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Title: The Island Providence
Author: Niven, Frederick John (1878-1944)
Cover illustrator: Anonymous ["WJ"]
Date of first publication: 1910
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: John Lane, The Bodley Head;
   New York: John Lane Company, 1910
   (first edition)
Date first posted: 17 March 2010
Date last updated: 17 March 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #503

This ebook was produced by:
David T. Jones, woodie4
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

This file was produced from images generously made available
by the Internet Archive/American Libraries




  [Illustration: cover]




  THE ISLAND PROVIDENCE


  _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

  THE LOST CABIN MINE

  Crown 8vo




  THE ISLAND
  PROVIDENCE

  BY FREDERICK NIVEN


  LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
  NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMX.


  THE ANCHOR PRESS LTD., TIPTREE, ESSEX.


  TO
  L. M. T.


                         CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                            PAGE

      I.  THE SECOND ADVENT                             1

     II.  FATHER AND SON                               10

    III.  THE HUMMING IN THE CLOVER                    27

     IV.  PROPHECIES----                               43

      V.  ----AND A FULFILMENT                         57

     VI.  TELLING THE BEES                             71

    VII.  HOW THE FIRST MAN CAME HOME                  85

   VIII.  ONE MAIDEN'S HEART                           96

     IX.  OSCULATIONS                                 104

      X.  CAPTAIN----                                 112

     XI.  "IS YOUR DRUNKEN BOATSWAIN ABOARD?"         124

    XII.  WITH THE PACK                               133

   XIII.  THE ISLE PROVIDENCE                         142

    XIV.  CAPTAIN AVERY'S PARADISE                    146

     XV.  AT _The Spanish Galleon_                    156

    XVI.  THE RENDEZVOUS                              169

   XVII.  THE OCCUPANCY                               176

  XVIII.  THE AFTERMATH                               197

    XIX.  THE EXILE                                   208

     XX.  IN WHICH THE VEIL IS RENT                   221

    XXI.  HOW JOHN UPCOTT STOOD IN THOUGHT            247

   XXII.  DISSERTATIONS IN DEVON                      283

  XXIII.  HOW THE THROSTLE SANG AT EVENING            296




THE ISLAND PROVIDENCE




CHAPTER I

THE SECOND ADVENT


In the year of grace, 1675, the seventh day of September, John Upcott,
being that day breeched for the first time, contemplated his shadow with
no small pride. And his appetite for applause being now but whetted by
the fond and jesting admiration of mother, sister, brother, he set off
to West Abbotsham to preen himself before the eyes of Cassandra Gifford.
His admiration of himself, crossing the stile from the lane into the
cart-track, was immense. Gilford's dog, sighting him from the barn-end,
had a moment's doubt, muzzle forward, ears twitching, legs taut,
scrutinizing the new playmate. Only with children did the dog renounce
the staid, taciturn manner that he had learnt in work with his
colleague, old Gifford. With children he renewed his youth, and every
new child was of interest. Then he recognised his friend, came
bounding--and snuffed. So again John had joy of his breeches; for they
had again assuredly been remarked.

This is no milk-and-water tale, but a tale of salt seas; let no one deem
otherwise, despite the following picture, nor be deceived by it into
fearing that kisses are to be the burden of my narrative. For my
narrative is not precisely of lilac and lavender. But the world is not
all of one colour; there be grey of rocks for purple of the heather,
green of the sea for white of its foam; and though I can tell you of the
old painted women of the Isle Providence I can tell you (in my heart had
rather tell you) of the Devon child with the wistful eyes, slant-set
beneath her pensive brows--already pensive--and her hair, red then, let
me say, and have done with it; though to be sure it turned auburn with
the years.

Long years after Upcott remembered her tiny, erect figure, her bent
head, chin on flat little breast, slender arms pendant, as she welcomed
him that day of second summer. Of her words he remembered but one
phrase; of their play, that afternoon, in that high upland farm-close,
nothing. He did remember that he was hot with playing, and cold with the
after chill, when Cassandra's mother came to him with some sweet morsel
from the pantry and suggested that it was time for him to be going home
to his own mother, the breeches notwithstanding. Cassandra was to see
him upon his way; for though her youth and his were equal it is an
unwritten law that the girl in such case, and at that age, must play
mother. Of where she left him he retained no recollection. It was by the
white-washed wall at the barn that he, seeing their shadows cast there
by the slanting sun of late afternoon, manlike, so-so pleased with his
companion's lean, spindle shadow, and intensely occupied with his
own--with the legs gloriously shadowed--cried out: "Ah, I am a man."

One forgets one's childhood; Upcott forgot much of his; but there was
some special emotion surely felt, passing by that sunlit wall.

"Cassandra," he cried, contemplating his swinging shadow, "I shall go to
the wars and be a shoulder."

"You mean a soldier," Cassandra corrected.

"Yes," he said, "shoulder, soldier; and carry a musket on my shoulder,"
trying to dissemble, child-like--and adult-like--his faulty speech.

Perhaps it was at the stile that she left him; for one fancies he would
lure her at least so far to behold the grown-up method of swinging a leg
across the bars.

There she fades, at any rate, out of that picture of the day, and the
child is left alone.

The lane wound through a wilderness of nettles and thistles and spiked
briar with great spiders' webs trailed from twig to twig; and at that
time hundreds of crane-flies staggered over grass and hedge. They had
bounced in his face on his journey upward to the farm but, full then
with the sense of his manliness, he had blown them aside grandly,
although daddies have a notable fad for going head to wind, for
fluttering against the mouth that blows them away.

Now he faced the lane with a sense of distaste. Not that he feared
daddy-long-legs. But there were also wasps. Not that he feared wasps,
exactly. But it was a long lane and tangled.

After all, no daddy-long-legs, no wasps, annoyed him. They seemed to be
all asleep. He marched on with regular stride, eyes twitching to left
and right. The spiders' webs were still there; but there was no spider
moving. Each spider sat bloated and motionless in the centre of his grey
winding-sheet. He saw one slow beetle as it strolled under a stone from
the muddy centre of the lane. A little further on he saw a solitary
daddy-long-legs feebly crawling, and falling, and fluttering, and
dancing creepily downward, into the abyss of a blackberry bush. And both
these living things seemed exhausted.

There was not another sign of life; and the lane suddenly wore to him
such an aspect that almost he would have welcomed the golden flash and
the spiteful hum of just one wasp. He felt so utterly alone. Overhead
was the blue, glittering sky, without a single high tenant: here was the
lane, forsaken, with not so much as a perennial wind passing through its
drear sunlit and shadowed chaos. At last he came to its end, and
mounting the hither stile and holding the topmost projecting post,
standing so, perilously, on tip-toe, he saw the hills wavering round the
bays, yearning up to the sky, rolling down to the sea in abrupt
declivities, broken here and there by the "mouths," cut off here and
there by sheer cliffs.

On the outjutting points he could see the white of breaking waves; for
though you could not have counted, on that day of calm, six white
flashes of foam in all those blue acres of confronting sea, yet the
verge of land and water was marked with the white breakers from Hartland
Point to Baggy Bay. And in all that vastness there was no sail of any
ship.

For a little way the boy's path led by a cliff whence he could hear the
sea on that day even, of calm, in a multitude of ceaseless sounds. For
groundwork was the eternal sigh, as of silk drawn through the hand. Then
would come a crack, as when one is struck on the cheek with the flat of
a hand. Again--you have seen women of a washing-day in the near field,
stretching a wet blanket, one at either end, arms extended; then you
have seen them give that quick, decisive flip and heard the flack of it.
A sound of that kind, but of infinitely greater volume, ever and again
burst deeply in the midst of the lesser sounds, burst with an awesome
detonation. These were the only sounds on all that shore.

Searching now, with your bird's-eye view, over that sweep of wild North
Devon land aslant to the sea, you can just pick out our five-year-old, a
mere dot, child and shadow, shadow by him forgotten now, marching home.

It was here that a gripping alarm assailed his mind, open, as you may
guess, by the loneliness, to any vagrant and disturbing thought.

He had heard rumours of the Second Advent; for rectors and lecturers, in
those days of transition, had thoughtful and critical, if (like
themselves) superstitious hearers. Men delved in the Bible as they
quested to the Spanish main, to Madagascar, to the kingdom of the great
Mogul--quested how navely, with what incongruities!

And here was a child of a dissolute father and a pious mother, and none
could tell what such a child might weave in his mind out of the loose
ends of talks of elder people and his own infantile observations of
life.

So now, when the utter loneliness embraced him, in his prepared mind
echoed the words: "Like a thief in the night." Quite clearly then he
perceived that his ideas regarding the Second Advent had lacked breadth.
At least his mind was developing, as minds with any developing capacity
do, in loneliness. A thief in the night would come quietly; that was
probably all that the phrase implied. By day, or by night, that coming
would be quiet.

Upcott swept with his eye the visible world, and imagination showed him
also a little farther, beyond the hill-verges and the sea-rim. His heart
leaped and swelled, and he began to run.

There was cause for haste. If, while he had come down that silent
lane--he remembered now the slow beetle, the failing crane-fly as
cumulative evidence--the Christ had come and snatched viewless all the
good into the blue, limitless heavens, as he feared, why did he run now?
Of what avail running home--home?

What he sought was certainty. Many a time in his tormented future was he
to go questing so, but never again perhaps with such a cold
helplessness. Later he was to learn stoic and callous aids. Yet already,
to-day, till he knew the worst he would not weep; but his heart, he
felt, was full of tears bubbling in a spring, rising, filling, bursting.

At last, after what seemed a run of half the world, he reached the gate
into the yard.

"Mother!" he cried. And there was no reply.

"Sis!" But there was no reply.

"Tom!" But no elder brother answered to his call.

Then he squared his shoulders. He was cold. His heart was fluttering.
And in a high, quavering voice with an insinuated hardness, as
betokening preparedness for aught:

"Father!"

There was no reply.

He crept terrified indoors and the wag-at-the-wall, ticking in the
shadowy kitchen and filling the house with its furtive, fearful, lonely
echo, told him that there was no one there. The white-faced clock was
but counting out inexorably the brief moments between the departure of
the good and the first outcry of the almost lost (for he thought he had
heard some rumour of a hint the Book proferred, that even then there
would be a frail, final hope) when they should discover that the world
was theirs, for a space.

He blubbered once and then gulped down the next sob.

To whom could he go? To whom, left behind, yet possessing a remnant of
kindliness, might he fly, to be beside in that dread hour when the evil
of the earth came grinning and halloing over the hills? He bethought him
of the old man of the bees, he who lived a little way east above the
clover lands; and thither he continued his broken trot. He had but
little hope left now, for he thought that the old man of the bees was a
man likely to be fit for transportation ere the inundation of the
rioters.

On the way he fell several times. The wonder is that his heart did not
burst. But at length he arrived at the tiny cot, standing solitary in a
fold of the hill with the two rows of beehives close by in the wild
little garden. Below waved the clover in the clover lands. There was
froth on the child's lips as he opened the gate into the garden.

The place was loud with bees but he had passed beyond any far-fetched
hope that their humming might have given, had he heard it. He did not
hear.

"Uncle!" he called, or strove to call.

There was no answer. He whom all the children called "uncle" was not
there.

That was final. He need go no farther. He had settled his fate. But, to
make absolutely sure, he crept to the cot door and looked into the tiny
place; one could see both its rooms from the low entrance. Uncle was not
there. He turned back and prepared for the worst. In that little buzzing
garden, in that hollow of the sweeping hills, under the high infinite
dome he stood preparing for he knew not what; feeble before the unknown,
yet not utterly cast down. There was fight in the little devil yet.

His eyes, with the sweat running into them, blinked ahead of him into
the nothingness as he waited. His ears were alert for the terrors
behind, for all sounds that might come. His chin twitched for all that
he pursed his lips together. In a word, at one and the same time (pardon
me, gentlemen) erect and trembling, he squared his shoulders and piddled
in his new breeches.

And then a voice, with an Irish brogue, said:

"Why! God bless the boy!"




CHAPTER II

FATHER AND SON


Upcott's father, to come straight to the point, was a loathly drunkard;
and his mother was a saint of that order whose martyrdom is the smiling
martyrdom of life.

The churches were then full of petty bickerings; and around the Book
then, as always, was seething all manner of talk quite bye the point.
One fancies, reading the records of the time, that to the disputants
there must have come moments when, withdrawn from the tumult and
pondering alone, they looked inwards on themselves with doubting, even
with sardonic eye. But Mrs. Upcott, thanks to her clarity of mind and
capacity for retaining hold of the main issue, was little troubled with
what one might call party-religion. With her melting grey eyes she read
the old heart-finding sentences at dusk, by the low lamplight, when
Upcott lay snoring in bed, the pigs grunting in the sty; and there would
be a peaceful gleam on her face as she read. That gleam of calm would
fade suddenly at times, the eyes harden, the form, once lissome, be
drawn up stately, in a blending of pain and dignity at a grunt of
part-awakening in the room above and a thick voice as of a somnabulist
crying out, "Moll! Dolly! Bridget!" For Mrs. Upcott's Christian name
was Grace.

"I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. Yet a little
while and the world seeth me no more; but you see me.... If a man love
me he will keep my words and my Father will love him, and we will come
unto him and make our abode with him.... Ye have heard how I said unto
you I go away and come again unto you...."

So she gained courage to live, the words falling gently on her soul, a
spiritual febrifuge; and one requisite; for her soul was often fevered
by self-criticism.

She had other ghostly consolations: thoughts of loved ones of her
people--her maiden surname was Smith, her father being the noted Thomas
Smith, silk-weaver, of Bideford, an honoured name in North Devon. Her
mother had been a holy woman, lived honourably and gone hence calmly.

Mrs. Upcott was possessor of "the lively hope;" but life is long, and to
aid her in the smiling business of the days, when her broken spirit
spent half the night in tears, she would ponder these words and others,
with their mysterious, delectable peace. She craved forgiveness for
herself and enlightenment on the duties of a wife; she craved
forgiveness for her husband and a new life. Never a soul durst
sympathise with her. She met the folk that looked on her, pondering
words of sympathy, with a barrier of smiles. Her mask was one of
innocence--she who knew all that is to be known. So her neighbours stood
almost in awe of her. All they could say of her was that she had a
touch of "gentrice," and they bowed to it with no jealousy.

These prayers by the way, of which I speak, she ever sternly informed
herself were heard, such was her indomitable sophistry. But for some
reason, beyond a mortal mind to dare, the prayers were not answered, she
would say simply, (amazed at her own faith at times) as the maker of the
prayer desired. Such was the high, blind faith of these lost days.

If she had not thought her children old enough to know all the
mightiness and mystery of God she had not kept them ignorant of certain
holy and joyous things. And as there is sophistry in the minds of the
aged, trying to make things fit, so are distortions in the minds of
children trying to make things comprehensible. So you see her more
clearly now, also her son. Without knowing the mother how can one ever
wholly understand her son?

Over at Hartland her brother had spoken his last word. He would come not
again to the Abbotsham farm until he came in black, to see lowered down
from sight and mind the ruination of his sister's life. For only thus
could he look on the matter, loving onlooker; and only mysterious God
knew, and visionary Grace at times perceived, what a rare thing, like an
eternal flower, blossomed in her bosom amidst that "ruination."

My words are faulty. They are material and not fit to tell of the vague
anodynes, the more than anodynes, of the Mrs. Upcotts of past or
present. Most of us look on these lives with the eyes of--Grace's
brother.

"If ever he comes to Hartland I'll set him on the broad of his back,"
said he, and her face was peaked. "That is all," he cried; "it taxes me
too much to come to see you, Grace." And she kissed him fondly as he
went; and he remembered how her hand plucked his shoulder.

Now and then, it is true, when neighbours met and, talking the talk of
the countryside, "turned over," as the phrase goes, the Upcott
household, some shaggy one might suggest (perhaps more from contrariety
than belief) that a wife could do a deal to keep a husband straight. But
such suggestions either fell flat as though unheard or were violently
repudiated. And a fate seemed to follow those who made such suggestions:
the ordinaries would presently claim their more frequent presence, and
the midnight ditch.

You will gather that Upcott's was no common backsliding. Even those who
loved to be "merry," or, as they said in quay parlance, "half-caulked,"
had a loathing for the man who would throw his money into the tavern
tills, hunt all the loose petticoats of the back streets, be none so
drunk but he recollected to save horseflesh going up hill home, and
then, at the turn off from Abbotsham Hill, start bellowing to the night
so that he raised the roosted crows: "Put the pan on the fire; I'm
a-coming hoom." You begin to feel the atmosphere at the Upcott farm; and
if the place was always clean as a new pin and wore a smiling air that
meant very much just what the smile of the mistress meant, you have
guessed whose mind directed it and in what a quiet way. There the two
boys and the sister grew up. Another child there had been; but--well,
the mother's prayer in her prison of circumstance was: "Lord, if this
child I am about to bear be not such as will lead a noble and clean
life, may the child, I pray thee, O God, in Thy mercy, be born still,
and its soul never leave thy sanctuary."

So there were but the three.

Tom, sullen, morose, answering his father in monosyllables, contrived to
work away from home as much as possible. Of what service could he be at
home when his mother counselled, ever and ever, the bearing of the yoke?

The girl was the mother's right hand. You could not say that she was a
pretty child. A late greater beauty came to her with years, just when
people had come to think she was to be a plain, sadly sweet reminder to
them of how Upcott had ruined more lives than his own. But that is by
the way; as a child--no, I think you could not call her pretty, though
you would be drawn to her more than to prettiness. She had a wide wonder
in her eyes, great brown eyes of the father's hue but of the melting
fashion of the mother's grey. The sordid things she saw, the gross
things she heard, were never taken for granted, never accepted as being
things that are even in merely normal conditions. Not from words of her
mother's, but from her mother's manner she understood that this
condition of things was accidental. So, when she came to the age of long
frocks she saw what she had thus the eye to see in mortals; and while
Miss Go-lightly would be met with a sidewise waggle of the head, a
half-wink, or leer, to Sis there would be respect tendered as matter of
course and accepted so. The lascivious, healthy, robust young stable
boy, a great blade, who was on terms familiar with many scattered maids,
had been seen to come to Sis with a spray of white heather one morning
when the hills were aflame and present it to her in silence and with a
bow that was greater than an achievement. Something in the morning hills
with the spray of white among the purple, something in that Devon sky,
or out of the Devon spaces had granted the stable Don Juan entrance
into, for him, another world; and he had in him, it would appear, the
native greatness to at least visit that world. So he brought the heather
to Sis.

John was learning life in many ways, and some of his lessons were taught
then, as you might say, and learnt afterwards.

One day in the autumn of 1685 the pony was put into the shafts and, as
Upcott had several calls to make in town, John went with him to play
groom. These were great days for John, for there was always stir in
Bideford. In the river would be ships from Newfoundland, ships from
Spain with wool. There would be tobacco ships, ships from Raleigh's
colony.

There were men to be found who had been with Blake and could acknowledge
it. There were men who durst not tell the names of captains they had
served. There were those who had been to and fro in the West Indies and
the Caribbean Sea among the islands, carrying to them much needed
merchandise which they sold at rates far below those that could be
offered by law-abiding Spanish merchants handicapped by Spain's taxes
and duties--rollicking smugglers. There were those who had hung about
the far Atlantic like gentlemen-of-the-road lurking on a common, waiting
the coming of the galleons on the wide sea highways.

To boys they did not talk much of their doings, nor even to their peers,
the tendency amongst them rather being to hint darkly that men must be
men indeed to do some things that had to be done in these far
sea-fields. But they lounged on the quay and watched the tides come and
go, spitting into the river; and criss-crossed to and from the
water-front ordinaries. Still, their tales, though the half were never
told, were in the air. They made an atmosphere around them. Faces and
gait spoke. Their tales exuded from them. And the things they brought
home, as sailors always do, spoke--aye, some spoke literally; for they
had a great fancy, when they could, to fetch home parrots, till nearly
every ordinary had its "pretty Poll." And the parrots would let out a
deal, one way or another. There was one, at "The Dolphin," that would
cry: "Prepare to meet thy God. The ship's going down."

These seamen did their best to make Bideford not tedious during their
spells ashore, and Bideford did its best to amuse them. Some might go to
church or meeting-house, and the meeting-house had so large a following
in Bideford that the bishops were moved to be broad-minded and speak of
meeting-houses with leniency. But to hear William Bartlett on the text:
"They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great
waters," was, if for the moment it touched the religious emotion, a dry
entertainment, despite the text, to seamen who had dabbled in
buccaneering. Many had more than dabbled. To listen to much of that and
take it home to one's heart, one would resolve to leave the kicking
tiller for the kicking ploughshaft: scuppers sometimes spouted blood
into the Caribbean Sea.

Into Bideford then, drove the Upcotts, father and younger son. John was
now fifteen years of age and a boy by that age is well advanced with his
note-book, packing it with suggestions of things that he will examine in
due course.

As they entered the town a party of soldiers were digging in the
road-side at the top of the High Street. John remarked their uniforms,
their swagger, and took special notice of how the officer stood, wrist
on hip, head flung back, looking on his men with insolent eyes.

They drove slowly there, partly for the sudden declivity, partly because
of the men's tools being thrown on the road and the men giving no heed
to passage-way for others; so John had opportunity to note that the men,
exchanging speech at their work--they were dropping a long beam into the
hole that had been dug--looked at each other with the same insolent
blankness of countenance that their leader wore on his, and spoke short
and rasping. He took note of this as a thing to be cultivated by
soldiers, but by way of a fashion, not surely so vindictive as it
looked, telling more what might be of fierceness rather than of what
constantly was. Imagine one always looking so! He had no idea that if
one of these men smiled at his work, or dropped that mask a moment, the
others would leap straightway upon him and rend him limb from limb--with
no change of expression.

At the quay they alighted and, the horse being led into the yard, sat
down on the bench before the door of "The Ship" to grow acclimatised to
the town before proceeding to business.

Now it chanced that two girls had been seated there, had but newly
risen, were still indeed in view, swinging along, heads in air stiffly,
but eyes glinting sidewise across to the expectorating mariners. Down
then clapped father, and John also subsided, gaze roving over the
shipping. Upcott called for a refresher (a humble beginning for the
fray) of bread and cheese and ale. Then up he jumped suddenly. Here is
an incident I do not care to tell; but it has to be told, as it gives
you, once and for all and done with it, an idea of the kind of father
John had.

"God, John," said he, "there's warmth i' they maids," and nudged
fifteen-year-old in the ribs and then sat with eyes twinkling over the
only pleasantry he had ever passed with his son, waiting for the ale.
And fifteen-year-old, rightly or wrongly, had a sense of the unfitness
of the jest between father and son, to say the least. He was old enough
to see both sides of the coin, if not quite to understand the full
significance of all the stampings.

Another glimpse he was to be given of the creature his father was, when
in the Gunstone Lane up came a villainous, cross-eyed man with a nose
into the nostrils of which one could look, the impudent way it was set
on his face, and began: "Iss, there ye be, Upcott o' Abbotsham come down
along to Bideford to carry on your capers and thinks we don't know you.
I know you----"

Upcott hastened his steps, his son, shamed, at his side, until they
found refuge in a shop where Upcott made a pretence of looking over some
goods. But the short-nosed man was dancing at the door, yahing and
booing and making sounds like a monkey from Madagascar.

A crowd was gathering. Within was Upcott trembling over the goods and
the shopman eyeing him and then eyeing the crowd at the door, beginning
to discern the subterfuge of Upcott's entrance. His brusque manner put a
period to Upcott's slinking there.

Shame was in John's heart at his father's cowardice, whatever the cause,
real or imagined, of this man's animosity.

John was glad to see a sign of fight and a masterly look come on his
father's face as they emerged again into the clamant street. But it
signified little of action, for again the father sought to make a way
for himself.

"You and your gentrice wife!" cried the man for ending to another
taunt.

John looked to his father and saw the blood in his face. He assuredly
appeared then as though he had an intention to make an end of the weazel
hanging to his neck; but some other thought came to him and (though now
with clenched fists) he plodded nervously on afresh, in a new resolve.
But now, to be sure, his bearing was such that the crowd stayed aside
from him, gave him passage freely.

But this was not enough for John.

For himself he could, all his life, stand a deal of abuse and smile on
the giver. But a word against family, a word against his secretly
beloved, and John was neither to hold nor bind.

"No word of that!" he cried, wheeling and leaping.

White and glaring-eyed he smote the weazel under the chin, following the
blow, the only way one can describe his attack seems to be by saying,
with himself; hurled himself on the man as he staggered back, falling
down in the crowd that parted and then encircled.

I am painting the picture of no hero of melodrama, whatever I may be
painting, and I have to tell you the truth.

"I will have no word of my----"

The crowd heard John cry so much in a voice that appalled with its
blent, youthful timbre and its madness. He had flung himself on the
fallen man, and they both were now struggling and smiting. Either the
weazel did, or Upcott imagined that he did, while cuffing and gripping,
try to bite his hand. And even as he cried the words, John Upcott, at
the hint, and feeling his antagonist's strength, set his teeth in the
man's throat. His own ribs were cracking, for the weazel was a man
grown, an ugly devil too.

Then he found himself (it was the next thing he knew) standing cold in
the street, glaring down on a gulping man, and hands were pulling him
back; voices, almost caressing for some reason, saying: "All right,
sonny. All right. But that's not an Englishman's way."

The man on the causey was struggling to his feet as the crowd thrust
John and father away. The whole thing had not lasted long, the climax
not a minute.

They went on in silence, long after they had passed from range of the
immediate and curious eyes, the father now and then looking down on the
boy, and John, with the tail of his eye, as the phrase is, aware of the
frequent scrutiny, though he would not meet it. It was nothing to him,
condemnatory or appreciative. Something had come between father and son
for ever.

Upcott had several calls to make, many of them with a side-issue of
liquidation in the nearest ordinary. Once said Upcott to his son,
smiling fatherly on him:

"Now, John, there's no need for you to hang round with me seeing us have
put up the nag. You can run off and see the ships, or what you fancy."

But John announced, with something of the aspect of the soldiers on the
hill, that he would prefer to stay with his father.

"Ha, ha," laughed the father's then fellow tippler, "an exemplary boy, a
good lad, fond o' his father." And Upcott appeared a trifle annoyed at
the words, reading, doubtless, in the twinkle of the man's eye, an irony
more keen than was intended.

There were two or three such episodes. The father gave permission to his
boy to go if he so desired; then he suggested that he should go; and all
the while, as ballads have it, "the wine was birling." Then came the
command:

"Get out of it now, John, and meet me to the Ship a couple of hours from
now."

The eyes of father and son met. They understood each other in that
gaze--and there was more than the barrier between.

"Yes, that's me," said the father's eye. "You're getting years, and you
can understand things a bit. Well, that's me, so now you know."

And the lad's eye said: "So be it. And I am growing older every day!"

But he obeyed, and gave his father his absence.

In the streets as he strolled round, his face no very placid face then,
he encountered a man that he remembered--he having a distinctive,
superlative air of vagabondage--as one of the crowd in the Gunstone Lane
fight.

This man merits description. He wore, a-cock, a fine hat with braid, and
round his pow, beneath the hat, was a red handkerchief with blue and
yellow spots, coming down to near his ears, which were long and narrow
and ran down in the line of his slanting jaw, with hardly any tendency
toward the erect. He was clean-shaven, long of nose, close of brow, had
a chin that announced a mixture of strength and weakness. His hair stuck
out behind, from under the kerchief, in a tuft. He wore a long gallant
coat that had seen some salt service, the buttons, of gold, all there,
but many hanging loosely. A fancy waistcoat looked out brazenly and a
little worn from the sagging coat, yellow lace from his sleeves, on the
brown wrists, and silver buckles shone on his heavy shoes. John gathered
him together with his eye, felt himself in the presence of an extreme
devil and yet, evil as the man looked, terribly evil, his face wearing
the sear of a knife and all the sears of debauchery, found him
attractive. His mother could never have seen the man attractive--nor
could his father; and he should not perhaps have been attractive from
any standpoint. From the romantic standpoint of youth he was. There was
in his evil eyes a glitter of comradeship.

"Hullo, shipmate. You're the bloody boy," the piratical person hailed
him. "Shaken the da' off, have you?"

Upcott for some reason laughed recklessly.

"Yes," said he.

"That's the bold lad. Come and have a tot of brandy, lad."

"No, thank you, sir," said Upcott, casting off the recklessness.

"Eh? Oh, you are still on clotted cream. Well, I forgive the insult, for
you're a well plucked un. Bit of a rat you be, when your blood's up.
That ain't English, they said! Damn England, say I. What's English way?
I know your breed. If you don't go in over the bulwarks amidships you'll
wriggle through by the anchor chains. You'd scuttle your boats, you
would, afore you went in over one of them fortified galleons, scuttle
your boats, you would, so as when you got in amidships you'd ha' no
place to go back to and you just 'ud have to get in on 'em either in the
forecastle or the sterncastle. I know you. You're English enough for me.
I see your future on the high seas, lad. Never you go to Bristol into no
business man's house. Pack o' pimps, them Bristol merchants. I know."
And then at the thought of Bristol merchants he fell into the most
blasphemous language that Upcott had ever heard. The horror of it
prompted flight beyond earshot. And the man's keen preoccupation with
his thoughts (he staring ahead with contorted face, seeing some
memory-created Bristol merchant, it would appear, on whom he breathed
his brimstone) gave Upcott the opportunity. The lad took two tentative
steps away, and then, the mariner still swearing, a third; then his
steps quickened and he whisked around the corner and ran from the echo
of that voice.

But he was to see the mariner of the crimson speech again and hear the
tale of Bristol merchants told coherently. At the moment came other
matters, for now he met his father rolling and spluttering inn-ward and
fell in step with him.

"Supper," growled Upcott at the inn; and so they both were seated. John
munched slowly at first and, despite his hunger, soon forebore to eat at
all. His stomach turned seeing his father sitting opposite him at that
board. Sitting? Nay, lying over his plate, scooping the contents into
his mouth held low over it, and then bawling for more.

John slipped into the stuffy passage and saw himself to the stowing of
the goods, then arriving at the inn, in the bottom of the cart, also to
the harnessing. A little shamefaced he bade the boy who waited on his
father to ply him speedily with all the viands for which he might call.
The more the father ate here the less he would need at home, and the
mother might have a less terrible night of it; for John knew too well
the scene that would ensue if, as she cooked and the husband swallowed,
there came a too lengthy pause with empty plate.

Here, in the Bideford inn, alone with his father, instead of at home,
John felt first and in a superlative, heartbreaking degree, sympathy
with his mother.

At last they were in the cart and away, homeward bound.

As they crawled up High Street, perhaps it was due to the meal (or
meals) that Upcott had just swallowed, the drunkard began to perceive
and have a kind of clearer vision of his surroundings. Now they came
upon a ghastly spectacle. The horse, despite the hill-climb, swerved to
the side, but Upcott checked the curse on his tongue, risen at his son's
faulty driving, for he, too, jibbed that moment, like the horse, seeing
what it had seen.

High overhead dangled from a gibbet a thing that was a man and not a
man, not only for its broken, twisted state, but by the reason of the
droppings from it. The figure, headless, armless, was naked you might
say, but bound in what might have been mud, some thick substance that
hanged like black icicles from the dead, drooping feet.

"God forgive me!" cried Upcott. "What's this I see?" And he called on
the Maker three times in a loathsome voice.

And a soldier, passing on the causey, answered him and said: "A warning
to the people of Bideford. The man was a rebel and so are rebels served.
Pass on, old hogshead. The devil will boil you in brandy, not in tar.
That man was boiled in tar."

John imitated the stare he had seen and practised in the morning,
looking down on the soldier from his vantage with an expression like a
house-gable, and drove on. But the sight of that pitiable figure sent a
gripe through his midriff and the pendant broken thing that had once
been a man was before his eyes all the way. And his father, sagging down
in the cart, muttered: "Buried in tar, boiled in tar. God deliver me!"

The father was snoring in the bottom of the tail-cart and the son
weeping on the seat, weeping for that dying and desolate day, when they
drove into Abbotsham as lights were being lit in windows and stars being
lit on high.




CHAPTER III

THE HUMMING IN THE CLOVER


The old man of the bees, he who, years before, had arrived at his cot so
auspiciously to save a child from apoplexy, was journeying homewards,
twirling in his hand a wind-cast twig and turning over in his mind his
own foreign thoughts. Already, though he was five miles from where the
honey-makers and he dwelt, laden and homing bees were settling one by
one on him to have what is called "a lift home." So he plodded gently,
evading brushing branches, mouthing to himself some Latin about a
hill-top, murmuring trees and murmuring bees. I could not say that his
pronunciation was collegiate, for he had taught himself Latin from the
Aldines and the Elzevirs that he had sold, time was, in his little shop
in Bristol, little shop long since sold; and he had never possessed the
assurance to admit his knowledge even to his most friendly of scholarly
customers; though many a hint he had culled from them and digested in
secret for his further relish of the Latin and the Greek and the old
French. But he made a music of the Latin lines, with a difference; and
assuredly he enjoyed what he read. He was a lover of rich phrases and
of simple. At times, when the humour was on him, he spoke with the rich
utterance of the Irish, then coming in numbers to Bideford. That was
only his whim, he finding something pleasant to the ear in the accent of
these immigrants. In this late day the careful-eared stranger can still
hear that Irish blend in the Devon speech.

I need not here give our old man's history, nor the explanation, in so
many words, for the book-worm's presence there on the sea-echoing slopes
of North Devon: it will leak out _en route_, as do all histories more or
less.

When the bees rose from him with parting buzz it was sign that he was
come near home, and he arrived there soon after them, his face, ugly and
fascinating, a replica of that of Socrates, suddenly brightening in
welcome as he saw two lads squatted beside his dwelling, John Upcott and
his friend Ravenning.

"Good morning, lads," he said.

"Good morning, sir," said Upcott.

"Good morning, Uncle," said Ravenning. "Did you hear about our dog,
stung to death by bees up near to the Hoops?"

"They'd be swarming," said the old man complacently.

"Iss, swarming; and he went nosing and looking on."

"Ah well; bees are just the same as human beings, with times you must
either leave them alone or handle them with discernment," said Uncle.

Upcott looked on the philosopher with interest. He frequently
experienced a sense as of being near the fount of all wisdom, or
knowledge, when the old man spoke. Ravenning twinkled up bantering. It
was not native in him to give much respect, chiefly because of lack of
discernment also. The brain cells where wisdom goes were not developed
in him, perhaps, and he was not aware of the deficiency. He liked the
old man; but liked him in the romping way of youth: ready to listen to
what he found wise as he conceived wisdom; more ready to listen, a
joyous leer spreading on his face, to what he considered hints, at
times, that the old man was human and that, even with his wisdom and his
years he appreciated the view of life that the cavalier vicar of Dean
Prior, by Totnes Town, had put in his "Gather ye rosebuds while ye
may"--not that he knew Herrick, though Uncle did.

But when Ravenning would be gone, into what further realms did not the
old man lead the Upcott boy, and the boy conduct the old man! Something
pathetic, or awakening a sympathy for one knew not what, indicated but
unspoken, woke in Upcott's heart sometimes as he watched his Socrates
pottering agitated in the wild garden or ferreting in his library; for
the old man had books in one of his rooms, books brought hither from the
shop in Bristol that was but a memory. Especially did the narration of
voyages collected by Richard Haklyut interest Upcott, and he passed many
a spare hour bent to their pages, sitting on the stool before the rough
shelves. And sometimes the old man, remarking the boy's interest, for
which indeed he had hoped, would draw forth other books and read words
well-timed for the hour, whose music then, more than their meaning,
moved the boy's soul: but the meaning was borne on the music like pollen
on the wind; and there would yet be seed take root and flowers bloom
next year.

So, one late afternoon, clover-scented, and murmurous with bees and the
farther murmur of the sea, there entered his soul these random words:
"Pious spirits, who possessed their days in raptures of futurity, made
little more of this world than the world that was before it, while they
lay obscure in the chaos of preordination and night of their
fore-being." And I need hardly tell you that the reading of these words
was suggested to the old man as he sat listening to the boy's babel and
thinking of those from whom he had sprung, natures so strangely
assorted; thinking of them both, but thinking of the mother with
reverence.

John Upcott interested him; and in the boy's great brown liquid eyes
that started to all manner of suggestions of terror, or were bright to a
tale of daring and courage, Uncle saw indication of the Spanish blood,
the story of the coming of which to Devon he knew so well. For the old
man knew "a mort o' things." His spirit lived much among fables of the
immortal dead and the forgotten dead, forgotten only by reason of being
nameless, but known of him who wanders into the past. He lived among the
splendid ruins of his illusions, carrying his lamp, whose name I cannot
tell.

He was a man to whom the boy could unburden himself of his woes. And had
these woes been selfish the old man had been the first, I surmise, to
alter subtly the trend of thought. But the woes were seldom so.

One day Upcott sat, his hand bound up, for he had been grievously cut
when wrenching a knife from the grasp of his delirious progenitor, sat
in melancholy mood; but the mood of the most happily circumstanced youth
is often so; for youth is melancholy. Upcott had been speaking
sorrowfully of his mother, he being old enough now to grieve for her
beauty so abused. And the old man took his favourite book and turned the
leaves, and found and read: "I could be content that we might procreate
like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to
perpetuate the world without this trivial and worldly way of union." And
then said the old man:

"'Tis not but what, taking things all round, life is none so bad.
Believe me, boy, the love of man and woman is a holy thing. And after
all, in his best hours, when the man thinks of the moments when he does
get the knife in his hand, he arranges things so that he will be
punished for his lapses. Don't you forget that, lad; don't you get a
wrong view of life. There are many happy homes in North Devon where the
man and woman are both taking their own parts in the life--happy
homes----" and behold, the old man was wandered in silence into a day
dream, so that he hardly heard the boy's cry:

"Oh, I know that. I think they are all happy but ours." Then in a
little while: "What book is that you read from?" asked John.

"Ssh!" said the old man, raising his great hand. "It is best you should
not know, for so there will be for you a great joy in after years, when
you come on it again unawares, and open it, and the sentences murmur to
you again like voices of old friends. Then you will remember these sad
hours of your youth as far off, perhaps even remember them as happy in
their own way. You will remember the sound of the bees in this garden,
the far hum of your youth. You will remember that sunlight floating
there on the floor, cut clean by the door-post; and the dusty motes
there: and you will see yourself sitting here disconsolate and smile to
yourself; read again these words, and you will be happy in a way no man
can prevent, with a happiness of which no man may rob you. I would not
now rob you of that future accidental joy."

Upcott frowned and thought the old man odd; but, owing so much to him,
he humoured him, sought not to persuade him from what he thought a
foible.

Strange things would his Socrates say too, that Upcott had some inner
warning it were better not to repeat to Ravenning, held silent as it
were by some modesty of soul. Such a thing was said one memorable night.

Upcott, come over on that night of full moon, when the very stars were
blinded in the blue summer heaven, had found the old man with radiant
eyes sitting before his house and been bidden gently to come some other
time.

"I would be alone," said the old man.

And as Upcott turned impressed and softly away he heard Uncle's voice
again, speaking as it were to the loneliness then settling again after
the faint ruffling by the youth; heard the words spoken to the
loneliness and to the glittering night: "No one knows all that the moon
has meant to me."

Sometimes the old man of the bees and of the moon would mention his shop
in Bristol.

It was one afternoon of rising storm when, under flying black clouds,
over dull hills lit wierdly by a light that glowed from the meeting of
land and cloud, sea and cloud, Upcott had gone, a-tilt against the gale,
to see his Socrates, his old man of the bees. Said he:

"Why did you leave your book-shop, Uncle?"

"Because the money went," was the reply; and Upcott had a suspicion of
another disaster of the bottle. It struck him that the evil, if yet
beloved, aspect of his old friend's face might be the souvenir of
Bristol bottles; but the old man went on: "My sister was taken with a
grievous illness and the physicians required money to heal her." He
paused. "She was never healed; but so long as I had the money I paid the
best of them to tend her. And then came her deliverance. Oh! there have
been nights when the bravery of her stifling her moans took me with such
a pride of the invincible soul of the woman that my heart could have
burst. There have been nights when she has had ease and I have thought
to rest, relaxed, and forget the hardship of things--her ill, and the
shop doing poorly; but I could not rest and I have fetched home for a
lonely debauch a bottle of brandy that I could ill spare the money to
buy, and seeing her sleeping her exhausted sleep I have drunk all at a
gulp and sat on the bed edge in my own room watching the walls spin
round and laughing low to myself to see the window flashing past; and
the chairs would wave their legs at me and I would wave to them; and the
moon would look in like a face at the window and wink on me and I'd wink
back on it and fall drunk in bed. Ah, there have been nights I have sat
up with her: she never knew of these diversions, and me sitting holding
her hand she would talk to me in the dark--nights I can never forget."

It is the way of youth, hearing another speak of himself, to reply also
with personal talk, instead of being pleased to be auditor. But then for
sure he cannot be counsellor, hardly even impersonal sympathiser.

"I know," said John. "I can remember mother coming up to me sometimes at
night, on nights that she had not seen me when I went up the ladder to
bed because of----"

"I understand, yes, yes," said Uncle on the pause, his mood wholly
sympathetic now, his subjective fit gone on the instant.

"And she would sit," said Upcott, "and talk to me in a whisper, till I
couldn't abide the whisper in the dark for all I liked her to come there
that way. I could have wept hearing her voice in the dark and would
crave her to light the candle. I think she wondered why."

The old man nodded.

"Aye, I understand, I know the darkness and the voices in the dark,"
said he suddenly and impulsively, and rose agitated and made some
needless arrangements in his small demesne and sat again perturbed.
Here, on this subject, it would appear, he could not get far from
himself. Then he came back to the boy.

"And yet the things she would be saying were not fearsome in
themselves?"

"Oh, no, not fearsome at all, for she does not hold by telling fearsome
tales. We had an old woman who used to come round and sometimes tell us
tales of pirates that came to Lundy in the night and killed the fathers
and mothers of all the children; and she would tell tales of the plague
being in Bideford and how the children that had been playing round the
quay, where the Spanish wool lay, took ill suddenly and all died; and
how the people were all afraid; and how the mayor ran away in a rare
fantod. But mother would have none of that. She never held by making
children afraid. 'There's plenty to shake one in the world, she says,
'without telling fearsome tales for the joy of seeing the child's flesh
creep.' But us were always afraid. There seemed always something hanging
over we--aye, still."

"Yes," said Uncle, remembering the day on which the child had cried out:
"Oh, Uncle, we're left--have you got a musket and a cutlass?" And the
old man thinking over the matter decided it was not from the mother the
child had learnt terror, but from the father. What he had learnt from
the mother bore a better name. And more that Upcott had to tell
confirmed his view.

"There's one thing I cannot abide yet," said the lad, "and that is when
anyone knocks on a door so," and he gave a quick couple of loud taps and
a following blow on the wall. "Father has always made a knock like that
when----" he paused.

"Yes, I know; I know, lad."

"Sometimes he comes home quiet, steals up without anyone being aware
that he is near; then he thinks to himself we should all be out waiting
for him, loose his coat, pull off his boots; and without even trying to
see if the door is bolted he knocks like that. Mother used to open
herself always. She would have no one else run the risk of his first
fury. I remember the night I opened for the first time, jumping there
before she could put aside her terror and look not quite afraid. I gave
en a look," cried the boy, lapsing in his English as he did in
agitation. "'What do you open for?' says he. And before I knew, with
mother there, and Sis too, I says: 'Easy now! There's no need to shout
for food here the way you wouldn't dare do in an ordinary--' 'What do
you mean, you brat, you whelp?' says he and he made at me. And--and, by
God, sir, I made to strike en. A man shouldn't strike his father. I
think when he saw me ready to do that he took a new thought. Sure enough
'twas a lot quieter that night, and when mother got flustered, and
flustered Sis too when 'em was getting more and more cooked for en, I
said: 'All right, mother, don't you fret. Let him wait. I'm here.' Oh,
us have a happy life up to Abbotsham." Upcott laughed a cheerless laugh.
"Mind me," he said, "you won't tell no one, I know--I was but eleven
years old then; he had hit me over the head, kicked me out o' the door,
cursed at my mother; I mind he cried to en from up over, coming down
along holloing so's half Devon could hear en: 'Put the pan to the fire,
woman; I've a leary belly. None o' your zamzoaky stuff for me; I'm
a-comin'. I took a billet of oak up to his room to study how the bed lay
and think how I'd be doing a service all round to hit him over the head,
and him lying there one night blind, babbling drunk.

"Well, sir, I was looking, you might say, how the land lay, and planning
how to brain him and that's the plain truth, and I know it was but a
boy's folly that would never have been carried out. And I thought then I
could maybe roll him off the bed so as he'd look as if he had fallen;
and I took the billet and gave a whack on the pillow. And there he is
suddenly up the trap, him leaping through the house, chasing me with
some idea he had. 'What in hell,' he says, 'be you a-doin' of?'
'Boardin' ship,' I says. 'What?' he says, coming close with his swollen
hands. 'Playin' at boardin' ship,' I says. 'By God!' he says, 'I'll make
'e walk the plank for boardin' ship on my bed,' he says and took me by
the back and hove me over the window--frame and all. I struggled, and
with me struggling I kicked him under the chin as he shoved me over;
that maddened him so that he came down over for me again to chase me
with the billet. I heard him cursing, coming down; and so, sprained
ankle and all, and the window frame round my middle, I crawled away and
lay in the hedge. Hunted me all night, he did. Oh! we've had a happy
home up to Abbotsham. Then I got older. But about that way he knocks ...
I always hasten to once now and throw the door wide open to him. 'Tis a
knock that gives your heart a leap. I've seen mother catch her breast
when it comes and seen her mouth twitch a-sudden with dread. The only
way to do with fear of that kind is to face it--set the door open wide
and give en a look that says: 'What be you a-trying to do?'" Then the
hobble-de-hoy bowed his head in his hands.

The old man rose.

"You've had a sad life," he said, "but it will all pass--for you. Also,
there are consolations, lad," he cried, fumbling in his shelves, and
reached down another book. One wonders how much of this was due to a
desire to relieve the lad in the only way of which he could immediately
think, how much was due to the fact that the world of books and of the
great tales of the past, historical and imaginative, was for the old man
a world more real perhaps than his present world, assuredly as real as
this present in which he dwelt.

"See," said he, "how much better fit you are now to relish this," and he
fell to reading in the tragedy of Macbeth, that masterpiece of terror,
so great that to this day there are superstitious persons who fear the
very name of the mighty work:

  "'Lady Macbeth:           What do you mean?

    Macbeth:        Still it cried, _Sleep no more!_ To all the house:
                    _Glamis hath murdered sleep: and therefore Cawdor
                    Shall sleep no more,--Macbeth shall sleep no more!_

    Lady Macbeth:   Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy thane
                    You do unbend your noble strength to think
                    So brain-sickly of things. Go get some water
                    And wash this filthy witness from your hand.
                    Why did you bring these daggers from the place?
                    They must lie there: go carry them, and smear
                    The sleepy grooms with blood.

    Macbeth:                I'll go no more;
                    I am afraid to think what I have done;
                    Look on't again I dare not.

    Lady Macbeth:           Infirm of purpose!
                    Give me the daggers.   The sleeping and the dead
                    Are but as pictures; 'tis the eye of childhood
                    That fears a painted devil.   If he do bleed,
                    I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal
                    For it must seem their guilt.'"


Uncle had read thus far when he raised his head and looked under his
rough brows on the intent face of the boy. The temptation was too great
for him; he smote, as the boy had smitten on the wall, in the three
knocks of terror, and on the very knocking went on:


                            "'Whence is that knocking?
                    How is't with me when every noise appals me?
                    What hands are here?   Ha! they pluck out mine eyes!
                    Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
                    Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
                    The multitudinous seas incarnadine
                    Making the green one red.'"


The old man of the bees stopped, to relish these lines for himself
again, and the house was not in silence, but surrounded with the moaning
of the rising storm.

John Upcott felt his eyes hot. The old man went on again:


    "'Lady Macbeth:  My hands are of your colour;
                     But I shame
                     To wear a heart so white----'"


And then again the old man smote sudden on the wall by which he stood,
his hand by his side, and declaimed in a strained voice: "'I hear a
knocking,'" and so he read on to the end of that part; and as he closed
the book indeed there was an ominous "rat-tat-tat!" at the door of the
cot.

Old man and young man looked on each other with something very like
terror. Then the young man leapt to his feet and unlatched the door. The
old man was by his side and both were flung together backward, so
fiercely was the door, unlatched, thrust against them.

But there was no one there. It was but the wind that had rattled so at
the door.

They went out of one accord into the blustering, belligerent afternoon.
The wind rushed into their lungs at its first onslaught and they bowed
their heads against it to regulate their breathing. Indoors their voices
had been unconsciously raised because of the slapping of the wind on the
walls, the rattle of the sudden rain on the window, cry of wind in the
narrow chimney. Now, without, to be heard one would have had to shout.

The sea made one ceaseless roar. For the background of all its sound
there was not now the sigh as of silk drawn through the hand, but roar
and bellow as of bellowing and roaring of a mighty herd. That for
groundwork; and above that, and through it, crash and cannonade, and
also, what was awesome to hear, a sound like volley on volley of
musketry of an immense army: that was when, in the "mouths," the waves
would swing back and rake the pebbles down; and these volleys, harsh,
grating, kept on at various points far and nigh.

The old man flung up his head and Upcott saw it splashed with the rain
and shining with a strange light.

"Oh God of the Sea! Oh God of the Sea!" cried the old man in a rapture;
and his hat, that he had clutched to his head on coming out, was now in
his hand, his forehead bare to the keen wind.

Then suddenly, in the white seas over which the spindrift made a haze,
under a blackening sky, they saw a ship tacking in the bay.

It was under a flying sail, and a close-reefed main, bearing away to
where one knew that Lundy lay hid in the smoking seas; then it would
tack and go bravely staggering and the two watchers were proud of the
inanimate thing. And then they would feel a pity for its endeavours when
suddenly it would fail, go back like a fluttered bird; and after all the
arduous tack there it was again (surely with a mortified heart!) back
again to well-nigh the same spot of the clamant, gesticulating sea.

Then, ere the darkness of night fell on the storm-lit dusk of day, they
saw, as it emerged again from the haze, that the bobbing craft had made
some headway out yonder in the wet battle, after so many endeavours;
beheld it dimly, fluttering far out, but nigher home, in the "Golden
Bay," name then how ironic!

But Upcott did not know, being no necromancer like one who was to meet
him on the miry turnpike way to-morrow, that with the coming of that
ship (daring so valiantly to round Hartland Point that day of gale
against the cliffs) was to come something new and strange into his
life.




CHAPTER IV

PROPHECIES--


On the morrow there was great to-do on the north coast. The people were
flocking shoreward like vultures to a carcase; for in the night a ship
had been driven on to the Abbotsbury rocks, and there was spoil to be
obtained. Early in the day a lad went posting south past the Upcott
farm, coming from the cliffs. He was breathing hard with haste and anger
and Mrs. Upcott saw him and asked the cause of his disarrangement.

He spluttered some words about a fight on the shore and how he had
secured a couple of hogsheads, of what he did not say; how two brothers
of a neighbouring family had wrested his trove from him by weight of
numbers. "We'll show en," he ended and ran on grunting to summon his
kin.

From any vantage point you could see, all morning, the people coming by
lane and across country, hurrying nearer to the roar of the sea and to
the sea's offering.

Upcott senior snatched his hat. "By God," said he, "if there be all them
cooming over she be worth pillaging."

"Tom!" said Mrs. Upcott, distressed--the father's name, which the
oldest son also bore--"Tom!" she said again and looked on her husband
with speaking eyes.

"Well 'ooman," he cried, for he understood her; and then: "What for do
you think God gave we a rough foreshore if it wasn't to have the
wreckings?" For he loved to wound her, soul and body. "Anyhow, if the
rest be pillagin' you don't find Upcott hangin' back."

She moved toward him and laid hands timidly and yet bravely on his
shoulders.

"Tom," she said. "Would a Shebbeare or a Rawleigh, or a Leigh, or a
Stucley do the like of this?"

"Those are gentry names," he growled; "I'm not gentry. You'm a kind of a
half-gentry 'ooman yourself; and what's the good of half-gentry? What's
the good of a thing that gives you big ideas and nothing more?"

That was the man! She had known it for long; but to hear his own voice
speak so, growl it so upon her, his _credo_, gave her a sense of
hopelessness. She thought he had not always been like that.

"Of course they'd go wrecking--if they wasn't gentry," he said moving
from her.

"I can tell you," she replied, "that on this very shore a Stucley has
gone down with one or two lads that he had sworn expressly, at the first
sign of a wreck, to protect the stranger within our gates. Yes, he has
stood over the goods washed ashore with a brave, trusty lad or two,
musket and cutlass in hand, for no prize, for no prize--for nothing--as
you say. And you know that, for you have seen it; and you have seen how
Shebbeare of Abbotsbury----"

"Talking about muskets and cutlasses puts me in mind," said Upcott. "It
is sometimes rough at a wrecking;" and so saying he took his fowling
piece from the rack and brought the butt down with a clash on the
ash-lime floor. He saw to the priming in silence, his bearing uncouth,
he feeling uncouth, like a shaggy, whipped dog; but looking at his wife
now and then as he made his preparation, his pale eyes blinking at her.

Then he threw the piece into the crook of his left arm and flung up his
right, half turned to go, as though to deliver a backward blow on his
wife. But she did not waver. Then he swung out and was gone.

Meanwhile on the shore the wreckage was coming with every wave.

The ship lay, piled up, side on to the rocks. There was a waterfall
running over her waist, for so quickly did surging wave follow on
surging wave that you might have thought she gushed a fountain from her
holds. You could count her pierces from the land: she was pierced for
twenty guns but, with the list she had and the way she was broken, you
could see she had but six carriage guns. As like as not she never had
more than these six; for a formidable exterior did not necessarily imply
a formidable armament. Or perhaps some of her guns had gone by the
board in the sea-battle of the night--the ship's battle with the sea.

Of her cargo one could tell now, for it was piled upon the shingle here
and there, beyond the clutching, grasping waves, by the clutching,
grasping hands of the wreckers, such of it as had come ashore.

There were as many as five hundred persons under cliff already and
others a-top. These were principally the women-folk, for the women of
Devon are the purse-holders. A man may toil but woman will see that
there be no foolish spending and she will see to the storage and the
increase. And new arrivals came constantly. The little bay was black
with them; they were in the very waves, borne from their feet fighting
for the spoils. "Up over cliff" the colleagues of those below were
dragging up with the ship's own ropes--cut from her beached masts and
rigging--their trove, and guarding it, each over his kindred's spoil to
keep and hold, if he had the power. The excitement grew more intense.

"Get back from our rope!" screamed two men, father and son, as they
strove to pull up a too heavy load and helpers came towards them; for
they knew that if a man helped he would demand his share. But those who
had run forward to assist stood back straightway--again because they saw
the task was too great for the two. And sure enough they had the
amusement of beholding father and son jerked from their legs and going
over cliff to scatter their brains with the scattered spoil.

So things went on. And with the shore in such a state one is hardly
surprised to know that though a barrel was worth the grappling a mariner
swept cliffwards could look after himself.

One of these chance comers lightened the tedium of toil: a score of
times he grasped a rock near shore; a score of times the sea dragged him
back. At last he held; and then, when the wave swung back unsuccessful,
he leapt for the further shingle and began to move his legs as one
trying to run. But he ran like a squirrel on a revolving wheel. He was
too exhausted to run; he but marked time; and the next wave flung him
down, drew him back in the undertow, throttled him and made an end of
his playing the part of the clown who gets hurt for the delectation of
the onlookers.

The ship was a trader, laden with coffee, chocolate, staves, sugar and
rum, but her main lading was tobacco. The rum was already broached, to
warm the wreckers.

The master of the vessel had been washed from the wreck, a lean,
gesticulating Frenchman, with a face then like a death's head, and his
collar bones showing like the crossed bones on tombs. He was worn with
the night and the morning, and God knows how he dragged himself from the
beach, clutching at the great pebbles, stumbled upward, came to his
feet. No mortal aided him.

"Get out o' my way," cried one, thrusting aside the master, and
plunging, clattering, after a shore-coming cask. The Frenchman tottered.
He understood, to the full, his position.

His chin was on his chest with exhaustion, but he rose brokenly to his
knees, to his feet. He drew plaintively, brokenly erect. His legs were
tottering; but he looked with his brown-red eyes on the wreckers and
waved his arm to them, crooked it out like a tentacle, snapped his
ringers and showed gripping jaws and the sneer of his people.

"Dogs! English dogs!" he cried, and Thomas Upcott smote him over the
head so that he fell dead on the pebbles.

Meanwhile up at the farm was another scene.

Mrs. Upcott sat staring before her with dull eyes. John went to her.

"Mother," he said; "I know how you feel."

"We had gentry blood in our veins--my people," she said.

"Then it is in mine," said he.

"Iss, boy," she said. Was it the gentry blood in her veins that caused
her in that moment of all moments to "talk Devonsheer?" For the gentry
blood loves its land with a great, simple love.

"I will go down to the cliffs and see what I can do," said John
resolutely.

Her heart lightened at that. Lightened! In a flash she saw that her son
was not going to disappoint her prayers. For the son who plunged his
teeth in an adversary's neck once--though she had never heard that
tale--was a son she had seen and taken note of--and laid before the Lord
in prayers when she woke at dawn, and in the white but not yet crimsoned
sky saw the white of the buttresses of the Throne. Then came an idea.

"I shall go down," she said, for she made a quick mental picture of the
lad, her stripling, at the beach, and she feared he could do but little.
But a woman? A woman? Was not here the high place of woman? Was not it
in such passes that woman took her place, not by might, not by right
even, but by the divinity in her and touched the God in men?

"No, no, mother!" cried Sis, coming forward. "No, no; you cannot,
mother."

And indeed the mother could not, for she but took a step and fell in a
swoon into the arms of her children.

They brought restoratives and as she came round, her eyes fluttering
open saw John standing over her anxiously. "I am all right," she said.
"Go, lad--to help the stranger within our gates and to uphold the honour
of your mother's name, and of Devon."

So John went out and hastened to his counsellor's cot.

First he would go to Uncle's for advice. In the last resort--his heart
leapt and then beat evenly and the God in him stirred--in the last
resort he would go down alone and say the things he knew his mother
would have him say--and be killed; and there was a kind of balm, despite
his eager years, in the thought that so would he have an end not
inglorious. O, youth!

Shaggy fellows were running and panting on the slopes and all with that
heavy, intent look of men very keenly bent upon their own affairs--and
devil take you!

An old crone tottering downward in the rough lane (drawn thither in what
design?) as he passed her, turned her head to see who came. She
curtseyed when she saw his face.

"Pretty youth," said she, "there will be fortunes to be told to-day."

He was about to hurry on when her voice arrested him:

"Tell your fortune, pretty youth?"

"I am in haste," he said.

"It will but take a moment or two," she said.

Well, he was going out into he knew not what of to-day's occurrences,
and was on the threshold of unknown life.

He stopped to know his fate, or at least to hear what the woman had to
say and judge if there were any value in her words.

She took his hand in her old gnarled and brown one.

"There be foreign blood in your veins," she said. "You am come of a
mixed race. You have but newly left a mother ill. Be I right?"

"Yes," he said, half interested.

"She 'm some better now. Your sister tends her."

Upcott looked keenly on the old dame's face. She smiled wanly. "Be I
right?" she said.

"Yes."

"You have an elder brother. Be I right?"

"Yes."

"He has gone over the seas."

"No, he hasn't," said Upcott, relieved to find her in error for some
reason; "he is over to Hartland."

"Oh," she said, "is that where he was? Well, he be gone now--with a
silver crucifix on his hairy breast."

"Oh, not he. We are not Papists."

The dame paid no heed.

"You will never speak to him again but you will see him and not know
him."

"Oh, that will do," said he and made to withdraw his hand from this
folly. But the old dame arrested him again with:

"He has gone away with a young man a little older than you, a man with
high cheek bones and little peeping eyes and rough hair, a big made,
cheery, masterless kind of a lad."

The picture would fit Ravenning, and Upcott delayed, held again. He
bethought him that he had not seen Ravenning for some days.

"You have a soft place in your heart for a fair girl; you have
quarrelled--no, you have not quarrelled; but for some cause you do not
understand--you do not see much of each other now, and when you do you
feel a something between. You will come together again--iss, come
together again--years after. You will go over the sea first--come
together--iss--come together again--why, bhoy, you have a curious line,
you have. You will love two other women. One you will never say but
three words to and the other you will know. You am a strange lad. You do
have a strange hand. Eh! But you have a far ways to travel!" She paused,
gazing on the hand, not at all dreaming, but with a kind of
concentration of gaze that seemed not for the hand but for something
beyond. "God save us!" she ejaculated suddenly.

"What is it, good woman?" he cried, for she impressed him.

"You will be the death of one near to you," she said.

"Who?" he cried almost roughly.

"One near to you," she said with a tone as of impregnable indifference.
He felt that he need not try to have an answer to his question. She
dropped his hand and her face was transformed. She was but, again, as
when he had made up on her, an old whining beldam with lice in her
matted hair.

"Pretty sir, give me something," she said.

He gave her all he had and ran on to Uncle's, through a world that did
not matter much either way, and wished he had not seen the old crone.

By the door of Uncle's cot were leant two fowling-pieces and for a
moment a dread came to Upcott that the wreckers running to their
Domdaniel along the cliffs, had, in their demoniac mood, set on the old
man. And then he heard a voice in the cot, high and resonant and
masterful in a kind of wild glee. Then the voice stopped; and anon
Upcott, as he came to the door, heard it begin again, the same voice,
but now recognisable for Uncle's own, declaiming:

    "Give me my scallop shell of quiet
    My staff of Faith to walk upon."

And looking into the place--there was the old man buckling on "the
Turk's sword" that had hung for ornament on his wall, a sword found on
the Portledge shore.

Then the old man heard him and turned about, head thrown back, his mane
flung from his brows as waves from a galleon prow, his whole sturdy and
ageing figure squared and resolute.

"Ah," said he and having buckled his sword he lifted his musket, intent
on his employ, and set about loading from his powder horn.

"What's this?" said Upcott.

"Rawleigh," answered the old man ramming home the charge, "would have
gone down and stopped that," he indicated with a jerk of his head the
trouble westwards. "Rawleigh was a poet. I have been talking over to
myself some of his verses, the wonderful things he wrote. Poetry, sir,
is not inimical to action but is the spring of every noble action, as it
is of every high renunciation. Fools live in a world of confused
thoughts. They do not understand the secrets of life."

"You were going----?" began Upcott.

"I am going, sorr," said the old man, broadening his speech in the way
he had that the Irish had taught him. And he shouldered his musket and
at the door caught up in the other hand the two fowling-pieces.

"Alone?" said Upcott.

"As you please," said Uncle. "I had thought to go down and talk to them
sanely and wisely; but what avail sanity and wisdom to men who have left
their souls in the devil's closet till they come home a-Sunday. I am
glad you are not with them," he added.

"I?" cried John.

The old man made an inclination of his head as of deference.

"I am old enough," said he, "to have lost all faiths. I live among their
ruins."

Then Upcott in his quick, jerky way told his tale. The old man blinked
his eyes of their moisture.

"I am glad," he said. "Oh, this has all happened before. It happens
every winter. Last winter there were fifteen such wrecks, mostly Bristol
ships and Barnstaple and Bideford, one Dutchman and one French, of the
French trading people. It made no difference here. What are blood and
country? The sea is more salt than blood." The old man flung up his
head. "Last time I swore after it was over that I would go down and see
if I could not help in the next disaster. I spoke to some afterwards,
but what was that? The coward's way. Shebbeare came over from Northam
once and stopped them and they railed on him--told him time was the
gentry took the gentry's share. But he had his way. The sailors were
rescued and he took them up and fed them and tended them. But still the
spectacle of the grasping, to say no more, was bad--ah, bad sir, bad.
The grasping spirit is to me a more repulsive sin than most of those we
call the major sins. After all, you find that what men have called sins
are the things that may hit back on them--things with a penalty. It
won't do, sir. It won't do. Believe me--the clutching spirit, the grasp
all we can and look for more is a hideous, repulsive sin. Now I am going
down. I shall try talk, and if that fails, well, I shall use force--use
force." He must have here felt the ridiculous side of it. "And I shall
die at least and not live on ashamed. I swore last storm to do this with
the first wreck that came ashore, English, or Scots trader, or French,
or Dutch--aye, were it a rover of Salee. Come! I see you are armed with
your pistols. Here is a fowling-piece. It is loaded with about twenty
slugs."

They marched briskly along and athwart the slopes, the old man in a
divine madness, the youth in a mortal coldness; and as they came in
sight of the wreck threshing itself to death on Abbotsbury Reef and saw
the moving concourse on the pebbles and the cliffs the old man whipped
round.

"We shall have to use skilful tactics," said he. "We shall give them but
one offer of peace else our case is lost. Once we show our hand we are
lost if they get round us. We shall get upon this nigh point, which is,
as you might say, a strategic position, one difficult on which to
attempt the _escalada_. From thence we shall hail them; and if they meet
our suggestions with derision we shall let them see our armament and
inform them that if they do not make the saving of the seamen, instead
of the salving of the wreckage, their main endeavour, we shall fire on
the first man to touch so much as a hogshead."

A chance of peace! Two against five hundred! And give them a chance of
peace! Still--that was Grenville's way. And who knows what may not be
done with a rough crew when the right man comes on deck?




CHAPTER V

--AND A FULFILMENT


The din of the sea drowned their voices. From the top of the little
pyramid of granite that juts up, sentinel (or sphinx-like observer) over
the east end of the cove, Uncle strove to hail the wreckers. Upcott was
anxious to know, but did not know, could not read on the old man's face,
whether or no Uncle was afraid. There was a wild look on that
Socrates-mask; the eyes were bright as eyes of one in a fever and shone
with a red light in the very whites of them. But afraid? John could not
tell. Afraid or unafraid they were to go through with the business.

Leaning against the wall of that little natural fort Uncle cried and
halloed, but the wind snatched his words away with the sound of the wash
and the roar and the explosion of the seas, and his cries were quenched
in the foam-wet air. At last he was perceived, if not heard, by one,
then by another. His wind-blown, gesticulating figure, once descried,
became a source of curiosity. Up from the shingle came climbing one and
then, on his heels, others. They were anxious to know the cause of the
old dotterel's excitement and why he stood there like a lively
scarecrow with fluttering arms. Even those who had recollection of his
condemnation of these wreckings had no guess at the business that
brought Uncle thither. They had no idea of the madness of the old man
and the high folly of the youth by his side. Perhaps the old man had
sighted other spoil elsewhere, other sea offerings, and had come to
inform them: he was mad enough for that! He was the kind of man to do
others a good turn! Half expectant of some such folly they clambered.
The first man came within cry, through the sea's din.

"What's ado?" came up his voice, thin and quick and sharp, a kind of a
pin-prick in the gale.

"I say," cried Uncle, "that if you do not lend a hand to assist these
seamen we shall--open fire on you!"

"Eh?"

Uncle repeated. The man had not heard amiss, though there were grounds
for him fancying he had done so. He stared. Then he laughed, bellowed,
loosened hold of the wild, agitated bush to which he clung, and turned,
slithering back to those who followed. And presently, dotted on the
cliff side, were the discs of a score of gibbering faces turned up to
the rock summit. The faces were a-grin, red tongues showing as the lusty
throats bayed. Uncle was furious. He had a dislike of mocking laughter
falling on his supremest moment, of his glory being greeted with
derision. He raised his fowling-piece and pointed to the trigger,
pointed to the breaking wreck where still could be seen three men
clinging--assuredly between the devil and the deep sea. Then these two
madmen, the young and the old, saw the seaman on the rock, torn away,
clutching again, torn away. On the high verge of the pebbles was
laughter, but only John Upcott saw its cause. The old man, in his pitch
of excitement and fury, thought all the laughter was for him. The sound
of it was inaudible; but the faces showed, the heads thrown back; in
some places the bodies were a-sway with convulsive merriment.

"I shall go down," cried Uncle in John's wet face.

Then he saw where John's gaze was directed tensely, looked thence
likewise and his ugly and lovable mouth puckered and bulged. He looked
quick again to the throng on the beach. Yes; he was forgotten. The
laughter was for the baffled seaman. So a new rage, a rage not of
emotion but of mind, filled him.

All around that little amphitheatre there was a pause in the toil to
laugh at a man's struggle with powers beyond him!

"I shall go down!" roared Uncle with new force, and made to clamber over
his bastion.

"It would be the death of you," began John.

"I care not!" cried Uncle.

"And do no good," shouted Upcott.

Uncle frowned into the wind. "There is nothing left us but to fire a
shot and let them see we mean what we say. Do you signal to them, point
to the men there, signal to them to help. Let us both fire and then
signal to them. That fellow who came up will understand. He will
explain. If they laugh again--Ah, God! that other man is off. He is
lost!"

For just then there was visible the lean man battling with the waves,
borne on a crest, flung from the rock to which he had clung close as a
limpet and so far unperceived from the cliff. Then he leapt shoreward,
clutched a rock. The wave swung back and he leapt, in a wild endeavour,
for the pebbles and ran tottering.

"Ah, my God!" cried Uncle, and his hand fumbled on his musket; for as he
leant over his bastion, peering on the scene, he saw the newcomer thrust
aside, saw him fall. In his eagerness, watching the man to see him rise,
Uncle tarried. But John Upcott, who had been passing through all stages
of distress, from cold fear to twitching resolution, from bravery with
relapses to fear and fresh recoveries, and anon taken with a kind of
hilarity as of the damned, so that he laughed to himself as they may, or
as all might at a hideous dream, on awakening--John Upcott saw nothing
but the pathetic and majestic now. He saw the broken man on the shingle
drawn up in his supreme contempt, centre of the world. The crowd on the
beach was a haze, the cliffs were but a scenic background. To his dying
day he could picture that scene so; and always the sinking splendour of
the sailor was centre of the scene.

He threw up his gun as steady as the rock against which he leant, laid
his cheek to the damp stock, cuddled the butt to his shoulder. At that
very moment he felt a glorious sense of the fitness of what he was
doing, the manner in which it was being done. Was it not proper that the
unwieldy wretch who felled the seaman should be shot in the back? It was
there that John's shot entered. The smoke of the charge flew in a gust
back in his face; but he saw only that his aim had been true. The
hulking coward was down, sprawled on the beach in the attitude of death.
John looked on the picture he had changed as one looks on the
kaleidoscope that he turns. And it was good.

For a moment the picture had been magnificent, a brief moment; then it
had been hideous; then it could not be magnificent again, the hideous
having entered; but it was fitting. It was not hideous. Justice had been
done. John Upcott, musket in hand on the high rock, had a thrill as of
the angel at Eden's gate. The picture had been spoiled, but the sword
was drawn. It was all that could be done, things being as they are.

Then the faces were again turned upward toward the two madmen, and now
John Upcott surveyed the scene with impeccable clarity of vision. The
flying spindrift was in his eyes but his brows were puckered in
concentration. There was no thought of retreat in his mind. The first
excitement also was gone, the excitement that had made his neck to
twitch and the reins of his legs to quiver. He looked down on the faces
with a great vindictive calm. Mind had taken control of will so that he
even pictured himself and Uncle in the scene--it was beyond himself. The
whole thing was a picture to him and the mind of John Upcott was busy
planning and explaining to John Upcott's body how to conduct itself in
this perilous pass.

He saw a fowling-piece aimed on him and stretched back, told himself to
stretch a hand to Uncle for the musket and did so, taking it for granted
somehow that Uncle was but as his lieutenant, or aged retainer! But
Uncle had seen the danger and the crack of his piece sounded and was
briskly killed on the wind and the man on the pebbles fell.

"They are coming," said John. "You load and I shall----"

"No! you load, lad, and I----"

Then John Upcott's mind ceased to observe. After all, one cannot perhaps
expect a dignified calm in a youth at such a time. We never learn all
our lessons, only a part.

"Do as I tell you!" he cried. "Is this a time for bickering? Load you
and I'll fire. We cannot both fire, damn you!"

Uncle flashed up a look on the lad and did as he was told, his
inscrutable face fallen again over his task.

It was a supreme moment for John. He gathered his whole consciousness
again, as it were, into his eyes.

He showed but his shoulders above the rock's breast; and the way it
mounted, with these two in the cup of it, he had its other and higher
rim behind him, instead of sky. Besides, pistols were the main armament
on the beach and the cliff.

Here was a good cause! Be slain? He be slain? He knew he should not be
slain!

He fired again and then stretched back, as his man fell, for the loaded
gun that was thrust in his hand. And then he fired again. He was doing
his work with the precision, with the "dead-sure" hand of a consummate
artist. The wreckers nevertheless came crowding upward. They gained the
little platform below and just as they won so far a pistol ball grazed
John's cheek. And then, beside him, he felt Uncle against the bastion
and at his side was a flash--and another--and a third, the three in
quick succession: and three men staggered from the platform and lurched
to the beach and the surf, and Uncle had ducked back again and then a
pistol butt was in John's hand.

There was a pause then on the cliff.

Then again beside him leant Uncle. But no--it could not be; for into
John's hands was thrust, from behind, the other pistol. He turned his
head. And what was this? Who was this beside him? Beside him leant a man
with the most set and callous face he had ever seen. It called for no
more than a glance and was impressed on his mind like a brand. It
flashed on him that the Devil had come to their aid--to claim his
own--to pick them off, leering down on them with that awful countenance.
And the Devil himself was ramming fresh charges into his long-nosed
pistol and leaving Uncle to tend Upcott solely. The Devil fired again
and then suddenly threw out his arm stiffly so that the back of it, at
the biceps, took John in the face; and in the arm's sweep John was sent
sprawling on the ground a-top of the busy Uncle, whose face was
strained, though he slacked not in his toil. And then roaring fiercely,
"All hands to repel boarders! Out cutlasses!" the Devil sprang erect
from his leaning position against the rock face, drew his cutlass with a
sweep and swung it so that Uncle and John, rising stiffly and amazed,
ducked again, shrank back.

The newcomer was more mad than they were, for there was no room there
for such play.

They shrank back, half an eye on him, amazed, and loaded all their arms
against what might come, for when the Devil leant out and swung his
blade down in air and came back to the recover there was a hail of blood
flung from his blade into the flying scud.

Gingerly they rose to the rock face.

"Ugh!" said Uncle and sank down again and clapped his hand to his
throat. At that John went mad.

"You have killed him!" he cried, "Killed him and I wouldn't have him
killed!"

The Devil looked round on him at the cry, looked with a kind of a glee
on his face, a mocking grin, a look as of jeering comprehension, as of
one who knows men and what may move them.

John had snatched the "Turk's sword" which Uncle had leant on the rock,
and evading their helper's cutlass, seeing a boarder's head over the
bastion, he leapt bodily out over the rock face and with the force of
his leap, sword in hand, he felt the point on the man's breast, and
threw his weight home so that the broad end was buried and half the
blade, and only his fear of the next comer's cutlass gave him strength
to lunge back the cruel weapon.

It was all just like his boyhood's game of "Hold the Castle."

Then the besiegers shrank back. But it was not solely from fear of these
two that they so shrank--paused.

"Shebbeare!" they cried. "Shebbeare! He's leading 'em! Us had better go
down."

They fell on their knees. They crawled backwards. They scuttled on the
loose stones. They went down over cliff like frightened crabs.

And then the Devil, who had but been playing his cut and thrust within
the cup and had not, for all his madness, been lured over the verge,
folded his arms on the rock, spat a torn quid of Virginia leaf from his
jaws and mocked them in their disordered and precipitous flight; blood,
his own and others, flecking his jaws like patches on a lady's face.

But Upcott turned about, and there on the rock stood, sure enough,
Richard Shebbeare of Shebbeare Towne, in their own parish of Abbotsham.
The position he had taken in the country meant much, but I wonder how
much the fact that he was a legal man may have meant, for legal men know
how to get one to the gallows if they are so minded! It was true that he
was even then negotiating through his Bristol agents for the sale of
Shebbeare Towne; but no one knew of that, and he was still a good deal
of a king on that windy, sea-beat frontage of wild Devon.

The old gentry, it was said, had taken their share of wrecks. The later
gentry had looked the other way; then they had looked on with doubt. Now
they had come to denounce such things. Not so long after, as with
wrecking, so with smuggling, would they first share, and then look the
other way. And again a little while, and lights would be set up on the
coast to guide ships on their way; to say with their flash and sweep
through the night, "Beware, pass on!" Or if, battling with the sea and
the race of Harty they lost the day, along the cliffs there would be
watchers, day and night, on the look out for such disaster, ready to
succour the folk whom the sea scorned. The very descendants of these
wreckers, two hundred years later, would risk their own lives in
endeavour to save the shipwrecked, whatever flag fluttered and was torn
to shreds at the tottering main.

The Devil stopped his jeering and looked around on Shebbeare. He did not
straighten up, remained slouched against the rock; but he touched his
hat jauntily in seaman fashion and, "Morning, cap'n," said he. "A brisk
brush!"

But the fight was over and so Upcott sank to the aid of Uncle. Shebbeare
knelt by his side and opened the old man's waistcoat. His hand was on
the old man's heart. Upcott's madness ebbed from him as the sea ebbs
from Torridge sands. He stared on Shebbeare; and then Shebbeare looked
up and met his eyes, gazed directly in his a moment, nodded solemnly and
raised his hat.

"A brave old man," said he.

So the old man had died as he would have wished to die, rather than in
a bed between sheets striving to quiet his heart with brave lines, like
passing bells, writ by the men whose gallant lives he loved.

    "Oh, cruel time that takes in trust,
      Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
    And pays us but with earth and dust;
      Who in the dark and silent grave
    When we have wandered all our ways,
      Shuts up the story of our days."

So it reads in the Hart manuscript, but in Raleigh's Bible, to be sure,
the first words are not, "Oh, cruel time," but "Even such is time," as
with resignation or acceptance, and there are the two lines more:

    "But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
    My God shall raise me up, I trust."

And Upcott leant back in the hollow and you could not say he wept in the
active sense, as of giving oneself over to grief, but the tears welled
and ran from his eyes.

"And my last word to him was an oath," he said huskily and brokenly.
"And God knows I loved en."

"Sure it was spoke in the heat of the fight then, shipmate," said the
callous and rugged seaman with the diabolic face, though his voice was
full of compassion. "And a curse in the heat of the fight to a shipmate
is like a word o' love. It brings you closer to en." He looked from the
stripling to the dead man. "And I take it he understood," said he, "from
the looks of en."

But Upcott sat staring, and when he had again the powers to face reality
he found himself alone, Uncle's head upon his knee.

He rose, amazed at the stillness; for there is a stillness, a solitude,
in the heart of a roaring and beating sea and volleying wind.

Beyond their natural fort the wild seaman was casting down into the sea
the bodies of their slain assailants, spurning them with his foot. On
the beach Richard Shebbeare had assisted one seaman to land and was now
making signs to the other two on the wreck to leap into the waves and
attempt a landing. Here and there, on the cliffs, the routed wreckers
stood watching.

Shebbeare suddenly swung around and hailed them and they came scrambling
in response to his imperious sign, circled about him, harkened to his
words, and then Upcott looking on dully saw them join hands in two close
ranks and march, two abreast, into the surf to be ready to aid the
coming seamen.

Where the waves broke and then leapt, sprang, shouting, fifty feet, it
was not easy to help. But in just that place it had been no easier to
clutch wreckage! There was yet a difference. The right man had come on
deck.

Upcott started then inertly out of his own broken world. There was no
after glory from this fight. He was broken and desolate. And then a
voice said: "Which of you here was it that fired the first shot?"

He looked round; and there stood friend Ravenning. John had forgotten,
he did not then recollect the witch's prophecy, how she had described
Ravenning accurately and declared that he was gone over the seas.

"I did, Will," said he, crestfallen, as one acknowledging a sin; and
then a new thought gripped him, triumphing over the emotion, a thought
of the hideous scene they had ended. "And I'd do the same again," said
he, doggedly, though with no pride. And then: "But--oh, if they had not
killed Uncle."

"You think more of him than o' your father?" asked Ravenning, his small
eyes puckering as he tried afresh to fathom his incomprehensible friend.
"Well, I suppose it's no wonder, maybe," he said sagaciously. "But by
God! John, I don't know you. Times I ha' thought I did, times I ha'
thought I'd never know you. I don't know you."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you know, then?"

"Know what?"

"You don't mean you don't know--you didn't see----"

"What, then?"

"Why, God, John; that man you shot i' the back was----"

"Eh?"

"Your father."

John Upcott leant back on the rock, slid down, sat collapsed, staring
again. And the sound that came from his lips, the long-drawn hideous
cry, froze Ravenning's heart, chilled him as when one touches ice.

In one particular the witch had not erred. John had indeed been the
death of one near to him.

Then he began to taste the first faint beginning of what this meant. He
conjured up the picture of that form, that back, that he had seen with
dilated eyes in the first flurry of fight--and he knew Ravenning made no
mistake. That thing had been his father and he had slain it. He sat
staring. And from his mouth that trembled came that cry, rising and
falling: "Ah--ah--ah--ah--ah!" and over him, sheevoing and crying, were
the discordant gulls, and the whole wet, windy, disconsolate wold was
full of the eternal laughter of the sea.




CHAPTER VI

TELLING THE BEES


In the Abbotsham farm mother and daughter waited. They looked one to
another, mother and daughter, and then they knelt in prayer, and when
they rose from prayer they had somehow gained the power to face again
the gray wind-blown day, to hold unwavering hands for its unsought
offerings, to accept it in the necessary matter-of-fact manner.

They spoke a little of domestic matters, the plucking of the chicken,
the saffron cake, the apple-batter--the ordinary things of the ordinary
days--to drown the sound of the tickings of the clock that tip-toed
through the house, and to fend off other speech, talking down the
unheard voices of the silence with the sound of their own voices.

Suddenly they looked each to each and Mrs. Upcott's hand leapt to her
heart and stayed there. But neither of them stepped to the door, though
both had winced at the same moment; for they knew that the knock, the
double knock and the faint, following blow, was of no mortal hand.

There were then no popular weeklies to which they could afterwards have
written of the knocking, winning half-a-crown for that tale. Even had
there been they would not have written. They had, you will remember, a
touch of "gentrice." They never spoke of that occurrence; no, not even
to each other. They but came closer together in spirit by reason of the
knowledge that they both had heard it.

There were many bonds around them, and here was one more, a ghostly one;
the others were of mutual doubts, fears, hopes, and ethereal joys.
Laughter often rang in the Upcott yard, for all the mark of the beast on
the place and the atmosphere he made like the odour of fabled dragons.

Then Mrs. Upcott rose and went away to get ready her husband's bed
against his coming. There was a great brass warming-pan hung by the
ingle and she made as though to prepare it also, then paused over it and
her grey-blue eyes looked out blankly before her. She turned and sat
down huddled in her chair. At that Sis went to her, laid a hand on her
shoulder in passing, raked the fire, and filled the pan, a look as of
wise old age on the face of her youth as she did so.

Then they heard feet going past in the lane and Mrs. Upcott, with a
return of vigour, looked out and saw a young man posting by, going up
toward the turnpike road. She saw his face turned toward the farm as he
passed the gate, clearly there, then glimpsed again here and yonder
where the hedgerow was low. It was Ravenning who went by, and his whole
bearing was vocal of commiseration; for that riotous young man, who had
moralised over John Upcott's attitude toward a father murdered and an
old friend slain, had been known to tell John Upcott that Mrs. Upcott
was a better mother than his own. And Ravenning, for all his young
philanderings, could pity where he unselfishly loved.

Mrs. Upcott had drawn the curtain to look out, alert for what was to
come; and as she turned her head again inwards, back in the subdued
kitchen with its pale reflections of flickering firelight in the covers
and dishes in the racks, she saw the oval of her daughter's twilit face;
the girl had been as alert as she, gazing anxiously over the mother's
shoulder through the low casement. And Mrs. Upcott caught the maiden's
expression ere that expression vanished. Then their eyes just met and
Sis's were focussed back; the dread went from them, they almost smiled.

But the ticking of the clock was then again in their ears, tripping
flurried and furtive through the place. The mother sobbed, a great sob
from the depths of her life that had been spent most part in suspense.
And Sis came to her and put her arms about her and drew her down to the
stool by the fire. And so youth comforted a prime already old ere age
should have marked; and the mother resigned herself as a child a space,
resting her head on the young shoulders of the woman she had borne.

So when they heard the sound of feet in the yard they were able to rise
calmly and open the door, just in the most matter-of-fact way--as
though they had never felt. But as they rose each sighed, or perhaps it
was more an intake of breath with little breaks--they returning to the
battle.

Mrs. Upcott opened the door ere John could gain the threshold, so that
he might the easier say what had to be said. His face was ghastly. He
had paused uncertain, at a standstill in the yard, gazing at the mute
windows and the blank wall. Then his mother read his face and said:

"Where is he?"

And as they looked in each other's faces they did not find each other,
did not desire so to do. There are times that one would not hear more
than just what suffices for the moment's action.

"I came to tell you," he said in a dull voice. "They are bringing him
up."

"The bed is ready," she said and then she looked the next question, only
the one, and had her answer in his mien: Thomas Upcott was dead. She
bowed her head and so lost what she really did not wish to discover yet.
For on her son's face were now his questions: How much did she know? Who
had told her? She was prepared; therefore she had received some
notification. But how much did she know?

The mother turned away to her husband's room and Sis came toward John.

"How did it happen?" she asked. He looked at her sidewise and shrank
from her.

"There was fighting," he said. "There was fighting for the wreckage.
Shebbeare came down to protect the shipwrecked. There was fighting."

She was gazing on him horribly direct; her hot eyes were on him so that
he sickened with the knowledge in his breast.

"Uncle----" he began partly because the breaking thought of Uncle was
also with him, partly by way of a distracting remark.

"What?"

"Uncle is--Uncle was----"

Mrs. Upcott tottered into the kitchen again and looked on them.

"What is it?" she said.

"Uncle," said Sis, even as John tried to prevent her with a sign.

Mrs. Upcott looked to her son.

"No!" she gasped.

John nodded.

"Where is he?" she said coldly.

"They have carried him to his cot," said John, and heard his own voice
like a stranger's.

Mrs. Upcott gave her son one quick look, for a moment penetrating, then
blank, frightened.

"He has no one in the world," said she; "and he was good to you, John,"
she added. Then she turned aside and looked out into the storm.

"Oh God, give me strength in the day of tribulation," she said.

Then she turned to her children again and quite evenly said: "Do you go
down, John, and inform Mr. Ogilby. You had better take the tail-cart.
'Tis likely he will have the wish to come at once. He was Uncle's
nearest friend."

John went forth with a sense of relief, as one reprieved.

Mrs. Upcott had done the best for the old man of the bees, for this
Ogilby (for whom John now went), the cheerful ex-chaplain to King
Charles the Second, settled (or unsettled) in Bideford, was perhaps the
only man in the countryside who had a measure of Uncle's worth. Mrs.
Upcott did not understand Uncle's preoccupations; but she did know that
when Ogilby and he foregathered they were the better for the meeting.
That was enough for her. Ogilby's attitude, indeed, toward Uncle, was
sometimes rather of sitting at his feet than of sitting cheek by jowl.
The wisdom of his Socrates at times woke more than kinship, woke
respect; and in such moments Ogilby would have faint fears that at other
times the old man "talked down" to him to put him at his ease. Then he
would decide no, that it was only that the old man had exalted moments;
and then Ogilby would re-charge his pipe and puff with a return of
untroubled and flattered equality.

Once, long ago, when Uncle had been resident in Bideford, ere wandering
along the northern cliffs he had found his promised land and come
thither to live in the sunlight and the wind, Ogilby had met him on
Allhalland Street, stopped him with his roguish, friendly leer, and
questioned him in his waggish way on his neglect of church attendance.

"Faith," said Uncle, "I can read the prayers at home, and as to sermons,
I have much better ones to read than you ever preach," returning him
his canonical twinkle and his gruff friendliness.

So Ogilby had gone home with him that day, suspecting a man to his heart
and, seeing his shelves, "You are in the right," said he, "and I wish
all my parishioners were of the same opinion, for then I should have
little or nothing to do."

That was the beginning of their friendship, and after Uncle moved
westward Ogilby came frequently over Northam hill and along the windy
ledges to the cot, cramming down his hat, breathing deep of the sea
gusts. And there, above the clover lands they talked the sun out of the
western sky many a day, or sat in smoke-wreathed silence from when the
early moon like a white shell hung above the waning afternoon, alert for
the day's end, till it glowed like a broken shield of gold in the rich
blue of evening. And in the velvet nights Ogilby would go home through
the scented lanes with a great calm in a corner of his jolly heart.

Within two hours the tail cart passed again into the Upcott yard. The
drive had been in silence; for once John Upcott's sufficient, but by no
means voluble, tale had been told, Ogilby had fallen hushed on his own
thoughts. He was a man with the polish of the courts and with a vast
deal of the milk of human kindness. From the Book he drew principally
what we are apt to call "broad-mindedness." His religion was a kind of
garb, sometimes heavy, burdensome as a winter's cloak in summer,
sometimes worn proudly, as a robe of state. Had he been solely a
scholar, or an educated land-owner, he would have been spared his own
occasional self-condemnation, been spared these moments when he looked
in his mirror of a morning and said: "You are a damned hypocrite, my
friend." And also he would have been spared some aspersion from the
straight-laced. The man's choice of texts was significant. "He who is
not against us is for us,"--"Let him who is without sin amongst you cast
the first stone,"--"And He called a little child unto Him and set him in
the midst of them."

But, also, I fear his own weaknesses had something to do, as well as his
kind heart, with his choice of such texts. His mouth, and as you know,
men have the making of their mouths as they have of no other features,
was wont to sadden Mrs. Upcott while she loved it. It was the mouth of a
humorist and a kindly man but--the mouth of a man too human; and it had
about it a suggestion as of being rounded to the tankard more frequently
than necessary. He loved dogs, from his King Charles spaniels to "my
'Irishman'--he's the boy for the rats." He loved ale. He loved a French
brandy with a dash of cream and, if he had the cream from the dairymaid,
as like as not he would kiss her rosy cheeks--and bid her be a good
maiden as he shot out, head stooping under the low door, a regretful and
tender smile on his ruddy face and his elastic mouth pursing. But there
was that in his presence that gave a feeling, a little from his
hilarious bulk, much more from some real greatness, of strength. He gave
a sense of something to lean on more than flesh, though something not
ice-cold, but very kindly.

His hat was in his hand, his head slightly bowed as he entered the
Upcott kitchen. He felt in the atmosphere that here was too great sanity
for humbug, and he was glad. Humbug he could dispense, as a doctor, who
cares not for them, can prescribe a chemical dose when he had rather
prescribe a vegetable or herbal one, knowing that if he prescribed to
some people a thing of a simple, everyday name the dose would be
lightlied. So he said no unctuous word about knowing now where our dear
departed was. But in his rich and human voice he spoke quietly, as
though out of the open window where the clean curtain fluttered, or to
the walls, of the infinite mercy of God--whose ways are past finding
out. He said nothing about man. He thought it better not.

John had laid on the table the two woollen winding cloths, in which, as
the law was, all dead should lie. These Mrs. Upcott had bidden him bring
on his return. They made a splash of blue in the midst of the dusky
chamber.

The father had been carried home. The bearers had gone. John, like one
in a daze, his duties done and Ogilby there, moved to a corner and
glanced toward his mother.

She was listening to the consoling murmur of Ogilby's voice. John
searched her face.

How much did she know? What was the meaning of her apathy? Did she know
all?

But no; she did not yet wish to know the story of her husband's passing.
For the present she had her duties.

There stood Mrs. Upcott, in her ears the calming voice--and deep within,
somewhere else, another voice, asking questions.

But here before her were the facts--two blue woollen winding cloths.

Ogilby, seeing her fingering the woollens, was moved as never before had
he been moved at such times. He was more than cleric; and the woman's
very form spoke to his human heart; it was broken, and helpless, and
uncertain, and it was a woman's. That was the kind of man he was.

She marked, absently, that one of the cloths was flawed. When a man buys
cloths the shopkeeper generally tries to foist some flawed thing on his
ignorance. Yes, it was slightly flawed; she fingered it and fingered the
other. Yes, it was flawed. Ah well, that was shopkeepers' way. And
thinking then of Uncle dead and of how much he had meant to her son she
took up the one without blemish--for Uncle. Then she remembered the
faithfulness of a wife. But even as she laid down the flawless and took
up again the faulty, to go over to Uncle's, she had a quick thought in
her mind: Uncle had always had his bees to love, his sufficient
thoughts, his balm in his books. For such a one as Uncle what matter a
flaw in the garment? He would lie as well in the warped as in the whole.
But of all this wavering thought she was herself about as unaware as the
onlookers; only she fingered absently and they marked her fingering as
absently.

Over at Hartland there was a tomb:

    "Here I lie, at the chancel door,
    Here I lie because I am poor,
    The further in the more they pay;
    Here I lie as warm as they."

It is all the same under the grass.

So they went out, Ogilby and Mrs. Upcott and the old woman who had come
down from Abbotsham, hearing the news; she who helped at life's
entrances and exits with a strange kind of fatty and solemn zest.

John followed behind stupidly, Sis staring after him, watching the
broken procession--thinking.

John followed, haunted by one fear: would his mother hear the truth from
anyone? And he was haunted by his own remorse. I think he was little
better than a wandering idiot that day. Did she know? Did she know?

At the cot, by Shebbeare's order, sat the diabolic seaman, he who had
fought so valiantly on the cliff. A musket was at his feet. He sat on
the seat before the door, his hat at his side, with a stone flung in the
crown of it, sat there smoking a West Indian cigarro. He looked up on
the newcomers and inclined his head to Ogilby. For Mrs. Upcott he rose
and made a bow to the best of his ability. It was like a curtsey.

She did not recognise him, only thought, and lost the thought at the
instant, that he was a mighty ugly man with something very likeable in
the midst of his ugliness. So also thought Ogilby. Later Mrs. Upcott was
to recognise him, suddenly to remember who he was and have a new call
upon her for her compassion.

They passed within, reverently. It is on record how Ogilby took the dead
man's hand and wet it with two warm tears--but I prefer to leave much of
that part untold.

She of the exits and entrances had gone. Ogilby sat by his friend. John
Upcott, unseen, had flung himself down without, where he had followed,
in the long, tangled grass. The seaman, looking inwards and hearing a
low voice talking in a way that disturbed him, he being come fresh (as
you shall hear) from out the blue and the red and the gold of the
gorgeous Indies into the very drear climax of his life, had risen
abruptly. He could not abide that voice talking, or as it seemed, almost
chanting words that he did not hear but words with a sound like music;
so he rose and stole away to the limit of the wall that Uncle had made
of the great pebbles of that foreshore.

Upcott saw only his back now, the seaman being slung, in the way of
seamen resting, over the wall, his cigarro smoke veering about him.

Then the sun broke out and lit the place, lit the hill-slopes, lit the
sea in patches that changed and sped so that there were great sea-fields
of rippling, dazzling, broken lights, and fields of dark green, fleeing
and changing; and on the hills there were flying cloud-shadows and
pursuing flights of golden light, for the dome was all aflutter with the
rent clouds.

A kind of peace fell on the place, and Upcott, in the grass weeping (the
last tears he was to weep, he being that day come to man's estate) and
regaining his mental balance, saw his mother come forth of the cot with
her pained, illumined face, and her broken grandeur that told of
blighted "gentrice," and saw how she walked to the hives and then looked
round quickly this way and that. And, seeing only the still back of the
mariner, she bent to the first hive and he heard her voice:

"Thy wold man be gone, oh bees."

To each hive she spoke it, walking furtively along the rows, looking
left and right between, and the youth, lying there, looked on and
wondered at the scene that he was never to forget. And the ex-chaplain
to King Charles the Second, who had been sitting by his friend's old
dwelling-place, having risen, when left alone, to pace twice,
meditative, the little room, paused, seeing through the creepered
window, this scene.

He knew courts and he knew the people. He knew religions and he knew
superstitions. He knew the eternal hopes in the human heart and he knew
the faiths in God. Superstitions, old usages, the crossing of the hands,
the oar upon the grave, the obol on the mouth: he knew, scholarly and
human, many usages of mortals at the Gate. And here was "the telling of
the bees." And his eyes moistened afresh as he saw the woman whose faith
he knew, the woman he reverenced.

The memory he carried away of that day was a memory of the hushed friend
within, and without the splashes of flying sunlight, and the woman, over
whom they came and went, and her subdued voice: "Thy wold man be gone,
oh bees."

So the cleric saw and the son saw. As for the devil of a seaman, he did
not look round, only his head went lower in his shoulders. He lay
against the wall looking out with blind eyes on the wavering sea.




CHAPTER VII

HOW THE FIRST MAN CAME HOME


After the Abbotsham wreck, with all its attendant occurrences, there
came a spell of Indian summer, with its peace, to the north shore.

Mrs. Upcott had gone now into the sanctuary that she, and the gods, and
the fates, had been so long preparing, whence she could look with a
radiance that was never now a duty, never a mask now. The diabolic
seaman had, by Shebbeare's request, remained on guard at the forsaken
cot above the clover lands pending the discovery of Uncle's next of kin,
a task which lawyer Shebbeare had undertaken _con amore_. Frequent
visitors at the Upcott's farm were Cassandra Gifford and Thomasina
Ravenning; and John was sure that he knew why Thomasina, at least, came
thither. One of her reasons he did not discern; perhaps she herself was
hardly aware of it; but I suspect she came partly thus often into the
Upcott's close when she thought of her brother--to see her brother's
closest friend. She had another stronger reason, of which she was
certainly aware, the reason that Upcott divined. Not that she told him.
But he felt it, in encountering her glances toward him at times; he
recognised her intention in her turnings of the talk when the ribbon of
it swerved like the high road and suggested a probable descent toward
the cliff. At cross roads of the talk too, he, with his acute
sensitiveness, because of his deed, perceived how Tomsie chose the
turnpike way for all the company, as it were, and carried the party
carefully forward past the lane running down seawards. That was her task
at first, in the earlier dreads. Later she came but to provide the
distraction that one not of a family and yet not an unwelcome visitor
can give. For still, if Mrs. Upcott were to fall a-brooding, or were to
have full liberty, entire solitude to think over the affair, above all,
if there were to come to her ears any hint of the truth, how would she
fall blanched before that gripping suspicion and go tottering to the
full knowledge! "God spare her that," prayed John. With the dread of
that calamity John fell asleep, and woke; and it attended him in all the
duties of the day. So far his mother had seemed averse to hearing of the
fight. She had seen so much of the sordid and the hideous in her day!
She clearly thought that Thomas Upcott had been killed in just the usual
fight that accompanied wreckings, in a hideous squabbling for the spoil.
But John always had the fear that when they were alone one day the
atmosphere should suddenly be charged with tense, vocal silence, and she
should look up with her strange, blind, grey eyes, as they were in her
most dire moments, and say, cold and calm:

"Now, John, I am ready to know the full story of that fight; and
first--who killed your father?"

When she had asked some questions about the only part that was unusual
in the wrecking--the stand taken against it--that being the only part
she could not picture from knowledge or sight of similar scenes, John's
heart had missed a beat.

"Did you have to fire on them?" she said.

"Yes," said John, "we had to, so as to let them know we meant what we
said,"--followed the awful pause and then: "If Shebbeare had not come
then, or if they had not listened to en----" he was flustered, you see.

"Yes?"

"--listened to him--then--Oh, it would have been--been a terrible
business." And as he spoke he did not know of what he spoke, nor whether
he hid his secret skilfully, or but spoke so as to arouse suspicion,
because of his own picture ever before his eye, the picture of the gross
back on which he had fired--and slain his father.

So he and she were saved again.

What Mrs. Upcott thought of her husband's immortal soul--and I take it
she thought of that--no one can ever know. She was a woman of many
reticences.

And so now comes Peace. Now we leave her more in the background of our
picture. She recedes slowly, ere we leave her and Devon, leave her with
her fair flower (of my incompetent speech) a flower so fair as to redeem
the picture, I think, from the sordid. And here we have a group: mother,
daughter, John; Cassandra resting against Mrs. Upcott's knees; Tomsie
swaying against the wall, vigorous as always, springing back and forward
from her palms that pressed the wall behind her. And back of them, and
of the farm-close and the tilled furlongs, the oak woods mounting on the
climbing hills; and, between the higher boles, inlay of gold sunset; and
higher, mosaic of last sky-glow and silhouetted foliage and branches;
and higher, over all, the sky already studded with pale stars in its
blue and white like a veined marble.

Cassandra rose, thinking that she appropriated too much the blessedness
of Mrs. Upcott's hand on her head as she sat there, and strolled in the
close, rustling through the wind-cast leaves.

What the witch woman had said to John occurred to him then; for
something, as she had said, had come between the fair-haired girl friend
and him. Then, remembering how the witch woman had said that neither
knew the reason for that aloofness, he went to her slowly. She was
trying to break a staff from the hedge. Something, part heady, part
airy, in the fading day filled him with the glamour and the pride of
life. He saw Cassandra suddenly pluck back her hand from the hedge, with
a little intake of breath, pricked by a thorn. A quick glance showed him
the others, Thomasina, as Cassandra had expected, if not sitting at Mrs.
Upcott's feet, at least appropriating her now in her own way, bending
behind her, laying cheek to cheek, both arms around Mrs. Upcott's neck.

John turned to Cassandra in the dusky corner of the close.

"Let me cut en for you," said he and drew his jack-knife and thrust his
hands recklessly into the heart of the thorny hedge, lacerating himself
handsomely, of course. The action was full of the folly of quixotic
youth: symbolic, and intended so. He would share her pain--bear it for
her if he could, an hundred fold.

"Take care of your hands," she said. "The thorns are sharp and long."

He make no answer, cut the staff and trimmed it of side-issues,
assiduously, with bleeding hands.

"You needn't have done that--so wild," she was saying, but he was
trimming away the side-issues.

"Cassandra," he heard his voice as if there was a phlegm in his throat,
it was low and husky, "we haven't seen so much of each other recently.
Are we not as good friends as ever?"

"Yes--as good friends--sure," and her pensive eyes looked in his face,
but he was not quite satisfied with them; they had a look as of his
mother's when his mother would not know all. Her face was like ivory in
the twilight, brown ivory. He saw it shine and was moved with a kind of
sanctified passion.

"I--like you, Cassandra," he said, suddenly impulsive to speak;
suddenly, on the other word that died in his throat, restrained, he knew
not why.

"Us--us be young yet," she said. "I hope you may be a good man," she
added quickly.

He thought then that she had been aloof, come less frequently to the
farm, passed out of his way at church, because he was the son of his
father;--"for your mother's sake," she added. He thought then that
perhaps she considered him not as good a son as he might be, to his
mother. Then followed a sense of rebellion against what were, after all,
his self-created fancies, though they were so real that to him it was
rebellion against the domination of woman--of Cassandra Gifford. "Why
should she judge?" Then he bowed to his imagination of her, to her
fancied thoughts, and felt that his bowing to her so was a mighty sign
of his devotion--if she only knew!

And then into the yard, where was this group, in the sweet merging of
day and dusk, before candle-time, came Hacker, the diabolic seaman, for
Hacker was his name, though he had given it forth as Jones.

"Evening, ma'am; evening, all. Shebbeare is comin' up here, ma'am," said
he. "He has some news for you."

"Oh!" cried Mrs. Upcott--and here again is distraction of sympathy, and
all the while time passing and wounds a-healing. "Has he found Uncle's
friends?"

"The old man had no friends, ma'am, but we have found a will in the
cot."

And then the gate opened and Shebbeare entered the gold-lit farm close.
All came to their feet.

"This," said he, "is sure the happiest hour of the day. Don't
stir--don't stir! Do not rise."

But Cassandra and Thomasina fell back a few deferential paces and then
Shebbeare took from his pocket a crinkling parchment.

"Fetch a lamp, John," said he.

"Shall we go indoors, sir?" asked Mrs. Upcott, feeling perturbed,
somewhat aflutter.

"As you please, ma'am," said Shebbeare, "but it is so peaceful out here
on such a night. Indoors is stuffy on these warm autumn nights. Out here
one can breathe deep; outdoors, in evenings such as this, a mortal feels
that any kind of goodness can easily come to us."

Mrs. Upcott was looking on the aristocratic face, the clean-shaven,
sharp-chiselled face. John had brought the lamp and, "Sit down, Mrs.
Upcott, I beg of you," said Shebbeare. "In God's name, ma'am, why should
you stand to me?" And as she sat down she took the paper from Shebbeare;
and Shebbeare took the lamp from John and held it up so that she could
read, he looking on her face in the glow. She read the top line, for the
document was headed, so:

"There is Money in Bees!"

And then Shebbeare saw her eyes glisten with welling tears as she read.
She sat reading, intent, thoughtful. She must have finished quite some
little time before she raised her head.

"But has he no friends?" she asked.

"He had you and yours," said Shebbeare looking to her again, for he had
looked away, still holding the lamp, when he perceived that she had
finished her reading and yet did not look up.

"But 'tis blood-kin I mean," she said. "Oh, he was kind, kind and good,
but we must not take advantage of his kind heart."

He shook his head. "No," said he, "he was quite alone. He was the last
of his people."

"God bless him. God rest him," said Mrs. Upcott.

I need not tell you that the old man of the moon had left his all to
Mrs. Upcott in that quaintly headed will. But she was more moved by the
feeling that she should not take the beloved old man's savings than by
any feeling of relief to herself, by any thought of what the financial
aid meant. That was then but an afterthought; for, though she was in her
prime and had known what it was to save and stint, she was not a typical
Devon woman.

The diabolic seaman had been standing back behind his then commander,
his evil face looking wondrous kindly on the scene. And now, Shebbeare
having moved aside, the lamp rays smote on the seaman's face. And seen
in that light, at that moment wearing a softer expression than its
wonted, Mrs. Upcott's sense of knowing the face came again. And then,
sudden, come recollection, recognition absolute; her gaze focussed
keenly on him. She rose. She took a step, staring. The others wondered
at her, they standing back out of earshot in deference to Shebbeare of
Shebbeare Towne. And then the diabolic seaman bit on his lip and looked
as though he were afraid.

"Sydney Hacker," said Mrs. Upcott. "Sydney Hacker."

"Iss. Sydney Hacker, sure 'nough," he said, "though how you knew beats
me. No one else knows me." For the Spanish main had scarred him, changed
him, branded him; and he knew. And it was also many and many a year
since he had sailed from Bideford and gone out over bar to make his
fortune in a "reprisal ship."

Mrs. Upcott looked keenly on the scarred face and gauged its lurking,
unquenched kindness. She saw that he felt--and that he could bear, but
that he found it hard to bear. There was an old owl lived in the
Abbotsbury wood and he hooted then.

"I am sorry," she said, very low, very gently.

"Thank you," said Hacker; "it helps me, ma'am, for you to say that."

Shebbeare asked no question, though his expression did; and Hacker
turned to him. "You see, sir," said he, "I ha' been gone a long woile
from Devon and--human nature's human nature, sir--and--I've been gone
long 'nough to be dead for sure. 'Tisn't like as if my woman down to
Bideford had married again to once my back was turned, or to once she
thought I was dead. 'Twasn't till after the news came to her as that the
ship I was aboard was lost, so I hear, asking cautions down along."

Shebbeare bowed his head in sign of hearkening and sympathetic
attention, comprehension.

"And what will you do now, Hacker?" he asked when Hacker paused.

"Oh, I go back to the Indies," said Hacker. He seemed to feel that an
explanation was necessary. "I on'y came out along to see the ghas'ly
shore we was so near a-coming on and us so near hoom. And--well, because
I dursent stay to Bideford after I knew. No, sir, I couldn't stay so
near her; not that any man knew me, but I was too near her; and by
God!" he broke out with a thickness in his voice, "it's a terrible thing
when once a man's known a woman, and her his wife, to----" and he broke
off abruptly, ashamed.

"You are a brave man," said Mrs. Upcott, saying the best thing possible.

"Aye," said Shebbeare, his head inclined gravely.

Hacker threw up his head. Sympathy or aid from a woman, and skilful
sympathy at that, was one thing; from a man quite another. "Oh, Hell!"
he would have said to a man alone. Now he compromised.

"Oh," he said, "the ways of life calls for fortitude in man." And then
he bowed backward clumsily, but with a certain dignity, from Shebbeare
and Mrs. Upcott. "I suppose I can stay at the old man's cot sir, now,
though you have settled the things there?" he asked. "You'll not be
cleaning it out for a two-three days?"

"Yes, yes, my man," said Shebbeare. "You can stay there if you wish
for----"

"On'y till I hears of a vessel for the Indies," said Hacker,
"Good-night, all. Good-night, sir," he gave a seaman's salute.
"Good-night, ma'am;" he made a bow in a way that would have been
ridiculous had it not been so wholly sincere an expression of respect.
And then he turned back, as he went, weighted with the air of sympathy.

"Ain't it a beautiful night for time o' year?" he said, and then the
gate clicked, his broad back merged with the shadows in the land; and
the squelch of his feet in the mire, and the rustle in the banked
leaves, passed away from hearing.

So now you have the story of how one man came home.




CHAPTER VIII

ONE MAIDEN'S HEART


Ravenning's sister strayed down the lane that ran by the Abbotsbury
furlongs, on her plump thumb a ring that had been on the little finger
of one of the sea-spurned mariners, in her ears his tiny golden
ear-rings such as women wear firstly for adornment and men wear
ostensibly to aid the eyesight. You could have told her on first glance
for a Ravenning, for Will's sister, because of her build; but she was an
improvement on Will. Her cheek-bones were of the family, but not
sinister. She was altogether a bonnie and plump, white-teethed,
rollicking maiden; and though I say rollicking I do not insinuate
thoughtless. Of the same mould as her brother she had been more careful
than he and so there was no accentuation of the mark of the beast, that
stolid, serious, passionate beast that Will had carelessly cultivated;
and with her there was a cultivation of the more radiant side. Her
laughter saved her, even the boisterous laughter. You would still see
the family traits in the way she would swing about impetuous in her wide
gestures; in the impulsive way she had of, as it were, throwing herself
at you in conversation. But in these dancing brown eyes, so full of
wildness, there was a clearness and tenderness. The drowned man's ring
on her thumb signifies nothing much amiss; it is but a sign of the times
in which she lived.

These last two mornings she had frequented the lane with a kind enough
intention. She was watching for the expected departure of her brother's
best friend, to intercept him on his way to Hartland for Tom. And here
he came, as expected, riding past the file of cots.

"Good-morning, John," she hailed him, and stopped in her sauntering.

"Good-morning, Tomsie," said he and looked his affection on her; for
Will Ravenning's sister was to him different from other girls. His
friendship for Will, I take it, put him on a different footing with her;
he wore the air of a protector almost. On her side, she knew that Will
would have been a more dissolute young rascal lacking John's friendship.
Not but what John had spirit. She could read it in his eyes that
sometimes frightened her; sometimes in the midst of a talk with him, he
talking so frankly and easily, with so little of the usual bantering of
their age--and all ages--between youth, she would feel her bosom leap
up. And she would look solemn and frown on John and put him in a
balance, as it were, much as her brother did; and she would understand
him a little better than her brother could understand, and feel no fear
for herself for all the fierce leap at her bosom, but feel a kind of
sentimental pity for John Upcott and the way he had to go--a sisterly
pity. For she had, at such moments, a woman's or maiden's quick
intuition that John was not exactly different from other lads--but was
just as other lads--only different! That was about the sum of her
weighing. She divined the trouble in his eyes, eyes full of wilful fire
and yet as tender as his mother's. She divined how John Upcott held a
kind of restraint over Will Ravenning. And always she spoke to him as
she spoke to no other lad.

"Where be off to, John?" she asked.

"To Hartland," he said.

"What for?"

"Why, sure for brother Tom."

"John----"

"Yes?"

"I have something to tell 'e."

Her face was suddenly heavy. You could then see more noticeably the face
of Will--heavy, stolid. And at that solemn gaze John remembered the
witch's prophecy about his brother, and only faintly was eased in the
thought that the witch had been wrong in the matter of Will Ravenning.

"What is't?" he asked.

"Tom baint to Hartland now."

"No," said John, without any inflection in his voice.

"You know?" she said raising her brows. "Then why are you----"

"No; I know nothing. What is it?" he asked.

"Will came down along to tell 'e," she said, "but he couldn't--you
see--with that--your other trouble. I'm sorry, John. He told me. That
was all he came for--to tell about Tom. He told me and I've been
awaiting a chance. Will wouldn't have risked comin' down along but for
you, John." She broke off. "Will thought a heap o' you, John."

"What about it?"

"It's like this: Will went over to Hartland to see the bull-baiting, and
your brother Tom, you zee, was there. The bull-baiting was o' Sunday
mornin' and there was a gurt crowd a-gathered. But the bull was a game
un, he was. First dog up he gored clean and slung up so as he was dead
afore he fell in the women's aprons. An old witch-woman there spread her
apron with the rest when they all ran to catch en. She caught en. 'He be
dead,' says she, 'and out o' this troublesome world, poor dog.' Them
paid no heed to her silly words, for puttin' another dog on. Next dog
got the same and when the women spread to catch en falling, th' old
witch got en again, and says she: 'Poor dog. May we all die as speedy
and easy.' Third dog on tore the bull bad and kept to en. 'Twas a well
plucked dog. And then church bells started ringing and away they all
runs to wash for service and left but one or two to guard the gamey
bull. Brother Will was took with pity for the bull the way they put
stitches where it bled worse to save en till after service, and the bull
gruntin' and lookin' round, not for men but for fear of another dog; and
so brother Will, (he told me he thought you would ha' done it had you
been up along,) sticks his knife clean in a-tween bull's shoulders. They
was too much for Will. They caught en; and volks were so mad at having
no baitin' after service 'at Will found hisself in the stocks. Then your
brother Tom comes along and stands lookin' at en and watching the
folkses a-spittin' at en and a-peltin' en. Three hours he had to set
next Sunday mornin', the Sunday after the one when he killed the bull.
Sat there by the lych-gate and volks goin' to service jeerin' at en. The
old witch-woman--she seed how your Tom looked on, and came to en and
said she: 'Why don't you get your friend out?'--'How can I?' he says.
'Why,' she says, 'there be plenty gamey lads to Hartland to help in
that.'--''Tis a bad crime to break the stocks up,' says Tom, thinkin'
over it all the same. She put a ribband round his neck with a silver
cross to it. 'Wear you that,' she says, 'and you get through safe.'"

John stared. He had the sense of knowing all this of yore.

"So Tom went for two-three lads and after all was in church that Sunday,
all but the guards and two-three others, they came at en. 'You get no
shillin' this time for guardin' stocks,' says your Tom and hit first
guard over the head. 'And you get no shillin',' says another of the lads
and the other went down--not but what they made a fight. Then they
smashed up the stocks and away----" she paused, relishing the thought of
the fight.

"And where's Tom now?" asked John.

"Tom? Why Tom and Will by now----" she climbed to a stone and looked
seaward over the slopes and John turned in the saddle.

Out in the sparkling bay were dotted three sails, one far off by Lundy,
one near at hand, one east and tacking up channel.

"Shouldn't wonder if he's in that brig off the point," she said and just
as they looked the brig put about on a fresh tack and as she did so her
sails twinkled in the morning sun. She stood away on a long reach west
through the seas, Lundy like a cloud over her.

John's mouth fell.

"But couldn't he come and say good-bye--to--my mother?" he said.

"Ah, John, my brother John--let me call you brother just this one day,"
and she leapt from the stone and put her hand on his knee where he sat
on his pony. "Don't you see why he couldn't? The guard never rose again.
They were dead and--and--'twould be a terrible thing for to dangle on
Hartland gallows."

And John sat thinking of all that the old fortune-telling woman had
said.

"Brother Will risked comin' down. 'Twas not him that struck the guard,
you zee, and him sittin' in the stocks: so he risked comin' down. There
was a dozen of en, you zee; for they had to smash the stocks up. Not but
what breakin' stocks or breakin' out o' stocks is bad enough trouble.
Reckon it might be transportation, anyhow, for that."

"What can I tell mother?" said John, and one need not think this
heartless toward the deed of his brother and his friend; for cracked
skulls signified little then.

"You do have a wonderful mother," said Thomasina slowly. "I think I
should tell her the truth," she added simply.

"Thank 'e, Tomsie," said John and took a long breath and turned his
pony. Thomasina's grasp tightened on his knee. "Poor boy," she said.
"Our Will," she added, "thought a heap o' you, John." She stood looking
after him with frowning brows. And then he turned and rode back to her.

"Be you sure that they are away over the seas?"

"Iss, sure. Your Tom went aboard three days ago to Bideford and they've
been hidin' en there for fear of en bein' hunted for. Our Will risked
comin' back to tell 'e, you zee. She was to go out over bar wi' this
morning's tide. Reckon that be she us saw there."

John, from his vantage on the saddle, saw over the hedgerows to the
quivering acres of the sea and picked up again the white sails of a
vessel, too far off to tell her rig now, eating up the space between her
and Hartland Head, flying into the Atlantic, flying into the mystic
west.

"Cheer up, John," said Tomsie. "They'm free of Hartland gallows."

There is always something to be thankful for if one would only cultivate
a cheerful disposition.

John rode back, chin on chest, to tell his mother if he could. At the
gate he sat still on the saddle a moment or two, staring on the tiny
ship running towards Hartland Head. And Mrs. Upcott, in the yard,
looking out to sea also, across the slopes, with the wistful look on her
face, the look that moved him when he came upon her unexpected, turned,
recalled by the sound of his approach. And again she read his face and
desired to know--to know--she braced herself. Her husband was gone.
There was now no broken reed to interpose between her and the viewless
Unknown upon which we lean. The reed that she always had felt she could
not lean on, but had things been otherwise should have leant on, ought
to have leant on, had been plucked away, blown forth from the hill. She
was alone. Here was immensity. And she raised her face to the glittering
sky and found that her soul was strong enough now to know all. All that
John had to tell to-day she could bear with calm; she was leaning upon
no broken reed. And she could lean wholly where she now leant without
feeling that she slighted her man. For thus at times had she felt of
yore, such was her wondrous heart.

And as they looked each to each the sails passed beyond Hartland Head.




CHAPTER IX

OSCULATIONS


You will remember that when John Upcott was an imaginative child he once
planned the annihilation of his father. Well, we know what he did
eventually, unwittingly, and how the terrible deed affected him.
Frequently, too, he had in later years been haunted by the ambition,
sometimes faint as an idle idea, sometimes tormenting as a passion, to
go across the seas. There were vessels constantly going out of
Barnstaple and Bideford, here close at hand, and from Plymouth, to make
empire, called letters of marque ships, or reprisal ships, or what you
will; and there was money to be made in these vessels. Frequently then
he had thought to go off in one of these craft, make a fortune, come
home and, on the strength of his wealth, take over the government of the
farm, be, as it were, the prince there, under the queen mother, and put
the father, as it were, in a dungeon for the remainder of his life. And
now, behold, he still desired, as did all Devon youth then, to go
a-sailing over the rim of the sea; and yet the reason that he had before
given to himself for the desire had no longer existence.

Now, also, thanks to Uncle, there was more of the very necessary coin
of the realm to give its reassuring golden chink. Out of the late autumn
day, as John autumn-ploughed the field there seemed to have gone
something, the presence of which he had scarce remarked before. Perhaps
it was that his nature required some balancing affliction. In the autumn
nights there was a cold deadness. Still, it was good to come home at
candle-time and see the lit faces and the leaping fire. But now his
cooped-up energies demanded output; and one night when he had met
Cassandra, in talking to her, suddenly, as she looked at him, he knew
not how, some sparkle of her eye, smile of her face, set his head
a-whirl. He remembered her words in the farm-close: "We are young yet,"
and in the dead autumn night in which their voices sounded hollow, or as
though weighted by nature's quiescence, he had a sense of the end of
things, of an end led up to by just such stolid, dormant months. She
would never be close to him in the empty world. He flung his arms round
her, gathered her to him, kissed her cheek. It may seem odd to many a
young man of to-day, but he had never kissed a girl before, or woman,
only Sis and mother. He was twenty-one. It was his first kiss. The feel
of her shoulders in his hands, her cheek under his lips, intoxicated
him.

"Cassandra," he said, "Cassandra, I love you. Oh Cassandra, some
day----" and there she was standing off abruptly from him with a face,
as he could see, in horror, even in that gloaming, flashing pale this
moment, and darkening the next with blushes, and again pale.

"What do you mean?" cried she.

"Forgive me! Forgive me!" cried he, thickly.

She turned and fled and he ran a little way after her and then bethought
him that in so doing he would terrify her. And so he stood still in the
lane and stared at the lights that leapt to life and blinked from
windows up and down the darkened and dead hill.

Now he had done it! She would never, never be his, however he were to
work at home, or whatever fortune he were to make on the high seas.

He moved down the lane disconsolate and there came a girl swinging and
singing, broad of beam against the sky-line as she came over the rise.
Then the moon came out and sent its cold glamour over the slopes that
smelt of dead leaves.

"It's John!" cried the girl. "O-ho, John, us are well met. I wanted some
lad to walk me down to the shore and back, but most of them wants to
pull un about--and I can't be troubled with that to-night."

There was something so cheery in Thomasina as she made her friendly
request that John rejoiced at her coming. It was a relief to talk to
her. To talk to anyone else would have been an ordeal. His mind would
have gone straying. His mother would have thought him ill; Sis would
have looked wide-eyed and wondering on him and he would have read
suspicion in her gaze.

So Thomasina and he, under the flying silver clouds and the tilted moon,
went gaily down the lane, its unevenness causing them to bump each
other once, twice, and at the third time: "Look you here," cried
Tomsie, laughing, "do you want to push me into the hedge and get me with
prickles in my hand?" And she turned a roguish face on him and he
wondered just what she meant. You will perceive that he was always
imagining things! "You need a staff, you do, if you stagger like that.
Oh! nearly twisted my ankle in that rut. It's me needs a staff from the
hedge, I think!" She did not look her banter now, but he looked at her
and found her gazing straight ahead, but smiling. And then they came out
on the clear roll of land above the cliff.

"Listen to the sea. It's wild these nights," said Tomsie.

They listened to the flinging of the pebbles under the cliff and the
raking of them down by the swinging seas, walked slowly east to that
harsh sound and came to where Uncle's demesne loomed above them.

"Is the old sailor to home, I wonder?" said Thomasina; and they climbed
up and looked at the cot. There was no light in the window and as by
mutual consent they wandered on, burst open the little gate, and entered
the wild garden. Hacker was evidently still abroad.

They walked down to the end of the garden.

All the somewhat chill night was full of the voice of the sea and they
leant against the wall there, looking down on the darkness to which
their eyes were now becoming accustomed; and with the moon behind them
they saw the black of the sea brighten slowly, reveal itself with its
flashes of white, and here and there its tossing. And then John, his
mind vacant, the sea in his ears, had a new experience. He was then
perhaps a little stunned by his late encounter with Cassandra, though at
the moment he was not thinking deeply of that encounter. He really could
not. The thought of it was too gigantic. The affair was full of
portents, calling for solitude to be lived over and considered in all
its aspects and pondered on deeply to argue just what it would mean for
his chances of ever again being even spoken to by Cassandra. Such was
his frame of mind. One can hardly say he thought; his mind was
practically vacant. And then he felt a tingling in his cheek. By the
way, it was his left cheek and Thomasina was on his left. The tingling
ran down to his heart. He wondered; and then he was aware that Thomasina
was very close to him. Her thick fluffy hair was on his temple. Was it
but the wind that sent it fluttering so against his face? She moved her
head up and down, and then turned her face slowly and looked on him with
her, I had almost said chubby, cheeks, puckered with roguish laughter;
she laughed in his solemn face. And--and he flung his arm round her
waist. She nestled plumply to him on the instant, laid her head against
his shoulder.

What did this mean? She looked up at him. Her face was heavy, like
brother Will's.

"Kiss me," she said.

He bent to her forehead, remembering Will. She threw her head back and
took the kiss on the lips and John gathered her more closely and held
her head still higher, amazed at his action, feeling her face in his
hands, and kissed her on her plump, white throat, and felt how she
strained back her head. Then she turned her face aside, stood stolid,
chin on heaving bosom a space, while John wondered afresh at the world
and what it contained. And then she looked up at him, her aspect
radiant, and said she, softly:

"Brother John!"

He held her then with a difference, slight, yet enormous; and he felt
happier, too. She put up her hand, her right hand, as she nestled to his
left, and laid her fingers on his shoulder, and said she: "Forgive me. I
don't want 'e to think me a forthy maiden, John. Forgive me."

He could say nothing; he thought suddenly of Cassandra. He felt he did
not understand anything.

"Do you forgive me? Oh, John, forgive me!" she said.

"There is nothing to forgive! I don't understand 'e!" he said.

She looked frowning on him. "Well," she said, "it was my fault."

"What?" he said. "Me kissing 'e?"

She nodded and, "Um," she said, her lips closed on the sober,
affirmative nod.

"No, it wasn't," he said sharply and yet he almost thought perhaps it
was.

"Oh, but it was," she said.

"No, 'twasn't. I should liker ask you to forgive me for----"

"Will you shut up?" she said. "I tell 'e 'twas my fault!" And then she
added, with what was now a kind of mock solemnity: "Brother John," and
spoke the words with great weight, disengaged herself from his now
slackening arm, laid a hand on each side of his face, kissed him
squarely, and said she: "It was my fault."

"It was nobody's fault," said he.

"Us better leave it there, then," she said.

And then they both laughed, turned about, and sharing a feeling of
sparkling amusement, walked homeward, meeting the returning Hacker, who
stopped them with frowning face and a kindly hail; and the three stood
chatting a space.

That night, after hours of maddening examination of his new position in
relation to Cassandra, broken into by what grieved him as unfaithful, if
ecstatic, remembrance of Tomsie's nearness, John felt he would give the
world if only Cassandra had been in Tomsie's place. He had pictures of
galleons, from Hacker's tales; of Devon dogs boarding them boldly; of
the sharing of the trove on sun-bright, sandy shores, the brig anchored
in the blue sea to lee of the yellow isle, doubloons and pieces of eight
clattering at his feet. In a moment he had boarded a hundred Spanish
ships, shared a hundred treasures, come home, kissed mother and Sis,
clipped Cassandra to him, not then too young, craved forgiveness for
to-night and told her he had lived for her alone. He did not remember
the scarred face of Hacker, seared by the Carib seas, and the Spanish
main, by Hispaniola and the Tortugas.

He did not perceive, lacking humour then, as one does in such times,
that the solution of every difficulty was always--the Spanish seas. But
he was not alone in that foible. He was but inspired by the air of his
times and his land.




CHAPTER X

CAPTAIN----


"Ship ahoy! Ship ahoy!"

"Ahoy! Ship ahoy!"

The mariner of piratical aspect, he of the long greatcoat with the loose
gold buttons, stood on the bank of the pill with his hands in his
breeches pockets and his stiff coat and his twist of hair sticking out
absurdly behind him, shouting to the echo that has been spoiled these
many years by excavations on the opposing shore of Torridge. The pill
too, is gone, long gone like the piratical person himself. And the pill
echo was one of the favourite echoes of old Bideford, place of many
echoes; and the seaman of the gold buttons and the fantastic vocabulary
had a great relish of hearing it.

"Ship ahoy!" he would shout and listen to the echo--and then the second
echo that came about twice the length of time after the first that the
first came on the cry. Sometimes he would vary his amusement by laughing
mad laughter, and the echo bellowed back on him till the tears came to
his eyes and he held his sides in maudlin merriment.

The citizens resented his monopolising of the echo. Who was he to go out
there and roar and bellow at twilight to no ship that came in upon the
homing tide? But he could hardly be fined as a common loiterer, for he
had clearly means, as witness his gold buttons. Nor did he ever sit
ignominious in the stocks as a drunkard, for he had always the use of
his legs; and as for being mulcted for his oaths--well, a man had to
swear a deal indeed and generally do other things to make himself
objectionable before that law against swearing was brought to bear on
him. If a man was fined for swearing you could have a guess that he was
unpopular otherwise, in some way not within the law. "All right, sir,"
so to speak, "I can't have you there, but--let me catch you swearing!" A
shilling an oath for the man in the street; two shillings for the man of
position and three for the aristocrat--some of us would grow poor.

When the echo staled upon him he would go back to the sign of the
Dolphin, steal in quietly, like a man suspect, or one who had made a vow
of silence, take the shaded, secluded corner settle, have his liquor
solitary. His end would be achieved: no one would observe him. And then,
of a sudden, he would say farewell to his caution and his close-lipped
discretion (whatever prompted these), clear his throat and grin upon the
silence that that sound decreed, then smite his fist upon the table and
cry out: "Devil take this place. Give me an ordinary of the Hispaniola
or the Tortugas, where a man can hear the rattle of mugs and the clink
of glasses, and a shuffle board in every ordinary and no word said, a
pipe and tabour a-goin'; aye--and mugs a-walloping on the table and a
dust raisin' and you can sit and shout to yourself and nobody take no
heed, nobody hear you; sit and roar to yourself in the middle of it all
till you goes black in the face. That's life! That's me! That's
Captain----" and then he would pull himself together, cease abruptly on
the word, call for drinks round (or at least he often did so formerly,
though not of late) or start a stave of a song, as though to cover
something that he feared he had let slip. And if any temerarious or
idiotic tippler should question him on what he meant, with a leering
curiosity regarding that hiatus, he would lay his forefinger to the
right side of his nose, half close his red, right eye, and say: "You
need not work the pump when the sucker ain't on." Or, if he was not more
wary he would murmur: "Hearsay, only hearsay--not that I know o' them
matters from personal observation," and so further puzzle the curious.
Folk wondered what "them matters" might be.

If any man asked him his name he gave it as Mr. Rogers of Bristol, a
retired merchant skipper. But he had a look on him that belied the word
"merchant"--though that signified little in a seaman in Bideford in
those days.

Shortly after his witnessing of John Upcott's youthful fight in Gunstone
Lane, Rogers had disappeared abruptly from the Dolphin and from Devon,
going out on the Irish packet from Barnstaple; and then, one evening,
when his memory was quite forgot, under a young moon that sent the
golden discs dancing in Torridge, he came back, having walked all the
way from Plymouth, with his cutlass swinging against his leg and his
hands thrust in his seaman's belt and his eyes bloodshot--and yet with a
bearing still as of one who had curbed men and who could yet rule men of
his own chartless breed: Captain Rogers, retired merchant skipper of
Bristol!

He had still his former way of maligning the people and the modes around
him, and if anyone spoke up in defence of the subject of his tirade he
would smash on the table, and glare; and people fell silent, or even ate
their words, rather than argue with him. But if any other person spoke
(in the oracular manner of the tap-room politician or man-of-affairs)
against aught, usage or individual, and the piratical person chimed in
at all, it would be to play the part of belligerent advocate of the
usage or individual so maligned. There was no living with the man.

"Oh, don't talk to me!" he cried one day when a tap-room loafer had been
reviling the eccentric Sir Lewis Stucley. "I tell you all great men are
different to you; and you ain't fit to set up opinions on 'em. Why do
you run down Stucley like this? I tell you you are jealous of him,
that's what 'tis. You ain't got his wealth--but you've got his vermin!
'Tis jealousy. Why shouldn't he walk up and down his room through the
gold and silver if he wants so to do? Why shouldn't he pick the grey
lads off him and put 'em on a hot plate and wager his left ag'in' his
right which is off first and him minded that way? You sit there carpin'
against your betters and if he shows up here, why--what do you do? Why,
knuckle your hats to him, bow to him, make a leg to him. And so you
should do! Jealous, you be; and not only jealous, but--but--I forget the
word that fits you, but it's a long word and it means you be only fit
for removing of the throw-outs from the fore-door."

The landlord objected to this vituperative language, saying, in a voice
that was a curious blending of the stern and the cringing, that he could
not have such speech in his ordinary.

"Oh, can't you?" the so-called Rogers cried. "You take my money, don't
you? Well, you can take me. Or if you don't like me," and he paused
effectively, "why then I'll go somewheres else where I can be
appreciated, sink me if I don't! I'll give my custom somewheres
else--and my name. Yes, my name. You hear me," and the flat of his hand
came on the table, "my name too, sir, so as when I die maybe they'll
change the name of their house and have me on a sign above the door with
a telescope i' one hand and a glass o' grog in t'other, and a cutlass in
the nex'--what be you grinning at, you--? I'll larn you to grin at
Captain----" and then a long, glaring silence.

But he was not always so. He had other moods towards the end. He had
times when, after his bouts, the young blades would win his soft side
and make him believe almost anything they chose, however ridiculous. One
morning, for example, he called the landlord.

"Landlord," said he; "can you tell me if anything beyond the wonted
took place here last night?"

"Why no, cap'n; just the usual, so far as I know;"--and with that in
stepped a lad and touched his hat and "Good-morning, Sir John," he said
and passed on solemnly.

"I knew it!" cried Rogers; and then he plucked the landlord by the
button-hole. "Last night, sir," said he, "I received a knighthood for me
deeds. A depytation came down a-purpose from London. Strange to me that
you didn't know."

"I was away last night," said the astute landlord.

"Ah! that accounts! Well, after this you call me Sir John--eh--Rogers,"
said he, nodding and frowning; and then he added, as to himself, sadly:
"'Tis nevertheless a pity now! 'Tis sure a pity! Still--Sir John Rogers
is good enough, in its own way."

And explanation for all this was merely that the young blades had,
finding him in the fitting key, made up a play to knight him with a
wooden sword and performed the ceremony in the tap-room, ceremony
through which the maudlin captain passed with drunken gravity and
cock-eyed pomp. But a week later, when the mood had passed, it was as
much as a man's life was worth to mention titles; and he who for seven
days, or thereby, had refused to heed anyone who spoke to him unless the
speaker fittingly addressed him as Sir John, now, at the slightest drift
of talk toward titles or the aristocracy, would clear his throat and
draw up his right sleeve so that the dirty lace showed on his iron and
browned wrist.

Into the tap-room where he sat there came one day John Upcott, looking
for the landlord, to request two beds for the night.

It was a haggard face that John presented, for he was now on his way to
the Spanish seas. And here already, before leaving Devon soil, he was
full of regrets and self-accusations. Now he knew that all things were
to him but as excuses, not reasons, for going out to these romantic
waters. One by one during these last years the excuses had been made
invalid; and yet here he was, going. And the only reason now for his
departure was one that he could not tell, for it was simply born of the
situation that he had placed himself in towards his mother by the deed
that he had done in the Abbotsham fight. There was always that between
them of which the mother was unaware; but the closer they came, now that
he was the man in the house, the more did that affair gnaw his heart,
eat his vitality. Time passed, the days went by, and he began to believe
that the affair was well nigh forgotten by the people of the
countryside. Indeed, he began to fancy that perhaps there were few (how
madly he hoped there might be none!) who knew whose shot had laid low
Thomas Upcott. But there hung over him his own knowledge. And at last
the mother reasoned that the youth was fretting his life away with his
old hunger for voyaging. It was accordingly she who prepared the way.
For as she probed and wondered, seeking the cause of his strained
reveries, of his look as of one haunted, of his falling-in cheeks, she
bethought her that men were made for an up-and-doing life. It was the
way God had made men.

"I sometimes wonder, John," said she, "if you never think now of what
you so often used to--of being a sailor."

His jaw dropped.

"And leave you!" he cried. "Now that--that I'm the only man--leave you!"

"It might be you would see Tom overseas," said she, "and tell him that
he could come home safe enough so be he wanted to"--for it had been
discovered that the two guardians of the Hartland stocks had not died of
the assault upon them by the young men, but--quaint times!--because they
were evil-eyed by an old witch who came about the place just after the
riot, as though she had directed it all by occult powers, and come in to
see the fulfilment, to be in at the death. The men had been seen to
move, one had flickered an eyelid; all had seen that, or imagined they
had. The other had even sat up; but the witch woman, standing by
scratching her head, had looked vindictively on both. So they had died.
And she had been traced easily enough; for she had wandered from
Hartland to Bideford, fortune-telling all the way. And at Bideford,
being spurned by a certain woman, she had gone away muttering, and
shortly afterwards the woman who had sent her packing was seized with
stabbing pains over her body, and the old witch was seen by one, who
reported the matter, sitting by a field side stabbing with a long pin
in a piece of oak bark. The inference was clear, and the old witch
woman, so far from denying the charges against her, had listened to all,
and to every charge pled guilty, even giving light, of her own accord,
on how she had connection with the Black Man, the Devil, and how they,
he and she, did this and that thing hitherto inexplicable! So she had
been haled off to Exeter and there duly burnt. Tom might come safely
home.

Between Mrs. Upcott and her son there had been a deal of talk, this way
and that, but at the back of it all mother and son felt that, whatever
the reason, John was to go away. It was in the air, inevitable: they
knew it.

Mrs. Upcott measured the depth of his love for her, as well as the depth
of his roving hunger, in his emaciated cheeks, his despondent bearing,
because he never spoke of his roving-hunger!

And now here he was in Bideford, going away--and only he knew why. And
the reasons that his mother and he had tacitly decided were the reasons,
when he thought over them--ah! what a position they put him in. God knew
he was not that kind of son! And then again he thought how she must love
him, to love him still, believing that he could leave her so readily for
mere whims and only one at all weighty reason. For the only spoken,
discussed reason for his going, that seemed to him at all weighty enough
to bring down the balance against that other balance in which were her
loneliness and her love, was that he might find Tom overseas, and tell
him that all was well. But the truth was that John, loving his mother as
he did and being loved by her as she loved him, was dying of the secret
that he could not tell her.

The piratical person, sitting in his corner, suddenly observed John
talking to the landlord, recognised him, and up he rose, swept his hat
abroad magnificently, made a leg and: "Aha! The rat!" he said. "We have
met again."

But John Upcott could not be offended at the piratical person, for
clearly there was respect of a kind intended in his salutation. And then
the captain, as John bowed doubtfully: "Might I have a word with you,
sir?"

"Certainly," said John.

"Come you over here then. For quiet chats give me a corner where you can
see who comes. Have a tot o' something?"

"No sir, thank you," said John. The captain seemed almost relieved on
this occasion, instead of jeering at the refusal.

"Well, I don't blame you. If you do what I want you to do a clear sober
head will be no hindrance to you--nor to me, sir--nor to me. Fact is, I
ain't taking near so much myself now."

They sat on the corner bench whence they could see the door and those
who went past in the street.

"And now, sir," said the captain, "I know your breed; and to show you my
confidence in you, afore we say a word of business I tell you what I
have not told another soul in this town, drunk or sober; yes, drunk or
sober, I keep my thumb on it. Upcott is your name, sir, John Upcott as I
heard, making inquiries gentle like, and now, sir, I gives you mine. I
present myself to you, Mr. John Upcott--Captain"--and here his voice was
low but quite clear--"Avery."

"Eh?" said John.

"Even so, Mr. Upcott, as you remark--eh! But there you are. That's me in
dealing with men. I'm no Bristol merchant, sir. I'm no pimping Bristol
merchant. I come to business straight and show my hand at the word go.
Sink me if I don't! 'Tisn't a Bristol merchant's way, but it's my way
and then if one goes back on me I know how to deal with him." But from
all tales of Captain Avery that were then current it struck John that
the captain had a better opinion of his methods than the facts of his
ongoings would bear out; for was it not known how Captain Avery had made
himself rich by aid of other pirates and then, cleverly getting all
their joint plunder aboard his own ship, had slipped his cable one night
and gone off?

Upcott stared at the captain with a feeling of horror, and yet with a
certain curious respect; for a man who can rule a shipload of
cut-throats, tight packed at that, and take them helling through the
great sea-valleys, must have some masterly capacity. And just as John
recovered himself again after the shock of this introduction that old
parrot in its melancholy voice drawled sharply: "Prepare to meet thy
God--the ship's going down."

"Odd rot that bird!" said Avery. "'Tis an unchancy phrase it has; and
the way I am now, in this place, makes me mislike it more. But to
business, John Upcott, and no bones about it--that's me; that's Captain
Avery."




CHAPTER XI

"IS YOUR DRUNKEN BOATSWAIN ABOARD?"


"Are you a business man?" asked Avery abruptly, settling the long tails
of his coat behind him on the settle.

There was a flicker of a whimsical smile on John's face.

"No more am I," said Avery; "and that's the trouble. Them business men
are too much for me. I see their games plain as the sun but they always
do me brown for all I see through 'em. You see, they begin a-talking
business with you and so long as they're having their way they keep on
talking business; but when you chip in with your side they shore the
talk off on to beer, or skittles, or play-actin', and have you seen
this? and have you seen the other? till they gets on a subject as
interests you. And then when you're in good key over the talk that ain't
about business they slips in a bit of business sideways and says: 'By
the way, I've been enjoyin' this talk so much I well nigh forgot'--and
ten to one, you bein' still on the laugh over some story or some tale of
a rencounter of old days, you lets 'em have their way. 'Here's a fine,
affable cully,' says you, 'and I ain't goin' to argue too hard with en
and be too close with en.' So he has his way. Then there ain't no more
'Good-day to you, Captain Avery,' after that; no more 'How's the captain
this morning?' But they just swings round and says: 'Now, you idiot,
we've settled the business and--my time's precious if yours ain't.'
That's business men. Pimps, I call 'em, pimps!" Avery paused and
breathed deep. "It's like this with me," he continued. "I came up to
Bristol with a fortune--fortune!" and his voice went up in a cry, and
then he looked round suddenly cautious, leant across the table and
whispered the word; and the whisper was perhaps more forceful than the
cry. "A fortune; yes, sir, a fortune. And it cost me a bit of planning
and devising and o' blood, yes, sir, blood, my own and others, I tell
you. There's diamonds I got from the Great Mogul, turquoises like his
daughter's eyes and rubies like a drop of blood; and there's opals--them
opals is wonderful stones. 'Tisn't that I'm what you would call a swipes
of a man the like would sit toying with his lady's garters what he had
in memory of her, or wearin' of a twist of her hair in a locket, or
fondlin' of her kerchief, and sittin' dreamin' of her. No, sir; I'm one
of these up and board 'em men, plunder and home again and no sittin'
around dreamin.' That's me with everything--victuals and plunder. That's
me! I take all my liquor neat, and my life too, and all my victuals
underdone. But for all that--them opals I could sit a-fingering and
turning over quite a while. With a ruby you see it all--just a drop o'
blood, frozen like. Diamonds? Well, diamonds mean money, but they're
cold, hard lookin' things and the best service of them is for some
house-breaking cully to cut the glass out o' windows. But
opals--opals--some o' them opals you think you've seen all as is to them
and then you give en a bit of a turn and there you be seeing fresh in
'em. I've powdered one up, I mind once, to see what was to it, anyhow.
But it ain't no good. All the powdered bits is just the same."

"But what do you want me to do to help you?" asked Upcott, for there was
no end to this.

"Now you're talking," said Avery. "To do? Well, you see, them Bristol
merchants has all my jewels, rubies, opals, diamonds. You'd think I
could ha' sold 'em to Charleston or Boston maybe, but no; everybody
there in the fence way was afeared of them. I comes to Ireland and
there--I was afeared. Then I comes here, to Bideford, and sent up to
Bristol two-three careful messages and down comes first one and then
another merchant to see me. Well--I'm no merchant; I'm no pimping-minded
Bristol merchant. First one I was wary of and didn't show him all I had
by a long ways; but down came another of the same breed, but more sharp.
First fellow took me for a fool. Second cully had been posted up on me.
He fleeced me. I'll slit his weazand yet--here or hereafter. That's
me--that's Captain Avery! The first man was what you might call a
frigate, in a manner o' speaking, and the second was a sloop, in a way
o' speaking. Made a dash up, came aboard, took the lot. There was me a
rich man, rolling in wealth, and couldn't dispose o' me wealth; for it
was too big. And the warrants was out for me you see, me and Kid. Kid!
Who was Kid? A dam' swipes! Think o' Kid and me on the same
proclamation! Why, I've ruled the toughest crews in all the seas; and I
had what you call ideas. I was for doing new things. Cap'n Morgan had
cleared the West, pretty near. Did I content meself turnin' over where
he had been afore me, like an old beldam over a bucket at the fore-door?
Not me--not Avery! I just steps down in the cabin one day and tells the
skipper--'I'm cap'n now, and we're goin' to do summat. If you don't like
it you can go ashore. If the idea likes you, you can come as me
supercargo.' He didn't like it, so I put him on a sand-spit--that's
me--Avery. I hear now as how I set a fashion like, with that; and many a
smart young lad now does the same with a cap'n as has got too fat on the
poop. That's me! And don't it seem a pity to you that a man with a mind
like this 'ere mind o' mine should be bilked, sir, cozened, sir, by them
pimps up to Bristol? Mind you, they scared me clean away once when I
kep' on writin' 'em to settle up for the jewels they had took away from
me. I ran for it to Ireland. Said they'd put the traps on me and I was
scared. A man what's kinged it on the poop don't hanker for the Triple
Beam. And then I says to meself one day: 'Avery! What are you, a man
what has diddled the best cap'n on the high seas and plundered the
treasure ship o' the Great Mogul, what are you doin' here feared away
from your lawful rights,'--for mark you, them things is mine!--'feared
away by them grinnin,' sleek, blinkin'-eyed, grey-faced, tubby Bristol
fleecers?' Back I comes here by Plymouth. Some of them Dartmoor savages
set on me and me walkin' over. I finished 'em! Me! But I didn't have a
penny to me name--and me owns thousands--pearls and rubies and diamonds
and silk stuffs. And now what I want is a likely partner; and then we go
to Bristol and lay boldly aboard o' the offices o' them pimps--you at
the door to keep anyone from goin' out or comin' in while I slits their
weazands or gets me own back. Oh! damn 'em, damn 'em!" And then the
notorious pirate collapsed on the table all quivering and broken.

Suddenly he looked up with a terrible face.

"Don't you think me a weakling," he said, his jaw twittering, "but I
ain't had a bit to eat for a week. I had a little phial o' pearls left,
and the landlord o' the Mariners, when I offered him one for a week's
board, says: 'How did you come by these?' says he; and then he looked at
me--and he recognized me from the proclamation and I'd to give him half
the phial of pearls to shut his face. Me! Me--Cap'n Avery, feared o' a
clodpoll in Bideford! Now I'm wary; and I've got no money. But once we
get to Bristol, sir, and face them fellows we're safe--and we go shares,
you and me----"

At this entered Hacker, in quest of Upcott, spied the two in the corner
and came toward them. Then suddenly he stopped.

"Well, well," he said, "who'd have thought it?"

Avery's knowing eyes stared on Hacker like a wolf's.

"How's Captain Avery?" said Hacker, leering.

"You make a mistake, sir," said Avery. "Me name is Rogers."

"Oh, is it?" said Hacker.

"Sure," said Avery, "as this young man will inform you. I don't know
you, sir. You have made some mistake."

"Prepare," said the parrot, "to meet thy God. The ship's going down!"

Hacker came closer, laid his hands on the ale-stained and burnished
table, and looking directly on Avery, said he:

"Is your drunken boatswain aboard?"

Avery, it turned out, had been living on swipes with the last of his
money and eating nothing. Besides he had led a wild life and now at that
cryptic phrase he tottered to the floor, holding his head.

Hacker looked round, for the landlord came hastening.

"He is in a fit, I think," said Hacker. "He had better be carted home."

And so he was by two or three of the loafers who stood always outside
the ordinary, leaning first on one leg and then on the other and always
leaning against the wall. Bringing up the rear, each for his own
reasons, came the landlord, Hacker, Upcott. But the widow woman with
whom Avery lodged would allow no one to tarry after her lodger was laid
on the bed. All with various expressions glanced round the room,
elbowing together now, their task accomplished and Avery a-sprawl on the
low, dishevelled bed. But it was a woe-begone apartment and clearly the
home of one near his last pence.

"Come now--out with you," ordered the old dame, "and let the man be in
peace. Out with you--out with you. You'm in the way now your work be
done."

"What's all the haste? Do 'e want to be suspected o' doin' away with
un?" asked the landlord of the Dolphin. "He be a dyin' man."

"Drunk, you mean," said she.

"No," said the landlord. "He ain't had no drink this two-three days. He
be dyin'."

And at that the woman cried out to the dallying bearers to go for a
doctor, to go for a parson. And Captain Avery struggled to a sitting
posture on the low bed with its tangle of soiled blankets. "Give me a
tot o' drink," he said harshly.

The widow hastened to her cupboard and brought forth a brandy flask and
a broken cup. Avery took the cup with trembling hand, the widow helping
him. He made a wry face, shook his head. "I don't like the smell," said
he. He made another effort, puckering his nose over the cup as though
the odour were repugnant, put his lips to it and then threw backward,
blowing out his lips, just wet and no more, in loathing. The onlookers
gazed one to another.

"I heard you askin' for a doctor," said Avery looking round with his red
eyes. "I'm past doctorin'. I heard you askin' for a priest. I mind
Captain Flint's quartermaster at Hispaniola when they brought him the
priest. 'What's that you're carryin'?' he says. 'The host,' says the
priest. Quarter-master grins and says he, 'Sure,' says he, 'and it comes
again as of old upon an ass.' And then the priest comin' nearer he looks
close to him. 'You!' he says. 'You! Why? You come to me? And now,' says
he, 'what did you do with my sister?' Nobody ever knew what he meant,
for he tried to get at the priest and that finished him. You know what
priests and parsons is with women. Them not workin', you see, and always
a-hearin' confessions and thinkin' about the seven sins all day. Pirates
is cleaner--up and doin'. That's me! That's Captain Avery! Oh! I've seen
some things in my ti----what's that? What's that?" He clapped his hands
to his head and fell dead, back on his greasy pillow.

When I came this length I was filled with a hope that the captain might
have had, somewhere in the chamber, hid perhaps in the wainscoting,
perhaps even on his person, under his shirt, in a canvas bag, a chart
preserved, showing some islet in the magic sea with whales spouting
about it and dolphins curvetting, the islet where some other portion of
his treasure lay. And thither, thought I, my John Upcott might go, and
come home in the last chapter glorious and gemmed. But no. The affair
was but an interlude in John's life, so far as worldly gear went. It
was but an interlude so far as that kind of romance goes. But there is a
deeper kind of romance, if only people would have it, a deeper romance
than that which I scented at first and sought. Otherwise the affair was
no interlude, but part of the very stuff that made him. "Now for my life
it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not a history, but
a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable." Uncle
had read him that passage once.

The part that Hacker had played in Avery's passing, Hacker's bearing
showing clearly that no question was to be asked by John regarding it,
did but serve as another hint to John, here, on the threshold of his new
life, that there are more things than glamour and tinsel in the wide and
windy world.




CHAPTER XII

WITH THE PACK


The _Torridge Maid_, with her hundred men and her twenty guns, went over
bar and stood for Hartland Point. It was morning, and the bays swung
open and disclosed themselves to the mariners. And here, already, began
for John the testing of what is called manhood.

Upcott, looking landward, saw the mists rising in wavering grey pennons
from the shingles, swinging athwart the cliffs. Fields of heather, and
green lands, and ploughed lands suddenly leapt into the day where the
mists dispersed and rose till the last grey scarf lay along the hill
edges, thinned, was dissipated and Devon lay open to the new day and to
the sea. And to look on his native land so, from the vantage of the
waves, to survey it thus, as it was deliberately and particularly
disclosed, moved Upcott deeply. He had not known his land was so kin
with him; it seemed alive and he to be sharing its joy in this placid
unveiling and rejuvenation in the autumn morning. But, if he were to be
a wearer of the mask to hide his heart, he committed an error here, at
the very off-going, in staring as he did wistful toward the shore. If he
was hereafter to force men to take him as he was, then he committed no
error.

But here is only the beginning of things.

He might yet prove himself greater than all those manly ones who cast no
glances ashore--some lest their comrades might mock them; a few, because
for this or that cause Devon really meant nothing to them, for them was
surely dead. Strange faces these, marked with greed of gold, or with
savagery, or with love of such brief, fierce spells as they knew in the
ordinaries of the water-fronts of the American ports and the Caribbean
Islands; or marked with all these things; and on their foreheads you
might have surmised their destiny: the purple sea their place of
pillage, the grey sea their winding sheet, with all the world for a
headstone. Most were bleary with their farewell potations. One required
no more fingers than his own to count those who were wholly sober. And
they wrangled and argued, and talked of other ships in which they had
sailed, as they drunkenly set things ship-shape, and showed one another
how we did aboard the last ship, the so-and-so--that was the ship for
you, no apple batter aboard her, no come and tuck me in, mother, but get
a move on and let 'em see her paces.

For these mariners were little more than boys.

Out of the hundred there were fifty or so whose ages ran from eighteen
to twenty-one; the other twenty-five, say, from twenty-one to
twenty-seven, a score but turned thirty, which leaves you but a matter
of five older than these. And so, Hacker, quartermaster, with his
forty-two years was patriarchal. Some talk to-day of the youthfulness of
our warriors and seamen, as though such youthfulness were a new thing;
but our empire was made by boys.

Hacker smiled when he heard a wild youth say to the dreamy-eyed John:

"Thinking about the junket and the mazzard-pie ashore, be you?"

John did not smile, but yet he looked round on the jeering one.

"I'm thinking what a land is Devon," said John, staring expressionless.

"And wishing yourself safe ashore already by the looks of 'e," said the
youth, still smiling with that smile that never deludes anyone into
thinking it a sign of good-humour. But the youth was not invited by
John's precise reply nor by his stare as of a man cut out of a stone, so
he allowed that little interchange of word, and grin, and stare, to
serve by way of introduction between them and rolled forward to another
man who stood by the bulwark gazing on the foam-fringed shore, stole
softly behind him, put a mocking arm round his neck and said, with
rollicking insolence: "Kiss me good-bye, my maiden."

But he who was thus mocked looked round sharply and removed, with
deliberation, the caressing and mocking arm.

"Don't do it! I've sailed afore wi' you, Scudamore. I'd 'a thought you'd
'a known I don't allow no man to stroke me."

The bully's face lost its mockery a moment and there shadowed in his
eyes a kind of blent courage and fear, for he knew that there were
onlookers. He glanced round. Yes, there were sinister eyes studying him
to discover if he was a man to sustain his insolence.

"Can't you take a bit o' fun?" said he and recaptured his lying smile.
Those who have seen, in drawing-rooms, the meeting of ladies who happen
to be enemies, or seen bullies on the high seas, or in barrack-rooms,
will understand the kind of smile of which I write here.

But the bully's prey did not trouble to look round again; still gazing
absently shoreward, he said gently, and evenly, and placidly: "Go to
hell."

There was no lift in his voice; the order needs no exclamation point; to
put one would spoil the idea of how deliciously deliberately he spoke.

Of course the men laughed; and the bully tapped the shore-gazer on the
shoulder.

"See yur," he said, "what you mean talking to me like that? Do you think
you'm a better man nor me? I'll gie ye a hat on t'nose. If you takes me
for a gawkin you'm wrong."

The shore-gazer looked negligently over his shoulder, his head held so
that the bully had the taunting glimpse of his curled nostril and the
underside of his jeering jaw.

"Oh, go to hell," said he in a tired voice. And again the crew laughed.

The bully moved away. And then he saw that in doing so he made a
mistake--for those near leered on him.

The rules of the pack are very simple.

One man pushed himself in the bully's way and then gave a look as of
parodied astonishment, as though the collision had been accidental.

Bully Scudamore saw that he must recover himself, so he thrust aside the
man with whom he had collided. True, it was a slight push he gave; but
those who think women have the monopoly of perception of subtle shades
of meaning have to see real swashbucklers on sordid forecastles.

I fear you may find this part rather tedious, but I shall cut it short.

"Don't you hit me!" said the man who had taken it upon himself to make
jest of the bully.

"I didn't hat," said the bully, "I only shoved." It was a fatal remark.
He was losing ground and the words were no sooner out than he knew his
mistake and added, for recovery, "If I hat you'd know of it."

Then stepped forward the man who had been gazing shorewards. Talk of
subtlety!

"See yur," said he, "this be all along o' me."

Up he stepped into the ring already forming for the other two and
smashed his fist in Scudamore's face, sending the bully crashing to the
deck.

Scudamore was up in a second and charged on his assailant. The two met,
sparred, and bully Scudamore tried to come to grips, a believer in his
weight and in the efficacy of his hug. But his opponent staved him off,
smashed him to the deck again. "Good man, Ashplant!" cried the crew,
admirers of the victorious.

Up rose Scudamore suddenly, or half rose, and even as he was in the act
of rising caught Ashplant by the legs, tripped him, and had no sooner
brought him thus to the deck than he knelt three times in his middle
before a man could interfere, and so disordered Ashplant's wind, and
that hero of the placid voice lay gulping for breath and gasping some
words in an attempt to explain, in his pride and mortification, what was
evident enough in all conscience, that Scudamore had not fought fair.
But Scudamore did not rise, was still crouched by the side of his
stuttering foe, because no one had hauled him off, perhaps all being too
drunk.

And while some cried: "Good man, Ashplant!" others cried: "Go it,
Scudamore."

So Ashplant accepted the conditions, swung up an arm and, still gasping
to recover breath, but valiant, caught the bully by the throat and
plucked him to his breast even as he lay there--and followed the sound
of Scudamore strangling. Then--this is life, not a story in which only
pretty things happen, though I believe things do right themselves
eventually--then the choking bully stuck his thumb in his enemy's eye
and wriggled free at the moment of that assault.

"That for you!" he cried, thickly, from his choking.

And though the affair was hideous, bully Scudamore had evidently won the
fight--and you know that interesting tendency of the public to huzza
over victors.

But perhaps one should not be distressed by such things; there is always
a higher court.

Into the ring dashed the quartermaster, a belaying-pin in hand and
felled Scudamore to the deck as he might have felled a beast in a
slaughter-house.

Says he: "W'm to sea now, lads. Us bain't on Bideford quay." And then to
the man with the piteous optic: "You go aft there and I'll come and tend
your eye."

Aft went Ashplant, his forehead in his hands and the thick blood between
his fingers.

"Put Lord Goring there below," said the quartermaster, indicating the
fallen bully: a phrase that was by way of being an antiquated witticism,
or with a tinge of humour, it would appear--as a boy on the streets
might to-day, belatedly for sure, and only to some minds wittily, call
after a man with a goat-beard and soup on his shirt-front and a Wagner
pipe in his paw: "Hullo, Kruger!"

"Get en out of the way," said the quartermaster, "and keep the decks
clear. You take this ship for a bloody cock-pit? You mark me, you lads,
you'm to sea. I'll teach ye different if ye think you'm to a Bristol
bawdy-house. You'm out in the wide wurdle now. I'll make men o'you--not
swabs."

John Upcott took some more notes. He had perceived all the _nuances_ of
the affair, had even seen that perhaps it was his duty--according to
Cocker--to take up Ashplant's trouble as Ashplant had taken up another
man's. But though he perceived these subtleties he did not act upon
their suggestion. And he hung back, so, not so much from cowardice as
because he was not quite satisfied with the usages of the pack.

Yet somehow he admired Hacker's way, for all his vocabulary. There was
an air about Hacker as though he cried: "This is a cock-pit of a life,
but I'll see some ideas of decency in it if I do have to crack a skull
to get the ideas in."

And here it was that John burnt his boats in a spiritual sense. The cold
of the sea-wind was in his heart, side by side with his regrets at
leaving home and his sense of relief at having escaped from the lurking
dread of his mother's sighting, pursuing, discovering his secret.

"Stand by to go about!" roared the skipper. And as they ran on the deck,
"All ready about!"--"Raise tacks and sheets!"--"Mainsail
haul!"--"Forebowline!"

And the chant of the helmsman, "Helm's a-lee!" vibrated in his heart. He
thrilled with a wild joy and was brought in tune with the sea and the
sea-wind at hearing that cry.

And then there struck him a simple truism: That his mother was older
than he, and alone now, and his duty was at home, and that here he was
leaving her. The refrain of the adventurous sea and the echoes of the
voice that had talked to him in the darkness of the Abbotsham farm were
both in his heart. Then it was that he burnt his boats, in the spiritual
way, so difficult to tell in coarse words. He determined to listen ever
for that quiet voice, that whisper under the wild lilt, even when he
exulted as he did then, at that very moment, in the abandon and the wild
concentrated joy of freedom.

Irony again! Irony again! Within the month his hands were to be dipped
in blood.

But now he thought of his mother, and something of the clarity of her
atmosphere was round him like a spell. He read her in the far receding
depth of clearness between the tossing wave tops and the drooping
ceiling of the sky. She was that clearness. That clearness was she. And
the clearness was a greater thing than all the tormented ocean seething
in itself, or than the clouds, great and terrible though they were, or
than the wind that drove them. There was the infinite, receding,
clearness between stooping cloud and smoking sea--an infinite clearness.

John, as he looked forth then, decided to adopt a policy of silence and
aloofness.




CHAPTER XIII

THE ISLE PROVIDENCE


The _Torridge Maid_ was running for the Isle Providence and all hands
were looking forward to the landfall; for two days ago, very early,
indeed ere the sea was lit, the look-out had sighted a ship on the port
quarter, a ship that brought brave news.

"Sail O!" the cry had gone from the bleak masthead, and expectant hands
had tumbled on deck; because they were now passed through the Windward
and beyond the Leeward Islands and March being now well advanced, one
might look to see, at any hour, the castled ships of Spain coming regal
through the sea from Panama and Darien. But the ship picked up that
morning was alone, and no galleon, but just such another brig as the
_Torridge Maid_. And the two had come closer in the seas, like meeting
ants, and had stretched antenn, and touched, and passed on.

It was a memorable occasion. The hour was four of the morning and when
Upcott leaped up the companion-way and took the first volley of wind
into his lungs, stepping forth on the canted deck, he looked directly
out on a star stationed low in the pallid sky near the verge of the
world. And newly out of the forecastle's fetid air, into the gusts of
that hour before daylight, not only his face tingled but his heart
tingled with the sea. He found the _Torridge Maid_ swinging along with
the wind on her larboard, riding the slopes of the mounting and
subsiding waves with a flutter of foam crisply breaking from her. All
the tossing world was dark purple. The list the brig had on her was
because she was under much canvas, Master Lang being a devil to drive
her.

"God!" said John, "what a morning, what a world!"

I think it was rather an adoration than a blasphemy.

And over heeled the _Torridge Maid_. She swung, she rolled, she rolled
farther, speeding and wavering. Her yards dipped and the star seem to
swim upward. And John's heart leapt with a half fear, half mad love of
the night, the wind, the purple sea, the hour before dawn under the
amazing sky that was neither dark nor light. The Nirvanic idea was in
his soul, but he had not the skill to express it nor the knowledge that
others had felt it.

The sea and the sky and the wind were in his heart.

He saw the whole circle of his world of ocean as it were poised and
wavering as the poised compass wavered there before the balancing,
straddle-legged helmsman.

The ships drew closer, discovered themselves to each other in the
bursting morning, lit their top sails at the rising sun, and anon their
hulls at the risen sun, the black of them flashing into gold like
mirrors as they rose on the rollers. They drew within sight of flag,
within hail of voice.

"What ship is that?"

"The _Torridge Maid_ of Bideford--Master Lang. Who are you?"

"_Three Half Moons_ of Plymouth--Master Hands."

The vessels held on close and the _Torridge Maid_ had latest news of the
Gulf and the doings there.

"You should join the expedition if you be looking for rich pickings."

"What expedition?"

"De Pointis is going to make a landing somewhere on the Main. That's
better than the high seas. The high seas are getting overwell watched."

"But that's a Frenchy."

"Never mind that! He knows his business, they say; and half the
expedition will be English."

"Where are they to gather?"

"Hispaniola, the Tortugas, and the Isle Providence."

The words came fluttering across the windy space above the brightening
sea and, for some reason, moved Upcott, fired him more than wine,
delighted him more than songs of birds, thrilled him like love.

Then the ships held apart for sea-room, but all day were in sight each
of each, with their sun-splashed and blue-shadowed canvass and their
swinging hulls flashing back the golden suns. Then the wind died away
and the _Three Half Moons_ went from sight over the horizon with the
last of it, leaving the _Torridge Maid_ to flutter slower and more slow
in an area of calm into which the dolphins came with their many hues,
paused to look on her, and sported on.

Then came the wind again ere sunset, after much whistling; and three
days later the _Torridge Maid_, having clapped upon the fortunate trade
winds, picked up the Isle Providence and came safely into the bay, let
go her anchor with a splash of silver foam and a rattle of chains, and
lost way and swung at last at rest beside the _Three Half Moons_, whose
crew welcomed their late acquaintance with gentle and profane banter,
arms akimbo along the bulwarks. There were three other ships in the bay,
all waiting the hour when De Pointis should come to these seas and lead
them (for the hearts of youth and seamen are hopeful) to greater
treasure hoards than ever Lolonois or Morgan led. And in the hour of
waiting, to relieve its tedium, they disported themselves ashore in
this, the latest lair of the sea-rovers, latest and safest now that
their calling became more perilous--the Isle Providence. Now the Isle
Providence was a hot spot.




CHAPTER XIV

CAPTAIN AVERY'S PARADISE


Here was the paradise of Captain Avery. In the middle of the curving
bay, open to the blue of the sea and the humming or shouting of the
reef, the tiny town lay, a freshness coming to it from seaward, a tropic
freshness; and from backward, beyond where the coco-palms fanned the
isle and made a wavering fringe against the sky, came stench of decaying
vegetable matter in the swamps.

As for the town--a modern American would say that the Isle Providence
was experiencing its _boom_. The ordinaries were rilled day and night
with seamen and adventurers dicing and drinking--for to-morrow they
might die. And for the same reason the Isle Providence inhabitants were
reaping their harvest.

It was not everywhere that buccaneers could go now, since Morgan had
turned from pirate captain to pirate slayer. It was advisable to take as
many precautions as possible: a letter of marque with the San Domingo
seal was worth having, in default of a better. Kid, by the way, knew
what he was doing when he wheedled such a missive out of Colonel
Fletcher of New York--though in the last pass for sure it did not save
him from Execution Dock. The old haunts of the rovers were being made
uninhabitable; so the islands of the gulf had turn about of providing
for the rovers and of affording them space of land, amidst the sea they
harried, whereon to riot.

John Upcott wandered on the beach, ploughing in the sand. He had that
feeling of walking about in worlds not realised that one knows in new
places: one looks on at the novel world and seems doubtful if all be
real or but a dream. A voice hailed him:

"What cheer, John!"

He turned about, with his cloud of attendant flies, and there was Will
Ravenning, his face, never handsome, now positively ugly, blotched, and
a-gleam with sweat in its furrows. He had two pistols in his sash, a
gaudy silk sling over his shoulder, velvet breeches of Spanish make, his
shirt open at the breast for freshness, and a silk scarf wound around
his neck to prevent blistering under the chin by the reflected heat of
the burning isle. He went bare-foot, but wore a hat of broad brim, of
finely woven straw.

"Hullo, Will!"

Upcott ploughed back to his old friend and took his proferred hand. He
noticed that Will's eyes were bloodshot.

"What a life!" said Will. "What a life! This is sure like living. How do
you come here?"

"On the _Torridge Maid_," said John. "Tell me----"

"_Torridge Maid!_ Why then--'twas we told you of the gathering. Us saw
each other and didn't----"

"Tell me--where's brother Tom? Is he ashore? He sailed with you, didn't
he?"

"Eh?" And Will stared and sobered.

"Where's brother Tom? Is he ashore?"

Will stood blinking and sweating, his heavy jaw clenched, his lips
twitching. He had the look as of a reproved truant brought to book.

"I can't tell 'e! I can't tell 'e! Seems I always bring 'e bad news." He
looked into John's face and then, turning about, incontinently fled,
Upcott at his heels gasping.

"What is it, Will? For God's sake, Will, what is it? Tell me--where's
Tom?"

Will looked over his shoulder as he ran, the sand flying from his bare
feet, and then a thought came to him how to escape and, gaining the
houses, he fled into a place that was part ordinary, part brothel. But
John followed on his heels--into the sound of raucous roaring of men and
clinking of glasses ("and mugs a-walloping on the tables and a dust
raisin' and you can sit and shout to yourself"--you remember Avery's
desire?) and rattling dice and high piping laughter of painted women.

"What's ado? What's ado? Trying a race for who pays shot?" cried one.
But Will made for a corner and then turned about, at bay. It was no
use--John was there.

"Sit down," said he, "and I'll tell 'e--if you must have it."

He turned to a negro and ordered two glasses of rum. John looked quickly
round the hot chamber to take his bearings. Their entry had caused a
head or two to be turned--but that was all; and now that they were
seated they were ignored.

"Well?" said John.

"See she?" asked Will, indicating, with a lift of his brows and drift of
his bloodshot eyes, a woman who lay back on cushions, entertaining, with
flashing teeth and eyes and swings of her head and touchings of her hair
with serpentine arms, half a dozen young men who swaggered before her
like play-actors--as indeed they were.

"What of she?" asked John and then he saw, around her throat, a little
black ribband, whence hung, between her breasts, of which she was
inordinately proud, a silver crucifix. Something in the back of his
mind, he knew not what, told him that the woman had some knowledge of
his brother. He had never seen the crucifix and he did not recollect the
words of the old witch then, unless subconsciously.

"Tell me," said he; "he is dead?"

Will looked on John as though afraid. Then he noted that John stared
directly toward the woman on the cushions; noted that as he asked his
question, quietly, he had his eyes on her.

"Yes," said Will.

John's gaze did not waver from the woman.

"How?" he asked.

"Her took a fancy to he."

"Her--who? She?"

"Iss; that woman, Marie of Spain, they call she."

"Took a fancy?" asked John. "How?"

Will drained his glass.

"Us came in here and got talking to she and her saw that your Tom did
not take to she. Hands, our master, was to one side, close to she,
a-stroking her neck, making love to she. Her had he round her little
finger, as they say. Aye--zure 'nough--that ring on her little finger
Hands gave she. Her turned to your Tom and never looked so much as if
her felt Hands caressing she, and told your Tom to sit closer. He didn't
do it just so as her liked, for her wanted he to be looking at she like
them lads be looking now. And Tom was kind o' turning up his nose at
she. Oh! I know women----"

"Well, well! What of it?" And still John's eyes were on the woman.

"Oh, Hands, he rose angry like and walked up and down a spell looking
down on Tom now and then like as a lad's father might do: 'I'm your
father, sir--I'm your skipper.' I think Tom was near makin' love to she,
for spite, like. Her saw it all and was enjoying herself. One thing she
saw zure 'nough, was as how Tom wasn't feared of Hands; and I reckon
that made she angrier that he didn't make love to she--and him the best
set-up man of the lot of them. Tom gives a look to her, seein' droo her,
and kind o' smiles, as near friends wi' she as he had any taste to be, I
reckon. I was close beside. 'You're makin' our master jealous, you be,'
he said, quiet like and smiling over the fun. 'I don't care for your
master,' says she; 'you'm a better man than he;' and she rolls her eye
on him. Rot me if I could ha' gone on like Tom. I'd 'a clipped her and
caressed her afore Hands right there--zure 'nough. He didn't. Then her
bent across him as if she was going to speak to me and puts her hand on
your Tom's knee and looked up in's face. Her didn't look to me at all.
'I want you,' she says. Aye--just as she be doin' there with thicky lads
then. But your Tom he looked down and kind o' sniffed on she and
stretched acrost and took up his drink. Speak! Him didn't say a word.
She'm a liard, too. But her stares at him then--I see her eyes--I see
how she looked--and her cries, 'You call me that! You call me that!' And
her jumps back from he. Women, I tell ye, comes out a-top someways. The
only way is never to see 'em, never to look to 'em. If all men did that,
reckon they'd die off and something better come along. But there! I for
one don't have no intention to let 'em alone. 'What did him call you?'
says Hands. And her looked back to Tom again but Tom was looking at she
with his eyes just a little bit shut like and his head to one side,
sizin' her and kind o' interested like, and nothing else. 'I can't tell
you what he called me,' she says. Hands made at your Tom then. 'I'll
teach ye!' he says."

"Killed him?" asked John huskily.

"Iss. So quick as that," and Will flicked his hand in the air. "Struck
en on the neck."

John sat still staring on the woman. Then he rose. Will clutched him,
and "What be you about?" he asked.

"I'm a-going to kill she," said John.

"Eh? No! God! Oh my God! no. You can't kill a woman."

John sat helpless.

"Where's Hands to?" he asked suddenly. "Is he ashore?"

"Iss, somewheres; I don't know."

"Come and point en out to me."

"No, man; no, man. It won't do no good."

"Very well. I'll get someone else to point en out to me. 'Tisn't like he
was a nobody. A master everybody knows." And John rose and went from the
place without another word.

Out in the stagnant day he saw a man with a Spanish morion on his head
and wearing a long cloak that caused him to sweat the more in that heat,
but which he needs must wear for the swagger.

"Who's that?" he asked a man by the door.

"I don't know his name, but he be master of that brig out there--the
_Three Half Moons_."

"I thank you," said John and stepped across to the gorgeous master. He
saluted him and, "Captain Hands?" he said.

"That's my name, young man," said Hands. "What can I do for you?"

"You can draw your sword, sir," said John. "I am the brother of the man
you killed in that place and I have come to kill you."

Something he did not know he possessed woke in John's soul. He had not
been taught the grand manner, though he had learnt to fence; but when he
drew he saluted with just the perfect dignity.

"Who are you?" asked Hands staring.

"John Upcott is my name. We come from Abbotsbury, in Devon," said John.

"Well, John Upcott, if you must die you must. I'm sorry for you doing
this, all for the sake of a trull."

John answered nothing. He thought to say: "You do not understand." Then
he considered that to say aught would be but vanity and vexation of
spirit. He himself was against the dead wall. At any rate he knew that
from an outlook even far beyond the outlook of Master Hands the thing
was ridiculous. To kill Hands was not to get to the root of the matter.
But John thought that, as life was, to kill Hands was the only thing
left him to do.

The captain cast aside his gorgeous, shimmering, velvet cloak and drew,
and they looked eye to eye, unwavering.

At the first clash of steel there was a pushing back of chairs in the
ordinary and flying of sand from the feet of the curious congregating
without.

The two fell to it; and the crowd thronged and circled.

John had the sun in his eyes. But that was consistent. That was but a
part with the terms life offered him always. And he rejoiced in the sun
in his eyes, he coming more and more not only to expect, but proudly to
desire, handicappings. He bolstered himself up by telling himself that
these were life's tributes to him.

His lips were locked; his wrist was easy, his grasp sure; his eyes
never wavered from the stare of his antagonist.

Perhaps, after all, the glitter of the sun in his eyes gave fear to his
foe. Will said afterwards, telling the tale, that his eyes shone like
lamps. I think they were hard, yet elusive as opals. And they did not
waver, as a good swordsman's eyes should not; but they advertised no
coming cut or thrust. And there were cut, and thrust, and guard, and
parry, and pauses, and again the terrific play; and then a quick running
rasp of steel, clash of hilt on blade; for as John parried a thrust he
ran the deflected vigour of it off on the length of his own steel. And
then he lunged on, just continuing the parry, with a concentrated, calm
fierceness. There was the sound of the steel going through, his hilt
smote next on the second gold button of Hands' gaudy vest. Hands went
down dead and twitched John after him at the end of his triumphant
blade.

Then John wheeled about to the throng and picked out Will's face in the
circle and glared at him, standing there a little trembling and dazed
and short-breathed in his cock-pit with the onlookers round about.

"Will Ravenning," said he, indicating the throng with a wave of his
hand, which was red, because in hauling forth his blade he had been
splashed, "if there be any _Three Half Moon_ men here you can tell 'em
why I have done this."

Will was straightway besieged by the throng, those who were _Three Half
Moon_ men in haste to hear by what right this youth had challenged
their master, the others in admiration of the youth's fierce ease in
sword play. And John Upcott, turning aside, saw, in the doorway of the
ordinary, Marie of Spain, blowing a wreath of cigarro smoke and smiling,
showing her white teeth.




CHAPTER XV

AT THE SPANISH GALLEON


John Upcott had won his spurs and would accordingly now be spared much
"evil-eyeing."

Had it been in his nature so to do he might now even have set up as a
bit of a ruffler. For the slaying of Master Hands, when the story of
that affair was told, made him appear in a somewhat romantic light, and
as a bit of a hero.

But still you have John Upcott, just John Upcott, with his luck.

At least he could now, though he would not ruffle, go his own aloof ways
unmolested by such characters as Scudamore. Yet now, when he had won the
very condition for which he had longed, immunity from suspicions of
weakness, effeminacy, cowardice, from attempts to bully him, he must
suddenly lose hold of himself. The whole affair of his brother and Marie
of Spain and Master Hands preyed upon his mind. He must go about
morosely arguing to himself that affair, thrashing out its significance.

He passed on the yellow beach, trampling his small blue shadow in the
sand under the tropic noon, and something drew his gaze upwards to the
houses--and there was Marie of Spain, not looking at him, though it was
to her his head had jerked about unconsciously; no, not looking at him,
but looking past him, her eyelids drooping meditatively, she blowing
languid blue smoke.

He marked her fierce beauty--and had a sense of fear.

How, he asked himself, how to tame her? And then, walking on, he thought
that perhaps he had better leave her alone, that perhaps only so could
the evil of the evil woman be ineffectual. What was done was done, but
the world was not yet ended.

It struck him, considering Marie of Spain, that perhaps, if men never
looked to women at all, ignored them (women, of course, he surmised, in
their pride of the powers wherewith they gather men, would never believe
such aloofness possible) ignored them, ignored them, continued to ignore
them through all the instinctive clinging wiles of their adaptive
natures, let them show teeth, and lips, and limbs in vain, they would
die off for lack of caress, like famished flowers.

Then he thought of Cassandra, of Sis, of his mother--and discarded his
tormenting thoughts.

He had been directed to the place where his brother was buried on the
verge of the swamps and he stood beside the nameless mound. That took
him back home again. And thinking of his mother in his mood then, he
esteemed her life a cruel futility, and looking up to the glittering
tropic sky he blew a sneer through his nostrils. Then came a desolation
to his heart--his mother had never sneered--came a desolation to his
heart and he turned to retrace his steps from the mangrove swamp to the
bay--and passed into the most reputable ordinary! It was kept by an old
buccaneer, one of Morgan's men who had settled here, fearful of what his
old chief might do to him; for since Morgan had turned honest man his
war against unauthorised rovers was most relentless when the rovers
chanced to be men who knew too much about his own past. Old buccaneer
Thomas Wren kept his ordinary with a tight hand. It was not everyone who
could have board in his house. But though it was this so highly
respectable ordinary that John selected in his dull, defeated mood, he
yet called for a rum and put it over his throat like the driest
buccaneer that ever sailed the seas. He had a feeling as of another
mortal, not himself, directing his doings then; he was but a mute,
paralysed observer.

And now he who had held off from the convivial bottle sat down to the
solitary. He was aware of walls, of bars, barriers, constrictions. Life
seemed to him to have been conceived in a taunting or ironic spirit and
the rules of the game he thought too subtle: play as you would, evil
scored--and all this, alas! just at the moment when he might have
stepped forward in his life.

Instead he sat drinking. It was as though he had trained to the top
pitch, touched, and then could not hold. And as he drank he floated into
an airy world. He sat smiling over his cups and then looking up, said he
to those who lounged there:

"It is not so bad a world, after all."

They looked to him and smiled on his tone of grave enjoyment.

"And I can see," he went on, "that a man can very well live his own life
if he be minded so."

"Why, sure," said one to aid him; "live and let live," and winked to a
crony and they waited developments and the unfolding of the heads of
John's expected discourse.

"That is the word," said John. "Live and let live. There be different
ways of looking at life. There be different ways of looking at most
things; but I don't see why, because a man sometimes comes down, he
should tell himself he's always down. Now, look at me, I live up in the
air most times. My mate at home used to say he couldn't live the way I
lived. I could spend a whole day lying on the cliff top, listening to
the gulls and the sea. He could find naught in that. Give him a bottle,
or a maiden in the dark, he said; and I mind once he said to me: 'O-ho!'
he says, 'it's all very fine for you to say you like lying on the cliffs
a-thinking and a-thinking and seeing the gulls a-wheeling; but you'm
sure to come back, you've got to come back into the thick just like
everyone else. Don't you take yourself for better than others!" John
paused and smote the table before him. "Better!" he cried, "me take
myself for better than others! I don't! I don't say I'm better. If
there's any man here says I think myself better I'll show en! Why can't
a man listen to the gulls without----" he paused and looked moodily at
his glass and emptied it and signed for it to be replenished by the
stinking nigger with the dirty napkin on his arm. "And why, because a
man takes a glass once in a while, has that to be made the measure of
him and he to be told that--that there bain't anything in listening to
the gulls? Tell me that!" he cried. But no one had anything to tell. His
disdainful smile faded and he leapt to his feet.

"Tell me that!" he cried.

They thought that rum and sun were working havoc with John Upcott.

Then in the silence and amidst the curious scrutiny, he collected
himself. He drew erect and passed stiffly from the place. In the doorway
he met Will Ravenning.

"Now I know you!" said Will, staring at him both exultant and
contemptuous.

John caught Will by the coat. "Sir," said he, gravely, "if your brain is
fit to hear my argument, listen: if you had known me drunk all my life
and found me one day sober you would show as much sense in saying; 'Now
I know you.' Believe me, my dear" (this style of addressing is not in
Devon kept at all rigidly for use between the opposite sexes. Devon men
"my dear" each other, especially when in liquor) "believe me, my dear,
you are not fit to think about anything. Any little sense you have, you
learnt from me, just through coming in contact with me. When you'm left
alone and try to keep on a-thinking you'm worse than if you didn't try
to think at all. Uncle taught me a deal because I had it in me already.
But you'm only a poll parrot. When you'm left alone you get mazed. You
try to talk and go back to squeaking. You'm funny then." He looked sadly
at Will. "I'm sorry for you, Will, I am." And he passed on, while Will
entered the tap-room uncertain whether to be angry or no.

But somehow the house puzzled John. He wandered into the interior of it
and found himself looking out on the court to rearward. And then came a
soft step after him; and, looking round, he saw a damsel at his heels.

It was the daughter of the proprietor of _The Spanish Galleon_--Jenny
Wren--who followed quietly in the wake of the slightly divagating John.

The place was built Spanish fashion, with a _patio_ in the heart of it;
and John continued his lurching rearward, toward the _patio_ instead of
turning to his right. The wench came after him. She had been listening
to his talk within, from the doorway, and measuring him and wondering
just how much there was in his phrases.

"You should go to sleep, sir. You are not accustomed to so much rum, I
fear."

He turned about, contracting his brows, attempting to get her in
focus--for something had gone amiss with his eyes.

"I? Oh, I can stand anything," he said poignantly. Then he turned full
on her and stared in her eyes. He thought hers met him quite open and
frank; he saw kindness in them.

"Thank you," he said, "but I require no one to come to me and help me. I
can look after myself, face any man--do without any woman."

"You should go and have a sleep," she said. "I thought perhaps you were
looking for some place to sleep. There's one or two hammocks out there.
Go under the awnings. You certainly shouldn't go out in the noon sun in
the Isle Providence, like that."

He turned to obey her, seek the hammock, and making his exit to the
_patio_ he crashed his shoulder on the wall.

"'Tis only that I have not got my land-legs yet," he explained to the
girl as she caught his arm. But she conveyed him to a low-swung hammock
under the pale shadow of a stretched sail.

"There," said she, he subsiding. "Now, sir, you're all well." She stood
looking down on him, he sitting on the hammock; and she gathered he was
none so drunk, but more excited. "You're different from most men," she
said, searching his face, "and you shouldn't get like this."

"I am," he said. "Oh, I say it without conceit. 'Tis the way I see
things that makes me different. There's my father. He was a--well--no
matter. I learnt some things about life from him, seeing what a man
could come to. There's my mother--" he touched his hat that was askew on
his head. "By God! she's the finest woman on earth!" The girl frowned on
him.

John slacked back in the hammock and Jenny Wren took up a fan.

"You're hot," she said. "You are not accustomed to drinking rum. What
made you do this?"

"I don't know," he said.

"You do," said she; "you had some reason."

"It was just for a diversion," he said.

"True?" she asked. "Come now--true?"

"My brother--I was thinking of him."

"Oh, that should not have made you do this."

"No, it shouldn't, perhaps," and he hiccoughed and apologised.

"Life is so different, when you come to know it, from listening to the
gulls," he said, staring.

She had no word for that. That was beyond her. She moved in another way.

"You were wanting to forget something perhaps?" she said and her voice
rang sympathetic to the ears of the rummy John.

He drew a deep breath, trying to clear himself of the fumes, feeling now
a little fearful that he was being assailed by something else, more
meshing than rum fumes.

He looked at her and thought her eyes were kindly, wished he had never
bemused himself so. He thought a moment to cry out at her that he had
only taken the rum because he was sick of the rules of the game. There
were so many agonizing things, and the sum was excessive; the things
grew until, at last----

Instead: "Yes," he said, "it is lonely. If one had someone to tell who
understood it would be easier," and then he stopped, hearing his own
words and calling himself a puling child. Women, thought he, do not want
puling' children, thus falling between two stools; on the one hand aware
that there was something weak in thus declaring the necessity for
confirmation of his own feelings, on the other aware that to make a
woman's opinion his touchstone was the last thing that he desired to do.
He was drunk.

The woman captured him.

"Lonely?" she said. "I am sorry for you," and she stooped over him,
close, closer. Her breath came on his cheek.

His arm swung up even as he felt that he had rather thrust her away, and
he gathered her to him. Then he looked round the _patio_ and there being
no one there that he could see, and her body in his arms, telling him
that this, the breath of a woman, the warmth of her close to a man, was
the solace of a life whose enigma could not be solved, he dragged her
unresisting down beside him. And then she cried, gasping: "Sir, after
all you said in there! Oh! fie!"

He slackened his hold then a little, but she, feeling him slacken and
aware that he required but provocatives, made as to remove from him. At
that he clipped her to him again.

"What would your mother say?" she asked in a gasping voice.

He fell chill, the fumes of passion passed; he thrust her wholly from
the swinging hammock, recovered his hat that had fallen in the fray and,
struggling to a sitting posture on the hammock edge, glared up at her
where she stood like a ruffled hen.

She read his face and was before him with a speech.

"That's a way to treat me when I was doing all I could for you," she
said. "You are just like all men, after all."

He was crestfallen.

"I didn't mean it. 'Twas the drink," he said.

"Oh, was it?" she said and tossed her head.

"If only I hadn't touched it----"

He sat disconsolate, and with singing head, conjured up--or had flashed
before him by the John Upcott of other days--a picture of Cassandra
Gifford.

"And I expect you have a girl at home?" said Jenny.

"God forgive me, yes," said John, without looking up--and so missing the
anger that showed then on this girl's face.

He was assuredly too naf. Truly he was, he was different, after all,
from most men; others would have sworn "No," but he cried, "God forgive
me."

She turned from him.

He rose, and "I don't know what you'm thinking of me," he said to her
back which he thought vocal of wounded kindness.

She looked over her shoulder.

"Oh!" said she. "You are the worse o' drink."

Strange how some women make the John Upcotts petty: he had a thought to
say: "Well, it's your father's ordinary, is it not?" Fie, John! Instead,
he said, thinking what a mean, despicable creature he was, and noting
the girl's beauty: "Forgive me."

"I forgive you," she said and was gone, with a flash of lace at her
ankles across the sand of the _patio_ and a flash of her hand, her arm
up like a swan's neck and the fingers putting her hair back into the
lesser disorder, the merely sufficient disorder of her wonted coiffing.
And as John looked at her going he felt somehow, in her back, as it was
tautened in the pride of her going, in the swing of her draperies, in
the tossing of her head, a something that struck him as being a kind of
feminine taunt, a "That for you!"

And then came Ravenning to him, springing who knows whence?

"See yere, Mr. John Upcott," said he, "I see you then. And I want you to
know that thicky maiden is mine. The _Three Half Moons_ was in yere
ahaid of your tub and I'm ahaid o' you with this maiden. I told you
often enough you'd go back on your canting, Anabaptist, spoil-sport
ways; but when you do 'tis a pity you don't look for something that's
disengaged."

"Oh!" said John and sat up erect.

He had been grovelling in spirit; and here was hope. He laughed. He saw
the possible humour of the thing.

"All right, Will," he said. "I didn't know."

"Well, you know now," said Will, and somewhat mollified, "of course I
know she throws herself at plenty o' lads. The lads I can manage well
enough, mostly. She's a tricky piece, sure 'nough. I'd a bit o' trouble
over her myself, but I bain't goin' to share her while I'm here."

John seemed to be pondering some speech. Then he apparently thought
better of it and rose abruptly with a slight lurch. The fumes were
falling stagnant.

"Enough said," he said sharply. "I don't want, for old times, to have
trouble with you, Will." Then he paused, and thoughtfully added, as
though speaking to himself: "I shouldn't be surprised if, after all, my
brother did call Marie of Spain what she hinted he did."

"What's that to do wi' this?"

"Easy all!" said John. "I am beginning to see how women cause trouble;
they have a gift for it. But this wench ain't good enough for you and me
to fall out over, Will."

"Not she!" cried Will, winked, leered and took his old friend's hand in
a hearty, sordid grasp.

Then off he went in search of Jenny Wren, leaving John to think.

So you see how John did not get the world's prizes, tenderly guarded and
held away as he was, even in the moment when he thought the prizes worth
obtaining.

Well! he had learnt something. Stale from his drink that had so quickly
taken his head and, in the excitements following, been so quickly
nullified, he stood, uncouth, in the _patio_. He had learnt something
more about life--not without a wound.

And then he behaved in Adam's fashion. He blamed a woman.

"I wish," he said to himself, "that my mother had told me to beware of
women, instead of to be tender to en. But then perhaps she did not
know. She's different."

He was feeling pretty small, for though he had had the true measure of
the girl granted him at the end he had been humbled himself.




CHAPTER XVI

THE RENDEZVOUS


The heat was oppressive and it was a good thing for John to be free of
the woods and down on the beach at Tiburon where the sea wind could be
felt.

Of course he knew now who de Pointis was, for the Isle Providence had
discussed him well: a soldier of France who had had emissaries in the
islands these many months to inform all men of filibustering trend that
he was coming, as soon as France would give her authority, to pick up a
little army, it mattered not of what nationalities its units might be,
and go against the seaboard cities of the Don for plunder. This was all
to John Upcott's mind, as it was to the mind of every man aboard the
_Torridge Maid_.

De Pointis was late of coming, and when he did come he was
unconscionably haughty. Men like Hacker, who had known the other leaders
of expeditions against the Don, felt that they were ageing, that they
had lapsed over into new times with other manners.

Whether from aboard ship, looking to the land, or on the beach among the
buccaneers, Upcott felt that old sense of a froth on life, but was
haunted by the idea that far below the froth was a calm. He would lean
on the bulwark looking down into the water and see the coral there and
forests of seaweed stretching up like trees; then his eyes would rove
shoreward and mark the heat-haze along the land among the palms, their
tufted tops soaring out of it above the blue, and the dotted houses
looking through between the boles, and the land looked very low under
the immense sky. There was medley of colour on the yellow beach, where
were some scattered tents and stretched awnings; the filibusters moving
there like spots in a kaleidoscope; the picture gripped him somehow. And
then he would go ashore and draw near the inner circle where de Pointis
sat nonchalant, and sober, and expressionless, under his yellow awning
with the purple tassels, with his rapid, nipping talk and his refined
gestures and air as of cultured swagger.

Upcott's first sight of him was from the landward side, and he saw him
sitting in a great chair under the awning that cast more a mitigated
light than a shadow on him. And back of him, through the awning, were
the shining sea and the glittering horizon and the white line of the
bursting breakers.

In the offing lay his ships, and the ships of the filibusters come from
the Tortugas, Hispaniola, and the Isle Providence. And the high
twinkling gulls veered over all, now drawing together, now bursting
apart.

When Morgan recruited for his descent on Porto Bello he lay in a
hammock, fanned by a negress, having his gold cup replenished when it
was quaffed, as deliberately as one turns the sandglass.

De Pointis was abstemious. Kid and Avery and Tew and Hoare and Roberts
and all the rest of the infamous rovers, before or since, had a way of
making themselves more kin with their crews than had de Pointis. True
they all took the lion's share; but they unbent, they were at one,
somehow, with their men, though they did often keep order with a
belaying pin or the brass-bound edge of a bucket.

De Pointis was a man with an air of being sufficient to himself. He had
no curiosity to know the usages of other leaders, either as regarded
their care or neglect of themselves, or their attitude toward their
followers.

De Pointis did not unbend; and there were times that he would sit with
his head flung back and eyelids drooping languidly like a beauty: and
the buccaneers, come to talk over the expedition with him, would think
him a fop, until they discovered that he was weighing them so, damn him!
with his Nancy ways, and his poise like a rapier, and his delicate waist
and supple wrists with the fine lace on them, and the way he had of
yawning and putting his hand to his mouth when he talked!

But all this Upcott relished. He measured de Pointis for a rogue; but,
with the pack, a clean rogue was something. He saw something to admire
and yet felt he would come to hate de Pointis.

Sometimes after sitting so a space and the discussion going on, up would
go de Pointis's eyelids, and his chin, and his nostrils would sneer on
the captains, and he would rasp suavely on them his proposals, and turn
to look a question on Du Casse, in such a way as would make one think
that if Governor Du Casse seconded him it was always a seconding--and if
he did not it was a matter of moonshine.

Upcott, among the soldiers and seamen awaiting events, came closer where
the captains sat in their barbaric attire; for they seemed to vie with
each other in vulgar magnificence that ceased to be vulgar because all
the colours around were so bright. They sat about on cushions, under
their awnings of spread mainsails, gold-hilted daggers of Spanish make
in their sashes, great ear-rings in their ears. Many had impressed some
negress to stand behind and fan them. The whole scene was suddenly
colour-etched on Upcott's mind when, as he looked on, some straying wind
from the woods brought a scent of orchises to blend with the smell of
seaweed. And often after the scent of a quiet flower would flash the
whole scene on him again.

De Pointis held his position and had his way; at last the terms were
agreed upon: of the first million (they were about to do big things) a
thirtieth part was to go to those who did the work. The rest was for
those who sat at home, who gave de Pointis his ships and his stores and
his munitions--and legality for the venture! But the main thing was that
those who came with de Pointis, and the buccaneers who met him here,
were to share and share alike. Had there been any attempt to suggest
that they got less than de Pointis's men they might have more fiercely
objected to the excessive amount that those who sat at home in France
were to reap.

But they might as well have accepted any terms offered, because of what
was to befall so soon.

From the beginning de Pointis gave the filibusters a chance to show
their ruggedness.

They cursed him severely when, Cartagena before them, he ordered them,
not his own men, to the first landing. And Upcott shared the general
feeling--hatred of their leader: and yet they fought well! They cursed
him when he ordered them to the stiffest part of the fight.

"We'll show him," one cried. "He wants to see us crack his nut for him.
He wants us to pluck his orange. He wants us to get him what he wants
with our blood and save his own men. We see his game!" And then, "Oh
well! We'll show him we can do it!" And so they did not mutiny, but
fiercely, with a fierceness really against de Pointis in their hearts,
already fired with freely-served rum, they went to do his work, and a
little of their own, according to the contract. Their first task was to
take the hill east the town, and somehow they did it without the loss of
a man.

The sense of things being all wrong was still strong with John Upcott.
He had been morose all through the sea voyage down to Cartagena.
Everything was ridiculous. For what had his brother died? For what had
he slain Hands? For what were they here? John Upcott saw, in common
with almost all the filibusters, that the terms offered them for their
share in the taking of the city were comparatively paltry. And now de
Pointis's keeping of his own Frenchmen safe aboard and landing these
Englishmen to bear the brunt of the attack, was clearly a new injustice,
an injustice with an insult a-top of it: for de Pointis sent ashore with
them a force of eighty negroes, stinking, sweating savages who had the
effrontery to leer familiarly upon the filibusters, as though they were
equals be--of de Pointis cause making them so!

This finished the madness of John Upcott. But now he did not argue over
his position, did not continue to tell himself that he was venting his
rage upon the wrong heads, when he went for instance charging up to the
Bocca Chica castle, with a frenzy against--de Pointis!

At first Upcott stayed by Hacker; but soon in the advance on the castle,
with the guns of the ship sending their screaming death over their
heads, beyond them and beyond the walls, the party spread out. They
began to spread even as they ran from the beach upward to the hill where
was scant cover, the Spaniards having hewn all the trees that once stood
there, not only that they might have timber, but that an enemy coming on
that side should have less cover.

Round the walls was a little hell as the filibusters firing and running
came to close quarters. Here and there the ladders that they planted
were heaved bodily backward before the weight of the climbing men could
ballast them. But most were planted so quickly and mounted upon so
fleetly that the weight of men on them prevented their overthrow from
above.

"Up, lads!" cried Upcott and was amazed to hear the voice was his and to
find that he was clambering a ladder, knife in teeth, with but one
thought--to get at these Spaniards that seemed miles above. A falling
body struck him and well-nigh threw him down in the impact. He steadied
himself and then got back again fiercely to the climb.

Sloppy with blood and sweat and stinking with rum, the filibusters went
over the walls; and within the Spaniards ran from them; and they,
cheering, pursued.




CHAPTER XVII

THE OCCUPANCY


"By the way," said de Pointis and paused, and interrupted himself,
turning aside to attend some other matter that called for immediate
surveillance. But he would not forget. There was a warning, for those
who knew him, in his tone. He turned his head again and recovered the
dropped remark.

He sat--that you may picture him better do I now audaciously interrupt
him--under his yellow awning at the north end of the Plaza, looking out
on it, its fountains and flowers (the former broken in the bombardment,
one spraying out from its side a disconsolate jet of water; the later
dying from lack of attention in the occupancy), with the court-house
behind him, from the exquisite wrought-iron verandah-rail of which was
draped, he glorious in the midst of it, as in a picture, for the eyes of
those who passed in the Plaza, the tricolour flag of France. He sat
there under his awning, in a great oaken arm-chair brought from the
court-house, backed by the flag, King of Cartagena, for a day--to speak
symbolically; for twenty-two days, to speak by the calendar of the
historian. On the ground before him and on either hand sails had been
spread, broad mainsails whereon those coming from the looting of the
city poured forth, or piled, their trove. M. du Casse sat there also.
Near by, and to left and right, were the valuators and recorders, with
their scales great and small, their impressive tomes, quills and
ink-horns. All around them was the distressful city with the soldiers
and cut-throats pillaging.

"Apropos," said de Pointis again, returning from the interruption, "at
the taking of the Bocca Chica fort some of your men, Captain Lang,
fought with the negroes. I cannot permit feuds among our own people."

Captain Lang had been standing, mopping his hot brow, watching with
puckered face the departure, for the quay, of another string of laden
mules, with their file of guarding soldiers. The look he gave de
Pointis, turning then to him, was one of a man not at all perturbed. He
knew to what de Pointis referred.

It was the affair begun by that odd fish, Upcott, that had come to the
ears of de Pointis. Upcott did not seem to know when a fight was over
and, glaring-eyed, seemed always seeking further conflict. One of the
negroes had jostled him and Upcott had struck at him. Then several of
the blacks made at Upcott in a cluster and he swung his cutlass and slew
them, his fellows crying: "The fight's over! The fight's over!" Lean,
thoughtful men often behave like that after a fight, while the fat men
are fanning themselves and thinking of a smoke. There had come "bad
blood," as the phrase is, because of Upcott. But Lang did not object. He
had seen many fights.

"My men," said he, "did all to my satisfaction;" and having mopped his
forehead he mopped slowly around the inside of his broad-brimmed hat.

"Not wholly to mine," said de Pointis.

The court-house was behind him, with his soldiers sitting within at
their gaming from which they were ready to turn at a word from the
guards. But though everyone knew this, what cared Lang? What, for that
matter, cared any of the buccaneers now? They had no hope of redress
from their own flag if de Pointis should fail them; and he knew that;
nor did he seek to disguise signs of his knowledge. But he recognised
that in dealing with men who were fully aware that they had no hope of
redress, in event of being dealt with dishonourably, with men who,
because of their position, had accepted comparatively trivial terms, he
was dealing with the desperate who might seek redress for themselves
with their own red hands.

De Pointis smiled at this show of rebellion on Lang's part. He was
really talking so to Lang simply as part of his game; he was really
feeling for information on his own position. He had been top dog in this
expedition long enough for his purpose; all was well so far. The more
frequent evidences of a rebellious spirit merely showed him that he must
not dally in the playing of his game. He knew himself now as one moving
backwards, fronting his pursuers, with drawn sword in right hand and
bullion in left, to a door that stood open rearward; but he was not
flurried, for he believed that he could leap backwards anon and slam his
door on the noses of the plucked ones, he safe on the other side.

Master Lang put his hat on his head. The gentle tip-tapping of the
mules' feet went by amidst the hum. Another load was going down under
escort to the jetty, thence to be taken aboard de Pointis's ships. He
had already, in his own lazarette, the cream of Cartagena; in his holds,
what he considered must be the great part of the city's wealth.

The buccaneers had complained of this method of dealing with the spoil,
as Lang did now; but de Pointis always met such complaints as he did
now.

"I'd like to see where we come in," said Lang. "Where's our share of the
booty?"

"My dear friend," said de Pointis, with callous suavity, "if I mention
your lack of discipline it is but that I believe that without
discipline, and without leaders, no cause can prosper. For me--I act up
to this belief. That is why everything goes aboard my own ship. When all
is gathered--then the division." He pointed to the copy of the
regulations that blistered on the court-house wall. "When all is
gathered for the expedition then it will be to inquire if any man has
made a private hoard. If he has"--he gave a flip of his hand toward the
regulations--"there are the rules. He shall be punished and his private
hoard added to that of the expedition. Then, and then only, shall we be
in a position to compute, and divide, the spoil. I," and he frowned on
Lang, "am the head of the expedition."

At that du Casse turned with elevated brows; for du Casse did not love
this man that France had sent, who made him so little of a colleague.

"There," said de Pointis, "are the valuators. There are the recorders.
There are their books." He waved here, there, with an open hand, sitting
with one leg flung across the other, elbow on knee. "Every item is
entered, even as everything is weighed or valued. You can see." He
turned to du Casse. "Is not this correct, M. du Casse?" he said,
ignoring the open stare of the governor.

Du Casse shrugged. "Yes," he said, "it is all in black and white for our
allies to see. For me--I am a Frenchman and a man of honour."

De Pointis bowed, his face a little dark; then he too shrugged; and with
a tilt of his head reclined again and looked back on Lang, who had noted
du Casse's attitude as a warning, a confirmation of his own opinions,
noted it with respect; noted also, with a certain admiration, the phases
of de Pointis's daring attitude. But there could be no more dust in the
eyes of Master Lang.

"We run no further risks," said he. "Your terms are too small, so small
that we cannot run risks. We have asked for, if not a division, at least
a less suspicious way of storing----"

"_Sacre!_" cried de Pointis. "I am leader!"

Master Lang nodded his head.

"My men are mostly now," said he, "protecting the citizens from the
expedition----"

"How?" cried de Pointis.

"For a consideration," explained Lang.

"What?"

"As I say," said Lang.

"And you are a master, a _capitaine de vaisseau_?"

"Something of the kind," said Lang, "so I put it to them--the position:
Cartagena here being skinned, sucked dry. Where is the booty? Is there
any on board an English ship?" De Pointis gave his grim, debonair smile.
He thought to say that the ships were hardly English, but outcasts of
England. But he did not speak; he merely cleared his throat and looked
on Lang for the rest. "So my men have chosen their own leaders. Some
stay by me--and you; I am still risking."

"I thank you for the confidence," de Pointis bowed.

"Others are pillaging for themselves and storing for themselves," said
Lang.

De Pointis glanced round easily in the direction of the placard, with
its clauses covering such a contingency.

"Others are protecting the citizens for a consideration: so much a day,
or a certain proportion of what treasure may be in the houses that they
protect."

"Traitors!" said de Pointis.

"M. de Pointis," said Master Lang; "'tis a word best left alone."

It was even as Lang had said. And so it is that it is possible to have
such a picture as this of Hacker, Upcott, Ashplant, and three others, in
the _patio_ of a great house in Cartagena, as in a barrack-square, the
family living in the upper rooms of the house, their protectors in the
lower.

The windows were all barricaded; the door barricaded; a guard on watch,
front and rear; the place silent save the house's centre, the _patio_,
where the sun flooded down as into a well, smiting on stretched awnings
here and there, and casting on the red-bricked court their shadows in
which the protectors spent the day for such air as could come there,
though indoors, for a fact, there was less heat.

A cat appeared in the _patio_ and serpentinely walking across the bricks
leapt to Upcott's lap, he sitting cross-legged, gloomy, chin in hand. He
had been, only yesterday, intoxicated with the joy of fighting and now
he was raging at himself that he could have been so delighted--with
pictures of the Abbotsham farm in his mind, and Abbotsham evenings, with
feathery clouds and a slip of moon in the quiet sky; pictures forming
and dissolving, as white clouds form and dissolve; and the calm of his
mother haunting him. What did she know of this world! For the sacking
was so sordid as to disgust his sober part. He had seen women quailing,
white-faced, in corners, with their great eyes unforgettable in their
frightened faces, half hid by the nervously gathered mantillas. He had
seen in these eyes the glaze and stare and rolling of imbecility,
women's minds having been unhinged at sight of their men-folk slain and
at sound of clattering feet of invaders hammering through the house.

He stroked the cat absently.

A voice rambled on near him, one of his fellows speaking:

" ... and then, be God, I took another look at them and them firing on
us and I says: 'Boys, the longer we count the chances, the fewer there
will be to count. To ut!' I says and up we goes and five minutes after
by Saint Patrick Oi was wiping the blood from me cutlass and saying:
'We're there!' It's a quare thing, a fight."

They ate and drank well there, these buccaneers; they would not stint
themselves food and liquor; if either lacked they would but have to go
out into the city. They were no prisoners! But so far, in the house,
there was a sufficiency of food and liquor for both protectors and
protected. One of the men drew a cork and passed the bottle. Hacker
shook his head. "Enough," he said. Upcott shook his head and pursed his
lips closer.

"What's the matter?" asked Ashplant. "You'm brooding again, Upcott."

Upcott raised a sick face.

"What be us doing here, anyhow?" he asked.

"Well," said Ashplant, "'twas your idea, wasn't it?' We'm done over by
de Pointis,' says you. 'Us'll never see so much as a silver piece from
him.' You was one of the first to say that, when old Lang put it to us.
You was for offering to protect houses instead of going on our own. And
now we'm here you'm wanting to get to the pillaging."

But it was not so. Upcott would have fled away after the attack was
over, and its fire had failed in the blood, fled away from that hideous
victory, would have fled from that most hideous sacking. But whither?

Hacker read him more acutely, read him also leniently.

"Upcott's all right," he growled, "when you see a cat go up to a man
like that you can take it from me--you can take it from the cat--that
the man be all right. A dog will keep along with the scurviest knave on
earth; but a cat's a judge. If you see a cat go up to a man and rub
against his legs you know that if the man has a fault 'tis that if you
went to him and asked him the loan of a shilling you'd have it in your
hand right there--and never a question o' when he was to be paid back."

"Kind o' a simple sort you'm making him out," suggested Scudamore, who
was of the party.

"Eh?" said Hacker. "Oh, 'tis as you see it. You want to see this cat's
friend when he's fighting. I've seen en!" and then he looked at the
quiet, apparently heedless Upcott. "'You load and I'll fire, damn ye!'"
he said. "Eh, Upcott?"

Upcott did not look up from his reverie into which all the talk came as
from far off, yet with effect; only he frowned as in anger, and then the
frown faded. He could have wept at the flood of memories that Hacker
brought to him with that reminiscent phrase, remembering then the
quieter life of Devon when events and their emotions came to him
peaceful, not terrific. He sought peace, and life gave him only
cataclysm on cataclysm.

"Never mind," said Hacker. "You'm a good man, Upcott."

In the depths of self-condemnation that has atrophied the powers a word
of praise suffices to rally them, even though the praise may seem, to
the repentant one, fulsome. Upcott felt that Hacker had wakened again in
him the flickering something that had seemed to him at one time the very
soul of life, the light of life. Yes, he would still believe it was in
his breast. But how to live by its light in the world as it was around
him, the world into which he had come?

"Hark!" said Hacker, raising a hand. "What's that?" And all listened.

The guard at the door was crying to those in the _patio_ to come to him
and they hastened in response, expecting another attack; but there were
only two men without, Spaniards, citizens, desiring to see the master of
the house.

Hacker opened the door wide and met them on the step.

"We wish to see the seor," they said.

"Your message?" said Hacker. "We occupy here."

"We cannot give it. We must see the seor."

Hacker bade them enter, but he would not permit them to pass beyond the
entrance, bidding them wait there--with a word to Scudamore to see that
his order was obeyed--while he informed the master. The seor came forth
on the verandah, in answer to Hacker's hail, he looking down suavely,
Hacker blinking up, devilish in the sun. There was some talk between
them and then Hacker cried out that the two visitors might be brought to
the _patio_. But when they came there, with Scudamore at their heels,
their eyes, glimpsing the confusion of arms strewed in the place,
showed, for a moment, a cringing fear. Then they spied the seor on the
verandah and advanced to beneath him, half defiant, half timid.

Upcott, with his smattering of Spanish and his faculty of observation,
had a gleaning of the talk that followed.

First the two desired private speech, but that was denied them, not, as
Upcott could see, because the seor feared to have them come up to him,
but because he had a lofty contempt for them. Upcott gathered so much
and looked to Hacker's face, to read there a verification of his
surmise. Hacker told them all, after, just what had been said.

"M. de Pointis," said the spokesman of the two, "has made rules for his
occupancy."

The seor bowed amiably. "All of which," said he, "have not been kept,"
and he looked and smiled to Hacker.

The two scowled. But they had not expected to be met with open arms. The
spokesman went on:

"We are aware that you have your plate hid under the _patio_----"

"Naturally," said the seor, "seeing that you helped to store it there."
He was sneering on the two, consumed with disgust.

"If we disclose the place where your wealth lies de Pointis will give us
our share, to the amount of a tenth--and that is no small amount."

The seor swore softly, and said: "And is this offer of de Pointis's
then enough to turn fellow-citizens into traitors? What can de Pointis
think of Spain, to make such an offer to us?" Then he turned his gaze on
Hacker; and for all the diabolic face of that seaman he found a
kindliness there. The seor and the seaman could meet on some common
ground. "If I do not give these wretches something," said the seor,
"they will report to de Pointis and he may think an attack here more
desirable. He may send a large force against you. I jeopardize you the
more if I do not buy off these fellows."

"You told us the truth," said Hacker. "We know," and he turned to the
two, "where this wealth lies," and he stamped his heel on the red bricks
with which the place was paved. "As for de Pointis--" he broke off and
looked to his fellows, translating the talk that had passed; and then
said he, looking with a leering smile on them, noting by their glances
toward the two how the wind blew: "What's it to be, boys?"

"Keep one of them as a hostage," suggested Scudamore, "and chuck t'other
out."

"Yes, let en go to de Pointis," said Ashplant, "if he cares to then; but
if they come we kill his partner."

The seor on the verandah had the English, for he said: "The idea would
be of value were either of these men able to understand the meaning of
honour, but no matter which you keep as a hostage, the other would think
nothing of it, he would not be deterred."

One O'Neal, at that (he was never rightly sober and always on the verge
of quarrelling with everyone) rose from his reclining in a hammock, and
lurching towards the two, said he: "Let's hang 'em both." And though
they had no English they moved back from his face that told them of
their peril.

Hacker raised his hand in protest.

"That'll do," he said. "Put 'em out. That'll do. Let 'em go. We ain't
afeard o' de Pointis. I tell 'e there's going to be some fun in
Cartagena afore this business is droo."

O'Neal spidered on toward the two, they falling back pace for pace. The
gold chain of some high Spanish official hung dangling from his neck in
a bombastic loop. He wore a scarf about his middle with two
double-barrelled pistols thrust in it, and as he bent forward the gold
chain fell over the silver-mounted butt of one of the pistols; and as he
straightened the pistol was pulled up a little way. As his hand
readjusted the chain the face of the man nearest lengthened in terror.
But O'Neal had no thought of killing the wretches thus. Suddenly he
leapt forward and catching an ear of each, proceeded to lead them out
like cowed schoolboys, amidst banter.

But they were no sooner gone from the brightness of the court into the
shadow of the entrance that was lit up suddenly with an interior light,
telling of the outer door being opened for their exit, than there
sounded two shots in quick succession.

Hacker, Upcott, all in the _patio_, ran for the front. But there was no
attack.

O'Neal turned to them, framed in the doorway, with the oblong of sunlit,
cobbled street without and part of a prone man visible there in
melancholy and suggestive foreshortening.

In O'Neal's hand was his double-barrelled pistol smoking. They moved
closer and gazed out in the then quiet street where the two men were
sprawled, dead.

"Thought they was off free," said O'Neal lightly, in condescending
explanation, "and so they turned about and spanned their noses to me."

"Oh!" said Hacker, and nothing more. Perhaps he thought that this was
just as well. All the houses occupied by the filibusters who had
rebelled must by this time be marked down by de Pointis. But none had
exactly an anxiety to be singled out for special attention. No man knew,
in a sacking, to what end it might come. It was that, as much as the
bloodiness, that gave the look of madness to those who adventured on the
Spanish main.

Then arose a cry in the city. They heard it far off, mounting, coming
nearer, swelling, fierce, fearsome in its advance, seeing that they knew
not what it meant. Upcott felt that he must get to the front and see
the cause of this approaching din, otherwise his courage would fail him.
He must see. He must meet. He must be face to face. It was just as once,
on cliff top in Devon, he had heard, as a child, so mad a crying of sea
that he had been struck with terror and turned to flee from the sound.
Then he had, instead, gone forward, shuddering, but nevertheless gone
forward, till he could look down through a cleft, whence the sound came,
and see the actual waves that made the fearsome clamour, the actual
toothed rock and declivity of tossed shingle in a cranny of the slope.

But he had company to-day as he hastened to the front and the
loop-holes. The approaching din was too significant for any to let it
go, for any to be content to leave the men on watch to tell its meaning.

Then as they hastened to their stations they heard a cry in English and
French: "The Indians! The Indians!"

Through the loop-holes in the front they saw the street, along which
came French, English, negroes. What a crowd! What a medley of colour, of
arms, of clothing, and of nakedness. And as the army passed, for indeed
the tramping throng was nearly an army, the shouts went up and the faces
were turned left and right to the houses, the more insistently in these
places where the barricades told of a company of rebel filibusters being
in possession: "The Indians! The Indians are coming with Spanish
leaders. Turn out and help to hold the city!"

Also they kept shouting, "Fifty thousand! Fifty thousand! Fifty
thousand!" They were giving the numbers of the rescuing force advancing
on the city.

Upcott had a sense of joy. Here was the end of it all. He felt that it
would be a fitting climax to this expedition if the town should be
rushed by the fifty thousand, with their Spanish leaders, and French and
English wiped out to a man. He felt he deserved it. He almost desired
it, to clear him of his remorse. His fellows, at all this shouting, were
in a quandary.

Hacker turned and leered. "Here's a nice business!" he said. "We may not
even touch what we were to get here, if thicky Indians gets in. Come,
lads!" They had no thought to tell the people of the house that they
were going; they merely gathered together their arms, and some food, and
flooded out into the street, a-foam with the ragged army, another tiny
tributary. But the people of the house heard all from above. It was but
another phase of the hideous business.

So they all went swinging through the streets, past the broken doors,
with the Moorish lamps above them smashed in the assaults of the last
days and showing ragged edges of dusky blue and green and purple glass,
swinging a-clatter on cobbles red with blood spilt in the lesser,
sanguinary fights, of which every sacking knows and history tells so
little.

One of the crew of the _Three Half Moons_, recognising Upcott,

"Hullo," he said. "What have you been doing? Gathering gear for de
Pointis or for yourself?"

"Oh! protecting a house," said Upcott.

The fellow laughed.

"So you got on to that too! So have we," said he; "three of us; one of
the wealthiest houses o' them all. Put up a fight, they did, against a
lot of Frenchies till we came past; and then they hailed us and asked if
we'd protect 'em. 'What?' we says. I've got Spanish, you know. I asked
'em what they meant and they told us plenty was doing the same. We stood
outside there in the bloody sun arguing like a woman over fish, and they
offered us a fortune--there's money in Cartagena--and so we made a few
more widows in France and in we goes and they barricaded up again.
They'd ha' held the place themselves the way the house was built, but
they couldn't keep awake. So in we goes--to protect them. Then they went
to sleep--never wakened."

Upcott looked sidewise on the man. He was about to say "How? Did they
have fever? Did they die of exhaustion? Did they----" he was wondering.
And then it dawned on him.

"It's a great ruse," said the fellow. "We've got the stuff they had
planted safe enough, where only we can get it when we come back."

The man next him laughed.

"Yes," said he, "and I hope two of the three o' us get a finish from
holding off these Indians, so as only one goes back that knows where
that booty is--and that one me!"

The two looked at each other and laughed over the pleasantry (you cannot
say there was no comradeship among the rovers), and he who had been
telling the affair said to his jocular comrade, with a waggle of his
head toward Upcott: "He's been on it too--defending the Spanish! Oh, my
God! 'Tis a funny business." And as he marched he drew from his wallet a
bottle of rum, almost empty, took the dregs of it and flung the bottle
against the gate-house--for they were now come to the south gate, and
were soon up on the rolling slopes, driving with them a herd of cattle
for provisions.

At one house by the way, quite clear of the city, Upcott noticed that
many among the filibusters turned their heads and, looking through
between the mesh of green, waved their hands and cheered.

"Who's there?" he asked; but the first he asked did not know, evidently
did not desire to know, merely heedlessly shaking his head; but another
told him: "Du Casse."

"Is he a favourite?" asked Upcott.

"Well--he's for us. That's why he's come out of the city to live there.
He don't agree with the way de Pointis is going on with the treasure.
He's a civil man, is du Casse, and he said our demands were right
enough, to have our share o' treasure apart. When de Pointis told him as
he was master, du Casse says: 'All right,' he says, 'then I shan't serve
under you.'--'You can't resign in time of war,' said de Pointis. But du
Casse thought he could, and he did, to show him."

"And what's de Pointis doing then?"

"Why, still at his old game of it."

"Then du Casse did no good."

"Oh, I don't know. You see, de Pointis can go on the way he's doing; but
du Casse is a governor. When he told de Pointis that, de Pointis said:
'A fig for that. At sea I am of higher rank than you and I am given this
expedition to command.' But he's a governor, nevertheless, and of
consequence, and he can write to France about the business--a treaty is
a treaty. He's an honourable man, that's something."

Upcott waved his hand to the house that showed its yellow walls through
the green leaves of the garden--and felt a lighter heart then.

But soon the men began looking around them questioningly. They were
trudging through the woods, alert for what might be ahead, some with
their kerchiefs under their hat-brims and hanging down as a screen
against the flies; others hatless, kerchiefs bound about their heads and
over their ear-ringed ears. Their shirts were of all colours, most
gaudy. Some wore no shirt, but a great scarf around the neck falling
shawl-fashion over their shoulders, their arms bare, save for bracelets
of gold, silver, plain or jewelled. Some wore short breeches with bowed
garters, some flapping canvas drawers. There were faces and complexions
that told of many races--but here, deep in the woods, it began to dawn
on them that none were French. One by one the French had dropped
behind.

"It is a ruse!"

"There's no French here."

"Where's the French that came with us?"

"Dropped behind, maybe, coming along with the goats and beeves." They
halted murmuring, their voices hailing and crying through the woods that
gave back only the dull forest echoes, or jabber of monkeys and scream
of parrots.

They had been "diddled." They killed the last beeves, drank the last
rum, sharpened their cutlasses, their knives, saw to the cleaning of
their firelocks and their muskets, heedless of their own cleanliness;
turned about.

One wet his finger and held it aloft. Upcott looked, wondering for what
he wished to know the direction of the wind; there seemed none then in
the forest.

"Wind from the north!" cried the man suddenly.

The others took the idea at once.

"Fire the forest! Fire the forest! If there be any coming down on us let
_that_ fight them!" The woods were dry. The fire rose; they left it
roaring, with a hoarse cheer in key. They required no leader. Every man,
there and then, knew what he was to do, where he was going.

A diabolic thrill, infectious, unanimous, terrible, moved through the
horde, black and white. They came lower down from the hills where the
air was quaking with heat, all the tree-bereft slopes trembling in it.
The army was lean from heat, callous from liquor, an army of
outcasts--an army of units all going to hell, unsparing of themselves.

The glamour and the sun and the frenzy swept through them, instantaneous
as light; and they all cried out in one voice: "To Cartagena! Back to
Cartagena!"




CHAPTER XVIII

THE AFTERMATH


The returning filibusters reached the city and, finding the gates'
closed and the place defended against them, sat down without to consider
their plan of campaign. Some were for assaulting the city, others for
circling about it to the seaboard and attacking the French ships in the
harbour. They were ripe for either deed, and competent. Parties that
went down to the shore, spying, returned to say that the ships were
still lying at anchor, the boats coming and going.

"They've sucked the place dry," said some.

"What matter? Let us rush the city and drive them out, lay aboard them
and scoop the lot for ourselves," was the tenor of other proposals.

"Think of their number," said the doubtful.

"What are numbers!" cried others, recollecting many a dash from the
Tortuga or Santo Domingo shore; or earlier, from the Jamaica shore
before that shore ceased to provide them sanctuary; in low, lean
pinnace, toward the great galleons that looked so redoubtable in the
seas, high as cliffs, formidable as castles, and yet taken, pillaged,
and scuttled or fired, their end but eddy, or flame, smoke, a sizzling
in the heedless ocean, charred wood.

Upcott, with his eyes like spots of fire, and his jaws set, moved among
the rovers seeking the least inhuman suggestion.

"This is hell!" he thought. He had a vision of his mother, of Devon
evenings, and was filled with trembling: the sweat ran from him in the
jostling crowd, not because of the heat alone, but because of the sudden
comparison in his mind. The emotion came sudden and terrific. Well, he
was here. That was all that could be said. And the sweat that broke on
him then was cold.

"Have we to die here of pestilence?" cried one man who sat hunched up so
that the back of the brim of his great chip-hat touched on his shoulder
blades. He smashed fiercely at a mosquito on the back of his left hand
and then stretched out for a lemon, bit into it savagely, took the half
in his hand, squeezed the juice into his mouth and then rubbed himself
over neck and naked breast with the rind. Upcott thought he looked like
an ape, a beast. He had got over such thoughts, but something in the
man's movements now brought back his old attitude of mind. And then he
thought how he was a match now for beasts; and he laughed, throwing up
his head.

"What are you laughing at?" cried he of the lemon.

Upcott gave him the leer. That was all.

"Here's du Casse!"

"Here's the mounseer!"

Yes, here was du Casse among them.

"What's he here for?"

"To lead us, like enough--get his own back out of that de Pointis."

They clustered around him.

"Lead us, monsieur! We're ready!"

"Lead us! Lead us! We'll get your own for you."

"I've come here to----" du Casse began.

"Lead us! Lead us!"

Du Casse shook his head and waved them off, held up his hand for
silence.

"I shall appeal, you may be sure," he said, "to the French Courts. An
alliance is an alliance. I shall appeal; but I cannot fight against my
own people. You know me. I am a governor; I am at least a governor," he
said bitterly. "I shall appeal on your behalf and it is my belief that I
shall yet have the pleasure of passing over to you your share. De
Pointis is not France, though he is here in the name of France."

"Dirty skulker! He's playing a game on us!"

"He's sure as dirty as de Pointis; in league with him!"

"He's here to cover de Pointis's retirement!" cried another.

Du Casse heard this and his face paled a little. Upcott felt alert now
and saw all keenly. He had a vast admiration of du Casse here in their
camp. Perhaps none other saw du Casse's momentary sign of quite natural
fear, so quickly did his jaw set and he wheel towards the speaker. His
head went up and his face had that expression of the faces of men who
stand alone and misunderstood, misjudged. Then he saw the one who spoke
and gave him a look of scorn.

"Lead us, mounseer! Never mind he!"

"Lead us! 'Tis all right, mounseer!"

"I cannot do that," said du Casse; "what I have come to say is that I
have withdrawn because of de Pointis's treachery, but I believe in the
ultimate value of the protest I am sending to the Home Government."

"Good man, du Casse! But we want our own now!"

"Take it!" said du Casse, with something of the air of a Pilate letting
the mob have its way.

And just then a party came with fresh news. One of the gates that they
had been watching was undefended. The lean, and now again disintegrated
army rushed for the city.

But M. le Baron de Pointis was slipping away from Cartagena, his guns
firing a derisive salute.

And then through the unhappy place the filibusters passed. The French
were gone. It was against reason that there could be a doubloon
anywhere.

But now came the aftermath!

The first thought was food, the next drink, the next women, the next
plunder. I leave it to you to imagine Cartagena of the next two days; to
imagine speedily, in one fearsome, breath-taking picture, and speedily
dismiss. Upcott could not, in the thick of it, as you can in the light
reading, make these days brief. He remembered, afterwards, the screams
of women in the hardly-lit night; remembered groups of his fellows
standing around men who hanged by thumbs, great toes, anything, by way
of torture, waiting till the unhappy wretches might recollect some store
of wealth not already discovered by the expedition. He had the temerity
to expostulate over more than one such scene.

At one place a man with a red, sun-blistered neck was lashing the naked
back of a Spaniard who had been spread-eagled at his own door. The blood
splashed in the eyes of the scourger. He stepped back and cursed and
drew the back of his hand across his face. Upcott wondered why the man
being tortured did not cry out. He had fainted perhaps, Nature giving
him ease. Another snatched the whip and laid on. Upcott, coming like a
lean jackal down the street, got his head up.

"What's the good of this?" he cried. "The man has no more to give up."

The new scourger wheeled on him and swung the wet cords to smite him on
the face, but slipped in the blood at his feet with his vehemence. The
bloated one thrust John aside with an oath. Upcott clapped hands to the
sword in his great sash. The two leapt on him simultaneously, cursing
him; but with his long sword he slew them both, and stepping to the door
found it was a dead man that hung there.

"No! no! Take away those faces!" So he cried out afterwards, in the
delirium of fever.

He remembered a stair at top of which he stood sword in hand with blood
trickling in his left eye from some wound, and men, of his own race,
were coming up to him, hunched, bent, sinister, with red blades and
eyes; and then he remembered, it seemed to be a long while afterwards,
coming down between dead men on the stair and slinking out, tiptoeing,
looking left and right for fresh assault and finding only the vacant,
staring day in the bloody street.

Through the oppressive noon he had wandered and seen in the graveyard
some of his fellows, sweating and cursing, digging there. They were
taking turn about because of the heat; they were too crazy to give over
their toil in the hot hours. A man shovelled a space and then got back
into the shadows of the trees and another fell to work.

John Upcott did not understand the significance of this toil.

"Who's dead?" he asked.

They laughed simultaneously, an outburst of wild laughter. They had not
known him for a wit, only for a quiet man who seemed not to be eager for
blood, yet when a fight came did not know when to stop, a man for the
last ditch.

"A great scheme this," one said, "to hide their goods in a graveyard;
these Spaniards are none so foolish."

The rollicking notes of a chanty caused them to turn; and here came a
man Upcott remembered. He had found water close at hand, it appeared,
for about his head, under his hat, he had wrapped a great dripping sash,
and the steam came out from under the brim.

"----! It's hot," he said, breaking in on his chanty and then: "What
are you fellows a-doing yere? This grave is mine."

"What do you mean, man?" he who was then digging replied, looking round
and resting his hands on the shovel. "We were here first."

"But I tell 'e I buried that stuff there myself. I--" he recognised
Upcott as he looked round the group. "Ah!" he said, "you know! You mind
my mate telling you how three of us had buried our haul where we
reckoned 'twould be safe?"

There was a feeling in the air that something was going to happen.

"I remember your face," Upcott said. "Where's your partners?" His head
went down, his jaw out, he advanced, staring into the man's eyes.

"They're dead," said the man and looked nonplussed on John. "Many a true
word be spoken in jest," he added. "You mind what I said to my mate; how
I hoped but one of us would live----"

"Who killed them?" asked Upcott.

"What do you mean?" cried the man as Upcott advanced, still with that
puckering stare, brows drawn, looking in the man's face as though to
read there the fate of his fellows.

"Hold back!" screamed the other. "Damn 'e, hold back! You're mad! He's
mad, boys! I tell 'e I'll knife 'e! Hold him off, boys! Hold him off and
I'll say nought about--oh----"

Upcott remembered staring down on a black face in which the eyes bulged
like a fish's. That was all. But it was all nightmare; all was unreal.
The whole period had a feel of unreality as though life is a nightmare
and when one dies one may awake with a sigh and know it so.

By the end of the third day the scattered filibusters had bethought them
that they were in a dangerous position. Upcott knew that something
beyond the wonted was afoot that day, because of the massing of the
various crews and their marching through the city, firing in the air,
firing through doorways and casements, chanting their ungodly chanties
as they tramped. This was their method of intimidating the inhabitants,
word having come, by a brig then newly arrived at the dishevelled port,
of a fleet of Dutch and English off the coast.

The filibusters knew they must decamp; but they put a price upon their
going, without payment of which, in departing, they would leave the city
in flames. They got their price, as Upcott saw on the morrow, attracted
to the plaza by the centralisation there of the city's uproar and
curious to know what was to happen. What he had eaten during these days
he had won as the prowling dogs of the city won their food.

In the plaza he found raiders and citizens gathered, for the moment at
peace, while the haggard town's officers came to the court-house to
discuss with the pirate captains. And anon the sum was paid over to the
buccaneer chiefs, they sitting where de Pointis had sat, the plaza all
agog with the mad freebooters and the imbecile citizens--for such days
and nights as Cartagena and they had known of late unhinge men. De
Pointis had gone away pretty well content, imagining that he had sucked
Cartagena as dry as it could be sucked. But it could evidently still be
squeezed; there was evidently treasure still not found by either de
Pointis's horde or by the ragged army of outcasts. Where the five
thousand livres came from, that the buccaneers demanded--and got--as the
price of their going, who knows!

Next morning the filibusters were aboard their ships, whether they knew
it or not, the less drunken helping the more drunken.

Someone found John Upcott wandering alone, one of the _Torridge Maid_
lads.

"Hullo, Upcott--come along," he said. "Mad--mad--and there's more like
him," he muttered in an aside.

"I'm not mad. I'm--I'm----"

"Well, well. That's all well. Come along then. We're going off. We're
going home. Coming home, Upcott? Coming out of this hell of a place?"

The last boat put off, the last devil climbed on board and the
filibusters set sail. But outside the harbour, bearing down on the
coast, came the English men-o'-war and the Dutch, seeking not the
Spaniard, but the freebooter: as de Pointis knew, these filibusters had
no hope from their own land, or from any. And then each pirate ship had
to think but of itself and its own preservation.

Little cared Upcott. He lay below with the drunkest, lay with closed
eyes that burned, and the excited antennae-waving cockroaches ran on the
walls and over the sprawled men's out-flung hands. He tossed. He talked
in his unrest, that no one heeded, where so many were delirious for one
cause or the other. Of that part he had no recollection, only a dulled
recollection of babblings of voices of the dead and the living, which he
could not disentangle; echoes of unforgotten cries of women in the
clutches of men; oaths of men striving with men, a rat running over
him--and then a voice shouting repeatedly: "Tumble up! Tumble up, all
hands!" and a howl of profanity. "There's a Dutchy close aboard."

Doubtless he bore a hand; for in striving to remember that day--it was
like him to try to reconstruct the illegible and to try to banish the
too clear--he remembered carrying a hot iron from the galley to a
gun--perhaps he burnt himself and so had consciousness for a moment of
his life; remembered a splinter of the smashed bulwark in his cheek, and
how someone pulled it out for him--with the pain again perhaps brought
to a half knowledge of his surroundings. And then he was in water, and
struck out and was aided by a wave so that, with a few strokes, he
touched bottom and, stumbling forward and upward, flicking his hair from
his eyes and looking into the new world like a tired retriever, he found
a scorching shore and, staring round, saw men running on the shingle
and, looking seaward, beheld the tattered ship of his delirium, on her
beam ends, close in shore in the spray of the reef, and a high
man-o'-war with a broken mast, and sails through which the sky showed,
standing by in the fairway.

He gathered that they had, in the fight, driven on the rocks, perhaps
rudderless. Turning again he found himself, unarmed, hair in his eyes, a
pounding in his head so that the skull might have been visibly swelling
and contracting at every leap of blood, surrounded by--he did not care
much what they were, who they were; but he had an idea that the faces in
the mist, up and down which globules of light danced like a juggling of
beads, were Spanish faces. But when he heard a voice from far off,
ordering someone to move, and then felt a hand on his arm, neither
kindly nor rough, neither one thing nor another (his arm might have been
of wood and his knowledge the knowledge of a tree) he turned his head,
and "Where?" he asked.

"To Cartagena!"

"Ah, my God!" he cried. "Not there!"

Perhaps his cry was taken for a cry of fear; or perhaps his captors had
an idea of the truth. It mattered little. Falling down an abyss, walking
on air, he knew not precisely what he was doing; moving in some
manner--yes, he was walking--he heard the voices, far off, all dancing
like a haze of flies around a carcase:

"To Cartagena! Back to Cartagena!"




CHAPTER XIX

THE EXILE


John Upcott plodded down the mountain side. Had you been there on the
baking road you would hardly have seen him, swathed as he was in the
billows of dust sent up by the trudging hoofs of the reluctant,
complaining oxen, and by the screaming wooden wheels of the low car they
pulled, bearing great hewn stones for the building of the Cartagena
breakwater. John Upcott was glad in his work. He performed it with a
positive relish. One day he raised his hat to the blue vault, and "Thank
God," he murmured, "I thank Thee, God."

True, perhaps he was broken down, nervy, from his recent distracted
life, and much more than rationally sensitive, perhaps abnormally
sensitive But, "I am glad," he thought, "that I am here helping at the
building of the city in whose desecration I assisted."

There was a fellow-prisoner, whose mind, it would appear, was unhinged.
"I'm the man," he would say, "who dam' nearly put an end to the
expedition afore it started. I'm the man that killed the French cook at
Tiburon and they was going to hang."

"You're the man, by that," said one, "who brought bad feeling into the
expedition from the start. You killed the cook and when they was going
to shoot you for it, what could we do but tell 'em not to be so hasty?
And when they said you'd killed, and you'd to be shot, and told us to
get off, what could we do but rescue you and tell 'em there was two
parties to consider? Yes; that's what you did--you began the bad
feelings. You've got naught to brag about. Jonah, you be."

The Spanish guard ordered that the bickering stop.

"You be working," said one of John's fellows one day, "as if you was
paid for it"--that was when he was on the first duty to which he had
been sent, labouring for the masons on the breakwater.

"Paid?" said another. "More like as if he was building his own house."

"I am," thought Upcott; but he said: "Well, why shouldn't I work? Aren't
we prisoners and aren't we here to work?"

"You're afeard of them," said one. "I'm afeard o' none o' them. I ain't
afeared o' them. I do as little as I can."

After that Upcott was removed from the breakwater gang, became a driver
of oxen, and armed with his long nail-tipped pole, plodded and prodded
from and to the quarries all day. There were two men to a team and the
teams generally went in threes, with a mounted guard, one in advance and
one in rear. For choice of those positions they spun a coin, as the
chances of assault from the teamsters behind were infinitesimal, while
to ride behind the teams was to be covered with grit and to breathe
grit and to find it in one's teeth at meal-time. The teamsters were all
picked men from among the prisoners and all of the better sort. And they
had soon arranged for them, for convenience in the mornings, quarters of
their own near the cattle-sheds. They were prisoners who had shown
themselves not only quiet, but willing; and as time went on they were
allowed to go forth into the city on evenings and on fte-days.

It shamed Upcott to see how well, on the whole, they were treated. Few
of the citizens called out insolencies or gibes to them, and these only
of the baser sort. And on most of the occasions when they were so
treated the mockers were not left unreproved, some more debonair citizen
with incisive words silencing the scoffers in shame.

"They are our prisoners of war," Upcott heard one corrected mocker
expostulate.

"We are Spanish gentlemen," said his corrector, while--

"Pirates they are," said one of the scoffers, "pirates! Think how they
treated us!"

And then he heard a piece of what was news to him, and heard another
point of view.

"Did they not shoot two of their own men in the plaza, during their
occupancy, because these two had been found assaulting our women? They
are an honourable foe."

"Um-m-m!" said one who had paused to listen to the bickering and at that
passed on with an air of a man drawn into futilities and returning
again to his own place. Upcott noted the man, lean, deep-browed, with
eyes that had in them both a fire and a weariness.

"Yes; they did that, we know," said a voice and the hooting died down
while the silent one walked away more quickly, his head suddenly bent as
though from a blow, out of the picture, cuddling his books under his
arm.

This news amazed Upcott. He wondered at the fact, and fact it was,
clearly; for others assented, saying: "Shame! Let them pass unremarked."

He could not understand. He had seen so much of hideous killing of men
and of ugly assault on women. He had a guess that, if the truth were
known, these two who had been shot had been trying to filch away some
women fancied by their leaders.

It was in his second year that Upcott was promoted to the oxen-driving
and that the woman of whom we shall hear anon looked from her high
lattice in Calle Papuda, one beflagged fte-day; and between the flutter
of the flags his gaze went up, and his heart was stirred. It was like
the falling of a golden petal from so high to a pool below.

Once or twice he saw her and then saw her no more; the house in Calle
Papuda was tenantless. But about that time also his circumstances
changed again. As he had been marked by the warders at the breakwater,
so he had been observed by the guards of the teams, and now was
discovered by Don Alfonso Bene, the collector and seller of Indian
curios in Calle Centura; and that dilettante, who seemed so out of
place in the great new city, spoke of the unusual prisoner (with whom he
had fallen in talk one day at his door) to some of his exalted patrons:
the result being that Upcott was put on his feet, given a house of his
own in Calle Abtao on condition that he taught the English language to
three youths, sons of three of these exalted persons.

He came without swagger to his new duties. It was noted, therefore, that
he was not a vainglorious man; but really Upcott was subdued by the
reflection that he was hardly paying the price he should have paid for
his share in the late horrors.

And then there came the next step, when one of his patrons called to
thank him for his work and handed him a written permit, with the city
seal, according to the terms of which he could set up as a teacher of
the English language if he cared so to do. And this without asking!

He had a curious thrill at his heart many times, a thrill of novelty and
wonder (and he thought how various is life) on going forth from his
house and glancing, as he did on his every exit, at the legend "Seor
John Upcott, teacher of English." And when he returned to the door there
was a kind of thankful tittering in his heart as he read his description
there. But he felt that he was getting off too lightly.

For the coaching of all save the first three pupils he had a fee, and as
Cartagena was neither mean nor poor, he did well.

Then came a letter to him, requesting the favour of his presence, to
discuss the question of teaching a child at the Casa Blanca beyond the
city wall, that stood shining white in the yellow hill, in its oasis of
garden, with the blue sky above it.

He saw the Seorita (for none called her Seora; it was the Spanish
courtesy not to; also perhaps a tribute to her rare beauty) on his
visit, in reply to her note, and recognised her, and wondered if she
recognised him: for she was the lady whose eyes had called him--no, not
so, the lady he had been insolent enough to gaze on once, to look for
again, when his way had led him through Calle Papuda. But she showed no
sign of recognition.

The Seorita, he understood, was a widow; and the husband, he suspected,
had been a man of substance, not only because of the house in Calle
Papuda, but because of this one. And though the Calle Papuda house had
been sacked it mattered little; the resources of the Seorita were far
beyond the city; the springs of wealth had not been touched, but only so
much as was gathered here. And Casa Blanca, when John Upcott came to it,
wore the air of comfort to the verge of luxuriance. It was arranged that
the child's lessons be given not at his own house, but here; and
remembering his own youth, and how the things that he had ever really
learnt had come to him not ostensibly as lessons, he made no parade of
being schoolmaster. This was his youngest pupil, and he feared that he
would have difficulties; but he played with the child, told her tales
that interested her so that she asked questions galore, which he
answered, giving cause for other questions, further explanations, and
she would wag her head and say: "Now I understand."

And the child helped to heal him of the bitterness of the Spanish seas
and to take its salt from his soul.

He was restless to recapture a sense of his own rightness in the world.
He had gone so far from the life he had desired on coming out of Bristol
Channel into the smoking Atlantic!

"I have lost something," he thought, "which I can never find." Yet,
talking to the little girl, he almost surprised it in her innocent
eyes--and then feared to snatch it to him lest, after all, he robbed
her!

Of the mother he had now and then glimpses, on the balcony or on other
terraces of the garden, for it was in the garden that almost all his
lessons were given, on the stone seat of the terrace over which the
bignonia subtly adventured, or under the tall oil-palm to whose smooth
stem the orchids clung caressing.

Then she came to him one day, smiling on the picture the child and he
made, and Upcott rose and bowed and remained standing before her. She
begged him to be seated, and "Anita interests me in her teacher," she
said.

"Teacher? What is teacher?" asked Anita.

"I forgot," said the Seorita, "I beg pardon; I forgot your methods,
Seor Upcott. A teacher is----"

"Is Seor Upcott a teacher?" asked Anita.

"Yes," said he.

"Then that means an old friend who plays with me and tells me stories. I
did not know that before."

Upcott and the mother delayed a little, so to speak, in digesting the
smile they shared there beside innocence.

Then John looked at the Seorita and could not reconcile her widowhood
with her attire; for she had the face of one who had deep feeling for
love, large eyes of what is called the "melting" order, soft gestures,
tender hands clasping her child as she subsided, like a falling,
fluttering petal for grace, on the stone seat. She was dressed in some
white stuff that spread and ruffled as she sat, spread, too, a little as
she walked, adding to her innocent allure, her charm. And over her head
was cast a white mantilla of rare, delicate weaving.

"I was going to leave you alone," she said, "thinking you would prefer
to be left alone; but I am curious to come nearer to you--Anita speaks
so sweetly of you."

"It is kind of Anita. Her tea--old friend"--and they shared again the
echo of the former ripple--"has to admit that he is devoted to her."

"Has to admit?" she replied. "Anita does not admit. Anita states,
declares her partiality. She looks upon her--on you as an old friend."

Then she rose.

"May I bring Seor Upcott with me when the gong sounds?" asked Anita.

"If Seor Upcott would care to come."

Upcott looked up and found that her eyes rested ever so kindly on him.
He wondered that she did not remember him, as he looked up so: for to
him there flashed, then, a picture of her, as he had first seen her when
his gaze had leapt up and found her at her lattice in the old city
house, between the flags, that fte-day.

"It is too great an honour for one who is, after all, a prisoner--a
slave," he suggested.

"I had thought," she said, "that you could never be a slave, were you
manacled."

And when she went, leaving that in the air, among the orchid-scent,
Anita said: "Why are you so quiet?"

"I was thinking," said Upcott and then: "But to our lessons--our play, I
mean."

He had a sense of ease. The house and garden lay very quiet to the sun,
so that one could hear the ruffle of a leaf where a lizard peeped among
the purple bignonia near by and, backward, the subdued tinkle of the
fountain in the court.

It seemed to him that his rest was here. Suddenly he emerged, as at the
end of a briared lane, into the open and delightful world of spaces,
rolling slopes with vastness of sea beyond. And a little silver thread
crept into the gold of his thoughts, with the tinkle of the fountain's
silver thread; he remembered that there was said to be Spanish blood in
North Devon. He left the thought like that in the air, thinking himself
too far from foolish youth to allow such tinselly threads in his
weavings.

But he had come against an enemy and found friends. He had seen his own
fellows as grasping, uncouth desecraters. He did not see that it was
with the ways of mankind he was at variance, nor consider that he had
come here with his own people's basest on a base errand and was now
living among the Spaniards in their quiet homes. Nor did it occur to him
to consider how the Spaniard gained his wealth; though these thoughts,
of course, need not, however settled, have prevented him from
considering his years here as a period in which to recapture his lost
self. Surely it was blessed unction to think that he was recompensing
those he had wronged. The sensitive have their unctions as well as their
wounds. At any rate, he found that he loved New Spain. And so, sincerely
enough, he told the Seorita, over the white table with its bright
silver ware in which were the twinkling miniatures of the room, showing
the table, and the sun-rays drifting through shaded windows and floating
in subdued pools on the floor. That was when she talked with him on his
experiences in the city. Of the sacking there was no word. She spoke to
him as though he were some visitor, guest. The young duenna sat also at
the table--her face, by the way, seeming to Upcott as though not then
beheld for the first time, but as though dreamt of, as it were; he could
not fix it. He thought she looked, once or twice, wonderingly at the
Seorita; but her eyes were set far apart, her air wistful, pensive. She
had the motions of--Upcott remembered is readings of Uncle's books and
considered she had the motions of--the nymphs rising before Hylas from
the pool. But the duenna and he did not exchange a word, she being
always occupied, when there chanced a pause in which she might be
expected to speak, on attending Anita's wants. If she was brought into
the conversation at all she spoke to air, or turned toward her mistress;
but all this as if it were her manner, and not ever rudely. It was her
way and a fascinating way. And never during the months that followed,
though to begin with now and then, and later frequently, Upcott was
similarly invited, did her manner change.

Now and then, in his talks with the Seorita, he was brought up sharp by
the thought that the talk was of himself and, perceiving as we have his
curious mixture of egoistic individualism, if so one can call his way of
setting his own particular seal on those pages of life that he touched,
and of, at the same time, humility, we can understand how he tried at
such times of self-consciousness to change the theme. But it had come to
be either that theme or silence. So he told himself that, after all, he
had but indicated lightly, much more lightly than he felt then, his
impressions of the New World, and that when he spoke about things in
general he spoke merely of them.

Somewhat thus, breaking in upon them on a sunny terrace one day, we
hear: "What a curious idea. I should have thought you would be hungry
for home."

He had been talking of New Spain and she had asked him, to test the
depth of his enthusiasm, if he did not long for his own land.

"No," he said, "I feel--it is of course, odd, but apart from the fact
that I am a prisoner here--I feel that after the cruelties we practised
on your people it is a boon to be able to do a very little in return. We
are helping to rebuild Cartagena, we slaves, prisoners."

She looked at him steadily, perhaps did not say the first thing that
leaped in her mind, but something else.

"And Cartagena itself, how of that? When your helping is sufficient you
will feel then that you can go, the debt is paid? No, no! it is not
Cartagena you love, not this new land. It is only your idea you cherish.
And I pride myself I understand your idea," she said quickly with a haze
in those melting eyes, and then, as she ended: "when you feel you have
assuaged that, Cartagena will fall from you," they looked deep in his
with a strange keenness. And as he, self-centred, probed inward on
himself, seriously to see if her suggestion that he had indeed that
idea, but _with a difference_, was an acute suggestion, her eyes
suddenly danced with merriment on the truthful man. And the serious John
Upcott smiled in reply. But at that she was grave again, her face
strangely shining.

"You think you could live on in Cartagena?" she asked. She lay back in
her chair suddenly, lissome, wonderful. Then, "You have impossible
ideas, Seor Upcott," she said and as she crossed her hands on a knee
the flicker of her hands so, moving quickly, ivory hands in the yellow
of the shaded room, and then the way she leant forward and, as it were,
peered on him, gave him a sudden horrifying thought that she held a
contempt for him in her heart.

"You may find me foolish," he said and thought that perhaps he had
already nearly worked off his debt to Cartagena, that at the end of the
six years, his term as prisoner, it would be assuredly worked off.

"Oh, no," she said. "I can understand your ideas;" her voice changed: "I
respect you for them;" and then Anita entered with the duenna at her
heels. And Anita ran to her mother and kissed her and thence turned to
Upcott; and that day, for the first time, held up her face, meaningful
enough to cause Upcott not to refrain from observing the child's
intention. He stooped his head to her and there was a quick little
fiasco of a kiss. Then raising his head, he bowed in reply to the
duenna's bow, she waiting for his salute. And, as she bowed, her eyes
looked on him with more of friendliness in their wide wistfulness. She
seemed more at ease.




CHAPTER XX

IN WHICH THE VEIL IS RENT


One night of tropic blue and stars, John Upcott, wandering on the hills,
came down the _arroyo_ that flanked the knoll behind Casa Blanca, and
found himself suddenly, like a child, imagining.

He transformed the _arroyo_ into a Devon _mouth_. Instead of grisly,
creeping, sharp-leaved and piny low bushes, there grew in it nettle,
blackberry, hawthorn. He wandered slowly down its darkness and then he
saw, against the velvet blue above, the silhouette of a man and woman.

They stood monumental even as he glimpsed them and then touched lips,
came closer; then turned abruptly each from each, and he thought he
recognised the retreating woman. But she was lost to sight over the
ridge, going down without a backward glance, at least till she had
dwindled on the ridge against the sky, pliant swinging form, erect
shoulders, upcast head--and then only the ridge; and the man was gone
from sight along the slope.

Then his heart beat wildly; it was as though it had stopped while he had
looked on that picture, picture so brief as hardly to have interrupted
his stride. It was just as though he had paused, seen--and then all his
blood was afire.

On the instant he began to walk quickly, not asking himself why. Was it
she, or had his eyes deceived him? If it were not she ... then he must
find her indeed, wherever she was, and tell her that he could not live
with the thought of her going away from him; she must be his--his only.

Stumbling down the _arroyo_ he sought certainty.

He reached the _arroyo's_ mouth and came out on the level and so along
the hill's foot. He went quickly; and though he had thus taken two sides
of a triangle and the woman but one, she cutting across the slope
directly toward the Casa Blanca--that is, if it was she--then would they
arrive there, to rear of the house, together. He saw the housetop over
the wall, the shadow of the wall flung toward him by the moon; and then
the garden-door creaked, opened, and in the oblong of it, against the
glimmer of the inner garden, he saw a woman. But the door did not close;
the woman stood there, and as he came nearer he saw her, dimly, one with
the shadow a space, and then clear in the moonlight, walking slowly away
from the house--the Seorita. She strayed a little way up hill; then
slowly, listlessly, as one dallies after the day, she came toward him
and he knew then that he had stopped as he stared upon the house. He
walked on again. Perhaps she had not seen him, walking as she did
looking up to the hill. Slowly he advanced, she wheeling about then and
straying toward the door.

Then she turned, quite near the wall and--perhaps the moonlight had
blinded her--she called: "Is that you, Manuela?"

His heart leaped. He went down to her, she backing slowly, not in a
fear-prompted haste, to the door.

"Ah!" she said, "Seor Upcott! You are walking on your hills."

He spoke--"words, words," as Hamlet said.

"I love the stars and the night," said he, of course with the personal
note, when what was in his heart was for otherwise. But before her
languid ease he felt doubtful, ashamed. Yet he tried to discover her
eyes. If he could but have seen her eyes!

But he and she were in the shadow of the wall.

"Have you been far?" she asked.

"Only wandering on the hills," he said.

There was a little pause as though both desired to say something and
neither could.

"You have by no chance seen my Manuela?" she asked.

"No, I have not," said Upcott.

"Poor girl! It may be none of my affair. Some think a mistress should
not meddle with her servants, should see little. But poor Manuela has so
big a heart for love. Her lover was killed in the French attack. She
sorrowed--of course she sorrowed; but one is only human and she has many
admirers and the years pass. I fear for her. She has so many admirers.
And she has no one to look after her----Why do you look so?"

"How do you mean?"

"I believe your have seen her, but that sense of honour of yours is so
strong. 'Tis as a vice, almost."

"I did see," said he, slowly, "I did see two lovers when I came down the
_arroyo_." He was scrutinizing her form beside him.

It was light enough, after all, in the deep blue shadow of that
star-blinded night to see her eyes. His brows puckered on her. He told
himself that this was not the form he had seen blotted on the ridge.
"But I paid no heed. The woman, I noticed, came down this way, but I
went on--by the _arroyo_. I was just coming thence when--when I saw
you," he thought his voice trembled as he ended.

At the sound of footsteps in the garden they turned their heads and saw
the fragile duenna come forth.

"Can I do anything for the Seorita?" she asked. "Would you care for me
to play--ah! I beg pardon. I did not see----" and she paused.

"Is Manuela come in?" asked the Seorita.

"Yes, Manuela is in. Do you wish her?"

"I shall see her later. What a night! What stars! New Spain is better
than old. Oh! what an exultation comes over me in this land at times.
Walk with me, Seor Upcott--unless you are in haste home."

"I have nothing to take me home," he said.

"Walk with me," she said; and with a curious sense of treading in an
unreal world he fell in step with her and they strayed up the slope,
turning about now and then to look down on the twinkling lights of
Cartagena, strayed round and returned to the knoll above the _arroyo_
down which Upcott had come and seen thence, looking up thither----

She had stopped, looking pensive into the dark with its lamps low, and
its stars low and high. His breath caught; his heart seemed to knot like
a constricted muscle, and looking on her he felt his eyes burn. But
she--she stood impassive, gazing on the jewelled night, came perhaps
ever so little closer to him, gently swaying; or was it the blood
surging again from his heart that made the world seem to reel, and she
toward him? He flung an arm round her and gathered her to him. He kissed
her cheek and she did not resent; and he kissed her mouth. He did not
know how long they had stood, when, sighing, she said: "We had better go
home."

They went down the slope abruptly and as they came to the level they saw
the duenna seated by the door, the wall high above her, moonlit now, for
the world had been turning.

"I have at least a faithful _duenna del casa_," said the Seorita to
Upcott. "Why--Isabella!" (to the duenna) "why did you not come? I
thought you were going back or I would have asked you to come."

"One must take care of the house," said the duenna, "and the gate was
opened, and the gardener is away to-night--there was no one else."

Upcott had no memory of the good-night, how they looked, how they
parted; he only knew they had gone in and he was drawing erect from his
bow, sweeping his hat to his head again.

And now he lived for the morrow. He refused himself to dwell on the
night just dying. He fell asleep in its glory as one can fall asleep
looking on a bright light and caring not what manner of illuminant it is
that makes the hypnotic point. There was a tangle of thoughts in his
mind, but he could not disentangle them. He was as one who, knotting a
cord in nervous ringers, tossing it down, finds that it has formed a
wondrous decorative design of lines and spaces. He knew there were
thoughts that were suspicions--either founded, or hideous. If he was
wrong, what sort of mind had he?

"God forgive me my suspicions," he thought--and than he had only the
sense of the woman in his arms. He could not think even of that. He fell
asleep knowing that there would come a morrow. And on the morrow, when
he saw her, her eyes, as they met his, were so full of candour that he
was ashamed. Of course she made no reference to the night before. But
she was as wondrous as ever. They were lovers. Love had lent daring to
this prisoner and he had won his desire. She was called away from him
that day before much had been said, but at least he had seen her and
found that he had not lost her by his action of the night before. The
day passed like sweet music and night fell gently like the silence after
a perfect song.

He woke to the sound of the church bells clanging, reverberating,
setting the air dancing; and wakened so from sleep he waked joyful,
leaping again radiantly into life. The bells might have been ringing for
him.

He thought over his life; thought of his mother in Devon. That brought
regret. That brought in an alien, if exquisite, thread into the
weavings of that morning: he had no news of her; but then, in his day,
no news for years could be borne more easily than now can no news for
months--that of course; and pardon me if I seem to insult you by the
reminder.

Still--he longed to see her again. But after all he was making more
money here than he could make at home; and if he were to support her in
her age, here he could gather wealth to help toward the fulfilment of
that desire; here was the place to stay. All this apart from the fact
that his six years had not yet expired.

But then, you see, he had found his balance again My John Upcott may be
unusual, but he is not improbable; he is really delightfully human here.

And then he thought of the Seorita, at the same moment, it would seem,
as he remembered that his time as a prisoner was not yet gone, and that
to take advantage of all this extra licence given him and endeavour to
slip away ... he thought of the Seorita, in her resignation, in his
arms! Passion confused his thoughts. Then for a moment, when his heart
stopped again as it had done on seeing the picture, he recollected
it--two silhouetted forms on the night-hushed hill.

And in the flush that he felt spread then on his cheek he knew that he
was tampering with something dubious. Why did he flush, why did he flush
so, sitting alone, half dressed in his little Calle Abtao house? He was
a prurient-minded wretch! He would think such thoughts no more! He
decided to love with no foolish thoughts born of jealousy. He banished
the suspicion--and felt better, more like the man he desired to be. At
the same place, too, she had stood with him! Hideous! Hideous! He
breathed an unworded prayer to be kept in the fairness and not in the
fire of love; and he remembered Uncle, who knew so much, translating to
him some fragment of Sappho, "Now Love is master of my limbs and shakes
me, fatal creature, bitter-sweet." Why bitter-sweet? thought he; and
then it occurred to him that he dallied with life, who should go
indomitable, head held high, making his own world.

There were to be no lessons that day; for the galleons had been off the
coast yesterday, to-day would be in harbour. The _tiempo muerto_ was at
an end. Hence the bells; and hence, when Upcott, this again new Upcott,
head erect, thrown back, air a little magnificent, went into the
streets, the sight he saw there:--new arrivals to the colony, just come
ashore, looking about them with eyes, some almost afraid, one might be
excused for thinking; troubled, at any rate, with strangeness; young
men, with quick, roving glances, who had that odd air of trying to walk
as though they knew the town, were aware of their route; also, nearer
the water, soldiers and sailors, with their sea-going gait and vagabond
ease; and a great number of mule teams stepping down shoreward. But
Upcott knew, from the previous years of his sojourn here, that this
incidental stir was only a promise of the premeditated conviviality and
uproar that would come later, after a lull, when the ships, having
passed on westward, returned again to Cartagena.

In Calle Papuda, as he passed the old house where the Seorita had
lived, he experienced the now familiar emotion; for always now as he
passed and looked up to it, it seemed somehow silently vocal, as though
its adobe and strawless brick, made out of earth like himself, had, like
himself, life, an unknown, incomprehensible life, a life quite mute; but
it seemed to know things; it had participated in the lives of two, one
who looked downward, one who looked upward there. The house had that
odd, poignant friendliness of inanimate things that have been with us,
or around us, in the few eternal moments of our fading life. Quiet in
the sun, brooding in the moon, what did it think? Did it not think,
perhaps, how men come and go upon their passionate, or God-seeking
business, and how now the cobbled street is thronged and anon emptied?
Fantasy! All fantasy! It was he who gave the dead house-front its air of
thought, the latticed, deep-set windows their magic. Fantasy! And then
he saw a man of military bearing, standing back from the door and
looking up frowning on the house and just as Upcott came by his side the
man turned and their eyes met.

"Pardon me, seor," and the stranger touched his thin morion that shone
in the sun. "You appear to be a citizen, not a stranger here. Cartagena
is changed. Can you inform me where the people of this house have
gone--Don Tristan Peyrens?"

"Don Tristan is--he is dead, seor," said John, returning the salute.

"Dead?" and the stranger raised his brows.

"Some years," said Upcott.

The stranger's face clouded, expressionless. Then:

"Ah!" he said, "ah! And the Seorita--do you know the affairs of the
house?"

"I believe," said Upcott--though why he put it thus who knows? Perhaps
because he was speaking to a stranger and the stranger had suddenly,
after his first shining and gallant manner, seemed to have drawn a
silence round him as one might draw a cloak--"I believe she is now
resident at the Casa Blanca--a house beyond the wall. You come to it on
the hill road--under the second hill with the cactus on its side--_Cerro
Alegre_----"

"Ah! I know. A house by itself in a garden--just before one comes to the
narrow _quebrada_? No?"

"Yes, seor. That is the house."

"Bueno! I thank you, seor."

"I am glad to have been of service, seor."

"Good-day, seor."

"Good-day, seor."

And so Upcott went on to see the galleons in the harbour and the boats
coming and going under the gulls that swept and cried over the shipping;
and he felt the old unrest in his heart looking on these castellated
craft and thinking of their far journey. So he was sent into a day-dream
and held in it as long as the sun lasted, gathering impressions of the
day without thinking he did so, so that afterwards he could picture it
all--the sailors on the quays (those specially privileged to come ashore
on the day of arrival) squatted against the wine-shops with the water
melons between their knees, slicing with their great knives and looking
up bantering on the passing people of the world in which they had just
landed; negroes bringing ashore the belongings of the new colonists in
the great bluff floats, proud slaves, childishly proud, shining black
fellows with brawny arms pulling on their long sweeps, and they looking
up quick and furtive to shore in anxiety to known if their muscles were
admired; boats coming landward with soldiers to guard the treasure
already gathered and the remaining treasure that should come during the
next two months over the inland trails. But in the late afternoon he
turned away from the city, and on the Camina Cintura, that skirted the
sand-hills and the _quebradas_ (where often he had seen bands of his own
race, with shackled ankles, road-making) he met his lady and her child
and the duenna. And his lady's face was radiant.

She talked of the stir in the city and of the sense of being again in
touch with home.

"I expect we shall see some of our old friends," she said. Upcott was on
the point of telling her of the gentleman whom he had directed from the
old Calle Papuda house; but the day was a dilatory day, a day in which
the spirit said _poco tiempo_, and made no haste; murmured _manana_, and
was content in the sunshine, so her pause was not long enough for
another to speak. "I suppose one cannot expect visits from them the
first day they are here. But if they knew how long our 'dead-time' seems
they would come at once. What can that 'dead-time' have been years ago
when there were but a quarter the number of us here that are here
to-day, and nothing but wooden houses to live in? To-morrow we shall see
them, some of them, doubtless. They have their duties to attend to on
arrival."

He noticed that the duenna looked strangely at her mistress; and his
heart was again visited by doubt. Then said the duenna:

"Yes; they will come later. You must not feel ignored if they do not
come at once. Their first day here is always full for them. They may
even come to-night."

Her eyes were wide and calm. She was as though perfectly, sweetly
friendly with her mistress. But the brows of her mistress frowned a
moment. And then "Let us hope so," she said. "I should like to renew
some old friendship. I should like to think that I was remembered well
enough to be sought out soon."

"You are at least sought for. I can relieve you so far," said Upcott. "I
saw a gentleman to-day who inquired if I knew your address."

"Oh?" Her head lifted and then the languid air came, as was natural to
the day. "What was his name?"

"I do not know. It was on the street he asked me, at your old house."

"Bueno! Then we may hope for one visitor, at least, with the latest
gossip of Madrid. Perhaps, as you directed him, he is now awaiting our
arrival."

"Unless the gentleman that Seor Upcott directed," suggested the duenna,
"was Francisco de Avila."

The Seorita looked at her with a quick turn of head.

"Ah!" she said, and "Why not?" That was her pet phrase, serving often,
its meaning varying by her mutable voice. "_Como no?_ Why not? I had not
thought of him. How was he attired--how did he look--this nameless
gentleman you directed?"

But she asked the question after a pause, and in what, for such as she,
was a voice almost flurried. It seemed not her voice, but had the
staccato the voice has when it speaks because speech is demanded when
silence is craved.

The pleasant languor seemed to have ebbed from the day. It was all the
difference between being leisurely, and tired.

Upcott conjured up the man and described him somewhat.

"That would be he," said the Seorita, and seemed tired of the subject
before he had spoken two phrases. Either, it would appear, he had the
gift of quick description, or the lady was wearied of a trivial matter.

Anita piped up: "But Don Francisco had a feather in his hat. You did not
tell he had a feather, a great one."

There was a little silence.

"Yes," said Upcott and his hand just touched on the child's shoulder.
"Yes, _cara mia_, the gentleman wore a feather. I forgot that in
describing him."

He spoke to air, but he saw both the Seorita and the duenna turn a
glance on his face. And then he talked airily, gaily. He held them in
talk to the gate.

"Will you come in and rest?" asked the Seorita. "The day is heavy."

"It has fallen heavy," said Upcott; "but no--I had not intended to come
so far, only meeting you--I must return."

He sought her eyes for love, his yearning a question; she looked at him;
he had his wish; he saw her eyes, two pools of trouble. He did not know
what they said. He saw terror in them, but he saw also questions. It was
as if they said: "What is wrong? Do you not love me?"

He went home haunted by these eyes, and thinking how this Francisco de
Avila had worn not one of the new-world broad hats, not one of the high
feathered hats of the Spanish grandees, but one of these light, thin
morions, such as still were worn by many.

He could not rest. He paced his chamber and then sat down again
feverishly to recall words, phrases, glances of the Seorita, to
remember what might be considered contradictions. But he could not think
sanely.

Then the door opened. Perhaps his housekeeper had knocked and he had not
heard. Perhaps she had not. But the door opened and he looked up with a
distracted face that suddenly wore a false calm, a distracted calm--for
the Seorita stood before him. He heard a chink of gold, and then the
feet of the old woman, his housekeeper, shuffling away; and the Seorita
advanced on him with lustrous eyes, casting back her black mantilla with
a wonderful gesture.

"Juan," she said, "Juan, I love you." He held out his arms but to ward
her off.

"God knows," said he, "I love you. I could go to the ends of the earth
for you. For you I am strong."

"I am proud of you," she said; and her face changed, her gesture too,
changed; and she leant to him. He embraced her ever so tenderly,
subduing his passion.

"Kiss me," she said; "I had to come to you."

He held her face between his hands, she pliant before him, he bending to
her; and reverently he kissed her forehead.

"I love you," he said. "But do you remember--ah, my God! do you remember
that night when I was on the hill----"

"And I came out to the hill?" she interjected.

"I was wandering there, thinking of you," he said.

"And I--_que lastima!_" she said in a whisper that seemed to pierce more
than a cry--"I lied to you."

It flashed through John Upcott's heart that at least she was about to
confess--for love's sake. So might all be well.

"I told you that I came looking for my Manuela," she said. "It was not
so----"

"No; do not tell me," he said: "it is too much for you."

"I shall tell: it was you I came out to see. Something told me you were
there. I came looking for you. I felt you were there. Do you know that?
Can you understand that?"

He held her close, tenderly. How he had wronged her!

She looked into his eyes and said: "I love you."

"It is a sacred word," said he solemnly, and thought what a canting dog
he had been, but how now in a new life beginning with this woman he
would be a man. He stood with her there, not in his shadowing room at
all, as it felt, but in Eternity. "It is a sacred word," said he
solemnly, trembling. "I love you. I shall love you for ever." Ah! the
wonderful spirit he held in his hands--the spirit he had wronged, the
spirit so wonderfully clothed in perfect form.

"A passionate word," she corrected him. "I give you my love for ever,
but also now."

He looked on her wildly, though, as she spoke, he gathered her to him.
He looked at her wildly. In his mind were two spirits at conflict: that
spirit that had breathed deep in lonely crystal mornings on the Devon
cliffs, where the white gulls wavered up and down, and another spirit.
And the spirit that had lived on the flying of the gulls, and the voice
of the sea, and the remote light in his mother's eyes that saw the
things that few see, had its ascendancy a moment; and in that moment he
caught the woman's shoulders in his hands and held himself a little
backward and looked, searching in her eyes. And her face changed. She
was pale and she smiled on him as he looked. But one thing then suddenly
riveted his attention: the moment before she had been beautiful beyond
words; now, in the next moment, as she smiled, he found her utterly
evil. As some of the lizards of that land affected him with repugnance,
as certain snakes did, as even some forms of rock on his old home's
coast had affected him--so was he affected then. He noted, as she
smiled, how, after all, she was not beautiful, the most beautiful woman
in Cartagena. As she smiled he saw a tooth that seemed no tooth, but a
fang. Till that moment he had not seen it, that terrible fang-like
tooth, so far back, so well hid by the amazing coral bow of her lips.
But as he looked on her so, with searching eyes, she smiled thus
horribly, the fang-like tooth showed, her one blemish that spoiled all
and put her in the world of flat-headed things and things with warted
backs and low, dust-touching bellies.

And then _deliberately_ he grasped her and drew her to him. He felt as
though he could crush her in his arms, and as he did so her face swam up
to meet him, the eyes closed, the lips almost closed, the fang-tooth was
hidden, the face was that of a sphinx, an eidolon swimming up to him out
of the nether darkness, out of the shadow of the world. He looked again
and holding her snake-like body he made again a choice. For at that
moment he felt that a choice must be made. It was one thing or another
with him. He blotted out, with a gesture, the whole chronicle of crystal
things, lights of sunrises, sad-sweet twilights; he was then far beyond
thought of duties. And in a tortured abandon he chose for the things
that perish.

As suddenly as she had come, she went, after the brief tropic twilight.
Nay; it was night; and her white face had gone. She had fled again and
left him alone in the dark. And the dark was full of whispering voices.
But it was no dream, no hallucination. She had come and gone.

"Oh woman!" he cried. "It should not have been! We do not stand alone,
she and I. We are only units." Up out of the past came memories, not of
the words, but of the sense of words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius that
Uncle had read to him, translating to him. He knew the duties of men,
there being others in the world besides ourselves. "For the sake of all,
these things should not be, John Upcott. You hear me?" It was his own
voice now, talking on to himself in the darkness. "Nature says no.
Conscience says no. All things say no. Only the selfish and those who
need not the welfare of others dare defend to-night. It is not that you
have sinned, John Upcott, as your mother, with her Book, would tell you;
it is that you have done a thing for passion's sake ... And I love her."

He thought suddenly of the manner of her coming, thought of the clink of
gold in the old woman's hand and for a moment that which he lacked so
greatly despite all his egotism, namely a sense of _amour propre_,
sprang fiercely to life. He could have cursed the woman he had loved.
The stuffiness of the chamber was oppressive and he went out into the
streets, out beyond the walls. He was in a ferment. And then passing
away by the Camina Centura he found the silence of the climbing slopes,
wandered athwart the hill and then sat down to grope in the vastness to
discover if anywhere there was yet to be found an indication that he
might still, one day, find again a sense of going well, going rightly.
Already he was frantic to _get back_. Then he laughed strangely, a laugh
of bitter mockery, he jeering at himself, for he was on the knoll above
the Casa Blanca: Cerro Alegre it was called--"happy hill."

He did not fling himself down madly, melodramatic. He merely seated
himself, with a forced calm, and then, broken, slipped to earth, lay
prone, with the smell of the hot sandy soil in his nostrils and the feel
of it in his hands for his only possible consolations. He lay there
trying to calm himself; and, calming himself, he got outside the man he
had been in the last days, looked on at himself, as once or twice
already in his life we have known him look.

He was critical enough then to remember--in that frame of mind then,
looking on at himself--of Socrates on the Volga's ice standing
night-long to settle some haunting question in his mind; but he
bethought him that the argument that held Socrates there would be no
matter of personal fever, of fightings with self, but some matter of
wide import. He thought too how he lay, while Socrates stood. He found
himself altogether contemptible. And then, with almost a moan, he turned
his head, writhed almost then, and behold, the unnumbered stars in the
roofless night!

He saw them with awe and wonder; he felt that he had forgotten the
stars: that was the secret of his fall that had brought this anguish.

And then as he lay he saw two shadows coming down the hill; but he paid
no heed. He had just this moment seen where calm dwelt, had his spirit
jogged, as it were, by the silent stars. Living people, who must die,
passing on the hill, were hardly even intruders. He merely turned his
head again from them and lay staring, looking along the hill, through
the tangle of bushes, out into starry space.

"Should I flee to forget her?" he moaned. "Should I remain and try, by a
great love, to hold her to me? I love her well enough for that."

A sound behind him caused him again to turn. The two shadows that he had
seen drifting higher on the hill had come close--a man and woman. And he
knew the woman: how could he fail to know her now even in the darkness?
And there was no mistaking her pose of surrender to the man who came
with her.

The surging of blood in his ears made him that he never knew whether the
words of love he heard were spoken, or imagined, or remembered. He could
not believe that these words he heard, among the sound of the blood
throbbing roughly through his veins, were spoken to another. It could
not be! They were the very words that had been spoken to his own ear,
sighed there, so lately. His temples throbbed. And then she was alone,
coming almost upon him and the man going away. And then suddenly, near
him, following on a quick rustle in the scrub, he saw the duenna. There
he lay, the duenna so close that he could have touched her feet by
stretching forth his hand; and beyond her, her mistress. And the
picture, to his eyes at least, he being now at home in the starry dark,
was perfectly clear.

The Seorita started, whipped erect. "Well?" she said; and her head went
back with a toss that let fall her mantilla on her shoulders. It was
strange that she, so daring, so langorously brazen in her life, should
then wear the air of a creature at bay. Perhaps she knew, keenly quick,
that indeed she was almost at bay. It was but a matter of moments.

"The Seor has come home," said the duenna.

"What?" And then, as though perhaps after all she was not at bay, but
could still carry things through in the face of all, "_Como no?_" But it
was overdone, that air of "Well, why this rushing out to seek for me and
tell me that?"

"I only came to find you," said the duenna.

"How--why did you come here? Have you been far looking for me? Have
you--told him--that I was out for a walk on the hill?"

"Do I look as if I had told him? I have not seen him." Suddenly the
pensive, deer-like duenna drew erect. "Do I look like a woman to mix
myself in your world? I knew where to find you: that is all."

"Spy! Spy! Spy! And how did you know where to find me?"

"I am no spy. I have only seen things. One cannot help seeing. I look
for nothing. It is not my affair. That is perhaps why one sees so much.
You--you--oh, you make me ashamed of my womanhood, my sex, the very
function of my sex. Do not call me spy! You will say next that my mind
is evil. That is the way of women such as you. You use all truths and
all lies but to aid you in your evil ways. Do not call me spy. Why could
you not hide from me what you are? I--I--I had no desire to see----"

"How dare you talk so! I have done nothing. I am not what you think.
Your mind is debauched! I do not understand you!"

"Your husband is waiting. He is home. I came to tell you--that is all,"
said the duenna and half turned to go.

"Caramba! You----" began the Seorita with the oath of a beldame, then
choked on her words. And then close at hand, coming up hill, taking them
unawares, they being plunged in this private eddy, came a man out of his
own world. He was on them before Upcott, at any rate, was aware of his
coming. It was some exquisite movement of the Seorita, simultaneous
with a drawing aside of the duenna, that caused Upcott to look round,
from the woman who had witched him, to look round to discover why her
manner so suddenly changed.

"_Mehito mio!_" cried the man already beside them. "It is you!"

She tottered to him and he gathered her in his arms and she drooped
toward him and broke into weeping on his breast.

"Who is that?" asked the man presently.

"Who?" she quavered. "Whom do you mean?"

"That woman who was here; that woman there."

"Ah!" Upcott heard her gasping breath. "That is my duenna. She is of a
good family ruined in the French attack. That is all. She--she walks
with me when I come out here."

The trustful egotism of the man aided her.

"You come often here then--to our _Cerro Alegre_?" he asked and held her
again, caressing.

"Yes--when I am lonely." And she looked up with her head
sidewise--Upcott knew how the moonlight would be in her eyes, they
gazing upward lustrously.

"You are lonely?" asked her husband.

She nestled to him.

"I have thought you--thought you dead," she said and shook upon him.

"_Mehito mio_," he said and gathered her close. "I will tell you after,
tell you all my wanderings. But here we are together. To think of you
coming here--to this house just under our hill! Was it----"

"It was cheaper; several of us are here who were impoverished in the
sacking," she said. "And it was under the hill," her voice was atune to
her eyes, melting and moving.

All this that Upcott had seen and heard had occupied but a short space
of time, yet long enough to cause him to think many a conflicting
thought. He was an unintentional eavesdropper--he should turn and flee
away too quickly for recognition. With the first man he had had murder
in his heart; he could have leapt up and drawn sword on him on the
instant. Then had come the duenna on the scene and he had fallen
atrophied, helpless. And this man--her husband--he had no anger for him;
but as for the woman--how could he feel toward her? Feelings mattered
nothing. She was a woman. There was nothing could be done.

But he was not the only one who had seen this meeting. Down hill,
clattering, came the man from whom the Seorita had parted, or at least
Upcott thought it was the same man. The sequence of pictures went on
before his eyes like some disordered dream.

"Draw! Draw!" cried the man who now broke through the scrub.

"What is this?" cried the husband. "Madman! What do you want?"

"Draw! Draw!" And the man leaped toward the two, naked blade in hand.
And Upcott recognised him as the man he had directed in Calle Papuda.

The Seorita cringed backward.

"He is mad!" she cried. "Sancta Maria, he is mad!"

Her husband drew her aside, sanctuarised her in his holding left
arm--and as the madman lunged on him he evaded the thrust with an agile
sidewise movement, still shielding his wife. And then he boldly leaped
forward. He must have been unarmed, for he leapt as though to catch the
madman's arm, ducking low and sidewise from the thrust. But, doing so,
he stumbled, and the second thrust passed over his falling body and ran
on--through the heart of the Seorita. She fell, gurgling "Holy Mary,
Mother of God." She gave a great gasp as the horrified swordsman leapt
back. She sank down spluttering from her lips. As she fell dead thus and
the madman recoiled, crying a wordless, demented cry, he had his legs
clutched by the fallen husband, struggling to his feet. But as the
madman tottered, gripped so, he raised his sword arm, crooked and
vindictive, and thrust down into the man at his feet and drew forth and
thrust again and again and then turned and fled like a disjointed shadow
flung along the hill.

Upcott lay shuddering, how long he knew not, and then he heard a voice:

"Seor Upcott! Seor Upcott!"

He raised a white face. It was the duenna, more pale than he.

"Seor Upcott, I do not ask what you do here. I heard you speak as I
stood there waiting. You did not see me when you came up here. I
expected you to pass on and did not show myself. From your words I do
not judge you are evil. Ah, you men! How you allow beauty to----" she
suddenly sobbed. Upcott half rose and she moved away. He saw her in the
twilight of the night more beautiful than his dreams. "Seor Upcott, I
shall not say I saw you here: I would advise you to be gone. I shall not
say, because I believe this is the end here. Oh, God, what I have
suffered in that house."

She looked down and shuddered, and Upcott, unconsciously looking down
likewise, thought the house had a diabolic, sinister aspect, standing in
its walled garden in the moonlight with its yellow-lit windows and its
great shadows.

"I would never go back if it were not for the child. One must think of
the children. Good-bye, Seor Upcott;" and she moved down from him,
looking round in her farewell so wondrously that he rose, abashed, as in
the Presence.

"God bless you," he said.

"God help you," said she.




CHAPTER XXI

HOW JOHN UPCOTT STOOD IN THOUGHT


John Upcott was aboard the _Pearl_ of Plymouth, Richard Proust, master:
and this change affected him as a shock, left him a little stunned.

He felt the precipitancy, as, in a way, we feel it in the reading:
yesterday in Cartagena, in the midst of a maze at the end of a tangle;
to-day, all the past over, he plucked out of it. So he was a little
stunned.

But how, and why, had he come here? One thing haunted him, difficult
though I, for one, find it to understand his infatuation; and that was
his love for the lady of the Casa Blanca. He knew her now, through and
through; and yet he loved her--he loathed her! But the thing he had
imagined her, the thing she was not--his adoration of which had led him
at last to the same end as came those others who had presumably
recognised her for what she was, desired her as she was, and won their
share in her--the thing she was not, he still had in his mind's eye. So
a medley of conflicting thoughts was in John's mind: disgust at being of
that company; tellings of himself that he was not really of that
company; tellings of himself that he assuredly was: for who was he to
judge by what ways they too had travelled, to bow before her and be
swine as the voyagers before Circe? The thought smote him with horror,
as he jeered at this leniency toward them, that no one could think his
adoration aught but as theirs, a kind of canine dalliance. His soul was
sick.

He was, after that, less haunted by the linked memories of the clean
hours in the terraced garden with the child and her, and crystal-clear
visits in the house, when he found her worshipable, when she was to him
but the thing he made her, ere, having loved her for what she was not
and gathered her, she gave him herself. A hundred thoughts of her, loves
of what she was not, loathings of what she was, hatreds of those who had
nurtured that thing which, alas, she was, that woman whom he had not
desired, imagining some other woman there, possible at least of
cultivation: a hundred thoughts of her smoked in his mind. When Upcott
took an idea he clung to it. He remembered, with maddening anguish, his
landlady's manner on the morning after the visit, her mixture of a new
deference and a familiar banter. He had fled the sight of his landlady
and gone half way to the shop of his friend the antiquary, Don Alfonso
Rene. There were the two poles: the old woman, who could never have
believed that he had done aught but "made a conquest" of the lady of the
Casa Blanca: the ascetic Don Alfonso, who could have understood a love
for one to whom one might even never so much as speak, the love for a
spirit, real or imagined, that passed one by, or sat nigh one daily,
robed about with the vanquishing flesh so soon to be vanquished and fade
like roses. He had heard Don Alfonso talk of Helen of Troy in the way of
a scholar who loves her as a name that has lived through the ages,
loving not Helen, but Eternity.

But he had stopped half way and turned back--alone.

For the first time in life he felt utterly alone. He had thought himself
so before, many times. But now he knew he had never been so. He turned
about and went home again and gathered his wealth, the savings of these
four years, a fair sum. Something sustaining, almost healing, was with
him then, as he prepared for departure. He felt that somewhere in the
world there was a fount of sympathy. A thought of the duenna flashed in
his mind and then he remembered, thinking of her face as he had seen it
on the hill last night--she had been in the Cartagena house that Hacker,
Ashplant, O'Neil and he had held. He recalled the time of horror of the
sacking. Yes; he was sure. Now he had fixed her: the duenna was the girl
in that house, seen once on the upper balcony. He stood comparing the
faces in his mind's eye: the terrified face of the house, the pained
face of the hill. So that was why he had seemed to know the duenna; that
was why she, recognising him, was so reserved! He thought of his
behaviour at the house they had held. Could it be because they had
behaved there, after all, as the occupancy went, with decency, that she
had at the end spoken to him so wondrously? He allowed himself that
belief and took its balm.

His landlady entered with a note. There was no answer desired. The negro
who had delivered it was gone. And John, breaking the seal, read:

     "Are you aware that English vessels are often to be found off the
     coast to westward? Especially at this time of year when many
     Government officials from the lesser places are in Cartagena and
     Porto Bello, do these vessels come to shore with merchandise which
     they sell to our villagers."

Yes: Upcott knew that such a traffic went on successfully, thanks to the
duties of New Spain; and he had no doubt who had penned the note, though
it lacked signature. Folding it reverently he placed it in his breast
pocket. And then, with a stronger sense of support, as though he had now
a blessing on his departure, he paid his landlady, called a porter and
bade him bring mules. He did not tell his landlady that he would not
return; and he took so little luggage that she must have imagined him
only going for a change of air. He did not tell her, merely suggested,
that he might be gone some days; and her knowing leer was a new goad to
urge him onward. But as he departed he looked once, long, at the sign by
his door: "Seor Upcott--teacher of English."

He went by the Camina Burbacoas and then through the varied forests, now
burnt by sun, now drenched by tropic rain that draggled him as his
spirits were draggled and brought out a following of stinging mosquitos.
At last he came over against Baru Island on the seaboard and so on to
Via del Mar, that little cluster of adobe huts under the high palms
fronting the trembling air, set agog by the trembling surges. The place
reminded him of the clustering cob-walled cots of the close-packed Devon
hamlets where the labourers thronged of winter nights and heard the
bombardment of his northern and greyer sea.

You will have noticed that so far there has always been a woman in
Upcott's life, or his image of some woman. In this, his worst pass, the
eidolon was of the dimmest. He had no real proof of whose hand had
written the note that he carried in his breast, but the presence of the
duenna was with him, before him--for his pillar of cloud and fire. Again
he was taking strength from the eternal feminine, finding, as poets find
in brooks, in dawns, in sunsets, solitary twilights, echoes of their
cries, confirmation of their beliefs; or imagine they so find, though
they know the story of Narcissus and how he, looking in the water, saw
there his own face.

His entrance into the village, he perceived, was frowned upon. Clearly a
Don from Cartagena was not welcome at the moment. And the reason for
this lack of welcome was not far to seek; for over the promontory to
west of the village, between the tree stems and through the lianae, John
saw an English brig close in shore; and here at his side, as he and his
peon, passing, scattered the lean chickens in the dust, heard: "Looks
like some government Don; slit his weazand if he meddles."

"Whose weazand would you slit?" he cried, reining up sharp, so that his
negro rode into him and he cursed him. Next moment he was surrounded by
his countrymen, for the garb was the garb of Spain but the voice was of
Devon. So he came again to an English deck, an English cabin, for Proust
had him rowed aboard and below with him to crack a bottle of Alciante
and then one of rum in the way of an English mariner. "This Don's
Alciante," said he, "is swipes for a seaman's stomach." Proust was in
high fettle; for his little 140-ton _Pearl_ with its ten guns--four to
starboard, one on the poop, one on the forecastle, and its twenty
men--was making money.

They slipped down the coast with their contraband to two other villages
and it was then, his main business fortunately ended, that Proust
bethought him of coming to some agreement with his passenger.

Upcott was in the cabin, plumped down in this new life, the life of
yesterday seeming curiously far off, as though a tale, like that of
Jason's rovings, broken like the fragmentary half-myths of Modoc of
Wales and his wanderings. And as he sat in the tiny cabin, a cigarro
smoking in his fingers and he looking vacant through the low ports on
the scintillating shore and hearing the familiar plucking of the little
waves all about the ship, there fell a shadow in the oblong of barred
light from the skylight and delayed there. And into the vacant mind of
Upcott came something like a warning. He did not look up; but when the
shadow passed he rose lightly and, stepping immediately to the table
where lay the charts of the coast, he took from the half-open drawer a
pistol, on the butt of which, as he sat there, his eyes had rested; and
withdrawing the charge he replaced it, ran his hand in the drawer lest
another pistol lay there, and, finding one, served it similarly; and
then back again to his apparently listless loafing. When the vessel
again was under weigh down came Proust.

"That's the end of that," said he, cheerily.

"Done well?" asked Upcott without looking up.

"Sure I have. This is the best trip since the sacking by de Pointis. He
spoiled the coast a bit for us." He was not certain of Upcott, did not
know what to make of this scowling man who had asked a passage with him
to some English port. He produced a bottle, and the slip of a cabin boy,
some runaway apprentice from London town, set the glasses.

"Where do you head for now?" asked John.

"'Twas in my mind to run home a cargo from Virginia for Bideford.
Bideford is coming on these days, running the port of London close for
tobacco and West Indy trade generally--" West Indian, by the way,
meaning, in those days, any place from New York south to the Carib Seas.

His old acquaintances would have failed to recognise John as he sat
there in the cabin. He was not the Upcott of old, a new man with two
perpendicular furrows on his forehead and a mouth puckered. Proust had
asked him of the Dons, of life in Cartagena; for Upcott's attire alone
told its tale. But Proust had difficulty in believing that this man was
an escaping prisoner; his figure did not fit with the tales of Spanish
treatment of their captives. He filled the glasses and John
congratulated him on his trip and wished him a better still, next time,
taking the first glass like the "half-gentry" man he was, holding it up
to the dim light from the brightening and anon dim ports along which the
tops of the long, green and sliding waves went glittering and sending
their wavering arabesque along the tiny cabin. His second glass was
replenished by the master. To the third he helped himself; and then a
new light came in his eye. Now he felt himself of the world. When he
blew through his nostrils he was blowing from him all his past. When he
stretched his legs abroad and canted up his head he was coming into the
bitter world, as he esteemed it, to meet it with its own bitterness. And
then Proust felt more at ease with him. Before, he had found Upcott
overawing; now, he was with a man to whom he could talk straight, of
business, so he thought.

"By the way, Mr. Upcott," said he, "touching the question of your voyage
with me, now that we be clear for the homeward spin."

Upcott freshened. He looked on Proust keenly, replenished his glass.

"Yes?" said he.

"You make tolerable free with the liquor," said Proust. Tut! he had
begun the wrong way with his refugee; he laughed and added: "No
offence--my jest, I will have my jest."

Upcott waited.

"Touching the matter of the voyage?" he asked.

"Yes; where do you want to get, Mr. Upcott?"

"Any English port you like," said Upcott. "Put me ashore at Port Royal
if you be going there. Or if you be running on for the Atlantic seaboard
good and well." Then he smiled, seeing the look that told of calculation
on Proust's face. "Or for that matter," said he as though placing a card
that sets back a gay opponent even before the game's end, "or for the
matter of that, the Isle Providence would serve, or the Tortugas, or the
Isle of Pines."

"Eh?" said Proust--for the three last names had a smack of bloody
cutlasses.

"Touching the matter of the voyage?" said Upcott. "You were about to say
something?"

Proust scowled over a thought; and then, "See here," said he, heavily,
"you come to me very like a man running away from something, though you
don't look like a prisoner. I've asked no questions. I don't ask them
now. By your clothes, and by your black servant, and your mules, and
your tin box, you were no small jo in Cartagena. You've got money; you
can pay your way."

"Which was even my intention," said Upcott in a voice dangerously
debonair.

"'Tis usual to discuss terms for a voyage before coming aboard," said
Proust and took a sip of his rum.

"I'd have thought it usual, finding a man of one's own country stranded
in an enemy's, to help him," said Upcott.

"So we did," said Proust, grinning; "took you to our arms like a lost
brother found again and no questions asked. You wanted to get aboard?
Aboard you come. Here you be."

Upcott's face went heavy and his mouth pursed and bulged.

Proust leant across the table.

"And _stranded_, you say; you weren't stranded!"

"Well, well!" said Upcott. "What do you want to carry me to Port Royal?"

But the heavy Proust failed to see that now was his time, if ever: he
was about to make a higher bid and ignored this lesser.

"Do you think it safe," said he, "for a man that would as lightly land
in the Isle Providence, or the Tortugas, or the Isle of Pines," speaking
slow and stolid, "to go to Port Royal?"

Proust had a great belief in his penetration and had considerable
conceit of himself in his present role of strategist.

"Carracho!" swore John in his Spanish. "Do I look like a man that's
afraid of anything--or any man that was ever littered? Do you take me
for some knee-trembling, lackeying custrel?" The allocutions of Upcott
acting were vigorous.

"Well, sir," said Proust, staring on this new man disclosed to him, "I'm
not talking of what you look like--I'm talking of passage money. I'll
put you ashore to Port Royal for half of what you've got in your tin box
that you brought along on your mule with your black servant."

Upcott frowned, and then laughed quietly; and he said: "You have not the
cut of a gambler, Master Proust. I see you haggling over ha'pence but I
don't see you gambling. How do you know there's anything of value in my
boxes?"

Proust grinned on him and did not answer, which irritated Upcott more
than speech. He yanked his chair forward suddenly with his left hand
between his legs and put his right elbow on the table and held up a
forefinger in Proust's face, shook it at him; then, leaning forward, he
stared in the red face of the cod-fish-eyed merchant skipper.

"'Tis not what can I give you, but what's fair." "Oh, is it?" said
Proust. "There's where you be wrong. 'Tis a case of you coming to me and
here you be. You're in a hole and you pay to get out--that's life, Mr.
Upcott."

Upcott closed an eye.

"Iss," he drawled. "That's life. Well! What if I don't pay you?"

Proust swelled in his chair.

"Did you ever," said he, leering, "hear of marooning?"

Upcott's eyes danced blithesome.

"Why, yes," said he; "you'll have heard of Captain Avery? I knew him
well! Great friends we were, old Avery and I--here's to him--in hell!"
and he quaffed his glass and saw Proust's eye show a quaver of something
very like fear at the vigour with which John spoke out his afterthought.
"Do you mind the story of how he marooned his skipper? Mate he was then
and sitting in the cabin with the heavy-jowled old cully of a master"
(Upcott tasted the words over, rejoicing, and Proust blinked). "Says he:
'I'm captain of this ship now and you've your choice of sailing under me
or going ashore on that key, with a keg of biscuit and a keg of
water.'" Upcott paused and then: "And the captain chose the key."
Upcott's voice had a hardness; but Proust was not intimidated by his
voice.

"Well--that's your choice, Mr. Upcott," he said heavily, and his
bull-neck came down in his shoulders as he nodded his head once on John.
"I'm making an offer and it's still open. I can understand you feeling
bad about it, but this is life, sir; and life's hard. You pay as you
go--according as you can pay. Hark ye!" and Proust slapped the table
with his palm, for Upcott was still leaning forward, chin in hand now,
was staring in the master's face blankly as though waiting for him to
make an end. "An' I was so minded I could do the maroon business with
you now--and keep your box. D'ye see where we are now?"

"Why, yes," said Upcott and laughed again. "Mr. Proust," said he and
rose to his feet and stood between Proust and the companion-way, "I'm
captain of this ship and I give you no choice. Life, Mr. Proust, is
hard."

"What do you mean?" cried Proust and snatching his pistol from the
drawer he rose. "Are you mazed or what?"

"You can pack your belongings," said Upcott quietly, his chin squared,
his eyes puckering, smiling grimly. "Come!" he stepped forward and
stretched out a hand as though to clutch Proust's shoulder.

"What d'ye mean?" said Proust thickly, and redder than ever in the face.

"What I say," said Upcott. "This is life, sir. You pay as you go and
the man with the whip hand rules----"

"Rot you!" cried Proust and up with his pistol that had been at half
cock--and clicked it to full--and pressed trigger. But there was just
the flash in the pan--and then Upcott leapt on him, smashing him to the
deck, and tearing the master's neckchief from about his bull throat he
thrust it in the half-stunned man's mouth. Proust's teeth bit on his
finger and Upcott gave a snarl, stretched out as he crouched above the
mariner for the fallen pistol, caught it by the barrel and rapped Proust
over the skull with the bossed butt. "That's life," he snarled; and
then, casting about for a rope's end he trussed Proust, hands and heels.
He listened. The regular pace of feet went on on the poop above. He
heard an order shouted as the vessel went about on a fresh tack. Then he
opened the table drawer and drew forth the other pistol, priming it and
the one which Proust had used in vain; poured out another noggin, but
thought better of it, let it stand; and then went gaily and triumphantly
on deck, having first rifled the lazarette and cabin keys that Proust
carried.

The captain's mate was by the companion-way and nodded to Upcott who
cast a quick eye over him as he returned the nod and, seeing that that
officer had a pistol in his sash, a swaggering go-ashore sash of silk,
he suddenly plucked it forth and flung it out into the joggling sea.

"I'm captain of this ship," said he. "Call the men aft."

And then he stepped back with that swagger that always, so far, had been
his when he came out of his shell into what he, at the moments of his
coming out called bitterly "the world," his shoulders flung back, his
weight on his right foot, the left leg a little forward; and as he did
so he jerked his left hip so that his jewel-hilted Spanish sword swung
forward and the hilt glittered. He did not deceive himself with his
acting but it was effectual with his audience. Yet the captain's mate
was more calm than Upcott desired to see him; and so he was alert for
any ruse, and his mind agile when the mate said: "What's the game?" and
stood back, it would appear neither offensive nor defensive, but
interested.

Upcott looked very keenly in his eyes.

"We're going to take some prizes, sir," said he. "That's the game. This
smuggling is no good, 'tis too slow; and Mr. Proust is going ashore and
leaving me in command."

"I've always wanted the old man to do that," said the mate grimly. "I've
sometimes thought of doing what you've done. How did you do it? What
have you done with him?"

"Oh, we had a talk about my passage money and he gave me a stiffish
choice--so I gave him one. He's going ashore."

"Well, Mr. Upcott, this is something sudden. You're a bold man, you
are--but I'm with you if you want a mate that can navigate and keep
order."

"Oh, I can keep order," said Upcott. "Still--what's your name, sir? It
was mentioned by Mr. Proust but I forget it," for Upcott bellicose had
skill in fine insult as in coarse invective.

"Turner."

"Ah yes; so I remember--a Devon name?"

"From Bideford," said Turner, unconsciously easier at the recognition of
the name's locality.

"Same as I be," said Upcott. "Well, if you'm Devon you look to see where
the money is to be got."

"I do that--and I know a captain when I see him, though this is a bit
sudden." He wiped his face with his red silk handkerchief.

"What do you make of my offer?" said Upcott, precipitately. He paused
and scrutinized his man and then: "Two thirds to the crew; and you and I
split the other third of all we come by on this cruise."

Turner stood frowning. His eyes looked away and Upcott following their
drift noticed how he looked on the helmsman, who cast a glance of
puzzled curiosity on them. "It's a different thing doing such things in
these seas now," Turner mused aloud. "Oh! Not but what I've thought of
it often enough. But they call it piracy now. You don't even get a
letter of marque to protect you if you be caught at it." He pondered
again and then gave a snort, and "Shall I call the men aft?" he asked.

Upcott laughed.

"Call them aft," he replied.

And the reason for all this, as he told himself (Upcott had always his
reasons) was--what think you?

All through these years, ever and again, memory had served him with the
picture of a Devon maiden, slender, pensive, wide-eyed, looking on his
ways, as some dim picture of a gentle lady of old years looks on us from
the master's bewitched canvas. But while he was engaged upon his
dalliance--he had now no better word for that--with the lady of the Casa
Blanca, he growing more familiar with her image and at last finding it
necessary for him, when that picture intervened it required no great
sophistry to wave it aside. Almost as lightly as with a flick of the
hand one waves away a smoke he waved aside that dim and ghostly picture.
For had not Cassandra, of all the maidens he knew in the homeland, been
the least demonstrative? Why, Will Ravenning's sister came nearer to
him!

And yet thoughts of Cassandra had often aided him; perhaps as the poets
already mentioned are healed, in cities, by the thought of some far
lake-water's plashing. Yes; in that terrible pillaging, when he with his
fellows had chosen the less ensanguined course, he had thought: "This
would please Cassandra." Yet, of course, after all, Cassandra did not
know, any more than the lake knows of how its plashing on the reedy
shore has been put to rime to right the rimer's heart and sustain the
exile's.

Now he had suddenly bethought him that he was going home; and was
he--was he?--to go home with little wealth from the lands and seas
whence came homeward less able men, no more to be labourers vexing their
lives for others in the red fields of Devon and living close and
cramped in the red farm-houses, but able to live in Bideford, strut on
the quay looking knowing on the shipping and then cross to the
ordinaries to quaff ale and be called "captain" by the lads who came in
from these close-packed cots on market days?

Cassandra would be his. He would be able to claim her. He would be able,
getting out of the thick of this world overseas, of which the folks at
home knew nothing, to possess--to possess; as did others. He would have,
at least, his own farm, his own respected wife, in the teeth of all, won
from the world, in the world, accepting the conditions of the game.

And after all, these smugglers were but pirates in embryo and needed no
coaxing.

Turner called them aft--but Upcott did the talking, and he knew his
audience and how to reach them, not as he would be reached; and even as
he spoke to them, and moved them, his pride made him feel, for all the
fumes seething in his head, that he could halt in the midst of his talk
and say: "I don't argue things this way for myself--but that's the kind
of talk that moves you." For he took them on the point of gathering
gear, of getting rich quick, and dismissed any possible honourable
qualms of theirs as a kind of cowardice, fear of consequences.

"See here, boys," said he, "I've taken over this ship for you. I'm going
to make your fortunes--and my own." He cast his eye over the two rows
drawn up athwart the deck. "You're a likely lot of lads. Lads like you
don't want to be wasting your pluck in paltry smuggling when there be
better fish to fry."

He laughed with an upcast of his chin, and paused. He knew the breed.
One or two faces amidst these turned up to him stabbed him with their
youth and he deliberately regretted not having quaffed that last noggin
of rum. Thought he, "If the drink fades in me I can't do it;" for these
one or two faces were as the face of his own lost youth. "Life--they
must know life," he urged. That was when his face gloomed on them--you
could not tell it for Upcott's--and he said: "Is there any here with a
white liver who's afraid of a little blood-letting and smell of powder
when there's ships on the sea for the taking?"

But it was not the most innocent who replied. One hang-dog fellow spoke
up: "Times is changed, captain, since the Treaty. We hain't at war now
with Spain; and France, ye know, is trying to get in with Spain again,
making up to her, like."

Upcott knew this, having heard in Cartagena how the holy vessels of gold
and silver, taken from the churches, had been sent back by France. Yes;
he was going a-pirating late in the day. Even the great Morgan had now
to walk circumspectly. But the Upcotts, when they "come into the world"
never take up a "safe thing."

Another spoke: "We hear as how you've been in Cartagena for years, sir.
Maybe you don't know how them seas is now."

"What! Afraid?"

"'Tain't that. But you can't run to the old ports now. Isle Providence
ain't scarce comfortable with the new governor. He'll maybe close an eye
here and there, but he ain't going to run the risk of answering for
another man's capers."

"Well! You know the safe spots. You tell me them and I'll get you the
prizes."

"There's Darien," suggested Turner.

"Darien?" asked Upcott and then he recollected news he had heard of how
the Spaniards had had trouble with the Indians there.

"Yes, that's right," said the young sailor with the evil face. "I know
the Darien coast. Any of them Mosquito Indian bays is safe for us and
there's nat'ral harbours there where you can careen if you wants and all
safe."

So they thrashed out the matter and clearly the majority were in favour
of quick returns. But Upcott perceived as they talked that he had a
difficult task. Conditions had changed with the years; and the rovers
had now four imminent dooms: the Spanish prisons and work in the mines
or at the Pearl Islands; the French yard-arms; or the Dutch; or
Gibbet-hill outside Port Royal.

Upcott, when the affair seemed nearly, but not quite, settled, looked on
the seaman who had first spoken.

"What's your name?" he asked, and the shaggy youth who was so well
posted for his years replied: "Teach, sir."

"Good! I make you my quartermaster--what are you scowling at, sir? I see
you scowl--you there. Don't you scowl when I say what I want. Teach,
eh? Well, you can teach the rest of the lads how to work. You look as if
you've seen some bloody combs yourself."

"I know a thing or two, cap'n," replied Teach, while the others grinned,
at some witticism perhaps, as they thought it, in their new master's
words.

"What's your name?" asked Upcott, glaring on the man whose face seemed
to show resentment of Teach's rank.

"Tracy."

    "'All the Tracys
    Have the wind in their faces,'"

quoted Upcott. "Well! Men with the wind in their faces know where they
are. They mostly can fight. Can you fight?"

"Yes, sir; I know gunnery too."

"Oh do ye? All right! You're master gunner then and may we soon have
proof of your mettle."

Upcott turned to the mate.

"Tell them the shares," he said and Turner made the suggestion and then
the men talked among themselves and as they talked Upcott turned to the
steersman. "Take her in shore," he said.

"What's this for?" asked Turner.

"To land Mr. Proust," said Upcott.

Teach spoke then for the crew.

"All right, cap'n," he said.

"All right," replied Upcott. "Teach, lower away there and take a couple
of lads with you. Mr. Proust is going ashore. Tracy! You and another
there can come and carry up Mr. Proust. He's lying down waiting for the
shove ashore. He's taking what they call a _siesta_ in the Don's lingo."

So Upcott strutted. He might have been taking the leading part in one of
the plays writ about the life of Captain Avery for the delectation of
the groundlings in some London play-house. He lay over the rail and
passed a vulgarism to the departing Proust, the _Pearl_ hove-to the
while. And the boat was no sooner back and inboard, Proust visible only
as a melancholy dot on the yellow shore of the main, where he had been
left with a musket, a bag of biscuit, and a flask of rum, than Upcott
called Teach aft and bade him see to it that there was always a man in
the cross-trees keeping a sharp look-out. And so three days later came
their first fight. Talks on the _Torridge Maid_ were now found of
service to Upcott. He remembered those of the crew who had gone
a-privateering and a-buccaneering telling their tales, the side-issues
of which were so illuminating; remembered how it is best to draw close
to a ship from windward, especially if the wind be shepherding clouds
before it; for then the clouds are your back-cloth and the shadowed sea;
and if your ship be without topsails to take the light, only the lower
sails drawing, so much the better. Even in the desert of the ocean
cunning can aid one. Upcott remembered hearing a tale of Avery (was it
Hacker who had told him?) how he had his ship hung about with chains so
that it was, as it were, clad in a suit of mail.

It was afternoon and a storm promising light and shadow fleeing on the
sea. The men were mostly against the forecastle for'ard engaged in a
slipper hunt to relieve the tedium of waiting for a prey. Upcott,
sitting on the poop, looking lazy on his own drunken sea, could hear the
shrieks of laughter rising from the wild game and the slaps when the
slipper was found and the loser had to turn about and take his
punishment. Now it happened that, with much use, the slipper had fallen
dilapidated and a nail protruded from the sole; and this nail was
suddenly felt.

The game was ended.

"Fair play!" shouted the man who had been taking his punishment. "What
you doing with that slipper?" and snatching it from the gleeful finder
he discovered the nail and then--the game was over--slapped it against
the face of the last finder who had belaboured him as the rules of the
game go. It happened to be Teach who had been the finder and at the
flack of the slipper in his face he plucked forth his knife (he an
adept, it would seem, in the use of a knife), laid it on the palm of his
hand which went back and forward like a shuttle--and the knife was in
his enemy's jugular. In after years he was to rule his own ships and
haze his crews after this fashion. But it was such experiences as this
that brought about, as piracy developed and became more complex, rules
such as the notorious Captain Bartholomew Roberts brought to a fine
completion. That pirate came to see that--one smiles--gambling for
money, for instance, on a pirate ship could not be tolerated. It was
dangerous, and so on his table of rules was a clause: "No playing cards
or dicing for money or stakes while aboard ship."

Upcott came out of his scowling listlessness with an unholy joy and went
elated down the steps and for'ard.

"Here's life," thought he. "This Teach should swing; but he's a good man
for me."

Teach was already surrounded by his fellows, holding them off. Upcott
snatched a brass-bound bucket and smote into the throng.

"No fighting among yourselves," said he. "Next time there's trouble like
this we hold a court--and somebody hangs."

The sighting of a ship by the man in the cross-trees was opportune,
though I dare say that Upcott could have held his way without the aid of
any distractions. As it was the dead man was hove over with weighted
heels and went down in the green.

The _Pearl_ was running east on a fair wind, the ship sighted beating
into it, running from horizon to horizon; and anon her colours could be
seen, and they being French her business was guessed at and she surmised
to be a trader from French Guiana, like enough, winging up to the French
Indies. Upcott had his guns loaded, all cleared for action, and hardly
an order given, because of the young rogue Teach, whose schooling had
been that of a half-soldier, half-seaman in the Jamaica privateers.

Tracy it was who sent, zipping across her bows, the signal for the
Frenchman to heave to. But the Frenchman held on.

"Again!" cried Upcott, for the two were rapidly drawing closer. "Give
her a nearer shave."

Again the gun spoke. But the Frenchman at that, with his starboard tacks
aboard, stood toward them boldly, he having the weather gauge.

Upcott called the runaway apprentice and gave him the keys of the
lazarette. "Fetch up rum and serve out to all hands," said he. "Turner!
About ship!" The _Pearl_ went round upon her heel, hung in stays a
moment, and then surged along parallel with the advancing Frenchman.
"Haul up that mainsail in the brails! Ready there, Tracy. Ready all!"

Teach's voice rose thickly amidships, he wiping his mouth with the back
of his hand after his cup of rum: "Easy, lads! The fun ain't started
yet! Easy all. We be all right!"

The Frenchman bore down on them and then Upcott rose. He had sat all
this while, after returning to his poop, on his stool, understanding how
to general his men, observing their glances ever and again toward him
but ignoring them, or perceiving them only to look away lazily on the
Frenchman.

Turner suspected him then of having seen a deal of this kind of
sea-traffic, and respected him, and kept cool. But now Upcott rose and
his voice held a relentless _timbre_ when he stepped to the wheel--had
he not learnt well the art of steering on the _Torridge Maid_ under
Hacker?

"Fenders ready!" he cried and the strips of cork were swung over. Then
he ordered the yards to be swung, clapt the foretopsail to the mast and
then: "Tracy!"

Tracy, quivering but eager, and no whit afraid, roared an "Aye, aye!"

"Give her a broadside! Aim true!"

The guns went like a tattoo; and then while the smoke drifted, Upcott
filled his foretopsail and kept under weigh as the Frenchman's mainmast
came down with a chaos of cordage.

At that Teach roared: "Let's board her, cap'n! That did it. Board her
now, cap'n."

"Will you lead on?" cried Upcott.

"Aye, aye!"

Upcott ran the _Pearl_ close, and board and board came French and
English; and then the Frenchman let go with her guns. The splinters flew
on the _Pearl_, two men reeled and reddened the deck; but the Frenchman,
calm enough to hold his fire till he came to what doubtless he thought
to be sure range, had at the last perhaps been flurried. If he had fired
ere coming to quite such close quarters he might have done more
execution. Upcott, at the wheel, brought the ships board and board.
Perhaps the Frenchman had not looked for that.

"Sink me for a clodpole," yelled Teach, "if she don't turn on her heel,
this Pearl, like--" and then "Up lads!" he broke in on his simile. But
as Upcott brought the _Pearl_ alongside thus neatly, and you could have
tossed a biscuit from deck to deck, a hail of musketry swept on them
from the Frenchman and two more fell and others cried out. What Teach
cried was, "That warms you! Nothing like it! Oh, we'll have our own
back!"

The intervening space lessened. The ships ran close so that the fenders
screamed as in agony. And then Teach led the assault with cutlass and
pistol, leaping with his followers aboard the Frenchman.

"Make fast there, Turner," cried Upcott.

The helmsman, who had relinquished the wheel to John, was still by his
side. Upcott turned on him with murder in his eye.

"Make fast for'ard you!" he shrieked. "D'ye think I can hold board and
board like this?"

But the fight was a short one and soon Teach was hauling down the French
flag and the two craft joggled there amidst the wrestling waves under
the sky that was like a smoked ceiling with its smoothed and rushing
clouds, and under these clouds, flying away like things distressed or
demented, were the smoke clouds from the firing.

Turner remained on the poop and Upcott went aboard the Frenchman to
overhaul the spoil.

Here was no romance, for all that he thought of Drake and Dampier,
masters on enemies' decks, and had a feeling of insolent pride, with the
French master before him unarmed, and Teach and the lads already
unbattening batches, the crew all trussed up along the bulwark. This was
what his countrymen had been about for centuries, in one way or
another--and here was he, a captain, a victor. But it all had to be done
deliberately and against what was his real self. When the lees only of
rum was in him he had no stomach for the job. He must replenish
constantly. And now, behold him acting the part, strutting the deck of
his prize, hearing some wounded men moaning, seeing the fear on the
faces of the prisoners, the pathetic broken look of the master with
whom he went below to the cabin; and seeing a bottle of wine there in
the racks he knocked the head off and drank the contents while the
Frenchman stared stupidly. The young rogue Teach was on deck, with
distinct initiative for such undertakings, seeing to the disembowelling
of the ship, and all hands working like 'longshore men, while Upcott was
taking over the ship's monies and casting an eye over the trade books.
When Upcott came on deck again he saw how the clouds lowered, heard how
the wind cried in the cordage, while over to leeward the wreckage of the
mainmast set up a pother of foam and the two ships joggled uncouthly.
Turner came anxiously to Upcott, the navigator in him in the ascendancy.
"I tell 'e, cap'n, we'll have to let her go, and stand by, if there's to
be more pickings. See yere!"

Upcott looked.

"All right," he said. "All right!" and looked contemptuously at the
stormy lights and the stormy darkness.

They took as much as the rising gale would allow them to take.

At last all hands saw their danger and away back to their brig went the
pillagers and stood away from their prey, and none too soon. But Teach
was fierce. He came aft to the poop.

"See yere, cap'n," he said. "You run our heads in the noose, like this.
Times is changed now. When you take a ship now 'tis a choice to every
man aboard--walk the plank or join us."

The ships were already sundering, and the rising of the wind and coming
of the night would make it the more doubtful if the _Pearl_ could keep
within sight of her prey. But Upcott leant over the rail.

"Go for'ard," he said. "I'm cap'n here."

And Teach scowled, but went forward.

Then Upcott laughed, and to Turner--

"That's life," he said; "Teach took that ship, you may say. Teach is in
the right now. Yet Teach gets sent for'ard with hell in his heart.
That's right! That's life! Cabin boy--fetch up the rum."

In the storm before which they ran they lost the Frenchman; but what
trouble Teach could make among the others by grumbling over the affair
was forgotten on sighting a Spanish ship. True, the Spanish glory waned.
Dampier, Morgan, de Pointis, all the rest, great and lesser, had seen to
that. But still there were pearls in the South Sea, gold in Peru. Still
Indian, and half-caste Indian, and negro, toiled across the isthmus with
the treasure of the seas beyond and it was shipped for old Spain. But
there is scarce need in this late day to picture the boarding of that
treasure ship. History and fiction are full of such accounts or pictures
and one grows more interested in Upcott than in sea-fights. The Spaniard
was taken in boats, Upcott himself coxswaining one with five men, Teach
in the other with a like number. They took her suddenly, attacking from
starboard and larboard, throwing up their grappling lines and swarming
aboard like spiders, for it was night and the _Pearl_ showed no lights
after picking up the twinkle of the high Spanish lantern. The English
ran on the decks, smiting down all the watch with hideous celerity, so
that the Spanish ship took aback with a crackling of sails that, as much
as the cries of the men on deck, brought up the watch below. But these
came to their doom. They fought, to be sure, some of them, but they were
taken suddenly, and in the dark, and had no knowledge of the number of
the foe.

But after the capture of that prize, which made Upcott undoubted leader
and made the matter of the escape of the Frenchman ancient history,
Upcott fell morose. He went to the charts, studied them scowlingly, came
on deck--it was the morning after the taking of the Spaniard and he had
spent the night roaring and babbling incoherently in his bunk, all his
clothes on--and sharply he asked Turner to come below for a minute.
Turner followed him wondering; but immediately they were below Upcott
came to his point.

"Mr. Turner," said he, "I've shown you I can master a rough crew, but
I'm not what you might call a navigator. You've seen that, belike. I'm
mazed with charts and the like; but I want you to get this ship on a
course for the Isle Providence."

"Isle Providence?" cried Turner.

"That's it!" said Upcott. "You pick up the Isle Providence and----"

"Is it safe?" said Turner.

"Rot me!" cried Upcott. "Don't I know the Isle Providence well enough?
You do as I tell you and when we pick up the island I'll give you an
offer that will sure tickle you."

Turner had a fear of questioning him; but after noon he ventured, in the
soothing voice that Devon men know so well, when they approach an
unknown, as it were, "feeling for grips," to say: "What's the idea in
this course you want me to hold, might I ask?"

Upcott looked on him and his mouth twisted insolently.

"You'll see," said he.

Turner's eyes blinked. His face had a defeated air. As for the men, they
had no heed of where they were going, for Upcott had let them have a
sufficiency of the Spaniard's wines. There was really not a wholly sober
man on deck. The London apprentice was lying dead drunk in the scuppers.
Upcott noticed him.

It was like him to muster the whole crew aft when to order one man would
have served. They came with red eyes and stood under the poop.

"Take that lad below!" he ordered. "Throw a bucket of water on him
first. If we get more seas he might be overboard."

They did not move, expecting some further words.

"That's all," he said. "Get for'ard."

Teach laughed.

"What be you laughing at?" roared Upcott.

"Sure 'tis admiration," said Teach.

Upcott was pacified.

Turner kept an eye on him. "You've had no sleep these two days and
nights," said he gently with the cooing "oos." But then Upcott was
"Devon" too.

"I'm not sleeping to-night either," said he. "I'm staying on deck,
Turner, now that I know the course; so you can get drunker if you like,
for I'll look after the brig myself."

"Drunker? I ain't drunk!"

"Mr. Turner," said Upcott solemnly, "'twould vex me to have trouble with
you. We've pulled pretty well so far."

"What's your game?" asked Turner.

"It's no harm to you, anyhow," said Upcott. "You'll see that; and
Turner, first thing in the morning we'll make a computation of the
shares of that last prize."

And so it was done in the morning, so far as the monies were concerned,
amidships, the sails brailed up, all hands clustered together there; and
when that business was over, Turner, who had been searching the horizon,
handed his perspective glass to Upcott and pointed a finger. Upcott
looked through on the circle of tossing waves and sky that came and went
and then caught the far blue of the land.

"That's your Isle Providence," said Turner grimly, "and now I'm going to
ask you--are you going to run our heads in the noose?"

"You come below with me and I'll tell you what I'm going to do," said
Upcott, so down they went again together, Upcott grim, Turner
suspicious. "Mr. Turner," said Upcott, "sober up."

"I'm sober enough," said Turner. "I'm sober enough to want to know what
you're running there for."

"I'll tell you," said Upcott. "Sit down." And they sat down at the
table, one on either side.

"I'm going to give you the ship."

"Eh?"

"I'm going ashore to the Isle Providence."

"Ashore! 'Sblood! They'll----"

"They'll know naught of us there yet."

"'Tis not safe."

"Safe enough."

"But I tell 'e there's a governor there now who----"

"Ain't I Captain Proust? Haven't I kept a log? Look at it! It's all
right; I wrote it up yesterday. We'll tell them the truth at
Providence."

"The truth?"

"Why, sure. We'll make no bones about that. We've been smuggling on the
Spanish main and we've done well, not only in monies but in cargo. The
larboard bulwarks be a bit splintered. Well--smuggling ain't all calm
water, is it?"

"And what after that?" asked Turner. The hope that leapt in his brain
helped to sober him.

"That's your affair," said Upcott. "I go ashore; that's all. The men
understand that I know the Isle Providence and I am going belike for
recruits on the quiet, for we can't go pirating long with a matter of
fifteen men."

"I'd like to know your story," said Turner. "There's something behind
this all--when I think of the way you came aboard and then----" he
broke off, musing.

"You'll never know that," said Upcott. "But, for sure, this I'm telling
you of my intention is straight enough."

"I can see that," said Turner, looking on Upcott's face oddly and he
held out his hand and shook Upcott's and winked. Then, "What about your
share?" he asked. "How's it to go ashore without the men getting to
suspect you're leaving us?"

"Oh, the men! I'm captain. They can think what they like. They can think
I've got some friend here. I don't want to count my share of the cargo
and argubargy over that. I'll take my monies--that'll suffice for me.
They'll not miss me. The like of that Teach now, if he thought I had
left for good, would make a bid for the ship before you could say
knife."

Turner swelled in his chair, tilted his head, stretched his legs. Upcott
had a picture of himself presented to him then.

"I'll _teach_ him," said Turner.

The men were of course a trifle timid when they saw to what land they
came, but when Upcott called them aft and began: "Boys! my name is
Proust--Richard Proust--and don't you forget it when we run into the
bay, whoever comes aboard," they stared and then they laughed. After all
they were not in so bad a plight.

And when they ran into the bay and swung at anchor, a boat put out, a
sign that the Isle Providence was in the period of regeneration. But
Upcott, alias Proust, met the governor's representative with ease. That
the ship was a smuggler mattered little to that functionary. He could
but congratulate Proust on a good voyage and take, bowing, a handsome
gift of Spanish wines.

And that very night Upcott stood by the swamp's edge where lay the
creepered cemetery, so quickly filling, of that little island town. His
boxes were already aboard _The Three Castles_ of Bristol and he had
taken his passage aboard her, for at the _Spanish Galleon_ he had
fortunately encountered, on his arrival, the master of that ship which
was to sail on the morrow.

An island is not reformed in a day, though governors may come to it,
representatives of the home land. Their coming is always a step in the
right direction. They may perhaps fall at times into the ways of the
islanders, or learn to look aside. They may perhaps even be really
hoodwinked now and then, and unconsciously aid in lawlessness those whom
they have been sent to keep in the fear of the law. But Upcott had no
difficulties; fortune favoured him. Wren had clearly no recollection of
him, nor had Wren's daughter. For him, he looked on both with a cold
eye; but finding some ship captains in the ordinary, and hearing their
talk and how that _The Three Castles_ was to sail on the morrow, he had
made his arrangements at once. Perhaps Wren, who was present when Upcott
approached the master of _The Three Castles_, took him not for the
master of the _Pearl_ but for a passenger fortunate enough to arrive
thus timely to find another ship at his immediate service. But that is
side-issue--Wren was inn-keeper enough to meddle in no man's life.

So after nightfall John went out to the creepered burial place. It had
been stretching since John was there before and its increased area smote
him with a thought of the fleeting years and the faces dropping out of
sight. The only sounds heard there, where his brother lay, were the
singing of frogs and chattering of lizards and the low hum of mosquitos
as they alighted to sting. From farther came occasional louder voices of
the taverns, sounds of pipe or tabor.

He bowed his head and stood in the insect-haunted night--stood for
hours. The sound of revelry at the ordinaries, that hardly came so far,
dwindled; the stars glowed brighter. Upcott remained motionless on that
uncertain islet, the life of which had been so full of vicissitude in
the midst of the Spanish seas that were now more the seas of all
nations.

There are various ways in which men say: "I will not let Thee go unless
Thou bless me."

But with John Upcott there were always reservations. The thought of his
recently acquired gains kept jarring in on the other thoughts,
discordantly. He thought of the men slain. He thought how these monies
were stolen, stolen with violence and murder. Then he got back to the
murmurous night and its stars again; but the dissonance returned. He
told himself that the old adventurers had done even as he; then told
himself that they had not: they had fought with enemies of their
country. Bah! Yes, for gain! And back he went to his yearning in the
night. Always he had felt outwards for something above, beyond the
meannesses of life, beyond its sordidness. And sometimes, feeling for
that, would come a sudden consciousness of it as though it were already
in his possession--as one lights a taper at a fire. But there was always
something that he retained deliberately, which seemed inimical to that
light, something that extinguished, like sand flung on flame.

Yet he gained a certain measure of peace from the solitary watch he kept
with the stars. The passenger who was rowed aboard _The Three Castles_
in the morning, even as the anchor was weighing, was not the same man
who had come ashore from the _Pearl_, assuredly not the man who had
taken Proust's place. Yet though his face was less flushed, his head was
held as high. His lips were firm, though not puckered. He was more of a
man than of a bravo.




CHAPTER XXII

DISSERTATIONS IN DEVON


"What! John Upcott! Home again! Thought you was lost out in the wide
wurdle."

"No, home again."

"And for out again, like all the rest of them that's once tasted, eh?"

"'Tis not likely."

"What? Well, 'tain't for want o' ships. Harbour-master tells me not a
tide comes in, not a tide goes out, without he has a couple of dozen
arrivals and sailings to enter in his books."

"Ah, so! Well, you see, Devon's Devon--and I'm home."

"Sure. I'd ha' thought a man better out in the windy wurdle instead of
home in Bideford listening to the townsfolk grumbling at the
assessments!"

But no; John could close an ear to the grumblings and the small talk and
the foolish talk. He had seen the world. He had lived. True, at home
there was this tedious small talk, dementing sometimes in its smallness
if one gave ear to it. But here one need not join in the trivialities,
could slip out of them. Overseas there were no recluses, no escapers;
one had to join in there--in deeds, not talk, in deeds that were
terrible. He was of no use there.

On the way home he had had no peace till his savings from the two
captures made during his brief command on the _Pearl_ had been cast in
the deep. I think quite a tragi-comedy could be written, by the capable
hand, on the casting away of that spoil, telling how it was handled, to
be thrown--and then put back; how a part was cast away and then a halt
called and the pros and cons considered anew; and how, when the last
went glittering to the deep with a final tiny splash, Upcott drew a deep
breath and lost an anguish.

Yes; he was indubitably in Devon, with ever and again stabs of joy in
his heart at some keener sense of being there, awakened by familiar
blending of colour or sudden new relish of the tufted ridges of the
grey-blue woods lying low along the blue-grey sky at end of his vistas;
or at accents of voices heard at doors or in the fields; or at sight of
the full rippling Torridge, his own Torridge, sifting the stars in the
summer evenings.

But not at once, on coming home, did he come into his own. For not
only he, overseas, had changed, but at home there had been changes;
changes wrought slowly and surely, while his had been volcanic and
sudden. He could not find his mother, and that was his worst trouble.
Of course he found her in a sense, embraced her, kissed her (and Sis)
and was welcomed; but that is not exactly what I mean. He could not
find her eyes. Even when he looked directly he could not find her
there, the mother of his youth. He looked in their grey-blue where
mists hazed and lights dwindled and knew in his heart a poignant sense
of not meeting her. He thought how, on winter evenings, when one sits
staring long in the reverie-awakening fire the eyes are changed
strangely. The eyes of his mother had beheld the beatific vision.
Once, after he had been home some days, he came in from the fields and
finding her opportunely at rest, as he had hoped, he sat at her feet;
for out in the fields he had felt the anguish of not finding her
strong in him and had come home hoping to find an opportunity to draw
nearer her, to wander back, a man, not to childhood, but to the spirit
of the lost yesterdays, and forget what lay between. He was a man
grown, but a man hungering to come close to the spirit that his
knowledge of the world had taught him was the rarest he knew. Absence
and years rendered it possible for him, though a son, to look on her
as a worshipper. But she had gone farther back into her Sanctuary. Yet
who was he to desire her to come forth, to solace him? When her hand
fell on his shoulder, gentle as an autumn leaf, his spirit fled to
her; she came not far to him. He felt a self-consciousness, a
childishness, sitting there. Yet he sat awhile. Love even has to be
protected. Was it not love, a pure love, that had laid him, in
Cartagena, a sacrifice on the clotted altar of lust? But he, too, grew
away from others. He could understand in some manner his mother's
centralization; and he found it good. In his life were meetings when
he could not give himself to those to whom he had once given almost
all. Ravenning was one such. He had, for instance, met Ravenning in
Bideford, the old shouldering, swaggering Ravenning, but bloated now,
just home from a Virginia trip.

"Hullo!" said Will. "Upcott again!"

They shook hands, but it was mostly for the sake of the days that had
been that their grasp was mutually warm. Ravenning was for the sea
again.

"I heard you was held in Cartagena," said Will.

"Yes, I was that. Were you there? I didn't see you in the place."

"Me? No; us didn't go after all but us heard about it. Us met some of
the ships that got away. 'Twas at the Isle Avache. Ever get your share
out o' the attack?"

Upcott shook his head and gave a pucker to his lips. "Don't want it," he
said.

"God! You'm queer. Du Casse stumped up, sure enough. But I reckon there
was lots didn't get their share, though Du Casse did his best. Sure he
didn't need to be so keen to pay over. He got the monies from France all
right and was eager too, by all accounts, to meet all the English
masters and see all that had been in the sacking, and come to a
settlement."

"What of yourself?" asked John.

"Me? Oh!" Will flung up his head and swaggered. Then suddenly, "See
her?"

Upcott looked and saw a woman who had once been considered "powerful
thick wi' Will." She passed grandly.

"I axed her," said Will, "when I came home, if her would settle me. Put
it to her straight. I've got a bit o' money, reckon I could go partners
in some shipping venture, part owner and master maybe. Says she: 'I know
too much about you,' she says; 'I've heard of your doings overseas.'
Says I: 'Drink? Oh, they all drink in the Indies.' Says she: 'No, worse
than drink. I know 'e! And you come to a respectable woman after
that!'--somebody had been telling her about me in the Tortugas or
elsewheres; there was no denying it. ''Tain't as if they was girls to
home,' she says; 'but you never know what's come to a man as keeps
company such as you keep in your Indy ports.'"

Upcott had no interest in this, wanted to turn and flee away. He saw
that what Ravenning imagined he spoke of was but a refusal of an offer
of marriage. What John saw was that--and other things; and among these
other things he perceived this woman's outlook; it was not the evil, but
the possible consequences of which she thought. Ravenning's ill taste,
not his morals, barred him. You remember how Hacker came home. This
tale, apart from what else it is, is also, in a way, a tale of how three
men came home.

And that was how another man was met when he came home. Also that was
perhaps another formative influence for John--the hearing of this talk,
meeting Will there.

Upcott was glad to get away from Ravenning again. He shook his hand with
the old warm grasp, as warm in parting as in meeting, what might have
been lost in warmth by finding how much Will was different from him
being balanced by the thought that they were parting; let them part
friends for old time's sake. But somehow he resented the way Will's eyes
looked deep in his as he said: "Sure, I'm glad to see you again, John.
I'll see you about, like enough, afore I sail again."

Upcott was depressed all that day and was not in sweeter frame of mind
till the next day's sunrise, which he saw, waking just as the summer
night tip-toed silently hence. He lay in his bed looking through the
little casement, suddenly wide awake with a thought of how fresh and
clean all was, and saw the dawn.

It was like an inaudible explosion beyond the eastern hill; it was like
the tossing up of the pigments wherewith rainbows are made in a
fountain. Some formation of the clouds on which the rising, but not yet
risen, sun shone gave first the appearance of a wavering gold plume
behind the hill, a great plume with the trembling quill set in the
unknown world beyond; and then came these other colours. The tiny clouds
higher up, tiny clouds sailing solitary in the blue, were lit on their
lower verges with the hues of that splendid jet, fountain, plume of
gold, orange, red. And then suddenly that all dissolved, and the day was
all golden; and even as Upcott breathed long and deep the sun swam up,
blinding. It would have pleased Jeremy Taylor to know how that sunrise
inspired this home-come wanderer and lit him on the way that he was
still to travel, a way not of seas and far islands; for it was Jeremy
Taylor who said: "In the morning, when you wake, accustom yourself to
think first upon God, or something in order to His service; and at night
also, let Him close thine eyes, and let your sleep be necessary and
healthful, not idle and expensive of time, beyond the needs and
conveniences of nature; and sometimes be curious to see the preparation
which the sun makes when he is coming forth from his chambers of the
east."

That day, when John returned from working in the fields, said Mrs.
Upcott to him: "I wonder what's come to Cassandra. 'Tis odd that she has
not been down along these three weeks."

"And her coming so often before," said Sis and went on with laying the
table.

"She comes down along still?" asked John.

Sis flung him a look; and he thought she set the dishes with a defiant
clatter. He could not understand Sis: often he saw her radiant enough at
her work, alert, blithesome. When he spoke with her she fell listless.
If he talked she seemed to pay little heed. Perhaps a neighbour would
drop in and draw out John in chat about the Indies. Sis would break in
with talk of the crops.

Cassandra! The name moved his heart. It beat quicker at the sound. But
he had not dared to speak of her. He could not even hope. The episode of
the "Seorita" of Casa Blanca had put the pure Cassandra for ever from
him--Seora Sara Peyrens, the most beautiful woman in Cartagena, she of
the melting eyes that looked so straight in one's. When the cat in the
midst of the kitchen sat once elegantly erect, admirable tail curled
about its toes and he sat moody, he suddenly found himself staring in
the cat's eyes. "A cat can look at a king," he remembered. And then,
because he was thinking of Cassandra and of what he considered a bar to
his ever loving her now, he muttered: "_She_ could look straight as a
cat at me always. God! What a woman to care for! That's how she could
look so--she had but the cat's sleek, licking nature."

"How is Cassandra?" he asked after a pause.

"Quite the same as ever," said Sis. "Sweet as ever; but there's
something at times seems wrong with her."

"Yes; I don't like her looks at times," said Mrs. Upcott.

"She's not got married then, like Tomsie Ravenning?"

"No--not yet," said Sis.

"Oh--is there talk of it?"

Sis turned and looked on her brother with that inscrutable face of hers;
and he was angry; because he did not understand it.

There were some fading roses in a bowl in the window.

"She left these roses last time she was here," said Mrs. Upcott.

John looked at them, remembering how Gifford had a turn for
horticulture. He thought how roses fade, and thought the thoughts that
fading roses bring to life in us.

There were all sorts of persons to see, acquaintanceships to renew.
People kept dropping in, were encountered, as they are in a play where
the least interesting come first and then--crash! your leading
character; hush!

Cassandra! Cassandra! Cassandra! She was here, under these very skies,
seeing these very clouds. She had come often in his absence but came not
now. What was she thinking? But he could not see her, dared not see her,
and then again--he must see her and she so near. Then he thought how he
came to her, tainted from a woman she would loathe.

Still, there were distractions; also Upcott had it shown him that even
among the moral were those who were as far away from him as were now the
selfish evil--their morality their only saving grace, while the evil had
their gaiety; a dangerous thought--but after all one to bear little
consideration.

There was one Mrs. Babbacombe, an uncouth, great woman, with flashing
eyes and strident voice, who considered herself of some consequence, she
being wed to a small farmer. She was no mere labourer's wife--though a
labourer's daughter. One wonders if there was not perhaps a shock of
surprise when Babbacombe discovered where his condescensions had led
him. She told the tale herself for the guidance of maidens.

"'See yere, Babbacombe,' I says. 'I've put up with 'e a deal, but what
do 'e mean?' and I came close to en and put my face to hisn. Says he,
'Lord bless 'e Sal, mean? Why I mean it all. What be thinkin'
of?'--'That's all right then,' I says. 'You've been coming and going
some while and I'm not that kind. I'm an honest maiden and willing to
look after you to the end o' my days.' I kept en to it. Men tries to
slip away from responsibility. A woman's got to put her fist down."

It was this lady who now entered, following her quick knock on the
partly open door which she left wide open.

Yes; John was indubitably in Devon.

"Good-day to 'e. I likes seein' you volks--just pazzin' and dropped in.
You'm homely here, you be." She ruffled from some recent affront. "Mrs.
Ackland wasn't in to zee you--no? Oh! I just passed she going up along;
high and mighty she be, goes by me with her nose in the air. Who do she
think she be, anyhow?" A snort. "Married over twelve-month too, and
never a sign!"

Sis, as the phrase is, looked daggers, then drew erect. The mother, one
might have been excused for thinking, from her expression, had not
heard.

Then entered our old friend, Tomsie Ravenning, now Tomsie Sellick.

"Oh Mrs. Sellick," cried Mrs. Babbacombe, "I've just been saying as how
I met----"

"I heard 'e," said Tomsie. "I heard 'e wi' you leaving the door wide. Do
'e have the door shut, Mrs. Upcott?" and she closed it. "There ain't no
harm in Liz Ackland. 'Tis better when all's said and done as it is
instead of a case of bein' in a t'rr'ble hurry to get passon to tie the
knot--same's it is wi' some----" and she turned from the bridling face
of Mrs. Babbacombe to kiss Sis and Mrs. Upcott.

"Well, I'll be going, Mrs. Upcott," said Mrs. Babbacombe. "I wasn't
goin' to sit down--just pazzin' and I looked in. Not but what all's well
to home. I told him" (her husband) "to see to things, and what I says
goes, but still it's a woman's place to be in her own home."

Tomsie's eyes fell on the roses and she looked on them and smelt their
passing fragrance. Mrs. Babbacombe had turned to go, but saw an
opportunity to monopolise again the conversation, and turning to Sis,
said she: "Well, you keep a fine tidy house, cleanest house I go into. A
good wife you'll make to some man. Have 'e not zingled en out yet?"

Tomsie wheeled about, looked over her shoulder at Mrs. Babbacombe, and
then to Sis, to change the conversation, remarked: "They roses be
dabbered now; but they be sweet."

Sis was willing!

"Yes," she said turning to Tomsie. "They do smell sweet still, but they
be fading."

"Aye," said Mrs. Babbacombe, "that's it. We all do fade, same as roses"
(John had a pang with one thought and then smiled to himself at the
simile, for he had another, a thought that Mrs. Babbacombe would fade
more like a bladder of lard, grown spotty) "and when a woman
fades--well, well, there yu be."

"Sure," said Tomsie. "Dabbered roses is sweet," and she smelt again. "I
have a bowl full of old rose leaves up along. Faded roses is one thing
but dabbered poppies in the rain is another. The roses you can always
love. But a poppy? Just all a-hang and a-slop and nothing left to it.
And yet I suppose roses and poppies is both flowers, so to speak, and
the good God made 'em both--and there ye be."

"Well, I'll be going," said Mrs. Babbacombe. "Good-night all."

"And now she's gone," sighed Tomsie. "You dear, dear woman," and she
turned to Mrs. Upcott, "you get all kinds a-dropping in to see you.
Impudent woman, that. Young Ashplant--ye mind Ashplant, John, maybe ye
saw him to abroad."

"Yes, I saw him. He sailed with us."

"Ah, iss, sure, so him did. I hear he was to Cartagena. He was asking
for word o'you. He'd heard as how your ship had been captured by the
Dons. But what I was going to say was what that Babbacombe woman did.
Young Ashplant met me up along talking to some volks and says he: 'Why,
here's Tomsie Ravenning,' and that Babbacombe woman cried out from her
door: 'Easy, young man--that be Mrs Sellick. You'm behind the times.
She's Tomsie Sellick now, wi' three brats, two boys and a cheeld. She's
been busy. A fine, healthy, busy woman,' shouts out like that. I'm proud
of my childer, I am, but there's ways and ways of looking on life, Mrs.
Upcott; there's ways and ways, as you know, and I don't like that Mrs.
Babbacombe."

Mrs. Upcott clapped Tomsie's plump shoulder and seemed to calm her
flutter; though John noticed in the mother's face then, too, a something
that seemed to indicate that she lived elsewhere, in another world;
there was still the barrier in the sweet, understanding eyes. And he
reverenced his mother then. He loved her. He understood how it was
possible for so many differing types of people to come to see her, to
care to "drop in, pazzing."

But this is only our old friend Tomsie, so far. We have not yet come to
Cassandra.




CHAPTER XXIII

HOW THE THROSTLE SANG AT EVENING


Because I have a certain pity for John Upcott I do not wish his to be a
kind of Marsyas fate; I would not tell quite word for word what he said
that evening to Tomsie Sellick, not narrate with excessive particularity
of detail how he felt, the moment after the words were said, as though
he had again, not sinfully, but weakly, lost the lordship of his soul;
not only that but, somehow, wronged Cassandra. You can surmise all that.

For the pirate captain of the _Pearl_ was weak enough to seek a
confidant, a moral counsellor, and that counsellor a woman--Tomsie.

Still, if he had to seek a confidant I suppose she was the best
possible. His mother besides, I take it, required no fresh anguish to
aid her.

He strayed out with Tomsie, as though with the intention to go a little
way homeward with her across the fields; but once out of earshot of the
house, though she was already deep in a cheerful prattle of talk, to
which he paid no heed, said he, "Tomsie," with that in his voice that
caused her to stare.

"Tomsie, if a man has always, first along and last along, had a terrible
liking for a maid and been away from her and come back not as he went,
not clean as he would be, should he tell her?"

Tomsie gasped and "John!" she ejaculated. "Oh! John!"

Even in the dark he saw her go white and then her face darkened,
presumably suffused with blood.

"What do you just mean?" she said.

"'Tis Cassandra," he said. "I can't stay away from her and yet I dursent
go to see her. There was a woman--in the Indies."

"And you were trysted to Cassandra?"

"Oh no, my God! no. If only I had been 'twould never have happened--that
other."

Tomsie had a sense of relief. "But you, John," she said, and stood stock
still. "You, John? I always thought you was the last man," and then
tears glistened in her eyes and her bosom heaved as she understood that
she was being made a confidant. "How can I help 'e?" she said. "My God,
John! What a woman she must have been. When I think of you----"

"Tell me," he said; "tell me--you're a woman. Have I to tell Cassandra
_that_? That be the question, Tomsie. Do 'e think a man should tell the
like o' that if it's happened, to the woman he comes to wi' love?"

Tomsie walked on slowly with downcast head. Huskily she said: "Don't you
tell her. 'Tis done and can't be undone and there ye be. And once she's
told, well then she knows. Even if a woman suspected--when she knows she
knows and she can't delude herself no more and say: 'Maybe 'tis not
so.'"

And then Tomsie looked up and cried out:

"No no, John. I'm bad, I'm wrong to talk to 'e so. 'Tain't the help you
want, I know. I know, brother John, I know the help you want," and then
she gathered herself and then composed herself and spoke in a
matter-of-fact voice:

"'Tis strange to speak to a man like this yere and a man like you above
all, John. I feel mazed like. I can't kind o' believe I be talking at
all. I never thought as how you were--could----" she halted as though
horrified while John was saying:

"Nor had I--nor had I. That's it. I ain't a man like that. And--my God!
That makes it all the worse."

"Aye," said Tomsie, but speaking as though another thought lurked
unspoken, "you'm different from most. No, I was wrong, John. You'm
different; and Cassandra--she's different."

But Tomsie stood where she had halted. She was thinking of this John
Upcott and the John Upcott she had known--and of Cassandra.

"Seeing 'tis you and seeing 'tis Cassandra," she said, and delayed, and
then: "There be all kinds in the world. There's even some in Devon here
would think you a fool to worry so--I know that. They'd think 'twas a
terr'ble store to make o' nothing. They don't count. 'Tisn't what they
think. I said to 'e just now 'don't 'e tell'; but that don't count.
'Twasn't right. You tell her. You tell her and God help you. If she
takes it like me," and she sighed, "'twill be all well wi' 'e. But you,
John! You!" There was still a thought held unspoken; and then: "I'm
doing no wrong to Sellick by asking you, John, by telling you like; but
was it" she hesitated and began her thought again elsewhere: "You
always, when I was with 'e, made me feel content like, safe like. 'Twas
as if I could come to you and be happy. 'Twasn't like that--oh tell me
'twasn't like that with her, to the Indies?"

"My God, no!" said John.

Tomsie had another sense of relief.

"'Tis what's right you want to do," said she sighing.

"Iss."

"You tell her--go now. She's alone. Gifford's over to Bideford and it's
afore his time. Good-night, John--no--don't 'e thank me."

As she went home, blinded ever and again with tears, Tomsie said to her
heart: "It doo seem like's the happiest things and the best things is
come at through pain." Then she paused. "But that ain't excusing him!"
she said. "And John Upcott, too! But what a terr'ble thing for he, oh,
what a terr'ble thing for he! I wonder--I wonder if he wanted me to tell
Cassie for him?" And again thought she: "Lor! if anyone was to know us
had talked about it what would they think? The likes o' Mrs. Babbacombe
would be saying: 'Nobody ever talked to me like that.' No, sure, you
couldn't talk to her like that. That's just it. She'd carry any bad
tale in the country, but no one could ever go to her wi' trouble. God
help him."

That would perhaps be about the time that Cassandra heard the steps
without and the knock on the door that stood part open to the summer
evening all full of scents of grass and flowers and all aglow with the
amazing end of the day, with throstles in the tree-tops trembling their
songs into the sunset.

"John!" she said.

But he did not salute her so much as petition her, hat in hand; yet she
found him a very self-reliant figure to look at, clean-limbed,
clean-skinned, tanned, glitter of the last sun-rays in his dark hair.
Looking at him she saw him a man with a grip on himself, a man who was
strong. He saw Cassandra, lissome, slender, her hair going back in
smooth gold from a forehead such as one calls open, above candid,
undefended eyes, their sweetness and kind candour their defence; eyes
that touched one often with their great gentleness and peace. Cassandra
had a leap of joy at her heart that John looked as he did. John had but
a wonder for her, and a numb regret for himself that she was so far
beyond him. She was glad, because she had seen others come home from
overseas. Only that day she had seen Will Ravenning again, with his
drink-hazed, dancing eyes, his pugnacious swagger.

"Cassandra," said John, "can I come in?"

"Come in over, John. Come in over;" and she caught his hand. For a
moment it was as if she was going to kiss him. He had kissed Tomsie
when he saw her again after coming home, kissed her smack before the
husband. Still, as they say here--there ye be!

But when he entered and was seated neither spoke. It would' have looked
the foolishest affair imaginable to anyone who might have seen--just
these two sitting tongue-tied. John, feeling this embarrassment, broke
it, for her sake, to relieve her.

"And how have you been, Cassandra, all this while?"

"Nicely, nicely, thankee. Things just go on as usual here. So you'm
really home! Well, you'm changed." And then she captured the attitude of
old friend. "You'm changed for the better, John. You'm quite the man
now. And when did you get home?"

"Two-three weeks back," he said. "I've been---"

"Oh! Just new back, as you might say. After being gone so long you can't
hardly feel to home yet."

"That's it," he said grasping at what he thought a chance remark. "I'd
have been over afore this but----"

"I know," she said. "It must take quite a bit o' shaking down after
being gone so long. How's all to home? I haven't been hardly over the
door one way and another myself these last days."

"Nicely," he said, "nicely, thankee," and then came again that
embarrassing and foolish silence; but Cassandra was now looking at him
with a curious kind of keenness and he noted, looking up from his
plucking of his hat like a very clodpole, her sharp gaze, the bright
eyes piercing him; but he noted also how her cheeks were drawn as of one
who suffered pain. Ah! If he could only have her always near, to cheer
her, to smooth away from her heart whatever it was that wrought that
something of pathetic in the cheeks, that made that something, a little
on the sad side of pensive, to dwell in the eyes.

"Zounds!" cried a hearty voice in the doorway. "Coampany! Ye've got
coampany. The wandering sailor. Eh, lad! You'm twice the breadth you
were afore you went out to the abroad. Eh! And a big hand too and the
heartiest grip. Give a Don's bow now, lad. Or is it a Don's oaths you've
brought back with 'e to astonish quiet volkses?--How's the maiden?"

"Nicely--nicely."

"Supper ready?"

"Iss, all ready."

"Set a plaat for John then. 'Taint every day we get the coampany of a
gurt captain that's taken ships and cities and fought duels wi' the
Dons. You have work afore ye, lad, to give we the rights and the wrongs
and the ins and the outs of the stories that us gets now and then of you
and other Devon lads out there. You bain't too gurt a man now to eat
laver wi' bubble and squeak off humble cloam, be ye, after supping off
gold plate?" And then he turned to his daughter. "Another stitch?"

"Naught, 'tis naught," she said.

John saw how pale she was.

"What is it?" he asked her.

"'Tis naught," she said.

"What is it?" he asked Gifford.

"'Tis a pain she takes. No physic seems any use to aid her and it do get
worse."

"Have you had this long--has she had it long?"

"Two-three years, for all I know," said Gifford. "She's like her mother
that was. She's summat like your mother and the rest of the best o'
them, a heap different from them kind that's always talking of their own
pains and all the pains they hear tell of."

But Cassandra smiled again, was gay; and then Gifford had a score of
questions to ask regarding the ways of the Dons. But as John answered
these he had often an anxious eye for Cassandra.

As for loving her--that was changed somehow. He could not say "I love
her." He could but say: "I dare not love her." The whole woman was
sacred to him. But that pallor when she had been pained, and what
Gifford had told him of her sufferings, distressed him. He wished he
could take her pain and bear it for her. As he went homeward he not so
much thought of her as was accompanied by her spirit. And half way down
the slope, in the red loam by the stile, he stood still, heaved a sigh
in his reveries and softly to the dim slopes that he tilled, the smell
of the earth in his nostrils, the tranquillity of night around him, said
he: "Love bain't all billing and cooing. Love is holding the wife's head
and her ratching." He had a sense of the greatness and sanctity of life
in its meanest circumstance, in its every circumstance. Here, at home,
he had at last stepped into the verges of the land he had sought
oversea. Here, at home, came to him a whisper of the voices he had
hearkened for elsewhere.

It was as if he had never lived before.

And next day he felt as if he had only then come home. Mother and Sis
both seemed to look on him with new eyes. He could not understand. One
gnawing thought persisted in intruding itself, one worrying thought of
self, apart from his thought of Cassandra's unnamed trouble: he
regretted speaking to Tomsie. Only between himself and the Silence
should that matter have been settled. If ever spoken, only to Cassandra.
But he guarded himself that day; he would not allow his face to show
these stabbing thoughts--why should others be dulled by his concerns?
That day, too, Mrs. Upcott said: "We've news for you, John."

"What news?" asked he and did not think of himself.

"Good news," said Mrs. Upcott.

He looked from one to the other.

"'Tis something about Sis?" he said eagerly.

"She going to be married."

It had never occurred to him that Sis would be married! But he looked at
her and was amazed that she should have been so long by the mother's
side.

"Ah!" said he, "things have been moving while I've been away wasting
life. Who is the happy man, Sis? God bless ye."

"'Tis Walter Shebbeare," said Mrs. Upcott. "So she won't be going very
far, only to Putford."

"God bless ye," said John and stepped across and kissed his sister on
the cheek. There were others in the world besides himself, with their
loves and longings and hopes.

So there was a little stir of preparation in the farm, sewings, and
quiet flutterings, and the taking out of the bottom drawer, and when Sis
drove away by Walter's side, three weeks later, she went feeling that
all was well at the home whence she departed. When Mrs. Upcott waved
farewell to the happy pair John stepped back behind her suddenly,
feeling that the last glimpse should be of the mother. Going back
indoors with her he had a sense of something to live up to; and he was
ready. His mother put a hand on his shoulder: "I have a son," she said,
"a good, strong son, a man like what I prayed for."

Mother and son pictured Sis's home-going, each in their own way. Both
saw the witching gold and green of the valley whither she now journeyed
over the purple moor, through the azure and wind-sweet day; the mother's
eyes dwelling longest on that part of the picture where the steeple
stood sanctifying the valley and all day the cawing rooks wavered in the
immemorial trees that almost hid it, that might have hidden it save from
eyes that sought it; John's eyes, roving on his picture, saw the rising
and settling rooks above the tufted hill, the steeple peeping through,
saw the dotted farms in the valley, the purple of the moor; but
lingered where the river ran tessellated with magic pebbles, and the
illusive, wavering gleams of sun and shade intertwined their baffling
mosaic on its wind-ruffled and dancing surface.

And the summer bloomed on, resplendent, with the old friends coming and
going. But Cassandra was not of these. She had taken to bed, after long,
brave fightings against the unknown malady, succumbing at last, about
the end of summer; and in the golden August and the gorgeous Septembral
days there was always someone, this one or that one who had loved her,
of an afternoon or of an evening finding old Gifford to ask: "Is she
sleeping?" or "Is she minded for coampany?"

Always after John had a sense of her presence near when he heard a
thrush sing, whether in the first sun-splashes of spring or in the
golden tree-tops of later summers; for--in her deepest pain, as he sat
by her, holding her hand for solace and yearning to endue her with
strength to bear, should it sap his life, she turned her pale face to
him and the thin lips puckered in a smile, and said she:

"'Tis sweet to hear the drishel in the hedge."

She went with the falling leaves and was carried up to lie in that quiet
place where Silence has his sanctuary (the old square steeple locates it
for you as you come over the hill and look along the slopes); where,
when rain comes, the green of the grass shines through, the birds
criss-cross from wall to wall.

Next day, after breakfast, John took down a book, one of Uncle's gift,
and tried to read. It was a book of sermons of a Welsh divine. Suddenly
he thought of his mother. She too had loved Cassandra. He turned and
looked at her. She had her eyes on him, the dear grey-blue eyes that had
looked upon the beatific vision.

"There bain't much to do to-day, John," she said. "Why don't 'e go for
one o' your rambles. I'm sure ye can neither read nor work to-day."

"Oh yes," said he; "there's work to be done."

"That can stand," she said. "You go for one of your long rambles like
you used in the old days when you'd come home and tell of the way the
gulls went up and down."

He stood a moment staring.

"Just to-day," he said. "Just one day, then. I'll be back come sunset."

"Very good, my dear. You go 'long. Take you something to eat with 'e."

And when he was gone she said, according to her lights (and considering
what she had achieved I cannot just mock her ingenuous thoughts),
looking at the books in which he read: "There be only one Book for me;
but God would not have allowed a man to think o' printing if there
weren't good in it. The older I get the more I do think the one Book is
enough for us. But after all, John does seem somehow bettered for these
books. Still, the cliffs and the moors will do en more service to-day.
Our blessed Saviour when he was distressed did go apart into a mountain.
Why should not a mortal man do the like? And John was always terrible
taken up with gulls, and cliffs, and the sea breaking and the winds."

A robin alighted and flicked on a tree stump as John went forth. The
clipping of some early labourer, hedge-trimming, smote crisply on the
air. Up the course of Torridge that twined hidden yonder beyond the hill
a gull went high in air, winding there as the river swung, following its
course above its reflection, dipped, and veered from sight and left the
hill ridge clear and lonely. Here gulls came and went, from sea-side to
land-side of the cliffs, dipping and veering too and returning on their
plaintive cries that left the day silent. There was a slight whiteness
of frost, a dreamy blue of distance, and the other blue of morning smoke
rising here and there among the woods from hidden, quiet homes that lay
in hollows whence rose the slopes of green field--the fields are always
green in Devon--and dappled wood, a little way under the great sweep of
the sky; and above again were mountains of cloud with white summits over
which the rays of sunlight shot, their higher brightness making it
appear as though below there were shafts of darkness. But of course it
was not so.

And under that sky, into the rising south-west wind, John journeyed by
the old, familiar routes.

He noted absently, as he walked, the building up and the dissolving of
the clouds that were blown eastwards. He trudged on and on. The thick
leggings that he wore, he being yet somewhat unaccustomed to them,
galled his ankles. Each step was a pain; but he did not heed the pain.
The pain seemed right. Without that pain he would have sunk in a stupor.
The pain gave him the sense of being indeed there--at every step. He did
not even trouble to slacken these unwonted bindings. Subconsciously he
knew whither he was going but did not ask why. He was going to the west
shore to look out, out where the wings of gulls went and were lost in
the sun, and where the waves came in these thousand miles.

The day was colder on the higher lands. South were dimly seen the tors
of Dartmoor in the cold azure distance. North, far out, was Lundy, clear
and blue. The wind buffeted him, but he breasted into it. Higher here
the leaves were strewn more widely. He evaded Hartland, going over the
slopes to north with the steeple of Stoke standing lonely, almost
terrible in the wind-blown day.

At length he came to the last slopes, where the depopulated squat trees
were all whipped back from the sea-side by the force of many a gale;
marched on and heard the roar of the sea (that echoes ever through that
corner of North Devon) grow louder.

On Hartland cliffs he stayed. The foam was coming from under, flung
straight up, as if blown up a chimney; then, broken, it sped over the
fields. The great Atlantic leaped far below, smote and seethed up the
trembling cliffs. With puckered eyes he gazed into the nothingness far
off beyond the verge of the climbing sea, beneath the lowering sky, and
the keen wind made his eyes to water.

There was one long ceaseless roar, the tide too high now for the rattle
of the back-drawn pebbles; the yelling of the sea and the smashing on
the awesome cliff; and flying upward, high in air, were great clots of
foam that burst there and flew asunder.

There he stood, looking out into Infinity.


THE END


Transcriber's Note:

Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.

The following printers errors were addressed.

Page 19 'nozed' to 'nosed'
(But the short-nosed man)

Page 24 'everheard' to 'ever heard'
(Uppcott had ever heard)

Page 28 'nozing' to 'nosing'
(And he went nosing and looking on)

Page 72 'der' to 'her'
(huddled in her chair)

Page 139 'preceived' to 'perceived'
(Though he perceived)

Page 174 'causemaking' to 'cause making'
(of de Pointis cause making them so)

Page 308 'unacustomed' to 'unaccustomed'
(yet somewhat unaccustomed to them)




[End of _The Island Providence_ by Frederick Niven]
