THE ADDRESS OF THE LETTER
There was hard and ghastly work that day when the Revenge was cleared
after action, and there was lively and interesting work on board the
Badger when Blackbeard and his officers went over the captured vessel to
discover what new possessions they had won.
At first Blackbeard had thought to establish himself upon the corvette
and abandon the Revenge. It would have been such a grand thing to
scourge the seas in a British man-of-war with the Jolly Roger floating
over her. But this would have been too dangerous; the combined naval
force of England in American waters would have been united to put down
such presumption. So the wary pirate curbed his ambition.
Everything portable and valuable was stripped from the Badger--her guns
would have been taken had it been practicable to ship them to the
Revenge in a rising sea--and then she was scuttled, fired, and cast
off, and with her dead on board she passed out of commission in the
royal navy.
During the turmoil, the horror and the bringing aboard of pillage,
Dickory Charter had kept close below deck, his face in his hands and his
heart almost broken. It is so easy for young hearts to almost break.
When he had seen the British ship come sailing down upon them, hope had
sprung up brightly in his heart; now there was a chance of his escaping
from this hell of the waves. When the Revenge should be taken he would
rush to the British captain, or any one in authority, and tell his tale.
It would be believed, he doubted not; even his uniform would help to
prove he was no pirate; he would be taken away, he would reach Jamaica;
he would see Kate; he would carry to her the great news of her father.
After that his life could take care of itself.
But now the blackness of darkness was over everything. Those who were to
have been his friends had vanished, the ship which was to have given him
a new life had disappeared forever. He was on board the pirate ship,
bound for the shores of England--horrible shores to him--bound to the
shores of England and to Blackbeard's Eliza!
He was not a fool, this Dickory; he had no unwarrantable and romantic
fears that in these enlightened days one man could say to another, "Go
you, and marry the woman I have chosen for you." There was nothing silly
or cowardly about him, but he knew Blackbeard.
Not one ray of hope thrust itself through his hands into his brain. Hope
had gone, gone to the bottom, and he was on his storm-tossed way to the
waters of another continent.
But in the midst of his despair Dickory never thought of freeing
himself, by a sudden bound, of the world and his woes. So long as Kate
should live he must live, even if it were to prove to himself, and to
himself only, how faithful to her he could be.
It was dark when men came tumbling below, throwing themselves into
hammocks and bunks, and Dickory prepared to turn in. If sleep should
come and without dreams, it would be greater gain than bags of gold. As
he took off his coat, the letter of the English captain dropped from his
breast. Until then he had forgotten it, but now he remembered it as a
sacred trust. The dull light of the lantern barely enabled him to
discern objects about him, but he stuck the letter into a crack in the
woodwork where in the morning he would see it and take proper care of
it.
Soon sleep came, but not without dreams. He dreamed that he was rowing
Kate on the river at Bridgetown, and that she told him in a low sweet
voice, with a smile on her lips and her eyes tenderly upturned, that
she would like to row thus with him forever.
Early in the morning, through an open port-hole, the light of the
eastern sun stole into this abode of darkness and sin and threw itself
upon the red-stained letter sticking in the crack of the woodwork.
Presently Dickory opened his eyes, and the first thing they fell upon
was that letter. On the side of the folded sheet he could see the
superscription, boldly but irregularly written: "Miss Kate Bonnet,
Kingston, Ja."
Dickory sat upright, his eyes hard-fixed and burning. How long he sat he
knew not. How long his brain burned inwardly, as his eyes burned
outwardly, he knew not. The noise of the watch going on deck roused him,
and in a moment he had the letter in his hands.
All that day Dickory Charter was worth nothing to anybody. Blackbeard
swore at him and pushed him aside. The young fellow could not even count
the doubloons in a bag.
"Go to!" cried the pirate, blacker and more fantastically horrible than
ever, for his bare left shoulder was bound with a scarf of silk and his
great arm was streaked and bedabbled with his blood, "you are the most
cursed coward I have met with in all my days at sea. So frightened out
of your wits by a lively brush as that of yesterday! Too scared to count
gold! Never saw I that before. One might be too scared to pray, but to
count gold! Ha! ha!" and the bold pirate laughed a merry roar. He was
in good spirits; he had captured and sunk an English man-of-war; sunk
her with her English ensign floating above her. How it would have
overjoyed him if all the ships, little and big, that plied the Spanish
Main could have seen him sink that man-of-war. He was a merry man that
morning, the great Blackbeard, triumphant in victory, glowing with the
king's brandy, and with so little pain from that cut in his shoulder
that he could waste no thought upon it.
"But Eliza will like it well," continued the merry pirate; "she will
lead you with a string, be you bold or craven, and the less you pull at
it the easier it will be for my brave girl. Ah! she will dance with joy
when I tell her what a frightened rabbit of a husband it is that I give
her. Now get away somewhere, and let your face rid itself of its
paleness; and should you find a dead man lying where he has been
overlooked, come and tell me and I will have him put aside. You must not
be frightened any more or Eliza may find that you have not left even the
spirit of a rabbit."
All day Dickory sat silent, his misery pinned into the breast of his
coat. "Miss Kate Bonnet, Kingston, Ja."--and this on a letter written in
the dying moments of an English captain, a high and mighty captain who
must have loved as few men love, to write that letter, his life's blood
running over the paper as he wrote. And could a man love thus if he
were not loved? That was the terrible question.
Sometimes his mind became quiet enough for him to think coherently, then
it was easy enough for him to understand everything. Kate had been a
long time in Jamaica; she had met many people; she had met this man,
this noble, handsome man. Dickory had watched him with glowing
admiration as he stood up before Blackbeard, fighting like the champion
of all good against the hairy monster who struck his blows for all that
was base and wicked.
How Dickory's young heart had gone out in sympathy and fellowship
towards the brave English captain! How he had hoped that the next of his
quick, sharp lunges might slit the black heart of the pirate! How he had
almost wept when the noble Englishman went down! And now it made him
shudder to think his heart had stood side by side with the heart of
Kate's lover! He had sworn to deliver the letter of that lover, and he
would do it. More cruel than the bloodiest pirate was the fate that
forced him thus to bear the death-warrant of his own young life.