A MIDNIGHT THEFT.
It fell a stark calm at ten o'clock, and then I believed that there
could be nothing for it but to bring up--that is, to let go the anchor;
but half an hour later the moonlight upon the water--for by this time
the moon had floated southward--was tarnished by a little air of wind
from the south and west; it breathed, wet with dew, like a sigh into
the schooner's canvas, then softly freshened into a small summer
night-wind. The mass of clouds in the west had vanished; all was clear
heaven from the sea line there to the looming shadow of the land over
our bow; the moon rode high, small and piercingly clear; the canvas
shone like ice in the light; stars of diamond-like brilliance sparkled
in the moisture along the rail; and every man's shadow lay at his feet
upon the pearl-colored planks, as though drawn in Indian ink there. The
hush of expectation lay upon the little vessel as she crept along with
a noise of rippling water refreshingly rising from alongside. Captain
Dopping held his watch to the moon.
"Wants but twenty minutes to midnight," said he; "we're close enough
in. Down helm," and he began to sing out orders in a voice whose
harshness sounded startlingly upon the ear amid the exquisite serenity
of that moonlit night.
The men ran about, still further reducing sail. So clear was the
night, it was possible even at a distance to read the expressions
upon their faces. There was no Preventive Force or Coastguard Service
then as now. The English coast was indeed watched at certain parts
of it where smuggling was notoriously carried on, and the people who
kept a look-out were styled blockaders; but the northern reaches,
more particularly where the coast was rugged and high, and where
the facility for "running" goods, as it was called, was small, were
unsentineled. The smuggler needed the accommodating creek, the
comfortably shoaling foreshore, secret hiding places, and, above all, a
handy local machinery for the prompt distribution of his commodities.
All this was to be found in the English Channel, more particularly in
that stretch of it which lies between the North and South Forelands;
but it was not to be met with up here, on this lonely iron-bound
Cumberland coast. In our time, even in these times, when smuggling
is a decaying, an almost extinct business, the pallid apparition of
such a schooner as La Casandra hovering doubtfully at midnight off any
point of the English shore would infallibly in a very short time win
the regard and invite the visit of a boat full of brawny coastguards,
armed, as our men were about to arm themselves, with pistols and with
cutlasses.
"Get the boat launched, my lads," called out Captain Dopping.
The gangway was unshipped, the muscular fists of the seamen gripped
her gunwales, and she was run with a note of thunder overboard, stern
foremost, smiting the water a blow that lashed it white, then lying
quietly in the shadow of the schooner. The two Spaniards descended
into the cabin, Don Lazarillo talking noisily as he trod upon his
companion's heels. I stood looking on while Captain Dopping and the
seamen girded the cutlasses to their hips and thrust pistols into their
pockets or breasts.
"You will keep a bright look-out for us, Mr. Portlack," said the
captain. "Hold the schooner as stationary as possible. There's nothing
going to hurt her to-night," said he, with a look round, "and there'll
be no tide to speak of for another two hours. You will then wear and
keep her with her head to the nor'ard."
"Ay, ay, sir. But suppose, while you're ashore, a boat should come off
and speak us?"
"Not likely, not likely," he rasped out.
"But suppose it, Captain Dopping. I accept no responsibility. What am I
to say, and what am I to do?"
"Don't Don Christoval and his friend mean to come?" he answered,
walking to the skylight and looking down.
Either he could not invent any instructions, or he considered a visit
from a shore boat as a thing too improbable to merit consideration.
The two Spaniards came on deck. I had never supposed that Don Lazarillo
would have had courage to enter the boat until I observed that he had
armed himself with a long saber, the extremity of whose steel scabbard
was visible at the skirts of the Spanish cloak he had drawn over his
shoulders. Don Christoval was similarly swathed, but how armed I am
unable to say, as no weapon was to be seen upon him.
"All's ready for the start, gentlemen," exclaimed Captain Dopping.
"Right!" exclaimed Don Christoval in a firm, deep voice, "let the men
enter the boat."
The sailors dropped into her one by one, and sat silent and grim and
dark in the gloom of the schooner's side, waiting.
"Where is Mariana?" cried Don Christoval.
The ugly cook's voice answered from somewhere forward, and he
approached. Don Christoval addressed him in Spanish impressively, and
as it seemed to my ear menacingly, emphasizing his words with frequent
gestures. Mariana responded humbly with many shakes of the head, as
though in deprecation of what had been said to him. Don Christoval then
turned to me and extended his hand.
"Mr. Portlack, I rely upon your vigilance and seamanship. We hope not
to be long absent."
He relinquished my hand, I raised my cap, and without another word, he,
Don Lazarillo and Captain Dopping stepped over the side.
"Shove off," the captain exclaimed, and in a few moments the boat was
gliding shoreward to the noise of the rhythmic grind of her five long
oars betwixt the thole-pins, with eddies of dim phosphorescence under
each lifted blade.
I watched her until her small shape, blending with the shadow thrown by
the high land upon the water, was lost to sight, and then stepped aft
to the helm, at which stood the negro boy Tom, who had been ordered to
the tiller by me when the steersman had relinquished it to enter the
boat. I mechanically eyed the illuminated disk of compass card, while
my thoughts accompanied the armed expedition that was making for the
shore. I figured the arrival of the boat at the margin of white sand
that curved with the bay; in fancy I saw the people get out of her,
leaving one behind to watch, and marching in a little dark company up
the gap, a faint noise of the clank of side-arms attending them. In
imagination I marked them cautiously approach the house--but what sort
of house was it? Walls I had heard it had, and gates, and these must
be forced or scaled. But what of Madame del Padron, the Ida of Don
Christoval's heart, if not of his hearth? Was she lying awake yonder,
expecting her husband? Impossible! for no date could certainly have
been fixed for the arrival of the schooner off the coast. But of course
she would be awaiting him with impassioned anxiety at all hours of the
night--nights that were gone, and to-night that was going: and he would
have told her that he meant to regain her with the aid of an armed crew
of seamen. Yet, though forewarned, should a struggle happen, she would
listen with terror to the sound of firearms, to explosions, which might
signify the death of her husband, or the fall of one or more of her
own people, only a little less dear to her than her husband. What was
her age? Was she dark or fair? Beautiful I could not but imagine the
heroine, or, rather, the object, of such an adventure as this must be.
Then from musings of this sort my mind rambled into reflections of
the odd and perilous fortune that had brought me into this business.
How had fared the two sailors whom the murderous rogue of a Yankee
skipper had pilfered from me? Into what-parallels had the Ocean Ranger
penetrated by this time, and what man of her crew had been selected to
fill my place? I looked at the negro boy, whose eyes in the moonlight
resembled a brace of new silver coins set in a block of indigo.
"What's your other name?" said I.
"Tom, sah."
"Ay, but what besides Tom?"
"Tom ober and ober again, massa, as often as yah like."
"How old are you?"
He grinned widely as he answered, "Nebber was told, sah."
"Are you a Roman Catholic?" said I, talking sheerly for the want
of something to do, and imagining he might have been chosen by Don
Christoval because of his religion.
He shook his head, still broadly grinning, but meaning that he did not
understand.
"Have you any religion?"
"Yes, sah."
"What is it?"
"I believe dat when I die I shall be seen no mo'."
"Where do you go when you die?"
"I know, sah," he answered, with a low throaty laugh.
"Where?" said I.
"Dis child," said he, touching his body, "goes dar," and he pointed
down; "dat child," he continued, indicating his shadow that stretched
sharply defined upon the planks, "goes up dar," and he pointed upward.
"Who taught you that?" said I.
"Is it true, massa?"
"Mind your helm," said I, "and I'll talk to you another time."
I went to the side and peered. The atmosphere in the south-west was
brimful of moonshine, and the sea line mingled with the sky in the
delicate haze of sheen till you could not tell heaven from water.
Nothing broke the stillness but the voice of the wind-brushed ripples,
unless it were the chafe of a rope on high or the gull-like cry of the
sheave of a block stirred by a sudden strain. The shadowy figure of
Mariana, the cook, restlessly paced the deck forward. He seemed to be
keeping a sharp look-out, as I was. A flock of wild fowl passed high
overhead; their cries as they swept, invisible, over our trucks made a
strange, solemn, plaintive noise in the midnight silence that was upon
the sea. Sometimes I believed I could hear the small remote thunder
of surf echoing out of the line of land which, now that the moon was
shining upon it, stood in a long pale spectral range.
I was thirsty and stepped below for a tumbler of seltzer and claret. I
took a cigar from a box which stood upon the table, dimmed the cabin
lamps, and returned on deck. Expectation, the constant obligation of
keeping a penetrating look-out, made the time heavy. The moon floated
into the western quarter, and slowly the orb lost its brilliance and
took its rusty hue of setting, though it was still high above the
horizon. Nothing in the shape of a sail was visible the wide sea round;
I was able to sink my sight to the confines of the water, but never
could see the dimmest apparition of a ship.
Some time before three o'clock I wore the schooner, and waiting until
she regained the point at which the boat had left her, I brought her
head to the wind and held her so with her canvas trembling to the
breeze. It was shortly after I had done this that my eye was taken by a
faint redness ashore. The rim of the cliff turned black against the dim
crimson light. It might have passed as the first of the lunar dawn--as
though another moon were rising beyond the land to replace the orb that
was sinking in the west. Mariana came out of the bows and called out to
me with his incommunicable accent:
"Señor, do you see?" and he pointed to the light.
"Yes," said I, "that looks like a fire ashore. Whether the house has
been fired by design or mischance, our people will have to bear a hand;
for should there be any sort of country-side thereabouts it'll be
swiftly up and wide awake and running and shouting to _that_ signal."
He grunted, evidently without understanding a word of what I had said,
and went forward again.
I had just glanced at the cabin clock and observed that it exactly
wanted five minutes to four when my ears were caught by the sound of
oars working in their pins. A moment later we were hailed in a voice
thin with distance. I answered with a "Halloa!" at the top of my lungs.
Presently the boat shaped itself out of the gloom that lay heavy upon
the waters to the eastward. The gathering strength of the grinding
noise was warrant that the men strained hard at their oars. The boat
came shearing and hissing alongside as though her stem were of red-hot
steel; the oars were flung in and a boat-hook arrested the fabric's
progress.
I stood at the side in the open space of the schooner's gangway. My eye
was instantly caught by the figure of a woman supported in the arms of
Don Christoval. One sees a thing quickly, and in the breathless pause
between the arrival of the boat and what next happened I had time to
note that the woman rested perfectly motionless as though dead, that
her head was uncovered, and that her left arm lay like a stroke or dash
of white paint in the gloom with a scintillation of gems in the dim
gleam of some gold ornaments upon her wrist. Indeed, imperfect as my
view was of her, I might yet know that she was in ball attire!
Three or four seamen came bounding out of the boat; the voice of Don
Christoval exclaimed:
"Is that you, Mr. Portlack?"
"It is, sir."
"Captain Dopping," he cried, "has been shot dead. We were forced to
leave him behind. The command of the schooner devolves upon you. This
lady is in a heavy swoon, and must be lifted over the side. Let it be
done instantly, pray; there is no time to lose."
I was greatly startled and shocked to hear of Captain Dopping having
been shot dead and left behind, but the general agitation of the
moment, the obligation of hurry, the wild impatience of the Spaniard,
that hissed feverishly through his words, gave me no time to think of
anything but what we had in hand. Don Christoval, muscular and big
as he was, was unable, no doubt through exhaustion, to rise with the
burden he supported. Don Lazarillo, addressing him in Spanish, sprang
on board the schooner. I ordered a couple of seamen to assist Don
Christoval, and the lady was lifted over the side and received by Don
Lazarillo and Mariana, who straightway bore her below. I believed her
to be dead. She never stirred, or uttered the least sound.
"Are all returned, saving the captain?" I called out.
"All returned, sir," answered the gruff voice of one of the seamen.
"Anybody wounded?"
"Nobody hurt, saving the captain, who was shot dead," responded the
same voice.
Don Christoval, with a stagger in his gait, stepped out of the boat on
to the deck, calling to me to give him my hand, lest he should fall
backward.
"Be quick, and sail away, Mr. Portlack," said he, hoarsely. "A wing of
the house caught fire, but through no fault of ours--no! It was owing
to the carelessness of some terrified servant within. Only one shot
was fired; it was meant for me, and slew Captain Dopping, who was at
my side. That fire was a terrible signal--it may still be burning: I
do not know; all seemed in darkness when we gained the gap, but they
rang a danger bell, a fearful summons that seemed to echo for miles
and miles. Did you hear it here?" he cried, almost gasping with the
rapidity of his utterance.
"No, sir."
"Mounted messengers will have been flying from place to place long
ago," he continued; "they will send to Whitehaven, where, I heard
our sailors say, there may be lying a Revenue cutter, or some more
formidable ship of the State yet, to pursue us; therefore, for our
lives' sake, Mr. Portlack, get the boat in and start at once."
He paused an instant to clasp his hands with an air of impassioned,
theatrical appeal to me, then went below walking like a drunken man.
The bows of the boat were hastily hoisted into the gangway by means
of a tackle called a burton. All hands of us then grasped the fabric,
and dragged her bodily to her place on the deck. I could collect, by
the motions of the men, that they were frightfully fatigued, but they
worked with a will, as for their lives, indeed; well knowing--better
knowing than I probably--what must be the fate of all hands of us if
we were to be captured red-handed thus, with the house still on fire
ashore for all we could tell--though I could now see no signs of the
glow I had before observed--and with the dead body of the captain to
fearfully testify to the audacious nature of this expedition.
Every stitch of sail the schooner carried was, cloth by cloth,
expanded. Within ten minutes of the boat's return she was in her place
on deck, the little topgallant-sail was being sheeted home, and La
Casandra, under full breasts of canvas, was sliding out into the gloom
south and west. Clouds had collected in the west; and if the moon still
hung over the sea, she could not show her face. Our course brought the
weak damp wind a little forward of the beam. This was the schooner's
best point of sailing, and she slided through it with a nimbleness that
I hoped would put her out of sight of land before daybreak.
While the men, with weary motions, were coiling away the running gear
which littered the deck, Mariana came up out of the cabin with a bottle
of brandy. He told me that Don Christoval wished the sailors to drink.
I said--
"Take it forward and serve it out; but see that no man gets more than a
dram. If you muddle their brains, you will be putting us in the way of
being hanged."
That he partly understood me I knew, by the energetic assent he howled
out in his own tongue. I carefully swept the sea line, and then took a
look through the cabin skylight. I had intended no more than a glance,
but my gaze was arrested, as though fascinated by the spectacle it
surveyed. Some one had turned up the lamps, and their flames burned
brightly. Don Christoval sat at the table, supporting his head by
resting his jaw upon his clinched fists. Don Lazarillo occupied a
chair close to him; a tumbler, half full, was before him; he held an
unlighted cigar, and his eyes were fixed upon the object at which his
friend was staring.
_This_ was no more nor less than the figure of a girl of about
two-and-twenty, resting at full length upon a velvet couch. The remains
of what might have been a wreath of flowers were in her hair. A portion
of her hair, that was of a dark red, and that glowed like gold, as
though it had been plentifully dusted with gilt powder, was detached,
and lay in a long thick tress upon her shoulder. They had unclasped a
rich opera cloak, and her attire was revealed. Her ball-dress of white
satin, looped here and there with pink roses, was cut low, and exposed
her throat and shoulders; but there were some ugly scratches on the
flesh near her left shoulder. She wore very handsome jewelry: diamond
earrings, a rope of pearls with a cross of diamonds that sparkled
against the dark yellow of the tresses which had fallen. Her arms of
faultless mold were bare to the short sleeves; her hands were gloved;
I believed I could witness traces of blood upon the white kid; and her
wrists were circled with bracelets.
But to describe all this is really to describe nothing: for how am I to
convey to you the disorder of apparel that suggested a struggle which
you must have thought deadly in its consequences, when you looked at
her motionless shape, her closed eyes, her bloodless face, and the
lifeless pose of her arms?
I stood gazing. Presently Don Christoval, extending a trembling hand,
poured himself out half a tumbler of brandy--brandy I might suppose it
was, by observing that he filled up the glass with water. He drained
the tumbler, and suddenly looked up and saw me. He instantly rose and
came on deck. He was without his hat. He seated himself on the corner
of the skylight, where he commanded a view of the interior of the
cabin, and called down some words in Spanish to Don Lazarillo, who
nodded violently, but without removing his eyes from the girl.
"Does the schooner make good way?" said Don Christoval.
"Yes," I answered; "her speed is about five miles an hour."
"At dawn shall we be out of sight of the coast?"
"It will not be long before daybreak," said I, "and at dawn the coast
may be in sight of us, but I do not suppose we shall be in sight of it."
He stood up to look around the sea.
"It is sad," he exclaimed, "that Captain Dopping should have been shot."
"It is shocking," said I.
"You have sole control of the schooner now, Captain Portlack, for my
captain I make you," said he. "And the money that I had agreed to pay
to Captain Dopping shall be yours, in addition to the fifty guineas as
arranged."
I gave him a bow and said, "Thank you." My eyes were fixed upon the
motionless girl below; he was able to observe the direction of my gaze
by the sheen of the lamp-light, that rose like a haze through the glass
and the lifted lid of the skylight.
"How cruel! how cruel!" said he, in a deep yet musical voice, that
was not the less thrilling because of a certain indefinable flavor
of theatricalism; "how cruel, that I should be obliged to claim what
is mine by force, which I find barbarous when I look there," said
he, pointing to the figure of his wife, "and when I recall Captain
Dopping's cry as he fell lifeless at my side."
"Is your lady dead?" said I.
"No, no, I think not; indeed, I am sure not. She is sunk in a trance
or stupor. If she were bled, she would revive; but there is no man on
board who has the skill to bleed her."
"She looks to have been very roughly handled."
"What you see," he cried, "is the work of her inhuman father and
brother. Captain Noble, his son, and my wife had returned from a ball.
We found the gate open, the carriage at the door: they had only just
alighted, indeed, and the carriage was in the act of driving away;
but the hall-door was closed. We knocked, and Captain Noble put his
head out of a window and asked who was there. I told him that it was
I, Don Christoval del Padron; that I had arrived to take possession
of my wife, whom he had forcibly divorced from me and was keeping a
prisoner--that is, never leaving her out of his own sight or the sight
of others of his family. He disappeared, and then returned to the
window. I did not know he was armed. He shouted insultingly to us to
be off. "Give me my wife!" I cried. "I desire no struggle, no uproar.
Give her to me, to whom she belongs, and we will withdraw peacefully."
He fired, and Captain Dopping fell and died with a groan. On this we
stormed the door; we put a pistol to the keyhole and blew away the
lock. Strangely enough, the door was not bolted. No doubt, in the
alarm our sudden appearance had caused, this had been overlooked, or
possibly Captain Noble supposed that some one had shot the bolts. We
entered; but what follows others may be better able to tell than I.
All was confusion and cries. They had hidden my wife. We entered five
rooms before we found her. This search was mine and Don Lazarillo's.
The seamen guarded the door, and stood cutlass in hand over Captain
Noble and his son. I found my wife locked in a room. When I turned the
key and she beheld me she rushed to my arms with a cry of delight. I
enveloped her in her opera cloak and conducted her downstairs, but on
Captain Noble and his son beholding us they dashed themselves against
the seamen, rushed upon us, and then it was that my wife suffered in
her apparel and upon her neck, as you see. She fainted, she instantly
became insensible. In the stupor that she now lies in we carried her to
the boat. As we left the house I saw the red light of fire in a wing on
the left, but it was not our doing; they can not charge that to me."
This extraordinary story he told in such broken-winded English as
I have attempted to convey it in. While I listened, I had found it
difficult to reconcile his statement that his wife had been imprisoned
by her father with the circumstance of her having accompanied him and
her brother to a ball. Then, again, while I listened, from time to
time, looking at the figure of the girl as he spoke, I wondered, as I
had before wondered again and again, in thinking over the object of
this expedition, why, if the lady, as he had represented, had been all
anxiety to rejoin her husband, should Don Christoval have considered
it necessary to carry an armed force ashore with him? That she had not
been a prisoner, in the sense of being confined to a room, or to a
suite of rooms, was made manifest by the ball attire in which she lay
as one dead upon the cabin sofa. Her liberty in a certain degree she
must have enjoyed. Could she not, at some preconcerted signal, have
stolen from the house secretly, and darkly joined her husband, and
secretly and darkly sailed away with him, saving all this tremendous
obligation of midnight landing and of armed seamen, with its tragic
result of fire and a slain man, not to mention the condition of the
wife, who, if not now actually dead, might be a corpse before the sun
rose?
There might have been a pause of five or six seconds while I thus
mused, during which I seemed to feel rather than see that his dark
and burning eyes were scrutinizing me by aid of the cabin light that
touched my face.
"The lady lies startlingly motionless, shockingly lifeless, Don
Christoval," said I.
"But her pulse beats--her pulse beats."
"Shall you persist in sailing to Cuba, sir?"
"Certainly; we are now proceeding to Cuba," he exclaimed, and he half
rose from the corner of the skylight as though with a mind to step to
the compass.
"Cuba is a long way off," said I.
"What of that?" he cried, instantly, and with heat.
"Seeing the condition of that lady," said I, "I could not be sure but
that you would wish to visit some near port to obtain medical help,
and----"
"What?" he demanded, bending his head forward to observe me.
"Why!" said I, with embarrassment, because I was about to say something
that might sound like impertinence in the ear of the Spaniard, "madame,
your wife, Don Christoval, will not be expected by you to make a voyage
to the island of Cuba in a ball-dress."
"I have provided for that," he exclaimed, haughtily. "I have minded my
business, Captain Portlack, and if you will mind yours all will be
well." He immediately added in a softened voice, as though regretting
any display of temper, "Yes, we must proceed to Cuba. If Cuba is erased
from my programme, my arrangements will be rendered worthless. Besides,
we have to-night done that which must oblige us, for every man's sake,
to put as many leagues of water between ourselves and yonder country
as this schooner can measure in a month. The Atlantic Ocean is not too
wide for us after what has happened in the darkness this morning."
Just then the cook or steward Mariana came under the skylight and
upturned his mask of a face. He addressed Don Christoval in Spanish.
The other answered and was about quitting me, but stopped and said:
"Let me see, Captain Portlack, I believe you sleep under the main
hatch?"
I said yes, that was so.
"Well, we shall not wish to disturb you. Don Lazarillo surrenders his
cabin to my wife, and he takes that which Captain Dopping occupied.
But any conveniences you may require, pray ask for, and you shall
have them. I will take care that all the nautical instruments, the
chronometer, the charts, and such furniture are conveyed to you."
He then went below. It was not proper that I should linger at the
skylight as though I were a spy. I paced the deck, looking eastward for
the first faint green of the dawn; yet my walk carried me so close to
the skylight, and the length of deck I traversed was so short besides,
that it was easy to see what was going on below without pausing or
appearing to look. Still, what I saw was no more than this: that Don
Christoval, his friend, and Mariana assembled at the side of the
unconscious girl, where they appeared to hold a consultation; that
when I passed the skylight in another turn, I observed them posturing
themselves as though to lift her; and that when I once more passed the
skylight in the third turn, the interior was empty--the lady had been
conveyed to her berth.
Day broke a little later. The land showed dim against the dawn; and the
distance we had made good during the hour of darkness had carried us,
as I had foreseen, far out of eye-shot of any point of the range of
cliffs. There was a small vessel standing to the north, abeam of us,
and the sails of another, hull down, were shining upon the blue edge of
the sea right ahead, as prismatically to the early piercing radiance
of the now risen sun as a leaning shaft of crystal. I leveled a glass
at her and found that she was pursuing the course we were steering.
There was nothing in sight where the shadow of the land was; but even
if I had supposed we should be pursued, I was very sure we should
not be caught. There was nothing, I might swear, flying the crimson
cross, capable of holding her own with La Casandra. As to our being
intercepted--life moved sluggishly in those days. Steamers there were
indeed, but they were few, and none to be promptly prepared for sea to
a swift summons. The electric telegraph did not exist. I can not say
there were no railways; but I am certain that pursuit would have been
long rendered hopeless before intelligence of what had taken place
could be communicated to a port where the machinery necessary for an
ocean chase was to be found and put in motion.
But, then, were we likely to be pursued? Who would be able to guess at
our destination?
I paced the deck, depressed, anxious, full of misgiving. I heartily
wished myself out of this business; yet I now stood so committed to
it that I was at a loss to know how to act. The violent death of
Captain Dopping was a shock to me. It sharply edged my realization of
the significance of this midnight adventure. And now that the tragic
business was ended there was something I found unintelligible in it,
something which pleaded to my instincts, stirring and troubling them.
Four seamen sat to leeward of the little galley; they seemed to be
dozing; their whiskered faces were bowed over their folded arms; a
fifth man was at the tiller. I peered through the skylight and saw Don
Lazarillo asleep in a chair. The man at the helm was William Scott; he
had been there while Don Christoval talked to me, and I guessed that
he had overheard every syllable of the Spaniard's narrative of the
adventures of the party ashore. I stepped up to him and said:
"This has been a strange business."
"It has, sir."
"I am now in command here, as I suppose you know?"
"I didn't know, sir; but you're the one to take command, surely, now
the captain's dead and gone."
"Yes, but it is a command I do not desire. I shall want a mate, some
man to stand watch and watch with me. Did you hear Don Christoval tell
me just now what happened ashore?"
"Yes, sir. His yarn was pretty near the truth; not quite, though."
"Where," said I, "was he mistaken?"
"The lady was insensible when him and the other Spanish gent brought
her downstairs. It's true that her father and the young gentleman,
her brother, bust from us when they see her being carried through the
hall, but it is not true that she got them scratches upon her shoulder
_then_. She was bleeding when the two Spaniards came along down the
stairs with her. I took notice of them marks, and so did Tubb and
Butler."
"Did her father, Captain Noble, say anything during the time you were
guarding him--while you, or whoever else it was, stood watch over him?"
"Ay, a deal more than my memory carries, sir. Yet it was nothing but
calling names--nothing in the way of explaining matters. It was '_The
infernal villain!--The brutal wretch!--Who are these scoundrels?--Are
you pirates, you ruffians?--You speak English; you are English; will
you help these two Spaniards, English as I reckon you to be, to kidnap
an Englishwoman from her father's home in England?_' But if that had
been all! Butler, he flourished his cutlass and threatened to give
the old gent a tap over the head if he didn't belay his jaw. Pirates
we _wasn't_! We was ashore helping a gentleman to his rights. Captain
Dopping told us that the law was on our side, and there's ne'er a
pirate as can say _that_ of his calling."
I continued to pace the deck a while musing on this man's version of
the adventure. The morning opened wide and brilliant as the sun soared.
Soon after daybreak the breeze freshened, and the waters were now
streaming and arching into little heads of foam as they ran with it.
Mariana came out of the cabin and was trudging forward when I called to
him:
"How is the lady?"
Instead of responding he shrugged his shoulders till the lobes of his
long yellow ears rested upon them, proceeded to the galley and lighted
the fire. I went a little way forward and called to the seamen, who at
daybreak had risen from their squatting postures and now hung together
talking in low voices. They approached me. There were four of them,
Trapp, South, Butler, and Tubb; Scott still grasped the tiller till he
should be relieved at four bells--that is to say, at six o'clock.
"Men," said I, "Don Christoval has asked me to take charge of this
schooner. You may have heard him say so when he came aboard this
morning."
"I heard him, sir," said Andrew Trapp.
"I shall want a mate," said I. "Butler, you filled that post under
Captain Dopping. Will you take it afresh?"
"If I must, I must, sir," he answered gloomily. "No extra pay goes to
the job, I suppose?"
"I can not tell you. Scott says that the lady's father behaved like a
madman, and that you threatened him with your cutlass."
"That's true," answered Butler. "He called us pirates, and swore he'd
have us hanged as pirates. I never was tarmed a pirate afore, and I
lost my temper, but I did him no hurt."
"It's a job," exclaimed Tubb, "which I, for one, am sorry I ever
meddled with. Yonder," cried he, pointing to the dim haze of land,
"lies Captain Dopping, shot through the head. Had any man said it was
a-going to come to _that_, I should have told the Don that _I_ wasn't
one of the sailors he was looking out for."
"That's a bad part of it," said I, "perhaps the worst part. But another
very bad part is the condition of the lady. She looked to me, as she
lay in the cabin, as if she had been very roughly handled."
The ugly cook put his head out of the galley and stared at us. I
called to him, in an angry voice, to bear a hand and get the men's
breakfast, adding that they had been up all night and wanted the meal.
"There's to be no loafing, no skulking, now, d'ye understand. We're too
few as it is, and you're just one of those rusty pieces of old iron
which want working up, Yankee fashion; so turn to, d'ye hear?" and I
confirmed my meaning by a menacing inclination of the head. The ugly
rogue vanished, but I could hear him muttering a number of Spanish
oaths to himself.
"You were speaking of the lady, sir," said Butler.
"She looks," said I, "to have been rascally used. Her dress is vilely
torn, as though in a struggle. Her shoulder is badly scratched, and why
should she have fainted dead away, and why should she remain insensible
for hours--insensible still, for all I know? For joy at seeing her
husband?"
"She was carried down the stairs unconscious by the two Spaniards,"
said Tubb, "her clothes was tore then, and her flesh was scratched."
"Did the Spaniards mount the stairs alone?"
"Alone, sir," answered Butler. "Scott and me stood over the lady's
father and his son; and South and Tubb guarded the door."
"Who remained in charge of the boat?"
"Me," said the man named Trapp.
"The name of the lady's father," said I, "is Captain Noble. Did he say
nothing more to the point than to abuse you as pirates?"
"Nothing noticeable," answered Butler; "his wits seemed to be drove out
of him by his rage."
"I heard him ask," said South, "how we, as English sailors, could help
a scoundrel Spaniard to steal an English lady away from her father's
house in England."
"Did he say _steal_?" said I.
"Force was the word he used--force an Englishwoman away. I didn't hear
the word steal, George," said Butler.
"Is it a fine house?" said I.
"A regular gentleman's castle, sir," answered Butler. "We found the
gates open; there was a carriage with a coachman and footman at the
door; it was just a-driving off as we marched in."
"What became of that carriage?"
"I see the coachman pull up," answered South, "when he was near the
gates. I kept my eye on the vehicle, for there were two men on the box
of it. When the lock was blowed away, the coachman flogged his horses,
and the whole concern disappeared. I expect they drove off to give the
alarm, but where to, blowed if I know, for there looked to be no houses
for miles around."
"What happened next?" said I.
But what the men now told me substantially corresponded with Don
Christoval's story: saving that they were all agreed that the lady was
insensible and in the disordered and torn condition in which she had
been brought aboard when carried downstairs by the two Spaniards.
"Well," said I, "the schooner's decks must go without a scrubbing this
morning. Hurry up that cook and get your breakfast. Butler, you'll
relieve me at eight bells. I must find out how the lady is doing. If
she's to die--and as she lay in the cabin she looked as if she were
dying--Don Christoval will surely not want us to sail him to Cuba."
"But where else?" said Butler, nervously and suspiciously.
"To a French port, if you like--to any place that is near. I wish to
get out of this ship."
"So do I," said Butler, looking at his mates, "but we want our money,
Mr. Portlack, and we want to be landed in some part of the world where
we aren't going to be nabbed for this 'ere job. Let it be Cuba, if
_you_ please, sir. 'Tain't too far off--no, by a blooming long chalk,
'tain't too far off."
"Get your breakfast and relieve me at eight," said I, and I walked aft.