"What will you do?" I asked through my now fast-falling tears, tears that none needed to be ashamed of; tears that none, listening to his heart-broken words as they dropped slowly from his lips, could have forborne to shed. "What is your life to be?"
"God only knows," he replied; "yet one of penitence, of prayers for forgiveness so long as that life lasts. Thereby--thereby--I shall be fitter for the end. I am almost old now; it may not be far off."
Silence came upon us after that--a silence broken only by the howl of the wind outside the lonely house, by the thud of snow falling now and again from the roof and eaves--blown off by the fury of the tempest. But broken by scarcely aught else, unless 'twas a sigh that occasionally, and all unwittingly, as I thought, escaped from that poor sinner's overcharged breast. Yet, for the rest, nothing; no sound from that room above, where Juana lay sleeping; nothing but sometimes the expiring logs falling together with a gentle clash in the grate.
Then suddenly, as I almost dozed on one side of those logs, he being on the other, I heard him speaking to me, his voice deep, sonorous and low--perhaps he feared it might reach her above!--yet clear and distinct.
"Evil," he said, "as my existence has been, misjudge me not. None started on life's path meaning better than I. God help me! none drifted into worse extremes. Will you hear my story--such as 'tis meet you should know--you who love my child?"
I bowed my head; I whispered, "Yes." Once, because I pitied him, I gently touched his hand with mine.
"I was a sailor," he went on, his dark eyes gleaming tenderly at that small offering of my sympathy, "bred up to the sea, the only child of a poor Protestant woman. Later--when Louis the king first fell under the thrall of the wanton, De Maintenon, my mother died of starvation, ruined by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, ruined ere that revocation by the shadow it cast before it on all of our faith. Think you that what was doing in the Indies by the Spaniards made me love the followers of the Romish church more?"
He paused a moment--again he went on:
"In the Indies to which I had wandered, I met with men who had sworn to extirpate, if might be, every Spaniard, every one of those who in their time swore that there was to be no peace beyond the line. That was their oath--we helped them to keep it, made it our watchword, too. All of us, Morgan, Pointis, Avery, Lolonois, your other countryman, Stede Bonnet, a hundred others, all of different lands, yet all of one complexion--hatred against Spain. And there was no peace beyond the line. You are a soldier, may be one for years, yet you will never know blood run as blood ran then. You may rack cities, even Louis' own capital, you will never know what sharing booty means as we knew it. Ere I was thirty I possessed a hundred thousand gold pistoles, ere another year had passed I owned nothing but the sword by my side, the deck I trod."
"Yet," I said, "when you were lost--disappeared--you left your child a fortune--which Eaton stole."