They were seated in the admiral's cabin on another such hot July day as that on which St. Georges had been dragged out of the sea with still a portion of his chain attached to the ring round his ankle, and which was rapidly sinking him, but the latter was looking in very different case now. The burnt face was still very black and hollow, the lines of suffering still plainly marked, as they would be for many a day, but otherwise all was changed. He was dressed as a gentleman once more, in a plain but neat suit of blue clothes, guarded with white cotton lace—it had been the unfortunate lieutenant's. His hair, which was combed and brushed now, was, although still somewhat short—it being the custom in the galleys to crop it close to the head for those days once a month—no longer thick and matted.
St. Georges went on as the admiral bade him; he was telling the whole story of his life to his host.
"Yet, sir," he continued, "she was no common wanton either, as I heard afterward, but a lady of Louis's court who loved De Roquemaure. Doubtless her hate and anger were roused by the words I addressed to her. And I must have wronged her in one instance at least; it could scarce have been she who stole my—my poor little babe." And, as ever, when he mentioned that lost one, his eyes filled with tears. She was gone from him now, he feared, forever—he had been in that accursed galley for two years!—how could he hope to see her again on this earth? No wonder that the tears sprang to his eyes!
The seaman opposite to him certainly wondered not at their doing so; instead, he passed his own hand before his eyes, as he had done more than once before in the course of the narrative. Countless men had been sent to their doom by that hand and by his orders, but that was in battle; now, as he thought of St. Georges's little lonely child and wondered if it still lived, his memory wandered back to Monk's Horton, a pleasant seat in Kent, where his own children were doubtless playing at their mother's knee, and his brave heart became as tender as a woman's.
"Poor babe!" he said, "poor babe! Pray God the other woman, the one who did steal her at Troyes, has some bowels of compassion! Surely she must have, however base in other respects."
"I pray so night and day," St. Georges said. "O God! how I pray so." Then again, at the admiral's desire that he should not fret too much, but hope ever for the best, he went on with the account of all that had befallen him.
"When my wound was nearly healed," he said, "there came to the room in the inn, where I was closely guarded, a small body of exempts who carried me to Paris to the prison of La Tournelle, a place from which, as I shortly afterward learned, a chain of condemned galley slaves was to set out, all winter as it was, for Marseilles."
"'But,' I cried to the man who fed us morning and night like animals, while we lay each with an iron collar round our necks by which we were chained to a beam that traversed the dungeon——"
"In a Christian country!" exclaimed the admiral—"a Christian country!"
"Ay! in a Christian country! Yet I cried, I say, to the man who guarded us: 'But these companions of mine are condemned—I am not. I have undergone no trial!'