SURRENDER
/Sword/ in hand, statuesquely from his rocky plinth, Don Pedro bowed
until his trunk was at right angles with his shapely legs. He hoped
that he was not ridiculous.
The lady across the brook whom he thus saluted belonged to a type
which to a son of Spain must ever seem the most delectable by virtue
of that natural law which renders opposites interattractive.
Her cheeks were delicate as apple blossoms; her hair was of the ruddy
golden of ripe corn, and tied with great simplicity, without any of
those monstrous affectations which Elizabeth had rendered fashionable
in England. Her eyes were deeply blue, and the surprise now staring
out of them gave them a look of startled innocence. She was tall, he
observed with approval, and of those most sweet proportions which
ripening womanhood alone can display. Her dress marked her in his eyes
for a person of quality. Her peaked stomacher and ridiculous
farthingale--though less ridiculous by much than mode
prescribed--proclaimed to him clearly that here was no rustic Dian for
his Endymion. And not only her dress but her bearing and the
self-assured manner in which she now confronted this noble-looking
and--in his rumpled, sodden garments--rather fantastic stranger, went
further to announce her quality.
‘Sir, would you have killed my dog?’
Now it was not for nothing that Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna had spent
three years in London in the Ambassador’s train and gone about the
Court. He spoke English better than many Englishmen, and beyond a
slight exaggeration of the vowel sounds there was little in his speech
to betray the foreigner.
‘Madam,’ he answered her smoothly, ‘I trust you will not count it a
lack of gallantry in me that I am reluctant to be eaten by a lady’s
dog.’
His accent and the light humour of his answer set her staring harder.
‘Now, God a’ mercy!’ she ejaculated. ‘You’ll not have sprouted here,
like a mushroom, in the night. Whence are you, sir?’
‘Ah! Whence!’ He shrugged. A melancholy smile invested his fine sombre
eyes. ‘That is not to be answered in a word.’
He came down from his rock and in three active strides, from boulder
to boulder, was across the brook. The crouching hound half-rose and
growled at his approach, whereupon the lady bade him down again, and
cut him across the body with a hazel switch to quicken his obedience.
Don Pedro stood before her to explain himself. ‘I am no better than a
piece of wreckage; some of the flotsam from a Spanish galleon that
foundered on the rocks down there in last night’s storm. I am all that
has come ashore alive.’
He saw the sudden darkening of that fair face, the recoil before him
in which if there was fear there was more repugnance. ‘A Spaniard!’
she exclaimed in the tone we use when we mention evil and detested
things.
He sank his head between his shoulders; spread his hands in
deprecation. ‘A very sorry one,’ said he, and on that sighed
plaintively.
Almost at once he saw racial prejudice cast aside for womanly pity.
She observed more closely his condition, his sodden garments and
dishevelled head, and saw that it bore out his tale. She pictured to
herself the thing he told her, and was stricken at the thought of that
sunken galleon and the loss of life.
Upon her face he read the reflection of this uprush of compassion, for
he was very skilled in the deciphering of human documents, and being,
too, a very subtle gentleman, he perceived his course, and promptly
took it.
‘My name,’ he said, and said it with a certain conscious pride that
was not to be mistaken, ‘is Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna. I am Count of
Marcos, a Grande of Spain, and your prisoner.’ On that he went down
upon his knees, and proffered her the hilt of the sword which he still
held naked in his hands.
She fell back a pace or two in sheer surprise. ‘My prisoner?’ Her
brows were knit in bewilderment. ‘Nay, now; nay, now.’
‘An it please you,’ he insisted. ‘It has never been imputed to me, and
I hope it never may be, that I want for courage. Yet finding myself
shipwrecked, alone in a hostile land, I am in no case to offer
resistance to my capture. I am like a garrison that is forced to
capitulation and merely asks that it may capitulate without hurt to
honour. On the beach down there I had a choice of alternatives. One
was to walk back into the sea which has rejected me, and drown. But I
am young, as you observe, and suicide is the certain gateway to
damnation. I fell back, then, upon the other alternative which was to
make my way to the haunts of men, and, upon finding one who was of a
quality to receive my sword, to make surrender. Here at your feet,
lady, my quest is ended almost as soon as it began.’ And again he
proffered her the blade, held now across his two hands.
‘But I am not a man, sir.’ She was obviously nonplussed.
‘Let all men thank God with me for that,’ he cried. Then more solemnly
continued: ‘In all ages it has been deemed proper that valour should
yield to beauty. For my valour I will beg you to accept my word until
such time as it may be tested, when the test, I trust, will be in your
own service. For the rest your mirror and the eyes of every man will
vouch. And as for your quality, I were blind or a clown did I not
perceive it.’
That the situation piqued and pleased her from the very outset is as
certain as that the astute Don Pedro judged confidently it must. It
was so tinctured with romance that its appeal to a lady of any heart
and imagination must prove beyond resistance. Only the extraordinary
nature of the adventure made her hesitate, aroused a doubt on the
score of the practical fulfilment of this Spanish gentleman’s
proposal.
‘But I have never heard the like. How can I take you prisoner?’
‘By accepting my sword, madam.’
‘But how can I hold you?’
‘How?’ he smiled. ‘It is easy to hold the captive who desires
captivity. Who would desire liberty that may be your prisoner?’
His eyes grew so ardent as to leave no vagueness in his meaning. She
flushed under that regard of his, as well she might, for Don Pedro
went very fast indeed. ‘I surrender me,’ he said. ‘Yourself shall fix
my ransom and make it what you will. Until it comes from Spain I am
your prisoner.’
He saw that her hesitation was still far from conquered. Perhaps,
indeed, his momentary ardour by its prematureness had increased it.
Therefore he had recourse to utter frankness, confident that, by
revealing the full extent of his peril and thus arousing her
compassion, he would prevail upon her. He showed her that it was upon
her mercy that he counted; that it was his faith in her gentleness and
her pity for his plight that impelled him to take this course which
she accounted extraordinary and which was certainly unusual.
‘Consider,’ he begged her. ‘In the hands of another it might go very
ill with me. I intend no insult to your countrymen’s sense of what is
in honour due to an unfortunate and helpless enemy, of what is
prescribed by all the usages of chivalry. But men are the creatures of
their passions, of their feelings; and the feelings to-day of
Englishmen for Spaniards…’ He broke off and shrugged. ‘You know them.
It may well be that the feelings of the first Englishman I meet will
conquer his notions of what is becoming. He may summon others to help
him cut me down.’
‘Would so much be needed?’ she flashed at him, touched by his sly
imputation that no one Englishman would suffice to take a Spaniard.
But he knew women, and he answered without hesitation, though in
accents that sounded humble and self-deprecatory: ‘I think so, lady.
And if you deny me now I must resolve your doubts by making proof of
it.’
He knew that she would not, and knew that the half-challenge of his
answer struck the right note and preserved him a figure of dignity in
misfortune, a man who would condescend only within certain definite
honourable limits to accept shelter from his peril. If he made it
plain that he sought compassion from her, he also made it plain that
he sought no more than he might accept without loss of self-respect.
She perceived clearly enough that if she assented to his odd proposal,
if she accepted him for her prisoner, it would be hers to shield him.
She would be doing a worthy thing; for Spaniard though he might be, he
was human and a gentleman. That she had the power to carry this thing
through and claim him for her own against any aggressor, reflection
made her gradually confident. He had rightly gauged her mettle and her
quality. In all that Cornish countryside there was probably none
strong enough to stand against her imperious will once she determined
to exert it.
The combined appeal of her womanliness and her sense of the romantic
carried the day with her. She accepted his surrender, and this in
terms of a generosity for which she was sure that there was abundant
chivalrous precedent.
‘Be it as you will then, sir,’ she said at last. ‘You shall be my
prisoner. Give me your parole of honour that you will attempt no
escape, and you may retain your weapons, holding them in trust for
me.’
Still on his knees, the sword still proffered, he bowed his head, and
solemnly gave the oath required.
‘Before God and Our Lady, by my honour and my faith, I swear to hold
myself your captive, and that I shall not leave you until yourself you
restore me the liberty which I here surrender.’
Upon that he rose, and sheathed his rapier. ‘Is it a presumption,
madam, to ask my captor’s name?’
She smiled, for all that there still abode in her a shade of
uneasiness at the eccentricity of this transaction.
‘I am the Lady Margaret Trevanion,’ she replied.
‘Trevanion?’ He manifested a faint quickening of interest. ‘You will
be of the family of the Earl of Garth.’
She was justifiably surprised that a Spaniard should be so
well-informed upon English family matter.
‘He is my father, sir.’ And she expressed her astonishment in her
question: ‘What do you know of the Earl of Garth?’
‘I? Nothing, alas. Though that is a deficiency in me which the fortune
of war should now repair. But I have heard my father speak of him and
the near escape he had of losing his head in the service of your
present Queen when Mary Tudor reigned in England. My father was here
in the train of King Philip in those days when he was the Queen of
England’s husband, and I think he knew your father well. It is an odd
link between us, if you please.’
The link was none so odd as Don Pedro assumed or would have it appear.
His father had been one of a cloud of Spanish noblemen who had come
and gone about the Court of Queen Mary at a time when the Lord Admiral
Seymour and his friends were prominent in the public eye and
particularly in the eye of King Philip and his following, whose
position in England was menaced by their activities.
‘From the memory of his own misfortunes and the perils in which he all
but lost his life, my Lord Garth may not be without sympathy for the
misfortunes of another.’ Then, lest he should appear to plead too
much, he essayed to diminish it by humour. ‘The first of these
misfortunes, my lady, and the peril of life most pressing upon me at
the moment comes from hunger.’
She smiled. ‘Come, sir. I will see what may be done to mend it and the
rest of your condition.’
‘The rest of my condition? _Valga me Dios!_ There’s naught amiss with
the rest of my condition.’
‘Come,’ she commanded, and led the way, the hound bounding forward
ahead.
Don Pedro, obediently, as became a prisoner, followed closely, and
began at last to be truly thankful for his miraculous preservation.