II
It was so improbable as to be accounted impossible that news of Captain Blood's capture of the Spanish flagship at San Domingo could already have reached Puerto Rico; therefore the white–and–gold splendours, and the pronouncedly Spanish lines, of the Maria Gloriosa should be his sufficient credentials at the outset. He had made free with the Marquis of Riconete's extensive wardrobe, and he came arrayed in a suit of violet taffetas, with stockings of lilac silk and a baldrick of finest Cordovan of the same colour that was stiff with silver bullion. A broad black hat with a trailing claret feather covered his black periwig and shaded his weathered, high–bred face.
Tall, straight, and vigorously spare, his head high, and authority in every line of him, he came to stand, leaning upon his tall gold–headed cane, before the Captain–General of Puerto Rico, Don Sebastian Mendes, and to explain himself in that fluent Castilian so painfully acquired.
Some Spaniards, making a literal translation of his name, spoke of him as Don Pedro Sangre, others alluded to him as El Diablo Encarnado. Humorously blending now the two, he impudently announced himself as Don Pedro Encarnado, deputy of the Admiral of the Ocean–Sea, the Marquis of Riconete, who could not come ashore in person because chained to his bed aboard by an attack of gout. From a Dutch vessel, spoken off Sainte Croix, his Excellency the Admiral had heard of an attack by scoundrelly buccaneers upon two ships of Spain from Cartagena, which had sought shelter here at San Juan. These ships he had seen in the harbour, but the Marquis desired more precise information in the matter.
Don Sebastian supplied it tempestuously. He was a big, choleric man, flabby and sallow, with little black moustachios surmounting lips as thick almost as an African's, and he possessed a number of chins, all of them blue from the razor.
His reception of the false Don Pedro had been marked, first by all the ceremony due to the deputy of a representative of the Catholic King, and then by the cordiality proper from one Castilian gentleman to another; he presented him to his dainty, timid, still youthful little wife, and kept him to dinner, which was spread in a cool white patio under the green shade of a trellis of vines, and served by liveried negro slaves at the orders of a severely formal Spanish majordomo.
At table the tempestuousness aroused in Don Sebastian by his visitor's questions was maintained. It was true enough — por Dios! — that the plate–ships had been set upon by buccaneers, the same vile hijos de puta who had lately transformed Cartagena into the likeness of Hell. There were nauseating details, which the Captain–General supplied without regard for the feelings of Doña Leocadia, who shuddered and crossed herself more than once while his horrible tale was telling.
If it shocked Captain Blood to learn that such things were being imputed to him and his followers, he forgot this in the interest aroused in him by the information that there was bullion aboard those plate–ships to the value of two hundred thousand pieces of eight, to say nothing of pepper and spices worth almost the like amount.
'What a prize would not that have been for that incarnate devil Blood, and what a mercy of the Lord it was that the ships were able not only to get away from Cartagena, but to escape his subsequent pursuit of them!'
'Captain Blood?' said the visitor. 'Is it certain, then, that this was his work?'