The Sea-Hawk | Page 4

As a consequence he has little that is good to say of anyone, and rarely mentions one of his contemporaries but to tap the sources of a picturesque invective. After all, it is possible to make excuses for him. He was at once a man of thought and a man of action--a combination as rare as it is usually deplorable. The man of action in him might have gone far had he not been ruined at the outset by the man of thought. A magnificent seaman, he might have become Lord High Admiral of England but for a certain proneness to intrigue. Fortunately for him--since otherwise he could hardly have kept his head where nature had placed it--he came betimes under a cloud of suspicion. His career suffered a check; but it was necessary to afford him some compensation since, after all, the suspicions could not be substantiated.
Consequently he was removed from his command and appointed by the Queen's Grace her Lieutenant of Cornwall, a position in which it was judged that he could do little mischief. There, soured by this blighting of his ambitions, and living a life of comparative seclusion, he turned, as so many other men similarly placed have turned, to seek consolation in his pen. He wrote his singularly crabbed, narrow and superficial History of Lord Henry Goade: his own Times--which is a miracle of injuvenations, distortions, misrepresentations, and eccentric spelling. In the eighteen enormous folio volumes, which he filled with his minute and gothic characters, he gives his own version of the story of what he terms his downfall, and, having, notwithstanding his prolixity, exhausted this subject in the first five of the eighteen tomes, he proceeds to deal with so much of the history of his own day as came immediately under his notice in his Cornish retirement.
For the purposes of English history his chronicles are entirely negligible, which is the reason why they have been allowed to remain unpublished and in oblivion. But to the student who attempts to follow the history of that extraordinary man, Sir Oliver Tressilian, they are entirely invaluable. And, since I have made this history my present task, it is fitting that I should here at the outset acknowledge my extreme indebtedness to those chronicles. Without them, indeed, it were impossible to reconstruct the life of that Cornish gentleman who became a renegade and a Barbary Corsair and might have become Basha of Algiers--or Argire, as his lordship terms it--but for certain matters which are to be set forth.
Lord Henry wrote with knowledge and authority, and the tale he has to tell is very complete and full of precious detail. He was, himself, an eyewitness of much that happened; he pursued a personal acquaintance with many of those who were connected with Sir Oliver's affairs that he might amplify his chronicles, and he considered no scrap of gossip that was to be gleaned along the countryside too trivial to be recorded. I suspect him also of having received no little assistance from Jasper Leigh in the matter of those events that happened out of England, which seem to me to constitute by far the most interesting portion of his narrative.
R. S.

CONTENTS

PART ONE
SIR OLIVER TRESSILIAN

CHAPTER
I.
THE HUCKSTER
II. ROSAMUND
III. THE FORGE
IV. THE INTERVENER
V. THE BUCKLER
VI. JASPER LEIGH
VII. TREPANNED
VIII. THE SPANIARD

PART TWO
SAKR-EL-BAHR
I. THE CAPTIVE
II. THE RENEGADE
III. HOMEWARD BOUND
IV. THE RAID
V. THE LION OF THE FAITH
VI. THE CONVERT
VII. MARZAK-BEN-ASAD
VIII. MOTHER AND SON
IX. COMPETITORS
X. THE SLAVE-MARKET
XI. THE TRUTH
XII. THE SUBTLETY OF FENZILEH
XIII. IN THE SIGHT OF ALLAH
XIV. THE SIGN
XV. THE VOYAGE
XVI. THE PANNIER
XVII. THE DUPE
XVIII. SHEIK MAT
XIX. THE MUTINEERS
XX. THE MESSENGER
XXI. MORITURUS
XXII. THE SURRENDER
XXIII. THE HEATHEN CREED
XXIV. THE JUDGES
XXV. THE ADVOCATE
XXVI. THE JUDGMENT



PART I
SIR OLIVER TRESSILIAN


CHAPTER I
THE HUCKSTER
Sir Oliver Tressilian sat at his ease in the lofty dining-room of the handsome house of Penarrow, which he owed to the enterprise of his father of lamented and lamentable memory and to the skill and invention of an Italian engineer named Bagnolo who had come to England half a century ago as one of the assistants of the famous Torrigiani.
This house of such a startlingly singular and Italianate grace for so remote a corner of Cornwall deserves, together with the story of its construction, a word in passing.
The Italian Bagnolo who combined with his salient artistic talents a quarrelsome, volcanic humour had the mischance to kill a man in a brawl in a Southwark tavern. As a result he fled the town, nor paused in his headlong flight from the consequences of that murderous deed until he had all but reached the very ends of England. Under what circumstances he became acquainted with Tressilian the elder I do not know. But certain it is that the meeting was a very timely one for both of them. To the fugitive, Ralph Tressilian--who appears to have been inveterately