Marjorie Page 27

  CHAPTER XXVII

  AN ILL TALE

  It was an ill tale which he had to tell, and he told it awkwardly, forhe was not a little confused and put about, both by his wound and by histreatment at the hands of those people. We gave him somewhat to eat anddrink, and he munched and sipped between sentences, for he had not faredwell with the pirates. We would have given him a change of raiment, too,after his ducking, but this he refused stiffly, saying that he was wellenough as he was, and that a wetting would not hurt him. And he wasindeed a strong, tough man.

  Much of what he had to tell us we knew, of course, already--of theappearance of Jensen on the island, of the attack upon the colonists andthe massacre of the most part of them. He himself had got his cut overthe head in the fight, a cut that knocked him senseless, so that by thetime he came to again the business was over and the pirates were mastersof the island.

  But he was able to tell us the thing we most wanted to know, the thingwhich the fugitives could give us no inkling of, and that was how itcame to pass that Jensen, whom we all deemed dead and drowned, shouldhave come so calamitously to life again.

  It was, it seemed, in this wise. Jensen, who united a madman's cunningto a bad man's daring, saw that my suspicions of him might prove fatalto his plans. Those plans had indeed been, as I had guessed, to seizethe Royal Christopher and make a pirate ship of her, with himself forher captain; and to that end he had manned the ship with men upon whomhe could rely, many of whom had been pirates before, all of whom werewilling to go to any lengths for the sake of plunder and pleasure. Butso long as our party were suspicious of him, and had arms in readinessto shoot him and his down at the first show of treachery, it was plainto a simpler man that his precious scheme stood every chance of comingto smoke.

  He guessed, therefore, that if we could be led to believe that he wasdead and done with our suspicions would be lulled, and he would be leftwith a fair field to carry out his plan. To that end he devised a schemeto befool us, and, having primed his party as to his purpose, hecarried it out with all success.

  It was no man's body that went overboard on that night, but merely amighty beam of wood that one of Jensen's confederates cast over thevessel's side just before he raised the cry of 'Man overboard!' Jensenhimself was snugly concealed in the innermost parts of the ship, wherehe lay close, laughing in his sleeve at us and our credulity. After weleft he came out of his hole and made his way to Early Island, as agreedupon with his companions, who, on his arrival, butchered the most of thecolonists.

  One mystery was disposed of. So was the other mystery--how Jensen andhis men came to be so well-armed and so gaily attired. When ourexpedition was preparing, Captain Marmaduke commissioned Jensen to buy astore of all manner of agricultural and household implements andutensils for the use of the young colony. Now, as such gear was notlikely to be of service to Jensen in his piracies, he was at pains toserve his own ends while he pretended to obey the Captain's commands.

  He had therefore made up and committed to the hold a quantity of caseswhich professed to contain what the Captain had commanded. But never aspade or pick, never a roasting-jack or flat-iron, never a string ofbeads or a mirror for barter with natives was to be found in all thoseboxes. If our colony had ever by any chance arrived at their goal theywould have found themselves in sore straits for the means of tilling theearth and of cooking their food.

  The boxes contained instead a great quantity of arms, such as musketsand pistols and cutlasses, together with abundance of ammunition in theshape of powder, bullets and shot. Others of those boxes containedgoodlier gear, for Jensen was a vain rogue as well as a clever rogue,and dearly loved brave colours about him and to make a gaudy show. Ibelieve that it was a passion for power and the pomp that accompaniespower more than anything else which drove him to be a pirate, and thatif he could have been, say, a great Minister of State, who is, afterall, often only another kind of pirate, he might have carried himselfvery well and been looked upon by the world at large as a very decent,public-spirited sort of fellow. I have known men in high office withjust such passion for display and dominion as Jensen, and I do not thinkthat there is much to choose between him and them in that regard.

  So sundry of those lying boxes were loaded with gay clothing, such asthose scarlet coats with which we had now made acquaintance, and whichwere fashioned on the pattern of those of the bodyguard of His Majesty,only much more flauntingly tricked out with gold lace and gildedbuttons. It added a shade of darkness to the treachery of this scoundrelthat he should thus presume to parade himself in a parody of such auniform.

  But besides all this there was yet another secret which those same falsecoffers concealed. He had dealings with shipbuilders at Haarlem, whowere noted for their ingenuity and address, and this firm had built forhim two large skiffs, which were made in such a fashion that the majorpart of them could be taken to pieces and the whole packed away in asmall space with safety and convenience for his purpose. These vesselswere as easily put together as taken to pieces, and were as serviceablea kind of boat as ever vessel carried. And so there was the rascal wellprepared to make sure of our ship.

  It makes my heart bleed now, after all these years, to think how thefellow deceived my dear patron, and how the Royal Christopher wentsailing the seas with that secret in her womb, and that we all walkedthose decks night after night and day after day, and never suspectedthe treason that lay beneath our feet.

  But we never did suspect it, and when the time came for us to leave theship in a hurry we had little thought in our minds of takingagricultural implements or household gear or articles of barter with us.So they lay there snugly in the hold, and Jensen with them, and Jensenwas busy and happy in his wicked way in getting at them, and in laughingas he did so over our folly in being deceived by him.

  It seems that after the departure of Lancelot and our little partycertain of the sailors, as agreed upon beforehand, made their way backto the ship, and in the dead of night transported the greater quantityof the weapons and ammunition. They put the skiffs together, too, andlowered them over the side. The camp had gone to rest when Jensen,shrieking like a fiend, leaped from his concealment among the trees andgave the signal for attack. The butchery was brief. The few men who werearmed found that their weapons had been rendered useless, but even iftheir murderers had not taken that precaution their victims could havemade no sort of a stand. They were taken by surprise. The horrible criesthat the pirates made as they rushed from their ambush helped todishearten the colonists, for they took those noises for the war-criesof savages, and they yielded to the panic. A very few escaped from theslaughter, and hid themselves in the woods in the centre of the island.The manner of their escape I have already related. It seemed from whatthe parson now told us that Jensen made little effort to pursue them,feeling confident that they must perish miserably from hunger andthirst, if not from wild beasts, in the jungle.

  The first use Jensen made of his triumph was to bring over to the islandfrom the wreck everything that he believed to be needful for the comfortand adornment of his person and the persons of his following. All thearms and ammunition that his malign thoughtfulness had provided, all thefine clothes that he had hidden away, all the store of wines and strongwaters that still remained upon the ship were carefully disembarked andbrought to Early Island. He dressed himself and his followers up in thesmart clothes that we had seen, called himself king of the island, madehis companions take a solemn oath of allegiance to him and sign it withtheir blood, and then they all gave themselves up to an orgie.

  For, bad as all this was to tell and to listen to, there was still worseto be told and heard. To treachery and bloodshed were added treacheryand lust. The cup of Jensen's iniquity was more than full. It ran overand was spilt upon the ground, crying out to Heaven for vengeance.

  There were, as you know, women among our colonists--not many, but stillsome, the wives of some of the settlers, the daughters and sisters ofothers. None of these were hurt when Jensen and his fellow-fiends m
adetheir attack--none of them, unhappily for themselves, were killed. Mycheeks blazed with shame and wrath as I listened to what the parson hadto say, and if Jensen had been before me I would have been rejoiced topistol him with my own hand.

  The women were parcelled out among the men as the best part of theirbooty. There was not a wickeder place on God's earth at that hour thanthe island, and its sins, as I thought, should be blotted out by athunderbolt from Heaven.

  Yet there is something still worse to come, as I take it. In all thisinfamy Jensen reserved for himself the privilege of a deeper degree ofinfamy. For he told Hatchett, it seems, that he must give up Barbara,and when Hatchett laughed in his face Jensen shot him dead where hestood and took her by force. Such was the terror the man inspired thatno one of all his fellows presumed to avenge Hatchett, or even toprotest against the manner of his death. As for the woman, as forBarbara, she was a strong woman, and she loved Hatchett with all herheart, and she fought, I believe, hard. But if she was strong, Jensenwas stronger, and merciless. He had everything his own way at theisland; he had his arts of taming people, and the parson told me that hehad tamed Barbara.

  I have had to set these wrongs down here for the sake of truth, and tojustify our final deeds against Jensen and his gang. I have set themdown as barely and as briefly as possible, for there are some things soterrible that they scarcely bear the telling. I cannot be moreparticular; the whole bad business was hideous in the extreme, with allthe hideousness that could come from a mind like Jensen's--a mindbegotten of the Bottomless Pit.

  But in all my sorrow I was grateful to Heaven that Marjorie had not beenleft upon that other island. Better for her to die here by the hand ofthe man who loved her than to have been on that island at the mercy ofsuch men. Thank God, thank God, thank God! I said to myself again andagain. I could say nothing more, I could think nothing more, only thankGod, thank God!