“As far as I could make out, he’s wanted in England,” said Sebright, “for some matter of a stolen watch, years ago in Liverpool, I think. And your cousin, the grandee, was mixed up in that, too. That sounds funny; you didn’t tell us about that. Damme if he didn’t seem to imply that you, too... But you have never been in Liverpool. Of course not....”
But that had not been precisely Castro’s point. He had affirmed he had enemies in Spain; he shuddered at the idea of going to France, and now my English fancifulness had made it impossible for him to live in Rio Medio, where he had had the care of a good pad-rona.
“I suppose he means a landlady,” Sebright chuckled. “Old but good, he says. He expected to die there in peace, a good Christian. And what’s that about the priests getting hold of his very last bit of silver? I must say that sounded truest of all his rigmarole. For the salvation of his soul, I suppose?”
“No, my cousin’s soul,” I said gloomily.
“Humbugs. I only understood one word in three.”
Just then Tomas himself stalked into sight among the men forward. Coming round the corner of the deck-house, he stopped at the galley door like a crow outside a hut, waiting. We watched him getting a light for his cigarette at the galley door with much dignified pantomime. The negro cook of the Lion, holding out to him in the doorway a live coal in a pair of tongs, turned his Ethiopian face and white ivories towards a group of sailors lost in the contemplation of the proceedings.’ And, when Castro had passed them, spurting jets of smoke, they swung about to look after his short figure, upon whose draped blackness the sunlight brought out reddish streaks as if bucketfuls of rusty water had been thrown over him from hat to toe. The end of his broken plume hung forward aggressively.
“Look how the fellow struts! Night and thunder! Hey, Don Tenebroso! Would your worship hasten hither....” Sebright hailed jocularly.
Castro, without altering his pace, came up to us.
“What do you think of her now?” asked Sebright, pointing to the strange sail. “She’s grown a bit plainer, now she is out of the glare.”
Castro, wrapping his chin, stood still, face to the sea. After a long while: