Chapter 16

A PIRATES' DINNER.

"But the best of the joke was, the moment he spoke Those words which the party seemed almost to choke, As by mentioning Noah some spell had been broke, And, hearing the din from barrel and bin, Drew at once the conclusion that thieves had got in."

When the guests had assembled in the pirate's saloon it was some minutes before their host appeared. When, however, he did step into the room from his private apartment adjoining, he was altogether a different man in outward appearance than in the early morning. In place of the loose sailor summer rig which he then wore, he was now attired as a gentleman of elegant fashion of the time in which we write. His lower limbs were clothed with flesh-colored silk stockings, and fitted into a pair of pointed toed pumps with buckles of brilliants that a duchess might have envied. A pair of white cassimere breeches, which set off to advantage his well-shaped leg, were tied in a dainty bow of rose-colored satin ribbon below the knee, and fitted him like a second skin. His waistcoat was of rose-colored watered silk, embroidered with silver, and which, with its flaps and ample proportions, was halfway hidden by a dress coat of green velvet. This last garment had a sort of navy cut, with standing collar richly laced with silver, gold buttons in a double row of the size of doubloons, with loose sleeves and cuffs heavily laced with silver also. His linen was of the most gossamer fineness, the collar thrown slightly back and confined by a single clasp of rubies the size of beans, while below was a frill of cambric ruffles sparkling with opal studs framed in diamonds. The ruffles, too, at his wrist were of the most beautiful point lace, secured by royal brilliants, and he was altogether a dandy of such princely magnificence that the courtiers of the days of the old French monarchy might have taken him for a study. His manner, likewise, was every way in keeping with his splendid attire; and the ease and grace with which he excused himself to his guests for keeping them waiting certainly denoted a knowledge of a higher order of breeding and society than that in which his lot had been cast.

From the very moment of his entrance, however, Don Ignaçio had measured him at a glance. His single glittering eye of jet had taken him in from the laced collar of his coat to the buckles of his shoes. Not a jewel in his dress, from the flaming opals in his bosom to the brilliant stones at his wrists, and down to the sparkling clusters at his feet, did not his one uneasy optic drink in the flash and estimate the value. Nay, he calculated by instinct the weight of the gold buttons on his coat and the price of the exquisite lace which fell in snowy folds about his hands. Oh, a rare mathematician was Don Ignaçio! What greedy thoughts, too, passed through that little Spaniard's brain! "Ah!" thought he, "shall I take my debt in those priceless gems, each one the ransom of a princess, which the old Captain General may one of these days reclaim? Hola! no! Or shall I receive more negotiable commodities in gold, cochineal, or silks? Well! _Veremos!_ we shall see!"

The effect produced upon the good Padre Ricardo was altogether different. As the captain entered with all his glorious raiment upon him, he started back, and, bowing before him as if he were Saint Paul himself, he seized his superior's white hand, and kissed it with fervent devotion. Not satisfied with this mark of respect, he raised his dingy paws, holding his crucifix before him, and murmured, in a sort of ecstasy,

"_Mi hico! mi capitano! que brillante!_"--"My son! my captain! what a brilliant being you are!"

Singularly in contrast, however, was the effect produced upon the doctor, who merely raised his dark eyes in an abstracted gaze, gave a careless and rather contemptuous nod of recognition, and then turned to examine one of the richly-inlaid cabinets which adorned the saloon. All these various phases of sympathy, attraction, or contempt flickered like a sunbeam into Captain Brand's reflecting brain, as, with a delicately-perfumed handkerchief in one hand, and a gold-enameled and diamond-incrusted snuff-box in the other, he bowed gracefully to his visitors, and seated himself at table.

The table was now rolled out into the centre of the saloon, laid with a snowy-white damask cloth, and covered with the equipage for a banquet. At either corner were noble branches of solid silver candelabra, which would have graced an altar, as perhaps they had, and holding clusters of wax-lights, which shed their rays over the display below. In the centre arose a huge épergne of silver, fashioned into the shape of a drooping palm-tree, whose leaves were of frosted silver, and about the trunk played a wilderness of monkeys. Beneath, around the board, were cut-glass decanters, flat bulbous flasks of colored Bohemian glass, crystal goblets, delicate and almost shadowy wine-cups from Venice, silver wine-coolers, all mingled in with a heterogeneous collection of rare china and silver dishes. Such wines, too, as filled those vessels! not a prince or magnate in all the lands where the vine is planted could boast of so rare and exquisite a collection. Pure, thin, rain-water Madeira, full threescore years in bottle! Pale, limpid Port, whose color had long since gone with age, and left only the musk-like odor; flasks of Johannisberg of pearly light; bottles of Tokay for lips of cardinals; tall, slim stems of the taper flasks of the Rhine; while the ruby hues of wine from the Rhone stood clustering about amid pyramids of pine-apples, oranges, and bananas, and all loading the air of the saloon with their delicious fragrance.

When the party had become fairly seated around the board, and while the host was bailing out the soup from an enormous silver tureen with a tea-cup--for it did not appear that he had ever been presented in the usual way with a ladle--fishing out the floating morsels of rich callipee, with the delicate frills of his sleeves turned back, he began the conversation in the Castilian language:

"Well, _amigos_, we are taking our last feast together, I fear, on this little cluster of rocks, for a long time to come."

"How!" exclaimed the padre, as he stuffed a wedge of turtle fat in his oily mouth, and opened his round black eyes to their fullest extent in manifest surprise.

"_Como, mi hico!_" he repeated, as he passed a dirty paw over his smooth chin, and looked inquiringly.

"Yes, holy father, our good friend Don Ignaçio here has brought us somewhat startling intelligence. Capital soup, this. I shall give Babette a dollar. Yes, the eagles and vultures are after us; all the West India fleet; the Lord only knows how many ships, and brigs, and gun-boats. Glass of Madeira with you, doctor?" wiping his thin lips with a corner of the damask table-cloth as he spoke; "and they have tampered, too, with my old friends the custom-house people. Take away the tureen, Babette--and, in point of fact, I shouldn't be the least surprised to see a swarm of those navy gentlemen off the reef here at any moment. A sharp knife, Babette, for these teal--a duck should be cut, not torn. Try that Moselle, Don Ignaçio; I know your fancy for light wines. This was given me by a Captain--'pon my soul, I forget his name; he had such a pretty wife, Madame Matilde," glancing at the frame of miniatures on the wall; "sweet creature she was; took quite a fancy for me, I believe, and might have been sitting here at this moment, but a--really I forget her other name. However, it makes no difference: the wine is called Moselle."

Now be it here observed that Don Ignaçio drank very little wine or stimulants of any sort, and never by any chance a drop from any vessel which, with his single bright eye, he did not see his host first indulge in. This self-imposed sacrifice may have been owing to his diffidence, or modesty, or deference to Captain Brand, or, perhaps, other and private reasons of his own; but yet he never broke through that rule of politeness and abstemiousness. Sometimes, indeed, he carried his principles so far as to refuse a meat or the fruits which his host had not partaken of, and always with a slow shake of his brown fore finger, as if he did not like even to smell the dish presented to him.

"What! not even a sip of that nectar, _compadre mio_?"

The compadre shook his digit, and observed that drinking nectar sometimes made people sick.

The captain laughed gayly, and said, "Bah! learning to drink does the harm, and not the art, when properly acquired."

During all the foregoing interlude the doctor remained in his grave, calm humor, and only when the captain alluded to the lady whose husband's name escaped him did he show signs of interest. Then his eye followed the look toward the miniature, and his jaws came together with a slight grating spasm.

Padre Ricardo, however, was in excellent sympathetic spirits, eating and drinking like a glutton of all within his reach, and turning his full eyes at times, as if to a deity, upon his friend the captain. Once he spoke--

"But, my son, you were talking of leaving this quiet retreat, where we have passed so many happy hours."

"Yes, friend of my soul! Those fellows with commissions, and pennants at their mast-heads, and guns, and what not, seem determined to do us a mischief." The devout padre crossed himself, and pressed the crucifix to his greasy lips. "Ay! they would no doubt arraign us before some one of their legal tribunals. Put us in prison, perhaps; or maybe give us a slight squeeze in a rope or iron collar!"

The padre groaned audibly, and dropped the wing of a teal he was gnawing, forgetting, strange as it may seem, to cross himself.

"_Hola, mi padre!_ cheer up! We are worth a million of dead men yet. The world is wide, the sea open, and with a stout plank under our feet and one of these fellows"--here he balanced a long carving-knife, dripping with blood-red gravy, in his hand--"in our belts, who can stop us?"

There was the cold, ferocious-eyed gleam of a dying shark in the speaker's eyes as he went on with his carving; but the priest gave a jerk of trepidation with his chin, and appeared anxious to hear more.

"Don Ignaçio, try a bit of this roast _guana_; it's quite white and tender. No? Babette, give me some of that rabbit stew!" The one-eyed individual was likewise helped to some of that savory ragoût, and proceeded to pick the bones with much care and deliberation.

"Still _triste_, my _padre_! Come, come, this will never do. Join me in a bumper of this generous old Port. _Bueno!_ may we attain the same age! By the way, where did this rich stuff come from?" holding up the decanter between the light and his face as he spoke.

Don Ignaçio's glittering optic pierced clear through the light ruby medium of the wine, cut-glass decanter and all, as he furtively watched his host, and was prepared to dodge in case the heavy vessel should slip out of the captain's hand. Such things had happened, and might again; besides, a hard flint substance with a multitude of sharp projections, two or three inches thick and five or six pounds in weight, falling from a height on a man's head, might kill him. The Don thought of all this, and twitched something up his sleeve with his hand under the table. But Captain Brand, it seemed, had no intention of smashing his elegant dinner set of glass, and putting down the decanter and raising a finger to his forehead, he said, "How did that wine come into my possession?"

"Somebody gave it to you, perhaps. _Quien sabe?_ (Who knows?)" suggested Don Ignaçio.

Without heeding the interruption, the captain's eye rested on the brilliant snuff-box on the table beside him, where the letter L was set in diamonds and blue enamel on the back, and catching it with a rap, his face lighted up, and as he took a pinch and passed the box to the padre, he exclaimed,

"Ah! now I remember, my old friend--the Portuguese countess from Oporto. _Dios! de mi alma!_ (God of my soul!) what a stately beauty was her daughter!"

Here Captain Brand sneezed, and, drawing a delicately-perfumed lace handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket, blew his nose. Meanwhile the box went round the table; Padre Ricardo took a huge pinch with his dirty fingers, and feasted his eyes upon the precious lid. The doctor scarcely gave the elegant bawble a glance as he helped himself. The Don, however, examined it with the eye of a connoisseur, and not only that, but he threw a spark at the captain's flashy waistcoat, and thought he detected some other article in the capacious pockets vice the handkerchief. Perhaps he may have been mistaken and perhaps not, though he was so very suspicious an old villain that he sometimes did his friends injustice. Nor did he put his thin brown fingers, with the few grains of snuff he had dipped from the box, to his sheepskin nostrils till he had watched the effect it had produced on those around him.

"Ah! my friends, I remember distinctly now all about it," continued the captain, as he returned the kerchief and shook a few specks of the titillating dust from his point-lace sleeve; "it is about three years ago, just before you came to live with me, padre, that we fell in with a large ship bound to Porto Rico. She had been disabled in an awful hurricane, which had taken two of her masts clean off at the decks, and was leaking badly. We, too, had been a little hurt in the same gale, and having made a pretty good season, I was anxious to get back here and give the crews a rest. Well, we made out the ship about an hour before sunset, and it was quite dark before we came up with her. There she lay, rolling like a log, though there was not much sea on, and we could hear her chain-pumps clanking, and saw the water spouting out from her scuppers as pure almost as it went into her hold. As we came up alongside they hailed me for assistance, and said the ship was sinking, and could not live till morning.

"Of course I could give them no actual assistance, situated as I was"--here the narrator smiled as he glanced round upon his guests--"it would have been simply absurd, you know, the idea of my putting men on board to keep her afloat for the nearest gibbet. Bah! I did not dream of such ridiculous nonsense. However, I determined to make her a visit, and, if there should be any thing to save from the wreck in an undamaged condition, why, I should look around.

"Not too much of that Port, _mi padre_; think of your rheumatism in the morning! Doctor, you don't drink!

"Well, going on board, I found two lady passengers--the wife and daughter of an old judge of the island of Porto Rico, with half a dozen servants, who were all screaming, and praying, and beseeching me to save them--all but one, a tall, graceful girl, with a large India shawl wrapped around her shoulders, her white arms glancing through the folds, and a pair of dark, liquid, almond-shaped eyes, such as I had never before seen. The fact is, my friends, I had always before fancied blue. But there stood this girl, with eyes like a wounded stag, leaning up against the weather bulwarks near the open cabin door.

"Babette, take away all but the wine and fruit, and bring fire. Pass that box this way, if you please, _compadre_! Thank you."

Don Ignaçio seemed to have an affection for the trifle, and had counted the brilliants over and over again, and made a mental calculation of their weight and value; and when he did move it as he was desired, his greedy eye followed it with fascination.

"Yes, it's very pretty, and I set a great store by it," parenthesized the host, as he resumed his tale:

"The girl never screamed or even spoke, and, amid all the hubbub of a drunken skipper and a disorderly crew, she remained quiet and unmoved. To assure the people, I told them that I would stay by the ship and do what I could for them. At this the old lady clasped me around the neck, and kissed me, and blubbered over me more than ever she did, I imagined, to the old Spanish judge, her husband--imploring me too, by all the saints she could think of, to take herself and daughter out of the sinking vessel at once. You may believe that I would much rather have been treated in that way by the lovely girl with the wonderful eyes instead of the fat, rancid old woman beside her; but there was no help for it just then, and so I consented, with all the professions of sympathy I could make, to do as she desired."

Here the captain lit a pure Havana, and, after a few puffs and a sip of Port, continued: