Trevanion’s dark face whitened. But his hand still gripped the key.
“I had enough of your cursed ship!” he flung in surly defiance, “and you’ll not take me, either.”
Cassidy laughed and turned to the seamen at his back. They stepped forward.
In Gordon’s mind, in that moment of tension, crucial forces were weirdly contending. Over the heads of the group below, through the open door, he saw a ship’s jolly-boat, pulling along the Arno bank. Leghorn—the Pylades—and years in a military fortress. That was what it meant for Trevanion. And what for him? The peace he coveted, a respite of persecution, for him and for Teresa—the right to live and work unmolested.
It was a lawless act—seizure unwarranted and on a foreign soil; an attempt daring but not courageous—they were ten against one. It was a deed of personal and private revenge on the part of Cassidy. And the man had taken refuge under his roof. For any other he would have interposed from a sheer sense of justice and hatred of hypocrisy. But for him—a poltroon, a skulker, and—his enemy?
What right had he to interfere? The manner was high-handed, but the penalty owed to British admiralty was just. It was not his affair. The hour he had sat in the moonlight near the Ravenna osteria, when his conscience had accepted this Nemesis, he had put away the temptation to harm him; though the other’s weapon had struck, he had lifted no hand. He had left all to fate. And fate was arranging now. He had not summoned those marines!
But through these strident voices sounded a clearer one in his soul. It was not for that long-buried shame and cowardice in Greece—not for the attempt on his life at Bagnacavallo, nor for anything belonging to the present—that Trevanion stood now in this plight. It was ostensibly for an act antedating either, one he himself had known and mentally condoned years ago—a boy’s desertion from a hateful routine. If he let him be taken now, was he not a party to Cassidy’s revenge? Would he be any better than Cassidy? Would it be in him also any less than an ignoble and personal retaliation—what he had promised himself, come what might, he would not seek?
He strode down the stair, past Trevanion, and faced the advancing marines.
“Pardon me,” he said. “This man is in my house. By what right do you pursue him?”
The blue-jackets stopped. A blotch of red sprang in Cassidy’s straw-colored cheeks.