the life of a planter. He had prospered
from the first, as men sometimes will who care nothing for prosperity.
Prospering, he had bethought him of his younger brother, a soldier at
home reputed somewhat wild. He had advised him to come out to Barbados;
and the advice, which at another season William Bishop might have
scorned, reached him at a moment when his wildness was beginning to bear
such fruit that a change of climate was desirable. William came, and
was admitted by his generous brother to a partnership in the prosperous
plantation. Some six years later, when Arabella was fifteen, her father
died, leaving her in her uncle's guardianship. It was perhaps his one
mistake. But the goodness of his own nature coloured his views of other
men; moreover, himself, he had conducted the education of his daughter,
giving her an independence of character upon which perhaps he counted
unduly. As things were, there was little love between uncle and niece.
But she was dutiful to him, and he was circumspect in his behaviour
before her. All his life, and for all his wildness, he had gone in a
certain awe of his brother, whose worth he had the wit to recognize;
and now it was almost as if some of that awe was transferred to his
brother's child, who was also, in a sense, his partner, although she
took no active part in the business of the plantations.

Peter Blood judged her--as we are all too prone to judge--upon
insufficient knowledge.

He was very soon to have cause to correct that judgment. One day towards
the end of May, when the heat was beginning to grow oppressive, there
crawled into Carlisle Bay a wounded, battered English ship, the Pride of
Devon, her freeboard scarred and broken, her coach a gaping wreck, her
mizzen so shot away that only a jagged stump remained to tell the place
where it had stood. She had been in action off Martinique with two
Spanish treasure ships, and although her captain swore that the
Spaniards had beset him without provocation, it is difficult to avoid a
suspicion that the encounter had been brought about quite otherwise. One
of the Spaniards had fled from the combat, and if the Pride of Devon had
not given chase it was probably because she was by then in no case to
do so. The other had been sunk, but not before the English ship had
transferred to her own hold a good deal of the treasure aboard the
Spaniard. It was, in fact, one of those piratical affrays which were a
perpetual source of trouble be