“They shall be avenged,” he declared, “to-morrow! I shall seek out the
senorita. I shall find her. I shall find her! For me she was destined by
my venerable friend.”
He snatched a black velvet jacket from the table and put it on.
“Afterwards, Señor, you shall relate. Have no fear. I shall save you. I
shall save all men oppressed by this scourge of the land. For the moment
afford me the opportunity to meditate.” He crossed his arms, and dropped
his round head. “Alas, yes!” he meditated.
Suddenly he waved towards the door. “Señor,” he said swiftly, “I must
have air; I stifle. Come with me to the corridor....”
He went towards the window giving on to the _patio_; he stood in the
shadow, his arms folded, his head hanging dejectedly. At the moment it
grew suddenly dark, as if a veil had been thrown over a lamp. The sun
had set outside the walls. A drum began to beat. Down below in the
obscurity the crowd separated into three strings and moved slowly
towards the barren tunnels. Under our feet the white shirts disappeared;
the ragged crowd gravitated to the left; the small children strung into
the square cage-door. The drum beat again and the crowd hurried. Then
there was a clang of closing grilles and lights began to show behind the
bars from deep recesses. In a little time there was a repulsive hash of
heads and limbs to be seen under the arches vanishing a long way within,
and a little light washed across the gravel of the _patio_ from within.
“Señor,” the Cuban said suddenly, “I will pronounce his panegyric.
He was a man of a great gentleness, of an inevitable nobility, of an
invariable courtesy. Where, in this degenerate age, shall we find the
like!” He stopped to breathe a sound of intense exasperation.
“When I think of these Irish,...” he said. “Of that O’Brien....”
A servant was arranging the shining room that we had left. Salazar
interrupted himself to give some orders about a banquet, then returned
to me. “I tell you I am here for introducing my knife to the spine of
some sort of Madrid _embustero_, a man who was insolent to my _amiga_
Clara. Do you believe that for that this O’Brien, by the influence of
the priests whose soles he licks with his tongue, has had me inclosed
for many months? Because he feared me! Aha! I was about to expose him to
the noble don who is now dead! I was about to wed the Señorita who
has disappeared. But to-morrow... I shall expose his intrigue to the
Captain-General. You, Señor, shall be my witness! I extend my protection
to you....” He crossed his arms and spoke with much deliberation.
“Señor, this Irishman incommodes me, Don Vincente Salazar de Valdepeñas
y Forli....” He nodded his head expressively. “Señor, we offered these
Irish the shelter of our robe for that your Government was making
martyrs of them who were good Christians, and it behoves us to act in
despite of your Government, who are heretics and not to be tolerated
upon God’s Christian earth. But, Señor, if they incommoded your
Government as they do us, I do not wonder that there was a desire to
remove them. Señor, the life of that man is not worth the price of eight
mules, which is the price I have paid for my release. I might walk free
at this moment, but it is not fitting that I should slink away under
cover of darkness. I shall go out in the daylight with my carriage. And
I will have an offering to show my friends who, like me, are incommoded
by this....” The man was a monomaniac; but it struck me that, if I had
been O’Brien, I should have felt uncomfortable.
In the dark of the corridor a long shape appeared, lounging. The Cuban
beside me started hospitably forward.
“_Vamos_,” he said briskly; “to the banquet....” He waved his hand
towards the shining door and stood aside. We entered.
The other man was undoubtedly the Nova Scotian mate of the _Thames_, the
man who had dissuaded me from following Carlos on the day we sailed into
Kingston Harbour. He was chewing a toothpick, and at the ruminant motion
of his knife-jaws I seemed to see him, sitting naked to the waist in
his bunk, instead of upright there in red trousers and a blue shirt--an
immense lank-length of each. I pieced his history together in a sort of
flash. He was the true Nikola el Escoces; his name was Nichols, and he
came from Nova Scotia. He had been the chief of O’Brien’s _Lugareños_.
He surveyed me now with a twinkle in his eyes, his yellow jaws as
shiny-shaven as of old; his arms as much like a semaphore. He said
mockingly:
“So you went there, after all?”
But the Cuban was pressing us towards his banquet; there was _gaspacho_
in silver plates, and a man in livery holding something in a napkin. It
worried me. We surveyed each other in silence. I wondered what Nichols
knew; what it would be safe to tell him; how much he could help me? One
or other of these men undoubtedly might. The Cuban was an imbecile; but
he might have some influence--and if he really were going out on the
morrow, and really did go to the Captain-General, he certainly could
further his own revenge on O’Brien by helping me.... But as for
Nichols....
Salazar began to tell a long, exaggerated story about his cook, whom he
had imported from Paris.
“Think,” he said; “I bring the fool two thousand miles--and then--not
even able to begin on a land-crab. A fool!”
The Nova Scotian cast an uninterested side glance at him, and said in
English, which Salazar did not understand:
“So you went there, after all? And now _he’s_ got you.” I did not answer
him. “I know all about you,” he added.
“It’s more than I do about you,” I said.
He rose and suddenly jerked the door open, peered on each side of the
corridor, and then sat down again.
“I’m not afraid to tell,” he said defiantly. “I’m not afraid of
anything. I’m safe.”
The Cuban said to me in Spanish: “This senor is my friend. Everyone who
hates that devil is my friend.”
“I’m safe,” Nichols repeated. “I know too much about our friend the
raparee.” He lowered his voice. “They say you’re to be given up for
piracy, eh?” His eyes had an extraordinarily anxious leer. “You are now,
eh? For how much? Can’t you tell a man? We’re in the same boat! I kin
help you!”
Salazar accidentally knocked a silver goblet off the table and, at the
sound, Nichols sprang half off his chair. He glared in a wild stare
around him then grasped at a flagon of _aguardiente_ and drank.
“I’m not afraid of any damn thing” he said. “I’ve got a hold on that
man. He dursen’t give me up. I kin see! He’s going to give you up and
say you’re responsible for it all.”
“I don’t know what he’s going to do,” I answered.
“Will you not, Señor,” Salazar said suddenly, “relate, if you can
without distress, the heroic death of that venerated man?”
I glanced involuntarily at Nichols. “The distress,” I said, “would be
very great. I was Don Balthasar’s kinsman. The Señor O’Brien had a great
fear of my influence in the Casa. It was in trying to take me away
that Don Balthasar, who defended me, was slain by the _Lugareños_ of
O’Brien.”
Salazar said, “Aha! Aha! We are kindred spirits. Hated and loved by the
same souls. This fiend, Señor. And then....”
“I escaped by sea--in an open boat, in the confusion. When I reached
Havana, the _Juez_ had me arrested.”
Salazar raised both hands; his gestures, made for large, grave men, were
comic in him. They reduced Spanish manners to absurdity. He said:
“That man dies. That man dies. To-morrow I go to the Captain-General.
He shall hear this story of yours, Señor. He shall know of these
machinations which bring honest men to this place. We are a band of
brothers....”
“That’s what I say.” Nichols leered at me. “We’re all in the same boat.”
I expect he noticed that I wasn’t moved by his declaration. He said,
still in English:
“Let us be open. Let’s have a council of war. This O’Brien hates me
because I wouldn’t fire on my own countrymen.” He glanced furtively at
me. “I wouldn’t,” he asserted; “he wanted me to fire into their boats;
but I wouldn’t. Don’t you believe the tales they tell about me! They
tell worse about you. Who says I would fire on my countrymen? Where’s
the man who says it?” He had been drinking more brandy and glared
ferociously at me. “None of your tricks, my hearty,” he said. “None of
your getting out and spreading tales. O’Brien’s my friend; he’ll never
give me up. He dursen’t. I know too much. You’re a pirate! No doubt it
was you who fired into them boats. By God I’ll be witness against you if
they give me up. I’ll show you up.”
All the while the little Cuban talked swiftly and with a saturnine
enthusiasm. He passed the wine rapidly.
“My own countrymen!” Nichols shouted. “Never! I shot a Yankee
lieutenant--Allen he was--with my own hand. That’s another thing. I’m
not a man to trifle with. No, sir. Don’t you try it.... Why, I’ve papers
that would hang O’Brien. I sent them home to Halifax. I know a trick
worth his. By God, let him try it! Let him only try it. He dursen’t give
me up....”
The man in livery came in to snuff the candles. Nichols sprang from his
seat in a panic and drew his knife with frantic haste. He continued,
glaring at me from the wall, the knife in his hand:
“Don’t you dream of tricks. I’ve cut more throats than you’ve kissed
gals in your little life.”
Salazar himself drew an immense pointed knife with a shagreen hilt. He
kissed it rapturously.
“Aha!... Aha!” he said, “bear this kiss into his ribs at the back.” His
eyes glistened with this mania. “I swear it; when I next see this dog;
this friend of the priests.” He threw the knife on the table. “Look,” he
said, “was ever steel truer or more thirsty?”
“Don’t you make no mistake,” Nichols continued to me. “Don’t you think
to presume. O’Brien’s my friend. I’m here snug and out of the way of the
old fool of an admiral. That’s why he’s kept waiting off the Morro. When
he goes, I walk out free. Don’t you try to frighten me. I’m not a man to
be frightened.”
Salazar bubbled: “Ah, but now the wine flows and is red. We are a band
of brothers, each loving the other. Brothers, let us drink.”
The air of close confinement, the blaze, the feel of the jail, pressed
upon me, and I felt sore, suddenly, at having eaten and drunk with those
two. The idea of Seraphina, asleep perhaps, crying perhaps, something
pure and distant and very blissful, came in upon me irresistibly.
The little Cuban said, “We have had a very delightful conversation. It
is very plain this O’Brien must die.”
I rose to my feet. “Gentlemen,” I said in Spanish, “I am very weary; I
will go and sleep in the corridor.”
The Cuban sprang towards me with an immense anxiety of hospitableness.
I was to sleep on his couch, the couch of cloth of gold. It was
impossible, it was insulting, that I should think of sleeping in the
corridor. He thrust me gently down upon it, making with his plump hands
the motions of smoothing it to receive me. I lay down and turned my face
to the wall.
It wasn’t possible to sleep, even though the little Cuban, with a tender
solicitude, went round the walls blowing out the candles. He might be
useful to me, might really explain matters to the Captain-General, or
might even, as a last resource, take a letter from me to the British
Consul. But I should have to be alone with him. Nichols was an
abominable scoundrel; bloodthirsty to the defenceless; a liar; craven
before the ghost of a threat. No doubt O’Brien did not want to give him
up. Perhaps he _had_ papers. And no doubt, once he could find a trace of
Seraphina’s whereabouts, O’Brien would give me up. All I could do was to
hope for a gain of time. And yet, if I gained time, it could only mean
that I should in the end be given up to the admiral.
And Seraphina’s whereabouts. It came over me lamentably that I myself
did not know. The _Lion_ might have sailed. It was possible. She might
be at sea. Then, perhaps, my only chance of ever seeing her again lay in
my being given up to the admiral, to stand in England a trial, perhaps
for piracy, perhaps for treason. I might meet her only in England, after
many years of imprisonment. It wasn’t possible. I would not believe in
the possibility. How I loved her! How wildly, how irrationally--this
woman of another race, of another world, bound to me by sufferings
together, by joys together. Irrationally! Looking at the matter now,
the reason is plain enough. Before then I had not lived. I had only
waited--for her and for what she stood for. It was in my blood, in my
race, in my tradition, in my training. We, all of us for generations,
had made for efficiency, for drill, for restraint. Our Romance was just
this very Spanish contrast, this obliquity of vision, this slight
tilt of the convex mirror that shaped the same world so differently to
onlookers at different points of its circle.
I could feel a little of it even then, when there was only the merest
chance of my going back to England and getting back towards our old
position on the rim of the mirror. The deviousness, the wayward passion,
even the sempiternal abuses of the land were already beginning to take
the aspect of something like quaint impotence. It was charm that, now I
was on the road away, was becoming apparent. The inconveniences of life,
the physical discomforts, the smells of streets, the heat, dropped into
the background. I felt that I did not want to go away, irrevocably from
a land sanctioned by her presence, her young life. I turned uneasily
to the other side. At the heavy black table, in the light of a single
candle, the Cuban and the Nova Scotian were discussing, their heads
close together.
“I tell you no,” Nichols was saying in a fluent, abominable, literal
translation into Spanish. “Take the knife so... thumb upwards. Stab down
in the soft between the neck and the shoulder-blade. You get right into
the lungs with the point. I’ve tried it: ten times. Never stick the
back. The chances are he moves, and you hit a bone. There are no bones
there. It’s the way they kill pigs in New Jersey.”
The Cuban bent his brows as if he were reflecting over a chessboard.
“Ma....” he pondered. His knife was lying on the table. He unsheathed
it, then got up, and moved behind the seated Nova Scotian.
“You say... there?” he asked, pressing his little finger at the base of
Nichols’ skinny column of a neck. “And then...” He measured the length
of the knife on Nichols’s back twice with elaborate care, breathing
through his nostrils. Then he said with a convinced, musing air, “It is
true. It would go down into the lungs.”
“And there are arteries and things,” Nichols said.
“Yes, yes,” the Cuban answered, sheathing the knife and thrusting it
into his belt.
“With a knife that length it’s perfect.” Nichols waved his shadowy hand
towards Salazar’s scarf. Salazar moved off a little.
“I see the advantages,” he said. “No crying out, because of the blood in
the lungs. I thank yous Señor Escoces.”
Nichols rose, lurching to his full height, and looked in my direction. I
closed my eyes. I did not wish him to talk to me. I heard him say:
“Well, _hasta mas ver_. I shall get away from here. Good-night.”
He swayed an immense shadow through the door. Salazar took the candle
and followed him into the corridor.
Yes, that was it, why she was so great a part, a whole wall, a whole
beam of my life’s house. I saw her suddenly in the blackness, her full
red lips, her quivering nostrils, the curve of her breasts, her lithe
movements from the hips, the way she set her feet down, the white flower
waxen in the darkness of her hair, and the robin-wing flutter of her
lids over her gray eyes when she smiled. I moved convulsively in my
intense desire. I would have given my soul, my share of eternity, my
honour, only to see that flutter of the lids over the shining gray eyes.
I never felt I was beneath the imponderable pressure of a prison’s wall
till then. She was infinite miles away; I could not even imagine what
inanimate things surrounded her. She must be talking to someone else;
fluttering her lids like that. I recognized with a physical agony that
was more than jealousy how slight was my hold upon her. It was not in
her race, in her blood as in mine, to love me and my type. She had lived
all her life in the middle of Romance, and the very fire and passion
of her South must make me dim prose to her. I remember the flicker
of Salazar’s returning candle, cast in lines like an advancing scythe
across the two walls from the corridor. I slept.
I had the feeling of appalled horror suddenly invading my sleep; a vast
voice seemed to be exclaiming:
“Tell me where she is!”
I looked at the glowing horn of a lanthorn. It was O’Brien who held it.
He stood over me, very sombre.
“Tell me where she is,” he said, the moment my eyes opened.