Chapter 6 The Hounds of God by Rafael Sabatini
SURRENDER
Sword in hand, statuesquely from his rocky plinth, Don Pedro bowed until his trunk was at right angles with his shapely legs. He hoped that he was not ridiculous.
The lady across the brook whom he thus saluted belonged to a type which to a son of Spain must ever seem the most delectable by virtue of that natural law which renders opposites inter-attractive.
Her cheeks were delicate as apple-blossoms; her hair was of the ruddy golden of ripe corn, and tired with great simplicity, without any of those monstrous affections which Elizabeth had rendered fashionable in England. Her eyes were deeply blue, and the surprise now staring out of them gave them a look of startled innocence. She was tall, he observed with approval, and of those most sweet proportions which ripening womanhood alone can display. Her dress marked her in his eyes for a person of quality. Her peaked stomacher and ridiculous farthingale—though less ridiculous by much than mode prescribed—proclaimed to him clearly that here was no rustic Diana for his Endymion. And not only her dress but her bearing and the self-assured manner in which she now confronted this noble-looking and—in his rumpled, sodden garments—rather fantastic stranger, went further to announce her quality.
"Sir, would you have killed my dog?"
Now it was not for nothing that Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna had spent three years in London in the Ambassador's train and gone about the Court. He spoke English better than many Englishmen, and beyond a slight exaggeration of the vowel sounds there was little in his speech to betray the foreigner.
"Madam," he answered her smoothly, "I trust you will not count it a lack of gallantry in me that I am reluctant to be eaten by a lady's dog."
His accent and the light humour of his answer set her staring harder.
"Now, God a' mercy!" she ejaculated. "You'll not have sprouted here, like a mushroom, in the night. Whence are you, sir?
"Ah! Whence!" He shrugged. A melancholy smile invested his fine sombre eyes. "That is not to be answered in a word."
He came down from his rock and in three active strides, from boulder to boulder, was across the brook. The crouching hound half-rose and growled at his approach whereupon the lady bade him down again, and cut him across the body with a hazel switch to quicken his obedience.
Don Pedro stood before her to explain himself. "I am no better than a piece of wreckage; some of the flotsam from a Spanish galleon that foundered on the rocks down there in last night's storm. I am all that has come ashore alive."
He saw the sudden darkening of that fair face, the recoil before him in which if there was fear there was more repugnance. "A Spaniard!" she exclaimed in the tone we use when we mention evil and detested things.
He sank his head between his shoulders; spread his hands in deprecation. "A very sorry one," said he, and on that sighed plaintively.
Almost at once he saw racial prejudice cast aside for womanly pity. She observed more closely his condition, his sodden garments and dishevelled head, and saw that it bore out his tale. She pictured to herself the thing lie told her, and was stricken at the thought of that sunken galleon and the loss of life.
Upon her face he read the reflection of this uprush of compassion, for he was very skilled in the deciphering of human documents; and being too a very subtle gentleman, he perceived his course, and promptly took it.
"My name," he said, and said it with a certain conscious pride that was not to be mistaken, "is Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna. I am Count of Marcos, a Grande of Spain, and your prisoner." On that he went down upon his knees, and proffered her the hilt of the sword which he still held naked in his hands.
She fell back a pace or two in sheer surprise. "My prisoner?" Her brows were knit in bewilderment. "Nay now; hay now."
"And it please you," he insisted. "It has never been imputed to me, and I hope it never may be, that I want for courage. Yet finding myself shipwrecked, alone in a hostile land, I am in no case to offer resistance to my capture. I am like a garrison that is forced to capitulation and merely asks that it may capitulate without hurt to honour. On the beach down there I had a choice of alternatives. One was to walk back into the sea which has rejected me, and drown. But I am young, as you observe, and suicide is the certain gateway to damnation. I preferred, then, the other alternative which was to make my way to the haunts of men, and upon finding one who was of a quality to receive my sword, to make surrender. Here at your feet, lady, my quest is ended almost as soon as it began."
And again he proffered her the blade, held now across his two hands.
"But I am not a man, sir." She was obviously nonplussed.
"Let all men thank God with me for that," he cried. Then more solemnly continued: "In all ages it has been deemed proper that valour should yield to beauty. For my valour I will beg you to accept my word until such time as it may be tested, when the test, I trust, will be in your own service. For the rest your mirror and the eyes of every man will vouch. And as for your quality, I were blind or a clown did I not perceive it."
That the situation piqued and pleased her from the very outset is as certain as that the astute Don Pedro judged confidently it must. It was so tinctured with romance that its appeal to a lady of any heart and imagination must prove beyond resistance. Only the extraordinary nature of the adventure made her hesitate, aroused a doubt on the score of the practical fulfilment of this Spanish gentleman's proposal.
"But I have never heard the like. How can I take you prisoner?
"By accepting my sword, madam."
"But how can I hold you?"
"How?" he smiled. "It is easy to hold the captive who desires captivity. Who would desire liberty that might be your prisoner?"
His eyes grew so ardent as to leave no vagueness in his meaning. She flushed under that regard of his, as well she might, for Don Pedro went very fast indeed.
"I surrender me," he said. "Yourself shall fix my ransom and make it what you will. Until it comes from Spain I am your prisoner."
He saw that her hesitation was still far from conquered. Perhaps, indeed, his momentary ardour by its prematureness had increased it. Therefore he had recourse to utter frankness, confident that by revealing the full extent of his peril and thus arousing her compassion, he would prevail upon her. He showed her that it was upon her mercy that he counted; that it was his faith in her gentleness and her pity for his plight that impelled him to take this course which she accounted extraordinary and which was certainly unusual.
"Consider," he begged her. "In the hands of another it might go very ill with me. I intend no insult to your countrymen's sense of what is in honour due to an unfortunate and helpless enemy, of what is prescribed by all the usages of chivalry. But men are the creatures of their passions, of their feelings; and the feelings to-day of Englishmen for Spaniards..." He broke off, and shrugged. "You know them. It may well be that the feelings of the first Englishman I meet will conquer his notions of what is becoming. He may summon others to help him cut me down."
"Would so much be needed?" she flashed at him, touched by his sly imputation that no one Englishman would suffice to take a Spaniard.
But he knew women, and he answered without hesitation, though in accents that sounded humble and self-deprecatory. "I think so, lady. And if you deny me now I must resolve your doubts by making proof of it."
He knew that she would not, and knew that the half-challenge of his answer struck the right note, and preserved him a figure of dignity in misfortune, a man who would condescend only within certain definite honourable limits to accept shelter from his peril. If he made it plain that he sought compassion from her, he also made it plain that he sought no more than he might accept without loss of self-respect.
She perceived clearly enough that if she assented to his odd proposal, if she accepted him for her prisoner, it would be hers to shield him. She would be doing a worthy thing; for Spaniard though he might be, he was human and a gentleman. That she had the power to carry this thing through and claim him for her own against any aggressor, reflection made her gradually confident. He had rightly gauged her mettle and her quality. In all that Cornish countryside there was probably none strong enough to stand against her imperious will once she determined to exert it.
The combined appeal to her womanliness and her sense of the romantic carried the day with her. She accepted his surrender, and this in terms of a generosity for which she was sure that there was abundant chivalrous precedent.
"Be it as you will then, sir," she said at last. "You shall be my prisoner. Give me your parole of honour that you will attempt no escape, and you may retain your weapons, holding them in trust for me."
Still on his knees, the sword still proffered, he bowed his head, and solemnly gave the oath required.
"Before God and Our Lady, by my honour and my faith, I swear to hold myself your captive, and that I shall not leave you until yourself you restore me the liberty which I here surrender."
Upon that he rose, and sheathed his rapier. "Is it a presumption, madam, to ask my captor's name?"
She smiled, for all that there still abode in her a shade of uneasiness at the eccentricity of this transaction.
"I am the Lady Margaret Trevanion," she replied.
"Trevanion?" He manifested a faint quickening of interest. "Are you by chance of the family of the Earl of Garth?"
She was justifiably surprised that a Spaniard should be so well-informed upon English family matters.
"He is my father, sir." And she expressed her astonishment in her question: "What do you know of the Earl of Garth?"
"I? Nothing, alas. Though that is a deficiency in me which the fortune of war should now repair. But I have heard my father speak of him and the near escape he had of losing his head in the service of your present Queen when Mary Tudor reigned in England. My father was here in the train of King Philip in those days when he was the Queen of England's husband, and I think he knew your father well. It is an odd link between us, if you please."
The link was none so odd as Don Pedro assumed or would have it appear. His father had been one of a cloud of Spanish noblemen who had come and gone about the Court of Queen Mary at a time when the Lord Admiral Seymour and his friends were prominent in the public eye and particularly in the eye of King Philip and his following, whose position in England was menaced by their activities.
"From the memory of his own misfortunes and the perils in which he all but lost his life, my Lord Garth may not be without sympathy for the misfortunes of another." Then, lest he should appear to plead too much, he essayed to diminish it by humour. "The first of these misfortunes, my lady, and the peril of life most pressing upon me at the moment comes from hunger."
She smiled. "Come sir. I will see what may be done to mend it and the rest of your condition."
"The rest of my condition? Valga me Dios! There's naught amiss with the rest of my condition."
"Come," she commanded, and led the way, the hound bounding forward ahead.
Don Pedro, obediently, as became a prisoner, followed closely, and began at last to be truly thankful for his miraculous preservation.