“He is in good keeping,” said I.
“He is in the hands of God,” said she, in a voice and manner so touched with unwonted solemnity and deep feeling that I gazed at her in amazement.
Then a wild thought came to me: could she, did she, our princess, care for this man? But no sooner had the thought arisen in my mind than I dismissed it. “What have I to do with love?” she had said on a former occasion, and she had meant it.
Her next words, however, appeared to give point to my suspicion, but when I considered them more carefully, I saw I was wrong. For what she had said was, “There are few men like Don Francisco,” but the tone in which they were spoken was not that, it seemed to me, of a woman who loves; rather was it that of one who deplores the expected loss of a dear friend. Yet sometimes, in the silent watches of the night, have I wondered—and I wonder still.
“We have heard the roar of great guns from time to time this morning,” said she, changing the subject abruptly, “and, knowing that you had no ordnance to speak of, I feared for your safety. Tell me what has happened.”
Whereupon I related all that had taken place, and how that the English war-vessel had been dashed to pieces on the rocks at the hither end of the Gate of Fears.
Much I spoke in praise of Calvagh and the rowers of The Cross of Blood, and said that it was fitting they should be given a rich reward, for, notwithstanding the terrors inspired in all seafaring men by the place, and in spite of the ordnance of the Englishman making the passage like the mouth of hell, they had stood fast every one.
“And what of yourself?” cried she, between smiles and tears. “What of yourself, my Ruari?”
And she took from the mantle upon her shoulder a brooch of gold, with mystic signs, of which I knew not the meaning, engraved upon it, and in the midst of it a sapphire, with the deep blue in it of the unfathomed abysses of the sea. This she handed to me, one of her arms about my neck, and I was uplifted with pride, albeit there was some shame mixed with it too. But the gift I compelled myself to decline.
“I may not take it,” cried I; for the brooch was one of the tokens of her chieftainship to her people, and firmly resolved was I that there, in the land of her fathers, no man should ever have the slightest cause to think there was any other chief save her, and her alone. But if I took the brooch—”No,” said I; “I may not take it.”