[Illustration: I unsheathed my Saxon sword _See Page 140_ ]
The Wonderful Adventures
of
Phra the Phoenician
Retold by
Edwin Lester Arnold
With an Introduction by
Sir Edwin Arnold, K. C. I. E.
_With Fifteen Illustrations by
H. M. Paget_
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1917
Publisher’s Note.
This is a new edition of an extraordinary and original book, first
published many years ago.
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
I unsheathed my Saxon sword _Frontispiece_
Slipped a length of twisted cloth over his wicked neck and
tightened it with a jerk 12
I gave him the spear as he lowered his head 62
“Die, then!” she yelled; “and may a thousand curses weigh down
your souls!” 84
The Princes stood hesitating as I towered before them 110
Stern, inflexible, I frowned upon them 154
“By Abraham! noble Sir, those greaves become your legs!” 182
“I will not trust you!” she screamed 234
Five hundred of us charged boldly ten thousand Frenchmen! 270
Flamaucœur had taken it full in his side 276
Looking gently in the dead girl’s face, was Blodwen--Blodwen--my
thousand-years-dead wife 288
She proffered it to me 318
He kept those yellow orbs turned upon the garden 364
The great bird was dropping his ivory beak into the sweet chalice 372
Then came the scoundrel Spaniard, his lean, hungry face all drawn
and puckered with his wicked passions 446
The Wonderful Adventures
of
Phra the Phoenician
INTRODUCTION
BY SIR EDWIN ARNOLD, K.C.I.E.
In the garden of my Japanese home in Tokyo I have just perused the last
sheets of my son’s philosophical and historical romance, “Phra the
Phœnician.”
Amid other scenes I might be led to analyze, to criticize, perhaps a
little to argue about the singular hypothesis upon which he builds
his story. Here, with a Buddhist temple at my gate, and with Japanese
Buddhists around me, nothing seems more natural than that an author,
sufficiently gifted with imagination and study, should follow his hero
beyond the narrow limits of one little existence, down the chain of
many lives, taken up link by link, after each long interval of rest and
reward in the Paradise of Jô-Dô. I have read several chapters to my
Asiatic friends, and they say, “Oh, yes! It is _ingwa_! it is _Karma_!
That is all quite true. We, also, have lived many times, and shall live
many times more on this earth.” One of them opens the _shoji_ to let a
purple and silver butterfly escape into the sunshine. She thinks some
day it will thank her--perhaps a million years hence.
Moreover, here is a passage which I lately noted, suggestive enough
to serve as preface, even by itself, to the present book. Commenting
on a line in my “Song Celestial,” the writer thus remarks: “The human
soul should, therefore, be regarded as already in the present life
connected at the same time with two worlds, of which, so far as it is
confined to personal unity to a body, the material only is clearly
felt. It is, therefore, as good as proved, or, to be diffuse, it could
easily be proved, or, better still, it will hereafter be proved (I know
not where or when), that the human soul, even in this life, stands in
indissoluble community with all immaterial natures of the spirit-world;
that it mutually acts upon them and receives from them impressions, of
which, however, as man it is unconscious, as long as all goes well. It
is, therefore, truly one and the same subject, which belongs at the
same time to the visible and to the invisible world, but not just the
same person, since the representations of the one world, by reason of
its different quality, are not associated with ideas of the other, and,
therefore, what I think as spirit is not remembered by me as man.”
I, myself, have consequently taken the stupendous postulates of Phra’s
narrative with equanimity, if not acceptance, and derived from it a
pleasure and entertainment too great to express, since the critic, in
this case, is a well-pleased father.
The author of “Phra” has claimed for Romance the ancient license
accorded to Poetry and to Painting--
Pictoribus atque poetis
Quidlibet audendi semper fuit æqua potestas.
He has supposed a young Phœnician merchant, full of the love of
adventure, and endowed with a large and observant if very mystic
philosophy--such as would serve for no bad standpoint whence to witness
the rise and fall of religions and peoples. The Adventurer sets out for
the “tin islands,” or Cassiterides, at a date before the Roman conquest
of England. He dies and lives anew many times, but preserves his
personal identity under the garb of half a dozen transmigrations. And
yet, while renewing in each existence the characteristic passions and
sentiments which constitute his individuality and preserve the unity of
the narrative, the author seems to me to have adapted him to varying
times and places with a vraisemblance and absence of effort which are
extremely effective.
A Briton in British days, the slave-consort of his Druid wife, he
passes, by daring but convenient inventiveness, into the person of a
Centurion in the household of a noble Roman lady who illustrates in her
surroundings the luxurious vices of the latter empire with some relics
still of the older Republican virtues. Hence he glides again into
oblivion, yet wakes from the mystical slumber in time to take part in
King Harold’s gallant but fatal stand against the Normans.
He enjoys the repose, as a Saxon thane, which the policy of the
Conqueror granted to the vanquished; but after some startling
adventures in the vast oak woods of the South kingdom is rudely ousted
from his homestead by the “foreigners,” and in a neighboring monastery
sinks into secular forgetfulness once more of wife and children, lands
and life.
On the return of consciousness he finds himself enshrined as a saint,
thanks to the strange physical phenomena of his suspended animation,
and learns from the Abbot that he has lain there in the odor of
sanctity, according to indisputable church records, during 300 years.
He wanders off again, finding everything new and strange, and becomes
an English knight under King Edward III. He is followed to Crecy by a
damsel, who, from act to act of his long life-drama, similarly renews
an existence linked with his own, and who constantly seeks his love.
She wears the armor of a brother knight, and on the field of battle she
sacrifices her life for his.
Yet once more, a long spell of sleep, which is not death, brings this
much-wandering Phra to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and it is there,
after many and strange vicissitudes, he writes his experiences, and the
curtain finally falls over the last passage of this remarkable record.
Such, briefly, is the framework of the creation which, while it has
certainly proved to me extremely seductive as a story, is full, I
think, of philosophical suggestiveness. As long as men count mournfully
the years of that human life which M. Renan has declared to be so
ridiculously short, so long their fancies will hover about the
possibility of an _elixir vitæ_, of splendidly extended spans like
those ascribed to the old patriarchs, and meditate with fascination
the mystical doctrines of Buddhism and the Vedantes. In such a spirit
the Egyptians wrapped their dead in careful fashion, after filling the
body with preservatives; and if ancient tomes have the “Seven Sleepers”
of the Koran, the Danish King who dozes under the Castle of Elsinore,
and our own undying King Arthur, do we not go to see “Rip Van Winkle”
at the play, and is not hibernation one among the problems of modern
science which whispers that we might, if we liked, indefinitely adjourn
the waste of corporeal tissue, and spread our seventy or eighty years
over ever so many centuries?
But to be charming, an author is not obliged to be credible, or
what would become of the “Arabian Nights,” of “Gulliver,” and of
the best books in the library? Personally, I admire and I like
“Phra” enormously, and, being asked to pen these few lines by way of
introduction, I counsel everybody to read it, forgetting who it is that
respectfully offers this advice until the end of the book, when I shall
be no longer afraid if they remember.
Tokyo, Japan: April 14, 1890.
The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phœnician
PROLOGUE
Well and truly an inspired mind has written, “One man in his time plays
many parts,” but surely no other man ever played so many parts in the
course of a single existence as I have.
My own narrative seems incredible to me, yet I am myself a witness of
its truth. When I say that I have lived in this England more than one
thousand years, and have seen her bud from the callowest barbarity to
the height of a prosperity and honor with which the world is full, I
shall at once be branded as a liar. Let it pass! The accusation is
familiar to my ears. I tired of resenting it before your fathers’
fathers were born, and the scorn of your offended sense of veracity is
less to me than the lisping of a child.
I was, in the very distance of the beginning, a citizen of that
ancient city whose dominion once stretched from the blue waters of the
Ægean round to and beyond the broad stream of the Nile herself. Your
antiquities were then my household gods, your myths were my beliefs;
those facts and fancies on the very fringe of records about which you
marvel were the commonplace things of my commencement. Yes! and those
dusty relics of humanity that you take with unholy zeal from the
silent chambers of sarcophagi and pyramids were my boon companions,
the jolly revelers I knew long ago--the good fellows who drank and
sang with me through warm, long-forgotten nights--they were the great
princes to whom I bent an always duteous knee, and the fair damsels who
tripped our sunny streets when Sidon existed, and Tyre was not a matter
of speculation, or laughed at their own dainty reflections, in the
golden leisure of that forgotten age, where the black-legged ibis stood
sentinel among the blue lotus-flowers of the temple ponds.
Since then, what have I not done! I have traveled to the corners of
the world, and forgotten my own land in the love of another. I have
sat here in Britain at the tables of Roman Centurions, and the last
of her Saxon Kings died in my arms. I have sworn hatred of foreign
tyrants in the wassail bowls of serfs, and bestrode Norman chargers in
tiltyards and battlefields. The kingdoms of the misty western islands
which it was my wonderful fortune to see submerged by alternate tides
of conquest, I have seen emerge triumphant, with all their conquerors
welded into one. I have seen more battles than I can easily recall, and
war in every shape; I have enjoyed all sorts of peace, from the rudest
to the most cultivated.
I have lived, in fact, more than one thousand years in this seagirt
island of yours; and so strange and grim and varied have been my
experiences that I am tempted to set them down with a melancholy faith
in my own uniqueness. Though it is more than probable few will believe
me, yet for this I care nothing, nor do I especially seek your approval
of my labors. I, who have tasted a thousand pleasures, and am hoary
with disappointments, can afford to hold your censure as lightly as I
should your commendation.
Here, then, are my adventures, and this is how they commenced.
CHAPTER I
Regarding the exact particulars of my earliest wanderings I do confess
I am somewhat uncertain. This may tempt you to reply that one whose
memory is so far-reaching and capacious as mine will presently prove
might well have stored up everything that befell him from his very
beginning. All I can say is, things are as I set them down; and those
facts which you cannot believe you must continue to doubt. The first
thirty years of my life, it will be guessed in extenuation, were full
of the frailties and shortcomings of an ordinary mortal; while those
years which followed have impressed themselves indelibly upon my mind
by right of being curious past experience and credibility.
Looking back, then, into the very remote past is like looking upon a
country which a low sun at once illuminates and blurs. I dimly perceive
in the golden haze of the ancient time a fair city rising, tier upon
tier, out of the blue waters of the midland sea. A splendid harbor
frames itself out of the mellow uncertainty--a harbor whereof the long
white arms are stretched out to welcome the commerce of all the known
world; and under the white fronts, and at the temple steps of that
ancient city, Commerce poured into the lap of Luxury every commodity
that could gratify cupidity or minister to human pleasure.
I was young then, no doubt, nor need I say a fool; and very likely the
sight of a thousand strange sails at my father’s door excited my daily
wonder, while the avarice which recognizes no good fortune in a present
having was excited by the silks and gems, the rich stuffs and the gums,
the quaint curiosities of human ingenuity and the frolic things of
nature, which were piled up there. More than all, my imagination must
have been fired by the sea captains’ tales of wonder or romance, and,
be the cause what it may, I made up my mind to adventure like them, and
carried out my wilful fancy.
It is a fitting preface to all I have learned since that my first
real remembrance should be one of vanity. Yet so it was. More than a
thousand years ago--I will not lower my record by a single luster to
propitiate your utmost unbelief--I set out on a first voyage. It might
be yesterday, so well it comes before me--with my youthful pride as
the spirit of a man was born within, and I felt the strong beat of the
fresh salt waves of the open sea upon my trading vessel’s prow, and
knew, as I stood there by her steering-oar, that she was stuffed with
a hundred bales of purple cloth from my father’s vats along the shore,
and bound whither I listed. Who could have been prouder than I?--who
could have heard finer songs of freedom in the merry hum of the warm
southern air in the brown cordage overhead, or the frothy prattle of
the busy water alongside, as we danced that day out of the white arms
of Tyre, the queenly city of the ancient seas, and saw the young world
unfurl before us, full of magnificent possibilities?
It is not my wish or intention to write of my early travels, were it
possible. On this voyage (or it may be on some others that followed,
now merged into the associations of the first) we traded east and west,
with adventure and success. The adventure was sure enough, for the
great midland sea was then the center of the world, and what between
white-winged argosies of commerce, the freebooters of a dozen nations
who patroled its bays and corners, and rows of royal galleys sailing to
the conquest of empires, it was a lively and perilous place enough. As
for the profit, it came quickly to those who opened a hundred virgin
markets in the olden days.
We sailed into the great Egyptian river up to Heliopolis, bartering
stuffs for gold-dust and ivory; at another time we took Trinacrian
wine and oranges into Ostia--a truly magnificent port, with incredible
capacities for all the fair and pleasant things of life. Then we sailed
among the beautiful Achaian islands with corn and olives; and so,
profiting everywhere, we lived, for long, a jolly, uncertain life, full
of hardship and pleasure.
For the most part, we hugged the coasts and avoided the open sea.
It was from the little bays, whose mouths we thus crossed, that
the pirates we greatly dreaded dropped down upon merchantmen, like
falcons from their perches. When they took a vessel that resisted,
the crew, at those rough hands, got scant mercy. I have come across a
galley drifting idly before the wind, with all her crew, a grim row
of skeletons, hanging in a row along her yard, and swinging this way
and that, and rattling drearily against the sail and each other in
melancholy unison with the listless wallow of their vessel. At another
time, a Roman trireme fell upon a big pirate of Melita and stormed and
captured her. The three hundred men on board were too ugly and wicked
to sell, so the Romans drove them overboard like sheep, and burned the
boat. When we sailed over the spot at sundown the next day she was
still spluttering and hissing, with the water lapping over the edge of
her charred side, and round among the curls of yellow smoke overhead a
thousand gulls were screeching, while a thousand more sat, gorged and
stupid, upon the dead pirates. Not for many nights did we forget the
evil picture of retribution, and how the setting sun flooded the sea
with blood, and how the dead villains, in all their horror, swirled
about in twos and threes in that crimson light, and fell into our wake,
drawn by the current, and came jostling and grinning, and nodding after
us, though we made all sail to outpace them, in a gloomy procession
for a mile or so.
It often seemed to me in those days there were more freebooters afloat
than honest men. At times we ran from these, at times we fought them,
and again we would give a big marauder a share of cargo to save the
ship from his kindred who threatened us. It was a dangerous game, and
one never knew, on rising, where his couch would be at night, nor
whether the prosperous merchant of the morning might not be the naked
slave of the evening, storing his own wealth in a robber cave under the
lash of some savage sea tyrant.
Yet even these cruel rovers did me a good turn. We were short of water,
and had run down along a lonely coast to a green spring we knew of to
fill water-butts and skins. When we let go in the little inlet where
the well was to be found, another vessel, and, moreover, a pirate, lay
anchored before us. However, we were consciously virtuous, and, what
was of more consideration, a larger vessel and crew than the other,
so we went ashore and made acquaintance round the fresh water with as
villainous a gang of sea-robbers as ever caused the blood of an honest
trader to run cold in his veins. The very air of their neighborhood
smelled so of treachery and cruelty we soon had but one thought--to
load up and be gone.
But this was a somewhat longer process than we wished, as our friends
had baled the little spring dry, and we had to wait its refilling.
While we did so, I strolled over to a group of miserable slaves turned
out for an airing, and cowering on the black and shadeless rocks. There
were in that abject group captives from every country that fared upon
those seas, and some others besides. The dusky peasant of Bœotia, that
fronts the narrow straits, wrung her hands by the fair-cheeked girl
snapped up from the wide Gulf of Narbo; the dark Numidian pearl-fisher
cursed his patron god; and the tall Achaian from the many islands of
Peloponnesian waters gritted his teeth as he cowered beneath his rags
and bemoaned the fate that threw him into the talons of the sea-hawks.
I looked upon them with small interest, for new-taken slaves were no
great sight to me, until I chanced, a little way from the others, upon
such a captive as I had rarely or never seen. She struck me at once as
being the fiercest and most beautiful creature that mortal eyes had
ever lit upon. Never was Umbrian or Iberian girl like that; never was
Cyprian Aphrodite served by a maid so pink and white. Her hair was
fiery red gold, gleaming in the sunshine like the locks of the young
goddess Medusa. Her face was of ruddy ivory, and her native comeliness
gleamed through the unwashed dust and tears of many long days and
nights. Her eyes were as blue under her shaggy wild hair as the sky
overhead, and her body--grimy under its sorrow-stains--was still as
fair as that of some dainty princess.
Knowing the pirate captain would seek a long price for his property, I
determined to use a little persuasion with him. I went back to my men,
and sent one of them, proficient in the art of the bowstring, to look
at the slaves. Then I drew the unsuspecting scoundrel up there for a
bargain, and, well out of sight of his gang, we faced the red-haired
girl and discussed her price. The rascal’s first figure was three
hundred of your modern pounds, a sum which would then have fetched the
younger daughter of a sultan, full of virtue and accomplishments. As
this girl very likely had neither one nor the other, I did not see why
it was necessary to pay so much, and, stroking my beard, in an agreed
signal, with my hand, as my man was passing behind the old pirate, he
slipped a length of twisted cloth over his wicked neck and tightened it
with a jerk that nearly started the eyes from his head, and brought
him quickly to his knees.
[Illustration: Slipped a length of twisted cloth over his wicked neck
and tightened it with a jerk]
“Now, delicately-minded one,” I said, “I don’t want to fight you and
your crew for this maid here, on whom I have set my heart, but you know
we are numerous and well armed, so let us have a peaceful and honest
bargain. Give me a fairer price,” and, obedient to my signal, the band
was loosened.
“Not a sesterce will I take off,” spluttered the wretch, “not a
drachma, not an ounce!”
“Come! come! think again,” I said, persuasively, “and the cloth shall
help you.” Thereon, another turn was taken, and my henchman turned his
knuckles into the nape of the swarthy villain’s neck until the veins on
his forehead stood out like cordage and the blood ran from his nose and
eyes.
In a minute the rover threw up his hands and signed he had enough, and
when he got his breath we found he had knocked off a hundred pounds.
We gave him the cord again, and brought him down, twist by twist,
to fifty. By this time he was almost at his last gasp, and I was
contented, paying the coins out on a rock and leaving them there, with
the rogue well bound. I was always honest, though, as became the times,
a trifle hard at bargains.
Then I cut the red maid loose and took her by the elbow and led her
down to the beach, where we were secretly picked up by my fellows, and
shortly afterward we set sail again for the open main.
Thus was acquired the figure-head of my subsequent adventures--the
Siren who lured me to that coast where I have lived a thousand years
and more.
It was the inscrutable will of Destiny that those shining coins I
paid down on the bare, hot African rock should cost me all my wealth,
my cash and credit at many ports, and that that fair slave, who I
deemed would serve but to lighten a voyage or two, should mock my
forethought, and lead my fate into the strangest paths that ever were
trodden by mortal foot.
In truth, that sunny virago bewitched me. She combined such ferocity
with her grace, and was so pathetic in her reckless grief at times,
that I, the immovable, was moved, and softened the rigor of her
mischance as time went on so much as might be. At once, on this, like
some caged wild creature, which forgives to one master alone the
sorrows of captivity, she softened to me; and before many days were
over she had bathed, and, discarding her rags for a length or two of
cloth, had tied up her hair with a strand of ribbon she found, and,
looking down at her reflection in a vessel of water (her only mirror,
for we carried women but seldom), she smiled for the first time.
After this, progress was rapid, and, though at first we could only
with difficulty make ourselves understood, yet she soon picked up
something of the Southern tongue from me, while I very fairly acquired
the British language of this comely tutoress. Of her I learned she was
of that latter country, where her father was a chief; how their coast
village had been surprised by a Southern rover’s foray; she knew not
how many of the people slain, or made captive, and herself carried
off. Afterward she had fallen into the hands of other pirates by an
act of sea barter, and they were taking her to Alexandria, hoping, as
I guessed, in that luxurious city to obtain a higher price than in the
ordinary markets of Gaul or Italy.
What I heard of Britain from these warm lips greatly fired my
curiosity, and, after touching at several ports and finding trade but
dull, chance clenched my resolution.
We had sailed northward with a cargo of dates, and on the sixth day
ran in under the high promontory of Massilia, which you moderns call
Marseilles. Here I rid myself of my fruit at a very good profit, and,
after talking to a brother merchant I met by chance upon the quay,
fully determined to load up with oil, wine, stuffs, and such other
things as he recommended, and sail at once for Britain.
Little did I think how momentous this hasty decision would be! It was
brought about partly as I have explained, and partly by the interest
which just then that country was attracting. All the weapons and
things of Britain were then in good demand: no tin and gold, the
smiths roundly swore, were like the British; no furs in winter, the
Roman ladies vowed, were so warm as those; while no patrician from
Tarentum to the Tiber held his house well furnished unless a red-haired
slave-girl or two from that remote place idled, sad and listlessly, in
his painted porticoes.
In these slaves there was a brisk and increasing traffic. I went into
the market that ran just along the inner harbor one day, and saw there
an ample supply of such curious goods suitable for every need.
All down the middle of a wide street rough booths of sailcloth had been
run up, and about and before these crouched slaves of every age and
condition. There were old men and young men--fierce and wild-looking
barbarians, in all truth--some with the raw, red scars on chest and
limbs they had taken a few weeks before in a last stand for liberty,
and some groaning in the sickness that attended the slaver’s lash and
their condition.
There were lank-haired girls, submitting with sullen hate to the
appraising fingers of purchasers laughing and chatting in Latin or
Gaulish, as they dealt with them no more gently than a buyer deals with
sheep when mutton is cheap. Mothers again--sick and travel-stained
themselves--were soothing the unkempt little ones who cowered behind
them and shrank from every Roman footstep as the quails shrink from
a kestrel’s shadow. Some of these children were very flowers of
comeliness, though trodden into the mire of misfortune. I bought a
little girl to attend upon her upon my ship, who, though she wore at
the time but one sorry cloth, and was streaked with dirt and dust,
had eyes clear as the southern sky overhead, and hair that glistened
in uncared-for brightness upon her shoulders like a tissue of golden
threads. Her mother was loth to part with her, and fought like a tiger
when we separated them. It was only after the dealer’s lash had cut a
dozen red furrows into her back, and a bystander had beat her on the
head with the flat of his sword, that she gave in and swooned, and I
led the weeping little one away.
So we loaded up again with Easter nothings, such as the barbarians
might be supposed to like, and in a few weeks started once more. We
sailed down the green coast of Hispania, through the narrow waters
of Herculis Fretum, and then, leaving the undulating hills of that
pleasant strait behind, turned northward through the long waves of the
black outer sea.
For many days we rolled up a sullen and dangerous coast, but one
morning our pilot called me from my breakfast of fruit and millet
cakes, and, pointing over the green expanse, told me yonder white surf
on the right was breaking on the steep rocks of Armorica, while the
misty British shore lay ahead.
So I called out Blodwen the slave, and told her to snuff the wind
and find what it had to say. She knew only too well, and was vastly
delighted, wistfully scanning the long gray horizon ahead, and being
beside herself with eagerness.
We steered westwardly toward the outer islands, called Cassiterides,
where most of our people collected and bought their tin, but we were
fated not to reach them. On the morrow so fierce a gale sprang out of
the deep we could by no means stand against it, but turned and fled
through the storm, and over such a terrible expanse of mighty billows
as I never saw the like of.
To my surprise, my girl thought naught of the wind and sea, but came
constantly to the groaning bulwarks, where the angry green water
swirled and gleamed like a caldron, and, holding on by a shroud, looked
with longing but familiar eyes at the rugged shore we were running
down. At one time I saw her smile to recognize, close in shore, and
plunging heavily toward some unknown haven, half a dozen of her own
native fisher-boats. Later on, Blodwen brightened up even more as the
savage cliffs of the west gave way to rolling downs of grass, and when
these, as we fled with the sea-spume, grew lower, and were here and
there clothed with woods, and little specks among them of cornfields,
she shouted with joy, and, leaping down from the tall prow, where she
had stood, indifferent to the angry thunder of the bursting surges upon
our counter, and the sting and rattle of the white spray that flew up
to the swinging yard every time we dropped into the bosom of the angry
sea, she said exultingly, with her face red and gleaming in a salt wet
glaze, she could guide us to a harbor if we would.
I was by this time a little sick at heart for the safety of all my
precious things in bales and boxes below, and something like the long
invoice of them I knew so well rose in my throat every time we sank
with a horrible sinking into one of those shadowy valleys between the
hissing crests--so I nodded. Blodwen at once made the helmsman draw
nearer the coast. By the time we had approached the shore within a
mile or so the white squalls were following each other fast, while
heavy columns of western rain were careering along the green sea in
many tall, spectral forms. But nothing cared that purchase of mine.
She had gone to the tiller, and, like some wild goddess of the foam,
stood there, her long hair flying on the wet sea wind, and her fierce,
bright eyes aglow with pleasure and excitement as she scanned the white
ramparts of the coast down which we were hurtling. She was oblivious
of the swarthy seamen, who eyed her with wonder and awe; oblivious of
the white bed of froth which boiled and flashed all down the rim of our
dipping gunwale; and equally indifferent to the heavy rain that smoked
upon our decks, and made our straining sails as hard and stiff as wood.
Just as the great shore began to loom over us, and I sorely doubted
my wisdom in sailing these unknown waters with such a pilot, she gave
a scream of pleasure--an exulting, triumphant note that roused a
sympathetic chorus in the piping wild fowl overhead--and, following the
point of her finger, we saw the solid rampart of cliffs had divided,
and a little estuary was opening before us.
Round went our felucca to the imperious gesture of that girl, and,
gripping the throbbing tiller over the hands of the strong steersman,
aglow with excitement, yet noting everything, while the swart brown
sailors shouted at the humming cordage, she took us down through an
angry caldron of sea and over a foaming bar (where I cursed, in my
haste, every ounce I had spent upon her) into the quieter waters
beyond; and when, a few minutes later--reeking with salt spray, but
safe and sound--we slowly rolled in with the making tide to a secure,
landlocked haven, that brave girl left the rudder, and, going forward,
gave one look at the opening valley, which I afterward knew was her
strangely recovered home, and then her fair head fell upon her arms,
and, leaning against the mast, under the tent of her red hair, she
burst into a passionate storm of tears.
She soon recovered, and stealing a glance at me as she wiped her lids
with the back of her hands, to note if I were angry, her feminine
perception found my eyes gave the lie to the frown upon my forehead,
so she put on some extra importance (as though the air of the place
suited her dignity), and resumed command of the ship.
Well! There is much to tell, so it must be told briefly. We sailed
into a fair green estuary, with woods on either hand dipping into the
water and nodding their own glistening reflections, until we turned
a bend and came upon a British village down by the edge. There were,
perhaps, two hundred huts scattered round the slope of a grassy mound,
upon top of which was a stockade of logs and mud walls encompassing a
few better-built houses. Canoes and bigger boats were drawn up on the
beach, and naked children and dogs were at play along the margin; while
women and some few men were grinding corn and fashioning boat-gear.
As our sails came round the headland, with one single accord the
population took to flight, flung down their meal-bags and tools,
tumbling over each other in their haste, and, yelling and scrambling,
they streamed away to the hill.
This amused Blodwen greatly, and she let them run until the fat
old women of the crowd had sorted themselves out into a panting
rear guard halfway up, and the long-legged youngsters were already
scrambling over the barrier; then, with her hand over her mouth, she
exerted her powerful voice in a long, wailing signal cry. The effect
was instantaneous. The crowd stopped, hesitated, and finally came
scrambling down again to the beach; and, after a little parley, being
assured of their good-will, and greatly urged by Blodwen, we landed,
and were soon overwhelmed in a throng of wondering, jostling, excited
British.
But it was not me to whom they thronged, but rather her; and such
wonder and surprise, broadening slowly in joy as she, with her nimble
woman’s tongue, answered their countless questions, I never witnessed.
At last they set up yelling and shouting, and, seizing her, dragged and
carried her in a tumultuous procession up the zigzag into the fortalice.
Blodwen had come home--that was all; and from a slave girl had
blossomed into a Princess!
Never before was there such a yelling and chattering and blowing of
horns and beating of shields. While messengers rushed off down the
woodland paths to rouse the country, the villagers crowded round me and
my men, and, having by the advice of one of their elders, relinquished
their first intention of cutting all our throats in the excess of their
pleasure, treated us very handsomely, feeding and feasting the crew to
the utmost of their capacity.
I, as you will suppose, was ill at ease for my fair barbarian who had
thus turned the tables upon me, and in whose power it was impossible
not to recognize that we now lay. How would the slave Princess treat
her captive master? I was not long in doubt. Her messenger presently
touched me on the shoulder as I sat, a little rueful, on a stone apart
from my rollicking men, and led me through that prehistoric village
street up the gentle slope and between the oak-log barrier into the
long, low dwelling that was at once the palace and the citadel of the
place.
Entering, I found myself in a very spacious hall, effective in its
gloomy dignity. All round the three straight sides the massive walls
were hidden in drapery of the skins and furs of bear, wolf, and deer,
and over these were hung in rude profusion light round shields embossed
with shining metal knobs, javelins, and boar spears, with a hundred
other implements of war or woodcraft. Below them stood along the
walls rough settles, and benches with rougher tables, enough to seat,
perhaps, a hundred men. At the crescent-shaped end of the hall, facing
the entrance door, was a daïs--a raised platform of solid logs closely
placed together and covered with skins--upon which a massive and ample
chair stood, also of oak, and wonderfully fashioned and carved by the
patient labor of many hands.
Nigh it were a group of women, and one or two white-robed Druids, as
these people call their priests. But chief among them was she who
stepped forth to meet me, clad (for her first idea had been to change
her dress) in fine linen and fair furs--how, I scarcely know, save
that they suited her marvelously. Fine chains of hammered gold were
about her neck, a shining gorget belt set with a great boss of native
pearls upon her middle, and her two bare white arms gleamed like ivory
under their load of bracelets of yellow metal and prismatic pearl shell
that clanked harmoniously to her every movement. But the air she put
on along with these fine things was equally becoming, and she took me
by the hand with an affectionate condescension, while, turning to her
people, she briefly harangued them, running glibly over my virtues,
and bestowing praise upon the way in which I had “rescued and restored
her to her kindred,” until, so gracefully did she pervert the truth, I
felt a blush of unwonted virtue under my callous skin; and when they
acclaimed me friend and ally, I stood an inch taller among them to find
myself of such unexpected worth--one tall Druid alone scowling on me
evilly.
For long that pleasant village by the shallow waters remembered the
coming of Blodwen to her own. Her kinsmen had all been slain in the
raid of the sea-rovers which brought about her captivity, and thus--the
succession to headship and rule being very strictly observed among the
Britons--she was elected, after an absence of six months, to the oak
throne and the headship of the clan with an almost unbroken accord.
But that priest, Dhuwallon, her cousin, and next below her in birth,
scowled again to see her seated there, and hated me, I saw, as the
unconscious thwarter of his ambition.
Those were fine times, and the Princess bought my cargo of wine and
oil and Southern things, distributing it to all that came to pay her
homage, so that for days we were drunk and jolly. Fires gleamed on
twenty hilltops round about, and the little becks ran red down to the
river with the blood of sheep and bullocks slaughtered in sacrifice;
and the foot-tracks in the woods were stamped into highways; and the
fords ran muddy to the ocean; and the grass was worn away; and birds
and beasts fled to quieter thickets; and fishes swam out to the blue
sea; and everything was eaten up, far and wide; that time my fair slave
girl first put her foot upon the daïs and prayed to the manes of her
ancestors among the oak trees.