Stephen Gore smiled, and looked with surreptitious shrewdness at the mother.
“Pauvre petite!”
“La maladie des femmes.—Jean et Jeanette!”
They laughed and glanced, each of them; out of their respective windows, not noticing the dull gleam in the girl’s dark eyes.
Meanwhile the Don John of their love prophecies had changed his nag for a fast wherry on the Thames, and had landed at Deptford stairs before my lord’s coach had come within sight of the towers of Westminster. Picking his way amid the sea-lumber of the place, he hunted out a tavern known as “The Eight Bells,” a tavern with great tipsy tables, and little windows like blinking eyes, and rough benches along the wall.
Within, a parlor full of tobacco smoke, black beams, and copper-colored faces that seemed to conjure up all the adventuresomeness of the wild life of the sea. It was a corner of the world where men about a winter fire might tell tales of treasure, of sea-fights, and all the coarse, quaint, crudely colored romance of the Spanish seas. The mere words were magical to a roving spirit. Pieces of eight, culverins, great rivers with strange names, treasure-houses full of ingots of gold, the far islands of the buccaneers. There men should tell tales of wine drunk under tropical moons, of mulatto women in bright garments, of Indian girls, of prize-money and the smell of powder, and the salt sweat of the bustling seas. The whole strong perfume of that adventurous life seemed to permeate the shadows of that low-beamed room, with Jasper of the guns turning his hawk’s eyes from man to man, and talking of the days when the captain should sail the ship that they had already seen and coveted.
Ha!—and Jasper’s face grew fierce and happy—they would sweep down the Channel with sails whiter than Dover cliffs, and all their cannon sparkling like ingots of gold! There would be pikes bristling in the arm-racks around the masts; the hissing of the grindstone as the men sharpened their cutlasses. Full sail past Tangier, and a “lookout” in the foretop for any heathen devil that dared show a nose in the open sea. Even a few piratical jests would not come amiss. Jasper had pictured it all to his mates after they had seen and coveted Old Man Hollis’s ship, The Wolf, lying at anchor in mid-stream. Just the girl to carry the captain in her lap! They would wipe out the smell of that Barbary prison, and set the brass boys bellowing like bulls of Bashan.
They tumbled up from the benches of “The Eight Bells” when the figure in the red coat showed at the doorway. Jasper, old sea-wolf, with ringed ears and a buckram skin, grinned joyfully, proud with the pride of an old Norse pirate.
There was a chair by the rough table for John Gore. He sat down there, while the men formed a ring round him, while Jasper of the guns said his say.
“We have found you a ship, captain: twenty brass cannon and wings like a sea-gull. All her tackle new as a girl’s stockings after Michaelmas.”