Chapter 12

"Then a just man told you my story justly," he began, but she interrupted him, her breath coming faster.

"I have also made other inquiry; on my knees, on my face, in the dead of the night when I knew that thou, too, waked, I have asked of God, and of our Lord the Christ who suffered.... I know not if they heard me, there be so many that clamor in their ears...." With a quick movement she arose from the stone seat and began to pace the grass-plot, her hands clasped behind her head, the gold star yet bright in the late, late sunshine. "I would they had answered me distinctly. Perhaps they did.... But be that as it may be I will follow my own heart, I will go my own way--"

He arose and began to walk with her. "And thy heart led thee this way?" he asked in a whisper.

She flashed upon him a look so bright that it was as if high noon had returned to the garden. "Pluck me yonder lily," she said. "It is the first I have smelled this year."

He brought it to her, trembling. "Presently it will close," he said, "never to open again."

"That also is among the things we know not," she answered. "Think you not there is one who revives the souls of men?"

"Ay, I believe it," he answered. They paced again the green to its flowery margin.

"Give me yon spray of love-lies-bleeding," she said; then as it rested against the lily in her hand, "Wounds may be cured," she said. "I have heard talk here, there, at the court even, else, beshrew me, if I had come this way to-day! I know that thou goest forth--" Her voice broke and the gold star shook with the trembling of her frame. "I know that thou mayst never, never, never return. I will pray for thy soul's welfare.... See! there is a heartsease at my feet."

He knelt, but touched not the floweret, instead caught at the long folds of her silver gown and held her where she stood. "For my soul's welfare, thou balm from heaven!" he cried. "For only my soul's welfare?"

"No, no," she answered. "For the welfare of all of thee, soul and body--soul and body!" She bent over him, and there fell from her eyes a bright rain of tears, quickly come, quickly checked. "Ah, a contrary world of queens and guardians!" she cried. "Oh, my God! if thou mightst only make me thy wife before thou goest!"

He arose and drew her into his arms. "The story is true," he whispered, to which she answered:

"I care not! Sayest thou, 'A thing was done.' Say I, '_Thou_ didst it!' and high above the deed I love thee!"

Suddenly she fell into a storm of weeping, then broke from him, and somewhat blindly sought the garden seat, sank down upon it, and buried her face in her arms. He kneeled beside her, and presently she was crouching against his breast, that rose and fell with his answering emotion. She put up her hand and touched the deep lines of past suffering in the face above her.

"I know that thou must go," she said. "I would not have thee stay. But, Mortimer, if it were possible ... He forgave you long, long ago, for he loved you above all men. I, his sister, answer for him. Ah, God wot! brother and sister we have loved you well.... If I could keep tryst, after all, if thou couldst make me thy wife before thou goest--or if kindred and the Queen be too powerful, I could escape, could follow thee as thy page, trusting thy honor ... Ah, look not so upon me! Ah, to be a woman and do one's own wooing! Ah, think what thou wilt of me, only know that I love thee to the uttermost!"

Ferne left her side, and moving to the garden wall, looked out over the far-away downs to the far-away sea--the sea that, for weary months had called and-thundered in his ears. Now he saw it all halcyon, stretching fair and mute to the boundless west, the sinking sun, the lovers' star. They two--could they two, lying with closed eyes, but drift out over bar, floating away through golds and purples towards the kiss of heaven and sea--flotsam of this earth, jetsam of age-distant shores, each to the other paradise and all in all! How profound the stillness--how deep the fragrance of the lily--what indifference, what quiet as of scorn did the Maker of man, having placed his creature in the lists, turn aside to other spectacles!... Should man be more careful than his God? Right! Wrong!--to die at last and find them indeed words of a length and the prize of sore striving a fool's bauble:--to die and miss the rose and wine cup!--to die and find not the struggle and the star!--to loose the glorious bird in the hand and beyond the portals to feel no fanning of a vaster wing! What use--what use--to be at once the fleeing Adam and the dark archangel at Eden's gates?

He turned to behold the woman whom now, with no trace of the fancifulness, the idealism of his time, he loved with all depth, passion, actuality; he set wrist to teeth and bit the flesh until blood started; he moved towards her where she sat with her hands clasped above her knee, her head thrown back, watching his coming with those deep eyes of hers. He reached her side; she rose to meet him, and the two stood embraced in the flattering sunshine, the odor of the lilies, the pale glory of the failing day.

"My dear love, it is not possible," he said. "Flower of women! didst dream that I would leave thee here blasted by my name, or that I would carry thee where I must go? Star of my earth, to-day we say a clean farewell!"

"Then God be with thee," she said, brokenly.

"And with thee!" he answered. Hand in hand they moved to the broken wall, and leaning upon it, looked out to that far line of sea. Her under-sleeve of silver gauze fell away from her arm.

"How white is thy arm!" he breathed. "How branched with tender blue!"

"Wilt kiss it?" she answered, "so I shall grow to love myself."

"Thou art the fairest thing the sun shines on," he said. "Thy lips are like flowers I have never seen in the West."

"Gather the flowers," she said, and raised her face to his. "The garden is kept for thee."

The sun began to decline, the earth to darken, swallows circled past. "It grows late," she said, "late, late! When goest thou?"

"Within the week."

"By then her Grace will have whirled me leagues away.... I would I were a queen. If thou goest to death--oh God! we'll not speak of that!--Give me that chain of thine."

He unclasped it, laid it in her hands. Raising her arms, she drew it over her neck.

"Seest thou thy prisoner?" she asked. "Forever thy prisoner!" From its fellow of watchet blue she detached her floating silver sleeve. "It is my favor," she whispered. "Wear it when thou wilt."

He folded the gauze and thrust it within his doublet. "When I may, my lady," he said, with his eyes upon the sunset that held the colors of the dawning. "When I may."

A sickle moon swung in the gold harvest-fields of the west, then a great star came out to watch that reaping. The thrush was silent now, but from a covert rushed suddenly the full tide of a nightingale's song. With a cry the maid of honor put hands to her ears. "Ay me, my heart it will break! Tell me that thou goest but to come again!"

He took her hands, pressing them to his heart, to his lips. "No, no, my dearest dear, since God no longer worketh miracles! I go more surely than ever went John Oxenham; I would not have thee cheat thyself, spend thy days in watching, listening. I kiss thee a lifetime good-by.... Oh child, seest thou how broken I am? I that myself loosed all the winds--I that kneel, a penitent, before the just and the unjust, before my lover and my foe! But when all's said, all's done, all's quiet:--the arrow sped, the stone fallen, the curfew rung, the dust returned to dust! then shall stand my soul.... A ruined man, a man in just disgrace, who hath played the coward, who hath sinned against thee and against others, that am I--yet our souls endure, and thou art my mate; queenly as thou standest here, thou art my mate! I love thee, and in life, in death, I claim thee still: Forget me not when I am gone!"

"When thou art gone!" she cried. "When thou art gone with all my mind I'll hold myself thy bride! In those strange countries beneath the sun if bitterness comes over thee"--she put her hand to her heart--"think of thy fireside here. Think, 'Even in this wavering life I have an abiding home, a heart that's true, true, true to me!' When thou diest--if thou diest first--linger for me; where a thousand years are as a day travel not so far that I may not overtake thee. Mortimer, Mortimer, Mortimer! I'll not believe in a God who at the last says not to me, 'That path he took.' When He says it, listen for my flying feet. Oh, my dear, listen for my flying feet!"

"Star and rose!" he said. "If we dream, we dream. Better so, even though we pass to sleep too deep for dreaming. For we plan a temple though we build it not.... That falconer's whistle! is it thy signal? Then thou must make no tarrying here. I will put thy cloak about thee."

He brought from the ruinous steps her watchet mantle, and she let him clasp it about her throat. In the raised air of that isolate peak where true lovers take farewell there are few words used at the last. Sighs, kisses, broken utterance,--"Forever," ... "Forever," ... "I love thee," ... "I love thee"; the eternal "I will come"; the eternal "I will wait"! Possessors of an instant of time, of an atom of space, they sent their linked hopes, their mailed certainties forth to the unseen, untrenched fields of the future, and held their love coeval with existence. Then, slowly, she withdrew herself from his clasp, and as slowly moved backward to the broken stair. He waited by the stone seat, for she must go secretly and in silence, and he might not, as in old times, lead her with stateliness through the ways of Ferne House. Upon the uppermost step she paused a moment, and he, lifting his eyes, saw above him her mantled figure, her outstretched arms with the lily of her body in between, the gold star swimming above her forehead. One breathless moment thus, then she turned, and folding her mantle about her, passed from her lover's sight towards the darkening orchard.

He stayed an hour in the garden, then went back to his great, old, dimly lighted hall. Here, half the night, chin in one hand, the other hanging below his booted knee, he brooded over the now glowing, now ashen chimney logs; yet Robin-a-dale, who believed in Master Arden, and very mightily in visions as beautiful as that which had been vouchsafed to him going through the orchard that eventide, felt as light a heart as if no shadowy ship awaited in the little port down by the little town, whose people either cursed or looked askance. Waking in the middle of the night, he thought he saw a knight at prayer--one of the old stone Templars from Ferne church, where they lay with palm to palm, awaiting with frozen patience the last trumpet-call that ever they should hear. This knight, however, was kneeling with bowed head and hidden face, a thing against all rule with those other stark and sternly waiting forms. So Robin, being too drowsy to reason, let the matter alone and went to sleep again.

X

The _Sea Wraith_, an ancient ship, gray and patched of sail, battered and worn with a name for all disaster, sailed the Spanish seas as though she bore a charmed life--and her crew that was the refuse of land and sea, used to license, to whom mutiny was no uglier a word than another, kept the terms of an iron discipline--and her Captain waked and slept as one aware of when to wake and when to sleep.

There was fever between the decks; there was fever in black hearts; of dark nights a corposant burned now at this masthead, now at that. Mariner and soldier knew the story of the shadowy figure keeping company with the stars there above them on the poop-royal. Did he keep company only with the stars and with the boy, his familiar? The sick, tossing from side to side, raved out curses, and the well saw many omens. Dissatisfaction, never far from their unstayed minds, crept at times very near, and superstition sat always amongst them. But they reckoned with a Captain stronger for this voyage than had been Francis Drake or John Hawkins, and stranger than any under whom they had ever sailed. He was so still a man that they knew not how to take him, but beneath his eyes vain imaginings and half-formed conspiracies withered like burnt paper. He called upon neither God nor devil, but his voice blew like an icy wind upon the heat of disloyal intents, and like the white fire that touched now stem, now stern, so his will held the ship, driving it like a leaf towards the mainland and the fortress of Nueva Cordoba.

The ship that seemed so aged and disgraced yet had a strength of sinew which made her formidable. All things had been patiently cared for by the man who, selling his patrimony, had labored against wind and tide to the end that he might carry forth with him such an armament as scarce had been the _Cygnet's_ own. Tier on tier rose the _Sea Wraith's_ ordnance; she carried warlike stores of all sorts that might serve for battle by sea or land. If his money could not buy such men as stood ready to ship with Drake and Hawkins, yet in his wild, sin-stained crew he had purchased experience, the maddest bravery, and a lust of Spanish gold that might not be easily sated. The qualities of a captain over men he himself supplied.

In his confidence neither before nor after their sailing, yet the two hundred men of the _Sea Wraith_ guessed well his destination, but for themselves preferred the island towns--Santiago and Santo Domingo in Hispaniola. There were wealth and wine and women, there the fringing islets where booty might be hidden, and there the deep caves where foregathered many small craft misnamed piratical. "Lord! the _Sea Wraith_ would soon make herself Admiral of that brood, leading them forth from those hidden places to pounce upon Santo Domingo, that was the seat of government and as wealthy a place as any in the Indies!--the _Sea Wraith_ and her Captain, that was a good Captain and a tall!--ay, ay, that would they maintain despite all land talk--a good Captain and a tall, 'spite of Dick Carpenter's dream--"

"What was Dick Carpenter's dream?" asked the Captain, seated, sword in hand and hat on head, before a deputation from the forecastle.

The speaker fidgeted, then out came the clumsy taunt, the carpenter's dream. "Why, sir, he dreamed he saw the women of the islands, sitting by the shores, a-sifting gold-dust and a-weighing of pearls;--and then he dreamed that he looked along the sea-floor, leagues and leagues to the south'ard, until he saw the very roots of the mainland, and the great fish swimming in and out. And a many and a many dead men were there, drawn into ranks, very strange to see, for their swollen flesh yet hung to their bones, and they beckoned and laughed; and Captain Robert Baldry, that was once, on a Guinea voyage, Dick Carpenter's Captain, he laughed the loudest and beckoned the fastest. And, Sir Mortimer Ferne, an it please you, we've no longing to follow that beckoning."

"Thou dog!" said the Captain, with no change of mien. "Presently Dick Carpenter and thou shall have food for dreams--bad dreams, bad dreams, man! Thou fool, have I set thee quaking who, forsooth, would mutiny! Begone, the whole of ye, and sail the whole of ye wheresoever I list to go!"

Seeing that the _Sea Wraith_ obeyed him still, her crew believed yet more devoutly that a secret voice spoke in his ear and a dark hand gave him aid. It was later, when he began to feed them gold, that they who owned caps threw them up for him, and they whose brains had only nature's thatching shouted for him as for a demigod. A Spanish squadron bound for The Havannah was met by a hurricane, several of its ships lost, and the remainder widely separated. The hurricane past, forth from an island harbor stole the _Sea Wraith_ that so many storms had beleaguered. Gray as with eld, lonely as the ark, a haggard ship manned by outcasts, she spread her vampire wings and flitted from her enshadowed anchorage. An hour later, like a vampire still, she hooked herself to a gay galleon and sucked from it life that was cheap and gold that was dear; then descrying other sails, she left that ruined hulk for a long and fierce struggle with a Portuguese carrack. The battle waxed so fell that the carrack also might have been worked by men who had all to win and naught to lose, and captained by one who bared his brow to the thunder-stone.

Like harpies they fought, but when night came there was only the _Sea Wraith_ scudding to the south, and that pied crew of hers knocking at the stars with the knowledge that ever and always their judgment (even though he asked it not) jumped with the Captain's, and that before them lay the gilded cities and the chances of Pizarro. It was of his subtlety that the Captain never used to them fair promises, spake not once a sennight of gold, never bragged to them of what must be. Oh! a subtle captain, whose very strangeness was his best lieutenant upon that eldritch, nine-lived ship, through days and days of monstrous luck. "Baldry's luck," quoth the mariner who had sailed with the _Star_, then held his breath and looked askance at his present Captain, who, however, could never have heard him up there on the poop-deck! Natheless that night the man was ordered forward, and finding Sir Mortimer Ferne sitting alone, save for the boy, in the great cabin, was bidden to talk of Robert Baldry. "Speak freely, Carpenter,--freely! Why, thou art one of his friends, and I another, and we go, somewhat at our peril, to hale him from perdition! Why, thou thyself saw him beckoning to us to hasten and do our friendly part! So praise thy old Captain to me with all thy might. We'll fill an empty hour with stories of his valor!" He put forth his hand and turned the hour-glass, and the carpenter began to stammer and make excuses, which no whit availed him.

At last, one afternoon, they came to Margarita, and, the ship needing water, they entered a placid bight, where a strip of dazzling sand lay between the rippling surf and a heavy wood, but found beforehand with them a small bark from the mainland, her crew ashore filling barrels from a limpid spring, and her master and a Franciscan friar eating fruit upon her tiny poop. The dozen on land showed their heels; the worthless bark was taken, a party with calivers landed to complete the filling of the abandoned casks, and the master and the friar brought before the Captain of the _Sea Wraith_ where he sat beneath a great tree, tasting the air of the land. An insatiable gatherer of Spanish news, it was his custom to search for what crumbs of knowledge his captives might possess, but hitherto the yield, pressed together, had not made even a small cake of enlightenment. He was prepared to have shortly done with the two who now stood before him. The seaman cringed, expecting torture, furtively watching for some indication of what the Englishman wished him to say. A fellow new to these parts and ignorant, he would have sworn a highway to El Dorado itself if that was the point towards which his inquisitor's quiet, unemphatic questions tended; but he knew not, and his lies fell dead before the grave eyes of the man beneath the tree. At last he was tossed aside like a squeezed sponge and the Franciscan beckoned forward, who, being of sturdier make, twisted his thumbs in his rope girdle and prepared to present a blank countenance to those queries of armaments and treasure which an enemy to Spain would naturally make. But the Englishman asked strange questions; so general that they seemed to encompass the mainland from Tres Puntas to Nombre de Dios, and so particular that it was even as if he were interested in the friar himself, his order, and his wanderings from town to town, the sights that he had seen and the people whom he had known. The questions seemed harmless as mother's milk, but the friar was shrewd; moreover, in his youth had been driven to New Spain by flaming zeal for the conversion of countless souls. That fire had burned low, but by its dying light he knew that this man, who was young and yet so still, whose lowered voice was but as sheathed steel, whose eyes it was not comfortable to meet, had set his hand to a plough that should drive a straight furrow, was sending his will like an arrow to no uncertain mark. But what was the mark the Franciscan could not discover, therefore he gave the truth or a lie where seemed him best, increasingly the truth, as it increasingly appeared that lies would not serve. He also, seeing that with gathering years he had begun to set value upon flesh and bone, wished to please his captor. He glanced stealthily at the scarred and ancient craft in the windless harborage, idly flapping her mended sails, before he said aught of the great English ships that in pomp and the fulness of pride had entered these waters now months agone. The Englishman had heard of this adventure--so much was evident--but details would seem to have escaped him. He knew, however, that there had been first victory and then defeat, and he too looked at his ship and at the guns she carried.

"The town was sacked, but the castle not taken," he said. "What, good brother, if I should break a lance in these same lists?"

"It would be broken indeed," said the friar, grimly. "An it please you, I will bear your challenge to Don Juan de Mendez."

"To Don Luiz de Guardiola," said the man beneath the tree.

"Pardon, señor, but Juan de Mendez is at present Governor of Nueva Cordoba. Don Luiz de Guardiola has been transferred to Panama."

The Englishman arose and looked out to sea, his hand above his eyes because of the flash and sparkle of the sun upon the water. The Franciscan, having told the truth, wondered forthwith if falsehood had better served his turn. Face and form of his interlocutor were turned from him, but he saw upon the hot, white sand the shadow of a twitching hand. Moments passed before the shadow was still; then said the Englishman, in a changed voice:

"Since you know of its governors, old and new, I judge you to be of Nueva Cordoba. So you may inform me of certain matters."

"You mistake, señor, you mistake," began the Franciscan, somewhat hastily. "The master of the bark will bear witness that I came to Margarita upon the _Santa Maria_, sailing directly from Cartagena, but that, being ill, I chose to recover myself at Pampatar before proceeding (as you now behold me, valorous señor) to Hispaniola, and thence by the first vessel home to Spain, to the convent of my order at Segovia, which is my native town. I know naught of Nueva Cordoba beyond that which I have told you."

"Why, I believe thee," answered the Englishman, his back still turned. "You go from Cartagena, where, Franciscan and Dominican, you play so large a part in this world's affairs, to your order at Segovia, which is an inland town, and doubtless hath no great knowledge of these outlandish parts. Your tongue will tire with telling of wonders."

"Why, that is true," answered the other. "One lives not fifteen years in these parts to carry away but a handful of marvels." Relieved by the easiness of his examination and the courtesy of his captor, he even smiled and ventured upon a small pleasantry. "You cannot take from me, redoubtable señor, that which my eyes have seen and my ears have heard."

Ferne wheeled. "Give me the letter which you bear from your superior at Cartagena to the head of your order at Segovia."

As he recoiled, the Franciscan's hand went involuntarily to the breast of his gown, and then fell again to his side. The Captain of the _Sea Wraith_ whistled, and several of the mariners, who were now rolling the water-casks down the little beach to the waiting boats, came at his call. "Seize him," ordered the Captain. "Robin, take from him the packet he carries."