Rafael Sabatini - The Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

“If this wind holds,” he told them that night at supper, after he had announced to them their position, “we should reach Curacao inside three days.”

For three days the wind held, indeed it freshened a little on the second, and yet when the third night descended upon them they had still made no landfall. The Cinco Llagas was ploughing through a sea contained on every side by the blue bowl of heaven. Captain Blood uneasily mentioned it to Don Diego.

“It will be for to-morrow morning,” he was answered with calm conviction.

“By all the saints, it is always ‘to-morrow morning’ with you Spaniards; and to-morrow never comes, my friend.”

“But this to-morrow is coming, rest assured. However early you may be astir, you shall see land ahead, Don Pedro.”

Captain Blood passed on, content, and went to visit Jerry Pitt, his patient, to whose condition Don Diego owed his chance of life. For twenty-four hours now the fever had left the sufferer, and under Peter Blood’s dressings, his lacerated back was beginning to heal satisfactorily. So far, indeed, was he recovered that he complained of his confinement, of the heat in his cabin. To indulge him Captain Blood consented that he should take the air on deck, and so, as the last of the daylight was fading from the sky, Jeremy Pitt came forth upon the Captain’s arm.

Seated on the hatch-coamings, the Somersetshire lad gratefully filled his lungs with the cool night air, and professed himself revived thereby. Then with the seaman’s instinct his eyes wandered to the darkling vault of heaven, spangled already with a myriad golden points of light. Awhile he scanned it idly, vacantly; then, his attention became sharply fixed. He looked round and up at Captain Blood, who stood beside him.

“D’ye know anything of astronomy, Peter?” quoth he.

“Astronomy, is it? Faith, now, I couldn’t tell the Belt of Orion from the Girdle of Venus.”

“Ah! And I suppose all the others of this lubberly crew share your ignorance.”

“It would be more amiable of you to suppose that they exceed it.”

Jeremy pointed ahead to a spot of light in the heavens over the starboard bow. “That is the North Star,” said he.

“Is it now? Glory be, I wonder ye can pick it out from the rest.”

“And the North Star ahead almost over your starboard bow means that we’re steering a course, north, northwest, or maybe north by west, for I doubt if we are standing more than ten degrees westward.”

“And why shouldn’t we?” wondered Captain Blood.

“You told me—didn’t you?—that we came west of the archipelago between Tobago and Grenada, steering for Curacao. If that were our present course, we should have the North Star abeam, out yonder.”

On the instant Mr. Blood shed his laziness. He stiffened with apprehension, and was about to speak when a shaft of light clove the gloom above their heads, coming from the door of the poop cabin which had just been opened. It closed again, and presently there was a step on the companion. Don Diego was approaching. Captain Blood’s fingers pressed Jerry’s shoulder with significance. Then he called the Don, and spoke to him in English as had become his custom when others were present.

“Will ye settle a slight dispute for us, Don Diego?” said he lightly. “We are arguing, Mr. Pitt and I, as to which is the North Star.”

“So?” The Spaniard’s tone was easy; there was almost a suggestion that laughter lurked behind it, and the reason for this was yielded by his next sentence. “But you tell me Mr. Pitt he is your navigant?”

“For lack of a better,” laughed the Captain, good-humouredly contemptuous. “Now I am ready to wager him a hundred pieces of eight that that is the North Star.” And he flung out an arm towards a point of light in the heavens straight abeam. He afterwards told Pitt that had Don Diego confirmed him, he would have run him through upon that instant. Far from that, however, the Spaniard freely expressed his scorn.

“You have the assurance that is of ignorance, Don Pedro; and you lose. The North Star is this one.” And he indicated it.

“You are sure?”

“But my dear Don Pedro!” The Spaniard’s tone was one of amused protest. “But is it possible that I mistake? Besides, is there not the compass? Come to the binnacle and see there what course we make.”

His utter frankness, and the easy manner of one who has nothing to conceal resolved at once the doubt that had leapt so suddenly in the mind of Captain Blood. Pitt was satisfied less easily.

“In that case, Don Diego, will you tell me, since Curacao is our destination, why our course is what it is?”

Again there was no faintest hesitation on Don Diego’s part. “You have reason to ask,” said he, and sighed. “I had hope’ it would not be observe’. I have been careless—oh, of a carelessness very culpable. I neglect observation. Always it is my way. I make too sure. I count too much on dead reckoning. And so to-day I find when at last I take out the quadrant that we do come by a half-degree too much south, so that Curacao is now almost due north. That is what cause the delay. But we will be there to-morrow.”

The explanation, so completely satisfactory, and so readily and candidly forthcoming, left no room for further doubt that Don Diego should have been false to his parole. And when presently Don Diego had withdrawn again, Captain Blood confessed to Pitt that it was absurd to have suspected him. Whatever his antecedents, he had proved his quality when he announced himself ready to die sooner than enter into any undertaking that could hurt his honour or his country.

New to the seas of the Spanish Main and to the ways of the adventurers who sailed it, Captain Blood still entertained illusions. But the next dawn was to shatter them rudely and for ever.

Coming on deck before the sun was up, he saw land ahead, as the Spaniard had promised them last night. Some ten miles ahead it lay, a long coast-line filling the horizon east and west, with a massive headland jutting forward straight before them. Staring at it, he frowned. He had not conceived that Curacao was of such considerable dimensions. Indeed, this looked less like an island than the main itself.

Beating out aweather, against the gentle landward breeze he beheld a great ship on their starboard bow, that he conceived to be some three or four miles off, and—as well as he could judge her at that distance—of a tonnage equal if not superior to their own. Even as he watched her she altered her course, and going about came heading towards them, close-hauled.

A dozen of his fellows were astir on the forecastle, looking eagerly ahead, and the sound of their voices and laughter reached him across the length of the stately Cinco Llagas.

“There,” said a soft voice behind him in liquid Spanish, “is the Promised Land, Don Pedro.”

It was something in that voice, a muffled note of exultation, that awoke suspicion in him, and made whole the half-doubt he had been entertaining. He turned sharply to face Don Diego, so sharply that the sly smile was not effaced from the Spaniard’s countenance before Captain Blood’s eyes had flashed upon it.

“You find an odd satisfaction in the sight of it—all things considered,” said Mr. Blood.

“Of course.” The Spaniard rubbed his hands, and Mr. Blood observed that they were unsteady. “The satisfaction of a mariner.”

“Or of a traitor—which?” Blood asked him quietly. And as the Spaniard fell back before him with suddenly altered countenance that confirmed his every suspicion, he flung an arm out in the direction of the distant shore. “What land is that?” he demanded. “Will you have the effrontery to tell me that is the coast of Curacao?”

He advanced upon Don Diego suddenly, and Don Diego, step by step, fell back. “Shall I tell you what land it is? Shall I?” His fierce assumption of knowledge seemed to dazzle and daze the Spaniard. For still Don Diego made no answer. And then Captain Blood drew a bow at a venture—or not quite at a venture. Such a coast-line as that, if not of the main itself, and the main he knew it could not be, must belong to either Cuba or Hispaniola. Now knowing Cuba to lie farther north and west of the two, it followed, he reasoned swiftly, that if Don Diego meant betrayal he would steer for the nearer of these Spanish territories. “That land, you treacherous, forsworn Spanish dog, is the island of Hispaniola.”