‘Excuse me, Don Benito,’ said Captain Delano, ‘but this scene surprises me; what means it, pray?’

‘It means that that negro alone, of all the band, has given me peculiar cause of offence. I have put him in chains; I—’

Here he paused, his hand to his head, as if there were a swimming there, or a sudden bewilderment of memory had come over him; but meeting his servant’s kindly glance seemed reassured, and proceeded: ‘I could not scourge such a form. But I told him he must ask my pardon. As yet he has not. At my command, every two hours he stands before me.’

‘And how long has this been?’

‘Some sixty days.’

‘And obedient in all else? And respectful?’

‘Yes.’

‘Upon my conscience, then,’ exclaimed Captain Delano impulsively, ‘he has a royal spirit in him, this fellow.’

‘He may have some right to it,’ bitterly returned Don Benito; ‘he says he was king in his own land.’

‘Yes,’ said the servant, entering a word, ‘those slits in Atufal’s ears once held wedges of gold; but poor Babo here, in his own land, was only a poor slave; a black man’s slave was Babo, who now is the white’s’.

Somewhat annoyed by these conversational familiarities, Captain Delano turned curiously upon the attendant, then glanced enquiringly at his master; but, as if long wonted to these little informalities, neither master nor man seemed to understand him.

‘What, pray, was Atufal’s offence, Don Benito?’ asked Captain Delano; ‘if it was not something very serious, take a fool’s advice and, in view of his general docility, as well as in some natural respect for his spirit, remit him his penalty.’

‘No, no, master never will do that,’ here murmured the servant to himself, ‘proud Atufal must first ask master’s pardon. The slave there carries the padlock, but master here carries the key.’

His attention thus directed, Captain Delano now noticed for the first time that, suspended by a slender silken cord, from Don Benito’s neck hung a key. At once, from the servant’s muttered syllables, divining the key’s purpose, he smiled and said: ‘So, Don Benito—padlock and key—significant symbols, truly.’

Biting his lip, Don Benito faltered.

Though the remark of Captain Delano, a man of such native simplicity as to be incapable of satire or irony, had been dropped in playful allusion to the Spaniard’s singularly evidenced lordship over the black; yet the hypochondriac seemed some way to have taken it as a malicious reflection upon his confessed inability thus far to break down, at least, on a verbal summons, the entrenched will of the slave. Deploring this supposed misconception, yet despairing of correcting it, Captain Delano shifted the subject; but finding his companion more than ever withdrawn, as if still sourly digesting the less of the presumed affront above-mentioned, by and by Captain Delano likewise became less talkative, oppressed, against his own will, by what seemed the secret vindictiveness of the morbidly sensitive Spaniard. But the good sailor, himself of a quite contrary disposition, refrained, on his part, alike from the appearance as from the feeling of resentment, and if silent, was only so from contagion.

Presently the Spaniard, assisted by his servant, somewhat discourteously crossed over from his guest; a procedure which sensibly enough, might have been allowed to pass for idle caprice of ill-humour, had