“And not only that,” continued the captain, rapidly, “but the daughter of an English peer of the realm once proposed to run away with me. Ho! ho! yes, she actually proposed to elope with me; but as she was verging on fifty years, and only weighed fifty pounds, with never a pound in her pocket, I sighed my regrets. Ay, great compliment it was, but I declined the honor. You yourself, compadre, must remember how I was received by the people on the Buena Vista villa at Principe; how the obispo blessed me, the old general embraced me, and the beautiful marquesa, with the hour-glass waist, smiled on me.”
“Cierto!” That astute old Spaniard never forgot any thing, particularly a debt due to him; and he remembered, moreover, to have heard that when the noble Mi Lord Inglez left the villa one dark night, a good deal of plate, jewels, doubloons, and other valuable property disappeared with him. Ay, the sly old fellow had a faint recollection as well of seeing a heavily-armed schooner running the gauntlet through the forts before daylight, and that she left a certain bag of gold ounces for him––Don Ignaçio Sanchez––somewhere in a secret hole beneath a well-known rock inside the harbor. Oh, a wonderful 110 memory for matters of this nature had our rapacious one-eyed acquaintance!
“Yes,” went on his partner in many a scene of pillage and crime, “I have every reason to know that I won the hearts, and purses too, sometimes, of some of the fine people I met in refined society. But yet there have been occasions when the game has gone against me––”
Don Ignaçio’s tenacious memory came again into play, and he looked back to the time when he himself had cleaned his profuse friend out of all his gains at the card-table, even to the buttons off his coat; but he gave no sign of remembrance of those days, and only blew a dense cloud of smoke from his thin yellow nostrils as the captain spoke.
“––Though those occasions have not been of frequent recurrence.”
The good Padre Ricardo at this juncture hoped that, by Saint Barnabas, luck might, in all time to come, befriend his son and patron; croaking, too, with a goblet of punch to his unctuous lips, “Vamonos! Tell us more of the adorable Doña Lucia!”
Captain Brand rapped his snuff-box, opened the diamond-crusted lid, took a dainty pinch, laid his cambric handkerchief over his kerseymere breeches, and resumed his narrative.
“So passed the days, caballeros; and when, one morning, the high mountains back of Port Guantamano were reported to me, I felt a presentiment that my dream of bliss was drawing to a close. Indeed, I might probably have remained at sea a week or two longer, but the men were getting a little impatient, and I thought it better to sacrifice my own pleasure to theirs. That day we caught a cracking breeze out of the Windward Passage, and toward midnight we came up with this little sandy island here.
“The preparations for going into port excited the curiosity of my bride; for, poor thing! she believed we were bound into Porto Rico, and I had some trouble in inducing her to go below before we crossed the reef. Bueno! the coast was clear, the signals were all right, and an hour later the schooner had her anchor down and sails furled pretty much in the spot where she now lies moored.
“While, however, we were sweeping up the inlet, I sent a boat ahead, with directions for my tidy old housekeeper, Babette, to have every thing prepared to receive her new mistress. Just then one of those terrible thunder-storms came up; heavy masses of clouds obscured the sky, followed by such double-barrel shocks and intensely vivid lightning as is only beheld in the tropics preceding the equinox. The rain, too, came along in horizontal sheets, driven by a squall which burst in fury over the island, and it seemed to me that all the devils from hell were howling and shrieking in the air.