THE wind, which had heretofore come in fierce blasts, was now steadying
to a gale. What with the flying of the heaped clouds, the slanting,
groaning pines, and the rushing of the river, the whole earth seemed a
fugitive, fleeing breathless to the sea. From across the neck of land
came the long-drawn howl of wolves, and in the wood beyond the church a
catamount screamed and screamed. The town before us lay as dark and as
still as the grave; from the garden where we were we could not see the
Governor's house.
“I will carry madam's bundle,” said a voice behind us.
It was the minister who had spoken, and he now stood beside us. There
was a moment's silence, then I said, with a laugh: “We are not going
upon a summer jaunt, friend Sparrow. There is a warm fire in the great
room, to which your reverence had best betake yourself out of this windy
night.”
As he made no movement to depart, but instead possessed himself of
Mistress Percy's bundle, I spoke again, with some impatience: “We are no
longer of your fold, reverend sir, but are bound for another parish. We
give you hearty thanks for your hospitality, and wish you a very good
night.”
As I spoke I would have taken the bundle from him, but he tucked it
under his arm, and, passing us, opened the garden gate. “Did I forget to
tell you,” he said, “that worthy Master Bucke is well of the fever, and
returns to his own to-morrow? His house and church are no longer mine. I
have no charge anywhere. I am free and footloose. May I not go with
you, madam? There may be dragons to slay, and two can guard a distressed
princess better than one. Will you take me for your squire, Captain
Percy?”
He held out his great hand, and after a moment I put my own in it.
We left the garden and struck into a lane. “The river, then, instead of
the forest?” he asked in a low voice.
“Ay,” I answered. “Of the two evils it seems the lesser.”
“How about a boat?”
“My own is fastened to the piles of the old deserted wharf.”
“You have with you neither food nor water.”
“Both are in the boat. I have kept her victualed for a week or more.”
He laughed in the darkness, and I heard my wife beside me utter a
stifled exclamation.
The lane that we were now in ran parallel to the street to within fifty
yards of the guest house, when it bent sharply down to the river. We
moved silently and with caution, for some night bird might accost us
or the watch come upon us. In the guest house all was darkness save one
room,--the upper room,--from which came a very pale light. When we had
turned with the lane there were no houses to pass; only gaunt pines
and copses of sumach. I took my wife by the hand and hurried her on. A
hundred yards before us ran the river, dark and turbulent, and between
us and it rose an old, unsafe, and abandoned landing. Sparrow laid his
hand upon my arm. “Footsteps behind us,” he whispered.
Without slackening pace I turned my head and looked. The clouds, high
around the horizon, were thinning overhead, and the moon, herself
invisible, yet lightened the darkness below. The sandy lane stretched
behind us like a ribbon of twilight,--nothing to be seen but it and the
ebony mass of bush and tree lining it on either side. We hastened on. A
minute later and we heard behind us a sound like the winding of a small
horn, clear, shrill, and sweet. Sparrow and I wheeled--and saw nothing.
The trees ran down to the very edge of the wharf, upon whose rotten,
loosened, and noisy boards we now trod. Suddenly the clouds above us
broke, and the moon shone forth, whitening the mountainous clouds,
the ridged and angry river, and the low, tree-fringed shore. Below us,
fastened to the piles and rocking with the waves, was the open boat in
which we were to embark. A few broken steps led from the boards above to
the water below. Descending these I sprang into the boat and held out my
arms for Mistress Percy. Sparrow gave her to me, and I lifted her down
beside me; then turned to give what aid I might to the minister, who was
halfway down the steps--and faced my Lord Carnal.
What devil had led him forth on such a night; why he, whom with my own
eyes, three hours agone, I had seen drunken, should have chosen, after
his carouse, cold air and his own company rather than sleep; when and
where he first spied us, how long he had followed us, I have never
known. Perhaps he could not sleep for triumph, had heard of my impending
arrest, had come forth to add to the bitterness of my cup by his
presence, and so had happened upon us. He could only have guessed at
those he followed, until he reached the edge of the wharf and looked
down upon us in the moonlight. For a moment he stood without moving;
then he raised his hand to his lips, and the shrill call that had before
startled us rang out again. At the far end of the lane lights appeared.
Men were coming down the lane at a run; whether they were the watch,
or my lord's own rogues, we tarried not to see. There was not time to
loosen the rope from the piles, so I drew my knife to cut it. My lord
saw the movement, and sprang down the steps, at the same time shouting
to the men behind to hasten. Sparrow, grappling with him, locked him in
a giant's embrace, lifted him bodily from the steps, and flung him into
the boat. His head struck against a thwart, and he lay, huddled beneath
it, quiet enough. The minister sprang after him, and I cut the rope. By
now the wharf shook with running feet, and the backward-streaming flame
of the torches reddened its boards and the black water beneath; but each
instant the water widened between us and our pursuers. Wind and current
swept us out, and at that wharf there were no boats to follow us.
Those whom my lord's whistle had brought were now upon the very edge of
the wharf. The marshal's voice called upon us in the name of the King to
return. Finding that we vouchsafed no answer, he pulled out a pistol and
fired, the ball going through my hat; then whipped out its fellow and
fired again. Mistress Percy, whose behavior had been that of an angel,
stirred in her seat. I did not know until the day broke that the ball
had grazed her arm, drenching her sleeve with blood.
“It is time we were away,” I said, with a laugh. “If your reverence will
keep your hand upon the tiller and your eye upon the gentleman whom you
have made our traveling companion, I'll put up the sail.”
I was on my way to the foremast, when the boom lying prone before
me rose. Slowly and majestically the sail ascended, tapering upward,
silvered by the moon,--the great white pinion which should bear us we
knew not whither. I stopped short in my tracks, Mistress Percy drew a
sobbing breath, and the minister gasped with admiration. We all three
stared as though the white cloth had veritably been a monster wing
endowed with life.
“Sails don't rise of themselves!” I exclaimed, and was at the mast
before the words were out of my lips. Crouched behind it was a man. I
should have known him even without the aid of the moon. Often enough,
God knows, I had seen him crouched like this beside me, ourselves in
ambush awaiting some unwary foe, brute or human; or ourselves in hiding,
holding our breath lest it should betray us. The minister who had been a
player, the rival who would have poisoned me, the servant who would
have stabbed me, the wife who was wife in name only,--mine were strange
shipmates.
He rose to his feet and stood there against the mast, in the old
half-submissive, half-defiant attitude, with his head thrown back in the
old way.
“If you order me, sir, I will swim ashore,” he said, half sullenly,
half--I know not how.
“You would never reach the shore,” I replied. “And you know that I
will never order you again. Stay here if you please, or come aft if you
please.”
I went back and took the tiller from Sparrow. We were now in mid-river,
and the swollen stream and the strong wind bore us on with them like a
leaf before the gale. We left behind the lights and the clamor, the dark
town and the silent fort, the weary Due Return and the shipping about
the lower wharf. Before us loomed the Santa Teresa; we passed so close
beneath her huge black sides that we heard the wind whistling through
her rigging. When she, too, was gone, the river lay bare before us;
silver when the moon shone, of an inky blackness when it was obscured by
one of the many flying clouds.
My wife wrapped her mantle closer about her, and, leaning back in her
seat in the stern beside me, raised her face to the wild and solemn
heavens. Diccon sat apart in the bow and held his tongue. The minister
bent over, and, lifting the man that lay in the bottom of the boat, laid
him at full length upon the thwart before us. The moonlight streamed
down upon the prostrate figure. I think it could never have shone upon
a more handsome or a more wicked man. He lay there in his splendid dress
and dark beauty, Endymion-like, beneath the moon. The King's ward turned
her eyes upon him, kept them there a moment, then glanced away, and
looked at him no more.
“There's a parlous lump upon his forehead where it struck the thwart,”
said the minister, “but the life's yet in him. He'll shame honest men
for many a day to come. Your Platonists, who from a goodly outside argue
as fair a soul, could never have been acquainted with this gentleman.”
The subject of his discourse moaned and stirred. The minister raised one
of the hanging hands and felt for the pulse. “Faint enough,” he went on.
“A little more and the King might have waited for his minion forever
and a day. It would have been the better for us, who have now, indeed, a
strange fish upon our hands, but I am glad I killed him not.”
I tossed him a flask. “It's good aqua vitae, and the flask is honest.
Give him to drink of it.”
He forced the liquor between my lord's teeth, then dashed water in his
face. Another minute and the King's favorite sat up and looked around
him. Dazed as yet, he stared, with no comprehension in his eyes, at
the clouds, the sail, the rushing water, the dark figures about him.
“Nicolo!” he cried sharply.
“He's not here, my lord,” I said.
At the sound of my voice he sprang to his feet.
“I should advise your lordship to sit still,” I said. “The wind is very
boisterous, and we are not under bare poles. If you exert yourself, you
may capsize the boat.”
He sat down mechanically, and put his hand to his forehead. I watched
him curiously. It was the strangest trick that fortune had played him.
His hand dropped at last, and he straightened himself, with a long
breath. “Who threw me into the boat?” he demanded.
“The honor was mine,” declared the minister.
The King's minion lacked not the courage of the body, nor, when
passionate action had brought him naught, a certain reserve force of
philosophy. He now did the best thing he could have done,--burst into
a roar of laughter. “Zooks!” he cried. “It's as good a comedy as ever
I saw! How's the play to end, captain? Are we to go off laughing, or
is the end to be bloody after all? For instance, is there murder to be
done?” He looked at me boldly, one hand on his hip, the other twirling
his mustaches.
“We are not all murderers, my lord,” I told him. “For the present you
are in no danger other than that which is common to us all.”
He looked at the clouds piling behind us, thicker and thicker, higher
and higher, at the bending mast, at the black water swirling now and
again over the gunwales. “It's enough,” he muttered.
I beckoned to Diccon, and putting the tiller into his hands went forward
to reef the sail. When it was done and I was back in my place, my lord
spoke again.
“Where are we going, captain?”
“I don't know.”
“If you leave that sail up much longer, you will land us at the bottom
of the river.”
“There are worse places,” I replied.
He left his seat, and moved, though with caution, to one nearer Mistress
Percy. “Are cold and storm and peril sweeter to you, lady, than warmth
and safety, and a love that would guard you from, not run you into,
danger?” he said in a whisper. “Do you not wish this boat the Santa
Teresa, these rude boards the velvet cushions of her state cabin, this
darkness her many lights, this cold her warmth, with the night shut out
and love shut in?”
His audacity, if it angered me, yet made me laugh. Not so with the
King's ward. She shrank from him until she pressed against the tiller.
Our flight, the pursuing feet, the struggle at the wharf, her wounded
arm of which she had not told, the terror of the white sail rising as if
by magic, the vision of the man she hated lying as one dead before her
in the moonlight, the cold, the hurry of the night,--small wonder if
her spirit failed her for some time. I felt her hand touch mine where
it rested upon the tiller. “Captain Percy,” she murmured, with a little
sobbing breath.
I leaned across the tiller and addressed the favorite. “My lord,” I
said, “courtesy to prisoners is one thing, and freedom from restraint
and license of tongue is another. Here at the stern the boat is somewhat
heavily freighted. Your lordship will oblige me if you will go forward
where there is room enough and to spare.”
His black brows drew together. “And what if I refuse, sir?” he demanded
haughtily.
“I have rope here,” I answered, “and to aid me the gentleman who once
before to-night, and in despite of your struggles, lifted you in his
arms like an infant. We will tie you hand and foot, and lay you in the
bottom of the boat. If you make too much trouble, there is always the
river. My lord, you are not now at Whitehall. You are with desperate
men, outlaws who have no king, and so fear no king's minions. Will you
go free, or will you go bound? Go you shall, one way or the other.”
He looked at me with rage and hatred in his face. Then, with a laugh
that was not good to hear and a shrug of the shoulders, he went forward
to bear Diccon company in the bow.