We outlived that storm, but how I scarcely know. As Kirby would have done, so did I; rating my crew like hounds, turning my point this way and that, daring them to come taste the red death upon it, braving it out like some devil who knows he is invulnerable. My lord, swinging the cutlass with which he was armed, stood beside me, knee to knee, and Diccon cursed after me, making quarterstaff play with his long pike. But it was the minister that won us through. At length they laughed, and Paradise, standing forward, swore that such a captain and such a mate were worth the lives of a thousand Spaniards. To pleasure Kirby, they would depart this once from their ancient usage and let the prisoners go, though it was passing strange,—it being Kirby’s wont to clap prisoners under hatches and fire their ship above them. At the end of which speech the Spaniard began to rave, and sprang at me like a catamount. Paradise put forth a foot and tripped him up, whereat the pirates laughed again, and held him back when he would have come at me a second time.
From the deck of the shattered galleon I watched her boats, with their heavy freight of cowering humanity, pull off toward the island. Back upon my own poop, the grappling-irons cast loose, and a swiftly widening ribbon of blue between us and the sinking ship, I looked at the pirates thronging the waist below me, and knew that the play was nearly over. How many days, weeks, hours, before the lights would go out, I could not tell; they might burn until we took or lost another ship; the next hour might see that brief tragedy consummated.
I turned, and going below met Sparrow at the foot of the poop ladder.
“I have sworn at these pirates until my hair stood on end,” he said ruefully. “God forgive me! And I have bent into circles three half-pikes in demonstration of the thing that would occur to them if they tempted me overmuch. And I have sung them all the bloody and lascivious songs that ever I knew in my unregenerate days. I have played the bravo and buffoon until they gaped for wonder. I have damned myself to all eternity, I fear, but there’ll be no mutiny this fair day. It may arrive by to-morrow, though.”
“Likely enough,” I said. “Come within. I have eaten nothing since yesterday.”
“I’ll speak to Diccon first,” he answered, and went on toward the forecastle, while I entered the state cabin. Here I found Mistress Percy kneeling beside the bench beneath the stern windows, her face buried in her outstretched arms, her dark hair shadowing her like a mantle. When I spoke to her she did not answer. With a sudden fear I stooped and touched her clasped hands. A shudder ran through her frame, and she slowly raised a colourless face.
“Are you come back?” she whispered. “I thought you would never come back. I thought they had killed you. I was only praying before I killed myself.”
I took her hands and wrung them apart to rouse her, she was so white and cold, and spoke so strangely. “God forbid that I should die yet awhile, madam!” I said. “When I can no longer serve you, then I shall not care how soon I die.”
The eyes with which she gazed upon me were still wide and unseeing. “The guns!” she cried, wresting her hands from mine and putting them to her ears. “Oh, the guns! they shake the air. And the screams and the trampling—the guns again!”
I brought her wine and made her drink it; then sat beside her, and told her gently, over and over again, that there was no longer thunder of the guns or screams or trampling. At last the long, tearless sobs ceased, and she rose from her knees, and let me lead her to the door of her cabin. There she thanked me softly, with downcast eyes and lips that yet trembled; then vanished from my sight, leaving me first to wonder at that terror and emotion in her who seldom showed the thing she felt, and finally to conclude that it was not so wonderful, after all.