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Captain Blood

by Rafael Sabatini · English · Gutenberg #1965 · 661,649 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Captain Blood

Author: Rafael Sabatini


        
Release date: November 1, 1999 [eBook #1965]
                Most recently updated: March 10, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1965

Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAIN BLOOD ***




Produced by An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer





CAPTAIN BLOOD

By Rafael Sabatini


CAPTAIN BLOOD His Odyssey



CONTENTS

     I.       THE MESSENGER
     II.      KIRKE'S DRAGOONS
     III.     THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE
     IV.      HUMAN MERCHANDISE
     V.       ARABELLA BISHOP
     VI.      PLANS OF ESCAPE
     VII.     PIRATES
     VIII.    SPANIARDS
     IX.      THE REBELS-CONVICT
     X.       DON DIEGO
     XI.      FILIAL PIETY
     XII.     DON PEDRO SANGRE
     XIII.    TORTUGA
     XIV.     LEVASSEUR'S HEROICS
     XV.      THE RANSOM
     XVI.     THE TRAP
     XVII.    THE DUPES
     XVIII.   THE MILAGROSA
     XIX.     THE MEETING
     XX.      THIEF AND PIRATE
     XXI.     THE SERVICE OF KING JAMES
     XXII.    HOSTILITIES
     XXIII.   HOSTAGES
     XXIV.    WAR
     XXV.     THE SERVICE OF KING LOUIS
     XXVI.    M. DE RIVAROL
     XXVII.   CARTAGENA
     XXVIII.  THE HONOUR OF M. DE RIVAROL
     XXIX.    THE SERVICE OF KING WILLIAM
     XXX.     THE LAST FIGHT OF THE ARABELLA
     XXXI.    HIS EXCELLENCY THE GOVERNOR




CHAPTER I. THE MESSENGER


Peter Blood, bachelor of medicine and several other things besides,
smoked a pipe and tended the geraniums boxed on the sill of his window
above Water Lane in the town of Bridgewater.

Sternly disapproving eyes considered him from a window opposite, but
went disregarded. Mr. Blood's attention was divided between his task and
the stream of humanity in the narrow street below; a stream which poured
for the second time that day towards Castle Field, where earlier in
the afternoon Ferguson, the Duke's chaplain, had preached a sermon
containing more treason than divinity.

These straggling, excited groups were mainly composed of men with green
boughs in their hats and the most ludicrous of weapons in their hands.
Some, it is true, shouldered fowling pieces, and here and there a sword
was brandished; but more of them were armed with clubs, and most of them
trailed the mammoth pikes fashioned out of scythes, as formidable to
the eye as they were clumsy to the hand. There were weavers, brewers,
carpenters, smiths, masons, bricklayers, cobblers, and representatives
of every other of the trades of peace among these improvised men of war.
Bridgewater, like Taunton, had yielded so generously of its manhood to
the service of the bastard Duke that for any to abstain whose age and
strength admitted of his bearing arms was to brand himself a coward or a
papist.

Yet Peter Blood, who was not only able to bear arms, but trained and
skilled in their use, who was certainly no coward, and a papist only
when it suited him, tended his geraniums and smoked his pipe on that
warm July evening as indifferently as if nothing were afoot. One other
thing he did. He flung after those war-fevered enthusiasts a line of
Horace--a poet for whose work he had early conceived an inordinate
affection:

“Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?”

And now perhaps you guess why the hot, intrepid blood inherited from the
roving sires of his Somersetshire mother remained cool amidst all this
frenzied fanatical heat of rebellion; why the turbulent spirit which had
forced him once from the sedate academical bonds his father would
have imposed upon him, should now remain quiet in the very midst of
turbulence. You realize how he regarded these men who were rallying to
the banners of liberty--the banners woven by the virgins of Taunton, the
girls from the seminaries of Miss Blake and Mrs. Musgrove, who--as the
ballad runs--had ripped open their silk petticoats to make colours for
King Monmouth's army. That Latin line, contemptuously flung after them
as they clattered down the cobbled street, reveals his mind. To him they
were fools rushing in wicked frenzy upon their ruin.

You see, he knew too much about this fellow Monmouth and the pretty
brown slut who had borne him, to be deceived by the legend of
legitimacy, on the strength of which this standard of rebellion had
been raised. He had read the absurd proclamation posted at the Cross
at Bridgewater--as it had been posted also at Taunton and
elsewhere--setting forth that “upon the decease of our Sovereign Lord
Charles the Second, the right of succession to the Crown of England,
Scotland, France, and Ireland, with the dominions and territories
thereunto belonging, did legally descend and devolve upon the most
illustrious and high-born Prince James, Duke of Monmouth, son and heir
apparent to the said King Charles the Second.”

It had moved him to laughter, as had the further announcement that
“James Duke of York did first cause the said late King to be poysoned,
and immediately thereupon did usurp and invade the Crown.”

He knew not which was the greater lie. For Mr. Blood had spent a third
of his life in the Netherlands, where this same James Scott--who now
proclaimed himself James the Second, by the grace of God, King, et
cetera--first saw the light some six-and-thirty years ago, and he was
acquainted with the story current there of the fellow's real paternity.
Far from being legitimate--by virtue of a pretended secret marriage
between Charles Stuart and Lucy Walter--it was possible that this
Monmouth who now proclaimed himself King of England was not even the
illegitimate child of the late sovereign. What but ruin and disaster
could be the end of this grotesque pretension? How could it be hoped
that England would ever swallow such a Perkin? And it was on his behalf,
to uphold his fantastic claim, that these West Country clods, led by a
few armigerous Whigs, had been seduced into rebellion!

“Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?”

He laughed and sighed in one; but the laugh dominated the sigh, for Mr.
Blood was unsympathetic, as are most self-sufficient men; and he
was very self-sufficient; adversity had taught him so to be. A more
tender-hearted man, possessing his vision and his knowledge, might have
found cause for tears in the contemplation of these ardent, simple,
Nonconformist sheep going forth to the shambles--escorted to the
rallying ground on Castle Field by wives and daughters, sweethearts and
mothers, sustained by the delusion that they were to take the field
in defence of Right, of Liberty, and of Religion. For he knew, as
all Bridgewater knew and had known now for some hours, that it was
Monmouth's intention to deliver battle that same night. The Duke was to
lead a surprise attack upon the Royalist army under Feversham that was
now encamped on Sedgemoor. Mr. Blood assumed that Lord Feversham would
be equally well-informed, and if in this assumption he was wrong,
at least he was justified of it. He was not to suppose the Royalist
commander so indifferently skilled in the trade he followed.

Mr. Blood knocked the ashes from his pipe, and drew back to close his
window. As he did so, his glance travelling straight across the street
met at last the glance of those hostile eyes that watched him. There
were two pairs, and they belonged to the Misses Pitt, two amiable,
sentimental maiden ladies who yielded to none in Bridgewater in their
worship of the handsome Monmouth.

Mr. Blood smiled and inclined his head, for he was on friendly terms
with these ladies, one of whom, indeed, had been for a little while his
patient. But there was no response to his greeting. Instead, the eyes
gave him back a stare of cold disdain. The smile on his thin lips grew a
little broader, a little less pleasant. He understood the reason of that
hostility, which had been daily growing in this past week since Monmouth
had come to turn the brains of women of all ages. The Misses Pitt,
he apprehended, contemned him that he, a young and vigorous man, of a
military training which might now be valuable to the Cause, should stand
aloof; that he should placidly smoke his pipe and tend his geraniums on
this evening of all evenings, when men of spirit were rallying to the
Protestant Champion, offering their blood to place him on the throne
where he belonged.

If Mr. Blood had condescended to debate the matter with these ladies, he
might have urged that having had his fill of wandering and adventuring,
he was now embarked upon the career for which he had been originally
intended and for which his studies had equipped him; that he was a man
of medicine and not of war; a healer, not a slayer. But they would have
answered him, he knew, that in such a cause it behoved every man who
deemed himself a man to take up arms. They would have pointed out that
their own nephew Jeremiah, who was by trade a sailor, the master of a
ship--which by an ill-chance for that young man had come to anchor at
this season in Bridgewater Bay--had quitted the helm to snatch up a
musket in defence of Right. But Mr. Blood was not of those who argue. As
I have said, he was a self-sufficient man.

He closed the window, drew the curtains, and turned to the pleasant,
candle-lighted room, and the table on which Mrs. Barlow, his
housekeeper, was in the very act of spreading supper. To her, however,
he spoke aloud his thought.

“It's out of favour I am with the vinegary virgins over the way.”

He had a pleasant, vibrant voice, whose metallic ring was softened and
muted by the Irish accent which in all his wanderings he had never lost.
It was a voice that could woo seductively and caressingly, or command in
such a way as to compel obedience. Indeed, the man's whole nature was in
that voice of his. For the rest of him, he was tall and spare, swarthy
of tint as a gipsy, with eyes that were startlingly blue in that dark
face and under those level black brows. In their glance those eyes,
flanking a high-bridged, intrepid nose, were of singular penetration
and of a steady haughtiness that went well with his firm lips. Though
dressed in black as became his calling, yet it was with an elegance
derived from the love of clothes that is peculiar to the adventurer he
had been, rather than to the staid medicus he now was. His coat was of
fine camlet, and it was laced with silver; there were ruffles of Mechlin
at his wrists and a Mechlin cravat encased his throat. His great black
periwig was as sedulously curled as any at Whitehall.

Seeing him thus, and perceiving his real nature, which was plain upon
him, you might have been tempted to speculate how long such a man would
be content to lie by in this little backwater of the world into which
chance had swept him some six months ago; how long he would continue to
pursue the trade for which he had qualified himself before he had begun
to live. Difficult of belief though it may be when you know his history,
previous and subsequent, yet it is possible that but for the trick
that Fate was about to play him, he might have continued this peaceful
existence, settling down completely to the life of a doctor in this
Somersetshire haven. It is possible, but not probable.

He was the son of an Irish medicus, by a Somersetshire lady in whose
veins ran the rover blood of the Frobishers, which may account for a
certain wildness that had early manifested itself in his disposition.
This wildness had profoundly alarmed his father, who for an Irishman was
of a singularly peace-loving nature. He had early resolved that the
boy should follow his own honourable profession, and Peter Blood, being
quick to learn and oddly greedy of knowledge, had satisfied his parent
by receiving at the age of twenty the degree of baccalaureus medicinae
at Trinity College, Dublin. His father survived that satisfaction by
three months only. His mother had then been dead some years already.
Thus Peter Blood came into an inheritance of some few hundred pounds,
with which he had set out to see the world and give for a season a free
rein to that restless spirit by which he was imbued. A set of curious
chances led him to take service with the Dutch, then at war with France;
and a predilection for the sea made him elect that this service should
be upon that element. He had the advantage of a commission under the
famous de Ruyter, and fought in the Mediterranean engagement in which
that great Dutch admiral lost his life.

After the Peace of Nimeguen his movements are obscure. But we know that
he spent two years in a Spanish prison, though we do not know how he
contrived to get there. It may be due to this that upon his release
he took his sword to France, and saw service with the French in their
warring upon the Spanish Netherlands. Having reached, at last, the age
of thirty-two, his appetite for adventure surfeited, his health having
grown indifferent as the result of a neglected wound, he was suddenly
overwhelmed by homesickness. He took ship from Nantes with intent to
cross to Ireland. But the vessel being driven by stress of weather
into Bridgewater Bay, and Blood's health having grown worse during the
voyage, he decided to go ashore there, additionally urged to it by the
fact that it was his mother's native soil.

Thus in January of that year 1685 he had come to Bridgewater, possessor
of a fortune that was approximately the same as that with which he had
originally set out from Dublin eleven years ago.

Because he liked the place, in which his health was rapidly restored
to him, and because he conceived that he had passed through adventures
enough for a man's lifetime, he determined to settle there, and take
up at last the profession of medicine from which he had, with so little
profit, broken away.

That is all his story, or so much of it as matters up to that night, six
months later, when the battle of Sedgemoor was fought.

Deeming the impending action no affair of his, as indeed it was not, and
indifferent to the activity with which Bridgewater was that night agog,
Mr. Blood closed his ears to the sounds of it, and went early to bed. He
was peacefully asleep long before eleven o'clock, at which hour, as
you know, Monmouth rode but with his rebel host along the Bristol Road,
circuitously to avoid the marshland that lay directly between himself
and the Royal Army. You also know that his numerical advantage--possibly
counter-balanced by the greater steadiness of the regular troops on the
other side--and the advantages he derived from falling by surprise upon
an army that was more or less asleep, were all lost to him by blundering
and bad leadership before ever he was at grips with Feversham.

The armies came into collision in the neighbourhood of two o'clock in
the morning. Mr. Blood slept undisturbed through the distant boom of
cannon. Not until four o'clock, when the sun was rising to dispel the
last wisps of mist over that stricken field of battle, did he awaken
from his tranquil slumbers.

He sat up in bed, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and collected himself.
Blows were thundering upon the door of his house, and a voice was
calling incoherently. This was the noise that had aroused him.
Conceiving that he had to do with some urgent obstetrical case, he
reached for bedgown and slippers, to go below. On the landing he almost
collided with Mrs. Barlow, new-risen and unsightly, in a state of panic.
He quieted her cluckings with a word of reassurance, and went himself to
open.

There in slanting golden light of the new-risen sun stood a breathless,
wild-eyed man and a steaming horse. Smothered in dust and grime, his
clothes in disarray, the left sleeve of his doublet hanging in rags,
this young man opened his lips to speak, yet for a long moment remained
speechless.

In that moment Mr. Blood recognized him for the young shipmaster,
Jeremiah Pitt, the nephew of the maiden ladies opposite, one who had
been drawn by the general enthusiasm into the vortex of that rebellion.
The street was rousing, awakened by the sailor's noisy advent; doors
were opening, and lattices were being unlatched for the protrusion of
anxious, inquisitive heads.

“Take your time, now,” said Mr. Blood. “I never knew speed made by
overhaste.”

But the wild-eyed lad paid no heed to the admonition. He plunged,
headlong, into speech, gasping, breathless.

“It is Lord Gildoy,” he panted. “He is sore wounded... at Oglethorpe's
Farm by the river. I bore him thither... and... and he sent me for you.
Come away! Come away!”

He would have clutched the doctor, and haled him forth by force in
bedgown and slippers as he was. But the doctor eluded that too eager
hand.

“To be sure, I'll come,” said he. He was distressed. Gildoy had been a
very friendly, generous patron to him since his settling in these parts.
And Mr. Blood was eager enough to do what he now could to discharge
the debt, grieved that the occasion should have arisen, and in such a
manner--for he knew quite well that the rash young nobleman had been an
active agent of the Duke's. “To be sure, I'll come. But first give me
leave to get some clothes and other things that I may need.”

“There's no time to lose.”

“Be easy now. I'll lose none. I tell ye again, ye'll go quickest by
going leisurely. Come in... take a chair...” He threw open the door of a
parlour.

Young Pitt waved aside the invitation.

“I'll wait here. Make haste, in God's name.” Mr. Blood went off to dress
and to fetch a case of instruments.

Questions concerning the precise nature of Lord Gildoy's hurt could wait
until they were on their way. Whilst he pulled on his boots, he gave
Mrs. Barlow instructions for the day, which included the matter of a
dinner he was not destined to eat.

When at last he went forth again, Mrs. Barlow clucking after him like
a disgruntled fowl, he found young Pitt smothered in a crowd of scared,
half-dressed townsfolk--mostly women--who had come hastening for news
of how the battle had sped. The news he gave them was to be read in the
lamentations with which they disturbed the morning air.

At sight of the doctor, dressed and booted, the case of instruments
tucked under his arm, the messenger disengaged himself from those who
pressed about, shook off his weariness and the two tearful aunts that
clung most closely, and seizing the bridle of his horse, he climbed to
the saddle.

“Come along, sir,” he cried. “Mount behind me.”

Mr. Blood, without wasting words, did as he was bidden. Pitt touched
the horse with his spur. The little crowd gave way, and thus, upon
the crupper of that doubly-laden horse, clinging to the belt of his
companion, Peter Blood set out upon his Odyssey. For this Pitt, in whom
he beheld no more than the messenger of a wounded rebel gentleman, was
indeed the very messenger of Fate.



CHAPTER II. KIRKE'S DRAGOONS


Oglethorpe's farm stood a mile or so to the south of Bridgewater on the
right bank of the river. It was a straggling Tudor building showing grey
above the ivy that clothed its lower parts. Approaching it now, through
the fragrant orchards amid which it seemed to drowse in Arcadian peace
beside the waters of the Parrett, sparkling in the morning sunlight,
Mr. Blood might have had a difficulty in believing it part of a world
tormented by strife and bloodshed.

On the bridge, as they had been riding out of Bridgewater, they had met
a vanguard of fugitives from the field of battle, weary, broken men,
many of them wounded, all of them terror-stricken, staggering in
speedless haste with the last remnants of their strength into the
shelter which it was their vain illusion the town would afford them.
Eyes glazed with lassitude and fear looked up piteously out of haggard
faces at Mr. Blood and his companion as they rode forth; hoarse voices
cried a warning that merciless pursuit was not far behind. Undeterred,
however, young Pitt rode amain along the dusty road by which these
poor fugitives from that swift rout on Sedgemoor came flocking in
ever-increasing numbers. Presently he swung aside, and quitting the road
took to a pathway that crossed the dewy meadowlands. Even here they
met odd groups of these human derelicts, who were scattering in all
directions, looking fearfully behind them as they came through the long
grass, expecting at every moment to see the red coats of the dragoons.

But as Pitt's direction was a southward one, bringing them ever nearer
to Feversham's headquarters, they were presently clear of that human
flotsam and jetsam of the battle, and riding through the peaceful
orchards heavy with the ripening fruit that was soon to make its annual
yield of cider.

At last they alighted on the kidney stones of the courtyard, and Baynes,
the master, of the homestead, grave of countenance and flustered of
manner, gave them welcome.

In the spacious, stone-flagged hall, the doctor found Lord
Gildoy--a very tall and dark young gentleman, prominent of chin and
nose--stretched on a cane day-bed under one of the tall mullioned
windows, in the care of Mrs. Baynes and her comely daughter. His cheeks
were leaden-hued, his eyes closed, and from his blue lips came with each
laboured breath a faint, moaning noise.

Mr. Blood stood for a moment silently considering his patient. He
deplored that a youth with such bright hopes in life as Lord Gildoy's
should have risked all, perhaps existence itself, to forward the
ambition of a worthless adventurer. Because he had liked and honoured
this brave lad he paid his case the tribute of a sigh. Then he knelt to
his task, ripped away doublet and underwear to lay bare his lordship's
mangled side, and called for water and linen and what else he needed for
his work.

He was still intent upon it a half-hour later when the dragoons invaded
the homestead. The clatter of hooves and hoarse shouts that heralded
their approach disturbed him not at all. For one thing, he was not
easily disturbed; for another, his task absorbed him. But his lordship,
who had now recovered consciousness, showed considerable alarm, and the
battle-stained Jeremy Pitt sped to cover in a clothes-press. Baynes was
uneasy, and his wife and daughter trembled. Mr. Blood reassured them.

“Why, what's to fear?” he said. “It's a Christian country, this, and
Christian men do not make war upon the wounded, nor upon those who
harbour them.” He still had, you see, illusions about Christians.
He held a glass of cordial, prepared under his directions, to his
lordship's lips. “Give your mind peace, my lord. The worst is done.”

And then they came rattling and clanking into the stone-flagged hall--a
round dozen jack-booted, lobster-coated troopers of the Tangiers
Regiment, led by a sturdy, black-browed fellow with a deal of gold lace
about the breast of his coat.

Baynes stood his ground, his attitude half-defiant, whilst his wife
and daughter shrank away in renewed fear. Mr. Blood, at the head of the
day-bed, looked over his shoulder to take stock of the invaders.

The officer barked an order, which brought his men to an attentive halt,
then swaggered forward, his gloved hand bearing down the pummel of
his sword, his spurs jingling musically as he moved. He announced his
authority to the yeoman.

“I am Captain Hobart, of Colonel Kirke's dragoons. What rebels do you
harbour?”

The yeoman took alarm at that ferocious truculence. It expressed itself
in his trembling voice.

“I... I am no harbourer of rebels, sir. This wounded gentleman....”

“I can see for myself.” The Captain stamped forward to the day-bed, and
scowled down upon the grey-faced sufferer.

“No need to ask how he came in this state and by his wounds. A damned
rebel, and that's enough for me.” He flung a command at his dragoons.
“Out with him, my lads.”

Mr. Blood got between the day-bed and the troopers.

“In the name of humanity, sir!” said he, on a note of anger. “This is
England, not Tangiers. The gentleman is in sore case. He may not be
moved without peril to his life.”

Captain Hobart was amused.

“Oh, I am to be tender of the lives of these rebels! Odds blood! Do you
think it's to benefit his health we're taking him? There's gallows being
planted along the road from Weston to Bridgewater, and he'll serve
for one of them as well as another. Colonel Kirke'll learn these
nonconforming oafs something they'll not forget in generations.”

“You're hanging men without trial? Faith, then, it's mistaken I am.
We're in Tangiers, after all, it seems, where your regiment belongs.”

The Captain considered him with a kindling eye. He looked him over from
the soles of his riding-boots to the crown of his periwig. He noted
the spare, active frame, the arrogant poise of the head, the air of
authority that invested Mr. Blood, and soldier recognized soldier. The
Captain's eyes narrowed. Recognition went further.

“Who the hell may you be?” he exploded.

“My name is Blood, sir--Peter Blood, at your service.”

“Aye--aye! Codso! That's the name. You were in French service once, were
you not?”

If Mr. Blood was surprised, he did not betray it.

“I was.”

“Then I remember you--five years ago, or more, you were in Tangiers.”

“That is so. I knew your colonel.”

“Faith, you may be renewing the acquaintance.” The Captain laughed
unpleasantly. “What brings you here, sir?”

“This wounded gentleman. I was fetched to attend him. I am a medicus.”

“A doctor--you?” Scorn of that lie--as he conceived it--rang in the
heavy, hectoring voice.

“Medicinae baccalaureus,” said Mr. Blood.

“Don't fling your French at me, man,” snapped Hobart. “Speak English!”

Mr. Blood's smile annoyed him.

“I am a physician practising my calling in the town of Bridgewater.”

The Captain sneered. “Which you reached by way of Lyme Regis in the
following of your bastard Duke.”

It was Mr. Blood's turn to sneer. “If your wit were as big as your
voice, my dear, it's the great man you'd be by this.”

For a moment the dragoon was speechless. The colour deepened in his
face.

“You may find me great enough to hang you.”

“Faith, yes. Ye've the look and the manners of a hangman. But if you
practise your trade on my patient here, you may be putting a rope round
your own neck. He's not the kind you may string up and no questions
asked. He has the right to trial, and the right to trial by his peers.”

“By his peers?”

The Captain was taken aback by these three words, which Mr. Blood had
stressed.

“Sure, now, any but a fool or a savage would have asked his name before
ordering him to the gallows. The gentleman is my Lord Gildoy.”

And then his lordship spoke for himself, in a weak voice.

“I make no concealment of my association with the Duke of Monmouth.
I'll take the consequences. But, if you please, I'll take them after
trial--by my peers, as the doctor has said.”

The feeble voice ceased, and was followed by a moment's silence. As is
common in many blustering men, there was a deal of timidity deep down
in Hobart. The announcement of his lordship's rank had touched those
depths. A servile upstart, he stood in awe of titles. And he stood in
awe of his colonel. Percy Kirke was not lenient with blunderers.

By a gesture he checked his men. He must consider. Mr. Blood, observing
his pause, added further matter for his consideration.

“Ye'll be remembering, Captain, that Lord Gildoy will have friends and
relatives on the Tory side, who'll have something to say to Colonel
Kirke if his lordship should be handled like a common felon. You'll go
warily, Captain, or, as I've said, it's a halter for your neck ye'll be
weaving this morning.”

Captain Hobart swept the warning aside with a bluster of contempt, but
he acted upon it none the less. “Take up the day-bed,” said he, “and
convey him on that to Bridgewater. Lodge him in the gaol until I take
order about him.”

“He may not survive the journey,” Blood remonstrated. “He's in no case
to be moved.”

“So much the worse for him. My affair is to round up rebels.” He
confirmed his order by a gesture. Two of his men took up the day-bed,
and swung to depart with it.

Gildoy made a feeble effort to put forth a hand towards Mr. Blood.
“Sir,” he said, “you leave me in your debt. If I live I shall study how
to discharge it.”

Mr. Blood bowed for answer; then to the men: “Bear him steadily,” he
commanded. “His life depends on it.”

As his lordship was carried out, the Captain became brisk. He turned
upon the yeoman.

“What other cursed rebels do you harbour?”

“None other, sir. His lordship....”

“We've dealt with his lordship for the present. We'll deal with you in
a moment when we've searched your house. And, by God, if you've lied to
me....” He broke off, snarling, to give an order. Four of his dragoons
went out. In a moment they were heard moving noisily in the adjacent
room. Meanwhile, the Captain was questing about the hall, sounding the
wainscoting with the butt of a pistol.

Mr. Blood saw no profit to himself in lingering.

“By your leave, it's a very good day I'll be wishing you,” said he.

“By my leave, you'll remain awhile,” the Captain ordered him.

Mr. Blood shrugged, and sat down. “You're tiresome,” he said. “I wonder
your colonel hasn't discovered it yet.”

But the Captain did not heed him. He was stooping to pick up a soiled
and dusty hat in which there was pinned a little bunch of oak leaves. It
had been lying near the clothes-press in which the unfortunate Pitt had
taken refuge. The Captain smiled malevolently. His eyes raked the room,
resting first sardonically on the yeoman, then on the two women in the
background, and finally on Mr. Blood, who sat with one leg thrown over
the other in an attitude of indifference that was far from reflecting
his mind.

Then the Captain stepped to the press, and pulled open one of the wings
of its massive oaken door. He took the huddled inmate by the collar of
his doublet, and lugged him out into the open.

“And who the devil's this?” quoth he. “Another nobleman?”

Mr. Blood had a vision of those gallows of which Captain Hobart had
spoken, and of this unfortunate young shipmaster going to adorn one of
them, strung up without trial, in the place of the other victim of whom
the Captain had been cheated. On the spot he invented not only a title
but a whole family for the young rebel.

“Faith, ye've said it, Captain. This is Viscount Pitt, first cousin to
Sir Thomas Vernon, who's married to that slut Moll Kirke, sister to your
own colonel, and sometime lady in waiting upon King James's queen.”

Both the Captain and his prisoner gasped. But whereas thereafter young
Pitt discreetly held his peace, the Captain rapped out a nasty oath. He
considered his prisoner again.

“He's lying, is he not?” he demanded, seizing the lad by the shoulder,
and glaring into his face. “He's rallying rue, by God!”

“If ye believe that,” said Blood, “hang him, and see what happens to
you.”

The dragoon glared at the doctor and then at his prisoner. “Pah!”
 He thrust the lad into the hands of his men. “Fetch him along to
Bridgewater. And make fast that fellow also,” he pointed to Baynes.
“We'll show him what it means to harbour and comfort rebels.”

There was a moment of confusion. Baynes struggled in the grip of the
troopers, protesting vehemently. The terrified women screamed until
silenced by a greater terror. The Captain strode across to them. He took
the girl by the shoulders. She was a pretty, golden-headed creature,
with soft blue eyes that looked up entreatingly, piteously into the face
of the dragoon. He leered upon her, his eyes aglow, took her chin in his
hand, and set her shuddering by his brutal kiss.

“It's an earnest,” he said, smiling grimly. “Let that quiet you, little
rebel, till I've done with these rogues.”

And he swung away again, leaving her faint and trembling in the arms of
her anguished mother. His men stood, grinning, awaiting orders, the two
prisoners now fast pinioned.

“Take them away. Let Cornet Drake have charge of them.” His smouldering
eye again sought the cowering girl. “I'll stay awhile--to search out
this place. There may be other rebels hidden here.” As an afterthought,
he added: “And take this fellow with you.” He pointed to Mr. Blood.
“Bestir!”

Mr. Blood started out of his musings. He had been considering that in
his case of instruments there was a lancet with which he might perform
on Captain Hobart a beneficial operation. Beneficial, that is, to
humanity. In any case, the dragoon was obviously plethoric and would
be the better for a blood-letting. The difficulty lay in making the
opportunity. He was beginning to wonder if he could lure the Captain
aside with some tale of hidden treasure, when this untimely interruption
set a term to that interesting speculation.

He sought to temporize.

“Faith it will suit me very well,” said he. “For Bridgewater is my
destination, and but that ye detained me I'd have been on my way thither
now.”

“Your destination there will be the gaol.”

“Ah, bah! Ye're surely joking!”

“There's a gallows for you if you prefer it. It's merely a question of
now or later.”

Rude hands seized Mr. Blood, and that precious lancet was in the case on
the table out of reach. He twisted out of the grip of the dragoons, for
he was strong and agile, but they closed with him again immediately, and
bore him down. Pinning him to the ground, they tied his wrists behind
his back, then roughly pulled him to his feet again.

“Take him away,” said Hobart shortly, and turned to issue his orders to
the other waiting troopers. “Go search the house, from attic to cellar;
then report to me here.”

The soldiers trailed out by the door leading to the interior. Mr. Blood
was thrust by his guards into the courtyard, where Pitt and Baynes
already waited. From the threshold of the hall, he looked back at
Captain Hobart, and his sapphire eyes were blazing. On his lips trembled
a threat of what he would do to Hobart if he should happen to survive
this business. Betimes he remembered that to utter it were probably to
extinguish his chance of living to execute it. For to-day the King's men
were masters in the West, and the West was regarded as enemy country, to
be subjected to the worst horror of war by the victorious side. Here a
captain of horse was for the moment lord of life and death.

Under the apple-trees in the orchard Mr. Blood and his companions in
misfortune were made fast each to a trooper's stirrup leather. Then at
the sharp order of the cornet, the little troop started for Bridgewater.
As they set out there was the fullest confirmation of Mr. Blood's
hideous assumption that to the dragoons this was a conquered enemy
country. There were sounds of rending timbers, of furniture smashed and
overthrown, the shouts and laughter of brutal men, to announce that this
hunt for rebels was no more than a pretext for pillage and destruction.
Finally above all other sounds came the piercing screams of a woman in
acutest agony.

Baynes checked in his stride, and swung round writhing, his face ashen.
As a consequence he was jerked from his feet by the rope that attached
him to the stirrup leather, and he was dragged helplessly a yard or two
before the trooper reined in, cursing him foully, and striking him with
the flat of his sword.

It came to Mr. Blood, as he trudged forward under the laden apple-trees
on that fragrant, delicious July morning, that man--as he had long
suspected--was the vilest work of God, and that only a fool would set
himself up as a healer of a species that was best exterminated.



CHAPTER III. THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE


It was not until two months later--on the 19th of September, if you
must have the actual date--that Peter Blood was brought to trial, upon
a charge of high treason. We know that he was not guilty of this; but
we need not doubt that he was quite capable of it by the time he was
indicted. Those two months of inhuman, unspeakable imprisonment had
moved his mind to a cold and deadly hatred of King James and his
representatives. It says something for his fortitude that in all the
circumstances he should still have had a mind at all. Yet, terrible
as was the position of this entirely innocent man, he had cause for
thankfulness on two counts. The first of these was that he should have
been brought to trial at all; the second, that his trial took place
on the date named, and not a day earlier. In the very delay which
exacerbated him lay--although he did not realize it--his only chance of
avoiding the gallows.

Easily, but for the favour of Fortune, he might have been one of those
haled, on the morrow of the battle, more or less haphazard from
the overflowing gaol at Bridgewater to be summarily hanged in the
market-place by the bloodthirsty Colonel Kirke. There was about the
Colonel of the Tangiers Regiment a deadly despatch which might have
disposed in like fashion of all those prisoners, numerous as they were,
but for the vigorous intervention of Bishop Mews, which put an end to
the drumhead courts-martial.

Even so, in that first week after Sedgemoor, Kirke and Feversham
contrived between them to put to death over a hundred men after a trial
so summary as to be no trial at all. They required human freights for
the gibbets with which they were planting the countryside, and they
little cared how they procured them or what innocent lives they took.
What, after all, was the life of a clod? The executioners were kept busy
with rope and chopper and cauldrons of pitch. I spare you the details of
that nauseating picture. It is, after all, with the fate of Peter Blood
that we are concerned rather than with that of the Monmouth rebels.

He survived to be included in one of those melancholy droves of
prisoners who, chained in pairs, were marched from Bridgewater to
Taunton. Those who were too sorely wounded to march were conveyed in
carts, into which they were brutally crowded, their wounds undressed and
festering. Many were fortunate enough to die upon the way. When Blood
insisted upon his right to exercise his art so as to relieve some of
this suffering, he was accounted importunate and threatened with a
flogging. If he had one regret now it was that he had not been out with
Monmouth. That, of course, was illogical; but you can hardly expect
logic from a man in his position.

His chain companion on that dreadful march was the same Jeremy Pitt who
had been the agent of his present misfortunes. The young shipmaster
had remained his close companion after their common arrest. Hence,
fortuitously, had they been chained together in the crowded prison,
where they were almost suffocated by the heat and the stench during
those days of July, August, and September.

Scraps of news filtered into the gaol from the outside world. Some may
have been deliberately allowed to penetrate. Of these was the tale of
Monmouth's execution. It created profoundest dismay amongst those men
who were suffering for the Duke and for the religious cause he had
professed to champion. Many refused utterly to believe it. A wild story
began to circulate that a man resembling Monmouth had offered himself up
in the Duke's stead, and that Monmouth survived to come again in glory
to deliver Zion and make war upon Babylon.

Mr. Blood heard that tale with the same indifference with which he had
received the news of Monmouth's death. But one shameful thing he heard
in connection with this which left him not quite so unmoved, and served
to nourish the contempt he was forming for King James. His Majesty had
consented to see Monmouth. To have done so unless he intended to pardon
him was a thing execrable and damnable beyond belief; for the only other
object in granting that interview could be the evilly mean satisfaction
of spurning the abject penitence of his unfortunate nephew.

Later they heard that Lord Grey, who after the Duke--indeed, perhaps,
before him--was the main leader of the rebellion, had purchased his own
pardon for forty thousand pounds. Peter Blood found this of a piece with
the rest. His contempt for King James blazed out at last.

“Why, here's a filthy mean creature to sit on a throne. If I had known
as much of him before as I know to-day, I don't doubt I should have
given cause to be where I am now.” And then on a sudden thought: “And
where will Lord Gildoy be, do you suppose?” he asked.

Young Pitt, whom he addressed, turned towards him a face from which the
ruddy tan of the sea had faded almost completely during those months of
captivity. His grey eyes were round and questioning. Blood answered him.

“Sure, now, we've never seen his lordship since that day at
Oglethorpe's. And where are the other gentry that were taken?--the real
leaders of this plaguey rebellion. Grey's case explains their absence,
I think. They are wealthy men that can ransom themselves. Here awaiting
the gallows are none but the unfortunates who followed; those who had
the honour to lead them go free. It's a curious and instructive reversal
of the usual way of these things. Faith, it's an uncertain world
entirely!”

He laughed, and settled down into that spirit of scorn, wrapped in
which he stepped later into the great hall of Taunton Castle to take his
trial. With him went Pitt and the yeoman Baynes. The three of them were
to be tried together, and their case was to open the proceedings of that
ghastly day.

The hall, even to the galleries--thronged with spectators, most of whom
were ladies--was hung in scarlet; a pleasant conceit, this, of the Lord
Chief Justice's, who naturally enough preferred the colour that should
reflect his own bloody mind.

At the upper end, on a raised dais, sat the Lords Commissioners, the
five judges in their scarlet robes and heavy dark periwigs, Baron
Jeffreys of Wem enthroned in the middle place.

The prisoners filed in under guard. The crier called for silence under
pain of imprisonment, and as the hum of voices gradually became hushed,
Mr. Blood considered with interest the twelve good men and true that
composed the jury. Neither good nor true did they look. They were
scared, uneasy, and hangdog as any set of thieves caught with their
hands in the pockets of their neighbours. They were twelve shaken men,
each of whom stood between the sword of the Lord Chief Justice's recent
bloodthirsty charge and the wall of his own conscience.

From them Mr. Blood's calm, deliberate glance passed on to consider the
Lords Commissioners, and particularly the presiding Judge, that Lord
Jeffreys, whose terrible fame had come ahead of him from Dorchester.

He beheld a tall, slight man on the young side of forty, with an oval
face that was delicately beautiful. There were dark stains of suffering
or sleeplessness under the low-lidded eyes, heightening their brilliance
and their gentle melancholy. The face was very pale, save for the vivid
colour of the full lips and the hectic flush on the rather high but
inconspicuous cheek-bones. It was something in those lips that marred
the perfection of that countenance; a fault, elusive but undeniable,
lurked there to belie the fine sensitiveness of those nostrils, the
tenderness of those dark, liquid eyes and the noble calm of that pale
brow.

The physician in Mr. Blood regarded the man with peculiar interest
knowing as he did the agonizing malady from which his lordship suffered,
and the amazingly irregular, debauched life that he led in spite of
it--perhaps because of it.

“Peter Blood, hold up your hand!”

Abruptly he was recalled to his position by the harsh voice of the clerk
of arraigns. His obedience was mechanical, and the clerk droned out the
wordy indictment which pronounced Peter Blood a false traitor against
the Most Illustrious and Most Excellent Prince, James the Second, by
the grace of God, of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland King, his
supreme and natural lord. It informed him that, having no fear of God in
his heart, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil,
he had failed in the love and true and due natural obedience towards his
said lord the King, and had moved to disturb the peace and tranquillity
of the kingdom and to stir up war and rebellion to depose his said lord
the King from the title, honour, and the regal name of the imperial
crown--and much more of the same kind, at the end of all of which he
was invited to say whether he was guilty or not guilty. He answered more
than was asked.

“It's entirely innocent I am.”

A small, sharp-faced man at a table before and to the right of him
bounced up. It was Mr. Pollexfen, the Judge-Advocate.

“Are you guilty or not guilty?” snapped this peppery gentleman. “You
must take the words.”

“Words, is it?” said Peter Blood. “Oh--not guilty.” And he went on,
addressing himself to the bench. “On this same subject of words, may it
please your lordships, I am guilty of nothing to justify any of those
words I have heard used to describe me, unless it be of a want of
patience at having been closely confined for two months and longer in a
foetid gaol with great peril to my health and even life.”

Being started, he would have added a deal more; but at this point the
Lord Chief Justice interposed in a gentle, rather plaintive voice.

“Look you, sir: because we must observe the common and usual methods of
trial, I must interrupt you now. You are no doubt ignorant of the forms
of law?”

“Not only ignorant, my lord, but hitherto most happy in that ignorance.
I could gladly have forgone this acquaintance with them.”

A pale smile momentarily lightened the wistful countenance.

“I believe you. You shall be fully heard when you come to your defence.
But anything you say now is altogether irregular and improper.”

Enheartened by that apparent sympathy and consideration, Mr. Blood
answered thereafter, as was required of him, that he would be tried by
God and his country. Whereupon, having prayed to God to send him a good
deliverance, the clerk called upon Andrew Baynes to hold up his hand and
plead.

From Baynes, who pleaded not guilty, the clerk passed on to Pitt, who
boldly owned his guilt. The Lord Chief Justice stirred at that.

“Come; that's better,” quoth he, and his four scarlet brethren nodded.
“If all were as obstinate as his two fellow-rebels, there would never be
an end.”

After that ominous interpolation, delivered with an inhuman iciness that
sent a shiver through the court, Mr. Pollexfen got to his feet. With
great prolixity he stated the general case against the three men, and
the particular case against Peter Blood, whose indictment was to be
taken first.

The only witness called for the King was Captain Hobart. He testified
briskly to the manner in which he had found and taken the three
prisoners, together with Lord Gildoy. Upon the orders of his colonel he
would have hanged Pitt out of hand, but was restrained by the lies of
the prisoner Blood, who led him to believe that Pitt was a peer of the
realm and a person of consideration.

As the Captain's evidence concluded, Lord Jeffreys looked across at
Peter Blood.

“Will the prisoner Blood ask the witness any questions?”

“None, my lord. He has correctly related what occurred.”

“I am glad to have your admission of that without any of the
prevarications that are usual in your kind. And I will say this, that
here prevarication would avail you little. For we always have the truth
in the end. Be sure of that.”

Baynes and Pitt similarly admitted the accuracy of the Captain's
evidence, whereupon the scarlet figure of the Lord Chief Justice heaved
a sigh of relief.

“This being so, let us get on, in God's name; for we have much to do.”
 There was now no trace of gentleness in his voice. It was brisk and
rasping, and the lips through which it passed were curved in scorn. “I
take it, Mr. Pollexfen, that the wicked treason of these three rogues
being established--indeed, admitted by them--there is no more to be
said.”

Peter Blood's voice rang out crisply, on a note that almost seemed to
contain laughter.

“May it please your lordship, but there's a deal more to be said.”

His lordship looked at him, first in blank amazement at his audacity,
then gradually with an expression of dull anger. The scarlet lips fell
into unpleasant, cruel lines that transfigured the whole countenance.

“How now, rogue? Would you waste our time with idle subterfuge?”

“I would have your lordship and the gentlemen of the jury hear me on my
defence, as your lordship promised that I should be heard.”

“Why, so you shall, villain; so you shall.” His lordship's voice was
harsh as a file. He writhed as he spoke, and for an instant his features
were distorted. A delicate dead-white hand, on which the veins showed
blue, brought forth a handkerchief with which he dabbed his lips and
then his brow. Observing him with his physician's eye, Peter Blood
judged him a prey to the pain of the disease that was destroying him.
“So you shall. But after the admission made, what defence remains?”

“You shall judge, my lord.”

“That is the purpose for which I sit here.”

“And so shall you, gentlemen.” Blood looked from judge to jury. The
latter shifted uncomfortably under the confident flash of his blue eyes.
Lord Jeffreys's bullying charge had whipped the spirit out of them. Had
they, themselves, been prisoners accused of treason, he could not have
arraigned them more ferociously.

Peter Blood stood boldly forward, erect, self-possessed, and saturnine.
He was freshly shaven, and his periwig, if out of curl, was at least
carefully combed and dressed.

“Captain Hobart has testified to what he knows--that he found me at
Oglethorpe's Farm on the Monday morning after the battle at Weston. But
he has not told you what I did there.”

Again the Judge broke in. “Why, what should you have been doing there
in the company of rebels, two of whom--Lord Gildoy and your fellow
there--have already admitted their guilt?”

“That is what I beg leave to tell your lordship.”

“I pray you do, and in God's name be brief, man. For if I am to be
troubled with the say of all you traitor dogs, I may sit here until the
Spring Assizes.”

“I was there, my lord, in my quality as a physician, to dress Lord
Gildoy's wounds.”

“What's this? Do you tell us that you are a physician?”

“A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin.”

“Good God!” cried Lord Jeffreys, his voice suddenly swelling, his eyes
upon the jury. “What an impudent rogue is this! You heard the witness
say that he had known him in Tangiers some years ago, and that he was
then an officer in the French service. You heard the prisoner admit that
the witness had spoken the truth?”

“Why, so he had. Yet what I am telling you is also true, so it is. For
some years I was a soldier; but before that I was a physician, and I
have been one again since January last, established in Bridgewater, as I
can bring a hundred witnesses to prove.”

“There's not the need to waste our time with that. I will convict you
out of your own rascally mouth. I will ask you only this: How came you,
who represent yourself as a physician peacefully following your
calling in the town of Bridgewater, to be with the army of the Duke of
Monmouth?”

“I was never with that army. No witness has sworn to that, and I dare
swear that no witness will. I never was attracted to the late rebellion.
I regarded the adventure as a wicked madness. I take leave to ask your
lordship” (his brogue became more marked than ever) “what should I,
who was born and bred a papist, be doing in the army of the Protestant
Champion?”

“A papist thou?” The judge gloomed on him a moment. “Art more like
a snivelling, canting Jack Presbyter. I tell you, man, I can smell a
Presbyterian forty miles.”

“Then I'll take leave to marvel that with so keen a nose your lordship
can't smell a papist at four paces.”

There was a ripple of laughter in the galleries, instantly quelled by
the fierce glare of the Judge and the voice of the crier.

Lord Jeffreys leaned farther forward upon his desk. He raised that
delicate white hand, still clutching its handkerchief, and sprouting
from a froth of lace.

“We'll leave your religion out of account for the moment, friend,” said
he. “But mark what I say to you.” With a minatory forefinger he beat the
time of his words. “Know, friend, that there is no religion a man
can pretend to can give a countenance to lying. Thou hast a precious
immortal soul, and there is nothing in the world equal to it in value.
Consider that the great God of Heaven and Earth, before Whose tribunal
thou and we and all persons are to stand at the last day, will take
vengeance on thee for every falsehood, and justly strike thee into
eternal flames, make thee drop into the bottomless pit of fire and
brimstone, if thou offer to deviate the least from the truth and nothing
but the truth. For I tell thee God is not mocked. On that I charge you
to answer truthfully. How came you to be taken with these rebels?”

Peter Blood gaped at him a moment in consternation. The man was
incredible, unreal, fantastic, a nightmare judge. Then he collected
himself to answer.

“I was summoned that morning to succour Lord Gildoy, and I conceived it
to be the duty imposed upon me by my calling to answer that summons.”

“Did you so?” The Judge, terrible now of aspect--his face white, his
twisted lips red as the blood for which they thirsted--glared upon
him in evil mockery. Then he controlled himself as if by an effort.
He sighed. He resumed his earlier gentle plaintiveness. “Lord! How you
waste our time. But I'll have patience with you. Who summoned you?”

“Master Pitt there, as he will testify.”

“Oh! Master Pitt will testify--he that is himself a traitor
self-confessed. Is that your witness?”

“There is also Master Baynes here, who can answer to it.”

“Good Master Baynes will have to answer for himself; and I doubt not
he'll be greatly exercised to save his own neck from a halter. Come,
come, sir; are these your only witnesses?”

“I could bring others from Bridgewater, who saw me set out that morning
upon the crupper of Master Pitt's horse.”

His lordship smiled. “It will not be necessary. For, mark me, I do not
intend to waste more time on you. Answer me only this: When Master Pitt,
as you pretend, came to summon you, did you know that he had been, as
you have heard him confess, of Monmouth's following?”

“I did, My lord.”

“You did! Ha!” His lordship looked at the cringing jury and uttered a
short, stabbing laugh. “Yet in spite of that you went with him?”

“To succour a wounded man, as was my sacred duty.”

“Thy sacred duty, sayest thou?” Fury blazed out of him again. “Good God!
What a generation of vipers do we live in! Thy sacred duty, rogue, is to
thy King and to God. But let it pass. Did he tell you whom it was that
you were desired to succour?”

“Lord Gildoy--yes.”

“And you knew that Lord Gildoy had been wounded in the battle, and on
what side he fought?”

“I knew.”

“And yet, being, as you would have us believe, a true and loyal subject
of our Lord the King, you went to succour him?”

Peter Blood lost patience for a moment. “My business, my lord, was with
his wounds, not with his politics.”

A murmur from the galleries and even from the jury approved him. It
served only to drive his terrible judge into a deeper fury.

“Jesus God! Was there ever such an impudent villain in the world as
thou?” He swung, white-faced, to the jury. “I hope, gentlemen of the
jury, you take notice of the horrible carriage of this traitor rogue,
and withal you cannot but observe the spirit of this sort of people,
what a villainous and devilish one it is. Out of his own mouth he has
said enough to hang him a dozen times. Yet is there more. Answer me
this, sir: When you cozened Captain Hobart with your lies concerning the
station of this other traitor Pitt, what was your business then?”

“To save him from being hanged without trial, as was threatened.”

“What concern was it of yours whether or how the wretch was hanged?”

“Justice is the concern of every loyal subject, for an injustice
committed by one who holds the King's commission is in some sense a
dishonour to the King's majesty.”

It was a shrewd, sharp thrust aimed at the jury, and it reveals,
I think, the alertness of the man's mind, his self-possession ever
steadiest in moments of dire peril. With any other jury it must have
made the impression that he hoped to make. It may even have made its
impression upon these poor pusillanimous sheep. But the dread judge was
there to efface it.

He gasped aloud, then flung himself violently forward.

“Lord of Heaven!” he stormed. “Was there ever such a canting, impudent
rascal? But I have done with you. I see thee, villain, I see thee
already with a halter round thy neck.”

Having spoken so, gloatingly, evilly, he sank back again, and composed
himself. It was as if a curtain fell. All emotion passed again from his
pale face. Back to invest it again came that gentle melancholy. Speaking
after a moment's pause, his voice was soft, almost tender, yet every
word of it carried sharply through that hushed court.

“If I know my own heart it is not in my nature to desire the hurt of
anybody, much less to delight in his eternal perdition. It is out of
compassion for you that I have used all these words--because I would
have you have some regard for your immortal soul, and not ensure its
damnation by obdurately persisting in falsehood and prevarication. But I
see that all the pains in the world, and all compassion and charity are
lost upon you, and therefore I will say no more to you.” He turned again
to the jury that countenance of wistful beauty. “Gentlemen, I must tell
you for law, of which we are the judges, and not you, that if any person
be in actual rebellion against the King, and another person--who really
and actually was not in rebellion--does knowingly receive, harbour,
comfort, or succour him, such a person is as much a traitor as he who
indeed bore arms. We are bound by our oaths and consciences to declare
to you what is law; and you are bound by your oaths and your consciences
to deliver and to declare to us by your verdict the truth of the facts.”

Upon that he proceeded to his summing-up, showing how Baynes and Blood
were both guilty of treason, the first for having harboured a traitor,
the second for having succoured that traitor by dressing his wounds. He
interlarded his address by sycophantic allusions to his natural lord
and lawful sovereign, the King, whom God had set over them, and with
vituperations of Nonconformity and of Monmouth, of whom--in his own
words--he dared boldly affirm that the meanest subject within the
kingdom that was of legitimate birth had a better title to the crown.
“Jesus God! That ever we should have such a generation of vipers among
us,” he burst out in rhetorical frenzy. And then he sank back as if
exhausted by the violence he had used. A moment he was still, dabbing
his lips again; then he moved uneasily; once more his features were
twisted by pain, and in a few snarling, almost incoherent words he
dismissed the jury to consider the verdict.

Peter Blood had listened to the intemperate, the blasphemous, and almost
obscene invective of that tirade with a detachment that afterwards, in
retrospect, surprised him. He was so amazed by the man, by the reactions
taking place in him between mind and body, and by his methods of
bullying and coercing the jury into bloodshed, that he almost forgot
that his own life was at stake.

The absence of that dazed jury was a brief one. The verdict found the
three prisoners guilty. Peter Blood looked round the scarlet-hung court.
For an instant that foam of white faces seemed to heave before him. Then
he was himself again, and a voice was asking him what he had to say
for himself, why sentence of death should not be passed upon him, being
convicted of high treason.

He laughed, and his laugh jarred uncannily upon the deathly stillness
of the court. It was all so grotesque, such a mockery of justice
administered by that wistful-eyed jack-pudding in scarlet, who was
himself a mockery--the venal instrument of a brutally spiteful and
vindictive king. His laughter shocked the austerity of that same
jack-pudding.

“Do you laugh, sirrah, with the rope about your neck, upon the very
threshold of that eternity you are so suddenly to enter into?”

And then Blood took his revenge.

“Faith, it's in better case I am for mirth than your lordship. For I
have this to say before you deliver judgment. Your lordship sees me--an
innocent man whose only offence is that I practised charity--with a
halter round my neck. Your lordship, being the justiciar, speaks with
knowledge of what is to come to me. I, being a physician, may speak with
knowledge of what is to come to your lordship. And I tell you that I
would not now change places with you--that I would not exchange this
halter that you fling about my neck for the stone that you carry in
your body. The death to which you may doom me is a light pleasantry by
contrast with the death to which your lordship has been doomed by that
Great Judge with whose name your lordship makes so free.”

The Lord Chief Justice sat stiffly upright, his face ashen, his lips
twitching, and whilst you might have counted ten there was no sound in
that paralyzed court after Peter Blood had finished speaking. All those
who knew Lord Jeffreys regarded this as the lull before the storm, and
braced themselves for the explosion. But none came.

Slowly, faintly, the colour crept back into that ashen face. The scarlet
figure lost its rigidity, and bent forward. His lordship began to speak.
In a muted voice and briefly--much more briefly than his wont on such
occasions and in a manner entirely mechanical, the manner of a man
whose thoughts are elsewhere while his lips are speaking--he delivered
sentence of death in the prescribed form, and without the least
allusion to what Peter Blood had said. Having delivered it, he sank back
exhausted, his eyes half-closed, his brow agleam with sweat.

The prisoners filed out.

Mr. Pollexfen--a Whig at heart despite the position of Judge-Advocate
which he occupied--was overheard by one of the jurors to mutter in the
ear of a brother counsel:

“On my soul, that swarthy rascal has given his lordship a scare. It's a
pity he must hang. For a man who can frighten Jeffreys should go far.”



CHAPTER IV. HUMAN MERCHANDISE


Mr. Pollexfen was at one and the same time right and wrong--a condition
much more common than is generally supposed.

He was right in his indifferently expressed thought that a man whose
mien and words could daunt such a lord of terror as Jeffreys, should by
the dominance of his nature be able to fashion himself a considerable
destiny. He was wrong--though justifiably so--in his assumption that
Peter Blood must hang.

I have said that the tribulations with which he was visited as a result
of his errand of mercy to Oglethorpe's Farm contained--although as yet
he did not perceive it, perhaps--two sources of thankfulness: one that
he was tried at all; the other that his trial took place on the 19th
of September. Until the 18th, the sentences passed by the court of the
Lords Commissioners had been carried out literally and expeditiously.
But on the morning of the 19th there arrived at Taunton a courier from
Lord Sunderland, the Secretary of State, with a letter for Lord Jeffreys
wherein he was informed that His Majesty had been graciously pleased
to command that eleven hundred rebels should be furnished for
transportation to some of His Majesty's southern plantations, Jamaica,
Barbados, or any of the Leeward Islands.

You are not to suppose that this command was dictated by any sense of
mercy. Lord Churchill was no more than just when he spoke of the King's
heart as being as insensible as marble. It had been realized that in
these wholesale hangings there was taking place a reckless waste of
valuable material. Slaves were urgently required in the plantations,
and a healthy, vigorous man could be reckoned worth at least from ten
to fifteen pounds. Then, there were at court many gentlemen who had some
claim or other upon His Majesty's bounty. Here was a cheap and ready way
to discharge these claims. From amongst the convicted rebels a certain
number might be set aside to be bestowed upon those gentlemen, so that
they might dispose of them to their own profit.

My Lord Sunderland's letter gives precise details of the royal
munificence in human flesh. A thousand prisoners were to be distributed
among some eight courtiers and others, whilst a postscriptum to his
lordship's letter asked for a further hundred to be held at the disposal
of the Queen. These prisoners were to be transported at once to His
Majesty's southern plantations, and to be kept there for the space of
ten years before being restored to liberty, the parties to whom they
were assigned entering into security to see that transportation was
immediately effected.

We know from Lord Jeffreys's secretary how the Chief Justice inveighed
that night in drunken frenzy against this misplaced clemency to which
His Majesty had been persuaded. We know how he attempted by letter to
induce the King to reconsider his decision. But James adhered to it. It
was--apart from the indirect profit he derived from it--a clemency
full worthy of him. He knew that to spare lives in this fashion was to
convert them into living deaths. Many must succumb in torment to the
horrors of West Indian slavery, and so be the envy of their surviving
companions.

Thus it happened that Peter Blood, and with him Jeremy Pitt and Andrew
Baynes, instead of being hanged, drawn, and quartered as their sentences
directed, were conveyed to Bristol and there shipped with some fifty
others aboard the Jamaica Merchant. From close confinement under
hatches, ill-nourishment and foul water, a sickness broke out amongst
them, of which eleven died. Amongst these was the unfortunate yeoman
from Oglethorpe's Farm, brutally torn from his quiet homestead amid
the fragrant cider orchards for no other sin but that he had practised
mercy.

The mortality might have been higher than it was but for Peter Blood.
At first the master of the Jamaica Merchant had answered with oaths and
threats the doctor's expostulations against permitting men to perish
in this fashion, and his insistence that he should be made free of the
medicine chest and given leave to minister to the sick. But presently
Captain Gardner came to see that he might be brought to task for
these too heavy losses of human merchandise and because of this he was
belatedly glad to avail himself of the skill of Peter Blood. The doctor
went to work zealously and zestfully, and wrought so ably that, by his
ministrations and by improving the condition of his fellow-captives, he
checked the spread of the disease.

Towards the middle of December the Jamaica Merchant dropped anchor in
Carlisle Bay, and put ashore the forty-two surviving rebels-convict.

If these unfortunates had imagined--as many of them appear to have
done--that they were coming into some wild, savage country, the
prospect, of which they had a glimpse before they were hustled over
the ship's side into the waiting boats, was enough to correct the
impression. They beheld a town of sufficiently imposing proportions
composed of houses built upon European notions of architecture, but
without any of the huddle usual in European cities. The spire of a
church rose dominantly above the red roofs, a fort guarded the entrance
of the wide harbour, with guns thrusting their muzzles between the
crenels, and the wide facade of Government House revealed itself
dominantly placed on a gentle hill above the town. This hill was vividly
green as is an English hill in April, and the day was such a day as
April gives to England, the season of heavy rains being newly ended.

On a wide cobbled space on the sea front they found a guard of
red-coated militia drawn up to receive them, and a crowd--attracted by
their arrival--which in dress and manner differed little from a crowd in
a seaport at home save that it contained fewer women and a great number
of negroes.

To inspect them, drawn up there on the mole, came Governor Steed,
a short, stout, red-faced gentleman, in blue taffetas burdened by a
prodigious amount of gold lace, who limped a little and leaned heavily
upon a stout ebony cane. After him, in the uniform of a colonel of the
Barbados Militia, rolled a tall, corpulent man who towered head and
shoulders above the Governor, with malevolence plainly written on his
enormous yellowish countenance. At his side, and contrasting oddly with
his grossness, moving with an easy stripling grace, came a slight young
lady in a modish riding-gown. The broad brim of a grey hat with scarlet
sweep of ostrich plume shaded an oval face upon which the climate of
the Tropic of Cancer had made no impression, so delicately fair was its
complexion. Ringlets of red-brown hair hung to her shoulders. Frankness
looked out from her hazel eyes which were set wide; commiseration
repressed now the mischievousness that normally inhabited her fresh
young mouth.

Peter Blood caught himself staring in a sort of amazement at that
piquant face, which seemed here so out of place, and finding his stare
returned, he shifted uncomfortably. He grew conscious of the sorry
figure that he cut. Unwashed, with rank and matted hair and a
disfiguring black beard upon his face, and the erstwhile splendid suit
of black camlet in which he had been taken prisoner now reduced to rags
that would have disgraced a scarecrow, he was in no case for inspection
by such dainty eyes as these. Nevertheless, they continued to inspect
him with round-eyed, almost childlike wonder and pity. Their owner put
forth a hand to touch the scarlet sleeve of her companion, whereupon
with an ill-tempered grunt the man swung his great bulk round so that he
directly confronted her.

Looking up into his face, she was speaking to him earnestly, but the
Colonel plainly gave her no more than the half of his attention. His
little beady eyes, closely flanking a fleshly, pendulous nose, had
passed from her and were fixed upon fair-haired, sturdy young Pitt, who
was standing beside Blood.

The Governor had also come to a halt, and for a moment now that little
group of three stood in conversation. What the lady said, Peter could
not hear at all, for she lowered her voice; the Colonel's reached him
in a confused rumble, but the Governor was neither considerate nor
indistinct; he had a high-pitched voice which carried far, and believing
himself witty, he desired to be heard by all.

“But, my dear Colonel Bishop, it is for you to take first choice from
this dainty nosegay, and at your own price. After that we'll send the
rest to auction.”

Colonel Bishop nodded his acknowledgment. He raised his voice in
answering. “Your excellency is very good. But, faith, they're a weedy
lot, not likely to be of much value in the plantation.” His beady eyes
scanned them again, and his contempt of them deepened the malevolence of
his face. It was as if he were annoyed with them for being in no better
condition. Then he beckoned forward Captain Gardner, the master of the
Jamaica Merchant, and for some minutes stood in talk with him over a
list which the latter produced at his request.

Presently he waved aside the list and advanced alone towards the
rebels-convict, his eyes considering them, his lips pursed. Before the
young Somersetshire shipmaster he came to a halt, and stood an instant
pondering him. Then he fingered the muscles of the young man's arm,
and bade him open his mouth that he might see his teeth. He pursed his
coarse lips again and nodded.

He spoke to Gardner over his shoulder.

“Fifteen pounds for this one.”

The Captain made a face of dismay. “Fifteen pounds! It isn't half what I
meant to ask for him.”

“It is double what I had meant to give,” grunted the Colonel.

“But he would be cheap at thirty pounds, your honour.”

“I can get a negro for that. These white swine don't live. They're not
fit for the labour.”

Gardner broke into protestations of Pitt's health, youth, and vigour.
It was not a man he was discussing; it was a beast of burden. Pitt, a
sensitive lad, stood mute and unmoving. Only the ebb and flow of colour
in his cheeks showed the inward struggle by which he maintained his
self-control.

Peter Blood was nauseated by the loathsome haggle.

In the background, moving slowly away down the line of prisoners, went
the lady in conversation with the Governor, who smirked and preened
himself as he limped beside her. She was unconscious of the loathly
business the Colonel was transacting. Was she, wondered Blood,
indifferent to it?

Colonel Bishop swung on his heel to pass on.

“I'll go as far as twenty pounds. Not a penny more, and it's twice as
much as you are like to get from Crabston.”

Captain Gardner, recognizing the finality of the tone, sighed and
yielded. Already Bishop was moving down the line. For Mr. Blood, as
for a weedy youth on his left, the Colonel had no more than a glance of
contempt. But the next man, a middle-aged Colossus named Wolverstone,
who had lost an eye at Sedgemoor, drew his regard, and the haggling was
recommenced.

Peter Blood stood there in the brilliant sunshine and inhaled the
fragrant air, which was unlike any air that he had ever breathed. It
was laden with a strange perfume, blend of logwood flower, pimento, and
aromatic cedars. He lost himself in unprofitable speculations born of
that singular fragrance. He was in no mood for conversation, nor was
Pitt, who stood dumbly at his side, and who was afflicted mainly at the
moment by the thought that he was at last about to be separated from
this man with whom he had stood shoulder to shoulder throughout all
these troublous months, and whom he had come to love and depend upon for
guidance and sustenance. A sense of loneliness and misery pervaded him
by contrast with which all that he had endured seemed as nothing. To
Pitt, this separation was the poignant climax of all his sufferings.

Other buyers came and stared at them, and passed on. Blood did not heed
them. And then at the end of the line there was a movement. Gardner was
speaking in a loud voice, making an announcement to the general public
of buyers that had waited until Colonel Bishop had taken his choice of
that human merchandise. As he finished, Blood, looking in his direction,
noticed that the girl was speaking to Bishop, and pointing up the line
with a silver-hilted riding-whip she carried. Bishop shaded his eyes
with his hand to look in the direction in which she was pointing.
Then slowly, with his ponderous, rolling gait, he approached again
accompanied by Gardner, and followed by the lady and the Governor.

On they came until the Colonel was abreast of Blood. He would have
passed on, but that the lady tapped his arm with her whip.

“But this is the man I meant,” she said.

“This one?” Contempt rang in the voice. Peter Blood found himself
staring into a pair of beady brown eyes sunk into a yellow, fleshly face
like currants into a dumpling. He felt the colour creeping into his face
under the insult of that contemptuous inspection. “Bah! A bag of bones.
What should I do with him?”

He was turning away when Gardner interposed.

“He maybe lean, but he's tough; tough and healthy. When half of them was
sick and the other half sickening, this rogue kept his legs and doctored
his fellows. But for him there'd ha' been more deaths than there was.
Say fifteen pounds for him, Colonel. That's cheap enough. He's tough, I
tell your honour--tough and strong, though he be lean. And he's just the
man to bear the heat when it comes. The climate'll never kill him.”

There came a chuckle from Governor Steed. “You hear, Colonel. Trust
your niece. Her sex knows a man when it sees one.” And he laughed, well
pleased with his wit.

But he laughed alone. A cloud of annoyance swept across the face of
the Colonel's niece, whilst the Colonel himself was too absorbed in the
consideration of this bargain to heed the Governor's humour. He twisted
his lip a little, stroking his chin with his hand the while. Jeremy Pitt
had almost ceased to breathe.

“I'll give you ten pounds for him,” said the Colonel at last.

Peter Blood prayed that the offer might be rejected. For no reason that
he could have given you, he was taken with repugnance at the thought
of becoming the property of this gross animal, and in some sort the
property of that hazel-eyed young girl. But it would need more than
repugnance to save him from his destiny. A slave is a slave, and has
no power to shape his fate. Peter Blood was sold to Colonel Bishop--a
disdainful buyer--for the ignominious sum of ten pounds.



CHAPTER V. ARABELLA BISHOP


One sunny morning in January, about a month after the arrival of the
Jamaica Merchant at Bridgetown, Miss Arabella Bishop rode out from her
uncle's fine house on the heights to the northwest of the city. She was
attended by two negroes who trotted after her at a respectful distance,
and her destination was Government House, whither she went to visit the
Governor's lady, who had lately been ailing. Reaching the summit of
a gentle, grassy slope, she met a tall, lean man dressed in a sober,
gentlemanly fashion, who was walking in the opposite direction. He was
a stranger to her, and strangers were rare enough in the island. And yet
in some vague way he did not seem quite a stranger.

Miss Arabella drew rein, affecting to pause that she might admire the
prospect, which was fair enough to warrant it. Yet out of the corner
of those hazel eyes she scanned this fellow very attentively as he came
nearer. She corrected her first impression of his dress. It was
sober enough, but hardly gentlemanly. Coat and breeches were of plain
homespun; and if the former sat so well upon him it was more by virtue
of his natural grace than by that of tailoring. His stockings were of
cotton, harsh and plain, and the broad castor, which he respectfully
doffed as he came up with her, was an old one unadorned by band or
feather. What had seemed to be a periwig at a little distance was now
revealed for the man's own lustrous coiling black hair.

Out of a brown, shaven, saturnine face two eyes that were startlingly
blue considered her gravely. The man would have passed on but that she
detained him.

“I think I know you, sir,” said she.

Her voice was crisp and boyish, and there was something of boyishness
in her manner--if one can apply the term to so dainty a lady. It arose
perhaps from an ease, a directness, which disdained the artifices of her
sex, and set her on good terms with all the world. To this it may be
due that Miss Arabella had reached the age of five and twenty not merely
unmarried but unwooed. She used with all men a sisterly frankness which
in itself contains a quality of aloofness, rendering it difficult for
any man to become her lover.

Her negroes had halted at some distance in the rear, and they squatted
now upon the short grass until it should be her pleasure to proceed upon
her way.

The stranger came to a standstill upon being addressed.

“A lady should know her own property,” said he.

“My property?”

“Your uncle's, leastways. Let me present myself. I am called Peter
Blood, and I am worth precisely ten pounds. I know it because that
is the sum your uncle paid for me. It is not every man has the same
opportunities of ascertaining his real value.”

She recognized him then. She had not seen him since that day upon the
mole a month ago, and that she should not instantly have known him
again despite the interest he had then aroused in her is not surprising,
considering the change he had wrought in his appearance, which now was
hardly that of a slave.

“My God!” said she. “And you can laugh!”

“It's an achievement,” he admitted. “But then, I have not fared as ill
as I might.”

“I have heard of that,” said she.

What she had heard was that this rebel-convict had been discovered to
be a physician. The thing had come to the ears of Governor Steed, who
suffered damnably from the gout, and Governor Steed had borrowed the
fellow from his purchaser. Whether by skill or good fortune, Peter Blood
had afforded the Governor that relief which his excellency had failed to
obtain from the ministrations of either of the two physicians practising
in Bridgetown. Then the Governor's lady had desired him to attend her
for the megrims. Mr. Blood had found her suffering from nothing worse
than peevishness--the result of a natural petulance aggravated by the
dulness of life in Barbados to a lady of her social aspirations. But he
had prescribed for her none the less, and she had conceived herself the
better for his prescription. After that the fame of him had gone through
Bridgetown, and Colonel Bishop had found that there was more profit to
be made out of this new slave by leaving him to pursue his profession
than by setting him to work on the plantations, for which purpose he had
been originally acquired.

“It is yourself, madam, I have to thank for my comparatively easy
and clean condition,” said Mr. Blood, “and I am glad to take this
opportunity of doing so.”

The gratitude was in his words rather than in his tone. Was he mocking,
she wondered, and looked at him with the searching frankness that
another might have found disconcerting. He took the glance for a
question, and answered it.

“If some other planter had bought me,” he explained, “it is odds that
the facts of my shining abilities might never have been brought to
light, and I should be hewing and hoeing at this moment like the poor
wretches who were landed with me.”

“And why do you thank me for that? It was my uncle who bought you.”

“But he would not have done so had you not urged him. I perceived your
interest. At the time I resented it.”

“You resented it?” There was a challenge in her boyish voice.

“I have had no lack of experiences of this mortal life; but to be
bought and sold was a new one, and I was hardly in the mood to love my
purchaser.”

“If I urged you upon my uncle, sir, it was that I commiserated you.”
 There was a slight severity in her tone, as if to reprove the mixture of
mockery and flippancy in which he seemed to be speaking.

She proceeded to explain herself. “My uncle may appear to you a hard
man. No doubt he is. They are all hard men, these planters. It is the
life, I suppose. But there are others here who are worse. There is Mr.
Crabston, for instance, up at Speightstown. He was there on the mole,
waiting to buy my uncle's leavings, and if you had fallen into his
hands... A dreadful man. That is why.”

He was a little bewildered.

“This interest in a stranger...” he began. Then changed the direction of
his probe. “But there were others as deserving of commiseration.”

“You did not seem quite like the others.”

“I am not,” said he.

“Oh!” She stared at him, bridling a little. “You have a good opinion of
yourself.”

“On the contrary. The others are all worthy rebels. I am not. That
is the difference. I was one who had not the wit to see that England
requires purifying. I was content to pursue a doctor's trade in
Bridgewater whilst my betters were shedding their blood to drive out an
unclean tyrant and his rascally crew.”

“Sir!” she checked him. “I think you are talking treason.”

“I hope I am not obscure,” said he.

“There are those here who would have you flogged if they heard you.”

“The Governor would never allow it. He has the gout, and his lady has
the megrims.”

“Do you depend upon that?” She was frankly scornful.

“You have certainly never had the gout; probably not even the megrims,”
 said he.

She made a little impatient movement with her hand, and looked away from
him a moment, out to sea. Quite suddenly she looked at him again; and
now her brows were knit.

“But if you are not a rebel, how come you here?”

He saw the thing she apprehended, and he laughed. “Faith, now, it's a
long story,” said he.

“And one perhaps that you would prefer not to tell?”

Briefly on that he told it her.

“My God! What an infamy!” she cried, when he had done.

“Oh, it's a sweet country England under King James! There's no need to
commiserate me further. All things considered I prefer Barbados. Here at
least one can believe in God.”

He looked first to right, then to left as he spoke, from the distant
shadowy bulk of Mount Hillbay to the limitless ocean ruffled by the
winds of heaven. Then, as if the fair prospect rendered him conscious
of his own littleness and the insignificance of his woes, he fell
thoughtful.

“Is that so difficult elsewhere?” she asked him, and she was very grave.

“Men make it so.”

“I see.” She laughed a little, on a note of sadness, it seemed to
him. “I have never deemed Barbados the earthly mirror of heaven,” she
confessed. “But no doubt you know your world better than I.” She touched
her horse with her little silver-hilted whip. “I congratulate you on
this easing of your misfortunes.”

He bowed, and she moved on. Her negroes sprang up, and went trotting
after her.

Awhile Peter Blood remained standing there, where she left him, conning
the sunlit waters of Carlisle Bay below, and the shipping in that
spacious haven about which the gulls were fluttering noisily.

It was a fair enough prospect, he reflected, but it was a prison, and in
announcing that he preferred it to England, he had indulged that almost
laudable form of boasting which lies in belittling our misadventures.

He turned, and resuming his way, went off in long, swinging strides
towards the little huddle of huts built of mud and wattles--a miniature
village enclosed in a stockade which the plantation slaves inhabited,
and where he, himself, was lodged with them.

Through his mind sang the line of Lovelace:

  “Stone walls do not a prison make,
   Nor iron bars a cage.”

But he gave it a fresh meaning, the very converse of that which its
author had intended. A prison, he reflected, was a prison, though it had
neither walls nor bars, however spacious it might be. And as he realized
it that morning so he was to realize it increasingly as time sped on.
Daily he came to think more of his clipped wings, of his exclusion from
the world, and less of the fortuitous liberty he enjoyed. Nor did the
contrasting of his comparatively easy lot with that of his unfortunate
fellow-convicts bring him the satisfaction a differently constituted
mind might have derived from it. Rather did the contemplation of their
misery increase the bitterness that was gathering in his soul.

Of the forty-two who had been landed with him from the Jamaica Merchant,
Colonel Bishop had purchased no less than twenty-five. The remainder had
gone to lesser planters, some of them to Speightstown, and others still
farther north. What may have been the lot of the latter he could not
tell, but amongst Bishop's slaves Peter Blood came and went freely,
sleeping in their quarters, and their lot he knew to be a brutalizing
misery. They toiled in the sugar plantations from sunrise to sunset, and
if their labours flagged, there were the whips of the overseer and his
men to quicken them. They went in rags, some almost naked; they dwelt
in squalor, and they were ill-nourished on salted meat and maize
dumplings--food which to many of them was for a season at least so
nauseating that two of them sickened and died before Bishop remembered
that their lives had a certain value in labour to him and yielded to
Blood's intercessions for a better care of such as fell ill. To curb
insubordination, one of them who had rebelled against Kent, the brutal
overseer, was lashed to death by negroes under his comrades' eyes, and
another who had been so misguided as to run away into the woods was
tracked, brought back, flogged, and then branded on the forehead with
the letters “F. T.,” that all might know him for a fugitive traitor
as long as he lived. Fortunately for him the poor fellow died as a
consequence of the flogging.

After that a dull, spiritless resignation settled down upon the
remainder. The most mutinous were quelled, and accepted their
unspeakable lot with the tragic fortitude of despair.

Peter Blood alone, escaping these excessive sufferings, remained
outwardly unchanged, whilst inwardly the only change in him was a daily
deeper hatred of his kind, a daily deeper longing to escape from this
place where man defiled so foully the lovely work of his Creator. It was
a longing too vague to amount to a hope. Hope here was inadmissible.
And yet he did not yield to despair. He set a mask of laughter on his
saturnine countenance and went his way, treating the sick to the
profit of Colonel Bishop, and encroaching further and further upon the
preserves of the two other men of medicine in Bridgetown.

Immune from the degrading punishments and privations of his
fellow-convicts, he was enabled to keep his self-respect, and was
treated without harshness even by the soulless planter to whom he had
been sold. He owed it all to gout and megrims. He had won the esteem of
Governor Steed, and--what is even more important--of Governor Steed's
lady, whom he shamelessly and cynically flattered and humoured.

Occasionally he saw Miss Bishop, and they seldom met but that she paused
to hold him in conversation for some moments, evincing her interest
in him. Himself, he was never disposed to linger. He was not, he told
himself, to be deceived by her delicate exterior, her sapling grace, her
easy, boyish ways and pleasant, boyish voice. In all his life--and it
had been very varied--he had never met a man whom he accounted more
beastly than her uncle, and he could not dissociate her from the man.
She was his niece, of his own blood, and some of the vices of it, some
of the remorseless cruelty of the wealthy planter must, he argued,
inhabit that pleasant body of hers. He argued this very often to
himself, as if answering and convincing some instinct that pleaded
otherwise, and arguing it he avoided her when it was possible, and was
frigidly civil when it was not.

Justifiable as his reasoning was, plausible as it may seem, yet he would
have done better to have trusted the instinct that was in conflict
with it. Though the same blood ran in her veins as in those of Colonel
Bishop, yet hers was free of the vices that tainted her uncle's, for
these vices were not natural to that blood; they were, in his
case, acquired. Her father, Tom Bishop--that same Colonel Bishop's
brother--had been a kindly, chivalrous, gentle soul, who, broken-hearted
by the early death of a young wife, had abandoned the Old World and
sought an anodyne for his grief in the New. He had come out to the
Antilles, bringing with him his little daughter, then five years of age,
and had given himself up to the life of a planter. He had prospered
from the first, as men sometimes will who care nothing for prosperity.
Prospering, he had bethought him of his younger brother, a soldier at
home reputed somewhat wild. He had advised him to come out to Barbados;
and the advice, which at another season William Bishop might have
scorned, reached him at a moment when his wildness was beginning to bear
such fruit that a change of climate was desirable. William came, and
was admitted by his generous brother to a partnership in the prosperous
plantation. Some six years later, when Arabella was fifteen, her father
died, leaving her in her uncle's guardianship. It was perhaps his one
mistake. But the goodness of his own nature coloured his views of other
men; moreover, himself, he had conducted the education of his daughter,
giving her an independence of character upon which perhaps he counted
unduly. As things were, there was little love between uncle and niece.
But she was dutiful to him, and he was circumspect in his behaviour
before her. All his life, and for all his wildness, he had gone in a
certain awe of his brother, whose worth he had the wit to recognize;
and now it was almost as if some of that awe was transferred to his
brother's child, who was also, in a sense, his partner, although she
took no active part in the business of the plantations.

Peter Blood judged her--as we are all too prone to judge--upon
insufficient knowledge.

He was very soon to have cause to correct that judgment. One day towards
the end of May, when the heat was beginning to grow oppressive, there
crawled into Carlisle Bay a wounded, battered English ship, the Pride of
Devon, her freeboard scarred and broken, her coach a gaping wreck, her
mizzen so shot away that only a jagged stump remained to tell the place
where it had stood. She had been in action off Martinique with two
Spanish treasure ships, and although her captain swore that the
Spaniards had beset him without provocation, it is difficult to avoid a
suspicion that the encounter had been brought about quite otherwise. One
of the Spaniards had fled from the combat, and if the Pride of Devon had
not given chase it was probably because she was by then in no case to
do so. The other had been sunk, but not before the English ship had
transferred to her own hold a good deal of the treasure aboard the
Spaniard. It was, in fact, one of those piratical affrays which were a
perpetual source of trouble between the courts of St. James's and the
Escurial, complaints emanating now from one and now from the other side.

Steed, however, after the fashion of most Colonial governors, was
willing enough to dull his wits to the extent of accepting the English
seaman's story, disregarding any evidence that might belie it. He shared
the hatred so richly deserved by arrogant, overbearing Spain that
was common to men of every other nation from the Bahamas to the Main.
Therefore he gave the Pride of Devon the shelter she sought in his
harbour and every facility to careen and carry out repairs.

But before it came to this, they fetched from her hold over a score of
English seamen as battered and broken as the ship herself, and together
with these some half-dozen Spaniards in like case, the only survivors of
a boarding party from the Spanish galleon that had invaded the English
ship and found itself unable to retreat. These wounded men were conveyed
to a long shed on the wharf, and the medical skill of Bridgetown was
summoned to their aid. Peter Blood was ordered to bear a hand in this
work, and partly because he spoke Castilian--and he spoke it as fluently
as his own native tongue--partly because of his inferior condition as a
slave, he was given the Spaniards for his patients.

Now Blood had no cause to love Spaniards. His two years in a Spanish
prison and his subsequent campaigning in the Spanish Netherlands had
shown him a side of the Spanish character which he had found anything
but admirable. Nevertheless he performed his doctor's duties zealously
and painstakingly, if emotionlessly, and even with a certain superficial
friendliness towards each of his patients. These were so surprised at
having their wounds healed instead of being summarily hanged that they
manifested a docility very unusual in their kind. They were shunned,
however, by all those charitably disposed inhabitants of Bridgetown who
flocked to the improvised hospital with gifts of fruit and flowers and
delicacies for the injured English seamen. Indeed, had the wishes of
some of these inhabitants been regarded, the Spaniards would have been
left to die like vermin, and of this Peter Blood had an example almost
at the very outset.

With the assistance of one of the negroes sent to the shed for the
purpose, he was in the act of setting a broken leg, when a deep, gruff
voice, that he had come to know and dislike as he had never disliked the
voice of living man, abruptly challenged him.

“What are you doing there?”

Blood did not look up from his task. There was not the need. He knew the
voice, as I have said.

“I am setting a broken leg,” he answered, without pausing in his
labours.

“I can see that, fool.” A bulky body interposed between Peter Blood and
the window. The half-naked man on the straw rolled his black eyes to
stare up fearfully out of a clay-coloured face at this intruder. A
knowledge of English was unnecessary to inform him that here came an
enemy. The harsh, minatory note of that voice sufficiently expressed the
fact. “I can see that, fool; just as I can see what the rascal is. Who
gave you leave to set Spanish legs?”

“I am a doctor, Colonel Bishop. The man is wounded. It is not for me to
discriminate. I keep to my trade.”

“Do you, by God! If you'd done that, you wouldn't now be here.”

“On the contrary, it is because I did it that I am here.”

“Aye, I know that's your lying tale.” The Colonel sneered; and then,
observing Blood to continue his work unmoved, he grew really angry.
“Will you cease that, and attend to me when I am speaking?”

Peter Blood paused, but only for an instant. “The man is in pain,” he
said shortly, and resumed his work.

“In pain, is he? I hope he is, the damned piratical dog. But will you
heed me, you insubordinate knave?”

The Colonel delivered himself in a roar, infuriated by what he conceived
to be defiance, and defiance expressing itself in the most unruffled
disregard of himself. His long bamboo cane was raised to strike. Peter
Blood's blue eyes caught the flash of it, and he spoke quickly to arrest
the blow.

“Not insubordinate, sir, whatever I may be. I am acting upon the express
orders of Governor Steed.”

The Colonel checked, his great face empurpling. His mouth fell open.

“Governor Steed!” he echoed. Then he lowered his cane, swung round, and
without another word to Blood rolled away towards the other end of the
shed where the Governor was standing at the moment.

Peter Blood chuckled. But his triumph was dictated less by humanitarian
considerations than by the reflection that he had baulked his brutal
owner.

The Spaniard, realizing that in this altercation, whatever its nature,
the doctor had stood his friend, ventured in a muted voice to ask him
what had happened. But the doctor shook his head in silence, and pursued
his work. His ears were straining to catch the words now passing between
Steed and Bishop. The Colonel was blustering and storming, the great
bulk of him towering above the wizened little overdressed figure of the
Governor. But the little fop was not to be browbeaten. His excellency
was conscious that he had behind him the force of public opinion to
support him. Some there might be, but they were not many, who held such
ruthless views as Colonel Bishop. His excellency asserted his authority.
It was by his orders that Blood had devoted himself to the wounded
Spaniards, and his orders were to be carried out. There was no more to
be said.

Colonel Bishop was of another opinion. In his view there was a
great deal to be said. He said it, with great circumstance, loudly,
vehemently, obscenely--for he could be fluently obscene when moved to
anger.

“You talk like a Spaniard, Colonel,” said the Governor, and thus dealt
the Colonel's pride a wound that was to smart resentfully for many a
week. At the moment it struck him silent, and sent him stamping out of
the shed in a rage for which he could find no words.

It was two days later when the ladies of Bridgetown, the wives and
daughters of her planters and merchants, paid their first visit of
charity to the wharf, bringing their gifts to the wounded seamen.

Again Peter Blood was there, ministering to the sufferers in his care,
moving among those unfortunate Spaniards whom no one heeded. All the
charity, all the gifts were for the members of the crew of the Pride
of Devon. And this Peter Blood accounted natural enough. But rising
suddenly from the re-dressing of a wound, a task in which he had
been absorbed for some moments, he saw to his surprise that one lady,
detached from the general throng, was placing some plantains and a
bundle of succulent sugar cane on the cloak that served one of his
patients for a coverlet. She was elegantly dressed in lavender silk and
was followed by a half-naked negro carrying a basket.

Peter Blood, stripped of his coat, the sleeves of his coarse shirt
rolled to the elbow, and holding a bloody rag in his hand, stood at gaze
a moment. The lady, turning now to confront him, her lips parting in a
smile of recognition, was Arabella Bishop.

“The man's a Spaniard,” said he, in the tone of one who corrects a
misapprehension, and also tinged never so faintly by something of the
derision that was in his soul.

The smile with which she had been greeting him withered on her lips. She
frowned and stared at him a moment, with increasing haughtiness.

“So I perceive. But he's a human being none the less,” said she.

That answer, and its implied rebuke, took him by surprise.

“Your uncle, the Colonel, is of a different opinion,” said he, when he
had recovered. “He regards them as vermin to be left to languish and die
of their festering wounds.”

She caught the irony now more plainly in his voice. She continued to
stare at him.

“Why do you tell me this?”

“To warn you that you may be incurring the Colonel's displeasure. If
he had had his way, I should never have been allowed to dress their
wounds.”

“And you thought, of course, that I must be of my uncle's mind?” There
was a crispness about her voice, an ominous challenging sparkle in her
hazel eyes.

“I'd not willingly be rude to a lady even in my thoughts,” said he. “But
that you should bestow gifts on them, considering that if your uncle
came to hear of it....” He paused, leaving the sentence unfinished. “Ah,
well--there it is!” he concluded.

But the lady was not satisfied at all.

“First you impute to me inhumanity, and then cowardice. Faith! For a
man who would not willingly be rude to a lady even in his thoughts, it's
none so bad.” Her boyish laugh trilled out, but the note of it jarred
his ears this time.

He saw her now, it seemed to him, for the first time, and saw how he had
misjudged her.

“Sure, now, how was I to guess that... that Colonel Bishop could have
an angel for his niece?” said he recklessly, for he was reckless as men
often are in sudden penitence.

“You wouldn't, of course. I shouldn't think you often guess aright.”
 Having withered him with that and her glance, she turned to her negro
and the basket that he carried. From this she lifted now the fruits and
delicacies with which it was laden, and piled them in such heaps upon
the beds of the six Spaniards that by the time she had so served the
last of them her basket was empty, and there was nothing left for her
own fellow-countrymen. These, indeed, stood in no need of her bounty--as
she no doubt observed--since they were being plentifully supplied by
others.

Having thus emptied her basket, she called her negro, and without
another word or so much as another glance at Peter Blood, swept out of
the place with her head high and chin thrust forward.

Peter watched her departure. Then he fetched a sigh.

It startled him to discover that the thought that he had incurred her
anger gave him concern. It could not have been so yesterday. It became
so only since he had been vouchsafed this revelation of her true nature.
“Bad cess to it now, it serves me right. It seems I know nothing at all
of human nature. But how the devil was I to guess that a family that can
breed a devil like Colonel Bishop should also breed a saint like this?”



CHAPTER VI. PLANS OF ESCAPE

After that Arabella Bishop went daily to the shed on the wharf with
gifts of fruit, and later of money and of wearing apparel for the
Spanish prisoners. But she contrived so to time her visits that Peter
Blood never again met her there. Also his own visits were growing
shorter in a measure as his patients healed. That they all throve and
returned to health under his care, whilst fully one third of the wounded
in the care of Whacker and Bronson--the two other surgeons--died
of their wounds, served to increase the reputation in which this
rebel-convict stood in Bridgetown. It may have been no more than the
fortune of war. But the townsfolk did not choose so to regard it. It
led to a further dwindling of the practices of his free colleagues and a
further increase of his own labours and his owner's profit. Whacker
and Bronson laid their heads together to devise a scheme by which this
intolerable state of things should be brought to an end. But that is to
anticipate.

One day, whether by accident or design, Peter Blood came striding down
the wharf a full half-hour earlier than usual, and so met Miss Bishop
just issuing from the shed. He doffed his hat and stood aside to give
her passage. She took it, chin in the air, and eyes which disdained to
look anywhere where the sight of him was possible.

“Miss Arabella,” said he, on a coaxing, pleading note.

She grew conscious of his presence, and looked him over with an air that
was faintly, mockingly searching.

“La!” said she. “It's the delicate-minded gentleman!”

Peter groaned. “Am I so hopelessly beyond forgiveness? I ask it very
humbly.”

“What condescension!”

“It is cruel to mock me,” said he, and adopted mock-humility. “After
all, I am but a slave. And you might be ill one of these days.”

“What, then?”

“It would be humiliating to send for me if you treat me like an enemy.”

“You are not the only doctor in Bridgetown.”

“But I am the least dangerous.”

She grew suddenly suspicious of him, aware that he was permitting
himself to rally her, and in a measure she had already yielded to it.
She stiffened, and looked him over again.

“You make too free, I think,” she rebuked him.

“A doctor's privilege.”

“I am not your patient. Please to remember it in future.” And on that,
unquestionably angry, she departed.

“Now is she a vixen or am I a fool, or is it both?” he asked the blue
vault of heaven, and then went into the shed.

It was to be a morning of excitements. As he was leaving an hour or so
later, Whacker, the younger of the other two physicians, joined him--an
unprecedented condescension this, for hitherto neither of them had
addressed him beyond an occasional and surly “good-day!”

“If you are for Colonel Bishop's, I'll walk with you a little way,
Doctor Blood,” said he. He was a short, broad man of five-and-forty with
pendulous cheeks and hard blue eyes.

Peter Blood was startled. But he dissembled it.

“I am for Government House,” said he.

“Ah! To be sure! The Governor's lady.” And he laughed; or perhaps he
sneered. Peter Blood was not quite certain. “She encroaches a deal upon
your time, I hear. Youth and good looks, Doctor Blood! Youth and
good looks! They are inestimable advantages in our profession as in
others--particularly where the ladies are concerned.”

Peter stared at him. “If you mean what you seem to mean, you had better
say it to Governor Steed. It may amuse him.”

“You surely misapprehend me.”

“I hope so.”

“You're so very hot, now!” The doctor linked his arm through Peter's.
“I protest I desire to be your friend--to serve you. Now, listen.”
 Instinctively his voice grew lower. “This slavery in which you find
yourself must be singularly irksome to a man of parts such as yourself.”

“What intuitions!” cried sardonic Mr. Blood. But the doctor took him
literally.

“I am no fool, my dear doctor. I know a man when I see one, and often I
can tell his thoughts.”

“If you can tell me mine, you'll persuade me of it,” said Mr. Blood.

Dr. Whacker drew still closer to him as they stepped along the wharf. He
lowered his voice to a still more confidential tone. His hard blue eyes
peered up into the swart, sardonic face of his companion, who was a head
taller than himself.

“How often have I not seen you staring out over the sea, your soul in
your eyes! Don't I know what you are thinking? If you could escape from
this hell of slavery, you could exercise the profession of which you
are an ornament as a free man with pleasure and profit to yourself. The
world is large. There are many nations besides England where a man of
your parts would be warmly welcomed. There are many colonies besides
these English ones.” Lower still came the voice until it was no more
than a whisper. Yet there was no one within earshot. “It is none so far
now to the Dutch settlement of Curacao. At this time of the year the
voyage may safely be undertaken in a light craft. And Curacao need be no
more than a stepping-stone to the great world, which would lie open to
you once you were delivered from this bondage.”

Dr. Whacker ceased. He was pale and a little out of breath. But his hard
eyes continued to study his impassive companion.

“Well?” he said alter a pause. “What do you say to that?”

Yet Blood did not immediately answer. His mind was heaving in tumult,
and he was striving to calm it that he might take a proper survey of
this thing flung into it to create so monstrous a disturbance. He began
where another might have ended.

“I have no money. And for that a handsome sum would be necessary.”

“Did I not say that I desired to be your friend?”

“Why?” asked Peter Blood at point-blank range.

But he never heeded the answer. Whilst Dr. Whacker was professing that
his heart bled for a brother doctor languishing in slavery, denied the
opportunity which his gifts entitled him to make for himself, Peter
Blood pounced like a hawk upon the obvious truth. Whacker and his
colleague desired to be rid of one who threatened to ruin them.
Sluggishness of decision was never a fault of Blood's. He leapt where
another crawled. And so this thought of evasion never entertained until
planted there now by Dr. Whacker sprouted into instant growth.

“I see, I see,” he said, whilst his companion was still talking,
explaining, and to save Dr. Whacker's face he played the hypocrite. “It
is very noble in you--very brotherly, as between men of medicine. It is
what I myself should wish to do in like case.”

The hard eyes flashed, the husky voice grew tremulous as the other asked
almost too eagerly:

“You agree, then? You agree?”

“Agree?” Blood laughed. “If I should be caught and brought back, they'd
clip my wings and brand me for life.”

“Surely the thing is worth a little risk?” More tremulous than ever was
the tempter's voice.

“Surely,” Blood agreed. “But it asks more than courage. It asks money. A
sloop might be bought for twenty pounds, perhaps.”

“It shall be forthcoming. It shall be a loan, which you shall repay
us--repay me, when you can.”

That betraying “us” so hastily retrieved completed Blood's
understanding. The other doctor was also in the business.

They were approaching the peopled part of the mole. Quickly, but
eloquently, Blood expressed his thanks, where he knew that no thanks
were due.

“We will talk of this again, sir--to-morrow,” he concluded. “You have
opened for me the gates of hope.”

In that at least he tittered no more than the bare truth, and expressed
it very baldly. It was, indeed, as if a door had been suddenly flung
open to the sunlight for escape from a dark prison in which a man had
thought to spend his life.

He was in haste now to be alone, to straighten out his agitated mind
and plan coherently what was to be done. Also he must consult another.
Already he had hit upon that other. For such a voyage a navigator would
be necessary, and a navigator was ready to his hand in Jeremy Pitt. The
first thing was to take counsel with the young shipmaster, who must be
associated with him in this business if it were to be undertaken. All
that day his mind was in turmoil with this new hope, and he was sick
with impatience for night and a chance to discuss the matter with
his chosen partner. As a result Blood was betimes that evening in the
spacious stockade that enclosed the huts of the slaves together with the
big white house of the overseer, and he found an opportunity of a few
words with Pitt, unobserved by the others.

“To-night when all are asleep, come to my cabin. I have something to say
to you.”

The young man stared at him, roused by Blood's pregnant tone out of the
mental lethargy into which he had of late been lapsing as a result of
the dehumanizing life he lived. Then he nodded understanding and assent,
and they moved apart.

The six months of plantation life in Barbados had made an almost tragic
mark upon the young seaman. His erstwhile bright alertness was
all departed. His face was growing vacuous, his eyes were dull and
lack-lustre, and he moved in a cringing, furtive manner, like an
over-beaten dog. He had survived the ill-nourishment, the excessive
work on the sugar plantation under a pitiless sun, the lashes of the
overseer's whip when his labours flagged, and the deadly, unrelieved
animal life to which he was condemned. But the price he was paying for
survival was the usual price. He was in danger of becoming no better
than an animal, of sinking to the level of the negroes who sometimes
toiled beside him. The man, however, was still there, not yet dormant,
but merely torpid from a surfeit of despair; and the man in him promptly
shook off that torpidity and awoke at the first words Blood spoke to him
that night--awoke and wept.

“Escape?” he panted. “O God!” He took his head in his hands, and fell to
sobbing like a child.

“Sh! Steady now! Steady!” Blood admonished him in a whisper, alarmed by
the lad's blubbering. He crossed to Pitt's side, and set a restraining
hand upon his shoulder. “For God's sake, command yourself. If we're
overheard we shall both be flogged for this.”

Among the privileges enjoyed by Blood was that of a hut to himself, and
they were alone in this. But, after all, it was built of wattles thinly
plastered with mud, and its door was composed of bamboos, through which
sound passed very easily. Though the stockade was locked for the night,
and all within it asleep by now--it was after midnight--yet a prowling
overseer was not impossible, and a sound of voices must lead to
discovery. Pitt realized this, and controlled his outburst of emotion.

Sitting close thereafter they talked in whispers for an hour or more,
and all the while those dulled wits of Pitt's were sharpening themselves
anew upon this precious whetstone of hope. They would need to recruit
others into their enterprise, a half-dozen at least, a half-score if
possible, but no more than that. They must pick the best out of that
score of survivors of the Monmouth men that Colonel Bishop had acquired.
Men who understood the sea were desirable. But of these there were only
two in that unfortunate gang, and their knowledge was none too full.
They were Hagthorpe, a gentleman who had served in the Royal Navy, and
Nicholas Dyke, who had been a petty officer in the late king's time, and
there was another who had been a gunner, a man named Ogle.

It was agreed before they parted that Pitt should begin with these three
and then proceed to recruit some six or eight others. He was to move
with the utmost caution, sounding his men very carefully before making
anything in the nature of a disclosure, and even then avoid rendering
that disclosure so full that its betrayal might frustrate the plans
which as yet had to be worked out in detail. Labouring with them in
the plantations, Pitt would not want for opportunities of broaching the
matter to his fellow-slaves.

“Caution above everything,” was Blood's last recommendation to him at
parting. “Who goes slowly, goes safely, as the Italians have it. And
remember that if you betray yourself, you ruin all, for you are the only
navigator amongst us, and without you there is no escaping.”

Pitt reassured him, and slunk off back to his own hut and the straw that
served him for a bed.

Coming next morning to the wharf, Blood found Dr. Whacker in a generous
mood. Having slept on the matter, he was prepared to advance the convict
any sum up to thirty pounds that would enable him to acquire a boat
capable of taking him away from the settlement. Blood expressed his
thanks becomingly, betraying no sign that he saw clearly into the true
reason of the other's munificence.

“It's not money I'll require,” said he, “but the boat itself. For
who will be selling me a boat and incurring the penalties in Governor
Steed's proclamation? Ye'll have read it, no doubt?”

Dr. Whacker's heavy face grew overcast. Thoughtfully he rubbed his chin.
“I've read it--yes. And I dare not procure the boat for you. It would be
discovered. It must be. And the penalty is a fine of two hundred pounds
besides imprisonment. It would ruin me. You'll see that?”

The high hopes in Blood's soul, began to shrink. And the shadow of his
despair overcast his face.

“But then...” he faltered. “There is nothing to be done.”

“Nay, nay: things are not so desperate.” Dr. Whacker smiled a little
with tight lips. “I've thought of it. You will see that the man who buys
the boat must be one of those who goes with you--so that he is not here
to answer questions afterwards.”

“But who is to go with me save men in my own case? What I cannot do,
they cannot.”

“There are others detained on the island besides slaves. There are
several who are here for debt, and would be glad enough to spread
their wings. There's a fellow Nuttall, now, who follows the trade of
a shipwright, whom I happen to know would welcome such a chance as you
might afford him.”

“But how should a debtor come with money to buy a boat? The question
will be asked.”

“To be sure it will. But if you contrive shrewdly, you'll all be gone
before that happens.”

Blood nodded understanding, and the doctor, setting a hand upon his
sleeve, unfolded the scheme he had conceived.

“You shall have the money from me at once. Having received it, you'll
forget that it was I who supplied it to you. You have friends in
England--relatives, perhaps--who sent it out to you through the agency
of one of your Bridgetown patients, whose name as a man of honour you
will on no account divulge lest you bring trouble upon him. That is your
tale if there are questions.”

He paused, looking hard at Blood. Blood nodded understanding and assent.
Relieved, the doctor continued:

“But there should be no questions if you go carefully to work. You
concert matters with Nuttall. You enlist him as one of your companions
and a shipwright should be a very useful member of your crew. You engage
him to discover a likely sloop whose owner is disposed to sell. Then let
your preparations all be made before the purchase is effected, so that
your escape may follow instantly upon it before the inevitable questions
come to be asked. You take me?”

So well did Blood take him that within an hour he contrived to see
Nuttall, and found the fellow as disposed to the business as Dr. Whacker
had predicted. When he left the shipwright, it was agreed that Nuttall
should seek the boat required, for which Blood would at once produce the
money.

The quest took longer than was expected by Blood, who waited impatiently
with the doctor's gold concealed about his person. But at the end of
some three weeks, Nuttall--whom he was now meeting daily--informed him
that he had found a serviceable wherry, and that its owner was disposed
to sell it for twenty-two pounds. That evening, on the beach, remote
from all eyes, Peter Blood handed that sum to his new associate, and
Nuttall went off with instructions to complete the purchase late on the
following day. He was to bring the boat to the wharf, where under cover
of night Blood and his fellow-convicts would join him and make off.

Everything was ready. In the shed, from which all the wounded men had
now been removed and which had since remained untenanted, Nuttall had
concealed the necessary stores: a hundredweight of bread, a quantity
of cheese, a cask of water and some few bottles of Canary, a compass,
quadrant, chart, half-hour glass, log and line, a tarpaulin, some
carpenter's tools, and a lantern and candles. And in the stockade, all
was likewise in readiness. Hagthorpe, Dyke, and Ogle had agreed to join
the venture, and eight others had been carefully recruited. In Pitt's
hut, which he shared with five other rebels-convict, all of whom were
to join in this bid for liberty, a ladder had been constructed in secret
during those nights of waiting. With this they were to surmount the
stockade and gain the open. The risk of detection, so that they made
little noise, was negligible. Beyond locking them all into that stockade
at night, there was no great precaution taken. Where, after all, could
any so foolish as to attempt escape hope to conceal himself in that
island? The chief risk lay in discovery by those of their companions
who were to be left behind. It was because of these that they must go
cautiously and in silence.

The day that was to have been their last in Barbados was a day of hope
and anxiety to the twelve associates in that enterprise, no less than to
Nuttall in the town below.

Towards sunset, having seen Nuttall depart to purchase and fetch
the sloop to the prearranged moorings at the wharf, Peter Blood came
sauntering towards the stockade, just as the slaves were being driven
in from the fields. He stood aside at the entrance to let them pass, and
beyond the message of hope flashed by his eyes, he held no communication
with them.

He entered the stockade in their wake, and as they broke their ranks
to seek their various respective huts, he beheld Colonel Bishop in talk
with Kent, the overseer. The pair were standing by the stocks, planted
in the middle of that green space for the punishment of offending
slaves.

As he advanced, Bishop turned to regard him, scowling. “Where have you
been this while?” he bawled, and although a minatory note was normal to
the Colonel's voice, yet Blood felt his heart tightening apprehensively.

“I've been at my work in the town,” he answered. “Mrs. Patch has a fever
and Mr. Dekker has sprained his ankle.”

“I sent for you to Dekker's, and you were not there. You are given to
idling, my fine fellow. We shall have to quicken you one of these days
unless you cease from abusing the liberty you enjoy. D'ye forget that
ye're a rebel convict?”

“I am not given the chance,” said Blood, who never could learn to curb
his tongue.

“By God! Will you be pert with me?”

Remembering all that was at stake, growing suddenly conscious that
from the huts surrounding the enclosure anxious ears were listening, he
instantly practised an unusual submission.

“Not pert, sir. I... I am sorry I should have been sought....”

“Aye, and you'll be sorrier yet. There's the Governor with an attack of
gout, screaming like a wounded horse, and you nowhere to be found. Be
off, man--away with you at speed to Government House! You're awaited,
I tell you. Best lend him a horse, Kent, or the lout'll be all night
getting there.”

They bustled him away, choking almost from a reluctance that he dared
not show. The thing was unfortunate; but after all not beyond remedy.
The escape was set for midnight, and he should easily be back by then.
He mounted the horse that Kent procured him, intending to make all
haste.

“How shall I reenter the stockade, sir?” he enquired at parting.

“You'll not reenter it,” said Bishop. “When they've done with you at
Government House, they may find a kennel for you there until morning.”

Peter Blood's heart sank like a stone through water.

“But...” he began.

“Be off, I say. Will you stand there talking until dark? His excellency
is waiting for you.” And with his cane Colonel Bishop slashed the
horse's quarters so brutally that the beast bounded forward all but
unseating her rider.

Peter Blood went off in a state of mind bordering on despair. And
there was occasion for it. A postponement of the escape at least until
to-morrow night was necessary now, and postponement must mean the
discovery of Nuttall's transaction and the asking of questions it would
be difficult to answer.

It was in his mind to slink back in the night, once his work at
Government House were done, and from the outside of the stockade make
known to Pitt and the others his presence, and so have them join him
that their project might still be carried out. But in this he reckoned
without the Governor, whom he found really in the thrall of a severe
attack of gout, and almost as severe an attack of temper nourished by
Blood's delay.

The doctor was kept in constant attendance upon him until long after
midnight, when at last he was able to ease the sufferer a little by a
bleeding. Thereupon he would have withdrawn. But Steed would not hear of
it. Blood must sleep in his own chamber to be at hand in case of need.
It was as if Fate made sport of him. For that night at least the escape
must be definitely abandoned.

Not until the early hours of the morning did Peter Blood succeed in
making a temporary escape from Government House on the ground that he
required certain medicaments which he must, himself, procure from the
apothecary.

On that pretext, he made an excursion into the awakening town, and
went straight to Nuttall, whom he found in a state of livid panic. The
unfortunate debtor, who had sat up waiting through the night, conceived
that all was discovered and that his own ruin would be involved. Peter
Blood quieted his fears.

“It will be for to-night instead,” he said, with more assurance than
he felt, “if I have to bleed the Governor to death. Be ready as last
night.”

“But if there are questions meanwhile?” bleated Nuttall. He was a thin,
pale, small-featured, man with weak eyes that now blinked desperately.

“Answer as best you can. Use your wits, man. I can stay no longer.” And
Peter went off to the apothecary for his pretexted drugs.

Within an hour of his going came an officer of the Secretary's to
Nuttall's miserable hovel. The seller of the boat had--as by law
required since the coming of the rebels-convict--duly reported the sale
at the Secretary's office, so that he might obtain the reimbursement
of the ten-pound surety into which every keeper of a small boat was
compelled to enter. The Secretary's office postponed this reimbursement
until it should have obtained confirmation of the transaction.

“We are informed that you have bought a wherry from Mr. Robert Farrell,”
 said the officer.

“That is so,” said Nuttall, who conceived that for him this was the end
of the world.

“You are in no haste, it seems, to declare the same at the Secretary's
office.” The emissary had a proper bureaucratic haughtiness.

Nuttall's weak eyes blinked at a redoubled rate.

“To... to declare it?”

“Ye know it's the law.”

“I... I didn't, may it please you.”

“But it's in the proclamation published last January.”

“I... I can't read, sir. I... I didn't know.”

“Faugh!” The messenger withered him with his disdain.

“Well, now you're informed. See to it that you are at the Secretary's
office before noon with the ten pounds surety into which you are obliged
to enter.”

The pompous officer departed, leaving Nuttall in a cold perspiration
despite the heat of the morning. He was thankful that the fellow had not
asked the question he most dreaded, which was how he, a debtor, should
come by the money to buy a wherry. But this he knew was only a respite.
The question would presently be asked of a certainty, and then hell
would open for him. He cursed the hour in which he had been such a fool
as to listen to Peter Blood's chatter of escape. He thought it very
likely that the whole plot would be discovered, and that he would
probably be hanged, or at least branded and sold into slavery like
those other damned rebels-convict, with whom he had been so mad as
to associate himself. If only he had the ten pounds for this
infernal surety, which until this moment had never entered into their
calculations, it was possible that the thing might be done quickly
and questions postponed until later. As the Secretary's messenger had
overlooked the fact that he was a debtor, so might the others at the
Secretary's office, at least for a day or two; and in that time he
would, he hoped, be beyond the reach of their questions. But in the
meantime what was to be done about this money? And it was to be found
before noon!

Nuttall snatched up his hat, and went out in quest of Peter Blood.
But where look for him? Wandering aimlessly up the irregular, unpaved
street, he ventured to enquire of one or two if they had seen Dr. Blood
that morning. He affected to be feeling none so well, and indeed his
appearance bore out the deception. None could give him information; and
since Blood had never told him of Whacker's share in this business, he
walked in his unhappy ignorance past the door of the one man in Barbados
who would eagerly have saved him in this extremity.

Finally he determined to go up to Colonel Bishop's plantation. Probably
Blood would be there. If he were not, Nuttall would find Pitt, and leave
a message with him. He was acquainted with Pitt and knew of Pitt's share
in this business. His pretext for seeking Blood must still be that he
needed medical assistance.

And at the same time that he set out, insensitive in his anxiety to the
broiling heat, to climb the heights to the north of the town, Blood
was setting out from Government House at last, having so far eased the
Governor's condition as to be permitted to depart. Being mounted, he
would, but for an unexpected delay, have reached the stockade ahead of
Nuttall, in which case several unhappy events might have been averted.
The unexpected delay was occasioned by Miss Arabella Bishop.

They met at the gate of the luxuriant garden of Government House, and
Miss Bishop, herself mounted, stared to see Peter Blood on horseback.
It happened that he was in good spirits. The fact that the Governor's
condition had so far improved as to restore him his freedom of movement
had sufficed to remove the depression under which he had been labouring
for the past twelve hours and more. In its rebound the mercury of his
mood had shot higher far than present circumstances warranted. He was
disposed to be optimistic. What had failed last night would certainly
not fail again to-night. What was a day, after all? The Secretary's
office might be troublesome, but not really troublesome for another
twenty-four hours at least; and by then they would be well away.

This joyous confidence of his was his first misfortune. The next was
that his good spirits were also shared by Miss Bishop, and that she
bore no rancour. The two things conjoined to make the delay that in its
consequences was so deplorable.

“Good-morning, sir,” she hailed him pleasantly. “It's close upon a month
since last I saw you.”

“Twenty-one days to the hour,” said he. “I've counted them.”

“I vow I was beginning to believe you dead.”

“I have to thank you for the wreath.”

“The wreath?”

“To deck my grave,” he explained.

“Must you ever be rallying?” she wondered, and looked at him gravely,
remembering that it was his rallying on the last occasion had driven her
away in dudgeon.

“A man must sometimes laugh at himself or go mad,” said he. “Few realize
it. That is why there are so many madmen in the world.”

“You may laugh at yourself all you will, sir. But sometimes I think you
laugh at me, which is not civil.”

“Then, faith, you're wrong. I laugh only at the comic, and you are not
comic at all.”

“What am I, then?” she asked him, laughing.

A moment he pondered her, so fair and fresh to behold, so entirely
maidenly and yet so entirely frank and unabashed.

“You are,” he said, “the niece of the man who owns me his slave.” But he
spoke lightly. So lightly that she was encouraged to insistence.

“Nay, sir, that is an evasion. You shall answer me truthfully this
morning.”

“Truthfully? To answer you at all is a labour. But to answer truthfully!
Oh, well, now, I should say of you that he'll be lucky who counts you
his friend.” It was in his mind to add more. But he left it there.

“That's mighty civil,” said she. “You've a nice taste in compliments,
Mr. Blood. Another in your place....”

“Faith, now, don't I know what another would have said? Don't I know my
fellow-man at all?”

“Sometimes I think you do, and sometimes I think you don't. Anyway, you
don't know your fellow-woman. There was that affair of the Spaniards.”

“Will ye never forget it?”

“Never.”

“Bad cess to your memory. Is there no good in me at all that you could
be dwelling on instead?”

“Oh, several things.”

“For instance, now?” He was almost eager.

“You speak excellent Spanish.”

“Is that all?” He sank back into dismay.

“Where did you learn it? Have you been in Spain?”

“That I have. I was two years in a Spanish prison.”

“In prison?” Her tone suggested apprehensions in which he had no desire
to leave her.

“As a prisoner of war,” he explained. “I was taken fighting with the
French--in French service, that is.”

“But you're a doctor!” she cried.

“That's merely a diversion, I think. By trade I am a soldier--at least,
it's a trade I followed for ten years. It brought me no great gear,
but it served me better than medicine, which, as you may observe, has
brought me into slavery. I'm thinking it's more pleasing in the sight of
Heaven to kill men than to heal them. Sure it must be.”

“But how came you to be a soldier, and to serve the French?”

“I am Irish, you see, and I studied medicine. Therefore--since it's a
perverse nation we are--.... Oh, but it's a long story, and the Colonel
will be expecting my return.” She was not in that way to be defrauded
of her entertainment. If he would wait a moment they would ride back
together. She had but come to enquire of the Governor's health at her
uncle's request.

So he waited, and so they rode back together to Colonel Bishop's house.
They rode very slowly, at a walking pace, and some whom they passed
marvelled to see the doctor-slave on such apparently intimate terms with
his owner's niece. One or two may have promised themselves that they
would drop a hint to the Colonel. But the two rode oblivious of all
others in the world that morning. He was telling her the story of his
early turbulent days, and at the end of it he dwelt more fully than
hitherto upon the manner of his arrest and trial.

The tale was barely done when they drew up at the Colonel's door, and
dismounted, Peter Blood surrendering his nag to one of the negro grooms,
who informed them that the Colonel was from home at the moment.

Even then they lingered a moment, she detaining him.

“I am sorry, Mr. Blood, that I did not know before,” she said, and there
was a suspicion of moisture in those clear hazel eyes. With a compelling
friendliness she held out her hand to him.

“Why, what difference could it have made?” he asked.

“Some, I think. You have been very hardly used by Fate.”

“Och, now....” He paused. His keen sapphire eyes considered her steadily
a moment from under his level black brows. “It might have been worse,”
 he said, with a significance which brought a tinge of colour to her
cheeks and a flutter to her eyelids.

He stooped to kiss her hand before releasing it, and she did not deny
him. Then he turned and strode off towards the stockade a half-mile
away, and a vision of her face went with him, tinted with a rising blush
and a sudden unusual shyness. He forgot in that little moment that he
was a rebel-convict with ten years of slavery before him; he forgot
that he had planned an escape, which was to be carried into effect
that night; forgot even the peril of discovery which as a result of the
Governor's gout now overhung him.



CHAPTER VII. PIRATES


Mr. James Nuttall made all speed, regardless of the heat, in his journey
from Bridgetown to Colonel Bishop's plantation, and if ever man was
built for speed in a hot climate that man was Mr. James Nuttall, with
his short, thin body, and his long, fleshless legs. So withered was
he that it was hard to believe there were any juices left in him, yet
juices there must have been, for he was sweating violently by the time
he reached the stockade.

At the entrance he almost ran into the overseer Kent, a squat,
bow-legged animal with the arms of a Hercules and the jowl of a bulldog.

“I am seeking Doctor Blood,” he announced breathlessly.

“You are in a rare haste,” growled Kent. “What the devil is it? Twins?”

“Eh? Oh! Nay, nay. I'm not married, sir. It's a cousin of mine, sir.”

“What is?”

“He is taken bad, sir,” Nuttall lied promptly upon the cue that Kent
himself had afforded him. “Is the doctor here?”

“That's his hut yonder.” Kent pointed carelessly. “If he's not there,
he'll be somewhere else.” And he took himself off. He was a surly,
ungracious beast at all times, readier with the lash of his whip than
with his tongue.

Nuttall watched him go with satisfaction, and even noted the direction
that he took. Then he plunged into the enclosure, to verify in
mortification that Dr. Blood was not at home. A man of sense might have
sat down and waited, judging that to be the quickest and surest way in
the end. But Nuttall had no sense. He flung out of the stockade again,
hesitated a moment as to which direction he should take, and finally
decided to go any way but the way that Kent had gone. He sped across
the parched savannah towards the sugar plantation which stood solid as
a rampart and gleaming golden in the dazzling June sunshine. Avenues
intersected the great blocks of ripening amber cane. In the distance
down one of these he espied some slaves at work. Nuttall entered the
avenue and advanced upon them. They eyed him dully, as he passed them.
Pitt was not of their number, and he dared not ask for him. He continued
his search for best part of an hour, up one of those lanes and then
down another. Once an overseer challenged him, demanding to know his
business. He was looking, he said, for Dr. Blood. His cousin was
taken ill. The overseer bade him go to the devil, and get out of the
plantation. Blood was not there. If he was anywhere he would be in his
hut in the stockade.

Nuttall passed on, upon the understanding that he would go. But he went
in the wrong direction; he went on towards the side of the plantation
farthest from the stockade, towards the dense woods that fringed it
there. The overseer was too contemptuous and perhaps too languid in the
stifling heat of approaching noontide to correct his course.

Nuttall blundered to the end of the avenue, and round the corner of
it, and there ran into Pitt, alone, toiling with a wooden spade upon an
irrigation channel. A pair of cotton drawers, loose and ragged, clothed
him from waist to knee; above and below he was naked, save for a broad
hat of plaited straw that sheltered his unkempt golden head from the
rays of the tropical sun. At sight of him Nuttall returned thanks aloud
to his Maker. Pitt stared at him, and the shipwright poured out his
dismal news in a dismal tone. The sum of it was that he must have ten
pounds from Blood that very morning or they were all undone. And all he
got for his pains and his sweat was the condemnation of Jeremy Pitt.

“Damn you for a fool!” said the slave. “If it's Blood you're seeking,
why are you wasting your time here?”

“I can't find him,” bleated Nuttall. He was indignant at his reception.
He forgot the jangled state of the other's nerves after a night of
anxious wakefulness ending in a dawn of despair. “I thought that
you....”

“You thought that I could drop my spade and go and seek him for you? Is
that what you thought? My God! that our lives should depend upon such a
dummerhead. While you waste your time here, the hours are passing! And
if an overseer should catch you talking to me? How'll you explain it?”

For a moment Nuttall was bereft of speech by such ingratitude. Then he
exploded.

“I would to Heaven I had never had no hand in this affair. I would so! I
wish that....”

What else he wished was never known, for at that moment round the block
of cane came a big man in biscuit-coloured taffetas followed by two
negroes in cotton drawers who were armed with cutlasses. He was not
ten yards away, but his approach over the soft, yielding marl had been
unheard.

Mr. Nuttall looked wildly this way and that a moment, then bolted like
a rabbit for the woods, thus doing the most foolish and betraying thing
that in the circumstances it was possible for him to do. Pitt groaned
and stood still, leaning upon his spade.

“Hi, there! Stop!” bawled Colonel Bishop after the fugitive, and added
horrible threats tricked out with some rhetorical indecencies.

But the fugitive held amain, and never so much as turned his head. It
was his only remaining hope that Colonel Bishop might not have seen his
face; for the power and influence of Colonel Bishop was quite sufficient
to hang any man whom he thought would be better dead.

Not until the runagate had vanished into the scrub did the planter
sufficiently recover from his indignant amazement to remember the two
negroes who followed at his heels like a brace of hounds. It was a
bodyguard without which he never moved in his plantations since a slave
had made an attack upon him and all but strangled him a couple of years
ago.

“After him, you black swine!” he roared at them. But as they started he
checked them. “Wait! Get to heel, damn you!”

It occurred to him that to catch and deal with the fellow there was not
the need to go after him, and perhaps spend the day hunting him in that
cursed wood. There was Pitt here ready to his hand, and Pitt should tell
him the identity of his bashful friend, and also the subject of that
close and secret talk he had disturbed. Pitt might, of course, be
reluctant. So much the worse for Pitt. The ingenious Colonel Bishop knew
a dozen ways--some of them quite diverting--of conquering stubbornness
in these convict dogs.

He turned now upon the slave a countenance that was inflamed by heat
internal and external, and a pair of heady eyes that were alight with
cruel intelligence. He stepped forward swinging his light bamboo cane.

“Who was that runagate?” he asked with terrible suavity. Leaning over on
his spade, Jeremy Pitt hung his head a little, and shifted uncomfortably
on his bare feet. Vainly he groped for an answer in a mind that could do
nothing but curse the idiocy of Mr. James Nuttall.

The planter's bamboo cane fell on the lad's naked shoulders with
stinging force.

“Answer me, you dog! What's his name?”

Jeremy looked at the burly planter out of sullen, almost defiant eyes.

“I don't know,” he said, and in his voice there was a faint note at
least of the defiance aroused in him by a blow which he dared not, for
his life's sake, return. His body had remained unyielding under it, but
the spirit within writhed now in torment.

“You don't know? Well, here's to quicken your wits.” Again the cane
descended. “Have you thought of his name yet?”

“I have not.”

“Stubborn, eh?” For a moment the Colonel leered. Then his passion
mastered him. “'Swounds! You impudent dog! D'you trifle with me? D'you
think I'm to be mocked?”

Pitt shrugged, shifted sideways on his feet again, and settled into
dogged silence. Few things are more provocative; and Colonel Bishop's
temper was never one that required much provocation. Brute fury now
awoke in him. Fiercely now he lashed those defenceless shoulders,
accompanying each blow by blasphemy and foul abuse, until, stung beyond
endurance, the lingering embers of his manhood fanned into momentary
flame, Pitt sprang upon his tormentor.

But as he sprang, so also sprang the watchful blacks. Muscular bronze
arms coiled crushingly about the frail white body, and in a moment the
unfortunate slave stood powerless, his wrists pinioned behind him in a
leathern thong.

Breathing hard, his face mottled, Bishop pondered him a moment. Then:
“Fetch him along,” he said.

Down the long avenue between those golden walls of cane standing some
eight feet high, the wretched Pitt was thrust by his black captors in
the Colonel's wake, stared at with fearful eyes by his fellow-slaves at
work there. Despair went with him. What torments might immediately await
him he cared little, horrible though he knew they would be. The real
source of his mental anguish lay in the conviction that the elaborately
planned escape from this unutterable hell was frustrated now in the very
moment of execution.

They came out upon the green plateau and headed for the stockade and
the overseer's white house. Pitt's eyes looked out over Carlisle Bay, of
which this plateau commanded a clear view from the fort on one side to
the long sheds of the wharf on the other. Along this wharf a few shallow
boats were moored, and Pitt caught himself wondering which of these was
the wherry in which with a little luck they might have been now at sea.
Out over that sea his glance ranged miserably.

In the roads, standing in for the shore before a gentle breeze that
scarcely ruffled the sapphire surface of the Caribbean, came a stately
red-hulled frigate, flying the English ensign.

Colonel Bishop halted to consider her, shading his eyes with his fleshly
hand. Light as was the breeze, the vessel spread no canvas to it beyond
that of her foresail. Furled was her every other sail, leaving a clear
view of the majestic lines of her hull, from towering stern castle to
gilded beakhead that was aflash in the dazzling sunshine.

So leisurely an advance argued a master indifferently acquainted with
these waters, who preferred to creep forward cautiously, sounding his
way. At her present rate of progress it would be an hour, perhaps,
before she came to anchorage within the harbour. And whilst the Colonel
viewed her, admiring, perhaps, the gracious beauty of her, Pitt was
hurried forward into the stockade, and clapped into the stocks that
stood there ready for slaves who required correction.

Colonel Bishop followed him presently, with leisurely, rolling gait.

“A mutinous cur that shows his fangs to his master must learn good
manners at the cost of a striped hide,” was all he said before setting
about his executioner's job.

That with his own hands he should do that which most men of his station
would, out of self-respect, have relegated to one of the negroes, gives
you the measure of the man's beastliness. It was almost as if with
relish, as if gratifying some feral instinct of cruelty, that he now
lashed his victim about head and shoulders. Soon his cane was reduced,
to splinters by his violence. You know, perhaps, the sting of a flexible
bamboo cane when it is whole. But do you realize its murderous quality
when it has been split into several long lithe blades, each with an edge
that is of the keenness of a knife?

When, at last, from very weariness, Colonel Bishop flung away the stump
and thongs to which his cane had been reduced, the wretched slave's back
was bleeding pulp from neck to waist.

As long as full sensibility remained, Jeremy Pitt had made no sound.
But in a measure as from pain his senses were mercifully dulled, he sank
forward in the stocks, and hung there now in a huddled heap, faintly
moaning.

Colonel Bishop set his foot upon the crossbar, and leaned over his
victim, a cruel smile on his full, coarse face.

“Let that teach you a proper submission,” said he. “And now touching
that shy friend of yours, you shall stay here without meat or
drink--without meat or drink, d' ye hear me?--until you please to tell
me his name and business.” He took his foot from the bar. “When you've
had enough of this, send me word, and we'll have the branding-irons to
you.”

On that he swung on his heel, and strode out of the stockade, his
negroes following.

Pitt had heard him, as we hear things in our dreams. At the moment so
spent was he by his cruel punishment, and so deep was the despair into
which he had fallen, that he no longer cared whether he lived or died.

Soon, however, from the partial stupor which pain had mercifully
induced, a new variety of pain aroused him. The stocks stood in the
open under the full glare of the tropical sun, and its blistering rays
streamed down upon that mangled, bleeding back until he felt as if
flames of fire were searing it. And, soon, to this was added a torment
still more unspeakable. Flies, the cruel flies of the Antilles, drawn by
the scent of blood, descended in a cloud upon him.

Small wonder that the ingenious Colonel Bishop, who so well understood
the art of loosening stubborn tongues, had not deemed it necessary to
have recourse to other means of torture. Not all his fiendish cruelty
could devise a torment more cruel, more unendurable than the torments
Nature would here procure a man in Pitt's condition.

The slave writhed in his stocks until he was in danger of breaking his
limbs, and writhing, screamed in agony.

Thus was he found by Peter Blood, who seemed to his troubled vision
to materialize suddenly before him. Mr. Blood carried a large palmetto
leaf. Having whisked away with this the flies that were devouring
Jeremy's back, he slung it by a strip of fibre from the lad's neck, so
that it protected him from further attacks as well as from the rays of
the sun. Next, sitting down beside him, he drew the sufferer's head down
on his own shoulder, and bathed his face from a pannikin of cold water.
Pitt shuddered and moaned on a long, indrawn breath.

“Drink!” he gasped. “Drink, for the love of Christ!” The pannikin was
held to his quivering lips. He drank greedily, noisily, nor ceased
until he had drained the vessel. Cooled and revived by the draught, he
attempted to sit up.

“My back!” he screamed.

There was an unusual glint in Mr. Blood's eyes; his lips were
compressed. But when he parted them to speak, his voice came cool and
steady.

“Be easy, now. One thing at a time. Your back's taking no harm at all
for the present, since I've covered it up. I'm wanting to know what's
happened to you. D' ye think we can do without a navigator that ye go
and provoke that beast Bishop until he all but kills you?”

Pitt sat up and groaned again. But this time his anguish was mental
rather than physical.

“I don't think a navigator will be needed this time, Peter.”

“What's that?” cried Mr. Blood.

Pitt explained the situation as briefly as he could, in a halting,
gasping speech. “I'm to rot here until I tell him the identity of my
visitor and his business.”

Mr. Blood got up, growling in his throat. “Bad cess to the filthy
slaver!” said he. “But it must be contrived, nevertheless. To the devil
with Nuttall! Whether he gives surety for the boat or not, whether he
explains it or not, the boat remains, and we're going, and you're coming
with us.”

“You're dreaming, Peter,” said the prisoner. “We're not going this time.
The magistrates will confiscate the boat since the surety's not paid,
even if when they press him Nuttall does not confess the whole plan and
get us all branded on the forehead.”

Mr. Blood turned away, and with agony in his eyes looked out to sea over
the blue water by which he had so fondly hoped soon to be travelling
back to freedom.

The great red ship had drawn considerably nearer shore by now. Slowly,
majestically, she was entering the bay. Already one or two wherries were
putting off from the wharf to board her. From where he stood, Mr. Blood
could see the glinting of the brass cannons mounted on the prow above
the curving beak-head, and he could make out the figure of a seaman in
the forechains on her larboard side, leaning out to heave the lead.

An angry voice aroused him from his unhappy thoughts.

“What the devil are you doing here?”

The returning Colonel Bishop came striding into the stockade, his
negroes following ever.

Mr. Blood turned to face him, and over that swarthy countenance--which,
indeed, by now was tanned to the golden brown of a half-caste Indian--a
mask descended.

“Doing?” said he blandly. “Why, the duties of my office.”

The Colonel, striding furiously forward, observed two things. The
empty pannikin on the seat beside the prisoner, and the palmetto leaf
protecting his back. “Have you dared to do this?” The veins on the
planter's forehead stood out like cords.

“Of course I have.” Mr. Blood's tone was one of faint surprise.

“I said he was to have neither meat nor drink until I ordered it.”

“Sure, now, I never heard ye.”

“You never heard me? How should you have heard me when you weren't
here?”

“Then how did ye expect me to know what orders ye'd given?” Mr. Blood's
tone was positively aggrieved. “All that I knew was that one of your
slaves was being murthered by the sun and the flies. And I says to
myself, this is one of the Colonel's slaves, and I'm the Colonel's
doctor, and sure it's my duty to be looking after the Colonel's
property. So I just gave the fellow a spoonful of water and covered his
back from the sun. And wasn't I right now?”

“Right?” The Colonel was almost speechless.

“Be easy, now, be easy!” Mr. Blood implored him. “It's an apoplexy ye'll
be contacting if ye give way to heat like this.”

The planter thrust him aside with an imprecation, and stepping forward
tore the palmetto leaf from the prisoner's back.

“In the name of humanity, now....” Mr. Blood was beginning.

The Colonel swung upon him furiously. “Out of this!” he commanded. “And
don't come near him again until I send for you, unless you want to be
served in the same way.”

He was terrific in his menace, in his bulk, and in the power of him. But
Mr. Blood never flinched. It came to the Colonel, as he found himself
steadily regarded by those light-blue eyes that looked so arrestingly
odd in that tawny face--like pale sapphires set in copper--that this
rogue had for some time now been growing presumptuous. It was a matter
that he must presently correct. Meanwhile Mr. Blood was speaking again,
his tone quietly insistent.

“In the name of humanity,” he repeated, “ye'll allow me to do what I can
to ease his sufferings, or I swear to you that I'll forsake at once the
duties of a doctor, and that it's devil another patient will I attend in
this unhealthy island at all.”

For an instant the Colonel was too amazed to speak. Then--

“By God!” he roared. “D'ye dare take that tone with me, you dog? D'ye
dare to make terms with me?”

“I do that.” The unflinching blue eyes looked squarely into the
Colonel's, and there was a devil peeping out of them, the devil of
recklessness that is born of despair.

Colonel Bishop considered him for a long moment in silence. “I've been
too soft with you,” he said at last. “But that's to be mended.” And he
tightened his lips. “I'll have the rods to you, until there's not an
inch of skin left on your dirty back.”

“Will ye so? And what would Governor Steed do, then?”

“Ye're not the only doctor on the island.”

Mr. Blood actually laughed. “And will ye tell that to his excellency,
him with the gout in his foot so bad that he can't stand? Ye know very
well it's devil another doctor will he tolerate, being an intelligent
man that knows what's good for him.”

But the Colonel's brute passion thoroughly aroused was not so easily to
be baulked. “If you're alive when my blacks have done with you, perhaps
you'll come to your senses.”

He swung to his negroes to issue an order. But it was never issued. At
that moment a terrific rolling thunderclap drowned his voice and shook
the very air. Colonel Bishop jumped, his negroes jumped with him, and so
even did the apparently imperturbable Mr. Blood. Then the four of them
stared together seawards.

Down in the bay all that could be seen of the great ship, standing now
within a cable's-length of the fort, were her topmasts thrusting above
a cloud of smoke in which she was enveloped. From the cliffs a flight
of startled seabirds had risen to circle in the blue, giving tongue to
their alarm, the plaintive curlew noisiest of all.

As those men stared from the eminence on which they stood, not yet
understanding what had taken place, they saw the British Jack dip from
the main truck and vanish into the rising cloud below. A moment more,
and up through that cloud to replace the flag of England soared the gold
and crimson banner of Castile. And then they understood.

“Pirates!” roared the Colonel, and again, “Pirates!”

Fear and incredulity were blent in his voice. He had paled under his tan
until his face was the colour of clay, and there was a wild fury in his
beady eyes. His negroes looked at him, grinning idiotically, all teeth
and eyeballs.



CHAPTER VIII. SPANIARDS


The stately ship that had been allowed to sail so leisurely into
Carlisle Bay under her false colours was a Spanish privateer, coming to
pay off some of the heavy debt piled up by the predaceous Brethren of
the Coast, and the recent defeat by the Pride of Devon of two treasure
galleons bound for Cadiz. It happened that the galleon which escaped in
a more or less crippled condition was commanded by Don Diego de Espinosa
y Valdez, who was own brother to the Spanish Admiral Don Miguel de
Espinosa, and who was also a very hasty, proud, and hot-tempered
gentleman.

Galled by his defeat, and choosing to forget that his own conduct had
invited it, he had sworn to teach the English a sharp lesson which they
should remember. He would take a leaf out of the book of Morgan and
those other robbers of the sea, and make a punitive raid upon an English
settlement. Unfortunately for himself and for many others, his brother
the Admiral was not at hand to restrain him when for this purpose he
fitted out the Cinco Llagas at San Juan de Porto Rico. He chose for
his objective the island of Barbados, whose natural strength was apt to
render her defenders careless. He chose it also because thither had the
Pride of Devon been tracked by his scouts, and he desired a measure of
poetic justice to invest his vengeance. And he chose a moment when there
were no ships of war at anchor in Carlisle Bay.

He had succeeded so well in his intentions that he had aroused no
suspicion until he saluted the fort at short range with a broadside of
twenty guns.

And now the four gaping watchers in the stockade on the headland beheld
the great ship creep forward under the rising cloud of smoke,
her mainsail unfurled to increase her steering way, and go about
close-hauled to bring her larboard guns to bear upon the unready fort.

With the crashing roar of that second broadside, Colonel Bishop awoke
from stupefaction to a recollection of where his duty lay. In the town
below drums were beating frantically, and a trumpet was bleating, as
if the peril needed further advertising. As commander of the Barbados
Militia, the place of Colonel Bishop was at the head of his scanty
troops, in that fort which the Spanish guns were pounding into rubble.

Remembering it, he went off at the double, despite his bulk and the
heat, his negroes trotting after him.

Mr. Blood turned to Jeremy Pitt. He laughed grimly. “Now that,” said he,
“is what I call a timely interruption. Though what'll come of it,” he
added as an afterthought, “the devil himself knows.”

As a third broadside was thundering forth, he picked up the palmetto
leaf and carefully replaced it on the back of his fellow-slave.

And then into the stockade, panting and sweating, came Kent followed by
best part of a score of plantation workers, some of whom were black and
all of whom were in a state of panic. He led them into the low white
house, to bring them forth again, within a moment, as it seemed, armed
now with muskets and hangers and some of them equipped with bandoleers.

By this time the rebels-convict were coming in, in twos and threes,
having abandoned their work upon finding themselves unguarded and upon
scenting the general dismay.

Kent paused a moment, as his hastily armed guard dashed forth, to fling
an order to those slaves.

“To the woods!” he bade them. “Take to the woods, and lie close there,
until this is over, and we've gutted these Spanish swine.”

On that he went off in haste after his men, who were to be added to
those massing in the town, so as to oppose and overwhelm the Spanish
landing parties.

The slaves would have obeyed him on the instant but for Mr. Blood.

“What need for haste, and in this heat?” quoth he. He was surprisingly
cool, they thought. “Maybe there'll be no need to take to the woods at
all, and, anyway, it will be time enough to do so when the Spaniards are
masters of the town.”

And so, joined now by the other stragglers, and numbering in all a
round score--rebels-convict all--they stayed to watch from their
vantage-ground the fortunes of the furious battle that was being waged
below.

The landing was contested by the militia and by every islander capable
of bearing arms with the fierce resoluteness of men who knew that
no quarter was to be expected in defeat. The ruthlessness of Spanish
soldiery was a byword, and not at his worst had Morgan or L'Ollonais
ever perpetrated such horrors as those of which these Castilian
gentlemen were capable.

But this Spanish commander knew his business, which was more than could
truthfully be said for the Barbados Militia. Having gained the advantage
of a surprise blow, which had put the fort out of action, he soon showed
them that he was master of the situation. His guns turned now upon the
open space behind the mole, where the incompetent Bishop had marshalled
his men, tore the militia into bloody rags, and covered the landing
parties which were making the shore in their own boats and in several
of those which had rashly gone out to the great ship before her identity
was revealed.

All through the scorching afternoon the battle went on, the rattle and
crack of musketry penetrating ever deeper into the town to show that
the defenders were being driven steadily back. By sunset two hundred and
fifty Spaniards were masters of Bridgetown, the islanders were disarmed,
and at Government House, Governor Steed--his gout forgotten in his
panic--supported by Colonel Bishop and some lesser officers, was being
informed by Don Diego, with an urbanity that was itself a mockery, of
the sum that would be required in ransom.

For a hundred thousand pieces of eight and fifty head of cattle, Don
Diego would forbear from reducing the place to ashes. And what time
that suave and courtly commander was settling these details with the
apoplectic British Governor, the Spaniards were smashing and looting,
feasting, drinking, and ravaging after the hideous manner of their kind.

Mr. Blood, greatly daring, ventured down at dusk into the town. What
he saw there is recorded by Jeremy Pitt to whom he subsequently related
it--in that voluminous log from which the greater part of my narrative
is derived. I have no intention of repeating any of it here. It is
all too loathsome and nauseating, incredible, indeed, that men however
abandoned could ever descend such an abyss of bestial cruelty and lust.

What he saw was fetching him in haste and white-faced out of that hell
again, when in a narrow street a girl hurtled into him, wild-eyed, her
unbound hair streaming behind her as she ran. After her, laughing and
cursing in a breath, came a heavy-booted Spaniard. Almost he was upon
her, when suddenly Mr. Blood got in his way. The doctor had taken a
sword from a dead man's side some little time before and armed himself
with it against an emergency.

As the Spaniard checked in anger and surprise, he caught in the dusk the
livid gleam of that sword which Mr. Blood had quickly unsheathed.

“Ah, perro ingles!” he shouted, and flung forward to his death.

“It's hoping I am ye're in a fit state to meet your Maker,” said Mr.
Blood, and ran him through the body. He did the thing skilfully: with
the combined skill of swordsman and surgeon. The man sank in a hideous
heap without so much as a groan.

Mr. Blood swung to the girl, who leaned panting and sobbing against a
wall. He caught her by the wrist.

“Come!” he said.

But she hung back, resisting him by her weight. “Who are you?” she
demanded wildly.

“Will ye wait to see my credentials?” he snapped. Steps were clattering
towards them from beyond the corner round which she had fled from
that Spanish ruffian. “Come,” he urged again. And this time, reassured
perhaps by his clear English speech, she went without further questions.

They sped down an alley and then up another, by great good fortune
meeting no one, for already they were on the outskirts of the town. They
won out of it, and white-faced, physically sick, Mr. Blood dragged her
almost at a run up the hill towards Colonel Bishop's house. He told her
briefly who and what he was, and thereafter there was no conversation
between them until they reached the big white house. It was all in
darkness, which at least was reassuring. If the Spaniards had reached
it, there would be lights. He knocked, but had to knock again and yet
again before he was answered. Then it was by a voice from a window
above.

“Who is there?” The voice was Miss Bishop's, a little tremulous, but
unmistakably her own.

Mr. Blood almost fainted in relief. He had been imagining the
unimaginable. He had pictured her down in that hell out of which he had
just come. He had conceived that she might have followed her uncle into
Bridgetown, or committed some other imprudence, and he turned cold from
head to foot at the mere thought of what might have happened to her.

“It is I--Peter Blood,” he gasped.

“What do you want?”

It is doubtful whether she would have come down to open. For at such
a time as this it was no more than likely that the wretched plantation
slaves might be in revolt and prove as great a danger as the Spaniards.
But at the sound of her voice, the girl Mr. Blood had rescued peered up
through the gloom.

“Arabella!” she called. “It is I, Mary Traill.”

“Mary!” The voice ceased above on that exclamation, the head was
withdrawn. After a brief pause the door gaped wide. Beyond it in
the wide hall stood Miss Arabella, a slim, virginal figure in white,
mysteriously revealed in the gleam of a single candle which she carried.

Mr. Blood strode in followed by his distraught companion, who, falling
upon Arabella's slender bosom, surrendered herself to a passion of
tears. But he wasted no time.

“Whom have you here with you? What servants?” he demanded sharply.

The only male was James, an old negro groom.

“The very man,” said Blood. “Bid him get out horses. Then away with you
to Speightstown, or even farther north, where you will be safe. Here you
are in danger--in dreadful danger.”

“But I thought the fighting was over...” she was beginning, pale and
startled.

“So it is. But the deviltry's only beginning. Miss Traill will tell you
as you go. In God's name, madam, take my word for it, and do as I bid
you.”

“He... he saved me,” sobbed Miss Traill.

“Saved you?” Miss Bishop was aghast. “Saved you from what, Mary?”

“Let that wait,” snapped Mr. Blood almost angrily. “You've all the night
for chattering when you're out of this, and away beyond their reach.
Will you please call James, and do as I say--and at once!”

“You are very peremptory....”

“Oh, my God! I am peremptory! Speak, Miss Trail!, tell her whether I've
cause to be peremptory.”

“Yes, yes,” the girl cried, shuddering. “Do as he says--Oh, for pity's
sake, Arabella.”

Miss Bishop went off, leaving Mr. Blood and Miss Traill alone again.

“I... I shall never forget what you did, sir,” said she, through her
diminishing tears. She was a slight wisp of a girl, a child, no more.

“I've done better things in my time. That's why I'm here,” said Mr.
Blood, whose mood seemed to be snappy.

She didn't pretend to understand him, and she didn't make the attempt.

“Did you... did you kill him?” she asked, fearfully.

He stared at her in the flickering candlelight. “I hope so. It is very
probable, and it doesn't matter at all,” he said. “What matters is that
this fellow James should fetch the horses.” And he was stamping off to
accelerate these preparations for departure, when her voice arrested
him.

“Don't leave me! Don't leave me here alone!” she cried in terror.

He paused. He turned and came slowly back. Standing above her he smiled
upon her.

“There, there! You've no cause for alarm. It's all over now. You'll be
away soon--away to Speightstown, where you'll be quite safe.”

The horses came at last--four of them, for in addition to James who was
to act as her guide, Miss Bishop had her woman, who was not to be left
behind.

Mr. Blood lifted the slight weight of Mary Traill to her horse, then
turned to say good-bye to Miss Bishop, who was already mounted. He
said it, and seemed to have something to add. But whatever it was, it
remained unspoken. The horses started, and receded into the sapphire
starlit night, leaving him standing there before Colonel Bishop's door.
The last he heard of them was Mary Traill's childlike voice calling back
on a quavering note--

“I shall never forget what you did, Mr. Blood. I shall never forget.”

But as it was not the voice he desired to hear, the assurance brought
him little satisfaction. He stood there in the dark watching the
fireflies amid the rhododendrons, till the hoofbeats had faded. Then he
sighed and roused himself. He had much to do. His journey into the town
had not been one of idle curiosity to see how the Spaniards conducted
themselves in victory. It had been inspired by a very different purpose,
and he had gained in the course of it all the information he desired. He
had an extremely busy night before him, and must be moving.

He went off briskly in the direction of the stockade, where his
fellow-slaves awaited him in deep anxiety and some hope.



CHAPTER IX. THE REBELS-CONVICT


There were, when the purple gloom of the tropical night descended upon
the Caribbean, not more than ten men on guard aboard the Cinco Llagas,
so confident--and with good reason--were the Spaniards of the complete
subjection of the islanders. And when I say that there were ten men on
guard, I state rather the purpose for which they were left aboard than
the duty which they fulfilled. As a matter of fact, whilst the main body
of the Spaniards feasted and rioted ashore, the Spanish gunner and his
crew--who had so nobly done their duty and ensured the easy victory of
the day--were feasting on the gun-deck upon the wine and the fresh meats
fetched out to them from shore. Above, two sentinels only kept vigil, at
stem and stern. Nor were they as vigilant as they should have been, or
else they must have observed the two wherries that under cover of the
darkness came gliding from the wharf, with well-greased rowlocks, to
bring up in silence under the great ship's quarter.

From the gallery aft still hung the ladder by which Don Diego had
descended to the boat that had taken him ashore. The sentry on guard in
the stern, coming presently round this gallery, was suddenly confronted
by the black shadow of a man standing before him at the head of the
ladder.

“Who's there?” he asked, but without alarm, supposing it one of his
fellows.

“It is I,” softly answered Peter Blood in the fluent Castillan of which
he was master.

“Is it you, Pedro?” The Spaniard came a step nearer.

“Peter is my name; but I doubt I'll not be the Peter you're expecting.”

“How?” quoth the sentry, checking.

“This way,” said Mr. Blood.

The wooden taffrail was a low one, and the Spaniard was taken completely
by surprise. Save for the splash he made as he struck the water,
narrowly missing one of the crowded boats that waited under the counter,
not a sound announced his misadventure. Armed as he was with corselet,
cuissarts, and headpiece, he sank to trouble them no more.

“Whist!” hissed Mr. Blood to his waiting rebels-convict. “Come on, now,
and without noise.”

Within five minutes they had swarmed aboard, the entire twenty of them
overflowing from that narrow gallery and crouching on the quarter-deck
itself. Lights showed ahead. Under the great lantern in the prow they
saw the black figure of the other sentry, pacing on the forecastle. From
below sounds reached them of the orgy on the gun-deck: a rich male voice
was singing an obscene ballad to which the others chanted in chorus:

“Y estos son los usos de Castilla y de Leon!”

“From what I've seen to-day I can well believe it,” said Mr. Blood, and
whispered: “Forward--after me.”

Crouching low, they glided, noiseless as shadows, to the quarter-deck
rail, and thence slipped without sound down into the waist. Two thirds
of them were armed with muskets, some of which they had found in the
overseer's house, and others supplied from the secret hoard that Mr.
Blood had so laboriously assembled against the day of escape. The
remainder were equipped with knives and cutlasses.

In the vessel's waist they hung awhile, until Mr. Blood had satisfied
himself that no other sentinel showed above decks but that inconvenient
fellow in the prow. Their first attention must be for him. Mr. Blood,
himself, crept forward with two companions, leaving the others in the
charge of that Nathaniel Hagthorpe whose sometime commission in the
King's Navy gave him the best title to this office.

Mr. Blood's absence was brief. When he rejoined his comrades there was
no watch above the Spaniards' decks.

Meanwhile the revellers below continued to make merry at their ease
in the conviction of complete security. The garrison of Barbados was
overpowered and disarmed, and their companions were ashore in complete
possession of the town, glutting themselves hideously upon the fruits
of victory. What, then, was there to fear? Even when their quarters were
invaded and they found themselves surrounded by a score of wild,
hairy, half-naked men, who--save that they appeared once to have been
white--looked like a horde of savages, the Spaniards could not believe
their eyes.

Who could have dreamed that a handful of forgotten plantation-slaves
would have dared to take so much upon themselves?

The half-drunken Spaniards, their laughter suddenly quenched, the song
perishing on their lips, stared, stricken and bewildered at the levelled
muskets by which they were checkmated.

And then, from out of this uncouth pack of savages that beset them,
stepped a slim, tall fellow with light-blue eyes in a tawny face, eyes
in which glinted the light of a wicked humour. He addressed them in the
purest Castilian.

“You will save yourselves pain and trouble by regarding yourselves my
prisoners, and suffering yourselves to be quietly bestowed out of harm's
way.”

“Name of God!” swore the gunner, which did no justice at all to an
amazement beyond expression.

“If you please,” said Mr. Blood, and thereupon those gentlemen of Spain
were induced without further trouble beyond a musket prod or two to drop
through a scuttle to the deck below.

After that the rebels-convict refreshed themselves with the good things
in the consumption of which they had interrupted the Spaniards. To taste
palatable Christian food after months of salt fish and maize dumplings
was in itself a feast to these unfortunates. But there were no excesses.
Mr. Blood saw to that, although it required all the firmness of which he
was capable.

Dispositions were to be made without delay against that which must
follow before they could abandon themselves fully to the enjoyment of
their victory. This, after all, was no more than a preliminary skirmish,
although it was one that afforded them the key to the situation. It
remained to dispose so that the utmost profit might be drawn from it.
Those dispositions occupied some very considerable portion of the
night. But, at least, they were complete before the sun peeped over
the shoulder of Mount Hilibay to shed his light upon a day of some
surprises.

It was soon after sunrise that the rebel-convict who paced the
quarter-deck in Spanish corselet and headpiece, a Spanish musket on his
shoulder, announced the approach of a boat. It was Don Diego de Espinosa
y Valdez coming aboard with four great treasure-chests, containing each
twenty-five thousand pieces of eight, the ransom delivered to him at
dawn by Governor Steed. He was accompanied by his son, Don Esteban, and
by six men who took the oars.

Aboard the frigate all was quiet and orderly as it should be. She
rode at anchor, her larboard to the shore, and the main ladder on her
starboard side. Round to this came the boat with Don Diego and his
treasure. Mr. Blood had disposed effectively. It was not for nothing
that he had served under de Ruyter. The swings were waiting, and the
windlass manned. Below, a gun-crew held itself in readiness under the
command of Ogle, who--as I have said--had been a gunner in the Royal
Navy before he went in for politics and followed the fortunes of
the Duke of Monmouth. He was a sturdy, resolute fellow who inspired
confidence by the very confidence he displayed in himself.

Don Diego mounted the ladder and stepped upon the deck, alone, and
entirely unsuspicious. What should the poor man suspect?

Before he could even look round, and survey this guard drawn up to
receive him, a tap over the head with a capstan bar efficiently handled
by Hagthorpe put him to sleep without the least fuss.

He was carried away to his cabin, whilst the treasure-chests, handled
by the men he had left in the boat, were being hauled to the deck. That
being satisfactorily accomplished, Don Esteban and the fellows who had
manned the boat came up the ladder, one by one, to be handled with the
same quiet efficiency. Peter Blood had a genius for these things, and
almost, I suspect, an eye for the dramatic. Dramatic, certainly, was the
spectacle now offered to the survivors of the raid.

With Colonel Bishop at their head, and gout-ridden Governor Steed
sitting on the ruins of a wall beside him, they glumly watched the
departure of the eight boats containing the weary Spanish ruffians who
had glutted themselves with rapine, murder, and violences unspeakable.

They looked on, between relief at this departure of their remorseless
enemies, and despair at the wild ravages which, temporarily at least,
had wrecked the prosperity and happiness of that little colony.

The boats pulled away from the shore, with their loads of laughing,
jeering Spaniards, who were still flinging taunts across the water at
their surviving victims. They had come midway between the wharf and the
ship, when suddenly the air was shaken by the boom of a gun.

A round shot struck the water within a fathom of the foremost boat,
sending a shower of spray over its occupants. They paused at their oars,
astounded into silence for a moment. Then speech burst from them like
an explosion. Angrily voluble they anathematized this dangerous
carelessness on the part of their gunner, who should know better than
to fire a salute from a cannon loaded with shot. They were still cursing
him when a second shot, better aimed than the first, came to crumple one
of the boats into splinters, flinging its crew, dead and living, into
the water.

But if it silenced these, it gave tongue, still more angry, vehement,
and bewildered to the crews of the other seven boats. From each the
suspended oars stood out poised over the water, whilst on their feet in
the excitement the Spaniards screamed oaths at the ship, begging Heaven
and Hell to inform them what madman had been let loose among her guns.

Plump into their middle came a third shot, smashing a second boat with
fearful execution. Followed again a moment of awful silence, then among
those Spanish pirates all was gibbering and jabbering and splashing of
oars, as they attempted to pull in every direction at once. Some were
for going ashore, others for heading straight to the vessel and there
discovering what might be amiss. That something was very gravely amiss
there could be no further doubt, particularly as whilst they discussed
and fumed and cursed two more shots came over the water to account for
yet a third of their boats.

The resolute Ogle was making excellent practice, and fully justifying
his claims to know something of gunnery. In their consternation the
Spaniards had simplified his task by huddling their boats together.

After the fourth shot, opinion was no longer divided amongst them. As
with one accord they went about, or attempted to do so, for before they
had accomplished it two more of their boats had been sunk.

The three boats that remained, without concerning themselves with their
more unfortunate fellows, who were struggling in the water, headed back
for the wharf at speed.

If the Spaniards understood nothing of all this, the forlorn islanders
ashore understood still less, until to help their wits they saw the flag
of Spain come down from the mainmast of the Cinco Llagas, and the
flag of England soar to its empty place. Even then some bewilderment
persisted, and it was with fearful eyes that they observed the return
of their enemies, who might vent upon them the ferocity aroused by these
extraordinary events.

Ogle, however, continued to give proof that his knowledge of gunnery was
not of yesterday. After the fleeing Spaniards went his shots. The last
of their boats flew into splinters as it touched the wharf, and its
remains were buried under a shower of loosened masonry.

That was the end of this pirate crew, which not ten minutes ago had
been laughingly counting up the pieces of eight that would fall to
the portion of each for his share in that act of villainy. Close upon
threescore survivors contrived to reach the shore. Whether they had
cause for congratulation, I am unable to say in the absence of any
records in which their fate may be traced. That lack of records is in
itself eloquent. We know that they were made fast as they landed, and
considering the offence they had given I am not disposed to doubt that
they had every reason to regret the survival.

The mystery of the succour that had come at the eleventh hour to
wreak vengeance upon the Spaniards, and to preserve for the island the
extortionate ransom of a hundred thousand pieces of eight, remained yet
to be probed. That the Cinco Llagas was now in friendly hands could no
longer be doubted after the proofs it had given. But who, the people
of Bridgetown asked one another, were the men in possession of her, and
whence had they come? The only possible assumption ran the truth very
closely. A resolute party of islanders must have got aboard during
the night, and seized the ship. It remained to ascertain the precise
identity of these mysterious saviours, and do them fitting honour.

Upon this errand--Governor Steed's condition not permitting him to go
in person--went Colonel Bishop as the Governor's deputy, attended by two
officers.

As he stepped from the ladder into the vessel's waist, the Colonel
beheld there, beside the main hatch, the four treasure-chests, the
contents of one of which had been contributed almost entirely by
himself. It was a gladsome spectacle, and his eyes sparkled in beholding
it.

Ranged on either side, athwart the deck, stood a score of men in two
well-ordered files, with breasts and backs of steel, polished Spanish
morions on their heads, overshadowing their faces, and muskets ordered
at their sides.

Colonel Bishop could not be expected to recognize at a glance in these
upright, furbished, soldierly figures the ragged, unkempt scarecrows
that but yesterday had been toiling in his plantations. Still less could
he be expected to recognize at once the courtly gentleman who advanced
to greet him--a lean, graceful gentleman, dressed in the Spanish
fashion, all in black with silver lace, a gold-hilted sword dangling
beside him from a gold embroidered baldrick, a broad castor with a
sweeping plume set above carefully curled ringlets of deepest black.

“Be welcome aboard the Cinco Llagas, Colonel, darling,” a voice vaguely
familiar addressed the planter. “We've made the best of the Spaniards'
wardrobe in honour of this visit, though it was scarcely yourself we had
dared hope to expect. You find yourself among friends--old friends of
yours, all.” The Colonel stared in stupefaction. Mr. Blood tricked out
in all this splendour--indulging therein his natural taste--his face
carefully shaven, his hair as carefully dressed, seemed transformed into
a younger man. The fact is he looked no more than the thirty-three years
he counted to his age.

“Peter Blood!” It was an ejaculation of amazement. Satisfaction followed
swiftly. “Was it you, then...?”

“Myself it was--myself and these, my good friends and yours.” Mr. Blood
tossed back the fine lace from his wrist, to wave a hand towards the
file of men standing to attention there.

The Colonel looked more closely. “Gad's my life!” he crowed on a note
of foolish jubilation. “And it was with these fellows that you took
the Spaniard and turned the tables on those dogs! Oddswounds! It was
heroic!”

“Heroic, is it? Bedad, it's epic! Ye begin to perceive the breadth and
depth of my genius.”

Colonel Bishop sat himself down on the hatch-coaming, took off his broad
hat, and mopped his brow.

“Y'amaze me!” he gasped. “On my soul, y'amaze me! To have recovered the
treasure and to have seized this fine ship and all she'll hold! It will
be something to set against the other losses we have suffered. As Gad's
my life, you deserve well for this.”

“I am entirely of your opinion.”

“Damme! You all deserve well, and damme, you shall find me grateful.”

“That's as it should be,” said Mr. Blood. “The question is how well we
deserve, and how grateful shall we find you?”

Colonel Bishop considered him. There was a shadow of surprise in his
face.

“Why--his excellency shall write home an account of your exploit, and
maybe some portion of your sentences shall be remitted.”

“The generosity of King James is well known,” sneered Nathaniel
Hagthorpe, who was standing by, and amongst the ranged rebels-convict
some one ventured to laugh.

Colonel Bishop started up. He was pervaded by the first pang of
uneasiness. It occurred to him that all here might not be as friendly as
appeared.

“And there's another matter,” Mr. Blood resumed. “There's a matter of
a flogging that's due to me. Ye're a man of your word in such matters,
Colonel--if not perhaps in others--and ye said, I think, that ye'd not
leave a square inch of skin on my back.”

The planter waved the matter aside. Almost it seemed to offend him.

“Tush! Tush! After this splendid deed of yours, do you suppose I can be
thinking of such things?”

“I'm glad ye feel like that about it. But I'm thinking it's mighty lucky
for me the Spaniards didn't come to-day instead of yesterday, or it's
in the same plight as Jeremy Pitt I'd be this minute. And in that case
where was the genius that would have turned the tables on these rascally
Spaniards?”

“Why speak of it now?”

Mr. Blood resumed: “ye'll please to understand that I must, Colonel,
darling. Ye've worked a deal of wickedness and cruelty in your time, and
I want this to be a lesson to you, a lesson that ye'll remember--for
the sake of others who may come after us. There's Jeremy up there in the
round-house with a back that's every colour of the rainbow; and the poor
lad'll not be himself again for a month. And if it hadn't been for the
Spaniards maybe it's dead he'd be by now, and maybe myself with him.”

Hagthorpe lounged forward. He was a fairly tall, vigorous man with a
clear-cut, attractive face which in itself announced his breeding.

“Why will you be wasting words on the hog?” wondered that sometime
officer in the Royal Navy. “Fling him overboard and have done with him.”

The Colonel's eyes bulged in his head. “What the devil do you mean?” he
blustered.

“It's the lucky man ye are entirely, Colonel, though ye don't guess the
source of your good fortune.”

And now another intervened--the brawny, one-eyed Wolverstone, less
mercifully disposed than his more gentlemanly fellow-convict.

“String him up from the yardarm,” he cried, his deep voice harsh and
angry, and more than one of the slaves standing to their arms made echo.

Colonel Bishop trembled. Mr. Blood turned. He was quite calm.

“If you please, Wolverstone,” said he, “I conduct affairs in my own way.
That is the pact. You'll please to remember it.” His eyes looked along
the ranks, making it plain that he addressed them all. “I desire that
Colonel Bishop should have his life. One reason is that I require him as
a hostage. If ye insist on hanging him, ye'll have to hang me with him,
or in the alternative I'll go ashore.”

He paused. There was no answer. But they stood hang-dog and
half-mutinous before him, save Hagthorpe, who shrugged and smiled
wearily.

Mr. Blood resumed: “Ye'll please to understand that aboard a ship there
is one captain. So.” He swung again to the startled Colonel. “Though
I promise you your life, I must--as you've heard--keep you aboard as a
hostage for the good behaviour of Governor Steed and what's left of the
fort until we put to sea.”

“Until you...” Horror prevented Colonel Bishop from echoing the
remainder of that incredible speech.

“Just so,” said Peter Blood, and he turned to the officers who had
accompanied the Colonel. “The boat is waiting, gentlemen. You'll have
heard what I said. Convey it with my compliments to his excellency.”

“But, sir...” one of them began.

“There is no more to be said, gentlemen. My name is Blood--Captain
Blood, if you please, of this ship the Cinco Llagas, taken as a prize of
war from Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez, who is my prisoner aboard.
You are to understand that I have turned the tables on more than the
Spaniards. There's the ladder. You'll find it more convenient than being
heaved over the side, which is what'll happen if you linger.”

They went, though not without some hustling, regardless of the
bellowings of Colonel Bishop, whose monstrous rage was fanned by terror
at finding himself at the mercy of these men of whose cause to hate him
he was very fully conscious.

A half-dozen of them, apart from Jeremy Pitt, who was utterly
incapacitated for the present, possessed a superficial knowledge
of seamanship. Hagthorpe, although he had been a fighting officer,
untrained in navigation, knew how to handle a ship, and under his
directions they set about getting under way.

The anchor catted, and the mainsail unfurled, they stood out for the
open before a gentle breeze, without interference from the fort.

As they were running close to the headland east of the bay, Peter
Blood returned to the Colonel, who, under guard and panic-stricken, had
dejectedly resumed his seat on the coamings of the main batch.

“Can ye swim, Colonel?”

Colonel Bishop looked up. His great face was yellow and seemed in that
moment of a preternatural flabbiness; his beady eyes were beadier than
ever.

“As your doctor, now, I prescribe a swim to cool the excessive heat
of your humours.” Blood delivered the explanation pleasantly, and,
receiving still no answer from the Colonel, continued: “It's a mercy for
you I'm not by nature as bloodthirsty as some of my friends here. And
it's the devil's own labour I've had to prevail upon them not to be
vindictive. I doubt if ye're worth the pains I've taken for you.”

He was lying. He had no doubt at all. Had he followed his own wishes and
instincts, he would certainly have strung the Colonel up, and accounted
it a meritorious deed. It was the thought of Arabella Bishop that had
urged him to mercy, and had led him to oppose the natural vindictiveness
of his fellow-slaves until he had been in danger of precipitating a
mutiny. It was entirely to the fact that the Colonel was her uncle,
although he did not even begin to suspect such a cause, that he owed
such mercy as was now being shown him.

“You shall have a chance to swim for it,” Peter Blood continued. “It's
not above a quarter of a mile to the headland yonder, and with ordinary
luck ye should manage it. Faith, you're fat enough to float. Come on!
Now, don't be hesitating or it's a long voyage ye'll be going with us,
and the devil knows what may happen to you. You're not loved any more
than you deserve.”

Colonel Bishop mastered himself, and rose. A merciless despot, who had
never known the need for restraint in all these years, he was doomed by
ironic fate to practise restraint in the very moment when his feelings
had reached their most violent intensity.

Peter Blood gave an order. A plank was run out over the gunwale, and
lashed down.

“If you please, Colonel,” said he, with a graceful flourish of
invitation.

The Colonel looked at him, and there was hell in his glance. Then,
taking his resolve, and putting the best face upon it, since no other
could help him here, he kicked off his shoes, peeled off his fine coat
of biscuit-coloured taffetas, and climbed upon the plank.

A moment he paused, steadied by a hand that clutched the ratlines,
looking down in terror at the green water rushing past some
five-and-twenty feet below.

“Just take a little walk, Colonel, darling,” said a smooth, mocking
voice behind him.

Still clinging, Colonel Bishop looked round in hesitation, and saw the
bulwarks lined with swarthy faces--the faces of men that as lately as
yesterday would have turned pale under his frown, faces that were now
all wickedly agrin.

For a moment rage stamped out his fear. He cursed them aloud venomously
and incoherently, then loosed his hold and stepped out upon the plank.
Three steps he took before he lost his balance and went tumbling into
the green depths below.

When he came to the surface again, gasping for air, the Cinco Llagas
was already some furlongs to leeward. But the roaring cheer of mocking
valediction from the rebels-convict reached him across the water, to
drive the iron of impotent rage deeper into his soul.



CHAPTER X. DON DIEGO


Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez awoke, and with languid eyes in aching
head, he looked round the cabin, which was flooded with sunlight from
the square windows astern. Then he uttered a moan, and closed his eyes
again, impelled to this by the monstrous ache in his head. Lying thus,
he attempted to think, to locate himself in time and space. But between
the pain in his head and the confusion in his mind, he found coherent
thought impossible.

An indefinite sense of alarm drove him to open his eyes again, and once
more to consider his surroundings.

There could be no doubt that he lay in the great cabin of his own
ship, the Cinco Llagas, so that his vague disquiet must be, surely,
ill-founded. And yet, stirrings of memory coming now to the assistance
of reflection, compelled him uneasily to insist that here something was
not as it should be. The low position of the sun, flooding the cabin
with golden light from those square ports astern, suggested to him at
first that it was early morning, on the assumption that the vessel was
headed westward. Then the alternative occurred to him. They might be
sailing eastward, in which case the time of day would be late afternoon.
That they were sailing he could feel from the gentle forward heave of
the vessel under him. But how did they come to be sailing, and he, the
master, not to know whether their course lay east or west, not to be
able to recollect whither they were bound?

His mind went back over the adventure of yesterday, if of yesterday it
was. He was clear on the matter of the easily successful raid upon the
Island of Barbados; every detail stood vividly in his memory up to the
moment at which, returning aboard, he had stepped on to his own deck
again. There memory abruptly and inexplicably ceased.

He was beginning to torture his mind with conjecture, when the door
opened, and to Don Diego's increasing mystification he beheld his best
suit of clothes step into the cabin. It was a singularly elegant and
characteristically Spanish suit of black taffetas with silver lace that
had been made for him a year ago in Cadiz, and he knew each detail of it
so well that it was impossible he could now be mistaken.

The suit paused to close the door, then advanced towards the couch on
which Don Diego was extended, and inside the suit came a tall, slender
gentleman of about Don Diego's own height and shape. Seeing the wide,
startled eyes of the Spaniard upon him, the gentleman lengthened his
stride.

“Awake, eh?” said he in Spanish.

The recumbent man looked up bewildered into a pair of light-blue eyes
that regarded him out of a tawny, sardonic face set in a cluster of
black ringlets. But he was too bewildered to make any answer.

The stranger's fingers touched the top of Don Diego's head, whereupon
Don Diego winced and cried out in pain.

“Tender, eh?” said the stranger. He took Don Diego's wrist between thumb
and second finger. And then, at last, the intrigued Spaniard spoke.

“Are you a doctor?”

“Among other things.” The swarthy gentleman continued his study of the
patient's pulse. “Firm and regular,” he announced at last, and dropped
the wrist. “You've taken no great harm.”

Don Diego struggled up into a sitting position on the red velvet couch.

“Who the devil are you?” he asked. “And what the devil are you doing in
my clothes and aboard my ship?”

The level black eyebrows went up, a faint smile curled the lips of the
long mouth.

“You are still delirious, I fear. This is not your ship. This is my
ship, and these are my clothes.”

“Your ship?” quoth the other, aghast, and still more aghast he added:
“Your clothes? But... then....” Wildly his eyes looked about him. They
scanned the cabin once again, scrutinizing each familiar object. “Am I
mad?” he asked at last. “Surely this ship is the Cinco Llagas?”

“The Cinco Llagas it is.”

“Then....” The Spaniard broke off. His glance grew still more troubled.
“Valga me Dios!” he cried out, like a man in anguish. “Will you tell me
also that you are Don Diego de Espinosa?”

“Oh, no, my name is Blood--Captain Peter Blood. This ship, like this
handsome suit of clothes, is mine by right of conquest. Just as you, Don
Diego, are my prisoner.”

Startling as was the explanation, yet it proved soothing to Don Diego,
being so much less startling than the things he was beginning to
imagine.

“But... Are you not Spanish, then?”

“You flatter my Castilian accent. I have the honour to be Irish. You
were thinking that a miracle had happened. So it has--a miracle wrought
by my genius, which is considerable.”

Succinctly now Captain Blood dispelled the mystery by a relation of
the facts. It was a narrative that painted red and white by turns the
Spaniard's countenance. He put a hand to the back of his head, and there
discovered, in confirmation of the story, a lump as large as a pigeon's
egg. Lastly, he stared wild-eyed at the sardonic Captain Blood.

“And my son? What of my son?” he cried out. “He was in the boat that
brought me aboard.”

“Your son is safe; he and the boat's crew together with your gunner and
his men are snugly in irons under hatches.”

Don Diego sank back on the couch, his glittering dark eyes fixed upon
the tawny face above him. He composed himself. After all, he possessed
the stoicism proper to his desperate trade. The dice had fallen against
him in this venture. The tables had been turned upon him in the very
moment of success. He accepted the situation with the fortitude of a
fatalist.

With the utmost calm he enquired:

“And now, Senior Capitan?”

“And now,” said Captain Blood--to give him the title he had
assumed--“being a humane man, I am sorry to find that ye're not dead
from the tap we gave you. For it means that you'll be put to the trouble
of dying all over again.”

“Ah!” Don Diego drew a deep breath. “But is that necessary?” he asked,
without apparent perturbation.

Captain Blood's blue eyes approved his bearing. “Ask yourself,” said he.
“Tell me, as an experienced and bloody pirate, what in my place would
you do, yourself?”

“Ah, but there is a difference.” Don Diego sat up to argue the matter.
“It lies in the fact that you boast yourself a humane man.”

Captain Blood perched himself on the edge of the long oak table. “But
I am not a fool,” said he, “and I'll not allow a natural Irish
sentimentality to stand in the way of my doing what is necessary and
proper. You and your ten surviving scoundrels are a menace on this ship.
More than that, she is none so well found in water and provisions. True,
we are fortunately a small number, but you and y

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