"You have heard correctly," said I. "The pilot's name was Morales."
"Well, it is to hear that tale that I have travelled across the world to visit you."
"Ah, but forgive me, Sir!" I poured out another glassful of wine, drew up my chair, rested both elbows on the table, and looked at him over my folded hands. "You must first satisfy me what reason you have for asking."
"My name is Thomas d'Arfet," he said.
"I do not forget it: but maybe I should rather have said—What aim you have in asking. I ought first to know that, methinks."
In his impatience he would have leapt from his chair had his old limbs allowed. Pressing the table with white finger-tips, he sputtered some angry words of English, and then fell back on the interpreter Martin, who from first to last wore a countenance fixed like a mask.
"Mother of Heaven, Sir! You see me here, a man of eighty, broken of wind and limb, palsied, with one foot in the grave: you know what it costs to fit out and victual a ship for a voyage: you know as well as any man, and far better than I, the perils of these infernal seas. I brave those perils, undergo those charges, drag my old limbs these thousands of miles from the vault where they are due to rest—and you ask me if I have any reason for coming!"
"Not at all," I answered. "I perceive rather that you must have an extraordinarily strong reason—a reason or a purpose clean beyond my power of guessing. And that is just why I wish to hear it."
"Men of my age—" he began, but I stopped Martin's translation midway.
"Men of your age, Sir, do not threaten the peace of such islands as these. Men of your age do not commonly nurse dangerous schemes. All that I can well believe. Men of your age, as you say, do not chase a wild goose so far from their chimney-side. But men of your age are also wise enough to know that governors of colonies—ay," for my words were being interpreted to him a dozen at a time and I saw the sneer grow on his face, "even of so poor a colony as this—do not give up even a small secret to the very first questioner."