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?”