"The captain of the Buenos Ayrean privateer, sir," said Tooraloo, stopping at the door and ushering him in past him—jamming himself as flat as a flounder against the door-post, as if to prevent even a fibre of his clothing from touching the other.
Lennox looked up—his eyebrows instantly contracted, his colour faded, and he became as pale as death. The pen dropped unheeded from his lips, while the large law paper that he held in his left hand, in which he had apparently been writing, trembled like an aspen leaf.—At length he ground out between his teeth—
"Hast thou found me—O mine enemy?"
"Found you," said the other, who had started, or rather staggered back, equally overcome with extreme surprise apparently, and nearly capsizing Tooraloo, whose breath he fairly knocked out of his body against the door-post with a grunt—"Found you, Saunders? why if I have, it has not been in consequence of looking for you, let me tell you that; for of all the unexpected meetings that ever befell me, so help me God—this is"—
"Blaspheme not, William Adderfang—take not His name into your mouth—you have found me, let that suffice—and am I wrong in calling you my enemy—me!—
"Yes, Saunders—you are wrong—for with little of your profession, and none of your romance and nonsense, my boy, I will prove you are wrong at a fitting opportunity—so there's my hand in the mean time, man—there's my hand."—Lennox sprang back, as if it had held a viper—"Heyday," said the other, drawing himself up fiercely—"why I thought you might have allowed bygones to be bygones at this time of day—and surely I may cry quits now, after your having scoured your knife against my ribs, at"——
Here he checked himself, and Lennox, making an effort to resume his composure, shook Adderfang's hand, but very much as one would shake a red-hot poker—and then with no very good grace asked him to sit down to breakfast, which the other instantly did with apparent cordiality; and a deuced good one he made too, chattering and doing the agreeable all the while, as if he had been an old and intimate acquaintance come on board to welcome us on our arrival. As for me Benjie—I freely confess that I could not have told whether I was eating biscuit or blancmange; nay, I verily believe you might have palmed castor oil on me for coffee, and I never would have noticed it.
"Adderfang—William Adderfang—the seducer of Jessy Miller!" said I to myself; "here's a coil—the villain who stabbed and robbed me at Havanna! the master Wilson of Montego bay—the man with the blunderbuss at Kingston.—Whew! This devil of a fellow to pounce upon us so unexpectedly, in an out of the way place like San Andreas too! and with a couple of whacking privateers, to give them still their genteel name, with a hundred and fifty neat young gentlemen at the fewest, I make no question, to back him. There's a climax of agreeables for you, if he should recognise me now! Come, this does account with a vengeance for the floating notions that crossed my mind at Mr Roseapple's—I was sure I had seen him before."
Still, notwithstanding these pleasant dreams, I gave in to circumstances, better than either of my two shipmates, I fancy; for Lennox could eat but little, and was evidently ill at ease—-as for the skipper he gobbled mechanically—he could not help that; but I noticed that he watched the stranger like a cat watching a terrier, starting at his every motion; and when he dropped his knife by accident on the floor and stooped to pick it up, he held his breath until he saw him at work at the biscuit and cold ham again; as if he had considered there was a tolerable chance of his giving him a progue with it en passant, just for the fun of the thing as it were.
Gradually, however, I got more at ease, and was noticing the extreme beauty of his short curling auburn hair, now that his cap was thrown aside, with a dash of premature grey here and there, like hoarfrost in early autumn; and the noble ivory forehead, paler by contrast with the bronzing of his face, and smooth as monumental alabaster while his fierce spirit was in calm, but crisping in a moment if his passions were roused, like the ripple on the calm sea before the first of the breeze; when he rose abruptly and led the way from the cabin.