"When you told me what that dead man planned, I thought there must be
some way out for my people. I told Caterina to tell them to do what
seemed best and not think of us--that we would rescue ourselves."
The fact of Mr. Cave's death struck Andrew now with a queer force--he
had hardly taken it in before. Mr. Cave would never dabble his
fingers in Sparta Gentian's hair again or rave impotently at the
legitimate world. It seemed odd to think of that strong, bulky body
empty of violence--those heavy hands no longer able to afflict or
destroy. There must be something left--a soul?--where was it? He
saw it fluttering in the wind like a burnt rag, maimed, stupid,
defiant and alone. "Poor devil," he thought for a moment--the rag
fluttered at him angrily--it did not want pity--it still wanted to
hurt but it no longer had the power--the thought made him a little
sick....
"Think they'll chase us?" he said, after a while.
"Have their hands full," said Sebastian. "Caterina says the Italians
were going to pay off old scores and fire the Greek huts. If they
did, they'll be fighting fire all the rest of the night."
They were far down the river now, the breeze had freshened, the
current ran smooth and fast. All sound but the sound of water and
wind and trees had died away. Andrew trailed his hand over the side
and drew it up, dripping. His mind was quieting gradually. Already
the furious scene in which, such a short time ago, he had taken such
active part seemed unreal as a stage-play. Yet it had been real. He
had passed through just such a painted and bedizened adventure as he
had always envied and wished against hope might be his own, when he
was a little boy playing under a table, listening to the
ship-captains and soldiers tell their sparse, enthralling tales. He
had broken a prison--he had killed a man--even now he was running
away from death in a leaky pleasure-boat, perhaps to be wrecked on an
island like Robinson Crusoe's, perhaps merely to drown. Yet it did
not seem to him that this adventure was his, as the adventure in the
tales had been his while he listened to them.
Now he knew why those tales had been so sparse and crudely-fashioned.
When you were living a tale you did not have time to color it as it
should be colored--your mind stuck on odd useless trifles--the teeth
of a man you struck--the feel of an iron bar--the shape of a sail
against the stars. Besides, in life, you were hungry and thirsty and
had to make water--things which did not happen in a tale, or if they
did, assumed heroic-proportions. He felt betrayed, somehow, as he
thought of this. Even he should have a trace at least of attractive
venturesomeness upon him now, but if it were there, he could not see
or feel it. The thought of the long, baking voyage still ahead of
them brought no flavor of romance with it, no smell of strange
flowers. It would be hot and irksome and dangerous, and he would be
very glad when it was done.
Something splashed overside--Caterina was bailing the boat. He
sighed and started to help her. After a while she stopped, but he
went on.
"Tired, Caterina?" he said, in a pause.
"No--yes--but it does not matter," she said, with face half turned.
She shut her eyes for an instant--the moon laid a silver penny on
each closed lid. He stared at her face. Then she started to bail
again, and the slight charm was broken.
She gave a little sigh after a moment. "I think they hit me, after
all," she said in a commonplace voice.
He crawled over to her, anguished suddenly. "Where is it?" he said.
"There--ah"--his fingers touched something sticky and warm. On her
left side her dress was soaked--blood or water?--he could not tell.
"Do you hear, Sebastian? She's hurt," he said, in a sharp, angry
voice. The dark figure at the tiller moved uneasily, the boat
shifted, spray blew in Andrew's face.
"Is it deep, Caterina?"
"No, no--only a flesh wound--nothing--" But her voice seemed
changed. "See, when I put my hand on it--it stops the blood."
Andrew put her hand aside, gently. He started to tear a strip from
his shirt to bandage the wound. But the shirt was dirty and hard to
tear. "Have you a handkerchief--anything--Caterina?" he asked
anxiously. He felt in the darkness--she was wearing a scarf at her
waist. He held her up and undid it.
"My poor scarf," she said, smiling. Her eyelids fluttered and closed
again--her face looked more content.
He bandaged the wound as best he could with the scarf. "There, is
that better?"
"Much," she said, and sighed, lazily. "Thank you, _señor_ Beard."
"Don't call me _señor_," said Andrew.
"I won't call you anything," she said, with a faint laugh. "I shall
go to sleep. I am tired. Wake me when it is time to bail again."
He helped her to stretch out as comfortably as possible in the bottom
of the boat, pillowing her head on the coat from which Sebastian had
taken the button. Then he crawled back aft and crouched there, his
head by Sebastian's knees. They were out in the little bay, now, the
moonlight was ghostly on its white shelves of sand, the line of foam
on the beach was a pale thread spun by a ghost on a shuttle of pearl.
Presently they would run past the headland and the broad sea would
take them.
Sebastian tested the wind. "Good," he muttered. "Can you handle
her, amigo, after we get out of this bay?"
"Uh," said Andrew, nearly asleep. Sebastian laughed. "I'll wake you
when you have to take her," he said.
Andrew threw back his head and looked up at the sky, breathing deep.
The moon was a sailor's lamp now, a lamp of silver salt, sea-crusted,
at the masthead of heaven. The stars were lights in a rigging. As
he lay back he felt not only the movement of the boat, but a larger,
vaguer roll, the roll of earth itself, a dark, huge ark plunging
forward slowly through a black-and-silver waste. The slow way of
that tremendous passage shook in his heart. He felt suddenly very
happy and no longer dismayed by what might be in store for them.
They had escaped, they were free. Caterina lay sleeping there in the
bow: he could make out the huddle of her shoulder. In the morning he
would see her as he had never seen her, familiar, friendly, with no
mark of fear or oppression between her brows. They would live
together always, somehow, Sebastian, Caterina and he--and gradually
the stigmata of the stranger would depart from him and he would be
able to read the runes enciphered in the ivory box of her heart.
His eyes, however, were closing. They could not really have closed,
for it did not seem a moment before Sebastian nudged him to take the
tiller and the sheet. Yet they stuck when he tried to open them, and
when he had the tiller in his hand at last, the bay was gone and the
boat was climbing endless hummocks of black-and-silver glass. It was
rougher than it had been in the bay and the boat seemed diminished
and apologetic in the wide face of ocean, but it settled to its work
like a tired and patient pony, and after a few moments Andrew felt
less afraid of drowning them all. The breeze was steady, he had
little to do but follow the coastline and keep from going to sleep.
Twice he shipped unnecessary water and once just averted jibing
disastrously in a sudden puff, then he settled back into the way of
it as a man who has not ridden for some time settles back into the
way of a horse. The heavy drowsiness of exhaustion no longer pawed
at his throat--the black-and-silver monotony, the rushing of the near
water, lulled him, but not toward sleep, rather into a shining,
half-bodiless wakefulness. He felt that he could steer forever,
through an endless, fluid universe of wet shadow streaked with
radiance while the boat answered his hand.
2.
The sky was a flight of grey doves touched with faint, pink markings
like the markings inside a seashell, the sea was a heap of
rose-quartz and grey stones, the light that came seemed to struggle
through dew and roughened glass. It was the illusory hour, the hour
just before dawn, when the tide of the blood sets back toward life
again, and birds ruffle their feathers, and a light wind rises from
nowhere to run across the tops of grass-blades, shaking a crystal
bauble, whose tiny clapperless bells utter only the ghost of sound.
Andrew, heavy-eyed, saw the boat and his companions solidify and
emerge from a world where all was mist and water of light. Sebastian
changed from a heap of sacks to a man asleep--there was a little fur
of dew on his garments. Andrew looked down at his own shirt--yes, it
too was damp and the tiller beyond his hand was beaded at the edges.
Of a sudden he felt very cold and shivered. Well, he would be hot
enough when the sun was up.
He stared at the shore-line, wondering how far they had come. He had
no idea. Wet rocks and white beach--a palm-tree like a green feather
duster on end--a hedge of wild Spanish bayonet on the brow of a
cliff--it might be anywhere on the Florida coast. He felt lost and
alone in a world, except for him and the sleepers in the boat, so
completely deserted of humanity that he had the odd feeling he should
breathe very slowly and gently or the whole misty picture of land and
sea and sky would rise from around them in a sudden thunder of wings,
like a flight of scared partridge, and leave boat and cargo swinging
in a sparkling, measureless void. Now a gull rose squawking from
between two humps of water and he took odd comfort in that harsh and
living sound. The universe altered slowly from grey and rose as he
watched the gull, the colors of morning deepened, the east caught
fire from a burning bush.
The day would be hot and calm. Already the wind was changing and
dying as it changed. All day they would crawl over flawed sapphire
under the point of a brazen arrow. He must wake the others. He
wondered how much fresh water they had on board. He had crept in too
near the coast--they were on the edge of rocky waters. Wake
Sebastian, yes.
He leaned over and shook Sebastian by the shoulder. "Wake up!" he
said. Sebastian stirred and groaned. Should he wake Caterina? He
looked over at her where she lay in the bow.
Her head had slipped off his coat in the night; it was pillowed on
her arm now, uncomfortably. Her other arm lay lax--the hand trailed
in a puddle of water. He rubbed his eyes--she must be very tired to
sleep in so cramped a posture. Then he saw that the red color in the
puddle was not the reflection of the sun, and that, if she were
sleeping, she slept with open eyes.
He was stumbling over to her, wildly, across Sebastian's body. The
boat yawed violently and nearly flung him overboard. He heard
Sebastian give a startled shout. Then he had her in his arms and the
world was steady again.
"You're not dead," he kept saying to her. "You can't be dead." His
hand passed over her forehead a dozen times, smoothing it. He felt
at her wrist, at her heart, there was nothing to feel but flesh. Her
fingers were cool, but it was the insensate coolness of wax and
stone. The blood on her dress was drying already--she must have bled
a great deal for all the water around her was stained.
Still holding her, he stared anxiously down at her face, trying to
realize. This at least--death could not have come in horror but only
as a slow dissolving tincture, for, though there was no smile upon
them, her features were composed. She looked very tired and a little
stern, but not dead as he thought of death. There was a stain on her
mouth where she had bitten her lip: he wiped it off with his sleeve.
No, to her death could not have been as horrible as it might have
been, but to him it was most horrible that she should have died so
quietly, without a word. Perhaps she had meant to call out and had
been too weak--he tried to remember dizzily if he had heard a sound
in the night--she must have made some sort of sound. He could
remember nothing.
He looked back. Sebastian was staring at them fixedly from the helm.
His hand lay on the tiller as if he had forgotten it--a little muscle
twitched in his cheek--his eyes were fey. Andrew thought, oddly,
that he looked much as a man looks who has just got a sharp,
excruciating blow in the groin--his mouth had the same sick stiffness.
He laid Caterina down. Then, bending over her, he looked ahead and
felt a hoarse, startled cry tear out of his throat. "Rocks!" he
yelled. "Sebastian! We're going on the rocks!" and fell in the
stained water in the bottom of the boat as the boat jerked and the
sail slatted over. There was a firm little jar beneath him like a
sharp push from a heavy hand--a ripping sound--then catastrophe had
passed, and they were going on again.
"Get out farther--from coast--" he said weakly, scrambling up. He
looked back. Another moment and they would have struck that jagged
line of black stumps full on. As it was they had just scraped across
the edge where the water simmered uneasily like a bubbling pot. They
had just escaped.
His feet were wetter than they had been. He stared down. A little
spring of water was pumping up in the bottom, diluting the bloody
puddles with fresh clear green. That slight firm push had been
enough to ruin them. The boat was filling.
"Have to beach her, Sebas'," he said in a lifeless voice. "We're
sinking."
Sebastian did not seem to hear: he was still staring ahead, with
those blind, busy eyes, as if he were intent on counting every wave
in the sea.
"Christ," said Andrew, flatly, and went back to shake him alive.
They beached the boat just in time. Twenty yards more to go or a
rougher sea and they could not have done it. As it was, when a slow,
huge roller took her at last and sludged her nose in the sand, she
hesitated in its grip like a flogged, unwieldy mare, and the sea
nearly took her and Caterina back again before they could haul up
into safety. When they had done so, they lifted out Caterina's body
between them and carried it up on the beach.
They had landed in a little cove. The sand was very clean and
white--their footsteps dinted it sharply. It was morning now--the
dew had vanished--the world was a glittering toy of silver and blue
enamel.
"We must bury her," said Sebastian dully. "We cannot take her with
us to consecrated ground." The muscle throbbed in his cheek. It was
the first time he had spoken.
"I wish there were a priest," he said, looking about. "We must put
up a cross." His mouth jerked.
Andrew followed his glance. There were other marks on the sand
beside the marks of their footsteps and those of the gulls. A long
slouching track crossed the beach and broke off at the edge of the
rocks, the pawprints indented freshly like the marks of a devil's
signet-ring.
"We can't just bury her and leave her," he said, with a shudder. He
stared at the tracks. In the darkness something came down from the
woods and pawed at a new mound.
He turned to his friend.
"Help me get some wood, Sebastian," he said, with a sob. "They can't
hurt her if we burn her."
They toiled all morning, making the pyre. There was driftwood
scattered on the beach and, up a little gully, they came upon the
dry, tindery carcass of a dead tree. At last, toward afternoon, they
had enough and sat down to rest for a while and to try to eat. The
hard bread and boucanned meat with which the boat had been
provisioned was soaked and dirty, the water in the keg brackish and
warm, but neither of them noted these things. Andrew heard the
tinkle of running water, somewhere up in the woods. "Stream,
Sebastian," he said, but he was too tired to go and look for it. He
brushed the crumbs from his knees and rose. "Come along," he said.
The pyre was a tangled heap of wood--broken jackstraws cluttered
together. They covered it with the sail, smoothing it out clumsily.
Then they laid Caterina upon it. Sebastian had closed her eyes and
her dress was as much in order as they could manage. Now Sebastian
crossed her hands on her breast and, taking a little brass medal from
a string about his neck, put it between them. "I should not have
prayed for vengeance," he muttered, his mouth shaking. Then he got
down.
They both stood for a moment, gazing. She lay reclined on the sail
in a posture of stiff ease--she looked smaller than he remembered
her, but neither pitiful nor strange. Andrew thought of the first
time he had seen her, a barbarous saint, walking through the deep
coils of night with a candle in her hand. She had seemed removed
enough then, now she was forever removed. The fingers had been cool,
the alien heart had carried a treasure secretly, wrapped in a
gleaming cloth. Now the secret and she were air, he could follow
them no longer, the treasure was lost, the runner in chains had
shaken off the burden. What had been the mystery in the blood, so
jealously guarded--the writing behind the eyes? Had she loved him,
had she loved Sebastian, had she loved any man on earth? It did not
matter now, she had taken her knowledge with her, clutched between
stiff fingers, like a relic returned to its saint, secure alike from
worshippers and blasphemers. It was gone, now, and with it had gone
the youthful part of his heart.
He wished, idly, that he had not torn her scarf, the night before, to
bandage her wound. She had not liked his tearing her scarf.
"Wait," he said, as Sebastian bent to strike the flint on the steel.
He looked about desperately--there must be something else--something
he could give. His glance fell on a bush of green spikes near the
foot of the cliff. The Spanish bayonet was just coming into flower
again, as he had seen it in flower, in Judge Willo's garden. He ran
ploddingly over to the bush and thrust his hand among the thorns.
His arm was bleeding from a dozen scratches when he pulled it out,
but he had the flower. It had not yet come to full bloom, but it was
enough.
He laid the white stalk on her breast--it rested there like an order
bestowed by the Moon. He touched her fingers an instant. Then he
crouched down at Sebastian's feet to blow the tinder into sparks.
The sparks hung for a moment and caught, the tinder started to burn.
They fed the flame carefully, with small pieces, till it grew strong,
then they stood aside. The bottom logs began to crackle, a little at
first, then more. The driftwood burned eerily with ghosts of blues
and greens, strange as the colors of an enchanter's rose; as it
mounted, the flame grew purer.
Soon the whole pyre was well alight. The tiny cracklings blended
into a fiercer, deeper utterance, strangely petulant in that quietude
where the only other sound was the slow crash of a single, heavy
breaker on the sand, repeated at even intervals like the firing of
minute-guns for the burial of a mermaid queen in a tomb of coral and
weed. Above of the pyre the heat began to tremble in the still air
like threads of isinglass. They could not have quenched the fire now
if they had wished--it had become a furnace--the petulant mutter
settled to a harsh, husky roar. Now the overlapping edge of the sail
felt the pure aspiration of the flame-a wisp of smoke blew across
Caterina's face--a running creeper of fire sprang up and crouched at
her feet.
Andrew turned away. Sebastian was lying face down in the sand, his
arms out, his body in the shape of a cross. He was silent, but now
and then a convulsive shudder rippled the muscles of his back and
broke.
Andrew looked blindly at the palm of his own hand, surprised to find
it unscorched, undefaced by fire. He would not look at the pyre
again, to see that body altered and the last revenge of flesh on
spirit. So he looked once, hastily, but saw nothing but flame and
smoke. Through the rest of his life, he thought, in stupor of mind,
he would go his ways like a man caught up alive out of hell, with the
rustle of fire always in his ears and the thin, acrid reek of it
clung to his flesh.
They had to feed the fire once, when it slackened, but by then they
were numb and went about the task like sleepers.
It was over at last. The pyre had sunk to a bed of ashes and sparks.
There were charred things lying there, but they did not gather them
up. What little wind there was had scattered some of the ashes, they
could not tell which were hers. They heaped stones in a rough sort
of cairn over the place and covered the stones with sand. Soon the
mound looked as if it had always been there. At the top of the
finished mound, Sebastian put a badly-fashioned cross--two pieces of
wood lashed together with rope. Andrew looked at it, thinking the
next gale would blow it down.
He had intended to cut a name on the cross, but the only knife they
had was dull, and now there was no time.
He tried to recollect what he could of the burial service they read
in Trinity Church, in the brown gloom, under the puffy busts of
gilded angels. "I am the resurrection and the life," he muttered,
but the remembered syrup of the minister's voice spoiled the words.
Besides, any words seemed an affront to the bleak impermanence of
that heap of sand and stones.
The sun was low in the sky--his shadow on the sand was long and
black. They could not have mended the boat without tools and they
had no tools but a musket and a dull knife. They would have to go
on. They would have to try and find the road.
"We'd better get on," he murmured, lifting from the ground the little
pack of bread and dried meat he had tied up in his coat.
3.
They had known before what it was to go on when they stood at the end
of resource, now they were to know what it was to go on beyond that
end. There were two courses open to them--to plunge into the woods
at a venture, hoping to strike the road and the Minorcans--or to
attempt to reach St. Augustine by the beaches, alone. They would
make better time at first, along the beach, but at the end of the
cove a headland jutted out into rocks and they would have to swim for
it. They chose the woods, staking what was left them on finding the
road in the few hours of daylight that remained.
At first, it was easy. At the top of the gully they climbed was a
long open glade, full of lush, deep grass. But at the end of the
glade the underbrush began. They tried to keep a straight course by
picking one tree out of the many to guide them, but, as they had to
fight their way through the underbrush, their guidepost-tree would
mix with other trees, and though they would imagine they had found
the right one again, they could not be sure. Their tree had had a
lightning-blaze on its left side--this one was blazed there too, but
the blaze seemed a different shape.
Twilight came and with it the fear of the woods, the fear of going
around and around the circle of a tethered horse till at last
something cracked in the mind as they stumbled again upon the
deep-trodden track they had made before, and they began to strike at
the trees with their hands. The light faded inexorably, night crept
between the trees, soft-footed, dark-eyed. "Mustn't run," said
Andrew to himself, plodding ahead through a confusion of shadows.
There was a dry stirring in the bushes at his right--a sound
half-yawn, half-hiss, like the hiss of an angry cat. He froze. In
his mind he could feel the blunt, cool, deadly head of a moccasin
against his thigh. Indians, too,--he remembered the Indian he had
seen peer out of a bush and vanish. "Mustn't run," he repeated to
himself with a gulp. It was very dark now. When he got back in a
house, he would never let it be dark. He would sleep with a dozen
candles flaring in his room and buy a slave to keep them tended all
through the night. A bough stung his cheek. "Mustn't run," but,
insensibly, he knew his pace had increased.
He plunged through a little thicket that seemed full of fish-hooks
and came out upon an open space. Where was Sebastian? He couldn't
hear Sebastian behind him any more. He stood trembling on the edge
of the clearing like a beaten hound. He did not dare call to
Sebastian--there might be no answer. If there were no answer, he
would go quite mad.
"Mustn't run," he advised himself for the last time, and then,
tearing the pack from his shoulders with a jerk, began to run blindly
across the clearing on drunken feet, moaning to himself as he ran.
Things struck at him with springy clubs, but he kept on, thrashing
his arms against them like a drowning man. Then at last the ground
itself betrayed him and gave way beneath him, and he was rolling into
a hidden pit where Fear and Night lay crouched like twin spiders,
ready to swathe him in suffocating, innumerable folds of glutinous,
dark silk the moment he touched bottom.