Black’erchief Dick pushed the empty platter from before him, leaned back in his seat, and looked round the room with approval.
It was six o’clock in the morning; and although only a faint grayish light was beginning to steal in the windows and the air was cool and slightly rum-tainted, the kitchen in the old Ship Inn presented a cheerful and lively scene of domestic bustle. The fire, though newly lighted, blazed brightly and the logs, some with the hoar-frost still glittering on them, crackled and spat merrily.
Hal, his boyish face glowing after a hasty splash at the well-nigh frozen pump, hastened to and fro from the scullery to the kitchen, bearing great trays of newly washed tankards, while Sue, a little paler than on the preceding night, but all the same retaining most of her usual good humour, her sleeves rolled high above her elbows and a sail-cloth apron tied about her waist, appeared from time to time in the open doorway between the kitchen and the back scullery, whence the pleasant smell of cooking emerged.
Gilbot was yet abed but his seat with its old hay-stuffed cushions was put in readiness for his coming, in his favourite corner by the fireplace.
One of the long tressle-tables had been pulled out into the wider part of the room clear of the high-backed seats and it was here, one at either end of the table, that Black’erchief Dick and Big French sat in tall, wooden, box-like chairs, finishing the first meal of the day.
Anny waited on them.
This morning she was more beautiful than on the evening before. At least so thought the Spaniard as he watched her trip to and fro with a wooden platter or an earthen pitcher of home-brewed ale in her hands. Her cheeks seemed to him to have more colour in them, her little bare feet, as they pattered over the stones, more elasticity and lightness of touch, and her wonderful, shadowed green eyes, more mirth and gaiety than he had noticed before. As she moved about she sang little snatches of old songs in a lulling, childish voice, tuneful and sweet.
“My father’s gone a-roving—a-roving—a-roving,
My father’s gone a-roving across the raging sea,
With a feather in his stocking cap,
A new son on his rocking lap,
My father’s gone a-roving and never thinks o’ me.”
The Spaniard’s white fingers kept time to the simple refrain almost without his knowing it; he caught himself silently repeating the words after her, and he laughed abruptly and then looked round him so fiercely that none dared ask the jest.
It was absurd, he told himself, he, Black’erchief Dick, smuggler, chief of all the Eastern coast, Captain of the Coldlight, and owner of six other good sailing-vessels in the trade, to waste his time humming tunes after a serving-wench, a pretty lass of some seventeen years, who served rum to a pack of greasy fishermen in a wayside tavern on the almost uninhabited end of a mud island, when there were women in France, in Spain—he shrugged his shoulders, and to take his thoughts off the girl he ran his mind over the events of the preceding night.