iles Arden, having ridden far as required the tale of miles from the tavern of the Triple Tun, came, upon a sunshiny afternoon of early spring, to an oak knoll where one might halt to admire a fair picture of an old house set in old gardens. Old were the trees that shadowed it, and ivy darkened all its walls; without sound a listless beauty breathed beneath the pale blue skies; for all the sunshine and the bourgeoning of the spring, the picture seemed but sombrely rich, but sadly sweet. To the lips of a light-of-heart there was that in its quality had brought a sigh: as for Arden, when he had checked his horse he looked upon the scene with a groan, then presently for very mirthlessness, laughed.
"That day," he said to himself with a grimace--"that day when we forsook our hawking, and dismounting on this knoll, planned for him his new house! There should be the front, there the tower, there the great room where the Queen should lie when she made progress through these ways! All to be built when, like a tiercel-gentle to his wrist, came more fame, more gold!"
The speaker turned in his saddle and looked about him with a rueful smile.
"I on yonder mossy stone, and Sidney, chin in hand, full length beneath that oak, and he standing there, his arm about the neck of his gray! And what says monsieur the traitor? 'I like it well as it stands, nor will I tear down what my forefathers built. Plain honor and plain truth are the walls thereof, and encompassed by them, the Queen's Grace may lie down with pride.' Brave words, traitor! Gulls, gulls (saith the world), friend Sidney! For a modicum of thy judgment, Solomon, King of Jewry, I would give (an he would bestow it upon me) my cousin the Earl's great ruby!"
He laughed again, then sighed, and gathering up his reins, left the little eminence and trotted on through sun and shade to a vacant, ruinous lodge and a twilit avenue, silent and sad beneath the heavy interlacing of leafy boughs. Closing the vista rose a squat doorway, ivy-hung; and tumbled upon the grass beside it, attacking now a great book and now a russet pippin, lay a lad in a blue jerkin.
At the sound of the horse's hoofs the reader marked his page with his apple, and with a single movement of his lithe body was on his feet, a-stare to see a visitor where for many days visitors had been none. Declining autumn and snowy winter and greening spring, he could count upon the fingers of one hand the number of those who had come that way where once there had been gay travelling beneath the locked elms. Another moment and he was at Arden's side, clinging to that gentleman's jack-boot, raising to his hard-favored but not unkindly countenance a face aflame with relief and eagerness. Presently came the big tears to his eyes, he swallowed hard, and ended by burying his head in the folds of the visitor's riding-cloak.
"Where is your master, Robin-a-dale?" Arden demanded.
The boy, now red and shamefaced because of his wet lashes, stood up, and squaring himself, looked before him with winking eyes, nor would answer until he could speak without a quaver. Then: "He sits in the north chamber, Master Arden. This side o' the house the sun shines." Despite his boyish will the tears again filled his eyes. "'Tis May-time now, and there's been none but him above the salt since Lammas-tide. Sir John came and Sir Philip came, but he would not let them stay. 'Tis lonesome now at Ferne House, and old Humphrey and I be all that serve him. Of nights a man is a'most afeard.... I'll fasten your horse, sir, and mayhap you'll have other luck."
Arden dismounted, and presently the two, boy and adventurer, passed into a hall where the latter's spur rang upon the stone flooring, and thence into a long room, cold and shadowy, with the light stealing in through deep windows past screens of fir and yew. Touched by this wan effulgence, beside an oaken table on which was not wine nor dice nor books, a man sat and looked with strained eyes at the irrevocable past.
"Master, master!" cried Robin-a-dale. "Here be company at last. Master!"
Sir Mortimer passed his hand across brow and eyes as though to brush away thick cobwebs. "Is it you, Giles Arden?" he asked. "It was told me, or I dreamed it, that you were in Ireland."
"I was, may God and St. George forgive me!" Arden answered, with determined lightness. "Little to be got and hard in the getting! Even the Muses were not bountiful, for my men and I wellnigh ate Edmund Spenser out of Kilcolman. He sends you greeting, Mortimer; swears he is no jealous poet, and begs you to take up that old scheme which he forsook of King Arthur and his Knights--"
"He is kind," said Ferne, slowly. "I am well fitted to write of old, heroic deeds. Nor is there any doubt that the man-at-arms who hath lost his uses in the struggle of this world should take delight in quiet exile, sating his soul with the pomp of dead centuries."
"Nor he nor I meant offence," began Arden, hastily.
"I know you did not," the other answered. "I have grown churlish of late. Robin! a stirrup-cup for Master Arden!"
A silence followed, then said Arden: "And if I want it not, Mortimer? And if, old memories stirring, I have ridden from London to Ferne House that I might see how thou wert faring?"
"Thou seest," said Ferne.
"I see how bitterly thou art changed."
"Ay, I am changed," answered Sir Mortimer. "Your thought was kindly, and I thank you for it. Once these doors opened wide to all who knocked, but it is not so now. Ride on to the town below the hill, and take your rest in the inn! Your bedfellow may be Iscariot, but if you know him not, and as yet he knows himself but slenderly, you may sleep without dreaming. Ride on!"
"The inn is full," answered Arden, bluntly. "This week the Queen rests in her progress with your neighbor, the Earl, and the town will be crowded with mummers and players, grooms, cutpurses, quacksalvers, and cockatrices, travellers and courtiers whom the north wind hath nipped! 'Sblood, Mortimer, I had rather sleep in this grave old place!"
"With Judas who knows himself at last?" asked Ferne, coldly, without moving from his place. The door opened, and old Humphrey, shuffling across the floor to the table, placed thereon a dish of cakes and a great tankard of sack, then as he turned away cast a backward glance upon his master's face. Arden noted the look, that there was in it fear, overmastering ancient kindness, and withal a curiosity as ignoble as it was keen. Suddenly, as though the fire of that knowledge had leaped to his own heart from that of his host, he knew in every fibre how intolerable was the case of the master of the house, sitting alone in this gloomy chamber, served by this frightened boy, by that old man whose gaze was ever greedy for the quiver of an eyelid, the pressing together of white lips, whose coarse and prying hand ever strayed towards the unhealed sore. He strode to the table and laid hands upon the tankard. "The dust of the road is in my throat," he explained, and drank deep of the wine, then put the tankard down and turned to the figure yet standing in the cold light as in an atmosphere all its own.
"Mortimer Ferne," he said, "I came here as thy aforetime friend. I will not believe that it is my stirrup-cup that I have drunk."
"Ay, your stirrup-cup," answered the other, steadily. "Nowadays I see no company--my aforetime friend."
"That word was ill chosen," began Arden, hastily. "I meant not--"
"I care not what you meant," said Sir Mortimer, and sitting down at the table, shaded his eyes with his hand. "Of all my needs the least is now a friend. Go your ways to the town and be merry there, forgetting this limbo and me, who wander to and fro in its shadows." Suddenly he struck his hand with force against the table and started to his feet, pushing from him with a grating sound the heavy oaken settle. "Go!" he cried. "The players and mummers are there. Go sit upon the stage, and in the middle of the play cry to your neighbors: 'These be no actors! Why, once I knew a man who could so mask it that he deceived himself!' There are quacksalvers who will sell you anything. Go buy some ointment for your eyes will show you the coiled serpent at the bottom of a man's heart! Travellers!--ask them if Prester John can see the canker where the fruit seems fairest. Nipped courtiers! laugh with them at one against whom blow all the winds of hell, blast after blast, driving his soul before them! Ballad-mongers--"
He paused, laughed, then beckoned to him Robin-a-dale. "Sirrah," he said, "Master Arden ever loved a good song. Now sing him the ballad we heard when the devil drove us to town last Wednesday."
"I--I have forgotten it, master," answered the boy, and cowered against the wall.
"You lie!" cried Ferne, and the table shook again beneath his hand. "Did I not exercise you in it until you were perfect? Sing!"
The boy opened his mouth and there came forth a heart-broken sound. His master stamped upon the floor. "Shall I not also torture where I can? Sing, Robin, my man! Fling back your head and sing like the lark in the sky! What! am I fallen so low that my very page flouts me, kicks obedience out-of-doors?"
Robin-a-dale straightened himself and began to sing, with bravado, a fierce red in his cheeks, and his young voice high and clear:
"Now list to me, ladies, and list to me, gentles;I've a story for your ears of a false, false knight,Whom England held in honor, but he treasured Spain so dearlyThat he sold into her hands his comrades in fight."'Twas before a walled city with the palm-trees hanging over;He was Captain of theCygnet, and it sank before his eyes;The Englishmen ashore, they're taken in the pitfall,Good lack! they toil in galleys or their souls to God arise."He sees them in his sleep, the craven and the traitor.The sea it keeps their bones, their bloody ghosts they pass--"
"For God's sake!" cried Arden; and the boy, snatching with despairing haste at the interruption, ceased his singing, and in the heavy silence that followed crept nearer and nearer to his master until he touched a listless hand.
"Ay, Robin," said Ferne, absently, and laid the hand upon his head. "And the bloody ghosts they pass."
Arden spoke with emotion: "All men when their final account is made up may have sights to see that now they dream not of. Thou art both too much and too little what thou wast of old, and thou seest not fairly in these shadows. I know that Philip Sidney and John Nevil have come to Ferne House, and here am I, thy oldest comrade of them all. A sheet of paper close written with record of noble deeds becomes not worthless because of one deep blot."
Ferne, his burst of passion past, arose and moved from table to window, from window to great chimney-piece. There was that in the quiet, almost stealthy regularity of his motions that gave subtle suggestion of days and nights spent in pacing to and fro, to and fro, this deep-windowed room.
At last he spoke, pausing by the fireless hearth: "I say not that it is so, nor that there is not One who may read the writing beneath the blot. But from the time of Cain to the present hour if the blotted sheet be bound with the spotless the book is little esteemed."
"Cain slew his brother wilfully," said Arden.
"That also is told us," answered the other. "Jealousy constrained him, while constancy of soul was lacking unto me. I know not if it was but taken from me for a time, or if, despite all seeming, I never did possess it. I know that the dead are dead, and I know not to what ambuscade I, their leader, sent them.... I fell, not wilfully, but through lack of will. Now, an the Godhead within me be not flown, I will recover myself,--but never what is past and gone, never the dead flowers, never the souls I set loose, never one hour's eternal scar!... Enough of this. Ride on to the inn, for Ferne House keepeth guests no longer. To-morrow, an you choose, come again, and we will say farewell. Why, old school-fellow! thou seest I am sane--no hermit or madman, as the clowns of this region would have me. But will you go?--will you go?"
"It seems that you yourself journey to the town upon occasion," said Arden. "Ride with me now, Mortimer. No country lass more sweet than the air to-day!"
The other shook his head. "Business has taken me there. But now that I have sold this house I at present go no more."
"Sold this house!" echoed Arden, and with a more and more perturbed countenance began to pace the floor. "I did never think to hear of Ferne House fallen to strange hands! Your father--" He paused before a picture set in the panelled wall. "Your father loved it well."
"My father was of pure gold," said Sir Mortimer, "but I, his son, am of iron, or what baser metal there may be. Now I go forth to my kind."
"Oh! in God's name, leave Plato alone!" cried the other. "'Tis not by that pagan's advice that you divest yourself of house and land!"
"I wanted money," said Ferne, dully.
The man whom ancient friendship had brought that way stopped short in his pacing to gaze upon the figure standing in the light of the high window. For what could such an one want money? Courtier, no more forever; patron of letters, friend of wise men, no more forever; soldier and sea-king, comrade and leader of brave men never, never again,--what wanted he so much, what other was his imperative need than this old, quiet house sunk in the shadows of its age-old trees, grave with a certain solemnity, touched upon with tragedy, attuned to a sorrowful patience? For a moment the room and the man who made its core were blurred to Arden's vision. He walked to the window and stood there, twirling his mustachios, finally humming to himself the lines of a song.
"That is Sidney's," said Ferne, quietly. "I hear that he does the Queen noble service.... Well, even in the old times he was ever a length before me!"
"Why do you need money?" demanded the visitor. "What more retired--what better house than this?"
The man who leaned against the chimney-piece turned to gaze at his visitor with that which had not before showed in mien or words. It was wonder, slight and mournful, yet wonder. "Of course you also would think that," he said at last. "Even Robin thinks that the stained blade should rust in its scabbard,--that here I should await my time, training the rose-bushes in my garden, listening to the sere leaves fall, singing of other men's harvests."
The boy cried out: "I don't, I don't! You've promised to take me with you!" and flung himself down upon the pavement, with his head beside his master's knee.
"I have bought me a ship," said Ferne, "together with a crew of beggared mariners and cast soldiers. I think they be all villains and desperate folk, or they would not sail with me. Some that seemed honest have fallen away since they knew the name of their Captain.... We must begone, Robin! If we would not sail the ship ourselves we must begone--we must begone."
"Begone where?" demanded Arden, and wheeled from the window.
"To fight the Spaniard," said Ferne. "The Queen hath been my very good mistress. John Nevil and Sidney have procured me leave to go--if it so be that I go quietly. I think that I will not return--and England will forget me, but Spain may remember.... For the rest, I go to search for Robert Baldry; to seek if not to find my enemy, the foe that I held in contempt, whom in my heart I despised because he was not poet and courtier, as I was, nor knight and gentleman, as I was, nor very wise, as I was, and because all his vision was clouded and gross, while I--I might see the very flower o' the sun.... Well, he was a brave man."
"He is dead," whispered Arden. "Surely he is dead."
"Maybe," answered the other. "But I nor no man else saw him die. And we know that these Spanish tombs do sometimes open and give up the dead. I'll throw for size-ace."
"If he lived they would have sent him to Cartagena,--to the Holy Office!" cried the other. "One ship--a scoundrel crew.... Mortimer, Mortimer, some other ordeal than that!"
Ferne raised his eyes. "I call it by no such fine name," he said. "I but know that if he yet lives, then he and what other Englishmen are left alive do cry out for deliverance, looking towards the sea, thinking, 'Where is now a friend?'" He left the table and came near to Arden. "'Twas a kindly impulse sent you here, old comrade of mine; but now will you go? The dead and I hold Ferne House of nights. To-morrow come again and say good-by."
"I will sail with you to the Indies, Mortimer," said the visitor.
There was silence in the room; then, "No, no," answered Ferne, in a strange voice. "No, no."
Arden persisted, speaking rapidly, carrying it off with sufficient lightness. "He was just home from Ireland and stood in need of the sun. His cousin wanted him not; John Nevil was in the north and had helpers enough. The slaying of Spaniards was at once good service and good sport. Best take him along for old time's sake. Indeed, he asked no better than to go--" On and on he talked, until, looking up, his speech was cut short by the aspect of the man before him.
If in every generation the house of Ferne, father and son, could wear a dark face when occasion warranted, certainly in this moment that of the latest of his race was dark indeed. "And at the first pinch be betrayed. Awake, or here, or there, in the torments of Spain or in another world! Awake and curse me by all your gods! Speak not to me--I am not hungry for a friend! I have no faith to pledge against your trust! The rabble which await me upon my ship, I have bought them with my gold, and they know me, who I am. For Robin--God help the boy! He had a fever, and he would not cease his cries until I sware not to part from him. Robin, Robin! Master Arden will take horse! Go, Arden, go! or as God lives I will strike you where you stand. No,--no hand-touching! Can you not see that you heat the iron past all bearing? A moment since and I could have sworn I saw behind you Henry Sedley! Go, go!"
He sank upon the settle beneath the window, and buried his head in his arms. For a long minute Arden stood with a drawn face, then turning, left the house and left the place, for the knowledge was borne in upon him that here and now friendship could give no aid. When, half an hour later, he arrived at the Blue Swan in the neighboring town and called foraqua-vitæ, mine host, jolly and round and given over to facetiousness, swore that to look so white and bewitched-like the gentleman must have gathered mandrakes from Ferne church-yard, or have dined with the traitor knight himself.
That same afternoon, when the rays of the sun were lower, Ferne went into his garden and lifted his bared brow, that perchance the air might cool it. It was the quiet hour when the goal of the sun is in view, and the shadows of the fruit trees lay long upon the grass. There were breaches in the garden walls where they had crumbled into ruin, and through these openings, beyond dark masses of all-covering ivy, sight might be had of old trees set in alleys, of primrose-yellowed downs, and of a distant cliff-head where sheep grazed, while far below gleamed a sapphire line of sea. Tender quiet, fair stillness, marked the spot. Day mused as she was going: Evening, drawing near, held her finger to her lips. A tall flower, keeping fairy guard beside three ruinous steps, moved not her slightest bell, but there came one note of a hidden thrush.
Full in the midst of a grass-plot was set a semi-circular bench of stone. To this Ferne moved, threw himself down, and with a moaning sigh closed his eyes. There had been long days and sleepless nights; there had been, once his brain had ceased to whirl, the growth of a purpose slowly formed, then held like iron; there had been the humble pleading for freedom, the long delay, the hope deferred; then, his petition granted, the going forth to mart and highway, the bargaining, amidst curious traffickers, for that rotting ship, for those lives, as worthless as his own, which yet must have their price. This going forth was very bad; like hot lead within the gaping wound, like searing sunshine upon the naked eye. And now, to-day, not an hour since, Arden! to mock, to goad, to torture--
Slowly, slowly, the sun went down the west, and the peace of the garden deepened. Very stealthily the quiet stole upon him; softly, silently, with spirit touch, it brought him healing simples. Utterly weary as he was, the balm of the hour at last flowed over him, faintly soothing, faintly caressing. He opened his eyes, and breathing deeply, looked about him with a saner vision than he had used of late.
The lily by the broken stair slept on, but the thrush sang once again. The bell-like note died into the charmed stillness, and all things were as they had been. Thirty paces away, stark against the evening sky, rose the western wall of Ferne House, and it was shaggy with ivy that was rooted like a tree, wide-branched, populous with birds' nests, and high, high against the blue a thing of tenderest sprays and palest leaves. The long ridge of them kept the late sunshine, and so far was it lifted above the earth, so still in that dreamy hour, so touched with pale gold, so distant and so delicate against high heaven, that it caught and held eye and soul of the man for whom Fate had borrowed Ixion's wheel. He gazed until the poet in him sighed with pure pleasure; then came forgetfulness; then, presently, he looked into his heart and began to make a little song, amorous, quaint, and honey-sweet, just such a song as in that full dawn of poesy Englishmen struck from the lyre and thought naught of it. His lips did not move; had he spoken, at the sound of his own voice the charm had cracked, the little lyric had shrunk away before tragedy that was yet as fierce as it was profound, that had as yet few other notes than those of primal pain.
With the final cadence, the last sugared word, the ivy sprays somewhat darkened against the eastern sky. His fancy being yet aloft, he turned that he might behold the light upon the downs, and then he saw Damaris Sedley where she stood upon the lowest of the ruined steps, stiller than the flower beside her, and with something rich and strange in her bearing and her dress. Cloth of silver sheathed her body, while the flowing sleeves that half revealed, half hid her white and rounded arms were of silver tissue over watchet blue, and of watchet was the mantle which she had let fall upon the step beside her. A net of wire of gold crossing her hair that was but half confined, held high above her forehead a golden star. In one hand she bore a silvered spear well tipped with gold, the other she pressed above her heart. Her face was pale and grave, her scarlet lip between her teeth, her dark eyes intent upon the man before her.
Ferne sprang to his feet and started forward, very white, his arm outstretched and trembling, crying to her if she were spirit merely. She shook her head, regarding him gravely, her hand yet upon her heart. "I attend the Queen upon her progress," she said. "This day at the Earl's there is a great masque of Dian and her huntresses, satyrs, fauns, all manner of sylvan folk. At last I might steal aside unmissed.... By the favor of a friend I rode here through the quiet lanes, for I wished to see you face to face, to speak to you--to you who gave me no answer when I wrote, and wrote again!... I am weary with the joys of this day. May I rest upon yonder seat?"
He moved backward before her, slowly, across the grass-plot to the bench of stone, and she followed him. Their gaze met the while. There was no wonder in his look, no consciousness of self in hers. In the spaces beyond life their souls might meet thus; each drawing by the veil, each recognizing the other for what it was. They took their seat upon the wide stone bench, with the primroses at their feet, and above them the empurpling arch of the sky. Throughout the past months, when he dreamed of her, when he thought of her, he bowed himself before her, he raised not his eyes to hers. But now their looks met, and his countenance of a haggard and ravaged beauty did not change before her still regard. The floating silver gauze of her open sleeve lying upon the stone between them he lightly, with no pressure that she might notice, let rest his hand upon it. In the act of doing this he wondered at himself, but then he thought, "I am on my way to death...."
She was the first to speak.
"Seven months have gone since that day at Whitehall."
"Ay," he answered, "seven months."
She went on: "I have learned not to reckon life that way. Since that day at Whitehall life has lasted a very long time."
Again he echoed--"A very long time." Then, after a pause: "I have made for you a long, long life. If to have done so is to your irreparable loss, then this, also, is to be forgiven.... Long life! now in the watches of one night I live to be an old man! For you may forgetfulness come at last!"
She turned slightly, looking at him from beneath the gold star. "Wish me no such happy wishes! Let me not think that such wishes dwell in your heart. Since that day at Whitehall I have written to you--written twice. Why did you never answer?"
He looked down upon his clasped hands. "What was there to be said? I thought, 'I have sorely wounded her whom I love, and with my own words I have seared that wound as with white heat of iron. Now God keep me man enough to say no farther word!'"
"I was benumbed that day," she said; "I was frozen. My brother's face came between us.... Oh, my brother!... Since that day I have seen Sir John Nevil--"
"Then a just man told you my story justly," he began, but she interrupted him, her breath coming faster.
"I have also made other inquiry; on my knees, on my face, in the dead of the night when I knew that thou, too, waked, I have asked of God, and of our Lord the Christ who suffered.... I know not if they heard me, there be so many that clamor in their ears...." With a quick movement she arose from the stone seat and began to pace the grass-plot, her hands clasped behind her head, the gold star yet bright in the late, late sunshine. "I would they had answered me distinctly. Perhaps they did.... But be that as it may be I will follow my own heart, I will go my own way--"
He arose and began to walk with her. "And thy heart led thee this way?" he asked in a whisper.
She flashed upon him a look so bright that it was as if high noon had returned to the garden. "Pluck me yonder lily," she said. "It is the first I have smelled this year."
He brought it to her, trembling. "Presently it will close," he said, "never to open again."
"That also is among the things we know not," she answered. "Think you not there is one who revives the souls of men?"
"Ay, I believe it," he answered. They paced again the green to its flowery margin.
"Give me yon spray of love-lies-bleeding," she said; then as it rested against the lily in her hand, "Wounds may be cured," she said. "I have heard talk here, there, at the court even, else, beshrew me, if I had come this way to-day! I know that thou goest forth--" Her voice broke and the gold star shook with the trembling of her frame. "I know that thou mayst never, never, never return. I will pray for thy soul's welfare.... See! there is a heartsease at my feet."
He knelt, but touched not the floweret, instead caught at the long folds of her silver gown and held her where she stood. "For my soul's welfare, thou balm from heaven!" he cried. "For only my soul's welfare?"
"No, no," she answered. "For the welfare of all of thee, soul and body--soul and body!" She bent over him, and there fell from her eyes a bright rain of tears, quickly come, quickly checked. "Ah, a contrary world of queens and guardians!" she cried. "Oh, my God! if thou mightst only make me thy wife before thou goest!"
He arose and drew her into his arms. "The story is true," he whispered, to which she answered:
"I care not! Sayest thou, 'A thing was done.' Say I, 'Thoudidst it!' and high above the deed I love thee!"
Suddenly she fell into a storm of weeping, then broke from him, and somewhat blindly sought the garden seat, sank down upon it, and buried her face in her arms. He kneeled beside her, and presently she was crouching against his breast, that rose and fell with his answering emotion. She put up her hand and touched the deep lines of past suffering in the face above her.
"I know that thou must go," she said. "I would not have thee stay. But, Mortimer, if it were possible ... He forgave you long, long ago, for he loved you above all men. I, his sister, answer for him. Ah, God wot! brother and sister we have loved you well.... If I could keep tryst, after all, if thou couldst make me thy wife before thou goest--or if kindred and the Queen be too powerful, I could escape, could follow thee as thy page, trusting thy honor ... Ah, look not so upon me! Ah, to be a woman and do one's own wooing! Ah, think what thou wilt of me, only know that I love thee to the uttermost!"
"'AH, LOOK NOT SO UPON ME!'"
Ferne left her side, and moving to the garden wall, looked out over the far-away downs to the far-away sea--the sea that, for weary months had called and-thundered in his ears. Now he saw it all halcyon, stretching fair and mute to the boundless west, the sinking sun, the lovers' star. They two--could they two, lying with closed eyes, but drift out over bar, floating away through golds and purples towards the kiss of heaven and sea--flotsam of this earth, jetsam of age-distant shores, each to the other paradise and all in all! How profound the stillness--how deep the fragrance of the lily--what indifference, what quiet as of scorn did the Maker of man, having placed his creature in the lists, turn aside to other spectacles!... Should man be more careful than his God? Right! Wrong!--to die at last and find them indeed words of a length and the prize of sore striving a fool's bauble:--to die and miss the rose and wine cup!--to die and find not the struggle and the star!--to loose the glorious bird in the hand and beyond the portals to feel no fanning of a vaster wing! What use--what use--to be at once the fleeing Adam and the dark archangel at Eden's gates?
He turned to behold the woman whom now, with no trace of the fancifulness, the idealism of his time, he loved with all depth, passion, actuality; he set wrist to teeth and bit the flesh until blood started; he moved towards her where she sat with her hands clasped above her knee, her head thrown back, watching his coming with those deep eyes of hers. He reached her side; she rose to meet him, and the two stood embraced in the flattering sunshine, the odor of the lilies, the pale glory of the failing day.
"My dear love, it is not possible," he said. "Flower of women! didst dream that I would leave thee here blasted by my name, or that I would carry thee where I must go? Star of my earth, to-day we say a clean farewell!"
"Then God be with thee," she said, brokenly.
"And with thee!" he answered. Hand in hand they moved to the broken wall, and leaning upon it, looked out to that far line of sea. Her under-sleeve of silver gauze fell away from her arm.
"How white is thy arm!" he breathed. "How branched with tender blue!"
"Wilt kiss it?" she answered, "so I shall grow to love myself."
"Thou art the fairest thing the sun shines on," he said. "Thy lips are like flowers I have never seen in the West."
"Gather the flowers," she said, and raised her face to his. "The garden is kept for thee."
The sun began to decline, the earth to darken, swallows circled past. "It grows late," she said, "late, late! When goest thou?"
"Within the week."
"By then her Grace will have whirled me leagues away.... I would I were a queen. If thou goest to death--oh God! we'll not speak of that!--Give me that chain of thine."
He unclasped it, laid it in her hands. Raising her arms, she drew it over her neck.
"Seest thou thy prisoner?" she asked. "Forever thy prisoner!" From its fellow of watchet blue she detached her floating silver sleeve. "It is my favor," she whispered. "Wear it when thou wilt."
He folded the gauze and thrust it within his doublet. "When I may, my lady," he said, with his eyes upon the sunset that held the colors of the dawning. "When I may."
A sickle moon swung in the gold harvest-fields of the west, then a great star came out to watch that reaping. The thrush was silent now, but from a covert rushed suddenly the full tide of a nightingale's song. With a cry the maid of honor put hands to her ears. "Ay me, my heart it will break! Tell me that thou goest but to come again!"
He took her hands, pressing them to his heart, to his lips. "No, no, my dearest dear, since God no longer worketh miracles! I go more surely than ever went John Oxenham; I would not have thee cheat thyself, spend thy days in watching, listening. I kiss thee a lifetime good-by.... Oh child, seest thou how broken I am? I that myself loosed all the winds--I that kneel, a penitent, before the just and the unjust, before my lover and my foe! But when all's said, all's done, all's quiet:--the arrow sped, the stone fallen, the curfew rung, the dust returned to dust! then shall stand my soul.... A ruined man, a man in just disgrace, who hath played the coward, who hath sinned against thee and against others, that am I--yet our souls endure, and thou art my mate; queenly as thou standest here, thou art my mate! I love thee, and in life, in death, I claim thee still: Forget me not when I am gone!"
"When thou art gone!" she cried. "When thou art gone with all my mind I'll hold myself thy bride! In those strange countries beneath the sun if bitterness comes over thee"--she put her hand to her heart--"think of thy fireside here. Think, 'Even in this wavering life I have an abiding home, a heart that's true, true, true to me!' When thou diest--if thou diest first--linger for me; where a thousand years are as a day travel not so far that I may not overtake thee. Mortimer, Mortimer, Mortimer! I'll not believe in a God who at the last says not to me, 'That path he took.' When He says it, listen for my flying feet. Oh, my dear, listen for my flying feet!"
"Star and rose!" he said. "If we dream, we dream. Better so, even though we pass to sleep too deep for dreaming. For we plan a temple though we build it not.... That falconer's whistle! is it thy signal? Then thou must make no tarrying here. I will put thy cloak about thee."
He brought from the ruinous steps her watchet mantle, and she let him clasp it about her throat. In the raised air of that isolate peak where true lovers take farewell there are few words used at the last. Sighs, kisses, broken utterance,--"Forever," ... "Forever," ... "I love thee," ... "I love thee"; the eternal "I will come"; the eternal "I will wait"! Possessors of an instant of time, of an atom of space, they sent their linked hopes, their mailed certainties forth to the unseen, untrenched fields of the future, and held their love coeval with existence. Then, slowly, she withdrew herself from his clasp, and as slowly moved backward to the broken stair. He waited by the stone seat, for she must go secretly and in silence, and he might not, as in old times, lead her with stateliness through the ways of Ferne House. Upon the uppermost step she paused a moment, and he, lifting his eyes, saw above him her mantled figure, her outstretched arms with the lily of her body in between, the gold star swimming above her forehead. One breathless moment thus, then she turned, and folding her mantle about her, passed from her lover's sight towards the darkening orchard.
He stayed an hour in the garden, then went back to his great, old, dimly lighted hall. Here, half the night, chin in one hand, the other hanging below his booted knee, he brooded over the now glowing, now ashen chimney logs; yet Robin-a-dale, who believed in Master Arden, and very mightily in visions as beautiful as that which had been vouchsafed to him going through the orchard that eventide, felt as light a heart as if no shadowy ship awaited in the little port down by the little town, whose people either cursed or looked askance. Waking in the middle of the night, he thought he saw a knight at prayer--one of the old stone Templars from Ferne church, where they lay with palm to palm, awaiting with frozen patience the last trumpet-call that ever they should hear. This knight, however, was kneeling with bowed head and hidden face, a thing against all rule with those other stark and sternly waiting forms. So Robin, being too drowsy to reason, let the matter alone and went to sleep again.
heSea Wraith, an ancient ship, gray and patched of sail, battered and worn with a name for all disaster, sailed the Spanish seas as though she bore a charmed life--and her crew that was the refuse of land and sea, used to license, to whom mutiny was no uglier a word than another, kept the terms of an iron discipline--and her Captain waked and slept as one aware of when to wake and when to sleep.
There was fever between the decks; there was fever in black hearts; of dark nights a corposant burned now at this masthead, now at that. Mariner and soldier knew the story of the shadowy figure keeping company with the stars there above them on the poop-royal. Did he keep company only with the stars and with the boy, his familiar? The sick, tossing from side to side, raved out curses, and the well saw many omens. Dissatisfaction, never far from their unstayed minds, crept at times very near, and superstition sat always amongst them. But they reckoned with a Captain stronger for this voyage than had been Francis Drake or John Hawkins, and stranger than any under whom they had ever sailed. He was so still a man that they knew not how to take him, but beneath his eyes vain imaginings and half-formed conspiracies withered like burnt paper. He called upon neither God nor devil, but his voice blew like an icy wind upon the heat of disloyal intents, and like the white fire that touched now stem, now stern, so his will held the ship, driving it like a leaf towards the mainland and the fortress of Nueva Cordoba.
The ship that seemed so aged and disgraced yet had a strength of sinew which made her formidable. All things had been patiently cared for by the man who, selling his patrimony, had labored against wind and tide to the end that he might carry forth with him such an armament as scarce had been theCygnet'sown. Tier on tier rose theSea Wraith'sordnance; she carried warlike stores of all sorts that might serve for battle by sea or land. If his money could not buy such men as stood ready to ship with Drake and Hawkins, yet in his wild, sin-stained crew he had purchased experience, the maddest bravery, and a lust of Spanish gold that might not be easily sated. The qualities of a captain over men he himself supplied.
In his confidence neither before nor after their sailing, yet the two hundred men of theSea Wraithguessed well his destination, but for themselves preferred the island towns--Santiago and Santo Domingo in Hispaniola. There were wealth and wine and women, there the fringing islets where booty might be hidden, and there the deep caves where foregathered many small craft misnamed piratical. "Lord! theSea Wraithwould soon make herself Admiral of that brood, leading them forth from those hidden places to pounce upon Santo Domingo, that was the seat of government and as wealthy a place as any in the Indies!--theSea Wraithand her Captain, that was a good Captain and a tall!--ay, ay, that would they maintain despite all land talk--a good Captain and a tall, 'spite of Dick Carpenter's dream--"
"What was Dick Carpenter's dream?" asked the Captain, seated, sword in hand and hat on head, before a deputation from the forecastle.
The speaker fidgeted, then out came the clumsy taunt, the carpenter's dream. "Why, sir, he dreamed he saw the women of the islands, sitting by the shores, a-sifting gold-dust and a-weighing of pearls;--and then he dreamed that he looked along the sea-floor, leagues and leagues to the south'ard, until he saw the very roots of the mainland, and the great fish swimming in and out. And a many and a many dead men were there, drawn into ranks, very strange to see, for their swollen flesh yet hung to their bones, and they beckoned and laughed; and Captain Robert Baldry, that was once, on a Guinea voyage, Dick Carpenter's Captain, he laughed the loudest and beckoned the fastest. And, Sir Mortimer Ferne, an it please you, we've no longing to follow that beckoning."
"Thou dog!" said the Captain, with no change of mien. "Presently Dick Carpenter and thou shall have food for dreams--bad dreams, bad dreams, man! Thou fool, have I set thee quaking who, forsooth, would mutiny! Begone, the whole of ye, and sail the whole of ye wheresoever I list to go!"
Seeing that theSea Wraithobeyed him still, her crew believed yet more devoutly that a secret voice spoke in his ear and a dark hand gave him aid. It was later, when he began to feed them gold, that they who owned caps threw them up for him, and they whose brains had only nature's thatching shouted for him as for a demigod. A Spanish squadron bound for The Havannah was met by a hurricane, several of its ships lost, and the remainder widely separated. The hurricane past, forth from an island harbor stole theSea Wraiththat so many storms had beleaguered. Gray as with eld, lonely as the ark, a haggard ship manned by outcasts, she spread her vampire wings and flitted from her enshadowed anchorage. An hour later, like a vampire still, she hooked herself to a gay galleon and sucked from it life that was cheap and gold that was dear; then descrying other sails, she left that ruined hulk for a long and fierce struggle with a Portuguese carrack. The battle waxed so fell that the carrack also might have been worked by men who had all to win and naught to lose, and captained by one who bared his brow to the thunder-stone.
Like harpies they fought, but when night came there was only theSea Wraithscudding to the south, and that pied crew of hers knocking at the stars with the knowledge that ever and always their judgment (even though he asked it not) jumped with the Captain's, and that before them lay the gilded cities and the chances of Pizarro. It was of his subtlety that the Captain never used to them fair promises, spake not once a sennight of gold, never bragged to them of what must be. Oh! a subtle captain, whose very strangeness was his best lieutenant upon that eldritch, nine-lived ship, through days and days of monstrous luck. "Baldry's luck," quoth the mariner who had sailed with theStar, then held his breath and looked askance at his present Captain, who, however, could never have heard him up there on the poop-deck! Natheless that night the man was ordered forward, and finding Sir Mortimer Ferne sitting alone, save for the boy, in the great cabin, was bidden to talk of Robert Baldry. "Speak freely, Carpenter,--freely! Why, thou art one of his friends, and I another, and we go, somewhat at our peril, to hale him from perdition! Why, thou thyself saw him beckoning to us to hasten and do our friendly part! So praise thy old Captain to me with all thy might. We'll fill an empty hour with stories of his valor!" He put forth his hand and turned the hour-glass, and the carpenter began to stammer and make excuses, which no whit availed him.
At last, one afternoon, they came to Margarita, and, the ship needing water, they entered a placid bight, where a strip of dazzling sand lay between the rippling surf and a heavy wood, but found beforehand with them a small bark from the mainland, her crew ashore filling barrels from a limpid spring, and her master and a Franciscan friar eating fruit upon her tiny poop. The dozen on land showed their heels; the worthless bark was taken, a party with calivers landed to complete the filling of the abandoned casks, and the master and the friar brought before the Captain of theSea Wraithwhere he sat beneath a great tree, tasting the air of the land. An insatiable gatherer of Spanish news, it was his custom to search for what crumbs of knowledge his captives might possess, but hitherto the yield, pressed together, had not made even a small cake of enlightenment. He was prepared to have shortly done with the two who now stood before him. The seaman cringed, expecting torture, furtively watching for some indication of what the Englishman wished him to say. A fellow new to these parts and ignorant, he would have sworn a highway to El Dorado itself if that was the point towards which his inquisitor's quiet, unemphatic questions tended; but he knew not, and his lies fell dead before the grave eyes of the man beneath the tree. At last he was tossed aside like a squeezed sponge and the Franciscan beckoned forward, who, being of sturdier make, twisted his thumbs in his rope girdle and prepared to present a blank countenance to those queries of armaments and treasure which an enemy to Spain would naturally make. But the Englishman asked strange questions; so general that they seemed to encompass the mainland from Tres Puntas to Nombre de Dios, and so particular that it was even as if he were interested in the friar himself, his order, and his wanderings from town to town, the sights that he had seen and the people whom he had known. The questions seemed harmless as mother's milk, but the friar was shrewd; moreover, in his youth had been driven to New Spain by flaming zeal for the conversion of countless souls. That fire had burned low, but by its dying light he knew that this man, who was young and yet so still, whose lowered voice was but as sheathed steel, whose eyes it was not comfortable to meet, had set his hand to a plough that should drive a straight furrow, was sending his will like an arrow to no uncertain mark. But what was the mark the Franciscan could not discover, therefore he gave the truth or a lie where seemed him best, increasingly the truth, as it increasingly appeared that lies would not serve. He also, seeing that with gathering years he had begun to set value upon flesh and bone, wished to please his captor. He glanced stealthily at the scarred and ancient craft in the windless harborage, idly flapping her mended sails, before he said aught of the great English ships that in pomp and the fulness of pride had entered these waters now months agone. The Englishman had heard of this adventure--so much was evident--but details would seem to have escaped him. He knew, however, that there had been first victory and then defeat, and he too looked at his ship and at the guns she carried.