CHAPTER XXVI
The return of Ortho Penhale, nearly seven years after his supposed death, caused a sensation in West Cornwall. The smuggling affair at Monks Cove was remembered and exaggerated out of all semblance to the truth. Millions of gallons had been run through by Ortho and his gang, culminating in a pitched battle with the dragoons. Nobody could say how many were killed in that affray, and it was affirmed that nobody ever would know. Midnight buryings were hinted at, hush money and so on; a dark, thrilling business altogether. Ortho was spoken of in the same breath as King Nick and other celebrities of the “Trade.” His subsequent adventures lost nothing in the mouths of the gossips. He had landed in Barbary a slave and in the space of two years become a general. The Sultan’s favorite queen fell in love with him; on being discovered in her arms he had escaped by swimming four miles out to sea and intercepting an East Indiaman, in which vessel he had visited India and seen the Great Mogul.
Ortho discovered himself a personage. It was a most agreeable sensation. Men in every walk of life rushed to shake his hand. He found himself sitting in Penzance taverns in the exalted company of magistrates and other notables telling the story of his adventures—with picturesque additions.
And the women. Even the fine ladies in Chapel Street turned their proud heads when he limped by. His limp was genuine to a point; but when he saw a pretty woman ahead he improved on it to draw sympathy and felt their softened eyes following him on his way, heard them whisper, “Ortho Penhale, my dear . . . general in Barbary . . . twelve times wounded. . . . How pale he looks and how handsome!”
A most agreeable sensation.
To insure that he should not pass unnoticed he affected a slight eccentricity of attire. For him no more the buff breeches, the raffish black and silver coats; dressed thus he might have passed for any squire.
He wore instead the white trousers of a sailor, a marine’s scarlet tunic he had picked up in a junk shop, a colored kerchief loosely knotted about his throat, and on his bull curls the round fur cap of the sea. There was no mistaking him. Small boys followed him in packs, round-eyed, worshipful. . . . “Ortho Penhale, smuggler, Barbary lancer!”
If he had been popular once he was doubly popular now. The Monks Cove incident was forgiven but not forgotten; it went to swell his credit, in fact. To have arrested him on that old score would have been more than the Collector’s life was worth. The Collector, prudent man, publicly shook Penhale by the hand and congratulated him on his miraculous escape.
Ortho found his hoard of six hundred and seventy pounds intact in the hollow ash by Tumble Down and spent it freely. He gave fifty pounds to Anson’s widow (who had married a prosperous cousin some years before, forgotten poor Anson and did not need it) and put a further fifty in his pockets to give to Tamsin Eva.
Bohenna told him the story as a joke, but Ortho was smitten with what he imagined was remorse.