With a sudden, concerted rush, as though the flames encouraged it to advance, the sea of shining morions and corselets rose once more, surged forward, broke over the Admiral’s bulwark, undulating, clashing, roaring, as the receding line of English fell back before it inch by inch.
The Admiral’s deck was now a heaving sea of molten silver.
But the eyes of St. Magil, looking across to it from the outer shade of the Madre de Dios’s bow, suddenly grew grave and lost their triumph. The wind had changed. Fate intervened. Vytal was backed by the elements. The insidious fire, of Sir Walter’s own kindling, had recoiled. The Admiral carried no sails, the Madre de Dios many. The fire returned to feed itself. Leaving behind it a burning skeleton superstructure, from which small spars fell flaming on the combatants amid a maze of ropes that glowed like fuses over all, it glided back, a venomous snake, to the Spanish vessel, or, rather, like a hundred snakes, for the very grapple-ropes by which St. Magil had bound his enemy were golden serpents now writhing to the shrouds.
Suddenly a tongue of fire, licking the Spanish bowsprit and spritsail yards, lolled listlessly for an instant, as though satiated and fatigued, then shot up all the more greedily to the foretop.
And now a wavering sheet of flame rose and swayed like an immense golden flag, as though the fire itself had flung to the breeze a royal emblem of destruction.
But at the instant, when only the bowsprit and spritsail yard had as yet succumbed, St. Magil had hastened amidships. Here he commanded the few Spaniards who had not yet forced their way to the English vessel to cut the grapples and cast off immediately. But the intertwining fingers that he himself had stretched out to enfold the prey held tenaciously. Snarled inextricably, they lay across from ship to ship, high and low, a hopeless tangle of fetters.
When finally the sheet of flame unspread itself aloft, St. Magil desisted. His men would have rushed then to the Admiral, preferring the chance of battle to a furnace death; but he controlled with desperate power.
“Cut away the bowsprit and foretop-gallant-mast!”
The men, following him, ran to the forecastle. “The foretop-gallant-mast is too high. It burns!”