Captain Blood | Page 5

military training which might now be valuable to
the Cause, should stand aloof; that he should placidly smoke his pipe

and tend his geraniums on this evening of all evenings, when men of
spirit were rallying to the Protestant Champion, offering their blood to
place him on the throne where he belonged.
If Mr. Blood had condescended to debate the matter with these ladies,
he might have urged that having had his fill of wandering and
adventuring, he was now embarked upon the career for which he had
been originally intended and for which his studies had equipped him;
that he was a man of medicine and not of war; a healer, not a slayer.
But they would have answered him, he knew, that in such a cause it
behoved every man who deemed himself a man to take up arms. They
would have pointed out that their own nephew Jeremiah, who was by
trade a sailor, the master of a ship - which by an ill-chance for that
young man had come to anchor at this season in Bridgewater Bay - had
quitted the helm to snatch up a musket in defence of Right. But Mr.
Blood was not of those who argue. As I have said, he was a
self-sufficient man.
He closed the window, drew the curtains, and turned to the pleasant,
candle-lighted room, and the table on which Mrs. Barlow, his
housekeeper, was in the very act of spreading supper. To her, however,
he spoke aloud his thought.
"It's out of favour I am with the vinegary virgins over the way."
He had a pleasant, vibrant voice, whose metallic ring was softened and
muted by the Irish accent which in all his wanderings he had never lost.
It was a voice that could woo seductively and caressingly, or command
in such a way as to compel obedience. Indeed, the man's whole nature
was in that voice of his. For the rest of him, he was tall and spare,
swarthy of tint as a gipsy, with eyes that were startlingly blue in that
dark face and under those level black brows. In their glance those eyes,
flanking a high-bridged, intrepid nose, were of singular penetration and
of a steady haughtiness that went well with his firm lips. Though
dressed in black as became his calling, yet it was with an elegance
derived from the love of clothes that is peculiar to the adventurer he
had been, rather than to the staid medicus he now was. His coat was of
fine camlet, and it was laced with silver; there were ruffles of Mechlin

at his wrists and a Mechlin cravat encased his throat. His great black
periwig was as sedulously curled as any at Whitehall.
Seeing him thus, and perceiving his real nature, which was plain upon
him, you might have been tempted to speculate how long such a man
would be content to lie by in this little backwater of the world into
which chance had swept him some six months ago; how long he would
continue to pursue the trade for which he had qualified himself before
he had begun to live. Difficult of belief though it may be when you
know his history, previous and subsequent, yet it is possible that but for
the trick that Fate was about to play him, he might have continued this
peaceful existence, settling down completely to the life of a doctor in
this Somersetshire haven. It is possible, but not probable.
He was the son of an Irish medicus, by a Somersetshire lady in whose
veins ran the rover blood of the Frobishers, which may account for a
certain wildness that had early manifested itself in his disposition. This
wildness had profoundly alarmed his father, who for an Irishman was
of a singularly peace-loving nature. He had early resolved that the boy
should follow his own honourable profession, and Peter Blood, being
quick to learn and oddly greedy of knowledge, had satisfied his parent
by receiving at the age of twenty the degree of baccalaureus medicinae
at Trinity College, Dublin. His father survived that satisfaction by three
months only. His mother had then been dead some years already. Thus
Peter Blood came into an inheritance of some few hundred pounds,
with which he had set out to see the world and give for a season a free
rein to that restless spirit by which he was imbued. A set of curious
chances led him to take service with the Dutch, then at war with France;
and a predilection for the sea made him elect that this service should be
upon that element. He had the advantage of a commission under the
famous de Ruyter, and fought in the Mediterranean engagement in
which that great Dutch admiral lost his life.
After