horton Pen. He had
a little estate of his own, too, at the mouth of the River Minho, where
he grew rice very profitably. He had been the first man to plant it on
the island.
Horton Pen nestled down at the foot of the tall white scars that end the
Vale of St. Thomas and are not much unlike Dover Cliffs, hanging over
a sea of squares of the green cane, alternating with masses of pimento
foliage. Macdonald's wife was an immensely stout, raven-haired,
sloe-eyed, talkative body, the most motherly woman I have ever known--I
suppose because she was childless.
What was anomalous in my position had passed away with the next outward
mail. Veronica wrote to me; Ralph to his attorney and the Macdonalds.
But by that time Mrs. Mac. had darned my socks ten times.
The surrounding gentry, the large resident landowners, of whom there
remained a sprinkling in the Vale, were at first inclined to make much
of me. There was Mrs. Topnambo, a withered, very dried-up personage, who
affected pink trimmings; she gave the _ton_ to the countryside as far as
ton could be given to a society that rioted with hospitality. She
made efforts to draw me out of the Macdonald environment, to make me
differentiate myself, because I was the grandson of an earl. But the
Topnambos were the great Loyalists of the place, and the Macdonalds the
principal Separationists, and I stuck to the Macdonalds. I was searching
for romance, you see, and could find none in Mrs. Topnambo's white
figure, with its dryish, gray skin, and pink patches round the neck,
that lay forever in dark or darkened rooms, and talked querulously of
"Your uncle, the earl," whom I had never seen. I didn't get on with the
men any better. They were either very dried up and querulous, too, or
else very liquorish or boisterous in an incomprehensible way. Their
evenings seemed to be a constant succession of shouts of laughter,
merging into undignified staggers of white trousers through blue
nights--round the corners of ragged huts. I never understood the hidden
sources of their humour, and I had not money enough to mix well with
their lavishness. I was too proud to be indebted to them, too.
They didn't even acknowledge me on the road at last; they called
me poor-spirited, a thin-blooded nobleman's cub--a Separationist
traitor--and left me to superintend niggers and save money. Mrs. Mac,
good Separationist though she was, as became the wife of her husband,
had the word "home" forever on her lips. She had once visited the
Rooksbys at Horton; she had treasured up a host of tiny things, parts
of my forgotten boyhood, and she talked of them and talked of them until
that past seemed a wholly desirable time, and the present a dull thing!
Journeying in search of romance--and that, after all, is our business in
this world--is much like trying to eaten the horizon. It lies a little
distance before us, and a little _distance behind--about as far as the
eye can carry._ One, discovers that one has passed through it just as
one passed what is to-day our horizon--One looks back and says. "Why
there it is." One looks forward and says the same. It lies either in
the old days when we used to, or in _the new days when we shall_. I look
back upon those days of mine, and little things remain, come back to me,
assume an atmosphere, take significance, go to the making of a _temps
jadis_. Probably, when I look back upon what is the dull, arid waste of
to-day, it will be much the same.
I could almost wish to take again one of the long, uninteresting night
rides from the Vale to Spanish Town, or to listen once more to one of
old Macdonald's interminable harangues on the folly of Mr. Canning's
policy, or the virtues of Scotch thrift. "Jack, lad," he used to bellow
in his curious squeak of a voice, "a gentleman you may be of guid Scots
blood. But ye're a puir body's son for a' that." He was set on my making
money and turning honest pennies. I think he really liked me.
It was with that idea that he introduced me to Ramon, "an esteemed
Spanish merchant of Kingston and Spanish Town." Ramon had seemed
mysterious when I had seen him in company with Carlos and Castro but
re-introduced in the homely atmosphere of the Macdonalds, he had become
merely a saturnine, tall, dusky-featured, gold-spectacled Spaniard, and
very good company. I learnt nearly all my Spanish from him. The only
mystery about him was the extravagantly cheap rate at which he sold
his things under the flagstaff in front of Admiral Rowley's house, the
King's House, as it was called. The admiral himself was said to have
extensive dealings with Ramon; he had at least the reputation of
desiring to turn an honest penny, like myself. At any rate, everyone,
from the proudest planters to the editor of the _Buckatoro Journal_
next door, was glad of a chat with Ramon, whose knowledge of an immense
variety of things was as deep as a draw-well--and as placid.
I used to buy island produce through him, ship it to New Orleans, have
it sold, and re-import parcels of "notions," making a double profit. He
was always ready to help me, and as ready to talk, saying that he had an
immense respect for my relations, the Riegos.
That was how, at the end of my second year in the island, I had come to
talking to him. The stage should have brought a letter from Veronica,
who was to have presented Rooksby with a son and heir, but it was
unaccountably late. I had been twice to the coach office, and was making
my way desultorily back to Ramon's. He was talking to the editor of the
_Buckatoro Journal_--the man from next door--and to another who had,
whilst I walked lazily across the blazing square, ridden furiously up
to the steps of the arcade. The rider was talking to both of them with
exaggerated gestures of his arms. He had ridden off, spurring, and the
editor, a little, gleaming-eyed hunchback, had remained in the sunshine,
talking excitedly to Ramon.
I knew him well, an amusing, queer, warped, Satanic member of society,
who was a sort of nephew to the Macdonalds, and hand in glove with
all the Scotch Separationists of the island. He had started an
extraordinary, scandalous paper that, to avoid sequestration, changed
its name and offices every few issues, and was said by Loyalists, like
the Topnambos, to have an extremely bad influence.
He subsisted a good deal on the charity of people like the Macdonalds,
and I used sometimes to catch sight of him at evenfall listening to Mrs.
Macdonald; he would be sitting beside her hammock on the veranda, his
head very much down on his breast, very much on one side, and his great
hump portending over his little white face, and ruffling up his ragged
black hair. Mrs. Macdonald clacked all the scandal of the Vale, and the
_Buckatoro Journal_ got the benefit of it all, with adornments.
For the last month or so the Journal had been more than usually
effective, and it was only because Rowley was preparing to confound his
traducers by the boat attack on Rio Medio, that a warrant had not come
against David. When I saw him talking to Ramon, I imagined that the
rider must have brought news of a warrant, and that David was preparing
for flight. He hopped nimbly from Ramon's steps into the obscurity of
his own door. Ramon turned his spectacles softly upon me.
"There you have it," he said. "The folly; the folly! To send only little
boats to attack such a nest of villains. It is inconceivable."
The horseman had brought news that the boats of Rowley's squadron had
been beaten off with great loss, in their attack on Rio Medio.
Ramon went on with an air of immense superiority, "And all the while we
merchants are losing thousands."
His dark eyes searched my face, and it came disagreeably into my head
that he was playing some part; that his talk was delusive, his anger
feigned; that, perhaps, he still suspected me of being a Separationist.
He went on talking about the failure of the boat attack. All Jamaica had
been talking of it, speculating about it, congratulating itself on it.
British valour was going to tell; four boats' crews would do the trick.
And now the boats had been beaten off, the crews captured, half the men
killed! Already there was panic on the island. I could see men coming
together in little knots, talking eagerly. I didn't like to listen
to Ramon, to a Spaniard talking in that way about the defeat of my
countrymen by his. I walked across the King's Square, and the stage
driving up just then, I went to the office, and got my correspondence.
Veronica's letter came like a faint echo, like the sound of very distant
surf, heard at night; it seemed impossible that any one could be as
interested as she in the things that were happening over there. She had
had a son; one of Ralph's aunts was its godmother. She and Ralph had
been to Bath last spring; the country wanted water very badly. Ralph had
used his influence, had explained matters to a very great personage,
had spent a little money on the injured runners. In the meanwhile I had
nearly forgotten the whole matter; it seemed to be extraordinary that
they should still be interested in it.
I was to come back; as soon as it was safe I was to come back; that was
the main tenor of the letter.
I read it in a little house of call, in a whitewashed room that
contained a cardboard cat labelled "The Best," for sole ornament. Four
swarthy fellows, Mexican patriots, were talking noisily about their War
of Independence, and the exploits of a General Trapelascis, who had
been defeating the Spanish troops over there. It was almost impossible
to connect them with a world that included Veronica's delicate
handwriting with the pencil lines erased at the base of each line of
ink. They seemed to be infinitely more real. Even Veronica's interest
in me seemed a little strange; her desire for my return irritated me. It
was as if she had asked me to return to a state of bondage, after having
found myself. Thinking of it made me suddenly aware that I had become a
man, with a man's aims, and a disillusionized view of life. It suddenly
appeared very wonderful that I could sit calmly there, surveying, for
instance, those four sinister fellows with daggers, as if they were
nothing at all. When I had been at home the matter would have caused
me extraordinary emotions, as many as if I had seen an elephant in a
travelling show. As for going back to my old life, it didn't seem to be
possible.
CHAPTER TWO
One night I was riding alone towards Horton Pen. A large moon hung
itself up above me like an enormous white plate. Finally the sloping
roof of the Ferry Inn, with one dishevelled palm tree drooping over it,
rose into the disk. The window lights were reflected like shaken torches
in the river. A mass of objects, picked out with white globes, loomed
in the high shadow of the inn, standing motionless. They resolved
themselves into a barouche, with four horses steaming a great deal, and
an army of negresses with bandboxes on their heads. A great lady was
on the road; her querulous voice was calling to someone within the open
door that let down a soft yellow light from the top of the precipitous
steps. A nondescript object, with apparently two horns and a wheel,
rested inert at the foot of the sign-post; two negroes were wiping their
foreheads beside it. That resolved itself into a man slumbering in a
wheelbarrow, his white face turned up to the moon. A sort of buzz of
voices came from above; then a man in European clothes was silhouetted
against the light in the doorway. He held a full glass very carefully
and started to descend. Suddenly he stopped emotionally. Then he turned
half-right and called back, "Sir Charles! Sir Charles! Here's the very
man! I protest, the very man!" There was an interrogative roar from
within. It was like being outside a lion's cage.
People appeared and disappeared in front of the lighted door; windows
stood open, with heads craning out all along the inn face. I was
hurrying off the back of my horse when the admiral came out on to the
steps. Someone lit a torch, and the admiral became a dark, solid figure,
with the flash of the gold lace on his coat. He stood very high in the
leg; had small white whiskers, and a large nose that threw a vast shadow
on to his forehead in the upward light; his high collar was open, and a
mass of white appeared under his chin; his head was uncovered. A third
male face, very white, bobbed up and down beside his shining left
shoulder. He kept on saying:
"What? what? what? Hey, what?... That man?" He appeared to be halfway
between supreme content and violent anger. At last he delivered himself.
"Let's duck him... hey?... Let's duck him!" He spoke with a sort of
benevolent chuckle, then raised his voice and called, "Tinsley! Tinsley!
Where the deuce is Tinsley?"
A high nasal sound came from the carriage window. "Sir Charles! Sir
Charles! Let there be no scene in my presence, I beg."
I suddenly saw, halfway up, laboriously ascending the steps, a black
figure, indistinguishable at first on account of deformities. It was
David Macdonald. Since his last, really terrible comments on the failure
of the boat-attack, he had been lying hidden somewhere. It came upon me
in a flash that he was making his way from one hiding place to another.
In making his escape from Spanish Town, either to Kingston or the
Vale, he had run against the admiral and his party returning from the
Topnambos' ball. It was hardly a coincidence: everyone on the road met
at the Ferry Inn. But that hardly made the thing more pleasant.
Sir Charles continued to clamour for Tinsley, his flag lieutenant, who,
as a matter of fact, was the man drunk in the wheelbarrow. When this was
explained by the shouts of the negroes, he grunted, "Umph!" turned on
the man at his side, and said, "Here, Oldham; you lend a hand to duck
the little toad." It was the sort of thing that the thirsty climate
of Jamaica rendered frequent enough. Oldham dropped his glass and
protested. Macdonald continued silently and enigmatically to climb
the steps; now he was in for it he showed plenty of pluck. No doubt
he recognized that, if the admiral made a fool of himself, he would be
afraid to issue warrants in soberness. I could not stand by and see
them bully the wretched little creature. At the same time I didn't, most
decidedly, want to identify myself with him.
I called out impulsively, "Sir Charles, surely you would not use
violence to a cripple."
Then, very suddenly, they all got to action, David Macdonald reaching
the top of the steps. Shrieks came from the interior of the carriage,
and from the waiting negresses. I saw three men were falling upon a
little thing like a damaged cat. I couldn't stand that, come what might
of it.
I ran hastily up the steps, hoping to be able to make them recover their
senses, a force of purely conventional emotion impelling me. It was
no business of mine; I didn't want to interfere, and I felt like a
man hastening to separate half a dozen fighting dogs too large to be
pleasant.
When I reached the top, there was a sort of undignified scuffle, and
in the end I found myself standing above a ghastly white gentleman who,
from a sitting posture, was gasping out, "I'll commit you!... I swear
I'll commit you!..." I helped him to his feet rather apologetically,
while the admiral behind me was asking insistently who the deuce I was.
The man I had picked up retreated a little, and then turned back to look
at me. The light was shining on my face, and he began to call out, "I
know him. I know him perfectly well. He's John Kemp. I'll commit him at
once. The papers are in the barouche." After that he seemed to take it
into his head that I was going to assault him again. He bolted out
of sight, and I was left facing the admiral. He stared at me
contemptuously. I was streaming with perspiration and upbraiding him for
assaulting a cripple.
The admiral said, "Oh, that's what you think? I will settle with
you presently. This is rank mutiny." I looked at Oldham, who was the
admiral's secretary. He was extremely dishevelled about his neck, much
as if a monkey had been clawing him thereabouts. Half of his roll collar
flapped on his heaving chest; his stock hung down behind like a cue.
I had seen him kneeling on the ground with his head pinned down by the
hunchback. I said loftily:
"What did you set him on a little beggar like that for? You were three
to one. What did you expect?"
The admiral swore. Oldham began to mop with a lace handkerchief at a
damaged upper lip from which a stream of blood was running; he even
seemed to be weeping a little. Finally, he vanished in at the door, very
much bent together. The undaunted David hopped in after him coolly.
The admiral said, "I know your kind. You're a treasonous dog, sir. This
is mutiny. You shall be made an example of."
All the same he must have been ashamed of himself, for presently he and
the two others went down the steps without even looking at me, and their
carriage rolled away.
Inside the inn I found a couple of merchant captains, one asleep with
his head on the table and little rings shining in his great red ears;
the other very spick and span--of what they called the new school then.
His name was Williams--Captain Williams of the _Lion_, which he part
owned; a man of some note for the dinners he gave on board his ship. His
eyes sparkled blue and very round in a round rosy face, and he clawed
effusively at my arm.
"Well done!" he bubbled over. "You gave it them; strike me, you did! It
did me good to see and hear. I wasn't going to poke my nose in, not I.
But I admire you, my boy."
He was a quite guileless man with a strong dislike for the admiral's
blundering--a dislike that all the seamen shared--and for people of the
Topnambo kidney who affected to be above his dinners. He assured me that
I had burst upon those gentry roaring... "like the Bull of Bashan. You
should have seen!" and he drank my health in a glass of punch.
David Macdonald joined us, looming through wreaths of tobacco smoke. He
was always very nice in his dress, and had washed himself into a state
of enviable coolness.
"They won't touch me now," he said. "I wanted that assault and
battery...." He suddenly turned vivid, sarcastic black eyes upon me.
"But you," he said--"my dear Kemp! You're in a devil of a scrape!
They'll have a warrant out against you under the Black Act. I know the
gentry."
"Oh, he won't mind," Williams struck in, "I know him; he's a trump.
Afraid of nothing."
David Macdonald made a movement of his head that did duty for an ominous
shake:
"It's a devil of a mess," he said. "But I'll touch them up. Why did you
hit Topnambo? He's the spitefullest beast in the island. They'll make it
out high treason. They are capable of sending you home on this charge."
"Oh, never say die." Williams turned to me, "Come and dine with me on
board at Kingston to-morrow night. If there's any fuss I'll see what I
can do. Or you can take a trip with me to Havana till it blows over. My
old woman's on board." His face fell. "But there, you'll get round her.
I'll see you through."
They drank some sangaree and became noisy. I wasn't very happy;
there was much truth in what David Macdonald had said. Topnambo would
certainly do his best to have me in jail--to make an example of me as
a Separationist to please the admiral and the Duke of Manchester. Under
the spell of his liquor Williams became more and more pressing with his
offers of help.
"It's the devil that my missus should be on board, just this trip. But
hang it! come and dine with me. I'll get some of the Kingston men--the
regular hot men--to stand up for you. They will when they hear the
tale."
There was a certain amount of sense in what he said. If warrants were
out against me, he or some of the Kingston merchants whom he knew, and
who had no cause to love the admiral, might help me a good deal.
Accordingly, I did go down to Kingston. It happened to be the day when
the seven pirates were hanged at Port Royal Point. I had never seen a
hanging, and a man who hadn't was rare in those days. I wanted to keep
out of the way, but it was impossible to get a boatman to row me off to
the _Lion_. They were all dying to see the show, and, half curious, half
reluctant, I let myself drift with the crowd.
The gallows themselves stood high enough to be seen--a long very stout
beam supported by posts at each end. There was a blazing sun, and the
crowd pushed and shouted and craned its thousands of heads every time
one heard the cry of "Here they come," for an hour or so. There was a
very limpid sky, a very limpid sea, a scattering of shipping gliding up
and down, and the very silent hills a long way away. There was a large
flavour of Spaniards among the crowd. I got into the middle of a knot of
them, jammed against the wheels of one of the carriages, standing, hands
down, on tiptoe, staring at the long scaffold. There were a great many
false alarms, sudden outcries, hushing again rather slowly. In between
I could hear someone behind me talk Spanish to the occupants of the
carriage. I thought the voice was Ramon's, but I could not turn, and the
people in the carriage answered in French, I thought. A man was shouting
"Cool Drinks" on the other side of them.
Finally, there was a roar, an irresistible swaying, a rattle of musket
ramrods, a rhythm of marching feet, and the grating of heavy iron-bound
wheels. Seven men appeared in sight above the heads, clinging to each
other for support, and being drawn slowly along. The little worsted
balls on the infantry shakos bobbed all round their feet. They were
a sorry-looking group, those pirates; very wild-eyed, very ragged,
dust-stained, weather-beaten, begrimed till they had the colour of
unpolished mahogany. Clinging still to each other as they stood beneath
the dangling ropes of the long beam, they had the appearance of a
group of statuary to forlorn misery. Festoons of chains completed the
"composition."
One was a very old man with long yellow-white hair, one a negro
whose skin had no lustre at all. The rest were very dark-skinned,
peak-bearded, and had long hair falling round their necks. A soldier
with a hammer and a small anvil climbed into the cart, and bent down out
of sight. There was a ring of iron on iron, and the man next the very
old man raised his arms and began to speak very slowly, very distinctly,
and very mournfully. It was quite easy to understand him; he declared
his perfect innocence. No one listened to him; his name was Pedro Nones.
He ceased speaking, and someone on a horse, the High Sheriff, I think,
galloped impatiently past the cart and shouted. Two men got into the
cart, one pulled the rope, the other caught the pirate by the elbows.
He jerked himself loose, and began to cry out; he seemed to be lost in
amazement, and shrieked:
"_Adonde esta el padre?... Adonde esta el padre?_" No one answered; there
wasn't a priest of any denomination; I don't know whether the omission
was purposed. The man's face grew convulsed with agony, his eyeballs
stared out very white and vivid, as he struggled with the two men. He
began to curse us epileptically for compassing his damnation. A hoarse
patter of Spanish imprecations came from the crowd immediately round me.
The man with the voice like Ramon's groaned in a lamentable way; someone
else said, "What infamy . . . what infamy!"
An aged voice said tremulously in the carriage, "This shall be a matter
of official remonstrance." Another said, "Ah, these English heretics!"
There was a forward rush of the crowd, which carried me away. Someone
in front began to shout orders, and the crowd swayed back again. The
infantry muskets rattled. The commotion lasted some time. When it
ceased, I saw that the man about to die had been kissing the very old
man; tears were streaming down the gray, parchment-coloured cheeks.
Pedro Nones had the rope round his neck; it curved upwards loosely
towards the beam, growing taut as the cart jolted away. He shouted:
"_Adios, viejo, para siempre adi------_"
My whole body seemed to go dead all over. I happened to look downwards
at my hands; they were extraordinarily white, with the veins standing
out all over them. They felt as if they had been sodden in water, and
it was quite a long time before they recovered their natural colour.
The rest of the men were hung after that, the cart jolting a little way
backwards and forwards and growing less crowded after every journey.
One man, who was very large framed and stout, had to go through it twice
because the rope broke. He made a good deal of fuss. My head ached, and
after the involuntary straining and craning to miss no details was over,
I felt sick and dazed. The people talked a great deal as they streamed
back, loosening over the broader stretch of pebbles; they seemed to wish
to remind each other of details. I have an idea that one or two, in
the sheer largeness of heart that seizes one after occasions of popular
emotions, asked me in exulting voices if I had seen the nigger's tongue
sticking out.
Others thought that there wasn't very much to be exultant over. We
had not really captured the pirates; they had been handed over to
the admiral by the Havana authorities--as an international courtesy I
suppose, or else because they were pirates of no account and short in
funds, or because the admiral had been making a fuss in front of the
Morro. It was even asserted by the anti-admiral faction that the seven
weren't pirates at all, but merely Cuban _mauvais sujets_, hawkers of
derogatory _coplas_, and known freethinkers. In any case, excited people
cheered the High Sheriff and the returning infantry, because it was
pleasant to hang any kind of Spaniard. I got nearly knocked down by the
kettle-drummers, who came through the scattering crowd at a swinging
quick-step. As I cannoned off the drums, a hand caught at my arm, and
someone else began to speak to me. It was old Ramon, who was telling
me that he had a special kind of Manchester goods at his store. He
explained that they had arrived very lately, and that he had come from
Spanish Town solely on their account. One made the eighth of a penny a
yard more on them than on any other kind. If I would deign to have some
of it offered to my inspection, he had his little curricle just off the
road. He was drawing me gently towards it all the time, and I had not
any idea of resisting. He had been behind in the crowd, he said, beside
the carriage of the commissioner and the judge of the Marine Court sent
by the Havana authorities to deliver the pirates.
It was after that, that in Ramon's dusky store, I had my first sight
of Seraphina and of her father, and then came my meeting with Carlos. I
could hardly believe my eyes when I saw him come out with extended hand.
It was an extraordinary sensation, that of talking to Carlos again. He
seemed to have worn badly. His face had lost its moist bloom, its hardly
distinguishable subcutaneous flush. It had grown very, very pale. Dark
blue circles took away from the blackness and sparkle of his eyes. And
he coughed, and coughed.
He put his arm affectionately round my shoulders and said, "How splendid
to see you again, my Juan." His eyes had affection in them, there was no
doubt about that, but I felt vaguely suspicious of him. I remembered how
we had parted on board the _Thames_. "We can talk here," he added; "it
is very pleasant. You shall see my uncle, that great man, the star of
Cuban law, and my cousin Seraphina, your kinsfolk. They love you; I have
spoken well of you." He smiled gayly, and went on, "This is not a place
befitting his greatness, nor my cousin's, nor, indeed, my own." He
smiled again. "But I shall be very soon dead, and to me it matters
little." He frowned a little, and then laughed. "But you should have
seen the faces of your officers when my uncle refused to go to their
governor's palace; there was to have been a _fiesta_, a 'reception'; is
it not the word? It will cause a great scandal."
He smiled with a good deal of fine malice, and looked as if he expected
me to be pleased. I said that I did not quite understand what had
offended his uncle.
"Oh, it was because there was no priest," Carlos answered, "when those
poor devils were hung. They were _canaille_. Yes; but one gives that
much even to such. And my uncle was there in his official capacity as a
a plenipotentiary. He was very much distressed: we were all. You heard,
my uncle himself had advised their being surrendered to your English.
And when there was no priest he repented very bitterly. Why, after all,
it was an infamy."
He paused again, and leant back against the counter. When his eyes
were upon the ground and his face not animated by talking, there became
lamentably insistent his pallor, the deep shadows under his eyes, and
infinite sadness in the droop of his features, as if he were preoccupied
by an all-pervading and hopeless grief. When he looked at me, he smiled,
however.
"Well, at worst it is over, and my uncle is here in this dirty place
instead of at your palace. We sail back to Cuba this very evening." He
looked round him at Ramon's calicos and sugar tubs in the dim light, as
if he accepted almost incredulously the fact that they could be in
such a place, and the manner of his voice indicated that he thought
our governor's palace would have been hardly less barbarous. "But I
am sorry," he said suddenly, "because I wanted you--you and all your
countrymen--to make a good impression on him. You must do it yourself
alone. And you will. You are not like these others. You are our kinsman,
and I have praised you very much. You saved my life."
I began to say that I had done nothing at all, but he waved his hand
with a little smile.
"You are very brave," he said, as if to silence me. "I am not
ungrateful."
He began again to ask for news from home--from my home. I told him that
Veronica had a baby, and he sighed.
"She married the excellent Rooksby?" he asked. "Ah, what a waste." He
relapsed into silence again. "There was no woman in your land like her.
She might have------- And to marry that--that excellent personage, my
good cousin. It is a tragedy."
"It was a very good match," I answered.
He sighed again. "My uncle is asleep in there, now," he said, after a
pause, pointing at the inner door. "We must not wake him; he is a very
old man. You do not mind talking to me? You will wait to see them? Dona
Seraphina is here, too."
"You have not married your cousin?" I asked.
I wanted very much to see the young girl who had looked at me for a
moment, and I certainly should have been distressed if Carlos had said
she was married.
He answered, "What would you have?" and shrugged his shoulders gently. A
smile came into his face. "She is very willful. I did not please her, I
do not know why. Perhaps she has seen too many men like me."
He told me that, when he reached Cuba, after parting with me on the
_Thames_, his uncle, "in spite of certain influences," had received
him quite naturally as his heir, and the future head of the family. But
Seraphina, whom by the laws of convenience he ought to have married, had
quite calmly refused him.
"I did not impress her; she is romantic. She wanted a very bold man, a
Cid, something that it is not easy to have."
He paused again, and looked at me with some sort of challenge in his
eyes.
"She could have met no one better than you," I said.
He waved his hand a little. "Oh, for that-------" he said deprecatingly.
"Besides, I am dying. I have never been well since I went into your cold
sea, over there, after we left your sister. You remember how I coughed
on board that miserable ship."
I did remember it very well.
He went to the inner door, looked in, and then came back to me.
"Seraphina needs a guide--a controller--someone very strong and gentle,
and kind and brave. My uncle will never ask her to marry against her
wish; he is too old and has too little will. And for any man who would
marry her--except one--there would be great dangers, for her and for
him. It would need a cool man, and a brave man, and a good one, too, to
hazard, perhaps even life, for her sake. She will be very rich. All
our lands, all our towns, all our gold." There was a suggestion of
fabulousness in his dreamy voice. "They shall never be mine," he added.
"_Vaya_."
He looked at me with his piercing eyes set to an expression that
might have been gentle mockery. At any rate, it also contained intense
scrutiny, and, perhaps, a little of appeal. I sighed myself.
"There is a man called O'Brien in there," he said. "He does us the
honour to pretend to my cousin's hand."
I felt singularly angry. "Well, he's not a Spaniard," I said.
Carlos answered mockingly, "Oh, for Spaniard, no. He is a descendant of
the Irish kings."
"He's an adventurer," I said. "You ought to be on your guard. You don't
know these bog-trotting fortune-hunters. They're the laughter of Europe,
kings and all."
Carlos smiled again. "He's a very dangerous man for all that," he said.
"I should not advise any one to come to Rio Medio, my uncle's town,
without making a friend of the Senor O'Brien."
He went once more to the inner door, and, after a moment's whispering
with someone within, returned to me.
"My uncle still sleeps," he said. "I must keep you a little longer. Ah,
yes, the Senor O'Brien. He shall marry my cousin, I think, when I am
dead."
"You don't know these fellows," I said.
"Oh, I know them very well," Carlos smiled, "there are many of them at
Havana. They came there after what they call the '98, when there was
great rebellion in Ireland, and many good Catholics were killed and
ruined."
"Then he's a rebel, and ought to be hung," I said.
Carlos laughed as of old. "It may be, but, my good Juan, we Christians
do not see eye to eye with you. This man rebelled against your
government, but, also, he suffered for the true faith. He is a good
Catholic; he has suffered for it; and in the Ever Faithful Island, that
is a passport. He has climbed very high; he is a judge of the Marine
Court at Havana. That is why he is here to-day, attending my uncle in
this affair of delivering up the pirates. My uncle loves him very much.
O'Brien was at first my uncle's clerk, and my uncle made him a _juez_,
and he is also the intendant of my uncle's estates, and he has a great
influence in my uncle's town of Rio Medio. I tell you, if you come to
visit us, it will be as well to be on good terms with the Senor Juez
O'Brien. My uncle is a very old man, and if I die before him, this
O'Brien, I think, will end by marrying my cousin, because my poor uncle
is very much in his hands. There are other pretenders, but they have
little chance, because it is so very dangerous to come to my uncle's
town of Rio Medio, on account of this man's intrigues and of his power
with the populace."
I looked at Carlos intently. The name of the town had seemed to be
familiar to me. Now I suddenly remembered that it was where Nicolas
el Demonio, the pirate who was so famous as to be almost mythical, had
beaten off Admiral Rowley's boats.
"Come, you had better see this Irish hidalgo who wants to do us so much
honour,"--he gave an inscrutable glance at me,--"but do not talk loudly
till my uncle wakes."
He threw the door open. I followed him into the room, where the vision
of the ancient Don and the charming apparition of the young girl had
retreated only a few moments before.
CHAPTER THREE
The room was very lofty and coldly dim; there were great bars in front
of the begrimed windows. It was very bare, containing only a long black
table, some packing cases, and half a dozen rocking chairs. Of these,
five were very new and one very old, black and heavy, with a green
leather seat and a coat of arms worked on its back cushions. There
were little heaps of mahogany sawdust here and there on the dirty tiled
floor, and a pile of sacking in one corner. Beneath a window the flap
of an open trap-door half hid a large green damp-stain; a deep recess
in the wall yawned like a cavern, and had two or three tubs in the
right corner; a man with a blond head, slightly bald as if he had been
tonsured, was rocking gently in one of the new chairs.
Opposite him, with his aged face towards us, sat the old Don asleep in
the high chair. His delicate white hands lay along the arms, one of them
holding a gold vinaigrette; his black, silver-headed cane was between
his silk-stockinged legs. The diamond buckles of his shoes shot out
little vivid rays, even in that gloomy place. The young girl was sitting
with her hands to her temples and her elbows on the long table, minutely
examining the motionlessness of a baby lizard, a tiny thing with golden
eyes, whom fear seemed to have turned into stone.
We entered quietly, and after a moment she looked up candidly into my
eyes, and placed her finger on her lips, motioning her head towards her
father. She placed her hand in mine, and whispered very clearly:
"Be welcome, my English cousin," and then dropped her eyes again to the
lizard.
She knew all about me from Carlos. The man of whom I had seen only the
top of his head, turned his chair suddenly and glinted at me with little
blue eyes. He was rather small and round, with very firm flesh, and very
white, plump hands. He was dressed in the black clothes of a Spanish
judge. On his round face there was always a smile like that which
hangs around the jaws of a pike--only more humorous. He bowed a little
exaggeratedly to me and said:
"Ah, ye are that famous Mr. Kemp."
I said that I imagined him the more famous Senor Juez O'Brien.
"It's little use saying ye arren't famous," he said. His voice had the
faint, infinitely sweet twang of certain Irishry; a thing as delicate
and intangible as the scent of lime flowers. "Our noble friend"--he
indicated Carlos with a little flutter of one white hand--"has told me
what make of a dare-devil gallant ye are; breaking the skulls of half
the Bow Street runners for the sake of a friend in distress. Well,
I honour ye for it; I've done as much myself." He added, "In the old
days," and sighed.
"You mean in the '98," I said, a little insolently.
O'Brien's eyes twinkled. He had, as a matter of fact, nearly lost his
neck in the Irish fiasco, either in Clonmel or Sligo, bolting violently
from the English dragoons, in the mist, to a French man-of-war's boats
in the bay. To him, even though he was now a judge in Cuba, it was an
episode of heroism of youth--of romance, in fact. So that, probably, he
did not resent my mention of it. I certainly wanted to resent something
that was slighting in his voice, and patronizing in his manner.
The old Don slumbered placidly, his face turned up to the distant
begrimed ceiling.
"Now, I'll make you a fair offer," O'Brien said suddenly, after an
intent study of the insolent glance that I gave him. I disliked him
because I knew nothing about the sort of man he was. He was, as a matter
of fact, more alien to me than Carlos. And he gave me the impression
that, if perhaps he were not absolutely the better man, he could still
make a fool of me, or at least make me look like a fool.
"I'm told you are a Separationist," he said. "Well, it's like me. I am
an Irishman; there has been a price on my head in another island. And
there are warrants out against you here for assaulting the admiral. We
can work together, and there's nothing low in what I have in mind for
you."
He had heard frequently from Carlos that I was a desperate and
aristocratically lawless young man, who had lived in a district entirely
given up to desperate and murderous smugglers. But this was the first I
had heard definitely of warrants against me in Jamaica. That, no
doubt, he had heard from Ramon, who knew everything. In all this little
sardonic Irishman said to me, it seemed the only thing worth attention.
It stuck in my mind while, in persuasive tones, and with airy fluency,
he discoursed of the profits that could be made, nowadays, in arming
privateers under the Mexican flag. He told me I needn't be surprised
at their being fitted out in a Spanish colony. "There's more than one
aspect to disloyalty like this," said he dispassionately, but with a
quick wink contrasting with his tone.
Spain resented our recognition of their rebellious colonies. And with
the same cool persuasiveness, relieved by humorous smiles, he explained
that the loyal Spaniards of the Ever Faithful Island thought there was
no sin in doing harm to the English, even under the Mexican flag, whose
legal existence they did not recognize.
"Mind ye, it's an organized thing, I have something to say in it. It
hurts Mr. Canning's Government at home, the curse of Cromwell on him and
them. They will be dropping some of their own colonies directly. And as
you are a Separationist, small blame to you, and I am an Irishman, we
shan't cry our eyes out over it. Come, Mr. Kemp, 'tis all for the good
of the Cause.... And there's nothing _low_. You are a gentleman, and I
wouldn't propose anything that was. The very best people in Havana are
interested in the matter. Our schooners lie in Rio Medio, but I can't be
there all the time myself."
Surprise deprived me of speech. I glanced at Carlos. He was watching us
inscrutably. The young girl touched the lizard gently, but it was too
frightened to move. O'Brien, with shrewd glances, rocked his chair....
What did I want? he inquired. To see life? What he proposed was the
life for a fine young fellow like me. Moreover, I was half Scotch. Had I
forgotten the wrongs of my own country? Had I forgotten the '45?
"You'll have heard tell of a Scotch Chief Justice whose son spent
in Amsterdam the money his father earned on the justice seat in
Edinb'ro'--money paid for rum and run silks . . ."
Of course I had heard of it; everybody had; but it had been some years
before.
"We're backwards hereabouts," O'Brien jeered. "But over there they
winked and chuckled at the judge, and they do the same in Havana at us."
Suddenly from behind us the voice of the young girl said, "Of what do
you discourse, my English cousin?"
O'Brien interposed deferentially. "Senorita, I ask him to come to Rio,"
he said.
She turned her large dark eyes scrutinizingly upon me, then dropped them
again. She was arranging some melon seeds in a rayed circle round the
lizard that looked motionlessly at her.
"Do not speak very loudly, lest you awaken my father," she warned us.
The old Don's face was still turned to the ceiling. Carlos, standing
behind his chair, opened his mouth a little in a half smile. I was
really angry with O'Brien by that time, with his air of omniscience,
superiority, and self-content, as if he were talking to a child or
someone very credulous and weak-minded.
"What right have you to speak for me, Senor Juez?" I said in the best
Spanish I could.
The young girl looked at me once more, and then again looked down.
"Oh, I can speak for you," he answered in English, "because I know. Your
position's this." He sat down in his rocking chair, crossed his legs,
and looked at me as if he expected me to show signs of astonishment at
his knowing so much. "You're in a hole. You must leave this island of
Jamaica--surely it's as distressful as my own dear land--and you can't
go home, because the runners would be after you. You're 'wanted' here as
well as there, and you've nowhere to go."
I looked at him, quite startled by this view of my case. He extended one
plump hand towards me, and still further lowered his voice.
"Now, I offer you a good berth, a snug berth. And 'tis a pretty spot."
He got a sort of languorous honey into his voice, and drawled out,
"The--the Senorita's." He took an air of businesslike candour. "You can
help us, and we you; we could do without you better than you without us.
Our undertaking--there's big names in it, just as in the Free Trading
you know so well, don't be saying you don't--is worked from Havana. What
we need is a man we can trust. We had one--Nichols. You remember the
mate of the ship you came over in. He was Nicola el Demonio; he won't be
any longer--I can't tell you why, it's too long a story."
I did remember very vividly that cadaverous Nova Scotian mate of the
_Thames_, who had warned me with truculent menaces against showing
my face in Rio Medio. I remembered his sallow, shiny cheeks, and the
exaggerated gestures of his claw-like hands.
O'Brien smiled. "Nichols is alive right enough, but no more good than if
he were dead. And that's the truth. He pretends his nerve's gone; he was
a devil among tailors for a time, but he's taken to crying now. It was
when your blundering old admiral's boats had to be beaten off that
his zeal cooled. He thinks the British Government will rise in its
strength." There was a bitter contempt in his voice, but he regained
his calm business tone. "It will do nothing of the sort. I've given them
those seven poor devils that had to die to-day without absolution. So
Nichols is done for, as far as we are concerned. I've got him put away
to keep him from blabbing. You can have his place--and better than his
place. He was only a sailor, which you are not. However, you know enough
of ships, and what we want is a man with courage, of course, but also a
man we can trust. Any of the Creoles would bolt into the bush the moment
they'd five dollars in hand. We'll pay you well; a large share of all
you take."
I laughed outright. "You're quite mistaken in your man," I said. "You
are, really."
He shook his head gently, and brushed an invisible speck from his plump
black knees.
"You _must_ go somewhere," he said. "Why not go with us?"
I looked at him, puzzled by his tenacity and assurance.
"Ramon here has told us you battered the admiral last night; and there's
a warrant out already against you for attempted murder. You're hand and
glove with the best of the Separationists in this island, I know, but
they won't save you from being committed--for rebellion, perhaps. You
know it as well as I do. You were down here to take a passage to-day,
weren't you, now?"
I remembered that the Island Loyalists said that the pirates and
Separationists worked together to bother the admiral and raise
discontent. Living in the centre of Separationist discontent with the
Macdonalds, I knew it was not true. But nothing was too bad to say
against the planters who clamoured for union with the United States.
O'Brien leaned forward. His voice had a note of disdain, and then took
one of deeper earnestness; it sank into his chest. He extended his hand;
his eyebrows twitched. He looked--he was--a conspirator.
"I tell you I do it for the sake of Ireland," he said passionately.
"Every ship we take, every clamour they raise here, is a stroke and is
disgrace for them over there that have murdered us and ruined my own
dear land." His face worked convulsively; I was in the presence of one
of the primeval passions. But he grew calm immediately after. "_You_
want Separation for reasons of your own. I don't ask what they are. No
doubt you and your crony Macdonald and the rest of them will feather
your own nests; I don't ask. But help me to be a thorn in their
sides--just a little--just a little longer. What do I put in your way?
Just what you want. Have your Jamaica joined to the United States.
You'll be able to come back with your pockets full, and I'll be
joyful--for the sake of my own dear land."
I said suddenly and recklessly--if I had to face one race-passion, he
had to look at another; we were cat and dog--Celt and Saxon, as it was
in the beginning: "I am not a traitor to my country." Then I realized
with sudden concern that I had probably awakened the old Don. He stirred
uneasily in his chair, and lifted one hand.
"The moment I go out from here I'll denounce you," I said very low; "I
swear I will. You're here; you can't get away; you'll swing."
O'Brien started. His eyes blazed at me. Then he frowned. "I've been
misled," he muttered, with a dark glance at Carlos. And recovering his
jocular serenity, "Ye mean it?" he asked; "it's not British heroics?"
The old Don stirred again and sighed. The young girl glided swiftly to
his side. "Senor O'Brien," she said, "you have so irritated my English
cousin that he has awakened my father."
O'Brien grinned gently. "'Tis ever the way," he said sardonically. "The
English fools do the harm and the Irish fool gets the kicking." He rose
to his feet, quite collected, a spick-and-span little man. "I suppose
I've said too much. Well, well! You are going to denounce the senior
judge of the Marine Court of Havana as a pirate. I wonder who will
believe you!" He went behind the old Don's chair with the gliding motion
of a Spanish lawyer, and slipped down the open trap-hatch near the
window.
It was the disappearance of a shadow. I heard some guttural mutterings
come up through the hatch, a rustling, then silence. If he was afraid
of me at all he carried it off very well. I apologized to the young girl
for having awakened her father. Her colour was very high, and her eyes
sparkled. If she had not been so very beautiful I should have gone away
at once. She said angrily:
"He is odious to me, the Senor Juez. Too long my father has suffered his
insolence." She was very small, but she had an extraordinary dignity of
command. "I could see, Senor, that he was annoying you. Why should you
consider such a creature?" Her head drooped. "But my father is very
old."
I turned upon Carlos, who stood all black in the light of the window.
"Why did you make me meet him? He may be a judge of your Marine Court,
but he's nothing but a scoundrelly bog-trotter."
Carlos said a little haughtily, "You must not denounce him. You should
not leave this place if I feared you would try thus to bring dishonour
on this gray head, and involve this young girl in a public scandal." His
manner became soft. "For the honour of the house you shall say nothing.
And you shall come with us. I need you."
I was full of mistrust now. If he did countenance this unlawful
enterprise, whose headquarters were in Rio Medio, he was not the man
for me. Though it was big enough to be made, by the papers at home,
of political importance, it was, after all, neither more nor less
than piracy. The idea of my turning a sort of Irish traitor was so
extravagantly outrageous that now I could smile at the imbecility of
that fellow O'Brien. As to turning into a sea-thief for lucre--my blood
boiled.
No. There was something else there. Something deep; something dangerous;
some intrigue, that I could not conceive even the first notion of. But
that Carlos wanted anxiously to make use of me for some purpose was
clear. I was mystified to the point of forgetting how heavily I was
compromised even in Jamaica, though it was worth remembering, because
at that time an indictment for rebellion--under the Black Act--was no
joking matter. I might be sent home under arrest; and even then, there
was my affair with the runners.
"It is coming to pay a visit," he was saying persuasively, "while your
affair here blows over, my Juan--and--and--making my last hours easy,
perhaps."
I looked at him; he was worn to a shadow--a shadow with dark wistful
eyes. "I don't understand you," I faltered.
The old man stirred, opened his lids, and put a gold vinaigrette to his
nostrils.
"Of course I shall not denounce O'Brien," I said. "I, too, respect the
honour of your house."
"You are even better than I thought you. And if I entreat you, for the
love of your mother--of your sister? Juan, it is not for myself, it
is------"
The young girl was pouring some drops from a green phial into a silver
goblet; she passed close to us, and handed it to her father, who had
leant a little forward in his chair. Every movement of hers affected me
with an intimate joy; it was as if I had been waiting to see just that
carriage of the neck, just that proud glance from the eyes, just that
droop of eyelashes upon the cheeks, for years and years.
"No, I shall hold my tongue, and that's enough," I said.
At that moment the old Don sat up and cleared his throat. Carlos
sprang towards him with an infinite grace of tender obsequiousness. He
mentioned my name and the relationship, then rehearsed the innumerable
titles of his uncle, ending "and patron of the Bishopric of Pinar del
Rio."
I stood stiffly in front of the old man. He bowed his head at intervals,
holding the silver cup carefully whilst his chair rocked a little. When
Carlos' mellow voice had finished the rehearsing of the sonorous styles,
I mumbled something about "transcendent honour."
He stopped me with a little, deferentially peremptory gesture of one
hand, and began to speak, smiling with a contraction of the lips and a
trembling of the head. His voice was very low, and quavered slightly,
but every syllable was enunciated with the same beauty of clearness that
there was in his features, in his hands, in his ancient gestures.
"The honour is to me," he said, "and the pleasure. I behold my kinsman,
who, with great heroism, I am told, rescued my dearly loved nephew from
great dangers; it is an honour to me to be able to give him thanks. My
beloved and lamented sister contracted a union with an English hidalgo,
through whose house your own very honourable family is allied to my own;
it is a pleasure to me to meet after many years with one who has seen
the places where her later life was passed."
He paused, and breathed with some difficulty, as if the speech had
exhausted him. Afterwards he began to ask me questions about Rooksby's
aunt--the lamented sister of his speech. He had loved her greatly, he
said. I knew next to nothing about her, and his fine smile and courtly,
aged, deferential manners made me very nervous. I felt as if I had been
taken to pay a ceremonial visit to a supreme pontiff in his dotage. He
spoke about Horton Priory with some animation for a little while, and
then faltered, and forgot what he was speaking of. Suddenly he said:
"But where is O'Brien? Did he write to the Governor here? I should like
you to know the Senor O'Brien. He is a spiritual man."
I forbore to say that I had already seen O'Brien, and the old man sank
into complete silence. It was beginning to grow dark, and the noise of
suppressed voices came from the open trap-door. Nobody said anything.
I felt a sort of uneasiness; I could by no means understand the
connection between the old Don and what had gone before, and I did not,
in a purely conventional sense, know how long I ought to stop. The sky
through the barred windows had grown pallid.
The old Don said suddenly, "You must visit my poor town of Rio Medio,"
but he gave no specific invitation and said nothing more.
Afterwards he asked, rather querulously, "But where is O'Brien? He must
write those letters for me."
The young girl said, "He has preceded us to the ship; he will write
there."
She had gone back to her seat. Don Balthasar shrugged his shoulders to
his ears, and moved his hands from his knees.
"Without doubt, he knows best," he said, "but he should ask me."
It grew darker still; the old Don seemed to have fallen asleep again.
Save for the gleam of the silver buckle of his hat, he had disappeared
into the gloom of the place. I remembered my engagement to dine with
Williams on board the _Lion_, and I rose to my feet. There did not seem
to be any chance of my talking to the young girl. She was once more
leaning nonchalantly over the lizard, and her hair drooped right across
her face like clusters of grapes. There was a gleam on a little piece
of white forehead, and all around and about her there were shadows
deepening. Carlos came concernedly towards me as I looked at the door.
"But you must not go yet," he said a little suavely; "I have many things
to say. Tell me----"
His manner heightened my uneasiness to a fear. The expression of his
eyes changed, and they became fixed over my shoulder, while on his lips
the words "You must come, you must come," trembled, hardly audible. I
could only shake my head. At once he stepped back as if resigning.
He was giving me up--and it occurred to me that if the danger of his
seduction was over, there remained the danger of arrest just outside the
door.
Some one behind me said peremptorily, "It is time," and there was a
flickering diminution of the light. I had a faint instantaneous view of
the old Don dozing, with his head back--of the tall windows, cut up into
squares by the black bars. Something hairily coarse ran harshly down
my face; I grew blind; my mouth, my eyes, my nostrils were filled with
dust; my breath shut in upon me became a flood of warm air. I had no
time to resist. I kicked my legs convulsively; my elbows were drawn
tight against my sides. Someone grunted under my weight; then I was
carried--down, along, up, down again; my feet were knocking along a
wall, and the top of my head rubbed occasionally against what must have
been the roof of a low stone passage, issuing from under the back room
of Ramon's store. Finally, I was dropped upon something that felt like
a heap of wood-shavings. My surprise, rage, and horror had been so great
that, after the first stifled cry, I had made no sound. I heard the
footsteps of several men going away.
CHAPTER FOUR
I remained lying there, bound hand and foot, for a long time; for quite
long enough to allow me to collect my senses and see that I had been a
fool to threaten O'Brien. I had been nobly indignant, and behold! I
had a sack thrown over my head for my pains, and was put away safely
somewhere or other. It seemed to be a cellar.
I was in search of romance, and here were all the elements; Spaniards,
a conspirator, and a kidnapping; but I couldn't feel a fool and
romantic as well. True romance, I suppose, needs a whirl of emotions to
extinguish all the senses except that of sight, which it dims. Except
for sight, which I hadn't at all, I had the use of them all, and all
reported unpleasant things.
I ached and smarted with my head in a sack, with my mouth full of
flour that had gone mouldy and offended my nostrils; I had a sense of
ignominy, and I was extremely angry; I could see that the old Don was in
his dotage--but Carlos I was bitter against.
I was not really afraid; I could not suppose that the Riegos would allow
me to be murdered or seriously maltreated. But I was incensed against
Fate or Chance or whatever it is--on account of the ignominious details,
the coarse sack, the mouldy flour, the stones of the tunnel that
had barked my shins, the tightness of the ropes that bound my ankles
together, and seemed to cut into my wrists behind my back.
I waited, and my fury grew in a dead silence. How would it end--with
what outrage? I would show my contempt and preserve my dignity by
submitting without a struggle--I despised this odious plot. At last
there were voices, footsteps; I found it very hard to carry out my
resolution and refrain from stifled cries and kicks. I was lifted up and
carried, like a corpse, with many stumbles, by men who sometimes growled
as they hastened along. From time to time somebody murmured, "Take
care." Then I was deposited into a boat. The world seemed to be swaying,
splashing, jarring--and it became obvious to me that I was being taken
to some ship. The Spanish ship, of course. Suddenly I broke into cold
perspiration at the thought that, after all, their purpose might be
to drop me quickly overboard. "Carlos!" I cried. I felt the point of a
knife on my breast. "Silence, Senor!" said a gruff voice.
This fear vanished when we came alongside a ship evidently already under
way; but I was handled so roughly and clumsily that I was thoroughly
exhausted and out of breath, by the time I was got on board. All was
still around me; I was left alone on a settee in the main cabin, as I
imagined. For a long time I made no movement; then a door opened and
shut. There was a murmured conversation between two voices. This went
on in animated whispers for a time. At last I felt as if someone were
trying, rather ineffectually, to remove the sack itself. Finally, that
actually did rub its way over my head, and something soft and silken
began to wipe my eyes with a surprising care, and even tenderness. "This
was stupidly done," came a discontented remark; "you do not handle a
_caballero_ like this."
"And how else was it to be done, to that kind of _caballero?_" was the
curt retort.
By that time I had blinked my eyes into a condition for remaining open
for minute stretches. Two men were bending over me--Carlos and O'Brien
himself. The latter said:
"Believe me, your mistake made this necessary. This young gentleman was
about to become singularly inconvenient, and he is in no way harmed."
He spoke in a velvety voice, and walked away gently through the
darkness. Carlos followed with the lanthorn dangling at arm's length;
strangely enough he had not even looked at me. I suppose he was ashamed,
and I was too proud to speak to him, with my hands and feet tied fast.
The door closed, and I remained sitting in the darkness. Long small
windows grew into light at one end of the place, curved into an outline
that suggested a deep recess. The figure of a crowned woman, that moved
rigidly up and down, was silhouetted over my body. Groaning creaks of
wood and the faint swish of water made themselves heard continuously.
I turned my head to a click, I saw a door open a little way, and the
small blue flame of a taper floated into the room. Then the door closed
with a definite sound of shutting in. The light shone redly through
protecting fingers, and upwards on to a small face. It came to a halt,
and I made out the figure of a girl leaning across a table and looking
upwards. There was a click of glass, and then a great blaze of light
created a host of shining things; a glitter of gilded carvings, red
velvet couches, a shining table, a low ceiling, painted white, on carved
rafters. A large silver lamp she had lighted kept on swinging to the
gentle motion of the ship.
She stood just in front of me; the girl that I had seen through the
door; the girl I had seen play with the melon seeds. She was breathing
fast--it agitated me to be alone with her--and she had a little shining
dagger in her hand.
She cut the rope round my ankles, and motioned me imperiously to turn
round. "Your hands--your hands!"
I turned my back awkwardly to her, and felt the grip of small, cool,
very firm fingers upon my wrists. My arms fell apart, numb and perfectly
useless; I was half aware of pain in them, but it passed unnoticed among
a cloud of other emotions. I didn't feel my finger-tips because I had
the agitation, the flutter, the tantalization of looking at her.
I was all the while conscious of the--say, the irregularity of my
position, but I felt very little fear. There were the old Don, an
ineffectual, silver-haired old gentleman, who obviously was not a
pirate; the sleek O'Brien, and Carlos, who seemed to cough on the edge
of a grave--and this young girl. There was not any future that I could
conceive, and the past seemed to be cut off from me by a narrow, very
dark tunnel through which I could see nothing at all.
The young girl was, for the moment, what counted most on the whole,
the only thing the eye could rest on. She affected me as an apparition
familiar, yet absolutely new in her charm. I had seen her gray eyes; I
had seen her red lips; her dark hair, her lithe gestures; the carriage
of her head; her throat, her hands. I knew her; I seemed to have known
her for years. A rush of strange, sweet feeling made me dumb. She was
looking at me, her lips set, her eyes wide and still; and suddenly she
said:
"Ask nothing. The land is not far yet. You can escape, Carlos
thought.... But no! You would only perish for nothing. Go with God." She
pointed imperiously towards the square stern-ports of the cabin.
Following the direction of her hand, my eyes fell upon the image of a
Madonna; rather large--perhaps a third life-size; with a gilt crown,
a pink serious face bent a little forward over a pink naked child that
perched on her left arm and raised one hand. It stood on a bracket,
against the rudder casing, with fat cherubs' heads carved on the
supports. The young girl crossed herself with a swift motion of the
hand. The stern-ports, glazed in small panes, were black, and gleaming
in a white frame-work.
"Go--go--go with God," the girl whispered urgently. "There is a
boat-------"
I made a motion to rise; I wanted to go. The idea of having my liberty,
of its being again a possibility, made her seem of less importance;
other things began to have their share. But I could not stand, though
the blood was returning, warm and tingling, in my legs and hands. She
looked at me with a sharp frown puckering her brows a little; beat a
hasty tattoo with one of her feet, and cast a startled glance towards
the forward door that led on deck. Then she walked to the other side of
the table, and sat looking at me in the glow of the lamp.
"Your life hangs on a thread," she murmured.
I answered, "You have given it to me. Shall I never-------?" I was
acutely conscious of the imperfection of my language.
She looked at me sharply; then lowered her lids. Afterwards she raised
them again. "Think of yourself. Every moment is-------"
"I will be as quick as I can," I said.
I was chafing my ankles and looking up at her. I wanted, very badly, to
thank her for taking an interest in me, only I found it very difficult
to speak to her. Suddenly she sprang to her feet:
"That man thinks he can destroy you. I hate him--I detest him! You have
seen how he treats my father."
It struck me, like a blow, that she was merely avenging O'Brien's
insolence to her father. I had been kidnapped against Don Balthasar
Riego's will. It gave me very well the measure of the old man's
powerlessness in face of his intendant--who was obviously confident of
afterwards soothing the resentment.
I was glad I had not thanked her for taking an interest in me. I was
distressed, too, because once more I had missed Romance by an inch.
Someone kicked at the locked door. A voice cried--I could not help
thinking--warningly, "Seraphina, Seraphina," and another voice said with
excessive softness, "_Senorita! Voyons! quelle folie_."
She sprang at me. Her hand hurt my wrist as she dragged me aft. I
scrambled clumsily into the recess of the counter, and put my head out.
The night air was very chilly and full of brine; a little boat towing
by a long painter was sheering about in the phosphorescent wake of the
ship. The sea itself was pallid in the light of the moon, invisible to
me. A little astern of us, on our port quarter, a vessel under a press
of canvas seemed to stand still; looming up like an immense pale ghost.
She might have been coming up with us, or else we had just passed her--I
couldn't tell. I had no time to find out, and I didn't care. The great
thing was to get hold of the painter. The whispers of the girl urged me,
but the thing was not easy; the rope, fastened higher up, streamed
away out of reach of my hand. At last, by watching the moment when it
slacked, and throwing myself half out of the stern window, I managed to
hook it with my finger-tips. Next moment it was nearly jerked away from
me, but I didn't lose it, and the boat taking a run just then under the
counter, I got a good hold. The sound of another kick at the door made
me swing myself out, head first, without reflection. I got soused to the
waist before I had reached the bows of the boat. With a frantic effort
I clambered up and rolled in. When I got on my legs, the jerky motion
of tossing had ceased, the boat was floating still, and the light of
the stern windows was far away already. The girl had managed to cut the
painter.
The other vessel was heading straight for me, rather high on the water,
broad-beamed, squat, and making her way quietly, like a shadow. The
land might have been four or five miles away--I had no means of knowing
exactly. It looked like a high black cloud, and purple-gray mists here
and there among the peaks hung like scarves.
I got an oar over the stern to scull, but I was not fit for much
exertion. I stared at the ship I had left. Her stern windows glimmered
with a slight up-and-down motion; her sails seemed to fall into black
confusion against the blaze of the moon; faint cries came to me out of
her, and by the alteration of her shape I understood that she was being
brought to, preparatory to lowering a boat. She might have been half a
mile distant when the gleam of her stern windows swung slowly round and
went out. I had no mind to be recaptured, and began to scull frantically
towards the other vessel. By that time she was quite near--near
enough for me to hear the lazy sound of the water at her bows, and the
occasional flutter of a sail. The land breeze was dying away, and in the
wake of the moon I perceived the boat of my pursuers coming over, black
and distinct; but the other vessel was nearly upon me. I sheered under
her starboard bow and yelled, "Ship ahoy! Ship ahoy!"
There was a lot of noise on board, and no one seemed to hear my shouts.
Several voices yelled. "That cursed Spanish ship ahead is heaving-to
athwart our hawse." The crew and the officers seemed all to be forward
shouting abuse at the "lubberly Dago," and it looked as though I were
abandoned to my fate. The ship forged ahead in the light air; I failed
in my grab at her fore chains, and my boat slipped astern, bumping
against the side. I missed the main chain, too, and yelled all the time
with desperation, "For God's sake! Ship ahoy! For God's sake throw me a
rope, some-, body, before it's too late!"
I was giving up all hope when a heavy coil--of a brace, I suppose--fell
upon my head, nearly knocking me over. Half stunned as I was,
desperation lent me strength to scramble up her side hand over hand,
while the boat floated away from under my feet. I was done up when I got
on the poop. A yell came from forward, "Hard aport." Then the same voice
addressed itself to abusing the Spanish ship very close to us now. "What
do you mean by coming-to right across my bows like this?" it yelled in a
fury.
I stood still in the shadows on the poop. We were drawing slowly past
the stern of the Spaniard, and O'Brien's voice answered in English:
"We are picking up a boat of ours that's gone adrift with a man. Have
you seen anything of her?" "No--confound you and your boat." Of course
those forward knew nothing of my being on board. The man who had thrown
me the rope--a passenger, a certain Major Cowper, going home with his
wife and child--had walked away proudly, without deigning as much as to
look at me twice, as if to see a man clamber on board a ship ten miles
from the land was the most usual occurrence. He was, I found afterwards,
an absurd, pompous person, as stiff as a ramrod, and so full of his
own importance that he imagined he had almost demeaned himself by his
condescension in throwing down the rope in answer to my despairing
cries. On the other hand, the helmsman, the only other person aft, was
so astounded as to become quite speechless. I could see, in the light of
the binnacle thrown upon his face, his staring eyes and his open mouth.
The voice forward had subsided by then, and as the stern of the Spanish
ship came abreast of the poop, I stepped out of the shadow of the sails,
and going close to the rail I said, not very loud--there was no need to
shout--but very distinctly:
"I am out of your clutches, Mr. O'Brien, after all. I promise you that
you shall hear of me yet."
Meanwhile, another man had come up from forward on the poop, growling
like a bear, a short, rotund little man, the captain of the ship. The
Spanish vessel was dropping astern, silent, with her sails all black,
hiding the low moon. Suddenly a hurried hail came out of her.
"What ship is this?"
"What's that to you, blank your eyes? The _Breeze_, if you want to know.
What are you going to do about it?" the little skipper shouted fiercely.
In the light wind the ships were separating slowly.
"Where are you bound to?" hailed O'Brien's voice again.
The little skipper laughed with exasperation. "Dash your blanked
impudence. To Havana, and be hanged to you. Anything more you want to
know? And my name's Lumsden, and I am sixty years old, and if I had you
here, I would put a head on you for getting in my way, you------"
He stopped, out of breath. Then, addressing himself to his passenger:
"That's the Spanish chartered ship that brought these sanguinary
pirates that were hanged this morning, major. She's taking the Spanish
commissioner back. I suppose they had no man-of-war handy for the
service in Cuba. Did you ever------"
He had caught sight of me for the first time, and positively jumped a
foot high with astonishment.
"Who on earth's that there?"
His astonishment was comprehensible. The major, Without deigning to
enlighten him, walked proudly away. He was too dignified a person to
explain.
It was left to me. Frequenting, as I had been doing, Ramon's store,
which was a great gossiping centre of the maritime world in Kingston, I
knew the faces and the names of most of the merchant captains who used
to gather there to drink and swap yarns. I was not myself quite unknown
to little Lumsden. I told him all my story, and all the time he kept
on scratching his bald head, full of incredulous perplexity. Old Senor
Ramon! Such a respectable man. And I had been kidnapped? From his store!
"If I didn't see you here in my cuddy before my eyes, I wouldn't believe
a word you say," he declared absurdly.
But he was ready enough to take me to Havana. However, he insisted upon
calling down his mate, a gingery fellow, short, too, but wizened, and as
stupid as himself.
"Here's that Kemp, you know. The young fellow that Macdonald of the
Horton Pen picked up somewhere two years ago. The Spaniards in that
ship kidnapped him--so he says. He says they are pirates. But that's a
government chartered ship, and all the pirates that have ever been in
her were hanged this morning in Kingston. But here he is, anyhow. And
he says that at home he had throttled a Bow Street runner before he went
off with the smugglers. Did you ever hear the likes of it, Mercer? I
shouldn't think he was telling us a parcel of lies; hey, Mercer?"
And the two grotesque little chaps stood nodding their heads at me
sagaciously.
"He's a desperate character, then," said Mercer at last, cautiously.
"This morning, the very last thing I heard ashore, as I went to fetch
the fresh beef off, is that he had been assaulting a justice of the
peace on the highroad, and had been trying to knock down the admiral,
who was coming down to town in a chaise with Mr. Topnambo. There's a
warrant out against him under the Black Act, sir."
Then he brightened up considerably. "So he must have been kidnapped or
something after all, sir, or he would be in chokey now."
It was true, after all. Romance reserved me for another fate, for
another sort of captivity, for more than one sort. And my imagination
had been captured, enslaved already by the image of that young girl who
had called me her English cousin, the girl with the lizard, the girl
with the dagger! And with every word she uttered romance itself, if I
had only known it, the romance of persecuted lovers, spoke to me through
her lips.
That night the Spanish ship had the advantage of us in a freshening
wind, and overtook the _Breeze_. Before morning dawned she passed us,
and before the close of the next day she was gone out of sight ahead,
steering, apparently, the same course with ourselves.
Her superior sailing had an enormous influence upon my fortunes; and I
was more adrift in the world than ever before, more in the dark as to
what awaited me than when I was lugged along with my head in a sack.
I gave her but little thought. A sort of numbness had come over me. I
could think of the girl who had cut me free, and for all my resentment
at the indignity of my treatment, I had hardly a thought to spare for
the man who had me bound. I was pleased to remember that she hated him;
that she had said so herself. For the rest, I had a vague notion of
going to the English Consul in Havana. After all, I was not a complete
nobody. I was John Kemp, a gentleman, well connected; I could prove
it. The Bow Street runner had not been dead as I had thought. The
last letter from Veronica informed me that the man had given up
thief-catching, and was keeping, now, a little inn in the neighbourhood.
Ralph, my brother-in-law, had helped him to it, no doubt. I could come
home safely now.
And I had discovered I was no longer anxious to return home.
CHAPTER FIVE
There wasn't any weirdness about the ship when I woke in the sunlight.
She was old and slow and rather small. She carried Lumsden (master),
Mercer (mate), a crew that seemed no better and no worse than any other
crew, and the old gentleman who had thrown me the rope the night before,
and who seemed to think that he had derogated from his dignity in doing
it. He was a Major Cowper, retiring from a West Indian regiment, and had
with him his wife and a disagreeable little girl, with a yellow pigtail
and a bony little chest and arms.
On the whole, they weren't the sort of people that one would have chosen
for companions on a pleasure-trip. Major Cowper's wife lay all day in a
deck chair, alternately drawing to her and repulsing the whining little
girl. The major talked to me about the scandals with which the world was
filled, and kept a suspicious eye upon his wife. He spent the morning
in shaving what part of his face his white whiskers did not cover, the
afternoon in enumerating to me the subjects on which he intended to
write to the Horse Guards. He had grown entirely amiable, perhaps for
the reason that his wife ignored my existence.
Meantime I let the days slip by idly, only wondering how I could manage
to remain in Havana and breathe the air of the same island with the girl
who had delivered me. Perhaps some day we might meet--who knows? I was
not afraid of that Irishman.
It never occurred to me to bother about the course we were taking,
till one day we sighted the Cuban coast, and I heard Lumsden and Mercer
pronounce the name of Rio Medio. The two ridiculous old chaps talked
of Mexican privateers, which seemed to rendezvous off that place.
They pointed out to me the headland near the bay. There was no sign of
privateer or pirate, as far as the eye could reach. In the course of
beating up to windward we closed in with the coast, and then the wind
fell.
I remained motionless against the rail for half the night, looking at
the land. Not a single light was visible. A wistful, dreamy longing, a
quiet longing pervaded me, as though I had been drugged. I dreamed, as
young men dream, of a girl's face. She was sleeping there within this
dim vision of land. Perhaps this was as near as I should ever be able to
approach her. I felt a sorrow without much suffering. A great stillness
reigned around the ship, over the whole earth. At last I went below and
fell asleep.
I was awakened by the idea that I had heard an extraordinary
row--shouting and stamping. But there was a dead silence, to which I
was listening with all my ears. Suddenly there was a little pop, as if
someone had spat rather vigorously; then a succession of shouts, then
another little pop, and more shouts, and the stamping overhead. A woman
began to shriek on the other side of the bulkhead, then another woman
somewhere else, then the little girl. I hurried on deck, but it was some
minutes before I could make things fit together. I saw Major Cowper on
the poop; he was brandishing a little pistol and apostrophizing Lumsden,
who was waving ineffectual arms towards the sky; and there was a
great deal of shouting, forward and overhead. Cowper rushed at me, and
explained that something was an abominable scandal, and that there were
women on board. He waved his pistol towards the side; I noticed that the
butt was inlaid with mother-of-pearl Lumsden rushed at him and clawed at
his clothes, imploring him not to be rash.
We were so close in with the coast that the surf along the shore gleamed
and sparkled in full view.
Someone shouted aloft, "Look out! They are firing again."
Then only I noticed, a quarter of a mile astern and between the land and
us, a little schooner, rather low in the water, curtseying under a cloud
of white canvas--a wonderful thing to look at. It was as if I had never
seen anything so instinct with life and the joy of it. A snowy streak
spattered away from her bows at each plunge. She came at a great speed,
and a row of faces looking our way became plain, like a beady decoration
above her bulwarks. She swerved a little out of her course, and a sort
of mushroom of smoke grew out of her side; there was a little gleam of
smouldering light hidden in its heart. The spitting bang followed again,
and something skipped along the wave-tops beside us, raising little
pillars of spray that drifted away on the wind. The schooner came back
on her course, heading straight for us; a shout like groaned applause
went up from on board us. Lumsden hid his face in his hands.
I could hear little Mercer shrieking out orders forwards. We were
shortening sail. The schooner, luffing a little, ranged abreast. A hail
like a metal blare came out of her.
"If you donn'd heef-to we seenk you! We seenk you! By God!"
Major Cowper was using abominable language beside me. Suddenly he began
to call out to someone:
"Go down... go down, I say."
A woman's face disappeared into the hood of the companion like a
rabbit's tail into its burrow. There was a great volley of cracks from
the loose sails, and the ship came to. At the same time the schooner,
now on our beam and stripped of her light kites, put in stays and
remained on the other tack, with her foresheet to windward.
Major Cowper said it was a scandal. The country was going to the
dogs because merchantmen were not compelled by law to carry guns. He
spluttered into my ears that there wasn't so much as a twopenny signal
mortar on board, and no more powder than enough to load one of his
duelling pistols. He was going to write to the Horse Guards.
A blue-and-white ensign fluttered up to the main gaff of the schooner; a
boat dropped into the water. It all went breathlessly--I hadn't time to
think. I saw old Cowper run to the side and aim his pistol overboard;
there was an ineffectual click; he made a gesture of disgust, and tossed
it on deck. His head hung dejectedly down upon his chest.
Lumsden said, "Thank God, oh, thank God!" and the old man turned on him
like a snarling dog.
"You infernal coward," he said. "Haven't you got a spark of courage?"
A moment after, our decks were invaded by men, brown and ragged, leaping
down from the bulwarks one after the other.
They had come out at break of day (we must have been observed the
evening before), a big schooner--full of as ill-favoured, ragged rascals
as the most vivid imagination could conceive. Of course, there had been
no resistance on our part. We were outsailed, and at the first ferocious
hail the halyards had been let go by the run, and all our crew had
bolted aloft. A few bronzed bandits posted abreast of each mast kept
them there by the menace of bell-mouthed blunderbusses pointed upwards.
Lumsden and Mercer had been each tied flat down to a spare spar. They
presented an appearance too ridiculous to awaken genuine compassion.
Major Cowper was made to sit on a hen-coop, and a bearded pirate, with
a red handkerchief tied round his head and a cutlass in his hand, stood
guard over him. The major looked angry and crestfallen. The rest of that
infamous crew, without losing a moment, rushed into the cuddy to loot
the cabins for wearing apparel, jewellery, and money. They squabbled
amongst themselves, throwing the things on deck into a great heap of
booty.
The schooner flying the Mexican flag remained hove to abeam. But in the
man in command of the boarding party I recognized Tomas Castro!
He _was_ a pirate. My surmises were correct. He looked the part to the
life, in a plumed hat, cloaked to the chin, and standing apart in a
saturnine dignity.
"Are you going to have us all murdered, Castro?" I asked, with
indignation. To my surprise he did not seem to recognize me; indeed, he
pretended not to see me at all. I might have been thin air for any sign
he gave of being aware of my presence; but, turning his back on me, he
addressed himself to the ignobly captive Lumsden, telling him that he,
Castro, was the commander of that Mexican schooner, and menacing him
with dreadful threats of vengeance for what he called the resistance we
had offered to a privateer of the Republic. I suppose he was pleased to
qualify with the name of armed resistance the miserable little pop of
the major's pocket pistol. To punish that audacity he announced that no
private property would be respected.
"You shall have to give up all the money on board," he yelled at the
wretched man lying there like a sheep ready for slaughter. The other
could only gasp and blink. Castro's ferocity was so remarkable that for
a moment it struck me as put on. There was no necessity for it. We were
meek and silent enough, only poor Major Cowper muttered:
"My wife and child. . . ."
The ragged brown men were pouring on deck from below; their arms full
of bundles. Half a dozen of them started to pull off the main hatch
tarpaulin. Up aloft the crew looked down with scared eyes. I began to
say excitedly, in my indignation, almost into his very ear:
"I know you, Tomas Castro--I know you--Tomas Castro."
Even then he seemed not to hear; but at last he looked into my face
balefully, as if he wished to convey the plague to me.
"Hold your tongue," he said very quickly in Spanish. "This is folly!"
His little hawk's beak of a nose nestled in his moustache. He waved his
arm and declared forcibly, "I don't know you. I am Nicola el Demonio,
the Mexican."
Poor old Cowper groaned. The reputation of Nicola el Demonio, if rumours
were to be trusted, was a horrible thing for a man with women depending
on him.
Five or six of these bandits were standing about Lumsden, the major,
and myself, fingering the locks of their guns. Poor old Cowper, breaking
away from his guard, was raging up and down the poop; and the big pirate
kept him off the companion truculently. The major wanted to get below;
the little girl was screaming in the cuddy, and we could hear her very
plainly. It was rather horrible. Castro had gone forward into the crowd
of scoundrels round the hatchway. It was only then that I realized that
Major Cowper was in a state of delirious apprehension and fury; I seemed
to remember at last that for a long time he had been groaning somewhere
near me. He kept on saying:
"Oh, for God's sake--for God's sake--my poor wife."
I understood that he must have been asking me to do something.
It came as a shock to me. I had a vague sensation of his fears. Up till
then I hadn't realized that any one could be much interested in Mrs.
Cowper.
He caught hold of my arm, as if he wanted support, and stuttered:
"Couldn't you--couldn't you speak to------" He nodded in the direction
of Tomas Castro, who was bent and shouting down the hatch. "Try
to-------" the old man gasped. "Didn't you hear the child scream?" His
face was pallid and wrinkled, like a piece of crumpled paper; his mouth
was drawn on one side, and his lips quivered one against the other.
I went to Castro and caught him by the arm. He spun round and smiled
discreetly.
"We shall be using force upon you directly. Pray resist, Senor; but not
too much. What? His wife? Tell that stupid Inglez with whispers that she
is safe." He whispered with an air of profound intelligence, "We shall
be ready to go as soon as these foul swine have finished their stealing.
I cannot stop them," he added.
I could not pause to think what he might mean. The child's shrieks
resounding louder and louder, I ran below. There were a couple of men
in the cabin with the women. Mrs. Cowper was lying back upon a sofa,
her face very white and drawn, her eyes wide open. Her useless hands
twitched at her dress; otherwise she was absolutely motionless, like a
frozen woman. The black nurse was panting convulsively in a corner--a
palpitating bundle of orange and purple and white clothes. The child was
rushing round and round, shrieking. The two men did nothing at all. One
of them kept saying in Spanish:
"But--we only want your rings. But--we only want your rings."
The other made feeble efforts to catch the child as it rushed past him.
He wanted its earrings--they were contraband of war, I suppose.
Mrs. Cowper was petrified with terror. Explaining the desires of the two
men was like shouting things into the ear of a very deaf woman. She kept
on saying:
"Will they go away then? Will they go away then?" All the while she was
drawing the rings off her thin fingers, and handing them to me. I gave
them to the ruffians whose presence seemed to terrify her out of her
senses. I had no option. I could do nothing else. Then I asked her
whether she wished me to remain with her and the child. She said:
"Yes. No. Go away. Yes. No--let me think."
Finally it came into my head that in the captain's cabin she would be
able to talk to her husband through the deck ventilator, and, after a
time, the idea filtered through to her brain. She could hardly walk at
all. The child and the nurse ran in front of us, and, practically, I
carried her there in my arms. Once in the stateroom she struggled loose
from me, and, rushing in, slammed the door violently in my face. She
seemed to hate me.
CHAPTER SIX
I went on deck again. On the poop about twenty men had surrounded Major
Cowper; his white head was being jerked backwards and forwards above
their bending backs; they had got his old uniform coat off, and were
fighting for the buttons. I had just time to shout to him, "Your wife's
down there, she's all right!" when very suddenly I became aware that
Tomas Castro was swearing horribly at these thieves. He drove them away,
and we were left quite alone on the poop, I holding the major's coat
over my arm. Major Cowper stooped down to call through the skylight. I
could hear faint answers coming up to him.
Meantime, some of the rascals left on board the schooner had filled on
her in a light wind, and, sailing round our stern, had brought their
vessel alongside. Ropes were thrown on board and we lay close together,
but the schooner with her dirty decks looked to me, now, very sinister
and very sordid.
Then I remembered Castro's extraordinary words; they suggested infinite
possibilities of a disastrous nature, I could not tell just what. The
explanation seemed to be struggling to bring itself to light, like a
name that one has had for hours on the tip of a tongue without being
able to formulate it. Major Cowper rose stiffly, and limped to my side.
He looked at me askance, then shifted his eyes away. Afterwards, he took
his coat from my arm. I tried to help him, but he refused my aid, and
jerked himself painfully into it. It was too tight for him. Suddenly, he
said:
"You seem to be deuced intimate with that man--deuced intimate."
His tone caused me more misgiving than I should have thought possible.
He took a turn on the deserted deck; went to the skylight; called down,
"All well, still?" waited, listening with his head on one side, and then
came back to me.
"You drop into the ship," he said, "out of the clouds. Out of the
clouds, I say. You tell us some sort of cock-and-bull story. I say it
looks deuced suspicious." He took another turn and came back. "My wife
says that you took her rings and--and--gave them to------"
He had an ashamed air. It came into my head that that hateful woman had
been egging him on to this through the skylight, instead of saying her
prayers.
"Your wife!" I said. "Why, she might have been murdered--if I hadn't
made her give them up. I believe I saved her life."
He said suddenly, "Tut, tut!" and shrugged his shoulders. He hung his
head for a minute, then he added, "Mind, I don't say--I don't say that
it mayn't be as you say. You're a very nice young fellow.... But what
I say is--I am a public man--you ought to clear yourself." He was
beginning to recover his military bearing.
"Oh! don't be absurd," I said.
One of the Spaniards came up to me and whispered, "You must come now.
We are going to cast off." At the same time Tomas Castro prowled to the
other side of the ship, within five yards of us. I called out, "Tomas
Castro! Tomas Castro! I will not go with you." The man beside me said,
"Come, senor! _Vamos!_"
Suddenly Castro, stretching his arm out at me, cried, "Come, _hombres_.
This is the _caballero_; seize him." And to me in his broken English he
shouted, "You may resist, if you like."
This was what I meant to do with all my might. The ragged crowd
surrounded me; they chattered like monkeys. One man irritated me beyond
conception. He looked like an inn-keeper in knee-breeches, had a broken
nose that pointed to the left, and a double chin. More of them came
running up every minute. I made a sort of blind rush at the fellow with
the broken nose; my elbow caught him on the soft folds of flesh and he
skipped backwards; the rest scattered in all directions, and then stood
at a distance, chattering and waving their hands. And beyond them I saw
old Cowper gesticulating approval. The man with the double chin drew a
knife from his sleeve, crouched instantly, and sprang at me. I hadn't
fought anybody since I had been at school; raising my fists was like
trying a dubious experiment in an emergency. I caught him rather hard on
the end of his broken nose; I felt the contact on my right, and a small
pain in my left hand. His arms went up to the sky; his face, too. But
I had started forward to meet him, and half a dozen of them flung their
arms round me from behind.
I seemed to have an exaggerated clearness of vision; I saw each brown
dirty paw reach out to clutch some part of me. I was not angry any more;
it wasn't any good being angry, but I made a fight for it. There were
dozens of them; they clutched my wrists, my elbows, and in between my
wrists and my elbows, and my shoulders. One pair of arms was round my
neck, another round my waist, and they kept on trying to catch my legs
with ropes. We seemed to stagger all over the deck; I expect they got in
each other's way; they would have made a better job of it if they hadn't
been such a multitude. I must then have got a crack on the head, for
everything grew dark; the night seemed to fall on us, as we fought.
Afterwards I found myself lying gasping on my back on the deck of the
schooner; four or five men were holding me down. Castro was putting a
pistol into his belt. He stamped his foot violently, and then went and
shouted in Spanish:
"Come you all on board. You have done mischief enough, fools of
_Lugarenos_. Now we go."
I saw, as in a dream of stress and violence, some men making ready to
cast off the schooner, and then, in a supreme effort, an effort of lusty
youth and strength, which I remember to this day, I scattered men like
chaff, and stood free.
For the fraction of a second I stood, ready to fall myself, and looking
at prostrate men. It was a flash of vision, and then I made a bolt for
the rail. I clambered furiously; I saw the deck of the old barque; I had
just one exulting sight of it, and then Major Cowper uprose before
my eyes and knocked me back on board the schooner, tumbling after me
himself.
Twenty men flung themselves upon my body. I made no movement. The
end had come. I hadn't the strength to shake off a fly, my heart was
bursting my ribs. I lay on my back and managed to say, "Give me air." I
thought I should die.
Castro, draped in his cloak, stood over me, but Major Cowper fell on his
knees near my head, almost sobbing: "My papers! My papers! I tell you
I shall starve. Make them give me back my papers. They ain't any use to
them--my pension--mortgages--not worth a penny piece to you."
He crouched over my face, and the Spaniards stood around, wondering.
He begged me to intercede, to save him those papers of the greatest
importance.
Castro preserved his attitude of a conspirator. I was touched by the
major's distress, and at last I condescended to address Castro on his
behalf, though it cost me an effort, for I was angry, indignant, and
humiliated.
"Whart--whart? What do I know of his papers? Let him find them." He
waved his hand loftily.
The deck was hillocked with heaps of clothing, of bedding, casks of rum,
old hats, and tarpaulins. Cowper ran in and out among the plunder, like
a pointer in a turnip field. He was groaning.
Beside one of the pumps was a small pile of shiny cases; ship's
instruments, a chronometer in its case, a medicine chest.
Cowper tottered at a black dispatch-box. "There, there!" he said; "I
tell you I shall starve if I don't have it. Ask him--ask him-------" He
was clutching me like a drowning man.
Castro raised the inevitable arm towards heaven, letting his round black
cloak fall into folds like those of an umbrella. Cowper gathered that
he might take his japanned dispatch-box; he seized the brass handles and
rushed towards the side, but at the last moment he had the good impulse
to return to me, holding out his hand, and spluttering distractedly,
"God bless you, God bless you." After a time he remembered that I had
rescued his wife and child, and he asked God to bless me for that too.
"If it is ever necessary," he said, "on my honour, if you escape, I will
come a thousand miles to testify. On my honour--remember." He said he
was going to live in Clapham. That is as much as I remember. I was held
pinned down to the deck, and he disappeared from my sight. Before the
ships had separated, I was carried below in the cabin of the schooner.
They left me alone there, and I sat with my head on my arms for a long
time, I did not think of anything at all; I was too utterly done up with
my struggles, and there was nothing to be thought about. I had grown to
accept the meanness of things as if I had aged a great deal. I had
seen men scratch each other's faces over coat buttons, old shoes--over
Mercer's trousers. My own future did not interest me at this stage. I
sat up and looked round me.
I was in a small, bare cabin, roughly wainscotted and exceedingly
filthy. There were the grease-marks from the backs of heads all along a
bulkhead above a wooden bench; the rough table, on which my arms rested,
was covered with layers of tallow spots. Bright light shone through a
porthole. Two or three ill-assorted muskets slanted about round the foot
of the mast--a long old piece, of the time of Pizarro, all red velvet
and silver' chasing, on a swivelled stand, three English fowling-pieces,
and a coachman's blunderbuss. A man was rising from a mattress stretched
on the floor; he placed a mandolin, decorated with red favours, on
the greasy table. He was shockingly thin, and so tall that his head
disturbed the candle-soot on the ceiling. He said: "Ah, I was waiting
for the cavalier to awake."
He stalked round the end of the table, slid between it and the side,
and grasped my arm with wrapt earnestness as he settled himself slowly
beside me. He wore a red shirt that had become rather black where his
long brown ringlets fell on his shoulders; it had tarnished gilt buttons
ciphered "G. R.," stolen, I suppose, from some English ship.
"I beg the Senor Caballero to listen to what I have to record," he said,
with intense gravity. "I cannot bear this much longer--no, I cannot bear
my sufferings much longer."
His face was of a large, classical type; a close-featured, rather long
face, with an immense nose that from the front resembled the section of
a bell; eyebrows like horseshoes, and very large-pupilled eyes that
had the purplish-brown lustre of a horse's. His air was mournful in
the extreme, and he began to speak resonantly as if his chest were
a sounding-board. He used immensely long sentences, of which I only
understood one-half.
"What, then, is the difference between me, Manuel-del-Popolo Isturiz,
and this Tomas Castro? The Senor Caballero can tell at once. Look at me.
I am the finer man. I would have you ask the ladies of Rio Medio, and
leave the verdict to them. This Castro is an Andalou--a foreigner. And
we, the braves of Rio Medio, will suffer no foreigner to make headway
with our ladies. Yet this Andalusian is preferred because he is a humble
friend of the great Don, and because he is for a few days given the
command. I ask you, Senor, what is the radical difference between me,
the sailing captain of this vessel, and him, the fighting captain for a
few days? Is it not I that am, as it were, the brains of it, and he only
its knife? I ask the Senor Caballero."
I didn't in the least know what to answer. His great eyes wistfully
explored my face. I expect I looked bewildered.
"I lay my case at your feet," he continued. "You are to be our
chief leader, and, on account of your illustrious birth and renowned
intelligence, will occupy a superior position in the council of the
notables. Is it not so? Has not the Senor Juez O'Brien so ordained? You
will give ear to me, you will alleviate my indignant sufferings?" He
implored me with his eyes for a long time.
Manuel-del-Popolo, as he called himself, pushed the hair back from his
forehead. I had noticed that the love-locks were plaited with black
braid, and that he wore large dirty silk ruffles.
"The _caballero_" he continued, marking his words with a long, white
finger a-tap on the table, "will represent my views to the notables.
My position at present, as I have had the honour to observe, is become
unbearable. Consider, too, how your worship and I would work together.
What lightness for you and me. You will find this Castro unbearably
gross. But I--I assure you I am a man of taste--an _improvisador_--an
artist. My songs are celebrated. And yet!..."
He folded his arms again, and waited; then he said, employing his most
impressive voice:
"I have influence with the men of Rio. I could raise a riot. We Cubans
are a jealous people; we do not love that foreigners should take our
best from us. We do not love it; we will not suffer it. Let this Castro
bethink himself and go in peace, leaving us and our ladies. As the
proverb says, 'It is well to build a bridge for a departing enemy.'"
He began to peer at me more wistfully, and his eyes grew more luminous
than ever. This man, in spite of his grotesqueness, was quite in
earnest, there was no doubting that.
"I have a gentle spirit," he began again, "a gentle spirit. I am
submissive to the legitimate authorities. What the Senor Juez O'Brien
asks me to do, I do. I would put a knife into any one who inconvenienced
the Senor Juez O'Brien, who is a good Catholic; we would all do that,
as is right and fitting. But this Castro--this Andalou, who is nearly as
bad as a heretic! When my day comes, I will have his arms flayed and the
soles of his feet, and I will rub red pepper into them; and all the men
of Rio who do not love foreigners will applaud. And I will stick little
thorns under his tongue, and I will cut off his eyelids with little
scissors, and set him facing the sun. _Caballero_, you would love me; I
have a gentle spirit. I am a pleasant companion." He rose and squeezed
round the table. "Listen"--his eyes lit up with rapture--"you shall hear
me. It is divine--ah, it is very pleasant, you will say."
He seized his mandolin, slung it round his neck, and leant against the
bulkhead. The bright light from the port-hole gilded the outlines of his
body, as he swayed about and moved his long fingers across the strings;
they tinkled metallically. He sang in a nasal voice:
"'Listen!' the young girls say as they hasten to the barred window.
'Listen! Ah, surely that is the guitar of Man--u--el--del-Popolo,
As he glides along the wall in the twilight.'"
It was a very long song. He gesticulated freely with his hand in between
the scratching of the strings, which seemed to be a matter of luck.
His eyes gazed distantly at the wall above my head. The performance
bewildered and impressed me; I wondered if this was what they had
carried me off for. It was like being mad. He made a decrescendo
tinkling, and his lofty features lapsed into their normal mournfulness.
At that moment Castro put his face round the door, then entered
altogether. He sighed in a satisfied manner, and had an air of having
finished a laborious undertaking.
"We have arranged the confusion up above," he said to Manuel-del-Popolo;
"you may go and see to the sailing. . . . Hurry; it is growing late."
Manuel blazed silently, and stalked out of the door as if he had an
electric cloud round his head. Tomas Castro turned towards me.
"You are better?" he asked benevolently. "You exerted yourself too much.
. . . But still, if you liked------" He picked up the mandolin, and
began negligently scratching the strings. I noticed an alteration in
him; he had grown softer in the flesh in the past years; there were
little threads of gray in the knotted curls of his beard. It was as
if he had lived well, on the whole. He bent his head over the strings,
plucked one, tightened a peg, plucked it again, then set the instrument
on the table, and dropped on to the mattress. "Will you have some rum?"
he said. "You have grown broad and strong, like a bull.... You made
those men fly, _sacre nom d'une pipe_.... One would have thought you
were in earnest.... Ah, well!" He stretched himself at length on the
mattress, and closed his eyes.
I looked at him to discover traces of irony. There weren't any. He was
talking quietly; he even reproved me for having carried the pretence of
resistance beyond a joke.
"You fought too much; you struck many men--and hard. You will have made
enemies. The _picaros_ of this dirty little town are as conceited as
pigs. You must take care, or you will have a knife in your back."
He lay with his hands crossed on his stomach, which was round like a
pudding. After a time he opened his eyes, and looked at the dancing
white reflection of the water on the grimy ceiling.
"To think of seeing you again, after all these years," he said. "I did
not believe my ears when Don Carlos asked me to fetch you like this.
Who would have believed it? But, as they say," he added philosophically,
"'The water flows to the sea, and the little stones find their places.'"
He paused to listen to the sounds that came from above. "That Manuel is
a fool," he said without rancour; "he is mad with jealousy because for
this day I have command here. But, all the same, they are dangerous
pigs, these slaves of the Senor O'Brien. I wish the town were rid of
them. One day there will be a riot--a function--with their jealousies
and madness."
I sat and said nothing, and things fitted themselves together, little
patches of information going in here and there like the pieces of a
puzzle map. O'Brien had gone on to Havana in the ship from which I
had escaped, to render an account of the pirates that had been hung at
Kingston; the Riegos had been landed in boats at Rio Medio, of course.
"That poor Don Carlos!" Castro moaned lamentably. "They had the
barbarity to take him out in the night, in that raw fog. He coughed
and coughed; it made me faint to hear him. He could not even speak to
me--his Tomas; it was pitiful. He could not speak when we got to the
Casa."
I could not really understand why I had been a second time kidnapped.
Castro said that O'Brien had not been unwilling that I should reach
Havana. It was Carlos that had ordered Tomas to take me out of the
_Breeze_. He had come down in the raw morning, before the schooner had
put out from behind the point, to impress very elaborate directions upon
Tomas Castro; indeed, it was whilst talking to Tomas that he had burst a
blood-vessel.
"He said to me: 'Have a care now. Listen. He is my dear friend, that
Senor Juan. I love him as if he were my only brother. Be very careful,
Tomas Castro. Make it appear that he comes to us much against his will.
Let him be dragged on board by many men. You are to understand, Tomas,
that he is a youth of noble family, and that you are to be as careful of
compromising him as you are of the honour of Our Lady."!
Tomas Castro looked across at me. "You will be able to report well of
me," he said; "I did my best. If you are compromised, it was you who did
it by talking to me as if you knew me."
I remembered, then, that Tomas certainly had resented my seeming to
recognize him before Cowper and Lumsden. He closed his eyes again. After
a time he added:
"_Vaya!_ After all, it is foolishness to fear being compromised. You
would never believe that his Excellency Don Balthasar had led a riotous
life--to look at him with his silver head. It is said he had three
friars killed once in Seville, a very, very long time ago. It was
dangerous in those days to come against our Mother, the Church." He
paused, and undid his shirt, laying bare an incredibly hairy chest; then
slowly kicked off his shoes. "One stifles here," he said. "Ah! in the
old days------"
Suddenly he turned to me and said, with an air of indescribable
interest, as if he were gloating over an obscene idea:
"So they would hang a gentleman like you, if they caught you? What
savages you English people are!--what savages! Like cannibals! You did
well to make that comedy of resisting. _Quel pays!_... What a people...
I dream of them still.... The eyes; the teeth! Ah, well! in an hour we
shall be in Rio. I must sleep...."
CHAPTER SEVEN
By two of the afternoon we were running into the inlet of Rio Medio. I
had come on deck when Tomas Castro had started out of his doze. I wanted
to see. We went round violently as I emerged, and, clinging to the side,
I saw, in a whirl, tall, baked, brown hills dropping sheer down to a
strip of flat land and a belt of dark-green scrub at the water's edge;
little pink squares of house-walls dropped here and there, mounting the
hillside among palms, like men standing in tall grass, running back,
hiding in a steep valley; silver-gray huts with ragged dun roofs, like
dishevelled shocks of hair; a great pink church-face, very tall and
narrow, pyramidal towards the top, and pierced for seven bells, but
having only three. It looked as if it had been hidden for centuries in
the folds of an ancient land, as it lay there asleep in the blighting
sunlight.
When we anchored, Tomas, beside me in saturnine silence, grunted and
spat into the water.
"Look here," I said. "What is the meaning of it all? What is it? What is
at the bottom?"
He shrugged his shoulders gloomily. "If your worship does not know, who
should?" he said. "It is not for me to say why people should wish to
come here."
"Then take me to Carlos," I said. "I must get this settled."
Castro looked at me suspiciously. "You will not excite him?" he said. "I
have known people die right out when they were like that."
"Oh, I won't excite him," I said.
As we were rowed ashore, he began to point out the houses of the
notables. Rio Medio had been one of the principal ports of the Antilles
in the seventeenth century, but it had failed before the rivalry of
Havana because its harbour would not take the large vessels of modern
draft. Now it had no trade, no life, no anything except a bishop and a
great monastery, a few retired officials from Havana. A large settlement
of ragged thatched huts and clay hovels lay to the west of the
cathedral. The Casa Riego was an enormous palace, with windows like
loopholes, facing the shore. Don Balthasar practically owned the whole
town and all the surrounding country, and, except for his age and
feebleness, might have been an absolute monarch.
He had lived in Havana with great splendour, but now, in his failing
years, had retired to his palace, from which he had since only twice set
foot. This had only been when official ceremonies of extreme importance,
such as the international execution of pirates that I had witnessed,
demanded the presence of someone of his eminence and lustre. Otherwise
he had lived shut up in his palace. There was nowhere in Rio Medio for
him to go to.
He was said to regard his intendente O'Brien as the apple of his eye,
and had used his influence to get him made one of the judges of the
Marine Court. The old Don himself probably knew nothing about the
pirates. The inlet had been used by buccaneers ever since the days of
Columbus; but they were below his serious consideration, even if he had
ever seen them, which Tomas Castro doubted.
There was no doubting the sincerity of his tone.
"Oh, you thought _I_ was a pirate!" he muttered. "For a day--yes--to
oblige a Riego, my friend--yes! Moreover, I hate that familiar of the
priests, that soft-spoken Juez, intendente, intriguer--that O'Brien. A
sufferer for the faith! _Que picardia!_ Have I, too, not suffered for
the faith? I am the trusted humble friend of the Riegos. But, perhaps,
you think Don Balthasar is himself a pirate! He who has in his veins the
blood of the Cid Campeador; whose ancestors have owned half this island
since the days of Christopher himself. . . ."
"Has he nothing whatever to do with it?" I asked. "After all, it goes on
in his own town."
"Oh, you English," he muttered; "you are all mad! Would one of your
great nobles be a pirate? Perhaps they would--God knows. Alas, alas!" he
suddenly broke off, "when I think that my Carlos shall leave his bones
in this ungodly place. . . ."
I gave up questioning Tomas Castro; he was too much for me.
We entered the grim palace by the shore through an imposing archway, and
mounted a broad staircase. In a lofty room, giving off the upper gallery
round the central court of the Casa Riego, Carlos lay in a great bed.
I stood before him, having pushed aside Tomas Castro, who had been
cautiously scratching the great brilliant mahogany panels with a dirty
finger-nail.
"Damnation, Carlos!" I said. "This is the third of your treacheries.
What do you want with me?"
You might well have imagined he was a descendant of the Cid Campeador,
only to look at him lying there without a quiver of a feature, his face
stainlessly white, a little bluish in extreme lack of blood, with all
the nobility of death upon it, like an alabaster effigy of an old knight
in a cathedral. On the red-velvet hangings of the bed was an immense
coat-of-arms, worked in silk and surrounded by a collar, with the golden
sheep hanging from the ring. The shield was patched in with an immense
number of quarterings--lions rampant, leopards courant, fleurs de lis,
castles, eagles, hands, and arms. His eyes opened slowly, and his face
assumed an easy, languorous smile of immense pleasure.
"Ah, Juan," he said, "_se bienvenido_, be welcome, be welcome."
Castro caught me roughly by the shoulder, and gazed at me with blazing,
yellow eyes.
"You should not speak roughly to him," he said. "English beast! He is
dying."
"No, I won't speak roughly to him," I answered. "I see."
I did see. At first I had been suspicious; it might have been put on
to mollify me. But one could not put on that blueness of tinge, that
extra--nearly final--touch of the chisel to the lines round the nose,
that air of restfulness that nothing any more could very much disturb.
There was no doubt that Carlos was dying.
"Treacheries--no. You had to come," he said suddenly. "I need you. I am
glad, dear Juan." He waved a thin long hand a little towards mine. "You
shall not long be angry. It had to be done--you must forgive the means."
His air was so gay, so uncomplaining, that it was hard to believe it
came from him.
"You could not have acted worse if you had owed me a grudge, Carlos," I
said. "I want an explanation. But I don't want to kill you. . . ."
"Oh, no, oh, no," he said; "in a minute I will tell."
He dropped a gold ball into a silver basin that was by the bedside,
and it sounded like a great bell. A nun in a sort of coif that took the
lines of a buffalo's horns glided to him with a gold cup, from which he
drank, raising himself a little. Then the religious went out with Tomas
Castro, who gave me a last ferocious glower from his yellow eyes. Carlos
smiled.
"They try to make my going easy," he said. "_Vamos!_ The pillow is
smooth for him who is well loved." He shut his eyes. Suddenly he said,
"Why do you, alone, hate me, John Kemp? What have I done?"
"God knows I don't hate you, Carlos," I answered.
"You have always mistrusted me," he said. "And yet I am, perhaps, nearer
to you than many of your countrymen, and I have always wished you well,
and you have always hated and mistrusted me. From the very first you
mistrusted me. Why?"
It was useless denying it; he had the extraordinary incredulity of his
kind. I remembered how I had idolized him as a boy at home.
"Your brother-in-law, my cousin Rooksby, was the very first to believe
that I was a pirate. I, a vulgar pirate! I, Carlos Riego! Did he not
believe it--and you?" He glanced a little ironically, and lifted a thin
white finger towards the great coat-of-arms. "That sort of thing," he
said, "_amigo mio_, does not allow one to pick pockets." He suddenly
turned a little to one side, and fixed me with his clear eyes. "My
friend," he said, "if I told you that Rooksby and your greatest Kent
earls carried smugglers' tubs, you would say I was an ignorant fool.
Yet they, too, are magistrates. The only use I have ever made of these
ruffians was to-day, to bring you here. It was a necessity. That O'Brien
had gone on to take you when you arrived. You would never have come
alive out of Havana. I was saving your life. Once there, you could never
have escaped from that man."
I saw suddenly that this might be the truth. There had been something
friendly in Tomas Castro's desire not to compromise me before the people
on board the ship. Obviously he had been acting a part, with a visible
contempt for the pilfering that he could not prevent. He _had_ been sent
merely to bring me to Rio Medio.
"I never disliked you," I protested. "I do not understand what you mean.
All I know is, that you have used me ill--outrageously ill. You have
saved my life now, you say. That may be true; but why did you ever make
me meet with that man O'Brien?"
"And even for that you should not hate me," he said, shaking his head on
the silk pillows. "I never wished you anything but well, Juan, because
you were honest and young, of noble blood, good to look upon; you had
done me and my friend good service, to your own peril, when my own
cousin had deserted me. And I loved you for the sake of another. I loved
your sister. We have a proverb: 'A man is always good to the eyes in
which the sister hath found favour.'"
I looked at him in amazement. "You loved Veronica!" I said. "But
Veronica is nothing at all. There was the Senorita."
He smiled wearily. "Ah, the Senorita; she is very well; a man could love
her, too. But we do not command love, my friend."
I interrupted him. "I want to know why you brought me here. Why did you
ask me to come here when we were on board the _Thames?_"
He answered sadly, "Ah, then! Because I loved your sister, and you
reminded me always of her. But that is all over now--done with for
good.... I have to address myself to dying as it becomes one of my
race to die." He smiled at me. "One must die in peace to die like a
Christian. Life has treated me rather scurvily, only the gentleman must
not repine like a poor man of low birth. I would like to do a good turn
to the friend who is the brother of his sister, to the girl-cousin whom
I do not love with love, but whom I understand with affection--to the
great inheritance that is not for my wasted hands."
I looked out of the open door of the room. There was the absolutely
quiet inner court of the palace, a colonnade of tall square pillars,
in the centre the little thread of a fountain. Round the fountain were
tangled bushes of flowers--enormous geraniums, enormous hollyhocks, a
riot of orange marigolds.
"How like our flowers at home!" I said mechanically.
"I brought the seeds from there--from your sister's garden," he said.
I felt horribly hipped. "But all these things tell me nothing," I said,
with an attempt towards briskness.
"I have to husband my voice." He closed his eyes.
There is no saying that I did not believe him; I did, every word. I had
simply been influenced by Rooks-by's suspicions. I had made an ass of
myself over that business on board the _Thames_. The passage of Carles
and his faithful Tomas had been arranged for by some agent of O'Brien in
London, who was in communication with Ramon and Rio Medio. The same man
had engaged Nichols, that Nova Scotian mate, an unscrupulous sailor,
for O'Brien's service. He was to leave the ship in Kingston, and report
himself to Ramon, who furnished him with the means to go to Cuba. That
man, seeing me intimate with two persons going to Rio Medio, had got it
into his head that I was going there, too. And, very naturally, he did
not want an Englishman for a witness of his doings.
But Rooksby's behaviour, his veiled accusations, his innuendoes against
Carlos, had influenced me more than anything else. I remembered a
hundred little things now that I knew that Carlos loved Veronica. I
understood Rooksby's jealous impatience, Veronica's friendly glances at
Carlos, the fact that Rooksby had proposed to Veronica on the very day
that Carlos had come again into the neighbourhood with the runners after
him. I saw very well that there was no more connection between the
Casa Riego and the rascality of Rio Medio than there was between
Ralph himself and old drunken Rangsley on Hythe beach. There was less,
perhaps.
"Ah, you have had a sad life, my Carlos," I said, after a long time.
He opened his eyes, and smiled his brave smile. "Ah, as to that," he
said, "one kept on. One has to husband one's voice, though, and not
waste it over lamentations. I have to tell you--ah, yes...." He paused
and fixed his eyes upon me. "Figure to yourself that this house, this
town, an immense part of this island, much even yet in Castile itself,
much gold, many slaves, a great name--a very great name--are what I
shall leave behind me. Now think that there is a very noble old man, one
who has been very great in the world, who shall die very soon; then all
these things shall go to a young girl. That old man is very old, is a
little foolish with age; that young girl knows very little of the world,
and is very passionate, very proud, very helpless.
"Add, now, to that a great menace--a very dangerous, crafty, subtle
personage, who has the ear of that old man; whose aim it is to become
the possessor of that young girl and of that vast wealth. The old man
is much subject to the other. Old men are like that, especially the very
great. They have many things to think of; it is necessary that they
rely on somebody. I am, in fact, speaking of my uncle and the man called
O'Brien. You have seen him." Carlos spoke in a voice hardly above a
whisper, but he stuck to his task with indomitable courage. "If I die
and leave him here, he will have my uncle to himself. He is a terrible
man. Where would all that great fortune go? For the re-establishing of
the true faith in Ireland? _Quien sabe?_ Into the hands of O'Brien, at
any rate. And the daughter, too--a young girl--she would be in the hands
of O'Brien, too. If I could expect to live, it might be different. That
is the greatest distress of all." He swallowed painfully, and put his
frail hand on to the white ruffle at his neck. "I was in great trouble
to find how to thwart this O'Brien. My uncle went to Kingston because
he was persuaded it was his place to see that the execution of those
unhappy men was conducted with due humanity. O'Brien came with us as his
secretary. I was in the greatest horror of mind. I prayed for guidance.
Then my eyes fell upon you, who were pressed against our very carriage
wheels. It was like an answer to my prayers." Carlos suddenly reached
out and caught my hand.
I thought he was wandering, and I was immensely sorry for him. He looked
at me so wistfully with his immense eyes. He continued to press my hand.
"But when I saw you," he went on, after a time, "it had come into my
head, 'That is the man who is sent in answer to my prayers.' I knew it,
I say. If you could have my cousin and my lands, I thought, it would be
like my having your sister--not quite, but good enough for a man who is
to die in a short while, and leave no trace but a marble tomb. Ah, one
desires very much to leave a mark under God's blessed sun, and to
be able to know a little how things will go after one is dead.... I
arranged the matter very quickly in my mind. There was the difficulty of
O'Brien. If I had said, 'Here is the man who is to marry my cousin,' he
would have had you or me murdered; he would stop at nothing. So I said
to him very quietly, 'Look here, Senor Secretary, that is the man you
have need of to replace your Nichols--a devil to fight; but I think
he will not consent without a little persuasion. Decoy him, then, to
Ramon's, and do your persuading.' O'Brien was very glad, because he
thought that at last I was coming to take an interest in his schemes,
and because it was bringing humiliation to an Englishman. And Sera-phina
was glad, because I had often spoken of you with enthusiasm, as very
fearless and very honourable. Then I made that man Ramon decoy you,
thinking that the matter would be left to me."
That was what Carlos had expected. But O'Brien, talking with Ramon, had
heard me described as an extreme Separationist so positively that he had
thought it safe to open himself fully. He must have counted, also, on my
youth, my stupidity, or my want of principle. Finding out his mistake,
he very soon made up his mind how to act; and Carlos, fearing that worse
might befall me, had let him.
But when the young girl had helped me to escape, Carlos, who understood
fully the very great risks I ran in going to Havana in the ship that
picked me up, had made use of O'Brien's own picaroons to save me from
him. That was the story.
Towards the end his breath came fast and short; there was a flush on his
face; his eyes gazed imploringly at me.
"You will stay here, now, till I die, and then--I want you to
protect.------" He fell back on the pillows.
PART THIRD -- CASA RIEGO
CHAPTER ONE
All this is in my mind now, softened by distance, by the tenderness of
things remembered--the wonderful dawn of life, with all the mystery and
promise of the young day breaking amongst heavy thunder-clouds. At the
time I was overwhelmed--I can't express it otherwise. I felt like a
man thrown out to sink or swim, trying to keep his head above water. Of
course, I did not suspect Carlos now; I was ashamed of ever having
done so. I had long ago forgiven him his methods. "In a great need,
you must," he had said, looking at me anxiously, "recur to desperate
remedies." And he was going to die. I had made no answer, and only hung
my head--not in resentment, but in doubt of my strength to bear the
burden of the great trust that this man whom I loved for his gayety, his
recklessness and romance, was going to leave in my inexperienced hands.
He had talked till, at last exhausted, he sank back gently on the
pillows of the enormous bed emblazoned like a monument. I went out,
following a gray-headed negro, and the nun glided in, and stood at the
foot with her white hands folded patiently.
"Senor!" I heard her mutter reproachfully to the invalid.
"Do not scold a poor sinner, Dona Maria," he addressed her feebly, with
valiant jocularity. "The days are not many now."
The strangeness and tremendousness of what was happening came over me
very strongly whilst, in a large chamber with barred loopholes, I was
throwing off the rags in which I had entered this house. The night had
come already, and I was putting on some of Carlos' clothes by the many
flames of candles burning in a tall bronze candelabrum, whose three legs
figured the paws of a lion. And never, since I had gone on the road to
wait for the smugglers, and been choked by the Bow Street runners, had
I remembered so well the house in which I was born. It was as if, till
then, I had never felt the need to look back. But now, like something
romantic and glamorous, there came before me Veronica's sweet, dim
face, my mother's severe and resolute countenance. I had need of all her
resoluteness now. And I remembered the figure of my father in the big
chair by the ingle, powerless and lost in his search for rhymes. He
might have understood the romance of my situation.
It grew upon me as I thought. Don Balthasar, I understood, was apprised
of my arrival. As in a dream, I followed the old negro, who had
returned to the door of my room. It grew upon me in the silence of this
colonnaded court. We walked along the upper gallery; his cane tapped
before me on the tessellated pavement; below, the water splashed in the
marble basins; glass lanthorns hung glimmering between the pillars and,
in wrought silver frames, lighted the broad white staircase. Under the
inner curve of the vaulted gateway a black-faced man on guard, with
a bell-mouthed gun, rose from a stool at our passing. I thought I saw
Castro's peaked hat and large cloak flit in the gloom into which fell
the light from the small doorway of a sort of guardroom near the closed
gate. We continued along the arcaded walk; a double curtain was drawn to
right and left before me, while my guide stepped aside.
In a vast white apartment three black figures stood about a central
glitter of crystal and silver. At once the aged, slightly mechanical
voice of Don Balthasar rose thinly, putting himself and his house at my
disposition.
The formality of movements, of voices, governed and checked the
unbounded emotions of my wonder. The two ladies sank, with a rustle of
starch and stiff silks, in answer to my profound bow. I had just enough
control over myself to accomplish that, but mentally I was out of
breath; and when I felt the slight, trembling touch of Don Balthasar's
hand resting on my inclined head, it was as if I had suddenly become
aware for a moment of the earth's motion. The hand was gone; his face
was averted, and a corpulent priest, all straight and black below his
rosy round face, had stepped forward to say a Latin grace in solemn
tones that wheezed a little. As soon as he had done he withdrew with a
circular bow to the ladies, to Don Balthasar, who inclined his silvery
head. His lifeless voice propounded:
"Our excellent Father Antonio, in his devotion, dines by the bedside
of our beloved Carlos." He sighed. The heavy carvings of his chair
rose upright at his back; he sat with his head leaning forward over his
silver plate. A heavy silence fell. Death hovered over that table--and
also, as it were, the breath of past ages. The multitude of lights, the
polished floor of costly wood, the bare whiteness of walls wainscotted
with marble, the vastness of the room, the imposing forms of furniture,
carved heavily in ebony, impressed me with a sense of secular and
austere magnificence. For centuries there had always been a Riego living
in this fortress-like palace, ruling this portion of the New World with
the whole majesty of his race. And I thought of the long, loop-holed,
buttressed walls that this abode of noble adventurers presented
foursquare to the night outside, standing there by the seashore like a
tomb of warlike glories. They built their houses thus, centuries ago,
when the bands of buccaneers, indomitable and atrocious, had haunted
their conquest with a reminder of mortality and weakness.
It was a tremendous thing for me, this dinner. The portly duenna on my
left had a round eye and an irritated, parrot-like profile, crowned by
a high comb, a head shaded by black lace. I dared hardly lift my eyes
to the dark and radiant presence facing me across a table furniture that
was like a display of treasure.
But I did look. She was the girl of the lizard, the girl of the dagger,
and, in the solemnity of the silence, she was like a fabulous apparition
from a half-forgotten tale. I watched covertly the youthful grace of her
features. The curve of her cheek filled me with delight. From time to
time she shook the heavy clusters of her curls, and I was amazed, as
though I had never before seen a woman's hair. Each parting of her lips
was a distinct anticipation of a great felicity; when she said a few
words to me, I felt an inward trembling. They were indifferent words.
Had she forgotten she was the girl with the dagger? And the old Don?
What did that old man know? What did he think? What did he mean by that
touch of a blessing on my head? Did _he_ know how I had come to his
house? But every turn of her head troubled my thoughts. The movements of
her hands made me forget myself. The gravity of her eyes above the smile
of her lips suggested ideas of adoration.
We were served noiselessly. A battalion of young lusty negroes, in blue
jackets laced with silver, walked about barefooted under the command of
the old major-domo. He, alone, had white silk stockings, and shoes with
silver buckles; his wide-skirted maroon velvet coat, with gold on the
collar and cuffs, hung low about his thin shanks; and, with a long ebony
staff in his hand, he directed the service from behind Don Balthasar's
chair. At times he bent towards his master's ear. Don Balthasar answered
with a murmur: and those two faces brought close together, one like a
noble ivory carving, the other black with the mute pathos of the African
faces, seemed to commune in a fellowship of age, of things far off,
remembered, lived through together. There was something mysterious and
touching in this violent contrast, toned down by the near approach to
the tomb--the brotherhood of master and slave.
At a given moment an enormous iron key was brought in on a silver
salver, and, bending over the chair, the gray-headed negro laid it by
Don Balthasar's plate.
"Don Carlos' orders," he muttered.
The old Don seemed to wake up; a little colour mounted to his cheeks.
"There was a time, young _caballero_, when the gates of Casa Riego stood
open night and day to the griefs and poverty of the people, like the
doors of a church--and as respected. But now it seems . . ."
He mumbled a little peevishly, but seemed to recollect himself. "The
safety of his guest is like the breath of life to a Castilian," he
ended, with a benignant but attentive look at me.
He rose, and we passed out through the double lines of the servants
ranged from table to door. By the splash of the fountain, on a little
round table between two chairs, stood a many-branched candlestick.
The duenna sat down opposite Don Balthasar. A multitude of stars was
suspended over the breathless peace of the court.
"Senorita," I began, mustering all my courage, and all my Spanish, "I do
not know------"
She was walking by my side with upright carriage and a nonchalant step,
and shut her fan smartly.
"Don Carlos himself had given me the dagger," she said rapidly.
The fan flew open; a touch of the wind fanning her person came faintly
upon my cheek with a suggestion of delicate perfume.
She noticed my confusion, and said, "Let us walk to the end, Senor."
The old man and the duenna had cards in their hands now. The intimate
tone of her words ravished me into the seventh heaven.
"Ah," she said, when we were out of ear-shot, "I have the spirit of my
house; but I am only a weak girl. We have taken this resolution because
of your _hidal-guidad_, because you are our kinsman, because you are
English. _Ay de mi!_ Would I had been a man. My father needs a son in
his great, great age. Poor father! Poor Don Carlos!"
There was the catch of a sob in the shadow of the end gallery. We turned
back, and the undulation of her walk seemed to throw me into a state of
exaltation.
"On the word of an Englishman------" I began.
The fan touched my arm. The eyes of the duenna glittered over the cards.
"This woman belongs to that man, too," muttered Seraphina. "And yet she
used to be faithful--almost a mother. _Misericordia!_ Senor, there is no
one in this unhappy place that he has not bought, corrupted, frightened,
or bent to his will--to his madness of hate against England. Of our poor
he has made a rabble. The bishop himself is afraid."
Such was the beginning of our first conversation in this court
suggesting the cloistered peace of a convent. We strolled to and fro;
she dropped her eyelids, and the agitation of her mind, pictured in the
almost fierce swiftness of her utterance, made a wonderful contrast to
the leisurely rhythm of her movements, marked by the slow beating of
the fan. The retirement of her father from the world after her mother's
death had made a great solitude round his declining years. Yes, that
sorrow, and the base intrigues of that man--a fugitive, a hanger-on
of her mother's family--recommended to Don Balthasar's grace by her
mother's favour. Yes! He had, before she died, thrown his baneful
influence even upon that saintly spirit, by the piety of his practices
and these sufferings for his faith he always paraded. His faith! Oh,
hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite! His only faith was hate--the hate of
England. He would sacrifice everything to it. He would despoil and ruin
his greatest benefactors, this fatal man!
"Senor, my cousin," she said picturesquely, "he would, if he could, drop
poison into every spring of clear water in your country. . . . Smile,
Don Juan."
Her repressed vehemence had held me spellbound, and the silvery little
burst of laughter ending her fierce tirade had the bewildering effect of
a crash on my mind. The other two looked up from their cards.
"I pretend to laugh to deceive that woman," she explained quickly. "I
used to love her."
She had no one now about her she could trust or love. It was as if
the whole world were blind to the nefarious nature of that man. He had
possessed himself of her little father's mind. I glanced towards the old
Don, who at that moment was brokenly taking a pinch of snuff out of
a gold snuff-box, while the duenna, very sallow and upright, waited,
frowning loftily at her cards.
"It seemed as if nothing could restrain that man," Seraphina's voice
went on by my side, "neither fear nor gratitude." He seemed to cast a
spell upon people. He was the plenipotentiary of a powerful religious
order--no matter. Don Carlos knew these things better than she did. He
had the ear of the Captain-General through that. "Sh! But the intrigues,
the intrigues!" I saw her little hand clenched on the closed fan. There
were no bounds to his audacity. He wasted their wealth. "The audacity!"
He had overawed her father's mind; he claimed descent from his Irish
kings, he who------ "Senor, my English cousin, he even dares aspire to
my person."
The game of cards was over.
"Death rather," she let fall in a whisper of calm resolution.
She dropped me a deep curtsey. Servants were ranging themselves in a
row, holding upright before their black faces wax lights in tall silver
candlesticks inherited from the second Viceroy of Mexico. I bowed
profoundly, with indignation on her behalf and horror in my breast;
and, turning away from me, she sank low, bending her head to receive her
father's blessing. The major-domo preceded the _cortege_. The two women
moved away with an ample rustling of silk, and with lights carried on
each side of their black, stiff figures. Before they had disappeared up
the wide staircase, Don Balthasar, who had stood perfectly motionless
with his old face over his snuff-box, seemed to wake up, and made in the
air a hasty sign of the cross after his daughter.
They appeared again in the upper gallery between the columns. I saw
her head, draped in lace, carried proudly, with the white flower in her
hair. I raised my eyes. All my being seemed to strive upwards in that
glance. Had she turned her face my way just a little? Illusion! And
the double door above closed with an echoing sound along the empty
galleries. She had disappeared.
Don Balthasar took three turns in the courtyard, no more. It was
evidently a daily custom. When he withdrew his hand from my arm to tap
his snuff-box, we stood still till he was ready to slip it in again.
This was the strangest part of it, the most touching, the most
startling--that he should lean like this on me, as if he had done it for
years. Before me there must have been somebody else. Carlos? Carlos, no
doubt. And in this placing me in that position there was apparent the
work of death, the work of life, of time, the pathetic realization of an
inevitable destiny. He talked a little disjointedly, with the uncertain
swaying of a shadow on his thoughts, as if the light of his mind had
flickered like an expiring lamp. I remember that once he asked me, in a
sort of senile worry, whether I had ever heard of an Irish king called
Brian Boru; but he did not seem to attach any importance to my reply,
and spoke no more till he said good-night at the door of my chamber.
He went on to his apartment, surrounded by lights and preceded by his
major-domo, who walked as bowed with age as himself; but the African had
a firmer step.
I watched him go; there was about his progress in state something
ghostlike and royal, an old-time, decayed majesty. It was as if he had
arisen before me after a hundred years' sleep in his retreat--that man
who, in his wild and passionate youth, had endangered the wealth of the
Riegos, had been the idol of the Madrid populace, and a source of dismay
to his family. He had carried away, _vi et armis_, a nun from a convent,
incurring the enmity of the Church and the displeasure of his sovereign.
He had sacrificed all his fortune in Europe to the service of his king,
had fought against the French, had a price put upon his head by a
special proclamation. He had known passion, power, war, exile, and love.
He had been thanked by his returned king, honoured for his wisdom, and
crushed with sorrow by the death of his young wife--Seraphina's mother.
What a life! And what was my arm--my arm on which he had leaned in his
decay? I looked at it with a sort of surprise, dubiously. What was
expected of it? I asked myself. Would it have the strength? Ah, let
_her_ only lean on it!
It seemed to me that I would have the power to shake down heavy pillars
of stone, like Samson, in her service; to reach up and take the stars,
one by one, to lay at her feet. I heard a sigh. A shadow appeared in the
gallery.
The door of my room was open. Leaning my back against the balustrade, I
saw the black figure of the Father Antonio, muttering over his breviary,
enter the space of the light.
He crossed himself, and stopped with a friendly, "You are taking the
air, my son. The night is warm." He was rubicund, and his little eyes
looked me over with priestly mansuetude.
I said it was warm indeed. I liked him instinctively.
He lifted his eyes to the starry sky. "The orbs are shining
excessively," he said; then added, "To the greater glory of God. One is
never tired of contemplating this sublime spectacle."
"How is Don Carlos, your reverence?" I asked.
"My beloved penitent sleeps," he answered, peering at me benevolently;
"he reposes. Do you know, young _caballero_, that I have been a prisoner
of war in your country, and am acquainted with Londres? I was chaplain
of the ship _San Jose_ at the battle of Trafalgar. On my soul, it is,
indeed, a blessed, fertile country, full of beauty and of well-disposed
hearts. I have never failed since to say every day an especial prayer
for its return to our holy mother, the Church. Because I love it."
I said nothing to this, only bowing; and he laid a short, thick hand on
my shoulder.
"May your coming amongst us, my son, bring calmness to a Christian soul
too much troubled with the affairs of this world." He sighed, nodded to
me with a friendly, sad smile, and began to mutter his prayers as he
went.
CHAPTER TWO
Don Balthasar accepted my presence without a question. Perhaps he
fancied he had invited me; of my manner of coming he was ignorant, of
course. O'Brien, who had gone on to Havana in the ship which had landed
the Riegos in Rio Medio, gave no sign of life. And yet, on the arrival
of the _Breeze_, he must have found out I was no longer on board. I
forgot the danger suspended over my head. For a fortnight I lived as if
in a dream.
"What is the action you want me to take, Carlos?"
I asked one day.
Propped up with pillows, he looked at me with the big eyes of his
emaciation.
"I would like best to see you marry my cousin. Once before a woman of
our race had married an Englishman. She had been happy. English things
last forever--English peace, English power, English fidelity. It is a
country of much serenity, of order, of stable affection. . . ."
His voice was very weak and full of faith. I remained silent,
overwhelmed at this secret of my innermost heart, voiced by his
bloodless lips--as if a dream had come to pass, as if a miracle had
taken place. He added, with an indefinable smile of an almost unearthly
wistfulness:
"I would have married your sister, my Juan."
He had on him the glamour of things English--of English power emerging
from the dust of wars and revolution; of England stable and undismayed,
like a strong man who had kept his feet in the tottering of secular
edifices shaken to their foundations by an earthquake. It was as if for
him that were something fine, something romantic, just as for me romance
had always seemed to be embodied in his features, in his glance, and to
live in the air he breathed. On the other side of the bed the old Don,
lost in a high-backed armchair, remained plunged in that meditation of
the old which resembles sleep, as sleep resembles death. The priest,
lighted up by the narrow, bright streak of the window, was reading his
breviary through a pair of enormous spectacles. The white coif of the
nun hovered in distant corners of the room.
We were constantly talking of O'Brien. He was the only subject of all
our conversations; and when Carlos inveighed against the Intendente, the
old Don nodded sadly in his chair. He was dishonouring the name of the
Riegos, Carlos would exclaim feebly, turning his head towards his uncle.
His uncle's own province, the name of his own town, stood for a refuge
of the scum of the Antilles. It wras a shameful sanctuary. Every
ruffian, rascal, murderer, and thief of the West Indies had come to
think of this ancient and honourable town as a safe haven.
I myself could very well remember the Jamaica household expression, "The
Rio Medio piracies," and all these paragraphs in the home papers that
reached us a month old headed, "The Activity of the So-called Mexican
Privateers," and urging upon our Government the necessity of energetic
remonstrances in Madrid. "The fact, incredible as it may appear," said
the writers, "seeming to be that the nest of these Picaroons is actually
within the loyal dominions of the Spanish Crown." If Spain, our press
said, resented our recognition of South American independence, let it
do so openly, not by countenancing criminals. It was unworthy of a great
nation. "Our West Indian trade is being stabbed in the back," declaimed
the _Bristol Mirror_. "Where is our fleet?" it asked. "If the Cuban
authorities are unable or unwilling, let us take the matter in our own
hands."
There was a great deal of mystery about this peculiar outbreak of
lawlessness that seemed to be directed so pointedly against the British
trade. The town of Rio Medio was alluded to as one of the unapproachable
towns of the earth--closed, like the capital of Prester John to the
travellers, or Mecca to the infidels. Nobody I ever met in Jamaica had
set eyes on the place. The impression prevailed that no stranger could
come out of it alive. Incredible stories were told of it in the island,
and indignation at its existence grew at home and in the colonies.
Admiral Rowley, an old fighter, grown a bit lazy, no diplomatist
(the stories of his being venal, I take it, were simply abominable
calumnies), unable to get anything out of the Cuban authorities but
promises and lofty protestations, had made up his mind, under direct
pressure from home, to take matters into his own hands. His boat attack
had been a half-and-half affair, for all that. He intended, he had said,
to go to the bottom of the thing, and find out what there was in the
place; but he could not believe that anybody would dare offer resistance
to the boats of an English squadron. They were sent in as if for an
exploration rather than for an armed landing.
It ended in a disaster, and a sense of wonder had been added to the
mystery of the fabulous Rio Medio organization. The Cuban authorities
protested against the warlike operations attempted in a friendly
country; at the same time, they had delivered the seven pirates--the men
whom I saw hanged in Kingston. And Rowley was recalled home in disgrace.
It was my extraordinary fate to penetrate into this holy city of the
last organized piracy the world would ever know. I beheld it with my
eyes; I had stood on the point behind the very battery of guns which had
swept Rowley's boats out of existence.
The narrow entrance faced, across the water, the great portal of the
cathedral. Rio Medio had been a place of some splendour in its time. The
ruinous heavy buildings clung to the hillsides, and my eyes plunged into
a broad vista of an empty and magnificent street. Behind many of the
imposing and escutcheoned frontages there was nothing but heaps of
rubble; the footsteps of rare passers-by woke lonely echoes, and strips
of grass outlined in parallelograms the flagstones of the roadway. The
Casa Riego raised its buttressed and loop-holed bulk near the shore,
resembling a defensive outwork; on my other hand the shallow bay, vast,
placid, and shining, extended itself behind the strip of coast like an
enormous lagoon. The fronds of palm-clusters dotted the beach over the
glassy shimmer of the far distance. The dark and wooded slopes of the
hills closed the view inland on every side.
Under the palms the green masses of vegetation concealed the hovels of
the rabble. There were three so-called 'villages' at the bottom of the
bay; and that good Catholic and terrible man, Senor Juez O'Brien, could
with a simple nod send every man in them to the gallows.
The respectable population of Rio Medio, leading a cloistered existence
in the ruins of old splendour, used to call that thievish rabble
_Lugarenos_--villagers. They were sea-thieves, but they were dangerous.
At night, from these clusters of hovels surrounded by the banana
plantations, there issued a villainous noise, the humming of hived
scoundrels. Lights twinkled. One could hear the thin twanging of
guitars, uproarious songs, all the sounds of their drinking, singing,
gambling, quarrelling, love-making, squalor. Sometimes the long shriek
of a woman rent the air, or shouting tumults rose and subsided; while,
on the other side of the cathedral, the houses of the past, the houses
without life, showed no light and made no sound.
There would be no strollers on the beach in the daytime; the masts of
the two schooners (bought in the United States by O'Brien to make war
with on the British Empire) appeared like slender sticks far away up
the empty stretch of water; and that gathering of ruffians, thieves,
murderers, and runaway slaves slept in their noisome dens. Their habits
were obscene and nocturnal. Cruel without hardihood, and greedy without
courage, they were no skull-and-crossbones pirates of the old kind,
that, under the black flag, neither gave nor expected quarter. Their
usual practice was to hang in rowboats round some unfortunate ship
becalmed in sight of their coast, like a troop of vultures hopping about
the carcass of a dead buffalo on a plain. When they judged the thing was
fairly safe, they would attack with a great noise and show of ferocity;
do some hasty looting amongst the cargo; break into the cabins for
watches, wearing apparel, and so on; perpetrate at times some atrocity,
such as singeing the soles of some poor devil of a ship-master, when
they had positive information (from such affiliated helpers as Ramon,
the storekeeper in Jamaica) that there was coined money concealed on
board; and take themselves off to their sordid revels on shore, and to
hold auctions of looted property on the beach. These Were attended by
people from the interior of the province, and now and then even the
Havana dealers would come on the quiet to secure a few pieces of silk
or a cask or two of French wine. Tomas Castro could not mention them
without spitting in sign of contempt. And it was with that base crew
that O'Brien imagined himself to be making war on the British Empire!
In the time of Nichols it did look as if they were really becoming
enterprising. They had actually chased and boarded ships sixty miles out
at sea. It seems he had inspired them with audacity by means of kicks,
blows, and threats of instant death, after the manner of Bluenose
sailors. His long limbs, the cadaverous and menacing aspect, the strange
nasal ferocity of tone, something mocking and desperate in his aspect,
had persuaded them that this unique sort of heretic was literally in
league with the devil. He had been the most efficient of the successive
leaders O'Brien had imported to give some sort of effect to his warlike
operations. I laugh and wonder as I write these words; but the man did
look upon it as a war and nothing else. What he had had the audacity to
propose to me had been treason, not thieving. It had a glamour for him
which, he supposed, a Separationist (as I had the reputation of being)
could not fail to see. He was thinking of enlarging his activity, of
getting really in touch with the Mexican Junta of rebels. As he had
said, he needed a gentleman now. These were Carlos' surmises.
Before Nichols there had been a rather bloodthirsty Frenchman, but he
got himself stabbed in an _aguardiente_ shop for blaspheming the Virgin.
Nichols, as far as I could understand, had really grown scared at
O'Brien's success in repulsing Rowley's boats; he had mysteriously
disappeared, and neither of the two schooners had been out till the
day of my kidnapping, when Castro, by order of Carlos, had taken the
command. The freebooters of Rio Medio had returned to their cautious and
petty pilfering in boats, from such unlucky ships as the chance of the
weather had delivered into their hands. I heard, also, during my walks
with Castro (he attended me wrapped in his cloak, and with two pistols
in his belt), that there were great jealousies and bickerings amongst
that base populace. They were divided into two parties. For instance,
the rascals living in the easternmost village accepted tacitly the
leadership of a certain Domingo, a mulatto, keeper of a vile grogshop,
who was skilled in the art of throwing a knife to a great distance.
Man-uel-del-Popolo, the extraordinary _improvisador_ with the guitar,
was an aspirant for power with a certain following of his own. Words
could not express Castro's scorn for these fellows. _Ladrones!_ vermin
of the earth, scum of the sea, he called them.
His position, of course, was exceptional. A dependent of the Riegos,
a familiar of the Casa, he was infinitely removed from a Domingo or a
Manuel. He lived soberly, like a Spaniard, in some hut in the nearest of
the villages, with an old woman who swept the earth floor and cooked his
food at an outside fire--his _puchero_ and _tortillas_--and rolled for
him his provision of cigarettes for the day. Every morning he marched up
to the Casa, like a courtier, to attend on his king. I never saw him eat
or drink anything there. He leaned a shoulder against the wall, or sat
on the floor of the gallery with his short legs stretched out near the
big mahogany door of Carlos' room, with many cigarettes stuck behind
his ears and in the band of his hat. When these were gone he grubbed for
more in the depths of his clothing, somewhere near his skin. Puffs of
smoke issued from his pursed lips; and the desolation of his pose, the
sorrow of his round, wrinkled face, was so great that it seemed were he
to cease smoking, he would die of grief.
The general effect of the place was of vitality exhausted, of a body
calcined, of romance turned into stone. The still air, the hot sunshine,
the white beach curving around the deserted sheet of water, the sombre
green of the hills, had the motionlessness of things petrified,
the vividness of things painted, the sadness of things abandoned,
desecrated. And, as if alone intrusted with the guardianship of life's
sacred fire, I was moving amongst them, nursing my love for Sera-phina.
The words of Carlos were like oil upon a flame; it enveloped me from
head to foot with a leap. I had the physical sensation of breathing it,
of seeing it, of being at the same time driven on and restrained. One
moment I strode blindly over the sand, the next I stood still; and
Castro, coming up panting, would remark from behind that, on such a hot
day as this, it was a shame to disturb even a dog sleeping in the shade.
I had the feeling of absolute absorption into one idea. I was ravaged by
a thought. It was as if I had never before imagined, heard spoken of, or
seen a woman.
It was true. She was a revelation to my eye and my ear, as much as to my
heart and mind. Indeed, I seemed never before to have seen a woman. Whom
had I seen? Veronica? We had been too poor, and my mother too proud, to
keep up a social intercourse with our neighbours; the village girls had
been devoid of even the most rustic kind of charm; the people were too
poor to be handsome. I had never been tempted to look at a woman's face;
and the manner of my going from home is known. In Jamaica, sharing with
an exaggerated loyalty the unpopularity of the Mac-donalds, I had led
a lonely life; for I had no taste for their friends' society, and the
others, after a time, would have nothing to do with me. I had made a
sort of hermitage for myself out of a house in a distant plantation, and
sometimes I would see no white face for whole weeks together. She was
the first woman to me--a strange new being, a marvel as great as Eve
herself to Adam's wondering awakening.
It may be that a close intimacy stands in the way of love springing up
between two young people, but in our case it was different. My passion
seemed to spring from our understanding, because the understanding was
in the face of danger. We were like two people in a slowly sinking
ship; the feeling of the abyss under our feet was our bond, not the real
comprehension of each other. Apart from that, she remained to me always
unattainable and romantic?--unique, with all the unexpressed promises
of love such as no world had ever known. And naturally, because for
me, hitherto, the world had held no woman. She was an apparition of
dreams--the girl with the lizard, the girl with the dagger, a wonder to
stretch out my hands to from afar; and yet I was permitted to whisper
intimately to this my dream, to this vision. We had to put our heads
close together, talking of the enemy and of the shadow over the
house; while under our eyes Carlos waited for death, made cruel by his
anxieties, and the old Don walked in the darkness of his accumulated
years.
As to me, what was I to her?
Carlos, in a weak voice, and holding her hand with a feeble and
tenacious grasp, had told her repeatedly that the English cousin was
ready to offer up his life to her happiness in this world. Many a time
she would turn her glance upon me--not a grateful glance, but, as it
were, searching and pensive--a glance of penetrating candour, a young
girl's glance, that, by its very trustfulness, seems to look one through
and through.
And then the sense of my unworthiness made me long for her love as a
sinner, in his weakness, longs for the saving grace.
"Our English cousin is worthy of his great nation. He is very brave, and
very chivalrous to a poor girl," she would say softly.
One day, I remember, going out of Carlos' room, she had just paused on
the threshold for an almost imperceptible moment, the time to murmur,
with feeling, "May Heaven reward you, Don Juan." This sound, faint and
enchanting, like a breath of sweet wind, staggered me. Castro, sitting
outside as usual, had scrambled to his feet and stood by, hat in hand,
his head bent slightly with saturnine deference. She smiled at him. I
think she felt kindly towards the tubby little bandit of a fellow. After
all, there was something touching and pathetic in his mournful vigil
at the door of our radiant Carlos. I could have embraced that figure of
grotesque and truculent devotion. Had she not smiled upon him?
The rest of that memorable day I spent in a state of delightful
distraction, as if I had been ravished into the seventh heaven, and
feared to be cast out again presently, as my unworthiness deserved. What
if it were possible, after all?--this, what Carlos wished, what he had
said. The heavens shook; the constellations above the court of Casa
Riego trembled at the thought.
Carlos fought valiantly. There were days when his courage seemed to
drive the grim presence out of the chamber, where Father Antonio with
his breviary, and the white coif of the nun, seemed the only reminders
of illness and mortality. Sometimes his voice was very strong, and a
sort of hopefulness lighted his wasted features. Don Balthasar paid
many visits to his nephew in the course of each day. He sat apparently
attentive, and nodding at the name of O'Brien. Then Carlos would talk
against O'Brien from amongst his pillows as if inspired, till the old
man, striking the floor with his gold-headed cane, would exclaim, in a
quavering voice, that he, alone, had made him, had raised him up from
the dust, and could abase him to the dust again. He would instantly
go to Havana; orders would be given to Cesar for the journey this very
moment. He would then take a pinch of snuff with shaky energy, and lean
back in the armchair. Carlos would whisper to me, "He will never leave
the Casa again," and an air of solemn, brooding helplessness would fall
upon the funereal magnificence of the room. Presently we would hear the
old Don muttering dotingly to himself the name of Seraphina's mother,
the young wife of his old days, so saintly, and snatched away from him
in punishment of his early sinfulness. It was impossible that she
should have been deceived in Don Patricio (O'Brien's Christian name was
Patrick). The intendente was a man of great intelligence, and full of
reverence for her memory. Don Balthasar admitted that he himself was
growing old; and, besides, there was that sorrow of his life. . . . He
had been fortunate in his affliction to have a man of his worth by
his side. There might have been slight irregularities, faults of youth
(O'Brien was five-and-forty if a day). The archbishop himself was
edified by the life of the upright judge--all Havana, all the island.
The intendente's great zeal for the House might have led him into an
indiscretion or two. So many years now, so many years. A noble himself.
Had we heard of an Irish king? A king . . . king... he could not
recall the name at present. It might be well to hear what a man of such
abilities had to say for himself.
Carlos and I looked at each other silently. "And his life hangs on a
thread," whispered the dying man with something like despair.
The crisis of all these years of plotting would come the moment the
old Don closed his eyes. Meantime, why was it that O'Brien did not show
himself in Rio Medio? What was it that kept him in Havana?
"Already I do not count, my Juan," Carlos would say. "And he prepares
all things for the day of my uncle's death."
The dark ways of that man were inscrutable. He must have known, of
course, that I was in Rio Medio. His presence was to be feared, and his
absence itself was growing formidable.
"But what do you think he will do? How do you think he will act?" I
would ask, a little bewildered by my responsibility.
Carlos could not tell precisely. It was not till some time after his
arrival from Europe that he became clearly aware of all the extent of
that man's ambition. At the same time, he had realized all his power.
That man aimed at nothing less than the whole Riego fortune, and, of
course, through Seraphina. I would feel a rage at this--a sort of rage
that made my head spin as if the ground had reeled. "He would have found
means of getting rid of me if he had not seen I was not long for this
world," Carlos would say. He had gained an unlimited ascendency over his
uncle's mind; he had made a solitude round this solemn dotage in which
ended so much power, a great reputation, a stormy life of romance and
passion--so picturesque and excessive even in his old man's love,
whose after-effect, as though the work of a Nemesis resenting so much
brilliance, was casting a shadow upon the fate of his daughter.
Small, fair, plump, concealing his Irish vivacity of intelligence under
the taciturn gravity of a Spanish lawyer, and backed by the influence
of two noble houses, O'Brien had attained to a remarkable reputation of
sagacity and unstained honesty. Hand in glove with the clergy, one of
the judges of the Marine Court, procurator to the cathedral chapter, he
had known how to make himself so necessary to the highest in the land
that everybody but the very highest looked upon him with fear. His
occult influence was altogether out of proportion to his official
position. His plans were carried out with an unswerving tenacity
of purpose. Carlos believed him capable of anything but a vulgar
peculation. He had been reduced to observe his action quietly, hampered
by the weakness of ill-health. As an instance of O'Brien's methods, he
related to me the manner in which, faithful to his purpose of making a
solitude about the Riegos, he had contrived to prevent overtures for an
alliance from the Salazar family. The young man Don Vincente himself was
impossible, an evil liver, Carlos said, of dissolute habits. Still, to
have even that shadow of a rival out of the way, O'Brien took advantage
of a sanguinary affray between that man and one of his boon companions
about some famous guitar-player girl. The encounter having taken place
under the wall of a convent, O'Brien had contrived to keep Don Vincente
in prison ever since--not on a charge of murder (which for a young man
of that quality would have been a comparatively venial offence), but
of sacrilege. The Salazars were a powerful family, but he was strong
enough to risk their enmity. "Imagine that, Juan!" Carlos would exclaim,
closing his eyes. What had caused him the greatest uneasiness was the
knowledge that Don Balthasar had been induced lately to write some
letter to the archbishop in Havana. Carlos was afraid it was simply
an expression of affection and unbounded trust in his intendente,
practically dictated to the old man by O'Brien. "Do you not see, Juan,
how such a letter would strengthen his case, should he ask the guardians
for Seraphina's hand?" And perhaps he was appointed one of the
guardians himself. It was impossible to know what, were the testamentary
dispositions; Father Antonio, who had learned many things in the
confessional, could tell us nothing, but, when the matter was mentioned,
only rolled his eyes up to heaven in an alarming manner. It was
startling to think of all the unholy forces awakened by the temptation
of Seraphina's helplessness and her immense fortune. Incorruptible
himself, that man knew how to corrupt others. There might have been
combined in one dark intrigue the covetousness of religious orders, the
avarice of high officials--God knows what conspiracy--to help O'Brien's
ambition, his passions. He could make himself necessary; he could bribe;
he could frighten; he was able to make use of the highest in the land
and of the lowest, from the present Captain-General to the _Lugarenos_.
In Havana he had for him the reigning powers; in Rio Medio the lowest
outcasts of the island.
This last was the most dangerous aspect of his power for us, and
also his weakest point. This was the touch of something fanciful and
imaginative; a certain grim childishness in the idea of making war on
the British Empire; a certain disregard of risk; a bizarre illusion
of his hate for the abhorred Saxon. That he risked his position by his
connection with such a nest of scoundrels, there could be no doubt. It
was he who had given them such organization as they had, and he stood
between them and the law. But whatever might have been suspected of him,
he was cautious enough not to go too far. He never appeared personally;
his agents directed the action--men who came from Havana rather
mysteriously. They were of all sorts; some of them were friars. But the
rabble, who knew him really only as the intendente of the great man,
stood in the greatest dread of him. Who was it procured the release of
some of them who had got into trouble in Havana? The intendente. Who was
it who caused six of their comrades, who had been taken up on a matter
of street-brawling in the capital, to be delivered to the English
as pirates? Again, the intendente, the terrible man, the Juez, who
apparently had the power to pardon and condemn.
In this way he was most dangerous to us in Rio Medio. He had that
rabble at his beck and call. He could produce a rising of cut-throats by
lifting his little finger. He was not very likely to do that, however.
He was intriguing in Havana--but how could we unmask him there? "He has
cut us off from the world," Carlos would say. "It is so, my Juan, that,
if I tried to write, no letter of mine would reach its destination; it
would fall into his hands. And if I did manage to make my voice heard,
he would appeal to my uncle himself in his defence."
Besides, to whom could he write?--who would believe him? O'Brien would
deny everything, and go on his way. He had been accepted too long, had
served too many people and known so many secrets. It was terrible.
And if I went myself to Havana, no one would believe me. But I should
disappear; they would never see me again. It was impossible to
unmask that man unless by a long and careful action. And for this
he--Carlos--had no time; and I--I had no standing, no relations, no
skill even....
"But what is my line of conduct, Carlos?" I insisted; while Father
Antonio, from whom Carlos had, of course, no secrets, stood by the bed,
his round, jolly face almost comical in its expression of compassionate
concern.
Carlos passed his thin, wasted hand over a white brow pearled with the
sweat of real anguish.
Carlos thought that while Don Balthasar lived, O'Brien would do nothing
to compromise his influence over him. Neither could I take any action;
I must wait and watch. O'Brien would, no doubt, try to remove me; but
as long as I kept within the Casa, he thought I should be safe. He
recommended me to try to please his cousin, and even found strength
to smile at my transports. Don Balthasar liked me for the sake of his
sister, who had been so happy in England. I was his kinsman and his
guest. From first to last, England, the idea of my country, of my home,
played a great part in my life then; it seemed to rest upon all our
thoughts. To me it was but my boyhood, the farm at the foot of the
downs--Rooksby's Manor--all within a small nook between the quarry by
the side of the Canterbury road and the shingle beach, whose regular
crashing under the feet of a smuggling band was the last sound of my
country I had heard. For Carlos it was the concrete image of stability,
with the romantic feeling of its peace and of Veronica's beauty; the
unchangeable land where he had loved. To O'Brien's hate it loomed up
immense and odious, like the form of a colossal enemy. Father Antonio,
in the naive benevolence of his heart, prayed each night for its
conversion, as if it were a loved sinner. He believed this event to
be not very far off accomplishment, and told me once, with an amazing
simplicity of certitude, that "there will be a great joy amongst the
host of heaven on that day." It is marvellous how that distant land,
from which I had escaped as if from a prison to go in search of romance,
appeared romantic and perfect in these days--all things to all men! With
Seraphina I talked of it and its denizens as of a fabulous country.
I wonder what idea she had formed of my father, of my mother, my
sister--"Senora Dona Veronica Rooksby," she called her--of the
landscape, of the life, of the sky. Her eyes turned to me seriously.
Once, stooping, she plucked an orange marigold for her hair; and at last
we came to talk of our farm as the only perfect refuge for her.
CHAPTER THREE
One evening Carlos, after a silence of distress, had said, "There's
nothing else for it. When the crisis comes, you must carry her off from
this unhappiness and misery that hangs over her head. You must take her
out of Cuba; there is no safety for her here."
This took my breath away. "But where are we to go, Carlos?" I asked,
bending over him.
"To--to England," he whispered.
He was utterly worn out that evening by all the perplexities of his
death-bed. He made a great effort and murmured a few words more--about
the Spanish ambassador in London being a near relation of the Riegos;
then he gave it up and lay still under my amazed eyes. The nun was
approaching, alarmed, from the shadows. Father Antonio, gazing sadly
upon his beloved penitent, signed me to withdraw.
Castro had not gone away yet; he greeted me in low tones outside the big
door.
"Senor," he went on, "I make my report usually to his Senoria Don
Carlos; only I have not been admitted to-day into his rooms at all. But
what I have to say is for your ear, also. There has arrived a friar from
a Havana convent amongst the _Lugarenos_ of the bay. I have known him
come like this before."
I remembered that in the morning, while dressing, I had glanced out
of the narrow outside window of my room, and had seen a brown, mounted
figure passing on the sands. Its sandalled feet dangled against the
flanks of a powerful mule.
Castro shook his head. "Malediction on his green eyes! He baptizes the
offspring of this vermin sometimes, and sits for hours in the shade
before the door of Domingo's posada telling his beads as piously as a
devil that had turned monk for the greater undoing of us Christians.
These women crowd there to kiss his oily paw. What else they------
_Basta!_ Only I wanted to tell you, Senor, that this evening (I just
come from taking a _pasear_ that way) there is much talk in the villages
of an evil-intentioned heretic that has introduced himself into this our
town; of an _Inglez_ hungry for men to hang--of you, in short."
The moon, far advanced in its first quarter, threw an ashen, bluish
light upon one-half of the courtyard; and the straight shadow upon the
other seemed to lie at the foot of the columns, black as a broad stroke
of Indian ink.
"And what do you think of it, Castro?" I asked.
"I think that Domingo has his orders. Manuel has made a song already.
And do you know its burden, Senor? Killing is its burden. I would the
devil had all these _Improvisadores_. They gape round him while he
twangs and screeches, the wind-bag! And he knows what words to sing to
them, too. He has talent. _Maladetta!_"
"Well, and what do you advise?"
"I advise the senor to keep, now, within the Casa. No songs can give
that vermin the audacity to seek the senor here. The gate remains
barred; the firearms are always loaded; and Cesar is a sagacious
African. But methinks this moon would fall out of the heaven first
before they would dare.... Keep to the Casa, I say--I, Tomas Castro."
He flung the corner of his cloak over his left shoulder, and preceded me
to the door of my room; then, after a "God guard you, Senor," continued
along the colonnade. Before I had shut my door it occurred to me that
he was going on towards the part of the gallery on which Seraphina's
apartments opened. Why? What could he want there?
I am not so much ashamed of my sudden suspicion of him--one did not know
whom to trust--but I am a little ashamed to confess that, kicking off my
shoes, I crept out instantly to spy upon him.
This part of the house was dark in the inky flood of shadow; and before
I had come to a recess in the wall, I heard the discreet scratching of a
finger-nail on a door. A streak of light darted and disappeared, like a
signal for the murmurs of two voices.
I recognized the woman's at once. It belonged to one of Seraphina's
maids, a pretty little quadroon--a favourite of hers--called La Chica.
She had slipped out, and her twitter-like whispering reached me in the
still solemnity of the quadrangle. She addressed Castro as "His Worship"
at every second word, for the saturnine little man, in his unbrushed
cloak and battered hat, was immensely respected by the household. Had he
not been sent to Europe to fetch Don Carlos? He was in the confidence of
the masters--their humble friend. The little tire-woman twittered of her
mistress. The senorita had been most anxious all day--ever since she had
heard the friar had come. Castro muttered:
"Tell the Excellency that her orders have been obeyed. The English
_caballero_ has been warned. I have been sleepless in my watchfulness
over the guest of the house, as the senorita has desired--for the honour
of the Riegos. Let her set her mind at ease."
The girl then whispered to him with great animation. Did not his worship
think that it was the senorita's heart which was not at ease?
Then the quadrangle became dumb in its immobility, half sheen, half
night, with its arcades, the soothing plash of water, with its expiring
lights, in a suggestion of Castilian severity, enveloped by the exotic
softness of the air.
"What folly!" uttered Castro's sombre voice. "You women do not mind how
many corpses come into your imaginings of love. The mere whisper of such
a thing------"
She murmured swiftly. He interrupted her.
"Thine eyes, La Chica--thine eyes see only the silliness of thine own
heart. Think of thine own lovers, _nina. Por Dios!_"--he changed to a
tone of severe appreciation--"thy foolish face looks well by moonlight."
I believe he was chucking her gravely under the chin. I heard her
soft, gratified cooing in answer to the compliment; the streak of light
flashed on the polished shaft of a pillar; and Castro went on, going
round to the staircase, evidently so as not to pass again before my open
door.
I forgot to shut it. I did not stop until I was in the middle of
my room; and then I stood still for a long time in a self-forgetful
ecstasy, while the many wax candles of the high candelabrum burned
without a flicker in a rich cluster of flames, as if lighted to throw
the splendour of a celebration upon the pageant of my thoughts.
For the honour of the Riegos!
I came to myself. Well, it was sweet to be the object of her anxiety and
care, even on these terms--on any terms. And I felt a sort of profound,
inexpressible, grateful emotion, as though no one, never, on no day, on
no occasion, had taken thought of me before.
I should not be able to sleep. I went to the window, and leaned my
forehead on the iron bar. There was no glass; the heavy shutter was
thrown open; and, under the faint crescent of the moon I saw a small
part of the beach, very white, the long streak of light lying mistily
on the bay, and two black shapes, cloaked, moving and stopping all of a
piece like pillars, their immensely long shadows running away from their
feet, with the points of the hats touching the wall of the Casa Riego.
Another, a shorter, thicker shape, appeared, walking with dignity. It
was Castro. The other two had a movement of recoil, then took off their
hats.
"_Buenas noches, caballeros_," his voice said, with grim politeness.
"You are out late."
"So is your worship. _Vaya, Senor, con Dios_. We are taking the air."
They walked away, while Castro remained looking after them. But I,
from my elevation, noticed that they had suddenly crouched behind some
scrubby bushes growing on the edge of the sand. Then Castro, too, passed
out of my sight in the opposite direction, muttering angrily.
I forgot them all. Everything on earth was still, and I seemed to be
looking through a casement out of an enchanted castle standing in the
dreamland of romance. I breathed out the name of Seraphina into the
moonlight in an increasing transport. "Seraphina! Seraphina! Seraphina!"
The repeated beauty of the sound intoxicated me. "Seraphina!" I cried
aloud, and stopped, astounded at myself. And the moonlight of romance
seemed to whisper spitefully from below:
"Death to the traitor! Vengeance for our brothers dead on the English
gallows!" "Come away, Manuel."
"No. I am an artist. It is necessary for my soul..."
"Be quiet!"
Their hissing ascended along the wall from under the window. The two
_Lugarenos_ had stolen in unnoticed by me. There was a stifled metallic
ringing, as of a guitar carried under a cloak.
"Vengeance on the heretic _Inglez!_"
"Come away! They may suddenly open the gate and fall upon us with
sticks."
"My gentle spirit is roused to the accomplishment of great things.
I feel in me a valiance, an inspiration. I am no vulgar seller of
_aguardiente_, like Domingo. I was born to be the _capataz_ of the
_Lugarenos_."
"We shall be set upon and beaten, oh, thou Manuel. Come away!"
There were no footsteps, only a noiseless flitting of two shadows, and a
distant voice crying:
"Woe, woe, woe to the traitor!"
I had not needed Castro's warning to understand the meaning of this.
O'Brien was setting his power to work, only this Manuel's restless
vanity had taught me exactly how the thing was to be done. The friar
had been exciting the minds of this rabble against me; awakening their
suspicions, their hatred, their fears.
I remained at the casement, lost in rather sombre reflections. I was now
a prisoner within the walls of the Casa. After all, it mattered little.
I did not want to go away unless I could carry off Seraphina with me.
What a dream! What an impossible dream! Alone, without friends, with no
place to go to, without means of going; without, by Heaven, the right of
even as much as speaking of it to her. Carlos--Carlos dreamed--a
dream of his dying hours. England was so far, the enemy so near;
and--Providence itself seemed to have forgotten me.
A sound of panting made me turn my head. Father Antonio was mopping his
brow in the doorway. Though a heavy man, he was noiseless of foot. A
wheezing would be heard along the dark galleries some time before his
black bulk approached you with a gliding motion. He had the outward
placidity of corpulent people, a natural artlessness of demeanour
which was amusing and attractive, and there was something shrewd in his
simplicity. Indeed, he must have displayed much tact and shrewdness to
have defeated all O'Brien's efforts to oust him from his position of
confessor to the household. What had helped him to hold his ground was
that, as he said to me once, "I, too, my son, am a legacy of that truly
pious and noble lady, the wife of Don Riego. I was made her spiritual
director soon after her marriage, and I may say that she showed more
discretion in the choice of her confessor than in that of her man of
affairs. But what would you have? The best of us, except for Divine
grace, is liable to err; and, poor woman, let us hope that, in her
blessed state, she is spared the knowledge of the iniquities going on
here below in the Casa."
He used to talk to me in that strain, coming in almost every evening
on his way from the sick room. He, too, had his own perplexities, which
made him wipe his forehead repeatedly; afterwards he used to spread his
red bandanna handkerchief over his knees.
He sympathized with Carlos, his beloved penitent, with Seraphina, his
dear daughter, whom he had baptized and instructed in the mysteries of
"our holy religion," and he allowed himself often to drop the remark
that his "illustrious spiritual son," Don Balthasar, after a stormy
life of which men knew only too much, had attained to a state of truly
childlike and God-fearing innocence--a sign, no doubt, of Heaven's
forgiveness for those excesses. He ended, always, by sighing heartily,
to sit with his gaze on the floor.
That night he came in silently, and after shutting the door with care,
took his habitual seat, a broad wooden armchair.
"How did your reverence leave Don Carlos?" I asked.
"Very low," he said. "The disease is making terrible ravages, and my
ministrations------I ought to be used to the sight of human misery,
but------" He raised his hands; a genuine emotion overpowered him; then,
uncovering his face to stare at me, "He is lost, Don Juan," he
exclaimed.
"Indeed, I fear we are about to lose him, your reverence," I said,
surprised at this display. It seemed inconceivable that he should have
been in doubt up to this very moment.
He rolled his eyes painfully. I was forgetting the infinite might of
God. Still, nothing short of a miracle------But what had we done to
deserve miracles?
"Where is the ancient piety of our forefathers which made Spain so
great?" he apostrophized the empty air, a little wildly, as if in
distraction. "No, Don Juan; even I, a true servant of our faith, am
conscious of not having had enough grace for my humble ministrations to
poor sailors and soldiers--men naturally inclined to sin, but simple.
And now--there are two great nobles, the fortune of a great house...."
I looked at him and wondered, for he was, in a manner, wringing his
hands, as if in immense distress.
"We are all thinking of that poor child--_mas que_, Don Juan, imagine
all that wealth devoted to the iniquitous purposes of that man. Her
happiness sacrificed."
"I cannot imagine this--I will not," I interrupted, so violently that he
hushed me with both hands uplifted.
"To these wild enterprises against your own country," he went on
vehemently, disregarding my exasperated and contemptuous laugh. "And she
herself, the _nina_ I have baptized her; I have instructed her; and a
more noble disposition, more naturally inclined to the virtues and
proprieties of her sex------But, Don Juan, she has pride, which
doubtless is a gift of God, too, but it is made a snare of by Satan,
the roaring lion, the thief of souls. And what if her feminine
rashness--women are rash, my son," he interjected with unction--"and her
pride were to lead her into--I am horrified at the thought--into an act
of mortal sin for which there is no repentance?"
"Enough!" I shouted at him.
"No repentance," he repeated, rising to his feet excitedly, and I stood
before him, my arms down my sides, with my fists clenched.
Why did the stupid priest come to talk like this to me, as if I had not
enough of my own unbearable thoughts?
He sat down and began to flourish his handkerchief. There was depicted
on his broad face--depicted simply and even touchingly--the inward
conflict of his benevolence and of his doubts.
"I observe your emotion, my son," he said. I must have been as pale
as death. And, after a pause, he meditated aloud, "And, after all, you
English are a reverent nation. You, a scion of the nobility, have been
brought up in deplorable rebellion against the authority of God on this
earth; but you are not a scoffer--not a scoffer. I, a humble
priest------But, after all, the Holy Father himself, in his inspired
wisdom------I have prayed to be enlightened...."
He spread the square of his damp handkerchief on his knees, and bowed
his head. I had regained command over myself, but I did not understand
in the least. I had passed from my exasperation into a careworn fatigue
of mind that was like utter darkness.
"After all," he said, looking up naively, "the business of us priests is
to save souls. It is a solemn time when death approaches. The affairs of
this world should be cast aside. And yet God surely does not mean us to
abandon the living to the mercy of the wicked."
A sadness came upon his face, his eyes; all the world seemed asleep. He
made an effort. "My son," he said with decision, "I call you to follow
me to the bedside of Don Carlos at this very hour of night. I, a humble
priest, the unworthy instrument of God's grace, call upon you to bring
him a peace which my ministrations cannot give. His time is near."
I rose up, startled by his solemnity, by the hint of hidden significance
in these words.
"Is he dying now?" I cried.
"He ought to detach his thoughts from this earth; and if there is no
other way------"
"What way? What am I expected to do?"
"My son, I had observed your emotion. We, the appointed confidants
of men's frailties, are quick to discern the signs of their innermost
feelings. Let me tell you that my cherished daughter in God, Senorita
Dona Seraphina Riego, is with Don Carlos, the virtual head of the
family, since his Excellency Don Balthasar is in a state of, I may say,
infantile innocence."
"What do you mean, father?" I faltered.
"She is waiting for you with him," he pronounced, looking up. And as his
solemnity seemed to have deprived me of my power to move, he added, with
his ordinary simplicity, "Why, my son, she is, I may say, not wholly
indifferent to your person."
I could not have dropped more suddenly into the chair had the good
_padre_ discharged a pistol into my breast. He went away; and when I
leapt up, I saw a young man in black velvet and white ruffles staring
at me out of the large mirror set frameless into the wall, like the
apparition of a Spanish ghost with my own English face.
When I ran out, the moon had sunk below the ridge of the roof; the whole
quadrangle of the Casa had turned black under the stars, with only a
yellow glimmer of light falling into the well of the court from the lamp
under the vaulted gateway. The form of the priest had gone out of sight,
and a far-away knocking, mingling with my footfalls, seemed to be part
of the tumult within my heart. Below, a voice at the gate challenged,
"Who goes there?" I ran on. Two tiny flames burned before Carlos' door
at the end of the long vista, and two of Seraphina's maids shrank away
from the great mahogany panels at my approach. The candlesticks trembled
askew in their hands; the wax guttered down, and the taller of the two
girls, with an uncovered long neck, gazed at me out of big sleepy
eyes in a sort of dumb wonder. The teeth of the plump little one--La
Chica--rattled violently like castanets. She moved aside with a
hysterical little laugh, and glanced upwards at me.
I stopped, as if I had intruded; of all the persons in the sick-room,
not one turned a head. The stillness of the lights, of things, of the
air, seemed to have passed into Seraphina's face. She stood with a stiff
carriage under the heavy hangings of the bed, looking very Spanish and
romantic in her short black skirt, a black lace shawl enveloping her
head, her shoulders, her arms, as low as the waist. Her bare feet,
thrust into high-heeled slippers, lent to her presence an air of flight,
as if she had run into that room in distress or fear. Carlos, sitting up
amongst the snowy pillows of eider-down at his back, was not speaking
to her. He had done; and the flush on his cheek, the eager lustre of
his eyes, gave him an appearance of animation, almost of joy, a sort of
consuming, flame-like brilliance. They were waiting for me. With all his
eagerness and air of life, all he could do was to lift his white hand an
inch or two off the silk coverlet that spread over his limbs smoothly,
like a vast crimson pall. There was something joyous and cruel in the
shimmer of this piece of colour, contrasted with the dead white of the
linen, the duskiness of the wasted face, the dark head with no visible
body, symbolically motionless. The confused shadows and the tarnished
splendour of emblazoned draperies, looped up high under the ceiling,
fell in heavy and unstirring folds right down to the polished floor,
that reflected the lights like a sheet of water, or rather like ice.
I felt it slippery under my feet. I, alone, had to move, in this
great chamber, with its festive patches of colour amongst the funereal
shadows, with the expectant, still figures of priest and nun, servants
of passionless eternity, as if immobilized and made mute by hostile
wonder before the perishable triumph of life and love. And only the
impatient tapping of the sick man's hand on the stiff silk of the
coverlet was heard.
It called to me. Seraphina's unstirring head was lighted strongly by a
two-branched sconce on the wall; and when I stood by her side, not even
the shadow of the eyelashes on her cheek trembled. Carlos' lips moved;
his voice was almost extinct; but for all his emaciation, the profundity
of his eyes, the sunken cheeks, the hollow temples, he remained
attractive, with the charm of his gallant and romantic temper worn away
to an almost unearthly fineness.
He was going to have his desire because, on the threshold of his
spiritual inheritance, he refused, or was unable, to turn his gaze away
from this world. Father Antonio's business was to save this soul; and
with a sort of simple and sacerdotal shrewdness, in which there was much
love for his most noble penitent, he would try to appease its trouble by
a romantic satisfaction. His voice, very grave and profound, addressed
me:
"Approach, my son--nearer. We trust the natural feelings of pity which
are implanted in every human breast, the nobility of your extraction,
the honour of your _hidalguidad_, and that inextinguishable courage
which, as by the unwearied mercy of God, distinguishes the sons of
your fortunate and unhappy nation." His bass voice, deepened in solemn
utterance, vibrated huskily. There was a rustic dignity in his uncouth
form, in his broad face, in the gesture of the raised hand. "You
shall promise to respect the dictates of our conscience, guided by the
authority of our faith; to defer to our scruples, and to the procedure
of our Church in matters which we believe touch the welfare of our
souls.... You promise?"
He waited. Carlos' eyes burned darkly on my face. What were they asking
of me? This was nothing. Of course I would respect her scruples--her
scruples--if my heart should break. I felt her living intensely by my
side; she could be brought no nearer to me by anything they could do, or
I could promise. She had already all the devotion of my love and youth,
the unreasoning and potent devotion, without a thought or hope of
reward. I was almost ashamed to pronounce the two words they expected.
"I promise."
And suddenly the meaning pervading this scene, something that was in my
mind already, and that I had hardly dared to look at till now, became
clear to me in its awful futility against the dangers, in all its remote
consequences. It was a betrothal. The priest--Carlos, too--must have
known that it had no binding power. To Carlos it was symbolic of his
wishes. Father Antonio was thinking of the papal dispensation. I was a
heretic. What if it were refused? But what was that risk to me, who had
never dared to hope? Moreover, they had brought her there, had persuaded
her; she had been influenced by her fears, impressed by Carlos. What
could she care for me? And I repeated:
"I promise. I promise, even at the cost of suffering and unhappiness,
never to demand anything from her against her conscience."
Carlos' voice sounded weak. "I answer for him, good father." Then
he seemed to wander in a whisper, which we two caught faintly, "He
resembles his sister, O Divine------"
And on this ghostly sigh, on this breath, with the feeble click of beads
in the nun's hands, a silence fell upon the room, vast as the stillness
of a world of unknown faiths, loves, beliefs, of silent illusions, of
unexpressed passions and secret motives that live in our unfathomable
hearts.
Seraphina had given me a quick glance--the first glance--which I had
rather felt than seen. Carlos made an effort, and, raising himself, put
her hand in mine.
Father Antonio, trying to pronounce a short allocution, broke down,
naive in his emotion, as he had been in his dignity. I could at first
catch only the words, "Beloved child--Holy Father--poor priest...."
He had taken this upon himself; and he would attest the purity of our
intentions, the necessity of the case, the assent of the head of the
family, my excellent disposition. All the Englishmen had excellent
dispositions. He would, personally, go to the foot of the Holy See--on
his knees, if necessary. Meantime, a document--he should at once prepare
a justificative document. The archbishop, it is true, did not like him
on account of the calumnies of that man O'Brien. But there was, beyond
the seas, the supreme authority of the Church, unerring and inaccessible
to calumnies.
All that time Seraphina's hand was lying passive in my palm--warm,
soft, living; all the life, all the world, all the happiness, the only
desire--and I dared not close my grasp, afraid of the vanity of my
hopes, shrinking from the intense felicity in the audacious act.
Father Antonio--I must say the word--blubbered. He was now only a
tender-hearted, simple old man, nothing more.
"Before God now, Don Juan.... I am only a poor priest, but invested
with a sacred office, an enormous power. Tremble, Senor, it is a young
girl... I have loved her like my own; for, indeed, I have in baptism
given her the spiritual life. You owe her protection; it is for that,
before God, Senor------"
It was as if Carlos had swooned; his eyes were closed, his face like
a carving. But gradually the suggestion of a tender and ironic smile
appeared on his lips. With a slow effort he raised his arm and his
eyelids, in an appeal of all his weariness for my ear. I made a movement
to stoop over him, and the floor, the great bed, the whole room, seemed
to heave and sway. I felt a slight, a fleeting pressure of Seraphina's
hand before it slipped out of mine; I thought, in the beating rush of
blood to my temples, that I was going mad.
He had thrown his arm over my neck; there was the calming austerity of
death on his lips, that just touched my ear and departed, together with
the far-away sound of the words, losing themselves in the remoteness of
another world:
"Like an Englishman, Juan."
"On my honour, Carlos."
His arm, releasing my neck, fell stretched out on the coverlet. Father
Antonio had mastered his emotion; with the trail of undried tears on
his face, he had become a priest again, exalted above the reach of his
earthly sorrow by the august concern of his sacerdocy.
"Don Carlos, my son, is your mind at ease, now?"
Carlos closed his eyes slowly.
"Then turn all your thoughts to heaven." Father Antonio's bass voice
rose, aloud, with an extraordinary authority. "You have done with the
earth."
The arm of the nun touched the cords of the curtains" and the massive
folds shook and fell expanded, hiding from us the priest and the
penitent.
CHAPTER FOUR
Seraphina and I moved towards the door sadly, as if under the oppression
of a memory, as people go back from the side of a grave to the cares of
life. No exultation possessed me. Nothing had happened. It had been a
sick man's whim.
"Senorita," I said low, with my hand on the wrought bronze of the
door-handle, "Don Carlos might have died in full trust of my devotion to
you--without this."
"I know it," she answered, hanging her head.
"It was his wish," I said. "And I deferred."
"It was his wish," she repeated.
"Remember he had asked you for no promise."
"Yes, it is you only he has asked. You have remembered it very well,
Senor. And you--you ask for nothing."
"No," I said; "neither from your heart nor from your conscience--nor
from your gratitude. Gratitude from you! As if it were not I that
owe you gratitude for having condescended to stand with your hand in
mine--if only for a moment--if only to bring peace to a dying man; for
giving me the felicity, the illusion of this wonderful instant, that,
all my life, I shall remember as those who are suddenly stricken blind
remember the great glory of the sun. I shall live with it, I shall
cherish it in my heart to my dying day; and I promise never to mention
it to you again."
Her lips were slightly parted, her eyes remained downcast, her head
drooped as if in extreme attention.
"I asked for no promise," she murmured coldly.
My heart was heavy. "Thank you for that proof of your confidence," I
said. "I am yours without any promises. Wholly yours. But what can I
offer? What help? What refuge? What protection? What can I do? I can
only die for you. Ah, but this was cruel of Carlos, when he knew that I
had nothing else but my poor life to give."
"I accept that," she said unexpectedly. "Senorita, it is generous of you
to accept so worthless a gift--a life I value not at all save for one
unique memory which I owe to you."
I knew she was looking at me while I swung open the door with a low bow.
I did not trust myself to look at her. An unreasonable disenchantment,
like the awakening from a happy dream, oppressed me. I felt an almost
angry desire to seize her in my arms--to go back to my dream. If I had
looked at her then, I believed I could not have controlled myself.
She passed out; and when I looked up there was O'Brien booted and
spurred, but otherwise in his lawyer's black, inclining his dapper
figure profoundly before her in the dim gallery. She had stopped short.
The two maids, huddled together behind her, stared with terrified eyes.
The flames of their candles vacillated very much.
I closed the door quietly. Carlos was done with the earth. This had
become my affair; and the necessity of coming to an immediate decision
almost deprived me of my power of thinking. The necessity had arisen too
swiftly; the arrival of that man acted like the sudden apparition of
a phantom. It had been expected, however; only, from the moment we
had turned away from Carlos' bedside, we had thought of nothing but
ourselves; we had dwelt alone in our emotions, as if there had been no
inhabitant of flesh and blood on the earth but we two. Our danger had
been present, no doubt, in our minds, because we drew it in with every
breath. It was the indispensable condition of our contact, of our words,
of our thoughts; it was the atmosphere of our feelings; a something
as all-pervading and impalpable as the air we drew into our lungs. And
suddenly this danger, this breath of our life, had taken this material
form. It was material and expected, and yet it had the effect of an evil
spectre, inasmuch as one did not know where and how it was vulnerable,
what precisely it would do, how one should defend one's self.
His bow was courtly; his gravity was all in his bearing, which was quiet
and confident: the manner of a capable man, the sort of man the great
of this earth find invaluable and are inclined to trust. His full-shaven
face had a good-natured, almost a good-humored expression, which I have
come to think must have depended on the cast of his features, on the
setting of his eyes--on some peculiarity not under his control, or else
he could not have preserved it so well. On certain occasions, as this
one, for instance, it affected me as a refinement of cynicism; and,
generally, it was startling, like the assumption of a mask inappropriate
to the action and the speeches of the part.
He had journeyed in his customary manner overland from Havana, arriving
unexpectedly at night, as he had often done before; only this time he
had found the little door, cut out in one of the sides of the big gate,
bolted fast. It was his knocking I had heard, as I hurried after the
priest. The major-domo, who had been called up to let him in, told me
afterwards that the senor intendente had put no question whatever to him
as to this, and had gone on, as usual, towards his own room. Nobody knew
what was going on in Carlos' chamber, but, of course, he came upon the
two girls at the door. He said nothing to them either, only just stopped
there and waited, leaning with one elbow on the balustrade with his
good-tempered, gray eyes fixed on the door. He had fully expected to see
Seraphina come out presently, but I think he did not count on seeing
me as well. When he straightened himself up after the bow, we two were
standing side by side.
I had stepped quickly towards her, asking myself what he would do. He
did not seem to be armed; neither had I any weapon about me. Would he
fly at my throat? I was the bigger, and the younger man. I wished he
would. But he found a way of making me feel all his other advantages.
He did not recognize my existence. He appeared not to see me at all. He
seemed not to be aware of Seraphina's startled immobility, of my firm
attitude; but turning his good-humoured face towards the two girls, who
appeared ready to sink through the floor before his gaze, he shook his
fore-finger at them slightly.
This was all. He was not menacing; he was almost playful; and this
gesture, marvellous in its economy of effort, disclosed all the might
and insolence of his power. It had the unerring efficacy of an act of
instinct. It was instinct. He could not know how he dismayed us by
that shake of the finger. The tall girl dropped her candlestick with
a clatter, and fled along the gallery like a shadow. La Chica cowered
under the wall. The light of her candle just touched dimly the form of
a negro boy, waiting passively in the background with O'Brien's
saddle-bags over his shoulder.
"You see," said Seraphina to me, in a swift, desolate murmur. "They are
all like this--all, all."
Without a change of countenance, without emphasis, he said to her in
French:
"_Votre pere dort sans doute, Senorita_."
And she intrepidly replied, "You know very well, Senor Intendente, that
nothing can make him open his eyes."
"So it seems," he muttered between his teeth, stooping to pick up the
dropped candlestick. It was lying at my feet. I could have taken him
at a disadvantage, then; I could have felled him with one blow, thrown
myself upon his back. Thus may an athletic prisoner set upon a jailer
coming into his cell, if there were not the prison, the locks, the bars,
the heavy gates! the walls, all the apparatus of captivity, and the
superior weight of the idea chaining down the will, if not the courage.
It might have been his knowledge of this, or his absolute disdain of
me. The unconcerned manner in which he busied himself--his head within
striking distance of my fist--in lighting the extinguished candle from
the trembling Chica's humiliated me beyond expression. He had some
difficulty with that, till he said to her just audibly, "Calm thyself,
nina," and she became rigid in her appearance of excessive terror.
He turned then towards Seraphina, candlestick in hand, courteously
saying in Spanish:
"May I be allowed to help light you to your door, since that silly
Juanita--I think it was Juanita--has taken leave of her senses? She is
not fit to remain in your service--any more than this one here."
With a gasp of desolation, La Chica began to sob limply against the
wall. I made one step forward; and, holding the candle well up, as
though for the purpose of examining my face carefully, he never looked
my way, while he and Seraphina were exchanging a few phrases in French
which I did not understand well enough to fellow.
He was politely interrogatory, it seemed to me. The natural,
good-humoured expression never left his face, as though he had a fund of
inexhaustible patience for dealing with the unaccountable trifles of a
woman's conduct. Seraphina's shawl had slipped off her head. La Chica
sidled towards her, sobbing a deep sob now and then, without any sign of
tears; and with their scattered hair, their bare arms, the disorder of
their attire, they looked like two women discovered in a secret flight
for life. Only the mistress stood her ground firmly; her voice was
decided; there was resolution in the way one little white hand clutched
the black lace on her bosom. Only once she seemed to hesitate in her
replies. Then, after a pause he gave her for reflection, he appeared
to repeat his question. She glanced at me apprehensively, as I thought,
before she confirmed the previous answer by a slow inclination of her
head.
Had he allowed himself to make a provoking movement, a dubious gesture
of any sort, I would have flung myself upon him at once; but the
nonchalant manner in which he looked away, while he extended to me his
hand with the candlestick, amazed me. I simply took it from him. He
stepped back, with a ceremonious bow for Seraphina. La Chica ran up
close to her elbow. I heard her voice saying sadly, "You need fear
nothing for yourself, child"; and they moved away slowly. I remained
facing O'Brien, with a vague notion of protecting their retreat.
This time it was I who was holding the light before his face. It was
calm and colourless; his eyes were fixed on the ground reflectively,
with the appearance of profound and quiet absorption. But suddenly I
perceived the convulsive clutch of his hand on the skirt of his coat. It
was as if accidentally I had looked inside the man--upon the strength of
his illusions, on his desire, on his passion. Now he will fly at me,
I thought, with a tremendously convincing certitude. Now------All my
muscles, stiffening, answered the appeal of that thought of battle.
He said, "Won't you give me that light?"
And I understood he demanded a surrender.
"I would see you die first where you stand," was my answer.
This object in my hand had become endowed with moral
meaning--significant, like a symbol--only to be torn from me with my
life.
He lifted his head; the light twinkled in his eyes. "Oh, _I_ won't die,"
he said, with that bizarre suggestion of humour in his face, in his
subdued voice. "But it is a small thing; and you are young; it may be
yet worth your while to try and please me--this time."
Before I could answer, Seraphina, from some little distance, called out
hurriedly:
"Don Juan, your arm."
Her voice, sounding a little unsteady, made me forget O'Brien, and,
turning my back on him, I ran up to her. She needed my support; and
before us La Chica tottered and stumbled along with the lights, moaning:
"_Madre de Dios!_ What will become of us now! Oh, what will become of us
now!"
"You know what he had asked me to let him do," Seraphina talked rapidly.
"I made answer, 'No; give the light to my cousin.' Then he said, 'Do you
really wish it, Senorita? I am the older friend.' I repeated, 'Give the
light to my cousin, Senor.' He, then, cruelly, 'For the young man's own
sake, reflect, Senorita.' And he waited before he asked me again, 'Shall
I surrender it to him?' I felt death upon my heart, and all my fear for
you--there." She touched her beautiful throat with a swift movement of
a hand that disappeared at once under the lace. "And because I could
not speak, I------Don Juan, you have just offered me your life--I------
_Misericordia!_ What else was possible? I made with my head the sign
'Yes.'"
In the stress, hurry, and rapture encompassing my immense gratitude,
I pressed her hand to my side familiarly, as if we had been two lovers
walking in a lane on a serene evening.
"If you had not made that sign, it would have been worse than death--in
my heart," I said. "He had allied me, too, to renounce my trust, my
light."
We walked on slowly, accompanied in our sudden silence by the plash of
the fountain at the bottom of the great square of darkness on our left,
and by the piteous moans of La Chica.
"That is what he meant," said the enchanting voice by my side. "And you
refused. That is your valour."
"From no selfish motives," I said, troubled, as if all the great
incertitude of my mind had been awakened by the sound that brought so
much delight to my heart. "My valour is nothing."
"It has given me a new courage," she said.
"You did not want more," I said earnestly.
"Ah! I was very much alone. It is difficult to------"
She hesitated.
"To live alone," I finished.
"More so to die," she whispered, with a new note of timidity. "It is
frightful. Be cautious, Don Juan, for the love of God, because I could
not------"
We stopped. La Chica, silent, as if exhausted, drooped lamentably,
with her shoulder against the wall, by Seraphina's door; and the pure
crystalline sound of the fountain below, enveloping the parting pause,
seemed to wind its coldness round my heart.
"Poor Don Carlos!" she said. "I had a great affection for him. I was
afraid they would want me to marry him. He loved your sister."
"He never told her," I murmured. "I wonder if she ever guessed."
"He was poor, homeless, ill already, in a foreign land."
"We all loved him at home," I said.
"He never asked her," she breathed out. "And, perhaps--but he never
asked her."
"I have no more force," sighed La Chica, suddenly, and sank down at the
foot of the wall, putting the candlesticks on the floor.
"You have been very good to him," I said; "only he need not have
demanded this from you. Of course, I understood perfectly.... I hope you
understand, too, that I------"
"Senor, my cousin," she flashed out suddenly, "do you think that I would
have consented only from my affection for him?"
"Senorita," I cried, "I am poor, homeless, in a foreign land. How can I
believe? How can I dare to dream?--unless your own voice------"
"Then you are permitted to ask. Ask, Don Juan."
I dropped on one knee, and, suddenly extending her arm, she pressed her
hand to my lips. Lighted up from below, the picturesque aspect of her
figure took on something of a transcendental grace; the unusual upward
shadows invested her beauty with a new mystery of fascination. A minute
passed. I could hear her rapid breathing above, and I stood up before
her, holding both her hands.
"How very few days have we been together," she whispered. "Juan, I am
ashamed."
"I did not count the days. I have known you always. I have dreamed of
you since I can remember--for days, for months, a year, all my life."
The crash of a heavy door flung to, exploded, filling the galleries all
round the _patio_ with the sonorous reminder of our peril.
"Ah! We had forgotten."
I heard her voice, and felt her form in my arms. Her lips at my ear
pronounced:
"Remember, Juan. Two lives, but one death only."
And she was gone so quickly that it was as though she had passed through
the wood of the massive panels.
La Chica crouched on her knees. The lights on the floor burned before
her empty stare, and with her bare shoulders the tone of old ivory
emerging from the white linen, with wisps of raven hair hanging down her
cheeks, the abandonment of her whole person embodied every outward mark
and line of desolation.
"What do you fear from him?" I asked.
She looked up; moved nearer to me on her knees. "I have a lover
outside."
She seized her hair wildly, drew it across her face, tried to stuff
handfuls of it into her mouth, as if to stop herself from shrieking.
"He shook his finger at me," she moaned.
Her terror, as incomprehensible as the emotion of an animal, was gaining
upon me. I said sternly:
"What can he do, then?"
"I don't know."
She did not know. She was like me. She feared for her love. Like myself!
Was there anything in the way of our undoing which it was not in his
power to achieve?
"Try to be faithful to your mistress," I said, "and all may be well
yet."
She made no answer, but staggered to her feet, and went away blindly
through the door, which opened just wide enough to let her through.
There were clouds on the sky. The _patio_, in its blackness, was like
the rectangular mouth of a bottomless pit. I picked up the candlesticks,
and lighted myself to my room, walking upon air, upon tempestuous air,
in a feeling of insecurity and exultation.
The lights of my candelabrum had gone out. I stood the two candlesticks
on a table, and the shadows of the room, uplifted above the two flames
as high as the ceiling, filled the corners heavily like gathered
draperies, descended to the foot of the four walls in the shape of a
military tent, in which warlike objects vaguely gleamed: a trophy of
ancient arquebuses and conquering swords, arranged with bows, spears,
the stick and stone weapons of an extinct race, a war collar of shells
or pebbles, a round wicker-work shield in a halo of arrows, with a
matchlock piece on each side--of the sort that had to be served by two
men.
I had left the door of my room open on purpose, so that he should know
I was back there, and ready for him. I took down a long straight blade,
like a rapier, with a basket hilt. It was a cumbrous weapon, and with a
blunt edge; still, it had a point, and I was ready to thrust and parry
against the world. I called upon my foes. No enemy appeared, and by
the light of two candles, with a sword in my hand, I lost myself in the
foreshadowings of the future.
It was positive and uncertain. I wandered in it like a soul outside the
gates of paradise, with an anticipation of bliss, and the pain of my
exclusion. There was only one man in the way. I was certain he had been
watching us across the blackness of the _patio_. He must have seen the
dimly-lit dumb show of our parting at Sera-phina's door. I hoped he had
understood, and that my shadow, bearing the two lights, had struck him
as triumphant and undismayed, walking upon air. I strained my ears. I
had heard....
Somebody was coming towards me along the silent galleries. It was he;
I knew it. He was coming nearer and nearer. In the profound, tomb-like
stillness of the great house, I had heard the sound of his footsteps on
the tessellated pavement from afar. Now he had turned the corner, and
the calm, strolling pace of his approach was enough to strike awe into
an adversary's heart. It never hesitated, not once; never hurried; never
slowed till it stopped. He stood in the doorway.
I suppose, in that big room, by the light of two candles, I must have
presented an impressive picture of a menacing youth all in black, with
a tense face, and holding a naked, long rapier in his hand. At any rate,
he stood still, eyeing me from the doorway, the picture of a dapper
Spanish lawyer in a lofty frame; all in black, also, with a fair head
and a well-turned leg advanced in a black silk stocking. He had taken
off his riding boots. For the rest, I had never seen him dressed
otherwise. There was no weapon in his hand, or at his side.
I lowered the point, and, seeing he remained on the doorstep, as if not
willing to trust himself within, I said disdainfully:
"You don't suppose I would murder a defenceless man."
"Am I defenceless?" He had a slight lift of the eyebrows. "That is news,
indeed. It is you who are supposing. I have been a very certain man for
this many a year."
"How can you know how an English gentleman would feel and act? I am
neither a murderer nor yet an intriguer."
He walked right in rapidly, and, getting round to the other side of the
table, drew a small pistol out of his breeches pocket.
"You see--I am not trusting too much to your English generosity."
He laid the pistol negligently on the table. I had turned about on my
heels. As we stood, by lunging between the two candlesticks, I should
have been able to run him through the body before he could cry out.
I laid the sword on the table.
"Would you trust a damned Irish rebel?" he asked.
"You are wrong in your surmise. I would have nothing to do with a rebel,
even in my thoughts and suppositions. I think that the Intendente of Don
Balthasar Riego would look twice before murdering in a bedroom the guest
of the house--a relation, a friend of the family."
"That's sensible," he said, with that unalterable air of good nature,
which sometimes was like the most cruel mockery of humour. "And do you
think that even a relation of the Riegos would escape the scaffold for
killing Don Patricio O'Brien, one of the Royal Judges of the Marine
Court, member of the Council, Procurator to the Chapter...."
"Intendente of the Casa," I threw in.
"That's my gratitude," he said gravely. "So you see...."
"Supreme chief of thieves and picaroons," I suggested again.
He answered this by a gesture of disdainful superiority.
"I wonder if you---if any of you English--would have the courage to risk
your all--ambition, pride, position, wealth, peace of mind, your dearest
hope, your self-respect--like this. For an idea."
His tone, that revealed something exalted and sad behind everything that
was sordid and base in the acts of that man's villainous tools,
struck me with astonishment. I beheld, as an inseparable whole, the
contemptible result, the childishness of his imagination, the danger of
his recklessness, and something like loftiness in his pitiful illusion.
"Nothing's too hot, too dirty, too heavy. Any way to get at you English;
any means. To strike! That's the thing. I would die happy if I knew I
had helped to detach from you one island--one little island of all the
earth you have filched away, stolen, taken by force, got by lying....
Don't taunt me with your taunts of thieves. What weapons better worthy
of you could I use? Oh, I am modest. I am modest. This is a little
thing, this Jamaica. What do I care for the Separationist blatherskite
more than for the loyal fools? You are all English to me. If I had my
way, your Empire would die of pin-pricks all over its big, overgrown
body. Let only one bit drop off. If robbing your ships may help it,
then, as you see me standing here, I am ready to go myself in a leaky
boat. I tell you Jamaica's gone. And that may be the beginning of the
end."
He lifted his arm not at me, but at England, if I may judge from his
burning stare. It was not to me he was speaking. There we were, Irish
and English, face to face, as it had been ever since we had met in the
narrow way of the world that had never been big enough for the tribes,
the nations, the races of man.
"Now, Mr. O'Brien, I don't know what you may do to me, but I won't
listen to any of this," I said, very red in the face.
"Who wants you to listen?" he muttered absently, and went away from the
table to look out of the loophole, leaving me there with the sword and
the pistol.
Whatever he might have said of the scaffold, this was very imprudent
of him. It was characteristic of the man--of that impulsiveness which
existed in him side by side with his sagacity, with his coolness in
intrigue, with his unmerciful and revengeful temper. By my own feelings
I understood what an imprudence it was. But he was turning his back on
me, and how could I?... His imprudence was so complete that it made for
security. He did not, I am sure, remember my existence. I would just as
soon have jumped with a dagger upon a man in the dark.
He was really stirred to his depths--to the depths of his hate, and of
his love--by seeing me, an insignificant youth (I was no more), surge up
suddenly in his path. He turned where he stood at last, and contemplated
me with a sort of thoughtful surprise, as though he had tried to account
to himself for my existence.
"No," he said, to himself really, "I wonder when I look at you. How did
you manage to get that pretty reputation over there? Ramon's a fool. He
shall know it to his cost. But the craftiness of that Carlos! Or is it
only my confounded willingness to believe?"
He was putting his finger nearly on the very spot. I said nothing.
"Why," he exclaimed, "when it's all boiled down, you are only an English
beggar boy."
"I've come to a man's estate since we met last," I said meaningly.
He seemed to meditate over this. His face never changed, except,
perhaps, to an even more amused benignity of expression.
"You have lived very fast by that account," he remarked artlessly.
"Is it possible now? Well, life, as you know, can't last forever; and,
indeed, taking a better look at you in this poor light, you do seem to
be very near death."
I did not flinch; and, with a very dry mouth, I uttered defiantly:
"Such talk means nothing."
"Bravely said. But this is not talk. You've gone too fast. I am giving
you a chance to turn back."
"Not an inch," I said fiercely. "Neither in thought, in deed; not even
in semblance."
He seemed as though he wanted to swallow a bone in his throat.
"Believe me, there is more in life than you think. There is at your age,
more than..." he had a strange contortion of the body, as though in a
sudden access of internal pain; that humorous smile, that abode in the
form of his lips, changed into a ghastly, forced grin... "than one love
in a life--more than one woman."
I believe he tried to leer at me, because his voice was absolutely dying
in his throat. My indignation was boundless. I cried out with the fire
of deathless conviction:
"It is not true. You know it is not true."
He was speechless for a time; then, shaking and stammering with that
inward rage that seemed to heave like molten lava in his breast, without
ever coming to the surface of his face:
"What! Is it I, then, who have to go back? For--for you---a boy--come
from devil knows where--an English, beggarly.... For a girl's whim....
I--a man."
He calmed down. "No; you are mad. You are dreaming. You don't know. You
can't--you! You don't know what a man is; you with your calf-love a day
old. How dare you look at me who have breathed for years in the very
air? You fool--you little, wretched fool! For years sleeping, and
waking, and working...."
"And intriguing," I broke in, "and plotting, and deceiving--for years."
This calmed him altogether. "I am a man; you are but a boy; or else I
would not have to tell you that your love"--he choked at the word--"is
to mine like--like--"
His eyes fell on a cut-glass water-ewer, and, with a convulsive sweep
of his arm, he sent it flying far away from the table. It fell heavily,
shattering itself with the unringing thud of a piece of ice. "Like
this." He remained for some time with his eyes fixed on the table, and
when he looked up at me it was with a sort of amused incredulity. His
tone was not resentful. He spoke in a business-like manner, a little
contemptuously. I had only Don Carlos to thank for the position in which
I found myself. What the "poor devil over there" expected from me, he,
O'Brien, would not inquire. It was a ridiculous boy-and-girl affair. If
those two--meaning Carlos and Seraphina--had not been so mighty clever,
I should have been safe now in Jamaica jail, on a charge of treasonable
practices. He seemed to find the idea funny. Well, anyhow, he had meant
no worse by me than my own dear countrymen. When he, O'Brien, had found
how absurdly he had been hoodwinked by Don Carlos--the poor devil--and
misled by Ramon--he would make him smart for it, yet--all he had
intended to do was to lodge me in Havana jail. On his word of honour...
"Me in jail!" I cried angrily. "You--you would dare! On what charge? You
could not...."
"You don't know what Pat O'Brien can do in Cuba."
The little country solicitor came out in a flash from under the Spanish
lawyer. Then he frowned slightly at me. "You being an Englishman, I
would have had you taken up on a charge of stealing."
Blood rushed to my face. I lost control over myself. "Mr. O'Brien," I
said, "I dare say you could have trumped up anything against me. You are
a very great scoundrel."
"Why? Because I don't lie about my motives, as you all do? I would wish
you to know that I would scorn to lie either to myself or to you."
I touched the haft of the sword on the table. It was lying with the
point his way.
"I had been thinking," said I, in great heat, "to propose to you that we
should fight it out between us two, man to man, rebel and traitor as you
have been."
"The devil you have!" he muttered.
"But really you are too much of a Picaroon. I think the gallows should
be your end."
I gave rein to my exasperation, because I felt myself hopelessly in his
power. What he was driving at, I could not tell. I had an intolerable
sense of being as much at his mercy as though I had been lying bound
hand and foot on the floor. It gave me pleasure to tell him what
I thought. And, perhaps, I was not quite candid, either. Suppose I
provoked him enough to fire his pistol at me. He had been fingering the
butt, absently, as we talked. He might have missed me, and then.... Or
he might have shot me dead. But surely there was some justice in Cuba.
It was clear enough that he did not wish to kill me himself. Well, this
was a desperate strait; to force him to do something he did not wish to
do, even at the cost of my own life, was the only step left open to
me to thwart his purpose; the only thing I could do just then for the
furtherance of my mission to save Seraphina from his intrigues. I was
oppressed by the misery of it all. As to killing him as he stood--if I
could do it by being very quick with the old rapier--my bringing up, my
ideas, my very being, recoiled from it. I had never taken a life. I was
very young. I was not used to scenes of violence; and to begin like this
in cold blood! Not only my conscience, but my very courage faltered.
Truth to tell, I was afraid; not for myself--I had the courage to
die; but I was afraid of the act. It was the unknown for me--for my
nerve--for my conscience. And then the Spanish gallows! That, too,
revolted me. To kill him, and then kill myself.... No, I must live. "Two
lives, one death," she had said..... For a second or two my brain reeled
with horror; I was certainly losing my self-possession. His voice broke
upon that nightmare.
"It may be your lot, yet," it said. I burst into a nervous laugh. For a
moment I could not stop myself.
"I won't murder you," I cried.
To this he said astonishingly, "Will you go to Mexico?"
It sounded like a joke. He was very serious. "I shall send one of the
schooners there on a little affair of mine. I can make use of you. I
give you this chance." It was as though he had thrown a bucketful of
water over me. I had an inward shiver, and became quite cool. It was his
turn now to let himself go.
It was a matter of delivering certain papers to the Spanish commandant
in Tamaulipas. There would be some employment found for me with the
Royal troops. I was a relation of the Riegos. And there came upon his
voice a strange ardour; a swiftness into his utterance. He walked away
from the table; came back, and gazed into my face in a marked, expectant
manner. He was not prompted by any love for me, he said, and gave an
uncertain laugh.
My wits had returned to me wholly; and as he repeated "No love for
you--no love for you," I had the intuition that what influenced him was
his love for Seraphina. I saw it. I read it in the workings of his
face. His eyes retained his good-humoured twinkle. He did not attach
any importance to a boy-and-girl affair; not at all--pah! The lady,
naturally young, warmhearted, full of kindness. I mustn't think.... Ha,
ha! A man of his age, of course, understood.... No importance at all.
He walked away from the table trying to snap his fingers, and, suddenly,
he reeled; he reeled, as though he had been overcome by the poison of
his jealousy--as though a thought had stabbed him to the heart. There
was an instant when the sight of that man moved me more than anything
I had seen of passionate suffering before (and that was nothing), or
since. He longed to kill me--I felt it in the very air of the room; and
he loved her too much to dare. He laughed at me across the table. I had
ridiculously misunderstood a very proper and natural kindness of a girl
with not much worldly experience. He had known her from the earliest
childhood.
"Take my word for it," he stammered.
It seemed to me that there were tears in his eyes. A stiff smile was
parting his lips. He took up the pistol, and evidently not knowing
anything about it, looked with an air of curiosity into the barrel.
It was time to think of making my career. That's what I ought to
be thinking of at my age. "At your age--at your age," he repeated
aimlessly. I was an Englishman. He hated me--and it was easy to believe
this, though he neither glared nor grimaced. He smiled.
He smiled continuously and rather pitifully. But his devotion to
a--a--person who.... His devotion was great enough to overcome even
that, even that. Did I understand? I owed it to the lady's regard,
which, for the rest, I had misunderstood--stupidly misunderstood.
"Well, at your age it's excusable!" he mumbled. "A career that..."
"I see," I said slowly. Young as I was, it was impossible to mistake
his motives. Only a man of mature years, and really possessed by a great
passion--by a passion that had grown slowly, till it was exactly as big
as his soul--could have acted like this--with that profound simplicity,
with such resignation, with such horrible moderation--But I wanted
to find out more. "And when would you want me to go?" I asked, with
a dissimulation of which I would not have suspected myself capable a
moment before. I was maturing in the fire of love, of danger; in the
lurid light of life piercing through my youthful innocence.
"Ah," he said, banging the pistol on to the table hurriedly. "At once.
To-night. Now."
"Without seeing anybody?"
"Without seeing... Oh, of course. In your own interest."
He was very quiet now. "I thought you looked intelligent enough," he
said, appearing suddenly very tired. "I am glad you see your position.
You shall go far in the Royal service, on the faith of Pat O'Brien,
English as you are. I will make it my own business for the sake of--the
Riego family. There is only one little condition."
He pulled out of his pocket a piece of paper, a pen, a travelling
inkstand. He looked the lawyer to the life; the Spanish family lawyer
grafted on an Irish attorney.
"You can't see anybody. But you ought to write. Dona Seraphina naturally
would be interested. A cousin and... I shall explain to Don Balthasar,
of course.... I will dictate: 'Out of regard for your future, and the
desire for active life, of your own will, you accept eagerly Senor
O'Brien's proposition.' She'll understand."
"Oh, yes, she'll understand," I said.
"Yes. And that you will write of your safe arrival in Tamaulipas. You
must promise to write. Your word..."
"By heavens, Senor O'Brien!" I burst out with inexpressible scorn,
"I thought you meant your villains to cut my throat on the passage. I
should have deserved no better fate."
He started. I shook with rage. A change had come upon both of us as
sudden as if we had been awakened by a violent noise. For a time we did
not speak a word. One look at me was enough for him. He passed his hand
over his forehead.
"What devil's in you, boy?" he said. "I seem to make nothing but
mistakes."
He went to the loophole window, and, advancing his head, cried out:
"The schooner does not sail to-night."
He had some of his cut-throats posted under the window. I could not make
out the reply he got; but after a while he said distinctly, so as to be
heard below:
"I give up that spy to you." Then he came back, put the pistol in his
pocket, and said to me, "Fool! I'll make you long for death yet."
"You've given yourself away pretty well," I said. "Some day I shall
unmask you. It will be my revenge on you for daring to propose to me...."
"What?" he interrupted, over his shoulder. "You? Not you--and I'll tell
you why. It's because dead men tell no tales."
He passed through the door--a back view of a dapper Spanish lawyer,
all in black, in a lofty frame. The calm, strolling footsteps went away
along the gallery. He turned the corner. The tapping of his heels echoed
in the _patio_, into whose blackness filtered the first suggestion of
the dawn.
CHAPTER FIVE
I remember walking about the room, and thinking to myself, "This is bad,
this is very bad; what shall I do now?" A sort of mad meditation that in
this meaningless way became so tense as positively to frighten me. Then
it occurred to me that I could do nothing whatever at present, and I was
soothed by this sense of powerless-ness, which, one would think, ought
to have driven me to distraction. I went to sleep ultimately, just as a
man sentenced to death goes to sleep, lulled in a sort of ghastly way by
the finality of his doom. Even when I awoke it kept me steady, in a way.
I washed, dressed, walked, ate, said "Good-morning, Cesar," to the old
major-domo I met in the gallery; exchanged grins with the negro boys
under the gateway, and watched the mules being ridden out barebacked
by other nearly naked negro boys into the sea, with great splashing
of water and a noise of voices. A small knot of men, unmistakably
__Lugarenos__, stood on the beach, also, watching the mules, and
exchanging loud jocular shouts with the blacks. Rio Medio, the dead,
forsaken, and desecrated city, was lying, as bare as a skeleton, on the
sands. They were yellow; the bay was very blue, the wooded hills very
green.
After the mules had been ridden uproariously back to the stables, wet
and capering, and shaking their long ears, all the life of the land
seemed to take refuge in this vivid colouring. As I looked at it from
the outer balcony above the great gate, the small group of __Lugarenos__
turned about to look at the Casa Riego.
They recognized me, no doubt, and one of them flourished, threateningly,
an arm from under his cloak. I retreated indoors.
This was the only menacing sign, absolutely the only sign that marked
this day. It was a day of pause. Seraphina did not leave her apartments;
Don Balthasar did not show himself; Father Antonio, hurrying towards the
sick room, greeted me with only a wave of the hand. I was not admitted
to see Carlos; the nun came to the door, shook her head at me, and
closed it gently in my face. Castro, sitting on the floor not very far
away, seemed unaware of me in so marked a manner that it inspired me
with the idea of not taking the slightest notice of him. Now and then
the figure of a maid in white linen and bright petticoat flitted in the
upper gallery, and once I fancied I saw the black, rigid carriage of the
duenna disappearing behind a pillar.
Senor O'Brien, old Cesar whispered, without looking at me, was extremely
occupied in the _Cancilleria_. His midday meal was served him there.
I had mine all alone, and then the sunny, heat-laden stillness of
siesta-time fell upon the Castilian dignity of the house.
I sank into a kind of reposeful belief in the work of accident.
Something would happen. I did not know how soon and how atrociously
my belief was to be justified. I exercised my ingenuity in the most
approved lover-fashion--in devising means how to get secret speech
with Seraphina. The confounded silly maids fled from my most distant
appearance, as though I had the pest. I was wondering whether I should
not go simply and audaciously and knock at her door, when I fancied I
heard a scratching at mine. It was a very stealthy sound, quite capable
of awakening my dormant emotions.
I went to the door and listened. Then, opening it the merest crack, I
saw the inexplicable emptiness of the gallery. Castro, on his hands and
knees, startled me by whispering at my feet:
"Stand aside, Senor."
He entered my room on all-fours, and waited till I got the door closed
before he stood up.
"Even he may sleep sometimes," he said. "And the balustrade has hidden
me."
To see this little saturnine bandit, who generally stalked about
haughtily, as if the whole Casa belonged to him by right of fidelity,
crawl into my room like this was inexpressibly startling. He shook the
folds of his cloak, and dropped his hat on the floor.
"Still, it is better so. The very women of the house are not safe," he
said. "Senor, I have no mind to be delivered to the English for hanging.
But I have not been admitted to see Don Carlos, and, therefore, I must
make my report to you. These are Don Carlos' orders. 'Serve him, Castro,
when I am dead, as if my soul had passed into his body.'"
He nodded sadly. "_Si!_ But Don Carlos is a friend to me and you--you."
He shook his head, and drew me away from the door. "Two __Lugarenos__,"
he said, "Manuel and another one, did go last night, as directed by the
friar"--he supposed--"to meet the _Juez_ in the bush outside Rio Medio."
I had guessed that much, and told him of Manuel's behaviour under my
window. How did they know my chamber?
"Bad, bad," muttered Castro. "La Chica told her lover, no doubt." He
hissed, and stamped his foot.
She was pretty, but flighty. The lover was a silly boy of decent,
Christian parents, who was always hanging about in the low villages. No
matter.
What he could not understand was why some boats should have been held in
readiness till nearly the morning to tow a schooner outside. Manuel came
along at dawn, and dismissed the crews. They had separated, making a
great noise on the beach, and yelling, "Death to the _Inglez!_"
I cleared up that point for him. He told me that O'Brien had the duenna
called to his room that morning. Nothing had been heard outside, but the
woman came out staggering, with her hand on the wall. He had terrified
her. God knows what he had said to her. The widow--as Castro called
her--had a son, an _escrivano_ in one of the Courts of Justice. No doubt
it was that.
"There it is, Senor," murmured Castro, scowling all round, as if every
wall of the room was an enemy. "He holds all the people in his hand in
some way. Even I must be cautious, though I am a humble, trusted friend
of the Casa!"
"What harm could he do you?" I asked.
"He is civil to me. _Amigo Castro_ here, and _Amigo Castro_ there. Bah!
The devil, alone, is his friend! He could deliver me to justice, and get
my life sworn away. He could------_Quien sabe?_ What need he care what
he does--a man that can get absolution from the archbishop himself if he
likes."
He meditated. "No! there is only one remedy for him." He tiptoed to my
ear. "The knife!"
He made a pass in the air with his blade, and I remembered vividly the
cockroach he had impaled with such accuracy on board the _Thames_. His
baneful glance reminded me of his murderous capering in the steerage,
when he had thought that the only remedy for _me_ was the knife.
He went to the loop-hole, and passed the steel thoughtfully on the stone
edge. I had not moved.
"The knife; but what would you have? Before, when I talked of this
to Don Carlos, he only laughed at me. That was his way in matters of
importance. Now they will not let me come in to him. He is too near
God--and the Senorita--why, she is too near the saints for all the
great nobility of her spirit. But, _que dia-bleria_, when I--in my
devotion--opened my mouth to her I saw some of that spirit in her
eyes...."
There was a slight irony in his voice. "No! Me--Castro! to be told that
an English Senora would have dismissed me forever from her presence for
such a hint. 'Your Excellency,' I said, 'deign, then, to find it good
that I should avoid giving offence to that man. It is not my desire to
run my neck into the iron collar.'"
He looked at me fixedly, as if expecting me to make a sign, then
shrugged his shoulders.
"_Bueno_. You see this? Then look to it yourself, Senor. You are to
me even as Don Carlos--all except for the love. No English body is big
enough to receive his soul. No friend will be left that would risk his
very honour of a noble for a man like Tomas Castro. Let me warn you not
to leave the Casa, even if a shining angel stood outside the gate and
called you by name. The gate is barred, now, night and day. I have
dropped a hint to Cesar, and that old African knows more than the Senor
would suppose. I cannot tell how soon I may have the opportunity to talk
to you again."
He peeped through the crack of the door, then slipped out, suddenly
falling at once on his hands and knees, so as to be hidden by the stone
balustrade from anybody in the _patio_. He, too, did not think himself
safe.
Early in the evening I descended into the court, and Father Antonio,
walking up and down the _patio_ with his eyes on his breviary, muttered
to me:
"Sit on this chair," and went on without stopping.
I took a chair near the marble rim of the basin with its border of
English flowers, its splashing thread of water. The goldfishes that had
been lying motionless, with their heads pointing different ways, glided
into a bunch to the fall of my shadow, waiting for crumbs of bread.
Father Antonio, his head down, and the open breviary under his nose,
brushed my foot with the skirt of his cassock.
"Have you any plan?"
When he came back, walking very slowly, I said, "None."
At this next turn I pronounced rapidly, "I should like to see Carlos."
He frowned over the edge of the book. I understood that he refused to
let me in. And, after all, why should I disturb that dying man? The news
about him was that he felt stronger that day. But he was preparing for
eternity. Father Antonio's business was to save souls. I felt horribly
crushed and alone. The priest asked, hardly moving his lips: "What do
you trust to?"
I had the time to meditate my reply. "Tell Carlos I think of escape by
sea."
He made a little sign of assent, turned off towards the staircase, and
went back to the sick room.
"The folly of it," I thought. How could I think of it? Escape where? I
dared not even show myself outside the Casa. My safety within depended
on old Cesar more than on anybody else. He had the key of the gate, and
the gate was practically the only thing between me and a miserable death
at the hands of the first ruffian I met outside. And with the thought I
seemed to stifle in that _patio_ open to the sky.
That gate seemed to cut off the breath of life from me. I was there, as
if in a trap. Should I--I asked myself--try to enlighten Don Balthasar?
Why not? He would understand me. I would tell him that in his own town,
as he always called Rio Medio, there lurked assassination for his guest.
That would move him if anything could.
He was then walking with O'Brien after dinner, as he had walked with me
on the day of my arrival. Only Seraphina had not appeared, and we three
men had sat out the silent meal alone.
They stopped as I approached, and Don Balthasar listened to me
benignantly. "Ah, yes, yes! Times have changed." But there was no reason
for alarm. There were some undesirable persons. Had they not arrived
lately? He turned to O'Brien, who stood by, in readiness to resume
the walk, and answered, "Yes, quite lately. Very undesirable," in a
matter-of-fact tone. The excellent Don Patricio would take measures
to have them removed, the old man soothed me. But it was not really
dangerous for any one to go out. Again he addressed O'Brien, who only
smiled gently, as much as to say, "What an absurdity!" I must not
forget, continued the old man, the veneration for the very name of Riego
that still, thank Heaven, survived in these godless and revolutionary
times in the Riegos' own town. He straightened his back a little,
looking at me with dignity, and then glanced at the other, who inclined
his head affirmatively. The utter and complete hopelessness of the
position appalled me for a moment. The old man had not put foot outside
his door for years, not even to go to church. Father Antonio said
Mass for him every day in the little chapel next the dining room.
When O'Brien--for his own purposes, and the better to conceal his own
connection with the Rio Medio piracies--had persuaded him to go to
Jamaica officially, he had been rowed in state to the ship waiting
outside. For many years now it had been impossible to enlighten him as
to the true condition of affairs. He listened to people's talk as though
it had been children's prattle. I have related how he received Carlos'
denunciations. If one insisted, he would draw himself up in displeasure.
But in his decay he had preserved a great dignity, a grave firmness that
intimidated me a little.
I did not, of course, insist that evening, and, after giving me
my dismissal in a gesture of blessing, he resumed his engrossing
conversation with O'Brien. It related to the services commemorating his
wife's death, those services that, once every twelve months, draped in
black all the churches in Havana. A hundred masses, no less, had to
be said that day; a distribution of alms had to be made. O'Brien was
charged with all the arrangements, and I caught, as they crept past me
up and down the _patio_, snatches of phrases relating to this mournful
function, when all the capital was invited to pray for the soul of the
illustrious lady. The priest of the church of San Antonio had said this
and that; the grand vicar of the diocese had made difficulties about
something; however, by the archbishop's special grace, no less than
three altars would be draped in the cathedral.
I saw Don Balthasar smile with an ineffable satisfaction; he thanked
O'Brien for his zeal, and seemed to lean more familiarly on his arm. His
voice trembled with eagerness. "And now, my excellent Don Patricio, as
to the number of candles...."
I stood for a while as if rooted to the spot, overwhelmed by my
insignificance. O'Brien never once looked my way. Then, hanging my head,
I went slowly up the white staircase towards my room.
Cesar, going his rounds along the gallery, shuffled his silk-clad shanks
smartly between two young negroes balancing lanthorns suspended on
the shafts of their halberds. That little group had a mediaeval and
outlandish aspect. Cesar carried a bunch of keys in one hand, his staff
of office in the other. He stood aside, in his maroon velvet and gold
lace, holding the three-cornered hat under his arm, bowing his gray,
woolly head--the most venerable and deferential of majordomos. His
attendants, backing against the wall, grounded their halberds heavily at
my approach.
He stepped out to intercept me, and, with great discretion, "Senor, a
word," he said in his subdued voice. "A moment ago I have been called
within the door of our senorita's apartments. She has given me this for
your worship, together with many compliments. It is a seal. The Senor
will understand."
I took it; it was a tiny seal with her monogram on it. "Yes," I said.
"And Senorita Dona Seraphina has charged me to repeat"--he made a
stealthy sign, as if to counteract an evil influence--"the words, 'Two
lives--one death.' The Senor will understand."
"Yes," I said, looking away with a pang at my heart. He touched my
elbow. "And to trust Cesar. Senor, I dandled her when she was quite
little. Let me most earnestly urge upon your worship not to go near the
windows, especially if there is light in your worship's room. Evil men
are gazing upon the house, and I have seen myself the glint of a musket
at the end of the street. The moon grows fast, too. The senorita begs
you to trust Cesar."
"Are there many men?" I asked.
"Not many in sight; I have seen only one. But by signs, open to a man of
my experience, I suspect many more to be about." Then, as I looked down
on the ground, he added parenthetically, "They are poor shots, one and
all, lacking the very firmness of manhood necessary to discharge a
piece with a good aim. Still, Senor, I am ordered to entreat you to be
cautious. Strange it is that to-night, from the great revelry at the
Aldea Bajo, one might think they had just visited an English ship
outside."
A ship! a ship! of any sort. But how to get out of the Casa? Murder
forbade me even as much as to look out of the windows. Was there a ship
outside? Cesar was positive there was not--not since I had arrived.
Besides, the empty sea itself was unattainable, it seemed. I pressed the
seal to my lips. "Tell the senorita how I received her gift," I said;
and the old negro inclined his head lower still. "Tell her that as the
letters of her name are graved on this, so are all the words she has
spoken graven on my heart."
They went away busily, the lanthorns swinging about the ax-heads of the
halberds, Cesar's staff tapping the stones.
I shut my door, and buried my face in the pillows of the state bed. My
mental anguish was excessive; action, alone, could relieve it. I had
been battling with my thoughts like a man fighting with shadows. I could
see no issue to such a struggle, and I prayed for something tangible to
encounter--something that one could overcome or go under to. I must
have fallen suddenly asleep, because there was a lion in front of me. It
lashed its tail, and beyond the indistinct agitation of the brute I saw
Seraphina. I tried to shout to her; no voice came out of my throat. And
the lion produced a strange noise; he opened his jaws like a door. I sat
up. It was like a change of dream. A glare filled my eyes. In the wide
doorway of my room, in a group of attendants, I saw a figure in a short
black cloak standing, hat on head, and an arm outstretched. It was Don
Balthasar. He held himself more erect than I had ever seen him before.
Stifled sounds of weeping, a vast, confused rumour of lamentations,
running feet and flamming doors, came from behind him; his aged, dry
voice, much firmer and very distinct, was speaking to me.
"You are summoned to attend the bedside of Don Carlos Riego at the hour
of death, to help his soul struggling on the threshold of eternity, with
your prayers--as a kinsman and a friend."
A great draught swayed the lights about that black and courtly figure.
All the windows and doors of the palace had been flung open for the
departure of the struggling soul. Don Balthasar turned; the group of
attendants was gone in a moment, with a tramp of feet and jostling of
lights in the long gallery.
I ran out after them. A wavering glare came from under the arch, and,
through the open gate, I saw the bulky shape of the bishop's coach
waiting outside in the moonlight. A strip of cloth fell from step
to step down the middle of the broad white stairs. The staircase was
brilliantly lighted, and quite empty. The household was crowding the
upper galleries; the sobbing murmurs of their voices fell into the
deserted _patio_. The strip of crimson cloth laid for the bishop ran
across it from the arch of the stairway to the entrance.
The door of Carlos' room stood wide open; I saw the many candles on
a table covered with white linen, the side of the big bed, surpliced
figures moving within the room. There was the ringing of small bells,
and sighing groans from the kneeling forms in the gallery through which
I was making my way slowly.
Castro appeared at my side suddenly. "Senor," he began, with saturnine
stoicism, "he is dead. I have seen battlefields------" His voice broke.
I saw, through the large portal of the death-chamber, Don Balthasar
and Seraphina standing at the foot of the bed; the bowed heads of
two priests; the bishop, a tiny old man, in his vestments; and Father
Antonio, burly and motionless, with his chin in his hand, as if left
behind after leading that soul to the very gate of Eternity. All about
me, women and men were crossing themselves; and Castro, who for a moment
had covered his eyes with his hand, touched my elbow.
"And you live," he said, with sombre emphasis; then, warningly, "You are
in great danger now."
I looked around, as if expecting to see an uplifted knife. I saw only a
lot of people--household negroes and the women--rising from their knees.
Below, the _patio_ was empty.
"The house is defenceless," Castro continued. We heard tumultuous voices
under the gate. O'Brien appeared in the doorway of Carlos' room with an
attentive and dismayed expression on his face. I do not really think he
had anything to do with what then took place. He meant to have me killed
outside; but the rabble, excited by Manuel's inflammatory speeches,
had that night started from the villages below with the intention of
clamouring for my life. Many of their women were with them. Some of the
__Lugarenos__ carried torches, others had pikes; most of them, however,
had nothing but their long knives. They came in a disorderly, shouting
mob along the beach, intending this not for an attack, but as a simple
demonstration.
The sight of the open gate struck them with wonder. The bishop's coach
blocked the entrance, and for a time they hesitated, awed by the mystery
of the house and by the rites going on in there. Then two or three
bolder spirits stole closer. The bishop's people, of course, did not
think of offering any resistance. The very defencelessness of the house
restrained the mob for a while. A few more men from outside ran in.
Several women began to clamour scoldingly to them to bring the _Inglez_
out. Then the men, encouraging each other in their audacity, advanced
further under the arch.
A solitary black, the only guard left at the gate, shouted at them,
"_Arria!_ Go back!" It had no effect. More of them crowded in, though,
of course, the greater part of that mob remained outside. The black
rolled big eyes. He could not stop them; he did not like to leave his
post; he dared not fire. "Go back! Go back!" he repeated.
"Not without the _Inglez_," they answered.
The tumult we had heard arose when the _Lugarenos_ suddenly fell upon
the sentry, and wrenched his musket from him.
This man, when disarmed, ran away. I saw him running across the
_patio_, on the crimson pathway, to the foot of the staircase. His
shouting, "The _Lugarenos_ have risen!" broke upon the hush of mourning.
Father Antonio made a brusque movement, and Seraphina sent a startled
glance in my direction.
The cloistered court, with its marble basin and a jet of water in the
centre, remained empty for a moment after the negro had run across; a
growing clamour penetrated into it. In the midst of it I heard O'Brien's
voice saying, "Why don't they shut the gate?" Immediately afterwards a
woman in the gallery cried out in surprise, and I saw the _Lugarenos_
pour into the _patio_.
For a time that motley group of bandits stood in the light, as if
intimidated by the great dignity of the house, by the mysterious
prestige of the Casa whose interior, probably, none of them had
ever seen before. They gazed about silently, as if surprised to find
themselves there.
It looked as if they would have retired if they had not caught sight of
me. A murmur of "the _Inglez_" arose at once. By that time the household
negroes had occupied the staircase with what weapons they could find
upstairs.
Father Antonio pushed past O'Brien out of the room, and shook his arms
over the balustrade.
"Impious men," he cried, "begone from this house of death." His eyes
flashed at the ruffians, who stared stupidly from below.
"Give us the _Inglez_," they growled. Seraphina, from within, cried,
"Juan." I was then near the door, but not within the room.
"The _Inglez!_ The heretic! The traitor!" came in sullen, subdued
mutter. A hoarse, reckless voice shouted, "Give him to us, and we shall
go!"
"You are putting in danger all the lives in this house!" O'Brien hissed
at me. "Senorita, pray do not." He stood in the way of Seraphina, who
wished to come out.
"It is you!" she cried. "It is you! It is your voice, it is your hand,
it is your iniquity!"
He was confounded by her vehemence.
"Who brought him here?" he stammered. "Am I to find one of that accursed
brood forever in my way? I take him to witness that for your sake------"
A formidable roar, "Throw us down the _Inglez!_" filled the _patio_.
They were gaining assurance down there; and the ferocious clamouring of
the mob outside came faintly upon our ears.
O'Brien barred the way. Don Balthasar leaned on his daughter's arm--she
very straight, with tears still on her face and indignation in her eye,
he bowed, and with his immovable fine features set in the calmness of
age. Behind that group there were two priests, one with a scared, white
face, another, black-browed, with an exalted and fanatical aspect. The
light of the candles from the improvised altar fell on the bishop's
small, bald head, emerging with a patient droop from the wide spread of
his cope, as though he had been inclosed in a portable gold shrine. He
was ready to go.
Don Balthasar, who seemed to have heard nothing, as if suddenly waking
up to his duty, left his daughter, and muttering to O'Brien, "Let me
precede the bishop," came out, bare-headed, into the gallery. Father
Antonio had turned away, and his heavy hand fell on O'Brien's shoulder.
"Have you no heart, no reverence, no decency?" he said. "In the name
of everything you respect, I call upon you to stop this sacrilegious
outbreak."
O'Brien shook off the priestly hand, and fixed his eyes upon Seraphina.
I happened to be looking at his face; he seemed to be ready to go out
of his mind. His jealousy, the awful torment of soul and body, made him
motionless and speechless.
Seeing Don Balthasar appear by the balustrade, the ruffians below had
become silent for a while. His aged, mechanical voice was heard asking
distinctly:
"What do these people want?"
Seraphina, from within the room, said aloud, "They are clamouring for
the life of our guest." She looked at O'Brien contemptuously, "They are
doing this to please you."
"Before God, I have nothing to do with this."
It was true enough, he had nothing to do with this outbreak; and I
believe he would have interfered, but, in his dismay at having lost
himself in the eyes of Seraphina, in his rage against myself, he did
not know how to act. No doubt he had been deceiving himself as to his
position with Seraphina. He was a man who in his wishes. His desire of
revenge on me, the downfall of his hopes (he could no longer deceive
himself), a desperate striving of thought for their regaining, his
impulse towards the impossible--all these emotions paralyzed his will.
Don Balthasar beckoned to me.
"Don't go near him," said O'Brien, in a thick, mumbling voice. "I
shall------I must------"
I put him aside. Don Balthasar took my arm. "Misguided populace," he
whispered. "They have been a source of sorrow to me lately. But this
wicked folly is incredible. I shall call upon them to come to their
senses. My voice------"
The court below was strongly lighted, so that I saw the bearded,
bronzed, wild faces of the _Lugarenos_ looking up. We, also, were
strongly shown by the light of the doorway behind us, and by the torches
burning in the gallery.
That morning, in my helplessness, I had come to put my trust in
accident--in some accident--I hardly knew of what nature--my own death,
perhaps--that would find a solution for my responsibilities, put an end
to my tormenting thoughts. And now the accident came with a terrible
swiftness, at which I shudder to this day.
We were looking down into the _patio_. Don Balthasar had just said,
"You are nowhere as safe as by my side," when I noticed a _Lugareno_
withdrawing himself from the throng about the basin. His face came to me
familiarly. He was the pirate with the broken nose, who had had a taste
of my fist. He had the sentry's musket on his shoulder, and was slinking
away towards the gate.
Don Balthasar extended his hand over the balustrade, and there was
a general movement of recoil below. I wondered why the slaves on the
stairs did not charge and clear the _patio_; but I suppose with such a
mob outside there was a natural hesitation in bringing the position to
an issue. The _Lugarenos_ were muttering, "Look at the _Inglez!_" then
cried out together, "Excellency, give up this _Inglez!_"
Don Balthasar seemed ten years younger suddenly. I had never seen him so
imposingly erect.
"Insensate!" he began, without any anger.
"He is going to fire!" yelled Castro's voice somewhere in the gallery.
I saw a red dart in the shadow of the gate. The broken-nosed pirate had
fired at me. The report, deadened in the vault, hardly reached my
ears. Don Balthazar's arm seemed to swing me back. Then I felt him lean
heavily on my shoulder. I did not know what had happened till I heard
him say:
"Pray for me, gentlemen."
Father Antonio received him in his arms.
For a second after the shot, the most dead silence prevailed in the
court. It was broken by an affrighted howl below: and Seraphina's voice
cried piercingly:
"Father!"
The priest, dropping on one knee, sustained the silvery head, with its
thin features already calm in death. Don Balthasar had saved my life;
and his daughter flung herself upon the body. O'Brien pressed his hands
to his temples, and remained motionless.
I saw the bishop, in his stiff cope, creep up to the group with the
motion of a tortoise. And, for a moment, his quavering voice pronouncing
the absolution was the only sound in the house.
Then a most fiendish noise broke out below. The negroes had charged, and
the _Lugarenos_, struck with terror at the unforeseen catastrophe, were
rushing helter-skelter through the gate. The screaming of the maids was
frightful. They ran up and down the galleries with their hair streaming.
O'Brien passed me by swiftly, muttering like a madman.
I, also, got down into the courtyard in time to strike some heavy blows
under the gateway; but I don't know who it was that thrust into my hands
the musket which I used as a club. The sudden burst of shrieks,
the cries of terror under the vault of the gate, yells of rage and
consternation, silenced the mob outside. The _Lugarenos_, appalled at
what had happened, shouted most pitifully. They squeaked like the vermin
they were. I brought down the clubbed musket; two went down. Of two I am
sure. The rush of flying feet swept through between the walls, bearing
me along. For a time a black stream of men eddied in the moonlight round
the bishop's coach, like a torrent breaking round a boulder. The great
heavy machine rocked, mules plunged, torches swayed.
The archway had been cleared. Outside, the slaves were forming in the
open space before the Casa, while Cesar, with a few others, laboured
to swing the heavy gates to. Hats, torn cloaks, knives strewed the
flagstones, and the dim light of the lamps, fastened high up on the
walls, fell on the faces of three men stretched out on their backs.
Another, lying huddled up in a heap, got up suddenly and rushed out.
The thought of Seraphina clinging to the lifeless body of her father
upstairs came to me; it came over me in horror, and I let the musket
fall out of my hand. A silence like the silence of despair reigned in
the house. She would hate me now. I felt as if I could walk out and give
myself up, had it not been for the sight of O'Brien.
He was leaning his shoulders against the wall in the posture of a man
suddenly overcome by a deadly disease. No one was looking at us. It came
to me that he could not have many illusions left to him now. He looked
up wearily, saw me, and, waking up at once, thrust his hands into the
pockets of his breeches. I thought of his pistol. No wild hope of love
would prevent him, now, from killing me outright. The fatal shot that
had put an end to Don Balthasar's life must have brought to him an
awakening worse than death. I made one stride, caught him by both arms
swiftly, and pinned him to the wall with all my strength. We struggled
in silence.
I found him much more vigorous than I had expected; but, at the same
time, I felt at once that I was more than a match for him. We did not
say a word. We made no noise. But, in our struggle, we got away from the
wall into the middle of the gateway I dared not let go of his arms to
take him by the throat. He only tried to jerk and wrench himself away.
Had he succeeded, it would have been death for me. We never moved our
feet from the spot, fairly in the middle of the archway but nearer to
the gate than to the _patio_. The slaves, formed outside, guarded the
bishop's coach, and I do not know that there was anybody else actually
with us under the vault of the entrance. We glared into each other's
faces, and the world seemed very still around us. I felt in me a
passion--not of hate, but of determination to be done with him; and from
his face it was impossible to guess his suffering, his despair, or his
rage.
In the midst of our straining I heard a sibilant sound. I detached my
eyes from his; his struggles redoubled, and, behind him, stealing in
towards us from the court, black on the strip of crimson cloth, I saw
Tomas Castro. He flung his cloak back. The light of the lanthorn under
the keystone of the arch glimmered feebly on the blade of his maimed
arm. He made a discreet and bloodcurdling gesture to me with the other.
How could I hold a man so that he should be stabbed from behind in my
arms? Castro was running up swiftly, his cloak opening like a pair of
sable wings. Collecting all my strength, I forced O'Brien round, and
we swung about in a flash. Now he had his back to the gate. My effort
seemed to have uprooted him. I felt him give way all over.
As soon as our position had changed, Castro checked himself, and stepped
aside into the shadow of the guardroom doorway. I don't think O'Brien
had been aware of what had been going on. His strength was overborne
by mine. I drove him backwards. His eyes blinked wildly. He bared his
teeth. He resisted, as though I had been forcing him over the brink of
perdition. His feet clung to the flagstones. I shook him till his head
rolled.
"Viper brood!" he spluttered.
"Out you go!" I hissed.
I had found nothing heroic, nothing romantic to say--nothing that would
express my desperate resolve to rid the world of his presence. All I
could do was to fling him out. The Casa Riego was all my world--a World
full of great pain, great mourning, and love. I saw him pitch headlong
under the wheels of the bishop's enormous carriage. The black coachman
who had sat aloft, unmoved through all the tumult, in his white
stockings and three-cornered hat, glanced down from his high box. And
the two parts of the gate came together with a clang of ironwork and a
heavy crash that seemed as loud as thunder under that vault.
CHAPTER SIX
Not even in memory am I willing to live over again those three days when
Father Antonio, the old major-domo, and myself would meet each other
in the galleries, in the _patio_, in the empty rooms, moving in the
stillness of the house with heavy hearts and desolate eyes, which seemed
to demand, "What is there to do?"
Of course, precautions were taken against the Lugarenos. They were
besieging the Casa from afar. They had established a sort of camp at the
end of the street, and they prowled about amongst the old, barricaded
houses in their pointed hats, in their rags and finery; women, with
food, passed constantly between the villages and the panic-stricken
town; there were groups on the beach; and one of the schooners had been
towed down the bay, and was lying, now, moored stem and stern opposite
the great gate. They did nothing whatever active against us. They lay
around and watched, as if in pursuance of a plan traced by a superior
authority. They were watching for me. But when, by some mischance, they
burnt the roof off the outbuildings that were at some distance from the
Casa, their chiefs sent up a deputation of three, with apologies.
Those men came unarmed, and, as it were, under Castro's protection,
and absolutely whimpered with regrets before Father Antonio. "Would his
reverence kindly intercede with the most noble senorita?..."
"Silence! Dare not pronounce her name!" thundered the good priest,
snatching away his hand, which they attempted to grab and kiss.
I, in the background, noted their black looks at me even as they
cringed. The man who had fired the shot, they said, had expired of his
wounds after great torments. Their other dead had been thrust out of
the gate before. A long fellow, with slanting eyebrows and a scar on his
cheek, called El Rechado, tried to inform Cesar, confidentially, that
Manuel, his friend, had been opposed to any encroachment of the Casa's
offices, only: "That Domingo------"
As soon as we discovered what was their object (their apparent object,
at any rate), they were pushed out of the gate unceremoniously,--still
protesting their love and respect--by the Riego negroes. Castro followed
them out again, after exchanging a meaning look with Father Antonio. To
live in the two camps, as it were, was a triumph of Castro's diplomacy,
of his saturnine mysteriousness. He kept us in touch with the outer
world, coming in under all sorts of pretences, mostly with messages from
the bishop, or escorting the priests that came in relays to pray by the
bodies of the two last Riegos lying in state, side by side, rigid in
black velvet and white lace ruffles, on the great bed dragged out into
the middle of the room.
Two enormous wax torches in iron stands flamed and guttered at the door;
a black cloth draped the emblazoned shields; and the wind from the sea,
blowing through the open casement, inclined all together the flames of
a hundred candles, pale in the sunlight, extremely ardent in the night.
The murmur of prayers for these souls went on incessantly; I have it in
my ears now. There would be always some figure of the household kneeling
in prayer at the door; or the old major-domo would come in to stand at
the foot, motionless for a time; or, through the open door, I would see
the cassock of Father Antonio, flung on his knees, with his forehead
resting on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped above his tonsure.
Apart from what was necessary for defence, all the life of the house
seemed stopped. Not a woman appeared; all the doors were closed; and
the numbing desolation of a great bereavement was symbolized by Don
Bal-thasar's chair in the _patio_, which had remained lying overturned
in full view of every part of the house, till I could bear the sight
no longer, and asked Cesar to have it put away. "_Si, Senor_," he said
deferentially, and a few tears ran suddenly down his withered cheeks.
The English flowers had been trampled down; an unclean hat floated on
the basin, now here, now there, frightening the goldfish from one side
to the other.
And Seraphina. It seems not fitting that I should write of her in these
days. I hardly dared let my thoughts approach her, but I had to think of
her all the time. Her sorrow was the very soul of the house.
Shortly after I had thrown O'Brien out the bishop had left, and then I
learned from Father Antonio that Seraphina had been carried away to her
own apartments in a fainting condition. The excellent man was almost
incoherent with distress and trouble of mind, and walked up and down,
his big head drooping on his capacious chest, the joints of his entwined
fingers cracking. I had met him in the gallery, as I was making my way
back to Carlos' room in anxiety and fear, and we had stepped aside into
a large saloon, seldom used, above the gateway. I shall never forget
the restless, swift pacing of that burly figure, while, feeling utterly
crushed, now the excitement was over, I leaned against a console. Three
long bands of moonlight fell, chilly bluish, into the vast room, with
its French Empire furniture stiffly arranged about the white walls.
"And that man?" he asked me at last.
"I could have killed him with my own hands," I said. "I was the
stronger. He had his pistols on him, I am certain, only I could not be a
party to an assassination...."
"Oh, my son, it would have been no sin to have exerted the strength
which God had blessed you with," he interrupted. "We are allowed to kill
venomous snakes, wild beasts; we are given our strength for that, our
intelligence...." And all the time he walked about, wringing his hands.
"Yes, your reverence," I said, feeling the most miserable and helpless
of lovers on earth; "but there was no time. If I had not thrown him out,
Castro would have stabbed him in the back in my very hands. And that
would have been------" Words failed me.
I had been obliged not only to desist myself, but to save his life from
Castro. I had been obliged! There had been no option. Murderous enemy as
he was, it seemed to me I should never have slept a wink all the rest of
my life.
"Yes, it is just, it is just. What else? Alas!" Father Antonio repeated
disconnectedly. "Those feelings implanted in your breast----I have
served my king, as you know, in my sacred calling, but in the midst of
war, which is the outcome of the wickedness natural to our fallen state.
I understand; I understand. It may be that God, in his mercy, did not
wish the death of that evil man--not yet, perhaps. Let us submit. He
may repent." He snuffled aloud. "I think of that poor child," he said
through his handkerchief. Then, pressing my arm with his vigorous
fingers, he murmured, "I fear for her reason."
It may be imagined in what state I spent the rest of that sleepless
night. At times, the thought that I was the cause of her bereavement
nearly drove me mad.
And there was the danger, too.
But what else could I have done? My whole soul had recoiled from the
horrible help Castro was bringing us at the point of his blade. No love
could demand from me such a sacrifice.
Next day Father Antonio was calmer. To my trembling inquiries he said
something consolatory as to the blessed relief of tears. When not
praying fervently in the mortuary chamber, he could be seen pacing the
gallery in a severe aloofness of meditation. In the evening he took
me by the arm, and, without a word, led me up a narrow and winding
staircase. He pushed a small door, and we stepped out on a flat part of
the roof, flooded in moonlight.
The points of land dark with the shadows of trees and broken ground
clasped the waters of the bay, with a body of shining white mists in
the centre; and, beyond, the vast level of the open sea, touched with
glitter, appeared infinitely sombre under the luminous sky.
We stood back from the parapet, and Father Antonio threw out a thick arm
at the splendid trail of the moon upon the dark water.
"This is the only way," he said.
He had a warm heart under his black robe, a simple and courageous
comprehension of life, this priest who was very much of a man; a certain
grandeur of resolution when it was a matter of what he regarded as his
principal office.
"This is the way," he repeated.
Never before had I been struck so much by the gloom, the vastness,
the emptiness of the open sea, as on that moonlight night. And Father
Antonio's deep voice went on:
"My son, since God has made use of the nobility of your heart to save
that sinner from an unshriven death------"
He paused to mutter, "Inscrutable! inscrutable!" to himself, sighed, and
then:
"Let us rejoice," he continued, with a completely unconcealed
resignation, "that you have been the chosen instrument to afford him an
opportunity to repent."
His tone changed suddenly.
"He will never repent," he said with great force. "He has sold his
soul and body to the devil, like those magicians of old of whom we have
records."
He clicked his tongue with compunction, and regretted his want of
charity. It was proper for me, however, as a man having to deal with a
world of wickedness and error, to act as though I did not believe in his
repentance.
"The hardness of the human heart is incredible; I have seen the most
appalling examples." And the priest meditated. "He is not a common
criminal, however," he added profoundly.
It was true. He was a man of illusions, ministering to passions
that uplifted him above the fear of consequences, Young as I was, I
understood that, too. There was no safety for us in Cuba while he lived.
Father Antonio nodded dismally.
"Where to go?" I asked. "Where to turn? Whom can we trust? In whom can
we repose the slightest confidence? Where can we look for hope?"
Again the _padre_ pointed to the sea. The hopeless aspect of its moonlit
and darkling calm struck me so forcibly that I did not even ask how he
proposed to get us out there. I only made a gesture of discouragement.
Outside the Casa, my life was not worth ten minutes' purchase. And how
could I risk her there? How could I propose to her to follow me to an
almost certain death? What could be the issue of such an adventure?
How could we hope to devise such secret means of getting away as would
prevent the _Lugarenos_ pursuing us? I should perish, then, and she...
Father Antonio seemed to lose his self-control suddenly.
"Yes," he cried. "The sea is a perfidious element, but what is it to
the blind malevolence of men?" He gripped my shoulder. "The risk to her
life," he cried; "the risk of drowning, of hunger, of thirst--that is
all the sea can do. I do not think of that. I love her too much. She
is my very own spiritual child; and I tell you, Senor, that the unholy
intrigue of that man endangers not her happiness, not her fortune
alone--it endangers her innocent soul itself."
A profound silence ensued. I remembered that his business was to save
souls. This old man loved that young girl whom he had watched growing
up, defenceless in her own home; he loved her with a great strength of
paternal instinct that no vow of celibacy can extinguish, and with a
heroic sense of his priestly duty. And I was not to say him nay. The
sea--so be it. It was easier to think of her dead than to think of her
immured; it was better that she should be the victim of the sea than of
evil men; that she should be lost with me than to me.
Father Antonio, with that naive sense of the poetry of the sky he
possessed, apostrophized the moon, the "gentle orb," as he called it,
which ought to be weary of looking at the miseries of the earth. His
immense shadow on the leads seemed to fling two vast fists over the
parapet, as if to strike at the enemies below, and without discussing
any specific plan we descended. It was understood that Seraphina and I
should try to escape--I won't say by sea, but to the sea. At best, to
ask the charitable help of some passing ship, at worst to go out of the
world together.
I had her confidence. I will not tell of my interview with her; but I
shall never forget my sensations of awe, as if entering a temple, the
melancholy and soothing intimacy of our meeting, the dimly lit loftiness
of the room, the vague form of La Chica in the background, and the
frail, girlish figure in black with a very pale, delicate face. Father
Antonio was the only other person present, and chided her for giving way
to grief. "It is like rebellion--like rebellion," he denounced, turning
away his head to wipe a tear hastily; and I wondered and thanked God
that I should be a comfort to that tender young girl, whose lot on earth
had been difficult, whose sorrow was great but could not overwhelm her
indomitable spirit, which held a promise of sweetness and love.
Her courage was manifest to me in the gentle and sad tones of her voice.
I made her sit in a vast armchair of tapestry, in which she looked
lost like a little child, and I took a stool at her feet. This is an
unforgettable hour in my life in which not a word of love was spoken,
which is not to be written of. The burly shadow of the priest lay
motionless from the window right across the room; the flickering flame
of a silver lamp made an unsteady white circle of light on the lofty
ceiling above her head. A clock was beating gravely somewhere in the
distant gloom, like the unperturbed heart of that silence, in which our
understanding of each other was growing, even into a strength fit to
withstand every tempest.
"Escape by the sea," I said aloud. "It would be, at least, like two
lovers leaping hand in hand off a high rock, and nothing else."
Father Antonio's bass voice spoke behind us.
"It is better to jeopardize the sinful body that returns to the dust of
which it is made than the redeemed soul, whose awful lot is eternity.
Reflect."
Seraphina hung her head, but her hand did not tremble in mine.
"My daughter," the old man continued, "you have to confide your fate to
a noble youth of elevated sentiments, and of a truly chivalrous
heart...."
"I trust him," said Seraphina.
And, as I heard her say this, it seemed really to me as if, in very
truth, my sentiments were noble and my heart chivalrous. Such is the
power of a girl's voice. The door closed on us, and I felt very humble.
But in the gallery Father Antonio leaned heavily on my shoulder.
"I shall be a lonely old man," he whispered faintly. "After all these
years! Two great nobles; the end of a great house--a child I had seen
grow up.... But I am less afraid for her now."
I shall not relate all the plans we made and rejected. Everything seemed
impossible. We knew from Castro that O'Brien had gone to Havana, either
to take the news of Don Balthasar's death himself, or else to prevent
the news spreading there too soon. Whatever his motive for leaving Rio
Medio, he had left orders that the house should be respected under the
most awful penalties, and that it should be watched so that no one left
it. The Englishman was to be killed at sight. Not a hair on anybody
else's head was to be touched.
To escape seemed impossible; then on the third day the thing came to
pass. The way was found. Castro, who served me as if Carlos' soul had
passed into my body, but looked at me with a saturnine disdain, had
arranged it all with Father Antonio.
It was the day of the burial of Carlos and Don Balthasar. That same day
Castro had heard that a ship had been seen becalmed a long way out to
sea. It was a great opportunity; and the funeral procession would give
the occasion for my escape. There was in Rio Medio, as in all Spanish
towns amongst the respectable part of the population, a confraternity
for burying the dead, "The Brothers of Pity," who, clothed in black
robes and cowls, with only two holes for the eyes, carried the dead to
their resting-place, unrecognizable and unrecognized in that pious work.
A "Brother of Pity" dress would be brought for me into Father Antonio's
room. Castro was confident as to his ability of getting a boat. It would
be a very small and dangerous one, but what would I have, if I neither
killed my enemy, nor let any one else kill him for me, he commented with
sombre sarcasm.
A truce of God had been called, and the burial was to take place in the
evening when the mortal remains of the last of the Riegos would be
laid in the vault of the cathedral of what had been known as their
own province, and had, in fact, been so for a time under a grant from
Charles V.
Early in the day I had a short interview with Seraphina. She was
resolute. Then, long before dark, I slipped into Father Antonio's room,
where I was to stay until the moment to come out and mingle with the
throng of other Brothers of Pity. Once with the bodies in the crypt of
the cathedral, I was to await Seraphina there, and, together, we should
slip through a side door on to the shore. Cesar, to throw any observer
off the scent (three _Lugarenos_ were to be admitted to see the bodies
put in their coffins), posted two of the Riego negroes with loaded
muskets on guard before the door of my empty room, as if to protect me.
Then, just as dusk fell, Father Antonio, who had been praying silently
in a corner, got up, blew his nose, sighed, and suddenly enfolded me in
his powerful arms for an instant.
"I am an old man--a poor priest," he whispered jerkily into my ear, "and
the sea is very perfidious. And yet it favours the sons of your nation.
But, remember--the child has no one but you. Spare her."
He went off; stopped. "Inscrutable! inscrutable!" he murmured, lifting
upwards his eyes. He raised his hand with a solemn slowness. "An old
man's blessing can do no harm," he said humbly. I bowed my head. My
heart was too full for speech, and the door closed. I never saw him
again, except later on in his surplice for a moment at the gate, his
great bass voice distinct in the chanting of the priests conducting the
bodies.
The _Lugarenos_ would respect the truce arranged by the bishop.
No man of them but the three had entered the Casa. Already, early in the
night, their black-haired women, with coarse faces and melancholy eyes,
were kneeling in rows under the black _mantillas_ on the stone floor of
the cathedral, praying for the repose of the soul of Seraphina's
father, of that old man who had lived among them, unapproachable, almost
invisible, and as if infinitely removed. They had venerated him, and
many of them had never set eyes on his person.
It strikes me, now, as strange and significant of a mysterious human
need, the need to look upwards towards a superiority inexpressibly
remote, the need of something to idealize in life. They had only that
and, maybe, a sort of love as idealized and as personal for the mother
of God, whom, also, they had never seen, to whom they trusted to save
them from a devil as real. And they had, moreover, a fear even more real
of O'Brien.
And, when one comes to think of it, in putting on the long spectacled
robe of a Brother of Pity, in walking before the staggering bearers
of the great coffin with a tall crucifix in my hand, in thus taking
advantage of their truce of God, I was, also, taking advantage of what
was undoubtedly their honour--a thing that handicapped them quite as
much as had mine when I found myself unable to strike down O'Brien. At
that time, I was a great deal too excited to consider this, however. I
had many things to think of, and the immense necessity of keeping a cool
head.
It was, after all, Tomas Castro to whom all the credit of the thing
belonged. Just after it had fallen very dark, he brought me the black
robes, a pair of heavy pistols to gird on under them, and the heavy
staff topped by a crucifix. He had an air of sarcastic protest in the
dim light of my room, and he explained with exaggeratedly plain words
precisely what I was to do--which, as a matter of fact, was neither more
nor less than merely following in his own footsteps.
"And, oh, Senor," he said sardonically, "if you desire again to pillow
your head upon the breast of your mother; if you would again see your
sister, who, alas! by bewitching my Carlos, is at the heart of all our
troubles; if you desire again to see that dismal land of yours, which
politeness forbids me to curse, I would beg of you not to let the
mad fury of your nation break loose in the midst of these thieves and
scoundrels."
He peered intently into the spectacled eyeholes of my cowl, and laid
his hand on his sword-hilt. His small figure, tightly clothed in black
velvet from chin to knee, swayed gently backwards and forwards in the
light of the dim candle, and his grotesque shadow flitted over the
ghostly walls of the great room. He stood gazing silently for a minute,
then turned smartly on his heels, and, with a gesture of sardonic
respect, threw open the door for me.
"Pray, Senor," he said, "that the moon may not rise too soon."
We went swiftly down the colonnades for the last time, in the pitch
darkness and into the blackness of the vast archway. The clumping staff
of my heavy crucifix drew hollow echoes from the flagstones. In the deep
sort of cave behind us, lit by a dim lanthorn, the negroes waited to
unbar the doors. Castro himself began to mutter over his beads. Suddenly
he said:
"It is the last time I shall stand here. Now, there is not any more a
place for me on the earth."
Great flashes of light began to make suddenly visible the tall pillars
of the immense mournful palace, and after a long time, absolutely
without a sound, save the sputter of enormous torches, an incredibly
ghostly body of figures, black-robed from head to foot, with large
eyeholes peering fantastically, swayed into the great arch of the hall.
Above them was the enormous black coffin. It was a sight so appalling
and unexpected that I stood gazing at them without any power to move,
until I remembered that I, too, was such a figure. And then, with an
ejaculation of impatience, Tomas Castro caught at my hand, and whirled
me round.
The great doors had swung noiselessly open, and the black night,
bespangled with little flames, was framed in front of me. He suddenly
unsheathed his portentous sword, and, hanging his great hat upon his
maimed arm, stalked, a pathetic and sinister figure of grief, down the
great steps. I followed him in the vivid and extraordinary compulsion of
the sinister body that, like one fabulous and enormous monster, swayed
impenetrably after me.
My heart beat till my head was in a tumultuous whirl, when thus, at
last, I stepped out of that house--but I suppose my grim robes cloaked
my emotions--though, seeing very clearly through the eyeholes, it was
almost incredible to me that I was not myself seen. But these Brothers
of Pity were a secret society, known to no man except their spiritual
head, who chose them in turn, and not knowing even each other. Their
good deeds of charity were, in that way, done by pure stealth. And it
happened that their spiritual director was the Father Antonio himself.
At that foot of the palace steps, drawn back out of our way, stood the
great glass coach of state, containing, even then, the woman who was
all the world to me, invisible to me, unattainable to me, not to be
comforted by me, even as her great griefs were to me invisible and
unassuageable. And there between us, in the great coffin, held on
high by the grim, shadowy beings, was all that she loved, invisible,
unattainable, too, and beyond all human comfort. Standing there, in the
midst of the whispering, bare-headed, kneeling, and villainous crowd, I
had a vivid vision of her pale, dim, pitiful face. Ah, poor thing! she
was going away for good from all that state, from all that seclusion,
from all that peace, mutely, and with a noble pride of quietness, into
a world of dangers, with no head but mine to think for her, no arm but
mine to ward off all the great terrors, the immense and dangerous weight
of a new world.
In the twinkle of innumerable candles, the priceless harness of the
white mules, waiting to draw the great coach after us, shone like
streaks of ore in an infinitely rich silver mine. A double line of
tapers kept the road to the cathedral, and a crowd of our negroes, the
bell muzzles of their guns suggested in the twinkling light, massed
themselves round the coach. Outside the lines were the crowd of
rapscallions in red jackets, their women and children--all the
population of the Aldea Bajo, groaning. The whole crowd got into motion
round us, the white mules plunging frantically, the coach swaying. Ahead
of me inarched the sardonic, gallantly grotesque figure of true Tomas,
his sword point up, his motions always jaunty. Ahead of him, again,
were the white robes of many priests, a cluster of tall candles, a great
jewelled cross, and a tall saint's figure swaying, more than shoulder
high, and disappearing up above into the darkness. For me, under my
cowl, it was suffocatingly hot; but I seemed to move forward, following,
swept along without any volition of my own. It appeared an immensely
long journey; and then, as we went at last up the cathedral steps, a
voice cried harshly, "Death to the heretic!" My heart stood still.
I clutched frantically at the handle of a pistol that I could not
disengage from folds of black cloth. But, as a matter of fact, the cry
was purely a general one; I was supposed to be shut up in the palace
still.
The sudden glow, the hush, the warm breath of incense, and the blaze
of light turned me suddenly faint; my ears buzzed, and I heard strange
sounds.
The cathedral was a mass of heads. Everyone in Rio Medio was present,
or came trooping in behind us. The better class was clustered near the
blaze of gilding, mottled marble, wax flowers, and black and purple
drapery that vaulted over the two black coffins in the choir. Down in
the unlit body of the church the riff-raff of O'Brien kept the doors.
I followed the silent figure of Tomas Castro to the bishop's own stall,
right up in the choir, and we became hidden from the rest by the forest
of candles round the catafalque. Up the centre of the great church,
and high over the heads of the kneeling people, came the great coffin,
swaying, its bearers robbed of half their grimness by the blaze of
lights. Tomas Castro suddenly caught at my sleeve whilst they were
letting the coffin down on to the bier. He drew me unnoticed into
the shadow behind the bishop's stall. In the swift transit, I had a
momentary glance of a small, black figure, infinitely tiny in that
quiet place, and infinitely solitary, veiled in black from head to foot,
coming alone up the centre of the nave.
I stood hidden there beside the bishop's stall for a long time, and then
suddenly I saw the black figure alone in the gallery, looking down upon
me--from the _loggia_ of the Riegos. I felt suddenly an immense calm;
she was looking at me with unseeing eyes, but I knew and felt that she
would follow me now to the end of the world. I had no more any doubts
as to the issue of our enterprise; it was open to no unsuccess with a
figure so steadfast engaged in it; it was impossible that blind fate
should be insensible to her charm, impossible that any man could strike
at or thwart her.
Monks began to sing; a great brass instrument grunted lamentably; in the
body of the building there was silence. The bishop and his supporters
moved about, as if aimlessly, in front of the altar; the chains of the
gold censors clicked ceaselessly. Seraphina's head had sunk forward out
of my sight. All the heads of the cathedral bowed down, and suddenly,
from round the side of the stall, a hand touched mine, and a voice said,
"It is time." Very softly, as if it were part of the rite, I was drawn
round the stall through a door in the side of the screen. As we went
out, in his turnings, the old bishop gave us the benediction. Then the
door closed on the glory of his robes, and in a minute, in the darkness
we were rustling down a circular narrow staircase into the dimness of
a crypt, lit by the little blue flame of an oil lamp. From above came
sounds like thunder, immense, vibrating; we were immediately under the
choir. Through the cracks round a large stone showed a parallelogram of
light.
In the dimness I had a glimpse of the face of my conductor--a thin,
wonderfully hollow-cheeked lay brother. He began, with great gentleness,
to assist me out of my black robes, and then he said:
"The senorita will be here very soon with the Senor Tomas," and then
added, with an infinitely sad and tender, dim smile:
"Will not the Senor Caballero, if it is not repugnant, say a prayer for
the repose of..." He pointed gently upwards to the great flagstone above
which was the coffin of Don Balthasar and Carlos. The priest himself was
one of those very holy, very touching---perhaps, very stupid--men that
one finds in such places. With his dim, wistful face he is very present
in my memory. He added: "And that the good God of us all may keep it
in the Senor Caballero's heart to care well for the soul of the dear
senorita."
"I am a very old man," he whispered, after a pause. He was indeed an
old man, quite worn out, quite without hope on earth. "I have loved the
senorita since she was a child. The Senor Caballero takes her from us. I
would have him pray--to be made worthy."
Whilst I was doing it, the place began to be alive with whispers of
garments, of hushed footsteps, a small exclamation in a gruff voice.
Then the stone above moved out of its place, and a blaze of light fell
down from the choir above.
I saw beside me Seraphina's face, brilliantly lit, looking upwards.
Tomas Castro said:
"Come quickly... come quickly... the prayers are ending; there will be
people in the street." And from above an enormous voice intoned:
"_Tu.. u.. ba mi.. i.. i..rum..._" And the serpent groaned discordantly.
The end of a great box covered with black velvet glided forward above
our heads; ropes were fastened round it. The priest had opened a door in
the shadowy distance, beside a white marble tablet in the thick walls.
The coffin up above moved forward a little again; the ropes were
readjusted with a rattling, wooden sound. A dry, formal voice intoned
from above:
"_Erit... Justus Ab auditione..._"
From the open door the priest rattled his keys, and said, "Come, come,"
impatiently.
I was horribly afraid that Seraphina would shriek or faint, or refuse
to move. There was very little time. The pirates might stream out of the
front of the cathedral as we came from the back; the bishop had promised
to accentuate the length of the service. But Seraphina glided towards
the open door; a breath of fresh air reached us. She looked back once.
The coffin was swinging right over the hole, shutting out the light.
Tomas Castro took her hand and said, "Come... come," with infinite
tenderness.
He had been sobbing convulsedly. We went up some steps, and the door
shut behind us with a sound like a sigh of relief.
We walked fast, in perfect blackness and solitude, on the deserted beach
between the old town and the village. Every soul was near the cathedral.
A boat lay half afloat. To the left in the distance the light of the
schooner opposite the Casa Riego wavered on the still water.
Suddenly Tomas Castro said:
"The senorita never before set foot to the open ground."
At once I lifted her into the boat. "Shove off, Tomas," I said, with a
beating heart.
PART FOURTH -- BLADE AND GUITAR
CHAPTER ONE
There was a slight, almost imperceptible jar, a faint grating noise, a
whispering sound of sand--and the boat, without a splash, floated.
The earth, slipping as it were away from under the keel, left us borne
upon the waters of the bay, which were as still as the windless night
itself. The pushing off of that boat was like a launching into space, as
a bird opens its wings on the brow of a cliff, and remains poised in
the air. A sense of freedom came to me, the unreasonable feeling of
exultation--as if I had been really a bird essaying its flight for the
first time. Everything, sudden and evil and most fortunate, had been
arranged for me, as though I had been a lay figure on which Romance
had been wreaking its bewildering unexpectedness; but with the floating
clear of the boat, I felt somehow that this escape I had to manage
myself.
It was dark. Dipping cautiously the blade of the oar, I gave another
push against the shelving shore. Seraphina sat, cloaked and motionless,
and Tomas Castro, in the bows, made no sound. I didn't even hear him
breathe. Everything was left to me. The boat, impelled afresh, made
a slight ripple, and my elation was replaced in a moment by all the
torments of the most acute anxiety.
I gave another push, and then lost the bottom. Success depended upon
my resource, readiness, and courage. And what was this success?
Immediately, it meant getting out of the bay, and into the open sea in
a twelve-foot dinghy looted from some ship years ago by the Rio Medio
pirates, if that miserable population of sordid and ragged outcasts of
the Antilles deserved such a romantic name. They were sea-thieves.
Already the wooded shoulder of a mountain was thrown out intensely
black by the glow in the sky behind. The moon was about to rise. A great
anguish took my heart as if in a vice. The stillness of the dark shore
struck me as unnatural. I imagined the yell of the discovery breaking
it, and the fancy caused me a greater emotion than the thing itself, I
flatter myself, could possibly have done. The unusual silence in which,
through the open portals, the altar of the cathedral alone blazed with
many flames upon the bay, seemed to enter my very heart violently, like
a sudden access of anguish. The two in the boat with me were silent,
too. I could not bear it.
"Seraphina," I murmured, and heard a stifled sob.
"It is time to take the oars, Senor," whispered Castro suddenly, as
though he had fallen asleep as soon as he had scrambled into the bows,
and only had awaked that instant. "The mists in the middle of the bay
will hide us when the moon rises."
It was time--if we were to escape. Escape where? Into the open sea? With
that silent, sorrowing girl by my side! In this miserable cockleshell,
and without any refuge open to us? It was not really a hesitation; she
could not be left at the mercy of O'Brien. It was as though I had for
the first time perceived how vast the world was; how dangerous; how
unsafe. And there was no alternative. There could be no going back.
Perhaps, if I had known what was before us, my heart would have failed
me utterly out of sheer pity. Suddenly my eyes caught sight of the moon
making like the glow of a bush fire on the black slope of the mountain.
In a moment it would flood the bay with light, and the schooner anchored
off the beach before the Casa Riego was not eighty yards away. I dipped
my oar without a splash. Castro pulled with his one hand.
The mists rising on the lowlands never filled the bay, and I could see
them lying in moonlight across the outlet like a silvery white ghost
of a wall. We penetrated it, and instantly became lost to view from the
shore.
Castro, pulling quickly, turned his head, and grunted at a red blur
very low in the mist. A fire was burning on the low point of land where
Nichols--the Nova Scotian--had planted the battery which had worked such
havoc with Admiral Rowley's boats. It was a mere earthwork and some of
the guns had been removed. The fire, however, warned us that there were
some people on the point. We ceased rowing for a moment, and Castro
explained to me that a fire was always lit when any of these thieves'
boats were stirring. There would be three or four men to keep it up. On
this very night Manuel-del-Popolo was outside with a good many rowboats,
waiting on the _Indiaman_. The ship had been seen nearing the shore
since noon. She was becalmed now. Perhaps they were looting her already.
This fact had so far favoured our escape. There had been no strollers on
the beach that night. Since the investment of the Casa Riego, Castro had
lived amongst the besiegers on his prestige of a superior person, of
a _caballero_ skilled in war and diplomacy. No one knew how much the
tubby, saturnine little man was in the confidence of the Juez O'Brien;
and there was no doubt that he was a good Catholic. He was a very grave,
a very silent _caballero_. In reality his heart had been broken by the
death of Carlos, and he did not care what happened to him. His action
was actuated by his scorn and hate of the Rio Medio population, rather
than by any friendly feeling towards myself.
On that night Domingo's partisans were watching the Casa Riego, while
Manuel (who was more of a seaman) had taken most of his personal
friends, and all the larger boats that would float, to do a bit of
"outside work," as they called it, upon the becalmed West Indiaman.
This had facilitated Castro's plan, and it also accounted for the
smallness of the boat, which was the only one of the refuse lot left
on the beach that did not gape at every seam. She was not tight by any
means, though. I could hear the water washing above the bottom-boards,
and I remember how concern about keeping Seraphina's feet dry mingled
with the grave apprehensions of our enterprise.
We had been paddling an easy stroke. The red blurr of the fire on the
point was growing larger, while the diminished blaze of lights on the
high altar of the cathedral pierced the mist with an orange ray.
"The boat should be baled out," I remarked in a whisper.
Castro laid his oar in and made his way to the thwart. It shows how well
we were prepared for our flight, that there was not even a half-cocoanut
shell in the boat. A gallon earthenware jar, stoppered with a bunch of
grass, contained all our provision of fresh water. Castro displaced it,
and, bending low, tried to bale with his big, soft hat. I should imagine
that he found it impracticable, because, suddenly, he tore off one
of his square-toed shoes with a steel buckle. He used it as a scoop,
blaspheming at the necessity, but in a very low mutter, out of respect
for Seraphina.
Standing up in the stern-sheets by her side, I kept on sculling gently.
Once before I had gone desperately to sea--escaping the gallows,
perhaps--in a very small boat, with the drunken song of Rangsley's uncle
heralding the fascination of the unknown to a very callow youth. That
night had been as dark, but the danger had been less great. The boat, it
is true, had actually sunk under us, but then it was only the sea that
might have swallowed me who knew nothing of life, and was as much a
stranger to fate as the animals on our farm. But now the world of men
stood ready to devour us, and the Gulf of Mexico was of no more account
than a puddle on a road infested by robbers. What were the dangers
of the sea to the passions amongst which I was launched--with my high
fortunes in my hand, and, like all those who live and love, with a sword
suspended above my head?
The danger had been less great on that old night, when I had heard
behind me the soft crash of the smugglers' feet on the shingle. It had
been less great, and, if it had had a touch of the sordid, it had led me
to this second and more desperate escape--in a cockleshell, carrying
off a silent and cloaked figure, which quickened my heart-beats at each
look. I was carrying her off from the evil spells of the Casa Riego,
as a knight a princess from an enchanted castle. But she was more to me
than any princess to any knight.
There was never anything like that in the world. Lovers might have gone,
in their passion, to a certain death; but never, it seemed to me, in
the history of youth, had they gone in such an atmosphere of cautious
stillness upon such a reckless adventure. Everything depended upon
slipping out through the gullet of the bay without a sound. The men on
the point had no means of pursuit, but, if they heard or saw anything,
they could shout a warning to the boats outside. These were the real
dangers--my first concern. Afterwards... I did not want to think
of afterwards. There were only the open sea and the perilous coast.
Perhaps, if I thought of them, I should give up.
I thought only of gaining each successive moment and concentrated all
my faculties into an effort of stealthiness. I handled the boat with a
deliberation full of tense prudence, as if the oar had been a stalk of
straw, as if the water of the bay had been the film of a glass bubble an
unguarded movement could have shivered to atoms. I hardly breathed, for
the feeling that a deeper breath would have blown away the mist that was
our sole protection now.
It was not blown away. On the contrary, it clung closer to us, with the
enveloping chill of a cloud wreathing a mountain crag. The vague shadows
and dim outlines that had hung around us began, at last, to vanish
utterly in an impenetrable and luminous whiteness. And through the
jumble of my thoughts darted the sudden knowledge that there was a
sea-fog outside--a thing quite different from the nightly mists of the
bay. It was rolling into the passage inexplicably, for no stir of air
reached us. It was possible to watch its endless drift by the glow of
the fire on the point, now much nearer us. Its edges seemed to melt
away in the flight of the water-dust. It was a sea-fog coming in. Was
it disastrous to us, or favourable? It, at least, answered our immediate
need for concealment, and this was enough for me, when all our future
hung upon every passing minute.
The Rio picaroons, when engaged in thieving from some ship becalmed
on the coast, began by towing one of their schooners as far as the
entrance. They left her there as a rallying point for the boats, and to
receive the booty.
One of these schooners, as I knew, was moored opposite the Casa Riego.
The other might be lying at anchor somewhere right in the fairway ahead,
within a few yards. I strained my ears for some revealing sound from
her, if she were there--a cough, a voice, the creak of a block, or the
fall of something on her deck. Nothing came. I began to fear lest I
should run stem on into her side without a moment's warning. I could see
no further than the length of our twelve-foot boat.
To make certain of avoiding that danger, I decided to shave close the
spit of sand that tipped the narrow strip of lowland to the south. I set
my teeth, and sheered in resolutely.
Castro remained on the after-thwart, with his elbows on his knees. His
head nearly touched my leg. I could distinguish the woeful, bent
back, the broken swaying of the plume in his hat. Seraphina's perfect
immobility gave me the measure of her courage, and the silence was so
profoundly pellucid that the flutter of the flames that we were nearing
began to come loud out of the blur of the glow. Then I heard the very
crackling of the wood, like a fusillade from a great distance. Even then
Castro did not deign to turn his head.
Such as he was--a born vagabond, _contrabandista_, spy in armed camps,
sutler at the tail of the _Grande Armee_ (escaped, God only knows how,
from the snows of Russia), beggar, _guerrillero_, bandit, sceptically
murderous, draping his rags in saturnine dignity--he had ended by
becoming the sinister and grotesque squire of our quixotic Carlos. There
was something romantically sombre in his devotion. He disdained to turn
round at the danger, because he had left his heart on the coffin as a
lesser affection would have laid a wreath. I looked down at Seraphina.
She too, had left a heart in the vaults of the cathedral. The edge of
the heavy cloak drawn over her head concealed her face from me, and,
with her face, her ignorance, her great doubts, her great fears.
I heard, above the crackling of dry wood, a husky exclamation of
surprise, and then a startled voice exclaiming:
"Look! _Santissima Madre!_ What is this?"
Sheer instinct altered at once the motion of my hand so as to incline
the bows of the dinghy away from the shore; but a sort of stupefying
amazement seized upon my soul. We had been seen. It was all over. Was it
possible? All over, already?
In my anxiety to keep clear of the schooner which, for all I know to
this day, may not have been there at all, I had come too close to the
sand, so close that I heard soft, rapid footfalls stop short in the fog.
A voice seemed to be asking me in a whisper:
"Where, oh, where?"
Another cried out irresistibly, "I see it."
It was a subdued cry, as if hushed in sudden awe.
My arm swung to and fro; the turn of my wrist went on imparting the
propelling motion of the oar. All the rest of my body was gripped
helplessly in the dead expectation of the end, as if in the benumbing
seconds of a fall from a towering height. And it was swift, too. I felt
a draught at the back of my neck--a breath of wind. And instantly, as if
a battering-ram had been let swing past me at many layers of stretched
gauze, I beheld, through a tattered deep hole in the fog, a roaring
vision of flames, borne down and springing up again; a dance of purple
gleams on the strip of unveiled water, and three coal-black figures in
the light.
One of them stood high on lank black legs, with long black arms thrown
up stiffly above the black shape of a hat. The two others crouched low
on the very edge of the water, peering as if from an ambush.
The clearness of this vision was contained by a thick and fiery
atmosphere, into which a soft white rush and swirl of fog fell like a
sudden whirl of snow. It closed down and overwhelmed at once the tall
flutter of the flames, the black figures, the purple gleams playing
round my oar. The hot glare had struck my eyeballs once, and had melted
away again into the old, fiery stain on the mended fabric of the fog.
But the attitudes of the crouching men left no room for doubt that we
had been seen. I expected a sudden uplifting of voices on the shore,
answered by cries from the sea, and I screamed excitedly at Castro to
lay hold of his oar.
He did not stir, and after my shout, which must have fallen on the
scared ears with a weird and unearthly note, a profound silence attended
us--the silence of a superstitious fear. And, instead of howls, I heard,
before the boat had travelled its own short length, a voice that seemed
to be the voice of fear itself asking, "Did you hear that?" and a
trembling mutter of an invocation to all the saints. Then a strangled
throat trying to pronounce firmly, "The souls of the dead _Inglez_.
Crying from pain."
Admiral Rowley's seamen, so miserably thrown away in the ill-conceived
attack on the bay, were making a ghostly escort for our escape. Those
dead boats'-crews were supposed to haunt the fatal spot, after the
manner of spectres that linger in remorse, regret, or revenge, about
the gates of departure. I had blundered; the fog, breaking apart, had
betrayed us. But my obscure and vanquished countrymen held possession
of the outlet by the memory of their courage. In this critical moment it
was they, I may say, who stood by us.
We, on our part, must have been disclosed, dark, indistinct, utterly
inexplicable; completely unexpected; an apparition of stealthy shades.
The painful voice in the fog said:
"Let them be. Answer not. They shall pass on, for none of them died on
the shore--all in the water. Yes, all in the water."
I suppose the man was trying to reassure himself and his companions.
His meaning, no doubt, was that, being on shore, they were safe from
the ghosts of those _Inglez_ who had never achieved a landing. From
the enlarging and sudden deepening of the glow, I knew that they were
throwing more brushwood on the fire.
I kept on sculling, and gradually the sharp fusillade of dry twigs grew
more distant, more muffled in the fog. At last it ceased altogether.
Then a weakness came over me, and, hauling my oar in, I sat down by
Sera-phina's side. I longed for the sound of her voice, for some tender
word, for the caress of a murmur upon my perplexed soul. I was sure of
her, as of a conquered and rare treasure, whose possession simplifies
life into a sort of adoring guardianship--and I felt so much at her
mercy that an overwhelming sense of guilt made me afraid to speak to
her. The slight heave of the open sea swung the boat up and down.
Suddenly Castro let out a sort of lugubrious chuckle, and, in low tones,
I began to upbraid him with his apathy. Even with his one arm he should
have obeyed my call to the oar. It was incomprehensible to me that
we had not been fired at. Castro enlightened me, in a few moody and
scornful words. The Rio Medio people, he commented upon the incident,
were fools, of bestial nature, afraid of they knew not what.
"Castro, the valour of these dead countrymen of mine was not wasted;
they have stood by us like true friends," I whispered in the excitement
of our escape.
"These insensate English," he grumbled....
"A dead enemy would have served the turn better. If the _caballero_ had
none other than dead friends...."
His harsh, bitter mumble stopped. Then Sera-phina's voice said softly:
"It is you who are the friend, Tomas Castro. To you shall come a
friend's reward."
"Alas, Senorita!" he sighed. "What remains for me in this world--for me
who have given for two masses for the souls of that illustrious man, and
of your cousin Don Carlos, my last piece of silver?"
"We shall make you very rich, Tomas Castro," she said with decision, as
if there had been bags of gold in the boat.
He returned a high-flown phrase of thanks in a bitter, absent whisper.
I knew well enough that the help he had given me was not for money, not
for love--not even for loyalty to the Riegos. It was obedience to the
last recommendation of Carlos. He ran risks for my safety, but gave me
none of his allegiance.
He was still the same tubby, murderous little man, with a steel blade
screwed to the wooden stump of his forearm, as when, swelling his
breast, he had stepped on his toes before me like a bloodthirsty pigeon,
in the steerage of the ship that had brought us from home. I heard him
mumble, with almost incredible, sardonic contempt, that, indeed,
the senor would soon have none but dead friends if he refrained
from striking at his enemies. Had the senor taken the very excellent
opportunity afforded by Providence, and that any sane Christian man
would have taken--to let him stab the Juez O'Brien--we should not then
be wandering in a little boat. What folly! What folly! One little thrust
of a knife, and we should all have been now safe in our beds....
His tone was one of weary superiority, and I remained appalled by that
truth, stripped of all chivalrous pretence. It was clear, in sparing
that defenceless life, I had been guilty of cruelty for the sake of
my conscience. There was Seraphina by my side; it was she who had to
suffer. I had let her enemy go free, because he had happened to be near
me, disarmed. Had I acted like an Englishman and a gentleman, or only
like a fool satisfying his sentiment at other people's expense? Innocent
people, too, like the Riego servants, Castro himself; like Seraphina,
on whom my high-minded forbearance had brought all these dangers, these
hardships, and this uncertain fate.
She gave no sign of having heard Castro's words. The silence of women
is very impenetrable, and it was as if my hold upon the world--since she
was the whole world for me--had been weakened by that shade of decency
of feeling which makes a distinction between killing and murder. But
suddenly I felt, without her cloaked figure having stirred, her small
hand slip into mine. Its soft warmth seemed to go straight to my heart
soothing, invigorating--as it she had slipped into my palm a weapon of
extraordinary and inspiring potency.
"Ah, you are generous," I whispered close to the edge of the cloak
overshadowing her face.
"You must now think of yourself, Juan," she said.
"Of myself," I echoed sadly. "I have only you to think of, and you
are so far away--out of my reach. There are your dead--all your loss,
between you and me."
She touched my arm.
"It is I who must think of my dead," she whispered. "But you, you must
think of yourself, because I have nothing of mine in this world now."
Her words affected me like the whisper of remorse. It was true. There
were her wealth, her lands, her palaces; but her only refuge was that
little boat. Her father's long aloofness from life had created such an
isolation round his closing years that his daughter had no one but me to
turn to for protection against the plots of her own Intendente. And,
at the thought of our desperate plight, of the suffering awaiting us in
that small boat, with the possibility of a lingering death for an end,
I wavered for a moment. Was it not my duty to return to the bay and give
myself up? In that case, as Castro expressed it, our throats would be
cut for love of the _Juez_.
But Seraphina, the rabble would carry to the Casa on the palms of their
hands--out of veneration for the family, and for fear of O'Brien.
"So, Senor," he mumbled, "if to you to-morrow's sun is as little as to
me let us pull the boat's head, round."
"Let us set our hands to the side and overturn it, rather," Seraphina
said, with an indignation of high command.
I said no more. If I could have taken O'Brien with me into the other
world, I would have died to save her the pain of so much as a pinprick.
But because I could not, she must even go with me; must suffer because I
clung to her as men cling to their hope of highest good--with an exalted
and selfish devotion.
Castro had moved forward, as if to show his readiness to pull round.
Meantime I heard a click. A feeble gleam fell on his misty hands under
the black halo of the hat rim. Again the flint and blade clicked, and a
large red spark winked rapidly in the bows. He had lighted a cigarette.
CHAPTER TWO
Silence, stillness, breathless caution were the absolute conditions of
our existence. But I hadn't the heart to remonstrate with him for the
danger he caused Seraphina and myself. The fog was so thick now that
I could not make out his outline, but I could smell the tobacco very
plainly.
The acrid odour of _picadura_ seemed to knit the events of three years
into one uninterrupted adventure. I remembered the shingle beach; the
deck of the old _Thames_. It brought to my mind my first vision of
Seraphina, and the emblazoned magnificence of Carlos' sick bed. It all
came and went in a whiff of smoke; for of all the power and charm that
had made Carlos so seductive there remained no such deep trace in
the world as in the heart of the little grizzled bandit who, like a
philosopher, or a desperado, puffed his cigarette in the face of the
very spirit of murder hovering round us, under the mask and cloak of the
fog. And by the serene heaven of my life's evening, the spirit of
murder became actually audible to us in hasty and rhythmical knocks,
accompanied by a cheerful tinkling.
These sounds, growing swiftly louder, at last induced Castro to throw
away his cigarette. Seraphina clutched my arm. The noise of oars rowing
fast, to the precipitated jingling of a guitar, swooped down upon us
with a gallant ferocity.
"_Caramba_," Castro muttered; "it is the fool Manuel himself!"
I said, then: "We have eight shots between us two, Tomas."
He thrust his brace of pistols upon my knees.
"Dispose of them as your worship pleases," he muttered.
"You mustn't _give_ up, yet," I whispered.
"What is it that I give up?" he mumbled wearily. "Besides, there grows
from my forearm a blade. If I shall find myself indisposed to quit this
world alone.... Listen to the singing of that imbecile."
A carolling falsetto seemed to hang muffled in upper space, above the
fog that settled low on the water, like a dense and milky sediment of
the air. The moonlight fell into it strangely. We seemed to breathe at
the bottom of a shallow sea, white as snow, shining like silver, and
impenetrably opaque everywhere, except overhead, where the yellow disc
of the moon glittered through a thin cloud of steam. The gay truculence
of the hollow knocking, the metallic jingle, the shrill trolling, went
on crescendo to a burst of babbling voices, a mad speed of tinkling, a
thundering shout, "_Altro, Amigos!_" followed by a great clatter of oars
flung in. The sudden silence pulsated with the ponderous strokes of my
heart.
To escape now seemed impossible. At least it seemed impossible while
they talked. A dark spot in the shining expanse of fog swam into view.
It shifted its place after I had first made it out, and then remained
motionless, astern of the dinghy. It was the shadow of a big boat full
of men, but when they were silent, I was not sure that I saw anything
at all. I made no doubt, had they been aware of our nearness, there were
amongst them eyes that could have detected us in the same elusive way.
But how could they even dream of anything of the kind? They talked
noisily, and there must have been a round dozen of them, at the least.
Sometimes they would fall a-shouting all together, and then keep quiet
as if listening. By-and-by I began to hear answering yells, that seemed
to converge upon us from all directions.
We were in the thick of it. It was Manuel's boat, as Castro had guessed,
and the other boats were rallying upon it gropingly, keeping up a
succession of yells:
"_Ohe! Ohe!_ Where, where?"
And the people in Manuel's boat howled back at them, "_Ohe! Ohe...e!_
This way; here!"
Suddenly he struck the guitar a mighty blow, and chanted in an inspired
and grandiose strain:
"Steer--for--the--song."
His fingers ran riot among the strings, and above the jingling his
voice, forced to the highest pitch, declaimed, as in the midst of a
tempest:
"I adore the saints in the glory of heaven
And, on the dust of the earth,
The print of her footsteps."
He was improvising. Sometimes he gasped; the rill of softened tinkle ran
on, and, glaring watchfully, I fancied I could detect his shape in the
white vapour, like a shadow thrown from afar by a tallow dip upon a
snowy sheet--the lank droop of his posturing, the greasy locks, the
attentive poise of his head, the sentimental rolling of his lustrous and
enormous eyes.
I had not forgotten his astonishing display in the cabin of the schooner
when, after the confiding of his woes and his ambitions, he had favoured
me with a sample of his art. As at that time, when he had been nursing
his truculent conceit, he sang, and the unsteady twanging of his guitar
lurched and staggered far behind his voice, like a drunken slave in the
footsteps of a raving master. Tinkle, tinkle, twang! A headlong rush of
muddled fingering; a sudden bang, like a heavy stumble.
"She is the proud daughter of the old Castile! _Ola! Ola!_" he chanted
mysteriously at the beginning of every stanza in a rapturous and soft
ecstasy, and then would shriek, as though he had been suddenly cast up
on the rock. The poet of Rio Medio was rallying his crew of thieves to a
rhapsody of secret and unrequited passion. _Twang, ping, tinkle tinkle_.
He was the _Capataz_ of the valiant _Lugarenos_! The true _Capataz!_
The only _Capataz. Ola! Ola! Twang, twang_. But he was the slave of
her charms, the captive of her eyes, of her lips, of her hair, of her
eyebrows, which, he proclaimed in a soaring shriek, were like rainbows
arched over stars.
It was a love-song, a mournful parody, the odious grimacing of an ape to
the true sorrow of the human face. I could have fled from it, as from
an intolerable humiliation. And it would have been easy to pull away
unheard while he sang, but I had a plan, the beginning of a plan,
something like the beginning of a hope. And for that I should have to
use the fog for the purpose of remaining within earshot.
Would the fog last long enough to serve my turn? That was the only
question, and I believed it would, for it settled lower; it settled
down denser, almost too heavy to be stirred by the fitful efforts of the
breeze. It was a true night fog of the tropics, that, born after sunset,
tries to creep back into the warm bosom of the sea before sunrise. Once
in Rio Medio, taking a walk in the early morning along the sand-dunes,
I had stood watching below me the heads of some people, fishing from a
boat, emerge strangely in the dawn out of such a fog. It concealed their
very shoulders more completely than water could have done. I trusted it
would not come so soon to our heads, emerging, though it seemed to me
that already, by merely clambering on Castro's shoulders, I could attain
to clear moonlight; see the highlands of the coast, the masts of the
English ship. She could not be very far off if only one could tell
the direction. But an unsteady little dinghy was not the platform for
acrobatic exercises, and Castro not exactly the man.
The slightest noise would have betrayed us, and moreover, the thing
was no good, for even supposing I had got a hurried sight of the ship's
spars, I should have to get down into the fog to pull, and there would
be nothing visible to keep us from going astray, unless at every
dozen strokes I clambered on Castro's shoulders again to rectify the
direction--an obviously impracticable and absurd proceeding.
"She is the proud daughter of old Castile, _Ola, Ola_," Manuel sang
confidentially with a subdued and gallant lilt... Obviously
impracticable. But I had another idea.
"_Tinkle tinkle pinnnng... Brrroum. Brrrroum_.
My soul yearns for the alms of a smile.
For a forgiving glance yearns my lofty soul..."
he sang. Ah, if one could have added another four feet to one's stature.
Four or five feet only. There seemed to be nothing but a thin veil
between me and the moon. No more than a thin haze. But at the level
of my eyes everything was hidden. From behind the white veil came
the crying of the strings, a screeching, lugubrious and fierce in its
artificial transport, as if it were mocking my sad and ardent conviction
of un-worthiness, the crowning torment, and the inward pride of pure
love. In the breathless pauses I could hear the hollow bumping of
gunwales knocking against each other; faint splashings of oars; the
distant hail of some laggards groping their way on the shrouded sea.
The note of cruel passion that runs in the blood held these cut-throats
profoundly silent in their boats, as at home I could imagine a party of
smugglers (they would not stick at a murder or two, either) listening,
with pensive faces, to a sentimental ditty of some "sweet Nancy," howled
dismally within the walls of a wayside taproom in the smoke of pipes. I
seemed to understand profoundly the difference of races that brings with
it the feeling of romance or awakens hate. My gorge rose at Manuel's
song. I hated his lamentations. "Alas, alas; in vain, in vain." He
strummed with vertiginous speed, with fury, and the distracted clamour
of his voice, wrestling madly with the ringing madness of the strings,
ended in a piercing and supreme shriek.
"Finished. It is finished." A low and applauding murmur flowed to
my ears, the austere acclamations of connoisseurs. "Viva, viva,
Manuele!"--a squeak of fervid admiration. "Ah, our _Manuelito_."... But
a gruff voice discoursed jovially, "Care not, Manuel. What of Paquita
with the broken tooth? Is she not left to thee? And _por Dios, hombres_,
in the dark all women are alike."
"I will cram thy unclean mouth with live coals," Manuel drawled
spitefully.
They roared with laughter at this sally. I depicted to myself their
shapes, their fierce gesticulations, their earrings, bound heads, rags,
and weapons, the vile scowls on their swarthy, grimacing faces. My
anxiety beheld them as plainly as anything seen with the eyes of
the body. And, with my sharpened hearing catching every word with
preternatural distinctness, I felt as if, the ring of Gyges on my
finger, I had sat invisible at the council of my enemies.
It was noisy, animated, with an issue of supreme interest for us.
The ship, seen at midday standing inshore with a light wind, had not
approached the bay near enough to be conveniently attacked till just
after dusk. They had waited for her all the afternoon, sleeping and
gambling on the spit of sand. But something heavy in her appearance had
excited their craven suspicions, and checked their ardour. She appeared
to them dangerous. What if she were an English man-of-war disguised?
Some even pretended to recognize in her positively one of the lighter
frigates of Rowley's squadron. Night had fallen whilst they squabbled,
and their flotilla hung under the land, the men in a conflict of
rapacity and fear, arguing among themselves as to the ship's character,
but all unanimously goading Manuel--since he _would_ call himself their
only _Capataz_--to go boldly and find out.
It seems he had just been doing this with the help of a few choicer
spirits, and under cover of the fog. They had managed to steal near
enough to hear Englishmen conversing on board, orders given, and the
yo-hoing of invisible sailors, trimming the yards of the ship to the
fitful airs. This last, of course, was decisive. Such sounds are not
heard on a man-of-war. She was a merchant ship: she would be an easy
prey. And Manuel, in a state of exaltation at his venturesome bravery,
had pulled back inshore, to rally all the boats round his own, and lead
them to certain plunder. They would soon find out, he declaimed, what
it was to have at their head their own valiant Manuel, instead of that
vagabond, that stranger, that Andalusian starveling; that traitor, that
infidel, that Castro. Hidden away, he seemed to spout all this for
our ears alone, as though he could see us in our boat.... Patience;
patience! Some day he would cut off that interloper's eyelids, and lay
him on his back under a nice clear sun. Castro made a brusque movement;
a little shudder of disgust escaped Seraphina.... Meantime, Manuel
declared, by his audacity, that ship was as good as theirs already.
"_Viva el Capataz!_" they cheered.
The cloud-like vapours resting on the sea muffled the short roar; we
heard grim laughter, excited cries. He began to make a set speech, and
his voice, haranguing with vehement inflections in the shining whiteness
of a cloud, had an amazing and uncorporeal character; the quality of
abstract surprise; of phenomenal emotion shouted into empty space. And
for me it had, also, the fascination of a revealed depth.
It was like the oration of an ambitious leader in a farce; he held his
hearers with his eloquence, as much as he had done with the song of his
grotesque and desecrating love. He vaunted his sagacity and his valour,
and overwhelmed with invective all sorts of names--my own and
Castro's among them. He revealed the unholy ideals of all that band
of scoundrels--ideals that he said should find fruition under his
captaincy. He boasted of secret conferences with O'Brien. There were
murmurs of satisfaction.
I don't wonder at Seraphina's shudder of horror, of disgust, of dismay,
and indignation. Robbed of the inexpugnable shelter of the Casa Riego,
she, too, was made to look into the depths; upon the animalism, the
lusts, and the reveries of that sordid, vermin-haunted crowd. I felt for
her a profound and shamed sorrow. It was like a profaning touch on the
sacredness of her mourning for the dead, and on her clear and passionate
vision of life.
"_Hombres de Rio Medio! Amigos! Valientes!..._" Manuel was beginning
his peroration. He would lead them, now, against the English ship. The
terrified heretics would surrender. There was always gold in English
ships. He stopped his speech, and then called loudly, "Let the boats
keep touch with each other, and not stray in that fog."
"The dog," grunted Castro. We heard a resolute bustle of preparation;
oars were being shipped.
"Make ready, Tomas," I whispered.
"Ready for what?" he grumbled. "Where shall your worship run from these
swine?"
"We must follow them," I answered.
"The madness of the senor's countrymen descends upon him," he whispered
with sardonic politeness. "Wherefore follow?"
"To find the English ship," I answered swiftly.
This, from the moment we had heard Manuel's guitar, had been my
idea. Since the fog that concealed us from their sight made us, too,
hopelessly blind, those wretches must guide us themselves out of their
own clutches, as it were. I don't put this forward as an inspired
conception. It was a most risky and almost hopeless expedient; but the
position was so critical that there was no other alternative to sitting
still and waiting with folded hands for discovery. Castro seemed more
inclined for the latter.
Fortunately, the bandits wasted some time in blasphemous bickerings as
to the order of the boats in the procession of attack. I urged my views
upon Castro in hurried whispers. His assent was of importance, since he
could use an oar very well, and, if left to myself, I could not hope to
scull fast enough to keep within hearing of the flotilla.
"Of what use to us would be a ship in Manuel's power?" he argued
morosely. On the other hand, if we waited near her till she had been
plundered and released, neither the fog nor the night would last
forever.
"My countrymen will beat them off," I affirmed confidently. "At any
rate, let us be on the spot. We may take a hand. And remember, Tomas,
they are not led by you, this time."
"True," he said, mollified. "But one thing more deserves the
consideration of your worship... If we follow this plan, we take the
senorita among flying bullets. And lead, alas! unlike steel, is blind,
or that illustrious man would not now be dead. If we wait here, the
senorita, at least, shall take no harm from these ruffians, as I have
said."
"Are you afraid of the bullets?" I asked Seraphina.
Before she had answered, Castro hissed at me:
"Oh, you unspeakable English. Would you sacrifice the daughter, too,
only because she is brave?"
His sinister allusion made my blood boil with rage, and suddenly run
cold in my veins. Swathed in the brilliant cloud, we heard the sounds
of quarrelling and scrambling die away; cries of "Ready! ready!" an
unexpected and brutal laugh. Seraphina leaned forward.
"Tomas, I wish this thing. I command it," she whispered imperiously. "We
shall help these English on the ship. We must; I command it. For these
are now my people."
I heard him mutter to himself, "h, dear shade of my Carlos. Her people.
Where are now mine?" But he shipped his oar, and sat waiting.
In the moment before the picaroons actually started, I became the prey
of the most intense anxiety. I knew we were to seaward of the cluster.
But of our position relatively to the boats, and to the English ship
they would make for, I was profoundly ignorant. The dinghy might be
lying right in the way. Before I could master the sort of disorder I was
thrown into by that thought--which, strange to say, had not occurred to
me till then--with a shrill whistle Manuel led off.
We are always incited to trust, our eyes rather than our ears; and such
is the conventional temper in which we receive the impression of our
senses that I had no idea they were so near us. The destruction of my
illusory feeling of distance was the most startling thing in the world.
Instantly, it seemed, with the second swing and plash of the oars, the
boats were right upon us. They went clear. It was like being grazed by a
fall of rocks. I seemed to feel the wind of the rush.
The rapid clatter of rowing, the excited hum of voices, the violent
commotion of the water, passed by us with an impetuosity that took my
breath away. They had started in a bunch. There must have been amongst
them at least one crew of negroes, because somebody was beating
a tambourine smartly, and the rowers chorused in a quick, panting
undertone, "_Ho, ho, talibambo.... Ho, ho, talibambo_." One of the
boats silhouetted herself for an instant, a row of heads swaying back
and forth, towered over astern by a full-length figure as straight as an
arrow. A retreating voice thundered, "Silence!" The sounds and the forms
faded together in the fog with amazing swiftness.
Seraphina, her cloak off, her head bare, stared forward after the
fleeting murmurs and shadows we were pursuing. Sometimes she warned us,
"More to the left "; or, "Faster!" We had to put forth our best, for
Manuel, as if in the very wantonness of confidence, had set a tremendous
pace.
I suppose he took his first direction by the light on the point. I
cannot tell what guided him after that feeble sheen had become buried in
the fog; but there was no check in the speed, no sign of hesitation.
We followed in the track of the sound, and, for the most part, kept in
sight of the elusive shadow of the sternmost boat. Often, in a denser
belt of fog, the sounds of rowing became muffled almost to extinction;
or we seemed to hear them all round and, startled, checked our speed.
Dark apparitions of boats would surge up on all sides in a most
inexplicable way; to the right; to the left; even coming from behind.
They appeared real, unmistakable, and, before we had time to dodge them,
vanished utterly. Then we had to spurt desperately after the grind of
the oars, caught, just in time, in an unexpected direction.
And then we lost them. We pulled frantically. Seraphina had been urging
us, "Faster! faster!" From time to time I would ask her, "Can you see
them?" "Not yet," she answered curtly. The perspiration poured down
my face. Castro's panting was like the wheezing of bellows at my back.
Suddenly, in a despairing tone, she said:
"Stop! I can neither see nor hear anything now."
We feathered our oars at once, and fell to listening with lowered heads.
The ripple of the boat's way expired slowly. A great white stillness
hung slumbrously over the sea.
It was inconceivable. We pulled once or twice with extreme energy for
a few minutes after imaginary whistles or shouts. Once I heard them
passing our bows. But it was useless; we stopped, and the moon, from
within the mistiness of an immense halo, looked dreamily upon our heads.
Castro grunted, "Here is an end of your plan, Senor Don Juan."
The peculiar and ghastly hopelessness of our position could not
be better illustrated than by this fresh difficulty. We had lost
touch--with a murderous gang that had every inducement not to spare our
lives. And positively it was a misfortune; an abandonment. I refused to
admit to myself its finality, as if it had reflected upon the devotion
of tried friends. I repeated to Castro that we should become aware of
them directly--probably even nearer than we wished. And, at any rate,
we were certain of a mighty loud noise when the attack on the ship
began. She, at least, could not be very far now. "Unless, indeed,"
I admitted with exasperation, "we are to suppose that your imbecile
_Lugarenos_ have missed their prey and got themselves as utterly lost as
we ourselves."
I was irritated--by his nodding plume; by his cold, perfunctory, as if
sleepy mutters, "Possibly, possibly, _puede ser_." He retorted: "Your
English generosity could wish your countrymen no better luck than that
my _Lugarenos_, as your worship pleases to call them, should miss their
way. They are hungry for loot--with much fasting. And it is hunger that
makes your wolf fly straight at the throat."
All the time Seraphina breathed no word. But when I raised my voice, she
put out a hushing hand to my arm. And, from her intent pose, from the
turn of her shadowy head, I knew that she was peering and listening
loyally.
Minutes passed--very few, I dare say--and brought no sound. The
restlessness of waiting made us dip our oars in a haphazard stroke,
without aim, without the means of judging whether we pulled to seaward,
inshore, north, or south, or only in a circle. Once we went excitedly
in chase of some splashing that must have been a leaping fish. I was
hanging my head over my idle oar when Seraphina touched me.
"I see!" she said, pointing over the bows.
Both Castro and I, peering horizontally over the water, did not see
anything. Not a shadow. Moreover, if they were so near, we ought to have
heard something.
"I believe it is land!" she murmured. "You are looking too low, Juan."
As soon as I looked up I saw it, too, dark and beetling, like the
overhang of a low cliff. Where on earth had we blundered to? For a
moment I was confounded. Fiery reflections from a light played faintly
above that shape. Then I recognized what I was looking at. We had found
the ship.
The fog was so shallow that up there the upper bulk of a heavy, square
stern, the very rails and stanchions crowning it like a balustrade,
jutted out in the misty sheen like the balcony of an invisible edifice,
for the lines of her run, the sides of her hull, were plunged in the
dense white layer below. And, throwing back my head, I traced even
her becalmed sails, pearly gray pinnacles of shadow uprising, tall and
motionless, towards the moon.
A redness wavered over her, as from a blaze on her deck. Could she be
on fire? And she was silent as a tomb. Could she be abandoned? I had
promised myself to dash alongside, but there was a weirdness in that
fragment of a dumb ship hanging out of a fog. We pulled only a stroke or
two nearer to the stern, and stopped. I remembered Castro's warning--the
blindness of flying lead; but it was the profound stillness that checked
me. It seemed to portend something inconceivable. I hailed, tentatively,
as if I had not expected to be answered, "Ship, ahoy!"
Neither was I answered by the instantaneous, "Hallo," of usual
watchfulness, though she was not abandoned. Indeed, my hail made a good
many men jump, to judge by the sounds and the words that came to me from
above. "What? What? A hail?" "Boat near?" "In English, sir."
"Dive for the captain, one of you," an authoritative voice directed.
"He's just run below for a minute. Don't frighten the missus. Call him
out quietly."
Talking, in confidential undertones, followed.
"See him?" "Can't, sir." "What's the dodge, I wonder." "Astern, I think,
sir." "D------n this fog, it lies as thick as pea-soup on the water."
I waited, and after a perplexed sort of pause, heard a stern "Keep off."
CHAPTER THREE
They did not suspect how close I was to them. And their temper struck
me at once as unsafe. They seemed very much on the alert, and, as I
imagined, disposed to precipitate action. I called out, deadening my
voice warily:
"I am an Englishman, escaping from the pirates here. We want your help."
To this no answer was made, but by that time the captain had come on
deck. The dinghy must have drifted in a little closer, for I made
out behind the shadowy rail one, two, three figures in a row, looming
bulkily above my head, as men appear enlarged in mist.
"'Englishman,' he says." "That's very likely," pronounced a new voice.
They held a hurried consultation up there, of which I caught only
detached sentences, and the general tone of concern. "It's perfectly
well known that there _is_ an Englishman here.... Aye, a runaway second
mate.... Killed a man in a Bristol ship.... What was his name, now?"
"Won't you answer me?" I called out.
"Aye, we will answer you as soon as we see you.... Keep your eyes
skinned fore and aft on deck there.... Ready, boys?"
"All ready, sir"; voices came from further off.
"Listen to me," I entreated.
Someone called out briskly, "This is a bad place for pretty tales of
Englishmen in distress. We know very well where we are."
"You are off Rio Medio," I began anxiously; "and I-------"
"Speaks the truth like a Briton, anyhow," commented a lazy drawl.
"I would send another man to the pump," a reflective voice suggested.
"To make sure of the force, Mr. Sebright, you know."
"Certainly, sir.... Another hand to the brakes, bo'sun."
"I have been held captive on shore," I said. "I escaped this evening,
three hours ago."
"And found this ship in the fog? You made a good shot at it, didn't
you?"
"It's no time for trifling, I swear to you," I continued. "They are out
looking for you, in force. I've heard them. I was with them when they
started."
"I believe you."
"They seem to have missed the ship."
"So you came to have a friendly chat meantime. That's kind. Beastly
weather, aint it?"
"I want to come aboard," I shouted. "You must be crazy not to believe
me."
"But we do believe every single word you say," bantered the Sebright
voice with serenity.
Suddenly another struck in, "Nichols, I call to mind, sir."
"Of course, of course. This is the man."
"My name's not Nichols," I protested.
"Now, now. You mustn't begin to lie," remonstrated Sebright. Somebody
laughed discreetly.
"You are mistaken, on my honour," I said. "Nichols left Rio Medio some
time ago."
"About three hours, eh?" came the drawl of insufferable folly in these
precious minutes.
It was clear that Manuel had gone astray, but I feared not for long.
They would spread out in search. And now I had found this hopeless ship,
it seemed impossible that anybody else could miss her.
"You may be boarded any moment by more than a dozen boats. I warn you
solemnly. Will you let me come?"
A low whistle was heard on board. They were impressed, "Why should he
tell us this?" an undertone inquired.
"Why the devil shouldn't he? It's no great news, is it? Some scoundrelly
trick. This man's up to any dodge. Why, the '_Jane_' was taken in broad
day by two boats that pretended they were going to sell vegetables."
"Look out, or by heavens you'll be taken by surprise. There's a lot of
them," I said as impressively as I could.
"Look out, look out. There's a lot of them," someone yelled in a sort of
panic.
"Oh, that's your game," Sebright's voice said to me. "Frighten us, eh?
Never you mind what this skunk says, men. Stand fast. We shall take a
lot of killing." He was answered by a sort of pugnacious uproar, a clash
of cutlasses and laughter, as if at some joke.
"That's right, boys; mind and send them away with clean faces, you
gunners. Jack, you keep a good lookout for that poor distressed
Englishman. What's that? a noise in the fog? Stand by. Now then,
cook!..."
"All ready to dish up, sir," a voice answered him.
It was like a sort of madness. Were they thinking of eating? Even at
that the English talk made my heart expand--the homeliness of it. I
seemed to know all their voices, as if I had talked to each man before.
It brought back memories, like the voices of friends.
But there was the strange irrelevancy, levity, the enmity--the
irrational, baffling nature of the anguishing conversation, as if with
the unapproachable men we meet in nightmares.
We in the dinghy, as well as those on board, were listening anxiously. A
profound silence reigned for a time.
"I don't care for myself," I tried once more, speaking distinctly. "But
a lady in the boat here is in great danger, too. Won't you do something
for a woman?"
I perceived, from the sort of stir on board, that this caused some
sensation.
"Or is the whole ship's company afraid to let one little boat come
alongside?" I added, after waiting for an answer.
A throat was cleared on board mildly, "Hem... you see, we don't know who
you are."
"I've told you who I am. The lady is Spanish."
"Just so. But there are Englishmen and Englishmen in these days. Some of
them keep very bad company ashore, and others afloat. I couldn't think
of taking you on board, unless I know something more of you."
I seemed to detect an intention of malice in the mild voice. The more
so that I overheard a rapid interchange of mutterings up there. "See him
yet?" "Not a thing, sir." "Wait, I say."
Nothing could overcome the fixed idea of these men, who seemed to enjoy
so much the cleverness of their suspicions. It was the most dangerous of
tempers to deal with. It made them as untrustworthy as so many lunatics.
They were capable of anything, of decoying us alongside, and stoving
the bottom out of the boat, and drowning us before they discovered their
mistake, if they ever did. Even as it was, there was danger; and yet I
was extremely loath to give her up. It was impossible to give her up.
But what were we to do? What to say? How to act?
"Castro, this is horrible," I said blankly. That he was beginning to
chafe, to fret, and shuffle his feet only added to my dismay. He might
begin at any moment to swear in Spanish, and that was sure to bring a
shower of lead, blind, fired blindly. "We have nothing to expect from
the people of that ship. We cannot even get on board."
"Not without Manuel's help, it seems," he said bitterly. "Strange, is
it not, Senor? Your countrymen--your excellent and virtuous countrymen.
Generous and courageous and perspicacious."
Seraphina said suddenly, "They have reason. It is well for them to be
suspicious of us in this place." She had a tone of calm reproof, and of
faith.
"They shall be of more use when they are dead," Castro muttered. "The
senor's other dead countrymen served us well."
"I shall give you great, very great sums of money," Seraphina suddenly
cried towards the ship. "I am the Senorita Seraphina Riego."
"There is a woman--that's a woman's voice, I'll swear," I heard them
exclaim on board, and I cried again:
"Yes, yes. There is a woman."
"I dare say. But where do you come in? You are a distressed Englishman,
aren't you?" a voice came back.
"You shall let us come up on your ship," Seraphina said. "I shall come
myself, alone--Seraphina Riego."
"Eh, what?" the voice asked.
I felt a little wind on the back of my head. There was desperate hurry.
"We are escaping to get married," I called out. They were beginning to
shout orders on the ship. "Oh, you've come to the wrong shop. A church
is what you want for _that_ trouble," the voice called back brutally,
through the other cries of orders to square the yards.
I shouted again, but my voice must have been drowned in the creaking
of blocks and yards. They were alert enough for every chance of getting
away--for every flaw of wind. Already the ship was less distinct, as if
my eyes had grown dim. By the time a voice on board her cried, "Belay,"
faintly, she had gone from my sight. Then the puff of wind passed away,
too, and left us more alone than ever, with only the small disk of the
moon poised vertically above the mists.
"Listen," said Tomas Castro, after what seemed an eternity of
crestfallen silence.
He need not have spoken; there could be no doubt that Manuel had lo |
