“I’ll see you damned before I do,” fumed his lordship.
“Why, that’s unreasonable and unreasoning. But if ye insist, why, another messenger will do as well, and another hostage aboard – as I had originally intended – will make my hand the stronger.”
Lord Julian stared at him, realizing exactly what he had refused.
“You’ll think better of it now that ye understand?” quoth Blood.
“Aye, in God’s name, go, my lord,” spluttered Bishop, “and make yourself obeyed. This damned pirate has me by the throat.”
His lordship surveyed him with an eye that was not by any means admiring. “Why, if that is your wish…” he began. Then he shrugged, and turned again to Blood.
“I suppose I can trust you that no harm will come to Colonel Bishop if you are allowed to sail?”
“You have my word for it,” said Blood. “And also that I shall put him safely ashore again without delay.”
Lord Julian bowed stiffly to the cowering Deputy-Governor. “You understand, sir, that I do as you desire,” he said coldly.
“Aye, man, aye!” Bishop assented hastily.
“Very well.” Lord Julian bowed again and took his departure. Blood escorted him to the entrance ladder at the foot of which still swung the Arabella’s own cock-boat.
“It’s good-bye, my lord,” said Blood. “And there’s another thing.” He proffered a parchment that he had drawn from his pocket.” It’s the commission. Bishop was right when he said it was a mistake.”
Lord Julian considered him, and considering him his expression softened.
“I am sorry,” he said sincerely.
“In other circumstances…” began Blood. “Oh, but there! Ye’ll understand. The boat’s waiting.”
Yet with his foot on the first rung of the ladder, Lord Julian hesitated.
“I still do not perceive – blister me if I do! – why you should not have found some one else to carry your message to the Commandant, and kept me aboard as an added hostage for his obedience to your wishes.”
Blood’s vivid eyes looked into the other’s that were clear and honest, and he smiled, a little wistfully. A moment he seemed to hesitate. Then he explained himself quite fully.
“Why shouldn’t I tell you? It’s the same reason that’s been urging me to pick a quarrel with you so that I might have the satisfaction of slipping a couple of feet of steel into your vitals. When I accepted your commission, I was moved to think it might redeem me in the eyes of Miss Bishop – for whose sake, as you may have guessed, I took it. But I have discovered that such a thing is beyond accomplishment. I should have known it for a sick man’s dream. I have discovered also that if she’s choosing you, as I believe she is, she’s choosing wisely between us, and that’s why I’ll not have your life risked by keeping you aboard whilst the message goes by another who might bungle it. And now perhaps ye’ll understand.”
Lord Julian stared at him bewildered. His long, aristocratic face was very pale.
“My God!” he said. “And you tell me this?”
“I tell you because… Oh, plague on it! – so that ye may tell her; so that she may be made to realize that there’s something of the unfortunate gentleman left under the thief and pirate she accounts me, and that her own good is my supreme desire. Knowing that, she may… faith, she may remember me more kindly – if It’s only in her prayers. That’s all, my lord.”
Lord Julian continued to look at the buccaneer in silence. In silence, at last, he held out his hand; and in silence Blood took it.
“I wonder whether you are right,” said his lordship, “and whether you are not the better man.”
“Where she is concerned see that you make sure that I am right. Good-bye to you.”
Lord Julian wrung his hand in silence, went down the ladder, and was pulled ashore. From the distance he waved to Blood, who stood leaning on the bulwarks watching the receding cock-boat.
The Arabella sailed within the hour, moving lazily before a sluggish breeze. The fort remained silent and there was no movement from the fleet to hinder her departure. Lord Julian had carried the message effectively, and had added to it his own personal commands.
CHAPTER XXIV WAR
Five miles out at sea from Port Royal, whence the details of the coast of Jamaica were losing their sharpness, the Arabella hove to, and the sloop she had been towing was warped alongside.
Captain Blood escorted his compulsory guest to the head of the ladder. Colonel Bishop, who for two hours and more had been in a state of mortal anxiety, breathed freely at last; and as the tide of his fears receded, so that of his deep-rooted hate of this audacious buccaneer resumed its normal flow. But he practised circumspection. If in his heart he vowed that once back in Port Royal there was no effort he would spare, no nerve he would not strain, to bring Peter Blood to final moorings in Execution Dock, at least he kept that vow strictly to himself.
Peter Blood had no illusions. He was not, and never would be, the complete pirate. There was not another buccaneer in all the Caribbean who would have denied himself the pleasure of stringing Colonel Bishop from the yardarm, and by thus finally stifling the vindictive planter’s hatred have increased his own security. But Blood was not of these. Moreover, in the case of Colonel Bishop there was a particular reason for restraint. Because he was Arabella Bishop’s uncle, his life must remain sacred to Captain Blood.
And so the Captain smiled into the sallow, bloated face and the little eyes that fixed him with a malevolence not to be dissembled.
“A safe voyage home to you, Colonel, darling,” said he in valediction, and from his easy, smiling manner you would never have dreamt of the pain he carried in his breast. “It’s the second time ye’ve served me for a hostage. Ye’ll be well advised to avoid a third. I’m not lucky to you, Colonel, as you should be perceiving.”
Jeremy Pitt, the master, lounging at Blood’s elbow, looked darkly upon the departure of the Deputy-Governor. Behind them a little mob of grim, stalwart, sun-tanned buccaneers were restrained from cracking Bishop like a flea only by their submission to the dominant will of their leader. They had learnt from Pitt while yet in Port Royal of their Captain’s danger, and whilst as ready as he to throw over the King’s service which had been thrust upon them, yet they resented the manner in which this had been rendered necessary, and they marvelled now at Blood’s restraint where Bishop was concerned. The Deputy-Governor looked round and met the lowering hostile glances of those fierce eyes. Instinct warned him that his life at that moment was held precariously, that an injudicious word might precipitate an explosion of hatred from which no human power could save him. Therefore he said nothing. He inclined his head in silence to the Captain, and went blundering and stumbling in his haste down that ladder to the sloop and its waiting negro crew.
They pushed off the craft from the red hull of the Arabella, bent to their sweeps, then, hoisting sail, headed back for Port Royal, intent upon reaching it before darkness should come down upon them. And Bishop, the great bulk of him huddled in the stem sheets, sat silent, his black brows knitted, his coarse lips pursed, malevolence and vindictiveness so whelming now his recent panic that he forgot his near escape of the yardarm and the running noose.
On the mole at Port Royal, under the low, embattled wall of the fort, Major Mallard and Lord Julian waited to receive him, and it was with infinite relief that they assisted him from the sloop.
Major Mallard was disposed to be apologetic.
“Glad to see you safe, sir,” said he. “I’d have sunk Blood’s ship in spite of your excellency’s being aboard but for your own orders by Lord Julian, and his lordship’s assurance that he had Blood’s word for it that no harm should come to you so that no harm came to him. I’ll confess I thought it rash of his lordship to accept the word of a damned pirate….”
“I have found it as good as another’s,” said his lordship, cropping the Major’s too eager eloquence. He spoke with an unusual degree of that frosty dignity he could assume upon occasion. The fact is that his lordship was in an exceedingly bad humour. Having written jubilantly home to the Secretary of State that his mission had succeeded, he was now faced with the necessity of writing again to confess that this success had been ephemeral. And because Major Mallard’s crisp mostachios were lifted by a sneer at the notion of a buccaneer’s word being acceptable, he added still more sharply: “My justification is here in the person of Colonel Bishop safely returned. As against that, sir, your opinion does not weigh for very much. You should realize it.”