When Dame Charter heard what had happened at the Governor's house and had listened to the recital of Kate's glowing schemes, her eyes did not immediately glisten with joy.
"If you go, Mistress Kate," said she, "in search of your father or that wicked Captain Vince, I go with you, but I cannot go without my Dickory. It is full time to expect his return, although, as he was to depend upon so many chances before he could come back, his absence may, with good reason, continue longer, and I could not have him come back and find his mother gone, no man knows where. For in such a quest, what man could know?"
"Oh, Dickory will be here soon!" cried Kate; "any ship which comes sailing towards the harbour may bring him."
The Governor of Jamaica was a man of great experience, and with a fairly clear insight into the ways of the wicked. When Kate and her uncle had left him and he paced the floor, with the memory of the beautiful eyes of the pirate's daughter as they had been uplifted to his own, he felt assured that he could see rightly into the designs of the unscrupulous Captain Vince. Of what avail would it be for him to kill the father of the girl who had rejected him? It would be an atrocious but temporary triumph scarcely to be considered. But to capture that father; to disregard the laws of the service and the orders of his superiors, which he had already proposed to do; to communicate with Kate and to hold up before her terror-stricken eyes the life of her father, to be ended in horror or enjoyed in peace as she might decide—that would be Vince, as the Governor knew him.
The Governor knew well his man, and those were the designs and intentions of Captain Christopher Vince of his Majesty's corvette the Badger.
[CHAPTER XVI]
A QUESTION OF ETIQUETTE
