"He is in the next room," replied a decent-tongued chap sitting near the fire; "and he desired me to give his compliments to Lieutenant Warneford, and say he wished to see him alone."
"Very civil and considerate, upon my word! In this room, do you say?"
"Yes, sir; in that room." I pushed open a rickety door, and found myself in a dingy hole of a room, little more than about a couple of yards square, at the further side of which stood a lithe, sinewy man in a blue pea-jacket, and with a fur-cap on his head. His back was toward me; and as my entrance did not cause him to change his position, I said, "You are Captain Pickard, I am informed?"
He swung sharply round as I spoke, threw off his cap, and said, briefly and sternly, "Yes, Warneford, I am Captain Pickard."
The sudden unmasking of a loaded battery immediately in my front could not have so confounded and startled me as these words did, as they issued from the lips of the man before me. The curling black hair, the dark flashing eyes, the marble features, were those of Lieutenant Hendrick—of the gallant seaman whose vigorous arm I had seen turn the tide of battle against desperate odds on the deck of a privateer!
"Hendrick!" I at length exclaimed, for the sudden inrush of painful emotion choked my speech for a time—"can it indeed be you?"
"Ay, truly, Warneford. The Hendrick of whom Collingwood prophesied high things is fallen thus low; and worse remains behind. There is a price set upon my capture, as you know; and escape is, I take it, out of the question." I comprehended the slow, meaning tone in which the last sentence was spoken, and the keen glance that accompanied it. Hendrick, too, instantly read the decisive though unspoken reply.
"Of course it is out of the question," he went on. "I was but a fool to even seem to doubt that it was. You must do your duty, Warneford, I know; and since this fatal mishap was to occur, I am glad for many reasons that I have fallen into your hands."
"So am not I; and I wish with all my soul you had successfully threaded the passage you essayed."
"The fellow who undertook to pilot us failed in nerve at the critical moment. Had he not done so, Les Trois Frères would have been long since beyond your reach. But the past is past, and the future of dark and bitter time will be swift and brief."