Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Ten
Just as Micah saved Decimus from the Dutch slaver at the book's opening, so Decimus appears on the scene to free Micah from his bondage and to set him up as a soldier-of-fortune in Europe -- welcoming him to the brotherhood of "the old and honorable guild." Thus, Decimus becomes yet another of Micah's several father figures.
Decimus further establishes the honorable highwayman Hector Marot on board the slaver with the plan that he will incite a mutiny among the Barbadoes-bound enslaved Puritans.
"If I were captain," chortles Decimus, "I would rather have the Devil himself, horns, hoof, and tail, for my first mate than have that man aboard my ship."
For his own part, Decimus has blackmailed Beaufort into arranging for him a commission to fight Indians in the New England colony of Virginia.
Micah relates that Decimus "did so out-ambush their ambushes and out-trick their most cunning warriors," that the Indians gave him a name meaning "the long-legged wily one with the eye of a rat."
At night, Micah still has visions of Decimus' face with its "shifting, blinky eyes turned toward me in his sidelong fashion."
He was, Micah concludes, "a bad man in many ways . . . cunning and wily, with little scruple of conscience; and yet so strange a thing is human nature, and so difficult it is to control our feelings, that my heart warms when I think of him, and that fifty years have increased rather than weakened the kindliness which I bear to him."
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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