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Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer - Romance

J >> Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer >> Romance




She stood just in front of me; the girl that I had seen through the
door; the girl I had seen play with the melon seeds. She was breathing
fast--it agitated me to be alone with her--and she had a little shining
dagger in her hand.

She cut the rope round my ankles, and motioned me imperiously to turn
round. "Your hands--your hands!"

I turned my back awkwardly to her, and felt the grip of small, cool,
very firm fingers upon my wrists. My arms fell apart, numb and perfectly
useless; I was half aware of pain in them, but it passed unnoticed among
a cloud of other emotions. I didn't feel my finger-tips because I had
the agitation, the flutter, the tantalization of looking at her.

I was all the while conscious of the--say, the irregularity of my
position, but I felt very little fear. There were the old Don, an
ineffectual, silver-haired old gentleman, who obviously was not a
pirate; the sleek O'Brien, and Carlos, who seemed to cough on the edge
of a grave--and this young girl. There was not any future that I could
conceive, and the past seemed to be cut off from me by a narrow, very
dark tunnel through which I could see nothing at all.

The young girl was, for the moment, what counted most on the whole,
the only thing the eye could rest on. She affected me as an apparition
familiar, yet absolutely new in her charm. I had seen her gray eyes; I
had seen her red lips; her dark hair, her lithe gestures; the carriage
of her head; her throat, her hands. I knew her; I seemed to have known
her for years. A rush of strange, sweet feeling made me dumb. She was
looking at me, her lips set, her eyes wide and still; and suddenly she
said:

"Ask nothing. The land is not far yet. You can escape, Carlos
thought.... But no! You would only perish for nothing. Go with God." She
pointed imperiously towards the square stern-ports of the cabin.

Following the direction of her hand, my eyes fell upon the image of a
Madonna; rather large--perhaps a third life-size; with a gilt crown,
a pink serious face bent a little forward over a pink naked child that
perched on her left arm and raised one hand. It stood on a bracket,
against the rudder casing, with fat cherubs' heads carved on the
supports. The young girl crossed herself with a swift motion of the
hand. The stern-ports, glazed in small panes, were black, and gleaming
in a white frame-work.

"Go--go--go with God," the girl whispered urgently. "There is a
boat-------"

I made a motion to rise; I wanted to go. The idea of having my liberty,
of its being again a possibility, made her seem of less importance;
other things began to have their share. But I could not stand, though
the blood was returning, warm and tingling, in my legs and hands. She
looked at me with a sharp frown puckering her brows a little; beat a
hasty tattoo with one of her feet, and cast a startled glance towards
the forward door that led on deck. Then she walked to the other side of
the table, and sat looking at me in the glow of the lamp.

"Your life hangs on a thread," she murmured.

I answered, "You have given it to me. Shall I never-------?" I was
acutely conscious of the imperfection of my language.

She looked at me sharply; then lowered her lids. Afterwards she raised
them again. "Think of yourself. Every moment is-------"

"I will be as quick as I can," I said.

I was chafing my ankles and looking up at her. I wanted, very badly, to
thank her for taking an interest in me, only I found it very difficult
to speak to her. Suddenly she sprang to her feet:

"That man thinks he can destroy you. I hate him--I detest him! You have
seen how he treats my father."

It struck me, like a blow, that she was merely avenging O'Brien's
insolence to her father. I had been kidnapped against Don Balthasar
Riego's will. It gave me very well the measure of the old man's
powerlessness in face of his intendant--who was obviously confident of
afterwards soothing the resentment.

I was glad I had not thanked her for taking an interest in me. I was
distressed, too, because once more I had missed Romance by an inch.

Someone kicked at the locked door. A voice cried--I could not help
thinking--warningly, "Seraphina, Seraphina," and another voice said with
excessive softness, "_Senorita! Voyons! quelle folie_."

She sprang at me. Her hand hurt my wrist as she dragged me aft. I
scrambled clumsily into the recess of the counter, and put my head out.
The night air was very chilly and full of brine; a little boat towing
by a long painter was sheering about in the phosphorescent wake of the
ship. The sea itself was pallid in the light of the moon, invisible to
me. A little astern of us, on our port quarter, a vessel under a press
of canvas seemed to stand still; looming up like an immense pale ghost.
She might have been coming up with us, or else we had just passed her--I
couldn't tell. I had no time to find out, and I didn't care. The great
thing was to get hold of the painter. The whispers of the girl urged me,
but the thing was not easy; the rope, fastened higher up, streamed
away out of reach of my hand. At last, by watching the moment when it
slacked, and throwing myself half out of the stern window, I managed to
hook it with my finger-tips. Next moment it was nearly jerked away from
me, but I didn't lose it, and the boat taking a run just then under the
counter, I got a good hold. The sound of another kick at the door made
me swing myself out, head first, without reflection. I got soused to the
waist before I had reached the bows of the boat. With a frantic effort
I clambered up and rolled in. When I got on my legs, the jerky motion
of tossing had ceased, the boat was floating still, and the light of
the stern windows was far away already. The girl had managed to cut the
painter.

The other vessel was heading straight for me, rather high on the water,
broad-beamed, squat, and making her way quietly, like a shadow. The
land might have been four or five miles away--I had no means of knowing
exactly. It looked like a high black cloud, and purple-gray mists here
and there among the peaks hung like scarves.

I got an oar over the stern to scull, but I was not fit for much
exertion. I stared at the ship I had left. Her stern windows glimmered
with a slight up-and-down motion; her sails seemed to fall into black
confusion against the blaze of the moon; faint cries came to me out of
her, and by the alteration of her shape I understood that she was being
brought to, preparatory to lowering a boat. She might have been half a
mile distant when the gleam of her stern windows swung slowly round and
went out. I had no mind to be recaptured, and began to scull frantically
towards the other vessel. By that time she was quite near--near
enough for me to hear the lazy sound of the water at her bows, and the
occasional flutter of a sail. The land breeze was dying away, and in the
wake of the moon I perceived the boat of my pursuers coming over, black
and distinct; but the other vessel was nearly upon me. I sheered under
her starboard bow and yelled, "Ship ahoy! Ship ahoy!"

There was a lot of noise on board, and no one seemed to hear my shouts.
Several voices yelled. "That cursed Spanish ship ahead is heaving-to
athwart our hawse." The crew and the officers seemed all to be forward
shouting abuse at the "lubberly Dago," and it looked as though I were
abandoned to my fate. The ship forged ahead in the light air; I failed
in my grab at her fore chains, and my boat slipped astern, bumping
against the side. I missed the main chain, too, and yelled all the time
with desperation, "For God's sake! Ship ahoy! For God's sake throw me a
rope, some-, body, before it's too late!"

I was giving up all hope when a heavy coil--of a brace, I suppose--fell
upon my head, nearly knocking me over. Half stunned as I was,
desperation lent me strength to scramble up her side hand over hand,
while the boat floated away from under my feet. I was done up when I got
on the poop. A yell came from forward, "Hard aport." Then the same voice
addressed itself to abusing the Spanish ship very close to us now. "What
do you mean by coming-to right across my bows like this?" it yelled in a
fury.

I stood still in the shadows on the poop. We were drawing slowly past
the stern of the Spaniard, and O'Brien's voice answered in English:

"We are picking up a boat of ours that's gone adrift with a man. Have
you seen anything of her?" "No--confound you and your boat." Of course
those forward knew nothing of my being on board. The man who had thrown
me the rope--a passenger, a certain Major Cowper, going home with his
wife and child--had walked away proudly, without deigning as much as to
look at me twice, as if to see a man clamber on board a ship ten miles
from the land was the most usual occurrence. He was, I found afterwards,
an absurd, pompous person, as stiff as a ramrod, and so full of his
own importance that he imagined he had almost demeaned himself by his
condescension in throwing down the rope in answer to my despairing
cries. On the other hand, the helmsman, the only other person aft, was
so astounded as to become quite speechless. I could see, in the light of
the binnacle thrown upon his face, his staring eyes and his open mouth.

The voice forward had subsided by then, and as the stern of the Spanish
ship came abreast of the poop, I stepped out of the shadow of the sails,
and going close to the rail I said, not very loud--there was no need to
shout--but very distinctly:

"I am out of your clutches, Mr. O'Brien, after all. I promise you that
you shall hear of me yet."

Meanwhile, another man had come up from forward on the poop, growling
like a bear, a short, rotund little man, the captain of the ship. The
Spanish vessel was dropping astern, silent, with her sails all black,
hiding the low moon. Suddenly a hurried hail came out of her.

"What ship is this?"

"What's that to you, blank your eyes? The _Breeze_, if you want to know.
What are you going to do about it?" the little skipper shouted fiercely.
In the light wind the ships were separating slowly.

"Where are you bound to?" hailed O'Brien's voice again.

The little skipper laughed with exasperation. "Dash your blanked
impudence. To Havana, and be hanged to you. Anything more you want to
know? And my name's Lumsden, and I am sixty years old, and if I had you
here, I would put a head on you for getting in my way, you------"

He stopped, out of breath. Then, addressing himself to his passenger:

"That's the Spanish chartered ship that brought these sanguinary
pirates that were hanged this morning, major. She's taking the Spanish
commissioner back. I suppose they had no man-of-war handy for the
service in Cuba. Did you ever------"

He had caught sight of me for the first time, and positively jumped a
foot high with astonishment.

"Who on earth's that there?"

His astonishment was comprehensible. The major, Without deigning to
enlighten him, walked proudly away. He was too dignified a person to
explain.

It was left to me. Frequenting, as I had been doing, Ramon's store,
which was a great gossiping centre of the maritime world in Kingston, I
knew the faces and the names of most of the merchant captains who used
to gather there to drink and swap yarns. I was not myself quite unknown
to little Lumsden. I told him all my story, and all the time he kept
on scratching his bald head, full of incredulous perplexity. Old Senor
Ramon! Such a respectable man. And I had been kidnapped? From his store!

"If I didn't see you here in my cuddy before my eyes, I wouldn't believe
a word you say," he declared absurdly.

But he was ready enough to take me to Havana. However, he insisted upon
calling down his mate, a gingery fellow, short, too, but wizened, and as
stupid as himself.

"Here's that Kemp, you know. The young fellow that Macdonald of the
Horton Pen picked up somewhere two years ago. The Spaniards in that
ship kidnapped him--so he says. He says they are pirates. But that's a
government chartered ship, and all the pirates that have ever been in
her were hanged this morning in Kingston. But here he is, anyhow. And
he says that at home he had throttled a Bow Street runner before he went
off with the smugglers. Did you ever hear the likes of it, Mercer? I
shouldn't think he was telling us a parcel of lies; hey, Mercer?"

And the two grotesque little chaps stood nodding their heads at me
sagaciously.

"He's a desperate character, then," said Mercer at last, cautiously.
"This morning, the very last thing I heard ashore, as I went to fetch
the fresh beef off, is that he had been assaulting a justice of the
peace on the highroad, and had been trying to knock down the admiral,
who was coming down to town in a chaise with Mr. Topnambo. There's a
warrant out against him under the Black Act, sir."

Then he brightened up considerably. "So he must have been kidnapped or
something after all, sir, or he would be in chokey now."

It was true, after all. Romance reserved me for another fate, for
another sort of captivity, for more than one sort. And my imagination
had been captured, enslaved already by the image of that young girl who
had called me her English cousin, the girl with the lizard, the girl
with the dagger! And with every word she uttered romance itself, if I
had only known it, the romance of persecuted lovers, spoke to me through
her lips.

That night the Spanish ship had the advantage of us in a freshening
wind, and overtook the _Breeze_. Before morning dawned she passed us,
and before the close of the next day she was gone out of sight ahead,
steering, apparently, the same course with ourselves.

Her superior sailing had an enormous influence upon my fortunes; and I
was more adrift in the world than ever before, more in the dark as to
what awaited me than when I was lugged along with my head in a sack.
I gave her but little thought. A sort of numbness had come over me. I
could think of the girl who had cut me free, and for all my resentment
at the indignity of my treatment, I had hardly a thought to spare for
the man who had me bound. I was pleased to remember that she hated him;
that she had said so herself. For the rest, I had a vague notion of
going to the English Consul in Havana. After all, I was not a complete
nobody. I was John Kemp, a gentleman, well connected; I could prove
it. The Bow Street runner had not been dead as I had thought. The
last letter from Veronica informed me that the man had given up
thief-catching, and was keeping, now, a little inn in the neighbourhood.
Ralph, my brother-in-law, had helped him to it, no doubt. I could come
home safely now.

And I had discovered I was no longer anxious to return home.




CHAPTER FIVE

There wasn't any weirdness about the ship when I woke in the sunlight.
She was old and slow and rather small. She carried Lumsden (master),
Mercer (mate), a crew that seemed no better and no worse than any other
crew, and the old gentleman who had thrown me the rope the night before,
and who seemed to think that he had derogated from his dignity in doing
it. He was a Major Cowper, retiring from a West Indian regiment, and had
with him his wife and a disagreeable little girl, with a yellow pigtail
and a bony little chest and arms.

On the whole, they weren't the sort of people that one would have chosen
for companions on a pleasure-trip. Major Cowper's wife lay all day in a
deck chair, alternately drawing to her and repulsing the whining little
girl. The major talked to me about the scandals with which the world was
filled, and kept a suspicious eye upon his wife. He spent the morning
in shaving what part of his face his white whiskers did not cover, the
afternoon in enumerating to me the subjects on which he intended to
write to the Horse Guards. He had grown entirely amiable, perhaps for
the reason that his wife ignored my existence.

Meantime I let the days slip by idly, only wondering how I could manage
to remain in Havana and breathe the air of the same island with the girl
who had delivered me. Perhaps some day we might meet--who knows? I was
not afraid of that Irishman.

It never occurred to me to bother about the course we were taking,
till one day we sighted the Cuban coast, and I heard Lumsden and Mercer
pronounce the name of Rio Medio. The two ridiculous old chaps talked
of Mexican privateers, which seemed to rendezvous off that place.
They pointed out to me the headland near the bay. There was no sign of
privateer or pirate, as far as the eye could reach. In the course of
beating up to windward we closed in with the coast, and then the wind
fell.

I remained motionless against the rail for half the night, looking at
the land. Not a single light was visible. A wistful, dreamy longing, a
quiet longing pervaded me, as though I had been drugged. I dreamed, as
young men dream, of a girl's face. She was sleeping there within this
dim vision of land. Perhaps this was as near as I should ever be able to
approach her. I felt a sorrow without much suffering. A great stillness
reigned around the ship, over the whole earth. At last I went below and
fell asleep.

I was awakened by the idea that I had heard an extraordinary
row--shouting and stamping. But there was a dead silence, to which I
was listening with all my ears. Suddenly there was a little pop, as if
someone had spat rather vigorously; then a succession of shouts, then
another little pop, and more shouts, and the stamping overhead. A woman
began to shriek on the other side of the bulkhead, then another woman
somewhere else, then the little girl. I hurried on deck, but it was some
minutes before I could make things fit together. I saw Major Cowper on
the poop; he was brandishing a little pistol and apostrophizing Lumsden,
who was waving ineffectual arms towards the sky; and there was a
great deal of shouting, forward and overhead. Cowper rushed at me, and
explained that something was an abominable scandal, and that there were
women on board. He waved his pistol towards the side; I noticed that the
butt was inlaid with mother-of-pearl Lumsden rushed at him and clawed at
his clothes, imploring him not to be rash.

We were so close in with the coast that the surf along the shore gleamed
and sparkled in full view.

Someone shouted aloft, "Look out! They are firing again."

Then only I noticed, a quarter of a mile astern and between the land and
us, a little schooner, rather low in the water, curtseying under a cloud
of white canvas--a wonderful thing to look at. It was as if I had never
seen anything so instinct with life and the joy of it. A snowy streak
spattered away from her bows at each plunge. She came at a great speed,
and a row of faces looking our way became plain, like a beady decoration
above her bulwarks. She swerved a little out of her course, and a sort
of mushroom of smoke grew out of her side; there was a little gleam of
smouldering light hidden in its heart. The spitting bang followed again,
and something skipped along the wave-tops beside us, raising little
pillars of spray that drifted away on the wind. The schooner came back
on her course, heading straight for us; a shout like groaned applause
went up from on board us. Lumsden hid his face in his hands.

I could hear little Mercer shrieking out orders forwards. We were
shortening sail. The schooner, luffing a little, ranged abreast. A hail
like a metal blare came out of her.

"If you donn'd heef-to we seenk you! We seenk you! By God!"

Major Cowper was using abominable language beside me. Suddenly he began
to call out to someone:

"Go down... go down, I say."

A woman's face disappeared into the hood of the companion like a
rabbit's tail into its burrow. There was a great volley of cracks from
the loose sails, and the ship came to. At the same time the schooner,
now on our beam and stripped of her light kites, put in stays and
remained on the other tack, with her foresheet to windward.

Major Cowper said it was a scandal. The country was going to the
dogs because merchantmen were not compelled by law to carry guns. He
spluttered into my ears that there wasn't so much as a twopenny signal
mortar on board, and no more powder than enough to load one of his
duelling pistols. He was going to write to the Horse Guards.

A blue-and-white ensign fluttered up to the main gaff of the schooner; a
boat dropped into the water. It all went breathlessly--I hadn't time to
think. I saw old Cowper run to the side and aim his pistol overboard;
there was an ineffectual click; he made a gesture of disgust, and tossed
it on deck. His head hung dejectedly down upon his chest.

Lumsden said, "Thank God, oh, thank God!" and the old man turned on him
like a snarling dog.

"You infernal coward," he said. "Haven't you got a spark of courage?"

A moment after, our decks were invaded by men, brown and ragged, leaping
down from the bulwarks one after the other.

They had come out at break of day (we must have been observed the
evening before), a big schooner--full of as ill-favoured, ragged rascals
as the most vivid imagination could conceive. Of course, there had been
no resistance on our part. We were outsailed, and at the first ferocious
hail the halyards had been let go by the run, and all our crew had
bolted aloft. A few bronzed bandits posted abreast of each mast kept
them there by the menace of bell-mouthed blunderbusses pointed upwards.
Lumsden and Mercer had been each tied flat down to a spare spar. They
presented an appearance too ridiculous to awaken genuine compassion.
Major Cowper was made to sit on a hen-coop, and a bearded pirate, with
a red handkerchief tied round his head and a cutlass in his hand, stood
guard over him. The major looked angry and crestfallen. The rest of that
infamous crew, without losing a moment, rushed into the cuddy to loot
the cabins for wearing apparel, jewellery, and money. They squabbled
amongst themselves, throwing the things on deck into a great heap of
booty.

The schooner flying the Mexican flag remained hove to abeam. But in the
man in command of the boarding party I recognized Tomas Castro!

He _was_ a pirate. My surmises were correct. He looked the part to the
life, in a plumed hat, cloaked to the chin, and standing apart in a
saturnine dignity.

"Are you going to have us all murdered, Castro?" I asked, with
indignation. To my surprise he did not seem to recognize me; indeed, he
pretended not to see me at all. I might have been thin air for any sign
he gave of being aware of my presence; but, turning his back on me, he
addressed himself to the ignobly captive Lumsden, telling him that he,
Castro, was the commander of that Mexican schooner, and menacing him
with dreadful threats of vengeance for what he called the resistance we
had offered to a privateer of the Republic. I suppose he was pleased to
qualify with the name of armed resistance the miserable little pop of
the major's pocket pistol. To punish that audacity he announced that no
private property would be respected.

"You shall have to give up all the money on board," he yelled at the
wretched man lying there like a sheep ready for slaughter. The other
could only gasp and blink. Castro's ferocity was so remarkable that for
a moment it struck me as put on. There was no necessity for it. We were
meek and silent enough, only poor Major Cowper muttered:

"My wife and child. . . ."

The ragged brown men were pouring on deck from below; their arms full
of bundles. Half a dozen of them started to pull off the main hatch
tarpaulin. Up aloft the crew looked down with scared eyes. I began to
say excitedly, in my indignation, almost into his very ear:

"I know you, Tomas Castro--I know you--Tomas Castro."

Even then he seemed not to hear; but at last he looked into my face
balefully, as if he wished to convey the plague to me.

"Hold your tongue," he said very quickly in Spanish. "This is folly!"
His little hawk's beak of a nose nestled in his moustache. He waved his
arm and declared forcibly, "I don't know you. I am Nicola el Demonio,
the Mexican."

Poor old Cowper groaned. The reputation of Nicola el Demonio, if rumours
were to be trusted, was a horrible thing for a man with women depending
on him.

Five or six of these bandits were standing about Lumsden, the major,
and myself, fingering the locks of their guns. Poor old Cowper, breaking
away from his guard, was raging up and down the poop; and the big pirate
kept him off the companion truculently. The major wanted to get below;
the little girl was screaming in the cuddy, and we could hear her very
plainly. It was rather horrible. Castro had gone forward into the crowd
of scoundrels round the hatchway. It was only then that I realized that
Major Cowper was in a state of delirious apprehension and fury; I seemed
to remember at last that for a long time he had been groaning somewhere
near me. He kept on saying:

"Oh, for God's sake--for God's sake--my poor wife."

I understood that he must have been asking me to do something.

It came as a shock to me. I had a vague sensation of his fears. Up till
then I hadn't realized that any one could be much interested in Mrs.
Cowper.

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