Part 13

Captain Margaret had planned to arrive at Jamestown early in the season, so that he might secure the cream of the tobacco crop before the summer fleet came in. Now that he was safe for a little while, he set about his business. At the end of the fifth day he chartered a couple of swift sloops from a Jamaica merchant, and loaded them, in one day, under official supervision, with fifty tons of assorted goods. He kept some twenty seamen at the work, from turn-to time till sunset, driving them himself. His zeal startled all of them. But Margaret was working with his whole nature to save the merchants who had fitted him out. He felt that he had risked their money, by gratifying a foolish whim; now he was to save them, having seen his chance. The bales and casks swung up out of the hold into the sloops. The winches clanked, the ropes creaked, the bosun swore at the slingmen. The slingmen, dripping in the hot darkness, damned and spat, and worked their hands full of splinters. A fine dust rose up out of the hatch to quiver in the sunlight. The slings fell with a rattling thud on to the boxes below; the block creaked as the fall was overhauled; a thirsty throat called “Hoist.” The bosun, too hurried to pipe, bent over the coamings to spit, telling the men on deck to hoist or sway away. Up came the boxes and casks, swinging to the yard-arm tackle. The boatswain, bearing them over, swearing, followed them to the rail, as the yard-arm was rounded in. Then there came the “High enough. Walk back”; and the sling strained slowly downwards to the stevedores, whose black skins gleamed in the sun. By sunset the sloops were cast off from the _Broken Heart_. Cammock and Margaret swung themselves into the stern of one of them as she sheered out. The slingmen, relieved from their hell below, stared at them silently over the rail with grime-ringed eyes. The sweat had streaked the dirt on their faces, making them look haggard. Like a row of corpses, dug up after the first day of burial, those silent men stood. Margaret, looking at them, thought with horror that the lives of some men might be expressed, defined, summed, in a sort of purser’s tally: so many boxes hoisted out, so many creatures killed, so many pots drunk, so many books read: with the sum added, the life extinct, nothing remaining, nothing for God or the Devil; merely a sum in addition for the harping quirers.

Sail was packed upon the sloops. All that night they drove, a red lamp burning astern. At dawn, when the sea below the woods was like steel, though tremulous in pale light, they were standing in to a jetty on the Accomac side. It was dusk in the clearing where the house stood; but the stumps of felled trees stood up black, a troop of dwarfs; and the cattle moved dimly among them, cropping grass with a wrench. Casks stood at the edge of the jetty; there was a gleam upon their hoops. There was a gleam of dew upon the forest, as a little dawn-wind, stirring the birds, made a patter of dropping. A fire with a waving flame burned under a pent-house, making a thick, sweet smoke, which floated everywhere, smelling of burning gum, driving away the mosquitoes. When the flame leaped up, brightly shaking, it showed a tilted cart, with a man under a red robe asleep against the wheel. Quietly, before the light was come, they made the sloops fast and stepped ashore. They stamped to kill the numbness in their feet; then, rousing the sleeper, they helped him to prepare a breakfast, of apples, fish, and new cider, before trading for his tobacco.

All that day they plied along the Accomac coast, Cammock in the _Peach_, Margaret in the _Daisy_, buying tobacco at every clearing, paying the planters in goods. When the _Peach_ sloop was full, Cammock drove her back, with her boom-end under, to sling the tobacco into the _Broken Heart_ at dawn, and to fill up again with trade. Margaret’s keenness puzzled him; the man was on fire. “I thought he was one of these dreamy fellows,” he said to himself. “But he drives a tight bargain, and he goes at it like a tiger.”

He went aboard the ship, putting all hands to the work of clearing and reloading the sloop. Mr. Cottrill met him at the gangway with word that two of their best men had deserted from the trading-booth, taking with them about fifty pounds’ worth of goods; that they had gone off at sunset, just as the sloops cast off; and that one of the men aboard had heard that they were going for a run with a gang of Indian-snatchers. Worse still. The foretopmast was sprung at the heel, and the new spar couldn’t be ready for a week. Cammock had been at a driving strain for a couple of days; but, like most hard cases, he found the second day a day of exaltation, of nervous excitement. The news pleased him; it occupied his mind. He bade his men get out trade from all three hatches as fast as the winches could sway it out, while he with a dozen men went ashore in the sloop, still half full of tobacco.

As soon as he got ashore he struck the booth, crammed all the goods into the sloop, lock, stock, and barrel, and carried them back aboard. As they were thrust into the sloop he made a rough inventory.

“Now, Mr. Cottrill,” he said, “just take this list and check it as soon as you’ve got a chance. Then check it with the trade-book, and find out what’s missing. Then check that with the clerk’s list. Rig up an awning from the break of the poop to the mast there. That’ll be your trade booth. Call the trade clerk. Call Mrs. Inigo. Mr. Harthop, you’ll keep your trade booth here in future. Mrs. Inigo, you’ll have to give up your berth in the sail-locker. See to that, Mr. Cottrill. Mrs. Inigo’ll sleep in the steward’s room. The steward’ll have to go into the round-house. Mr. Harthop, you’ll use the sail-room, where Mrs. Inigo’s been sleeping, as your sample-room. See that no one goes up the alleyway to the cabin. Keep a clear gangway from the alley to the companion there. Mr. Cottrill, give Mr. Harthop three hands and let him arrange his shop. He’d better stone out the sail-room after breakfast. Shift your things, Mrs. Inigo. You, too, steward. Mr. Cottrill, pick out three good hands to be under Mr. Harthop. Quiet, steady men. Pick one or two of the boys. Mr. Harthop, what were you doing to let those men away?”

Mr. Harthop, a little, bald jocular man with a pale face and long drooping moustaches, which gave him a sad, Chinese expression, rolled slowly forward, peering under his spectacles.

“I’d gone up to the Governor’s house, sir, with some velvets.”

“Why didn’t you send one of the men? Or wait till trade was over for the day?”

“The Governor’s lady asked me to come, Captain Cammock.”

“Women’ll be the death of this cruise,” said Cammock to himself. “Who was in charge while you were gone?”

“Smale, the boy, Captain Cammock, sir. I was only gone twenty minutes.”

“There it is,” said Cammock. “Smale, how did this happen?”

“Please, zur,” said Smale, a short young ploughboy from Gloucestershire, “I were a-’avin’ my zupper, zur. ’N I seed a owd feller come up and give ’is fist like to Andrews. And her’d a-done it avore. Zo they talked, and by’n by, Captain Cammock, zur, another feller come like. Her said as Mr. Harthop said as I wus to go to Governor’s house, to fetch a few fowls for th’ ’en-coop. Zo I went. And her’d all gone avore I’d come back. And her’d took the things.”

Cammock kept back what he thought of the Governor’s wife.

“Mr. Cottrill,” he said. “You, Mr. Ramage, and the bosun, will have to stand trade watches. No visitor is to talk to any of the hands under any pretext whatsoever.”

“Ay, ay, sir. I thought I could have trusted Andrews.”

“You may go, Mr. Harthop. It ought never to have been allowed. Directly my back was turned.” He was blaming himself for having been so easy of access, and so friendly with old acquaintance. “Naturally,” he said to himself, “the men got notions. Well, they’ll get no more.” He walked to the waist, where the work was going busily with songs. The sloop was being loaded forward as she discharged abaft. His presence made the men zealous. He had never seen cargo worked so well.

“Bosun,” he called, “who’s night watchman?”

“Pearson, Captain Cammock,” said Harris. He smeared his mouth with the back of his hand, and left a cask to dangle aloft over the hatch. He ran towards Cammock in a shambling trot.

“Tell Pearson that I want him. Mr. Cottrill, choose a good man to stand night watchman with Pearson, to walk round the ship, harbour-guard, all night long, in opposite directions. No man whatever to come aboard or to leave the ship after sunset. Pearson, when you come on duty to-night you’ll apply to Mr. Ramage for a pair of pistols. You’re to shoot at any man who attempts to desert. You’re to heave cold shot into any boat which tries to come alongside. Tell the lamp-man he’s to have lanterns lit abreast the main and fore chains. Call all hands if any boat comes off to us after two bells. You’re to shoot at any boat which does not answer to a hail. You understand.”

“Yes, sir. Shoot at any man as tries to desert, and any boat as don’t reply.”

“H’m,” said Cammock to himself, noting the faces of the crew. “There’ll be no more deserting from this hooker.”

“Carry on,” he said aloud. “Bosun, call away the gig. Let the gig’s crew dress. Doctor, there, kill me six fowls. The best we’ve got in the fattening coop. Steward there. Call the steward you, boy. Tell him to bring a dozen Burgundy. Now, Mr. Cottrill, a word with you, sir. Mr. Perrin and the rest, are they all well?”

“As far as I know, they are, sir.”

“Mr. Stukeley?”

“Mr. Stukeley’s like fat Jack of the Boneyard, I guess, sir. He’s bigger than the admiral.”

“What’s he been doing?”

“He’s been wanting the gig’s crew all day. I told him I needed the men in the hold. He’d have to use the long-boat, I said, when she goes in for water.”

“Very right. Yes?”

“So he came and called me down before the men. Said I wasn’t a gentleman. He said as Captain Margaret had said he and his lady was to have the gig whenever they wanted her.”

“Was Mrs. Stukeley there?”

“No, sir. So I up and said that I’d had no orders. Then he calls me down some more; and goes and gets Mr. Perrin to come to me, to say that Captain Margaret wished to oblige Mr. Stukeley in all things.”

“Yes?”

“So I told Mr. Perrin, pretty quick, I said, I was in command, I said. It wasn’t for him to tell me my duty. I told him to tell his society friends they could do the Barney’s Bull act. They’d get no gig out of me. That’s what I said.”

“Yes?”

“So that Mr. Stukeley, he went ashore in the long-boat, after calling me down some more before the men. He got a shore-boat to go about in. After that he said his boatman should have dinner aboard of us. I stopped that. But Mr. Stukeley was very rude, and then the man got rude. All hands working the hatch there, hearing it all. Mrs. Stukeley beside. So that was two blocks, I thought. I give the boatman a thick ear there and then. I told him if he didn’t sheer off I’d drop a cold shot into him. And I would have. Mr. Stukeley told me to keep my hands off the man. Then the man wanted his money. My hat, we had it all up and down. I thought that Stukeley would hit me, one time. I wish ’e ’ad done. I’d a laid him out.”

“And Mr. Perrin? How did it end?”

“I saw some of the hands knocked off to listen, so I give them a few. And he stood there telling them not to take no blows. Telling ’em to down me. And then the long-boat come alongside with water. Mr. Ramage was in her, of course. He hears the row, and he come over the side just as quick as cut. He just took that Stukeley by the arm, and walked him into the alleyway. ‘Don’t you incite no sailors, sir,’ he says. ‘No more of that, sir. I respects your feelings, sir,’ he says, ‘but for Gord’s and your lady’s sake,’ he says, ‘you quit. You don’t know what you’re doin’.’ That was the end for that time. I suppose we’ll ’ave another dollop of it to-day.”

“Put him in irons at once, publicly, if he gives you any more trouble. And he’s not to talk to any man. That’s another thing. Iron him directly he gives a back answer. Tell Mr. Ramage, too. Now bring those fowls along doctor. I’m off to the man-of-war sloop, about them Indian-snatchers.”

He pulled aboard the man-of-war sloop, with his present of wine and poultry. As he sat in his gig calling to the men to pull the stroke out, he wrote descriptions of the missing seamen.

When he returned to the _Broken Heart_, the sloop was nearly full of trade. It was just half-past seven. He went to his cabin to wash, walking quickly and quietly, like a forest Indian. There was some slight noise to his left as he entered the alleyway. He turned sharply, to look into the sail-room, to see if it were ready for the samples. The door shut in his face with a bang. He could not swear to it--the door shut in a fraction of a second--yet it seemed to him that he had seen Stukeley with Mrs. Inigo, for one bright flash of time. He would not open to make sure; for it was a woman’s cabin; he might have been mistaken; but he turned in his tracks and blew his whistle. A man ran to him.

“Get some dry stone, and stone this door clean,” he said, showing Mrs. Inigo’s door. “Stone the outside, and keep at it till breakfast.” That would keep Stukeley within (if he were within) until breakfast, at any rate. He flung his clothes from him and swilled himself with water; then dressed rapidly and went to Perrin’s cabin. “Mr. Perrin,” he said, bursting in after knocking once, “how are you, Mr. Perrin? I want you to keep your eye on Mrs. Inigo’s door. See who comes out of it. Is Mrs. Stukeley well?”

“Very well. How are you and the captain?”

“The captain’ll be back later in the day. I’m just off again.”

“We’d a lot of trouble yesterday. I’ll be glad when you’re back for good.”

“Cheer up, sir,” said Cammock. “Remember. Mrs. Inigo’s door till one bell. If Mrs. Inigo comes out, open it and search the cabin.” He went on deck again, where the steward met him with a tray. He sat down on a coaming and made a hurried breakfast, while the sloop’s crew hoisted sail. When he had finished his meal, he glanced into the alleyway, where the man was rubbing holystone across the door. “Anybody in there?” he said.

“I hear some one shifting around, sir,” said the man. “The woman’s getting her gear, sir.”

“Right,” said Cammock. “I wish I could stay to see the end,” he said to himself. “But I must be off.” In a few minutes he was bound again for Accomac, under a huge square cutter’s foresail, which made the sloop leap like a flying-fish.

Very late one night, having just arrived aboard after a week of labour, Captain Margaret sat in his cabin comparing tally-books with Captain Cammock; but quietly, lest they should wake Perrin. He was very tired; for the hurry from one clearing to another, and the long rides into the wilderness to planters who lived far away, had been a strain. He had endured them only in the fire of his excitement. He had enjoyed his week of bargaining; the zest of the struggle had been like wine to him. On the lonely clearings, or drinking with strangers in woodmen’s shacks, he had forgotten his love, forgotten the torment of the voyage, Olivia’s child, the settlement on Darien. All had been forgotten. Now that the struggle was over, he felt the exhaustion; but nodding as he was, over his tally-book, his whirling brain praised him with that excited inner voice which talks to the overwrought. “You’ve got the pick of the crop, the pick of the crop, the cream of the year’s leaf,” the voice kept telling him. He had bought seven hundred tons of the best tobacco in the colony; the little that remained to be sold was the poor, crude leaf from the young plants and the poorly cured, poorly flavoured leaf from the distant walks in the forest.

“We’ve got the whole trade, sir,” said Cammock. “You needn’t fear for your owners.”

“No,” said Margaret. “Now to get a bottom to carry it home. Of course, in a week we ought to have the summer fleet here.”

“They’ll not find much,” said Cammock. “We’ve got it all. But supposing a letter comes with the fleet. We shall have to sail that night probably, shan’t we? Supposing we’ve to cut and run, leaving it all in the warehouse?”

“I’ve thought of that,” said Margaret, “I thought of that, too. Heigho, captain, I’m tired. This week has been an experience. I shall leave Mr. Harthop in charge ashore, with powers to deal. He’s shrewd. He’s got a funny way of getting at the point with that queer humour as a cloak. And I’ve got Howard, Cammock. Howard’s our agent.”

“You’ve got the Governor, sir?”

“Oh yes. That was my first move. I knew old Howard wanted specie; so I went to see him and told him my plans. He was expensive, though. He knew his worth to a penny.”

“What it is to be a gentleman. If I’d gone, he’d have kicked me out. Well. Birth tells, they say.”

Perrin sat up in his bunk, and looked at them through the curtains.

“A servile, insolent, bribing, tipping race, the English,” he said. “An Englishman will never do anything for any one without expecting something.”

“Oh, you’re awake, are you? At it again, too,” said Cammock. “How about that door, sir?”

“Well, Edward, how are you? What door is this?”

“Oh. Mrs. Inigo’s door,” said Perrin. “Oh yes. Yes. Mrs. Inigo came out at eight bells, and then I tried to get in. But it was locked on the inside. So I called Mr. Harthop’s three men, and the man who was scrubbing it.”

“Good. Good,” said Cammock.

“And I told them ‘the door was jammed.’ So they’d a jemmy there, for opening cases with, and we burst the door open. We found Stukeley inside.”

“Stukeley?” said Margaret. “I half suspected that.”

“He was on his knees on the deck, sponging that blue silk dress Olivia wears.”

“Ha,” said Captain Cammock. “I should never have thought of that.”

“Shrewd these Cornish women are.”

“He was rather red in the face, but he asked us what was the matter. Then he asked me to give him a hand, as he’d got to get the dress ready for Olivia, he said. She’d spilt some chocolate down it. It was----”

“Was he flustered? Hectoring?”

“Afterwards. Not then. He kept saying that Olivia wished to wear the dress at breakfast.”

“Did she?”

“Yes. Oh yes. I don’t know, Charles. There might have been nothing wrong.”

“I thought I saw something,” said Cammock.

“Well,” said Margaret. “I suppose we’ll have to discharge Mrs. Inigo, and pay her passage home. Captain Cammock, what do you think of Stukeley?”

“I’m like the parrot,” said Cammock, “I think a lot more’n I’ll say. Now turn in, all hands. A long lie, and pie for dinner. Captain Margaret, if you don’t turn in, you’ll find you won’t sleep. Oh. Has Mr. Stukeley been in irons?”

“He’s been threatened with them. He’s been very quiet though lately. That Inigo time gave him a scare, I think.”

“Well. Good night, gentlemen.”

“Good night.”

As Captain Margaret drew his bunk-curtains and settled himself to sleep, the voices in his brain took bodies to them, fiery bodies, which leaned and called to him. “You’ve got the pick of the crop, the pick of the crop, the pick of the crop,” they called. “Lucky devil. Lucky devil. Oh, you lucky devil.”

VIII. IN PORT

“Yet still he stands prefract and insolent.” _Charles, Duke of Byron._

After breakfast the next morning the two Stukeleys sat in their stateroom talking. They had had a week of comparative isolation, of comparative privacy, very sweet to Olivia, who had learned, during the voyage, to regret the days at Salcombe, when one had but to close a door, to shut the world of love from that other world, full of thorns and thistles, where ordinary mortals walked, not having the key of the burning imagination. With Margaret and Cammock away, and Perrin seldom present at meals, owing to his fear of the badgering of Stukeley, the cabin of the _Broken Heart_ had come to be something of a home to her. She could feel again that nothing else really existed, that no one else really lived, that all the world, all the meaning and glory and life of the world, centred in the two burning mouths, in the two hearts which divined each other, apprehending all things in themselves. During that week of privacy she had even learned to think tenderly again of the three men who had shared the cabin with her. She found that she no longer resented Cammock’s want of breeding; his want of culture; his past as explained by Tom; his social position as compared with her aunt Pile’s coachman. During the voyage she had grown to dislike Margaret and Perrin, much as one dislikes the guests who have overstayed their welcome. She had been too much in the rapture of love to see things clearly, to judge character clearly; she had taken her judgments ready-made from Tom, who disliked the two men. She had liked them both as old friends; had liked them much, in the old days, before she knew life. But, under the strain of the voyage, ever prompted by Stukeley’s bitterness, while looking on them as her friends, she had come to resent their continual presence, to be cross at their conversation, which (as she felt instinctively) was restrained by their dislike of Tom, through their want of imaginative sympathy with his point of view. Now that they were no longer ever present, like spices added to each dish till every dish disgusts, she thought of them both with pity; feeling that they were growing old in their ways, narrowed in their sympathies, never knowing the meaning of life, which is love. Thus thought she, in the confidence of exulting health, in the rapture of being possessed, with the merciless pity of a newly married woman. This that she had waited for, this love which crowned and made her, it cleared the eyes, she thought, it exalted, it ennobled, it glorified. She would that those two pathetic figures, Margaret so serious and proud, with his clumsy walk, and halting, almost affected picked precision of phrase, and Perrin, the forlorn parasite who looked as though he had been frozen, were married; she would so gladly see them happy, tasting something of the joy which made earth heaven to her. Margaret would be a beautiful lover, very thoughtful and tender, but cold; he was cold-hearted, she thought, and rather frightening. Perrin would be attracted by some little merry woman who would laugh at him and twist him round her finger. Perrin, she confessed to Tom, attracted her more than the other, because he looked so wretched. Being so happy herself, she wished others to be happy. Her education, like most women’s education, had been aimed to make her fear the world, to make her shrink from those characters who judged the world and sought to direct it. Her own world, beautiful as it was, existed only by the exclusion of such characters; her nature could not accept Margaret wholly; she could only respect and vaguely fear him, as one respects and fears all things which one is not wise enough to understand. Perrin looked wretched, and having a tenderness for wretched folk, she thought that she understood him. All the time, unknown to her, the three men summed her up with pity and reverence and tender devotion; but mostly with pity, and with a mournful, tender curiosity. It was perhaps partly that curiosity which had made their absence pleasant to her. Their absence had been a relief to her, it had also relieved her husband. And since their arrival at Virginia her husband had made her anxious; he had behaved very queerly at times, ever since the first day. She felt that he was keeping something from her, perhaps some ailment which tortured him and made him irritable. She had been very thankful to have her dear love so much to herself during an entire week.