Sir Mortimer Part 4

The latter, in the instant that pa.s.sed before he made any answer to Baldry's challenging look, saw once again that vision of the other morning--the flare of dawn, and high against it one desperate figure, a man just balancing if to keep his life or no, seeing that for the thing he loved there was no rescue. Say that the doomed ship had been the _Cygnet_--would Mortimer Ferne have so cheapened grief, have grown so bitter, be so ready to eat his heart out with envy and despite? Perhaps not; and yet, who knew? The _Cygnet_ was there, visible through the port windows, lifting against serenest skies her proud bulk, her castellated p.o.o.p and forecastle, her tall masts and streaming pennants. The _Star_ was down below, a hundred leagues from any lover, and the sea was deep upon her, and her guns were silent and her decks untrodden.... He was wearied of Baldry's company, impatient of his mad temper and peasant breeding, very sure that he chose, open-eyed, to torment himself from Teneriffe to America with the sight of a prospering foe merely that that foe might feel a nettle in his unwilling grasp. Yet, so challenged, when had pa.s.sed that moment, he met Baldry's gloomy eyes, and again a.s.sured the adventurer that the presence of so brave a man and redoubted fighter could but do honor to the _Cygnet_.

His words were all that courtesy could desire: if tone and manner were of the coldest, yet Baldry, not being sensitive, and having gained his point, could afford to let that pa.s.s. He turned to the Admiral with a short laugh.

"You see, sir, we are yoke-brothers--Sir Mortimer Ferne and I,--though whether G.o.d or the devil hath joined us!... Well, the two of us may send some Spanish souls to h.e.l.l!"

With his yoke-brother, Arden, and Sedley he returned to the _Cygnet_, and that evening at supper, having drunken much sack, began to loudly vaunt the deeds of the drowned _Star_, magnifying her into a being sentient and heroical, and darkly-wishing that the luck of the expedition be not gone with her to the bottom of the sea.

"Luck!" exclaimed Ferne at last, haughtily. "I hate the word. Your luck--my luck--the luck of this our enterprise! It is a craven word, overmuch upon the lips of Christian gentlemen."

"I was not born a gentleman," said Baldry, playing with his knife. "You know that, Sir Mortimer Ferne."

"I'll swear you've taken out no patent since," muttered Arden, whereat his neighbor laughed aloud, and Baldry, pushing back his stool, glared at each in turn.

"I know that a man's will, and not a college of heralds, makes him what he is," said Ferne. "I have known churls in honorable houses and true knights in the common camp. And I submit not my destinies to that gamester Luck: as I deserve and as G.o.d wills, so run my race!"

"Oh, every man of us knows our Captain's deserving!" quoth Baldry.

"Well, gentlemen, on that occasion of which I was speaking, the devil's own luck being with me, I sunk both the carrack and the galley, and headed the _Star_ for the castle of Paria."

On went the wondrous tale, with no further interruption from Sir Mortimer, who sat at the head of the table, playing the part of host to Captain Robert Baldry, listening with cold patience to the adventurer's rhodomontade. When spurred by wine there was wont to awaken in Baldry a certain mordant humor, a rough wit, making straight for the mark and clanging harshly against an adversary's shield, a lurid fancy dully illuminating the subject he had in hand. The wild story that he was telling caught the attention of the more thoughtless sort at table; they leaned forward, encouraging him from flight to flight, laughing at each sally of boatswain's wit, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. admiration when the _Star_ and her Captain fairly left the realm of the natural. One splendid lie followed another, until Baldry was caught by his own words, and saw himself thus, and thus, and thus!--a sea-dog confessed, a gatherer of riches, a dealer of death from the p.o.o.p of the _Star_! In his mind's eye the lost bark swelled to a phantom ship, gigantic, terrible, wrapped with the mist of the sea; while he himself--ah! he himself--

"He struck the mainmast with his hand, The foremast with his knee--"

All that he had been and all that he had done, if man were only something more than man, if devil's luck and devil's power would come to his whistle, if the seed of his nature could defy the iron stricture of the flesh, reaching its height, shooting up into a terrible upas-tree--so for the moment Baldry saw himself. Into his voice came a deep and sonorous note, his black eyes glowed; he began to gesture with his hand, stately as a Spaniard. And then, chancing to glance towards the head of the board, he met the eyes of the man who sat there, his Captain now, whom he must follow! What might he read in their depths?

Half-scornful amus.e.m.e.nt, perhaps, and the contempt of the man who has done what man may do for the yoke-fellow who habitually made claim to supernatural prowess; in addition to the scholar's condemnation of blatant ignorance, the courtier's dislike of unmannerliness, the soldier's scorn of unproved deeds, athwart all the philosophic smile!

Baldry, flushing darkly, hated with all his wild might, for that he chose to hate, the man who sat so quietly there, who held with so much ease the knowledge that by right of much beside his commission he was leader of every man within those floating walls. The Captain of the _Star_ struck the table with his hand.

"Ah, I had good help that time! My brother sailed with me--Thomas Baldry, that was master of the _Speedwell_ that went down at Fayal in the Azores.... Didst ever see a ghost, Sir Mortimer Ferne?"

"No," answered Ferne, curtly.

"Then the dead come not to haunt us," said Baldry. "I would have sworn a many had pa.s.sed before your eyes. Now had I been Thomas Baldry I would have won back."

"That also?" demanded Sir Mortimer. His tone was of simple wonder, and there went round the board a laugh for Baldry's boasting. That adventurer started to his feet, his eyes, that were black, deep-set, and very bright, fixed upon Ferne.

"That also," he answered. "An I should die before our swords cross, that also!"

He turned and left the cabin.

"Now," said Arden, as his heavy footsteps died away, "I had rather gather snow for the Grand Turk than rubies with some I wot of!"

Henry Sedley, a hot red in his cheek, and his dark hair thrown back, turned from staring after the retreating figure. "If I send him my cartel, Sir Mortimer, wilt put me in irons?"

"Ay, that will I," said Ferne, calmly. "Word and deed he but doth after his kind. Well, let him go. For his words, that a man's deeds do haunt him, rising like shadows across his path, I believe full well--but for me the master of the _Speedwell_ makes no stirring.... Take thy lute, Henry Sedley, and sing to us, giving honey after gall! Sing to me of other things than war."

As he spoke he moved to the stern windows, took his seat upon the bench beneath, and leaning on his arm, looked out upon the low red sun and the darkening ocean.

"'Ring out your bells, let mourning shows be spread: For love is dead: Love is dead, infected With plague of deep disdain--'"

sang Sedley with throbbing sweetness, depth of melancholy pa.s.sion. The listener's spirit left its chafing, left pride and disdain, and drifted on that melodious tide to far heavens.

"'Weep, neighbors, weep; do you not hear it said That Love is dead?

His death-bed peac.o.c.k's folly; His winding sheet is shame; His will false-seeming wholly; His sole executor blame!'"

rang Sedley's splendid voice. The song ended; the sun sank; on came the invader night. Ferne took the lute and slowly swept its strings.

"How much, how little of it all is peac.o.c.k's folly," he said; "who knoweth? Life and Living, Love and Hate, and Honor the bubble, and Shame the Nessus-robe, and Death, which, when all's done, may have no answer to the riddle!--Where is the fixed star, and who knoweth depth from shallow, or himself, or anything?" He struck the lute again, drawing from it a lingering and mournful note.

"Now out upon the man who brought melancholy into fashion!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Arden. "In danger the blithest soul alive, when all is well you do ask yourself too many questions! I'll go companion with Robert Baldry, who keeps no fashions save of Mars's devising."

"Why, I am not sad," said Ferne, rousing himself. "Come, I'll dice with thee for fifty ducats and a gold jewel--to be paid from the first ship we take!"

On sailed the ships through tranquil seas, until many days had fallen into their wake, slipping by them like painted clouds of floating seaweed or silver-finned vagrants of the deep. Great calms brooded upon the water, and the sails fell idle, flag and pennant drooped; then the trade-wind blew, and the white ships drove on. They drove into the blue distance, towards unknown ports--known only in that they would surely prove themselves Ports of All Peril. At night the sea burned; a field of gold it ran to horizons jewelled with richer stars than shone at home.

Above them, in the vault of heaven, hung the Great Ship, blazed the Southern Cross. Every hour saw the flight of meteors, and their trains, golden argosies of the sky, faded slowly from the dark-blue depths. When the moon arose she was ringed with colors, but the men who gazed upon her said not, "Every hue of the rainbow is there." They said, "See the red gold, the pearls and the emeralds!" The night died suddenly and the day was upon them, an aureate G.o.d, lavish of splendor. They hailed him with music; as they pulled and hauled, the seamen sang. Other winds than those of heaven drove them on. High purpose, love of country, religious ecstasy, chivalrous devotion, greed of gain, l.u.s.t of aggrandizement, l.u.s.t of power, mad ambitions, ruthless intents--by how strong a current, here crystal clear, there thick and denied, were they swept towards their appointed haven! In cruelty and l.u.s.t, in the faith of little children and the courage of old demi-G.o.ds, they went like homing pigeons; and not a soul, from him who gave command to him who, far aloft, looked out upon the deep, recked or cared that another age would call him pirate or corsair, raising brow and shoulder over the morality of his deeds.

In the realms which they were entering, Truth, shattered into a thousand gleaming fragments, might be held in part, but never wholly. There man's quarry was the false Florimel, and she lured him on and he saw with magically anointed eyes. Too suddenly awakened, the imagination of the time was reeling; its sap ran too fast; wonders of the outer, revelations of the inner, universe crowded too swiftly; the heady wine made now G.o.ds, now fools of men. The white light was not for the heirs of that age, nor yet the golden mean. Wonders happened, that they knew, and so like children they looked for strange chances. There was no miracle at which their faith would balk, no illusion whose cobweb tissue they cared to tear away. Give but a grain whereon to build, a phenomenon before which started back, amazed and daunted, the knowledge of the age, and forthwith a mighty imagination leaped upon it, claimed it for its own. There had been but a grain of sand, an inexplicable fact--lo! now, a rounded pearl shot with all the hues of the morning, a miracle of grace or an evidence of diabolic power, to doubt which was heresy!

Adventurers to the Spanish Main believed in devil-haunted seas, in flying islands, in a nation of men whose eyes were set in their shoulders, and of women who cut off the right breast and slew every male child. They believed in a hidden city, from end to end a three days'

march, where gold-dust thickened the air, and an Inca drank with his n.o.bles in a garden whose plants waved not in the wind, whose flowers drooped not, whose birds never stirred upon the bough, for all alike were made of gold. They believed in a fair fountain, hard indeed to find, but of such efficacy that the graybeard who dipped in its shining waters stepped forth a youth upon ever-vernal banks.

So with these who like an arrow now clave the blue to the point of danger. In this strange half of the world where nature's juggling hand dealt now in supernal beauty, now in horror without a name, how might they, puppets of their age, hold an even balance, know the mirage, know the truth? Inextricably mingled were the threads of their own being, and none could tell warp from woof, or guess the pattern that was weaving or stay the flying shuttle. What if upon the material scroll unrolling before them G.o.d had chosen to write strange characters? Was not the parchment His, and how might man question that moving finger?

One day they discerned an island, fair and clear against the horizon--undoubtedly there, although no chart made mention of it. All saw the island; but when one man cried out at the amazing height of its snowy peak another laughed him to scorn, declaring the peak a cloud, and spoke of sand-dunes topped with low bushes. A third clamored of a fair white city, an evident harbor, and the masts of great ships; a fourth, every whit as positive, stood out for unbroken forests and surf upon a lonely reef. While they contended, the island vanished. Then they knew that they had seen St. Brandon's Isle, and in his prayer at the setting of the watch the chaplain made mention of the matter. On a night when all the sea was phosph.o.r.escent, Thynne the master saw in the wake of the _Cygnet_ a horned spirit, very black and ugly, leaping from one fiery ripple to another, but when he called on Christ's name, rushing madly away, full tilt into the setting moon. Again, Ferne and young Sedley, pacing the p.o.o.p beneath a sky of starry splendor, and falling silent after talk that had travelled from Petrarch and Ariosto to that _Faerie Queene_ which Edmund Spenser was writing, heard a faint sweet singing far across the deep. "Hark!" breathed Sedley. "The strange sweet sound.... Surely mermaiden singing!"

"I know not," replied Ferne, his hands upon the railing. "Perchance 'tis so. They say they are fair women.... The sound is gone. I would I might hear thy sister singing."

"How silver and how solemn is the sky!" said his companion. "Perhaps it was the echo of some heavenly strain. There goeth a great star! They say that the fall of such stars is portentous, speaking to men of doom."

His Captain laughed. "Hast added so much astrology to thy store of learning? Now, good-wife Atropos may cut her thread by the light of a comet; but when the comet has flared away and the shearer returned to her place, then in the deep darkness, where even the stars shine not, the shorn thread may feel G.o.d's touch, may know it hath yet its uses....

How all the sea grows phosph.o.r.escent! and the stars do fall so thickly that there may be men a-dying. Well, before long there will be other giving of swords to Death!"

In the silence which followed his words, lightly spoken as they were, young Sedley, who indeed owed very much to Mortimer Ferne, laid impulsively his hand upon his Captain's hand. "On the night you give your sword to Death, how great a star shall fall! An I go first, I shall know when the trumpet sounds for your coming."

"When I give my sword to Death," said Ferne, absently. "Ay, lad, when I give my sword to Death.... There again, do you not hear the singing? It is the wind, I think, and not the people of the sea. It hath a mocking sound.... When I give my sword to Death."

From the tops above them fell a voice of Stentor. "Sail ho! sail ho!"

Upon which they gave for the remainder of the tropic night small attention to aught but warlike matters. With the morning the three ships counted to the general gain the downright sinking of a small fleet from Hispaniola, and the taking therefrom porcelain, many bales of rich silk and rosaries of gold beads, a bala.s.s-ruby, twenty wedges of silver, and a chest well lined with ducats.

With this treasure to hark them forward, on and on sailed the ships; and now land birds came to them, and now they pa.s.sed, floating upon the water, the leafy branch of a strange tree with red, cuplike blossoms.

Full--sailed upon the quiet sea they held their course, while the men upon them, eager-eyed and keen, watched for land and for the galleons of Spain. Content with the taking of the _Star_, calamity now kept away from the ships. None upon them died, few were sick, master and captains were kind, mariners and landsmen trusted in their tried might and wealthy promises, and all the gales of heaven prospered the voyage.

On the last day of July, seven weeks from that leave-taking in the tavern of the Triple Tun, they came to the rocky island of Tobago; watered there; then, driven by the constant wind, went on until faint upon the horizon rose the coast of the mainland.

The mountains of Maccanoa in the island of Margarita loomed before them; they pa.s.sed Coche, and on a night when light clouds obscured the moon approached the pearl islet of Cubagua. With the dawn the _Mere Honour_ and the _Marigold_ entered the harbor of New Cadiz, and began to bombard that much-decayed town of the pearl-fishers. The _Cygnet_ kept on to the slight settlement of La Rancheria, and met, emerging in hot haste from a little bay of blue crystal, the galleon _San Jose_, one thousand tons, commanded by Antonio de Castro, very richly laden, sailing from Puerto Bello to Santo Domingo, and carrying, moreover, a company of soldiers from Nueva Cordoba on the mainland to Pampatar in Margarita.

IV

Myriads of sea-birds, frightened by the thunder of the guns, fled screaming; the palm-fringed sh.o.r.es of the bay showed through the smoke brown and dim and far removed; hot indeed was the tropic morning in the core of that murk and flame and ear-splitting sound. Each of the combatants carried three tiers of ordnance; in each the guns were served by masters at their trade. Cannons and culverins, sakers and falcons, rent the air; then the _Cygnet_, having the wind of the Spaniard, laid her aboard, and the harquebusiers, caliver, and crossbow-men also began to speak. Together with the great guns they spoke to such effect that the fight became very deadly. Twice the English strove to enter the huge _San Jose_, and twice the Spaniards, thick upon her as swarming bees, beat them back with sword and pike and blinding volleys from their musketeers. From the tops fell upon them stones and heated pitch; the hail-shot mowed them down; swordsmen and halberdiers thrust many from their footing, loosening forevermore their clutching fingers, forever stayed the hoa.r.s.e shout in their throats. Many fell into the sea and were drowned before the soul could escape through gaping wounds; others reached their own decks to die there, or to lie writhing at the feet of the unhurt, who might not stay for the need of any comrade. At the second repulse there arose from the galleon a deafening cry of triumph.