PART FIFTH — THE LOT OF MAN

CHAPTER ONE

“Why have I been brought here, your worships?” I asked, with a great deal of firmness.

There were two figures in black, the one beside, the other behind a large black table. I was placed in front of them, between two soldiers, in the centre of a large, gaunt room, with bare, dirty walls, and the arms of Spain above the judge’s seat.

“You are before the Juez de la Primiera Instancia,” said the man in black beside the table. He wore a large and shadowy tricorn. “Be silent, and respect the procedure.”

It was, without doubt, excellent advice. He whispered some words in the ear of the Judge of the First Instance. It was plain enough to me that the judge was a quite inferior official, who merely decided whether there were any case against the accused; he had, even to his clerk, an air of timidity, of doubt.

I said, “But I insist on knowing....”

The clerk said, “In good time....” And then, in the same tone of disinterested official routine, he spoke to the Lugareño, who, from beside the door, rolled very frightened eyes from the judges and the clerk to myself and the soldiers—“Advance.”

The judge, in a hurried, perfunctory voice, put questions to the Lugareño; the clerk scratched with a large quill on a sheet of paper.

“Where do you come from?”

“The town of Rio Medio, Excellency.”

“Of what occupation?”

“Excellency—a few goats....”

“Why are you here?”

“My daughter, Excellency, married Pepe of the posada in the Calle....”

The judge said, “Yes, yes,” with an unsanguine impatience. The Lugareño’s dirty hands jumped nervously on the large rim of his limp hat.

“You lodge a complaint against the senor there.”

The clerk pointed the end of his quill towards me.

“I? God forbid, Excellency,” the Lugareño bleated. “The Alguazil of the Criminal Court instructed me to be watchful.”

“You lodge an information, then?” the juez said.

“Maybe it is an information, Excellency,” the Lugareño answered, “as regards the senor there.”

The Alguazil of the Criminal Court had told him, and many other men of Rio Medio, to be on the watch for me, “undoubtedly touching what had happened, as all the world knew, in Rio Medio.”

He looked me full in the face with stupid insolence, and said:

“At first I much doubted, for all the world said this man was dead—though others said worse things. Perhaps, who knows?”

He had seen me, he said, many times in Rio Medio, outside the Casa; on the balcony of the Casa, too. And he was sure that I was a heretic and an evil person.

It suddenly struck me that this man—I was undoubtedly familiar with his face—must be the lieutenant of Manuel-del-Popolo, his boon companion. Without doubt, he had seen me on the balcony of the Casa.

He had gained a lot of assurance from the conciliatory manner of the Juez, and said suddenly, in a tentative way:

“An evil person; a heretic? Who knows? Perhaps it was he who incited some people there to murder his señoria, the illustrious Don.”

I said almost contemptuously, “Surely the charge against me is most absurd? Everyone knows who I am.”

The old judge made a gentle, tired motion with his hand.

“Señor,” he said, “there is no charge against you—except that no one knows who you are. You were in a place where very lamentable and inexplicable things happened; you are now in Havana: you have no passport. I beg of you to remain calm. These things are all in order.”

I hadn’t any doubt that, as far as he knew, he was speaking the truth. He was a man, very evidently, of a weary and naïve simplicity. Perhaps it was really true—that I should only have to explain; perhaps it was all over.

O’Brien came into the room with the casual step of an official from an office entering another’s room.

It was as if seeing me were a thing that he very much disliked—that he came because he wanted to satisfy himself of my existence, of my identity, and my being alone. The slow stare that he gave me did not mitigate the leisureliness of his entry. He walked behind the table; the judge rose with immense deference; with his eternal smile, and no word spoken, he motioned the judge to resume the examination; he stood looking at the clerk’s notes meditatively, the smile still round lips that had a nervous tremble, and eyes that had dark marks beneath them. He seemed as if he were still smiling just after having been violently shaken.

The judge went on examining the Lugareño.

“Do you know whence the señor came?”

“Excellency, Excellency....” The man stuttered, his eyes on O’Brien’s face.

“Nor how long he was in the town of Rio Medio?” the judge went on.

O’Brien suddenly drooped towards his ear. “All those things are known, senor, my colleague,” he said, and began to whisper.

The old judge showed signs of very naïve astonishment and joy.

“Is it possible?” he exclaimed. “This man? He is very young to have committed such crimes.”

The clerk hurriedly left the room. He returned with many papers. O’Brien, leaning over the judge’s shoulder, emphasized words with one finger. What new villainies could O’Brien be meditating? It wasn’t possibly the Lugareño’s suggestion that I had lured men to murder Don Balthasar? Was it merely that I had infringed some law in carrying off Seraphina?

The old judge said, “How lucky, Don Patricio! We may now satisfy the English admiral. What good fortune!”

He suddenly sat straight in his chair; O’Brien behind him scrutinized my face—to see how I should bear what was coming.

“What is your name?” the judge asked peremptorily.

I said, “Juan—John Kemp. I am of noble English family; I am well enough known. Ask the Señor O’Brien.”

On O’Brien’s shaken face the smile hardened.

“I heard that in Rio Medio the senor was called... was called...” He paused and appealed to the Lugareño.

“What was he called—the capataz the man who led the picaroons?”

The Lugareño stammered, “Nikola... Nikola el Escoces, Señor Don Patricio.”

“You hear?” O’Brien asked the judge. “This villager identifies the man.”

“Undoubtedly—undoubtedly,” the Juez said. “We need no more evidence.... You, Señor, have seen this villain in Rio Medio, this villager identifies him by name.”

I said, “This is absurd. A hundred witnesses can say that I am John Kemp....”

“That may be true,” the Juez said dryly, and then to his clerk:

“Write here, ‘John Kemp, of noble British family, called, on the scene of his crimes, Nikola el Escoces, otherwise El Demonio.’”

I shrugged my shoulders. I did not, at the moment, realize to what this all tended.

The judge said to the clerk, “Read the Act of Accusation. Read here....” He was pointing to a paragraph of the papers the clerk had brought in. They were the Act of Accusation, prepared long before, against the man Nichols.

This particular villainy suddenly became grotesquely and portentously plain. The clerk read an appalling catalogue of sordid crimes, working into each other like kneaded dough—the testimony of witnesses who had signed the record. Nikola had looted fourteen ships, and had apparently murdered twenty-two people with his own hand—two of them women—and there was the affair of Rowley’s boats. “The pinnace,” the clerk read, “of the British came within ten yards. The said Nikola then exclaimed, ‘Curse the bloodthirsty hounds,’ and fired the grapeshot into the boat. Seven were killed by that discharge. This I saw with my own eyes.... Signed, Isidoro Alemanno.” And another swore, “The said Nikola was below, but he came running up, and with one blow of his knife severed the throat of the man who was kneeling on the deck....”

There was no doubt that Nikola had committed these crimes; that the witnesses had sworn to them and signed the deposition.... The old judge had evidently never seen him, and now O’Brien and the Lugareño had sworn that I was Nikola el Escoces, alias El Demonio.

My first impulse was to shout with rage; but I checked it because I knew I should be silenced. I said:

“I am not Nikola el Escoces. That I can easily prove.”

The Judge of the First Instance shrugged his shoulders and looked, with implicit trust, up into O’Brien’s face.

“That man,” I pointed at the Lugareño, “is a pirate. And, what is more, he is in the pay of the Señor Juez O’Brien. He was the lieutenant of a man called Manuel-del-Popolo, who commanded the Lugareños after Nikola left Rio Medio.”

“You know very much about the pirates,” the Juez said, with the sardonic air of a very stupid man. “Without doubt you were intimate with them. I sign now your order for committal to the carcel of the Marine Court.”

I said, “But I tell you I am not Nikola....”

The Juez said impassively, “You pass out of my hands into those of the Marine Court. I am satisfied that you are a person deserving of a trial. That is the limit of my responsibility.”

I shouted then, “But I tell you this O’Brien is my personal enemy.”

The old man smiled acidly.

“The señor need fear nothing of our courts. He will be handed over to his own countrymen. Without doubt of them he will obtain justice.” He signed to the Lugareño to go, and rose, gathering up his papers; he bowed to O’Brien. “I leave the criminal at the disposal of your worship,” he said, and went out with his clerk.

O’Brien sent out the two soldiers after him, and stood there alone. He had never been so near his death. But for sheer curiosity, for my sheer desire to know what he could say, I would have smashed in his brains with the clerk’s stool. I was going to do it; I made one step towards the stool. Then I saw that he was crying.

“The curse—the curse of Cromwell on you,” he sobbed suddenly. “You send me back to hell again.” He writhed his whole body. “Sorrow!” he said, “I know it. But what’s this? What’s this?”

The many reasons he had for sorrow flashed on me like a procession of sombre images.

“Dead and done with a man can bear,” he muttered. “But this—Not to know—perhaps alive—perhaps hidden—She may be dead....” With a change like a flash he was commanding me.

“Tell me how you escaped.”

I had a vague inspiration of the truth.

“You aren’t fit for a decent man’s speaking to,” I said.

“You let her drown.”

It gave me suddenly the measure of his ignorance; he did not know anything—nothing. His hell was uncertainty. Well, let him stay there.

“Where is she?” he said. “Where is she?”

“Where she’s no need to fear you,” I answered.

He had a sudden convulsive gesture, as if searching for a weapon.

“If you’ll tell me she’s alive...” he began.

“Oh, I’m not dead,” I answered.

“Never a drowned puppy was more,” he said, with a flash of vivacity. “You hang here—for murder—or in England for piracy.”

“Then I’ve little to want to live for,” I sneered at him.

“You let her drown,” he said. “You took her from that house, a young girl, in a little boat. And you can hold up your head.”

“I was trying to save her from you,” I answered.

“By God,” he said. “These English—I’ve seen them, spit the child on the mother’s breast. I’ve seen them set fire to the thatch of the widow and childless. But this.... But this.... I can save you, I tell you.”

“You can’t make me go through worse than I’ve borne,” I answered. Sorrow and all he might wish on my head, my life was too precious to him till I spoke. I wasn’t going to speak.

“I’ll search every ship in the harbour,” he said passionately.

“Do,” I said. “Bring your Lugareños to the task.”

Upon the whole, I wasn’t much afraid. Unless he got definite evidence he couldn’t—in the face of the consul’s protests, and the presence of the admiral—touch the Lion again. He fixed his eyes intently upon me.

“You came in the American brigantine,” he said. “It’s known you landed in her boat.”

I didn’t answer him; it was plain enough that the drogher’s arrival had either not been reported to him, or it had been searched in vain.

“In her boat,” he repeated. “I tell you I know she is not dead; even you, an Englishman, must have a different face if she were.”

“I don’t at least ask you for life,” I said, “to enjoy with her.”

“She’s alive,” he said. “Alive! As for where, it matters little. I’ll search every inch of the island, every road, every hacienda. You don’t realize my power.”

“Then search the bottom of the sea,” I shouted.

“Let’s look at the matter in the right light.”

He had mastered his grief, his incertitude. He was himself again, and the smile had returned—as if at the moment he forced his features to their natural lines.

“Send one of your friars to heaven—you’ll never go there yourself to meet her.”

“If you will tell me she’s alive, I’ll save you.”

I made a mute, obstinate gesture.

“If she’s alive, and you don’t tell me, I can’t but find her. And I’ll make you know the agonies of suspense—a long way from here.”

I was silent.

“If she’s dead, and you’ll tell me, I’ll save you some trouble. If she’s dead and you don’t, you’ll have your own remorse and the rest, too.”

I said, “You’re too Irish mysterious for me to understand. But you’ve a choice of four evils for me—choose yourself.”

He continued with a quivering, taut good-humour: “Prove to me she’s dead, and I’ll let you die sharply and mercifully.”

“You won’t believe!” I said; but he took no notice.

“I tell you plainly,” he smiled. “If we find... if we find her dear body—and I can’t help; but I’ve men on the watch all along the shores—I’ll give you up to your admiral for a pirate. You’ll have a long slow agony of a trial; I know what English justice is. And a disgraceful felon’s death.”

I was thinking that, in any case, a day or so might be gained, the Lion would be gone; they could not touch her while the flagship remained outside. I certainly didn’t want to be given up to the admiral; I might explain the mistaken identity. But there was the charge of treason in Jamaica. I said:

“I only ask to be given up; but you daren’t do it for your own credit. I can show you up.”

He said, “Make no mistake! If he gets you, he’ll hang you. He’s going home in disgrace. Your whole blundering Government will work to hang you.”

“They know pretty well,” I answered, “that there are queer doings in Havana. I promise you, I’ll clear things up. I know too much....”

He said, with a sudden, intense note of passion, “Only tell me where her grave is, I’ll let you go free. You couldn’t, you dare not, dastard that you are, go away from where she died—without... without making sure.”

“Then search all the new graves in the island,” I said, “I’ll tell you nothing.... Nothing!”

He came at me again and again, but I never spoke after that. He made all the issues clearer and clearer—his own side involuntarily and all the griefs I had to expect. As for him, he dared not kill me—and he dared not give me up to the admiral. In his suspense, since, for him, I was the only person in the world who knew Seraphina’s fate, he dared not let me out of his grip. And all the while he had me he must keep the admiral there, waiting for the surrender either of myself or of some other poor devil whom he might palm off as Nikola el Escoces. While the admiral was there the Lion was pretty safe from molestation, and she would sail pretty soon.

At the same time, except for the momentary sheer joy of tormenting a man whom I couldn’t help regarding as a devil, I had more than enough to fear. I had suffered too much; I wanted rest, woman’s love, slackening off. And here was another endless coil—endless. If it didn’t end in a knife in the back, he might keep me for ages in Havana; or he might get me sent to England, where it would take months, an endless time, to prove merely that I wasn’t Nikola el Escoces. I should prove it; but, in the meantime, what would become of Sera-phina? Would she follow me to England? Would she even know that I had gone there? Or would she think me dead and die herself? O’Brien knew nothing; his spies might report a hundred uncertainties. He was standing rigidly still now, as if afraid to move for fear of breaking down. He said suddenly:

“You came in some ship; you can’t deceive me, I shall have them all searched again.”

I said desperately, “Search and be damned—whatever ships you like.”

“You cold, pitiless, English scoundrel,” he shrieked suddenly. The breaking down of his restraint had let him go right into madness. “You have murdered her. You cared nothing; you came from nowhere. A beggarly fool, too stupid to be even an adventurer. A miserable blunderer, coming in blind; coming out blind; and leaving ruin and worse than hell. What good have you done yourself? What could you? What did you see? What did you hope?... Sorrow? Ruin? Death? I am acquainted with them. It is in the blood; ’tis in the tone; in the entrails of us, in our mother’s milk. Your accursed land has brought always that on our own dear and sorrowful country.... You waste, you ruin, you spoil. What for?... Tell me what for? Tell me? Tell me? What did you gain? What will you ever gain? An unending curse!... But, ah, ye’ve no souls.”

He called very loudly, as if with a passionate relief, his voice giving life to an unsuspected, misgiving echo:

“Guards! Soldiers!... You shall be shot, now!”

He was going to cut the knot that way. Two soldiers pushed the door noisily open, their muskets advanced. He took no notice of them; and they retained an attitude of military stupidity, their eyes upon him. He whispered:

“No, no! Not yet!”

Then he looked at me searchingly, as if he still hoped to get some certainty from my face, some inkling, perhaps some inspiration of what would persuade me to speak. Then he shook his wrists violently, as if in fear of himself.

“Take him away,” he said. “Away! Out of reach of my hands. Out of reach of my hands.”

I was trembling a good deal; when the soldiers entered I thought I had got to my last minute. But, as it was, he had not learnt a thing from me. Not a thing. And I did not see where else he could go for information.

CHAPTER TWO

The entrance to the common prison of Havana was a sort of lofty tunnel, finished by great, iron-rusted, wooden gates. A civil guard was exhibiting the judge’s warrant for my committal to a white-haired man, with a red face and blue eyes, that seemed to look through tumbled bushes of silver eyebrows—the alcayde of the prison. He bowed, and rattled two farcically large keys. A practicable postern was ajar on the yellow wood of the studded gates. It was as if it afforded a glimpse of the other side of the world. The venerable turnkey, a gnome in a steeple-crowned hat, protruded a blood-red hand backwards in the direction of the postern.

“Señor Caballero,” he croaked, “I pray you to consider this house your own. My servants are yours.”

Within was a gravel yard, shut in by portentous lead-white house-sides with black window holes. Under each row of windows was a vast vaulted tunnel, caged with iron bars, for all the world like beasts’ dens. It being day, the beasts were out and lounging about the patio. They had an effect of infinite tranquillity, as if they were ladies and gentlemen parading in a Sunday avenue. Perhaps twenty of them, in snowy white shirts and black velvet knee-breeches, strutted like pigeons in a knot, some with one woman on the arm, some with two. Bundles of variegated rags lay against the walls, as if they were sweepings. Well, they were the sweepings of Havana jail. The men in white and black were the great thieves... and there were children, too—the place was the city orphanage. For the fifth part of a second my advent made no difference. Then, at the far end, one of the men in black and white separated himself, and came swiftly to me across the sunny patio. The others followed slowly, with pea-fowl steps, their women hanging to them and whispering. The bundles of rags rose up towards me; others slunk furtively out of the barred dens. The man who was approaching had the head of a Julius Cæsar of fifty, for all the world as if he had stolen a bust and endowed it with yellow skin and stubby gray and silver hair. He saluted me with intense gravity and an imperial glance of yellow eyes along a hooked nose. His linen was the most spotless broidered and embossed stuff; from the crimson scarf round his waist protruded the shagreen and silver handle of a long dagger. He said:

“Señor, I have the honour to salute you. I am Crisostomo Garcia. I ask the courtesy of your trousers.”

I did not answer him. I did not see what he wanted with my trousers, which weren’t anyway as valuable as his own. The others were closing in on me like a solid wall. I leant back against the gate; I was not frightened, but I was mightily excited. The man like Cæsar looked fiercely at me, swayed a long way back on his haunches, and imperiously motioned the crowd to recede.

“Señor Inglesito,” he said, “the gift I have the honour to ask of you is the price of my protection. Without it these, my brothers, will tear you limb from limb, there will nothing of you remain.”

His brothers set up a stealthy, sinister growl, that went round among the heads like the mutter of an obscene echo among the mountain-tops. I wondered whether this, perhaps, was the man who, O’Brien said, would put a knife in my back. I hadn’t any knife; I might knock the fellow’s teeth down his throat, though.

The alcayde thrust his immense hat, blood-red face, and long, ragged, silver locks out of the little door. His features were convulsed with indignation. He had been whispering with the Civil Guard.

“Are you mad, gentlemen?” he said. “Do you wish to visit hell before your times? Do you know who the senor is? Did you ever hear of Carlos el Demonio? This is the Inglesito of Rio Medio!”

It was plain that my deeds, such as they were, reported by O’Brien spies, by the Lugareños, by all sorts of credulous gossipers, had got me the devil of a reputation in the patio of the jail. Men detached themselves from the crowd, and went running about to announce my arrival. The alcayde drew his long body into the patio, and turned to lock the little door with an immense key. In the crowd all sorts of little movements happened. Women crossed themselves, and furtively thrust pairs of crooked, skinny, brown, black-nailed fingers in my direction. The man like Cæsar said:

“I ask your pardon, Señor Caballero. I did not know. How could I tell? You are free of all the patios in this land.”

The tall alcayde finished grinding the immense key in the lock, and touched me on the arm.

“If the senor will follow me,” he said. “I will do the honours of this humble mansion, and indicate a choice of rooms where he may be free from the visits of these gentry.”

We went up steps, and through long, shadowy corridors, with here and there a dark, lounging figure, like a stag seen in the dim aisles of a wood. The alcayde threw open a door.

The room was like a blazing oblong-box, filled with light, but without window or chimney. Two men were fencing in the illumination of some twenty candles stuck all round the mildewed white walls on lumps of clay. There was a blaze of silver things, like an altar of a wealthy church, from a black, carved table in the far corner. The two men, in shirts and breeches, revolved round each other, their rapiers clinking, their left arms scarved, holding buttoned daggers. The alcayde proclaimed:

“Don Vincente Salazar, I have the honour to announce an English senor.”

The man with his face to me tossed his rapier impatiently into a corner. He was a plump, dark Cuban, with a brooding truculence. The other faced round quickly. His cheeks shone in the candle-light like polished yellow leather, his eyes were narrow slits, his face lugubrious. He scrutinized me intently, then drawled:

“My! You?... Hang me if I didn’t think it would be you!”

He had the air of surveying a monstrosity, and pulled the neck of his dirty print shirt open, panting. He slouched out into the corridor, and began whispering eagerly to the alcayde. The little Cuban glowered at me; I said I had the honour to salute him.

He muttered something contemptuous between his teeth. Well, if he didn’t want to talk to me, I didn’t want to talk to him. It had struck me that the tall, sallow man was undoubtedly the second mate of the Thames. Nicholas, the real Nikola el Escoces! The Cuban grumbled suddenly:

“You, Señor, are without doubt one of the spies of that friend of the priests, that O’Brien. Tell him to beware—that I bid him beware. I, Don Vincente Salazar de Valdepefias y Forli y...”

I remembered the name; he was once the suitor of Seraphina—the man O’Brien had put out of the way. He continued with a grotesque frown of portentous significance:

“To-morrow I leave this place. And your compatriot is very much afraid, Señor. Let him fear! Let him fear! But a thousand spies should not save him.”

The tall alcayde came hurriedly back and stood bowing between us. He apologized abjectly to the Cuban for intruding me upon him. But the room was the best in the place at the disposal of the prisoners of the Juez O’Brien. And I was a noted caballero. Heaven knows what I had not done in Rio Medio. Burnt, slain, ravished.... The Señor Juez was understood to be much incensed against me. The gloomy Cuban at once rushed upon me, as if he would have taken me into his arms.

“The Inglesito of Rio Medio!” he said. “Ha, ha! Much have I heard of you. Much of the senor’s valiance! Many tales! That foul eater of the carrion of the priests wishes your life! Ah, but let him beware! I shall save you, Señor—I, Don Vincente Salazar.”

He presented me with the room—a remarkably bare place but for his properties: silver branch candlesticks, a silver chafing-dish as large as a basin. They might have been chased by Cellini—one used to find things like that in Cuba in those days, and Salazar was the person to have them. Afterwards, at the time of the first insurrection, his eight-mule harness was sold for four thousand pounds in Paris—by reason of the gold and pearls upon it. The atmosphere, he explained, was fetid, but his man was coming to burn sandal-wood and beat the air with fans.

“And to-morrow!” he said, his eyes rolling. Suddenly he stopped. “Señor,” he said, “is it true that my venerated friend, my more than father, has been murdered—at the instigation of that fiend? Is it true that the senorita has disappeared? These tales are told.”

I said it was very true.

“They shall be avenged,” he declared, “to-morrow! I shall seek out the senorita. I shall find her. I shall find her! For me she was destined by my venerable friend.”

He snatched a black velvet jacket from the table and put it on.

“Afterwards, Señor, you shall relate. Have no fear. I shall save you. I shall save all men oppressed by this scourge of the land. For the moment afford me the opportunity to meditate.” He crossed his arms, and dropped his round head. “Alas, yes!” he meditated.

Suddenly he waved towards the door. “Señor,” he said swiftly, “I must have air; I stifle. Come with me to the corridor....”

He went towards the window giving on to the patio; he stood in the shadow, his arms folded, his head hanging dejectedly. At the moment it grew suddenly dark, as if a veil had been thrown over a lamp. The sun had set outside the walls. A drum began to beat. Down below in the obscurity the crowd separated into three strings and moved slowly towards the barren tunnels. Under our feet the white shirts disappeared; the ragged crowd gravitated to the left; the small children strung into the square cage-door. The drum beat again and the crowd hurried. Then there was a clang of closing grilles and lights began to show behind the bars from deep recesses. In a little time there was a repulsive hash of heads and limbs to be seen under the arches vanishing a long way within, and a little light washed across the gravel of the patio from within.

“Señor,” the Cuban said suddenly, “I will pronounce his panegyric. He was a man of a great gentleness, of an inevitable nobility, of an invariable courtesy. Where, in this degenerate age, shall we find the like!” He stopped to breathe a sound of intense exasperation.

“When I think of these Irish,...” he said. “Of that O’Brien....” A servant was arranging the shining room that we had left. Salazar interrupted himself to give some orders about a banquet, then returned to me. “I tell you I am here for introducing my knife to the spine of some sort of Madrid embustero, a man who was insolent to my amiga Clara. Do you believe that for that this O’Brien, by the influence of the priests whose soles he licks with his tongue, has had me inclosed for many months? Because he feared me! Aha! I was about to expose him to the noble don who is now dead! I was about to wed the Señorita who has disappeared. But to-morrow... I shall expose his intrigue to the Captain-General. You, Señor, shall be my witness! I extend my protection to you....” He crossed his arms and spoke with much deliberation. “Señor, this Irishman incommodes me, Don Vincente Salazar de Valdepeñas y Forli....” He nodded his head expressively. “Señor, we offered these Irish the shelter of our robe for that your Government was making martyrs of them who were good Christians, and it behoves us to act in despite of your Government, who are heretics and not to be tolerated upon God’s Christian earth. But, Señor, if they incommoded your Government as they do us, I do not wonder that there was a desire to remove them. Señor, the life of that man is not worth the price of eight mules, which is the price I have paid for my release. I might walk free at this moment, but it is not fitting that I should slink away under cover of darkness. I shall go out in the daylight with my carriage. And I will have an offering to show my friends who, like me, are incommoded by this....” The man was a monomaniac; but it struck me that, if I had been O’Brien, I should have felt uncomfortable.

In the dark of the corridor a long shape appeared, lounging. The Cuban beside me started hospitably forward.

“Vamos,” he said briskly; “to the banquet....” He waved his hand towards the shining door and stood aside. We entered.

The other man was undoubtedly the Nova Scotian mate of the Thames, the man who had dissuaded me from following Carlos on the day we sailed into Kingston Harbour. He was chewing a toothpick, and at the ruminant motion of his knife-jaws I seemed to see him, sitting naked to the waist in his bunk, instead of upright there in red trousers and a blue shirt—an immense lank-length of each. I pieced his history together in a sort of flash. He was the true Nikola el Escoces; his name was Nichols, and he came from Nova Scotia. He had been the chief of O’Brien’s Lugareños. He surveyed me now with a twinkle in his eyes, his yellow jaws as shiny-shaven as of old; his arms as much like a semaphore. He said mockingly:

“So you went there, after all?”

But the Cuban was pressing us towards his banquet; there was gaspacho in silver plates, and a man in livery holding something in a napkin. It worried me. We surveyed each other in silence. I wondered what Nichols knew; what it would be safe to tell him; how much he could help me? One or other of these men undoubtedly might. The Cuban was an imbecile; but he might have some influence—and if he really were going out on the morrow, and really did go to the Captain-General, he certainly could further his own revenge on O’Brien by helping me.... But as for Nichols....

Salazar began to tell a long, exaggerated story about his cook, whom he had imported from Paris.

“Think,” he said; “I bring the fool two thousand miles—and then—not even able to begin on a land-crab. A fool!”

The Nova Scotian cast an uninterested side glance at him, and said in English, which Salazar did not understand:

“So you went there, after all? And now he’s got you.” I did not answer him. “I know all about you,” he added.

“It’s more than I do about you,” I said.

He rose and suddenly jerked the door open, peered on each side of the corridor, and then sat down again.

“I’m not afraid to tell,” he said defiantly. “I’m not afraid of anything. I’m safe.”

The Cuban said to me in Spanish: “This senor is my friend. Everyone who hates that devil is my friend.”

“I’m safe,” Nichols repeated. “I know too much about our friend the raparee.” He lowered his voice. “They say you’re to be given up for piracy, eh?” His eyes had an extraordinarily anxious leer. “You are now, eh? For how much? Can’t you tell a man? We’re in the same boat! I kin help you!”

Salazar accidentally knocked a silver goblet off the table and, at the sound, Nichols sprang half off his chair. He glared in a wild stare around him then grasped at a flagon of aguardiente and drank.

“I’m not afraid of any damn thing” he said. “I’ve got a hold on that man. He dursen’t give me up. I kin see! He’s going to give you up and say you’re responsible for it all.”

“I don’t know what he’s going to do,” I answered.

“Will you not, Señor,” Salazar said suddenly, “relate, if you can without distress, the heroic death of that venerated man?”

I glanced involuntarily at Nichols. “The distress,” I said, “would be very great. I was Don Balthasar’s kinsman. The Señor O’Brien had a great fear of my influence in the Casa. It was in trying to take me away that Don Balthasar, who defended me, was slain by the Lugareños of O’Brien.”

Salazar said, “Aha! Aha! We are kindred spirits. Hated and loved by the same souls. This fiend, Señor. And then....”

“I escaped by sea—in an open boat, in the confusion. When I reached Havana, the Juez had me arrested.”

Salazar raised both hands; his gestures, made for large, grave men, were comic in him. They reduced Spanish manners to absurdity. He said:

“That man dies. That man dies. To-morrow I go to the Captain-General. He shall hear this story of yours, Señor. He shall know of these machinations which bring honest men to this place. We are a band of brothers....”

“That’s what I say.” Nichols leered at me. “We’re all in the same boat.”

I expect he noticed that I wasn’t moved by his declaration. He said, still in English:

“Let us be open. Let’s have a council of war. This O’Brien hates me because I wouldn’t fire on my own countrymen.” He glanced furtively at me. “I wouldn’t,” he asserted; “he wanted me to fire into their boats; but I wouldn’t. Don’t you believe the tales they tell about me! They tell worse about you. Who says I would fire on my countrymen? Where’s the man who says it?” He had been drinking more brandy and glared ferociously at me. “None of your tricks, my hearty,” he said. “None of your getting out and spreading tales. O’Brien’s my friend; he’ll never give me up. He dursen’t. I know too much. You’re a pirate! No doubt it was you who fired into them boats. By God I’ll be witness against you if they give me up. I’ll show you up.”

All the while the little Cuban talked swiftly and with a saturnine enthusiasm. He passed the wine rapidly.

“My own countrymen!” Nichols shouted. “Never! I shot a Yankee lieutenant—Allen he was—with my own hand. That’s another thing. I’m not a man to trifle with. No, sir. Don’t you try it.... Why, I’ve papers that would hang O’Brien. I sent them home to Halifax. I know a trick worth his. By God, let him try it! Let him only try it. He dursen’t give me up....”

The man in livery came in to snuff the candles. Nichols sprang from his seat in a panic and drew his knife with frantic haste. He continued, glaring at me from the wall, the knife in his hand:

“Don’t you dream of tricks. I’ve cut more throats than you’ve kissed gals in your little life.”

Salazar himself drew an immense pointed knife with a shagreen hilt. He kissed it rapturously.

“Aha!... Aha!” he said, “bear this kiss into his ribs at the back.” His eyes glistened with this mania. “I swear it; when I next see this dog; this friend of the priests.” He threw the knife on the table. “Look,” he said, “was ever steel truer or more thirsty?”

“Don’t you make no mistake,” Nichols continued to me. “Don’t you think to presume. O’Brien’s my friend. I’m here snug and out of the way of the old fool of an admiral. That’s why he’s kept waiting off the Morro. When he goes, I walk out free. Don’t you try to frighten me. I’m not a man to be frightened.”

Salazar bubbled: “Ah, but now the wine flows and is red. We are a band of brothers, each loving the other. Brothers, let us drink.”

The air of close confinement, the blaze, the feel of the jail, pressed upon me, and I felt sore, suddenly, at having eaten and drunk with those two. The idea of Seraphina, asleep perhaps, crying perhaps, something pure and distant and very blissful, came in upon me irresistibly.

The little Cuban said, “We have had a very delightful conversation. It is very plain this O’Brien must die.”

I rose to my feet. “Gentlemen,” I said in Spanish, “I am very weary; I will go and sleep in the corridor.”

The Cuban sprang towards me with an immense anxiety of hospitableness. I was to sleep on his couch, the couch of cloth of gold. It was impossible, it was insulting, that I should think of sleeping in the corridor. He thrust me gently down upon it, making with his plump hands the motions of smoothing it to receive me. I lay down and turned my face to the wall.

It wasn’t possible to sleep, even though the little Cuban, with a tender solicitude, went round the walls blowing out the candles. He might be useful to me, might really explain matters to the Captain-General, or might even, as a last resource, take a letter from me to the British Consul. But I should have to be alone with him. Nichols was an abominable scoundrel; bloodthirsty to the defenceless; a liar; craven before the ghost of a threat. No doubt O’Brien did not want to give him up. Perhaps he had papers. And no doubt, once he could find a trace of Seraphina’s whereabouts, O’Brien would give me up. All I could do was to hope for a gain of time. And yet, if I gained time, it could only mean that I should in the end be given up to the admiral.

And Seraphina’s whereabouts. It came over me lamentably that I myself did not know. The Lion might have sailed. It was possible. She might be at sea. Then, perhaps, my only chance of ever seeing her again lay in my being given up to the admiral, to stand in England a trial, perhaps for piracy, perhaps for treason. I might meet her only in England, after many years of imprisonment. It wasn’t possible. I would not believe in the possibility. How I loved her! How wildly, how irrationally—this woman of another race, of another world, bound to me by sufferings together, by joys together. Irrationally! Looking at the matter now, the reason is plain enough. Before then I had not lived. I had only waited—for her and for what she stood for. It was in my blood, in my race, in my tradition, in my training. We, all of us for generations, had made for efficiency, for drill, for restraint. Our Romance was just this very Spanish contrast, this obliquity of vision, this slight tilt of the convex mirror that shaped the same world so differently to onlookers at different points of its circle.

I could feel a little of it even then, when there was only the merest chance of my going back to England and getting back towards our old position on the rim of the mirror. The deviousness, the wayward passion, even the sempiternal abuses of the land were already beginning to take the aspect of something like quaint impotence. It was charm that, now I was on the road away, was becoming apparent. The inconveniences of life, the physical discomforts, the smells of streets, the heat, dropped into the background. I felt that I did not want to go away, irrevocably from a land sanctioned by her presence, her young life. I turned uneasily to the other side. At the heavy black table, in the light of a single candle, the Cuban and the Nova Scotian were discussing, their heads close together.

“I tell you no,” Nichols was saying in a fluent, abominable, literal translation into Spanish. “Take the knife so... thumb upwards. Stab down in the soft between the neck and the shoulder-blade. You get right into the lungs with the point. I’ve tried it: ten times. Never stick the back. The chances are he moves, and you hit a bone. There are no bones there. It’s the way they kill pigs in New Jersey.”

The Cuban bent his brows as if he were reflecting over a chessboard. “Ma....” he pondered. His knife was lying on the table. He unsheathed it, then got up, and moved behind the seated Nova Scotian.

“You say... there?” he asked, pressing his little finger at the base of Nichols’ skinny column of a neck. “And then...” He measured the length of the knife on Nichols’s back twice with elaborate care, breathing through his nostrils. Then he said with a convinced, musing air, “It is true. It would go down into the lungs.”

“And there are arteries and things,” Nichols said.

“Yes, yes,” the Cuban answered, sheathing the knife and thrusting it into his belt.

“With a knife that length it’s perfect.” Nichols waved his shadowy hand towards Salazar’s scarf. Salazar moved off a little.

“I see the advantages,” he said. “No crying out, because of the blood in the lungs. I thank yous Señor Escoces.”

Nichols rose, lurching to his full height, and looked in my direction. I closed my eyes. I did not wish him to talk to me. I heard him say:

“Well, hasta mas ver. I shall get away from here. Good-night.”

He swayed an immense shadow through the door. Salazar took the candle and followed him into the corridor.

Yes, that was it, why she was so great a part, a whole wall, a whole beam of my life’s house. I saw her suddenly in the blackness, her full red lips, her quivering nostrils, the curve of her breasts, her lithe movements from the hips, the way she set her feet down, the white flower waxen in the darkness of her hair, and the robin-wing flutter of her lids over her gray eyes when she smiled. I moved convulsively in my intense desire. I would have given my soul, my share of eternity, my honour, only to see that flutter of the lids over the shining gray eyes. I never felt I was beneath the imponderable pressure of a prison’s wall till then. She was infinite miles away; I could not even imagine what inanimate things surrounded her. She must be talking to someone else; fluttering her lids like that. I recognized with a physical agony that was more than jealousy how slight was my hold upon her. It was not in her race, in her blood as in mine, to love me and my type. She had lived all her life in the middle of Romance, and the very fire and passion of her South must make me dim prose to her. I remember the flicker of Salazar’s returning candle, cast in lines like an advancing scythe across the two walls from the corridor. I slept.

I had the feeling of appalled horror suddenly invading my sleep; a vast voice seemed to be exclaiming:

“Tell me where she is!”

I looked at the glowing horn of a lanthorn. It was O’Brien who held it. He stood over me, very sombre.

“Tell me where she is,” he said, the moment my eyes opened.

I said, “She’s... she’s———I don’t know.”

It appalls me even now to think how narrow was my escape. It was only because I had gone to sleep in the thought that I did not know, that I answered that I did not know. Ah—he was a cunning devil! To suddenly wake one; to get one’s thoughts before one had had time to think! I lay looking at him, shivering. I couldn’t even see much of his face.

“Where is she?” he said again. “Where? Dead? Dead? God have mercy on your soul if the child is dead!”

I was still trembling. If I had told him!—I could hardly believe I had not. He continued bending over me with an attitude that hideously mocked solicitude.

“Where is she?” he asked again.

“Ransack the island,” I said. He glared at me, lifting the lamp. “The whole earth, if you like.”

He ground his teeth, bending very low over me; then stood up, raising his head into the shadow above the lamp.

“What do I care for all the admirals?” he was speaking to himself. “No ship shall leave Havana till....” He groaned. I heard him slap his forehead, and say distractedly, “But perhaps she is not in a ship.”

There was a silence in which I heard him breathe heavily, and then he amazed me by saying:

“Have pity.”

I laughed, lying on my back. “On you!”

He bent down. “Fool! on yourself.”

A vast and towering shadow ran along the wall.

There wasn’t a sound. The face of Salazar appeared behind him, and an uplifted hand grasping a knife. O’Brien saw the horror in my eyes. I gasped to him: “Look....” and before he could move the knife went softly home between neck and shoulder. Salazar glided to the door and turned to wave his hand at me. O’Brien’s lips were pressed tightly together, the handle of the knife was against his ear, the lanthorn hung at the end of his rigid arm for a moment. As he lowered it, the blood spurted from his shoulder as if from a burst stand-pipe, only black and warm. It fell over my face, over my hands, everywhere. For a minute of eternity his agonized eyes searched my features, as if to discern whether I had connived, whether I condoned.

I had started up, my face coming right against his. I felt an immense horror. What did it mean? What had he done? He had been such a power for so long, so inevitably, over my whole life that I could not even begin to understand that this was not some new subtle villainy of his. He shook his head slowly, his ear disturbing the knife.

Then he turned jerkily on his heel, the lanthorn swinging round and leaving me in his shadow. There were ten paces to reach the door. It was like the finish of a race whether he would cover the remaining seven after the first three steps. The dangling lanthorn shed small patches of light through the holes in the metal top, like sunlight through leaves, upon the gloom of the remote ceiling. At the fifth step he pressed his hand spasmodically to his mouth; at the sixth he wavered to one side. I made a sudden motion as if to save him from falling. He was dying! He was dying! I hardly realized what it meant. This immense weight was being removed from me. I had no need to fear him any more. I couldn’t understand, I could only look. This was his passing. This....

He sank, knelt down, placing the Ian thorn on the floor. He covered his face with his hands and began to cough incessantly, like a man dying of consumption. The glowing top of the lanthorn hissed and sputtered out in little sharp blows, like hammer strokes... Carlos had coughed like that. Carlos was dead. Now O’Brien! He was going. I should escape. It was all over. Was it all over? He bowed stiffly forward, placing his hands on the stones, then lay over on his side with his face to the light, his eyes glaring at it. I sat motionless, watching him. The lanthorn lit the carved leg of the black table and a dusty circle of the flags. The spurts of blood from his shoulder grew less long in answer to the pulsing of his heart; his fists unclenched, he drew his legs up to his body, then sank down. His eyes looked suddenly at mine and, as the features slowly relaxed, the smile seemed to come back, enigmatic, round his mouth.

He was dead; he was gone; I was free! He would never know where she was; never! He had gone, with the question on his lips; with the agony of uncertainty in his eyes. From the door came an immense, grotesque, and horrible chuckle.

“Aha!-Aha! I have saved you, Señor, I have protected you. We are as brothers.”

Against the tenuous blue light of the dawn Salazar was gesticulating in the doorway. I felt a sudden repulsion; a feeling of intense disgust. O’Brien lying there, I almost wished alive again—I wanted to have him again, rather than that I should have been relieved of him by that atrocious murder. I sat looking at both of them.

Saved! By that lunatic? I suddenly appreciated the agony of mind that alone could have brought O’Brien, the cautious, the all-seeing, into this place—. to ask me a question that for him was answered now. Answered for him more than for me.

Where was Seraphina? Where? How should I come to her? O’Brien was dead. And I.... Could I walk out of this place and go to her? O’Brien was dead. But I...

I suddenly realized that now I was the pirate Nikola el Escoces—that now he was no more there, nothing could save me from being handed over to the admiral. Nothing.

Salazar outside the door began to call boastfully towards the sound of approaching footsteps.’

“Aha! Aha! Come all of you! See what I have done! Come, Señor Alcayde! Come, brave soldiers...”

In that way died this man whose passion had for so long hung over my life like a shadow. Looking at the matter now, I am, perhaps, glad that he fell neither by my hand nor in my quarrel. I assuredly had injured him the first; I had come upon his ground; I had thwarted him; I had been a heavy weight at a time when his fortunes had been failing. Failing they undoubtedly were. He had run his course too far.

And, if his death removed him out of my path, the legacy of his intrigue caused me suffering enough. Had he lived, there is no knowing what he might have done. He was bound to deliver someone to the British—either myself or Nichols. Perhaps, at the last moment, he would have kept me in Havana. There is no saying.

Undoubtedly he had not wished to deliver Nichols; either because he really knew too much or because he had scruples. Nichols had certainly been faithful to him. And, with his fine irony, it was delightful to him to think that I should die a felon’s death in England. For those reasons he had identified me with Nikola el Escoces, intending to give up whichever suited him at the last moment.

Now that was settled for him and for me. The delivery was to take place at dawn, and O’Brien not to be found, the old Judge of the First Instance had been sent to identify the prisoner. He selected me, whom, of course, he recognized. There was no question of Nichols, who had been imprisoned on a charge of theft trumped up by O’Brien.

Salazar, whether he would have gone to the Captain-General or not, was now entirely useless. He was retained to answer the charge of murder. And to any protestations I could make, the old Juez was entirely deaf.

“The senor must make representations to his own authorities,” he said. “I have warrant for what I have done.”

It was impossible to expose O’Brien to him. The soldiers of the escort, in the dawn before the prison gates, simply laughed at me.

They marched me down through the gray mists, to the water’s edge. Two soldiers held my arms; O’Brien’s blood was drying on my face and on my clothes. I was, even to myself, a miserable object. Among the négresses on the slimy boat-steps a thick, short man was asking questions. He opened amazed eyes at the sight of me. It was Williams—the Lion was not yet gone then. If he spoke to me, or gave token of connection with Seraphina, the Spaniards would understand. They would take her from him certainly; perhaps immure her in a convent. And now that I was bound irrevocably for England, she must go, too. He was shouldering his way towards my guards.

“Silence!” I shouted, without looking at him. “Go away, make sail.... Tell Sebright....”

My guards seemed to think I had gone mad; they laid hands upon me. I didn’t struggle, and we passed down towards the landing steps, brushing Williams aside. He stood perturbedly gazing after me; then I saw him asking questions of a civil guard. A man-of-war’s boat, the ensign trailing in the glassy water, the glazed hats of the seamen bobbing like clockwork, was flying towards us. Here was England! Here was home! I should have to clear myself of felony, to strain every nerve and cheat the gallows. If only Williams understood, if only he did not make a fool of himself. I couldn’t see him any more; a jabbering crowd all round us was being kept at a distance by the muskets of the soldiers. My only chance was Sebright’s intelligence. He might prevent Williams making a fool of himself. The commander of the guard said to the lieutenant from the flagship, who had landed, attended by the master-at-arms:

“I have the honour to deliver to your worship’s custody the prisoner promised to his excellency the English admiral. Here are the papers disclosing his crimes to the justice. I beg for a receipt.”

A shabby escrivano from the prison advanced bowing, with an inkhorn, shaking a wet goose-quill. A guardia civil offered his back. The lieutenant signed a paper hastily, then looking hard at me, gave the order:

“Master-at-arms, handcuff one of the prisoner’s hands to your own wrist. He is a desperate character.”

CHAPTER THREE

The first decent word I had spoken to me after that for months came from my turnkey at Newgate. It was when he welcomed me back from my examination before the Thames Court magistrate. The magistrate, a bad-tempered man, snuffy, with red eyes, and the air of being a piece of worn and dirty furniture of his court, had snapped at me when I tried to speak:

“Keep your lies for the Admiralty Session. I’ve only time to commit you. Damn your Spaniards; why can’t they translate their own papers;” had signed something with a squeaky quill, tossed it to his clerk, and grunted, “Next case.”

I had gone back to Newgate.

The turnkey, a man with the air of an innkeeper, bandy-legged, with a bulbous, purple-veined nose and watering eyes, slipped out of the gatehouse door, whilst the great, hollow-sounding gate still shook behind me. He said:

“If you hurries up you’ll see a bit of life.... Do you good. Condemned sermon. Being preached in the chapel now; sheriffs and all. They swing tomorrow—three of them. Quick with the stumps.”

He hurried me over the desolate mossy-green cobbles of the great solitary yard into a square, tall, bare, whitewashed place. Already from the outside one caught a droning voice. There might have been three hundred people there, boxed off in pews, with turnkeys at each end. A vast king’s arms, a splash of red and blue gilt, sprawled above a two-tiered pulpit that was like the trunk of a large broken tree. The turnkey pulled my hat off, and nudged me into a box beside the door.

“Kneel down,” he whispered hoarsely.

I knelt. A man with a new wig was droning out words, waving his hands now and then from the top of the tall pulpit. Beneath him a smaller man in an old wig was dozing, his head bent forward. The place was dirty, and ill-lighted by the tall, grimy windows, heavily barred. A pair of candles flickered beside the preacher’s right arm....

“They that go down to the sea in ships, my poor brethren,” he droned, “lying under the shadow...”

He directed his hands towards a tall deal box painted black, isolated in the centre of the lower floor. A man with a red head sat in it, his arms folded; another had his arms covering his head, which leant abjectly forward on the rail in front. There were large rusty gyves upon his wrists.

“But observe, my poor friends,” the chaplain droned on, “the psalmist saith, ‘At the last He shall bring them unto the desired haven.’ Now...”

The turnkey whispered suddenly into my ear: “Them’s the condemned he’s preaching at, them in the black pew. See Roguey Cullen wink at the woman prisoners up there in the gallery.... Him with the red hair.... All swings to-morrow.”

“After they have staggered and reeled to and fro, and been amazed... observe. After they have been tempted; even after they have fallen....”

The sheriffs had their eyes decorously closed. The clerk reached up from below the preacher, and snuffed one of the candles. The preacher paused to rearrange his shining wig. Little clouds of powder flew out where he touched it. He struck his purple velvet cushion, and continued:

“At the last, I say, He shall bring them to the haven they had desired.”

A jarring shriek rose out of the black pew, and an insensate jangling of irons rattled against the hollow wood. The ironed man, whose head had been hidden, was writhing in an epileptic fit. The governor began signalling to the jailers, and the whole dismal assembly rose to its feet, and craned to get a sight. The jailers began hurrying them out of the building. The redheaded man was crouching in the far corner of the black box.

The turnkey caught the end of my sleeve, and hurried me out of the door.

“Come away,” he said. “Come out of it.... Damn my good nature.”

We went swiftly through the tall, gloomy, echoing stone passages. All the time there was the noise of the prisoners being marshalled somewhere into their distant yards and cells. We went across the bottom of a well, where the weeping December light struck ghastly down on to the stones, into a sort of rabbit-warren of black passages and descending staircases, a horror of cold, solitude, and night. Iron door after iron door clanged to behind us in the stony blackness. After an interminable traversing, the turnkey, still with his hand on my sleeve, jerked me into my familiar cell. I hadn’t thought to be glad to get back to that dim, frozen, damp-chilled little hole; with its hateful stone walls, stone ceiling, stone floor, stone bed-slab, and stone table; its rope mat, foul stable-blanket, its horrible sense of eternal burial, out of sound, out of sight under a mined mountain of black stones. It was so tiny that the turnkey, entering after me, seemed to be pressed close up to my chest, and so dark that I could not see the colour of the dirty hair that fell matted from the bald patch on the top of his skull; so familiar that I knew the feel of every little worming of rust on the iron candlestick. He wiped his face with a brown rag of handkerchief, and said:

“Curse me if ever I go into that place again.” After a time he added: “Unless ’tis a matter of duty.”

I didn’t say anything; my nerves were still jangling to that shrieking, and to the clang of the iron doors that had closed behind me. I had an irresistible impulse to get hold of the iron candlestick and smash it home through the skull of the turnkey—as I had done to the men who had killed Seraphina’s father... to kill this man, then to creep along the black passages and murder man after man beside those iron doors until I got to the open air.

He began again. “You’d think we’d get used to it—you’d think we would—but ’tis a strain for us. You never knows what the prisoners will do at a scene like that there. It drives ’em mad. Look at this scar. Machell the forger done that for me, ’fore he was condemned, after a sermon like that—a quiet, gentlemanly man, much like you. Lord, yes, ’tis a strain....” He paused, still wiping his face, then went on: “And I swear that when I sees them men sit there in that black pew, an’ hev heard the hammers going clack, clack on the scaffolding outside, and knew that they hadn’t no more chance than you have to get out of there...” He pointed his short thumb towards the handkerchief of an opening, where the little blurr of blue light wavered through the two iron frames crossed in the nine feet of well. “Lord, you never gets used to it. You wants them to escape; ’tis in the air through the whole prison, even the debtors. I tells myself again and again, ‘You’re a fool for your pains.’ But it’s the same with the others—my mates. You can’t get it out of your mind. That little kid now. I’ve seen children swing; but that little kid—as sure to swing as what... as what you are....”

“You think I am going to swing?” I asked.

I didn’t want to kill him any more; I wanted too much to hear him talk. I hadn’t heard anything for months and months of solitude, of darkness—on board the admiral’s ship, stranded in the guardship at Plymouth, bumping round the coast, and now here in Newgate. And it had been darkness all the time. Jove! That Cuban time, with its movements, its pettiness, its intrigue, its warmth, even its villainies showed plainly enough in the chill of that blackness. It had been romance, that life.

Little, and far away, and irrevocably done with, it showed all golden. There wasn’t any romance where I lay then; and there had been irons on my wrists; gruff hatred, the darkness, and always despair.

On board the flagship coming home I had been chained down in the cable-tier—a place where I could feel every straining of the great ship. Once these had risen to a pandemonium, a frightful tumult. There was a great gale outside. A sailor came down with a lanthorn, and tossed my biscuit to me.

“You d———d pirate,” he said, “maybe it’s you saving us from drowning.”

“Is the gale very bad?” I had called.

He muttered—and the fact that he spoke to me at all showed how great the strain of the weather must have been to wring any words out of him:

“Bad—there’s a large Indiaman gone. We saw her one minute and then...” He went away, muttering.

And suddenly the thought had come to me. What if the Indiaman were the Lion—the Lion with Seraphina on board? The man would not speak to me when he came again. No one would speak to me; I was a pirate who had fired on his own countrymen. And the thought had pursued me right into Newgate—if she were dead; if I had taken her from that security, from that peace, to end there.... And to end myself.

“Swing!” the turnkey said; “you’ll swing right enough.” He slapped the great key on his flabby hand. “You can tell that by the signs. You, being an Admiralty case, ought to have been in the Marshalsea. And you’re ordered solitary cell, and I’m tipped the straight wink against your speaking a blessed word to a blessed soul. Why don’t they let you see an attorney? Why? Because they mean you to swing.”

I said, “Never mind that. Have you heard of a ship called the Lion? Can you find out about her?”

He shook his head cunningly, and did not answer. If the Lion had been here, I must have heard. They couldn’t have left me here.

I said, “For God’s sake find out. Get me a shipping gazette.”

He affected not to hear.

“There’s money in plenty,” I said.

He winked ponderously and began again. “Oh, you’ll swing all right. A man with nothing against him has a chance; with the rhino he has it, even if he’s guilty. But you’ll swing. Charlie, who brought you back just now, had a chat with the ’Torney-General’s devil’s clerk’s clerk, while old Nog o’ Bow Street was trying to read their Spanish. He says it’s a Gov’nment matter. They wants to hang you bad, they do, so’s to go to the Jacky Spaniards and say, ‘He were a nob, a nobby nob.’ (So you are, aren’t you? One uncle an earl and t’other a dean, if so be what they say’s true.) ‘He were a nobby nob and we swung ’im. Go you’n do likewise.’ They want a striking example t’ keep the West India trade quiet...” He wiped his forehead and moved my water jug of red earth on the dirty deal table under the window, for all the world like a host in front of a guest. “They means you to swing,” he said. “They’ve silenced the Thames Court reporters. Not a noospaper will publish a correct report t’morrer. And you haven’t see nobody, nor you won’t, not if I can help it.”

He broke off and looked at me with an expression of candour.

“Mind you,” he said, “I’m not uffish. To ’n ornery gentleman—of the road or what you will—I’m not, if so be he’s the necessary. I’d take a letter like another. But for you, no—fear. Not that I’ve my knife into you. What I can do to make you comfor’ble I will do, both now an’ hereafter. But when I gets the wink, I looks after my skin. So’d any man. You don’t see nobody, nor you won’t; nor your nobby relations won’t have the word. Till the Hadmir’lty trile. Charlie says it’s unconstitutional, you ought to see your ’torney, if you’ve one, or your father’s got one. But Lor’, I says, ‘Charlie, if they wants it they gets it. This ain’t no habeas carpis, give-the-man-a-chance case. It’s the Hadmir’lty. And not a man tried for piracy this thirty year. See what a show it gives them, what bloody Radicle knows or keeres what the perceedin’s should be? Who’s a-goin’ t’ make a question out of it? Go away,’ says I to Charlie. And that’s it straight.”

He went towards the door, then turned.

“You should be in the Marshalsea common yard; even I knows that. But they’ve the wink there. ‘Too full,’ says they. Too full be d———d. I’ve know’d the time—after the Vansdell smash it were—when they found room for three hundred more improvident debtors over and above what they’re charted for. Too full! Their common yard! They don’t want you to speak to a soul, an’ you won’t till this day week, when the Hadmir’lty Session is in full swing.” He went out and locked the door, snorting, “Too full at the Marshalsea!... Go away!”

“Find out about the Lion,” I called, as the door closed.

It cleared the air for me, that speech. I understood that they wanted to hang me, and I wanted not to be hung, desperately, from that moment. I had not much cared before; I had—call it, moped. I had not really believed, really sensed it out. It isn’t easy to conceive that one is going to be hanged, I doubt if one does even with the rope round one’s neck. I hadn’t much wanted to live, but now I wanted to fight—one good fight before I went under for good and all, condemned or acquitted. There wasn’t anything left for me to live for, Seraphina could not be alive. The Lion must have been lost.

But I was going to make a fight for it; curse it, I was going to give them trouble. My “them” was not so much the Government that meant to hang me as the unseen powers that suffered such a state of things, that allowed a number of little meannesses, accidents, fatalities, to hang me. I began to worry the turnkey. He gave me no help, only shreds of information that let me see more plainly than ever how set “they” were on sacrificing me to their exigencies.

The whole West Indian trade in London was in an uproar over the Pirate Question and over the Slave Question. Jamaica was still squealing for Separation before the premonitory grumbles of Abolition. Horton Pen, over there, came back with astonishing clearness before me. I seemed to hear old, wall-eyed, sandy-headed Macdonald, agitating his immense bulk of ill-fitting white clothes in front of his newspaper, and bellowing in his ox-voice:

“Abolition, they give us Abolition... or ram it down our throats. They who haven’t even the spunk to rid us o’ the d———d pirates, not the spunk to catch and hang one.... Jock, me lahd, we’s abolush them before they sail touch our neegurs.... Let them clear oor seas, let them hang one pirate, and then talk.”

I was the one they were going to hang, to consolidate the bond with the old island. The cement wanted a little blood in the mixing. Damn them! I was going to make a fight; they had torn me from Seraphina, to fulfill their own accursed ends. I felt myself grow harsh and strong, as a tree feels itself grow gnarled by winter storms. I said to the turnkey again and again:

“Man, I will promise you a thousand pounds or a pension for life, if you will get a letter through to my mother or Squire Rooksby of Horton.”

He said he daren’t do it; enough was known of him to hang him if he gave offence. His flabby fingers trembled, and his eyes grew large with successive shocks of cupidity. He became afraid of coming near me; of the strain of the temptation. On the next day he did not speak a word, nor the next, nor the next. I began to grow horribly afraid of being hung. The day before the trial arrived. Towards noon he flung the door open.

“Here’s paper, here’s pens,” he said. “You can prepare your defence. You may write letters. Oh, hell! why did not they let it come sooner, I’d have had your thousand pounds. I’ll run a letter down to your people fast as the devil could take it. I know a man, a gentleman of the road. For twenty pun promised, split between us, he’ll travel faster’n Turpin did to York.” He was waving a large sheet of newspaper agitatedly.

“What does it mean?” I asked. My head was whirling.

“Radical papers got a-holt of it,” he said. “Trust them for nosing out. And the Government’s answering them. They say you’re going to suffer for your crimes. Hark to this... um, um... ‘The wretched felon now in Newgate will incur the just penalty...’ Then they slaps the West Indies in the face. ‘When the planters threaten to recur to some other power for protection, they, of course, believe that the loss of the colonies would be severely felt. But...’”

“The Lion’s home,” I said.

It burst upon me that she was—that she must be. Williams—or Sebright—he was the man, had been speaking up for me. Or Seraphina had been to the Spanish ambassador.

She was back; I should see her. I started up.

“The Lion’s home,” I repeated.

The turnkey snarled, “She was posted as overdue three days ago.”

I couldn’t believe it was true.

“I saw it in the papers,” he grumbled on. “I dursn’t tell you.” He continued violently, “Blow my dickey. It would make a cat sick.”

My sudden exaltation, my sudden despair, gave way to indifference.

“Oh, coming, coming!” he shouted, in answer to an immense bellowing cry that loomed down the passage without.

I heard him grumble, “Of course, of course. I shan’t make a penny.” Then he caught hold of my arm. “Here, come along, someone to see you in the press-yard.”

He pulled me along the noisome, black warren of passages, slamming the inner door viciously behind him.

The press-yard—the exercising ground for the condemned—was empty; the last batch had gone out, my batch would be the next to come in, the turnkey said suddenly. It was a well of a place, high black walls going up into the desolate, weeping sky, and quite tiny. At one end was a sort of slit in the wall, closed with tall, immense windows. From there a faint sort of rabbit’s squeak was going up through the immense roll and rumble of traffic on the other side of the wall. The turnkey pushed me towards it.

“Go on,” he said. “I’ll not listen; I ought to. But, curse me, I’m not a bad sort,” he added gloomily; “I dare say you’ll make it worth my while.”

I went and peered through the bars at a faint object pressed against other bars in just another slit across a black passage.

“What, Jackie, boy; what, Jackie?” Blinking his eyes, as if the dim light were too strong for them, a thin, bent man stood there in a brilliant new court coat. His face was meagre in the extreme, the nose and cheekbones polished and transparent like a bigaroon cherry. A thin tuft of reddish hair was brushed back from his high, shining forehead. It was my father. He exclaimed:

“What, Jackie, boy! How old you look!” then waved his arm towards me. “In trouble?” he said. “You in trouble?”

He rubbed his thin hands together, and looked round the place with a cultured man’s air of disgust. I said, “Father!” and he suddenly began to talk very fast and agitatedly of what he had been doing for me. My mother, he said, was crippled with rheumatism, and Rooksby and Veronica on the preceding Thursday had set sail for Jamaica. He had read to my mother, beside her bed, the newspaper containing an account of my case; and she had given him money, and he had started with violent haste for London. The haste and the rush were still dazing him. He had lived down there in the farmhouse beneath the downs, with the stackyards under his eyes, with his books of verse and his few prints on the wall———My God, how it all came back to me.

In his disjointed speeches, I could see how exactly the same it all remained. The same old surly man with a squint had driven him along the muddy roads in the same ancient gig, past the bare elms, to meet the coach. And my father had never been in London since he had walked the streets with the Prince Regent’s friends.

Whilst he talked to me there, lines of verse kept coming to his lips; and, after the habitual pleasure of the apt quotation, he felt acutely shocked at the inappropriateness of the place, the press-yard, with the dim light weeping downwards between immensely high walls, and the desultory snowflakes that dropped between us. And he had tried so hard, in his emergency, to be practical. When he had reached London, before even attempting to see me, he had run from minister to minister trying to influence them in my favour—and he reached me in Newgate with nothing at all effected.

I seemed to know him then, so intimately, so much better than anything else in the world.

He began, “I had my idea in the up-coach last night. I thought, ‘A very great personage was indebted to me in the old days (more indebted than you are aware of, Johnnie). I will intercede with him.’ That was why my first step was to my old tailor’s in Conduit Street. Because... what is fit for a farm for a palace were low.” He stopped, reflected, then said, “What is fit for the farm for the palace were low.”

He felt across his coat for his breast pocket. It was what he had done years and years ago, and all these years between, inscribe ideas for lines of verse in his pocket-book. I said:

“You have seen the king?”

His face lengthened a little. “Not seen him. But I found one of the duke’s secretaries, a pleasant young fellow... not such as we used to be. But the duke was kind enough to interest himself. Perhaps my name has lived in the land. I was called Curricle Kemp, as I may have told you, because I drove a vermilion one with green and gilt wheels....”

His face, peering at me through the bars, had, for a moment, a flush of pride. Then he suddenly remembered, and, as if to propitiate his own reproof, he went on:

“I saw the Secretary of State, and he assured me, very civilly, that not even the highest personage in the land....” He dropped his voice, “Jackie, boy,” he said, his narrow-lidded eyes peering miserably across at me, “there’s not even hope of a reprieve afterwards.”

I leaned my face wearily against the iron bars. What, after all, was the use of fighting if the Lion were not back?

Then, suddenly, as the sound of his words echoed down the bare, black corridors, he seemed to realize the horror of it. His face grew absolutely white, he held his head erect, as if listening to a distant sound. And then he began to cry—horribly, and for a long time.

It was I that had to comfort him. His head had bowed at the conviction of his hopeless uselessness; all through his own life he had been made ineffectual by his indulgence in perfectly innocent, perfectly trivial enjoyments, and now, in this extremity of his only son, he was rendered almost fantastically of no avail.

“No, no, sir! You have done all that any one could; you couldn’t break these walls down. Nothing else would help.”

Small, hopeless sobs shook him continually. His thin, delicate white fingers gripped the black grille, with the convulsive grasp of a very weak man. It was more distressing to me than anything I had ever seen or felt. The mere desire, the intense desire to comfort him, made me get a grip upon myself again. And I remembered that, now that I could communicate with the outer air, it was absolutely easy; he would save my life. I said:

“You have only to go to Clapham, sir.”

And the moment I was in a state to command him, to direct him, to give him something to do, he became a changed man. He looked up and listened. I told him to go to Major Cowper’s. It would be easy enough to find him at Clapham. Cowper, I remembered, could testify to my having been seized by Tomas Castro. He had seen me fight on the decks. And what was more, he would certainly know the addresses of Kingston planters, if any were in London. They could testify that I had been in Jamaica all the while Nikola el Escoces was in Rio Medio. I knew there were some. My father was fidgeting to be gone. He had his name marked for him, and a will directing his own. He was not the same man. But I particularly told him to send me a lawyer first of all.

“Yes, yes!” he said, fidgeting to go, “to Major Cowper’s. Let me write his address.”

“And a solicitor,” I said. “Send him to me on your way there.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, “I shall be able to be of use to the solicitor. As a rule, they are men of no great perspicacity.”

And he went hurriedly away.

The real torture, the agony of suspense began then. I steadied my nerves by trying to draw up notes for my speech to the jury on the morrow. That was the turnkey’s idea.

He said, “Slap your chest, ’peal to the honour of a British gent, and pitch it in strong.”

It was not much good; I could not keep to any logical sequence of thought, my mind was forever wandering to what my father was doing. I pictured him in his new blue coat, running agitatedly through crowded streets, his coat-tails flying behind his thin legs. The hours dragged on, and it was a matter of minutes. I had to hold upon the table edge to keep myself from raging about the cell. I tried to bury myself again in the scheme for my defence. I wondered whom my father would have found. There was a man called Cary who had gone home from Kingston. He had a bald head and blue eyes; he must remember me. If he would corroborate! And the lawyer, when he came, might take another line of defence. It began to fall dusk slowly, through the small barred windows.

The entire night passed without a word from my father. I paced up and down the whole time, composing speeches to the jury. And then the day broke. I calmed myself with a sort of frantic energy.

Early the jailer came in, and began fussing about my cell.

“Case comes on about one,” he said. “Grand jury at half after twelve. No fear they won’t return a true bill. Grand jury, five West India merchants. They means to have you. ’Torney-General, S’lic’tor-General. S’r Robert Mead, and five juniors agin you... You take my tip. Throw yourself on the mercy of the court, and make a rousing speech with a young ’ooman in it. Not that you’ll get much mercy from them. They Admir’lty jedges is all hangers. ’S we say, ‘Oncet the anchor goes up in the Old Bailey, there ain’t no hope. We begins to clean out the c’ndemned cell, here. Sticks the anchor up over their heads, when it is Hadmir’lty case,’” he commented.

I listened to him with strained attention. I made up my mind to miss not a word uttered that day. It was my only chance.

“You don’t know any one from Jamaica?” I asked.

He shook his bullet head, and tapped his purple nose. “Can’t be done,” he said. “You’d get a ornery hallybi fer a guinea a head, but they’d keep out of this case. They’ve necks like you and me.”

Whilst he was speaking, the whole of the outer world, as far as it affected me, came suddenly in upon me—that was what I meant to the great city that lay all round, the world, in the centre of which was my cell. To the great mass, I was matter for a sensation; to them I might prove myself beneficial in this business. Perhaps there were others who were thinking I might be useful in one way or another. There were the ministers of the Crown, who did not care much whether Jamaica separated or not. But they wanted to hang me because they would be able to say disdainfully to the planters, “Separate if you like; we’ve done our duty, we’ve hanged a man.”

All those people had their eyes on me, and they were about the only ones who knew of my existence. That was the end of my Romance! Romance! The broadsheet sellers would see to it afterwards with a “Dying confession.”

CHAPTER FOUR

I never saw my father again until I was in the prisoner’s anteroom at the Old Bailey. It was full of lounging men, whose fleshy limbs bulged out against the tight, loud checks of their coats and trousers. These were jailers waiting to bring in their prisoners. On the other side of one black door the Grand Jury was deliberating on my case, behind another the court was in waiting to try me. I was in a sort of tired lull. All night I had been pacing up and down, trying to bring my brain to think of points—points in my defence. It was very difficult. I knew that I must keep cool, be calm, be lucid, be convincing; and my brain had reeled at times, even in the darkness of the cell. I knew it had reeled, because I remembered that once I had fallen against the stone of one of the walls, and once against the door. Here, in the light, with only a door between myself and the last scene, I regained my hold. I was going to fight every inch from start to finish. I was going to let no chink of their armour go untried. I was going to make a good fight. My teeth chattered like castanets, jarring in my jaws until it was painful. But that was only with the cold.

A hubbub of expostulation was going on at the third door. My turnkey called suddenly:

“Let the genman in, Charlie. Pal o’ ourn,” and my father ran huntedly into the room. He began an endless tale of a hackney coachman who had stood in front of the door of his coach to prevent his number being taken; of a crowd of caddee-smashers, who had hustled him and filched his purse. “Of course, I made a fight for it,” he said, “a damn good fight, considering. It’s in the blood. But the watch came, and, in short—on such an occasion as this there is no time for words—I passed the night in the watch-house. Many and many a night I passed there when I and Lord———But I am losing time.”

“You ain’t fit to walk the streets of London alone, sir,” the turnkey said.

My father gave him a corner of his narrow-lidded eyes. “My man,” he said, “I walked the streets with the highest in the land before your mother bore you in Bridewell, or whatever jail it was.”

“Oh, no offence,” the turnkey muttered.

I said, “Did you find Cowper, sir? Will he give evidence?”

“Jackie,” he said agitatedly, as if he were afraid of offending me, “he said you had filched his wife’s rings.”

That, in fact, was what Major Cowper had said—that I had dropped into their ship near Port Royal Heads, and had afterwards gone away with the pirates who had filched his wife’s rings. My father, in his indignation, had not even deigned to ask him for the address of Jamaica planters in London; and on his way back to find a solicitor he had come into contact with those street rowdies and the watch. He had only just come from before the magistrates.

A man with one eye poked his head suddenly from behind the Grand Jury door. He jerked his head in my direction.

“True bill against that ’ere,” he said, then drew his head in again.

“Jackie, boy,” my father said, putting a thin hand on my wrist, and gazing imploringly into my eyes, “I’m... I’m ... I can’t tell you how....”

I said, “It doesn’t matter, father.” I felt a foretaste of how my past would rise up to crush me. Cowper had let that wife of his coerce him into swearing my life away. I remembered vividly his blubbering protestations of friendship when I persuaded Tomas Castro to return him his black deed-box with the brass handle, on that deck littered with rubbish.... “Oh, God bless you, God bless you. You have saved me from starvation....” There had been tears in his old blue eyes. “If you need it I will go anywhere... do anything to help you. On the honour of a gentleman and a soldier.” I had, of course, recommended his wife to give up her rings when the pirates were threatening her in the cabin. The other door opened, another man said:

“Now, then, in with that carrion. D’you want to keep the judges waiting?”

I stepped through the door straight down into the dock; there was a row of spikes in the front of it. I wasn’t afraid; three men in enormous wigs and ermine robes faced me; four in short wigs had their heads together like parrots on a branch. A fat man, bareheaded, with a gilt chain round his neck, slipped from behind into a seat beside the highest placed judge. He was wiping his mouth and munching with his jaws. On each side of the judges, beyond the short-wigged assessors, were chairs full of ladies and gentlemen. They all had their eyes upon me. I saw it all very plainly. I was going to see everything, to keep my eyes open, not to let any chance escape. I wondered why a young girl with blue eyes and pink cheeks tittered and shrugged her shoulders. I did not know what was amusing. What astonished me was the smallness, the dirt, the want of dignity of the room itself. I thought they must be trying a case of my importance there by mistake.

Presently I noticed a great gilt anchor above the judges’ heads. I wondered why it was there, until I remembered it was an Admiralty Court. I thought suddenly, “Ah! if I had thought to tell my father to go and see if the Lion had come in in the night!”

A man was bawling out a number of names.... “Peter Plimley, gent., any challenge.... Lazarus Cohen, merchant, any challenge....”

The turnkey beside me leant with his back against the spikes. He was talking to the man who had called us in.

“Lazarus Cohen, West Indian merchant.... Lord, well, I’d challenge....”

The other man said, “S—sh.”

“His old dad give me five shiners to put him up to a thing if I could,” the turnkey said again.

I didn’t catch his meaning until an old man with a very ragged gown was handing up a book to a row of others in a box so near that I could almost have touched them. Then I realized that the turnkey had been winking to me to challenge the jury. I called out at the highest of the judges:

“I protest against that jury. It is packed. Half of them, at least, are West Indian merchants.”

There was a stir all over the court. I realized then that what had seemed only a mass of stuffs of some sort were human beings all looking at me. The judge I had called to opened a pair of dim eyes upon me, clasped and unclasped his hands, very dry, ancient, wrinkled. The judge on his right called angrily:

“Nonsense, it is too late.... They are being sworn. You should have spoken when the names were read.” Underneath his wig was an immensely broad face with glaring yellow eyes.

I said, “It is scandalous. You want to murder me, How should I know what you do in your courts? I say the jury is packed.”

The very old judge closed his eyes, opened them again, then gasped out:

“Silence. We are here to try you. This is a court of law.”

The turnkey pulled my sleeve under cover of the planking. “Treat him civil,” he whispered, “Lord Justice Stowell of the Hadmir’lty. ’Tother’s Baron Garrow of the Common Law; a beast; him as hanged that kid. You can sass him; it doesn’t matter.”

Lord Stowell waved his hand to the clerk with the ragged gown; the book passed from hand to hand along the faces of the jury, the clerk gabbling all the while. The old judge said suddenly, in an astonishingly deep, majestic voice:

“Prisoner at the bar, you must understand that we are here to give you an impartial trial according to the laws of this land. If you desire advice as to the procedure of this court you can have it.”

I said, “I still protest against that Jury. I am an innocent man, and———”

He answered querulously, “Yes, yes, afterwards.” And then creaked, “Now the indictment....”

Someone hidden from me by three barristers began to read in a loud voice not very easy to follow. I caught:

“For that the said John Kemp, alias Nichols, alias Nikola el Escoces, alias el Demonio, alias el Diabletto, on the twelfth of May last, did feloniously and upon the high seas piratically seize a certain ship called the Victoria... um... um, the properties of Hyman Cohen and others... and did steal and take therefrom six hundred and thirty barrels of coffee of the value of... um... um... um... one hundred and one barrels of coffee of the value of... ninety-four half kegs... and divers others...”

I gave an immense sigh.... That was it, then. I had heard of the Victoria; it was when I was at Horton that the news of her loss reached us. Old Macdonald had sworn; it was the day a negro called Apollo had taken to the bush. I ought to be able to prove that. Afterwards, one of the judges asked me if I pleaded guilty or not guilty. I began a long wrangle about being John Kemp but not Nikola el Escoces. I was going to fight every inch of the way. They said: