CAPTAIN BLOOD

CONTENTS

I. THE MESSENGER
II. KIRKE'S DRAGOONS
III. THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE
IV. HUMAN MERCHANDISE
V. ARABELLA BISHOP
VI. PLANS OF ESCAPE
VII. PIRATES
VIII. SPANIARDS
IX. THE REBELS-CONVICT
X. DON DIEGO
XI. FILIAL PIETY
XII. DON PEDRO SANGRE
XIII. TORTUGA
XIV. LEVASSEUR'S HEROICS
XV. THE RANSOM
XVI. THE TRAP
XVII. THE DUPES
XVIII. THE MILAGROSA
XIX. THE MEETING
XX. THIEF AND PIRATE
XXI. THE SERVICE OF KING JAMES
XXII. HOSTILITIES
XXIII. HOSTAGES
XXIV. WAR
XXV. THE SERVICE OF KING LOUIS
XXVI. M. DE RIVAROL
XXVII. CARTAGENA
XXVIII. THE HONOUR OF M. DE RIVAROL
XXIX. THE SERVICE OF KING WILLIAM
XXX. THE LAST FIGHT OF THE ARABELLA
XXXI. HIS EXCELLENCY THE GOVERNOR




CHAPTER I. THE MESSENGER


Peter Blood, bachelor of medicine and several other things besides,
smoked a pipe and tended the geraniums boxed on the sill of his window
above Water Lane in the town of Bridgewater.

Sternly disapproving eyes considered him from a window opposite, but
went disregarded. Mr. Blood's attention was divided between his task and
the stream of humanity in the narrow street below; a stream which poured
for the second time that day towards Castle Field, where earlier in
the afternoon Ferguson, the Duke's chaplain, had preached a sermon
containing more treason than divinity.

These straggling, excited groups were mainly composed of men with green
boughs in their hats and the most ludicrous of weapons in their hands.
Some, it is true, shouldered fowling pieces, and here and there a sword
was brandished; but more of them were armed with clubs, and most of them
trailed the mammoth pikes fashioned out of scythes, as formidable to
the eye as they were clumsy to the hand. There were weavers, brewers,
carpenters, smiths, masons, bricklayers, cobblers, and representatives
of every other of the trades of peace among these improvised men of war.
Bridgewater, like Taunton, had yielded so generously of its manhood to
the service of the bastard Duke that for any to abstain whose age and
strength admitted of his bearing arms was to brand himself a coward or a
papist.

Yet Peter Blood, who was not only able to bear arms, but trained and
skilled in their use, who was certainly no coward, and a papist only
when it suited him, tended his geraniums and smoked his pipe on that
warm July evening as indifferently as if nothing were afoot. One other
thing he did. He flung after those war-fevered enthusiasts a line of
Horace--a poet for whose work he had early conceived an inordinate
affection:

"Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?"

And now perhaps you guess why the hot, intrepid blood inherited from the
roving sires of his Somersetshire mother remained cool amidst all this
frenzied fanatical heat of rebellion; why the turbulent spirit which had
forced him once from the sedate academical bonds his father would
have imposed upon him, should now remain quiet in the very midst of
turbulence. You realize how he regarded these men who were rallying to
the banners of liberty--the banners woven by the virgins of Taunton, the
girls from the seminaries of Miss Blake and Mrs. Musgrove, who--as the
ballad runs--had ripped open their silk petticoats to make colours for
King Monmouth's army. That Latin line, contemptuously flung after them
as they clattered down the cobbled street, reveals his mind. To him they
were fools rushing in wicked frenzy upon their ruin.

You see, he knew too much about this fellow Monmouth and the pretty
brown slut who had borne him, to be deceived by the legend of
legitimacy, on the strength of which this standard of rebellion had
been raised. He had read the absurd proclamation posted at the Cross
at Bridgewater--as it had been posted also at Taunton and
elsewhere--setting forth that "upon the decease of our Sovereign Lord
Charles the Second, the right of succession to the Crown of England,
Scotland, France, and Ireland, with the dominions and territories
thereunto belonging, did legally descend and devolve upon the most
illustrious and high-born Prince James, Duke of Monmouth, son and heir
apparent to the said King Charles the Second."

It had moved him to laughter, as had the further announcement that
"James Duke of York did first cause the said late King to be poysoned,
and immediately thereupon did usurp and invade the Crown."

He knew not which was the greater lie.