No Defense Part 18

He had had his high moment with the French admiral, had given his commands to the fleet and had arranged the disposition of the captured French ships. He was in good spirits, and the wreckage in the fleet seemed not to shake his nerve, for he had lost in men far less than the enemy, and had captured many ships--a good day's work, due finally to the man in sailor's clothes standing there with Captain Ivy. The admiral took in the dress of Calhoun at a glance--the trousers of blue cloth, the sheath-knife belt, the stockings of white silk, the white shirt with the horizontal stripes, the loose, unstarched, collar, the fine black silk handkerchief at the throat, the waistcoat of red kerseymere, the shoes like dancing-pumps, and the short, round blue jacket, with the flat gold b.u.t.tons--a seaman complete. He smiled broadly; he liked this mutineer and ex-convict.

"Captain Calhoun, eh!" he remarked mockingly, and bowed satirically.

"Well, you've played a strong game, and you've plunged us into great difficulty."

Dyck did not lose his opportunity. "Happily, I've done what I planned to do when we left the Thames, admiral," he said. "We came to get the chance of doing what, by favour of fate, we have accomplished. Now, sir, as I'm under arrest, and the ship which I controlled has done good service, may I beg that the Ariadne's personnel shall have amnesty, and that I alone be made to pay--if that must be--for the mutiny at the Nore."

The admiral nodded. "We know of your breaking away from the mutinous fleet, and of their firing on you as you pa.s.sed, and that is in your favour. I can also say this: that bringing the ship here was masterly work, for I understand there were no officers on the Ariadne. She always had the reputation of being one of the best-trained ships in the navy, and she has splendidly upheld that reputation. How did you manage it, Mr. Calhoun?"

Dyck briefly told how the lieutenants were made, and how he himself had been enormously indebted to Greenock, the master of the ship, and all the subordinate officers.

The admiral smiled sourly. "I have little power until I get instructions from the Admiralty, and that will take some time. Meanwhile, the Ariadne shall go on as she is, and as if she were--and had been from the first, a member of my own squadron."

Dyck bowed, explained what reforms he had created in the food and provisions of the Ariadne, and expressed a hope that nothing should be altered. He said the ship had proved herself, chiefly because of his reforms.

"Besides, she's been badly hammered. She's got great numbers of wounded and dead, and for many a day the men will be busy with repairs."

"For a man without naval experience, for a mutineer, an ex-convict and a usurper, you've done quite well, Mr. Calhoun; but my instructions were, if I captured your ship, and you fell into my hands, to try you, and hang you."

At this point Captain Ivy intervened.

"Sir," he said, "the instructions you received were general. They could not antic.i.p.ate the special service which the Ariadne has rendered to the king's fleet. I have known Mr. Calhoun; I have visited at his father's house; I was with him on his journey to Dublin, which was the beginning of his bad luck. I would beg of you, sir, to give Mr. Calhoun his parole on sea and land until word comes from the Admiralty as to what, in the circ.u.mstances, his fate shall be."

"To be kept on the Beat.i.tude on parole!" exclaimed the admiral.

"Land or sea, Captain Ivy said. I'm as well-born as any man in the king's fleet," declared Dyck. "I've as clean a record as any officer in his majesty's navy, save for the dark fact that I was put in prison for killing a man; and I will say here, in the secrecy of an admiral's cabin, that the man I killed--or was supposed to kill--was a traitor. If I did kill him, he deserved death by whatever hand it came. I care not what you do with me"--his hands clenched, his shoulders drew up, his eyes blackened with the dark fire of his soul--"whether you put me on parole, or try me by court-martial, or hang me from the yard-arm. I've done a piece of work of which I'm not ashamed. I've brought a mutinous ship out of mutiny, sailed her down the seas for many weeks, disciplined her, drilled her, trained her, fought her; helped to give the admiral of the West Indian squadron his victory. I enlisted; I was a quota man. I became a common sailor--I and my servant and friend, Michael Clones. I shared the feelings of the sailors who mutinied. I wrote pet.i.tions and appeals for them. I mutinied with them. Then at last, having been made leader of the ship, with the captain and the lieutenants sent safely ash.o.r.e, and disagreeing with the policy of the Delegates in not accepting the terms offered, I brought the ship out, commanding it from the captain's cabin, and have so continued until to-day. If I'm put ash.o.r.e at Jamaica, I'll keep my parole; if I stay a prisoner here, I'll keep my parole. If I've done you service, admiral, be sure of this, it was done with clear intent. My object was to save the men who, having mutinied and fled from Admiralty control, are subject to capital punishment."

"Your thinking came late. You should have thought before you mutinied,"

was the sharp reply.

"As a common sailor I acted on my conscience, and what we asked for the Admiralty has granted. Only by mutiny did the Admiralty yield to our demands. What I did I would do again! We took our risks in the Thames against the guns that were levelled at us; we've taken our risks down here against the French to help save your squadron, and we've done it.

The men have done it, because they've been loyal to the flag, and from first to last set to make the Admiralty and the people know they have rights which must be cherished. If all your men were as faithful to the Crown as are the men on the Ariadne, then they deserve well of the King.

But will you put for me on paper the written word that every man now aboard the Ariadne shall be held guiltless in the eyes of the admiral of this fleet; that the present officers shall remain officers, that the reforms I have made shall become permanent? For myself, I care not; but for the men who have fought under me, I want their amnesty. And I want Michael Clones to be kept with me, and Greenock, the master, and Ferens, the purser, to be kept where they are. Admiral, I think you know my demands are just. Over there on the Ariadne are a hundred and fifty wounded at least, and fifty have been killed. Let the living not suffer."

"You want it all on the nail, don't you?"

"I want it at this moment when the men who have fought under me have helped to win your battle, sir." There was something so set in Dyck's voice that the admiral had a sudden revulsion against him, yet, after a moment of thought, he made a sign to Captain Ivy. Then he dictated the terms which Dyck had asked, except as to the reforms he had made, which was not in his power to do, save for the present.

When the doc.u.ment had been signed by the admiral, Dyck read the contents aloud. It embodied nearly all he had asked.

"Now I ask permission for one more thing only, sir--for the new captain of the Ariadne to go with me to her, and there I will read this paper to the crew. I will give a copy of it to the new captain, whoever he may be."

The admiral stood for a moment in thought. Then he said:

"Ivy, I transfer you to the Ariadne. It's better that some one who understands, as you do, should be in control after Calhoun has gone.

Go with him now, and have your belongings sent to you. I appoint you temporary captain of the Ariadne, because I think no one could deal with the situation there so wisely. Ivy, every ship in the squadron must treat the Ariadne respectfully. Within two days, Mr. Calhoun, you shall be landed at Jamaica, there to await the Admiralty decree. I will say this: that as the sure victory of our fleet has come through you, you shall not suffer in my report. Fighting is not an easy trade, and to fight according to the rules is a very hard trade. Let me ask you to conduct yourself as a prisoner of war on parole."

CHAPTER XVI. A LETTER

With a deep sigh, the planter raised his head from the table where he was writing, and looked out upon the lands he had made his own. They lay on the Thomas River, a few hours' horseback travelling from Spanish Town, the capital, and they had the advantage of a plateau formation, with mountains in the far distance and ravines everywhere.

It was Christmas Day, and he had done his duty to his slaves and the folk on his plantation. He had given presents, had attended a seven o'clock breakfast of his people, had seen festivities of his negroes, and the feast given by his manager in Creole style to all who came--planting attorneys, buccras, overseers, bookkeepers, the subordinates of the local provost-marshal, small planters, and a few junior officers of the army and navy.

He had turned away with cynicism from the overladen table, with its shoulder of stewed wild boar in the centre; with its chocolate, coffee, tea, spruce-beer, ca.s.sava-cakes, pigeon-pies, tongues, round of beef, barbecued hog, fried conchs, black crab pepper-pod, mountain mullet, and acid fruits. It was so unlike what his past had known, so "d.a.m.nable luxurious!" Now his eyes wandered over the s.p.a.ce where were the grandilla, with its blossom like a pa.s.sion-flower, the black Tahiti plum, with its bright pink ta.s.sel-blossom, and the fine mango trees, loaded half with fruit and half with bud. In the distance were the guinea cornfields of brownish hue, the cotton-fields, the long ranges of negro houses like thatched cottages, the penguin hedges, with their beautiful red, blue, and white convolvuluses; the lime, logwood, and breadfruit trees, the avocado-pear, the feathery bamboo, and the jack-fruit tree; and between the mountains and his own sugar-estates, negro settlements and pens. He heard the flight of parrots chattering, he watched the floating humming-bird, and at last he fixed his eyes upon the cabbage tree down in the garden, and he had an instant desire for it. It was a natural and human taste--the cabbage from the tree-top boiled for a simple yet sumptuous meal.

He liked simplicity. He did not, as so many did in Jamaica, drink claret or punch at breakfast soon after sunrise. In a land where all were bon-vivants, where the lowest tradesmen drank wine after dinner, and rum, brandy and water, or sangaree in the forenoon, a somewhat lightsome view of table-virtues might have been expected of the young unmarried planter. For such was he who, from the windows of his "castle," saw his domain shimmering in the sun of a hot December day.

It was Dyck Calhoun.

With an impatient air he took up the sheets that he had been reading.

Christmas Day was on his nerves. The whole town of Kingston, with its twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants, had but one church. If he entered it, even to-day, he would have seen no more than a hundred and fifty to two hundred people; mostly mulattoes--"bronze ornaments"--and peasants in s.h.a.g trousers, jackets of coa.r.s.e blue cloth, and no waistcoats, with one or two magistrates, a dozen gentlemen or so, and probably twice that number of ladies. It was not an island given over to piety, or to religious habits.

Not that this troubled Dyck Calhoun; nor, indeed, was he shocked by the fact that nearly every unmarried white man in the island, and many married white men, had black mistresses and families born to the black women, and that the girls had no married future. They would become the temporary wives of white men, to whom they were on the whole faithful and devoted. It did not even vex him that a wretched mulatto might be whipped in the market-square for laying his hands upon a white man, and that if he was a negro-slave he could be shot for the same liberty.

It all belonged to the abnormal conditions of an island where black and white were in relations impossible in the countries from which the white man had come. It did not even startle Dyck that all the planters, and the people generally in the island, from the chief justice and custos rotulorum down to the deckswabber, cultivated amplitude of living.

But let Dyck tell his own story. The papers he held were sheets of a letter he was writing to one from whom he had heard nothing since the night he enlisted in the navy, and that was nearly three years before.

This was the letter:

MY DEAR FRIEND:

You will see I address you as you have done me in the two letters I have had from you in the past. You will never read this letter, but I write it as if you would. For you must know I may never hope for personal intercourse with you. I was imprisoned for killing your father, Erris Boyne, and that separates us like an abysss. It matters little whether I killed him or not; the law says I did, and the law has taken its toll of me. I was in prison for four years, and when freed I enlisted in the king's navy, a quota man, with my servant-friend, Michael Clones. That was the beginning of painful and wonderful days for me. I was one of the mutineers of the Nore, and--

Here followed a description of the days he had spent on the Ariadne and before, and of all that happened down to the time when he was arrested by the admiral in the West Indian Sea. He told how he was sent over to the Ariadne with Captain Ivy to read the admiral's letter to the seamen, and then, by consent of the admiral, to leave again with Michael Clones for Jamaica, where he was set ash.o.r.e with twenty pounds in his pocket--and not on parole, by the admiral's command. Here the letter shall again take up the story, and be a narrative of Dyck Calhoun's life from that time until this Christmas Day.

What to do was the question. I knew no one in Jamaica--no one at all except the governor, Lord Mallow, and him I had fought with swords in Phoenix Park five years before. I had not known he was governor here. I came to know it when I first saw him riding over the unpaved street into Kingston from Spanish Town with his suite, ornate with his governorship. He was a startling figure in scarlet, with huge epaulets on his lieutenant-general's uniform, as big a pot as ever boiled on any fire-chancellor, head of the government and of the army, master of the legislature, judging like one o'clock in the court of chancery, controller of the affairs of civil life, and maker of a policy of which he alone can judge who knows what interests clash in the West Indies.

English, French, Spanish, and Dutch are all hereabout. All struggle for place above the other in the world of commerce and society, though chiefly it is the English versus the French in these days; and the policy of the governor is the policy of the country. He never knows whether there will be a French naval descent or whether the blacks in his own island will do as the blacks in St. Domingo did--ma.s.sacre the white people in thousands. Or whether the free blacks, the Maroons, who got their freedom by treaty with Governor Trelawney, when the British commander changed hats with Cudjoe, the Maroon chief, as the sealing of the bargain--whether they will rise again, as they before have risen, and bring terror into the white settlement; and whether, in that case, all negro-slaves will join them, and Jamaica become a land of revolution.

Of what good, then, will be the laws lately pa.s.sed regulating the control of slaves, securing them rights never given before, even forbidding lashes beyond forty-nine! Of what use, then, the punishment of owners who have ill-used the slaves? The local councils who have power to punish never proceed against white men with rigour; and to preserve a fair balance between the white man up above and the black down below is the responsibility of the fair- minded governor. If, like Mallow, he is not fair-minded, then is the lash the heavier, and the governor has burdens greater than could easily be borne in lands where the climate is more friendly.

Lord Mallow did not see me when I pa.s.sed him in the street, but he soon came to know of me from the admiral and Captain Ivy, who told him all my story since I was freed from jail. Then he said I should be confined in a narrow s.p.a.ce near to Kingston, and should have no freedom; but the admiral had his way, and I was given freedom of the whole island till word should come from the Admiralty what should be done with me. To the governor's mind it was dangerous allowing me freedom, a man convicted of crime, who had been imprisoned, had been a mutineer, had stolen one of his majesty's ships, and had fled to the Caribbean Sea. He thought I should well be at the bottom of the ocean, where he would soon have put me, I make no doubt, if it had not been for the admiral, and Captain Ivy--you do not know him, I think--who played a good part to me, when men once close friends have deserted me.

Well, we had, Michael and I, but twenty pounds between us; and if there was not plenty of free food in the island, G.o.d knows what would have become of us! But there it was, fresh in every field, by every wayside, at every doorway. We could not starve, or die of thirst, or faint for lack of sleep, since every bush was a bed in spite of the garapatos or wood-ticks, the snore of the tree-toad, the hoa.r.s.e shriek of the macaw, and the shrill gird of the guinea- fowl. Every bed was thus free, and there was land to be got for a song, enough to grow what would suffice for two men's daily wants.

But we did not rest long upon the land--I have it still, land which cost me five pounds out of the twenty, and for the rest there was an old but on the little place--five acres it was, and good land too, where you could grow anything at all. Heaven knows what we might have become in that tiny plantation, for I was sick of life, and the mosquitos and flying ants, and the chattering parroquets, the grim gallinazo, and the quatre, or native bed--a wooden frame and canvas; but one day at Kingston I met a man, one Ca.s.sandro Biatt, who had an obsession for adventure, and he spoke to me privately. He said he knew me from people's talk, and would I listen to him? What was there to do? He was a clean-cut rogue, if ever there was one, but a rogue of parts, as he proved; and I lent an ear.

Now, what think you was his story? Well, but this--that off the coast of Haiti, there was a ship which had been sunk with every man on board, and with the ship was treasure without counting-jewels belonging once to a Spaniard of high place, who was taking them to Paris. His box had been kept in the captain's cabin, and it could be found, no doubt, and brought to the surface. Even if that were not possible, there was plenty of gold on the ship, and every piece of it was good money. There had been searching for the ship, but none had found it; but he, Ca.s.sandro Biatt, had sure knowledge, got from an obi-man, of the place where it lay. It would not be an expensive business, but, cheap as it was, he had no means of raising cash for the purpose; while I could, no doubt, raise the needed money if I set about it. That was how he put it to me. Would I do it? It was not with me a case of "no shots left in the locker, no copper to tinkle on a tombstone." I was not down to my last macaroni, or quarter-dollar; but I drank some sangaree and set about to do it. I got my courage from a look towards Rodney's statue in its temple--Rodney did a great work for Jamaica against Admiral de Gra.s.se.

Why should I tell Biatt the truth about myself? He knew it.

Ca.s.sandro was an accomplished liar, and a man of merit of his kind.

This obi-man's story I have never believed; yet how Biatt came to know where that treasure-ship was I do not know now.

Yes, out we went through the harbour of Kingston, beyond the splendid defences of Port Royal and the men-of-war there, past the Palisadoes and Rock Fort, and away to the place of treasure-trove.

We found it--that lost galleon; and we found the treasure-box of the captain's cabin. We found gold too; but the treasure-box was the chief thing; and we made it ours after many a hard day. Three months it was from the day Biatt first spoke to me to the day when, with an expert diver, we brought the box to the surface and opened it.

How I induced one of the big men of Jamaica to be banker and skipper for us need not be told; but he is one of whom men have dark sayings--chiefly, I take it, because he does bold, incomprehensible things. That business paid him well, for when the rent of the ship was met, and the few men on it paid--slaves they were chiefly--he pocketed ten thousand pounds, while Biatt and I each pouched forty thousand, and Michael two thousand. Aye, to be sure, Michael was in it! He is in all I do, and is as good as men of ten times his birth and history. Michael will be a rich man one day. In two years his two thousand have grown to four, and he misses no chance.