Sir Mortimer Part 7

"Last night--when I thought to take you by-surprise--were you the leader then?"

"Yes, senor."

"Wore you," the Spaniard spoke slowly--"wore you black armor? Wore you in your helm a knot of rose-colored velvet?... Ah, it was you unhorsed me, then!"

"Again, senor, the fortune of war."

A spasm distorted for the moment De Guardiola's every feature. So often of late had chagrin been pressed to his lips that the cup had grown poisonous. When he spoke it was with a hollow voice: "Had not Mexia come in between us!... The light caught the velvet knot upon your helm and it flamed like a star. I, Luiz de Guardiola, lying at your feet, looked up and saw it blaze above me like an evil star!" His hand fell heavily upon the table. "The star may fall, Englishman!"

"The helm that bore the star may decline to earth," answered Ferne. "The star is fixed--beyond thy s.n.a.t.c.hing, Spaniard!"

Thrust in Mexia, leaving El Dorado for the present less gilded plight of the Spanish: "Fifty thousand ducats! Holy Virgin! Are we Incas of Peru--Atahualpas who can fill a hall with gold? Now, twenty thousand--"

"I will not pay one peso," said De Guardiola. His voice, low and vibrant, was as a warder thrown down. On the instant, all the length of the table, the hurried speech, the growing excitement, the interchange of taunt and bravado, ceased, and men leaned forward, waiting. The silence was remarkable. Down in the square was heard the sentinel's tread; from a bough that drooped against the wall a globe of vegetable gold fell with the noise of stone-shot.

"Raze every house in Nueva Cordoba," went on the Spaniard, "play the earthquake and the wave--then sail away, sail away, marauders! and leave the fortress virgin, and the treasure no lighter by one piece, and Luiz de Guardiola to find a day when English dogs shall cringe before him!"

He had risen from his place, and at that movement sprang also to their feet his ten cavaliers. At once arose a tumult that might have resulted in the severance of the truce with sharp steel had not the leaders of the several parties stayed with lifted arm and stern command that threatened disgrace. At last was compelled a stillness sinister as that of the air before a storm.

"I bid our guests good night," said the Admiral. "Our enemies we shall meet again. I think that so slight a ransom will not now content us. As you ride through the streets of Nueva Cordoba look your last, senors, upon her goodly houses and pleasant places."

"Do thy worst!" answered De Guardiola, grinning like a death's-head.

Mexia wiped the sweat from his brow.

"Let us go--let us go, Don Luiz! I stifle here. There's a strangeness in the air--my heart beats to bursting! Holy Teresa, give that the wine was not poisoned!"

Back to their fortress rode the Spaniards, up the bare, steep, pallid hillside, through the tunal, past their strong battery; back to the town rode the English, who with the punctilio of the occasion had accompanied their foes to the base of the hill. They rode through the streets which that morning they had laid waste, and through those that the stern Admiral had sworn to destroy. There black ruin faced them starkly; here doomed things awaited mutely. The town was little, and it seemed to cower before them like a child. Almost in silence did they ride, lifted and restless in mind, thought straining at the leash, but finding no words that should free it.

"How hot is the night!" spoke Baldry at last. "Hast noticed the smell of the earth? We killed a great serpent coming across the plain to-day."

"How the sea burns!" said Henry Sedley. "There is a will-o'-the-wisp upon the marsh yonder."

"Here they call it the soul of the tyrant Aguirre," answered Ferne. "A lost soul."

A little longer and they parted for the night to meet early next morning in the council with the Admiral. If to Nueva Cordoba, stripped and beaten, trembling beneath the fear of worse things to come, an army with banners held the land, so, in no lesser light, did the English see themselves, and they meant to have the treasure and to humble that white fortress. But it must be done quickly, quickly! Pampatar in Margarita, the castle of Paria or Berreo's settlement in Trinidad, could send no ships that might contend with the four swinging yonder in the river's mouth, but from the west at any hour, from La Guayra or Santa Marta, thunderbolts might fall. Would they indeed be wholly victors, then a general and overwhelming attack must soon be planned, soon made.

Weary enough from the day's work, yet, when he and his fellow adventurers had exchanged good night, Mortimer Ferne went not to his quarters. Instead he pa.s.sed through a dim corridor to the little cell-like room where was lodged Master Francis Sark, whom the English kept under surveillance, and who, under another name, had given to Pedro Mexia his knowledge of English speech and English history. What persuasion the Captain of the _Cygnet_ used, what bribe or promise or threat, what confidence that there was more to tell thereby like a magnet compelling any wandering information, is not known; nor is known what hatred of his conqueror, of a gallant form and a stainless name, may have uncoiled itself to poisonous ends in the soul of the small, smug, innocent-seeming man to whom he spoke; but at the end of a half-hour the Captain of the _Cygnet_ left his prisoner of the _San Jose_, moved swiftly and lightly down the corridor to his own apartment, where he crossed to the window and stood there with his eyes upon the fortress of Nueva Cordoba, rising shadowy upon its shadowy hill. So often had he looked upon it that now, despite the night, he saw with precision the squat, white walls, the dark sweep of the encircling tunal, and, strong clasp for that th.o.r.n.y girdle, the too formidable battery defending the one apparent opening. "Another path!" he said to himself. "Masked and hidden, unguarded, known only to their leaders....

To come upon them from the rear while, catlike, they watch the highway yonder!" His breath came in a long sigh of satisfaction. "What if he lies? Why should he lie, seeing that he is in our power? But if he does ..."

Minutes pa.s.sed and yet he stood there, gazing with thoughtful eyes at hill and fortress rising above the silent town. Finally he went over to Robin-a-dale, asleep upon a pallet, and shaking him awake, bade the lad to follow him but make no noise. To the sentinels at the great door, in the square, at the edge of the town, he gave the word of the night, and so issued with the boy from the huddle of flat-roofed houses, overhung by palm-trees, to the open plain.

Overhead innumerable stars, between heaven and earth incalculable swarms of luminous insects, from the soil a heavy exhalation as of musk, here arid places, there cacti like columns, like candelabra, like dark writhing fingers thrust from the teeming earth;--Robin-a-dale liked not the place, wondered what dangerous errand his master was upon, but since he as greatly feared as greatly loved the man he served, cared not to ask. Presently Ferne turned, and a few moments found them climbing the long western slope of the hill, above them the dim outline of the fortress, the dark fringe of the tunal. Half-way up they came to a little rocky plateau, and here Ferne paused, hesitated a moment, then sat down upon a great stone and looked out to sea. He was waiting for the moon to rise, for with her white finger she must point out that old way through the tunal of which Master Francis Sark had told him. Was it indeed there? The man, he thought, had all the marks of a liar. Again, why should he lie, being in their power?--unless treachery were so ingrained that it was his natural speech. By all the tokens Sark had given, the opening should not be fifty yards away. When the moon rose he would see for himself....

A pale radiance in the east proclaimed her approach. Since wait he must he waited patiently, and by degrees withdrew his mind from his errand and from strife and plotting. The boy crouched in silence beside him.

There was air upon these heights, and the stir of it made Robin-a-dale to shiver. He gazed about him fearfully, for it was a dismal place. From behind those piled rocks, from the shadow of those strange trees, what things might creep or spring? Robin thought it time that the adventure were ended, and had he dared had said as much. Lights were burning upon the _Cygnet_ where she rode in the pale river, near to the _Phoenix_, with the _Mere Honour_ and the _Marigold_ just beyond, and there came over the boy a great homesickness for her decks. He crept as closely as he might to her Captain, sitting there as quietly as if the teeming, musky soil were good Devon earth, and that phosph.o.r.escent ocean the gray waves of English seas, and he laid his hand upon Sir Mortimer's booted knee, and so was somewhat comforted.

Upon Ferne, waiting in inaction, looking out over the vast, dim panorama of earth and ocean, there fell, after the fever and exaltation, the stress and exertion of the past hours, a strange mood of quiet, of dreaming, and of peace. Sitting there in listless strength, he thought in quietude and tenderness of other things than gold, and fame, and the fortress which must be taken of Nueva Cordoba. With his eyes upon the gleaming sea he thought of Damaris Sedley, and of Sidney, and of a day at Windsor when the Queen had showed him much favor, and of a little, windy knoll, near to his house of Ferne, where, returning from hunting or hawking, he was wont to check his horse that he might taste the sweet and sprightly air.

Now this man waited at the threshold of an opening door, and like a child his fancy gathered door-step flowers, recking nothing of the widening s.p.a.ce behind, the beckoning hands, the strange chambers into which shortly he must go. Some faint and far monition, some breath of colder air may have touched him, for now, like a shriven man drowsing into death, his mind dwelt lightly upon all things, gazed quietly upon a wide, retreating landscape, and saw that great and small are one. He was wont to think of Damaris Sedley with ardor, imagining embraces, kisses, cries of love, sweet lips, warm arms,--but to-night he seemed to see her in a gla.s.s, somewhat dimly. She stood a little remote, quiet, sweet, and holy, and his spirit chastened itself before her. Dear were his friends to him; his heart lodged them in s.p.a.cious chambers and lapped them with observance; now he thought whimsically and lightly of his guests as though their lodgings were far removed from that misty central hall where he himself abode. Loyal with the fantastic loyalty of an earlier time, practiser of chivalry and Honor's fanatic, for a moment those things also lost their saliency and edge. Word and deed of this life appeared of the silver and the moonlight, not of gold and sunlight; existence a dream and no matter of moment. He plucked the flowers one by one, looked at them tranquilly, and laid them down, nor thought, This is Farewell.

Nueva Cordoba lay still amongst her rustling palms; the ocean rippled gold, and like gold-dust were the scintillating clouds of insects; the limpid river palely slid between its mangrove banks, a low wind sighed, a night-bird called; far, far in the forest behind the hill a m.u.f.fled roar proclaimed that the jaguar had found its meat. The moon rose--such a moon as never had England looked upon. Pearl, amethyst, and topaz were her rings; she made the boss of a vast shield; like G.o.d's own candle she lit the night. "At home the nightingales would sing," thought Sir Mortimer. "Ah, Philomela, here befits a wilder song than thine!" He looked towards the _Cygnet_, still as a painted ship upon the silver sluggish flood. "When there shall be no more sea, what will seamen do?"

Over the marsh wandered the _ignes fatui_. "How restlessly and to no bourne dost thou move, lost soul!" The boy at his feet stirred and sighed. "Poor Robin! Tired and sleepy and frightened, art not? Why, dear knave, the jaguar is not roaring for thee!" Bending, he put an arm about the lad and drew him to his side. "I only wait for the brightness to grow," he said. "Do not shiver so! In a little while we shall be gone."

The moon rose higher and the plain grew spectral, the town a dream town, and the ships dream ships. Ferne turned slightly so that he might behold the Cordillera. In mystery and enormity the mountains reared themselves, high as the battlements of heaven, deep as those of h.e.l.l. The Elizabethan looked long upon them, and he wreathed that utter wall, that sombre and terrific keep, with strange imaginings.

At last the two, master and boy, arose, and climbing the farther slope to the tunal, began to skirt that spiked and th.o.r.n.y circlet, moving warily because to the core it was envenomed. Beneath the sun it swarmed with hideous life; beneath the moon the poison might yet stir. The moon silvered the edge of things, drew illusion like a veil across the haunted ring; below, what hidden foulness!... Did the life there know its hideousness? Those lengths and coils, those twisting locks of Medusa, might think themselves desirable. These pulpy, starkly branching cacti, these shrubs that bred poignards, these fibrous ropes, dark and knotted lianas, binding all together like monstrous exaggerations of the tenants of the place, like serpents seen of a drunkard, were they not to themselves as fair as the fairest vine or tree or flower? The dwellers here deceived themselves, never dreamed they were so thwart and distorted.

As he walked, the halo of the moon seemed to widen until it embraced a quarter of the heavens. The sea beneath was molten silver. A low sound of waves was in his ears, and a wind pressed against him faintly, like a ghost's withstanding. From the woods towards the mountains came a long, b.e.s.t.i.a.l cry, hoa.r.s.e and mournful. "O G.o.d," said Sir Mortimer, "whither dost Thou draw us? What am I? What is my meaning and my end?"

Beyond loomed the fortress, all its lineaments blurred, softened, qualitied like a dream by the flooding moonlight. A snake stretching across their path, Sir Mortimer drew his sword, but the creature slipped away, kept before them for a while, then turned aside into its safe home. They came to the place they were seeking. Here was the cactus, taller than its fellows, and gaunt as a gallows-tree, and here the projecting end of a fallen cross. Between showed no vestige of an opening; dark, impervious, formidable as a fortress wall, the tunal met the eye. Ferne, attacking it with his sword, thrust aside a heavy curtain of broad-leaved vine, came upon a network of thorn and spike and p.r.i.c.kly leaf, hewed this away, to find behind it a like barrier.

Evidently the man had lied!--to what purpose Sir Mortimer Ferne would presently make it his business to discover.... There overtook him a sudden revulsion of feeling, depression of spirit, cold and sick distaste of the place. Tom and breathless, in very savagery over his defeated hope and fool's errand, he thrust with all his strength at the heart of this panoplied foe. His blade, piercing the swart curtain, met with no resistance. With an exclamation he threw himself against that thick-seeming barrier, and so, with Robin-a-dale behind him, burst into a narrow, secret way, masked at entrance and exit, and winding like a serpent through the tunal which surrounded the fortress of Nueva Cordoba.

VI

"Now Neptune keep the plate-fleet at Cartagena!" whistled Arden. "When I go home I'll dress in cloth of gold, eat tongues of peac.o.c.ks, and drink dissolved pearls!"

"When I go home I'll build again my father's house," cried Henry Sedley.

"In Plymouth port there's a bark I know," quoth Baldry. "When I go home she's mine,--I'll make of her another _Star_!"

"When I go home--" said Sir Mortimer, and paused. The early light was on his face, a deeper light within his eyes that saw the rose which he should gather when he went home. Then, since he would not utter so deep and dear a thought--"When we go home," he said, and began to speak--half in earnest, half in relief from the gravity of the past council--of that returning. By degrees the fire burned, and he whose spirit the live coal touched as it touched Sidney's and, more rarely, Walter Raleigh's, bore his listeners with him in a rhapsody of antic.i.p.ation. Long fronds of palm drooped without the room which held them, Englishmen in a world or savage or Spanish, but their spirits followed the speaker to green fields of Kent or Devon. They saw the English summer, saw the twilight fall, heard the lonely tinkle of far sheep-bells, heard the nightingales singing beneath the moon that shone on England. Friends' homes opened to them; Grenville welcomed them to Stowe, Sidney to charmed Penshurst.

Then to London and the Triple Tun! Bow Bells rang for them; they drank in the inn's long-room; their names were in men's mouths. What welcome, what clashing of the bells, when they should sail up the Thames again--the _Mere Honour_, the _Cygnet_, the _Marigold_, and the _Phoenix_--with treasure in their holds, and for pilot that bright angel Fame! What should they buy with their treasure? what should they do with their fame? Treasure should beget stout ships, stout hearts to sail them; fame, laid to increase, might swell to deathless glory!

Sea-captains now, sea-kings would the English be, gathering tribute from the waters and the winds, bringing gifts to England--frankincense of wealth, myrrh of knowledge, spikenard of power!--till, robed and crowned, she rose above the peoples, Joseph's sheaf, Joseph's star!

On went the charmed words, each a lantern flashed on thought, grave, poetic, telling of triumph, yet far removed from gross optimism, not without that strange, melancholy note sounding now and again amongst the age's crashing chords. Abruptly his voice fell, but presently with a lighter note he broke the silence in which his listeners gazed upon the stately vision he had conjured up. "Ah, we will talk to Frank Drake of this night! Canst not hear Richard Hawkins laugh in the Triple Tun's long-room? The Queen, too, in her palace will laugh,--like a man with the flash in her eye and her white hand clenched! And they whom we love.... What is the word for to-night, John Nevil? I may give it?

Then--Dione!"

It was the red dawn after his vigil on the fortress hill: in the great room of the stone house the leaders of the expedition had followed, line by line, his sword point as it drew upon the flagging a plan of attack, to which they gave instant adoption; Master Francis Sark had been dismissed, and to the Admiral's grave hint of possible treachery Ferne had answered, "Ay, John Nevil, I also think him a false--hearted craven, Spaniolated and perverse, a huckster, whose wares do go to the highest bidder! Well, with our hand at his throat we do not bid the highest?"

Now as he raised his tankard to thirsty lips, suddenly from the square below, shattering all the languid stillness of the tropic dawn, brayed a trumpet, arose a noise of hurrying steps and hasty voices. Baldry, at the window, wheeled, color in his cheeks, light in his deep eyes.

"War is my mistress! Down the hillside come those to whom I can speak--can speak as well as thou, Sir Mortimer Ferne!" The door was flung open, and Ambrose Wynch, a mighty man in a battered breastplate and morion, looked joyfully in upon them.

"The Dons supped so well last night, Sir John, that now they're coming to breakfast! 'Tis just a flourish--no great sortie. Shall a handful of us go out against them?"

That sally from the fortress was led by Mexia, who somewhat burned to wipe out the memory of his lost battery at the river's mouth. And as blind Fortune's dearest favor flutters often to the lackey while the master s.n.a.t.c.hes vainly, so it befell in this case, for Mexia's chance raid, a piece of mere bravado to which De Guardiola had given grudging consent, was productive of results. Bravado for bravado, interchange of chivalric folly, of magnificence that was not war,--forth to meet the Spaniard and his company must go no greater force of Englishmen! Luiz de Guardiola, Governor of Nueva Cordoba, kept his state in his fortress; therefore, Sir John Nevil, Admiral of the English and of no less worth than the Castilian, remained for this skirmish inactive. On both sides their captains played the game.

Sir Mortimer Ferne and Robert Baldry at the head of threescore men, some mounted, some on foot, deemed themselves and this medley sufficient for Pedro Mexia. Nor can it be said that their reckoning was at fault, since Mexia, deep in curses, had at last to make hasty way across the strip of plain between Nueva Cordoba and its fortress. Too easily did the English repel an idle sortie, too eagerly did they follow Mexia in retreat, for suddenly Chance, leaving all neutrality, threw herself, a G.o.ddess armed, upon the Spanish side. In the very shadow of the hill, the mounted English, well ahead of those on foot, Mexia's disordered band making for the shelter of the tunal, a Spaniard turned, raised his harquebus and fired. The great bay steed which bore Sir Mortimer Ferne reared, screamed, then fell, hurling its rider to earth, where he lay, senseless, stark in black armor, with a knot of rose-colored velvet in his crest.

No hawk like De Guardiola was Pedro Mexia, but when luck pinioned his prey his talons were strong to close upon it. Now on the instant he wheeled, swooped with all his might upon the disordered vanguard of the English. Baldry and those with him fought madly, the English on foot made all haste; the prostrate figure, pinned beneath the dying bay, became the centre of a wild melee, the hotly contested prize of friend and foe! Then burst from the tunal, came at a run down the hill, re-enforcements for Mexia....

Erelong, Don Luiz de Guardiola sent to inform Sir John Nevil that he had for his prisoner one of the latter's captains. It appeared to the Governor of Nueva Cordoba that the English held the man in some esteem,--perchance even that he was their leader's close friend. Sir John Nevil would understand that to a Spanish soldier and good son of the Church the prisoner was, inevitably, mere pirate and heretic, to be dealt with as such.

To this announcement John Nevil returned curt answer. Nueva Cordoba lay in the hollow of his hand, and at his disposal were some Spanish lives perhaps not altogether valueless in the eyes of Don Luiz de Guardiola, since their kindred and friends and Spain herself might hold him responsible for their sudden and piteous taking off.