"Two years!" I exclaimed.
"In truth, 'tis so," my young gentleman, whose name I now learned, replied. "Two years. These galleons should have sailed from Hispaniola that length of time ago, only so many things have happened. First there was the getting them properly laden, then the fear of filibusters and buccaneers----"
"That fear exists no longer, my son," the monk interrupted. "They are disbanded, broken up, gone, dispersed. There will be no more buccaneering now, the saints be praised."
He said: "the saints be praised yet had he not worn the holy garb he did, I should have almost thought that he said it with regret. Indeed, were it not for his shaven crown and face, he would not have ill-befitted the general idea I had formed of those gentry--what with his stalwart form, bold, fierce eyes and sun-browned visage.
"Ay, the saints be praised!" the young señor repeated after him, "the saints be praised. They were the curse of the Indies--I am old enough to remember that. Yet, now, all are gone, as you say, dispersed--broken up. Pointis has done that, and death and disease. Still, where are they?--those who are alive--I wonder."
"There are few alive now," the monk replied, "and those of no worth. Recall, my son, recall what we know happened in the Indies. Kidd is taken, Grogniet dead, Le Picard executed. Townley--a great man that!--I--I mean, a great villain--fell with forty wounds in his body; at Guayaquil nine brave--nine vagabonds--left dead; and more, many more."
"And the villain Gramont"--and now I started; was this whom he called Gramont the man that old vagabond Carstairs had spoken of--as I supposed--as Grandmont?--"forget not the greatest of them all, holy father. What of him?"
"He died at sea. Drowned," Father Jaime replied. Then added: "He was the boldest of them all."
"'Twas never known for certain that he was so drowned," Belmonte said.
"'Twas known for certain; is certain. I have spoken with those who saw his ship's boats floating near where he must have been cast away and lost. Fool that he was! Madman! Louis the King gave him his commission, made him Lieutenant du Roi. Then, because the devil's fever was hot in his blood, he must make one more of his accursed cruises, and go filibustering thus, besieging towns, plundering and destroying once more. The fool! to do it 'neath the King's lilies--to ruin himself forever, when he was rich, rich--ah, heavens! how rich he was! 'Tis well for him that he was drowned--disappeared forever. Otherwise the wheel would have been his portion. And," he added after a pause, "righteously so. Righteously so!"