I looked at Mistress Mary and she at me. We had withdrawn to the
deepness of a window, while the black slaves moved in and out,
bearing the breakfast dishes, as reasonably unheeded by us as the
cup-bearers in a picture of a Roman banquet in the time of the
Caesars which I saw once. Mistress Mary was pale with dismay, and
yet her mouth twitched with laughter at the notion of displaying,
before the horrified eyes of Madam Cavendish, those grim adornments
which had arrived in the Golden Horn.
"La," said she, "when they come a-trundling in a powder-cask and I
courtesy and say, 'Madam, here is my furbelowed and gold-flowered
sacque,' I wonder what will come to pass." Then she laughed.
"My God, madam," said I, "why did you give that list?" She laughed
again, and her eyes flashed with the very light of mischief.
"I grant 'twas a fib," said she; "but I was taken unawares, and, la,
how could I recite to her the true list of my rare finery which came
to port yesterday? So I but gave the list of goods for which my Lady
Culpeper sent to England for the replenishing of her wardrobe and
her daughter's, and which is daily expected by ship. I had it from
Cicely Hyde, who had it from Cate Culpeper. The ship is due now, and
may be even now in port, and so I worded what I said, that 'twas
not, after all, a fib, except the hearer chose to make it so. I
said, 'Such goods as these are due, madam.'" Then she gave the list
anew, like a parrot, while Catherine, who had returned, stood
staring at her, white with terror, though Mary did not see her until
she had finished. Then, when she turned and caught her keenly
anxious eyes, she started. "You here, Catherine?" said she. Then,
knowing not how much her sister knew already, she tried to cover her
confusion, like a child denying its raid on the jam pots, while its
lips and fingers are still sticky with the stolen sweet. "What think
you of my list, sweetheart?" cried she, merrily. "A pair of the silk
stockings and two of the breast-knots and a mask and a flowered
apron shall you have." Then out of the room she whisked abruptly,
laughing from excess of nervous confusion, and not being able to
keep up the farce longer.
Then Catherine turned to me. "She has undone herself, for Madam
Cavendish will see those goods when the Golden Horn comes in, or
ferret the mystery to its farthest hole of hiding," said she. Then
she wrung her hands and cried out sharply, "My God, Harry Wingfield,
what is to be done?"
"Madam Cavendish would surely never betray her own flesh and blood,"
said I, though doubtfully, when I reflected upon her hardness to
Catherine herself, for Madam Judith Cavendish was not one for whom
love could change the colour of the clear light of justice, and she
would see forever her own as they were.
"There is to her no such word as betray except in the service of the
king," said Catherine. Then she added in a whisper, "Know you the
story of her youngest son, my uncle Ralph Cavendish, who went over
to Cromwell?"
I nodded. I knew it well, and had heard it from a lad how Ralph
Cavendish's own mother had turned him from her door one night with
the king's troops in the neighbourhood, though it was afterward
argued that she did not know of that, and he had been taken before
morning and afterwards executed, and she had never said a word nor
shed a tear that any one saw.
"When the Golden Horn comes in she will demand to see the goods,"
Catherine repeated.
"Then--the Golden Horn must not come in," said I.
Catherine looked at me with that flash of ready wit in her eyes
which was like to the flash of fire from gunpowder meeting tinder.
Then she cried out, "Quick, then, quick, I pray thee, Harry
Wingfield, to the wharf! For if ever I saw sail, I saw that, and the
tide will have turned 'm. Quick, quick!"
She waited not for any head-gear, but forth into the May sunlight
she rushed, and I with her, and shouted at the top of my lungs to
the slaves for my horse, then went myself, having no mind to wait,
and hustled the poor beast from his feed-bin, and was on his back
and at a hard gallop to the wharf, with Mistress Catherine following
as fast as she was able. Now and then, when I turned, I saw her slim
green shape advancing, looking for all the world to my fancy like
some nymph who had been changed into a river-reed and had gotten
life again.
When I reached the wharf, with my horse all afoam, there was indeed
the Golden Horn down the river, coming in. The tide and the wind had
been against her, or she would have reached shore ere now. Then
along the bank I urged my horse, and in some parts, where there was
no footing and the tangle of woods too close, into the stream we
plunged and swam, then up bank again, and so on with a mighty
splatter of mire and water and rain of green leaves and blossoms
from the low hang of branches through which we tore way, till we
came abreast of the Golden Horn. Then I hallooed, first making sure
that there was no one lurking near to overhear, and waved my
handkerchief, keeping my horse standing to his fetlocks in the
current, until over the water came an answering halloo from the
Golden Horn, and I could plainly see Captain Calvin Tabor on the
quarter-deck. The ship was not far distant, and I could have swam to
her, and would have, though the tide was strong, had there been no
other way.
"Halloo," shouted Captain Tabor, and two more men came running to
the side, then more still, till it was overhung by a whole row of
red English faces.
"Halloo!" shouted I.
"What d'ye lack? What's afoot? Halloo!"
"Send a boat, for God's sake," I shouted back. "News, news; keep
where ye be. Do not land. Send a boat!"
"Is it the convict tutor, Wingfield?" shouted the captain.
I called back yes, and repeated my demand that he send a boat for
God's sake.
Then I saw a great running hither and thither, and presently a boat
touched water from the side of the Golden Horn with a curious
lapping dip, and I was off my horse and tied him fast to a tree on
the bank, with loose rein that he might crop his fill of the sweet
spring herbage, and when the boat touched bank was in her and
speedily aboard the ship.
Captain Tabor was leaning over the bulwarks, and his ruddy face was
pale, and his look of devil-may-care gayety somewhat subdued.
When I gained the deck forward he came and grasped me by the arm,
and led me into his own cabin, having first shouted forth to his
mate an order to drop anchor and keep the ship in midstream.
"Now, in the name of all the fiends, what is afoot?" he cried out,
though with a cautious cock of his eyes toward the deck, for English
sailors are not black slaves when it comes to discussing matters of
weight.
"There is a plot afoot against His Majesty King Charles, and you but
yesterday, that being also a day on which it is unlawful to unload a
ship, discharged a portion of your cargo, toward its furtherance and
abetting," said I.
"Hell and damnation!" he cried out, "when I trust a woman's tongue
again may I swing from my own yard-arms. What brought that
fair-faced devil into it, anyway? Be there not men enough in this
colony?"
"And you keep not a civil tongue in your head when you speak of
Mistress Mary Cavendish; you will find of a surety that there be one
man in this colony, sir," said I.
He laughed in that mocking fashion of his which incensed me still
further. Then he spoke civilly enough, and said that he meant no
disrespect to one of the fairest ladies whom he had ever had the
good fortune to see, but that it was so well known as to be no more
slight in mentioning than the paint and powder wherewith a woman
enhanced her beauty, that a woman's tongue could not be trusted like
a man's, and that it were a pity that money, which were much better
spent by her for pretty follies, should be put to such grim uses,
and where were the gallants of Virginia that they suffered it, but
did not rather empty their own purses?
I explained, being somewhat mollified, and also somewhat of his way
of thinking, that men there were, but there was little gold since
the Navigation Act. And I informed Captain Tabor how Mistress Mary
Cavendish, having an estate not so heavily charged with expenses as
some, and being her own mistress with regard to the disposal of its
revenues, had the means which the men lacked.
"But what was the news which brought you thither, sir?" demanded
Captain Tabor.
"You know of the plot--" I begun, but he broke in upon me
fiercely.
"May the fiends take me, but what know I of a plot?" he cried.
"Can I not bring over gowns and kerchiefs and silken ribbons for a
pretty maid without a plot? How knew you that? There is the woman's
tongue again. But can I not bring over goods even of such sort;
might I not with good reason suppose them to be for the defence of
the cause of his most gracious Majesty King Charles against the
savages, or any malcontents in his colonies? What plot, sirrah?"
"The plot for the cutting down of the young tobacco plants, Captain
Tabor," said I.
His eyes blazed at me, while his face was pale and grim.
"How many know of the goods I discharged from the Golden Horn
yesterday?" he asked.
"Three men, and I know not how many more, and two women," said I.
"Two women!" he groaned out. "Pestilence on these tide-waters which
hold a ship like a trap! Two women!"
"But the concern is lest a third woman know," said I.
"If three women know, then God save us all, for their triple tongues
will carry as far as the last trump!" cried Captain Tabor. Perturbed
as he was, he never lost that air of reckless daring which compelled
me to a sort of liking for him. "Out with the rest of it, sir," he
said.
Then I told my story, to which he listened, scowling, yet with that
ready laugh at his mouth. "'Tis a scurvy trick to serve a woman,
both for her sake and the rest of us, to let her meddle with such
matters," he said, "and so I told that cousin of hers, Master Drake,
who came with her to give the order ere I sailed for England."
"Came any man save Ralph Drake with her then?" I asked.
"The saints forbid," he replied. "A secret is a secret only when in
the keeping of one; with two it findeth legs, but with three it
unfoldeth the swiftest wings of flight in all creation, and is
everywhere with no alighting. Had three come to me with that mad
order to bring powder and shot in the stead of silk stockings and
garters and cambric shifts and kerchiefs, I would have clapped full
sail on the Golden Horn, though--" he hesitated, then spoke in a
whisper--"my mind is against tyranny, to speak you true, though
I care not a farthing whether men pray on their knees or their feet,
or in gowns or the fashion of Eden. And I care not if they pray at
all, nor would I for the sake of that ever have forsaken, had I
stood in my grandfather's shoes, the flesh-pots of old England for
that howling wilderness of Plymouth. But for the sake of doing as I
willed, and not as any other man, would I have sailed or swam the
seas had they been blood instead of water. And so am I now with a
due regard to the wind and the trim of my sails and the ears of
tale-bearers, for a man hath but one head to lose with you of
Virginia. But, the Lord, to make a little maid like that run the
risk of imprisonment or worse, knew you aught of it, sir?"