“Yes,” the Dictator said, “I am better than when last we met. You remember the time we met, on board the Venturer?”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“I, too, I do not forget. Listen, all of you; this man is one of those who saved me in the Noche Triste. I was ruined: I was a beggar, what? Love killed, ay de mi; friends killed, hope killed. Myself wounded, exhausted. Those swinery had a price upon my head: two thousand English pounds. These men in the Venturer they took me in; they defended me. Those swinery were rowing harbour-guard for me. These men in the Venturer drew me half drowned from the sea and stood between me and death.”
He paused for a moment muttering words which were customary with him when moved: some were prayers for Carlotta, the rest curses on her killers.
“Yes,” he muttered, “the swinery; but they paid with their life’s blood, all but that dog, Don José, and that dog, Rafael. They wetted those stones of horror with their tears, those swinery.”
“There was a boy in the Venturer,” he continued, “what you call reefer, in what you call the half deck. He brought me in the dusk a suit of serges and a shirt and said, ‘Better luck next time, Señor.’ What was that reefer’s name? Hey?”
Sard growled that reefers generally answer to the name of Smith.
“Not this one,” Don Manuel said. “Por Dios, Captain Harker, it was you did that charity, you, then a boy. In the dusk, you remember, by the deckhouse, under the chocks of the boats, I know not the right name of it: you remember? Por Dios, I remember.
“Yes, yes, yes, por Dios; never will I forget. £2,000 to give me up, and I all in rags and bloody and shaking, with nothing but my personal charm, what?
“Ay de mi, one is slow in being grateful, too slow; but always in life the present is so full, the past drops, fades. I have watched for all old Venturers. I read all ships’ papers for names. I have watched and waited for you. ‘Everything comes to him who waits,’ you say. Many things come; not everything; some things come not again. Ah, Harker, youth comes not again; thank God, what? Dead love comes not again.”