Monsieur de Bernis shrugged, and sank back into his chair, quietly sipping his wine. His manner, faintly contemptuous, showed that he withdrew from the discussion. Captain Bransome took it up in his place.
'However it may have been, we've Sir Henry Morgan to thank for it that we can sail in safety now. That at least will be something to his credit.'
Major sneered. 'He's been constrained to it,' was his grudging admission. 'They've had him home once, and very nearly hanged him for the disloyal way in which he neglected the duty for which he was paid and commissioned. As if loyalty were to be looked for in such men. It was only that danger awakened him to the necessity to keep faith with those who had paid him in advance. I'll own that since then he seems to have gone more vigorously about the business of sweeping the seas clean. But that don't make me forget that it was he and his kind who fouled them.'
'Don't grudge him his due, Major,' Bransome pleaded. 'It's to be doubted if another could ha' done what he has done. It needed him with his own lads behind him to tackle the disorders afloat, and put an end to them.'
But the Major would not yield. In the heat of argument and exasperation he plunged recklessly into matters from which, yesterday, concern for Priscilla had made him steer them. 'Put an end to it? I seem to have heard of a buccaneering villain named Tom Leach who still goes roaring up and clown the Caribbean, setting Morgan at defiance.'
Bransome's face darkened. 'Tom Leach, aye. Rot his soul! But Morgan'll get him. It's known from Campeche to Trinidad and from Trinidad to the Bahamas that Morgan is offering five hundred pounds for the head of the last of the buccaneers.'
Monsieur de Bernis stirred. He set down his wine-glass.
'That is not a buccaneer, Captain. It offends me to hear you say it. Tom Leach is just a nasty pirate.'
'And that's the fact,' Bransome approved him. 'As wicked a cut-throat as was ever loose upon the seas. An inhuman beast, without honour and without mercy, making war upon all, and intent only upon robbery and plunder.'
And he fell to relating horrors of Leach's performance, until de Bernis raised a long graceful hand to check him.
'You nauseate Miss Priscilla.'
Made aware of her pallor, the Captain begged her pardon, and closed the subject with a prayer.
'God send that filthy villain may soon come to moorings in execution dock.'
Miss Priscilla intervened.
'You have talked enough of pirates,' she censured them, and rendered the Major at last aware of his enormity.
She leaned across to Monsieur de Bernis, smiling up at him, perhaps all the more sweetly because she desired to reward him for his admirable patience and self-restraint under provocation that had been gross. 'Monsieur de Bernis, will you not fetch your guitar, and sing to us again?'
The Frenchman rose to do her bidding, whilst Major Sands was left to marvel ill-humouredly that all that had been revealed touching this adventurer's abominable antecedents should have made so little impression upon the lady in his charge. Decidedly she was in urgent need of a season of the sedate dignity of English county life to bring the world into correct perspective to her eyes.
CHAPTER 4.
THE PURSUIT
The historical truth of the situation, as it concerned Sir Henry Morgan and the notorious Tom Leach, emerges so clearly from that conversation in the cabin of the Centaur that little remains to be added by a commentator.
Morgan had certainly been shaken up by the authorities at home for his lack of zeal in the prosecution of the task entrusted to him of exterminating the sea-brigands who infested the Caribbean. He had been admonished with more severity than justice; for, after all, in the short time that had elapsed since his own retirement from the Brotherhood of the Coast, he had wrought miracles in the discharge of the duty assumed. The very force of his example had in itself gone far. The very fact that he had ranged himself under the banners of law and order, with the consequent disbanding of the buccaneer fleet of which he had been the admiral, had compelled the men who had followed him to drift back gradually to the peaceful arts of logwood-cutting, planting, and boucanning proper. Many more had been induced to quit the seas by the general amnesty Morgan had been authorized to proclaim, backed by a grant of twenty-five acres of land to every filibuster who should choose to take advantage of it. Those who defiantly remained afloat he pursued so actively and relentlessly as to have deserved better of the Government than a reprimand and the threat of deposition and worse. Because in spite of his endeavours there were some sea-robbers who still eluded him, the authorities at home did not scruple to suggest that Morgan might be playing a double game and might be receiving tribute from those who still remained at large.
Sir Henry was not merely enraged by the insinuation; he was fearful of a solid indictment being built upon it which might end by depriving him of his head. It made the old pirate realize that in accepting a knighthood and the King's commission he had given stern hostages to Fortune. And whilst he may have cursed the one and the other, he addressed himself fearfully to the business of satisfying his terrible taskmasters. The business was rendered heavy by the lawless activities of his old associate Tom Leach, whom Major Sands had named. Tom Leach, as crafty a seaman as he was a brutal, remorseless scoundrel, had gathered about him a host of those buccaneers who were reluctant to forsake their old ways of life, and with these, in a powerful forty-gun ship, the Black Swan, he was in strength upon the Caribbean and wreaking fearful havoc. Being outlawed now, an Ishmael with every man's hand against him, he practised none of the old discrimination of the Brethren of the Coast, as the buccaneers had been called. He was just a brigand, making war upon every ship that sailed, and caring nothing what flag was flown by the vessels he captured, stripped, and sank.
For four anxious months, Morgan had been hunting him in vain, and so as to encourage others to hunt him, he had put the price of five hundred pounds upon the ruffian's head. Not only had Leach eluded him and grown ever more defiant in his depredations, but two months ago off Granada, when two ships of the Jamaica squadron had cornered him, he had delivered battle so successfully that he had sunk one of the Government frigates and disabled the other.
Well might Captain Bransome have uttered his prayer that this evil villain should soon come to moorings in execution dock. The following morning was to bring him the urgent dread that, if the prayer was to be answered at all, it was not likely to be answered in time to be of profit to the Centaur.
Going early on deck to take the air and summon his fellow passengers to breakfast, Monsieur de Bernis found the Captain on the poop, levelling a telescope at a ship some three or four miles away to eastward on their starboard quarter. Beside him stood Major Sands in his burnt-red coat and Miss Priscilla very dainty in a gown of lettuce-green with ivory lace that revealed the lissom beauty of her milk-white neck.
The wind which had veered to the north had freshened a little since dawn, and swept the ship with a grateful coolness. With topsails furled, and a considerable list to larboard, the Centaur was rippling through the sea on a course almost due west. She was still some leagues south-east of Ayes, and land was nowhere in sight.
The master lowered his telescope as de Bernis came up. Turning his head, and seeing the Frenchman, he first pointed with the glass, then proffered it.
'Tell me what you make of her, Mossoo.'
Monsieur de Bernis took the glass. He had not observed the grave look in Bransome's eyes, for he displayed no urgency in complying. He paused first to exchange a greeting with Miss Priscilla and the Major. But when at last he did bear the glass to his eye, he kept it there for an unconscionable time. When he lowered it, his countenance reflected the gravity worn by the Captain's. Even then he did not speak. He stepped deliberately to the side,