was my friend. Sir Oliver is no more than my half-brother. I would give
a deal to the man who would abstract Sir Oliver secretly from the doom
that hangs over him, and yet do the thing in such a way that Sir Oliver
should not thereby escape the punishment he deserves.”

It was strange, he thought, even as he said it, that he could bring his
lips so glibly to utter words that his heart detested.

The captain looked grim. He laid a finger upon Master Lionel’s velvet
doublet in line with that false heart of his.

“I am your man,” said he. “But the risk is great. Yet ye say that ye’ld
give a deal....”

“Yourself shall name the price,” said Lionel quickly, his eyes burning
feverishly, his cheeks white.

“Oh I can contrive it, never fear,” said the captain. “I know to a
nicety what you require. How say you now: if I was to carry him
overseas to the plantations where they lack toilers of just such thews
as his?” He lowered his voice and spoke with some slight hesitation,
fearing that he proposed perhaps more than his prospective employer
might desire.

“He might return,” was the answer that dispelled all doubts on that
score.

“Ah!” said the skipper. “What o’ the Barbary rovers, then! They lack
slaves and are ever ready to trade, though they be niggardly payers. I
never heard of none that returned once they had him safe aboard their
galleys. I ha’ done some trading with them, bartering human freights
for spices and eastern carpets and the like.”

Master Lionel breathed hard. “’Tis a horrible fate, is’t not?”

The captain stroked his beard. “Yet ’tis the only really safe bestowal,
and when all is said ’tis not so horrible as hanging, and certainly
less dishonouring to a man’s kin. Ye’ld be serving Sir Oliver and
yourself.”

“’Tis so, tis so,” cried Master Lionel almost fiercely. “And the
price?”

The seaman shifted on his short, sturdy legs, and his face grew
pensive. “A hundred pound?” he suggested tentatively.

“Done with you for a hundred pounds,” was the prompt answer—so prompt
that Captain Leigh realized he had driven a fool’s bargain which it was
incumbent upon him to amend.

“That is, a hundred pound for myself,” he corrected slowly. “Then there
be the crew to reckon for—to keep their counsel and lend a hand; ’twill
mean another hundred at the least.”

Master Lionel considered a moment. “It is more than I can lay my hands
on at short notice. But, look you, you shall have a hundred and fifty
pounds in coin and the balance in jewels. You shall not be the loser in
that, I promise you. And when you come again, and bring me word that
all is done as you now undertake there shall be the like again.”

Upon that the bargain was settled. And when Lionel came to talk of ways
and means he found that he had allied himself to a man who understood
his business thoroughly. All the assistance that the skipper asked was
that Master Lionel should lure his gentleman to some concerted spot
conveniently near the waterside. There Leigh would have a boat and his
men in readiness, and the rest might very safely be left to him.

In a flash Lionel bethought him of the proper place for this. He swung
round, and pointed across the water to Trefusis Point and the grey pile
of Godolphin Court all bathed in sunshine now.

“Yonder, at Trefusis Point in the shadow of Godolphin Court at eight
to-morrow night, when there will be no moon. I’ll see that he is there.
But on your life do not miss him.”

“Trust me,” said Master Leigh. “And the money?”

“When you have him safely aboard come to me at Penarrow,” he replied,
which showed that after all he did not trust Master Leigh any further
than he was compelled.

The captain was quite satisfied. For should his gentleman fail to
disburse he could always return Sir Oliver to shore.

On that they parted. Lionel mounted and rode away, whilst Master Leigh
made a trumpet of his hands and hallooed to the ship.

As he stood waiting for the boat that came off to fetch him, a smile
slowly overspread the adventurer’s rugged face. Had Master Lionel seen
it he might have asked himself how far it was safe to drive such
bargains with a rogue who kept faith only in so far as it was
profitable. And in this matter Master Leigh saw a way to break faith
with profit. He had no conscience, but he loved as all rogues love to
turn the tables upon a superior rogue. He would play Master Lionel most
finely, most poetically false; and he found a deal to chuckle over in
the contemplation of it.

CHAPTER VII.
TREPANNED

Master Lionel was absent most of the following day from Penarrow, upon
a pretext of making certain purchases in Truro. It would be half-past
seven when he returned; and as he entered he met Sir Oliver in the
hall.

“I have a message for you from Godolphin Court,” he announced, and saw
his brother stiffen and his face change colour. “A boy met me at the
gates and bade me tell you that Mistress Rosamund desires a word with
you forthwith.”

Sir Oliver’s heart almost stopped, then went off at a gallop. She asked
for him! She had softened perhaps from her yesterday’s relentlessness.
She would consent at last to see him!

“Be thou blessed for these good tidings!” he answered on a note of high
excitement. “I go at once.” And on the instant he departed. Such was
his eagerness, indeed, that under the hot spur of it he did not even
stay to fetch that parchment which was to be his unanswerable advocate.
The omission was momentous.

Master Lionel said no word as his brother swept out. He shrank back a
little into the shadows. He was white to the lips and felt as he would
stifle. As the door closed he moved suddenly. He sprang to follow Sir
Oliver. Conscience cried out to him that he could not do this thing.
But Fear was swift to answer that outcry. Unless he permitted what was
planned to take its course, his life might pay the penalty.

He turned, and lurched into the dining-room upon legs that trembled.

He found the table set for supper as on that other night when he had
staggered in with a wound in his side to be cared for and sheltered by
Sir Oliver. He did not approach the table; he crossed to the fire, and
sat down there holding out his hands to the blaze. He was very cold and
could not still his trembling. His very teeth chattered.

Nicholas came in to know if he would sup. He answered unsteadily that
despite the lateness of the hour he would await Sir Oliver’s return.

“Is Sir Oliver abroad?” quoth the servant in surprise.

“He went out a moment since, I know not whither,” replied Lionel. “But
since he has not supped he is not like to be long absent.”

Upon that he dismissed the servant, and sat huddled there, a prey to
mental tortures which were not to be repressed. His mind would turn
upon naught but the steadfast, unwavering affection of which Sir Oliver
ever had been prodigal towards him. In this very matter of Peter
Godolphin’s death, what sacrifices had not Sir Oliver made to shield
him? From so much love and self-sacrifice in the past he inclined to
argue now that not even in extreme peril would his brother betray him.
And then that bad streak of fear which made a villain of him reminded
him that to argue thus was to argue upon supposition, that it would be
perilous to trust such an assumption; that if, after all, Sir Oliver
should fail him in the crucial test, then was he lost indeed.

When all is said, a man’s final judgment of his fellows must be based
upon his knowledge of himself; and Lionel, knowing himself incapable of
any such sacrifice for Sir Oliver, could not believe Sir Oliver capable
of persisting in such a sacrifice as future events might impose. He
reverted to those words Sir Oliver had uttered in that very room two
nights ago, and more firmly than ever he concluded that they could have
but one meaning.

Then came doubt, and, finally, assurance of another sort, assurance
that this was not so and that he knew it; assurance that he lied to
himself, seeking to condone the thing he did. He took his head in his
hands and groaned loud. He was a villain, a black-hearted, soulless
villain! He reviled himself again. There came a moment when he rose
shuddering, resolved even in this eleventh hour to go after his brother
and save him from the doom that awaited him out yonder in the night.

But again that resolve was withered by the breath of selfish fear.
Limply he resumed his seat, and his thoughts took a fresh turn. They
considered now those matters which had engaged them on that day when
Sir Oliver had ridden to Arwenack to claim satisfaction of Sir John
Killigrew. He realized again that Oliver being removed, what he now
enjoyed by his brother’s bounty he would enjoy henceforth in his own
unquestioned right. The reflection brought him a certain consolation.
If he must suffer for his villainy, at least there would be
compensations.

The clock over the stables chimed the hour of eight. Master Lionel
shrank back in his chair at the sound. The thing would be doing even
now. In his mind he saw it all—saw his brother come running in his
eagerness to the gates of Godolphin Court, and then dark forms resolve
themselves from the surrounding darkness and fall silently upon him. He
saw him struggling a moment on the ground, then, bound hand and foot, a
gag thrust into his mouth, he beheld him in fancy borne swiftly down
the slope to the beach and so to the waiting boat.

Another half-hour sat he there. The thing was done by now, and this
assurance seemed to quiet him a little.

Then came Nicholas again to babble of some possible mischance having
overtaken his master.

“What mischance should have overtaken him?” growled Lionel, as if in
scorn of the idea.

“I pray none indeed,” replied the servant. “But Sir Oliver lacks not
for enemies nowadays, and ’tis scarce zafe for he to be abroad after
dark.”

Master Lionel dismissed the notion contemptuously. For pretence’s sake
he announced that he would wait no longer, whereupon Nicholas brought
in his supper, and left him again to go and linger about the door,
looking out into the night and listening for his master’s return. He
paid a visit to the stables, and knew that Sir Oliver had gone forth
afoot.

Meanwhile Master Lionel must make pretence of eating though actual
eating must have choked him. He smeared his platter, broke food, and
avidly drank a bumper of claret. Then he, too, feigned a growing
anxiety and went to join Nicholas. Thus they spent the weary night,
watching for the return of one who Master Lionel knew would return no
more.

At dawn they roused the servants and sent them to scour the countryside
and put the news of Sir Oliver’s disappearance abroad. Lionel himself
rode out to Arwenack to ask Sir John Killigrew bluntly if he knew aught
of this matter.

Sir John showed a startled face, but swore readily enough that he had
not so much as seen Sir Oliver for days. He was gentle with Lionel,
whom he liked, as everybody liked him. The lad was so mild and kindly
in his ways, so vastly different from his arrogant overbearing brother,
that his virtues shone the more brightly by that contrast.

“I confess it is natural you should come to me,” said Sir John. “But,
my word on it, I have no knowledge of him. It is not my way to beset my
enemies in the dark.”

“Indeed, indeed, Sir John, I had not supposed it in my heart,” replied
the afflicted Lionel. “Forgive me that I should have come to ask a
question so unworthy. Set it down to my distracted state. I have not
been the same man these months, I think, since that happening in
Godolphin Park. The thing has preyed upon my mind. It is a fearsome
burden to know your own brother—though I thank God he is no more than
my half-brother—guilty of so foul a deed.”

“How?” cried Killigrew, amazed. “You say that? You believed it
yourself?”

Master Lionel looked confused, a look which Sir John entirely
misunderstood and interpreted entirely in the young man’s favour. And
it was thus and in that moment that was sown the generous seed of the
friendship that was to spring up between these two men, its roots
fertilized by Sir John’s pity that one so gentle-natured, so honest,
and so upright should be cursed with so villainous a brother.

“I see, I see,” he said. And he sighed. “You know that we are daily
expecting an order from the Queen to her Justices to take the action
which hitherto they have refused against your... against Sir Oliver.”
He frowned thoughtfully. “D’ye think Sir Oliver had news of this?”

At once Master Lionel saw the drift of what was in the other’s mind.

“I know it,” he replied. “Myself I bore it him. But why do you ask?”

“Does it not help us perhaps to understand and explain Sir Oliver’s
disappearance? God lack! Surely, knowing that, he were a fool to have
tarried here, for he would hang beyond all doubt did he stay for the
coming of her grace’s messenger.”

“My God!” said Lionel, staring. “You... you think he is fled, then?”

Sir John shrugged. “What else is to be thought?”

Lionel hung his head. “What else, indeed?” said he, and took his leave
like a man overwrought, as indeed he was. He had never considered that
so obvious a conclusion must follow upon his work so fully to explain
the happening and to set at rest any doubt concerning it.

He returned to Penarrow, and bluntly told Nicholas what Sir John
suspected and what he feared himself must be the true reason of Sir
Oliver’s disappearance. The servant, however, was none so easy to
convince.

“But do ee believe that he done it?” cried Nicholas. “Do ee believe it,
Master Lionel?” There was reproach amounting to horror in the servant’s
voice.

“God help me, what else can I believe now that he is fled.”

Nicholas sidled up to him with tightened lips. He set two gnarled
fingers on the young man’s arm.

“He’m not fled, Master Lionel,” he announced with grim impressiveness.
“He’m never a turntail. Sir Oliver he don’t fear neither man nor devil,
and if so be him had killed Master Godolphin, he’d never ha’ denied it.
Don’t ee believe Sir John Killigrew. Sir John ever hated he.”

But in all that countryside the servant was the only one to hold this
view. If a doubt had lingered anywhere of Sir Oliver’s guilt, that
doubt was now dispelled by this flight of his before the approach of
the expected orders from the Queen.

Later that day came Captain Leigh to Penarrow inquiring for Sir Oliver.

Nicholas brought word of his presence and his inquiry to Master Lionel,
who bade him be admitted.

The thick-set little seaman rolled in on his bowed legs, and leered at
his employer when they were alone.

“He’s snug and safe aboard,” he announced. “The thing were done as
clean as peeling an apple, and as quiet.”

“Why did you ask for him?” quoth Master Lionel.

“Why?” Jasper leered again. “My business was with him. There was some
talk between us of him going a voyage with me. I’ve heard the gossip
over at Smithick. This will fit in with it.” He laid that finger of his
to his nose. “Trust me to help a sound tale along. ’T were a clumsy
business to come here asking for you, sir. Ye’ll know now how to
account for my visit.”

Lionel paid him the price agreed and dismissed him upon receiving the
assurance that the Swallow would put to sea upon the next tide.

When it became known that Sir Oliver had been in treaty with Master
Leigh for a passage overseas, and that it was but on that account that
Master Leigh had tarried in that haven, even Nicholas began to doubt.

Gradually Lionel recovered his tranquillity as the days flowed on. What
was done was done, and, in any case, being now beyond recall, there was
no profit in repining. He never knew how fortune aided him, as fortune
will sometimes aid a villain. The royal pour-suivants arrived some six
days later, and Master Baine was the recipient of a curt summons to
render himself to London, there to account for his breach of trust in
having refused to perform his sworn duty. Had Sir Andrew Flack but
survived the chill that had carried him off a month ago, Master Justice
Baine would have made short work of the accusation lodged against him.
As it was, when he urged the positive knowledge he possessed, and told
them how he had made the examination to which Sir Oliver had
voluntarily submitted, his single word carried no slightest conviction.
Not for a moment was it supposed that this was aught but the subterfuge
of one who had been lax in his duty and who sought to save himself from
the consequences of that laxity. And the fact that he cited as his
fellow-witness a gentleman now deceased but served to confirm his
judges in this opinion. He was deposed from his office and subjected to
a heavy fine, and there the matter ended, for the hue-and-cry that was
afoot entirely failed to discover any trace of the missing Sir Oliver.

For Master Lionel a new existence set in from that day. Looked upon as
one in danger of suffering for his brother’s sins, the countryside
determined to help him as far as possible to bear his burden. Great
stress was laid upon the fact that after all he was no more than Sir
Oliver’s half-brother; some there were who would have carried their
kindness to the lengths of suggesting that perhaps he was not even
that, and that it was but natural that Ralph Tressilian’s second wife
should have repaid her husband in kind for his outrageous infidelities.
This movement of sympathy was led by Sir John Killigrew, and it spread
in so rapid and marked a manner that very soon Master Lionel was almost
persuaded that it was no more than he deserved, and he began to sun
himself in the favour of a countryside that hitherto had shown little
but hostility for men of the Tressilian blood.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE SPANIARD

The Swallow, having passed through a gale in the Bay of Biscay—a gale
which she weathered like the surprisingly steady old tub she
was—rounded Cape Finisterre and so emerged from tempest into peace,
from leaden skies and mountainous seas into a sunny azure calm. It was
like a sudden transition from winter into spring, and she ran along
now, close hauled to the soft easterly breeze, with a gentle list to
port.

It had never been Master Leigh’s intent to have got so far as this
without coming to an understanding with his prisoner. But the wind had
been stronger than his intentions, and he had been compelled to run
before it and to head to southward until its fury should abate. Thus it
fell out—and all marvellously to Master Lionel’s advantage, as you
shall see—that the skipper was forced to wait until they stood along
the coast of Portugal—but well out to sea, for the coast of Portugal
was none too healthy just then to English seamen—before commanding Sir
Oliver to be haled into his presence.

In the cramped quarters of the cabin in the poop of the little vessel
sat her captain at a greasy table, over which a lamp was swinging
faintly to the gentle heave of the ship. He was smoking a foul pipe,
whose fumes hung heavily upon the air of that little chamber, and there
was a bottle of Nantes at his elbow.

To him, sitting thus in state, was Sir Oliver introduced—his wrists
still pinioned behind him. He was haggard and hollow-eyed, and he
carried a week’s growth of beard on his chin. Also his garments were
still in disorder from the struggle he had made when taken, and from
the fact that he had been compelled to lie in them ever since.

Since his height was such that it was impossible for him to stand
upright in that low-ceilinged cabin, a stool was thrust forward for him
by one of the ruffians of Leigh’s crew who had haled him from his
confinement beneath the hatchway.

He sat down quite listlessly, and stared vacantly at the skipper.
Master Leigh was somewhat discomposed by this odd calm when he had
looked for angry outbursts. He dismissed the two seamen who fetched Sir
Oliver, and when they had departed and closed the cabin door he
addressed his captive.

“Sir Oliver,” said he, stroking his red beard, “ye’ve been most foully
abused.”

The sunshine filtered through one of the horn windows and beat full
upon Sir Oliver’s expressionless face.

“It was not necessary, you knave, to bring me hither to tell me so
much.” he answered.

“Quite so,” said Master Leigh. “But I have something more to add. Ye’ll
be thinking that I ha’ done you a disservice. There ye wrong me.
Through me you are brought to know true friends from secret enemies;
henceforward ye’ll know which to trust and which to mistrust.”

Sir Oliver seemed to rouse himself a little from his passivity,
stimulated despite himself by the impudence of this rogue. He stretched
a leg and smiled sourly.

“You’ll end by telling me that I am in your debt,” said he.

“You’ll end by saying so yourself,” the captain assured him. “D’ye know
what I was bidden do with you?”

“Faith, I neither know nor care,” was the surprising answer, wearily
delivered. “If it is for my entertainment that you propose to tell me,
I beg you’ll spare yourself the trouble.”

It was not an answer that helped the captain. He pulled at his pipe a
moment.

“I was bidden,” said he presently, “to carry you to Barbary and sell
you there into the service of the Moors. That I might serve you, I made
believe to accept this task.”

“God’s death!” swore Sir Oliver. “You carry make-believe to an odd
length.”

“The weather has been against me. It were no intention o’ mine to ha’
come so far south with you. But we’ve been driven by the gale. That is
overpast, and so that ye’ll promise to bear no plaint against me, and
to make good some of the loss I’ll make by going out of my course, and
missing a cargo that I wot of, I’ll put about and fetch you home again
within a week.”

Sir Oliver looked at him and smiled grimly. “Now what a rogue are you
that can keep faith with none!” he cried. “First you take money to
carry me off; and then you bid me pay you to carry me back again.”

“Ye wrong me, sir, I vow ye do! I can keep faith when honest men employ
me, and ye should know it, Sir Oliver. But who keeps faith with rogues
is a fool—and that I am not, as ye should also know. I ha’ done this
thing that a rogue might be revealed to you and thwarted, as well as
that I might make some little profit out of this ship o’ mine. I am
frank with ye, Sir Oliver. I ha’ had some two hundred pounds in money
and trinkets from your brother. Give me the like and....”

But now of a sudden Sir Oliver’s listlessness was all dispelled. It
fell from him like a cloak, and he sat forward, wide awake and with
some show of anger even.

“How do you say?” he cried, on a sharp, high note.

The captain stared at him, his pipe neglected. “I say that if so be as
ye’ll pay me the same sum which your brother paid me to carry you
off....”

“My brother?” roared the knight. “Do you say my brother?”

“I said your brother.”

“Master Lionel?” the other demanded still.

“What other brothers have you?” quoth Master Leigh.

There fell a pause and Sir Oliver looked straight before him, his head
sunken a little between his shoulders. “Let me understand,” he said at
length. “Do you say that my brother Lionel paid you money to carry me
off—in short, that my presence aboard this foul hulk of yours is due to
him?”

“Whom else had ye suspected? Or did ye think that I did it for my own
personal diversion?”

“Answer me,” bellowed Sir Oliver, writhing in his bonds.

“I ha’ answered you more than once already. Still, I tell you once
again, since ye are slow to understand it, that I was paid a matter of
two hundred pound by your brother, Master Lionel Tressilian, to carry
you off to Barbary and there sell you for a slave. Is that plain to
you?”

“As plain as it is false. You lie, you dog!”

“Softly, softly!” quoth Master Leigh, good-humouredly.

“I say you lie!”

Master Leigh considered him a moment. “Sets the wind so!” said he at
length, and without another word he rose and went to a sea-chest ranged
against the wooden wall of the cabin. He opened it and took thence a
leather bag. From this he produced a handful of jewels. He thrust them
under Sir Oliver’s nose. “Haply,” said he, “ye’ll be acquainted with
some of them. They was given me to make up the sum since your brother
had not the whole two hundred pound in coin. Take a look at them.”

Sir Oliver recognized a ring and a long pear-shaped pearl earring that
had been his brother’s; he recognized a medallion that he himself had
given Lionel two years ago; and so, one by one, he recognized every
trinket placed before him.

His head drooped to his breast, and he sat thus awhile like a man
stunned. “My God!” he groaned miserably, at last. “Who, then, is left
to me! Lionel too! Lionel!” A sob shook the great frame. Two tears
slowly trickled down that haggard face and were lost in the stubble of
beard upon his chin. “I am accursed!” he said.

Never without such evidence could he have believed this thing. From the
moment that he was beset outside the gates of Godolphin Court he had
conceived it to be the work of Rosamund, and his listlessness was
begotten of the thought that she could have suffered conviction of his
guilt and her hatred of him to urge her to such lengths as these. Never
for an instant had he doubted the message delivered him by Lionel that
it was Mistress Rosamund who summoned him. And just as he believed
himself to be going to Godolphin Court in answer to her summons, so did
he conclude that the happening there was the real matter to which she
had bidden him, a thing done by her contriving, her answer to his
attempt on the previous day to gain speech with her, her manner of
ensuring that such an impertinence should never be repeated.

This conviction had been gall and wormwood to him; it had drugged his
very senses, reducing him to a listless indifference to any fate that
might be reserved him. Yet it had not been so bitter a draught as this
present revelation. After all, in her case there were some grounds for
the hatred that had come to take the place of her erstwhile love. But
in Lionel’s what grounds were possible? What motives could exist for
such an action as this, other than a monstrous, a loathly egoism which
desired perhaps to ensure that the blame for the death of Peter
Godolphin should not be shifted from the shoulders that were unjustly
bearing it, and the accursed desire to profit by the removal of the man
who had been brother, father and all else to him? He shuddered in sheer
horror. It was incredible, and yet beyond a doubt it was true. For all
the love which he had showered upon Lionel, for all the sacrifices of
self which he had made to shield him, this was Lionel’s return. Were
all the world against him he still must have believed Lionel true to
him, and in that belief must have been enheartened a little. And
now...His sense of loneliness, of utter destitution overwhelmed him.
Then slowly of his sorrow resentment was begotten, and being begotten
it grew rapidly until it filled his mind and whelmed in its turn all
else. He threw back his great head, and his bloodshot, gleaming eyes
fastened upon Captain Leigh, who seated now upon the sea-chest was
quietly observing him and waiting patiently until he should recover the
wits which this revelation had scattered.

“Master Leigh,” said he, “what is your price to carry me home again to
England?”

“Why, Sir Oliver,” said he, “I think the price I was paid to carry you
off would be a fair one. The one would wipe out t’other as it were.”

“You shall have twice the sum when you land me on Trefusis Point
again,” was the instant answer.

The captain’s little eyes blinked and his shaggy red eyebrows came
together in a frown. Here was too speedy an acquiescence. There must be
guile behind it, or he knew naught of the ways of men.

“What mischief are ye brooding?” he sneered.

“Mischief, man? To you?” Sir Oliver laughed hoarsely. “God’s light,
knave, d’ye think I consider you in this matter, or d’ye think I’ve
room in my mind for such petty resentments together with that other?”

It was the truth. So absolute was the bitter sway of his anger against
Lionel that he could give no thought to this rascally seaman’s share in
the adventure.

“Will ye give me your word for that?”

“My word? Pshaw, man! I have given it already. I swear that you shall
be paid the sum I’ve named the moment you set me ashore again in
England. Is that enough for you? Then cut me these bonds, and let us
make an end of my present condition.”

“Faith, I am glad to deal with so sensible a man! Ye take it in the
proper spirit. Ye see that what I ha’ done I ha’ but done in the way of
my calling, that I am but a tool, and that what blame there be belongs
to them which hired me to this deed.”

“Aye, ye’re but a tool—a dirty tool, whetted with gold; no more. ’Tis
admitted. Cut me these bonds, a God’s name! I’m weary o’ being trussed
like a capon.”

The captain drew his knife, crossed to Sir Oliver’s side and slashed
his bonds away without further word. Sir Oliver stood up so suddenly
that he smote his head against the low ceiling of the cabin, and so sat
down again at once. And in that moment from without and above there
came a cry which sent the skipper to the cabin door. He flung it open,
and so let out the smoke and let in the sunshine. He passed out on to
the poop-deck, and Sir Oliver—conceiving himself at liberty to do
so—followed him.

In the waist below a little knot of shaggy seamen were crowding to the
larboard bulwarks, looking out to sea; on the forecastle there was
another similar assembly, all staring intently ahead and towards the
land. They were off Cape Roca at the time, and when Captain Leigh saw
by how much they had lessened their distance from shore since last he
had conned the ship, he swore ferociously at his mate who had charge of
the wheel. Ahead of them away on their larboard bow and in line with
the mouth of the Tagus from which she had issued—and where not a doubt
but she had been lying in wait for such stray craft as this—came a
great tall-masted ship, equipped with top-gallants, running wellnigh
before the wind with every foot of canvas spread.

Close-hauled as was the Swallow and with her top-sails and mizzen
reefed she was not making more than one knot to the Spaniard’s five—for
that she was a Spaniard was beyond all doubt judging by the haven
whence she issued.

“Luff alee!” bawled the skipper, and he sprang to the wheel, thrusting
the mate aside with a blow of his elbow that almost sent him sprawling.

“’Twas yourself set the course,” the fellow protested.

“Thou lubberly fool,” roared the skipper. “I bade thee keep the same
distance from shore. If the land comes jutting out to meet us, are we
to keep straight on until we pile her up?” He spun the wheel round in
his hands, and turned her down the wind. Then he relinquished the helm
to the mate again. “Hold her thus,” he commanded, and bellowing orders
as he went, he heaved himself down the companion to see them executed.
Men sprang to the ratlines to obey him, and went swarming aloft to let
out the reefs of the topsails; others ran astern to do the like by the
mizzen and soon they had her leaping and plunging through the green
water with every sheet unfurled, racing straight out to sea.

From the poop Sir Oliver watched the Spaniard. He saw her veer a point
or so to starboard, heading straight to intercept them, and he observed
that although this manceuvre brought her fully a point nearer to the
wind than the Swallow, yet, equipped as she was with half as much
canvas again as Captain Leigh’s piratical craft, she was gaining
steadily upon them none the less.

The skipper came back to the poop, and stood there moodily watching
that other ship’s approach, cursing himself for having sailed into such
a trap, and cursing his mate more fervently still.

Sir Oliver meanwhile took stock of so much of the Swallow’s armament as
was visible and wondered what like were those on the main-deck below.
He dropped a question on that score to the captain, dispassionately, as
though he were no more than an indifferently interested spectator, and
with never a thought to his position aboard.

“Should I be racing her afore the Wind if I as properly equipped?”
growled Leigh. “Am I the man to run before a Spaniard? As it is I do no
more than lure her well away from land.”

Sir Oliver understood, and was silent thereafter. He observed a bo’sun
and his mates staggering in the waist under loads of cutlasses and
small arms which they stacked in a rack about the mainmast. Then the
gunner, a swarthy, massive fellow, stark to the waist with a faded
scarf tied turban-wise about his head, leapt up the companion to the
brass carronade on the larboard quarter, followed by a couple of his
men.

Master Leigh called up the bo’sun, bade him take the wheel, and
dispatched the mate forward to the forecastle, where another gun was
being prepared for action.

Thereafter followed a spell of racing, the Spaniard ever lessening the
distance between them, and the land dropping astern until it was no
more than a hazy line above the shimmering sea. Suddenly from the
Spaniard appeared a little cloud of white smoke, and the boom of a gun
followed, and after it came a splash a cable’s length ahead of the
Swallow’s bows.

Linstock in hand the brawny gunner on the poop stood ready to answer
them when the word should be given. From below came the gunner’s mate
to report himself ready for action on the main-deck and to receive his
orders.

Came another shot from the Spaniard, again across the bows of the
Swallow.

“’Tis a clear invitation to heave to,” said Sir Oliver.

The skipper snarled in his fiery beard. “She has a longer range than
most Spaniards,” said he. “But I’ll not waste powder yet for all that.
We’ve none to spare.”

Scarcely had he spoken when a third shot boomed. There was a
splintering crash overhead followed by a sough and a thud as the
maintopmast came hurtling to the deck and in its fall stretched a
couple of men in death. Battle was joined, it seemed. Yet Captain Leigh
did nothing in a hurry.

“Hold there!” he roared to the gunner who swung his linstock at that
moment in preparation.

She was losing way as a result of that curtailment of her mainmast, and
the Spaniard came on swiftly now. At last the skipper accounted her
near enough, and gave the word with an oath. The Swallow fired her
first and last shot in that encounter. After the deafening thunder of
it and through the cloud of suffocating smoke, Sir Oliver saw the high
forecastle of the Spaniard rent open.

Master Leigh was cursing his gunner for having aimed too high. Then he
signalled to the mate to fire the culverin of which he had charge. That
second shot was to be the signal for the whole broadside from the
main-deck below. But the Spaniard anticipated them. Even as the skipper
of the Swallow signalled the whole side of the Spaniard burst into
flame and smoke.

The Swallow staggered under the blow, recovered an instant, then listed
ominously to larboard.

“Hell!” roared Leigh. “She’s bilging!” and Sir Oliver saw the Spaniard
standing off again, as if satisfied with what she had done. The mate’s
gun was never fired, nor was the broadside from below. Indeed that
sudden list had set the muzzles pointing to the sea; within three
minutes of it they were on a level with the water. The Swallow had
received her death-blow, and she was settling down.

Satisfied that she could do no further harm, the Spaniard luffed and
hove to, awaiting the obvious result and intent upon picking up what
slaves she could to man the galleys of his Catholic Majesty on the
Mediterranean.

Thus the fate intended Sir Oliver by Lionel was to be fulfilled; and it
was to be shared by Master Leigh himself, which had not been at all in
that venal fellow’s reckoning.

PART II.
SAKR-EL-BAHR

CHAPTER I.
THE CAPTIVE

Sakr-el-Bahr, the hawk of the sea, the scourge of the Mediterranean and
the terror of Christian Spain, lay prone on the heights of Cape
Spartel.

Above him on the crest of the cliff ran the dark green line of the
orange groves of Araish—the reputed Garden of the Hesperides of the
ancients, where the golden apples grew. A mile or so to eastward were
dotted the huts and tents of a Bedouin encampment on the fertile
emerald pasture-land that spread away, as far as eye could range,
towards Ceuta. Nearer, astride of a grey rock an almost naked goatherd,
a lithe brown stripling with a cord of camel-hair about his shaven
head, intermittently made melancholy and unmelodious sounds upon a reed
pipe. From somewhere in the blue vault of heaven overhead came the
joyous trilling of a lark, from below the silken rustling of the
tideless sea.

Sakr-el-Bahr lay prone upon a cloak of woven camel-hair amid
luxuriating fern and samphire, on the very edge of the shelf of cliff
to which he had climbed. On either side of him squatted a negro from
the Sus both naked of all save white loin-cloths, their muscular bodies
glistening like ebony in the dazzling sunshine of mid-May. They wielded
crude fans fashioned from the yellowing leaves of date palms, and their
duty was to wave these gently to and fro above their lord’s head, to
give him air and to drive off the flies.

Sakr-el-Bahr was in the very prime of life, a man of a great length of
body, with a deep Herculean torso and limbs that advertised a giant
strength. His hawk-nosed face ending in a black forked beard was of a
swarthiness accentuated to exaggeration by the snowy white turban wound
about his brow. His eyes, by contrast, were singularly light. He wore
over his white shirt a long green tunic of very light silk, woven along
its edges with arabesques in gold; a pair of loose calico breeches
reached to his knees; his brown muscular calves were naked, and his
feet were shod in a pair of Moorish shoes of crimson leather, with
up-curling and very pointed toes. He had no weapons other than the
heavy-bladed knife with a jewelled hilt that was thrust into his girdle
of plaited leather.

A yard or two away on his left lay another supine figure, elbows on the
ground, and hands arched above his brow to shade his eyes, gazing out
to sea. He, too, was a tall and powerful man, and when he moved there
was a glint of armour from the chain mail in which his body was cased,
and from the steel casque about which he had swathed his green turban.
Beside him lay an enormous curved scimitar in a sheath of brown leather
that was heavy with steel ornaments. His face was handsome, and
bearded, but swarthier far than his companion’s, and the backs of his
long fine hands were almost black.

Sakr-el-Bahr paid little heed to him. Lying there he looked down the
slope, clad with stunted cork-trees and evergreen oaks; here and there
was the golden gleam of broom; yonder over a spur of whitish rock
sprawled the green and living scarlet of a cactus. Below him about the
caves of Hercules was a space of sea whose clear depths shifted with
its slow movement from the deep green of emerald to all the colours of
the opal. A little farther off behind a projecting screen of rock that
formed a little haven two enormous masted galleys, each of fifty oars,
and a smaller galliot of thirty rode gently on the slight heave of the
water, the vast yellow oars standing out almost horizontally from the
sides of each vessel like the pinions of some gigantic bird. That they
lurked there either in concealment or in ambush was very plain. Above
them circled a flock of seagulls noisy and insolent.

Sakr-el-Bahr looked out to sea across the straits towards Tarifa and
the faint distant European coastline just visible through the limpid
summer air. But his glance was not concerned with that hazy horizon; it
went no further than a fine white-sailed ship that, close-hauled, was
beating up the straits some four miles off. A gentle breeze was blowing
from the east, and with every foot of canvas spread to catch it she
stood as close to it as was possible. Nearer she came on her larboard
tack, and not a doubt but her master would be scanning the hostile
African littoral for a sight of those desperate rovers who haunted it
and who took toll of every Christian ship that ventured over-near.
Sakr-el-Bahr smiled to think how little the presence of his galleys
could be suspected, how innocent must look the sun-bathed shore of
Africa to the Christian skipper’s diligently searching spy-glass. And
there from his height, like the hawk they had dubbed him, poised in the
cobalt heavens to plumb down upon his prey, he watched the great white
ship and waited until she should come within striking distance.

A promontory to eastward made something of a lee that reached out
almost a mile from shore. From the watcher’s eyrie the line of
demarcation was sharply drawn; they could see the point at which the
white crests of the wind-whipped wavelets ceased and the water became
smoother. Did she but venture as far southward on her present tack, she
would be slow to go about again, and that should be their opportunity.
And all unconscious of the lurking peril she held steadily to her
course, until not half a mile remained between her and that
inauspicious lee.

Excitement stirred the mail-clad corsair; he kicked his heels in the
air, then swung round to the impassive and watchful Sakr-el-Bahr.

“She will come! She will come!” he cried in the Frankish jargon—the
lingua franca of the African littoral.

“Insh’ Allah!” was the laconic answer—“If God will.”

A tense silence fell between them again as the ship drew nearer so that
now with each forward heave of her they caught a glint of the white
belly under her black hull. Sakr-el-Bahr shaded his eyes, and
concentrated his vision upon the square ensign flying from, her
mainmast. He could make out not only the red and yellow quarterings,
but the devices of the castle and the lion.

“A Spanish ship, Biskaine,” he growled to his companion. “It is very
well. The praise to the One!”

“Will she venture in?” wondered the other.

“Be sure she will venture,” was the confident answer. “She suspects no
danger, and it is not often that our galleys are to be found so far
westward. Aye, there she comes in all her Spanish pride.”

Even as he spoke she reached that line of demarcation. She crossed it,
for there was still a moderate breeze on the leeward side of it, intent
no doubt upon making the utmost of that southward run.

“Now!” cried Biskaine—Biskaine-el-Borak was he called from the
lightning-like impetuousness in which he was wont to strike. He
quivered with impatience, like a leashed hound.

“Not yet,” was the calm, restraining answer. “Every inch nearer shore
she creeps the more certain is her doom. Time enough to sound the
charge when she goes about. Give me to drink, Abiad,” he said to one of
his negroes, whom in irony he had dubbed “the White.”

The slave turned aside, swept away a litter of ferns and produced an
amphora of porous red clay; he removed the palm-leaves from the mouth
of it and poured water into a cup. Sakr-el-Bahr drank slowly, his eyes
never leaving the vessel, whose every ratline was clearly defined by
now in the pellucid air. They could see men moving on her decks, and
the watchman stationed in the foremast fighting-top. She was not more
than half a mile away when suddenly came the manceuvre to go about.

Sakr-el-Bahr leapt instantly to his great height and waved a long green
scarf. From one of the galleys behind the screen of rocks a trumpet
rang out in immediate answer to that signal; it was followed by the
shrill whistles of the bo’suns, and that again by the splash and creak
of oars, as the two larger galleys swept out from their ambush. The
long armoured poops were a-swarm with turbaned corsairs, their weapons
gleaming in the sunshine; a dozen at least were astride of the
crosstree of each mainmast, all armed with bows and arrows, and the
ratlines on each side of the galleys were black with men who swarmed
there like locusts ready to envelop and smother their prey.

The suddenness of the attack flung the Spaniard into confusion. There
was a frantic stir aboard her, trumpet blasts and shootings and wild
scurryings of men hither and thither to the posts to which they were
ordered by their too reckless captain. In that confusion her manceuvre
to go about went all awry, and precious moments were lost during which
she stood floundering, with idly flapping sails. In his desperate haste
the captain headed her straight to leeward, thinking that by running
thus before the wind he stood the best chance of avoiding the trap. But
there was not wind enough in that sheltered spot to make the attempt
successful. The galleys sped straight on at an angle to the direction
in which the Spaniard was moving, their yellow dripping oars flashing
furiously, as the bo’suns plied their whips to urge every ounce of
sinew in the slaves.

Of all this Sakr-el-Bahr gathered an impression as, followed by
Biskaine and the negroes, he swiftly made his way down from that eyrie
that had served him so well. He sprang from red oak to cork-tree and
from cork-tree to red oak; he leapt from rock to rock, or lowered
himself from ledge to ledge, gripping a handful of heath or a
projecting stone, but all with the speed and nimbleness of an ape. He
dropped at last to the beach, then sped across it at a run, and went
bounding along a black reef until he stood alongside of the galliot
which had been left behind by the other Corsair vessels. She awaited
him in deep water, the length of her oars from the rock, and as he came
alongside, these oars were brought to the horizontal, and held there
firmly. He leapt down upon them, his companions following him, and
using them as a gangway, reached the bulwarks. He threw a leg over the
side, and alighted on a decked space between two oars and the two rows
of six slaves that were manning each of them.

Biskaine followed him and the negroes came last. They were still
astride of the bulwarks when Sakr-el-Bahr gave the word. Up the middle
gangway ran a bo’sun and two of his mates cracking their long whips of
bullock-hide. Down went the oars, there was a heave, and they shot out
in the wake of the other two to join the fight.

Sakr-el-Bahr, scimitar in hand, stood on the prow, a little in advance
of the mob of eager babbling corsairs who surrounded him, quivering in
their impatience to be let loose upon the Christian foe. Above, along
the yardarm and up the ratlines swarmed his bowmen. From the mast-head
floated out his standard, of crimson charged with a green crescent.

The naked Christian slaves groaned, strained and sweated under the
Moslem lash that drove them to the destruction of their Christian
brethren.

Ahead the battle was already joined. The Spaniard had fired one single
hasty shot which had gone wide, and now one of the corsair’s
grappling-irons had seized her on the larboard quarter, a withering
hail of arrows was pouring down upon her decks from the Muslim
crosstrees; up her sides crowded the eager Moors, ever most eager when
it was a question of tackling the Spanish dogs who had driven them from
their Andalusian Caliphate. Under her quarter sped the other galley to
take her on the starboard side, and even as she went her archers and
stingers hurled death aboard the galleon.

It was a short, sharp fight. The Spaniards in confusion from the
beginning, having been taken utterly by surprise, had never been able
to order themselves in a proper manner to receive the onslaught. Still,
what could be done they did. They made a gallant stand against this
pitiless assailant. But the corsairs charged home as gallantly, utterly
reckless of life, eager to slay in the name of Allah and His Prophet
and scarcely less eager to die if it should please the All-pitiful that
their destinies should be here fulfilled. Up they went, and back fell
the Castilians, outnumbered by at least ten to one.

When Sakr-el-Bahr’s galliot came alongside, that brief encounter was at
an end, and one of his corsairs was aloft, hacking from the mainmast
the standard of Spain and the wooden crucifix that was nailed below it.
A moment later and to a thundering roar of “Al-hamdolliah!” the green
crescent floated out upon the breeze.

Sakr-el-Bahr thrust his way through the press in the galleon’s waist;
his corsairs fell back before him, making way, and as he advanced they
roared his name deliriously and waved their scimitars to acclaim him
this hawk of the sea, as he was named, this most valiant of all the
servants of Islam. True he had taken no actual part in the engagement.
It had been too brief and he had arrived too late for that. But his had
been the daring to conceive an ambush at so remote a western point, and
his the brain that had guided them to this swift sweet victory in the
name of Allah the One.

The decks were slippery with blood, and strewn with wounded and dying
men, whom already the Muslimeen were heaving overboard—dead and wounded
alike when they were Christians, for to what end should they be
troubled with maimed slaves?

About the mainmast were huddled the surviving Spaniards, weaponless and
broken in courage, a herd of timid, bewildered sheep.

Sakr-el-Bahr stood forward, his light eyes considering them grimly.
They must number close upon a hundred, adventurers in the main who had
set out from Cadiz in high hope of finding fortune in the Indies. Their
voyage had been a very brief one; their fate they knew—to toil at the
oars of the Muslim galleys, or at best, to be taken to Algiers or Tunis
and sold there into the slavery of some wealthy Moor.

Sakr-el-Bahr’s glance scanned them appraisingly, and rested finally on
the captain, who stood slightly in advance, his face livid with rage
and grief. He was richly dressed in the Castilian black, and his velvet
thimble-shaped hat was heavily plumed and decked by a gold cross.

Sakr-el-Bahr salaamed ceremoniously to him. “Fortuna de guerra, senor
capitan,” said he in fluent Spanish. “What is your name?”

“I am Don Paulo de Guzman,” the man answered, drawing himself erect,
and speaking with conscious pride in himself and manifest contempt of
his interlocutor.

“So! A gentleman of family! And well-nourished and sturdy, I should
judge. In the sôk at Algiers you might fetch two hundred philips. You
shall ransom yourself for five hundred.”

“Por las Entranas de Dios!” swore Don Paulo who, like all pious Spanish
Catholics, favoured the oath anatomical. What else he would have added
in his fury is not known, for Sakr-el-Bahr waved him contemptuously
away.

“For your profanity and want of courtesy we will make the ransom a
thousand philips, then,” said he. And to his followers—“Away with him!
Let him have courteous entertainment against the coming of his ransom.”

He was borne away cursing.

Of the others Sakr-el-Bahr made short work. He offered the privilege of
ransoming himself to any who might claim it, and the privilege was
claimed by three. The rest he consigned to the care of Biskaine, who
acted as his Kayia, or lieutenant. But before doing so he bade the
ship’s bo’sun stand forward, and demanded to know what slaves there
might be on board. There were, he learnt, but a dozen, employed upon
menial duties on the ship—three Jews, seven Muslimeen and two
heretics—and they had been driven under the hatches when the peril
threatened.

By Sakr-el-Bahr’s orders these were dragged forth from the blackness
into which they had been flung. The Muslimeen upon discovering that
they had fallen into the hands of their own people and that their
slavery was at an end, broke into cries of delight, and fervent praise
of Allah than whom they swore there was no other God. The three Jews,
lithe, stalwart young men in black tunics that fell to their knees and
black skull-caps upon their curly black locks, smiled ingratiatingly,
hoping for the best since they were fallen into the hands of people who
were nearer akin to them than Christians and allied to them, at least,
by the bond of common enmity to Spain and common suffering at the hands
of Spaniards. The two heretics stood in stolid apathy, realizing that
with them it was but a case of passing from Charybdis to Scylla, and
that they had as little to hope for from heathen as from Christian. One
of these was a sturdy bowlegged fellow, whose garments were little
better than rags; his weather-beaten face was of the colour of mahogany
and his eyes of a dark blue under tufted eyebrows that once had been
red—like his hair and beard—but were now thickly intermingled with
grey. He was spotted like a leopard on the hands by enormous dark brown
freckles.

Of the entire dozen he was the only one that drew the attention of
Sakr-el-Bahr. He stood despondently before the corsair, with bowed head
and his eyes upon the deck, a weary, dejected, spiritless slave who
would as soon die as live. Thus some few moments during which the
stalwart Muslim stood regarding him; then as if drawn by that
persistent scrutiny he raised his dull, weary eyes. At once they
quickened, the dulness passed out of them; they were bright and keen as
of old. He thrust his head forward, staring in his turn; then, in a
bewildered way he looked about him at the ocean of swarthy faces under
turbans of all colours, and back again at Sakr-el-Bahr.

“God’s light!” he said at last, in English, to vent his infinite
amazement. Then reverting to the cynical manner that he had ever
affected, and effacing all surprise—

“Good day to you, Sir Oliver,” said he. “I suppose ye’ll give yourself
the pleasure of hanging me.”

“Allah is great!” said Sakr-el-Bahr impassively.

CHAPTER II.
THE RENEGADE

How it came to happen that Sakr-el-Bahr, the Hawk of the Sea, the
Muslim rover, the scourge of the Mediterranean, the terror of
Christians, and the beloved of Asad-ed-Din, Basha of Algiers, would be
one and the same as Sir Oliver Tressilian, the Cornish gentleman of
Penarrow, is at long length set forth in the chronicles of Lord Henry
Goade. His lordship conveys to us some notion of how utterly
overwhelming he found that fact by the tedious minuteness with which he
follows step by step this extraordinary metamorphosis. He devotes to it
two entire volumes of those eighteen which he has left us. The whole,
however, may with advantage be summarized into one short chapter.

Sir Oliver was one of a score of men who were rescued from the sea by
the crew of the Spanish vessel that had sunk the Swallow; another was
Jasper Leigh, the skipper. All of them were carried to Lisbon, and
there handed over to the Court of the Holy Office. Since they were
heretics all—or nearly all—it was fit and proper that the Brethren of
St. Dominic should undertake their conversion in the first place. Sir
Oliver came of a family that never had been famed for rigidity in
religious matters, and he was certainly not going to burn alive if the
adoption of other men’s opinions upon an extremely hypothetical future
state would suffice to save him from the stake. He accepted Catholic
baptism with an almost contemptuous indifference. As for Jasper Leigh,
it will be conceived that the elasticity of the skipper’s conscience
was no less than Sir Oliver’s, and he was certainly not the man to be
roasted for a trifle of faith.

No doubt there would be great rejoicings in the Holy House over the
rescue of these two unfortunate souls from the certain perdition that
had awaited them. It followed that as converts to the Faith they were
warmly cherished, and tears of thanksgiving were profusely shed over
them by the Hounds of God. So much for their heresy. They were
completely purged of it, having done penance in proper form at an Auto
held on the Rocio at Lisbon, candle in hand and sanbenito on their
shoulders. The Church dismissed them with her blessing and an
injunction to persevere in the ways of salvation to which with such
meek kindness she had inducted them.

Now this dismissal amounted to a rejection. They were, as a
consequence, thrown back upon the secular authorities, and the secular
authorities had yet to punish them for their offence upon the seas. No
offence could be proved, it is true. But the courts were satisfied that
this lack of offence was but the natural result of a lack of
opportunity. Conversely, they reasoned, it was not to be doubted that
with the opportunity the offence would have been forthcoming. Their
assurance of this was based upon the fact that when the Spaniard fired
across the bows of the Swallow as an invitation to heave to, she had
kept upon her course. Thus, with unanswerable Castilian logic was the
evil conscience of her skipper proven. Captain Leigh protested on the
other hand that his action had been dictated by his lack of faith in
Spaniards and his firm belief that all Spaniards were pirates to be
avoided by every honest seaman who was conscious of inferior strength
of armaments. It was a plea that won him no favour with his
narrow-minded judges.

Sir Oliver fervently urged that he was no member of the crew of the
Swallow, that he was a gentleman who found himself aboard her very much
against his will, being the victim of a villainous piece of trepanning
executed by her venal captain. The court heard his plea with respect,
and asked to know his name and rank. He was so very indiscreet as to
answer truthfully. The result was extremely educative to Sir Oliver; it
showed him how systematically conducted was the keeping of the Spanish
archives. The court produced documents enabling his judges to recite to
him most of that portion of his life that had been spent upon the seas,
and many an awkward little circumstance which had slipped his memory
long since, which he now recalled, and which certainly was not
calculated to make his sentence lighter.

Had he not been in the Barbados in such a year, and had he not there
captured the galleon Maria de las Dolores? What was that but an act of
villainous piracy? Had he not scuttled a Spanish carack four years ago
in the bay of Funchal? Had he not been with that pirate Hawkins in the
affair at San Juan de Ulloa? And so on. Questions poured upon him and
engulfed him.

He almost regretted that he had given himself the trouble to accept
conversion and all that it entailed at the hands of the Brethren of St.
Dominic. It began to appear to him that he had but wasted time and
escaped the clerical fire to be dangled on a secular rope as an
offering to the vengeful gods of outraged Spain.

So much, however, was not done. The galleys in the Mediterranean were
in urgent need of men at the time, and to this circumstance Sir Oliver,
Captain Leigh, and some others of the luckless crew of the Swallow owed
their lives, though it is to be doubted whether any of them found the
matter one for congratulation. Chained each man to a fellow, ankle to
ankle, with but a short length of links between, they formed part of a
considerable herd of unfortunates, who were driven across Portugal into
Spain and then southward to Cadiz. The last that Sir Oliver saw of
Captain Leigh was on the morning on which he set out from the reeking
Lisbon gaol. Thereafter throughout that weary march each knew the other
to be somewhere in that wretched regiment of galley-slaves; but they
never came face to face again.

In Cadiz Sir Oliver spent a month in a vast enclosed space that was
open to the sky, but nevertheless of an indescribable foulness, a place
of filth, disease, and suffering beyond human conception, the details
of which the curious may seek for himself in my Lord Henry’s
chronicles. They are too revolting by far to be retailed here.

At the end of that month he was one of those picked out by an officer
who was manning a galley that was to convey the Infanta to Naples. He
owed this to his vigorous constitution which had successfully withstood
the infections of that mephitic place of torments, and to the fine
thews which the officer pummelled and felt as though he were acquiring
a beast of burden—which, indeed, is precisely what he was doing.

The galley to which our gentleman was dispatched was a vessel of fifty
oars, each manned by seven men. They were seated upon a sort of
staircase that followed the slope of the oar, running from the gangway
in the vessel’s middle down to the shallow bulwarks.

The place allotted to Sir Oliver was that next the gangway. Here, stark
naked as when he was born, he was chained to the bench, and in those
chains, let us say at once, he remained, without a single moment’s
intermission, for six whole months.

Between himself and the hard timbers of his seat there was naught but a
flimsy and dirty sheepskin. From end to end the bench was not more than
ten feet in length, whilst the distance separating it from the next one
was a bare four feet. In that cramped space of ten feet by four, Sir
Oliver and his six oar-mates had their miserable existence, waking and
sleeping—for they slept in their chains at the oar without sufficient
room in which to lie at stretch.

Anon Sir Oliver became hardened and inured to that unspeakable
existence, that living death of the galley-slave. But that first long
voyage to Naples was ever to remain the most terrible experience of his
life. For spells of six or eight endless hours at a time, and on one
occasion for no less than ten hours, did he pull at his oar without a
single moment’s pause. With one foot on the stretcher, the other on the
bench in front of him, grasping his part of that appallingly heavy
fifteen-foot oar, he would bend his back to thrust forward—and upwards
so to clear the shoulders of the groaning, sweating slaves in front of
him—then he would lift the end so as to bring the blade down to the
water, and having gripped he would rise from his seat to throw his full
weight into the pull, and so fall back with clank of chain upon the
groaning bench to swing forward once more, and so on until his senses
reeled, his sight became blurred, his mouth parched and his whole body
a living, straining ache. Then would come the sharp fierce cut of the
boatswain’s whip to revive energies that flagged however little, and
sometimes to leave a bleeding stripe upon his naked back.

Thus day in day out, now broiled and blistered by the pitiless southern
sun, now chilled by the night dews whilst he took his cramped and
unrefreshing rest, indescribably filthy and dishevelled, his hair and
beard matted with endless sweat, unwashed save by the rains which in
that season were all too rare, choked almost by the stench of his
miserable comrades and infested by filthy crawling things begotten of
decaying sheepskins and Heaven alone knows what other foulnesses of
that floating hell. He was sparingly fed upon weevilled biscuit and
vile messes of tallowy rice, and to drink he was given luke-warm water
that was often stale, saving that sometimes when the spell of rowing
was more than usually protracted the boatswains would thrust lumps of
bread sodden in wine into the mouths of the toiling slaves to sustain
them.

The scurvy broke out on that voyage, and there were other diseases
among the rowers, to say nothing of the festering sores begotten of the
friction of the bench which were common to all, and which each must
endure as best he could. With the slave whose disease conquered him or
who, reaching the limit of his endurance, permitted himself to swoon,
the boat-swains had a short way. The diseased were flung overboard; the
swooning were dragged out upon the gangway or bridge and flogged there
to revive them; if they did not revive they were flogged on until they
were a horrid bleeding pulp, which was then heaved into the sea.

Once or twice when they stood to windward the smell of the slaves being
wafted abaft and reaching the fine gilded poop where the Infanta and
her attendants travelled, the helmsmen were ordered to put about, and
for long weary hours the slaves would hold the galley in position,
backing her up gently against the wind so as not to lose way.

The number that died in the first week of that voyage amounted to close
upon a quarter of the total. But there were reserves in the prow, and
these were drawn upon to fill the empty places. None but the fittest
could survive this terrible ordeal.

Of these was Sir Oliver, and of these too was his immediate neighbour
at the oar, a stalwart, powerful, impassive, uncomplaining young Moor,
who accepted his fate with a stoicism that aroused Sir Oliver’s
admiration. For days they exchanged no single word together, their
religions marking them out, they thought, for enemies despite the fact
that they were fellows in misfortune. But one evening when an aged Jew
who had collapsed in merciful unconsciousness was dragged out and
flogged in the usual manner, Sir Oliver, chancing to behold the scarlet
prelate who accompanied the Infanta looking on from the poop-rail with
hard unmerciful eyes, was filled with such a passion at all this
inhumanity and at the cold pitilessness of that professed servant of
the Gentle and Pitiful Saviour, that aloud he cursed all Christians in
general and that scarlet Prince of the Church in particular.

He turned to the Moor beside him, and addressing him in Spanish—

“Hell,” he said, “was surely made for Christians, which may be why they
seek to make earth like it.”

Fortunately for him the creak and dip of the oars, the clank of chains,
and the lashes beating sharply upon the wretched Jew were sufficient to
muffle his voice. But the Moor heard him, and his dark eyes gleamed.

“There is a furnace seven times heated awaiting them, O my brother,” he
replied, with a confidence which seemed to be the source of his present
stoicism. “But art thou, then, not a Christian?”

He spoke in that queer language of the North African seaboard, that
lingua franca, which sounded like some French dialect interspersed with
Arabic words. But Sir Oliver made out his meaning almost by intuition.
He answered him in Spanish again, since although the Moor did not
appear to speak it yet it was plain he understood it.

“I renounce from this hour,” he answered in his passion. “I will
acknowledge no religion in whose name such things are done. Look me at
that scarlet fruit of hell up yonder. See how daintily he sniffs at his
pomander lest his saintly nostrils be offended by the exhalations of
our misery. Yet are we God’s creatures made in God’s image like
himself. What does he know of God? Religion he knows as he knows good
wine, rich food, and soft women. He preaches self-denial as the way to
heaven, and by his own tenets is he damned.” He growled an obscene oath
as he heaved the great oar forward. “A Christian I?” he cried, and
laughed for the first time since he had been chained to that bench of
agony. “I am done with Christians and Christianity!”

“Verily we are God’s, and to Him shall we return,” said the Moor.

That was the beginning of a friendship between Sir Oliver and this man,
whose name was Yusuf-ben-Moktar. The Muslim conceived that in Sir
Oliver he saw one upon whom the grace of Allah had descended, one who
was ripe to receive the Prophet’s message. Yusuf was devout, and he
applied himself to the conversion of his fellow-slave. Sir Oliver
listened to him, however, with indifference. Having discarded one creed
he would need a deal of satisfying on the score of another before he
adopted it, and it seemed to him that all the glorious things urged by
Yusuf in praise of Islam he had heard before in praise of Christianity.
But he kept his counsel on that score, and meanwhile his intercourse
with the Muslim had the effect of teaching him the lingua franca, so
that at the end of six months he found himself speaking it like a
Mauretanian with all the Muslim’s imagery and with more than the
ordinary seasoning of Arabic.

It was towards the end of that six months that the event took place
which was to restore Sir Oliver to liberty. In the meanwhile those
limbs of his which had ever been vigorous beyond the common wont had
acquired an elephantine strength. It was ever thus at the oar. Either
you died under the strain, or your thews and sinews grew to be equal to
their relentless task. Sir Oliver in those six months was become a man
of steel and iron, impervious to fatigue, superhuman almost in his
endurance.

They were returning home from a trip to Genoa when one evening as they
were standing off Minorca in the Balearic Isles they were surprised by
a fleet of four Muslim galleys which came skimming round a promontory
to surround and engage them.

Aboard the Spanish vessel there broke a terrible cry of
“Asad-ed-Din”—the name of the most redoubtable Muslim corsair since the
Italian renegade Ochiali—the Ali Pasha who had been killed at Lepanto.
Trumpets blared and drums beat on the poop, and the Spaniards in morion
and corselet, armed with calivers and pikes, stood to defend their
lives and liberty. The gunners sprang to the culverins. But fire had to
be kindled and linstocks ignited, and in the confusion much time was
lost—so much that not a single cannon shot was fired before the
grappling irons of the first galley clanked upon and gripped the
Spaniard’s bulwarks. The shock of the impact was terrific. The armoured
prow of the Muslim galley—Asad-ed-Din’s own—smote the Spaniard a
slanting blow amidships that smashed fifteen of the oars as if they had
been so many withered twigs.

There was a shriek from the slaves, followed by such piteous groans as
the damned in hell may emit. Fully two score of them had been struck by
the shafts of their oars as these were hurled back against them. Some
had been killed outright, others lay limp and crushed, some with broken
backs, others with shattered limbs and ribs.

Sir Oliver would assuredly have been of these but for the warning,
advice, and example of Yusuf, who was well versed in galley-fighting
and who foresaw clearly what must happen. He thrust the oar upward and
forward as far as it would go, compelling the others at his bench to
accompany his movement. Then he slipped down upon his knees, released
his hold of the timber, and crouched down until his shoulders were on a
level with the bench. He had shouted to Sir Oliver to follow his
example, and Sir Oliver without even knowing what the manoeuvre should
portend, but gathering its importance from the other’s urgency of tone,
promptly obeyed. The oar was struck an instant later and ere it snapped
off it was flung back, braining one of the slaves at the bench and
mortally injuring the others, but passing clean over the heads of Sir
Oliver and Yusuf. A moment later the bodies of the oarsmen of the bench
immediately in front were flung back atop of them with yells and
curses.

When Sir Oliver staggered to his feet he found the battle joined. The
Spaniards had fired a volley from their calivers and a dense cloud of
smoke hung above the bulwarks; through this surged now the corsairs,
led by a tall, lean, elderly man with a flowing white beard and a
swarthy eagle face. A crescent of emeralds flashed from his snowy
turban; above it rose the peak of a steel cap, and his body was cased
in chain mail. He swung a great scimitar, before which Spaniards went
down like wheat to the reaper’s sickle. He fought like ten men, and to
support him poured a never-ending stream of Muslimeen to the cry of
“Din! Din! Allah, Y’Allah!” Back and yet back went the Spaniards before
that irresistible onslaught.

Sir Oliver found Yusuf struggling in vain to rid himself of his chain,
and went to his assistance. He stooped, seized it in both hands, set
his feet against the bench, exerted all his strength, and tore the
staple from the wood. Yusuf was free, save, of course, that a length of
heavy chain was dangling from his steel anklet. In his turn he did the
like service by Sir Oliver, though not quite as speedily, for strong
man though he was, either his strength was not equal to the
Cornishman’s or else the latter’s staple had been driven into sounder
timber. In the end, however, it yielded, and Sir Oliver too was free.
Then he set the foot that was hampered by the chain upon the bench, and
with the staple that still hung from the end of it he prised open the
link that attached it to his anklet.

That done he took his revenge. Crying “Din!” as loudly as any of the
Muslimeen boarders, he flung himself upon the rear of the Spaniards
brandishing his chain. In his hands it became a terrific weapon. He
used it as a scourge, lashing it to right and left of him, splitting
here a head and crushing there a face, until he had hacked a way clean
through the Spanish press, which bewildered by this sudden rear attack
made but little attempt to retaliate upon the escaped galley-slave.
After him, whirling the remaining ten feet of the broken oar, came
Yusuf.

Sir Oliver confessed afterwards to knowing very little of what happened
in those moments. He came to a full possession of his senses to find
the fight at an end, a cloud of turbaned corsairs standing guard over a
huddle of Spaniards, others breaking open the cabin and dragging thence
the chests that it contained, others again armed with chisels and
mallets passing along the benches liberating the surviving slaves, of
whom the great majority were children of Islam.

Sir Oliver found himself face to face with the white-bearded leader of
the corsairs, who was leaning upon his scimitar and regarding him with
eyes at once amused and amazed. Our gentleman’s naked body was splashed
from head to foot with blood, and in his right hand he still clutched
that yard of iron links with which he had wrought such ghastly
execution. Yusuf was standing at the corsair leader’s elbow speaking
rapidly.

“By Allah, was ever such a lusty fighter seen!” cried the latter. “The
strength of the Prophet is within him thus to smite the unbelieving
pigs.”

Sir Oliver grinned savagely.

“I was returning them some of their whip-lashes—with interest,” said
he.

And those were the circumstances under which he came to meet the
formidable Asad-ed-Din, Basha of Algiers, those the first words that
passed between them.

Anon, when aboard Asad’s own galley he was being carried to Barbary, he
was washed and his head was shaved all but the forelock, by which the
Prophet should lift him up to heaven when his earthly destiny should
come to be fulfilled. He made no protest. They washed and fed him and
gave him ease; and so that they did these things to him they might do
what else they pleased. At last arrayed in flowing garments that were
strange to him, and with a turban wound about his head, he was
conducted to the poop, where Asad sat with Yusuf under an awning, and
he came to understand that it was in compliance with the orders of
Yusuf that he had been treated as if he were a True-Believer.

Yusuf-ben-Moktar was discovered as a person of great consequence, the
nephew of Asad-ed-Din, and a favourite with that Exalted of Allah the
Sublime Portal himself, a man whose capture by Christians had been a
thing profoundly deplored. Accordingly his delivery from that thraldom
was matter for rejoicing. Being delivered, he bethought him of his
oar-mate, concerning whom indeed Asad-ed-Din manifested the greatest
curiosity, for in all this world there was nothing the old corsair
loved so much as a fighter, and in all his days, he vowed, never had he
seen the equal of that stalwart galley-slave, never the like of his
performance with that murderous chain. Yusuf had informed him that the
man was a fruit ripe for the Prophet’s plucking, that the grace of
Allah was upon him, and in spirit already he must be accounted a good
Muslim.

When Sir Oliver, washed, perfumed, and arrayed in white caftan and
turban, which gave him the air of being even taller than he was, came
into the presence of Asad-ed-Din, it was conveyed to him that if he
would enter the ranks of the Faithful of the Prophet’s House and devote
the strength and courage with which Allah the One had endowed him to
the upholding of the true Faith and to the chastening of the enemies of
Islam, great honour, wealth and dignity were in store for him.

Of all that proposal, made at prodigious length and with great wealth
of Eastern circumlocution, the only phrase that took root in his rather
bewildered mind was that which concerned the chastening of the enemies
of Islam. The enemies of Islam he conceived, were his own enemies; and
he further conceived that they stood in great need of chastening, and
that to take a hand in that chastening would be a singularly grateful
task. So he considered the proposals made him. He considered, too, that
the alternative—in the event of his refusing to make the protestations
of Faith required of him—was that he must return to the oar of a
galley, of a Muslim galley now. Now that was an occupation of which he
had had more than his fill, and since he had been washed and restored
to the normal sensations of a clean human being he found that whatever
might be within the scope of his courage he could not envisage
returning to the oar. We have seen the ease with which he had abandoned
the religion in which he was reared for the Roman faith, and how
utterly deluded he had found himself. With the same degree of ease did
he now go over to Islam and with much greater profit. Moreover, he
embraced the Religion of Mahomet with a measure of fierce conviction
that had been entirely lacking from his earlier apostasy.

He had arrived at the conclusion whilst aboard the galley of Spain, as
we have seen, that Christianity as practised in his day was a grim
mockery of which the world were better rid. It is not to be supposed
that his convictions that Christianity was at fault went the length of
making him suppose that Islam was right, or that his conversion to the
Faith of Mahomet was anything more than superficial. But forced as he
was to choose between the rower’s bench and the poop-deck, the oar and
the scimitar, he boldly and resolutely made the only choice that in his
case could lead to liberty and life.

Thus he was received into the ranks of the Faithful whose pavilions
wait them in Paradise, set in an orchard of never-failing fruit, among
rivers of milk, of wine, and of clarified honey. He became the Kayia or
lieutenant to Yusuf on the galley of that corsair’s command and
seconded him in half a score of engagements with an ability and a
conspicuity that made him swiftly famous throughout the ranks of the
Mediterranean rovers. Some six months later in a fight off the coast of
Sicily with one of the galleys of the Religion—as the vessels of the
Knights of Malta were called—Yusuf was mortally wounded in the very
moment of the victory. He died an hour later in the arms of Sir Oliver,
naming the latter his successor in the command of the galley, and
enjoining upon all implicit obedience to him until they should be
returned to Algiers and the Basha should make known his further will in
the matter.

The Basha’s will was to confirm his nephew’s dying appointment of a
successor, and Sir Oliver found himself in full command of a galley.
From that hour he became Oliver-Reis, but very soon his valour and fury
earned him the by-name of Sakr-el-Bahr, the Hawk of the Sea. His fame
grew rapidly, and it spread across the tideless sea to the very shores
of Christendom. Soon he became Asad’s lieutenant, the second in command
of all the Algerine galleys, which meant in fact that he was the
commander-in-chief, for Asad was growing old and took the sea more and
more rarely now. Sakr-el-Bahr sallied forth in his name and his stead,
and such was his courage, his address, and his good fortune that never
did he go forth to return empty-handed.

It was clear to all that the favour of Allah was upon him, that he had
been singled out by Allah to be the very glory of Islam. Asad, who had
ever esteemed him, grew to love him. An intensely devout man, could he
have done less in the case of one for whom the Pitying the Pitiful
showed so marked a predilection? It was freely accepted that when the
destiny of Asad-ed-Din should come to be fulfilled, Sakr-el-Bahr must
succeed him in the Bashalik of Algiers, and that thus Oliver-Reis would
follow in the footsteps of Barbarossa, Ochiali, and other Christian
renegades who had become corsair-princes of Islam.

In spite of certain hostilities which his rapid advancement begot, and
of which we shall hear more presently, once only did his power stand in
danger of suffering a check. Coming one morning into the reeking bagnio
at Algiers, some six months after he had been raised to his captaincy,
he found there a score of countrymen of his own, and he gave orders
that their letters should instantly be struck off and their liberty
restored them.

Called to account by the Basha for this action he took a high-handed
way, since no other was possible. He swore by the beard of the Prophet
that if he were to draw the sword of Mahomet and to serve Islam upon
the seas, he would serve it in his own way, and one of his ways was
that his own countrymen were to have immunity from the edge of that
same sword. Islam, he swore, should not be the loser, since for every
Englishman he restored to liberty he would bring two Spaniards,
Frenchmen, Greeks, or Italians into bondage.

He prevailed, but only upon condition that since captured slaves were
the property of the state, if he desired to abstract them from the
state he must first purchase them for himself. Since they would then be
his own property he could dispose of them at his good pleasure. Thus
did the wise and just Asad resolve the difficulty which had arisen, and
Oliver-Reis bowed wisely to that decision.

Thereafter what English slaves were brought to Algiers he purchased,
manumitted, and found means to send home again. True, it cost him a
fine price yearly, but he was fast amassing such wealth as could easily
support this tax.

As you read Lord Henry Goade’s chronicles you might come to the
conclusion that in the whorl of that new life of his Sir Oliver had
entirely forgotten the happenings in his Cornish home and the woman he
had loved, who so readily had believed him guilty of the slaying of her
brother. You might believe this until you come upon the relation of how
he found one day among some English seamen brought captive to Algiers
by Biskaine-el-Borak—who was become his own second in command—a young
Cornish lad from Helston named Pitt, whose father he had known.

He took this lad home with him to the fine palace which he inhabited
near the Bab-el-Oueb, treated him as an honoured guest, and sat through
a whole summer night in talk with him, questioning him upon this person
and that person, and thus gradually drawing from him all the little
history of his native place during the two years that were sped since
he had left it. In this we gather an impression of the wistful longings
the fierce nostalgia that must have overcome the renegade and his
endeavours to allay it by his endless questions. The Cornish lad had
brought him up sharply and agonizingly with that past of his upon which
he had closed the door when he became a Muslim and a corsair. The only
possible inference is that in those hours of that summer’s night
repentance stirred in him, and a wild longing to return. Rosamund
should reopen for him that door which, hard-driven by misfortune, he
had slammed. That she would do so when once she knew the truth he had
no faintest doubt. And there was now no reason why he should conceal
the truth, why he should continue to shield that dastardly half-brother
of his, whom he had come to hate as fiercely as he had erstwhile loved
him.

In secret he composed a long letter giving the history of all that had
happened to him since his kidnapping, and setting forth the entire
truth of that and of the deed that had led to it. His chronicler opines
that it was a letter that must have moved a stone to tears. And,
moreover, it was not a mere matter of passionate protestations of
innocence, or of unsupported accusation of his brother. It told her of
the existence of proofs that must dispel all doubt. It told her of that
parchment indited by Master Baine and witnessed by the parson, which
document was to be delivered to her together with the letter. Further,
it bade her seek confirmation of that document’s genuineness, did she
doubt it, at the hands of Master Baine himself. That done, it besought
her to lay the whole matter before the Queen, and thus secure him
faculty to return to England and immunity from any consequences of his
subsequent regenade act to which his sufferings had driven him. He
loaded the young Cornishman with gifts, gave him that letter to deliver
in person, and added instructions that should enable him to find the
document he was to deliver with it. That precious parchment had been
left between the leaves of an old book on falconry in the library at
Penarrow, where it would probably be found still undisturbed since his
brother would not suspect its presence and was himself no scholar. Pitt
was to seek out Nicholas at Penarrow and enlist his aid to obtain
possession of that document, if it still existed.

Then Sakr-el-Bahr found means to conduct Pitt to Genoa, and there put
him aboard an English vessel.

Three months later he received an answer—a letter from Pitt, which
reached him by way of Genoa—which was at peace with the Algerines, and
served then as a channel of communication with Christianity. In this
letter Pitt informed him that he had done all that Sir Oliver had
desired him; that he had found the document by the help of Nicholas,
and that in person he had waited upon Mistress Rosamund Godolphin, who
dwelt now with Sir John Killigrew at Arwenack, delivering to her the
letter and the parchment; but that upon learning on whose behalf he
came she had in his presence flung both unopened upon the fire and
dismissed him with his tale untold.

Sakr-el-Bahr spent the night under the skies in his fragrant orchard,
and his slaves reported in terror that they had heard sobs and weeping.
If indeed his heart wept, it was for the last time; thereafter he was
more inscrutable, more ruthless, cruel and mocking than men had ever
known him, nor from that day did he ever again concern himself to
manumit a single English slave. His heart was become a stone.

Thus five years passed, counting from that spring night when he was
trepanned by Jasper Leigh, and his fame spread, his name became a
terror upon the seas, and fleets put forth from Malta, from Naples, and
from Venice to make an end of him and his ruthless piracy. But Allah
kept watch over him, and Sakr-el-Bahr never delivered battle but he
wrested victory to the scimitars of Islam.

Then in the spring of that fifth year there came to him another letter
from the Cornish Pitt, a letter which showed him that gratitude was not
as dead in the world as he supposed it, for it was purely out of
gratitude that the lad whom he had delivered from thraldom wrote to
inform him of certain matters that concerned him. This letter reopened
that old wound; it did more; it dealt him a fresh one. He learnt from
it that the writer had been constrained by Sir John Killigrew to give
such evidence of Sir Oliver’s conversion to Islam as had enabled the
courts to pronounce Sir Oliver as one to be presumed dead at law,
granting the succession to his half-brother, Master Lionel Tressilian.
Pitt professed himself deeply mortified at having been forced
unwittingly to make Sir Oliver so evil a return for the benefits
received from him, and added that sooner would he have suffered them to
hang him than have spoken could he have foreseen the consequences of
his testimony.

So far Sir Oliver read unmoved by any feeling other than cold contempt.
But there was more to follow. The letter went on to tell him that
Mistress Rosamund was newly returned from a two years’ sojourn in
France to become betrothed to his half-brother Lionel, and that they
were to be wed in June. He was further informed that the marriage had
been contrived by Sir John Killigrew in his desire to see Rosamund
settled and under the protection of a husband, since he himself was
proposing to take the seas and was fitting out a fine ship for a voyage
to the Indies. The writer added that the marriage was widely approved,
and it was deemed to be an excellent measure for both houses, since it
would weld into one the two contiguous estates of Penarrow and
Godolphin Court.

Oliver-Reis laughed when he had read thus far. The marriage was
approved not for itself, it would seem, but because by means of it two
stretches of earth were united into one. It was a marriage of two
parks, of two estates, of two tracts of arable and forest, and that two
human beings were concerned in it was apparently no more than an
incidental circumstance.

Then the irony of it all entered his soul and spread it with
bitterness. After dismissing him for the supposed murder of her
brother, she was to take the actual murderer to her arms. And he, that
cur, that false villain!—out of what depths of hell did he derive the
courage to go through with this mummery?—had he no heart, no
conscience, no sense of decency, no fear of God?

He tore the letter into fragments and set about effacing the matter
from his thoughts. Pitt had meant kindly by him, but had dealt cruelly.
In his efforts to seek distraction from the torturing images ever in
his mind he took to the sea with three galleys, and thus some two weeks
later came face to face with Master Jasper Leigh aboard the Spanish
carack which he captured under Cape Spartel.

CHAPTER III.
HOMEWARD BOUND

In the cabin of the captured Spaniard, Jasper Leigh found himself that
evening face to face with Sakr-el-Bahr, haled thither by the corsair’s
gigantic Nubians.

Sakr-el-Bahr had not yet pronounced his intentions concerning the
piratical little skipper, and Master Leigh, full conscious that he was
a villain, feared the worst, and had spent some miserable hours in the
fore-castle awaiting a doom which he accounted foregone.

“Our positions have changed, Master Leigh, since last we talked in a
ship’s cabin,” was the renegade’s inscrutable greeting.

“Indeed,” Master Leigh agreed. “But I hope ye’ll remember that on that
occasion I was your friend.”

“At a price,” Sakr-el-Bahr reminded him. “And at a price you may find
me your friend to-day.”

The rascally skipper’s heart leapt with hope.

“Name it, Sir Oliver,” he answered eagerly. “And so that it lies within
my wretched power I swear I’ll never boggle at it. I’ve had enough of
slavery,” he ran on in a plaintive whine. “Five years of it, and four
of them spent aboard the galleys of Spain, and no day in all of them
but that I prayed for death. Did you but know what I ha’ suffered.”

“Never was suffering more merited, never punishment more fitting, never
justice more poetic,” said Sakr-el-Bahr in a voice that made the
skipper’s blood run cold. “You would have sold me, a man who did you no
hurt, indeed a man who once befriended you—you would have sold me into
slavery for a matter of two hundred pounds....”

“Nay, nay,” cried the other fearfully, “as God’s my witness, ’twas
never part of my intent. Ye’ll never ha’ forgot the words I spoke to
you, the offer that I made to carry you back home again.”

“Ay, at a price, ’tis true,” Sakr-el-Bahr repeated. “And it is
fortunate for you that you are to-day in a position to pay a price that
should postpone your dirty neck’s acquaintance with a rope. I need a
navigator,” he added in explanation, “and what five years ago you would
have done for two hundred pounds, you shall do to-day for your life.
How say you: will you navigate this ship for me?”

“Sir,” cried Jasper Leigh, who could scarce believe that this was all
that was required of him, “I’ll sail it to hell at your bidding.”

“I am not for Spain this voyage,” answered Sakr-el-Bahr. “You shall
sail me precisely as you would have done five years ago, back to the
mouth of the Fal, and set me ashore there. Is that agreed?”

“Ay, and gladly,” replied Master Leigh without a second’s pause.

“The conditions are that you shall have your life and your liberty,”
Sakr-el-Bahr explained. “But do not suppose that arrived in England you
are to be permitted to depart. You must sail us back again, though once
you have done that I shall find a way to send you home if you so desire
it, and perhaps there will be some measure of reward for you if you
serve me faithfully throughout. Follow the habits of a lifetime by
playing me false and there’s an end to you. You shall have for constant
bodyguard these two lilies of the desert,” and he pointed to the
colossal Nubians who stood there invisible almost in the shadow but for
the flash of teeth and eyeballs. “They shall watch over you, and see
that no harm befalls you so long as you are honest with me, and they
shall strangle you at the first sign of treachery. You may go. You have
the freedom of the ship, but you are not to leave it here or elsewhere
save at my express command.”

Jasper Leigh stumbled out counting himself fortunate beyond his
expectations or deserts, and the Nubians followed him and hung behind
him ever after like some vast twin shadow.

To Sakr-el-Bahr entered now Biskaine with a report of the prize
captured. Beyond the prisoners, however, and the actual vessel, which
had suffered nothing in the fight, the cargo was of no account. Outward
bound as she was it was not to be expected that any treasures would be
discovered in her hold. They found great store of armaments and powder
and a little money; but naught else that was worthy of the corsairs’
attention.

Sakr-el-Bahr briefly issued his surprising orders.

“Thou’lt set the captives aboard one of the galleys, Biskaine, and
thyself convey them to Algiers, there to be sold. All else thou’lt
leave aboard here, and two hundred picked corsairs to go a voyage with
me overseas, men that will act as mariners and fighters.”

“Art thou, then, not returning to Algiers, O Sakr-el-Bahr?”

“Not yet. I am for a longer voyage. Convey my service to Asad-ed-Din,
whom Allah guard and cherish, and tell him to look for me in some six
weeks time.”

This sudden resolve of Oliver-Reis created no little excitement aboard
the galleys. The corsairs knew nothing of navigation upon the open
seas, none of them had ever been beyond the Mediterranean, few of them
indeed had ever voyaged as far west as Cape Spartel, and it is doubtful
if they would have followed any other leader into the perils of the
open Atlantic. But Sakr-el-Bahr, the child of Fortune, the protected of
Allah, had never yet led them to aught but victory, and he had but to
call them to heel and they would troop after him whithersoever he
should think well to go. So now there was little trouble in finding the
two hundred Muslimeen he desired for his fighting crew. Rather was the
difficulty to keep the number of those eager for the adventure within
the bounds he had indicated.

You are not to suppose that in all this Sir Oliver was acting upon any
preconcerted plan. Whilst he had lain on the heights watching that fine
ship beating up against the wind it had come to him that with such a
vessel under him it were a fond adventure to sail to England, to
descend upon that Cornish coast abruptly as a thunderbolt, and present
the reckoning to his craven dastard of a brother. He had toyed with the
fancy, dreamily almost as men build their castles in Spain. Then in the
heat of conflict it had entirely escaped his mind, to return in the
shape of a resolve when he came to find himself face to face with
Jasper Leigh.

The skipper and the ship conjointly provided him with all the means to
realize that dream he had dreamt. There was none to oppose his will, no
reason not to indulge his cruel fancy. Perhaps, too, he might see
Rosamund again, might compel her to hear the truth from him. And there
was Sir John Killigrew. He had never been able to determine whether Sir
John had been his friend or his foe in the past; but since it was Sir
John who had been instrumental in setting up Lionel in Sir Oliver’s
place—by inducing the courts to presume Sir Oliver’s death on the score
that being a renegade he must be accounted dead at law—and since it was
Sir John who was contriving this wedding between Lionel and Rosamund,
why, Sir John, too, should be paid a visit and should be informed of
the precise nature of the thing he did.

With the forces at his disposal in those days of his absolute lordship
of life and death along the African littoral, to conceive was with
Oliver-Reis no more than the prelude to execution. The habit of swift
realization of his every wish had grown with him, and that habit guided
now his course.

He made his preparations quickly, and on the morrow the Spanish
carack—lately labelled Nuestra Senora de las Llagas, but with that
label carefully effaced from her quarter—trimmed her sails and stood
out for the open Atlantic, navigated by Captain Jasper Leigh. The three
galleys under the command of Biskaine-el-Borak crept slowly eastward
and homeward to Algiers, hugging the coast, as was the corsair habit.
The wind favoured Oliver so well that within ten days of rounding Cape
St. Vincent he had his first glimpse of the Lizard.

CHAPTER IV.
THE RAID

In the estuary of the River Fal a splendid ship, on the building of
which the most cunning engineers had been employed and no money spared,
rode proudly at anchor just off Smithick under the very shadow of the
heights crowned by the fine house of Arwenack. She was fitting out for
a distant voyage and for days the work of bringing stores and munitions
aboard had been in progress, so that there was an unwonted bustle about
the little forge and the huddle of cottages that went to make up the
fishing village, as if in earnest of the great traffic that in future
days was to be seen about that spot. For Sir John Killigrew seemed at
last to be on the eve of prevailing and of laying there the foundations
of the fine port of his dreams.

To this state of things his friendship with Master Lionel Tressilian
had contributed not a little. The opposition made to his project by Sir
Oliver—and supported, largely at Sir Oliver’s suggestion, by Truro and
Helston—had been entirely withdrawn by Lionel; more, indeed Lionel had
actually gone so far in the opposite direction as to support Sir John
in his representations to Parliament and the Queen. It followed
naturally enough that just as Sir Oliver’s opposition of that cherished
project had been the seed of the hostility between Arwenack and
Penarrow, so Lionel’s support of it became the root of the staunch
friendship that sprang up between himself and Sir John.

What Lionel lacked of his brother’s keen intelligence he made up for in
cunning. He realized that although at some future time it was possible
that Helston and Truro and the Tressilian property there might come to
suffer as a consequence of the development of a port so much more
advantageously situated, yet that could not be in his own lifetime; and
meanwhile he must earn in return Sir John’s support for his suit of
Rosamund Godolphin and thus find the Godolphin estates merged with his
own. This certain immediate gain was to Master Lionel well worth the
other future possible loss.

It must not, however, be supposed that Lionel’s courtship had
thenceforward run a smooth and easy course. The mistress of Godolphin
Court showed him no favour and it was mainly that she might abstract
herself from the importunities of his suit that she had sought and
obtained Sir John Killigrew’s permission to accompany the latter’s
sister to France when she went there with her husband, who was
appointed English ambassador to the Louvre. Sir John’s authority as her
guardian had come into force with the decease of her brother.

Master Lionel moped awhile in her absence; but cheered by Sir John’s
assurance that in the end he should prevail, he quitted Cornwall in his
turn and went forth to see the world. He spent some time in London
about the Court, where, however, he seems to have prospered little, and
then he crossed to France to pay his devoirs to the lady of his
longings.

His constancy, the humility with which he made his suit, the obvious
intensity of his devotion, began at last to wear away that
gentlewoman’s opposition, as dripping water wears away a stone. Yet she
could not bring herself to forget that he was Sir Oliver’s brother—the
brother of the man she had loved, and the brother of the man who had
killed her own brother. Between them stood, then, two things; the ghost
of that old love of hers and the blood of Peter Godolphin.

Of this she reminded Sir John on her return to Cornwall after an
absence of some two years, urging these matters as reasons why an
alliance between herself and Lionel Tressilian must be impossible.

Sir John did not at all agree with her.

“My dear,” he said, “there is your future to be thought of. You are now
of full age and mistress of your own actions. Yet it is not well for a
woman and a gentlewoman to dwell alone. As long as I live, or as long
as I remain in England, all will be well. You may continue indefinitely
your residence here at Arwenack, and you have been wise, I think, in
quitting the loneliness of Godolphin Court. Yet consider that that
loneliness may be yours again when I am not here.”

“I should prefer that loneliness to the company you would thrust upon
me,” she answered him.

“Ungracious speech!” he protested. “Is this your gratitude for that
lad’s burning devotion, for his patience, his gentleness, and all the
rest!”

“He is Oliver Tressilian’s brother,” she replied.

“And has he not suffered enough for that already? Is there to be no end
to the price that he must pay for his brother’s sins? Besides, consider
that when all is said they are not even brothers. They are but
half-brothers.”

“Yet too closely kin,” she said. “If you must have me wed I beg you’ll
find me another husband.”

To this he would answer that expediently considered no husband could be
better than the one he had chosen her. He pointed out the contiguity of
their two estates, and how fine and advantageous a thing it would be to
merge these two into one.

He was persistent, and his persistence was increased when he came to
conceive his notion to take the seas again. His conscience would not
permit him to heave anchor until he had bestowed her safely in wedlock.
Lionel too was persistent, in a quiet, almost self-effacing way that
never set a strain upon her patience, and was therefore the more
difficult to combat.

In the end she gave way under the pressure of these men’s wills, and
did so with the best grace she could summon, resolved to drive from her
heart and mind the one real obstacle of which, for very shame, she had
made no mention to Sir John. The fact is that in spite of all, her love
for Sir Oliver was not dead. It was stricken down, it is true, until
she herself failed to recognize it for what it really was. But she
caught herself thinking of him frequently and wistfully; she found
herself comparing him with his brother; and for all that she had bidden
Sir John find her some other husband than Lionel, she knew full well
that any suitor brought before her must be submitted to that same
comparison to his inevitable undoing. All this she accounted evil in
herself. It was in vain that she lashed her mind with the reminder that
Sir Oliver was Peter’s murderer. As time went on she found herself
actually making excuses for her sometime lover; she would admit that
Peter had driven him to the step, that for her sake Sir Oliver had
suffered insult upon insult from Peter, until, being but human, the cup
of his endurance had overflowed in the end, and weary of submitting to
the other’s blows he had risen up in his anger and smitten in his turn.

She would scorn herself for such thoughts as these, yet she could not
dismiss them. In act she could be strong—as witness how she had dealt
with that letter which Oliver sent her out of Barbary by the hand of
Pitt—but her thoughts she could not govern, and her thoughts were full
often traitors to her will. There were longings in her heart for Oliver
which she could not stifle, and there was ever the hope that he would
one day return, although she realized that from such a return she might
look for nothing.

When Sir John finally slew the hope of that return he did a wiser thing
than he conceived. Never since Oliver’s disappearance had they heard
any news of him until Pitt came to Arwenack with that letter and his
story. They had heard, as had all the world, of the corsair
Sakr-el-Bahr, but they had been far indeed from connecting him with
Oliver Tressilian. Now that his identity was established by Pitt’s
testimony, it was an easy matter to induce the courts to account him
dead and to give Lionel the coveted inheritance.

This to Rosamund was a small matter. But a great one was that Sir
Oliver was dead at law, and must be so in fact, should he ever again
set foot in England. It extinguished finally that curiously hopeless
and almost subconscious hope of hers that one day he would return. Thus
it helped her perhaps to face and accept the future which Sir John was
resolved to thrust upon her.

Her betrothal was made public, and she proved if not an ardently
loving, at least a docile and gentle mistress to Lionel. He was
content. He could ask no more in reason at the moment, and he was
buoyed up by every lover’s confidence that given opportunity and time
he could find the way to awaken a response. And it must be confessed
that already during their betrothal he gave some proof of his reason
for his confidence. She had been lonely, and he dispelled her
loneliness by his complete surrender of himself to her; his restraint
and his cautious, almost insidious creeping along a path which a more
clumsy fellow would have taken at a dash made companionship possible
between them and very sweet to her. Upon this foundation her affection
began gradually to rise, and seeing them together and such excellent
friends, Sir John congratulated himself upon his wisdom and went about
the fitting out of that fine ship of his—the Silver Heron—for the
coming voyage.

Thus they came within a week of the wedding, and Sir John all
impatience now. The marriage bells were to be his signal for departure;
as they fell silent the Silver Heron should spread her wings.

It was the evening of the first of June; the peal of the curfew had
faded on the air and lights were being set in the great dining-room at
Arwenack where the company was to sup. It was a small party. Just Sir
John and Rosamund and Lionel, who had lingered on that day, and Lord
Henry Goade—our chronicler—the Queen’s Lieutenant of Cornwall, together
with his lady. They were visiting Sir John and they were to remain yet
a week his guests at Arwenack that they might grace the coming
nuptials.

Above in the house there was great stir of preparation for the
departure of Sir John and his ward, the latter into wedlock, the former
into unknown seas. In the turret chamber a dozen sempstresses were at
work upon the bridal outfit under the directions of that Sally
Pentreath who had been no less assiduous in the preparation of
swaddling clothes and the like on the eve of Rosamund’s appearance in
this world.

At the very hour at which Sir John was leading his company to table Sir
Oliver Tressilian was setting foot ashore not a mile away.

He had deemed it wiser not to round Pendennis Point. So in the bay
above Swanpool on the western side of that promontory he had dropped
anchor as the evening shadows were deepening. He had launched the
ship’s two boats, and in these he had conveyed some thirty of his men
ashore. Twice had the boats returned, until a hundred of his corsairs
stood ranged along that foreign beach. The other hundred he left on
guard aboard. He took so great a force upon an expedition for which a
quarter of the men would have sufficed so as to ensure by overwhelming
numbers the avoidance of all unnecessary violence.

Absolutely unobserved he led them up the slope towards Arwenack through
the darkness that had now closed in. To tread his native soil once more
went near to drawing tears from him. How familiar was the path he
followed with such confidence in the night; how well known each bush
and stone by which he went with his silent multitude hard upon his
heels. Who could have foretold him such a return as this.

Who could have dreamt when he roamed amain in his youth here with dogs
and fowling-piece that he would creep one night over these dunes a
renegade Muslim leading a horde of infidels to storm the house of Sir
John Killigrew of Arwenack?

Such thoughts begot a weakness in him; but he made a quick recovery
when his mind swung to all that he had so unjustly suffered, when he
considered all that he came thus to avenge.

First to Arwenack to Sir John and Rosamund to compel them to hear the
truth at least, and then away to Penarrow for Master Lionel and the
reckoning. Such was the project that warmed him, conquered his weakness
and spurred him, relentless, onward and upward to the heights and the
fortified house that dominated them.

He found the massive iron-studded gates locked, as was to have been
expected at that hour. He knocked, and presently the postern gaped, and
a lantern was advanced. Instantly that lantern was dashed aside and Sir
Oliver had leapt over the sill into the courtyard. With a hand gripping
the porter’s throat to choke all utterance, Sir Oliver heaved him out
to his men, who swiftly gagged him.

That done they poured silently through that black gap of the postern
into the spacious gateway. On he led them, at a run almost, towards the
tall mullioned windows whence a flood of golden light seemed invitingly
to beckon them.

With the servants who met them in the hall they dealt in the same swift
silent fashion as they had dealt with the gatekeeper, and such was the
speed and caution of their movements that Sir John and his company had
no suspicion of their presence until the door of the dining-room
crashed open before their eyes.

The sight which they beheld was one that for some moments left them
mazed and bewildered. Lord Henry tells us how at first he imagined that
here was some mummery, some surprise prepared for the bridal couple by
Sir John’s tenants or the folk of Smithick and Penycumwick, and he adds
that he was encouraged in this belief by the circumstance that not a
single weapon gleamed in all that horde of outlandish intruders.

Although they came full armed against any eventualities, yet by their
leader’s orders not a blade was bared. What was to do was to be done
with their naked hands alone and without bloodshed. Such were the
orders of Sakr-el-Bahr, and Sakr-el-Bahr’s were not orders to be
disregarded.

Himself he stood forward at the head of that legion of brown-skinned
men arrayed in all the colours of the rainbow, their heads swathed in
turbans of every hue. He considered the company in grim silence, and
the company in amazement considered this turbaned giant with the
masterful face that was tanned to the colour of mahogany, the black
forked beard, and those singularly light eyes glittering like steel
under his black brows.

Thus a little while in silence, then with a sudden gasp Lionel
Tressilian sank back in his tall chair as if bereft of strength.

The agate eyes flashed upon him smiling, cruelly.

“I see that you, at least, recognize me,” said Sakr-el-Bahr in his deep
voice. “I was assured I could depend upon the eyes of brotherly love to
pierce the change that time and stress have wrought in me.”

Sir John was on his feet, his lean swarthy face flushing darkly, an
oath on his lips. Rosamund sat on as if frozen with horror, considering
Sir Oliver with dilating eyes, whilst her hands clawed the table before
her. They too recognized him now, and realized that here was no
mummery. That something sinister was intended Sir John could not for a
moment doubt. But of what that something might be he could form no
notion. It was the first time that Barbary rovers were seen in England.
That famous raid of theirs upon Baltimore in Ireland did not take place
until some thirty years after this date.

“Sir Oliver Tressilian!” Killigrew gasped, and “Sir Oliver Tressilian!”
echoed Lord Henry Goade, to add “By God!”

“Not Sir Oliver Tressilian, came the answer, but Sakr-el-Bahr, the
scourge of the sea, the terror of Christendom, the desperate corsair
your lies, cupidity, and false-heartedness have fashioned out of a
sometime Cornish gentleman.” He embraced them all in his denunciatory
gesture. “Behold me here with my sea-hawks to present a reckoning long
overdue.”

Writing now of what his own eyes beheld, Lord Henry tells us how Sir
John leapt to snatch a weapon from the armoured walls; how Sakr-el-Bahr
barked out a single word in Arabic, and how at that word a half-dozen
of his supple blackamoors sprang upon the knight like greyhounds upon a
hare and bore him writhing to the ground.

Lady Henry screamed; her husband does not appear to have done anything,
or else modesty keeps him silent on the score of it. Rosamund, white to
the lips, continued to look on, whilst Lionel, overcome, covered his
face with his hands in sheer horror. One and all of them expected to
see some ghastly deed of blood performed there, coldly and callously as
the wringing of a capon’s neck. But no such thing took place. The
corsairs merely turned Sir John upon his face, dragged his wrists
behind him to make them fast, and having performed that duty with a
speedy, silent dexterity they abandoned him.

Sakr-el-Bahr watched their performance with those grimly smiling eyes
of his. When it was done he spoke again and pointed to Lionel, who
leapt up in sudden terror, with a cry that was entirely inarticulate.
Lithe brown arms encircled him like a legion of snakes. Powerless, he
was lifted in the air and borne swiftly away. For an instant he found
himself held face to face with his turbaned brother. Into that pallid
terror-stricken human mask the renegade’s eyes stabbed like two
daggers. Then deliberately and after the fashion of the Muslim he was
become he spat upon it.

“Away!” he growled, and through the press of corsairs that thronged the
hall behind him a lane was swiftly opened and Lionel was swallowed up,
lost to the view of those within the room.

“What murderous deed do you intend?” cried Sir John indomitably. He had
risen and stood grimly dignified in his bonds.

“Will you murder your own brother as you murdered mine?” demanded
Rosamund, speaking now for the first time, and rising as she spoke, a
faint flush coming to overspread her pallor. She saw him wince; she saw
the mocking lustful anger perish in his face, leaving it vacant for a
moment. Then it became grim again with a fresh resolve. Her words had
altered all the current of his intentions. They fixed in him a dull,
fierce rage. They silenced the explanations which he was come to offer,
and which he scorned to offer here after that taunt.

“It seems you love that—whelp, that thing that was my brother,” he
said, sneering. “I wonder will you love him still when you come to be
better acquainted with him? Though, faith, naught would surprise me in
a woman and her love. Yet I am curious to see—curious to see.” He
laughed. “I have a mind to gratify myself. I will not separate you—not
just yet.”

He advanced upon her. “Come thou with me, lady,” he commanded, and held
out his hand.

And now Lord Henry seems to have been stirred to futile action.

“At that,” he writes, “I thrust myself between to shield her. ‘Thou
dog,’ I cried, ‘thou shalt be made to suffer!’

“‘Suffer?’ quoth he, and mocked me with his deep laugh. ‘I have
suffered already. ’Tis for that reason I am here.’

“‘And thou shalt suffer again, thou pirate out of hell!’ I warned him.
‘Thou shalt suffer for this outrage as God’s my life!’

“‘Shall I so?’ quoth he, very calm and sinister. ‘And at whose hands, I
pray you?’

“‘At mine, sir,’ I roared, being by now stirred to a great fury.

“‘At thine?’ he sneered. ‘Thou’lt hunt the hawk of the sea? Thou? Thou
plump partridge! Away! Hinder me not!”’

And he adds that again Sir Oliver spoke that short Arabic command,
whereupon a dozen blackamoors whirled the Queen’s Lieutenant aside and
bound him to a chair.

Face to face stood now Sir Oliver with Rosamund—face to face after five
long years, and he realized that in every moment of that time the
certainty had never departed from him of some such future meeting.

“Come, lady,” he bade her sternly.

A moment she looked at him with hate and loathing in the clear depths
of her deep blue eyes. Then swiftly as lightning she snatched a knife
from the board and drove it at his heart. But his hand moved as swiftly
to seize her wrist, and the knife clattered to the ground, its errand
unfulfilled.

A shuddering sob escaped her then to express at once her horror of her
own attempt and of the man who held her. That horror mounting until it
overpowered her, she sank suddenly against him in a swoon.

Instinctively his arms went round her, and a moment he held her thus,
recalling the last occasion on which she had lain against his breast,
on an evening five years and more ago under the grey wall of Godolphin
Court above the river. What prophet could have told him that when next
he so held her the conditions would be these? It was all grotesque and
incredible, like the fantastic dream of some sick mind. But it was all
true, and she was in his arms again.

He shifted his grip to her waist, heaved her to his mighty shoulder, as
though she were a sack of grain, and swung about, his business at
Arwenack accomplished—indeed, more of it accomplished than had been his
intent, and also something less.

“Away, away!” he cried to his rovers, and away they sped as fleetly and
silently as they had come, no man raising now so much as a voice to
hinder them.

Through the hall and across the courtyard flowed that human tide; out
into the open and along the crest of the hill it surged, then away down
the slope towards the beach where their boats awaited them.
Sakr-el-Bahr ran as lightly as though the swooning woman he bore were
no more than a cloak he had flung across his shoulder. Ahead of him
went a half-dozen of his fellows carrying his gagged and pinioned
brother.

Once only before they dipped from the heights of Arwenack did Oliver
check. He paused to look across the dark shimmering water to the woods
that screened the house of Penarrow from his view. It had been part of
his purpose to visit it, as we know. But the necessity had now been
removed, and he was conscious of a pang of disappointment, of a hunger
to look again upon his home. But to shift the current of his thoughts
just then came two of his officers—Othmani and Ali, who had been
muttering one with the other. As they overtook him, Othmani set now a
hand upon his arm, and pointed down towards the twinkling lights of
Smithick and Penycumwick.

“My lord,” he cried, “there will be lads and maidens there should fetch
fat prices in the sôk-el-Abeed.”

“No doubt,” said Sakr-el-Bahr, scarce heeding him, heeding indeed
little in this world but his longings to look upon Penarrow.

“Why, then, my lord, shall I take fifty True-Believers and make a raid
upon them? It were an easy task, all unsuspicious as they must be of
our presence.”

Sakr-el-Bahr came out of his musings. “Othmani,” said he, “art a fool,
the very father of fools, else wouldst thou have come to know by now
that those who once were of my own race, those of the land from which I
am sprung, are sacred to me. Here we take no slave but these we have.
On, then, in the name of Allah!”

But Othmani was not yet silenced. “And is our perilous voyage across
these unknown seas into this far heathen land to be rewarded by no more
than just these two captives? Is that a raid worthy of Sakr-el-Bahr?”

“Leave Sakr-el-Bahr to judge,” was the curt answer.

“But reflect, my lord: there is another who will judge. How shall our
Basha, the glorious Asad-ed-Din, welcome thy return with such poor
spoils as these? What questions will he set thee, and what account
shalt thou render him for having imperilled the lives of all these
True-Believers upon the seas for so little profit?”

“He shall ask me what he pleases, and I shall answer what I please and
as Allah prompts me. On, I say!”

And on they went, Sakr-el-Bahr conscious now of little but the warmth
of that body upon his shoulder, and knowing not, so tumultuous were his
emotions, whether it fired him to love or hate.

They gained the beach; they reached the ship whose very presence had
continued unsuspected. The breeze was fresh and they stood away at
once. By sunrise there was no more sign of them than there had been at
sunset, there was no more clue to the way they had taken than to the
way they had come. It was as if they had dropped from the skies in the
night upon that Cornish coast, and but for the mark of their swift,
silent passage, but for the absence of Rosamund and Lionel Tressilian,
the thing must have been accounted no more than a dream of those few
who had witnessed it.

Aboard the carack, Sakr-el-Bahr bestowed Rosamund in the cabin over the
quarter, taking the precaution to lock the door that led to the
stern-gallery. Lionel he ordered to be dropped into a dark hole under
the hatchway, there to lie and meditate upon the retribution that had
overtaken him until such time as his brother should have determined
upon his fate—for this was a matter upon which the renegade was still
undecided.

Himself he lay under the stars that night and thought of many things.
One of these things, which plays some part in the story, though it is
probable that it played but a slight one in his thoughts, was begotten
of the words Othmani had used. What, indeed, would be Asad’s welcome of
him on his return if he sailed into Algiers with nothing more to show
for that long voyage and the imperilling of the lives of two hundred
True-Believers than just those two captives whom he intended, moreover,
to retain for himself? What capital would not be made out of that
circumstance by his enemies in Algiers and by Asad’s Sicilian wife who
hated him with all the bitterness of a hatred that had its roots in the
fertile soil of jealousy?

This may have spurred him in the cool dawn to a very daring and
desperate enterprise which Destiny sent his way in the shape of a
tall-masted Dutchman homeward bound. He gave chase, for all that he was
full conscious that the battle he invited was one of which his corsairs
had no experience, and one upon which they must have hesitated to
venture with another leader than himself. But the star of Sakr-el-Bahr
was a star that never led to aught but victory, and their belief in
him, the very javelin of Allah, overcame any doubts that may have been
begotten of finding themselves upon an unfamiliar craft and on a
rolling, unfamiliar sea.

This fight is given in great detail by my Lord Henry from the
particulars afforded him by Jasper Leigh. But it differs in no great
particular from other sea-fights, and it is none of my purpose to
surfeit you with such recitals. Enough to say that it was stern and
fierce, entailing great loss to both combatants; that cannon played
little part in it, for knowing the quality of his men Sakr-el-Bahr made
haste to run in and grapple. He prevailed of course as he must ever
prevail by the very force of his personality and the might of his
example. He was the first to leap aboard the Dutchman, clad in mail and
whirling his great scimitar, and his men poured after him shouting his
name and that of Allah in a breath.

Such was ever his fury in an engagement that it infected and inspired
his followers. It did so now, and the shrewd Dutchmen came to perceive
that this heathen horde was as a body to which he supplied the brain
and soul. They attacked him fiercely in groups, intent at all costs
upon cutting him down, convinced almost by instinct that were he felled
the victory would easily be theirs. And in the end they succeeded. A
Dutch pike broke some links of his mail and dealt him a flesh wound
which went unheeded by him in his fury; a Dutch rapier found the breach
thus made in his defences, and went through it to stretch him bleeding
upon the deck. Yet he staggered up, knowing as full as did they that if
he succumbed then all was lost. Armed now with a short axe which he had
found under his hand when he went down, he hacked a way to the
bulwarks, set his back against the timbers, and hoarse of voice,
ghastly of face, spattered with the blood of his wound he urged on his
men until the victory was theirs—and this was fortunately soon. And
then, as if he had been sustained by no more than the very force of his
will, he sank down in a heap among the dead and wounded huddled against
the vessel’s bulwarks.

Grief-stricken his corsairs bore him back aboard the carack. Were he to
die then was their victory a barren one indeed. They laid him on a
couch prepared for him amidships on the main deck, where the vessel’s
pitching was least discomfiting. A Moorish surgeon came to tend him,
and pronounced his hurt a grievous one, but not so grievous as to close
the gates of hope.

This pronouncement gave the corsairs all the assurance they required.
It could not be that the Gardener could already pluck so fragrant a
fruit from Allah’s garden. The Pitiful must spare Sakr-el-Bahr to
continue the glory of Islam.

Yet they were come to the straits of Gibraltar before his fever abated
and he recovered complete consciousness, to learn of the final issue of
that hazardous fight into which he had led those children of the
Prophet.

The Dutchman, Othmani informed him, was following in their wake, with
Ali and some others aboard her, steering ever in the wake of the carack
which continued to be navigated by the Nasrani dog, Jasper Leigh. When
Sakr-el-Bahr learnt the value of the capture, when he was informed that
in addition to a hundred able-bodied men under the hatches, to be sold
as slaves in the sôk-el-Abeed, there was a cargo of gold and silver,
pearls, amber, spices, and ivory, and such lesser matters as gorgeous
silken fabrics, rich beyond anything that had ever been seen upon the
seas at any one time, he felt that the blood he had shed had not been
wasted.

Let him sail safely into Algiers with these two ships both captured in
the name of Allah and his Prophet, one of them an argosy so richly
fraught, a floating treasure-house, and he need have little fear of
what his enemies and the crafty evil Sicilian woman might have wrought
against him in his absence.

Then he made inquiry touching his two English captives, to be informed
that Othmani had taken charge of them, and that he had continued the
treatment meted out to them by Sakr-el-Bahr himself when first they
were brought aboard.

He was satisfied, and fell into a gentle healing sleep, whilst, on the
decks above, his followers rendered thanks to Allah the Pitying the
Pitiful, the Master of the Day of Judgment, who Alone is All-Wise,
All-Knowing.

CHAPTER V.
THE LION OF THE FAITH

Asad-ed-Din, the Lion of the Faith, Basha of Algiers, walked in the
evening cool in the orchard of the Kasbah upon the heights above the
city, and at his side, stepping daintily, came Fenzileh, his wife, the
first lady of his hareem, whom eighteen years ago he had carried off in
his mighty arms from that little whitewashed village above the Straits
of Messina which his followers had raided.

She had been a lissom maid of sixteen in those far-off days, the child
of humble peasant-folk, and she had gone uncomplaining to the arms of
her swarthy ravisher. To-day, at thirty-four, she was still beautiful,
more beautiful indeed than when first she had fired the passion of
Asad-Reis—as he then was, one of the captains of the famous Ali-Basha.
There were streaks of red in her heavy black tresses, her skin was of a
soft pearliness that seemed translucent, her eyes were large, of a
golden-brown, agleam with sombre fires, her lips were full and
sensuous. She was tall and of a shape that in Europe would have been
accounted perfect, which is to say that she was a thought too slender
for Oriental taste; she moved along beside her lord with a sinuous,