"While I'm a slave it's of no value," said Ben, knowing that this was not at all true.
"Mother of God, it's your very impudence that saves you. If you were what I've sometimes feared you might be, your conversation would not be so. You'd be sly, I think. You'd try to please me, I think, and not spit back at me like a little wildcat.... Well—Cornelius Barentsz was an agent, and that in the service of Queen Anne of England."
"I don't believe it."
"It doesn't matter. You haven't my ways of discovering truth. But now that you know I know this, will there be any particular thing you wish to tell me, Ben Cory?"
"No, Shawn."
"If you be what I devoutly pray you are, you've nothing to fear even in your impudence. But those who betray me I do not forgive."
Ben knew—and had known for some time, he supposed—that he was in the presence of madness, whatever that is. It seemed not to be the simple, half-supernatural thing that the common speech heard in Ben's childhood had made of it. Shawn did not rave or babble or foam at the mouth; he never acted as one possessed of a devil ought to act, and besides, are there any devils? If so, what are they, and how was one who had lived three years with the calm skepticism of John Kenny to believe in them? One remembered Reuben snorting and gurgling and sometimes cursing over Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, and then reading with greater joy the burlesque of it written by the merchant Robert Calef of Boston, whom Uncle John admired. Never mind about devils.
Ben knew his own life could end at any moment. At that time, however, he had already lived three months with the nearness of sudden death—his own defiance, he sometimes thought, the sheerest bluff. Like living in the same den with a tiger who, for his own reasons, has so far refrained from destroying you. You can cringe and shiver for only a limited time; then it becomes tiresome, and you must look after your own occasions of eating and sleeping and waking no matter what the tiger does. And doubtless a tiger is more likely to pounce on a creature that cringes than on one who spits back at him. And in spitting back, in turning his face directly toward the lightning and to hell with the consequences, Ben had found, no doubt of it, a hot pleasure as definite, almost as keen as in the surging moments when Clarissa had loved him.
Shawn played few chess games with Ben after that day, appearing to lose interest in them. He seemed to Ben to be changing in some gradual, obscure fashion—more aloof, more silent except for the occasional furious monologue after some ship had been sighted, and followed a while, and then allowed to slip away over the horizon because Shawn's voice told him the moment was not ripe and his forces not sufficient. Several times Shawn had robbed small interisland vessels—trivial occasions when Ben was not tied below but allowed to remain on deck with Manuel and Dummy and the monkey. The Diana swooped down on these helpless chickens like the wrath of God, but having taken what little they held of provisions and valuables, and having learned that no man aboard them was willing or worthy to go with him, Shawn showed contemptuous mercy and let them depart unharmed. What they could tell, he said, was no threat to him—he had already satisfied himself, after the pursuit by the frigate Dread, that the Diana could outrun anything afloat.
Vessels in the Diana's class or larger were always too well manned or too well armed, or sighted too near the land or in the presence of other shipping, or simply rejected by the inner voice. Something—("I am compassed about," said Shawn—"compassed about")—something was always not quite right.