‘Oh, in the great cabin,’ replied the captain. ‘A sullen piece of goods, I warrant you. He refuses to speak a word.’
‘Have him out,’ answered I; ‘and we will try to make him find his tongue.’
And so, presently, Master Pilot was hustled forth upon the deck.
‘Will you tell us,’ quoth I, ‘why you choose to live alone amongst these grim rocks?’
The little man grinned, twisted his features, and answered never a word. The crew looked on curiously.
‘Once upon a time, there sailed a Spanish treasure-ship from Porto Bello.’
The dwarf pricked up his ears, and all the blood went away from his face.
‘In which ship,’ I continued, ‘there was a mariner named Vincente y Tormes. But the ship had not been six days at sea, going to Hispaniola to receive the tribute of the Caciques, when it was lost upon certain reefs, with the treasure on board, and Vincente y Tormes of all the crew was saved, and carried to Spain, where afterwards he became a water-carrier and servant to a priest, named——’
‘You need not trouble yourself to recite further,’ said the dwarf, with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘You guess my secret. I thought none of you had wit enough to pick the marrow out of that bone, but it was all my own fault. I came on board this schooner, and in doing so threw away, by one moment of folly, the fruits of years of labour and danger. Dolt that I was!—what could it matter to me whether you succeeded in blundering out, as you blundered in, or stayed here until the first heavy blow smashed your ship to powder on these coral reefs? It would have been all the same to me.’
Having made this speech with great bitterness, but in a perfectly composed fashion, the dwarf sat down upon a coil of rope, and shrugged his shoulders almost as high as the crown of his head.