The Sea-Hawk (20 page)

He came forward smiling, his slender brown fingers combing his long beard, his white djellaba trailing behind him along the ground.

"Thou hast heard, not a doubt, O Fenzileh," said he. "Art thou answered enough?"

She sank down again upon her cushions and idly considered herself in a steel mirror set in silver.

"Answered?" she echoed lazily, with infinite scorn and a hint of rippling contemptuous laughter running through the word. "Answered indeed. Sakr-el-Bahr risks the lives of two hundred children of Islam and a ship that being taken was become the property of the State upon a voyage to England that has no object but the capturing of two slaves—two slaves, when, had his purpose been sincere, it might have been two hundred."

"Ha! And is that all that thou hast heard?" he asked her, mocking in his turn.

"All that signifies," she replied, still mirroring herself. "I heard as a matter of lesser import that on his return meeting fortuitously a Frankish ship that chanced to be richly laden he seized it in thy name."

"Fortuitously, sayest thou?"

"What else?" She lowered the mirror, and her bold, insolent eyes met his own quite fearlessly. "Thou'lt not tell me that it was any part of his design when he went forth?"

He frowned; his head sank slowly in thought. Observing the advantage gained she thrust it home.

"It was a lucky wind that blew that Dutchman into his path, and luckier still her being so richly fraught that he may dazzle thine eyes with the sight of gold and gems, and so blind thee to the real purpose of his voyage."

"Its real purpose?" he asked dully. "What was its real purpose?"

She smiled a smile of infinite knowledge to hide her utter ignorance, her inability to supply even a reason that should wear an air of truth.

"Dost ask me, O perspicuous Asad? Are not thine eyes as sharp, thy wits as keen at least as mine, that what is clear to me should be hidden from thee? Or hath this Sakr-el-Bahr bewitched thee with enchantments of Babyl?"

He strode to her and caught her wrist in a cruelly rough grip of his sinewy old hand.

"His purpose, thou jade! Pour out the foulness of thy mind. Speak!"

She sat up, flushed and defiant.

"I will not speak," said she.

"Thou wilt not? Now, by the Head of Allah! dost dare to stand before my face and defy me, thy lord? I'll have thee whipped, Fenzileh. I have been too tender of thee these many years—so tender that thou hast forgot the rods that await the disobedient wife. Speak then ere thy flesh is bruised or speak thereafter, at thy pleasure."

"I will not," she repeated. "Though I be flung to the hooks not another word will I say of Sakr-el-Bahr. Shall I unveil the truth to be spurned and scorned and dubbed a liar and the mother of lies?" Then abruptly changing she fell to weeping. "O source of my life!" she cried to
him, "how cruelly unjust to me art thou!" She was grovelling now, a thing of supplest grace, her lovely arms entwining his knees. "When my love for thee drives me to utter what I see I earn but thy anger, which is more than I can endure. I swoon beneath the weight of it."

He flung her off impatiently. "What a weariness is a woman's tongue!" he cried, and stalked out again, convinced from past experiences that did he linger he would be whelmed in a torrent of words.

But her poison was shrewdly administered, and slowly did its work. It abode in his mind to torture him with the doubts that were its very essence. No reason, however well founded, that she might have urged for Sakr-el-Bahr's strange conduct could have been half so insidious as her suggestion that there was a reason. It gave him something vague and intangible to consider. Something that he could not repel since it had no substance he could grapple with. Impatiently he awaited the morning and the coming of Sakr-el-Bahr himself, but he no longer awaited it with the ardent whole-hearted eagerness as of a father awaiting the coming of a beloved son.

Sakr-el-Bahr himself paced the poop deck of the carack and watched the lights perish one by one in the little town that straggled up the hillside before him. The moon came up and bathed it in a white hard light, throwing sharp inky shadows of rustling date palm and spear-like minaret, and flinging shafts of silver athwart the peaceful bay.

His wound was healed and he was fully himself once more. Two days ago he had come on deck for the first time since the fight with the Dutchman, and he had spent there the greater portion of the time since then. Once only had he visited his captives. He had risen from his couch to repair straight to the cabin in the poop where Rosamund was confined. He had found her pale and very wistful, but with her courage entirely unbroken. The Godolphins were a stiff-necked race, and Rosamund bore in her frail body the spirit of a man. She looked up
when he entered, started a little in surprise to see him at last, for it was the first time he stood before her since he had carried her off from Arwenack some four weeks ago. Then she had averted her eyes, and sat there, elbows on the table, as if carved of wood, as if blind to his presence and deaf to his words.

To the expressions of regret—and they were sincere, for already he repented him his unpremeditated act so far as she was concerned—she returned no slightest answer, gave no sign indeed that she heard a word of it. Baffled, he stood gnawing his lip a moment, and gradually, unreasonably perhaps, anger welled up from his heart. He turned and went out again. Next he had visited his brother, to consider in silence a moment the haggard, wild-eyed, unshorn wretch who shrank and cowered before him in the consciousness of guilt. At last he returned to the deck, and there, as I have said, he spent the greater portion of the last three days of that strange voyage, reclining for the most part in the sun and gathering strength from its ardour.

Tonight as he paced under the moon a stealthy shadow crept up the companion to call him gently by his English name—

"Sir Oliver!"

He started as if a ghost had suddenly leapt up to greet him. It was Jasper Leigh who hailed him thus.

"Come up," he said. And when the fellow stood before him on the poop—"I have told you already that here is no Sir Oliver. I am Oliver-Reis or Sakr-el-Bahr, as you please, one of the Faithful of the Prophet's House. And now what is your will?"

"Have I not served you faithfully and well?" quoth Captain Leigh.

"Who has denied it?"

"None. But neither has any acknowledged it. When you lay wounded below it had been an easy thing for me to ha' played the traitor. I might ha' sailed these ships into the mouth of Tagus. I might so, by God!"

"You'ld have been carved in pieces on the spot," said Sakr-el-Bahr.

"I might have hugged the land and run the risk of capture and then claimed my liberation from captivity."

"And found yourself back on the galleys of his Catholic Majesty. But there! I grant that you have dealt loyally by me. You have kept your part of the bond. I shall keep mine, never doubt it."

"I do not. But your part of the bond was to send me home again."

"Well?"

"The hell of it is that I know not where to find a home, I know not where home may be after all these years. If ye send me forth I shall become a wanderer of no account."

"What else am I to do with you?"

"Faith now, I am as full weary of Christians and Christendom as you was yourself when the Muslims took the galley on which you toiled. I am a man of parts, Sir Ol . . . Sakr-el-Bahr. No better navigator ever sailed a ship from an English port, and I ha' seen a mort o' fighting and know the art of it upon the sea. Can ye make naught of me here?"

"You would become a renegade like me?" His tone was bitter.

"I ha' been thinking that 'renegade' is a word that depends upon which side you're on. I 'ld prefer to say that I've a wish to be converted to the faith of Mahound."

"Converted to the faith of piracy and plunder and robbery upon the seas is what you mean," said Sakr-el-Bahr.

"Nay, now. To that I should need no converting, for all that I were afore," Captain Leigh admitted frankly. "I ask but to sail under another flag than the Jolly Roger."

"You'll need to abjure strong drink," said Sakr-el-Bahr.

"There be compensations," said Master Leigh.

Sakr-el-Bahr considered. The rogue's appeal smote a responsive chord in his heart. It would be good to have a man of his own race beside him, even though it were but such a rascal as this.

"Be it as you will," he said at last. "You deserve to be hanged in spite of what promises I made you. But no matter for that. So that you become a Muslim I will take you to serve beside me, one of my own lieutenants to begin with, and so long as you are loyal to me, Jasper, all will be well. But at the first sign of faithlessness a rope and the yard-arm, my friend, and an airy dance into hell for you."

The rascally skipper stooped in his emotion, caught up Sakr-el-Bahr's hand and bore it to his lips.

"It is agreed," he said. "Ye have shown me mercy who have little deserved it from you. Never fear for my loyalty. My life belongs to you, and worthless thing though it may be, ye may do with it as ye please."

Despite himself Sakr-el-Bahr tightened his grip upon the rogue's hand, and Jasper shuffled off and down the companion again, touched to the heart for once in his rough villainous life by a clemency that he knew to be undeserved, but which he swore should be deserved ere all was done.

CHAPTER VII

MARZAK-BEN-ASAD

I
T
took no less than forty camels to convey the cargo of that Dutch argosy from the mole to the Kasbah, and the procession—carefully marshalled by Sakr-el-Bahr, who knew the value of such pageants to impress the mob—was such as never yet had been seen in the narrow streets of Algiers upon the return of any corsair. It was full worthy of the greatest Muslim conqueror that sailed the seas, of one who, not content to keep to the tideless Mediterranean as had hitherto been the rule of his kind, had ventured forth upon the wider ocean.

Ahead marched a hundred of his rovers in their short caftans of every conceivable colour, their waists swathed in gaudy scarves, some of which supported a very arsenal of assorted cutlery; many wore body armour of mail and the gleaming spike of a casque thrust up above their turbans. After them, dejected and in chains, came the five score prisoners taken aboard the Dutchman, urged along by the whips of the corsairs who flanked them. Then marched another regiment of corsairs, and after these the long line of stately, sneering camels, shuffling cumbrously along and led by shouting Saharowis. After them followed yet more corsairs, and then, mounted on a white Arab jennet, his head swathed in a turban of cloth of gold, came Sakr-el-Bahr. In the narrower streets, with their white and yellow washed houses, which presented blank windowless walls broken here and there by no more than a slit to admit light and air, the spectators huddled themselves fearfully into doorways to avoid being
crushed to death by the camels, whose burdens bulging on either side entirely filled those narrow ways. But the more open spaces, such as the strand on either side of the mole, the square before the sôk, and the approaches of Asad's fortress, were thronged with a motley roaring crowd. There were stately Moors in flowing robes cheek by jowl with half-naked blacks from the Sus and the Draa; lean, enduring Arabs in their spotless white djellabas rubbed shoulders with Berbers from the highlands in black camel-hair cloaks; there were Levantine Turks, and Jewish refugees from Spain ostentatiously dressed in European garments, tolerated there because bound to the Moor by ties of common suffering and common exile from that land that once had been their own.

Under the glaring African sun this amazing crowd stood assembled to welcome Sakr-el-Bahr; and welcome him it did, with such vocal thunder that an echo of it from the mole reached the very Kasbah on the hill-top to herald his approach.

By the time, however, that he reached the fortress his procession had dwindled by more than half. At the sôk his forces had divided, and his corsairs, headed by Othmani, had marched the captives away to the bagnio—or banyard, as my Lord Henry calls it—whilst the camels had continued up the hill. Under the great gateway of the Kasbah they padded into the vast courtyard to be ranged along two sides of it by their Saharowi drivers, and there brought clumsily to their knees. After them followed but some two score corsairs as a guard of honour to their leader. They took their stand upon either side of the gateway after profoundly salaaming to Asad-ed-Din. The Basha sat in the shade of an awning enthroned upon a divan, attended by his wazeer Tsamanni and by Marzak, and guarded by a half-dozen janissaries, whose sable garments made an effective background to the green and gold of his jewelled robes. In his white turban glowed an emerald crescent.

The Basha's countenance was dark and brooding as he
watched the advent of that line of burdened camels. His thoughts were still labouring with the doubt of Sakr-el-Bahr which Fenzileh's crafty speech and craftier reticence had planted in them. But at sight of the corsair leader himself his countenance cleared suddenly, his eyes sparkled, and he rose to his feet to welcome him as a father might welcome a son who had been through perils in a service dear to both.

Sakr-el-Bahr entered the courtyard on foot, having dismounted at the gate. Tall and imposing, with his head high and his forked beard thrusting forward, he stalked with great dignity to the foot of the divan, followed by Ali and a mahogany-faced fellow, turbaned and red-bearded, in whom it needed more than a glance to recognize the rascally Jasper Leigh, now in all the panoply of your complete renegado.

Sakr-el-Bahr went down upon his knees and prostrated himself solemnly before his prince.

"The blessing of Allah and His peace upon thee, my lord," was his greeting.

And Asad, stooping to lift that splendid figure in his arms, gave him a welcome that caused the spying Fenzileh to clench her teeth behind the fretted lattice that concealed her.

"The praise to Allah and to our Lord Mahomet that thou art returned and in health, my son. Already hath my old heart been gladdened by the news of thy victories in the service of the Faith."