The sailors fell back to make way for us. It was only by the touch of her hand on my arm that I had any hope that she trusted me, me personally, and apart from the commands of the dead Carlos; the dead father, and the great weight of her dead traditions that could be never anything any more for her—except a memory. Ah, she stood it very well; her head was erect and proud. The cabin door opened, and a rigid female figure with dry outlines, and a smooth head, stood out with severe simplicity against the light of the cabin door. The light falling on Seraphina seemed to show her for the first time. A lamentable voice bellowed:
“Señorita! … Señorita!” and then, in an insinuating, heartbreaking tone, “Señorita! …”
She walked quietly past the figure of the woman, and disappeared in the brilliant light of the cabin. The door closed. I remained standing there. Manuel, at her disappearance, raised his voice to a tremendous, incessant yell of despair, as if he expected to make her hear.
“Señorita … proteccion del opprimido; oh, hija de piedad … Señorita.”
His lamentable noise brought half the ship round us; the sailors fell back before the mate, Sebright, walking at the elbow of a stout man in loose trousers and jacket. They stopped.
“An unexpected meeting, Captain Williams,” was all I found to say to him. He had a constrained air, and shook hands in awkward silence.
“How do you do?” he said hurriedly. After a moment he added, with a sort of confused, as if official air, “I hope, Kemp, you’ll be able to explain satisfactorily …”
I said, rather offhandedly, “Why, the two men I killed ought to be credentials enough for all immediate purposes!”
“That isn’t what I meant,” he said. He spoke rather with a mumble, and apologetically. It was difficult to see in him any trace of the roystering Williams who had roared toasts to my health in Jamaica, after the episode at the Ferry Inn with the admiral. It was as if, now, he had a weight on his mind. I was tired. I said:
“Two dead men is more than you or any of your crew can show. And, as far as I can judge, you did no more than hold your own till I came.”
He positively stuttered, “Yes, yes. But …”
I got angry with what seemed stupid obstinacy.
“You’d be having a rope twisted tight round your head, or red-hot irons at the soles of your feet, at this very moment, if it had not been for us,” I said indignantly.
He wiped his forehead perplexedly. “Phew, how you do talk!” he remonstrated. “What I mean is that my wife …” He stopped again, then went on. “She took it into her head to come with me this voyage. For the first time. … And you two coming alone in an open boat like this! It’s what she isn’t used to.”
I simply couldn’t get at what he meant; I couldn’t even hear him very well, because Manuel-del-Popolo was still calling out to Seraphina in the cabin. Williams and I looked at each other—he embarrassed, and I utterly confounded.
“Mrs. Williams thinks it’s irregular,” Sebright broke in, “you and your young lady being alone—in an open boat at night, and that sort of thing. It isn’t what they approve of at Bristol.”
Manuel suddenly bellowed out, “Señorita—save me from their barbarity. I am a victim. Behold their bloody knives ready—and their eyes which gloat.”
He shrank convulsively from the fellow with the bundle of cutlasses under his arm, who innocently pushed his way close to him; he threw himself forward, the two sailors hung back on his arms, nearly sitting on the deck, and he strained doglike in his intense fear of immediate death. Williams, however, really seemed to want an answer to his absurdity that I could not take very seriously. I said:
“What do you expect us to do? Go back to our boat, or what?”
It seemed to affect him a good deal. “Wait till you are caught by a good woman yourself,” he mumbled wretchedly.
Was this the roystering Williams? The jolly good fellow? I wanted to laugh, a little hysterically, because of the worry after great fatigue. Was his wife such a terrifying virago? “A good woman,” Williams insisted. I turned my eyes to Sebright, who looked on amusedly.
“It’s all right,” he answered my questioning look. “She’s a good soul, but she doesn’t see fellows like us in the congregation she worships with at home.” Then he whispered in my ear, “Owner’s niece. Older than the skipper. Married him for love. Suspects every woman—every man, too, by George, except me, perhaps. She’s learned life in some back chapel in Bristol. What can you expect? You go straight into the cabin,” he added.
At that moment the cabin door opened again, and the figure of the woman I had seen before reappeared against the light.
“I was allowed to stand under the gate of the Casa, Excellency, I was in very truth. Oh, turn not the light of your face from me.” Manuel, who had been silent for a minute, immediately recommenced his clamour in the hope, I suppose, that it would reach Seraphina’s ears, now the door was opened.
“What is to be done, Owen?” the woman asked, with a serenity I thought very merciless.
She had precisely the air of having someone “in the house,” someone rather questionable that you want, at home, to get rid of, as soon as a very small charity permitted.
“Madam,” I said rather coldly, “I appeal to your woman’s compassion. …”
“Even thus the arch-enemy sets his snares,” she retorted on me a little tremulously.
“Señorita, I have seen you grow,” Manuel called again. “Your father, who is with the saints, gave me alms when I was a boy. Will you let them kill a man to whom your father …”
“Snares. All snares. Can she be blessed in going away from her natural guardians at night, alone, with a young man? How can we, consistently with our duty …”
Her voice was cold and gentle.
