The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood. Rafael Sabatini

one that for some moments left them mazed and bewildered. Lord Henry tells us how at first he imagined that here was some mummery, some surprise prepared for the bridal couple by Sir John’s tenants or the folk of Smithick and Penycumwick, and he adds that he was encouraged in this belief by the circumstance that not a single weapon gleamed in all that horde of outlandish intruders.

      Although they came full armed against any eventualities, yet by their leader’s orders not a blade was bared. What was to do was to be done with their naked hands alone and without bloodshed. Such were the orders of Sakr-el-Bahr, and Sakr-el-Bahr’s were not orders to be disregarded.

      Himself he stood forward at the head of that legion of brown-skinned men arrayed in all the colours of the rainbow, their heads swathed in turbans of every hue. He considered the company in grim silence, and the company in amazement considered this turbaned giant with the masterful face that was tanned to the colour of mahogany, the black forked beard, and those singularly light eyes glittering like steel under his black brows.

      Thus a little while in silence, then with a sudden gasp Lionel Tressilian sank back in his tall chair as if bereft of strength.

      The agate eyes flashed upon him smiling, cruelly.

      “I see that you, at least, I recognize me,” said Sakr-el-Bahr in his deep voice. “I was assured I could depend upon the eyes of brotherly love to pierce the change that time and stress have wrought in me.”

      Sir John was on his feet, his lean swarthy face flushing darkly, an oath on his lips. Rosamund sat on as if frozen with horror, considering Sir Oliver with dilating eyes, whilst her hands clawed the table before her. They too recognized him now, and realized that here was no mummery. That something sinister was intended Sir John could not for a moment doubt. But of what that something might be he could form no notion. It was the first time that Barbary rovers were seen in England. That famous raid of theirs upon Baltimore in Ireland did not take place until some thirty years after this date.

      “Sir Oliver Tressilian!” Killigrew gasped, and “Sir Oliver Tressilian!” echoed Lord Henry Goade, to add “By God!”

      “Not Sir Oliver Tressilian, came the answer, but Sakr-el-Bahr, the scourge of the sea, the terror of Christendom, the desperate corsair your lies, cupidity, and false-heartedness have fashioned out of a sometime Cornish gentleman.” He embraced them all in his denunciatory gesture. “Behold me here with my sea-hawks to present a reckoning long overdue.”

      Writing now of what his own eyes beheld, Lord Henry tells us how Sir John leapt to snatch a weapon from the armoured walls; how Sakr-el-Bahr barked out a single word in Arabic, and how at that word a half-dozen of his supple blackamoors sprang upon the knight like greyhounds upon a hare and bore him writhing to the ground.

      Lady Henry screamed; her husband does not appear to have done anything, or else modesty keeps him silent on the score of it. Rosamund, white to the lips, continued to look on, whilst Lionel, overcome, covered his face with his hands in sheer horror. One and all of them expected to see some ghastly deed of blood performed there, coldly and callously as the wringing of a capon’s neck. But no such thing took place. The corsairs merely turned Sir John upon his face, dragged his wrists behind him to make them fast, and having performed that duty with a speedy, silent dexterity they abandoned him.

      Sakr-el-Bahr watched their performance with those grimly smiling eyes of his. When it was done he spoke again and pointed to Lionel, who leapt up in sudden terror, with a cry that was entirely inarticulate. Lithe brown arms encircled him like a legion of snakes. Powerless, he was lifted in the air and borne swiftly away. For an instant he found himself held face to face with his turbaned brother. Into that pallid terror-stricken human mask the renegade’s eyes stabbed like two daggers. Then deliberately and after the fashion of the Muslim he was become he spat upon it.

      “Away!” he growled, and through the press of corsairs that thronged the hall behind him a lane was swiftly opened and Lionel was swallowed up, lost to the view of those within the room.

      “What murderous deed do you intend?” cried Sir John indomitably. He had risen and stood grimly dignified in his bonds.

      “Will you murder your own brother as you murdered mine?” demanded Rosamund, speaking now for the first time, and rising as she spoke, a faint flush coming to overspread her pallor. She saw him wince; she saw the mocking lustful anger perish in his face, leaving it vacant for a moment. Then it became grim again with a fresh resolve. Her words had altered all the current of his intentions. They fixed in him a dull, fierce rage. They silenced the explanations which he was come to offer, and which he scorned to offer here after that taunt.

      “It seems you love that—whelp, that thing that was my brother,” he said, sneering. “I wonder will you love him still when you come to be better acquainted with him? Though, faith, naught would surprise me in a woman and her love. Yet I am curious to see—curious to see.” He laughed. “I have a mind to gratify myself. I will not separate you—not just yet.”

      He advanced upon her. “Come thou with me, lady,” he commanded, and held out his hand.

      And now Lord Henry seems to have been stirred to futile action.

      “At that,” he writes, “I thrust myself between to shield her. ‘Thou dog,’ I cried, ‘thou shalt be made to suffer!’

      “‘Suffer?’ quoth he, and mocked me with his deep laugh. ‘I have suffered already. ‘Tis for that reason I am here.’

      “‘And thou shalt suffer again, thou pirate out of hell!’ I warned him. ‘Thou shalt suffer for this outrage as God’s my life!’

      “‘Shall I so?’ quoth he, very calm and sinister. ‘And at whose hands, I pray you?’

      “‘At mine, sir, I roared, being by now stirred to a great fury.

      “‘At thine?’ he sneered. ‘Thou’lt hunt the hawk of the sea? Thou? Thou plump partridge! Away! Hinder me not!”’

      And he adds that again Sir Oliver spoke that short Arabic command, whereupon a dozen blackamoors whirled the Queen’s Lieutenant aside and bound him to a chair.

      Face to face stood now Sir Oliver with Rosamund—face to face after five long years, and he realized that in every moment of that time the certainty had never departed from him of some such future meeting.

      “Come, lady,” he bade her sternly.

      A moment she looked at him with hate and loathing in the clear depths of her deep blue eyes. Then swiftly as lightning she snatched a knife from the board and drove it at his heart. But his hand moved as swiftly to seize her wrist, and the knife clattered to the ground, its errand unfulfilled.

      A shuddering sob escaped her then to express at once her horror of her own attempt and of the man who held her. That horror mounting until it overpowered her, she sank suddenly against him in a swoon.

      Instinctively his arms went round her, and a moment he held her thus, recalling the last occasion on which she had lain against his breast, on an evening five years and more ago under the grey wall of Godolphin Court above the river. What prophet could have told him that when next he so held her the conditions would be these? It was all grotesque and incredible, like the fantastic dream of some sick mind. But it was all true, and she was in his arms again.

      He shifted his grip to her waist, heaved her to his mighty shoulder, as though she were a sack of grain, and swung about, his business at Arwenack accomplished—indeed, more of it accomplished than had been his intent, and also something less.

      “Away, away!” he cried to his rovers, and away they sped as fleetly and silently as they had come, no man raising now so much as a voice to hinder them.

      Through the hall and across the courtyard flowed that human tide; out into the open and along the crest of the hill it surged, then away down the slope towards the beach where their boats awaited them. Sakr-el-Bahr ran as lightly as though the swooning woman he bore were no more than a cloak he had flung across his shoulder. Ahead of him went a half-dozen of his fellows carrying his gagged and pinioned brother.