"All free colonists, of course--but lazy fellows, you know, Mr.
Beard--lazy fellows like most of us--" he chirrupped in tones of mock
condemnation. "Any one of them would be only too glad to get out of
the fields for a while and take life easy in the cool of the big
house. I admit it was not my first intention to use them for such
work. I had a shipload of negroes on the way--but the ship was
wrecked," he sighed, "and the sea ate up my poor blackamoors--a
pity--a great pity--I've not felt justified in expending further
monies on slaves since then, so we've had to scratch along as best we
could. By the way," he continued airily, "I understand you had an
encounter with my daughter's maid last night--she's a Mahonese."
"I beg to assure you sir--it was very clumsy of me--" said Andrew,
flushing.
"Not at all," said Dr. Gentian, "Don't trouble your mind with it
further, I beg of you. The poor silly girl was frightened and took
you for a ghost--they're very superstitious. I assure you she won't
behave in such a foolish manner again." He tapped his pomander and
looked at Andrew.
"A hot, dogged wench--that Minorca piece," said Mr. Cave with ugly
abruptness, and Andrew decided then and there that he definitely
disliked Mr. Cave.
His behaviour at supper that evening did not make Andrew like him any
better, though it did produce a certain tinge of contemptuous pity
for him. The man fumbled absurdly with his food, through the meal,
in a dour silence, his reddened brow bent on his plate, in spite of
all the genial Doctor's attempts to draw him out. Occasionally he
would steal a queer, hostile, glance at Miss Gentian and address a
few loutish words to her to be repaid with an iced gentility. Andrew
could not blame Miss Gentian for her aloofness, but he felt sorry for
Mr. Cave nevertheless. He himself was in fine feather and described
the hanging of Lieutenant Governor Golden in effigy, during the Stamp
Act riots, with the devil whispering in his ear, and the unparalleled
musical clock but recently exhibited in Hull's assembly rooms, in a
manner to win the concerted smiles of both the Gentian ladies.
After supper they retired to the drawing room again, and again Sparta
Gentian's voice breathed gold through a crystal instrument in the
strains of "Beauty Retire." The occasion was marred for Andrew only
by the fact that Mr. Cave had obviously taken too much wine in the
interval before joining the ladies, and now sat in a brooding,
red-browed silence like a stupefied bear, with his drooping-lidded
eyes stupidly intent upon Sparta Gentian's averted face. When the
song was ended he got up abruptly, almost overturning his chair, and
without a word went over to the open window at the other end of the
room and remained standing there with his back to the company.
Andrew seemed to read a message in Dr. Gentian's face--he rose too,
and went over to the window himself. He stood for a moment at Mr.
Cave's side--the man was staring out into darkness and did not notice
him. Then he laid his hand lightly on Mr. Cave's arm to attract his
attention, as he had seen Dr. Gentian do that morning.
All Mr. Cave's stolid composure dropped from him on the instant.
"Don't touch me!" he said in a fierce whisper, shaking off Andrew's
hand as if it stung him, "Don't touch me, I tell you!"
"But my dear sir--" said Andrew astounded. Then he paused, for he
had seen the man's eyes, and the watery madness in them. For an
instant Andrew felt on his body the impact of a blow that was not
given--a blow like a hammerstroke. Then the bloody color died from
Mr. Cave's eyes and his mouth ceased to quiver like an angry child's.
"I--I am very sorry, Mr. Beard," he said, recovering himself with
visible effort, "The heat--and Miss Gentian's singing--I am not very
well with the heat and I--I cannot endure to have a stranger touch me
suddenly--don't think too hardly of me because of it, Mr. Beard--"
He was almost fawning now. Andrew did not know which aspect of the
man he found more distasteful--the sudden, lunatic rage of a minute
ago or this present and horrible obsequiousness.
"Pray think no more of it," said Andrew, haughtily, trying to copy
Dr. Gentian's tone, "Miss Gentian is about to sing again--shall we
hear her?" He led the way back into the room. But he was relieved
when, after Mr. Cave had taken his bearish departure, Dr. Gentian
explained the reason for his singular behaviour.
"You have my thanks for treating Mr. Cave so courteously," he said
gravely. "A strange, bitter creature, Cave--but loyal and devoted,
so we must put up with his strangeness." He lowered his voice, "He
comes of good enough stock--but you see it's by the left hand--and
that frets him, whenever he's in company."
"If he had his rights he'd be rich. Rich," said Sparta Gentian
suddenly in her thrilling voice.
"You were going to play us something of Handel's, my dear," said her
father, and the girl turned back to the forte-piano with an impatient
jerk of her head. Under cover of the music, Dr. Gentian went on in
snatches.
"I found him in London--what an exquisite passage, my pet--very
bitter against the world. Well, I'd known his father. A hard man.
I thought perhaps in a country where nobody knew the story--but I
fear the wound is too old and deep. One cannot blame him too much.
In his place, who would not be strange? Ah, bravo, daughter!" and he
clapped his hands.
Surely, thought Andrew, here was a gentleman of the most
comprehensive benevolence and understanding, and as he looked at the
beauty of Sparta Gentian's face, a little flushed now from the
exertion of playing, he resolved that the morrow would find him more
than courteous to unlucky Mr. Cave.
7.
The morrow came--and other morrows. A month slipped down the curve
of the year without Andrew's realizing how quickly it had
vanished--the indigo was in its third cutting--then in its fourth.
Soon it was time for hoarfrost to whiten the doorstep of the house on
Wall Street and autumn to gild and redden the trees on the Boston
road. Here it was hard to believe in snow feathering from a leaden
caldron of sky and the cries of skaters on the black ice of
Lispenard's Pond. The news from the North was scant and disturbing,
but its message, to Andrew, very tiny and far away, a troubled voice
hardly heard through heavy glass, the faint disturbance of cannon and
drums on a ship anchored beyond the horizon.
The tea-ships had been sent back from New York in orderly
protest--ships along the Northern seaboard hoisted their colors at
halfmast when the news of the closing of the port of Boston came, and
in Philadelphia, the bells of the churches were muffled and tolled
all day. In the city Andrew had left, the Committee of Fifty One was
organized and began to quarrel internally at once. The call for the
First Continental Congress went forth, and from all the colonies but
Georgia the delegates began to assemble. Dust-powdered riders jogged
along bad roads, north and south, to Philadelphia--John Adams and the
other delegates from defiant Massachusetts were received along their
way with the state and circumstance of dukes or convicted felons.
The Congress sat and deliberated--adopted a declaration of
rights--resolved to import no British merchandise after the first of
December--ended with a stately but ineffective petition to the king.
John Adams found the Philadelphia ladies charming but deplored the
general extravagance of the city--the Congress dissolved, to meet
again the following May, having made its gesture.
A cloud formed in the sky and grew--behind it a masked and
indifferent figure of chaos sharpened certain lightnings and saw that
his thunders were in voice. But cloud and figure were alike
unperceived by the plump, stupid king who still thought of his
obedient subjects of New York Colony, and by those subjects who still
stood ready to drink his health in broken glass on his birthday and
wish him better advised. Only Chatham in the increasing weakness of
his age saw a little--and a few men in America who had helped push a
stone to the edge of a steep slope, perceived now where that bounding
missile would strike in the valley, and caught their breath. But
Andrew was not one of those few.
He was honestly concerned at the tone of his father's letters,
however. At first they were stiff and a little magniloquent, now
they grew hasty and brief, with odd gaps in them as if the writer
were too constantly fretted in mind to drive quill along paper for
long at a time. One strange, sparse missive had come from Lucius--he
had left the house on Wall Street and the business of Alexander Beard
and Son, and remained Andrew's affectionate brother, with no address.
Andrew had written him at once, asking for the details of the
estrangement, but had got no reply except a bundle of the more
violent manifestoes of the Sons of Liberty, which he had read with a
queer detachment. Lucius' name dropped abruptly out of his father's
letters and was not alluded to again, while every letter was full of
eager, almost querulous queries as to the details of
plantation-management. Andrew pictured his father as a man at
sword's-points with an invisible enemy, forced back and back into a
shadow. He took his courage in both hands and wrote him formally for
permission to come home--sons did that, then. But the letter he got
in answer was even briefer and stranger than the rest, and adjured
Andrew, by every tie of filial duty, to remain where he was for a
time. "My dear Son--I implore you by all I hold most holy to remain
yet a while in the Floridas--I have reasons for this request you know
not of, my Dear Son--and if you would be the Staff of my Age, I
conjure you to obey me in this--. Your mother is not Well and I am
everywhere beset by difficulty--"
So it ran, in part, and Andrew, perplexed and sorry, could not but
obey. Besides, there were other reasons for his staying. He had
fallen deeply in love with Sparta Gentian and as deeply in hate with
the uncouth Mr. Cave.
The first complete passion of the heart may be written in water for
its permanency, but it leaves a cicatrice few care to have the wind
blow on, even when iron has grown over the scar. Andrew had known
women before, or their flesh, as a part of his coming of age--a
circumstance of as definite, physical importance as the acquisition
of a new watch by Green of London or the ability to curse a servant
adequately. But the fashionable bawdy-house by the docks which he
had visited a trifle shrinkingly in Lucius' company, with its ton of
syrup-voiced female meat who rapped her trollops' knuckles with an
iron key-ring to make them be civil to the young gentlemen, had as
little to do with this present fever as the stiff exchange of high
compliment with suitably marriageable daughters, minikin-mouthed, in
green lutestring gowns. This was burning and ague at once, an arrow
in the veins, a bitter gold in the mind.
He had realized it first some weeks ago, overseeing a gang of Greeks
sickle the tall indigo with shining, leisurely strokes while the
flies buzzed and the mown swathe gave out a scent of crushed herb.
An incongruous moment, but most high moments are incongruous.
Something had passed before his eyes like the shadow of a sea-gull in
flight; then he knew; and the rest of the afternoon he had let his
Greeks soldier as they would, while he stared at a visionary image
through eyes that saw the field he stood in and the men who worked in
that field as meaningless silhouettes cut out of colored paper.
Then he went back to the house and, after washing the smell of the
fields from his body with unusual thoroughness, descended to supper
and was tongue-tied and inept whenever he looked at Sparta. But
gradually the first sheer bedazzlement passed, and he began to think
and suffer.
He was so thoroughly acclimated to New Sparta by now that at times it
seemed as if he never had led any other life. He could test the
indigo in the beating vats as expertly as Dr. Gentian himself; and
knew why no sun must fall upon it while it lies in the drying-shed;
and the differences between the light, pure indigo called flotant or
flora, the _gorge-de-pigeon_ sort, and the copper-colored, heavier
stuff that is used for dying woolens and the coarser fabrics. The
smell of the rotting plant no longer revolted him, he had become
inured to it, and if not inured, accustomed at least to the
mosquitoes and flies in the fields.
He had long ago acquired his body-servant--a slim, silent, olive
Minorcan lad with melancholy eyes. Also, he had begun to take a
considerable interest in many of the other men and see the colony
much more clearly as a whole. Some things he saw made him wince--but
it was a hard-handed age, and he gradually fell into the way men have
of overlooking little uncomfortable incidents that would have given
him pause six months before. Whatever happened, Dr. Gentian was
never to blame. The Doctor could not be everywhere, and if,
occasionally he seemed to overlook occurrences that made Andrew hot
behind the eyes, the abundant, evident prosperity of the settlement
was ample testimony for the general wisdom and justice of his policy.
Besides, and always now, he was Sparta's father.
Mr. Cave, though, was a brute and an unpleasant one. In regard to
him, Andrew could not but feel that Dr. Gentian carried a point of
generosity too far. The friction between himself and Mr. Cave had
begun the very morning after the scene between them at the window.
Mr. Cave was giving him his first lesson in the ways of the
plantation, and Andrew had certainly intended all scrupulous courtesy
towards him. But after an hour or so of contemptuous, ursine
explanations on Mr. Cave's part and eager questions on Andrew's, Mr.
Cave stopped suddenly as they were crossing a field together.
"What did he tell you about me, last night, after I was gone, hey?"
he said hoarsely, jerking his thumb in the general direction of the
great house.
Andrew felt trapped. "I do not recall that we discussed any one of
your qualities in particular," he said finally. The man galled him,
but he was resolved to be civil.
"Qualities!" said Mr. Cave, scornfully. "Qualities, hell. He told
you I was a bastard--didn't he now? A London lawyer's bastard
without even a decent name to his back?" His voice was vinegary. He
looked Andrew up and down with red, peering eyes.
"I assure you, Mr. Cave," said Andrew, still grasping at civility,
"that even if Dr. Gentian did happen to refer to the--the unhappy
circumstances of your birth--"
"Listen to me!" said Mr. Cave with sudden violence, "You can't talk
fine to me--I don't want any of your stinking New York sop! I'm a
bastard, all right--I knew he'd tell you--well, if I am--" he beat
his fist in his palm, "I don't want any damn cocked-hat pity from you
or him neither--savvy? I take care of myself--savvy? I could stake
the two of you out in the sun to dry there for boucan--savvy? All
right--now you go and snigger about me with him over your wine as
much as you damn well want to!"
The hoarse, brief explosion of his rage left Andrew stunned for an
instant. He felt as if he had stretched out his hand in the dark and
put it upon a toad.
"Oh--go to the devil!" he said, rather impotently, and started to
walk away in a fog of anger. But already the man's fit had passed
and he was running after him with apologies.
"Mr. Beard! Mr. Beard! I didn't mean anything, sir--I swear I
didn't! I get a fit like that every now and then--Dr. Gentian knows
it--he never pays any attention to it. You aren't going to tell him,
Mr. Beard? You aren't going to--"
The tawdry tears were actually running down his cheeks. It took some
time for Andrew, loathing them both, to quiet him with promises and
assurances. Then the man relapsed into his usual heavy sullenness
and the tour of instruction proceeded. But even the crowded months
since then had not been able to obliterate the shoddy scene from
Andrew's memory.
Then there was the time, a month or so later, when Mr. Cave had been
about to take the whip to the Minorcan. The Minorcan was the
fine-looking fellow whom Andrew had noticed on his first day at New
Sparta, and Andrew had stopped the projected whipping in short order,
for he was used to his work by then, and conscious of Dr. Gentian's
favor. But again, he would not easily forget the Minorcan's clenched
face as Mr. Cave had whistled the rawhide lash in his hands in
preparation to strike, nor Mr. Cave's dull fury when Andrew had
intervened.
That matter had gone up to Dr. Gentian and Mr. Cave had been
cautioned, though, as Dr. Gentian explained, there were times when
the whip--"A new colony must live its first decade under what, to all
purposes, is martial law, Mr. Beard, if it is to survive. Take away
the punitive power--even the power of life and death--from its
governors and--well, you've heard of the first days at Jamestown--"
Andrew agreed. Dr. Gentian, as usual, had reason and experience on
his side. But he thought Mr. Cave should be discharged and said so.
"Some time, perhaps--if I could find him another post," mused Dr.
Gentian, gravely. "But just now--well--we are short of men, Mr.
Beard, and after all, if I did discharge him, where would the
wretched fellow go? I could not turn him out naked to pig it with
the Indians."
Andrew saw the justice of that, and the air cleared again. At least,
he thought, the incident had been of some value, for it won him the
friendship of the Minorcan concerned and he began to be popular among
the palmetto-huts.
The Minorcan's name was Sebastian Zafortezas, and Andrew discovered,
with that curious pleasure the mind takes in tiny coincidences, that
they had been born in the same year. He began to visit Sebastian's
hut, now and then--it was on the edge of the Minorcan quarter and
cleaner and better kept than those of his Greek neighbors. As the
acquaintanceship grew, Sebastian began to teach him Mahonese
Spanish--hesitatingly at first, for he had only a little English to
begin on. But soon they were really able to talk to each other--and
Andrew began to learn about the deserted hut near the Altar of the
Gentiles and the long sick voyage from Port Mahon.
Gradually, Andrew slipped into the way of frequenting Sebastian's hut
as often as circumstance allowed. Conversation with Dr. Gentian was
always instructive--but he found that at times he missed the
fellowship of men near his own age more than he had thought--and Mr.
Cave was the only other possibility. Colonial and Mahonese exchanged
knives and minor confidences and began to feel secure in each other's
company. Andrew discovered that Sebastian was passionately fond of
tobacco and repaid his language lessons with pipefuls of rank
Virginia, while the two chatted and the blue smoke wavered in the
evening air, and the Barbary ape that Sebastian was so proud of
bringing alive from Minorca chattered to itself in a corner. Andrew
thought a dozen times of transferring Sebastian from the fields to
the coquina house, as his body servant, but something held him
back--he suspected his friend of a pride of race as great as any De
Lancey's and feared to wound him.
They were seated so, one afternoon in early March when work was over,
smoking in comparative silence, for both were tired. Andrew was
thinking that it was nearly a year since he had sailed from New York,
that he had had no news from home for almost two months now, and that
the little hollow at the base of Sparta Gentian's throat was the most
lovely of all created things.
He had long ago confided his passion to Sebastian and had received a
grave, laconic sympathy in return. Sometimes he wondered at himself
for revealing the most hidden trouble of his heart so easily to a
foreign laborer--but that ghost of snobbery was quickly laid. His
friend understood him, that was enough. But he wondered sometimes,
if he understood his friend.
The other had told him many things--he could see the barren island of
ringdoves and eagles rise before him out of the sea, in Sebastian's
words, like a city long-drowned--he could hear the soft slur of the
dancers' feet in the rocky streets of Mahon--but the secret springs
of Sebastian's mind remained unrevealed. Occasionally, in a chance
word or a casual idiom, he could catch a glimpse of some alien,
resolved purpose, hidden under the surface of Sebastian's talk like
the gleam of a fish, seen far down, in very deep water, but that was
all. Still, Andrew decided, he did not like Sebastian any the less
for it. He shook out the dottel from his pipe, stretched his arms,
and spoke.
"She is beautiful as a golden rose," he said in Spanish. "Beautiful.
Is she not beautiful, my friend?"
Sebastian nodded gravely. "All women are beautiful, but only one to
a lover," he said, reflectively, "It is well, so. When do you speak
to her father, amigo?"
"Soon," said Andrew, "As soon as I have any notion there is hope for
me in her mind."
"You must serenade her more often," said Sebastian smiling.
"No." Andrew smiled, too. "I have told you we have not the custom
of the serenade."
"That is bad," said Sebastian seriously. "Guitar-music comes like a
child to a woman's heart--it can enter where a man must stay out in
the darkness. I would get you a guitar, my friend, if you had need
of it. Tonight is a night for love and the guitar."
"That is true," said Andrew, nodding, "But you, Sebastian--how do you
know? Have you never been in love?"
Sebastian regarded the bowl of his pipe.
"Yes. I have been in love," he said.
"But I've never seen you with a girl."
"No," said Sebastian. "You have never seen me with a girl." His
face was masked.
"And yet--what happened, Sebastian?--Are you still, perhaps--"
"It is possible," said Sebastian, smiling. "Let us talk no more of
it, my friend. Let us talk of your love instead--and wish you good
fortune."
Andrew felt rebuffed, but he respected the other's reticence.
Besides, it was so very much more interesting to pour his own doubts
and fears in Sebastian's sympathetic ear.
"Perhaps, I will find my rose tonight," he said, tossing a pebble
idly in his hand, "Perhaps."
"May you wear it many years," said Sebastian with courteous dignity.
"Dr. Gentian sets out for St. Augustine soon," went on Andrew,
thinking aloud. "He will be gone some time. If I do not speak
before then--"
"Ah," said Sebastian and muttered something to himself in Spanish.
"_Que?_" said Andrew, eagerly. He had not caught the words.
"I said nothing," said Sebastian, holding out his hand before the
door of his hut to try the direction of the wind. "The air is heavy.
We will have rain before morning. Rain and thunder."
"Nonsense, Sebastian," said Andrew and laughed. "The sky's as clear
as a bell and it rained only two days ago."
"Perhaps," said Sebastian, staring into a distance. His eyes were
veiled. "But for all that, we will have rain soon enough, and
thunder. There is thunder in the air, my friend--thunder coming up
from the sea."
PART TWO:
_The Dazzling Net_
The strangeness of his friend's last speech bothered Andrew a little,
on his way back to the house, but not long. The gradual veils of
dusk blue, patched with silver, that evening drew solemnly across the
sky were too calm and gentle to be flowered with anything more sullen
than the palest stripes of Spring rain--a cool air blew from the
inlet like a promise given in a whisper--it was, indeed, a night for
love and the guitar. Andrew came up the grassy avenue that led to
the house with that promise clutched tight in his hand like a Spanish
coin.