carefully prepared these pious sentences, they rolled so roundly off
his tongue. But he was eager now to get on with his story, and it was
in a homelier style that he went on: "If you knew these seas as well
as I--and it's near twenty years now that I've been sailing
them--you'd have some knowledge of this same holy man that--God rot
their souls for it!--these cursed Arabs have done to death here. I've
heard of him more than once in my time, and not always well spoken of;
for, to tell the honest truth, he does more harm with his preachments
to good Christian traders than ever he did good to black-hearted
heathen dogs. Leave the bees alone, I say, and if you can get a little
honey out of them quietly, so much the better; but he goes about among
the beehives with a pole, stirring up trouble for himself and others
too. Leave them alone to their damnation, is what I say, and get what
you can from them this side of hell. But, still, he has died a holy
martyr's death. God rest his soul! A martyr is a wonderful thing, you
know, and it's not for the likes of us to understand what they mean by
it all.
"They do say, too, that he could make gold. And, to my mind, it would
have been a thing more pleasing to God and man if he had stopped at
home minting money for poor folks and dealing it round, so that
there'd be no need to work any more and break oneself for a morsel of
bread. Yes, he was great at gold-making and at the books too. They
tell me he was called the Illuminated Doctor. But I know him still as
plain Lully. I used to hear of him from my father, plain Lully, and no
better once than he should have been.
"My father was a shipwright in Minorca in those days--how long since?
Fifty, sixty years perhaps. He knew him then; he has often told me the
tale. And a raffish young dog he was. Drinking, drabbing, and dicing
he outdid them all, and between the bouts wrote poems, they say, which
was more than the rest could do. But he gave it all up on the sudden.
Gave away his lands, quitted his former companions, and turned hermit
up in the hills, living alone like a fox in his burrow, high up above
the vines. And all because of a woman and his own qualmish stomach."
The shipmaster paused and helped himself to a little wine. "And what
did this woman do?" the girl asked curiously.
"Ah, it's not what she did but what she didn't do," the captain
answered, with a leer and wink. "She kept him at his distance--all but
once, all but once; and that was what put him on the road to being a
martyr. But there, I'm outrunning myself. I must go more soberly.
"There was a lady of some consequence in the island--one of the
Castellos, I think she was; her first name has quite slipped my
memory--Anastasia, or something of the kind. Lully conceives a passion
for her, and sighs and importunes her through I know not how many
months and years. But her virtue stands steady as the judgment seat.
Well, in the end, what happens was this. The story leaked out after it
was all over, and he was turned hermit in the mountains. What
happened, I say, was this. She tells him at last that he may come and
see her, fixing some solitary twilight place and time, her own room at
nightfall. You can guess how he washes and curls and scents himself,
shaves his chin, chews anises, musks over whatever of the goat may
cling about the body. Off he goes, dreaming swoons and ecstasies,
foretasting inconceivable sweets. Arrived, he finds the lady a little
melancholy--her settled humour, but a man might expect a smile at such
a time. Still, nothing abashed, he falls at her feet and pours out his
piteous case, telling her he has sighed through seven years, not
closed an eye for above a hundred nights, is forepined to a shadow,
and, in a word, will perish unless she show some mercy. She, still
melancholy her--settled humour, mark you--makes answer that she is
ready to yield, and that her body is entirely his. With that, she lets
herself be done with as he pleases, but always sorrowfully. 'You are
all mine,' says he--'all mine'--and unlaces her gorgeret to prove the
same. But he was wrong. Another lover was already in her bosom, and
his kisses had been passionate--oh, burning passionate, for he had
kissed away half her left breast. From the nipple down it had all been
gnawed away by a cancer.
"Bah, a man may see as bad as that any day in the street or at
church-doors where beggars most congregate. I grant you that it is a
nasty sight, worm-eaten flesh, but still--not enough, you will agree,
to make yourself a hermit over. But there, I told you he had a
queasiness of the stomach. But doubtless it was all in God's plan to
make a holy martyr of him. But for that same queasiness of his, he
would still be living there, a superannuated rake; or else have died
in very foul odour, instead of passing, all embalmed with sanctity, to
Paradise Gate.
"I know not what happened to him between his hermit-hood and his quest
for martyrdom. I saw him first a dozen years ago, down Tunis way. They
were always clapping him into prison or pulling out his beard for
preaching. This time, it seems, they have made a holy martyr of him,
done the business thoroughly with no bungling. Well, may he pray for
our souls at the throne of God. I go in secretly to-night to steal his
body. It lies on the shore there beyond the jetty. It will be a
notable work, I tell you, to bring back so precious a corpse to
Christendom. A most notable work. . . ."
The captain rubbed his hands.
* * * * *
It was after midnight, but there was still a bustle of activity on
board the galley. At any moment they were expecting the arrival of the
boat with the corpse of the martyr. A couch, neatly draped in black,
with at its head and foot candles burning two by two, had been set out
on the poop for the reception of the body. The captain called the
young Spaniard and his mistress to come and see the bier.
"That's a good bit of work for you," he said, with justifiable pride.
"I defy anyone to make a more decent resting-place for a martyr than
that is. It could hardly have been done better on shore, with every
appliance at hand. But we sailors, you know, can make anything out of
nothing. A truckle-bed, a strip of tarred canvas, and four tallow dips
from the cabin lanterns--there you are, a bier for a king."
He hurried away, and a little later the young man and the girl could
hear him giving orders and cursing somewhere down below. The candles
burned almost without a tremor in the windless air, and the
reflections of the stars were long, thin tracks of fire along the
utterly calm water.
"Were there but perfumed flowers and the sound of a lute," said the
young Spaniard, "the night would tremble into passion of its own
accord. Love should come unsought on such a night as this, among these
black waters and the stars that sleep so peacefully on their bosom."
He put his arm round the girl and bent his head to kiss her. But she
averted her face. He could feel a shudder run her through the body.
"Not to-night," she whispered. "I think of the poor dead man. I would
rather pray."
"No, no," he cried. "Forget him. Remember only that we are alive, and
that we have but little time and none to waste."
He drew her into the shadow under the bulwark, and, sitting down on a
coil of rope, crushed her body to his own and began kissing her with
fury. She lay, at first, limp in his arms, but gradually she kindled
to his passion.
A plash of oars announced the approach of the boat. The captain
hallooed into the darkness: "Did you find him?"
"Yes, we have him here," came back the answer.
"Good. Bring him alongside and we'll hoist him up. We have the bier in
readiness. He shall lie in state to-night."
"But he's not dead," shouted back the voice from the night.
"Not dead?" repeated the captain, thunderstruck. "But what about the
bier, then?"
A thin, feeble voice came back. "Your work will not be wasted, my
friend. It will be but a short time before I need your bier."
The captain, a little abashed, answered in a gentler tone, "We
thought, holy father, that the heathens had done their worst and that
Almighty God had already given you the martyr's crown."
By this time the boat had emerged from the darkness. In the stern
sheets an old man was lying, his white hair and beard stained with
blood, his Dominican's robe torn and fouled with dust. At the sight of
him, the captain pulled off his cap and dropped upon his knees.
"Give us your blessing, holy father," he begged.
The old man raised his hand and wished him peace.
They lifted him on board and, at his own desire, laid him upon the
bier which had been prepared for his dead body. "It would be a waste
of trouble," he said, "to put me anywhere else, seeing I shall in any
case be lying there so soon."
So there he lay, very still under the four candles. One might have
taken him for dead already, but that his eyes, when he opened them,
shone so brightly.
He dismissed from the poop everyone except the young Spaniard. "We are
countrymen," he said, "and of noble blood, both of us. I would rather
have you near me than anyone else."
The sailors knelt for a blessing and disappeared; soon they could be
heard weighing the anchor; it was safest to be off before day. Like
mourners at either side of the lighted bier crouched the Spaniard and
his mistress. The body of the old man, who was not yet dead, lay quiet
under the candles. The martyr was silent for some time, but at last he
opened his eyes and looked at the young man and the woman.
"I too," he said, "was in love, once. In this year falls the jubilee
of my last earthly passion; fifty years have run since last I longed
after the flesh--fifty years since God opened my eyes to the
hideousness of the corruption that man has brought upon himself.
"You are young, and your bodies are clean and straight, with no blotch
or ulcer or leprous taint to mar their much-desired beauty; but
because of your outward pride, your souls, it may be, fester inwardly
the more.
"And yet God made all perfect; it is but accident and the evil of will
that causes defaults. All metals should be gold, were it not that
their elements willed evilly in their desire to combine. And so with
men: the burning sulphur of passion, the salt of wisdom, the nimble
mercurial soul should come together to make a golden being,
incorruptible and rustless. But the elements mingle jarringly, not in
a pure harmony of love, and gold is rare, while lead and iron and
poisonous brass that leaves a taste as of remorse behind it are
everywhere common.
"God opened my eyes to it before my youth had too utterly wasted
itself to rottenness. It was half a hundred years ago, but I see her
still, my Ambrosia, with her white, sad face and her naked body and
that monstrous ill eating away at her breast.
"I have lived since then trying to amend the evil, trying to restore,
as far as my poor powers would go, some measure of original perfection
to the corrupted world. I have striven to give to all metals their
true nature, to make true gold from the false, the unreal, the
accidental metals, lead and copper and tin and iron. And I have
essayed that more difficult alchemy, the transformation of men. I die
now in my effort to purge away that most foul dross of misbelief from
the souls of these heathen men. Have I achieved anything? I know not."
The galley was moving now, its head turned seaward. The candles
shivered in the wind of its speed, casting uncertain, changing shadows
upon his face. There was a long silence on the poop. The oars creaked
and splashed. Sometimes a shout would come up from below, orders given
by the overseer of the slaves, a curse, the sound of a blow. The old
man spoke again, more weakly now, as though to himself.
"I have had eighty years of it," he said--"eighty years in the midst
of this corroding sea of hatred and strife. A man has need to keep
pure and unalloyed his core of gold, that little centre of perfection
with which all, even in this declination of time, are born. All other
metal, though it be as tough as steel, as shining-hard as brass, will
melt before the devouring bitterness of life. Hatred, lust, anger--the
vile passions will corrode your will of iron, the warlike pomp of your
front of brass. It needs the golden perfection of pure love and pure
knowledge to withstand them.
"God has willed that I should be the stone--weak, indeed, in
virtue--that has touched and transformed at least a little of baser
metal into the gold that is above corruption. But it is hard
work--thankless work. Man has made a hell of his world, and has set up
gods of pain to rule it. Goatish gods, that revel and feast on the
agony of it all, poring over the tortured world, like those hateful
lovers, whose lust burns darkly into cruelty.
"Fever goads us through life in a delirium of madness. Thirsting for
the swamps of evil whence the fever came, thirsting for the mirages of
his own delirium, man rushes headlong he knows not whither. And all
the time a devouring cancer gnaws at his entrails. It will kill him in
the end, when even the ghastly inspiration of fever will not be enough
to whip him on. He will lie there, cumbering the earth, a heap of
rottenness and pain, until at last the cleansing fire comes to sweep
the horror away.
"Fever and cancer; acids that burn and corrode. . . . I have had
eighty years of it. Thank God, it is the end."
It was already dawn; the candles were hardly visible now in the light,
faded to nothing, like souls in prosperity. In a little while the old
man was asleep.
The captain tiptoed up on to the poop and drew the young Spaniard
aside for a confidential talk.
"Do you think he will die to-day?" he asked.
The young man nodded.
"God rest his soul," said the captain piously. "But do you think it
would be best to take his body to Minorca or to Genoa? At Minorca they
would give much to have their own patron martyr. At the same time it
would add to the glory of Genoa to possess so holy a relic, though he
is in no way connected with the place. It's there is my difficulty.
Suppose, you see, that my people of Genoa did not want the body, he
being from Minorca and not one of them. I should look a fool then,
bringing it in in state. Oh, it's hard, it's hard. There's so much to
think about. I am not sure but what I hadn't better put in at Minorca
first. What do you think?"
The Spaniard shrugged his shoulder. "I have no advice to offer."
"Lord," said the captain as he bustled away, "life is a tangled knot
to unravel."
PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH
Transcriber's Note
This transcription is based on images scanned from a copy made
available by the University of Toronto and posted by the Internet
Archive at:
archive.org/details/limbohux00huxluoft
The following changes were noted:
-- p. 70: "Let it start smouldering at once I must--Inserted period
after "once".
-- p. 196: Even make pretences to re ard--Changed "re ard" to
"regard".
-- p. 203: Eupompus' next picture, representing an orchard of
identical trees--As this paragraph is a continuation of Emberlin's
speech, an opening double quotation mark was inserted at the beginning
of the paragraph.
-- p. 243: How exciting it was, wasn't it, HENRIKA?--Changed "HENRIKA"
from small caps to "Henrika".