Part 16

“I think they’re very like, Edward. They’re fond of liberty. They take a beautiful pride in their bodies. They are attached to the country. They’re very like Athenians. The world doesn’t alter much.”

“How about Plato and Sophocles?”

“They were not the world. They had wrought themselves to something finer than the world.”

“The Governor’s got a devil of a lot of letters,” said Stukeley. “There goes his secretary to him.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I pity the man who tries it,” Stukeley muttered, thinking of an arrest.

“Is this a very good harbour for ships?” Olivia asked.

“Yes; very good,” said Margaret. “Don’t you love to imagine the river here full of ships, the biggest and most beautiful kinds of ships? And then the banks here, and yonder, with a city. A city, built of marble. Marble cathedrals. And a great citadel on the hill there.”

“A great naval power is always on the brink of ruin,” said Perrin. “Athens was a great naval power, and had her navy smashed by a power without a navy. Carthage the same. Spain was greatest at the eighty-eight. There’s another instance.”

“Naval power is a very fine thing,” said Margaret. “You’re mixing up greatness, and the weakness which comes of overweening pride, or the defect of greatness.”

“That’s what you silly Celts are always doing,” said Stukeley.

At this moment the orderly reappeared, saluting.

“Beg pardon, sirs,” he said, “but which of you gents is Captain Margaret?”

“I am.”

“’Is lordship’s compliments, sir; ’n’ will you step this way?”

Margaret glanced at the faces of his friends. Stukeley sat down, nursing the sword, looking at the doorway and at the window. Perrin, who sincerely hoped he was about to see the end of Stukeley, enjoyed a mental vision of the Ephesian matron. His day-dream was of Olivia in black, in a darkened London room, and of himself, the comforter, come to console her, with platitude in low tone, sentiment speaking grief’s language. Olivia turned to the spinet. She tried one or two notes with her finger, making little wry mouths at the want of tune. “Is there any Virginian music, Edward?” she asked. “I heard some negroes singing in the tobacco fields the other day. It sounded very sweet. It came home to one strangely. All working songs come home to one, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” said Perrin. “They are so simple. They’re like a simple person speaking passionately. They leave the intellect untouched, of course.”

“Yes. But you and Charles are always blaming poultry, shall we say, for not being golden eagles. Poultry as poultry are very good. Don’t you think so? Won’t you sit down, Edward? This is the song the negroes sang. I think it’s so charming.”

While she touched the tune upon the spinet, Margaret stood in the presence of Howard, the Governor, a heavy-looking, weary-looking man with dark moustaches. His voice was hard and grating, an official voice. It jarred on Margaret, who expected bad news from it.

“Sit down, Margaret,” he said, picking up a letter. “I hope you’re well.”

“Thanks. Yes. You wanted to see me?”

“Do you know that I could lodge you all in prison?”

“So you’ve heard, then?”

“Read this letter.”

He glanced through the letter of instructions from the Board. It set forth Stukeley’s crime, the details of the escape from Salcombe, the necessity for the arrest of the whole party; it was not a pleasant letter. No one had ever before described Margaret as an abettor of felons; the sensation was new; and oppressive, like some contaminations.

“Well,” said Howard. “You seem to take it very coolly.”

“I’ve been preparing for this moment for a quarter of a year.”

“What is this Stukeley? He seems a boorish kind of fellow.”

“He’s an unpleasant man. A bad man.”

“I should call him a thorough scoundrel, from that letter.”

“He’s married to a charming woman. A woman I’ve known for years. You can see for yourself that she’s a lot too good for him.”

“Do you wish him to be arrested? You know the penalty, of course?”

“I suppose I could plead ignorance?”

“You? Yes. But he. _Sus. per col._ Eh?”

“I think, Howard, he ought to be cut off. But his wife’s going to have a child. I happen to know her, as I said. She believes in him. She doesn’t suspect. I’m afraid the shock would kill both her and the child.”

“You’d rather that I didn’t arrest?”

“For her sake, yes. And for the sake of the merchants concerned in the venture with me.”

“Your tobacco will keep them from loss. They’re all right. Do you know that your Darien scheme is known in Spain?”

“Ah. Then. Then the Government will curry favour with Spain by arresting us on this pretext, and claiming to have stopped us on her account?”

“That is, of course, possible. It depends on party needs at the moment. I know nothing of that.”

“It is something you ought to reckon, Howard.”

“Well. If I don’t arrest you. You’ve put me in such an awkward position. I can’t very well arrest my guests. It would bring me into disfavour, and my office into disrepute. I don’t know what to say. Are you ready to sail?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you sail two or three days ago? As soon as you’d made your voyage. Why in the world did you wait for the tobacco fleet?”

“We were kept waiting for our new topmast. We found our foretopmast sprung. It was only this morning that we finished setting up the rigging on the new spar.”

“You understand, Margaret, that at this moment you’re Stukeley’s judge. You’ve got power of life and death over him. You can turn it over in your mind, and then say, whether you wish me to arrest him, or not. You wish to spare the girl, his wife. Looking at it impartially, I should doubt whether you would spare her by sparing him. The man’s a scoundrel.”

“There’s the child, remember.”

“Yes. I was forgetting the child. Of course. There’s the child.”

“If you arrest us all and send us home, of course her people will look after her on arrival. Is that a possible solution to you?”

“Between you and me, Margaret, I don’t want to arrest you all. If I do, why, there’ll be a scandal here. ‘The Governor’s friends proved to be escaping felons.’ The cry will be everywhere. I don’t want that. On the other hand, the man’s a scoundrel. H’m. It’s a pretty problem.”

“You can arrest me in mistake for Stukeley. How would that do?”

“No,” said the Governor, shaking his head; “that won’t do. What are your plans for the lady in case I don’t arrest?”

“I suppose we shall have to leave her at Jamaica after a month or two in Darien.”

“Perhaps she’ll be better off there than in England. Has she a woman with her?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t, in your heart, wish me to proceed?”

“No, Howard; I want you to spare her.”

“Very well, then. You must sail this night. Sail directly you get on board.”

“Thank you, Howard. I will. You won’t get into trouble with the Board over this?”

“I shall say that you crept away in the night. No singing at the capstan, remember. No cheering. If you’re not gone by dawn I’ll arrest the whole pack of you. I can’t do more.”

“I’m very---- This is very kind of you, Howard.”

“Kind? A kind man has no business in politics. I’m shirking my duty.”

“Yes,” said Margaret, with a sigh. “And I’m pleading with you, trying to make you shirk it.”

“Not a bit of it,” said the Governor. “There’s the gong. We’ll go down to dinner. By the way, there’s a letter for you. Where did I put it? Here it is.” He handed a sealed packet to Margaret, who glanced abstractly at the seal, and then, not recognizing the crest, put it in his pocket, and followed his host to the door. “Honour,” he repeated to himself. “Honour. My honour is a smirched rag. A smirched rag.”

The dining-room was a long, low, bare apartment. The whitewashed walls were hung with one or two prints by Dürer, the “Adam and Eve,” the “Justice,” and “The Man of Sorrows,” from the “Lesser Passion.” The table was heaped with a deal of silver, all of it very crudely designed. The dinner was mostly of fruit and vegetables; it was too hot for meat. The wine bottles lay outside the window in jackets of wetted flannel. Each guest had a palm fan at his side, for use between the courses.

The Governor sat at the end of the table with the door at his back. Olivia sat next to him, with Margaret beside her. Mrs. Prinsep sat next to Margaret, with Stukeley on her right, then Perrin, then an empty seat directly at the Governor’s left. During the dinner Howard asked the footman if Captain Lewin had arrived. The man told him, no.

“Captain Lewin is in command of the frigate there,” Howard explained to Olivia. “I asked him to join us, so that you could hear the news. By the by, I’m sorry to hear you’re sailing.”

Olivia noticed that he, too, looked at her with something of the shrewd, hard, medical gaze with which Perrin and Cammock sometimes looked at her. She resented the look as an impertinence, half wondering if there was something strange about her face--some sudden growth of eyelid or droop of hair.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry we’re going, too, for several reasons. But I hope we shall meet again in England. You must come and see us when we’re settled there.”

“That will be delightful. In what part do you think of settling?”

“In Devon. Near a place called Flaxley.”

“Oh yes. Indeed. Flaxley. That’s near the sea. I know Flaxley, Mrs. Stukeley. There’s a beautiful old house there. I once stayed a night there. What was the fellow’s name, now?”

“Then you know my uncle. Do you? Neston Pile.”

“Pile. Yes. Pile. Of course. So he’s your uncle, Mrs. Stukeley? What a fine old man he is.”

“Yes,” she said, with quiet indifference. “He is very much loved.” She would have given much to be back at Flaxley sitting in the great hall there. A Vandyck hung in the hall, the portrait of Sir Nicolas Pile, her great-uncle, once the king’s standard-bearer, who had been killed in the fight at Naseby. He looked down upon the hall in melancholy honour, a noble guardian, full of grave pride, helpful to those who sat there. Howard’s words gave her a longing to see that austere, sweet, thoughtful face looking down upon her, a longing all the more keen for the knowledge that perhaps she would never again see him, now that her uncle had been so horrid to Tom. The pang of homesickness went shrewdly to her heart; but she sipped her wine, her face unchanged, her smile ready.

“What brought you to Flaxley, I wonder?” she added. “I wonder if I was there then.”

“It was seven or eight years ago,” said Howard. “I had to go there about some Roman coins. I collect antiques, you know. Rather a dull subject for you. Your uncle had written a little pamphlet on the coins dug up at Hurst’s Castle, that old Roman Camp in Somerset.”

“Yes. He used to collect coins then. He’d a few very rare ones. Were you there in the summer? Did you see the rose-garden?”

“On a slope, somewhere at the back, rather exposed?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve a dim recollection of it. I was only there one night. You weren’t there then?”

“My brothers were alive then. I expect I was with them.”

“Is that old gate-keeper of yours alive still? An oldish woman. Rather a character?”

“Old Maggie? Oh, do you remember old Maggie? Poor old Maggie. She’s dead now. There was a shipwreck on the rocks beyond Flaxley, and she rowed out to the wreck with her idiot son. She was such a fine old woman. None of the men would go out; so she said she would go. She rowed and rowed. There’s a very strong current there, too. When she got to the wreck her boat was smashed against the side, so she had to stay there for nearly a day, I think, and she died soon afterwards from the exposure.”

“Indeed. She impressed me. A fierce old Roman.”

Perrin looked up to remark that the courage of a woman was as it were complementary to the courage of man. That women did things which men could not do; and that their courage was on the whole of a finer quality. Mrs. Prinsep, who may perhaps have thought that the compliment to her sex was designed subtly to please her, seemed to bridle.

“I think women would be proud to hear that,” she said contemptuously. She disliked Perrin; all common natures did.

“Yes,” said Margaret. “A woman’s courage comes from a quality of soul. A man’s comes more from a faculty of body. You can’t think of the two without feeling that in the woman you have something far finer.”

“They squeal if they see a mouse,” said Stukeley.

“Yes? If you will name the highest flight of man’s courage, I will prove to you that at that point woman’s courage begins.”

“A man’s courage is often indifference,” said Perrin. “When I was nearly drowned once, I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to die. Why am I not frightened?’ I wasn’t frightened. I was only tired of swimming and swimming, with the water against me.”

“You skedaddled from that dog the other day,” said Stukeley.

“What dog was that, Mr. Stukeley?” Mrs. Prinsep asked.

“Oh,” said Stukeley, with a chuckle. “A dog that flounced out at him from one of the houses here. Good luck. To see old Pilly run. Did he get you, Pilly, or did you get up the tree in time?”

“I was in time,” said Perrin, flushing, looking very uncomfortable.

“Are you very much afraid of dogs, Mr. Perrin?” Mrs. Prinsep asked.

“Yes,” he answered rudely. “So are you.”

At this moment Captain Lewin entered, so that the discussion came to an end before it had well begun, like most discussions of the kind.

Captain Lewin was a tall, grey, upright man, with a sharp, dictatorial manner that was somehow not authoritative, and therefore not offensive. He entered the room with his hands behind his back, snapping quickly from the nervous strain of being late. Howard greeted him and introduced him. He sat down nervously on his host’s left, looked round the room with the quick apprehension of an animal, much as he would have looked aloft on coming on deck, and began to apologize for his lateness.

“I dined before I left the ship,” he said. “That rascal, my purser, kept me. Very good claret, your Excellency. Who’s the man next but one on my left? I seem to know his face.”

“Stukeley. Thomas Stukeley, husband of the lady here,” the Governor answered in a low voice.

“I seem to have seen him somewhere. Wasn’t he in the rising in Beverley’s time?”

“No, captain.”

“Reminds me of that beauty who led us such a dance up the Delaware.”

“Oh, George Bond?”

“Yes. He was a beauty. I wonder what’s become of George Bond?”

“Yes. He kept us all alive here.”

“You have just come from England?” Olivia asked.

“Yes,” said the captain. “We sailed at the end of July. Your Excellency, I wouldn’t go down the river with such another convoy. Not if the King knighted me.”

Olivia was not quite sure of the technical terms, so she answered nothing, but smiled a smile of interested sympathy. She remembered suddenly that perhaps he had brought mails. She asked him.

“Mails? Yes, madam. Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh I’ve brought the mails. They’re in his Excellency’s hands.”

“None for you, Mrs. Stukeley, I’m afraid,” said Howard. “Captain Margaret had one.”

“Captain Margaret?” said Lewin quickly. “Do you know a Captain Margaret here?”

Stukeley pushed back his chair, and seemed to fumble in his pocket. Margaret looked up quickly from the cracking of a nut.

“I am he,” he said quietly.

“You are he, are you? I missed your name just now,” said Lewin, putting his hand within his coat.

Perrin pushed back his chair so that his body covered Lewin from Stukeley.

“Ah,” continued Lewin, in his hard voice with its ring of jocularity, “I’ve a letter for you. I was to deliver it into your hands. You’ve got friends at Court, I think, sir. It came to me through the Secretary.”

Margaret kept a steady face, not daring to glance at Stukeley; for a wink to a blind horse may be as disastrous as a blow. His first thought was, “here it ends”; his second thought told him that Perrin was giving the show away, by pushing back his chair; his third thought took in the possibilities of the pistol. He filled his wine-glass composedly, so that he might have a missile handy, then poured a little claret into Olivia’s glass.

“Friends at Court, Captain Lewin?” he answered. “No. I don’t think so. Let me see this mysterious letter.” A sudden impulse urged him to keep Olivia’s eyes from her husband’s face. “Howard,” he added, “you never showed Mrs. Stukeley those experiments of yours on the maize-ear. Aren’t those some of the maize-ears just behind you?”

“Ah yes, Mrs. Stukeley,” said Howard, reaching behind him to the jar. “Let me explain them to you.”

Lewin selected a sealed packet from his pocket-book and handed it across the table. Olivia, reaching out her hand to pass the letter to Margaret, saw the superscription.

“Why,” she cried, “it’s from Uncle Nestor. How strange. We were just now talking of him.”

“So is this Sir Nestor’s hand?” said Margaret, putting the letter to one side. He asked because the letter in his pocket was addressed in the same hand.

“Yes,” said Olivia, looking down at it. “Aren’t you going to read it?”

“Read it,” said Stukeley in a strange voice.

Howard laid down his maize-cobs. The letter lay at Margaret’s side; everybody looked at it. Mrs. Prinsep, in her shrewd Scotch way, glanced at her neighbours, and saw that there was something wrong. “There is something wrong somewhere,” she said to herself. Olivia, looking at Perrin and at her husband, wondered if the heat had been too much for them. Their faces were so very curious. It struck her that the talk had gone to pieces. The host, waiting for her head to turn, so that he might expound his new science to her, held his peace.

“Everybody’s waiting for you, Charles,” she added.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Prinsep, guessing that Margaret disliked Olivia’s prompting. “Captain Margaret will tell us all the news.”

Captain Margaret asked Mrs. Prinsep if he might hand her a sapadillo.

“I’m anxious to hear the news,” she answered. “No, thank you.”

“Oh,” said Margaret lightly, as he put the letter in his pocket, “I won’t read the letter during dinner. I’ve been meaning to ask you, Mrs. Prinsep, how you keep domestic servants here, with such a scarcity of white women.”

“I’d rather hear what the letter says,” she answered, “than talk about servants. We get so little news here from England.”

“I don’t understand the craving for news,” said Perrin. “One carries the world in one’s head.”

“You must want a big head to do that,” said Mrs. Prinsep.

“It doesn’t matter what size it is, so long as it’s empty. Why read letters and gazettes when one can read imaginative work?”

Mrs. Prinsep remarked with bitterness that she knew not what imaginative work meant, unless it was a kind of thing which she disliked very much. She half rose, catching Olivia’s eye. The two ladies left the room--Mrs. Prinsep to abuse Perrin and to apply crudely an examination; Olivia to suffer from home-sickness, thinking of her uncle’s letter. Mrs. Prinsep could draw little from her; for Mrs. Prinsep, while suspecting something wrong, naturally suspected a woman of finer beauty than her own of being a party to it. Her theory was that Olivia had run away from her home, and that, being beautiful, she was possibly not correctly married. She liked Stukeley; but she had her duty to herself to consider. She put Olivia through a conventional catechism, in the course of which she asked for particulars of the wedding. Olivia, seeing her drift, replied coldly, in monosyllables.

Meanwhile, in the dining-room, over the wine, Stukeley badgered Margaret to read the letter.

“Read it,” he kept saying. “Read it. Let’s hear what’s in it.”

Howard wondered at his tone; but as he knew something of Stukeley’s affairs, he drew Lewin out of the room, so that the voyagers might read the letter together undisturbed. When he had gone, Margaret opened the packet brought by Lewin. Stukeley picked up his wine-glass and crossed over towards Margaret, so that he, too, might read.

“What do you want, Stukeley?” Margaret asked him.

“I want to read that letter, of course. It’s about me.”

“Do you generally read the letters of others?”

“I’m going to read this.”

“Are you?” Margaret looked at him coolly, finished his letter, and started to read the other. As he had expected, the letters were alike. One had been brought by a merchantman, the other by the man-of-war. The letter was that saddest of all letters, the letter of the old man who asks humbly, knowing the selfishness of youth. That the old man wrote without hope seemed evident to Margaret from the appeal he made to chivalrous sentiment. “I am confident to write to you,” ran the un-confident words, “though we are little acquainted. I had the honour to serve with your father more than forty years ago.” Then there came a request that Captain Margaret would cause Stukeley to be arrested and brought home to trial, so that Olivia might again be under his care. There was also a moving prayer that he, the son of that old brother-in-arms who had ridden with the writer at Newbury forty odd years before, would let Olivia know what her husband had done. She was ignorant of her husband’s nature; but in England it was said that she was not so ignorant. In England her honour seemed smirched, for there were some who saw in her flight the ruse of a criminal and his doxy. It was right that she should know this, and very right that her husband should stand his trial, so that their honour might be cleared. The letter was bitter reading to Margaret. It made him feel that he had stained Olivia’s honour in staining his own, and all for the sake of a ruffian incapable of feeling the sacrifice. If the letter had come before his interview with Howard he would have pleaded differently, child or no child. He looked grave, helped himself to more wine, and handed a letter to Perrin.

“What’s the old boy say?” said Stukeley.

“That is surely not your business,” Margaret answered.

“I’ll make it my business. It concerns me. Isn’t it all about me? Eh?”

“No.”

“Isn’t it? I’ll soon see. Now then, Pilly. Hand over.”

“Leave Edward alone,” said Margaret. “The letter’s a private letter to myself. I prefer that you shall not read it, Stukeley.”

“Shall not. Eh? Blood. Eh? Shall not. Give it to me, Pilly.”

“Sit down, Stukeley,” said Margaret.

“Don’t you touch me, Stukeley,” said Perrin.

“Give me that letter.” He was within snatching distance; but Perrin twisted aside, so that he missed his mark. He sprawled across Perrin trying to reach his outstretched hand.

“Get out, you beast,” said Perrin, thrusting with his elbow.

“Temper, eh?” said Stukeley. He feinted quickly for Perrin’s nose; Perrin’s outstretched hand flew back to guard; the letter was seized with a whoop of triumph. Stukeley glanced contemptuously at Perrin, and began to read the letter, as Margaret quietly walked round the table to him.

Stukeley saw him coming, and kicked Mrs. Prinsep’s chair across his shins, checking his progress for an instant. As he kicked the chair, Perrin dashed at him, to snatch the paper. Stukeley flung him aside heavily, laughing at the fun of the tussle.

“You see what you get, little Pilly,” he said. “You see what you get. Eh?”

Margaret set aside the chair and advanced upon him. “Now, Stukeley,” he said, “that letter.”

Stukeley backed a pace to avoid him. Perrin, recovering, felt blindly along the table for a knife. At this moment the door opened, and Olivia entered.

“I’ve come to ask if I might read the letter. Uncle Nestor’s letter, Charles,” she said.

Perrin, in a voice which shook with the hysteria of wrath, told her that she had better ask her husband.

“There it is,” said Margaret quietly, indicating Stukeley.

Olivia glanced at the three men with surprise, even anxiety. Stukeley, who had not yet read the letter, looked to Margaret for a hint that the letter might be shown.

“There it is,” Margaret repeated.

“What is the matter with you three men?” Olivia asked. “You were fighting.”

“Pilly gets so excited,” Stukeley said.

“What were you doing, Tom?”

“Reading the letter,” Perrin said.

“What is in the letter?”

“There it is,” said Margaret.