Chapter XXXI

THE RETURN

IT was at the dead of the same night when Jack began to be disturbed in his sleep by iterated poundings upon the floor overhead. He heard the noise, and for some time it mingled in his dreams before he began recognizing it with his waking thoughts. He raised himself upon his elbow where he lay upon the floor. Dred, too, was sitting up, and there was the sound of stirring overhead. They could hear the patter of bare feet, and presently Betty Teach came running down-stairs. The next moment she burst into the room, clad in a blanket which she had wrapped around her. “The sloop’s come back!” she cried. “Hands heard ‘em, and he’s been pounding on the floor with his shoe for a deal of a while, but ye slept like ye were dead.”

Even before she had ended speaking, Jack was pulling on his shoes. He tied the thongs hurriedly and then slipped on his coat and hat. He looked up at the clock as he ran off out of the house, leaving Dred dressing more slowly and deliberately, and he saw that it was half-past twelve.

The rain was still driving in fine sheets, and there was the constant sound of running water, and every now and then the dropping and pattering of many drops from the trees as they bowed gustily before the wind. There were lights moving about down at the landing-place, and there were two other lights twinkling out over the harbor, where the sloop evidently lay, the bright sparks reflected in long, restless trickles of light across the broken face of the water. Jack could see that there were figures moving about the landing wharf, and he started to go thither.

He was still dazed and bewildered with the sudden waking, and everything seemed to him to be singularly strange and unreal; what he saw took on the aspect of night-time, but things that had happened the day before mingling oddly with those of the present—the spitting of the fine, chill rain blending with a recollection of Miss Eleanor Parker as she crouched at the foot of the cypress-tree. A cock crew in the rainy night, and the sound was singularly pregnant of the wet darkness of the unborn day.

He had gone only a little distance when he suddenly met two dark figures walking up toward the house through the long, wet, rain-sodden grass. One was Captain Teach, the other was Morton, the gunner. They stopped abruptly as they met him, and the pirate captain asked him where he was going. Jack could tell by the sound of his voice that he was in one of his most savagely lowering humors. “I’m going down to the landing,” Jack answered.

“You’re going to do nothing of the sort,” said the pirate captain’s hoarse husky voice from out of the darkness. “You’re going straight back to the house again.” And then, as Jack hesitated a moment, “D’ye hear me?” he cried out, with a sudden savage truculence, “you go back to the house again,” and Jack did not dare to disobey.

Betty Teach met them at the door, and they all went directly into the kitchen, where a freshly-laid bunch of faggots crackled upon the fire, dispelling the chill dampness of the night. The pirate captain, without offering any word of greeting to Dred, turned to his wife and asked her if she had heard anything from Virginia concerning the young lady.

“No,” she said, “not a word.”

“What!” cried out the pirate, “are you sure? Nothing yet? Why, to be sure there must be something. It has been nigh six weeks since I left.”

“There’s nothing come yet,” said his wife.

Blackbeard’s face lowered at her as though he thought it was somehow her fault that no letter had come, but he said nothing. All this while Dred was standing before the fire as though waiting, and Jack knew it must be that he could hardly contain his desire to learn something about the fortune of the expedition. But however great was his desire to know, he asked no immediate question.

“How be you, Dred?” said Morton at last.

“I’m better now,” said Dred, “and able to be about a bit.” He opened his mouth as though to speak, when the pirate captain cut in:

“How’s Hands getting on?”

“He’s still abed,” said Dred, “but he’s a deal better than he was. He stood on his leg yesterday for nigh an hour.” Then at last he asked, “What luck did you have?” The question was directed at Blackbeard, and Jack and Betty Teach stood waiting breathlessly for the reply, but, in his sullen, evil humor, the pirate captain did not choose to answer. He turned away, flung his hat down upon the bench, and began slowly peeling off his rough coat, wet and heavy with the fine rain. Dred eyed him for a second or two, and then he turned to Morton. “What luck did ye have, Morton?” he asked.

Morton was a slow, heavy, taciturn man, very unready of speech. The reply came almost as though reluctantly from him, but he could not hide the triumphant exultation that swelled his heart. “‘Twere good enough luck, Chris Dred”—a pause—“ay, ‘twere good luck. You lost the chance of your life for a big prize this time, when you stayed ashore—that’s what you did, Chris Dred.”

“Did you, then, come across the packet?” asked Dred, impatiently; and again Jack and Betty waited breathlessly for the reply. Morton was filling his pipe. “‘Twere better than that,” he said, slowly. “‘Twere better than any packet betwixt here and Halifax. ‘Twere a French bark loaded full of sugar and rum from Martinique; that’s what it were, Chris Dred.”

Then, with many pauses in his slow narrative, and every now and then a few quick, strong puffs at his pipe, he told how the two pirate sloops—the sloop from Bath Town and the other from Ocracock—had captured the French bark with its—at that time—precious cargo of sugar and rum; that prize that afterward became so famous in the annals of the American pirates; that prize so valuable that it was impossible that Blackbeard should be allowed to keep it for his own without having to fight the law for it.

The pirate captain, in his sworn statement made before Governor Eden a few weeks later, said that the two sloops had found the bark adrift in the western ocean; and Governor Eden had then condemned it, as being without an owner and belonging to those who had brought it in.

It was a very different story that Jack listened to that night as Morton told it in his slow sentences, sitting in the red light of the crackling faggot fire. Morton said that the Frenchman had fought for over half an hour before he had surrendered. Two of the pirates had been killed and four wounded, and the Frenchman had lost thirteen in killed and wounded. He said that there were a number of Englishmen aboard—castaways, whom the Frenchmen had picked up off a water-logged bark that had been driven out of its course to the southward in a storm off the Bermudas. The Frenchmen, he said, would have surrendered a deal sooner than they did, only that the Englishmen had lent a hand in the fighting. He said that the English captain and a passenger from the English bark were the only men on deck when they came aboard, and it was the English captain who had informed them of the precious nature of the Frenchman’s cargo. Dred asked incidentally what had been done with the prisoners, and Morton said that Blackbeard had, at first, been all for throwing the Englishmen overboard, because they had fought against their own blood, but that he (Morton) and the boatswain of the other sloop had dissuaded him from his first intention, and that finally the crew and passengers of the prize had all been set adrift in three of the Frenchman’s boats, though without compass and with only provisions and water for three days. This was the story that Morton told, and it was very different from Blackbeard’s statement made before Governor Eden.

Jack listened most intently. It all sounded very strange and remote—that savage piracy upon a poor merchantman,—and yet it was all singularly real as Morton told it. He wished very strongly that he had been along. What a thing it would have been to remember in after years! What a thing to have talked about if he should ever get back again to Southampton!

Dred asked who of their own men had been hurt.

“Swigget was killed nigh the first fire the parleyvoos gave us,” Morton answered, “and Robinson was shot a while later and died whiles they were carrying him below. T’others’ll all get well like enough, unless it be black Tom, who was shot in the neck.”

Jack did not know Robinson, but he recollected Swigget very distinctly as being one of the crew that had made the descent upon Marlborough. He had not seen him since those days, but it seemed very strange, almost shocking, to think that he who had been so strong and well at that time, who had snapped his finger in time to the captain’s guitar music and who had been so exultant when he had won at cards, that he should now be suddenly dead!

“‘Twere a hot fight while it lasted,” Morton was saying. “But, oh, Chris, you should just ha’ seen that there bark—full, chock up to the hatches, with sugar, and twenty hogsheads of rum in the forehold besides. ‘Twas the chance of your life you missed, Chris Dred.”

There was a long pause, and then Dred asked, “Where is she now?”

“She’s lying down below Stagg’s Island,” said Morton.

What, during that little pause, was the intangible cause that should have so suddenly have recalled to Jack’s memory the scene of yesterday—the swamp, and the poor fugitive girl crouching at the foot of the cypress-tree? Some expression of Dred’s face, perhaps; some indefinable motion of his hand. His mind rushed back to that other event, and a recollection of the young lady’s white, woeful face—a remembrance of the touch of her cold chin upon his hand, stood out very strongly upon his memory.

All the while Morton had been talking, Blackbeard had sat at the table in sullen silence, taking no part in, and not even seeming to hear, what was said. Morton still smoked his pipe, and now the kitchen was pungent with rank tobacco smoke. Meantime Betty Teach had been bustling about, and had brought out a bottle of rum and some glasses, half a ham, and a lot of corn bread. Then she set a couple of pewter plates with knives and forks upon the table. Blackbeard cut himself a slice of ham and helped himself to a piece of bread, and by and by Morton took his place at the table also, drawing up his chair with a noisy scrape upon the floor.