Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini (read the beginning after the end novel txt) 📗
- Author: Rafael Sabatini
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A livelier colour crept into her cheeks. There was a perceptible heave of the slight breast that faintly swelled the flimsy bodice of white silk. But if she resented his tone and his words, she stifled her resentment. She realized that perhaps she had, herself, provoked his anger. She honestly desired to make amends.
“You are mistaken,” she began. “It isn't that.”
But they were fated to misunderstand each other.
Jealousy, that troubler of reason, had been over-busy with his wits as it had with hers.
“What is it, then?” quoth he, and added the question: “Lord Julian?”
She started, and stared at him blankly indignant now.
“Och, be frank with me,” he urged her, unpardonably. “'Twill be a kindness, so it will.”
For a moment she stood before him with quickened breathing, the colour ebbing and flowing in her cheeks. Then she looked past him, and tilted her chin forward.
“You... you are quite insufferable,” she said. “I beg that you will let me pass.”
He stepped aside, and with the broad feathered hat which he still held in his hand, he waved her on towards the house.
“I'll not be detaining you any longer, ma'am. After all, the cursed thing I did for nothing can be undone. Ye'll remember afterwards that it was your hardness drove me.”
She moved to depart, then checked, and faced him again. It was she now who was on her defence, her voice quivering with indignation.
“You take that tone! You dare to take that tone!” she cried, astounding him by her sudden vehemence. “You have the effrontery to upbraid me because I will not take your hands when I know how they are stained; when I know you for a murderer and worse?”
He stared at her open-mouthed.
“A murderer—I?” he said at last.
“Must I name your victims? Did you not murder Levasseur?”
“Levasseur?” He smiled a little. “So they've told you about that!”
“Do you deny it?”
“I killed him, it is true. I can remember killing another man in circumstances that were very similar. That was in Bridgetown on the night of the Spanish raid. Mary Traill would tell you of it. She was present.”
He clapped his hat on his head with a certain abrupt fierceness, and strode angrily away, before she could answer or even grasp the full significance of what he had said.
CHAPTER XXIII. HOSTAGES
Peter Blood stood in the pillared portico of Government House, and with unseeing eyes that were laden with pain and anger, stared out across the great harbour of Port Royal to the green hills rising from the farther shore and the ridge of the Blue Mountains beyond, showing hazily through the quivering heat.
He was aroused by the return of the negro who had gone to announce him, and following now this slave, he made his way through the house to the wide piazza behind it, in whose shade Colonel Bishop and my Lord Julian Wade took what little air there was.
“So ye've come,” the Deputy-Governor hailed him, and followed the greeting by a series of grunts of vague but apparently ill-humoured import.
He did not trouble to rise, not even when Lord Julian, obeying the instincts of finer breeding, set him the example. From under scowling brows the wealthy Barbados planter considered his sometime slave, who, hat in hand, leaning lightly upon his long beribboned cane, revealed nothing in his countenance of the anger which was being steadily nourished by this cavalier reception.
At last, with scowling brow and in self-sufficient tones, Colonel Bishop delivered himself.
“I have sent for you, Captain Blood, because of certain news that has just reached me. I am informed that yesterday evening a frigate left the harbour having on board your associate Wolverstone and a hundred men of the hundred and fifty that were serving under you. His lordship and I shall be glad to have your explanation of how you came to permit that departure.”
“Permit?” quoth Blood. “I ordered it.”
The answer left Bishop speechless for a moment. Then:
“You ordered it?” he said in accents of unbelief, whilst Lord Julian raised his eyebrows. “'Swounds! Perhaps you'll explain yourself? Whither has Wolverstone gone?”
“To Tortuga. He's gone with a message to the officers commanding the other four ships of the fleet that is awaiting me there, telling them what's happened and why they are no longer to expect me.”
Bishop's great face seemed to swell and its high colour to deepen. He swung to Lord Julian.
“You hear that, my lord? Deliberately he has let Wolverstone loose upon the seas again—Wolverstone, the worst of all that gang of pirates after himself. I hope your lordship begins at last to perceive the folly of granting the King's commission to such a man as this against all my counsels. Why, this thing is... it's just mutiny... treason! By God! It's matter for a court-martial.”
“Will you cease your blather of mutiny and treason and courts-martial?” Blood put on his hat, and sat down unbidden. “I have sent Wolverstone to inform Hagthorpe and Christian and Yberville and the rest of my lads that they've one clear month in which to follow my example, quit piracy, and get back to their boucans or their logwood, or else sail out of the Caribbean Sea. That's what I've done.”
“But the men?” his lordship interposed in his level, cultured voice. “This hundred men that Wolverstone has taken with him?”
“They are those of my crew who have no taste for King James's service, and have preferred to seek work of other kinds. It was in our compact, my lord, that there should be no constraining of my men.”
“I don't remember it,” said his lordship, with sincerity.
Blood looked at him in surprise. Then he shrugged. “Faith, I'm not to blame for your lordship's poor memory. I say that it was so; and I don't lie. I've never found it necessary. In any case ye couldn't have supposed that I should consent to anything different.”
And then the Deputy-Governor exploded.
“You have given those damned rascals in Tortuga this warning so that they may escape! That is what you have done. That is how you abuse the commission that has saved your own neck!”
Peter Blood considered him steadily, his face impassive. “I will remind
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