CHAPTER XII
PRISONER AND CAPTOR
WHEN the heels of the Sally had put so great a distance between herself and her pursuers that there was nothing to fear of their overhauling her, Bras-de-Fer went below to the cabin. Exhausted by the events of the night, leaning listlessly against the sill of the stern-port, was Mistress Clerke, her lids drooping with weariness as she struggled against tired nature to keep her lone vigil. Her eyes started wide at the sound of his footsteps. She struggled to her feet and stood, her face pallid and drawn, in the cold, garish light of the morning. She scanned him eagerly, peering fearfully into his face for any portentous sign. The dust of battle was still streaked upon it, and the shadows under the brows which had made his countenance forbidding in the mad flush of war upon the San Isidro now only gave the shadows a darker depth of settled melancholy. There was a fierceness and wildness, too, but it was distant, hidden, and self-contained; at bay, only with nothing of aggressiveness for immediate apprehension or alarm. Instead, there was a reserved dignity and aloofness which spoke of a nice sense of a delicate situation. He made no move to draw near her, but stood in the narrow cabin door, hat in hand.
“Madame is weary?” he said. “If you will permit—” And then he searched the cabin, a question in his eyes.
“The señorita, madame?” he asked.
Mistress Clerke sighed wearily. “I am alone, monsieur. She came frozen with terror—and fled again—”
“You alone!”
“I can only crave your pity.”
He peered around at the dingy surroundings. “I am bereaved, madame. This cabin is not the San Isidro. ’Twere better, more cleanly. I am sorry. I had come to order it to your comfort. See. I have brought your bedding and belongings from the San Isidro. In a moment, if you will permit, I can do very much to better your condition.”
A spark of gratitude at this evidence of his kindly disposition gleamed in her eyes a moment and she signed an acquiescence. The Frenchman conducted her to the half-deck, while two negroes set busily about the place, removing his and Cornbury’s effects and making it sweet and clean for its gentle tenant.
The Frenchman would have left her, but Mistress Barbara stopped him at the cabin door.
“I cannot thank you, monsieur. To do so pays no jot of my great obligation, which every moment becomes greater.”
He bowed and would have passed out. “You owe me nothing but silence, madame,” he said, coldly.
“And that I cannot pay,” she cried. “Oh, why will you not listen to me, monsieur? Have you no kindness?”
“I have done what small service I could, madame. If I owe you more—”
She clenched her small hands together, as though in pain. “Ah, you do not understand. Why will you not see? It is not that. I wish you to do me justice.”
“Madame, justice and I are many miles asunder. I have no indulgent memory. It is best that there should be no talk of what has been. Only what is and what is to be has any power to open my ears or my lips. And so, if you will permit me,” and once more he made the motion to withdraw.
“It is the present and the future, Monsieur le Chevalier,” she began. But at the sound of that name he turned abruptly towards her, frowning darkly.
“It cannot be, madame,” he cried, with a brusqueness which frightened her. “I have no name but Bras-de-Fer aboard this ship. Please address your needs to him.”
She recoiled in dismay in the corner of the bulkhead to listen to the tramp of his heavy sea-boots down the passage. For the first time she feared him. She could not know that it was the sight of her face and of something new he saw there which raised a doubt that had entered, a canker, into his mind. She could not know what a struggle it was costing him and at what pains he took refuge in the silence he demanded. His brutality was but the sudden outward manifestation of this battle, which, should it not take one side, must assuredly take the other. He had decided. Nothing should turn the iron helm of his will. But as he sought the deck, hot memory poured over him in a flood. He recalled the times she had tossed her head at him, even before the incident of the coach. That, too, he remembered, even with a sense of amusement. The coranto! and how he had sought to patch and mend his wounded pride by fruitlessly assailing hers, battering abortively at the citadel of the heart he could never hope to win. Ferrers! The precious papers he had had for a sweet half-hour in his bosom and had thrown away! Where had Ferrers hidden them from her? The priceless heritage with which he could have daunted this woman-enemy of his whom he had loved and hated at the same time and from whom he had received only scorn and misprision. Could he refuse her now that she was a helpless captive, weak, frail, and unfriended among a crew of rascals who stood at nothing and from whom only himself could preserve her? Had he not secretly welcomed her wish last night to be carried aboard the Saucy Sally, and the contingency which made it impossible for her to be returned to the San Isidro? Was he not conscious of a sense of guilt that he had not found an opportunity to send her back to safety? She was completely in his power. His heart sang high; but the cord was frayed, and the note rang false. It was impossible; no matter how deeply he had seared his soul, no man born as he had been born could refuse the mute appeal of a woman in distress. He thought of his dishonor the night he had come upon the Saucy Sally, when in a fury against the fortune which still denied him he had railed, madly, impotently, against all virtue, and in a passion of vengefulness sunk so low that he had loudly threatened, like a common street ruffian and card-room bully, this woman, whom—God help him!—he loved and would love throughout all time. The depth of his degradation cumbered him about, remorse fell upon him, and anguish wrung his heart from his body as nothing—not even the loss of the papers—had done.
The old life in London, with its gaming, its carousing and gallantry—he could see it all through new eyes, washed clean and clear by the purging winds and storms of heaven. Himself he marked from a great moral distance, almost as though from another planet—the silly, spoiled child of folly that he had been. And it was this impotent creature who had cried out against his fate, which, with a rare honesty, had only lowered him from the high estate to which he had won, in accordance with the same inexorable regulations of the human law which had raised him there. The figures in that London life passed before him like a row of tawdry puppets, serving the same martyrdom to folly as himself, at the expense of love, charity, and all true virtue. Soft thinking for a powder-blackened, bearded flibustier, with hands even yet red from his last depredation! He smiled supinely to himself, that he could think thus of the things that so recently had been his very existence. In that London life, amid that throng of tinsel goddesses, one figure stood eminent and conspicuous. It was that of the woman who in all companies of men and women held her fame so fair that, whatever their reputations for high deeds or ignoble vices, none was so great as she. In that great court where virtue was a gem of so little worth that it was kept hid and secret, Mistress Barbara had worn it openly, broadly, high upon her brow, with a rare pride, as the most priceless of her inestimable jewels.
He loved her. Flaunted, scorned, despised, he loved her the more. The past was engulfed and vanquished. He only saw her an actuality of the flesh here aboard his very ship—the dove in the eagle’s nest, whom every law and impulse, human and divine, impelled him to succor and protect. The vibrant voice, the gentle touch, the soft perfume of her presence provoked the covetous senses and stole away his will. It was with mingled feelings of apprehension and alarm that he discovered to himself the persistency of his attachment. He acknowledged it only when he learned that nothing else was possible. And when that was done he planned and resolved again, with a new fervency of determination. The future should atone. She had thought him a wild, reckless gallant, who had won his way and continued to win—by his wits—a worthless creature who consorted with the worst men of the court and presented in the world the characteristics she most despised. How he hated the thing that he had been, the mask that he had worn! If she had cared, she could have seen, she would have learned that he was not all that she had thought him. The reckless gallant was become a rough boucanier and pirato. She had seen him in the red fever of battle. Eh bien. He would not undeceive her. Red-handed pirato he would remain. No glimpse should she have of the struggle beneath. He would set her safe ashore at Port Royal. He would sail away from her forever, and she should enjoy her fortune. That was the price that he would pay.
None the less, he found the occasion to wash away the stains of battle, and in fresh linen and hose became less offensive to the sight. When he sought the deck there was no sign of a vessel upon any side. Cornbury he found at the after-hatch, puffing upon a pipe.
“Ochone, dear Iron Arm,” the Irishman began, “ye’re the anomalous figure of a pirato, to be sure. One minute your form is painted broad upon the horizon with a cutlass in your teeth, an’ glistenin’ pikes in both your fists. I’ the next ye’re playin’ the hero part of ‘Vartue in Distress.’”
Bras-de-Fer smiled.
“Oh, ye may laugh. But in truth ’tis all most irregular. Ye violate every tradition of the thrade. By the laws, ye’re no dacent figure of a swashbuckler at all at all.”
“What would ye have then, mon ami?”
“Ah, he’s clean daffy! What would I have? Bah! ye know my misliking for the sex, and ye ask me what would I have? Egad! a walk on the plank, and a little dance on nothing would not be amiss for her. ’Tis the simplest thing in the world. The least bit of a rope, three ten-pound shot, a shove of the arm, and spsh! your troubles are sunk in a mile of sea. To England, a treaty of peace with Captain Ferrers, and, voilà! ye’re a French viscount, with a fortune beyond the dreams of avarice, and an out-at-the-knees-and-elbows of an Irishman to help ye spend it. Man, ’tis a squanderin’ waste of opportunity.” He growled, and puffed upon his pipe, sending crabbed, sour glances at his captain.
“Oh, ye may laugh. Instead of this, what do ye do? Ye have my lady aboard the ship to the pervarsion of all dacent piratical society, give her my bed and board, and my particular niggar for waiting-man. Ye’re sowin’ the seeds of ripe mutiny, me handsome picaroon, an’ a red-headed Irishman will be there to aid in the blossomin’.”
“Nay, Cornbury,” said Bras-de-Fer. “We do but go a short cruise to Port Royal. I’ve set my mind on seeing my lady safe in English hands.”
“There ye are,” fumed the Irishman. “There ye are! Ye’ll kill the golden goose. Ye’ll jeopardize your callin’ again, all for that same finical bundle of superficialities. Slapped once in the face, ye turn your cheek with new avidity for more. Zoons! I’ve no patience with such shilly-shallyin’.” And, as Bras-de-Fer was silent, he sent forth a quick succession of smoke puffs which chased madly down the wind.
“Ask Jacquard,” he growled again; “he likes it no more than I. There’s a mutterin’ forward. ’Tis discipline—the lack of drink and an unequal partitionin’ of the spoils—”
“Pardieu!” interrupted the Frenchman at last, his eyes flashing in a fury. “Do they growl? Let them do it in the forecastle. No man, no, not even you, shall beard me on my quarter-deck!”
Cornbury did not arise or show the least sign of a changed countenance. “Ask Jacquard,” he repeated again.
Bras-de-Fer swung hotly on his heel and went below.