John Wingfield, Sr., who stood by the grate, was drumming nervously on the mantel.  The drumming ceased.  The fingers rested rigid and white on the dark wood.  Alive to another manifestation of the lurking force in his son, he hastened to change the subject.

“I had almost forgotten that you always had a taste for art, Jack.”

“Yes, from her;” which was hardly changing the subject.

“As for the first John Wingfield, you may be sure that I wanted to know everything there was to know about the old fellow,” said the father.  “So I set a lot of bookworms looking up the archives of the English and Spanish governments and digging around in the libraries after material.  Then I had it all put together in proper shape by a literary sharp.”

“You have that!” cried Jack.  “You have the framework from which you can build the whole story of him—­the story of how he fought and how Velasquez came to paint him?  Oh, I want to read it!” With an unexplored land between gilt-tooled covers under his arm he went upstairs early, in the transport of wanderlust that had sent him away over the sand from Little Rivers. Si, si, Firio, outward bound, camp under the stars!  If Senor Don’t Care’s desert journeys were over—­and he had no thought but that they were—­there was no ban on travelling in fancy over sea trails in the ancestor’s company.

Jack was with the buccaneer when he boarded the enemy at the head of his men; with him before the Board of Admiralty when, a young captain of twenty-two, he refused to lie to save his skin; with him when, in answer to the scolding of Elizabeth, then an old woman, he said:  “It is glorious for one who fought so hard for Your Majesty to have the recognition even of Your Majesty’s chiding in answer to the protest of the Spanish ambassador,” which won Elizabeth’s reversal of the Admiralty’s decision; with him when, in a later change of fortune, he went to the court of Spain for once on a mission which required a sheathed blade; with him when the dark eye of Velasquez, who painted men and women of his time while his colleagues were painting Madonnas, glowed with a discoverer’s joy at sight of this fair-haired type of the enemy, whom he led away to his studio.

More than once was there mention of the fact that this terrible fighter was gentle with women and fonder of the company of children than of statesmen or courtiers.  He had married the daughter of a great merchant, a delicate type of beauty; the last to fascinate a buccaneer, according to the gossips of the time.  Rumor had it that he had taken her for the wherewithal to pay the enormous debts contracted in his latest exploit.  To disprove this he went to sea in a temper with a frigate and came back laden with the treasure of half a dozen galleons, to find that his wife had died at the birth of a son.  He promised himself to settle down for good; but the fog of London choked lungs used to soft airs; he heard the call of the sun and was away again to seek adventure in the broiling reaches of the Caribbean.  A man of restless, wild spirit, breathing inconsistencies incomprehensible to the conventions of Whitehall!  And his son had turned a Cromwellian, who, in poverty, sought refuge in America when Charles II. came to the throne; and from him, in the vicissitudes of five generations, the poor clergyman was descended.