Amber, copper, jet and tin,Anklet, bracelet, necklace, pin,—That is the way the trades beginOver the pony's back.Mother-o'-pearl or malachite,Ebony black or ivory whiteLade the dromond's rushing flightOver Astarte's track.Crucifix or mangonel,Steel for sword or bronze for bell,—That is the way we trafficking sell,Out of the tempest's wrack.Marble, porcelain, tile or brick,Hemlock, vitriol, arsenic—Souls or bodies barter quick—Masters, what d'ye lack?
It was Nicholas Gay's last night at home. At dawn his father's best ship, the Sainte Spirite, would weigh anchor for the longest eastward voyage she had ever undertaken. His father's brother, Gervase Gaillard of Bordeaux, was going out in charge of the venture. Gilbert Gay, the London merchant, who had altered his name though not his long-sighted French mind in his twenty years of England, thought this an excellent time for his eighteen-year-old son to see the world.
Since Nicholas could remember, he had known the wharves of the Thames and the changeful drama of London Pool. He had been twice to Normandy, but to a lad French by birth, that was hardly a foreign land. Now he was to see countries neither English nor French—some of them not even Christian. Half Spain and all the north coast of Africa were Moslem. Sicily and Sardinia had Saracen traditions. This would be his first sight of the great sea-road from Gibraltar to Byzantium.
During the past three years Gilbert Gay had been often absent, and the boy had taken responsibility of the sort that makes a man. With the keen aquiline French profile he had a skin almost as fair as a girl's, and yellow-brown waving hair. The steady gray eyes and firm lips, however, had nothing girlish about them.
As luck had it these last hours were crowded with visitors. Robert Edrupt, the wool-merchant, and David Saumond, the mason, were taking passage in the Sainte Spirite. Guy Bouverel had a share in her cargo, and came for a word about that and to bid Nicholas good-by. Brother Ambrosius, a solemn-faced portly monk, had letters to send to Rome. Lady Adelicia Giffard came to ask that inquiry be made for her husband, who had gone on pilgrimage more than a year before, and had not been heard of for many months. The poor soul was as nearly distraught as a woman could be. She begged Gervase Gaillard to ask all the pilgrims and merchants he met whether in their travels they had seen or heard of Sir Stephen Giffard, and should any trace of him be found, to send a messenger to her without delay. She was wealthy, and promised liberal reward to any one who could help her in the search. It was her great fear that the knight had been taken prisoner by the Moslems.
“I think that you must have heard of it in that case,” said Gilbert Gay gently, “since these marauders ever demand ransom. I pray you remember, my lady, that there are a thousand chances whereby in these unsettled times a man may be delayed, or his letters fail to reach you. 'Tis not well to brood over vain rumors.”
“I know,” whimpered the poor lady, “but I cannot—I cannot bear that he should be a captive and suffering, and I with hoarded gold that I have no heart to look upon. 'Tis cruel.”
“Holy Church,” observed Brother Ambrosius, “hath always need of our hearts and of our gold, lady. Peace comes to the spirit that hath learned the sweet uses of submission. To dote on the things of the flesh is unpleasing to God.”
“When I was in Spain,” said Edrupt, “I heard a monk preaching a new religion. He urged his hearers to aid in rescuing the captives held in Moslem slavery. 'Tis said he has saved many.”
“Were it not well,” pursued Brother Ambrosius as if he had not heard, “to think upon the glorious opportunity of a captive to bear witness to his faith? We read how angels delivered the apostles from prison, and how Saint Paul in his bonds exhorted and rebuked his people, to the edification of many.”
“True,” commented Gilbert Gay rather dryly, “but we are not all Saint Pauls. And I have never known of God sending angels to do work that He might properly expect of men and women.”
This was a new idea to Brother Ambrosius. Not finding a place in his mind for one just then, he looked meek and said nothing, and presently took his leave.
“Saint Paul was a tentmaker, was he not?” queried Guy Bouverel when the door had closed upon the churchman. “Had he rowed in the galleys I doubt whether we should have had those Epistles.”
Nicholas recalled this conversation the next day, as the sturdy little ship of English oak filled her great sails and went blithely out upon the widening estuary of the Thames. The last of the dear London landmarks faded into the gray soft sky. Soon the sailors would begin to look for Sheerness and the Forelands, Dungeness, Beachy Head. Nicholas leaned on the rail above the dancing morning waters and remembered it all.
There was his mother's sweet pale face under the white coif, her busy fingers completing a last bit of stitchery for him. There was his father's fine, keen, kindly face bent over his account-books and coffers. There was pretty Genevieve, his sister, with her husband, Crispin Eyre. And there were the comrades of his boyhood, and the prating monk, and the unhappy lady with her white face framed in rich velvets and furs, and her piteous beseeching hands that were never still. Those faces, in the glow of the fire and the shine of tall candles in their silver sconces, were to be with him often in the months to come.
Edrupt came up just as a long Venetian galley went plowing out to sea, the great oars flashing in the sunlight, one rank above another. “They do not have to pray for a fair wind, those Venetians,” Nicholas commented idly.
“That galley's past praying for anything,” Edrupt said grimly. “You may be glad that your men fear neither wind nor seas—nor you. 'Tis an ill thing to sail the seas with those who serve only through fear.”
Nicholas had not thought of it in that way. He knew, of course, that the slaves who rowed the racing galleys were the offscouring of mankind, desperate men, drawn from all nations. It was as much as two men could do to handle one oar, and all must pull in unison as a huge machine. The Venetian dromond was to other merchant-ships as the dromedary to other camels. To make the speed required the rowers must put forth their whole strength, hour after hour, day after day.
Any work which makes men into parts of a machine is not likely to improve them as men. When they have no love for their work and no hope of reward, and do not even speak the same language, the one motive which can be depended upon to keep them going is fear. The whip of the overseer bred festering, burning hatred, but it kept the sweeps from breaking their monotonous unceasing motion. If the voyage were quick, the profits were the greater, and no one cared for anything else.
Thinking of the hard sea-bitten faces of the galley-slaves Nicholas rejoiced that rather than live so the crew of the Sainte Spirite would every man of them choose a clean death at sea.
Some days later it seemed as if they were fated to die so. A Biscay tempest caught them, and from dark to daylight they were buffeted by the giant battledores of wind and sea. Nicholas spent the sleepless hours in lending a hand and cheering the men as he could.
At last they sighted the great Rock of Gibraltar, fifteen hundred feet of it clear against the sky, like the gateway pillar of another world. Between Europe and Africa they passed into the blue Mediterranean,—blue with the salty sparkle beloved of all sea-lovers since Ulysses. Light warm winds, the scent of orange-groves and rose-gardens, a sky only less deep in its azure splendor than the sea itself—it seemed indeed another world.
But the Sainte Spirite had not come whole out of her struggle with the powers of the abyss. Timbers were sadly strained, a mast was gone, every man on board was weary and muscle-sore. And then a Levantine gale drove the crippled merchantman down on the Barbary coast.
The blackness of that storm ended, for Nicholas Gay, in a plunge into the black waters and a glimpse of the high lantern of his father's ship dancing above the tossing foam like a witch-fire, for an instant before she went down. When he came to himself he was lying on hot sand in the sunshine, and Edrupt and David Saumond were bending anxiously over him.
Half the seamen were gone; so was the captain; so was all of the cargo. Gervase Gaillard had been injured by a falling mast and was helpless. The coast was strange to them all, but the old merchant and Edrupt made a guess that it was a part of Morocco somewhere near the town of Fez. Food they had none; water they might find; and the merchants had not lost quite all they had in the wreck. Some gold and jewels they had saved, secured about their persons. These would pay the passage of the company to London—if they had luck.
They were considering what to do next when a body of some twoscore horsemen swept down upon them. The leader might have been either Turk or Frank. He was as dark as a Saracen and wore the chain-mail, scimitar and light helmet of the heathen, but he spoke Levantine rather too well for a Moor, and with a different intonation.
“Who are you?” he asked curtly. Nicholas Gay stood up, not yet quite steady on his feet.
“We are London merchant folk,” he said, “from the wrecked ship Sainte Spirite, whereof my father, Gilbert Gay, was owner. My uncle here is our chief man, but as you see, he is injured and cannot move. If we may get food and lodging until we are able to return to England, we will requite it freely.”
“London,” repeated the soldier. “A parcel of London traders, eh?” He spoke a few words to the Moor who rode next him, in another language. “This is the domain of Yusuf of the Almohades,” he went on, “and we make no terms with the enemies of God. Yet we condemn no man to starve. Ye shall have food and lodging so long as ye remain with us. Doubtless ye are honest and will pay, but in this barbarous land there are many thieves. Therefore we will take charge of such wealth as ye have. As for that old man, he cannot live to reach his home. Abu Hassan!”
A trooper spurred toward the old merchant and thrust him through with his lance. He half rose, groaned and fell back, dead. Others, dismounting, seized upon the astonished and indignant castaways, and took from them with the deftness of practiced hands whatever they had of value. This was too much for the Breton and English sailors. They would have fought it out then and there. But Nicholas spoke quickly so that only those nearest him heard.
“There is no gain in being killed here one by one. Wait and be silent. Pass the word to the rest.”
When the prisoners had been herded into a compact company in the center of the mounted troop, the leader chirruped to his horse. “It grows late,” he said. “Y'Allah!” And at the point of the lance the captives were driven forward.
They were taken through the crowded narrow streets of a squalid town and left in a walled enclosure where two negroes brought them an earthen jar of water and some sort of cooked grain in a large bowl. The sun blazed down upon their shelterless heads and flies hummed about the filth in the unclean place. Nicholas, when their hunger had been partly satisfied and there was no more to eat or drink, addressed himself to the others in a cool and quiet voice.
“Friends, it is like we are to be sold into slavery among the infidels. If each man is left to shift for himself they may break us. If we stand by one another and keep our faith we may yet win home to England. They may not separate us at first, and I have been thinking that if they find out the value of a company of men freely choosing to work together in harmony, they will hardly separate us at all. But we must obey their will, we must keep order among ourselves, and above all, we must seem to have given up all hope of escape. What say you?”
Edrupt spoke first. “I'm with you, lad. 'Tis our one chance of seeing home again, I do think.”
David Saumond's shrewd eyes were scanning the faces of the sailors. “I'll no be the last to join ye,” he said. “But all must agree. One man out would make a hole i' the dyke.”
A big Breton sailor stepped forward. “Kadoc of Saint Malo sticks to his ship,” he growled, and drew with his forefinger a line in the dust. “Who's next?”
One after another, but with little hesitation, the men crossed the line. All had some idea of what awaited them in the Moorish provinces. It was no new thing for captives of European blood to be sold as slaves. Gangs of them toiled on canals, walls, fortresses, in grain-fields, on board galleys. Those leaders of Islam who urged a holy war sowed fortifications wherever they went. The need for slave labor for such work was greater than the supply. Much of the slave population was unfit for anything but the simplest and rudest tasks, and could be kept at work only by the constant use of the whip.
All the tales Nicholas had heard of slavery crowded into his mind in the first moments of captivity. Once a black-browed Sicilian had told of a night of blood and flame, when the slaves of a galley, mad with toil, privation and hatred, killed their masters and attempted to seize the ship,—and almost succeeded. “Slaves cannot unite,” the Sicilian ended contemptuously. “There is always a Judas.” But Gilbert Gay had chosen his men for this voyage with especial care. Every man of them, Nicholas believed, could be trusted.
They had never dreamed of anything like the next few days—the filth, the degradation, the cruelty. Nicholas was glad, when half-naked Moslem boys called them names from a safe distance, that the others could not understand. The insults of an Oriental are primitive and plain—and very old. Nicholas had a trick of absorbing languages, and already knew half a score of outlandish tongues and dialects.
Not only the townspeople but their Moslem fellow-slaves held the Kafirs in contempt. Their rations were sometimes food condemned by the Moslem faith. Edrupt's cool common sense and David's dry humor were of valiant service in those days. The Scot averred that better men than Mahomet had been bred on barley bannocks, and that the flat coarse cakes of the Berbers were as near them as a heathen could be expected to come. He also warned them that Moses knew what he was about when he forbade pork to his people, and that the pigs that ran in the streets of an African town were very different eating from the beech-fed hogs of Kent. From a Jewish physician for whom he had once built a secret treasure-vault he had picked up a rough-and-ready knowledge of medicine which was of very considerable value.
One morning they were all marched off, in charge of a greasy indifferent-looking Turk, to work on a canal embankment. The garden of an emir's favorite was to have a new bath-pavilion. Here the great strength of Kadoc, the hard clean muscle and ready resourcefulness of Edrupt, and the Scotch mason's experience in the ways of stones and waters, set the pace for the rest. The seamen studied how to use their strength to the best advantage as they had once studied the sky and the sea. They moved together to the tune of their own chanteys, and the Turk discovered that this one gang was worth any two others on the ground. When questioned, Nicholas replied briefly that it was the way of his people.
The foreign-looking officer smiled incredulously when this explanation was given, and watched them for some time with obvious suspicion. But the men seemed not to be plotting together, and to be thinking only of their work. If the English were fools enough to do more than they were made to do it was certainly no loss to their masters.
“I should like to know the name of that vinegar-faced captain,” said Edrupt one day. “I mistrust he wasn't born here.”
“No,” said Nicholas. “They call him the Khawadji, and they never use that name for one of themselves.”
“He's too free with his whip. Yon tall man that tends his horses could tell something of that, I make my guess.”
One night they came on the Khawadji's stable-man caring for a lame horse with such skill that Nicholas spoke of it. By some instinct he spoke in Norman-French. The other answered in the same tongue.
“Every knight should know his horse.”
“You are of gentle birth, my lord?”
“Call me not lord,” the Norman said wearily. “I have seen too much to be any man's lord hereafter. Since my fever I am fit only for this, and none will know the grave of Stephen Giffard.”
Nicholas' heart leaped. “Sir,” he said quickly, “ere we left London the Lady Adelicia, your wife, came to my father's house to beseech him to aid her in searching for you. If any of us ever see home again I will take care that she is told of this.”
The knight looked ten years younger. “I thank you,” he answered gravely. “And if I should not live to see her again, I would have her know that my thoughts have been constantly of her.”
“Is not this Khawadji a caitiff knight of France? He does not seem like a Moor.”
The Norman nodded. “He is Garin de Biterres, a miscreant of Guienne. My brother balked him in some villainy years ago. He took me for Walter when he saw me, and let it out. Aquitaine being too hot to hold him, and the Normans in Ireland refusing to enlist him, he came through the Breach of Roland and took service under the Crescent. He was once a slave among the Moors of Andalusia, and owes his deformity to that. He cozened an old beggar into treating his leg with some ointment which would wither it up so that he could not work, and it never wholly recovered.”
“How comes it that he has not allowed you to send word to your people? Most of these folk are greedy for ransom.”
“I think he keeps me here for his pleasure. At first he took the letters I wrote and pretended to have sent them, and gibed in his bitter fashion when no reply came. That is how I know that the letters were not sent at all. Had my lady heard so much as a word of my captivity she would have searched me out.”
The approach of some troopers broke off the conversation, and Nicholas went his way, marveling at the strange chances of life.
Some months passed, during which the English worked at varying tasks—brickmaking, the hauling of brick and cut stone, the building of walls. Then a merchant called Mustafa came seeking slaves for his galley. After much crafty bargaining he secured Nicholas and his companions for about two-thirds the original price asked. But the Khawadji refused to part with Stephen Giffard.
The galley was a rackety, noisome trading-ship that plied along the coast. On board were already some rowers of various races, accustomed to the work, but the bulk of the labor was to be done by the new men. It was killing toil. Fed on black beans and coarse bread and unclean water, they worked the ship from one filthy white-walled port to another, never seeing more than the dock where the galley anchored or some mean street where their barracks might be. There were times when Nicholas seemed to himself hardly more human than the rats that gnawed and scrabbled in the dark at night. He began to see how a galley-slave is made—molded and tainted through and through by that of which he is a part.
The clean comradeship of the little group of Northern exiles did not count for so much in this work. The pace of the ship was the average pace of the whole crew. They became too weary to think or feel, too ravenous to disdain the most unwholesome rations. Nicholas found himself mysteriously aware of the moods of those about him, as men are when herded together in silent multitudes. In the free world one feels this only now and then—in an army, a mob, a church. Among slaves the dog-like instinct is common. They know more of their masters than their masters can ever know of them.
Nicholas had been carefully trained by wise parents to the habit of self-control, but he found that he was moved nevertheless by the mad unreasoning impulses of the half-barbarous people about him, ridden fiercely by their black thoughts of hate and fear. That it was the same with his comrades he knew from little things they said—and even more from what they did not say. They grew dulled to beauty and suffering alike. There were glorious dawns, that flushed the white walls of a seaport rose-red, above waters of mingled ink and blood that changed as by magic to blue like lapis-lazuli. Then the sky turned saffron and the minarets were of a fleeting gold above the deep blue shadows of the streets. There were velvet nights when the stars blazed like a king's ransom, and white-robed desert men moved in the moist chill air like phantoms. But all this was as little to them as to the lizards that crept along the walls or the sweeps they handled with their hardening hands. Years after, Nicholas recalled those nights and those mornings and knew that something that sat within his deadened brain had been alive and had stored the memories for him. But he did not know it then.
Mustafa bragged among his friends, from Jebel el Tarik to Iskanderia, of his fine ship and his unparalleled crew. The listeners would smile and stroke their beards and exclaim at intervals, “Ma sh'Allah!”—believing perhaps one tenth of what they heard. Oftenest he boasted of the Feringhi rowers whom he had purchased from the sheikh's own steward in the slave-market of Lundra—a city of mist and wealth and pigs and fair maidens. Thus it came about that Ahmed ibn Said, the host, and Abu Selim, the letter-writer of the bazaar, devised a jest for a supper at the khan. They would send for one of these Frankish slaves and see what he would say. The flattered Mustafa agreed, and the messenger returned with Nicholas Gay, whose gray eyes and yellow hair caused a mild sensation.
The guests began to ask questions, first in Levantine, then in Arabic. Were there bazaars in Lundra? Did the people drink coffee? Had they camels? Did the muezzin call them to prayer? Did the women sleep upon the housetops? Was the city most like Aleppo the White, or Istamboul, or Damasc-ush-Shah? How many Muslimun were there? How many of the idolaters?
To these inquiries Nicholas replied, at first with faint amusement at the mingled shrewdness and ignorance of these men, then with a fierce pride in his city which made his words, as the letter-writer expressed it, shine like rubies and sing like a fountain. The merchants listened, and munched their sticky baclawi, ripe olives and dates and figs, and drank many tiny cups of coffee, more entertained than they had ever been by Mustafa. Finally the host sent for a basket of fruit—great pale Egyptian melons, pomegranates, oranges, figs—and graciously bestowed it upon the gifted galley-slave. He meant to come next day, he said, and with Mustafa's permission behold the prowess of the English in swimming.
To every one's surprise, Ahmed really came. Those who could swim were had out of their stifling quarters and allowed to do so. Nicholas could swim like an eel, and all were amazed when, after swimming farther out than any of the others, he flung up his arms, uttered a loud cry, and vanished. They watched and searched, but nothing more was seen of him, and there was mourning among the English.
But there was a Genoese galley in the harbor, and Nicholas had seen it. He had dived, swum under water as far as he could inshore, and come up with his head inside the scooped-out rind of a large melon. During the search the seeming melon quietly bobbed away toward a reedy shallow, and the swimmer hid among the reeds until dark, and then swam across to the Genoese ship. The captain knew Gilbert Gay and listened with interest to the youth's story.
The Genoese captain did not care to interfere with' Mustafa in a town full of his Moslem countrymen. He waited until the crazy trading-galley was well out to sea and rammed her with the beak of his own ship. Crossbowmen lined the rail, grappling irons were thrown out, and the captain, with Nicholas and some soldiers, went and unearthed Mustafa among bales of striped cotton. When he understood that they merely wanted all of his Feringhi slaves, he thankfully surrendered them.
“Shall we put this fellow to death?” inquired the captain. Mustafa understood the tone and gesture though not the words, and turned a dirty yellow-gray. “No,” said Nicholas Gay. “He was a good master—for an Arab.”
Mustafa took heart. He would never reach port, he complained, being so short-handed.
“You can work your ship under sail for that distance,” said the Genoese, twisting his mustachios, “if you dare loose your other slaves.” At that Mustafa had an ague. When they saw the last of him he was making slow and crooked progress.
“And after all,” said Edrupt one day, as they sighted the cliffs of Dover, “you bore witness among the heathen, as the fat old monk directed.”
“Stupid pig!” David grumbled. “I'd like fine to have him bearing witness in a Barbary brick-yard, sweating and whaizling over his tale o' brick. He'd throw his six hundred a day or I'd have his hide.”
“All the same,” said Edrupt thoughtfully, “a Londoner beats a Turk even for a galley-slave—eh, Nicholas?”
“We were never slaves,” said Nicholas. “We were free men doing the work of slaves for a time. We had memory and hope left us. There is nothing to be learned at such work. Stick together and give them the slip if you can—that's all the wisdom of the galleys.”
HARBOUR SONG
Sails in the mist-gray morning, wide wings alert for flight,Outward you fare with the sea-wind, seeking your ancient rightTo range with your foster-brethren, the sleepless waves of the sea,And come at the end of your wandering home again to me.By the bright Antares, the Shield of Sobieski,By the Southern Cross ablaze above the hot black sea,You shall seek the Pole-Star below the far horizon,—Steer by Arthur's Wain, lads, and home again to me!Caravel, sloop and galleon follow the salt sea galeThat whispers ever of treasure, the ancient maddening tale,—Round the world he leads ye, the sorcerer of the sea,Battered and patched and bleeding ye come again to me.By the spice and sendal, beads and trumpery trinkets,By the weight of ingots that cost a thousand dead,You shall seek your fortune under hawthorn hedges,—Come to know your birthright in the land you fled.Sails of my sons and my lovers, I watch for ye through the night,My lamps are trimmed and burning, my hearth is clear and bright.With every sough of the trade-wind that blows across the seaI wake and wait and listen for the call of your hearts to me.By Saint Malo's lanterns, by Medusa-firesRolling round your plunging prows in midnight tropic sea,You shall sight the beacon on my headlands lifting—All sail set, lads, and home again to me!
Where the moor met the woodland beyond the Fairies' Hill, old Izan went painfully searching for the herbs she had been wont to find there. The woodcutters had opened clearings that gave an unaccustomed look to the place. Fumiter, mercury, gilt-cups, four-leaved grass and the delicate blossoms of herb-robert came out to meet the sun with a half-scared look, and wished they had stayed underground. The old wife was in a bad humor, and she was not the better pleased when her donkey, moved by some eccentric donkeyish idea, gave a loud bray and went trotting gleefully off down the hill.
“Saints save us!” muttered the old woman, shaking a vain crutch after him. “I can never walk all that distance.”
But the donkey was not to get his holiday so easily. There came a shout from the forest, and a boy on a brown moor pony went racing off after the truant beast, while a lady and a young girl looked on laughing. It was a very pretty chase, but at last Roger came back in triumph and tethered the donkey, repentant and lop-eared, to a wind-warped oak.
“O Mother Izan!” cried Eleanor, “we've found a great parcel of herbs. I never saw this before, but mother thinks it's what they called polygonec in France and used for bruises and wounds.”
The old woman seized eagerly on the plant. It was a long curved stalk with a knotted root and oval leaves almost concealing the narrow greenish bells that hung from the joints of the stem. “Aye,” she said, “that's Solomon's Seal, and 'tis master good for ointment. The women,” she added dryly, “mostly comes for it after their men ha' made holiday.”
Eleanor was already off her pony, and Roger followed her. “We'll get you all you want, Mother Izan,” she called back; “there's ever so much of it up here among the rocks.”
“I should like to know,” queried Roger as they pulled and pried at the queer twisted roots, “why they call this Solomon's Seal. I don't believe Solomon ever came here.”
“Maybe it was because he was so wise,” said Eleanor sagely. “Mother said it was good to seal wounds. We'll ask David.”
In those days a knowledge of herbs and medicines was part of a lady's education. Physicians were few, and in remote places the ladies of the castle were called upon not only to nurse but to prescribe for cases of accident, fever, wounds or pestilence. Rarely did a week go by without Lady Philippa being consulted about some illness among her husband's people. She had begun to teach Eleanor the use of herbs, especially the nature of those to be found in the neighborhood, and here Mother Izan was of great service. In her younger days she had ranged the country for miles in every direction, in search of healing plants, and she knew what grew in every swamp, glen, meadow and thicket.
“Mother Izan must have been uncommonly anxious to get that Solomon's Seal,” said Roger as they rode home in the purple dusk. “I believe Howel has been beating Gwillym again.”
Almost as well-informed as Mother Izan was David Saumond, the stone-mason, who was rebuilding the village church. He had come to the castle one day with news of Sir Stephen Giffard, Eleanor's uncle, who had been a prisoner among the infidels but had now been ransomed and was on his way home. Finding that David understood his business, the lord and lady of the castle had decided to give into his hands the work to be done on the church. Masons were scarce in England at that time, and most of those who had skill were at work on half-built cathedrals. David was a wise and thorough builder, but he had the reputation of being rather crotchety. Sir Walter Giffard suspected that this was due to his absolute honesty. He would rather pick up a job here and there which he could do as it should be done, than to have steady employment where scamped building was winked at. This suited the knight very well. He wanted a man whom he need not watch.
“An unfaithful mason's like a broken tooth or a foot out of joint,” observed the Scot when he saw some haphazard masonry he was to replace with proper stonework. “That wall's a bit o' baith.”
David would take all the pains in the world with a well-meaning but slow workman, but he disposed of shirkers and double-dealers without needless words. Neither did he encourage discussion and idle talk about the work.
“A true mason's no sae glib-gabbet,” he observed one day. “There's no need o' speechmaking to make an adder bite or a gude man work.”
David confirmed Mother Izan's opinion of the virtues of Solomon's Seal. The Turks, he said, used to eat the young shoots, cooked. The children already knew that Solomon was the Grand Worshipful Master of all the masons of the world. About his majestic and mystical figure centered legends and traditions innumerable. Solomon's Knot was a curious intricate combination of curving lines. Solomon's signet was a stone of magical virtues. The temple of Solomon was the most wonderful building ever seen, and the secrets of its masonry were still treasured by master masons everywhere. No sound of building was heard within its walls; the stones were so perfectly cut and fitted that they slid into their places without noise. And Solomon himself was the wisest man who ever lived. He could understand the talk of the martins under the eaves, the mice in the meal-tub and the beasts of burden in the stables, when they conversed among themselves.
“Aiblins that's what gar'd him grow sae unco wise,” David ended. “You bear in mind, Master Roger, that every leevin' thing ye see, frae baukie-bird tae blackfish, kens some bit cantrip he doesna tell, and ye'll be a Solomon—if ye live.”
David was eating his bread and cheese on the lee side of the wall when Eleanor came by with a gray lump of clay in her hands.
“See what Gwillym has made,” she said.
David stopped with the cheese half way to his mouth. “Who's Gwillym?” he asked.
“He's a boy we've known ever since he was very little—he's only eight now—and he does make the most alive looking things out of clay. He heard you telling about Solomon talking with the birds and beasts, and he made this.”
The clay group was really an unusual piece of modelling for an untrained hand. That a child should have made it was more than remarkable. The thin bent figure of the wise King was seated on a throne formed of gnarled tree-roots. On his wrist a raven perched; on his shoulder crouched a squirrel, with tail alert for flight; two rabbits sat upright at his feet; a lamb huddled against his knee on one side and a goat on the other. The figures all had a curiously lifelike appearance. As Eleanor said, one felt that if they heard a noise they would go away. Moreover she saw with wonder that the head of King Solomon and his lifted hand made him a fair portrait of David.
David took the clay group in his hand, turned it about, whistled softly. “Wha owns this bairn?” he inquired.
“Howel's his father,” said Roger. “He's quite good to him—unless he's drunk. Then he pounds him. He hates to have Gwillym make images; he thinks it's witch-craft. Gwillym made an image of him once and the leg broke off, and that very same day Howel's donkey kicked him and made him lame for a week.”
“There's ower mony gowks in the land for a' the mills to grind,” said David, and that was all they could get out of him. They knew he was interested or he would not have been so Scotch. David could speak very good English, and did as a rule, but with Eleanor and Roger he often returned to the speech of his boyhood because they liked it so much.
They liked David exceedingly. He had seen more interesting things than any one else they knew. He showed Roger how to make a fish-pond, and he told Eleanor how the Saracen city in her tapestry ought to look. He had himself been a slave among the infidels, and the children heard his adventures with awe and delight. Eleanor loved the story of the bath-pavilion like a tiny palace, built by the emir for the lady Halima, and the turning of the course of a river to fill her baths and her fountains, and water her gardens. Roger's hero was the young English merchant who had escaped by swimming, under his master's very nose. If one could have such exciting experiences it seemed almost worth while to be a captive of the Moslems. But when Roger said so, David smiled a dry smile and said nothing.
But it was of King Solomon that he spoke most, and he seemed to have the sayings of the wise king all by heart. A Hebrew physician whom he had once known used, he said, to write one of Solomon's proverbs on the lid of every box of salve he sent out.
“You follow his wisdom, Master Roger,” David said one day, “and you'll see how to build ye a house or a kingdom. 'Envy thou not the oppressor and choose none of his ways,' he says. 'Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of man to do it,' he says. 'God shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.'
“I tell ye,” David added, glancing from the trim gray wall of the lychgate up to the castle on the hill, “every day's judgment day wi' a builder—or the head of a house.”
Thus the stonemason was touched more deeply perhaps than he would have owned, by the likening of his face to that of Solomon in the clay figures of little Gwillym ap Howel.
As the work on the church progressed three friends of David's journeyed from Salisbury to see him. They had come from Lombardy a long time ago, when they were Piero, Andrea and Gianbattista. At Avignon they were known as Pierre, Jean-Baptiste and Andre, and in Spain they were rechristened Pedro, Juan and Andres. Now they were called Peter, Andrew and John,—and sometimes the Apostles. Peter understood vaulting; Andrew could carve a stone image of anything he saw, and John had great skill in the laying of pavements. They talked of cathedrals and palaces with a familiarity that took one's breath away.
The building of a cathedral seemed to be full of a kind of fairy lore. The plan was that of a crucifix, the chancel being the head, the transept the arms and the nave representing body and legs. The two western towers stood for Adam and Eve. There was a magic in numbers; three, seven and nine were better than six, eleven or thirteen. Certain flowers were marked for use in sacred sculpture as they were for other purposes. Euphrasy or eyebright with its little bright eye was a medicine for sore eyes. The four-petaled flowers,—the cross-bearers,—were never poisonous, and many of them, as mustard and cabbage, were valuable for food or medicine. But when Roger took this lore to Mother Izan for her opinion she remarked that if that was doctors' learning it was no wonder they killed more folk than they cured.
In fact the three Lombard builders, while each man was a master of his own especial art, had done most of their work in cities, and when it came to matters of the fields and woods they were not to be trusted. But when David found Roger a little inclined to vaunt his superior woodcraft he set him a riddle to answer:
“The baldmouse and the chauve-souri,The baukie-bird and bat,The barbastel and flittermouse,—How many birds be that?”
And the masons were all grinning at him before Roger found out that these were half a dozen names for the bat, from as many different places.
The vaulting of the roof of the church was now under consideration. For so small a building the “barrel vault,” a row of round arches, was often used; but David's voice was for the pointed arch throughout. “The soarin' curve lifts the eye,” he said, “like the mountains yonder.” He drew with a bit of charcoal a line so beautiful that it was like music. It was not merely the meeting of two arcs of a circle, but the meeting of two mysteriously curved perfect lines. Sir Walter Giffard saw at a glance that here was the arch he had dreamed of.
He saw more than that. David was that rare builder, a man who can work with his hands and see all the time inside his soul the completed work. He could no more endure slipshod work or graceless lines in his building than the knight himself could do a cowardly or dishonest thing. David would have done his task faithfully in any case, but it rejoiced his soul to find that the knight and his lady would know not only that their village church was beautiful, but why it was so.
Andrew was at work upon the decorative carving of the arches of the doorway. The outer was done in broad severe lines heavily undercut; the next inner arch in a simple pattern of alternating bosses and short lines—Andrew called it the egg and dart pattern—and the inner arch in a delicate vine rather like the ivy that grew over the keep. Andrew said it was a vine found in the ruins of the Coliseum at Rome.
When it came to the carving of the animals and birds and figures for the inside of the church, Andrew's designs did not quite suit Lady Philippa. They were either too classical or too grotesque; they were better fitted to the elaborate richness of a great cathedral than to a little stone church in the mountains. She would have liked figures which would seem familiar to the people, of the birds and beasts they knew, but Andrew did not know anything about this countryside.
“Mother,” said Eleanor one night after this had been talked over, “what if Roger and I were to ask Andrew to go with us to Mother Izan's and see her tame birds and animals, and Gwillym's squirrel? And we could explain what he wants of them.”
Like many children in such remote places, Eleanor and Roger had picked up dialects as they did rhymes or games, and often interpreted for a peasant who knew neither Norman nor Saxon and wished to make himself understood at the castle.
The idea met with approval, and the next day Lady Philippa, Eleanor, Roger and Andrew went to the cottage by the Fairies' Well. They found that David had been there before them.
“He's a knowledgeable man, that,” the old woman said with a shrewd smile. “He's even talked Howel into letting the clay images alone, he has. Gwillym's down by the claybank now, a-making Saint Blaise and little Merlin.”
The cottage evidently was a new sort of place to Andrew, and his dark eyes were full of kindly interest as he looked about. The old dame sat humped in her doorway among her chirping, fluttering, barking and squeaking pets. An ancient raven cocked his eye wisely at the visitors, a tame hare hopped about the floor, a cat with three kittens, all as black as soot, occupied a basket, and there were also a fox cub rescued from a trap, a cosset lamb and a tiny hedgehog. Birds nested in the thatch; a squirrel barked from the lintel, and all the four-footed things of the neighborhood seemed at home there,
The stone-carver readily made friends with Gwillym, who seemed to understand by some instinct his broken talk and lively gestures. When Andrew wished to know what some bird or animal was like, the boy would mold it in clay, or perhaps take him to some haunt of the woodlands where they could lie motionless for a half-hour watching the live creature itself.
But there was one among Gwillym's clay figures which they never saw in the forest, and to which the boy never would give a name. It was a shaggy half-human imp with stubby horns, goat-legs and little hoofed feet. He modeled it, bent under a huge bundle, perched on a point of rock, dancing, playing on an oaten pipe. Andrew was so taken with the seated figure that he copied it in stone to hold up the font.
“What's that for?” asked David when he saw it. “Are ye askin' Auld Hornie ben the kirk, man?”
Andrew laughed and dusted his pointed brown fingers. “One of Pan's people, David. They will not stay away from us. If you sprinkle the threshold with holy water they come through the window.”
That figure puzzled David, but Gwillym would say nothing. At last the church was finished, and the village girls went gathering fresh rushes, fragrant herbs and flowers to strew the floor. David went fishing with Roger in Roger's own particular trout-stream. Coming back in the twilight they beheld Gwillym dancing upon the moss, to the piping of a strange little hairy man sitting on a rock. An instant later the stranger vanished, and the boy came toward them searching their faces with his solemn black eyes.
“That was my playfellow,” he said. “I have not seen him for a long time. He and his people lived here once, but they ran away when there came to be so many houses. I used to hide in the woods when father came seeking me at Mother Izan's, and my playfellow gave me nuts and berries and wild honey. He said that if father beat me I was to go and live with his people. I think I should if you had not come.”
Howel, the mason, was a bewildered man that night. He agreed, before he fairly knew what he was about, to David's adopting Gwillym as his own son, to go with him to the house of a good woman in London and be taught all that a lad should learn. In time he might be able to carve stone saints and angels, kings and queens, gargoyles and griffins, for great cathedrals. And all this had come of the forbidden clay toys.
“I beat him week after week,” he muttered, “for melling wi' mud images and running away to the forest to play wi' devils. 'Twas no good to him, being reared by an old witch.”
David's mouth set in a grim line and he rubbed the little black head with his crooked, skillful, weatherworn hand.
“Even a child is known by his doings, whether his heart be pure, and whether it be right,” he said half aloud as he led Gwillym away toward his own lodgings. “But the fool hates knowledge. The hearing ear and the seeing eye are the gifts of the Lord—and if a man was meant to be a bat or a donkey he'd ha' been made so. When Solomon said that a wise son maketh a glad father he didna reckon on a father being a fule. Ye'll say yer farewells to Auld Hornie, laddie, and then we'll gang awa' to London and leave Solomon's Seal i' the wilderness.”
And that was how the little wild cave-man of the forest came to be inside a village church, under the font for the christening.
THE LEPRECHAUN
Terence he was a harper tall, and served the King o' Kildare, And lords and lodies free-handed all gave largesse to him there, And once when he followed the crescent moon to the rose of a summer dawn, Wandering down the mountain-side, he met the Leprechaun.
And a wondrous power of heart and voice came over Terence then, For a secret in his harp-strings lay, to call to the hearts of men, That he could make magic of common songs, and none might understand The words he said nor the dreams they bred—for he had them of Fairyland.
Eily she was a colleen fair, the light of the harper's eyes, And he won by the aid of the Leprechaun his long-desired prize. The wedding-feast was but just begun,—when 'twixt the dark and the day, Quick as the water that runs to earth the Leprechaun slipped away!