So I left him and went within to sleep a fevered, troubled sleep, in which I saw the wounded cavalier grinning upon my sword again, till he sprang at last from off it, and, seizing Harry and the Drakes, swung them up on gibbets in a long ghastly row, while Mrs. Drake cried to me, who could not move, to save them.
CHAPTER VIII
On the morrow, as I walked in the orchard after dinner with Frank Drake and Harry, for the rest were gone, I took occasion to inquire what they thought of piracy; for our adventure, and especially my own part in it, weighed no less heavily on my mind for my night's rest.
'That was a shrewd thrust of yours, Mr. Festing,' said Drake, as our talk turned, naturally enough, on our adventure. 'But for you we might have had ugly work. I give you good thanks for it, and all the honour; ay, and if I had my way you should have the lion's share of the booty too.'
'Have my thanks, Mr. Drake,' said I, 'for your good words. Yet think me not churlish if I say they might be better bestowed. As for the thrust, it was none, for the Don spitted himself; as for the honour, let us talk of that when there is any in such work; and as for the booty, I will have none of it.'
'Your reasons, Mr. Festing, your reasons?' said Drake good-humouredly.
'For the honour,' answered I, 'it is a thing which I hold pirates have little part in; for the booty, I care not to share with water-thieves.'
He turned sharp on me then and stopped in his walk with a flush in his face, looking hard at me with that strange, honest, searching look of his. I was ready to bite my tongue out; for I saw in a moment that my hot words had seared the unsullied spirit of a man whom nothing would bend to an act which he thought base, a man in all ways nobler than myself. God knows, I thought him wrong, and thought he led Harry wrong, but now I would have given half I had to have chosen kindlier words to say my say.
'You use hard words, and wrong ones too, Mr. Festing, saving your scholarship,' said Drake at last, proud as a Spaniard. 'I am no water-thief or pirate either. I shall tell you what a pirate is, not to speak more of water-thieves, which is a hard word that breaks no more bones than another. By the most ancient customs of the sea, sir, whereof be it your excuse that you are ignorant, a pirate is one who, without license from his prince or his prince's officers, in time of peace or truce doth spoil or rob those which have peace or truce with him.'