SPANISH BAYONET
BY
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
_Copyright, 1926,
By George H. Doran Company_
_Spanish Bayonet_
_Printed in the United States of America_
_To_
MY MOTHER AND FATHER
_This Brightly-Painted Arrow_
Contents
PRELUDE:
_The Barbary Ape_
PART ONE:
_The Pride of the Colonies_
PART TWO:
_The Dazzling Net_
PART THREE:
_The Pit of Oppression_
PART FOUR:
_The Fire on the Beach_
SPANISH BAYONET
PRELUDE:
_The Barbary Ape_
They were dancing in the streets of Port Mahon.
The time was shortly after Easter in the year of our Lord, 1769.
Christ had died and risen again in the Cathedral, with flowers and
candleflame and the songs of Easter Eve, when strollers pass through
the narrow, rocky streets, singing the Fromajardis--the sorrows of
Mary--and receive through opened lattice and shutter, small
sanctified gifts of sweetmeats and pastry from hands blurred by the
dusk. This year the sweetmeats had been few and poor, for the scanty
crops of Minorca had failed for the third successive season, and all
Lent the Vicar-General had excused his afflicted children from their
duty of abstinence, so pinched were the times. But now, with the
resurrection of the earth and the grave twilights of April, there was
hope in the air, and the tiled and terrace-roofed houses that clung
together in a town against the rock, like the nests of swallows upon
a chimney of stone, knew again the music of the guitar.
Below, in the famous harbor where all the fleets of Europe might ride
at anchor, lay the ships which had brought that hope. Minorca had
too many children to feed from a narrow and indurate breast--the
ships would take some away, over the ocean, to a new country, where
the British flag flew from the top of a palm-tree in the Floridas of
America, and, after four years of labor for the master of the
expedition, a man might claim his own fifty acres of fertile ground
and take his siesta at noon in the shadow of his own trees.
Sebastian Zafortezas, looking down at the harbor through the clear
darkness, made out the riding-lights of those ships, and pondered the
strange benevolencies of the English. Quick, loud-voiced, red-faced
men who swore without punctilio and prayed without courtesy, who
bathed themselves unnecessarily in frigid waters as a preparation for
future torments of incessant fire, they nevertheless displayed an
extraordinary unwillingness to let newly-reconquered subjects die
quietly of starvation. They were all a little mad, of course, and
the master of the ships in the harbor no doubt as mad as any.
A doctor they called him, but Sebastian could hardly believe it. He
was not like Spanish doctors, seemly and mournful, as befits one who
immediately precedes the priest and the undertaker, but spry and
perpetually smiling with clean hands and a gentleman's wig. Moreover
the English governor had received him with much honor, which even an
English governor would hardly show to one whose avouched occupation
was not much better than that of a burier-beetle. Ah well, it was
all one, thought Sebastian--doctor or prince, he had given the word
of an Englishman as to the rewards which might be gained by those who
embarked with him as colonists for the distant country--and the word
of an Englishman, no matter how mad, was good. Minorca had learned
that in her last fifty years of shuttlecocking between the
Powers--and the hearts of her people cherished few romantic yearnings
for reunion with Spain.
Spain was well enough, but they were the people of the islands. They
had given sailors to Carthage and slingers to Rome, their rocks held
deserted altars to gods forgotten before the Cross. Their pilots had
known the sea when Prince Henry the Navigator was a royal doll in
swaddling-clothes, and it was said of them on the mainland that the
poorest fisherman of the islands was prouder than three grandees.
As Sebastian gazed at the harbor, he felt a wave of unexpected
sickness strike at his heart at the thought of never seeing it again
nor any of the streamless island of doves and eagles, but it soon
passed. At the age of fifteen he was admittedly a man and men did
not suffer from homesickness. Besides, there was nothing else to do.
His uncle could not keep him in Port Mahon any longer; there were
enough mouths in that house already. And the hut near the Altar of
the Gentiles, in the boulders of Fererias, where he had been born and
lived till a year ago, had been picked clean before his mother died.
He had her rosary of sea-snail shells and his father's knife; that
was all one could expect.
Moreover, his adventure would not be a lonely one. When the ships
passed out by St. Philip's Castle next week, on the track the beaten
Almojarife had travelled toward Barbary with his people, his books of
magic, his Moorish gowns and his fifty swords, more than a thousand
Mahonese would be aboard, men, women and children, pet lizards, pots
and scapulars. Sebastian saw himself in the future for an instant,
gazing out over the foreign landscape of his fifty acres with a burst
ripe fig half-eaten in his hand and a child making scrawls with a
stick in the dust before his doorstep. Then he turned away from his
post of musing with a smile on his mouth.
He had made his confession at Easter and been absolved--the past was
balanced, the future incomprehensible,--but tonight he could dance
with a free heart. He followed the clue of the music along mazy
alleyways, his body a little giddy at times from weeks of
undernourishment, but his mind at peace. At last he came out where
the wider street was crowded with the grave dancers and the throb of
the guitars echoed like silver blood in the dark veins of heaven. He
stood for a moment, observing the scene.
The street was lit by torches--occasionally one of them would sputter
and send up a shower of tiny golden bees in the still air. Beneath
them the dissolving patterns of the dance formed and broke and
reformed again like a shower of the colored petals of flowers stirred
by light wind. The women danced discreetly, their eyes cast on the
ground; the men were more extravagant in their gestures; but in the
faces of both, the eyes were large with starvation and solemn with
joy. The rebozillas pinned about the heads of the women did not hide
the faint hollows in their cheeks--hunger had given them a new and
extenuate beauty--their feet seemed lighter to them and a little mad.
The red worsted girdles of the men were drawn tighter about their
bodies, their cheeks showed the play of hunger too, but their broad
flat shoes of white leather slapped gallantly on the stones; and in a
corner of shadows the musicians plucked at their ribboned instruments
yet more swiftly and the dance went on and on, without beginning or
end.
Occasionally, without apparent reason, the musicians would give in
unison a short sonorous cry, and the bystanders would call out at
once "Long live the dancers!" in reticent approval, to be echoed by a
low, soft murmur from the dancers of "Long live the lookers-on!"
Such was the courtesy of Minorca, and to Sebastian, as he watched,
the murmurous call and response turned to the perpetual cooing of the
ringdoves in the sea-caves where his father had been drowned and the
red of worsted girdle and Phrygian cap was the blood of the sun
sinking into the waters of evening above the Altar of the Gentiles,
and music touched at the heart, and an island was hard to leave. But
presently he found himself dancing, too--aloofly and arrogantly as
befits a man of fifteen.
He hardly noticed his partner--the torches threw confusing shadows,
her eyes were averted, her mouth hidden behind her black fan.
Presently one of the bystanders called out to him gayly in the
permissible words, "Say a word to her! Say a word to her!" He
responded mechanically in the set and ancient compliment, "What would
you have me say to her but that she has the face of a rose?" and
there was a clapping of hands. But her face, as the fan drooped
aside for an instant in acknowledgment, was not like that of a rose
but a darker and more barbarous flower. He sought idly for the name
of such a flower for a moment, then the thought passed from his mind
and the pattern of the dance took its place. "Ha! Ha!" cried the
musicians and stamped their feet--"Spain! Spain!" twanged the
strings of the guitars.
It was some time later and Sebastian was wholly absorbed in the flow
of the dance, when the little ape on the roof of one of the houses
overlooking the street, decided that there might be pickings down
among men if he were bold enough to go and look for them. He was
very hungry but equally terrified and the more recent events of his
life had given him little confidence in humanity. Bought from a
Barbary Jew by the master of a Spanish merchantman and sold again in
Mahon harbor to a drunken private of the Royal Irish Foot, he had
tasted the characteristics of three different nations of mankind in
the last few weeks and found each as bitter and strange as the cold,
stinging waters of the sea. He was a young, uninstructed ape,
smaller than most of his tail-less species--and his disposition
normally inclined toward the cheerful. But his heart was gloomy now,
and the fur of his body miserable.
There were neither proper victuals nor people of his race in this
stony region and he could not forget the fight between his latest
master and another bellowing, red-furred giant which had given him
his liberty some hours ago. The sergeant had made suggestions anent
the succulent qualities of roasted monkey which the other had not
treated with due respect--but a knowledge of this was spared the
cause of the combat who regarded all the various, inexplicable noises
emitted by the human race with the same timid disdain. Their
occupations, too, seemed both futile and mysterious, he thought as he
shivered on his rooftop, watching the dance. One never could expect
anything of them but curious pawings and tweakings and a series of
imprisonments in places that smelt indelicately of humanity. But his
hunger drove him, and presently he slipped down the wall of the house
to crouch a moment in the shadows at its foot, peering about with
quick, startled, melancholy eyes.
The dancers did not observe him but a boy half-asleep in a doorway
did, came awake abruptly and ran, shouting and waving his arms.
Quite distraught with terror at once, the monkey lost his wits
completely and darted blindly between the feet of the dancers. Great
jostling bodies trampled all about him and his nostrils were full of
the unpleasing odor of man. He ran this way and that confusedly for
an instant while everyone shouted and pointed, and then suddenly
leaped for refuge at something tall and stationary which, if Fate
were really a monkey, might prove to be some new sort of tree. It
was not a tree but a man, and he knew it while he was yet in the air,
but at least he was off the dangerous ground. He clung to the man's
shirt, half-dead and hardly daring to breathe. But the man stayed
perfectly still, and, after a while, the monkey felt a finger rubbing
his fur the right way.
The incident had only halted the dance for a moment. It continued
now; the boy, his brief excitement forgotten, fell asleep in his
doorway again; "Say a word to her! Say a word to her!" called the
loungers by the walls to another dancer; the music caught new fire
from crafty hands. Sebastian was the only person much affected--he
had dropped out of the dance and stood a little removed now, gently
stroking the monkey's back.
He could not have said why he had protected the little creature--the
Latin has no great native tenderness for animals, and while monkeys
were a rarity in Minorca, no one but a mad Englishman would buy such
a thing. But as he looked into the wrinkled and mournful face of the
animal clinging at his breast, he knew that he intended to keep it if
he could, even take it with him on his travels. It was bad to refuse
shelter to the shelterless, and, though this petitioner had no soul,
he came dressed as a friar and so deserved the hospitality of a
Christian--but those were not the real reasons, "Besides, we are both
alone in the world," thought Sebastian--but that was no reason,
either, for a world where many were alone. What the true springs of
his action had been, he could not have said.
"You shall have a little gold collar and sit on a perch when I have
my fifty acres" he confided to the monkey. The monkey, hearing a new
noise, thought he was to be beaten and looked up prepared to bite--so
it seemed to Sebastian as if he had understood. After a moment
Sebastian fumbled a piece of cord from his pocket and tied one end
about the monkey's neck--an attention the latter accepted with
passive resignation--at least this latest owner seemed quieter than
the others. "There," said Sebastian, "No, you must not bite at the
cord--we are going to the Floridas, monkey, you and I--we shall be
rich there, monkey," and he pulled his coat around further so the
monkey should be warm. Then his eyes turned away from his new
possession and lost themselves in watching the dance--and presently
the girl who had been his partner and whose face was like some flower
more savage than the rose came over and stood near him, her fan
moving in a slow regular beat that ruffled the soft black fur on the
top of the monkey's head.
PART ONE:
_The Pride of the Colonies_
Some five years later, the merchantman, "Pride of the Colonies,"
bound out of New York for St. Augustine, was running before a fresh
breeze down the blue, sparkling plain of the Atlantic. The single
passenger she carried, a young man named Andrew Beard, was seated in
a sort of improvised chair by the lee-rail, watching the
milk-streaked ribbon of her wake dwindle out continually along the
broad, endless back of the sea, with that idle, rather pleasant
monotony of mind which comes to those who have been many days on the
water without much active occupation. A small, brown, dumpy copy of
Mr. Pope's translation of the Iliad lay in his lap, and his
forefinger mechanically kept the place where he had left off reading.
He had been drawn from the book by a certain, inert curiosity as to
whether the color of the waters of any ocean might fitly be compared
with the color of wine--and having decided, sleepily, that not even
the palest vintages of the Rhine, beheld through green Venetian
glass, could match the occasional streaks of lucid emerald where the
trace of the ship's wake grew faint as the imprint of a feather on
velvet, had excused himself from further concern at present with the
doings of the well-greaved Achæans.
He had never felt either so well or so lazy and New York and the life
he had led till this voyage began seemed very small and distant--a
diminutive red city with paper snow on its gables, imprisoned in a
glass bubble that the sea had washed away. To-morrow, Captain Stout
had said, they were likely to sight the lighthouse on Anastasia
Island, and journey's end--but at the moment the journey still seemed
infinite. It was impossible to think that in a little while the last
sound in his head as he fell asleep at night would not be the strain
of the breeze in the cordage and the complaint of wood against wind
and water or that he would ever rise again in the morning to look out
upon a solid and unfluctuating world. Nevertheless, these things
would be so, and swiftly. It behooved him, against his will, to
think of what lay in store for him beyond the horizon, and why he had
lived all this time with a seashell held close to his ear.
A series of inconsecutive pictures passed before his eyes. He was a
little boy, stiffly seated in a high, banister-backed chair before a
gleaming mirror, his eyes sober with excitement, as that most
impressive of men, his father's barber, who lived in a shop full of
sweet-smelling bottles with a great gold basin hung over the front
door, arranged upon his shorn head with deft, pale, long fingers the
tiny, marvellous wig that had come in a box from London, and, wonder
of wonders, crowned it at last with a little laced hat, just like his
older brother's even to its Kevenhuller cock.
He smiled--how proud he had been of that ridiculous wig and what a
fight he had had with the butcher's boy who had asked him jeeringly
if old Sandy Beard was setting up for a Lord. Fashions had changed,
and little boys could wear their own hair now, even when their
fathers were as important merchants as Alexander Beard. The thought
called up an image of his father's huge, cool storehouses down by the
water and a gang of negroes, singing together in rich, deep, mournful
voices, as they unloaded merchandise consigned to Alexander Beard and
Son from a ship just come to port from strangely-painted corners of
the map. Wherever the commerce of New York Colony voyaged, Alexander
Beard's name was known and his signature good.
The storehouses disappeared, and in their place, for some reason,
Andrew saw the silver-sanded floor of a Dutch kitchen. He was
munching an oelykoek and Gerrit Jans was telling him stolidly of the
wonders of St. Nicholas who stuffed the wooden shoes of godly little
boys in Holland with crullers and toy windmills and silver skates on
his name-day.... The heavy, flowery scent of the catalpa-trees
outside the King's Arms, on Broadway between Crown and Little Prince
Streets, where the officers came from Fort George, mixed, somehow,
with the odor of mignonette and sweet-william in his mother's garden
in the country. She was walking along the bricked path on a hot,
Spring morning, with her green calash shading her stern, fine face,
and a small painted basket of seeds in her hand.
Then he was one of a group of boys running home past the Fort on a
chill, green winter evening, not daring to look aside lest Governor
Sir Danvers Osborne, who had hanged himself on the palisade after
five days of office, should suddenly be dangling there to appal them,
with his silk-handkerchief noosed around his neck ... he was sitting
on his brother Lucius's knees watching the historic cockfight out on
the Germantown road when Massachusetts Boy had beaten and killed Mr.
Signet's long-undefeated Cock of the North ... he was walking with
his father underneath the arches of the Exchange, unspeakably proud
at being allowed to hold his father's gold-headed cane and see him
converse with the great ones of the city.
The images faded. He sighed, lazily. Boyhood had been a good time.
If he had never been as dashing as Lucius, he had always admired
Lucius far too much to envy him and had been well content to take
second place. As for Peggy, poor child, he certainly did not envy
her--with her stiff, buckram stays clamped on her round, adolescent
body, and the long needle stuck upright in the front of her dress for
an hour each day to teach her to hold her chin erect as a young girl
of quality should. Somewhere among his baggage he had the letter
case stitched with red and green silk that had been her damp, parting
gift to him--and how she had begged him to bring her home a little
alligator from the Floridas! He smiled amusedly. He felt quite old
enough to be Peggy's grandfather, now that he was travelling alone on
important business for his father--though he was only twenty-one and
she was fourteen.
By the way, he must look at his new case of pistols again. He had
been warned particularly against letting the sea-air rust them. But
the thought of the pistols brought up the troubled state of the times
to his mind, and his eyes narrowed. It seemed to him that through
all the years of his boyhood, New York had been in a constant turmoil
of celebrations and protests and placards on the walls. The Stamp
Act--the Liberty poles--the repeal of the Stamp Act and the new
gilded statue of a togaed King George ramping upon a fat, embarrassed
charger in the Bowling Green--the liberty boys with their rowdy songs
and their continual scuffles with the soldiers--this tea business,
now. Lucius, too--he knew that his father suspected Lucius, for all
his dandyism, of secret affiliations with the more fashionable wing
of the so-called Friends of Liberty--young Gouverneur Morris and some
of the Livingston set. He himself did not care so much for young
Gouverneur Morris. His celebrated King's College oration upon Wit
and Beauty might be of as marbled an elegance as the conversation of
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia--but he wore a conscious little air of
prodigy that irked Andrew's soul.
Andrew stirred, uneasily, and wondered what the latest news was from
the madmen in Boston. He remembered his father's bitter description
of that troublesome John Hancock--"a rattle-tongued spendthrift who
has wasted two fortunes on fine clothes and sedition"--mincing along
the streets at noonday in a scarlet velvet cap, red morocco slippers
and a blue damask gown. It would have been fun, if you had been
unlucky enough to be born in Boston, to paint yourself up like an
Indian and dump tea chests into grey water. But it was a boy's
exploit, for all that, hardly worth the attention of a level-headed
New Yorker. When the New York tea-ship arrived, the world would see
how a really civilized colony dealt with such matters. He was sorry
to be out of it all--the meeting of protest at the City Hall had been
most impressive, though noisy. Still, it was quite unthinkable that
the present tangle would lead to anything really serious. They would
repeal the tea-tax as they had repealed the Stamp Act--such pushing
Massachusetts gentry as Hancock and Sam Adams would be taught a
lesson--the Livingston faction sing smaller for a while--and people
drive out in Italian chaises to Turtle Bay for fish-suppers to the
end of time.
He yawned, and turning his head, took in the steady eyes and the
broad, leathery chest of the helmsman of the ship. For a boyish
moment he envied the man completely the easy strength of his hands,
and the blue tail of the tattooed mermaid disappearing under his
shirt. Then he told himself sternly that he had pistols in his
cabin, and at twenty-one, was already the master of an errand that
could command the bodies of a dozen such able seamen. He tried over
a phrase or two of textbook Spanish in his mind and then, sailor and
errand alike dismissed for the moment, settled back to reading Mr.
Pope's Homer at the passage where Hector bids Andromache farewell in
the choicest of Addisonian English.
2.
Nevertheless, in the privacy of his cabin that night, as he lay on
one arm, staring out through the open porthole at stars that seemed
already tropical and soft in a languid heaven, certain fragments of
his last long conversation with his father recurred to his mind to
trouble it obscurely. For one thing, not one of the many excellent
reasons for his present journey to the South had seemed particularly
urgent till the trouble over the tea-tax grew to a head.
He had suffered from colds and occasional fever for some two winters,
and the doctor had diagnosed a weakness of the lungs and recommended
a sea-voyage toward warmer climates--that was true enough. And it
was undoubtedly true that, since his health had not permitted him to
finish his course of studies at King's College, he should begin to
learn the ins and outs of the great merchant-house of Alexander Beard
and Son. But there had been something in his father's eyes, when
they talked together of the trip, that had disquieted him. For one
thing he had never conceived before that his father might be
uncertain of or puzzled by anything on earth.
He had started out firmly enough with, "Andrew--how's your cough?"
"About the same, sir," said Andrew, coughing.
"H'm--sit down, lad--I thought so. Well, my son, you'll be rid of it
shortly, if Dr. Summerall knows his business. Can you sail on the
"Pride of the Colonies" for St. Augustine two weeks from now--on my
business?"
"Yes sir," said Andrew, at once dumbfounded and very flattered. It
was the first time in his life that his father had treated him
entirely as an equal.
"Good son," said Alexander Beard and played with the feathers of a
goose-quill a moment. "It may be business of weight, Andrew. I
would go myself if," he hesitated, "if times were more settled, d'ye
see?--yes--I might go myself--but as things are--" He frowned and
lost himself in staring at something dubious he seemed to see in the
wood of the table. After a while, "You may think it strange I don't
send your brother," he said.
Here was something that Andrew, in the innocence of his heart, had
never even considered. The glittering Lucius seemed to him far too
splendid an adornment of the house of Beard to be spared for any such
errand. He said something of the sort.
"Your obleeged servant sir, I'm sure, but Lucius is a damned
macaroni!" said Alexander Beard abruptly, then, as Andrew grew rigid
with loyalty, "Sorry, boy--I lost my temper then--but your brother,
Lucius--if you can inform me why your brother Lucius" (the
goose-quill rapped on his knuckles) "makes such friends of the pack
of ranting Mohocks that set up barber's poles to Liberty all over the
town--"
"My brother, sir," said Andrew, stiffly, "has his own political
opinions, but--"
"But, but, but," said his father impatiently, "Oh your brother's a
damned fine fellow--but he'll marry that Livingston wench before he's
done and set the De Lanceys against him for good and all--if he
doesn't do worse and go to bed with some Boston madam who thinks Sam
Adams is God Almighty because he talks like a codfish. A plague on
them all, I say--a plague out of Egypt--" He threw the snapped
goose-quill aside.
Andrew was silent--his father's tempers were rare, but when they
came, they had to run their course. He tried not to hear what his
father was saying about the Livingstons and the De Lanceys. His
father's passionate reverence for James De Lancey, the dead
ex-Governor, had always irked him queerly, and he had never been able
to see the great, stately family coach roll by behind its famous
white horses without a secret feeling of discontent. He remembered
the time it had drawn up before their own door and the arrogant,
courteous, languid gentleman who was carried like a phial of
holywater inside it had descended to take a glass of Malaga with an
Alexander Beard whose hands and manner were suddenly and definitely
obsequious. That had happened when Andrew was only a small boy, but
the imprint of it had remained in his mind. He had not been sorry, a
little later, to stand in the crowd and watch the long black worm of
the funeral procession wind slowly, with its gilt-escutcheoned
hearse, toward Trinity Church, while the minute guns from Copsey
Battery tolled out the fifty-seven years of the dead man's life.
"A great gentleman," his father was saying. He sighed. "And yet one
that would drink his glass of wine in my house and never once--" He
checked himself.
Andrew stirred rebelliously. "Father! But why should not even a
gentleman like Governor De Lancey take wine in our house?"
"Why not indeed?" said his father, and smiled. "Why not indeed?"
The words were gently-spoken, but at their implication, Andrew felt
the steady world rock under his feet.
"But, Father, we--we've always been--gentle--haven't we?"
"Gentle enough, of a surety," said his father, with eyes averted.
"Or why should my eldest son be able to carry a sword?"
"But--the Beards of Westmoreland, sir--" said Andrew, horrified.
Somehow, he had always taken gentility for granted. Now, in a brief
moment, the very fabric of pleasant existence grew infirm.
"Aye," said his father, quietly. "The Beards of Westmoreland. Of a
truth no one can say that there are not Beards in Westmoreland," and
he actually chuckled. For an instant Andrew was appalled to find
himself almost hating him. In his mind, he had walked through the
green, English park of that Westmoreland estate a thousand times--he
had rubbed the brown dust away with his finger from the names of the
tombs in the chapel that ran back before Elizabeth. And yet, now
that he came to think of it, park and manor-house and chapel alike
had all been built of the insubstantial stuff of his own imagination.
His father had never told him one word about his people. Now,
suspicion once awake, he could see those imaginary ancestors and
their signs of honor, crumble slowly to ash before him--leaving only
a shopkeeper's family, uneasy with new-got riches, their backs supple
whenever a gentleman passed in the street--and he felt naked and
ashamed.
Something of what he felt and thought must have been written in his
face, for "Dinna hurt yourself so, laddie," said his father now, his
speech slipped suddenly back to the burr of the countryman, "That's
the benefit of a new country. A man starts more even. And your
mother's folk are gentle--and--well--we can all say with right that
we're gentle, now. But nevertheless--no, ye wouldn't understand--but
when Governor De Lancey came to my house--"
He left the words in the air, seeing their uselessness. What he said
was true. Andrew could not understand. He could not look back
through the years and see what his father saw--the little boy in the
rough fur cap and the blue-yarn stockings staring round-eyed from the
door of the catchpenny shop to see the fine gentleman's coach whirl
past in a glory of gilt and glass and trampling white horses--the
lank, burningly-ambitious, young man with ink on his fingers who had
found in James De Lancey a patron worthy of worship. The little boy
and young man had come a long and hazardous way to the impressive new
house on the right side of Wall Street, with its fashionable cupola
and the Turkey carpets on its floors--but the stages of that epic
were hidden from Andrew, and father and son looked at each other
across a barrier that would not fall.
"Well, sir," said his father at last, breaking the deep silence, "As
to this matter of the Floridas--"
The ensuing conversation helped Andrew back on his feet again at the
time, though, remembered, certain things rose in a cloud of silver
bubbles to fret him. He had always known his father's business
interests wide, but now, for the first time, he saw them unroll
before him like a parti-colored map on the dark table, and it made
him proud. Even down in that strange, hot, spicy peninsula so lately
Spain's, his father's eyes saw the long rows of indigo, cut down in
the moment of flowering, and counted the profit of traffic with swamp
Indians, hidden like alligators in the marshes, and the yield of
fields of sugar cane he had never seen in the flesh.
It appeared that his father had had some dealings already with this
Scotch Dr. Hilary Gentian who had brought his mixed cargo of
Minorcans, Greeks and Italians to colonize the hammock-lands below
St. Augustine. "An ingenious man, sir, but pressed for money--and
the men in London never understand that. They think a colony grows
as easily as a thistle patch, once it's seeded--'tis more like an
asparagus-bed--you can't expect returns for the first few years."
Yet there had been some returns already--the indigo alone had brought
in three thousand pounds during the last year. "Then there are his
sugar works--and the hemp and maize and barilla. But they began with
over two thousand souls to feed and were much harassed by sickness, I
understand. You must be free with your glass, boy, when you reach
there--they say a free glass wards off the fevers."
Andrew listened dazzled, seeing the strange landscape rise before him
with its blue sea and its tufted palms and its smell of alien
blossoms. And yet the deep-seated reason, if there were one, for his
immediate departure remained unexplained to him. Dr. Gentian had
been warned of his probable arrival--that made Andrew blink a
little--his father had never really mentioned the project before. He
was to remain at New Sparta for a number of months at
least--half-guest, half-apprentice in the ways of such a plantation,
always his father's agent. "I would have you write me most fully of
all that comes to your mind--particularly as to whether such a
venture as Dr. Gentian's might be profitably copied by other
gentlemen of sufficient fortune."
Now what had his father meant by that? Surely he could not be
thinking of transferring part of his interests to the distant
Floridas? But there was more. "Also, sir, and most particularly, I
would have you note the temper of the colony toward these
scatterbrains your brother admires so greatly. I have heard that of
all the colonies the Floridas alone feel no whistle-belly grievance
against the Crown. If that be so--and these Gadarene swine that call
themselves sons of Liberty start running their path to the sea--"
"But, sir, you cannot really think that--"
"I do not know," said his father, sombrely, "I do not know. God
knows there's no reason--but there. I only know where the De Lanceys
will stand--if it comes to more than speechifying. And their
interest is mine."
"But why must your interest go with any other man's interest?" said
Andrew, touchily--the sting still in the old wound his father had
reopened.
"Because it must, boy. The one sure loser in any conflict is your
neutral--and we're not patroons. It's lucky the Patroon's a
minor--they'll be out of it whatever happens. They'd think me mad at
the Coffee House if I told them what's at the back of my mind, but
let a few years pass and--if your mother could see it as plain as I
do and were better able to stomach the trials of a new venture--But
'tis little use talking of that and things may better somehow--You'll
need a new fowling-piece and some light sort of gear--they say the
sun is hot, though not deadly as it is in India--"
So the conversation had flickered out into a discussion of Andrew's
wardrobe and the climate, leaving him with a feeling of mingled
insecurity and pride. The abrupt extinction of those long-cherished
kinsfolk, the Beards of Westmoreland, rankled now and then, but he
could feel no scornful challenge to the accepted dignity of the house
of Beard in the air of the city; and a fowling-piece with silver
mounts soon wiped out the freshness of the hurt. On the whole he was
too anxious to acquit himself well and too awed by the vague
magnitude of his responsibilities, to give excessive thought to the
gentility of his lineage, or the lack of it.
It occurred to him more than once that his father might be sending
him away on a pretext to keep him from mixing too intimately with
those friends of Lucius' who met every Thursday to drink toasts of a
porcupine saddle, a cobweb pair of breeches and a long gallop to all
enemies of Liberty. But even if the queer constraint of Lucius'
farewell seemed to bear this theory out--he could not really believe
in it when he thought it over. And it was equally impossible to
believe with reason that his father actually considered abandoning
the house on Wall Street and the cavernous storehouses by the docks
for a palmetto-hut by a white-shawled strip of sand just because a
row of wigs in a vague House of Parliament over the water had decided
to impose a duty on certain, small, black dried leaves. And yet--
The days of the voyage gave him time to follow many such speculations
to no conclusion. Of only one thing could he be sure. The fabric of
life had always seemed secure and definite before--now he felt it
give under his feet like a floor of fresh pine-boughs and saw things
begin to grow unfamiliar that had always been familiar as water and
light.
He gave the problem up and began to wonder drowsily just what he
would find at New Sparta, Dr. Gentian had a Greek wife and a pair of
daughters--or was it a daughter? He saw a tall, high-breasted girl
with the face of Nausicaa--then her features sharpened--feathers came
on her arms--was she harpy or eagle?--He did not know, but there was
a soft thunder of wings about him for an instant, that passed away
into the rumble of a cart over the paving-stones, a cart bringing
sweet water to the house from the Tea-Water Pump--a blackamoor got
out of it, dressed in his brother Lucius' best scarlet coat and was
offering him a basket of indigo in the name of Liberty as he fell
asleep.
3.
The rumble of the cart was in his ears again as he woke, but he
translated it swiftly into accustomed sounds. Bare feet ran on the
deck above him to the piping whine of the bosun's whistle--cries
answered a bawling voice. He jumped out of his bunk and felt
something knock at his heart. Through the round porthole, like a
picture held in the circle of a Spyglass, was the white stone thumb
of a lighthouse and a crawling line of foam on a beach--then, across
more water, the vivid green of unexpected pines and the solid bones
of land. The land had been an indented, meaningless line to
starboard before, vanishing and reappearing again like a casual,
evanescent mark scrawled hastily on the surface of the universal
sea--now it lay broad across the path in a continent, and the sea
shrank back again from the illimitable and savage world into
measurable blue water, fretting the sides of a cup of rock and sand.
He dressed hastily, in a mounting excitement and ran up on deck.
"Have to anchor outside the bar, sir," said Captain Stout, "The
Pride's a lady--she draws more'n eight feet of water, she does--Now
if she was one of your nasty little French baggages, which she
ain't--"
Andrew nodded sagely, paying little attention. Now the actual land
lay so plump before them, he felt a vast, unreasonable impatience at
the various petty motions that must be gone through before they could
set foot on it. The air seemed to him to smell of oranges already
and he stared through the captain's spyglass feverishly, as if doing
so would transport him at once to the shore.
"That's the Fort," said the Captain, pointing, "Spanishy-looking
affair, _I_ call it--see the lobsterback walking post? Cathedral's
over there--don't know as you can make it out--" He chuckled, "Queer
souls, Spaniards, and that's a fact," he confided, "No spit and
polish about them--no, sir. Don't even have any Christian sort of a
bellringer in the church--just a lame old codger to rattle the bells
with a stick."
Andrew turned to him with a thousand questions on his tongue.
"How soon before we--"
"Oh, they know we're here," said the Captain, chuckling again. "See
that boat, Mr. Beard? Shouldn't be surprised if Dr. Gentian was
aboard her." His throat suddenly became a leather trumpet. "_Aye,
Mister Mate?_" he roared. He turned away.
The black, struggling bug in the waves jumped into a longboat as
Andrew put the glass to his eye again. He could see the sweat start
on the backs of the eight negro rowers as their oars rose and fell in
thrashing dumb-show. But the figure in the stern-sheets was what
held his gaze--if it could be Doctor Gentian.
He had expected such a different personage. A Scotch army-surgeon
turned planter suggested, somehow, a tall, rawboned, iron-mouthed
dragoon in patched kilts and a palmetto hat. This spruce, erect
little figure with the chin and eyes of Cæsar was dressed in black
superfine broadcloth, with Mechlin ruffles at the throat and wrists.
His wig was freshly powdered, his gold-laced hat cocked in the fine
extreme of fashion--even Lucius, Andrew thought, might have been a
little awed by the sombre perfection of his attire. Andrew suddenly
realized the incongruity of his own apparel with a start. He had
dressed hastily, in the clothes he had worn during most of the
voyage. After one glance through the spyglass at his host, the
glazed hat borrowed from a sailor on his own head, the loose shirt
and wide breeches he had thought so aptly nautical, made him feel as
if he had strolled into White's in London painted like a Seneca
chief. He cast a wild glance around him, but it was too late. They
were lowering the Jacob's ladder already. In a moment Dr. Gentian
would be aboard.
"Ahoy, Pride of the Colonies!" came a sharp clear voice from the
water. "Ahoy, Captain Stout!"
"Ahoy sir!" called the Captain, "Stand by the ladder for Dr. Gentian,
you sons of sweeps, or by God I'll--We've a passenger aboard for ye,
Doctor!"
The spruce little Cæsar in black broadcloth called back something
that the wind blew away. Then he was coming up the Jacob's ladder as
nimbly as a fly. Andrew shivered with annoyance and embarrassment.
Why hadn't the Captain told him the Doctor was like this?
"Mr. Beard?" said the man whom Andrew had visualized as a kilted
dragoon. There was a fresh breeze blowing, but not a drop of spray
seemed to have spotted his black silk stockings and he stepped across
the spattered deck with the quick daintiness of a cat. "Your
obliged, obedient servant, Mr. Beard." A ring winked on his
outstretched hand.
"Nay, yours, sir," said Andrew, diffidently, and stood staring.
He liked Dr. Gentian at first sight--there was something very merry
about his mouth. Moreover, he had obviously taken in Andrew's
strange attire at one rapid glance, and yet the sight had not
perceptibly increased his merriment.
Captain Stout came bumbling up in a sort of respectful fury.
"Servant, Doctor Gentian--so you've met your passenger?--good, sir.
You'll find him a bit broadened out since he started to voyage with
us--none of your night-sweats now, eh, Mr. Beard?--and if you could
have seen him set to his victuals after the first natteral
squeamishness, sir--By God, the first day out, I thought he'd puke
the very anchor up--but after that--"
Andrew felt with abhorrence that his ears were reddening, but Dr.
Gentian saved him.
"The sea plays odd tricks on the best of us," he said easily, "I have
seen an Admiral of the Blue hold his head in his cabin and wish
himself a turnip-patch back on land--the first day out." He turned
to Andrew, "I am glad to hear our good captain is so excellent a
victualler. Do you snuff, Mr. Beard?"
"Thank you, sir," said Andrew gratefully, his fingers fumbling at
fine rappee in a gold-and-tortoise shell box. The little act somehow
set himself and Dr. Gentian apart from the effusive Captain in a
world where the immodest allusions of such captains to nausea and
victuals were the permitted liberties of old family servants.
"A weakness of mine, I fear," sighed Dr. Gentian, after an
elegantly-managed sneeze. Andrew's sneezes had been far less elegant
but he noted gratefully that Dr. Gentian had not been critical. Now,
though, he grew a little brisk.
"But we must have you ashore, Mr. Beard, as soon as may suit your
convenience. Have you breakfasted?"
"Not yet," said Andrew, suddenly conscious that he wished to very
much.
Dr. Gentian put his palms together softly. "Excellent. Then you
must do me the honor of breakfasting with me at Judge Willo's--we
must set out for New Sparta, tomorrow, I fear, but meanwhile it is
only fit you should meet some of the gentry of the town. Perhaps
Captain Stout would favor us, also--"
"Thankee, Doctor." Somehow the captain had deflated in the last few
minutes and seemed awkwardly aware of it. "But I shan't get ashore
much before noon, you know--"
"You deprive us of a pleasure, I assure you." The Doctor was smiling
again, "Mr. Beard, I venture to hope, will not be so harsh."
"Delighted--certainly--Doctor Gentian," stammered Andrew confusedly,
"but--my luggage--"
"I am sure our good captain can send what you find most necessary
with us--the heavier luggage can follow later. I have already
settled for the services of a barber for you, in case you should need
him. A sea-voyage is always trying to one's razors. If there is
anything else--you have only to command me--I have a little business
to transact with the captain--but if you could be ready to go ashore
with your small baggage in half an hour--Your servant till then, sir."
"Yours," said a slightly bewildered but flattered Andrew, and
stumbled down below to strip himself hastily of the glazed hat in
which he had taken such pride and to thank his stars that he had
abandoned the transient idea of having the bosun tattoo the Royal
Arms of Great Britain in blue across his chest.
4.
The evening air was light with the frail sweetness of crepe-myrtle; a
little wind stirred in the trees like the ghost of a humming-bird.
In Judge Willo's dining-room, the cloth had long been drawn and the
branched silver candlesticks at either end of the table cast shadowy
pools of light that seemed to sink into the grain of the dark
mahogany. The wreck of the dessert lay scattered like the relics of
a battlefield--a great china punchbowl of bombo had succeeded the St.
Lucar wine and gentlemen were beginning to be flushed and loquacious.
Andrew, seated between Judge Willo and Dr. Gentian in the post of
honor, sipped slowly at the cool deceptive compound of grated nutmeg,
sugared water and Antigua rum, and felt a great indefinite affection
for all humanity in general and the Floridas in particular rise in
his heart.
He was wearing his best India-muslin cravat, his hair was clubbed and
powdered, he felt clean and gay and at ease. Already he loved this
little, lazy city whose trees were hung with the golden balls of
oranges and whose houses were built of a multitude of tiny seashells
weathered into stone. He would be sorry to leave it in the
morning--the projecting balconies of the old Spanish dwellings had
printed their shape on his heart. Many times, in the dreams before
dawn, in the cold hour, he would wander the narrow swept streets, for
years unmarred by the track of any wheeled vehicle, where the Spanish
ladies in the old time had walked in their satin ball-slippers, at
evening, with a languid grace.
He finished his glass of bombo with an air of wise melancholy--life
was like that. The glass was refilled--he drank again, abstractedly,
musing on the world. Life was like that, yes. Life was an
orange-tree--an orange-tree in flower--and he was getting a little
drunk.
Only two things marred his perfect content--his interview with the
Governor and the fact that his best shoe-buckles had been slightly
tarnished by the sea-air. The Governor was a petulant, worried
person who had treated him like a boy. But Dr. Gentian had behaved
to the man with freezing civility and apologized for him to Andrew
later. "An honest gentleman, Mr. Beard, but alas, no friend of
mine." "Then no friend of mine, sir, I'll warrant you!" Andrew had
cried sagaciously and Dr. Gentian had thanked him gravely and
explained. It appeared that the best of St. Augustine was with them
in lacking the Governor's approval.
The candles were growing very bright. Judge Willo's voice in his ear
besought him to tell the company again the ridiculous tale of
Governor Tryon's escape in his shirt from his burning house and how
only the heavy snow on the roofs of the city had saved New York from
a general conflagration that winter. It was an effort to find the
proper words, but when he did, he was well repaid, for all the
gentlemen laughed like thunder and Dr. Gentian clapped him on the
back and called him a very Harry Fielding for choiceness of wit.
Then he tried to repeat some verse of Phillis Wheatley's, the young
negro poetess who had just made such a stir, but broke down in the
middle and only saved himself by saying that he hoped they understood
he had meant no disrespect to Governor Tryon by his story.
"Governor Tryon's worthy gentleman," he heard himself repeating "They
called him the Black Wolf in the Carolinas--but he's for the King!
And we're all for the King here, aren't we--and damnation to
liberty-boys? Who isn't for the King here?" he asked uncertainly,
but his query was drowned in a roar of applause as they all stood up
and drank to the King. Andrew, drinking too, felt the tears come to
his eyes at the thought of such splendid loyalty to the King. He
tried to picture the King to himself--he felt he should--but the
features kept getting more and more uncertain.
A second bowl of bombo succeeded the first and, some time later,
Andrew found himself by a window, gazing out into the garden. His
legs seemed subject to occasional, inexplicable wabblings, but the
night air, cool on his forehead, was a great refreshment. He glanced
back at the room--a stertorous huddle of scarlet on the floor must be
that pleasant Major from the garrison, succumbed at last to bombo and
the force of gravity--the gentleman in plum-colored velvet whose name
he could not remember was asleep with his head in a bowl of
nuts--Judge Willo seemed to be making indefinite attempts at song.
Andrew felt a great pride that he was still soberly on his feet.
"They say our moonlight here is brighter than yours in the North,"
said the serene voice of Dr. Gentian in his ear.