Читать книгу Brethren of the Main - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 6

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Slowly and majestically the great red ship was now entering the bay, and already one or two pinnaces were putting off from the wharf to board her. From where he stood Mr. Blood could see the glint of the brass cannons mounted on the prow above her beak-head. And then another object interposed itself in his line of vision, and a furious voice assailed him.

"What the —— are you doing here?"

The returning Colonel Bishop strode through the opening in the Stockade, his negroes following.

"The duties of my office," answered Mr. Blood, bland as a Chinaman.

Before he had turned soldier of fortune; and again after some six or seven years of that roving life, Mr. Peter Blood had been a surgeon. Indeed, it was this that had undone him. Established at Bridgewater when Monmouth's army marched thither, he had been requisitioned to attend a wounded gentleman of the duke's immediate following.

Purely from motives of humanity he had gone, and purely from motives of humanity—having no interest, in or sympathy with the cause—he had remained to minister to other wounded. With them he had been taken prisoner after Sedgmoor. He had explained himself, but none had listened to him.

"And what for should I be out with the Protestant Champion, seeing that I'm a Papist bred?" he had asked Jeffreys, when he came to stand his trial for high treason.

But he had been browbeaten, silenced—no easy matter this—and finally sentenced to death. That sentence had finally been commuted to transportation. Slaves were urgently required in the plantations, and rebel convicts were cheaper than negroes.

Mr. Blood swore that he had performed his last service in the cause of humanity; nor could he have been induced to practise medicine in Barbados had he not discovered that by doing so he could mitigate a lot that must otherwise have proved unendurable. His services were lent from time to time by his master, Colonel Bishop, to other colonials; and it was thus that he had come to make that friend at Bridgtown who had served him in the matter of the sale of the merchandise from home.

The colonel, striding furiously forward; observed two things. The empty pannikin on the seat beside the prisoner and the palmetto leaf protecting his back. The veins of his forehead stood out like cords.

"Have you done this?"

"Of course I have." Mr. Blood seemed surprized.

"I said that he was to have neither meat nor drink until he—until I ordered it."

"Sure, now, I never heard you!" said Mr. Blood.

"You never heard me!" He looked as if he were about to strike the man. "How should you have heard me when you weren't there?"

"Then how did ye expect me to know what orders ye'd given? All I knew was that one of your slaves was being murdered by the heat of the sun and the flies. And says I to myself, this is one of the colonel's slaves, and I am the colonel's doctor, and sure it's my duty to be looking after the colonel's property. So I just gave the fellow a spoonful of water and covered his back from the sun. And wasn't I right now?"

"Right!" The colonel was speechless.

"Be easy now, be easy!" Mr. Blood implored him.. "It's an apoplexy ye'll be contracting if ye give way to heat like this. D'ye know, colonel darling, ye'll be the better for a blood-lettin', so ye would."

The planter thrust him aside with an imprecation, stepped up to the prisoner, and ripped the palmetto leaf from his back.

"In the name of humanity, now—" Mr. Blood was beginning.

"Out of this!" roared the colonel. "And don't you come near him again until I send for you unless you want to be served in the same way."

He was terrific in his menace, in his bulk and in the power of him. But Mr. Blood never flinched. Aforetime the colonel had found him a difficult man to cow. He remembered it now, as he found himself steadily regarded by those light-blue eyes that looked so arrestingly odd in that tawny face—like pale sapphires set in copper. And he swore to himself that he would mend the fellow's impudence. Meanwhile, Mr. Blood was speaking, his tone quietly insistent.

"In the name of humanity," he repeated, "ye'll allow me to do what I can to help; his sufferings, or I swear to you that I'll forsake at once the duties of doctor, and —— another sufferer will I 'tend in this unhealthy island at all. And I'll be reminding you that your own lady is mortal sick this minute with the fever."

"By ——, you dog! D'ye dare to take that tone? D'ye dare make terms with me?"

"I do that." The unflinching glance squarely met the planter's eyes, that were blood-injected, and yellowish in the whites.

Colonel Bishop considered him for a long moment in silence.

"I've been too soft with you," he said at last. "But that's to be mended." And he tightened his lips. "I'll have the rods to you until there's not an inch of skin to your dirty back."

"Will ye so? And what would your lady do then?"

"Ye're not the only doctor on the island."

Mr. Blood actually laughed.

"And will ye tell that to Governor Creed that's got the gout in his foot so that he can't stand? Ye know very well it's —— another doctor but myself will the governor tolerate at all, being an intelligent man and knowing what's good for him."

But the colonel's brute passion, thoroughly aroused, was not to be balked so easily.

"If ye're alive when my blacks have one with you, perhaps you'll come to your senses." He swung to his negroes. "Make him fast, and let him have a hundred lashes so that—"

The rest of his command was never uttered. At that moment a terrific rolling thunder-clap drowned his voice and shook the very air. Colonel Bishop jumped, the negroes jumped with him, and so did Mr. Blood. Then the four of them stared together seaward.

Down in the bay all that could be seen of the great ship, standing now within a cable's length of the sort, were her top-masts emerging from a cloud of smoke in which she was enveloped. From the cliffs about the bay a flight of startled sea-birds had risen to circle in the blue, giving tongue to their alarm, the plaintive curlew noisiest of all.