Romance. Joseph Conrad
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laughed outright. “You’re quite mistaken in your man,” I said. “You are, really.”
He shook his head gently, and brushed an invisible speck from his plump black knees.
“You must go somewhere,” he said. “Why not go with us?”
I looked at him, puzzled by his tenacity and assurance.
“Ramon here has told us you battered the admiral last night; and there’s a warrant out already against you for attempted murder. You’re hand and glove with the best of the Separationists in this island, I know, but they won’t save you from being committed – for rebellion, perhaps. You know it as well as I do. You were down here to take a passage to-day, weren’t you, now?”
I remembered that the Island Loyalists said that the pirates and Separationists worked together to bother the admiral and raise discontent. Living in the centre of Separationist discontent with the Macdonalds, I knew it was not true. But nothing was too bad to say against the planters who clamoured for union with the United States.
O’Brien leaned forward. His voice had a note of disdain, and then took one of deeper earnestness; it sank into his chest. He extended his hand; his eyebrows twitched. He looked – he was – a conspirator.
“I tell you I do it for the sake of Ireland,” he said passionately. “Every ship we take, every clamour they raise here, is a stroke and is disgrace for them over there that have murdered us and ruined my own dear land.” His face worked convulsively; I was in the presence of one of the primeval passions. But he grew calm immediately after. “You want Separation for reasons of your own. I don’t ask what they are. No doubt you and your crony Macdonald and the rest of them will feather your own nests; I don’t ask. But help me to be a thorn in their sides – just a little – just a little longer. What do I put in your way? Just what you want. Have your Jamaica joined to the United States. You’ll be able to come back with your pockets full, and I’ll be joyful – for the sake of my own dear land.”
I said suddenly and recklessly – if I had to face one race-passion, he had to look at another; we were cat and dog – Celt and Saxon, as it was in the beginning: “I am not a traitor to my country.” Then I realized with sudden concern that I had probably awakened the old Don. He stirred uneasily in his chair, and lifted one hand.
“The moment I go out from here I’ll denounce you,” I said very low; “I swear I will. You’re here; you can’t get away; you’ll swing.”
O’Brien started. His eyes blazed at me. Then he frowned. “I’ve been misled,” he muttered, with a dark glance at Carlos. And recovering his jocular serenity, “Ye mean it?” he asked; “it’s not British heroics?”
The old Don stirred again and sighed. The young girl glided swiftly to his side. “Señor O’Brien,” she said, “you have so irritated my English cousin that he has awakened my father.”
O’Brien grinned gently. “‘Tis ever the way,” he said sardonically. “The English fools do the harm and the Irish fool gets the kicking.” He rose to his feet, quite collected, a spick-and-span little man. “I suppose I’ve said too much. Well, well! You are going to denounce the senior judge of the Marine Court of Havana as a pirate. I wonder who will believe you!” He went behind the old Don’s chair with the gliding motion of a Spanish lawyer, and slipped down the open trap-hatch near the window.
It was the disappearance of a shadow. I heard some guttural mutterings come up through the hatch, a rustling, then silence. If he was afraid of me at all he carried it off very well. I apologized to the young girl for having awakened her father. Her colour was very high, and her eyes sparkled. If she had not been so very beautiful I should have gone away at once. She said angrily:
“He is odious to me, the Señor Juez. Too long my father has suffered his insolence.” She was very small, but she had an extraordinary dignity of command. “I could see, Señor, that he was annoying you. Why should you consider such a creature?” Her head drooped. “But my father is very old.”
I turned upon Carlos, who stood all black in the light of the window.
“Why did you make me meet him? He may be a judge of your Marine Court, but he’s nothing but a scoundrelly bog-trotter.”
Carlos said a little haughtily, “You must not denounce him. You should not leave this place if I feared you would try thus to bring dishonour on this gray head, and involve this young girl in a public scandal.” His manner became soft. “For the honour of the house you shall say nothing. And you shall come with us. I need you.”
I was full of mistrust now. If he did countenance this unlawful enterprise, whose headquarters were in Rio Medio, he was not the man for me. Though it was big enough to be made, by the papers at home, of political importance, it was, after all, neither more nor less than piracy. The idea of my turning a sort of Irish traitor was so extravagantly outrageous that now I could smile at the imbecility of that fellow O’Brien. As to turning into a sea-thief for lucre – my blood boiled.
No. There was something else there. Something deep; something dangerous; some intrigue, that I could not conceive even the first notion of. But that Carlos wanted anxiously to make use of me for some purpose was clear. I was mystified to the point of forgetting how heavily I was compromised even in Jamaica, though it was worth remembering, because at that time an indictment for rebellion – under the Black Act – was no joking matter. I might be sent home under arrest; and even then, there was my affair with the runners.
“It is coming to pay a visit,” he was saying persuasively, “while your affair here blows over, my Juan – and – and – making my last hours easy, perhaps.”
I looked at him; he was worn to a shadow – a shadow with dark wistful eyes. “I don’t understand you,” I faltered.
The old man stirred, opened his lids, and put a gold vinaigrette to his nostrils.
“Of course I shall not denounce O’Brien,” I said. “I, too, respect the honour of your house.”
“You are even better than I thought you. And if I entreat you, for the love of your mother – of your sister? Juan, it is not for myself, it is – ”
The young girl was pouring some drops from a green phial into a silver goblet; she passed close to us, and handed it to her father, who had leant a little forward in his chair. Every movement of hers affected me with an intimate joy; it was as if I had been waiting to see just that carriage of the neck, just that proud glance from the eyes, just that droop of eyelashes upon the cheeks, for years and years.
“No, I shall hold my tongue, and that’s enough,” I said.
At that moment the old Don sat up and cleared his throat. Carlos sprang towards him with an infinite grace of tender obsequiousness. He mentioned my name and the relationship, then rehearsed the innumerable titles of his uncle, ending “and patron of the Bishopric of Pinar del Rio.”
I stood stiffly in front of the old man. He bowed his head at intervals, holding the silver cup carefully whilst his chair rocked a little. When Carlos’ mellow voice had finished the rehearsing of the sonorous styles, I mumbled something about “transcendent honour.”
He stopped me with a little, deferentially peremptory gesture of one hand, and began to speak, smiling with a contraction of the lips and a trembling of the head. His voice was very low, and quavered slightly, but every syllable was enunciated with the same beauty of clearness that there was in his features, in his hands, in his ancient gestures.
“The honour is to me,” he said, “and the pleasure. I behold my kinsman, who, with great heroism, I am told, rescued my dearly loved nephew from great dangers; it is an honour to me to be able to give him thanks. My beloved and lamented sister contracted a union with an English hidalgo, through whose house your own very honourable family is allied to my own; it is a pleasure to me to meet after many years with one who has seen the places where her later life was passed.”
He paused, and breathed with some difficulty, as if the speech had exhausted him. Afterwards he began to ask me questions about Rooksby’s aunt – the lamented sister of