“Expressly.”
His lordship waited a moment for a reply. None coming from the speechless Deputy-Governor, he asked a question: “Would you still venture to describe the matter as a mistake, sir? And dare you take the risk of correcting it?”
“I... I had not dreamed....”
“I understand, sir. Let me present Captain Blood.”
Perforce Bishop must put on the best face he could command. But that it was no more than a mask for his fury and his venom was plain to all.
From that unpromising beginning matters had not improved; rather had they grown worse.
Blood's thoughts were upon this and other things as he lounged there on the day-bed. He had been a fortnight in Port Royal, his ship virtually a unit now in the Jamaica squadron. And when the news of it reached Tortuga and the buccaneers who awaited his return, the name of Captain Blood, which had stood so high among the Brethren of the Coast, would become a byword, a thing of execration, and before all was done his life might pay forfeit for what would be accounted a treacherous defection. And for what had he placed himself in this position? For the sake of a girl who avoided him so persistently and intentionally that he must assume that she still regarded him with aversion. He had scarcely been vouchsafed a glimpse of her in all this fortnight, although with that in view for his main object he had daily haunted her uncle's residence, and daily braved the unmasked hostility and baffled rancour in which Colonel Bishop held him. Nor was that the worst of it. He was allowed plainly to perceive that it was the graceful, elegant young trifler from St. James's, Lord Julian Wade, to whom her every moment was devoted. And what chance had he, a desperate adventurer with a record of outlawry, against such a rival as that, a man of parts, moreover, as he was bound to admit?
You conceive the bitterness of his soul. He beheld himself to be as the dog in the fable that had dropped the substance to snatch at a delusive shadow.
He sought comfort in a line on the open page before him:
“levius fit patientia quicquid corrigere est nefas.”