"Your Excellency, my lords! I appeal to you to save me from this man, not my son but my nephew——"
"S'death, sirrah!" shouted the Viceroy, enraged beyond measure by the allusion to any relationship, "not a drop of your base blood pollutes his veins. I have given you over to him. He will attend to you."
"What means he to do then?"
"You shall see."
"When?"
"To-morrow."
The sombre, sinister, although unknown purpose of the Spaniards had new terrors lent to it by the utter inability of the buccaneer to foresee what was to be his punishment. He was a man of the highest courage, the stoutest heart, yet in that hour he was astonied. His knees smote together; he clenched his teeth in a vain effort to prevent their chattering. All his devilry, his assurance, his fortitude, his strength, seemed to leave him. He stood before them suddenly an old, a broken man, facing a doom portentous and terrible, without a spark of strength or resolution left to meet it, whatever it might be. And for the first time in his life he played the craven, the coward. He moistened his dry lips and looked eagerly from one face to another in the dark and gloomy ring that encircled him.
"Lady," he said at last, turning to Mercedes as the most likely of his enemies to befriend him, "you are a woman. You should be tender hearted. You don't want to see an old man, old enough to be your father, suffer some unknown, awful torture? Plead for me! Ask your lover. He will refuse you nothing now."
There was a dead silence in the room. Mercedes stared at the miserable wretch making his despairing appeal as if she were fascinated.
"Answer him," said her stern old father, "as a Spanish gentlewoman should."