CHAPTER VII
IN WHICH JUAN RODRIQUEZ TAKES HIS REVENGE
THE voyage of the Concepcion, thus inauspiciously begun, continued with fair weather upon the sea and squalls threatening aboard the ship. Doña Julia spent much time in her oddly-equipped cabin; Don Rodrigo, impatient of delay, fretted at the tedium of the passage and paced the poop restlessly for hours at a time. Between Juan Rodriquez and Captain Hernandez a sullen truce was maintained for several weeks succeeding the incident recorded at the end of the foregoing chapter. But Juan had neither forgotten nor forgiven the insult which he had received at the hands of the relentless navigator. He awaited, with the patience of a crafty schemer, an opportunity to avenge himself upon the man who had turned his melodramatic declaration of love into an undignified farce.
A Carmelite friar, who had begged passage to Hispaniola from Don Rodrigo, discovered, after a time, a radical change in the disposition manifested by the heterogeneous crew toward his white frock and all that it represented. In so far as the discipline of Captain Hernandez permitted open grumbling, the sailors grew outspoken in their protests. The good priest, who had found the crew devoted to their beads at the outset of the voyage, was unable, as the weeks went by, to persuade the sailors to put their grievance into words. Nor was he able to keep them at their prayers or to lead their voices in quaint old Latin hymns. There was in the ship a mysterious, elusive influence which had convinced the impressionable, superstitious seamen that the vessel was accursed and that somebody aboard ship, being in league with Satan, was able to nullify the effects of their religious observances. Thus it was that the sweet-faced Carmelite labored in vain to restore before the mast the devout atmosphere which had prevailed among the crew while the coast of Spain still lay but a few miles astern.
Matters grew worse aboard the Concepcion after the white friar had been put ashore at the Indies and the clumsy vessel had begun to beat up the Gulf of Mexico against baffling head-winds. The sailors whispered to each other that the desertion of the Carmelite had left the Prince of Darkness in full control of the ship. To a crew composed in large part of Spanish desperadoes, with a sprinkling of Portuguese cutthroats, it was not easy to restore an atmosphere of religious fervor after it had once been destroyed by evil tongues. Experienced as he was in the fickleness of the half-savage sailors who in those adventurous days manned the omnipresent ships of Spain, Captain Hernandez witnessed with grave concern the gradual abandonment by his crew of its religious attitude and the increasing tendency of the sailors to imply, either by word or manner, that Mary and the saints had abandoned the ship to a cruel fate.
To Julia de Aquilar the voyage had become a seemingly interminable imprisonment. The elation which she had felt at the outset of the cruise had never returned to her after the depressing episode which had aroused in Juan Rodriquez a deadly hatred for the captain of the ship. The girl had caught the gleam of murder in the secretary’s eyes as he lay out-stretched upon the deck gazing upward at Gomez Hernandez, and in her cabin, as she tossed restlessly in her hammock, her mind grew sick with a foreboding which waxed more insistent as the weary days and nights crept by. Now and then she would climb the clumsy ladder to walk the deck for a while, but the dread of finding herself again alone with Juan Rodriquez made her shy of this diversion. Don Rodrigo, whose spirits rose higher the nearer the ship approached the land in which his silver lay concealed, would enter her stuffy cabin—a hole between decks hardly worthy of the name—to rally her upon her indifference to the splendors of the sea and the polychromatic beauties of the islands on their bow. Upon her father’s departure, the tears, held back while he was by her side, would dim the lustre of her splendid eyes, and her white, slender hands would rise in supplication to the smiling Virgin who looked down upon her from the slanting wooden wall above her head.
Why had she, to whom the Old World offered all its sweetest gifts, become a voluntary exile, a hopeless maiden weeping in a corner of a vagrant ship? Ever with her through those weary weeks this question craved an answer. Ever from the past arose the gorgeous pictures of her former life, a life of courtly splendor where the world was gay. In the dark watches of the night, Doña Julia de Aquilar, half dozing, half awake, would tread again the stately mazes of a contre-dance or smile demurely upon a powdered and bejewelled cavalier. She would hear again the merry, mocking voices of Versailles or the stately tones of Spanish gentlemen. Suddenly the lurching of the ship would rouse her from her waking dream, and, putting up a hand, as if defying fate, she would touch the wooden walls of her voluntary cell, walls that seemed to be bearing down upon her with the weight of worlds, crushing out the color from her cheeks, the light from her eyes, the joy of youth from her rebellious soul.
But, waking or sleeping, one face was always gazing at her from the past, a face which seemed to laugh in courteous derision at her plight. “I slew Don Josef—your betrothed,” the haunting vision seemed to say, while upon the clear-cut countenance which memory photographed the girl could see the gay and mocking smile of one who knew the world too well. Her betrothed? Though dead, she hated him. Caprice and vanity had forged for her the chains that had made her, at Versailles, a captive, longing to be free. And when her freedom came, when the sword of him whose vibrant voice she could hear above the creaking and groaning of the ship had severed forever the bonds which tied her to an unloved man, her liberty was nothing worth, taking its revenge upon her for her former negligence by coming back too late. She had learned, through the gossip of a chattering court, that he who had cut down her betrothed had fled across the sea. Never again would she look upon de Sancerre’s face, nor hear a voice which, while it mocked at love, had thrilled her heart of hearts. The years in passing would leave to her a memory—and nothing more.
What mattered it, then, whether she passed her weary span of life in the city of Seville or in the strange environment toward which the ship plunged on? In either case, the romance of her youth was dead. That the strange chances of existence would ever bring Louis de Sancerre again to her side, Julia de Aquilar never dreamed. Even in the prayers that she offered day and night to the Virgin Mother above her head she had never voiced a longing which, put into words, would have sounded to her ears like the incipient ravings of insanity. Her betrothed and the man whom she had begun to love had both passed from her life at the same moment, and through the gloom of night there came to Doña Julia no ray of hope save from the gentle radiance of Mother Church. The veil, and its promise of perfect peace, grew constantly more alluring to her distraught soul, as week crept into week and the very timbers of the ship cried ever louder against the cruel persistence of the lonely sea.
From a dreamless sleep—a rare blessing vouchsafed by Mother Mary—Doña Julia awoke one night with a start and sat upright in her hammock, peering into the darkness with straining eyes. What had disturbed her slumber she did not at first know. But above her head echoed the shuffling sounds of hurrying feet, and the flapping of canvas as the ship came about in a stiff breeze. Leaping down from her hammock and throwing a long, black cape over her shoulders, she groped her way to the entrance to her cabin and threw open the clumsy door. A swinging lantern lighted the hatchway, and, almost before her eyes had grown accustomed to the sudden glare, above her head sounded the grewsome cry of “Man overboard!”
At that instant down the ladder in front of the trembling girl crept the slinking figure of Juan Rodriquez. For a fleeting moment Doña Julia caught a glimpse of the youth’s pallid face, upon which there rested an evil smile made up of fear, cruelty, and triumph. Believing himself unobserved, Juan stood for a moment at the foot of the ladder looking upward toward the deck and listening intently to the uproar above his head. Then, with a subdued chuckle, which sent a chill through the heart of the motionless girl, he stole into the shadows toward his berth amidships.
The harsh cries of the panic-stricken sailors filled the night with a horrid din. The Spanish maiden, undecided whether to climb to the deck or to return to her hammock, crossed herself devoutly and murmured a prayer to St. Christopher, who watches over seamen and protects the faithful from night alarms. The mischievous lantern, vibrating wildly as the ship took the seas broadside on, threw lights and shadows across the disturbed face of the girl, and seemed to rejoice at its chance to add to the uncanny features of her surroundings.
The turmoil on the deck decreased as the moments passed, but Doña Julia still stood waiting, listening, praying; chafing at inaction, but distrustful of the night beyond the hatchway. To her, thus agitated, came her father down the ladder, his worn figure bent as if it carried a great burden. He turned and faced her, and as the playful lantern swung toward them she saw that his face was ghastly pale, and that his thin hand trembled as he wiped the sea-spray from his furrowed brow.
“What is it, father?” asked the girl, springing toward Don Rodrigo and placing both hands upon his shoulders as she peered into his white face.
“Captain Hernandez,” muttered the old man, in a voice that told the story of his despair—“he fell into the sea. None saw him in the blackness of the night, but far astern the helmsman heard a cry—and that was all! God rest his soul!” he groaned, crossing himself. “It will go hard with us, I fear.”
“But, father—Mother Mary, pray for him!—the voyage nears its end. Captain Hernandez—the saints receive him!—had with him men who know these seas?”
“I trust them not,” murmured the old man, wearily. Then, as if he regretted the admission he had made, he bent and kissed the anxious face of his daughter and said, with an effort at cheerfulness, “But fear not, Julia. All will yet be well. I’ve vowed an altar to St. James of Compostella, whose blessing rests on pilgrims of the faith. But how to calm the crew I hardly know. The sailors seem nigh mad with fear. They say that Satan is aboard the ship.”
“Alas, I think he is,” murmured Julia to herself, as she returned to her cabin and threw herself despondently upon her swinging bed. That she had solved by chance the awful secret of the captain’s death, she could not for a moment doubt.