Читать книгу Brethren of the Main - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 11

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Don Diego Valdez awoke, and with languid eyes in aching head he looked around the sunlit cabin. Then he closed his eyes again, and endeavored to think. But between the pain in his head and the confusion that he discovered in his mind, he found thought almost impossible.

An indefinite sense of alarm drove him to consider his surroundings yet again. There could be no doubt that he lay in the roundhouse of his own ship, the Cinco Llagas, so that his disquiet must be ill-founded.

And yet stirrings of memory coming now to the assistance of reflection compelled him uneasily to insist that here something was not as it should be. The position of the sun, flooding the cabin with golden light from the square window astern, suggested that it was early morning, unless indeed they were sailing eastward, in which case it would be late afternoon.

That they were sailing he could feel from the gentle forward heave of the vessel under him. And how did they come to be sailing, and he, the master, not to know whether their course lay east or west, not to be able to recollect whither they were bound?

His mind went back over the adventure of yesterday, if of yesterday it was. He was clear oh the matter of the easily successful raid upon the Island of Barbados; every detail of it stood vividly in his memory up to the moment at which, returning aboard, he had stepped on to the deck.

He had brought the ransom of a hundred thousand pieces of eight, wrung from the defeated islanders, and his men had been following in eight boats that were laden also with plunder and provisions. That much he clearly remembered. But there memory abruptly ceased. It was as if he had fallen asleep at the moment of stepping from the ladder to the deck.

He was beginning to torture his mind with conjecture when the door opened, and to Don Diego's increasing mystification he beheld his best suit of clothes step into the cabin. It was a singularly elegant and characteristically Spanish suit of black taffeta with silver lace that had been made for him a year ago in Cadiz, and he knew each detail of it so well that it was impossible he could be mistaken.

The suit paused to close the door, then advanced toward the couch on which Don Diego was extended; and inside the suit came Mr. Peter Blood, a tall, slender gentleman of about Don Diego's own height and shape... Seeing the wide, startled eyes of the Spaniard upon him, Mr. Blood lengthened his stride.

"Awake, eh?" said he in Spanish.

The recumbent man looked up, bewildered, into a pair of light-blue eyes that regarded him out of a tawny, sardonic face set in a duster of black ringlets.

Mr. Blood's fingers touched the top of Don Diego's head, whereupon Don Diego winced and cried out in pain.'

"Tender, eh?" said Mr. Blood.

He took Don Diego's wrist between thumb and second finger. And then at last the Spaniard spoke.

"Are you a doctor?"

"Among other things," was the cryptic answer.

Mr. Blood continued his study of the patient's pulse.

"A trifle intermittent," said he, and dropped the wrist.

Don Diego struggled up into a sitting position on the red-velvet couch.

"Who the —— are you?" he asked. "And what the —— are you doing in my clothes and aboard my ship?"

The level, black eyebrows went up.

"You are still delirious, I fear. This is not your ship. This is my ship, and these are my clothes."

"Your ship?" quoth the other, aghast; and, still more aghast, he added:

"Your clothes? But—Then—"

He stared, his eyes wild. Then he looked round the cabin once again, scrutinizing each familiar object.

"Am I mad?" he asked at last. "Surely this ship is the Cinco Llagas?"

"The Cinco Llagas it is."

"Then—"

The Spaniard broke off. His glance grew still more troubled.

"Valga me Dios!" he cried out like a man in anguish. "Will you tell me also that you are Don Diego Valdez?"

"Oh, no; my name is Blood—Captain Peter Blood. This ship, like this handsome suit of clothes, is mine by right of conquest. Just as you, Don Diego, are my prisoner."