Lord Julian stood a moment, watching the tall figure
as it moved away towards the taffrail. Then
letting his arms fall helplessly to his sides in dejection,
he departed.
Just within the doorway of the alley leading to the
cabin, he ran into Miss Bishop. Yet she had
not been coming out, for her back was towards him,
and she was moving in the same direction. He
followed her, his mind too full of Captain Blood to
be concerned just then with her movements.
In the cabin he flung into a chair, and exploded,
with a violence altogether foreign to his nature.
“Damme if ever I met a man I liked better, or
even a man I liked as well. Yet there’s
nothing to be done with him.”
“So I heard,” she admitted in a small
voice. She was very white, and she kept her
eyes upon her folded hands.
He looked up in surprise, and then sat conning her
with brooding glance. “I wonder, now,”
he said presently, “if the mischief is of your
working. Your words have rankled with him.
He threw them at me again and again. He wouldn’t
take the King’s commission; he wouldn’t
take my hand even. What’s to be done with
a fellow like that? He’ll end on a yardarm
for all his luck. And the quixotic fool is running
into danger at the present moment on our behalf.”
“How?” she asked him with a sudden startled
interest.
“How? Have you forgotten that he’s
sailing to Jamaica, and that Jamaica is the headquarters
of the English fleet? True, your uncle commands
it....”
She leaned across the table to interrupt him, and
he observed that her breathing had grown labored,
that her eyes were dilating in alarm.
“But there is no hope for him in that!”
she cried. “Oh, don’t imagine it!
He has no bitterer enemy in the world! My uncle
is a hard, unforgiving man. I believe that it
was nothing but the hope of taking and hanging Captain
Blood that made my uncle leave his Barbados plantations
to accept the deputy-governorship of Jamaica.
Captain Blood doesn’t know that, of course....”
She paused with a little gesture of helplessness.
“I can’t think that it would make the
least difference if he did,” said his lordship
gravely. “A man who can forgive such an
enemy as Don Miguel and take up this uncompromising
attitude with me isn’t to be judged by ordinary
rules. He’s chivalrous to the point of
idiocy.”
“And yet he has been what he has been and done
what he has done in these last three years,”
said she, but she said it sorrowfully now, without
any of her earlier scorn.
Lord Julian was sententious, as I gather that he often
was. “Life can be infernally complex,”
he sighed.
THE SERVICE OF KING JAMES
