She held out her hand to me as she spoke. I took it coldly, my other hand on my sword. But that was not the end. With a sudden wild impulse she flung her arms about me, and my lips were tingling with one last passionate kiss. She had sprung into the boat and pushed off ere I hardly knew what she had done.
'So, faint heart,' she cried, as she stood up beautiful in the moonlight, 'so I set my sign upon you. When another comes to whom you would give what you deny to me, may she taste my kiss still lingering there and learn, though you know it not, that you have loved before.'
With difficulty she rowed herself back to the ship. I watched her shapely figure grow less and less across the moonlit water, till she was lost behind the dark hull, and I was alone once more.
CHAPTER XXVIII
I never saw my Señorita again. Early next morning the Pasha's anchors were hove up, and Mr. Oxenham went aboard to work her out through the tortuous channels by which she had entered more than six months ago.
It took all one day and part of the next to get the ship free, and Mr. Oxenham did not quit her till she was quite clear of the shoals. What passed between him and my Señorita then I cannot say. Whether they found means whereby afterwards letters went between them I do not know, but when years after news of his end came I could not but think it might have been so; and, in spite of seeming contradictions in the varying reports that reached us, I have often wondered whether my Señorita were not the same fair lady for whose sweet sake, less than three years after, when he had won undying honour by having sailed the South Sea first of all Englishmen, he madly did that whereby he not only lost all the wealth he had taken there, but also his trusty company and his fair name, ay, and gave up his wasted life beside as a pirate on a Spanish gallows at Lima. But let that pass. I bear him no ill-will, and trust he rests in peace, as, for all his sins, his courageous spirit well deserves.
For such a spirit indeed he had, and, next to the general, our whole company had conceived greater hope in him than in any other. So that, when a few days after the release of the prisoners we came with the frigate and the pinnaces to the Catenas, he was chosen to lead the attempt to recover the French captain and the buried treasure. For in spite of all Frank could say we would not suffer him to go, saying his life was too precious to us now to be risked on so dangerous a service, seeing he was the only man on whom we could count to carry us back to England.
Mr. Oxenham undertook the desperate service with the same light heart wherewith he always faced the greatest perils, but was not rewarded according to his courage. For, on coming to the Rio Francisco, he found in most forlorn condition one of the men who had stayed behind with Monsieur Tetú. From him he had news that the brave captain had been taken half an hour after our departure, and his fellow a little later, because he would not cast away his treasure, and so could not run fast enough to escape.
Moreover he told us that some two thousand Spaniards and negroes had been digging and ranting up the ground for the space of a mile, every way about the place where they must have learned from the prisoners that our treasure was buried. This Mr. Oxenham found to be true; for, notwithstanding the report, he still would go and see for himself, and was rewarded by the discovery of thirteen silver bars and some quoits of gold, which the Spaniards had not been able to find.