The twilight was gathering, when the bolts shot back, the door swung wide, and the great figure of Mr Murch appeared in the dark of the doorway.
“If you will have the kindness to come into my room, gentlemen, we will have a talk,” said he.
“Sir,” began Pomfrett, “what——”
But Murch had turned his back. Following him, we stepped into the passage, glancing left and right for a chance of escape. The passage opened at either end to the cool of the evening air; and in the doorways lounged two or three white men in great hats, holding long guns in the hollow of their arms, whom I took to be overseers. We followed Mr Murch into the room opposite our prison. He sat beside a tall scrutoire, a pair of lighted candles in silver candlesticks at his elbow.
“Now, gentlemen,” said he. “I have heard your captain’s account of you. I should be glad to hear your own.”
“By what right——” Brandon began.
“By right of purchase,” Mr Murch broke in. “You are as much mine”—he spread his broad hand upon the desk—“to keep, burn, or destroy, as this piece of furniture. Do you require documentary evidence? Here it is.”
He took a folded paper from his vest and laid it beside him. It was as we thought. We were indentured slaves for five years.
But Brandon declined to look at the document, declined to accept Mr Murch’s explanation, declined to have anything to do with him. He demanded, as a free British subject, to be liberated instantly, and so forth, with a fine indignation; to all of which Mr Murch hearkened with more patience than I should have expected him to manifest, on the whole. As he reclined in his chair, his great size and mass half in light and half in shadow, his narrow eyes, the upper lids drawn close, like the lids of a hawk’s eye, fixed upon the speaker’s simple countenance, the old buccaneer disengaged a strong expression of latent force; of sleeping fires that a touch might kindle into a highly disagreeable conflagration.
“I should tell you, Mr Pomfrett,” said he, in his sounding, deliberate tones, “that all this is nothing. Barbadoes is not England. Once for all, I am master here. There’s no admiral that sails the seas commands the obedience I command. Now, as to my request, again. Your story, gentlemen, is of no moment to me. You, Mr Pomfrett, may have misapplied your uncle’s money; you, Mr Winter, may have stolen a virtuous young woman from her parents”—here, then, were some of Mr Dawkins’s rather clumsy inventions—“it is nothing to me. It was rather for your own sakes that I made my request. I make it again.”