Читать книгу The West Wind - Crosbie Garstin - Страница 6

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Burnadick sat below, at the head of the dining-table, brooding, sucking a dead pipe. How the fellow had talked! And what talk! The East, Barbary, the Guinea Coast, the Antilles; cavalry charges, fleet actions, hurricanes and humming-birds—it reminded him of his own parrot house, a medley of barbaric colour shifting and flashing. There was not much he had missed in his forty odd years, this Ortho Penhale. A queer fish, part gypsy, part squire, earrings and riding boots, the one side uppermost, then the other. Sly yet generous, brutal yet oddly sympathetic, over-dressed, vain as a peacock, a swaggering blade—yet somehow likeable, attractive very. Burnadick smiled when he remembered that his sister had hardly been able to keep her eyes off the fellow throughout dinner—his austere Honor! A queer fish, an eternal contradiction, alternately admirable and disgusting. Was such a person fit to be entrusted with a letter of marque? Burnadick thought so. Mulatto pirates and Rif mountaineers were one thing, Frenchmen another. Civilized war was fought under fast rules. Penhale knew this as well as he did. Anyhow he had offered him the ship now. The chance must be taken.

Horse-coper, smuggler, slave in Barbary, captain of Arab lances, navy seaman, blackbirder—queer company for sleepy old Nancarrow! He glanced at the portraits of his ancestors, bare-shouldered dames with nosegays at their high bosoms, men in scarlet or blue, with glossy curled perukes or neat powdered wigs—what had they thought of this guest at their board, lounging in one chair, his spurred heel on another, cracking nuts with his teeth, this handsome adventurer in tarnished black and silver, with his tales of love and plunder, his scars, his oaths, his gay disarming laugh? What were their thoughts?

The painted faces gave no sign.

A spatter of driven rain tapped the window. A draught piped eerily in the chimney. Ten candle flames in the great silver candelabra bent to the right.

Burnadick cocked his head. The wind rising, the west wind, the sea wind, sharp with brine, laden with spindrift. Again the draught-pipe in the chimney. The wind murmured outside, a multitude of whispering voices.

To the cripple they were the ghosts of his fathers, those stout captains, bidding him up and defend his own, as they had done, calling him out: “Burnadick! Burnadick! The fleets are beating seaward. The guns are shotted. Where are you, son of ours? Where are you?”

He grasped the sides of his chair, hove himself erect striving by sheer will-power to drive strength into his withered legs. It was moving, his right foot, he felt it! By God, the spell was breaking! A little further—so! Chalk-white, the veins standing out on his forehead, the sweat beading from his brow, he let his weight drop slowly on his legs. They sagged under him like reeds. He crashed back in his chair a huddled heap. The wind voices rose again, beating on the window.

“No, I cannot come,” he groaned; then, jerking his head upwards, “Your man is yonder.”