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What I have come to propose to you, my Captain, at the suggestion of our good friend M. d'Ogeron, is, in brief, that you enroll your ships and your force under M. de Rivarol's flag." Blood looked at him with a faint kindling of interest. "You are offering to take us into the French service?" he asked. "On what terms, monsieur?"
D'Ogeron pretended to subscribe to these conditions, passed over to Tortuga where he received the submission of la Place, and then to Petit-Goave and Leogane, in the cul-de-sac of Hispaniola. There he made his headquarters, adopted every means to attract planters and engagés, and firmly established his authority.
Levasseur's smiling eyes, intent upon the young man's face, saw the horror that crept into his glance. M. d'Ogeron cast a wild glance at mademoiselle, and observed the grey despair that had almost stamped the beauty from her face. Disgust and fury swept across his countenance. Then he braced himself and answered resolutely: "No, you dog! A thousand times, no!" "You are foolish to persist."
D'Ogeron first established himself at Port Margot on the coast of Hispaniola opposite Tortuga in the early part of 1665; and here the adventurers at once gave him to understand that they would never submit to any mere company, much less suffer an interruption of their trade with the Dutch, who had supplied them with necessities at a time when it was not even known in France that there were Frenchmen in that region.
The inhabitants fled to La Vega and only avoided the burning of their city by paying a ransom of 25,000 pesos, whereupon Delisle returned to the French colony. D'Ogeron at this time proposed to the French government the conquest of the entire island for France, and would probably have attempted to carry out this plan, had not his death occurred shortly after.
Captain Blood's crisp, authoritative, faintly disdainful manner stirred Levasseur's quick anger. The blood crept slowly back into his blenched face, and his glance grew in insolence, almost in menace. Meanwhile the prisoner answered for him. "I am Henri d'Ogeron, and this is my sister." "D'Ogeron?" Captain Blood stared. "Are you related by chance to my good friend the Governor of Tortuga?"
There was no reason why he should not, though he began to find the catechism intriguing. "Captain Blood killed him." "Why?" Pitt hesitated. It was not a tale for a maid's ears. "They quarrelled," he said shortly. "Was it about a... a lady?" Miss Bishop relentlessly pursued him. "You might put it that way." "What was the lady's name?" Pitt's eyebrows went up; still he answered. "Miss d'Ogeron.
Count it, if you please, a friendly loan to be repaid entirely at your convenience." Mademoiselle stared at him in unbelief. M. d'Ogeron rose to his feet. "Monsieur, is it possible that you are serious?" "I am. It may not happen often nowadays. I may be a pirate. But my ways are not the ways of Levasseur, who should have stayed in Europe, and practised purse-cutting.
"His future father-in-law?" said she, and stared at him round-eyed, with parted lips. Then added: "M. d'Ogeron? The Governor of Tortuga?" "The same. You see the fellow's well protected. It's a piece of news I gathered in St. Nicholas. I am not sure that I welcome it, for I am not sure that it makes any easier a task upon which my kinsman, Lord Sunderland, has sent me hither. But there it is.
If he... if he loved a woman and was betrothed, and was also rich as you say, surely he would have abandoned this desperate life, and..." "Why, so I thought," his lordship interrupted, "until I had the explanation. D'Ogeron is avaricious for himself and for his child. And as for the girl, I'm told she's a wild piece, fit mate for such a man as Blood.
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