Adventure Magazine Cover, April 1916 — page 70: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

68 hold of the Snapdragon spread through all the ale-houses and taverns where the men rushed so soon as they could contrive to leave the ship, until at length the story of the Devon girl who had rescued thirty Eng- lishmen from the French in the Indies was the talk of the town, and John Evelyn him- self went down, with some of the gentle- men of the Admiralty, to see the British ship they had retaken from the Spaniards, and verify the tales of gold that had reached even the king, and greatly astonished were they to find in command Godfrey Stilling- fleet, who had long been given over. for dead. | Nothing would do but Mr. Evelyn must carry them straight away to Whitehall, al- though Nancy would rather far have gone to her cousin Mountford’s house, as well to learn news of her father and her old friend Colonel Sidney, as to deliver their message to her kinsman, the importance of which, she feared, had been destroyed by her long absence in the tropics, making the news she bore stale. But they would not hear of this, and so carried her off with them in a coach, waiting only to put the Snapdragon under the protection of the customs off- cers. CHAPTER XVI “__AND ALL’S WELL” HARLES STUART was not the man to be unmoved by so stirring a tale of adventure, and as Captain Stillingfleet de- scribed how Nancy had come to him and the English pirates in the night, in the French Governor’s castle on the cliffs of Tortuga, and had called to them in the darkness a message of freedom, the sparkle in his eyes grew more bright and his face beamed. “Tis a pity, Mr. Evelyn,” said he, ‘‘that we have not such tarpaulins in the fleet as these men who have been fighting our bat- tles below the tropic, else would we have had greater success lately against the Dutch and the Turk. Yet; methinks your favorite theory as to the value of discipline receives a rude blow from this account.” “Nay, sire,” replied Mr. Evelyn, whose keen interest in the welfare of his Majesty’s navy had made him an authority on all such matters at court, “‘but does not the fact that it was Master Stillingfleet who Adventure took command at a critical juncture, and so brought them off safely with all their booty from that fellow Morgan—who must be a very devil of a captain, an’ I misjudge him not, and will be heard from one day to the credit and glory of our arms—does not the fact that Captain Stillingfleet, as a gen- tleman of the fleet, had been trained to command, but prove the soundness of my contention?” “It doth seem to me that Captain Stil- lingfleet did but conduct himself indiffer- ently well, since he assumed command of the—what is the name, it doth please me hugely, ah—the Snapdragon, only when the maid had been put out of the combat, as it were,” returned the king dryly. Nancy, accompanied by Godfrey Stilling- fleet and the gentlemen of the Admiralty, had arrived at Whitehall to find there the usual gay and dissolute assemblage, so that the Puritan girl, reared as she had been, felt that she would stifle in the fetid atmos- phere. In the gallery a great crowd of lords and ladies in all the finery of the period, were at cards or dice, and Nancy had grown suddenly timid as she beheld so many of the women whom she had been taught to regard as creatures of vice and shame, re- garding her with ill-concealed astonishment written on their painted cheeks and lifted eyebrows as she was hurried through one of the long corridors toward the king’s private apartment. Charles, toying with a spaniel, was seat- ed at a table looking at a collection of me- dallions which a goldsmith had spread out before him for his inspection, and his Maj- esty’s interest had been divided at first be- tween the trinkets and the story which Captain Stillingfleet, at the request of Mr. Evelyn, had begun to tell. But as he progressed, the king’s atten- tion was more and more attracted to the slender girl who stood shrinkingly in the shadow of a magnificent cabinet, until now he regarded her with such frank admira- tion that Nancy, feeling upon her those dark eyes which were never so agreeably occupied as in the inspection of a beauti- ful woman, suddenly felt herself grow shy and her cheeks to burn. “And how much treasure have you brought off with you?’”’ he demanded sud- denly, when he had surveyed her critically at his leisure from beneath his heavy eye- lids. COMmMichoooks CO