Pirates' Hope. Lynde Francis

when Mrs. Van Tromp, mother of marriageable, and as yet unmarried, daughters came waddling aft to join us. How far she might go in letting Ingerson's wealth atone for his many sins, I neither knew nor cared, but that the wealth had its due and proper weight with her was proved by the alacrity with which she relieved me of the necessity of taking any part in a three-cornered talk. So, when I got up to empty my pipe ashes over the rail, I kept on going, quite willingly abandoning the field to inherited money and its avid worshiper.

      With such an unfruitful beginning, one might predicate an introductory day little less than stupefying. But later on there were ameliorations. After luncheon, which, like the breakfast, was a straggling meal with only three or four of us at table at the same time, I found myself lounging on the port promenade with Beatrice, the middle member of the Van Tromp trio, a fair-haired, self-contained young woman with a slant toward bookish things which set her well apart from her athletic older sister and tomboyish younger.

      "'Westward Ho!'?" I said, glancing at the title of the book lying in her lap.

      "Yes; I've been trying to get the atmosphere. But Kingsley takes too much time with his introductions. Whereabouts are we now?"

      I marked the slow rise and fall of the ship as it swung along making its leisurely southing. As in the early morning, the Andromeda was logging only loafing speed.

      "We are still a long way from the scene of Sir Francis Drake's more or less piratical exploits," I told her. "Do you take Kingsley at his face value?"

      "He calls it war, but it seems to me more like legalized buccaneering," she rejoined. Then: "How much of it do you suppose is true?"

      I laughed.

      "Have you already learned to distrust history, at your tender age?" I mocked. "Isn't it all set down in the books?"

      She turned large and disparaging eyes upon me.

      "Of course you know well enough that all history is distorted; especially war history where the victors are the only source of information. The other people can't tell their side of it."

      "True enough," I admitted. "I fancy old Sir Francis was a good bit more than half a pirate, if all the facts were known. That story about his burning of the Spanish galleon at Pirates' Hope, for example."

      "I haven't heard it. Tell it to me," she urged.

      I gave her the story as Van Dyck had given it to me, omitting – for no good reason that I could have offered – all mention of my own unnerving experiences on the island of the legend.

      "Left those poor wretches to starve because they wouldn't buy their lives off him?" she commented, with a belated horror in her voice.

      "It is only a legend, you must remember," I hastened to say. "Most likely there isn't a word of truth in it."

      Her gaze was upon the distant merging line of sea and sky, and there was a dreamy look in her eyes.

      "I should like to see that island," she said. "I wonder if we shall go anywhere near it?"

      If I smiled it was only at the hold the ancient tale had apparently taken upon her.

      "Bonteck will doubtless make it a port of call, if you ask him to. But it is hundreds of miles from here."

      "What does it look like?"

      "Very much like any or all of the coral islands you may have seen pictured in your school geographies, only it is long and narrow instead of being circular, like the Pacific atolls. But it is a true coral island, for all that; a strip of land possibly a quarter of a mile wide and a mile long, densely wooded – jungled, you might say – with tropical vegetation; a beach of white sand running all the way around; beyond the beach, a lagoon; and enclosing the lagoon, and with only a few passages through it here and there, the usual coral reef. The lagoon is shallow for the greater part of it, but outside of the reef the bottom goes down like the side of a mountain."

      "Why, you must have seen the island!" she said.

      "I have," I answered, rather grimly.

      "Did you land on it when you were there? – but of course you must have, to be able to describe it so well."

      "Oh, yes; I landed upon it," I admitted.

      Again she let her gaze go adrift to leeward. She was evidently reveling in something that seemed to her more tangible than Kingsley's famous story of Amyas Leigh and his voyagings.

      "You say it is called Pirates' Hope. Was that on account of Sir Francis Drake's battle with the Spanish galleon?"

      "Oh, no; I imagine it got its name at a much later date; in the time of the bold buccaneers. There are two little bays, one on the north and another on the south. Either would be a good place in which to careen the little cockleshell ships of our ancestors and scrape their bottoms. Possibly Morgan or some of the others put in there for that purpose and thus gave the island its name."

      "Did you find any relics when you were there?"

      It didn't seem necessary to tell this open-minded young woman about the bones, so I turned her question aside.

      "The last of the buccaneers was permanently hanged some time in the closing decade of the seventeenth century, if I remember rightly. You'd scarcely expect to find any traces of them or their works now."

      "No; that's so," she conceded.

      Into the pause that followed I thrust a query of my own.

      "Where has Conetta been keeping herself all day?"

      "She is with her aunt. It seems that Miss Gilmore isn't a very good sailor."

      I laughed because I couldn't help it. If the dragoness was upset by the easy swinging of the Andromeda over a sea that was more like a gently undulating mirror than anything else, what would happen to her if we should encounter a gale, or even half a gale?

      "You needn't laugh," Beatrice put in reproachfully. "There is nothing funny about seasickness."

      "I was laughing at the idea of anybody's being seasick in weather like the present," I explained. "But I fancy it is the old story in the case of Miss Mehitable. If she had nothing worse than a toothache, Conetta would have to play the part of a nurse."

      "My-oh!" said my pretty lounging-companion; "it is perfectly easy to see that there is no love lost between you and Miss Mehitable."

      "There isn't," I replied shortly; and there that matter rested.

      Still later in the day – just at sunset, to be strictly accurate as to the time – there was another compensation for a day which had been hanging rather heavily on my hands. I had gone alone into the yacht's fore-peak, and was wondering if I should have time to smoke another pipe before the dinner call should sound, when a mocking voice behind me said: "Isn't it about time we were quarreling some more?"

      I went on filling my pipe without looking around.

      "You've been careful not to give me an earlier chance," I said. "How is your Aunt Mehitable by this time?"

      "She is able to sit up and take a bit of nourishment." Then: "How you do hate poor Aunt Mehitable, don't you?"

      "As I see it, I haven't any particularly good reason to squander any part of my scanty store of affection upon her. Did she know I was going to make one of this mixed-up ship's-quota?"

      "Honestly, I don't think she did. She said a tremendous lot of things last night when she saw you with Bonteck. Aren't you going to be decent to her?"

      "She is Bonteck's guest, or one of them, and I'm another. South America and the tropics haven't sacked me of quite all of the conventionalities."

      "How nice! Of course, we've all been supposing they had. When are you going to tell me some more about the Castilian princess? the one you could have married, and didn't – to your later sorrow."

      Strange as it may seem, all this light-hearted mockery cut into me much more deeply than any real bitterness could have. Because, let me explain, it was precisely the attitude she used to hold toward me in the old days when the mockeries were only so many love taps, as one might say; a sort of joyous letting down, or keying up, for her, after a day-long immurement