I felt the long slim hand tighten on mine for an instant, then release it a moment later; but she said no more for a time. Yet the look on her face was one of happiness extreme. After a while, however, she spoke again.
"The admiral knew," she whispered. "He had found out my secret."
For a moment I could not recall what she referred to--the incidents which had happened in such quick succession since we had quitted the fleet had almost obliterated from my memory the recollection of all that had taken place prior to that time. Yet now I remembered, and--remembering--there came back to me Sir George Rooke's strange diffidence after she had seized his hand and pressed it to her heart. Also, I recalled the deference with which he had treated her whom I thought then to be no more than a handsome, elegant youth, as well as my feeling of surprise at that deference.
And still, as I reflected over this, there was one other thing in connection with him which also came back to me; his words, to wit, that there were even worse things than shot or steel or death to cloud a brave man's career--that many a soldier had gone down before worse than these. And I knew now against what he had intended to warn me--against the woman now lying here sore stricken, the woman whom I loved and worshipped, the one who had been to me as faithful as a dog.
"So be it," I said to myself, "so be it. If I am to become bankrupt and shipwrecked through my love for her, I must be. Henceforth she is all in all to me, and there is nothing else in my life. Yet, up to now, the admiral's warning has been but little realised--I owe no ruin to her, but, rather, salvation."
For I could not but recall that 'twas through her that any loophole of escape had come to me in the prison of Lugo; to her unhappy father that I owed, if Morales had spoken true, the absolute escape itself.
Even as I sat there meditating thus she moaned again: "My father. My lost, doomed father," and once more I heard her whisper: "His child! His child! The saints pity me!"
And now I set myself to place that lost father before her in a far different light than that in which she regarded him--to make her believe that, when almost all in the Indies who had their account with the sea had in their time been much as he had been, his crimes were not so black as they appeared to her; to also paint in glowing colours that sublime sacrifice--Morales had termed it truthfully!--which he had made in remaining behind whilst I escaped, in dying while opening to me the path to life and freedom.