“There’s always more than yourself in the world. Come, sir.”
“I think, captain,” said Margaret, “you’re the only one of us all who comes up prepared and calm, ready for everything. I ought to have been on the Main with you and Morgan, instead of learning Latin at a university. If I ever have a son, I shall send him abroad with you to be a buccaneer.”
They entered the gulf in the darkness of the new moon. They sailed in a clump together, Tucket leading. They sailed without lights, but for the night-lights in the binnacles. They moved in blackness on the sea, great fish making fire-streaks, lumbering whales with their brood. The men aboard them, waiting in the darkness for the word, struck their shins on guns and longed to be off. Few of them took their hammocks from the nettings that night. They passed the hours talking and smoking, in slow sea-walks to and fro, humming old tunes over their pipestems. They had made themselves ready many hours before. Their guns had been oiled and loaded, and their belts filled with cartridges, during the afternoon. All that they had to do now was to buckle on their water-bottles and snapsacks, and get into their boats. They heard the surf tumbling on the Mestizos. Setting stars, like ships’ lights, burned out into the sea. The seamen watched them as they shifted their tides, talking of the past, with its memories, of ships and women, its memories of life and the sun.
The word was given some four miles from the city, lest the Indian sentinels should sight the ships from the walls. The land was like a cloud at that distance, like a sharply defined blackness on the sky, shutting off the rising stars. It was a dark morning; but to the seamen’s eyes it was light enough. They had been on deck since the setting of the watch. They had grown accustomed to the darkness. It was now an hour before the dawn. It was to be a red dawn above Tolu.
Captain Margaret stood with Cammock at the gangway watching his men go over the side to the canoas. All the men of war, twenty of his crew, and a few Indians, fifty men in all, were coming with him from the ship. They loitered about the gangway like sheep at a gap, they seemed a great company. They did not talk much among themselves. One or two, the wags of the fo’c’s’le, made jests about “Tolu soup”; and the laughter spread in the canoas, where the men were packed tightly, like lovers on a bench. One or two of the men, the most intelligent among them, asked to shake hands with Captain Margaret as they passed him at the gangway side. Perrin touched him on the shoulder when about half of them had gone.
“Charles,” he said, “Olivia wants to see you. She’s in the alleyway.”
“In a minute,” he answered. “Good-bye, West.”
“Good-bye, sir.”
“Look after them, captain. Don’t let them shove off without me.”
In the darkness of the alleyway he found Olivia. He could see her great eyes in the oval of her face. She was trembling.