Chapter 3 The Deliverance — The Fortunes of Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini
At the very moment that Mr Geoffrey Court was drinking that morning whet in the cabin of the Arabella, his cousin Sir James, a tall, spare man of fifty, as vigorous still of body as he was irresolute of mind, sat at his breakfast-table with a satchel of letters that had just arrived from England. They were letters long overdue, for the ship that had brought them, delayed and driven out of her course by gales, had exceeded by fully two months the normal time of the voyage.
Sir James had emptied the satchel on to the table, and had spread the contents for a general preliminary glance. A package bulkier than the rest drew his attention, and he took it up. He scanned the superscription with a frown that gradually drew together his heavy, grizzled brows. He hesitated, passing a brown, bony hand along his chin; then, as if abruptly taking a decision, he broke the seals and tore away the wrapper. From this husk he extracted a dainty volume bound in vellum, with some gold tooling on the spine and the legend, also in gold, The Poems of Sir John Suckling.
He sniffed contemptuously, and contemptuously tossed the thing aside. But as it fell, the volume partly opened, and at what he saw his narrow face grew attentive. He took it up again. The fold of vellum on the inner side of the cover had become detached and had slightly curled away from the board. The paste securing that fold had perished, and as he fingered the curled edge the entire flap forming the side of the cover came loose. Between this and the board a folded sheet was now disclosed.
That sheet was still in James' hand ten minutes later, when the room was abruptly invaded by the dainty lady who might have been, in years, his daughter, but was, in fact, his wife. She was scarcely of the middle height and virginally slight of figure, clear-eyed and of a delicate tint unblemished by the climate of the tropics. She was dressed for riding, her face in the shadow of a wide hat, a whip in her hand.
'I have to speak to you,' she announced, her voice musical, but its tone shrewish.
Sir James, sitting with his back to the door, had not turned to see who entered. At the sound of her voice he dropped a napkin over the volume of poems. Then, still without turning, he spoke. 'In that case the King's business may go to the devil.'
'Must you always sneer, sir?' The shrewish note grew sharper. 'Do you transact the King's business at the breakfast-table?'
Always calm, even lethargic, of spirit, Sir James replied: 'Not always. No. But just as often as you must be peremptory.'
'I don't want for cause.' She swept forward and round the table so that she might directly face him. She stood there, very straight, her riding-whip in her gloved hands, held across her slim, vigorous young body. There was a petulance on the sensual lips, an aggressive forward thrust of the little pointed chin.
'I have been insulted,' she announced.
Grey-faced, Sir James considered her. 'To be sure,' he said at last.
'What do you mean--"To be sure"?'
'Doesn't it happen every time that you ride out?'
'And if it does, who shall wonder when yourself you set the example?'
He avoided the offered argument. Argument, at least, was something that he had learnt to refuse this winsome termagant of half his age whom he had married five years ago and who had since poisoned his life with the bad manners and ill-temper brought from her tradesman-father's home.
'Who was it today?' asked his weary voice.
'That dog Hagthorpe. I would to God I had left him rotting in Barbados.'
'Instead of bringing him to rot here. Yes? What did he say to you?'
'Say? You don't conceive he had the effrontery to speak to me?'
He smiled a little sourly. In these days of disillusion he was able to perceive that most of the trouble came from her being too consciously a lady without proper preparation for the role.
'But if he insulted you?'
'It was in the cursed impudent way he looked at me, with a half-smile on his insolent face.'
'A half-smile?' The bushy brows went up. 'It may have been no more than a greeting.'
'You would say that. You would take sides even with your slaves against your wife. Happen what may, I am never in the right. Oh no. Never. A greeting?' she sniffed. 'This was no greeting. And if it was, is a low slave to greet me with smiles?'
'A half-smile, I think you said. And as for low, he may be a slave--poor devil!--but he was born a gentleman.'
'Fine gentleman to be sure! A damned rebel who should have been hanged.'
His deep-set eyes gravely considered her daintiness. 'Are you quite without pity?' he asked her. 'I wonder sometimes. And is there no constancy in you either? You were so taken with the lad when first we saw him in Barbados that nothing would content you until I had bought him so that you might make of him your groom and lavish favours on him only to--'
Her whip crashed down on the table to interrupt him. 'I'll listen to no more of this. It's cowardly always to browbeat and bully me, and put me in the wrong. But I shall know what to do another time. I'll lay my whip across that rogue's smug face. That will teach him to leer at me.'
'It will be worthy,' was the bitter comment. 'It will be brave, towards an unfortunate who must bear whatever comes lest worse should follow.'
But she was no longer listening. The stroke of her whip had scattered some of the letters heaped upon the table. Her attention was sharply diverted.
'Has a packet come from England?' Her breathing seemed to quicken as he watched her.
'I spoke, I think, of the King's business. Here you see it. At the breakfast-table.'
She was already rummaging through the heap, scanning each package in turn. 'Are there letters for me?'
It was a second or two before his suddenly compressed lips parted again to reply evasively: 'I haven't seen all of them yet.'
She continued her search, whilst he watched her from under his brows. At the end she looked at him again.
'Nothing?' she asked, on a note of surprised, aggrieved inquiry. Her brows were knit, her delicate chin seemed to grow more pointed. 'Nothing?'
'You have looked for yourself,' he said.
She turned slowly away, her lip between finger and thumb. He was grimly amused to observe that the furious grievance with which she had sought him was forgotten; that her wrath on the matter of the slave had been quenched in another preoccupation. Slowly she moved to the door, passing out of his range of sight. Her hand upon the knob, she paused. She spoke in a voice that was soft and amiable. 'You have no word from Geoffrey?' He answered without turning. 'I have told you that I have not yet looked through all the letters.'
Still she lingered. 'I did not see his hand on any of them.'
'In that case he has not written to me.'
'Odd!' she said slowly, 'It is very odd. We should have had word by now of when to expect him.'
'I'll not pretend to anxiety for that news.'
'You'll not?' A flush slowly inflamed her face in the pause she made. Then her anger lashed him again. 'And I? You've no thought, of course, for me, chained in this hateful island, with no society but the parson and the commandant and their silly wives. Haven't I sacrificed enough for you that you should grudge me even the rare company of someone from the world, who can give me news of something besides sugar and pepper and the price of blackamoors?' She waited through a silent moment. 'Why don't you answer me?' she shrilled.
He had turned pale under his tan. He swung slowly round in his chair.
'You want an answer, do you?' There was an undertone of thunder in his voice.
Evidently she didn't. For at the mere threat of it she went abruptly out, and slammed the door. He half rose, and she little knew in what peril she stood at that moment from the anger that flamed up in him. Emotion of any kind, however, was short-lived in this lethargic-minded man. An imprecation fluttered from him on a sigh as he sagged back again into his chair. Again unfolding the sheet which his hand had retained during her presence in the room, he resumed his scowling study of it. Then, having sat gloomily in thought for a long while, he rose and went to lock both the letter and the vellum-bound volume in a secretaire that stood between the open windows. After that, at last, he gave his attention to the other packages that awaited him.