THE HILT OF A RAPIER.
“Voysye! Hold on, man! Here, come along back!”
“Belay your jaw, you landlubber! I’m bound to overhaul that clipper
before she gets away! Cast off your grapnel, or”--
And twisting his arm away from Francis Billington, with whom he had
been drinking until both men had had more than enough, Richard Voysye,
seaman of the Golden Fleece, set out to overtake the female figure
which had just flitted past them in the twilight. Billington, not so
tipsy as the sailor, lunged forward in pursuit, and once more grasping
his arm exclaimed,--
“’Tis the young dame your captain is going to marry, I tell you, and
’twill go hard with the man that affronts her”--
“Hang the captain, and you too! There, then, you fool--take that!”
Delivering, as he spoke, a cruel blow in the face of his opponent,
Voysye felled him to the ground, and pursuing Gillian, who hearing the
scuffle had paused to look behind her, threw a rude arm around her
waist, crying,--
“Come, now, I’ll have one kiss, if I die for’t.”
But Gillian, lithe as a cat, struggled and fought after her kind, so
successfully that the ruffian had not been able to snatch his kiss
before a heavy foot reached him with a kick, and a furious voice roared
in his ear,--
“Avast there, you”--but the epithets are not writable, and in these
days no man, however angry, would use them in a woman’s presence.
They were, however, effectual, for with an oath quite as furious and
quite as unmentionable, Voysye quitted his hold upon the girl’s waist
and, turning, aimed at Cromwell’s face a buffet which, however, only
reached his shoulder. Angered, not so much at the assault as the
insubordination, the captain seized his sheathed rapier, and dealt with
the hilt a blow upon the sailor’s head which prostrated him, bleeding
and senseless, at Gillian’s feet.
“You’ve killed him, and they’ll hang you for murder!” cried she. “Hide
him, and get away with your vessels before it’s found out.”
“And would you go with me?” demanded Cromwell, gazing curiously in the
girl’s fierce, flushed face.
“Yes--no--yes, if you could get clear, and save your neck and your
money,” returned Gillian with cynical frankness.
“Ay, I thought as much, Mistress,” retorted the sailor, “and I’m a fool
to care for such a woman; but still I do, and when I go you shall go
too, or if I’m hung you shall have the price of a soul. Thirty pieces
satisfied Judas, didn’t it?”
“Here’s another man coming,” replied Gillian coldly, and with no more
words she walked away, while Cromwell, turning to the new-comer, said,--
“Well, Higgins, I’m beholden to you for setting me on his track, and
here he is. He lifted his hand on me, and I felled him with a tap of my
cutlass hilt. See if he’s hurt.”
Higgins, a man of few words, stared for a moment into his captain’s
face, looked after the retreating figure of Gillian, and then kneeling
beside his comrade fingered the wound awhile, mumbling, “Hurt, I should
say! ’Tis a shrewd wound i’faith! A parlous cut! ’Tis life and death,
and nigher death than life, to my mind.”
“Nonsense, man,” replied Cromwell a little uneasily. “A great hulking
fellow like that don’t die of a tap on his numskull. Run you into the
village and fetch a surgeon. Hasten, now, and when you’ve sent him, see
about some sort of litter, that we may take him to Cole’s tavern.”
“’Tis no use,” grumbled Higgins, but still scrambled to his feet, and
set off at such good speed that in half an hour Doctor Matthew Fuller,
nephew and successor of our old friend Doctor Samuel, was on the spot
and encouraging the wounded man’s efforts toward consciousness. But so
soon as he could sit up and speak, Voysye, true to his nature, paid
his surgeon’s bill with a curse, responded to his captain’s rough
expressions of amity with sulky silence, and scorning the litter, or
even the support of a friendly arm, staggered off toward the shore, and
as soon as possible got aboard ship and comforted his wound with as
much Santa Cruz rum as he could obtain, seasoning it with dire threats
of vengeance against Higgins, who prudently kept out of his way.
“’Tis an ill wind blown over,” reported Cromwell to his sweetheart that
night; and so it might have proved but that Voysye, waking next morning
in the dispositions natural to a man who has a fevered wound across
his head, and has gone to bed very drunk, insisted upon going ashore
to find and fight with Higgins, who had, as he knew, reported him to
the captain. In the captain’s absence all discipline had fallen into
such disrepute that nobody opposed the half-delirious movements of the
wounded man, who went ashore, roved around for a while, and finally,
just as he had discovered Higgins and was pointing a pistol at his
head, was seized with convulsions, and twenty-four hours later lay a
dead man in an upper chamber of Cole’s tavern.
So serious a matter as this could not be suffered to pass unnoticed
by the authorities, and with some grave expressions of regret and an
assurance of honorable treatment, Captain Cromwell was placed under
arrest and lodged in the strong-room of the Fort under guardianship of
Lieutenant Holmes, while a messenger was dispatched to Captain’s Hill
to summon Standish to a conference with the governor and the others
of his council; for the sailor had requested to be tried by a court
martial, and who but the General Officer of all the Colonies could
organize and head it? With the great captain came Lieutenant Nash, and
Ensign-bearer Constant Southworth, with Hatherley, Alden, Willett,
Cudworth, and other of the Duxbury men, so that for some days Plymouth
assumed the air of a garrisoned place in time of war, much to the
delight of Gillian, and perhaps some other of the lonely maids of the
almost deserted town.
The court martial, formal and dignified in its proceedings and
absolutely just in its dealings, lasted for a whole day, and much
testimony to Cromwell’s generous and humane treatment of his men was
rendered, as well as a good deal most unfavorable to the character of
the dead man, who seems to have been a very drunken and brutal fellow.
The only possible testimony as to the rencontre was that of Gillian,
and this she was most anxious to be permitted to give in person before
the court; but here both Bradford and Brewster interposed, and
insisted that a written affidavit made and sworn before the governor
should be accepted, a course indorsed by Standish with great alacrity.
In the end Cromwell was acquitted, but not without an exhortation from
Parson Rayner, the Chaplain of the Commission, to greater reverence and
tenderness for human life, to which the prisoner listened respectfully,
but Standish with a covert smile playing around the sadness of his
mouth, as he recalled a similar reproach long ago made to him by John
Robinson, now many years gone to his rest.
Perhaps as a mark of respect to the court martial that had tried and
acquitted him, possibly as a late testimony to his tenderness for
human life, Cromwell’s first act as a free man was to order a military
funeral for Voysye, and to request the presence of the train band
of Plymouth, to every member of which he presented a piece of black
taffeta to make a mourning cloak.
“And now I will marry you,” said Gillian, when next she saw her lover
alone; but he, with a queer smile, replied,--
“Think better of it, my dear! my money is well-nigh spent, and I feel
it in my bones that the next court martial will order me to be shot.
You’ll make a poor bargain, and that’s not to your mind.”
“A poor bargain indeed!” retorted Gillian, her temper flaming up; and
as John Alden’s boat was over from Duxbury she begged a passage in
it, and an hour later was on her way to visit Betty Pabodie, as she
pretended, but really to torment Sarah Brewster, who felt that she had
no right to refuse her willful kinswoman shelter whenever she claimed
it.
A few days later Cromwell sailed for Boston, where he remained for some
months, presented Governor Winthrop with an elegant sedan-chair, taken
out of one of his prizes, and was much admired and petted. Whether
Gillian joined him there and was openly married to him, or whether the
innate romance pervasive of the sea moved Cromwell to plan and execute
an elopement for the girl, whose relatives would have been only too
glad to give her to any worthy husband, we cannot tell; but that in
some way they at last came together is evident, and also that they were
married, since she was allowed to inherit his property. The manner
of his death was one of those marvels which men then regarded as a
direct judgment from heaven, but which we moderns are content to call a
strange coincidence.
It was in the late autumn, and Cromwell, after a merry feast at the
house of a boon companion in Dorchester, was riding rapidly homeward,
when his horse slipped upon an icy slope, and threw his rider violently
over his head. The night passed, and in the morning a wayfarer found
the faithful beast standing pensive and patient beside his master’s
prostrate body, now cold and stiff; and when he was brought into the
town and carried to his lodgings a wild-eyed woman rushed to meet
him, and staring at the wound whence his lifeblood had drained away,
shrieked, “’Tis Voysye’s hurt over again,” and fell in a swoon across
the body.
John Higgins, who had followed his captain’s body home, started in
terror at that word, and coming forward drew away the hair from the
wound, stared at it as Gillian had done, and hoarsely asked,--
“Was’t Voysye’s spook did it?”
“Nay, man,” impatiently answered the man who had found him. “See you
not that ’twas the hilt of the poor gentleman’s own rapier did it? When
I came upon him, the brass was bedded in the wound, and you may see the
blood and hairs upon it now. See!”
“Ay, I see,” replied Higgins heavily. “And well do I know, without
seeing, whose hand it was that urged the hilt to just that spot upon my
poor captain’s head. Wow! But I wish I might have seen the tussle that
befell when the old man got free of his carcase and fell upon Voysye
man to man; nay, spook to spook. Would they still be at it, think you?”
In a month or so more, Gillian, a very wealthy young widow, sailed for
England, where she married a pious and passing rich old Covenanter,
whom she also survived, and became one of the gayest and least
prejudiced ladies of the Court of Charles the Second, where we will
leave her.