He pondered for a minute. Then putting his hand into his bosom, he drew it forth, the hollow of the palm filled with small pearls, all glistening in the sun, like beads of frozen milk. Then he poured the precious morsels from one hand to the other, the pearls pattering and rattling like chips of shivered glass and pebbles, and began again to speak, like a man who talks in his sleep.
‘Ay,’ he cried, ‘and you will sparkle in the coronets of nobles, or mayhap you will rise and fall on the white bosom of some peerless beauty across the western sea. Little will she think how her braveries have been won. Little will she think that the gems of her adornment are but as coagulated drops of human blood. Red, red, you ought to be, and not of that lying virgin whiteness—red, red, you ought to be, as the guilt of him who hath purveyed you, and the blood of the hapless men who, ere now, are doubtless but as lumps of brown carrion—only good to feed the vultures and the crows!’
At this, I observed Jenipa and Disco exchange curious glances with each other; but Peralta, after musing for a short space further, put the pearls back into their hiding-place, and resumed, to a certain degree, his usual manner.
‘I doubt not,’ he said to me, presently, ‘but that your acuteness hath taught you much of what last night you burned to know. The two poor savages, of whom I spoke, were indeed my agents among their brethren; and, thanks to their ingenuity and courage, many a rare pearl hath come to my wallet, instead of the poke of their Spanish task-masters. But all is over now. While I remained on shore, I risked the danger borne by my confederates. Had it been within the power of man to have saved them, I would have perilled limbs and life to bring them off, but it fell out otherwise. What is writ, is writ. Adieu, poor Juan and Blanco, and may you find the next world a better one than this.’
Having pronounced this curious sort of funeral oration, Peralta straightway resumed his former demeanour, and I never heard him allude to the subject again. Meantime, we bounded merrily across the ocean, masts bending, canvas swelling, and sheet and haulyard cracking and straining; the blue heaven, with not a cloud to fleck it, all a blaze of azure light and glory above, and the crystal sea foaming, and tumbling, and gambolling beneath the swift piragua, as, with dripping prow and polished sides, she tore away upon her headlong course. My spirits, long drooping under captivity, now came flushing back, sending the young hot blood tingling through my veins. I leaped and danced about the piragua for very cheery-heartedness—Peralta smiling slily at my antics—and sometimes lifting up my voice, I sang an echoing chorus to the music of wind and wave! ‘A day or two,’ I thought, ‘and I shall see, sleeping in the smooth water landward of the Palisades, my gallant schooner, which I love, and hear ringing from beneath her snow-white awning the cheery voices of my old comrades, of Stout Jem, the true-hearted, and Nicky Hamstring, the merry-minded!’
Alas! not so fast, Leonard Lindsay—not so fast! There are perils and sufferings for you, by sea and land, ere you step upon English ground again!
CHAPTER XXV.
THE PIRAGUA IS PICKED UP BY A GREAT PRIVATEER, AND I FIND
MYSELF AMONG NEW SHIPMATES.
We were within a day’s sail of Jamaica. At the setting of the sun we had seen, even from our low vessel, the distant outline of the Blue Mountains. Peralta had the middle watch. I roused up about an hour and a half before sunrise, and found the piragua heaving upon smooth, oily swells, all unruffled even by a puff of wind. There was a great dank mist around us, packing upon the water as thick as smoke from a man-of-war’s broadside, and the very air seemed loaded with chill damp. I walked up and down the small fore deck of the piragua, trying, in my thin garments, to keep myself warm, and whistling for a breeze to blow away to leeward the filthy fog, which seemed, as it were, to enclose us round, and to cling and settle in its densest volume about the piragua. Standing at the bows, I could not see the stern, and as for the heads of the sails they were lost in the thick opaque air. It was curious to gaze out upon the water as the black looking undulations of the sea rolled under us, the mist seeming to rise and fall with them, and sometimes boiling and eddying from the motion of the waves, although not a breath of wind strayed over the ocean. I might have been upon duty about half an hour, when I almost leaped from the deck with amazement to hear suddenly, coming from whence I knew not, but ringing shrilly through the thick air, a loud cry or scream, like that uttered by a man in mortal anguish.
‘Disco,’ I shouted, ‘did you hear that? What was that cry?’