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Title: The Sea-Hawk

Author: Raphael Sabatini

Release Date: February 25, 2009 [EBook #3294]
Last Updated: December 7, 2019

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEA-HAWK ***




Produced by John Stuart Middleton, and David Widger




The Sea-Hawk

by Raphael Sabatini

Contents

 NOTE

Part I.        SIR OLIVER TRESSILIAN
CHAPTER I.     THE HUCKSTER
CHAPTER II.    ROSAMUND
CHAPTER III.   THE FORGE
CHAPTER IV.    THE INTERVENER
CHAPTER V.     THE BUCKLER
CHAPTER VI.    JASPER LEIGH
CHAPTER VII.   TREPANNED
CHAPTER VIII.  THE SPANIARD

Part II.       SAKR-EL-BAHR
CHAPTER I.     THE CAPTIVE
CHAPTER II.    THE RENEGADE
CHAPTER III.   HOMEWARD BOUND
CHAPTER IV.    THE RAID
CHAPTER V.     THE LION OF THE FAITH
CHAPTER VI.    THE CONVERT
CHAPTER VII.   MARZAK-BEN-ASAD
CHAPTER VIII.  MOTHER AND SON
CHAPTER IX.    COMPETITORS
CHAPTER X.     THE SLAVE-MARKET
CHAPTER XI.    THE TRUTH
CHAPTER XII.   THE SUBTLETY OF FENZILEH
CHAPTER XIII.  IN THE SIGHT OF ALLAH
CHAPTER XIV.   THE SIGN
CHAPTER XV.    THE VOYAGE
CHAPTER XVI.   THE PANNIER
CHAPTER XVII.  THE DUPE
CHAPTER XVIII. SHEIK MAT
CHAPTER XIX.   THE MUTINEERS
CHAPTER XX.    THE MESSENGER
CHAPTER XXI.   MORITURUS
CHAPTER XXII.  THE SURRENDER
CHAPTER XXIII. THE HEATHEN CREED
CHAPTER XXIV.  THE JUDGES
CHAPTER XXV.   THE ADVOCATE
CHAPTER XXVI.  THE JUDGMENT




NOTE


Lord Henry Goade, who had, as we shall see, some personal acquaintance
with Sir Oliver Tressilian, tells us quite bluntly that he was
ill-favoured. But then his lordship is addicted to harsh judgments and
his perceptions are not always normal. He says, for instance, of Anne
of Cleves, that she was the “ugliest woman that ever I saw.” As far as
we can glean from his own voluminous writings it would seem to be
extremely doubtful whether he ever saw Anne of Cleves at all, and we
suspect him here of being no more than a slavish echo of the common
voice, which attributed Cromwell’s downfall to the ugliness of this
bride he procured for his Bluebeard master. To the common voice from
the brush of Holbein, which permits us to form our own opinions and
shows us a lady who is certainly very far from deserving his lordship’s
harsh stricture. Similarly, I like to believe that Lord Henry was wrong
in his pronouncement upon Sir Oliver, and I am encouraged in this
belief by the pen-portrait which he himself appends to it. “He was,” he
says, “a tall, powerful fellow of a good shape, if we except that his
arms were too long and that his feet and hands were of an uncomely
bigness. In face he was swarthy, with black hair and a black forked
beard; his nose was big and very high in the bridge, and his eyes sunk
deep under beetling eyebrows were very pale-coloured and very cruel and
sinister. He had—and this I have ever remarked to be the sign of great
virility in a man—a big, deep, rough voice, better suited to, and no
doubt oftener employed in, quarter-deck oaths and foulnesses than the
worship of his Maker.”

Thus my Lord Henry Goade, and you observe how he permits his lingering
disapproval of the man to intrude upon his description of him. The
truth is that—as there is ample testimony in his prolific writings—his
lordship was something of a misanthropist. It was, in fact, his
misanthropy which drove him, as it has driven many another, to
authorship. He takes up the pen, not so much that he may carry out his
professed object of writing a chronicle of his own time, but to the end
that he may vent the bitterness engendered in him by his fall from
favour. As a consequence he has little that is good to say of anyone,
and rarely mentions one of his contemporaries but to tap the sources of
a picturesque invective. After all, it is possible to make excuses for
him. He was at once a man of thought and a man of action—a combination
as rare as it is usually deplorable. The man of action in him might
have gone far had he not been ruined at the outset by the man of
thought. A magnificent seaman, he might have become Lord High Admiral
of England but for a certain proneness to intrigue. Fortunately for
him—since head where nature had placed it—he came betimes under a cloud
of suspicion. His career suffered a check; but it was necessary to
afford him some compensation since, after all, the suspicions could not
be substantiated.

Consequently he was removed from his command and appointed by the
Queen’s Grace her Lieutenant of Cornwall, a position in which it was
judged that he could do little mischief. There, soured by this
blighting of his ambitions, and living a life of comparative seclusion,
he turned, as so many other men similarly placed have turned, to seek
consolation in his pen. He wrote his singularly crabbed, narrow and
superficial _History of Lord Henry Goade:_ his own Times—which is a
miracle of injuvenations, distortions, misrepresentations, and
eccentric spelling. In the eighteen enormous folio volumes, which he
filled with his minute and gothic characters, he gives his own version
of the story of what he terms his downfall, and, having,
notwithstanding his prolixity, exhausted this subject in the first five
of the eighteen tomes, he proceeds to deal with so much of the history
of his own day as came immediately under his notice in his Cornish
retirement.

For the purposes of English history his chronicles are entirely
negligible, which is the reason why they have been allowed to remain
unpublished and in oblivion. But to the student who attempts to follow
the history of that extraordinary man, Sir Oliver Tressilian, they are
entirely invaluable. And, since I have made this history my present
task, it is fitting that I should here at the outset acknowledge my
extreme indebtedness to those chronicles. Without them, indeed, it were
impossible to reconstruct the life of that Cornish gentleman who became
a renegade and a Barbary Corsair and might have become Basha of
Algiers—or Argire, as his lordship terms it—but for certain matters
which are to be set forth.

Lord Henry wrote with knowledge and authority, and the tale he has to
tell is very complete and full of precious detail. He was, himself, an
eyewitness of much that happened; he pursued a personal acquaintance
with many of those who were connected with Sir Oliver’s affairs that he
might amplify his chronicles, and he considered no scrap of gossip that
was to be gleaned along the countryside too trivial to be recorded. I
suspect him also of having received no little assistance from Jasper
Leigh in the matter of those events that happened out of England, which
seem to me to constitute by far the most interesting portion of his
narrative.

R. S.




PART I.
SIR OLIVER TRESSILIAN




CHAPTER I.
THE HUCKSTER


Sir Oliver Tressilian sat at his ease in the lofty dining-room of the
handsome house of Penarrow, which he owed to the enterprise of his
father of lamented and lamentable memory and to the skill and invention
of an Italian engineer named Bagnolo who had come to England half a
century ago as one of the assistants of the famous Torrigiani.

This house of such a startlingly singular and Italianate grace for so
remote a corner of Cornwall deserves, together with the story of its
construction, a word in passing.

The Italian Bagnolo who combined with his salient artistic talents a
quarrelsome, volcanic humour had the mischance to kill a man in a brawl
in a Southwark tavern. As a result he fled the town, nor paused in his
headlong flight from the consequences of that murderous deed until he
had all but reached the very ends of England. Under what circumstances
he became acquainted with Tressilian the elder I do not know. But
certain it is that the meeting was a very timely one for both of them.
To the fugitive, Ralph Tressilian—who appears to have been inveterately
partial to the company of rascals of all denominations—afforded
shelter; and Bagnolo repaid the service by offering to rebuild the
decaying half-timbered house of Penarrow. Having taken the task in hand
he went about it with all the enthusiasm of your true artist, and
achieved for his protector a residence that was a marvel of grace in
that crude age and outlandish district. There arose under the
supervision of the gifted engineer, worthy associate of Messer
Torrigiani, a noble two-storied mansion of mellow red brick, flooded
with light and sunshine by the enormously tall mullioned windows that
rose almost from base to summit of each pilastered facade. The main
doorway was set in a projecting wing and was overhung by a massive
balcony, the whole surmounted by a pillared pediment of extraordinary
grace, now partly clad in a green mantle of creepers. Above the burnt
red tiles of the roof soared massive twisted chimneys in lofty majesty.

But the glory of Penarrow—that is, of the new Penarrow begotten of the
fertile brain of Bagnolo—was the garden fashioned out of the tangled
wilderness about the old house that had crowned the heights above
Penarrow point. To the labours of Bagnolo, Time and Nature had added
their own. Bagnolo had cut those handsome esplanades, had built those
noble balustrades bordering the three terraces with their fine
connecting flights of steps; himself he had planned the fountain, and
with his own hands had carved the granite faun presiding over it and
the dozen other statues of nymphs and sylvan gods in a marble that
gleamed in white brilliance amid the dusky green. But Time and Nature
had smoothed the lawns to a velvet surface, had thickened the handsome
boxwood hedges, and thrust up those black spear-like poplars that
completed the very Italianate appearance of that Cornish demesne.

Sir Oliver took his ease in his dining-room considering all this as it
was displayed before him in the mellowing September sunshine, and found
it all very good to see, and life very good to live. Now no man has
ever been known so to find life without some immediate cause, other
than that of his environment, for his optimism. Sir Oliver had several
causes. The first of these—although it was one which he may have been
far from suspecting—was his equipment of youth, wealth, and good
digestion; the second was that he had achieved honour and renown both
upon the Spanish Main and in the late harrying of the Invincible
Armada—or, more aptly perhaps might it be said, in the harrying of the
late Invincible Armada—and that he had received in that the
twenty-fifth year of his life the honour of knighthood from the Virgin
Queen; the third and last contributor to his pleasant mood—and I have
reserved it for the end as I account this to be the proper place for
the most important factor—was Dan Cupid who for once seemed compounded
entirely of benignity and who had so contrived matters that Sir
Oliver’s wooing Of Mistress Rosamund Godolphin ran an entirely smooth
and happy course.

So, then, Sir Oliver sat at his ease in his tall, carved chair, his
doublet untrussed, his long legs stretched before him, a pensive smile
about the firm lips that as yet were darkened by no more than a small
black line of moustachios. (Lord Henry’s portrait of him was drawn at a
much later period.) It was noon, and our gentleman had just dined, as
the platters, the broken meats and the half-empty flagon on the board
beside him testified. He pulled thoughtfully at a long pipe—for he had
acquired this newly imported habit of tobacco-drinking—and dreamed of
his mistress, and was properly and gallantly grateful that fortune had
used him so handsomely as to enable him to toss a title and some
measure of renown into his Rosamund’s lap.

By nature Sir Oliver was a shrewd fellow (“cunning as twenty devils,”
is my Lord Henry’s phrase) and he was also a man of some not
inconsiderable learning. Yet neither his natural wit nor his acquired
endowments appear to have taught him that of all the gods that rule the
destinies of mankind there is none more ironic and malicious than that
same Dan Cupid in whose honour, as it were, he was now burning the
incense of that pipe of his. The ancients knew that innocent-seeming
boy for a cruel, impish knave, and they mistrusted him. Sir Oliver
either did not know or did not heed that sound piece of ancient wisdom.
It was to be borne in upon him by grim experience, and even as his
light pensive eyes smiled upon the sunshine that flooded the terrace
beyond the long mullioned window, a shadow fell athwart it which he
little dreamed to be symbolic of the shadow that was even falling
across the sunshine of his life.

After that shadow came the substance—tall and gay of raiment under a
broad black Spanish hat decked with blood-red plumes. Swinging a long
beribboned cane the figure passed the windows, stalking deliberately as
Fate.

The smile perished on Sir Oliver’s lips. His swarthy face grew
thoughtful, his black brows contracted until no more than a single deep
furrow stood between them. Then slowly the smile came forth again, but
no longer that erstwhile gentle pensive smile. It was transformed into
a smile of resolve and determination, a smile that tightened his lips
even as his brows relaxed, and invested his brooding eyes with a gleam
that was mocking, crafty and almost wicked.

Came Nicholas his servant to announce Master Peter Godolphin, and close
upon the lackey’s heels came Master Godolphin himself, leaning upon his
beribboned cane and carrying his broad Spanish hat. He was a tall,
slender gentleman, with a shaven, handsome countenance, stamped with an
air of haughtiness; like Sir Oliver, he had a high-bridged, intrepid
nose, and in age he was the younger by some two or three years. He wore
his auburn hair rather longer than was the mode just then, but in his
apparel there was no more foppishness than is tolerable in a gentleman
of his years.

Sir Oliver rose and bowed from his great height in welcome. But a wave
of tobacco-smoke took his graceful visitor in the throat and set him
coughing and grimacing.

“I see,” he choked, “that ye have acquired that filthy habit.”

“I have known filthier,” said Sir Oliver composedly.

“I nothing doubt it,” rejoined Master Godolphin, thus early giving
indications of his humour and the object of his visit.

Sir Oliver checked an answer that must have helped his visitor to his
ends, which was no part of the knight’s intent.

“Therefore,” said he ironically, “I hope you will be patient with my
shortcomings. Nick, a chair for Master Godolphin and another cup. I bid
you welcome to Penarrow.”

A sneer flickered over the younger man’s white face. “You pay me a
compliment, sir, which I fear me ’tis not mine to return to you.”

“Time enough for that when I come to seek it,” said Sir Oliver, with
easy, if assumed, good humour.

“When you come to seek it?”

“The hospitality of your house,” Sir Oliver explained.

“It is on that very matter I am come to talk with you.”

“Will you sit?” Sir Oliver invited him, and spread a hand towards the
chair which Nicholas had set. In the same gesture he waved the servant
away.

Master Godolphin ignored the invitation. “You were,” he said, “at
Godolphin Court but yesterday, I hear.” He paused, and as Sir Oliver
offered no denial, he added stiffly: “I am come, sir, to inform you
that the honour of your visits is one we shall be happy to forgo.”

In the effort he made to preserve his self-control before so direct an
affront Sir Oliver paled a little under his tan.

“You will understand, Peter,” he replied slowly, “that you have said
too much unless you add something more.” He paused, considering his
visitor a moment. “I do not know whether Rosamund has told you that
yesterday she did me the honour to consent to become my wife....”

“She is a child that does not know her mind,” broke in the other.

“Do you know of any good reason why she should come to change it?”
asked Sir Oliver, with a slight air of challenge.

Master Godolphin sat down, crossed his legs and placed his hat on his
knee.

“I know a dozen,” he answered. “But I need not urge them. Sufficient
should it be to remind you that Rosamund is but seventeen and that she
is under my guardianship and that of Sir John Killigrew. Neither Sir
John nor I can sanction this betrothal.”

“Good lack!” broke out Sir Oliver. “Who asks your sanction or Sir
John’s? By God’s grace your sister will grow to be a woman soon and
mistress of herself. I am in no desperate haste to get me wed, and by
nature—as you may be observing—I am a wondrous patient man. I’ll even
wait,” And he pulled at his pipe.

“Waiting cannot avail you in this, Sir Oliver. ’Tis best you should
understand. We are resolved, Sir John and I.”

“Are you so? God’s light. Send Sir John to me to tell me of his
resolves and I’ll tell him something of mine. Tell him from me, Master
Godolphin, that if he will trouble to come as far as Penarrow I’ll do
by him what the hangman should have done long since. I’ll crop his
pimpish ears for him, by this hand!”

“Meanwhile,” said Master Godolphin whettingly, “will you not essay your
rover’s prowess upon me?”

“You?” quoth Sir Oliver, and looked him over with good-humoured
contempt. “I’m no butcher of fledgelings, my lad. Besides, you are your
sister’s brother, and ’tis no aim of mine to increase the obstacles
already in my path.” Then his tone changed. He leaned across the table.
“Come, now, Peter. What is at the root of all this matter? Can we not
compose such differences as you conceive exist? Out with them. ’Tis no
matter for Sir John. He’s a curmudgeon who signifies not a finger’s
snap. But you, ’tis different. You are her brother. Out with your
plaints, then. Let us be frank and friendly.”

“Friendly?” The other sneered again. “Our fathers set us an example in
that.”

“Does it matter what our fathers did? More shame to them if, being
neighbours, they could not be friends. Shall we follow so deplorable an
example?”

“You’ll not impute that the fault lay with my father,” cried the other,
with a show of ready anger.

“I impute nothing, lad. I cry shame upon them both.”

“’Swounds!” swore Master Peter. “Do you malign the dead?”

“If I do, I malign them both. But I do not. I no more than condemn a
fault that both must acknowledge could they return to life.”

“Then, Sir, confine your condemnings to your own father with whom no
man of honour could have lived at peace....”

“Softly, softly, good Sir....”

“There’s no call to go softly. Ralph Tressilian was a dishonour, a
scandal to the countryside. Not a hamlet between here and Truro, or
between here and Helston, but swarms with big Tressilian noses like
your own, in memory of your debauched parent.”

Sir Oliver’s eyes grew narrower: he smiled. “I wonder how you came by
your own nose?” he wondered.

Master Godolphin got to his feet in a passion, and his chair crashed
over behind him. “Sir,” he blazed, “you insult my mother’s memory!”

Sir Oliver laughed. “I make a little free with it, perhaps, in return
for your pleasantries on the score of my father.”

Master Godolphin pondered him in speechless anger, then swayed by his
passion he leaned across the board, raised his long cane and struck Sir
Oliver sharply on the shoulder.

That done, he strode off magnificently towards the door. Half-way
thither he paused.

“I shall expect your friends and the length of your sword,” said he.

Sir Oliver laughed again. “I don’t think I shall trouble to send them,”
said he.

Master Godolphin wheeled, fully to face him again. “How? You will take
a blow?”

Sir Oliver shrugged. “None saw it given,” said he.

“But I shall publish it abroad that I have caned you.”

“You’ll publish yourself a liar if you do; for none will believe you.”
Then he changed his tone yet again. “Come, Peter, we are behaving
unworthily. As for the blow, I confess that I deserved it. A man’s
mother is more sacred than his father. So we may cry quits on that
score. Can we not cry quits on all else? What can it profit us to
perpetuate a foolish quarrel that sprang up between our fathers?”

“There is more than that between us,” answered Master Godolphin. “I’ll
not have my sister wed a pirate.”

“A pirate? God’s light! I am glad there’s none to hear you for since
her grace has knighted me for my doings upon the seas, your words go
very near to treason. Surely, lad, what the Queen approves, Master
Peter Godolphin may approve and even your mentor Sir John Killigrew.
You’ve been listening to him. ’Twas he sent you hither.”

“I am no man’s lackey,” answered the other hotly, resenting the
imputation—and resenting it the more because of the truth in it.

“To call me a pirate is to say a foolish thing. Hawkins with whom I
sailed has also received the accolade, and who dubs us pirates insults
the Queen herself. Apart from that, which, as you see, is a very empty
charge, what else have you against me? I am, I hope, as good as any
other here in Cornwall; Rosamund honours me with her affection and I am
rich and shall be richer still ere the wedding bells are heard.”

“Rich with the fruit of thieving upon the seas, rich with the treasures
of scuttled ships and the price of slaves captured in Africa and sold
to the plantations, rich as the vampire is glutted—with the blood of
dead men.”

“Does Sir John say that?” asked Sir Oliver, in a soft deadly voice.

“I say it.”

“I heard you; but I am asking where you learnt that pretty lesson. Is
Sir John your preceptor? He is, he is. No need to tell me. I’ll deal
with him. Meanwhile let me disclose to you the pure and disinterested
source of Sir John’s rancour. You shall see what an upright and honest
gentleman is Sir John, who was your father’s friend and has been your
guardian.”

“I’ll not listen to what you say of him.”

“Nay, but you shall, in return for having made me listen to what he
says of me. Sir John desires to obtain a licence to build at the mouth
of the Fal. He hopes to see a town spring up above the haven there
under the shadow of his own Manor of Arwenack. He represents himself as
nobly disinterested and all concerned for the prosperity of the
country, and he neglects to mention that the land is his own and that
it is his own prosperity and that of his family which he is concerned
to foster. We met in London by a fortunate chance whilst Sir John was
about this business at the Court. Now it happens that I, too, have
interests in Truro and Penryn; but, unlike Sir John, I am honest in the
matter, and proclaim it. If any growth should take place about Smithick
it follows from its more advantageous situation that Truro and Penryn
must suffer, and that suits me as little as the other matter would suit
Sir John. I told him so, for I can be blunt, and I told the Queen in
the form of a counter-petition to Sir John’s.” He shrugged. “The moment
was propitious to me. I was one of the seamen who had helped to conquer
the unconquerable Armada of King Philip. I was therefore not to be
denied, and Sir John was sent home as empty-handed as he went to Court.
D’ye marvel that he hates me? Knowing him for what he is, d’ye marvel
that he dubs me pirate and worse? ’Tis natural enough so to
misrepresent my doings upon the sea, since it is those doings have
afforded me the power to hurt his profit. He has chosen the weapons of
calumny for this combat, but those weapons are not mine, as I shall
show him this very day. If you do not credit what I say, come with me
and be present at the little talk I hope to have with that curmudgeon.”

“You forget,” said Master Godolphin, “that I, too, have interests in
the neighbourhood of Smithick, and that you are hurting those.”

“Soho!” crowed Sir Oliver. “Now at last the sun of truth peeps forth
from all this cloud of righteous indignation at my bad Tressilian blood
and pirate’s ways! You, too, are but a trafficker. Now see what a fool
I am to have believed you sincere, and to have stood here in talk with
you as with an honest man.” His voice swelled and his lip curled in a
contempt that struck the other like a blow. “I swear I had not wasted
breath with you had I known you for so mean and pitiful a fellow.”

“These words....” began Master Godolphin, drawing himself up very
stiffly.

“Are a deal less than your deserts,” cut in the other, and he raised
his voice to call—“Nick.”

“You shall answer to them,” snapped his visitor.

“I am answering now,” was the stern answer. “To come here and prate to
me of my dead father’s dissoluteness and of an ancient quarrel between
him and yours, to bleat of my trumped-up course of piracy and my own
ways of life as a just cause why I may not wed your sister whilst the
real consideration in your mind, the real spur to your hostility is not
more than the matter of some few paltry pounds a year that I hinder you
from pocketing. A God’s name get you gone.”

Nick entered at that moment.

“You shall hear from me again, Sir Oliver,” said the other, white with
anger. “You shall account to me for these words.”

“I do not fight with... with hucksters,” flashed Sir Oliver.

“D’ye dare call me that?”

“Indeed, ’tis to discredit an honourable class, I confess it. Nick, the
door for Master Godolphin.”




CHAPTER II.
ROSAMUND


Anon, after his visitor had departed, Sir Oliver grew calm again. Then
being able in his calm to consider his position, he became angry anew
at the very thought of the rage in which he had been, a rage which had
so mastered him that he had erected additional obstacles to the already
considerable ones that stood between Rosamund and himself. In full
blast, his anger swung round and took Sir John Killigrew for its
objective. He would settle with him at once. He would so, by Heaven’s
light!

He bellowed for Nick and his boots.

“Where is Master Lionel? he asked when the boots had been fetched.

“He be just ridden in, Sir Oliver.”

“Bid him hither.”

Promptly, in answer to that summons, came Sir Oliver’s half-brother—a
slender lad favouring his mother the dissolute Ralph Tressilian’s
second wife. He was as unlike Sir Oliver in body as in soul. He was
comely in a very gentle, almost womanish way; his complexion was fair
and delicate, his hair golden, and his eyes of a deep blue. He had a
very charming stripling grace—for he was but in his twenty-first
year—and he dressed with all the care of a Court-gallant.

“Has that whelp Godolphin been to visit you?” he asked as he entered.

“Aye,” growled Sir Oliver. “He came to tell me some things and to hear
some others in return.”

“Ha. I passed him just beyond the gates, and he was deaf to my
greeting. ’Tis a most cursed insufferable pup.”

“Art a judge of men, Lal.” Sir Oliver stood up booted. “I am for
Arwenack to exchange a compliment or two with Sir John.”

His tight-pressed lips and resolute air supplemented his words so well
that Lionel clutched his arm.

“You’re not... you’re not...?”

“I am.” And affectionately, as if to soothe the lad’s obvious alarm, he
patted his brother’s shoulder. “Sir John,” he explained, “talks too
much. ’Tis a fault that wants correcting. I go to teach him the virtue
of silence.”

“There will be trouble, Oliver.”

“So there will—for him. If a man must be saying of me that I am a
pirate, a slave-dealer, a murderer, and Heaven knows what else, he must
be ready for the consequences. But you are late, Lal. Where have you
been?”

“I rode as far as Malpas.”

“As far as Malpas?” Sir Oliver’s eyes narrowed, as was the trick with
him. “I hear it whispered what magnet draws you thither,” he said. “Be
wary, boy. You go too much to Malpas.”

“How?” quoth Lionel a trifle coldly.

“I mean that you are your father’s son. Remember it, and strive not to
follow in his ways lest they bring you to his own end. I have just been
reminded of these predilections of his by good Master Peter. Go not
over often to Malpas, I say. No more.” But the arm which he flung about
his younger brother’s shoulders and the warmth of his embrace made
resentment of his warning quite impossible.

When he was gone, Lionel sat him down to dine, with Nick to wait on
him. He ate but little, and never addressed the old servant in the
course of that brief repast. He was very pensive. In thought he
followed his brother on that avenging visit of his to Arwenack.
Killigrew was no babe, but man of his hands, a soldier and a seaman. If
any harm should come to Oliver...He trembled at the thought; and then
almost despite him his mind ran on to calculate the consequences to
himself. His fortune would be in a very different case, he refected. In
a sort of horror, he sought to put so detestable a reflection from his
mind; but it returned insistently. It would not be denied. It forced
him to a consideration of his own circumstances.

All that he had he owed to his brother’s bounty. That dissolute father
of theirs had died as such men commonly die, leaving behind him heavily
encumbered estates and many debts; the very house of Penarrow was
mortgaged, and the moneys raised on it had been drunk, or gambled, or
spent on one or another of Ralph Tressilian’s many lights o’ love. Then
Oliver had sold some little property near Helston, inherited from his
mother; he had sunk the money into a venture upon the Spanish Main. He
had fitted out and manned a ship, and had sailed with Hawkins upon one
of those ventures, which Sir John Killigrew was perfectly entitled to
account pirate raids. He had returned with enough plunder in specie and
gems to disencumber the Tressilian patrimony. He had sailed again and
returned still wealthier. And meanwhile, Lionel had remained at home
taking his ease. He loved his ease. His nature was inherently indolent,
and he had the wasteful extravagant tastes that usually go with
indolence. He was not born to toil and struggle, and none had sought to
correct the shortcomings of his character in that respect. Sometimes he
wondered what the future might hold for him should Oliver come to
marry. He feared his life might not be as easy as it was at present.
But he did not seriously fear. It was not in his nature—it never is in
the natures of such men—to give any excess of consideration to the
future. When his thoughts did turn to it in momentary uneasiness, he
would abruptly dismiss them with the reflection that when all was said
Oliver loved him, and Oliver would never fail to provide adequately for
all his wants.

In this undoubtedly he was fully justified. Oliver was more parent than
brother to him. When their father had been brought home to die from the
wound dealt him by an outraged husband—and a shocking spectacle that
sinner’s death had been with its hasty terrified repentance—he had
entrusted Lionel to his elder brother’s care. At the time Oliver was
seventeen and Lionel twelve. But Oliver had seemed by so many years
older than his age, that the twice-widowed Ralph Tressilian had come to
depend upon this steady, resolute, and masterful child of his first
marriage. It was into his ear that the dying man had poured the
wretched tale of his repentance for the life he had lived and the state
in which he was leaving his affairs with such scant provision for his
sons. For Oliver he had no fear. It was as if with the prescience that
comes to men in his pass he had perceived that Oliver was of those who
must prevail, a man born to make the world his oyster. His anxieties
were all for Lionel, whom he also judged with that same penetrating
insight vouchsafed a man in his last hours. Hence his piteous
recommendation of him to Oliver, and Oliver’s ready promise to be
father, mother, and brother to the youngster.

All this was in Lionel’s mind as he sat musing there, and again he
struggled with that hideous insistent thought that if things should go
ill with his brother at Arwenack, there would be great profit to
himself; that these things he now enjoyed upon another’s bounty he
would then enjoy in his own right. A devil seemed to mock him with the
whispered sneer that were Oliver to die his own grief would not be
long-lived. Then in revolt against that voice of an egoism so loathsome
that in his better moments it inspired even himself with horror, he
bethought him of Oliver’s unvarying, unwavering affection; he pondered
all the loving care and kindness that through these years past Oliver
had ever showered upon him; and he cursed the rottenness of a mind that
could even admit such thoughts as those which he had been entertaining.
So wrought upon was he by the welter of his emotions, by that fierce
strife between his conscience and his egotism, that he came abruptly to
his feet, a cry upon his lips.

“Vade retro, Sathanas!”

Old Nicholas, looking up abruptly, saw the lad’s face, waxen, his brow
bedewed with sweat.

“Master Lionel! Master Lionel!” he cried, his small bright eyes
concernedly scanning his young master’s face. “What be amiss?”

Lionel mopped his brow. “Sir Oliver has gone to Arwenack upon a
punitive business,” said he.

“An’ what be that, zur?” quoth Nicholas.

“He has gone to punish Sir John for having maligned him.”

A grin spread upon the weather-beaten countenance of Nicholas.

“Be that so? Marry, ’twere time. Sir John he be over long i’ th’
tongue.”

Lionel stood amazed at the man’s easy confidence and supreme assurance
of how his master must acquit himself.

“You... you have no fear, Nicholas....” He did not add of what. But the
servant understood, and his grin grew broader still.

“Fear? Lackaday! I bain’t afeeard for Sir Oliver, and doan’t ee be
afeeard. Sir Oliver’ll be home to sup with a sharp-set appetite—’tis
the only difference fighting ever made to he.”

The servant was justified of his confidence by the events, though
through a slight error of judgment Sir Oliver did not quite accomplish
all that promised and intended. In anger, and when he deemed that he
had been affronted, he was—as his chronicler never wearies of
insisting, and as you shall judge before the end of this tale is
reached—of a tigerish ruthlessness. He rode to Arwenack fully resolved
to kill his calumniator. Nothing less would satisfy him. Arrived at
that fine embattled castle of the Killigrews which commanded the
entrance to the estuary of the Fal, and from whose crenels the country
might be surveyed as far as the Lizard, fifteen miles away, he found
Peter Godolphin there before him; and because of Peter’s presence Sir
Oliver was more deliberate and formal in his accusation of Sir John
than he had intended. He desired, in accusing Sir John, also to clear
himself in the eyes of Rosamund’s brother, to make the latter realize
how entirely odious were the calumnies which Sir John had permitted
himself, and how basely prompted.

Sir John, however, came halfway to meet the quarrel. His rancour
against the Pirate of Penarrow—as he had come to dub Sir
Oliver—rendered him almost as eager to engage as was his visitor.

They found a secluded corner of the deer-park for their business, and
there Sir John—a slim, sallow gentleman of some thirty years of
age—made an onslaught with sword and dagger upon Sir Oliver, full
worthy of the onslaught he had made earlier with his tongue. But his
impetuosity availed him less than nothing. Sir Oliver was come there
with a certain purpose, and it was his way that he never failed to
carry through a thing to which he set his hand.

In three minutes it was all over and Sir Oliver was carefully wiping
his blade, whilst Sir John lay coughing upon the turf tended by
white-faced Peter Godolphin and a scared groom who had been bidden
thither to make up the necessary tale of witnesses.

Sir Oliver sheathed his weapons and resumed his coat, then came to
stand over his fallen foe, considering him critically.

“I think I have silenced him for a little time only,” he said. “And I
confess that I intended to do better. I hope, however, that the lesson
will suffice and that he will lie no more—at least concerning me.”

“Do you mock a fallen man?” was Master Godolphin’s angry protest.

“God forbid!” said Sir Oliver soberly. “There is no mockery in my
heart. There is, believe me, nothing but regret—regret that I should
not have done the thing more thoroughly. I will send assistance from
the house as I go. Give you good day, Master Peter.”

From Arwenack he rode round by Penryn on his homeward way. But he did
not go straight home. He paused at the Gates of Godolphin Court, which
stood above Trefusis Point commanding the view of Carrick Roads. He
turned in under the old gateway and drew up in the courtyard. Leaping
to the kidney-stones that paved it, he announced himself a visitor to
Mistress Rosamund.

He found her in her bower—a light, turreted chamber on the mansion’s
eastern side, with windows that looked out upon that lovely sheet of
water and the wooded slopes beyond. She was sitting with a book in her
lap in the deep of that tall window when he entered, preceded and
announced by Sally Pentreath, who, now her tire-woman, had once been
her nurse.

She rose with a little exclamation of gladness when he appeared under
the lintel—scarce high enough to admit him without stooping—and stood
regarding him across the room with brightened eyes and flushing cheeks.

What need is there to describe her? In the blaze of notoriety into
which she was anon to be thrust by Sir Oliver Tressilian there was
scarce a poet in England who did not sing the grace and loveliness of
Rosamund Godolphin, and in all conscience enough of those fragments
have survived. Like her brother she was tawny headed and she was
divinely tall, though as yet her figure in its girlishness was almost
too slender for her height.

“I had not looked for you so early....” she was beginning, when she
observed that his countenance was oddly stern. “Why... what has
happened?” she cried, her intuitions clamouring loudly of some
mischance.

“Naught to alarm you, sweet; yet something that may vex you.” He set an
arm about that lissom waist of hers above the swelling farthingale, and
gently led her back to her chair, then flung himself upon the
window-seat beside her. “You hold Sir John Killigrew in some
affection?” he said between statement and inquiry.

“Why, yes. He was our guardian until my brother came of full age.”

Sir Oliver made a wry face. “Aye, there’s the rub. Well, I’ve all but
killed him.”

She drew back into her chair, recoiling before him, and he saw horror
leap to her eyes and blench her face. He made haste to explain the
causes that had led to this, he told her briefly of the calumnies
concerning him that Sir John had put about to vent his spite at having
been thwarted in a matter of his coveted licence to build at Smithick.

“That mattered little,” he concluded. “I knew these tales concerning me
were abroad, and I held them in the same contempt as I hold their
utterer. But he went further, Rose: he poisoned your brother’s mind
against me, and he stirred up in him the slumbering rancour that in my
father’s time was want to lie between our houses. To-day Peter came to
me with the clear intent to make a quarrel. He affronted me as no man
has ever dared.”

She cried out at that, her already great alarm redoubled. He smiled.

“Do not suppose that I could harm him. He is your brother, and, so,
sacred to me. He came to tell me that no betrothal was possible between
us, forbade me ever again to visit Godolphin Court, dubbed me pirate
and vampire to my face and reviled my father’s memory. I tracked the
evil of all this to its source in Killigrew, and rode straight to
Arwenack to dam that source of falsehood for all time. I did not
accomplish quite so much as I intended. You see, I am frank, my Rose.
It may be that Sir John will live; if so I hope that he may profit by
this lesson. I have come straight to you,” he concluded, “that you may
hear the tale from me before another comes to malign me with false
stories of this happening.”

“You... you mean Peter?” she cried.

“Alas!” he sighed.

She sat very still and white, looking straight before her and not at
all at Sir Oliver. At length she spoke.

“I am not skilled in reading men,” she said in a sad, small voice. “How
should I be, that am but a maid who has led a cloistered life. I was
told of you that you were violent and passionate, a man of bitter
enmities, easily stirred to hatreds, cruel and ruthless in the
persecution of them.”

“You, too, have been listening to Sir John,” he muttered, and laughed
shortly.

“All this was I told,” she pursued as if he had not spoken, “and all
did I refuse to believe because my heart was given to you. Yet... yet
of what have you made proof to-day?”

“Of forbearance,” said he shortly.

“Forbearance?” she echoed, and her lips writhed in a smile of weary
irony. “Surely you mock me!”

He set himself to explain.

“I have told you what Sir John had done. I have told you that the
greater part of it—and matter all that touched my honour—I know Sir
John to have done long since. Yet I suffered it in silence and
contempt. Was that to show myself easily stirred to ruthlessness? What
was it but forbearance? When, however, he carries his petty huckster’s
rancour so far as to seek to choke for me my source of happiness in
life and sends your brother to affront me, I am still so forbearing
that I recognize your brother to be no more than a tool and go straight
to the hand that wielded him. Because I know of your affection for Sir
John I gave him such latitude as no man of honour in England would have
given him.”

Then seeing that she still avoided his regard, still sat in that frozen
attitude of horror at learning that the man she loved had imbrued his
hands with the blood of another whom she also loved, his pleading
quickened to a warmer note. He flung himself upon his knees beside her
chair, and took in his great sinewy hands the slender fingers which she
listlessly surrendered. “Rose,” he cried, and his deep voice quivered
with intercession, “dismiss all that you have heard from out your mind.
Consider only this thing that has befallen. Suppose that Lionel my
brother came to you, and that, having some measure of power and
authority to support him, he swore to you that you should never wed me,
swore to prevent this marriage because he deemed you such a woman as
could not bear my name with honour to myself; and suppose that to all
this he added insult to the memory of your dead father, what answer
would you return him? Speak, Rose! Be honest with thyself and me. Deem
yourself in my place, and say in honesty if you can still condemn me
for what I have done. Say if it differs much from what you would wish
to do in such a case as I have named.”

Her eyes scanned now his upturned face, every line of which was
pleading to her and calling for impartial judgment. Her face grew
troubled, and then almost fierce. She set her hands upon his shoulders,
and looked deep into his eyes.

“You swear to me, Noll, that all is as you have told it me—you have
added naught, you have altered naught to make the tale more favourable
to yourself?”

“You need such oaths from me?” he asked, and she saw sorrow spread upon
his countenance.

“If I did I should not love thee, Noll. But in such an hour I need your
own assurance. Will you not be generous and bear with me, strengthen me
to withstand anything that may be said hereafter?”

“As God’s my witness, I have told you true in all,” he answered
solemnly.

She sank her head to his shoulder. She was weeping softly, overwrought
by this climax to all that in silence and in secret she had suffered
since he had come a-wooing her.

“Then,” she said, “I believe you acted rightly. I believe with you that
no man of honour could have acted otherwise. I must believe you, Noll,
for did I not, then I could believe in naught and hope for naught. You
are as a fire that has seized upon the better part of me and consumed
it all to ashes that you may hold it in your heart. I am content so you
be true.”

“True I shall ever be, sweetheart,” he whispered fervently. “Could I be
less since you are sent to make me so?”

She looked at him again, and now she was smiling wistfully through her
tears.

“And you will bear with Peter?” she implored him.

“He shall have no power to anger me,” he answered. “I swear that too.
Do you know that but to-day he struck me?”

“Struck you? You did not tell me that!”

“My quarrel was not with him but with the rogue that sent him. I
laughed at the blow. Was he not sacred to me?”

“He is good at heart, Noll,” she pursued. “In time he will come to love
you as you deserve, and you will come to know that he, too, deserves
your love.”

“He deserves it now for the love he bears to you.”

“And you will think ever thus during the little while of waiting that
perforce must lie before us?”

“I shall never think otherwise, sweet. Meanwhile I shall avoid him, and
that no harm may come should he forbid me Godolphin Court I’ll even
stay away. In less than a year you will be of full age, and none may
hinder you to come and go. What is a year, with such hope as mine to
still impatience?”

She stroked his face. “Art very gentle with me ever, Noll,” she
murmured fondly. “I cannot credit you are ever harsh to any, as they
say.”

“Heed them not,” he answered her. “I may have been something of all
that, but you have purified me, Rose. What man that loved you could be
aught but gentle.” He kissed her, and stood up. “I had best be going
now,” he said. “I shall walk along the shore towards Trefusis Point
to-morrow morning. If you should chance to be similarly disposed....”

She laughed, and rose in her turn. “I shall be there, dear Noll.”

“’Twere best so hereafter,” he assured her, smiling, and so took his
leave.

She followed him to the stair-head, and watched him as he descended
with eyes that took pride in the fine upright carriage of that
stalwart, masterful lover.




CHAPTER III.
THE FORGE


Sir Oliver’s wisdom in being the first to bear Rosamund the story of
that day’s happenings was established anon when Master Godolphin
returned home. He went straight in quest of his sister; and in a frame
of mind oppressed by fear and sorrow, for Sir John, by his general
sense of discomfiture at the hands of Sir Oliver and by the anger
begotten of all this he was harsh in manner and disposed to hector.

“Madam,” he announced abruptly, “Sir John is like to die.”

The astounding answer she returned him—that is, astounding to him—did
not tend to soothe his sorely ruffled spirit.

“I know,” she said. “And I believe him to deserve no less. Who deals in
calumny should be prepared for the wages of it.”

He stared at her in a long, furious silence, then exploded into oaths,
and finally inveighed against her unnaturalness and pronounced her
bewitched by that foul dog Tressilian.

“It is fortunate for me,” she answered him composedly, “that he was
here before you to give me the truth of this affair.” Then her assumed
calm and the anger with which she had met his own all fell away from
her. “Oh, Peter, Peter,” she cried in anguish, “I hope that Sir John
will recover. I am distraught by this event. But be just, I implore
you. Sir Oliver has told me how hard-driven he had been.”

“He shall be driven harder yet, as God’s my life! If you think this
deed shall go unpunished....”

She flung herself upon his breast and implored him to carry this
quarrel no further. She spoke of her love for Sir Oliver and announced
her firm resolve to marry him in despite of all opposition that could
be made, all of which did not tend to soften her brother’s humour. Yet
because of the love that ever had held these two in closest bonds he
went so far in the end as to say that should Sir John recover he would
not himself pursue the matter further. But if Sir John should die—as
was very likely—honour compelled him to seek vengeance of a deed to
which he had himself so very largely contributed.

“I read that man as if he were an open book,” the boy announced, with
callow boastfulness. “He has the subtlety of Satan, yet he does not
delude me. It was at me he struck through Killigrew. Because he desires
you, Rosamund, he could not—as he bluntly told me—deal with me however
I provoked him, not even though I went the length of striking him. He
might have killed me for’t; but he knew that to do so would place a
barrier ’twixt him and you. Oh! he is calculating as all the fiends of
Hell. So, to wipe out the dishonour which I did him, he shifts the
blame of it upon Killigrew and goes out to kill him, which he further
thinks may act as a warning to me. But if Killigrew dies....” And thus
he rambled on, filling her gentle heart with anguish to see this feud
increasing between the two men she loved best in all the world. If the
outcome of it should be that either were to kill the other, she knew
that she could never again look upon the survivor.

She took heart at last in the memory of Sir Oliver’s sworn promise that
her brother’s life should be inviolate to him, betide what might. She
trusted him; she depended upon his word and that rare strength of his
which rendered possible to him a course that no weaker man would dare
pursue. And in this reflection her pride in him increased, and she
thanked God for a lover who in all things was a giant among men.

But Sir John Killigrew did not die. He hovered between this world and a
better one for some seven days, at the end of which he began to
recover. By October he was abroad again, gaunt and pale, reduced to
half the bulk that had been his before, a mere shadow of a man.

One of his first visits was to Godolphin Court. He went to remonstrate
with Rosamund upon her betrothal, and he did so at the request of her
brother. But his remonstrances were strangely lacking in the force that
she had looked for.

The odd fact is that in his near approach to death, and with his
earthly interest dwindling, Sir John had looked matters frankly in the
face, and had been driven to the conclusion—a conclusion impossible to
him in normal health—that he had got no more than he deserved. He
realized that he had acted unworthily, if unconscious at the time of
the unworthiness of what he did; that the weapons with which he had
fought Sir Oliver were not the weapons that become a Gentleman or in
which there is credit to be won. He perceived that he had permitted his
old enmity for the house of Tressilian, swollen by a sense of injury
lately suffered in the matter of the licence to build at Smithick, to
warp his judgment and to persuade him that Sir Oliver was all he had
dubbed him. He realized that jealousy, too, had taken a hand in the
matter. Sir Oliver’s exploits upon the seas had brought him wealth, and
with this wealth he was building up once more the Tressilian sway in
those parts, which Ralph Tressilian had so outrageously diminished, so
that he threatened to eclipse the importance of the Killigrews of
Arwenack.

Nevertheless, in the hour of reaction he did not go so far as to admit
that Sir Oliver Tressilian was a fit mate for Rosamund Godolphin. She
and her brother had been placed in his care by their late father, and
he had nobly discharged his tutelage until such time as Peter had come
to full age. His affection for Rosamund was tender as that of a lover,
but tempered by a feeling entirely paternal. He went very near to
worshipping her, and when all was said, when he had cleared his mind of
all dishonest bias, he still found overmuch to dislike in Oliver
Tressilian, and the notion of his becoming Rosamund’s husband was
repellent.

First of all there was that bad Tressilian blood—notoriously bad, and
never more flagrantly displayed than in the case of the late Ralph
Tressilian. It was impossible that Oliver should have escaped the taint
of it; nor could Sir John perceive any signs that he had done so. He
displayed the traditional Tressilian turbulence. He was passionate and
brutal, and the pirate’s trade to which he had now set his hand was of
all trades the one for which he was by nature best equipped. He was
harsh and overbearing, impatient of correction and prone to trample
other men’s feelings underfoot. Was this, he asked himself in all
honesty, a mate for Rosamund? Could he entrust her happiness to the
care of such a man? Assuredly he could not.

Therefore, being whole again, he went to remonstrate with her as he
accounted it his duty and as Master Peter had besought him. Yet knowing
the bias that had been his he was careful to understate rather than to
overstate his reasons.

“But, Sir John,” she protested, “if every man is to be condemned for
the sins of his forbears, but few could escape condemnation, and
wherever shall you find me a husband deserving your approval?”

“His father....” began Sir John.

“Tell me not of his father, but of himself,” she interrupted.

He frowned impatiently—they were sitting in that bower of hers above
the river.

“I was coming to ’t,” he answered, a thought testily, for these
interruptions which made him keep to the point robbed him of his best
arguments. “However, suffice it that many of his father’s vicious
qualities he has inherited, as we see in his ways of life; that he has
not inherited others only the future can assure us.”

“In other words,” she mocked him, yet very seriously, “I am to wait
until he dies of old age to make quite sure that he has no such sins as
must render him an unfitting husband?”

“No, no,” he cried. “Good lack! what a perverseness is thine!”

“The perverseness is your own, Sir John. I am but the mirror of it.”

He shifted in his chair and grunted. “Be it so, then,” he snapped. “We
will deal with the qualities that already he displays.” And Sir John
enumerated them.

“But this is no more than your judgment of him—no more than what you
think him.”

“’Tis what all the world thinks him.”

“But I shall not marry a man for what others think of him, but for what
I think of him myself. And in my view you cruelly malign him. I
discover no such qualities in Sir Oliver.”

“’Tis that you should be spared such a discovery that I am beseeching
you not to wed him.”

“Yet unless I wed him I shall never make such a discovery; and until I
make it I shall ever continue to love him and to desire to wed him. Is
all my life to be spent so?” She laughed outright, and came to stand
beside him. She put an arm about his neck as she might have put it
about the neck of her father, as she had been in the habit of doing any
day in these past ten years—and thereby made him feel himself to have
reached an unconscionable age. With her hand she rubbed his brow.

“Why, here are wicked wrinkles of ill-humour,” she cried to him. “You
are all undone, and by a woman’s wit, and you do not like it.”

“I am undone by a woman’s wilfulness, by a woman’s headstrong resolve
not to see.”

“You have naught to show me, Sir John.”

“Naught? Is all that I have said naught?”

“Words are not things; judgments are not facts. You say that he is so,
and so and so. But when I ask you upon what facts you judge him, your
only answer is that you think him to be what you say he is. Your
thoughts may be honest, Sir John, but your logic is contemptible.” And
she laughed again at his gaping discomfiture. “Come, now, deal like an
honest upright judge, and tell me one act of his—one thing that he has
ever done and of which you have sure knowledge—that will bear him out
to be what you say he is. Now, Sir John!”

He looked up at her impatiently. Then, at last he smiled.

“Rogue!” he cried—and upon a distant day he was to bethink him of those
words. “If ever he be brought to judgment I can desire him no better
advocate than thou.”

Thereupon following up her advantage swiftly, she kissed him. “Nor
could I desire him a more honest judge than you.”

What was the poor man to do thereafter? What he did. Live up to her
pronouncement, and go forthwith to visit Sir Oliver and compose their
quarrel.

The acknowledgment of his fault was handsomely made, and Sir Oliver
received it in a spirit no less handsome. But when Sir John came to the
matter of Mistress Rosamund he was, out of his sense of duty to her,
less generous. He announced that since he could not bring himself to
look upon Sir Oliver as a suitable husband for her, nothing that he had
now said must mislead Sir Oliver into supposing him a consenting party
to any such union.

“But that,” he added, “is not to say that I oppose it. I disapprove,
but I stand aside. Until she is of full age her brother will refuse his
sanction. After that, the matter will concern neither him nor myself.”

“I hope,” said Sir Oliver, “he will take as wise a view. But whatever
view he takes will be no matter. For the rest, Sir John, I thank you
for your frankness, and I rejoice to know that if I may not count you
for my friend, at least I need not reckon you among my enemies.”

But if Sir John was thus won round to a neutral attitude, Master
Peter’s rancour abated nothing; rather it increased each day, and
presently there came another matter to feed it, a matter of which Sir
Oliver had no suspicion.

He knew that his brother Lionel rode almost daily to Malpas, and he
knew the object of those daily rides. He knew of the lady who kept a
sort of court there for the rustic bucks of Truro, Penryn, and Helston,
and he knew something of the ill-repute that had attached to her in
town—a repute, in fact, which had been the cause of her withdrawal into
the country. He told his brother some frank and ugly truths, concerning
her, by way of warning him, and therein, for the first time, the twain
went very near to quarrelling.

After that he mentioned her no more. He knew that in his indolent way
Lionel could be headstrong, and he knew human nature well enough to be
convinced that interference here would but set up a breach between
himself and his brother without in the least achieving its real object.
So Oliver shrugged resignedly, and held his peace.

There he left the affair, nor ever spoke again of Malpas and the siren
who presided there. And meanwhile the autumn faded into winter, and
with the coming of stormy weather Sir Oliver and Rosamund had fewer
opportunities of meeting. To Godolphin Court he would not go since she
did not desire it; and himself he deemed it best to remain away since
otherwise he must risk a quarrel with its master, who had forbidden him
the place. In those days he saw Peter Godolphin but little, and on the
rare occasions when they did meet they passed each other with a very
meagre salute.

Sir Oliver was entirely happy, and men noticed how gentler were his
accents, how sunnier had become a countenance that they had known for
haughty and forbidding. He waited for his coming happiness with the
confidence of an immortal in the future. Patience was all the service
Fate asked of him, and he gave that service blithely, depending upon
the reward that soon now would be his own. Indeed, the year drew near
its close; and ere another winter should come round Penarrow House
would own a mistress. That to him seemed as inevitable as the season
itself. And yet for all his supreme confidence, for all his patience
and the happiness he culled from it, there were moments when he seemed
oppressed by some elusive sense of overhanging doom, by some
subconsciousness of an evil in the womb of Destiny. Did he challenge
his oppression, did he seek to translate it into terms of reason, he
found nothing upon which his wits could fasten—and he came ever to
conclude that it was his very happiness by its excessiveness that was
oppressing him, giving him at times that sense of premonitory weight
about the heart as if to check its joyous soarings.

One day, a week from Christmas, he had occasion to ride to Helston on
some trifling affair. For half a week a blizzard had whirled about the
coast, and he had been kept chafing indoors what time layer upon layer
of snow was spread upon the countryside. On the fourth day, the storm
being spent, the sun came forth, the skies were swept clear of clouds
and all the countryside lay robed in a sun-drenched, dazzling
whiteness. Sir Oliver called for his horse and rode forth alone through
the crisp snow. He turned homeward very early in the afternoon, but
when a couple of miles from Helston he found that his horse had cast a
shoe. He dismounted, and bridle over arm tramped on through the sunlit
vale between the heights of Pendennis and Arwenack, singing as he went.
He came thus to Smithick and the door of the forge. About it stood a
group of fishermen and rustics, for, in the absence of any inn just
there, this forge was ever a point of congregation. In addition to the
rustics and an itinerant merchant with his pack-horses, there were
present Sir Andrew Flack, the parson from Penryn, and Master Gregory
Baine, one of the Justices from the neighbourhood of Truro. Both were
well known to Sir Oliver, and he stood in friendly gossip with them
what time he waited for his horse.

It was all very unfortunate, from the casting of that shoe to the
meeting with those gentlemen; for as Sir Oliver stood there, down the
gentle slope from Arwenack rode Master Peter Godolphin.

It was said afterwards by Sir Andrew and Master Baine that Master Peter
appeared to have been carousing, so flushed was his face, so unnatural
the brightness of his eye, so thick his speech and so extravagant and
foolish what he said. There can be little doubt that it was so. He was
addicted to Canary, and so indeed was Sir John Killigrew, and he had
been dining with Sir John. He was of those who turn quarrelsome in
wine—which is but another way of saying that when the wine was in and
the restraint out, his natural humour came uppermost untrammelled. The
sight of Sir Oliver standing there gave the lad precisely what he
needed to indulge that evil humour of his, and he may have been
quickened in his purpose by the presence of those other gentlemen. In
his half-fuddled state of mind he may have recalled that once he had
struck Sir Oliver and Sir Oliver had laughed and told him that none
would believe it.

He drew rein suddenly as he came abreast of the group, so suddenly that
he pulled his horse until it almost sat down like a cat; yet he
retained his saddle. Then he came through the snow that was all
squelched and mudded just about the forge, and leered at Sir Oliver.

“I am from Arwenack,” he announced unnecessarily. “We have been talking
of you.”

“You could have had no better subject of discourse,” said Sir Oliver,
smiling, for all that his eyes were hard and something scared—though
his fears did not concern himself.

“Marry, you are right; you make an engrossing topic—you and your
debauched father.”

“Sir,” replied Sir Oliver, “once already have I deplored your mother’s
utter want of discretion.”

The words were out of him in a flash under the spur of the gross insult
flung at him, uttered in the momentary blind rage aroused by that
inflamed and taunting face above him. No sooner were they sped than he
repented them, the more bitterly because they were greeted by a guffaw
from the rustics. He would have given half his fortune in that moment
to have recalled them.

Master Godolphin’s face had changed as utterly as if he had removed a
mask. From flushed that it had been it was livid now and the eyes were
blazing, the mouth twitching. Thus a moment he glowered upon his enemy.
Then standing in his stirrups he swung aloft his whip.

“You dog!” he cried, in a snarling sob. “You dog!” And his lash came
down and cut a long red wheal across Sir Oliver’s dark face.

With cries of dismay and anger the others, the parson, the Justice and
the rustics got between the pair, for Sir Oliver was looking very
wicked, and all the world knew him for a man to be feared.

“Master Godolphin, I cry shame upon you,” exclaimed the parson. “If
evil comes of this I shall testify to the grossness of your aggression.
Get you gone from here!”

“Go to the devil, sir,” said Master Godolphin thickly. “Is my mother’s
name to be upon the lips of that bastard? By God, man, the matter rests
not here. He shall send his friends to me, or I will horse-whip him
every time we meet. You hear, Sir Oliver?”

Sir Oliver made him no reply.

“You hear?” he roared. “There is no Sir John Killigrew this time upon
whom you can shift the quarrel. Come you to me and get the punishment
of which that whiplash is but an earnest.” Then with a thick laugh he
drove spurs into his horse’s flanks, so furiously that he all but sent
the parson and another sprawling.

“Stay but a little while for me,” roared Sir Oliver after him. “You’ll
ride no more, my drunken fool!”

And in a rage he bellowed for his horse, flinging off the parson and
Master Baine, who endeavoured to detain and calm him. He vaulted to the
saddle when the nag was brought him, and whirled away in furious
pursuit.

The parson looked at the Justice and the Justice shrugged, his lips
tight-pressed.

“The young fool is drunk,” said Sir Andrew, shaking his white head.
“He’s in no case to meet his Maker.”

“Yet he seems very eager,” quoth Master Justice Baine. “I doubt I shall
hear more of the matter.” He turned and looked into the forge where the
bellows now stood idle, the smith himself grimy and aproned in leather
in the doorway, listening to the rustics account of the happening.
Master Baine it seems had a taste for analogies. “Faith,” he said, “the
place was excellently well chosen. They have forged here to-day a sword
which it will need blood to temper.”




CHAPTER IV.
THE INTERVENER


The parson had notions of riding after Sir Oliver, and begged Master
Baine to join him. But the Justice looked down his long nose and opined
that no good purpose was to be served; that Tressilians were ever wild
and bloody men; and that an angry Tressilian was a thing to be avoided.
Sir Andrew, who was far from valorous, thought there might be wisdom in
the Justice’s words, and remembered that he had troubles enough of his
own with a froward wife without taking up the burdens of others. Master
Godolphin and Sir Oliver between them, quoth the justice, had got up
this storm of theirs. A God’s name let them settle it, and if in the
settling they should cut each other’s throats haply the countryside
would be well rid of a brace of turbulent fellows. The pedlar deemed
them a couple of madmen, whose ways were beyond the understanding of a
sober citizen. The others—the fishermen and the rustics—had not the
means to follow even had they had the will.

They dispersed to put abroad the news of that short furious quarrel and
to prophesy that blood would be let in the adjusting of it. This
prognostication the they based entirely upon their knowledge of the
short Tressilian way. But it was a matter in which they were entirely
wrong. It is true that Sir Oliver went galloping along that road that
follows the Penryn river and that he pounded over the bridge in the
town of Penryn in Master Godolphin’s wake with murder in his heart. Men
who saw him riding wildly thus with the red wheal across his white
furious face said that he looked a very devil.

He crossed the bridge at Penryn a half-hour after sunset, as dusk was
closing into night, and it may be that the sharp, frosty air had a hand
in the cooling of his blood. For as he reached the river’s eastern bank
he slackened his breakneck pace, even as he slackened the angry
galloping of his thoughts. The memory of that oath he had sworn three
months ago to Rosamund smote him like a physical blow. It checked his
purpose, and, reflecting this, his pace fell to an amble. He shivered
to think how near he had gone to wrecking all the happiness that lay
ahead of him. What was a boy’s whiplash, that his resentment of it;
should set all his future life in jeopardy? Even though men should call
him a coward for submitting to it and leaving the insult unavenged,
what should that matter? Moreover, upon the body of him who did so
proclaim him he could brand the lie of a charge so foolish. Sir Oliver
raised his eyes to the deep sapphire dome of heaven where an odd star
was glittering frostily, and thanked God from a swelling heart that he
had not overtaken Peter Godolphin whilst his madness was upon him.

A mile or so below Penryn, he turned up the road that ran down to the
ferry there, and took his way home over the shoulder of the hill with a
slack rein. It was not his usual way. He was wont ever to go round by
Trefusis Point that he might take a glimpse at the walls of the house
that harboured Rosamund and a glance at the window of her bower. But
to-night he thought the shorter road over the hill would be the safer
way. If he went by Godolphin Court he might chance to meet Peter again,
and his past anger warned him against courting such a meeting, warned
him to avoid it lest evil should betide. Indeed, so imperious was the
warning, and such were his fears of himself after what had just passed,
that he resolved to leave Penarrow on the next day. Whither he would go
he did not then determine. He might repair to London, and he might even
go upon another cruise—an idea which he had lately dismissed under
Rosamund’s earnest intercession. But it was imperative that he should
quit the neighbourhood, and place a distance between Peter Godolphin
and himself until such time as he might take Rosamund to wife. Eight
months or so of exile; but what matter? Better so than that he should
be driven into some deed that would compel him to spend his whole
lifetime apart from her. He would write, and she would understand and
approve when he told her what had passed that day.

The resolve was firmly implanted in him by the time he reached
Penarrow, and he felt himself uplifted by it and by the promise it
afforded him that thus his future happiness would be assured.

Himself he stabled his horse; for of the two grooms he kept, one had by
his leave set out yesterday to spend Christmas in Devon with his
parents, the other had taken a chill and had been ordered to bed that
very day by Sir Oliver, who was considerate with those that served him.
In the dining-room he found supper spread, and a great log fire blazed
in the enormous cowled fire-place, diffusing a pleasant warmth through
the vast room and flickering ruddily upon the trophies of weapons that
adorned the walls, upon the tapestries and the portraits of dead
Tressilians. Hearing his step, old Nicholas entered bearing a great
candle-branch which he set upon the table.

“You’m late, Sir Oliver,” said the servant, “and Master Lionel bain’t
home yet neither.”

Sir Oliver grunted and scowled as he crunched a log and set it sizzling
under his wet heel. He thought of Malpas and cursed Lionel’s folly, as,
without a word, he loosed his cloak and flung it on an oaken coffer by
the wall where already he had cast his hat. Then he sat down, and
Nicholas came forward to draw off his boots.

When that was done and the old servant stood up again, Sir Oliver
shortly bade him to serve supper.

“Master Lionel cannot be long now,” said he. “And give me to drink,
Nick. ’Tis what I most require.”

“I’ve brewed ee a posset o’ canary sack,” announced Nicholas; “there’m
no better supping o’ a frosty winter’s night, Sir Oliver.”

He departed to return presently with a black jack that was steaming
fragrantly. He found his master still in the same attitude, staring at
the fire, and frowning darkly. Sir Oliver’s thoughts were still of his
brother and Malpas, and so insistent were they that his own concerns
were for the moment quite neglected; he was considering whether it was
not his duty, after all, to attempt a word of remonstrance. At length
he rose with a sigh and got to table. There he bethought him of his
sick groom, and asked Nicholas for news of him. Nicholas reported the
fellow to be much as he had been, whereupon Sir Oliver took up a cup
and brimmed it with the steaming posset.

“Take him that,” he said. “There’s no better medicine for such an
ailment.”

Outside fell a clatter of hooves.

“Here be Master Lionel at last,” said the servant.

“No doubt,” agreed Sir Oliver. “No need to stay for him. Here is all he
needs. Carry that to Tom ere it cools.”

It was his object to procure the servant’s absence when Lionel should
arrive, resolved as he was to greet him with a sound rating for his
folly. Reflection had brought him the assurance that this was become
his duty in view of his projected absence from Penarrow; and in his
brother’s interest he was determined not to spare him.

He took a deep draught of the posset, and as he set it down he heard
Lionel’s step without. Then the door was flung open, and his brother
stood on the threshold a moment at gaze.

Sir Oliver looked round with a scowl, the well-considered reproof
already on his lips.

“So....” he began, and got no further. The sight that met his eyes
drove the ready words from his lips and mind; instead it was with a
sharp gasp of dismay that he came immediately to his feet. “Lionel!”

Lionel lurched in, closed the door, and shot home one of its bolts.
Then he leaned against it, facing his brother again. He was deathly
pale, with great dark stains under his eyes; his ungloved right hand
was pressed to his side, and the fingers of it were all smeared with
blood that was still oozing and dripping from between them. Over his
yellow doublet on the right side there was a spreading dark stain whose
nature did not intrigue Sir Oliver a moment.

“My God!” he cried, and ran to his brother. “What’s happened, Lal? Who
has done this?”

“Peter Godolphin,” came the answer from lips that writhed in a curious
smile.

Never a word said Sir Oliver, but he set his teeth and clenched his
hands until the nails cut into his palms. Then he put an arm about this
lad he loved above all save one in the whole world, and with anguish in
his mind he supported him forward to the fire. There Lionel dropped to
the chair that Sir Oliver had lately occupied.

“What is your hurt, lad? Has it gone deep?” he asked, in terror almost.

“’Tis naught—a flesh wound; but I have lost a mort of blood. I thought
I should have been drained or ever I got me home.”

With fearful speed Sir Oliver drew his dagger and ripped away doublet,
vest, and shirt, laying bare the lad’s white flesh. A moment’s
examination, and he breathed more freely.

“Art a very babe, Lal,” he cried in his relief. “To ride without
thought to stanch so simple a wound, and so lose all this blood—bad
Tressilian blood though it be.” He laughed in the immensity of his
reaction from that momentary terror. “Stay thou there whilst I call
Nick to help us dress this scratch.”

“No, no!” There was note of sudden fear in the lad’s voice, and his
hand clutched at his brother’s sleeve. “Nick must not know. None must
know, or I am undone else.”

Sir Oliver stared, bewildered. Lionel smiled again that curious
twisted, rather frightened smile.

“I gave better than I took, Noll,” said he. “Master Godolphin is as
cold by now as the snow on which I left him.”

His brother’s sudden start and the fixed stare from out of his slowly
paling face scared Lionel a little. He observed, almost subconsciously,
the dull red wheal that came into prominence as the colour faded out of
Sir Oliver’s face, yet never thought to ask how it came there. His own
affairs possessed him too completely.

“What’s this?” quoth Oliver at last, hoarsely.

Lionel dropped his eyes, unable longer to meet a glance that was
becoming terrible.

“He would have it,” he growled almost sullenly, answering the reproach
that was written in every line of his brother’s taut body. “I had
warned him not to cross my path. But to-night I think some madness had
seized upon him. He affronted me, Noll; he said things which it was
beyond human power to endure, and....” He shrugged to complete his
sentence.

“Well, well,” said Oliver in a small voice. “First let us tend this
wound of yours.”

“Do not call Nick,” was the other’s swift admonition. “Don’t you see,
Noll?” he explained in answer to the inquiry of his brother’s stare,
“don’t you see that we fought there almost in the dark and without
witnesses. It....” he swallowed, “it will be called murder, fair fight
though it was; and should it be discovered that it was I....” He
shivered and his glance grew wild; his lips twitched.

“I see,” said Oliver, who understood at last, and he added bitterly:
“You fool!”

“I had no choice,” protested Lionel. “He came at me with his drawn
sword. Indeed, I think he was half-drunk. I warned him of what must
happen to the other did either of us fall, but he bade me not concern
myself with the fear of any such consequences to himself. He was full
of foul words of me and you and all whoever bore our name. He struck me
with the flat of his blade and threatened to run me through as I stood
unless I drew to defend myself. What choice had I? I did not mean to
kill him—as God’s my witness, I did not, Noll.”

Without a word Oliver turned to a side-table, where stood a metal basin
and ewer. He poured water, then came in the same silence to treat his
brother’s wound. The tale that Lionel told made blame impossible, at
least from Oliver. He had but to recall the mood in which he himself
had ridden after Peter Godolphin; he had but to remember, that only the
consideration of Rosamund—only, indeed, the consideration of his
future—had set a curb upon his own bloodthirsty humour.

When he had washed the wound he fetched some table linen from a press
and ripped it into strips with his dagger; he threaded out one of these
and made a preliminary crisscross of the threads across the lips of the
wound—for the blade had gone right through the muscles of the breast,
grazing the ribs; these threads would help the formation of a clot.
Then with the infinite skill and cunning acquired in the course of his
rovings he proceeded to the bandaging.

That done, he opened the window and flung out the blood-tinted water.
The cloths with which he had mopped the wound and all other similar
evidences of the treatment he cast upon the fire. He must remove all
traces even from the eyes of Nicholas. He had the most implicit trust
in the old servant’s fidelity. But the matter was too grave to permit
of the slightest risk. He realized fully the justice of Lionel’s fears
that however fair the fight might have been, a thing done thus in
secret must be accounted murder by the law.

Bidding Lionel wrap himself in his cloak, Sir Oliver unbarred the door,
and went upstairs in quest of a fresh shirt and doublet for his
brother. On the landing he met Nicholas descending. He held him a
moment in talk of the sick man above, and outwardly at least he was now
entirely composed. He dispatched him upstairs again upon a trumped-up
errand that must keep him absent for some little time, whilst himself
he went to get the things he needed.

He returned below with them, and when he had assisted his brother into
fresh garments with as little movement as possible so as not to disturb
his dressing of the wound or set it bleeding afresh, he took the
blood-stained doublet, vest, and shirt which he had ripped and flung
them, too, into the great fire.

When some moments later Nicholas entered the vast room he found the
brothers sitting composedly at table. Had he faced Lionel he would have
observed little amiss with him beyond the deep pallor of his face. But
he did not even do so much. Lionel sat with his back to the door and
the servant’s advance into the room was checked by Sir Oliver with the
assurance that they did not require him. Nicholas withdrew again, and
the brothers were once more alone.

Lionel ate very sparingly. He thirsted and would have emptied the
measure of posset, but that Sir Oliver restrained him, and refused him
anything but water lest he should contract a fever. Such a sparing meal
as they made—for neither had much appetite—was made in silence. At last
Sir Oliver rose, and with slow, heavy steps, suggestive of his humour,
he crossed to the fire-place. He threw fresh logs on the blaze, and
took from the tall mantelshelf his pipe and a leaden jar of tobacco. He
filled the pipe pensively, then with the short iron tongs seized a
fragment of glowing wood and applied it to the herb.

He returned to the table, and standing over his brother, he broke at
last the silence that had now endured some time.

“What,” he asked gruffly, “was the cause of your quarrel?”

Lionel started and shrank a little; between finger and thumb he kneaded
a fragment of bread, his eyes upon it. “I scarce know,” he replied.

“Lal, that is not the truth.”

“How?”

“’Tis not the truth. I am not to be put off with such an answer.
Yourself you said that you had warned him not to cross your path. What
path was in your mind?”

Lionel leaned his elbows on the table and took his head in his hands.
Weak from loss of blood, overwrought mentally as well, in a state of
revulsion and reaction also from the pursuit which had been the cause
of to-night’s tragic affair, he had not strength to withhold the
confidence his brother asked. On the contrary, it seemed to him that in
making such a confidence, he would find a haven and refuge in Sir
Oliver.

“’Twas that wanton at Malpas was the cause of all,” he complained. And
Sir Oliver’s eye flashed at the words. “I deemed her quite other; I was
a fool, a fool! I”—he choked, and a sob shook him—“I thought she loved
me. I would have married her, I would so, by God.”

Sir Oliver swore softly under his breath.

“I believed her pure and good, and....” He checked. “After all, who am
I to say even now that she was not? ’Twas no fault of hers. ’Twas he,
that foul dog Godolphin, who perverted her. Until he came all was well
between us. And then....”

“I see,” said Sir Oliver quietly. “I think you have something for which
to thank him, if he revealed to you the truth of that strumpet’s
nature. I would have warned thee, lad. But... Perhaps I have been weak
in that.”

“It was not so; it was not she....”

“I say it was, and if I say so I am to be believed, Lionel. I’d smirch
no woman’s reputation without just cause. Be very sure of that.”

Lionel stared up at him. “O God!” he cried presently, “I know not what
to believe. I am a shuttle-cock flung this way and that way.”

“Believe me,” said Sir Oliver grimly. “And set all doubts to rest.”
Then he smiled. “So that was the virtuous Master Peter’s secret
pastime, eh? The hypocrisy of man! There is no plumbing the endless
depths of it!”

He laughed outright, remembering all the things that Master Peter had
said of Ralph Tressilian—delivering himself as though he were some
chaste and self-denying anchorite. Then on that laugh he caught his
breath quite suddenly. “Would she know?” he asked fearfully. “Would
that harlot know, would she suspect that ’twas your hand did this?”

“Aye—would she,” replied the other. “I told her to-night, when she
flouted me and spoke of him, that I went straight to find him and pay
the score between us. I was on my way to Godolphin Court when I came
upon him in the park.”

“Then you lied to me again, Lionel. For you said ’twas he attacked
you.”

“And so he did.” Lionel countered instantly. “He never gave me time to
speak, but flung down from his horse and came at me snarling like a
cross-grained mongrel. Oh, he was as ready for the fight as I—as
eager.”

“But the woman at Malpas knows,” said Sir Oliver gloomily. “And if she
tells....”

“She’ll not,” cried Lionel. “She dare not for her reputation’s sake.”

“Indeed, I think you are right,” agreed his brother with relief. “She
dare not for other reasons, when I come to think of it. Her reputation
is already such, and so well detested is she that were it known she had
been the cause, however indirect, of this, the countryside would
satisfy certain longings that it entertains concerning her. You are
sure none saw you either going or returning?”

“None.”

Sir Oliver strode the length of the room and back, pulling at his pipe.
“All should be well, then, I think,” said he at last. “You were best
abed. I’ll carry you thither.”

He took up his stripling brother in his powerful arms and bore him
upstairs as though he were a babe.

When he had seen him safely disposed for slumber, he returned below,
shut the door in the hall, drew up the great oaken chair to the fire,
and sat there far into the night smoking and thinking.

He had said to Lionel that all should be well. All should be well for
Lionel. But what of himself with the burden of this secret on his soul?
Were the victim another than Rosamund’s brother the matter would have
plagued him but little. The fact that Godolphin was slain, it must be
confessed, was not in itself the source of his oppression. Godolphin
had more than deserved his end, and he would have come by it months ago
at Sir Oliver’s own hand but for the fact that he was Rosamund’s
brother, as we know. There was the rub, the bitter, cruel rub. Her own
brother had fallen by the hand of his. She loved her brother more than
any living being next to himself, just as he loved Lionel above any
other but herself. The pain that must be hers he knew; he experienced
some of it in anticipation, participating it because it was hers and
because all things that were hers he must account in some measure his
own.

He rose up at last, cursing that wanton at Malpas who had come to fling
this fresh and terrible difficulty where already he had to face so
many. He stood leaning upon the overmantel, his foot upon one of the
dogs of the fender, and considered what to do. He must bear his burden
in silence, that was all. He must keep this secret even from Rosamund.
It split his heart to think that he must practise this deceit with her.
But naught else was possible short of relinquishing her, and that was
far beyond his strength.

The resolve adopted, he took up a taper and went off to bed.




CHAPTER V.
THE BUCKLER


It was old Nicholas who brought the news next morning to the brothers
as they were breaking their fast.

Lionel should have kept his bed that day, but dared not, lest the fact
should arouse suspicion. He had a little fever, the natural result both
of his wound and of his loss of blood; he was inclined to welcome
rather than deplore it, since it set a flush on cheeks that otherwise
must have looked too pale.

So leaning upon his brother’s arm he came down to a breakfast of
herrings and small ale before the tardy sun of that December morning
was well risen.

Nicholas burst in upon them with a white face and shaking limbs. He
gasped out his tale of the event in a voice of terror, and both
brothers affected to be shocked, dismayed and incredulous. But the
worst part of that old man’s news, the true cause of his terrible
agitation, was yet to be announced.

“And they do zay,” he cried with anger quivering through his fear,
“they do zay that it were you that killed he, Sir Oliver.”

“I?” quoth Sir Oliver, staring, and suddenly like a flood there burst
upon his mind a hundred reasons overlooked until this moment, that
inevitably must urge the countryside to this conclusion, and to this
conclusion only. “Where heard you that foul lie?”

In the tumult of his mind he never heeded what answer was returned by
Nicholas. What could it matter where the fellow had heard the thing; by
now it would be the accusation on the lips of every man. There was one
course to take and he must take it instantly—as he had taken it once
before in like case. He must straight to Rosamund to forestall the tale
that others would carry to her. God send he did not come too late
already.

He stayed for no more than to get his boots and hat, then to the
stables for a horse, and he was away over the short mile that divided
Penarrow from Godolphin Court, going by bridle and track meadow
straight to his goal. He met none until he fetched up in the courtyard
at Godolphin Court. Thence a babble of excited voices had reached him
as he approached. But at sight of him there fell a general silence,
ominous and staring. A dozen men or more were assembled there, and
their eyes considered him first with amazement and curiosity, then with
sullen anger.

He leapt down from his saddle, and stood a moment waiting for one of
the three Godolphin grooms he had perceived in that assembly to take
his reins. Seeing that none stirred—

“How now?” he cried. “Does no one wait here? Hither, sirrah, and hold
my horse.”

The groom addressed hesitated a moment, then, under the stare of Sir
Oliver’s hard, commanding eye, he shuffled sullenly forward to do as he
was bid. A murmur ran through the group. Sir Oliver flashed a glance
upon it, and every tongue trembled into silence.

In that silence he strode up the steps, and entered the rush-strewn
hall. As he vanished he heard the hubbub behind him break out anew,
fiercer than it had been before. But he nothing heeded it.

He found himself face to face with a servant, who shrank before him,
staring as those in the courtyard had stared. His heart sank. It was
plain that he came a little late already; that the tale had got there
ahead of him.

“Where is your mistress?” said he.

“I...I will tell her you are here, Sir Oliver,” the man replied in a
voice that faltered; and he passed through a doorway on the right. Sir
Oliver stood a moment tapping his boots with his whip, his face pale, a
deep line between his brows. Then the man reappeared, closing the door
after him.

“Mistress Rosamund bids you depart, sir. She will not see you.”

A moment Sir Oliver scanned the servant’s face—or appeared to scan it,
for it is doubtful if he saw the fellow at all. Then for only answer he
strode forward towards the door from which the man had issued. The
servant set his back to it, his face resolute.

“Sir Oliver, my mistress will not see you.”

“Out of my way!” he muttered in his angry, contemptuous fashion, and as
the man persistent in his duty stood his ground, Sir Oliver took him by
the breast of his jacket, heaved him aside and went in.

She was standing in mid-apartment, dressed by an odd irony all in
bridal white, that yet was not as white as was her face. Her eyes
looked like two black stains, solemn and haunting as they fastened up
on this intruder who would not be refused. Her lips parted, but she had
no word for him. She just stared in a horror that routed all his
audacity and checked the masterfulness of his advance. At last he
spoke.

“I see that you have heard,” said he, “the lie that runs the
countryside. That is evil enough. But I see that you have lent an ear
to it; and that is worse.”

She continued to regard him with a cold look of loathing, this child
that but two days ago had lain against his heart gazing up at him in
trust and adoration.

“Rosamund!” he cried, and approached her by another step. “Rosamund! I
am here to tell you that it is a lie.”

“You had best go,” she said, and her voice had in it a quality that
made him tremble.

“Go?” he echoed stupidly. “You bid me go? You will not hear me?”

“I consented to hear you more than once; refused to hear others who
knew better than I, and was heedless of their warnings. There is no
more to be said between us. I pray God that they may take and hang
you.”

He was white to the lips, and for the first time in his life he knew
fear and felt his great limbs trembling under him.

“They may hang me and welcome since you believe this thing. They could
not hurt me more than you are doing, nor by hanging me could they
deprive me of aught I value, since your faith in me is a thing to be
blown upon by the first rumour of the countryside.”

He saw the pale lips twist themselves into a dreadful smile. “There is
more than rumour, I think,” said she. “There is more than all your lies
will ever serve to cloak.”

“My lies?” he cried. “Rosamund, I swear to you by my honour that I have
had no hand in the slaying of Peter. May God rot me where I stand if
this be not true!”

“It seems,” said a harsh voice behind him, “that you fear God as little
as aught else.”

He wheeled sharply to confront Sir John Killigrew, who had entered
after him.

“So,” he said slowly, and his eyes grew hard and bright as agates,
“this is your work.” And he waved a hand towards Rosamund. It was plain
to what he alluded.

“My work?” quoth Sir John. He closed the door, and advanced into the
room. “Sir, it seems your audacity, your shamelessness, transcends all
bounds. Your....”

“Have done with that,” Sir Oliver interrupted him and smote his great
fist upon the table. He was suddenly swept by a gust of passion. “Leave
words to fools, Sir John, and criticisms to those that can defend them
better.”

“Aye, you talk like a man of blood. You come hectoring it here in the
very house of the dead—in the very house upon which you have cast this
blight of sorrow and murder....”

“Have done, I say, or murder there will be!”

His voice was a roar, his mien terrific. And bold man though Sir John
was, he recoiled. Instantly Sir Oliver had conquered himself again. He
swung to Rosamund. “Ah, forgive me!” he pleaded. “I am mad—stark mad
with anguish at the thing imputed. I have not loved your brother, it is
true. But as I swore to you, so have I done. I have taken blows from
him, and smiled; but yesterday in a public place he affronted me,
lashed me across the face with his riding-whip, as I still bear the
mark. The man who says I were not justified in having killed him for it
is a liar and a hypocrite. Yet the thought of you, Rosamund, the
thought that he was your brother sufficed to quench the rage in which
he left me. And now that by some grim mischance he has met his death,
my recompense for all my patience, for all my thought for you is that I
am charged with slaying him, and that you believe this charge.”

“She has no choice,” rasped Killigrew.

“Sir John,” he cried, “I pray you do not meddle with her choice. That
you believe it, marks you for a fool, and a fool’s counsel is a rotten
staff to lean upon at any time. Why God o’ mercy! assume that I desired
to take satisfaction for the affront he had put upon me; do you know so
little of men, and of me of all men, that you suppose I should go about
my vengeance in this hole-and-corner fashion to set a hangman’s noose
about my neck. A fine vengeance that, as God lives! Was it so I dealt
with you, Sir John, when you permitted your tongue to wag too freely,
as you have yourself confessed? Heaven’s light, man; take a proper
view; consider was this matter likely. I take it you are a more
fearsome antagonist than was ever poor Peter Godolphin, yet when I
sought satisfaction of you I sought it boldly and openly, as is my way.
When we measured swords in your park at Arwenack we did so before
witnesses in proper form, that the survivor might not be troubled with
the Justices. You know me well, and what manner of man I am with my
weapons. Should I not have done the like by Peter if I had sought his
life? Should I not have sought it in the same open fashion, and so
killed him at my pleasure and leisure, and without risk or reproach
from any?”

Sir John was stricken thoughtful. Here was logic hard and clear as ice;
and the knight of Arwenack was no fool. But whilst he stood frowning
and perplexed at the end of that long tirade, it was Rosamund who gave
Sir Oliver his answer.

“You ran no risk of reproach from any, do you say?”

He turned, and was abashed. He knew the thought that was running in her
mind.

“You mean,” he said slowly, gently, his accents charged with
reproachful incredulity, “that I am so base and false that I could in
this fashion do what I dared not for your sake do openly? ’Tis what you
mean. Rosamund! I burn with shame for you that you can think such
thoughts of one whom... whom you professed to love.”

Her coldness fell from her. Under the lash of his bitter, half-scornful
accents, her anger mounted, whelming for a moment even her anguish in
her brother’s death.

“You false deceiver!” she cried. “There are those who heard you vow his
death. Your very words have been reported to me. And from where he lay
they found a trail of blood upon the snow that ran to your own door.
Will you still lie?”

They saw the colour leave his face. They saw his arms drop limply to
his sides, and his eyes dilate with obvious sudden fear.

“A... a trail of blood?” he faltered stupidly.

“Aye, answer that!” cut in Sir John, fetched suddenly from out his
doubts by that reminder.

Sir Oliver turned upon Killigrew again. The knight’s words restored to
him the courage of which Rosamund’s had bereft him. With a man he could
fight; with a man there was no need to mince his words.

“I cannot answer it,” he said, but very firmly, in a tone that brushed
aside all implications. “If you say it was so, so it must have been.
Yet when all is said, what does it prove? Does it set it beyond doubt
that it was I who killed him? Does it justify the woman who loved me to
believe me a murderer and something worse?” He paused, and looked at
her again, a world of reproach in his glance. She had sunk to a chair,
and rocked there, her fingers locking and interlocking, her face a mask
of pain unutterable.

“Can you suggest what else it proves, sir?” quoth Sir John, and there
was doubt in his voice.

Sir Oliver caught the note of it, and a sob broke from him.

“O God of pity!” he cried out. “There is doubt in your voice, and there
is none in hers. You were my enemy once, and have since been in a
mistrustful truce with me, yet you can doubt that I did this thing. But
she... she who loved me has no room for any doubt!”

“Sir Oliver,” she answered him, “the thing you have done has broken
quite my heart. Yet knowing all the taunts by which you were brought to
such a deed I could have forgiven it, I think, even though I could no
longer be your wife; I could have forgiven it, I say, but for the
baseness of your present denial.”

He looked at her, white-faced an instant, then turned on his heel and
made for the door. There he paused.

“Your meaning is quite plain,” said he. “It is your wish that I shall
take my trial for this deed.” He laughed. “Who will accuse me to the
Justices? Will you, Sir John?”

“If Mistress Rosamund so desires me,” replied the knight.

“Ha! Be it so. But do not think I am the man to suffer myself to be
sent to the gallows upon such paltry evidence as satisfies that lady.
If any accuser comes to bleat of a trail of blood reaching to my door,
and of certain words I spoke yesterday in anger, I will take my
trial—but it shall be trial by battle upon the body of my accuser. That
is my right, and I will have every ounce of it. Do you doubt how God
will pronounce? I call upon him solemnly to pronounce between me and
such an one. If I am guilty of this thing may He wither my arm when I
enter the lists.”

“Myself I will accuse you,” came Rosamund’s dull voice. “And if you
will, you may claim your rights against me and butcher me as you
butchered him.”

“God forgive you, Rosamund!” said Sir Oliver, and went out.

He returned home with hell in his heart. He knew not what the future
might hold in store for him; but such was his resentment against
Rosamund that there was no room in his bosom for despair. They should
not hang him. He would fight them tooth and claw, and yet Lionel should
not suffer. He would take care of that. And then the thought of Lionel
changed his mood a little. How easily could he have shattered their
accusation, how easily have brought her to her proud knees imploring
pardon of him! By a word he could have done it, yet he feared lest that
word must jeopardize his brother.

In the calm, still watches of that night, as he lay sleepless upon his
bed and saw things without heat, there crept a change into his mental
attitude. He reviewed all the evidence that had led her to her
conclusions, and he was forced to confess that she was in some measure
justified of them. If she had wronged him, he had wronged her yet more.
For years she had listened to all the poisonous things that were said
of him by his enemies—and his arrogance had made him not a few. She had
disregarded all because she loved him; her relations with her brother
had become strained on that account, yet now, all this returned to
crush her; repentance played its part in her cruel belief that it was
by his hand Peter Godolphin had fallen. It must almost seem to her that
in a sense she had been a party to his murder by the headstrong course
to which she had kept in loving the man her brother hated.

He saw it now, and was more merciful in judging her. She had been more
than human if she had not felt as he now saw that she must feel, and
since reactions are to be measured by the mental exaltations from which
they spring, so was it but natural that now she must hate him fiercely
whom she had loved wellnigh as fiercely.

It was a heavy cross to bear. Yet for Lionel’s sake he must bear it
with what fortitude he could. Lionel must not be sacrificed to his
egoism for a deed that in Lionel he could not account other than
justified. He were base indeed did he so much as contemplate such a way
of escape as that.

But if he did not contemplate it, Lionel did, and went in terror during
those days, a terror that kept him from sleep and so fostered the fever
in him that on the second day after that grim affair he had the look of
a ghost, hollow-eyed and gaunt. Sir Oliver remonstrated with him and in
such terms as to put heart into him anew. Moreover, there was other
news that day to allay his terrors: the Justices, at Truro had been
informed of the event and the accusation that was made; but they had
refused point-blank to take action in the matter. The reason of it was
that one of them was that same Master Anthony Baine who had witnessed
the affront offered Sir Oliver. He declared that whatever had happened
to Master Godolphin as a consequence was no more than he deserved, no
more than he had brought upon himself, and he gave it as his decision
that his conscience as a man of honour would not permit him to issue
any warrant to the constable.

Sir Oliver received this news from that other witness, the parson, who
himself had suffered such rudeness at Godolphin’s hands, and who, man
of the Gospel and of peace though he was, entirely supported the
Justice’s decision—or so he declared.

Sir Oliver thanked him, protesting that it was kind in him and in
Master Baine to take such a view, but for the rest avowing that he had
had no hand in the affair, however much appearances might point to him.

When, however, it came to his knowledge two days later that the whole
countryside was in a ferment against Master Baine as a consequence of
the attitude he had taken up, Sir Oliver summoned the parson and
straightway rode with him to the Justice’s house at Truro, there to
afford certain evidence which he had withheld from Rosamund and Sir
John Killigrew.

“Master Baine,” he said, when the three of them were closeted in that
gentleman’s library, “I have heard of the just and gallant
pronouncement you have made, and I am come to thank you and to express
my admiration of your courage.”

Master Baine bowed gravely. He was a man whom Nature had made grave.

“But since I would not that any evil consequences might attend your
action, I am come to lay proof before you that you have acted more
rightly even than you think, and that I am not the slayer.”

“You are not?” ejaculated Master Baine in amazement.

“Oh, I assure you I use no subterfuge with you, as you shall judge. I
have proof to show you, as I say; and I am come to do so now before
time might render it impossible. I do not desire it to be made public
just yet, Master Baine; but I wish you to draw up some such document as
would satisfy the courts at any future time should this matter be taken
further, as well it may.”

It was a shrewd plea. The proof that was not upon himself was upon
Lionel; but time would efface it, and if anon publication were made of
what he was now about to show, it would then be too late to look
elsewhere.

“I assure you, Sir Oliver, that had you killed him after what happened
I could not hold you guilty of having done more than punish a boorish
and arrogant offender.”

“I know sir. But it was not so. One of the pieces of evidence against
me—indeed the chief item—is that from Godolphin’s body to my door there
was a trail of blood.”

The other two grew tensely interested. The parson watched him with
unblinking eyes.

“Now it follows logically, I think, inevitably indeed, that the
murderer must have been wounded in the encounter. The blood could not
possibly have been the victim’s, therefore it must have been the
slayer’s. That the slayer was wounded indeed we know, since there was
blood upon Godolphin’s sword. Now, Master Baine, and you, Sir Andrew,
shall be witnesses that there is upon my body not so much as a scratch
of recent date. I will strip me here as naked as when first I had the
mischance to stray into this world, and you shall satisfy yourselves of
that. Thereafter I shall beg you, Master Baine, to indite the document
I have mentioned.” And he removed his doublet as he spoke. “But since I
will not give these louts who accuse me so much satisfaction, lest I
seem to go in fear of them, I must beg, sirs, that you will keep this
matter entirely private until such time as its publication may be
rendered necessary by events.”

They saw the reasonableness of his proposal, and they consented, still
entirely sceptical. But when they had made their examination they were
utterly dumbfounded to find all their notions entirely overset. Master
Baine, of course, drew up the required document, and signed and sealed
it, whilst Sir Andrew added his own signature and seal as witness
thereunto.

With this parchment that should be his buckler against any future need,
Sir Oliver rode home, uplifted. For once it were safe to do so, that
parchment should be spread before the eyes of Sir John Killigrew and
Rosamund, and all might yet be well.




CHAPTER VI.
JASPER LEIGH


If that Christmas was one of sorrow at Godolphin Court, it was nothing
less at Penarrow.

Sir Oliver was moody and silent in those days, given to sit for long
hours staring into the heart of the fire and repeating to himself again
and again every word of his interview with Rosamund, now in a mood of
bitter resentment against her for having so readily believed his guilt,
now in a gentler sorrowing humour which made full allowance for the
strength of the appearances against him.

His half-brother moved softly about the house now in a sort of
self-effacement, never daring to intrude upon Sir Oliver’s
abstractions. He was well acquainted with their cause. He knew what had
happened at Godolphin Court, knew that Rosamund had dismissed Sir
Oliver for all time, and his heart smote him to think that he should
leave his brother to bear this burden that rightly belonged to his own
shoulders.

The thing preyed so much upon his mind that in an expansive moment one
evening he gave it tongue.

“Noll,” he said, standing beside his brother’s chair in the firelit
gloom, and resting a hand upon his brother’s shoulder, “were it not
best to tell the truth?”

Sir Oliver looked up quickly, frowning. “Art mad?” quoth he. “The truth
would hang thee, Lal.”

“It might not. And in any case you are suffering something worse than
hanging. Oh, I have watched you every hour this past week, and I know
the pain that abides in you. It is not just.” And he insisted—“We had
best tell the truth.”

Sir Oliver smiled wistfully. He put out a hand and took his brother’s.

“’Tis noble in you to propose it, Lal.”

“Not half so noble as it is in you to bear all the suffering for a deed
that was my own.”

“Bah!” Sir Oliver shrugged impatiently; his glance fell away from
Lionel’s face and returned to the consideration of the fire. “After
all, I can throw off the burden when I will. Such knowledge as that
will enhearten a man through any trial.”

He had spoken in a harsh, cynical tone, and Lionel had turned cold at
his words. He stood a long while in silence there, turning them over in
his mind and considering the riddle which they presented him. He
thought of asking his brother bluntly for the key to it, for the
precise meaning of his disconcerting statement, but courage failed him.
He feared lest Sir Oliver should confirm his own dread interpretation
of it.

He drew away after a time, and soon after went to bed. For days
thereafter the phrase rankled in his mind—“I can throw off the burden
when I will.” Conviction grew upon him that Sir Oliver meant that he
was enheartened by the knowledge that by speaking if he choose he could
clear himself. That Sir Oliver would so speak he could not think.
Indeed, he was entirely assured that Sir Oliver was very far from
intending to throw off his burden. Yet he might come to change his
mind. The burden might grow too heavy, his longings for Rosamund too
clamorous, his grief at being in her eyes her brother’s murderer too
overwhelming.

Lionel’s soul shuddered to contemplate the consequences to himself. His
fears were self-revelatory. He realized how far from sincere had been
his proposal that they should tell the truth; he perceived that it had
been no more than the emotional outburst of the moment, a proposal
which if accepted he must most bitterly have repented. And then came
the reflection that if he were guilty of emotional outbursts that could
so outrageously play the traitor to his real desires, were not all men
subject to the same? Might not his brother, too, come to fall a prey to
one of those moments of mental storm when in a climax of despair he
would find his burden altogether too overwhelming and in rebellion cast
it from him?

Lionel sought to assure himself that his brother was a man of stern
fibres, a man who never lost control of himself. But against this he
would argue that what had happened in the past was no guarantee of what
might happen in the future; that a limit was set to the endurance of
every man be he never so strong, and that it was far from impossible
that the limit of Sir Oliver’s endurance might be reached in this
affair. If that happened in what case should he find himself? The
answer to this was a picture beyond his fortitude to contemplate. The
danger of his being sent to trial and made to suffer the extreme
penalty of the law would be far greater now than if he had spoken at
once. The tale he could then have told must have compelled some
attention, for he was accounted a man of unsmirched honour and his word
must carry some weight. But now none would believe him. They would
argue from his silence and from his having suffered his brother to be
unjustly accused that he was craven-hearted and dishonourable, and that
if he had acted thus it was because he had no good defence to offer for
his deed. Not only would he be irrevocably doomed, but he would be
doomed with ignominy, he would be scorned by all upright men and become
a thing of contempt over whose end not a tear would be shed.

Thus he came to the dread conclusion that in his endeavours to screen
himself he had but enmeshed himself the more inextricably. If Oliver
but spoke he was lost. And back he came to the question: What assurance
had he that Oliver would not speak?

The fear of this from occurring to him occasionally began to haunt him
day and night, and for all that the fever had left him and his wound
was entirely healed, he remained pale and thin and hollow-eyed. Indeed
the secret terror that was in his soul glared out of his eyes at every
moment. He grew nervous and would start up at the least sound, and he
went now in a perpetual mistrust of Oliver, which became manifest in a
curious petulance of which there were outbursts at odd times.

Coming one afternoon into the dining-room, which was ever Sir Oliver’s
favourite haunt in the mansion of Penarrow, Lionel found his
half-brother in that brooding attitude, elbow on knee and chin on palm,
staring into the fire. This was so habitual now in Sir Oliver that it
had begun to irritate Lionel’s tense nerves; it had come to seem to him
that in this listlessness was a studied tacit reproach aimed at
himself.

“Why do you sit ever thus over the fire like some old crone?” he
growled, voicing at last the irritability that so long had been growing
in him.

Sir Oliver looked round with mild surprise in his glance. Then from
Lionel his eyes travelled to the long windows.

“It rains,” he said.

“It was not your wont to be driven to the fireside by rain. But rain or
shine ’tis ever the same. You never go abroad.”

“To what end?” quoth Sir Oliver, with the same mildness, but a wrinkle
of bewilderment coming gradually between his dark brows. “Do you
suppose I love to meet lowering glances, to see heads approach one
another so that confidential curses of me may be muttered?”

“Ha!” cried Lionel, short and sharp, his sunken eyes blazing suddenly.
“It has come to this, then, that having voluntarily done this thing to
shield me you now reproach me with it.”

“I?” cried Sir Oliver, aghast.

“Your very words are a reproach. D’ye think I do not read the meaning
that lies under them?”

Sir Oliver rose slowly, staring at his brother. He shook his head and
smiled.

“Lal, Lal!” he said. “Your wound has left you disordered, boy. With
what have I reproached you? What was this hidden meaning of my words?
If you will read aright you will see it to be that to go abroad is to
involve myself in fresh quarrels, for my mood is become short, and I
will not brook sour looks and mutterings. That is all.”

He advanced and set his hands upon his brother’s shoulders. Holding him
so at arm’s length he considered him, what time Lionel drooped his head
and a slow flush overspread his cheeks. “Dear fool!” he said, and shook
him. “What ails you? You are pale and gaunt, and not yourself at all. I
have a notion. I’ll furnish me a ship and you shall sail with me to my
old hunting-grounds. There is life out yonder—life that will restore
your vigour and your zest, and perhaps mine as well. How say you, now?”

Lionel looked up, his eye brightening. Then a thought occurred to him;
a thought so mean that again the colour flooded into his cheeks, for he
was shamed by it. Yet it clung. If he sailed with Oliver, men would say
that he was a partner in the guilt attributed to his brother. He
knew—from more than one remark addressed him here or there, and left by
him uncontradicted—that the belief was abroad on the countryside that a
certain hostility was springing up between himself and Sir Oliver on
the score of that happening in Godolphin Park. His pale looks and
hollow eyes had contributed to the opinion that his brother’s sin was
weighing heavily upon him. He had ever been known for a gentle, kindly
lad, in all things the very opposite of the turbulent Sir Oliver, and
it was assumed that Sir Oliver in his present increasing harshness used
his brother ill because the lad would not condone his crime. A deal of
sympathy was consequently arising for Lionel and was being testified to
him on every hand. Were he to accede to such a proposal as Oliver now
made him, assuredly he must jeopardize all that.

He realized to the full the contemptible quality of his thought and
hated himself for conceiving it. But he could not shake off its
dominion. It was stronger than his will.

His brother observing this hesitation, and misreading it drew him to
the fireside and made him sit.

“Listen,” he said, as he dropped into the chair opposite. “There is a
fine ship standing in the road below, off Smithick. You’ll have seen
her. Her master is a desperate adventurer named Jasper Leigh, who is to
be found any afternoon in the alehouse at Penycumwick. I know him of
old, and he and his ship are to be acquired. He is ripe for any
venture, from scuttling Spaniards to trading in slaves, and so that the
price be high enough we may buy him body and soul. His is a stomach
that refuses nothing, so there be money in the venture. So here is ship
and master ready found; the rest I will provide—the crew, the
munitions, the armament, and by the end of March we shall see the
Lizard dropping astern. What do you say, Lal? ’Tis surely better than
to sit, moping here in this place of gloom.”

“I’ll...I’ll think of it,” said Lionel, but so listlessly that all Sir
Oliver’s quickening enthusiasm perished again at once and no more was
said of the venture.

But Lionel did not altogether reject the notion. If on the one hand he
was repelled by it, on the other he was attracted almost despite
himself. He went so far as to acquire the habit of riding daily over to
Penycumwick, and there he made the acquaintance of that hardy and
scarred adventurer of whom Sir Oliver had spoken, and listened to the
marvels the fellow had to tell—many of them too marvellous to be
true—of hazards upon distant seas.

But one day in early March Master Jasper Leigh had a tale of another
kind for him, news that dispelled from Lionel’s mind all interest in
the captain’s ventures on the Spanish Main. The seaman had followed the
departing Lionel to the door of the little inn and stood by his stirrup
after he had got to horse.

“A word in your ear, good Master Tressilian,” said he. “D’ye know what
is being concerted here against our brother?”

“Against my brother?”

“Ay—in the matter of the killing of Master Peter Godolphin last
Christmas. Seeing that the Justices would not move of theirselves, some
folk ha’ petitioned the Lieutenant of Cornwall to command them to grant
a warrant for Sir Oliver’s arrest on a charge o’ murder. But the
Justices ha’ refused to be driven by his lordship, answering that they
hold their office direct from the Queen and that in such a matter they
are answerable to none but her grace. And now I hear that a petition be
gone to London to the Queen herself, begging her to command her
Justices to perform their duty or quit their office.”

Lionel drew a sharp breath, and with dilating eyes regarded the
mariner, but made him no answer.

Jasper laid a long finger against his nose and his eyes grew cunning.
“I thought I’d warn you, sir, so as you may bid Sir Oliver look to
hisself. ’Tis a fine seaman and fine seamen be none so plentiful.”

Lionel drew his purse from his pocket and without so much as looking
into its contents dropped it into the seaman’s ready hand, with a
muttered word of thanks.

He rode home in terror almost. It was come. The blow was about to fall,
and his brother would at last be forced to speak. At Penarrow a fresh
shock awaited him. He learnt from old Nicholas that Sir Oliver was from
home, that he had ridden over to Godolphin Court.

The instant conclusion prompted by Lionel’s terror was that already the
news had reached Sir Oliver and that he had instantly taken action; for
he could not conceive that his brother should go to Godolphin Court
upon any other business.

But his fears on that score were very idle. Sir Oliver, unable longer
to endure the present state of things, had ridden over to lay before
Rosamund that proof with which he had taken care to furnish himself. He
could do so at last without any fear of hurting Lionel. His journey,
however, had been entirely fruitless. She had refused point-blank to
receive him, and for all that with a humility entirely foreign to him
he had induced a servant to return to her with a most urgent message,
yet he had been denied. He returned stricken to Penarrow, there to find
his brother awaiting him in a passion of impatience.

“Well?” Lionel greeted him. “What will you do now?”

Sir Oliver looked at him from under brows that scowled darkly in
reflection of his thoughts.

“Do now? Of what do you talk?” quoth he.

“Have you not heard?” And Lionel told him the news.

Sir Oliver stared long at him when he had done, then his lips tightened
and he smote his brow.

“So!” he cried. “Would that be why she refused to see me? Did she
conceive that I went perhaps to plead? Could she think that? Could
she?”

He crossed to the fireplace and stirred the logs with his boot angrily.
“Oh! ’Twere too unworthy. Yet of a certainty ’tis her doing, this.”

“What shall you do?” insisted Lionel, unable to repress the question
that was uppermost in his mind; and his voice shook.

“Do?” Sir Oliver looked at him over his shoulder. “Prick this bubble,
by heaven! Make an end of it for them, confound them and cover them
with shame.”

He said it roughly, angrily, and Lionel recoiled, deeming that
roughness and anger aimed at himself. He sank into a chair, his knees
loosened by his sudden fear. So it seemed that he had had more than
cause for his apprehensions. This brother of his who boasted such
affection for him was not equal to bearing this matter through. And yet
the thing was so unlike Oliver that a doubt still lingered with him.

“You... you will tell them the truth?” he said, in small, quavering
voice.

Sir Oliver turned and considered him more attentively.

“A God’s name, Lal, what’s in thy mind now?” he asked, almost roughly.
“Tell them the truth? Why, of course—but only as it concerns myself.
You’re not supposing that I shall tell them it was you? You’ll not be
accounting me capable of that?”

“What other way is there?”

Sir Oliver explained the matter. The explanation brought Lionel relief.
But this relief was ephemeral. Further reflection presented a new fear
to him. It came to him that if Sir Oliver cleared himself, of necessity
his own implication must follow. His terrors very swiftly magnified a
risk that in itself was so slender as to be entirely negligible. In his
eyes it ceased to be a risk; it became a certain and inevitable danger.
If Sir Oliver put forward this proof that the trail of blood had not
proceeded from himself, it must, thought Lionel, inevitably be
concluded that it was his own. As well might Sir Oliver tell them the
whole truth, for surely they could not fail to infer it. Thus he
reasoned in his terror, accounting himself lost irrevocably.

Had he but gone with those fears of his to his brother, or had he but
been able to abate them sufficiently to allow reason to prevail, he
must have been brought to understand how much further they carried him
than was at all justified by probability. Oliver would have shown him
this, would have told him that with the collapsing of the charge
against himself no fresh charge could be levelled against any there,
that no scrap of suspicion had ever attached to Lionel, or ever could.
But Lionel dared not seek his brother in this matter. In his heart he
was ashamed of his fears; in his heart he knew himself for a craven. He
realized to the full the hideousness of his selfishness, and yet, as
before, he was not strong enough to conquer it. In short, his love of
himself was greater than his love of his brother, or of twenty
brothers.

The morrow—a blustering day of late March found him again at that
alehouse at Penycumwick in the company of Jasper Leigh. A course had
occurred to him, as the only course now possible. Last night his
brother had muttered something of going to Killigrew with his proofs
since Rosamund refused to receive him. Through Killigrew he would reach
her, he had said; and he would yet see her on her knees craving his
pardon for the wrong she had done him, for the cruelty she had shown
him.

Lionel knew that Killigrew was absent from home just then; but he was
expected to return by Easter, and to Easter there was but a week.
Therefore he had little time in which to act, little time in which to
execute the project that had come into his mind. He cursed himself for
conceiving it, but held to it with all the strength of a weak nature.

Yet when he came to sit face to face with Jasper Leigh in that little
inn-parlour with the scrubbed table of plain deal between them, he
lacked the courage to set his proposal forth. They drank sherry sack
stiffly laced with brandy by Lionel’s suggestion, instead of the more
customary mulled ale. Yet not until he had consumed the best part of a
pint of it did Lionel feel himself heartened to broaching his loathsome
business. Through his head hummed the words his brother had said some
time ago when first the name of Jasper Leigh had passed between them—“a
desperate adventurer ripe for anything. So the price be high enough you
may buy him body and soul.” Money enough to buy Jasper Leigh was ready
to Lionel’s hand; but it was Sir Oliver’s money—the money that was
placed at Lionel’s disposal by his half-brother’s open-handed bounty.
And this money he was to employ for Oliver’s utter ruin! He cursed
himself for a filthy, contemptible hound; he cursed the foul fiend that
whispered such suggestions into his mind; he knew himself, despised
himself and reviled himself until he came to swear to be strong and to
go through with whatever might await him sooner than be guilty of such
a baseness; the next moment that same resolve would set him shuddering
again as he viewed the inevitable consequences that must attend it.

Suddenly the captain set him a question, very softly, that fired the
train and blew all his lingering self-resistance into shreds.

“You’ll ha’ borne my warning to Sir Oliver?” he asked, lowering his
voice so as not to be overheard by the vintner who was stirring beyond
the thin wooden partition.

Master Lionel nodded, nervously fingering the jewel in his ear, his
eyes shifting from their consideration of the seaman’s coarse,
weather-tanned and hairy countenance.

“I did,” he said. “But Sir Oliver is headstrong. He will not stir.”

“Will he not?” The captain stroked his bushy red beard and cursed
profusely and horribly after the fashion of the sea. “Od’s wounds! He’s
very like to swing if he bides him here.”

“Ay,” said Lionel, “if he bides.” He felt his mouth turn dry as he
spoke; his heart thudded, but its thuds were softened by a slight
insensibility which the liquor had produced in him.

He uttered the words in so curious a tone that the sailor’s dark eyes
peered at him from under his heavy sandy eyebrows. There was alert
inquiry in that glance. Master Lionel got up suddenly.

“Let us take a turn outside, captain,” said he.

The captain’s eyes narrowed. He scented business. There was something
plaguily odd about this young gentleman’s manner. He tossed off the
remains of his sack, slapped down the pot and rose.

“Your servant, Master Tressilian,” said he.

Outside our gentleman untethered his horse from the iron ring to which
he had attached the bridle; leading his horse he turned seaward and
strode down the road that wound along the estuary towards Smithick.

A sharp breeze from the north was whipping the water into white peaks
of foam; the sky was of a hard brightness and the sun shone
brilliantly. The tide was running out, and the rock in the very neck of
the haven was thrusting its black crest above the water. A cable’s
length this side of it rode the black hull and naked spars of the
Swallow—Captain Leigh’s ship.

Lionel stepped along in silence, very gloomy and pensive, hesitating
even now. And the crafty mariner reading this hesitation, and anxious
to conquer it for the sake of such profit as he conceived might lie in
the proposal which he scented, paved the way for him at last.

“I think that ye’ll have some matter to propose to me.” said he slyly.
“Out with it, sir, for there never was a man more ready to serve you.”

“The fact is,” said Lionel, watching the other’s face with a sidelong
glance, “I am in a difficult position, Master Leigh.”

“I’ve been in a many,” laughed the captain, “but never yet in one
through which I could not win. Strip forth your own, and haply I can do
as much for you as I am wont to do for myself.”

“Why, it is this wise,” said the other. “My brother will assuredly hang
as you have said if he bides him here. He is lost if they bring him to
trial. And in that case, faith, I am lost too. It dishonours a man’s
family to have a member of it hanged. ’Tis a horrible thing to have
happen.”

“Indeed, indeed!” the sailor agreed encouragingly.

“I would abstract him from this,” pursued Lionel, and at the same time
cursed the foul fiend that prompted him such specious words to cloak
his villainy. “I would abstract him from it, and yet ’tis against my
conscience that he should go unpunished for I swear to you, Master
Leigh, that I abhor the deed—a cowardly, murderous deed!”

“Ah!” said the captain. And lest that grim ejaculation should check his
gentleman he made haste to add—“To be sure! To be sure!”

Master Lionel stopped and faced the other squarely, his shoulders to
his horse. They were quite alone in as lonely a spot as any conspirator
could desire. Behind him stretched the empty beach, ahead of him the
ruddy cliffs that rise gently to the wooded heights of Arwenack.

“I’ll be quite plain and open with you, Master Leigh. Peter Godolphin
was my friend. Sir Oliver is no more than my half-brother. I would give
a deal to the man who would abstract Sir Oliver secretly from the doom
that hangs over him, and yet do the thing in such a way that Sir Oliver
should not thereby escape the punishment he deserves.”

It was strange, he thought, even as he said it, that he could bring his
lips so glibly to utter words that his heart detested.

The captain looked grim. He laid a finger upon Master Lionel’s velvet
doublet in line with that false heart of his.

“I am your man,” said he. “But the risk is great. Yet ye say that ye’ld
give a deal....”

“Yourself shall name the price,” said Lionel quickly, his eyes burning
feverishly, his cheeks white.

“Oh I can contrive it, never fear,” said the captain. “I know to a
nicety what you require. How say you now: if I was to carry him
overseas to the plantations where they lack toilers of just such thews
as his?” He lowered his voice and spoke with some slight hesitation,
fearing that he proposed perhaps more than his prospective employer
might desire.

“He might return,” was the answer that dispelled all doubts on that
score.

“Ah!” said the skipper. “What o’ the Barbary rovers, then! They lack
slaves and are ever ready to trade, though they be niggardly payers. I
never heard of none that returned once they had him safe aboard their
galleys. I ha’ done some trading with them, bartering human freights
for spices and eastern carpets and the like.”

Master Lionel breathed hard. “’Tis a horrible fate, is’t not?”

The captain stroked his beard. “Yet ’tis the only really safe bestowal,
and when all is said ’tis not so horrible as hanging, and certainly
less dishonouring to a man’s kin. Ye’ld be serving Sir Oliver and
yourself.”

“’Tis so, tis so,” cried Master Lionel almost fiercely. “And the
price?”

The seaman shifted on his short, sturdy legs, and his face grew
pensive. “A hundred pound?” he suggested tentatively.

“Done with you for a hundred pounds,” was the prompt answer—so prompt
that Captain Leigh realized he had driven a fool’s bargain which it was
incumbent upon him to amend.

“That is, a hundred pound for myself,” he corrected slowly. “Then there
be the crew to reckon for—to keep their counsel and lend a hand; ’twill
mean another hundred at the least.”

Master Lionel considered a moment. “It is more than I can lay my hands
on at short notice. But, look you, you shall have a hundred and fifty
pounds in coin and the balance in jewels. You shall not be the loser in
that, I promise you. And when you come again, and bring me word that
all is done as you now undertake there shall be the like again.”

Upon that the bargain was settled. And when Lionel came to talk of ways
and means he found that he had allied himself to a man who understood
his business thoroughly. All the assistance that the skipper asked was
that Master Lionel should lure his gentleman to some concerted spot
conveniently near the waterside. There Leigh would have a boat and his
men in readiness, and the rest might very safely be left to him.

In a flash Lionel bethought him of the proper place for this. He swung
round, and pointed across the water to Trefusis Point and the grey pile
of Godolphin Court all bathed in sunshine now.

“Yonder, at Trefusis Point in the shadow of Godolphin Court at eight
to-morrow night, when there will be no moon. I’ll see that he is there.
But on your life do not miss him.”

“Trust me,” said Master Leigh. “And the money?”

“When you have him safely aboard come to me at Penarrow,” he replied,
which showed that after all he did not trust Master Leigh any further
than he was compelled.

The captain was quite satisfied. For should his gentleman fail to
disburse he could always return Sir Oliver to shore.

On that they parted. Lionel mounted and rode away, whilst Master Leigh
made a trumpet of his hands and hallooed to the ship.

As he stood waiting for the boat that came off to fetch him, a smile
slowly overspread the adventurer’s rugged face. Had Master Lionel seen
it he might have asked himself how far it was safe to drive such
bargains with a rogue who kept faith only in so far as it was
profitable. And in this matter Master Leigh saw a way to break faith
with profit. He had no conscience, but he loved as all rogues love to
turn the tables upon a superior rogue. He would play Master Lionel most
finely, most poetically false; and he found a deal to chuckle over in
the contemplation of it.




CHAPTER VII.
TREPANNED


Master Lionel was absent most of the following day from Penarrow, upon
a pretext of making certain purchases in Truro. It would be half-past
seven when he returned; and as he entered he met Sir Oliver in the
hall.

“I have a message for you from Godolphin Court,” he announced, and saw
his brother stiffen and his face change colour. “A boy met me at the
gates and bade me tell you that Mistress Rosamund desires a word with
you forthwith.”

Sir Oliver’s heart almost stopped, then went off at a gallop. She asked
for him! She had softened perhaps from her yesterday’s relentlessness.
She would consent at last to see him!

“Be thou blessed for these good tidings!” he answered on a note of high
excitement. “I go at once.” And on the instant he departed. Such was
his eagerness, indeed, that under the hot spur of it he did not even
stay to fetch that parchment which was to be his unanswerable advocate.
The omission was momentous.

Master Lionel said no word as his brother swept out. He shrank back a
little into the shadows. He was white to the lips and felt as he would
stifle. As the door closed he moved suddenly. He sprang to follow Sir
Oliver. Conscience cried out to him that he could not do this thing.
But Fear was swift to answer that outcry. Unless he permitted what was
planned to take its course, his life might pay the penalty.

He turned, and lurched into the dining-room upon legs that trembled.

He found the table set for supper as on that other night when he had
staggered in with a wound in his side to be cared for and sheltered by
Sir Oliver. He did not approach the table; he crossed to the fire, and
sat down there holding out his hands to the blaze. He was very cold and
could not still his trembling. His very teeth chattered.

Nicholas came in to know if he would sup. He answered unsteadily that
despite the lateness of the hour he would await Sir Oliver’s return.

“Is Sir Oliver abroad?” quoth the servant in surprise.

“He went out a moment since, I know not whither,” replied Lionel. “But
since he has not supped he is not like to be long absent.”

Upon that he dismissed the servant, and sat huddled there, a prey to
mental tortures which were not to be repressed. His mind would turn
upon naught but the steadfast, unwavering affection of which Sir Oliver
ever had been prodigal towards him. In this very matter of Peter
Godolphin’s death, what sacrifices had not Sir Oliver made to shield
him? From so much love and self-sacrifice in the past he inclined to
argue now that not even in extreme peril would his brother betray him.
And then that bad streak of fear which made a villain of him reminded
him that to argue thus was to argue upon supposition, that it would be
perilous to trust such an assumption; that if, after all, Sir Oliver
should fail him in the crucial test, then was he lost indeed.

When all is said, a man’s final judgment of his fellows must be based
upon his knowledge of himself; and Lionel, knowing himself incapable of
any such sacrifice for Sir Oliver, could not believe Sir Oliver capable
of persisting in such a sacrifice as future events might impose. He
reverted to those words Sir Oliver had uttered in that very room two
nights ago, and more firmly than ever he concluded that they could have
but one meaning.

Then came doubt, and, finally, assurance of another sort, assurance
that this was not so and that he knew it; assurance that he lied to
himself, seeking to condone the thing he did. He took his head in his
hands and groaned loud. He was a villain, a black-hearted, soulless
villain! He reviled himself again. There came a moment when he rose
shuddering, resolved even in this eleventh hour to go after his brother
and save him from the doom that awaited him out yonder in the night.

But again that resolve was withered by the breath of selfish fear.
Limply he resumed his seat, and his thoughts took a fresh turn. They
considered now those matters which had engaged them on that day when
Sir Oliver had ridden to Arwenack to claim satisfaction of Sir John
Killigrew. He realized again that Oliver being removed, what he now
enjoyed by his brother’s bounty he would enjoy henceforth in his own
unquestioned right. The reflection brought him a certain consolation.
If he must suffer for his villainy, at least there would be
compensations.

The clock over the stables chimed the hour of eight. Master Lionel
shrank back in his chair at the sound. The thing would be doing even
now. In his mind he saw it all—saw his brother come running in his
eagerness to the gates of Godolphin Court, and then dark forms resolve
themselves from the surrounding darkness and fall silently upon him. He
saw him struggling a moment on the ground, then, bound hand and foot, a
gag thrust into his mouth, he beheld him in fancy borne swiftly down
the slope to the beach and so to the waiting boat.

Another half-hour sat he there. The thing was done by now, and this
assurance seemed to quiet him a little.

Then came Nicholas again to babble of some possible mischance having
overtaken his master.

“What mischance should have overtaken him?” growled Lionel, as if in
scorn of the idea.

“I pray none indeed,” replied the servant. “But Sir Oliver lacks not
for enemies nowadays, and ’tis scarce zafe for he to be abroad after
dark.”

Master Lionel dismissed the notion contemptuously. For pretence’s sake
he announced that he would wait no longer, whereupon Nicholas brought
in his supper, and left him again to go and linger about the door,
looking out into the night and listening for his master’s return. He
paid a visit to the stables, and knew that Sir Oliver had gone forth
afoot.

Meanwhile Master Lionel must make pretence of eating though actual
eating must have choked him. He smeared his platter, broke food, and
avidly drank a bumper of claret. Then he, too, feigned a growing
anxiety and went to join Nicholas. Thus they spent the weary night,
watching for the return of one who Master Lionel knew would return no
more.

At dawn they roused the servants and sent them to scour the countryside
and put the news of Sir Oliver’s disappearance abroad. Lionel himself
rode out to Arwenack to ask Sir John Killigrew bluntly if he knew aught
of this matter.

Sir John showed a startled face, but swore readily enough that he had
not so much as seen Sir Oliver for days. He was gentle with Lionel,
whom he liked, as everybody liked him. The lad was so mild and kindly
in his ways, so vastly different from his arrogant overbearing brother,
that his virtues shone the more brightly by that contrast.

“I confess it is natural you should come to me,” said Sir John. “But,
my word on it, I have no knowledge of him. It is not my way to beset my
enemies in the dark.”

“Indeed, indeed, Sir John, I had not supposed it in my heart,” replied
the afflicted Lionel. “Forgive me that I should have come to ask a
question so unworthy. Set it down to my distracted state. I have not
been the same man these months, I think, since that happening in
Godolphin Park. The thing has preyed upon my mind. It is a fearsome
burden to know your own brother—though I thank God he is no more than
my half-brother—guilty of so foul a deed.”

“How?” cried Killigrew, amazed. “You say that? You believed it
yourself?”

Master Lionel looked confused, a look which Sir John entirely
misunderstood and interpreted entirely in the young man’s favour. And
it was thus and in that moment that was sown the generous seed of the
friendship that was to spring up between these two men, its roots
fertilized by Sir John’s pity that one so gentle-natured, so honest,
and so upright should be cursed with so villainous a brother.

“I see, I see,” he said. And he sighed. “You know that we are daily
expecting an order from the Queen to her Justices to take the action
which hitherto they have refused against your... against Sir Oliver.”
He frowned thoughtfully. “D’ye think Sir Oliver had news of this?”

At once Master Lionel saw the drift of what was in the other’s mind.

“I know it,” he replied. “Myself I bore it him. But why do you ask?”

“Does it not help us perhaps to understand and explain Sir Oliver’s
disappearance? God lack! Surely, knowing that, he were a fool to have
tarried here, for he would hang beyond all doubt did he stay for the
coming of her grace’s messenger.”

“My God!” said Lionel, staring. “You... you think he is fled, then?”

Sir John shrugged. “What else is to be thought?”

Lionel hung his head. “What else, indeed?” said he, and took his leave
like a man overwrought, as indeed he was. He had never considered that
so obvious a conclusion must follow upon his work so fully to explain
the happening and to set at rest any doubt concerning it.

He returned to Penarrow, and bluntly told Nicholas what Sir John
suspected and what he feared himself must be the true reason of Sir
Oliver’s disappearance. The servant, however, was none so easy to
convince.

“But do ee believe that he done it?” cried Nicholas. “Do ee believe it,
Master Lionel?” There was reproach amounting to horror in the servant’s
voice.

“God help me, what else can I believe now that he is fled.”

Nicholas sidled up to him with tightened lips. He set two gnarled
fingers on the young man’s arm.

“He’m not fled, Master Lionel,” he announced with grim impressiveness.
“He’m never a turntail. Sir Oliver he don’t fear neither man nor devil,
and if so be him had killed Master Godolphin, he’d never ha’ denied it.
Don’t ee believe Sir John Killigrew. Sir John ever hated he.”

But in all that countryside the servant was the only one to hold this
view. If a doubt had lingered anywhere of Sir Oliver’s guilt, that
doubt was now dispelled by this flight of his before the approach of
the expected orders from the Queen.

Later that day came Captain Leigh to Penarrow inquiring for Sir Oliver.

Nicholas brought word of his presence and his inquiry to Master Lionel,
who bade him be admitted.

The thick-set little seaman rolled in on his bowed legs, and leered at
his employer when they were alone.

“He’s snug and safe aboard,” he announced. “The thing were done as
clean as peeling an apple, and as quiet.”

“Why did you ask for him?” quoth Master Lionel.

“Why?” Jasper leered again. “My business was with him. There was some
talk between us of him going a voyage with me. I’ve heard the gossip
over at Smithick. This will fit in with it.” He laid that finger of his
to his nose. “Trust me to help a sound tale along. ’T were a clumsy
business to come here asking for you, sir. Ye’ll know now how to
account for my visit.”

Lionel paid him the price agreed and dismissed him upon receiving the
assurance that the Swallow would put to sea upon the next tide.

When it became known that Sir Oliver had been in treaty with Master
Leigh for a passage overseas, and that it was but on that account that
Master Leigh had tarried in that haven, even Nicholas began to doubt.

Gradually Lionel recovered his tranquillity as the days flowed on. What
was done was done, and, in any case, being now beyond recall, there was
no profit in repining. He never knew how fortune aided him, as fortune
will sometimes aid a villain. The royal pour-suivants arrived some six
days later, and Master Baine was the recipient of a curt summons to
render himself to London, there to account for his breach of trust in
having refused to perform his sworn duty. Had Sir Andrew Flack but
survived the chill that had carried him off a month ago, Master Justice
Baine would have made short work of the accusation lodged against him.
As it was, when he urged the positive knowledge he possessed, and told
them how he had made the examination to which Sir Oliver had
voluntarily submitted, his single word carried no slightest conviction.
Not for a moment was it supposed that this was aught but the subterfuge
of one who had been lax in his duty and who sought to save himself from
the consequences of that laxity. And the fact that he cited as his
fellow-witness a gentleman now deceased but served to confirm his
judges in this opinion. He was deposed from his office and subjected to
a heavy fine, and there the matter ended, for the hue-and-cry that was
afoot entirely failed to discover any trace of the missing Sir Oliver.

For Master Lionel a new existence set in from that day. Looked upon as
one in danger of suffering for his brother’s sins, the countryside
determined to help him as far as possible to bear his burden. Great
stress was laid upon the fact that after all he was no more than Sir
Oliver’s half-brother; some there were who would have carried their
kindness to the lengths of suggesting that perhaps he was not even
that, and that it was but natural that Ralph Tressilian’s second wife
should have repaid her husband in kind for his outrageous infidelities.
This movement of sympathy was led by Sir John Killigrew, and it spread
in so rapid and marked a manner that very soon Master Lionel was almost
persuaded that it was no more than he deserved, and he began to sun
himself in the favour of a countryside that hitherto had shown little
but hostility for men of the Tressilian blood.




CHAPTER VIII.
THE SPANIARD


The Swallow, having passed through a gale in the Bay of Biscay—a gale
which she weathered like the surprisingly steady old tub she
was—rounded Cape Finisterre and so emerged from tempest into peace,
from leaden skies and mountainous seas into a sunny azure calm. It was
like a sudden transition from winter into spring, and she ran along
now, close hauled to the soft easterly breeze, with a gentle list to
port.

It had never been Master Leigh’s intent to have got so far as this
without coming to an understanding with his prisoner. But the wind had
been stronger than his intentions, and he had been compelled to run
before it and to head to southward until its fury should abate. Thus it
fell out—and all marvellously to Master Lionel’s advantage, as you
shall see—that the skipper was forced to wait until they stood along
the coast of Portugal—but well out to sea, for the coast of Portugal
was none too healthy just then to English seamen—before commanding Sir
Oliver to be haled into his presence.

In the cramped quarters of the cabin in the poop of the little vessel
sat her captain at a greasy table, over which a lamp was swinging
faintly to the gentle heave of the ship. He was smoking a foul pipe,
whose fumes hung heavily upon the air of that little chamber, and there
was a bottle of Nantes at his elbow.

To him, sitting thus in state, was Sir Oliver introduced—his wrists
still pinioned behind him. He was haggard and hollow-eyed, and he
carried a week’s growth of beard on his chin. Also his garments were
still in disorder from the struggle he had made when taken, and from
the fact that he had been compelled to lie in them ever since.

Since his height was such that it was impossible for him to stand
upright in that low-ceilinged cabin, a stool was thrust forward for him
by one of the ruffians of Leigh’s crew who had haled him from his
confinement beneath the hatchway.

He sat down quite listlessly, and stared vacantly at the skipper.
Master Leigh was somewhat discomposed by this odd calm when he had
looked for angry outbursts. He dismissed the two seamen who fetched Sir
Oliver, and when they had departed and closed the cabin door he
addressed his captive.

“Sir Oliver,” said he, stroking his red beard, “ye’ve been most foully
abused.”

The sunshine filtered through one of the horn windows and beat full
upon Sir Oliver’s expressionless face.

“It was not necessary, you knave, to bring me hither to tell me so
much.” he answered.

“Quite so,” said Master Leigh. “But I have something more to add. Ye’ll
be thinking that I ha’ done you a disservice. There ye wrong me.
Through me you are brought to know true friends from secret enemies;
henceforward ye’ll know which to trust and which to mistrust.”

Sir Oliver seemed to rouse himself a little from his passivity,
stimulated despite himself by the impudence of this rogue. He stretched
a leg and smiled sourly.

“You’ll end by telling me that I am in your debt,” said he.

“You’ll end by saying so yourself,” the captain assured him. “D’ye know
what I was bidden do with you?”

“Faith, I neither know nor care,” was the surprising answer, wearily
delivered. “If it is for my entertainment that you propose to tell me,
I beg you’ll spare yourself the trouble.”

It was not an answer that helped the captain. He pulled at his pipe a
moment.

“I was bidden,” said he presently, “to carry you to Barbary and sell
you there into the service of the Moors. That I might serve you, I made
believe to accept this task.”

“God’s death!” swore Sir Oliver. “You carry make-believe to an odd
length.”

“The weather has been against me. It were no intention o’ mine to ha’
come so far south with you. But we’ve been driven by the gale. That is
overpast, and so that ye’ll promise to bear no plaint against me, and
to make good some of the loss I’ll make by going out of my course, and
missing a cargo that I wot of, I’ll put about and fetch you home again
within a week.”

Sir Oliver looked at him and smiled grimly. “Now what a rogue are you
that can keep faith with none!” he cried. “First you take money to
carry me off; and then you bid me pay you to carry me back again.”

“Ye wrong me, sir, I vow ye do! I can keep faith when honest men employ
me, and ye should know it, Sir Oliver. But who keeps faith with rogues
is a fool—and that I am not, as ye should also know. I ha’ done this
thing that a rogue might be revealed to you and thwarted, as well as
that I might make some little profit out of this ship o’ mine. I am
frank with ye, Sir Oliver. I ha’ had some two hundred pounds in money
and trinkets from your brother. Give me the like and....”

But now of a sudden Sir Oliver’s listlessness was all dispelled. It
fell from him like a cloak, and he sat forward, wide awake and with
some show of anger even.

“How do you say?” he cried, on a sharp, high note.

The captain stared at him, his pipe neglected. “I say that if so be as
ye’ll pay me the same sum which your brother paid me to carry you
off....”

“My brother?” roared the knight. “Do you say my brother?”

“I said your brother.”

“Master Lionel?” the other demanded still.

“What other brothers have you?” quoth Master Leigh.

There fell a pause and Sir Oliver looked straight before him, his head
sunken a little between his shoulders. “Let me understand,” he said at
length. “Do you say that my brother Lionel paid you money to carry me
off—in short, that my presence aboard this foul hulk of yours is due to
him?”

“Whom else had ye suspected? Or did ye think that I did it for my own
personal diversion?”

“Answer me,” bellowed Sir Oliver, writhing in his bonds.

“I ha’ answered you more than once already. Still, I tell you once
again, since ye are slow to understand it, that I was paid a matter of
two hundred pound by your brother, Master Lionel Tressilian, to carry
you off to Barbary and there sell you for a slave. Is that plain to
you?”

“As plain as it is false. You lie, you dog!”

“Softly, softly!” quoth Master Leigh, good-humouredly.

“I say you lie!”

Master Leigh considered him a moment. “Sets the wind so!” said he at
length, and without another word he rose and went to a sea-chest ranged
against the wooden wall of the cabin. He opened it and took thence a
leather bag. From this he produced a handful of jewels. He thrust them
under Sir Oliver’s nose. “Haply,” said he, “ye’ll be acquainted with
some of them. They was given me to make up the sum since your brother
had not the whole two hundred pound in coin. Take a look at them.”

Sir Oliver recognized a ring and a long pear-shaped pearl earring that
had been his brother’s; he recognized a medallion that he himself had
given Lionel two years ago; and so, one by one, he recognized every
trinket placed before him.

His head drooped to his breast, and he sat thus awhile like a man
stunned. “My God!” he groaned miserably, at last. “Who, then, is left
to me! Lionel too! Lionel!” A sob shook the great frame. Two tears
slowly trickled down that haggard face and were lost in the stubble of
beard upon his chin. “I am accursed!” he said.

Never without such evidence could he have believed this thing. From the
moment that he was beset outside the gates of Godolphin Court he had
conceived it to be the work of Rosamund, and his listlessness was
begotten of the thought that she could have suffered conviction of his
guilt and her hatred of him to urge her to such lengths as these. Never
for an instant had he doubted the message delivered him by Lionel that
it was Mistress Rosamund who summoned him. And just as he believed
himself to be going to Godolphin Court in answer to her summons, so did
he conclude that the happening there was the real matter to which she
had bidden him, a thing done by her contriving, her answer to his
attempt on the previous day to gain speech with her, her manner of
ensuring that such an impertinence should never be repeated.

This conviction had been gall and wormwood to him; it had drugged his
very senses, reducing him to a listless indifference to any fate that
might be reserved him. Yet it had not been so bitter a draught as this
present revelation. After all, in her case there were some grounds for
the hatred that had come to take the place of her erstwhile love. But
in Lionel’s what grounds were possible? What motives could exist for
such an action as this, other than a monstrous, a loathly egoism which
desired perhaps to ensure that the blame for the death of Peter
Godolphin should not be shifted from the shoulders that were unjustly
bearing it, and the accursed desire to profit by the removal of the man
who had been brother, father and all else to him? He shuddered in sheer
horror. It was incredible, and yet beyond a doubt it was true. For all
the love which he had showered upon Lionel, for all the sacrifices of
self which he had made to shield him, this was Lionel’s return. Were
all the world against him he still must have believed Lionel true to
him, and in that belief must have been enheartened a little. And
now...His sense of loneliness, of utter destitution overwhelmed him.
Then slowly of his sorrow resentment was begotten, and being begotten
it grew rapidly until it filled his mind and whelmed in its turn all
else. He threw back his great head, and his bloodshot, gleaming eyes
fastened upon Captain Leigh, who seated now upon the sea-chest was
quietly observing him and waiting patiently until he should recover the
wits which this revelation had scattered.

“Master Leigh,” said he, “what is your price to carry me home again to
England?”

“Why, Sir Oliver,” said he, “I think the price I was paid to carry you
off would be a fair one. The one would wipe out t’other as it were.”

“You shall have twice the sum when you land me on Trefusis Point
again,” was the instant answer.

The captain’s little eyes blinked and his shaggy red eyebrows came
together in a frown. Here was too speedy an acquiescence. There must be
guile behind it, or he knew naught of the ways of men.

“What mischief are ye brooding?” he sneered.

“Mischief, man? To you?” Sir Oliver laughed hoarsely. “God’s light,
knave, d’ye think I consider you in this matter, or d’ye think I’ve
room in my mind for such petty resentments together with that other?”

It was the truth. So absolute was the bitter sway of his anger against
Lionel that he could give no thought to this rascally seaman’s share in
the adventure.

“Will ye give me your word for that?”

“My word? Pshaw, man! I have given it already. I swear that you shall
be paid the sum I’ve named the moment you set me ashore again in
England. Is that enough for you? Then cut me these bonds, and let us
make an end of my present condition.”

“Faith, I am glad to deal with so sensible a man! Ye take it in the
proper spirit. Ye see that what I ha’ done I ha’ but done in the way of
my calling, that I am but a tool, and that what blame there be belongs
to them which hired me to this deed.”

“Aye, ye’re but a tool—a dirty tool, whetted with gold; no more. ’Tis
admitted. Cut me these bonds, a God’s name! I’m weary o’ being trussed
like a capon.”

The captain drew his knife, crossed to Sir Oliver’s side and slashed
his bonds away without further word. Sir Oliver stood up so suddenly
that he smote his head against the low ceiling of the cabin, and so sat
down again at once. And in that moment from without and above there
came a cry which sent the skipper to the cabin door. He flung it open,
and so let out the smoke and let in the sunshine. He passed out on to
the poop-deck, and Sir Oliver—conceiving himself at liberty to do
so—followed him.

In the waist below a little knot of shaggy seamen were crowding to the
larboard bulwarks, looking out to sea; on the forecastle there was
another similar assembly, all staring intently ahead and towards the
land. They were off Cape Roca at the time, and when Captain Leigh saw
by how much they had lessened their distance from shore since last he
had conned the ship, he swore ferociously at his mate who had charge of
the wheel. Ahead of them away on their larboard bow and in line with
the mouth of the Tagus from which she had issued—and where not a doubt
but she had been lying in wait for such stray craft as this—came a
great tall-masted ship, equipped with top-gallants, running wellnigh
before the wind with every foot of canvas spread.

Close-hauled as was the Swallow and with her top-sails and mizzen
reefed she was not making more than one knot to the Spaniard’s five—for
that she was a Spaniard was beyond all doubt judging by the haven
whence she issued.

“Luff alee!” bawled the skipper, and he sprang to the wheel, thrusting
the mate aside with a blow of his elbow that almost sent him sprawling.

“’Twas yourself set the course,” the fellow protested.

“Thou lubberly fool,” roared the skipper. “I bade thee keep the same
distance from shore. If the land comes jutting out to meet us, are we
to keep straight on until we pile her up?” He spun the wheel round in
his hands, and turned her down the wind. Then he relinquished the helm
to the mate again. “Hold her thus,” he commanded, and bellowing orders
as he went, he heaved himself down the companion to see them executed.
Men sprang to the ratlines to obey him, and went swarming aloft to let
out the reefs of the topsails; others ran astern to do the like by the
mizzen and soon they had her leaping and plunging through the green
water with every sheet unfurled, racing straight out to sea.

From the poop Sir Oliver watched the Spaniard. He saw her veer a point
or so to starboard, heading straight to intercept them, and he observed
that although this manceuvre brought her fully a point nearer to the
wind than the Swallow, yet, equipped as she was with half as much
canvas again as Captain Leigh’s piratical craft, she was gaining
steadily upon them none the less.

The skipper came back to the poop, and stood there moodily watching
that other ship’s approach, cursing himself for having sailed into such
a trap, and cursing his mate more fervently still.

Sir Oliver meanwhile took stock of so much of the Swallow’s armament as
was visible and wondered what like were those on the main-deck below.
He dropped a question on that score to the captain, dispassionately, as
though he were no more than an indifferently interested spectator, and
with never a thought to his position aboard.

“Should I be racing her afore the Wind if I as properly equipped?”
growled Leigh. “Am I the man to run before a Spaniard? As it is I do no
more than lure her well away from land.”

Sir Oliver understood, and was silent thereafter. He observed a bo’sun
and his mates staggering in the waist under loads of cutlasses and
small arms which they stacked in a rack about the mainmast. Then the
gunner, a swarthy, massive fellow, stark to the waist with a faded
scarf tied turban-wise about his head, leapt up the companion to the
brass carronade on the larboard quarter, followed by a couple of his
men.

Master Leigh called up the bo’sun, bade him take the wheel, and
dispatched the mate forward to the forecastle, where another gun was
being prepared for action.

Thereafter followed a spell of racing, the Spaniard ever lessening the
distance between them, and the land dropping astern until it was no
more than a hazy line above the shimmering sea. Suddenly from the
Spaniard appeared a little cloud of white smoke, and the boom of a gun
followed, and after it came a splash a cable’s length ahead of the
Swallow’s bows.

Linstock in hand the brawny gunner on the poop stood ready to answer
them when the word should be given. From below came the gunner’s mate
to report himself ready for action on the main-deck and to receive his
orders.

Came another shot from the Spaniard, again across the bows of the
Swallow.

“’Tis a clear invitation to heave to,” said Sir Oliver.

The skipper snarled in his fiery beard. “She has a longer range than
most Spaniards,” said he. “But I’ll not waste powder yet for all that.
We’ve none to spare.”

Scarcely had he spoken when a third shot boomed. There was a
splintering crash overhead followed by a sough and a thud as the
maintopmast came hurtling to the deck and in its fall stretched a
couple of men in death. Battle was joined, it seemed. Yet Captain Leigh
did nothing in a hurry.

“Hold there!” he roared to the gunner who swung his linstock at that
moment in preparation.

She was losing way as a result of that curtailment of her mainmast, and
the Spaniard came on swiftly now. At last the skipper accounted her
near enough, and gave the word with an oath. The Swallow fired her
first and last shot in that encounter. After the deafening thunder of
it and through the cloud of suffocating smoke, Sir Oliver saw the high
forecastle of the Spaniard rent open.

Master Leigh was cursing his gunner for having aimed too high. Then he
signalled to the mate to fire the culverin of which he had charge. That
second shot was to be the signal for the whole broadside from the
main-deck below. But the Spaniard anticipated them. Even as the skipper
of the Swallow signalled the whole side of the Spaniard burst into
flame and smoke.

The Swallow staggered under the blow, recovered an instant, then listed
ominously to larboard.

“Hell!” roared Leigh. “She’s bilging!” and Sir Oliver saw the Spaniard
standing off again, as if satisfied with what she had done. The mate’s
gun was never fired, nor was the broadside from below. Indeed that
sudden list had set the muzzles pointing to the sea; within three
minutes of it they were on a level with the water. The Swallow had
received her death-blow, and she was settling down.

Satisfied that she could do no further harm, the Spaniard luffed and
hove to, awaiting the obvious result and intent upon picking up what
slaves she could to man the galleys of his Catholic Majesty on the
Mediterranean.

Thus the fate intended Sir Oliver by Lionel was to be fulfilled; and it
was to be shared by Master Leigh himself, which had not been at all in
that venal fellow’s reckoning.




PART II.
SAKR-EL-BAHR




CHAPTER I.
THE CAPTIVE


Sakr-el-Bahr, the hawk of the sea, the scourge of the Mediterranean and
the terror of Christian Spain, lay prone on the heights of Cape
Spartel.

Above him on the crest of the cliff ran the dark green line of the
orange groves of Araish—the reputed Garden of the Hesperides of the
ancients, where the golden apples grew. A mile or so to eastward were
dotted the huts and tents of a Bedouin encampment on the fertile
emerald pasture-land that spread away, as far as eye could range,
towards Ceuta. Nearer, astride of a grey rock an almost naked goatherd,
a lithe brown stripling with a cord of camel-hair about his shaven
head, intermittently made melancholy and unmelodious sounds upon a reed
pipe. From somewhere in the blue vault of heaven overhead came the
joyous trilling of a lark, from below the silken rustling of the
tideless sea.

Sakr-el-Bahr lay prone upon a cloak of woven camel-hair amid
luxuriating fern and samphire, on the very edge of the shelf of cliff
to which he had climbed. On either side of him squatted a negro from
the Sus both naked of all save white loin-cloths, their muscular bodies
glistening like ebony in the dazzling sunshine of mid-May. They wielded
crude fans fashioned from the yellowing leaves of date palms, and their
duty was to wave these gently to and fro above their lord’s head, to
give him air and to drive off the flies.

Sakr-el-Bahr was in the very prime of life, a man of a great length of
body, with a deep Herculean torso and limbs that advertised a giant
strength. His hawk-nosed face ending in a black forked beard was of a
swarthiness accentuated to exaggeration by the snowy white turban wound
about his brow. His eyes, by contrast, were singularly light. He wore
over his white shirt a long green tunic of very light silk, woven along
its edges with arabesques in gold; a pair of loose calico breeches
reached to his knees; his brown muscular calves were naked, and his
feet were shod in a pair of Moorish shoes of crimson leather, with
up-curling and very pointed toes. He had no weapons other than the
heavy-bladed knife with a jewelled hilt that was thrust into his girdle
of plaited leather.

A yard or two away on his left lay another supine figure, elbows on the
ground, and hands arched above his brow to shade his eyes, gazing out
to sea. He, too, was a tall and powerful man, and when he moved there
was a glint of armour from the chain mail in which his body was cased,
and from the steel casque about which he had swathed his green turban.
Beside him lay an enormous curved scimitar in a sheath of brown leather
that was heavy with steel ornaments. His face was handsome, and
bearded, but swarthier far than his companion’s, and the backs of his
long fine hands were almost black.

Sakr-el-Bahr paid little heed to him. Lying there he looked down the
slope, clad with stunted cork-trees and evergreen oaks; here and there
was the golden gleam of broom; yonder over a spur of whitish rock
sprawled the green and living scarlet of a cactus. Below him about the
caves of Hercules was a space of sea whose clear depths shifted with
its slow movement from the deep green of emerald to all the colours of
the opal. A little farther off behind a projecting screen of rock that
formed a little haven two enormous masted galleys, each of fifty oars,
and a smaller galliot of thirty rode gently on the slight heave of the
water, the vast yellow oars standing out almost horizontally from the
sides of each vessel like the pinions of some gigantic bird. That they
lurked there either in concealment or in ambush was very plain. Above
them circled a flock of seagulls noisy and insolent.

Sakr-el-Bahr looked out to sea across the straits towards Tarifa and
the faint distant European coastline just visible through the limpid
summer air. But his glance was not concerned with that hazy horizon; it
went no further than a fine white-sailed ship that, close-hauled, was
beating up the straits some four miles off. A gentle breeze was blowing
from the east, and with every foot of canvas spread to catch it she
stood as close to it as was possible. Nearer she came on her larboard
tack, and not a doubt but her master would be scanning the hostile
African littoral for a sight of those desperate rovers who haunted it
and who took toll of every Christian ship that ventured over-near.
Sakr-el-Bahr smiled to think how little the presence of his galleys
could be suspected, how innocent must look the sun-bathed shore of
Africa to the Christian skipper’s diligently searching spy-glass. And
there from his height, like the hawk they had dubbed him, poised in the
cobalt heavens to plumb down upon his prey, he watched the great white
ship and waited until she should come within striking distance.

A promontory to eastward made something of a lee that reached out
almost a mile from shore. From the watcher’s eyrie the line of
demarcation was sharply drawn; they could see the point at which the
white crests of the wind-whipped wavelets ceased and the water became
smoother. Did she but venture as far southward on her present tack, she
would be slow to go about again, and that should be their opportunity.
And all unconscious of the lurking peril she held steadily to her
course, until not half a mile remained between her and that
inauspicious lee.

Excitement stirred the mail-clad corsair; he kicked his heels in the
air, then swung round to the impassive and watchful Sakr-el-Bahr.

“She will come! She will come!” he cried in the Frankish jargon—the
lingua franca of the African littoral.

“Insh’ Allah!” was the laconic answer—“If God will.”

A tense silence fell between them again as the ship drew nearer so that
now with each forward heave of her they caught a glint of the white
belly under her black hull. Sakr-el-Bahr shaded his eyes, and
concentrated his vision upon the square ensign flying from, her
mainmast. He could make out not only the red and yellow quarterings,
but the devices of the castle and the lion.

“A Spanish ship, Biskaine,” he growled to his companion. “It is very
well. The praise to the One!”

“Will she venture in?” wondered the other.

“Be sure she will venture,” was the confident answer. “She suspects no
danger, and it is not often that our galleys are to be found so far
westward. Aye, there she comes in all her Spanish pride.”

Even as he spoke she reached that line of demarcation. She crossed it,
for there was still a moderate breeze on the leeward side of it, intent
no doubt upon making the utmost of that southward run.

“Now!” cried Biskaine—Biskaine-el-Borak was he called from the
lightning-like impetuousness in which he was wont to strike. He
quivered with impatience, like a leashed hound.

“Not yet,” was the calm, restraining answer. “Every inch nearer shore
she creeps the more certain is her doom. Time enough to sound the
charge when she goes about. Give me to drink, Abiad,” he said to one of
his negroes, whom in irony he had dubbed “the White.”

The slave turned aside, swept away a litter of ferns and produced an
amphora of porous red clay; he removed the palm-leaves from the mouth
of it and poured water into a cup. Sakr-el-Bahr drank slowly, his eyes
never leaving the vessel, whose every ratline was clearly defined by
now in the pellucid air. They could see men moving on her decks, and
the watchman stationed in the foremast fighting-top. She was not more
than half a mile away when suddenly came the manceuvre to go about.

Sakr-el-Bahr leapt instantly to his great height and waved a long green
scarf. From one of the galleys behind the screen of rocks a trumpet
rang out in immediate answer to that signal; it was followed by the
shrill whistles of the bo’suns, and that again by the splash and creak
of oars, as the two larger galleys swept out from their ambush. The
long armoured poops were a-swarm with turbaned corsairs, their weapons
gleaming in the sunshine; a dozen at least were astride of the
crosstree of each mainmast, all armed with bows and arrows, and the
ratlines on each side of the galleys were black with men who swarmed
there like locusts ready to envelop and smother their prey.

The suddenness of the attack flung the Spaniard into confusion. There
was a frantic stir aboard her, trumpet blasts and shootings and wild
scurryings of men hither and thither to the posts to which they were
ordered by their too reckless captain. In that confusion her manceuvre
to go about went all awry, and precious moments were lost during which
she stood floundering, with idly flapping sails. In his desperate haste
the captain headed her straight to leeward, thinking that by running
thus before the wind he stood the best chance of avoiding the trap. But
there was not wind enough in that sheltered spot to make the attempt
successful. The galleys sped straight on at an angle to the direction
in which the Spaniard was moving, their yellow dripping oars flashing
furiously, as the bo’suns plied their whips to urge every ounce of
sinew in the slaves.

Of all this Sakr-el-Bahr gathered an impression as, followed by
Biskaine and the negroes, he swiftly made his way down from that eyrie
that had served him so well. He sprang from red oak to cork-tree and
from cork-tree to red oak; he leapt from rock to rock, or lowered
himself from ledge to ledge, gripping a handful of heath or a
projecting stone, but all with the speed and nimbleness of an ape. He
dropped at last to the beach, then sped across it at a run, and went
bounding along a black reef until he stood alongside of the galliot
which had been left behind by the other Corsair vessels. She awaited
him in deep water, the length of her oars from the rock, and as he came
alongside, these oars were brought to the horizontal, and held there
firmly. He leapt down upon them, his companions following him, and
using them as a gangway, reached the bulwarks. He threw a leg over the
side, and alighted on a decked space between two oars and the two rows
of six slaves that were manning each of them.

Biskaine followed him and the negroes came last. They were still
astride of the bulwarks when Sakr-el-Bahr gave the word. Up the middle
gangway ran a bo’sun and two of his mates cracking their long whips of
bullock-hide. Down went the oars, there was a heave, and they shot out
in the wake of the other two to join the fight.

Sakr-el-Bahr, scimitar in hand, stood on the prow, a little in advance
of the mob of eager babbling corsairs who surrounded him, quivering in
their impatience to be let loose upon the Christian foe. Above, along
the yardarm and up the ratlines swarmed his bowmen. From the mast-head
floated out his standard, of crimson charged with a green crescent.

The naked Christian slaves groaned, strained and sweated under the
Moslem lash that drove them to the destruction of their Christian
brethren.

Ahead the battle was already joined. The Spaniard had fired one single
hasty shot which had gone wide, and now one of the corsair’s
grappling-irons had seized her on the larboard quarter, a withering
hail of arrows was pouring down upon her decks from the Muslim
crosstrees; up her sides crowded the eager Moors, ever most eager when
it was a question of tackling the Spanish dogs who had driven them from
their Andalusian Caliphate. Under her quarter sped the other galley to
take her on the starboard side, and even as she went her archers and
stingers hurled death aboard the galleon.

It was a short, sharp fight. The Spaniards in confusion from the
beginning, having been taken utterly by surprise, had never been able
to order themselves in a proper manner to receive the onslaught. Still,
what could be done they did. They made a gallant stand against this
pitiless assailant. But the corsairs charged home as gallantly, utterly
reckless of life, eager to slay in the name of Allah and His Prophet
and scarcely less eager to die if it should please the All-pitiful that
their destinies should be here fulfilled. Up they went, and back fell
the Castilians, outnumbered by at least ten to one.

When Sakr-el-Bahr’s galliot came alongside, that brief encounter was at
an end, and one of his corsairs was aloft, hacking from the mainmast
the standard of Spain and the wooden crucifix that was nailed below it.
A moment later and to a thundering roar of “Al-hamdolliah!” the green
crescent floated out upon the breeze.

Sakr-el-Bahr thrust his way through the press in the galleon’s waist;
his corsairs fell back before him, making way, and as he advanced they
roared his name deliriously and waved their scimitars to acclaim him
this hawk of the sea, as he was named, this most valiant of all the
servants of Islam. True he had taken no actual part in the engagement.
It had been too brief and he had arrived too late for that. But his had
been the daring to conceive an ambush at so remote a western point, and
his the brain that had guided them to this swift sweet victory in the
name of Allah the One.

The decks were slippery with blood, and strewn with wounded and dying
men, whom already the Muslimeen were heaving overboard—dead and wounded
alike when they were Christians, for to what end should they be
troubled with maimed slaves?

About the mainmast were huddled the surviving Spaniards, weaponless and
broken in courage, a herd of timid, bewildered sheep.

Sakr-el-Bahr stood forward, his light eyes considering them grimly.
They must number close upon a hundred, adventurers in the main who had
set out from Cadiz in high hope of finding fortune in the Indies. Their
voyage had been a very brief one; their fate they knew—to toil at the
oars of the Muslim galleys, or at best, to be taken to Algiers or Tunis
and sold there into the slavery of some wealthy Moor.

Sakr-el-Bahr’s glance scanned them appraisingly, and rested finally on
the captain, who stood slightly in advance, his face livid with rage
and grief. He was richly dressed in the Castilian black, and his velvet
thimble-shaped hat was heavily plumed and decked by a gold cross.

Sakr-el-Bahr salaamed ceremoniously to him. “Fortuna de guerra, senor
capitan,” said he in fluent Spanish. “What is your name?”

“I am Don Paulo de Guzman,” the man answered, drawing himself erect,
and speaking with conscious pride in himself and manifest contempt of
his interlocutor.

“So! A gentleman of family! And well-nourished and sturdy, I should
judge. In the sôk at Algiers you might fetch two hundred philips. You
shall ransom yourself for five hundred.”

“Por las Entranas de Dios!” swore Don Paulo who, like all pious Spanish
Catholics, favoured the oath anatomical. What else he would have added
in his fury is not known, for Sakr-el-Bahr waved him contemptuously
away.

“For your profanity and want of courtesy we will make the ransom a
thousand philips, then,” said he. And to his followers—“Away with him!
Let him have courteous entertainment against the coming of his ransom.”

He was borne away cursing.

Of the others Sakr-el-Bahr made short work. He offered the privilege of
ransoming himself to any who might claim it, and the privilege was
claimed by three. The rest he consigned to the care of Biskaine, who
acted as his Kayia, or lieutenant. But before doing so he bade the
ship’s bo’sun stand forward, and demanded to know what slaves there
might be on board. There were, he learnt, but a dozen, employed upon
menial duties on the ship—three Jews, seven Muslimeen and two
heretics—and they had been driven under the hatches when the peril
threatened.

By Sakr-el-Bahr’s orders these were dragged forth from the blackness
into which they had been flung. The Muslimeen upon discovering that
they had fallen into the hands of their own people and that their
slavery was at an end, broke into cries of delight, and fervent praise
of Allah than whom they swore there was no other God. The three Jews,
lithe, stalwart young men in black tunics that fell to their knees and
black skull-caps upon their curly black locks, smiled ingratiatingly,
hoping for the best since they were fallen into the hands of people who
were nearer akin to them than Christians and allied to them, at least,
by the bond of common enmity to Spain and common suffering at the hands
of Spaniards. The two heretics stood in stolid apathy, realizing that
with them it was but a case of passing from Charybdis to Scylla, and
that they had as little to hope for from heathen as from Christian. One
of these was a sturdy bowlegged fellow, whose garments were little
better than rags; his weather-beaten face was of the colour of mahogany
and his eyes of a dark blue under tufted eyebrows that once had been
red—like his hair and beard—but were now thickly intermingled with
grey. He was spotted like a leopard on the hands by enormous dark brown
freckles.

Of the entire dozen he was the only one that drew the attention of
Sakr-el-Bahr. He stood despondently before the corsair, with bowed head
and his eyes upon the deck, a weary, dejected, spiritless slave who
would as soon die as live. Thus some few moments during which the
stalwart Muslim stood regarding him; then as if drawn by that
persistent scrutiny he raised his dull, weary eyes. At once they
quickened, the dulness passed out of them; they were bright and keen as
of old. He thrust his head forward, staring in his turn; then, in a
bewildered way he looked about him at the ocean of swarthy faces under
turbans of all colours, and back again at Sakr-el-Bahr.

“God’s light!” he said at last, in English, to vent his infinite
amazement. Then reverting to the cynical manner that he had ever
affected, and effacing all surprise—

“Good day to you, Sir Oliver,” said he. “I suppose ye’ll give yourself
the pleasure of hanging me.”

“Allah is great!” said Sakr-el-Bahr impassively.




CHAPTER II.
THE RENEGADE


How it came to happen that Sakr-el-Bahr, the Hawk of the Sea, the
Muslim rover, the scourge of the Mediterranean, the terror of
Christians, and the beloved of Asad-ed-Din, Basha of Algiers, would be
one and the same as Sir Oliver Tressilian, the Cornish gentleman of
Penarrow, is at long length set forth in the chronicles of Lord Henry
Goade. His lordship conveys to us some notion of how utterly
overwhelming he found that fact by the tedious minuteness with which he
follows step by step this extraordinary metamorphosis. He devotes to it
two entire volumes of those eighteen which he has left us. The whole,
however, may with advantage be summarized into one short chapter.

Sir Oliver was one of a score of men who were rescued from the sea by
the crew of the Spanish vessel that had sunk the Swallow; another was
Jasper Leigh, the skipper. All of them were carried to Lisbon, and
there handed over to the Court of the Holy Office. Since they were
heretics all—or nearly all—it was fit and proper that the Brethren of
St. Dominic should undertake their conversion in the first place. Sir
Oliver came of a family that never had been famed for rigidity in
religious matters, and he was certainly not going to burn alive if the
adoption of other men’s opinions upon an extremely hypothetical future
state would suffice to save him from the stake. He accepted Catholic
baptism with an almost contemptuous indifference. As for Jasper Leigh,
it will be conceived that the elasticity of the skipper’s conscience
was no less than Sir Oliver’s, and he was certainly not the man to be
roasted for a trifle of faith.

No doubt there would be great rejoicings in the Holy House over the
rescue of these two unfortunate souls from the certain perdition that
had awaited them. It followed that as converts to the Faith they were
warmly cherished, and tears of thanksgiving were profusely shed over
them by the Hounds of God. So much for their heresy. They were
completely purged of it, having done penance in proper form at an Auto
held on the Rocio at Lisbon, candle in hand and sanbenito on their
shoulders. The Church dismissed them with her blessing and an
injunction to persevere in the ways of salvation to which with such
meek kindness she had inducted them.

Now this dismissal amounted to a rejection. They were, as a
consequence, thrown back upon the secular authorities, and the secular
authorities had yet to punish them for their offence upon the seas. No
offence could be proved, it is true. But the courts were satisfied that
this lack of offence was but the natural result of a lack of
opportunity. Conversely, they reasoned, it was not to be doubted that
with the opportunity the offence would have been forthcoming. Their
assurance of this was based upon the fact that when the Spaniard fired
across the bows of the Swallow as an invitation to heave to, she had
kept upon her course. Thus, with unanswerable Castilian logic was the
evil conscience of her skipper proven. Captain Leigh protested on the
other hand that his action had been dictated by his lack of faith in
Spaniards and his firm belief that all Spaniards were pirates to be
avoided by every honest seaman who was conscious of inferior strength
of armaments. It was a plea that won him no favour with his
narrow-minded judges.

Sir Oliver fervently urged that he was no member of the crew of the
Swallow, that he was a gentleman who found himself aboard her very much
against his will, being the victim of a villainous piece of trepanning
executed by her venal captain. The court heard his plea with respect,
and asked to know his name and rank. He was so very indiscreet as to
answer truthfully. The result was extremely educative to Sir Oliver; it
showed him how systematically conducted was the keeping of the Spanish
archives. The court produced documents enabling his judges to recite to
him most of that portion of his life that had been spent upon the seas,
and many an awkward little circumstance which had slipped his memory
long since, which he now recalled, and which certainly was not
calculated to make his sentence lighter.

Had he not been in the Barbados in such a year, and had he not there
captured the galleon Maria de las Dolores? What was that but an act of
villainous piracy? Had he not scuttled a Spanish carack four years ago
in the bay of Funchal? Had he not been with that pirate Hawkins in the
affair at San Juan de Ulloa? And so on. Questions poured upon him and
engulfed him.

He almost regretted that he had given himself the trouble to accept
conversion and all that it entailed at the hands of the Brethren of St.
Dominic. It began to appear to him that he had but wasted time and
escaped the clerical fire to be dangled on a secular rope as an
offering to the vengeful gods of outraged Spain.

So much, however, was not done. The galleys in the Mediterranean were
in urgent need of men at the time, and to this circumstance Sir Oliver,
Captain Leigh, and some others of the luckless crew of the Swallow owed
their lives, though it is to be doubted whether any of them found the
matter one for congratulation. Chained each man to a fellow, ankle to
ankle, with but a short length of links between, they formed part of a
considerable herd of unfortunates, who were driven across Portugal into
Spain and then southward to Cadiz. The last that Sir Oliver saw of
Captain Leigh was on the morning on which he set out from the reeking
Lisbon gaol. Thereafter throughout that weary march each knew the other
to be somewhere in that wretched regiment of galley-slaves; but they
never came face to face again.

In Cadiz Sir Oliver spent a month in a vast enclosed space that was
open to the sky, but nevertheless of an indescribable foulness, a place
of filth, disease, and suffering beyond human conception, the details
of which the curious may seek for himself in my Lord Henry’s
chronicles. They are too revolting by far to be retailed here.

At the end of that month he was one of those picked out by an officer
who was manning a galley that was to convey the Infanta to Naples. He
owed this to his vigorous constitution which had successfully withstood
the infections of that mephitic place of torments, and to the fine
thews which the officer pummelled and felt as though he were acquiring
a beast of burden—which, indeed, is precisely what he was doing.

The galley to which our gentleman was dispatched was a vessel of fifty
oars, each manned by seven men. They were seated upon a sort of
staircase that followed the slope of the oar, running from the gangway
in the vessel’s middle down to the shallow bulwarks.

The place allotted to Sir Oliver was that next the gangway. Here, stark
naked as when he was born, he was chained to the bench, and in those
chains, let us say at once, he remained, without a single moment’s
intermission, for six whole months.

Between himself and the hard timbers of his seat there was naught but a
flimsy and dirty sheepskin. From end to end the bench was not more than
ten feet in length, whilst the distance separating it from the next one
was a bare four feet. In that cramped space of ten feet by four, Sir
Oliver and his six oar-mates had their miserable existence, waking and
sleeping—for they slept in their chains at the oar without sufficient
room in which to lie at stretch.

Anon Sir Oliver became hardened and inured to that unspeakable
existence, that living death of the galley-slave. But that first long
voyage to Naples was ever to remain the most terrible experience of his
life. For spells of six or eight endless hours at a time, and on one
occasion for no less than ten hours, did he pull at his oar without a
single moment’s pause. With one foot on the stretcher, the other on the
bench in front of him, grasping his part of that appallingly heavy
fifteen-foot oar, he would bend his back to thrust forward—and upwards
so to clear the shoulders of the groaning, sweating slaves in front of
him—then he would lift the end so as to bring the blade down to the
water, and having gripped he would rise from his seat to throw his full
weight into the pull, and so fall back with clank of chain upon the
groaning bench to swing forward once more, and so on until his senses
reeled, his sight became blurred, his mouth parched and his whole body
a living, straining ache. Then would come the sharp fierce cut of the
boatswain’s whip to revive energies that flagged however little, and
sometimes to leave a bleeding stripe upon his naked back.

Thus day in day out, now broiled and blistered by the pitiless southern
sun, now chilled by the night dews whilst he took his cramped and
unrefreshing rest, indescribably filthy and dishevelled, his hair and
beard matted with endless sweat, unwashed save by the rains which in
that season were all too rare, choked almost by the stench of his
miserable comrades and infested by filthy crawling things begotten of
decaying sheepskins and Heaven alone knows what other foulnesses of
that floating hell. He was sparingly fed upon weevilled biscuit and
vile messes of tallowy rice, and to drink he was given luke-warm water
that was often stale, saving that sometimes when the spell of rowing
was more than usually protracted the boatswains would thrust lumps of
bread sodden in wine into the mouths of the toiling slaves to sustain
them.

The scurvy broke out on that voyage, and there were other diseases
among the rowers, to say nothing of the festering sores begotten of the
friction of the bench which were common to all, and which each must
endure as best he could. With the slave whose disease conquered him or
who, reaching the limit of his endurance, permitted himself to swoon,
the boat-swains had a short way. The diseased were flung overboard; the
swooning were dragged out upon the gangway or bridge and flogged there
to revive them; if they did not revive they were flogged on until they
were a horrid bleeding pulp, which was then heaved into the sea.

Once or twice when they stood to windward the smell of the slaves being
wafted abaft and reaching the fine gilded poop where the Infanta and
her attendants travelled, the helmsmen were ordered to put about, and
for long weary hours the slaves would hold the galley in position,
backing her up gently against the wind so as not to lose way.

The number that died in the first week of that voyage amounted to close
upon a quarter of the total. But there were reserves in the prow, and
these were drawn upon to fill the empty places. None but the fittest
could survive this terrible ordeal.

Of these was Sir Oliver, and of these too was his immediate neighbour
at the oar, a stalwart, powerful, impassive, uncomplaining young Moor,
who accepted his fate with a stoicism that aroused Sir Oliver’s
admiration. For days they exchanged no single word together, their
religions marking them out, they thought, for enemies despite the fact
that they were fellows in misfortune. But one evening when an aged Jew
who had collapsed in merciful unconsciousness was dragged out and
flogged in the usual manner, Sir Oliver, chancing to behold the scarlet
prelate who accompanied the Infanta looking on from the poop-rail with
hard unmerciful eyes, was filled with such a passion at all this
inhumanity and at the cold pitilessness of that professed servant of
the Gentle and Pitiful Saviour, that aloud he cursed all Christians in
general and that scarlet Prince of the Church in particular.

He turned to the Moor beside him, and addressing him in Spanish—

“Hell,” he said, “was surely made for Christians, which may be why they
seek to make earth like it.”

Fortunately for him the creak and dip of the oars, the clank of chains,
and the lashes beating sharply upon the wretched Jew were sufficient to
muffle his voice. But the Moor heard him, and his dark eyes gleamed.

“There is a furnace seven times heated awaiting them, O my brother,” he
replied, with a confidence which seemed to be the source of his present
stoicism. “But art thou, then, not a Christian?”

He spoke in that queer language of the North African seaboard, that
lingua franca, which sounded like some French dialect interspersed with
Arabic words. But Sir Oliver made out his meaning almost by intuition.
He answered him in Spanish again, since although the Moor did not
appear to speak it yet it was plain he understood it.

“I renounce from this hour,” he answered in his passion. “I will
acknowledge no religion in whose name such things are done. Look me at
that scarlet fruit of hell up yonder. See how daintily he sniffs at his
pomander lest his saintly nostrils be offended by the exhalations of
our misery. Yet are we God’s creatures made in God’s image like
himself. What does he know of God? Religion he knows as he knows good
wine, rich food, and soft women. He preaches self-denial as the way to
heaven, and by his own tenets is he damned.” He growled an obscene oath
as he heaved the great oar forward. “A Christian I?” he cried, and
laughed for the first time since he had been chained to that bench of
agony. “I am done with Christians and Christianity!”

“Verily we are God’s, and to Him shall we return,” said the Moor.

That was the beginning of a friendship between Sir Oliver and this man,
whose name was Yusuf-ben-Moktar. The Muslim conceived that in Sir
Oliver he saw one upon whom the grace of Allah had descended, one who
was ripe to receive the Prophet’s message. Yusuf was devout, and he
applied himself to the conversion of his fellow-slave. Sir Oliver
listened to him, however, with indifference. Having discarded one creed
he would need a deal of satisfying on the score of another before he
adopted it, and it seemed to him that all the glorious things urged by
Yusuf in praise of Islam he had heard before in praise of Christianity.
But he kept his counsel on that score, and meanwhile his intercourse
with the Muslim had the effect of teaching him the lingua franca, so
that at the end of six months he found himself speaking it like a
Mauretanian with all the Muslim’s imagery and with more than the
ordinary seasoning of Arabic.

It was towards the end of that six months that the event took place
which was to restore Sir Oliver to liberty. In the meanwhile those
limbs of his which had ever been vigorous beyond the common wont had
acquired an elephantine strength. It was ever thus at the oar. Either
you died under the strain, or your thews and sinews grew to be equal to
their relentless task. Sir Oliver in those six months was become a man
of steel and iron, impervious to fatigue, superhuman almost in his
endurance.

They were returning home from a trip to Genoa when one evening as they
were standing off Minorca in the Balearic Isles they were surprised by
a fleet of four Muslim galleys which came skimming round a promontory
to surround and engage them.

Aboard the Spanish vessel there broke a terrible cry of
“Asad-ed-Din”—the name of the most redoubtable Muslim corsair since the
Italian renegade Ochiali—the Ali Pasha who had been killed at Lepanto.
Trumpets blared and drums beat on the poop, and the Spaniards in morion
and corselet, armed with calivers and pikes, stood to defend their
lives and liberty. The gunners sprang to the culverins. But fire had to
be kindled and linstocks ignited, and in the confusion much time was
lost—so much that not a single cannon shot was fired before the
grappling irons of the first galley clanked upon and gripped the
Spaniard’s bulwarks. The shock of the impact was terrific. The armoured
prow of the Muslim galley—Asad-ed-Din’s own—smote the Spaniard a
slanting blow amidships that smashed fifteen of the oars as if they had
been so many withered twigs.

There was a shriek from the slaves, followed by such piteous groans as
the damned in hell may emit. Fully two score of them had been struck by
the shafts of their oars as these were hurled back against them. Some
had been killed outright, others lay limp and crushed, some with broken
backs, others with shattered limbs and ribs.

Sir Oliver would assuredly have been of these but for the warning,
advice, and example of Yusuf, who was well versed in galley-fighting
and who foresaw clearly what must happen. He thrust the oar upward and
forward as far as it would go, compelling the others at his bench to
accompany his movement. Then he slipped down upon his knees, released
his hold of the timber, and crouched down until his shoulders were on a
level with the bench. He had shouted to Sir Oliver to follow his
example, and Sir Oliver without even knowing what the manoeuvre should
portend, but gathering its importance from the other’s urgency of tone,
promptly obeyed. The oar was struck an instant later and ere it snapped
off it was flung back, braining one of the slaves at the bench and
mortally injuring the others, but passing clean over the heads of Sir
Oliver and Yusuf. A moment later the bodies of the oarsmen of the bench
immediately in front were flung back atop of them with yells and
curses.

When Sir Oliver staggered to his feet he found the battle joined. The
Spaniards had fired a volley from their calivers and a dense cloud of
smoke hung above the bulwarks; through this surged now the corsairs,
led by a tall, lean, elderly man with a flowing white beard and a
swarthy eagle face. A crescent of emeralds flashed from his snowy
turban; above it rose the peak of a steel cap, and his body was cased
in chain mail. He swung a great scimitar, before which Spaniards went
down like wheat to the reaper’s sickle. He fought like ten men, and to
support him poured a never-ending stream of Muslimeen to the cry of
“Din! Din! Allah, Y’Allah!” Back and yet back went the Spaniards before
that irresistible onslaught.

Sir Oliver found Yusuf struggling in vain to rid himself of his chain,
and went to his assistance. He stooped, seized it in both hands, set
his feet against the bench, exerted all his strength, and tore the
staple from the wood. Yusuf was free, save, of course, that a length of
heavy chain was dangling from his steel anklet. In his turn he did the
like service by Sir Oliver, though not quite as speedily, for strong
man though he was, either his strength was not equal to the
Cornishman’s or else the latter’s staple had been driven into sounder
timber. In the end, however, it yielded, and Sir Oliver too was free.
Then he set the foot that was hampered by the chain upon the bench, and
with the staple that still hung from the end of it he prised open the
link that attached it to his anklet.

That done he took his revenge. Crying “Din!” as loudly as any of the
Muslimeen boarders, he flung himself upon the rear of the Spaniards
brandishing his chain. In his hands it became a terrific weapon. He
used it as a scourge, lashing it to right and left of him, splitting
here a head and crushing there a face, until he had hacked a way clean
through the Spanish press, which bewildered by this sudden rear attack
made but little attempt to retaliate upon the escaped galley-slave.
After him, whirling the remaining ten feet of the broken oar, came
Yusuf.

Sir Oliver confessed afterwards to knowing very little of what happened
in those moments. He came to a full possession of his senses to find
the fight at an end, a cloud of turbaned corsairs standing guard over a
huddle of Spaniards, others breaking open the cabin and dragging thence
the chests that it contained, others again armed with chisels and
mallets passing along the benches liberating the surviving slaves, of
whom the great majority were children of Islam.

Sir Oliver found himself face to face with the white-bearded leader of
the corsairs, who was leaning upon his scimitar and regarding him with
eyes at once amused and amazed. Our gentleman’s naked body was splashed
from head to foot with blood, and in his right hand he still clutched
that yard of iron links with which he had wrought such ghastly
execution. Yusuf was standing at the corsair leader’s elbow speaking
rapidly.

“By Allah, was ever such a lusty fighter seen!” cried the latter. “The
strength of the Prophet is within him thus to smite the unbelieving
pigs.”

Sir Oliver grinned savagely.

“I was returning them some of their whip-lashes—with interest,” said
he.

And those were the circumstances under which he came to meet the
formidable Asad-ed-Din, Basha of Algiers, those the first words that
passed between them.

Anon, when aboard Asad’s own galley he was being carried to Barbary, he
was washed and his head was shaved all but the forelock, by which the
Prophet should lift him up to heaven when his earthly destiny should
come to be fulfilled. He made no protest. They washed and fed him and
gave him ease; and so that they did these things to him they might do
what else they pleased. At last arrayed in flowing garments that were
strange to him, and with a turban wound about his head, he was
conducted to the poop, where Asad sat with Yusuf under an awning, and
he came to understand that it was in compliance with the orders of
Yusuf that he had been treated as if he were a True-Believer.

Yusuf-ben-Moktar was discovered as a person of great consequence, the
nephew of Asad-ed-Din, and a favourite with that Exalted of Allah the
Sublime Portal himself, a man whose capture by Christians had been a
thing profoundly deplored. Accordingly his delivery from that thraldom
was matter for rejoicing. Being delivered, he bethought him of his
oar-mate, concerning whom indeed Asad-ed-Din manifested the greatest
curiosity, for in all this world there was nothing the old corsair
loved so much as a fighter, and in all his days, he vowed, never had he
seen the equal of that stalwart galley-slave, never the like of his
performance with that murderous chain. Yusuf had informed him that the
man was a fruit ripe for the Prophet’s plucking, that the grace of
Allah was upon him, and in spirit already he must be accounted a good
Muslim.

When Sir Oliver, washed, perfumed, and arrayed in white caftan and
turban, which gave him the air of being even taller than he was, came
into the presence of Asad-ed-Din, it was conveyed to him that if he
would enter the ranks of the Faithful of the Prophet’s House and devote
the strength and courage with which Allah the One had endowed him to
the upholding of the true Faith and to the chastening of the enemies of
Islam, great honour, wealth and dignity were in store for him.

Of all that proposal, made at prodigious length and with great wealth
of Eastern circumlocution, the only phrase that took root in his rather
bewildered mind was that which concerned the chastening of the enemies
of Islam. The enemies of Islam he conceived, were his own enemies; and
he further conceived that they stood in great need of chastening, and
that to take a hand in that chastening would be a singularly grateful
task. So he considered the proposals made him. He considered, too, that
the alternative—in the event of his refusing to make the protestations
of Faith required of him—was that he must return to the oar of a
galley, of a Muslim galley now. Now that was an occupation of which he
had had more than his fill, and since he had been washed and restored
to the normal sensations of a clean human being he found that whatever
might be within the scope of his courage he could not envisage
returning to the oar. We have seen the ease with which he had abandoned
the religion in which he was reared for the Roman faith, and how
utterly deluded he had found himself. With the same degree of ease did
he now go over to Islam and with much greater profit. Moreover, he
embraced the Religion of Mahomet with a measure of fierce conviction
that had been entirely lacking from his earlier apostasy.

He had arrived at the conclusion whilst aboard the galley of Spain, as
we have seen, that Christianity as practised in his day was a grim
mockery of which the world were better rid. It is not to be supposed
that his convictions that Christianity was at fault went the length of
making him suppose that Islam was right, or that his conversion to the
Faith of Mahomet was anything more than superficial. But forced as he
was to choose between the rower’s bench and the poop-deck, the oar and
the scimitar, he boldly and resolutely made the only choice that in his
case could lead to liberty and life.

Thus he was received into the ranks of the Faithful whose pavilions
wait them in Paradise, set in an orchard of never-failing fruit, among
rivers of milk, of wine, and of clarified honey. He became the Kayia or
lieutenant to Yusuf on the galley of that corsair’s command and
seconded him in half a score of engagements with an ability and a
conspicuity that made him swiftly famous throughout the ranks of the
Mediterranean rovers. Some six months later in a fight off the coast of
Sicily with one of the galleys of the Religion—as the vessels of the
Knights of Malta were called—Yusuf was mortally wounded in the very
moment of the victory. He died an hour later in the arms of Sir Oliver,
naming the latter his successor in the command of the galley, and
enjoining upon all implicit obedience to him until they should be
returned to Algiers and the Basha should make known his further will in
the matter.

The Basha’s will was to confirm his nephew’s dying appointment of a
successor, and Sir Oliver found himself in full command of a galley.
From that hour he became Oliver-Reis, but very soon his valour and fury
earned him the by-name of Sakr-el-Bahr, the Hawk of the Sea. His fame
grew rapidly, and it spread across the tideless sea to the very shores
of Christendom. Soon he became Asad’s lieutenant, the second in command
of all the Algerine galleys, which meant in fact that he was the
commander-in-chief, for Asad was growing old and took the sea more and
more rarely now. Sakr-el-Bahr sallied forth in his name and his stead,
and such was his courage, his address, and his good fortune that never
did he go forth to return empty-handed.

It was clear to all that the favour of Allah was upon him, that he had
been singled out by Allah to be the very glory of Islam. Asad, who had
ever esteemed him, grew to love him. An intensely devout man, could he
have done less in the case of one for whom the Pitying the Pitiful
showed so marked a predilection? It was freely accepted that when the
destiny of Asad-ed-Din should come to be fulfilled, Sakr-el-Bahr must
succeed him in the Bashalik of Algiers, and that thus Oliver-Reis would
follow in the footsteps of Barbarossa, Ochiali, and other Christian
renegades who had become corsair-princes of Islam.

In spite of certain hostilities which his rapid advancement begot, and
of which we shall hear more presently, once only did his power stand in
danger of suffering a check. Coming one morning into the reeking bagnio
at Algiers, some six months after he had been raised to his captaincy,
he found there a score of countrymen of his own, and he gave orders
that their letters should instantly be struck off and their liberty
restored them.

Called to account by the Basha for this action he took a high-handed
way, since no other was possible. He swore by the beard of the Prophet
that if he were to draw the sword of Mahomet and to serve Islam upon
the seas, he would serve it in his own way, and one of his ways was
that his own countrymen were to have immunity from the edge of that
same sword. Islam, he swore, should not be the loser, since for every
Englishman he restored to liberty he would bring two Spaniards,
Frenchmen, Greeks, or Italians into bondage.

He prevailed, but only upon condition that since captured slaves were
the property of the state, if he desired to abstract them from the
state he must first purchase them for himself. Since they would then be
his own property he could dispose of them at his good pleasure. Thus
did the wise and just Asad resolve the difficulty which had arisen, and
Oliver-Reis bowed wisely to that decision.

Thereafter what English slaves were brought to Algiers he purchased,
manumitted, and found means to send home again. True, it cost him a
fine price yearly, but he was fast amassing such wealth as could easily
support this tax.

As you read Lord Henry Goade’s chronicles you might come to the
conclusion that in the whorl of that new life of his Sir Oliver had
entirely forgotten the happenings in his Cornish home and the woman he
had loved, who so readily had believed him guilty of the slaying of her
brother. You might believe this until you come upon the relation of how
he found one day among some English seamen brought captive to Algiers
by Biskaine-el-Borak—who was become his own second in command—a young
Cornish lad from Helston named Pitt, whose father he had known.

He took this lad home with him to the fine palace which he inhabited
near the Bab-el-Oueb, treated him as an honoured guest, and sat through
a whole summer night in talk with him, questioning him upon this person
and that person, and thus gradually drawing from him all the little
history of his native place during the two years that were sped since
he had left it. In this we gather an impression of the wistful longings
the fierce nostalgia that must have overcome the renegade and his
endeavours to allay it by his endless questions. The Cornish lad had
brought him up sharply and agonizingly with that past of his upon which
he had closed the door when he became a Muslim and a corsair. The only
possible inference is that in those hours of that summer’s night
repentance stirred in him, and a wild longing to return. Rosamund
should reopen for him that door which, hard-driven by misfortune, he
had slammed. That she would do so when once she knew the truth he had
no faintest doubt. And there was now no reason why he should conceal
the truth, why he should continue to shield that dastardly half-brother
of his, whom he had come to hate as fiercely as he had erstwhile loved
him.

In secret he composed a long letter giving the history of all that had
happened to him since his kidnapping, and setting forth the entire
truth of that and of the deed that had led to it. His chronicler opines
that it was a letter that must have moved a stone to tears. And,
moreover, it was not a mere matter of passionate protestations of
innocence, or of unsupported accusation of his brother. It told her of
the existence of proofs that must dispel all doubt. It told her of that
parchment indited by Master Baine and witnessed by the parson, which
document was to be delivered to her together with the letter. Further,
it bade her seek confirmation of that document’s genuineness, did she
doubt it, at the hands of Master Baine himself. That done, it besought
her to lay the whole matter before the Queen, and thus secure him
faculty to return to England and immunity from any consequences of his
subsequent regenade act to which his sufferings had driven him. He
loaded the young Cornishman with gifts, gave him that letter to deliver
in person, and added instructions that should enable him to find the
document he was to deliver with it. That precious parchment had been
left between the leaves of an old book on falconry in the library at
Penarrow, where it would probably be found still undisturbed since his
brother would not suspect its presence and was himself no scholar. Pitt
was to seek out Nicholas at Penarrow and enlist his aid to obtain
possession of that document, if it still existed.

Then Sakr-el-Bahr found means to conduct Pitt to Genoa, and there put
him aboard an English vessel.

Three months later he received an answer—a letter from Pitt, which
reached him by way of Genoa—which was at peace with the Algerines, and
served then as a channel of communication with Christianity. In this
letter Pitt informed him that he had done all that Sir Oliver had
desired him; that he had found the document by the help of Nicholas,
and that in person he had waited upon Mistress Rosamund Godolphin, who
dwelt now with Sir John Killigrew at Arwenack, delivering to her the
letter and the parchment; but that upon learning on whose behalf he
came she had in his presence flung both unopened upon the fire and
dismissed him with his tale untold.

Sakr-el-Bahr spent the night under the skies in his fragrant orchard,
and his slaves reported in terror that they had heard sobs and weeping.
If indeed his heart wept, it was for the last time; thereafter he was
more inscrutable, more ruthless, cruel and mocking than men had ever
known him, nor from that day did he ever again concern himself to
manumit a single English slave. His heart was become a stone.

Thus five years passed, counting from that spring night when he was
trepanned by Jasper Leigh, and his fame spread, his name became a
terror upon the seas, and fleets put forth from Malta, from Naples, and
from Venice to make an end of him and his ruthless piracy. But Allah
kept watch over him, and Sakr-el-Bahr never delivered battle but he
wrested victory to the scimitars of Islam.

Then in the spring of that fifth year there came to him another letter
from the Cornish Pitt, a letter which showed him that gratitude was not
as dead in the world as he supposed it, for it was purely out of
gratitude that the lad whom he had delivered from thraldom wrote to
inform him of certain matters that concerned him. This letter reopened
that old wound; it did more; it dealt him a fresh one. He learnt from
it that the writer had been constrained by Sir John Killigrew to give
such evidence of Sir Oliver’s conversion to Islam as had enabled the
courts to pronounce Sir Oliver as one to be presumed dead at law,
granting the succession to his half-brother, Master Lionel Tressilian.
Pitt professed himself deeply mortified at having been forced
unwittingly to make Sir Oliver so evil a return for the benefits
received from him, and added that sooner would he have suffered them to
hang him than have spoken could he have foreseen the consequences of
his testimony.

So far Sir Oliver read unmoved by any feeling other than cold contempt.
But there was more to follow. The letter went on to tell him that
Mistress Rosamund was newly returned from a two years’ sojourn in
France to become betrothed to his half-brother Lionel, and that they
were to be wed in June. He was further informed that the marriage had
been contrived by Sir John Killigrew in his desire to see Rosamund
settled and under the protection of a husband, since he himself was
proposing to take the seas and was fitting out a fine ship for a voyage
to the Indies. The writer added that the marriage was widely approved,
and it was deemed to be an excellent measure for both houses, since it
would weld into one the two contiguous estates of Penarrow and
Godolphin Court.

Oliver-Reis laughed when he had read thus far. The marriage was
approved not for itself, it would seem, but because by means of it two
stretches of earth were united into one. It was a marriage of two
parks, of two estates, of two tracts of arable and forest, and that two
human beings were concerned in it was apparently no more than an
incidental circumstance.

Then the irony of it all entered his soul and spread it with
bitterness. After dismissing him for the supposed murder of her
brother, she was to take the actual murderer to her arms. And he, that
cur, that false villain!—out of what depths of hell did he derive the
courage to go through with this mummery?—had he no heart, no
conscience, no sense of decency, no fear of God?

He tore the letter into fragments and set about effacing the matter
from his thoughts. Pitt had meant kindly by him, but had dealt cruelly.
In his efforts to seek distraction from the torturing images ever in
his mind he took to the sea with three galleys, and thus some two weeks
later came face to face with Master Jasper Leigh aboard the Spanish
carack which he captured under Cape Spartel.




CHAPTER III.
HOMEWARD BOUND


In the cabin of the captured Spaniard, Jasper Leigh found himself that
evening face to face with Sakr-el-Bahr, haled thither by the corsair’s
gigantic Nubians.

Sakr-el-Bahr had not yet pronounced his intentions concerning the
piratical little skipper, and Master Leigh, full conscious that he was
a villain, feared the worst, and had spent some miserable hours in the
fore-castle awaiting a doom which he accounted foregone.

“Our positions have changed, Master Leigh, since last we talked in a
ship’s cabin,” was the renegade’s inscrutable greeting.

“Indeed,” Master Leigh agreed. “But I hope ye’ll remember that on that
occasion I was your friend.”

“At a price,” Sakr-el-Bahr reminded him. “And at a price you may find
me your friend to-day.”

The rascally skipper’s heart leapt with hope.

“Name it, Sir Oliver,” he answered eagerly. “And so that it lies within
my wretched power I swear I’ll never boggle at it. I’ve had enough of
slavery,” he ran on in a plaintive whine. “Five years of it, and four
of them spent aboard the galleys of Spain, and no day in all of them
but that I prayed for death. Did you but know what I ha’ suffered.”

“Never was suffering more merited, never punishment more fitting, never
justice more poetic,” said Sakr-el-Bahr in a voice that made the
skipper’s blood run cold. “You would have sold me, a man who did you no
hurt, indeed a man who once befriended you—you would have sold me into
slavery for a matter of two hundred pounds....”

“Nay, nay,” cried the other fearfully, “as God’s my witness, ’twas
never part of my intent. Ye’ll never ha’ forgot the words I spoke to
you, the offer that I made to carry you back home again.”

“Ay, at a price, ’tis true,” Sakr-el-Bahr repeated. “And it is
fortunate for you that you are to-day in a position to pay a price that
should postpone your dirty neck’s acquaintance with a rope. I need a
navigator,” he added in explanation, “and what five years ago you would
have done for two hundred pounds, you shall do to-day for your life.
How say you: will you navigate this ship for me?”

“Sir,” cried Jasper Leigh, who could scarce believe that this was all
that was required of him, “I’ll sail it to hell at your bidding.”

“I am not for Spain this voyage,” answered Sakr-el-Bahr. “You shall
sail me precisely as you would have done five years ago, back to the
mouth of the Fal, and set me ashore there. Is that agreed?”

“Ay, and gladly,” replied Master Leigh without a second’s pause.

“The conditions are that you shall have your life and your liberty,”
Sakr-el-Bahr explained. “But do not suppose that arrived in England you
are to be permitted to depart. You must sail us back again, though once
you have done that I shall find a way to send you home if you so desire
it, and perhaps there will be some measure of reward for you if you
serve me faithfully throughout. Follow the habits of a lifetime by
playing me false and there’s an end to you. You shall have for constant
bodyguard these two lilies of the desert,” and he pointed to the
colossal Nubians who stood there invisible almost in the shadow but for
the flash of teeth and eyeballs. “They shall watch over you, and see
that no harm befalls you so long as you are honest with me, and they
shall strangle you at the first sign of treachery. You may go. You have
the freedom of the ship, but you are not to leave it here or elsewhere
save at my express command.”

Jasper Leigh stumbled out counting himself fortunate beyond his
expectations or deserts, and the Nubians followed him and hung behind
him ever after like some vast twin shadow.

To Sakr-el-Bahr entered now Biskaine with a report of the prize
captured. Beyond the prisoners, however, and the actual vessel, which
had suffered nothing in the fight, the cargo was of no account. Outward
bound as she was it was not to be expected that any treasures would be
discovered in her hold. They found great store of armaments and powder
and a little money; but naught else that was worthy of the corsairs’
attention.

Sakr-el-Bahr briefly issued his surprising orders.

“Thou’lt set the captives aboard one of the galleys, Biskaine, and
thyself convey them to Algiers, there to be sold. All else thou’lt
leave aboard here, and two hundred picked corsairs to go a voyage with
me overseas, men that will act as mariners and fighters.”

“Art thou, then, not returning to Algiers, O Sakr-el-Bahr?”

“Not yet. I am for a longer voyage. Convey my service to Asad-ed-Din,
whom Allah guard and cherish, and tell him to look for me in some six
weeks time.”

This sudden resolve of Oliver-Reis created no little excitement aboard
the galleys. The corsairs knew nothing of navigation upon the open
seas, none of them had ever been beyond the Mediterranean, few of them
indeed had ever voyaged as far west as Cape Spartel, and it is doubtful
if they would have followed any other leader into the perils of the
open Atlantic. But Sakr-el-Bahr, the child of Fortune, the protected of
Allah, had never yet led them to aught but victory, and he had but to
call them to heel and they would troop after him whithersoever he
should think well to go. So now there was little trouble in finding the
two hundred Muslimeen he desired for his fighting crew. Rather was the
difficulty to keep the number of those eager for the adventure within
the bounds he had indicated.

You are not to suppose that in all this Sir Oliver was acting upon any
preconcerted plan. Whilst he had lain on the heights watching that fine
ship beating up against the wind it had come to him that with such a
vessel under him it were a fond adventure to sail to England, to
descend upon that Cornish coast abruptly as a thunderbolt, and present
the reckoning to his craven dastard of a brother. He had toyed with the
fancy, dreamily almost as men build their castles in Spain. Then in the
heat of conflict it had entirely escaped his mind, to return in the
shape of a resolve when he came to find himself face to face with
Jasper Leigh.

The skipper and the ship conjointly provided him with all the means to
realize that dream he had dreamt. There was none to oppose his will, no
reason not to indulge his cruel fancy. Perhaps, too, he might see
Rosamund again, might compel her to hear the truth from him. And there
was Sir John Killigrew. He had never been able to determine whether Sir
John had been his friend or his foe in the past; but since it was Sir
John who had been instrumental in setting up Lionel in Sir Oliver’s
place—by inducing the courts to presume Sir Oliver’s death on the score
that being a renegade he must be accounted dead at law—and since it was
Sir John who was contriving this wedding between Lionel and Rosamund,
why, Sir John, too, should be paid a visit and should be informed of
the precise nature of the thing he did.

With the forces at his disposal in those days of his absolute lordship
of life and death along the African littoral, to conceive was with
Oliver-Reis no more than the prelude to execution. The habit of swift
realization of his every wish had grown with him, and that habit guided
now his course.

He made his preparations quickly, and on the morrow the Spanish
carack—lately labelled Nuestra Senora de las Llagas, but with that
label carefully effaced from her quarter—trimmed her sails and stood
out for the open Atlantic, navigated by Captain Jasper Leigh. The three
galleys under the command of Biskaine-el-Borak crept slowly eastward
and homeward to Algiers, hugging the coast, as was the corsair habit.
The wind favoured Oliver so well that within ten days of rounding Cape
St. Vincent he had his first glimpse of the Lizard.




CHAPTER IV.
THE RAID


In the estuary of the River Fal a splendid ship, on the building of
which the most cunning engineers had been employed and no money spared,
rode proudly at anchor just off Smithick under the very shadow of the
heights crowned by the fine house of Arwenack. She was fitting out for
a distant voyage and for days the work of bringing stores and munitions
aboard had been in progress, so that there was an unwonted bustle about
the little forge and the huddle of cottages that went to make up the
fishing village, as if in earnest of the great traffic that in future
days was to be seen about that spot. For Sir John Killigrew seemed at
last to be on the eve of prevailing and of laying there the foundations
of the fine port of his dreams.

To this state of things his friendship with Master Lionel Tressilian
had contributed not a little. The opposition made to his project by Sir
Oliver—and supported, largely at Sir Oliver’s suggestion, by Truro and
Helston—had been entirely withdrawn by Lionel; more, indeed Lionel had
actually gone so far in the opposite direction as to support Sir John
in his representations to Parliament and the Queen. It followed
naturally enough that just as Sir Oliver’s opposition of that cherished
project had been the seed of the hostility between Arwenack and
Penarrow, so Lionel’s support of it became the root of the staunch
friendship that sprang up between himself and Sir John.

What Lionel lacked of his brother’s keen intelligence he made up for in
cunning. He realized that although at some future time it was possible
that Helston and Truro and the Tressilian property there might come to
suffer as a consequence of the development of a port so much more
advantageously situated, yet that could not be in his own lifetime; and
meanwhile he must earn in return Sir John’s support for his suit of
Rosamund Godolphin and thus find the Godolphin estates merged with his
own. This certain immediate gain was to Master Lionel well worth the
other future possible loss.

It must not, however, be supposed that Lionel’s courtship had
thenceforward run a smooth and easy course. The mistress of Godolphin
Court showed him no favour and it was mainly that she might abstract
herself from the importunities of his suit that she had sought and
obtained Sir John Killigrew’s permission to accompany the latter’s
sister to France when she went there with her husband, who was
appointed English ambassador to the Louvre. Sir John’s authority as her
guardian had come into force with the decease of her brother.

Master Lionel moped awhile in her absence; but cheered by Sir John’s
assurance that in the end he should prevail, he quitted Cornwall in his
turn and went forth to see the world. He spent some time in London
about the Court, where, however, he seems to have prospered little, and
then he crossed to France to pay his devoirs to the lady of his
longings.

His constancy, the humility with which he made his suit, the obvious
intensity of his devotion, began at last to wear away that
gentlewoman’s opposition, as dripping water wears away a stone. Yet she
could not bring herself to forget that he was Sir Oliver’s brother—the
brother of the man she had loved, and the brother of the man who had
killed her own brother. Between them stood, then, two things; the ghost
of that old love of hers and the blood of Peter Godolphin.

Of this she reminded Sir John on her return to Cornwall after an
absence of some two years, urging these matters as reasons why an
alliance between herself and Lionel Tressilian must be impossible.

Sir John did not at all agree with her.

“My dear,” he said, “there is your future to be thought of. You are now
of full age and mistress of your own actions. Yet it is not well for a
woman and a gentlewoman to dwell alone. As long as I live, or as long
as I remain in England, all will be well. You may continue indefinitely
your residence here at Arwenack, and you have been wise, I think, in
quitting the loneliness of Godolphin Court. Yet consider that that
loneliness may be yours again when I am not here.”

“I should prefer that loneliness to the company you would thrust upon
me,” she answered him.

“Ungracious speech!” he protested. “Is this your gratitude for that
lad’s burning devotion, for his patience, his gentleness, and all the
rest!”

“He is Oliver Tressilian’s brother,” she replied.

“And has he not suffered enough for that already? Is there to be no end
to the price that he must pay for his brother’s sins? Besides, consider
that when all is said they are not even brothers. They are but
half-brothers.”

“Yet too closely kin,” she said. “If you must have me wed I beg you’ll
find me another husband.”

To this he would answer that expediently considered no husband could be
better than the one he had chosen her. He pointed out the contiguity of
their two estates, and how fine and advantageous a thing it would be to
merge these two into one.

He was persistent, and his persistence was increased when he came to
conceive his notion to take the seas again. His conscience would not
permit him to heave anchor until he had bestowed her safely in wedlock.
Lionel too was persistent, in a quiet, almost self-effacing way that
never set a strain upon her patience, and was therefore the more
difficult to combat.

In the end she gave way under the pressure of these men’s wills, and
did so with the best grace she could summon, resolved to drive from her
heart and mind the one real obstacle of which, for very shame, she had
made no mention to Sir John. The fact is that in spite of all, her love
for Sir Oliver was not dead. It was stricken down, it is true, until
she herself failed to recognize it for what it really was. But she
caught herself thinking of him frequently and wistfully; she found
herself comparing him with his brother; and for all that she had bidden
Sir John find her some other husband than Lionel, she knew full well
that any suitor brought before her must be submitted to that same
comparison to his inevitable undoing. All this she accounted evil in
herself. It was in vain that she lashed her mind with the reminder that
Sir Oliver was Peter’s murderer. As time went on she found herself
actually making excuses for her sometime lover; she would admit that
Peter had driven him to the step, that for her sake Sir Oliver had
suffered insult upon insult from Peter, until, being but human, the cup
of his endurance had overflowed in the end, and weary of submitting to
the other’s blows he had risen up in his anger and smitten in his turn.

She would scorn herself for such thoughts as these, yet she could not
dismiss them. In act she could be strong—as witness how she had dealt
with that letter which Oliver sent her out of Barbary by the hand of
Pitt—but her thoughts she could not govern, and her thoughts were full
often traitors to her will. There were longings in her heart for Oliver
which she could not stifle, and there was ever the hope that he would
one day return, although she realized that from such a return she might
look for nothing.

When Sir John finally slew the hope of that return he did a wiser thing
than he conceived. Never since Oliver’s disappearance had they heard
any news of him until Pitt came to Arwenack with that letter and his
story. They had heard, as had all the world, of the corsair
Sakr-el-Bahr, but they had been far indeed from connecting him with
Oliver Tressilian. Now that his identity was established by Pitt’s
testimony, it was an easy matter to induce the courts to account him
dead and to give Lionel the coveted inheritance.

This to Rosamund was a small matter. But a great one was that Sir
Oliver was dead at law, and must be so in fact, should he ever again
set foot in England. It extinguished finally that curiously hopeless
and almost subconscious hope of hers that one day he would return. Thus
it helped her perhaps to face and accept the future which Sir John was
resolved to thrust upon her.

Her betrothal was made public, and she proved if not an ardently
loving, at least a docile and gentle mistress to Lionel. He was
content. He could ask no more in reason at the moment, and he was
buoyed up by every lover’s confidence that given opportunity and time
he could find the way to awaken a response. And it must be confessed
that already during their betrothal he gave some proof of his reason
for his confidence. She had been lonely, and he dispelled her
loneliness by his complete surrender of himself to her; his restraint
and his cautious, almost insidious creeping along a path which a more
clumsy fellow would have taken at a dash made companionship possible
between them and very sweet to her. Upon this foundation her affection
began gradually to rise, and seeing them together and such excellent
friends, Sir John congratulated himself upon his wisdom and went about
the fitting out of that fine ship of his—the Silver Heron—for the
coming voyage.

Thus they came within a week of the wedding, and Sir John all
impatience now. The marriage bells were to be his signal for departure;
as they fell silent the Silver Heron should spread her wings.

It was the evening of the first of June; the peal of the curfew had
faded on the air and lights were being set in the great dining-room at
Arwenack where the company was to sup. It was a small party. Just Sir
John and Rosamund and Lionel, who had lingered on that day, and Lord
Henry Goade—our chronicler—the Queen’s Lieutenant of Cornwall, together
with his lady. They were visiting Sir John and they were to remain yet
a week his guests at Arwenack that they might grace the coming
nuptials.

Above in the house there was great stir of preparation for the
departure of Sir John and his ward, the latter into wedlock, the former
into unknown seas. In the turret chamber a dozen sempstresses were at
work upon the bridal outfit under the directions of that Sally
Pentreath who had been no less assiduous in the preparation of
swaddling clothes and the like on the eve of Rosamund’s appearance in
this world.

At the very hour at which Sir John was leading his company to table Sir
Oliver Tressilian was setting foot ashore not a mile away.

He had deemed it wiser not to round Pendennis Point. So in the bay
above Swanpool on the western side of that promontory he had dropped
anchor as the evening shadows were deepening. He had launched the
ship’s two boats, and in these he had conveyed some thirty of his men
ashore. Twice had the boats returned, until a hundred of his corsairs
stood ranged along that foreign beach. The other hundred he left on
guard aboard. He took so great a force upon an expedition for which a
quarter of the men would have sufficed so as to ensure by overwhelming
numbers the avoidance of all unnecessary violence.

Absolutely unobserved he led them up the slope towards Arwenack through
the darkness that had now closed in. To tread his native soil once more
went near to drawing tears from him. How familiar was the path he
followed with such confidence in the night; how well known each bush
and stone by which he went with his silent multitude hard upon his
heels. Who could have foretold him such a return as this.

Who could have dreamt when he roamed amain in his youth here with dogs
and fowling-piece that he would creep one night over these dunes a
renegade Muslim leading a horde of infidels to storm the house of Sir
John Killigrew of Arwenack?

Such thoughts begot a weakness in him; but he made a quick recovery
when his mind swung to all that he had so unjustly suffered, when he
considered all that he came thus to avenge.

First to Arwenack to Sir John and Rosamund to compel them to hear the
truth at least, and then away to Penarrow for Master Lionel and the
reckoning. Such was the project that warmed him, conquered his weakness
and spurred him, relentless, onward and upward to the heights and the
fortified house that dominated them.

He found the massive iron-studded gates locked, as was to have been
expected at that hour. He knocked, and presently the postern gaped, and
a lantern was advanced. Instantly that lantern was dashed aside and Sir
Oliver had leapt over the sill into the courtyard. With a hand gripping
the porter’s throat to choke all utterance, Sir Oliver heaved him out
to his men, who swiftly gagged him.

That done they poured silently through that black gap of the postern
into the spacious gateway. On he led them, at a run almost, towards the
tall mullioned windows whence a flood of golden light seemed invitingly
to beckon them.

With the servants who met them in the hall they dealt in the same swift
silent fashion as they had dealt with the gatekeeper, and such was the
speed and caution of their movements that Sir John and his company had
no suspicion of their presence until the door of the dining-room
crashed open before their eyes.

The sight which they beheld was one that for some moments left them
mazed and bewildered. Lord Henry tells us how at first he imagined that
here was some mummery, some surprise prepared for the bridal couple by
Sir John’s tenants or the folk of Smithick and Penycumwick, and he adds
that he was encouraged in this belief by the circumstance that not a
single weapon gleamed in all that horde of outlandish intruders.

Although they came full armed against any eventualities, yet by their
leader’s orders not a blade was bared. What was to do was to be done
with their naked hands alone and without bloodshed. Such were the
orders of Sakr-el-Bahr, and Sakr-el-Bahr’s were not orders to be
disregarded.

Himself he stood forward at the head of that legion of brown-skinned
men arrayed in all the colours of the rainbow, their heads swathed in
turbans of every hue. He considered the company in grim silence, and
the company in amazement considered this turbaned giant with the
masterful face that was tanned to the colour of mahogany, the black
forked beard, and those singularly light eyes glittering like steel
under his black brows.

Thus a little while in silence, then with a sudden gasp Lionel
Tressilian sank back in his tall chair as if bereft of strength.

The agate eyes flashed upon him smiling, cruelly.

“I see that you, at least, recognize me,” said Sakr-el-Bahr in his deep
voice. “I was assured I could depend upon the eyes of brotherly love to
pierce the change that time and stress have wrought in me.”

Sir John was on his feet, his lean swarthy face flushing darkly, an
oath on his lips. Rosamund sat on as if frozen with horror, considering
Sir Oliver with dilating eyes, whilst her hands clawed the table before
her. They too recognized him now, and realized that here was no
mummery. That something sinister was intended Sir John could not for a
moment doubt. But of what that something might be he could form no
notion. It was the first time that Barbary rovers were seen in England.
That famous raid of theirs upon Baltimore in Ireland did not take place
until some thirty years after this date.

“Sir Oliver Tressilian!” Killigrew gasped, and “Sir Oliver Tressilian!”
echoed Lord Henry Goade, to add “By God!”

“Not Sir Oliver Tressilian, came the answer, but Sakr-el-Bahr, the
scourge of the sea, the terror of Christendom, the desperate corsair
your lies, cupidity, and false-heartedness have fashioned out of a
sometime Cornish gentleman.” He embraced them all in his denunciatory
gesture. “Behold me here with my sea-hawks to present a reckoning long
overdue.”

Writing now of what his own eyes beheld, Lord Henry tells us how Sir
John leapt to snatch a weapon from the armoured walls; how Sakr-el-Bahr
barked out a single word in Arabic, and how at that word a half-dozen
of his supple blackamoors sprang upon the knight like greyhounds upon a
hare and bore him writhing to the ground.

Lady Henry screamed; her husband does not appear to have done anything,
or else modesty keeps him silent on the score of it. Rosamund, white to
the lips, continued to look on, whilst Lionel, overcome, covered his
face with his hands in sheer horror. One and all of them expected to
see some ghastly deed of blood performed there, coldly and callously as
the wringing of a capon’s neck. But no such thing took place. The
corsairs merely turned Sir John upon his face, dragged his wrists
behind him to make them fast, and having performed that duty with a
speedy, silent dexterity they abandoned him.

Sakr-el-Bahr watched their performance with those grimly smiling eyes
of his. When it was done he spoke again and pointed to Lionel, who
leapt up in sudden terror, with a cry that was entirely inarticulate.
Lithe brown arms encircled him like a legion of snakes. Powerless, he
was lifted in the air and borne swiftly away. For an instant he found
himself held face to face with his turbaned brother. Into that pallid
terror-stricken human mask the renegade’s eyes stabbed like two
daggers. Then deliberately and after the fashion of the Muslim he was
become he spat upon it.

“Away!” he growled, and through the press of corsairs that thronged the
hall behind him a lane was swiftly opened and Lionel was swallowed up,
lost to the view of those within the room.

“What murderous deed do you intend?” cried Sir John indomitably. He had
risen and stood grimly dignified in his bonds.

“Will you murder your own brother as you murdered mine?” demanded
Rosamund, speaking now for the first time, and rising as she spoke, a
faint flush coming to overspread her pallor. She saw him wince; she saw
the mocking lustful anger perish in his face, leaving it vacant for a
moment. Then it became grim again with a fresh resolve. Her words had
altered all the current of his intentions. They fixed in him a dull,
fierce rage. They silenced the explanations which he was come to offer,
and which he scorned to offer here after that taunt.

“It seems you love that—whelp, that thing that was my brother,” he
said, sneering. “I wonder will you love him still when you come to be
better acquainted with him? Though, faith, naught would surprise me in
a woman and her love. Yet I am curious to see—curious to see.” He
laughed. “I have a mind to gratify myself. I will not separate you—not
just yet.”

He advanced upon her. “Come thou with me, lady,” he commanded, and held
out his hand.

And now Lord Henry seems to have been stirred to futile action.

“At that,” he writes, “I thrust myself between to shield her. ‘Thou
dog,’ I cried, ‘thou shalt be made to suffer!’

“‘Suffer?’ quoth he, and mocked me with his deep laugh. ‘I have
suffered already. ’Tis for that reason I am here.’

“‘And thou shalt suffer again, thou pirate out of hell!’ I warned him.
‘Thou shalt suffer for this outrage as God’s my life!’

“‘Shall I so?’ quoth he, very calm and sinister. ‘And at whose hands, I
pray you?’

“‘At mine, sir,’ I roared, being by now stirred to a great fury.

“‘At thine?’ he sneered. ‘Thou’lt hunt the hawk of the sea? Thou? Thou
plump partridge! Away! Hinder me not!”’

And he adds that again Sir Oliver spoke that short Arabic command,
whereupon a dozen blackamoors whirled the Queen’s Lieutenant aside and
bound him to a chair.

Face to face stood now Sir Oliver with Rosamund—face to face after five
long years, and he realized that in every moment of that time the
certainty had never departed from him of some such future meeting.

“Come, lady,” he bade her sternly.

A moment she looked at him with hate and loathing in the clear depths
of her deep blue eyes. Then swiftly as lightning she snatched a knife
from the board and drove it at his heart. But his hand moved as swiftly
to seize her wrist, and the knife clattered to the ground, its errand
unfulfilled.

A shuddering sob escaped her then to express at once her horror of her
own attempt and of the man who held her. That horror mounting until it
overpowered her, she sank suddenly against him in a swoon.

Instinctively his arms went round her, and a moment he held her thus,
recalling the last occasion on which she had lain against his breast,
on an evening five years and more ago under the grey wall of Godolphin
Court above the river. What prophet could have told him that when next
he so held her the conditions would be these? It was all grotesque and
incredible, like the fantastic dream of some sick mind. But it was all
true, and she was in his arms again.

He shifted his grip to her waist, heaved her to his mighty shoulder, as
though she were a sack of grain, and swung about, his business at
Arwenack accomplished—indeed, more of it accomplished than had been his
intent, and also something less.

“Away, away!” he cried to his rovers, and away they sped as fleetly and
silently as they had come, no man raising now so much as a voice to
hinder them.

Through the hall and across the courtyard flowed that human tide; out
into the open and along the crest of the hill it surged, then away down
the slope towards the beach where their boats awaited them.
Sakr-el-Bahr ran as lightly as though the swooning woman he bore were
no more than a cloak he had flung across his shoulder. Ahead of him
went a half-dozen of his fellows carrying his gagged and pinioned
brother.

Once only before they dipped from the heights of Arwenack did Oliver
check. He paused to look across the dark shimmering water to the woods
that screened the house of Penarrow from his view. It had been part of
his purpose to visit it, as we know. But the necessity had now been
removed, and he was conscious of a pang of disappointment, of a hunger
to look again upon his home. But to shift the current of his thoughts
just then came two of his officers—Othmani and Ali, who had been
muttering one with the other. As they overtook him, Othmani set now a
hand upon his arm, and pointed down towards the twinkling lights of
Smithick and Penycumwick.

“My lord,” he cried, “there will be lads and maidens there should fetch
fat prices in the sôk-el-Abeed.”

“No doubt,” said Sakr-el-Bahr, scarce heeding him, heeding indeed
little in this world but his longings to look upon Penarrow.

“Why, then, my lord, shall I take fifty True-Believers and make a raid
upon them? It were an easy task, all unsuspicious as they must be of
our presence.”

Sakr-el-Bahr came out of his musings. “Othmani,” said he, “art a fool,
the very father of fools, else wouldst thou have come to know by now
that those who once were of my own race, those of the land from which I
am sprung, are sacred to me. Here we take no slave but these we have.
On, then, in the name of Allah!”

But Othmani was not yet silenced. “And is our perilous voyage across
these unknown seas into this far heathen land to be rewarded by no more
than just these two captives? Is that a raid worthy of Sakr-el-Bahr?”

“Leave Sakr-el-Bahr to judge,” was the curt answer.

“But reflect, my lord: there is another who will judge. How shall our
Basha, the glorious Asad-ed-Din, welcome thy return with such poor
spoils as these? What questions will he set thee, and what account
shalt thou render him for having imperilled the lives of all these
True-Believers upon the seas for so little profit?”

“He shall ask me what he pleases, and I shall answer what I please and
as Allah prompts me. On, I say!”

And on they went, Sakr-el-Bahr conscious now of little but the warmth
of that body upon his shoulder, and knowing not, so tumultuous were his
emotions, whether it fired him to love or hate.

They gained the beach; they reached the ship whose very presence had
continued unsuspected. The breeze was fresh and they stood away at
once. By sunrise there was no more sign of them than there had been at
sunset, there was no more clue to the way they had taken than to the
way they had come. It was as if they had dropped from the skies in the
night upon that Cornish coast, and but for the mark of their swift,
silent passage, but for the absence of Rosamund and Lionel Tressilian,
the thing must have been accounted no more than a dream of those few
who had witnessed it.

Aboard the carack, Sakr-el-Bahr bestowed Rosamund in the cabin over the
quarter, taking the precaution to lock the door that led to the
stern-gallery. Lionel he ordered to be dropped into a dark hole under
the hatchway, there to lie and meditate upon the retribution that had
overtaken him until such time as his brother should have determined
upon his fate—for this was a matter upon which the renegade was still
undecided.

Himself he lay under the stars that night and thought of many things.
One of these things, which plays some part in the story, though it is
probable that it played but a slight one in his thoughts, was begotten
of the words Othmani had used. What, indeed, would be Asad’s welcome of
him on his return if he sailed into Algiers with nothing more to show
for that long voyage and the imperilling of the lives of two hundred
True-Believers than just those two captives whom he intended, moreover,
to retain for himself? What capital would not be made out of that
circumstance by his enemies in Algiers and by Asad’s Sicilian wife who
hated him with all the bitterness of a hatred that had its roots in the
fertile soil of jealousy?

This may have spurred him in the cool dawn to a very daring and
desperate enterprise which Destiny sent his way in the shape of a
tall-masted Dutchman homeward bound. He gave chase, for all that he was
full conscious that the battle he invited was one of which his corsairs
had no experience, and one upon which they must have hesitated to
venture with another leader than himself. But the star of Sakr-el-Bahr
was a star that never led to aught but victory, and their belief in
him, the very javelin of Allah, overcame any doubts that may have been
begotten of finding themselves upon an unfamiliar craft and on a
rolling, unfamiliar sea.

This fight is given in great detail by my Lord Henry from the
particulars afforded him by Jasper Leigh. But it differs in no great
particular from other sea-fights, and it is none of my purpose to
surfeit you with such recitals. Enough to say that it was stern and
fierce, entailing great loss to both combatants; that cannon played
little part in it, for knowing the quality of his men Sakr-el-Bahr made
haste to run in and grapple. He prevailed of course as he must ever
prevail by the very force of his personality and the might of his
example. He was the first to leap aboard the Dutchman, clad in mail and
whirling his great scimitar, and his men poured after him shouting his
name and that of Allah in a breath.

Such was ever his fury in an engagement that it infected and inspired
his followers. It did so now, and the shrewd Dutchmen came to perceive
that this heathen horde was as a body to which he supplied the brain
and soul. They attacked him fiercely in groups, intent at all costs
upon cutting him down, convinced almost by instinct that were he felled
the victory would easily be theirs. And in the end they succeeded. A
Dutch pike broke some links of his mail and dealt him a flesh wound
which went unheeded by him in his fury; a Dutch rapier found the breach
thus made in his defences, and went through it to stretch him bleeding
upon the deck. Yet he staggered up, knowing as full as did they that if
he succumbed then all was lost. Armed now with a short axe which he had
found under his hand when he went down, he hacked a way to the
bulwarks, set his back against the timbers, and hoarse of voice,
ghastly of face, spattered with the blood of his wound he urged on his
men until the victory was theirs—and this was fortunately soon. And
then, as if he had been sustained by no more than the very force of his
will, he sank down in a heap among the dead and wounded huddled against
the vessel’s bulwarks.

Grief-stricken his corsairs bore him back aboard the carack. Were he to
die then was their victory a barren one indeed. They laid him on a
couch prepared for him amidships on the main deck, where the vessel’s
pitching was least discomfiting. A Moorish surgeon came to tend him,
and pronounced his hurt a grievous one, but not so grievous as to close
the gates of hope.

This pronouncement gave the corsairs all the assurance they required.
It could not be that the Gardener could already pluck so fragrant a
fruit from Allah’s garden. The Pitiful must spare Sakr-el-Bahr to
continue the glory of Islam.

Yet they were come to the straits of Gibraltar before his fever abated
and he recovered complete consciousness, to learn of the final issue of
that hazardous fight into which he had led those children of the
Prophet.

The Dutchman, Othmani informed him, was following in their wake, with
Ali and some others aboard her, steering ever in the wake of the carack
which continued to be navigated by the Nasrani dog, Jasper Leigh. When
Sakr-el-Bahr learnt the value of the capture, when he was informed that
in addition to a hundred able-bodied men under the hatches, to be sold
as slaves in the sôk-el-Abeed, there was a cargo of gold and silver,
pearls, amber, spices, and ivory, and such lesser matters as gorgeous
silken fabrics, rich beyond anything that had ever been seen upon the
seas at any one time, he felt that the blood he had shed had not been
wasted.

Let him sail safely into Algiers with these two ships both captured in
the name of Allah and his Prophet, one of them an argosy so richly
fraught, a floating treasure-house, and he need have little fear of
what his enemies and the crafty evil Sicilian woman might have wrought
against him in his absence.

Then he made inquiry touching his two English captives, to be informed
that Othmani had taken charge of them, and that he had continued the
treatment meted out to them by Sakr-el-Bahr himself when first they
were brought aboard.

He was satisfied, and fell into a gentle healing sleep, whilst, on the
decks above, his followers rendered thanks to Allah the Pitying the
Pitiful, the Master of the Day of Judgment, who Alone is All-Wise,
All-Knowing.




CHAPTER V.
THE LION OF THE FAITH


Asad-ed-Din, the Lion of the Faith, Basha of Algiers, walked in the
evening cool in the orchard of the Kasbah upon the heights above the
city, and at his side, stepping daintily, came Fenzileh, his wife, the
first lady of his hareem, whom eighteen years ago he had carried off in
his mighty arms from that little whitewashed village above the Straits
of Messina which his followers had raided.

She had been a lissom maid of sixteen in those far-off days, the child
of humble peasant-folk, and she had gone uncomplaining to the arms of
her swarthy ravisher. To-day, at thirty-four, she was still beautiful,
more beautiful indeed than when first she had fired the passion of
Asad-Reis—as he then was, one of the captains of the famous Ali-Basha.
There were streaks of red in her heavy black tresses, her skin was of a
soft pearliness that seemed translucent, her eyes were large, of a
golden-brown, agleam with sombre fires, her lips were full and
sensuous. She was tall and of a shape that in Europe would have been
accounted perfect, which is to say that she was a thought too slender
for Oriental taste; she moved along beside her lord with a sinuous,
languorous grace, gently stirring her fan of ostrich plumes. She was
unveiled; indeed it was her immodest habit to go naked of face more
often than was seemly, which is but the least of the many undesirable
infidel ways which had survived her induction into the Faith of Islam—a
necessary step before Asad, who was devout to the point of bigotry,
would consent to make her his wife. He had found her such a wife as it
is certain he could never have procured at home; a woman who, not
content to be his toy, the plaything of his idle hour, insinuated
herself into affairs, demanded and obtained his confidences, and
exerted over him much the same influence as the wife of a European
prince might exert over her consort. In the years during which he had
lain under the spell of her ripening beauty he had accepted the
situation willingly enough; later, when he would have curtailed her
interferences, it was too late; she had taken a firm grip of the reins,
and Asad was in no better case than many a European husband—an
anomalous and outrageous condition this for a Basha of the Prophet’s
House. It was also a dangerous one for Fenzileh; for should the burden
of her at any time become too heavy for her lord there was a short and
easy way by which he could be rid of it. Do not suppose her so foolish
as not to have realized this—she realized it fully; but her Sicilian
spirit was daring to the point of recklessness; her very dauntlessness
which had enabled her to seize a control so unprecedented in a Muslim
wife urged her to maintain it in the face of all risks.

Dauntless was she now, as she paced there in the cool of the orchard,
under the pink and white petals of the apricots, the flaming scarlet of
pomegranate blossoms, and through orange-groves where the golden fruit
glowed and amid foliage of sombre green. She was at her eternal work of
poisoning the mind of her lord against Sakr-el-Bahr, and in her
maternal jealousy she braved the dangers of such an undertaking, fully
aware of how dear to the heart of Asad-ed-Din was that absent renegade
corsair. It was this very affection of the Basha’s for his lieutenant
that was the fomenter of her own hate of Sakr-el-Bahr, for it was an
affection that transcended Asad’s love for his own son and hers, and it
led to the common rumour that for Sakr-el-Bahr was reserved the high
destiny of succeeding Asad in the Bashalik.

“I tell thee thou’rt abused by him, O source of my life.”

“I hear thee,” answered Asad sourly. “And were thine own hearing less
infirm, woman, thou wouldst have heard me answer thee that thy words
weigh for naught with me against his deeds. Words may be but a mask
upon our thoughts; deeds are ever the expression of them. Bear thou
that in mind, O Fenzileh.”

“Do I not bear in mind thine every word, O fount of wisdom?” she
protested, and left him, as she often did, in doubt whether she fawned
or sneered. “And it is his deeds I would have speak for him, not indeed
my poor words and still less his own.”

“Then, by the head of Allah, let those same deeds speak, and be thou
silent.”

The harsh tone of his reproof and the scowl upon his haughty face, gave
her pause for a moment. He turned about.

“Come!” he said. “Soon it will be the hour of prayer.” And he paced
back towards the yellow huddle of walls of the Kasbah that overtopped
the green of that fragrant place.

He was a tall, gaunt man, stooping slightly at the shoulders under the
burden of his years; but his eagle face was masterful, and some
lingering embers of his youth still glowed in his dark eyes.
Thoughtfully, with a jewelled hand, he stroked his long white beard;
with the other he leaned upon her soft plump arm, more from habit than
for support, for he was full vigorous still.

High in the blue overhead a lark burst suddenly into song, and from the
depths of the orchard came a gentle murmur of doves as if returning
thanks for the lessening of the great heat now that the sun was sinking
rapidly towards the world’s edge and the shadows were lengthening.

Came Fenzileh’s voice again, more musical than either, yet laden with
words of evil, poison wrapped in honey.

“O my dear lord, thou’rt angered with me now. Woe me! that never may I
counsel thee for thine own glory as my heart prompts me, but I must
earn thy coldness.”

“Abuse not him I love,” said the Basha shortly. “I have told thee so
full oft already.”

She nestled closer to him, and her voice grew softer, more akin to the
amorous cooing of the doves. “And do I not love thee, O master of my
soul? Is there in all the world a heart more faithful to thee than
mine? Is not thy life my life? Have not my days been all devoted to the
perfecting of thine happiness? And wilt thou then frown upon me if I
fear for thee at the hands of an intruder of yesterday?”

“Fear for me?” he echoed, and laughed jeeringly. “What shouldst thou
fear for me from Sakr-el-Bahr?”

“What all believers must ever fear from one who is no true Muslim, from
one who makes a mock and travesty of the True Faith that he may gain
advancement.”

The Basha checked in his stride, and turned upon her angrily.

“May thy tongue rot, thou mother of lies!”

“I am as the dust beneath thy feet, O my sweet lord, yet am I not what
thine heedless anger calls me.”

“Heedless?” quoth he. “Not heedless but righteous to hear one whom the
Prophet guards, who is the very javelin of Islam against the breast of
the unbeliever, who carries the scourge of Allah against the infidel
Frankish pigs, so maligned by thee! No more, I say! Lest I bid thee
make good thy words, and pay the liar’s price if thou shouldst fail.”

“And should I fear the test?” she countered, nothing daunted. “I tell
thee, O father of Marzak, that I should hail it gladly. Why, hear me
now. Thou settest store by deeds, not words. Tell me, then, is it the
deed of a True-Believer to waste substance upon infidel slaves, to
purchase them that he may set them free?”

Asad moved on in silence. That erstwhile habit of Sakr-el-Bahr’s was
one not easy to condone. It had occasioned him his moments of
uneasiness, and more than once had he taxed his lieutenant with the
practice ever to receive the same answer, the answer which he now made
to Fenzileh. “For every slave that he so manumitted, he brought a dozen
into bondage.”

“Perforce, else would he be called to account. ’Twas so much dust he
flung into the face of true Muslimeen. Those manumissions prove a
lingering fondness for the infidel country whence he springs. Is there
room for that in the heart of a true member of the Prophet’s immortal
House? Hast ever known me languish for the Sicilian shore from which in
thy might thou wrested me, or have I ever besought of thee the life of
a single Sicilian infidel in all these years that I have lived to serve
thee? Such longings are betrayed, I say, by such a practice, and such
longings could have no place in one who had uprooted infidelity from
his heart. And now this voyage of his beyond the seas—risking a vessel
that he captured from the arch-enemy of Islam, which is not his to risk
but thine in whose name he captured it; and together with it he
imperils the lives of two hundred True-Believers. To what end? To bear
him overseas, perchance that he may look again upon the unhallowed land
that gave him birth. So Biskaine reported. And what if he should
founder on the way?”

“Thou at least wouldst be content, thou fount of malice,” growled Asad.

“Call me harsh names, O sun that warms me! Am I not thine to use and
abuse at thy sweet pleasure? Pour salt upon the heart thou woundest;
since it is thy hand I’ll never murmur a complaint. But heed me—heed my
words; or since words are of no account with thee, then heed his deeds
which I am drawing to thy tardy notice. Heed them, I say, as my love
bids me even though thou shouldst give me to be whipped or slain for my
temerity.”

“Woman, thy tongue is like the clapper of a bell with the devil
swinging from the rope. What else dost thou impute?”

“Naught else, since thou dost but mock me, withdrawing thy love from
thy fond slave.”

“The praise to Allah, then,” said he. “Come, it is the hour of prayer!”

But he praised Allah too soon. Woman-like, though she protested she had
done, she had scarce begun as yet.

“There is thy son, O father of Marzak.”

“There is, O mother of Marzak.”

“And a man’s son should be the partner of his soul. Yet is Marzak
passed over for this foreign upstart; yet does this Nasrani of
yesterday hold the place in thy heart and at thy side that should be
Marzak’s.”

“Could Marzak fill that place,” he asked. “Could that beardless boy
lead men as Sakr-el-Bahr leads them, or wield the scimitar against the
foes of Islam and increase as Sakr-el-Bahr increases the glory of the
Prophet’s Holy Law upon the earth?”

“If Sakr-el-Bahr does this, he does it by thy favour, O my lord. And so
might Marzak, young though he be. Sakr-el-Bahr is but what thou hast
made him—no more, no less.”

“There art thou wrong, indeed, O mother of error. Sakr-el-Bahr is what
Allah hath made him. He is what Allah wills. He shall become what Allah
wills. Hast yet to learn that Allah has bound the fate of each man
about his neck?”

And then a golden glory suffused the deep sapphire of the sky heralding
the setting of the sun and made an end of that altercation, conducted
by her with a daring as singular as the patience that had endured it.
He quickened his steps in the direction of the courtyard. That golden
glow paled as swiftly as it had spread, and night fell as suddenly as
if a curtain had been dropped.

In the purple gloom that followed the white cloisters of the courtyard
glowed with a faintly luminous pearliness. Dark forms of slaves stirred
as Asad entered from the garden followed by Fenzileh, her head now
veiled in a thin blue silken gauze. She flashed across the quadrangle
and vanished through one of the archways, even as the distant voice of
a Mueddin broke plaintively upon the brooding stillness reciting the
Shehad—

“La illaha, illa Allah! Wa Muhammad er Rasool Allah!”

A slave spread a carpet, a second held a great silver bowl, into which
a third poured water. The Basha, having washed, turned his face towards
Mecca, and testified to the unity of Allah, the Compassionate, the
Merciful, King of the Day of judgment, whilst the cry of the Mueddin
went echoing over the city from minaret to minaret.

As he rose from his devotions, there came a quick sound of steps
without, and a sharp summons. Turkish janissaries of the Basha’s guard,
invisible almost in their flowing black garments, moved to answer that
summons and challenge those who came.

From the dark vaulted entrance of the courtyard leapt a gleam of
lanterns containing tiny clay lamps in which burned a wick that was
nourished by mutton fat. Asad, waiting to learn who came, halted at the
foot of the white glistening steps, whilst from doors and lattices of
the palace flooded light to suffuse the courtyard and set the marbles
shimmering.

A dozen Nubian javelin-men advanced, then ranged themselves aside
whilst into the light stepped the imposing, gorgeously robed figure of
Asad’s wazeer, Tsamanni. After him came another figure in mail that
clanked faintly and glimmered as he moved.

“Peace and the Prophet’s blessings upon thee, O mighty Asad!” was the
wazeer’s greeting.

“And peace upon thee, Tsamanni,” was the answer. “Art the bearer of
news?”

“Of great and glorious tidings, O exalted one! Sakr-el-Bahr is
returned.”

“The praise to Him!” exclaimed the Basha, with uplifted hands; and
there was no mistaking the thrill of his voice.

There fell a soft step behind him and a shadow from the doorway. He
turned. A graceful stripling in turban and caftan of cloth of gold
salaamed to him from the topmost step. And as he came upright and the
light of the lanterns fell full upon his face the astonishingly white
fairness of it was revealed—a woman’s face it might have been, so
softly rounded was it in its beardlessness.

Asad smiled wrily in his white beard, guessing that the boy had been
sent by his ever-watchful mother to learn who came and what the tidings
that they bore.

“Thou hast heard, Marzak?” he said. “Sakr-el-Bahr is returned.”

“Victoriously, I hope,” the lad lied glibly.

“Victorious beyond aught that was ever known,” replied Tsamanni. “He
sailed at sunset into the harbour, his company aboard two mighty
Frankish ships, which are but the lesser part of the great spoil he
brings.”

“Allah is great,” was the Basha’s glad welcome of this answer to those
insidious promptings of his Sicilian wife. “Why does he not come in
person with his news?”

“His duty keeps him yet awhile aboard, my lord,” replied the wazeer.
“But he hath sent his kayia Othmani here to tell the tale of it.”

“Thrice welcome be thou, Othmani.” He beat his hands together, whereat
slaves placed cushions for him upon the ground. He sat, and beckoned
Marzak to his side. “And now thy tale!”

And Othmani standing forth related how they had voyaged to distant
England in the ship that Sakr-el-Bahr had captured, through seas that
no corsair yet had ever crossed, and how on their return they had
engaged a Dutchman that was their superior in strength and numbers; how
none the less Sakr-el-Bahr had wrested victory by the help of Allah,
his protector, how he had been dealt a wound that must have slain any
but one miraculously preserved for the greater glory of Islam, and of
the surpassing wealth of the booty which at dawn tomorrow should be
laid at Asad’s feet for his division of it.




CHAPTER VI.
THE CONVERT


That tale of Othmani’s being borne anon to Fenzileh by her son was gall
and wormwood to her jealous soul. Evil enough to know that Sakr-el-Bahr
was returned in spite of the fervent prayers for his foundering which
she had addressed both to the God of her forefathers and to the God of
her adoption. But that he should have returned in triumph bringing with
him heavy spoils that must exalt him further in the affection of Asad
and the esteem of the people was bitterness indeed. It left her mute
and stricken, bereft even of the power to curse him.

Anon, when her mind recovered from the shock she turned it to the
consideration of what at first had seemed a trivial detail in Othmani’s
tale as reported by Marzak.

“It is most singularly odd that he should have undertaken that long
voyage to England to wrest thence just those two captives; that being
there he should not have raided in true corsair fashion and packed his
ship with slaves. Most singularly odd!”

They were alone behind the green lattices through which filtered the
perfumes of the garden and the throbbing of a nightingale’s voice laden
with the tale of its love for the rose. Fenzileh reclined upon a divan
that was spread with silken Turkey carpets, and one of her
gold-embroidered slippers had dropped from her henna-stained toes. Her
lovely arms were raised to support her head, and she stared up at the
lamp of many colours that hung from the fretted ceiling.

Marzak paced the length of the chamber back and forth, and there was
silence save for the soft swish of his slippers along the floor.

“Well?” she asked him impatiently at last. “Does it not seem odd to
thee?”

“Odd, indeed, O my mother,” the youth replied, coming to a halt before
her.

“And canst think of naught that was the cause of it?”

“The cause of it?” quoth he, his lovely young face, so closely modelled
upon her own, looking blank and vacant.

“Ay, the cause of it,” she cried impatiently. “Canst do naught but
stare? Am I the mother of a fool? Wilt thou simper and gape and trifle
away thy days whilst that dog-descended Frank tramples thee underfoot,
using thee but as a stepping-stone to the power that should be thine
own? And that be so, Marzak, I would thou hadst been strangled in my
womb.”

He recoiled before the Italian fury of her, was dully resentful even,
suspecting that in such words from a woman were she twenty times his
mother, there was something dishonouring to his manhood.

“What can I do?” he cried.

“Dost ask me? Art thou not a man to think and act? I tell thee that
misbegotten son of a Christian and a Jew will trample thee in the dust.
He is greedy as the locust, wily as the serpent, and ferocious as the
panther. By Allah! I would I had never borne a son. Rather might men
point at me the finger of scorn and call me mother of the wind than
that I should have brought forth a man who knows not how to be a man.”

“Show me the way,” he cried. “Set me a task; tell me what to do and
thou shalt not find me lacking, O my mother. Until then spare me these
insults, or I come no more to thee.”

At this threat that strange woman heaved herself up from her soft
couch. She ran to him and flung her arms about his neck, set her cheek
against his own. Not eighteen years in the Basha’s hareem had stifled
the European mother in her, the passionate Sicilian woman, fierce as a
tiger in her maternal love.

“O my child, my lovely boy,” she almost sobbed. “It is my fear for thee
that makes me harsh. If I am angry it is but my love that speaks, my
rage for thee to see another come usurping the place beside thy father
that should be thine. Ah! but we will prevail, sweet son of mine. I
shall find a way to return that foreign offal to the dung-heap whence
it sprang. Trust me, O Marzak! Sh! Thy father comes. Away! Leave me
alone with him.”

She was wise in that, for she knew that alone Asad was more easily
controlled by her, since the pride was absent which must compel him to
turn and rend her did she speak so before others. Marzak vanished
behind the screen of fretted sandalwood that masked one doorway even as
Asad loomed in the other.

He came forward smiling, his slender brown fingers combing his long
beard, his white djellaba trailing behind him along the ground.

“Thou hast heard, not a doubt, O Fenzileh,” said he. “Art thou answered
enough?”

She sank down again upon her cushions and idly considered herself in a
steel mirror set in silver.

“Answered?” she echoed lazily, with infinite scorn and a hint of
rippling contemptuous laughter running through the word. “Answered
indeed. Sakr-el-Bahr risks the lives of two hundred children of Islam
and a ship that being taken was become the property of the State upon a
voyage to England that has no object but the capturing of two
slaves—two slaves, when had his purpose been sincere, it might have
been two hundred.”

“Ha! And is that all that thou hast heard?” he asked her mocking in his
turn.

“All that signifies,” she replied, still mirroring herself. “I heard as
a matter of lesser import that on his return, meeting fortuitously a
Frankish ship that chanced to be richly laden, he seized it in thy
name.”

“Fortuitously, sayest thou?”

“What else?” She lowered the mirror, and her bold, insolent eyes met
his own quite fearlessly. “Thou’lt not tell me that it was any part of
his design when he went forth?”

He frowned; his head sank slowly in thought. Observing the advantage
gained she thrust it home. “It was a lucky wind that blew that Dutchman
into his path, and luckier still her being so richly fraught that he
may dazzle thine eyes with the sight of gold and gems, and so blind
thee to the real purpose of his voyage.”

“Its real purpose?” he asked dully. “What was its real purpose?” She
smiled a smile of infinite knowledge to hide her utter ignorance, her
inability to supply even a reason that should wear an air of truth.

“Dost ask me, O perspicuous Asad? Are not thine eyes as sharp, thy wits
as keen at least as mine, that what is clear to me should be hidden
from thee? Or hath this Sakr-el-Bahr bewitched thee with enchantments
of Babyl?”

He strode to her and caught her wrist in a cruelly rough grip of his
sinewy old hand.

“His purpose, thou jade! Pour out the foulness of thy mind. Speak!”

She sat up, flushed and defiant.

“I will not speak,” said she.

“Thou wilt not? Now, by the Head of Allah! dost dare to stand before my
face and defy me, thy Lord? I’ll have thee whipped, Fenzileh. I have
been too tender of thee these many years—so tender that thou hast
forgot the rods that await the disobedient wife. Speak then ere thy
flesh is bruised or speak thereafter, at thy pleasure.”

“I will not,” she repeated. “Though I be flung to the hooks, not
another word will I say of Sakr-el-Bahr. Shall I unveil the truth to be
spurned and scorned and dubbed a liar and the mother of lies?” Then
abruptly changing she fell to weeping. “O source of my life!” she cried
to him, “how cruelly unjust to me thou art!” She was grovelling now, a
thing of supplest grace, her lovely arms entwining his knees. “When my
love for thee drives me to utter what I see, I earn but thy anger,
which is more than I can endure. I swoon beneath the weight of it.”

He flung her off impatiently. “What a weariness is a woman’s tongue!”
he cried, and stalked out again, convinced from past experiences that
did he linger he would be whelmed in a torrent of words.

But her poison was shrewdly administered, and slowly did its work. It
abode in his mind to torture him with the doubts that were its very
essence. No reason, however well founded, that she might have urged for
Sakr-el-Bahr’s strange conduct could have been half so insidious as her
suggestion that there was a reason. It gave him something vague and
intangible to consider. Something that he could not repel since it had
no substance he could grapple with. Impatiently he awaited the morning
and the coming of Sakr-el-Bahr himself, but he no longer awaited it
with the ardent whole-hearted eagerness as of a father awaiting the
coming of a beloved son.

Sakr-el-Bahr himself paced the poop deck of the carack and watched the
lights perish one by one in the little town that straggled up the
hillside before him. The moon came up and bathed it in a white hard
light, throwing sharp inky shadows of rustling date palm and spearlike
minaret, and flinging shafts of silver athwart the peaceful bay.

His wound was healed and he was fully himself once more. Two days ago
he had come on deck for the first time since the fight with the
Dutchman, and he had spent there the greater portion of the time since
then. Once only had he visited his captives. He had risen from his
couch to repair straight to the cabin in the poop where Rosamund was
confined. He had found her pale and very wistful, but with her courage
entirely unbroken. The Godolphins were a stiff-necked race, and
Rosamund bore in her frail body the spirit of a man. She looked up when
he entered, started a little in surprise to see him at last, for it was
the first time he stood before her since he had carried her off from
Arwenack some four weeks ago. Then she had averted her eyes, and sat
there, elbows on the table, as if carved of wood, as if blind to his
presence and deaf to his words.

To the expressions of regret—and they were sincere, for already he
repented him his unpremeditated act so far as she was concerned—she
returned no slightest answer, gave no sign indeed that she heard a word
of it. Baffled, he stood gnawing his lip a moment, and gradually,
unreasonably perhaps, anger welled up from his heart. He turned and
went out again. Next he had visited his brother, to consider in silence
a moment the haggard, wild-eyed, unshorn wretch who shrank and cowered
before him in the consciousness of guilt. At last he returned to the
deck, and there, as I have said, he spent the greater portion of the
last three days of that strange voyage, reclining for the most part in
the sun and gathering strength from its ardour.

To-night as he paced under the moon a stealthy shadow crept up the
companion to call him gently by his English name—

“Sir Oliver!”

He started as if a ghost had suddenly leapt up to greet him. It was
Jasper Leigh who hailed him thus.

“Come up,” he said. And when the fellow stood before him on the poop—“I
have told you already that here is no Sir Oliver. I am Oliver-Reis or
Sakr-el-Bahr, as you please, one of the Faithful of the Prophet’s
House. And now what is your will?”

“Have I not served you faithfully and well?” quoth Captain Leigh.

“Who has denied it?”

“None. But neither has any acknowledged it. When you lay wounded below
it had been an easy thing for me to ha’ played the traitor. I might ha’
sailed these ships into the mouth of Tagus. I might so by God!”

“You’ld have been carved in pieces on the spot,” said Sakr-el-Bahr.

“I might have hugged the land and run the risk of capture and then
claimed my liberation from captivity.”

“And found yourself back on the galleys of his Catholic Majesty. But
there! I grant that you have dealt loyally by me. You have kept your
part of the bond. I shall keep mine, never doubt it.”

“I do not. But your part of the bond was to send me home again.”

“Well?”

“The hell of it is that I know not where to find a home, I know not
where home may be after all these years. If ye send me forth, I shall
become a wanderer of no account.”

“What else am I to do with you?”

“Faith now I am as full weary of Christians and Christendom as you was
yourself when the Muslims took the galley on which you toiled. I am a
man of parts, Sir Ol-Sakr-el-Bahr. No better navigator ever sailed a
ship from an English port, and I ha’ seen a mort o’ fighting and know
the art of it upon the sea. Can ye make naught of me here?”

“You would become a renegade like me?” His tone was bitter.

“I ha’ been thinking that ‘renegade’ is a word that depends upon which
side you’re on. I’d prefer to say that I’ve a wish to be converted to
the faith of Mahound.”

“Converted to the faith of piracy and plunder and robbery upon the seas
is what you mean,” said Sakr-el-Bahr.

“Nay, now. To that I should need no converting, for all that I were
afore,” Captain Leigh admitted frankly. “I ask but to sail under
another flag than the Jolly Roger.”

“You’ll need to abjure strong drink,” said Sakr-el-Bahr.

“There be compensations,” said Master Leigh.

Sakr-el-Bahr considered. The rogue’s appeal smote a responsive chord in
his heart. It would be good to have a man of his own race beside him,
even though it were but such a rascal as this.

“Be it as you will,” he said at last. “You deserve to be hanged in
spite of what promises I made you. But no matter for that. So that you
become a Muslim I will take you to serve beside me, one of my own
lieutenants to begin with, and so long as you are loyal to me, Jasper,
all will be well. But at the first sign of faithlessness, a rope and
the yard-arm, my friend, and an airy dance into hell for you.”

The rascally skipper stooped in his emotion, caught up Sakr-el-Bahr’s
hand and bore it to his lips. “It is agreed,” he said. “Ye have shown
me mercy who have little deserved it from you. Never fear for my
loyalty. My life belongs to you, and worthless thing though it may be,
ye may do with it as ye please.”

Despite himself Sakr-el-Bahr tightened his grip upon the rogue’s hand,
and Jasper shuffled off and down the companion again, touched to the
heart for once in his rough villainous life by a clemency that he knew
to be undeserved, but which he swore should be deserved ere all was
done.




CHAPTER VII.
MARZAK-BEN-ASAD


It took no less than forty camels to convey the cargo of that Dutch
argosy from the mole to the Kasbah, and the procession—carefully
marshalled by Sakr-el-Bahr, who knew the value of such pageants to
impress the mob—was such as never yet had been seen in the narrow
streets of Algiers upon the return of any corsair. It was full worthy
of the greatest Muslim conqueror that sailed the seas, of one who, not
content to keep to the tideless Mediterranean as had hitherto been the
rule of his kind, had ventured forth upon the wider ocean.

Ahead marched a hundred of his rovers in their short caftans of every
conceivable colour, their waists swathed in gaudy scarves, some of
which supported a very arsenal of assorted cutlery; many wore body
armour of mail and the gleaming spike of a casque thrust up above their
turbans. After them, dejected and in chains, came the five score
prisoners taken aboard the Dutchman, urged along by the whips of the
corsairs who flanked them. Then marched another regiment of corsairs,
and after these the long line of stately, sneering camels, shuffling
cumbrously along and led by shouting Saharowis. After them followed yet
more corsairs, and then mounted, on a white Arab jennet, his head
swathed in a turban of cloth of gold, came Sakr-el-Bahr. In the
narrower streets, with their white and yellow washed houses, which
presented blank windowless walls broken here and there by no more than
a slit to admit light and air, the spectators huddled themselves
fearfully into doorways to avoid being crushed to death by the camels,
whose burdens bulging on either side entirely filled those narrow ways.
But the more open spaces, such as the strand on either side of the
mole, the square before the sôk, and the approaches of Asad’s fortress,
were thronged with a motley roaring crowd. There were stately Moors in
flowing robes cheek by jowl with half-naked blacks from the Sus and the
Draa; lean, enduring Arabs in their spotless white djellabas rubbed
shoulders with Berbers from the highlands in black camel-hair cloaks;
there were Levantine Turks, and Jewish refugees from Spain
ostentatiously dressed in European garments, tolerated there because
bound to the Moor by ties of common suffering and common exile from
that land that once had been their own.

Under the glaring African sun this amazing crowd stood assembled to
welcome Sakr-el-Bahr; and welcome him it did, with such vocal thunder
that an echo of it from the mole reached the very Kasbah on the hilltop
to herald his approach.

By the time, however, that he reached the fortress his procession had
dwindled by more than half. At the sôk his forces had divided, and his
corsairs, headed by Othmani, had marched the captives away to the
bagnio—or banyard, as my Lord Henry calls it—whilst the camels had
continued up the hill. Under the great gateway of the Kasbah they
padded into the vast courtyard to be ranged along two sides of it by
their Saharowi drivers, and there brought clumsily to their knees.
After them followed but some two score corsairs as a guard of honour to
their leader. They took their stand upon either side of the gateway
after profoundly salaaming to Asad-ed-Din. The Basha sat in the shade
of an awning enthroned upon a divan, attended by his wazeer Tsamanni
and by Marzak, and guarded by a half-dozen janissaries, whose sable
garments made an effective background to the green and gold of his
jewelled robes. In his white turban glowed an emerald crescent.

The Basha’s countenance was dark and brooding as he watched the advent
of that line of burdened camels. His thoughts were still labouring with
the doubt of Sakr-el-Bahr which Fenzileh’s crafty speech and craftier
reticence had planted in them. But at sight of the corsair leader
himself his countenance cleared suddenly, his eyes sparkled, and he
rose to his feet to welcome him as a father might welcome a son who had
been through perils on a service dear to both.

Sakr-el-Bahr entered the courtyard on foot, having dismounted at the
gate. Tall and imposing, with his head high and his forked beard
thrusting forward, he stalked with great dignity to the foot of the
divan followed by Ali and a mahogany-faced fellow, turbaned and
red-bearded, in whom it needed more than a glance to recognize the
rascally Jasper Leigh, now in all the panoply of your complete
renegado.

Sakr-el-Bahr went down upon his knees and prostrated himself solemnly
before his prince.

“The blessing of Allah and His peace upon thee, my lord,” was his
greeting.

And Asad, stooping to lift that splendid figure in his arms, gave him a
welcome that caused the spying Fenzileh to clench her teeth behind the
fretted lattice that concealed her.

“The praise to Allah and to our Lord Mahomet that thou art returned and
in health, my son. Already hath my old heart been gladdened by the news
of thy victories in the service of the Faith.”

Then followed the display of all those riches wrested from the Dutch,
and greatly though Asad’s expectations had been fed already by Othmani,
the sight now spread before his eyes by far exceeded all those
expectations.

In the end all was dismissed to the treasury, and Tsamanni was bidden
to go cast up the account of it and mark the share that fell to the
portion of those concerned—for in these ventures all were partners,
from the Basha himself, who represented the State down to the meanest
corsair who had manned the victorious vessels of the Faith, and each
had his share of the booty, greater or less according to his rank, one
twentieth of the total falling to Sakr-el-Bahr himself.

In the courtyard were left none but Asad, Marzak and the janissaries,
and Sakr-el-Bahr with Ali and Jasper. It was then that Sakr-el-Bahr
presented his new officer to the Bashal as one upon whom the grace of
Allah had descended, a great fighter and a skilled seaman, who had
offered up his talents and his life to the service of Islam, who had
been accepted by Sakr-el-Bahr, and stood now before Asad to be
confirmed in his office.

Marzak interposed petulantly, to exclaim that already were there too
many erstwhile Nasrani dogs in the ranks of the soldiers of the Faith,
and that it was unwise to increase their number and presumptuous in
Sakr-el-Bahr to take so much upon himself.

Sakr-el-Bahr measured him with an eye in which scorn and surprise were
nicely blended.

“Dost say that it is presumptuous to win a convert to the banner of Our
Lord Mahomet?” quoth he. “Go read the Most Perspicuous Book and see
what is there enjoined as a duty upon every True-Believer. And bethink
thee, O son of Asad, that when thou dost in thy little wisdom cast
scorn upon those whom Allah has blessed and led from the night wherein
they dwelt into the bright noontide of Faith, thou dost cast scorn upon
me and upon thine own mother, which is but a little matter, and thou
dost blaspheme the Blessed name of Allah, which is to tread the ways
that lead unto the Pit.”

Angry but defeated and silenced, Marzak fell back a step and stood
biting his lip and glowering upon the corsair, what time Asad nodded
his head and smiled approval.

“Verily art thou full learned in the True Belief, Sakr-el-Bahr,” he
said. “Thou art the very father of wisdom as of valour.” And thereupon
he gave welcome to Master Leigh, whom he hailed to the ranks of the
Faithful under the designation of Jasper-Reis.

That done, the renegade and Ali were both dismissed, as were also the
janissaries, who, quitting their position behind Asad, went to take
their stand on guard at the gateway. Then the Basha beat his hands
together, and to the slaves who came in answer to his summons he gave
orders to set food, and he bade Sakr-el-Bahr to come sit beside him on
the divan.

Water was brought that they might wash. That done, the slaves placed
before them a savoury stew of meat and eggs with olives, limes, and
spices.

Asad broke bread with a reverently pronounced “Bismillah!” and dipped
his fingers into the earthenware bowl, leading the way for Sakr-el-Bahr
and Marzak, and as they ate he invited the corsair himself to recite
the tale of his adventure.

When he had done so, and again Asad had praised him in high and loving
terms, Marzak set him a question.

“Was it to obtain just these two English slaves that thou didst
undertake this perilous voyage to that distant land?”

“That was but a part of my design,” was the calm reply. “I went to rove
the seas in the Prophet’s service, as the result of my voyage gives
proof.”

“Thou didst not know that this Dutch argosy would cross thy path,” said
Marzak, in the very words his mother had prompted him.

“Did I not?” quoth Sakr-el-Bahr, and he smiled confidently, so
confidently that Asad scarce needed to hear the words that so cunningly
gave the lie to the innuendo. “Had I no trust in Allah the All-wise,
the All-knowing?

“Well answered, by the Koran!” Asad approved him heartily, the more
heartily since it rebutted insinuations which he desired above all to
hear rebutted.

But Marzak did not yet own himself defeated. He had been soundly
schooled by his guileful Sicilian mother.

“Yet there is something in all this I do not understand,” he murmured,
with false gentleness.

“All things are possible to Allah!” said Sakr-el-Bahr, in tones of
incredulity, as if he suggested—not without a suspicion of irony—that
it was incredible there should be anything in all the world that could
elude the penetration of Marzak.

The youth bowed to him in acknowledgment. “Tell me, O mighty
Sakr-el-Bahr,” he begged, “how it came to pass that having reached
those distant shores thou wert content to take thence but two poor
slaves, since with thy followers and the favour of the All-seeing thou
might easily have taken fifty times that number.” And he looked
ingenuously into the corsair’s swarthy, rugged face, whilst Asad
frowned thoughtfully, for the thought was one that had occurred to him
already.

It became necessary that Sakr-el-Bahr should lie to clear himself. Here
no high-sounding phrase of Faith would answer. And explanation was
unavoidable, and he was conscious that he could not afford one that did
not go a little lame.

“Why, as to that,” said he, “these prisoners were wrested from the
first house upon which we came, and their capture occasioned some
alarm. Moreover, it was night-time when we landed, and I dared not
adventure the lives of my followers by taking them further from the
ship and attacking a village which might have risen to cut off our good
retreat.”

The frown remained stamped upon the brow of Asad, as Marzak slyly
observed.

“Yet Othmani,” said he, “urged thee to fall upon a slumbering village
all unconscious of thy presence, and thou didst refuse.”

Asad looked up sharply at that, and Sakr-el-Bahr realized with a
tightening about the heart something of the undercurrents at work
against him and all the pains that had been taken to glean information
that might be used to his undoing.

“Is it so?” demanded Asad, looking from his son to his lieutenant with
that lowering look that rendered his face evil and cruel.

Sakr-el-Bahr took a high tone. He met Asad’s glance with an eye of
challenge.

“And if it were so my lord?” he demanded.

“I asked thee is it so?”

“Ay, but knowing thy wisdom I disbelieved my ears,” said Sakr-el-Bahr.
“Shall it signify what Othmani may have said? Do I take my orders or am
I to be guided by Othmani? If so, best set Othmani in my place, give
him the command and the responsibility for the lives of the Faithful
who fight beside him.” He ended with an indignant snort.

“Thou art over-quick to anger,” Asad reproved him, scowling still

“And by the Head of Allah, who will deny my right to it? Am I to
conduct such an enterprise as this from which I am returned laden with
spoils that might well be the fruits of a year’s raiding, to be
questioned by a beardless stripling as to why I was not guided by
Othmani?”

He heaved himself up and stood towering there in the intensity of a
passion that was entirely simulated. He must bluster here, and crush
down suspicion with whorling periods and broad, fierce gesture.

“To what should Othmani have guided me?” he demanded scornfully. “Could
he have guided me to more than I have this day laid at thy feet? What I
have done speaks eloquently with its own voice. What he would have had
me do might well have ended in disaster. Had it so ended, would the
blame of it have fallen upon Othmani? Nay, by Allah! but upon me. And
upon me rests then the credit, and let none dare question it without
better cause.”

Now these were daring words to address to the tyrant Asad, and still
more daring was the tone, the light hard eyes aflash and the sweeping
gestures of contempt with which they were delivered. But of his
ascendancy over the Basha there was no doubt. And here now was proof of
it.

Asad almost cowered before his fury. The scowl faded from his face to
be replaced by an expression of dismay.

“Nay, nay, Sakr-el-Bahr, this tone!” he cried.

Sakr-el-Bahr, having slammed the door of conciliation in the face of
the Basha, now opened it again. He became instantly submissive.

“Forgive it,” he said. “Blame the devotion of thy servant to thee and
to the Faith he serves with little reck to life. In this very
expedition was I wounded nigh unto death. The livid scar of it is a
dumb witness to my zeal. Where are thy scars, Marzak?”

Marzak quailed before the sudden blaze of that question, and
Sakr-el-Bahr laughed softly in contempt.

“Sit,” Asad bade him. “I have been less than just.”

“Thou art the very fount and spring of justice, O my lord, as this
thine admission proves,” protested the corsair. He sat down again,
folding his legs under him. “I will confess to you that being come so
near to England in that cruise of mine I determined to land and seize
one who some years ago did injure me, and between whom and me there was
a score to settle. I exceeded my intentions in that I carried off two
prisoners instead of one. These prisoners,” he ran on, judging that the
moment of reaction in Asad’s mind was entirely favourable to the
preferment of the request he had to make, “are not in the bagnio with
the others. They are still confined aboard the carack I seized.”

“And why is this?” quoth Asad, but without suspicion now.

“Because, my lord, I have a boon to ask in some reward for the service
I have rendered.”

“Ask it, my son.”

“Give me leave to keep these captives for myself.”

Asad considered him, frowning again slightly. Despite himself, despite
his affection for Sakr-el-Bahr, and his desire to soothe him now that
rankling poison of Fenzileh’s infusing was at work again in his mind.

“My leave thou hast,” said he. “But not the law’s, and the law runs
that no corsair shall subtract so much as the value of an asper from
his booty until the division has been made and his own share allotted
him,” was the grave answer.

“The law?” quoth Sakr-el-Bahr. “But thou art the law, exalted lord.”

“Not so, my son. The law is above the Basha, who must himself conform
to it so that he be just and worthy of his high office. And the law I
have recited thee applies even should the corsair raider be the Basha
himself. These slaves of thine must forthwith be sent to the bagnio to
join the others that tomorrow all may be sold in the sôk. See it done,
Sakr-el-Bahr.”

The corsair would have renewed his pleadings, but that his eye caught
the eager white face of Marzak and the gleaming expectant eyes, looking
so hopefully for his ruin. He checked, and bowed his head with an
assumption of indifference.

“Name thou their price then, and forthwith will I pay it into thy
treasury.”

But Asad shook his head. “It is not for me to name their price, but for
the buyers,” he replied. “I might set the price too high, and that were
unjust to thee, or too low, and that were unjust to others who would
acquire them. Deliver them over to the bagnio.”

“It shall be done,” said Sakr-el-Bahr, daring to insist no further and
dissembling his chagrin.

Very soon thereafter he departed upon that errand, giving orders,
however, that Rosamund and Lionel should be kept apart from the other
prisoners until the hour of the sale on the morrow when perforce they
must take their place with the rest.

Marzak lingered with his father after Oliver had taken his leave, and
presently they were joined there in the courtyard by Fenzileh—this
woman who had brought, said many, the Frankish ways of Shaitan into
Algiers.




CHAPTER VIII.
MOTHER AND SON


Early on the morrow—so early that scarce had the Shehad been
recited—came Biskaine-el-Borak to the Basha. He had just landed from a
galley which had come upon a Spanish fishing boat, aboard of which
there was a young Morisco who was being conducted over seas to Algiers.
The news of which the fellow was the bearer was of such urgency that
for twenty hours without intermission the slaves had toiled at the oars
of Biskaine’s vessel—the capitana of his fleet—to bring her swiftly
home.

The Morisco had a cousin—a New-Christian like himself, and like
himself, it would appear, still a Muslim at heart—who was employed in
the Spanish treasury at Malaga. This man had knowledge that a galley
was fitting out for sea to convey to Naples the gold destined for the
pay of the Spanish troops in garrison there. Through parsimony this
treasure-galley was to be afforded no escort, but was under orders to
hug the coast of Europe, where she should be safe from all piratical
surprise. It was judged that she would be ready to put to sea in a
week, and the Morisco had set out at once to bring word of it to his
Algerine brethren that they might intercept and capture her.

Asad thanked the young Morisco for his news, bade him be housed and
cared for, and promised him a handsome share of the plunder should the
treasure-galley be captured. That done he sent for Sakr-el-Bahr, whilst
Marzak, who had been present at the interview, went with the tale of it
to his mother, and beheld her fling into a passion when he added that
it was Sakr-el-Bahr had been summoned that he might be entrusted with
this fresh expedition, thus proving that all her crafty innuendoes and
insistent warnings had been so much wasted labour.

With Marzak following at her heels, she swept like a fury into the
darkened room where Asad took his ease.

“What is this I hear, O my lord?” she cried, in tone and manner more
the European shrew than the submissive Eastern slave. “Is Sakr-el-Bahr
to go upon this expedition against the treasure-galley of Spain?”

Reclining on his divan he looked her up and down with a languid eye.
“Dost know of any better fitted to succeed?” quoth he.

“I know of one whom it is my lord’s duty to prefer to that foreign
adventurer. One who is entirely faithful and entirely to be trusted.
One who does not attempt to retain for himself a portion of the booty
garnered in the name of Islam.”

“Bah!” said Asad. “Wilt thou talk forever of those two slaves? And who
may be this paragon of thine?”

“Marzak,” she answered fiercely, flinging out an arm to drag forward
her son. “Is he to waste his youth here in softness and idleness? But
yesternight that ribald mocked him with his lack of scars. Shall he
take scars in the orchard of the Kasbah here? Is he to be content with
those that come from the scratch of a bramble, or is he to learn to be
a fighter and leader of the Children of the Faith that himself he may
follow in the path his father trod?”

“Whether he so follows,” said Asad, “is as the Sultan of Istambul, the
Sublime Portal, shall decree. We are but his vicegerents here.”

“But shall the Grand Sultan appoint him to succeed thee if thou hast
not equipped him so to do? I cry shame on thee, O father of Marzak, for
that thou art lacking in due pride in thine own son.”

“May Allah give me patience with thee! Have I not said that he is still
over young.”

“At his age thyself thou wert upon the seas, serving with the great
Ochiali.”

“At his age I was, by the favour of Allah, taller and stronger than is
he. I cherish him too dearly to let him go forth and perchance be lost
to me before his strength is full grown.”

“Look at him,” she commanded. “He is a man, Asad, and such a son as
another might take pride in. Is it not time he girt a scimitar about
his waist and trod the poop of one of thy galleys?”

“Indeed, indeed, O my father!” begged Marzak himself.

“What?” barked the old Moor. “And is it so? And wouldst thou go forth
then against the Spaniard? What knowledge hast thou that shall equip
thee for such a task?”

“What can his knowledge be since his father has never been concerned to
school him?” returned Fenzileh. “Dost thou sneer at shortcomings that
are the natural fruits of thine own omissions?”

“I will be patient with thee,” said Asad, showing every sign of losing
patience. “I will ask thee only if in thy judgment he is in case to win
a victory for Islam? Answer me straightly now.”

“Straightly I answer thee that he is not. And, as straightly, I tell
thee that it is full time he were. Thy duty is to let him go upon this
expedition that he may learn the trade that lies before him.”

Asad considered a moment. Then: “Be it so,” he answered slowly. “Shalt
set forth, then, with Sakr-el-Bahr, my son.”

“With Sakr-el-Bahr?” cried Fenzilch aghast.

“I could find him no better preceptor.”

“Shall thy son go forth as the servant of another?”

“As the pupil,” Asad amended. “What else?”

“Were I a man, O fountain of my soul,” said she, “and had I a son, none
but myself should be his preceptor. I should so mould and fashion him
that he should be another me. That, O my dear lord, is thy duty to
Marzak. Entrust not his training to another and to one whom despite thy
love for him I cannot trust. Go forth thyself upon this expedition with
Marzak here for thy kayia.”

Asad frowned. “I grow too old,” he said. “I have not been upon the seas
these two years past. Who can say that I may not have lost the art of
victory. No, no.” He shook his head, and his face grew overcast and
softened by wistfulness. “Sakr-el-Bahr commands this time, and if
Marzak goes, he goes with him.”

“My lord....” she began, then checked. A Nubian had entered to announce
that Sakr-el-Bahr was come and was awaiting the orders of his lord in
the courtyard. Asad rose instantly and for all that Fenzileh, greatly
daring as ever, would still have detained him, he shook her off
impatiently, and went out.

She watched his departure with anger in those dark lovely eyes of hers,
an anger that went near to filming them in tears, and after he had
passed out into the glaring sunshine beyond the door, a silence dwelt
in the cool darkened chamber—a silence disturbed only by distant trills
of silvery laughter from the lesser women of the Basha’s house. The
sound jarred her taut nerves. She moved with an oath and beat her hands
together. To answer her came a negress, lithe and muscular as a
wrestler and naked to the waist; the slave ring in her ear was of
massive gold.

“Bid them make an end of that screeching,” she snapped to vent some of
her fierce petulance. “Tell them I will have the rods to them if they
again disturb me.”

The negress went out, and silence followed, for those other lesser
ladies of the Basha’s hareem were more obedient to the commands of
Fenzileh than to those of the Basha himself.

Then she drew her son to the fretted lattice commanding the courtyard,
a screen from behind which they could see and hear all that passed out
yonder. Asad was speaking, informing Sakr-el-Bahr of what he had
learnt, and what there was to do.

“How soon canst thou put to sea again?” he ended

“As soon as the service of Allah and thyself require,” was the prompt
answer.

“It is well, my son.” Asad laid a hand, affectionately upon the
corsair’s shoulder, entirely conquered by this readiness. “Best set out
at sunrise to-morrow. Thou’lt need so long to make thee ready for the
sea.”

“Then by thy leave I go forthwith to give orders to prepare,” replied
Sakr-el-Bahr, for all that he was a little troubled in his mind by this
need to depart again so soon.

“What galleys shalt thou take?”

“To capture one galley of Spain? My own galeasse, no more; she will be
full equal to such an enterprise, and I shall be the better able, then,
to lurk and take cover—a thing which might well prove impossible with a
fleet.”

“Ay—thou art wise in thy daring,” Asad approved him. “May Allah prosper
thee upon the voyage.”

“Have I thy leave to go?”

“A moment yet. There is my son Marzak. He is approaching manhood, and
it is time he entered the service of Allah and the State. It is my
desire that he sail as thy lieutenant on this voyage, and that thou be
his preceptor even as I was thine of old.”

Now here was something that pleased Sakr-el-Bahr as little as it
pleased Marzak. Knowing the bitter enmity borne him by the son of
Fenzileh he had every cause to fear trouble if this project of Asad’s
were realized.

“As I was thine of old!” he answered with crafty wistfulness. “Wilt
thou not put to sea with us to-morrow, O Asad? There is none like thee
in all Islam, and what a joy were it not to stand beside thee on the
prow as of old when we grapple with the Spaniard.”

Asad considered him. “Dost thou, too, urge this?” quoth he.

“Have others urged it?” The man’s sharp wits, rendered still sharper by
his sufferings, were cutting deeply and swiftly into this matter. “They
did well, but none could have urged it more fervently than I, for none
knows so well as I the joy of battle against the infidel under thy
command and the glory of prevailing in thy sight. Come, then, my lord,
upon this enterprise, and be thyself thine own son’s preceptor since
’tis the highest honour thou canst bestow upon him.”

Thoughtfully Asad stroked his long white beard, his eagle eyes growing
narrow. “Thou temptest me, by Allah!”

“Let me do more....”

“Nay, more thou canst not. I am old and worn, and I am needed here.
Shall an old lion hunt a young gazelle? Peace, peace! The sun has set
upon my fighting day. Let the brood of fighters I have raised up keep
that which my arm conquered and maintain my name and the glory of the
Faith upon the seas.” He leaned upon Sakr-el-Bahr’s shoulder and
sighed, his eyes wistfully dreamy. “It were a fond adventure in good
truth. But no...I am resolved. Go thou and take Marzak with thee, and
bring him safely home again.”

“I should not return myself else,” was the answer. “But my trust is in
the All-knowing.”

Upon that he departed, dissembling his profound vexation both at the
voyage and the company, and went to bid Othmani make ready his great
galeasse, equipping it with carronades, three hundred slaves to row it,
and three hundred fighting men.

Asad-ed-Din returned to that darkened room in the Kasbah overlooking
the courtyard, where Fenzileh and Marzak still lingered. He went to
tell them that in compliance with the desires of both Marzak should go
forth to prove himself upon this expedition.

But where he had left impatience he found thinly veiled wrath

“O sun that warms me,” Fenzileh greeted him, and from long experience
he knew that the more endearing were her epithets the more vicious was
her mood, “do then my counsels weigh as naught with thee, are they but
as the dust upon thy shoes?”

“Less,” said Asad, provoked out of his habitual indulgence of her
licences of speech.

“That is the truth, indeed!” she cried, bowing her head, whilst behind
her the handsome face of her son was overcast.

“It is,” Asad agreed. “At dawn, Marzak, thou settest forth upon the
galeasse of Sakr-el-Bahr to take the seas under his tutelage and to
emulate the skill and valour that have rendered him the stoutest
bulwark of Islam, the very javelin of Allah.”

But Marzak felt that in this matter his mother was to be supported,
whilst his detestation of this adventurer who threatened to usurp the
place that should rightly be his own spurred him to mad lengths of
daring.

“When I take the seas with that dog-descended Nasrani,” he answered
hoarsely, “he shall be where rightly he belongs—at the rowers’ bench.”

“How?” It was a bellow of rage. Upon the word Asad swung to confront
his son, and his face, suddenly inflamed, was so cruel and evil in its
expression that it terrified that intriguing pair. “By the beard of the
Prophet! what words are these to me?” He advanced upon Marzak until
Fenzileh in sudden terror stepped between and faced him, like a lioness
springing to defend her cub. But the Basha, enraged now by this want of
submission in his son, enraged both against that son and the mother who
he knew had prompted him, caught her in his sinewy old hands, and flung
her furiously aside, so that she stumbled and fell in a panting heap
amid the cushions of her divan.

“The curse of Allah upon thee!” he screamed, and Marzak recoiled before
him. “Has this presumptuous hellcat who bore thee taught thee to stand
before my face, to tell me what thou wilt and wilt not do? By the
Koran! too long have I endured her evil foreign ways, and now it seems
she has taught thee how to tread them after her and how to beard thy
very father! To-morrow thou’lt take the sea with Sakr-el-Bahr, I have
said it. Another word and thou’lt go aboard his galeasse even as thou
saidst should be the case with him—at the rowers’ bench, to learn
submission under the slave master’s whip.”

Terrified, Marzak stood numb and silent, scarcely daring to draw
breath. Never in all his life had he seen his father in a rage so
royal. Yet it seemed to inspire no fear in Fenzileh, that congenital
shrew whose tongue not even the threat of rods or hooks could silence.

“I shall pray Allah to restore sight to thy soul, O father of Marzak,”
she panted, “to teach thee to discriminate between those that love thee
and the self-seekers that abuse thy trust.”

“How!” he roared at her. “Art not yet done?”

“Nor ever shall be until I am lain dumb in death for having counselled
thee out of my great love, O light of these poor eyes of mine.”

“Maintain this tone,” he said, with concentrated anger, “and that will
soon befall.”

“I care not so that the sleek mask be plucked from the face of that
dog-descended Sakr-el-Bahr. May Allah break his bones! What of those
slaves of his—those two from England, O Asad? I am told that one is a
woman, tall and of that white beauty which is the gift of Eblis to
these Northerners. What is his purpose with her—that he would not show
her in the suk as the law prescribes, but comes slinking here to beg
thee set aside the law for him? Ha! I talk in vain. I have shown thee
graver things to prove his vile disloyalty, and yet thou’lt fawn upon
him whilst thy fangs are bared to thine own son.”

He advanced upon her, stooped, caught her by the wrist, and heaved her
up.

His face showed grey under its deep tan. His aspect terrified her at
last and made an end of her reckless forward courage.

He raised his voice to call.

“Ya anta! Ayoub!”

She gasped, livid in her turn with sudden terror. “My lord, my lord!”
she whimpered. “Stream of my life, be not angry! What wilt thou do?”

He smiled evilly. “Do?” he growled. “What I should have done ten years
ago and more. We’ll have the rods to thee.” And again he called, more
insistently—“Ayoub!”

“My lord, my lord!” she gasped in shuddering horror now that at last
she found him set upon the thing to which so often she had dared him.
“Pity! Pity!” She grovelled and embraced his knees. “In the name of the
Pitying the Pitiful be merciful upon the excesses to which my love for
thee may have driven this poor tongue of mine. O my sweet lord! O
father of Marzak!”

Her distress, her beauty, and perhaps, more than either, her unusual
humility and submission may have moved him. For even as at that moment
Ayoub—the sleek and portly eunuch, who was her wazeer and
chamberlain—loomed in the inner doorway, salaaming, he vanished again
upon the instant, dismissed by a peremptory wave of the Basha’s hand.

Asad looked down upon her, sneering. “That attitude becomes thee best,”
he said. “Continue it in future.” Contemptuously he shook himself free
of her grasp, turned and stalked majestically out, wearing his anger
like a royal mantle, and leaving behind him two terror-shaken beings,
who felt as if they had looked over the very edge of death.

There was a long silence between them. Then at long length Fenzileh
rose and crossed to the meshra-biyah—the latticed window-box. She
opened it and took from one of its shelves an earthenware jar, placed
there so as to receive the slightest breeze. From it she poured water
into a little cup and drank greedily. That she could perform this
menial service for herself when a mere clapping of hands would have
brought slaves to minister to her need betrayed something of her
disordered state of mind.

She slammed the inner lattice and turned to Marzak. “And now?” quoth
she.

“Now?” said the lad.

“Ay, what now? What are we to do? Are we to lie crushed under his rage
until we are ruined indeed? He is bewitched. That jackal has enchanted
him, so that he must deem well done all that is done by him. Allah
guide us here, Marzak, or thou’lt be trampled into dust by
Sakr-el-Bahr.”

Marzak hung his head; slowly he moved to the divan and flung himself
down upon its pillows; there he lay prone, his hands cupping his chin,
his heels in the air.

“What can I do?” he asked at last.

“That is what I most desire to know. Something must be done, and soon.
May his bones rot! If he lives thou art destroyed.”

“Ay,” said Marzak, with sudden vigour and significance. “If he lives!”
And he sat up. “Whilst we plan and plot, and our plans and plots come
to naught save to provoke the anger of my father, we might be better
employed in taking the shorter way.”

She stood in the middle of the chamber, pondering him with gloomy eyes
“I too have thought of that,” said she. “I could hire me men to do the
thing for a handful of gold. But the risk of it....”

“Where would be the risk once he is dead?”

“He might pull us down with him, and then what would our profit be in
his death? Thy father would avenge him terribly.”

“If it were craftily done we should not be discovered.”

“Not be discovered?” she echoed, and laughed without mirth. “How young
and blind thou art, O Marzak! We should be the first to be suspected. I
have made no secret of my hate of him, and the people do not love me.
They would urge thy father to do justice even were he himself averse to
it, which I will not credit would be the case. This Sakr-el-Bahr—may
Allah wither him!—is a god in their eyes. Bethink thee of the welcome
given him! What Basha returning in triumph was ever greeted by the
like? These victories that fortune has vouchsafed him have made them
account him divinely favoured and protected. I tell thee, Marzak, that
did thy father die to-morrow Sakr-el-Bahr would be proclaimed Basha of
Algiers in his stead, and woe betide us then. And Asad-ed-Din grows
old. True, he does not go forth to fight. He clings to life and may
last long. But if he should not, and if Sakr-el-Bahr should still walk
the earth when thy father’s destiny is fulfilled, I dare not think what
then will be thy fate and mine.”

“May his grave be defiled!” growled Matzak.

“His grave?” said she. “The difficulty is to dig it for him without
hurt to ourselves. Shaitan protects the dog.”

“May he make his bed in hell!” said Marzak.

“To curse him will not help us. Up, Marzak, and consider how the thing
is to be done.”

Marzak came to his feet, nimble and supple as a greyhound. “Listen
now,” he said. “Since I must go this voyage with him, perchance upon
the seas on some dark night opportunity may serve me.”

“Wait! Let me consider it. Allah guide me to find some way!” She beat
her hands together and bade the slave girl who answered her to summon
her wazeer Ayoub, and bid a litter be prepared for her. “We’ll to the
sôk, O Marzak, and see these slaves of his. Who knows but that
something may be done by means of them! Guile will serve us better than
mere strength against that misbegotten son of shame.”

“May his house be destroyed!” said Marzak.




CHAPTER IX.
COMPETITORS


The open space before the gates of the sôk-el-Abeed was thronged with a
motley, jostling, noisy crowd that at every moment was being swelled by
the human streams pouring to mingle in it from the debauching labyrinth
of narrow, unpaved streets.

There were brown-skinned Berbers in black goat-hair cloaks that were
made in one piece with a cowl and decorated by a lozenge of red or
orange colour on the back, their shaven heads encased in skull-caps or
simply bound in a cord of plaited camel-hair; there were black Saharowi
who went almost naked, and stately Arabs who seemed overmuffled in
their flowing robes of white with the cowls overshadowing their
swarthy, finely featured faces; there were dignified and
prosperous-looking Moors in brightly coloured selhams astride of sleek
mules that were richly caparisoned; and there were Tagareenes, the
banished Moors of Andalusia, most of whom followed the trade of
slave-dealers; there were native Jews in sombre black djellabas, and
Christian-Jews—so-called because bred in Christian countries, whose
garments they still wore; there were Levantine Turks, splendid of dress
and arrogant of demeanour, and there were humble Cololies, Kabyles and
Biscaries. Here a water-seller, laden with his goatskin vessel, tinkled
his little bell; there an orange-hawker, balancing a basket of the
golden fruit upon his ragged turban, bawled his wares. There were men
on foot and men on mules, men on donkeys and men on slim Arab horses,
an ever-shifting medley of colours, all jostling, laughing, cursing in
the ardent African sunshine under the blue sky where pigeons circled.
In the shadow of the yellow tapia wall squatted a line of whining
beggars and cripples soliciting alms; near the gates a little space had
been cleared and an audience had gathered in a ring about a Meddah—a
beggar-troubadour—who, to the accompaniment of gimbri and gaitah from
two acolytes, chanted a doleful ballad in a thin, nasal voice.

Those of the crowd who were patrons of the market held steadily amain,
and, leaving their mounts outside, passed through the gates through
which there was no admittance for mere idlers and mean folk. Within the
vast quadrangular space of bare, dry ground, enclosed by dust-coloured
walls, there was more space. The sale of slaves had not yet begun and
was not due to begin for another hour, and meanwhile a little trading
was being done by those merchants who had obtained the coveted right to
set up their booths against the walls; they were vendors of wool, of
fruit, of spices, and one or two traded in jewels and trinkets for the
adornment of the Faithful.

A well was sunk in the middle of the ground, a considerable octagon
with a low parapet in three steps. Upon the nethermost of these sat an
aged, bearded Jew in a black djellaba, his head swathed in a coloured
kerchief. Upon his knees reposed a broad, shallow black box, divided
into compartments, each filled with lesser gems and rare stones, which
he was offering for sale; about him stood a little group of young Moors
and one or two Turkish officers, with several of whom the old Israelite
was haggling at once.

The whole of the northern wall was occupied by a long penthouse, its
contents completely masked by curtains of camel-hair; from behind it
proceeded a subdued murmur of human voices. These were the pens in
which were confined the slaves to be offered for sale that day. Before
the curtains, on guard, stood some dozen corsairs with attendant negro
slaves.

Beyond and above the wall glistened the white dome of a zowia, flanked
by a spear-like minaret and the tall heads of a few date palms whose
long leaves hung motionless in the hot air.

Suddenly in the crowd beyond the gates there was a commotion. From one
of the streets six colossal Nubians advanced with shouts of—

“Oak! Oak! Warda! Way! Make way!”

They were armed with great staves, grasped in their two hands, and with
these they broke a path through that motley press, hurling men to right
and left and earning a shower of curses in return.

“Balâk! Make way! Way for the Lord Asad-ed-Din, the exalted of Allah!
Way!”

The crowd, pressing back, went down upon its knees and grovelled as
Asad-ed-Din on a milk-white mule rode forward, escorted by Tsamanni his
wazeer and a cloud of black-robed janissaries with flashing scimitars.

The curses that had greeted the violence of his negroes were suddenly
silenced; instead, blessings as fervent filled the air.

“May Allah increase thy might! May Allah lengthen thy days! The
blessings of our Lord Mahomet upon thee! Allah send thee more
victories!” were the benedictions that showered upon him on every hand.
He returned them as became a man who was supremely pious and devout.

“The peace of Allah upon the Faithful of the Prophet’s House,” he would
murmur in response from time to time, until at last he had reached the
gates. There he bade Tsamanni fling a purse to the crouching
beggars—for is it not written in the Most Perspicuous Book that of alms
ye shall bestow what ye can spare, for such as are saved from their own
greed shall prosper, and whatever ye give in alms, as seeking the face
of Allah shall be doubled unto you?

Submissive to the laws as the meanest of his subjects, Asad dismounted
and passed on foot into the sôk. He came to a halt by the well, and,
facing the curtained penthouse, he blessed the kneeling crowd and
commanded all to rise.

He beckoned Sakr-el-Bahr’s officer Ali—who was in charge of the slaves
of the corsair’s latest raid and announced his will to inspect the
captives. At a sign from Ali, the negroes flung aside the camel-hair
curtains and let the fierce sunlight beat in upon those pent-up
wretches; they were not only the captives taken by Sakr-el-Bahr, but
some others who were the result of one or two lesser raids by Biskaine.

Asad beheld a huddle of men and women—though the proportion of women
was very small—of all ages, races, and conditions; there were pale
fair-haired men from France or the North, olive-skinned Italians and
swarthy Spaniards, negroes and half-castes; there were old men, young
men and mere children, some handsomely dressed, some almost naked,
others hung with rags. In the hopeless dejection of their countenances
alone was there any uniformity. But it was not a dejection that could
awaken pity in the pious heart of Asad. They were unbelievers who would
never look upon the face of God’s Prophet, accursed and unworthy of any
tenderness from man. For a moment his glance was held by a lovely
black-haired Spanish girl, who sat with her locked hands held fast
between her knees, in an attitude of intense despair and suffering—the
glory of her eyes increased and magnified by the dark brown stains of
sleeplessness surrounding them. Leaning on Tsamanni’s arm, he stood
considering her for a little while; then his glance travelled on.
Suddenly he tightened his grasp of Tsamanni’s arm and a quick interest
leapt into his sallow face.

On the uppermost tier of the pen that he was facing sat a very glory of
womanhood, such a woman as he had heard tell existed but the like of
which he had never yet beheld. She was tall and graceful as a
cypress-tree; her skin was white as milk, her eyes two darkest
sapphires, her head of a coppery golden that seemed to glow like metal
as the sunlight caught it. She was dressed in a close gown of white,
the bodice cut low and revealing the immaculate loveliness of her neck.

Asad-ed-Din turned to Ali. “What pearl is this that hath been cast upon
this dung-heap?” he asked.

“She is the woman our lord Sakr-el-Bahr carried off from England.”
Slowly the Basha’s eyes returned to consider her, and insensible though
she had deemed herself by now, he saw her cheeks slowly reddening under
the cold insult of his steady, insistent glance. The glow heightened
her beauty, effacing the weariness which the face had worn.

“Bring her forth,” said the Basha shortly.

She was seized by two of the negroes, and to avoid being roughly
handled by them she came at once, bracing herself to bear with dignity
whatever might await her. A golden-haired young man beside her, his
face haggard and stubbled with a beard of some growth, looked up in
alarm as she was taken from his side. Then, with a groan, he made as if
to clutch her, but a rod fell upon his raised arms and beat them down.

Asad was thoughtful. It was Fenzileh who had bidden him come look at
the infidel maid whom Sakr-el-Bahr had risked so much to snatch from
England, suggesting that in her he would behold some proof of the bad
faith which she was forever urging against the corsair leader. He
beheld the woman, but he discovered about her no such signs as Fenzileh
had suggested he must find, nor indeed did he look for any. Out of
curiosity had he obeyed her prompting. But that and all else were
forgotten now in the contemplation of this noble ensample of Northern
womanhood, statuesque almost in her terrible restraint.

He put forth a hand to touch her arm, and she drew it back as if his
fingers were of fire.

He sighed. “How inscrutable are the ways of Allah, that He should
suffer so luscious a fruit to hang from the foul tree of infidelity!”

Tsamanni watching him craftily, a master-sycophant profoundly learned
in the art of playing upon his master’s moods, made answer:

“Even so perchance that a Faithful of the Prophet’s House may pluck it.
Verily all things are possible to the One!”

“Yet is it not set down in the Book to be Read that the daughters of
the infidel are not for True-Believers?” And again he sighed.

But Tsamanni knowing full well how the Basha would like to be answered,
trimmed his reply to that desire.

“Allah is great, and what hath befallen once may well befall again, my
lord.”

Asad’s kindling eyes flashed a glance at his wazeer.

“Thou meanest Fenzileh. But then, by the mercy of Allah, I was rendered
the instrument of her enlightenment.”

“It may well be written that thou shalt be the same again, my lord,”
murmured the insidious Tsamanni. There was more stirring in his mind
than the mere desire to play the courtier now. ’Twixt Fenzileh and
himself there had long been a feud begotten of the jealousy which each
inspired in the other where Asad was concerned. Were Fenzileh removed
the wazeer’s influence must grow and spread to his own profit. It was a
thing of which he had often dreamed, but a dream he feared that was
never like to be realized, for Asad was ageing, and the fires that had
burned so fiercely in his earlier years seemed now to have consumed in
him all thought of women. Yet here was one as by a miracle, of a beauty
so amazing and so diverse from any that ever yet had feasted the
Basha’s sight, that plainly she had acted as a charm upon his senses.

“She is white as the snows upon the Atlas, luscious as the dates of
Tafilalt,” he murmured fondly, his gleaming eyes considering her what
time she stood immovable before him. Suddenly he looked about him, and
wheeled upon Tsamanni, his manner swiftly becoming charged with anger.

“Her face has been bared to a thousand eyes and more,” he cried.

“Even that has been so before,” replied Tsamanni.

And then quite suddenly at their elbow a voice that was naturally soft
and musical of accent but now rendered harsh, cut in to ask:

“What woman may this be?”

Startled, both the Basha and his wazeer swung round. Fenzileh,
becomingly veiled and hooded, stood before them, escorted by Marzak. A
little behind them were the eunuchs and the litter in which,
unperceived by Asad, she had been borne thither. Beside the litter
stood her wazeer Ayoub-el-Samin.

Asad scowled down upon her, for he had not yet recovered from the
resentment she and Marzak had provoked in him. Moreover, that in
private she should be lacking in the respect which was his due was evil
enough, though he had tolerated it. But that she should make so bold as
to thrust in and question him in this peremptory fashion before all the
world was more than his dignity could suffer. Never yet had she dared
so much nor would she have dared it now but that her sudden anxiety had
effaced all caution from her mind. She had seen the look with which
Asad had been considering that lovely slave, and not only jealousy but
positive fear awoke in her. Her hold upon Asad was growing tenuous. To
snap it utterly no more was necessary than that he who of late years
had scarce bestowed a thought or glance upon a woman should be taken
with the fancy to bring some new recruit to his hareem.

Hence her desperate, reckless courage to stand thus before him now, for
although her face was veiled there was hardy arrogance in every line of
her figure. Of his scowl she took no slightest heed.

“If this be the slave fetched by Sakr-el-Bahr from England, then rumour
has lied to me,” she said. “I vow it was scarce worth so long a voyage
and the endangering so many valuable Muslim lives to fetch this
yellow-faced, long-shanked daughter of perdition into Barbary.”

Asad’s surprise beat down his anger. He was not subtle.

“Yellow-faced? Long-shanked?” quoth he. Then reading Fenzileh at last,
he displayed a slow, crooked smile. “Already have I observed thee to
grow hard of hearing, and now thy sight is failing too, it seems.
Assuredly thou art growing old.” And he looked her over with such an
eye of displeasure that she recoiled.

He stepped close up to her. “Too long already hast thou queened it in
my hareem with thine infidel, Frankish ways,” he muttered, so that none
but those immediately about overheard his angry words. “Thou art become
a very scandal in the eyes of the Faithful,” he added very grimly. “It
were well, perhaps, that we amended that.”

Abruptly then he turned away, and by a gesture he ordered Ali to return
the slave to her place among the others. Leaning on the arm of Tsamanni
he took some steps towards the entrance, then halted, and turned again
to Fenzileh:

“To thy litter,” he bade her peremptorily, rebuking her thus before
all, “and get thee to the house as becomes a seemly Muslim woman. Nor
ever again let thyself be seen roving the public places afoot.”

She obeyed him instantly, without a murmur; and he himself lingered at
the gates with Tsamanni until her litter had passed out, escorted by
Ayoub and Marzak walking each on one side of it and neither daring to
meet the angry eye of the Basha.

Asad looked sourly after that litter, a sneer on his heavy lips.

“As her beauty wanes so her presumption waxes,” he growled. “She is
growing old, Tsamanni—old and lean and shrewish, and no fit mate for a
Member of the Prophet’s House. It were perhaps a pleasing thing in the
sight of Allah that we replaced her.” And then, referring obviously to
that other one, his eye turning towards the penthouse the curtains of
which were drawn again, he changed his tone.

“Didst thou mark, O Tsamanni, with what a grace she moved?—lithely and
nobly as a young gazelle. Verily, so much beauty was never created by
the All-Wise to be cast into the Pit.”

“May it not have been sent to comfort some True-Believer?” wondered the
subtle wazeer. “To Allah all things are possible.”

“Why else, indeed?” said Asad. “It was written; and even as none may
obtain what is not written, so none may avoid what is. I am resolved.
Stay thou here, Tsamanni. Remain for the outcry and purchase her. She
shall be taught the True Faith. She shall be saved from the furnace.”
The command had come, the thing that Tsamanni had so ardently desired.

He licked his lips. “And the price, my lord?” he asked, in a small
voice.

“Price?” quoth Asad. “Have I not bid thee purchase her? Bring her to
me, though her price be a thousand philips.”

“A thousand philips!” echoed Tsamanni amazed. “Allah is great!”

But already Asad had left his side and passed out under the arched
gateay, where the grovelling anew at the sight of him.

It was a fine thing for Asad to bid him remain for the sale. But the
dalal would part with no slave until the money was forthcoming, and
Tsamanni had no considerable sum upon his person. Therefore in the wake
of his master he set out forthwith to the Kasbah. It wanted still an
hour before the sale would be held and he had time and to spare in
which to go and return.

It happened, however, that Tsamanni was malicious, and that the hatred
of Fenzileh which so long he had consumed in silence and dissembled
under fawning smiles and profound salaams included also her servants.
There was none in all the world of whom he entertained a greater
contempt than her sleek and greasy eunuch Ayoub-el-Samin of the
majestic, rolling gait and fat, supercilious lips.

It was written, too, that in the courtyard of the Kasbah he should
stumble upon Ayoub, who indeed had by his mistress’s commands been set
to watch for the wazeer. The fat fellow rolled forward, his hands
supporting his paunch, his little eyes agleam.

“Allah increase thy health, Tsamanni,” was his courteous greeting.
“Thou bearest news?”

“News? What news?” quoth Tsamanni. “In truth none that will gladden thy
mistress.”

“Merciful Allah! What now? Doth it concern that Frankish slave-girl?”

Tsamanni smiled, a thing that angered Ayoub, who felt that the ground
he trod was becoming insecure; it followed that if his mistress fell
from influence he fell with her, and became as the dust upon Tsamanni’s
slippers.

“By the Koran thou tremblest, Ayoub!” Tsamanni mocked him. “Thy soft
fat is all a-quivering; and well it may, for thy days are numbered, O
father of nothing.”

“Dost deride me, dog?” came the other’s voice, shrill now with anger.

“Callest me dog? Thou?” Deliberately Tsamanni spat upon his shadow. “Go
tell thy mistress that I am bidden by my lord to buy the Frankish girl.
Tell her that my lord will take her to wife, even as he took Fenzileh,
that he may lead her into the True Belief and cheat Shaitan of so fair
a jewel. Add that I am bidden to buy her though she cost my lord a
thousand philips. Bear her that message, O father of wind, and may
Allah increase thy paunch!” And he was gone, lithe, active, and
mocking.

“May thy sons perish and thy daughters become harlots,” roared the
eunuch, maddened at once by this evil news and the insult with which it
was accompanied.

But Tsamanni only laughed, as he answered him over his shoulder—

“May thy sons be sultans all, Ayoub!”

Quivering still with a rage that entirely obliterated his alarm at what
he had learnt, Ayoub rolled into the presence of his mistress with that
evil message.

She listened to him in a dumb white fury. Then she fell to reviling her
lord and the slave-girl in a breath, and called upon Allah to break
their bones and blacken their faces and rot their flesh with all the
fervour of one born and bred in the True Faith. When she recovered from
that burst of fury it was to sit brooding awhile. At length she sprang
up and bade Ayoub see that none lurked to listen about the doorways.

“We must act, Ayoub, and act swiftly, or I am destroyed and with me
will be destroyed Marzak, who alone could not stand against his
father’s face. Sakr-el-Bahr will trample us into the dust.” She checked
on a sudden thought. “By Allah it may have been a part of his design to
have brought hither that white-faced wench. But we must thwart him and
we must thwart Asad, or thou art ruined too, Ayoub.”

“Thwart him?” quoth her wazeer, gaping at the swift energy of mind and
body with which this woman was endowed, the like of which he had never
seen in any woman yet. “Thwart him?” he repeated.

“First, Ayoub, to place this Frankish girl beyond his reach.”

“That is well thought—but how?”

“How? Can thy wit suggest no way? Hast thou wits at all in that fat
head of thine? Thou shalt outbid Tsamanni, or, better still, set
someone else to do it for thee, and so buy the girl for me. Then we’ll
contrive that she shall vanish quietly and quickly before Asad can
discover a trace of her.”

His face blanched, and the wattles about his jaws were shaking. “And...
and the cost? Hast thou counted the cost, O Fenzileh? What will happen
when Asad gains knowledge of this thing?”

“He shall gain no knowledge of it,” she answered him. “Or if he does,
the girl being gone beyond recall, he shall submit him to what was
written. Trust me to know how to bring him to it.”

“Lady, lady!” he cried, and wrung his bunches of fat fingers. “I dare
not engage in this!”

“Engage in what? If I bid thee go buy this girl, and give thee the
money thou’lt require, what else concerns thee, dog? What else is to be
done, a man shall do. Come now, thou shalt have the money, all I have,
which is a matter of some fifteen hundred philips, and what is not laid
out upon this purchase thou shalt retain for thyself.”

He considered an instant, and conceived that she was right. None could
blame him for executing the commands she gave him. And there would be
profit in it, clearly—ay, and it would be sweet to outbid that dog
Tsamanni and send him empty-handed home to face the wrath of his
frustrated master. He spread his hands and salaamed in token of
complete acquiescence.




CHAPTER X.
THE SLAVE-MARKET


At the sôk-el-Abeed it was the hour of the outcry, announced by a blast
of trumpets and the thudding of tom-toms. The traders that until then
had been licensed to ply within the enclosure now put up the shutters
of their little booths. The Hebrew pedlar of gems closed his box and
effaced himself, leaving the steps about the well clear for the most
prominent patrons of the market. These hastened to assemble there,
surrounding it and facing outwards, whilst the rest of the crowd was
ranged against the southern and western walls of the enclosure.

Came negro water-carriers in white turbans with aspersers made of
palmetto leaves to sprinkle the ground and lay the dust against the
tramp of slaves and buyers. The trumpets ceased for an instant, then
wound a fresh imperious blast and fell permanently silent. The crowd
about the gates fell back to right and left, and very slowly and
stately three tall dalals, dressed from head to foot in white and with
immaculate turbans wound about their heads, advanced into the open
space. They came to a halt at the western end of the long wall, the
chief dalal standing slightly in advance of the other two.

The chattering of voices sank upon their advent, it became a hissing
whisper, then a faint drone like that of bees, and then utter silence.
In the solemn and grave demeanour of the dalals there was something
almost sacerdotal, so that when that silence fell upon the crowd the
affair took on the aspect of a sacrament.

The chief dalal stood forward a moment as if in an abstraction with
downcast eyes; then with hands outstretched to catch a blessing he
raised his voice and began to pray in a monotonous chant:

“In the name of Allah the Pitying the Pitiful Who created man from
clots of blood! All that is in the Heavens and in the Earth praiseth
Allah, Who is the Mighty, the Wise! His the kingdom of the Heavens and
of the Earth. He maketh alive and killeth, and He hath power over all
things. He is the first and the last, the seen and the unseen, and He
knoweth all things.”

“Ameen,” intoned the crowd.

“The praise to Him who sent us Mahomet His Prophet to give the world
the True Belief, and curses upon Shaitan the stoned who wages war upon
Allah and His children.”

“Ameen.”

“The blessings of Allah and our Lord Mahomet upon this market and upon
all who may buy and sell herein, and may Allah increase their wealth
and grant them length of days in which to praise Him.”

“Ameen,” replied the crowd, as with a stir and rustle the close ranks
relaxed from the tense attitude of prayer, and each man sought
elbow-room.

The dalal beat his hands together, whereupon the curtains were drawn
aside and the huddled slaves displayed—some three hundred in all,
occupying three several pens.

In the front rank of the middle pen—the one containing Rosamund and
Lionel—stood a couple of stalwart young Nubians, sleek and muscular,
who looked on with completest indifference, no whit appalled by the
fate which had haled them thither. They caught the eye of the dalal,
and although the usual course was for a buyer to indicate a slave he
was prepared to purchase, yet to the end that good beginning should be
promptly made, the dalal himself pointed out that stalwart pair to the
corsairs who stood on guard. In compliance the two negroes were brought
forth.

“Here is a noble twain,” the dalal announced, “strong of muscle and
long of limb, as all may see, whom it were a shameful thing to
separate. Who needs such a pair for strong labour let him say what he
will give.” He set out on a slow circuit of the well, the corsairs
urging the two slaves to follow him that all buyers might see and
inspect them.

In the foremost ranks of the crowd near the gate stood Ali, sent
thither by Othmani to purchase a score of stout fellows required to
make up the contingent of the galeasse of Sakr-el-Bahr. He had been
strictly enjoined to buy naught but the stoutest stuff the market could
afford—with one exception. Aboard that galeasse they wanted no
weaklings who would trouble the boatswain with their swoonings. Ali
announced his business forthwith.

“I need such tall fellows for the oars of Sakr-el-Bahr,” said he with
loud importance, thus drawing upon himself the eyes of the assembly,
and sunning himself in the admiring looks bestowed upon one of the
officers of Oliver-Reis, one of the rovers who were the pride of Islam
and a sword-edge to the infidel.

“They were born to toil nobly at the oar, O Ali-Reis,” replied the
dalal in all solemnity. “What wilt thou give for them?”

“Two hundred philips for the twain.”

The dalal paced solemnly on, the slaves following in his wake.

“Two hundred philips am I offered for a pair of the lustiest slaves
that by the favour of Allah were ever brought into this market. Who
will say fifty philips more?”

A portly Moor in a flowing blue selham rose from his seat on the step
of the well as the dalal came abreast of him, and the slaves scenting
here a buyer, and preferring any service to that of the galleys with
which they were threatened, came each in turn to kiss his hands and
fawn upon him, for all the world like dogs.

Calm and dignified he ran his hands over them feeling their muscles,
and then forced back their lips and examined their teeth and mouths.

“Two hundred and twenty for the twain,” he said, and the dalal passed
on with his wares, announcing the increased price he had been offered.

Thus he completed the circuit and came to stand once more before Ali.

“Two hundred and twenty is now the price, O Ali! By the Koran, they are
worth three hundred at the least. Wilt say three hundred?”

“Two hundred and thirty,” was the answer.

Back to the Moor went the dalal. “Two hundred and thirty I am now
offered, O Hamet. Thou wilt give another twenty?”

“Not I, by Allah!” said Hamet, and resumed his seat. “Let him have
them.”

“Another ten philips?” pleaded the dalal.

“Not another asper.”

“They are thine, then, O Ali, for two hundred and thirty. Give thanks
to Allah for so good a bargain.”

The Nubians were surrendered to Ali’s followers, whilst the dalal’s two
assistants advanced to settle accounts with the corsair.

“Wait wait,” said he, “is not the name of Sakr-el-Bahr good warranty?”

“The inviolable law is that the purchase money be paid ere a slave
leaves the market, O valiant Ali.”

“It shall be observed,” was the impatient answer, “and I will so pay
before they leave. But I want others yet, and we will make one account
an it please thee. That fellow yonder now. I have orders to buy him for
my captain.” And he indicated Lionel, who stood at Rosamund’s side, the
very incarnation of woefulness and debility.

Contemptuous surprise flickered an instant in the eyes of the dalal.
But this he made haste to dissemble.

“Bring forth that yellow-haired infidel,” he commanded.

The corsairs laid hands on Lionel. He made a vain attempt to struggle,
but it was observed that the woman leaned over to him and said
something quickly, whereupon his struggles ceased and he suffered
himself to be dragged limply forth into the full view of all the
market.

“Dost want him for the oar, Ali?” cried Ayoub-el-Samin across the
quadrangle, a jest this that evoked a general laugh.

“What else?” quoth Ali. “He should be cheap at least.”

“Cheap?” quoth the dalal in an affectation of surprise. “Nay, now. ’Tis
a comely fellow and a young one. What wilt thou give, now? a hundred
philips?”

“A hundred philips!” cried Ali derisively. “A hundred philips for that
skinful of bones! Ma’sh’-Allah! Five philips is my price, O dalal.”

Again laughter crackled through the mob. But the dalal stiffened with
increasing dignity. Some of that laughter seemed to touch himself, and
he was not a person to be made the butt of mirth.

“’Tis a jest, my master,” said he, with a forgiving yet contemptuous
wave. “Behold how sound he is.” He signed to one of the corsairs, and
Lionel’s doublet was slit from neck to girdle and wrenched away from
his body, leaving him naked to the waist, and displaying better
proportions than might have been expected. In a passion at that
indignity Lionel writhed in the grip of his guards, until one of the
corsairs struck him a light blow with a whip in earnest of what to
expect if he continued to be troublesome. “Consider him now,” said the
dalal, pointing to that white torso. “And behold how sound he is. See
how excellent are his teeth.” He seized Lionel’s head and forced the
jaws apart.

“Ay,” said Ali, “but consider me those lean shanks and that woman’s
arm.”

“’Tis a fault the oar will mend,” the dalal insisted.

“You filthy blackamoors!” burst from Lionel in a sob of rage.

“He is muttering curses in his infidel tongue,” said Ali. “His temper
is none too good, you see. I have said five philips. I’ll say no more.”

With a shrug the dalal began his circuit of the well, the corsairs
thrusting Lionel after him. Here one rose to handle him, there another,
but none seemed disposed to purchase.

“Five philips is the foolish price offered me for this fine young
Frank,” cried the dalal. “Will no True-Believer pay ten for such a
slave? Wilt not thou, O Ayoub? Thou, Hamet—ten philips?”

But one after another those to whom he was offered shook their heads.
The haggardness of Lionel’s face was too unprepossessing. They had seen
slaves with that look before, and experience told them that no good was
ever to be done with such fellows. Moreover, though shapely, his
muscles were too slight, his flesh looked too soft and tender. Of what
use a slave who must be hardened and nourished into strength, and who
might very well die in the process? Even at five philips he would be
dear. So the disgusted dalal came back to Ali.

“He is thine, then, for five philips—Allah pardon thy avarice.”

Ali grinned, and his men seized upon Lionel and bore him off into the
background to join the two negroes previously purchased.

And then, before Ali could bid for another of the slaves he desired to
acquire, a tall, elderly Jew, dressed in black doublet and hose like a
Castilian gentleman, with a ruffle at his neck, a plumed bonnet on his
grey locks, and a serviceable dagger hanging from his girdle of
hammered gold, had claimed the attention of the dalal.

In the pen that held the captives of the lesser raids conducted by
Biskaine sat an Andalusian girl of perhaps some twenty years, of a
beauty entirely Spanish.

Her face was of the warm pallor of ivory, her massed hair of an ebony
black, her eyebrows were finely pencilled, and her eyes of deepest and
softest brown. She was dressed in the becoming garb of the Castilian
peasant, the folded kerchief of red and yellow above her bodice leaving
bare the glories of her neck. She was very pale, and her eyes were wild
in their look, but this detracted nothing from her beauty.

She had attracted the jew’s notice, and it is not impossible that there
may have stirred in him a desire to avenge upon her some of the cruel
wrongs, some of the rackings, burning, confiscations, and banishment
suffered by the men of his race at the hands of the men of hers. He may
have bethought him of invaded ghettos, of Jewish maidens ravished, and
Jewish children butchered in the name of the God those Spanish
Christians worshipped, for there was something almost of contemptuous
fierceness in his dark eyes and in the hand he flung out to indicate
her.

“Yonder is a Castilian wench for whom I will give fifty Philips, O
dalal,” he announced. The datal made a sign, whereupon the corsairs
dragged her struggling forth.

“So much loveliness may not be bought for fifty Philips, O Ibrahim,”
said he. “Yusuf here will pay sixty at least.” And he stood expectantly
before a resplendent Moor.

The Moor, however, shook his head.

“Allah knows I have three wives who would destroy her loveliness within
the hour and so leave me the loser.”

The dalal moved on, the girl following him but contesting every step of
the way with those who impelled her forward, and reviling them too in
hot Castilian. She drove her nails into the arms of one and spat
fiercely into the face of another of her corsair guards. Rosamund’s
weary eyes quickened to horror as she watched her—a horror prompted as
much by the fate awaiting that poor child as by the undignified fury of
the futile battle she waged against it. But it happened that her
behaviour impressed a Levantine Turk quite differently. He rose, a
short squat figure, from his seat on the steps of the well.

“Sixty Philips will I pay for the joy of taming that wild cat,” said
he.

But Ibrahim was not to be outbidden. He offered seventy, the Turk
countered with a bid of eighty, and Ibrahim again raised the price to
ninety, and there fell a pause.

The dalal spurred on the Turk. “Wilt thou be beaten then, and by an
Israelite? Shall this lovely maid be given to a perverter of the
Scriptures, to an inheritor of the fire, to one of a race that would
not bestow on their fellow-men so much as the speck out of a
date-stone? It were a shame upon a True-Believer.”

Urged thus the Turk offered another five Philips, but with obvious
reluctance. The Jew, however, entirely unabashed by a tirade against
him, the like of which he heard a score of times a day in the course of
trading, pulled forth a heavy purse from his girdle.

“Here are one hundred Philips,” he announced. “’Tis overmuch. But I
offer it.”

Ere the dalal’s pious and seductive tongue could urge him further the
Turk sat down again with a gesture of finality.

“I give him joy of her,” said he.

“She is thine, then, O Ibrahim, for one hundred philips.”

The Israelite relinquished the purse to the dalal’s white-robed
assistants and advanced to receive the girl. The corsairs thrust her
forward against him, still vainly battling, and his arms closed about
her for a moment.

“Thou has cost me dear, thou daughter of Spain,” said he. “But I am
content. Come.” And he made shift to lead her away. Suddenly, however,
fierce as a tiger-cat she writhed her arms upwards and clawed at his
face. With a scream of pain he relaxed his hold of her and in that
moment, quick as lightning she plucked the dagger that hung from his
girdle so temptingly within her reach.

“Valga me Dios!” she cried, and ere a hand could be raised to prevent
her she had buried the blade in her lovely breast and sank in a
laughing, coughing, heap at his feet. A final convulsive heave and she
lay there quite still, whilst Ibrahim glared down at her with eyes of
dismay, and over all the market there hung a hush of sudden awe.

Rosamund had risen in her place, and a faint colour came to warm her
pallor, a faint light kindled in her eyes. God had shown her the way
through this poor Spanish girl, and assuredly God would give her the
means to take it when her own turn came. She felt herself suddenly
uplifted and enheartened. Death was a sharp, swift severing, an easy
door of escape from the horror that threatened her, and God in His
mercy, she knew, would justify self-murder under such circumstances as
were her own and that poor dead Andalusian maid’s.

At length Ibrahim roused himself from his momentary stupor. He stepped
deliberately across the body, his face inflamed, and stood to beard the
impassive dalal.

“She is dead!” he bleated. “I am defrauded. Give me back my gold!”

“Are we to give back the price of every slave that dies?” the dalal
questioned him.

“But she was not yet delivered to me,” raved the Jew. “My hands had not
touched her. Give me back my gold.”

“Thou liest, son of a dog,” was the answer, dispassionately delivered.
“She was thine already. I had so pronounced her. Bear her hence, since
she belongs to thee.”

The Jew, his face empurpling, seemed to fight for breath

“How?” he choked. “Am I to lose a hundred philips?”

“What is written is written,” replied the serene dalal.

Ibrahim was frothing at the lips, his eyes were blood-injected. “But it
was never written that....”

“Peace,” said the dalal. “Had it not been written it could not have
come to pass. It is the will of Allah! Who dares rebel against it?”

The crowd began to murmur.

“I want my hundred philips,” the Jew insisted, whereupon the murmur
swelled into a sudden roar.

“Thou hearest?” said the dalal. “Allah pardon thee, thou art disturbing
the peace of this market. Away, ere ill betide thee.”

“Hence! hence!” roared the crowd, and some advanced threateningly upon
the luckless Ibrahim. “Away, thou perverter of Holy Writ! thou filth!
thou dog! Away!”

Such was the uproar, such the menace of angry countenances and clenched
fists shaken in his very face, that Ibrahim quailed and forgot his loss
in fear.

“I go, I go,” he said, and turned hastily to depart.

But the dalal summoned him back. “Take hence thy property,” said he,
and pointed to the body. And so Ibrahim was forced to suffer the
further mockery of summoning his slaves to bear away the lifeless body
for which he had paid in lively potent gold.

Yet by the gates he paused again. “I will appeal me to the Basha,” he
threatened. “Asad-ed-Din is just, and he will have my money restored to
me.”

“So he will,” said the dalal, “when thou canst restore the dead to
life,” and he turned to the portly Ayoub, who was plucking at his
sleeve. He bent his head to catch the muttered words of Fenzileh’s
wazeer. Then, in obedience to them, he ordered Rosamund to be brought
forward.

She offered no least resistance, advancing in a singularly lifeless
way, like a sleep-walker or one who had been drugged. In the heat and
glare of the open market she stood by the dalal’s side at the head of
the well, whilst he dilated upon her physical merits in that lingua
franca which he used since it was current coin among all the assorted
races represented there—a language which the knowledge of French that
her residence in France had taught her she was to her increasing horror
and shame able to understand.

The first to make an offer for her was that same portly Moor who had
sought to purchase the two Nubians. He rose to scrutinize her closely,
and must have been satisfied, for the price he offered was a good one,
and he offered it with contemptuous assurance that he would not be
outbidden.

“One hundred philips for the milk-faced girl.”

“’Tis not enough. Consider me the moon-bright loveliness of her face,”
said the dalal as he moved on. “Chigil yields us fair women, but no
woman of Chigil was ever half so fair.”

“One hundred and fifty,” said the Levantine Turk with a snap.

“Not yet enough. Behold the stately height which Allah hath vouchsafed
her. See the noble carriage of her head, the lustre of her eye! By
Allah, she is worthy to grace the Sultan’s own hareem.”

He said no more than the buyers recognized to be true, and excitement
stirred faintly through their usually impassive ranks. A Tagareen Moor
named Yusuf offered at once two hundred.

But still the dalal continued to sing her praises. He held up one of
her arms for inspection, and she submitted with lowered eyes, and no
sign of resentment beyond the slow flush that spread across her face
and vanished again.

“Behold me these limbs, smooth as Arabian silks and whiter than ivory.
Look at those lips like pomegranate blossoms. The price is now two
hundred philips. What wilt thou give, O Hamet?”

Hamet showed himself angry that his original bid should so speedily
have been doubled. “By the Koran, I have purchased three sturdy girls
from the Sus for less.”

“Wouldst thou compare a squat-faced girl from the Sus with this
narcissus-eyed glory of womanhood?” scoffed the dalal.

“Two hundred and ten, then,” was Hamet’s sulky grunt.

The watchful Tsamanni considered that the time had come to buy her for
his lord as he had been bidden.

“Three hundred,” he said curtly, to make an end of matters, and—

“Four hundred,” instantly piped a shrill voice behind him.

He spun round in his amazement and met the leering face of Ayoub. A
murmur ran through the ranks of the buyers, the people craned their
necks to catch a glimpse of this open-handed purchaser.

Yusuf the Tagareen rose up in a passion. He announced angrily that
never again should the dust of the sôk of Algiers defile his slippers,
that never again would he come there to purchase slaves.

“By the Well of Zem-Zem,” he swore, “all men are bewitched in this
market. Four hundred philips for a Frankish girl! May Allah increase
your wealth, for verily you’ll need it.” And in his supreme disgust he
stalked to the gates, and elbowed his way through the crowd, and so
vanished from the sôk.

Yet ere he was out of earshot her price had risen further. Whilst
Tsamanni was recovering from his surprise at the competitor that had
suddenly appeared before him, the dalal had lured an increased offer
from the Turk.

“’Tis a madness,” the latter deplored. “But she pleaseth me, and should
it seem good to Allah the Merciful to lead her into the True Faith she
may yet become the light of my hareem. Four hundred and twenty philips,
then, O dalal, and Allah pardon me my prodigality.”

Yet scarcely was his little speech concluded than Tsamanni with laconic
eloquence rapped out: “Five hundred.”

“Y’Allah!” cried the Turk, raising his hands to heaven, and “Y’Allah!”
echoed the crowd.

“Five hundred and fifty,” shrilled Ayoub’s voice above the general din.

“Six hundred,” replied Tsamanni, still unmoved.

And now such was the general hubbub provoked by these unprecedented
prices that the dalal was forced to raise his voice and cry for
silence.

When this was restored Ayoub at once raised the price to seven hundred.

“Eight hundred,” snapped Tsamanni, showing at last a little heat.

“Nine hundred,” replied Ayoub.

Tsamanni swung round upon him again, white now with fury.

“Is this a jest, O father of wind?” he cried, and excited laughter by
the taunt implicit in that appellation.

“And thou’rt the jester,” replied Ayoub with forced calm, “thou’lt find
the jest a costly one.”

With a shrug Tsamanni turned again to the dalal. “A thousand philips,”
said he shortly.

“Silence there!” cried the dalal again. “Silence, and praise Allah who
sends good prices.”

“One thousand and one hundred,” said Ayoub the irrepressible

And now Tsamanni not only found himself outbidden, but he had reached
the outrageous limit appointed by Asad. He lacked authority to go
further, dared not do so without first consulting the Basha. Yet if he
left the sôk for that purpose Ayoub would meanwhile secure the girl. He
found himself between sword and wall. On the one hand did he permit
himself to be outbidden his master might visit upon him his
disappointment. On the other, did he continue beyond the limit so idly
mentioned as being far beyond all possibility, it might fare no less
ill with him.

He turned to the crowd, waving his arms in furious gesticulation. “By
the beard of the Prophet, this bladder of wind and grease makes sport
of us. He has no intent to buy. What man ever heard of the half of such
a price for a slave girl?”

Ayoub’s answer was eloquent; he produced a fat bag and flung it on the
ground, where it fell with a mellow chink. “There is my sponsor,” he
made answer, grinning in the very best of humours, savouring to the
full his enemy’s rage and discomfiture, and savouring it at no cost to
himself. “Shall I count out one thousand and one hundred philips, O
dalal.”

“If the wazeer Tsamanni is content.”

“Dost thou know for whom I buy?” roared Tsamanni. “For the Basha
himself, Asad-ed-Din, the exalted of Allah,” He advanced upon Ayoub
with hands upheld. “What shalt thou say to him, O dog, when he calls
thee to account for daring to outbid him.”

But Ayoub remained unruffled before all this fury. He spread his fat
hands, his eyes twinkling, his great lips pursed. “How should I know,
since Allah has not made me all-knowing? Thou shouldst have said so
earlier. ’Tis thus I shall answer the Basha should he question me, and
the Basha is just.”

“I would not be thee, Ayoub—not for the throne of Istambul.”

“Nor I thee, Tsamanni; for thou art jaundiced with rage.”

And so they stood glaring each at the other until the dalal called them
back to the business that was to do.

“The price is now one thousand and one hundred philips. Wilt thou
suffer defeat, O wazeer?”

“Since Allah wills. I have no authority to go further.”

“Then at one thousand and one hundred philips, Ayoub, she is....”

But the sale was not yet to be completed. From the dense and eager
throng about the gates rang a crisp voice—

“One thousand and two hundred philips for the Frankish girl.”

The dalal, who had conceived that the limits of madness had been
already reached, stood gaping now in fresh amazement. The mob crowed
and cheered and roared between enthusiasm and derision, and even
Tsamanni brightened to see another champion enter the lists who perhaps
would avenge him upon Ayoub. The crowd parted quickly to right and
left, and through it into the open strode Sakr-el-Bahr. They recognized
him instantly, and his name was shouted in acclamation by that
idolizing multitude.

That Barbary name of his conveyed no information to Rosamund, and her
back being turned to the entrance she did not see him. But she had
recognized his voice, and she had shuddered at the sound. She could
make nothing of the bidding, nor what the purpose that surely underlay
it to account for the extraordinary excitement of the traders. Vaguely
had she been wondering what dastardly purpose Oliver might intend to
serve, but now that she heard his voice that wonder ceased and
understanding took its place. He had hung there somewhere in the crowd
waiting until all competitors but one should have been outbidden, and
now he stepped forth to buy her for his own—his slave! She closed her
eyes a moment and prayed God that he might not prevail in his intent.
Any fate but that; she would rob him even of the satisfaction of
driving her to sheathe a poniard in her heart as that poor Andalusian
girl had done. A wave almost of unconsciousness passed over her in the
intensity of her horror. For a moment the ground seemed to rock and
heave under her feet.

Then the dizziness passed, and she was herself again. She heard the
crowd thundering “Ma’sh’Allah!” and “Sakr-el-Bahr!” and the dalal
clamouring sternly for silence. When this was at last restored she
heard his exclamation—

“The glory to Allah who sends eager buyers! What sayest thou, O wazeer
Ayoub?”

“Ay!” sneered Tsamanni, “what now?”

“One thousand and three hundred,” said Ayoub with a quaver of uneasy
defiance.

“Another hundred, O dalal,” came from Sakr-el-Bahr in a quiet voice.

“One thousand and five hundred,” screamed Ayoub, thus reaching not only
the limit imposed by his mistress, but the very limit of the resources
at her immediate disposal. Gone, too, with that bid was all hope of
profit to himself.

But Sakr-el-Bahr, impassive as Fate, and without so much as deigning to
bestow a look upon the quivering eunuch, said again—

“Another hundred, O dalal.”

“One thousand and six hundred philips!” cried the dalal, more in
amazement than to announce the figure reached. Then controlling his
emotions he bowed his head in reverence and made confession of his
faith. “All things are possible if Allah wills them. The praise to Him
who sends wealthy buyers.”

He turned to the crestfallen Ayoub, so crestfallen that in the
contemplation of him Tsamanni was fast gathering consolation for his
own discomfiture, vicariously tasting the sweets of vengeance. “What
say you now, O perspicuous wazeer?”

“I say,” choked Ayoub, “that since by the favour of Shaitan he hath so
much wealth he must prevail.”

But the insulting words were scarcely uttered than Sakr-el-Bahr’s great
hand had taken the wazeer by the nape of his fat neck, a growl of anger
running through the assembly to approve him.

“By the favour of Shaitan, sayest thou, thou sex-less dog?” he growled,
and tightened his grip so that the wazeer squirmed and twisted in an
agony of pain. Down was his head thrust, and still down, until his fat
body gave way and he lay supine and writhing in the dust of the sôk.
“Shall I strangle thee, thou father of filth, or shall I fling thy soft
flesh to the hooks to teach thee what is a man’s due from thee?” And as
he spoke he rubbed the too daring fellow’s face roughly on the ground.

“Mercy!” squealed the wazeer. “Mercy, O mighty Sakr-el-Bahr, as thou
lookest for mercy!”

“Unsay thy words, thou offal. Pronounce thyself a liar and a dog.”

“I do unsay them. I have foully lied. Thy wealth is the reward sent
thee by Allah for thy glorious victories over the unbelieving.”

“Put out thine offending tongue,” said Sakr-el-Bahr, “and cleanse it in
the dust. Put it forth, I say.”

Ayoub obeyed him in fearful alacrity, whereupon Sakr-el-Bahr released
his hold and allowed the unfortunate fellow to rise at last,
half-choked with dirt, livid of face, and quaking like a jelly, an
object of ridicule and cruel mockery to all assembled.

“Now get thee hence, ere my sea-hawks lay their talons on thee. Go!”

Ayoub departed in all haste to the increasing jeers of the multitude
and the taunts of Tsamanni, whilst Sakr-el-Bahr turned him once more to
the dalal.

“At one thousand and six hundred philips this slave is thine, O
Sakr-el-Bahr, thou glory of Islam. May Allah increase thy victories!”

“Pay him, Ali,” said the corsair shortly, and he advanced to receive
his purchase.

Face to face stood he now with Rosamund, for the first time since that
day before the encounter with the Dutch argosy when he had sought her
in the cabin of the carack.

One swift glance she bestowed on him, then, her senses reeling with
horror at her circumstance she shrank back, her face of a deathly
pallor. In his treatment of Ayoub she had just witnessed the lengths of
brutality of which he was capable, and she was not to know that this
brutality had been a deliberate piece of mummery calculated to strike
terror into her.

Pondering her now he smiled a tight-lipped cruel smile that only served
to increase her terror.

“Come,” he said in English.

She cowered back against the dalal as if for protection. Sakr-el-Bahr
reached forward, caught her by the wrists, and almost tossed her to his
Nubians, Abiad and Zal-Zer, who were attending him.

“Cover her face,” he bade them. “Bear her to my house. Away!”




CHAPTER XI.
THE TRUTH


The sun was dipping swiftly to the world’s rim when Sakr-el-Bahr with
his Nubians and his little retinue of corsairs came to the gates of
that white house of his on its little eminence outside the Bab-el-Oueb
and beyond the walls of the city.

When Rosamund and Lionel, brought in the wake of the corsair, found
themselves in the spacious courtyard beyond the dark and narrow
entrance, the blue of the sky contained but the paling embers of the
dying day, and suddenly, sharply upon the evening stillness, came a
mueddin’s voice calling the faithful unto prayer.

Slaves fetched water from the fountain that played in the middle of the
quadrangle and tossed aloft a slender silvery spear of water to break
into a myriad gems and so shower down into the broad marble basin.
Sakr-el-Bahr washed, as did his followers, and then he went down upon
the praying-mat that had been set for him, whilst his corsairs detached
their cloaks and spread them upon the ground to serve them in like
stead.

The Nubians turned the two slaves about, lest their glances should
defile the orisons of the faithful, and left them so facing the wall
and the green gate that led into the garden whence were wafted on the
cooling air the perfumes of jessamine and lavender. Through the laths
of the gate they might have caught a glimpse of the riot of colour
there, and they might have seen the slaves arrested by the Persian
waterwheel at which they had been toiling and chanting until the call
to prayer had come to strike them into statues.

Sakr-el-Bahr rose from his devotions, uttered a sharp word of command,
and entered the house. The Nubians followed him, urging their captives
before them up the narrow stairs, and so brought them out upon the
terrace on the roof, that space which in Eastern houses is devoted to
the women, but which no woman’s foot had ever trodden since this house
had been tenanted by Sakr-el-Bahr the wifeless.

This terrace, which was surrounded by a parapet some four feet high,
commanded a view of the city straggling up the hillside to eastward,
from the harbour and of the island at the end of the mole which had
been so laboriously built by the labour of Christian slaves from the
stones of the ruined fortress—the Peñon, which Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa
had wrested from the Spaniards. The deepening shroud of evening was now
upon all, transmuting white and yellow walls alike to a pearly
greyness. To westward stretched the fragrant gardens of the house,
where the doves were murmuring fondly among the mulberries and lotus
trees. Beyond it a valley wound its way between the shallow hills, and
from a pool fringed with sedges and bullrushes above which a great
stork was majestically sailing came the harsh croak of frogs.

An awning supported upon two gigantic spears hung out from the southern
wall of the terrace which rose to twice the height of that forming the
parapet on its other three sides. Under this was a divan and silken
cushions, and near it a small Moorish table of ebony inlaid with
mother-of-pearl and gold. Over the opposite parapet, where a lattice
had been set, rioted a trailing rose-tree charged with blood-red
blossoms, though now their colours were merged into the
all-encompassing greyness.

Here Lionel and Rosamund looked at each other in the dim light, their
faces gleaming ghostly each to each, whilst the Nubians stood like twin
statues by the door that opened from the stair-head.

The man groaned, and clasped his hands before him. The doublet which
had been torn from him in the sôk had since been restored and
temporarily repaired by a strand of palmetto cord. But he was woefully
bedraggled. Yet his thoughts, if his first words are to be taken as an
indication of them were for Rosamund’s condition rather than his own.

“O God, that you should be subjected to this!” he cried. “That you
should have suffered what you have suffered! The humiliation of it, the
barbarous cruelty! Oh!” He covered his haggard face with his hands.

She touched him gently on the arm.

“What I have suffered is but a little thing,” she said, and her voice
was wonderfully steady and soothing. Have I not said that these
Godolphins were brave folk? Even their women were held to have
something of the male spirit in their breasts; and to this none can
doubt that Rosamund now bore witness. “Do not pity me, Lionel, for my
sufferings are at an end or very nearly.” She smiled strangely, the
smile of exaltation that you may see upon the martyr’s face in the hour
of doom.

“How?” quoth he, in faint surprise.

“How?” she echoed. “Is there not always a way to thrust aside life’s
burden when it grows too heavy—heavier than God would have us bear?”

His only answer was a groan. Indeed, he had done little but groan in
all the hours they had spent together since they were brought ashore
from the carack; and had the season permitted her so much reflection,
she might have considered that she had found him singularly wanting
during those hours of stress when a man of worth would have made some
effort, however desperate, to enhearten her rather than repine upon his
own plight.

Slaves entered bearing four enormous flaming torches which they set in
iron sconces protruding from the wall of the house. Thence they shed a
lurid ruddy glow upon the terrace. The slaves departed again, and
presently, in the black gap of the doorway between the Nubians, a third
figure appeared unheralded. It was Sakr-el-Bahr.

He stood a moment at gaze, his attitude haughty, his face
expressionless; then slowly he advanced. He was dressed in a short
white caftan that descended to his knees, and was caught about his
waist in a shimmering girdle of gold that quivered like fire in the
glow of the torches as he moved. His arms from the elbow and his legs
from the knee were bare, and his feet were shod with gold-embroidered
red Turkish slippers. He wore a white turban decked by a plume of
osprey attached by a jewelled clasp.

He signed to the Nubians and they vanished silently, leaving him alone
with his captives.

He bowed to Rosamund. “This, mistress,” he said, “is to be your domain
henceforth which is to treat you more as wife than slave. For it is to
Muslim wives that the housetops in Barbary are allotted. I hope you
like it.”

Lionel staring at him out of a white face, his conscience bidding him
fear the very worst, his imagination painting a thousand horrid fates
for him and turning him sick with dread, shrank back before his
half-brother, who scarce appeared to notice him just then.

But Rosamund confronted him, drawn to the full of her splendid height,
and if her face was pale, yet it was as composed and calm as his own;
if her bosom rose and fell to betray her agitations yet her glance was
contemptuous and defiant, her voice calm and steady, when she answered
him with the question—“What is your intent with me?”

“My intent?” said he, with a little twisted smile. Yet for all that he
believed he hated her and sought to hurt, to humble and to crush her,
he could not stifle his admiration of her spirit’s gallantry in such an
hour as this.

From behind the hills peeped the edge of the moon—a sickle of burnished
copper.

“My intent is not for you to question,” he replied. “There was a time,
Rosamund, when in all the world you had no slave more utter than was I.
Yourself in your heartlessness, and in your lack of faith, you broke
the golden fetters of that servitude. You’ll find it less easy to break
the shackles I now impose upon you.”

She smiled her scorn and quiet confidence. He stepped close to her.
“You are my slave, do you understand?—bought in the market-place as I
might buy me a mule, a goat, or a camel—and belonging to me body and
soul. You are my property, my thing, my chattel, to use or abuse, to
cherish or break as suits my whim, without a will that is not my will,
holding your very life at my good pleasure.”

She recoiled a step before the dull hatred that throbbed in his words,
before the evil mockery of his swarthy bearded face.

“You beast!” she gasped.

“So now you understand the bondage into which you are come in exchange
for the bondage which in your own wantonness you dissolved.”

“May God forgive you,” she panted.

“I thank you for that prayer,” said he. “May He forgive you no less.”

And then from the background came an inarticulate sound, a strangled,
snarling sob from Lionel.

Sakr-el-Bahr turned slowly. He eyed the fellow a moment in silence,
then he laughed.

“Ha! My sometime brother. A pretty fellow, as God lives is it not?
Consider him Rosamund. Behold how gallantly misfortune is borne by this
pillar of manhood upon which you would have leaned, by this stalwart
husband of your choice. Look at him! Look at this dear brother of
mine.”

Under the lash of that mocking tongue Lionel’s mood was stung to anger
where before it had held naught but fear.

“You are no brother of mine,” he retorted fiercely. “Your mother was a
wanton who betrayed my father.”

Sakr-el-Bahr quivered a moment as if he had been struck. Yet he
controlled himself.

“Let me hear my mother’s name but once again on thy foul tongue, and
I’ll have it ripped out by the roots. Her memory, I thank God, is far
above the insults of such a crawling thing as you. None the less, take
care not to speak of the only woman whose name I reverence.”

And then turning at bay, as even the rat will do, Lionel sprang upon
him, with clawing hands outstretched to reach his throat. But
Sakr-el-Bahr caught him in a grip that bent him howling to his knees.

“You find me strong, eh?” he gibed. “Is it matter for wonder? Consider
that for six endless months I toiled at the oar of a galley, and you’ll
understand what it was that turned my body into iron and robbed me of a
soul.”

He flung him off, and sent him crashing into the rosebush and the
lattice over which it rambled.

“Do you realize the horror of the rower’s bench? to sit day in day out,
night in night out, chained naked to the oar, amid the reek and stench
of your fellows in misfortune, unkempt, unwashed save by the rain,
broiled and roasted by the sun, festering with sores, lashed and cut
and scarred by the boatswain’s whip as you faint under the ceaseless,
endless, cruel toil?”

“Do you realize it?” From a tone of suppressed fury his voice rose
suddenly to a roar. “You shall. For that horror which was mine by your
contriving shall now be yours until you die.”

He paused; but Lionel made no attempt to avail himself of this. His
courage all gone out of him again, as suddenly as it had flickered up,
he cowered where he had been flung.

“Before you go there is something else,” Sakr-el-Bahr resumed,
“something for which I have had you brought hither to-night.

“Not content with having delivered me to all this, not content with
having branded me a murderer, destroyed my good name, filched my
possessions and driven me into the very path of hell, you must further
set about usurping my place in the false heart of this woman I once
loved.”

“I hope,” he went on reflectively, “that in your own poor way you love
her, too, Lionel. Thus to the torment that awaits your body shall be
added torment for your treacherous soul—such torture of mind as only
the damned may know. To that end have I brought you hither. That you
may realize something of what is in store for this woman at my hands;
that you may take the thought of it with you to be to your mind worse
than the boatswain’s lash to your pampered body.”

“You devil!” snarled Lionel. “Oh, you fiend out of hell!”

“If you will manufacture devils, little toad of a brother, do not
upbraid them for being devils when next you meet them.”

“Give him no heed, Lionel!” said Rosamund. “I shall prove him as much a
boaster as he has proved himself a villain. Never think that he will be
able to work his evil will.”

“’Tis you are the boaster there,” said Sakr-el-Bahr. “And for the rest,
I am what you and he, between you, have made me.”

“Did we make you liar and coward?—for that is what you are indeed,” she
answered.

“Coward?” he echoed, in genuine surprise. “’Twill be some lie that he
has told you with the others. In what, pray, was I ever a coward?”

“In what? In this that you do now; in this taunting and torturing of
two helpless beings in our power.”

“I speak not of what I am,” he replied, “for I have told you that I am
what you have made me. I speak of what I was. I speak of the past.”

She looked at him and she seemed to measure him with her unwavering
glance.

“You speak of the past?” she echoed, her voice low. “You speak of the
past and to me? You dare?”

“It is that we might speak of it together that I have fetched you all
the way from England; that at last I may tell you things I was a fool
to have kept from you five years ago; that we may resume a conversation
which you interrupted when you dismissed me.”

“I did you a monstrous injury, no doubt,” she answered him, with bitter
irony. “I was surely wanting in consideration. It would have become me
better to have smiled and fawned upon my brother’s murderer.”

“I swore to you, then, that I was not his murderer,” he reminded her in
a voice that shook.

“And I answered you that you lied.”

“Ay, and on that you dismissed me—the word of the man whom you
professed to love, the word of the man to whom you had given your trust
weighing for naught with you.”

“When I gave you my trust,” she retorted, “I did so in ignorance of
your true self, in a headstrong wilful ignorance that would not be
guided by what all the world said of you and your wild ways. For that
blind wilfulness I have been punished, as perhaps I deserved to be.”

“Lies—all lies!” he stormed. “Those ways of mine—and God knows they
were none so wild, when all is said—I abandoned when I came to love
you. No lover since the world began was ever so cleansed, so purified,
so sanctified by love as was I.”

“Spare me this at least!” she cried on a note of loathing

“Spare you?” he echoed. “What shall I spare you?”

“The shame of it all; the shame that is ever mine in the reflection
that for a season I believed I loved you.”

He smiled. “If you can still feel shame, it shall overwhelm you ere I
have done. For you shall hear me out. Here there are none to interrupt
us, none to thwart my sovereign will. Reflect then, and remember.
Remember what a pride you took in the change you had wrought in me.
Your vanity welcomed that flattery, that tribute to the power of your
beauty. Yet, all in a moment, upon the paltriest grounds, you believed
me the murderer of your brother.”

“The paltriest grounds?” she cried, protesting almost despite herself

“So paltry that the justices at Truro would not move against me.”

“Because,” she cut in, “they accounted that you had been sufficiently
provoked. Because you had not sworn to them as you swore to me that no
provocation should ever drive you to raise your hand against my
brother. Because they did not realize how false and how forsworn you
were.”

He considered her a moment. Then he took a turn on the terrace. Lionel
crouching ever by the rose-tree was almost entirely forgotten by him
now.

“God give me patience with you!” he said at length. “I need it. For I
desire you to understand many things this night. I mean you to see how
just is my resentment; how just the punishment that is to overtake you
for what you have made of my life and perhaps of my hereafter. Justice
Baine and another who is dead, knew me for innocent.”

“They knew you for innocent?” There was scornful amazement in her tone.
“Were they not witnesses of the quarrel betwixt you and Peter and of
your oath that you would kill him?”

“That was an oath sworn in the heat of anger. Afterwards I bethought me
that he was your brother.”

“Afterwards?” said she. “After you had murdered him?”

“I say again,” Oliver replied calmly, “that I did not do this thing.”

“And I say again that you lie.”

He considered her for a long moment; then he laughed. “Have you ever,”
he asked, “known a man to lie without some purpose? Men lie for the
sake of profit, they lie out of cowardice or malice, or else because
they are vain and vulgar boasters. I know of no other causes that will
drive a man to falsehood, save that—ah, yes!—” (and he flashed a
sidelong glance at Lionel)—“save that sometimes a man will lie to
shield another, out of self-sacrifice. There you have all the spurs
that urge a man to falsehood. Can any of these be urging me to-night?
Reflect! Ask yourself what purpose I could serve by lying to you now.
Consider further that I have come to loathe you for your unfaith; that
I desire naught so much as to punish you for that and for all its
bitter consequences to me that I have brought you hither to exact
payment from you to the uttermost farthing. What end then can I serve
by falsehood?”

“All this being so, what end could you serve by truth?” she countered.

“To make you realize to the full the injustice that you did. To make
you understand the wrongs for which you are called to pay. To prevent
you from conceiving yourself a martyr; to make you perceive in all its
deadly bitterness that what now comes to you is the inevitable fruit of
your own faithlessness.”

“Sir Oliver, do you think me a fool?” she asked him.

“Madam, I do—and worse,” he answered.

“Ay, that is clear,” she agreed scornfully, “since even now you waste
breath in attempting to persuade me against my reason. But words will
not blot out facts. And though you talk from now till the day of
judgment no word of yours can efface those bloodstains in the snow that
formed a trail from that poor murdered body to your own door; no word
of yours can extinguish the memory of the hatred between him and you,
and of your own threat to kill him; nor can it stifle the recollection
of the public voice demanding your punishment. You dare to take such a
tone as you are taking with me? You dare here under Heaven to stand and
lie to me that you may give false gloze to the villainy of your present
deed—for that is the purpose of your falsehood, since you asked me what
purpose there could be for it. What had you to set against all that, to
convince me that your hands were clean, to induce me to keep the troth
which—God forgive me!—I had plighted to you?”

“My word,” he answered her in a ringing voice.

“Your lie,” she amended.

“Do not suppose,” said he, “that I could not support my word by proofs
if called upon to do so.”

“Proofs?” She stared at him, wide-eyed a moment. Then her lip curled.
“And that no doubt was the reason of your flight when you heard that
the Queen’s pursuivants were coming in response to the public voice to
call you to account.”

He stood at gaze a moment, utterly dumbfounded. “My flight?” he said.
“What fable’s that?”

“You will tell me next that you did not flee. That that is another
false charge against you?”

“So,” he said slowly, “it was believed I fled!”

And then light burst upon him, to dazzle and stun him. It was so
inevitably what must have been believed, and yet it had never crossed
his mind. O the damnable simplicity of it! At another time his
disappearance must have provoked comment and investigation, perhaps.
But, happening when it did, the answer to it came promptly and
convincingly and no man troubled to question further. Thus was Lionel’s
task made doubly easy, thus was his own guilt made doubly sure in the
eyes of all. His head sank upon his breast. What had he done? Could he
still blame Rosamund for having been convinced by so overwhelming a
piece of evidence? Could he still blame her if she had burnt unopened
the letter which he had sent her by the hand of Pitt? What else indeed
could any suppose, but that he had fled? And that being so, clearly
such a flight must brand him irrefutably for the murderer he was
alleged to be. How could he blame her if she had ultimately been
convinced by the only reasonable assumption possible?

A sudden sense of the wrong he had done rose now like a tide about him.

“My God!” he groaned, like a man in pain. “My God!”

He looked at her, and then averted his glance again, unable now to
endure the haggard, strained yet fearless gaze of those brave eyes of
hers.

“What else, indeed, could you believe?” he muttered brokenly, thus
giving some utterance to what was passing through his mind.

“Naught else but the whole vile truth,” she answered fiercely, and
thereby stung him anew, whipped him out of his sudden weakening back to
his mood of resentment and vindictiveness.

She had shown herself, he thought in that moment of reviving anger, too
ready to believe what told against him.

“The truth?” he echoed, and eyed her boldly now. “Do you know the truth
when you see it? We shall discover. For by God’s light you shall have
the truth laid stark before you now, and you shall find it hideous
beyond all your hideous imaginings.”

There was something so compelling now in his tone and manner that it
drove her to realize that some revelation was impending. She was
conscious of a faint excitement, a reflection perhaps of the wild
excitement that was astir in him.

“Your brother,” he began, “met his death at the hands of a false
weakling whom I loved, towards whom I had a sacred duty. Straight from
the deed he fled to me for shelter. A wound he had taken in the
struggle left that trail of blood to mark the way he had come.” He
paused, and his tone became gentler, it assumed the level note of one
who reasons impassively. “Was it not an odd thing, now, that none
should ever have paused to seek with certainty whence that blood
proceeded, and to consider that I bore no wound in those days? Master
Baine knew it, for I submitted my body to his examination, and a
document was drawn up and duly attested which should have sent the
Queen’s pursuivants back to London with drooping tails had I been at
Penarrow to receive them.”

Faintly through her mind stirred the memory that Master Baine had urged
the existence of some such document, that in fact he had gone so far as
to have made oath of this very circumstance now urged by Sir Oliver;
and she remembered that the matter had been brushed aside as an
invention of the justice’s to answer the charge of laxity in the
performance of his duty, particularly as the only co-witness he could
cite was Sir Andrew Flack, the parson, since deceased. Sir Oliver’s
voice drew her attention from that memory.

“But let that be,” he was saying. “Let us come back to the story
itself. I gave the craven weakling shelter. Thereby I drew down
suspicion upon myself, and since I could not clear myself save by
denouncing him, I kept silent. That suspicion drew to certainty when
the woman to whom I was betrothed, recking nothing of my oaths, freely
believing the very worst of me, made an end of our betrothal and
thereby branded me a murderer and a liar in the eyes of all.
Indignation swelled against me. The Queen’s pursuivants were on their
way to do what the justices of Truro refused to do.

“So far I have given you facts. Now I give you surmise—my own
conclusions—but surmise that strikes, as you shall judge, the very
bull’s-eye of truth. That dastard to whom I had given sanctuary, to
whom I had served as a cloak, measured my nature by his own and feared
that I must prove unequal to the fresh burden to be cast upon me. He
feared lest under the strain of it I should speak out, advance my
proofs, and so destroy him. There was the matter of that wound, and
there was something still more unanswerable he feared I might have
urged. There was a certain woman—a wanton up at Malpas—who could have
been made to speak, who could have revealed a rivalry concerning her
betwixt the slayer and your brother. For the affair in which Peter
Godolphin met his death was a pitifully, shamefully sordid one at
bottom.”

For the first time she interrupted him, fiercely. “Do you malign the
dead?”

“Patience, mistress,” he commanded. “I malign none. I speak the truth
of a dead man that the truth may be known of two living ones. Hear me
out, then! I have waited long and survived a deal that I might tell you
this

“That craven, then, conceived that I might become a danger to him; so
he decided to remove me. He contrived to have me kidnapped one night
and put aboard a vessel to be carried to Barbary and sold there as a
slave. That is the truth of my disappearance. And the slayer, whom I
had befriended and sheltered at my own bitter cost, profited yet
further by my removal. God knows whether the prospect of such profit
was a further temptation to him. In time he came to succeed me in my
possessions, and at last to succeed me even in the affections of the
faithless woman who once had been my affianced wife.”

At last she started from the frozen patience in which she had listened
hitherto. “Do you say that... that Lionel...?” she was beginning in a
voice choked by indignation.

And then Lionel spoke at last, straightening himself into a stiffly
upright attitude.

“He lies!” he cried. “He lies, Rosamund! Do not heed him.”

“I do not,” she answered, turning away.

A wave of colour suffused the swarthy face of Sakr-el-Bahr. A moment
his eyes followed her as she moved away a step or two, then they turned
their blazing light of anger upon Lionel. He strode silently across to
him, his mien so menacing that Lionel shrank back in fresh terror.

Sakr-el-Bahr caught his brother’s wrist in a grip that was as that of a
steel manacle. “We’ll have the truth this night if we have to tear it
from you with red-hot pincers,” he said between his teeth.

He dragged him forward to the middle of the terrace and held him there
before Rosamund, forcing him down upon his knees into a cowering
attitude by the violence of that grip upon his wrist.

“Do you know aught of the ingenuity of Moorish torture?” he asked him.
“You may have heard of the rack and the wheel and the thumbscrew at
home. They are instruments of voluptuous delight compared with the
contrivances of Barbary to loosen stubborn tongues.”

White and tense, her hands clenched, Rosamund seemed to stiffen before
him.

“You coward! You cur! You craven renegade dog!” she branded him.

Oliver released his brother’s wrist and beat his hands together.
Without heeding Rosamund he looked down upon Lionel, who cowered
shuddering at his feet.

“What do you say to a match between your fingers? Or do you think a
pair of bracelets of living fire would answer better, to begin with?”

A squat, sandy-bearded, turbaned fellow, rolling slightly in his gait,
came—as had been prearranged—to answer the corsair’s summons.

With the toe of his slipper Sakr-el-Bahr stirred his brother.

“Look up, dog,” he bade him. “Consider me that man, and see if you know
him again. Look at him, I say!” And Lionel looked, yet since clearly he
did so without recognition his brother explained: “His name among
Christians was Jasper Leigh. He was the skipper you bribed to carry me
into Barbary. He was taken in his own toils when his ship was sunk by
Spaniards. Later he fell into my power, and because I forebore from
hanging him he is to-day my faithful follower. I should bid him tell
you what he knows,” he continued, turning to Rosamund, “if I thought
you would believe his tale. But since I am assured you would not, I
will take other means.” He swung round to Jasper again. “Bid Ali heat
me a pair of steel manacles in a brazier and hold them in readiness
against my need of them.” And he waved his hand.

Jasper bowed and vanished.

“The bracelets shall coax confession from your own lips, my brother.”

“I have naught to confess,” protested Lionel. “You may force lies from
me with your ruffianly tortures.”

Oliver smiled. “Not a doubt but that lies will flow from you more
readily than truth. But we shall have truth, too, in the end, never
doubt it.” He was mocking, and there was a subtle purpose underlying
his mockery. “And you shall tell a full story,” he continued, “in all
its details, so that Mistress Rosamund’s last doubt shall vanish. You
shall tell her how you lay in wait for him that evening in Godolphin
Park; how you took him unawares, and....”

“That is false!” cried Lionel in a passion of sincerity that brought
him to his feet.

It was false, indeed, and Oliver knew it, and deliberately had recourse
to falsehood, using it as a fulcrum upon which to lever out the truth.
He was cunning as all the fiends, and never perhaps did he better
manifest his cunning.

“False?” he cried with scorn. “Come, now, be reasonable. The truth, ere
torture sucks it out of you. Reflect that I know all—exactly as you
told it me. How was it, now? Lurking behind a bush you sprang upon him
unawares and ran him through before he could so much as lay a hand to
his sword, and so....”

“The lie of that is proven by the very facts themselves,” was the
furious interruption. A subtle judge of tones might have realized that
here was truth indeed, angry indignant truth that compelled conviction.
“His sword lay beside him when they found him.”

But Oliver was loftily disdainful. “Do I not know? Yourself you drew it
after you had slain him.”

The taunt performed its deadly work. For just one instant Lionel was
carried off his feet by the luxury of his genuine indignation, and in
that one instant he was lost.

“As God’s my witness, that is false!” he cried wildly. “And you know
it. I fought him fair....”

He checked on a long, shuddering, indrawn breath that was horrible to
hear.

Then silence followed, all three remaining motionless as statues:
Rosamund white and tense, Oliver grim and sardonic, Lionel limp, and
overwhelmed by the consciousness of how he had been lured into
self-betrayal.

At last it was Rosamund who spoke, and her voice shook and shifted from
key to key despite her strained attempt to keep it level.

“What... what did you say, Lionel?” she asked. Oliver laughed softly.
“He was about to add proof of his statement, I think,” he jeered. “He
was about to mention the wound he took in that fight, which left those
tracks in the snow, thus to prove that I lied—as indeed I did—when I
said that he took Peter unawares.

“Lionel!” she cried. She advanced a step and made as if to hold out her
arms to him, then let them fall again beside her. He stood stricken,
answering nothing. “Lionel!” she cried again, her voice growing
suddenly shrill. “Is this true?”

“Did you not hear him say it?” quoth Oliver.

She stood swaying a moment, looking at Lionel, her white face distorted
into a mask of unutterable pain. Oliver stepped towards her, ready to
support her, fearing that she was about to fall. But with an imperious
hand she checked his advance, and by a supreme effort controlled her
weakness. Yet her knees shook under her, refusing their office. She
sank down upon the divan and covered her face with her hands.

“God pity me!” she moaned, and sat huddled there, shaken with sobs.

Lionel started at that heart-broken cry. Cowering, he approached her,
and Oliver, grim and sardonic, stood back, a spectator of the scene he
had precipitated. He knew that given rope Lionel would enmesh himself
still further. There must be explanations that would damn him utterly.
Oliver was well content to look on.

“Rosamund!” came Lionel’s piteous cry. “Rose! Have mercy! Listen ere
you judge me. Listen lest you misjudge me!”

“Ay, listen to him,” Oliver flung in, with his soft hateful laugh.
“Listen to him. I doubt he’ll be vastly entertaining.”

That sneer was a spur to the wretched Lionel. “Rosamund, all that he
has told you of it is false. I...I...It was done in self-defence. It is
a lie that I took him unawares.” His words came wildly now. “We had
quarrelled about... about... a certain matter, and as the devil would
have it we met that evening in Godolphin Park, he and I. He taunted me;
he struck me, and finally he drew upon me and forced me to draw that I
might defend my life. That is the truth. I swear to you here on my
knees in the sight of Heaven! And....”

“Enough, sir! Enough!” she broke in, controlling herself to check these
protests that but heightened her disgust.

“Nay, hear me yet, I implore you; that knowing all you may be merciful
in your judgment.”

“Merciful?” she cried, and almost seemed to laugh

“It was an accident that I slew him,” Lionel raved on. “I never meant
it. I never meant to do more than ward and preserve my life. But when
swords are crossed more may happen than a man intends. I take God to
witness that his death was an accident resulting from his own fury.”

She had checked her sobs, and she considered him now with eyes that
were hard and terrible.

“Was it also an accident that you left me and all the world in the
belief that the deed was your brother’s?” she asked him.

He covered his face, as if unable to endure her glance. “Did you but
know how I loved you—even in those days, in secret—you would perhaps
pity me a little,” he whimpered.

“Pity?” She leaned forward and seemed to spit the word at him.
“’Sdeath, man! Do you sue for pity—you?”

“Yet you must pity me did you know the greatness of the temptation to
which I succumbed.”

“I know the greatness of your infamy, of your falseness, of your
cowardice, of your baseness. Oh!”

He stretched out suppliant hands to her; there were tears now in his
eyes. “Of your charity, Rosamund....” he was beginning, when at last
Oliver intervened:

“I think you are wearying the lady,” he said, and stirred him with his
foot. “Relate to us instead some more of your astounding accidents.
They are more diverting. Elucidate the accident, by which you had me
kidnapped to be sold into slavery. Tell us of the accident by which you
succeeded to my property. Expound to the full the accidental
circumstances of which throughout you have been the unfortunate victim.
Come, man, ply your wits. ’Twill make a pretty tale.”

And then came Jasper to announce that Ali waited with the brazier and
the heated manacles.

“They are no longer needed,” said Oliver. “Take this slave hence with
you. Bid Ali to take charge of him, and at dawn to see him chained to
one of the oars of my galeasse. Away with him.”

Lionel rose to his feet, his face ashen. “Wait! Ah, wait! Rosamund!” he
cried.

Oliver caught him by the nape of his neck, spun him round, and flung
him into the arms of Jasper. “Take him away!” he growled, and Jasper
took the wretch by the shoulders and urged him out, leaving Rosamund
and Oliver alone with the truth under the stars of Barbary.




CHAPTER XII.
THE SUBTLETY OF FENZILEH


Oliver considered the woman for a long moment as she sat half-crouching
on the divan, her hands locked, her face set and stony, her eyes
lowered. He sighed gently and turned away. He paced to the parapet and
looked out upon the city bathed in the white glare of the full risen
moon. There arose thence a hum of sound, dominated, however, by the
throbbing song of a nightingale somewhere in his garden and the
croaking of the frogs by the pool in the valley.

Now that truth had been dragged from its well, and tossed, as it were,
into Rosamund’s lap, he felt none of the fierce exultation which he had
conceived that such an hour as this must bring him. Rather, indeed, was
he saddened and oppressed. To poison the unholy cup of joy which he had
imagined himself draining with such thirsty zest there was that
discovery of a measure of justification for her attitude towards him in
her conviction that his disappearance was explained by flight.

He was weighed down by a sense that he had put himself entirely in the
wrong; that in his vengeance he had overreached himself; and he found
the fruits of it, which had seemed so desirably luscious, turning to
ashes in his mouth.

Long he stood there, the silence between them entirely unbroken. Then
at length he stirred, turned from the parapet, and paced slowly back
until he came to stand beside the divan, looking down upon her from his
great height.

“At last you have heard the truth,” he said. And as she made no answer
he continued: “I am thankful it was surprised out of him before the
torture was applied, else you might have concluded that pain was
wringing a false confession from him.” He paused, but still she did not
speak; indeed, she made no sign that she had heard him. “That,” he
concluded, “was the man whom you preferred to me. Faith, you did not
flatter me, as perhaps you may have learnt.”

At last she was moved from her silence, and her voice came dull and
hard. “I have learnt how little there is to choose between you,” she
said. “It was to have been expected. I might have known two brothers
could not have been so dissimilar in nature. Oh, I am learning a deal,
and swiftly!”

It was a speech that angered him, that cast out entirely the softer
mood that had been growing in him.

“You are learning?” he echoed. “What are you learning?”

“Knowledge of the ways of men.”

His teeth gleamed in his wry smile. “I hope the knowledge will bring
you as much bitterness as the knowledge of women—of one woman—has
brought me. To have believed me what you believed me—me whom you
conceived yourself to love!” He felt, perhaps the need to repeat it
that he might keep the grounds of his grievance well before his mind.

“If I have a mercy to beg of you it is that you will not shame me with
the reminder.”

“Of your faithlessness?” he asked. “Of your disloyal readiness to
believe the worst evil of me?”

“Of my ever having believed that I loved you. That is the thought that
shames me, as nothing else in life could shame me, as not even the
slave-market and all the insult to which you have submitted me could
shame me. You taunt me with my readiness to believe evil of you....”

“I do more than taunt you with it,” he broke in, his anger mounting
under the pitiless lash of her scorn. “I lay to your charge the wasted
years of my life, all the evil that has followed out of it, all that I
have suffered, all that I have lost, all that I am become.”

She looked up at him coldly, astonishingly mistress of herself. “You
lay all this to my charge?” she asked him.

“I do.” He was very vehement. “Had you not used me as you did, had you
not lent a ready ear to lies, that whelp my brother would never have
gone to such lengths, nor should I ever have afforded him the
opportunity.”

She shifted on the cushions of the divan and turned her shoulder to
him.

“All this is very idle,” she said coldly. Yet perhaps because she felt
that she had need to justify herself she continued: “If, after all, I
was so ready to believe evil of you, it is that my instincts must have
warned me of the evil that was ever in you. You have proved to me
to-night that it was not you who murdered Peter; but to attain that
proof you have done a deed that is even fouler and more shameful, a
deed that reveals to the full the blackness of your heart. Have you not
proved yourself a monster of vengeance and impiety?” She rose and faced
him again in her sudden passion. “Are you not—you that were born a
Cornish Christian gentleman—become a heathen and a robber, a renegade
and a pirate? Have you not sacrificed your very God to your vengeful
lust?”

He met her glance fully, never quailing before her denunciation, and
when she had ended on that note of question he counter-questioned her.

“And your instincts had forewarned you of all this? God’s life, woman!
can you invent no better tale than that?” He turned aside as two slaves
entered bearing an earthenware vessel. “Here comes your supper. I hope
your appetite is keener than your logic.”

They set the vessel, from which a savoury smell proceeded, upon the
little Moorish table by the divan. On the ground beside it they placed
a broad dish of baked earth in which there were a couple of loaves and
a red, short-necked amphora of water with a drinking-cup placed over
the mouth of it to act as a stopper.

They salaamed profoundly and padded softly out again.

“Sup,” he bade her shortly.

“I want no supper,” she replied, her manner sullen.

His cold eye played over her. “Henceforth, girl, you will consider not
what you want, but what I bid you do. I bid you eat; about it,
therefore.”

“I will not.”

“Will not?” he echoed slowly. “Is that a speech from slave to master?
Eat, I say.”

“I cannot! I cannot!” she protested.

“A slave may not live who cannot do her master’s bidding.”

“Then kill me,” she answered fiercely, leaping up to confront and dare
him. “Kill me. You are used to killing, and for that at least I should
be grateful.”

“I will kill you if I please,” he said in level icy tones. “But not to
please you. You don’t yet understand. You are my slave, my thing, my
property, and I will not suffer you to be damaged save at my own good
pleasure. Therefore, eat, or my Nubians shall whip you to quicken
appetite.”

For a moment she stood defiant before him, white and resolute. Then
quite suddenly, as if her will was being bent and crumpled under the
insistent pressure of his own, she drooped and sank down again to the
divan. Slowly, reluctantly she drew the dish nearer. Watching her, he
laughed quite silently.

She paused, appearing to seek for something. Failing to find it she
looked up at him again, between scorn and intercession.

“Am I to tear the meat with my fingers?” she demanded.

His eyes gleamed with understanding, or at least with suspicion. But he
answered her quite calmly—“It is against the Prophet’s law to defile
meat or bread by the contact of a knife. You must use the hands that
God has given you.”

“Do you mock me with the Prophet and his laws? What are the Prophet’s
laws to me? If eat I must, at least I will not eat like a heathen dog,
but in Christian fashion.”

To indulge her, as it seemed, he slowly drew the richly hilted dagger
from his girdle. “Let that serve you, then,” he said; and carelessly he
tossed it down beside her.

With a quick indrawn breath she pounced upon it. “At last,” she said,
“you give me something for which I can be grateful to you.” And on the
words she laid the point of it against her breast.

Like lightning he had dropped to one knee, and his hand had closed
about her wrist with such a grip that all her arm felt limp and
powerless. He was smiling into her eyes, his swarthy face close to her
own.

“Did you indeed suppose I trusted you? Did you really think me deceived
by your sudden pretence of yielding? When will you learn that I am not
a fool? I did it but to test your spirit.”

“Then now you know its temper,” she replied. “You know my intention.”

“Forewarned, forearmed,” said he.

She looked at him, with something that would have been mockery but for
the contempt that coloured it too deeply. “Is it so difficult a thing,”
she asked, “to snap the thread of life? Are there no ways of dying save
by the knife? You boast yourself my master; that I am your slave; that,
having bought me in the market-place, I belong to you body and soul.
How idle is that boast. My body you may bind and confine; but my
soul.... Be very sure that you shall be cheated of your bargain. You
boast yourself lord of life and death. A lie! Death is all that you can
command.”

Quick steps came pattering up the stairs, and before he could answer
her, before he had thought of words in which to do so, Ali confronted
him with the astounding announcement that there was a woman below
asking urgently to speak with him.

“A woman?” he questioned, frowning. “A Nasrani woman, do you mean?”

“No, my lord. A Muslim,” was the still more surprising information.

“A Muslim woman, here? Impossible!”

But even as he spoke a dark figure glided like a shadow across the
threshold on to the terrace. She was in black from head to foot,
including the veil that shrouded her, a veil of the proportions of a
mantle, serving to dissemble her very shape.

Ali swung upon her in a rage. “Did I not bid thee wait below, thou
daughter of shame?” he stormed. “She has followed me up, my lord, to
thrust herself in here upon you. Shall I drive her forth?”

“Let her be,” said Sakr-el-Bahr. And he waved Ali away. “Leave us!”

Something about that black immovable figure arrested his attention and
fired his suspicions. Unaccountably almost it brought to his mind the
thought of Ayoub-el-Sarnin and the bidding there had been for Rosamund
in the sôk.

He stood waiting for his visitor to speak and disclose herself. She on
her side continued immovable until Ali’s footsteps had faded in the
distance. Then, with a boldness entirely characteristic, with the
recklessness that betrayed her European origin, intolerant of the
Muslim restraint imposed upon her sex, she did what no True-believing
woman would have done. She tossed back that long black veil and
disclosed the pale countenance and languorous eyes of Fenzileh.

For all that it was no more than he had expected, yet upon beholding
her—her countenance thus bared to his regard—he recoiled a step.

“Fenzileh!” he cried. “What madness is this?”

Having announced herself in that dramatic fashion she composedly
readjusted her veil so that her countenance should once more be
decently concealed.

“To come here, to my house, and thus!” he protested. “Should this reach
the ears of thy lord, how will it fare with thee and with me? Away,
woman, and at once!” he bade her.

“No need to fear his knowing of this unless, thyself, thou tell him,”
she answered. “To thee I need no excuse if thou’lt but remember that
like thyself I was not born a Muslim.”

“But Algiers is not thy native Sicily, and whatever thou wast born it
were well to remember what thou art become.”

He went on at length to tell her of the precise degree of her folly,
but she cut in, stemming his protestation in full flow.

“These are idle words that but delay me.”

“To thy purpose then, in Allah’s name, that thus thou mayest depart the
sooner.”

She came to it straight enough on that uncompromising summons. She
pointed to Rosamund. “It concerns that slave,” said she. “I sent my
wazeer to the sôk to-day with orders to purchase her for me.”

“So I had supposed,” he said.

“But it seems that she caught thy fancy, and the fool suffered himself
to be outbidden.”

“Well?”

“Thou’lt relinquish her to me at the price she cost thee?” A faint note
of anxiety trembled in her voice.

“I am anguished to deny thee, O Fenzileh. She is not for sale.”

“Ah, wait,” she cried. “The price paid was high—many times higher than
I have ever heard tell was given for a slave, however lovely. Yet I
covet her. ’Tis a whim of mine, and I cannot suffer to be thwarted in
my whims. To gratify this one I will pay three thousand philips.”

He looked at her and wondered what devilries might be stirring in her
mind, what evil purpose she desired to serve.

“Thou’lt pay three thousand philips?” he said slowly. Then bluntly
asked her: “Why?”

“To gratify a whim, to please a fancy.”

“What is the nature of this costly whim?” he insisted.

“The desire to possess her for my own,” she answered evasively.

“And this desire to possess her, whence is it sprung?” he returned, as
patient as he was relentless.

“You ask too many questions,” she exclaimed with a flash of anger.

He shrugged and smiled. “You answer too few.”

She set her arms akimbo and faced him squarely. Faintly through her
veil he caught the gleam of her eyes, and he cursed the advantage she
had in that her face was covered from his reading.

“In a word, Oliver-Reis,” said she, “wilt sell her for three thousand
philips?”

“In a word—no,” he answered her.

“Thou’lt not? Not for three thousand philips?” Her voice was charged
with surprise, and he wondered was it real or assumed.

“Not for thirty thousand,” answered he. “She is mine, and I’ll not
relinquish her. So since I have proclaimed my mind, and since to tarry
here is fraught with peril for us both, I beg thee to depart.”

There fell a little pause, and neither of them noticed the alert
interest stamped upon the white face of Rosamund. Neither of them
suspected her knowledge of French which enabled her to follow most of
what was said in the lingua franca they employed.

Fenzileh drew close to him. “Thou’lt not relinquish her, eh?” she
asked, and he was sure she sneered. “Be not so confident. Thou’lt be
forced to it, my friend—if not to me, why then, to Asad. He is coming
for her, himself, in person.”

“Asad?” he cried, startled now.

“Asad-ed-Din,” she answered, and upon that resumed her pleading. “Come,
then! It were surely better to make a good bargain with me than a bad
one with the Basha.”

He shook his head and planted his feet squarely. “I intend to make no
bargain with either of you. This slave is not for sale.”

“Shalt thou dare resist Asad? I tell thee he will take her whether she
be for sale or not.”

“I see,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “And the fear of this, then, is
the source of thy whim to acquire her for thyself. Thou art not subtle,
O Fenzileh. The consciousness that thine own charms are fading sets
thee trembling lest so much loveliness should entirely cast thee from
thy lord’s regard, eh?”

If he could not see her face, and study there the effect of that thrust
of his, at least he observed the quiver that ran through her muffled
figure, he caught the note of anger that throbbed in her reply—“And if
that were so, what is’t to thee?”

“It may be much or little,” he replied thoughtfully.

“Indeed, it should be much,” she answered quickly, breathlessly. “Have
I not ever been thy friend? Have I not ever urged thy valour on my
lord’s notice and wrought like a true friend for thine advancement,
Sakr-el-Bahr?”

He laughed outright. “Hast thou so?” quoth he.

“Laugh as thou wilt, but it is true,” she insisted. “Lose me and thy
most valuable ally is lost—one who has the ear and favour of her lord.
For look, Sakr-el-Bahr, it is what would befall if another came to fill
my place, another who might poison Asad’s mind with lies against
thee—for surely she cannot love thee, this Frankish girl whom thou hast
torn from her home!”

“Be not concerned for that,” he answered lightly, his wits striving in
vain to plumb the depths and discover the nature of her purpose. “This
slave of mine shall never usurp thy place beside Asad.”

“O fool, Asad will take her whether she be for sale or not.”

He looked down upon her, head on one side and arms akimbo. “If he can
take her from me, the more easily can he take her from thee. No doubt
thou hast considered that, and in some dark Sicilian way considered too
how to provide against it. But the cost—hast thou counted that? What
will Asad say to thee when he learns how thou hast thwarted him?”

“What do I care for that?” she cried in sudden fury, her gestures
becoming a little wild. “She will be at the bottom of the harbour by
then with a stone about her neck. He may have me whipped. No doubt he
will. But ’twill end there. He will require me to console him for his
loss, and so all will be well again.”

At last he had drawn her, pumped her dry, as he imagined. Indeed,
indeed, he thought, he had been right to say she was not subtle. He had
been a fool to have permitted himself to be intrigued by so shallow, so
obvious a purpose. He shrugged and turned away from her.

“Depart in peace, O Fenzileh,” he said. “I yield her to none—be his
name Asad or Shaitan.”

His tone was final, and her answer seemed to accept at last his
determination. Yet she was very quick with that answer; so quick that
he might have suspected it to be preconceived.

“Then it is surely thine intent to wed her.” No voice could have been
more innocent and guileless than was hers now. “If so,” she went on,
“it were best done quickly, for marriage is the only barrier Asad will
not overthrow. He is devout, and out of his deep reverence for the
Prophet’s law he would be sure to respect such a bond as that. But be
very sure that he will respect nothing short of it.”

Yet notwithstanding her innocence and assumed simplicity—because of it,
perhaps—he read her as if she had been an open book; it no longer
mattered that her face was veiled.

“And thy purpose would be equally well served, eh?” he questioned her,
sly in his turn.

“Equally,” she admitted.

“Say ‘better,’ Fenzileh,” he rejoined. “I said thou art not subtle. By
the Koran, I lied. Thou art subtle as the serpent. Yet I see whither
thou art gliding. Were I to be guided by thine advice a twofold purpose
would be served. First, I should place her beyond Asad’s reach, and
second, I should be embroiled with him for having done so. What could
more completely satisfy thy wishes?”

“Thou dost me wrong,” she protested. “I have ever been thy friend. I
would that....” She broke off suddenly to listen. The stillness of the
night was broken by cries from the direction of the Bab-el-Oueb. She
ran swiftly to the parapet whence the gate was to be seen and leaned
far out.

“Look, look!” she cried, and there was a tremor of fear in her voice.
“It is he—Asad-ed-Din.”

Sakr-el-Bahr crossed to her side and in a glare of torches saw a body
of men coming forth from the black archway of the gate.

“It almost seems as if, departing from thy usual custom, thou hast
spoken truth, O Fenzileh.”

She faced him, and he suspected the venomous glance darted at him
through her veil. Yet her voice when she spoke was cold. “In a moment
thou’lt have no single doubt of it. But what of me?” The question was
added in a quickening tone. “He must not find me here. He would kill
me, I think.”

“I am sure he would,” Sakr-el-Bahr agreed. “Yet muffled thus, who
should recognize thee? Away, then, ere he comes. Take cover in the
courtyard until he shall have passed. Didst thou come alone?”

“Should I trust anyone with the knowledge that I had visited thee?” she
asked, and he admired the strong Sicilian spirit in her that not all
these years in the Basha’s hareem had sufficed to extinguish.

She moved quickly to the door, to pause again on the threshold.

“Thou’lt not relinquish her? Thou’lt not.”

“Be at ease,” he answered her, on so resolved a note that she departed
satisfied.




CHAPTER XIII.
IN THE SIGHT OF ALLAH


Sakr-el-Bahr stood lost in thought after she had gone. Again he weighed
her every word and considered precisely how he should meet Asad, and
how refuse him, if the Basha’s were indeed such an errand as Fenzileh
had heralded.

Thus in silence he remained waiting for Ali or another to summon him to
the presence of the Basha. Instead, however, when Ali entered it was
actually to announce Asad-ed-Din, who followed immediately upon his
heels, having insisted in his impatience upon being conducted straight
to the presence of Sakr-el-Bahr.

“The peace of the Prophet upon thee,” my son, was the Basha’s greeting.

“And upon thee, my lord.” Sakr-el-Bahr salaamed. “My house is
honoured.” With a gesture he dismissed Ali.

“I come to thee a suppliant,” said Asad, advancing.

“A suppliant, thou? No need, my lord. I have no will that is not the
echo of thine own.”

The Basha’s questing eyes went beyond him and glowed as they rested
upon Rosamund.

“I come in haste,” he said, “like any callow lover, guided by my every
instinct to the presence of her I seek—this Frankish pearl, this
pen-faced captive of thy latest raid. I was away from the Kasbah when
that pig Tsamanni returned thither from the sôk; but when at last I
learnt that he had failed to purchase her as I commanded, I could have
wept for very grief. I feared at first that some merchant from the Sus
might have bought her and departed; but when I heard—blessed be
Allah!—that thou wert the buyer, I was comforted again. For thou’lt
yield her up to me, my son.”

He spoke with such confidence that Oliver had a difficulty in choosing
the words that were to disillusion him. Therefore he stood in hesitancy
a moment.

“I will make good thy, loss,” Asad ran on. “Thou shalt have the sixteen
hundred philips paid and another five hundred to console thee. Say that
will content thee; for I boil with impatience.”

Sakr-el-Bahr smiled grimly. “It is an impatience well known to me, my
lord, where she is concerned,” he answered slowly. “I boiled with it
myself for five interminable years. To make an end of it I went a
distant perilous voyage to England in a captured Frankish vessel. Thou
didst not know, O Asad, else thou wouldst....”

“Bah!” broke in the Basha. “Thou’rt a huckster born. There is none like
thee, Sakr-el-Bahr, in any game of wits. Well, well, name thine own
price, strike thine own profit out of my impatience and let us have
done.”

“My lord,” he said quietly, “it is not the profit that is in question.
She is not for sale.”

Asad blinked at him, speechless, and slowly a faint colour crept into
his sallow cheeks.

“Not... not for sale?” he echoed, faltering in his amazement.

“Not if thou offered me thy Bashalik as the price of her,” was the
solemn answer. Then more warmly, in a voice that held a note of
intercession—“Ask anything else that is mine,” he continued, “and
gladly will I lay it at thy feet in earnest of my loyalty and love for
thee.”

“But I want nothing else.” Asad’s tone was impatient, petulant almost.
“I want this slave.”

“Then,” replied Oliver, “I cast myself upon thy mercy and beseech thee
to turn thine eyes elsewhere.”

Asad scowled upon him. “Dost thou deny me?” he demanded, throwing back
his head.

“Alas!” said Sakr-el-Bahr.

There fell a pause. Darker and darker grew the countenance of Asad,
fiercer glowed the eyes he bent upon his lieutenant. “I see,” he said
at last, with a calm so oddly at variance with his looks as to be
sinister. “I see. It seems that there is more truth in Fenzileh than I
suspected. So!” He considered the corsair a moment with his sunken
smouldering eyes.

Then he addressed him in a tone that vibrated with his suppressed
anger. “Bethink thee, Sakr-el-Bahr, of what thou art, of what I have
made thee. Bethink thee of all the bounty these hands have lavished on
thee. Thou art my own lieutenant, and mayest one day be more. In
Algiers there is none above thee save myself. Art, then, so thankless
as to deny me the first thing I ask of thee? Truly is it written
‘Ungrateful is Man.’”

“Didst thou know,” began Sakr-el-Bahr, “all that is involved for me in
this....”

“I neither know nor care,” Asad cut in. “Whatever it may be, it should
be as naught when set against my will.” Then he discarded anger for
cajolery. He set a hand upon Sakr-el-Bahr’s stalwart shoulder. “Come,
my son. I will deal generously with thee out of my love, and I will put
thy refusal from my mind.”

“Be generous, my lord, to the point of forgetting that ever thou didst
ask me for her.”

“Dost still refuse?” The voice, honeyed an instant ago, rang harsh
again. “Take care how far thou strain my patience. Even as I have
raised thee from the dirt, so at a word can I cast thee down again.
Even as I broke the shackles that chained thee to the rowers’ bench, so
can I rivet them on thee anew.”

“All this canst thou do,” Sakr-el-Bahr agreed. “And since, knowing it,
I still hold to what is doubly mine—by right of capture and of
purchase—thou mayest conceive how mighty are my reasons. Be merciful,
then, Asad....”

“Must I take her by force in spite of thee?” roared the Basha.

Sakr-el-Bahr stiffened. He threw back his head and looked the Basha
squarely in the eyes.

“Whilst I live, not even that mayest thou do,” he answered.

“Disloyal, mutinous dog! Wilt thou resist me—me?”

“It is my prayer that thou’lt not be so ungenerous and unjust as to
compel thy servant to a course so hateful.”

Asad sneered. “Is that thy last word?” he demanded.

“Save only that in all things else I am thy slave, O Asad.”

A moment the Basha stood regarding him, his glance baleful. Then
deliberately, as one who has taken his resolve, he strode to the door.
On the threshold he paused and turned again. “Wait!” he said, and on
that threatening word departed.

Sakr-el-Bahr remained a moment where he had stood during the interview,
then with a shrug he turned. He met Rosamund’s eyes fixed intently upon
him, and invested with a look he could not read. He found himself
unable to meet it, and he turned away. It was inevitable that in such a
moment the earlier stab of remorse should be repeated. He had
overreached himself indeed. Despair settled down upon him, a full
consciousness of the horrible thing he had done, which seemed now so
irrevocable. In his silent anguish he almost conceived that he had
mistaken his feelings for Rosamund; that far from hating her as he had
supposed, his love for her had not yet been slain, else surely he
should not be tortured now by the thought of her becoming Asad’s prey.
If he hated her, indeed, as he had supposed, he would have surrendered
her and gloated.

He wondered was his present frame of mind purely the result of his
discovery that the appearances against him had been stronger far than
he imagined, so strong as to justify her conviction that he was her
brother’s slayer.

And then her voice, crisp and steady, cut into his torture of
consideration.

“Why did you deny him?”

He swung round again to face her, amazed, horror-stricken.

“You understood?” he gasped.

“I understood enough,” said she. “This lingua franca is none so
different from French.” And again she asked—“Why did you deny him?”

He paced across to her side and stood looking down at her.

“Do you ask why?”

“Indeed,” she said bitterly, “there is scarce the need perhaps. And yet
can it be that your lust of vengeance is so insatiable that sooner than
willingly forgo an ounce of it you will lose your head?”

His face became grim again. “Of course,” he sneered, “it would be so
that you’d interpret me.”

“Nay. If I have asked it is because I doubt.”

“Do you realize what it can mean to become the prey of Asad-ed-Din?”

She shuddered, and her glance fell from his, yet her voice was composed
when she answered him—“Is it so very much worse than becoming the prey
of Oliver-Reis or Sakr-el-Bahr, or whatever they may call you?”

“If you say that it is all one to you there’s an end to my opposing
him,” he answered coldly. “You may go to him. If I resisted him—like a
fool, perhaps—it was for no sake of vengeance upon you. It was because
the thought of it fills me with horror.”

“Then it should fill you with horror of yourself no less,” said she.

His answer startled her.

“Perhaps it does,” he said, scarcely above a murmur. “Perhaps it does.”

She flashed him an upward glance and looked as if she would have
spoken. But he went on, suddenly passionate, without giving her time to
interrupt him. “O God! It needed this to show me the vileness of the
thing I have done. Asad has no such motives as had I. I wanted you that
I might punish you. But he...O God!” he groaned, and for a moment put
his face to his hands.

She rose slowly, a strange agitation stirring in her, her bosom
galloping. But in his overwrought condition he failed to observe it.
And then like a ray of hope to illumine his despair came the counsel
that Fenzileh had given him, the barrier which she had said that Asad,
being a devout Muslim, would never dare to violate.

“There is a way,” he cried. “There is the way suggested by Fenzileh at
the promptings of her malice.” An instant he hesitated, his eyes
averted. Then he made his plunge. “You must marry me.”

It was almost as if he had struck her. She recoiled. Instantly
suspicion awoke in her; swiftly it drew to a conviction that he had but
sought to trick her by a pretended penitence.

“Marry you!” she echoed.

“Ay,” he insisted. And he set himself to explain to her how if she were
his wife she must be sacred and inviolable to all good Muslimeen, that
none could set a finger upon her without doing outrage to the Prophet’s
holy law, and that, whoever might be so disposed, Asad was not of
those, since Asad was perfervidly devout. “Thus only,” he ended, “can I
place you beyond his reach.”

But she was still scornfully reluctant.

“It is too desperate a remedy even for so desperate an ill,” said she,
and thus drove him into a frenzy of impatience with her.

“You must, I say,” he insisted, almost angrily. “You must—or else
consent to be borne this very night to Asad’s hareem—and not even as
his wife, but as his slave. Oh, you must trust me for your own sake!
You must!”

“Trust you!” she cried, and almost laughed in the intensity of her
scorn. “Trust you! How can I trust one who is a renegade and worse?”

He controlled himself that he might reason with her, that by cold logic
he might conquer her consent.

“You are very unmerciful,” he said. “In judging me you leave out of all
account the suffering through which I have gone and what yourself
contributed to it. Knowing now how falsely I was accused and what other
bitter wrongs I suffered, consider that I was one to whom the man and
the woman I most loved in all this world had proven false. I had lost
faith in man and in God, and if I became a Muslim, a renegade, and a
corsair, it was because there was no other gate by which I could escape
the unutterable toil of the oar to which I had been chained.” He looked
at her sadly. “Can you find no excuse for me in all that?”

It moved her a little, for if she maintained a hostile attitude, at
least she put aside her scorn.

“No wrongs,” she told him, almost with sorrow in her voice, “could
justify you in outraging chivalry, in dishonouring your manhood, in
abusing your strength to persecute a woman. Whatever the causes that
may have led to it, you have fallen too low, sir, to make it possible
that I should trust you.”

He bowed his head under the rebuke which already he had uttered in his
own heart. It was just and most deserved, and since he recognized its
justice he found it impossible to resent it.

“I know,” he said. “But I am not asking you to trust me to my profit,
but to your own. It is for your sake alone that I implore you to do
this.” Upon a sudden inspiration he drew the heavy dagger from his
girdle and proffered it, hilt foremost. “If you need an earnest of my
good faith,” he said, “take this knife with which to-night you
attempted to stab yourself. At the first sign that I am false to my
trust, use it as you will—upon me or upon yourself.”

She pondered him in some surprise. Then slowly she put out her hand to
take the weapon, as he bade her.

“Are you not afraid,” she asked him, “that I shall use it now, and so
make an end?”

“I am trusting you,” he said, “that in return you may trust me.
Further, I am arming you against the worst. For if it comes to choice
between death and Asad, I shall approve your choice of death. But let
me add that it were foolish to choose death whilst yet there is a
chance of life.”

“What chance?” she asked, with a faint return of her old scorn. “The
chance of life with you?”

“No,” he answered firmly. “If you will trust me, I swear that I will
seek to undo the evil I have done. Listen. At dawn my galeasse sets out
upon a raid. I will convey you secretly aboard and find a way to land
you in some Christian country—Italy or France—whence you may make your
way home again.”

“But meanwhile,” she reminded him, “I shall have become your wife.”

He smiled wistfully. “Do you still fear a trap? Can naught convince you
of my sincerity? A Muslim marriage is not binding upon a Christian, and
I shall account it no marriage. It will be no more than a pretence to
shelter you until we are away.”

“How can I trust your word in that?”

“How?” He paused, baffled; but only for a moment. “You have the
dagger,” he answered pregnantly.

She stood considering, her eyes upon the weapon’s lividly gleaming
blade. “And this marriage?” she asked. “How is it to take place?”

He explained to her then that by the Muslim law all that was required
was a declaration made before a kadi, or his superior, and in the
presence of witnesses. He was still at his explanation when from below
there came a sound of voices, the tramp of feet, and the flash of
torches.

“Here is Asad returning in force,” he cried, and his voice trembled.
“Do you consent?”

“But the kadi?” she inquired, and by the question he knew that she was
won to his way of saving her.

“I said the kadi or his superior. Asad himself shall be our priest, his
followers our witnesses.”

“And if he refuses? He will refuse!” she cried, clasping her hands
before her in her excitement.

“I shall not ask him. I shall take him by surprise.”

“It... it must anger him. He may avenge himself for what he must deem a
trick.”

“Ay,” he answered, wild-eyed. “I have thought of that, too. But it is a
risk we must run. If we do not prevail, then—”

“I have the dagger,” she cried fearlessly.

“And for me there will be the rope or the sword,” he answered. “Be
calm! They come!”

But the steps that pattered up the stairs were Ali’s. He flung upon the
terrace in alarm.

“My lord, my lord! Asad-ed-Din is here in force. He has an armed
following with him!”

“There is naught to fear,” said Sakr-el-Bahr, with every show of calm.
“All will be well.”

Asad swept up the stairs and out upon that terrace to confront his
rebellious lieutenant. After him came a dozen black-robed janissaries
with scimitars along which the light of the torches rippled in little
runnels as of blood.

The Basha came to a halt before Sakr-el-Bahr, his arms majestically
folded, his head thrown back, so that his long white beard jutted
forward.

“I am returned,” he said, “to employ force where gentleness will not
avail. Yet I pray that Allah may have lighted thee to a wiser frame of
mind.”

“He has, indeed, my lord,” replied Sakr-el-Bahr.

“The praise to Him!” exclaimed Asad in a voice that rang with joy. “The
girl, then!” And he held out a hand.

Sakr-el-Bahr stepped back to her and took her hand in his as if to lead
her forward. Then he spoke the fateful words.

“In Allah’s Holy Name and in His All-seeing eyes, before thee,
Asad-ed-Din, and in the presence of these witnesses, I take this woman
to be my wife by the merciful law of the Prophet of Allah the All-wise,
the All-pitying.”

The words were out and the thing was done before Asad had realized the
corsair’s intent. A gasp of dismay escaped him; then his visage grew
inflamed, his eyes blazed.

But Sakr-el-Bahr, cool and undaunted before that royal anger, took the
scarf that lay about Rosamund’s shoulders, and raising it, flung it
over her head, so that her face was covered by it.

“May Allah rot off the hand of him who in contempt of our Lord
Mahomet’s holy law may dare to unveil that face, and may Allah bless
this union and cast into the pit of Gehenna any who shall attempt to
dissolve a bond that is tied in His All-seeing eyes.”

It was formidable. Too formidable for Asad-ed-Din. Behind him his
janissaries like hounds in leash stood eagerly awaiting his command.
But none came. He stood there breathing heavily, swaying a little, and
turning from red to pale in the battle that was being fought within him
between rage and vexation on the one hand and his profound piety on the
other. And as he yet hesitated perhaps Sakr-el-Bahr assisted his piety
to gain the day.

“Now you will understand why I would not yield her, O mighty Asad,” he
said. “Thyself hast thou oft and rightly reproached me with my
celibacy, reminding me that it is not pleasing in the sight of Allah,
that it is unworthy a good Muslim. At last it hath pleased the Prophet
to send me such a maid as I could take to wife.”

Asad bowed his head. “What is written is written,” he said in the voice
of one who admonished himself. Then he raised his arms aloft. “Allah is
All-knowing,” he declared. “His will be done!”

“Ameen,” said Sakr-el-Bahr very solemnly and with a great surge of
thankful prayer to his own long-forgotten God.

The Basha stayed yet a moment, as if he would have spoken. Then
abruptly he turned and waved a hand to his janissaries. “Away!” was all
he said to them, and stalked out in their wake.




CHAPTER XIV.
THE SIGN


From behind her lattice, still breathless from the haste she had made,
and with her whelp Marzak at her side, Fenzileh had witnessed that
first angry return of the Basha from the house of Sakr-el-Bahr.

She had heard him bawling for Abdul Mohktar, the leader of his
janissaries, and she had seen the hasty mustering of a score of these
soldiers in the courtyard, where the ruddy light of torches mingled
with the white light of the full moon. She had seen them go hurrying
away with Asad himself at their head, and she had not known whether to
weep or to laugh, whether to fear or to rejoice.

“It is done,” Marzak had cried exultantly. “The dog hath withstood him
and so destroyed himself. There will be an end to Sakr-el-Bahr this
night.” And he had added: “The praise to Allah!”

But from Fenzileh came no response to his prayer of thanksgiving. True,
Sakr-el-Bahr must be destroyed, and by a sword that she herself had
forged. Yet was it not inevitable that the stroke which laid him low
must wound her on its repercussion? That was the question to which now
she sought an answer. For all her eagerness to speed the corsair to his
doom, she had paused sufficiently to weigh the consequences to herself;
she had not overlooked the circumstance that an inevitable result of
this must be Asad’s appropriation of that Frankish slave-girl. But at
the time it had seemed to her that even this price was worth paying to
remove Sakr-el-Bahr definitely and finally from her son’s path—which
shows that, after all, Fenzileh the mother was capable of some
self-sacrifice. She comforted herself now with the reflection that the
influence, whose waning she feared might be occasioned by the
introduction of a rival into Asad’s hareem, would no longer be so
vitally necessary to herself and Marzak once Sakr-el-Bahr were removed.
The rest mattered none so much to her. Yet it mattered something, and
the present state of things left her uneasy, her mind a cockpit of
emotions. Her grasp could not encompass all her desires at once, it
seemed; and whilst she could gloat over the gratification of one, she
must bewail the frustration of another. Yet in the main she felt that
she should account herself the gainer.

In this state of mind she had waited, scarce heeding the savagely
joyous and entirely selfish babblings of her cub, who cared little what
might betide his mother as the price of the removal of that hated rival
from his path. For him, at least, there was nothing but profit in the
business, no cause for anything but satisfaction; and that satisfaction
he voiced with a fine contempt for his mother’s feelings.

Anon they witnessed Asad’s return. They saw the janissaries come
swinging into the courtyard and range themselves there whilst the Basha
made his appearance, walking slowly, with steps that dragged a little,
his head sunk upon his breast, his hands behind him. They waited to see
slaves following him, leading or carrying the girl he had gone to
fetch. But they waited in vain, intrigued and uneasy.

They heard the harsh voice in which Asad dismissed his followers, and
the clang of the closing gate; and they saw him pacing there alone in
the moonlight, ever in that attitude of dejection.

What had happened? Had he killed them both? Had the girl resisted him
to such an extent that he had lost all patience and in one of those
rages begotten of such resistance made an end of her?

Thus did Fenzileh question herself, and since she could not doubt but
that Sakr-el-Bahr was slain, she concluded that the rest must be as she
conjectured. Yet, the suspense torturing her, she summoned Ayoub and
sent him to glean from Abdul Mohktar the tale of what had passed. In
his own hatred of Sakr-el-Bahr, Ayoub went willingly enough and hoping
for the worst. He returned disappointed, with a tale that sowed dismay
in Fenzileh and Marzak.

Fenzileh, however, made a swift recovery. After all, it was the best
that could have happened. It should not be difficult to transmute that
obvious dejection of Asad’s into resentment, and to fan this into a
rage that must end by consuming Sakr-el-Bahr. And so the thing could be
accomplished without jeopardy to her own place at Asad’s side. For it
was inconceivable that he should now take Rosamund to his hareem.
Already the fact that she had been paraded with naked face among the
Faithful must in itself have been a difficult obstacle to his pride.
But it was utterly impossible that he could so subject his self-respect
to his desire as to take to himself a woman who had been the wife of
his servant.

Fenzileh saw her way very clearly. It was through Asad’s devoutness—as
she herself had advised, though scarcely expecting such rich results as
these—that he had been thwarted by Sakr-el-Bahr. That same devoutness
must further be played upon now to do the rest.

Taking up a flimsy silken veil, she went out to him where he now sat on
the divan under the awning, alone there in the tepid-scented summer
night. She crept to his side with the soft, graceful, questing
movements of a cat, and sat there a moment unheeded almost—such was his
abstraction—her head resting lightly against his shoulder.

“Lord of my soul,” she murmured presently, “thou art sorrowing.” Her
voice was in itself a soft and soothing caress.

He started, and she caught the gleam of his eyes turned suddenly upon
her.

“Who told thee so?” he asked suspiciously.

“My heart,” she answered, her voice melodious as a viol. “Can sorrow
burden thine and mine go light?” she wooed him. “Is happiness possible
to me when thou art downcast? In there I felt thy melancholy, and thy
need of me, and I am come to share thy burden, or to bear it all for
thee.” Her arms were raised, and her fingers interlocked themselves
upon his shoulder.

He looked down at her, and his expression softened. He needed comfort,
and never was she more welcome to him.

Gradually and with infinite skill she drew from him the story of what
had happened. When she had gathered it, she loosed her indignation.

“The dog!” she cried. “The faithless, ungrateful hound! Yet have I
warned thee against him, O light of my poor eyes, and thou hast scorned
me for the warnings uttered by my love. Now at last thou knowest him,
and he shall trouble thee no longer. Thou’lt cast him off, reduce him
again to the dust from which thy bounty raised him.”

But Asad did not respond. He sat there in a gloomy abstraction, staring
straight before him. At last he sighed wearily. He was just, and he had
a conscience, as odd a thing as it was awkward in a corsair Basha.

“In what hath befallen,” he answered moodily, “there is naught to
justify me in casting aside the stoutest soldier of Islam. My duty to
Allah will not suffer it.”

“Yet his duty to thee suffered him to thwart thee, O my lord,” she
reminded him very softly.

“In my desires—ay!” he answered, and for a moment his voice quivered
with passion. Then he repressed it, and continued more calmly—“Shall my
self-seeking overwhelm my duty to the Faith? Shall the matter of a
slave-girl urge me to sacrifice the bravest soldier of Islam, the
stoutest champion of the Prophet’s law? Shall I bring down upon my head
the vengeance of the One by destroying a man who is a scourge of
scorpions unto the infidel—and all this that I may gratify my personal
anger against him, that I may avenge the thwarting of a petty desire?”

“Dost thou still say, O my life, that Sakr-el-Bahr is the stoutest
champion of the Prophet’s law?” she asked him softly, yet on a note of
amazement.

“It is not I that say it, but his deeds,” he answered sullenly.

“I know of one deed no True-Believer could have wrought. If proof were
needed of his infidelity he hath now afforded it in taking to himself a
Nasrani wife. Is it not written in the Book to be Read: ‘Marry not
idolatresses’? Is not that the Prophet’s law, and hath he not broken
it, offending at once against Allah and against thee, O fountain of my
soul?”

Asad frowned. Here was truth indeed, something that he had entirely
overlooked. Yet justice compelled him still to defend Sakr-el-Bahr, or
else perhaps he but reasoned to prove to himself that the case against
the corsair was indeed complete.

“He may have sinned in thoughtlessness,” he suggested.

At that she cried out in admiration of him. “What a fount of mercy and
forbearance art thou, O father of Marzak! Thou’rt right as in all
things. It was no doubt in thoughtlessness that he offended, but would
such thoughtlessness be possible in a True-Believer—in one worthy to be
dubbed by thee the champion of the Prophet’s Holy Law?”

It was a shrewd thrust, that pierced the armour of conscience in which
he sought to empanoply himself. He sat very thoughtful, scowling darkly
at the inky shadow of the wall which the moon was casting. Suddenly he
rose.

“By Allah, thou art right!” he cried. “So that he thwarted me and kept
that Frankish woman for himself, he cared not how he sinned against the
law.”

She glided to her knees and coiled her arms about his waist, looking up
at him. “Still art thou ever merciful, ever sparing in adverse
judgment. Is that all his fault, O Asad?”

“All?” he questioned, looking down at her. “What more is there?”

“I would there were no more. Yet more there is, to which thy angelic
mercy blinds thee. He did worse. Not merely was he reckless of how he
sinned against the law, he turned the law to his own base uses and so
defiled it.”

“How?” he asked quickly, eagerly almost.

“He employed it as a bulwark behind which to shelter himself and her.
Knowing that thou who art the Lion and defender of the Faith wouldst
bend obediently to what is written in the Book, he married her to place
her beyond thy reach.”

“The praise to Him who is All-wise and lent me strength to do naught
unworthy!” he cried in a great voice, glorifying himself. “I might have
slain him to dissolve the impious bond, yet I obeyed what is written.”

“Thy forbearance hath given joy to the angels,” she answered him, “and
yet a man was found so base as to trade upon it and upon thy piety, O
Asad!”

He shook off her clasp, and strode away from her a prey to agitation.
He paced to and fro in the moonlight there, and she, well-content,
reclined upon the cushions of the divan, a thing of infinite grace, her
gleaming eyes discreetly veiled from him—waiting until her poison
should have done its work.

She saw him halt, and fling up his arms, as if apostrophizing Heaven,
as if asking a question of the stars that twinkled in the wide-flung
nimbus of the moon.

Then at last he paced slowly back to her. He was still undecided. There
was truth in what she had said; yet he knew and weighed her hatred of
Sakr-el-Bahr, knew how it must urge her to put the worst construction
upon any act of his, knew her jealousy for Marzak, and so he mistrusted
her arguments and mistrusted himself. Also there was his own love of
Sakr-el-Bahr that would insist upon a place in the balance of his
judgment. His mind was in turmoil.

“Enough,” he said almost roughly. “I pray that Allah may send me
counsel in the night.” And upon that he stalked past her, up the steps,
and so into the house.

She followed him. All night she lay at his feet to be ready at the
first peep of dawn to buttress a purpose that she feared was still
weak, and whilst he slept fitfully, she slept not at all, but lay
wide-eyed and watchful.

At the first note of the mueddin’s voice, he leapt from his couch
obedient to its summons, and scarce had the last note of it died upon
the winds of dawn than he was afoot, beating his hands together to
summon slaves and issuing his orders, from which she gathered that he
was for the harbour there and then.

“May Allah have inspired thee, O my lord!” she cried. And asked him:
“What is thy resolve?”

“I go to seek a sign,” he answered her, and upon that departed, leaving
her in a frame of mind that was far from easy.

She summoned Marzak, and bade him accompany his father, breathed swift
instructions of what he should do and how do it.

“Thy fate has been placed in thine own hands,” she admonished him. “See
that thou grip it firmly now.”

In the courtyard Marzak found his father in the act of mounting a white
mule that had been brought him.

He was attended by his wazeer Tsamanni, Biskaine, and some other of his
captains. Marzak begged leave to go with him. It was carelessly
granted, and they set out, Marzak walking by his father’s stirrup, a
little in advance of the others. For a while there was silence between
father and son, then the latter spoke.

“It is my prayer, O my father, that thou art resolved to depose the
faithless Sakr-el-Bahr from the command of this expedition.”

Asad considered his son with a sombre eye. “Even now the galeasse
should be setting out if the argosy is to be intercepted,” he said. “If
Sakr-el-Bahr does not command, who shall, in Heaven’s name?”

“Try me, O my father,” cried Marzak.

Asad smiled with grim wistfulness. “Art weary of life, O my son, that
thou wouldst go to thy death and take the galeasse to destruction?”

“Thou art less than just, O my father,” Marzak protested.

“Yet more than kind, O my son,” replied Asad, and they went on in
silence thereafter, until they came to the mole.

The splendid galeasse was moored alongside, and all about her there was
great bustle of preparation for departure. Porters moved up and down
the gangway that connected her with the shore, carrying bales of
provisions, barrels of water, kegs of gunpowder, and other necessaries
for the voyage, and even as Asad and his followers reached the head of
that gangway, four negroes were staggering down it under the load of a
huge palmetto bale that was slung from staves yoked to their shoulders.

On the poop stood Sakr-el-Bahr with Othmani, Ali, Jasper-Reis, and some
other officers. Up and down the gangway paced Larocque and Vigitello,
two renegade boatswains, one French and the other Italian, who had
sailed with him on every voyage for the past two years. Larocque was
superintending the loading of the vessel, bawling his orders for the
bestowal of provisions here, of water yonder, and of powder about the
mainmast. Vigitello was making a final inspection of the slaves at the
oars.

As the palmetto pannier was brought aboard, Larocque shouted to the
negroes to set it down by the mainmast. But here Sakr-el-Bahr
interfered, bidding them, instead, to bring it up to the stern and
place it in the poop-house.

Asad had dismounted, and stood with Marzak at his side at the head of
the gangway when the youth finally begged his father himself to take
command of this expedition, allowing him to come as his lieutenant and
so learn the ways of the sea.

Asad looked at him curiously, but answered nothing. He went aboard,
Marzak and the others following him. It was at this moment that
Sakr-el-Bahr first became aware of the Basha’s presence, and he came
instantly forward to do the honours of his galley. If there was a
sudden uneasiness in his heart his face was calm and his glance as
arrogant and steady as ever.

“May the peace of Allah overshadow thee and thy house, O mighty Asad,”
was his greeting. “We are on the point of casting off, and I shall sail
the more securely for thy blessing.”

Asad considered him with eyes of wonder. So much effrontery, so much
ease after their last scene together seemed to the Basha a thing
incredible, unless, indeed, it were accompanied by a conscience
entirely at peace.

“It has been proposed to me that I shall do more than bless this
expedition—that I shall command it,” he answered, watching Sakr-el-Bahr
closely. He observed the sudden flicker of the corsair’s eyes, the only
outward sign of his inward dismay.

“Command it?” echoed Sakr-el-Bahr. “’Twas proposed to thee?” And he
laughed lightly as if to dismiss that suggestion.

That laugh was a tactical error. It spurred Asad. He advanced slowly
along the vessel’s waist-deck to the mainmast—for she was rigged with
main and foremasts. There he halted again to look into the face of
Sakr-el-Bahr who stepped along beside him.

“Why didst thou laugh?” he questioned shortly.

“Why? At the folly of such a proposal,” said Sakr-el-Bahr in haste, too
much in haste to seek a diplomatic answer.

Darker grew the Basha’s frown. “Folly?” quoth he. “Wherein lies the
folly?”

Sakr-el-Bahr made haste to cover his mistake. “In the suggestion that
such poor quarry as waits us should be worthy thine endeavour, should
warrant the Lion of the Faith to unsheathe his mighty claws. Thou,” he
continued with ringing scorn, “thou the inspirer of a hundred glorious
fights in which whole fleets have been engaged, to take the seas upon
so trivial an errand—one galeasse to swoop upon a single galley of
Spain! It were unworthy thy great name, beneath the dignity of thy
valour!” and by a gesture he contemptuously dismissed the subject.

But Asad continued to ponder him with cold eyes, his face inscrutable.
“Why, here’s a change since yesterday!” he said.

“A change, my lord?”

“But yesterday in the market-place thyself didst urge me to join this
expedition and to command it,” Asad reminded him, speaking with
deliberate emphasis. “Thyself invoked the memory of the days that are
gone, when, scimitar in hand, we charged side by side aboard the
infidel, and thou didst beseech me to engage again beside thee. And
now....” He spread his hands, anger gathered in his eyes. “Whence this
change?” he demanded sternly.

Sakr-el-Bahr hesitated, caught in his own toils. He looked away from
Asad a moment; he had a glimpse of the handsome flushed face of Marzak
at his father’s elbow, of Biskaine, Tsamanni, and the others all
staring at him in amazement, and even of some grimy sunburned faces
from the rowers’ bench on his left that were looking on with dull
curiosity.

He smiled, seeming outwardly to remain entirely unruffled. “Why... it
is that I have come to perceive thy reasons for refusing. For the rest,
it is as I say, the quarry is not worthy of the hunter.”

Marzak uttered a soft sneering laugh, as if the true reason of the
corsair’s attitude were quite clear to him. He fancied too, and he was
right in this, that Sakr-el-Bahr’s odd attitude had accomplished what
persuasions addressed to Asad-ed-Din might to the end have failed to
accomplish—had afforded him the sign he was come to seek. For it was in
that moment that Asad determined to take command himself.

“It almost seems,” he said slowly, smiling, “as if thou didst not want
me. If so, it is unfortunate; for I have long neglected my duty to my
son, and I am resolved at last to repair that error. We accompany thee
upon this expedition, Sakr-el-Bahr. Myself I will command it, and
Marzak shall be my apprentice in the ways of the sea.”

Sakr-el-Bahr said not another word in protest against that proclaimed
resolve. He salaamed, and when he spoke there was almost a note of
gladness in his voice.

“The praise to Allah, then, since thou’rt determined. It is not for me
to urge further the unworthiness of the quarry since I am the gainer by
thy resolve.”




CHAPTER XV.
THE VOYAGE


His resolve being taken, Asad drew Tsamanni aside and spent some
moments in talk with him, giving him certain instructions for the
conduct of affairs ashore during his absence. That done, and the wazeer
dismissed, the Basha himself gave the order to cast off, an order which
there was no reason to delay, since all was now in readiness.

The gangway was drawn ashore, the boatswains whistle sounded, and the
steersmen leapt to their niches in the stern, grasping the shafts of
the great steering-oars. A second blast rang out, and down the
gangway-deck came Vigitello and two of his mates, all three armed with
long whips of bullock-hide, shouting to the slaves to make ready. And
then, on the note of a third blast of Larocque’s whistle, the
fifty-four poised oars dipped to the water, two hundred and fifty
bodies bent as one, and when they heaved themselves upright again the
great galeasse shot forward and so set out upon her adventurous voyage.
From her mainmast the red flag with its green crescent was unfurled to
the breeze, and from the crowded mole, and the beach where a long line
of spectators had gathered, there burst a great cry of valediction.

That breeze blowing stiffly from the desert was Lionel’s friend that
day. Without it his career at the oar might have been short indeed. He
was chained, like the rest, stark naked, save for a loincloth, in the
place nearest the gangway on the first starboard bench abaft the narrow
waist-deck, and ere the galeasse had made the short distance between
the mole and the island at the end of it, the boatswain’s whip had
coiled itself about his white shoulders to urge him to better exertion
than he was putting forth. He had screamed under the cruel cut, but
none had heeded him. Lest the punishment should be repeated, he had
thrown all his weight into the next strokes of the oar, until by the
time the Peñon was reached the sweat was running down his body and his
heart was thudding against his ribs. It was not possible that it could
have lasted, and his main agony lay in that he realized it, and saw
himself face to face with horrors inconceivable that must await the
exhaustion of his strength. He was not naturally robust, and he had led
a soft and pampered life that was very far from equipping him for such
a test as this.

But as they reached the Peñon and felt the full vigour of that warm
breeze, Sakr-el-Bahr, who by Asad’s command remained in charge of the
navigation, ordered the unfurling of the enormous lateen sails on main
and foremasts. They ballooned out, swelling to the wind, and the
galeasse surged forward at a speed that was more than doubled. The
order to cease rowing followed, and the slaves were left to return
thanks to Heaven for their respite, and to rest in their chains until
such time as their sinews should be required again.

The vessel’s vast prow, which ended in a steel ram and was armed with a
culverin on either quarter, was crowded with lounging corsairs, who
took their ease there until the time to engage should be upon them.
They leaned on the high bulwarks or squatted in groups, talking,
laughing, some of them tailoring and repairing garments, others
burnishing their weapons or their armour, and one swarthy youth there
was who thrummed a gimri and sang a melancholy Shilha love-song to the
delight of a score or so of bloodthirsty ruffians squatting about him
in a ring of variegated colour.

The gorgeous poop was fitted with a spacious cabin, to which admission
was gained by two archways curtained with stout silken tapestries upon
whose deep red ground the crescent was wrought in brilliant green.
Above the cabin stood the three cressets or stern-lamps, great
structures of gilded iron surmounted each by the orb and crescent. As
if to continue the cabin forward and increase its size, a green awning
was erected from it to shade almost half the poop-deck. Here cushions
were thrown, and upon these squatted now Asad-ed-Din with Marzak,
whilst Biskaine and some three or four other officers who had escorted
him aboard and whom he had retained beside him for that voyage, were
lounging upon the gilded balustrade at the poop’s forward end,
immediately above the rowers’ benches.

Sakr-el-Bahr alone, a solitary figure, resplendent in caftan and turban
that were of cloth of silver, leaned upon the bulwarks of the larboard
quarter of the poop-deck, and looked moodily back upon the receding
city of Algiers which by now was no more than an agglomeration of white
cubes piled up the hillside in the morning sunshine.

Asad watched him silently awhile from under his beetling brows, then
summoned him. He came at once, and stood respectfully before his
prince.

Asad considered him a moment solemnly, whilst a furtive malicious smile
played over the beautiful countenance of his son.

“Think not, Sakr-el-Bahr,” he said at length, “that I bear thee
resentment for what befell last night or that that happening is the
sole cause of my present determination. I had a duty—a long-neglected
duty—to Marzak, which at last I have undertaken to perform.” He seemed
to excuse himself almost, and Marzak misliked both words and tone. Why,
he wondered, must this fierce old man, who had made his name a terror
throughout Christendom, be ever so soft and yielding where that
stalwart and arrogant infidel was concerned?

Sakr-el-Bahr bowed solemnly. “My lord,” he said, “it is not for me to
question thy resolves or the thoughts that may have led to them. It
suffices me to know thy wishes; they are my law.”

“Are they so?” said Asad tartly. “Thy deeds will scarce bear out thy
protestations.” He sighed. “Sorely was I wounded yesternight when thy
marriage thwarted me and placed that Frankish maid beyond my reach. Yet
I respect this marriage of thine, as all Muslims must—for all that in
itself it was unlawful. But there!” he ended with a shrug. “We sail
together once again to crush the Spaniard. Let no ill-will on either
side o’er-cloud the splendour of our task.”

“Ameen to that, my lord,” said Sakr-el-Bahr devoutly. “I almost
feared....”

“No more!” the Basha interrupted him. “Thou wert never a man to fear
anything, which is why I have loved thee as a son.”

But it suited Marzak not at all that the matter should be thus
dismissed, that it should conclude upon a note of weakening from his
father, upon what indeed amounted to a speech of reconciliation. Before
Sakr-el-Bahr could make answer he had cut in to set him a question
laden with wicked intent.

“How will thy bride beguile the season of thine absence, O
Sakr-el-Bahr?”

“I have lived too little with women to be able to give thee an answer,”
said the corsair.

Marzak winced before a reply that seemed to reflect upon himself. But
he returned to the attack.

“I compassionate thee that art the slave of duty, driven so soon to
abandon the delight of her soft arms. Where hast thou bestowed her, O
captain?”

“Where should a Muslim bestow his wife but according to the biddings of
the Prophet—in the house?”

Marzak sneered. “Verily, I marvel at thy fortitude in quitting her so
soon!”

But Asad caught the sneer, and stared at his son. “What cause is there
to marvel in that a true Muslim should sacrifice his inclinations to
the service of the Faith?” His tone was a rebuke; but it left Marzak
undismayed. The youth sprawled gracefully upon his cushions, one leg
tucked under him.

“Place no excess of faith in appearances, O my father!” he said.

“No more!” growled the Basha. “Peace to thy tongue, Marzak, and may
Allah the All-knowing smile upon our expedition, lending strength to
our arms to smite the infidel to whom the fragrance of the garden is
forbidden.”

To this again Sakr-el-Bahr replied “Ameen,” but an uneasiness abode in
his heart summoned thither by the questions Marzak had set him. Were
they idle words calculated to do no more than plague him, and to keep
fresh in Asad’s mind the memory of Rosamund, or were they based upon
some actual knowledge?

His fears were to be quickened soon on that same score. He was leaning
that afternoon upon the rail, idly observing the doling out of the
rations to the slaves, when Marzak came to join him.

For some moments he stood silently beside Sakr-el-Bahr watching
Vigitello and his men as they passed from bench to bench serving out
biscuits and dried dates to the rowers—but sparingly, for oars move
sluggishly when stomachs are too well nourished—and giving each to
drink a cup of vinegar and water in which floated a few drops of added
oil.

Then he pointed to a large palmetto bale that stood on the waist-deck
near the mainmast about which the powder barrels were stacked.

“That pannier,” he said, “seems to me oddly in the way yonder. Were it
not better to bestow it in the hold, where it will cease to be an
encumbrance in case of action?”

Sakr-el-Bahr experienced a slight tightening at the heart. He knew that
Marzak had heard him command that bale to be borne into the poop-cabin,
and that anon he had ordered it to be fetched thence when Asad had
announced his intention of sailing with him. He realized that this in
itself might be a suspicious circumstance; or, rather, knowing what the
bale contained, he was too ready to fear suspicion. Nevertheless he
turned to Marzak with a smile of some disdain.

“I understood, Marzak, that thou art sailing with us as apprentice.”

“What then?” quoth Marzak.

“Why merely that it might become thee better to be content to observe
and learn. Thou’lt soon be telling me how grapnels should be slung, and
how an action should be fought.” Then he pointed ahead to what seemed
to be no more than a low cloud-bank towards which they were rapidly
skimming before that friendly wind. “Yonder,” he said, “are the
Balearics. We are making good speed.”

Although he said it without any object other than that of turning the
conversation, yet the fact itself was sufficiently remarkable to be
worth a comment. Whether rowed by her two hundred and fifty slaves, or
sailed under her enormous spread of canvas, there was no swifter vessel
upon the Mediterranean than the galeasse of Sakr-el-Bahr. Onward she
leapt now with bellying tateens, her well-greased keel slipping through
the wind-whipped water at a rate which perhaps could not have been
bettered by any ship that sailed.

“If this wind holds we shall be under the Point of Aguila before
sunset, which will be something to boast of hereafter,” he promised.

Marzak, however, seemed but indifferently interested; his eyes
continued awhile to stray towards that palmetto bale by the mainmast.
At length, without another word to Sakr-el-Bahr, he made his way abaft,
and flung himself down under the awning, beside his father. Asad sat
there in a moody abstraction, already regretting that he should have
lent an ear to Fenzileh to the extent of coming upon this voyage, and
assured by now that at least there was no cause to mistrust
Sakr-el-Bahr. Marsak came to revive that drooping mistrust. But the
moment was ill-chosen, and at the first words he uttered on the
subject, he was growled into silence by his sire.

“Thou dost but voice thine own malice,” Asad rebuked him. “And I am
proven a fool in that I have permitted the malice of others to urge me
in this matter. No more, I say.”

Thereupon Marzak fell silent and sulking, his eyes ever following
Sakr-el-Bahr, who had descended the three steps from the poop to the
gangway and was pacing slowly down between the rowers’ benches.

The corsair was supremely ill at ease, as a man must be who has
something to conceal, and who begins to fear that he may have been
betrayed. Yet who was there could have betrayed him? But three men
aboard that vessel knew his secret—Ali, his lieutenant, Jasper, and the
Italian Vigitello. And Sakr-el-Bahr would have staked all his
possessions that neither Ali nor Vigitello would have betrayed him,
whilst he was fairly confident that in his own interests Jasper also
must have kept faith. Yet Marzak’s allusion to that palmetto bale had
filled him with an uneasiness that sent him now in quest of his Italian
boatswain whom he trusted above all others.

“Vigitello,” said he, “is it possible that I have been betrayed to the
Basha?”

Vigitello looked up sharply at the question, then smiled with
confidence. They were standing alone by the bulwarks on the waist-deck.

“Touching what we carry yonder?” quoth he, his glance shifting to the
bale. “Impossible. If Asad had knowledge he would have betrayed it
before we left Algiers, or else he would never have sailed without a
stouter bodyguard of his own.

“What need of bodyguard for him?” returned Sakr-el-Bahr. “If it should
come to grips between us—as well it may if what I suspect be true—there
is no doubt as to the side upon which the corsairs would range
themselves.”

“Is there not?” quoth Vigitello, a smile upon his swarthy face. “Be not
so sure. These men have most of them followed thee into a score of
fights. To them thou art the Basha, their natural leader.”

“Maybe. But their allegiance belongs to Asad-ed-Din, the exalted of
Allah. Did it come to a choice between us, their faith would urge them
to stand beside him in spite of any past bonds that may have existed
between them and me.”

“Yet there were some who murmured when thou wert superseded in the
command of this expedition,” Vigitello informed him. “I doubt not that
many would be influenced by their faith, but many would stand by thee
against the Grand Sultan himself. And do not forget,” he added,
instinctively lowering his voice, “that many of us are renegadoes like
myself and thee, who would never know a moment’s doubt if it came to a
choice of sides. But I hope,” he ended in another tone, “there is no
such danger here.”

“And so do I, in all faith,” replied Sakr-el-Bahr, with fervour. “Yet I
am uneasy, and I must know where I stand if the worst takes place. Go
thou amongst the men, Vigitello, and probe their real feelings, gauge
their humour and endeavour to ascertain upon what numbers I may count
if I have to declare war upon Asad or if he declares it upon me. Be
cautious.”

Vigitello closed one of his black eyes portentously. “Depend upon it,”
he said, “I’ll bring you word anon.”

On that they parted, Vigitello to make his way to the prow and there
engage in his investigations, Sakr-el-Bahr slowly to retrace his steps
to the poop. But at the first bench abaft the gangway he paused, and
looked down at the dejected, white-fleshed slave who sat shackled
there. He smiled cruelly, his own anxieties forgotten in the savour of
vengeance.

“So you have tasted the whip already,” he said in English. “But that is
nothing to what is yet to come. You are in luck that there is a wind
to-day. It will not always be so. Soon shall you learn what it was that
I endured by your contriving.”

Lionel looked up at him with haggard, blood-injected eyes. He wanted to
curse his brother, yet was he too overwhelmed by the sense of the
fitness of this punishment.

“For myself I care nothing,” he replied.

“But you will, sweet brother,” was the answer. “You will care for
yourself most damnably and pity yourself most poignantly. I speak from
experience. ’Tis odds you will not live, and that is my chief regret. I
would you had my thews to keep you alive in this floating hell.”

“I tell you I care nothing for myself,” Lionel insisted. “What have you
done with Rosamund?”

“Will it surprise you to learn that I have played the gentleman and
married her?” Oliver mocked him.

“Married her?” his brother gasped, blenching at the very thought. “You
hound!”

“Why abuse me? Could I have done more?” And with a laugh he sauntered
on, leaving Lionel to writhe there with the torment of his
half-knowledge.

An hour later, when the cloudy outline of the Balearic Isles had
acquired density and colour, Sakr-el-Bahr and Vigitello met again on
the waist-deck, and they exchanged some few words in passing.

“It is difficult to say exactly,” the boatswain murmured, “but from
what I gather I think the odds would be very evenly balanced, and it
were rash in thee to precipitate a quarrel.”

“I am not like to do so,” replied Sakr-el-Bahr. “I should not be like
to do so in any case. I but desired to know how I stand in case a
quarrel should be forced upon me.” And he passed on.

Yet his uneasiness was no whit allayed; his difficulties were very far
from solved. He had undertaken to carry Rosamund to France or Italy; he
had pledged her his word to land her upon one or the other shore, and
should he fail, she might even come to conclude that such had never
been his real intention. Yet how was he to succeed, now, since Asad was
aboard the galeasse? Must he be constrained to carry her back to
Algiers as secretly as he had brought her thence, and to keep her there
until another opportunity of setting her ashore upon a Christian
country should present itself? That was clearly impracticable and
fraught with too much risk of detection. Indeed, the risk of detection
was very imminent now. At any moment her presence in that pannier might
be betrayed. He could think of no way in which to redeem his pledged
word. He could but wait and hope, trusting to his luck and to some
opportunity which it was impossible to foresee.

And so for a long hour and more he paced there moodily to and fro, his
hands clasped behind him, his turbaned head bowed in thought, his heart
very heavy within him. He was taken in the toils of the evil web which
he had spun; and it seemed very clear to him now that nothing short of
his life itself would be demanded as the price of it. That, however,
was the least part of his concern. All things had miscarried with him
and his life was wrecked. If at the price of it he could ensure safety
to Rosamund, that price he would gladly pay. But his dismay and
uneasiness all sprang from his inability to discover a way of achieving
that most desired of objects even at such a sacrifice. And so he paced
on alone and very lonely, waiting and praying for a miracle.




CHAPTER XVI.
THE PANNIER


He was still pacing there when an hour or so before sunset—some fifteen
hours after setting out—they stood before the entrance of a long
bottle-necked cove under the shadow of the cliffs of Aquila Point on
the southern coast of the Island of Formentera. He was rendered aware
of this and roused from his abstraction by the voice of Asad calling to
him from the poop and commanding him to make the cove.

Already the wind was failing them, and it became necessary to take to
the oars, as must in any case have happened once they were through the
cove’s narrow neck in the becalmed lagoon beyond. So Sakr-el-Bahr, in
his turn, lifted up his voice, and in answer to his shout came
Vigitello and Larocque.

A blast of Vigitello’s whistle brought his own men to heel, and they
passed rapidly along the benches ordering the rowers to make ready,
whilst Jasper and a half-dozen Muslim sailors set about furling the
sails that already were beginning to flap in the shifting and
intermittent gusts of the expiring wind. Sakr-el-Bahr gave the word to
row, and Vigitello blew a second and longer blast. The oars dipped, the
slaves strained and the galeasse ploughed forward, time being kept by a
boatswain’s mate who squatted on the waist-deck and beat a tomtom
rhythmically. Sakr-el-Bahr, standing on the poop-deck, shouted his
orders to the steersmen in their niches on either side of the stern,
and skilfully the vessel was manoeuvred through the narrow passage into
the calm lagoon whose depths were crystal clear. Here before coming to
rest, Sakr-el-Bahr followed the invariable corsair practice of going
about, so as to be ready to leave his moorings and make for the open
again at a moment’s notice.

She came at last alongside the rocky buttresses of a gentle slope that
was utterly deserted by all save a few wild goats browsing near the
summit. There were clumps of broom, thick with golden flower, about the
base of the hill. Higher, a few gnarled and aged olive trees reared
their grey heads from which the rays of the westering sun struck a
glint as of silver.

Larocque and a couple of sailors went over the bulwarks on the larboard
quarter, dropped lightly to the horizontal shafts of the oars, which
were rigidly poised, and walking out upon them gained the rocks and
proceeded to make fast the vessel by ropes fore and aft.

Sakr-el-Bahr’s next task was to set a watch, and he appointed Larocque,
sending him to take his station on the summit of the head whence a wide
range of view was to be commanded.

Pacing the poop with Marzak the Basha grew reminiscent of former days
when roving the seas as a simple corsair he had used this cove both for
purposes of ambush and concealment. There were, he said, few harbours
in all the Mediterranean so admirably suited to the corsairs’ purpose
as this; it was a haven of refuge in case of peril, and an unrivalled
lurking-place in which to lie in wait for the prey. He remembered once
having lain there with the formidable Dragut-Reis, a fleet of six
galleys, their presence entirely unsuspected by the Genoese admiral,
Doria, who had passed majestically along with three caravels and seven
galleys.

Marzak, pacing beside his father, listened but half-heartedly to these
reminiscences. His mind was all upon Sakr-el-Bahr, and his suspicions
of that palmetto bale were quickened by the manner in which for the
last two hours he had seen the corsair hovering thoughtfully in its
neighbourhood.

He broke in suddenly upon his father’s memories with an expression of
what was in his mind.

“The thanks to Allah,” he said, “that it is thou who command this
expedition, else might this coves advantages have been neglected.”

“Not so,” said Asad. “Sakr-el-Bahr knows them as well as I do. He has
used this vantage point afore-time. It was himself who suggested that
this would be the very place in which to await this Spanish craft.”

“Yet had he sailed alone I doubt if the Spanish argosy had concerned
him greatly. There are other matters on his mind, O my father. Observe
him yonder, all lost in thought. How many hours of this voyage has he
spent thus. He is as a man trapped and desperate. There is some fear
rankling in him. Observe him, I say.”

“Allah pardon thee,” said his father, shaking his old head and sighing
over so much impetuosity of judgment. “Must thy imagination be for ever
feeding on thy malice? Yet I blame not thee, but thy Sicilian mother,
who has fostered this hostility in thee. Did she not hoodwink me into
making this unnecessary voyage?”

“I see thou hast forgot last night and the Frankish slave-girl,” said
his son.

“Nay, then thou seest wrong. I have not forgot it. But neither have I
forgot that since Allah hath exalted me to be Basha of Algiers, He
looks to me to deal in justice. Come, Marzak, set an end to all this.
Perhaps to-morrow thou shalt see him in battle, and after such a sight
as that never again wilt thou dare say evil of him. Come, make thy
peace with him, and let me see better relations betwixt you hereafter.”

And raising his voice he called Sakr-el-Bahr, who immediately turned
and came up the gangway. Marzak stood by in a sulky mood, with no
notion of doing his father’s will by holding out an olive branch to the
man who was like to cheat him of his birthright ere all was done. Yet
was it he who greeted Sakr-el-Bahr when the corsair set foot upon the
poop.

“Does the thought of the coming fight perturb thee, dog of war?” he
asked.

“Am I perturbed, pup of peace?” was the crisp answer.

“It seems so. Thine aloofness, thine abstractions....”

“Are signs of perturbation, dost suppose?”

“Of what else?”

Sakr-el-Bahr laughed. “Thou’lt tell me next that I am afraid. Yet I
should counsel thee to wait until thou hast smelt blood and powder, and
learnt precisely what fear is.”

The slight altercation drew the attention of Asad’s officers who were
idling there. Biskaine and some three others lounged forward to stand
behind the Basha, looking, on in some amusement, which was shared by
him.

“Indeed, indeed,” said Asad, laying a hand upon Marzak’s shoulder, “his
counsel is sound enough. Wait, boy, until thou hast gone beside him
aboard the infidel, ere thou judge him easily perturbed.”

Petulantly Marzak shook off that gnarled old hand. “Dost thou, O my
father, join with him in taunting me upon my lack of knowledge. My
youth is a sufficient answer. But at least,” he added, prompted by a
wicked notion suddenly conceived, “at least you cannot taunt me with
lack of address with weapons.”

“Give him room,” said Sakr-el-Bahr, with ironical good-humour, “and he
will show us prodigies.”

Marzak looked at him with narrowing, gleaming eyes. “Give me a
cross-bow,” he retorted, “and I’ll show thee how to shoot,” was his
amazing boast.

“Thou’lt show him?” roared Asad. “Thou’lt show him!” And his laugh rang
loud and hearty. “Go smear the sun’s face with clay, boy.”

“Reserve thy judgment, O my father,” begged Marzak, with frosty
dignity.

“Boy, thou’rt mad! Why, Sakr-el-Bahr’s quarrel will check a swallow in
its flight.”

“That is his boast, belike,” replied Marzak.

“And what may thine be?” quoth Sakr-el-Bahr. “To hit the Island of
Formentera at this distance?”

“Dost dare to sneer at me?” cried Marzak, ruffling.

“What daring would that ask?” wondered Sakr-el-Bahr.

“By Allah, thou shalt learn.”

“In all humility I await the lesson.”

“And thou shalt have it,” was the answer viciously delivered. Marzak
strode to the rail. “Ho there! Vigitello! A cross-bow for me, and
another for Sakr-el-Bahr.”

Vigitello sprang to obey him, whilst Asad shook his head and laughed
again.

“An it were not against the Prophet’s law to make a wager....” he was
beginning, when Marzak interrupted him.

“Already should I have proposed one.”

“So that,” said Sakr-el-Bahr, “thy purse would come to match thine head
for emptiness.”

Marzak looked at him and sneered. Then he snatched from Vigitello’s
hands one of the cross-bows that he bore and set a shaft to it. And
then at last Sakr-el-Bahr was to learn the malice that was at the root
of all this odd pretence.

“Look now,” said the youth, “there is on that palmetto bale a speck of
pitch scarce larger than the pupil of my eye. Thou’lt need to strain
thy sight to see it. Observe how my shaft will find it. Canst thou
better such a shot?”

His eyes, upon Sakr-el-Bahr’s face, watching it closely, observed the
pallor by which it was suddenly overspread. But the corsair’s recovery
was almost as swift. He laughed, seeming so entirely careless that
Marzak began to doubt whether he had paled indeed or whether his own
imagination had led him to suppose it.

“Ay, thou’lt choose invisible marks, and wherever the arrow enters
thou’lt say ’twas there! An old trick, O Marzak. Go cozen women with
it.”

“Then,” said Marzak, “we will take instead the slender cord that binds
the bale.” And he levelled his bow. But Sakr-el-Bahr’s hand closed upon
his arm in an easy yet paralyzing grip.

“Wait,” he said. “Thou’lt choose another mark for several reasons. For
one, I’ll not have thy shaft blundering through my oarsmen and haply
killing one of them. Most of them are slaves specially chosen for their
brawn, and I cannot spare any. Another reason is that the mark is a
foolish one. The distance is not more than ten paces. A childish test,
which, maybe, is the reason why thou hast chosen it.”

Marzak lowered his bow and Sakr-el-Bahr released his arm. They looked
at each other, the corsair supremely master of himself and smiling
easily, no faintest trace of the terror that was in his soul showing
upon his swarthy bearded countenance or in his hard pale eyes.

He pointed up the hillside to the nearest olive tree, a hundred paces
distant. “Yonder,” he said, “is a man’s mark. Put me a shaft through
the long branch of that first olive.”

Asad and his officers voiced approval.

“A man’s mark, indeed,” said the Basha, “so that he be a marksman.”

But Marzak shrugged his shoulders with make-believe contempt. “I knew
he would refuse the mark I set,” said he. “As for the olive-branch, it
is so large a butt that a child could not miss it at this distance.”

“If a child could not, then thou shouldst not,” said Sakr-el-Bahr, who
had so placed himself that his body was now between Marzak and the
palmetto bale. “Let us see thee hit it, O Marzak.” And as he spoke he
raised his cross-bow, and scarcely seeming to take aim, he loosed his
shaft. It flashed away to be checked, quivering, in the branch he had
indicated.

A chorus of applause and admiration greeted the shot, and drew the
attention of all the crew to what was toward.

Marzak tightened his lips, realizing how completely he had been
outwitted. Willy-nilly he must now shoot at that mark. The choice had
been taken out of his hands by Sakr-el-Bahr. He never doubted that he
must cover himself with ridicule in the performance, and that there he
would be constrained to abandon this pretended match.

“By the Koran,” said Biskaine, “thou’lt need all thy skill to equal
such a shot, Marzak.”

“’Twas not the mark I chose,” replied Marzak sullenly.

“Thou wert the challenger, O Marzak,” his father reminded him.
“Therefore the choice of mark was his. He chose a man’s mark, and by
the beard of Mohammed, he showed us a man’s shot.”

Marzak would have flung the bow from him in that moment, abandoning the
method he had chosen to investigate the contents of that suspicious
palmetto bale; but he realized that such a course must now cover him
with scorn. Slowly he levelled his bow at that distant mark.

“Have a care of the sentinel on the hill-top,” Sakr-el-Bahr admonished
him, provoking a titter.

Angrily the youth drew the bow. The cord hummed, and the shaft sped to
bury itself in the hill’s flank a dozen yards from the mark.

Since he was the son of the Basha none dared to laugh outright save his
father and Sakr-el-Bahr. But there was no suppressing a titter to
express the mockery to which the proven braggart must ever be exposed.

Asad looked at him, smiling almost sadly. “See now,” he said, “what
comes of boasting thyself against Sakr-el-Bahr.”

“My will was crossed in the matter of a mark,” was the bitter answer.
“You angered me and made my aim untrue.”

Sakr-el-Bahr strode away to the starboard bulwarks, deeming the matter
at an end. Marzak observed him.

“Yet at that small mark,” he said, “I challenge him again.” As he spoke
he fitted a second shaft to his bow. “Behold!” he cried, and took aim.

But swift as thought, Sakr-el-Bahr—heedless now of all
consequences—levelled at Marzak the bow which he still held.

“Hold!” he roared. “Loose thy shaft at that bale, and I loose this at
thy throat. I never miss!” he added grimly.

There was a startled movement in the ranks of those who stood behind
Marzak. In speechless amazement they stared at Sakr-el-Bahr, as he
stood there, white-faced, his eyes aflash, his bow drawn taut and ready
to launch that death-laden quarrel as he threatened.

Slowly then, smiling with unutterable malice, Marzak lowered his bow.
He was satisfied. His true aim was reached. He had drawn his enemy into
self-betrayal.

Asad’s was the voice that shattered that hush of consternation.

“Kellamullah!” he bellowed. “What is this? Art thou mad, too, O
Sakr-el-Bahr?”

“Ay, mad indeed,” said Marzak; “mad with fear.” And he stepped quickly
aside so that the body of Biskaine should shield him from any sudden
consequences of his next words. “Ask him what he keeps in that pannier,
O my father.”

“Ay, what, in Allah’s name?” demanded the Basha, advancing towards his
captain.

Sakr-el-Bahr lowered his bow, master of himself again. His composure
was beyond all belief.

“I carry in it goods of price, which I’ll not see riddled to please a
pert boy,” he said.

“Goods of price?” echoed Asad, with a snort. “They’ll need to be of
price indeed that are valued above the life of my son. Let us see these
goods of price.” And to the men upon the waist-deck he shouted, “Open
me that pannier.”

Sakr-el-Bahr sprang forward, and laid a hand upon the Basha’s arm.

“Stay, my lord!” he entreated almost fiercely. “Consider that this
pannier is my own. That its contents are my property; that none has a
right to....”

“Wouldst babble of rights to me, who am thy lord?” blazed the Basha,
now in a towering passion. “Open me that pannier, I say.”

They were quick to his bidding. The ropes were slashed away, and the
front of the pannier fell open on its palmetto hinges. There was a
half-repressed chorus of amazement from the men. Sakr-el-Bahr stood
frozen in horror of what must follow.

“What is it? What have you found?” demanded Asad.

In silence the men swung the bale about, and disclosed to the eyes of
those upon the poop-deck the face and form of Rosamund Godolphin. Then
Sakr-el-Bahr, rousing himself from his trance of horror, reckless of
all but her, flung down the gangway to assist her from the pannier, and
thrusting aside those who stood about her, took his stand at her side.




CHAPTER XVII.
THE DUPE


For a little while Asad stood at gaze, speechless in his incredulity.
Then to revive the anger that for a moment had been whelmed in
astonishment came the reflection that he had been duped by
Sakr-el-Bahr, duped by the man he trusted most. He had snarled at
Fenzileh and scorned Marzak when they had jointly warned him against
his lieutenant; if at times he had been in danger of heeding them, yet
sooner or later he had concluded that they but spoke to vent their
malice. And yet it was proven now that they had been right in their
estimate of this traitor, whilst he himself had been a poor, blind
dupe, needing Marzak’s wit to tear the bandage from his eyes.

Slowly he went down the gangway, followed by Marzak, Biskaine, and the
others. At the point where it joined the waist-deck he paused, and his
dark old eyes smouldered under his beetling brows.

“So,” he snarled. “These are thy goods of price. Thou lying dog, what
was thine aim in this?”

Defiantly Sakr-el-Bahr answered him: “She is my wife. It is my right to
take her with me where I go.” He turned to her, and bade her veil her
face, and she immediately obeyed him with fingers that shook a little
in her agitation.

“None questions thy right to that,” said Asad. “But being resolved to
take her with thee, why not take her openly? Why was she not housed in
the poop-house, as becomes the wife of Sakr-el-Bahr? Why smuggle her
aboard in a pannier, and keep her there in secret?”

“And why,” added Marzak, “didst thou lie to me when I questioned thee
upon her whereabouts?—telling me she was left behind in thy house in
Algiers?”

“All this I did,” replied Sakr-el-Bahr, with a lofty—almost a
disdainful—dignity, “because I feared lest I should be prevented from
bearing her away with me,” and his bold glance, beating full upon Asad,
drew a wave of colour into the gaunt old cheeks.

“What could have caused that fear?” he asked. “Shall I tell thee?
Because no man sailing upon such a voyage as this would have desired
the company of his new-wedded wife. Because no man would take a wife
with him upon a raid in which there is peril of life and peril of
capture.”

“Allah has watched over me his servant in the past,” said Sakr-el-Bahr,
“and I put my trust in Him.”

It was a specious answer. Such words—laying stress upon the victories
Allah sent him—had afore-time served to disarm his enemies. But they
served not now. Instead, they did but fan the flames of Asad’s wrath.

“Blaspheme not,” he croaked, and his tall form quivered with rage, his
sallow old face grew vulturine. “She was brought thus aboard in secret
out of fear that were her presence known thy true purpose too must
stand revealed.”

“And whatever that true purpose may have been,” put in Marzak, “it was
not the task entrusted thee of raiding the Spanish treasure-galley.”

“’Tis what I mean, my son,” Asad agreed. Then with a commanding
gesture: “Wilt thou tell me without further lies what thy purpose was?”
he asked.

“How?” said Sakr-el-Bahr, and he smiled never so faintly. “Hast thou
not said that this purpose was revealed by what I did? Rather, then, I
think is it for me to ask thee for some such information. I do assure
thee, my lord, that it was no part of my intention to neglect the task
entrusted me. But just because I feared lest knowledge of her presence
might lead my enemies to suppose what thou art now supposing, and
perhaps persuade thee to forget all that I have done for the glory of
Islam, I determined to bring her secretly aboard.

“My real aim, since you must know it, was to land her somewhere on the
coast of France, whence she might return to her own land, and her own
people. That done, I should have set about intercepting the Spanish
galley, and never fear but that by Allah’s favour I should have
succeeded.”

“By the horns of Shaitan,” swore Marzak, thrusting himself forward, “he
is the very father and mother of lies. Wilt thou explain this desire to
be rid of a wife thou hadst but wed?” he demanded.

“Ay,” growled Asad. “Canst answer that?”

“Thou shalt hear the truth,” said Sakr-el-Bahr.

“The praise to Allah!” mocked Marzak.

“But I warn you,” the corsair continued, “that to you it will seem less
easy to believe by much than any falsehood I could invent. Years ago in
England where I was born I loved this woman and should have taken her
to wife. But there were men and circumstances that defamed me to her so
that she would not wed me, and I went forth with hatred of her in my
heart. Last night the love of her which I believed to be dead and
turned to loathing, proved to be still a living force. Loving her, I
came to see that I had used her unworthily, and I was urged by a desire
above all others to undo the evil I had done.”

On that he paused, and after an instant’s silence Asad laughed angrily
and contemptuously. “Since when has man expressed his love for a woman
by putting her from him?” he asked in a voice of scorn that showed the
precise value he set upon such a statement.

“I warned thee it would seem incredible,” said Sakr-el-Bahr.

“Is it not plain, O my father, that this marriage of his was no more
than a pretence?” cried Marzak.

“As plain as the light of day,” replied Asad. “Thy marriage with that
woman made an impious mock of the True Faith. It was no marriage. It
was a blasphemous pretence, thine only aim to thwart me, abusing my
regard for the Prophet’s Holy Law, and to set her beyond my reach.” He
turned to Vigitello, who stood a little behind Sakr-el-Bahr. “Bid thy
men put me this traitor into irons,” he said.

“Heaven hath guided thee to a wise decision, O my father!” cried
Marzak, his voice jubilant. But his was the only jubilant note that was
sounded, his the only voice that was raised.

“The decision is more like to guide you both to Heaven,” replied
Sakr-el-Bahr, undaunted. On the instant he had resolved upon his
course. “Stay!” he said, raising his hand to Vigitello, who, indeed had
shown no sign of stirring. He stepped close up to Asad, and what he
said did not go beyond those who stood immediately about the Basha and
Rosamund, who strained her ears that she might lose no word of it.

“Do not think, Asad,” he said, “that I will submit me like a camel to
its burden. Consider thy position well. If I but raise my voice to call
my sea-hawks to me, only Allah can tell how many will be left to obey
thee. Darest thou put this matter to the test?” he asked, his
countenance grave and solemn, but entirely fearless, as of a man in
whom there is no doubt of the issue as it concerns himself.

Asad’s eyes glittered dully, his colour faded to a deathly ashen hue.
“Thou infamous traitor....” he began in a thick voice, his body
quivering with anger.

“Ah no,” Sakr-el-Bahr interrupted him. “Were I a traitor it is what I
should have done already, knowing as I do that in any division of our
forces, numbers will be heavily on my side. Let then my silence prove
my unswerving loyalty, Asad. Let it weigh with thee in considering my
conduct, nor permit thyself to be swayed by Marzak there, who recks
nothing so that he vents his petty hatred of me.”

“Do not heed him, O my father!” cried Marzak. “It cannot be that....”

“Peace!” growled Asad, somewhat stricken on a sudden.

And there was peace whilst the Basha stood moodily combing his white
beard, his glittering eyes sweeping from Oliver to Rosamund and back
again. He was weighing what Sakr-el-Bahr had said. He more than feared
that it might be no more than true, and he realized that if he were to
provoke a mutiny here he would be putting all to the test, setting all
upon a throw in which the dice might well be cogged against him.

If Sakr-el-Bahr prevailed, he would prevail not merely aboard this
galley, but throughout Algiers, and Asad would be cast down never to
rise again. On the other hand, if he bared his scimitar and called upon
the faithful to support him, it might chance that recognizing in him
the exalted of Allah to whom their loyalty was due, they would rally to
him. He even thought it might be probable. Yet the stake he put upon
the board was too vast. The game appalled him, whom nothing yet had
appalled, and it scarce needed a muttered caution from Biskaine to
determine him to hold his hand.

He looked at Sakr-el-Bahr again, his glance now sullen. “I will
consider thy words,” he announced in a voice that was unsteady. “I
would not be unjust, nor steer my course by appearances alone. Allah
forbid!”




CHAPTER XVIII.
SHEIK MAT


Under the inquisitive gaping stare of all about them stood Rosamund and
Sakr-el-Bahr regarding each other in silence for a little spell after
the Basha’s departure. The very galley-slaves, stirred from their
habitual lethargy by happenings so curious and unusual, craned their
sinewy necks to peer at them with a flicker of interest in their dull,
weary eyes.

Sakr-el-Bahr’s feelings as he considered Rosamunds’s white face in the
fading light were most oddly conflicting. Dismay at what had befallen
and some anxious dread of what must follow were leavened by a certain
measure of relief.

He realized that in no case could her concealment have continued long.
Eleven mortal hours had she spent in the cramped and almost suffocating
space of that pannier, in which he had intended to do no more than
carry her aboard. The uneasiness which had been occasioned him by the
impossibility to deliver her from that close confinement when Asad had
announced his resolve to accompany them upon that voyage, had steadily
been increasing as hour succeeded hour, and still he found no way to
release her from a situation in which sooner or later, when the limits
of her endurance were reached, her presence must be betrayed. This
release which he could not have contrived had been contrived for him by
the suspicions and malice of Marzak. That was the one grain of
consolation in the present peril—to himself who mattered nothing and to
her, who mattered all. Adversity had taught him to prize benefits
however slight and to confront perils however overwhelming. So he
hugged the present slender benefit, and resolutely braced himself to
deal with the situation as he found it, taking the fullest advantage of
the hesitancy which his words had sown in the heart of the Basha. He
hugged, too, the thought that as things had fallen out, from being
oppressor and oppressed, Rosamund and he were become fellows in
misfortune, sharing now a common peril. He found it a sweet thought to
dwell on. Therefore was it that he faintly smiled as he looked into
Rosamund’s white, strained face.

That smile evoked from her the question that had been burdening her
mind.

“What now? What now?” she asked huskily, and held out appealing hands
to him.

“Now,” said he coolly, “let us be thankful that you are delivered from
quarters destructive both to comfort and to dignity. Let me lead you to
those I had prepared for you, which you would have occupied long since
but for the ill-timed coming of Asad. Come.” And he waved an inviting
hand towards the gangway leading to the poop.

She shrank back at that, for there on the poop sat Asad under his
awning with Marzak, Biskaine, and his other officers in attendance.

“Come,” he repeated, “there is naught to fear so that you keep a bold
countenance. For the moment it is Sheik Mat—check to the king.”

“Naught to fear?” she echoed, staring.

“For the moment, naught,” he answered firmly. “Against what the future
may hold, we must determine. Be sure that fear will not assist our
judgment.”

She stiffened as if he had charged her unjustly.

“I do not fear,” she assured him, and if her face continued white, her
eyes grew steady, her voice was resolute.

“Then come,” he repeated, and she obeyed him instantly now as if to
prove the absence of all fear.

Side by side they passed up the gangway and mounted the steps of the
companion to the poop, their approach watched by the group that was in
possession of it with glances at once of astonishment and resentment.

Asad’s dark, smouldering eyes were all for the girl. They followed her
every movement as she approached and never for a moment left her to
turn upon her companion.

Outwardly she bore herself with a proud dignity and an unfaltering
composure under that greedy scrutiny; but inwardly she shrank and
writhed in a shame and humiliation that she could hardly define. In
some measure Oliver shared her feelings, but blent with anger; and
urged by them he so placed himself at last that he stood between her
and the Basha’s regard to screen her from it as he would have screened
her from a lethal weapon. Upon the poop he paused, and salaamed to
Asad.

“Permit, exalted lord,” said he, “that my wife may occupy the quarters
I had prepared for her before I knew that thou wouldst honour this
enterprise with thy presence.”

Curtly, contemptuously, Asad waved a consenting hand without
vouchsafing to reply in words. Sakr-el-Bahr bowed again, stepped
forward, and put aside the heavy red curtain upon which the crescent
was wrought in green. From within the cabin the golden light of a lamp
came out to merge into the blue-gray twilight, and to set a shimmering
radiance about the white-robed figure of Rosamund.

Thus for a moment Asad’s fierce, devouring eyes observed her, then she
passed within. Sakr-el-Bahr followed, and the screening curtain swung
back into its place.

The small interior was furnished by a divan spread with silken carpets,
a low Moorish table in coloured wood mosaics bearing the newly lighted
lamp, and a tiny brazier in which aromatic gums were burning and
spreading a sweetly pungent perfume for the fumigation of all
True-Believers.

Out of the shadows in the farther corners rose silently Sakr-el-Bahr’s
two Nubian slaves, Abiad and Zal-Zer, to salaam low before him. But for
their turbans and loincloths in spotless white their dusky bodies must
have remained invisible, shadowy among the shadows.

The captain issued an order briefly, and from a hanging cupboard the
slaves took meat and drink and set it upon the low table—a bowl of
chicken cooked in rice and olives and prunes, a dish of bread, a melon,
and a clay amphora of water. Then at another word from him, each took a
naked scimitar and they passed out to place themselves on guard beyond
the curtain. This was not an act in which there was menace or defiance,
nor could Asad so interpret it. The acknowledged presence of
Sakr-el-Balir’s wife in that poop-house, rendered the place the
equivalent of his hareem, and a man defends his hareem as he defends
his honour; it is a spot sacred to himself which none may violate, and
it is fitting that he take proper precaution against any impious
attempt to do so.

Rosamund sank down upon the divan, and sat there with bowed head, her
hands folded in her lap. Sakr-el-Bahr stood by in silence for a long
moment contemplating her.

“Eat,” he bade her at last. “You will need strength and courage, and
neither is possible to a fasting body.”

She shook her head. Despite her long fast, food was repellent. Anxiety
was thrusting her heart up into her throat to choke her.

“I cannot eat,” she answered him. “To what end? Strength and courage
cannot avail me now.”

“Never believe that,” he said. “I have undertaken to deliver you alive
from the perils into which I have brought you, and I shall keep my
word.”

So resolute was his tone that she looked up at him, and found his
bearing equally resolute and confident.

“Surely,” she cried, “all chance of escape is lost to me.”

“Never count it lost whilst I am living,” he replied. She considered
him a moment, and there was the faintest smile on her lips.

“Do you think that you will live long now?” she asked him.

“Just as long as God pleases,” he replied quite coolly. “What is
written is written. So that I live long enough to deliver you, then...
why, then, faith I shall have lived long enough.”

Her head sank. She clasped and unclasped the hands in her lap. She
shivered slightly.

“I think we are both doomed,” she said in a dull voice. “For if you
die, I have your dagger still, remember. I shall not survive you.”

He took a sudden step forward, his eyes gleaming, a faint flush glowing
through the tan of his cheeks. Then he checked. Fool! How could he so
have misread her meaning even for a moment? Were not its exact limits
abundantly plain, even without the words which she added a moment
later?

“God will forgive me if I am driven to it—if I choose the easier way of
honour; for honour, sir,” she added, clearly for his benefit, “is ever
the easier way, believe me.”

“I know,” he replied contritely. “I would to God I had followed it.”

He paused there, as if hoping that his expression of penitence might
evoke some answer from her, might spur her to vouchsafe him some word
of forgiveness. Seeing that she continued, mute and absorbed, he sighed
heavily, and turned to other matters.

“Here you will find all that you can require,” he said. “Should you
lack aught you have but to beat your hands together, one or the other
of my slaves will come to you. If you address them in French they will
understand you. I would I could have brought a woman to minister to
you, but that was impossible, as you’ll perceive.” He stepped to the
entrance.

“You are leaving me?” she questioned him in sudden alarm.

“Naturally. But be sure that I shall be very near at hand. And
meanwhile be no less sure that you have no cause for immediate fear. At
least, matters are no worse than when you were in the pannier. Indeed,
much better, for some measure of ease and comfort is now possible to
you. So be of good heart; eat and rest. God guard you! I shall return
soon after sunrise.”

Outside on the poop-deck he found Asad alone now with Marzak under the
awning. Night had fallen, the great crescent lanterns on the stern rail
were alight and cast a lurid glow along the vessel’s length, picking
out the shadowy forms and gleaming faintly on the naked backs of the
slaves in their serried ranks along the benches, many of them bowed
already in attitudes of uneasy slumber. Another lantern swung from the
mainmast, and yet another from the poop-rail for the Basha’s
convenience. Overhead the clustering stars glittered in a cloudless sky
of deepest purple. The wind had fallen entirely, and the world was
wrapped in stillness broken only by the faint rustling break of waves
upon the beach at the cove’s end.

Sakr-el-Bahr crossed to Asad’s side, and begged for a word alone with
him.

“I am alone,” said the Basha curtly.

“Marzak is nothing, then,” said Sakr-el-Bahr. “I have long suspected
it.”

Marzak showed his teeth and growled inarticulately, whilst the Basha,
taken aback by the ease reflected in the captain’s careless, mocking
words, could but quote a line of the Koran with which Fenzileh of late
had often nauseated him.

“A man’s son is the partner of his soul. I have no secrets from Marzak.
Speak, then, before him, or else be silent and depart.”

“He may be the partner of thy soul, Asad,” replied the corsair with his
bold mockery, “but I give thanks to Allah he is not the partner of
mine. And what I have to say in some sense concerns my soul.”

“I thank thee,” cut in Marzak, “for the justice of thy words. To be the
partner of thy soul were to be an infidel unbelieving dog.”

“Thy tongue, O Marzak, is like thine archery,” said Sakr-el-Bahr.

“Ay—in that it pierces treachery,” was the swift retort.

“Nay—in that it aims at what it cannot hit. Now, Allah, pardon me!
Shall I grow angry at such words as thine? Hath not the One proven full
oft that he who calls me infidel dog is a liar predestined to the Pit?
Are such victories as mine over the fleets of the unbelievers
vouchsafed by Allah to an infidel? Foolish blasphemer, teach thy tongue
better ways lest the All-wise strike thee dumb.”

“Peace!” growled Asad. “Thine arrogance is out of season.”

“Haply so,” said Sakr-el-Bahr, with a laugh. “And my good sense, too,
it seems. Since thou wilt retain beside thee this partner of thy soul,
I must speak before him. Have I thy leave to sit?”

Lest such leave should be denied him he dropped forthwith to the vacant
place beside Asad and tucked his legs under him.

“Lord,” he said, “there is a rift dividing us who should be united for
the glory of Islam.”

“It is of thy making, Sakr-el-Bahr,” was the sullen answer, “and it is
for thee to mend it.”

“To that end do I desire thine ear. The cause of this rift is yonder.”
And he jerked his thumb backward over his shoulder towards the
poop-house. “If we remove that cause, of a surety the rift itself will
vanish, and all will be well again between us.”

He knew that never could all be well again between him and Asad. He
knew that by virtue of his act of defiance he was irrevocably doomed,
that Asad having feared him once, having dreaded his power to stand
successfully against his face and overbear his will, would see to it
that he never dreaded it again. He knew that if he returned to Algiers
there would be a speedy end to him. His only chance of safety lay,
indeed, in stirring up mutiny upon the spot and striking swiftly,
venturing all upon that desperate throw. And he knew that this was
precisely what Asad had cause to fear. Out of this assurance had he
conceived his present plan, deeming that if he offered to heal the
breach, Asad might pretend to consent so as to weather his present
danger, making doubly sure of his vengeance by waiting until they
should be home again.

Asad’s gleaming eyes considered him in silence for a moment.

“How remove that cause?” he asked. “Wilt thou atone for the mockery of
thy marriage, pronounce her divorced and relinquish her?”

“That were not to remove her,” replied Sakr-el-Bahr. “Consider well,
Asad, what is thy duty to the Faith. Consider that upon our unity
depends the glory of Islam. Were it not sinful, then, to suffer the
intrusion of aught that may mar such unity? Nay, nay, what I propose is
that I should be permitted—assisted even—to bear out the project I had
formed, as already I have frankly made confession. Let us put to sea
again at dawn—or this very night if thou wilt—make for the coast of
France, and there set her ashore that she may go back to her own people
and we be rid of her disturbing presence. Then we will return—there is
time and to spare—and here or elsewhere lurk in wait for this Spanish
argosy, seize the booty and sail home in amity to Algiers, this
incident, this little cloud in the splendour of our comradeship, behind
us and forgotten as though it had never been. Wilt thou, Asad—for the
glory of the Prophet’s Law?”

The bait was cunningly presented, so cunningly that not for a moment
did Asad or even the malicious Marzak suspect it to be just a bait and
no more. It was his own life, become a menace to Asad, that
Sakr-el-Bahr was offering him in exchange for the life and liberty of
that Frankish slave-girl, but offering it as if unconscious that he did
so.

Asad considered, temptation gripping, him. Prudence urged him to
accept, so that affecting to heal the dangerous breach that now existed
he might carry Sakr-el-Bahr back to Algiers, there, beyond the aid of
any friendly mutineers, to have him strangled. It was the course to
adopt in such a situation, the wise and sober course by which to ensure
the overthrow of one who from an obedient and submissive lieutenant had
suddenly shown that it was possible for him to become a serious and
dangerous rival.

Sakr-el-Bahr watched the Basha’s averted, gleaming eyes under their
furrowed, thoughtful brows, he saw Marzak’s face white, tense and eager
in his anxiety that his father should consent. And since his father
continued silent, Marzak, unable longer to contain himself, broke into
speech.

“He is wise, O my father!” was his crafty appeal. “The glory of Islam
above all else! Let him have his way in this, and let the infidel woman
go. Thus shall all be well between us and Sakr-el-Bahr!” He laid such a
stress upon these words that it was obvious he desired them to convey a
second meaning.

Asad heard and understood that Marzak, too, perceived what was here to
do; tighter upon him became temptation’s grip; but tighter, too, became
the grip of a temptation of another sort. Before his fierce eyes there
arose a vision of a tall stately maiden with softly rounded bosom, a
vision so white and lovely that it enslaved him. And so he found
himself torn two ways at once. On the one hand, if he relinquished the
woman, he could make sure of his vengeance upon Sakr-el-Bahr, could
make sure of removing that rebel from his path. On the other hand, if
he determined to hold fast to his desires and to be ruled by them, he
must be prepared to risk a mutiny aboard the galeasse, prepared for
battle and perhaps for defeat. It was a stake such as no sane Basha
would have consented to set upon the board. But since his eyes had
again rested upon Rosamund, Asad was no longer sane. His thwarted
desires of yesterday were the despots of his wits.

He leaned forward now, looking deep into the eyes of Sakr-el-Bahr.

“Since for thyself thou dost not want her, why dost thou thwart me?” he
asked, and his voice trembled with suppressed passion. “So long as I
deemed thee honest in taking her to wife I respected that bond as
became a good Muslim; but since ’tis manifest that it was no more than
a pretence, a mockery to serve some purpose hostile to myself, a
desecration of the Prophet’s Holy Law, I, before whom this blasphemous
marriage was performed, do pronounce it to be no marriage. There is no
need for thee to divorce her. She is no longer thine. She is for any
Muslim who can take her.”

Sakr-el-Bahr laughed unpleasantly. “Such a Muslim,” he announced, “will
be nearer my sword than the Paradise of Mahomet.” And on the words he
stood up, as if in token of his readiness.

Asad rose with him in a bound of a vigour such as might scarce have
been looked for in a man of his years.

“Dost threaten?” he cried, his eyes aflash.

“Threaten?” sneered Sakr-el-Bahr. “I prophesy.” And on that he turned,
and stalked away down the gangway to the vessel’s waist. There was no
purpose in his going other than his perceiving that here argument were
worse than useless, and that the wiser course were to withdraw at once,
avoiding it and allowing his veiled threat to work upon the Basha’s
mind.

Quivering with rage Asad watched his departure. On the point of
commanding him to return, he checked, fearing lest in his present mood
Sakr-el-Bahr should flout his authority and under the eyes of all
refuse him the obedience due. He knew that it is not good to command
where we are not sure of being obeyed or of being able to enforce
obedience, that an authority once successfully flouted is in itself
half-shattered.

Whilst still he hesitated, Marzak, who had also risen, caught him by
the arm and poured into his ear hot, urgent arguments enjoining him to
yield to Sakr-el-Bahr’s demand.

“It is the sure way,” he cried insistently. “Shall all be jeopardized
for the sake of that whey-faced daughter of perdition? In the name of
Shaitan, let us be rid of her; set her ashore as he demands, as the
price of peace between us and him, and in the security of that peace
let him be strangled when we come again to our moorings in Algiers. It
is the sure way—the sure way!”

Asad turned at last to look into that handsome eager face. For a moment
he was at a loss; then he had recourse to sophistry. “Am I a coward
that I should refuse all ways but sure ones?” he demanded in a
withering tone. “Or art thou a coward who can counsel none other?”

“My anxiety is all for thee, O my father,” Marzak defended himself
indignantly. “I doubt if it be safe to sleep, lest he should stir up
mutiny in the night.”

“Have no fear,” replied Asad. “Myself I have set the watch, and the
officers are all trustworthy. Biskaine is even now in the forecastle
taking the feeling of the men. Soon we shall know precisely where we
stand.”

“In thy place I would make sure. I would set a term to this danger of
mutiny. I would accede to his demands concerning the woman, and settle
afterwards with himself.”

“Abandon that Frankish pearl?” quoth Asad. Slowly he shook his head.
“Nay, nay! She is a garden that shall yield me roses. Together we shall
yet taste the sweet sherbet of Kansar, and she shall thank me for
having led her into Paradise. Abandon that rosy-limbed loveliness!” He
laughed softly on a note of exaltation, whilst in the gloom Marzak
frowned, thinking of Fenzileh.

“She is an infidel,” his son sternly reminded him, “so forbidden thee
by the Prophet. Wilt thou be as blind to that as to thine own peril?”
Then his voice gathering vehemence and scorn as he proceeded: “She has
gone naked of face through the streets of Algiers; she has been gaped
at by the rabble in the sôk; this loveliness of hers has been
deflowered by the greedy gaze of Jew and Moor and Turk; galley-slaves
and negroes have feasted their eyes upon her unveiled beauty; one of
thy captains hath owned her his wife.” He laughed. “By Allah, I do not
know thee, O my father! Is this the woman thou wouldst take for thine
own? This the woman for whose possession thou wouldst jeopardize thy
life and perhaps the very Bashalik itself!”

Asad clenched his hands until the nails bit into his flesh. Every word
his son had uttered had been as a lash to his soul. The truth of it was
not to be contested. He was humiliated and shamed. Yet was he not
conquered of his madness, nor diverted from his course. Before he could
make answer, the tall martial figure of Biskaine came up the companion.

“Well?” the Basha greeted him eagerly, thankful for this chance to turn
the subject.

Biskaine was downcast. His news was to be read in his countenance. “The
task appointed me was difficult,” said he. “I have done my best. Yet I
could scarce go about it in such a fashion as to draw definite
conclusions. But this I know, my lord, that he will be reckless indeed
if he dares to take up arms against thee and challenge thine authority.
So much at least I am permitted to conclude.”

“No more than that?” asked Asad. “And if I were to take up arms against
him, and to seek to settle this matter out of hand?”

Biskaine paused a moment ere replying. “I cannot think but that Allah
would vouchsafe thee victory,” he said. But his words did not delude
the Basha. He recognized them to be no more than those which respect
for him dictated to his officer. “Yet,” continued Biskaine, “I should
judge thee reckless too, my lord, as reckless as I should judge him in
the like circumstances.”

“I see,” said Asad. “The matter stands so balanced that neither of us
dare put it to the test.”

“Thou hast said it.”

“Then is thy course plain to thee!” cried Marzak, eager to renew his
arguments. “Accept his terms, and....”

But Asad broke in impatiently. “Every thing in its own hour and each
hour is written. I will consider what to do.”

Below on the waist-deck Sakr-el-Bahr was pacing with Vigitello, and
Vigitello’s words to him were of a tenor identical almost with those of
Biskaine to the Basha.

“I scarce can judge,” said the Italian renegade. “But I do think that
it were not wise for either thou or Asad to take the first step against
the other.”

“Are matters, then, so equal between us?”

“Numbers, I fear,” replied Vigitello, “would be in favour of Asad. No
truly devout Muslim will stand against the Basha, the representative of
the Sublime Portal, to whom loyalty is a question of religion. Yet they
are accustomed to obey thee, to leap at thy command, and so Asad
himself were rash to put it to the test.”

“Ay—a sound argument,” said Sakr-el-Bahr. “It is as I had thought.”

Upon that he quitted Vigitello, and slowly, thoughtfully, returned to
the poop-deck. It was his hope—his only hope now—that Asad might accept
the proposal he had made him. As the price of it he was fully prepared
for the sacrifice of his own life, which it must entail. But, it was
not for him to approach Asad again; to do so would be to argue doubt
and anxiety and so to court refusal. He must possess his soul in what
patience he could. If Asad persisted in his refusal undeterred by any
fear of mutiny, then Sakr-el-Bahr knew not what course remained him to
accomplish Rosamund’s deliverance. Proceed to stir up mutiny he dared
not. It was too desperate a throw. In his own view it offered him no
slightest chance of success, and did it fail, then indeed all would be
lost, himself destroyed, and Rosamund at the mercy of Asad. He was as
one walking along a sword-edge. His only chance of present immunity for
himself and Rosamund lay in the confidence that Asad would dare no more
than himself to take the initiative in aggression. But that was only
for the present, and at any moment Asad might give the word to put
about and steer for Barbary again; in no case could that be delayed
beyond the plundering of the Spanish argosy. He nourished the faint
hope that in that coming fight—if indeed the Spaniards did show
fight—some chance might perhaps present itself, some unexpected way out
of the present situation.

He spent the night under the stars, stretched across the threshold of
the curtained entrance to the poop-house, making thus a barrier of his
body whilst he slept, and himself watched over in his turn by his
faithful Nubians who remained on guard. He awakened when the first
violet tints of dawn were in the east, and quietly dismissing the weary
slaves to their rest, he kept watch alone thereafter. Under the awning
on the starboard quarter slept the Basha and his son, and near them
Biskaine was snoring.




CHAPTER XIX.
THE MUTINEERS


Later that morning, some time after the galeasse had awakened to life
and such languid movement as might be looked for in a waiting crew,
Sakr-el-Bahr went to visit Rosamund.

He found her brightened and refreshed by sleep, and he brought her
reassuring messages that all was well, encouraging her with hopes which
himself he was very far from entertaining. If her reception of him was
not expressedly friendly, neither was it unfriendly. She listened to
the hopes he expressed of yet effecting her safe deliverance, and
whilst she had no thanks to offer him for the efforts he was to exert
on her behalf—accepting them as her absolute due, as the inadequate
liquidation of the debt that lay between them—yet there was now none of
that aloofness amounting almost to scorn which hitherto had marked her
bearing towards him.

He came again some hours later, in the afternoon, by when his Nubians
were once more at their post. He had no news to bring her beyond the
fact that their sentinel on the heights reported a sail to westward,
beating up towards the island before the very gentle breeze that was
blowing. But the argosy they awaited was not yet in sight, and he
confessed that certain proposals which he had made to Asad for landing
her in France had been rejected. Still she need have no fear, he added
promptly, seeing the sudden alarm that quickened in her eyes. A way
would present itself. He was watching, and would miss no chance.

“And if no chance should offer?” she asked him.

“Why then I will make one,” he answered, lightly almost. “I have been
making them all my life, and it would be odd if I should have lost the
trick of it on my life’s most important occasion.”

This mention of his life led to a question from her.

“How did you contrive the chance that has made you what you are? I
mean,” she added quickly, as if fearing that the purport of that
question might be misunderstood, “that has enabled you to become a
corsair captain.”

“’Tis a long story that,” he said. “I should weary you in the telling
of it.”

“No,” she replied, and shook her head, her clear eyes solemnly meeting
his clouded glance. “You would not weary me. Chances may be few in
which to learn it.”

“And you would learn it?” quoth he, and added, “That you may judge me?”

“Perhaps,” she said, and her eyes fell.

With bowed head he paced the length of the small chamber, and back
again. His desire was to do her will in this, which is natural
enough—for if it is true that who knows all must perforce forgive all,
never could it have been truer than in the case of Sir Oliver
Tressilian.

So he told his tale. Pacing there he related it at length, from the
days when he had toiled at an oar on one of the galleys of Spain down
to that hour in which aboard the Spanish vessel taken under Cape
Spartel he had determined upon that voyage to England to present his
reckoning to his brother. He told his story simply and without too
great a wealth of detail, yet he omitted nothing of all that had gone
to place him where he stood. And she, listening, was so profoundly
moved that at one moment her eyes glistened with tears which she sought
vainly to repress. Yet he, pacing there, absorbed, with head bowed and
eyes that never once strayed in her direction, saw none of this.

“And so,” he said, when at last that odd narrative had reached its end,
“you know what the forces were that drove me. Another stronger than
myself might have resisted and preferred to suffer death. But I was not
strong enough. Or perhaps it is that stronger than myself was my desire
to punish, to vent the bitter hatred into which my erstwhile love for
Lionel was turned.”

“And for me, too—as you have told me,” she added.

“Not so,” he corrected her. “I hated you for your unfaith, and most of
all for your having burnt unread the letter that I sent you by the hand
of Pitt. In doing that you contributed to the wrongs I was enduring,
you destroyed my one chance of establishing my innocence and seeking
rehabilitation, you doomed me for life to the ways which I was
treading. But I did not then know what ample cause you had to believe
me what I seemed. I did not know that it was believed I had fled.
Therefore I forgive you freely a deed for which at one time I confess
that I hated you, and which spurred me to bear you off when I found you
under my hand that night at Arwenack when I went for Lionel.”

“You mean that it was no part of your intent to have done so?” she
asked him.

“To carry you off together with him?” he asked. “I swear to God I had
not premeditated that. Indeed, it was done because not premeditated,
for had I considered it, I do think I should have been proof against
any such temptation. It assailed me suddenly when I beheld you there
with Lionel, and I succumbed to it. Knowing what I now know I am
punished enough, I think.”

“I think I can understand,” she murmured gently, as if to comfort him,
for quick pain had trembled in his voice.

He tossed back his turbaned head. “To understand is something,” said
he. “It is half-way at least to forgiveness. But ere forgiveness can be
accepted the evil done must be atoned for to the full.”

“If possible,” said she.

“It must be made possible,” he answered her with heat, and on that he
checked abruptly, arrested by a sound of shouting from without.

He recognized the voice of Larocque, who at dawn had returned to his
sentinel’s post on the summit of the headland, relieving the man who
had replaced him there during the night.

“My lord! My lord!” was the cry, in a voice shaken by excitement, and
succeeded by a shouting chorus from the crew.

Sakr-el-Bahr turned swiftly to the entrance, whisked aside the curtain,
and stepped out upon the poop. Larocque was in the very act of
clambering over the bulwarks amidships, towards the waist-deck where
Asad awaited him in company with Marzak and the trusty Biskaine. The
prow, on which the corsairs had lounged at ease since yesterday, was
now a seething mob of inquisitive babbling men, crowding to the rail
and even down the gangway in their eagerness to learn what news it was
that brought the sentinel aboard in such excited haste.

From where he stood Sakr-el-Bahr heard Larocque’s loud announcement.

“The ship I sighted at dawn, my lord!”

“Well?” barked Asad.

“She is here—in the bay beneath that headland. She has just dropped
anchor.”

“No need for alarm in that,” replied the Basha at once. “Since she has
anchored there it is plain that she has no suspicion of our presence.
What manner of ship is she?”

“A tall galleon of twenty guns, flying the flag of England.

“Of England!” cried Asad in surprise. “She’ll need be a stout vessel to
hazard herself in Spanish waters.”

Sakr-el-Bahr advanced to the rail.

“Does she display no further device?” he asked.

Larocque turned at the question. “Ay,” he answered, “a narrow blue
pennant on her mizzen is charged with a white bird—a stork, I think.”

“A stork?” echoed Sakr-el-Bahr thoughtfully. He could call to mind no
such English blazon, nor did it seem to him that it could possibly be
English. He caught the sound of a quickly indrawn breath behind him. He
turned to find Rosamund standing in the entrance, not more than half
concealed by the curtain. Her face showed white and eager, her eyes
were wide.

“What is’t?” he asked her shortly.

“A stork, he thinks,” she said, as though that were answer enough.

“I’ faith an unlikely bird,” he commented. “The fellow is mistook.”

“Yet not by much, Sir Oliver.”

“How? Not by much?” Intrigued by something in her tone and glance, he
stepped quickly up to her, whilst below the chatter of voices
increased.

“That which he takes to be a stork is a heron—a white heron, and white
is argent in heraldry, is’t not?”

“It is. What then?”

“D’ye not see? That ship will be the Silver Heron.”

He looked at her. “’S life!” said he, “I reck little whether it be the
silver heron or the golden grasshopper. What odds?”

“It is Sir John’s ship—Sir John Killigrew’s,” she explained. “She was
all but ready to sail when... when you came to Arwenack. He was for the
Indies. Instead—don’t you see?—out of love for me he will have come
after me upon a forlorn hope of overtaking you ere you could make
Barbary.”

“God’s light!” said Sakr-el-Bahr, and fell to musing. Then he raised
his head and laughed. “Faith, he’s some days late for that!”

But the jest evoked no response from her. She continued to stare at him
with those eager yet timid eyes.

“And yet,” he continued, “he comes opportunely enough. If the breeze
that has fetched him is faint, yet surely it blows from Heaven.”

“Were it...?” she paused, faltering a moment.

Then, “Were it possible to communicate with him?” she asked, yet with
hesitation.

“Possible—ay,” he answered. “Though we must needs devise the means, and
that will prove none so easy.”

“And you would do it?” she inquired, an undercurrent of wonder in her
question, some recollection of it in her face.

“Why, readily,” he answered, “since no other way presents itself. No
doubt ’twill cost some lives,” he added, “but then....” And he shrugged
to complete the sentence.

“Ah, no, no! Not at that price!” she protested. And how was he to know
that all the price she was thinking of was his own life, which she
conceived would be forfeited if the assistance of the Silver Heron were
invoked?

Before he could return her any answer his attention was diverted. A
sullen threatening note had crept into the babble of the crew, and
suddenly one or two voices were raised to demand insistently that Asad
should put to sea at once and remove his vessel from a neighbourhood
become so dangerous. Now, the fault of this was Marzak’s. His was the
voice that first had uttered that timid suggestion, and the infection
of his panic had spread instantly through the corsair ranks.

Asad, drawn to the full of his gaunt height, turned upon them the eyes
that had quelled greater clamours, and raised the voice which in its
day had hurled a hundred men straight into the jaws of death without a
protest.

“Silence!” he commanded. “I am your lord and need no counsellors save
Allah. When I consider the time come, I will give the word to row, but
not before. Back to your quarters, then, and peace!”

He disdained to argue with them, to show them what sound reasons there
were for remaining in this secret cove and against putting forth into
the open. Enough for them that such should be his will. Not for them to
question his wisdom and his decisions.

But Asad-ed-Din had lain overlong in Algiers whilst his fleets under
Sakr-el-Bahr and Biskaine had scoured the inland sea. The men were no
longer accustomed to the goad of his voice, their confidence in his
judgment was not built upon the sound basis of past experience. Never
yet had he led into battle the men of this crew and brought them forth
again in triumph and enriched by spoil.

So now they set their own judgment against his. To them it seemed a
recklessness—as, indeed, Marzak had suggested—to linger here, and his
mere announcement of his purpose was far from sufficient to dispel
their doubts.

The murmurs swelled, not to be overborne by his fierce presence and
scowling brow, and suddenly one of the renegades—secretly prompted by
the wily Vigitello—raised a shout for the captain whom they knew and
trusted.

“Sakr-el-Bahr! Sakr-el-Bahr! Thou’lt not leave us penned in this cove
to perish like rats!”

It was as a spark to a train of powder. A score of voices instantly
took up the cry; hands were flung out towards Sakr-el-Bahr, where he
stood above them and in full view of all, leaning impassive and stern
upon the poop-rail, whilst his agile mind weighed the opportunity thus
thrust upon him, and considered what profit was to be extracted from
it.

Asad fell back a pace in his profound mortification. His face was
livid, his eyes blared furiously, his hand flew to the jewelled hilt of
his scimitar, yet forbore from drawing the blade. Instead he let loose
upon Marzak the venom kindled in his soul by this evidence of how
shrunken was his authority.

“Thou fool!” he snarled. “Look on thy craven’s work. See what a devil
thou hast raised with thy woman’s counsels. Thou to command a galley!
Thou to become a fighter upon the seas! I would that Allah had stricken
me dead ere I begat me such a son as thou!”

Marzak recoiled before the fury of words that he feared might be
followed by yet worse. He dared make no answer, offer no excuse; in
that moment he scarcely dared breathe.

Meanwhile Rosamund in her eagerness had advanced until she stood at
Sakr-el-Bahr’s elbow.

“God is helping us!” she said in a voice of fervent gratitude. “This is
your opportunity. The men will obey you.”

He looked at her, and smiled faintly upon her eagerness. “Ay, mistress,
they will obey me,” he said. But in the few moments that were sped he
had taken his resolve. Whilst undoubtedly Asad was right, and the wise
course was to lie close in this sheltering cove where the odds of their
going unperceived were very heavily in their favour, yet the men’s
judgment was not altogether at fault. If they were to put to sea, they
might by steering an easterly course pass similarly unperceived, and
even should the splash of their oars reach the galleon beyond the
headland, yet by the time she had weighed anchor and started in pursuit
they would be well away straining every ounce of muscle at the oars,
whilst the breeze—a heavy factor in his considerations—was become so
feeble that they could laugh at pursuit by a vessel that depended upon
wind alone. The only danger, then, was the danger of the galleon’s
cannon, and that danger was none so great as from experience
Sakr-el-Bahr well knew.

Thus was he reluctantly forced to the conclusion that in the main the
wiser policy was to support Asad, and since he was full confident of
the obedience of the men he consoled himself with the reflection that a
moral victory might be in store for him out of which some surer profit
might presently be made.

In answer, then, to those who still called upon him, he leapt down the
companion and strode along the gangway to the waist-deck to take his
stand at the Basha’s side. Asad watched his approach with angry
misgivings; it was with him a foregone conclusion that things being as
they were Sakr-el-Bahr would be ranged against him to obtain complete
control of these mutineers and to cull the fullest advantage from the
situation. Softly and slowly he unsheathed his scimitar, and
Sakr-el-Bahr seeing this out of the corner of his eye, yet affected not
to see, but stood forward to address the men.

“How now?” he thundered wrathfully. “What shall this mean? Are ye all
deaf that ye have not heard the commands of your Basha, the exalted of
Allah, that ye dare raise your mutinous voices and say what is your
will?”

Sudden and utter silence followed that exhortation. Asad listened in
relieved amazement; Rosamund caught her breath in sheer dismay.

What could he mean, then? Had he but fooled and duped her? Were his
intentions towards her the very opposite to his protestations? She
leant upon the poop-rail straining to catch every syllable of that
speech of his in the lingua franca, hoping almost that her indifferent
knowledge of it had led her into error on the score of what he had
said.

She saw him turn with a gesture of angry command upon Larocque, who
stood there by the bulwarks, waiting.

“Back to thy post up yonder, and keep watch upon that vessel’s
movements, reporting them to us. We stir not hence until such be our
lord Asad’s good pleasure. Away with thee!”

Larocque without a murmur threw a leg over the bulwarks and dropped to
the oars, whence he clambered ashore as he had been bidden. And not a
single voice was raised in protest.

Sakr-el-Bahr’s dark glance swept the ranks of the corsairs crowding the
forecastle.

“Because this pet of the hareem,” he said, immensely daring, indicating
Marzak by a contemptuous gesture, “bleats of danger into the ears of
men, are ye all to grow timid and foolish as a herd of sheep? By Allah!
What are ye? Are ye the fearless sea-hawks that have flown with me, and
struck where the talons of my grappling-hooks were flung, or are ye but
scavenging crows?”

He was answered by an old rover whom fear had rendered greatly daring.

“We are trapped here as Dragut was trapped at Jerba.”

“Thou liest,” he answered. “Dragut was not trapped, for Dragut found a
way out. And against Dragut there was the whole navy of Genoa, whilst
against us there is but one single galleon. By the Koran, if she shows
fight, have we no teeth? Will it be the first galleon whose decks we
have overrun? But if ye prefer a coward’s counsel, ye sons of shame,
consider that once we take the open sea our discovery will be assured,
and Larocque hath told you that she carries twenty guns. I tell you
that if we are to be attacked by her, best be attacked at close
quarters, and I tell you that if we lie close and snug in here it is
long odds that we shall never be attacked at all. That she has no
inkling of our presence is proven, since she has cast anchor round the
headland. And consider that if we fly from a danger that doth not
exist, and in our flight are so fortunate as not to render real that
danger and to court it, we abandon a rich argosy that shall bring
profit to us all.”

“But I waste my breath in argument,” he ended abruptly. “You have heard
the commands of your lord, Asad-ed-Din, and that should be argument
enough. No more of this, then.”

Without so much as waiting to see them disperse from the rail and
return to their lounging attitudes about the forecastle, he turned to
Asad.

“It might have been well to hang the dog who spoke of Dragut and
Jerba,” he said. “But it was never in my nature to be harsh with those
who follow me.” And that was all.

Asad from amazement had passed quickly to admiration and a sort of
contrition, into which presently there crept a poisonous tinge of
jealousy to see Sakr-el-Bahr prevail where he himself alone must
utterly have failed. This jealousy spread all-pervadingly, like an oil
stain. If he had come to bear ill-will to Sakr-el-Bahr before, that
ill-will was turned of a sudden into positive hatred for one in whom he
now beheld a usurper of the power and control that should reside in the
Basha alone. Assuredly there was no room for both of them in the
Bashalik of Algiers.

Therefore the words of commendation which had been rising to his lips
froze there now that Sakr-el-Bahr and he stood face to face. In silence
he considered his lieutenant through narrowing evil eyes, whose message
none but a fool could have misunderstood.

Sakr-el-Bahr was not a fool, and he did not misunderstand it for a
moment. He felt a tightening at the heart, and ill-will sprang to life
within him responding to the call of that ill-will. Almost he repented
him that he had not availed himself of that moment of weakness and
mutiny on the part of the crew to attempt the entire superseding of the
Basha.

The conciliatory words he had in mind to speak he now suppressed. To
that venomous glance he opposed his ever ready mockery. He turned to
Biskaine.

“Withdraw,” he curtly bade him, “and take that stout sea-warrior with
thee.” And he indicated Marzak.

Biskaine turned to the Basha. “Is it thy wish, my lord?” he asked.

Asad nodded in silence, and motioned him away together with the cowed
Marzak.

“My lord,” said Sakr-el-Bahr, when they were alone, “yesterday I made
thee a proposal for the healing of this breach between us, and it was
refused. But now had I been the traitor and mutineer thou hast dubbed
me I could have taken full advantage of the humour of my corsairs. Had
I done that it need no longer have been mine to propose or to sue.
Instead it would have been mine to dictate. Since I have given thee
such crowning proof of my loyalty, it is my hope and trust that I may
be restored to the place I had lost in thy confidence, and that this
being so thou wilt accede now to that proposal of mine concerning the
Frankish woman yonder.”

It was unfortunate perhaps that she should have been standing there
unveiled upon the poop within the range of Asad’s glance; for the sight
of her it may have been that overcame his momentary hesitation and
stifled the caution which prompted him to accede. He considered her a
moment, and a faint colour kindled in his cheeks which anger had made
livid.

“It is not for thee, Sakr-el-Bahr,” he answered at length, “to make me
proposals. To dare it, proves thee far removed indeed from the loyalty
thy lips profess. Thou knowest my will concerning her. Once hast thou
thwarted and defied me, misusing to that end the Prophet’s Holy Law.
Continue a barrier in my path and it shall be at thy peril.” His voice
was raised and it shook with anger.

“Not so loud,” said Sakr-el-Bahr, his eyes gleaming with a response of
anger. “For should my men overhear these threats of thine I will not
answer for what may follow. I oppose thee at my peril sayest thou. Be
it so, then.” He smiled grimly. “It is war between us, Asad, since thou
hast chosen it. Remember hereafter when the consequences come to
overwhelm thee that the choice was thine.”

“Thou mutinous, treacherous son of a dog!” blazed Asad.

Sakr-el-Bahr turned on his heel. “Pursue the path of an old man’s
folly,” he said over his shoulder, “and see whither it will lead thee.”

Upon that he strode away up the gangway to the poop, leaving the Basha
alone with his anger and some slight fear evoked by that last bold
menace. But notwithstanding that he menaced boldly the heart of
Sakr-el-Bahr was surcharged with anxiety. He had conceived a plan; but
between the conception and its execution he realized that much ill
might lie.

“Mistress,” he addressed Rosamund as he stepped upon the poop. “You are
not wise to show yourself so openly.”

To his amazement she met him with a hostile glance.

“Not wise?” said she, her countenance scornful. “You mean that I may
see more than was intended for me. What game do you play here, sir,
that you tell me one thing and show me by your actions that you desire
another?”

He did not need to ask her what she meant. At once he perceived how she
had misread the scene she had witnessed.

“I’ll but remind you,” he said very gravely, “that once before you did
me a wrong by over-hasty judgment, as has been proven to you.”

It overthrew some of her confidence. “But then....” she began.

“I do but ask you to save your judgment for the end. If I live I shall
deliver you. Meanwhile I beg that you will keep your cabin. It does not
help me that you be seen.”

She looked at him, a prayer for explanation trembling on her lips. But
before the calm command of his tone and glance she slowly lowered her
head and withdrew beyond the curtain.




CHAPTER XX.
THE MESSENGER


For the rest of the day she kept the cabin, chafing with anxiety to
know what was toward and the more racked by it because Sakr-el-Bahr
refrained through all those hours from coming to her. At last towards
evening, unable longer to contain herself, she went forth again, and as
it chanced she did so at an untimely moment.

The sun had set, and the evening prayer was being recited aboard the
galeasse, her crew all prostrate. Perceiving this, she drew back again
instinctively, and remained screened by the curtain until the prayer
was ended. Then putting it aside, but without stepping past the Nubians
who were on guard, she saw that on her left Asad-ed-Din, with Marzak,
Biskaine, and one or two other officers, was again occupying the divan
under the awning. Her eyes sought Sakr-el-Bahr, and presently they
beheld him coming up the gangway with his long, swinging stride, in the
wake of the boat-swain’s mates who were doling out the meagre evening
meal to the slaves.

Suddenly he halted by Lionel, who occupied a seat at the head of his
oar immediately next to the gangway. He addressed him harshly in the
lingua franca, which Lionel did not understand, and his words rang
clearly and were heard—as he intended that they should be—by all upon
the poop.

“Well, dog? How does galley-slave fare suit thy tender stomach?”

Lionel looked up at him.

“What are you saying?” he asked in English.

Sakr-el-Bahr bent over him, and his face as all could see was evil and
mocking. No doubt he spoke to him in English also, but no more than a
murmur reached the straining ears of Rosamund, though from his
countenance she had no doubt of the purport of his words. And yet she
was far indeed from a correct surmise. The mockery in his countenance
was but a mask.

“Take no heed of my looks,” he was saying. “I desire them up yonder to
think that I abuse you. Look as a man would who were being abused.
Cringe or snarl, but listen. Do you remember once when as lads we swam
together from Penarrow to Trefusis Point?”

“What do you mean?” quoth Lionel, and the natural sullenness of his
mien was all that Sakr-el-Bahr could have desired.

“I am wondering whether you could still swim as far. If so you might
find a more appetizing supper awaiting you at the end—aboard Sir John
Killigrew’s ship. You had not heard? The Silver Heron is at anchor in
the bay beyond that headland. If I afford you the means, could you swim
to her do you think?”

Lionel stared at him in profoundest amazement. “Do you mock me?” he
asked at length.

“Why should I mock you on such a matter?”

“Is it not to mock me to suggest a way for my deliverance?”

Sakr-el-Bahr laughed, and he mocked now in earnest. He set his left
foot upon the rowers’ stretcher, and leaned forward and down his elbow
upon his raised knee so that his face was close to Lionel’s.

“For your deliverance?” said he. “God’s life! Lionel, your mind was
ever one that could take in naught but your own self. ’Tis that has
made a villain of you. Your deliverance! God’s wounds! Is there none
but yourself whose deliverance I might desire? Look you, now I want you
to swim to Sir John’s ship and bear him word of the presence here of
this galeasse and that Rosamund is aboard it. ’Tis for her that I am
concerned, and so little for you that should you chance to be drowned
in the attempt my only regret will be that the message was not
delivered. Will you undertake that swim? It is your one sole chance
short of death itself of escaping from the rower’s bench. Will you go?”

“But how?” demanded Lionel, still mistrusting him.

“Will you go?” his brother insisted.

“Afford me the means and I will,” was the answer.

“Very well.” Sakr-el-Bahr leaned nearer still. “Naturally it will be
supposed by all who are watching us that I am goading you to
desperation. Act, then, your part. Up, and attempt to strike me. Then
when I return the blow—and I shall strike heavily that no make-believe
may be suspected—collapse on your oar pretending to swoon. Leave the
rest to me. Now,” he added sharply, and on the word rose with a final
laugh of derision as if to take his departure.

But Lionel was quick to follow the instructions. He leapt up in his
bonds, and reaching out as far as they would permit him, he struck
Sakr-el-Bahr heavily upon the face. On his side, too, there was to be
no make-believe apparent. That done he sank down with a clank of
shackles to the bench again, whilst every one of his fellow-slaves that
faced his way looked on with fearful eyes.

Sakr-el-Bahr was seen to reel under the blow, and instantly there was a
commotion on board. Biskaine leapt to his feet with a half-cry of
astonishment; even Asad’s eyes kindled with interest at so unusual a
sight as that of a galley-slave attacking a corsair. Then with a snarl
of anger, the snarl of an enraged beast almost, Sakr-el-Bahr’s great
arm was swung aloft and his fist descended like a hammer upon Lionel’s
head.

Lionel sank forward under the blow, his senses swimming. Sakr-el-Bahr’s
arm swung up a second time.

“Thou dog!” he roared, and then checked, perceiving that Lionel
appeared to have swooned.

He turned and bellowed for Vigitello and his mates in a voice that was
hoarse with passion. Vigitello came at a run, a couple of his men at
his heels.

“Unshackle me this carrion, and heave it overboard,” was the harsh
order. “Let that serve as an example to the others. Let them learn thus
the price of mutiny in their lousy ranks. To it, I say.”

Away sped a man for hammer and chisel. He returned with them at once.
Four sharp metallic blows rang out, and Lionel was dragged forth from
his place to the gangway-deck. Here he revived, and screamed for mercy
as though he were to be drowned in earnest.

Biskaine chuckled under the awning, Asad looked on approvingly,
Rosamund drew back, shuddering, choking, and near to fainting from
sheer horror.

She saw Lionel borne struggling in the arms of the boatswain’s men to
the starboard quarter, and flung over the side with no more compunction
or care than had he been so much rubbish. She heard the final scream of
terror with which he vanished, the splash of his fall, and then in the
ensuing silence the laugh of Sakr-el-Bahr.

For a spell she stood there with horror and loathing of that renegade
corsair in her soul. Her mind was bewildered and confused. She sought
to restore order in it, that she might consider this fresh deed of his,
this act of wanton brutality and fratricide. And all that she could
gather was the firm conviction that hitherto he had cheated her; he had
lied when he swore that his aim was to effect her deliverance. It was
not in such a nature to know a gentle mood of penitence for a wrong
done. What might be his purpose she could not yet perceive, but that it
was an evil one she never doubted, for no purpose of his could be aught
but evil. So overwrought was she now that she forgot all Lionel’s sins,
and found her heart filled with compassion for him hurled in that
brutal fashion to his death.

And then, quite suddenly a shout rang out from the forecastle.

“He is swimming!”

Sakr-el-Bahr had been prepared for the chance of this.

“Where? Where?” he cried, and sprang to the bulwarks.

“Yonder!” A man was pointing. Others had joined him and were peering
through the gathering gloom at the moving object that was Lionel’s head
and the faintly visible swirl of water about it which indicated that he
swam.

“Out to sea!” cried Sakr-el-Bahr. “He’ll not swim far in any case. But
we will shorten his road for him.” He snatched a cross-bow from the
rack about the mainmast, fitted a shaft to it and took aim.

On the point of loosing the bolt he paused.

“Marzak!” he called. “Here, thou prince of marksmen, is a butt for
thee!”

From the poop-deck whence with his father he too was watching the
swimmer’s head, which at every moment became more faint in the failing
light, Marzak looked with cold disdain upon his challenger, making no
reply. A titter ran through the crew.

“Come now,” cried Sakr-el-Bahr. “Take up thy bow!”

“If thou delay much longer,” put in Asad, “he will be beyond thine aim.
Already he is scarcely visible.”

“The more difficult a butt, then,” answered Sakr-el-Bahr, who was but
delaying to gain time. “The keener test. A hundred philips, Marzak,
that thou’lt not hit me that head in three shots, and that I’ll sink
him at the first! Wilt take the wager?”

“The unbeliever is for ever peeping forth from thee,” was Marzak’s
dignified reply. “Games of chance are forbidden by the Prophet.”

“Make haste, man!” cried Asad. “Already I can scarce discern him. Loose
thy quarrel.”

“Pooh,” was the disdainful answer. “A fair mark still for such an eye
as mine. I never miss—not even in the dark.”

“Vain boaster,” said Marzak.

“Am I so?” Sakr-el-Bahr loosed his shaft at last into the gloom, and
peered after it following its flight, which was wide of the direction
of the swimmer’s head. “A hit!” he cried brazenly. “He’s gone!”

“I think I see him still,” said one.

“Thine eyes deceive thee in this light. No man was ever known to swim
with an arrow through his brain.”

“Ay,” put in Jasper, who stood behind Sakr-el-Bahr. “He has vanished.”

“’Tis too dark to see,” said Vigitello.

And then Asad turned from the vessel’s side. “Well, well—shot or
drowned, he’s gone,” he said, and there the matter ended.

Sakr-el-Bahr replaced the cross-bow in the rack, and came slowly up to
the poop.

In the gloom he found himself confronted by Rosamund’s white face
between the two dusky countenances of his Nubians. She drew back before
him as he approached, and he, intent upon imparting his news to her,
followed her within the poop-house, and bade Abiad bring lights.

When these had been kindled they faced each other, and he perceived her
profound agitation and guessed the cause of it. Suddenly she broke into
speech.

“You beast! You devil!” she panted. “God will punish you! I shall spend
my every breath in praying Him to punish you as you deserve. You
murderer! You hound! And I like a poor simpleton was heeding your false
words. I was believing you sincere in your repentance of the wrong you
have done me. But now you have shown me....”

“How have I hurt you in what I have done to Lionel?” he cut in, a
little amazed by so much vehemence.

“Hurt me!” she cried, and on the words grew cold and calm again with
very scorn. “I thank God it is beyond your power to hurt me. And I
thank you for correcting my foolish misconception of you, my belief in
your pitiful pretence that it was your aim to save me. I would not
accept salvation at your murderer’s hands. Though, indeed, I shall not
be put to it. Rather,” she pursued, a little wildly now in her deep
mortification, “are you like to sacrifice me to your own vile ends,
whatever they may be. But I shall thwart you, Heaven helping me. Be
sure I shall not want courage for that.” And with a shuddering moan she
covered her face, and stood swaying there before him.

He looked on with a faint, bitter smile, understanding her mood just as
he understood her dark threat of thwarting him.

“I came,” he said quietly, “to bring you the assurance that he has got
safely away, and to tell you upon what manner of errand I have sent
him.”

Something compelling in his voice, the easy assurance with which he
spoke, drew her to stare at him again.

“I mean Lionel, of course,” he said, in answer to her questioning
glance. “That scene between us—the blow and the swoon and the rest of
it—was all make-believe. So afterwards the shooting. My challenge to
Marzak was a ruse to gain time—to avoid shooting until Lionel’s head
should have become so dimly visible in the dusk that none could say
whether it was still there or not. My shaft went wide of him, as I
intended. He is swimming round the head with my message to Sir John
Killigrew. He was a strong swimmer in the old days, and should easily
reach his goal. That is what I came to tell you.”

For a long spell she continued to stare at him in silence.

“You are speaking the truth?” she asked at last, in a small voice.

He shrugged. “You will have a difficulty in perceiving the object I
might serve by falsehood.”

She sat down suddenly upon the divan; it was almost as if she collapsed
bereft of strength; and as suddenly she fell to weeping softly.

“And... and I believed that you... that you....”

“Just so,” he grimly interrupted. “You always did believe the best of
me.”

And on that he turned and went out abruptly.




CHAPTER XXI.
MORITURUS


He departed from her presence with bitterness in his heart, leaving a
profound contrition in her own. The sense of this her last injustice to
him so overwhelmed her that it became the gauge by which she measured
that other earlier wrong he had suffered at her hands. Perhaps her
overwrought mind falsified the perspective, exaggerating it until it
seemed to her that all the suffering and evil with which this chronicle
has been concerned were the direct fruits of her own sin of unfaith.

Since all sincere contrition must of necessity bring forth an ardent
desire to atone, so was it now with her. Had he but refrained from
departing so abruptly he might have had her on her knees to him suing
for pardon for all the wrongs which her thoughts had done him,
proclaiming her own utter unworthiness and baseness. But since his
righteous resentment had driven him from her presence she could but sit
and brood upon it all, considering the words in which to frame her plea
for forgiveness when next he should return.

But the hours sped, and there was no sign of him. And then, almost with
a shock of dread came the thought that ere long perhaps Sir John
Killigrew’s ship would be upon them. In her distraught state of mind
she had scarcely pondered that contingency. Now that it occurred to her
all her concern was for the result of it to Sir Oliver. Would there be
fighting, and would he perhaps perish in that conflict at the hands
either of the English or of the corsairs whom for her sake he had
betrayed, perhaps without ever hearing her confession of penitence,
without speaking those words of forgiveness of which her soul stood in
such thirsty need?

It would be towards midnight when unable longer to bear the suspense of
it, she rose and softly made her way to the entrance. Very quietly she
lifted the curtain, and in the act of stepping forth almost stumbled
over a body that lay across the threshold. She drew back with a
startled gasp; then stooped to look, and by the faint rays of the
lanterns on mainmast and poop-rail she recognized Sir Oliver, and saw
that he slept. She never heeded the two Nubians immovable as statues
who kept guard. She continued to bend over him, and then gradually and
very softly sank down on her knees beside him. There were tears in her
eyes—tears wrung from her by a tender emotion of wonder and gratitude
at so much fidelity. She did not know that he had slept thus last
night. But it was enough for her to find him here now. It moved her
oddly, profoundly, that this man whom she had ever mistrusted and
misjudged should even when he slept make of his body a barrier for her
greater security and protection.

A sob escaped her, and at the sound, so lightly and vigilantly did he
take his rest, he came instantly if silently to a sitting attitude; and
so they looked into each other’s eyes, his swarthy, bearded hawk face
on a level with her white gleaming countenance.

“What is it?” he whispered.

She drew back instantly, taken with sudden panic at that question. Then
recovering, and seeking womanlike to evade and dissemble the thing she
was come to do, now that the chance of doing it was afforded her—“Do
you think,” she faltered, “that Lionel will have reached Sir John’s
ship?”

He flashed a glance in the direction of the divan under the awning
where the Basha slept. There all was still. Besides, the question had
been asked in English. He rose and held out a hand to help her to her
feet. Then he signed to her to reenter the poop-house, and followed her
within.

“Anxiety keeps you wakeful?” he said, half-question, half-assertion.

“Indeed,” she replied.

“There is scarce the need,” he assured her. “Sir John will not be like
to stir until dead of night, that he may make sure of taking us
unawares. I have little doubt that Lionel would reach him. It is none
so long a swim. Indeed, once outside the cove he could take to the land
until he was abreast of the ship. Never doubt he will have done his
errand.”

She sat down, her glance avoiding his; but the light falling on her
face showed him the traces there of recent tears.

“There will be fighting when Sir John arrives?” she asked him
presently.

“Like enough. But what can it avail? We shall be caught—as was said
to-day—in just such a trap as that in which Andrea Doria caught Dragut
at Jerba, saving that whilst the wily Dragut found a way out for his
galleys, here none is possible. Courage, then, for the hour of your
deliverance is surely at hand.”

He paused, and then in a softer voice, humbly almost, “It is my
prayer,” he added, “that hereafter in a happy future these last few
weeks shall come to seem no more than an evil dream to you.”

To that prayer she offered no response. She sat bemused, her brow
wrinkled.

“I would it might be done without fighting,” she said presently, and
sighed wearily.

“You need have no fear,” he assured her. “I shall take all precautions
for you. You shall remain here until all is over and the entrance will
be guarded by a few whom I can trust.”

“You mistake me,” she replied, and looked up at him suddenly. “Do you
suppose my fears are for myself?” She paused again, and then abruptly
asked him, “What will befall you?”

“I thank you for the thought,” he replied gravely. “No doubt I shall
meet with my deserts. Let it but come swiftly when it comes.”

“Ah, no, no!” she cried. “Not that!” And rose in her sudden agitation.

“What else remains?” he asked, and smiled. “What better fate could
anyone desire me?”

“You shall live to return to England,” she surprised him by exclaiming.
“The truth must prevail, and justice be done you.”

He looked at her with so fierce and searching a gaze that she averted
her eyes. Then he laughed shortly.

“There’s but one form of justice I can look for in England,” said he.
“It is a justice administered in hemp. Believe me, mistress, I am grown
too notorious for mercy. Best end it here to-night. Besides,” he added,
and his mockery fell from him, his tone became gloomy, “bethink you of
my present act of treachery to these men of mine, who, whatever they
may be, have followed me into a score of perils and but to-day have
shown their love and loyalty to me to be greater than their devotion to
the Basha himself. I shall have delivered them to the sword. Could I
survive with honour? They may be but poor heathens to you and yours,
but to me they are my sea-hawks, my warriors, my faithful gallant
followers, and I were a dog indeed did I survive the death to which I
have doomed them.”

As she listened and gathered from his words the apprehension of a thing
that had hitherto escaped her, her eyes grew wide in sudden horror.

“Is that to be the cost of my deliverance?” she asked him fearfully.

“I trust not,” he replied. “I have something in mind that will perhaps
avoid it.”

“And save your own life as well?” she asked him quickly.

“Why waste a thought upon so poor a thing? My life was forfeit already.
If I go back to Algiers they will assuredly hang me. Asad will see to
it, and not all my sea-hawks could save me from my fate.”

She sank down again upon the divan, and sat there rocking her arms in a
gesture of hopeless distress.

“I see,” she said. “I see. I am bringing this fate upon you. When you
sent Lionel upon that errand you voluntarily offered up your life to
restore me to my own people. You had no right to do this without first
consulting me. You had no right to suppose I would be a party to such a
thing. I will not accept the sacrifice. I will not, Sir Oliver.”

“Indeed, you have no choice, thank God!” he answered her. “But you are
astray in your conclusions. It is I alone who have brought this fate
upon myself. It is the very proper fruit of my insensate deed. It
recoils upon me as all evil must upon him that does it.” He shrugged
his shoulders as if to dismiss the matter. Then in a changed voice, a
voice singularly timid, soft, and gentle, “it were perhaps too much to
ask,” said he, “that you should forgive me all the suffering I have
brought you?”

“I think,” she answered him, “that it is for me to beg forgiveness of
you.”

“Of me?”

“For my unfaith, which has been the source of all. For my readiness to
believe evil of you five years ago, for having burnt unread your letter
and the proof of your innocence that accompanied it.”

He smiled upon her very kindly. “I think you said your instinct guided
you. Even though I had not done the thing imputed to me, your instinct
knew me for evil; and your instinct was right, for evil I am—I must be.
These are your own words. But do not think that I mock you with them. I
have come to recognize their truth.”

She stretched out her hands to him. “If... if I were to say that I have
come to realize the falsehood of all that?”

“I should understand it to be the charity which your pitiful heart
extends to one in my extremity. Your instinct was not at fault.”

“It was! It was!”

But he was not to be driven out of his conviction. He shook his head,
his countenance gloomy. “No man who was not evil could have done by you
what I have done, however deep the provocation. I perceive it clearly
now—as men in their last hour perceive hidden things.”

“Oh, why are you so set on death?” she cried upon a despairing note.

“I am not,” he answered with a swift resumption of his more habitual
manner. “’Tis death that is so set on me. But at least I meet it
without fear or regret. I face it as we must all face the
inevitable—the gifts from the hands of destiny. And I am
heartened—gladdened almost—by your sweet forgiveness.”

She rose suddenly, and came to him. She caught his arm, and standing
very close to him, looked up now into his face.

“We have need to forgive each other, you and I, Oliver,” she said. “And
since forgiveness effaces all, let... let all that has stood between us
these last five years be now effaced.”

He caught his breath as he looked down into her white, straining face

“Is it impossible for us to go back five years? Is it impossible for us
to go back to where we stood in those old days at Godolphin Court?”

The light that had suddenly been kindled in his face faded slowly,
leaving it grey and drawn. His eyes grew clouded with sorrow and
despair.

“Who has erred must abide by his error—and so must the generations that
come after him. There is no going back ever. The gates of the past are
tight-barred against us.”

“Then let us leave them so. Let us turn our backs upon that past, you
and I, and let us set out afresh together, and so make amends to each
other for what our folly has lost to us in those years.”

He set his hands upon her shoulders, and held her so at arm’s length
from him considering her with very tender eyes.

“Sweet lady!” he murmured, and sighed heavily. “God! How happy might we
not have been but for that evil chance....” He checked abruptly. His
hands fell from her shoulders to his sides, he half-turned away,
brusque now in tone and manner. “I grow maudlin. Your sweet pity has so
softened me that I had almost spoke of love; and what have I to do with
that? Love belongs to life; love is life; whilst I... Moriturus te
salutat!”

“Ah, no, no!” She was clinging to him again with shaking hands, her
eyes wild.

“It is too late,” he answered her. “There is no bridge can span the pit
I have dug myself. I must go down into it as cheerfully as God will let
me.”

“Then,” she cried in sudden exaltation, “I will go down with you. At
the last, at least, we shall be together.”

“Now here is midsummer frenzy!” he protested, yet there was a
tenderness in the very impatience of his accents. He stroked the golden
head that lay against his shoulder. “How shall that help me?” he asked
her. “Would you embitter my last hour—rob death of all its glory? Nay,
Rosamund, you can serve me better far by living. Return to England, and
publish there the truth of what you have learnt. Be yours the task of
clearing my honour of this stain upon it, proclaiming the truth of what
drove me to the infamy of becoming a renegade and a corsair.” He
started from her. “Hark! What’s that?”

From without had come a sudden cry, “Afoot! To arms! To arms! Holâ!
Balâk! Balâk!”

“It is the hour,” he said, and turning from her suddenly sprang to the
entrance and plucked aside the curtain.




CHAPTER XXII.
THE SURRENDER


Up the gangway between the lines of slumbering slaves came a quick
patter of feet. Ali, who since sunset had been replacing Larocque on
the heights, sprang suddenly upon the poop still shouting.

“Captain! Captain! My lord! Afoot! Up! or we are taken!”

Throughout the vessel’s length came the rustle and stir of waking men.
A voice clamoured somewhere on the forecastle. Then the flap of the
awning was suddenly whisked aside and Asad himself appeared with Marzak
at his elbow.

From the starboard side as suddenly came Biskaine and Othmani, and from
the waist Vigitello, Jasper—that latest renegade—and a group of alarmed
corsairs.

“What now?” quoth the Basha.

Ali delivered his message breathlessly. “The galleon has weighed
anchor. She is moving out of the bay.”

Asad clutched his beard, and scowled. “Now what may that portend? Can
knowledge of our presence have reached them?”

“Why else should she move from her anchorage thus in the dead of
night?” said Biskaine.

“Why else, indeed?” returned Asad, and then he swung upon Oliver
standing there in the entrance of the poop-house. “What sayest thou,
Sakr-el-Bahr?” he appealed to him.

Sakr-el-Bahr stepped forward, shrugging. “What is there to say? What is
there to do?” he asked. “We can but wait. If our presence is known to
them we are finely trapped, and there’s an end to all of us this
night.”

His voice was cool as ice, contemptuous almost, and whilst it struck
anxiety into more than one it awoke terror in Marzak.

“May thy bones rot, thou ill-omened prophet!” he screamed, and would
have added more but that Sakr-el-Bahr silenced him.

“What is written is written!” said he in a voice of thunder and
reproof.

“Indeed, indeed,” Asad agreed, grasping at the fatalist’s consolation.
“If we are ripe for the gardeners hand, the gardener will pluck us.”

Less fatalistic and more practical was the counsel of Biskaine.

“It were well to act upon the assumption that we are indeed discovered,
and make for the open sea while yet there may be time.”

“But that were to make certain what is still doubtful,” broke in
Marzak, fearful ever. “It were to run to meet the danger.”

“Not so!” cried Asad in a loud, confident voice. “The praise to Allah
who sent us this calm night. There is scarce a breath of wind. We can
row ten leagues while they are sailing one.”

A murmur of quick approval sped through the ranks of officers and men.

“Let us but win safely from this cove and they will never overtake us,”
announced Biskaine.

“But their guns may,” Sakr-el-Bahr quietly reminded them to damp their
confidence. His own alert mind had already foreseen this one chance of
escaping from the trap, but he had hoped that it would not be quite so
obvious to the others.

“That risk we must take,” replied Asad. “We must trust to the night. To
linger here is to await certain destruction.” He swung briskly about to
issue his orders. “Ali, summon the steersmen. Hasten! Vigitello, set
your whips about the slaves, and rouse them.” Then as the shrill
whistle of the boatswain rang out and the whips of his mates went
hissing and cracking about the shoulders of the already half-awakened
slaves, to mingle with all the rest of the stir and bustle aboard the
galeasse, the Basha turned once more to Biskaine. “Up thou to the
prow,” he commanded, “and marshal the men. Bid them stand to their arms
lest it should come to boarding. Go!” Biskaine salaamed and sprang down
the companion. Above the rumbling din and scurrying toil of preparation
rang Asad’s voice.

“Crossbowmen, aloft! Gunners to the carronades! Kindle your linstocks!
Put out all lights!”

An instant later the cressets on the poop-rail were extinguished, as
was the lantern swinging from the rail, and even the lamp in the
poop-house which was invaded by one of the Basha’s officers for that
purpose. The lantern hanging from the mast alone was spared against
emergencies; but it was taken down, placed upon the deck, and muffled.

Thus was the galeasse plunged into a darkness that for some moments was
black and impenetrable as velvet. Then slowly, as the eyes became
accustomed to it, this gloom was gradually relieved. Once more men and
objects began to take shape in the faint, steely radiance of the summer
night.

After the excitement of that first stir the corsairs went about their
tasks with amazing calm and silence. None thought now of reproaching
the Basha or Sakr-el-Bahr with having delayed until the moment of peril
to take the course which all of them had demanded should be taken when
first they had heard of the neighbourhood of that hostile ship. In
lines three deep they stood ranged along the ample fighting platform of
the prow; in the foremost line were the archers, behind them stood the
swordsmen, their weapons gleaming lividly in the darkness. They crowded
to the bulwarks of the waist-deck and swarmed upon the rat-lines of the
mainmast. On the poop three gunners stood to each of the two small
cannon, their faces showing faintly ruddy in the glow of the ignited
match.

Asad stood at the head of the companion, issuing his sharp brief
commands, and Sakr-el-Bahr, behind him, leaning against the timbers of
the poop-house with Rosamund at his side, observed that the Basha had
studiously avoided entrusting any of this work of preparation to
himself.

The steersmen climbed to their niches, and the huge steering oars
creaked as they were swung out. Came a short word of command from Asad
and a stir ran through the ranks of the slaves, as they threw forward
their weight to bring the oars to the level. Thus a moment, then a
second word, the premonitory crack of a whip in the darkness of the
gangway, and the tomtom began to beat the time. The slaves heaved, and
with a creak and splash of oars the great galeasse skimmed forward
towards the mouth of the cove.

Up and down the gangway ran the boatswain’s mates, cutting fiercely
with their whips to urge the slaves to the very utmost effort. The
vessel gathered speed. The looming headland slipped by. The mouth of
the cove appeared to widen as they approached it. Beyond spread the
dark steely mirror of the dead-calm sea.

Rosamund could scarcely breathe in the intensity of her suspense. She
set a hand upon the arm of Sakr-el-Bahr.

“Shall we elude them, after all?” she asked in a trembling whisper.

“I pray that we may not,” he answered, muttering. “But this is the
handiwork I feared. Look!” he added sharply, and pointed.

They had shot clear to the headland. They were out of the cove, and
suddenly they had a view of the dark bulk of the galleon, studded with
a score of points of light, riding a cable’s length away on their
larboard quarter.

“Faster!” cried the voice of Asad. “Row for your lives, you infidel
swine! Lay me your whips upon these hides of theirs! Bend me these dogs
to their oars, and they’ll never overtake us now.”

Whips sang and thudded below them in the waist, to be answered by more
than one groan from the tormented panting slaves, who already were
spending every ounce of strength in this cruel effort to elude their
own chance of salvation and release. Faster beat the tomtom marking the
desperate time, and faster in response to it came the creak and dip of
oars and the panting, stertorous breathing of the rowers.

“Lay on! Lay on!” cried Asad, inexorable. Let them burst their
lungs—they were but infidel lungs!—so that for an hour they but
maintained the present pace.

“We are drawing away!” cried Marzak in jubilation. “The praise to
Allah!”

And so indeed they were. Visibly the lights of the galleon were
receding. With every inch of canvas spread yet she appeared to be
standing still, so faint was the breeze that stirred. And whilst she
crawled, the galeasse raced as never yet she had raced since
Sakr-el-Bahr had commanded her, for Sakr-el-Bahr had never yet turned
tail upon the foe in whatever strength he found him.

Suddenly over the water from the galleon came a loud hail. Asad
laughed, and in the darkness shook his fist at them, cursing them in
the name of Allah and his Prophet. And then, in answer to that curse of
his, the galleon’s side belched fire; the calm of the night was broken
by a roar of thunder, and something smote the water ahead of the Muslim
vessel with a resounding thudding splash.

In fear Rosamund drew closer to Sakr-el-Bahr. But Asad laughed again.

“No need to fear their marksmanship,” he cried. “They cannot see us.
Their own lights dazzle them. On! On!”

“He is right,” said Sakr-el-Bahr. “But the truth is that they will not
fire to sink us because they know you to be aboard.”

She looked out to sea again, and beheld those friendly lights falling
farther and farther astern.

“We are drawing steadily away,” she groaned. “They will never overtake
us now.”

So feared Sakr-el-Bahr. He more than feared it. He knew that save for
some miraculous rising of the wind it must be as she said. And then out
of his despair leapt inspiration—a desperate inspiration, true child of
that despair of which it was begotten.

“There is a chance,” he said to her. “But it is as a throw of the dice
with life and death for stakes.”

“Then seize it,” she bade him instantly. “For though it should go
against us we shall not be losers.”

“You are prepared for anything?” he asked her.

“Have I not said that I will go down with you this night? Ah, don’t
waste time in words!”

“Be it so, then,” he replied gravely, and moved away a step, then
checked. “You had best come with me,” he said.

Obediently she complied and followed him, and some there were who
stared as these two passed down the gangway, yet none attempted to
hinder her movements. Enough and to spare was there already to engage
the thoughts of all aboard that vessel.

He thrust a way for her, past the boatswain’s mates who stood over the
slaves ferociously plying tongues and whips, and so brought her to the
waist. Here he took up the lantern which had been muffled, and as its
light once more streamed forth, Asad shouted an order for its
extinction. But Sakr-el-Bahr took no least heed of that command. He
stepped to the mainmast, about which the powder kegs had been stacked.
One of these had been broached against its being needed by the gunners
on the poop. The unfastened lid rested loosely atop of it. That lid
Sakr-el-Bahr knocked over; then he pulled one of the horn sides out of
the lantern, and held the now half-naked flame immediately above the
powder.

A cry of alarm went up from some who had watched him. But above that
cry rang his sharp command:

“Cease rowing!”

The tomtom fell instantly silent, but the slaves took yet another
stroke.

“Cease rowing!” he commanded again. “Asad!” he called. “Bid them pause,
or I’ll blow you all straight into the arms of Shaitan.” And he lowered
the lantern until it rested on the very rim of the powder keg.

At once the rowing ceased. Slaves, corsairs, officers, and Asad himself
stood paralyzed, all at gaze upon that grim figure illumined by the
lantern, threatening them with doom. It may have crossed the minds of
some to throw themselves forthwith upon him; but to arrest them was the
dread lest any movement towards him should precipitate the explosion
that must blow them all into the next world.

At last Asad addressed him, his voice half-choked with rage.

“May Allah strike thee dead! Art thou djinn-possessed?”

Marzak, standing at his father’s side, set a quarrel to the bow which
he had snatched up. “Why do you all stand and stare?” he cried. “Cut
him down, one of you!” And even as he spoke he raised his bow. But his
father checked him, perceiving what must be the inevitable result.

“If any man takes a step towards me, the lantern goes straight into the
gunpowder,” said Sakr-el-Bahr serenely. “And if you shoot me as you
intend, Marzak, or if any other shoots, the same will happen of itself.
Be warned unless you thirst for the Paradise of the Prophet.”

“Sakr-el-Bahr!” cried Asad, and from its erstwhile anger his voice had
now changed to a note of intercession. He stretched out his arms
appealingly to the captain whose doom he had already pronounced in his
heart and mind. “Sakr-el-Bahr, I conjure thee by the bread and salt we
have eaten together, return to thy senses, my son.”

“I am in my sense,” was the answer, “and being so I have no mind for
the fate reserved me in Algiers—by the memory of that same bread and
salt. I have no mind to go back with thee to be hanged or sent to toil
at an oar again.”

“And if I swear to thee that naught of this shall come to pass?”

“Thou’lt be forsworn. I would not trust thee now, Asad. For thou art
proven a fool, and in all my life I never found good in a fool and
never trusted one—save once, and he betrayed me. Yesterday I pleaded
with thee, showing thee the wise course, and affording thee thine
opportunity. At a slight sacrifice thou mightest have had me and hanged
me at thy leisure. ’Twas my own life I offered thee, and for all that
thou knewest it, yet thou knewest not that I knew.” He laughed. “See
now what manner of fool art thou? Thy greed hath wrought thy ruin. Thy
hands were opened to grasp more than they could hold. See now the
consequence. It comes yonder in that slowly but surely approaching
galleon.”

Every word of it sank into the brain of Asad thus tardily to enlighten
him. He wrung his hands in his blended fury and despair. The crew stood
in appalled silence, daring to make no movement that might precipitate
their end.

“Name thine own price,” cried the Basha at length, “and I swear to thee
by the beard of the Prophet it shall be paid thee.”

“I named it yesterday, but it was refused. I offered thee my liberty
and my life if that were needed to gain the liberty of another.”

Had he looked behind him he might have seen the sudden lighting of
Rosamund’s eyes, the sudden clutch at her bosom, which would have
announced to him that his utterances were none so cryptic but that she
had understood them.

“I will make thee rich and honoured, Sakr-el-Bahr,” Asad continued
urgently. “Thou shalt be as mine own son. The Bashalik itself shall be
thine when I lay it down, and all men shall do thee honour in the
meanwhile as to myself.”

“I am not to be bought, O mighty Asad. I never was. Already wert thou
set upon my death. Thou canst command it now, but only upon the
condition that thou share the cup with me. What is written is written.
We have sunk some tall ships together in our day, Asad. We’ll sink
together in our turn to-night if that be thy desire.”

“May thou burn for evermore in hell, thou black-hearted traitor!” Asad
cursed him, his anger bursting all the bonds he had imposed upon it.

And then, of a sudden, upon that admission of defeat from their Basha,
there arose a great clamour from the crew. Sakr-el-Bahr’s sea-hawks
called upon him, reminding him of their fidelity and love, and asking
could he repay it now by dooming them all thus to destruction.

“Have faith in me!” he answered them. “I have never led you into aught
but victory. Be sure that I shall not lead you now into defeat—on this
the last occasion that we stand together.”

“But the galleon is upon us!” cried Vigitello. And so, indeed, it was,
creeping up slowly under that faint breeze, her tall bulk loomed now
above them, her prow ploughing slowly forward at an acute angle to the
prow of the galeasse. Another moment and she was alongside, and with a
swing and clank and a yell of victory from the English seamen lining
her bulwarks her grappling irons swung down to seize the corsair ship
at prow and stern and waist. Scarce had they fastened, than a torrent
of men in breast-plates and morions poured over her side, to alight
upon the prow of the galeasse, and not even the fear of the lantern
held above the powder barrel could now restrain the corsairs from
giving these hardy boarders the reception they reserved for all
infidels. In an instant the fighting platform on the prow was become a
raging, seething hell of battle luridly illumined by the ruddy glow
from the lights aboard the Silver Heron. Foremost among those who had
leapt down had been Lionel and Sir John Killigrew. Foremost among those
to receive them had been Jasper Leigh, who had passed his sword through
Lionel’s body even as Lionel’s feet came to rest upon the deck, and
before the battle was joined.

A dozen others went down on either side before Sakr-el-Bahr’s ringing
voice could quell the fighting, before his command to them to hear him
was obeyed.

“Hold there!” he had bellowed to his sea-hawks, using the lingua
franca. “Back, and leave this to me. I will rid you of these foes.”
Then in English he had summoned his countrymen also to desist. “Sir
John Killigrew!” he called in a loud voice. “Hold your hand until you
have heard me! Call your men back and let none others come aboard! Hold
until you have heard me, I say, then wreak your will.”

Sir John, perceiving him by the mainmast with Rosamund at his side, and
leaping at the most inevitable conclusion that he meant to threaten her
life, perhaps to destroy her if they continued their advance, flung
himself before his men, to check them.

Thus almost as suddenly as it had been joined the combat paused.

“What have you to say, you renegade dog?” Sir John demanded.

“This, Sir John, that unless you order your men back aboard your ship,
and make oath to desist from this encounter, I’ll take you straight
down to hell with us at once. I’ll heave this lantern into the powder
here, and we sink and you come down with us held by your own grappling
hooks. Obey me and you shall have all that you have come to seek aboard
this vessel. Mistress Rosamund shall be delivered up to you.”

Sir John glowered upon him a moment from the poop, considering. Then—

“Though not prepared to make terms with you,” he announced, “yet I will
accept the conditions you impose, but only provided that I have all
indeed that I am come to seek. There is aboard this galley an infamous
renegade hound whom I am bound by my knightly oath to take and hang.
He, too, must be delivered up to me. His name was Oliver Tressilian.”

Instantly, unhesitatingly, came the answer—“Him, too, will I surrender
to you upon your sworn oath that you will then depart and do here no
further hurt.”

Rosamund caught her breath, and clutched Sakr-el-Bahr’s arm, the arm
that held the lantern.

“Have a care, mistress,” he bade her sharply, “or you will destroy us
all.”

“Better that!” she answered him.

And then Sir John pledged him his word that upon his own surrender and
that of Rosamund he would withdraw nor offer hurt to any there.

Sakr-el-Bahr turned to his waiting corsairs, and briefly told them what
the terms he had made.

He called upon Asad to pledge his word that these terms would be
respected, and no blood shed on his behalf, and Asad answered him,
voicing the anger of all against him for his betrayal.

“Since he wants thee that he may hang thee, he may have thee and so
spare us the trouble, for ’tis no less than thy treachery deserves from
us.”

“Thus, then, I surrender,” he announced to Sir John, and flung the
lantern overboard.

One voice only was raised in his defence, and that voice was
Rosamund’s. But even that voice failed, conquered by weary nature. This
last blow following upon all that lately she had endured bereft her of
all strength. Half swooning she collapsed against Sakr-el-Bahr even as
Sir John and a handful of his followers leapt down to deliver her and
make fast their prisoner.

The corsairs stood looking on in silence; the loyalty to their great
captain, which would have made them spend their last drop of blood in
his defence, was quenched by his own act of treachery which had brought
the English ship upon them. Yet when they saw him pinioned and hoisted
to the deck of the Silver Heron, there was a sudden momentary reaction
in their ranks. Scimitars were waved aloft, and cries of menace burst
forth. If he had betrayed them, yet he had so contrived that they
should not suffer by that betrayal. And that was worthy of the
Sakr-el-Bahr they knew and loved; so worthy that their love and loyalty
leapt full-armed again upon the instant.

But the voice of Asad called upon them to bear in mind what in their
name he had promised, and since the voice of Asad alone might not have
sufficed to quell that sudden spark of revolt, there came down to them
the voice of Sakr-el-Bahr himself issuing his last command.

“Remember and respect the terms I have made for you! Mektub! May Allah
guard and prosper you!”

A wail was his reply, and with that wail ringing in his ears to assure
him that he did not pass unloved, he was hurried below to prepare him
for his end.

The ropes of the grapnels were cut, and slowly the galleon passed away
into the night, leaving the galley to replace what slaves had been
maimed in the encounter and to head back for Algiers, abandoning the
expedition against the argosy of Spain.

Under the awning upon the poop Asad now sat like a man who has awakened
from an evil dream. He covered his head and wept for one who had been
as a son to him, and whom through his madness he had lost. He cursed
all women, and he cursed destiny; but the bitterest curse of all was
for himself.

In the pale dawn they flung the dead overboard and washed the decks,
nor did they notice that a man was missing in token that the English
captain, or else his followers, had not kept strictly to the letter of
the bond.

They returned in mourning to Algiers—mourning not for the Spanish
argosy which had been allowed to go her ways unmolested, but for the
stoutest captain that ever bared his scimitar in the service of Islam.
The story of how he came to be delivered up was never clearly told;
none dared clearly tell it, for none who had participated in the deed
but took shame in it thereafter, however clear it might be that
Sakr-el-Bahr had brought it all upon himself. But, at least, it was
understood that he had not fallen in battle, and hence it was assumed
that he was still alive. Upon that presumption there was built up a
sort of legend that he would one day come back; and redeemed captives
returning a half-century later related how in Algiers to that day the
coming of Sakr-el-Bahr was still confidently expected and looked for by
all true Muslimeen.




CHAPTER XXIII.
THE HEATHEN CREED


Sakr-el-Bahr was shut up in a black hole in the forecastle of the
Silver Heron to await the dawn and to spend the time in making his
soul. No words had passed between him and Sir John since his surrender.
With wrists pinioned behind him, he had been hoisted aboard the English
ship, and in the waist of her he had stood for a moment face to face
with an old acquaintance—our chronicler, Lord Henry Goade. I imagine
the florid countenance of the Queen’s Lieutenant wearing a
preternaturally grave expression, his eyes forbidding as they rested
upon the renegade. I know—from Lord Henry’s own pen—that no word had
passed between them during those brief moments before Sakr-el-Bahr was
hurried away by his guards to be flung into those dark, cramped
quarters reeking of tar and bilge.

For a long hour he lay where he had fallen, believing himself alone;
and time and place would no doubt conduce to philosophical reflection
upon his condition. I like to think that he found that when all was
considered, he had little with which to reproach himself. If he had
done evil he had made ample amends. It can scarcely be pretended that
he had betrayed those loyal Muslimeen followers of his, or, if it is,
at least it must be added that he himself had paid the price of that
betrayal. Rosamund was safe, Lionel would meet the justice due to him,
and as for himself, being as good as dead already, he was worth little
thought. He must have derived some measure of content from the
reflection that he was spending his life to the very best advantage.
Ruined it had been long since. True, but for his ill-starred expedition
of vengeance he might long have continued to wage war as a corsair,
might even have risen to the proud Muslim eminence of the Bashalik of
Algiers and become a feudatory prince of the Grand Turk. But for one
who was born a Christian gentleman that would have been an unworthy way
to have ended his days. The present was the better course.

A faint rustle in the impenetrable blackness of his prison turned the
current of his thoughts. A rat, he thought, and drew himself to a
sitting attitude, and beat his slippered heels upon the ground to drive
away the loathly creature. Instead, a voice challenged him out of the
gloom.

“Who’s there?”

It startled him for a moment, in his complete assurance that he had
been alone.

“Who’s there?” the voice repeated, querulously to add: “What black hell
be this? Where am I?”

And now he recognized the voice for Jasper Leigh’s, and marvelled how
that latest of his recruits to the ranks of Mohammed should be sharing
this prison with him.

“Faith,” said he, “you’re in the forecastle of the Silver Heron; though
how you come here is more than I can answer.”

“Who are ye?” the voice asked.

“I have been known in Barbary as Sakr-el-Bahr.”

“Sir Oliver!”

“I suppose that is what they will call me now. It is as well perhaps
that I am to be buried at sea, else it might plague these Christian
gentlemen what legend to inscribe upon my headstone. But you—how come
you hither? My bargain with Sir John was that none should be molested,
and I cannot think Sir John would be forsworn.”

“As to that I know nothing, since I did not even know where I was
bestowed until ye informed me. I was knocked senseless in the fight,
after I had put my bilbo through your comely brother. That is the sum
of my knowledge.”

Sir Oliver caught his breath. “What do you say? You killed Lionel?”

“I believe so,” was the cool answer. “At least I sent a couple of feet
of steel through him—’twas in the press of the fight when first the
English dropped aboard the galley; Master Lionel was in the van—the
last place in which I should have looked to see him.”

There fell a long silence. At length Sir Oliver spoke in a small voice.

“Not a doubt but you gave him no more than he was seeking. You are
right, Master Leigh; the van was the last place in which to look for
him, unless he came deliberately to seek steel that he might escape a
rope. Best so, no doubt. Best so! God rest him!”

“Do you believe in God?” asked the sinful skipper on an anxious note.

“No doubt they took you because of that,” Sir Oliver pursued, as if
communing with himself. “Being in ignorance perhaps of his deserts,
deeming him a saint and martyr, they resolved to avenge him upon you,
and dragged you hither for that purpose.” He sighed. “Well, well,
Master Leigh, I make no doubt that knowing yourself for a rascal you
have all your life been preparing your neck for a noose; so this will
come as no surprise to you.”

The skipper stirred uneasily, and groaned. “Lord, how my head aches!”
he complained.

“They’ve a sure remedy for that,” Sir Oliver comforted him. “And you’ll
swing in better company than you deserve, for I am to be hanged in the
morning too. You’ve earned it as fully as have I, Master Leigh. Yet I
am sorry for you—sorry you should suffer where I had not so intended.”

Master Leigh sucked in a shuddering breath, and was silent for a while.

Then he repeated an earlier question.

“Do you believe in God, Sir Oliver?”

“There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his Prophet,” was the answer,
and from his tone Master Leigh could not be sure that he did not mock.

“That’s a heathen creed,” said he in fear and loathing.

“Nay, now; it’s a creed by which men live. They perform as they preach,
which is more than can be said of any Christians I have ever met.”

“How can you talk so upon the eve of death?” cried Leigh in protest.

“Faith,” said Sir Oliver, “it’s considered the season of truth above
all others.”

“Then ye don’t believe in God?”

“On the contrary, I do.”

“But not in the real God?” the skipper insisted.

“There can be no God but the real God—it matters little what men call
Him.”

“Then if ye believe, are ye not afraid?”

“Of what?”

“Of hell, damnation, and eternal fire,” roared the skipper, voicing his
own belated terrors.

“I have but fulfilled the destiny which in His Omniscience He marked
out for me,” replied Sir Oliver. “My life hath been as He designed it,
since naught may exist or happen save by His Will. Shall I then fear
damnation for having been as God fashioned me?”

“’Tis the heathen Muslim creed!” Master Leigh protested.

“’Tis a comforting one,” said Sir Oliver, “and it should comfort such a
sinner as thou.”

But Master Leigh refused to be comforted. “Oh!” he groaned miserably.
“I would that I did not believe in God!”

“Your disbelief could no more abolish Him than can your fear create
Him,” replied Sir Oliver. “But your mood being what it is, were it not
best you prayed?”

“Will not you pray with me?” quoth that rascal in his sudden fear of
the hereafter.

“I shall do better,” said Sir Oliver at last. “I shall pray for you—to
Sir John Killigrew, that your life be spared.”

“Sure he’ll never heed you!” said Master Leigh with a catch in his
breath.

“He shall. His honour is concerned in it. The terms of my surrender
were that none else aboard the galley should suffer any hurt.”

“But I killed Master Lionel.”

“True—but that was in the scrimmage that preceded my making terms. Sir
John pledged me his word, and Sir John will keep to it when I have made
it clear to him that honour demands it.”

A great burden was lifted from the skipper’s mind—that great shadow of
the fear of death that had overhung him. With it, it is greatly to be
feared that his desperate penitence also departed. At least he talked
no more of damnation, nor took any further thought for Sir Oliver’s
opinions and beliefs concerning the hereafter. He may rightly have
supposed that Sir Oliver’s creed was Sir Oliver’s affair, and that
should it happen to be wrong he was scarcely himself a qualified person
to correct it. As for himself, the making of his soul could wait until
another day, when the necessity for it should be more imminent.

Upon that he lay down and attempted to compose himself to sleep, though
the pain in his head proved a difficulty. Finding slumber impossible
after a while he would have talked again; but by that time his
companion’s regular breathing warned him that Sir Oliver had fallen
asleep during the silence.

Now this surprised and shocked the skipper. He was utterly at a loss to
understand how one who had lived Sir Oliver’s life, been a renegade and
a heathen, should be able to sleep tranquilly in the knowledge that at
dawn he was to hang. His belated Christian zeal prompted him to rouse
the sleeper and to urge him to spend the little time that yet remained
him in making his peace with God. Humane compassion on the other hand
suggested to him that he had best leave him in the peace of that
oblivion. Considering matters he was profoundly touched to reflect that
in such a season Sir Oliver could have found room in his mind to think
of him and his fate and to undertake to contrive that he should be
saved from the rope. He was the more touched when he bethought him of
the extent to which he had himself been responsible for all that
happened to Sir Oliver. Out of the consideration of heroism, a certain
heroism came to be begotten in him, and he fell to pondering how in his
turn he might perhaps serve Sir Oliver by a frank confession of all
that he knew of the influences that had gone to make Sir Oliver what he
was. This resolve uplifted him, and oddly enough it uplifted him all
the more when he reflected that perhaps he would be jeopardizing his
own neck by the confession upon which he had determined.

So through that endless night he sat, nursing his aching head, and
enheartened by the first purpose he had ever conceived of a truly good
and altruistic deed. Yet fate it seemed was bent upon frustrating that
purpose of his. For when at dawn they came to hale Sir Oliver to his
doom, they paid no heed to Jasper Leigh’s demands that he, too, should
be taken before Sir John.

“Thee bean’t included in our orders,” said a seaman shortly.

“Maybe not,” retorted Master Leigh, “because Sir John little knows what
it is in my power to tell him. Take me before him, I say, that he may
hear from me the truth of certain matters ere it be too late.”

“Be still,” the seaman bade him, and struck him heavily across the
face, so that he reeled and collapsed into a corner. “Thee turn will
come soon. Just now our business be with this other heathen.”

“Naught that you can say would avail,” Sir Oliver assured him quietly.
“But I thank you for the thought that marks you for my friend. My hands
are bound, Jasper. Were it otherwise I would beg leave to clasp your
own. Fare you well!”

Sir Oliver was led out into the golden sunlight which almost blinded
him after his long confinement in that dark hole. They were, he
gathered, to conduct him to the cabin where a short mockery of a trial
was to be held. But in the waist their progress was arrested by an
officer, who bade them wait.

Sir Oliver sat down upon a coil of rope, his guard about him, an object
of curious inspection to the rude seamen. They thronged the forecastle
and the hatchways to stare at this formidable corsair who once had been
a Cornish gentleman and who had become a renegade Muslim and a terror
to Christianity.

Truth to tell, the sometime Cornish gentleman was difficult to discern
in him as he sat there still wearing the caftan of cloth of silver over
his white tunic and a turban of the same material swathed about his
steel headpiece that ended in a spike. Idly he swung his brown sinewy
legs, naked from knee to ankle, with the inscrutable calm of the
fatalist upon his swarthy hawk face with its light agate eyes and black
forked beard; and those callous seamen who had assembled there to jeer
and mock him were stricken silent by the intrepidity and stoicism of
his bearing in the face of death.

If the delay chafed him, he gave no outward sign of it. If his hard,
light eyes glanced hither and thither it was upon no idle quest. He was
seeking Rosamund, hoping for a last sight of her before they launched
him upon his last dread voyage.

But Rosamund was not to be seen. She was in the cabin at the time. She
had been there for this hour past, and it was to her that the present
delay was due.




CHAPTER XXIV.
THE JUDGES


In the absence of any woman into whose care they might entrust her,
Lord Henry, Sir John, and Master Tobias, the ship’s surgeon, had
amongst them tended Rosamund as best they could when numbed and
half-dazed she was brought aboard the Silver Heron.

Master Tobias had applied such rude restoratives as he commanded, and
having made her as comfortable as possible upon a couch in the spacious
cabin astern, he had suggested that she should be allowed the rest of
which she appeared so sorely to stand in need. He had ushered out the
commander and the Queen’s Lieutenant, and himself had gone below to a
still more urgent case that was demanding his attention—that of Lionel
Tressilian, who had been brought limp and unconscious from the galeasse
together with some four other wounded members of the Silver Heron’s
crew.

At dawn Sir John had come below, seeking news of his wounded friend. He
found the surgeon kneeling over Lionel.

As he entered, Master Tobias turned aside, rinsed his hands in a metal
basin placed upon the floor, and rose wiping them on a napkin.

“I can do no more, Sir John,” he muttered in a desponding voice. “He is
sped.”

“Dead, d’ye mean?” cried Sir John, a catch in his voice.

The surgeon tossed aside the napkin, and slowly drew down the upturned
sleeves of his black doublet. “All but dead,” he answered. “The wonder
is that any spark of life should still linger in a body with that hole
in it. He is bleeding inwardly, and his pulse is steadily weakening. It
must continue so until imperceptibly he passes away. You may count him
dead already, Sir John.” He paused. “A merciful, painless end,” he
added, and sighed perfunctorily, his pale shaven face decently grave,
for all that such scenes as these were commonplaces in his life. “Of
the other four,” he continued, “Blair is dead; the other three should
all recover.”

But Sir John gave little heed to the matter of those others. His grief
and dismay at this quenching of all hope for his friend precluded any
other consideration at the moment.

“And he will not even recover consciousness?” he asked insisting,
although already he had been answered.

“As I have said, you may count him dead already, Sir John. My skill can
do nothing for him.”

Sir John’s head drooped, his countenance drawn and grave. “Nor can my
justice,” he added gloomily. “Though it avenge him, it cannot give me
back my friend.” He looked at the surgeon. “Vengeance, sir, is the
hollowest of all the mockeries that go to make up life.”

“Your task, Sir John,” replied the surgeon, “is one of justice, not
vengeance.”

“A quibble, when all is said.” He stepped to Lionel’s side, and looked
down at the pale handsome face over which the dark shadows of death
were already creeping. “If he would but speak in the interests of this
justice that is to do! If we might but have the evidence of his own
words, lest I should ever be asked to justify the hanging of Oliver
Tressilian.”

“Surely, sir,” the surgeon ventured, “there can be no such question
ever. Mistress Rosamund’s word alone should suffice, if indeed so much
as that even were required.”

“Ay! His offenses against God and man are too notorious to leave
grounds upon which any should ever question my right to deal with him
out of hand.”

There was a tap at the door and Sir John’s own body servant entered
with the announcement that Mistress Rosamund was asking urgently to see
him.

“She will be impatient for news of him,” Sir John concluded, and he
groaned. “My God! How am I to tell her? To crush her in the very hour
of her deliverance with such news as this! Was ever irony so cruel?” He
turned, and stepped heavily to the door. There he paused. “You will
remain by him to the end?” he bade the surgeon interrogatively.

Master Tobias bowed. “Of course, Sir John.” And he added, “’Twill not
be long.”

Sir John looked across at Lionel again—a glance of valediction. “God
rest him!” he said hoarsely, and passed out.

In the waist he paused a moment, turned to a knot of lounging seamen,
and bade them throw a halter over the yard-arm, and hale the renegade
Oliver Tressilian from his prison. Then with slow heavy step and
heavier heart he went up the companion to the vessel’s castellated
poop.

The sun, new risen in a faint golden haze, shone over a sea faintly
rippled by the fresh clean winds of dawn to which their every stitch of
canvas was now spread. Away on the larboard quarter, a faint cloudy
outline, was the coast of Spain.

Sir John’s long sallow face was preternaturally grave when he entered
the cabin, where Rosamund awaited him. He bowed to her with a grave
courtesy, doffing his hat and casting it upon a chair. The last five
years had brought some strands of white into his thick black hair, and
at the temples in particular it showed very grey, giving him an
appearance of age to which the deep lines in his brow contributed.

He advanced towards her, as she rose to receive him. “Rosamund, my
dear!” he said gently, and took both her hands. He looked with eyes of
sorrow and concern into her white, agitated face.

“Are you sufficiently rested, child?”

“Rested?” she echoed on a note of wonder that he should suppose it.

“Poor lamb, poor lamb!” he murmured, as a mother might have done, and
drew her towards him, stroking that gleaming auburn head. “We’ll speed
us back to England with every stitch of canvas spread. Take heart then,
and....”

But she broke in impetuously, drawing away from him as she spoke, and
his heart sank with foreboding of the thing she was about to inquire.

“I overheard a sailor just now saying to another that it is your intent
to hang Sir Oliver Tressilian out of hand—this morning.”

He misunderstood her utterly. “Be comforted,” he said. “My justice
shall be swift; my vengeance sure. The yard-arm is charged already with
the rope on which he shall leap to his eternal punishment.”

She caught her breath, and set a hand upon her bosom as if to repress
its sudden tumult.

“And upon what grounds,” she asked him with an air of challenge,
squarely facing him, “do you intend to do this thing?”

“Upon what grounds?” he faltered. He stared and frowned, bewildered by
her question and its tone. “Upon what grounds?” he repeated, foolishly
almost in the intensity of his amazement. Then he considered her more
closely, and the wildness of her eyes bore to him slowly an explanation
of words that at first had seemed beyond explaining.

“I see!” he said in a voice of infinite pity; for the conviction to
which he had leapt was that her poor wits were all astray after the
horrors through which she had lately travelled. “You must rest,” he
said gently, “and give no thought to such matters as these. Leave them
to me, and be very sure that I shall avenge you as is due.”

“Sir John, you mistake me, I think. I do not desire that you avenge me.
I have asked you upon what grounds you intend to do this thing, and you
have not answered me.”

In increasing amazement he continued to stare. He had been wrong, then.
She was quite sane and mistress of her wits. And yet instead of the
fond inquiries concerning Lionel which he had been dreading came this
amazing questioning of his grounds to hang his prisoner.

“Need I state to you—of all living folk—the offences which that dastard
has committed?” he asked, expressing thus the very question that he was
setting himself.

“You need to tell me,” she answered, “by what right you constitute
yourself his judge and executioner; by what right you send him to his
death in this peremptory fashion, without trial.” Her manner was as
stern as if she were invested with all the authority of a judge.

“But you,” he faltered in his ever-growing bewilderment, “you,
Rosamund, against whom he has offended so grievously, surely you should
be the last to ask me such a question! Why, it is my intention to
proceed with him as is the manner of the sea with all knaves taken as
Oliver Tressilian was taken. If your mood be merciful towards him—which
as God lives, I can scarce conceive—consider that this is the greatest
mercy he can look for.”

“You speak of mercy and vengeance in a breath, Sir John.” She was
growing calm, her agitation was quieting and a grim sternness was
replacing it.

He made a gesture of impatience. “What good purpose could it serve to
take him to England?” he demanded. “There he must stand his trial, and
the issue is foregone. It were unnecessarily to torture him.”

“The issue may be none so foregone as you suppose,” she replied. “And
that trial is his right.”

Sir John took a turn in the cabin, his wits all confused. It was
preposterous that he should stand and argue upon such a matter with
Rosamund of all people, and yet she was compelling him to it against
his every inclination, against common sense itself.

“If he so urges it, we’ll not deny him,” he said at last, deeming it
best to humour her. “We’ll take him back to England if he demands it,
and let him stand his trial there. But Oliver Tressilian must realize
too well what is in store for him to make any such demand.” He passed
before her, and held out his hands in entreaty. “Come, Rosamund, my
dear! You are distraught, you....”

“I am indeed distraught, Sir John,” she answered, and took the hands
that he extended. “Oh, have pity!” she cried with a sudden change to
utter intercession. “I implore you to have pity!”

“What pity can I show you, child? You have but to name....”

“’Tis not pity for me, but pity for him that I am beseeching of you.”

“For him?” he cried, frowning again.

“For Oliver Tressilian.”

He dropped her hands and stood away. “God’s light!” he swore. “You sue
for pity for Oliver Tressilian, for that renegade, that incarnate
devil? Oh, you are mad!” he stormed. “Mad!” and he flung away from her,
whirling his arms.

“I love him,” she said simply.

That answer smote him instantly still. Under the shock of it he just
stood and stared at her again, his jaw fallen.

“You love him!” he said at last below his breath. “You love him! You
love a man who is a pirate, a renegade, the abductor of yourself and of
Lionel, the man who murdered your brother!”

“He did not.” She was fierce in her denial of it. “I have learnt the
truth of that matter.”

“From his lips, I suppose?” said Sir John, and he was unable to repress
a sneer. “And you believed him?”

“Had I not believed him I should not have married him.”

“Married him?” Sudden horror came now to temper his bewilderment. Was
there to be no end to these astounding revelations? Had they reached
the climax yet, he wondered, or was there still more to come? “You
married that infamous villain?” he asked, and his voice was
expressionless.

“I did—in Algiers on the night we landed there.” He stood gaping at her
whilst a man might count to a dozen, and then abruptly he exploded. “It
is enough!” he roared, shaking a clenched fist at the low ceiling of
the cabin. “It is enough, as God’s my Witness. If there were no other
reason to hang him, that would be reason and to spare. You may look to
me to make an end of this infamous marriage within the hour.”

“Ah, if you will but listen to me!” she pleaded.

“Listen to you?” He paused by the door to which he had stepped in his
fury, intent upon giving the word that there and then should make an
end, and summoning Oliver Tressilian before him, announce his fate to
him and see it executed on the spot. “Listen to you?” he repeated,
scorn and anger blending in his voice. “I have heard more than enough
already!”

It was the Killigrew way, Lord Henry Goade assures us, pausing here at
long length for one of those digressions into the history of families
whose members chance to impinge upon his chronicle. “They were,” he
says, “ever an impetuous, short-reasoning folk, honest and upright
enough so far as their judgment carried them, but hampered by a lack of
penetration in that judgment.”

Sir John, as much in his earlier commerce with the Tressilians as in
this pregnant hour, certainly appears to justify his lordship of that
criticism. There were a score of questions a man of perspicuity would
not have asked, not one of which appears to have occurred to the knight
of Arwenack. If anything arrested him upon the cabin’s threshold,
delayed him in the execution of the thing he had resolved upon, no
doubt it was sheer curiosity as to what further extravagances Rosamund
might yet have it in her mind to utter.

“This man has suffered,” she told him, and was not put off by the hard
laugh with which he mocked that statement. “God alone knows what he has
suffered in body and in soul for sins which he never committed. Much of
that suffering came to him through me. I know to-day that he did not
murder Peter. I know that but for a disloyal act of mine he would be in
a position incontestably to prove it without the aid of any man. I know
that he was carried off, kidnapped before ever he could clear himself
of the accusation, and that as a consequence no life remained him but
the life of a renegade which he chose. Mine was the chief fault. And I
must make amends. Spare him to me! If you love me....”

But he had heard enough. His sallow face was flushed to a flaming
purple.

“Not another word!” he blazed at her. “It is because I do love you—love
and pity you from my heart—that I will not listen. It seems I must save
you not only from that knave, but from yourself. I were false to my
duty by you, false to your dead father and murdered brother else. Anon,
you shall thank me, Rosamund.” And again he turned to depart.

“Thank you?” she cried in a ringing voice. “I shall curse you. All my
life I shall loathe and hate you, holding you in horror for a murderer
if you do this thing. You fool! Can you not see? You fool!”

He recoiled. Being a man of position and importance, quick, fearless,
and vindictive of temperament—and also, it would seem, extremely
fortunate—it had never happened to him in all his life to be so
uncompromisingly and frankly judged. She was by no means the first to
account him a fool, but she was certainly the first to call him one to
his face; and whilst to the general it might have proved her extreme
sanity, to him it was no more than the culminating proof of her mental
distemper.

“Pish!” he said, between anger and pity, “you are mad, stark mad! Your
mind’s unhinged, your vision’s all distorted. This fiend incarnate is
become a poor victim of the evil of others; and I am become a murderer
in your sight—a murderer and a fool. God’s Life! Bah! Anon when you are
rested, when you are restored, I pray that things may once again assume
their proper aspect.”

He turned, all aquiver still with indignation, and was barely in time
to avoid being struck by the door which opened suddenly from without.

Lord Henry Goade, dressed—as he tells us—entirely in black, and with
his gold chain of office—an ominous sign could they have read it—upon
his broad chest, stood in the doorway, silhouetted sharply against the
flood of morning sunlight at his back. His benign face would, no doubt,
be extremely grave to match the suit he had put on, but its expression
will have lightened somewhat when his glance fell upon Rosamund
standing there by the table’s edge.

“I was overjoyed,” he writes, “to find her so far recovered, and
seeming so much herself again, and I expressed my satisfaction.”

“She were better abed,” snapped Sir John, two hectic spots burning
still in his sallow cheeks. “She is distempered, quite.”

“Sir John is mistaken, my lord,” was her calm assurance, “I am very far
from suffering as he conceives.”

“I rejoice therein, my dear,” said his lordship, and I imagine his
questing eyes speeding from one to the other of them, and marking the
evidences of Sir John’s temper, wondering what could have passed. “It
happens,” he added sombrely, “that we may require your testimony in
this grave matter that is toward.” He turned to Sir John. “I have
bidden them bring up the prisoner for sentence. Is the ordeal too much
for you, Rosamund?”

“Indeed, no, my lord,” she replied readily. “I welcome it.” And threw
back her head as one who braces herself for a trial of endurance.

“No, no,” cut in Sir John, protesting fiercely. “Do not heed her,
Harry. She....”

“Considering,” she interrupted, “that the chief count against the
prisoner must concern his... his dealings with myself, surely the
matter is one upon which I should be heard.”

“Surely, indeed,” Lord Henry agreed, a little bewildered, he confesses,
“always provided you are certain it will not overtax your endurance and
distress you overmuch. We could perhaps dispense with your testimony.”

“In that, my lord, I assure you that you are mistaken,” she answered.
“You cannot dispense with it.”

“Be it so, then,” said Sir John grimly, and he strode back to the
table, prepared to take his place there.

Lord Henry’s twinkling blue eyes were still considering Rosamund
somewhat searchingly, his fingers tugging thoughtfully at his short
tuft of ashen-coloured beard. Then he turned to the door. “Come in,
gentlemen,” he said, “and bid them bring up the prisoner.”

Steps clanked upon the deck, and three of Sir John’s officers made
their appearance to complete the court that was to sit in judgment upon
the renegade corsair, a judgment whose issue was foregone.




CHAPTER XXV.
THE ADVOCATE


Chairs were set at the long brown table of massive oak, and the
officers sat down, facing the open door and the blaze of sunshine on
the poop-deck, their backs to the other door and the horn windows which
opened upon the stern-gallery. The middle place was assumed by Lord
Henry Goade by virtue of his office of Queen’s Lieutenant, and the
reason for his chain of office became now apparent. He was to preside
over this summary court. On his right sat Sir John Killigrew, and
beyond him an officer named Youldon. The other two, whose names have
not survived, occupied his lordship’s left.

A chair had been set for Rosamund at the table’s extreme right and
across the head of it, so as to detach her from the judicial bench. She
sat there now, her elbows on the polished board, her face resting in
her half-clenched hands, her eyes scrutinizing the five gentlemen who
formed this court.

Steps rang on the companion, and a shadow fell athwart the sunlight
beyond the open door. From the vessel’s waist came a murmur of voices
and a laugh. Then Sir Oliver appeared in the doorway guarded by two
fighting seamen in corselet and morion with drawn swords.

He paused an instant in the doorway, and his eyelids flickered as if he
had received a shock when his glance alighted upon Rosamund. Then under
the suasion of his guards he entered, and stood forward, his wrists
still pinioned behind him, slightly in advance of the two soldiers.

He nodded perfunctorily to the court, his face entirely calm.

“A fine morning, sirs,” said he.

The five considered him in silence, but Lord Henry’s glance, as it
rested upon the corsair’s Muslim garb, was eloquent of the scorn which
he tells us filled his heart.

“You are no doubt aware, sir,” said Sir John after a long pause, “of
the purpose for which you have been brought hither.”

“Scarcely,” said the prisoner. “But I have no doubt whatever of the
purpose for which I shall presently be taken hence. However,” he
continued, cool and critical, “I can guess from your judicial attitudes
the superfluous mockery that you intend. If it will afford you
entertainment, faith, I do not grudge indulging you. I would observe
only that it might be considerate in you to spare Mistress Rosamund the
pain and weariness of the business that is before you.”

“Mistress Rosamund herself desired to be present,” said Sir John,
scowling.

“Perhaps,” said Sir Oliver, “she does not realize....”

“I have made it abundantly plain to her,” Sir John interrupted, almost
vindictively.

The prisoner looked at her as if in surprise, his brows knit. Then with
a shrug he turned to his judges again.

“In that case,” said he, “there’s no more to be said. But before you
proceed, there is another matter upon which I desire an understanding.

“The terms of my surrender were that all others should be permitted to
go free. You will remember, Sir John, that you pledged me your knightly
word for that. Yet I find aboard here one who was lately with me upon
my galeasse—a sometime English seaman, named Jasper Leigh, whom you
hold a prisoner.”

“He killed Master Lionel Tressilian,” said Sir John coldly

“That may be, Sir John. But the blow was delivered before I made my
terms with you, and you cannot violate these terms without hurt to your
honour.”

“D’ye talk of honour, sir?” said Lord Henry.

“Of Sir John’s honour, my lord,” said the prisoner, with mock humility.

“You are here, sir, to take your trial,” Sir John reminded him.

“So I had supposed. It is a privilege for which you agreed to pay a
certain price, and now it seems you have been guilty of filching
something back. It seems so, I say. For I cannot think but that the
arrest was inadvertently effected, and that it will suffice that I draw
your attention to the matter of Master Leigh’s detention.”

Sir John considered the table. It was beyond question that he was in
honour bound to enlarge Master Leigh, whatever the fellow might have
done; and, indeed, his arrest had been made without Sir John’s
knowledge until after the event.

“What am I do with him?” he growled sullenly.

“That is for yourself to decide, Sir John. But I can tell you what you
may not do with him. You may not keep him a prisoner, or carry him to
England or injure him in any way. Since his arrest was a pure error, as
I gather, you must repair that error as best you can. I am satisfied
that you will do so, and need say no more. Your servant, sirs,” he
added to intimate that he was now entirely at their disposal, and he
stood waiting.

There was a slight pause, and then Lord Henry, his face inscrutable,
his glance hostile and cold, addressed the prisoner.

“We have had you brought hither to afford you an opportunity of urging
any reasons why we should not hang you out of hand, as is our right.”

Sir Oliver looked at him in almost amused surprise. “Faith!” he said at
length. “It was never my habit to waste breath.”

“I doubt you do not rightly apprehend me, sir,” returned his lordship,
and his voice was soft and silken as became his judicial position.
“Should you demand a formal trial, we will convey you to England that
you may have it.”

“But lest you should build unduly upon that,” cut in Sir John fiercely,
“let me warn you that as the offences for which you are to suffer were
chiefly committed within Lord Henry Goade’s own jurisdiction, your
trial will take place in Cornwall, where Lord Henry has the honour to
be Her Majesty’s Lieutenant and dispenser of justice.”

“Her Majesty is to be congratulated,” said Sir Oliver elaborately.

“It is for you to choose, sir,” Sir John ran on, “whether you will be
hanged on sea or land.”

“My only possible objection would be to being hanged in the air. But
you’re not likely to heed that,” was the flippant answer.

Lord Henry leaned forward again. “Let me beg you, sir, in your own
interests to be serious,” he admonished the prisoner.

“I confess the occasion, my lord. For if you are to sit in judgment
upon my piracy, I could not desire a more experienced judge of the
matter on sea or land than Sir John Killigrew.”

“I am glad to deserve your approval,” Sir John replied tartly.
“Piracy,” he added, “is but the least of the counts against you.”

Sir Oliver’s brows went up, and he stared at the row of solemn faces.

“As God’s my life, then, your other counts must needs be sound—or else,
if there be any justice in your methods, you are like to be
disappointed of your hopes of seeing me swing. Proceed, sirs, to the
other counts. I vow you become more interesting than I could have
hoped.”

“Can you deny the piracy?” quoth Lord Henry.

“Deny it? No. But I deny your jurisdiction in the matter, or that of
any English court, since I have committed no piracy in English waters.”

Lord Henry admits that the answer silenced and bewildered him, being
utterly unexpected. Yet what the prisoner urged was a truth so obvious
that it was difficult to apprehend how his lordship had come to
overlook it. I rather fear that despite his judicial office,
jurisprudence was not a strong point with his lordship. But Sir John,
less perspicuous or less scrupulous in the matter, had his retort
ready.

“Did you not come to Arwenack and forcibly carry off thence....”

“Nay, now, nay, now,” the corsair interrupted, good-humouredly. “Go
back to school, Sir John, to learn that abduction is not piracy.”

“Call it abduction, if you will,” Sir John admitted.

“Not if I will, Sir John. We’ll call it what it is, if you please.”

“You are trifling, sir. But we shall mend that presently,” and Sir John
banged the table with his fist, his face flushing slightly in anger.
(Lord Henry very properly deplores this show of heat at such a time.)
“You cannot pretend to be ignorant,” Sir John continued, “that
abduction is punishable by death under the law of England.” He turned
to his fellow-judges. “We will then, sirs, with your concurrence, say
no more of the piracy.”

“Faith,” said Lord Henry in his gentle tones, “in justice we cannot.”
And he shrugged the matter aside. “The prisoner is right in what he
claims. We have no jurisdiction in that matter, seeing that he
committed no piracy in English waters, nor—so far as our knowledge
goes—against any vessel sailing under the English flag.”

Rosamund stirred. Slowly she took her elbows from the table, and folded
her arms resting them upon the edge of it. Thus leaning forward she
listened now with an odd brightness in her eye, a slight flush in her
cheeks reflecting some odd excitement called into life by Lord Henry’s
admission—an admission which sensibly whittled down the charges against
the prisoner.

Sir Oliver, watching her almost furtively, noted this and marvelled,
even as he marvelled at her general composure. It was in vain that he
sought to guess what might be her attitude of mind towards himself now
that she was safe again among friends and protectors.

But Sir John, intent only upon the business ahead, plunged angrily on.

“Be it so,” he admitted impatiently. “We will deal with him upon the
counts of abduction and murder. Have you anything to say?”

“Nothing that would be like to weigh with you,” replied Sir Oliver. And
then with a sudden change from his slightly derisive manner to one that
was charged with passion: “Let us make an end of this comedy,” he
cried, “of this pretence of judicial proceedings. Hang me, and have
done, or set me to walk the plank. Play the pirate, for that is a trade
you understand. But a’ God’s name don’t disgrace the Queen’s commission
by playing the judge.”

Sir John leapt to his feet, his face aflame. “Now, by Heaven, you
insolent knave....”

But Lord Henry checked him, placing a restraining hand upon his sleeve,
and forcing him gently back into his seat. Himself he now addressed the
prisoner.

“Sir, your words are unworthy one who, whatever his crimes, has earned
the repute of being a sturdy, valiant fighter. Your deeds are so
notorious—particularly that which caused you to flee from England and
take to roving, and that of your reappearance at Arwenack and the
abduction of which you were then guilty—that your sentence in an
English court is a matter foregone beyond all possible doubt.
Nevertheless, it shall be yours, as I have said, for the asking.

“Yet,” he added, and his voice was lowered and very earnest, “were I
your friend, Sir Oliver, I would advise you that you rather choose to
be dealt with in the summary fashion of the sea.”

“Sirs,” replied Sir Oliver, “your right to hang me I have not disputed,
nor do I. I have no more to say.”

“But I have.”

Thus Rosamund at last, startling the court with her crisp, sharp
utterance. All turned to look at her as she rose, and stood tall and
compelling at the table’s end.

“Rosamund!” cried Sir John, and rose in his turn. “Let me implore
you....”

She waved him peremptorily, almost contemptuously, into silence.

“Since in this matter of the abduction with which Sir Oliver is
charged,” she said, “I am the person said to have been abducted, it
were perhaps well that before going further in this matter you should
hear what I may hereafter have to say in an English court.”

Sir John shrugged, and sat down again. She would have her way, he
realized; just as he knew that its only result could be to waste their
time and protract the agony of the doomed man.

Lord Henry turned to her, his manner full of deference. “Since the
prisoner has not denied the charge, and since wisely he refrains from
demanding to be taken to trial, we need not harass you, Mistress
Rosamund. Nor will you be called upon to say anything in an English
court.”

“There you are at fault, my lord,” she answered, her voice very level.
“I shall be called upon to say something when I impeach you all for
murder upon the high seas, as impeach you I shall if you persist in
your intent.”

“Rosamund!” cried Oliver in his sudden amazement—and it was a cry of
joy and exultation.

She looked at him, and smiled—a smile full of courage and friendliness
and something more, a smile for which he considered that his impending
hanging was but a little price to pay. Then she turned again to that
court, into which her words had flung a sudden consternation.

“Since he disdains to deny the accusation, I must deny it for him,” she
informed them. “He did not abduct me, sirs, as is alleged. I love
Oliver Tressilian. I am of full age and mistress of my actions, and I
went willingly with him to Algiers where I became his wife.”

Had she flung a bomb amongst them she could hardly have made a greater
disorder of their wits. They sat back, and stared at her with blank
faces, muttering incoherencies.

“His... his wife?” babbled Lord Henry. “You became his....”

And then Sir John cut in fiercely. “A lie! A lie to save that foul
villain’s neck!”

Rosamund leaned towards him, and her smile was almost a sneer. “Your
wits were ever sluggish, Sir John,” she said. “Else you would not need
reminding that I could have no object in lying to save him if he had
done me the wrong that is imputed to him.” Then she looked at the
others. “I think, sirs, that in this matter my word will outweigh Sir
John’s or any man’s in any court of justice.”

“Faith, that’s true enough!” ejaculated the bewildered Lord Henry. “A
moment, Killigrew!” And again he stilled the impetuous Sir John. He
looked at Sir Oliver, who in truth was very far from being the least
bewildered in that company. “What do you say to that, sir?” he asked.

“To that?” echoed the almost speechless corsair. “What is there left to
say?” he evaded.

“’Tis all false,” cried Sir John again. “We were witnesses of the
event—you and I, Harry—and we saw....”

“You saw,” Rosamund interrupted. “But you did not know what had been
concerted.”

For a moment that silenced them again. They were as men who stand upon
crumbling ground, whose every effort to win to a safer footing but
occasioned a fresh slide of soil. Then Sir John sneered, and made his
riposte.

“No doubt she will be prepared to swear that her betrothed, Master
Lionel Tressilian, accompanied her willingly upon that elopement.”

“No,” she answered. “As for Lionel Tressilian he was carried off that
he might expiate his sins—sins which he had fathered upon his brother
there, sins which are the subject of your other count against him.”

“Now what can you mean by that?” asked his lordship.

“That the story that Sir Oliver killed my brother is a calumny; that
the murderer was Lionel Tressilian, who, to avoid detection and to
complete his work, caused Sir Oliver to be kidnapped that he might be
sold into slavery.”

“This is too much!” roared Sir John. “She is trifling with us, she
makes white black and black white. She has been bewitched by that
crafty rogue, by Moorish arts that....”

“Wait!” said Lord Henry, raising his hand. “Give me leave.” He
confronted her very seriously. “This... this is a grave statement,
mistress. Have you any proof—anything that you conceive to be a
proof—of what you are saying?”

But Sir John was not to be repressed. “’Tis but the lying tale this
villain told her. He has bewitched her, I say. ’Tis plain as the
sunlight yonder.”

Sir Oliver laughed outright at that. His mood was growing exultant,
buoyant, and joyous, and this was the first expression of it.
“Bewitched her? You’re determined never to lack for a charge. First
’twas piracy, then abduction and murder, and now ’tis witchcraft!”

“Oh, a moment, pray!” cried Lord Henry, and he confesses to some heat
at this point. “Do you seriously tell us, Mistress Rosamund, that it
was Lionel Tressilian who murdered Peter Godolphin?”

“Seriously?” she echoed, and her lips were twisted in a little smile of
scorn. “I not merely tell it you, I swear it here in the sight of God.
It was Lionel who murdered my brother and it was Lionel who put it
about that the deed was Sir Oliver’s. It was said that Sir Oliver had
run away from the consequences of something discovered against him, and
I to my shame believed the public voice. But I have since discovered
the truth....”

“The truth, do you say, mistress?” cried the impetuous Sir John in a
voice of passionate contempt. “The truth....”

Again his Lordship was forced to intervene.

“Have patience, man,” he admonished the knight. “The truth will prevail
in the end, never fear, Killigrew.”

“Meanwhile we are wasting time,” grumbled Sir John, and on that fell
moodily silent.

“Are we further to understand you to say, mistress,” Lord Henry
resumed, “that the prisoner’s disappearance from Penarrow was due not
to flight, as was supposed, but to his having been trepanned by order
of his brother?”

“That is the truth as I stand here in the sight of Heaven,” she replied
in a voice that rang with sincerity and carried conviction to more than
one of the officers seated at that table. “By that act the murderer
sought not only to save himself from exposure, but to complete his work
by succeeding to the Tressilian estates. Sir Oliver was to have been
sold into slavery to the Moors of Barbary. Instead the vessel upon
which he sailed was captured by Spaniards, and he was sent to the
galleys by the Inquisition. When his galley was captured by Muslim
corsairs he took the only way of escape that offered. He became a
corsair and a leader of corsairs, and then....”

“What else he did we know,” Lord Henry interrupted. “And I assure you
it would all weigh very lightly with us or with any court if what else
you say is true.”

“It is true. I swear it, my lord,” she repeated.

“Ay,” he answered, nodding gravely. “But can you prove it?”

“What better proof can I offer you than that I love him, and have
married him?”

“Bah!” said Sir John.

“That, mistress,” said Lord Henry, his manner extremely gentle, “is
proof that yourself you believe this amazing story. But it is not proof
that the story itself is true. You had it, I suppose,” he continued
smoothly, “from Oliver Tressilian himself?”

“That is so; but in Lionel’s own presence, and Lionel himself confirmed
it—admitting its truth.”

“You dare say that?” cried Sir John, and stared at her in incredulous
anger. “My God! You dare say that?”

“I dare and do,” she answered him, giving him back look for look.

Lord Henry sat back in his chair, and tugged gently at his ashen tuft
of beard, his florid face overcast and thoughtful. There was something
here he did not understand at all. “Mistress Rosamund,” he said
quietly, “let me exhort you to consider the gravity of your words. You
are virtually accusing one who is no longer able to defend himself; if
your story is established, infamy will rest for ever upon the memory of
Lionel Tressilian. Let me ask you again, and let me entreat you to
answer scrupulously. Did Lionel Tressilian admit the truth of this
thing with which you say that the prisoner charged him?”

“Once more I solemnly swear that what I have spoken is true; that
Lionel Tressilian did in my presence, when charged by Sir Oliver with
the murder of my brother and the kidnapping of himself, admit those
charges. Can I make it any plainer, sirs?”

Lord Henry spread his hands. “After that, Killigrew, I do not think we
can go further in this matter. Sir Oliver must go with us to England,
and there take his trial.”

But there was one present—that officer named Youldon—whose wits, it
seems, were of keener temper.

“By your leave, my lord,” he now interposed, and he turned to question
the witness. “What was the occasion on which Sir Oliver forced this
admission from his brother?”

Truthfully she answered. “At his house in Algiers on the night he....”
She checked suddenly, perceiving then the trap that had been set for
her. And the others perceived it also. Sir John leapt into the breach
which Youldon had so shrewdly made in her defences.

“Continue, pray,” he bade her. “On the night he....”

“On the night we arrived there,” she answered desperately, the colour
now receding slowly from her face.

“And that, of course,” said Sir John slowly, mockingly almost, “was the
first occasion on which you heard this explanation of Sir Oliver’s
conduct?”

“It was,” she faltered—perforce.

“So that,” insisted Sir John, determined to leave her no loophole
whatsoever, “so that until that night you had naturally continued to
believe Sir Oliver to be the murderer of your brother?”

She hung her head in silence, realizing that the truth could not
prevail here since she had hampered it with a falsehood, which was now
being dragged into the light.

“Answer me!” Sir John commanded.

“There is no need to answer,” said Lord Henry slowly, in a voice of
pain, his eyes lowered to the table. “There can, of course, be but one
answer. Mistress Rosamund has told us that he did not abduct her
forcibly; that she went with him of her own free will and married him;
and she has urged that circumstance as a proof of her conviction of his
innocence. Yet now it becomes plain that at the time she left England
with him she still believed him to be her brother’s slayer. Yet she
asks us to believe that he did not abduct her.” He spread his hands
again and pursed his lips in a sort of grieved contempt.

“Let us make an end, a’ God’s name!” said Sir John, rising.

“Ah, wait!” she cried. “I swear that all that I have told you is
true—all but the matter of the abduction. I admit that, but I condoned
it in view of what I have since learnt.”

“She admits it!” mocked Sir John.

But she went on without heeding him. “Knowing what he has suffered
through the evil of others, I gladly own him my husband, hoping to make
some amends to him for the part I had in his wrongs. You must believe
me, sirs. But if you will not, I ask you is his action of yesterday to
count for naught? Are you not to remember that but for him you would
have had no knowledge of my whereabouts?”

They stared at her in fresh surprise.

“To what do you refer now, mistress? What action of his is responsible
for this?”

“Do you need to ask? Are you so set on murdering him that you affect
ignorance? Surely you know that it was he dispatched Lionel to inform
you of my whereabouts?”

Lord Henry tells us that at this he smote the table with his open palm,
displaying an anger he could no longer curb. “This is too much!” he
cried. “Hitherto I have believed you sincere but misguided and
mistaken. But so deliberate a falsehood transcends all bounds. What has
come to you, girl? Why, Lionel himself told us the circumstances of his
escape from the galeasse. Himself he told us how that villain had him
flogged and then flung him into the sea for dead.”

“Ah!” said Sir Oliver between his teeth. “I recognize Lionel there! He
would be false to the end, of course. I should have thought of that.”

Rosamund at bay, in a burst of regal anger leaned forward to face Lord
Henry and the others. “He lied, the base, treacherous dog!” she cried.

“Madam,” Sir John rebuked her, “you are speaking of one who is all but
dead.”

“And more than damned,” added Sir Oliver. “Sirs,” he cried, “you prove
naught but your own stupidity when you accuse this gentle lady of
falsehood.”

“We have heard enough, sir,” Lord Henry interrupted.

“Have you so, by God!” he roared, stung suddenly to anger. “You shall
hear yet a little more. The truth will prevail, you have said yourself;
and prevail the truth shall since this sweet lady so desires it.”

He was flushed, and his light eyes played over them like points of
steel, and like points of steel they carried a certain measure of
compulsion. He had stood before them half-mocking and indifferent,
resigned to hang and desiring the thing might be over and ended as
speedily as possible. But all that was before he suspected that life
could still have anything to offer him, whilst he conceived that
Rosamund was definitely lost to him. True, he had the memory of a
certain tenderness she had shown him yesternight aboard the galley, but
he had deemed that tenderness to be no more than such as the situation
itself begot. Almost he had deemed the same to be here the case until
he had witnessed her fierceness and despair in fighting for his life,
until he had heard and gauged the sincerity of her avowal that she
loved him and desired to make some amends to him for all that he had
suffered in the past. That had spurred him, and had a further spur been
needed, it was afforded him when they branded her words with falsehood,
mocked her to her face with what they supposed to be her lies. Anger
had taken him at that to stiffen his resolve to make a stand against
them and use the one weapon that remained him—that a merciful chance, a
just God had placed within his power almost despite himself.

“I little knew, sirs,” he said, “that Sir John was guided by the hand
of destiny itself when last night, in violation of the terms of my
surrender, he took a prisoner from my galeasse. That man is, as I have
said, a sometime English seaman, named Jasper Leigh. He fell into my
hands some months ago, and took the same road to escape from thraldom
that I took myself under the like circumstances. I was merciful in that
I permitted him to do so, for he is the very skipper who was suborned
by Lionel to kidnap me and carry me into Barbary. With me he fell into
the hands of the Spaniards. Have him brought hither, and question him.”

In silence they all looked at him, but on more than one face he saw the
reflection of amazement at his impudence, as they conceived it.

It was Lord Henry who spoke at last. “Surely, sir, this is most oddly,
most suspiciously apt,” he said, and there could be no doubt that he
was faintly sneering. “The very man to be here aboard, and taken
prisoner thus, almost by chance....”

“Not quite by chance, though very nearly. He conceives that he has a
grudge against Lionel, for it was through Lionel that misfortune
overtook him. Last night when Lionel so rashly leapt aboard the galley,
Jasper Leigh saw his opportunity to settle an old score and took it. It
was as a consequence of that that he was arrested.”

“Even so, the chance is still miraculous.”

“Miracles, my lord, must happen sometimes if the truth is to prevail,”
Sir Oliver replied with a tinge of his earlier mockery. “Fetch him
hither, and question him. He knows naught of what has passed here. It
were a madness to suppose him primed for a situation which none could
have foreseen. Fetch him hither, then.”

Steps sounded outside but went unheeded at the moment.

“Surely,” said Sir John, “we have been trifled with by liars long
enough!”

The door was flung open, and the lean black figure of the surgeon made
its appearance.

“Sir John!” he called urgently, breaking without ceremony into the
proceedings, and never heeding Lord Henry’s scowl. “Master Tressilian
has recovered consciousness. He is asking for you and for his brother.
Quick, sirs! He is sinking fast.”




CHAPTER XXVI.
THE JUDGMENT


To that cabin below the whole company repaired in all speed in the
surgeon’s wake, Sir Oliver coming last between his guards. They
assembled about the couch where Lionel lay, leaden-hued of face, his
breathing laboured, his eyes dull and glazing.

Sir John ran to him, went down upon one knee to put loving arms about
that chilling clay, and very gently raised him in them, and held him so
resting against his breast.

“Lionel!” he cried in stricken accents. And then as if thoughts of
vengeance were to soothe and comfort his sinking friend’s last moments,
he added: “We have the villain fast.”

Very slowly and with obvious effort Lionel turned his head to the
right, and his dull eyes went beyond Sir John and made quest in the
ranks of those that stood about him.

“Oliver?” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Where is Oliver?”

“There is not the need to distress you....” Sir John was beginning,
when Lionel interrupted him.

“Wait!” he commanded in a louder tone. “Is Oliver safe?”

“I am here,” said Sir Oliver’s deep voice, and those who stood between
him and his brother drew aside that they might cease from screening
him.

Lionel looked at him for a long moment in silence, sitting up a little.
Then he sank back again slowly against Sir John’s breast.

“God has been merciful to me a sinner,” he said, “since He accords me
the means to make amends, tardily though it be.”

Then he struggled up again, and held out his arms to Sir Oliver, and
his voice came in a great pleading cry. “Noll! My brother! Forgive!”

Oliver advanced, none hindering until, with his hands still pinioned
behind him he stood towering there above his brother, so tall that his
turban brushed the low ceiling of the cabin. His countenance was stern
and grim.

“What is it that you ask me to forgive?” he asked. Lionel struggled to
answer, and sank back again into Sir John’s arms, fighting for breath;
there was a trace of blood-stained foam about his lips.

“Speak! Oh, speak, in God’s name!” Rosamund exhorted him from the other
side, and her voice was wrung with agony.

He looked at her, and smiled faintly. “Never fear,” he whispered, “I
shall speak. God has spared me to that end. Take your arms from me,
Killigrew. I am the... the vilest of men. It... it was I who killed
Peter Godolphin.”

“My God!” groaned Sir John, whilst Lord Henry drew a sharp breath of
dismay and realization.

“Ah, but that is not my sin,” Lionel continued. “There was no sin in
that. We fought, and in self-defence I slew him—fighting fair. My sin
came afterwards. When suspicion fell on Oliver, I nourished it...Oliver
knew the deed was mine, and kept silent that he might screen me. I
feared the truth might become known for all that... and... and I was
jealous of him, and... and I had him kidnapped to be sold....”

His fading voice trailed away into silence. A cough shook him, and the
faint crimson foam on his lips was increased. But he rallied again, and
lay there panting, his fingers plucking at the coverlet.

“Tell them,” said Rosamund, who in her desperate fight for Sir Oliver’s
life kept her mind cool and steady and directed towards essentials,
“tell them the name of the man you hired to kidnap him.”

“Jasper Leigh, the skipper of the Swallow,” he answered, whereupon she
flashed upon Lord Henry a look that contained a gleam of triumph for
all that her face was ashen and her lips trembled.

Then she turned again to the dying man, relentlessly almost in her
determination to extract all vital truth from him ere he fell silent.

“Tell them,” she bade him, “under what circumstances Sir Oliver sent
you last night to the Silver Heron.”

“Nay, there is no need to harass him,” Lord Henry interposed. “He has
said enough already. May God forgive us our blindness, Killigrew!”

Sir John bowed his head in silence over Lionel.

“Is it you, Sir John?” whispered the dying man. “What? Still there?
Ha!” he seemed to laugh faintly, then checked. “I am going....” he
muttered, and again his voice grew stronger, obeying the last flicker
of his shrinking will. “Noll! I am going! I...I have made reparation...
all that I could. Give me... give me thy hand!” Gropingly he put forth
his right.

“I should have given it you ere this but that my wrists are bound,”
cried Oliver in a sudden frenzy. And then exerting that colossal
strength of his, he suddenly snapped the cords that pinioned him as if
they had been thread. He caught his brother’s extended hand, and
dropped upon his knees beside him. “Lionel...Boy!” he cried. It was as
if all that had befallen in the last five years had been wiped out of
existence. His fierce relentless hatred of his half-brother, his
burning sense of wrong, his parching thirst for vengeance, became on
the instant all dead, buried, and forgotten. More, it was as if they
had never been. Lionel in that moment was again the weak, comely,
beloved brother whom he had cherished and screened and guarded, and for
whom when the hour arrived he had sacrificed his good name, and the
woman he loved, and placed his life itself in jeopardy.

“Lionel, boy!” was all that for a moment he could say. Then: “Poor lad!
Poor lad!” he added. “Temptation was too strong for thee.” And reaching
forth he took the other white hand that lay beyond the couch, and so
held both tight-clasped within his own.

From one of the ports a ray of sunshine was creeping upwards towards
the dying man’s face. But the radiance that now overspread it was from
an inward source. Feebly he returned the clasp of his brother’s hands.

“Oliver, Oliver!” he whispered. “There is none like thee! I ever knew
thee as noble as I was base. Have I said enough to make you safe? Say
that he will be safe now,” he appealed to the others, “that no....”

“He will be safe,” said Lord Henry stoutly. “My word on’t.”

“It is well. The past is past. The future is in your hands, Oliver.
God’s blessing on’t.” He seemed to collapse, to rally yet again. He
smiled pensively, his mind already wandering. “That was a long swim
last night—the longest I ever swam. From Penarrow to Trefusis—a fine
long swim. But you were with me, Noll. Had my strength given out...I
could have depended on you. I am still chill from it, for it was
cold... cold... ugh!” He shuddered, and lay still.

Gently Sir John lowered him to his couch. Beyond it Rosamund fell upon
her knees and covered her face, whilst by Sir John’s side Oliver
continued to kneel, clasping in his own his brother’s chilling hands.

There ensued a long spell of silence. Then with a heavy sigh Sir Oliver
folded Lionel’s hands across his breast, and slowly, heavily rose to
his feet.

The others seemed to take this for a signal. It was as if they had but
waited mute and still out of deference to Oliver. Lord Henry moved
softly round to Rosamund and touched her lightly upon the shoulder. She
rose and went out in the wake of the others, Lord Henry following her,
and none remaining but the surgeon.

Outside in the sunshine they checked. Sir John stood with bent head and
hunched shoulders, his eyes upon the white deck. Timidly almost—a thing
never seen before in this bold man—he looked at Sir Oliver.

“He was my friend,” he said sorrowfully, and as if to excuse and
explain himself, “and... and I was misled through love of him.”

“He was my brother,” replied Sir Oliver solemnly. “God rest him!”

Sir John, resolved, drew himself up into an attitude preparatory to
receiving with dignity a rebuff should it be administered him.

“Can you find it in your generosity, sir, to forgive me?” he asked, and
his air was almost one of challenge.

Silently Sir Oliver held out his hand. Sir John fell upon it almost in
eagerness.

“We are like to be neighbours again,” he said, “and I give you my word
I shall strive to be a more neighbourly one than in the past.”

“Then, sirs,” said Sir Oliver, looking from Sir John to Lord Henry, “I
am to understand that I am no longer a prisoner.”

“You need not hesitate to return with us to England, Sir Oliver,”
replied his lordship. “The Queen shall hear your story, and we have
Jasper Leigh to confirm it if need be, and I will go warranty for your
complete reinstatement. Count me your friend, Sir Oliver, I beg.” And
he, too, held out his hand. Then turning to the others: “Come, sirs,”
he said, “we have duties elsewhere, I think.”

They tramped away, leaving Oliver and Rosamund alone. The twain looked
long each at the other. There was so much to say, so much to ask, so
much to explain, that neither knew with what words to begin. Then
Rosamund suddenly came up to him, holding out her hands. “Oh, my dear!”
she said, and that, after all, summed up a deal.

One or two over-inquisitive seamen, lounging on the forecastle and
peeping through the shrouds, were disgusted to see the lady of
Godolphin Court in the arms of a beturbaned bare-legged follower of
Mahound.




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