“Gracias à Dios! Thanks be to heaven, my son, that you found me!” said the sacrilegious wretch, as he bowed to his superior and sipped a glass of rum punch. “Vamonos! let us hear more.”
“At the conclusion of our nuptials, while I held my sweet Lucia to my heart, and kissed her pale brow, and while tears of crystal drops, half in rapture and half in sorrow, dimmed her large, sparkling black eyes, she withdrew this royal sapphire from her slender finger, and gently placing the gem on mine––where you see it, amigos––she said,
“‘My dear and only love, this is the talisman of my race. It has been for ages in my family, and it has been the guardian of our hope and honor. Receive it, friend of my heart, and be the protector of the young girl who yielded up to you her very soul!’”
The doctor started as if he had been stung by a scorpion; but Captain Brand, heedless or inattentive to the movement, went on:
“Yes, caballeros, those were her very words; murmured, too, in her low contralto tones with a pure, lisping Castilian accent, as she laid her stately head on my shoulder.
“Ay, those were rapturous moments; and it was in some degree––yes, I may say in truth––entirely her own fault that they did not last.
“Well, for some days––eight or ten, perhaps––with light baffling 109 winds, we crept stealthily along the south side of St. Domingo; but the weather was delightful, and the time passed on the wings of a zephyr. In the warm, soft evenings, with the moon or stars shedding their pearly gleams over the sea, she sat beside me on the deck of the schooner, watching with girlish interest the white sails above her head, or singing to me the sweet little sequidillas of her native land. And again, starting up from my arms, she would peep over the counter, trace the foam as it flashed and bubbled in our wake, or point to the track of a dolphin as he leaped above the luminous waves and went like a bullet to windward.
“I flatter myself, caballeros, that there have been periods in my career on the high seas, or on land, and may be again, for aught I know,” continued the elegant pirate, as he crossed his legs and threw back the lappels of his velvet coat, so as to expose the magnificence of his waistcoat, and the frills on his broad, muscular chest, “when men of high birth and breeding, and lovely women too of noble lineage, have not thought it beneath them to dine with or to receive the homage of––a––Captain Brand.
“And, por Dios!”––the narrator did not consider it unbecoming his cloth and profession to swear in a foreign language––“por Dios! señores, I have known the time, too, when I have played whist with a French prince of the blood and two knights of the Golden Fleece.”
“And you fleeced them? No?” muttered Don Ignaçio, with an envious glimmer from his greedy eye, as if no one had a right to rob the community but himself.