“No; I repeat. All were lost but two—your father was one of these.”
“Heaven of heavens! And where is my father now?”
“That, too, you will learn anon. If you please, we will take things in the order of their occurring. Listen, now. Sit down and be calm; getting excited will do no good and only retard matters. The transport struck a sunken reef and was wrecked one stormy night. Your father and one sailor clung to a spar until daylight. By that time all the rest had disappeared—were engulfed in the ocean and perished. Captain, sailors, convicts and all were equal, at last, in the boundless sea. Before noon the next day your father and the sailor were seen and picked up by a passing vessel.”
“Were you that sailor?”
“Patience, my dear sir,” said Captain Reginald, with a slight smile: “who I was does not matter just now. The ship was a merchantman, bound to a far-distant port. They took us with them, and over a year elapsed before our sails filled for ‘Merrie England’ again. We were in the South Seas—then, as now, infested with pirates; and we never reached our island-home. For one day we were chased, overtaken, attacked and defeated by a pirate, and more than half our number found graves in the wide ocean, where many a brave heart had grown cold before, and will while the great sea rolls.”
“We?” broke in Ray at this point, fixing his eyes piercingly on the other’s face—“we? Then you were the sailor saved with my father?”
Again that fleeting, quickly-fading, inexplicable smile flickered for an instant round the lips of the outlaw, as he said:
“Hasty and impatient yet. You must learn that great Christian virtue, patience, Mr. Germaine; one cannot well get through the world without it. Whether I was the sailor in question, or not, does not matter; suffice it to say, I was on board the ship when she was mastered by the pirates. They were short of hands, and the captain very graciously offered their lives to those that remained, on condition of their taking an oath of allegiance to him, and becoming rovers and free lords of the high seas. One or two honest souls preferred the red maws of hungry sharks who went swimming round the ships, casting longing eyes up at us, asking, as plainly as looks could speak, for another mouthful of an old salt. They were gratified, too; for three of as good, brave, warm-hearted fellows as ever climbed the rigging walked the plank that hour, and found their graves in the capacious stomachs of the ravenous devils of sharks. Poor fellows! if there is such a place as heaven they went there straight; for heaven is as easily reached by water as land. I suppose it doesn’t matter whether people are conveyed to it in canvas shrouds or inside of sharks.”
“Very true,” said Ray; “and you joined the pirates to aid my father?”
“Yes, we joined them; I was reckless and so was he; we did not care a fillip whether we cruised under the black flag or the red cross of St. George. Life was not of much value to him for its own sake, but he had to live for sundry notions—revenge, I fancy, being the strongest. Then he had a child living—you, Master Raymond; and though considerable of a devil himself, he had some human feeling left, and the only white spot in his soul was his love for you, for his mother, and for Lady Maude Percy. For he loved her then, loves her still, and will while life remains for him.”