"What—by you, Ellis?" exclaimed Haystone, with such surprise that he nearly dropped his cigar.
"Rascal!—you saw me then?" said I.
"Ay—morning, noon, and night. Pretty often Monsieur Rouvigny and I have been within arm's length of you, when you and she used to sit in the garden bower, with your arms round each other, reading books in the French lingo, chattering like two monkeys on a cabbage-tree, or caterwauling to the banjo—guitar I s'pose you call it; and it was as much as I could do to keep him from pistolling you both outright, while he swore and sacréd like fury, for he is a desperate fierce thief, that colonel. Last night, when his patience became exhausted, and mine too for the matter o' that, he resolved to make a dash for the prize! Mounseer knew where Madame's bedroom lay on the ground-floor. He found her green blinds unfastened. We crept in and found her snug in her berth asleep. I drew back the curtains, and very pretty she looked with her black hair all braided smooth ways round her head, under a dainty bit of nightcap—far too pretty to be the wife of a Frenchman, say I. But now, the word was presto!
"We dragged her from bed—then she shrieked out; but I took the bandanna from my neck, and tied it over her mouth. One of our niggers stupidly smashed a window with his woolly head, and created an alarm; so, to make a diversion, and enable us to get clear off, the colonel threw the night lamp into the lady's bed, and, in a twinkling, set the curtains, the room, and the house in a blaze! We dragged her out of the window in her night-dress, across the flowers and bushes, and carried her off bodily on our shoulders along the highway, till we reached the gully, where the piragua lay moored under the mangroves. The poor thing was silent now, and offered no resistance, when she found whose prisoner she was. My eyes! she seemed to have a woeful terror of that man. He too, was silent, or only sacréd, and twisted his thick upper lip where the hair was shaven off, when he disguised himself as a French parson at St. Pierre.
"We put her on board the piragua; the colonel and his three niggers jumped in; I was about to follow, for, look you, I had not been paid a stiver of the hundred francs, and began to fear that after this affair the climate of Barbadoes might prove too hot for me; but what think you the infernal treacherous frogeater did? He clubbed a pistol and struck me down senseless among the mangroves. Then they shoved off and pulled away to seaward to reach his schooner, which was hull-down when I saw her this morning about daybreak, and bearing away north-and-by-west. Here, among the mangroves I lay until you fellows found me. This is all my story—a pretty one aint it, Master Oliver Ellis?"
"For what purpose did the Frenchman carry off his wife in this outrageous manner?" asked Mr. Haystone.
"To punish her for levanting from him and for becoming, as he said, a spy."
"Punish," said I anxiously; "but how?"
"By heaving her overboard, with a cold shot at her heels, or by marooning her on some rock—there are lots o' them among the Windward Isles, where the bones of the marooned may lie for years, as white as coral. I have seen them myself many times in these here Indian isles and in others up the Gulf of Florida, where they have lain since the days of the old Buccaneers, when Captain Kidd sailed in his frigate, the Vulture—ay, damme, that I have! The colonel often spoke of serving her so, if he found a bit of convenient rock far out at sea with nothing on it but a coating of guano, seaweed, and barnacles, and, mayhap, a petrel or two perching atop of it, and there leaving her to die—for he swore she should have a terrible end—and he is just the man to give her one. Now that I have payed out all my yarn, hand over hand, without any rigmarole or nonsense, what do you mean to do with me?"
"Send you on board the ship of Admiral Jervis," said Haystone, who ordered him to be secured by a musket-sling.