IN WHICH JUAN RODRIQUEZ TAKES HIS REVENGE
The voyage of the _Concepcion_, thus inauspiciously begun, continued
with fair weather upon the sea and squalls threatening aboard the ship.
Doña Julia spent much time in her oddly-equipped cabin; Don Rodrigo,
impatient of delay, fretted at the tedium of the passage and paced the
poop restlessly for hours at a time. Between Juan Rodriquez and Captain
Hernandez a sullen truce was maintained for several weeks succeeding
the incident recorded at the end of the foregoing chapter. But Juan had
neither forgotten nor forgiven the insult which he had received at the
hands of the relentless navigator. He awaited, with the patience of a
crafty schemer, an opportunity to avenge himself upon the man who had
turned his melodramatic declaration of love into an undignified farce.
A Carmelite friar, who had begged passage to Hispaniola from Don
Rodrigo, discovered, after a time, a radical change in the disposition
manifested by the heterogeneous crew toward his white frock and all
that it represented. In so far as the discipline of Captain Hernandez
permitted open grumbling, the sailors grew outspoken in their protests.
The good priest, who had found the crew devoted to their beads at the
outset of the voyage, was unable, as the weeks went by, to persuade
the sailors to put their grievance into words. Nor was he able to keep
them at their prayers or to lead their voices in quaint old Latin
hymns. There was in the ship a mysterious, elusive influence which had
convinced the impressionable, superstitious seamen that the vessel was
accursed and that somebody aboard ship, being in league with Satan, was
able to nullify the effects of their religious observances. Thus it was
that the sweet-faced Carmelite labored in vain to restore before the
mast the devout atmosphere which had prevailed among the crew while the
coast of Spain still lay but a few miles astern.
Matters grew worse aboard the _Concepcion_ after the white friar had
been put ashore at the Indies and the clumsy vessel had begun to
beat up the Gulf of Mexico against baffling head-winds. The sailors
whispered to each other that the desertion of the Carmelite had left
the Prince of Darkness in full control of the ship. To a crew composed
in large part of Spanish desperadoes, with a sprinkling of Portuguese
cutthroats, it was not easy to restore an atmosphere of religious
fervor after it had once been destroyed by evil tongues. Experienced
as he was in the fickleness of the half-savage sailors who in those
adventurous days manned the omnipresent ships of Spain, Captain
Hernandez witnessed with grave concern the gradual abandonment by his
crew of its religious attitude and the increasing tendency of the
sailors to imply, either by word or manner, that Mary and the saints
had abandoned the ship to a cruel fate.
To Julia de Aquilar the voyage had become a seemingly interminable
imprisonment. The elation which she had felt at the outset of the
cruise had never returned to her after the depressing episode which had
aroused in Juan Rodriquez a deadly hatred for the captain of the ship.
The girl had caught the gleam of murder in the secretary’s eyes as he
lay out-stretched upon the deck gazing upward at Gomez Hernandez, and
in her cabin, as she tossed restlessly in her hammock, her mind grew
sick with a foreboding which waxed more insistent as the weary days
and nights crept by. Now and then she would climb the clumsy ladder to
walk the deck for a while, but the dread of finding herself again alone
with Juan Rodriquez made her shy of this diversion. Don Rodrigo, whose
spirits rose higher the nearer the ship approached the land in which
his silver lay concealed, would enter her stuffy cabin--a hole between
decks hardly worthy of the name--to rally her upon her indifference to
the splendors of the sea and the polychromatic beauties of the islands
on their bow. Upon her father’s departure, the tears, held back while
he was by her side, would dim the lustre of her splendid eyes, and her
white, slender hands would rise in supplication to the smiling Virgin
who looked down upon her from the slanting wooden wall above her head.
Why had she, to whom the Old World offered all its sweetest gifts,
become a voluntary exile, a hopeless maiden weeping in a corner of a
vagrant ship? Ever with her through those weary weeks this question
craved an answer. Ever from the past arose the gorgeous pictures of her
former life, a life of courtly splendor where the world was gay. In the
dark watches of the night, Doña Julia de Aquilar, half dozing, half
awake, would tread again the stately mazes of a contre-dance or smile
demurely upon a powdered and bejewelled cavalier. She would hear again
the merry, mocking voices of Versailles or the stately tones of Spanish
gentlemen. Suddenly the lurching of the ship would rouse her from her
waking dream, and, putting up a hand, as if defying fate, she would
touch the wooden walls of her voluntary cell, walls that seemed to be
bearing down upon her with the weight of worlds, crushing out the color
from her cheeks, the light from her eyes, the joy of youth from her
rebellious soul.
But, waking or sleeping, one face was always gazing at her from the
past, a face which seemed to laugh in courteous derision at her plight.
“I slew Don Josef--your betrothed,” the haunting vision seemed to say,
while upon the clear-cut countenance which memory photographed the
girl could see the gay and mocking smile of one who knew the world too
well. Her betrothed? Though dead, she hated him. Caprice and vanity had
forged for her the chains that had made her, at Versailles, a captive,
longing to be free. And when her freedom came, when the sword of him
whose vibrant voice she could hear above the creaking and groaning of
the ship had severed forever the bonds which tied her to an unloved
man, her liberty was nothing worth, taking its revenge upon her for her
former negligence by coming back too late. She had learned, through the
gossip of a chattering court, that he who had cut down her betrothed
had fled across the sea. Never again would she look upon de Sancerre’s
face, nor hear a voice which, while it mocked at love, had thrilled her
heart of hearts. The years in passing would leave to her a memory--and
nothing more.
What mattered it, then, whether she passed her weary span of life in
the city of Seville or in the strange environment toward which the ship
plunged on? In either case, the romance of her youth was dead. That the
strange chances of existence would ever bring Louis de Sancerre again
to her side, Julia de Aquilar never dreamed. Even in the prayers that
she offered day and night to the Virgin Mother above her head she had
never voiced a longing which, put into words, would have sounded to
her ears like the incipient ravings of insanity. Her betrothed and the
man whom she had begun to love had both passed from her life at the
same moment, and through the gloom of night there came to Doña Julia no
ray of hope save from the gentle radiance of Mother Church. The veil,
and its promise of perfect peace, grew constantly more alluring to her
distraught soul, as week crept into week and the very timbers of the
ship cried ever louder against the cruel persistence of the lonely sea.
From a dreamless sleep--a rare blessing vouchsafed by Mother Mary--Doña
Julia awoke one night with a start and sat upright in her hammock,
peering into the darkness with straining eyes. What had disturbed
her slumber she did not at first know. But above her head echoed the
shuffling sounds of hurrying feet, and the flapping of canvas as the
ship came about in a stiff breeze. Leaping down from her hammock and
throwing a long, black cape over her shoulders, she groped her way to
the entrance to her cabin and threw open the clumsy door. A swinging
lantern lighted the hatchway, and, almost before her eyes had grown
accustomed to the sudden glare, above her head sounded the grewsome cry
of “Man overboard!”
At that instant down the ladder in front of the trembling girl crept
the slinking figure of Juan Rodriquez. For a fleeting moment Doña Julia
caught a glimpse of the youth’s pallid face, upon which there rested
an evil smile made up of fear, cruelty, and triumph. Believing himself
unobserved, Juan stood for a moment at the foot of the ladder looking
upward toward the deck and listening intently to the uproar above his
head. Then, with a subdued chuckle, which sent a chill through the
heart of the motionless girl, he stole into the shadows toward his
berth amidships.
The harsh cries of the panic-stricken sailors filled the night with a
horrid din. The Spanish maiden, undecided whether to climb to the deck
or to return to her hammock, crossed herself devoutly and murmured a
prayer to St. Christopher, who watches over seamen and protects the
faithful from night alarms. The mischievous lantern, vibrating wildly
as the ship took the seas broadside on, threw lights and shadows across
the disturbed face of the girl, and seemed to rejoice at its chance to
add to the uncanny features of her surroundings.
The turmoil on the deck decreased as the moments passed, but Doña Julia
still stood waiting, listening, praying; chafing at inaction, but
distrustful of the night beyond the hatchway. To her, thus agitated,
came her father down the ladder, his worn figure bent as if it carried
a great burden. He turned and faced her, and as the playful lantern
swung toward them she saw that his face was ghastly pale, and that his
thin hand trembled as he wiped the sea-spray from his furrowed brow.
“What is it, father?” asked the girl, springing toward Don Rodrigo and
placing both hands upon his shoulders as she peered into his white face.
“Captain Hernandez,” muttered the old man, in a voice that told the
story of his despair--“he fell into the sea. None saw him in the
blackness of the night, but far astern the helmsman heard a cry--and
that was all! God rest his soul!” he groaned, crossing himself. “It
will go hard with us, I fear.”
“But, father--Mother Mary, pray for him!--the voyage nears its end.
Captain Hernandez--the saints receive him!--had with him men who know
these seas?”
“I trust them not,” murmured the old man, wearily. Then, as if he
regretted the admission he had made, he bent and kissed the anxious
face of his daughter and said, with an effort at cheerfulness, “But
fear not, Julia. All will yet be well. I’ve vowed an altar to St. James
of Compostella, whose blessing rests on pilgrims of the faith. But how
to calm the crew I hardly know. The sailors seem nigh mad with fear.
They say that Satan is aboard the ship.”
“Alas, I think he is,” murmured Julia to herself, as she returned to
her cabin and threw herself despondently upon her swinging bed. That
she had solved by chance the awful secret of the captain’s death, she
could not for a moment doubt.