cannot subdue them--unless you choose. He can't get aid from the
governor--the governor's against him. If you choose--"
"There's a price," said Cave, glowering. "I want you. I want the
plantation. He wants his life and--I'd give him some place, I
suppose. If he doesn't choose it that way--By the way--what about
that lover of yours?"
"What you will," said Sparta, and smiled.
"I know what I will. But now, sweetheart, what if your father will
not--"
"I would not have you too much concerned about my father," said
Sparta, reflectively.
Cave stared at her. "By God, you're a cold piece," he said, huskily.
"Not to you, Charles." She rose to her full height. "I'd see you a
king, Charles--not the master of one trifling plantation here."
"And who says I couldn't be a king!" said Cave, with a touch of
half-drunken defiance. "Haven't bastards been kings before. What
was William Conquer but a common bastard--yet he had all England
under his teeth? I'm as good a bastard as he was, any day--I can--"
"Then be a king!" she said in a voice that seemed to shake out a
banner with a dragon on it above the quiet yellow spearheads of the
candles. She brought her clenched hand down on the table as if she
wanted to bruise its softness against something hostile and hard.
"My father has money hidden somewhere--he must--you have
men--strength--we could take ships--Davis did it--Teach was a fool,
but Morgan did it--There are pirate kingdoms, still--I tell you
this--I'll be a queen or nothing, Charles--I love you very well, but
I must be a queen--I'd starve for it--I'd burn my hand in the flame
for it--see--"
Her voice sank to a dry whisper, as she stretched her hand out over
the nearest candle. Cave snatched it back, at once, with a terrified
wordless sound. Then she was clinging to his shoulders, pleading
with him, in that fierce, brittle monotone.
"A queen, Charles--they made Harry Morgan a governor--what was
Spanish Pizarro but a pirate, yet he held Peru like a king--the
time's not over yet--a queen, Charles--and you a king--"
But, "No, lass--no--" he was muttering unsteadily, trying to seem
very bold, yet with shaken eyes, "You're trying me with talk like
that--'tis impossible--I'll raise the colony on your father right
enough--I'll make you a right queen here if that's what you want, but
turn pirate against the world and end in the hemp and the chains--"
His unsteady hand was fumbling with her hair, trying to quiet
her--she had sunk to the floor now, and was gripping his knees, still
pleading.
"Have done, girl--have done!" he said, in weak repetition but she
would not be quieted, though Mr. Cave was now fairly sweating with
discomfort and surprise. Further protestation was spared him for the
moment, for, on the tail of his last sentence, the door opened slowly
and admitted the tall, stately figure of Mrs. Gentian to the curious
scene. Mr. Cave froze at once, like a rabbit surprised by an owl,
but Sparta rose from the floor with some dignity and confronted her
mother.
"You fool," said the latter, slowly. "You bawdy little fool."
To Andrew, at his stricken post of observation, her voice was clear
and thin as the voice of a corpse speaking from the dust, and he felt
the sweat dry on his hands as he heard it.
She turned to Mr. Cave. "Kennel, dog!" she said, tersely, and Mr.
Cave, after one blustering, ineffective gesture, caught a glance from
Sparta, and passed out of the room with his brow red and his eyes
bent on the floor. Then Mrs. Gentian eyed her daughter.
"You madam," she said, without rancor, "You madam in gauze. What do
you mean by chambering here with that lackey when the gentleman
you're to marry lies sick in his bed upstairs?"
"Faith, madam," said Sparta, hardly, giving her gaze for gaze. "It
must run in the blood, I think--for my father, too, has a liking for
the servant's hall."
Mrs. Gentian's hand went slowly to her breast, but her face betrayed
no emotion.
"You're indeed his very daughter to say that," she said, quietly, and
now Sparta's eyes wavered and fell before hers. "But let it be so.
I've heard you call the man you're to marry a fool."
"Do you disagree, madam?"
"Not I," said Mrs. Gentian, and laughed. "He's a puff of painted
feathers--I'll buy his like for six-pence at a Punch-and-Judy. But,
fool or no fool, he's rich, or his father is. Your father needs
those riches--and no hot little miss like you is going to lecher him
out of them. Do you understand, miss?"
"I had not thought you so greatly attached to my father," said Sparta
in a stabbing voice.
"God knows I'm not," said her mother, tiredly. "But I'll not see him
humbled."
"And is it your proposal, madam, that I should--"
"I propose this," said Mrs. Gentian. Her hand fell upon Sparta's
shoulder and held it. "If this ninny you're to marry once knew
what's passed between you and that lawyer's by-blow--he'd throw you
aside like an applecore for all his ninnyishness. You must fasten
him to you by his ninny's honor or lose him. You'll have him in your
room, miss--as soon as he can walk--oh, I'll trust you for that--you
have ways that would blind a sailor--but that you'll do. After
that--" Her smile was an East wind. "Let him marry you or keep
you--it matters little--we have him in a yoke."
Andrew could bear no more. He shut the panel with fumbling fingers
and somehow got up the stairs and back to his room. When he reached
there, he found the Minorcan girl, just done with tidying his room
and about to leave. She gave a soft cry as she saw his face.
"Oh, go away, go away!" he sobbed wildly, as he flung himself into a
chair and put his head in his hands. "Go away and pray for me,
Caterina--I think I am the unhappiest man in the world!"
6.
Andrew lay on his bed, staring up at the ceiling with tormented eyes.
He had thought he had known shock before, when his father's easy
voice abolished the Beards of Westmoreland with a sentence. But that
half-forgotten wound in the vanity of youth seemed like a wound in
silk to this present pain. Again he felt the solid floor of life
turn under him dizzily and alter--but this time it did not merely
change, it blackened while he looked at it to the color of corrupted
silver and soiled thunder walked in iron wherever he could see. The
knowledge of good and evil had descended upon him at last, and he lay
excruciated beneath it, like a harper crucified upon the strings of
his own heart.
That his pain might well have seemed unnecessarily acute to any
dispassionate observer would hardly have consoled him, had he known
it. He saw the whole world now as a lie, which it was no more than
it ever had been. But circumstance had mixed in him the fool and the
gentleman--qualities both somewhat in disrepair nowadays--and at
present, no doubt, the gentleman was somewhat sunk in the fool. The
cold brain of heaven, whose thought is a falling star between
illusion and illusion, might properly regard his adolescent
strugglings with befitting contempt but that task of scorn may,
perhaps, be left to it.
A certain, stale equanimity returned to him at last. He was still
dazed and shaken but he began to think. At one moment he was quite
confident that what he had seen in Dr. Gentian's study was merely a
nightmare of the mind--at another that Sparta, for some inexplicable
reason, had been playing a game upon the sullen Mr. Cave. But truth
seeped in gradually through his defenses and at last he stood ready
to accept the fact.
Seen clearly, the situation was only too plausible. He had often
thought humbly enough, that it was strange that Sparta should love
him, and strange that she should never have loved before. Well, she
had loved before, that was all, and if she chose to garland an ass
with roses, such was her prerogative. It seemed curious to Andrew
that this wise and reasonable thought brought him so little relief.
He began to consider just what there was to be done.
He must get away from New Sparta. But then he shuddered--he and
Sparta were still betrothed, as much as they ever had been, he
remembered with sudden pain. It hardly lay with decency to call her
a slut to her father's face--yet what other reason could he give for
so sudden a departure? Then there was Mr. Cave's mad plan of an
uprising in the colony--a driving of the Minorcans to revolt.
Admitted, he now owed Dr. Gentian little but the hate of a bamboozled
sailor for his crimp--the Minorcans were still his
friends--Sebastian--he could not go without warning them. Now indeed
he felt a net on his body and struggled at the cords in futile
disgust. His struggles were interrupted by a light knock at the
door. He called. The door opened. Sparta was there.
"Why Andrew, dear," she said, looking at him in affectionate
surprise. "I thought to find you still in bed with the fever and
bring you your supper. But you are well again--and I am so glad."
Her voice was the same dropping skein of gold-and-crystal that he
remembered--the same enchanter slept in her eyes.
He looked at her a long time. No, he could not talk to her now.
"My fever's gone," he said at last. "I think I'll come down to
supper, if you'll call the boy to lend me his arm."
7.
He was sitting at table in Dr. Gentian's chair. The room had not
changed its aspect--the fruit-piece by Vandermoulen still hung above
the sideboard where silver glimmered in the candleshine. The ladies
he supped with took peaches from a bowl and peeled them delicately
with silver knives. There was no mark upon their white hands like
the mark of a bloody paw--the wine in the decanter at his elbow
seemed excellent St. Lucar,--he could savor its bouquet quite
naturally. That was odd, thought Andrew dully, as he ate and drank
and talked. He felt vaguely that things should have been
different--more in keeping with the tiny, persistent sound that
tapped like blood flowing from a wound continually inside his head.
He had yet to realize that tragedy may occur in a bandbox and that
horror needs no set apparatus of skeletons to make the bones feel
cold.
It was odd too, that he should be eating and drinking. He watched
his knife cut a piece of meat, his fork carry it to his mouth. The
hand did not falter at all, nor the throat refuse to swallow. All
his muscles obeyed him handily--it was clever of them. He could
question and reply in a normal voice--he found himself listening with
every appearance of attention to a long, tedious account by Mrs.
Gentian of some customs of the Spaniards in St. Augustine.
It appeared there was one called "Shooting the Jews." On the
Saturday morning after Good Friday, when the bells rang hallelujah
from the Cathedral, the Spanish inhabitants would shoot at straw
dummies labelled Judas and Caiaphas, hung up at the corners of
certain streets. Really, how interesting, he heard himself saying,
while privately he searched Mrs. Gentian's calm face for any
signature which might betray that she had been born in hell and was
surprised to find none there.
So the servants went and came, and plates were laid and removed, with
the passage of innumerable minutes, till the world grew old and white
and tottered upon a dry branch like a dying cripple, and a stone
hardened in Andrew's breast, and three people sat enchanted around a
long table, peeling peaches and putting the flesh of peaches in their
mouths. At last it was over, and he was left with his wine.
He arranged nuts on the table, very carefully, in a cross, in a
square, in the initials of his brother's name. His mind seemed to
have room for nothing but the exactitude of their patterns. He could
think consecutively no longer--he was tired of thinking.
A nut rolled away from under his hand, and he cursed it whiningly and
replaced it in its design with nice deliberation. Presently he would
go up to his room with the India chintz hangings, and, if he had his
wish, would die among its printed flowers like an insect crushed
between leaves of painted paper. But that would not happen--people
did not die as easily as that.
Mrs. Gentian and Sparta had watched each other all through the meal
like cat and cat. A detached part of his consciousness told him that
now, in the lifeless voice of a boy repeating a dull lesson. And,
for once, Mrs. Gentian had seemed the stronger of the two. Did that
mean anything--if it did, he was too tired to think what it might
mean.
Presently he was pleading fatigue to the ladies and climbing the
stairs to his room. The shadows wavered in the corridor before his
candle. He wished, vaguely, that he could see that Minorcan girl,
now, as he had first seen her, coming toward him like the image of a
barbarous saint walking the sea, the light of a single candle ghostly
upon the darkness of her brows. But even if she did come, she would
turn to something evil as soon as he touched her. All things turned
to evil the moment they were touched. There was evil in the very
particles of the air, an impalpable dust of black glass, and people
took it into their lungs and turned into dolls of spoilt straw and
rotten leather that fell to pieces as they moved.
Sebastian's thunder was coming. He could hear it growl in the
distance like a dog on a chain. The thought of the bright blade of
lightning gave him a little ease--that at least was clean, and could
run sick arrogance to the heart.
He was sitting, still dressed, in a chair in his room. Time had
passed, but how long a time he did not know. The candle on the table
burnt unevenly, with a smoky flame. The house was quiet--the thunder
nearer at hand.
He passed his hand over his forehead and tried to collect his
thoughts. The heat in his brain like the throb of blood from a spent
artery, had eased a little now--he was still in stupor, but the
weight of it was not so extreme. He began to realize that, whatever
else might have happened to him, the fever was not yet wholly gone
from his body. He must sleep--after he had slept, the beat in his
head might stop.
He was about to rise when his eyes were drawn to the door. It was
opening--a crack--a gap--letting in soft blackness. He stared at it,
without fear or surprise. It might be Death--if it were, he would
not lift a hand.
A hand, a bare arm, came slowly out of the darkness. The hand held a
white flower between its fingers. It was Sparta's hand.
After what seemed a long time, "Andrew," said Sparta's voice, in a
low call. He shut his teeth and would not answer. There was
silence, while the hand moved a little and the curtains waved in the
draft. Then, "Andrew," said the voice again--the fine gold streaking
the crystal with threads of radiance. Then hand and flower were
slowly withdrawn and the door closed gradually, leaving Andrew
staring like a blind man at where they had been.
His pistols lay on the table near him, in their case. He took one of
them out and examined it slowly, with minute care. The priming
needed to be changed--this damp weather ruined one's priming. But he
made no move to change it. He fiddled with the trigger a moment, a
childish look on his face, not thinking of anything; then he forgot
why he had taken up the pistol, and stuck it in his pocket to get it
out of the way. His hands relaxed--the spinning in his mind began to
slacken, like a top running down.
After another while, he rose, stiffly, and smiled. The stupor had
passed from him--he knew what he would do. If the world were colored
like a bat he would take the color of the world. He would take the
instant of brisk desire for the image seen in a cloud and know in its
entirety the damnation of possession and the wittiness of the flesh.
He would despoil as he had been despoiled and lose the rags of gold
he had brought from fool's paradise in the quick heat of the blood as
a wise man should.
A sudden glare of heat lightning showed his face to him in the
mirror. It was haggard and strange, but he smiled at it and went to
the door. Down the corridor, packed with bags of darkness, lay
another door with a white flower before it, and he was going there to
sleep with a ghost.
PART THREE:
The Pit of Oppression
All along the corridor, utter night lay reclined like the body of a
great, black cat, asleep with its head on its heavy paws. He went
softly--to his dizzy mind it seemed as if at any moment his feet
might sink into dark, sleek fur and a bristling, gigantic back hump
up uneasily beneath them. The corridor seemed much longer than it
did in daylight--why had he blown out the candle in his room? He had
come some distance and still he could see no door with a white flower
before it--he must have passed it, somehow, in this place where
darkness was a mask of black satin across the eyes.
He turned about, as he thought, and started to grope his way back,
with his hands out before him. They touched against a wall. He grew
confused and stopped, trying to fix the points of the compass in his
head. He turned again, walked forward and came up against another
wall--the corridor was gone--he was trapped in a narrowing box of
velvet and ebony whose sides shut in around him like a closing fist.
The ludicrous aspect of the situation did not strike him--he had
passed beyond humor--his mind was a sharpened point that had given
itself entirely to the pull of a dark lodestone and now wished with
all its strength to touch that lodestone and cease. He stood
perfectly still for a long moment before the unreasonable wall that
had so suddenly risen up in front of him, angry, ridiculous,
impotent, and more than a little afraid.
Ah, he had it at last. He turned to the left and moved
forward--right--the wall was gone. Sparta's chamber must be farther
along, on the other; side of the cross-corridor--he would find it
now. A sound would have helped him greatly--but there was no sound
at all in the buried world through which he moved but thunder
rattling the iron roof of heaven and the creeping noise of his own
shoes. No, wait a moment. There was another sound.
There was another sound, faint and distant, as if it came through
mufflings of black wool, but distinct enough when he listened for it,
a sound made by some creature in pain. He paused and listened
intently. At first he could not fix its direction. It seemed to
come at once from everywhere and from nowhere, as if the encompassing
and shadowy air of night itself were whispering to itself in
quietness a single, monotonous word of obscure anguish. Then at
last, after much time, he traced it down. The sound came from above,
it was the voice of the Minorcan girl, and she was calling "Water,
water, water," very slowly and weakly, as if her throat were small
with pain.
He stood irresolute for a few seconds, the blood thudding in his
head. Something hot and stinging began to die from his veins.
"Water, water, water," said the thread of breath from above, in
desolate supplication. He remembered a mole he had seen once, after
dogs had worried it--it lay on its side, half-dead, and made much the
same feeble, pitiful outcry, thin and incessant as the creak of a
locust. He had been ready for desire and hate--for Death playing
knucklebones with his joints in a corner--but for this he had not
been ready. He could not go to Sparta with that haunted outcry in
his ears.
He turned again, and bruised his shin against the bottom step of a
stair. He knew where he was, then--he had strayed into the
cross-corridor by mistake--the servants' quarters were above.
"Water," said the voice, and choked. He started to climb the stair.
The thread of voice led him to a closed door. He tried it--it was
locked but the key was on the outside. Then, just at the point of
unlocking it, he paused. What was he doing here--he was looking for
another door, a door with a flower before it. He had not come all
this way with a black hand muffling his face to comfort a
serving-wench in the throes of a bad dream. He started to turn back,
but as he did so, "Water," said the crucified voice again, and the
accents were not those of an imaginary anguish. He cursed himself
for a fool, and turned the key.
At first he could see little in the room but the pale square of the
window. Then, outside, a jagged thornbush of lightning flowered for
an instant and vanished, and in its abrupt glare, brief as the
flashing of powder, he saw the Minorcan girl standing upright against
the foot of her bed. But now she seemed much taller than he had
thought her. She was standing on tiptoe--why was she standing on
tiptoe, and why were her arms stretched up stiffly over her head?
Then she gave an inarticulate groan and he realized, with a shock,
that she was bound, and suspended from the ceiling by a cord tied
round her wrists so that the tips of her toes just brushed the floor.
He ran over to her and tried to lift her up in his arms. She gave a
moan of relief or pain and her head drooped suddenly on his shoulder.
Then he was trying to raise her with one arm and pick at the knots in
the cord with his other hand. "Knife," he kept whispering to
himself, inanely, "Knife. Knife. Knife. Where's knife?" It seemed
hours before the knife was out of his pocket and the cord frayed
apart.
He caught her in his arms. Her body was loose and heavy as the body
of a rebellious child--she had fainted with exhaustion and pain.
Staggeringly, he lifted her on the bed and laid her down as
comfortably as he could. She stirred a little and sighed. "Agua"
she said, in a whisper. He found some water in a ewer, splashed it
clumsily on her face, wet her lips with it. Outside the thunder grew
fainter and rain began to fall in a black, streaming torrent. He did
not notice it. He knew only that, he would never breathe easily
again, if he did not bring back to life, if but for an instant, this
slight, defiant flesh, austere now, coldly wrapped in the husk of a
darker flower than Sleep's.
She came back to consciousness, grudgingly, like a child learning to
walk, like a visitor long-detained by a gift of pomegranates at a
stony threshold and still half-unwilling to return. At last she was
strong enough to sit up and make the woman's automatic gesture at
arranging her hair.
"Thank Christ," said Andrew, shakily, hardly knowing what he said, "I
thought you were dead."
"I was dead," said the Minorcan girl, and smiled a little, "How did
you know?"
"I heard you--in the corridor--you were crying--"
She bit her lips. "They hurt my hands," she said, looking at them.
"They hurt my hands."
"Who did it?" said Andrew, voice and body cold.
"She said I was her husband's strumpet," said the Minorcan girl, her
eyes very black in the darkness. "She said she'd teach me. Then she
got Mr. Cave."
"I think I shall kill Mr. Cave," said Andrew. "But your--the other
servants--they must have heard--Good God--the key was in the door--"
"They are Greeks," said the Minorcan girl. "Touch a Greek and you
touch a rat. Besides--they are hers and Mr. Cave's."
"They are devils," said Andrew, sobbingly. "This is a house of
devils--oh, a house of devils--"
"Listen," said the Minorcan girl, with that smile that set her apart
from him, in a circle of antique and savage stones. "Even yet, you
do not know." And, sitting on the bed, while the rain slashed at the
window, and Andrew dabbed at her bloody wrists with a torn
handkerchief, she began, quite quietly, her recital of five years'
wrong. There was no passion in the sentences--if there had been
Andrew felt he could have borne their impact more easily. There was
only the calm, insistent pulse of her even voice, throbbing slowly in
the darkness like the beating of the wings of a tired bird.
"So they hanged the priest in his robes, on a wooden post, and stuck
a piece of bread in his mouth to mock him," her voice tolled gravely.
It was the unforgiveable sin. "After that--"
"Oh, for God's sake, Caterina--for God's sake--" stammered Andrew,
excruciated beyond his strength, "Can't we get away from this
house--tonight--in the rain--they can't hear us in the rain--there
are horses in the stable--we'll ride to St. Augustine--tell the
governor--he'll help us--my father's rich--we'll take Sebastian,
too--Oh, come, Caterina, come--" He was pulling at her hands. She
clenched her teeth, and he realized that he had hurt her.
"How can I ride, with my hands?" she said, helplessly.
"I'll tie you to the saddle--you can ride pillion behind Sebastian or
me--you must, Caterina--you must--we can't stay here any more--" He
was pleading with her now, as if for some salvation of spirit that
lay hidden between her hands like a coral amulet. Her face was
serene as she listened. She made a little gesture.