~~~ Project Gutenberg Australia ~~~

Title:      Anthony Adverse (1933)
Author:     Hervey Allen
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia ebook *
eBook No.:  0200541.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted:          August 2002
Date most recently updated: August 2002

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Due to the large foreign character content, the 8-bit ASCII character set
(which included accented characters) has been used. Anthony spends time
in many countries, hence the Italian, Spanish, German, French,
and even Cajun.

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Title: Anthony Adverse (1933)
Author: Hervey Allen





"There is something in us that can be without us, and will be after
us, though indeed it hath no history of what it was before us, and
cannot tell how it entered into us."

--SIR THOMAS BROWNE.




CONTENTS


VOLUME ONE

THE ROOTS OF THE TREE


BOOK I--IN WHICH THE SEED FALLS IN THE ENCHANTED FOREST


I.  The Coach

II.  The Little Madonna

III.  At the "Golden Sheaf"

IV.  The Enchanted Forest

V.  A Pastoral Interlude

VI.  The Muse of Tragedy

VII.  The Fly Walks In

VIII.  A Hole in the Wall


BOOK II--IN WHICH THE ROOTS OF THE TREE ARE EXPOSED


IX.  The Convent of Jesus the Child

X.  The Chick Emerges

XI.  Between Two Worlds

XII.  Casa da Bonnyfeather

XIII.  The Evidence of Things Unseen

XIV.  Reality Makes a Bid

XV.  The Shadows of Faith

XVI.  Pagan Mornings

XVII.  Philosophical Afternoons

XVIII.  Bodies in the Dark

XIX.  The Numbers of the Virgin


BOOK III--IN WHICH THE ROOTS OF THE TREE ARE TORN LOOSE


XX.  Apples and Ashes

XXI.  Adventures of a Shepherdess

XXII.  Icons and Iconoclasts

XXIII.  Farewells and Epitaphs



VOLUME TWO

THE OTHER BRONZE BOY


BOOK IV--IN WHICH SEVERAL IMAGES TRAVEL TOGETHER


XXIV.  The Table of the Sun

XXV.  The Villa Brignole

XXVI.  The Street of the Image Makers

XXVII.  The Pillars of Hercules

XXVIII.  The Seed of a Miracle


BOOK V--IN WHICH THE NECESSARY ALLOY IS ADDED



XXIX.  The House of Silenus

XXX.  The Miracle in the Chapel of St. Paul, Regla

XXXI.  A Decent Mammalian Philosophy

XXXII.  Honour Among Thieves

XXXIII.  A Mantilla Intrudes

XXXIV.  Through a Copy of Velasquez

XXXV.  The Temporary Sequestration of the Ariostatica


BOOK VI--IN WHICH THE BRONZE GOES INTO THE FIRE


XXXVI.  A Gradual Approach to Africa

XXXVII.  The Crew Go Ashore

XXXVIII.  A Whiff of Grapeshot

XXXIX.  Viewed from Gallegos

XL.  The Master of Gallegos

XLI.  A Glimpse into the Furnace

XLII.  The Vision of Light

XLIII.  The Image Begins to Melt

XLIV.  The Hard Metal Runs

XLV.  The Bronze Is Sublimed

XLVI.  The Unicorn Charges Home



VOLUME THREE

THE LONELY TWIN


BOOK VII--IN WHICH A WORLDLY BROTHER IS ACQUIRED


XLVII.  Reverberations

XLVIII.  Old Friends Grown Older

XLIX.  What Banking Is About

L.  Don Luis Reflects by Candlelight

LI.  The Coach and the Berlin

LII.  Over the Crest

LIII.  The Force of Gravity

LIV.  The Plains of France

LV.  The Little Man at Great Headquarters


BOOK VIII--IN WHICH PROSPERITY ENFORCES LONELINESS


LVI.  A Metallic Standard Is Resumed

LVII.  Your Humble Obedient Servant

LVIII.  Gloria Mundi

LIX.  The Swan-song of Romance

LX.  Panem et Circenses

LXI.  Shoes and Stockings

LXII.  The Prince of the Peace Beyond the Pyrenees


BOOK IX--IN WHICH THE TREE IS CUT DOWN


LXIII.  By the River of Babylon

LXIV.  The Snake Changes Its Skin

LXV.  The People of the Bear

LXVI.  The Pilgrimage of Grace

LXVII.  The Prison of St. Lazarus

LXVIII.  The Stone in the Heart of the Tree

Epilogue





VOLUME ONE

THE ROOTS OF THE TREE




BOOK ONE

In Which the Seed Falls in the Enchanted Forest




CHAPTER ONE

THE COACH


Between the villages of Aubière and Romagnat in the ancient
Province of Auvergne there is an old road that comes suddenly over
the top of a high hill.  To stand south of this ridge looking up at
the highway flowing over the skyline is to receive one of those
irrefutable impressions from landscape which requires more than a
philosopher to explain.  In this case it is undoubtedly, for some
reason, one of exalted expectation.

From the deep notch in the hillcrest where the road first appears,
to the bottom of the valley below it, the fields seem to sweep down
hastily for the express purpose of widening out and waiting by the
way.  From the low hills for a considerable distance about, the
stone farm buildings all happen to face toward it, and although
most of them have stood thus for centuries their expressions of
curiosity remain unaltered.

Somewhat to the east the hill of Gergovia thrusts its head into the
sky, and continually stares toward the notch as if speculating
whether Celtic pedlars, Roman legionaries, Franks, crusaders, or
cavaliers will raise the dust there.

In fact in whatever direction a man may look in this particular
vicinity his eyes are led inevitably by the seductive tracery of
the skyline to the most interesting point in all that countryside,
the place where the road surmounts the hill.  Almost anything might
appear there suddenly against the empty sky, fix itself upon the
memory, and then move on to an unknown destination.

Perhaps the high hill of Gergovia where heroic events have taken
place in the remote past now misses a certain epic grandeur in the
rhythms of mankind.  For ages past tribes have ceased to migrate
and armies to march over the highway it looks down upon.
Cavalcades, or companies of pilgrims have rarely been seen upon it
for some centuries now.  Individual wayfaring has long been the
rule.  Even by the last quarter of the eighteenth century it had
long been apparent what the best way of travelling the roads of
this world is when one has a definite, personal object in view.
Such, indeed, was then the state of society that the approach of a
single individual, if he happened to belong to a certain class,
might cause as much consternation to a whole countryside as the
advance of a hostile army.

It was this condition of affairs, no doubt, that accounted for the
alarm upon the faces of several peasants as they stood waiting
uneasily in the late afternoon sunshine one spring day in the year
1775.  They were gazing apprehensively at the deep notch in the
hill just above them where the road, which they had been mending,
surmounted the ridge.  Indeed, a grinding sound of wheels from the
farther side of the crest had already reached the ears of the
keenest some moments before.

Presently there was the loud crack of a whip, the shouts of a
postilion, and the heads of two horses made their appearance prick-
eared against the sky.  The off-leader, for there were evidently
more horses behind, was ridden by a squat-bodied little man with
abnormally short legs.  A broad-brimmed felt hat with the flap
turned up in front served, even at considerable distance, to
accentuate under its dingy green cockade an unusual breadth of
countenance.  The ridge at the apex is very steep.  The first team
had already begun to descend before immediately behind it appeared
the second straining hard against the breast straps.  Then the
coach, a "V"-shaped body with the powdered heads of two footmen in
cocked hats peering over its slightly curved roof, outlined itself
sharply in the bright notch of the road and seemed for an instant
to pause there.

As soon as it hove in full sight a babble of relieved exclamation
arose from the group of watching peasants.  It was NOT the coach
of M. de Besance.

As to whose coach it might be, there was small time for speculation.
The problem rapidly began to solve itself.  The coach was heavy and
the hill was steep.  Suddenly, at a cry from the little postilion,
who began to use his whip like a demon, the horses stretched
themselves out.  An immense cloud of dust arose and foamed about the
wheels.

The black body of the coach was now seen coming down the road like
a log over a waterfall.  Oaths, cries, shouts from the white-faced
footmen, the squall and moan of brakes, and a frantic drumming of
hoofs accompanied its descent.  Four horses and the carriage
flashed as one object through the spray of a little stream at the
foot of the hill.  There was a nautical pitch as the vehicle
mounted violently upon a brief length of causeway that led to the
ford.  But so great was the momentum which it had accumulated and
the terror of the horses that the postilion was unable to check
them even with the attempted assistance of the peasants.

A large hole full of water on one side of the little causeway now
became horribly apparent to him.  With a quick jerk on the bridle
and a firm hand the clever little driver dragged his horses around
it.  The front wheels missed it by a fraction.  But there had not
been time to turn the trick entirely.  For an instant the left hind
wheel hung spinning.  Then to the accompaniment of a shrill
feminine scream from the interior of the coach it sank with a
sickening jar and gravelly crunch into the very centre of the pit.
Nevertheless, the rear of the carriage finally rose to the level of
the causeway as the horses once more struggled forward.  A high
water mark showed itself upon the yellow stockings of the petrified
footmen.  The coach lurched again violently, rocked, and stopped.

Scarcely had the coach body ceased to oscillate in its slings when
from the window projected a claret-coloured face surmounted by a
travel-stained wig much awry.  A hand like a lion's paw flourished
a gold-headed cane furiously, and from the mouth of its entirely
masculine owner, which vent can only be described as grim,
proceeded in a series of staccato barks and lion-like roars a
masterpiece of Spanish profanity.  It began with God the Father and
ranged through the remainder of the Trinity.  It touched upon the
apostles, not omitting Judas; skipped sulphurously through a score
or two of saints, and ended with a few choked bellows caused by
twinges of violent pain, on Santiago of Compostela.  During the
entire period of this soul-shaking address, and for several
speechless seconds after, a small, intensely black, forked beard
continued to flicker like an adder's tongue through the haze of
words surrounding it.  Somewhat exhausted, its owner now paused.

Those who thought his vocabulary exhausted, however, were sadly
mistaken.

The gentleman looking out of the coach window owned estates both in
Spain and in Italy.  From both he drew copious revenues not only of
rents but of idiom.  He was of mixed Irish, Spanish, and Tuscan
ancestry, and his fluency was even thrice enhanced.  He now gripped
his cane more firmly and lapsed into Italian.

"You mule's bastard," roared he, twisting his head around with an
obvious grin of pain to address the little man sitting astride the
lead horse, "Come here, I say.  Come here till I break your back.
I'll . . ."  The rest was cut short by a second grimace of agony
and a whistling sound from the cane.

The recipient of this alluring invitation climbed down from his
saddle rather slowly, but with no further signs of hesitation
walked imperturbably past his four quivering horses toward the door
of the coach.  His legs, which already appeared small when astride
a horse, were now seen to be shorter than ever and crooked.  Yet he
moved with a certain feline motion that was somehow memorable.  As
he turned to face the door of the coach and removed his cocked hat,
two tufts of mouse-coloured hair just over his ears, and a long,
black whip thrust through his belt till it projected out of his
coat tails behind, completed for the peasants, who were now
crowding as close as they dared, the illusion that they were
looking, not at a man, but at an animal vaguely familiar.

The door of the coach was now pushed open by the gold-headed cane
revealing to those by the roadside a glimpse of the sumptuous
interior of a nobleman's private carriage.  Its owner had been
riding with his back to the horses.  As the door opened wider a
long, white object projecting across the aisle toward the rear
disclosed itself as a human leg disguised by a plethora of bandages
and resting upon a "T"-shaped stand contrived out of a couple of
varnished boards.  On this couch the ill member with its swathed
foot seemed to repose like a mummy.  On the rear seat could be
caught a glimpse of a brocaded skirt the folds of which remained
motionless.

The claret-coloured face now appeared again and the cane was once
more flourished as if about to descend upon the back of the
unfortunate postilion waiting hat in hand just beyond its reach.
But the gentleman had now reached the limit of his field of action.
He was the owner of the mummified limb on the "T"-shaped stand, a
fact of which he was just then agonizingly reminded, and a torrent
of several languages that seemed to start at his waist literally
leapt out of his mouth.

To the surprise of all but the footmen, who were thoroughly inured
to such scenes, the little man in the road ventured to reply.  He
purred in a soft Spanish patois accompanied by gestures that
provided a perfect pantomime.  Due to his eloquent motions towards
the peasants in the ditch and the hole in the road, it was not
necessary to understand his dialect in order to follow his
argument.  With this the gentleman, who had meanwhile violently
jerked his wig back into place, seemed inclined to agree.

Seeing how things were going, a tall fellow somewhat more
intelligent than his companions now stepped forward.

"It is to be hoped that monsieur will overlook the existence of the
terrible hole which has caused him such discomfort . . ."

"Overlook its existence, you scoundrel, when it nearly bumped me
into purgatory!" roared the gentleman.  "What do you mean?"

"Ah, if we had only known monsieur was coming this way so soon it
should have been filled in before this.  It is very difficult now
to get these rascals to come to the corvée.  We were informed you
would not arrive until day after tomorrow.  I can tell you, sir,"
continued he, turning an eye on his miserable companions which they
did not seem to appreciate, "I can tell you they were just now in a
fine sweat when they heard monsieur's coach ascending the hill.  If
it had been that of M. le Comte de Besance . . . oh, if it had been
M. le Comte himself!"

"M. de Besance?  Ah, then we are already upon his estates!"
interrupted the gentleman in the coach.  "Do you hear that, my
dear?"  Seemingly placated, and as if the incident were drawing to
a close, he began to close the door.  Noticing the crest on the
outside panel for the first time, the man by the road licked his
lips and hastened to correct himself.

"But yes, monseigneur," he gasped, "the Château de Besance is
scarcely half an hour's drive.  One goes as far as the cross-roads
at Romagnat and then turns to the left by the little wood.  And the
road from here on monseigneur will find in excellent shape.  For a
week now we have laboured upon it even in wheat sowing time."

Mollified at finding himself so near the end of a long and painful
journey the gentleman's face relaxed somewhat from its unrelenting
scowl.  A few pale blotches began to appear through its hitherto
uniform tint of scarlet.  Encouraged by this the unfortunate
bailiff essayed further.

"By special order we have smoothed the road from Romagnat for the
illustrious guest expected at the château; but not until day after
tomorrow."  Here he bowed.  "Yet an hour later and this accurséd
hole would have been filled.  A little more willingness on the part
of these"--a grim smile of understanding on the face of the
nobleman here transported the bailiff--"a little more skill on the
part of monseigneur's coachman . . ."

Scarcely had these words left the man's mouth, however, before a
hail of rocks and mud set him dodging and dancing.  The small
postilion who had all this time been waiting in the road hat in
hand was galvanized into instant action.  On all fours, he dashed
about snatching up every clod and stone that came ready to his
paws.  The whip flickered tail-like over his back, his grey-green
eyes blazed brilliantly, and he spat and squalled out a stream of
curses that might have done credit to his master.  One of the
peasants began to mutter something about the evil eye, and all
began to draw back from the coach.

"Are we all right?" shouted the master to his footmen.

"Yes, Your Excellency," they replied as if with one voice.

"Drive on then, Sancho, you devil's cat," roared the gentleman now
grinning with enjoyment at the grotesque scene before him and with
satisfaction at finding that neither his leg nor his coach was
irreparably damaged.

But at the word "cat" the little postilion fairly bounded into the
air.  His hair seemed to stand on end.  Those outside the coach
appeared to be fascinated.  They continued to stand and stare until
with an impatient gesture the gentleman on the inside pulled a
tasselled cord.  A small bell hung in a yoke on the roof tinkled
musically, and the horses long accustomed to the signal moved
forward.

Finding himself about to be left alone on the highroad in a
hopeless minority, the postilion with a final snarl turned, picked
up his hat, clapped it on his head, and in a series of panther-like
leaps, for his legs were far too short to run, gained the lead
horse already some yards ahead and vaulted into the saddle.

"A cat!  A cat!" shrieked the peasants.  The four horses broke into
a trot, and the coach and its passengers rocked and rolled along
the road that had been so carefully "smoothed" to the Château de
Besance.

But rumour preceded it in the person of a peasant runner who took a
short cut across the fields.  The servants at the château were
warned of the unexpectedly sudden approach of visitors.  Even
before the coach reached the cross-roads at Romagnat that entire
village was agog.  For nothing except scandal spreads so fast as an
apt nickname.  The two indeed are frequently related, and in this
case as long as he remained in that part of Auvergne Don Luis
Guzman Sotoymer y O'Connell, conde de Azuaga in Estremadura,
Marquis da Vincitata in Tuscany, and Envoy Extraordinary to the
Court of France from that grand duchy, was invariably associated
with his feline postilion, Sancho, and referred to over the entire
countryside as Monsieur le Marquis de Carabas and his cat.

Compared with the surface of the royal highway the recently
smoothed road upon the estates of M. de Besance was as a calm
harbour to the Bay of Biscay.  Both Don Luis and his leg thus began
to experience considerable benefit from the comparative ease with
which the coach now rolled along.  The end of a ten days' journey
from Versailles was almost in sight, and the marquis began to
contemplate the bandages in the vicinity of his big toe--from which
only a faint, blue light now seemed to emanate--if not with entire
satisfaction at least with considerable relief.  As he did so his
eyes happened to stray past his carefully cherished foot into the
deep recess formed by the rear seat, thus serving to remind him of
what he was at times somewhat prone to forget.

The ample rear seat of the coach upholstered in a smooth velvet of
a light rose colour was deep enough to form, with its painted side
panels and the arched roof above it, what seemed from the front
seat, where the marquis was now leaning back, to be a deep alcove.
Sunk in the luxurious cushions of the seat, and reclining against
the back of the coach with her head directly under an oval window
was what appeared to be the body of a young girl scarcely eighteen
years of age.  Her form was completely relaxed.  Her long sensitive
hands, upon one finger of which was a wedding ring, lay with
startling and web-like whiteness against the rose of the cushions.
Two waxen arms disappeared at the elbows into the folds of a grey
silk travelling scarf wrapped about her shoulders like a Vigée-
Lebrun drapery.  She sat with one leg crossed over the other so
that her skirt, stiffly brocaded in a heavy heliotrope and gold
pattern, fell in a sharp-edged fold that might have been moulded in
porcelain to one white-slippered foot.

Used as he was to an almost selfless yielding in his girl-wife
which constantly expressed itself in his presence in her relaxed
physical attitudes, there was, as he now looked at her across the
aisle of the coach, something in her posture which caused Don Luis
to glance hastily and uneasily at her face.  Her small, rather neat
head lay drooped to one side.  Since Bourges, which they had left
hastily after the death of her maid by plague, she had been unable
to accomplish an elaborate powdered coiffure.  Consequently her own
hair of a pure saffron colour seldom seen in the south of Europe,
burst, rather than was combed back, into a high Grecian knot held
precariously by one gold-knobbed pin.  Across her wide, clear
forehead, above carefully pencilled and minutely pointed arcs of
eyebrows, and blowing out from the temples before and around two
finely chiselled ears, sprang a delightful hedge of ringlets and
tiny silken wires.  These in the rays of the western sun, which
darted now and again through the oval window behind, were touched
along with a thousand dust motes that danced in the semi-darkness
of the coach, into a sudden blaze and aura of golden glory.  A
straight nose, and a rather small, pursed mouth, whose corners were
nevertheless drawn out enough to be turned down toward an obstinate
little chin, completed a countenance with a bisque complexion like
that of a miniature.  It needed only that the eyes should be wide
open and staring directly at you out of the shadows to give the
impression that you were actually in the presence of some dream-
like and helpless doll.  But her eyes were now closed, or almost
so.  As her husband looked at them with their long, brown lashes
disclosing only a blue polished glimmer of the pupils beneath,
while the lids remained perfectly motionless, it calmly occurred to
him that she might have fainted.

Yet this realization even when it became a certainty did not
suggest to Don Luis any necessity for immediate action.  Before
everything else the marquis was a connoisseur, an appreciator of
rare and accidental patterns of beauty in nature, and of their
successful imitation or creation in art.  The picture before him
was a combination of both.  The wide-flung frame of the upholstered
seat, the delicate rose-leaf tint of the background, the
perspective of the alcove, and the unusual arrangement of its
lights and shadows were, so it happened, in exact harmony with the
central and somewhat tragic figure of the portrait.  There was even
a high light in precisely the proper place, for a large emerald
breast pin concentrated the stray beams of sunlight and deflected
them in a living grey-green shaft across the folds of the girl's
scarf.

Don Luis was delighted.  For the time being he felt that his
condescension and his trouble in marrying this young woman had been
rewarded.  And where had he seen that exact arrangement of
headdress and features, accidental to be sure, but quite purely
classic in effect?  Ah, it was on a coin of Faustine; or was it
Theodora?  Perhaps a combination of both.  One's mind played tricks
like that.  His artistic imagination no doubt!  Yes, there was
something a little Byzantine here, and yet quite Grecian behind
with the knot, of course.  Well, he would look again in that
cabinet in the Pitti next time he was in Florence.  He knew the
exact spot where it stood.  Just next to that vile medallion of
Guido. . . .  But a slight trembling of his wife's eyelids reminded
him that some more direct attention to the subject of so admirable
a reverie was now in order.

"Maria," said he, leaning forward and feeling along her arms as if
she were a doll whose limbs might have been accidentally broken,
"listen, I am speaking to you."

Recalled thus from somewhere else by a command not to be
disregarded, she slowly opened her eyes, wide, and very blue, upon
him.  Scarcely had full consciousness returned to her look before
she hastened to disengage her arms from his grasp and to whisper,
"Better now.  It was that last jolt.  I was sure we should all be
killed.  I prayed to her all the way down the hill.  I dreamed I
was with her now."  A haze suffused itself over her eyes as if she
had been looking at the little hills of a child's paradise with the
morning mist still gathered upon them.

For a moment he remained silent.  There was one crack, however, in
his otherwise turtle-like armour.  Glancing toward a statuette of
the Madonna, which at his wife's entreaty had been set in a niche
in the side of the coach, he crossed himself fervently.  The
upholstery had been cut away to allow the insertion of this figure
and its little shrine, and for some time he kept his eyes fixed in
its direction with an expression at once conventionally pious and
fearfully sincere.  Only a boyhood in Spain could have achieved it.
But while it lasted and his lips moved, the girl remained still.  A
look of mixed jealousy and chagrin as if she were loath to share
some personal possession with him hardened her eyes and brought her
chin a little further forward while his devotions went on.  At
last, seeing that his gaze had shifted to the window again, she
ventured to ask, "What happened?"

"Nothing," said he.  The coach rolled on a short distance.

Settling back he pulled up a square flap in the cushion and
produced from a locker in the seat a bottle and a small, silver
travelling mug.  "Nothing, fortunately," he repeated, "but drink
this and you will soon feel better.  Shall I tell you now?  It was
a deep hole in the road.  A few minutes later and it would have
been filled.  No doubt it did jar you badly sitting directly over
the wheel, but the coach of monseigneur is undoubtedly a good one.
We shall not be delayed."

Without spilling any of the wine which he offered her, she managed
to sip it down and wipe the scarlet stain from her lips with a wisp
of a handkerchief.  Seeing how steady were her hands, Don Luis
congratulated her and proceeded to follow up his panacea for all
earthly ills, as he put the bottle back in the seat, with a little
cheering chat.

"It is really too bad that both of the mishaps of the journey have
fallen upon you, my dear," said he, wiping his own lips.  "I could
complain to M. de Besance about this last one and make it lively
for those lazy peasants.  He is said to prefer the high justice to
the low, but it is not quite so easy in these disturbed times to
take the high hand as it used to be.  Hanging or driving away a
tenant is not to be thought of nowadays, especially when one's luck
at cards has been of the sorriest.  They say some of these fellows
in the country are getting impatient at sending all their rents to
Versailles.  The fields here look in condition though," he
exclaimed, "fine, well-tilled acres!"

She nodded wearily.

"So they didn't expect us so soon," he chuckled, "otherwise that
hole would not have 'existed.'  Well, Sancho paid them back in
their own loose dirt."  He proceeded to relate the incident, at
which she succeeded in smiling faintly.

"No, we are decidedly before-hand with them.  If you had not
insisted on delaying at Bourges to be sure that maid would die, we
might have been here two days sooner.  That delay was a sheer waste
of time.  Oh! it has been difficult with your hair, I am sure.  But
do you know I admire you as you are.  There is a certain classic
air about you.  They told me you were quite the rage at the Petit
Trianon in a milkmaid's smock.  It was really clever of you to
manage that.  To be commanded to the dairy by the queen herself,
twice!"

A slight tinge of colour began to suffuse her cheeks.

"Still you should never have let them find out that you really did
know how to milk," he went on.  "That was a faux pas, a decidedly
peculiar accomplishment for the wife of an envoy extraordinary.  It
is not real simplicity they want.  You should have merely pretended
to be learning rapidly.  But to have finished milking before
Madame!  It was fatal!  I can tell you our stock dropped after
that.  I felt like M. Law himself.  If it had not been for my luck
in the oeil-de-Boeuf and that night at de Guémené's soirée we should
have been nowhere, nowhere at all.  Even the mission might have
failed.  But when I won M. d'Orléans' new coach from him at écarté,
and drove off in it with the lilies on the door!  Ha!  That was
something, even if one's wife did know how to milk."  He looked at
her, stroking his beard with satisfaction.

The coach rolled on while the shadows deepened.  In the depths of
the seat he could not see the tears in the eyes of his young wife.
The world outside glimmered before her.

A red ray of sunset dashed itself against the rose-coloured
cushions and glanced into the shimmering pools of her eyes.
Reflected there she saw the Palace of Love at the Petit Trianon;
the torchlight on the pool before it.  A dust mote became a boat
gliding past in the red glow.  Ghosts of music began to sound in
her ears.  The trees whispered outside like the park forest.

Suddenly the vision became intensely clear.  Up the little steps of
the temple sprang a young soldier in a white and gold uniform.  He
was putting roses on the altar before the god of love.  She leaned
forward now to see his face--and found herself gazing directly into
the eyes of her husband.

His lips parted slowly in a completely self-possessed smile.  She
gasped slightly.  The vision had been so clear!  She was almost
afraid he must have seen it, too.  But Don Luis was not given to
visions.  The gouty leg had unaccountably stopped pulsing and its
owner now felt inclined to talk.

"M. le Comte de Besance did not come off so well in his bets with
me either."  His smile widened.  "Five hundred louis against my
living on his estates till my leg is cured!  All of these fellows
are so sure of their provincial springs.  No one can dispute with
them.  It is like arguing with a country priest about a local
miracle.  Por Dios, how he leered over that fine hand he held.  I
almost believe he wanted to lose just to have me try his spa.  Else
how could he have played so ill?  So I shall take my time here.  It
is due my good luck.  And I like the air already.  None the less
that there are no handsome Irish captains of the guard to breathe
it.  Mark that!  O'Connell was my great-grandfather's name.  That
is all the Irish you will get.  We shall say no more about that
fellow, but"--and he leaned forward clutching her knee--
"REMEMBER!"

Having delivered this ultimatum he sat back again for some time in
silence.  At last one of the footmen absent-mindedly began to drum
upon the roof.  "Leave off that," roared his master.  Outside the
man snatched his hand back as if he had suddenly found it resting
on a hot stove.  Don Luis continued.

"You can rest here and forget all about it.  They say the Château
de Besance is a pleasant enough place.  The last M. de Besance but
one spent some time in Italy and even journeyed to see the Grand
Turk.  The rugs are said to be remarkable, and there are some good
Venetian pieces.  Besides, the place is not too large to be
comfortable.  I shall get you another maid, somehow, and you can
indulge your cursed English taste for driving about the country."

"Scotch, you mean," the girl said softly, "my father . . ."

"It is all the same," said he, a little impatient at the
interruption.  "Doubtless there is a small carriage in the count's
stables.  But no jaunting about in peasants' carts!  That was bad
enough at Livorno when you were a girl.  Remember!"

He had an unpleasant way of trilling the phrase in Italian, an
accent that might have accompanied a sneer.  She always felt it and
winced.  Yet seldom was he so talkative or so amiable as now.
Despite an occasional sardonic fall in his tones, without which he
could scarcely have expressed himself, for the first time in her
married life of about a year he was verging upon the affable.
Sensing the state of his feelings as well as their ephemeral
nature, she decided to pick flowers while the sun shone.

"At the château--could I have a dog?" she asked.  Her quick reading
of the human barometer and her instant grasp of opportunity tickled
his shrewd fancy.  In the mood he was in he consented with an ease
that astonished himself.

"At the château, yes.  But it must not come into the coach.  I will
not be having the cushions made for royalty itself ruined."

She laughed.  The very thought of a companion who could give and
receive affection revived her.  Leaning forward she looked out of
the window and let the breeze play on her forehead.  They were just
approaching a village.

Presently the coach and four wheeled sharply around a well-curb at
the forks of the road.  A weather-beaten cross stood above the town
fountain, and the usual crowd of women drawing water at that time
of day put their pitchers down or slipped the bucket yokes from
their shoulders at the sound of horses.  Almost everyone in the
village who could find an excuse to be away, and there were few who
could not, stood waiting to stare curiously but silently at the
coach.  The only sound was the clopping of hoofs and the occasional
snarl of the more vicious village curs carefully held back from
barking.  Dogs which barked at guests on the estates of M. le Comte
de Besance invariably failed to return to their owners.

"To the château?" cried Sancho, drawing up and nourishing his whip.

One of the horses began to crane its neck and sniff toward the
fountain.  The crowd gaped and began to murmur something among
themselves about a cat.  "But, yes, certainly, a cat!"  There
seemed a humorous difference of opinion.  Sancho began to jabber.
The bell on the top of the coach tapped twice with unusual
emphasis, and he swung the horses to the left.

"That fool!" exclaimed the marquis, "he would stop at every village
well to start a brawl.  An end must be put to that!  If he fights
with everyone who howls 'cat' after him between here and the Alps,
I shall be needing a new coachman long before we get to Italy.
Besides, the man does look like a cat!  You can see, my love, it
would never do to have a dog in the coach with Puss-in-Boots on the
box, never!"  Don Luis actually leaned out of the window and
laughed at his own joke.  In town he would never have thought of
doing so.  It was the first time she had ever heard him laugh
heartily and something in the tone of it startled her.

They were ascending a long rise now between a pleasant park-like
wood on one side and a carefully pruned vineyard on the other.  A
few bunches of grapes smaller than berries as yet showed here and
there.  An all but imperceptible perfume was in the air.  Maria
breathed deeply and lay back with her eyes closed.  The scent was
delightfully familiar, suggestive even in its intangibility, and
she allowed herself, as she relaxed into the cushions, the
unexpected boon of indulging to the full an overpowering illusion
that she was returning home.

After all, perhaps the Château de Besance might have its
compensations.  She would play that she was coming home anyway.  It
would make the arrival at another strange place more bearable.  The
faint tinge of colour brightened in her cheeks.  Even the illusion
made her heart beat faster.

Her husband was looking out over the vineyards, wide and peculiarly
mellow in the last, long rays of full daylight.  If only that
countenance with its pointed beard, the cheeks forever a dark wine
colour, the hard black eyes, and the mouth like a trap,--if only
HE were not here now to spoil her dream!  A small breeze blowing
across the aisle of the coach fanned her cheeks and brought a more
pungent whiff as of the vineyards about Livorno.  Shutting her eyes
tight she breathed more deeply, then she turned away from him and
opened them wide.

From the little niche in the side of the coach the madonna was
looking at her.  The girl began to pray to her silently.  The face
of the Virgin was very familiar.  The little statuette was the one
memento which she had been allowed to keep that still reminded her
of home.  Her lips moved imperceptibly, her nostrils widened to the
breeze, her eyes remained fixed upon the face of the statue.  For a
few wretched and blessed moments she was back again in her own room
in her father's house.

Don Luis had no idea of what was going on in his wife's mind.  He
saw that she was praying and that seemed natural enough.  But he
did not care how, when, where, or to what a woman prayed.  Just now
he was nowhere in particular himself.  His leg had stopped hurting
and left him pleasantly vacant of mind; in an easy, almost
garrulous mood.  He leaned out of the window still farther and
noticed they were nearly at the top of the hill.  Hadn't the
bailiff in charge of the peasants said the château was just over
the top of the rise?  The memory of that unfortunate fleeing in a
hail of mud again caused Don Luis to laugh aloud.

The little postilion turned about in his saddle and looked back at
his master.  An amused grin spread from his whiskers along his
jaws.  A knowing wink passed between the master and his man.  Just
then the horses began to descend.

"What can you see ahead?" shouted the marquis.

But the reply of the postilion was lost in the sudden grinding of
brakes.




CHAPTER TWO

THE LITTLE MADONNA


The peasants working on the corvée of M. de Besance had just
completed filling the hole in the causeway and were gathering up
their tools to depart for a well-earned night's rest, when the
sound of galloping hoofs once more fell upon their ears.

There was a short cessation of the sound.  Then without any further
warning a man mounted on a spirited bay horse darkened the notch at
the top of the hill.  Picking his way rapidly down the steep slope,
he splashed at a sharp clip through the ford and cantered onto the
causeway.  A certain military precision lurked in the folds of a
blue cloak that fell from his shoulders in trim, straight lines.
As he came opposite the group of peasants he reined up his horse
sharply, and at the first glance as if his judgment was seldom at a
loss, picked out the bailiff in charge of the work although the
man's clothes were still bespattered by the dirt with which his
friend the postilion had recently favoured him.  The stranger
beckoned to him, but somewhat suspicious from his recent experience
the man hesitated to step forward as smartly as before.  Nor did
two large pistols in the holsters of a military saddle, and the
brass clover of a rapier scabbard projecting below the newcomer's
riding cloak add to the bailiff's sense of self-possession.

"Come here," said the horseman, seeing how matters stood, in a
voice that was not to be denied.  With some visible hesitation the
bailiff advanced.

"Have you seen a gentleman on a black gelding pass this way
recently?"

"No, sir, he has not come by this road," replied the man.

The stranger's horse refreshed from its recent plunge in the ford
danced about uneasily and pawed the dust.  "Ha, Solange, you witch
you, ho, girl!" he cried, reining her about in a semi-circle with a
sure hand and bringing her back again as he called over one
shoulder, "How do you know that?"

"Because, monsieur," replied his informant, "we have been working
here all day and no one has passed southward except the coach of
monsieur . . . pardon, I mean monseigneur, the guest of M. le
Comte."

"Monseigneur!" said the stranger raising his eyebrows.  "Why do you
say that?"

"The crest, sir, the lilies were on the door!"

"Are you sure of it?"

"Am I likely to forget it?  Dieu! am I not covered from head to
foot by the filth which that devil, his cat of a postilion, threw
at me.  Look!" and the bailiff turned to exhibit the state of his
back.

He was immediately struck by another missile, but this time of a
more welcome kind.  As he stooped to pick up the coin, he saw the
limbs of the mare suddenly gathered under her as she felt the spur.
By the time he had picked up the money and bitten it, both horse
and rider were fifty yards away.

"Monsieur is in a hurry," he muttered, as he pocketed the piece and
prepared to go home.

It was easy enough to follow the coach.  In the newly smoothed
highway the broad wheel tracks of the great vehicle were as plainly
to be seen as if it had just been driven over a field of virgin
snow.  Yet the coach itself was nowhere visible.  Behind the top of
a little rise above the village the stranger dismounted and made
sure of this before urging his mount onto the level open ground
below.  He was about to gallop on when a low cloud of dust at the
top of a hill across the valley caught his eye.

The coach was just emerging from a patch of woodland and going over
the skyline.  From where he stood he could even see someone lean
from the window to speak to the postilion while the latter turned
in his saddle to reply.  Then the whole equipage disappeared over
the ridge.

Clapping spurs to his horse the stranger galloped down the road,
leaped over a low hedge, and taking an open short cut across some
meadows, found himself in a trice back on the road again.  The
village, which he had thus avoided, lay between the highways at the
"V" of the cross-roads, and he was now passing rapidly uphill with
a wood on one hand and vineyards on the other.  Just short of the
hillcrest he again dismounted suddenly and threw the reins over the
mare's neck.  She stood patiently, precisely where she had been
left.  Muffling his cloak well about him, he strode rapidly forward
a few yards, stooping low.  He then left the road, and taking
shelter behind a convenient shrub, looked down into the valley
beyond.

Before him lay a low valley, a wide, cultivated landscape
stretching away in the softly brilliant afterglow of a French
sunset.  In the foreground was the park of Besance.  A statue
gleamed here and there amid the wide-armed trees like an ivory high
light.  The road wound through the groves in a vague "S"-shaped
curve up to the château itself, an old building with candle snuffer
towers.  But there was a new wing in front with high, arched
renaissance windows and a row of conical trees in tubs.  It was one
of those minor Versailles which during the last two reigns had
sprung up all over Europe.  As he watched, a fountain began to play
on the terrace and the downstairs windows gleamed with a saffron
light as someone flitted from room to room lighting chandeliers.
The coach now emerged from between a wall of hedges, made the half-
circle before the entrance, and drew up before the door.  In the
lens-like air, as the footmen leaped to let down the steps, he
could even see their brass buttons.  After some little delay the
coach moved out and trotted around to the rear.

A scene of considerable bustle was now revealed on the steps of the
château.  Four lackeys bearing a man with a white object that stuck
out straight before him were swaying up the stairs, marshalled by a
bustling major-domo.  A woman stood waiting for them at the top
while various bags and valises in charge of other servants
disappeared through the door.  Even at that distance he could still
make out the peculiar heliotrope shade of her skirt, and that she
was carrying something in her hand.  "By God!" said he in English,
and with an emotion so violent that it found vent in immediate
action.  With a determined and almost desperate gesture he plucked
a handful of leaves off the bush which concealed him, and scattered
them angrily.

The four men bearing their human burden now began to shuffle on the
last ascent to the door.  Evidently what they had in hand was no
light matter.  At the very top someone stumbled.  The whole group
began to sway perilously.  Then, as the invalid's cane began to
play over their heads and along their backs viciously, they fairly
precipitated themselves into the gaping mouth of the door.  Only
the woman now remained, apparently looking out over the landscape
where the shadows were beginning to gather.  In the excitement
attending the entrance of the baggage and the gentleman it seemed
as if she stood there forgotten.

The watcher behind the bush had never hoped for such a stroke of
good fortune.  She might have been looking directly at him.  With a
deft bound he gained a large rock that stood squarely upon the
crest behind which he had been hiding.  He held his cloak out wide,
and tossed it.  Then he began to caper and wave his hat.

For a moment the little figure on the steps stood as if transfixed.
Then she too threw out her arms wildly and began to wave whatever
it was she was holding in her hands.  For a few seconds these
mutual signals continued.  Then the woman turned suddenly and
hurried into the house.  To the man standing on the rock it seemed
as though she had taken the daylight with her.

He instantly recovered himself, however, and hurried downhill to
his horse.  A glow far more lasting than his exercise on the rock
could have produced suffused him.  He felt bursting with good
nature and kindliness.  Plucking some small bunches of grass he
rubbed down the mare, and fondled her soft nose.  The grass was
next applied to a pair of long, very fine military boots.  A finely
worked handkerchief flicked the dust from a cocked hat whence, to
judge by the shading, a braid-edging and cockade had recently been
removed.  The stranger as if from mere military habit then looked
at the priming of his pistols, tightened the girth, and patting his
horse affectionately but heartily on the flank, sprang into the
saddle and trotted off at a brisk pace toward the village.

In the great hall of the Château de Besance Don Luis sat under a
chandelier, propped up in a huge chair nursing his leg.  The pain
of having been let down upon it did not subside for some time.
Immediately upon being brought in he had done full justice to the
occasion, and his shattered malacca cane that lay beside him on the
parqueterie was a mute witness that the man who stumbled would have
good reason to recollect his misfortune.  No one, indeed, had
escaped wholly.  Even Maria upon suddenly hastening in to help him
had been ordered to let his bandages alone.  He told her to go
upstairs and dress for dinner, in a way which made even the
servants wince.  Not that the marquis had been impolite.  It was
merely his tone.  There was a crushing viciousness in it which made
his young wife's solicitude wilt like a flower caught in the cloven
hoof of a bull.  In her agitation she had all but fled the room,
leaving the little object which she had been carrying like a
favourite doll lying forgotten upon a near-by table.

The major-domo of M. de Besance was wondering how he could fill the
place of the caned lackey whose arm would be useless for a week.
Well, he would have to wait upon the table himself.  Monsieur was
undoubtedly a hard case, and perhaps it would be better to take no
chances.  M. de Besance had sent strict orders for the careful
entertainment of these guests.  The accident was terrible!  He must
make amends for it.  He glanced at the face of the sufferer.  A
restorative perhaps, something unusual.  He bowed and retired, to
return presently with a small, squat, greenish-black bottle.

The marquis' expression changed.  He watched the cork-drawing with
the eye of an expert and could find nothing at which to cavil.  The
man's precise mixture of art and ritual was impeccable.  A divine
odour as of a basket of fresh, ripe peaches left in the sun filled
the room.  With good care and a steady hand the butler decanted the
upper inch of the liquid into a glass that had been carefully
wiped, and handed it to Don Luis.  The latter inhaled the bouquet
and a look of understanding passed between the two men.  It was an
occasion.

"Of the year of Malplaquet, Your Excellency," said the man bowing.

The marquis drank slowly.  Old toper as he was he was scarcely
prepared for the surcharged flavour.  It would have been cloying
had it not been accompanied by a fiery glow that might have made a
salamander start.  The marquis just succeeded in not choking, and
finished the glass.  His eyes shone.  He was surprised that such a
beverage existed.  It was worth having come from Paris just to
sniff the bouquet.  A genial glow miraculously combined with a
delightful languor swam through his veins.  His leg ceased to stab.
When the mist of pain and the dullness of fatigue cleared from his
eyes as though someone had washed a dusty window, he now saw that
he was seated in an apartment furnished with an exquisite but
somewhat outmoded taste.

"Monsieur need not move," said the butler.  He lit a fire of
resinous wood which instantly began to crackle and throw lambent
shadows about the brass andirons and white marble mantelpiece where
two satyrs grinned at each other through a tracery of leaves and
grapes.

It was not the first nobleman the old servant had treated for the
gout with brandy.  The great thing to do was to keep them still.
"Hot water and a valet will be here instantly, Your Excellency.
You shall be made comfortable."  He covered the bottom of the glass
again.  "Supper will also be served here, and I shall have an
apartment prepared for monsieur on the ground floor.  The stairs
are unnecessary.  I did not know of His Excellency's affliction or
the chamber on this floor should have been ready upon his arrival.
Another accident for monsieur is unthinkable!  The new room will
take some few moments.  After dinner it will be ready.  Monsieur
can retire then, if he desires, without going upstairs."

The man waited without seeming to do so for a sign of approval.
Don Luis knew when he was being well served.  A major-domo of the
old school was rare in this degenerate reign.  He raised his hand
in a gesture of assent and let it fall back to the stem of his
glass.  The man retired.  His queue, the precisely horizontal bow,
and every line of his back were at once respectful and correct.  As
he turned to close the door silently he saw the guest of his master
sitting dreamfully with his nose poised like a beak just over the
rim of the glass.  In his eyes there was an expression of great
content.

Don Luis finished the rest of the peach brandy and sat gazing into
the fire.  Below the waist he seemed to have vanished.  One of
those rare moments of heightened consciousness and clear vision was
upon him.  He felt himself to be all eyes.  The combination of
spirits and fatigue had been precisely right.  Without moving his
head he permitted his glance to wander about the room.  It passed
with keen relish from one stately bit to another and finally came
to rest on the object which his wife had left on the table.  It was
the little madonna which she had carried from the coach to take to
her room.  In the state that he was in, his hands reached for it
somewhat mechanically.  For the first time he began to examine it
closely, dreamfully.

It was very old, evidently the work of several distinct and widely
separated historical epochs.  He turned the little shrine in which
the figure stood to and fro.  The shrine itself was certainly
ancient Byzantine work.  No Gothic artist could have conceived
those wide, flat arches at the top.  What a vast dome had been
conveyed in-little by that curious, buttressed hood over the
Virgin's head!  And that sky, and those stars!  Don Luis grunted
and took out a small pocket glass.  The secret of that heavenly
blue must have been lost.

The figure, though small, was posed with immense dignity against a
background of night.  With some fusing of sepia, cobalt, and ebony
the artist had contrived to convey that living blue of heaven on a
summer evening which opens out through vast antres of atmosphere to
the milky shimmer of stars beyond.  Spread out and over this, like
the far and near points in a crushed net, was a galaxy of golden
stars.  These, as he moved them to a better perspective,
scintillated with the true zodiacal fire.  In the top of the dome
he was delighted to recognize the arrangement of the constellation
Virgo, and to note, as he brought them closer again, a light dash
of silver in the rays of what would otherwise have been too yellow
a fire.  The consummate brushwork of some painter upon ceramics had
wrought that.  In some mysterious way the whole background had been
given a universal lustre which by reverberated reflections all but
cancelled out the shadow of the figure that stood before it.  "It
was a cunning device," thought Don Luis.  He looked more closely.
"By heaven, it was glaze!"

From this sea of stars the face of the Virgin swam up to him
somehow vaguely familiar.  It was as if he had seen it in life.
Or, was it a kind of universal human memory?--something learned so
far back in childhood, perhaps from the face of his mother, or
before, that it had been consciously forgotten?  The expression of
the features was so deeply brooding, and yet so universal, that it
had produced in him that distinct and unplaceable sensation of
having often seen them somewhere else.  Those clear brows, those
wide-open eyes, the slightly distended nostrils and the archaic
smile; there was a hint of something sphinx-like, yes, distinctly
Egyptian about it.  And yet the poise of the head was Greek.  He
was at a loss at first to place it.  Now he looked more closely at
the stiff, jewelled robe.

It was made of small pieces of coloured stones with the glint of a
jewel-chip here and there.  It was set with seed pearls about the
hems, and ennobled with a gilt pattern of some papyrus-like plant.
Florentine mosaic work before the grand dukes, early Medici!  He
could also see it was attached to the statue by minute, extended
silver wires; a new coat given to her by some pious owner long ago.
It rose out and away from her body, to fall lower down into a
stiff, jewelled skirt such as medieval royalties once wore.  He
could even see behind the robe, for it stood out from her like a
herald's tabard.  Beneath the bodice her breasts sloped down in
pointed ovals that suggested sleep, and dreaming there, in utter
peace, held in the crook of her arm was the infant.  He thought of
Dionysius on the arm of Apollo at first.  And yet, as he peered
again, almost fearfully now, since the thing had become so real,
there was something too intimate and tender about this child in its
mother's arms to be pagan.  No, it was undoubtedly the Christ-child
on Mary's breast.  It must have been modelled in Alexandria an age
ago, the statue itself.  It would have taken a Christian born a
pagan to have done it, an Egyptian Greek, some artist who could
combine various old gods and humanity into something new; something
old but something new.

It had always been a theory of the marquis that it is in the
miniature masterpieces, those which can be put into a glass
cabinet, that the arts of civilization culminate.  First come your
gigantic architecture and your monoliths; then something more
human, more livable, realism, perhaps, gradually becoming
beautifully conventional; then medallions, engravings, miniatures,
cameos, and statuettes.  And here was a nice illustration of the
thing, he liked to think.  He stroked his beard.

In Byzantium this single shrine would have been part of a triptych.
He could still see that the right side of it had once fitted on to
something else.  He put it back on the table and slipped the glass
into his pocket.  The gilded sun-burst, that almost imperial sun-
crown upon the head of the Virgin; that had Constantinople written
all over it.  Some devout Arian had once owned it.  He leaned back
and let his imagination supply the two missing panels:--God the
Father most elevated in the middle, on one side of Him the dove
descending out of the clouds from the Father's bosom, on the other
the little shrine he held in his hands.  The triptych was perfect
again.  How easily he had restored it!  But was it necessary?

This shrine he actually held--why, it alone represented the entire
Trinity and humanity, too!  The cosmos for that matter; there were
the stars.  Had not the Holy Ghost descended upon the woman?  The
Son of God and man was in her arms.  And the Father?--why HE was
there by necessary implication, invisible as always, but the
creator of all.  How huge, how universal was this little symbol he
could hold in one hand.  For a moment he was humble before it.  He
came as near to worship as he could.  Then his natural pride
reasserted itself.  His logical and theological mind laughed in his
skull to think that out of that Arian triptych only this remained.
How literal and how elaborate was heresy!  The other panels had
been unnecessary.  Only the Catholic symbol was required and
everything essential was there.  Ah, a nice point!  Something even
the Jansenists could scarcely refute.  A fit subject for a
monograph.

And yet artistically WAS the statue perfect?  Weren't those
fluted mother-of-pearl inlays about her feet a little tawdry; about
1700, no doubt.  But no, narrow your eyes and you could see the
eternal stars mirrored in them.  She was standing before the
universe at the pearly gates.  Seventeen centuries had contrived to
make something perfect.  Don Luis conferred upon them the greatest
compliment of his own.  Drawing a small gold box from his waistcoat
he sprung back the lid, tapped his fingers lightly in a kind of
salutation, and took a large pinch of snuff.

The resulting sneeze so startled a valet who had just entered the
room that the marquis laughed.  It would never do to have all these
servants afraid of him.  Fear could make an antelope awkward.  The
marquis bade the man good evening and began to ask questions about
the château.  Presently the valet was at his ease and the work of
revamping Don Luis proceeded comfortably enough.  A small silver
basin filled with hot water served to refresh him as, with the wig
and cravat removed, a warm sponge was passed over his shaven head
and neck.  He soaked his hands in the water.  A fresh, lace jabot
was then wound about his neck and the frill carefully made to stand
out from his shirt.  A larger and more comfortable bag wig was
taken out of its box and slipped onto his head.  It was scarcely
necessary to use the brush at all, and the bow on the queue was
kept clean of powder.  To Don Luis that was the test.  No whisking
off afterward!  He preferred to beat servants rather than be beaten
by them, if it came to that.  A small dash of verbena on his
handkerchief, and with the cushions carefully, even solicitously
rearranged on the leg stand by the butler himself, the marquis felt
at home, ready for dinner in fact.

The man threw a few more logs on the fire, drew up a table before
Don Luis, carefully avoiding his bandaged limb, and began to lay
covers for two.  The napery was ivory-smooth, the candles were
carefully shaded, and the plate was not only good but positively
inviting.  "If the chef can do the appointments justice," thought
Don Luis, "I am prepared to be convinced that M. de Besance was not
merely trying to cure his homesickness by a vicarious visit in my
person to his ancestral halls."  He preferred to remain cynical,
however.  Nevertheless the variety and nice arrangement of the wine
glasses tended to confirm the claims of his absent host.  The
butler now lit a small lamp under a brazier and announced that
dinner was ready when madame should be announced.  "Tell her," said
the marquis.

The logs crackled in the grate and in some distant part of the
house a clock began to chime.  The room was a large one.  The table
was set under the last chandelier next to the fireplace.  The
candlelight from the sconces and chandeliers reflected themselves
and their crystals with long splashes of yellow light on the
polished floor.  As Maria entered the apartment from the opposite
door, it seemed to her that the little table was at an immense
distance.  The silver and glass twinkled upon it like stars caught
in a fleecy cloud, and over the edge of it, looking like the moon
itself, shone the scarlet face of her husband.  To a light
splashing of silk she seemed to float to him over the lake of the
floor in her wide panniered skirts, moving her feet invisibly like
those of a swan.  "Madame la Marquise."  The man with the injured
arm should have been at the door to announce.  With some well-
concealed embarrassment the butler also hastened forward to seat
her.

"Bravo, my dear," said her husband, "such a toilette in so short a
time is a marvel!  You know the lamentable reason which keeps me
from rising to the occasion."  To her relief she saw him smile.
She began to talk rather hastily.

"I have a maid, a woman from Fontanovo, that M. de Besance sent
here some days ago.  You cannot imagine how pleasant it is to hear
Tuscan again.  It is almost as welcome as English."  She checked
herself and coloured deeply.  The marquis overlooked the reference
to home.

"While we were in Paris I thought it best to use nothing but
French, but we can now speak Italian," said he, changing into that
tongue.  "It is certainly charming of M. de Besance to have sent an
Italian maid, probably one of his household he picked up while in
Florence recently."

"She is returning to Italy and hopes to go back with us."

"Ah, that explains it then.  But not altogether.  Besance has been
the best of fellows.  Paris would have been quite a different place
without him.  That little journey of congratulation to the Duchess
of Parma--I was able to help him with that, and we were compatible.
It is not often one makes such a friend after forty.  Do you
suppose he would really have turned his château over to us on a bet
at cards?  No, he is genuinely anxious to see me cured, and his
enthusiasm about the waters at Royat was really catching.  I hear
of many cures there, too.  By the way," said he turning to the man,
"Henri?  Jacques?"

"Pierre, Your Excellency."

"Pierre, then.  How far is it to the baths?"

"About an hour's drive, monsieur, by way of Clermont.  And there
is, if monsieur desires to stay overnight, an excellent inn."

The prospect seemed to cheer Don Luis greatly.  Since some time
before his marriage his leg had kept him little better than an
invalid, and a round of high living at Paris and Versailles was not
calculated to help the gout.  The very thought of getting rid of
his discomfort and being active again made him feel like rising
from his chair then and there.  Indeed, for the first time in his
life the state of his health had for a year past caused him to give
it some thought.

Newly married to the daughter of a Scotch merchant of Leghorn who
had some vague Jacobean claim to nobility, the marquis had from the
first been swept off his feet by the strange beauty of the young
girl who now sat across the table from him.  He had first seen her,
accidentally, while settling a matter of business at her father's
establishment.  As he happened to be the owner of the buildings in
which her father's concern did business, it was not difficult for
him to find the way of gaining a swift consent to his suit.  That
is not to say that the marquis' method of approach was crass; on
the contrary, it was adroit.

The good merchant was a widower up in years and anxious to see his
only child well and securely bestowed.  To that end a very
considerable dowry was her portion.  In fact, the old man was
prepared to embarrass himself, and did so.  Although Don Luis was a
quarter of a century older than his bride, still in the eyes of the
world, and to her father, the match had seemed a fortunate one.
The marquis condescended, no doubt, but the dowry was worth
stooping for, and to do him justice, in his own way Don Luis loved
the girl.  He held wide fiefs from both the Grand Duke of Tuscany
and the Crown of Spain, and was much employed in delicate
diplomatic affairs from time to time.  To Maria's father in
particular the marquis had seemed like a god from the machine come
to snatch his daughter back to the high Olympus of court life to
which in some sort she belonged.  From that realm an invincible
attachment to the unfortunate house of Stuart on the part of her
ancestors and her father's consequent necessitous lapse into trade
had effectually banished her.

The girl herself had been too young and inexperienced to realize
the full implications of what her father pressed upon her in the
most favourable light.  Even her maid, a girl about her own age,
and her one human confidante, had abetted the scheme as a wise
young woman should.  There had been no one else to turn to but the
little madonna.  From her she received comfort but no advice.  The
girl's heart had continued to shiver in a premonitory way at the
sight of her prospective husband.  But obedience and love for her
father, who she knew parted with her only because he thought he was
setting her feet upon a fortunate path, sealed her lips.  Yet
dutiful as she was, even after her marriage there was one thing for
which she could not bring herself to pray.  It was for the
restoration of her husband's health.  The thought of physical
contact, the mere touch of his hand, indeed, turned her to stone.

With Don Luis it was far, far otherwise.  He had in one sense been
starved for some time, and his touch was therefore too hungry to
note anything but its own temperature.  Yet he had deliberately
starved himself.  For if he was in love with his wife, he was also
in love with himself, and that self was possessed of an enormous
sense of the ludicrous.  In the rôle of husband and lover he saw
himself, not young and handsome--for he was too wise and too candid
to suppose the opposite of what his own mirror disclosed--but
forceful; not to be denied; a master of life upon important
occasions and possessed of some dignity withal.  A man of the
world, he had no illusion about bed-time intimacies.  There was
only one way to maintain a manly dignity there.  Hence he did not
intend to approach his marriage bed for the first time on crutches,
with a bandaged foot and debilitated--lights or no lights.  Besides
it MIGHT be painful.  The thought of it made him grin and wince
at the same time.  He was anxious for an heir, too.  But so far he
had deferred to circumstances.

The meal continued.  The potage paysan might have been a bit flat
but the rye bread in it had been toasted and imparted that nut-like
flavour in which the marquis delighted.  A dish of trout in butter,
a mushroom patty, an endive salad with chives together with some
excellent wines from the count's cellar composed a light meal for
which Pierre apologized profusely.  A fresh cheese cool from the
spring house, and a firm, white loaf caught in a silver clamp
provided with a small steel saw in the shape of a dragon's head
with teeth amused Maria.

By the time the marquis had sampled his host's liqueurs he was
prepared to remain all summer.  No doubt the cure WOULD take that
long.  He was tired after Paris anyway.  He rattled on about his
recovery.  "Have the coach ready at nine o'clock tomorrow.  Tell
that man of mine," said he to Pierre, "and don't allow him anything
but table wine tonight.  I shall go to the springs first thing in
the morning.  My dear, I shall soon be well!  I feel sure of it.  A
man you have not yet met in fact!"  He looked across the shaded
candles at his wife eagerly.

Her eyes opened wide and the colour left her cheeks.  She felt like
one trying to thrust off a nightmare.  Then the vision of the
figure waving to her from the rocks came to comfort her.  Watching
her closely, her husband leaned back and laughed.  Certain visions
also flashed across his mind.  He had never seen her look so well.
It would all be well enough shortly.  The child might come in the
spring, after they were in Florence.  That would fill her life for
her, and bind her to him.  He need not worry about cavaliers after
that.  Not that the young Irishman at Versailles would ordinarily
have caused him a second thought.  A beautiful, young wife would
have admirers, of course.  But under the circumstances!  No, it had
been just as well to leave a little sooner.  He was a dashing
fellow and the uniform of the guard was a handsome one.  It was
better not to put too much strain on a young girl's sense of duty.
He looked at her again.  Her eyes had wandered past him and her
lips were moving.  Following her glance he saw that her gaze was
fixed on the madonna still standing on a near-by table.  She looked
up again a bit startled.

"You forgot her when you went upstairs, you know.  I was examining
her while you were dressing.  She is quite a precious work of art.
Where did you get her, by the way?  Let me see her again."

She rose obediently and brought the figure in its little shrine to
him.  He put down his glass and took the relic in his hands.

"Where did you say you got her?"

"From my maid at home.  It had been in her family for a long time.
She was a Scotch girl."

"Scotch!" said he, "this at least did not come from Scotland."

"Her father was a Greek or of a Greek strain at least, a Greco-
Florentine.  His name was Paleologus."

"What a strange combination," he smiled.  "I remember her now, I
think.  She wanted to come along with you."

"Yes, Faith Paleologus," she turned the syllables over in her mouth
as if they were somehow unpleasantly reminiscent.

"Did you ever notice this, Maria?" he asked, turning the statue
sideways.  Taking a knife he pointed behind the mosaic work.

It had never occurred to her to look under the Virgin's robe.  She
had always thought of it as part of her.  Following the glittering
point of the knife she now saw the little silver wires holding the
stiff dress out from the statue like a herald's tabard before it.
Underneath was the figure of a naked woman with a child at her
breast!  Small jewelled lights glinting through the tiny bits of
glass and chips of gems in her robe played upon the shadows and
curves of her exquisite body.  But the knife was pointing coldly at
a fracture.  At some remote time the statue had evidently been
broken off below the knees and mended again cunningly.  To the mind
of the young girl, who was scarcely more than an idolater, the
whole thing came as a shock.  With a gasp she reached down, took
the madonna from her husband's hands, and as if the knife
threatened it, caught it to her breast as though it were alive.

"Be careful," he said.  But she crushed it the harder.  A look of
extreme happiness glimmered on her face.  Then suddenly becoming
aware of him again she stiffened.

"You are tired," said he, "take a good rest.  I shall be leaving
early tomorrow for the springs.  You will have the whole day at the
château to yourself.  Why not arrange for a drive?  That new maid
can go with you."  Taking her free hand he kissed it and looked up
at her.  The hand fell back into place.  "Good night, Maria."

She recollected herself and swept him a curtsy.  The shrine
remained cuddled in her arms like a doll.  Like a doll she carried
it from the room and turning just at the door looked at him.  With
a little movement almost fierce in its intensity she clasped her
precious-thing even closer and disappeared up the stairs.  "What a
child she is," thought he, "what a child!"  He looked around.  The
bell-pull on the wall was too far to reach.  He struck a goblet
with a knife.  Pierre appeared.

"Bed," said the marquis, "and mind how you get me there!"

The man disappeared.  He returned a few moments later with two
sturdy assistants carrying long poles.  These were lashed securely
under Don Luis' chair.  Placing themselves between the ends of the
staffs before and behind, the men lifted the burden easily and in
this improvised sedan he was carried out of the room.  Pierre,
holding a lighted candelabrum above his head, led the way.

The marquis smiled grimly.  He saw himself proceeding down the
marble hall like a Roman consul.  No, it was like a bridegroom
carried to his chamber with the torch before him.  The fancy
tickled him.  There was something in the omen he liked.  He seated
himself upon his bed with some difficulty and began with the
tenderest solicitude to unwrap the bandages from his foot.  The
valet with equal care aided him to remove his clothes, then the
wig.

Presently a shaggy, powerful man with a closely shaved head, a
thick chest, one swollen foot and large stubby hands was seen
sitting on the edge of the bed.  The candlelight glittered on his
scalp.  He slipped a long flannel sack over his head.  It fell in
folds about his waist.  He tied on a night-cap and had a small
calf-bound volume brought him as he settled himself, not without
grievances, in the huge bed.  The valet arranged the light.  "At
what hour, monsieur?"  "Eight," replied the marquis in a far-away
voice.  The man bowed and retired.  The marquis read on:


Now, my masters, you have heard a beginning of the horrific history
of Pantagruel.  You shall have the rest, and then you shall see how
Panurge was married, and made a cuckold within a month of his
wedding.  How Pantagruel found out the philosopher's stone, the
manner how he found it, and the way to use it.  How he passed over
the Caspian mountains, and how he sailed through the Atlantick sea,
defeated the cannibals, and conquered the isle of Perles.  How he
fought against the devil, ransacked the great black chamber and
threw Proserpine in the fire.  How he visited the regions of the
moon, and a thousand other little merriments.  All veritable.
These are brave things truly.  Good night gentlemen. . . .


Upstairs the light from his wife's bedroom turned her window that
looked toward the village into a bright yellow square.




CHAPTER THREE

AT THE "GOLDEN SHEAF"


From the rock on the hill where the stranger had exchanged signals
with Maria to the village below it was nearly a mile.  The mare at
that time of the evening expected oats not far ahead and needed no
urging.  Indeed, as he rode into the little town of Romagnat her
rider was forced to pull her up at the cross-roads with a firm
rein.  She stamped impatiently and pretended to shy at the grey
figure of an old woman drawing water in the twilight.  He heard the
bucket splash in the well.  It was supper time and the streets
appeared deserted.  Except for a few lights here and there and an
occasional murmur of voices or cry of a child he might have been
alone.  The bucket now reappeared on the well and the woman turned
toward him.

"Can you tell me, mother," said he, "where the inn is?"

"It is there, monsieur," she replied, pointing toward a dim light
at the end of the street leading back in the general direction of
the château, "at the lantern, where the door is opening now."  Some
distance up the hill a glow of firelight flooded out and vanished.
"But the great hostel is at Clermont about a league from here,"
continued the old woman hoping for a reward.

"Thank you, I am only wanting supper."  He automatically fumbled in
his pocket, but then thought better of it.  The less cause for
being remembered the better.  His disappointed informant
disappeared, and he turned toward the light.

It was a dim and smoky one hung under what at first appeared to be
a suspended mass of rubbish, but as he drew closer this resolved
itself into a sheaf of wheat tied over a sign.  La Gerbe d'Or could
still be faintly traced in faded characters as the lantern swung
gently to and fro.  He stood for a moment studying the building and
its surroundings carefully like an old campaigner, then he turned
through a low brick archway and rode into the courtyard of the inn.
The delighted whinny of the mare brought out an ostler.

"Send me your master, my lad, and be quick about it!"  The man in
the door, munching a large sponge-like fragment of black bread,
took a look at the long, lithe figure on the horse and disappeared.
A few moments later he came back with a lantern and a round, shiny-
faced little man in a white apron.

"I want a room for the night and supper," said the horseman.

"Certainly, if monsieur will descend, the request is not VERY
unusual."

The face of the clown with the lantern began to prepare itself for
a laugh at the stranger's expense.

"Come here, my host," said the man on the horse who did not show
any intention as yet of descending.  Somewhat abashed the fat man
came and stood by the saddle.  The horseman now leaned over and
began to talk in low impressive tones.  He was an adept at assuming
that confidential air which by taking one into a secret both
flatters and impresses.  The boor with the lantern had not been
included and to the innkeeper he represented the gaping world.

"Look, my friend," said the gentleman dismounting and bringing an
ardent and commanding countenance close to that of the round-faced
man, "I am here on the king's business, and I do not want the world
to hear of it.  Do you understand?"  A small, yellow coin with the
countenance of the king upon it passed hostward between them.  A
convulsive grasp of the fingers and a look of understanding were
simultaneous.  "Yes, monsieur," whispered the fat man like a
conspirator.

"Well then," said the gentleman, "can you give me a room and serve
my supper in it quietly without having half the village in to gape
at me?  And how about your wife's tongue?"

"I will serve you supper myself, monsieur, and my poor wife's
tongue has been silent these two years."  The fat man choked.  The
stranger laid his hand upon his host's shoulder.  "She is in
heaven, my friend," said he, "never doubt!"

"Ah, monsieur, you are very kind, but I am sure of it.  Come this
way and you shall have what you want.  It shall be the private
chamber upstairs.  Here, François, give me your lantern and get the
other from the settle."  Unlocking a narrow door that opened into
the court the innkeeper led the way.

They ascended a circular stone stairway and came out into a small,
blunt hall.  The host rattled his keys again and presently threw
open a door, standing aside for his guest to enter.  The room ran
clear across the house.  On one side was a window looking out upon
the court and on the other a long, leaded casement through which
penetrated a faint glow from the street.  The fat man advanced and
opening the lantern took out the candle and kindled the fire.  A
bright blaze sprang up from a pile of dry faggots revealing a low
apartment with ceiling beams, a high four-poster bed in the corner,
a table, two chests, and several chairs.  On the rough mortar wall
was a black crucifix immediately over the bed, and on the chimney a
faded print of what had once been meant for a likeness of "Louis
the Well-Beloved"--some fifty years before.  The host looked at his
guest inquiringly.

"Excellent," said the latter.

"It was our own room before my wife died," continued the fat man
lighting the sconces, "I sleep downstairs now to keep an eye on the
servants.  I hope monsieur will find himself comfortable.  Supper
will be served directly."

"The sooner the better," replied his guest.  "Have that ostler
bring up my saddle and bags, and see that my horse gets a full
measure.  No drenched chaff, mind you.  A good rub-down, too.  But
send the man up to me."

The fat man bustled out puffing with importance.  It was some time
since he had had a guest who did not haggle over terms.  Presently
the ostler was heard ascending the stairs.  His ungainly form
filled the door of the room as he deposited the saddle and its
heavy bags on the floor with a bump.

"Look out for the pistols, François," said the gentleman.

The man stared blankly.

"In the holsters, you know, you had better unstrap them."

The man did so, bringing them gingerly to the table and laying them
down carefully.  The weight of the weapons and the silver crown on
the flaps filled him with awe for their possessor.  The gentleman,
very tall and straight, now stood before the fireplace and was
holding aside his cloak to warm himself thus revealing a long
rapier with a plain brass hilt.  His eyes glittered with a hard
steel-blue under a mass of brown curls that had escaped from the
bow and queue in which he had in vain attempted to confine them.  A
long, straight nose with thin, quivering nostrils over a firm bow
of a mouth and a stronger chin completed a countenance which with
extraordinary mobility could flash from an expression of grim
determination to one of extreme charm.  He appeared to be about
thirty years old.

"Take good care of the mare, 'Solange.'  She answers to that.  Fill
her nose-bag full, she will not eat from a strange manger.  Mind
she doesn't nip you, but rub her down, and make a good deep bed."

"Yes, monsieur," said the man, "Maître Henri has already told me."

"Do it, then!" snapped out the gentleman.  He snapped him a coin
which fell onto the floor.  The man groped for it and stood up to
find himself even nearer to the stranger whose nostrils expanded.
He fumbled for his cap which he had forgotten.  He took it off.

"And, François."

"Yes, monsieur!"

"Do not come up here again, you bring the smell of the stable with
you."

"No, monsieur," said the man letting his hands fall humbly with a
ponderous despair as if he had been reminded of something fatal.
Suddenly a smile of vivid brightness irradiated the face of the
stranger.  His white teeth seemed like a flash of sunshine in the
light of which the heart of the man before him became happily warm
as he stood clutching his cap in one hand and the piece of silver
in the other.

"François," said the gentleman continuing to smile, "would you like
to earn a piece like that again tomorrow?"

"But yes, monsieur," gasped the ostler.

"Then remember this, do not say a word to anyone about my being
here.  Nothing, you understand?" The face suddenly became grim
again, "It might be dangerous!"

"Nothing, monsieur, nothing," but now the ostler was somehow again
looking at the face with a smile on it.  His own expanded into a
loutish grin with snagged teeth left here and there in ponderous
gums.  An idea slowly hatched itself.  "Monsieur," said he bowing
like a mountain in pain, "has never arrived.  I cannot remember
him--even in my prayers!"

"Precisely," said the gentleman.  "Go now."

A peal of boyish laughter followed him down the stairs.  "Whew!"
said the gentleman, and threw open the window that looked into the
street.

It was a clear starlit night.  He could see for some little
distance over a tract of open country beside the hill from which he
had just ridden down.  Far to the right the giant, sphinx-like
curve of a demi-mountain shouldered itself into the constellations.
In the valley shone the brilliant windows of the château.  He drew
a chair up and watched.  She was taking supper there now.  A look
of longing came over his face.  Then it suddenly turned white with
fury.  "With him!"

He sat for a while with an exceedingly grim expression in a reverie
so absorbing that he temporarily lost all count of time.
Gradually, as if he were dwelling on something more pleasant in the
past or some bright hope of the future, a faint smile began to play
about his lips.  Even with this, however, the look of determination
remained.  Presently his host knocked and entered bearing a tray
piled high with supper.  The gentleman was hungry and peculiarly
sensitive to odours, and the odour which now filled the room was
highly satisfactory to both his nose and his appetite.

"It is the best I could do for monsieur at short notice," said the
innkeeper.

He began to lay the table.  A bowl of soup, a steaming ragout of
rabbit and carrots, white rolls, and a bottle of wine discovered
themselves.

"Excellent!" said the stranger, as he settled himself with evident
satisfaction to the repast.  "Indeed, I was prepared for something
worse than this."  He filled his glass and after a preliminary sip
tossed it off without further doubt.  Nevertheless, the innkeeper
continued to stand before him clasping and unclasping his hands in
the folds of his white apron in considerable perturbation.

"Excellent," repeated the gentleman, polishing off the soup and
sampling the ragout.  The man, however, continued as before.
"Well?" said the gentleman, raising his eyebrows interrogatively
but with a slight tinge of annoyance.  "Oh, I see," and he reached
for his purse, stretching his long legs out under the table to do
so.

"No, no!" said the innkeeper deprecatingly.  "Monsieur mistakes me.
I have no doubt of his ability to pay--when he departs.  It is
this.  It is the law that I must report the arrival and the names
of strangers who stop here together with a declaration of their
business to the mayor-postmaster.  They must, in fact, show their
papers within twelve hours.  Otherwise I shall be heavily fined."
Here his hands locked themselves underneath the apron.  "The times
are troubled ones, you know, monsieur, the roads . . ."

"Do you take me for a brigand?" demanded the gentleman with the
stern look which he was able to assume instantly.  "Besides, I have
not yet been here twelve hours."

"Forgive me, monsieur, but it is not so simple as that," said his
host.  "My brother is the mayor-postmaster.  He is even now
downstairs and knows that you have arrived.  He has seen supper
brought to your room."

The stranger paused for a moment over his ragout while the flame of
the two candles on the table continued to mount steadily.  There
was no expression whatever on his face now.  His legs continued
stretched out under the table in a nonchalant manner.  Suddenly he
drew them up under him determinedly, and leaning forward with a
quizzical grin as though he anticipated something amusing,
remarked, "Show him up."

"Monsieur will not come down?  My brother, the postmaster . . ."

"Postmaster be damned!" snapped the gentleman.  "Who do you think
_I_ am?"

With a deprecatory gesture, the innkeeper disappeared.  There was
the sound of a short colloquy downstairs, a door opened, and two
pairs of heavy feet stumbled up the stairs.  The gentleman
addressed himself unconcernedly to his ragout.  The footfalls came
down the hall and ceased.  The gentleman helped himself to a
particularly savoury morsel, swallowed it slowly, and looked up as
if his thoughts were elsewhere.

Standing in the door, with the broad, white expanse of the
innkeeper behind him, was an almost equally rotund personage with a
wide, stupidly cunning face.  A huge cocked hat with a moth-eaten
cockade was pressed down importantly upon his brow to which it
managed to impart by wrinkling the rolls of fat a portentous and
official frown.  There was in the man's manner a combination of
obsequiousness and truculence either of which was ready to triumph
over the other as events might decide.  To the gentleman at the
table there was no doubt as to which attitude was going to win the
day, however.  His spurred boot shot out swiftly from beneath the
cloth.  Catching a chair deftly, he kicked it precisely into the
middle of the room.

"Sit down," said he.

The man advanced somewhat gingerly and sat, only to find himself
looking directly into the stranger's face.  Seeing the latter
eyeing his hat with surprise and disapproval, after an evident
inward debate, he removed it and laid it on his fat knees.

"Monsieur, the innkeeper's brother, I believe," said the stranger
looking at him with the ghost of a twinkle.  "No one could doubt
that at least."

"And the mayor-postmaster," began the little man puffing out his
cheeks.

"How am I to be sure of THAT?" asked the stranger leaning back
and looking at the man grimly.  "Have you your documents with you?"
The pompous look upon the face of the astonished official collapsed
from his cheeks as if they had been a child's balloon pricked by a
pin.  He squinted anxiously from his ferret eyes and began to feel
his pockets dubiously.  "Not WITH me," he admitted, still
fumbling.  Then his hands sank back onto his hat again.  The
situation was unprecedented.  Already he was almost convinced that
he was falsely impersonating himself.

"Extraordinary!" said the gentleman regarding him doubtfully.

"But, but, I AM the mayor, the postmaster.  All the village knows
it!  Is it not true, Henri?" he demanded appealing desperately to
his brother.

"Indeed, monsieur, it is," replied the innkeeper.  "The curé lives
but a few doors above and can verify it.  Surely . . ."

"Well, well," replied the stranger, "I am inclined to believe you."
He raised a hand to deprecate the need of the curé.

"See," cried the mayor-postmaster with a flash of inspiration on
his dull face, "here is my cockade!"  He shifted his hat suddenly
and turned that dingy mark of office toward his doubter.  "Monsieur
has been looking at the wrong side!  He did not see the cockade
when I entered."

"Ah, that is different," smiled the gentleman.  "Can you blame me--
when I was looking at the WRONG side?"

"Certainly not, monsieur," both voices replied together.

"In that case I shall be glad to show my own papers."  He reached
in his pocket and drew out a long folded sheet.  "You see,"
continued he frowning, "I always carry my identification about me.
And it would be well," he added, fixing the flustered man before
him with a cold stare while rapping the knuckles of his extended
hand with the edge of the document, "if you would do the same when
you demand the credentials of a military gentleman."

The shot went home.  With a flushed face and far from steady hand
the fat man took the extended paper.  He unfolded it nervously and
began to read.  He was almost afraid to find whom he had offended.

It was a special leave of absence issued by the Minister of War and
dated from Versailles permitting M. Denis Moore, subject of His
Most Christian Majesty, captain-interpreter attached to the first
regiment of the royal horseguard, to travel upon private affairs in
all the kingdom of France during the space of four months.  Upon
the expiration of leave he was to report back for duty at
Versailles.  The script was in the beautiful, round hand of a clerk
of the war office, yet the eyes of the mayor moved over it slowly
while his lips spelled out the words.  At the bottom of the
document, however, much to his relief, he came upon a block of good
solid print.  There, along with such other exalted personages as
the intendants of provinces and the mayors of cities, he thought he
found himself included amongst "all loyal subjects of the king" as
bound to render aid, protection and assistance to the said Captain
Denis Moore in all his lawful designs whatsoever.  Nor as an
officer of the royal household was the captain to be hindered,
taxed, prevented, or delayed in his going to and fro on pain of the
explicit displeasure of the king himself.  "And of this ye shall
take good heed."

"It is the Minister of War," said the captain, pointing to a
signature whose many flourishes the poor man was in vain trying to
decipher.  Face to face with the signature of so great a man as the
Minister of War the mayor-postmaster felt himself to be something
less than dust.  He also felt himself in the distinguished presence
of an unusual man.  Under the circumstances, it would be best to
waive the usual small fee for examination.  No, he would say
nothing about it!  He folded the paper carefully and handed it
back.  "Monsieur the captain will excuse the interruption I hope,"
he said, preparing to leave the room with evident relief.

"Without doubt," said the captain, "but sit down.  I have something
further to consult about with you.  Come in," said he to the
innkeeper, "and kindly close the door.  Can we be overheard?"

"By no one!"

"You will both understand," continued the captain, "that what I am
about to say to you is the king's business and goes no further than
this room."  He glanced significantly at both of them.  While their
voluble reassurances continued to flow, he again unfolded the
paper.

"You will note," said he, pointing to the line upon which the
phrase occurred, "that I am on 'private business.'"  The mayor
nodded sagely.  "Now follow me"--his finger ran on down the page--
"and that you are 'bound to render aid, assistance, and
protection.'  It is that, monsieur the mayor, which I am now about
to ask of you.  Draw your chairs up closer while I explain."  It
was not long before the three heads were so close together over the
table that a fly could scarcely have crawled between them.

In a lower voice than he had been using, and with that confidential
air of being about to impart a matter of capital import, the
captain continued.  "There arrived today at the Château de Besance
a certain gentleman, the Marquis da Vincitata.  He is on his way
back to Genoa.  He was sent last year on a special diplomatic
mission by the Grand Duke of Tuscany to the court of Versailles.
The matter was one of such extreme importance that you will
understand I cannot possibly discuss it with you at all."

The innkeeper was already too flattered at having been made a
confidant in affairs of state even to attempt to reply.  His
brother, however, managed to gasp out a deprecatory noise at the
very idea of a complete revelation, waving his fat hand as if to
brush away so ridiculous a thought.  Fearful that the swelling
pomposity of the mayor might become apoplectic, the captain paused
for a moment before he went on.

"The marquis has certain letters in his possession."  He now
lowered his voice to a whisper.  "I am following him.  It is my
mission to obtain them, and it is in this that I shall require the
assistance of you both as loyal subjects, but especially of you,
monsieur the mayor."

"Certainly, in any way, but . . ."

"It will be quite simple.  I have already taken the first steps to
ingratiate myself with the marquis' wife.  She is young and pretty,
and he is old."  A look of extreme knowingness and worldly wisdom
appeared on the faces of both worthies as they gazed with open-
mouthed admiration at the captain.  Scarcely able to stifle his
laughter he condescended to enlighten them further.  "From her I
have already learned that the marquis intends to linger here for
some time while taking the waters at Royat.  It is my hope before
the gentleman is cured to persuade the lady . . ."

"To steal the papers," mumbled the mayor.

"Exactly," said the captain, actually patting him on the arm.  "I
see you are able to think quickly."  The combined smiles of the
delighted parties now seemed to illuminate the room.

"But to do that I must have a quiet place where I can stay,
reasonably close to the château, and one--mind you--where the news
of my being there will not leak out.  One idle word carried to the
ear of the marquis and the game is up.  Do you understand?  One
word!--and can you help me?"

Confronted by his first problem in statecraft, the mayor sat
thinking ponderously.  One could almost hear the wheels turn.  The
innkeeper finally came to his assistance by whispering something in
his ear.

"Why, the very thing, why didn't _I_ think of it?" cried his
brother.  "The farm of Jacques Honneton!  He is my brother-in-law,
a widower, and his place is quite close to the château."

"Not too close?" inquired the captain.

"No, no, monsieur, about a mile or so.  And you can be quite
comfortable there."

"I shall, of course, be glad to pay liberally," interrupted the
captain, "in a case of this kind the government . . .  You can
see," said he turning to the innkeeper, "that under the
circumstances I cannot remain HERE."

"It will all be in the family anyway," said the innkeeper.

"And," said the captain taking the words out of his host's mouth
and bringing his fist down on the table, "it must stay there!  Men
have been broken on the wheel for a slip of the tongue in a case
like this.  I remember . . ."

"Never fear, my captain," cried the mayor already white to the
gills.  "I will take it upon myself . . ."

"Then we understand each other thoroughly I take it, and I can
leave the arrangements at the farm with you."  The captain inclined
his head slightly, indicating that the interview was at an end.
With the air of two conspirators upon whom the burden of portentous
things rested heavily, the innkeeper and his brother the mayor-
postmaster left the room.  The latch clicked.  Snatching the napkin
up hastily the captain crammed it in his mouth.  For some seconds
what might have been mistaken for a choking noise escaped through
the folds.

Rising after a few minutes, he blew out the supper candles,
noticing with an amused smile that in the midst of the conspiracy
the innkeeper had forgotten to remove the tray.  "How dramatic even
the simplest person can become," thought he.  "The man has been
completely transported by his new rôle."  The captain wondered
whether the dramatic sense was not on the whole a weakness in human
nature.  It depended on who produced the play, he supposed.  "Now
in the army your great generals . . ."  He strolled over to the
window again.

The lights in the lower story of the château were being
extinguished.  Finally only one remained.  Suddenly a single
upstairs window shone out brilliantly.  The captain grinned.
"Separate rooms, eh!  No stairs for a one-legged man.  Vive the
gout!"  His theory about the two lighted windows at opposite ends
of the château pleased him immensely.  "So the marquis imagined I
was calmly going to be left behind at Versailles mounting guard.
It will be much easier here with him away at the springs most of
the day."  He looked at the lights in the upper window again.  A
strong tremor shook him, "Maria," he cried between his teeth,
"Maria!"  If he could see her tonight!  No, that would be mere
folly.  It might spoil all.  If he could only send her a message,
though.  God!  She was going to bed alone down there less than a
mile away!

He leaned half-way out of the window and for some moments continued
to fill his lungs with the cool spring air that was at once
refreshing and provocative.  A sensuous odour of vineyards in bloom
came to his nostrils as a love song might have drifted to his ears.
When he drew himself back into the room again the innkeeper was
removing the remains of supper.

"Pardon, monsieur," said he, "I knocked, you did not answer, and I
thought you had gone downstairs."

A sudden idea flashed across the captain's mind.  This man must
know some people at the château.  "Could you get a message to the
lady at the château, my friend?" he blurted out, "tonight!"

"Not tonight, mon capitaine, it is much too late, but early
tomorrow morning without doubt.  The cook's sister . . ."

"I do not care how, that is for you to settle.  Only of this be
sure.  Employ no fools.  I shall pay your messenger well and the
message must be delivered to the marquise, not to her husband.  To
the marquise herself, quietly, mind you, and without fail.  I shall
hold you responsible for this."  He slipped a gold piece on the
tray.  "You can arrange the messenger's wages yourself, you know."

"It shall be done as you say, monsieur," said the innkeeper with
eyes shining.  "No one will ever be the wiser.  We have our own
ways of getting news to and fro about the château even when M. le
Comte is home."

"Doubtless you have," replied the captain, looking keenly at the
wine bottle.

"From the château vineyards, monsieur, but not from the count's
cellars.  Ma foi . . ."

"I said nothing," interrupted his guest.  "But here is the
message."  He took a scrap of paper from his dispatch box and sat
down.  For a moment his crayon hung poised above it.  On the whole
it would be better to write nothing.  He began to sketch rapidly.
Presently he handed the folded paper to the landlord.  "Tomorrow
before breakfast, to the lady, and to no one else!"

"Without fail, monsieur."  The man took up the tray and went
downstairs wishing his guest a hearty good night.  Arrived in the
kitchen he began to set the dishes aside to be washed next morning.
Finally nothing remained on the tray but the folded note and the
gold piece.  He took them up and listened.  Above his head the
beams creaked reassuringly.  Nevertheless, it was with some
hesitation even when in his own room that he finally opened the
note and spread out the paper before a dim rush light.

Before him lay no writing but a vivid little street scene sketched
with an economy of line which it is safe to say was entirely wasted
upon the pair of small eyes now examining it.  Their owner,
however, had no difficulty in recognizing instantly the peculiar
gabled front of his own inn.  And if there had been any doubt of
it, the sheaf of wheat, the sign, and the lantern swinging beneath,
left nothing vague as to the place or the artist's intention.
There was the brick arch, too.  But with the budding critical
spirit of a true connoisseur, Maître Henri noted with considerable
satisfaction that the arrangement of the chimney pots was decidedly
wrong.  If this detail had not escaped him, it was with both
surprise and indignation that he next surveyed the strange equipage
which appeared to be passing before his door.  It was a coach to
which, with an apt stroke or two, the artist had somehow managed to
give the outlines of a classical chariot.  Its prancing steeds were
driven by a cat.  Vulcan, or some other infernal lame god with a
crutch, lolled back in it.  Behind him in the guise of a footman
stood Mercury with a small shameless Cupid on his shoulders.  The
latter was shooting into the upstairs window of the inn.  The arrow
pointed straight toward it with a message attached.

Certainly no such vehicle had ever troubled the streets of
Romagnat.  Of that Maître Henri was sure.  Nor did he entirely
relish the half-tipsy air which the artist had managed to convey to
the inn.  His was a respectable place.  Above all that shirt
flapping from the window was a libel.  The wash was always hung in
the court!  Bursting with indignation he hurried out to make sure,
crossed the narrow street, and turned to survey the front of his
establishment.  The light in the captain's window was out, but
certainly there was a shirt flapping there over the sill as if hung
out to dry.  "Mort Dieu!  What was the place coming to?"




CHAPTER FOUR

THE ENCHANTED FOREST


The captain was awakened next morning by his friend the innkeeper.
Despite his chagrin at the shirt, which he noticed was still
fluttering at the window, the good man was once more obviously in
the rôle of conspirator.  Nor did the fact that he came bearing a
tray with a bowl of coffee and rolls prevent him from walking as
though a burden of state still rested upon his shoulders.  Between
his half-closed eyelids Denis Moore surveyed him as he arranged the
table, and permitted an inward smile to escape as an audible yawn.
Finding his guest awake, the innkeeper turned and bade him good
morning.

"The message was safely delivered, monsieur.  The cook's sister has
returned, two hours ago."

"Any reply?" yawned the captain stretching himself, but with a
throb of pulses under the covers.

"No, monsieur, you said nothing about that.  Did . . . ?"

"I did NOT expect one."

"Oh!" said the innkeeper.

"At least not till later, you know.  And what do we hear from the
mayor-postmaster?"

"All has been arranged as I--as he said.  There will be a room
prepared for you at the farm we spoke of.  You can go this morning
if you like.  François can drive you over in the cart with the
cover.  If monsieur will not mind sitting in the back, on a truss
of straw, no one will see him there as he goes through the
village."

"And the mare?" inquired the captain.

"She can be taken over this evening after it is dark."

The captain was visibly pleased.  "I am bound to say that you have
both done very well, you and your brother, the mayor-postmaster.  I
shall see that your services are properly mentioned in my report,"
he added, sitting up officially, and drawing on his shirt.  "All
that is needed now is a closed mouth.  You can leave the rest to
me."

The innkeeper bowed and puffed out his cheeks.  In his mind's eye
he beheld a document heavy with seals and loaded with encomiums
winging its official way to Paris.  What an honour for the family
Gervais to be mentioned to the Minister of War!  "Monsieur is
indeed very kind," he murmured.  With some difficulty he returned
to his rôle in actual life.  "Is there anything . . . is the
breakfast satisfactory?"

His guest surveyed it somewhat skeptically.  "A flask of whisky,
perhaps."  The host stared blankly.  "Eau de vie, then."  With
incredulity upon his face the man vanished to returned a few
minutes later with the desired liquid.  "Bon Dieu!" said he as the
captain emptied a considerable portion of it into his cup and
tossed it off raw.  "In the morning, monsieur!"

The captain laughed.  "It is a family custom, my friend.  Several
generations in France have not changed it.  We still drink to the
King of France whenever we can in Irish whisky, as my grandfather,
the great O'Moore, once drank to King James."  He looked at the
flask wistfully.  "Lacking whisky, brandy is the next best thing."

"But in the morning, monsieur!"

"It is a fine loyal way to begin the day.  Will you join me?"

Not daring to refuse, the innkeeper gulped down a fiery potion
poured out by his host, and retired gasping.  "Exit," thought the
captain, "I shall now be left in peace at least for some time.  But
what a slander on the O'Moore's.  Brandy before breakfast!  One
would think us to be Russians."  Labouring under great excitement
as he was, he had craved the drink.

It might be hours before he heard from the château.  Hours?  Days!
Perhaps not at all!  But he dismissed that from his mind.
Underneath he could hear the morning activities of the inn already
well under way.  Judging by the clatter in the stable, François was
currying down the mare and being nipped at for his pains.  He
looked out into the littered courtyard.  It was a beautiful, clear
day and the smoke from Maître Henri's two chimneys rose straight
into the air.  Then he crossed to the other window and standing
back some little way so as to remain unobserved from the street,
glanced toward the château.  An exclamation of surprise escaped
him.  On the road leading to the village a cloud of dust could be
seen coming his way rapidly.  There was no time to lose.

He turned back into the room and from an inner flap of his
saddlebag extracted a square object carefully packed in a fragment
of blanket.  Unwrapping this rapidly he took out a fair sized
mirror which it contained.  Again hastening to the window he
propped the glass on the window-sill almost at right angles to the
street.  Drawing up a chair some distance within the room, he
seated himself, adjusted the mirror once or twice and waited.

Like many old buildings the inn did not front squarely on the road.
Even the slight angle at which it was offset plus the overhang of
the casement enabled the scene outside to be thrown upon the glass
in a bright little miniature of that portion of the village street
which the captain was most anxious to see without being seen.
Despite his anxiety, the situation and his secret view amused him.

A few yards below him two women in white caps could be seen
gossiping and gesturing violently.  Their shrill voices came in
through the window.  He noticed the peculiar "well-what-could-one-
do-about-it" gesture of one of the women as she seemed to let the
bad luck she was relating pour back onto the spine of Providence.
A black goat switching a long lily stalk in its teeth wandered
across the street.  "What kind of an omen is that?" thought the
captain, who was now amused to imagine himself a crystal gazer.
Undoubtedly a great deal of fate was concentrated in the mirror.
He could not help feeling that way about it.  Suddenly the women
turned and both gazed in the same direction.  There was the distant
crack of a whip and a rumble.  He could hear feet running to the
door downstairs.  A small blur appeared in the glass that grew
rapidly, almost terrifyingly swiftly into a coach and four.  He
caught a glimpse of a squat, cat-faced postilion riding the right
lead horse, and the two tall footmen behind.  In the distortion of
the glass there was something diabolical about them.  Then horses,
coach and footmen seemed to vanish uphill across the mirror into
nothing.  The next instant the cocked hats, white wigs and profiles
of the two footmen appeared close to and on an exact level with the
window.  Their heads and a small part of the coach roof seemed to
glide along the sill miraculously.  He caught the flash of a yellow
glove.  There was a sharp crack, and the captain swore automatically.
The mirror, shivered into a hundred jagged fragments, had tinkled
musically to the floor.

He was on his knees now.  He wondered if the missile had bounded
back into the street.  Inadvertently he had miscalculated the
height of his room above the road.  It had not been quite so easy
to reach it as he had expected.  Then he gave a relieved
exclamation and rose with the desired object in his hands.  In a
few seconds the piece of paper was disengaged from the small stone
about which it had been tightly wrapped, and opened out on the
table before him.  He bent over it, for the writing though clear,
was exceedingly minute.


He will be gone all day.  This afternoon early, the road to
Beaumont by the mill at the first bridge.  Driving.  The maid can
be trusted.  Till then Dieu te garde--AND ALWAYS.


"And always"--his lips moved as if in prayer and sank to the paper
in Amen.  All his frame flushed with happiness.  He felt his throat
beating in the collar that was suddenly too tight for him.  No, he
had never known how much he needed her.  The tumult and the longing
of his body surprised his mind out of thought.  There could be only
one meaning to the note.  She had decided at last then.  It had
been impossible finally to bid him good-bye.  Those days at
Versailles had won against all her scruples at last.  Or, could she
only be flattered that he had followed her?  But this was not the
court!  He ran to the window to reassure himself.  No, no this was
Auvergne.  Miles of pastoral landscape, vineyards, fields, forests,
and meadows rolled up and away to the heights of Gergovia.  Sound,
odour, and sight swept up to him bringing a sudden access of peace,
conviction, and determination.  The quest for which he had been
prepared to devote his summer was about to end.  He turned and
threw himself upon the bed in an ecstasy that shook him.  For a
moment he gave himself up to a sensation of unmitigated happiness.
He breathed deeply and lay still.  When he arose some minutes later
he noticed that he was still only in his stockings.  And he had
been walking about heedlessly amid the shattered fragments of the
mirror that lay scattered about the floor.

In the heightened emotional state in which he found himself, the
accident to the glass worried him more than he would have thought
possible.  An unusual sensitivity in which he became painfully
aware of the strangeness of his surroundings flooded in upon him.
It was like homesickness; the only remedy was to be with her
wherever she was.  Yet he found a positive fear of going out, of
meeting strange faces, possessed him.  After the moment of ecstasy
he was now at the nadir of that state, and a conviction of
impending tragedy overpowered him.  "How could such an affair turn
out well?  Suppose, yes, suppose THAT . . . what would they do
then?"  He reached out almost unconsciously and took a pull at the
brandy.  A feeling of relief and of normal assurance gradually
returned.  He felt better, confident.  He walked about, pulled on
his boots, dressed with great care, slung his rapier carefully
under the arranged folds of his cloak, and tied back his hair,
missing his broken glass sorely.  "Damn that piece of luck!"  But
he would forget.  He rapped on the floor and brought up the
landlord.

"Monsieur must be careful or he will give himself away.  Lucky that
no one else heard him."

In the mood he was now in, it didn't matter.  Yet he realized the
man was right.

"How soon can François be ready with the wagon?  I must leave for
the farm as soon as possible."

"In a few minutes," replied the innkeeper.  "Watch from the window.
When I come out into the court without my apron all will be clear
and you can come down.  But do not delay, sir.  People are about
now all the time."  The man went downstairs while the captain
watched impatiently, François hitched a mule to the wagon.
Presently the fat host appeared in his vest.  Snatching up his
holsters and saddle-bags the captain dashed downstairs and bundling
his stuff hurriedly into the cart leaped in behind.  It was a high,
two-wheeled wagon with a kind of bulging tent over it which when
drawn behind effectually concealed its burden.

"Good-bye, Maître Henri, and thank you," said the passenger to the
innkeeper.  "Give me your hand to clinch the bargain."

The fat man cried out at the grip he received from the gentleman
under the cover.  But on withdrawing his hand he found that within
it which caused him to bid his guest, as he rattled out of the
court, an all but affectionate farewell.

A few minutes later and the captain was safely ensconced at the
farm of Jacques Honneton.  By his manner and the elaborate
precautions in the reception of his guest, that well-to-do peasant
had evidently not failed to be filled up with the importance and
peculiar requirements of his charge.  The mayor-postmaster must
have been more than usually impressive.  Best of all, the window of
his room, Denis noticed, had a clear and uninterrupted view across
the park and of the entire front of the château.  That fact, he
thought, might have strategic possibilities.  He proceeded to make
himself comfortable and to inquire from his new host as to the road
to Beaumont.

"Là-bas, monsieur," said Honneton, pointing out a streak across the
landscape that about a mile away disappeared into a dense mass of
ancient greenery.

                            ----------

At the château that morning Maria was strangely happy.  It was the
first fully happy day she remembered since her marriage.  Despite
the cold fear which had crept along her spine the night before at
supper as the marquis chatted so hopefully of his recovery--and all
that it implied--the sensation of coming home, which had begun with
her in the coach the afternoon before, had continued.  Against the
sanguine prophecy of Don Luis as to his health, she had, although
she tried not to permit herself to do so, set off the glimpse of
the figure waving from the rock.  Without realizing that she had
unconsciously leaped toward him as an alternative with all of her
being, she consciously thought of the near presence of Denis as a
protection.  Someone to appeal to in case--in case one needed
someone to whom to appeal.  Then the maid was a dear, a merry and
understanding person about thirty but seemingly much younger.  They
had already confessed their ages, while the golden childish
ringlets over which the older woman leaned in unfeigned admiration
were being brushed just before bed the night before.

"Ah, madame was so young--and to be married to the old monsieur,
already a year!"  It seemed impossible.  The talk ran on in the
eager Tuscan that completed for Maria the illusion that she was
being put to bed again at Livorno by Faith Paleologus.  Without
realizing it she began to talk of her maid, her father's house, of
Italy, of all the old life, a forbidden subject, or practically so,
for Don Luis would hear none of it.

"You are now in a new world, my dear, forget the old one," he would
say, and look dubiously on the frequent letters from home.  Once a
month she could reply.  And he must read and correct her letter
when it was finally done with many sighs and not a few blots.
Always it must be rewritten.  "A marquise, you know, must at least
be correct in her correspondence."  How she hated it--and him.

Now she could talk at her ease.  A flood of delightful, childish
chatter was soon joined in by the maid as she brushed and brushed,
and watched the bright, beautiful face tilted back at her in child-
like confidence, and relief, and ease.  They went to sleep
whispering.  At midnight Lucia found she was relating the story of
her life to her mistress who was asleep.  The last details of a
romantic affair with the butler of M. de Besance died away with a
sigh as the final candle in a corner sconce guttered and went out.

Then in the morning had come the wonderful picture from Denis.  No,
he had not been wrong.  Of course, she understood.  Perhaps without
Lucia she could not have puzzled it out so quickly.  And what else
could she do but reply?  That tallest footman had carried some
notes for her before to Denis at Versailles.  And Denis remembered!
After all she could write a good letter; say a great deal on such a
little space of paper.  How surprised Don Luis would be if he read
that.  But heaven forbid!  She could trust Lucia, though.  Yes, she
was sure of that.  It had all taken only a few moments.  And she
would see him this afternoon--at that mill in the forest that Lucia
knew about.  What a jewel she was, and how much she knew about the
château and the country around after arriving only a few days ago.

To Lucia what seemed more natural than that madame should have a
cavalier.  One could not expect an ogre to fill the heart of a
goddess.  Besides she herself must get back to Italy and it would
be well to ingratiate herself with madame, to make herself
indispensable.  With a certain amount of knowledge one need never
be discharged at all.  She had learned that much at Paris.  One did
not leave the hotel of M. de Besance with two fair-sized shoes full
of gold pieces merely for dusting off the chairs.  But before all
she was a woman, an Italian, and the cry of youth to youth was as
natural to her and as little to be cavilled at as the sunlight
streaming through the window.  So the drive that afternoon was
arranged, and the letter, carefully wrapped about the stone, which
so thoroughly shattered the captain's reflections, was dispatched.

Hence, at half past one of that beautiful spring afternoon the pony
and the little landaulet painted with wreaths of roses and blue
ribbons, that Mlle. de Besance now secretly pined for even in the
family great coach at Versailles, was waiting at the door.  Since
madame herself was going to drive, the small bell on the bridle
must be silenced.  It would never do to have the pony shying at it,
Lucia insisted.  Maria pouted at this, but a knowing glance from
her companion reminded her that it would never do.  "No, no, it
must be taken off."  There was a slight delay while the offending
chime was removed and then they were off, taking the great circle
of the drive, the straight road through the hedges, and then a
swift turn to the right and on to the road for Beaumont.

The horse was a well-behaved but eager little beast.  For some time
now he had been little used and he travelled the road briskly.  The
red tassel on the whip began to bend back into the wind and the
wheels on level spaces grew dim.  Maria laughed with sheer
exhilaration.  The sunlight drenched the rows of vines, and as if
she had already extracted from it that quality that would soon be
pressed out as wine, her cheeks glowed and her eyes sparkled.  From
the heights about looked down upon her old ruined towers, white
villages, and little chapels whence the distant bells rang out now
and again in what seemed like a chime to the trot and time of the
horse.  Always over this country of Auvergne there was the sound of
bells.  At that season the vines had already been tended weeks
before.  In the vineyards they passed through they saw no one.

Suddenly as if a cloud had passed over their heads they were in the
forest.  It was damp and cool.  Great beeches covered with green
moss on the southern side threw level arms across the road.  The
sound of the pony's hoofs was muffled in loam and leaves.  The
wheels swished through them like the prow of a boat moving rapidly
through water.  Their eyes grew wide in the watery, green light.
The silence seemed prophetic.  Bright golden patches shimmered and
chequered the road ahead.  Down the long, cool glades they saw the
pronged antlers of the deer disappearing amid the trees and
blending into the shadows of branches.  It was an enchanted
country.  Only the forlorn and distant sound of a hunter's horn
durst disturb it.  No one else ever came there, no one but
themselves.  Then as she threw her head back to drink in the wonder
of it, and to taste the essence of spring that seemed to flow from
the tips of the beech buds trembling in the heat on the highest
branches, her whole being for the first time partook of life to the
full.  She was in that hour and in that green virgin place a woman,
full grown.

The old merchant's daughter was a girl, a memory moving
pathetically, only half-alive it seemed now, about a gloomy house
in Livorno.  Her father's voice, that careful, wise and knowing
voice, was far, far off, talking to someone else that had once been
she, but was so no more.  And the girl-wife?  Ah, Madre mia!--what
had THAT man to do with HER?

The horse sped on as if he would take her away from Don Luis
forever, leaving the cold about her heart and the fear behind.  A
robin flicked across the road in a patch of sunlight.  Against the
tender green of the leaves his breast seemed to burn like scarlet.
As if he had flashed a message from the heart of that enchanted
forest, rushed upon her the remembrance, the knowledge, and the
full conviction that she was going to meet her lover.

There could be no holding back now.  Had he not followed her all
the way from Paris?  After the crushing of all hope by her
marriage, after a year of foreboding and life in death, to find
this full cup of life held out to her, waiting as it were just
around the next turn in the road, intoxicated her, thrilled her
through every fibre and flamed up with a sudden blaze and hope of
fulfilment in the very core of her being.  "Yes, yes, yes--and
never again no," that was what the voices amid these trees, and
whispers in the night all the way from Paris--she knew it now--that
was what they had all been saying.

She flicked the horse with her whip, half amazed at her own
sureness and firmness of grasp.  The little carriage darted along
under the tunnel of great branches even faster.  Lucia with
surprise and fear in her eyes grasped the sides of the vehicle
tighter.  The road began now in a series of long even curves to
descend.  The speed increased.  They could hear the pony breathing.
A sparkle of water glittered through the leaves ahead, then some
weathered stonework.  They wheeled out onto an open green over
which the road twisted to a high arched bridge, and drew up before
a long abandoned, stone building.  The singing voice of a small,
rapid river talking to itself filled the air of the deserted valley
in which the ruin lay.

"It is the mill, madame," said Lucia.  "That way," she pointed to a
squat doorway from which stairs overgrown with ferns descended to
some green region below.  Maria looked.  A huge root writhing like
a serpent had ages ago taken charge of and embraced that threshold
so that nothing could now make it let go short of steel and fire.
"Watch," said Maria, handing the reins to her companion who looked
down at her almost enviously.  A wave of colour swept over the
young girl's face, tingeing for a moment her neck and shoulders.
Then she turned, and stepping over the threshold lightly,
disappeared into the green shadows of the door.

For a moment it seemed to Maria that she was descending into
darkness.  The steps made a complete turn.  She felt her way in the
uncertain shadows.  The wall grew smooth.  Then, almost as soon as
she became aware of the light ahead and below, her hand began to
brush over the cool and lacy texture of ferns that grew ever more
luxuriantly from the damp stone.  When she emerged again into the
daylight the whole tunnel of the ancient stairs of the mill tower
was a vault of faintly vibrant green.

She now found herself almost on a level with the stream.  Behind
her rose the mill a whole story to the level of the road to which
it served as an embankment.  Before her stretched a short natural
terrace bounded on the side of the stream by the abandoned mill
race choked with water-lilies and on the other by a high bank
crowned with huge trees.  The place was still dewy and smelt of
mallows.  From the road its existence, to any casual traveller,
must remain unsuspected unless he came by the stairs or cut his way
through the great trees and undergrowth that now flourished on the
top of the ruined dam.  The miller of times past, whoever he had
been, had chosen his site well.

It seemed to Maria stepping out upon the smooth, natural lawn of
this sequestered coign that by some magic she had suddenly
succeeded in leaving the world behind.  Surely neither man nor
beast came here.  Those delicate white flowers, tossing themselves
in hazy sprays above the grass, were meant for magic feet.  The
sound of the river bubbled itself monotonously into her ears.  She
stood, she did not know how long, listening to it.  The sensation
of having reached a spot where time had ceased slowly grew upon
her.  She remembered some dim, old Scotch story of a maid who had
strayed into a place like this and come back still young.  But the
names of the gravestones of her generation had weathered away.
Then she saw him.

He had been waiting by the bank under an overhanging branch of a
pine, watching her.  As long as he lived he would never forget her
standing there listening to the stream, gazing into another world.

There are certain expressions at times upon the faces of some women
that utterly confute the doctrine of original sin but confirm
predestination.  Such glances of the soul are to be overtaken only
when it does not know it is being watched and reveals itself
unconsciously as one of the elect, sprung from love and naturally
and innocently bound for it again.  Whatever else circumstances may
do to such a soul that has no part with evil, they can never alter
the essence of its being.  It remains clear as a flame does even
when fed by and consuming the most dreadful refuse.  Such a clear
glance from the depths of the young girl's being Denis Moore had
just had the good fortune of seeing.  It was not lost upon him.  He
had both sensitivity and experience enough to understand.  When he
stepped out from behind the branch which had concealed him, he had
already abandoned utterly the very simple rôle of the hunter.  It
would never be sufficient merely to bring that beautiful body to
the ground.  Now he had seen who it was that lived within it.  He
must live with her, alive, all of her.  That glance of hers had
revealed to him a kindred thing within himself which he had
forgotten.  It caused him to remember the clean fire of his youth
before he had begun to choke it with ashes.  It was that which he
desired to blend with her.  Some spiritual breeze seemed to have
blown the ashes away.

Perhaps on the whole it would have been better for them both if
this had not been so.  Better if she had found merely a cavalier
waiting for her.  Then they might have met, parted, and let pass.
For there was one thing that the experience of the captain had not
taught him.  The flame kindled by the mere clashing of two bodies
together is usually a flash; the fire engendered by the fusing of
souls consumes the body and cannot be put out.  Such things,
however, are not ordered by merely worldly coincidence.  They are
kindled by the great urge and turn out as they may.  So it was not
a cavalier who stepped out into the sunlight to meet Maria, but
Denis Moore stripped of all worldly regimentals, and reduced to a
man quivering like a boy.

It was thus that she saw him as he was for the first time.

For a moment they stood gazing at each other.  Then as if a magnet
drew them together the faster as they approached, they moved toward
each other, cries rather than words on their lips.

"Maria!"  "Denis!"--and a long silence while he wrapped his cloak
about them both.  Then too overcome to speak he led her to the edge
of the mill race where on the green they sat down.  She bent
forward and put down her face amid the cool leaves of water-lilies,
bathing her forehead and cheeks with one hand, for he would not let
go of the other.  She had not realized what would happen in her
when he actually held her in his arms.  For her it was the
discovery of a whole new continent of the emotions; to him a new
aspect of shores that he had long thought familiar.  She touched
her own lips, reflected in the water, affectionately, and drank.
When she looked at him again she was cool and white.

Now that she had surrendered unconditionally, womanlike, she began
to plead with him and to try to make terms.  So long and gallant a
defence of the heart's city as hers had been, implied, she thought,
that the garrison should withdraw with the honours of war.  At
least she had not been taken by storm.  She would never admit that.
"Is it," she said leaning her head against him, "is it for always?"

"Always," he replied after her as if exchanging vows.

"And you will never leave, never go away?"

"Never!"

"You will take me away from him?  Away--"  Her voice trailed out.

He had not thought of that.  He had not thought of her as his wife,
until now.  How could he?  How did he know that it would turn out
like this?  He would have to leave France, the army.  A tremendous
vista of change suddenly opened up before him.  Yet how could it
turn out any other way if he was to be what he knew himself to be?
He did not shrink from the change that yawned before him.  He was
not sorry that the adventure had turned into a great quest with the
lady won.  He was merely taken by surprise.  It remained only to
carry her off.

She grasped the hem of his cloak almost tearfully.  "In whose arms
was she folded?"  He read the question in her eyes.

"Yes!" he answered pressing his lips on hers, "I swear it."

"By the Madonna?" she whispered.

"By Mary, the Mother of God, by . . ."

She put her hand over his mouth.  It was enough.  In her mind's eye
she saw him holding his hand out over the figure in her little
shrine.  No oath could be holier than that.  From that moment she
felt herself to be his.  If the holy ones had registered those
other vows, how could they help hearing these?  Her lips moved and
the tears came into her eyes.

"Denis, Denis," she said, as if she had added him to her pantheon.

A moment of beatific oblivion enfolded them both.

Presently they were walking up and down by the little mill race,
talking.  There was so much to tell.  All the journey down from
Paris.  The terrible time at Bourges with the plague.  The new maid
at the château.  How he had followed them.  His "conspiracy" of the
night before at the inn.  She clapped her hands.  And so they were
safe here for a while!  No one would carry the news to Don Luis.
The officials, the mayor-postmaster himself--she pouted the title
delightfully--were on their side.  "Oh, how clever of you, Denis--
and that wonderful note!"--and how she had understood it right
away.  "But I was SO glad!  I did not know I could be so glad to
see you waving that evening."  The memory of the supper that night
returned and brought a cloud on her sunshine.  That cloud that even
now she felt was just over the horizon.  She trembled, and again he
must repeat his promises to take her away.  "Before--before Don
Luis was well!"  She told him her worst fear.  He comforted her and
promised, delighted to find that she might still be his as he might
have dreamed.  Her very confusion over it exalted him.

"But when, but where shall we go?" she kept asking now.

"You must trust me, Maria, I shall find a way.  It will take much
planning.  Your . . . the marquis has powerful friends.  We must
make sure.  It would never do to fail."

"No, no!" she gasped pale at the very thought.

"But let us leave that till again, till the next time," he hastened
to say.  "There will be many days now to talk it all over.  Let be
just for now.  I did not know before, could not be sure, you know,
that I must plan for this."

Seeing his face become troubled, she threw herself into his arms.
They would be happy now for this hour and in this place.  Let all
else go.  What more did she need than his assurance?  All would go
well with them--all would go well.

The afternoon fled away before they knew it.  They must tell each
other of all the things they had thought and felt since they had
met.  When they had first begun to love.  Of how wonderful it had
been that evening of the fête at the Court of Love at Versailles.
Of how she had known, how she had GUESSED, whom the roses were
for that he had laid on the altar.  How she had dared then in her
own mind, but not admitted it.  Of how Don Luis' suspicions had
first made certain to her that "the Irish captain" was her
cavalier.  He had actually made her happy in her pain.  She knew
that now.  They smiled over it together.  He at Don Luis, and she
at the little girl from Livorno.

How long ago it seemed.  How this afternoon had changed everything.
It was almost gone!  The sun was behind the forest.  It was getting
cool.  There was the voice of Lucia calling anxiously.  "Madame,
Maa-DAME!"  They must part.  It seemed impossible.  She must go
back to the other world and away from him.

There was a hurried consultation.  Unconsciously they talked in
whispers now.  Yes, she understood the arrangement of lights in her
window.  "ONE when Don Luis was going the next morning to the
springs, TWO when she could not see Denis next day.  THREE
would bring him to her immediately if need be, no matter what."

"MaDAME!" there was an almost frantic note in the maid's voice
now.

He made her cry out.  Then she had broken away and vanished up the
stairs.  There was the sound of voices, a neigh from the pony, and
the dwindling grit of wheels.  He turned and flung himself down on
the grass.  When he rose again the stars had begun to shine through
the branches.

He wrapt his cloak about him and took the road back through the
beechwood.  Despite the late twilight it was dark there and he did
not arrive at the farm Honneton till quite late.  When he did so a
cheery fire, most unusual for that time of year, and a good supper
awaited him.  Afterward he went and sat in his room looking out of
the window at a landscape that about ten o'clock began to grow
bright under the face of a waning moon.

It was May in Auvergne.  The scent of the vineyards drifted up to
him as they had the night before, but this time with a seductive
softness he would scarcely have thought possible.  A peace greater
than he had ever known, filled his heart and soul.  There was not a
doubt in his mind or body that he had found that without which
happiness would be impossible.  He was glad the die was cast.
Nothing could alter it now.  Over the road through the notch in the
hill, they would ride off together, some day, soon.  He would think
of that tomorrow.  America, perhaps, or Ireland, he had relatives
there.  But tonight let there be nothing, nothing to spoil his
dream.

He leaned out again into the fragrant night.  The lights in the
château were still burning.  But none upstairs.  An hour or two
passed.  He did not know it.  Then the light in her window blazed
up.  Presently he could see the dot of one flame placed near the
casement.  He watched breathlessly.  It remained, burning steadily.
So it was to be tomorrow then.  He got up, stumbled about headlong,
found the tinder box and lit a candle.  He brought it to the window
and raised the flame up and down.  Across the fields the candle in
her window repeated the motion of his own.  "Good night, good
night, my lover," said the two lights.  Then the candle at the
château went out.  He extinguished his likewise and tumbled into
bed.  Without knowing it he had been chilled sitting at the window--
for how long?  He looked at the moon.  She was riding high now.
The sleep of an infant engulfed him.

Don Luis had been carried to bed in the same state as the night
before.  The soaking in the hot water at Royat had relaxed him.
And he had never seen Maria so gay as she had been tonight at
supper.  Almost too gay!  He wondered if she could be acting, but
dismissed the idea.  Doubtless the château was a delight to her.
She had been driving, too, and had had a good time.  It was lucky
Besance had sent that maid down, otherwise he would have had to
drag Maria back and forth to the springs, and amuse her.  Oh, yes,
and there was the dog.  They were going to look for that tomorrow,
she said.  Well, he must get better now.  Two or three months the
physicians insisted, and no wine.  That was a long time, at best.
He moved his leg impatiently and was rewarded promptly by the
proper twinge.  Why not begin by staying a week at the springs and
get a good start?  An excellent idea!  He pulled the bell cord.

"Jean," said he, "pack my portmanteau tomorrow for several days'
stay.  Have it ready early, and tell madame I shall be gone for a
week.  If I need anything I can send the coach back."

The thought of not making the still painful Royat drive twice a day
was an immense relief.  Later on it would be easy enough.  He
wondered he had not thought of it immediately.  He took up his
book.  While the two candles nodded to each other across the
moonlit fields, Don Luis nodded to Rabelais over the counterpane.




CHAPTER FIVE

A PASTORAL INTERLUDE


Early the next morning after dashing a bucket of cold water over
himself in the courtyard to the amazement of the stable boy, and
looking after the comfort of Solange, who was now comfortably
ensconced in Maître Honneton's largest stall, Denis proceeded to
dress in his room with unusual care.  The time he spent on shaving
and the arrangement of his hair while looking at the bottom of
Maître Honneton's most highly scoured milk pan would have satisfied
a professional macaroni.  As he was giving the ruffles of his
finest shirt the final touch he had the ineffable satisfaction of
seeing the coach of Monsieur le Marquis de Carabas, with Puss-in-
Boots on the lead horse as usual, swing around the great drive of
the château and take the road for Royat.

So the field was clear!  Of course, it would be the mill again.  He
had forgotten to say so, he remembered now.  But surely she would
know.  He went out and saddled Solange, in the meanwhile
questioning Honneton.

"Yes, monsieur, you can reach the woods that way," said the farmer
walking out with him to the brow of the hill on which the farm
stood.  He pointed to a rut across the landscape lined by old walls
and hedges, more like a ditch than a highway.  "It is a very
ancient lane, mon capitaine, used only by the hay carts in summer-
time, and not much for that now since the fields have been put to
vines.  You will meet no one.  Nor, unless one stands on the height
here, could a person see you pass.  We still occasionally use it
ourselves when the salt carts from Beaumont wish to dodge the
gabelle, but that is only at night," and his eyes twinkled.

"Thank you, Honneton," replied Denis mounting, "you will not forget
how important it is that no one . . ."  "Have no fear, monsieur.
There are none but men here, except Marie, the cook, and--" he
extended a sabot significantly, and laughed.  The captain gave rein
to his mare and disappeared a few minutes later into the mouth of
the dark walls of hedge.

The lane, almost a tunnel under its sturdy hedges, extended across
the landscape like a ruled line.  Here and there the green way
stretched before him on a straight level and he gave the mare full
head.  She sprang forward under him, quivering with the joy of the
morning, and would have whinnied had he not checked her with his
voice.  "A bad habit, girl," he warned her, striking her across the
neck with his glove, a punishment she danced under.  On a steep
slope her shoes rang on a bit of hard pavement where the turf had
washed off.  He saw the regular cut flagstone.  A Roman road!  Some
of Caesar's work about Gergovia?  Presently, as he had expected,
the way opened out on the top of the hill into an old camp, an
oblong court of green in which a few sheep were straying.  Where
the praetorium must have been, a young lamb was nuzzling his
mother.  He dismounted and ran up on the wall.

The old fossa was only a faint hollow now, filled with daisies, but
he was much higher here than he had expected.  He could look
directly across to the hill of Gergovia.  The roof of the château
lay far below him in the trees.  On the other side the beech forest
began, and tumbled in waves of hills down to the river.  The clear,
cool, morning air, the glittering sunlight on miles of new leaves,
the height, and the silence except for a continual undercurrent of
faint birdsong from the woods, flooded him with a sensation of
fresh and ardent well-being, a sense of youth and of being new-born
in strength that almost caused him to shout.  How triumphant to be
alive, to have found his mate, to be above and beyond fear!  It was
a sheerly masculine experience.  The small fountains of life
stirred within him filling his frame with premonitory thrills of
the ecstasies to come.  He beat his gloves on his arm till it
tingled.  Wrapping his cloak about him in semi-bravado he strode
along the parapet like Caesar himself.  Down there, down there in
the forest, he was going to meet her at the old mill.

He whistled to Solange who was sniffing uneasily at the sheep.  A
few seconds later and the forest had engulfed them.  The mystery of
the place closed about him.  He missed his own shadow.  The hoofs
of the mare fell noiselessly on the moss.  He might be a ghost
riding under the branches.  Who knew after all the end of the
errand upon which he was bound?  He wondered about his own father--
when and where?  Presently the mare was hobbled in a glade in the
forest and he was in the sunlight again on the little green by the
mill.  But it had been rather eery descending the old stairs, and
the place was lonely, without her.  He wished that she would come
now.  How slowly the time passed here!  It was so still except for
the river.  Did it after all move?

When Maria came down the stairs and stepped out onto the little
terrace she was terribly startled to see the white body of a young
god flashing and swimming about in the mill race.  For a minute her
heart was in her mouth.  It was as if she had surprised the
youthful spirit of all these spring woods sporting in his secret
pool.  But the head thrust up through the lily pads was that of
Denis.  For a minute they both looked at each other with horrified
surprise, and then burst into a laugh.  The blood rushed to his
face.  "Wait in the tunnel," he cried, "I shall only be a moment."
He could hear her laughter echoed from the fern-clad walls while he
frantically slipped into his clothes.  "I did not expect you so
soon!" he called.  "I should hope not, mon capitaine."  The
laughter continued.  What a fool he had been, after dressing so
carefully, too!  Now look, there was mud on the ruffles of his
shirt.  And his hair!

But she loved his damp curls when she came to him at last.  He
could not hold her close enough.  "Let me go, Denis!" she gasped at
length.  "You goose, I have something to tell you.  Such news," she
cried flinging her arms about him again, and whispering into his
"driest ear."  "He is going to be away for a week, for a whole
week!  I shall be all alone, and my own mistress at the château.
It will be like a honeymoon.  Let us call it that," and she clapped
her hands like a child as she always did when pleased and excited.
"Lucia and I have packed luncheon and brought it along.  She
thought of it.  We might have supper here, too.  He will be gone,
gone all today, and tomorrow."

"And the day after that!" added Denis.

Her eyes grew large at the vista of endless happiness that was
about to ensue.  They began to plan out the time together,
interrupting one another.  He drew a little calendar in a patch of
sand.  Tomorrow they would drive out to a farm that Lucia knew of
and get the puppy.  "And the next day?"  She faltered bewildered by
the endless possibilities.

"We will go up on the high hill of Gergovia.  It is a wonderful
place that," and he began to tell her.  The old story of the brave
Gauls took on a new lease of life.

"And after that to the old tower on the hill I can see from the
château."

"Why not?" he said.  "Anywhere, anywhere with you!  We can arrange
it each evening and meet the next day.  Only we must not be seen
together anywhere.  That would cause talk and might get back to the
château.  Remember after all a week is NOT so long."

How short, how terribly short it suddenly seemed.  She had pictured
him riding by the side of the little landaulet.  It would have been
so romantic.  She could look back at him and drop her glove.  He
would dismount and bring it to her, and kiss her hand.  The tableau
enchanted her.  It was not often she could imagine a scene so
clearly as that.  It was like something out of Paul and Virginia,
more real than life and somehow more beautiful.

"It will be better to be very careful now, and so have many days
all through the summer," he was saying.

So he was NOT planning to take her away with him soon.  But why
not now, this week, while Don Luis was away?  They could be gone
for days before he knew, she said.

"No, no, that would never do."  He began to explain.  "He would get
the news in a few hours at most after she was missed."  They must
have some place to go to.  He was writing a merchant at Marseilles
about a ship.  It would take some days, a week or so perhaps to
hear.  He had thought of Ireland, but America would be better on
the whole.  He had heard those who had campaigned there and knew
the country.  He began to tell her about it.  By noon they were
still lost in an idyll of forest life beyond the seas when Lucia
called from the world above and reminded them of lunch.

She brought it down in a little basket; was charmed with monsieur,
with his gift also.  A brave gentleman, indeed!  Her interest in
the affair became quite enthusiastic.  She laid the luncheon out on
a white cloth under the trees and went back to keep watch.  "I have
mine in the cart, you know.  Not many pass this way but it will be
well to be with the pony.  Monsieur will know what to do if I call--
and madame?  Ah, she is picking water-lilies!"  She gathered a
few, placed them in the empty lunch basket by the side of the race
and departed to the world above.

They sat down under the trees and ate together.  It was their first
meal.  In her heart she thought of it as a kind of lovers'
sacrament.  She said a little grace closing her eyes, while he
looked on fascinated and remembered to cross himself just in time.

"Ah, it will be like this in America, will it not, Denis?  We shall
eat out in the woods this way often.  And you will not let the
savages nor the great beasts come near me?"

He protested again and again that he would not.  The tears came
into his eyes as he thought of what must be ahead of her in
hardships, of the long journey, the ship, a strange land, nowhere
to turn, and he a poor man.  For a moment his heart failed him.
Could he ask that of her?  She was so daintily lovely here, so
fragile it seemed to him now; almost artificially beautiful with
her face like a cameo against the dark convolutions of the roots in
the bank before which she sat.  Those little rosebuds and garlands
embroidered on the clear silk of her gown, what would become of
them in Canada?  Could he after all?  Ah, could he not!

That delightful little golden head!  He was mad about that, the
face that looked up at him with so much wonder and appeal, so much
hope, and innocence and abandon.  He must have that near him in the
future, forever.  The future?  Why, here he was dreaming when she
was near him now!  Who could tell about the far-off days to come?
God held them in fee.  But this NOW, this was his, and she was
near him.  As if he were drawing her back from the shadows of the
unknown and would save her from all that his mind might forebode
but could not certainly form, he suddenly caught her to him.  She
saw that he had been weeping.  An access of wonder, and unreasoning
pity overcame her.  She comforted him for she knew not what, for
some sorrow that lay within her, too.  A great tenderness engulfed
them both.  Of all the doors by which love enters pity is the
widest.  Passion, the incendiary, is always waiting close by in the
disguise of an importunate beggar to glide over the threshold and
set fire to the house.

The afternoon shadows slowly lengthened over the grass.  The river
fled away forever modulating a monotone.  The dead windows of the
mill with little pine trees on the sills looked out at nothing.  A
small bird flitted back and forth over the white table-cloth on the
grass.  He looked doubtfully at the two figures by the bank under
the pine trees.  They did not stir.  Finally he lit upon a thin
stemmed glass and tilting back his little head drank delicately.
It was a light, sweet wine but it made him a bad, bold bird.  He
began to scatter the fragments of Maria's cake wantonly.  Finally
he put his head under his wing in broad daylight and went to sleep.
Under the pine branches there was nothing to show that the two who
lay there were alive except the long, slow rise and fall of their
breasts.  The wind tangled their curls together as it would if they
had both been dead.  Caught in the full tide of spring they drifted
closer and closer together through the long afternoon.

When Denis rode home through the starlit forest that evening it was
as if he had discovered himself as an entirely new person.  He was
inherently one of those rare but strong and natural people in whom
the realities of passion actually experienced invariably transcend
expectancy.  Nor was this due to a lack of imagination.  It was
merely that his mind could not remember with a thought vivid enough
to compass the actual feel of the flesh.

For the first time as he went home that evening he began to realize
that he was in a predicament.  He had already been caught in the
eddy of a current that flowed through him and possessed him.  Once
in the main stream of it he could neither control nor direct.  As
his imagination had been unequal to his capabilities, so his will
might be found inadequate to the unexpected strain.  "Might be?"
He knew it would.  It came upon him like fate.  Yet what could he
do?  He could not go away now.  By every tie that his heart and
soul knew he was bound to her.  Yes, even despite her marriage, by
every tie of an honourable mind.  That her father had sold her with
good intentions was no reason why he should recognize the bargain.
Society, the society he knew, would scoff at such scruples.  Her
marriage was a circumstance to be circumvented.  He would do that.
He would make her, so far as the world knew, honourable amends.
Beyond the sea they would be man and wife.  That last small remnant
of his grandfather's estate and the sale of his commission would
enable him to . . . oh, yes, that was all quite possible, a matter
of correspondence and some little time.

Time, that was it!  Could he control himself, tomorrow, or the next
day?  They had been so near the verge this afternoon.  He knew it
now.  But he did not care when he was with her.  He had become for
a time, what?  Putty in the hands of some outside force that might
mould him as it desired, not as he willed.  But he would summon his
self-control again.  He ground his teeth together and gripped the
mare with his knees so that she started forward.

They came up out of the forest into the old camp again.  He forced
the horse onto the rampart and stood looking back.  A low
chattering of night birds and hooting of little owls trembled up to
him through the night.  The moon was just rising and a light breeze
that seemed to follow the path she laid over the miles of new
leaves rippled the forest like a lake.  The breeze increased in
intensity and pressed against him.  It was warm, damp, and
fragrant, moulding itself into every fold and hollow of his body.
Wisps of it blew like hair across his lips and the smooth hands of
the mistral caressed his cheek.  He was holding her in his arms
again.  For an instant the spell of the afternoon recurred in full
force.  Every nerve of his body shuddered toward her.  The past and
the future were forgotten.  His entire consciousness became aware
of the meaning, blent with, and seemed to pass on into the languorous
longing of the spring night.

When he came to again, the mare, as if she had seen a ghost, was
shivering under him in the moonlight, and the last fringes of the
mistral had passed over the ramparts.  The wood which the wind had
passed through was strangely silent.  He rode home with a fear and
doubt of himself knocking at his heart.  Of the young man who
strode so confidently along those ramparts that very morning
nothing but a vague memory remained.  There was only one thing that
was stronger than his fear and that was his longing.  When he got
to his room the single candle was burning in the window at the
château.  He lit his own and signalled.  But there was no answer.
Maria had evidently gone to bed.

And, indeed, she had.  Lucia had seen to it.  It was only by the
exertion of some tact and will power that she had prevailed on her
mistress not to go down to supper in the great hall.  With the
quick instinct of her kind she had realized that the girl was in a
state that might well attract the not unobservant eyes of Pierre.
Hence the evening dress, which with great trouble and some
impatience had been put on, was now with evident relief and no
trouble whatever taken off.  Supper was served in the room.  A
complete lethargy seemed now to have fallen upon Maria.  She had
resigned herself into the hands of Lucia as if it were a relief to
have someone else make even the smallest decisions for her.

The older woman had now long passed the point where she was
striving to make herself agreeable from pure self-interest.  All
her motherly instincts had been aroused, and it was plain from
every little motion and attitude as she waited upon Maria that she
was actuated by strong affection for her.  Indeed, she had been
completely captivated by her young mistress whom she now pitied,
admired and loved with all her heart.  The affair of madame had
consequently taken on for Lucia a new aspect.  It had become a
vicarious experience of her own.  She had not expected that it
would be so serious and absorbing either to Maria or to herself.
Denis was exactly the kind of person she would have chosen for
Maria, and with the sudden turn of the affair she was at once
delighted with the present and fearful for the future.  Absorbed in
the fate of the lovers, she scarcely paused to consider what might
happen to her should a crisis of any kind occur.  Her first loyalty
was to her mistress, beside that any other duty as a member of the
marquis' household was too pale and abstract to engage her
attention.  She was one of those persons whose actions were
controlled purely by likes or dislikes.  She loved her mistress and
she disliked Don Luis.

Being of a somewhat bovine temperament herself, it was a surprise
to Lucia to note the effect of an afternoon spent in the presence
of her lover upon the highly strung young girl whom she was now
trying in vain to soothe.  That this was not the effect of
surrender but of being tremendously aroused without full
satisfaction, she was wise enough in the ways of her own sex to
know.  The result of having for the first time been stirred to the
depths of her being was to Maria like the after effects of a strong
and over-stimulating drug.  She was now completely unnerved.  Had
she been a weak character she would have been hysterical.  She had
come away in a daze.  Her body and spirit were now in an
indescribable tumult.  Nowhere could she find rest or satisfaction.
The sense of the physical absence of her lover was devastating.  At
the thought of him she experienced a longing for which there seemed
no adequate human control.  She threw herself on her knees before
the madonna, but it was in vain.  The very passivity of the statue
and her own attitude was an aggravation.  It was now like a final
twist of the rack that the thought of Don Luis intruded itself upon
her mind.  For the first time she fully understood what that meant.
A spiritual nausea and darkness overwhelmed her.  She cast herself
on the bed and then leaped from it in loathing.  Finally she took
to walking up and down the room repeating, "Denis, Denis, where are
you?  Denis!"

"Hush, madame, hush, the servants will hear you."  Lucia strove to
engage her attention.  "See, I shall put the candle in the window
for him.  It is a single one.  You will see him tomorrow."

The girl took the candle from her and rushed to the window with it
herself.  She raised the light up and down several times, but there
was no answer.  Then she turned and burst into tears.

"Do you love him so much?" said the maid stroking her hair.

"Oh, Lucia, Lucia," cried Maria.

A few minutes later she had been put to bed and was asleep.  Lucia
bent over her.  Except for a faint spasm now and then in the throat
muscles, she was calm again, worn out.  Presently she sighed and
lay utterly still.

It was Lucia who managed next day that they should see each other
only for a short time, and then not alone.  In the morning she
drove into the country with Maria and they returned with a puppy
which was instantly taken home to the young girl's heart.  It was
at least a living and responsive being upon which she could pour
out some of the affection that now constantly overwhelmed her.
They stopped at the mill for luncheon where Denis was walking up
and down distractedly.  He had been there since early morning.  But
the good woman by the exercise of much harmless ingenuity contrived
not to leave them alone.  Long before sunset Denis had to watch the
two women disappear along the road into the forest with Maria
looking back, her scarf waving in the wind, and the small, brown
face of the little dog peering over her shoulder.  He was forced to
admit to himself that Lucia was both right and understanding.
Nevertheless, an indignation overcame him and a sick longing as
they drove away and he found himself alone again without having
taken Maria in his arms.  Tomorrow, tomorrow, despite himself,
despite Lucia, he would feel those lips on his.  That hope alone
made the night supportable.

Nor was he disappointed.  Before noon the next day they had climbed
the high hill of Gergovia and were standing alone together upon its
top looking down upon all that part of Auvergne.  It was the first
hot day of the season and from the valleys already the warmth
shimmered up to them to lose itself in the crystal heights.  These
in turn glowed up and away into a vault of deepest blue blown clear
of clouds, quivering and sparkling.

Up here the red volcanic nature of the soil was apparent.  From the
rows in the vineyards below, where the grass had been stripped,
emanated an almost violet hue.  The domes of ancient volcanoes and
little breast-like hills rolled all about them, dotted with white
villages caught in a network of roads.  From these came faintly but
clearly the thin voices of bells.  A large amphitheatre of hills
covered with masses of vineyards and forest stretched southward and
upward to the Puy-de-Dôme.  Even from Gergovia they looked up to
see the ruined temple of the Gallic sun god overlooking his ancient
domain.

The entire bowl of surrounding mountains seemed to be catching the
sunlight and flinging it back at them.  Over the flat meadow on the
top of the shoulder, where they were now standing, and where the
town of the Gauls had once stood, the bees were greedy amid the
clover as if they preferred the wild, clean sweetness of the
flowers on that great height to the more cloying honey of the
blossoms in the valley below.  Indeed, from this place still
exhaled the faint memory of a fresher fragrance as if the dawn had
lingered there before moving westward to the lesser steeps.  But
now that whole hilltop was murmurous with wings, and vibrant with a
passion of light and heat.

The arms of Denis closed about the body of Maria.  Had anyone
looked over the slight rim of that hollow mountain meadow to the
very centre of which they had wandered, so that it enclosed them
with a complete circle from all but the sky, he would have seen but
one figure apparently, so close were they standing.  Denis bent
over Maria, while her hands, as if they were tapping at the door of
his heart, fumbled at his breast.  They stood for an instant with
the spring concentrated in them.  Then he picked her up and carried
her over the rim of the slope.

A jumble of huge stones, once a gate tower that had hurled back the
legions of Rome, lay scattered along the brow of the hill.  He
picked his way amid these rapidly.  Where the foundations still
remained they now leaned outward, overhung with brush or vines, and
sheltering a ledge-like hollow filled with last autumn's leaves.  A
short distance below, the shoulder of the hill fell away at a
tremendous angle.  It was a place where in the winter the shepherds
of the neighbourhood remembered to look for lost lambs sheltering
themselves from the blast.  Brushing aside the long, trailing
tendrils like a veil, Denis laid Maria softly in the nest of dry
ferns and leaves behind them.  The veil fell again.  To the curious
sheep cropping near by it seemed as if the man and his burden had
vanished into the old wall.  Soon their bells continued to sound
again gently.

Only once more during that noontide were they disturbed; this time
by a soft, tremulous cry.

On the meadow above, the sound of the bees' wings continued growing
a little deeper in tone as the heat of the day advanced.  By far
the majority of these honey gatherers were of the ordinary neuter
and domestic kind for whom work was an end in itself.  Here and
there, however, amid this host of humble workers, who took good
care to avoid so dangerous a neighbourhood, cruised a large male
bumble-bee like a pirate or gentleman adventurer covered with the
gold dust of the treasuries he had robbed.  These for the most part
seemed to have their nests or robber lairs about the tumbled stones
of the old tower where a kind of white cornflower trailed through
the grass.

From a fracture in the stone immediately above the little ledge
where the lovers had hidden themselves a peculiarly beautiful
specimen of this blossom had put forth.  But a large black spider,
who had also fixed on the same cranny in the rock for his abode,
had fastened on this bud as a support for his web and had succeeded
in dragging it to the ground.  In the shadow of the rock, the
flower, which could open fully only in the brightest sunshine,
still lay even after the noon had passed with the small green tip
of its maidenhead fastening its petals at the end of the pod.

Attracted by so lovely and virginal a store of honey, a bumble-bee
lit upon this blossom and after stroking its petals for some time
as if he were in love, began to tear away the small green membrane
that still defended it from his assault.  The petals opened
slightly and began to curl.  Settling back as it were upon his
haunches, and raking his body back and forth over this small
opening the bee finally succeeded in inserting himself into the
flower.  Here, as if in ecstasy, he dashed himself about.  The
flower opening ever wider, trembled, and drooped upon its stem.  At
this moment the spider suddenly becoming aware of what was
happening, emerged from his nook and began to weave his web again
across the bee.

Some hours after this lilliputian tragedy had occurred, Denis and
Maria emerged from their place of concealment.  All considerations
except that of each for the other were now banished from their
minds.  The clear peace of the great height and the quiet of the
late afternoon woods through which they began to descend found an
answering echo in their own natures.  Strangely enough it was this
walk down the ancient road that approaches the plateau of Gergovia
from its least precipitous side which formed for them the crowning
experience of their love.  The same cool mood of completion and
benign contentment after having fulfilled the plan of creation that
breathed from the panorama of landscape before them as the day
verged toward its close, was for a few blessed moments their own.
For a half mile perhaps, certainly no farther, they walked together
in utter unity with each other and in complete harmony with the
world without.  It is this rare mood which perhaps more than any
other deserves to be called "happiness."  And it was this which
they afterwards remembered and desired to return to and perpetuate
rather than that "agony of pleasure," which, while it convulses the
body, cancels the mind.

To Lucia, who had long been watching anxiously as the sun dropped
toward the western hills, the lovers appeared to be subdued as they
came down the forest road.  It was difficult for the good woman to
refrain from a smile as she noticed the subtle air of possession
with which Maria now leaned against and held Denis' arm.  The
frantic welcome with which the young dog would have greeted her was
hushed by his mistress as out of keeping with her mood and the
place.  Upon her face the colour now began to show.

In Denis' manner, however, there was no sign of embarrassment.
Taking it as a matter of course that the maid must be in all their
secrets from now on, he turned to her, and with a smile the
undeniable charm of which was in itself a powerful appeal, confided
Maria again to her charge.

"You will take good care of madame, will you not, Lucia?" he asked.
Despite himself and to his surprise, his voice trembled.

"As if she were my own child!  Oh, monsieur, do not doubt me,"
responded the woman deeply moved, "I love her, too."

"I am sure of it, sure of it," he replied, and added in a low tone,
"You will trust me, also?"

She gave him a warm grasp of her hand.

Turning he clasped Maria to him murmuring, "Good-bye, good-bye."
They stood together for a moment by the little carriage and would
have parted with tears had not the dog in her arms insisted on
trying to lick both their faces at once.  His comfortable assurance
that all was meant for him tipped the scales of their emotion into
merriment.

"Oh, he IS a dear, Denis, isn't he?" said she as he helped her
into the cart.  Under the guidance of Lucia the pony started
forward.  Riding for an instant on the step he had just time enough
to snatch a kiss.  Maria turned and tossed something back at him.
He picked it up.  It was a white cornflower whose petals, although
it was now nearly evening, were not yet fully blown.  As he raised
it to his lips there floated from it the wings of a bee.

He picked both of them up out of the grass and folded them
carefully along with the petals of the flower in his pocketbook.
That night when he looked out of the window in his room at the farm
there were two lights burning in the upper room of the château.




CHAPTER SIX

THE MUSE OF TRAGEDY


The marquis had returned unexpectedly.  From half-way up the
heights of Gergovia Lucia had caught sight of the great coach
coming over the ridge from Clermont.  By urging the little horse it
had been possible to reach the château about half an hour before
Don Luis arrived.  Maria came down to meet Don Luis with the puppy
in her arms and noted with consternation that he was able with only
a cane to negotiate the front steps alone.  She had, however,
presence of mind enough to welcome him with congratulations on his
improvement.  To her surprise he seemed almost childishly pleased.
Even the little dog received a reassuring pat.  But that sagacious
young animal from the start evinced a very evident doubt as to the
good intentions of the man with the cane.

Sitting in the hot springs at Royat with a half dozen other
invalids, after three days the marquis had become enormously bored.
He had actually begun to miss his young wife and to long for her
company.  Immensely cheered by his remarkable progress in so short
a time, he had somewhat overrated his powers of locomotion and
visualized himself as already walking about the gardens of the spa
and sitting with her in the various pavilions.  Not exactly a
thrilling existence after Paris, he admitted, but perhaps not so
completely rustic as the château.  After all, Clermont was a
considerable place for the provinces, and they might meet some of
the local noblesse.  It was not in vain that he drove in state with
two footmen and the big coach.  Without doubt the impression
already made was a good one.  With a pretty young wife by his side
in a court gown of the latest mode, several doors might soon be
open.  Hence he had returned to fetch her back the next morning.

"A stay of a week, my dear."  She could not wholly conceal her
disappointment at leaving, but of course acquiesced.  Under the
rouge which Lucia had wisely applied she turned pale, but managed
to summon a smile.  Somehow she must get word tonight to Denis.
Don Luis noticed her hesitation.  He was somewhat nettled, but glad
on the whole that she had found the château so pleasant.  At the
best she would have to spend considerable time there, he thought.
Perhaps most of the summer.  That night they packed for the stay at
Royat.

Once in her room Maria could not refrain from tears.  She could not
see Denis at the mill tomorrow; she would be driving to Royat in
that horrible coach.  For a moment she had an impulse to put three
candles in the window.  Lucia restrained her.  To do so might have
fatal results.  She reasoned with Maria.  "There is no need to
bring Monsieur Denis here tonight, madame.  No danger threatens.
You will return in a few days and he will still be here."

"But how will he know what has happened?" the girl cried
desperately, lighting the second candle and placing it on the sill
with tears in her eyes.  "Ah, if it had only been one!"  The
answering signal seemed only to increase her woe.  At last it was
arranged that Lucia should carry Denis a note.  She slipped out
without difficulty and made her way to the farm.  To Maria lying in
bed listening it seemed Lucia would never return.  When she did, it
was with good news.

"I spoke to him through the window, madame.  His light was out, but
I tapped on the frame.  Monsieur is so grand wrapped in a blanket!
He does not even wear a night-cap."  She rattled on while the girl
sighed.  "He will wait for you till you return again no matter how
long, he said.  When you do, put the candle in the window as
before.  Also he said, madame, that if anything went wrong to
address to Maître Honneton at the farm in care of the mayor-
postmaster at Romagnat.  He will arrange that with the postmaster.
After you fold the letter put a cross on the OUTSIDE, too."
Lucia giggled.  "But do not write unless you must.  No news will be
good news, and he will wait."  She paused.

"Was that all he said?" asked the girl after a little.  "Come,
Lucia, was that all?"  She stamped her foot as the maid smiled
provokingly.

"Lucia!"

"No, madame, that was not all.  He sent you this."

It was a small chamois skin bag with a cord from it like a scapula.
She went to the window and by the light of the two candles opened
it with eager fingers.  Inside was a gold ring worn thin.

The two women laughed and cried themselves to sleep.  Lucia's
merriment was taking, yet in reality she did not feel as much as
she expressed.  She was by no means a fool, and the possibilities
of the situation were more vividly before her than she cared to
indicate.  Come what might, madame must be kept calm and collected.
A repetition of the emotional transports of the evening before
might be difficult to explain to the marquis.  From her trundle bed
beside her mistress, Lucia continued in a tender way to rally and
to soothe Maria until the deep breathing of the girl gave place to
her last sleepy answers.  Lucia now arose, took a candle and looked
at her.  The new ring was on her finger--she must remember to take
THAT off!--and there was a smile on her lips which the woman,
turning to the madonna, prayed might remain.

Early the next morning the dust rolled behind the coach as it
dashed along the highway toward the springs.  Don Luis was buoyant
but Maria had little to say.  Had the marquis looked very closely
he might have found that the rather ponderous wedding ring which he
had conferred upon his wife in Livorno had just below it a narrow,
worn, gold band.  On that point alone Maria would not listen to
Lucia.  She had been obdurate.  But Don Luis did not notice.  He
was not thinking just then of wedding rings.

From the brow of the hill on which the farm Honneton was situated
Denis looked down gloomily.  A violet thunder storm later on in the
day served to relieve his feelings by expressing his mood in a
larger language than he could command.  That evening he sent for
the mayor-postmaster and, as he expressed it, "perfected the plot."
But no letter with a cross came.  A week dragged by.  The captain
was forced to take his exercise at night.  He swam at the mill.
Yet to be there without her was torture.

It was now ten days since!  He was about to saddle Solange and ride
over to Royat for news, when on the tenth night the candle, and
only a single one, glowed in the window at the château.  Maître
Honneton was somewhat surprised to be aroused after midnight by his
guest who forced him to swallow an enormous quantity of brandy.
When the farmer awoke it was late in the morning and the captain
had already been gone several hours.

Maria had returned and left the marquis at the springs.  As early
as possible without causing comment she had taken the little
carriage and driven over to the mill.  Denis, however, had been
there a long time before.  The feel of her heart throbbing against
his own caused him to lean back against a tree so that he might not
seem to stagger with her.  The sight of his mother's ring on her
finger as he kissed her hands moved him greatly.

"You will always wear it?"

"Always," she whispered.  "To the grave, and beyond."

"Hush!  Do not say that, Maria."

She looked up at him with a trust and adoration that went to his
heart.  He cursed the ten days that they had been parted.
Otherwise . . .

He began to tell her of his plan.

"I have been thinking while you have been away.  We must lose no
more time, after . . ."

"Yes?" she said.

"After what has happened."  He held her closer.  "I must go back to
Paris, make my arrangements, which will take some days, and then
come back for you."

"O Denis," she cried, "oh, you are not going away, going to leave
me now!  No, not for even a little while!  I need you here.  I must
have you.  I . . ."  Her hands were beating at his breast again.

He explained, and even argued.  "It is necessary.  We shall require
money.  I cannot desert!  I am an officer.  I must sell my
commission, make all our plans.  We shall need money to leave
France.  Can't you see?"

"You can have my jewels," she said, "all but this," and she clasped
the ring.

"Ah, that would not do, my little love.  One may run off with a
man's wife and still remain a gentleman, but one does not also make
off with his jewels.  Is it not so?  You must come with me even in
the gown which I shall give you."

"What colour will it be?" she asked trying to laugh.

"White, like the cornflower you gave me," he said and kissed her.
"But can't you see that it is as I say?"

To his surprise she could not.  The very thought of his leaving
reduced her to nervous despair.

"A week then," he said, "then I MUST go.  Must, or the summer
will be over before we know it.  And we must leave from here.  In
the cities as an ambassador the marquis would have every
assistance.  Here, the simple officials are on my side.  You see
how it is?  I am coming back, coming back to take you away
forever."  He took her again and held her close in his arms.

So they had their week.  The new moon came again, and with it, for
the season strode rapidly that year, not only days but long, warm
nights.  Then he had ridden off for Paris and the marquis was back
again at the château.

Don Luis made the trip to Royat every day now.  With the rapid
subsidence of all pain in his leg, he enjoyed it.  For the new
coach he bought some superb horses from M. de Polignac.  It had
provided him with as fine a turnout as the province had ever seen.
So he dashed back and forth in fine style and every day or so took
Maria along with him.  There was little else talked about over the
countryside than the Marquis de Carabas with his enchanting Puss-
in-Boots for a postilion, and the adorable little wife.  To the
wives of the petty noblesse, and to those unfortunate great ones
who could not afford to be at Versailles, the presence of Don Luis
and all that was his was a positive boon.  A round of suppers and
small garden fêtes began.  The marquise, it was whispered, was not
of high birth.  But after all with Puss-in-Boots in the saddle
Cinderella might well ride in the coach.  Undoubtedly too, her foot
was small.  Several eyes noted that, and not since the Chevalier de
Boufflers had come that way had anyone heard such conversation as
Don Luis'.  What if his wife were silent?  She herself was a golden
little mouse.

Maria was, indeed, silent.  It was now well on into July and Denis
was not yet back.  At last there was a letter.  The arrangements at
Paris had taken much longer than he supposed.  He might even have
to go to Havre to arrange about the ship.  "Patience, I love you.
All will be well."

The days slipped by.  The motion of the rapidly driven coach began
to make her seasick.  Lucia began to be anxious.  She questioned
madame.  She observed.  Yes, there could be no doubt of it.  There
was already the difference of one eyelet in lacing.  Kneeling on
the floor dressing her, she clasped the girl about the knees and
looking up with tears told her.  Maria blanched.

But to Lucia's surprise a look of joy and triumph then irradiated
her face.  It was as if suddenly while looking up Maria had caught
the gleam of some bright vision looking down at her.  Her eyelids
drooped.  Behind them there stood in the green haze of an
illimitable wilderness a log hut.  A woman with a golden-haired
child in her arms came to the door.  The blood crackling in Maria's
ears rang like the sound of an axe in the forest.  "Denis, Denis,"
she whispered.  She saw him coming, running toward her.

"It is our child," she cried aloud throwing up her arms, "ours!"
Presently she was sitting by the window again at the château.  She
began to pray to the madonna to bless her baby.

Three months ago she would not have been able to meet Don Luis
under such a burden of anxiety without collapsing.  Despite the
anxiety of Denis' continued absence and the perplexities and risks
of the future, she found herself in her now fast growing maturity
possessed of a fund of firmness and strength she had never known
before.  The delicate lines of girlhood had already begun to alter
in her countenance subtly.  From her eyes no longer looked a shy
and virginal spirit.  The glance, the widened archness of the eyes,
the chin and throat, but above all the breasts began to proclaim
the woman.  Nor was this change entirely physical.  Come what might
she had determined to bear her child.  Her longing for Denis had
also altered.  It was now more tender, deeper, but not so
necessitous.  Nor could even the fear of the steady recovery of her
husband entirely quell the fierce joy which surged over her.  At
the springs, and at the evening affairs at various châteaux she
began to take a part in the conversation, dropping her shawl over
one shoulder and letting it fall loosely as she talked, instead of
holding it with one hand tightly before her bosom and answering
questions respectfully as she had before.

Don Luis was delighted.  Without analysing it, he noted the change
with satisfaction.  She was growing up.  His marriage after all
would hold elements of companionship to which he had scarcely dared
look forward.  With him she determined to be gay.  And she
succeeded with an ease which astonished her.  He could in certain
moods be fascinating.  She began to understand him and to evoke
them.  It was Lucia who was now subdued and fearful.  Only at
nights a blind fear would settle upon Maria.  She would think she
heard her husband coming to her room.  Lucia would do her best to
console her.  But for the most part Maria would lie at those times
with her eyes wide open staring into the gloom.  Here was a burden
which she knew she would after all have to bear alone.  Every
night, and every night they looked for the candle in Denis' window.
There were no more letters.  It seemed aeons since she had seen him.
It was beginning to be difficult now for her to recall his features
when awake.  In her dreams they came clearer than ever and left her
weak and distrait in the morning.

Don Luis was now walking about without a cane at times, still
limping, but visibly recovering mentally and physically.  He would
come home in the evenings, lead her out to a seat in the garden and
caress her.  At these times sheer terror made her passive.  The
strength of his hands made even his lightest touch seem
threatening.  "O God!  If Denis would only come and take her away!"

It was well on into August when one midnight as she sat by the
window while Lucia slept the candle suddenly burned again in Denis'
window.  A great trembling came over her.  It was some time before
she could kindle her own.  For a minute the two lights fairly
danced.  He had scarcely hoped to find her awake.  Then she
remembered.  There were to be guests at the château next day!
Still trembling she lit another candle and placed it beside the
first one.  It was with difficulty that she refrained from lighting
a third.  She might bring him to her.  In a few minutes he might be
in her arms.  She took the third taper in her hand.  Then she threw
it away and wakened the maid.  While she dressed, Maria poured out
her heart in a note to Denis.

He must meet her at the mill as soon as it was safe.  She had
something of all importance to tell him.  But wait for the signal.
She could not come to him tomorrow, would tell him why later.  "Oh
you are back again, back again," rang her constant refrain.  The
pen kept saying it over and over.  She did not realize how often.
Lucia took the paper and disappeared.  It was almost morning when
she returned.  The great dog at the farm had kept baying.  "If
monsieur had not come at last, come to meet her . . ."  But Maria
did not hear Lucia.  She was reading Denis' letter, the long
absence was explained.  All was well.

The guests at the château stayed for several days.  Denis had come
back on a Monday.  It was not until Thursday morning that Don Luis
finally departed for Royat, somewhat disgruntled that Maria's
headaches prevented her from going with him.  She was becoming
necessary to him.  He would send the coach over for her next day.
He even thought of deferring his own departure until then.  Her
solicitude that he should not miss his regular treatment at the
springs secretly touched him.  Well, it should not be long now.
She would soon find him all that a husband ought to be.  She was
right about the cure.  He would follow his regimen closely from now
on.  He would soak himself for half a day in the hot water.  Sancho
was surprised how alertly and easily he mounted into the coach.  In
his own mind Don Luis was already well.  It was nearly noon when he
drove off at last.

At the mill Denis waited for her from early morning, pacing up and
down uneasily.  "What was this 'all important thing' she had to
tell him?  It was?--if it was THAT--it would enormously complicate
their plans."

It was the wait at some seaport that he feared.  They must if
possible so time their departure as to arrive when, and not before,
the ship sailed.  Otherwise he would have to go ahead and make
arrangements.  Don Luis would stir officialdom to its depths.  He
had the means of doing so.  They must arrive ahead of the posts.
Give him no time for warning.  Be gone and beyond recall.  The long
journey made the northern ports impossible.  It must be Marseilles.
If she had risked all, so had he.  Given up his post at Versailles,
his whole past, wiped it out.  All that represented it now was in
his saddle-bags.  Heavy enough to gall the mare.  Poor lass, he
would miss her.  Suddenly he realized with wakeful keenness like
one aroused from a dream that he was leaving forever all that he
knew.  The thought overpowered him as if he had been suddenly told
by a physician of the certainty of immediate death.  It was
poignant, it was undeniable.  He fell into an hour of reverie
listening to the stream.  A foreboding note in its many voices that
he had not heard before kept recurring.  Then her face glimmered up
from the water-lilies as it had that morning when she had stooped
to drink.  He stretched out his arms to the vision.  It was some
time before he realized that she was really standing above him
looking down.

They had both imagined the transports of this reunion but it was
not so.  They were too near together when once in each other's arms
to strive any closer.  She leaned back and looked up at him in
great peace.  The new strength in her face, seen now for the first
time after his absence, amazed and thrilled him.  Her lips began to
move silently so that he leaned closer.

"Do you know what it is that I have to tell you, Denis, my Denis?"

Something of her own great tenderness as she told him overcame him,
too.

Through the valley the stream rushed on as if madly prophetic in an
unknown tongue.  Sometimes merely colloquial, giggling, flashing
into a low laugh of sheer joy, always unintelligible, this child of
the mist which came apparently out of nothing, hurried headlong to
the limitless sea.  Beyond its gamut of musical tones that
expressed so often for those who listened the moods which most
moved them, moods for which there were no words, was now an
undertone and now an overtone of mystery, as if in the course of
geological ages the river had learned something of eternity which
it was trying to reverberate amid the stones.

"Does it understand?" whispered Maria.  "No," said Denis, "but we
hear."

The next day she was at the springs with Don Luis again.  Denis had
ridden off headlong at night for Marseilles.  He would be back
again as soon as he could arrange a passage for America and horses
for the trip down.  The next time his light burned in the window
she was to leave the château, come over to the farm, and they would
be gone.  That would give them at least six hours' start, even a
full day probably.  It would take the marquis some time at best to
discover which way they had gone.  The mayor could also be counted
upon temporarily to put him on the wrong track.  In the meantime
the days passed swiftly.  It was now the end of August.

Maria received one letter from Denis.  There was a ship sailing
from Marseilles for New Orleans the second Monday in September.  He
had arranged a cabin on board for "his wife and maid."  So it was
finally settled that Lucia was to go.  "I shall be back on the
night of the third.  Watch!"  Maria packed a few things in a small
bag, not forgetting the little madonna.  Lucia with the aid of her
mistress wrote a long letter.  She would never see her parents
again.  Both women wept.  The calendar slipped over into September.

On the first Don Luis rode horseback to the springs and felt the
better for it.  It was with some difficulty that Maria persuaded
him to allow her to follow in the coach instead of riding with him.
On the second she was still trying to be gay outwardly with the
wives of the invalids at the spa.  On the morning of the third she
sat alone in one of the pavilions half distracted with anxiety.
Would they return in time to meet Denis?  If not, what then?

Don Luis sat all that morning with the water above his knees.  Over
a small iron table set in a shallow part of the pool he and M.
d'Ayen indulged in a hand of loo while the bubbles came up through
their toes.  The place was hot, the cards stuck to the damp table,
and the game progressed slowly.  The duke was a dabbler in
chemistry and began to discuss the properties of the waters, the
history of the baths, water clocks, time measure, classical music,
and the opera of which he was a devotee.  He was known as an
"amiable conversationalist."  Opera was a pet aversion of the
marquis'.

The morning thus wore away rapidly in a spirited discussion as to
whether or not opera could be regarded as a separate art.
According to Don Luis opera was a mere pot-pourri of music,
painting, and bad drama.  The libretto was a poor fly of poetry
buzzing in the transparent web of the plot.  D'Ayen on the other
hand maintained that, given a fine performance with great artists,
all the arts employed blent into a unity of effect which in itself
was unique in artistic experience.  The degree of beauty, because
it was compounded from so many sources, was the greatest known.
Theories of aesthetics were thus involved.

M. d'Ayen had started to explain his own at great length when Lucia
appeared at the railing and announced that it was long past the
hour of luncheon.  Madame had been waiting in the pavilion outside
and was faint.  The two rose from the water and hastened to dress.
They were much pleased with each other.  It was not to have been
expected that at a place like Royat such a morning of talk could be
found.  They met at the door going out with mutual compliments.
Maria was still seated in the pavilion some little way down the
path.  The duke looked at her keenly.

"Monsieur is not only to be congratulated on his present wonderful
recovery but for an event of the future, I see.  Allow me to
anticipate the usual felicitations.  There is a certain expression
of the face in women, you know!  I happen to be familiar with it.
Tomorrow, then.  We shall finish our discussion?"

"I hope so!" replied Don Luis so emphatically that the other bowed.

"Au revoir."

Don Luis turned to his wife.

That these remarks had greatly disturbed him, he could not deny.
He studied her carefully as she came toward him.  She flushed under
his steady and appraising glance.  But the marquis was not so
simple as to suppose that every blush was a confession of guilt.
With her heightened colour, standing in a simple gown under the
shade of the trellis she appeared more beautiful to him than he had
ever known her.  How mature she had grown!  That was all, he
thought with relief, a little more mature.  Doubtless d'Ayen
thought himself as great an authority on women as on the opera.  He
had felt angry with him for a moment.  Yet the remark had been well
meant.  He now forgave him.  How much--how much he wished it were
TRUE.  Well . . .

"What were you two talking about so long?" she said.  "I am nearly
dead with hunger sitting here.  Was it a religious discussion?"

"Hardly that, my dear," said he, "although M. d'Ayen did venture to
assume the rôle of prophet and foretell a miracle.  By the aid of
man it may come true."  He took her arm and held it closely.  They
walked up on the terrace together and had lunch.  They were
returning to the château that night.

On the way home that evening the marquis galloped on ahead of the
coach like a veritable cavalier.  The regimen at the springs had
made him vigorous again.  What with a careful diet, no liqueurs
after supper, the hot water, and exercise regularly adhered to for
many weeks, he was not only recovered but actually felt younger
than he had for years.  A good bout with the foils tomorrow would
have been pleasant to anticipate.  How he missed that!  When he
arrived home he would have his old fencing-master up from the
garrison at Florence.  That raising of the hilt that seemed to
lower the point, the fatigued retreat, and the sudden clever rally;
that was a movement worth knowing.  And the fellow had other tricks
in his bag that he could teach as well.  Like a good pedlar he had
always one more.

Don Luis galloped up to the château a mile ahead of the coach and
dismounted with a spring.  He hurried to his room, and calling the
valet had himself shaved for the second time that day.  It was
already past the usual hour for dinner before his wig was properly
adjusted.  A white satin suit with gold frogs and lacing caused him
to glitter under the chandeliers and candlelight.

To Maria, who had been awaiting him for some time, his now almost
jovial presence seemed to pervade the room.  She could scarcely
bring herself to realize that this was to be the last meal with
him.  There was now an assurance and robustness in his mien and
gestures, a certain sardonic vigour in his locution that made it
seem impossible she should ever dare to think of casting him off.
Yet even as the courses proceeded she knew that Lucia was putting
the last things for the journey that night in her servant's
reticule.  It must be small enough to go on a pillion, Denis had
said.  They would ride as far as Issoire tonight and take coach at
three in the morning.  She thought of him waiting for her now at
the farm and the colour leaped to her face and her heart began to
beat strangely.  Ah, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow!

Don Luis was saying something to her.  She became aware now that he
was also looking at her piercingly, that he must have been doing so
during her entire reverie.  Her heart seemed to empty itself and
become dry.  Far off she heard him saying:  "After you have retired
tonight dismiss the maid.  Tell her to go to her own room and not
to disturb you till morning.  Do not be alarmed," he said, taking
her hand which was stone cold, "you will not be sleeping alone."

The supper proceeded in silence.  She ate nothing.  Don Luis
gradually became angry.  He had expected some shrinking, perhaps.
But his wife's face over the candles was now a clear, transparent
white, and he found himself looking into a pair of eyes so shadowed
with an agony of fear that they reminded him of a dying deer's.  He
had often cut their throats that way--after the chase was over.
This one was.  He smiled.

As she left the room, he leaned forward in his chair to watch her.
She turned as usual at the door to say good night, then stood there
as if in a daze.  "Remember," he said in his peculiar way.

His mind flashed back to the last time he had said that to her, in
the coach just before their arrival here.  That young captain!  The
remark of M. d'Ayen recurred to him again.  He started uneasily.
"No, no, impossible!  Nothing had occurred at Versailles!"  But he
sat thinking.  Pierre waited silently to remove the glasses.
Finally he poured out some more wine.  But the marquis sat
abstracted.  Unconsciously he played with his coffee spoon.  A
certain grim tenseness began to lift the black tuft of his beard
and tighten the lines of his close-shaven jaws.  Finally his teeth
clicked and his mouth took on the appearance of a closed trap.
"Pierre," said he, turning around upon the man almost violently.

"Monsieur!" said the man startled.

"Send Sancho to me immediately.  I shall be in my own room."

A few minutes later that worthy knocked at his master's door.  The
voice of the marquis could be heard within for some moments giving
earnest and emphatic instructions.  At the end of that time the
servant reappeared.  Holding a candle before his curious
countenance, the man walked down the corridor with a light
noiseless tread.  As he did so his animal-like shadow sneaked after
him along the wall.

                            -----------

Once beyond the paralysing presence of her husband, Maria's first
impulse was to flee immediately.  She came up the stairs on the
wings of fear and sped to her room.  Had the maid been there they
might have left instantly and have been gone into the night.  But
Lucia had gone to supper.  As Maria closed the door calling her,
and no answer came, an access of terror and trembling overcame her
and she was forced for a moment to sit down.  The dim light of one
candle left burning before the mirror on the dresser served only to
deepen the gloom of walls and curtains, and the young girl saw her
haggard face peering at her from the glass with an expression of
horror.  The absence of Lucia, upon whom she was so dependent,
temporarily deprived Maria of will power.  She felt it impossible
to leave without her.  At any moment Lucia might return.  But the
thought that at any moment Don Luis also might appear made her sick
and faint.  A low cry escaped her and she gasped.  Her state of
indecision was more than she could sustain.  At last she seized the
bell tassel and pulled it violently.  But Lucia did not answer.  A
conviction of fatality amounting to despair overcame Maria.  Then
she rallied.  Without Lucia then!

For a moment she was all activity.

She seized the candle and rushing to the window held it there
waiting beat by beat of her pulses for an answering light.  But
there was no light whatever at the farm.  Where was Denis?  Not in
his room!  Perhaps he was already waiting at the cross-roads below
the farm with the horses.  Hardly yet, though.  It was still early
and they were not to leave the château till after midnight.

No, she knew he was not waiting at the cross-roads.  That was the
desperate prompting of false hope.  It had all been SO well
understood.  They were to go to the farm and leave from there.  In
no other way could the horses be so well concealed.  And they were
to change into their new clothes there before the fire, and ride
off.  It was all so easy.  But he had promised to answer the last
night--not till later, of course.  If she could only make him see
now!  Where was he?  She waved the candle to and fro excitedly.  It
went out.  In the darkness she stood pressing her forehead to the
window.  Above the edge of the hill where the farm loomed darkly
came only the cold glitter of stars.

Nevertheless, she could not stay here.  She lit the candle again
with shaking hands.  Then she hastily tore open the bag which Lucia
had packed and extricating from it the statue of the madonna and a
dark riding cloak, she threw the latter over herself concealing her
white dress.  The bag was now nearly empty and seemed, to gape at
her widely.  Then she tiptoed to the door, opened it gently,
listened, and stepped out.

The long, gloomy corridor was empty.  Except for the slight beam of
light through her own keyhole and a thin radiance from either end
of the hall it was almost black.  At regular intervals the tall,
white, locked doors of the château guest chambers glimmered duskily
like the portals of so many vaults.  She hesitated.  To her left
the corridor led to the main staircase of the château; to the right
to the servants' stairs.  It was from these two stairways that the
light glimmered up at either end.

Pierre would have locked the front door by now, and the marquis'
room was in that direction.  She might meet him coming up!  Her
scalp crept at the thought.  She had never been in the servants'
wing, but they were probably quiet now.  She might slip out that
way.  She might still find Lucia there.  At any rate HE was not
that way.  She turned to the right and crept slowly and softly down
the corridor holding the small shrine in her arms like a doll.
Presently she found herself by the railing of the servants' stairs.
From a lamp placed on a table in the hall below a faint glow was
cast upward throwing grotesque shadows.  Very carefully she peeped
over.  The stairs were circular and it appeared to her that she was
looking down a deep well with a lantern at the bottom.

She put her foot on the first tread and started to descend
noiselessly.  Then she was arrested in mid-air by the sound of a
yawn and a scraping noise.  She looked down through the banisters.
Curled up in the shadow on the last step was Sancho.  He was
scratching himself under the arm with a peculiarly persistent
motion.  His head with the curious, dark grey tufts behind his ears
was now and then projected into the light and she caught a green
glint from his eyes.  No mouse ever crept back more stealthily into
the shadow than Maria.  So that was why Lucia did not come!  There
could be no doubt about it.  The man was watching.  She must get
back to her room instantly.

But it was not so easy to find.  There were many doors down the
long corridor.  She started trying the handles.  In her desperate
haste she must have passed her own.  Somehow she was too far down
toward the main hall.  She must go back, be methodical, and miss
none.  She listened for an instant.  Someone was coming up the big
stairs.  She turned scarcely able to stifle a scream.  She saw a
candle-glow through the keyhole of the next room.  She opened her
own door, and darted in.  For one second only she stood in the
faint light before she closed the door softly.  She even remembered
not to let the latch click.

For a few instants excitement sustained her and cleared her mind.
For the first time in her life her movements became precise and of
lightning rapidity.  She tore the cloak off, wrapped the statue in
it, thrust the bundle into the open bag, and the bag under the bed.
Gathering three candlesticks from her stand and dresser she placed
them in the window.  She lit them from the one already kindled and
threw that into the fireplace.  Then she turned facing the door
with her back to the wall against a long yellow curtain.  Her hands
were clasped behind her.  For an entire minute no one came.  It was
that delay which at last shattered her.

Don Luis had turned into the corridor just as Maria was closing the
door.  Against the opposite wall he had seen a dim square of light
and a shadow there like that of a cloaked woman carrying a child.
It vanished like a spectre.  Don Luis was carrying a candle
himself.  The hall beyond was dark, silent.  He could not be
certain.  It was a very old house.  He was not superstitious.  But
he was sufficiently startled to stop where he was for a full
minute.  Then he too saw the ray of light from the keyhole of his
wife's room.  A solution of the spectre dawned upon him.  He strode
forward angrily and flung open the door. . . .

While the marquis had for a moment been stayed by a shadow, Denis
three leagues away at Le Crest was knocking persistently and
hallooing at the door of a blacksmith who presently stuck a frowsy
head through an upstairs window and inquired with sleepy insolence
what was wanted.  A short interchange of views on the subject of
shoeing horses at night decided the point of whether the smith
should come down or wait for the gentleman to come up and fetch him
at the point of a pistol.  Under the double impetus of threats and
promised rewards the man made what he considered to be haste.
Monsieur meant business, there was no doubt about it!  But it was
almost an hour before the fellow could blow up his fire, take the
shoe off the foot which had gone lame, and fit a new one.  Denis
watched the man working over the cherry-coloured iron while the
time passed mercilessly.  In his terrible anxiety the dark shed
seemed like a prison chamber and the smith some black-browed jailer
who was about to put him to the question.  Would he, when the iron
was thrust into him, be able to remain firm?  He was half dead with
fatigue as it was.  The smith passed close to him with the sizzling
metal and he felt the heat through his sleeve and flinched.  "How
much pain could a man stand before he would tell?" he wondered.
Tired and nervous as he was, he felt how weak he might be.  He
roused himself.  He had almost gone to sleep.  Solange had gone
lame early that afternoon.  He was hours late.  Tossing the man a
full day's wage, he spurred out of the town striking sparks from
the cobbles. . . .

Don Luis stepped through the door and looked at his wife standing
with her back to the wall.  Her attitude was so tragic, her
background of the yellow curtain with the three candles burning in
the window so theatrical, that he thought for a moment she was
staging a scene.  He drew a chair up between his knees with the
back before him and sat regarding her.

"The illumination I take it is in honour of the event?"  Her lips
moved but no words followed.  "I cannot say I ever heard so ringing
a line," he sneered.  "Come, come, don't you think this is rather a
cold welcome for your husband?  The Muse of Tragedy, the three
lamps, curtain and all.  Magnificent!  But--considering the scene
to follow--aren't you perhaps a little over-costumed?  I expected
to find you in bed."

Her eyes rested on him for an instant like those of an accused
person seeing the state tormentor approach for the first time.  He
became aware that there was no art in this.  He was looking at the
face of terror in nature.  Why was it?

"Come here!" he said softly.

She flattened herself against the wall as if waiting for him to
spring.  It was provocative.  A gust of fury lifted him from the
chair.  With one stroke he ripped her gown from neck to heel.  She
clung desperately to the curtain.  It came away falling over both
of them.  The candles wavered.  He had not expected her to fight
him.  She cried out once bitterly.  He wrapped her head and arms in
the curtain, and stripped her like an Indian husking maize.  Then
he carried her to the bed and threw her down there.  She had ceased
struggling now.  She did not know anyone could be so strong.  She
felt and looked like a bird blown on to a ship by a hurricane.  Her
breast rose and fell quickly, but at intervals.  Between breaths
she lay as if dead.  Only her eyelids quivered.

The last vestige of pity had vanished from the breast of Don Luis.
His wig had been torn off and he had happened to see himself in the
glass while he was struggling with Maria.  So this was the
dignified approach to the marriage bed he had so fondly planned!
Marriage bed?  He looked at her lying under the shadow of the
canopy.  It was quite dark in that end of the room.  He crossed to
the window and taking one of the candles came back and stood beside
her.  Holding it above his head so that the yellow light washed
over the pale body of the girl, he studied her carefully for some
time.  Then with a terrific imprecation he dashed the light to the
floor.  The two candles remaining on the sill continued to burn
softly.

Presently she became aware that he was sitting on the bed beside
her.  She opened her eyes slightly and saw that her own hands were
completely lost in his.  His huge fingers curved around her arm
again reminded her of the paw of some monumental lion.  He was
holding her hands so gently though that she almost felt sorry for
him.  A little harder now.  She opened her eyes as the clasp became
firmer and found herself looking into his very close to her face.
She felt him breathe.

"His name?" said Don Luis whose grasp now began to hurt her.  She
looked at him again and bit her lip.  Her fingers began to ache
intolerably.

"HIS NAME?" repeated her husband.

She closed her eyes and braced herself.  Her hands now seemed on
fire.  She lost all sense of anything except the intolerable pain
that began to shoot up her arms to her shoulders.  Had the pain
been less she might have answered, but her whole mind was now
preoccupied with it.  The reiterated demand of the insistent voice
became only a senseless buzz.  Then she fainted.

Don Luis had not meant to carry it quite as far as that.  He dashed
water in her face.  It startled him to see the print of his own
fingers on hers, which she kept contracting spasmodically.  Finally
he bathed them in a bowl of cold water.  At that she came to, but
remained in a kind of daze.  She was now lying as if not only her
hands but her entire body had been crushed in his grasp.  Indeed,
from that moment on he never saw her in any other attitude.  Those
masterful hands had done their work more thoroughly than he
intended.

He sat down and began to ponder.  A long time passed.  He was
annoyed with himself for having allowed his rage to reduce him to
so rudimentary a procedure.  He had forgotten how fragile youth
was.  How sensitive he had been as a boy!  Pshaw!  That was a long
time ago now.  Well, he had forgotten.  He looked at her again.
The cold of the hours before dawn was beginning to penetrate the
chamber.  He started to cover her with the counterpane, but paused.
She was like the living dream, the pale counterfeit of which the
sculptor occasionally detains in stone.  By that body he intended
to have an heir.  What had happened should not swerve him from his
goal.  Also, it would be the most exquisite revenge possible.  He
would bide his time.  In the meantime--this thing which she held
from him?  He could arrange about that!  Don Luis covered her up as
if putting something away for safe keeping.  He sat down again and
in a calm, methodical manner perfected his new plans.  There was
only one link still missing in a carefully welded chain.  Even the
pressure of his hands had not been able to forge that, as yet.  But
patience!  There were other more subtle ways.

Toward morning she grew feverish and sat up.  Her eyes did not seem
to see anything in the room.  She choked and clutched her throat.
He began to fan her.  Then he threw open the window.  It was almost
dawn and deathly silent.  Suddenly as if a drum were beating, the
sound of hoofs at a furious gallop came in a sharp staccato over
the fields.  "Denis, Denis!" cried Maria, and fell back on the
pillow.  "Ah!" said Don Luis exhaling a long breath.

Denis galloped into the courtyard of the farm, threw a blanket over
his trembling horse, and rushed to his window.  In the upstairs
room of the château he saw two candles.  They burned steadily.  So
all his haste had been in vain then.  Something had interfered.
Well, he would hear from Lucia tomorrow.  There was no message yet
or Honneton would have given it to him.  Whatever it was he would
soon know.  Probably a late return from the springs had interfered.
He lay back for an instant on his bed without taking off his boots
and was instantly asleep.  Since morning he had ridden long
leagues.




CHAPTER SEVEN

THE FLY WALKS IN


Very early next morning the coach drew up before the door of the
château and the two footmen began loading luggage.  Don Luis sat in
the library writing a letter of fervent appreciation to his friend
the Comte de Besance.  He could see the two footmen strapping on
the leather trunks and putting bags in the hampers.  Presently
Lucia with a white, scared face ran down with something that had
evidently been overlooked.  It was a small, black bag which she
hurriedly put in the coach.  At her appearance Sancho stuck his
nose in the air and began to whistle softly.  She gave him a
vindictive look and went back.  The marquis' pen marched rapidly.


Not only have I to thank you, dear friend, for the hospitality of
your delightful roof which conceals, as I have discovered, an
excellent cellar, but for the restoration of my health.  I am now
entirely recovered.  At this moment I could take a creditable part
in an affair of honour, nor do I mean as a second, or with pistols.

All that you claimed for your springs here at Royat was true.
Their effect upon me has been one of rejuvenation.  Indeed, I am
almost superstitious about them.  I am forced to attribute even to
their vicinity a life-invoking quality.

Our stay here would have been even longer had not my wife, whom you
so much admired, unfortunately dislocated one of the small joints
in her finger which will probably require the attentions of a
chirurgeon.  One of that profession I hope will be found at the
first large town on our way down.

We pass by Marseilles to Florence, but leisurely.  I have purchased
four magnificent horses from your neighbour M. de Polignac and we
shall make as many detours as we list, thus seeing much of your
beautiful country.  I am in no haste.  Do not, I pray you, concern
yourself unduly about madame.  The accident is a slight one and
will soon be remedied.


He closed the letter with a host of salutations and a flourished
signature, sanded it, sealed it, and rang for Pierre.

"Send this to Paris by the count's agent.  I understand he leaves
with the rents shortly?  Good!  He will travel faster than the
post, I think."

"Yes, monsieur.  May I say," said Pierre respectfully, "that I . . .
that WE regret monsieur is leaving so soon.  He has been most
generous."

"It is only on account of this accident to madame that we are
hastened.  Otherwise we should have stayed some days longer.  You
have been very attentive.  I have said so in my letter to M. de
Besance."  Pierre looked relieved and pleased.

It was not the intention of the marquis to have any but the best
rumours of his visit at the Château de Besance emanate to the
world.  Even the man he had caned now considered himself lucky.  No
one but Lucia knew anything of what had occurred through the summer
or of the night before.  "And I am keeping her with madame!"
thought the marquis.  "It will be a pity if anything leaks out."
He smiled sardonically at Pierre disappearing with the letter to M.
de Besance.

Don Luis opened the window and called to Sancho.  Some conversation
in a low tone took place between them after which the marquis
handed him the gold-headed walking stick which he no longer needed,
his sword, his great coat, and a small strong box to put in the
coach.  He then walked upstairs and saw Maria and Lucia down to the
door.  No words were exchanged between them.  The suggestion of
something doll-like had again returned to Maria.  She walked like a
marionette.  Even to herself her life seemed only a semblance and
her actions corresponded.  They were both apathetic and mechanical.
As she passed between the lines of bowing servants at the door many
of them noted how pale she looked.  The face of Lucia was more
anxious than the slight sling in which her mistress carried one
hand might seem to warrant.  Don Luis saw to it that Lucia had no
opportunity to explain.

"Au revoir, monsieur le marquis, grand merci et bon voyage," cried
the servitors, genuinely sorry at the departure of a guest who had
proved so liberal.  "Adieu," replied the marquis with the ghost of
a smile.  He helped his wife into the coach lifting her under the
arms.  Then he took his sword from the seat, buckled it on, and
climbed in.  Lucia followed.  The footman folded up the little
stairs.  "Ready, your Excellency?"

Don Luis grasped one side of the seat firmly and waved his hat out
of the window.  There was a report like a pistol from the whip of
Sancho.  The four horses started forward so violently that the
front seat upon which Don Luis had motioned the two women to seat
themselves was nearly drawn out from under them.  A silent "Oh"
formed itself upon the lips of Maria.  She caught an amused gleam
in her husband's eye.  "It will be hard on the harness.
Fortunately it is new and strong."  Lucia broke out weeping.
"Leave off that!" said Don Luis fingering his cane.  The woman
turned deathly white and swallowed her sobs.

Don Luis was like an old general who after taking all the necessary
care to bring a campaign to a successful issue had been betrayed to
the enemy by his adjutant.  His surprise and defeat had
consequently been complete.  But he was also a general who never
abandoned the field.  Annihilation was the only way to deal with
him, as it was his own method whether in advance toward or retreat
from an enemy.  He was now seemingly in retreat after disaster.
But what might have seemed to the ordinary man an irretrievable
misfortune was to him merely a blow of fate to be circumvented, or
even taken advantage of in any direction that remained.

Sitting by his wife's bedside the night before, the furnace of his
soul had burnt at white heat under the enormous pressure of a will
that never relaxed.  The result of this incandescence was a hard,
clear diamond of unadulterated hate at the core of his being.  Such
jewels are rare as the moulds which produce them.  With them a few
names have been etched permanently on the window panes of the house
of fame.  Don Luis' diamond was for private use only.

His original purpose of enjoying Maria and of having an heir on her
body remained unaltered.  Indeed, it was now fixed, in the diamond,
as it were.  The elements of pleasure had merely been transmuted.
His enjoyment would now be that of hate instead of love.  This
fixity of purpose had been announced to himself the night before
when he had looked into the glass the second time and put his wig
back into place.  What had been put askew by emotional circumstance
was now rearranged.  The wig did not at first feel the same as
before, but it looked it.  No one would ever know, presently not
even the man who wore it.

While adjusting his wig Don Luis had also readjusted circumstances.
This he had done to his own satisfaction.  Every revolution of the
wheels of the coach, he imagined, was still taking him toward his
goal.  It remained merely to dispose of the contents of the vehicle
and to ward off possible interference from the outside.

About a half mile beyond the château the coach was overtaken by
Maria's little dog which had been left behind.  In the extremity of
the departure she had not even remembered it.  Having seen its
mistress enter the coach it had followed as fast as its short legs
would permit.  As the vehicle lumbered up a short hill, the dog
appeared, barking and whining.  It kept leaping for the iron step
and falling off.  In hopes the wheel would take care of it in a
natural way, Don Luis sat for some time ignoring it.  Seeing,
however, that it would surely follow them through the next village,
at the top of the hill he opened the door.  Maria could not keep
from calling it.

With a supreme effort the animal again made the step and started to
wriggle into the coach, wagging its tail.  With tremendous force
the marquis closed the door on its back.  The one sharp cry that
pierced the morning expressed so well for Maria her own agony that
she remained passive.  The coach was now moving too swiftly
downhill for the footmen to leave.  They expected it to stop at the
bottom on account of the dog but in this they were disappointed.
Sancho evidently had his instructions.  Over the worst ruts and
cobbles, through the long white villages, past the low, truncated
hills covered with vineyards they rushed southward into the valley
of the Allier.  The whip cracked and the splendid horses leaped.
The two men behind hung on grimly to their straps.  The two women
on the small front seat shot from side to side and collided with
each other.  Don Luis sat back in the deep, rose-coloured
upholstery and hummed an air from Italian opera.  As M. d'Ayen
would have phrased it, from one of those "perfect scenes."
Occasionally he treated himself to a pinch of Batavian snuff.

                            ----------

When Denis finally awoke the sun was high and streaming into the
room.  He was still staring up at the ceiling with his body flung
across the bed and his booted feet on the floor just as he had gone
to sleep.  He found himself stiff and unrefreshed.  In the hard
boots in which they had been encased for nearly two days his feet
were chafed and sore.  It was some time before he could recollect
himself.  As soon as he did so he went out to find the farmer.

It was the beginning of the grape harvest and his host was at a
neighbour's farm some distance away helping to tread out the first
vat.  It was almost an hour before he and the boy who had been sent
to find him returned.  Maître Honneton seemed surly at having been
thus interrupted.  He stood gloomily before Denis.  His bare ankles
where they protruded above his long sabots were dyed a rich, red
purple as if he had been treading in blood.

"Monsieur sent for me?"

"The message that came this morning!" said Denis eagerly.

"Message?  But there was no message, monsieur."

"What!  Are you sure?  Didn't the maid bring one?"

"No, monsieur, and if it was to come from the château, surely
monsieur knows that the marquis and his family have left."

"Left?  Gone!" cried Denis all in a breath.  "Why didn't you tell
me?  You mean they have driven off to the springs?"  His voice rose
with hope as this easy solution occurred to him.

"No, no, monsieur, by the road to Issoire, very early this morning.
From the vineyards we saw them pass with all the luggage strapped
on.  There were small-trunks on the roof.  It was for a journey.
They are gone."

"Oh, why, why didn't you tell me?" Denis kept asking.  Maître
Honneton had not thought it necessary.  Monsieur had left no
instructions.  He knew Denis was tired after so long a journey.  He
had heard him return late.

They walked back to the farm together while the good man's
apologies continued to flow.  Distracted as he was, Denis could not
help but be touched by his simple solicitude.  He sat down by the
well curb for a moment to gather his wits.

He was tired, desperately tired.  The trip to Marseilles had nearly
done him out.  There had been a thousand arrangements to make; the
ship, the relays of horses.  They should be on their way by now.
The mare's going lame yesterday had ruined it all.  And that signal
of two candles last night!  What had that meant?  To leave without
a word to him--it looked bad.  The disappointment and anxiety added
to his fatigue made him feel sick.  And he had slept all those
precious hours away!  God! he must do something.  Not sit here like
a fool.  He took the mare from the stable.  At any other time her
gentle protests at being saddled when still footsore and weary
would have touched him to the heart.  Now he pulled the saddle
girth tighter and swore.  Honneton stood looking on blankly.  He
scarcely knew monsieur.  "He who had been so debonair."

Denis ran to his room for his sword and pistols.  He renewed the
priming.  One curtain he noticed was blowing out of her window at
the château.  It seemed to be waving him farewell.  He knew he
would never see this place again.  He took his things out into the
courtyard and mounted.  Pressing a purse into the hand of the
farmer, he said, "Remember, should anyone ever ask about me, you
know nothing."  He clasped the man's hand warmly.  The sadness of
all farewells came upon them both.  What had he done that as the
man's hand left his own Denis seemed to have lost touch with life!
He felt older and alone.  He rode down over the slope.

It had rained the night before and there was a pool by the gate.
As the mare passed she left one footprint.  The water and sand
began to fill it in.  Maître Honneton stood looking down at it.
Presently the faint, smiling curve of the horseshoe disappeared.
The man hefted the weight of the purse in his hand with
satisfaction.  Here was something tangible.  "But how long would
even that last?"

With the motion of the horse and the fresh breeze in his face Denis
began to recover his powers of decision.  A thought struck him.
"Perhaps the marquis had remained at the château and sent the two
women on ahead."  If so, he had better find out.  He turned the
head of the mare toward the towers.  Then as he came to the
crossroads where the way branched to the south he saw the broad
tracks of the well-known wheels.  For a moment he was at a loss.
The wheel tracks drew him like a magnet.  He took after the coach
and hesitated no longer.

So far he had seemed in a dream.  Now he was thoroughly awake.  His
entire nature responded to the need for action.  Only in action
could he find relief.  Who had blundered?  Had she?  Lucia?  What
had happened?  He must know!  Solange felt the spurs and loped on,
in the opposite direction but along the same road over which she
had galloped so furiously the night before.  She was still slightly
lame.  No matter, what was a horse to him now?

At the top of the hill he found the dog by the road.  At first he
thought the coach had passed over it, but as he looked down at it,
shaken by a tempest of memories, something in its forlorn attitude
caused him to dismount and examine the little animal.  How that
unresponsive thing had once welcomed him and quivered at his touch!
At hers!  But the coach had not passed over it.  It was not
crushed!  Yet what an attitude, not fit to be seen!  He began to
kick a hole in the bank with his boot.  Presently he forced himself
to pick the thing up.  Its back had been broken.  By a blow, a
cane!  Whose, he thought he knew.  His mind obligingly presented
him with a scene.  Murmuring something which choked him he covered
the puppy up.  The hollow bank caved in and he stamped the turf
down.  He was surprised to find how rage weakened him.  His knees
trembled as he swung into the saddle.

What a fool he had been!  He cursed himself.  He had been too
careful.  He should have taken time by the bridle and ridden off
with Maria two months ago.  He might have known what kind of a man
he was dealing with in Don Luis.  Well, he knew now.  Yet, would
she have gone with him at first after all?  Ah, the enchanted
forest, the magic pool by the mill, that day on the hill!  It was
springtime in this volcanic country that had detained them.  They
had been bewitched.  The thought of her in his arms swept away
regrets.  It was an answer even to his self-reproaches.  At worst
he had tried to plan too well.  But what HAD happened?

He hoped to find them at Issoire but they had passed through hours
before.  This brought him to himself again.  He must husband his
own strength and that of his horse.  He saw to her himself;
unsaddled her, gave her a rest.  He took a cup of wine and forced
himself to eat.  Through the afternoon he nursed the mare along
with a hundred little attentions that a cavalryman knows.  He
walked up the hills, loosened the girth, rubbed her down, gave her
a little water carefully.  It was now near sunset and the wheel
tracks, those broad unmistakable tracks, still led forward
relentlessly.  It was a problem of one tired horse and a heavy man
against four tired horses and a heavy coach.  At last he topped a
rise from which several miles of country beyond could be seen.  The
mare stood with her head hanging down while Denis looked eagerly
ahead.  The road was empty and led straight away for some distance.
Then it disappeared amid clumps of trees, the remains of a wood.
Fatigue and disappointment overcame him.

                            ----------

It was just after sunset when the coach at Don Luis' command pulled
up before an inn.  It had been passing through a deserted strip of
country for some time; for the last mile or so between isolated
clumps of trees that were gradually closing in to form a wood.  The
long, rambling buildings of the inn with smoke and sparks pouring
out of the chimney against the darkness of the forest beyond was
the only habitation they had seen for some time.  Don Luis regarded
it with evident satisfaction and sent a man for the innkeeper.
When that worthy appeared the marquis stepped out of the coach and
proceeded to arrange matters to suit himself.

He saw Maria and Lucia upstairs into a room overlooking the
courtyard.  He gave it a brief inspection, and remarking that
supper would follow shortly, locked the door, pocketed the key, and
walked downstairs.  He held a short, emphatic conversation with the
innkeeper, but in a voice which was too low to be overheard either
by the servants or the lonely young guest in the worn garb of a
curé who sat by the fire turning a capon on the spit.  Greeting the
curé with the respect for the Church which a Spanish upbringing
made instinctive, Don Luis returned to the courtyard.

Sancho had already driven in and was preparing to feed his horses
when Don Luis approached him.  The master and man talked together
earnestly while a number of heads appeared at various windows and
loungers at the doors.  The curious little man with the tail was
already causing comment.  Then to the surprise of the onlookers he
mounted the lead horse, swung the coach in a circle, and drove off
up the road toward the forest.  Don Luis returned and sat down by
the fire.  The young priest was just taking the fowl from the spit
as he entered.

"Monsieur will do me the great favour of sharing with me?" he
asked.  "It is a gift from one of my flock and if shared with a
stranger will make a truly Christian feast."  The man smiled and
arranged a bowl of salad and a cup of wine invitingly.  The accent
of a gentleman and the face of a youthful ascetic allured Don Luis.
He thought he knew the type.  He would see if he had been correct--
there was time yet--and he sat down.  The simple feast proceeded.
To Don Luis' surprise so did the conversation.

He was a young man who evidently knew something of the great world
and had enjoyed it, yet he had bound himself out as a parish priest
in this remote spot.  Who was he?  Don Luis wondered.  Influence
might have done better for him than this.  But the priest was now
talking of his parishioners, unconsciously answering the questions
which the marquis could not ask.  The annals of his quiet
neighbourhood lived and took on a pastoral form; peasants, and his
life among them, became an idyll of primitive Christianity.  "Such
a delightful homily," thought Don Luis, "would make the man's
fortune at court, an antique style."  And how the man's face lit up
as he spoke of his poor.  But he was not asking for money.  He was
pleading that men of our rank--the "our" slipped out unconsciously--
should follow Christ and come down and help their brethren.  "Then
they would know what the love of God meant, because they would feel
as Our Lord had felt in his own heart.  So they would be like him."

Don Luis felt himself comfortable despite the man's earnestness.
The sermon was therefore a triumph.  He also caught himself
thinking that he would not care to hear a rebuke from the curé's
earnest lips.

"It is not liberty about which the philosophers are all talking
that men need," the young priest was saying.  "Even fraternity is
not enough.  That is an idea.  It must be a feeling, love.  Love of
each for his neighbour.  Love, I say, kindled by God.  That will
make us equal.  That will raise us all at the same time into one
highest rank."

"And the Church and State when we are all of the same rank--what
will become of them?" asked Don Luis.  He had heard of men like
this.  The times were uneasy.  The priest's face lit with the
reflected glow of the millennium.  For a moment it seemed near.
"The Church will then be universal and there will be no need for
the State.  God will be our king."

The Marquis pondered and took a pinch of snuff.  By God, he would
have to feed the starving then!  The women upstairs must be hungry.
This religious glow had made him forget them.  He rose and
listened.  From some distance up the road came the sound of a
trotting horse.

"I trust I have not bored, monsieur," said the priest.  "A thousand
pardons.  I have not meant . . ."

"Not at all," said Don Luis, "quite the contrary."  He gave the man
a reassuring smile.  "But I have cause to think that the person
approaching may be a former acquaintance of mine whom I may wish to
avoid.  If monsieur the curé would be so kind as NOT to call
attention to my presence?"  The marquis quietly pushed his own
plate under that of the priest, and bowed.

"Certainly," said the curé with a mild look of surprise.

Don Luis retired to a dark corner opposite the chimney and sat
down.  Presently a horse was heard on the cobbles.  Solange stood
there with her head hanging down.

Denis had seen the track of the wheels where the coach had turned
in, but he had also seen them still leading beyond.  So he
understood they had been there and had gone.  He could force
himself farther but not the horse.  Well, he might get another
horse here and press on.  At least he would ask.  He must rest and
eat, too.  He turned in and calling for the host began to question
him.

The host was a glib little man.  In the story which Don Luis had
paid him to tell he was quite pat.  Yes, the coach and persons that
monsieur described had been there that afternoon but had departed
about four o'clock.  It was a pity.  Yes, he was sure it was as
long ago as that.  No, there were no horses to be had until one
came to St.-Pierre--four leagues!  Would monsieur care to be made
comfortable for the night?

Denis was not sure about that yet, but he would take supper.  After
that he would see.  At this last disappointment, fatigue and
despair descended upon him like a pall.  He had not thought they
were so far ahead of him.  It seemed impossible.  Perhaps they had
left the château earlier than he thought.  He opened the door and
stepped into the public room.

He was too tired even to glance about the place.  He stood before
the fire and warmed himself.  From his dark corner Don Luis
inspected him closely.  He saw with great satisfaction the look of
fatigue and trouble on the countenance of the young man, and the
fact that he now limped slightly as if his boots chafed him.  He
noted his long reach as Denis dragged a chair up to the chimney,
and the style of his rapier.  The disarming nick on the hilt did
not escape him.  A handsome young dog and one sufficiently
difficult to deal with, he was forced to admit.  At least she had
had the good sense to choose a man.  So this was the hero who had
undertaken to provide an heir for the Marquis da Vincitata!  Very
quietly the possessor of that ancient title loosened his own sword
in its scabbard.  For something like eleven generations his family
had known how, where, and when to draw.  Don Luis was not going to
be the exception.  His cause was the best; the place was opportune.

But he was in no instant hurry.  He had in fact hoped that Maria
would have seen Denis from her window as he rode into the inn
courtyard.  In that case he had intended to tackle him on the
stairs.  But if that plan fell through, as it had, he intended to
detain him at the inn and take his measure exactly as he was doing
now.  But there was something more than this.  A certain element of
the spider in Don Luis permitted him to enjoy vastly the
opportunity of sitting back in his dark corner and watching the fly
walk in.  Thoroughly a Latin, he was not only an actor in, but an
author-spectator of his own drama.  Circumstances were now
collaborating with him to his huge satisfaction.

The priest meanwhile noticed the haggard look upon the features of
the newcomer.  The young curé was already familiar with misery in
all its various guises.  He was aware that the young man across the
fire from him was in great agony of soul.  He longed to comfort
him, but the inimical and secret presence of his recent guest
effectually restrained him.  Naturally sensitive, and by contact
with the primal substratum of life unconsciously, if not
preternaturally aware of the atmosphere attending emotion, the room
to the good curé had suddenly become unbearably tense.  He felt as
if he were sitting waiting for an execution.  So strong was this
irrational feeling that he began to reason himself out of it.

Of all this Denis was totally oblivious.  So far a reasonable hope
had buoyed him up.  But his mind and his body had now sunk
temporarily into a lethargy.  The comfortable warmth of the embers
made his fatigue more apparent to himself, and yet relaxed him.
Supper was long in coming.  His eyelids began to droop despite the
efforts of his will.  To keep himself from being overtaken by
oblivion he called for wine.  There was set before him a clear
glass decanter containing a liquid alleged to be burgundy.  He
removed the stopper and held the bottle up to the light suspiciously.
Instantly he saw a red liquid sphere through which drifted, tumbling
and eddying, shifting clouds of sediment.  There was a certain
hypnotic effect about thus gazing into those bloody depths which,
tired as he was, his mind did not instantly overcome. For some
seconds he continued to gaze with a blank expression.  It was only
for an instant or so but--

Through the wine a figure seemed to grow and advance upon him.  An
oval pot-shaped body began to shoot forth arms and legs that
wriggled up and down the sides of the bottle.  A face with a black
horn below the mouth grinned at him.  The grin expanded clear
across the bottle in a devilishly implacable smile surrounded by
familiar features.  Denis turned with the speed of thought and
dashed the contents of the bottle into the face of the man who had
stolen upon him.

"Death for that," said the marquis.  "You fool!"

For some seconds they stood facing each other.  They heard the wine
dripping onto the floor.  The consternation on Denis' face faded
into relieved joy.  So they had NOT escaped him after all.

He laughed like a boy.  "For THAT, monsieur?  Are you sure?"

"Draw!" blazed Don Luis.  His sword flashed.

As the steel flickered in the firelight there was a loud crash of
crockery at the door and the falsetto voice of the innkeeper began
to scream, "Not in the house, messieurs; messieurs, for the love of
God, not in the house!"  He ran back into the court crying for help
where a babblement arose while the wreck of Denis' supper smoked on
the threshold.

"For the love of God, not anywhere," cried the priest, rising up
now and laying hold of Don Luis' sword arm.  Thus beset and
hindered, the marquis beside himself with rage stood choking.  The
wine trickled down his face and bubbled on his lips as he strove to
speak.

"It is useless to try to interfere, father," said Denis in a calm
dry tone.  "You must have seen the insult which monsieur has just
received from me."

"The edicts, the ordinance of 'twenty-three!  Have a care,
gentlemen!" cried the priest.

The marquis shook the man off with some difficulty.  Had he not
been a priest he would have hurled him into the fire.

"Come," said he to Denis, "we shall settle this in the court."

Protesting, the curé followed them to the door where he remained to
look on with gloomy anticipation.

It had been comparatively dark in the long, low public room, but
outside there still lingered the late, white European twilight.  It
was that hour when the sky reflects and completely suffuses the
last western rays, when very small objects in nature such as men
cast no shadow at all, when a certain eeriness as of the meads of
the departed settles down over buildings and landscape.  The sounds
of life are subdued.  To some melancholy temperaments it is the
most tolerable hour of the day.

In this calm light the two men in their shirt sleeves stood facing
each other a few paces apart on a short space of closely cropped
green near the center of the court.  The litter which surrounded it
marked off its limits in a roughly oval boundary.  The servants and
hangers-on about the inn had already crowded into the court at the
cries of the landlord whose anxiety that his place would be closed
for harbouring brawlers led him up until the last moment to beseech
someone to interfere.

No one, however, had cared to intrude upon the two determined
gentlemen who burst out of the door.  The red wine upon Don Luis'
face and clothes looked as if first blood had already been drawn.
That more was to follow none could doubt.  Doors, windows,
wheelbarrows, dunghills, and other points of vantage were now at a
premium.

"I think, monsieur the captain," said Don Luis in a low tone, "that
under the circumstances we can omit all formalities."  Denis
nodded.  "Since there are no seconds, do you give the word to draw,
I shall simply count three and engage.  The present distance is
satisfactory?  The end you understand?"

"Draw," said Denis.

"Monsieur the curé," cried the marquis aloud, "I call on you to
witness that all is fair and understood between us here."

They fell on guard.

"One, two, three!"

Their blades rasped and hissed together.  The clash of steel, the
stamp of feet, and the heavy breathing of the two men filled the
courtyard.  There was nearly a full minute of sword play in which
no very earnest attacks were made while each tried to feel out the
other's school of fence.

Denis' was a simple combination of the short sword fence at which
any gentleman about the court was more or less an adept, and of the
onslaught and mêlée taught in barracks for the heavier military
rapier.  It was simple but dangerous.  But there was a lack of
economy in his recoveries and a waste of motion in his attacks
which betrayed to the marquis that the arm behind the point which
now so persistently menaced him remembered the sabre.  It was upon
this that he counted.

So far Don Luis had in no way betrayed himself as a subtle
swordsman.  To Denis' riposte and remise his counter-riposte and
reprise had followed, a trifle slow Denis thought.  It was that
upon which HE counted.  The marquis, however, although he was no
believer in the bottes secrets of the old school of fence, had
learned as a boy from an ancient Spaniard, one or the last of the
"Captains of Complements" de la cienca de las armas, a mathematical
pedant of the sword.  Nor had the supple and baffling wrist
movements of the Italian school been neglected by Don Luis in his
later manhood in Tuscany.

Thinking it time now to bring matters to a conclusion Denis burst
upon his opponent with a furious assault, hoping by sheer speed and
energy to get past the guard of the "slower" man.  For a moment the
air about the marquis was full of the darting tongues of Denis'
sword.  But to the surprise of the young man, the older by slight
but deft motions of his body, which Denis had never seen before,
avoided the swiftest thrusts.  At the last Denis was not quite
quick enough in recovering.  The blood dyed his left arm from the
shoulder down.  To his joy, however, Don Luis now began to give
ground.

An expectant gasp went up from the lookers on.

The marquis stepped back with a peculiar motion of the feet as if
they were being planted on exact chalked circles and squares,
movements that forced Denis, if he was to continue the attack, to
move to one side and the other of his opponent in order to find
openings for his thrusts.  For with each motion of his feet the
blade of the marquis assumed the exact line which at once guarded
his body and advanced his point.  They had moved thus with
lightning rapidity to the other end of the green before Denis
realized that he was being led instead of pursuing.  He must change
his tactics.  "God!"

He was almost exhausted . . . the long ride . . .

Suddenly the marquis straightened up from the knees and leaned
forward.  His left hand, so far held behind him as usual, now began
to move forward as he parried, as if it too would thrust Denis'
blade aside.  Gathered up in, and holding a heavy cuff, this was
precisely what it did.

Fence with two hands, sword and dagger, had long been forgotten in
France.  Denis was sure his adversary was failing and could no
longer keep his balance.  He rallied his own last resources and
changing to a kind of half sabre cut, and half rapier thrust,
endeavoured to beat down this ridiculous new guard of his enemy and
to strike home.  The marquis lowered his hilt and retreated
swiftly.

To Denis, whose eye followed rejoicing, it seemed as if the
marquis' point were falling.  "So it was the end!"

He raised his own arm, unconsciously now that of a charging
cavalryman wielding a sabre.  The impulse to thrust left his brain.
He thought his hand leapt forward.  And so it did.  But the sword
fell out of it.

Passing one foot in front of the other as fast as the beat of a
duck's wing, and at the same time lunging forward from the waist,
the marquis had thrust Denis through the heart.  Almost two hundred
seconds had elapsed since he had counted "three."

Denis did not move.  Two spinning black discs collapsed into
whirling funnels of darkness in his eyes.

A blank silence for an instant held everyone in the courtyard.
Then the young curé ran forward and turned Denis over on his back.
He listened to his heart and a few seconds later looked up at the
marquis with an expression in which the emotion of a woman and the
indignation of a strong man struggled for mastery.  From the
upstairs windows came a long, muffled, shuddering cry.  Two white,
despairing hands were beating on the sill.

"Ah," said the marquis, wiping his sword, "Helen has come upon the
wall to see!"

"Monsieur," said the young priest, his face turning scarlet, "God
has also seen."

In the room above someone came and took the white face away from
the window.

"The provocation was mortal," replied Don Luis looking at the
priest as if he had suddenly remembered an unpleasant fact.

"And the sin also," said the curé, letting Denis' hand fall.  Don
Luis' eyes hardened.

"Monsieur, monsieur," cried the priest, rising up and facing the
nobleman, "'Thou shalt not kill!'  It is you and men like you that
are bringing a doom upon yourselves and your class."  His face
worked.  "Hear me, Holy Father, I witness against this man.  Hear
me, ye saints . . ."

Don Luis sheathed his sword and walked away.  The voice of the
priest continued for some time.  From the stable Solange could be
heard neighing.  No one had yet brought her her oats.

The courtyard had by now cleared itself as if by magic.  It was
some minutes before Don Luis could find the landlord, and a quarter
of an hour at least before he could drive "sense" into his head.
The edicts against duelling were enforced mercilessly in France.
It was not the intention of Don Luis to have to fall back upon
diplomatic immunity in order to avoid being hanged upside down in
chains.  He had other plans.  He took the man roughly by the
shoulder and convinced him that the less said about the matter the
better.  "If you want to keep your inn open, tell your people to
keep their faces shut, and do likewise yourself!"

"But if there are inquiries, monsieur?"

"Refer them to the curé and hand the horse and the dead man over to
him.  Get him out of sight now.  This is not your fault, and anyway
you can do nothing about it."

The presence of the marquis' two tall footmen made this fact
glaringly apparent.  The innkeeper decided to make the best of a
bad affair.  Ten gold pieces were in his pocket; the intendant was
at Clermont.  Parbleu! what could a poor man do?  He shrugged his
shoulders.

Don Luis went upstairs.  One of the footmen went out to the road
and waved a lantern.  Presently the jingling of harness was heard.
The coach returned, made a wide circle, and drew up again before
the inn.

Maria's room was almost dark.  After a little Don Luis could make
her out lying on the bed.  Lucia crouched by her side.  He called
out for the man with the lantern.  "We leave immediately," he said
to Lucia.  There was no reply.  Presently the lantern came.  "Take
this woman and the things downstairs," he said, "and see them into
the coach.  Leave the lantern."

Her room seemed empty and silent now.  Outside a tree stirred in
the night breeze and tapped at the pane.  He went to the bed and
held the lantern over Maria.  Looking down, he beheld her utterly
bloodless face with wide, still eyes staring out of dark circles.
Looking up, she saw his scarlet stained features apparently glaring
out of the ceiling from a circle of light.

He set the lantern down and took her hands to raise her.  Her mouth
that reminded him now of his grandmother's in her coffin twitched
slightly.  He leaned down to listen.

"I will tell you.  His name is Denis," she whispered, and went
limp.  He carried her to the coach.

Before the inn the bulk of the coach loomed up against the feathery
background of the dark forest like a hearse with plumes.  About it
twinkled several lanterns.  The curé and the innkeeper stood by
silently as Don Luis consigned his burden to Lucia and climbed in
himself.  The footmen began to fold up the stairs.

"Pardon, monsieur," said the footman, "but there is blood on your
face."

"Get water," said Don Luis calmly.  He had forgotten.  "Bring a
bucket."  He got out again and washed himself by the road.  The
young priest continued to look at him holding his lantern so as to
throw the light upon him.  Don Luis was annoyed.

"Have the goodness to recollect, monsieur the curé, that this is
wine not blood."

"I see blood," replied the priest.

"Where?" asked Don Luis.

"On your soul, monsieur."  The curé turned on his heel and went
into the inn.

Despite himself Don Luis suddenly went cold.  One of the horses
whinnied.  From the stable came the answering neigh of the lonely
mare.  "Drive on, Sancho, you simpleton!" cried the marquis.

"If monsieur will get into the coach?" replied the man.  It was the
first time he had ever known his master to be confused.  "Reason
enough, too," thought Sancho.  "It will be a terrible night and the
horses are nearly foundered."  His whip cracked viciously.  "Who
knows what will happen now?"




CHAPTER EIGHT

A HOLE IN THE WALL


The coach rolled and pitched along.  The road through the forest
was bad and the darkness of a moonless midnight engulfed it.  The
two dim driving lanterns danced and swayed across the inky
landscape like fox-fires.  Sancho used his whip mercilessly.  At
St.-Pierre early next morning two of the beasts were ready to die.
A wheel was strained and had to be replaced.  Don Luis was forced
to pause while men, women, animals, and material, as he put it,
"renewed themselves."  He himself was blithe.  He drove a flinty
bargain with the keeper of the post relays for some heavier horses.
He left his own, not without apprehension, and pressed on.  He was
sorry for the horses.

Don Luis could not know that Denis had severed all connections,
that no one would be expecting his return.  He supposed that after
the death of a king's officer there would sooner or later be some
hue and cry.  For the purely legal offence of killing a man in a
duel the marquis cared nothing.  At worst he could get out of it.
That Denis had first dashed wine in his face might prove fortunate
in case . . .  He ground his teeth at the thought of explaining
away his honour.  A Spaniard before a foreign tribunal!  His honour
required that the real cause of that duel should under no
circumstances ever become known.

No, he preferred to let the innkeeper, or the curé, answer
questions, should there be any to answer, and to dissever himself
and all that was his utterly and forever from the man he had left
lying in the courtyard of the inn.  As for the child that was with
Maria, he would somehow take care of THAT!

After his own child came, later, he would eventually take Maria to
Spain.  She should live and die secluded there.  In Estremadura
hidalgos did not inquire after the health or happiness of one's
wife.  All this might take several years.  In the meantime she
might see reason, reconcile herself.  In the meantime he had both
private and diplomatic affairs to settle before leaving Italy.  He
intended to arrive there ostensibly in the same condition as he had
set out.  He had already satisfied his honour, now he would have
the use of her body.  It would provide him with an heir and a means
of punishing her.  He might even repeat it.  As he thought about it
he knew now that he preferred it that way.  There was a certain
zest.  He looked across the aisle at her where she lay in the arms
of Lucia.  She did not move.  So these were the two women who had
thought to play the fool with him.  A fine clever pair!  There was
a little surprise coming to Lucia, too.  He drooped his lids and
smiled.  Sancho was heading due east into the Montagnes du Forez.

If they looked for him at all it would be by the roads down the
valley of the Allier or in the passes of the Cévennes.  No one but
a crazy man would take a great coach like this through the
Montagnes du Forez.  But at a little hamlet in the foothills they
stopped and purchased mules from the charcoal burners.  The smith
spent the afternoon forging two heavy chains.  At evening the long
clouds draped themselves against the massif and crept down into the
valley.  The wolves howled.  At dawn the coach started upward.

Sancho rejoiced as only a Spaniard can at finding himself on the
back of a mule.  The whip snapped damply in the morning mist.  The
coach advanced upward foot by foot.  The torrent beside the road
deepened into a dark gorge.  Where a waterfall could be heard
roaring below they hurled down the heavy luggage.  The two footmen
walked behind putting their shoulders to the spokes at especially
bitter spots.

By noon the coach had disappeared from the plains below as if it
had flown into the clouds.  Indeed, for much of the time a grey
mist actually wrapped it.  Three weeks later it descended with
chained wheels into the valley of the Rhône.  Sancho licked his
whiskers.  He would be able to indulge in fresh fish and cream
again.  They galloped south along the post road, pausing only for
relays, and trundled over the bridge into Avignon.  Here the
marquis was out of French territory in the enclave and had friends.
One of the towers on the walls had for some ages past been used as
a dwelling.  An old washerwoman lived there.  It tickled the
marquis' fancy and suited his purpose.  He sent Maria and Lucia to
the turret room.  In the evenings Lucia could walk on the ramparts.
Sancho followed her.  At night he slept by the stairs and watched.

The conscience of the Marquis da Vincitata was a curious blend of
himself, particular circumstances, and the times.  Had he been a
simple-hearted or romantic person certain short cuts to an
immediate oblivion for his recent and present difficulties might
have been found available.  They had, of course, occurred to him,
but only that.  He regarded such promptings as crude, open to
possible embarrassments later on, and beneath him.  In short, he
was not a murderer by direct action.  As far as a man could, he
merely intended to shape events.  It was here that his conscience
came in.

Whether he was religious or only fundamentally superstitious might
provide matter for argument.  Probably he was a blend of both.  At
least he had been piously brought up.  The words of the curé had
therefore made an impression upon him which that good man would
have been the last to credit.  But as a matter of fact Don Luis
already considered the "blood on his soul" as a burden.  His code
approved, but his religion disapproved.  Thus he was able to
balance one load exactly, but he would not add to the weight
against him.  Above all he was in both religion and ethics a child
of his own class and the century in which he was born, that is,
purely conventional.  In his ideals of conduct any analysis of
motive was lacking.  Hence his actions were merely an application
in unfailing practice of a technique acceptable to his equals in
rank.  In short, his conscience was a code of honour tempered by
some fear of the supernatural.  In this precarious balance hung the
fate of the unborn child.

In fact the balance was so very delicate that the marquis had come
to a temporary halt at Avignon merely to readjust the scales in
which he had undertaken to weigh out his own justice.  True, he had
already given them every chance of tipping in the direction which
he desired by throwing in the weight of the coach for good
measures; by driving over as heartbreaking mountain roads as he
could find.  The results, however, had not been so satisfactory as
he had hoped.  At present it seemed as if Maria would lose her mind
instead of the child.  A demented wife was not in the scope of his
plans.  Hence, there was to be a sufficient interval of quiet.

The opportunity of torturing several wives and so of improving
gradually upon the method, does not occur frequently to many men.
Don Luis was neither a widower nor a Bluebeard, hence his method
with his first wife was not above criticism.  The numbing mental
shock of having seen her lover done to death before her eyes was
greater than the physical misery which the violent motion of the
coach could confer.  It was from mental shock that she had nearly
succumbed, and it was here that her husband had miscalculated.  The
extreme physical exhaustion of the trip over the mountains in
addition to what she had already suffered reduced her to a state of
apathy in which for a time she could remember nothing at all.

This condition provided sufficient respite to allow Maria to
survive.  Left utterly alone, except for the constant and now
tender ministrations of Lucia, she gradually regained a grasp on
herself.  Her memory returned, but with it came the strength to
bear it.  After some weeks went by she began to sit in a chair on
the ramparts overlooking the placid landscape that sloped away from
the walls of Avignon.  The bravery of a great despair filled her,
and she determined, as she sat feeling the babe stir within her, to
match her own strength, her determination, and if need be her life,
against the will that strove to possess her body and soul.  Despite
Don Luis, she would bring this child of her love into the world.
Its future she must place in the hands of God.  She could do no
more.  The statue of the Virgin came forth from the black bag
again.  Placing it in a little hole in the battlements where the
coping had dropped away and made room for a flowering plant with
long green leaves, she sat facing it, praying quietly through the
long afternoons.

Every evening when the old woman returned to her tower she found
the young girl sitting with sorrow and rapture in her face before
the madonna.  That Maria's sorrow was a tragedy which only heaven
could heal, she understood.  She pitied her.  She brought her small
bowls of fresh goat milk, mushrooms from the pastures beyond the
walls, and wild flowers for her room.  Only once was this blessed
solitude interrupted--by the visit of a physician at Don Luis'
behest.  The kindly old man would scarcely have discovered in the
subsequent proceedings of his generous employer the results of
medical advice.

Don Luis had been engaged for some time in working out a mate in
five moves with the governor of the town who was a devotee of
chess.  He had also completed sundry alterations both in the body
and in the chassis of the coach which were not without a certain
sinister significance.  The body was painted a dull black, the
lilies of monseigneur were removed from the door and a blank
escutcheon substituted.  Heavier axles and wheels with larger hubs
were prepared.  The sling straps were removed, the springs
reinforced, and the body of the vehicle hung from chains.  Save
that there were no barred gratings at the windows, from the outside
the coach now resembled nothing so much as one of those vehicles in
which the unfortunate objects of a lettre de cachet were
transported from fortress to fortress.  No one would have
recognized it for the graceful equipage which had left Versailles
in May.

The cat-like postilion who drove the mules with a secret and
malicious joy was the only thing which remained unchanged.  For Don
Luis' conversations with the governor had not been entirely
confined to theories of chess.  About the end of October the
frigate Hermione sailing from Marseilles with replacements for the
Indies was joined by his two erstwhile footmen who had unexpectedly
changed the livery of the Marquis da Vincitata for that of the King
of France.  Whatever stories they might have to tell of their late
employer would scarcely intrigue the natives of Malabar.  When the
days were growing visibly much shorter the coach and its four
passengers set out for the Alps.  The endless wanderings of one of
them were thus precariously renewed.

Had someone from a great height been able to observe the progress
of the coach over the network of little roads spun like gossamer
across the landscape below, he would have been convinced that the
owner of the equipage was possessed of a vacillating if not a
captious mind.

For many weeks it appeared to advance and retreat, to seek the most
unlikely of byways, to make long detours and excursions, and to
pause briefly at the most remote and sequestered spots.  By a
series of preposterous zigzags and circumlocutions it drew slowly
near to, when it did not seem to be retreating from, the pinnacles
of the Maritime Alps.

The exact state of "circumstances" which Don Luis thus hoped as he
told himself "to achieve" had, however, not come about.  Although
he had indeed weighed his fist heavily in the scale, an unexpected
strength in the powers of nature implicit in the endurance of his
wife had prevented him.  Without imitating Nero he could not get
rid of that which he hated and retain what he desired.  It was now
nearly the end of December.  He must be in Italy early in the new
year.  An occasional scream from Maria which she could no longer
forbear and the indignation of Lucia that fear no longer entirely
controlled were also annoying him.  It would not do to have scenes
even in the smallest towns, and he must retain some degree of hold
on the maid.  The last was now most essential in any event.  The
delay at Avignon had been too long.  He had defeated himself.  As
they began to enter Liguria the calendar convinced him.  He gave
the order and headed directly over the best roads for the pass.

Maria had long ere this lost all consciousness of place or time.
She seemed to herself to be tossing endlessly on a pitiless ocean,
always in misery and discomfort varied only by crests of agony and
valleys of pain as the waves passed under her uneasy vessel.  Lucia
had woven and fitted her secretly at night with a small harness
made out of the strips of a blanket.  The traditions of generations
of peasant women expectant of lifting and ploughing till their time
was fulfilled, informed her fingers.  It was this simple
contrivance which had so far proved a life-saver in the midst of
prolonged and premeditated shipwreck.

The coach began to mount toward the clouds again, this time on a
road engineered by ancient skill.  The slowness and steadiness of
the first degrees of the ascent brought to Maria a freedom from
pain to which she had long been a stranger.  Leaning against the
shoulder of Lucia she looked out of the coach window and beheld the
pleasant villages of the world slumbering in the sunshine of the
plains below.  The fields and hills of Liguria unrolled behind them
like a painted map.  From the mouth of the gloomy gorge upon which
they were just entering it seemed like a glimpse into that toy
paradise of which she had so often dreamed.

She no longer knew where she was, or remembered what had happened.
The man who sat across from her was a stranger.  What a fine coat
he wore!  She would like some of the long lace drooping over his
hands for the skirt of her doll.  Her tired body seemed to be
floating in air.  She was a great distance from it.  She was a
sleepy little girl.  She had been lost.

"Thank you, signore," she said suddenly, with a smile in which all
her radiant beauty seemed to shine again from her face as from a
revived flower, "thank you for taking me home."  Then her features
sank.  She drooped and wilted into Lucia's arms.

So deeply was the marquis immersed in his own opaque nature that
for a while he thought she had been ironical.

They had left the summer below far behind now.  Through the high
pass as they slowly mounted swept the white, swirling skirts of
December storms.  The frozen fingers of sleet trailed over them and
flapped against the glass.  The road grew slippery and Sancho, as
if he were loath to wet his feet, went slinking through the snow
leading the mules.  Far above them in a coign of the cliff to which
the road staggered was a mountain hamlet.  Once the clouds parted
and far above the village flashed amid the shining atmosphere a
sheer and breathless pinnacle of glittering ice.

Inside the coach it grew bitterly cold.  Even Don Luis began to
regret his temerity.  Travellers at this season of the year had
been known to set out by this road and to fail fatally.  Maria
began to utter at more and more frequent intervals a sharp
spasmodic cry.  Her eyes were closed and she seemed to hear
nothing.  Lucia wrapped her as it grew ever colder in her own
cloak.  The marquis finally got out and walked.

It was a question now whether they would make the village ahead of
them.  In the gorge it would soon be dark.  Even the mules seemed
to understand.  They strained ahead desperately.  As the last
sombre twilight reflected itself down upon them they began to pass
through a region of vast, purgatorial rocks.  Don Luis shivered and
re-entered the coach.  Sancho began as a last resort to ply his
whip again.  The now constant wailing of the woman within was
answered by strange voices from the winds without.  Slowly the
coach struggled around a huge buttress onto another incline.  The
lights of the village came in sight.  An hour later they arrived in
darkness and in icy storm.  A thousand feet above them the wind
from Italy raved over the crest of the pass.

Roused by the yammering of Sancho, and the thuds of the marquis'
stick on the door of the largest house the reluctant portal finally
opened after considerable parley.  Maria was carried in and laid on
a bed in an inner room, a kind of cave-like place, the rear wall of
which was the living stone of the mountain.  Through a partition
the champing and lowing of cattle could be heard in the stable
beyond as Sancho made place for the mules.  A few lanterns began to
flit about through the storm and the women to gather as the news of
the arrival and the predicament of the travellers spread from house
to house.  Presently an old woman with a nose like an owl's and
tangled hair through which her eyes glared piercingly arrived with
a large copper kettle in her hand.  It was filled with snow and put
on the fire to thaw and boil.

The chimney, indeed, was the one comfortable feature of the
establishment.  It was wide and deep and fed by great logs.  Few
travellers stopped here and when they did, only by necessity.
There was not even a professional welcome.  Don Luis was forced to
content himself with some porridge, tough goat's flesh, and a stoop
of vile wine.  He sat in the only chair with a bare table before
him and Sancho curled up at his feet.  The latter was fast asleep
as near the fire as he could get.  His damp coat steamed while he
snored with a kind of continuous purr.  Outside the tumult of the
wind was incredible.

The old woman with several others had gone into Maria's room with
Lucia.  He could hear their feet moving about in the lulls of the
storm as if they were stamping upon something.  Sometimes it
sounded as if they were being chased by mice.  Maria's cries had
ceased now.  Presently the pot boiled over and threatened to quench
the fire.  He took it off and shouted.  The old woman came out
again.  She jabbered at him in a dialect he could not understand.
Her nose seemed about to touch her chin.  He laughed at her, and
she cursed him.  "Of what use are men!"  She spat into the pot,
made the sign of the cross over it, and threw in a bundle of dried
leaves.  Presently the pure snow-water turned a cloudy green.
Taking the kettle with her, she disappeared into the room again.
He grew tired waiting.  If the child was born it had not cried yet.
Perhaps after all . . .

He wrapped himself in his cloak and stretched out on the table with
his feet to the fire and his head on a small valise.  Hours passed.
It was after midnight.  He dozed fitfully.  The table was hard.
The wind had gradually died away.  Once he heard the women
whispering together as the door opened and someone came out.  They
seemed to be quarrelling over what to do.  Let them!  He turned
over.  Finally he slept.  Maria was lying in the next room staring
up at the ceiling.  The old woman was piling hot stones wrapped in
cloth about her extremities.  Despite these measures her feet were
slowly turning cold.

Lucia had come out into the room and was now sitting on the chair
which the marquis had lately occupied.  On her lap was a man child
which she now and then held up and turned over in the warmth of the
blaze.  He moved feebly and breathed.  A red darkness like a shadow
on his face began to fade.  Towards morning he gave a few feeble
cries.  Don Luis awoke and looked at him but said nothing.  He lay
for some time thinking.  Lucia wrapped the child up and settled it
across her knees.  It was sleeping now.  She herself soon fell into
an exhausted slumber.

Don Luis rose quietly and went into his wife's room.  He was
startled to see candles burning at the foot of her bed.  She lay
very quiet.  There could be no doubt of it.  Circumstances had
again defeated him.

He turned suddenly at a slight noise.  The old woman was standing
beside him holding out her hand.

The marquis smiled grimly.  So he must pay for it, too!  He began
to fumble in his pocket.  Then a thought struck him.  He reached
down, and taking the wedding ring from Maria's finger dropped it
into the outstretched palm of the ancient crone.  There was a worn,
gold band on Maria's finger underneath her ring which he had never
seen before.  Some childish trinket, he supposed.  The iciness of
his wife's hand seemed to remain in the palm of Don Luis.  Even the
ring had been cold.

The old crone rushed out into the morning light to look at it.  A
heavy snow had fallen in the night and under the first rays of the
dawn there was in that high, snowy atmosphere a frosty, pale blue
like the hue in the depths of a cold lake.  As she held the ring up
to the east its single stone seemed to have concentrated in it a
spark of fire that was surrounded but not quenched by blue ice.
She clutched it to her breast and trudged up the road with the dry
snow blowing like dust about her.  Jesù-Maria!  She was rich!

Don Luis strolled over to the fire to warm his hands.  Lucia was
sleeping deeply, her face marked with the heavy lines of sad
fatigue.  Her mouth drooped.  The child lay utterly still, its web-
like hands to its face.

The marquis very quietly pushed two logs closer together and
continued to warm himself looking down at the pair.  His face
retained a single inscrutable expression like a mask.  Behind it he
was solving what he considered to be the final problem of a
disastrous episode.  The two persons before him were in question.
Should he drive quietly on and leave them sleeping there?  Should
he take them both, or take only the child?  It must be baptized as
soon as possible.  It might not live long.  He did not care to have
that on his soul in addition to . . . his hands clenched uneasily.

A log burned through and fell in the fireplace behind him.

If this woman ever followed him, he would know how to take care of
HER.  The story must die, be buried here with the lovely and
faithless dust in the next room.  He hoped the glaciers would cover
it.  He had seen mountain churchyards like that--the ice wall
overhanging the tombs, moving slowly.  His was a great and
honourable name.  Woe to those who hissed against it!  He looked at
Lucia narrowly again.  Well, it would be wiser to give her the
opportunity to forget completely.  He stirred Sancho with his foot.
In the silent room they whispered together for a while.

The silence of a great height and a heavy winter morning after
snowfall now wrapped the whole village.  The tired women who had
toiled so long and desperately the night before had gone home for a
brief rest before returning.  Even the cattle in the shed behind
lay quiet, glad of their own warmth.  Sancho had given them hay and
their usual morning bawling was stayed.  Through the partition came
only occasionally the faint jingle of chains as if someone had cast
down a silver coin on marble.  With great stealth and skill Sancho
was harnessing the mules while they ate.  Presently he tiptoed into
the room with a small brass receptacle filled with charcoal.  He
dropped a few coals into it and blew them up.  Don Luis nodded
approval, and raised his eyebrows inquiringly.  The man nodded and
left his master alone.

Unlocking the small portmanteau which had served the night before
as his pillow, Don Luis drew from it an unusually long, tasselled
purse.  It was half full.  After a little search he found a small
bag and untying it proceeded without any noise to transfer from it
a sufficient quantity of gold pieces to stuff the purse like a
sausage.  At the top he placed a tightly folded note that he
scrawled, and pulled the strings tight.  He now opened the
portmanteau wide and placed it beside Lucia.  It was too small.

He closed it again, walked out to the coach, and returned with the
larger black bag which had belonged to Maria.  All this stealthily.
He now put the bag in the same place beside Lucia which his own had
just occupied and opened it.  It gaped widely.  Inside were a few
silver toilet articles and on the bottom Maria's black riding
cloak.  The toilet articles he deposited in the white heat of the
fire and then stooped down to rearrange the folds of the cloak.
A hard object which he felt underneath the cloth he pushed
impatiently to one side.  He then rose and bent over Lucia.  She
still continued in the sleep of exhaustion.  One hand clutched that
part of the blanket nearest to the baby's head.  With great care
Don Luis slowly withdrew the folds of the cloth from the woman's
fingers and gently laid across her palm the tasselled purse.  She
stirred slightly while her fingers slowly closed around it.  Don
Luis smiled and remained standing before her for some minutes till
her breathing again became regular.  In the fire the backs of
Maria's silver brushes began to melt.  White drops of metal began
to course down the faces of Cupids to mingle with small bullet-like
lumps of metal that had once been festoons of grapes.  They now lay
in the ashes.

Very swiftly, but equally as lightly, Don Luis lifted the child
from the knees of Lucia and lowered it into the bag.  He closed it,
and avoiding giving it the slightest jar, tiptoed to the door.  He
turned on the doorstep to look back.  Lucia was asleep.  Only the
top of her high comb showed over the back of her chair.  In the
other room the candles still burned at the foot of Maria's bed.  As
he closed the door the draught blew them out.  Moving silently
through the deep snow he lifted the bag into the coach, climbed up,
and closed himself in.

Sancho put the mules in motion.  Through the silent drifts where
even the iron hoofs were muffled they moved upward toward the crest
of the pass.  Presently the sun, which had already for some hours
been looking at the plains of Tuscany, dazzled their eyes.  Sancho
leaned forward gazing with his hand to his forehead.  The morning
clouds had not yet lifted.  All that was going on upon the busy
plains below still remained withheld from him by their ghostly
veil.  To one passenger of the coach at least the future was
equally mysterious.  He was still riding as he had been for many
months before, completely in the dark.  Indeed, it was not until
many hours later that the marquis was disturbed by the faint voice
in the bag.  Don Luis also slept soundly.  The small charcoal
footstove imparted a somnolent warmth to the coach.  It had in fact
slightly tainted the air.  But it was now burnt out, and they had
long left the regions of snow behind them.  By the time they began
to pass through the villages in the foothills the protests of the
young gentleman in the bag were too strenuous to be much longer
ignored.

At Aulla the marquis was forced to descend to attend to several
vital necessities.  They remained till next day, the marquis at the
inn, and the child with a wet nurse.  She found the baby nursed
vigorously, tended him, and wrapped him about with long bands after
the manner of her kind.  Some hours of the morning were passed
procuring four decent horses.  The marquis had no intention of
entering his own country drawn by mules.  Hearing the child
reported thriving, Don L'uis decided to chance deferring its
baptism for some hours.

Indeed, as they rapidly approached his own feudal domains his self-
confidence returned apace.  His bodily movements became more
confident, his gestures more imperious, and he no longer worried
much about his soul.  As they crossed the bridge over the Arno the
obsequiousness of the officer in charge of the Tuscan troops at the
little guardhouse reminded Don Luis forcefully not only where, but
who he was.  In short the Marquis da Vincitata was himself again.
The experience through which he had passed had shaken him more than
he cared to admit.  But for that reason his mind all the more began
to thrust the memory into oblivion.  Every revolution of the wheels
left it further in the past.

Into the future, to which every revolution of the same wheels were
also carrying him and the child, Don Luis did not need to look very
far.  After a few miles he would take care that their respective
paths in life should never be the same again.  And he would
continue to see to that.  Should they ever meet it would always be
at right angles, and on different levels.  The marquis felt sure of
his own.  But the probability of their meeting was, he assured
himself, and for excellent reasons, extremely remote.  When the
cries of the baby annoyed him he closed the bag.

They turned south at Pontedera from the main route to Florence and
took the road to Livorno.  Don Luis had two small items of business
to transact there before returning to the main highway from which,
he told himself, he had been turned aside after all only
temporarily.

Towards nightfall of an evening unusually warm for that time of
year the coach came to a standstill on a lonely piece of road on
the hills overlooking Livorno.  Presently it drove on for a little
and halted again.  But to the eyes of its driver, who could see
remarkably well in the dark, it was plain that a figure had emerged
from it at the first halting place carrying something in one hand.
The man with the bag turned down a quiet lane bordered by poplars
and proceeded rapidly through the dusk as if the place were
familiar to him.  Presently he was passing along the high white
wall of some ecclesiastical establishment.

The Convent of Jesus the Child was indeed familiar to Don Luis, for
his family had aided greatly in its establishment.  Of its present
financial condition he was not aware.  There was apparently no gate
into the lane.  The straight lines of the stone walls continued for
some distance.  At last he came to what was in fact merely a hole
in the wall.  He placed the bag upon the sill and fumbling about in
the blackness finally felt a cold metal handle and pulled it.  At a
seemingly vast distance within arose the jangle of a small bell.
He retreated some way off and stood listening in the darkness.

The child began to cry.  In the tense silence of the last twilight
its feeble voice continued minute after minute in a thin wail.  He
was about to return and pull the bell again when the noise of a
sliding shutter prevented him.  A light stabbed out from the wall
and across the lane.  The bar of it remained for some seconds as if
suspended in darkness.  Then it was withdrawn as suddenly as it
came.  With it the cries of the child were also extinguished.  For
some minutes Don Luis listened intently.  A bell tolled calling the
nuns within to prayer.  He sighed unconsciously and turned away.
It was, he knew, a custom of the pious souls who thus received
unfortunate orphans to baptize them immediately.  A great weight
was now lifted from him.

He returned to Sancho in a cheerful mood.  "You can light the lamps
now," said he, and continued speaking, while the lanterns were
being kindled, in low, familiar tones.

"Sì, sì, señor, I understand," said the curious little man coming
to the door and laying his hand sympathetically on his master's
arm.  "Always I shall serve you."  His whip cracked and they drove
away.

Don Luis leaned back and closed his eyes.  His hand felt the hollow
in the cushions where Maria had once sat beside him.  It would not
be easy to break the news of the death of an only daughter to her
father.  "Buried in the Alps, buried do you understand?" he said,
"buried!"  He repeated it aloud as though rehearsing a scene in
which he would soon have to take a difficult part.

Only Sancho remained.  One faithful servant!  But what more could a
man expect of life?  He shrugged his shoulders.  The sound of hoofs
and the grinding noise of the wheels died away in the darkness
toward Livorno.

The child in the convent awoke and cried out as the bag was opened
and the light dazzled it.  At the sight of a raw male infant one of
the nuns screamed and caught her breath.

What was to be done with it?


END OF BOOK ONE





BOOK TWO

In Which the Roots of the Tree Are Exposed




CHAPTER NINE

THE CONVENT OF JESUS THE CHILD


In the Convent of Jesus the Child, Contessina, the lay portress,
moved about the central courtyard of the place as quietly as her
wooden pattens would permit.  She came every morning and evening to
perform certain tasks for the nuns, and she was now as busy as
usual about the hour of matins.  Since she was the only able-bodied
person in attendance upon ten querulous old women and a boy infant
her work was exacting enough and would have exhausted the patience
of several men.

But to the young peasant woman, who had children of her own at
home, and had no inclination to question her lot, her acceptable
labours seemed merely a form of natural service in an immutable
scheme.  Her position as "lay portress" was hereditary.  It went
with the land upon which she dwelt.  The convent had always been on
the little hill in the valley; her husband's broad vineyards lay
just below it, and as long as anyone could remember there had
always been a wife or daughter from the white house in the vine-
lands to serve as a maid-of-all-work to the sisterhood on the hill.

Nor did it ever occur to Contessina to trouble herself that her
labours were somewhat monotonous.  On the contrary, she
instinctively felt a decided satisfaction in their unchanging
round.  Change, indeed, was the last thing that anyone would
immediately associate with the Convent of Jesus the Child.  The
very approach to it served to convey even to the most casual
passer-by a sense of antiquity, security, and somnolence.

It was situated in the exact centre of a small, oval valley planted
with vineyards that looked westward over the city of Livorno, the
hills opening in that direction toward a wide vista of wine-
coloured sea.  The buildings, for there were several that rambled
into a rough rectangle, were themselves built upon a little
eminence in the dale, and were to be approached on all sides only
by a series of deeply sunken lanes.  From the high banks of these
ancient, grassy tracks cropped out here and there, especially after
heavy spring rains, fragments of marble masonry; the drum of an
antique pillar or a mottled festoon of ivy on shattered stone.

In fact, the whole hill or mound upon which the convent stood must
have been seething under its turf-covered waves and trellised
terraces with the dim animal and vegetable forms of the pagan past.
Perhaps there were even gods and giants, heroes and demigods with
all their half-human, half-divine progeny buried there, the lost-
children of the ineffably beautiful and calm classic dream.  If so,
they remained now in a conceivably pregnant darkness, earthy
spirits affecting the roots of things, while from the low tower of
the convent on the hill above them fell the sound of the chapel
bell tolling away by matins, angelus, and vespers the slowly
passing hours of the Christian era.  These had for innumerable
generations been regularly marked not only by the prayers of the
nuns in the chapel itself but by the bowed heads of the labourers
in the vineyards below.

Yet despite the calm and serenity which undoubtedly surrounded the
convent, it was still evident, to any eye used to looking below the
surface of things, that even here the restless forces of change had
been at their usual work, albeit somewhat more calmly and with less
of a tendency to become visible in violent breaks and shattered
outlines than elsewhere.  Here the forms of objects and the
profiles of eras had quietly flowed; had simply mouldered one into
the other, while to each generation that beheld only a little of
this constant flux and weathering all things appeared to have
remained the same.

No one except a curious and perhaps pedantic antiquary would have
recognized in sections of the convent's whitewashed walls the dim
entablatures of a pagan temple or have paused to wonder about
certain fragments of friezes that emerged here and there into the
sunlight only to disappear again behind more recently erected
portions of the buildings or beneath ancient cloisters of vaulted
stone.  Here, as everywhere else in the vicinity, one thing melted
calmly into another; only in the convent itself the process had
been arrested and had congealed, if one cared to look closely.

The place where the running handwriting of time was most plainly
visible and carefully preserved was in the most ancient and central
courtyard or cloister.  Here burst forth with a continual humorous
lament, like the ironical laughter of Nature herself, a clear
fountain whose source was either forgotten or unknown.

Above it rose an immense plane tree that overlooked the red tiles
of the convent and all the countryside toward Livorno and the sea.
Its top was the home of a flock of bronze-coloured pigeons, fed and
regarded with secret superstition and reverence by the peasants for
miles about.  The huge, mossy roots of the tree, knotted and
writhing like a cascade of gigantic serpents, overflowed the brink
of the fountain, embraced the wide bowl of it, and disappeared with
static, muscular convulsions into the fertile soil of the hill
under the pavement.

Just at the foot of this eternal and apparently changeless tree
there had stood for many ages looking down into the fountain the
antique, bronze statues of the twins Castor and Pollux.  In that
anciently remote portion of Italy the change from paganism to
Christianity had been a gradual one, and in the course of time the
church had seen fit to consecrate a place which had never ceased to
be venerated.  The worship of the offspring of Leda and the Swan
was discreetly discouraged while another legend more orthodox in
its implications was fitted upon the statues.  The bronze twins
were said to be the youthful Saviour and his brother St. John, both
in a state of boyish innocence.  A church known as the Chapel of
the Holy Children was constructed out of fragments of the temple
and devoted to their worship.  The clergy attached to it had in
primitive times taken an active part in the harmless semi-pagan
festivals of the neighbourhood; immersing catechumens in the
fountain, and blessing the nobly responding vines.

Then, in some dim foray following the age of Charlemagne, "St.
John" had been carried hence upon a galley of Byzantium into parts
unknown.

The loss was a severe one.  For some time the vogue of the shrine
on the little hill had languished.  But the ingenuity of the clergy
was again equal to the occasion.  The name of the chapel was now
changed to that of Jesus the Child, while the illiterate memory of
the countryside was encouraged to forget that the bronze boy who
remained alone by the fountain had ever had a brother.

How the Chapel of Jesus the Child was afterward turned into a
nunnery of perpetual adoration, how that in turn became an
orphanage, and toward the end of the eighteenth century a convent
school for fashionable young girls, was only the final addition of
its quiet history, every chapter of which had left its mark in some
indelible manner upon the venerable pile.

The tree, the fountain, and the bronze statue alone remained
unchanged.  Their natural and pagan outlines were quite undisguised.
But the pillars of the court which had once formed the façade of the
temple of Castor and Pollux were now the supports of the convent's
inmost cloister.

The rest of the buildings clustered about it, a maze of corridors
and cells now for the most part long disused and in various stages
of desolation and decay.  The girls' school was kept in a more
modern wing at the extreme end of the building, and the chapel
alone was now used for worship.  Even the ancient custom of a
bride's strewing flowers upon the pool before the statue of Jesus
the Child on the night before her marriage had been given up.  The
courtyard was now exclusively the abode of a number of superannuated
sisters whose cells gave upon the place.  And it was no wonder that
Contessina, who clattered about in her wooden shoes merrily enough
at home, felt constrained to walk quietly there--for upon this
cloistered refuge of old age and antiquity there actually brooded a
serene and immemorial quiet, a green patina of light and leaf-shade,
a sequestered placidity that it was sacrilege to disturb.

The main impression of the place was a vision of light; a kind of
trembling and watery iridescence, a flow of leaf-shadows and
brilliant sunshine that filtered through the quivering leaves of
the plane tree only to be reflected from the broad basin of the
fountain and washed in turn along the marble walls.  That, and the
stream of water perpetually rushing into the fountain, lent to the
whole cloister a soft, molten voice and a golden-liquid colour that
endowed it with a kind of mysteriously cheerful life; with a vague
and yet an essentially happy personality.

The tree, probably the last of a sacred grove, and the well or
spring were long thought to have been endowed with miraculous
powers.  Even the conversation of the pigeons was once held to be
salubrious for young married women to hear.  But since the arrival
of the nuns all that had been forgotten.  Only the water, which
came from no one knew where, continued to fall with a sleepy noise
into a dateless, green, marble fountain hewn from a single vast
block.  The jet seemed to be wrung from the spongy mouth of a
battered sea-monster whose face, scoured dim by the ages, had once
stood between the bronze statues of the twins.  The bronze boy who
still remained was a naked child with a time-worn smile and eyes
that appeared to have gone blind from contemplating for centuries
the shifting changelessness of the pool.

In the very monotony of the changes which the bright fountain so
constantly mirrored was a certain hypnotic fascination.  All those
who entered the courtyard were forced by a subtle trick of
architectural perspective to look at the pool before noticing the
roots of the tree.  Perhaps the constant interplay of light and
shadow upon the water accounted for the fixed and dreamless
expression upon the face of the bronze boy, who had watched it
since the gods began.  Indeed, it was hard to tell, after regarding
them steadily even for a few moments at a time, whether the changes
in the fountain arose internally or were caused by something
working upon it from without.  In this its waters might be said to
resemble the flowing stream of events themselves.  To be sure, it
shadowed forth a perpetual interplay of reflected patches of blue
Etruscan sky and the verdant glooms and gleams of the plane tree
soaring above.  But the tree itself was obviously the prime example
of still-life in eternity.  And then the water, which at a first
glance appeared to be stagnant in its green basin, was soon seen
and heard to be flowing away at a rapid rate.

To anyone coming suddenly out of the gloom of the cloisters into
the honeyed light of the courtyard the huge trunk of the tree was
not at first to be discovered in the comparative darkness of its
own central shadow.  Raise the eyes above the line of its roots,
and the tree seemed to be let down into the place; positively to be
hanging in atmosphere as though aerially supported on the great
fanlike vanes of its own wide-spreading foliage, or drooping from
the flaring parachute of leaves at the top.  It was this effect in
particular which gave to the whole courtyard that peculiar,
paradoxical aspect of something immutable forever occurring without
cause or reason, which is as near perhaps to a true vision of
reality as the eyes of man can attain.

Most people were merely momentarily confused or idly amused by
these manifestations, but during the course of centuries one or two
sages and several simple-minded persons who had entered the
courtyard had been suddenly shocked back into their own original
and naturally mystical vision by their first glimpse of the place.
All the habitual nonsense by which their minds forced them to
construct a reasonable basis for reality was shattered at one blow
by the amazing miracle of the hanging tree.

Yet the world remained; the fountain giggled, and the tree hung.

For a lucky moment or two only, they saw it wholly with their own
eyes again.  It was as if like gods, or infants, they had stumbled
suddenly into a cloudy nursery where the forms of matter were
toyfully assuming various astounding outlines for the amusement of
the inmates.

And it was exactly in that mood or condition that a pair of eyes,
hung on a convenient wall peg, were looking at the courtyard on a
certain morning while Contessina walked about it quietly, hanging
up some baby clothes which she had just finished washing.

                            ----------

The pair of eyes in question were very bright ones in the head of a
boy something over a year old who was hanging strapped in swaddling
clothes to a back-board suspended from a peg in the wall under an
arch of the cloister.  He was quite used to hanging there for hours
at a time.  And as no one had ever paid any attention either to his
cries of indignation or wails of boredom--except at precise and
stated intervals when he was taken down--he had already learned the
futility of protest in an indifferent universe composed apparently
of vast, glimmering faces and shifting light and shade.

The world as he found it nevertheless permitted him to exist rather
satisfactorily.  With considerable internal discomfort at times it
was true, but then he was not as yet much cursed with either memory
or anticipation.  And he had early discovered, was in fact
fascinated by, the remarkable manifestations in the region of his
eyes.

He already used those valuable organs well; that is to say, he used
them both together.  Through them the world was already accurately
focused upon him, and he upon it; and he must, even in the course
of a few hundred days since his emergence from the waters of
darkness, have made many more profound inferences about it than
some adult philosophers would be prepared to admit.  His eyes no
longer merely followed something moving or stared, they were, as
often as not, directed from within and in such a manner as to
indicate that he felt he was in the courtyard and not IT in him.
In fact, he was already quite sure of it.

It had taken several months and certain alterations in the shape of
his eyes to enable him to arrive at this stupendous and not
entirely logical conclusion.

The light and shade had at first been wholly in him.  He was
submerged in it.  Then the light had brightened.  As he hung on the
wall and opened his eyes from the blank of infancy it was the first
thing that had awakened his mind.  And it had awakened it
accompanied with a sense of well-being and joy.  The golden
trembling of the leaf-filtered light in the courtyard had washed in
ripples of happiness over the closed head-of-consciousness while it
had responded slowly like the submerged bud of a water-lily in a
clear, sunny lake.  That bud had at last come to the surface,
differentiated itself from the surrounding waters, and opened its
matured and sensitive flower to find what was in the light.

At first there were only shadows that moved in it like clouds over
the waters of chaos.  Then greyly, gigantic static outlines began
to loom up in the mist.  The mist itself became mottled.  Patches
of colours stood out; mysteriously and disappointingly disappeared.
Spots of light dazzled; moved here and there like beams of a torch
on a wall; vanished.  Darkness resumed.  He slept.  Then the
process would go on again--always a little farther removed; each
day more distinct; not quite so deeply inside him.

And all these sights were for the most part accompanied by noises
in the head, taps and thumps as shadows approached and withdrew,
gurglings, chortlings, hisses, and strings of vowels.  An
occasional stupendous roaring or crash made him cry out.  Then,
lapped in his own voice, everything dissolved in sound.  As he hung
day after day under the arch he began to know that with the
sunlight other things always happened or were part of it.  These
were a continuous low gurgling sound, and warmth.  Sometimes the
gurglings grew louder and were accompanied by certain white
flutterings.  This excited him pleasantly and he imitated the
sound.  As for all the sensations that alternately soothed or
tortured him, as the wheel of life upon which he was bound and
destined to be broken began to revolve, there are no names for them
except legion.

Suddenly--for the instrument having prepared itself, he now
blundered upon the use of it as if by accident--all this chaos was
swiftly resolved.  His eyes came to a focus one day as he hung on
the wall.  And there lay the courtyard before him, basking in the
sunlight, awash with shade.  The fountain glittered and the tree
hung.  The pigeons fluttered.  Contessina, whose voice he
recognized, and other forms in white moved to and fro accompanied
by sound.  Once having realized space, the directions of sounds
next attracted his notice.  Time began to glimmer upon him.
Meanwhile the world beyond was every day more glittering, fresh,
and beautiful.  He lapsed into sleep regretfully and returned to
the light with joy.  He lived only in the light.  Let there be
light and there was light.  Out of it all the forms of things had
also been created from chaos for him as his own act of creation
recapitulated the great original.  The baby and the fountain sang
together in the beautiful first morning of life.

For months this sound of pure human joy like the distant crowing of
roosters had from time to time echoed from the walls of the
courtyard to be re-echoed apparently by the fountain and carried
off.  Contessina and the nuns had unconsciously thrilled to it.  It
was a voice they had forgotten but still recognized.  For the
second time since the child had come to them the great plane tree
was in full leaf again.

Contessina finished tying the clothes on a line and walked over to
the baby.  She was passionately fond of it.  She had three of her
own at home but they were all dark little girls with brown eyes.
The golden hair and blue-grey pupils of the man child hanging on
the wall seemed to her to belong to another and better world.  She
made certain feminine sounds to the baby, the elliptical grammar of
which conveyed to him a sense of her complete approval and a
decided encouragement to continue to exist.  In his own manner he
replied.  Contessina then walked away again.

He held out his arms to her but only tentatively.  For he had
already learned that affection was not always returned.

Contessina on her part was waiting for the nuns to depart to the
chapel for matins.  A number of the old women garbed in white with
wide head-dresses were now sitting upon a marble bench in the
sunlight pattering and murmuring their morning prayers with a sound
as eternal as the waterspout itself.

Presently the convent bell rang.  The nuns rose, formed in
procession, and disappeared down a corridor in the direction of the
chapel, raising a quavering morning chant.  The pigeons resettled
about the fountain and began to walk and talk expectantly.  More
and more kept coming down out of the air with the sound of tearing
silk.  The child cried out with delight.  Contessina now took him
down from the wall, and unwrapping him from the board, carried him
over to the brim of the fountain upon which she sat holding him
upon her knee.  He stretched and moved his limbs gratefully.  The
pigeons gathered about her, lit on her shoulders and covered the
pavement with a plaque of iridescent bronze.

She produced a bag from her skirt and began to toss them some
barley.  Waves of excitement ran through the living metal.
Contessina and the baby laughed.  He began to seek her breasts.
She opened her dress and gave him suck.  The sound of the falling
water and the soft talk of the pigeons filled the courtyard as with
one contented voice.

Contessina looked at the bronze boy on the other side of the basin
under the tree and began to make a little conversational prayer to
him in her heart.  Her lips did not move and into her features
crept the same eternal, blind expression that slept on the face of
the statue.


"Dear Christ who also fed the pigeons when thou wast a boy, thou
wast also once a baby, as thou art now in the chapel lying upon
blessed Mary's breast, Contessina is poor and can bring to thine
altar only a little wine from Jacopo's vineyards.  Nevertheless, it
is blessed by Father Xavier and becomes thy blood.  Have mercy upon
me.  Accept also the milk of thy maid-servant's breast, which I
share now between my own baby and this thine orphan.  Remember
them, thy helpless children.  Remember also my old mother who
Father Xavier says is still in purgatory and who suckled nine.  Ah,
dear Child, for thy own mother's sweet sake remember her."


Contessina's eyes filled with tears.  She removed the baby from her
breast, crossed herself, and dashed some water on her face.

The child was still hungry.

From the same bag in which she kept the grain for the pigeons she
now brought out a little cloth package and spread it out on the rim
of the fountain.  The pigeons which now approached she drove away.
The cloth contained some fragments of sausage boiled tender, some
goat's cheese seethed with flour, mashed pieces of carrots, garlic
and parsley all made into a kind of cake.  She crumbled these
finely, and mixing the meal with the fountain water in a clean
hollow of the stone to the consistency of sticky gruel, she let it
warm for a while in the sun.  Then she fed it to the baby with her
finger.  It was a dangerous food.  On it most of Caesar's veterans
had been fed in infancy as a supplement to what flowed naturally
from the teats of the Roman wolf.

Contessina now returned to her more usual tasks.  She laid the baby
on a pile of dirty clothes in the sun where he soon went to sleep.
The nuns always remained out of the courtyard till about noon.
Contessina pounded their linen garments with a paddle and soused
them in the fountain till they were spotless.  Then she laid them
out in the sun to dry.  By the time she came to the pile on which
the baby still lay asleep she was hot and tired, and it was almost
time for the old women to return.

She took the child up in her arms and went over to the fountain.
Glancing hastily at the shadow on the wall-dial, to be sure she
would not be disturbed, she slipped hastily into the pool with the
child in her arms and sank slowly into the shell-shaped bowl.  The
water displaced by her body rose and overflowed.  The baby gasped
and clung to her.  Then he relaxed and splashed comfortably as the
liquid atmosphere washed delightfully over his frame.  The pigeons,
the woman, and the child all made similar noises.  After a minute
or two Contessina hastily resumed her clothes while the baby dried
off in the sun.  She then wrapped him in clean linen bandages,
binding him to his back-board as far up as his chest.  Only his
arms remained free.  When the nuns returned he was hanging under
the arch on the wall again.

From the refectory the nuns brought him a piece of bacon on a
string which they tied to his wrist.  They took care of him through
the afternoon until Contessina returned in the evening.  She then
fed him again and put him to bed.

As he grew older he began to creep about the courtyard.  He played
with pebbles and twigs in the sunlight.  He began to stand up and
dabble in the fountain.  He shouted at the bronze boy across the
pool.  But that taciturn youth continued staring into the basin and
made no reply.  The days of the little boy who stood looking up at
him so hopefully flowed away like the water with an unbroken joyous
monotony.

Contessina would have liked to take the child home with her to the
farm.  As he grew older she saw that he was lonely.  And she would
have liked nothing better than to have had him trotting around the
farmyard with her baby daughter during the afternoons.  But her
diffident suggestions were firmly vetoed by the mother superior.

Several curious circumstances had combined both for good and for
evil to keep the boy, who had arrived so mysteriously and
inopportunely, confined to the cloister.  Indeed, it was largely
his own doing that he finally escaped at all and acquired a worldly
name.

                            ----------

The first thing he could distinctly remember was seeing his own
face in the fountain.  Someone like himself had at last come to
play with him.  He followed the "other boy" around and around the
basin.

"Anthony," said one of the old nuns who had smiled and stopped to
watch him in passing.  So the boy in the fountain became "Anthony,"
his best, and for a while his only friend.  The boy in the court
watched the boy in the water and spent hours talking to him.

It was more successful than trying to talk to the bronze boy whose
expression never changed.  The lips of the boy in the water moved,
and he laughed back at you.  He was alive.

Presently when the child in the courtyard moved his own lips he
said nothing aloud.  "Anthony" in the pool was talking.  Anthony in
the court listened.  And it was not long before he distinctly heard
what the voice of the boy in the fountain had to say.  They talked
about everything.  Their conversations continued for hours.  They
would even laugh together, a long rippling laughter.

The old nuns who sat in the court turning their breviaries or doing
embroidery nudged each other and smiled.  Their own conversation
was always more subdued than that of the water.  Unconsciously, in
order to be heard, they had fallen into a lower register than the
constant babble of the fountain.  Occasionally the pigeons and the
water accidentally harmonized like a musical accompaniment.

How long these talks by the fountain with the other boy went on it
would be hard to tell, At last what Anthony had always fondly
wished for occurred.  The bronze boy joined in, too.

It was now possible, since Anthony knew a great many words and had
heard stories from both Contessina and the nuns, to continue and to
make variations upon the most enchanting themes.  In all these
"Anthony" in the pool and the "Bronze Boy" now began to take an
active part.

Then there were the children of the ring who went dancing about the
rim of the fountain carrying a festoon of ivy.  They were somewhat
confusing, because they were all the same and it made him dizzy to
look at them.  If he looked at them for a long while they seemed to
blend into a misty ring as if they were on a wheel going at great
speed.  It was hard to stop them.  And it was hard to play with
them.  For if he once began to single them out he never knew where
to leave off.  He kept going around and around the fountain because
he could never tell with which of the marble children he had
started.  They worried him even in his dreams.  They kept spinning
and dancing around in his head till he woke up and shouted at them
to stop.

Sister Agatha would come in and look at him when he shouted.  She
said, "Say your prayers to the Madonna."  And there was some
comfort in that, because SHE was always standing in exactly the
same place.

He saw the madonna when he went to bed at night.  And when he woke
up in the morning she was still looking at him from the little
niche in the wall where she stood just at the foot of his bed.  It
was best to lie, he thought, so he could see her and be seen.  Then
he was sure just where she was when he wanted to talk to her in the
dark.  Perhaps she had brought him here?  If not, how had he come
here?

"Here" was the courtyard.  It was bright and sunny, the centre of
all things.  On all sides of it extended corridors, long, dark,
silent.  He had once lost himself down one of these.  He had been
gone for a whole half-day.  Contessina at last found him silent and
white, shuddering in an old cell.  There was a high window there
and he was crouching in its shaft of sunlight.  After that he knew
what being "lost" meant.  You were left alone with yourself in
darkness.  You couldn't get back to the light.  And there was no
madonna to talk to in the corridors.  She lived in his room, by the
bed.

All the world beyond the courtyard must be made up of these
endless, dark corridors and abandoned rooms.  They went on and
never stopped.  After a while he learned that there were other
courtyards.  Sometimes he was taken there for a walk by the nuns.

But the other courtyards were strange.  There was no bronze boy, no
tree and fountain there.  Only arches.  Only his own courtyard was
home.  A universe of endless corridors leading into strange hostile
courtyards surrounded him.

It was Contessina who told him about "heaven."  Heaven was up there
at the top of the tree where the pigeons went at night.  It was in
the sky into which the tree climbed.  He began to lie under the
tree in a bowl of its great roots near the bronze boy and look up.
Sometime, he made up his mind, he would get out of the courtyard
into heaven.  He would climb the tree.  The nuns stopped him now
for fear he would fall.  He began to wait until they were absent in
order to try climbing.

The nuns were kindly enough.  They were all fond of the child.
Through the long afternoons they talked; they even played with him.
They taught him his prayers.  They made him clothes out of their
old linen, stitched with the exquisite needlework that only they
could do.  He sat watching their embroidery growing on the frames.
He learned to help work a little hand loom for them.  They made him
a doll.

But Father Xavier, the confessor of the convent, who would
occasionally come into the courtyard, had taken that away.  He
brought him a wooden horse, a ball, some coloured stones and a
broken abacus instead.  With these the child was rich.  His life
now seemed crowded.  Through all his life ran the rhythm of the
convent hours; the times to eat, to pray, to rise and to go to bed.
It did not occur to him that this routine of existence could be
varied.  The bell that marked its periods was as much a part of
nature to him as was the rising and setting sun.

Some of the old women in the courtyard died and were buried.  To
Sisters Agnes, Agatha, and Ursula he clung all the closer.  For the
first time he became aware of mutability and a growing loneliness.
The occasional visits of Father Xavier, who took a growing interest
in the boy, were now attended with an excitement that the good
priest took care to restrain.  He pitied the child, whom he admired
for his intense vigour and eager intelligence.  He was at some
pains to improve his speech.  And he determined to speak to the
mother superior about his education when the time arrived.  In the
meanwhile, he made friends with him.  There was little difficulty
about that.  Even the careful Jesuit found it pleasant to be an
oracle and a hero.

On the whole, however, the best times little Anthony spent were his
mornings with Contessina.  For several hours after matins he was
left alone with her.  From her came many of his rugged phrases in
hill-Tuscan that so amused Father Xavier.  And she seldom stopped
him from doing what he pleased.  "Young rabbits will play," she
said.  She would let him plunge into the fountain and paddle about.
The old women would never allow that.  And it was pleasant
especially on hot summer mornings to splash naked in the pool.  In
the centre it was deep enough for him to swim like a dog.
Afterwards he would curl up in the roots of the tree and go to
sleep in the sun.  Contessina always wakened him before the nuns
returned.  She had long given up bathing in the pool herself.  For
a time he dimly remembered going into the pool in her arms.  Then
it seemed only one of his dreams of some vanished playmate who had
haunted the fountain long ago.  Soon he thought of it no more.

He was now able to climb up to the first low branch of the tree and
to crawl out on it and look down into the water.  From there he
could see the little school of minnows in a patch of sunlight all
with their heads toward the spout, breathing.  He and the fish
seemed to be bathed in the same golden atmosphere.  It was from the
limb that he talked to all of the dream playmates he had summoned
from the deep.

They were as real to him now as any other people who came into the
court.  All he had to do was to think about them and they appeared;
"Anthony" in the pool, the Bronze Boy, and the children from the
stone ring who danced so gayly about.  The pigeons were literally
his bosom friends.  They ALL came and talked with him.  The
dream-boy in the water would now come out of the pool.  Sometimes
when he himself was in the court he could see him lying out on the
limb of the tree watching the minnows.  The sunlight glimmered
about him in the leaves.  He would talk with him in a low tone of
voice like the water.

"Anthony," he would call, "Anthony."  And the boy in the tree would
reply.

Most of these talks ranged about the wonderful fact that they both
had the same name.  Presently the bronze boy would join in.  A
story conducted in the terms of an endless conversation would go on
for hours.  His visions had become real.  The Bronze Boy promised
him that he should be able to climb the tree.  At night he talked
to the madonna in his room.  She remained there.  Sometimes he
heard her voice coming down to him through the leaves.  But he
could never see her.  She was the image in his room.

On the whole he preferred "Anthony" in the pool to anyone else.
The stone children dancing in the ring were still confusing.  He
marked one of them with a scratch and that stopped them dancing.
Now they stood still.  He had killed them himself.  He looked for
the boy in the pool again.  Decidedly he was the best of all.  He
must play with someone.  A year-long reverie about the boy in the
pool began.  It was delightful, unending.  Anthony was at the same
time himself and the boy in the pool.

When he was a little more than three years old his world, which had
by this time become a hopeless confusion of reality and dreams, was
enlarged considerably by his being taken to chapel.  Father Xavier
celebrated mass there.  You walked down several corridors; you
crossed another court, and went into the church.  In some of the
Courts there were other things besides fountains and churches.  He
kept his ears open now and heard about these things surreptitiously.
But he could make no pictures for the words.

Livorno?  He heard often about Livorno.  People went there
sometimes.  Livorno was in another court, then.  But what was "a
Livorno"?  The Madonna was in the chapel, too.  The same as the
little madonna in his room.  He asked about her.  "Yes, she was the
same," they said.  But larger in the chapel.  She grew larger when
she went there.  So did Father Xavier.  He was much taller in his
robes, very long ones, when saying mass.

At first the child was intensely interested in the service but
after a while it grew monotonous.  He had no part in it, so he
began to make stories in chapel, too.  It was easy now, no matter
where he was, to escape.  All he had to do was to close his eyes
and think.  In the chapel he would lean against one of the stone
pillars even when on his knees, and be somewhere or somebody else.

He would be the bronze boy looking at the water.  He would even
smile like that lonely heavenly-twin.  The young lips had somehow
caught the trick of the ancient, metal ones.  Looking down at him,
old Sister Ursula thought him rapt in childish adoration with his
eyes fixed on the altar.

But to Anthony the incense was water spouting from the altar.  The
marble of the chancel shimmering with candles was the pool in the
court, a more miraculous one.  Father Xavier moving about was the
shadow of the plane tree.  And he, Anthony, he himself was swimming
without effort in the mist.  The boy in the pool would flash down
amid the fishes naked as the child in bronze.  How they dashed
about!  How cool, how beautiful it was there.  Then a bell would
ring and his own little miracle would be ended.  He would be back
in the chapel again.

It was in the mist above this miraculous pool in the chapel that he
first began to see the face of the madonna.  The business of church
was, he knew, in some way vaguely connected with her.  Now and
again during the responses he heard her name repeated.  From now on
she began to join the company of his dreams.  She herself, of
course, stood looking down at him always from her niche in his own
room.

It was a small, square, whitewashed chamber.  Besides a straw bed,
a few clothes on pegs, and a crucifix, there was nothing there but
"his madonna."  He understood that she in some peculiar way
belonged to him and he to her.  Before he could remember the
madonna had brought him there, Sister Ursula said.  Her image
dominated the place from its niche in the wall.  For many years she
was the last thing that glimmered in his sight as he went to sleep
and the first thing he beheld when waking.  All night she had been
watching him, he knew.  On long summer evenings when he seemed to
go to bed too early her white face faded slowly into the twilight.
Then the gold sun-burst above her features burned a little longer
before it too went out.  For a long time he said his only prayers
to her.  Then she became someone to talk to.  He spoke to her.  His
lips moved slightly as though reading to himself, whispering in the
dusk.

After he had once seen her in the chapel she came to join him with
the water-child in the court.  He saw her there now in the
sunlight.  The three of them began to talk to one another.  The
babble of the water falling into the fountain moulded itself easily
in his ears into soft voices and heavenly replies.  The other child
lay in the arms of the great tree half lost in the gloom.  The leaf
shadows washed over him.  Only his beautiful face stood out
clearly.  For many months these singular triangular conversations
sufficed.  The Madonna had thus more than answered Anthony's most
urgent prayer.  She had finally come into the courtyard herself.

No one would listen to his stories of the "other boy" without
laughing, no one except Father Xavier.  He seemed to take the
matter seriously.  He even shook his head.  Finally he pointed out
that the boy in the pool was only a shadow, like the dark one on
the ground.  Anthony had not noticed the shadow before.  That
followed, too!  Everywhere except to bed.  So it must be true about
the boy in the pool.  You could see for yourself.

But you did not need to see for yourself.  Everything that Father
Xavier said WAS true.  The child parted unwillingly from his
first friend.  The image still came to play with him, but its face
was somehow sorrowful now.  That was because it knew itself to be a
shadow.  Now the real boy was lonely again.  For a while there was
no one to play with.

Then at last he found a way.  He began to make "real" stories to
himself about all the children of the pool.  The children were
imaginary, but the stories were real.  After a while, if you made
good stories, and did not ask Father Xavier about them, the
children became real, too.  If you sat very still they would even
come out to play with you again.

There was no one to tell Anthony that there were any real children
in the world besides himself.  Everyone, of course, took it for
granted that he knew.  Yet how could he know?  He took the world as
he found it, and he had never been taken beyond the convent walls.

                            ----------

In absolutely forbidding Contessina or anyone else to take the
child Anthony outside of the convent the mother superior had her
own excellent reasons.  It was not that she wished to be harsh or
was narrowly bigoted; she had a duty to perform to the institution
of which she was the responsible head.  Both she and the boy
confided to her care were, like everybody else in the world, to
some extent the victims of circumstances.

Many years before Anthony had been thrust through the hole in the
wall by the tender solicitude of Don Luis, the Medici had turned
the little fishing village of Livorno, only a few miles below the
convent, into the privileged port which has since become known to
the world as "Leghorn."

The news of the "Livornina," as the grand duke's decree of free
trade and religious toleration was called, penetrated into remote
regions.  English Catholics, Flemings fleeing from Alva, Huguenots,
Turks and Jews found refuge at Livorno in great numbers.  The town
grew cosmopolitan and prosperous.  The country around shared in the
benefits.  But not wholly or enthusiastically.  Over the orthodox
hills that looked down on the thriving seaport, where the wicked
flourished according to Scripture, passed a suppressed but holy
shudder.

The decree of Ferdinand was not to be gainsaid.  Yet to snatch some
brands from the burning of the heretical bonfire that blazed so
merrily would assuredly be a work of merit.

Several pious, petty nobles of the hinterland combined in the good
work urged on by the local clergy.  Among them was a maternal
ancestor of Don Luis.  Endowments and legacies were soon
forthcoming, and the ancient Chapel of Jesus the Child, which had
almost languished away under an order of nuns devoted to perpetual,
silent adoration, was reconstituted as an orphanage under the
Sisters of Mercy.  The purpose of the charitable endowment was to
save souls, and the method of receiving orphans was simplicity
itself.

Anyone, without let or hindrance, might leave at the hole in the
convent wall provided for that purpose an otherwise unwelcome
infant.  They might ring the bell, also provided, and go away
serene in the knowledge that the sliding panel would open and the
child vanish inwards, to be baptized, nourished, and brought up in
the Catholic faith.

The sisters devoted to this charity had toiled faithfully.  Leghorn
had become a great seaport.  The bell rang more and more
frequently.  The numbers of the motley flock of orphans over whom
the nuns watched bore ample evidence that the reasonable hope of
the founders of the institution had not only been realized but
greatly surpassed.  Gifts consequently continued to be forthcoming,
and the convent flourished according to its needs.  All might have
continued to go well had not the Queen of Spain insisted upon
finding some spare dominions for her favourite younger son.  In
consequence of her maternal solicitude, one Christmas Day some
fifty years before Anthony was born, the combined English and
Spanish fleets had descended upon Livorno.

In the troubled times of the occupation that followed troops had
been quartered in the convent.  For a long time the sisters and
their flock had been hopelessly scattered.  When a remnant of the
nuns finally returned in their old age it was to find their house
dilapidated, their lands seized upon by tenacious hands, and their
lambs, who might have been grateful, scattered as lost sheep.

Lawsuits had further harassed them.  They lacked earthly guidance.
There was nothing to do but pray.  The place had been almost
forgotten and the bell seldom rang.  The few children who did come
were hastily sent elsewhere in sheer desperation.  Word of this
went about the streets of the town and for some years the bell had
finally ceased to ring at all.  It looked as if the last of the
sisterhood would soon depart in peace and poverty, when the Convent
of Jesus the Child suddenly took on a new lease of life and service
through the unexpected arrival of Sister Marie José.

She was not only very much younger than the other nuns, but
capable, ambitious, and full of energy.  What her former history
had been no one at Livorno ever knew.  She had been sent to
rehabilitate the convent, and she prevailed against great odds.
From the first by sheer force of character and circumstances she
had been recognized by the remnant of the sisterhood as superior in
fact.  With the death of the ancient head of the house she had also
become mother superior in name.

After some cogitation, her solution for the difficulties that
already surrounded the convent was to avoid importing any more into
it.  That is to say, she tacitly abandoned the scheme of continuing
it as an orphanage, which in fact no longer existed.  Instead she
started a convent school for prosperous young girls.

The license of the ecclesiastical authorities had not, under the
circumstances, been difficult to obtain.  Mother Marie José had
even succeeded in awakening their languid interest.  She was an
educated woman herself, and she had been ably seconded in her
efforts, by Father Xavier, a Jesuit, who upon the suppression of
his order had been removed from the court of the Duchess of Parma
and had gone to reside quietly near Livorno.

Father Xavier combined simple but cultivated manners with an odour
of sanctity and the smell of the lamp.  He was, in short, a
gentleman, a priest, and a scholar.  As he had acted circumspectly,
he was permitted to continue at Livorno, nominally as confessor to
the convent, while his real work took him into certain cosmopolitan
circles in the city that both required and appreciated diplomacy
and the watchful presence of an able and educated man.

In the new school at the convent he had felt a powerful spiritual
lever fall into his hands.  Largely through his efforts the
daughters of some of the best families of the town and neighbourhood
had been obtained as pupils.  Even some of the Protestant English
merchants in Livorno sent their daughters to "The School on the
Hill."  Five new sisters had been lately received to teach.  These,
together with the revenues which were again ponderable, sufficed to
conduct the establishment and to take care of the ancient women of
the old régime who still survived but whose duties were purely
nominal.

Over all this Father Xavier kept a constant and watchful eye.  In
most things he and Mother Marie José moved as one.  But the mother
superior was justly proud of the new school as her own creation and
jealous of its reputation.  It might in a few years come to rank
with those which received none but the daughters of the rich and
the nobility.  Such was her ambition.

It was, therefore, with no little consternation that on a certain
January evening in the year 1776 she was suddenly disturbed by the
unwelcome jangling of the long disused orphans' bell.

One of the nuns upon whom the habits of former years were firmly
fixed had answered it automatically.  A few minutes later Mother
Marie José was looking down into the gaping mouth of a black bag in
which lay a boy baby loudly lamenting his fate.  Besides the baby
and his meagre clothes, the bag contained the rich, dark riding-
cloak of a lady, an ancient figurine of the Madonna and Child in a
curiously worked shrine, and ten Spanish gold pieces.  There was
nothing else whatever.

Mother Marie José was now faced by a serious dilemma.  According to
the legal requirements of the founders of the convent she was bound
to receive the child.  On the other hand, she was now engaged in
running a fashionable girls' school the reputation of which could
never survive a revival of the orphanage.  The two were utterly
incompatible, and the baby was a boy.

It was also evident from the contents of the bag that the child was
by no means a mere stray brat from the town streets.  Persona of
quality were somehow involved.  The convent had already suffered at
the hands of the civil law, and this made Mother Marie José doubly
wary of a possible test case.  It seemed especially suspicious that
sufficient money for a year's nurture had been provided.

Besides, the statue of the Madonna that accompanied the child had
thrown about him from the time of his arrival a certain glamour and
protection.  The pious old nuns, who secretly looked with somewhat
hostile eyes upon the new school, regarded this orphan as their
sacred charge from the first.  If he were not received, trouble
within and without the walls of the establishment might reasonably
be expected to follow.

The mother superior consulted Father Xavier.  A policy of caution
and silence was agreed upon.  The boy was duly baptized "Anthony,"
the saint's name day of his arrival.  He was then relegated to the
most sequestered parts of the building to be looked after by the
old nuns skilled in the care of foundlings.

In another part of the establishment Mother Marie José and the new
sisters continued to teach school without mentioning their
involuntary charity.  Except for Father Xavier, Contessina, and the
few old sisters whose cells abutted on the courtyard, his existence
remained unknown.  No more unwelcome orphans came to trouble Mother
Marie José.  After a full year had passed from Anthony's arrival
she obtained the necessary formal permission; the bell was silenced
forever, and the hole in the wall bricked up.  The metamorphosis of
the Convent of Jesus the Child was complete.  What to do about the
young orphan who remained over from the old order of things was put
off from time to time.  The problem was not yet urgent.  It seemed
better and easier to let it alone.

Meanwhile the boy had begun his education.

One day Father Xavier unexpectedly came into the courtyard and took
out of Anthony's hands some yarn which he had been holding up for
Sister Agatha to wind.

"My son," said he, "from now on you are through with woolly things
and the distaff.  Come with me."

He led him down one of the long corridors and unlocked a little
door at the end of it.  They stepped out together into the bright
sunshine of the world beyond the walls.  The boy raised his little
nose and sniffed the breeze.  This for some reason or other caused
Father Xavier to laugh.

Even here though there was nothing much to be seen of the great
world outside.  They had merely emerged into a deep, walled lane
behind the convent.  They continued down it a little way.

Overhead Anthony could see the same sky that he saw from the court.
There were other trees there.  He was somewhat surprised by that.
So many of them!  But he was still too small to see over the top of
the high banks.  The lane, he told himself, was merely a corridor
without a roof.  That was at least amusing.  By and by, still
chatting, they came to the door of a little house and passed
through it into a marvellous room.

There was a charcoal brazier in one corner that kept the place
pleasantly warm.  A small window on one side looked into a court.
Another court with new things in it!  Birds huger than any he had
ever seen were pecking about and dusting themselves.  Pigeons were
not to be compared with them.  There were some old, high-backed,
red velvet chairs against the walls.  He could never admire the
frayed and dusty tassels of these enough.  Upon one of them he was
actually permitted to sit.  Father Xavier, a spare man in a tight,
black gown, sat opposite to him, smilingly hospitably.  He would
answer all questions.  He gave Anthony a small glass of something
clear and sweet.  Compared to this all else to drink was milk or
water.  Anthony could not find words to express himself.  Finally
he cried.

The narrow face of the priest worked with a surprised pity.  He
could, luckily for the boy, understand the fetters of the avid
young mind so overwhelmed by images without words.  The starved
vocabulary that Anthony had picked up from Contessina and the nuns
in the courtyard broke down even in this barely furnished room.
The priest began to touch things and name them.  They went to the
window and saw "chickens."  A cat Anthony knew, but not a goat.
Holy Mother! what a miracle was a goat!

Here was a real interest in life for the priest.  Father Xavier,
whose story was a tragic one, was somewhat ennuied at his present
post so different from his last, so dull.  He began to freshen in
the pristine glamour shed by the young mind just released in his
room and beating itself about the walls like a dazzled moth going
for the light.  Here at least was something he could catch with his
own hands and pin down, even if he had failed elsewhere.  He would
do it.  The boy should come often.  That day both his worldly and
his spiritual education began.  "It is fortunate," thought Father
Xavier, "that they can be combined."

Father Xavier, who as a young man had once been counted one of the
ablest instructors of youth in an order devoted to teaching, had
long since, by his varied experience at the court of Parma and the
world in general, acquired wisdom as well as knowledge.  He could
now look back upon his own career with discerning eyes and see what
was worth dividing in order to teach, as well as how to divide it.

The suppression by the pope of the order to which he belonged had
caused him to do a good deal more thinking for himself than he
might otherwise have found either advisable or necessary.  He was
devoted to rehabilitating the Society of Jesus, but not blindly so.
He, and the party to which he belonged, believed that new
conditions required other methods of propaganda.  Above all they
desired an infusion of new blood and a number of ardent young men
capable of coping with the modern world as they should find it.

In the orphan, whom adverse circumstances had so opportunely
deposited in the courtyard of his convent, Father Xavier thought he
saw a providential opportunity.  He was not at all sure that the
boy would develop into the kind of man, who, as he phrased it,
would be worthy of taking up the cross.  That would remain to be
seen; "in the hands of God."  But he might begin the good work by
laying the basis of a broad and general foundation in which he
determined that languages should play the principal part.  Not, of
course, that he meant to neglect the child's soul.

"For what," said he to Leucosta, his ancient housekeeper, whom he
was wont to address for confirmation of his own opinions, "what is
it at the present time we most need in the face of the breaking up
of the old order?  This oncoming generation is going to be
confronted, mind you, Leucosta, by society in a state of flux.
Why, then we need--self-realization accompanied by great self-
control, a genial outward humility accompanied by a sustaining
spiritual pride, and--a knowledge of the fundamental moral tenets
of Christ's religion instead of a mere sentimental respect or
romantic adoration for its founder."  Knowing that the father was
always talkative during Sunday dinner after chapel, Leucosta, who
was stone deaf, hastened to clear off the table and bring a bottle
of crusty port which Mr. Udney, the English consul at Leghorn, had
sent to Father Xavier.  Mr. Udney was much "obleeged" to him in a
certain matter.  The priest sampled the wine with approval.  "Fit
for the orthodox," he said, and poured out a glass for the old
woman as well.

Not the fecund imagination of John Knox could have surmised that
Father Xavier was mentally encroaching on his vows in the direction
of Leucosta.

"She looked like a mummy of the Cumaean Sibyl preserved in
vinegar," said Mr. Udney to his wife, after returning from an
interview with the priest preliminary to entering his young
daughter Florence at the convent school.  "As for the priest
himself, he is the personification of geniality and wise diplomacy.
My Protestant scruples were, I admit, set at rest rather too
easily.  I advise YOU to be watchful, however."  The port had
followed a month later and had something to do with mental
reservations and an oath of allegiance taken to King George by an
old Jacobite merchant at Leghorn.  Father Xavier sipped it,
reflecting.

"It will probably be a dangerous experiment and I must prepare
myself to be disappointed," he said aloud.  "But you agree with me,
Leucosta, that it will be best to keep this boy uncontaminated by
the world for some time yet.  I wish a virgin field for the sowing
of the seed, and the rooting up of tares is always confusing and
wastes the time of the gardener.  OF COURSE, you will agree with
me!  That is the reason I keep a deaf housekeeper.  You will
recollect, my good woman, that one of the chief virtues of the
Romans was that they consulted the Fates merely to have their own
opinions decently confirmed.  A deaf Sibyl is invaluable.  It
promotes the capacity for action, and that is the only way in which
any opinion can finally be tested.  In the end the Fates do answer.
Thou, Leucosta, art an invaluable one."

He waved to the old crone to bring him his hat while he continued
to address her.

"And what after all could we do better for the boy?  A love-child,
and as lusty a young pagan as I ever saw bathing in a heathen
fountain.  He is like the Angles that Augustine sent to Hildebrand.
Or let us hope that he will be.  Shall I turn that fine pair of
arms and delicate hands over to Pietro the blacksmith as a human
attachment to his bellows?  No.  There are more fitting ones in the
village below.  Or, shall I, as Monsieur Rousseau tends to advise,
turn him loose into nature to become the wolf-boy of Tuscany like
the little fellow in M. what's-his-name's pamphlet?  No, no.  One
or two intellects who dwelt about this middle-sea of ours have
thought of things that are worth propounding to the barbarians.
And every new generation, YOU will recollect, Leucosta, is a
fresh invasion of savages.  Well, what can a poor teacher do then,
my belle of three generations past, thou fate of all mankind?  Why,
I read it in thy wrinkled face.  Even as all teachers have always
done from the beginning of things; the best they can, under wicked
and adverse circumstances.  Now give me my hat, mother.  That is
right, brush it.  The nap went years ago, but the conventions of
respectability are thus observed."

And Father Xavier walked off down the closed lane to seize his
young pupil by his "delicate" hand.

They slowly began to educate each other.  They began first with
manners and personal behaviour.  One must know how to eat and drink
decently.  What words to say upon entering and leaving a room.
When to stand up and bow, and when to sit down.  There was, it
appeared, a kind of being in the world called a "gentleman."
Father Xavier said there were not many of them.  One must learn to
think and feel correctly about other people in order to become one.
Manners were a sign of this.  There was a certain ritual in the
house for men and women as there was for Deo in the chapel.  One
must also be clean, silent, and pay attention.  When you did not
pay attention Father Xavier took the lobe of your ear between his
sharp finger nails and pinched.  He finally left a mark there.

"Is that the mark of a gentleman?" asked Anthony looking in a small
glass.

"In a way it is," said Father Xavier.  "It is also ad majoram Dei
gloriam.  It would be better to have a small piece of your ear drop
off than never to learn what both of them are hung on your head
for.  They are meant to listen with when someone wiser than
yourself is talking."

In the course of several years the mark became permanent along with
the lesson it conveyed.

"You see, my son, I do not talk to you very long at a time," said
Father Xavier.  "And when you play I do not interrupt you.  You
must do the same by me."

They understood each other well enough.  Words began to expand into
languages as the "talks" became longer.  Anthony spent nearly all
his afternoons at the priest's house.  Languages began to expand
into literature, literature into understanding and enlightenment.
The old abacus had been repaired.  It merged slowly from numbers
into the beginning of the science of them.  Along with all this
went a growth of mutual respect and affection.  Father Xavier had
scarcely allowed for the latter.  It troubled his ascetic heart
sometimes as he came home to find the bright young head bent over
the copying sheets or peering out of the door waiting for him to
turn the corner of the walled lane by the little iron gate.
Perhaps he was coming to set too much store by it.  He searched his
heart.  No, he must not waver.  Surely in this case the end DID
justify the means.  If there were incidental rewards of human
companionship the Lord might still call Samuel and remember Eli.
"My son," he would say gently in Latin, and "Welcome to this house,
father," would come the reply.

About the outside world, which he now began to apprehend lay
around, but still beyond him, Anthony could never ask enough or be
tired of talking.  Forced to defend himself from the minutiae of
every particular in the creation, Father Xavier took refuge in
generalities when Anthony was six years' old.  He purchased a
second hand globe from some defunct scholar's library and began to
talk about "the earth."  Before he had even seen a field Anthony
was aware of the major divisions of the planet.  As long as he
lived a large crack of leaking plaster extended the length of
Africa from Capetown to Cairo.  Soon he was reading animal fables
and saints' lives in Latin and helping Father Xavier as a bare-
legged little acolyte in the chapel.

The perforated incense pot which he swung there bore some
resemblance to the many-nostrilled beast that spouted into the
fountain in the court.  At first he played he was the animal behind
it throwing spray into the pool.  He loved to make the smoke ripple
over the smooth floor of the chancel which reflected the lights as
if it were water.  Then he began to learn, and to understand, what
the responses meant.  He began to realize someone within himself,
who, as a being apart from his body, addressed words to some unseen
Presence who remained a mystery.  He was also taught the proper
words to say to the Madonna, and he preferred always to speak to
her.

For was she not visible, and real?  Did she not actually live with
him in his own room, not a mystery and a spirit, but close, and
familiarly beloved?  The thing they talked to before the altar
remained unknown, a name made of three black letters in a book.
But a name for which there was no image on earth, only a word.  So
it went for many a day with the good priest acting as father
indeed.  The rest of the boy's silent life was passed timelessly
among the old women pacing slowly up and down the corridors with
faintly rustling gowns and high, starched head-dresses.  Or he was
in his room, or playing in the court, or going every day down the
"roofless hall" to the priest's house.  Here only he expanded and
lived abundantly.

How many, many times was he to recall in all the countless things
that were touched upon there, and later revived in memory, Father
Xavier's gentle, patient, and yet insistent voice.  How many facts
and fancies lived forever for him in those tones alone.  Only of
the reason that he must not go forth to wander and see for himself,
of that alone, the priest would never treat.  He must not, and that
was all.  Nor was this as yet a burdensome denial.  The time for
his release would come, he knew that.  Lacking means of comparison,
the boy's life seemed to him full enough.

Sweet are the uses of adversity and always unforeseen.  The careful
shaping which Father Xavier had provided for the waif left in the
courtyard was not to be devoted to the end by which he had
justified the means.  Old Leucosta, if she had not been deaf, might
have told him so.  The resources of the mind and soul of Father
Xavier were considerable, but his foresight was by no means
infallible.  In the field he had so carefully fenced-in he had
overlooked something.  It was the giant plane tree which grew in
the midst thereof, which from ancient times had overlooked both the
pagan temple and the Christian convent.

                            ----------

Half-way up, until it topped the roofs of the convent, the tree,
sheltered from all winds, was a dense mass of foliage.  For a long
time Anthony had confined his exploits to these lower regions and
pretended to himself that he was satisfied.  But it was a half
satisfaction only, clambering about these lower limbs.  The best he
could do was to lie out on the branches like his friend the dream
boy and peer down into the shadows of the pool.  But even this was
tantalizing, for in the pool itself were to be caught now and then
reflected glimpses of the open sky.  Gradually as he became expert
with practice, and more fearless, the boy enlarged the extent of
his arboreal kingdom.

No one could find him there.  Even Father Xavier had come into the
court looking for him and had gone away.  Anthony was at first
surprised.  He thought the priest would surely know.  So it was
possible to escape after all, if you desired.  The sense of the
possession of a secure retreat, a world all his own above the
regions of the convent, aroused in the boy a feeling of independence
and adventure which was the most delightful and strongest impression
he had ever known.  He cherished it night and day as his greatest
and only private possession until it became, and remained, a
passion.  Behind it, gathered up now into an intensity which was
equivalent to the stored force of an explosive, was a curiosity
whose power could scarcely be calculated.  This was impelling him
farther upwards day by day.

As his skill in climbing increased, the bare, giant limbs that
soared away from him to break into a second green country in the
sky above appeared continually to lure him on.  He thought of them
for weeks.  One day after matins, and an extra prayer to the
madonna in his own room, he set out after making sure that the
courtyard was deserted before he crossed it.  Taking off his shirt,
for the day was already hot, he left the ground and swung himself
like a young ape onto the lowest branch of the tree.

The first familiar stages were easily accomplished.  He was soon in
the great centre bole of the tree and on a level with the gutters.
The leafy, sheltered area that shaded the courtyard spread out
below him like a cracked, green saucer through which gleamed glints
of the pool below.  He was utterly alone now, dangling his feet
above this flat top of polished leaves.

From here, like an inverted tripod, three great trunks split the
main stem, one of which, more upright than the others, might be
said to be a continuation of the tree below.  It rose grandly, with
here and there a few stumps of branches sheered off by the winds
above the roof line, to a second and higher fork.  Even beyond that
it could still be traced, provided now with a more shaggy coat of
shorn branches, and rising like a handle to support the dark ribs
of the leafy umbrella which floated triumphantly above.  Beyond
that were the clouds.

The boy began to climb toward the upper fork.  He did not seem like
a monkey now.  The sense of the importance of his own predicament
had lent a very human caution to his movements.  The slight angle
of the tree helped.  He hauled himself upward, placing his feet in
the holes left by vanished branches and clutching the stubs and
leaf clumps which remained.  It was breathless.  From the corner of
his eyes he could see the red tile roofs glimmering below him,
receding vastly at every higher step.  Presently with his breast
scratched and bleeding he lay panting in the last fork.  The handle
of the parasol now rose straight above.  He looked up.

He did not dare look out or down.  Should he go on, or return?
After all he had come to where the tree finally forked.  That was
something.  He might go back safely to the comfortable, sheltered
life of the walls below and remain there--always--or, he might go
on and see what he should see.  The boy sat for some time with his
head in his hands, wrestling with himself.  He prayed to the
madonna again.  At last he was able to look down without falling.

Along the edge of the roof trotted a cat with a dove in its mouth.
"So that was where they went!" he thought.  "They came and took
what they wanted and went away.  They climbed up as he was doing."

The cat looked over the edge of the gutter at old Sister Ursula who
was tottering across the court on her cane.  Through the maze of
leaves below him, Anthony could hear her clicking across the
flagstones.  That the picture of the court was in his imagination
made it the brighter.  He watched the cat watching the nun.  The
sound of the cane passed.  The cat turned, took a firmer hold of
the dead bird, and trotted on over the ridge of the roof.  Anthony
laughed and again began to climb.

The sun beat on the back of his neck, and his chest and belly hurt
him as he clasped the trunk.  But it was easier than he thought.
One hitch at a time, then the next.  He planned each move
carefully.  Suddenly, before he expected it, he was safe amid the
ribs of the parasol.  The pigeons, which he had often fed in the
courtyard below, now began to discuss his arrival in doubtful and
puzzled tones.  Presently the conclave, since he remained quiet,
decided in his favour.  A few cautious dissenters departed.  He lay
resting and listening to their tones, the very language of the air.

Presently he wriggled up the last stout branches and thrust his
head through the final fabric of the leaves.  The spread of them
just below him cut off his dizzy height from the ground.  On the
top of his gigantic umbrella he crooked his elbows and knees in the
last branches and looked out and beyond.

At that instant his eyes were probably the only pair in Europe
which beheld the world precisely as it was, a miracle of beauty
beyond rapture, hung in mystery, and smiling back at the miraculous
skies.

It was the colours of the world that most amazed him.  He had
expected to find it like the pictures in books, white and grey.  In
a state of pleasant rest after the exhausting climb he hung there
in the boughs for a brief period of ecstasy, the greatest he was
ever to know; time suspended, and all expectations surpassed.

Gradually he became conscious of himself again as the cool wind
played on his face and rocked him.  He began to fit pieces of
things together.

The view coalesced surprisingly well.  He could understand most of
it in the large; the sun flashing enormously on the sea to the
west; the dim blue outline that was an island; the far wavering
coasts hemmed with white where they met the sea; the white roads
all tumbling down to the town below.  He could never see enough of
it!  He longed to be able to fly; to swoop down and examine things
intimately like the pigeons; to cross over that blue line where the
water met the sky.

Already his mood of complete happiness had vanished.  A cosmic
curiosity overwhelmed him and made him unhappy.  He was like a
starving man with food dangled before his eyes.  He reached out as
if to clutch all that lay below.  The small pattern of his own hand
blotted out half the view.  He almost lost his balance, and burst
into tears.

That night he was back in his room again, worn out with fatigue and
excitement, but no longer a child.  Like the cats he would keep
this means of escape to himself.  Some day, soon, he would get out
and keep going, always.  He would see it all.  He would take no one
with him, no one!

The face of the madonna glimmered from the wall.  After the great
height and uncertainty it was pleasant to be back with her again.
She had brought him here, they said.  He began to ponder and
altered his plan.  He would take her along when he went away.  It
would be better not to be entirely alone.  There should be someone
to talk to.  He began to tell her about the world beyond, softly,
so no one but she could hear.  It was a relief thus to share his
secret.  He slept.

Once having discovered the way to such a vantage point Anthony
returned again and again.  To the visits to Father Xavier's room,
to the hours of reading and talking with the priest, there were now
added long periods of observation in the treetop.  The tree was
used to supplement and as a check upon the more formal instruction
received in the realms below.  But from the day he first climbed it
the dream companions in the courtyard below betook themselves into
the limbo of memory.  The boy by the spout retired with an archaic
smile into the bronze; the dancing children in stone remained as if
frozen forever by the chill world of reality.

Had the madonna not remained constantly in his room it is possible
that she too might have followed the others into the land whence
only the burning wand of passion or fever could afterward summon
them.  She stood fixed there, however, day and night.  Unforgettable,
immovable, part of the living furniture of his existence.  For he
was taught and commanded to speak with her; to bring his troubles
before her as a good and helpful act.  In the life about him he saw
others doing likewise and heard her name spoken by living lips.  The
madonna was not like the others of his dreams.  His dream of her was
accepted by other people as a reality.  It seemed to be the same as
reality.  The madonna had the advantage of still possessing a cult.
That of the bronze boy and his brother had disappeared from the
memory of men ages before.  So the madonna remained.

With Anthony she had already become a habit of thought.  There were
paths in his brain which belonged to her.  Strapping her carefully
on his back, he took her with him one day to the top of the tree as
if to tempt her with the kingdoms of the world.  Her silence in
regard to them when he went to sleep that night was a distinct
disappointment.

As time went on he began, as he lay in the treetop day after day,
to learn much of the life of the neighbourhood.  The houses and the
people that lived in them, the horses, asses, and oxen that plied
in and out to Livorno or from village to village became known to
him.  The very creaking of the carts as they passed by took on an
individuality; it was in this way that he became aware of the
presence of other real children in the convent besides himself as
one morning he watched a small fleet of carriages bringing the
pupils to Mother Marie José's school.

A small cloud of them emerged about the same time along the road
from the town just before the convent bell rang, he observed.  Once
in the lane by the convent wall he could not see what became of
them.  Before long he became familiar, nevertheless, with the
passengers of every carriage.  Every morning they were always the
same.  It was seldom that he missed watching at that time.

So far he had kept his vantage point an utter secret.  The joy of
sole possession, the example of the cats, and an instinctive
feeling of defensive reticence combined to seal his lips.  Yet
above all things he longed to speak with these other children who
were now, he knew, so close to him.  Even to ask about them would,
he also knew, serve to betray himself.  But he pondered the
problem, nevertheless, day by day.  He had almost come to a
dangerous conclusion about the matter.  He was going to wave to
them from the tree, when with the approach of summer the school
stopped.

For a long, dreary time Anthony considered himself to have been
left alone.  He moped.  Why did they not come back?  It was often
upon the tip of his tongue to ask.  He began to approach it
obliquely with Father Xavier, plying him with questions about the
world without which seemed to the priest to be surprisingly knowing
ones.  But the boy dared not come to the point and would fall into
silence and sulk.

Father Xavier felt that the time had come to settle something about
Anthony.  He had his own plans.  He would have liked to prepare the
boy for entrance to a seminary near Rome.  He must begin by taking
him about with him outside.  There was something about the cast of
the boy's mind which he did not altogether like.  His avid
questionings and the things which moved him most reminded the
priest too frequently of the idle curiosity of the age without the
walls.  He had tried to protect his charge from this in a way, and
yet perhaps he had also been to blame for awakening it.  Under the
circumstances though . . .  He spoke to Mother Marie José about it.
She agreed with him.

By all means the boy should be given his first sight of life beyond
the walls in the company of his ghostly tutor.  How better could it
first be brought home to him?  In fact she had almost forgotten
about Anthony.  She was very busy now about several things.  It
might be better, too, to wait until the pupils for the coming term
were secured before parading the unwelcome presence of this orphan
about the town.  Undoubtedly, that would be talked about.  She sent
for Anthony.  In her formal presence the boy froze within himself.
Her voice from long hours of instruction was unintentionally harsh.
Anthony remained silent.  She could find nothing in him of the
qualities Father Xavier had enlarged upon.  The misplaced
enthusiasm of the childless priest, she thought.  This could wait.
Anthony was remanded to the courtyard.  Indeed he fled there in
relief.  He climbed the tree and Father Xavier could not find him.

Another summer slipped by punctuated only by escape into the cool
heights of the boughs, the droning of the pigeons and of Father
Xavier.




CHAPTER TEN

THE CHICK EMERGES


It was a great day for Anthony when in the late autumn he once more
saw the dust of the approaching vehicles and the children returned.
Reality was once more brought home to him.  There were several new
girls.  One, who arrived nearly always a little late in a car
behind a lazy, fat pony, especially delighted him.  She was about
his own size and her wriggles were noteworthy.  He could not quite
make out her features.  The cart always disappeared when he was
just about to catch a full glimpse of her face into the lane behind
the wall.  It was impossible to look closer for the edge of the
roof cut off his view.  He tried to imagine her into the court but
she had no face.  Somehow, too, he had lost the trick of evoking
vivid dreams.  The reality was now so much plainer.  The glimpses
of her enchanting arrivals and departures grew more and more
tantalizing.  See her face, speak to her, he must.

He began to investigate the plan of the corridors beyond the huge,
half-vacant wing of the convent that he already knew.  He soon
discovered an important fact.  While the children were present, all
the nuns in the other part of the building were absent from their
rooms.  This gave him courage.  He began to explore more
thoroughly.

On the third day, he found the corridor that led to the door.
Breathless and on tiptoe, more frightened even than when he had
climbed the tree, he ventured to the threshold and looked out.  The
world lay before him on its own level.  All he had to do was to put
his feet upon it and walk out.  He did so cautiously, then
brazenly.  As the shadow of the roof passed from his head and the
full sunlight burst upon him, he ceased from half-crouching and
stood up manfully.  At last, and forever, he knew himself to be
free.  The spell of the place had been broken conclusively.  No one
had led him.  He had found the way out himself.

Even now, however, he still found himself in a lane with the
convent on one side and a high wall on the other.  In both
directions it made a slight curve and he could not see beyond.  He
turned to the right and started to walk.  He passed a place in the
wall of the convent that was filled up with new bricks of a
brighter colour than the rest, a blind window.  Then the trees
started to meet overhead and became vaguely familiar.  Suddenly he
found himself before the door of the priest's house.  "Come in,"
said Father Xavier's voice.

Anthony walked in and sat down.  He felt weak with apprehension.
It was some minutes before he could bring himself to believe that
the priest had not noticed the unusual direction of his approach.
Not to have been found out upon this occasion gave him a confidence
which he never lost.  That afternoon Father Xavier began to talk to
Anthony about his future.  To the priest's suggestion of the
seminary the boy made no comment.  He sat silent, puzzling over the
direction of the lane.  "In a few years if you are attentive and do
well, you can go to Rome," Father Xavier was saying.  Anthony was
wondering where the lane led when you turned the other way.  The
next day he found out for himself.

It was lucky, thought Anthony, that the little girl whose face he
could not see always came late.  He watched her one morning from
the tree approaching after all the others had arrived.  The pony
took considerable persuading.  The boy slithered to the ground and
darting through the corridors ran out and placed himself in an
offset of the wall until she drove up.  A half-grown Italian lad
held the reins.  Anthony was dressed in nothing but a long, ragged
cassock that flapped about his bare feet.  It had once belonged to
Father Xavier and the row of rusty buttons ran from the neck to the
ground.  The boy had a good view of the little girl.  Under a mop
of brown hair, she had a fair, chubby face and blue eyes.  Anthony
lounged close to the wall and said nothing.  Neither the little
girl nor her driver paid any attention to him beyond giving him a
glance.  The sight of acolytes lounging about near chapels was not
novel to them.  The little girl took her satchel and went into
school.  Beyond making a face at Anthony when he drove away even
the driver ignored him.

Morning after morning, whenever circumstances would permit him to
leave the court without being noticed, and regardless of the
weather, Anthony continued to wait by the same nook in the wall.
Some time during the second week he was rewarded by a smile.  A
little later he ventured to hold the pony while she left the cart,
and to strike up a friendship with the lad who drove her.  Anthony
was now rewarded with a "good morning" to which after some days he
ventured to reply.  Secretly, to both children, the sound of their
own voices thus exchanged was thrilling, but especially to Anthony.
The little girl was proud that he came to hold her pony.  No one
did so for the other girls.  Knowing that she would be teased about
it if she said anything, she held her tongue.

From Angelo the driver, Anthony gradually learned all there was to
know about his "puella."  The older boy laughed at his queer jargon
of convent Latin and Italian, correcting him loftily.  Anthony had
the good sense to be humble before this older boy and thus lived in
his good graces.  He, Angelo, worked for MEESTER Udney, the
English consul at Livorno.  MEES Florence was the consul's
daughter.  The Udneys had two great houses and were very rich.  All
of the Inglese were rich.  Most of them were heretics.  Angelo
crossed himself.  He lived in great fear of the evil eye.  It was
from the villa that they drove every day, only sometimes in town.
The pony was slow, and they had permission from the mother superior
to be late--when necessary.  It was always necessary.  Angelo
grinned.  Miss Florence, it appeared, usually had her own way.

One morning Anthony presented her with some pigeon eggs in a little
nest of woven leaves which he had made.  The gift was acceptable.
About Totnes she had once hunted for birds' eggs with her cousins.
Here at Livorno it was not permitted.  She was the consul's
daughter!  The eggs were adorable.  In return she brought Anthony a
pair of shoes.  They were too short for him but he cut out the toes
and after that refrained from meeting her in entirely bare feet.

He told her about the pigeons and how he had first seen her from
the tree where the birds lived.  The restraint gradually wore off
from their brief morning talks.  Every day they had some childish
news to exchange, usually about animals.  Anthony about his pigeons
and the cats; the girl about her pets at home.  Before the term was
over it was arranged between them that Anthony should come to see
her rabbits.  There were also several puppies that had become the
heroes of an animal epic recounted from day to day.

Angelo demurred to this plan at first.  Anthony would have to ride
to the villa in the pony cart.  It appeared slightly irregular.
Orders had been given by Mr. Udney that no one should be given
rides in the cart.  Miss Florence stamped her foot, however, and
argued her case.  After several days of appeal, cajolery, and
threats Angelo succumbed.  Anthony was to lie in the back of the
cart with a wrap thrown over him.  How he was to return did not
concern either himself or the other conspirators--as yet.

One afternoon he borrowed Father Xavier's hat and whisking himself
to the end of the lane stood waiting patiently till the rumble of
the departing carriages ceased.  Some minutes later the pony cart
with Angelo and Florence passed by slowly as had been arranged.
Climbing into it hastily, Anthony wriggled under the rug in the
back, and they were off.

It was a marvellous sensation bumping along by the efforts of
someone else.  Miss Florence was bubbling with suppressed
excitement and laughter.  Angelo put the pony through what paces it
might be said to have had.  He succeeded at least in making it
wheeze.  It is doubtful if Elijah enjoyed the triumph of his
chariot journey to Heaven as keenly as did Anthony his trip in the
pony cart to the modest villa of Mr. Udney.  Both were a transit to
paradise.  But to be able to peep out from the blanket and to see
the scenes which he had so often observed from the tree actually
passing before his eyes, to catch a glimpse now and then of a
laughing face, a real one, smiling down at him--what were the
rewards of a mere prophet compared to all this?  Besides, the
speed, particularly downhill, was prodigious.  He could scarcely
believe he was not dreaming when he closed his eyes under the
blanket.  The very pain of the bumps gave him pleasure.  They were
so reassuring.  Presently they turned into an avenue lined with
poplars.  Anthony was commanded to cover up and keep still.  After
some delay, strange voices, and the smell of a strange place,
Angelo uncovered him and the boy found himself in the stable yard
of the villa.  He was being shown the horses, huge beasts he
thought, when Florence came out and joined him.  She had changed
out of her school dress and was in a long, blue frock with ribbons.
She was more beautiful than anything Anthony had ever seen.  Miss
Florence was a very small girl but she was not too young to enjoy
being admired even by a ragged acolyte.  After giving him more than
sufficient time to recover his breath, they went to see her rabbit
hutch.

Confronted by such an ideal beast as a rabbit for the first time;
actually permitted to hold one in his hands, Anthony was reduced to
tears.  He could not help himself.  It was too much.

"They ARE lovely," whispered Florence.  "I like the white ones
best."

He nodded sympathetically, wiping his eyes on Father Xavier's best
hat.  They both agreed that the tweaking nose of the largest rabbit
was a miracle of rare device.  From the rabbits they passed out
into the rear courtyard which, it appeared, was the abode of the
pups.

By this time Anthony had forgotten his entire past, and the future
did not yet exist.  Lost solely in each other, and in the animal
riot about their feet, the sylvan voices of the two children
laughing uncontrollably at the comical pranks of dogdom floated
into the library window to the ears of Mrs. Udney.  She crossed the
room to look out, stood for a minute amazed, and then turned her
head to say in a half whisper, "Come here, Henry."  Mr. Udney--who
was perusing a document the last line of which averred, "your
petitioner will ever pray"--was glad to be recalled to life.  He
dropped the paper on the floor and joined his wife.  It was a
singular scene upon which they now looked down.

Standing in the middle of the yard was their daughter Florence with
her frock in the most admired disorder.  She was looking up with an
expression of extreme happiness into the face of a figure whose
grotesqueness passed belief.

Presented to the view of Mr. and Mrs. Udney was the back of a huge
triangular priest's hat clapped upon the invisible head of a young
body in a long, black, clerical gown that fell in one sheer line
from neck to bare, brown calves.  One point of the hat, which was
worn at the angle of a shed roof, was exactly between a pair of
shoulder blades that appeared through the gown as did two elbows
from their ragged sleeves.  The effect upon the spectator was that
of having been suddenly presented with the eye of Don Quixote, or,
that Lazarus had taken orders.  While the Udneys gasped, the
laughter in the court continued till the stable arches rang.

The laughter was the least bit hysterical now.  Mrs. Udney giggled.
"My dear," said she, "where do you suppose she found him?"  "I'll
be demned!" said Mr. Udney, changing the sound of one vowel out of
deference to his spouse.  "Let us have them up."  He cleared his
throat in a preparatory manner--"Florence!"  Laughter in the court
ceased.  The children felt they were seen.  Anthony felt an impulse
to run, mastered it, and turned toward the direction of the voice.
"Take off your hat," whispered the little girl, "it's mother."  The
boy removed his hat with an unavoidable flourish owing to its size
and tucked it like a picture frame under his arm.  He looked up.

The removal of the hat did not disclose an ecclesiastical gnome but
the fair face of an English boy rather deeply tanned, yet still
unmistakable, under delicate ringlets of yellow hair.  His features
were more than usually aquiline.  There was a firm little jaw, a
broad brow, and grey-blue eyes.  If anything, the face was perhaps
a little too thin.  But this not unpleasant hint of keenness was
tempered by far-looking eyes and half-parted lips into the
expression of one not fully awakened yet from a remembered dream.

The head sat upon a firm neck, while the narrow-waisted, black gown
with its long row of buttons made the boy look taller than he
actually was.  In the afternoon's sunlight he seemed to radiate a
certain indescribable lustre like the leaves of a fresh plant after
rain.  Mrs. Udney, who had no son as yet, felt her bodice move.
Her husband laughed unconsciously.  "Upon my word!" he said.
"Florence," he called, "bring up your prince of the church for
tea."  He turned away from the window chuckling.

"How do you suppose a face like that got to Italy?" he asked his
wife.  "Leghorn is a peculiar place.  King George seems to have
lost a subject somehow."  The consul in him felt a dim impulse to
inquire--at which Mr. Udney smiled.  His wife remained by the
window.  Their cogitations upon different lines were now
interrupted by the arrival of one Signore Terrini, a dandified
young painter, whose tailor aped English styles in an Italian way.

Florence took Anthony by the hand not engaged with the hat and led
him up to the library.  The boy could never forget that room; the
long white curtains rippling in and out through the shaft of
sunlight, the warm, brown rows of calf-bound volumes, Mr. Udney's
desk heaped with papers, the ink, sand, and black seals.  The smell
of sealing wax forever after served to summon it to view.  There
was Mrs. Udney in a soft, white, low-bosomed dress, seated by the
tea table, the silver, the sound of low, happy voices within, that
of poplar trees without.  That such places existed, he had no
inkling.  He had never seen a lady.  He stood entranced and showed
it.

They were talking Italian to the artist to whom Anthony was now
introduced.  Mrs. Udney took the boy by both hands, looked in his
face, and declared he was an angel.  He blushed, but liked it.
Florence was enormously proud of her acquisition who was soon
seated on a chaise longue eating a raspberry tart and drinking weak
tea, neither of which delights he had ever tasted before.  A mist
came over his eyes.  He experienced the sensation of being at home.

Terrini leaned forward.  He would give anything to catch that
expression for a copy of the young St. John he was doing.  The face
of the original he worked from was blurred.  The slight plumpness
of the lower part of the fingers and back of the hands--one should
remember that in portraits of little boys.  The children of
merchants were the artist's chief subject and stock in trade.  What
a model!  One could repeat it indefinitely.  He began to ask
Anthony about himself.

Miss Florence broke in and was permitted to help explain.  She did
so with giggles which were contagious.  The atmosphere grew even
easier.  They were gay at no one's expense.  Soon Anthony was
talking about himself.  His queer jargon of obsolete Tuscan
interspersed with learned and stilted phrases from Latin and French
amazed and secretly convulsed them.  In this lingo the brief annals
of his quiet existence were soon told.  Mr. Udney became interested
and led Anthony about the room talking to him.  The avid mind and
the starved curiosity of the boy were at once apparent to him.  The
audience looked on quietly, amazed at the lad's exclamations over
the ordinary furniture of domestic life and his familiarity with
classics.  A lecture on the use of the library globes, which Mr.
Udney's encouragement drew forth, was inimitable.  The gentleman
was "demned" again.

From the standpoint of the British consul the whole exhibition was
a confirmation of his own opinion as to the wrong-headed education
provided by the Romish clergy.  Probably his own daughter was
having much the same kind of stuff driven into her head by the
nuns.  It was a sore point between him and his wife.  To be sure,
there was no other school, but . . .  He would have enlarged, on
the subject to her had it not been for the presence of the Italian
artist who was, of course, of the "opposite persuasion."  Besides
it occurred to him again, as he looked at Anthony sidewise, that
the boy DID look English.  His own son, if he ever had one, might
look like that, he flattered himself.

Mrs. Udney, on the other hand, was quietly scheming behind the
teacups to have Anthony remain for the night.  Instinctively she
wanted him in the house.  By these vague prejudices and emotions
passing unrecorded through the hearts and brains of strangers the
future of the boy was irrevocably shaped.

Mrs. Udney advanced her proposition only tentatively, but she was
heartily seconded by Florence.  To her surprise, her husband seemed
amused and easily consented.  Even Signore Terrini entered into the
spirit of the occasion, as he always made a point of doing, and
sketched Anthony with his hat on while Mr. Udney wrote a note.  A
charming sketch of Florence followed as a slight hint of what might
be done.  This with a magnificent flourish the artist signed
"Terrini, Livorno, 1785," and handed to Mrs. Udney.  As for
Anthony, he was invited forthwith to late dinner which proved to be
the climax of a clearly miraculous day.

                            ----------

Mother Marie José was considerably disturbed when she was informed
about an hour before vespers that Anthony was missing.  It annoyed
her to find that old Sister Agatha was more worried about the child
than the consequences which might follow his disappearance.  The
woman was too venerable, weak, and frightened to be disciplined any
longer.  The mother superior blamed herself for not having acted
promptly upon Father Xavier's recommendation of some months before.
After another thorough search of the convent she sent for the
priest.  They agreed that if Anthony did not appear shortly,
inquiry should be made next day leading to his return.  There was a
difference of opinion between them as to how he should then be
disposed of.  Father Xavier was for continuing his instructions at
the convent until he could send him to Rome.  Mother Marie was for
placing him with some honest tradesman as an apprentice.

In the continued presence of Anthony at the convent she saw many
and increasing difficulties.  Above all she hoped that he might now
return without having caused any talk.  Her school was in too
flourishing a condition to be blown upon by gossip.  She
recollected that the boy was now ten years old and this worried
her.  On the other hand, she was infinitely indebted to Father
Xavier.  Without him she could scarcely have obtained her more
fashionable hopefuls.  The priest's securing of the English
consul's daughter had been especially satisfactory.  The patronage
of the English element in the town was essential.

It was with some reluctance, therefore, after carefully weighing
the matter, that she finally consented to the priest's plea, and
then only with the understanding that he would make himself
responsible for the boy's whereabouts and good behaviour if he
continued to remain at the convent.  Father Xavier was surprised to
find how relieved and happy he was at this outcome.  He had become
more interested in the child than he had realized.

Such was the state of affairs when Mr. Udney's groom arrived with a
note for the mother superior.  The messenger desired an answer.
Mother Marie turned pale.  The note was the confirmation of her
worst fears.  In her agitation she saw the work of a decade about
to tumble about her ears.


. . . Kindly carry my compliments to Father Xavier and inform him
that his hat has been very much admired here . . .


Mr. Udney had not quite been able to restrain himself.

Mother Marie did not understand.  She was scandalized she should be
asked to "convey compliments" from one man to another.  At the
thought of the ragged orphan riding "concealed in a carriage" with
the daughter of one of her most valued patrons the roots of her
hair crept.  It outraged every convention of a hard training and an
unimaginative soul.  She forgot the children were very small.  Mr.
Udney's "explanation" had only made matters worse.  She changed her
mind on the instant.  Anthony would have to go.

Father Xavier had never seen her so vehement.  He was secretly
somewhat afraid of Mother Marie.  It would never do to oppose her
now.  He could see that.  If he was going to do anything for the
boy, prevent him from being turned into a peasant or a carpenter,
for instance, he would have to act promptly.  He would have to act
that night!  So he agreed with the mother superior.

"And this note?" she groaned.

"Allow me to carry the answer myself," he suggested.  "I shall call
on Mr. Udney immediately--to get my hat."

"Your hat!" cried she indignantly.

"But I shall also take the opportunity," continued Father Xavier,
"of explaining matters there.  I can do so I am sure.  Also," he
hurried on, seeing her look of doubt still lingering, "when I
return I shall have disposed of your orphan.  I am well known to
Signore Udney, you know."  He spread his hands out appealingly, and
with a hint of caution.  "You will be well advised I think if you
leave the matter to me."  She nodded.  "It is a lonely life we
lead, sometimes, my sister, is it not?  We orphans, you know," he
said as he passed out.  She nodded again.  "Yes, sometimes," he
heard her reply in a low voice.  "Do as you wish with him."  But he
did not hear that.  He had gone.

She sat in a mist of recollection longer than she knew.  For the
first time in ten years they waited for her at vespers.  Before she
rose from her knees she had changed her mind again.  Father Xavier
should keep his pupil.

The priest in the meanwhile in his best gown but hatless was being
driven to Mr. Udney's.  He arrived there when they were half
through dinner to be welcomed warmly by all including Anthony whose
cup was now running over with happiness.

"I have come for my hat and for the young rascal who took it,"
Father Xavier declared as he sat down.

"In the meantime let this refurbish you internally as well," said
Mr. Udney loading his plate.  He was fond of the priest who did not
insist on his cloth.  "A wise and kindly man," thought the
Englishman cutting him a choice slice of mutton.  They had in fact
been able to help each other on several occasions.  It was not the
first time Mr. Udney had carved for the priest.  Over the wine--
while Mrs. Udney, Signore Terrini and the children gathered about
her spinet in the next room--Father Xavier related all that he knew
of the story of Anthony to Mr. Udney . . .

"And so, my good friend," he ended,--the genuine eloquence of
affection having already lent wings to his plea,--"I would I could
say my co-religionist, I want your assistance in this matter, just
as you lately were in want of mine."  Mr. Udney held up his hand.

"Have you any plans?" he asked.

"There is the Casa da Bonnyfeather.  I had thought of that."  Mr.
Udney smiled at the priest's evident familiarity with lay affairs
in the town.

"Yes, I could help you there.  Old Bonnyfeather is, or was a
Jacobite, yet in his trading here, and everywhere, he needs his
British protection.  You see I made certain concessions about his
oath of allegiance.  Nothing really irregular, you know," he added
hastily.  The priest smiled.

"I also made certain concessions."

"Ah, he is of your persuasion then.  You are his confessor?"  Mr.
Udney did not press that point.  The father sipped his port.

"In other words, if both of us should call on him, say, tomorrow,"
continued Mr. Udney, "he might find room in his establishment for a
promising orphan.  It would be difficult to resist both the
temporal and ecclesiastical authorities combined.  Would it not,
father?"

"Impossible, I think," smiled the priest.  "But why not tonight?"

"Why not?" echoed his host.  "Mr. Bonnyfeather will not be busy."

They came out and sat in the hall looking into the big room.  Mrs.
Udney was touching the keys while Signore Terrini twittered through
an aria in an affected tenor.  The children were sitting close
together, Anthony's bare toes gleaming out of his shoes.  They
seemed to be reflecting the warmth of his expression of happiness.
Suddenly they started to dance.  Mrs. Udney had caught sight of her
audience in the hall and cutting off Signore Terrini rather
mercilessly, had broken into the stirring strains of "Malbrouk s'en
va-t-en guerre."  The notes rang and the face of the boy became
exalted.  Mrs. Udney managed to beckon to her husband who came
near.  A smile passed between them quietly as they looked at the
rapt face of Anthony.  "Does he really stay tonight, then?" she
asked.  "Yes," said he stooping lower, watching her hands flutter
over the keyboard.  "Father Xavier and I are making final
arrangements for him, I trust.  Mr. Bonnyfeather!"

"Good," said she.  "Splendid!  I knew you would do something."

He rejoined Father Xavier in the hall.

Presently the sound of wheels was heard above the tune.  The music
ceased and Anthony returned to this world to find a strange little
girl seated beside him.  Mrs. Udney rose and took the children to
their rooms.

Between the cool, lavender-scented sheets, a totally new experience
for Anthony, his body seemed to be floating in the smooth water of
the pool.  From somewhere down the hall came the silvery voice of a
little girl wishing him good night.  As he sank deeper into the
complete rest of tired happiness, he looked in vain for the face of
the madonna over the foot of his bed.  Presently a soft glow
suffusing the white wall of his chamber, and the habit of his mind
combined to place her there where she belonged.  He began his
prayer.  His lips moved making a sound like the trees outside, and
like that dying away into the peace of the night.

Father Xavier and Mr. Udney trotted rapidly down the winding road
to Livorno.  The moon was rising.  The water and air about it
became visible and blent together in a pervading white shimmer.  In
this the whiter buildings of the town and the long harbour mole
seemed to swim.  The coloured lights of the shipping were caught
like fireflies in a dark web of tangled rigging and masts.  The
streets were silent, but from a Maltese ketch some distance out
came the ecstatic agony of a pulsing stringed instrument punctuated
by the beating of feet on deck.  An occasional weird cry arose.  In
the light warm air the music was alternately loud and soft.

"The boy is in good hands tonight at least," said Father Xavier
softly.  "I wish . . ."

"It is curious," remarked Mr. Udney, "that no men are too savage to
be affected by moonlight.  It is the same to us all.  Like
imagination it presents a familiar world in a new light."  Mr.
Udney was privately given to this kind of semi-profundity.  He
hoped Father Xavier would be impressed.

"I am wondering," said the latter, "how Mr. Bonnyfeather will take
the proposal of receiving so young a lad into his establishment.
Since the death of his daughter . . ."

"Tush, man!  That was a decade or so ago, wasn't it?  Never fear.
Secretly he may be glad to have this boy.  A Scot, though, would
never say so, you know."

They drew up before a long building whose arches looped along the
water front, and were soon knocking loudly at a high double gate.
The echo boomed through the emptiness beyond.  In the sombre
archway a streak of lantern light suddenly flowed under the gate.

"Wha be ye poondin' at sic a rate oot there?" grumbled a voice to
itself while a chain rattled.  A small grille opened and a head in
a red night-cap peered through.

"It's Mr. Udney, Sandy," said that gentleman reassuringly.  "And
Father Xavier," he added as the lantern was flashed on them both
suspiciously.

"Losh, mon, come in, come in!" replied the voice as the bolts were
shot back.  "To think I hae kepit the Breetish consul, and the
faither durlen withoot.  Mind ye dinna trrip ower the besom the
noo."

Mr. Udney chuckled as their footfalls wakened the stones of the
court.

Mr. Bonnyfeather was at home.




CHAPTER ELEVEN

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS


Anthony was driven back to the convent the next morning in the cart
with Florence.  He was received with tears by Sister Agatha.  There
was a message for him to report to the mother superior.  She had
already relented and had made up her mind to give the boy only a
sharp lesson and allow him to continue with Father Xavier.  That
the priest had already made other arrangements for bestowing the
lad, she did not yet know.

His room and the court seemed warm and pleasantly familiar to
Anthony.  It was home after all.  He was glad to see the madonna,
but it was with a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach that
he threaded the maze of long corridors leading to the mother
superior's room.  One was not summoned there for trifles.  Already
the outside world seemed distant and ineffectual.  His feet raised
stony echoes that might call a dangerous attention to himself.  He
began to walk on tiptoe.

Mother Marie José's cheek band had been illy laundered.  It was
rough and chafed her under the chin.  She had removed it and was
changing her head-dress when Anthony appeared silently and
unexpectedly at the door.  Looking in, the boy saw a perfectly
smooth-shaven head shining like a skull, a face unexpectedly broad
with two glittering, brown eyes staring out of it, and a birthmark
that flowed down over the woman's chin into the breast of her black
gown.  Between the chin and the eyes the face seemed terribly
vacant by contrast.  It was an almost supernatural countenance.  A
comet seemed passing beneath two burning stars.  Intense fear and
horror contorted the face of the boy.  Mother Marie José gave a
faint scream and snatched at her head-dress which covered the
secret of her life.  From its broad, linen band only her fine wide
forehead and her statuesque profile now showed.  She had indeed
taken the veil again, but from her eyes there still darted an
intensely feminine fire.  She approached Anthony deliberately and
laid hold of his arm.

"Never tell what you saw," she said through her teeth.  The grasp
tightened.  "Do you understand, you boy!"  She began to shake him.
Her face drew nearer.  With a sudden desperate jerk he tore his arm
free and dashed down the corridor.  He flashed headlong into his
room and stood there while a mixture of rage, fear, indignation,
and surprise clutched his throat in dry, hard sobs.  Presently he
saw the calm face of the madonna through his tears.  He snatched
her to him from her niche and peeped out of the door.  Old Sister
Agatha had gone from the court.  He took the statue, climbed with
it into the tree, and hid himself.

Mother Marie José was also trembling with conflicting emotion in
which anger and fear predominated.  She rang her bell and sent
urgently for Father Xavier.  She spoke to him imperatively when he
appeared.  Her one idea now was to get Anthony away.

"I am sorry he has been impudent to you," he replied.

She accepted his unconscious explanation eagerly.

"Take him to your house until you have made your arrangements for
him.  I will not permit him to stay here.  It is impossible.  Not
an hour.  I . . ."

"Recollect yourself, madam," said the priest.

She saw she had gone too far.  "Do as I ask you then," she said
beseechingly.  "I will send his belongings and a certificate of
character to you shortly, but get him beyond these walls."

The priest looked at her sorrowfully and turned away.  No matter
what had occurred, he thought her haste petulant to say the least.
He was surprised that she should show such feeling.  One never knew
what a woman would do.  He had intended to take Anthony to town
tomorrow.  So it must be today, then!  Today?  His heart sank.  He
tried to shut the image of the child out of his mind.  It would
never do to torture himself for a whole day longer.  Now, it must
be now.  Anthony was not in his room.  Father Xavier bundled a few
of the child's pitiful belongings into a pillow case.  A broken
wooden horse smote his eyes dim.  He turned to the door and called.

The boy did not answer at first.  Then he saw that Father Xavier
was weeping.  "I am here, father," he called.  His bright hair and
face peered out of the leaves half-way up the tree.

"Come down, my son, I have something to tell you that you must
hear."  He kept trying to smile.  The boy climbed down and
approached him bravely.

"You are to come with me," said Father Xavier, and took him by the
hand.  They went down the lane to the house together silently.
Anthony was still holding fast to the statue of the madonna.

The priest had intended to keep the lad with him all afternoon.  He
had carefully prepared in his own mind the things which he most
wished to impress upon Anthony, a last and memorable lesson as it
were, and he had also counted upon explaining some of the things
which would be required of the boy in the strange, new world where
he would shortly find himself.  Faced by the actual fact of
parting, and shaken by the unexpected violence of Mother Marie
José, the heart and nerves of the man had combined to drive his
excellent little homily from his head.  A genuine ascetic, Father
Xavier was also shocked to find himself yearning over this orphan
whom chance had thrown in his way as if he had been a child of his
own flesh.  "The flesh is indeed weak," he told himself.  Affection
shown at leave-taking would be weakening with himself.  To save
himself from that, he knew that he might become stern.  He did not
want to do that.  He could not be sure of himself either way.
Plainly it would never do to prolong things.  He had intended to
send out for a decent suit for the boy.  Well, he would have to go
in his ragged cassock now.  The priest walked up and down keeping
his face from Anthony.  "How long would the Mother Superior take
with her certificate and the other things?  One might think a
prince was departing with paraphernalia.  Did she know she was
torturing him?"  Presently the portress came with a black, mildewed
bag.

"Is that all?" said Father Xavier.

"There was a statue of the madonna in his room which is also his.
It is to go too, the mother superior said," replied the woman.
"Here is the certificate.  You will please be sure to have this
receipt signed for all of his things, father.  I was told to be
sure not to forget to tell you that."

The priest nodded, and pointed to the madonna lying on the chair.
"All here," he said.  The good Contessina turned to go.  Anthony
was sitting by the window watching the chickens.  Suddenly he found
himself in the woman's arms.  She was crying over him, hugging him.

"The saints be with you, my bright little pigeon.  May you fly far.
Mary go with you!--my God!  Good-bye, good-bye!"  Then she was
gone.  A natural phenomenon had dimmed the scene from Father
Xavier's eyes.  Pretending not to notice, he busied himself by
putting the madonna into the bag.  He now closed it and looked up.
Anthony was standing with a blank face.

"I am going away?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Now?"

The priest nodded slowly.

"Because of what I have done?"

"No," said the man in spite of himself.

"Tell me, then!" cried the boy.  A sudden hope leaped into his
eyes.  "Is it to Signore Udney?  Ma donna there is not like . . ."

"Like whom?"

The boy faltered.  "Thou knowest," he said finally.

"Come," said Father Xavier.  "I shall tell you as we go."  He took
the bag from the table and led the boy from the room.  As they
passed down the lane a certain bricked-up window in the wall gaped
at them like a mouth that had been stopped with clay.

It was a good two miles to Livorno, a hot day, and a dusty road.
The stones of the highway hurt the feet of the boy used only to the
smooth courts of the convent.  He limped, but he listened so
intently to what Father Xavier was telling him that he scarcely had
time to notice his feet.

The priest's voice was once more calm.  In affectionate tones he
was creating for Anthony a new vista in life.  "Apprenticed"--
Father Xavier had to explain what that meant.  Yes, he had arranged
it all the night before.  "While I was sleeping at Signore
Udney's," thought Anthony.  He looked back.  Nothing was to be seen
now of the convent except its red roofs and the pigeons circling
about the top of his tree.  They swooped down and disappeared.
Contessina was feeding them then.  So, they could get along without
him!  He pondered the fact.  "But I shall come several times a
week, my son," the father's voice was saying, "to continue your
instruction--for at least a while."  The man sighed.  "Then, who
knows?"  Anthony looked up as the tones faltered again.  "Often?"
he asked.  The priest nodded with a determined look.  The boy
smiled.  "I am glad," he said.

They walked on in silence.  Anthony did not look back again.  It
was a relief when he felt the warm, smooth flagstones of the
approach to the Porta Pisa under his feet.  There was a throng of
country carts lined up there from which two Austrian soldiers in
glistening, white uniforms, with muskets slung behind them, were
collecting small copper coins.  Anthony stared.  They passed by the
striped sentry boxes with the grand ducal arms, and turned toward
the water front.  The whirl and colour of a seaport dizened itself
into his eyes.  For a moment it threatened to engulf him.

He had never imagined there were so many people in the world, or so
many tongues.  Along the rivers of the streets poured in both
directions a mass of vehicles; wheelbarrows piloted by whistling,
bawling porters; creaking oxcarts.  Donkeys with huge barrels slung
on either side crowded pedestrians to the wall and swept all before
them triumphantly.  Army wagons like canal boats on wheels laden
with wine and forage for the garrison, jolted toward the Castello
Vecchio.  They often seemed to dam up the whole street.  As they
turned the corner of the Piazza d'Arme a flood of low-hung drays
piled with bales, or loaded with live cattle and poultry swept past
them, whips cracking.

Father Xavier and Anthony stood back against the wall to avoid the
whisking tails of horses and mules that slithered by with ears laid
back.  The dust rolled, streaked with pencilled sunlight at the
cross streets.  Porters jostled them, and merchants in laced coats
laughed.  Anthony could scarcely repress an impulse to take refuge
in the dark, cool alleyways, or to dart into one of the many
courtyards filled with bright, fluttering clothes.  At times he
seemed lost in a forest of legs, knee breeches, and the flapping
trousers of British tars.  Above his head their black glazed hats
sailed past, a yard of ribbon fluttering behind.  He tripped over a
beggar who cursed him horribly.  The stench of everything-at-once
overpowered him, and clutched at his throat.  Suddenly they turned
a corner and came out on the long cobble-paved water front of the
minor, inner port or Darsena.

As long as he lived Anthony never forgot that moment.  There was a
vividness about it which was, at the time, more than he could
appreciate.  For the first time the lenses of his senses now came
to a completely clear and perfectly blent focus.  Into the still
bare, and somewhat misty room of his mind burst the glorious,
light-flooded vision of reality.  There was not still-life only as
heretofore.  On this crowded water front there was motion and song.
He lifted his head to drink it all in.  He felt his heritage as one
of the swarm fully conferred upon him.  The vision beyond and the
beholder for the first time lost themselves in each other and
became one.

For years it was impossible, except at rare moments, or by the aid
of closed eyelids to separate them again.  That, as he came to know
afterwards, was both the reward and the stumbling-block of a good
mind in a healthy body.

But this first impression of Livorno was his awakening.  As he
thought of it years later, it seemed to him that at the convent his
vision of life had taken place mysteriously in the camera obscura
of a child's mind.  Indeed, as he looked back, there was even a
kind of charm about it, a rather dark, melancholy tinge with bright
tufts of colour standing out beautifully.  Looking at a street
scene reflected in a black, polished stone in a jeweller's window
at Paris many years afterward, he was forcibly reminded again of
his days at the convent.  Things grew and disappeared in the black
mirror in a vista without reason.  They moved by a totally
disconnected motion with a volition all their own.  One could be a
polytheist in a world like that.  It was lovely, dimly god-like and
beautiful, but entirely unreal.

The one exception to this had been his first vision from the
treetop.

Now--now as he stood at the street corner just where the land met
the sea--life became more than a mere proper focus of several clear
lenses.  It seemed as if the windows of his soul had suddenly been
thrown wide open.  He felt the air, he heard a clangour, the light
streamed in and flooded the room.  Whimsical circumstance decreed
that all this wealth of the senses, the very odour of it, should
forever be carried for him in a Fortunatus purse of orange peel.

For in the quay opposite, a felucca from Sardinia was unloading.
Piles of oranges lay heaped upon its deck.  Some had been crushed
beneath the feet of the crew and the air reeked with them.  Father
Xavier held up his hand and a dark sailor in a red jacket tossed
him a yellow globe.  As the two stood at the corner sharing it,
Anthony's eyes continued to wander along the water front.

Landwise stretched an apparently endless row of long, white
buildings facing the harbour.  Between them and the quays was a
broad, cobble-paved way crawling with jolting, roaring drays, piled
with sea stores and merchandise.  On the water side sharp bows,
gilded figureheads, and bowsprits pierced and overhung the roadway,
while a geometrical forest of dark masts, spars, and cordage swept
clear around and bordered the inner port.  Amid this, like
snowdrifts caught here and there in the boughs of a leafless wood,
hung drying sails.  The sun twinkled at a thousand points on
polished brass.  It seemed to Anthony that each ship was alive,
looking at him narrowly out of its eyelike hawseholes.  Farther off
was the flashing water beyond the molo, or outer harbour, with a
glimpse of the white tower on the breakwater and the dark purple of
the sea beyond.

Father Xavier also stood looking at it.  While he finished his half
of the orange he unconsciously permitted himself a few moments of
purely sensuous enjoyment by beholding the view as if through the
boy's eyes.  The spell was broken as a ship's bell suddenly clanged
out.  The strokes were instantly taken up and swept the harbour
front in a gust of molten sound.  The priest threw his orange away,
picked up the bag, and grasping Anthony by the hand continued along
the narrow sidewalk.

It was somewhat difficult now to make way there.  The sound of the
ship's bells had been the signal releasing a throng of clerks and
apprentices.  They poured out of a hundred doors and gates
laughing, bawling out, and chaffing one another.  Besides that,
certain Italian urchins of the crowd began to attach themselves to
Father Xavier and his charge.  In the tall, thin-waisted priest
with the huge hat who carried a peculiar black bag, in the tow-
headed acolyte whose ragged cassock flapped about his bare calves
there was something rare and too earnest, an air of visitors from
another world bound upon some destiny that smacked of strangeness
and drama.  Despite all they could do to hurry on, a small
procession began to form behind the backs of Father Xavier and
Anthony.  It grew like a snowball, but moved like a queue to the
accompaniment of whistles and catcalls.  At last they began to pass
under the cool arcade of a long, low building whose arches looped
for some distance along the water front.

Just above the head of Anthony large, oval windows heavily barred
peered out from under a heavy parapet like a row of eyes under the
shaded brim of a monstrous hat.  Under the arches these eyes seemed
to be staring through gigantic spectacles.  The total expression of
the house was one of annoyed surprise.  Since it had commenced life
as a nobleman's palace and ended as a warehouse, there was some
reason for that.  Indeed, what had once been known as the Palacio
Gobo now bore shamefacedly along its entire forehead, as if it had
been caught in the act and branded, a scarlet legend that could be
read afar from the decks of ships, CASA DA BONNYFEATHER.  Yet an
air of ill-used magnificence still continued to haunt it doubtfully
as if loath to depart.  It succeeded in concealing itself somehow
and eluded the passers-by in the deep grooves and convolutions of
the rusticated marble front.

Before the central bronze gates of this peculiar edifice, upon
which some vestiges of gilding could still be traced, Father Xavier
and his charge came to a sudden halt.  The crowd of youngsters
following became expectantly silent but finally hooted when after
some time no one came.  In the meanwhile Anthony peered through the
grille.

Beyond the dark, tunnelled archway of the entrance, he could see a
sun-flooded courtyard.  There was a dilapidated fountain in pie-
crust style, and behind that a broad flight of steps led up rather
too grandly to a great double door only one leaf of which was open.
As he leaned forward to peer in, someone from behind tweaked his
cassock violently.  It ripped up the back exuberantly.  There was a
shout of delight.  Another urchin laid hold of him.

"Cosa volete, birbante?" yelled Father Xavier shaking the culprit.

Matters were obviously approaching a crisis when one of the crowd
shouted that the facchino was coming, and a Swiss porter opened the
gate.  Holding his torn skirt about him, Anthony stepped through
after Father Xavier.

He was not quite quick enough, however.  There was a sudden rush
behind him and his cassock was this time ripped clear off his back
and whisked away.  A shower of rubbish followed him as the gate
clanged.  He ran a little distance down the archway and stood
shivering.  Father Xavier's face was still red, but both he and the
porter now started to laugh heartily.

It was thus, naked as when he was born, that Anthony first found
shelter in the Casa da Bonnyfeather.




CHAPTER TWELVE

CASA DA BONNYFEATHER


They turned to the left through a door half-way down the vaulted
tunnel of the entrance and found themselves in a vestibule provided
with black marble benches.  It had evidently once been the guard-
room of the palace.  Against the wall there was a rack for halberds
now occupied by a couple of mops and a frayed broom.  Anthony found
the benches too cold to sit upon.  He stood disconsolately in the
middle of the apartment with mosaic dolphins sporting about his
cold feet.  The porter departed to inform the Capo della Casa of
the unexpected guests.  Father Xavier reflected with some alarm
that the present costume of his charge was not that proper to the
introduction of an apprentice to his master.  Suddenly he
remembered something, and with great eagerness opened the bag.

From it he extracted a lady's riding cloak moth-eaten along the
folds.  He shook it dubiously.  Several small spiders scampered
away and the dried petals of a white flower lilted to the floor.
It would have to do--under the circumstances.  He dropped it over
the boy's shoulders who gathered it about him eagerly, holding it
with crossed hands.  Presently the porter returned and beckoned to
Father Xavier to follow him.  The priest told Anthony to wait.

To Anthony standing alone in the centre of the vestibule, it seemed
as if he had been left in a limbo between two worlds.  The chill of
the stone made his feet ache and crept up his spine like a cold
iron.  Somewhere, in another world, he could hear a clock ticking.
It went on and on.  Presently he could stand it no longer.  The old
silk cloak rustled eerily when he moved, and smelt mouldy.  He
followed where the others had led, mounted several steps, and
stepped through a doorway.

At the end of what seemed to be a vast apartment, Father Xavier was
talking to an elderly gentleman in black who was seated behind a
desk in a high-backed chair.  Anthony remembered now that Father
Xavier had told him to wait.  He therefore stopped and gathered the
old cloak about him holding it close at the breast.  He was afraid
to go back now.  If he moved they might see him.

What daunted the boy most was the fact that the portion of the room
where the two men were talking was raised several feet above the
rest of the apartment like the quarter-deck of a ship.  It even had
a rail across it.  Before the old gentleman, who wore an immense,
old-fashioned wig, was a large bronze inkstand full of quills.
From the railing to Anthony stretched a long aisle lined on either
side by a perspective of empty desks piled high with ledgers and
copy books.  The clerks had all left.  In either wall a row of big
oval windows admitted bars of sunlight.  Father Xavier and the
gentleman continued talking.  They were talking in English.
Anthony knew that.  He heard his own name several times.  It grew
tiresome.  He looked up.

In an oval panel in the ceiling a number of people in cloudy
costumes were gathered banqueting about a huge man with a beard.
Anthony was peculiarly intrigued by a slim figure with wings on his
heels.  "How convenient," the boy thought, "but how small the wings
are!"  He pondered with his chin in the air.

"You will understand, then, what has happened," Father Xavier was
saying.  "The mother superior was most insistent.  I had not
intended to bring the boy to you until tomorrow, as we had
arranged, but under the circumstances--"  He spread out his hands
in a comprehensive gesture.  "Were it not for her request I should
not bother you about signing this receipt.  There is nothing in the
bag of any value I am quite sure except the ten gold pieces.  We
have never quite fathomed this case, apparently one of desertion by
people of means.  The boy has some of the earmarks of gentle blood.
For that reason, in view of possible influential complications
later on, it seems best to be able to show that not only did the
convent care for the orphan as its foundation on the old status
required, but restored him to the world with the best of prospects--
I am sure!--and with every item of his property intact.  Bag and
baggage complete for his earthly journey, you see."

"But a not too extensive wardrobe as I gather," interpolated the
gentleman smiling quizzically.

"My dear Mr. Bonnyfeather," replied Father Xavier, "you will not
only gain merit for having sheltered the orphan, but for clothing
the naked as well.  A rare opportunity, I assure you.  Now, as to
the receipt?  Shall I get the bag first?"

"Tut, TUT, man, of course I'll sign it.  You act as if you
suspected me of thinking you had spent the money for drink on the
way down."  Mr. Bonnyfeather leaned forward to dip his pen, but
never touched it.  His fingers remained extended pointing at the
door.  A look of astonished recognition and extreme fear worked in
his countenance.

"Who . . . who is that?" he finally rasped.

Father Xavier turned hastily and saw Anthony contemplating the
ceiling with a seraphic look.

"Why, that is the young gentleman of whom we have just been
speaking," exclaimed the priest.  "He seems to be admiring your
frescoes.  I told him to wait in the vestibule!"

"The benches are hard there," observed Mr. Bonnyfeather, regaining
his self-control with an obvious effort, "we save them for our
minor creditors."  He laughed half-heartedly.  "The truth is," he
hurried on in an uncontrollable and unusual burst of confidence,
"the truth is, standing there with his face just in that position
he reminded me forcibly just now of--my daughter."  The phrase
passed his lips for the first time in ten years.  It aroused a
thousand silent echoes of emotion in the merchant's empty heart.
He wiped his forehead.  The priest remained silent for some time.

"Perhaps you will speak with the boy now?" he said at last.  Mr.
Bonnyfeather nodded.

"Come here, Anthony," said Father Xavier a little sternly.  The boy
advanced slowly holding his cape about him.  Mr. Bonnyfeather's
mind flashed back to a night ten years before.  In the chair now
occupied by the priest sat a bulky nobleman with a florid face and
black-pointed beard.  "Buried in the Alps," he was saying, "both of
them.  Buried!  Do you understand?"  The black beard punctuated the
remark emphatically.  Through the haze of this vision, as if in
warm denial, the bright, serious face of the boy intervened.  The
priest was speaking again.

"Shake hands with your benefactor, my son.  You are fortunate in
having so kindly and sheltering an arm extended to you."  Father
Xavier was in reality congratulating himself on a good piece of
work.  Mr. Bonnyfeather now recollected himself and took the small
palm extended to him out of the folds of the faded cloak with a
kindly pressure.  The boy's face still troubled him.  He cleared
his throat.

"Do you think you will like it here, my boy?"

"I cannot tell yet, signore," replied Anthony gravely.

"That is right," said the merchant evidently gratified.  "Be frank
and we shall have no difficulty in getting along.  HUMMMM!  I
shall arrange for some other--for some clothes for you directly."
Anthony coloured.

"Thank you," he said.

As if the matter were concluded satisfactorily, Mr. Bonnyfeather
now reached down, carefully read, and signed the receipt.  "The
indentures will be ready tomorrow, father.  You can stop in for
them then or the next time you come to town.  It will be best I
think to have our own notary.  No one outside need then know that
the convent has had anything to do with this case.  You yourself
can witness the mother superior's signature."

The priest bowed in assent.  "May I," said he, "attempt to thank
you again?  To me it is more than . . ."

Mr. Bonnyfeather held up his hand and rose from his chair.

They walked down the room together, Anthony trailing behind.  "That
is the bag," said the priest as they came into the vestibule.  "Not
a very heavy one, I see," replied Mr. Bonnyfeather.  "It is hard to
tell what there might be in it, though."  The old man's eyes
twinkled.  A small lock of grey hair had escaped from under his wig
on one side.  It conferred upon his rather austere and regular face
a decided touch of benignity.  "Will you be staying for supper with
us?"  The priest shook his head.  "No, it is time to go--now."  A
misty look came into his eyes.

"I shall be back to continue your lessons, you know," he said to
Anthony trying to be casual, and added softly, "my son."  The boy
flung up his arms.  Father Xavier stopped short for an instant,
hesitated, then seized his hat and almost fled through the door.
Mr. Bonnyfeather whose heart had for a long time kept the same beat
as the clock which regulated his establishment felt a slight
internal pause in time as he looked at Anthony.

"Come," he said, "let us have a look at your new home."  They
walked down the archway together into the courtyard.

Seated before the fountain with her back toward them while she was
milking a goat, was the largest woman in Italy.  She had flaming
hair, and from where they were standing her figure appeared to be
that of a huge pear with a ripe cherry on top of the pear.  A small
keg under her seemed to provide ridiculous support, and for every
quiver of her frame as she milked, the goat bobbed its tufted tail.
Anthony laughed till he had to clutch at his cape to keep it from
falling off.  At this sound the pear rose from the bucket, and
pivoting on what appeared to be two mast stumps ending in
dumplings, took hold of a green petticoat and quivered a curtsy to
Mr. Bonnyfeather.

"Angela," said he, "this is Master Anthony, the new apprentice.
Will you look after him in the kitchen till after supper?  I may
change my mind about his sleeping in the clerks' dormitory.  You
might lend him some of your son's clothes, temporarily.  He has
suffered a mishap."

The face of the woman of a fine olive complexion beamed broadly
upon the small figure before her.

"Benvenuto, signore," she said.  "I shall attend to your clothes,
sir, as soon as I milk.  Saints!  The goat has gone!"

She started after the animal much in the manner of a mountain
pursuing a flea, but holding up her skirt.  The goat had taken
refuge in some defunct garden-beds, the graceful stone outlines of
which on either side of the court now enclosed nothing but heaps of
rubbish.  As the mountain approached, the flea merely hopped away
and the process repeated itself.  Finally it shifted to the other
flower-bed.

Mr. Bonnyfeather, although he had emitted no unseemly noises, was
in no shape to aid even had he been so inclined.  He was, however,
still able to nod to Anthony who now joined in the hunt.  The
mountain was thus aided in its pursuit of the flea by a small,
napping blackbird with white, gawky legs.  Mr. Bonnyfeather could
no longer restrain his guffaws.  Anthony now approached.  The goat
lowered her horns, and the boy flapped his cloak.  At this ill
omen, Capricorna departed nimbly up a staircase to the flat roof.
Its bearded, female countenance appeared shortly afterward peering
solemnly over the low parapet.

"M-A-A-A-A, my friends."

The challenge was accepted and the chase moved heavenward.  The
small boy preceded the huge woman up the narrow staircase toward
the roof.  Suddenly, the goat appeared at the top.  Her pursuers
paused thoughtfully in mid-air, but not for long.  Gathering her
feet under her like a bird in flight, the goat descended upon those
below in the manner of an ancient battering ram.  Two sounds marked
the whizzing return of her body to the earth below; a small puff
when it hit Anthony, and a grunt like a startled sow when Anthony
hit Angela.  The goat passed over them.  They both rolled to the
bottom of the stairs where they were met by Mr. Bonnyfeather who
was trying to laugh and cry at the same time.

For a few breathless moments the mountain appeared to be in
travail.  Then it wheezed, groaned, arose, and departed to the
kitchen feeling itself below the timber line for broken bones.  An
enormous clattering of pots and pans later ensued.

Anthony had luckily been saved serious injury by being driven into
a soft place on the mountain.  Nevertheless, he was in a miserable
enough state.  Mr. Bonnyfeather carried his limp form into the
house and sat down with him by a table near the door.  The boy's
face was chalky and his white eyelids trembled.  He gasped
occasionally and there was blood on his lips.

"Welcome, indeed!" thought Mr. Bonnyfeather, "puir little laddie!"
He sat for a minute wondering what he could do.

"Faith, Faith," he called at last.  There was no answer.  "Drat the
woman, she'll be oot wi the clarks, brisket bonny, nae doot."  His
indignation rose with his anxiety.  The whole establishment had
availed themselves of his permission to go to a carnival
performance.  Gianfaldoni was to dance.  Only the cook, who had no
interest in that art any longer, remained in the courtyard.  Mr.
Bonnyfeather reflected with some bitterness that even Faith
Paleologus, his trusted housekeeper of a decade or more, would
desert him to see a mere ballerino.  Alone with the hurt child in
his arms in a huge, dusty, old ballroom seething with mouldy
frescoes and hung with cobwebbed chandeliers, he felt as if fate
had played him a scurvy trick.

It was in this baroque scene of departed grandeur that the merchant
habitually ate and entertained visiting ship captains.  As he
looked about it now in the fast-fading light, the moth-eaten
splendours of the high-roofed and too ample apartment seemed to be
mocking his loneliness.  There was not a human sound in the
generally thronged courtyard.  An occasional suppressed bleat from
the goat only served to lend a slightly demoniac quality to the
unusual quiet.  It was suddenly borne in upon Mr. Bonnyfeather
sitting in the silence and the twilight that every living thing had
deserted him--that life would leave him alone thus a helpless and
childless old man.  He looked down at the pallid face of the boy
and sighed.

It was some thirty years now since he had held a child in his arms
who resembled this one.  The similarity of their features was
undoubted.  It troubled him.  It stirred, and not vaguely, a sorrow
so deep as to be tearless, a grief lapped as it were in deep, damp
stone, but one from which great pressure or a sudden shattering
blow might still extort drops of moisture.  It was in this deep
vein that he was now penetrated.  It came upon him that even the
cloak looked familiar.  But all women's cloaks look the same.
Pooh!  He was a foolish old man alone in the dark, aegri somnia.
Stop dreaming!  He must do something for this child who was ill,
who had been flung as it seemed into his arms by the Church--and
that devil of a goat, Auld Hornie himself.

Well, he WOULD do something about it.  He WAS lonely.  He could
cheat the devil at least.  As if he had come to a sudden and
irrevocable resolution Mr. Bonnyfeather rose determinately and laid
Anthony on the big oak table putting an old leather cushion under
his head.  The boy stirred weakly, and half opening his eyes closed
them again with a shiver.

The great ballroom of the Palacio Gobo had once extended the entire
length of the lower floor, but in its second incarnation as the
Casa da Bonnyfeather this painted scene of much ancient,
ceremonious gayety had been divided like Gaul.  Stone partitions
had been thrown across either end and the space behind them divided
in turn into several smaller rooms.  Of the two new apartments,
thus laid off at either end of the old, one was occupied by the
cook with a numerous family, and the other by Mr. Bonnyfeather
himself.

It was toward his own particular section of the building that the
merchant now made his way.  Taking a large bunch of keys from his
bulging pockets, he unlocked the door in the partition.

Before him was a long hall floored with a carpet of deep pile upon
which his feet fell noiselessly.  In the daytime this corridor was
lighted from above by a skylight.  That, however, was only a
glimmer now above his head where a few stars appeared as if peering
through a hole in the roof.  All that part of the building would
now have been entirely dark had it not been for a subdued radiance
that escaped from a small Chinese lamp on a gilt stand at the
extreme end of the hall.

Set beside the wide, white door of Mr. Bonnyfeather's room, the
gilded and carved lintel of which it invested with important
shadows, the light of this oriental lantern seemed to percolate its
jade screen statically as if determined to tinge even the shadows
upon which it now shone with its own quiet serenity.  Behind the
partition he had reared, and amid these shadows, the merchant had
attempted to build for himself a refuge from the world.  Once over
the threshold of these precincts, Mr. Bonnyfeather shook off the
rather staid man of business that the world knew and became a mere
man.  He unbent and moved now, not only more at ease, but more
gracefully, as if he had cast off the habits of half a lifetime and
returned to those of his youth.

Besides his own room at the end of the corridor, there were two
others on each side of it as he passed down.  The two on the left
were empty and had been so for years.  One had belonged to his wife
who had died in childbirth, and the other to the daughter she had
borne.  The rooms on the right, which looked into the court, were
those of Faith Paleologus, the housekeeper, and Sandy McNab, the
chief clerk.

On this evening, while the living were absent, as he stepped into
the corridor the place seemed to Mr. Bonnyfeather unbearably quiet.
The sense of loneliness which he had experienced so vividly a few
moments earlier was now reinforced and increased severalfold, and
this time with a kind of stealthy eeriness inherent in the close
quarters and the silent carpet underfoot.

As he passed the long-locked doors on his left, there arose in him
a strong impression that the rooms behind them were still occupied.
The memory of voices, footfalls, and faces once familiar to them
surged up in him toward reality again.  They suddenly threatened to
force conviction upon him.  They succeeded.  A blind terror
overcame him and stopped him sweating before the last door on the
left.  His keys tinkled in his hand.  He had heard a sound in
there!  Had he?  He listened intently again.  A minute passed.
"Maria?" he called.

At the sound of his own voice his self-possession flooded back.
Nevertheless, to reassure himself, he tried the handle of the door
immediately across the hall on the right.  It was that of his
housekeeper.  It too was locked.  He had hoped after all she might
be in.  He mumbled something and stood baffled.  "Drat the woman!
Cauld she no trust the maister wi his ain linen!"  The dialect
rasped in his head when he grew excited.  He had intended to put
the boy in there for a while.

But how long it had been since there were any sounds of life in the
room across the hall!  If he WAS going to hear things there--they
had better be real ones.  Besides, that child was still lying out
in the big room ill in the dark.  Well, he COULD do it.  Open
Maria's room alone?  But who was there left to open it with him,
now?  No one.  He would put somebody alive in there.  It needed the
familiar face of that young stranger.  Something gay there,
laughter, life!  And he would do it before Faith returned.

He strode into his own room and dashed a shower of sparks into the
tinder box.  Presently a number of candles were blazing, all that
he had.  He felt reassured.  Their sudden cheerfulness seemed to
beam approval on his plan.  Taking a candelabrum with no less than
six tapers in it, he came back into the hall again, set it down on
the floor, and with determined fingers thrust a rusty key into the
lock of his daughter's room.  He winced as the ward rasped, but
steeled himself.  He turned the knob boldly, thrust back the door
on its faintly complaining hinges, and faced the past.

It was not so poignant as he had expected.  Through a window set
high in the wall at the other end came lively noises from the
street beyond.  A horse trotted by.  The empty bed under an empty
niche in one corner of the wall had dust upon it.  That was all.
There was a dressing table with a cloth hung over its mirror.  He
removed the cloth and set the candle before the glass as rapidly as
possible.  The room seemed to glare then.  Some faded, girlish
dresses hanging in an open wardrobe he did not try to look at.  He
dusted the bed off, returned to his room, and came back again with
covers taken from his own couch.  These he disposed rapidly in a
comfortable way putting the pillow at the foot of the bed.  Then he
took a candle and went for Anthony.

The boy had opened his eyes and was trying to remember where he
was.  His belly and his ribs hurt him.  He felt sick.  The effort
of recollection was just now too much.  Presently there was a gleam
of light on the ceiling.  He looked up dizzily and saw the outline
of a chariot drawn by plunging horses disappearing into a dark bank
of clouds.  The face of the driver had dropped out of the plaster.
Then he saw the old merchant leaning over him and felt himself
being gathered into the man's arms.  He remembered now.  But where
was he being taken?  If Father Xavier were only here!  "Father," he
called.  He felt the man who carried him tremble.

As he neared the door with the boy in his arms, Mr. Bonnyfeather
saw a lantern crossing the court.  Suddenly its owner tripped over
something and began to swear.  The language was Protestant and from
north of the Tweed.  Ignoring all intercessors, the man who was now
trying to relight his lantern, addressed himself exclusively to God
Almighty.

"Come in, Sandy mon, I want ye," said Mr. Bonnyfeather.  "It's
argint," he called as he passed through the door with Anthony.  A
few seconds later, the boy was lying on the bed which had been
prepared for him.  Sandy McNab's florid countenance was soon
staring in at the proceedings of Mr. Bonnyfeather with astonishment.

"I'll no deny that it gave me a jert to see the licht from her door
the noo.  I couldna faddom it.  Mon, yon laddie looks forfairn!" he
exclaimed as his eyes fell on Anthony.

"You'd no be feelin' so gawsy yoursel' if you'd had the hourns of a
gait aneath your breastie, atwell," replied Mr. Bonnyfeather.

"Whaws bairn is he?" asked Sandy, ignoring the rebuke implied in
the merchant's tone of voice.  "I dinna ken thot--aiblins," replied
the merchant.  "He's the new apprentice."  Mr. McNab whistled and
grinned.  "Haud your fissle," said the merchant with some heat,
"rin and fetch me a ship's doctor.  The first ye can find aboot the
dock.  Dinna ye see the laddie's in a vera bad wa?"

"Ye maun busk him," countered the irrepressible McNab.

Mr. Bonnyfeather arose.  "Will ye stand there and bleeze the nicht
awa?" he asked icily.

"Barlafumble!" cried Sandy.  "I'll no try to argle-bargle wi ye
aughtlins.  Ye ken I'm too auld-farrant for thot.  But it's een
blank--new to a blinkie o' a dark like mysel' to find the maistre
o' this establishment singin' balow-baloo to a bit breekless
apprentice.  It gars me a' mixty-maxty.  You're a' the guid mon
agin."

"Bletheration!" said his master, laughing in spite of himself.
That was exactly what the man at the door had hoped for.  It was
unusual for Mr. Bonnyfeather to become excited.  It was several
years now since the chief clerk had seen the merchant's high cheek
bones with that faint flush on them and his eyes shining.
Something more important than appeared on the surface was toward,
he thought.  Besides, in this room!  He noticed that Mr.
Bonnyfeather's hands trembled.  He needed company.  That was
evident.  The boy on the bed began to gasp.

"Mind yoursel' he's aboot to bock!" cried Sandy.  Lacking anything
better he snatched off his hat into which Anthony "bocked."  "Puir
bairn, you maun be corn't wi crappit head.  You're donzie, but wha
will reimbarse me for your clappin' my headpiece like a coggie.
Dinna coghle ower it so.  I'm na feelin' sae cantie and chancy
mysel'.  Coomin' ower the coort, ye ken, I trippet ower yon clatch
of a bag and was like to clout oot me brain pan.  Wha would ken a
dorlach cauld cleek-it a mon by the foot?"

Mr. McNab took his hat to the window gingerly, opened the window,
and somewhat regretfully threw out the hat.  "I hope they keep to
the crown o' the causey oot there the nicht," he opined.  "And noo
I'll rin for the physeecian."  Glancing at his master with more
anxiety than at the boy, he sauntered out, indicating the offending
bag with his foot.  Mr. Bonnyfeather nodded helplessly.  For the
second time that day, he wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.
He placed the bag on the dresser and sat down close by the bedside.
The silence of the house was once more audible.

Anthony alternately dozed and awoke fitfully.  When he opened his
eyes now, he seemed to be back in his room at the convent.  The
place had somehow altered.  There was a very bright light.  The
window had shifted its place and altered its shape.  The niche in
the wall was there, but the statue had vanished from it.  That
troubled him.  He closed his eyes once more and tried to collect
himself.  When he opened them again they inevitably fell on the
vacant niche.  The process repeated itself and grew irritating.  He
muttered about it to himself; talked as though in his sleep.  Mr.
Bonnyfeather leaned over him rearranging the covers.  He wished
McNab would come back with the doctor, or that Faith would return.
The boy seemed out of his head.  What was all this talk about the
Madonna?  It was some little time before the merchant could make
out that "the madonna" was missing from her niche.  Then he
remembered the receipt he had signed that afternoon.  Perhaps the
thing was in the bag.  He also remembered vaguely that there had
once been a saint's image or something in the niche when it was her
room.

There was some difficulty with the bag.  It seemed reluctant to
open after Sandy had tripped over it.  The old catch was bent.  The
boy cried out something and Mr. Bonnyfeather's hand slipped.
Inadvertently he ripped the old leather while tugging at it.  The
bag fell open and gaped like a mouth that had nothing more to say.
Out of it Mr. Bonnyfeather extracted a long red purse like a
tongue--and the madonna.  The sun-burst on her head had been bent a
little.  He straightened it gingerly and put the statue in the
niche where the boy evidently wanted it.  Somehow it too seemed
vaguely familiar.  He tried to remember.  But all madonnas were
alike, more or less.  Yet she did seem to belong there, to fit
nicely.  It was as if she had been there before.

The boy's eyes opened again and now found what they had sought.  An
expression like that of a little girl whose lost doll has been
found just at bedtime flitted over his face.  His eyes caressed the
statue and closed happily.  He began to breathe more easily.  Some
colour crept into his cheeks as he slept.

After a while Mr. Bonnyfeather ventured to wipe the blood from
Anthony's mouth.  He saw now that it had come from a small cut in
the boy's lip.  He sat by the bed and waited.  An hour slipped by.
As he gazed steadily at the lad's quiet face, the conviction of his
first impression of it again attained the feeling of certainty.  He
felt as though he were being haunted.  Below the nostrils the
resemblance certainly weakened.  There was a firmer and broader
chin.  He placed his hands across the boy's mouth so as to shield
it from his view.  Instantly from the pillow the face of his
daughter looked up at him.  The merchant sat down overcome.  His
head dropped forward into his hands.

His thoughts were still in a whirl when McNab came back with a
ship's surgeon.  Searching along the dock, it had taken him some
time to find one.  The doctor was an orderly soul and it irked him
to find the patient's head placed at the foot of the bed.  He
forthwith shifted Anthony about and Mr. Bonnyfeather was forced to
see the boy's face just where he had tried to avoid placing it.
The doctor's examination disclosed no broken bones.  He removed the
old cloak, and despite the fact that Anthony cried out, went over
him thoroughly.  Lacking his instruments for bleeding, the surgeon
prescribed rest.  He departed with the chief clerk after having
received one of the gold pieces from the purse that had come in the
bag.  It was a large fee.  Mr. McNab began to recollect audibly
that his hat recently sacrificed in the same good cause was of the
best quality.  Mr. Bonnyfeather, however, was obtuse.  In a short
while he was left alone again.

This time the face of the boy was exactly where that of the last
occupant of the bed had been.  In the mind of the man watching, the
two faces were already confused or combined.  It was hard to tell
which.  Only his reason refused to consent.  He began to go over
word by word the nocturnal interview with Don Luis of ten years
before.  The words, the very gestures of the marquis, precise,
formal, not to be evaded, came back now across the warmth of his
new yearning like a wind from glacial peaks.  He heard the heavy
wheels of the coach rolling away again into the night leaving him
standing dazed.  "Buried in the Alps."

His own wife had died in childbed, too.  It had been like that with
Maria!  If only her child had lived!  Whether it had been a boy or
girl he did not know.  Don Luis had done all the talking.  Futile
to ask!  The man seemed to be in a white rage that night about
something.  Not a word for Maria.  Only the cold facts, and a final
farewell.  Disappointment, no doubt.  Well, he could understand
that.  Don Luis had never married again either.  Gone to Spain.
Nothing had passed between him and the marquis afterwards--nothing
but the rent.  Ought he to write now?  About what?  A facial
resemblance?  Certainly not like Don Luis.  Mr. Bonnyfeather
thought of something and started.  Impossible!

Impossible any way you looked at it.  Why, he would have to begin
by doubting the marquis' word.  What a letter that would be.  And
what a reply!  He winced.

He must collect himself.  The events of the past few hours were not
sufficient to explain the state in which he now found himself.  He
should not have stayed here alone looking at the boy's face, nor
should he have opened her room.  That was a mistake after all.  If
the housekeeper had only not been out.  "Damn the woman, would she
never come home!"  It must be nearly midnight.  He drew out his
watch.  In doing so he became aware that someone was standing in
the doorway.  He turned about swiftly, terribly startled in spite
of himself.




CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS UNSEEN


A countenance so regular and aquiline as to suggest a bird of prey
in forward flight was looking into the chamber where Mr.
Bonnyfeather sat grasping his watch convulsively.  The face was so
pallid and so deep-set in a round straw bonnet that the light from
the jade lamp cast a positively greenish hue upon it.  It had a
broad, low forehead under masses of thick, blue-black hair, a
rouged mouth that would have been passionate had it not now been
contorted into a grimace of terror and surprise, and a pair of
black-brown eyes.  These seemed to have something staring through
them from behind like those painted on an Egyptian mummy case.  The
folds of the dress were in obscurity, and a high furbelow from the
bonnet seemed to run up like a plume into the night beyond.  Mr.
Bonnyfeather's grip on his watch tightened.  Several seconds,
answered by heart beats which he felt throbbing in his hand, passed
slowly before he recognized in the plan of the shadows the familiar
lineaments of his housekeeper, Faith Paleologus.

"Creest, woman!" said he, "why do ye creep up like that on a body?
It's fearsome."  He was glad to hear his own voice and continued to
talk as he slipped his watch into his pocket allowing the heavy
seals to dangle heedlessly.  "Whar hae ye been?  It's long past
midnight, ye ken.  Wha hae ye been doin' wee yoursel' the nicht?"
She knew he must be excited to question her thus and to lapse into
Scotch, to be so direct and familiar.  His voice stiffened her.
She resented it.

"I'm not so old yet but that I still like a bit of a fling now and
then.  It was carnival, you know, and I danced.  Do you really want
to know where?"

"Naw . . . no," he replied, recollecting himself.  "But if you had
been here I should not have had to put him in this room."

"Who is HE then?" she asked.  "I saw the light from this room as
I came in.  You wonder I made no noise?  It's over ten years agone,
you know, since . . ."

"Yes, but . . ."

"You opened it then?"

He nodded unwillingly.

"Why?"

He pointed to the boy on the bed.

"John Bonnyfeather," she whispered, "who is it that has come back
with her face?"

"Orr-h!  You saw it, too?"  He went forward and shaded the boy's
chin with his hand.

"Saw it!  Do you think I need to have you do that?  When I looked
in here, I thought I was looking at the past again.  And I am," she
added moving forward so rapidly as to startle him.  "Here is a
piece of it come back."  She snatched the madonna from the niche
and bore it to the light.  "It is the same, I know."  They bent
over it together.  "Do you think I could ever mistake that?  Look!"
Under the candles she showed him the almost invisible fracture in
the statue to which the knife of the marquis had once pointed so
unerringly.

"I gave it to her years ago, here, in this room, long before she
left!"  The old man reached out for the madonna like a child
assuring itself of the reality of an object by touch.  But his
hands trembled so that she kept the statue and looking at him
meaningly returned it to its niche.  "How did THAT come here?"
she again flung at him.

"I dinna ken!" said Mr. Bonnyfeather mopping himself where the edge
of his wig met his brow.  Trying to explain things to himself, he
recounted to her all that he knew of Anthony together with the
events of the afternoon.  They whispered to each other for half an
hour by the boy's bedside.

". . . and that's all I know and the rest is uncanny," he finally
ended.  A short silence ensued between them.

"An orphan, eh, and from the old place on the hill?" she said.  He
nodded dubiously.

"I'll have to sleep on it," he sighed rising.  "I'm worn out,
watching, and waiting for you.  You can take your turn now at being
a nurse again.  For a lad this time."

"He'll be staying on in this room?" she asked, laying her hand on
his arm so eagerly that he looked surprised.

"Yes," he said.

"Wait, then.  I'll mix some hot milk and wine for you.  You'll need
it."

He sat down again and waited while she crossed the big hall to the
kitchen and returned.  As he looked at the boy Mr. Bonnyfeather's
satisfaction with his decision increased.  His eyes travelled from
the figure on the bed to the figure in the niche.  He crossed
himself and remained for some minutes in prayer.

Faith returned with the posset cup.  He drank silently.

"You'll leave this light here?" she asked as he rose again.  "I'll
get some more candles.  He's sleeping soundly enough now."

The old man nodded and left.  A few seconds later she heard his
door close.  The woman took off her bonnet and gathering her wrap
closer about her began her vigil.

                            ----------

The candles were still blazing brightly in Mr. Bonnyfeather's room.
He looked about him with keen satisfaction.  A certain pride and
hauteur was visible in his countenance as he did so.  If, when he
entered the corridor which led to this retreat, he dropped the
merchant and became the man; when he finally crossed the threshold
of his own chamber and closed the door, a further transformation
took place.  He then, in his own mind at least, became a nobleman.
Nor was this a mere aberration on his part.  If Prince Charles
Edward Stuart had only been able to pass on from Derby to London
and had his father proclaimed at Westminster as well as at
Holyrood, Mr. John Bonnyfeather, merchant, would have been the
Marquis of Aberfoil.  Since George and not James III or his son was
now king, all that was left of the hypothetical Marquisate of
Aberfoil was a proud memory in an old man's heart, and a room in a
mouldering palace in Italy.

Unlike the other chambers in Mr. Bonnyfeather's immediate
apartment, his own room had been originally part of the old
building.  It extended clear across the end of the ancient ballroom
and had once been used as a retiring room.  At one end there was an
immense monumental fireplace where several hundred cupids went
swarming through the Carrara helping themselves to several thousand
bunches of gilded grapes.  The fruit appeared to be dripping like
gilded icicles from the mantelpiece itself.  Just above this,
propped out at a considerable angle to avoid a fat satyr carved on
the chimney behind, was a large oil portrait of James II in
periwig, sword, and very high-heeled shoes.  It had been done at
St.-Germain's in the latter days of the monarch when he had become
a "healing saint."  The lines by the nose were almost cavernous,
the corners of the mouth turned down, and the eyes looked puzzled
and weary.  At the apartment before him, King James squinted with
an implacably sullen and gloomy look.  Nevertheless, the picture
was cherished by Mr. Bonnyfeather.  It had been given to his
grandfather who had followed his king into exile.

On the mantel itself there was nothing but a handsomely wrought
silver casket immediately below the portrait with a heavy
candelabrum at either side.  In these were exceptionally large wax
candles that burned with a fine, clear light.  In the mind of Mr.
Bonnyfeather, here was the family hearth of his castle in Scotland.
It, with the portrait, the casket, and the candles, had attained in
his inherited affections and loyalties the status of a lay shrine.
Nor was the shrine without its relics.  In the casket before the
picture reposed his grandfather's useless patent of nobility, a
miniature of his daughter as a little girl, and an ivory crucifix.
When Mr. Bonnyfeather prayed, as he still did occasionally, he
placed the crucifix against the casket and knelt down on the
hearth.

The rest of the room had somehow taken on the air of that chamber
in nowhere that it actually was.  It was furnished with a kind of
blurred magnificence.  In one corner there was a painted bed with a
canopy over it.  There had at one time even been a railing about
it, but as this had caused amusement to the servants, Mr.
Bonnyfeather had had it removed.  Next to the bed was an immense
wardrobe, the panelled doors of which led upward like a cliff to an
urn on the top.

Seen from the door, set off by the gilded parallelogram of the base
of the vanished railing, the bed and the wardrobe resembled nothing
so much as a catafalque waiting beside the closed doors of a family
tomb.

Certain lugubrious, and ludicrous, aspects of this bedroom had in
early years impinged themselves even upon the mind of Mr.
Bonnyfeather to whom it was home.  For one thing a heaven full of
adipose goddesses romping with cupids through a rack of plaster
clouds had been ruthlessly scraped from the ceiling, and the oval,
to which for some esoteric reason their sporting had been confined,
had been painted a deep blue.  As a consequence, at night the
centre of the room seemed to rise into a dome.  The walls which had
once been the scene of dithyrambic landscapes had also been painted
over.  But this coat was now wearing thin and the original, wild
pastoral vistas were faintly visible in outline and subdued colour
as if seen through a light Scotch mist.  The effect was to
exaggerate greatly the size of the apartment.  It was like looking
in the morning into the vanishing dreams of the night before.

In this mysterious and all but mystical atmosphere, the old
merchant nourished his dreams both of the past and of the future.
In the daytime with the bright, Tuscan sun streaming through the
high, oval windows, not unlike the portholes of some gargantuan
ship, the place was warm, dimly green, with half-obliterated
forests and cascades slumbering on the wall; glinting with old
gilt, and withal cheerful.  But with the descent of night all this
was changed.  The catafalque of the bed seemed to thrust itself
forward.  The dome rose into the ceiling again.  King James
glowered.  And the family tomb in the corner seemed waiting
determinedly for John Bonnyfeather, the last of his race.  It was
not without a shudder that he could prevail upon himself to hang
his breeches there after eight o'clock at night.

To offset the Jacobean melancholy that threatened to engulf the
place at dusk, the old man had many years before covered the floor
with a bright red, Turkey carpet.  He set cheerful brass firedogs
to ramping in the fireplace under piles of old ship timbers always
ready to blaze merrily, and provided himself with several mirrors
and an endless number of silver candlesticks, candelabra of noble
proportions, and sconces.  Since the death of his daughter he might
be said to have developed a passion for light.  Mr. Bonnyfeather's
weekly consumption of candles would have furnished forth a requiem
mass for a grandee of Spain.  This room with its nightly
illumination together with some fiery old port which produced the
same result constituted the chief indulgences of his amiable soul.

Here he retired, laid aside his wig, and put on a velvet dressing
gown.  Here he pored over his accounts spread out on a huge teak-
wood desk under a ship's lantern; planned out a profitable voyage
for one of his several ships, or answered especially important
correspondence.  A large globe which he turned often, running his
keen Scotch eye with a canny glance over many seas and lands, stood
by the desk.  There was a drawer for maps and charts.  There were
compasses and dividers apt to his hand, and down one side of the
room a long bookcase was insufficient to hold his tomes.  Atlases,
almanacs, and port guides of recent dates had begun to accumulate
in little towers along the floor.

To stand at the door, as he was doing now, and to run his eyes over
the apartment with the candles burning, always had about it the
elements of a cheerful surprise.  The change from the dimly lit
corridor was an abrupt one.  A wash of silver light reflected by
mirrors, sconces, and other silver objects flooded from the walls
of the room.  The George flashed on the breast of King James.  The
comfortable, large, gilt furniture and the books twinkled.  Only in
the corner the bed remained in mysterious shadow with his slippers
beside it like two crouching cats.

The merchant began to undress.  He hung his clothes on an old pair
of antlers, all that remained of feudal rights in Scotland, put on
his wrapper, and drew up a comfortable chair before the fire.  He
was quite chilled through by his wait in Anthony's room, and the
last discovery of Faith Paleologus had shaken him quite as much as
his first sight of Anthony's face.  He had decided already to keep
the boy in the house but upon purely instinctive and emotional
grounds.  An explanation that would provide him adequate reason for
so serious a change in his fixed household habits at first seemed
to him an absolute necessity.  More important still, the status of
the boy was not clear to him.  By his actions it seemed as though
the old man were trying to extract the answer to these questions by
poking hollow places in the fire or by repeated applications to the
bottle of port.

But the longer he thought the less likely it seemed that any
reasonable and satisfactory explanation could be arrived at.  If
the marquis had been hiding anything, it was something which he
desired to hide.  It would be useless, and it would certainly be
dangerous even to attempt to follow things up there.  That last
interview was meant to be a final one.  Mr. Bonnyfeather knew that.
Mr. Bonnyfeather could not see himself accusing Don Luis of
abandoning his own child--even if he had had one that lived--which
he had denied.  "And if it had not been his child . . . if it had
been Maria's!"

The old man's own conscience, his honour, stopped him here.  His
daughter was dead.  The vista opened up for him an instant in a
certain direction was one from which he recoiled a second time that
night in sheer horror.  All the pride, all the intense loyalty and
belief in his own blood and family cherished through generations
almost to the point of monomania precluded for him further
explorations in that direction.  With what felt like an actual
muscular action in his head, he closed the door against even this
suspicion.

He meant to shut it out entirely.  But thought is swifter than
honour.  He had only succeeded in imprisoning the impression,
perhaps an intuition, in the cells of his brain.

So he would not inquire any further, at the convent, or at any
other place.  Whatever was mysterious about this happening might,
so far as he was concerned, remain so--far better so.  He checked
himself again.  "Buried in the Alps!"  The words came back to him
now in the cold accents of Don Luis with a positive comfort.  They
must be final.

The old man now reproached himself even for his thoughts.  How
lovely and how innocent that daughter had been!  It was a long time
since he had looked at the girl in the miniature.  He would look at
her again tonight.  The pain that her likeness never failed to
inflict upon him should tonight be his penance.  Its beauty and
delicacy should also be his comfort and assurance.

He unlocked the casket and took out the locket.  He snapped it
open.  Save for certain subtle feminine contours, there looked up
at him from the oval frame the face of the boy on the bed in the
next room.  Mr. Bonnyfeather grew weak and leaned with his head
against the mantel.  He FELT now beyond all reasonable doubt what
he would never admit to himself he wanted to know.

A small chiming clock on his desk struck four as he climbed into
bed.  It was answered by the town chimes and echoed by all the
ships' bells in the harbour.  Mr. Bonnyfeather felt at peace with
himself, his Maker, and the past over the decision he had finally
made while resting his head against the mantel.  Characteristically
for him, it was compounded out of an emotional conviction and a
reasonable doubt.  It took the middle way between the horns of a
dilemma.  The boy who had come into his house that night should be
received and brought up AS IF he were akin, but never acknowledged.
The tie between them that he felt to be there but could not
understand should remain without a name.  That would solve the
question by not asking it.  It would, it should suffice.

The merchant took a deep breath of relief.  From the cellar below
the odour of tea and spices permeated his room.  He breathed it in
with satisfaction.  For one who proved himself capable and deserved
it, there might be a good inheritance in the vaults of the Casa da
Bonnyfeather.  "And so we shall see," he thought, "what we shall
see."

"God be praised.  But you especially, Merciful Virgin, who have had
this child in your holy and mysterious keeping, and have brought
comfort to an old man's heart."

Outside the last of the ships' bells had just ceased to ring as
drowsiness fell upon him.

                            ----------

The same bells which had rung Mr. Bonnyfeather across the borders
of sleep had awakened Faith Paleologus in the next room.  She had
not meant to go to sleep, but she was tired after the carnival.  It
was only a few minutes after Mr. Bonnyfeather's door had closed
before she had forgotten herself entirely.  She awoke now with her
bonnet at a drunken angle, her clothes disarranged, and her body
slumped down in her chair.  Her first thought was that she must
look a mess.  Her second that the boy might see her.

She stole a look at him furtively.  He was sleeping soundly.  The
rosy tinge of healthy slumber had returned to his cheeks.  For some
time her eyes continued to drink at this fountain of youth.  There
was no chance of her being seen doing so.  Finally one of the
candles guttered.  She rose silently, straightened her bonnet, and
renewed the candles from the pile she had brought from the kitchen
earlier.  Then she took the candelabrum and tiptoed into her own
room.  There was a long mirror.

Before this she took off her bonnet and let down her hair.  It fell
in a dense black mass about her knees.  She brushed it and combed
it carefully, plaited it in two long, thick coils, and wound them
around her head.  The ends, after a manner all her own, she pulled
up through the loops of the coils and bound them tight with black
tape.  They stood up over her forehead like two small horns.  She
next rubbed her face with a soft camel-hair brush dipped in lemon
juice, patted her cheeks with a soft towel and noted the effect.
She bathed her eyes with cold water.  Then she unloosed her clothes
about the shoulders and slipped them all, with one simple movement,
to the floor.  From the middle of this pile, she stepped out of her
shoes entirely naked.  The carefully demure housekeeper lay behind
her heaped on the floor with the toes of her shoes turned in.

The rather splendid moth that had thus emerged from its best silk
cocoon now flew across the room to one corner where on the stone
floor reposed a ship's water cask that had been sawed in half.  It
was four feet high and two-thirds full of cold water.  Without any
change of facial expression the woman stepped into it and crouched
down until the liquid met over her shoulders.  She remained there
for about half a minute as if her head floating free from her body
were regarding the room.  Then she rose without splashing, dried
herself hastily, and began to move quietly but rapidly about.
Every trace of fatigue had vanished.  There was a certain panther-
like sureness, an inevitable grace to her movements that was
admirable.  At that moment, upon emerging from the cool water which
at once soothed her nerves and stimulated her muscles, her brain
was like that of a dancer, preoccupied with physical motion but
thinking about nothing at all.

Faith Paleologus was tall and appeared to be slender.  Her
shoulders if one looked carefully were too wide.  But so superb was
the bosom that rose up to support them that this blemish, if
blemish it were, was magnificently disguised.  A sculptor of the
old school might have seen in her an Artemis to the breasts and
above that some relation of the Niké of Samothrace.  Perhaps the
latter was also suggested by her straight profile that seemed to
cleave the element through which it moved as if she were standing
on the bow of a ship.  Yet there was something too strange about
her to name as a guilty one the quality that was uniquely hers.
She seemed designed by the inscrutable for a use that was
incomplete; for a purpose doomed to defeat by finding an end in
itself.  It was her hips.  They were not those of a woman but of
something else.  A lemure's perhaps.  Exquisitely capable for the
relief of lovers they were inadequate for anything more.  In their
image was implicit an obstruction to life.

Her presence in the house of so honourable, and in the final
analysis so religious, a person as Mr. Bonnyfeather was by no means
the enigma which this glimpse into the privacy of his housekeeper's
room might indicate.  The implications of her body were offset and
to some extent controlled by a cautious and clever mind.

On the stage of life Faith Paleologus was a consummate actress.
Her rôle was a minor one, during the daytime, but it was subtly
conceived.  When she resumed her clothes in the morning and
prepared to move about the precincts of the Casa da Bonnyfeather,
her carefully chosen costume, and it was nothing more, her motions,
her attitude, and the very tones of her voice proclaimed the staid
virgin of uncertain age.  In a household predominantly one of male
contacts her face afforded no opportunities for amorous
speculation.  By a stroke which fell little short of genius she had
contrived an artfully repulsive bustle to cover her inviting hips.
Furthermore, she was never seen outside, even in the courtyard,
without her bonnet, a long, perfectly smooth cylinder of black
straw.  It was worn sufficiently tilted up, and was tied under the
chin with a dull bow of such miraculous precision as to cause every
honest British seaman she passed to touch his cap with an automatic
and nostalgic respect.  She had, in short, learned by art the
basest note in the cheap scale of respectability.  "Never commit an
indiscretion at home."

Yet it would be a genuine mistake to suppose that Faith Paleologus
was one of the numerous and familiar who regard themselves as a
means of gain and find the marketing pleasant.  There were several
gentlemen in sundry places who congratulated themselves on still
being alive to regret having made that error.  Her need was as deep
as the gulf out of which it arose.  It might, if she had cared to
make it do so, have carried her far.  But for her own always
immediate purposes, she found Livorno an ideal place.

It was composed, at the time she trod the boards there, of several
physical neighbourhoods socially an astronomical distance apart.
Along the water front wandered avidly a cosmopolitan flux, keen
eyes, ardent souls, and bodies from many shores.  During the
daytime Faith chose to hide herself from this; to live within the
precincts of an orderly mercantile establishment, and to conduct
the simple domestic affairs of its owner and his resident clerks.
But on some evenings, especially about the full of the moon, she
left it, bonneted, and bound ostensibly upon some domestic errand.
A few minutes later would find her not only in other precincts but
in other purlieus.

There she laid aside her respectable bonnet and received in privacy
a male member of the world flux that she had chosen, and summoned
as she well knew how, up from the water front.  During such
interviews her face darkened and took on the rapt expression of
some sibyl brooding upon far distant events.  The brown iris of her
eyes contorted, the black pupils narrowed into an inhuman and
almost oblong shape as if she were threading a needle.  Then
suddenly they widened and grew clearer and calm again.  Whether it
was some impassioned spirit temporarily appeased or merely a
satisfied animal that now looked through them it would be hard to
tell.

A young poet, an outcast who had once tarried with her, thought
that he had recognized in her face, when the disguise of the bonnet
was removed for him, a portrait of that Fate who sits at the gates
of first beginnings and tangles the threads of life.  He had
wondered if this personage could be loose and wandering about the
plains of earth.  He had returned to Faith again and again,
fascinated, trying to read her secret, until she cast him off tired
of his impotent curiosity.

But she was respected and even feared at the Casa da Bonnyfeather.
Her work was not all "acting."  It provided her sufficient scope
for the exercise of other abilities.  In a town where all save the
German and English mercantile establishments were notorious for
their clattiness and confusion, she maintained her employer's as a
model of order and cleanliness.  The private apartments of Mr.
Bonnyfeather, into which no guest was ever summoned since the death
of his wife, were not only spotless but bordered on the luxurious.
Nothing was lacking which at any time Mr. Bonnyfeather or she
herself really needed.  The one exception to this was the room of
Sandy McNab, which was Spartan.  He slept there and nothing more.

The master's table, which was always served in the old ballroom
exactly under the skeleton of the huge central chandelier
immediately opposite the main door, was provided with an abounding
plenty.  This was more a matter of business acumen than anything
else.  Mr. Bonnyfeather himself was rather abstemious of both food
and drink.  Scarcely a day passed, however, without one or two
guests, generally ship captains, factors, a brother merchant, or a
traveller of note and distinction who bore letters of introduction
or of credit to the house.  In addition, most men of affairs,
bankers, and even priests and artists in Livorno made it a point to
drop in occasionally upon Mr. Bonnyfeather both for the good cheer
and for the conversation.

From the table talk that went on about his board the merchant
gathered not only entertainment but a curious and valuable
knowledge of affairs in general, from world politics to how the
tides ran in the Bay of Fundy, or why the pilot fees were so high
on the River Hoogli.  Many a profitable enterprise and many a
shrewd deal had its inception or consummation here.  There were few
rumours adrift on the trade winds of the world which passed him by.
The conversation was polyglot.  A stray Russian had so far been the
only guest who had been forced to discuss nothing but his soup.
Even ships with cargoes consigned to his rivals found their
captains dining in a garrulous frame of mind with Mr. Bonnyfeather.

This notable table was catered to by Angela, the fat cook, one of
the best in town.  The dishes proceeded in an orderly manner
through a hole in the kitchen wall.  Thence they were wheeled
steaming on a small wagon with manifold trays by Tony Guessippi,
the cook's husband.  He was a kind of wizened male spider whose
function in life was to convey the dishes which his wife concocted
to their ultimate destination and to beget children on her body.  A
flock of eleven semi-naked youngsters and an equally lavish
technique with knife and ladle testified that Destiny had not been
mistaken this time in her choice.

On fine days both leaves of the great central door leading into the
old ballroom were thrown open.  At the top of the wide, low steps
which now swept up with a uselessly superb flare, Mr. Bonnyfeather
and his guests were to be seen dining under the swathed chandelier.
The old merchant enjoyed this.  In his secret heart he was the
laird of Aberfoil dispensing feudal hospitality to more illustrious
guests.  Something of that feeling overflowed into his mien and
conversation and served to flavour the meal with both the salt and
pepper of an old-world courtesy.

In all this Faith Paleologus was essential to Mr. Bonnyfeather.
Not only did she oversee the smooth and profitable abundance of his
own board, but the more simple comforts of the rest of the
establishment as well.  The merchant conducted his business in many
languages, and there were no less than nine resident clerks, four
Swiss porters, and several messengers and draymen who both ate and
slept in rooms that overlooked the courtyard.  On one side of this
was a kind of small barracks for the "gentlemen writers."  A ship's
cook and two boys sufficed for them.  The scrubwomen, five of whom
appeared every morning, also made up the beds.  When the master's
own ships were in harbour the pursers were provided with their
rooms and table, and there were generally transient guests of the
establishment who came with some legitimate claim on its
hospitality.

Such was the "factory" as it was called of the House of Bonnyfeather
in which the housekeeper held unrelenting sway.  Over the cellar,
the warehouse, the stables, and the office itself hovered the eagle
eye of Mr. Sandy (William) McNab.

The one spot in the place exempt from all authority was the
purlieus of the kitchen.  Here in gargantuan disorder and simian
anarchy rioted the clan Guessippi; boys, girls, chickens, cats, and
goats.  No dogs had been able to survive.  It was only when Faith
herself appeared there at some crisis of uproar that silence and
dismay brought about a specious appearance of order.  At such times
all the children fled either into or under the family bed.  Tony
departed to the wine cellar leaving his wife alone with her own
bulk.  It was well known throughout the neighbourhood that Faith
had the evil eye.  For that reason no spoons were ever missing, and
the scrubwomen invariably reported early.  One angry glance, and
you might wither away; a stare, and the Virgin herself might not be
able to help you.

To a certain degree the authority of Faith had been inherited.
Inheritance indeed might account for much else that was peculiar in
her.  Her father had been a Florentine of Greek extraction.  The
family tree led back to Constantinople.  They were workers in
mosaic and had, with the extinction of the Medici, their patrons,
fallen upon evil times.  The last of them, a boy with a face like a
hawk and the mad lusts of a leopard, had fallen in with a
Scotchwoman in the house of Mr. Bonnyfeather's father at Livorno.
She, Eliza McNab, was one of several who had followed the fortunes
of the Bonnyfeathers into exile.  She was a true daughter of the
heather.  After a while the young Paleologus disappeared to
assemble mosaics in parts unknown.  He left his wife with a flower-
like pattern of bruises, a baby daughter, and the statue of the
madonna.  It was this daughter who had become the maid of Mr.
Bonnyfeather's only child Maria, and it was she, Faith, who had
succeeded in due time to the keys of his house.

                            ----------

At half past four on the morning after Anthony arrived the Casa da
Bonnyfeather lay wrapt in the profound quiet which precedes the
first stir of dawn.  The last of the clerks had returned from the
carnival.  The only light to be seen in the courtyard was the
faint, downward ray cast from the lattice of Faith Paleologus.
Presently, it disappeared.  She had crossed the corridor and gone
into Anthony's room again.  She placed the candles on the table and
sat down.  It was not her intention to remain watching for the rest
of the night.  The boy was sleeping utterly quietly and could need
no further attention.  But she, too, desired to study his face
again.  She had already formed conclusions of her own.  In her case
there was no point of honour beyond which speculation was taboo.
Quite the contrary.  The maid of Maria had no doubts about the
family resemblance.  She concluded that Mr. Bonnyfeather knew more
than he cared to tell.  Else why had the boy been placed in this
room?  Then there was the madonna, of course.  To Faith that was
simply a confirmation of what she had already surmised.  Well, she
would find out some day.  She had lived long enough to know that
one of the best ways to get to the bottom of a mystery is to hold
your own tongue.  Others invariably wagged theirs sooner or later.
Someone's long ears usually wagged at the same time.

She wondered about Don Luis.  What was his connection with all
this?  Of many who came to the Casa da Bonnyfeather he had been the
only one who had read her with a glance.  "What are YOU doing
here?" he had said.  But he also could hold his tongue.  She had
admired him for that, and other things.  Their one night together
had been memorable.  It had been her hope that he would take her
away with him along with Maria.  For that reason she had urged the
marriage on the girl.

So her pretty young charge had given the marquis the slip after
all!  She would never have given her credit for that.  Don Luis was
no simpleton.  It aroused Faith's reluctant admiration for Maria
for whom even when a girl she had felt little else than a well-
concealed envy that amounted almost to jealousy.  Maria had been
beautiful.  Faith had been glad to see her leave the house.

So by hook or crook this boy had come back for HER to look after--
with the Paleologus madonna.  She did not like that.  She had an
impulse to destroy the thing.  But she checked herself.  No, that
would be to give herself away; to cause questions to be asked.  She
looked up at the statue and glowered.  What had been its rôle in
all this?  Nothing, of course, nothing!  It was only a statue, an
old one at that.  Her eyes sank to the boy's face again.

There was the same unassailable loveliness.  How she had envied it
once in Maria.  It was the opposite with which her nature was ever
trying to unite.  In this present young masculine mould in which it
had been returned to her, it seemed possible that she might yet
come to possess it after all, to possess it even for an instant in
the only way she knew how, by the only approach to strength and
beauty which she had.  She was only thirty-two.

Presently her face darkened and her eyes contorted.

She rose silently, took the candles, and approached the bed.  She
listened, and bent over Anthony with an attitude infinitely
stealthy.  Her breathing deepened.  Her hands trembled unexpectedly
and a drop of hot wax splashed on his breast.  He moved
convulsively and opened his eyes.  She snatched the candles away
and began tucking him in again.  But she had not been quite quick
enough.  In the sudden glare of light as he first wakened the boy
had seen her eyes.

"This place is full of them!" he cried out.  He remembered where he
was now.  Then he saw her standing beside him.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"The housekeeper.  I'm here to make you comfortable."  She smiled
at him.

"It was you who covered me up just now?"

"Yes, the sheets had slipped off and you looked cold."

He pondered the information as if it had great importance.
"Doubtfully," she thought a little apprehensively.  He rubbed his
eyes.

"It's funny, but do you know just now I thought I saw that old goat
looking down at me again."

"You must have dreamed it," she said.  "Can't you see the door's
closed?  It can't get in here."

"No," he admitted doubtfully.  The impression had been a strong
one.  The door was closed, however.  He could see that for himself.
He gave it up.

"What's your name?" he finally asked.  Then as if in a hurry to
make a fair exchange--"mine is Anthony."

"Faith."

"Faith!"  He pondered that, too.  Then as if to himself, "Father
Xavier said faith was the evidence of things unseen."

"And who is Father Xavier?" she asked, an unconscious twinge of
contempt creeping into her voice.  She loathed priests.

"He is my friend," said Anthony, "and," he added, sensitive to the
tone of her voice, "I shall be lonely without him.  He is coming
here to see me again often."  He flung this as a kind of challenge.
Then as if to placate her, "You stay here?"

"I live here.  I shall be near you all the time."

"Oh," he said.  The conversation paused.  He closed his eyes again.
She waited for a long time now as if to pose her new question to
what lay so deep within him that it must answer truthfully when
spoken to.  But she must not let him go to sleep entirely.  Time
passed.  She spoke to him dreamfully.

"Do you remember any other good friend?"

"Yes, I remember," he whispered.

Instinctively she chose now a tone just sufficient to reach him and
no more.  She leaned nearer carefully.  "Who?"

But the effect was exactly the opposite of what she had hoped for.
He suddenly aroused himself, sat up and began to look about in a
puzzled way as if he missed someone.

"I thought I saw her here, last night," he said.

"I wonder who SHE was?" thought Faith.  "The old man said nothing
about her."

The boy's eyes continued to search through the room.  He remembered
it vaguely from the night before, but he was confused by having
been turned around on the bed by the doctor.  Presently he twisted
himself completely about.

"There!" he said triumphantly, pointing to the madonna in her
niche.  "There she is."

"If she had only destroyed that statue last night!  That would have
been the time," she thought.  It was always a mistake not to act on
a deep prompting like that, to reason herself out of it.  One
should listen to one's voices.  But it was too late now.  The boy
evidently set great store by the thing.  It, "she," she caught
herself saying, was a "close friend."  He thought he had seen her
here last night!  A convent child with visions!  Priest-bred, bah!
He would have to get over that.  Nevertheless, she felt herself
balked in some way or other.  Her first approach had been
frustrated.  She cursed herself for having given the statue to
Maria.  "I might have known it would come back to haunt me.  It
brought ill luck to my mother."  In spite of herself she went cold.

"Well, is there anything you want?" she asked preparing to go.

He shook his head and settled back under the covers.  It was a
comfortable bed.  Like the one at Signora Udney's, he thought.  He
closed his eyes.  Outside a cock began to crow.

Faith slipped back to her own room.  She must catch a wink of sleep
herself before her day began.  Silence wrapped the Casa da
Bonnyfeather for another hour.  Whatever moved then through its
dilapidated corridors stole through them as silently as the dawn
that was just breaking.




CHAPTER FOURTEEN

REALITY MAKES A BID


Next morning Mr. Bonnyfeather "communicated" his decision of the
night before to Faith.  She said nothing, but she approved.  Both
of them were aware that considerable comment might be expected in
and about the Casa da Bonnyfeather.  Positions were eagerly sought
after there, and the arrival of so young an apprentice and his
immediate translation to the sacred apartment of the Capo della
Casa would tickle curiosity.  Both of them sat at breakfast
thinking of this.

"Hum-um!" said Mr. Bonnyfeather.  "How is he this morning?"

"A little dizzy yet, but quite all right again.  Three eggs for
breakfast," she replied.

"Keep him by you, in the room for several days," he went on.  "Tell
them he was badly shaken up.  You can stretch a point.  It will
then be natural enough that you should be taking care of him under
the circumstances."

"I had thought of it," she said.

"I knew you HAD," he smiled.  "But what after that?"

"You can tell McNab he is too young yet to be in the dormitory with
the grown men.  They will be glad enough not to have him about
carrying tales.  It would be miserable for him and them.  Also say
that no one's position has been filled or is threatened by his
coming here.  It is just a case of charity for Father Xavier.  Most
of the trouble here starts over fears or petty jealousies, you
know.  After a while it will seem perfectly natural for him to keep
on staying where he is.  It will also just have happened.  Trust
McNab to spread news."

"Exactly," said Mr. Bonnyfeather.  He was somewhat surprised by
having his own schemes put so eloquently.  His housekeeper
generally held her tongue.  "But it is natural enough," he thought,
"she was Maria's maid."  He was relieved and grateful to find that
he would not have to try to explain to her what he must never
explain to himself.  "This is just another orphan to whom we are
giving a start.  As you say, 'pure charity.'"  He looked at her
significantly.  She nodded and waited.  "Do you think anyone else
might notice the--his face?"

"McNab, perhaps.  He was here before Maria left.  He remembers her.
All the rest are new."

"Have the barber in and crop the boy's hair close.  It will make it
easier for me, too, in a way."  He sighed.  "Also, get him clothes.
Out of your household account.  I'll not ask you to save there.
One good suit.  For a gentleman's son."

"Or a merchant's grandson?" she asked suddenly.  She saw his cheek
bones flush.

"Woman," he said, "dinna propose it in words.  I dinna ken mysel'.
Let the dead stay buried!"  His face worked.

"Peace to you.  I'm no gossip.  Could you think that after all
these years?  I'll not whisper it this side of my shroud."

"It's not that," he said, calmer now.  "I wouldn't have you
think . . ."

"I think nothing," she said, "except that this is a new day and
it's time to begin it."

She walked over to a chest, unlocked it, and drew forth two flags
which she laid over his arm.  "Leave the boy to me now.  I'll see
to him."  He looked relieved and climbed to the roof intent on what
amounted to a daily ritual.

Arrived there he hoisted the two flags each on a separate pole.
One was the Union Jack and the other his house flag, a red pennant
with a black thistle.  In addition to this he always addressed a
short prayer to some member of the Holy Trinity.  He then unlocked
the small chest set into the parapet and took out a telescope.
From the roof of the house the entire inner and outer harbour and a
long vista down the coast was visible.  Steadying the glass on a
little bronze tripod, it was his custom every morning by this means
to study both the molo and the Darsena carefully and to sweep the
horizon.  In half an hour he would be thoroughly familiar with what
was going on at Livorno; what ships were coming and going, and what
business they were bound upon.  The glass was a good one.  He could
even recognize faces at a considerable distance.  It aided greatly
in eliminating from his affairs the disconcerting element of
surprise.  It would now be seven o'clock.

At precisely that instant Mr. Bonnyfeather could always be seen
descending the stairs from the roof.  At the foot of the stairs
Simon, the porter, handed him his gold-headed cane and a freshly
filled snuff box.  A large ship's bell which hung in the courtyard
rang out.  The gates were thrown open into the street.  The drays
began to rumble and the clerks to write.  The Casa da Bonnyfeather
was open for business.

On the morning after Anthony's arrival, Mr. Bonnyfeather was forced
to make one minor change in the ritual.  No one else knew it.  He
took the telescope out and swept the harbours as usual.  His
thoughts, however, were not upon the various swarming decks which
he passed in review but in the room just under his feet.  Through
the corridor skylight, which was opened every fine morning like a
ship's hatch, came the snipping of scissors and clear bursts of
laughter.  The barber was using his most humorous blandishments
while removing Anthony's hair.  Faith had lost no time about it.

Mr. Bonnyfeather smiled and turned his glass on the horizon.  A
cloud of mist seemed to cut off his view on a clear day.  "Dampness
in the glass!"  He unscrewed the eyepiece and wiped it assiduously,
likewise the large lens.  He looked again.  It was still dimmer.
Forced to admit the fact in spite of himself, he furtively wiped
his own eyes.  When he levelled the glass again the horizon stood
out startlingly clear.

Into a patch of brilliant sunlight sailed a full-rigged ship.  The
field of the glass covered her exactly.  He could see the
figurehead leaning forward and the slow rise and fall of the bows
as the waves whitened under the fore-chains.  Suddenly the ship
hesitated, the sails fluttered, and then filled out on the other
tack.  All the shadows on them now lay serenely on the other side.
In the crystal atmosphere of the glass the ship seemed to be
manoeuvring with supernatural ease in a better world.  It was his
own ship, long overdue, that was thus so calmly coming home again.
He descended the stairs in the rested mood that often follows
tears.

"Tell the draymen," said he, as the porter handed him his cane,
"that the Unicorn is coming in after all.  Be ready at the docks."

"A lucky day, sir," said Simon.

"VERY," replied Mr. Bonnyfeather.  His hand shook a little as he
took the cane.

In the corridor under the skylight the last of Anthony's ringlets
had just fallen to the floor.  Faith led him to Maria's mirror.  "I
am a man now," said he fiercely.  A very tall and slim, and a very
young, young gentleman dressed in a pair of plain, bow shoes and a
decent, dark green suit with buckles at the knees was trying to
frown back at him from the glass.  Even Anthony thought him to be
good-looking.  It annoyed him vastly to find that the barber was
taking all the credit for it as a result of his handiwork.  "I grew
these all myself," said the boy, turning upon the man angrily and
running his hand through his crisply shorn locks.  There was a
ripple of laughter from the door.  "Are you sure of it?" said Faith
Paleologus.  The barber clashed his shears and departed.

Three mornings later Anthony emerged from his seclusion to take up
his duties in the world of men.  He was anxious to do so.  An
overpowering curiosity, and a new, vivid sense of reality, totally
submerged any shrinking from the unknown which his temperament
might ordinarily have provided.  He accompanied Mr. Bonnyfeather to
the roof and was there permitted to raise the house flag which he
was given to understand was henceforth to be his first daily task.
Below him the mules were being hitched to the dray.  Big Angela and
her progeny were drawing water at the fountain.  The clerks were
making for the office.  Amid the garden-beds wandered his friend
the goat.  Mr. Bonnyfeather busied himself with the telescope.
Presently Sandy McNab beckoned to Anthony.  "Come down here,
laddie," said he.  Leaving the old man on the roof, Anthony
descended.

"How are you now?" said McNab in Italian, seeing that the boy had
understood only his gestures.  He also shook him by the hand with
so firm a clasp as to make him wince.  "Quite well, sir," replied
Anthony bravely.  Mr. McNab studied him for a minute.  "You'll do
now I guess," he said.  He looked at the short hair approvingly.
"Hold your chin up when you go about, and look out for goats."  He
grinned.  "But not so high as that," he cautioned, shoving the
boy's nose down with his thumb.  "I mean take your own part and
don't be afraid of anybody.  You understand?  That's what 'hold
your chin up' means."  Anthony nodded.  "Come on now, you're to eat
breakfast with the clerks.  The other meals you take with the
master.  And that's lucky for you," he added, taking the boy
roughly but not unkindly by the hand.  "There is a world of
difference in victuals."  He led the way across the broad
flagstones of the courtyard to the office which they entered
together in company with several clerks.

It was the big room where Anthony had first met Mr. Bonnyfeather.
But it was now a scene of great animation.  Down the aisle between
the desks had appeared as if by magic a long table at which were
seated a crowd of about twenty men varying in years from youth to
middle age.  They ate steadily and heartily of dishes strange to
Anthony.  No time, it appeared, was to be lost.  At the extreme end
of the apartment Mr. Bonnyfeather's desk rose impressively behind
its railing, majestic but lonely.

To the boy's surprise and delight little attention was paid to him
when he came in.  Those near by looked up and nodded perfunctorily
at McNab who sat at the head of the table near the door.  He drew a
stool up for Anthony next to him and rearranged some plates.  "This
will be your place now every morning," he said.  "Help yourself."

He set the example by pouring himself a large basin of tea and
heaping his plate with fish and scrambled eggs.  Out of the
coagulated mass a mackerel looked up at Anthony with a desperate
purple eye.  For a moment he could feel again where the goat had
hit him.  He turned his eyes up to the frescoed ceiling and for
some moments allowed them to remain there.  Just above him his
friend with the winged heels was taking off from a cloud, leaving
the banquet of the gods behind.  Perhaps he, too, felt dizzy.

"I see you are a man of sensibility," said a pleasant voice in
French next to Anthony.  Anthony took his eyes from the ceiling and
turned to find himself looking into a keen, youngish face with
sparkling brown eyes.  "I myself," continued the stranger smiling
in a friendly way upon him, "have upon several mornings preferred
to contemplate the banquet of the gods in the ceiling rather than
this breakfast of the English upon the floor."  Anthony summoned
his small stock of French to mind and replied with immense
precision, "Is it that in the ceiling they are not eating fish?"

"Never," cried his new-found friend fiercely, "never a fish!"  He
waved confirmatively toward a Bacchus just above him.  "Have you
not noticed," he rattled on, "the terrible Medusa-like stare of the
mackerel?  It produces in the pit of the stomach the sensation of
stone."  Anthony agreed.  He could not follow it all, but he felt
called upon to make a counter-reply.

"But at the breakfast of the English the food is real," he managed
to string together.  "True," cried his new friend, "your
observation does you credit, monsieur, it is a just one.  You have
named the chief advantage the English have over the gods.  But
consider, it is only a temporary one.  By tonight this breakfast
will have become food for an idea.  It will have become an idea.
That is the end of breakfasts.  And think," said he, suddenly
whisking about on the bench so that he sat astride of it with his
hands on his hips, "think what kind of an idea that mackerel will
become which is even now going into the head of Meester McNab."

Mr. McNab's eyes bulged out with indignation.  For a moment he
seemed doubtful himself as to the destination of the fish and
choked.  "Hauld your clack," he mumbled, and then turned to
Anthony.  "Eat your bun, my boy," said he, "and sop it in your tea.
Toussaint there is a Frenchman and a philosopher.  If you listen to
him you'll have naught but an ideal breakfast in your little basket
when the bell rings."  As if in premonition of famine and as an
example to the young, Mr. McNab, after clearing his own plate with
a piece of bread in spiral motion, departed for his desk.  Anthony,
who was embarrassed at thus finding himself the centre of a debate,
was relieved to see McNab grinning over his shoulder at Toussaint
who laughed back.  The latter now continued to regard him with his
arms akimbo.

"I can see that we shall get along famously," he said.  "You speak
French beautifully"--Anthony blushed with delight--"and you dislike
mackerel.  It is the basis for a firm, philosophic friendship.  You
look like a northerner.  Where have you been civilized?  You do not
speak English?"  Anthony shook his head.

"I would advise you to learn it," his friend rattled on.  "It is
the language out of which realities proceed, fish, tea, gold,
raiment--and finally power.  It will help you here greatly, for
that is the kind of thing they are after."  The boy nodded as if he
knew.  "Father Xavier has already said so," he interpolated.  "Ah,
yes, of course, the Jesuit.  He would know.  But he has already
taught you other things, I suppose?"  "Yes, monsieur, Latin,
French, and I know Italian.  I have read The Divine Comedy."

"Excellent," cried the philosopher.  "You have begun.  I myself
will continue your education, in French."  He held up a warning
finger.  "But say nothing about it.  Your desk is to be next to
mine.  Monseigneur McNab has in a way turned you over to me.  You
see I know where you come from."  For some reason the boy felt his
cheeks glow.

"Tut, tut, it is a great advantage.  You're not handicapped by a
mother.  It is THEY who make the world civilized and that is what
is the matter with it.  They want you for themselves.  Congratulate
yourself.  Also we shall circumvent Mr. McNab.  I am supposed to
teach you about invoices.  They are easy.  Afterwards we shall put
them by in a drawer and converse"--he pointed upwards dramatically--
"in the language which is useful up there.  You see those nine
women dancing about the gentleman with the lyre?"  Anthony nodded.
"We shall meet them," said he.  "Possibly even the gentleman
himself.  In the meantime, let me recommend to you the conduct of
this one, in so far as you see it portrayed there," he added
hastily, and pointed to the figure of a boy standing behind the
couch of Jove.  From the cup which he bore, the page was slyly
taking a drink behind the other man's back.  "Do you understand,
mon ami?" asked Toussaint looking down into Anthony's face.

Anthony nodded, "I think so," he replied.  "At least I shall learn
French."

"At the very least!" replied Toussaint.  "And now I shall prove to
you that McNab is wrong."  He pulled a fine gold watch out of his
bright yellow waistcoat and looked at it.  "You have seven minutes
before the bell rings to finish your breakfast.  You shall now see
what it is to be a natural philosopher."

He assembled some plates rapidly under the fascinated stare of
Anthony, placed upon them a fried egg with an unbroken yolk, a
piece of thin bacon beside it, a light, white roll and a piece of
butter which he cut into a square.  Then he poured out some tea
carefully straining out the leaves.  "It IS a little cold," said
he, "due to my causerie, but you see what makes it inviting is that
it is the combination of food and an idea.  It is déjeuner and not
merely the breaking of a fast.  Eat while you still have time."
They both broke into a laugh together.  The first of many.

"Five minutes till the bell rings," said Mr. McNab with his eyes
upon them from the other end of the room.  He was already at work.
Toussaint made a grimace.  Anthony stuffed himself.  Presently the
bell rang.

Instantly, all those who were still lingering arose.  The porters
seized the loose planks of which the tables were composed and
carried them out bodily with the remains of the breakfast upon
them.  The stools upon which the planks rested were each claimed by
a clerk who carried it to his desk and sat down upon it forthwith,
opened his ledger, and began to indite.  A man with a broom swept
the fragments down the aisle.  In a short time a complete silence
save for the scratching of divers pens reigned unbroken.

The sun streamed through the windows and only the gods in the
ceiling continued to dine.  Beneath them the figures of the
gentlemen writers bent over the desks, adding up columns or writing
letters.  Decorum from a niche in the corner smiled.  About five
minutes later the ferrule of a cane was heard clicking on the
mosaics in the vestibule.  Mr. McNab left his desk and took his
place by the door.

"Good morning, sir," said he as Mr. Bonnyfeather came through the
door.

"Good morning, Mr. McNab, good morning, gentlemen," said Mr.
Bonnyfeather.  A respectful murmur of welcome ensued without
interrupting the pens.  Mr. Bonnyfeather advanced one more step,
took off his hat, and hung it over the face of a dilapidated satyr
whose horns were worn giltless by this use.  From under the cocked
hat it grinned helplessly.  Mr. Bonnyfeather, the step, and the
simultaneous removal of the hat in the same place at the same time
each morning never failed.  It had gone on for thirty years.  The
Frenchman Toussaint Clairveaux was fascinated.  He had watched it
for seven.  The satyr was slowly becoming respectable.  There could
be no doubt about it.  Mr. Bonnyfeather now took a pinch of snuff
and advanced to his desk.  On this particular morning he made an
announcement.

"I shall need all hands at the quay this afternoon to take stock of
cargo.  The Unicorn has at last been released by the customs."  A
buzz of excitement followed.  All knew that it was a rich Eastern
cargo and premiums might follow.  Mr. Bonnyfeather believed in
prize money in peace as well as in war.

"He is a remarkable man, a gentleman, an honest spirit," said
Toussaint to Anthony who was now seated on a high stool near him.
The boy looked up to meet an encouraging smile from Mr.
Bonnyfeather sitting at the big desk.  He felt encouraged.  Just
then McNab came along and bade him follow.  They went over into the
corner to the chief clerk's bureau.  Mr. McNab took out a heap of
papers, spread them out, and looked at Anthony.  "These are your
indentures," he vouchsafed.  "You sign them here."  He handed a pen
to the boy.  At the place which McNab indicated the lad wrote very
carefully, Anthony.

"Anthony what?" asked McNab peering down at him.  The boy looked
puzzled.  "Your last name?"  The boy shook his head slowly.  It had
never occurred to him that he needed one.  Other people had them,
of course.  Mr. McNab grunted and began to look through the papers.

"A deposition by the Mother Superior of the Convent of Jesus the
Child situate in this Our Grand Duchy of Tuscany."  McNab grunted.
"In the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost, greeting."
Grunt.  The rest was in Latin.

The chief clerk paused for a minute, gripped the paper more firmly,
and gave it a shake.  The text, however, remained in the same
language.  He cleared his throat and looked at Anthony.

"Can YOU read this?" he asked, handing the paper to Anthony.  The
boy looked at him uneasily.

"Let's see if you can," suggested Mr. McNab in a doubtful tone of
voice.  "Read it aloud."  As if reciting to Father Xavier, Anthony
began.

It was a simple recital of the facts of his own arrival at the
convent.  He had been, it appeared, "but newly born, a perfect man
child with a sore navel."  Why was that? he thought.  The contents
of the black bag were then enumerated, himself included.  He became
intensely interested and pressed on.  The corridors of the convent
at night with Sister Agatha walking along them carrying a bundle
through the shadows leaped out from the bare recital on the page.
He knew every turn she would take, the whole scene.  The deposition
in bad, bare, legal Latin took on for the boy the fascination of a
literary masterpiece of which he was the hero.  "And on the next
day following the said male infant, parents unknown, was baptized
Anthony . . ."

"Go on," said McNab.

"According to the rite of the Holy . . ."

"You have no last name," interrupted the man sternly.

"No, sir," said Anthony meekly.

"Also you seem to have entered the world in great adversity,"
continued his tormentor.  He drummed on the desk.  "Have you any
suggestions?"  Anthony shook his head.

"--and to have arrived here under still more adverse circumstances!"
Mr. McNab's eyes twinkled.  "Well," said he, "why not catch up your
past misfortunes into a name and give your good luck a chance?  Wait
a minute."

He went over to Mr. Bonnyfeather and for some minutes held him in
conversation.  Anthony could see them looking his way now and then
and laughing.  He felt uncomfortable.  Why was it curious not to
have a last name?  Finally, Mr. Bonnyfeather took up his largest,
plumed pen and wrote something with a flourish on a small piece of
paper.  He held it up before him considering it.  Then he nodded as
if satisfied and handed it still smiling to Mr. McNab.  The clerk
returned to his bureau and thrust the paper under the boy's nose.
On it was written--


                          Anthony Adverse


"THAT," said Mr. McNab with a Mede and Persian gesture, "is your
name."  And it was.  Mr. McNab pronounced it, "Advarse."  It was
thus that Anthony always thought of it.

The signing of the papers was now completed and Toussaint called as
witness.  Anthony watched anxiously to see if his friend would
laugh at the new name.  He remained perfectly serious.  The clerk
now drew up a small document of his own.  It was a draft on
Anthony's pay for nine shillings for a hat, payable to Mr. William
McNab.  This also the boy signed.  Mr. McNab was now satisfied.  He
stuck the quill pen behind his ear and looked at Anthony.

"There is only one advantage," he said, "in having a name.  It
prevents you signing other peoples' names to papers.  But as in
everything else this advantage is outweighed by a corresponding
disadvantage."  The boy opened his eyes as the man was evidently in
earnest.  A certain grim kindness now lurked about the folds of
McNab's heavy jowl which Anthony had not noticed before.  "A
corresponding disadvantage," continued McNab.  "You have to sign
your own name!  Do so as little as possible.  And never sign any
paper without thinking it over three separate times."  The boy
blinked.  "For example, this paper which you have just signed will
cost you two months' pay.  No, not quite.  Sixty days from now you
will receive one shilling.  You understand, sixty days!  If you had
not signed it, you would have received ten shillings. . . .  Come
with me," said McNab, "and I will show you."

He took Anthony over to a large iron till which he unlocked.  From
a drawer he drew out ten shillings and placed them in the boy's
hand.  "All of these would have been yours, BUT you signed a
paper, didn't you?  Hence," growled McNab, "these are mine."  He
counted nine shillings out of the boy's palms back into his own.
The one remaining seemed to Anthony to have no weight at all.  The
clerk let the lightness of it sink home.  "Sixty days from now," he
said, and put the single shilling back in the till with the fatal
paper.  The other nine pieces he poured into his waistcoat pocket
where they seemed to chime.  He pointed Anthony to his own desk and
walked away.

Pondering over the responsibility of having a name and the enormous
difference between one and ten shillings, the boy climbed back on
his stool.  The tears welled up in his eyes.  He was afraid they
might drop on the desk so that Toussaint would see them.  The
latter was writing.  Anthony looked up at the ceiling again.
Presently his eyes dried leaving them hard and clear.  He was soon
lost amid the painted clouds.

The young gentleman with the winecup was also a "perfect man
child."  His navel, however, was not sore.  Anthony noticed that.
The other things were all there too.  On the lady sitting next to
the big man with the beard they were missing.  You longed to
provide them.  His own, for instance.  The thought appealed to him
as an original one.  He cherished it carefully.  The group amid the
frescoes began to move.  A faint glow began to steal up his back.
The stool under him grew pleasantly warm.  "What if . . . that
woman who had helped dress him and bathe him when he had been ill.
How soft her hands had been."  It was the same feeling.  He
trembled.  Toussaint was shaking him by the elbow and laughing.
All the blood in Anthony's body seemed to rush to his face.

"Come, come," said his new-found friend in a kindly way.  "Do you
want to turn into one of those?"  He pointed to the satyr under Mr.
Bonnyfeather's hat.  "There are lots of them around here like
that."

"I could never be like that!" Anthony flung back indignantly,
irritated at finding his thoughts so easily read.  His face no
doubt had betrayed him.  He must be careful then in this place
where there were so many sharp eyes about.  It was not like the
convent where you could sit and let the shadows come and go through
your eyes with no one to see them.  No, no, he must never betray
himself by his expression again.  His face became so grimly
determined that Toussaint laughed again.

"Now, you look like Monsieur McNab," he said.

"Oh, dear," thought Anthony, "that is impossible, too."  But he had
no time to protest further, for Toussaint was spreading out before
him a number of blank forms.  On each one of them was engraved a
small black ship in full sail with something printed underneath
several times over in as many languages.


Take notice: the good ship .............. of ..............., God
WILLING, proposes to sail from ............. this .......... day
of ............  17... with the following cargo; to wit, item:


There now unrolled about a foot of paper with ditto marks under
"item" and a long line opposite each ditto.  On each of these lines
Anthony was shown how to copy the list of a ship's cargo from forms
already filled out by Toussaint.  The forms were duplicates and the
work must be accurate.  Each line must correspond exactly.  It was
to be checked later at the customs.  At first, no matter how
careful he was, he kept making mistakes.  Barrels of sugar insisted
on inserting themselves upon lines meant exclusively for barrels of
pork.  Whereupon Toussaint tore up the form.  At last Anthony
managed to complete a set exactly and felt elated.  Another was
immediately shoved under his nose.  He continued to write all
morning.  His hands grew cramped and his body tired.  Toussaint
permitted him to slip down once or twice from his stool and to look
on.

"Tell me," said Anthony, pointing to the phrase "God willing" on
the form, "what has God got to do with all this?"

"It is a pious word for wind," said Toussaint.

"Oh," said Anthony, "and God makes it blow?  Is that it?"

"I suppose so," said Toussaint.

"But he does, of course."

"Perhaps; copy these."

But the boy stopped in the middle of the form.  "Who does then?"

"No one," replied Toussaint without allowing his pen to pause.

Anthony had never thought of that.  The mistakes multiplied.  His
world was shivering.  Toussaint tore up so many forms that Mr.
McNab snorted.

Various visitors came in to see Mr. Bonnyfeather from time to time.
You could hear them talking at the desk, but it was better not to
look.  The room gradually grew hotter.  Anthony felt himself
getting hungry.  Finally, the bell in the courtyard chimed once.
A thunder of closing ledgers followed and the clerks rushed out.
Anthony and Toussaint were left alone.

From a cubbyhole in the desk, the Frenchman drew forth one of
several small, calf-bound volumes.  Here he cherished a microscopic
library, shifting, trading, and even buying second-hand books from
time to time.  In the course of seven years much literature had
passed through the cubbyhole but tarried in his head.  The
Frenchman had a memory for the printed word as though his brain
contained an acid which bit the reflection of the page on the
surface of a mirror.

"You are hungry now," he said to Anthony, "I know.  But it is half
an hour yet till dinner and if you will give me that half hour
every day, I shall be glad to share it with you.  I do not think I
shall be wasting my time--or yours.  What do you say?"

The man's eyes glowed softly as if within him a banked fire had
begun to break through the ashes.  He saw the reflection of it in
the face of the boy before him.  "It is a bargain, then!" he cried.
"See, I shall clinch it with this to remind you of it always."  He
opened up the little book excitedly, crossed out his own name, and
wrote Anthony's.  Then he handed it to the boy with a noble
gesture.  "Open it," he said, "let us lose no time."  It was a copy
of La Fontaine's Fables with little engravings.

They turned to "Le Corbeau et le Renard" and began.  They
translated carefully into Italian, and when this was not precise
enough, into Latin.  Then Toussaint began to correct Anthony's
accent.  Again and again he repeated the French.  The boy was
delighted.  Here were more words, and such words!  After his flat
Jesuit's Latin and soft Tuscan, his tongue seemed at last to have
found itself.  Finally, Toussaint recited the whole poem.  The
clean music of it, the caressing stroke of the rhyme, and the charm
of the story held Anthony on the stool as if he were looking at a
play.  He stared up into Toussaint's face with parted lips.

"Anthony," said a kindly voice from the other end of the room.  It
was Mr. Bonnyfeather.  They both rose instinctively.

"We were just having a little French lesson, monsieur," said
Touissaint apprehensively.

"Splendid," replied the older man, "but we are waiting dinner."

"I am sorry, indeed . . ." began Toussaint.

"You do not need to be, perhaps later on . . ."  Mr. Bonnyfeather
drew for a moment with his cane on the ground.  "Well, we can let
that wait.  In the meantime by all means go on here as you have
begun."  He nodded approvingly.  By this time Anthony had joined
him and they went out of the door together, the little book in the
boy's hand.

Toussaint Clairveaux remained leaning on his desk and dreaming.  He
saw a small garden running down to the River Loire, a bridge,
across the river, a white castle on a hill, and broad steps leading
up the steep street of Blois.  At a small pond in the garden a man
with a scholar's gown thrown over his arm was helping an urchin
sail a boat.  It drifted out of reach.  The man let it go after a
few half-hearted efforts to recover it.  The wind stranded it amid
the reeds.  The child began to cry.  "Ah, mon cher," said a woman's
soft voice behind them, "it has always been like that."  The man
shifted uncomfortably but said nothing.  Presently he took a book
out of the pocket of his gown, leaned back, and began to read.  The
woman picked up the boy and comforted him.  He snuggled in her
dress.  She began to recite "Le Corbeau et le Renard."

Tears ran down the face of Toussaint Clairveaux and splashed upon
his desk.  How delightful, how dear!  Oh how heavenly ravishing
were those accents!  Would to Christ he could listen to them again
if only for another instant now!  O fields of asphodel, over which
that woman's sad face is now looking, under what sunless rays do
you ripple and toss?  Are they as beautiful as that glimpse from
the garden across the Loire?--the washerwomen along the banks of
the river under the willows, the white château in a haze of green
buds, a bird singing?  He choked.

"Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it was you who tempted me to leave all
that, to go vagabonding for Arcadia," he cried aloud, raising his
hands dramatically to the ceiling as if appealing to all-seeing
Jove feasting away up there.  "You made me an émigré before the
Revolution began, an émigré to nowhere.  And now, I am caught
here."  He looked about him desperately.  He swept the papers off
his desk onto the floor.

"I am lost in a prison where a merchant's hat is wearing the horns
off a satyr," he shrieked.  "I shall never find the country of the
beautiful savages!"

By this time the poor man was nervously striding up and down before
the rail of Mr. Bonnyfeather's desk, gesticulating at the empty
desks below.  At every one of them sat a useless regret or a vain
desire.  That was his senate.

"Ah, if I could have reached those wild American forests I should
have suffused my soul as a true poet and have blent you all into
one."  He shook his fist at the nine separate muses who paid no
attention.  "All into one!  I should have charmed the savages.  It
was that woman with the great eyes who kept me here.  Ah, yes!  Ah,
it was not you, Jean-Jacques, after all.  The spirit of man is
truly noble as you say, as mine was.  Yes, I believe that.  This
boy, I shall lead into your beautiful pages.  He shall later cross
the sea and find that natural country for himself, unspoiled.  He
shall see how beautiful are the minds and bodies of men when left
to themselves with nature.  He shall feast like you up there in the
ceiling.  I, I cannot go, I am lost, bewitched.  And sacred blood
of a bitch!" he snorted, returning to what after all was his chief
grievance, "ever since I have followed that Paleologus to this
place she will not even speak to me."

Mr. McNab looked in and saw a little Frenchman apparently going
mad.  He grinned.  The bell in the court rang twice.  "To eat or
not to eat, that is the question," the Scot called cupping his
hand.  Toussaint Clairveaux cursed him, stuffed a copy of La
Nouvelle Héloïse into his pocket, and raced for his dinner with
McNab.  The mercurial Frenchman was now laughing, too.  Despite the
gulf between them, the two men had learned to admire each other.
They were both capable of utter concentration on the matter at hand
and were completely sincere.  Over the desk they ceased to clash.

Anthony and Mr. Bonnyfeather were ascending the steps into the big
hall just as the last prolonged resonance of the bell in the
courtyard died away.  The table under the muffled chandelier was
set for four.

The guest for dinner that day was Captain Bittern of the Unicorn.
He was a very thin man with a hatchet face and a perfectly
horizontal, thin-lipped mouth.  His hat from being perpetually
jammed down on his forehead in a high wind had left a permanent red
streak in the oily tan of his hide.  Deep-set in cavernous sockets,
his clear, cold, blue eyes looked out from behind puckered lids
past the vertical, bony ridge of a long nose.  It was a face which
seemed even in the mouldy stillness of the old ballroom to be
facing into a high wind.  Anthony sat directly opposite it.

He felt instinctively that it would be impossible to disobey or to
discount any command or statement that proceeded from those
absolutely positive, horizontal lips.  During the course of about
thirty years several thousand nautical men and "natives" in various
parts of the world had agreed with Anthony.  One expected to hear a
bass voice boom out, but the captain's pitch was a perfectly self-
possessed falsetto.  The effect of this from such a countenance was
startling.  The voice piped away steadily, monotonously,
unexhausted, like a constant gale keening through taut rigging.  It
never rumbled.  In the man's ears were two very small gold rings.
He had risen from the fo'c'sle to the quarter-deck.  The rings
remained.

The meal began by Captain Bittern tilting a plate of soup into his
transverse cavern at one fell motion.  The lips simply widened
toward the ears, and the soup, still on a perfect level,
disappeared.  The act, if such it could be called, was so
irrevocable as to be almost ridiculous.  Had it not been for the
captain's eyes still looking out over the horizon of the bowl as if
in search of distant icebergs, Anthony must have laughed.  Mr.
Bonnyfeather remembered that he had once seen a shark swallow a
child's coffin like that in the China sea.  Nothing could be done
about it.  The captain never laughed.  It was impossible to imagine
that the corners of those lips should ever be turned either up or
down.

Nevertheless, the merchant treated him with great respect.  He was
the oldest and most dependable of the four captains of the fleet of
the house.  The single horn of his ship's figurehead pointed into
far and dangerous seas, and pointed home again.  He was just back
from Singapore and the Islands, four months overdue.  The account
he gave of his cargo made Mr. Bonnyfeather rub his hands.  Several
long tumblers of raw rum innocent of any water followed the
captain's soup.  At every return to port Captain Bittern preserved
himself in the genial fluid.  In transit he abstained.  Rum had
absolutely no effect upon him except to embalm his body and to
heighten the eloquence of his falsetto.  He now began, after a
series of gastronomic vanishing acts performed with both liquids
and solids, to relate the story of his voyage.  He took not the
slightest notice of Mr. Bonnyfeather, Anthony, or Faith Paleologus.
It was exactly as if he were reciting a portion of his memoirs for
the benefit of the cosmos while in his cabin at sea.

Anthony longed now to understand English.  He resolved to lose no
time in learning it.  From the tones of the captain's voice and a
few words here and there he caught the emotional drift.  When the
captain was bargaining he did so with his hands.  Over one
successful deal, he squeaked.  He almost broke the spell he cast by
that.  Anthony started when he felt Faith grip him by the knee.
She managed to get him to lean closer to her and began in her low
liquid voice to translate what the captain was saying.

The typhoon which had forced Captain Bittern to refit completely at
Mauritius was epochal.  The low voice of Faith beside him seemed to
transmit to Anthony's eyes rather than to his ears the picture of
the Unicorn dismasted, staggering, with the little beast at the bow
waving his horn at the scudding clouds and then plunging for the
bottom, while ribbons of split canvas streamed from the futile
jury-mast rigged forward.  The captain's voice became the constant
piping and fluting of the wind.  For the first time some conception
of the power of the elements was projected into the boy's
imagination.  Anthony felt a mountain snatched away from under the
ship, and gasped as he slid with the vessel into a molten, lead-
covered abyss.  The effect of wind was intolerable.  By a peculiar
reversal of effect the storm which the captain seemed to be facing
now flowed out along with his words from his elemental face.  The
voice of the man piped like the wind; the voice of the woman flowed
and leaped with excitement like the sea.  The two mated in the
boy's mind and became one experience.

A large chest and a desk in the captain's cabin started suddenly to
slide about and enter into a monstrous combat with each other.  The
desk burst open and its insides gushed out as the chest leaped upon
it.  The bilge water and the paper were slowly ground into pulp as
the chest continued to celebrate its victory drunkenly.  The white
paste produced by this milling of water and paper gathered in the
panels between the beams.  The cabin lamp went out.  The stern
windows dazzled with blue lightning.  The sea rushed in.  It went
on for days.  He went up on deck with the captain and saw an
albatross sucked across the sky down into the funnel of the west
where the sun plunged drawing the atmosphere after him.  Suddenly
it was calm again.  The crew came on deck like ants out of the
earth after rain, and crawled about jagged stumps of masts.
Presently Anthony was tasting oranges and drinking from cocoanuts
in Mauritius.  In memory of the long drought during the six weeks'
calm which had followed that storm, Captain Bittern allowed a
fourth tumbler of rum to trickle soothingly through his teeth.  He
smacked his lips.  Mr. Bonnyfeather sighed.  It was this kind of
thing, he thought, that made it profitable for a nobleman to have
become a merchant.

That afternoon on the dock Anthony was able to understand why the
hull of the Unicorn looked so aged and battered while aloft all was
new with a varnished spick-and-spanness.  He fell in love with the
trim ship from the romping little horned-horse that sprang out of
her bows to the faded gilt of the taffrail.  From the yawning
hatches streamed up an endless succession of bales, chests, and
long mummy-like packages.  The odour of preserved fruit, spices,
sandalwood, and tar blent with all the rank smells of Christendom
along the docks.  He had never thought there could be so many
different kinds of things in the world.  Toussaint and the clerks
kept calling them off to one another hour after hour.  The odours
and the weight of materials and objects seemed to press inward upon
Anthony, to weigh upon his chest.  He breathed deeply to free
himself of the impression but could not do so.  It was there, it
was real.  It was as real as he was.  Even more so, harder and
firmer.

What a fine thing it must be to own all of this, actually to
possess all of these things.  He glanced with a new respect and
understanding at Mr. Bonnyfeather who was laughing and talking with
some other merchants on the quarter-deck.  They were congratulating
him; already beginning to chaffer and bargain.  Various bales went
their way from time to time.  The railing of the quarter-deck
stretched between Anthony and their world just as it did between
him and Mr. Bonnyfeather's desk.  There was a difference then
between men, which had something to do with all of these things.

He looked about him once more.  Nothing belonged to him.  He had
only his dreams.  He was a poor boy, an orphan.  He understood that
now.  In sixty days he would have only one shilling.  He had lost
nine by the first use of his name.  He looked at Mr. McNab standing
by the capstan with a pile of papers on it.  Toussaint was checking
off.  Mr. McNab was wearing his new hat.  "God willing," thought
Anthony, "I shall follow both their advices.  I will not write my
name on papers, and I shall certainly learn English."  He began to
listen to the English words for things.  His chest expanded.  In
the days to come he would prove himself.

He went over to the group by the capstan and began to help
Toussaint to check the invoices.  McNab nodded approvingly.
Anthony felt himself suddenly in the main current of real life.
The quiet pool of the convent courtyard lay far behind him.  "Where
was the drift taking him?" he wondered.

"Attention," said Toussaint, "thirty-four bolts of prime Manila
hemp."  "Thirty-four," said Anthony.  "Check," said McNab.




CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE SHADOWS OF FAITH


Anthony was not detained very long by the copying out of invoices
and manifests.  His first promotion in the world of affairs was to
the desk of the correspondents or gentlemen writers.  A copperplate
hand that had been conferred upon him by Father Xavier, and his
proficiency in languages were responsible.  The arid years in the
convent were now to a certain extent a positive advantage.  He
could never get enough of the life about him.  He absorbed it at a
remarkable rate, in gulps.

No thirstier horse had ever been led to water.  So avid was he of
the words and the experiences, emotions, and facts which he
acquired through words that he was scarcely conscious of the
barriers between languages.  Words were simply the coins minted by
the tongues of men with which realization could be purchased.
Whether they were English, French, Spanish, or Italian he cared
little.  All of these, with an infinite variety of dialect, he
heard in daily use all about him.  The quays, the streets, the
counting houses of Livorno, and even the Casa da Bonnyfeather
itself were in a state of babel.

For a while language remained for him nothing but the common tongue
of mankind.  It was not until some months had passed that he began
to understand differences.  Now, without thinking about it, he
instinctively tasted the various savour of words and through them
life.  He found it good.

Slowly English began to displace in his thought his strange jargon
of hill-Tuscan and ecclesiastical Latin.  He heard English talked
constantly in the office.  It was dinned into his ears at the table
and in the house.  It corresponded to the new and real experiences
he was having.  It was also an advantage, he found, to use it when
employed as a messenger about the docks or to ship's officers.  It
got you instant attention.  He began to realize that his physical
appearance corresponded with it.  He began to use it when he had
some important problem to think out.  He spoke it with a slight
Scotch tang and a softening of the vowels.  The burr had been
softened to a purr.  The combined effect was musical and rather
arresting.  It was impossible to tell whence he hailed.  His verbal
messages seemed to come from some self-cultivated Arcadian nowhere.

Toussaint was a potent force in all this.  Mr. Bonnyfeather had
been quick to see the advantage of French lessons.  They did not
long continue to occupy only the half hour before lunch.  Before
long they were removed to the old ballroom after dinner had been
cleared away, and they went on in the afternoon.

Soon Toussaint and Anthony were reading books together.  Some
writing followed as a matter of course.  Later Toussaint put
Anthony to copying out correspondence with French firms.  In a year
he was able to answer letters that required no more than a
perfunctory reply.  Spanish followed.

At the table Anthony listened carefully.  He had learned when in
doubt how to resort to a grammar or a dictionary.  In the section
of correspondence in the office he would pass from stool to stool.
Of the several gentlemen writers each was glad to find the boy by
his side for the sake of his young and happy presence and for the
chance to impress upon him the superlative importance of a
particular department.  That Anthony was under the special eye of
the Capo della Casa all of them knew.

But Mr. Bonnyfeather was most careful about that.  He never
permitted Anthony to take advantage of it.  It was a nice piece of
tact.  On one or two occasions the merchant had condescended to
explain to the boy.  There he learned something valuable.

"See and hear everything, but be careful what you do and say,"
admonished the old man.  "Do not tell me that Garcia sleeps at his
desk, I know it, I see him nod.  If he thought you knew it, he
would hate you.  Knowledge which threatens anyone's bread and
butter should be concealed if you wish to get on."

But there was something more to it than just that.  Out of the
several occasions when Anthony had been thus admonished he began to
understand Mr. Bonnyfeather's careful, masculine sense of honour,
the indignity of eavesdropping to all concerned, the pettiness of
tattle.  In short, that to mind his own business meant he must
first possess his own tongue in dignity and peace.  A discretion
rather beyond his years was thus thrust upon him.

Once he had blurted out something he had heard at the big table
while he was walking along the street with McNab.  It was about the
unexpected arrival of a ship from Smyrna laden with oil consigned
to Mr. Bonnyfeather.  A smartly dressed young lad standing on the
corner had turned immediately and made his way through the crowd
into the near-by door of a counting house.

"Did you see yon laddie gang off wi' your tidings?" asked Sandy.
"He's Maister Nolte, the nevvy of a German marchant.  In ten
minutes they'll be sellin' oot a' their oil at the present prices.
If you're no keerfu' you'll be takin' your victuals in the kitchen,
laddie."  They walked on, Anthony's cheeks burning.

"You'll not say anything to Mr. Bonnyfeather, McNab?" he ventured.

"I always hold my tongue," was the reply.  It was a matter-of-fact
statement with no scorn in it.  But the boy wilted.

"And I'll tell ye this," added McNab.  "It's not only statements ye
maun be keerfu' aboot, it's questions, too.  Ye ask a warld too
mony.  Watch wi' yer ain eyes and see what happens.  Then draw your
ain concloosions.  Dinna pay attention after ye ken what is gangin'
on to what every zany may have to say."

They entered a warehouse and went to the desk of the shipping
clerk.  Anthony noticed that McNab let the clerk do all the
talking, using only an apt prod now and then to his volubility.  In
five minutes the man had contradicted himself twice and proved
himself in the wrong.  McNab collected his bill and left.

"Ye see?" said he, peering down at Anthony.  The boy never forgot.
Mr. McNab blew his nose loudly into a scarlet handkerchief large
enough to muffle a horn.  That afternoon to the sound of his
bugling they collected seventeen bills.

Distance had worked its inevitable negative magic with Father
Xavier.  For the first six weeks he had come rather regularly two
or three times a week.  Then for one reason or another his visits
became irregular, the instruction desultory.  It was finally
dropped.  The priest had done all he could.  He felt that himself.
New influences which he could not fully control were impinging upon
his pupil's mind.  The lives of saints, church history, Latin
fables seemed enormously remote to Anthony now.  Like the fountain
in the convent courtyard they sounded in his ears as something
speaking from a dream.  Finally he saw Father Xavier only when Mr.
Bonnyfeather confessed.  This was not often.  Then he heard that
Father Xavier had gone to Naples.  He received a letter and
answered it.  Another, and he forgot to reply.

Mr. Bonnyfeather's father had changed his religion to suit the
Cardinal of York.  Something of the old Calvinistic independence
remained in the son.  Secretly Mr. Bonnyfeather perused some of his
grandfather's books on theology.  The doctrine of predestination
fascinated him.  It was with a distinct struggle he persuaded
himself that he had laid it aside.  Several times he had been on
the point of asking Father Xavier about it.  Then he thought better
of it.

The old man was growing a little rheumatic now.  He was often cold
and his feet went blue at night.  The fireplace which caused so
much astonishment to the servants--its like was not in the
vicinity--roared constantly on cold, damp nights, which are not
unknown at Livorno.  Occasionally he would take supper in his room.
The warmth and the blaze of the many candles were preferable to the
chill and shadows in the great, hall.  At such times he began to
call Anthony in to dine.  Over the cover the story of Mr.
Bonnyfeather's family began to take shape in the boy's mind.  The
sudden flight from the old estate by the Scotch laird and his
family to King James at St.-Germain's, the long, loyal service at
the toy court of the exiles, the hope deferred, the honourable
poverty--all this was with Mr. Bonnyfeather a favourite theme.

Then there was the merchant's father, "the second marquis," as the
old man loved to call him.  He had been invaluable to the Stuarts,
a great stirrer-up of Jacobite intrigues.  Louis the Great had
settled a pension upon him.  "Ah, those were great days!"  As a
very little boy Mr. Bonnyfeather remembered Versailles.

As a lad he had been dragged about the Highlands during the "'45."
William McNab had come back with him then.  The McNabs were
faithful to the old lairds; had always sent the rent.  They were
family retainers.  Mr. Bonnyfeather extolled them.  Faith was half
Greek, to be sure, but her mother's blood would tell.  And then he
would tell over again of how his father had fought at Culloden and
barely escaped at Prestonpans.  His face would light up with the
old hope of the victory.  Or his eyes would flash as he told how it
felt to be the oldest son of a nobleman on his father's estates
hunting the stag.  At the last, fishermen had rowed them out to a
French ship with Cumberland's dragoons sweeping along behind them
over the reaches of a misty beach.  That was their last glimpse of
Scotland.  He would sigh and take another glass of port.

"And now," he would say, placing both hands on his breast in
agitation, "you see me here, the third marquis--in trade!"  He
would hasten on as if explanation were essential.

"It came about in this way.  When the prince returned again to
France my father still followed him.  He had become a Catholic in
all but name.  Then Charles Edward died.  We came to Italy to be
near the last of the house of Stuart.  My father was received into
the church with all his family.  He held a small place as
chamberlain to the Cardinal of York.  There he was still called
marquis.  His title and a small pittance from the cardinal was all
that he had.  The French pension was no longer paid.  I should not
forget the crucifix which the pope sent him.  I saw how things were
going and wrote to some of my Whig relatives in England.  One, my
mother's brother, smoothed the path for me.  I alienated my father,
however, by taking advantage of my uncle's offer.  I went to
England and attended college at Exeter.

"There I met the son of a cloth merchant, Francis Baring, whose
friendship has been invaluable and abiding.  You will see in this
Protestant Bible where he has written a number of things which we
then thought profound.  And it was he who drew these three clasped
hands on the flyleaf.  The third hand was for John Henry Nolte, now
a merchant at Hamburg.  We were inseparable and it is not often
that three people get on so well together.  Years later, just
before my daughter was married"--Mr. Bonnyfeather paused--"the
three of us took a long journey together through England and
Scotland.  I saw then for the last time the estate of which there
will be no fourth marquis.  But I was nobly entertained by both
John and Francis Baring in London.  I have since prospered greatly
as a merchant myself by remembering as a nobleman what a king once
said, 'L'exactitude est la politesse des rois!'  You should
remember that, too."

Mr. Bonnyfeather invariably ended his oft-repeated story in that
way.  Something in the intonation of the last phrase, something in
the man's attitude and expression as he rehearsed it, looking at
the boy over the candles with a supreme earnestness, gradually
impressed upon Anthony that for some reason or other here was a
tradition he was expected to follow.  Further than that Mr.
Bonnyfeather dared not permit himself to go.  Anthony remained
silent.  They would get up at last and go over by the fire.

It was at such times over his port that Mr. Bonnyfeather became
most genial.  He then jumped all doubts and scruples and secretly
permitted himself the luxury of feeling that he was talking to his
grandson.  He had been lonely for years and to have so pleasant and
bright a companion as young Anthony sitting before the fire sped
their association mightily.  He wrapped the boy in a haze of
carefully concealed affection, but as time went on gradually opened
his heart.

The intimacy and remote ramifications of his business and of the
personalities connected with it were discussed as if Anthony had
been years older and were the heir of the house.  The boy sat and
listened gravely.  But upon occasion Anthony could also delight
with a well-timed question, a smile of understanding, or a
surprising reply.  The voyages of ships were traced out on the map
and globe.  Anthony gradually became familiar with most of the
great harbours of the world; what was to be had in them, the names
and personalities of the merchants, market conditions; what, in a
general sense, from politics to planting, was afoot in Europe and
America.  Nor was it a hardship to listen.  With Mr. Bonnyfeather,
he became lost in it.  The little hectic spots glowed on the old
man's cheek bones and the boy talked too, or listened with open
lips and glowing eyes.  An hour of this after supper, and they
would sit down to write the letters resulting from the talk.  These
were of such a character that Mr. Bonnyfeather did not desire them
to go across the desks of the clerks.

Thus Anthony rapidly stepped into being the old man's secretary.
As time went on he was able and not afraid to suggest a better
phrase here and there or a more trenchant approach.  He strove
always to see the men to whom the letters were addressed.  He
learned all he could about them from the captains who had dealt
with them, or from the files of correspondence in the vault.  There
was a roomful.  But before he was sixteen he had read nearly all of
it.  The net which the firm of Bonnyfeather and those that it dealt
with cast over the waters of the world was surprisingly well
integrated in his mind.  Helping always to weave the meshes firmer
and closer was the constant talk of the harbour front that daily
flooded his ears.  But it was not all business by any means which
occupied these evenings.

In Mr. Bonnyfeather's room were his books.  They were a strange
assortment.  The intellectual, political, and spiritual adventures
of his family might be read in their titles.  The Covenanters as
well as the Jacobites were represented.  The conversion of Mr.
Bonnyfeather's father to Catholicism had not prevented his son from
bringing back from Exeter a collection at which the Librorum
Prohibitorum would have shied.

Anthony pored over these.  He became lost in the maze of the Faërie
Queene.  The illustrations, and afterwards the text of Fox's Book
of Martyrs first gave him some conception of the Protestant side of
the controversy.  He was amazed to discover it at all.  Baxter's
Saints' Rest scared him sick.  It required Toussaint to reassure
him.  Father Xavier might have been amazed, to say the least, to
have seen the pastures in which his pupil was not only wandering
but feeding.  Mr. Bonnyfeather had considerable Shakespeare by
heart and was given to a little rodomontade in its recitation,
especially of the first part of Henry IV, and The Merchant of
Venice.  It served to turn the trick for the boy who would scarcely
otherwise have been able to understand at first the nature of the
stage.  The lonely island in The Tempest haunted him.  Somehow he
thought Mr. Bonnyfeather in his black velvet suit, leaning over the
globe and conjuring forth cargoes, was like Prospero.

Before he left Livorno Anthony had whole passages of Religio Medici
by heart.  Milton's Italian poems first attracted him, then the
Latin.  It seemed perfectly natural to the polyglot nature of the
boy that a poet should write in many tongues.  As the music of
English became more audible to him he went on to L'Allegro and Il
Penseroso.  Paradise Lost made him drunk.  His own experience of
visions and dreams at the convent made the scenes and images of the
poem rise up for him as if fixed on his retina.  The incandescent
light, the lambent glooms of the blind poet's dramatic universe
peopled by even brighter gods and darker heroes remained for
Anthony always the supreme banquet of words in any tongue.  There
was nothing like the sound of it anywhere else, that great,
perfectly controlled, almighty organ vibrating and filling with
oceanic and cosmic harmony the cathedral of the mind.  It made the
Italian operas which he later went to hear at Livorno with Vincent
Nolte seem ridiculous.  Sometimes the contrast would come across
him as he watched a romantic little cockchafer in red tights
warbling and strutting melodramatically before his trilling
ladybird while brigands supplied harmony.  Or he thought of it when
the meretricious, saccharine roar of the finale sounded.  Then he
would laugh, and Vincent, whose syrupy German soul was congealing
into sweet crystals and beer, would hiccough with indignation.

Milton and Dante dramatized theology for Anthony.  For him it could
never be abstract.  Even the Holy Ghost had personality.  He had a
comforting smile.

It was with this life-endowing quality of the mind that Anthony
passed on from the poets and vivifiers of language to the
necromancers of words.  On the middle shelf was a long and daunting
array of Catholic and Protestant polemics, theological treatises,
works of piety and religion.  Anthony had made up his mind to read
all the books in the room.  So he read these, too; Augustine to
Calvin, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Origen, and the Reverend Adonijah
Parkhurst.  He strained his eyes over Kerson's Practical
Cathechisme, plunged into Bishop Burton, and heard the remote noise
of the sectaries through the years of James I to Charles II arguing
somewhere in space.  All were totally disconnected in time.  They
merely occurred on the shelf.  All were in words, all were
therefore about something.

A universe landscaped with the strange heavens of religious
utopiasters; full of maimed souls thrillingly rescued from or
delivered to the devil burst on his view.  Innocent and inane first
parents in delightful, tropical paradises; shining battlements of
the City of God on hills clouded by lightning gleamed like oases
amid the dark deserts of limbo, where old gentlemen with wigs like
Mr. Bonnyfeather's and terrific names gibbered and twittered moral
aphorisms and definitions while pouring dust on their own heads.
Or they threw worm-eaten tomes at one another.  Underneath, always
underneath, were the hot, the cold, and the dry, the wet, the
noisy, the silent hells.  These he could see were logical pictures
of indignant devices invented to punish in the other world ghastly
extremes of conduct in this.  In short, on the middle shelf of Mr.
Bonnyfeather's bookcase was a fair cross-section of the Western
mind which having lost its own religion was trying to confer Greek
order on Semitic nonsense.  All of these books were obsessed by one
thought.  They were perfectly sure that one God controlled
everything.  Yet Anthony read in one Nicole, "Dieu est la Diable,
c'est-la toute la religion."

Fortunately for him, most of this curious babble was lost on the
boy.  Yet his mind retained queer snatches of it, voices that later
on would shout advice about his conduct out of limbo.  It seemed to
him as if a troop of these disembodied theologians followed his
earthly experience arguing.  Occasionally some louder voice would
make itself intelligible, shouting a distinct message to him out of
the disputing crowd.  In the meantime the gods and demons, the
troops of angels, seraphim, and the apocalyptic landscapes were
certainly fascinating.

Lowest of all on the shelves, but in big volumes like foundations
of the edifice which they in fact supported, were the classics.
They were all in Latin for Mr. Bonnyfeather read no Greek.
Something in his accurate and precise Scotch mind loved Latin.  But
he was not scholar enough to carry this to a pedantic extreme.
Roman life did not come to an end for him when Cicero ceased to
fulminate.  It and Mr. Bonnyfeather went on.

In his old age he had come to like Claudian better than Virgil.
The hills of Sicily rolling their flowers close down to the sea,
but always in a "wildly cultivated" manner, the absurd panegyrics
of contemptible tyrants and defeated generals, which yet retained
the method of true praise; all this seemed to him as he read
Claudian to speak not only of Rome but of his own time.  He too
could feel the tang of something magnificent coming to an end with
confusion to follow.  The barbarians were so near.

In the pages of Ammianus Marcellinus the groans and weariness of
the great Roman machine rumbling to its end were audible.  Yet how
great were those heroes and emperors who repaired its disintegrations
with the bones of their bodies and the virtue of their souls!  How
terrible were the selfish tyrants feasting in the midst of
catastrophe!  Mr. Bonnyfeather would stride up and down reading from
the great book, intoning it, while Anthony leaned forward.  The
story of Julian fascinated them.  Ah! how much Europe needed someone
like that now, someone to thrust out the sick new things and bring
back the strong old gods as they were.  Prussian Frederick could not
do it, said the merchant.  But there was this man Buonaparte.  Some
people thought . . . at any rate from the roof they had seen the
cannon flashing one night over the horizon and ships on fire.  The
English did not want him.  The old man shook his head.  Perhaps they
are wrong, those islanders.  "I, you see, have had my feet on the
mainland for some time now," he would say.  Then he would end by
reading an ancient description of the valley of the Moselle:


Immemorial vines embower the pleasant, white villas.  The cup of
the valley receives the bounty of the sun god, the gratitude of man
rises in pious incense from the hills.  The dead are honoured in
the households of the living, and the spirit of the distant
emperors in the towns.  The magistrates punish vice with the
approval of the many virtuous.  The rich desire no roses in
January; they enjoy them with the peasants in the spring.  In the
amphitheatres the extreme rage of the barbarian provides spectacles
for the multitude and laughter for the cultivated; in the fields
his chained vigour enhances the crops.  The songs of the tenants
are heard upon the estates of great landlords.  Fortune is seldom
invoked, for no change is desired.  Through all the valley winds
the River Moselle in three reflecting curves.


Anthony understood from the tones of Mr. Bonny feather's voice that
he was yearning for something he had lost, trying to find a country
where he could be fully alive and at ease at the same time.  The
book of Marcellinus and that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau which he and
Toussaint were reading both placed that country in the past.  It
was also there in the Bible and in the theologians--that happy
garden!  Everybody seemed to have lost it and to be trying to get
back to it.  He himself at times already regretted the convent
garden.

The madonna had come from there.  He had brought her along with
him.  She was still in his room.  He could return to her at night
as an orphan wanderer from the old convent courtyard, or like an
exile from the garden or the valley of the Moselle--or whatever it
was he lost in the daytime--and be at peace again.  The madonna
understood.  She listened to him.  He could tell her of his
troubles during the day.  Books could not take her away from him,
let them say whatever they might.  All those crowds of people
talking about God stayed outside in the desert.  Those who argued
could not enter this oasis.  He knew!  They spent the night howling
outside, pouring dust on their own heads.  As though from the
living boughs of paradise he felt the bright face of the madonna
looking down upon him while he slept.

Faith would invariably be waiting for him when he left Mr.
Bonnyfeather's room and crossed the hall to go into his own.  It
was part of her routine to see that the house was closed and that
all were asleep.  At night she felt better and more awake than in
the daytime.  To watch all the others retire, leaving her to
darkness, gave her a sense of superiority and freedom in which she
revelled.  She prowled, silently.  She picked over a chicken and
sipped a glass of wine in the kitchen.  The embers of the dying
charcoal looked at her with small red eyes.  She sat in corners and
contemplated.

Anthony would find her sitting just behind her own door which was
opposite his.  He did not see her.  He became aware of her.  The
darkness there was slightly disarranged.  Its folds seemed to
blend, as the jade lamp burnt dimly, with the distorted shadows of
the wings and hour-glass carved above the lintel of Mr.
Bonnyfeather's door.  Whether she watched him or not he did not
know.

After he had gone to bed, she would come in, fold up his clothes,
rearrange the covers and bid him good night.  There was a hint of
affection when she touched him, as she did often, which he felt it
wrong to repulse but from which he almost shrank.  In the balance
he remained passive.  From the time she had nursed him just after
his arrival, she had thus speciously kept the key of his room as it
were in her apron pocket.  Sometimes she would sit down by the
candles on his dresser and talk.

There was a smooth quality in her voice that soothed him.  As she
talked, always of personalities about the office and yard, he would
watch a curious finger-play of shadows that took place at the foot
of his bed on the white wall.  Perhaps it was the shadow of the
curtain or the flow of the candle.  He and the madonna looked at
it.  Long, black fingers, semi-transparent here and there, kept
twitching wantonly at an inflamed point of light.  As this went on
and her voice accompanied it, he would slowly drift into sleep.
Sometimes he would awake a little after she had gone, rise, and
close the door to be alone with the madonna.  Another presence
interfered.  He found it necessary to keep it out.  As the months
slipped by and all became a matter of habit, he grew less sensitive
to such feelings.  He began to take the real world to bed with him.
Only the lashes when they at last rested on his cheeks finally
allowed nothing real to pass.

In the cope over the madonna's head the little stars twinkled as
the great ones did above the house.  The madonna kept looking past
the child in her arms into the shadows and darkness of the room as
if something were there.  Anthony had not noticed that yet.  To
discover it, her expression must be carefully studied in the light
as Don Luis had once done.  Don Luis had understood how to use
light and shadow only too well.

What was in the darkness bided its time silently.




CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PAGAN MORNINGS


Early in the morning, long before the flags were flying from the
roof of the Casa da Bonnyfeather, Angela, the cook, drove out in
her high-wheeled cart to collect fresh delicacies for the
merchant's table from all the country around.

The cart was nothing more than a strong, framed platform resting on
a high axle with an underslung rack behind it long enough to lie
down upon.  The rack with its dangling ropes was really for wine
kegs.  The shafts, which also formed the beams of the wagon
platform, ranged straight forward parallel with the ground but
pointed toward each other at the ends--as Anthony thought, like
parallel lines becoming intimate near infinity.  Between them there
was just room enough for the lean shoulders and fat rump of a happy
little mule.

To the animal's plump sides the padded shafts of the cart were
lashed by looped ropes that passed criss-cross over a yellow pack-
saddle.  The pack-saddle rested in turn upon a broad scarlet pad.
A brown leather collar resembling a huge horseshoe engaged bronze
rings on the shaft ends with two brass hooks.  It seemed to envelop
the forward part of the animal hopelessly.  Indeed, from this
encumbrance the head of the mule projected like a mounted hunting
trophy.  But its eyes were shielded by beaded straw blinders, it
wore a plaited hair bridle, and before its smooth chest dangled an
object like a small, brass umbrella shedding strings of parachutes.
These were bells.

To meet Angela and her cart in the early morning upon the country
roads about Livorno was a spontaneously exhilarating experience.
As the cart approached in a light cloud of dust and a swirl of
leaves, a mad rhythm shaking its bells, there was something
Dionysian about it.  One of the small Christian chapels of the
neighbouring hill country might, it seemed, have suffered a pagan
relapse during the grape harvest and be revelling along on a
heathen pilgrimage at a scandalous rate.

The clean, polished heels of the little mule kicked the pebbles out
behind him in a lateral hail.  The grey, olive-wood spokes were
frequently all but invisible.  Behind the mule, the car seemed to
float horizontally, or to be falling forward downhill in a mist of
speed.  It looked as if the mule were pursued by it.  And on the
platform sat Angela, a fat, abundant Earth Mother, leaning back
against a wine cask.

Her scarlet slippers, her bright green dress, her flashing smile
under her brilliant red hair matched the colour and design of the
ribbed canvas hood overhead embroidered with horseshoes, suns, and
shooting stars.  Her whip cracked merrily, and stung.  But no less
so than the pungent Tuscan drolleries with which she was given to
favour passing travellers and acquaintances on the road.
Franciscan fathers would by sheer instinct, and at the very first
glimpse of the cart, hitch the rope about their waist a little
tighter, and cross themselves as she passed.

"Christ may have died in vain," said Toussaint to himself one
morning, as he halted in the courtyard and ran his stick over the
spokes which gave out a muted harplike sound, "but here is a
perfect pagan thing made by the hand of man and acceptable to God."
Of course Anthony was wild to ride in it.

It was not difficult to assume an invitation.  He would simply
excuse himself from the flag-raising ceremony or deputize Toussaint
in his place.  Then having risen very early, he would crawl into
the wine rack under the cart and wait while Tony hitched the mule
and the family Guessippi performed its ablutions in the court.

This early morning cleansing was the only orderly procedure in the
riotous routine of their day.  Washing had been rigorously decreed
by Faith herself.  It was therefore enforced by the fear of the
evil eye and regarded by the juvenile Guessippis as a malign decree
of fate, without reason but inevitable.

As soon as the courtyard was thoroughly light the tribe emerged
from the kitchen door in that state in which it had pleased God to
deliver them to their parents.  They were lined up before the
fountain in the order tall to small, the younger ones whimpering in
a subdued manner.  Angela, the eldest, with an imperturbable
expression on her bright, olive face, then soused them each with a
bucket of cold water.  One muffled whoop apiece was permitted.
Just before the water descended Angela called aloud the name of the
victim.  After each baptism "M" or "N" was permitted to depart
immediately for the kitchen to dress.

Thus were daily cleansed and brought to physical grace and the
communion of men Arnolfo, Maria, Nicolò, Beatrice, Claudia,
Federigo, Pietro, Innocenza, and Jacopo Guessippi.  Luigi the
infant was mercifully permitted to remain in his cradle stewing
comfortably in his own juice near the kitchen fire.

After the last bucketful had descended upon the smallest, young
Angela herself would glide behind the clump of snarled tritons
composing the central group of the fountain, drop her frock, slip
in as deep as her firm, little, pearlike breasts, and wriggle out
again.  Then after a few moments' mystery with an old towel and
snaggled comb she would reappear, climb into the back of the cart
on the wine-rack, settle herself comfortably into the straw, and
smile at Anthony.

As often as possible especially in the spring and summer, Anthony
made it a point to drive out with Angela and to attend this lay
baptismal rite of the early morning.  The rigmarole of the
children's names captivated him.  The soft vowels and consonants
fell as liquidly from the lips of little Angela as did the water
from the bucket which followed them.  "Arnolfo--swish, Maria--
swish, Nicolò, Beatrice, Claudia, Federigo--swish."

As time went on these names burned themselves upon Anthony's
memory.  He would mumble over them at his desk like a priest at
prayer.  In the mornings he began to call them out with Angela.  It
added a new zest to the occasion.  They chanted them together.
Years afterwards he had but to repeat the formula and the scene
would rise before him.

There was to him something mysterious about it.  The early morning
shapes of the things about, the characters that composed it, the
event itself took on a meaning in another world beside reality.
It was like an ancient ritual the function of which had been
forgotten.  Life was full of things like that for Anthony,
happenings that seemed to hide their true significance in a mist of
impersonal memory always about to be clear.

If he could only remember what he had forgotten!  For a long while
he kept trying to do so.  Gradually as he grew older the feeling
wore away.  Then at times it would overcome him as if he were
homesick again.  Something would remind him of something better
somewhere else.  Perhaps in this case it was the repetition of the
scene in precisely the same terms, its inevitableness, that made it
take on an importance which could not be accounted for merely by
common sense.

The nine naked children lined up before the little girl--he should
have done something to lessen their discomfort, but he could not.
Their dismal expectation of the inevitable aroused his pity, and
yet it was ludicrous.  Gradually he came to understand how he could
remain merely a spectator.  It was because these children were
suffering what was to them mysteriously ordained, what was the
common lot of all of them.  It was in their different methods of
confronting the bucket of cold water that the interest lay.

The stoical Arnolfo thrust out his already faintly hairy chest and
allowed fate to run off him as from a roof.  Innocenza shivered,
the thin-legged Claudia wept, plump Beatrice pleaded, the sullen
Pietro dodged.  As spectator Anthony was each in turn.  He enjoyed
where the actors could not, but he also felt with them that fate
was unavoidable.  When their names were called the water descended
from on high.  It stifled the howls.  It descended upon those
forked, naked things, on Nicolò, on Maria, even upon the tiny
Jacopo who retired with a pair of cherubic buttocks twinkling under
a bucket that engulfed his head and shoulders.  From it floated
back faintly musical lamentations.

Unknown to himself, before that fountain in the courtyard of the
Casa da Bonnyfeather, Anthony lost most of his idle sensations
about and tendencies to dream curiously over the human form.  His
curiosity was surfeited, he saw that humanity was a shape, repeated
endlessly with minor variations, and that these minor variations
were unimportant in themselves.  All one could tell by them was the
way that certain kinds of people might act when the cold water
descended.  Thin people, he saw, acted differently from the fat
ones.  There was not so much difference between boys and girls.  He
learned this from what he saw rather than from what he thought.

Now he saw why the stone children that had danced around the
fountain at the convent had all been made the same.  They were
children of one idea and not each one a variation upon it.  They
were like the idea from which they sprang, all beautiful and happy.
But to sympathize with the Guessippi children he must in turn be
Tom, Dick, and Harry.  Only part of him was in them at any one
time.  All of him had danced with the stone children.

How long ago that seemed!  How old were the stone children?  Oh
very old!  He did not feel new.  He felt older than most people in
the world about him.  At least he thought so, lying in the cart
waiting for little Angela.

So he thought too lying in his room at night looking at the
madonna.  She remained.  She and he remained as they always had
been.  All that went on during the day passed in a space between
them which they both overlooked at night.  Some time he would creep
back whence he had come.  He would go back and be close to her like
that other child in her arms.  Other children ran back to their
mothers.  He longed sometimes to do that, too.  It was a need, a
desire he did not question.

As for the Guessippi children he made them tolerable to himself by
imagining them to be like the stone children in the ring.  All
alike, beautiful, dancing under the cold water.  Now he could be
happy with such beautiful things.  Their little individual
differences had vanished.  He did not have to sympathize with each
in turn.

As for little Angela she certainly belonged to the children of the
stone ring--to that time.  She had only stepped out of it into now.
He could see how smooth, how delightful and graceful, how self-
contained she was.  Impersonal.  Her being was equivalent to
affectionate and caressing sounds, coolness and softness thought of
warmly.  "Maea," he called her secretly.  This word simply bubbled
out of the feeling of the fifteen-year-old boy as he lay in the
"perfectly pagan" wine cart.

He was envied secretly by Toussaint who passed by with his basin in
the early morning with tired eyes to dash cold water upon those
windows of his disappointed soul.  He too would have liked to ride
in that cart back into Arcady with little Angela.  He would wink
knowingly, conveying by merely assuming it as adults do his own
immense experience and prophetic insight to Anthony.

Anthony would wink back, but it was with him only a greeting.  He
was not thinking about Toussaint.  He was waiting for little Angela
to finish her bath behind the fountain and to join him in the cart.

There was an assurance, a complete and happy naturalness about
"Angela Maea" that he liked from the first.  From the vast mass of
her mother she had sprouted like an unexpected, delicate bud from a
log.  The bud had grown into a slim, young branch.  When she joined
Anthony in the cart, drops from her bath in the fountain would
still be glittering in her hair.  Her breath was sweet and her face
was brown and firm with dark red lips.  It seemed as if she had
just been passing over a meadow gathering mushrooms before sunrise.
Her brown eyes appraised him frankly and liked him.  Before the
cart would start they would lie and look at each other with quiet
delight.

Then Angela the great would ascend the cart.  Looking up from the
little rack in which they lay at the enormous proportions of the
woman before and above them they would both laugh.  How different
from themselves!  "Angela," they would both whisper together as if
still calling the roll of those about to be cleansed before the
fountain.  The vision evoked convulsed them.

Then the whip would crack, then the mule would clatter along
through the still deserted streets, through the gate as the morning
gun was fired from the Castell' Vecchio--and out onto the long,
white road to Pisa.  It was that way they nearly always took.
Anthony abandoned himself on the hills to the sensation of speed.
He was going somewhere.  He felt free.  The hills of the world were
before him.  Of them he could never see enough.  The pungent smell
of burning olive wood, of myrtles, or of a slope of vineyards in
blossom seemed to fill his head.  It was good.  Somehow it was
often strangely familiar.  There was dew on the new-mown hay.  The
drops of moisture in Angela's hair drew rainbows.  From the
farmyards as they passed came the shrill cry of chanticleers that
ran over the hills into one far-off, continuous song of morning.
They answered the birds in shrill mockery together.  Great Angela
never looked back.  Her back was far too broad even to try to see
all that went on behind it.

Big Angela knew the countryside like a cookbook: where the best oil
was to be had, who had the fattest ducks, the farm where the
freshest cress grew, the most luscious broccoli.  As she made stop
after stop for bargain and purchase, they drew farther and farther
back into the hills.

To the sound of endless chaffer and the clink of small bronze or
silver coins the cart took on more and more the aspect of a bit of
the hanging market gardens of Babylon on wheels.  The small casks
behind were filled with wine, the hampers under the fat woman's
elbows grew loud with cacklings and quacks.  From between the
wicker bars thrust forth the snake-like, hissing heads of geese.
In his muffled basket a cock hailed a false dawn.  Bunches of
beets, garlic, onions, heads of lettuce, fruit were suspended from
the roof.  A small pig twisted on the floor bound by the heels.

On top of all this like a figure of plenty with the harvest about
her sat the mountainous woman, a flower thrust into her flaming
hair.  From behind, the happy faces of Angela and Anthony seemed to
mock at famine and the passer-by.  Sometimes they drove out far
enough to look down into the valley of the Arno with the river
twisting through the white villages and grey olive orchards that
swept away with it to the sea.  They could see the little people
tending their vines between the living posts of the mulberry tree.
White oxen ploughed and lowed plaintively.  Always to the west was
the blue flash from tables of sea.  Returning, Anthony could look
north where the Apennines shouldered away vaguely into the light
and haze, growing clearer and greener as the day gained on itself.

Once down a byroad he saw the red roofs of the convent.  His
pigeons were still circling about the tree.  How far off was that,
how long ago!  At the city gate there was always an argument about
the amount of the tax.  Then they would be home, cries of hungry
acclamation following them along the street.  In the noisy drive
through the town streets he and little Angela kept close.  In the
courtyard they slipped away from each other quietly.  She to the
kitchen, he to the office.

Mr. Bonnyfeather condoned these excursions, enjoyed them secretly.
McNab frowned.  Toussaint smiled.  A small package of cheese was
usually his share and a whispered description of the trip.  Then
the pens would scratch on.

Faith did not approve of these morning adventures, but she said
nothing.  Anthony, she thought, spent too much time with the
Guessippis.  She began to find work for little Angela whenever she
could.  The games of hide-and-seek, the romps with the children in
the kitchen wing grew somewhat more difficult and further between.
Anthony was fast growing up.  Somehow Faith made him feel this.
Her effect upon him was something of a paradox.  In her presence he
felt older, less embarrassed, yet she continued to put him to bed
like a child.




CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

PHILOSOPHICAL AFTERNOONS


Toussaint Clairveaux, Gentleman Writer,

Monsieur:--It is my desire that you will undertake the instruction
of the young clerk, Anthony Adverse, now apprenticed to me, with
the end in view of founding him in the following specific things,
to wit:  Easy and Legible Penmanship for both Letters and Accounts
(I provide you with models of the letters and figures I wish him to
use), facility in Arithmetic with particular application to the
accounts of this firm, Geometry with application to hoisting
machinery, tackles, and navigation, Geography (he already knows the
Globes), let him memorize the entire list of names of places,
natural features; in short the principal legend on the set of
English great-charts with which I shall provide you, Natural
History in all branches so that he may have a knowledge of the
first origins of various products and the localities from which
they come, a history of trade sufficient to understand the origin
and meaning of commercial regulations, agreements, usages, and the
laws of trade and exchange now generally in force, a knowledge of
the different classes and qualities of manufactured and natural
goods, products and materials (for this you will call in the
assistance of Mr. William McNab for three hours a week in the
storeroom, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Do not neglect this.  Let
the boy be able to tell the qualities of cloth by the feel of them
in the dark.  Let him educate his taste and smell in teas, wines,
and spices.  It is my desire that you supplement his practice in
commercial letter writing in French, English, Spanish and Italian
by instruction in the grammar of these tongues, calling in
assistance when necessary).  I shall myself oversee his Latin.  You
may draw on the chief clerk for buying what books you deem
necessary, first looking upon my own shelves to ascertain that you
do not duplicate unnecessarily.

Knowing you to be a man of liberal education and wide reading,
albeit somewhat unfortunate in your private financial ventures, I
have nevertheless confided A.A. to your charge.  Conduct your
instruction so far as possible in French.  Act (confidentially), on
the supposition that you are preparing this boy for the situation
in life of a gentleman-merchant.  In addition to this I recommend
to bring to his attention such works of the Modern Encyclopaedists,
Philosophers, and Savants as you can best present yourself, having
regard to the tender years of your pupil.  I exclude Voltaire.

You are to regard yourself in authority as the boy's tutor.  The
afternoons are made over to you until further notice.  Both you and
your pupil will be released from the office from dinner time to
five o'clock post meridian.  Waste not the time yourself nor permit
the boy to do so.  Your salary is increased during the time in
which you instruct him by twenty-five scudos the month and you will
take your noon meal at the big table.  Fear nothing in letting me
know wherein you cannot fulfil that I may call in aid.  I trust you
with much, a mind, and perhaps a soul.  May the Holy Trinity guide
you,

JOHN BONNYFEATHER.


So day after day and year by year the instruction went on.  The
maps crinkled on the big table while in imagination Anthony sailed
out through all the world.  "Pass from Hamburg to Pondicherry,"
Toussaint would say and the boy would begin.  "But you arrive first
off the coast of Coromandel," Toussaint would remark afterwards
with a slight hint of reproach as if a breach in etiquette had been
committed by Anthony's omission.  Then the Frenchman would start in
to talk of the countries, the towns, the cities, and the rivers;
their history, who traded there for what.  If there was a classical
legend or story about any blur of colour on the map which they
passed in these mythical voyages, Toussaint rehearsed it.  To many
of these places in the course of his hopeless search for Arcadia he
had been himself.

"At Malacca are settled many old Chinese merchants who sit smoking
opium by their lily ponds or sipping little cups of rice wine.
There is good quail hunting in the country behind.  In Cochin China
they allow fish to rot upon the roofs and from this they make sauce
for their dishes.  The liquor is brown and put in the center
compartment of the divided dish.  Only pretend to dip your bamboo
shoots in it when you dine with these merchants.  Make a delectable
noise when you eat.  It is good manners.  The charts of the
northern coast of Van Diemen's Land are cartographers' dreams,
Terra Australis Incognita.  Stand off from Bermuda ten miles and
burn flares for a pilot.  Nothing is to be had there but onions,
oranges, yellow fever, and trouble with the admiral.  At Malta the
drinking water is all brought from Africa and stinks.  Since the
Reformation most of the knights are French.  They choose only old
men as grand masters in order to keep things in their own hands and
have frequent elections which are profitable.  St. Paul himself was
wrecked there.  The inhabitants are really Phoenicians.  There is a
bad fever peculiar to the place."

Thus the maps took on reality, and what Toussaint did not know
Anthony heard sooner or later at the Big Table or in talking with
Mr. Bonnyfeather at night.

For two years the boy kept a set of ships' account books for McNab.
It was for the Unicorn.  At the end of that time Anthony attempted
to balance them with the hatchet-faced Captain Bittern.  In January
of the year before he found the captain had made a mistake.  The
captain himself pointed it out to him.  It was serious.  After four
hours continuous talk on the subject of Bottomry and agents'
commissions Anthony saw what was wrong, but he did not feel sorry.

Bottomry, indeed, was the boy's bête noire.  There was a young
lawyer in Livorno by the name of Baldasseroni who was an expert in
this terrible subject.  Assurance in general was his hobby.  For
several months he came once a week at Mr. Bonnyfeather's request
and lectured for hours at a time on the theory and practice of
Bottomry.  Toussaint finally tried to get rid of him by engaging
him in an argument as to the desirability of old age pensions as
lately suggested by the republican writer Thomas Paine.  In trying
to work out a scheme for the Island of Corsica the two quarrelled
over the possible number of old people in the island.  "Before the
French came," said Toussaint, "the feuds prevented anyone from
reaching old age."  The lawyer became enraged at this insult to
Italians and challenged Toussaint to a duel.

There was no way of getting out of it.  So one afternoon with McNab
as Toussaint's second they rode out to a lonely beach and shot at
each other.  Anthony was so thrilled as to be delighted.  The
bullet of Toussaint passed through the haunches of Signore
Baldasseroni.  McNab plugged him up with his handkerchief, for he
threatened to bleed to death.  Nevertheless, the laughter of the
Scot was Homeric.  "'Twas an aspect of Bottomry the signore had no
confarred suffeecint thoct upon you maun say," he remarked to Mr.
Bonnyfeather who smiled grimly and dropped the subject from the
"curriculum."

Toussaint strutted about like a peacock for days.  He felt himself
to be a gentleman again.  Signore Baldasseroni meditated for some
weeks on the bottom he had neglected to insure.  Anthony was
relieved.  Yet the primary facts of marine and other assurance
remained in the boy's mind flavoured with a curious reminiscent
humour and human connotations.

To a romantic like Toussaint assurance was a road to Utopia, for
the selfish and ruthless it was a method of cashing in on old ships
and drowned sailors.  This was what Mr. Bonnyfeather said about it.
To most Latins it was a form of the lottery.  Therefore, you
assured ships with honest, literal, and unimaginative persons.  The
British were best.  "The kind of people that meet in the little
room at Lloyds, for instance," said the old man.  "I once went
there with Francis Baring.  Those people were able to read figures
without lying to themselves or each other about them."  "This,"
thought Anthony, "is the final value of arithmetic.  It is why
McNab and not Toussaint, who is a much more brilliant mathematician,
is chief clerk."  Anthony had already begun to see around the
Frenchman a little.  Against the background of many others he began
to stand out in relief.  It was possible to see already that behind
him were certain shadows.

All that the boy learned, no matter how abstract, remained for him
in the terms of men.  Even the stars came down out of their spheres
to assume human meaning.

John Peel Williams, ex-mate of the ship Lion, living on his own
scanty savings and the bounty of Mr. Bonnyfeather, came down from
his garret in the slums once a week to give practical instruction
in the use of the instruments of navigation.  He had huge, steady
hands and the voice of a hoarse sea lion.  While the old house
shook to his rumbling and grumbling, the abstract geometry of
Toussaint was snatched down out of nowhere and suddenly became the
earth and other spheres around it.  Outlines of terrestrial and
celestial circles, zeniths and nadirs, of small ships crawling
through angles and degrees displayed themselves in blue chalk on
the floor of the ballroom from Friday to Monday when they were
finally washed away.  Navigation had been Mr. Williams' only
intellectual escape from his own dull soul.  His emotional exit was
by way of alcohol.  The first was his God and the second his demon.
A subtle combination of both evoked in him the inspired teacher.

He had read extensively in "navigation" but in nothing else.  His
admiration for the universe was due solely to his own comment upon
it, oft, and eternally repeated, "I tell you the stars cannot lie."
Mr. Williams proceeded by the method of the elimination of
negatives.  He showed Anthony that all other methods than the
particular one he proposed were wrong.  Thus with immense gusto he
orated into limbo the astrolabe.  He disposed vigorously of the
cross-staff with profound pity for those who had been forced to
discover new worlds by its doubtful aid.  He frowned upon the half-
arc, and he finally with enormous and dramatic emphasis produced
his sextant out of a shining leather case, extolled it with
infinite explanations, and ascending to the roof, roaring like a
bull in springtime, shot the astonished sun.  So much for latitude.

As to longitude there was still great difficulty.  "Owing," said
Mr. Williams, "not to the stars, which cannot lie, but to our own
unfortunate position on the earth.  The English Admiralty has long
offered a prize for the best method of solving it.  The log of the
day's run and the careful knowledge of drift due to winds,
currents, and the ship's habits are the best we can as yet do.  But
that is guess work, the rule of thumb.  I hear that the comparison
of clocks has been suggested, but I myself am at work on a bi-focal
mirror, two mirrors and an hemisphere.  With mirror '1' you take
the sun at sunrise, with mirror '2' you take the moon at moonrise.
You mark the path of their rays as extended upon the hemisphere.
The place," said Mr. Williams, leaning forward and lowering his
voice to half a gale, "the place where these rays intersect, will,
if properly calculated from the data provided by my table, that I
am preparing slowly, very slowly, and the degrees marked on the
hemisphere, give you your longitude.  The chief difficulty is owing
to the shifty nature of the moon.  However, let me show you this
astonishing instrument."

They ascended together the five pairs of stairs of his lodging.  At
the top floor a door across the hall half opened.  An old woman
looked out expectantly.  Seeing the mate she shoved the door shut
again.  "She is a decayed gentlewoman," said he in a whisper not
audible more than four floors away, "who makes her living by
astrology on the fifth floor and keeping girls on the first.  She
has written a book.  In it are all the old lies about the stars."
His voice growled with indignation.  He picked up a poor, cheaply
bound volume and commenced to read like a tremulous cannon.


It is said by savants that the angles of the three great pyramids
denote a shifting in the position of the North Star.  There will
come a time when Polaris will no longer mark the extension of the
axis from the northern pole of the earth.


Anthony saw the door across the hall open slightly and the head of
the old woman protrude listening.  She saw him, and put her finger
on her lips.

"Think of it, think of it!" roared the mate.  "Here is an old woman
who has written a book denying the whole truth of the beautiful and
eternal science of navigation.  She would have the pole star itself
shift.  What then would become of all the books and tables founded
upon the fact that Polaris remains forever fixed?  What would
become of them, I say?"  His rage was extreme.  The door across the
hall closed again.  The mate bellowed on now like a wounded animal.
The book shook in his hand.


The stars of the Dipper outline the womb of our universe.  Out of
the tail of the Great Bear were born the sun and the seven planets
that we see.  The ancient religions of the earth preserve this
essential tradition.  The era of Christianity itself can be read in
the dial of the stars.  We are now entering upon the last phase of
an epoch when man has worshipped himself.  God is about to become
matter.  Nature, God and man will be taken for one.  All things
will then become confused.  Words themselves will come to have no
meaning.  Babel will ensue.  When the sun enters upon the region of
the Water Carrier a new spiritual man will arrive.  The soul will
again recognize itself.  The cycle is repeating itself. . . .


The mate broke off and hurled the volume into the corner.

"Come up on the roof," said he, "and see my instrument.  It is a
waste of time to read such words."

They climbed up a ladder to a trap door.  On the tiles, resting on
a light platform was a half globe covered with quicksilver and
marked with degrees around the edge.  Two mirrors on rods shifted
about it.  "Now," said the mate, "we are getting back to facts
again!  But I will tell you something.  It is my own discovery.
Latitude and longitude are the same thing!  With these two mirrors
I shall prove it to you."  He proceeded to manipulate them.  Small
suns glittered on the quicksilver globe.  He became fascinated.
His voice boomed on as he continued for a full half hour to confuse
the astonished boy who tried to follow him.  Anthony could make
nothing of it.  The tone of the man's voice reminded him of
Toussaint's when he was reading or talking about Rousseau.  It was
what Mr. Bonnyfeather called "enthusiasm--an emotion without a
sufficient cause."

"How can anybody really get excited about quicksilver globes?"
thought Anthony.

His own instinct for words came to his rescue.  No one could ever
get anywhere, he saw, who thought that latitude and longitude were
the same thing.  He sat for a while apparently listening
respectfully, but swinging his feet over the edge of the roof and
looking out over Livorno.

The water he saw was exactly separated from the shore.  Hills were
the opposite of valleys.  The sky was not the earth.  On the
horizon they seemed to meet, but he knew when you got there there
was a gulf between.

After a while he crawled back down the ladder without disturbing
the mate.  Above him the stentorian voice rolled on.  As he slipped
down the hall the old woman looked out again.  She was laughing.
As he passed by she thrust her book into his hand.  A red card fell
out.


                          Signora Bovino
                        Explains the Past,
                               and
                      Elucidates the Future,
                Casts Horoscopes, and Reads Palms.
                     Her Art is Invulnerable
                       on the Fifth Floor
                         Strada Calypso
                             ------
                       Satisfactory Amatory
                    Entertainment on the First.


Anthony looked up again but the door had closed noiselessly.

He went home and tried to read the book.  A new meaning to religion
dawned on him as he turned its pages.  But between strange visions
of the past which the book suggested, shrieked out a shrill
feminine babel of nonsense in print.  His head spun.  He had had
enough of stars.

For a while Anthony had been induced to believe by Mr. Williams
that the stars could not lie.  It was impossible for him to
believe, however, that the art of Signora Bovino was invulnerable,
even on the fifth floor.  Yet Mr. Bonnyfeather who was now the
final appeal in most things confirmed the fact that the North Star
actually was shifting.  The news caused something to crack in
Anthony's head.  He blinked.  So there WAS something in the old
woman after all!  Both her art and the art of navigation were
partly right.  You could not trust anything too far, then.
Curious!

He began to wonder about Father Xavier, but that was past now.  It
was difficult to question what he had heard from him, very
difficult.  He had accepted it as truth for so long.  And then
there was Toussaint.  Perhaps Rousseau, then, was only Toussaint's
enthusiasm.  On the days when they walked out into the country and
read La Nouvelle Héloïse together Anthony began to listen with his
own ears rather than those which the eloquence of his tutor would
have provided for him.

They used to climb the hills back of the town on hot days and sit
down under the trees.  There was one place which Toussaint
particularly affected.  It was a small valley with a nondescript
ruin in it which peculiarly moved the soul of the Frenchman.  They
would lie down by a spring while the grasshoppers chirped in the
grass and Toussaint or Anthony read aloud.  In his excitement
Toussaint would occasionally mount upon a rock and give vent to his
feelings at some passage that aroused his enthusiasm.  Under the
spell of his eloquence the little valley became a charming glade in
an antique world.

Toussaint waved his hand.  He struck an attitude with his cloak
falling from his arm like a toga, and pointed dramatically to the
pile of stones covered with vines across the little valley that lay
before him.

"Do you see that ruin?" he cried.  Anthony could see it plainly.
"I shall cause it to rise before your eyes; to become once more the
home of simple and happy folk uncontaminated by the vices which a
cruel society would now thrust upon them.  I am about to show you
humanity walking alone, upright, free and noble; the beautiful body
and soul of man unfettered by the cruel irons of the fatal social
contract.  Religion has not been invented.  There is only the force
of nature reverently and happily worshipped.  There is no fear.
All is love.  There is nothing but the beautiful earth and the most
beautiful thing on it, man.  The more I think of him the nobler he
becomes."  With a single and simultaneous gesture of one foot and
two hands the philosopher now disposed of the entire Christian era.

"Roll back, you dull ages of slavery, pass three thousand years.  I
see before me a charming wattled hut.  It is near nightfall.  In
the doorway sits a woman with a distaff.  She manipulates the wool,
while her naked and beautiful children, while the lambs and kids
bound about her threshold.  The father returns.  Over that hill,
out of the beech forest, he appears, huge, noble, but graceful.  A
slaughtered deer is thrown over his shoulders.  A bow is in his
hand.  The dogs bark.  The woman and children run to meet him.
Their embraces are unrestrained.  The deer is roasted before the
fire.  Baked roots are raked from the ashes; a simple cake or two.
The power of nature is thanked in a simple prayer.  The family
quenches its thirst at the spring.  They leap in the pool and swim
in the moonlight.  They admire each other.  They are unashamed.
They lie down to undisturbed rest.  There is no care for the
morrow.  Nature will provide.  There are no priests except the
father, no taxes, no false manners, no conventions, no neighbours
to impose upon them or to be impressed, no books, no lessons except
that of husbandry, no, no, no . . ."  Toussaint swept away
everything with a final gesture.

After these outbursts Anthony was surprised to see that even the
ruin remained.  It had, he observed, after the mist of oratory
cleared away, an obstinate faculty of remaining a heap of stones
covered by vines.

Toussaint would then walk about a little.  Then he would throw
himself down in the grass again and eagerly begin to thumb over the
pages of some book which he had brought with him.  It was usually
one of Rousseau's.  He was especially fond of chanting these lines
by heart until he found the place he was looking for, whatever it
might be:


Emile was filled with love of Sophie.  And what were her charms
that bound him to her?  They were tenderness, virtue, the love of
honour.  But what most moved the heart of Sophie?  Those feelings
that were of the very nature of her love: respect for goodness, for
moderation, simplicity, for generous disinterestedness, a contempt
for splendour and luxury.

Frequently in their walks while admiring the beauties of nature
their pure and innocent hearts were exalted to their Creator.  But
they did not fear His presence, before Him they uncovered
themselves to each other.  Then they saw their own perfection in
all its beauty, then they loved each other most and conversed
charmingly on the subjects that the virtuous most appreciated.
Often they shed tears that were purer than the dews of heaven.


For some reason or other the recital of these paragraphs nearly
always brought tears to the eyes of Toussaint.  It brought a scene
to his mind as if Watteau had gone sketching in Japan.

It was also during these afternoon walks, readings and
"recitations" by Toussaint that the news of the French Revolution
had first been brought to Anthony's ears.  At first Toussaint had
been its prophet, if one could believe him.  As the boy listened to
him he thought at first his friend was talking about the Kingdom of
God which seemed close at hand.  Every day now was to be a little
better than the day before.  Things from now on were to go that
way, for some reason.  Because that was the way they went.  Anthony
had read a great deal about the Kingdom in the theological books on
Mr. Bonnyfeather's shelves.  Toussaint's kingdom was to be a
Republic.  But it was never clear to Anthony, no matter how much
Toussaint explained the "difference," what was the difference
between the Republic that the Revolution was to bring and the far-
off Kingdom of God, the reign of Christ and all his saints.

"But man will bring about his own perfect state by reason.  Can't
you see!" Toussaint would cry.  "What has God got to do with that?"

"Stuff and nonsense," said Mr. Bonnyfeather one night when Anthony
questioned him about all this.  "You are quite right.  The old
books were talking about the same thing.  Perfection is nothing
new.  It is just an old dream that had been forgotten for a while.
Now they are talking about it again with new words.  It is the
spirit of just men made perfect.  Don't you see if reason is to
make just men perfect, then reason must be God?  It is only a new
word for the Almighty.  If not, if it is human reason they are
talking about, how can an imperfect thing make a perfect one?
Besides," grumbled the old man, "find the just men.  Where are
they? . . .

"I will tell you something about all this talk of perfection, of
constant progress that is going on everywhere now," said the
merchant getting up and walking up and down.  "It is popular
because it is flattering.  And there is one great idea under it all
that I am convinced from both my own experience and my reading is
wrong.  It is this man Rousseau that your tutor is always reading
to you from, and talking to you about, who is mainly responsible.
Listen, this is it.  It is the idea that human nature is naturally
good; that by pulling on its own bootstraps it can raise itself to
God.  Do not believe that.  If you do you are lost."

The pit seemed to open at Anthony's feet.  He looked at his patron
amazed, not so much for what he said as for the earnest way he said
it.  Anthony had never seen him so determined before.

"No, no, the Church is right," cried the old merchant.  "I have
lived long enough to find that out.  Men are not so good as they
pretend to be, or like to think they are.  They are in fact evil.
Besides, I do not know anyone by the name of 'man.'  I meet and
deal only with men and women.  They are evil.  They do evil in
spite of themselves even when trying to do good.  You must be
humble in spirit to believe that.  That is what humility means.
You must not be too proud to ask for help for your evil self from
the outside; to pray, to try to commune.  It is the people who are
always trying to make the world better that are proud.  They have
no need of God.  Those who know they have a fatal lack in
themselves will not try to make others perfect.  They will only be
sorry for themselves and for others; perhaps they will be kind,
decent, affable if they can be.  They will hope that others will
find out how helpless and how liable to do evil they are, too.  A
thousand citizens like that gathered together in one place would
make a good town to live in.  You will never find it.  Do not look
for that town.  It is too much to expect on earth.  It is the City
of God.

"Remember it is only by a miracle that a man can escape from
himself.  By the power of something more than human.  That is what
our religion means with all its faults.  For it, too, is partly
made by man.  Can you understand?"

"I can follow what you say," said Anthony.

"You will feel it some time, you will understand it, after you are
vile enough, then you will know.  Now, good night."

The boy rose to go.

"Am I so evil?" he asked.

The old man stopped suddenly and came over to the door.  He put his
hands on Anthony's shoulders and drew him toward him.  He drew his
head back and looked down into his face.

"Not yet," he said.  For an instant he held the lad close to him.
"God keep you!" he murmured.

During the entire time in which Anthony remained under the roof of
the Casa da Bonnyfeather this was the sole positive manifestation
of affection which he received from the old merchant.  Sometimes he
felt restrained in the old man's presence.  Of Mr. Bonnyfeather's
great affection for him the boy was of course by this time aware.
At first he had accepted it with the calm, egotistic assurance of a
boy.  Naturally, people would like him!  But as he grew older he
realized that Mr. Bonnyfeather was, as he expressed it to himself,
"his earthly father."  Between them, though no words had passed on
the subject, it was understood that Anthony should some day succeed
to the old merchant's place.  A hundred little expressions and
phrases that the old man used showed it was that of which he was
thinking.  Then, too, his constant urging of the boy's ambition and
the careful preparation and planning of his instruction all pointed
that way.  Yet there was a reserve in each which the other
respected.  Mr. Bonnyfeather alluded frequently to his own past.
Anthony was finally able to piece most of it together.  But the
boy's past he never even touched upon.

"It is to save me embarrassment," thought Anthony.  Of the lost
daughter the merchant said nothing.  Faith had once talked of her
one night while the shadows danced, but carefully.  The boy had no
cause to connect himself with her.  Rather than ask about something
which he knew might give Mr. Bonnyfeather pain, he would have cut
off his own hand.

So they sat together in the merchant's room at night talking,
reading, going over business affairs.  There was in that room as
time went on a complete feeling of confidence and ease between
them.  The dim figures in the wall seemed to Anthony to be in his
past, the lost country out of which he had mysteriously come.  From
that company of dreams he had merely removed as it were into the
clearer, into the very clear and precise atmosphere of Mr.
Bonnyfeather's room in the bright candlelight.  He was now sitting
with the man who was a father to him, having the world as it
actually is explained and made understandable.  Some day he,
Anthony, would sit at that desk planning out the voyages of the
firm's ships, but not for a long while.  No, he would not, could
not bear to think of that.  But in the room he nevertheless felt
himself to be heir apparent.  Outside in the court, in the counting
house, and in the city there was a subtle difference in their
attitude to each other.  Mr. Bonnyfeather, he could see, did not
care to make plain to everybody what was understood between them
when they were alone.  And with this tacit arrangement the boy fell
in line and acted his part.  That was perhaps the crux of the
situation.  Anthony was sensitive and understanding enough to
accept it and not to presume.

Only once or twice in later years had that earlier feeling of
restraint fallen upon them.  It came at times when Mr. Bonnyfeather
seemed about to say something that weighed much on his mind.  He
would stand looking down into Anthony's face while he was talking.
Then a silence would overtake him for a minute as if his tongue had
been stopped by an overpowering thought.  Anthony felt sure at such
times that he was about to hear something of peculiar importance.
Then, as if Mr. Bonnyfeather had changed subjects with himself, he
would lower his eyes and go on just where he had left off.

Of all these things the boy thought as he went to sleep at night,
particularly after Faith had gone.  Then he would creep out and
draw close enough to the madonna to be able to see her in the faint
light that beat in from the hall.  He was thankful that he seemed
to have found an earthly father.  She herself, the statue, had now
become two things in one to him, things gathered up out of all the
dreams and experiences of his past.  She was that woman who might
take a child in her arms and comfort him, even a big lad, when, as
he went to bed again, he felt like a child in the dark, helpless
and alone; alone as the spirit of every man must be when he
attempts to commune with himself.  But she had also become that
power-beyond of which Mr. Bonnyfeather had spoken, something to
which he might appeal, which in his very efforts to talk with it
seemed to dictate its own reply within him.

So, creeping close to her by the wall in the warm Italian night,
the slim figure of the orphan out of habitude from old times came
close to the Virgin to whisper to her of that chaos of thought and
feeling that was already burning in his body and mind.  For a
while, crouched by the wall in the moonlight, he was at home again.
He had returned to the heart of that mystery from which he had
come.




CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

BODIES IN THE DARK


Toussaint had, as Anthony grew tall and took on the promise of an
early manhood, begun to talk to him of love.  It was always of
"love" and seldom of women.  Of women Anthony had heard much in a
coarse and generally good-natured way about the port.

Sailors who followed girls; clerks related their experiences.
These were sometimes strange or drôle enough.  Usually they were
merely muddled.  For a long time they had seemed to Anthony
adventures and experiences that could only happen to others, things
which could not, and need not, affect him.  Indeed, he felt a
little superior about it all.  He felt that he should pretend an
interest, yet secretly glad that he really cared so little.

But the stories of Garcia, the Spanish clerk, were graphic.
Indeed, that young correspondent was occasionally given to using
the firm's best stationery to draw pictures upon in which the
attitudes of human bodies when united with each other were so
accurately and intimately portrayed as to leave no room for
imagination between them.  It was for that very reason that
Anthony, who was allowed the privilege of looking at these graphti
from time to time, was, despite a few natural burning throbs,
finally disappointed.  There were too many of these pictures for
him.  It was being too prodigal with something rare.  You also saw
somewhat the same thing in farmyards when you drove out into the
country.  No one paid much attention to it there.  Why draw
pictures about it in town?  Big Angela could drive a flinty bargain
for sour wine while it was going on in the stables.  Only children
stared.

Nevertheless, from the Spanish clerk and anatomist the boy learned
certain intimate phrases and idioms which even the books of
Castilian grammar omitted by pure consent.  McNab had given the
final quietus to the drawing lessons by leaning over Garcia and
Anthony one day during a more than usually erective bit.

"Mon," said McNab suddenly extracting the paper from under the
artist's pencil and holding it up, "if you're in that state of mind
I'll lend you a hae crown mysel'."  Cornering Anthony later he had
remarked with a lift to his nostrils, "'Twas bad enough gazin' at
the ceilin' when ye first came.  Now you're crawlin' under and
lookin' up."  The lad wilted.  Then he felt sick.  After that he
confined himself and Garcia to letters in Spanish and nothing more.
Behind his desk McNab looked at the pictures, laughed and threw
them in the waste bin.

The passage about Emile and Sophie did not move Anthony.  He said
so.  Toussaint was hurt.  According to him "love" was allowing the
soul to expand.  It was important to find someone with the
qualities of soul with which one could--expand.  Emile and Sophie
had been able to expand together, he pointed out.  Together their
souls had filled the whole world for them and made it beautiful.
Yes, they had loved each other's bodies.  The human body was
beautiful and pure.  "Notice," said the philosopher, "when they
revealed themselves to each other, when on those charming walks
they were naked and lay down in the grass together,--it was then
that from the sight of their beautiful bodies their souls most
caught fire.  Then they had the most beautiful and truly virtuous
thoughts.  The finest things were said then, their purest tears
would flow."

"Why was that?" asked Anthony.

This irritated Toussaint.  A Gallic wriggle of his shoulders was
really his best answer.  To find words to explain it, he was forced
again to hunt some place in the pages of Rousseau which was
peculiarly "expansive."  There it was all clear.  One felt that it
MUST be so, he insisted.  One could weep and be pure with those
lovers in the book.  In reading the book Toussaint seldom thought
about Faith Paleologus.  The book and she belonged to two different
worlds.  He preferred not to confuse them.  Yet sometimes . . .

"All those children in the stone ring about the fountain were
beautiful," thought Anthony.  "Bodies in most books and some
pictures are also like that, especially in novels and poems.  But
real bodies are not all beautiful.  Some are disgusting.  Not all
those Guessippi children are beautiful.  Innocenza, she is like a
double radish under a smooth little onion.  And there is Arnolfo.
No, certainly he is not ugly, but he is not beautiful.  What could
you think about Arnolfo?"  There was something about Arnolfo which
Anthony would like to have talked about with Toussaint.  But
Toussaint was always reading from a book.  This was about something
that had really happened.

Arnolfo had taken Anthony upstairs one day into the warm, empty
room over the kitchen.  Then he had closed the door mysteriously
and locked it.  Then he had let down his clothes.  "Look," said
Arnolfo, "Look!  I can do that."  After a few fascinating moments
he proved that he could.

"Can YOU?" he asked.

"Could he?"--Anthony wondered.  Arnolfo was both triumphant and
incredulous.  The boy was smaller than Anthony.  Anthony felt
inclined to lie to him or to boast.  He mumbled something,
sweating.

"I don't think English clerks CAN," sneered Arnolfo.  "Straw
hair!"

So phrased it was now a dilemma of embarrassments.  He must either
retire or prove himself.  Besides, could he, COULD he?  Something
must be done.  In behalf of himself, his race, and his class
Anthony accepted the challenge.

There were a few moments of terrible doubt.

Then he forgot Arnolfo.  The walls of the room and the glimmering
window retreated to a vast distance.  He was left alone, absolutely
alone with a new and enchanted self.  It seemed as if someone else
were touching him; he and himself.

A vision of the fountain in the courtyard at the convent appeared
to him.  It became clearer and clearer.  The water in the pool was
bubbling.  The bronze boy was capering along the rim like a monkey.
The stone children beneath were dancing madly around and around.
Suddenly they blurred into a misty ring of speed.  The water rose
of itself, overflowed, and engulfed the bronze boy.  He saw the
roots of the great tree entirely exposed.  Then it was over.  He
wilted.  The mist cleared.

He was back in the mean, hot little room again.  He, Anthony
Adverse, awfully naked!  Arnolfo was laughing at him!

THAT little monkey knew it was the first time!  He had been with
him, peeping at the fountain in the temple.  He had seen it!
Another great emotion surged over Anthony bringing his strength
back to him again.  It was anger.  His leg shot out by itself.  The
foot on the end of it kicked Arnolfo soundly.  Arnolfo had laughed!

In the face of the elements the Italian boy collapsed and lay white
and still.  He saw tears of fury in the steely eyes of the boy
above him, who, he felt sure, was going to kill him.  Arnolfo kept
very quiet.  His legs and arms relaxed and quivered like the limbs
of a sleeping rabbit.  His olive skin blanched.  Anthony looked
down at him.

He understood now the meaning of the form of Arnolfo.  It was like
a little animal.  What had happened to it did not matter.  Arnolfo
had never found himself.  Arnolfo was "lost."  What he did to
himself was purely physical.  It did not concern anyone else nor
did it concern anything living in Arnolfo.  But to Anthony, ah, to
Anthony!  He drew his belt tightly about his waist and rushed
downstairs out into the cool air and light.

But reminiscent twinges of ecstasy and hot glows of anger continued
to flow up and down his spine.  For the first time in his life he
loathed himself.  He ran back through the hallway and peered into
Faith's room.  She had gone out.  The big ship's tub in the corner
stood alluringly with its circle of water gleaming.  He locked the
door, dragged off his clothes, and plunged in.

There, that was better now!  It was good to wash yourself, to come
out clean and cool.  How wonderful water was!  He felt that somehow
he had been forgiven by it.  He went back into his own room and lay
down.

Many things suddenly became clear to him in the light of this
tremendous experience.  Now, he knew.  By finding out about himself
he understood so much more about others.  No, it was not all bad,
this experience.  Not by any means.  Love must be something like
that.  So this was what it was all about.  He forgave Arnolfo.  He
would make up for having kicked him.  Yes, it was very pleasant.
It was wonderful.

Then an alarming thought occurred to him.  Perhaps, after all, he
might be like Arnolfo.  No, he did not look like Arnolfo--that
little beast--and yet how like him, too.  After a while he fell
into a dreamless sleep.  Faith came and looked at him but he did
not know it.  She saw he had been using her water.  The marks of
his feet had not yet dried from her floor.

The fascination of this experience did not overwhelm Anthony.  That
was because in his inmost thoughts he never felt himself entirely
alone.  It was that with which he spoke intimately, particularly at
night.  When he called it anything at all it was "the madonna."
God as yet was something remote.  He was the spirit which Father
Xavier had addressed, the force of nature which Toussaint talked
about, the creator of everything ages ago, but hardly present now,
hardly something intimate.

But the madonna was always there in his room.  She always had been
there.  She was a habit.  She had a shape and a locality.  In
addition to her form visible in the statue, which he had long
understood to be only a representation, only a statue of her, there
was an actual presence of her in his mind which from early time he
had been able to evoke in dreams.  Lately she had become more of a
voice.  He would pray to her in the dark.  It was not necessary to
light a candle before her any more to see her.  It was rather
helpful not to have a candle.  You addressed her first in the
regular prayer, Ave Maria.  Then you talked to her.  When you did
wrong she talked to you.  When he became like Arnolfo, for
instance, when he did that, he lost her.  He was left alone with
himself.  He was afraid.  He could not bear to be utterly alone.
That was what it meant to be lost.  It was like that time long ago
before anybody had come to play with him, dark, terrible.  He
prayed to her to stay with him, to help him.  Sometimes she did so.
Sometimes he drove her away.  Then he could not find her again for
days.  And on those days he was unhappy, he was miserable.  He
sulked.

At last he made a discovery.  When you did nothing but feel you
were left alone.  It was only your body you had then.  The voice
lived only in your mind.  "She" was there.  To the orphan this
voice, which had the form of a woman who cherished a child in her
arms, was a necessary comfort.  He was completely miserable without
her.  He instinctively felt that he could not speak to Mr.
Bonnyfeather about this trouble that was sometimes stronger than he
was himself.  As for Arnolfo, he could only feel.  He saw that boy
was all body, he was like an animal.  That was why they said
animals did not have a soul.  He understood it now.  They had no
voices in them.

Anthony did not want to be "like an animal."  He was afraid too
that his own body might come to look like Arnolfo's.  Undoubtedly
after such times when you looked in the glass your face had
changed.  Others might not be able to see it, but you could see it
yourself.  He began to take great trouble with himself.  He would
disguise that.  The clerks noticed that "Mr. Adverse" as they half
humorously, half affectionately called him, was getting to be a bit
of a dude.  They wondered who the girl was and twitted him about
her.  His pride was aroused.  Everybody had a girl or said they
had.  He believed them.  What would they think of him if they
really knew!  After a long struggle, by the help of the voice and
the opinion of the outside world, he was able to remain a man.  And
he was so proud of it, happy about it.  He was master of himself.
He longed to tell someone that he was, Toussaint, for instance.
But how could he go about that?  Yet his triumph became visible.

A new and manly confidence showed in his speech, in the way he
carried himself, acted and moved.  He felt himself at home now in
the world of men.  He was almost grateful to Arnolfo.  He could be
kind to him when he saw him now.  He, Anthony, knew, and he had
triumphed.  "No," he thought, "I am not evil, not as evil as Mr.
Bonnyfeather thinks.  I am strong.  I have proved it."  He did not
always feel it necessary now to talk with the madonna as he went to
bed.  He was so firm in his own new-found strength.  No, he did not
really need her--any more.  Only sometimes.  The crisis had passed,
he thought.

Besides, he would soon be a full grown man now.  It troubled him a
little that at the age of sixteen his soul still seemed to be the
same as the one he had always had.  Would that never grow up?  The
child inside of him!  His body now was tall, broad in the
shoulders, long in the legs.  His face was keen.  He was proud of
that strong, merry yet thoughtful fellow who looked out of his
eyes.  And it was something to be able to control that body now.
It was no longer the soft, fragile, tender thing it had once been.
It was swift, eager, warm, strong, and overflowing.  He was master
of this glorious animal, he, the child inside of him.  He was proud
of it.  Hence the swagger.

Also he knew a thing or two, he thought.  Toussaint had a hard time
of it in arguments.  It seemed doubtful at times if Anthony were
going to be an apostle of Rousseau, an Emile to be matched with
some glorious Sophie, as the little Frenchman so ardently hoped.

"Ah, if Faith had only had the mind of a Sophie," thought
Toussaint, "with that glorious body of hers how happy Toussaint and
Faith might have been together!"  Even now from the body of this
death of his love, from the living tomb of his hope, he could not
bear to be parted.  He must be near her.  It was some comfort to
see even the embodiment of his disappointment.  His eyes followed
her.  She never looked at him.  Her eyes were elsewhere.

As she sat in Anthony's room now at night her eyes seemed to be
resting upon that curious shadow play at the foot of the boy's bed.
If it had not been physically impossible it might have seemed that
it was her eyes that somehow caused these shadows to shift and
dance.  In her deep inexpressive pupils, had you looked closely
under the sun-bonnet even by daytime, the same mysterious kind of
ghostly nothings might be seen at play.  Anthony had noticed that.

The eyes of this woman were often upon him, he began to discover.
He had been uncomfortable under her scrutiny at first, but now in
his new-found strength he felt superior to her.  He was a man.
Then what she had to say at night gradually grew more and more
interesting.  She began to tell him revealing little bits of the
biographies of those who moved under the same roof as he did.  They
could laugh together now over certain foibles of others which they
discussed.  Some of the facts of life were revealed to them in the
same way.  He would lie watching the shadows and listening to her
talk.  The tones of her voice, he discovered, thrilled him.  They
did not send him to sleep any more.  It was a new kind of
companionship.  Physically, she served him in endless ways.  She
knew his bodily habits uncommonly well and catered to them.  She
had also been there a long time.  She began to recount some stories
of the women about the place.  It was flattering to know that he as
a man could understand.  Also it was quite all right to close the
door so that Mr. Bonnyfeather need not be disturbed by their
voices.  Indeed, he never had been.  He did not know.

It was now that a series of events occurred for which even long
afterwards Anthony was unable to fix the blame.  He could not tell
whether they were due to Fate, the Virgin, Faith, or what.

"Chance," said Toussaint.  "The auld deil," said McNab without
hesitation.  "Human nature," said Mr. Bonnyfeather.  But none of
these gentlemen ever knew ALL the story or they might have been
as perplexed as Anthony.




CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE NUMBERS OF THE VIRGIN


Anthony had made up his mind he was in love with little Angela.  It
was high time, he thought, that he should have a girl.  It was not
very difficult to persuade yourself that you were in love with
Angela, who, heaven knows, was good-looking enough.  Anyway, he did
not as yet really know any other girl sufficiently well even to
pretend to himself that he could be in love with her.  "Angela
Maea" he still called Angela.  It was close enough to Angela mia to
pass muster when whispering to her without causing him to explain
how much deeper than that the name really went.

It was not quite so easy, however, to make Angela understand that
you were in love with her; in love, that is, in a really formal
way, a situation to be publicly, although very quietly, made
apparent to everybody.  Angela merely preferred to like you, to be
fond of you, and not to be formal about it.  In other words, you
had such a good time with her, you enjoyed being with her so much,
it was difficult to remember to stop to make love to her in the
proper way by talking about it as Emile did to Sophie; by letting
your soul "expand" as Toussaint had explained.

When you made a speech to her almost as fine as those in the books
she would never take you seriously.  In fact, she did not seem to
know what you were talking about.  She laughed.  You saw it was
funny and you had to laugh, too.  That was hardly fair.  It stopped
your love-making.  If you continued, and insisted you were serious
about it she finally sulked.  Then you had to put your arm around
her and explain.  After a while she would kiss and make up, but
only after a long while.  No, it was simply impossible to make love
to Angela.

But the kisses of Angela--how cool they were!  How happy, and yet
how calm!  How you forgot yourself when you kissed her!  How soft,
and friendly, and comfortable were her brown arms about your neck!
Oh, how Anthony was to remember them afterwards, those kisses, in
thirsty, and hot, and bitter places!  Maea's kisses of peace he
called them.  The cool haze near snowbanks in the spring where the
first flowers began to grow--that was to remind him afterwards of
the kisses of little Angela.

So if she would not really be his in a way that he could flaunt
before the whole clerks' row in the counting house, still it was
pleasant, it was delightful, to drive with her back into the hill
country in the early morning.  Big Angela was glad to let them have
the cart now.  It was more and more difficult for her to climb into
it, for impossible as it might seem, as she grew older she grew
even larger.  The plump mule was also delighted.  These tall, slim
youngsters who drove behind him and shook the reins on the hills
were nothing to pull.  He sped along gayly, shaking the loud bells
merrily to the peals of laughter from the cart.

Little Angela remembered all the old places to call and the
dainties with which to load the cart.  Its advent now in various
farmyards was more the signal for gayety than for bargaining.  What
the two young people who drove it lacked in powers of haggling they
made up in the sense of youth and happiness they carried with them.
The country gossip they picked up and their talk of the town were
vastly appreciated.  They learned to retail this gossip with
considerable skill and not a little collaboration.  The new
vintages would be brought out, the new-born lambs exhibited, or
they must taste of the most remarkable sausages and cheeses.  Boys
and girls always gathered around wherever the cart stopped as well
as the old people, and Anthony would orate to them of the latest
news from the French wars.  Then they would drive on to the next
place.

Yes, decidedly, even the pleasure of bargaining could be dispensed
with for the joy these young people brought, thought the farmers'
wives.  You could afford to be a little generous in the light of
such eyes, the blue ones of the tall, gay, golden-haired English
lad who spoke your own language so uncannily well; of the brown-
eyed and statuesque girl with the ringing laugh.  The hampers that
returned to the Casa da Bonnyfeather did not suffer although old
Angela pretended to grumble.  The geese, she said, were never fat
enough and the prices were extortionate, she insisted.  Yet
secretly in her heart, like all the other wives of the countryside,
she blessed the cart and those who now rode upon it.

Then these pagan mornings were suddenly ended.  It was when only
three of the Guessippi children still remained small enough to be
doused in front of the fountain before the cart left.  Now it was
only, "Innocenza, Jacopo, Luigi."  The other names remained, but
only as part of the ritual.  Just at this particular time it
pleased God to make Papa Tony Guessippi, the waiter, rich.  As
usual Providence moved mysteriously.

In the first place, one morning as Anthony climbed down from the
cart on returning from an especially enjoyable drive with Angela,
out of sheer braggadocio and exuberance he kissed her.  He hoped
somebody would see him, and someone did.  It was Faith.  After
that, but not too soon afterward, Faith began to make it her
business to look after things in the kitchen herself.  They were,
so she said, not going to her satisfaction.  Big Angela was
scarcely to be moved by anything but an earthquake, but little
Angela and Tony found it quite difficult to bear her presence.  Do
what they would, they could not avoid the eyes of Faith.  She was
there in the kitchen often.  They shivered and crossed themselves
secretly.

Thus matters stood when, secondly, there was a great thunderstorm
and a bolt of lightning fell in the street just behind the Casa da
Bonnyfeather.  No less than nine copper pans were fused in Angela's
kitchen.  In Anthony's room the madonna herself was thrown to the
floor.

The consternation produced by these events had hardly died away
when, thirdly, Count Spanocchi, the Governor of Livorno, in order
to repair the defences of the city, announced by proclamation the
establishment of an official lottery with several very large
prizes.  It was already rumoured that the French were coming.
That, however, really did not worry anybody very much except the
English merchants.  Little else was talked of day after day in the
streets except the best numbers to bet upon.  Everything, even an
event, has numbers.  But which were the lucky ones?

Big Angela remembering that nine saucepans had been destroyed by
lightning bet 9.  Now 10 is the number of lightning.  So the good
woman squandered nearly all her savings in procuring ten tickets
upon each one of which 9 appeared in some combination.  Speechless
at the cleverness of his wife in reading omens, Tony sat down in
the corner of the kitchen and gave vent to his jealous spleen.

"It was not for you to have done that, Angela," said he.  "You
should have told me and allowed your husband to bet upon those
numbers.  He is a man and has more money than you will ever have to
risk in the lottery."

This was a sore point with Angela.  Despite her great bulk and
herculean labours, Tony, the insignificant, received more for
carrying the dishes to the table than she did for preparing them.
He was a man, was he?  She determined to dispute that.

"You, a man!" she shouted.  "You are a worthless, hot little mouse.
Get out!"  She descended upon him with the remaining pan.  Faith
watched without comment, but she followed Tony out.  Fixing him
with her eyes she said something to him in a low voice that Angela
could not overhear.  The huge cook was much troubled.  Bad luck
would follow, she felt sure.

A little later Tony approached Anthony hat in hand.  "Is it true,
Signore Adverso," he asked in suppressed excitement, "that the
madonna in your room was also struck by lightning?"

"Also?" said Anthony puzzled.  "Oh--yes, it is true.  That is she
was not struck.  She was merely thrown to the floor and not even
broken."

The man crossed himself.  A look of great relief shone on his face.
"Ah, then," he said, "I will do it!"

"Do what?" asked Anthony.

"You shall see," he said.  "If I win you shall share in my luck."

That evening in the crowd before the counting house of Franchetti
adjoining the mayoralty, Tony spent all he had and all he could
borrow on the numbers of lightning, saucepans, and the Virgin.  The
tickets he finally displayed were numbered 10, 9, 6, 8, 15.  In
order to obtain these he had to do some costly trading with other
ticket holders in the crowd.  But he was happy.  He had plunged for
the cinquina.

He left nothing undone in order to win.  He said the Crielleisonne;
he said thirteen Ave Marias in as many churches, he invoked
Baldassare, Gasper, and Marchionne, the three wise men.  Then he
went home and quarrelled with his wife.  She told him he was "peini
di superba, debiti, e pidocchi."  After this he went outside
without answering back.  This is hard to do, but it is almost bound
to bring good luck.

Even little Angela bet.  She dreamed her mother was dead.
Nevertheless she played that number, 52.  The lottery had been
heavily subscribed.  It was not only popular, but patriotic.

Two days of terrible, breathless waiting now followed.  Then
delirium descended upon the Casa da Bonnyfeather.  "Signore Antonio
Guessippi" had won 40,000 scudi.

The news came in the morning.  Before noon it was necessary to shut
the street gates to keep out the acclaiming populace.  Poor Tony
was beside himself.  At luncheon he was drunk.  Little Angela had
to wait on the table in his place.  While she brought the dishes
her father's head was thrust through the serving window from time
to time alternately bidding Mr. Bonnyfeather a tearful farewell and
exulting over him.

"Not once again will I, Tony, bring the soup to thee, thou grey-
headed old man.  It is I now who am rich.  Many persons will
henceforth bring soup to me."  Just then he was snatched back into
the kitchen.

A noise of struggling, the smashing of dishes, and big Angela's
remonstrances convulsed those sitting about the table.  But it was
incredible to Tony that a man so rich as he should any longer be
dominated by his wife.  His head, somewhat the worse for wear,
reappeared through the window.  He was weeping now.

"Thou knowest what I have suffered, O best of patrons.  It is over
now.  It is not from thee I would part but from that huge hill,
that mountain to which I am married.  It is not I who would have
had all these children.  I could not help myself.  I . . ."  Here
he was pulled into the kitchen again and a pail shoved down over
his head.  He sat weeping under it, shouting that he was rich.
When he attempted to move, his wife held him down.  After a while
he gave up the struggle and sat quiet.

He seemed to have gone into eclipse under the pail, but it was not
so.  In its serene darkness bright visions of freedom and affluent
grandeur glowed intensely.  The money he knew would make him more
powerful than his wife.  He would leave this scene of his lifelong
defeat immediately.  Tonight!  He would snatch his entire family
out of this ignominious kitchen, her field of victory.  He would
return to Pisa, the scene of his illustrious nativity and the home
of his ancestors, in unimaginable triumph.  There should be a coach
for every single member of his family--except for her.  A coach
even for Bambino Luigi, who was a prince now.  As for fat Angela--
that mountain--she should ride with him and watch him throw his
money out of the window to the crowd.  It would kill her.  Not a
stick or a dish would they take away of their poverty, nothing but
the clothes on their backs.  He would bury her in things, choke her
with pearls, hire cooks for her--that was a master thought.  And he
would have a small thin mistress.  Never would he be held down on
that hill again, never!  They would leave tonight, with cavalry!
He would ask the governor for an escort.

Seeing him sit so quietly Angela removed the pail and smiled at
him.  He looked at her with baleful eyes.  "Thy home is no more,
woman," he said, and spat at her.

She was amazed.  It did not seem to be her husband that she had
uncovered.  Who was this little man who gibbered at her?  The day
had been too much to bear anyway.  She began to cry out and wring
her hands.  Presently she was surrounded by her brood all weeping
hysterically except little Angela.  They could feel their world
dissolving.

At three o'clock McNab took Tony in hand and went to receive the
purse from the governor.  Tony could not be trusted alone, of
course.  A flowery speech of presentation by His Excellency dressed
in his gala uniform of a white coat with red vest and breeches, the
huzzaing and pandemonium of the crowd completed the nervous
devastation of Tony.  It was only by the grace of God, McNab, and
the hired coach that he got home with the money.  It was promptly
locked up in the strong room.  The rich man's wife did not get a
scudo.  A few minutes later Tony was gone again, having taken a
considerable sum along with him.  Big Angela cooked supper as if
nothing had happened, as if she were not the wife of a rich man.
Little Angela served it.  Anthony could see she had been weeping.
He managed to press her hand as she took his plate.  Faith smiled.

In the middle of the meal a tremendous clamour arose at the gate.
An enormous crowd in carnival mood was serenading its lucky hero
who was returning in state from the mayoralty.  There were shouts,
the indecent sounds of wind instruments, the trampling of many
horses.  The courtyard was invaded by twelve coaches and the guard
of honour which had been furnished by the helpless governor.  The
troopers had some difficulty in keeping the mob back.

In the first coach, the most sumptuous that could be hired in
Livorno, sat Tony.  A case of fine Florentine wine was opened
before him, and he was smoking a tremendous cigar.  He was now in a
thoroughly truculent state.

"I have come for my wife, my children, and my money," shouted he at
Mr. Bonnyfeather who was standing on the steps with Anthony and
Faith beside him.

"Scotch woman, with the evil eye, my good fortune will save us from
you.  Do not envy us at THIS hour."  He crossed himself.  Then he
began to demand his money in an insufferable manner from Mr.
Bonnyfeather who stood looking on rather shocked.  The corks popped
in the coach and Tony raved out of the window.

"You had best let him go, sir, I think," said McNab working his way
through the crowd.  "He has been to the governor again and got an
escort for as far as Pisa.  You had better clear the whole family
out now.  There is a carriage for everyone, you see, even for
little Luigi."

The crowd outside which was peering through the gate thought there
was some dispute about the money and began to howl.  Without
waiting for further orders McNab began to carry the bags out of the
strong room and to put them in the coach.  As each one appeared a
roar followed.  Presently Angela and her brood were brought out by
Faith.  The younger children were weeping, carrying a few broken
toys.  Tony shouted to them to throw them away.  Luigi clutched his
dirty doll.

"Good-bye, Anthony," said a quiet voice behind him.  He turned,
startled, from watching the silly scene below.  It was little
Angela.  Angela was going!  Maea would not be near him any more.
He stood stunned.  He could not say anything.  Where?--Why?  She
stood for a moment waiting for him to speak to her but he could
not.  Then she turned away wearily and marshalled the preposterous
brood of her parents down the steps.  In the courtyard for the last
time she began to call their names.

At this unexpected element of order in the scene of riot and
confusion, a sudden silence settled on the crowd and the
apprentices and clerks looking on.  For the first time, as if by
general consent, it seemed to be realized by all present that there
was an element of tragedy in the farce.

"Arnolfo, Maria, Nicolò, Beatrice, Claudia, Federigo, Pietro,
Innocenza, Jacopo, Luigi," chanted the soft, clear, sane voice.
Anthony's lips followed mechanically.  But now the water did not
descend.  As each name was called, that child was bundled into a
separate coach.  Into the last crept little Angela and burst into
tears.  Her father and mother were already quarrelling in the first
carriage.

"No!" shouted Tony to his wife, "no!"

Suddenly with surprising agility, the huge woman descended again,
and despite her husband's veto, seized her goat which was
innocently looking on.  A struggle followed.  Cries, screams,
acclamations, and the bleatings of the animal rent the air.  The
goat was dragged into the carriage and the door closed.  Then its
head appeared at the window looking out beside that of Tony who was
now too far gone to object.  He mouthed at Mr. Bonnyfeather with a
foolish grin.

"Get them gone, Sandy," said the merchant to McNab, "there is
something obscene about this."

"Aye," said McNab and signalled violently to the sergeant in charge
of the troopers to move on.  The procession, long remembered in
Livorno, started.

There was, as Mr. Bonnyfeather had said, something obscene about
it.  A kind of evil grotesqueness, as if the twelve carriages were
the happy funeral of an idiot, endeared it to the mob.  From the
first carriage, where sat the mountainous woman with flaming hair,
and from the window of which peered a bleating goat, a madman was
flinging out coins.  Scrambles, shrieks, fights, and hard-breathing
riots, as if society were disintegrating before it, marked the
progress of this vehicle of prodigality with its attendant soldiers
down the streets.  Behind followed a procession of scared gnomes
with small, pinched faces against the gawdy upholstery of their
grand carriages.  The passengers dwindled in size until the now
frantic little Jacopo and Luigi passed.  In the last vehicle was a
young girl sobbing her heart out.

Big Angela did not dare to restrain her husband.  The rain of
silver continued.  Every coin lost filled her with despair.  She
groaned aloud.  It was thus that the procession finally passed
through the Porta Pisa and disappeared into the darkness beyond.

In the courtyard of the Casa da Bonnyfeather Anthony sat alone on
the dark steps with his head in his hands.  He had been sitting
there for over an hour.  It was very quiet now.  The noise of the
riot had long died away.  Under the shed he could just make out the
outline of the cart.  Its shafts seemed to be extended up to the
stars like empty, beseeching arms.  He choked.  He could scarcely
understand the feeling of tight, dry despair that hindered his
breathing.  What was it that had happened?  Something over which
none of them had any control.  For the first time an arrow had
penetrated his soul.  Angela was gone.

He turned and blundered up the steps blindly.  There was a light in
the kitchen.  From old habit his heart leaped out to it.  Angela
used to be there.  He looked.  Faith was preparing something hot.
The place was in frightful disorder.  Amid the broken dishes, cast-
off clothes and fragments of food she moved calmly, even a little
triumphantly, while the charcoal watched her expectantly with its
small, red eyes.

He went in and threw himself down on his bed.


END OF BOOK TWO




BOOK THREE

In which the Roots of the Tree Are Torn Loose




CHAPTER TWENTY

APPLES AND ASHES


It was a warm night.  A faint streak of moonlight came through
Anthony's window and fell across the foot of his bed, splashing
itself against the wall.  He lay with his eyes wide open in the
darkness.  An occasional shout from passers-by returning from the
crowds that had followed the procession echoed in his vaulted
chamber.  These calls grew fewer and finally ceased at last to have
individual significance.  They blent themselves with the general,
low, musical monotone of the city's life that murmured now as if
mankind were at last getting what it desired under the full moon
while the trees sighed about it doubtfully.  On the wall at the
foot of the bed, as the moon climbed higher, a faint outline of the
shadow-play began.  Anthony looked at it wearily and closed his
eyes.

He had never felt so lonely.  The realization of all that Angela
meant to him grew upon him.  He longed for her intensely.  He
wanted to have her now in his arms, to press her firm little
breasts against his chest, to fondle and comfort her, to be boy and
girl together.  That was what "being in love" meant!  But he had
always kept putting that out of his mind about Angela,--because of
Arnolfo, perhaps.  But she was different.  It would be right with
her.  He had seen her once when she went behind the fountain.
There had seemed to be a light about her.  He would like to see her
that way again--now!  He would make her come back by dreaming her
into his room.  He opened his eyes to find her.  In the full gust
of a now manly passion, strangely enough, his strong childhood
faculty of evoking vivid visions returned.

For a minute he saw Angela lying beside him in the moonlight.
There was a faint, tender smile on her parted lips.  Her eyes
looked at him wide, and solemnly, as they had sometimes done when
she sat on the seat of the cart beside him.  She loved him!  Why
had he not known that before?  For an instant her whole form
glimmered into a bright, ivory light, glistening.  He trembled
toward her, the light, quick fire of his youth's desire flowing so
that it possessed him.  He half sat up and stretched out his hands
to touch her.  A mist began to curl about her ankles.  It seemed to
rush up her limbs and vanished with her like smoke into the
moonlight.

Suddenly on the other side of the room he saw the table clearly
standing against the wall.

He felt as if he were falling and dropped back on the pillow.  An
agony of grief, disappointment, and insufferable sorrow filled him
and overflowed from his eyes.  And he had not even spoken to her
the last time!  "Good-bye, Anthony."  It rang through his brain.
He put his hands over his ears.

What a dolt of a boy he had been to let all that time go by without
. . . to let Toussaint persuade him by words out of a book what
being in love meant!  He tore at his clothes as he thought of that.
He shifted uneasily.  One thing though, the self, the thing that
lived in his body was growing up.  After tonight he was not a boy;
the life inside him was not childish any more.  How fierce and
determined it was.  How it WOULD have its way.  He could hardly
imagine denying it now.  How could you?  It owned you.  The voice
seemed to have gone.  He listened.  It had nothing to say.
Faintly, perhaps.  So faintly you could not be sure.  But what was
it compared to this thing within him that demanded and clamoured
and burned?  Nothing!  Something to be dismissed.

And he had thought he could tell Angela how to make love like Emile
and Sophie!  To TELL her that!  And so she had laughed at him.
She had known.  Had she?  How did she know?  Just as he did now.
Now, after it was too late.  She had known all along!  He
understood now why it was that he had been so happy with her when
she had looked at him like THAT.  THAT was being in love.  They
had been.  They were!  And he had thought it had something to do
with words.

There was only one kind of words that could give him any
satisfaction now--oaths.  He had always shrunk from them a little
when he heard them along the docks.  They had secretly hurt him,
the terrible, coarse ones particularly.  Now he needed them.  A
string of them rolled out of his brain through his lips.  He
whispered them huskily in his throat.  He cursed himself.  It was a
relief.  He shifted his head onto his other arm.  That cheek was
not wet.  It felt hot against his muscles.  How cool and smooth his
arm was.

Then he heard Faith coming down the hall.  He forgot everything for
a moment but her footsteps.  Would she come in?  He hoped not.  He
did not want her to see that he had been in torment, weeping.  She
would understand.  He knew she would.  What was it she had
whispered to Tony about the madonna?  But how could she know those
numbers would win, that Angela would have to go?  How could she?
But would she come in?  He hoped not.

Her footsteps passed down the corridor to Mr. Bonnyfeather's door.
He heard her knock and give the merchant his hot, night drink.  The
door closed.  Faith returned to the kitchen again.  After all she
might have come in.  He might have liked to talk to her--in the
dark.  How hot it was!  He was clammy.  Even the bedclothes were
drenched with perspiration.  He began to throw off his clothes now.
The thought of the tub of cool water in the room just across the
hall occurred to him.  Quick!  He would run across and cool himself
off before Faith returned.  On noiseless, bare feet he sped through
the door.

The reflection of the full moon from the courtyard turned the walls
of Faith's apartment into a dull, silvery grey.  The various
familiar objects of her furniture seemed to be faintly luminous.
What a night it was!  He could see the disk of the water in the
cask faintly gleaming around the edge.  There seemed to be a film
of quicksilver on it.  He discarded his last garment to step in.
At that instant a crisp rustling sound as if someone were drawing a
silk drapery over stone, the very faintest of hisses, caused him to
turn.

In a patch of moonlight near the door stood a naked woman.  He was
just in time to see the folds of her dress rustle down from her
knees into coils about her feet.  She stood poised there for a
moment, with her head drawn back, before she stepped out of them.
He saw she was beautiful.  For some seconds he did not realize that
it was Faith.  Then he gasped.

In the moonlight she was another person.  She continued to look at
him.  He could feel that and looked down.  Then he looked at her
again.  He stood still, rooted.  The faint aroma of her body
floated to him.  A sudden tide of passion dragged at his legs.  He
could not help it.  He swayed slightly, away from her.  Then he
felt her arms wind around him in the dark.  They were smooth and
cool, smoother than his own.  Her hand pressed his head onto her
breast.

He was half blind, and speechless now.  All his senses had merged
into one feeling.  She seemed to be carrying him somewhere.  As he
stepped through the moony darkness his legs had lost the sensation
of weight.  "I shall think it is Angela," he said to himself.  But
he soon forgot all about Angela.  He could remember nothing but
himself.

To lie face downward on smooth, soft water with warmth lapping you
about, that had always been delightful.  How easily your arms and
legs moved in such an element.  The whole surface of the body felt
its soft, exquisite touch.  To be supported and yet possessed by an
ocean of unknown blue depths below you and to cease to think!  Yes,
it was something like swimming on a transcendent summer night.

Although his eyes were tightly closed, he was looking into dim,
moonlit depths where blue and green flashes of light and long
silver shafts wavered down to the darker depths below him.  On the
subliminal floor of this ocean in which he was now submerged, the
same shadow play that had haunted the walls of his room seemed to
be going on.  Translucent monsters, giant growths dimly opaque,
were alive and moving down there.

Now he began to rise and fall with the waves that washed over him
and yet lifted and lowered him, carrying with them as they passed a
tide of tingling feeling from his neck to his heels.  After a while
he was just drifting in a continuous, rippling current of ecstasy
that penetrated him as if he were part of the current in which he
lay.  He was completely alone again, but happy, completely happy.
"Are you?" something from beyond him seemed to ask.  "Yes," he
answered, "be quiet . . . not thinking now . . . let me alone."

He drifted on with the current.  Wherever it might be going he
would go with it.  It was moving fast now.  He was being borne
along more swiftly.  Faster yet.  The entire ocean was rushing down
a slope.  He was being whirled around and around, dying with a
delicious giddiness that drew on his brain.  He was in a whirlpool.
He was being drawn into the centre of it.

There began to be something just a little terrifying in the
pleasure of the descent.  The sensation divided.  "Be careful!"  He
opened his eyes and thrust up his head like one stretched on an
exquisite rack.  In the blur of moonlight and darkness a vision
shaped itself.  He saw he was not in the ocean but swimming in the
pool under the tree.  He was moving around with the water in it.

The water in the pool was bubbling and whirling at enormous speed.
It was shrinking down into a funnel-shape toward the middle.  He
would be drawn into that.  A curious, dim, white animal could be
seen at play as the water shoaled toward the floor of the pool.  He
looked beneath himself.  The monster with a pale, smooth belly lay
looking up at him.  Its eyes were terrible.  He began to struggle
to avoid it but his limbs were possessed by the lethargy of a
dream.  He saw that his own movements were reflected in every
motion by the bronze boy that stood at the edge of the pool.  There
was a terrible, mad pleasure that convulsed that boy by more than
pain.

There was something in the hollow statue causing that.  He must get
rid of it; fill up the hollow in the pool and rest again!  The
bronze boy grew still, trembled.  Suddenly from the mouth of the
beast below him a flood burst forth and filled up the pool.  It
overflowed gently now and washed Anthony clear over the brim.

He was lying on his back now looking up at the moonlight filtered
through the leaves of the great tree.  All was well.

He lay, for how long he did not know, in a timeless trance of
relief and release.  When he opened his eyes he saw that Faith
Paleologus was lying beside him.  Her bosom rose and fell softly.
Then he remembered Angela.

He was sorry he had forgotten her.  As the lethargy passed he made
a little mourning within himself for the memory that had been
Angela.  But he saw that it was for a memory, an ideal, not for
Angela herself.  Perhaps after a few days that ideal would return.
The desire would return and he would dream of it as Angela.  He
looked at Faith who lay there breathing as if she were asleep.  He
did not blame her.  No feeling of rage overcame him as it had that
day in the room with Arnolfo.  Yet this was a much more important
thing that had happened.  It had merely happened to him, there
could be no doubt of that.  Yet not because of some person, not
because of Faith.  It was the blind, overpowering feeling that had
come upon them both.  That was what had done it.  A slight noise
from the courtyard disturbed his half-dreamful, easy reverie.

He began to become fully conscious of who and where he was.  He had
better not stay here any longer.  He looked at the woman beside him
again.  She did not open her eyes.  There was a blank look of
relaxation on her face that the grey moonlight accentuated.
Somehow it was a little funny to see a countenance completely the
slave of feeling.  A mouth should not register mere contentment; be
so relaxed.  Something inside should make the muscles behave and
hold it shut at least.  He laughed silently.

Then he was completely aroused.  He noticed he did not care whether
he had any clothes on or not.  What if she did see him now?  There
was no bravado about it.  He simply did not care.  It was purely a
matter of indifference.  Come, this was getting dull.  It was over.
What he wanted now was a wide bed to himself and a sleep.  He
stretched himself.  He felt completely well and indifferent about
things in general.  What a relief it was not to be so sensitive
about everything.  Well, why should he care, or say anything to
Faith?  She understood.

He got up quietly and walked across the hall into his own bedroom.
Then he suddenly remembered he had left his clothes in Faith's
room.  Some of the possible practical implications of the affair
now thrust themselves upon him.  It would not always be dark and
private as it was now.  In the daytime people awoke.  They went
about seeing and saying things.  His shirt was still lying by the
water butt in the housekeeper's room.  He stopped before his bed.
He would like another bath, too, more than before.  What should he
do about it?

On her bed Faith stirred slightly and put out her arms in the semi-
darkness.  Her young lover was gone.  The shock of the disappointment
aroused her.  She sat up.  Her many experiences with men ashore
after a long voyage had destroyed in her a certain subtlety of
apprehension which she had once possessed.  She now expected the
comforting embraces of the aftermath of the first time to verge into
the return of warmth of the second.  She had forgotten it was not
always so.  For a moment a sense of loss overwhelmed her.  To solace
herself she began to think about what had just occurred.  From this
she derived comfort; over certain details an immense satisfaction.

He had, she felt, belonged to her completely for a few moments.  It
was the fruit of years of planning.  As the boy had grown into a
youth, blossomed into first manhood, his presence had obsessed her.
He possessed that curious freshness, an aloof beauty that seemed to
her to be the essence of innocence in itself, the very tag of it.
He was like his mother in that.  It was what she had always
desired, needed.  In Maria it had of course been unapproachable.
It was that of which she had been jealous.  Now she had possessed
it, she felt; crawled within the circle that fenced it off, made it
a part of her.  She felt she had triumphed over the dead woman,
too, the girl who had been carried off by Don Luis.

Ah, THERE would have been a mate for her!  There was something
hard, unbreakable, unconquerable about that man.  She pressed her
breasts back upon themselves, her virginal breasts, and trembled.
They could bear a great weight.  The thought of it possessed her.
Her eyes narrowed in the moonlight.  Just then a light footfall
disturbed her.  She looked up.  Anthony was coming into the room
again.

He passed her bed without a glance, and calmly and methodically, so
as to make no noise, stepped into the water cask and immersed
himself.  Even his head went under.  The water overflowed and ran
sparkling in patches of moonlight over the floor.  He emerged,
dried himself, and picked up his clothes.

"Now," she thought, "he will come to me again."  As though she did
not exist he started for the door.

It was more than she could bear.  Before he reached it her arms
were about him again.  He kept going.  She threw herself down and
clasped him about the knees.  "Stay with me," she begged him, her
mouth writhing in a whisper, "I will make you die with pleasure."

He reached down and seizing her by the wrists, unclasped her
fingers with a strength that she had not suspected in him.  His
hands were like a man's.  She fell forward on the floor with the
palms of her hands on his feet.  He withdrew them as if her touch
hurt him.  She lay there alone for a long time.  When she finally
looked up the full moon already grey with the opposing dawn was
looking in at her.  Its mouth seemed to be drawn down like her own.

It was some time before Anthony could orient himself to all that
this experience implied.  Most of his attitude about it was
instinctive.  For a long time he did not even care to look at the
madonna.  She was still in his room.  He felt her there.  But there
was nothing to be said between them.  He had trusted himself too
far.  He was essentially weak.  That was plain.  Yet he could not
bring himself to ask for help.

Indeed, it was a curious kind of self-balance which he now
attained.  Mr. Bonnyfeather might be right after all.  Perhaps he,
Anthony, was essentially sinful, but in the light of that fact he
would act with caution.  He would not allow himself to be surprised
again.  With possible pitfalls revealed to him, he walked
circumspectly, and yet more confidently and with a new completeness
of knowledge.  The swagger disappeared, but he stood upright like a
man, looking around him, aware and beware.  Into the life about him
he entered as one initiated.

What indignation he came to feel over the occurrence was gradual
rather than of sudden growth and quick ebb.  He disliked Faith more
and more as time went on.  He would not let her come into his room
any more, and he resented her eyes which he now felt upon him.
That she had long lain in wait for him was plain.  He shivered at
that.  There was something puma-like in her patience, he saw.  Yet
it was not entirely unpleasant to have been desired.  Only he did
not want her to desire him any longer.  He did not belong to her.
That was all.  He could not.  When he had been with her he had been
left alone.  He desired someone that he could share himself with.
There must be two.  The trouble with what Arnolfo had taught him
was that when you did that you tore yourself apart.  You became
two, divided.  You were trying to be you and yourself.  You touched
you.  It was a strain, a rending of the person.  What you should
love, your own dear body, you ended by loathing.  That he had found
out would never do.  You would end by hating yourself, be unhappy,
desperate.

Even with Faith it had been better.  Not entirely wrong, he
thought.  But he had still found himself alone.  Then there was
something too simply avid and sheerly physical about her.  What
lived inside of her you could not really meet.  Was it there at
all?  With Angela it would have been different.  With her he felt
he would not have been left alone.  He longed for her more now.  He
continued to miss her as the full significance of his loss became
apparent.  It was on that account that he finally came to hate
Faith.  She, he felt in his bones, had arranged the departure of
Angela.  It was Faith who had put that idea of the numbers of the
madonna into Tony's foolish head.

Even his madonna, he felt, had something to do with it.  He was
still unconsciously idolater enough to feel that.  It was one of
the reasons he delayed returning to her; why the voice was stilled
for so long.  A hush had fallen upon it.  Sometimes at night he was
frightened by this.  Yes, it was all very complicated.  He longed
to talk to someone about it.  Never could he approach Mr.
Bonnyfeather about it all.  His solution would be one of action, to
dismiss Faith.  That would accomplish nothing for Anthony.

And then, added to all this, was the knowledge that in what had
happened he had not at all directed himself.  He had not willed it.
It had merely come upon him.  The woman had known that.  The male
in him rebelled.  He should have taken the lead.  Yet he did not
hold Faith directly responsible.  She, he saw, had merely taken
advantage of the way the world was arranged.  She had merely caught
him up in the force which she personified.  That was what he must
be careful of, the blind force.  So he began to avoid her, even to
avoid the house.  The whole Casa da Bonnyfeather began to become
irksome at times, dangerous through familiarity with what lurked
there.  He began to go out and to be about the town more and more.

                            ----------

For the first time the afternoons with Toussaint, and the lessons
with various other people began to pall on him.  He struck up a
vivid friendship with young Vincent Nolte, the nephew of a Hamburg
merchant at Livorno.  A rather heedless round of gadding about and
tasting life as it offered itself began.  It was soon necessary to
draw on some small savings from his clerk's salary.  They were soon
gone.  McNab looked serious when he asked for a month's advance.
"Gang and ask it o' the maister," he said.

Somewhat diffidently Anthony approached Mr. Bonnyfeather.  In a
rush of embarrassed confidence he explained the new turn his
interests had taken.  To Anthony's surprise Mr. Bonnyfeather not
only took it as a matter of course but looked pleased.  He refused
to advance Anthony anything on his "salary."  Instead he provided
him with a generous allowance from his purse.  Of this Anthony was
to say nothing.  The old man was glad to hear that Anthony was
waking up, as he expressed it.  He had even thought of hastening
the process, it appeared.  But he had let well enough alone.
Anthony squirmed to think what that "well enough" had been.  But he
was able to obtain what leisure he desired.

"After the noon bell, then, your time will now be your own," said
Mr. Bonnyfeather.  "It is harder to spend time and get full value
for it than for money," the old merchant continued somewhat
sententiously.  "You do not believe that now, but you will soon
find it true.  I shall expect you, however, to go on with your
studies, particularly mathematics.  You should by this time begin
to be interested enough in some subject to begin to pursue it and
to plan your work yourself.  What would you think of going to
England to complete your schooling as I did?  To Exeter, say.  I
still have connections there.  It would unify what you already know
mighty well.  You would also be acquiring the idiom which is your
birthright."  The old merchant stopped himself suddenly.

Anthony scarcely noticed his expression.  He was thinking of the
opera that night with Vincent and some companions.  He only aroused
himself sufficiently from the dream of affluence which his new
allowance evoked to promise to consider Exeter.

How often afterwards he wondered with what a different die his life
might have been stamped if he had really considered that offer
seriously.  How different would his path have been?  As it was, he
considered it only briefly, only with his lips.

Toussaint was hurt to find his pupil straying away.  He had
regarded him already as a silent convert to Rousseau and the new
doctrines.  It was especially important to hold him, he felt, now
that the Revolution was about to descend upon Italy.  Nevertheless,
their afternoons together grew fewer although more intimate and
intense.  For Toussaint realized he was not talking to a boy any
longer.  He began to open his last reserve.  As he looked at
Anthony his heart beat with pride, his face glowed with affection.
There was an emotion now about their meetings over the table or by
the ruin as though each time were to be the last class.

But from Toussaint's intense monologues and exhortations Anthony
would now break away with a feeling of relief as soon as he
decently could.  The little man's great enthusiasm was often funny
to him now.  Anthony could not share in this intense emotion over
abstractions.  Above all he disliked having his own feelings probed
and made reasonable.  The Revolution and the Rights of Man were all
well enough, he supposed, but what did Toussaint think about a
woman?  How would he feel about Faith, for instance?  Several times
as he listened to some philosophical exhortation it was on the tip
of his tongue to say something about Faith, or even about Angela.
Toussaint might really know something important after all.  At
least it would be interesting to find out and to watch his
expression.  Yet from embarrassment he still refrained from asking.
As time went on, however, the temptation grew.

If Toussaint would only let him say something sometimes!  He wanted
to explain but he got no chance.  The other's voice went on.
Anthony would fling out exasperated at last to find amusement and
distraction where he could beyond the now irksome walls of the Casa
da Bonnyfeather.

He took to fencing after a while with a little Spaniard who kept a
place near the Porta Colonella.  But he did not care much for it.
The polite conventions of the art bored him.  Then he and Vincent
Nolte with some other youths hired a retired Austrian lieutenant to
teach them the pistol.  That went well for Anthony.  But Vincent
was awkward.  He could never get over shying at the report.  He
finally dropped out while Anthony kept on.  In six months Anthony
developed into a fair shot with several types of handguns.  He
learned not only their use but how to care for them.  Then the
bottom fell out of pistol practice, too.  Nothing was so pleasant
at last as going about town with Vincent.  The dandy state was upon
them both.  They idled magnificently in new clothes along the
Corso.  They patronized an English tailor and met other young
bloods.  A pistol, Anthony soon found, was the only thing that
Vincent was shy about.

Vincent Nolte was, as McNab once remarked, "a little too large for
his size."  He had very light, curly, brown hair that he was
conscious of as his chief attraction, and an open, rather sweet
countenance.  He had light-blue eyes and a firm chin under large,
pink, sensual lips.  His nose was keen and straight.  But it flared
out so much at the nostrils as to make the beak of it seem to be
just about to recover from a flattening blow.  His ears were very
small, a little ridiculous, and somewhat porcine.  But you seldom
saw them.  Indeed, if anything, it was their absence you felt.

It was only when Vincent turned his back to you that you saw that
his neck and the back of his head formed one and the same plane.
It was a racial peculiarity in Vincent accentuated that lent him a
fascination.  On the pivot of his spine, his head, a little bulging
at the brows and crowned with its flaring mass of curls, turned
with an unreasonable majesty.  His was a pride that could scarcely
be allowed in one so young.  Still it was impossible to escape the
keen, blue darts of his glances.

Yet despite the fact that nature seemed to have tried to make a
masterpiece of Vincent Nolte and had then marred it and tweaked it
out of proportion at every turn, despite that, the boy had an
undeniable charm.  There was, for instance, his warm, clear German
voice, and there were the bright things and incidents with which he
continually managed to surround himself.  In their innumerable and
unexpected combinations the delight of him lay.

He was the son of a Hamburg merchant, the same with whom Mr.
Bonnyfeather and Francis Baring had wandered through Scotland years
before.  It was for that reason at first, and later on for himself,
that the young man in spite of his harum-scarum escapades was
constantly welcomed at the table of the Casa da Bonnyfeather.
Besides, he was the nephew of Otto Frank, or rather of Otto Frank &
Company, a most successful German firm in Livorno.  At one time
they had been a dangerous rival of the House of Bonnyfeather.  But
since Mr. Bonnyfeather had outdistanced them many years before he
could now afford to look upon them complacently enough.

He could even be glad to see, as he secretly told himself, with an
eye to possible future advantages and mutual understandings, the
heirs of the two houses dining together and a friendship growing up
between them.  With the French army liable to swoop down at any
time on the town it was quite possible that the business of all the
English firms at Livorno might be wiped out at one stroke.  In that
case an intimate connection with the branch of a neutral Hamburg
house might be invaluable.

In fact the canny old merchant was already pulling in his financial
horns, transferring large credits to his friends the Barings in
England and Holland, and trying to collect long outstanding debts.
He was simply quietly putting his affairs in order in case the
avalanche that had already slipped down into Lombardy should
suddenly dam the rivers of trade in Tuscany.

Part of his policy consisted in shifting what business he still
carried on overseas into the names of German merchants.  Now and
then he also began to employ a Yankee ship.  The new gridiron
ensign had lately begun to appear with a surprising frequency in
the Mediterranean.  He had sometimes even thought of transferring
his still reluctant and purely practical allegiance to King George
to the Grand Duke Francis and of flying the flag of Tuscany from
the roof of his commercial stronghold.  But his long connection
with the English was notorious.  The subterfuge would have been too
transparent.  There were not wanting in Livorno those who would
have been base enough to point it out if the French did come.  The
presence of the British fleet near by still heartened the old man,
and he continued to hoist the Union Jack every morning as of old,
but more thoughtfully and prayerfully as the war clouds thickened
about him.

He called in Signore Baldasseroni, by now the best commercial
lawyer in Livorno, and made his will.  He remitted to the marquis
in Spain two years' rent, renewed his lease in advance, and
registered it with a notary.  Above all he feared being turned out
of his beloved rooms in the Casa da Bonnyfeather in his old age.
He desired to die there even if it were necessary to close out his
business entirely.  He kept the Unicorn and faithful Captain
Bittern close by in case of emergencies, sending the vessel only on
short coasting voyages that followed the movements of the British
fleet and convoys.

In short, as might have been expected, Mr. Bonnyfeather acted
wisely and circumspectly; secretly, and with great forethought.  In
this scheme an increased allowance conferred upon Anthony to enable
him to go about with Vincent Nolte was only one item in his general
fiscal policy.  It was not, had Anthony only known it, conferred
for purely sentimental reasons.  None the less Anthony spent the
money merrily.  In this way the time went on well enough, it
seemed; whole months of it.

For to all outward appearances the placid pool of Anthony's
existence continued to reflect unbrokenly the animated but
essentially unchanging scenes about him.  Of the shifting shadows
in its depths the surface at least showed nothing.  Only the
gentlest of winds seemed so far to have rippled it pleasantly.
Perhaps it was this light, animated change playing over deeply
troubled waters like breezes and sunlight on the surface of a
geyser waiting to erupt that lent the latter days in Livorno all
the diversity and fascination which they had.  Suddenly, however,
the smooth surface of the pool was broken as if by the plunge of a
meteor.  It was a long time before the rings of so violent a
disturbance spread themselves out and calm reflections returned.
The meteor was a quarrel with Toussaint.  It came, instantly, as if
out of the blue.

It all happened because he had overcome his reluctance to speak to
Toussaint about Faith.  In the little meadow, while they sat
together looking down at the ruin one afternoon, the meteor fell.

It had been very warm.  They had taken a bottle of light claret
along and consumed it.  Toussaint had talked for a long time about
a perfect state.  All Europe was to be included.  How heavenly
would it be in the halcyon future just ahead to withdraw to some
earthly paradise with a beloved, with a perfect woman.  In words
that glowed with a faintly golden, poetic tinge through the
soporific mist of their mutual afternoon laziness, and the wine,
Toussaint painted the scenes of an ideal, platonic honeymoon on the
shores of Lake Léman.  No place was quite so beautiful as Lake
Léman, he said.

". . . the reflections of snow peaks in water!--but do you hear
me?" he asked, looking at Anthony, who was leaning back against the
trunk of a tree with his eyes closed.

"Yes," said Anthony.  It was not exactly a lie.  He HAD heard him
over the chirp of the grasshoppers.  He had even seen himself going
out in a skiff on Toussaint's beautiful lake--with Angela.  They
would row out together to an island where no one could talk to
them--no one!  Be alone!

In the mind of Toussaint a woman with the conversational powers of
Madame de Staël and the body of Faith Paleologus was gathering
flowers with him in a meadow by Lake Léman.  The white, cool
mountains towered above them.  They looked at the lake and talked.
"If that Paleologus were only . . . if she only would . . ."

"Yes," said Anthony, "I heard you."

Both their dreams were shattered.  They looked at each other and
laughed.  Somehow they understood what each was thinking.

"Who would you take with you?" said Toussaint, for the first time
dropping completely his rôle of mentor and speaking man to man.

For an instant it was on the tip of Anthony's tongue to say
"Angela."  Yet he could not.  Toussaint was laughing a little.
Toussaint evidently enjoyed the embarrassment of the lad before him
who sat against the tree blushing.  That was obvious.  Then it
occurred to Anthony that this was his opportunity.  He would ask
Toussaint about Faith.  He would get the advice and comfort of a
friend.  He wanted that.  He wanted to get it off his mind.  He
began in an awkward and blundering way.  It was hard to break down
his own reserve.  Finally he blurted out the story baldly enough.

It seemed more terrible now that he had put it into sound.  Perhaps
it was a mistake after all to have let it slip into words.  They
sounded bad.  During the misery of this recital he kept his eyes on
the ground.  Now he raised them to the face of his friend.  There
would be sympathy there at least--wouldn't there?

Over his tightly wound stock the face of Toussaint glared at him as
if he were being choked by his own neckwear.  It was convulsed and
livid with fury.  He put his fingers up to his neck.  Suddenly he
leaned forward and without an instant's warning struck Anthony in
the face.  A stroke of lightning could not have been more
unexpected.  For an instant Anthony put his hand to his cheek in a
kind of dumb surprise.  Then he felt the sharp smart of the
insulting fingers.  Blinding tears spurted from his eyes.  With a
roar of rage he threw himself upon the little Frenchman and shook
him unmercifully.

Toussaint made no resistance.  He seemed paralysed by what he had
done.  Anthony stopped after a while, frightened by his own
strength.  What was it that had happened?  Why?  He leaned back
against the tree again, exhausted by rage.

"Mon Dieu!" said Toussaint, reassembling himself painfully on the
ground, "vous m'avez tué."  He groaned, weeping.  Anthony looked at
him now in silent misery.

"I love her," shouted Toussaint at him suddenly.  "I love her--and
it was you!  You boy!  Meldrun!"  He began to get up.  "Go away!
Leave me!"

Anthony snatched his hat and ran.  He got to the Casa da
Bonnyfeather breathless.  Toussaint came in later much the worse
for wear.  His coat was tattered.  They said nothing.  They passed
each other and went on as strangers.  They both hid it from all the
others.  They were outwardly polite.  But both were heartsick at
what had happened.  There were no more meetings by the ruin now.
In the afternoons Anthony went out.  Faith, he saw, had guessed.
Damn her!  Her eyes smiled.  The place was growing unbearable,
especially at meal times.  It was better at the Franks'.

So Anthony was often at Otto Frank's dining with Vincent Nolte.
The counting room and apartments of "Otto Franco," as he was
called, were in the great house of the Franchetti on the Piazza
della Comunità at the corner of the Piazza d'Arme.  From the door
of it and from its street windows there was an excellent view of
the piazza, where the troops of the garrison occasionally paraded,
and of the town hall or mayoralty close by.  It was the official
centre of both commercial and governmental activities of the town.
Something was always going on there.  There were sights to be seen,
news, and rumours to be picked up.  After several years of the life
along the docks Anthony was intrigued by the piazza..  It was the
opposite face of the life of Livorno.  To him a new one that he was
glad to look upon.  He began to go nearly every noon as soon as the
work at the office was over to dine with Vincent Nolte.

He would make some purely formal excuse to Toussaint about not
being able to spend that afternoon "as usual," hastily change into
a new, bottle-green suit, dampen his curls, and dash out of the
gate.

To the right of the Casa da Bonnyfeather a long alley led directly
from the quays along the Darsena through a maze of high tenements
to emerge finally on the wide Strada Ferdinanda.  After threading
his way over refuse piles, under flapping multi-coloured clothes,
past goats, and long strings of spaghetti hung out to dry, Anthony
would thus emerge suddenly as if coming out of a shadowed tunnel
into the brilliant sunlight of the strada.

By this short cut he had left the world of ships and the sea behind
him.  By it he seemed to have become at once and at one stride the
citizen of a more sophisticated world.

The Strada Ferdinanda ran in a direct line from the Porta Pisa to
the Porta Colonella.  Alone among the streets of the town at that
time it was swept daily.  A double line of poplars ran down the
middle of it, and it was lined with white marble fronts and bright,
stone houses where considerable brasswork twinkled in the sun.

Here the officers of the garrison exercised their horses.  Governor
Spanocchi was frequently to be glimpsed rolling along in his high-
backed equipage of state with gilded harness, outriders, and an
escort of cavalry.  The landaus and phaetons of the well-to-do
dashed back and forth.  About noon the gigs of merchants brought
them home for the day, the flower vendors from the country made
their last desperate effort to dispose of their fast wilting wares,
and a golden dust hung in the air from one gate of the city to the
other.  The flag could then be seen drooping on its staff at the
castle.  Exactly at a quarter after twelve the diligence from Pisa
flashed down the long street with a tooting horn and four horses,
to draw up on the piazza before the mayoralty.  Here the passports
of travellers were examined while a crowd gathered to view the
arrivals of the day.  The Pisa diligence was probably the only one
in Italy that made a point of leaving and arriving on time.  So far
at least had the influence of English travellers prevailed over the
native indifference to the clock.  The entire city was nevertheless
proud of this daily miracle of punctuality elsewhere unknown.

Anthony always timed himself by the infallible diligence.  If it
had arrived before he turned into the Strada he could consider
himself late for the noon meal.  If not, he was sure to find
Vincent's uncle, "Otto Franco," at the corner of the Piazza d'Arme
strutting up and down before his office entirely bareheaded.

The singular little man would be without a cravat, his linen shirt
open so as to allow the breezes to wave the hair on his chest.  His
morning gown flapped in the breeze.  In a pair of huge, red,
crescent-shaped, Turkish slippers he slithered along the sidewalks
while he gesticulated violently.  He was followed by a train of
goods and money-brokers and a few clerks from his own establishment
ready to grab and carry the luggage of strangers.  The reason for
this bizarre show was to advertise the importance of the Capo della
Casa to the strangers just dismounting from the diligence across
the street.  There a hired runner announced the merits of his
master in several languages and pointed him out to travellers
desirous of changing their money or of obtaining passage for
themselves or their goods to other lands.  And it was seldom that
someone was not thus inveigled into his net.  Nor did they ever
have cause to regret it, for Otto Frank was both able and honest.
He differed from his rivals only in not hiding his light under a
bushel of dignity.  Others who had tried his methods had failed.
As he himself explained it, they lacked the courage of Turkish
slippers and a naked breast.

When Anthony passed this personage he would invariably receive a
loud invitation to dinner.  The entire menu was always loudly
rehearsed.  He would hide his amusement and accept respectfully,
going into the counting room where Vincent was usually to be found
at his desk looking gloomy enough.  For as long as Uncle Otto
continued to drum trade in this manner the social aspirations of
Signore Vincent Nolte as the representative of a dignified merchant
firm were kept in dark eclipse.  Vincent's father, Herr Johann
Nolte of Hamburg, was, indeed, the head of the house and supplied
the capital for Uncle Otto.  The uncle's noisy advertising was
therefore the more difficult for the son of a long line of Hanseatic
merchants to swallow.  Nevertheless, there were compensations.
Vincent's position in the house gave him considerable freedom.  As
he grew older more and more of the business of the firm was being
concentrated in his hands by Hamburg.  Vincent was no fool.  Even
though his uncle was still consul for Hamburg at Livorno and wore
the red coat with one silver epaulette, his nephew was already
beginning to rule the roost.  In reality it was Vincent's invitation
to dine which Anthony accepted.

Vincent would put his hand on his friend's shoulder and tow him
upstairs to the long dining-room where the family ate.  Although
the windows gave onto the Piazza d'Arme the room was in Germany.
There was a great Nuremberg stove at one end, a long rack with
steins and cannikins against one wall and little, carved hanging-
shelves on the other.  The table was long and massive, supported by
wooden Corinthian columns ending in claws.  Set about it were dark,
high-backed, Gothic chairs with a wealth of meticulous carving in
which a frieze of bears pursued by men in medieval costume armed
with crossbows predominated.  For some reason or other the pursuit
of the bears was not occasionally interrupted by an angel blowing a
trumpet out of a wooden cloud.

The effect of this room and of the chairs in particular was
peculiar.  Anthony had never seen anything like it.  It was
astonishing to see a Corinthian column ending in claws.  Evidently
things beyond the Rhine rested upon a different pediment.  It was
somehow like the German language.  His Latin, all the past he knew,
did not help him much here.  Also there was a peculiar cheerfulness
and cleanliness about the apartment.

Under the windows, in which a hundred brilliant flowers bloomed in
boxes, sat a pale-faced little girl in a kirtle, with straw-
coloured hair peeping out under her white, starched cap.  She was
knitting, although she was only about eleven years old, like any
hausfrau.  Beside her a doll sat looking at her with large china
eyes.  The name of the little mädchen was Anna.  She was Vincent's
cousin.  When the two young men entered the room she would come
forward, curtsy, and put up her cool little cheek to be kissed.
Anthony was charmed with her.  While the servants were laying the
long, white table-cloth he would sit down on the floor beside her
and listen to her talk.  At first it was all in Italian but as time
went on and he began to understand her she lapsed gradually into
broad Hamburg Deutsch.

German, indeed, was the chief thing which Anthony acquired from his
long intimacy with Vincent and the Franks.  That he should pick up
another language without thinking about it was merely a continuation
of the normal order of his existence.  Little else but German was
spoken at the table in the Frank establishment and Anthony could
soon join in boldly.  Occasionally he aroused a good-natured laugh
and Anna would correct him.  From her he learned most of the German
he knew, and he never heard it spoken without recalling the gentle
tones of her voice.

While Vincent was donning some gorgeous attire for the afternoon
sally, Anthony listened to stories of Hamburg from Anna; to tales
of a never-to-be-forgotten visit to Helgoland in the company of one
Tante Rachel Rickmers of Bremerhaven.  White cliffs were there.
How green the pastures were above them!  The sea gnawed at the land
like a bone!  Vincent had once taken her to the Gymnasium of
Professor Carl F. Hipp.  She herself had actually sat on his august
knee while he "with condescending illustrious eyeshine" talked to
so small a girl.  Ach, how beautiful were those days!  When would
they be going back to Germany?

Meanwhile she was feeding her birds, and dressing her doll for
dinner.  Meanwhile Uncle Otto had appeared at the door, kicked off
his Turkish slippers and roared for a stein of beer, which he drank
at a gulp to cut the Italian dust out of his throat.  "In hot
countries the best brew lacks zest," he would exclaim, spit, and
dive into his own chamber to change into bright raiment which like
his nephew he particularly affected, or, if guests were expected,
into his consular uniform of which he was inordinately proud.

After a short Lutheran grace, in which it seemed strange to Anthony
that no one crossed himself, the meal began, usually with a
buttermilk soup with boiled cherries floating in it of which Uncle
Otto was very fond.  The smell of beer and sauerkraut would always
have penetrated the apartment.  There were various pickled meats,
Rhine wines, sausages and pfannkuchen, boiled vegetables with
vinegar on them, and, as a slight concession to the locality,
always a smoking dish of spaghetti with liver sauce.  There was
about this German meal a certain acid tang which Anthony had not
met elsewhere.  At first he disliked it, but it was not long before
both its quantity and its bittersweet flavours often rendered the
food which he had been used to somewhat insipid.  Still he could
never really like sour things nor control his face when he met
them.  Anna laughed.  For this her mother never failed to reprove
her.

It was truly remarkable the quantity of beer which the firm of Otto
Frank & Company, both uncle and nephew, could stow away.  At least
a shipload a year, thought Anthony.  He looked at them with
astonishment.

"The most profound difference between men on the continent of
Europe," said Uncle Otto, wiping the foam from his lips, "is
between wine drinkers and beer guzzlers.  Religion is nothing to be
compared to it.  Religions change; beer and wine remain.  Make up
your mind before you are forty where you intend to spend your
declining years, whether in a beer or in a wine land.  It will make
all the difference between a vivacious and a complacent old age."

"What are you going to do with that vivacious wardrobe of yours
then, Uncle Otto, if you go back to Germany?" asked Vincent.  "It
would only be tolerated on an old man in a wine-drinking place.  It
is, I should say, decidedly a product of the joyous grape; to be
conceived of only by an Italian tailor in his cups."

"Ach!" replied his uncle.  "Herr Gott!  I am not old yet, neither
have I gone back to Germany already to beer alone.  Besides, when
that time comes it will be so distant as to make all these fine
costumes out of date."

"Fine costumes, indeed!" continued Vincent who knew that the
vainglory of his uncle's raiment was a weak point in his armour.
"You should see them, Anthony, the glories of our Capo della Casa;
six embroidered and laced coats from azure to sunset-glow, a
bottle-green, gold-frogged wedding coat, satin breeches to match,
rhinestone buckles in filigree, a sword with a snakeskin hilt and
an emerald.  Du Lieber! and all of French make, all out of fashion
already."

Here his uncle fairly snarled at him.

"I told you so," continued the incorrigible nephew, "I told you
that the English cut was coming in.  If you had only taken my
advice and had your tailor copy the wardrobes of some of the young
milords who dine at your own table you would now be in the swim as
I am."

Here he leaned back and displayed his London watch fob, his neat
but gorgeous vest, the broad, double-breasted coat that was just
coming into style.  Herr Frank roared at him.  All that Vincent had
said was true.

It generally took the soft voice of Frau Elisabeth to smooth over
these occasions.  To her this mere ruffling of the surface of her
husband's complacency was a stirring of her own depths.  Her voice
was like oil.  Presently Uncle Otto would tell his one and only
joke.  Something about a Dutchman who swallowed peaches whole and
complained that the stones hurt his throat.  They would all laugh
at him, and pleased at the success of his joke he would rise
smiling.

A bell was struck, the servants cleared the remains of the meal
rapidly.  Another cover was laid.  Frau Frank again took her place
at the head of the table for the "second cover," and as Uncle Otto,
Vincent, and Anthony walked out the paying guests of the
establishment trooped in.  Anthony would look back.  The face of
the German woman would be solemn with a silent grace, the heads of
the travellers, mostly English, bowed, and little Anna would be
sitting in her chair again knitting, with the birds hopping about
above her.

Uncle Otto would lead the way to his desk.  "Do, my good nephew,
have a look at this correspondence," he would say.  "I need your
advice about it--and thine too, Herr Adverse, the Spanish is
difficult."  Then he would go away leaving Vincent to settle all
the pressing problems of the day.

The two young men would work together over the letters.  Vincent's
trust in Anthony was absolute.  There was no question here of the
old rivalry of the two commercial houses.  Knotty problems were
discussed on their merits, as if confidences could never be
betrayed, and in the process both of them learned respect for each
other's experience and powers of decision.  After the replies to
the piles of correspondence had been written and various directions
noted, they would look up at each other and laugh to think how
helpless and pompous Uncle Otto was in the face of the simplest
difficulties--and how able they were themselves.  How pitiable was
the vain old man!  Vincent would shoot the ledgers back into their
racks.  Then they would both take up their hats and gloves, give
each other a whisking, take a last reassuring glimpse into a small
bit of mirror, and sally forth into the Strada Ferdinanda canes in
hand.




CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ADVENTURES OF A SHEPHERDESS


It was fashionable to walk in the strada from half past three to
five o'clock.  But you must appear to be going somewhere, about to
make a call, or at least prepared to meet up with friends to make
supper engagements and rendezvous for the evening.  All the world
made it a point to know just exactly where it was bound for while
walking on the Strada Ferdinanda between half past three and five.
Hence, if you did not have an engagement you assumed one.

At first Anthony would have had to assume one had it not been for
Vincent.  But with that popular young gentleman's arm linked in his
own he was always sure of a supper engagement before the castle
clock struck five.  For there was no one more certain of getting a
promising party of young bloods together for the evening than
Vincent Nolte.  At worst you could always turn up at the galleries
of Signore Terrini, the painter, now grown prosperous and fat,
surrounded by the phlegmatic portraits of the purse-proud or the
originals of them eating cakes and sipping wine.  Signore Terrini
was now the only painter in Italy who could still make his nudes
look absolutely naked.  "True to life" in every particular.  For
that he was admired by the foreign merchants who composed his
clientele, and his studio, which contrived to hint of naughtiness,
with some canvases turned to the wall, yet remained at the hour of
cake and claret, or gooseberry wine, "elegant."  In Livorno it was
even taken for a salon.

Here on any afternoon two well-dressed young men introduced by "the
master" were sure of not being permitted to look forward to a
lonely evening.  This was an unfailing resource.  But after a while
it was unnecessary.  Social prestige like any other ponderous body
when once set in motion acquires momentum.  Attracted into the
orbit of Vincent, sometimes an eccentric one, Anthony was soon
whirling by his own proper motion.  It was pleasant, he found, thus
to glide along.

Several of the impressive doorways along the strada were in a few
months' time quite familiar.  It was soon evident to both Vincent
and Anthony that the daughters of bankers provided not only the
most substantial collations but the most luxurious transportation
to the opera.  To call on anyone whose father did not at least keep
a coach was soon, unless other attractions were unusual, voted
beneath their mutual dignity.  Theatre nights particularly were
those upon which they chose to shine.

When there was a company at the opera or a band of actors in town,
THAT afternoon they would only walk the length of the street once
merely to be in good form.  Then they would turn back to the
piazza..  There one of them would stand in line for a few minutes
chatting with other young dandies while waiting for the half-blind
clerk at the little booth like a sentry box to make out their opera
tickets.

The old clerk wrote a beautiful hand but naturally very slowly.  It
was also necessary to mark down every assignment to the boxes in a
book and to call out the name of the purchaser.  Thus it was
possible to take exception to anyone who was not qualified.  There
had at one time been duels over certain seats.  But times were
changing now.  The old clerk merely carried out a ritual.  A great
many people now were vulgar and rich enough merely to send a
footman for the pink slip.  Knowing and ardent young gentlemen,
however, still saw to it that they got a box due their rank.

"The Stall of the Angels, tonight, Signore Adverso."  How it
thrilled Anthony to be unexceptionable as he folded the long, pink
slip three times precisely, counted his change into his tasselled
purse, and stepped aside with a slight bow and flourish.  Provided,
of course, that the next in line was a gentleman.  If it was a
footman you held your place and permitted a gentleman to step up.
Of late there had been a good deal of grumbling about that from the
lackeys.  Like a first rumbling of revolution among the lower
orders there seemed to be some tendency among these fellows to
combine.  The gentlemen, of course, became even more punctilious.
Buying a ticket was now like attending a Spanish levée.  At last
one afternoon a burly Swiss footman was positively insolent and
required a touch of Vincent's cane to settle the matter while
Anthony held his place.  There was to be a double bill that night
and the queue was a long one.

"The Revolution has not yet arrived here, my fine fellow," said
Vincent.

"But soon," muttered the Swiss rubbing his arm.  His fellow
servants seemed about to make the prophecy come true.  The young
bucks gathered about Vincent.  He laughed and stood the man off
while Anthony coolly bought the tickets and handed his place over
to Luigi Pontrovo, the bishop's secretary.  After that there was no
more trouble.  But class feeling was already beginning to run high.
The story of even so trivial an incident spread.  That day the
names of Anthony and Vincent were passed about from lip to lip on
the Corso.

That evening they were pointed out in the Stall of the Angels
sitting with Maddalena Strozzi, the daughter of a Florentine
banker, and her friend Mlle. de Rhan visiting her from Nantes.  In
the sconces at the side of the stall, and in the two high
candelabra provided extra, burned the best French beeswax candles
which the Casa da Bonnyfeather imported.  It was considered by all
present to be an extravagant and nice little attention to the young
ladies.  The tallow dips provided by the management in the other
stalls guttered in drafts and dripped sadly.  One had to be careful
how one used one's fan with only a tallow dip just above.  In the
Stall of the Angels the fans fluttered merrily and carelessly as
fans should, and from the front of the box shimmered a peculiarly
clear, yellow light.  Farther back in the shadows sat Donna Anna
Montefeltro, the duenna of the banker's daughter.  Her fat,
powdered face like a white mask had a huge laced and ribboned
coiffure above it that disappeared into the darkness of the box
curtain.  Her eyes, which never seemed to take time off even to
wink, glittered like brown, polished wood.

The bill that night was a double one, La Veillée et la Matinée
Villageoise out of compliment to the large number of French émigrés
in the audience, followed by Schröder's comedy of Die Unglückliche
Ehe aus Delicatessen.  The latter was given at the request of a
number of German merchants who had not often in Livorno the
opportunity of hearing a play in their own tongue.

Vincent was forced to translate the German for the two girls and
Donna Montefeltro.  "From too much refinement come unhappy
matches," he whispered, touching Maddalena on the arm when he
thought no one was watching, and looking wise.  She looked at him
with mock surprise over her fan.  The powder creases in
Montefeltro's face assumed a conventional, shocked design.

"There is no chorus I hope to this German play with the revolting
title, Signore Nolte," she said.  "Maddalena is not permitted to
view the ballet as yet.  You promised me, you know."  Vincent
hastened to reassure her.

"There will be little or no dancing, signora.  You know this is not
the local staff on the stage this evening but the company which has
been thrust out of Brussels and is on its travels.  They will go by
way of Vienna to Hamburg, avoiding Buonaparte.  Nothing could be
more genteel than that.  In addition all the chief figures in the
plays tonight are men.  You see I have even been too careful.  But
Mees and Bergamis are both famous actors.  The main event, indeed,
is the fact that Debrülle who acts Count Klingsberg in the German
comedy has borrowed my uncle's uniform coat for the part and it
will undoubtedly be recognized.  My uncle and his wife are sitting
just across from us there.  Watch the fun."  Vincent bowed to his
uncle who somewhat pompously replied.

Uncle Otto was not aware that his coat had been "borrowed."  He sat
bored enough beside his frau through the rather short performance
in French which came first.  He looked somewhat puzzled at the
polite applause which followed and from which he refrained.  Not
having been able to find his consul's uniform that evening had made
him a bit glum.  He sat waiting for the German play to begin,
sullenly, dressed in his most gorgeous, pink, French costume.

Already he was conscious that what his nephew had said about his
clothes was true.  In the long, frogged paletot and knee-breeches
he already felt somehow a little out-of-age.  Secretly it was as if
he were going about in a dressing gown and drawers.  He looked over
the audience for consolation.  About half of it was still in wigs
and velvets, the more distinguished half, of course!  What was
coming over the world?  All these young men in their own hair,
wide-breasted coats, and breeches half-way down their calves!  And
the women with those thin, Greek night-gowns, a tight ribbon under
their breasts!  Uncle Otto snorted.

A vague feeling of uneasiness, of unexpected and undesired change
in all the ways of life and the familiar habiliments of things sent
him suddenly cold.  He wished he were back in Hamburg; that he had
on his consul's uniform, the long, red coat with the gold buttons
and the silver epaulette on one shoulder.  In that he looked like a
British general.  The feeling of authority and position which it
gave him would have warmed his heart.  Where was it?  He turned
again to his wife, who was breathing heavily in her stays, to renew
his reproaches.  At least she might keep his wardrobe in order!
The dispute grew loud enough to amuse those sitting near by.
Across the theatre Uncle Otto could see young Vincent whispering
into the ear of the banker's daughter.  What did that young dog
care in his high choker and loud, English watch fob.  The thing
flashed in your eyes clear across the pit.  Wax candles for the
mädchens, moonstone cufflinks!  He leaned back and fanned his
purple cheeks.  The curtain went up for the entr'acte.

For Anthony this proved to be the event of the evening.  It was one
of those little plotless pieces in which poetry, moonlight,
sentiment, and music waked the old court tradition of shepherdesses
and the sylvan village in the background to a brief charming life.
Something just a little old-fashioned about it now gave it a hint
of yearning.  This was announced by the low, full-throated overture
of the fiddles and the baritone singer Debrülle.  He, dressed as a
shepherd, warbled a melodious reveille to his love still asleep in
a village wrapped--behind a gauze curtain--in the mists of morning.

A low, happy reply of girls' voices, the high, feminine note of the
violins, and the clever imitation of a cock's crowing brought a
ripple of pleasure and amusement from the audience.  Anthony had
managed to secure Mlle. de Rhan's hand and an electric thrill from
the returned pressure of his fingers caused him to breathe deeply.
The gauze curtain was withdrawn.  A few more candles in rose-
coloured lanterns contrived to throw on the painted, rustic
village, now plainly revealed backstage, the illusion of sunrise.
The music quickened into dance-time with the theme of a song
emerging.  Anthony leaned forward.

The great apron of the stage swept out into the semi-darkness of
the audience, ringed round by its half-mystic, mellow candle
footlights.  The little hood for the head of the leader of the
orchestra cast a wide fan-like shadow across it.  Down there you
could dimly see the white, upturned faces of the audience, wigs,
and the flutter of a fan, the twinkle of women's jewels.  Debrülle
was standing in the middle of the stage with outstretched arms,
pleading in a rich baritone for his love to


     "Come forth, come forth,
      Into the morning light,
      The dew is on the rose,
      The rose, the birds begin . . ."


when from the preposterously bucolic houses on each side of the
grass-painted street emerged a troop of milkmaids in green
stockings and red bodices.  Half of them carried milking stools and
the others bright, silver buckets.  They advanced now, clicking
their heels, and performing various evolutions with the stools and
buckets in that kind of a dance which it is well known that all
milkmaids indulge in just at sunrise.


     "The dew is on the rose,
      The birds begin, begin,
      The milkmaids rise . . ."


Insisted the now impatiently impassioned voice of the baritone--



     "But where is she, the charm--
      The charming shepherdess
      My morning love . . ."


It seemed as if the music had reached the crest of yearning.

"Ah, where indeed?" thought Anthony.  He had forgotten her for a
moment.  Where had she gone, his dear, little girl?  The very word
"girl" sent a thrill through him.  He lingered over it as if it
tasted sweet.  Would there never be any answer to all his useless
inquiries?  She had driven through the Porta Pisa--and disappeared
into the great world beyond.  Would he never see Angela, Angela,
Angela again?  The trembling fibres of his fresh, boyish body
stretched to the last, high, pathetic fall of the shop-worn chords.

How much greater his sorrow for her loss, his need of her, had been
than he had ever known before!  The music opened new depths in him.
It was all dark and lonely there.  The strange, pallid memory of
Faith moved slippery about there in the shadow-play.  He shuddered.
"Angela!"  Angela could save him.

In a little village like that they might have had a house together;
be happy forever.  Why not?  He could forget everything there, even
the madonna.  He would have Angela.  Have her!  He choked.  Unknown
to him the poetry of his own longing had transposed the cheap
little scene before him into the most exquisite art.  How beautiful
it was!  "The dew is on the rose."  He could smell it; feel it on
his own bare feet as on the grass those lost, lovely mornings out
on the road.  In love with Angela!  "Gone, gone, lost, lala, lala
la-a," the fiddles wailed.  "O God, even a poor convent child can
pray to you!  Listen to me."  There were tears in his eyes for
himself.  He could not see Uncle Otto over there any more.  He
dropped Mlle. de Rhan's hand to dash them away furtively.  Her lips
curled in surprise.

Then the violins, as violins do, surpassed themselves.  What had
seemed the summit of ecstasy proved only an overture after all.
They went up and up into a madrigal of pure happiness.  The
baritone paused.

The boy was beside himself now.  The warm air and perfumes from the
stalls below poured up and intoxicated him.  Someone just
underneath must be crushing lime leaves in her hand.  His temples
and wrists throbbed to the music.  From behind the wings came a
girl's voice, fresh, but rich and full-throated as a song from the
orange groves of Sicily heard far up on the slopes in the early
morning.

A little shepherdess with her crook, in red, high-heeled shoes and
a short apron-skirt, now advanced down-stage answering with high
thrilling notes the amative welcome of her swain.  Their mutual
warblings moved the audience to applause.  But Anthony could only
SEE that.  In his own ears the blood was crackling.  That voice,
the way she pointed her toes, the movements of her limbs were
deliciously familiar.  Could it be . . . ?  He felt the sweat
running down his back under his coat.

She was wearing an absurd little straw hat, wide-brimmed at one
side, curved up archly at the other.  As yet he could not see under
it.  Then she turned her face upward into the light.  It was
Angela.

He was afraid it was a dream.  It would escape him.  His knees fell
apart and he leaned further forward clear over the front of the
box.  He would have called out to her but his voice failed.  Then
he remembered where he was.  Surely she would see him.  She was
looking directly at him now.  He made his arm move.  Someone else's
hand on the end of it seemed to take out his handkerchief and shake
it.  Presently in the middle of the dream he became aware that
Angela was lifting up her arms toward him and singing at the box.
Oh, yes, he and Vincent--and the other girls were in it.  It was
real!  He smiled and moved his lips in their old formula.  He knew
she would hear what he was saying.  He laughed aloud.

Some of the faces in the audience now began to be turned toward the
Stall of the Angels.  It was plain that between the young
shepherdess on the stage and the young man hanging over the railing
with a trembling handkerchief in his hand there was an understanding.
The baritone gladly took up the local lead and the song was finished
off obviously addressed to the good-looking young folks in the box
with the clear wax candles.

Anthony sat back dizzy with happiness and lax with relief.  She had
come back to him out of the country where she had been for a while.
In that delightful little village. . . .  Of course!  How could he
have ever doubted it?  He had found her again.  Angela had come
back!  Far down on the stage he saw two white hands toss him a
kiss.  The handkerchief replied.  The curtain fell on a round of
laughter and applause.  People kept looking up.  Now for the first
time Anthony felt terribly embarrassed.

Across the pit Mrs. Udney raised her glasses to examine the box
which had been receiving so much attention.  She was sitting with
her husband the English consul, her daughter Florence, and a young
Scotch merchant, David Parish, the scion of a rising commercial
house at Antwerp.  David, she hoped, was the young man to be.  Mrs.
Udney smiled as she watched the obviously fluttered party opposite
and started somewhat as her focus finally fixed upon Anthony.  She
thought she had never seen a face so completely happy.  And yet
where had she seen it before?  Just then Anthony happened to look
up, a streak of light gilding his hair.  Mrs. Udney suddenly
remembered him looking up at her from under a priest's hat while
she stood at her library window years before.

"My dear," she exclaimed giggling with excitement, "look who is in
the box there!"  She handed her glasses to Florence.  "Do you
recognize your prince of the church?  An old sweetheart of
Florence's," she continued, smiling on David Parish and touching
him on the arm with her fan.  It suited her plans quite well to
claim a fashionably dressed young man in a box with two bankers'
daughters as her own daughter's first conquest.  Florence looked.
Her small chin took on a serious angle for a minute under the
binoculars.  She blushed.

"Yes, I remember."  She might have said more, her mother thought.
Mr. Parish and Mr. Udney had each his turn.  The former smiled
complacently.

"My word!" exclaimed Mr. Udney, "Father Xavier and I made no
mistake.  Mr. Bonnyfeather has certainly done well by his appren--"
a tight squeeze from his wife stopped him--"ahem, by his ward."

"Decidedly," chimed in Mrs. Udney.  "We must have him in to tea
again," she looked sidewise at Parish.  "What do you think,
Florence?"

"Certainly, mother.  Will he sleep in the spare bedroom this time?"
asked Florence seemingly out of a reverie.  Her mother could have
pinched her.  The consul chuckled.  Mr. Parish looked at him a
little uncomfortably.  The curtains went up on Too Much Refinement
Makes Unhappy Matches--in German.

Anthony sat in a trance through the comedy.  He had even forgotten
that Mlle. de Rhan had a hand, that she existed.  Mademoiselle felt
her throat tighten a little with jealous chagrin.  She would
scarcely have credited the young creature in mouse-grey who sat
next to her with having known an actress.  He was deeper than she
had supposed.  Donna Montefeltro was outwardly scandalized and
inwardly pleased.  The box of her charges had been pleasantly
prominent that night.  It might pay to cultivate this young
Englishman.  How innocent he looked.  She grinned over her fan,
remembering.

With Vincent, Anthony's stock had soared.  The young dog! and never
to say a word about it!  He pawed his friend excitedly but was only
shaken off.  Presently he and Signorina Strozzi were leaning
forward breathlessly waiting for the cue when Uncle Otto's coat
should appear.  Presently "Count Klingsberg" strutted out.  For a
few minutes nothing happened.  Then someone giggled.  A whisper
began to run about.  "The coat of El Signore Consolino di Amburgo,
ah!"  Then Uncle Otto became aware of it.  He snorted and shook his
stick.  His nephew bowed back.  Even those who could not understand
German could understand this.  Gusts of applause shook the house.
The actor played up to it.  The curtain went down on a great hit--
and the audience filed out laughing and talking.

Vincent's friends waved at him.  The boy's little ears tingled with
excitement.  He and Anthony had contrived to be the most popular
young men in Livorno that night.  The girls fluttered their fans in
the gay light of public approval and looked pleased and excited,
even a little impressed.

As they filed out Anthony looked down on the crowd surging toward
the door below.  A long poke bonnet with a prim, black bow was for
a second turned up toward him.  At the bottom of it, as if at the
end of a shadowed tunnel, he saw the face of Faith.  It was pale,
he noticed.  Always she seemed to be looking out from shadows.  He
went cold for an instant.  Too bad SHE had to spoil an otherwise
perfect evening!  But how wonderful it had been.  Angela!

On the way out he forgot Faith.  The Udneys stopped him.  He saw
Florence standing behind her mother.  How lovely and fragile she
had grown!  Only the brown, golden hair and the deep grey eyes of
the plump little girl remained.  "Anthony, mother is asking you to
tea."  She laughed as she withdrew her hand.  It was true.  And she
had called him by his first name.  He drew himself together to
reply in almost too perfect English.  Vincent was now included in
the invitation.  "This is Mr. David Parish," said Florence.

"How do you do, MR. David Parish?" said Anthony.  Everybody
laughed except Parish.  "Yes, indeed, they would both come."

"Delighted," added Vincent, telling the literal truth and looking
with rapturous approval at Anthony.  His friend seemed to know
everybody.  The English consul's daughter!  Vincent whistled under
his breath as he drew on his gloves.

They went out and bowed Maddalena and Mlle. de Rhan into their
carriage.  Donna Anna was by this time completely persuaded of the
eligibility of the two young men.  The English consul's wife was
impeccable.  Yes, they might call on the two signorinas tomorrow.
The carriage rolled away.

Anthony and Vincent turned to join the crowd of young men standing
behind them.  There was considerable chaffing to be endured.  "Who
was she?"  "How did Anthony know her?"  After some minutes of
hearty German backslapping and heavy jokes, they managed to put
them off.  The two were left alone at last standing on the curb.

Anthony clutched Vincent's sleeve.  "How can I speak to her--now?"
he cried.  Vincent laughed.  After all there were some things this
English friend of his did not know.

"That's easy enough," he exclaimed, "follow me."  He led the way
toward the dim lantern over the stage door.  Moonlight pricked out
the pictures and messages scrawled upon the bricks of the old
theatre.  It was a warm, calm night.  The noise of carriage wheels
died away through the streets.  By this time everybody would be
taking the air on the Corso.

Vincent would have liked to be walking there, too.  By this time
the news of the doings of the theatre would be noised about and it
would be pleasant to be greeted knowingly by acquaintances.  But
this adventure of Anthony was also alluring, worth following up
just to see what would happen.  Anthony was proving to be somewhat
mysterious he felt.  Nevertheless, one would like to walk on the
Corso, be in two places at the same time.  Besides it would never
do to go home till Uncle Otto had cooled down about the coat.  No,
he would have to make a night of it.

They gave a small coin to the man at the door and went in.  Behind
the curtain the theatre seemed vast and dark.  A few lanterns hung
here and there in the wings lighting up bits of stacked scenery
like autumnal glimpses of a valley seen through the clouds.  The
wreck of the little village lay strewn about.  They stumbled over a
pile of the milkmaids' buckets making a ferocious din.  Finally
someone emerged from the wings shouting, "This way, this way,
messieurs," and led the way down a narrow, brick stairs in the wall
to the cell-like dressing-rooms.  A door opened letting out a wash
of light and revealing a man standing there stripped to the waist
and washing the grease paint off his face with a coarse towel.  It
was Debrülle himself.

"Come in," he half shouted, "I thought you would come for it."  He
handed Vincent his uncle's coat with the silver epaulette.  "I am a
thousand times obliged to you, my dear fellow," he hurried on, "it
was the hit of the evening.  Ah, your friend!  The young man in the
box."  The actor murmured his pleasure.  "We are also greatly
indebted to you, signore,--I suppose," he added seemingly not as
enthusiastic over Anthony's part as he was over the coat.  He
continued to address himself to Vincent.  A flat, stale smell of
old cigars, sloe gin, and damp cellar permeated everything.

"Can you tell me, sir, where I can find Angela?" said Anthony after
a while, unable to refrain any longer.

"Angela?  Ah! the little shepherdess, I suppose?" said Debrülle.
"No," he continued dubiously, "she has gone to her lodgings by this
time.  We are a very genteel company, VERY strict, you know."  He
winked at Vincent.  Anthony could not hide his disappointment.  So
she had not left him any message and it would not do to inquire.
"They were very strict."  Presently Vincent rose to leave.
Debrülle shook hands with Anthony with an amused gleam in his eyes.

"It was a great pleasure, sir, to hear you sing tonight," the young
man gasped.  He was sincere enough in this and he had to say
something.

The face of the actor lit up radiantly.  "I am glad to hear you say
so, my dear boy," said he.  "It is not often we receive a
compliment so genuine, after teasing our admirers--and so well
deserved," he added laughing again.  "Of course, she left something
for you.  Unless the girls go home early, you know, they are
bothered to death.  Here it is."  He rustled about among his paint
pots and cigar stubs and produced a small red card.  Anthony
grasped it blushing.

They stumbled up the brick steps together, Uncle Otto's coat on
Vincent's arm.  There was a ripping sound.  "Heavens!" said
Debrülle striking a spark, "you have tramped off the epaulette."
It was true.  Vincent turned a little pale.  "Gott!  I shall be
sued by your uncle, the consul, now.  I do not envy you either."
Debrülle went on up, laughing, his voice rumbling through the
wings.  At the door he stopped under the smoking lantern and
scribbled something on a card.

"There," he said, handing it to Vincent, "come to the matinée
tomorrow.  Thanks again!  I wish you both luck.  You with your
uncle and the coat, and you, monsieur, with--a happy pastoral
night!"  He flourished his gold-headed stick and went clicking down
the sidewalk toward the Corso.  A stave of the song to the
shepherdess drifted back through the moonlight.  The gin made him
place his feet carefully.  He stopped to look back once and raised
his hand.  It looked like a blessing.  They both laughed.


                      Chez Signora Bovino


"But what AM I going to do about it?" asked Vincent, anxiously
examining the coat from the shoulder of which the epaulette drooped
disconsolately.  To Anthony the predicament of his friend seemed
trivial.  He went close to the lantern and by its smoky light
examined the little red card.


                        Signora Bovino
                       Explains the Past
                             and
                    Elucidates the Future,
              Casts Horoscopes, and Reads Palms.
                   Her Art is Invulnerable
                      on the Fifth Floor
                        Strada Calypso
                            ------
              Satisfactory Amatory Entertainment
                         on the First.


Underneath was a dainty sketch of a small shepherdess with angel's
wings and a ribboned crook.  Anthony laughed.  He thought of the
longitude machine on the roof at Signora Bovino's.  Well, he would
take care not to waken Mr. Williams.  Doubtless he would be taking
the moon.  Let him.  His pupil would have a different use for it
tonight "on the first floor."  A recklessness and warmth
intoxicated the boy as he stood looking at the card.  It was his
first adventure--all his own.  A faint haze came between the card
and his eyes.  He felt suddenly competent, by "the art of Madame
Bovino," to foretell the immediate future.  He grasped Vincent by
the arm.

"Come on," he said.  "Forget that small trouble."  Vincent kept
fingering the rent in the coat.  "I'll tell you what we'll do.
Tomorrow we will take it to a tailor and have TWO epaulettes
sewed on it.  You can tell your uncle it is a compliment from his
friend the actor who knows what the uniform of a consul ought to
be."  He linked his arm in Vincent's sweeping him along by his own
recklessness.  In the moonlight it was as if they were both a
little drunk.  Anything seemed possible.  Vincent felt his friend
to be inspired.  Recklessness was always the mood most contagious
for Vincent.

"I think there might be someone waiting for you, too," whispered
Anthony excitedly as they swept along.  "I know it!"  He had
completely taken the lead now.  Vincent gave a low whistle.  He
felt the warmth and tenseness of his friend's arm.  The two
hastened even faster.

As they turned into the street of high, narrow houses with flat
roofs where Anthony had so often come by day to work out his
problems with the stertorous ex-mate, he looked upward by habit.
Sure enough, on the house of Signora Bovino the outline of the old
sailor could be seen against the skyline "shooting the moon."
Anthony cautioned Vincent and they began to walk softly.  It would
never do to have that enormous voice hail them from the roof.  They
crossed the street quietly, and keeping close to the wall arrived
safely at the door.  A few lights glimmered from the lower
shutters, but the door was barred and the house was silent.  It
would not do to arouse the mate by using the bell pull.  He would
be peering over the parapet instantly.  Vincent tapped at the
lowest shutter.  He was beginning to take the lead again.  After
another tap it was opened.  A white hand came forth.  Vincent
slipped something into it.  "The signora," he said.

"Have you been here before?" asked Anthony feeling indignant.

"No, no, it is always the way, you know," answered his friend
offhand while tossing the consul's uniform over his shoulder
nonchalantly.  "When you see a hand, put something in it."  A
mischievous smile pre-empted Vincent's lips.  "I have a notion to
put Uncle Otto's coat on."

"Oh, don't, Vincent, you are in trouble enough with your uncle,"
whispered Anthony.

Just then the door swung back noiselessly, revealing Signora Bovino
in a loose, linen wrapper.  She started to laugh, but Anthony put
his finger on his lips, and pointed upward.  She nodded and
beckoned them in.

"So you have come for a lesson in navigation, Meester Adverse.  No!
What can it be, then?"

Anthony looked so confused that she laid her hand on his arm.  A
senile giggle escaped her.  "Come, I know.  She has told me.  Madre
Maria!  I do not blame you.  She is a dear piece, and in the best
front chamber.  Clean linen!  And she will let no one else come up
now these two nights since she came.  A lady!  But your friend
here.  Is he with you?"

"Yes, oh, NO!" said Anthony seeing what she meant.  "I thought
perhaps you could . . . at least . . ."

"But yes!  The whole troupe is staying here.  You know, signore,
I do not keep a regular house, though."  A look of fierce
respectability stiffened her.  "Only transients.  They usually have
their own gentlemen."  She held up the candle inspecting Vincent.
The epaulette caught her eye.  She looked pleased.  "Ah, of the
military I see."  Vincent swaggered.  "You do not need to be
afraid, sir, and hide it.  Everything here is of the greatest
discretion.  I merely tell fortunes."  She winked.  They went
upstairs very quietly.  A smell of garlic and perfume permeated the
passage.  Presently the old woman swung her candle up.

"Her room," she said to Anthony.  "Good night, Meester--" she laid
her finger on her lips and laughed.  In the dying candlelight as
she led Vincent down the corridor Anthony could see there was no
paint on the panels.  Could this be the door to happiness?  It was
dark now in the hall, but there was moonlight flowing under the
threshold.  He leaned against the door-post, a lump in his throat.
How long it had been!  He took a deep breath.

"Angela!"

There was the sound of someone stirring but no answer.  Silence.
He tapped lightly on the door.  The sound of padding feet.

"Who is it?--you?"

He leaned close to the panel whispering, "Arnolfo, Maria, Nicolò,
Beatrice, Claudia--Angela Maea."  Someone caught her breath.  The
door opened suddenly.  He stumbled forward into the moonlight and
found himself in her arms.

"Oh, I thought I had lost you, Angela Maea!"

"Then you DID care, you never forgot me," she cried low, clinging
to him.  "Anthony, how you are trembling!  Let me see you."  She
led him to the window.  "Oh, yes, it is you, YOU.  I thought I
might never see you again."  She looked up at him in the moonlight
with a half-doubt and trouble in her face.

"What is it?" he whispered.  "Aren't you really glad to see me?"

"I am only half as happy as I expected to be," she said, hiding her
face against his shoulder, "I cannot see you for the tears."  Her
thin night-gown fluttered about her and he wrapped her closer.

They went over to the bed and sat down.  She lay back, breathing
dreamfully and contentedly with her hands under her head, looking
up at him.  In the moony twilight of the room it was like a dream
to both of them.

"Let me come behind the fountain to you, Angela.  I saw you that
way once.  Did you know?  Both of us that way now!  There is no one
else but you and me now."

"No one," she sighed.  "You are all that is left of those days.
They are all gone but you, did you know that?"  He felt her tears
again.  "Only 'Anthony' and 'Angela.'  There is no use saying the
other names any more.  No one will answer."

"Angela!"

He felt himself overcome by an access of pity for her.  It merged
into passive tenderness, then into a kind of wild weeping passion
for what he did not know, something he felt through her.  Presently
they were utterly quiet.  A deep, pagan peace slowly and surely
enveloped them.  He closed his eyes.

Down an immense vista as if a poke bonnet had been elongated into a
straw telescope he saw the gloomy face of Faith Paleologus looking
at him hungrily out of the shadows.  It was an immense shock, the
reverberations of which echoed through Angela.

"Tell me, tell me!  Anthony, what is it?"

He raised his head from her breast.  "That woman, Faith!  She is
here in the room.  The night after you left.  Angela!"  He was
crying to her for help.  She soothed him, smoothing the disturbing
vision away with her soft hands, putting her mouth to his.  Her
breath permeated him.  It was well again.  Only Angela could do
that, he knew, only Angela.  With her he could forget everything.
And she was his now, forever.  His strength flooded back at the
thought.  An undisturbed and perfect pleasure of both the inner
life and the body perfectly shared, all else forgotten, rest, and
comfort as of a divine blessing freely imparted and necessarily
given engulfed them both.  Outside the moonlight died from the
street and slowly paled into day.  On the bed the youth and the
young girl slept as one in being, their curls and legs tangled
together as if they lay on an island beach washed by the ocean of
Nirvana.  Towards morning he began to dream.

He saw a wave run up a beach, leaving a faint, lacy trace on the
sand.  Then another, and another.  Each destroyed the trace of the
one preceding and left its own.  All the outlines they left on the
sand were different.  Yet they were all the same, all pictures of
the wave of waves.  It went on forever.

Then the noise of the waves merged slowly into the murmur of the
leaves on the great plane tree in the court of the convent.  He was
lying in the pool of that place, looking up into the moonlit
branches of the tree.  The pigeons were faintly awake.  Like the
blood murmuring in his ears he could hear their sleepy love-making.
He lay and floated, happy in an ecstasy of calm.  The waters were
troubled no more.

Then in the shadows he saw that both the bronze boy and his lost
brother were there.  The lost twin had come back!  Their limbs
seemed to melt into the roots of the tree in a quiescent embrace.
The madonna was there, too.  She emerged slowly out of the light of
the tree.  It was the woman of the statue he knew so well, her
features and her grace, but much younger, naked.  Her hair seemed
caught in the net of leaves and of the stars behind them, and the
smile on her lips was without sorrow.  There was no child in her
arms.  Slowly she merged herself in the pool.  The water rose and
he felt himself washed over the brink.  But he could still see
himself there.  He looked down upon himself over the brim as he had
when a child.  His own utterly happy face came up to meet him as it
used to do--the eyes wide with a dream, the hair burning and
golden, laughing, dazzling.

He opened his eyes to see the vision better.  The sun was streaming
in through a chink in the shutter.  Angela lay beside him brown and
rosy, covered with little glints of the dawn as if the sun were
shining on her through the leaves of the great tree.  He drew her
even more closely to him.  She looked at him out of innumerable
centuries with his own completely happy smile.  For an hour they
lay so.  Then the noise in the streets began.

Someone in the room below them began to stir.  They could hear the
mumble of talk, movings around, slaps, small outcries, and
laughter.  Presently the door banged and a man with heavy boots
departed.  A bed creaked once again and all was silent.  Then there
were funny little snores.

They laughed themselves, and began to talk in low voices.  How easy
it was to talk to Angela, like having thoughts with another self.
Half of the things you said were already answered.  She asked
eagerly about the Casa da Bonnyfeather.  He told her all that had
happened, also about Faith.

"I knew last night," she said.

The quarrel with Toussaint, Mr. Bonnyfeather, the new friend
Vincent, the life about town--how clear and meaningful it all
seemed now as he told it to her.

"But you, Angela, where have YOU been?  Here I have been telling
you all about myself."   She tossed her curls at him.

"Even you, Anthony.  They always do."

"They, who are THEY?" he asked.

"Men," she said whimsically, "all of them."

It was the first shock of disillusion after the dream.  So she had
known others before him then!  His mouth went hard . . .

"But you had Faith," she said.

"No," he replied indignantly, "she had me.  I . . ."  he stopped,
colouring and ashamed.  It was true.  She drew him down to her
again.

"Listen, I will tell you," she whispered.  "Do not blame me.  I
loved you.  But I thought I would never see you again when we drove
through the Porta Pisa that night.  You remember!  We had not gone
five miles before the carriages stopped in a lonely place.  It was
dark by then.  One of the soldiers came back and took all of us
children up to the front carriage.  They had dragged father out on
the grass and he was lying there shivering and singing.  Then they
began to take out the money bags and divide them up.  Mother tried
to fight them but they tied her hands behind her back, and a rag
around her face.  We were too frightened to say anything.  She sat
by father rolling her eyes.  Some of the soldiers and drivers
started to quarrel over the money but the sergeant drew his pistol
and made them take what he gave them.

"'If you come back to Livorno,' the sergeant said, 'you will get
this.'  He gave Arnolfo a terrible kick and pointed his pistol at
mother's head!  'The guards at the gate understand.  Do you see!'
He threw one small purse in mother's lap.  Then he herded us all
into one carriage and made that man drive off with us toward Pisa,
swearing he would cut our throats if we made a noise.

"After about an hour the new coachman stopped and made us all get
out again.  He took the small purse from mother that the sergeant
had given her.  She begged and held up Luigi, but he only laughed.
'Pisa is there, not far,' he said, and whipped up his horses back
to Livorno.  Father was dead drunk.

"We got mother's hands untied and waited till morning.  We started
toward Pisa.  Arnolfo and I tried to carry father.  He became
violent.  We could see he was not drunk now but out of his mind.
He cursed mother for hours.  Finally some men with hay carts came
along and took us into the market at Pisa.  They had to tie father.
We arrived at the door of my grandparents weeping, hungry, and
without a scudo.  They are very poor.  My father who still thought
he was rich had to be locked in the cellar.  A few days later some
men with staves and irons came for him.  He shrieked and called
out.  We did not see him again.  He is always going to be mad.

"My grandmother went to her priest about it.  After a while he told
us that word had come back from Livorno that our story wasn't true.
It was the governor, I guess.  He and the sergeant.  We could do
nothing and we were very hungry."

Angela put her hands over her face as if to shut out the memory.
He saw tears trickle through her fingers.

"There is more yet.  Shall I go on?"  He nodded.  She waited a
while before she could begin.

"At Pisa the smallpox came.  Luigi, all the younger ones, died.
They would not let us leave the house and there was nothing to eat.
One goat.  After a while we ate her.  Big Angela--her loose skin
hung around her like rags!  Arnolfo got out one night and ran away.

"At last no one but my grandmother and two of the girls were there.
One day the old woman took a broom and beat me with it!  'Go out,
big girl, and bring us some money,' she said.  'We starve!'  I
could not give myself to the soldiers.  I was afraid.  I begged
only enough to keep us alive.  My grandmother continued to give me
many blows.  At last one day I was sitting on the steps of the
Duomo when Debrülle, the singer, came along.  I went with him.  Do
you see how it was?"

Anthony lay stretched out going hot and cold.  He was dry-eyed now.
So it HAD been that big German with the baritone voice.  "I hate
him," he said simply.

"Do not.  He has been very kind to me.  He took me to Milan with
him, bought me some clothes, put me on the stage with his company
as a flower girl.  He taught me to sing.  Anthony, I have a lovely
voice, they say.  I am the shepherdess now.  I shall be a great
actress some day.  The lights, the people!  I shall have beautiful
clothes, jewels, and see the world.  No, he is very good to me,
Debrülle, he has been like a father."

"Do you love him?" he asked.

She shook her head.  "Not like that, you know.  He, he is not with
me often," she whispered.  "I bear him."

"Then you will not marry me, Angela?" he said.  He looked at her
with a terrified determination and drew her to him.

"Once," she said, "but not now.  It is too late."

"But what are you going to do?" he cried.

"I am going on," she said.  "Now I have had you, I am going on."  A
smile of triumph and tenderness lit her face.

He pleaded with her, but she merely turned her head away and closed
her eyes.  "Come," she said after awhile, "lie on my breast again."
Thus they strove to forget together.

Later in the morning the signora knocked at their door.  She
finally put her head inside the room.  "Pardon, last night I forgot
to bring you the napkins of pleasure.  Here they are now.  When you
dress yourselves come up to my room.  There is a charming breakfast
there.  Your friend, the man with the great voice, has had it
brought in.  And you are to come, too, Meester Adverse.  Ah! how
generous is the noble singer to his shepherdess!  Yes, I have heard
about you both from his lips.  It is true love then.  You will
bring luck to my house.  Come, I will tell your fortunes for
nothing.  Jesù! how beautiful you are."  Her eyes rested on them
burning with admiration and regret.  "Do not be ashamed," she said.
"I was young once.  Now there is nothing left but the pleasure of
the eyes."  She closed the door reluctantly and went upstairs
sighing.

They lingered for a while but presently from upstairs the full-
chested tones of Debrülle rolled down to them:


     "The dew is on the rose,
      The birds begin, begin,
      The milkmaids rise,
      But where is she, the charm--
      The charming shepherdess,
      My morning love?"


And there was something so whole-hearted and good-natured about
those tones that they hastened in spite of themselves to rise and
dress.

"You will like him, you see if you don't!" said Angela.  Anthony
shook his head.

"Yes, yes, you will.  For my sake anyway, promise!"  She pouted and
kissed him.  They moved toward the door and opened it.  A great
pencil of sunlight washed down the stairs.  The smell of German
coffee and frying sausages rolled down to them.  They heard a gay
laugh and a cork popped loudly in the apartment of Signora Bovino.
The colour heightened in her cheeks.  They stood for a minute at
the threshold.  He caught her to him madly.

"Good-bye, Angela, my own Angela Maea.  Oh, you do not know how I
love you!"


     "But where is she, the charm--
      The charming . . . my morning love?"


trolled from upstairs.  It was from that voice that he would hold
her fast forever.

"You do not know."

"But I do, Anthony, dear, I know.  I have found out.  I love you.
I thank the Virgin I found you again.  And now we shall always be
like this."  She flung her arms around him choking, giving him a
long kiss.  "Boy, mine, dearest always, some time you will know,
too."

"But where is she . . ."  began the voice again upstairs.

"Coming, coming, papa mio," she cried; dashed the tears out of her
eyes and dragged Anthony over the threshold.  The wind banged the
door behind them.  She ran laughing up the stairs to Debrülle.

She had thanked the Virgin.  Well, so would he, the beautiful young
Virgin without the child who had come to him last night in the
dream.  To her then!  He stretched out his hands to her.  A great
peace and calm of completion was on him.  He could have, or be, no
more than that no matter how long he lived.  With or without Angela
then!  He blew a kiss back at the closed door.  Then he went up the
stairs.

The apartment of Signora Bovino was a great surprise.  It was awash
with sunlight that fell through a skylight now wide open.  Bright,
blooming plants waved in the windows and a far door led out onto
the roof where there were tubbed flowers.  A great yellow cat lay
spread-eagled in the sun out there.  And there was a table set with
a snowy cloth that flapped lazily.  In one corner the signora
busied herself over a small charcoal stove.  In the other sat
Vincent looking happy and foolish with a large German girl on his
knees.  Debrülle was doing some dance steps and humming to Angela
as she copied him, one foot after the other, daintily.  The whole
room hailed Anthony with a shout.  It was impossible not to accept
such a welcome.  The last bit of ice left for Debrülle thawed under
his ardent captivating humour.  He clapped Anthony on the back with
an undeniable affection.

"You, my prince charming, and your shepherdess have nearly starved
us.  Didn't you hear me singing to you?  In another moment the
sausages would have been in flames.  Come now, not a minute longer.
Herr Nolte, fräulein . . . ? ahem."

"Anthony, Anthony, it is to be OUR breakfast," cried Angela,
dancing up.  "You and I are to sit at the head of the table."  Her
eyes were still shining like skies after a rain.  She led them all
out and they sat down.  The old woman beaming and grinning, rapidly
set the dishes.

"When you have finished, signora, be pleased to sit down with us,"
Debrülle said.  "Thou, too, wast once a lady I see."  From
somewhere in the past she summoned a grand curtsy.  They all
applauded.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Debrülle, pausing and looking around
for anybody who might dare to contradict him, "Ladies and
gentlemen--This is a kind of impromptu and unofficial wedding
breakfast for the charming couple at the head of the table.  It is
the best under the circumstances," he continued, looking at Anthony
significantly, "that we can do.  May they always be as happy as
they were last night.  Always," he added as if by an afterthought--
"wherever they are."

They drank with a shout.  Over his steaming bowl of coffee Debrülle
broke into a German love song that clutched them all by the heart.
At the second chorus Vincent chimed in, carried away by the sheer,
rank sentiment of it.


     "One night at least a wandering knight may have,
      Though disinherited from all the past,
      And bear the memory of that burning love--
      And bear that memory with him to the last."


The high, clear voice of Angela trilled in.  The boy next to her
felt his breath pause as if that moment were too poignant and clear
to require an earthly atmosphere to live it.


     "And bear that memory with him to the last."


All their voices blent in a long, sentimental, drawn out, dying
chord that left them sitting astonished with their own harmony.
Indeed, it seemed as if they had not made it themselves.  It had
been drawn upon an unexpectedly rich account of pleasure, a draft
that left happiness undiminished.

Debrülle now opened small brown jugs of Asti Spumonti that foamed
like Normandy cider.  It was clearer and lighter than champagne, a
noble morning drink, bringing a glow of joy without heat or thirst.
Anthony could see by the way he looked at Angela that Debrülle
loved her; loved her with a kind of fatherly pity as if care of her
happiness had been conferred on him as his part in life.  Anthony
understood now the expression on the actor's face the night before
in the dressing-room.  It was his greater knowledge and his pity, a
wise generosity beyond a purely possessive male instinct that had
allowed Debrülle to let Angela have her young lover.  And this
gayety now?  It was partly to drown regret, regret that Debrülle
was not the same age, was not Anthony.  And yet there was wine and
music and happiness this morning!  It was as if Debrülle had shared
in the joy of the night before by some occult transference.  Angela
and Anthony would have to take him in.  He was there.  How strange!
How could he have ever imagined an association like this?

Anthony shook his head.  He had possessed her completely, and she
him, yet somehow he was going to lose her again.  He looked at her
now beside him putting a little flower into her hair, joyous and
cool.  He thought of the young madonna in the dream who had slowly
blent herself with the cool water.  Perhaps Angela was like that--
something that overflowed, that ran away like cool, clear water, a
natural thing that one could not possess by clutching with hands.
One could only be in it a while and be washed over the brink when
it overflowed--and look back upon one's own happy face, glorious
like the sun beating across the parapet through the green cool
leaves of Signora Bovino's plants.  He walked over to them a minute
to be alone.

The calm and deep joy of the night before leaving his blood cool
and his limbs relaxed in well-being, the present gayety and sunny
happiness, the harmony of dear voices searching his soul, the
strange premonitory loneliness of the days to come without Angela,--
all blent and existed simultaneously within him in a mood so far
beyond thought that he stood for a minute like a god among the
leaves lost in an indescribable flood of bright, imageless feeling.
Then they called him back.

The instinct of aloofness on his part made the occasion become even
a little gayer if possible.  It was as if the others in order to
confirm their own mood became more abandoned so as to take him
along.  Not the least element of a spectator could be tolerated.
Nor was it now hard for them to prevail.  Now that he understood it
all; had thrust it down past words and argument and resolved it
into pure feeling, he let himself go.  The wine helped.

Presently he was singing too, whenever he could, with a better
voice than he ever had thought he had.  After even the professional
repertoire of Debrülle was exhausted, Vincent's girl proved to be
able to make convulsing faces.  All the past was forgotten now.
Only the present existed.  Then Signora Bovino began to tell
fortunes.

She cast their horoscopes and they bent breathless over her books
and queer charts where zodiacal animals swarmed amid the stars.

"You have an immense fortune in diamonds coming to you," she
promised Angela.  Debrülle would never have any children.  He
clapped his hand tragically to his forehead.  Vincent would be rich
but would die poor.  A long life but a merry one!  A hard dark man
with a huge beard was to be the lot of the fräulein.  "'Küche,
kochen, und kinder.'  Ach!"  The fräulein sulked.  For some reason
the signora had left Anthony to the last.  She now turned her
piercing eyes upon him and began her formula again.

"What day and hour were you born?"

He had sat suddenly frozen when she began to ask the others that.
The mood of the morning passed.  The wine died in him.  A look of
embarrassed misery now crept into his features.

"I do not know, signora, I--you see . . ."

He coloured to the brows.  In the name of God, who was he?

There was a moment of silence.  Then the kindly Debrülle stepped
in.  He sneezed and made them laugh.  "Doubtless the illustrious
signora," he went on with the tears of the sneeze still in his
eyes, "has other methods of foretelling the future."

"Oh, yes, holy saints and angels!"  There were other ways.  "Yes
indeed!"

How much did Debrülle know?  Anthony wondered.  How much had Angela
told him?

The signora opened an old, black box and took out the ancient
shoulder blades of sheep, and a black veil embroidered with faded
stars.  She sat down at the table and throwing the veil over her
head began to click the sheep bones mysteriously behind it.  An
ancient Tuscan chant with gibberish come down from the days of
Etruria mumbled from her gums.  They looked at her, awed in spite
of themselves.  The dark veiled head now had the outlines of a
sibyl and the power to stir something in them, they knew not what.
Click, click, went the bones.  A voice began.

"You were born at midnight between a lucky and an unlucky day.  I
see many ships.  A crucifix is speaking.  You will see the King of
the World and serve him.  There is a great fire by night.  I cannot
make this out.  There is a veiled woman, a mountain very far away,
a great tree, stars."  She threw off the veil and looked at Anthony
with interest and surprise.  "I am only sure of two things," she
said, "you will travel far, the earth turned under you; and you
must beware of cold steel.  You will not always be very happy, my
son."  She looked at his palm and nodded confirmingly.  "Now," she
said, "put something in mine."

It occurred to Anthony, as he felt in his pocket, that Signora
Bovino might be performing a function which the world could not do
without and yet would never acknowledge.  One should pay well for
that.  He would owe her a great memory.


     "And bear that memory with him to the last."


The stave seemed to sing itself for him.  He gave her his best gold
coin.  Debrülle and Vincent pressed forward.  The old woman soon
had cause to be pleased and showed it.  Seeing her auspicious
expression the fräulein thrust her palm under the signora's nose.

"Have you nothing better to tell me?" she asked wistfully.

A long line extended right across the girl's hand like the hinge of
a leather box.  Her fingers closed on her wrist like a lid.  There
were no vertical lines from the wrist.  The old woman looked at it.

"Go along with you," she said, throwing the girl's hand aside like
an object.  "You are not one of us.  Your grandfather must have
been a Chinaman."

It was true, the whole room burst into laughter.  They had not
noticed it before, but there was something Mongolian about this
girl; an almond creep to her eyes.

Debrülle rose and took his cape.  Angela hurriedly got her things
together.  "The matinée, you know," he said, and held out his hand.
Anthony took it and paused.  He owed the man much.  "Thank you, I
know, now.  Thank you!  Take care of Angela," he whispered.  The
man caught both his hands and squeezed them hard.  "By God, I
will."  He went out first.

With a low cry Angela ran across the room and flung her arms about
Anthony.  For one instant he felt her warm cheek beating against
his.  He crushed her lips with a cry.  Then she had gone.

He was left standing in a universe deserted, alone beyond all
sounds, undone.  He could see nothing.  "Madonna, sweet Mother of
God, come to me now!"

As if his inner life were a plant that flourished in the soil of
his body he felt it sicken down to the most remote and delicate
roots.  The nerve tips which are always in motion bathed by the
rich liquor of the blood upon which they draw for nourishment and
warmth ceased for a moment to move and became numb.  He felt them
dimly loosen.  He grew cold.  Then the heart throbbed again
overcoming the shock as if by sheer energy.  But living was for a
little a great misery.

Another aspect of life had confronted Anthony.  Existence might be
painful!  For the first time the thought flashed upon him that
escape from it might be a relief.  There was a gate out of this.
How dark the garden of the world could suddenly become, how
scentless the flowers.  The clear, sheer joyous morning light was
over.  What would hot noon be like?  Thus the man's soul was first
torn loose within him.  He stood leaning on the table with one
hand.  He tottered a little.  The figures of things had become
confused.  A cool sweat burst out just above his eyebrows.  He
looked ill.

The old woman, mumbling something kindly, thrust him into a chair
and gave him a fiery drink.  When he could see clearly again the
German girl was projected before him just across the table, sitting
there with tears in her eyes still looking hopelessly at her palm.
Poor soul!  Life was sad for her, too!  Something had happened to
her before she was born.  A pity overflowed the boy, warming him
again.  For the first time he understood what it was to be a simple
child, a lost angel caught in a body without hope.  A look of
understanding passed between them.  There was comfort in it.

"Come, come," said Vincent, who did not understand exactly what had
happened, but could see that his friend looked white.  "If you are
ill, I will go home with you.  It is time to leave anyway, I
guess."  He picked up his uncle's torn coat.  They went out onto
the landing.  A door opened across the hall.

"Ahoy there," said a voice in a tone that was just now to Anthony
ghastly with heartiness.  "Do you think you can get away from me
like that?  I have been listening to you all morning."  It was the
navigating Mr. Williams.  They both stopped helplessly.  He came
down to them with his sextant in a bag.  "I'll go over to the casa
with you now," he roared.  "We can work out that new way of
plotting the longitude this afternoon."  He followed them like
fate.

"Oh, my God!" said Vincent, "he's coming!"

Anthony felt too far-off to resist.  They turned up the street
together.  The immense voice boomed on, causing cart drivers to
stare.  It was warm and sticky outside after the cool breezes of
the roof.

"I tell you the stars cannot lie . . . they . . ."

Yes, it was true.  That was the worst of it.  If you could only
decide these things for yourself.  Then . . . then Debrülle would
not go off with Angela, for instance.  But there was something
else, something beyond your own will and desire, that did the
deciding.  All your plans were as nothing to that.  He, Anthony,
had felt it at work this morning, fate, something beyond appeal.
Things had happened.  The little cottage with the garden around it
would never rise from Toussaint's old ruin as he had pictured to
himself.  Never!  It would remain a heap of stones.

Toussaint was a fool, a fool!  Mentally Anthony took out his grief
that now lapsed into anger on that little man.  It was foolish and
sentimental, he knew.  But he had been hurt, sickened.  Someone
must be at fault.  Would that great ass of an ex-mate never stop
roaring at him?  He was sick of them all.  Of every one of them.
Of the casa, of Mr. Bonnyfeather, of Faith.  Damn her!  He couldn't
stand her any more.  To take his boy's body that night!

"The admiralty is right after all.  They will have to agree on a
line of longitude and keep one clock to that time.  Then you will
have another clock that . . ."

"Christ deliver us!"

They turned into the vaulted archway of the Casa da Bonnyfeather.
The three pairs of feet echoed hollowly.  The bell rang releasing
the clerks for luncheon.  They streamed across the yard, glad to
escape.  So would he be, he thought.  He was tired of it all, the
whole familiar scene.  There was no one by the fountain either.
Angela!  After a while as though at a distance he saw they were all
sitting down to lunch.  Vincent was trying to be merry as usual.
Toussaint was still looking sorry.  Mr. Williams rumbled.  The old
merchant sat more quietly than usual as if there was something
troubling him.  It all went on.  How hot the day was.  Suddenly he
felt someone's hand under the table laid on his knee.  Even through
silk it felt cool, but it trembled slightly.  With her other hand
Faith was fingering a spoon.

"Let me alone," he cried leaping up so that they all stared at him.

"What is it?" said Faith.

"You . . ."  He turned and ran to his room.

"Anthony is a bit ill today," said Vincent after an awkward pause.
"We had . . . er, a rather--somewhat of a go last night."

"Does he need a leech, do you think?" asked Mr. Bonnyfeather.

"I'm thinkin' ye can spare yoursel' the expanse," said McNab,
looking at Faith.  So was Toussaint.  For the first time she turned
slightly pale.

Once in his room Anthony locked himself in.  He paid no attention
when Vincent came to the door later.  He was dry-eyed now.  He
wished only to be left alone.  He walked up and down.  Then at last
he cast himself down on the bed before the madonna.  Of what good
was the outside world?  It intruded upon your own only to give
pain.  It had taken years, but now, now at last he could open his
heart up to the madonna again.  She and he were left alone as they
had been when he first came there.




CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

ICONS AND ICONOCLASTS


In times of great change it is a question whether the restlessness
of the human heart is due more to individual dissatisfaction with
experience than to the drag and flux of the age.  The two play upon
each other, reverberate, and are inextricably intermingled.  In
this interplay there is no rest to be found anywhere.  No
adjustment suffices.  Few can attain equilibrium.  The pendulum of
the time is felt trembling at one extreme, high above all heads,
and threatening them.  Men dash about underneath it like disturbed
ants.

Yet every rational being desires a "home" of some kind for body and
mind.  Men cannot act spasmodically for ever.  They finally gather
together about some standard bearer and press in some definite
direction always labelled "Forward."  No matter what the vista
ahead may be they must come to some decision at some place, be it a
battlefield marked by graves.  Here at least is a rest, an end.
Perhaps, who knows, a beginning.  The normal symptom of such times
is the feeling of the approach of war.  Usual things, moods, modes,
interests, and passions, even lusts, lose their zest.  The familiar
becomes unreal.  Foundations hitherto taken as eternal begin to
crumble.

In the last days which Anthony spent in Livorno he was intensely
possessed by, if not wholly conscious of the sensation of something
new impending.  Remembering it afterwards, his attitudes and
actions--which then and for some time later seemed inexplicable--
became plainer to him.  He could see that along with the vast
majority he had unconsciously temporarily suspended his own will in
order to drift with a new tide in the affairs of men.  Whither he
did not seem to care.  It was a relief; easier just to watch and
see what would happen to him.  Who could expect to direct, control,
or even understand so titanic a thing as the European current?  The
frantic outbreak of gambling in society everywhere, which
overflowed into the very streets of the town and obstructed the
gutters with card players and dicers, was one expression of this.
"Let fate decide."  The universe was thrown back to its original
state.  The Guessippis had been merely some of the first lambs to
be shorn.  The crowds roared now every night before the lottery.
The governor became ridiculously rich and the government bankrupt.

Against this background the patient habits of mercantile industry
as a gainful occupation began to appear silly and to disintegrate.
Minor firms began to close their doors as if by premonition.

Almost alone, in a scene that was already trembling toward chaos,
the sedate Mr. Bonnyfeather continued calmly to hang his hat on the
horns of the satyr every morning.  The counting house hummed.  To
some plan, to which he and McNab alone were privy, the store-rooms
began to empty themselves.  At Nantes, Hamburg, Rotterdam, and
London the accounts of "John Bonnyfeather, merchant," began to show
snug balances.  The grim Captain Bittern came and went with the
Unicorn upon mysterious errands under the protecting guns of
Nelson's fleet.

Anthony worked over a flood of papers, which seemed to him to have
lost all vital interest.  He made his eyes and hands do things.  He
answered and filed mechanically only to escape at noon with Vincent
Nolte.  Sometimes he looked at Toussaint working beside him.  They
no longer exchanged anything but necessary words.  He too was
feeling the electric weather of the time.

The face of Toussaint Clairveaux had become a military and
political barometer.  As the news of the successes of the French
continued to arrive, as he felt the "glorious revolution"
approaching, his countenance became more and more radiant.  He
seemed to have secret sources of information.  At the thought of
seeing the personification of all his hopes and ideals, the
invincible Buonaparte in the streets of Livorno, he glowed with an
almost ethereal enthusiasm.  Even Faith was temporarily forgotten.
He thought he did not care what might become of himself or her when
Mr. Bonnyfeather should no longer hang his hat on the horns of the
satyr.  The new age would have arrived before it was too late.

He looked at the satyr.  A small remnant of gilding still glimmered
on its horns.  It might not be too late after all.  Anthony he now
regarded as lost.  Rousseau, Toussaint now saw, was merely a John
the Baptist.  The messiah of the age was about to enter Jerusalem
in the person of Buonaparte, on a war horse.  Anthony had been
worshipping Venus.  He would not be among the elect.  His one
favourite pupil!  How he yearned over him.  "Ah, he had failed
there--that woman again!"  He sighed.  He longed to talk with
Anthony.  He was utterly alone.

The French émigrés who had settled at Milan and Florence now began
to troop through Livorno, lingering a little before going
elsewhere.  English families came and embarked.  Otto Franco did a
roaring business.  Some of the beaten Austrian battalions hustled
onto transports with the grand duke's treasure.  The town throbbed
with drums.  In the night the garrison departed.  License revelled
by moonlight while the watch tactfully proclaimed that all was
well.  Provided with letters of marque from Mr. Udney, the Unicorn
departed from the now empty quay before the Casa da Bonnyfeather,
"bound for Gibraltar."  The dray mules were sold at public auction.
On the old courtyard a strange silence had fallen.  The clerks soon
wondered what they were going to do.

It was now that Mr. Bonnyfeather began to employ Anthony on
constant trips to Mr. Udney for the execution of various documents.
Among these was a copy of his will which had been carefully drawn
just before the final departure of the Unicorn.  It was witnessed
by McNab and Captain Bittern.  It was the old merchant's care to
register it with both the local and British authorities.

Had Anthony known the contents of the document the sudden renewed
cordiality of the British consul might not have caused him so much
personal satisfaction as it did.  Mr. Udney was a practical man.
The prospect of property in a young man's future by no means
darkened it for the Englishman.  After the will was filed a slight
shade of deference crept into his attitude toward Anthony, which,
if inexplicable to that young gentleman, was none the less
flattering.

He and Vincent had of course long ago availed themselves of the
invitation to come to tea at the Udneys'.  It was not at the old
villa but at the consul's rooms over his case.  The Union Jack on a
staff and the gilded royal arms over the door gave it a certain
"dash."  Upstairs, due to the participation of the consul in the
recent satisfactory condemnations of certain prizes, the apartment
was furnished in the latest Parisian style.  Amid the heavy
travesties of Greece and Rome, shining brass wreaths and republican
fasces, Mrs. Udney's old English spinet remained with both the
voice and the appearance of a charming ghost.  Here, seated on a
great "X"-shaped chair that might have supported the bulk of Tully,
from a huge urn surmounted by a Roman eagle she poured tea.

It was the first almost English tea that Anthony had seen, or
drunk.  David Parish, who still remained constant and took Miss
Florence driving every day with her mother, passed the gingerbread,
Mrs. Udney's specialty after a youthful sojourn in Jamaica.  She
talked of the island often.  It and Nevis were the nicest places in
the world.  Florence argued for the country about Totnes in Devon
while Mr. Udney, consuming bowls of hyson from the bottom of the
urn, nodded his approval.

He loved his moors.  Please God, he would soon see them again!  He
was fifty-three and all his teeth were out.  It was time Florence
was marrying.  This chap Parish was attentive enough, good
prospects, too.  Yet there was something about Anthony that
attracted him.  Evidently the boy had crept into old Bonnyfeather's
heart.  To a good tune at that!  Unknown origin, of course.  But
good stuff, look at him.  Well, well, things would have to take
their own way, he supposed--or his wife's.  Unconsciously she and
fate had become for him, in his domestic affairs at least,
synonymous.

They had never had a son.  He had given it up.  It made him too
tired now.  He remembered that day at the villa years ago when
Florence had brought Anthony.  How the boy had moved his heart--and
that priest's, poor fellow!  They had both done well by the boy.
It was those secret impulses that counted.  They shaped the world;
made plans.  He looked at Florence talking to Anthony with a
mixture of pride and happiness.  Oh, well, let HER have a son.
He turned to his wife.  "My dear, another cup of tea, from the
lees, strong."

"Why, Mr. Udney, since when did you start to take it off the lees?"

"A long time since," he replied firmly with the immense capacity
for self-pity of the older male in his voice.

Florence was all of girlhood that Anthony had missed.  The kind of
person from the kind of family that he felt somehow he belonged to
and had been robbed of.  How easy it was to talk to her.  It was
something like talking that night to Angela but less intense, more
assured, more casually satisfactory.  Her frocks were so
fashionable--neat and clean, NOT like Angela's--softly unusual he
thought.  She was wearing a white, high-waisted gown of the new
Greek cut with a cross-ribbon binding in her waist under her
breasts.  There were little ribboned puffs on the sleeves which
covered her arms just halfway to the elbow.  She was not too plump
any more.  Long, and slim, and cool with firm legs.  Those white
sandals!  One could see her pink toes through the thin net
stockings and straps.

Florence was "Miss Udney," too.  Someone to be proud of knowing.
One's equal--or more?  A new, a right, and a nice experience, safe
from the dark magic of Faith.  His kind!

In addition, unbelievable as it might seem, Miss Udney had eyes,
nose, and lips.  And it was probable that she continued under her
dress.  But he did not care to think of that just now.  She used a
faint violet perfume.  From her emanated a fragrant coolness as of
a lush spot about a thawing spring in early April.  It was that
which caused him to lean near her and to talk in a hushed way.  And
it was difficult, he felt, for both of them not to keep on looking
at each other's eyes.  Parish evidently did not care much for this.
He kept passing the gingerbread a little too frequently.

They talked of England, mostly.  Florence had been home to school
for several years since she had seen Anthony.  Her description of
Devon made him "homesick."  He felt the same way about Florence's
country as Mr. Bonnyfeather felt about the valley of the Moselle.
It was dreamland and Utopia, only real.  England was on the map.
He and Florence were often there together, alone.  It was a comfort
to know that Angela could not come there.  No one could disturb
them as they played under the huge stones of the bridge at Post
Bridge, or looked for white heather where the moor ponies fed above
Widdecombe and watched the rabbits playing about the tors.
Florence was more graphic than she knew.  He could see it all.
Together they lingered over it in conversational dreams.  Florence
found it pleasant and effortless to talk with such a listener.
With Anthony she talked about what interested her; with Parish
about what was supposed to be interesting.  She sighed.  Yet she
had come to make herself like Parish.  He was touchingly attentive,
generous, and in love.  Her mother liked him too, she felt.

Mrs. Udney was secretly a little alarmed now over the arrival of
Anthony.  She almost wished she had not brought him around.  Parish
was getting too restive.  She had merely meant to spur him on.  He
might shy off.  She wished Anthony would join in the talk more
generally.  Finally she would go to the spinet and looking back at
them both, touch the chords of "Malbrouk s'en va-t-en guerre."
That tune always brought the colour to Anthony's face.  He felt a
boy again and awkward.  Yet it touched a chord of sympathy.
Florence remembered, too.  So for a good many afternoons it went
on.

Vincent had dropped out entirely.  The plump, Florentine banker's
daughter was more to his mind.  She had surrendered to him
furtively.  Taking tea to Vincent now seemed a waste of time.
Anthony had gone to the Strozzi's once or twice, too.  He found
Mlle. de Rhan quite intriguing.  But she had soon gone back to
Nantes.  He had promised to write and he did so once.  Vincent's
intimate details about Maddalena began to revolt him.  One did not
care to think of Vincent that way.  There was something between the
pig and the rabbit about the German.  He was kin to Arnolfo,
Anthony thought.  Smooth!  He remembered the big blonde at Signora
Bovino's crying.  So they saw less of each other.  Vincent was
troubled about this separation.  What had happened?--he wondered.
He intended to speak to Anthony about it.

But upon all this stirring about of tea leaves in cups, and
drifting of rose petals in casual breezes blew the strong wind of
war.

One afternoon Florence had seemed particularly gay and attractive.
Her face shone from some inner excitement.  Mrs. Udney had been
careful to thump the spinet more than usual.  She gathered them all
around her and made them sing.  As Anthony left Mr. Udney entered
suddenly and beckoned to him.

"Give this to your guardian," he said.  It was a sealed letter.
"Be SURE not to forget," he called.  "It is urgently important,
hurry home!"

That was the last Saturday of June 1796 when Mr. Udney's letter
apparently began to act as a solvent on the world which Anthony had
known as "Livorno" and the "Casa da Bonnyfeather."

Mr. Bonnyfeather opened the letter with his carving knife when
Anthony came in late to supper.  "As I expected," he muttered.  He
sent the waiter out and leaned forward a little pale.  McNab,
Toussaint, Faith, and Anthony sat waiting.

"The French are at Florence, the consul informs me," he finally
said.  "Buonaparte will certainly be here by Tuesday if not sooner.
That gives us about forty-eight hours to close this factory."  He
paused painfully.  The happy excitement on the face of Toussaint
died out.  They were all looking at the old merchant with pity now.
A slight flush tinged his high cheek bones as he went on.

"Not a word of this to anyone.  I shall want you, Mr. McNab,
Toussaint, and Anthony, with me in my own quarters tonight.  The
clerks must all be gone by Monday.  Everyone--but those present,"
said Mr. Bonnyfeather.  "Keep the cook and one porter.  Make your
arrangements accordingly, Faith, and no delay."

They ate hurriedly.

"May I tell Vincent and the Franks?" asked Anthony as they rose.

"That is well thought of.  They should know," said Mr.
Bonnyfeather.  "But hurry back."  The Franks were enormously
grateful for the tip.

By the time Anthony returned the lights were burning in the old
merchant's room.  Piles of papers and cash bags were on the table
with McNab and Toussaint hard at work.  They made out a discharge
and a letter of recommendation for each employee, counted out the
total due each clerk plus a quarter's pay, and made a pile of the
coin.  Mr. Bonnyfeather answered any queries while he burned
correspondence steadily.  They worked all night.

Early next morning rioting broke out in the piazza.  The lottery
was closed and the money gone.  Rumours of the French advance flew
about.  The town throbbed.  At noon the British fleet anchored off
the molo under Commodore Nelson.  Save for the now frantic activity
of English departure along the docks of the Darsena the town lay
quiet under the British guns.  In the court of the Casa da
Bonnyfeather all hands gathered after lunch looking rather glum.
Mr. Bonnyfeather appeared on the steps.  The little crowd below him
uncovered.  He began haltingly but then went on gallantly enough.

"Gentlemen, Buonaparte will be in this town in a few hours.
Although England and France are not apparently at war, all British
property will undoubtedly be confiscated.  Trade is at an end.  The
gates of this establishment will never be opened again in my time
for business.  The Casa da Bonnyfeather has ceased to exist.  I
have retired."  He paused with all eyes upon him.

"I have not forgot any of you.  You will receive immediately from
Mr. McNab your full pay plus a quarter's salary gratis, also
letters of recommendation to other mercantile firms, and your
passports.  Those of you who are British subjects had best go
aboard the fleet tonight.  Do not on any pretext delay.  There are
many things I would say now but cannot.  This sudden decision is
due to the act of a tyrant who comes proclaiming liberty.  I have
done all I can for you who have served me faithfully.  Receive my
thanks, and may God be with you!"

There was a moment's dead silence.  Then the English gave a cheer.
There was a rush to pack belongings.  In a few hours the place was
as quiet as the courtyard of a ruined castle.  Outside only the
slap of a brush on the front of the establishment as a sailor
white-washed carefully over the legend "Casa da Bonnyfeather"
disturbed the silence of its now deserted quay.  Mr. Bonnyfeather
beckoned to Anthony.  They went up on the roof and hauled down both
the flags together.

"My son," said he with emotion as they locked them in the chest,
"if anyone ever raises them again it must be you."  He snapped the
lock.  Anthony stood by feeling a lump in his throat.

"And what shall we do now?" he asked.

"I shall talk about that with you later," the old man replied.
"Just now--"  He broke off and went to his room.

For some moments Anthony stood there.  The past seemed locked in
the chest.  Then he remembered the present and hastened over to the
Udneys'.  The consulate downstairs was in an uproar but Mrs. Udney,
Florence, and Parish were upstairs.

"Oh, I am so glad YOU came," Florence cried.  "We are leaving
tomorrow with the fleet."  She checked herself suddenly colouring
to the eyes.  "I did want to say good-bye, you know."

Of course, THEY would be going!  He knew that, and yet until the
last moment he had hoped not.  How much he had hoped he was aware
of only now as he looked at her standing so near him.  So Florence
was going away, too.

"All the world is going away!" he blurted out looking miserable and
depressed before he could recollect himself.  "I wish you were
staying.  Is it England?"

Her eyes suffused with tears.  "No," she said, "Rotterdam!"

"Rotterdam!" he mumbled.

"I think you had better tell Mr. Adverse, my dear," broke in her
mother.  "Florence, don't turn your back on us that way.  It isn't
polite."

"Good-bye," said the lips of Florence to Anthony though no sound
was heard.  When she turned to her mother and Parish she was gay
again with bright colour in her cheeks.

"Isn't she a little goose about it, David?" said Mrs. Udney.
"Florence wants to tell you, Anthony, that she and Mr. Parish are
engaged.  It will be announced shortly."   She looked at him
keenly.  But his face did not change now.

"Rather wooden," thought Mrs. Udney.

"I hope you will like Rotterdam as well as Totnes, Miss Florence,"
he managed to say.

"Believe me, she will," said Parish sitting down beside her with
the air of a proprietor.  "It is a fine town with lots of English
and Scotch merchants."

Anthony nodded.  He sat on his chair with his knees straight out
before him and drank his tea alone.  For the life of him he could
not think of anything to say.  He felt unaccountably sad.  Parish
talked on confidently.  As soon as he could Anthony bade them all
good-bye.  On the way down he met Mr. Udney coming up.  Anthony was
surprised by the heartiness of his good-bye.  "Good luck, my boy,
write us.  I want to hear from you!"  He caught him by the arm as
if to keep him.

"Mr. Udney, I have a great deal to thank you for.  I . . . I shall
miss you sadly.  It will be very lonely . . . with all the English
gone . . . very . . .  I--"

"Cheer up, my boy, we English always come back, you know.  You are
staying on with your guardian I suppose?"

"No, I am leaving!" said Anthony, and looked shocked.  It seemed as
if someone else had made the decision.  But he was sure of it,
sure!

"Hadn't you better consider your . . ."  began the consul.

"No, sir, I AM LEAVING LIVORNO!"  He flung out of the door.

"Humph!" said Mr. Udney and went upstairs to his wife, who was
alone now.

"Our young friend seems to be badly cut up over the recent trend of
events here."

"Does he?" she said doubtfully.

"Yes, he is going to leave.  I should think he would stay on and
look after Mr. Bonnyfeather's interests--and his own."

"His OWN?" she put down the teacup.

"Yes, didn't you know he is Bonnyfeather's heir?"

"Henry!" she cried.  "Why didn't you tell me?  Oh, you . . . you
old fool!"

She turned and began to play violently on the spinet.

"Well, I'll be damned!" muttered Mr. Udney.

Just as Anthony turned the corner of the street the strains of
"Malbrouk s'en va-t-en guerre" reached him faintly like an echo
from a past life.  He winced and clenched his fist.  Mrs. Udney
might have spared him that.  THAT settled it.  He WAS going.

With a heave of his shoulders as if he had cast off a load, he
raced to Otto Frank's.  They had a merry supper there.  That night
they watched the post-chaises and carriages dashing away southward.
Everybody, everybody was going.

About one o'clock there was a ringing bugle call at the Porta Pisa.
A few minutes later the high, clear, thrilling strain burst out at
the end of the long street.  Down the Strada Ferdinanda with a
clicking of sabres, sparks streaming from under their horses'
hoofs, and the wind whipping in their pennons streamed a squadron
of French cavalry.  The old days were done.  Only the English
finished loading goods under the guns of the fleet.

In the great hall of the mayoralty the French major swore.  Cavalry
was no good on the sea.  That had not occurred to the major before.
He was a cavalryman.  He could do nothing to stop the British.  But
he began to arrest people right and left as a relief to his own
feelings and as a proof of his zeal.

Uncle Otto was led off protesting, in his uniform coat despite the
two epaulettes now sewed on it.  Thus was the neutrality of Hamburg
wantonly outraged.  With many other important merchants of Livorno
Uncle Otto spent a miserable night locked up in an old banquet hall
at the mayoralty.  But on the lists of merchants taxable, which the
French officer conveniently used for arrests, the name of John
Bonnyfeather no longer appeared.  He had retired and was now listed
as "widower tenant of the Marquis da Vincitata, age 76, one female
housekeeper, and four servants."  The French were not arresting
"widower tenants."  Mr. Bonnyfeather slept at home.

                            ----------

He and Anthony lingered long over their breakfast next morning.  It
was pleasant in the cool of the summer morning with the great door
wide open with the long shadows in the court and the murmur of the
fountain now plainly audible in the strange quiet.  Everyone else
but he and Anthony had left earlier to watch for the arrival of the
main body of the French.

Mr. Bonnyfeather was pleased to find himself contented and relieved
at having "retired."  He would never have been able to do so
himself without the aid of circumstances.  He would have died in
harness.  Now he would have the beds in the court planted with
flowers, keep a carriage and pair and drive out when the French
departed.  He would rest his soul and die in peace here.  He had
plenty, well secured.  He would have in a few old friends to very,
very special little dinners and play chess.  Ah, he had never
permitted himself the time for that.  He must get out his notes on
combinations again.  McNab and Toussaint could stay on a little and
look after the few loose ends of things that remained, discreetly
of course.  The faintest premonitions of physical and spiritual
lethargy were pleasant this first, lovely summer morning of his
retirement.  He relaxed, stretching, with his feet under the table
and musing.  A rooster in the old mule stables crowed dreamfully.
Mr. Bonnyfeather looked at Anthony.

The lad was musing, too, but with a troubled face.  "What a strong,
lithe, young blade he had grown to be," thought the old man.  "And
how much, how much he still looked like Maria!  Ah, he would forget
that now, it was long ago.  Let the dead bury their dead."  He
started.  With his business gone this youth was the only vital
concern he still had.  Well, he would not have to conceal that any
longer, now that he was alone.  He put his hand gently on
Anthony's.

"You look troubled, my son."

"Yes," said Anthony looking up with the expression of frank
affection and confidence that had long been customary between them
in privacy, "I am greatly troubled.  I do not seem to be able to
find any comfort anywhere."

"At your age I was restless, too.  It is in the blood."

"No, it is not exactly that.  I hardly know how to begin to tell
you.  I have been thinking . . . I have been troubled by things
that have been happening to me.  I do not know just what I should
do, where I should go.  You see . . ."

"If it is about the future you need not be greatly troubled about
that.  I have made sure provision for you there, and in the
meanwhile.  This has been your home since . . ."

"Do you know anything before that?" Anthony asked by an impulse he
could no longer restrain.  "Who am I, where did I come from?  I do
not even know my birthday!  My father!"

The old man withdrew his hand suddenly.

"Oh, do not think me ungrateful, please, sir, do not think it.  It
can never be told you in words what I feel.  I know I was a
miserable orphan, a--  You have been my father.  I have read those
convent records, the day I got my last name, you remember.  But is
that all?  Don't you know--anything?"  His voice trailed off.  Mr.
Bonnyfeather sat looking into the distance.

"I have been thinking about it a great deal lately," Anthony
plunged on.  "I didn't used to, but now lately.  I will tell you
why."

Before he knew it he had plunged into the story of the horoscope at
Signora Bovino's, the whole story of Angela, the loss of Florence,
his decision to leave Livorno, even the quarrel with Toussaint.
The world seemed crumbling about him.  If he did not know who he
was he must go out and become somebody.  He even spoke of his
comfort in the madonna that seemed to link him with a past.  "To
give me some roots as if I had not just happened, been an original
creation.  I have never told anybody all this.  No one, only you.
I needed to tell you.  Don't you see?  That is all.  There is
nobody else who would understand me, man or woman."  He then
remembered Faith and stopped.

How did he instinctively know that she would understand?  He had
not thought of that before.  The thought reminded him that he not
only disliked her but feared her.  She knew, evilly!  No, he could
not speak to her, or of her.  No one should ever know about that,
only himself and the madonna.  Toussaint!  Too many knew already.
He looked at the old man anxiously.  What they saw in each other's
faces now made them both pale.

Mr. Bonnyfeather leaned forward, pondering long.  At last he spoke.

"I will show you something," said he.  Then after another long
pause--"but you must promise me on the honour of your soul, as a
gentleman--you must know what I mean by that now--never to ask me
any more questions or to try to inquire further.  Nay, I MUST ask
you something more, for my own sake.  If you are grateful to me and
love my honour, do not, even if in the future you should
accidentally find out more than I can tell you, permit your
discovery to be known.  Keep it close.  Die with it safe."  An
expression of fiery pride, that for a few seconds made Mr.
Bonnyfeather look years younger, quickened him.

"Will honour be equal to the fundamental curiosity I have aroused?
Do you understand what you promise, Anthony?  Give me your hand."
They looked at each other steadily.

"I promise you," said Anthony.

"Come," said the old merchant, and rising from the table he gravely
led the way to his room.

Under the picture of the exiled James he opened the little casket
with some difficulty.  It was years now since he had looked there,
he reflected.  In fact not since that night when Anthony had been
brought to him.  He took out the miniature of his daughter and
holding it cupped in his hands looked at it again.  It was almost
like having her come back from the dead.  A tremor shook him.

Whatever might come now, he reflected, he had protected her memory.
Even her son, if son of hers he was, should never know, should
never try to find out.  Perhaps it was a cruel promise to exact
from the boy, but he had exacted it of himself, and kept his
promise even in secret thought.  The Bonnyfeathers had preferred
ruin to disloyalty, always.  This boy--  The boy owed him much.
This should be the price, the test of loyal gratitude.  And he had
tried to teach him what "honour" was--the honour of a Bonnyfeather.

He gazed with avid eyes on the face of his child and bowed to kiss
the picture as sometimes in the night, when he knelt by the dying
ashes of his fire, he kissed the crucifix.  And by the rigid code
of his feudal soul he had no doubt but that he was doing right,
now, and to the past.  The name of Bonnyfeather was going out.  Let
it die in honour--and rest.  He turned with his icon in his hand.

"My son," he said, "come here.  I am putting our honour in your
hands."

He laid the picture in Anthony's palms.

"I believe," said he, "that she was your mother.  I am not certain,
but I think so.  That is all I can say."

Looking up at him from the locket Anthony beheld the same face that
he had seen reflected from the fountain of his dreams.  It seemed
to him as if he were peering down again as a child upon his other
self.  It was the same face that had gazed back at him that night
with Angela when the young madonna came to bathe in the pool, his
own face, and yet more lovely, tender and hazily radiant.  That was
the way his soul thought of itself, if the world would only let it
be.  As if a shadow had fallen on the water the image glimmered
away from him still laughing innocently through his tears.

"Mother, beautiful mother.  I know what I am like now.  Let me not
forget."

It was for that reason that he did not turn with an inevitable and
instinctive, "Who was she?" on his lips, despite his promise.  It
seemed to him that he already knew her as he knew himself.

He gave the picture back again, silently.

"Wait for me outside," said Mr. Bonnyfeather.  "I wish to be alone
for a little."

From the ashes he began to rake together a few bits of unconsumed
branches to make a small fire.  Presently by the aid of the bellows
the coals became white hot.  He did not look at the picture again.
"Farewell, Maria, may it be soon."  He stooped low and half closed
his eyes.  The bellows sighed; the gold melted.

When Mr. Bonnyfeather returned to the old ballroom the only
material likeness of Maria which existed was that which was still
traceable to a knowing eye in Anthony's face.  The eyes which could
best trace it there were already growing dim.

"So much for the past," said the old gentleman gallantly.  "Have I
answered your question?"

"You have given me your best gift, I know it," said Anthony.  Mr.
Bonnyfeather felt his old blood warm him again.

"That was understandingly said, I think," he replied.  "I am
repaid.  We are even!  In the future you will remember that
whatever you may do for me will be in your own interest as well.
Do you understand me?"

"It has always been so before, sir!"

"It is a little more certain now."  Yet some shreds of his long
reticence were so firmly rooted in precaution that Mr. Bonnyfeather
could not bring himself to mention his will.  He preferred to
delegate the bald mention of it to another.

"Ahem . . . if I were you I would not let these youthful love
affairs make me melancholy," he went on.  "It is very seldom that
one finds happiness that way.  Our loves are both our joy and our
undoing.  Remember, it is that way life is evoked, and life is both
happy and full of sorrow.  In youth we think only of the pleasure.
I did.  I was undeceived.  Do not think that these first light
shades can darken your soul.  You are restless, too.  The times are
disturbed.  I have thought of that.  You need to change this place
for another, to go out and prove yourself on the world."

"I should not care to go to England, to college, just now," said
Anthony--thinking that Florence would not be there.

"No, I have thought of a better school than that for you.  I mean
the age itself.  Also I need you now.  It so happens that you are
the only one left who may be able to carry out a certain plan of
mine successfully.  Neither McNab nor Toussaint will do.  It is the
collection of a large sum of money long due me, about nine thousand
pounds.  It will take you to Cuba.  What do you think?"

Anthony leaned forward too eagerly to permit his interest to be
doubted.

"It is like this," continued the merchant, "you may have noticed
from our Spanish correspondence that with the firm of Don Carlos
Gallego & Son in Havana we have long had extensive dealings.  Owing
to the nature of our transactions, which were somewhat peculiar,
their payments have been in kind as well as in cash.  We would ship
them, for instance, cargoes of brass wire, calicoes, toys,
millinery, Brummagem muskets, chain shot and handcuffs, together
with horse beans, German beads, Manchester cottons, gewgaws, and
kegs of Austrian thalers coined under Maria Theresa.  It is that
last item in particular which has been costly.  Such things, you
are aware, are eventually destined for trade in Africa, and there
can be no doubt but that the firm of Gallego conducts slave
operations, both hunting and selling, on a large scale.  They in
their turn send us cargoes of palm oil, ivory, various fine woods,
and so forth.  They also remit at various times bills to our
credit.  Thus, although we were forced to extend a large credit to
these people and to carry them for long terms, the profits in the
end were so high as to warrant even the risk of the loss of an
entire cargo by pirates or guarda costas.

"As matters now stand it so happens that we have in the last three
years shipped them three cargoes and received only one in return.
A debt of an unusual amount is therefore due us, the largest
remaining on our books.  With the disturbed conditions now existing
on the high seas, and this port in the hands of the French, it will
be impossible for the Gallegos to ship us any more ivory.  We must
collect from them in cash or by bills on France or Spain, or not at
all.

"Furthermore, for over a year we have had no answer to our
correspondence, although I know our letters were delivered at
Havana.  The old Señor Gallego is honest by long proof.  He is very
old, and it is possible that he may have lately died.  Of his son I
know nothing, nor of the present condition of the firm.  There is
no way at present in Havana to collect this large debt legally.
Spain forbids all direct trade with her colonies.  Everything,
therefore, depends on the attitude of the colonial officials,
frankly upon our finesse in bribery, if we are to realize even our
own outlay.  You will therefore have to act as a private diplomat
on a ticklish mission rather than as an aggrieved creditor.  But
you speak and write Spanish, you have been instructed carefully in
the ways of trade according to my own plans, and I think I do not
flatter myself in having confidence in your intelligence, ability,
and eventual success.  A reasonable accommodation would do.  I
should expect to dispatch you with funds, and letters to my agent
in Havana.  He is an Italian, one Carlo Cibo, amply capable of
instructing you in all the villainous indirections necessary to
conduct honest business in a Spanish colonial capital.  The
temptations of the place are said to be curious--"  Mr. Bonnyfeather
then added as if by afterthought, raising his eyebrows and
twinkling--"something like Livorno it would seem.  Do you care to
hazard yourself in the enterprise?"

"It will be a dream coming true, sir.  I could not imagine anything
more to my mind."

"Perhaps?" said the old man.  "Well, well, prepare yourself for the
journey.  Consult McNab about what you will take.  He knows Havana
from old times.  We shall take the first opportunity of getting you
off.  A neutral ship would be best now if one happens along.  The
neutrals will profit by these troubles.  But we shall see.  Here
comes your friend Vincent bubbling with news."

Vincent was indeed afire with excitement.  The French were entering
the town in full force now.

"They expect Buonaparte directly.  I thought you might both like to
come over and watch from our windows when he arrived.  Uncle Otto
has been released but he has been badly scared and is in bed."

Mr. Bonnyfeather would not go, however.

"I shall not go so far as to imitate your uncle but it will be
wisest for me to stay here.  You go, Anthony."  He waved them out
and remained sitting in his chair while Vincent and Anthony
hastened to Otto Franco's.  The streets and the piazza were
thronged.

Mr. Bonnyfeather took a book from the sleeve of his wadded dressing
gown and began to read.


                       Britannia Rediviva

A Poem on the Birth of the Prince, Born on the tenth of June, 1688.


How different it would have been for John Bonnyfeather, for
instance, if that prince had reigned.  The old Jacobite, a compound
of feudal sentimentality and commercial acumen, read on, allowing
his dreams of what might have been to warm his heart with ghostly
comfort in the silence of the deserted house.  Suddenly the pomp of
the courtly verse seemed to take on for him a peculiarly personal
meaning.  A good omen for Anthony's voyage, he thought, a light on
the past.  He lingered over the lines:


      Departing spring could only stay to shed
      Her blooming beauties on her genial bed,
      But left the manly Summer in her stead,
      With timely fruit the longing land to cheer,
      And to fulfil the promise of the year.
      Betwixt the seasons came the auspicious heir,
      This age to blossom, and the next to bear.


Well, he had seen the blossom.  And he would not have to bear the
next age.  Thanks to the Virgin that would rest on other, younger
shoulders!  "Anthony, my son, my son."

The thunder of the cannon of the departing British fleet saluting
the Tuscan flag still flying on the castle startled him and made
him drop Dryden to the floor.  So they were going!  All safe.  The
pulse of the French drums could be heard answering coming through
the Porta Pisa.

Half an hour later there was a roar from the crowd.  The tricolour
had taken the place of the grand duke's ensign.  But John
Bonnyfeather had not heard that.  He was sleeping peacefully an old
man's nap in the afternoon sun.  Only the echoes of the outside
world whispered in the Casa da Bonnyfeather.  On the shadowed wall
behind the merchant a faded Sisyphus was trying to roll a huge rock
up an impossible hill while various imps were laughing at him.
About two o'clock the gate clicked and Faith came stealthily across
the court in her bonnet.  She looked down at the old merchant
sardonically, smiled, and passed on to her room noiselessly.

Meanwhile from the upper windows of the Casa da Franco Anthony,
Vincent, Toussaint, and the Franks, with the exception of Uncle
Otto, were watching the arrival of the French.  When the castle was
seized Governor Spanocchi had been found there and was now brought
to the mayoralty at his own urgent request under guard.  The crowd
howled at him for its lottery money, which he was shrewdly enough
thought to have shipped off with the town treasure chests.  About
two o'clock the cannon from the castle were heard firing vainly at
a few English ships just steering out of the roads.

Shortly afterwards a column of French cavalry came galloping down
the Strada Ferdinanda with a magnificent horseman at their head.
He was at first taken for General Buonaparte and was cheered by a
radical mob.  It was Murat.  He dismounted and began to arrange a
fitting reception for the conqueror.

The governor and his staff were forced to get into gala uniform.
The various foreign consuls were assembled.  Uncle Otto was made to
get out of bed and put on his official coat.  His pallor was
extreme.  It took a great deal of beer and the reassurances of both
Vincent and Anthony to get him across the narrow street.  Amid the
crestfallen group of city officials and important merchants dragged
out for the occasion and standing uneasily on the steps of the
mayoralty just opposite, his shoulders sloped most disconsolately.
His nephew waved to him from the window, but in vain.

As usual with all military occasions an interminable delay now took
place.  The crowd grew restive, insolent, and was squeezed against
the walls by the French horses for its trouble.  Cries and curses
arose, the screams of a child.  Presently a little girl was carried
away gasping and moaning.  She had been trampled by a horse.
Toussaint looked down pale and shocked.  He could not bear the
noise the child had made.  Just then the police knocked at the door
ordering every house to illuminate that night.  "Liberty" had
officially arrived.  One must rejoice now or go to prison.

Anthony laughed and began to quote Rousseau at Toussaint.  Then he
was ashamed of himself for his thoughtless cruelty.  The face of
his old tutor was haggard with disappointment.  For the first time
in months Anthony took him by the hand and with quiet remorse
begged his pardon.  He could see that it was a real crisis for the
idealistic little Frenchman.

"Toussaint, mon maître, you who were so sweet to me when I was a
little boy--how could I be so cruel!  Do you not know I love you?
What has just happened, do not think of it.  The child!  It was a
cruel accident.  The hero is yet to arrive.  Be yourself, a
philosopher as always."

The little man looked up at him with so great a thankfulness in his
face as to touch Anthony infinitely.  He could never forget that
bland, sweet look.  How foolish their misunderstanding had been.
About what?  About Faith!

"You forgive me that blow, then, mon vieux?" Toussaint asked.

Anthony reached over and rumpled the short curls on the little
man's head.

"There," he said, "an insult for an insult!  Now we are even."
They walked back to the window again arm in arm.

The drums in the piazza had begun to roll.  A sharp command could
be heard.  As they looked out together a thousand sabres flashed
out as one.  In the late afternoon sunlight it seemed as if the
arrival of Jove were being announced by a steel lightning and
thunder.  A noise of galloping horses and wheels was heard in the
distance.  The world craned its neck.

Down the Strada Ferdinanda a plain carriage drawn by grey horses
and followed by a few mud-splashed guards careened into sight.  It
was moving at great speed.  A small, hatless, pale man with his
lank hair blowing in the wind was leaning back in the middle of the
rear seat reading a book.  He paid no attention whatever to the
roars of the crowd.  As the carriage turned into the piazza the
heavy, rear artillery wheels with which it had been fitted
described a quarter circle on the cobbles, grating hideously.  The
man in the carriage sat up at the same instant and tossed his book
out into the street.  Some urchins scrambled for a treatise on
ballistics which fluttered and fell among them like a hurt
butterfly.  Another flash of lightning, the sabres came to salute.
The carriage stopped with a jerk before the mayoralty.

The pale young man, who now seemed, as he sat bolt upright to
occupy not only the entire carriage but the piazza as well, put on
his hat and saluted.  Flash, flash, and the sabres grated back in
their scabbards.  The men sat at attention like ragged, equestrian
statues with bronze faces.  Murat came down the steps to meet
Buonaparte.

"Well, general," said a high clear voice which would have been
feminine had it not been so crisp and accusatory.  "So you were too
late!"

"The ships had already gone, mon général . . ."  began Murat when
he was cut short.

From the carriage an accusatory finger pointed at the group on the
steps.  It was fixed on Uncle Otto.

"Is that an English uniform I see?"

"No, padrone," moaned the terrified little German.  "No!  Questa e
l'uniforma di Amburgo!"

Even the troopers grinned with their general.  "PADRONE!"

"HAMBURG!" said Buonaparte as if he had already abolished the
place, and got out of the carriage.  He ran up the steps and took
the governor's sword which was held out to him like a bodkin.

"I shall expect you to provide my troops with ration, fodder,
clothing and shoes, especially shoes," shouted the little man
looking at Spanocchi like a small eagle.  "That is what you exist
for now.  See to it that the requisitions are filled."

"The dearth is extreme, Highness," faltered the poor man used only
to addressing Austrian superiors.  "The prices . . ."

"Tut, tut!  Omelettes are inflated due to the extreme scarcity of
eggs.  You talk like a merchant, now GO!  Hullin," said he
turning to a tall major of grenadiers, "I appoint you city major.
Comb out the place.  Do not be such a simpleton as you were at
Pisa.  If they have let the English go, make them pay.  Money!
Take the shoes off their feet.  Court-martial the governor.  Act as
if you were still taking the Bastille again."

He swept his eyes about the piazza, as though noting who was there
to see and hear.  For ten seconds or more he seemed to be looking
directly into the Franks' window at Anthony and at Toussaint whose
face worked with emotion.  He whispered something to Hullin, who
glanced up and shook his head.

"A fine welcome you give me here," he continued turning now on the
quaking merchants.  From the window across the narrow street
Anthony and Vincent could see him clearly and hear every word.  His
voice rose to a high pitch.

"Do not doubt it.  I shall give the English a final lesson.  I
march on Vienna and then northwards.  Hamburg, every hiding place
of these water rats shall be ferreted out, swept clean.  Then their
island next."  He beat his left leg with his gauntlets.  The leg
trembled.  Livorno was a bitter disappointment.  He had seen the
sails of Nelson glimmering away as he entered.  Beckoning to an
adjutant he reseated himself in the carriage.

To Toussaint it seemed as if Buonaparte had turned on the crowd the
unseeing glance of a mummy.  There was no speculation in those
eyes.  Only dull flashes as from the fires of Stromboli over the
horizon at night.  He was pallid, yellow.  His long, sleek, jet-
black hair dangled around his face like the locks of a Seminole
Indian threading the swamp.  He sat there diminutive, youthful, in
a worn simple uniform with gloom on his brow.

"No light," thought Toussaint.  "Bon Dieu! no light!"

The sabres flashed only lightning once more.  Hullin stood on the
carriage steps in an attitude of profound respect listening to some
last muttered admonitions.  Then as suddenly as he had come, and
with the same ominous rumble of wheels, Buonaparte was gone.

To Anthony looking down from the window, watching all this, there
had come that inexplicable feeling that his own fate had somehow
been laid in the hands of the little man whom he had watched
getting in and out of his carriage.  How and why?  Out of what
immense ramifications of events had the threads of his own
existence been laid in those hands?  One thin thread to be sure,
but it was bound up and woven into that thick rope of Europe, those
millions of other gossamers tangled into a strong strand by which
the world was to be towed along for a while; towed out of stagnant
waters into new.

It was a curious thing, but of all the thousands of eyes that had
looked on Buonaparte that day in Livorno there was scarcely a pair
but took this for granted.  For a few moments Anthony had actually
watched a section of that strand running through those nervous,
white hands.  It was a relief to have them gone.  He felt as if he
had to recapture the skein of his own life again.  He did not know
where it might lead, but at least he could follow it now himself,
even if blindly.  "To Havana," Mr. Bonnyfeather said.  Anywhere, as
long as it led away from Livorno.

For months past all the threads in the town had been warped out of
the normal blocks and pulleys through which they ran.  All the
world now seemed out of gear.  His own thread had slipped clear off
the familiar pulley where it had been running in what might have
become a ceaseless round.  Now it flapped free, was hurtling off
into the unknown.  He was glad of that.  It would not be his hands
only that would rig it to the tackle of life again.  No, there was
a strong mysterious drag on it, he felt.  He would see the world
now.  Never could he see enough of it.  The void of his first ten
years was still deep as a well.  One lifetime was not sufficient to
fill it.  He turned from the window with an unconscious gesture of
hail and farewell to find himself in the Franks' room with
Toussaint sitting on the sill beside him.  The little man sighed.

"It was the gloomy face of a tyrant, Anthony," he said.

Uncle Otto came in trying to recover face and exclaiming
"Birbante!"  His wife and the little girl and Vincent did their
best to soothe him.  The small ego of Uncle Otto had met something
so cosmic that he looked shattered.

Anthony and Toussaint walked home together, the latter gloomy.  But
that night at supper Faith began to talk with Toussaint and
actually smiled at him.  Sunlight burst in upon the little man and
shone again from his face.  To Anthony there was something sinister
about it all.  Yet he was surprised to find that much as he
disliked Faith he did not care to have her kind to Toussaint.  He
was enraged with himself at this.  What strange unknown depths were
in him?  Actually he could not tell himself what kind of person he
was.  What would he do under new circumstances in other worlds?
Who and what was he?

He sat half-undressed on the edge of his bed pondering.  Now he
knew why Mr. Bonnyfeather had said, "God keep you."  You did not
even know who you were yourself.  The face in the miniature came
back to him now with comfort.  That was what he wanted to be like.
Only this morning he had felt he was like that, his mother!  Part
of him.  Who and what was the other part?  He wondered.  But he
could never ask now.  His father!

"Father, mother, father, mother," he kept saying the words over
again trying to give them some reality, shape, and memory.  He was
somebody's son.  He would some day be a father.  Angela might have
a child!  He had not thought of that.  What did it all mean?  These
human words had always had a sound of prayer about them, still had.

"Mother, son, father--Holy mother," he turned to the Madonna on the
wall.  The old formulas sprang to his lips full of new meanings.
It was a relief to be able to pray that way again!  He had not been
able to do so for so long.  Not until the other day.  Whatever he
might do he was not to be left alone.  The misery, restlessness,
and youthful despairs of the past hectic months rushed from his
lips in a whispered confession to the Virgin.  All doubt had
vanished with the blessed relief.  Was she not there, on the wall,
in heaven, as always!  Had she not come to him in his dream with
Angela, young and beautiful?  He and the Virgin were very old, very
old together.  He had seen her that night as his soul remembered
her, looking back through ancient doors of birth and death made
transparent by the light of eternal passion breaking through them.
Before, now, and forever, he had seen her merging with the waters
at the root of the great tree as he remembered her in the
springtime of the world.

"Ah, they called her mother, mother of sorrows.  But she was mother
of joy as well.  Yes, he believed that.  She was sitting there now,
as always, with the child in her arms.  But in the dream there were
two of them.  The other heavenly twin had come back.  Who was he,
that lost one?  Was he like Anthony lost for a while on earth?  Was
he Anthony?  Anthony who could return to her knees, in dreams?  Ah
God! if he could only lay his head on her breast!  Be rocked to
sleep there as he never had been, forget and forget, already he
would forget."

He drew near to her in a dreamful mood in which the life within him
seemed to leave his body sitting breathing, while he drew closer to
her against the wall.  He laid his head there and kneeled looking
at her head lost among the stars.  Silence and peace and silence.
To be and not to think, only to know and feel.  Ecstasy.

At last he opened his eyes again and found that he really was
kneeling against the wall.  By the dim light that burned before
her, very dim, except about the little shrine, he seemed to see her
now more clearly than ever before.  His eyes were wide awake and
rested.  They were made to peer into far spaces.  It was not
necessary even to wink.  He looked steadily and easily at the
statue.

It seemed to him as he saw her there now as the madonna of his
dreams, but older, sweeter, with something more tender, more human,
the mystic woman of the fountain touched and wafted by some
ineffable experience into a being far more beautiful, sympathetic,
and divine.  And it seemed now to him, too, that for the first time
he saw she was holding the child out to him as if he should draw
near and touch it.  He had been like that once.  Was he now?
Partly perhaps.  The child was her son.  Father Xavier had told him
the story.  Born in the rocky stable amid the oxen under the stars.
And there had been more to that story.  It was about the babe after
he became a man.  He had thought very little about that.  Perhaps
he should think more.  Why did she hold him out that way?  Should
he really draw near and touch him?  He put out his hand.  Then he
saw that the child was still sleeping on her breast.  He dared not
awaken him.  Not yet.  "After a while," he thought.  It was as
though his lips went on speaking another's words.  "After a while
when you find him again."

Late in the night he awakened cold.  He was still leaning against
the wall, but the light had gone out.  It was dark now.  He
slipped, half dressed as he was, under the covers and slept
exhausted.  Next morning the room for the first time for months
seemed washed with a happy light as he woke.

"There will not be many more mornings here," he thought.  How quiet
and how home-like it was.  He pressed his cheek against the pillow
enjoying it and whistling softly.  How wonderful, and after all how
happy his days had been here!  A light tap sounded on his door.

"Anthony, are you awake yet, my boy?" said the kindly voice of Mr.
Bonnyfeather.  "Get up and dress yourself.  I have news for you."

Anthony smoothed out the dent on the pillow where his head had been
and put on his clothes.  In the big room they were already at
breakfast.  The court lay quiet and serene in the morning sun with
the shadows withdrawing from it as if by magic.




CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

FAREWELLS AND EPITAPHS


"Your ship has come in, Anthony," said Mr. Bonnyfeather.  "At least
I hope it has," he added hastily, smiling at the involuntarily
prophetic nature of the remark.

"Nolte sent word this morning.  It is an American brig and he and
his precious uncle will be taking advantage of this neutral to get
rid of some of their anxious travellers.  Frau Frank must have had
her hands full feeding a dozen or more at once.  You and McNab go
down and look her over.  If it is necessary you might ask her
captain to supper tonight.  I might persuade him to make your
voyage direct.  But be careful, arrange everything if you can,
yourselves.  We do not want to attract notice here just now.  So
far the French have ignored us.  You will have to avoid all
clearance papers."

The old man turned to his latest London newspaper which he scanned
anxiously.  A month ago war seemed inevitable, he noted anxiously--
over his chop.

Anthony and McNab hurried through breakfast and went down to the
quay at the lower end of the Darsena.  A trim little brig was
warped in close to the dock but not into the slip.  She had springs
on her cables, and running his eye aloft McNab noted that, while to
an unprofessional glance the canvas might seem snugly furled, it
was stowed so as to be let go if necessary with a run.

Anthony liked the ship.  He had never met anything quite like her.
She appeared a little more frail and bird-like than any other craft
he had seen.  From her sharp bows blew back the carved eagle
feathers of an Indian chief's head-dress.  His hooked nose seemed
to snuff the surges.  The masts raked aft at a sharp angle and were
stayed so tautly that the standing rigging hummed in the morning
breeze.  Her deck was spotless.  Between the two masts was a "long
tom" carefully covered with canvas.  Aft, the box over the
captain's cabin rose above the quarter-deck.  Even in port her
hatches were battened down.  Except for these, and her polished
wheel and hooded binnacle, there seemed nothing else on deck.

"All a-tanto and not a soul aboard?" grunted McNab.

They walked down past the brig a little farther giving their eyes a
sailor's treat.  The wind whipped the ensign out over the water.
It flowed out into the breeze curling with long tiger streaks.  On
a blue field a circle of stars seemed whirling about nothing.  It
was the first time Anthony had seen the Stars and Stripes.  Then,
just around the corner of the galley, they saw what ever afterwards
he thought of as the spirit of the ship.

Seated in a sea-chair lashed to two large wooden half-moons sat
rocking contentedly, and with an air of self-possession that only
she herself could convey, a prim, bony woman with extraordinarily
pointed lips.  She was knitting a positively gigantic stocking with
the heaviest yarn imaginable, and for every stitch and click of her
needles she twisted the extreme tips of her lips.  It looked as if
she silently whistled.  At the distance of a few yards they stood
looking at her over the water as at an apparition.  On McNab and
Anthony she did not bestow a glance.  For a while they watched time
being destroyed while the stocking grew.

"Ahoy, the brig there," said McNab at last tentatively.

"EE-lisha," said the woman without missing a stitch and
continuing to rock, "Ee-LISHA!"

"Comin' on deck," said a deep voice from the cabin with a restraint
so abject as to make McNab grin.  A red-faced man with an iron-grey
beard and cold blue eyes stuck his head through the aft sliding
hatch and looked at them.

"Ahoy, the brig," said McNab again.

"Ahoy, the dock there," said the man and glowered.  The woman
continued to knit.  It seemed to Anthony as if they had reached an
impasse.  McNab cleared his throat.

"If you'll waft us a wee bit o' a skiff, captain," said he, "I'll
put that in your lug will belike warm your pocket."

"Aye?" said the man.  "Philly!"

A darky stuck his head out of the galley.

"Fetch the gentlemen."

"The crew are ashore," he bawled.  "Ye won't mind having the cook
get ye, I hope," he continued, evidently to Anthony, who was
dressed like a merchant's clerk.

"Not at all," said Anthony, "if he's a good cook."

"Best 'tween here and Boston," replied the captain.

"He ain't," said the woman.

The little boat sculled by the negro danced to them over the few
yards of harbour.

"It's na miracle the French hae no seized yon brig," said McNab as
they were ferried across.  "Yon carline wi' her knittin' needles
would stand off Buonaparte I'm thinkin'."


                             WAMPANOAG
                         Providence, R. I.


gleamed across the duck-like stern as they passed.  They climbed up
the dangling ladder and found themselves on deck in the tremendous
white light that beat about the rocking chair.

"Good morning, ma'm," said McNab touching his hat, despite himself
a little sneakily.

The woman missed one stitch.  "Ee-lisha," she said.

"Come below," roared the captain.

At the foot of the ladder they found themselves standing in the
most peculiar captain's cabin imaginable.  It was neither a ship's
cabin nor a New England parlour.  It was both.  There were four
bunks built into the ribs of the ship.  Two of these like Dutch
beds were provided with folding shutters.  The two, round stern
windows were curtained with an effeminate lace.  Under each of
these eyes was a chest painted pure white, labelled respectively
"Jane" and "Elisha."  Between the two chests the great keel beam of
the ship curved out like a nose and widened toward the floor as if
it were trying to expand its bolted nostrils.

The effect of all this was to give the aft end of the cabin with
its half-curtained eyes the appearance of a peculiarly bestial face
trying to be coquettish in a lace night-cap.  As he looked at the
two chests standing out like white, bared tusks from the cheeks of
this sinister countenance, Anthony felt as Red Riding-hood must
have when she first began to realize that her grandmother was a
wolf.

But if the cabin was sinister toward the stern it made up for it by
being safely domestic forward.  Lashed to the ship's ribs by a
perverse puzzle of beautifully intricate knots was a mahogany
sideboard of undoubtedly genteel lineage.  Its gracefully curved
limbs seemed straining outward.  The lady was plainly being held
there against her will--facing the wolf.  A sturdy, manly sea-desk
near by watched this perpetual crisis indifferently.  It was
stuffed with ship's papers to the point of self-importance and it
wore a plume pen in its inkstand hat with an air of "business or
nothing."

Anthony and McNab sat down upon two chairs spiked to the deck while
the captain seemed to preside from the chest labelled "Elisha."

"Captain Ee-lisha Adonijah Jorham of Providence Plantations, New
England," said the red-faced man looking at them with level eyes.
"Gentlemen, at yer service.  She," he continued jabbing upward with
one thumb, "is my wife, Mrs. Jorham.  She was a Putnam--ONCE."
He lowered his voice slightly.

Having no means of controverting this McNab and Anthony introduced
themselves.  It was not long before the captain and McNab had taken
each other's measure.  Yankee had met Scot.  Both were interested
in each other and fenced carefully.  Ten minutes went by and
neither had learned anything.

"I'm thinkin'," said McNab, "that the deil will soon be dizzy
gangin' aroond the bush.  Let's talk till the point."

Captain Elisha opened his chest and took out a bottle of rum.  As
he did so, as if by prearrangement, his wife came down the ladder
and stood knitting.  She would not sit down.  The captain sighed.
Nevertheless, the discussion went on.

After an hour it appeared that the captain would be glad to
consider a voyage to Havana on charter terms, provided he was
allowed to make certain ports of call on the way.  Yes, he knew of
course of Mr. Bonnyfeather, and of the conditions at Livorno.  On
their mutual dislike of the French he and McNab almost clinched the
bargain.  Then the captain sheered off.  He would prefer to sign
with Mr. Bonnyfeather himself.

But there were to be no papers, reminded McNab.  It would not do
now.  Mr. Bonnyfeather was no longer in business.  It might
compromise him.  This was to be a purely private affair.  Merely to
take the young gentleman to Havana.  It could all be arranged
verbally.

All the more reason then for seeing the merchant personally, said
the captain.  It was McNab's turn to sigh.  Mr. Bonnyfeather, he
knew, would not drive so close a bargain as might be.  Nevertheless,
he was forced to play his last card and invite the captain that
night to dinner.  In the presence of the lady Anthony thoughtfully
added her to the invitation.

"What do you say, Mrs. Jorham?" asked the captain.  All realized it
was a final appeal.

"I won't mind some shore fixin's--if they're turned out right," she
added noncommittally.  "Ye might send Philadelphy along with that
Bank tartle to help out.  I'm plum worn out watchin' the critter
tryin' to get away."

"Like the sideboard, ma'm?" said Anthony unable to restrain
himself.  The captain laughed.

"Young man," said she icily, "where might YE be expectin' to
spend etarnity?"  Her mouth pointed.

"Wall, wall," cried the captain trying to move them out before the
threatened gale could break.  "At eight then, after dark.  I'll
mind the patrols.  So long now."  He looked with an approving but
anxious eye at Anthony.  The knitting had stopped and his wife was
watching.

"I don't care if I do," said McNab pouring himself a drink from the
square bottle and tossing it off.  "A wee doch-an-dorris, noo. . ."

But no sooner had his hand left the bottle the first time than it
was seized by Mrs. Jorham and deposited in the chest marked "Jane."
It was the first drop that had passed, and the last for any of
them.  A parched twinge wrinkled the lips of Captain Elisha, but he
waved them out as his wife locked the chest.  They went.

"A watched bottle never gurgles," said McNab as they went down the
ship's side.  In the cabin the typhoon had burst.

"'Twas an ill jest o' yours, laddie.  If you sail in yon ship
you're no like to hae heard the last o' it.  Losh!"

The captain, his face more fiery than before, was hailing them.

"I'll send the nigger with the tartle," he shouted at the dock.
Then he must have heard the voice of his mate calling him, for he
dived below.

                            ----------

The dinner for the Jorhams was to be an unusual feast; one not for
business alone.  Indeed, McNab had been instructed to return to the
brig and to arrange for Anthony's passage on the captain's terms.
He had done so.  He and Philadelphia had returned with the turtle
which was killed in the courtyard amidst immense curiosity.  Dinner
was to be a memorable, final feast.

Mr. Bonnyfeather had planned it with a double motive.  As a
farewell to Anthony it was to be a merry one.  He would spare
Anthony the sadness of a sorrowful parting and he would also spare
himself the lonely, private agony of a good-bye that he scarce
dared to face.  "The last, the dear last of us all," he thought
looking at the boy's golden head.  They sat in his room together
talking, making last arrangements, pausing, and reverting to
familiar topics as one goes back to look at something for the last
time.

Faith was very busy outside packing Anthony's chests.  They could
hear her moving about in the hall.

"I suppose you will be taking the madonna with you, Mr. Anthony,"
she said coming in suddenly.

"Oh," said he getting up.  He had almost forgotten her.  "YES,
wrap her up carefully.  Put her in the big chest."

Faith nodded.  So she would see the last of THAT, she thought.
She turned the thing face downward and closed the lid.  "Farewell
to the bad luck of a Paleologus!"

In the room Anthony and Mr. Bonnyfeather sounded very merry.  But
it seemed to both of them at times that the misty landscapes on the
wall were hazier than usual.  The old man lighted his candles.  He
wiped his spectacles and put them on again several times.  Thus
they both talked through the long twilight as if they would always
be able to do so till evenings were no more.  At eight o'clock the
guests arrived.

It fell to Anthony that evening to do the honours.  He found
Captain Elisha and Mrs. Jorham, the latter assisted gingerly by
Philadelphia, climbing down in the court from a high-wheeled cab.
The captain was dressed in a homespun suit so tight that it gave
him the cherubic outlines of an overgrown cupid.  Mrs. Jorham
trailed behind her a long sea-green skirt of a mid-century,
colonial vintage.  Into this ocean of faded velvet a pointed bodice
thrust violently like the bow of a ship.  Above it her head rose
like a teak figurehead.  She carried a canvas umbrella with
whalebone ribs and what appeared to be a spar for a handle.  On the
end of the spar was a yellow ivory ball like a doll's head.  The
whole affair, which had a belligerent air about it, flapped about
the point, bulged in the middle, where its hips might have been,
and was tied about the waist with a rope.  As Mrs. Jorham stood in
the court holding it maternally close to the folds of her skirt it
appeared to be her bashful replica in miniature and might have been
her female child.

"Philly," said she, "take my umbreller."  The captain laid his pea-
jacket over the darky's other arm.  Holding these objects
majestically before him, Philadelphia ushered them up the steps.

The Americans seemed to have learned from the Indians the savage
custom of shaking hands.  They shook hands with Mr. Bonnyfeather,
with Anthony, with McNab, with Faith, solemnly and with malice of
forethought.  It looked as if Captain Elisha would shake hands with
himself when his eye fell upon the dinner-table already set with
many glasses.  He and Mr. Bonnyfeather disappeared to talk business
while Anthony was left alone with Mrs. Jorham and the umbrella.

They sat facing each other on two heavy gilt chairs.  Seemingly at
a vast distance from them in the great apartment the white round of
the table, much enlarged for the occasion, lay in a cheerful glow.
But by contrast all the rest of the room was in darkness.  The
folds of the angular woman's skirt swept around her and into the
shadows.  Above them in the twilight gleamed the bony ribs and the
pale ivory knob of the umbrella.  She seemed to emanate a kind of
masterful, yet maternally-virtuous disapproval of everything, whose
only softening influence was a touch of lugubrious woe.  Having
said "how" to this chieftainess in whalebone, Anthony was now at a
loss.  He could not shake hands again.  At the very thought he
started to smile.  The woman's lips pointed indignantly.

"I trust," said she, "that ye haven't spent the arternoon jokin'.
Ye seemed in an idle mood this mornin'.  It was not that I object
to what ye said about my sideboard!  It was yer levity in comparin'
it to a woman."

"I have been getting ready to leave home all afternoon, Mrs.
Jorham.  I can assure you there was not much levity in that, and I
was not idle."

Mrs. Jorham looked somewhat mollified but nevertheless shook her
head doubtfully.  "Mere earthly consarns are not sufficient.  You
should cast your eyes above."  Anthony looked surprised.  "Unless
you have devoted some time during the day to prayer you may
consider it wasted, you know."  She laid her umbrella across her
knees and folded her hands in her lap.

Embarked thus on the pursuit of her favourite quarry, the soul, she
began to feel more congenial.  In the semi-darkness her outline
lost much of its rigidity.  She cuddled the umbrella.  It no longer
seemed likely that she might open it in the twilight and flit off
on the wings of a bat.  There might even be shelter under it for
two.  Anthony wondered about the captain.

"Whenever I'm fixin' to make a v'y'ge," snapped Mrs. Jorham, "I go
in for extensive prayer.  V'y'ges are solemn things.  Ye can never
tell.  I pack my duds in the mornin', all but the scriptures, and I
usually goes to the ta-own churchyards in the arternoon and takes
the good book along for reference.  There's nothing like a few
chice epitaphs and a little solemn scripture to put you in a frame
of mind fit to go to sea.  It makes your petitions gin-uine, the
kind that goes straight through to the marcy seat.  I tell ye I
know it.  Have ye any clever graveyards here?" she inquired
suggestively.

"Several," said Anthony, "but most of the clever epitaphs are in
Latin."

"That's the way in heathen parts," she went on.  "I am glad to tell
that it's dyin' out at home.  I must say Latin's Greek to me,
although I was a Putnam."

"Do the Putnams speak Latin like the Jesuits?" asked Anthony.  He
wondered if they were tonsured, too.

"Nope, they don't need it to git along in Bosting, and most of my
family round Nuburyport went in for rum and ile.  But all of 'em
got fine epitaphs.  Granite stones, too.  Not a soapstone in the
lot.  No, siree."  The lady paused triumphantly.

"Ye ever been to my pa-arts?"

Anthony shook his head regretfully.

"Well, sir, there's a fine parcel o' ta-owns in New England.  A
feast for Christian eyes with white churches and neat houses.  The
snow comes regular and kills off the roaches.  We don't have
critters except what comes in ships from Jamaiky and other foreign
pa-arts.  But the best thing about the ta-owns is the clever
graveyards.  I've seen a sight of 'em all up and da-own the cyoast.
But they Southern planters sleeps too proud o' their own private
plots!  You'd think Gabriel was goin' to call ra-ound and give some
souls a separate toot.  No, sir, there'll be just one long, common
blast, and them that sleeps late'll fry.  One o' the slickest
churchyards I ever see was at Bridgewater, Mass.  I spent a hull
week there.  Visitin'!  I got them inscriptions pat.  Some of 'em
was poetry.  Here's one:  'Here lies buried Mrs. Martha Alden, the
wife of Mr. Eleazer Alden, who died 6 January, 1769, aged 69
years.'"  Mrs. Jorham broke into song.


     "The resurrection day will come,
      And Christ's strong voice will burst the tume;
      The sleeping dead, we trust, will rise
      With joy and pleasure in her eyes,
      And ever shine among the wise.
      A-men."


The nasal tune twanged its way about the mouldering frescoes.  It
seemed to curl up among the clouds that had once been rosy with a
false dawn but were now like rolling billows of blue and grey smoke
through which the chariots of the gods plunged in a growing
twilight.

"It'll do the heathens good," said Mrs. Jorham rolling her eyes
aloft and askance.  "And that naked man rolling his barrel in hell.
Well, I cala-late their clothes WOULD singe off, but it don't
seem right.  I wouldn't allow even the damned to expose
themselves."

Anthony sat silent in sheer amazement.  The woman was evidently
having a good time.  He remembered having read about persons like
this in Mr. Bonnyfeather's Protestant books.  There was, for
instance, "The female Saint of Wimbledon."  What was it, that
phrase the old author used, a classical scholar, he was, oh, yes,
"That chaste Diana of endangered souls,"--something, something,
rolls--


     "The heat of pious ardour lit her face
      As through the wood of error roared the chase,
      Acteon-like the heretic was torn
      While scornfully she wound her Christian horn."


And so on ad infinitum.

O lord! he wished Vincent would come.  He could hear the snatch of
harmony at Signora Bovino's ringing out now as if his mind were
defending itself automatically.  Undoubtedly he was being chased.


     "In memory of Capt. Seth Alden--
      The corpse in silent darkness lies
      Our friend is gone, the captain dies . . ."


"Thar she spa-outs, and thar she bla-ows," roared the voice of

Captain Elisha who emerged just then from the corridor with Mr.
Bonnyfeather.  They had clinched their bargain over a bottle of
rum, at least the captain had, and he was not what might be termed
his better self.

"Has that old cachalot been spa-outin' dirges to ye, young man?
I'm sorry for ye, plum sorry!"  He clapped Anthony on the back.  "A
little sea-vility, a little sea-vility is what you Putnams need to
larn, Jane.  I allers said so.  I'm the man to larn yer.  The
idear.  I kin smell them tumes right through the tartle soup."

"Ee-lisha, ye've been drinkin'," said his wife sniffing something
else than turtle soup.

"I hev.  And what's more I'm goin' right on for the rest of the
evenin' and ye can belay yer temperance drip and MO-lasses."  He
looked approvingly at the table.  "Philly, is that potage
perfected?"

"It air, suh!"

The captain made a gesture which in its generous expansiveness
included the more remote members of the solar system.  "Come on,"
said he, and led Mr. Bonnyfeather by the arm to his own table.

"Mr. Adverse," said Mrs. Jorham in a voice now so subdued that
Anthony felt sorry for her, "don't forget what I have been tellin'
ye.  Do a graveyard or two, before . . ."

"Belay them sepelchrees, Jane," called her husband.

But Anthony promised and saw that he had made a friend.  Slipping
her arm in his they advanced to the table.

"Madame," said Mr. Bonnyfeather escaping, "you will also permit me
to do some of the honours."  He seated her on his right.  All the
gentlemen now took their chairs, and with this display of manners
Mrs. Jorham was obviously touched.  She permitted herself a dab at
her eyes.

"Ye make me feel at home," she said to Mr. Bonnyfeather.

"I regard that," said he, "as a touching compliment."

Mrs. Jorham began to rally and to remember who she had once been.
"I do miss the fixin's sometimes," she sighed running her eye over
the glass and silver and fingering the tablecloth.  "And land's
sake the napkins!  We do live like Injuns on the Wampanoag!  I
often says to Elisha, says I . . ."  but the captain was looking at
her.  "Anyway it's nice to be settin' with gentlemen and a
respectable female again!"

"I'll say it is," slipped in the captain, also looking with
approval at Faith.

Suddenly an electric thrill ran through him.  He had seen Faith
flutter her eye at him.  There could be no doubt of it.  It hadn't
happened to him for years.

"Woman," said he, tossing off a glass of wine to her with a loud
smack, "it's a tarnation wonder someone didn't marry ye years ago.
Years ago! I say."  He banged his fist on the table so that the
soup jumped.

Mrs. Jorham's eyes narrowed.  The landscape did not seem so
respectable as she had thought a moment before.

"There's some things a woman can wait too long to change her mind
about," she said dryly.  Faith's throat rippled.  There was an
awkward pause.  Toussaint jumped into the breach gallantly.

"Madame, I can assure you it has not been for lack of opportunities,
or want of a philosopher to persuade mademoiselle that she remains
a . . . er, single.  Monsieur," said he catching Mr. Bonnyfeather's
eye, "may I be the first to propose a toast--TO THE LADIES."

"Gaud bless 'em," added McNab with a sardonic twist looking at the
two women glaring at each other.  "What would we do without them?"
The crisis might have continued but just then Vincent dashed in
late shaking the rain off his curls.

"Well!  Elisha, I told ye it would rain," said Mrs. Jorham.

"Aye, ye're a clever barometer, I'll give ye that," said the
captain.

"Vera sansitive to dampness in any form," muttered McNab to Faith.
But Faith was proposing the return toast.

"I propose something we can all drink to," she said smiling at Mrs.
Jorham, "and I with as much hope as any of you, perhaps more, who
knows?  'The future.'"

"But not without faith," amended Mr. Bonnyfeather who could not
avoid the obvious.

Mrs. Jorham hesitated.  She had been trapped.

"Come on, Jane," said Captain Elisha appreciating the housekeeper's
finesse.

"I'm a temperance woman," she snapped.

"Madame," said Mr. Bonnyfeather, "allow me.  A very light wine, a
remedy for the climate, never intoxicating, in small doses.  The
custom of the country."  He bowed, his eyes twinkling, and from a
decanter filled Mrs. Jorham's glass with a fiery burgundy.  He
stood waiting.

Mrs. Jorham arose with a stiff yet coy reluctance.  She hesitated
but finally clinked her glass against Mr. Bonnyfeather's as if she
had already been seduced and nothing could be done about it.

"The future," she murmured, her cheeks tingling at her inconceivable
abandon.  Then she swallowed the burgundy with a gulp.

"The auld deil," whispered McNab to Anthony.  She sat down slowly.
Her hands remained spread out on the table as if placed on a
faintly pleasant electric contact.

"Well, darn my mother's socks!" said the captain.

Everybody laughed and broke out talking at once.  The ice had been
broken.

Anthony glanced at Mr. Bonnyfeather.  He was sitting with a look of
great satisfaction at the success of his ruse.  As for Mrs. Jorham
there was no doubt that she was wrapt in a deep spiritual
experience.  The end of her nose was slowly beginning to glow.

Vincent was as full of news and as merry as ever.  "Have you heard
the new song the gamins are singing?  It throws the French out of
step when they pass."  He broke out with his full tenor.


     "Io cledevo di veder fla pochino,
      Che se n'andasser via questi blicconi:
      Dia Saglata! ne vien ogni tantino
      Quasi, quasi dilei, Dio mi peldoni!
      O che anche Clisto polta il palticcino,
      O che i Soplani son tanti minchioni!"


The happy, careless voice transported Anthony again to the molten
hours they had wasted delightfully together along the Corso.  In
the gay mocking lilt was concentrated the life of the streets of
Livorno.  How he loved it all.  Now that he was going, how homesick
for it he was already.  Could it, could it be possible that so much
happiness, and dear sorrow, could pass?  "The future?"  What was
it?  Let them always sit listening about a table like this.  The
voice ceased.  The silence seemed unbearable.

"Sing again, Vincent, sing again.  The song we sang that morning
together, do you remember?"

Vincent burst out with it.  Anthony joined in.  On the surge of his
own notes he recovered himself.  His voice rang out clearly.  He
could blend it with Vincent's beautifully.  For another moment he
was gayly happy.  But this time with a new poignance.

He looked at Mr. Bonnyfeather.  With the music and the words he
poured out his boundless gratitude and at the end reached over and
filled his glass to the old man.  They all understood and drank
with a shout.  The table rose, Captain Jorham grunting.

The bright red flush appeared on the merchant's cheek bones.  He
was much moved.  The young voices had gone home.  He rose slowly
and held out his glass with an air that the world had already
forgotten.

"Anthony, my dear boy, God bless you."

They drank it silently.  Anthony caught Faith's eye.  He was aware
that behind her serious expression she was amused at all this.  A
minute ago he could almost have forgiven her.  But not now, not
ever.  It would be war between them to the last.  Poor Toussaint!
He wished Faith would make up her mind to leave Leghorn.  They were
sitting down now.  He would have to reply.

Heavens, what was that strange noise?

Captain Jorham had also been moved by the occasion, and his
potations, to the point of song.  His face glowed like a bonfire.
A husky roar proceeded from his chest.


     "Yankee skipper comin' down the river
      Yankee skipper, HO . . ."


He had forgotten the rest of the words.  He hummed the tune,
rumbling like a cart going downhill.  Then a look of inspiration
came into his eyes.  He had remembered the last line just in time.


     "Yankee skipper comin' down the river."


He ended triumphantly, gurgling.  Then he filled his glass till it
spilled and slopped over as he raised it.

"To the v'y'ge!"

The success of the toast was disturbed by a sound as of dry sticks
crackling.  It proceeded from Mrs. Jorham.  Mr. Bonnyfeather was
about to pat her on the back when it became evident that she was
laughing.

"Why, Jane," said her husband, "ye ain't gorn off that way since ye
was a Putnam."

"Ain't I?" she spat back.  "How do ye know?"

For some reason, perhaps because a small bright bead seemed about
to leave the fiery tip of Mrs. Jorham's nose but miraculously did
not, they all laughed.  She joined in heartily.  A whole brush-fire
seemed to be alight, crackling and snapping.  Suddenly in the
middle of it a hen was disturbed and went off cackling.  Wine is a
marvellous playfellow.  They all lay back and roared.  McNab nearly
split his tight waistcoat.  At this he suddenly looked serious and
they went off again.  Captain Jorham was still standing like a
nonplussed colossus with his glass poised questioningly.  He
glanced at his buttons uneasily.  They were all right.

"Whar's the joke?" he rumbled.

Then they all wondered.  Something, something that nobody could
quite remember now had been so funny.  Anthony still wheezed but it
was purely physical.  His stomach seemed to have collapsed with the
joke.  A cold voice stilled them all.

"Elisha, be ye fixin' to go to Havaner?" demanded Mrs. Jorham.  She
seemed to have accused him of a crime.  They all looked at him.
How would he defend himself?  He put his glass down defiantly.  "I
be," he said.

"Then," said she, "who's goin' to do the navigatin'?  That's what I
want to know."

She looked at them all appealingly.

"The last time we come over we started for London.  Do ye know
where we fetched up at?  Lisbon!" she shouted.  "Lisbon!"

"Woman," he said sitting down heavily, "I forbid ye."

She had touched him to the quick.  For the past two years something
terribly wrong had overtaken the navigation of Captain Elisha
Jorham.  He could not fathom it.  Secretly he had taken to coasting
from port to port picking up what he called "cargoes of notions."
He had turned many a lucky penny.  But the cargoes of the Wampanoag
had become as eccentric as her course when she took to the high
seas.  He had hoped to conceal his difficulties.  Only Mr.
Bonnyfeather's exceptional offer of an hour before had finally
screwed his resolution to the point of heading for deep blue water
again.  That Lisbon landfall had shaken him terribly, and now his
wife had betrayed him.

He sat looking crushed, shaking his head at her.

"Ye've taken the bread out of yer own mouth," he muttered, "I
KNOW the way back."

"I'm sure you do, captain," said Mr. Bonnyfeather, "besides Mr.
Adverse here is by now an excellent navigator in theory.  All he
needs is some actual practice.  You and he can work your reckoning
together.  You can give him his final polish in the art.  Just what
he needs."

Captain Jorham looked much mollified and relieved.

"When do you plan to get under way?" continued the merchant.

"Thar's a strong land breeze usually picks up about dawn on these
coasts," said the captain in his own element again.  "If Mr.
Adverse can come aboard at about two bells we'll leave first thing
in the mornin'.  Better not delay and risk trouble with the
authorities."

Mr. Bonnyfeather looked at Anthony.  A glance of understanding
passed between them.

"Get your chests down while it's dark and then keep below till you
are out of the Darsena.  Your passports might be an awkward
question now with Mr. Udney's visà.

"Vincent," he added, "I regret to interfere with any of your
uncle's plans, but I'm afraid your aunt will have to entertain some
of her refugees a few days longer.  I have engaged Captain Jorham
to take Anthony to Havana.  He goes north to Genoa first to pick up
cargo.  There is nothing for him here, as you know.  If Genoa suits
any of your travellers' plans, they will have to be aboard
tonight."

"I'm only sorry for one thing, sir," said Vincent.

He put his arm around Anthony.

"Aye," said the old man, "we're a grieten sair o'er that!  And noo
let's hae a stirrup cup tigether for the last time, and no more
goodbyes, for I canna bide them."

All their cups touched.  Anthony felt very proud and tall and
straight.  Excitement he knew would now lend him wings to clear the
threshold.  He thought of his old friend Mercury taking off from
the cloud with the banquet behind him.

They broke away from the table.  Anthony looked up just in time to
see Mr. Bonnyfeather vanish into the door of his corridor.  He did
not look back.  The door closed.

"Faith," said Anthony, "will you do me a favour?"

"Yes, Signore Adverse," she said trying to look through him it
seemed.  He met her glance.  "Certainly."

"Fetch my hat and cape and the small bag on the table from my room.
I do not care to go back there any more."

"I'll take care o' the chests," said McNab.

"Good night, Captain Jorham, I'll see you directly," he called
after him.  It helped thus to be doing ordinary things.  Vincent
still sat at the table turning a glass about in his hand.  Their
eyes met affectionately.

"Good night," bellowed the captain from the court.  "Two bells,
mind ye.  The tide won't wait.  A clever evenin' it was, fine and
dandy.  Philly."

"Yes, suh."

"ON them chests!"

"I'll swan if it ain't rainin'!" said Mrs. Jorham.  She raised the
immense umbrella over them.  They disappeared under it.

"Yankee skipper comin' down the river," trilled the captain.  The
echoes awoke in the old court in a kind of jargon.

"Land's sake, 'Lisha, ye'll wake the dead," they heard his wife
say.

"Anthony," said Vincent turning to him.  "Is it all right between
us?  Lately I have thought, sometimes, you know . . . I didn't want
you to leave without being sure.  I . . ." he choked.

All that was best in his nature shone in his face.

Anthony grasped his hands.

"Yes, yes, all right for always, Vincent."

"Let's swear it," said the German looking dramatic and sentimental
but earnest as ever.

"The same old Vincent," said Anthony laughing.  Then he grew
silent.  "But we'll call it an oath."  They exchanged grips again.

Just then Faith returned.  She also smiled.  The little bag was
very heavy and as she gave it to Anthony she said, "I see you are
leaving with more than you brought."

"Are you sorry?" he asked.

"No," she said.  She brought her hands up half-way to her breast
tensely and then let them fall.

"No, I'll tell you something.  It belongs to you!"  Then she turned
and began to gather the silver together on the table.  It bore the
Bonnyfeather mark.

He saw his chests go out.  "Did you put the madonna in, Faith?" he
asked just to be sure.  She had always looked after his things.
His voice suddenly sounded boyish again.

"In the big one with the books."

For an instant he caught her eyes burning at him over the table
like wells of night.  Then she blew out the candles.

He and Vincent stumbled down the steps together.  The rain was over
but clouds were still scudding across the moon.  The courtyard was
awash with writhing shadows.  He stood looking at it for the last
time.  The fountain dripped musically like a faint bell.  As he and
Vincent turned into the street the only light in all the harbour
was on the Wampanoag.  It moved very quietly.  They were bringing
her up to her anchor.

Anthony remembered the Darsena that day that he and Father Xavier
had first come to the Casa da Bonnyfeather.  All the busy life of
the place, the bells, the voices, and the ships had departed.
Something had dragged them away as if upon an invisible tide.  The
tide was ebbing from these shores.  He, too, felt it tonight.  It
clutched him strongly.  He was going out with it.  He would not
remain here looking at the past.  It and Mr. Bonnyfeather would
remain closed up together in the room with the misty walls.

Here just on this corner he had stood as a little boy first looking
at the bright, new world.  Right here Father Xavier had caught the
orange that he had shared with him.  How sweet it had tasted then.
Now he would catch the whole orange for himself, the whole round
world of it, press it to his lips and drain it dry.  It was only
the rind of it that was bitter.  "Golden fruit of the Hesperides
growing in the west, I shall find the bough."  On the quay he
parted with Vincent.

Two bearded Yankee sailors rowed him out to the Wampanoag.  They
looked at him curiously, sitting in the stern sheets with a coat-
of-many-capes falling over his shoulders.  He had bought a knitted
cap for the voyage and under this his hair, now just beginning to
turn brown, struggled out about his cheeks.  His eyes looked widely
into the darkness and his lips were parted with happy expectation.
He had seemed very tall and straight as he stood for a moment on
the thwart.  There was something pleasant and strong about him.
Something of the sweetness that had been Maria and the passionate
strength of Denis Moore, a wide, clear, Scotch forehead and a
provoking Irish smile.  The man at the stroke oar winked at him as
they shoved off.

"Be you the young gentleman we're takin' to Havaner?" he asked.

"Yes, do you want to go there?"

The man laughed and spat over the side.

"Not that we're ever axed.  But westward bound IS homeward bound,
and that suits ME."  He brought the boat around with a long sweep
under the stern.

"Ho, it does, does it?" said Captain Jorham looking over the
taffrail and lowering a lantern so that it cast a smudge of light
on the black water.  "Wall then, lay forward with ye, and bring the
anchor to the peak.  Stand by to cast loose on the jibs.  Did ye
slush them blocks like I told ye?  Belay your jaw tackle now, and
no stampin' and caterwaulin' round the capstan.  Pipe down and a
quiet getaway.  Pass the word for that again.  Mind YE, Collins."

"Aye, aye," muttered the sailor, and went forward.

"Ye'd best go below now for a while," said the captain to Anthony.
"Yer dunnage hez been stowed in the cabin and Jane's made the
starboard bunk up for ye.  Ye'll be snug enough.  Don't mind her.
She do snore."

Anthony went below.  A lantern was burning and cast a dim radiance
over the place.  His chests were already neatly lashed to the
stanchions.  He started to hang up some things.  Just then over the
chest marked "Jane" one panel of the closed bunk opened and the
head of Mrs. Jorham in a night-cap looked out.  She pointed her
lips.

"That's right," she said, "that's yours.  Elisha sleeps over there
behind tother shutters.  This is mine.  But don't mind me.  I'm
used to it.  I'm glad to have you with us."  She beamed on him,
pointed her lips, and closed the panel.

He sat down and laughed silently.  She reminded him of a picture of
a toucan he had once seen, "extraordinary female bird walled in."
What a beak it was!  The thought of Elisha and Jane billing and
cooing through that panel sent him off again.  He lay back and
enjoyed himself thoroughly.  He felt the anchor thump gently.
Ropes dragged on deck.  Then through the side of the ship came
mysteriously the low laughter of ripples as she began to glide.  He
laid his ear to the planks rejoicing in that hushed, half-merry and
semi-sad chantey of farewell.  "Good-bye, Livorno."  Feet stamped
over his head.

Half an hour later his now sleepy reverie was disturbed by Captain
Jorham lighting a rank pipe at the lantern.

"Ye can come on deck now.  We're out o' the Darsena and passin' the
molo.  Now's the rub."  He stumped on deck with Anthony.  The brig
was slipping along very quietly in a following wind with nothing
but her jibs set.

"They don't stand out like a squaresail against the sky," said the
captain, eyeing the molo with its row of cannon and the flagstaff
still bare before sunrise.  "In ten minutes we'll be by.  The
tide's with us."

 Suddenly Philadelphia emerged from the galley beating a pan.
"Breakfus is re-ady!"

"God DANG ye!" howled the captain plunging at him and smothering
the pan.  They watched the shore breathlessly.  There was a spurt
of fire on the sea wall by the molo . . .

"ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX," counted the captain.

BANG, drifted to them the report of the sentry's musket.

"Make sail," he ordered.  "Over two thousand yards.  We'll make it,
Mr. Adverse."

The Wampanoag surged forward.  Both her masts were now blossoming
out sail after sail.  As yet there was nothing more from the fort.
Then they saw some lanterns glimmer behind the embrasures in the
morning twilight.  The captain gave the ship a sudden wide yaw to
port.

Flash, flash, flash.  Along the molo smoke and thunder.  The round
shot smacked just to starboard and astern.  Captain Elisha whistled
as he twisted the spokes of the big wheel again and brought the
Wampanoag back on her course.

"The trick is not to spill more'n half your wind," said he calmly.

"They are old Spanish pieces, captain," said Anthony.

"Aye, aye," said he, "and sleepy gunners behind 'em."

Flash, bang, smack.

"Kind o' vicious about it, be'n't they?  But the stern of a ship
ain't much to hit at nigh a mile in the glimmerin' dawn.  Tide
hasn't half ebbed yet and we'll keep our backside pinted at 'em
clear over the bar."

"Lay aloft and douse them sails down, all hands.  Philly, God dang
YE, buckets, buckets!"

"The canvas is still wet from the rain last night, sir, isn't it?"
asked Anthony.

"Yep," said the captain looking not too pleased.  Then he laughed.
"By God, ye're right, young man, ye're a cool one! . . .  Belay
that," he bellowed.  "Collins, h'ist the grand old gridiron, let
'em see what they're shootin' at."

Well out from the lee of the land, the ship gathered way rapidly as
she flashed down the roads with a bone in her teeth and the morning
light tingeing her topsails.  It was a long and lucky shot that
would catch her now!  But the French were evidently annoyed and
continued to burn powder.

Thus with the fort thundering behind her and the Stars and Stripes
snapping at her peak the Wampanoag rushed forward into the open
sea.



END OF VOLUME ONE



ANTHONY ADVERSE by HERVEY ALLEN



VOLUME TWO

THE OTHER BRONZE BOY




BOOK FOUR

In Which Several Images Travel Together




CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

THE TABLE OF THE SUN


That great continental knee that curves southward to thrust the leg
of Europe into the boot of Italy also encloses its gulf with a
twinkling garter of mountains.  These are not always clearly to be
seen, but once glimpsed are provocative beyond most vistas, even if
the traveller is an experienced one.  In winter and other doubtful
seasons the gulf hides itself in rain, or mists which sweep down
like the swirling skirts of cosmic dancers from the slopes of the
Maritime Alps.

But in early summer before a sirocco blows it is quite another
thing.  Then the sky over the gulf is turquoise, and the
Mediterranean Homeric blue.  By night the planets appear to lower
themselves and burn nearer to the earth, and the stars to march
higher as they do in tropic latitudes.  Dawn comes from Italy, and
if you are so lucky or so wise as to be on deck at that early hour,
you need have no fear of an anticlimax in your destination, for
before you lies Genoa rising unbelievable, white marble terrace
above white marble; red tiles, churches, towers, villas, orchards,
and castles ringed in by a noble amphitheatre of hills.

It was thus that Anthony Adverse first beheld it from the deck of
the Wampanoag one summer morning while the ship's cutwater slipped
contentedly through the untroubled seas.  Never since his first
bright sight of the world from the top of the tree at the convent
had he seen anything quite so beautiful.  Something of that first,
fresh exaltation now returned to him as he leaned over the rail,
gazing his eyes full.

They were tacking in slowly against a land breeze, now on a wide
reach to port and now close hauled to windward, while the crew
slowly took in sail.  The sweet, heavy scent of orange groves and
the intangible coolness of jasmine and new-mown grass rolled to him
across the water.  Only now, after nearly an hour of light, the
olive orchards were beginning to stand out greyly amid the brighter
green of the pink-topped oleanders.

The light widened and the sea grew bluer.  Just a few minutes
before it had been dark violet.  How could he ever sleep; miss a
moment of it?  Why did men have to die and leave a world like this?
Life could not be long enough on a star so beautiful.  He wondered
if Captain Jorham, who was at the wheel while the steersman helped
take in sail, saw or felt anything similar.  Philadelphia called
them below to breakfast.

Anthony had slept like a child every night since leaving Livorno.
His senses were keen, yet soothed and washed limpid by the clear
sea air.  There was a tang and a zest about everything--about the
movements of his arms, of his hands and fingers.  He could feel the
most delicate surface texture of things.  In the quiet ship he
could hear the slightest sound.  Captain Jorham looked at him and
grinned.

"Feelin' pretty keen, eh?  I used ter myself.  Glad to get away?"
Anthony had to admit that he was.  All the little objects of
furniture, houses; people that had annoyed him; the pain of
familiarity with a thousand things that he wished instinctively to
avoid but that had possessed some irksome claim upon him had
vanished.  He was no longer accountable to them.  He need be sorry
for nothing.  Just now he was too happy to regret even those he
loved--had loved!  What a magical thing was this, the mere
transporting of the body!

He within, he felt, remained the same.  He himself had not moved.
It was merely the outside world that had shifted.  The encumbrances
about him had vanished.

So he sat in the cabin that morning inhaling his coffee slowly,
feeling the surprisingly healthy warmth of it, watching the green
water slip by outside the porthole and enjoying one of the noblest
of illusions immensely.  Travel had set him free.

The blocks rattled on the deck as the ship came about again.  Mrs.
Jorham galvanized by the smell of coffee opened her panel and
thrust her head, dressed in brown curl-papers and a night-cap,
through the narrow aperture.  Captain Jorham, seating himself upon
the chest marked "Jane," began to feed his wife biscuits and bacon.
From the biscuits from time to time he gallantly knocked out the
weevils.  It was a sign that he was in the best of good humour.

"'Strordinary female bird walled in," thought Anthony.

The lips of Mrs. Jorham pointed, came out of the slot, and
surreptitiously pecked her husband on his leather cheek.  Then she
looked at Anthony and rearranged her cap.  Properly embarrassed by
such intimate domestic details and endearments before a stranger,
she smiled, pecked her husband once again, and closed the panel
with an overpowering air of virtue and dignity.  Throughout the
entire meal her manner had been that of a lady-Putnam.  That was
it.  She was not a toucan, she was a Putnam!  Anthony saw that even
on shipboard, in the intimate presence of strangers and of the
ocean itself, Mrs. Jorham contrived to remain elegant and refined.
It was a perfection which knocked out the weevils in their own
dust.  It was "Putnamism."  Captain Jorham, who participated in it
distantly by marriage, was proud of it, too.  He set down the mess-
kid in which only the wriggling weevils remained, triumphantly.

After Philadelphia cleared the board the captain took some papers
from his desk and spreading them out on the table with a knowing
air, dipped his pen, and beckoned to Anthony.  As he sat down
beside him he noticed that Captain Jorham not only reeked of
tobacco but was also redolent of rum.

"Sign here," said the captain, without previous palaver.

Anthony leaned over the paper, which he found to be a roster of the
crew.  The captain's stubby finger pointed to the vacant line
marked MATE.

"Died o' smallpox at Lisbon," vouchsafed Captain Jorham.

But Anthony still hesitated with McNab's first lesson in mind.

"It's all fair and above board," continued Captain Jorham a little
anxiously.  "Didn't yer old man tell ye about it before ye left?
He and I arranged it all before supper that night.  Ye're to be
carried as second mate.  That'll keep the Frenchies from askin' any
questions about ye at Genoway.  I'll tell ye how it is.  It's
mighty ticklish work these days bein' a neutral and tryin' to make
ports and pick up cargoes with the French lordin' it on land and
the king's navee on the water.  It all depends pretty much on what
cargo ye carry.  But if I can git a nice cargo of fryin' ile over
to Havaner it'll sell high.  That's what I'm pushin' into Genoway
fer.  There's a sight of it piled up there now.  Cost nothin'!
It's worth the chance.  It would go plum against the grain to run
empty to Havaner.  I'm layin' to pick up some fine blocks of marble
for ballast, tew.  I expect even the British ul have a hard time
calalatin' THAT as contraband.  And the French 'll let us clear
all right if we don't have English refugees aboard.  Na-ow if ye
just sign on as mate, between ye and me sort of ex-officio--no
wages, of course,--ye can pass tolerable fer Yankee born.  Better
say Virginny, though.  Your talk's a lot more like that.  Ye don't
use your nose proper to Bosting way.  I'll tell ye another thing,
tew, if the British board us at sea it may save yer bein' pressed,
ye bein' a mate.  Look here!"

He pointed out on the roll the names of six seamen with the
notation, "Pressed at Sea off Ushant, February 6, 1796, by H. M. S.
Ariadne."

"A fast frigate or she'd never have done it.  Most chasers we just
sink in the blue, but there's a few on 'em can overhaul us with a
followin' wind.  That leaves us six hands forward to git home on.
Old 'uns all.  That English snotty that boarded us did know how to
pick his men.  Even the babies now have practice in that, dang 'em!
Still it ain't such a bad berth bein' a mate on board with a lady
in the cabin."

More than convinced by this time Anthony signed.  The captain
looked pleased and relieved.  He opened up "Elisha" and taking out
a bottle poured out a double tot.

"Wall, MISTER," he said with a twinkle, "here's luck to ye, and a
fast first run."

The panel opened slightly as the lady-Putnam sniffed through the
orifice.

Anthony saw trouble come into the woman's eyes.  Her mouth trembled
a little, but she said nothing.  At last with a look of unhappy
resignation she closed herself in again.

The captain drew his hand across his mouth and went on deck.  As
the ship beat in toward the harbour he descended twice again for a
spiritual interview with "Elisha."  Before they passed the Molo
Vecchio he was in a genially prophetic humour and moved with a
superbly confident roll.  It was in this semi-rapt condition that
the skipper felt himself most able to cope with a bargaining world.
"Well iled."  But the precise amount of lubricant necessary to fill
the Wampanoag with a profitable cargo was hard to gauge.  There was
one curious thing about it, however.  Liquor had brought the
captain luck.  A cargo of parrots once proved remunerative beyond
all sober expectation.  He gave a slight hitch to his trousers.

"Goin' ashore, MISTER?" he asked with a grin.  That a young
gentleman like Anthony should be his mate tickled him immensely.
In his present mood the joke seemed colossal.  "Get yer togs on."

Anthony dived into his chest hastily to get his purse and coat.  As
he opened the chest for the first time since leaving, he found a
letter addressed to him in the engraved strokes of Mr.
Bonnyfeather.  He opened it very impatiently now and read hastily.
He reproached himself for this, but with the early morning noises
of the new city coming through the port he could not control his
impatience.

It was a prolix letter of instruction how to proceed about the
collection of the debt.  Mr. Bonnyfeather had apparently foreseen
all possible contingencies.  They were under nine heads.  Bother!
This could wait till Havana.  How coldly it was written.  The old
man addressed him as if he were nothing but an agent.  There were
several enclosures, some drafts on Spanish bankers, and two other
letters.


           Il Signore Carlo Cibo, Regla, Habana, Cuba.


That could wait, too.  How cramped the old man's signature was
getting now.  Well, his hand . . .  Then his eyes fell on a
postscript.


P. S.  I have not cast this epistle in terms of affection lest I
should have no eyes left to see with as I write it.  Wherever you
are when you read this, remember the hand of him who writ it is (as
ever in the past) extended to you in blessing (and even from the
grave).  I have put this in your chest myself.  Do you look under
your great-coat for further remembrance, my son.  Thine,

J. B.


He sat down on his bunk holding the letter which swam grey before
him.  How had it been possible for him to forget all past benefits
in a few hours?  He felt he should like to stab himself to make the
hard heart in his breast capable of feeling as it should.

Yet, perhaps gratitude was like sorrow, you could not feel it all
at once or it would overwhelm you.  He looked at the open chest.
He could see the madonna wrapped up there in something that made
her look like a mummy.  Preserved, eh?  So the past was still with
him.  But he would not disturb her now.  And he would look under
the great-coat later on.  He could not bear to receive anything
more from that hand "extended even from the . . ."  Oh, for just
one day without any past behind it and no future before!  The old
man must still be well in Livorno.

Livorno?  Where was that?  Was there such a place?  It was the
noise and smell of Genoa that were coming in through the port.

He roused himself.  In order to act it would be necessary to shake
off the past, to remember it only in its proper place.  Be
grateful, yes!  But not now, not this morning--in Genoa.  He closed
the lid of the chest with a bang right on the nose of the madonna
and all the rest.

But he had forgotten his purse.  He had to open the chest again for
THAT.  As he put back Mr. Bonnyfeather's letter which he had
unconsciously clutched in one hand all the while, the other
enclosure fell out before him.


To the Reverend Father Claude Aquaviva Xavier, S. J.
At the Palazzo Brignole, Genoa.

A. A., Deliver this in person.  'Tis the old summer school of the
Jesuits in the suburb Albaro.  Fail not in this if time permit.


So Father Xavier was in Genoa!  Here was the past with a vengeance.
How long it had been since he had thought of him!  He had sent him
his last childish letter to Naples years ago, and he had not
answered the last from the priest.  Meant to, of course.  Naples?
These priests of the suppressed Jesuits moved about now from pillar
to post.  Probably Father Xavier had had no easy time of it.  His
heart smote him.  He might have written him.  But it was just after
Faith . . . damn it all!  How much there was in that chest!  Well,
he would try to see him.  The direction was in Mr. Bonnyfeather's
hand, his last request as it were.  This time he closed the chest
deliberately and locked it, clapped on his hat and went on deck.
Captain Jorham eyed him.

"It ain't sea-vility for the mate to keep the captain waitin',
mister," he said as they stepped into the boat.

Philadelphia, grinning and sweating, rowed them through the crowded
shipping of the old semi-circular harbour.  Looking up, Anthony saw
the tricolour waving on the massive Fortress of Sperone towering
above them on Monte Peraldo.  Bugle calls floated down faintly.
Here and there along the miles of walls inland the sun glinted on
cannon or flashed on bayonets.  All the churches were built of
black and white marble.  There seemed to be any number of their
striped façades and towers.

They landed at the Porta Lanterna and it was four mortal hours
before the French officers in charge of the port were finished
examining papers and quizzing Anthony who had to translate for the
captain.

It was not easy to convince the military authorities that a neutral
ship was not a legitimate prize of war.  They rowed out and made
sure she was empty.  But they looked disappointed.  Captain Jorham
had cause to be grateful for his "mate."  Finally with his papers
reluctantly signed permitting him to purchase "ship's stores,
olive-oil, marble, and statuary," he was allowed to go.

"Stat-uary," rumbled the captain, "statoo-ary?"

Anthony laughed.  The French had been slow to understand about the
marble blocks for ballast.  Statuary was made out of marble, marble
was statuary.  Meldrun! let them buy them both, neither was
contraband.  The captain kept looking at the document.

"By God, mister, I got an idear!" he suddenly roared.

It was some minutes before Anthony's back stopped stinging between
the shoulders as they walked along.

Genoa was a welter of small, crooked streets with narrow, high
houses, hunchbacked, twisted, and set at all angles.  A perpetual
dank shadow lived here as if at the bottom of an old well.  Even
the stones seemed to be rotten.  An odour as of old cheese wrapped
in a goatskin weighed on the senses.

The streets swarmed with half-naked urchins, women with baskets of
fish or equally redolent dirty clothes on their heads.  Soldiers
slouched by on unmilitary errands, and every fifth or sixth person
was a dark, scurvy-looking priest with a sallow, grimy countenance.
Here, about the Porto Franco, where their errands lay that morning,
Anthony could scarcely believe that he was really within the walls
of the noble city set in green hills that he had seen from the
ship.

They passed under endless arcades where the plaster walls had
turned black with ages of grime.  Festering piles of rubbish and
garbage, rag piles, and unspeakable refuse piled against the walls.
Yet between the outward-facing arches along the curb the merchants
of macaroni and polenta kept their stalls, especially where the
sword-like streaks of sunlight descended upon their heads.

The quantity of oil which the captain desired seemed unheard of.
Even with his new mate to do the talking, the bargaining took them
well past noon.  The Ligurian dialects were often difficult, and
the Genoese laughed at Anthony's Tuscan.  When at last all was
completed it took another hour or two to assemble carts to haul the
jars to the quay.  Captain Jorham was too wise to take his eyes off
his purchases for a minute, or to pay until the last jar wrapped in
straw ropes was safely deposited in the official confines of the
Porto Franco.  Then he was forced to see that the custom officials
there had good cause to remember him.

But even at that the captain could rub his hands with satisfaction.
Since the French had come, trade in Genoa was at a standstill.  For
that reason he was able to purchase supplies and provisions for the
voyage at less than cost.  His eyes sparkled, and to Anthony's
alarm he showed some signs of being about to clap his newly
acquired mate on the back for the second time that day.

Under ordinary circumstances Captain Elisha would have now returned
to the ship to take his grub and save his pennies, but the liquor
he had taken that morning was already dying out in him by noon.
And he had secretly embarked on a long sipping wassail which
engaged him for about four months every three years, when he began
to hear the stealthy approach of certain footsteps overtaking him
out of the past.  It was his peculiar habit during the approach of
the shadow feet, to mix wine with rum and porter into a potion
known as "A Dog's Nose" for the reason that there are no whiskers
on it and it drips.  Rum and porter he had, but little or no wine.

Also he desired to purchase marble for ballast and to sell that
usually unprofitable item at Havana for tombstones.  It could be
replaced there by ordinary stones, said to be abundant in Cuba.  As
a cautious measure he desired holes to be drilled in those marble
blocks to secure them when once aboard.  Then he was pleased with
his "mate" for slinging the lingo so well.  He intended to use such
abilities further.

For above all there was the great "idear."

This was nothing less than to take full advantage of the permission
to purchase statuary, so accidentally conferred upon him that
morning, and to fill the vacant bunks in the fo'c'sle of the
Wampanoag with "idols," to wit: various examples of life-size
ecclesiastical statuary, saints, madonnas, and bambinos
manufactured at Genoa in vast quantities cheaply, and hence
doubtless salable at substantial profit to the less-artistic
faithful in Havana.  Indeed, the churches in Cuba, as Captain
Elisha assured himself, although his data was based on only a few
visits of irreverent curiosity, were lamentably bare of "idols."
Some Protestant qualms assailed him, but the idea he felt was truly
inspired.

Standing on a sunny corner he mopped his brow with a green duster
while all this passed rapidly and somewhat confusedly through his
troubled old mind.  He was hungry, likewise he was very thirsty.
Mrs. Jorham was safely "on board."  Well, he would get her a
present.  He would get himself plenty of wine, see the ta-own and
make his macaroni mate do the talking.

"Come on, mister, let's find victuals and drink.  Lead the way.
Captain's and owner's charges."

Anthony was willing.  He had been afraid they would go back to the
ship.  Now he might be able to get time off to see the town--and
Father Xavier.

He hailed a French officer passing across the way, an amiable
fellow, who led them gayly along a decent, little side street under
wrought-iron balconies into a trellised courtyard covered by one
huge vine.  A party of French officers sat at a big stone table in
the centre, their sabretaches, swords and sashes heaped up like
tangled trophies on the stone benches.  There was a litter of
bottles, half-devoured salads, cheeses, loaves, and the remnant of
a fine ham garnished with cloves on the wine-stained table-cloth.
Corks popped and flew about with oaths.  They raised a shout when
their comrade appeared.  Captain Elisha's eyes brightened.  He
sensed distraction.

He and Anthony sat down in a corner.  A woman with a red petticoat
flapping about her bare calves came and placed a small wooden table
before them.  On this she set a bowl of grape vinegar, a dish of
fresh young garlic, salt and a brown loaf.

"Onions," remarked Captain Jorham, "are a sovran remedy for
scurvy."

He forthwith fell to and proceeded to eat the entire bowl of
garlic, dipping each pearl-like bulb in the vinegar, sprinkling a
little salt on it, and then plumping it into his mouth where it
disappeared slowly, wagging its green tail nearly to the end.  But
just before the end, each tail was bitten off at precisely the same
distance and spat out upon the floor.  After the "onions" he
inserted a piece of bran bread off the edge of his knife and rammed
it home as if to keep the bullets in place.  He looked about him
complacently and noted that he was sitting in the centre of a demi-
lune of tender garlic tips all pointing outward.  He counted them;
one to forty-three.

"Scurvy's an awful thing if it gets to you," he said, "makes your
fangs loosen."  He spat experimentally through his own front teeth
again.  They were firm.  Still he looked a little uneasy about
something.

"Liquor, mister," he said, "somethin' hot and stirrin'!  I feel
them onions prominent in my midst.  Ugh! that's better!"  The
captain plugged with his spoon thoughtfully.  "I heard of a
schooner from Bermudy what started oncet with a cargo of cedar
casks and onions for the whalin' grounds off the South-Shetlands.
Them onions was sealed in they casks to keep.  That was where
trouble started.  Afore that ship reached Jamaiky the casks swelled
up like a cargo o' newfangled French balloons.  Onion gas!  The
ship went skiddin' along on her side.  They couldn't tack her.
They had to stave in them casks or they'd a floated clear o' the
water and made leeway clear to Afriky.  Well, sir, I'm beginnin' to
feel like that schooner now.  Whiroosh!"

One of the French officers, a man with a long, red beard smeared
with salad oil and particles of cheese, looked at him in disgust.

"I'm floatin'," said Captain Elisha, "I'm risin' like bakers'
bread.  I'm like a bloater when he's tickled, a dead cachalot in
the sun.  Nothin' but strong cordial will belay it."  He reached
for the vinegar.  Anthony stopped him alarmed.  Just then the woman
returned with a jug and a large smoking dish.  Captain Elisha
applied himself to the jug.  His throat rippled.

"Coolin'," he said, "but nigh as sour as vinegar."  He put it down.
Anthony tasted the wine.  It was Lachryma Christi.  His teeth went
on edge.  He ordered the sweetest thing available, Mountain-Malaga.
The captain gulped a glass of it.  He still rumbled but looked more
comfortable.

"That's the antidote, mister, now let's sample the grub.  I'm blown
up fer full capacity."

It was a large basin of rice and boiled chicken.  They polished
this off between them.  It was enough for Anthony.  He ordered some
muscat of which he was very fond.  The captain was captivated with
it.  After two bottles he looked around on a new world.  The
"onions" were hopelessly buried.

"Na-ow I allow I'm beginnin' to be hungry."  He looked at the empty
dish regretfully and at his mate expectantly.  Anthony called the
woman and ordered further refreshment.  Having now some gauge upon
the captain's capacity and being enthusiastic with burgundy
himself, he commanded a feast.

The captain cut himself a large quid of tobacco, which he stuffed
into a round place in his cheek, while he continued to look on
approvingly.  The woman somewhat awed departed.  They heard her
giving excited directions in the kitchen.  Meanwhile the captain
extracted what solace he could from the tobacco, evolving in the
process great quantities of saliva.  Presently he had attracted the
notice of the party of French officers who began to bet on his aim.

At some distance on the pavement before Captain Jorham a small
lizard was basking innocently in the sun.  The captain's front
teeth were bared from time to time and immediately afterward the
universe of the lizard dissolved in brown juice.  It moved each
time like a flash.  The eye could not follow it.  At a distance of
about four feet nearer the wall, and farther away from the captain,
another and browner lizard seemed to appear.  It was about twenty
feet to the wall.

The bets began to become interesting.  At each saurian remove the
stakes became higher and the odds against the captain rose.  But
the major with the red beard and salad oil, looking at the mahogany
tinge of the captain's teeth, bet a meagre fortune upon him.  The
major was an artilleryman.  Two more shifts of the devastated
lizard confirmed the major's faith touchingly.  He now staked his
watch and placed it on the table.  The trajectory he hastily
calculated was then about four and a half metres, allowing for the
curve of the parabola.  It was a long chance.  But the captain
fetched the lizard.  The unfortunate, and by now suspicious, animal
paused once more, but this time near a hole in the wall.  Whatever
happened it had only two inches to flinch, and it was now nearly
twenty feet away from the captain.  The latter ruminated slowly,
accumulating ammunition with a lacklustre look.  The stakes were by
this time reckless even from a military standpoint.  Captain Elisha
straightened himself, every eye upon him.  Suddenly the lizard was
washed into its hole.  A yellow rainbow had collapsed accurately
upon it.

The consequent enthusiasm was loud and prolonged.  The major, who
had won a month's pay, insisted that the captain should join him
and his companions in celebrating so remarkable an event.  The
artillery, he maintained, had been gloriously upheld.  Anthony
participated in the reflected glory.  The whole party gathered
about the big stone table while Anthony translated for the captain
the round of congratulatory toasts that followed.  Outwardly
unperturbed but inwardly ravished, Captain Jorham sat grey and
bleak as Plymouth Rock in a gale of laughter.  Nevertheless he was
adequate to the international occasion.

"Confusion to the British."

The table roared back at him with delight.  The major would have
embraced him but even Captain Jorham renigged at the salad oil
beard.  Instantly he was more popular with the others, captains and
lieutenants who had only moustaches.  In the offing much more food
now appeared.  The captain resumed his seat and began to feed.
Between dishes they plied him with wine.  He drank all and
everything, setting down his empty glass each time with obvious
regret.  For the first time in his life, surrounded by enthusiastic
friends, he became entirely gay.  Into the frozen swamp of his
feelings burst a warm April light.  He began to croak and to bellow


     "Yankee skipper comin' down the river
      Ho, ho, ho, ho HO."


"Incroyable, magnifique!  Allons, enfants de la patrie!"

The little courtyard rocked with song.  Taking the cue from his
mate the captain waved his glass, too.  The woman in red petticoats
stood by loyally.  Shouting something to a mysterious "Batcheetcha"
in the kitchen she produced a stage thunder there amid the pans.
Things were pounded in a pestle.  The two timbres of sizzling
denoting roasting and frying arose simultaneously.  Chickens died
noisily several times.  The major was a generous man.  Cloths
whisked and dishes clicked.  Everybody began to eat and drink all
over again as if their stomachs had expanded as the generous wine
enlarged their souls.

They ate tagliarini, they ate ravioli, they ate cocks' combs and
sheep-kidney minced with mutton chops and liver.  They imbibed
tender pieces of shredded veal fried and heaped upon a vast platter
like a miraculous draught of shrimps.  They ate chickens and
spaghetti and mushrooms and ducks.  When all the others were
satiated Captain Jorham continued.  He polished off a heap of
sausages fried with garlic, topped that with a dish of green figs,
and washed it all into place like a glacial drift that finds the
worst is over and warmer times have come again--with waves of
Madeira.

A happy silence compounded of satiety and pure human affability
settled down upon the party.  They looked at one another with
complete approval and admiration.  A Gascoigne major whose
forefathers had been petty, brawling, and carousing nobles gazed
into the eyes of Captain Elisha whose grandfather was an English
regicide, and belched little nothings into his ear.

"Surely," thought Anthony, looking at a rat-like quartermaster
opposite him, "no more gallant band of heroes has ever assembled to
do honours to strong souls from the sea like Captain Jorham and his
mate."

It mattered not that nothing which Captain Jorham said could be
understood intellectually.  What was the intellect?  Indeed, where
was it?  The very sounds the old sailor made were enormously
popular.  He who had overwhelmed the lizard!  Mark you, at six
metres!  When he told a joke and laughed, the courtyard howled.
Two brown, dirty little boys sat in a crook of the great vine
looking down from the pergola above.  They chattered like little
monkeys with their arms about each other watching a feast of lions.
Yet even they, Anthony felt, and all the rest he thought felt with
him, were part of this pleasant perfect society.  To be approved,
included, and considered.  Yes, everything was perfect.  Everybody
was delightful.  He was.  They all were.

He had never drunk quite so much or enjoyed it so greatly before.
Wine ran in his blood.  He was absolved from all responsibility.
The world, though slightly hazy, sparkled like a thicket in the
sunshine.  The pattern of vine leaves and the shadows on the floor
under the trellis were revealed to him as beautiful beyond hope of
imitation.

For the first few bottles he had still felt himself as a spectator,
at times even a disapproving one.  Then, as he had returned again
and again to the scarlet glass, he seemed to emerge completely into
another atmosphere.  Delight, warmth, a delicious lightness and a
complete identification with a perfect world ensued.  He was
convinced that this was the way things really were.  A sober vision
simply did not reveal them or put one in touch.  Everything now
became very clear, a little enlarged.  The edges of things were
framed in amber and the vistas beyond became supernal; bathed in
auriferous light.  Never had he felt so at home with his fellows as
with these men in this courtyard.  All of these people, all of
them, men that he had never seen before today, were friends.  The
capacity for trouble had been removed from the universe.  He was
one in a brotherhood of a paradisiacal company.

Wine, the sun and vines had done this.  The sun?  He looked up at
the sun through the vine leaves.  This delicious wash of grape
shade and shifting light under the trellis was like being at the
bottom of a lake, a lake of air.  So he was!  He remembered that
now.  And it was in this kind of light under the plane tree that he
had first come to life.  No one could remember original darkness.
He remembered the full, simple, unquestioning joy of light now.
The clear light and the warmth and joy that had become part of him,
that was still in him.  Nothing could ever destroy that.  It was
what he was.  Like the face in the miniature, that face!  He crowed
like a child again, moving his hands and feet slowly, feeling them.
He thought; he dreamed.

It was the sun that brought all of this food and wine and joy out
of the earth.  That gave light, that made the eyes live.  In that
light moved shadows, men and things that ordinarily seemed to be to
the light what shadows were, projections of something else.  You
could never quite understand what was throwing these shadows when
you were sober.  You forgot the origin of them and so you did not
see things, and men themselves.  But now, now he felt near to these
fellow beings and things at last.  He could see them as they
actually were.  You could draw close and know them.  The darkness
between them was gone.  In the sunlight all were of one substance.
All were part of this glory of heat and light beating down into the
little courtyard.  The very food and wine they had eaten came from
it.  They ate it and it became part of them.  All were of one
substance, men and things.  All of it came out of the light.

Everybody was always eating and drinking everywhere.  He longed to
tell them about it but he could not.  It was the sun that laid this
daily table around which humanity gathered.  Or something that made
the sun. . . .  He rose to his feet overpowered by so sublime a
thought, striving for words.  Only thick, lowing sounds came from
his lips.  He could not tell them.  They shouted back at him but he
did not understand.  He felt sad.  He wandered off somewhere.  The
world seemed to open out before him.  The light became brighter.
It flashed; streamed.

A vast table whose gleaming cloth stretched out like a white road
to the horizon lay spread out before him thronged by all the
nations of men.  He could see them coming and going.  Beyond the
horizon there was nothing, nothing but clouds rising out of an
abyss.  He too could draw near to the table and partake with
everybody.  He dragged his feet a few steps farther and seemed to
be standing on the table himself.  He sat down on it.  The table-
cloth shone like the sun on water, dazzled.

He did not want to eat after all.  He felt dizzy.  He put his hand
to his head and leaned against something.  An hour passed, another.
After a while the horizon cleared enough to see again.  The monster
table of the sun had vanished.  He was sitting on the curb before
the door of the restaurant looking up the Strada Balbi, long,
white, blinding and silent in the late, hot afternoon.

Oh, yes, he knew now where he was.  It was Genoa!  He had been
thinking about something.  About a sacrament?  Something like that.

An ancient love feast?  Oh, well, nonsense!  How long had he been
sitting here?  Where was the captain?  They had something to do.
What day was it now?  But what did he care about time!  He turned
and walked back into the courtyard steadying himself.  He had a
great drink of water.  It tasted flat.  The woman was laughing at
him.  Everything was clearer now.  He must have slept a long time.
Only a sense of tremendous well-being and a little irresponsibility
remained.  After a while the floor grew steady.  Bon!

Captain Jorham lay sleeping, leaning back in a chair propped
against the wall.  A fly was crawling over his bald head slowly.

Those princes, those best of all good fellows, where were they?
Vanished.  Yet there was something tangible about them.  The major
had paid the bill.  "'For the honour of the French Army,' signore,
he said," thus the woman pocketing Anthony's coin.  He felt
relieved.  All that for a tip!  Now he knew he was sober.

Inside the skull over which the fly was crawling the captain was
not really asleep.  His brain had merely slipped the cogs of time
backward some twenty years and transported him hence.  He was
sitting on a bench before his door in Scituate, Massachusetts.
Just across the bay over there was Abner Lincoln's house and mill
by the stream.  The mill wheel was turning.  The swallows dipped
and left rings in the shallows.  It was sunset.  Overhead Jane was
putting their child to bed.  He could hear her singing and the feet
of the child padding about on the floor.  Now his wife was humming
and rocking the baby monotonously.  A note of foreboding crept into
her voice.  Suddenly the mill across the stream started to grind.
It seemed to be uttering the letter "R" for minutes at a time.  It
was grinding up something.  His child!  Run, do something about it!
If only he could move his feet.  "Rrrrrrr."  He reached up and
brushed the fly out of his ear.

Better!  The mill had stopped.  Dreaming?  Why wake up?  How happy
he and Jane had been until . . . let him hear the child's feet
again.  Dead!  Oh, yes, he had forgotten!  He was afraid he MIGHT
hear them again, at night.  No, no, not dead!  Yes, DEAD!  Good
lord!  "Do not cry, Jane.  We will go to the cemetery tomorrow."
But it is already tomorrow.  "Come, you can take your knitting."
He started for the cemetery, and woke with his feet slipping.
After a few minutes he remembered.  The child was dead years ago.
Poor little baba!  But he must forget that, not hear the feet, on
the deck, anywhere. . . .  Shove it down, put the lid on it, live
only now.  "Remember, Elisha, it is pleasant here now, better now,
better NOW," insisted one part of him to the other.  "You can
always take a drink and make it NOW.  Take a drink, take a
drink!"  Captain Jorham arose from his chair roaring for liquor.

"This is the way I put soft shoes on my baby's feet, mister," he
said as he downed a glass.  "Can't hear 'em then."  Anthony was
sure the captain was still very drunk.  Yet he looked sober.

They stayed the rest of the afternoon at the Café of St. Lawrence
the Martyr.  They had another little nap while it rained.  Felt
better, all well.  The time seemed to have come to sally forth.
The captain, Anthony was relieved to find, was now in a gracious
Madeiran mood.

                            ----------

At six o'clock of a particularly, fine June evening the City of
Genoa was already beginning to bestir itself smoothly for the
moonlight night that was to follow.  After the shower it was very
clear, cool.  Long, deepening shadows lay across the streets.  Yet
the sky was suffused with the red light of the approaching sunset.
The air was blue and sparkling, just exhilarating and soothing
enough to be grateful as an aftermath to the wine which still
warmed them.  Responsibility had nobly died.

Scarcely caring where they were going, they threaded their way
through a maze of streets so narrow that no vehicles could pass.
It was far too late to think of going after the marble blocks.  In
the mood in which he found himself Captain Jorham was willing to go
anywhere and readily fell in with Anthony's suggestion that they
should visit Father Xavier in the suburbs.  Afterwards they could
have supper, more wine, return late, or make a night of it.  Yes,
the marble and statuary could go till tomorrow.  Everything could
wait until tomorrow.  Just at present they were like two fish
swimming indolently and without particular direction, suspended,
and suspiring in a golden, liquid atmosphere.

Bell-jingling strings of mules going home, sedan chairs for hire,
painted private chairs for the nobility preceded through the dark
tunnels of streets by carriers with linen lanterns on poles, passed
and crossed and recrossed each other in all directions as if a
festa were going on.  Tall, narrow houses frescoed in glowing
colours with pictures of saints, gods, and angels rose all about
them, flinging their balconies half-way across the street.  Beneath
streamed a medley of motley costumes whose weird, cloaked fashions
and screaming colours blent with the voluble soft voices and
grotesque street cries into the total spectacle of the life that
thronged and flowed, gathered and dispersed, gestured and hurried
onward.

It was with some difficulty that Anthony prevented the captain from
climbing into a gorgeous but lousy sedan whose bearers kept turning
up at every corner and offering themselves.  God knows where they
would have got to in that.  He linked his arm through the
captain's.  He occasionally wobbled a little yet.  Keeping a sharp
eye on their pockets, they passed on.  Suddenly they left behind
them the zone of premature evening in the narrow streets and
emerged by pure chance on the Strada Nuova where day was dying
brilliantly.

The endless street stretched on up into the hills above, narrow,
clean, lined with rows of marble fronts where a few lights were
already beginning to twinkle on the balconies.  The long rays of
light struck along it like a cañon.  Only illustrious people could
live on a street like that.  Beggars were out of place there even
in Genoa.

They shook off a man with sore eyes who had followed them holding
his inflamed lids apart.  Calling a gay little carriage drawn by
two mules with pompons and bells they left the beggar toiling and
cursing after.  The fat driver on the tasselled box was in no more
hurry than his team.  They trotted on indolently inland toward
Albaro, rising every moment a little higher and gradually leaving
the crowded port behind.  It was now that to his great joy Anthony
rediscovered the noble city which he had seen from the ship like a
happy morning dream.  All day he had lost it amid the narrow
streets of the stinking water front.

Although the approach to the suburb of Albaro itself is through
ribbon-like lanes giving entrance to long, silent villas painted
with vast frescoes which the sea air has dimmed--subjects holy,
profane, and grim--yet there are many spaces where the main road
passes in an arc over crests and opens upon sweeping vistas of the
heights above and the sea below.

It was a little after sunset when the mules and driver as if by
mutual consent came to a halt at one of these spots.  The breathing
of the animals, gradually becoming more regular after the labour of
the ascent, as they slowly and more slowly inhaled the restful
quiet of the evening air, finally seemed to die away altogether and
to become one with the silence of the evening.  All in the carriage
were in unconscious sympathy with this relaxing rhythm, and the
process continued to penetrate even further into their minds as
they looked about them.

Lofty hills with fortresses on their crags from which banners of
evening mist were already flowing leapt above them.  On the lower
slopes white villas smouldered in the sunset, set deeply in an ever
darkening green intaglio of gardens and lawns.  The twelve miles of
the city's defences streamed and tumbled like the wall of China
across the heights.  In the valleys of the Bsagnio and Polcevera an
opalescent fog had already begun to gather.  Out of it flowed the
dark rivers under their bridges into the still flashing bay.

Genoa, the wide far-flung city, lay there at their feet, encircling
the light-twinkling harbour with the beautiful curve of its white
arms, gathering the ships to its breast from the ruined Chapel of
S. Giovanni Battista on the rocky seashore to the Porta Lanterna.
Beyond all this, limitless and smooth with distance, stretched the
violet tables of the open sea.  Westward it glowed with submarine
fires that reflected themselves upon the sky, and as they cooled
and went out, blotched the long horizon with glazed patches of
floating scarlet veiled by narrow clouds touched by the lingering
pencils of the sun.  Slowly even these melted showing stars behind.
It seemed now as if everything earthly were dissolving into the
sky.  It was like the hood over the Virgin's head, thought Anthony.
Even the hills slowly expanded and blended into the same engulfing
shadow that was swallowing the sea.

At the centre of all this dying world sat Anthony.  Only the mules,
the dim outline of the driver on the box above, and the captain
beside him still remained outside of his mind as another reality.
The wheels had for a while been holding him up, he felt, but soon
he knew himself just to be floating in the body of the carriage on
a sea of twilight.  Then no carriage.  He and the outside world
merged.  Or he held it all within him as a slowly darkening image.
The place where his eyes ended and the world began had again been
swept away.  It was a timeless, spaceless levitation . . .

Only a moment ago his being extended thus had felt limitless.  Now
as darkness grew he was slowly withdrawing himself again into a
point bounded by stars as they came out one by one and grew
clearer.  Soon he would be back within his head again.  Something
already had begun to remain outside.

The mules stirred.  The carriage moved forward a few inches on
solid ground.  He looked down and saw his own hand on his knee and
felt it.  He looked around at the face of the captain.  He also had
lost himself Anthony could see.

His face had grown wide and peaceful, glimmering.  The lines of
stress and hard care and sorrow were relaxed on his forehead and
cheeks.  His lips framed themselves wonderfully about the smile of
a younger man.  Much had been forgotten and caressed away as though
Elisha Jorham had once participated in vivid happiness and the
vision remained, one which he only needed to be reminded of to
resume.

"This is Elisha himself," thought Anthony.  "I hope that he can see
me as I am, too."  He moved slightly.  They looked at each other
long and silently in the low twilight.  They were both at home
with, and comforted by the unspoiled glory of the world.  That was
an important discovery for friendship.  Then the captain suddenly
resumed the mask which experience had provided him.  His face
hardened.

"Well," said he, "what little thing happens next, mister?  I'm
trustin' my events to you now, see?"

"Nothing that matters much, sir, I suppose," replied Anthony
shaking the stars out of his head.

"Wall, na-ow ye never can be sartain I calalate.  Let's make sail
anyway.  We've got to be goin' somewhere."

The captain was getting sleepy.  He began to nod shortly
afterwards.  A quarter of a mile farther brought them to the door
of a small inn.

"I'll turn in here while you drive on and see yer friend," said
Captain Elisha.  "It's bed and not victuals I want now.  But be
sure to call fer me in the mornin' even if you make a night of it.
That's orders, mister.  Don't leave me stranded, mate," he added
anxiously, "I can't swing the lingo, you know."

Anthony reassured him.  He would call him for an early breakfast.

"Good!  It's marble and statoo-ary tomorrow, and that may take
longer than buyin' ile.  They're never in any hurry around
cemeteries."  The captain yawned.  "But you can't live that way; do
business."

Anthony left him comfortable enough in a bedroom under the eaves
where the moonlight was already beginning to filter through the
tiles.

"Looks like one of Jane's crazy-quilts," murmured the captain
fingering the covers dreamfully.  "Say, mister . . ."

But Anthony had already driven on.




CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE VILLA BRIGNOLE


Half a mile across the valley from the inn Anthony was driving
along the endless garden wall of the Palazzo Brignole.  It had once
been a summer school of the Jesuits but was long since deserted, as
most of that suppressed order had fled to Russia or Poland.  The
hoofs of the mules echoed against the cracked and peeling stucco of
the outbuildings in the empty moonlight.  The driver turned in
reluctantly enough through a rusty iron gate, and unhitching under
a shed, began to make himself and his team as comfortable as the
fleas would permit.  Supper seemed remote.  He was heard to wish
fervently that il signore would not be long.

"An hour or two at most," replied Anthony, who then began to pick
his way gingerly across a weedy terrace, fingering the letter to
Father Xavier.  The address upon it now seemed improbable, for in
the moonlight he stumbled over piles of rubbish and old stable
litter while tribes of owl-eyed cats fled wailing before him.

Even in Genoa Father Xavier could scarcely have found another
dwelling which expressed so well the departed grandeur and the
present desolation of his order.  The vast uncompromising façade of
the Palazzo Brignole stretched itself before Anthony on the crest
of a series of terraces.  Its flat face looked blindly at the moon
as if it too were oblivious to change.  Its lower apertures were
stopped with rubbish like gagged mouths.  From its upper windows
the cracked and wrinkled shutters, like so many grey cataracts over
innumerable eyes, told of nothing but seething darkness in the
cells behind them.  Two ruined arcades, extending from the house at
right angles, stumbled with collapsing arches down the giant steps
of the terraces and enclosed within their shattered arms the long
approach that had once been a landscaped garden but was now a
melancholy wilderness.

It seemed to Anthony as he looked up at the great house, from which
not a light shone nor a sound emanated, that the garden was rushing
down upon him over its arcades in tangled masses of shrubbery and
flowing outlines of serpentine vines.  It was a river of dark
vegetation in sinister spate.  What made it worse was that it had
once been meant to be as artificial as a canal and neat as a priest
with a new tonsure.  It was some moments before he could force
himself to follow the cats and plunge into its moon-shadowed mazes
toward the house itself.  At this hour it was a garden fit only for
those that could see in the dark.

He tripped over roots that had forced their way through an old
pavement cracked in a thousand directions.  At other places the
walks gave oozily under his feet.  Everything was overgrown with
weeds, gaunt, or blackly flamboyant.  Frogs croaked in the stagnant
stone basins, and as he rose turn after turn up the ruined steps,
statues with mossy faces started out at him from their vine-tangled
niches or lay prone with leprous spots upon them as if dead in the
moonlight.  Once he thought he saw a lantern gleaming far before
him.  But it was only a solitary firefly signalling vainly for an
answer.  The house remained pale and lampless, and grew even huger
and more lonely as he approached it.

At last he stood upon the last pleasance, peering in through an
open portal whose doors had long lost their hinges and were now
leaning drunkenly against the pilasters of the cavern-like
vestibule.  Into this he did not care to venture.  Indeed, he would
have ended his mission here had it not been that now for the first
time his ears were saluted by a sound other than that made by frogs
and crickets.

At first he thought it was water dripping musically into some
abandoned well, but as he stood listening intently the ghost of a
tune emerged.  Someone was negligently touching the strings of a
harp.  The sound grew louder.  It seemed to emanate from the
silent, wandering barracks before him.  For a while it had come
from nowhere, and the effect of the soft music in the moonlight had
been so eery as to halt him where he stood.  But to the notes of
the harp were now added the slightly flat tones of a feminine voice
practising the bravura.  One, the highest note, was a dismal
failure and made him laugh.  It was an entirely human anticlimax.
He strode through the vestibule eagerly and almost immediately
found himself in the inevitable littered courtyard beyond.

From a porter's lodge in one corner of the quadrangle came a few
gleams of light and the sound of the harp although the heavy
shutters were closed.  There were even heavy bars on the windows.
He walked over and knocked at the door but there was no reply.  The
music had stopped instantly.  He heard a few stealthy footfalls
behind the shutters and the light went out.  At first he was
inclined to be angry at this reception, but then he could not help
but grin.  He knocked again.  Silence.

After a long interval a queer voice said softly, "I am not at home.
I went away years ago.  Let me alone."

"Signora, or ma donna," he said, "I am not a brigand, I do not wish
to disturb you.  I am looking for a priest, Father Xavier.  Do you
know him?"  He waited anxiously but still there was no reply.  Some
time passed.  Then he knocked again, this time impatiently.

"You must call for him in the court.  Call loudly," said the tired
voice within.  "He is getting a little deaf I think.  He no longer
cares for my music."  That was all.  After a while the light
reappeared and the harp resumed.

He turned away again.  The four walls of the high villa frowned
down upon him with tightly-barred windows.  The moon looked over
one corner of the roof a little tilted.  Best do as he had been
told!

"Father Xavier, oh, Father Xavier!"

"Ier, ier, ier," mocked the echoes, dying away into a solemn
gibberish.  The harp dripped and tinkled, and the flat voice in the
lodge ran through an eery, windy bar or two again.  Somewhere in
the shadows a chorus of cats began insultingly.  He felt enormously
irritated.  It was warm and damp here, too.  He was sweating.  The
place was decidedly . . . decidedly so!

"Father Xavier!" he roared again in a sane determined tone.

"What is it, my son?" said a familiar voice so close to his
shoulder that he wheeled about, startled in spite of himself.

A few feet away stood a slight, emaciated figure with a black robe
fluttering in the night breeze that sighed through the archway.
There was a small crucifix hanging from its belt.  This, and a
shining tonsure of thin, grey locks glinted in the moon.  Only the
face was the same.  At the sight of those familiar features, which
standing out above the shadows seemed to be glowing with a quiet
light from within, Anthony was transported by the fascination of
fond memory into the past.  He seemed to be standing again in the
court of the Convent of Jesus the Child.  Each looked at the other
searchingly.

"My father, is it possible you do not know me?" said Anthony.

"Anthony, my son, my son!" cried Father Xavier.  "I would rather
see you here tonight than an archangel.  Where have you fallen
from?"

He came forward and put his hands on Anthony's shoulders and looked
up into his face.

"I used to look down at you.  You remember?"

Anthony could feel how old his hands were.  A feeling of pity swept
over him.  An irritating cadenza of the woman's voice interrupted
them.  Suddenly he felt embarrassed.

"I have a letter from Mr. Bonnyfeather for you," he said awkwardly.

Father Xavier laughed.  "A formal introduction I trust--'Anything
you may be able to do to further the fortunes of so estimable and
prepossessing a young gentleman will be esteemed as a service
rendered to your obedient servant'--eh?  So, we are on the formal
basis of manhood.  Come, my son, I shall receive you as I am sure
you deserve, letter or no letter."

He laid his hand on Anthony's arm and led him across the court to a
little door with a grille in it, a door so narrow as to be
successfully concealed behind a large pillar.  Taking a candle from
the niche where he had left it, Father Xavier extended a shielding
hand before the flame and they began to ascend a series of narrow
stairs.

The ramifications of the old house were unimaginable.  A thousand
closed doors loomed mysteriously on a hundred corridors going
nowhere.  Anthony suddenly felt an overpowering sensation that he
had been here before.  It seemed improbable that the priest could
ever find the way to his own room again.  The silence was
oppressive, but somehow as they went higher it was not so hostile
as it had been on the ground floor.  Inside, the house was merely
asleep, not dead.  People could come back here and be happy again.
It was not like the garden.  In summer the house was warm and dry,
dusty.

They had both unconsciously fallen into their old step as if
sauntering again through the corridors of the convent.  Father
Xavier walked as though he had a child beside him.  Anthony's steps
became shorter and faster.  He did not notice it but the priest
did.  The light from the candle made the enlarged, blue veins on
Father Xavier's hands stand out in knots.  A still, porcelain light
filtered through his thin, shielding fingers and fell upon his face
as if the glow upon it were from within.

As they walked on through endless corridors and up confusing
flights of well-like stairs, Father Xavier gave the impression that
with all this paraphernalia of the building about him--with the
glimpses of frayed frescoes starting up before the candle and dying
away into the darkness like the gliding fringes of a delirious
dream--the priest had nothing whatever to do.  He alone, in all the
passing phantasmagoria of vaguely glimpsed scenes of nature and the
works of man, held the light which revealed them--and let them go
again.  Only his face shining as from within remained.  Yes, Father
Xavier looked that way tonight.  Anthony wondered what such
impressions might mean.

At last they paused before a door apparently no different from a
hundred others they had passed but to which Father Xavier
unhesitatingly applied his iron key.

It swung open upon a small apartment under the leads.  The
moonlight poured in through a dormer window.  Beyond was a glimpse
of a few pale stars.  Even with only one candle and a little
moonlight Anthony felt at home in the place immediately.  Father
Xavier motioned him to a shadowy chair, and when some more candles
were lit, he saw it was one of the old, red ones with tassels that
had so intrigued him as a child at the convent.  Through what
vicissitudes had it been since then, he wondered, to come here?

It was marvellous how with the closing of the door the very memory
of the labyrinthian chaos of a house that was below and around them
had vanished.  They might have been in a comfortably furnished,
opaque bubble hung somewhere in space, utterly safe from and
independent of the outside universe.  A few embers from the faggots
which had cooked the priest's supper still glowed and made the
place, if anything, too warm.  Father Xavier threw the window wider
and they heard the notes of the harp at a great distance below
them.

The priest turned and touched his forehead significantly.

"She is composing an opera which will never be sung," he said.  "An
old cousin of the Brignoles who has been permitted to live on here
in the lodge these ten years now.  It is a little weird at times.
Let us close it out tonight.  What do you say?"

He shut the window again and going over to the fire poured some
water on the embers.  As the last hissing died away he extended his
arms along the mantelpiece, leaning back and looking at Anthony.

"Do you remember my old room in the little house?"

"I now feel as if I had never left it, father."

"Here are some of YOUR books, the ones with the pictures in
them," said Father Xavier smiling and running his hands affectionately
over the backs of the leather bindings, without turning to look at
them.  "That was where your world began, was it not?  Ah, those were
good times at the convent after all.  Better than we knew.  And now,
to think of it, we have ten years or more to talk away between us.
Why, a life-time would not be long enough for that!  Have you not
found it so, Anthony?"

"I remember some days I think it would take ten years to tell
about.  I do not think I shall live long enough to find out what
really happened in some of them, father.  And yet looking at you
now it all seems as though I had only dreamed them all.  I could
almost imagine that harp down there was our old fountain in the
court splashing away under the plane tree.  That sound of water
comes often at night.  I hear it then."

"So, does it go that way with you?  Yes, we often return to
ourselves at night, to what we were, or are.  Tell me all about
yourself, my son.  It is long since we have had a good talk.  Do!"

He took down a long pipe from the mantel.  "Do you smoke?  No?  I
do.  It is one benign, fleshly indulgence to which I have finally
succumbed."--He began to rummage around in various curious
receptacles for another pipe, carrying his guest's attention from
one thing to another, but giving him no chance to speak.--"You must
inure yourself to the weed before its true virtues can be evoked.
Try this.  Just one or two whiffs at first, if you do not really
care for it.  Real Virginia, very light and sweet.  Old.  I keep it
in this jar with a little damp sponge."  He lifted the pipe rapidly
and brought a lighter.  The stem was in Anthony's mouth and he was
drawing in the sweet smoke almost before he knew it.

"I AM a little cold after all," said Father Xavier, looking at
the fire regretfully.  "A second till I change into my wool."  His
voice now came floating in from his little bedroom just beyond.  "I
am quite luxurious here you see," he added as he secretly put on a
stole under his gown.

Anthony had taken a few whiffs of the pipe.  The first few were
pleasant but he did not care to go on.  He felt himself to be
floating just a little free in space, his feet not quite on the
floor.  It was not dizziness but the beginning of levitation.  He
was no longer connected with anything in space--with nothing except
Father Xavier's voice.  That was the only reality--and himself.

"Now tell me about yourself, as you said you would," said Father
Xavier coming back into the room and seating himself opposite with
an air of one who has come to listen to a moving story.  He wrapped
the loose gown a little closer over his chest.  "Tell me
everything.  What DID happen that day I brought you to the Casa?
You had an encounter with a goat, didn't you?  I remember something
about that."

"Ah yes, the goat!" Anthony began, and without being aware of it
launched forth into what gradually and surely grew into the minute
autobiography of the years since he had left the convent.  If there
was anything that he omitted he could not remember it.  All the
people, the house, the books, the benign and sedate Mr.
Bonnyfeather, Toussaint, Faith, and Angela crowded into the little
room under the eaves of the Villa Brignole where Father Xavier sat
with two fingers across his breast holding his woollen gown.  At
which two fingers somehow Anthony could not help but look as he
went on and on.

At first he was aware only of a certain pleasure in the sheer
narrative of his own affairs with so good and trusted a listener.
Then a kind of exaltation overtook him on the wings of which his
story began to move, but always inward toward the core of his
being.  He was scarcely conscious of the little exclamations,
encouragements, and an occasional query from Father Xavier.  Their
voices seemed to blend, and it seemed to have been suggested to
Anthony that he should ask certain questions of himself rather than
that he might answer another person's.  He even took a certain
vague pleasure in inflicting pain upon himself as he related his
struggles and doubts, or discussed the perplexing books on Mr.
Bonnyfeather's shelves, the curious philosophy of Toussaint, that
day in the room with Arnolfo.  Now, strangely enough, he could tell
everything, even the burning of that night with Faith.  It was a
relief.  Somehow it did not seem so terrible now that he had told
it.  Father Xavier said nothing disturbing.  So he could tell him
of his love for Angela too, and the vision afterward.

As he began to speak of the madonna, HIS madonna, he began to
understand that all he said, all his story of the days he had lived
and the nights he had dreamed, were bound up and made one
intelligible thing to himself by the feeling about a picture of her
that he carried within him.  It was inexplicable but it was so.

She was the one permanent thing he had known.  How could words
compass it?  It was not the little statue.  That was only his
particular familiar image of her, an inheritance from childhood.
Into what had she grown?  How could he tell it to Father Xavier?

"You see what she is lives in me, yet that is what I can speak to
when I must speak to something beyond me--or be left alone--or die
I guess.  Shall I say that in her I, and the world, and what she is
meet?  At her feet!  That is not it, but it is how words put it.
It seems to me now I came here just to tell you that.  I know it
now!  I came up from the sea, and through that evil, tangled garden
with the dead statues, and into the court tonight.  And I heard the
music of the mad woman, and then I called to you, and you were
there.  We are not alone in this deserted house, are we?  Tell me
we two are not alone, my father.  There is something beyond us and
yet in us and with us.  I believe you know.  It is not all like
walking up through those meaningless corridors tonight, my father.
Thou knowest?"

His voice ceased and the candles burned steadily upright.  There
was not a sound except the tick and tock of the pendulum over the
mantel.

Then he saw the two fingers on Father Xavier's breast move.  His
hand was moving in the air and his lips in absolution.  His gown
fell apart where the fingers had been holding it, revealing the
stole.  Neither said anything for a while.  On both of them had
fallen a great peace.  It seemed to Anthony that now he was free of
the past forever.  But the clock went on.  It was after midnight.
It was the morning of July 14, 1796.  The clock and the calendar
both said so.  But in the souls of the priest and the young man it
was no time at all.

After a while Father Xavier got up and going over to a cupboard
took out some white wine.  Anthony now remembered he had had no
supper.  They both felt stiff.  A small blaze in the grate and some
wine and bread brought them back to the warm room again and the
present.

Father Xavier then made up a pallet in one corner of the chamber
and insisted that Anthony should lie down.  He pulled up a chair
close to the fire, and wrapping his gown about him again, stuck his
slippers up before the little blaze.  Propped upon one elbow
Anthony watched the firelight glancing across the priest's strong
but sensitive profile.  There was something exquisite and smooth
about it, but a strength there that might be stern.  His eyes were
a little sunken and the grey locks of the tonsure gave him the look
of a venerable youth.

"I am sure," said Father Xavier at last, "that we are NOT alone."
The clock seemed to interrupt him again.

"You must tell me about yourself, father," said Anthony.  "Here I
have taken up the whole long evening about my own precious
affairs."

The priest smiled a little sadly.

"I have been busy upon the errands of my order.  For a while at
Naples, then in Sicily.  A starving time there.  These are very sad
days for us.  We Jesuits no longer whisper into the ears of kings.
It is very difficult to bear the scorn of the world and to
reconcile the bull of the Holy Father against us with obedience to
the order--and the service of Jesus Christ.  It is difficult in
practice, that is.  I have stayed in Italy, but I have been hunted
at times.  Indeed, I lately have been very ill, sick in body and
mind."  He leaned his head on his hand.

"I was educated in this house, before I went to Rome.  Did you know
that, Anthony?  In the old days it was the summer school for the
novices.  Please God, it may be so again!"  He seemed to be seeing
things in the coals and went on in a lower tone.

"Many years ago in the days of the Colonnas it was the Villa
Brignole.  My mother was one of that family.  Now that the Jesuits
have been driven out it has fallen into their hands again.  I have
relatives here.  They have let me stay on in these rooms quietly
until I am stronger and times are better.  Since the French have
come things are so disturbed I need hide no longer.  There is food,
an old servant, and my books.  I am writing one myself about our
holy martyrs for the faith.  It has meant more than I can tell you
to have you come here tonight.  Most of the work of my life seems
to have crumbled.  But I take courage in you as I see you now."

"Then so do I, father," said Anthony.  "You first encouraged me.
Indeed, without you . . ."  He could not go on.

They were both silent a little again.

"Perhaps, you had better give me the letter from Mr. Bonnyfeather
now," said Father Xavier smiling.

"I had forgotten all about it!  Forgive me.  I seem to have been
interested only in myself tonight.  Believe me, it is not entirely
so."

Father Xavier reassured him.  "You can in part blame me for that
tonight.  But give Mr. Bonnyfeather some of the credit for having
brought us together again," he added as he broke the seal and began
to read.

As he read further his brows wrinkled.  It was as he had thought.
All had gone well with Anthony in the matters of this world.  More
than well.  But Mr. Bonnyfeather was in doubt as to his ghostly
state of mind.  "I have not neglected it," wrote the old man, "I
have done what I could, but my ignorance is great and in your
absence I have, alas, felt myself somewhat helpless.  Sir, you will
forgive me, but I am old.  Some things have fallen through my
hands.  Perhaps I should blame myself for having turned the boy
over to the Frenchman.

"Perhaps?  Yet I would have you remember, too, that he was to be
prepared for the world, and that is not a seminary . . .  In the
matter of first communion I have been most remiss.  He is going on
the long journey I mentioned above, so to your care and wisdom I
leave the matter.  Also in the matter of the will I would have your
wisdom exercised as to whether he is to be told now the full extent
of his benefits.  Do as you think best."  So the priest read on for
several pages.  "And this enclosure to you is only an earnest in
advance of that other money matter of which I have spoken."  Father
Xavier sat pondering for some time.

"Anthony!" said he.

"Yes," replied Anthony sleepily, "sir?"

"Rouse yourself.  I have some things I must talk to you about.  How
long will you be in Genoa?"

"Not over a day or so at most.  The ship must sail . . ."

"Yes, I see," said Father Xavier.  "Then you must take the
sacrament at my hands tomorrow.  At least I am still an ordained
priest," he added with a proud melancholy half to himself.  "I know
a chapel where we can go together."

Anthony was sitting up now clasping his knees and thoroughly awake.
Somehow he felt a little reluctant.  He was not sure.  It seemed
hurried.  He recoiled somewhat.

"I have never taken the wafer, father,--you know?"

The priest nodded and tapped the letter.  "So I am told."

"I must pick up the captain too at an inn near here.  We have much
to do tomorrow--and my confession?"

"It was tonight, have you forgotten already?"  Anthony winced.  No,
he had not forgotten.  That was it.  Somehow he felt that the
confession had been drawn from him.  It was unpremeditated--and
yet?

"I would not put pressure on you, Anthony--but you are going on a
long journey," said Father Xavier looking into the fire.  His
expression was very sad.  He continued after a while.  "God knows I
would give you more preparation.  There are many things I would
talk about with you.  There is one thing I must say to you tonight
lest in my weakness I forget it.  There is God and His son as well
as the Madonna.  No, I would not disturb you in what I may call
your faith, in the comfort she has brought you.  Continue, but let
it lead you on.  I would put it this way for your peculiar case.
Do you from now on consider that which she holds in her arms."  He
paused to consider his own phrases.  "So Christ came into the
world, but so did he not go out of it."

Their concentration on each other was again intense.

"Tomorrow early then," said Anthony after a little, and felt
himself relax.  He lay back gladly again.

Father Xavier rose.  "You have made me very happy," he said.  He
put a little crucifix on the table and left a candle by it.  "There
is a piece of worldly news which I was also bidden by Mr.
Bonnyfeather to convey to you if I thought it wise to do so."  He
snuffed the candle carefully.  "Well, I DO think it wise.  You
are to be his heir."  He stayed a minute looking fixedly at
Anthony.  Then he turned and went into his bedroom.  The candle
remained burning by the crucifix.

After a while Anthony got up and put it out.  He found it
impossible to do anything more than say a Pater Noster.  He was in
a sleepy tumult within.  The night had been an exhausting one.  He
tried to feel grateful in his heart--and went to sleep.

                            ----------

They were awakened next morning by the lusty bellowing in the court
below of the man who had driven Anthony the night before.  He was
much worried about the disappearance of his fare.  Anthony stuck
his head out of the window and a hearty exchange of divergent views
as to the advantage of spending a supperless night in an abandoned
shed went on.

"But you always sleep in your carriage," remonstrated Anthony; "why
should I pay you extra for it?"

"Si, signore, but always under a dry archway and with wine in my
own belly, and hay for the mules.  Last night there was famine,
fleas, and fog.  The cushions are soaked with dew and I in agony
from rheumatism.  I shall catch the miasmic fever, I shall die.  My
wife and ten children, my aged mother, my two aunts . . ."

Anthony laughed and tossed something down to him.  "I hire you for
all day, with meals at restaurants, wine included," he said.

The man picked up the coin and kissed his hand toward the window.
"Pardon, signore, I did not understand I was retained by a
nobleman.  I remain then till you appear."  He looked ridiculous
bowing there in the court so far below.  An obsequious mouse,
Anthony laughed again.

"Will it all go as easily as that did?  The heir is feeling
generous this morning, eh!" said Father Xavier from the next room.

"Very," said Anthony, "and awfully hungry."

"I am afraid you have forgotten something, my son," smiled Father
Xavier, standing by the door with his hat under his arm.  "We could
not eat now, you know.  There is holy food for us this morning."

An inexplicable reluctance swept over Anthony.  His promise!

"I am sorry.  In the joy of the bright morning, after last night,
after finding you, I felt like a boy again.  I had forgotten."

They emerged into the court and took their way rapidly to the
garden.  Along the lower terraces a few wisps of mist were still
smoking.  The rest of the place lay flashing with dewy laurel
thickets, flower-beds a riot of colour, and living green steeples
of cypresses pointing up through the tangled vines.  The sunlight
glinted from a hundred little ponds and rain-filled basins.  Down
at the far gate tossed the scarlet pompons on the mules' bridles.

Anthony stopped and took a deep breath of the cool air just
beginning to be tinged with the heat of the coming day.  It was, he
felt, right, and a fortunate thing to be alive this morning; just
to be alive.  Then he remembered their errand again and looked a
little guiltily at Father Xavier.

"Rejoice," said the priest, "it is not sinful to be gay and happy.
We are not bound on a sorrowful errand.  Do you not suppose that I
am happy about it too?  Ah, yes!  I am afraid from Mr. Bonnyfeather,
and from those books of his you have imbibed a sombre tinge about
the matter.  The northern races, you know, do not have a talent for
religion.  It is, after all, an affair of the heart, liable either
to sour or to effervesce if it goes too much to the head.  It is
between the heart and the head that the church mediates.  But come!
You would not have me making a homily to you here with that
shattered Calypso grinning at us from the grass!"

They began to descend the sweeping steps of the approach.  Through
the gaping gateway behind them came the distant notes of the harp.
Father Xavier shook his head.  Anthony wondered if she had been
playing all night.

"Sometimes for two days and nights at a time, then she sleeps--and
so do I," said Father Xavier.

It was a little uncomfortable, thought Anthony, to have his
thoughts replied to this way out of the thin air.  There was
something in the tone of the harp that had reminded him of the
garden the night before, damp moon shadows and dripping moss.

"But very beautiful here this morning," continued Father Xavier,
"in full day or by the light of memory it can be very lovely even
in its ruin.  And I remember it when it was kept to the old
marchesa's taste.  I spent my childhood here and by a curious
chance my novitiate, too, after the fathers took it over, years
ago.  A long time ago now it seems."

They had descended somewhat into the shades of the vegetation and
dense paths.

"To that little pool over there I can remember coming with my
mother and sailing a toy boat, a divine little Argo, I assure you.
And it was in this grotto I spent a year alone as a novice.  You
see, Anthony, this is my--my convent."  He lifted a heavy branch
and they stepped through into a space of open green with an
artificial grotto in the rocks behind it.

Before this cave staggered pitifully enough even though in dull
green bronze a large figure of a water carrier.  Once from the
mouth of his receptacle had gushed a refreshing stream into the
basin before him.  But that now lay cracked and empty with a few
plants struggling in its many fissures, dependent for their
sustaining moisture solely upon the accidents of heaven.  Already
in the growing heat of the morning they were beginning to droop.
Yet the eye scarcely noticed their small and ordinary tragedy.  It
was inevitably fixed by the terrible predicament of the water
carrier himself.  Above his patient human limbs the empty, lead
pipe that had once conducted his secret supply was now uprooted and
writhing like a snake determined to trip him.

They stood for a minute looking at this.  Father Xavier picked a
small flower from the basin and put it in his pocket.  His lips
moved.  Then they went on along the terrace and down a flight,
along another terrace and down, and still another--and climbed into
the carriage at the gate.




CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

THE STREET OF THE IMAGE MAKERS


The hard road, dustless with the damp of night still on it, and
shining before them, clicked cheerfully under the wheels.  Under
the spell of the exhilarating miracle of motion an enchanted
seascape opened itself before them.  The Mediterranean sparkling
from headland to headland rolled away northward toward France.  The
still, white town at the foot of the distant hills with the sun
upon it might have been an eternal one.  For a moment the mood of
the day-before possessed Anthony again.  He could apprehend the
vision of the table.  He could not see it any longer, but he felt
that he was united again with all men in the bounty of that feast.
The feast of the sun and wine!  "It was an affair of the heart."
The words recurred to him with startling clearness.  The head had
nothing to do with it.  Why meditate?

What was this that Father Xavier was trying to tell him about the
holy communion as they drove along over these ineffable hills?
What of sorrow and pain and mercy; of the meaning of certain words?
It was true that he could not really hear them.  Meaning should be
attached to words like these.  What was it he was about to do?
Something for Father Xavier!  It would be his pupil who would do it
then; who would take the wafer.  Not Anthony, not Anthony Adverse.
He would not do it.  No, that was it, that was it exactly.  He,
Anthony, would NOT do it.  Presently he would have to tell Father
Xavier that he would not.  That was going to be hard.  He sat back
for a minute against the seat and felt the grit of the road crunch
reassuringly under the wheels.  Clip, clop, clip, clop, rang the
iron shoes on reality.

"Thus the communion of saints . . ." said Father Xavier.

"Father," said Anthony suddenly, interrupting him, "I must talk to
you now.  I must tell you that I cannot take the wafer this
morning.  It is impossible.  It would not be I.  You would merely
be giving it to me.  Don't you see, it would be neither the head
nor the heart?  Not now at least."  His eyes widened.  "Not now . . ."

Father Xavier had gone grey.  He looked as if something within him
had crumbled.  He sat very still.

"In the house," he thought, "in the house, before we left this
morning.  Now it is too late.  I had prayed for this but it is not
to be given to me.  The work of my own hands . . ."

They were climbing a hill again, with no visible ending.  The mules
began to walk dragging the weight behind them slowly upward.

"Will it always be like this, I wonder?" thought the priest--and
then bit his own tongue.

"Forgive me, forgive me, my father.  I am sorry to have given you
pain," said Anthony.  "I would not be so sudden in telling you
but . . ."

"In God's time and not mine," replied the priest.  The colour
slowly came back to his face.  "Let us say no more about it.  Now
where are you going today?  Perhaps I can help you.  At least I
know something about Genoa."  He smiled, still quite pale.

It was not until many years later that Anthony understood that he
had been present at a miracle that morning after all--a miracle of
self-control.

At the top of the hill he unexpectedly found himself driving past
the inn where he had left the captain the night before.  A hearty
"Avast there, mister," apprised him of the fact and revealed
Captain Elisha gesticulating from the door with a napkin, while
wiping egg from his moustache.

There was something about his portly figure poised on its thick
legs like a tree that has gripped the rocks and withstood tempests,
which caused Father Xavier to appraise the mariner with approval,
nor did a slightly puzzled twinkle in the captain's steady blue
eyes escape him.  He had seen a deeply concealed but unsolved
trouble effervesce in humour like that before.

Captain Elisha on his part soon ceased to regard the kindly priest
as a "foreigner."  Anthony was more relieved than anyone.  It had
been impossible for him to imagine upon what grounds these two
could meet.  It was simply to be as man to man over the breakfast
table.  Their legs were soon under it.

"I swan to Jesus, mister," said Captain Jorham pouring a little
coffee into his rum, "ye're the first mate I ever did have servin'
under me that spent his shore leave with the clergy.  Beggin' yer
pardon, father.  Not that I have any pec-OO-lar objectshune.
There's wus ways of killin' time I heard tell on.  Didn't know Mr.
Adverse was of the persuasion."  He grew more offhand as he felt
himself getting into deeper water.

"You see, Mr. Adverse was a pupil of mine a good many years ago,"
vouchsafed Father Xavier, "I used to teach him geography and
Latin."

"Wall now then," said the captain glad of so naturalistic an
explanation of his mate's intimacy with the priesthood, "I did hear
him tell ye was by way of bein' an old friend.  Sort of a reunion,
then eh?"

"Exactly," said Father Xavier.

"I met a priest in Canton oncet that had a whole school o' Chinee
orphans.  He was a good man for all they might say at home.  Heard
he was murdered afterwards.  One of them slow demises they devils
goes in for.  Begin with yer fingers and toes and work in."  He
began to cut up a piece of potato graphically.  "It's wonderful how
little holdin' ground the soul needs.  I've seen a Chinee shaped
like an egg and his eyes still bright.  Fact! . . .  Course it's
different with children.  They just up anchor and goes."  He looked
troubled.

"What was the priest's name?" asked Father Xavier.

Captain Elisha could not remember but Father Xavier did.  It had
been one of his own order.  "I have his story in my book."

"Wall, I swan--to man!" said the captain.  He began to tell them
about his voyages to Canton.  They all felt at ease with one
another.  "Seemed like that poor fellow died jes' to make us better
acquaint," he averred finally.

"That has been one remote result," said Father Xavier half to
himself.  "Who knows?"

Anthony observed that the captain was doing well with his "coffee."
The mood of the evening before seemed likely to continue.  After a
while they got up and smoked a pipe outside.  Anthony indulged in
one, too.  He did not care much for it yet.  But after the
experience of the night before he had made up his mind to go in for
tobacco.  It might pay to investigate it as well as wine.  He felt
just a little light in the knees as they climbed into the carriage.
The captain had Anthony interpret while he paid his bill.

"And you might ask the woman," he said, "if they have a child in
the house."

"Si, signore, just learning to walk.  I trust its cries were not
disturbing.  She is very little yet."

The captain looked relieved.  "'Taint the cryin'," he said.  His
face seemed to forbid curiosity about his inquiry.

Soon they drove on, merrily enough, it seemed to Anthony.  He
glanced at Father Xavier curiously.  All seemed well there, too.
But it had been profane food that morning after all.

"Is your hunger fully satisfied, my son?" said Father Xavier
quietly in Anthony's ear.  His face did not change.  Anthony did
not answer.

Not one to neglect any aspect of opportunity, Captain Jorham had
been quick to see in the accidental presence of the priest that
morning an expert aide and adviser in the purchase of church
statuary.  As they drove down the hills back to Genoa he began
without further ado, or any sense of embarrassment, to unfold his
scheme for improving the condition of the church in Cuba.

Somewhat to Anthony's surprise Father Xavier consented to serve in
an advisory capacity.  Indeed, as the priest listened to the
captain's rather remarkable plan unfold an amused smile seemed to
be hiding itself in the deep shadows under his eyes.  But his mouth
remained grave.

Yes, he could undoubtedly aid the captain in making the proper
purchases.  "It is in the Street of the Image Makers that you will
find what you are looking for, I think.  As to the marble blocks--I
do not know whether I can help you, but I suggest that you ask some
of the masons and sculptors at the place that I spoke of.  Do you
want to go there now?"

Captain Jorham assured him that he did.  The less delay the better.
Father Xavier directed the driver.

Just where the Albaro Road approaches the city gate they passed a
small chapel with a fresco upon its outside walls so striking as to
cause Captain Jorham to stop and descend to examine it.  Outside
the door there was a little money box for the benefit of souls in
purgatory.  Just above it on either side of the grated portal,
behind which an altar could be seen, was an enormous picture of
souls frying in hell.  The sympathy of the artist had evidently
been with the devils who were undoubtedly enjoying themselves.  A
small baby for the extreme trespass of not having been baptized had
had both its thumbs cut off and could find nothing but a hot coal
to put in its mouth.  This seemed to hold the captain, although the
main exhibit was an old-man-soul with a grey moustache and
carefully parted hair who was being put feet first into a furnace
vomiting flames.  Various minor activities of a somewhat frank and
painful nature were being carried on in the background.  These
occasionally caused Captain Jorham to "swan to man."  He paused for
some minutes, thoughtfully.

"I hope, father," said Anthony taking the opportunity while they
were left sitting in the carriage, "that you are not shocked at the
captain's scheme for taking the saints to Cuba.  I am not
responsible, you know."

Father Xavier smiled.  "Far from it," he rejoined.  "I regard
Captain Jorham, and men like him, as respectable means to higher
ends.  Sailors, soldiers, shopkeepers, and the like are usually
commendable in themselves.  One should consider what is using them
and why.  In this case I have my own idea that the end may be a
worthy one.  But let us say no more, he is returning."  They heard
a small coin fall in the box.  The captain climbed in tilting the
carriage slightly.  For some distance he seemed inclined to get the
priest's views on infant baptism.  From these he could derive small
comfort.

"Er--na-ow that picture," he went on, "is that your idee of the
hereafter?"

Father Xavier was non-committal though not reassuring.

"I'll tell ye some o' the parsons on the Cape could get p'inters
from it," he resumed.  "It would fill a church down Truro way every
Sunday.  It's not wasted here I guess.  Nope!  Do you know I
calalate we're all like to be surprised by the way etarnity really
is.  'Nearest I ever come to it was oncet off the Andamans when a
bolt of fire fell into the sea right plumb off'n the starboard
quarter.  Left me blind for a week, it did."  He paused dreamfully
as if remembering something, closing his eyes.

"What did you see on the other side of the lightning, Captain
Jorham?" asked Father Xavier very quietly.

The captain opened his eyes and looked at him.  "I'm not giving
away etarnal information for nothin' ara-ound here," said the
captain.  The thought of the coin he had dropped in the box for the
baby remained with him.  With it he had secretly bought a little
comfort and was now indignant at himself for having done so.

They were now well within the town again driving through crowded
streets.  A seemingly endless number of twists and turns finally
landed them in front of an apothecary shop that was built into the
side of a hill.  They told the driver to wait and entered.

As they did so a number of shabby men who were waiting near the
door hurried forward to meet them.  "We want medicines only," said
Father Xavier.  Whereupon these physicians, for such they were,
sank back disconsolately into their chairs.

They left the light of the street behind them and continued to walk
along a bottle-lined passageway that gradually grew darker.

It was some seconds before Anthony's eyes became used to the
deepening shadows or comprehended the meaning of a bright patch of
sunlight some distance ahead.  The air became dank and cool.  They
ascended a few rock steps, where some white mushrooms flourished,
and then suddenly came out of the long tunnel into a drench of
sunshine just beyond.

"This," said Father Xavier, "is the Street of the Image Makers.
Without me, my son, I do not think you could have come even so
far."

"Swan to man, if we ain't come clean through the hill into a lot of
old stone quarries," exclaimed the captain shoving his hat back.
"Thar's the sky."

The captain was correct.  The Street of the Image Makers descended
straight before them into a huge, rocky pocket in the hill which
had once been an immense stone quarry.  From the surrounding white
cliffs tall, forbidding houses turned their bleak backs upon it,
and from dizzy ledges goats looked down indulgently upon the place.
In fact, the only entrance, that through which they had just come,
had been mined in ancient times.  Hence, where the tunnel ended the
street began.  It was merely a gash in the living stone, a
gradually widening continuation of the tunnel now open to the sky
like the bed of a dry canal.

In the walls of this marble prism shops and dwellings had been
hollowed out from time to time, and their fronts carved in the
various styles which the caprices of the owners had dictated.
Before several doors an arcade rested upon Ionic pillars, one solid
piece of stone.  Another shop affected a classic façade with a
temple-like entablature resembling a rock tomb.  Some had severely
plain fronts pierced by doors and windows only, but even around
these openings skilful chisels had traced wreaths of flowers and
vines.  Farther on the street widened away and descended into the
heart of the abandoned quarry, where at the end of its gleaming
vista sparkled a dark blue pond.

Completely removed from the noise and sweaty confusion of the city,
the first impression of this little community was that of a
sepulchral place set apart from the living interests of mankind.
It seemed to brood upon its peculiar affairs exclusively, as if the
inner moods of its troglodytical inhabitants were reflected by the
single eye of the pool in the marble at the end of their curious
avenue.

"This is where most of the holy images, shrines, and ecclesiastical
carvings in this part of Italy are made," said Father Xavier.
"Look, that is a forge over there."  He pointed to a hole in the
rock topped by a little chimney pot from which smoke and flames
were issuing.  "There are also several small potteries scattered
about.  Sculptors work here in both stone and wood.  Those who
apply colour are a separate fraternity and live farther down the
street.  I would not be surprised if the images of the gods had
been made here when Genoa was a Roman town.  Some of these places
you can see from the weathered carvings escape the memory of man."

The priest's remarks had by now brought them before the arcaded
shops.  From these a continuous muffled thudding proceeded.
Looking in, they saw a number of workmen with wooden mallets
beating upon chamois skins.  Stepping to the first window Father
Xavier called loudly for "Messer Stefano."  An artisan in a leather
apron appeared at the door.  Tall, thin, and very dark, there was
something Egyptian about the man, as he stood peering out into the
sunlight with hawklike eyes, small gold earrings, and a short
leather apron.  "Stefano, I have brought you some customers," said
Father Xavier.  The man hastened to lay aside his tools.

"This is the potentate of the whole street," whispered the priest
to Anthony.  "A rather remarkable fellow.  You will have to do all
your bargaining through him.  Humour him.  He regards himself with
some justice as an artist and a philosopher."

The thudding in the shop had ceased.  Only from the forge down the
street a thin troll-like clinking could still be heard.  As Father
Xavier explained the nature of their errand to Messer Stefano at
some length it seemed as though not only the padrone but the place
itself was listening.

"Go on with your work in there," said Stefano after a while.  The
hammers of the gold beaters resumed.

"Since the captain here speaks nothing but English," concluded
Father Xavier, "you will have to conduct your negotiations with
Signore Adverse.  You will find him not without a natural insight
in this affair, a young gentleman of honour and sensibility, a
former pupil of mine."  The workman bowed slightly.

"And now," said Father Xavier, turning to Anthony unexpectedly and
with a smile that was almost tremulous, "you see I have brought you
as far as I can.  It is time to say good-bye.  Let it be here
then."

"To see you again, and when, my father?"

Father Xavier wrung Anthony's hands and hurried up the street.  At
the mouth of the tunnel he turned.  Anthony raised his hand in
farewell.  He saw that the priest was blessing him.  Then he
disappeared into the shadow of the tunnel behind.

"If the signori care to, I will show them about the street," said
the voice of Stefano smooth but not obsequious.  He led the way
into the shop.

"All the shops here are now under my direction," the man continued
a little proudly, "but the gold leaf is my special care.  Would you
like to see?"

He drew aside a chamois skin revealing the beautiful, yellow metal
underneath spreading out from a lump in the middle in one shining
sheet.  He showed them the process.  "Under a skilful hammer, you
see, there will be no holes."

The captain was much impressed.  "Wall, sir, I used to think my dad
could make gold spread further than any living man.  It would have
hurt his pride to see this.  He was pretty talented though.  When I
was nine years old he brought me a penny after a successful v'y'ge
to Nassau.  Sir, I had to show him that coin every Thanksgivin' for
ten years.  I've kept it so durned long I larned the only Latin off
it I ever knowed.  'Expulsis piratus, resti-too-shia commercia.'
Kick out the pirates and reopen the stores," he translated, flushed
with his own learning.  "And that penny was only copper, and here
it is."

Stefano had managed to catch the Latin.  "We are not pirates here,"
he said grievously displeased.  Anthony was forced to explain.  The
man summoned a vague laugh from somewhere and laying down his
hammer led them out again.

"You will find each little place given up to its own specialty,
signore," he explained.  "Trade in images has not been very good
for nearly a hundred years.  My grandfather remembered a better
time.  With the makers of holy images it now goes hard.  War, it is
always war!  Few churches or shrines are being built.  No one makes
vows.  It is mostly the women and antiquarians who buy now.  I have
been forced to control things here in Genoa.  I buy up even the old
figures and retouch them.  Only a few of the most popular blesséd
ones still sell.  In here we make nothing but bambinos."

He threw open a door for them at the side of the street.  Inside a
number of boys and girls were preparing plaster and pouring it into
moulds.  From a drying kiln at one end of the room a girl returned
with a tray full of white baby dolls and laid them before an old
man who sat with brushes and various paints before him.  They
watched him a while.

"Do NOT vary the smile, Pietro," said their guide.  "How often
must I tell you?  It is that one beatific expression of
Buonarrotti's which I desire you to repeat.  What do you know of
ecstasy?"

"Si, si, padrone," said the artist deprecatingly as he retouched a
few cherubic lips.  "But memory plays me tricks with these smiles.
I once had children of my own.  You should have let me stay
moulding resignation into holy hands.  I was good at that."

"Not so good as you think," said Stefano as they went out.

"It is very difficult to have to make these artists always do the
most perfect thing and keep repeating it," he continued as they
went along further.  "So many of them have their own ideas.  And
that would be well enough, signore, if this street were given over
to secular art.  But you see, in my case, in what _I_ have
undertaken to do here, the perfect examples both in life and art
have already been given.  It is restraint therefore and imitation
that are needed . . .

"Si, I have thought much and often as to the effect of these
statues upon those who will acquire them.  They are to bring to
mind the very image of the holy one whose intercession is sought or
whose example is to be followed.  In that, as in everything, a
certain technique is necessary.  Have you ever thought of that,
signore?  Without a technique, a bodily method for faith, morality,
religion itself would perish.  Without the church as one immortal
corporation, without the methodology which it inculcates and even
turns into a habit, the memory of divine things would be lost.  Or
it would be left in the minds of women to be told to babies.  It is
true most vital things ARE remembered that way from generation to
generation.  But our religion is not so simple as that.  There must
ever be images, concrete moulds into which it can be poured."  He
flung up his hands excitedly.  "But, pardon me, I do not wish to
bore you.  You see this is my life work, my enthusiasm, this small
street.  It is not altogether that I live by it.  I live IN it."
He checked himself somewhat embarrassed.

"Tell me what you think," said Anthony.  "It is seldom that people
will do so.  I have often thought about what you are speaking of.
Tell me, you would not have them worship the image itself?"

"I would not stop them," said Stefano.  "What can you do with such
minds as that but give them something outside themselves to adore?
Let them play in their divine doll house.  Let them dress their
saints and be happy.  Those who plague such people with abstract
ideas about God are foolish.  Is it not better to leave them with
an image which may lead to something beyond?

"I am not speaking of philosophers and savants, my friend.  They
are idolaters of ideas.  With them both the image and the technique
of the ways of life they would inculcate are always lacking.  Hence
their dreams must be renewed every generation in adults, by the few
who can read and understand.  God forgive me, I hope I utter no
heresy," he crossed himself, "but I have often thought it is not
such a mystery after all that God should have embodied himself in
human form.  Otherwise he would have remained to us unknown,
imageless, a vague voice in the winds, mystery in the landscape,
the theory of some teacher, or the beautiful dream of an artist in
some idol ugly or beautiful as sin.  In Christ he became a body,
the way, and the life.  I believe; I know that."  He wiped his brow
with his sleeve.

"What is the man saying?" asked Captain Jorham, a little alarmed at
being left out so long.

"He is talking about the image of God," said Anthony with secret
enjoyment.

"Holy smoke, resti-too-shia commercia, let's be gettin' on!"
snapped the captain.

"I see that your friend does not fully understand," said Stefano.

"What I was trying to tell YOU, signore," he hurried on in a
lower voice, "is that in all my images here I have, for reasons
that you can now surmise, tried to embody nothing but the most
perfect attitudes and gestures.  I have studied the works of the
old artists in the days of great faith, and have chosen for each
saint or bambino or madonna, even for Christ himself, those
features which have been found to have the most appeal.  Each one
of these images is a lasting and a silent preacher.  Come, let me
show you something wonderful now."

He took out the key for the door before which they now stood.
"These are too precious to be worked on except under supervision.
The model here is of great value.  It is part of the French spoil
from Milan.  Not now, not of this Buonaparte, but of the French
kings many generations ago."  He threw open the door.

"Only I and my assistant work here," he said.  "All of these models
are from my hands.  See, here is the original."  He pulled a cloth
off an almost life-sized figure in the centre of the room where the
light fell upon it from the door.

It was a Virgin and Child carved in some soft grained stone.  Just
the head and bust of a peasant woman wrapped in an ample medieval
garment.  The stone had been coloured and gilded and a great blue
fold of the virgin's cloak swept down over her breast.  In the
folds of the deep hollow slept the child.  It could not be seen
from the front.  It was completely concealed in the hollow.  Only
the folds of the cloak and the position of the woman's hands
conveyed the fact that something infinitely precious was concealed
there.

Stefano pointed to the hands and paid them the compliment of saying
nothing at all.  Then he turned to the models.

"You see we could not afford to reproduce this in stone," he said.
"These are clay replicas.  When they are first baked the colour is
a little garish but if properly placed in the shadow the effect of
the lines and the whole figure is admirable.  I think we have
caught what those hands are saying . . . and the wonderful sweeping
fold!"  He ran his hand over the bulge of the blue scarf with
satisfaction.

"It is well reproduced, Messer Stefano," said Anthony, "but not so
durable as the original I suppose."

"No, signore, but light, even porous, and easy to transport," said
Stefano lifting one of the images.  "See!"

"The biggest thing we've seen yet," said Captain Jorham.  "You
might start with one of these, mister."  He peered over the edge of
the fold.  "Just as I thought, she's got a baby, too!  The hul
thing's complete.  Better start in and make your dicker now.  This
is the kind of thing we want.  Nothing small and cheap.  How about
some o' they life-sized figurines?"

With some censoring of the text Anthony translated.

"If it is large figures," said Stefano, "come this way."

He led them directly across the street and up a few steps into a
kind of stone lean-to with its rear wall in the rock itself.  Here
standing in solemn tiers were twenty or thirty life-sized figures
of saints and a large thorn-crowned Christ with the conventional
anatomy of the bleeding heart exposed.  Its expression of agony was
so intense as to make a large St. Lawrence stretched out on his
gridiron over terra cotta flames comparatively genial.

"That's the stuff," said Captain Jorham.  "Some of them are a
little cracked, too.  They ought to be knocked down reasonable.
Git busy, mister.  Why not the hul lot?"

Stefano was surprised at the wholesale gusto of his customer.  A
little disgusted, too, Anthony could see.  For that reason he began
by bargaining for one of the fine clay figures of the Virgin they
had just seen across the street.  The man seemed somewhat mollified
by this.  After all the young gentleman did understand the pride of
an artist.

"As your masterpiece," said Anthony, "we will give you for the
model ten crowns less than you ask.  And that, as you know, is more
than meeting your expectations.  For that reason, and because we
shall be taking all of this old stock, you must make me, on worn
figures at least, a more reasonable rate."

After an hour and a half of chaffering, by which time the captain's
hat was shoved clear back on his head and his hands deep in his
pockets, an agreement was in sight.  Another half hour and it was
agreed that Stefano should retouch and repaint where necessary.
All of the "old holy ones" were to be made bright and new.  It
would take two days for the paint and gilding to dry.  Anthony
would call for them then and take them to the Wampanoag.  It was
also arranged that they should be transported in carriages.  "Every
respect must be shown them," explained Stefano.  The excitement in
the streets at so extensive a flitting of saints would undoubtedly
be considerable.  After some demur Captain Jorham agreed.  He had
once seen a religious riot at Lisbon.

"Tell him we'll even put 'em to bed when we get 'em aboard," he
said.  "I mean it.  It won't do to have any of these people
breakin' loose in the hold.  Besides somethin' might shatter 'em if
the cargo shifted.  Now how about them marble blocks for ballast?"

But this could not be arranged.  It would take weeks to drill the
holes.

"Never thought of that," said Captain Elisha.  "Ask him about some
plain marble slabs.  I can batten them down I calalate.  We want
weight, weight!  There ain't profit in water ballast.  The crew
drinks it."

It was possible to arrange for the slabs.  Captain Elisha looked
very pleased.  The total outlay had not been large and he had
obtained more statuary than he had thought possible.  They
adjourned to Stefano's hut and sealed the bargain over a bottle of
bad wine.  By sunset they were back on board the brig.

"And a couple of days will just give us time to load stores, water
the ship, and do a little calkin' along the water line where that
Portegee bumboat rammed her," mouthed the captain through a
mouthful of Philadelphia's grub, "and lay in a few kegs of wine,"
he added looking his wife in the eye.  "Say, Jane, don't 'e look
solemn about that.  Wait till you see who's comin' aboard to keep
you company.  Taewsday mornin'.  Whew!"  He paused for a minute
with his fork and knife held bolt upright.

"Right on that Putnam sideboard is going to be a heathen idol--with
a baby.  It's the prize o' the hul lot.  It goes to Havaner in the
cabin!"  He cut a piece of salt pork at one blow.  "As for the rest
of 'em, there's five empty bunks in the fo'c'sle.  I'd like to see
the British come aboard now with a press gang.  They'd have to
prove Jesus Christ was born in Sussex.  Still," said he rapping on
wood, "some of them post captains could do that all right.  It ud
take God A'mighty to stop 'em.  That it would."  He poured some hot
water into his rum.

"Mister, you're a macaroni mate and you can't hand, reef, nor
steer.  But you're goin' to have a hul starboard watch with haloes,
and a cargo of tombstones for ballast.  There's only one thing I
got to say to you as captain of this HOLY ship.  I don't want no
miracles occurrin' when I'm below.  Do you hear? THAT GOES!"  He
left the fork quivering in the table.

"Now you get your charts and we'll lay out the course."

The lines about Captain Jorham's mouth began to be a little more
drawn as he imbibed a large pitcher of "dog's nose."  He gradually
became silent and morose as the evening wore away and his wife
knitted and knitted.

"More baby clothes?" said the captain at ten o'clock by the
chronometer when they prepared to turn in.  She nodded and closed
the panel.  The captain drew off his heavy boots.

"Mister," said he, "YOU'LL do the navigatin'?  You kin?"  He
looked anxious.

Anthony felt sure of it.  He took out his new sextant that Mr.
Bonnyfeather had given him.  The latest London make, he noted.  By
degrees and by degrees he would soon be slipping over into new
latitudes.  He went on deck for a while and looked again at the
city.

In his room at the Palazzo Brignole, Father Xavier fumbling in his
pocket for his pipe found the flower he had picked from the empty
basin in the garden that morning.  It seemed to him as it lay in
his palm that he had also permitted that to wither.  His hand shook
slightly.  But what could one do with wild flowers?  Leave them to
the winds of God?  A sorry argument about predestination failed to
comfort his soul.  His dreams were sorrowful.

On the Wampanoag next morning they began to bend on a suit of new
sails.




CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE PILLARS OF HERCULES


Captain Jorham had miscalculated.  Nearly a week passed before the
Wampanoag could put to sea.  Much against his better judgment,
because he was so short-handed, he was forced to ship some "Spanish
riff-raff" and a few "select" British deserters hanging about the
docks at Genoa.  The latter, after they sobered up, proved willing
hands enough.  At least they could be counted on to keep a weather-
eye peeled for king's ships.  And above all else Captain Elisha was
anxious to give British cruisers a wide berth.

At last the brig was watered and her cargo stowed.  Five saints
were lashed in the fo'c'sle bunks and the grumbling men told to
swing hammocks.  Late one afternoon they hoisted the anchor merrily
enough and a few hours later sunk the peaks which gird in the Gulf
of Genoa under the northern horizon.

Under a complete suit of new sails the ship bowled along famously.
Philadelphia, happy with an ample supply of olive wood, his
favourite fuel, sang at the door of his little galley now
surrounded by chicken coops.  Forward, two pigs, a milch goat and
her kids, and a number of ducks and geese swelled a bucolic chorus
that sang of good fare to come.

Captain Jorham had reverted to a kind of man-o'-war discipline for
his now motley crew, a discipline with which as an ex-privateersman
he was familiar.  One Jeb Collins, a middle-aged down-easter with
iron-grey hair and a rasping voice, had been appointed "quartermaster"
with the authority but not the wages of a second mate.  Under the
press of sail which the brig was carrying, both of the watches were
kept pretty constantly on deck.  Captain Jorham had not seen fit to
appoint Anthony to either.  He took one himself and gave the other
to Collins.  In the strong and continually freshening breeze pouring
out of the east he carried sail till the weather shrouds sang a
higher note.

Mrs. Jorham was the only member of the crew who persistently kept
below.  She sat in her cabin and contemplated with an indignation
which only she could control the large terra cotta figure of the
Virgin Mary that now occupied the place of her copper coffee urn on
the Putnam sideboard.  A little less than life-sized, the statue
seemed to have thrust aside the urn, which was Mrs. Jorham's chief
pride, in wanton intrusion.  It occurred to Mrs. Jorham that the
Virgin kept wrapping the folds of her ample, blue cloak about her
with a calm aloofness that amounted to provocative disdain.

It was only an added exasperation to the captain's wife to find
that in the deep fold over the statue's right shoulder a baby lay
concealed.  Aside from sectarian scruples about "idols," she had
also certain personal reasons which made even the statue of a woman
with a child in her arms, especially when it was snugly ensconced
in her own cabin, peculiarly hard to bear.  Besides, as she
continued to look at it--and she could scarcely avoid doing so--in
the atmosphere of her lonely reveries the thing began to take on
the elements of a living personality.  She caught herself giving it
from time to time a caustic piece of her mind.

That her husband had inflicted this reminder upon her seemed a
piece of deliberate cruelty and reproach.  Her only consolation
was, if he had not been drinking he would not have done so.  But in
the obstinate state which the captain had now reached, and took
care to increase from day to day, remonstrance would be useless.
His only reply would be to mix himself another dog's nose.
Furthermore, with the primary cause of her husband's drinking Mrs.
Jorham was to some extent forced to sympathize.  Indeed, she
reproached herself in a Biblical manner with having been
responsible for it.

Up until now the captain had kept the deck.  But the delay at Genoa
had advanced his potable calendar considerably, and she foreboded
his early and complete retirement to the cabin in no very
complacent mood.  Meanwhile she sat there reduced to silence,
minding her knitting, and brushing away an occasional mist of
stinging tears.  Under these circumstances she felt it would have
been some company and no little protection to have had the new mate
keep to the cabin more than he did.

Anthony, however, kept the deck early and late.  He was anxious to
pick up every item of nautical lore that might come his way, and
that in as short a time as possible.  His position on the ship was,
he realized himself, somewhat ridiculous.  To the crew as well as
to the captain he was already known as the "macaroni mate."
Neither the captain nor the men paid much attention to him at
first.  He was, as Captain Jorham had said, strictly "ex-officio."
He had been inclined to accept this position more or less, but
during a dog watch at Genoa Collins, the quartermaster, had leaned
over the bulwarks with him one evening while they watched the
lights of the city coming out one by one, and unburdened his mind.

"Before we git into the trades, Mr. Adverse, you'll find yourself
in real charge," said the quartermaster.  "I know the skipper, and
he ain't d-ue to last tew long as things are going na-ow.  Ye're
mate on the roster, and ye'll find that mate ye'll have to be.
Na-ow I'll clew all _I_ can, but you might keep that in mind.
Authority's authority, and ye either are, air ye ain't."

So Anthony kept it in mind.  To be lost on the Atlantic with a ship
and crew--to be lost there!  It haunted his dreams.  He could only
pray that Captain Jorham would last.  But wishes soon became
ridiculous.  Already it was a miracle how Captain Elisha could keep
going as he did.

"He counts on gittin' us through the Straits," said Collins.  "And
then--"

"Ah, and then!" thought Anthony.  He was glad he had spent his life
more or less about ships around the docks at Livorno.  The
nomenclature and the lingo were familiar.  He began now to memorize
commands.  But above all he began to furbish up his navigation.  He
even wished he had listened to the mad Mr. Williams' theory of
lunar longitude.  The Wampanoag's chronometer was obviously a joke.
He made a few friends among the older members of the crew.  Once at
sea he went up on the yards to shake out or take in sail.  Collins
at least was for him.  That was one comfort.  And he had learned
the ship from trucks to keelson at Genoa while she was lading.
After a week he felt the men respected him even if they laughed.
He laughed with them, and kept the deck.  The first noon out he
brought up his sextant but the captain would have none of it.

"Lay off that, mister, till I give the word.  I don't need that
contraption to tell where we're at na-ow."

"The old man's awful techy about shootin' the sun," whispered
Collins.  "He'll try to go by dead reckonin' when he kin."

So the new sextant went back to the cabin.  But the men had seen
it, and some of the old hands who had sailed with Captain Jorham
before looked pleased.

The captain's method of navigation, since his faith had been
shattered some years before in his pet sextant, was, although he
did not condescend to explain it, abundantly plain.  In the
Mediterranean it consisted in coasting from one well-known landfall
to another.  In wider, ampler oceans of late years his progress had
become truly wonderful.  Each voyage had rivalled that of Columbus
in view of the possible mysteries ahead.  One grand fact had
consoled him.  Sailing east from Amurakee one was bound to reach U-
rup.  Undoubtedly the converse might also be true.  At any rate he
was about to put it to a pragmatic test.  In the meantime in a
comparatively small place like the Mediterranean he felt at home.
With two ex-whalers for lookouts he continued to crack on sail
unmercifully.

Once the bend in the coast by Genoa was out of sight he took a long
southern slant till he raised the peaks of Corsica.  A day later
the fishing boats making for Ajaccio allowed him to mark himself
down as about 42 N. and 8 E.  After that it was comparatively easy
going for a while.  The east wind, which held and continued to
freshen a little every day, suited him well.  On that tack the
Wampanoag was at her best.  He merely squared away a little to be
sure to pass to leeward of Asinara and then ran down the coast of
Sardinia as far as S. Pietro.

"Call it thirty-nine North," said Captain Elisha.  "Gib is just
thirty-six and away, and away west."

But he frowned a little as he looked at the chart.  The bulge in
the coast of Africa was somewhat confusing.  He wanted to give Port
Mahon and the Balearics a wide berth on account of British
cruisers.  To make, as he put it, "a good southing" before he
squared away before the wind for the Straits.  Part of Africa,
however, appeared to be in the way.  And Algiers was an unhealthy
neighbourhood.  Between the horns of this dilemma, Algiers and
Minorca, he lingered over the chart for an hour or two.  The
application of a third dog's nose he was glad to see had
straightened out the coast of Africa.  "Well, he would hold on
south; take a good plenty south."  And he did so.

Next day the wind showed every sign of freshening to a blow.  With
some difficulty Collins got permission to reduce sail and finally
to send down the royal and t'gallant masts.  Not only the ship but
its new mate now rode much easier.  Watching the yards roll against
the sky while the spars came down had given Anthony his first
serious qualms.  Nothing, however, could persuade the captain to
follow the example of several other ships and head west.  Collins
was obviously worried at this obstinacy.

"Git a sight today if ye kin, Mr. Adverse," he managed to say while
the men were lashing the lower topmasts to the shrouds with extra
precautions.  "This here weather looks like a little patch o' clear
before a big blow.  For God's sake take advantage of it.  I'll try
to keep the skipper below at noon.  Seems like I could smell
Afriky."

When Anthony came up with his sextant a few hours later both the
deck and the horizon were momentarily clear.  Taking advantage of a
patch of clear sky just at noon, when the scud which had been
driving for some hours luckily opened out overhead, he made his
first observation at sea.

When he worked out his position he made it to be much farther south
than the captain's longest guess would admit.  Africa must be not
far over the southern horizon.  He said so, but somewhat too
diffidently.

Ordinarily Captain Elisha would have given heed and taken the
credit to himself.  Under influences more potent than the
calculations of his merely titular mate he now argued and held on.
He was convinced at dawn by a frantic voice from the masthead and a
not too distant glimpse of a long beach dead ahead where breakers
bared their fangs and endless sand dunes smoked in the gale.  For a
few hours he was somewhat sobered.  The ship was instantly put
before the wind which swept her westward.  The trend of the coast
soon caused them to man the port braces and give the brig a safe
northern slant.  After that they all breathed easier.

"Drunken man's luck it wasn't a lee shore," muttered Collins to
Anthony.  "We'll git more wind sure before tonight."

The incident proved a fortunate one for Anthony.  In the estimation
of all hands he advanced considerably.  A certain subdued humorous
tolerance with which he had so far been treated now gave way to a
more serious acceptance and respect.  From that time on his
appearance on deck with a sextant was hailed by the older members
of the crew in particular with a secret sigh of relief.  The
vagaries of the captain's navigation even when sober were only too
well known.  It was not long before Anthony discovered the cause.

The captain's sextant, he found after a little checking, had once
been repaired and its angle altered.  Evidently it had had a fall
some time prior to the American Revolution.  Consequently the more
accurate the observation the more certain the error.  It was only a
few seconds--but at the end of a voyage!  To amuse himself he
worked out a table of compensation.

But of all this he determined for the time being to say nothing.
In the captain's present mood it would do no good.  And knowledge
was power.  Excellent seaman as Captain Jorham ordinarily was,
should the mixing of dogs' noses continue, Anthony was by no means
certain how much responsibility might not yet rest on the
inexperienced shoulders of his mate.  It would be well to keep safe
what little claim to authority he had.  With this Mrs. Jorham and
the now greatly perturbed Collins agreed.

Indeed, from the time of their brief glimpse of Africa dead ahead
Anthony worked out the course daily with the aid of the
quartermaster.  The captain was already moving in spheres without
parallels, a diviner ether and an ampler air.  The cabin itself had
begun to take on a peculiar air of unreality which Anthony could
scarcely account for.  In this both the captain and his wife seemed
to have an equal share.  He took the charts out of this realm of
speculation into the more sober and ecclesiastical fo'c'sle.

"Necessity makes strange bedfellows, indeed," Anthony thought as he
and Jeb Collins fumbled over the charts, laying out the compass
bearings for the day while surrounded by several bunks full of
Christian martyrs and saints.  The whale-oil lamp overhead swung
with the motion of the ship causing murky shadows to chase over the
face of the map like little clouds over a miniature landscape.  The
face of St. Lawrence who was lashed on his gridiron to the forward
bulkhead grew alternately dark and pale.  Beneath him the terra
cotta flames continued to flicker.  Someone, Anthony noticed, had
put a tarpaulin over Christ.  St. Catherine's wheel was hung with
oilskins and gear.

"It's a turrible time on this little ship when the skipper begins
wallerin' in grog," remarked Collins looking about a little
apprehensively.  "Luck's usually with him even then, I dew allow,
but it don't seem right to tempt it tew far by lashin' all these
heathen people in a Christian fo'c'sle.  'Sides, 'tain't shipshape.
I kivered that awful bleedin' heart myself.  Looked like murder and
mutiny on board."

He turned to the chart again with a distinct look of relief.

"Lay it a good deal north of west, Mr. Adverse.  Ye'll be wantin'
to give them Sallee rovers a wide berth and yet not nose tew near
Minorca.  Call it nor'west by north, that's about right till
tomorrow allowin' fer what you said the variation is.  She logs
about ten knots in this breeze.  Ye can see where that ul git you
tomorrow noon.  Hope ye can git the sun then.  Maybe?  But as I've
been sayin' all erlong it's comin' on to bla-ow.  We're not far
enough off the coast yet to suit me."

They went up on deck together.  Astern, between the low slate-
coloured cloud that covered them like the roof of a cave, and the
leaden floor of the sea below, was a long bright streak, green,
intensely clear, and apparently gaining on them fast.  A flock of
gulls streamed past screaming, going downwind.  Beyond the clear
streak Anthony thought he could see land.  A long range of sombre
hills wrought with a freedom that only ruthless nature could attain
were lifting sullen, tortured peaks above the horizon.  Suddenly a
hellish glow of sunset flashed redly from peak to peak.  As if
returning an answer their dark battlements lightened and winked
with sheets of internal flame.  Their pinnacles started to wither
away.  From beneath them endless lines of mad cavalry with white
tossing manes came galloping down on the ship.  The rumble of
distant artillery rang around the horizon, a volley of bullet-like
hail spattered the sails and deck.

"Land O," roared the lookout.

As if warned by instinct Captain Elisha instantly appeared on the
quarter-deck.

"Ready about, take your stations for stays," he roared through his
speaking trumpet.

"Stations!" howled Collins.  "Git 'em up, Mr. Adverse, don't lose
no time.  There's no chance to strip her now."  His whistle
shrilled.

"Put the helm da-own," bellowed the captain.

The Wampanoag shot around into the wind her canvas slatting and
thundering.  Warned by the pother overhead as much as by Collins'
now profane encouragements the men were at their stations before
the ship teetered into the eye of the wind.  As if she had received
a sudden blow from a furious fist the Wampanoag was taken aback.

"Haul taut!  Mainsail haul!" bellowed the enormous trumpet.  The
aft sails moved around together and filled with a loud report.  The
yards were braced up.  "Let go and haul," commanded the trumpet.
Anthony saw the foreyards come round and the canvas bellow out.
The jibs were sheeted home.  With a great bound under the first
full impulse of the gale the brig dashed off on the opposite tack.
The men went about coiling up ropes as if nothing had happened.

The cause of all this had been a glimpse of Cape Carthage to
leeward.  The manoeuvre was repeated again several times that
night.  The captain remained on deck for hours until he had worked
well out to the northward into the open sea.

Under the outward buffeting of the elements and the internal
refreshment with which Philadelphia constantly supplied him, the
captain seemed that night to surpass the usual limits of human
personality.  He stood behind the steersman with his legs braced
far apart in what appeared to Anthony to be seven league sea boots.
The foam and spume streamed off his oilskins that fluttered in
occasional wild glimpses of moonlight like infernal rags.  As the
night wore on his voice took on more and more of a brazen quality.
He drove his crew and his ship hour by hour clawing off the coast
of Africa, thrashing along now on a short, mad stretch to leeward,
and now beating up into the teeth of the wind.  The rigging
shrieked and the bows of the Wampanoag thundered and foamed.  In
the tireless figure on the quarter-deck at home in the storm,
Anthony thought he could glimpse a more colossal emanation of the
man who had been at one with the world when he sat in the carriage
at Genoa watching the sunset.  It was the curious quality of this
man that he seemed during the night to grow in stature, to be an
antidote for fear.  Perhaps it was the immense brazen voice from
the trumpet that all obeyed.  Perhaps?  When the dawn broke Anthony
was surprised to see again that Captain Jorham was really not so
tall.  A rather short figure if you looked closely.

About dawn the brig was put before the wind again.  From now on it
would be a straight run for the Straits.  During the night she had
been stripped of canvas and was driving with nothing but a reefed
foresail, a spanker, and a jib to keep her from yawing.  There were
two men at the wheel, for the seas were now coming on so fast from
behind as to kick her stern at times almost clear of the water.
The drag when she settled back again was terrific.  Four arms on
the spokes were none too many.  They shook out a reef in the
foresail but it was not enough--another.  She continued to plunge
more determinedly.

"It'll never do to broach to na-ow," shouted the captain in
Anthony's ear as an unusually large wave rose and combed just aft
of the taffrail only to break and go hissing by.

"Na-ow's the time to get a little more drag on her for'd.  Do you
see, mister?" he roared, pointing to some of the crew busy rigging
preventer stays to the foretopmast, "I'm going to give her a double
reefed foretops'l."

Presently there was a report as if a small cannon had been fired
and streams of ripped canvas whipped about frantically, beating the
crew off the yard.  Collins drove them back and made them cut it
loose.  It was snatched to leeward.

"The old sail," said the captain.  "Thought we'd try that first.
Na-ow watch.  Ye might have to do this sometime."

He went forward banging on the scuttle for the other watch who came
tumbling up.  The new sail was hoisted and bent on slowly with
extra lashings.  When it opened out they let it blow away clear of
the lower yard.  For a moment it stood out flat and clear like a
horizontal banner streaming forward.  At that instant the captain
roared and it was sheeted home to the lower yard with an even pull
on both tackles.

The brig leaped ahead.  The men at the wheel wrestled with the
spokes over a brief "S"-shaped course that soon flattened out into
a clear wake of bubbles left straight behind.  Aft, the waves still
rose now as before, followed, but fell astern.  Captain Jorham
returned to the quarter-deck and spat over the side.  He cupped his
hands to shout.  "Never let 'em slat back on ye.  Ye hev to sheet
home JES' so.  If ye let the blocks whip back and tangle, ye're
gorn!"

They stood together a while watching the ship tear through the
crests and race down into the hollows beyond as if in mad pursuit
of some invisible prey.  But she rose now and seemed to be lifted
ahead, the sails booming as they came up out of the valleys of
water into the full force of the wind.

Under the pressure of her increased canvas the Wampanoag was
whipped forward at startling speed.  Anthony could feel transferred
to his own body her wild desire to twist and lay-to which the men
at the wheel constantly checked.  It must be certain, he thought,
that something would go.  In reality it was only a good hearty
gale, but to his inexperience it seemed a hurricane.  When the
gusts came he waited for an ominous crack overhead, having no
adequate idea of the relative strength of yards, cordage, and
ship's timbers.  So he stood for hours, watching, but nothing
happened.  The ship had been made for this, he had to admit at
last.

The bell was struck with the spray and rain streaming off it.  The
men at the wheel and the watches were relieved regularly.  Old
Collins heaved the log.  The wind keened through the rigging, and
the turmoil of waters raced by.  As the sun sank at last in a red
mist and the horizon narrowed to the ship's dimensions he began to
feel confident again.  Soon even the ship disappeared except for a
few feet of deck and a dim tracery aloft.  He was alone in the
universe standing on something.  A few feet aft the bearded face of
a sailor smoking a pipe seemed to be floating without a body over
the feeble glow of the binnacle.  Only when the ship rolled could
you sense the man's body eclipsing a few misty stars.  A faint
glimmer from the stern windows followed and followed over the
tossing wake.  The sound of hissing and foaming was muffled by
monotony.  An endless, meaningless story told in a mad liquid
tongue, it was.  Its constant narrative was unimportant, only its
cessation or a complete change of tone could be significant.  It
was the same with the sails.  They would go on that way and go on--
till the wind changed.  He turned and went below.

As he slid the scuttle hood over his head and descended into the
cabin the piping of the gale and the song of the rigging was
suddenly cut off and made infinitely remote.  It was a relief to
escape it.  Then the curious face at the aft end of the cabin was
looking at him.  He paused half-way on the ladder listening,
missing the noise of wind and water, only to become aware gradually
of the internal life of the ship.

It was a kind of suspended motion accompanied by muffled
cracklings, strainings and squeaks, groans and the hushed swishing
of water under the keel.  The floor of the cabin tilted always to
another angle, poised, tilted again, slid, and climbed.  A long
gurgle of bilge water bubbled and stopped like a drowned flute at
every subsidence.  Clothes suspended from hooks pointed to the
middle of the floor only to find the ship's sides nuzzling them.
THEY had not moved.  And to all of this there was a kind of
inexpressible rhythm, a repetition which no one could predict or
remember.  But it went on.

Yet the main impression of the cabin bathed in its smoky yellow
light was that those who sat there were waiting for something
inevitable to happen.  As Anthony stood on the ladder and looked
about him he was instantly aware of it.  Yet he could not account
for it at all.  It was like listening behind a closed door for
someone he knew was there but who made no sign.  Mrs. Jorham was
knitting.  She did not even look up.  Philadelphia was laying the
table, noiselessly.  Captain Jorham was nodding with his mouth
open.  Yet they were waiting--not for him.  The shadows slipped
slowly from side to side.  The lamp hummed as if a moth were in it.
The Virgin wrapped her cloak about her and looked in its folds.  He
came down slowly, peeled off his heavy wet coat and sat in his
bunk.  The air was not so fresh down here.  He was tired and
perhaps a little dizzy.

The same impression that he had going to Genoa came over him.  He
was not moving at all.  The sea outside, the shadows, the events in
the cabin were all coming out of somewhere and going past him.  He,
watching this vague panorama, remained still.  Yes, the long
corridors in Father Xavier's house with all the frescoes in the
wall had gone past him.  It was all like walking in a treadmill.
The convent, the days at the Casa and the streets of Livorno,
Faith, Angela, Vincent, Genoa--tonight in the cabin was going by
like that.  It had all come out of the darkness into the light of
his eyes and returned into the darkness again.  Dreams of it
remained in memory.  There was more, more to come.  You could not
stop it.  You walked to the last rung in the treadmill--and then?
Travel!  He laughed silently as the side of the ship pressed itself
against him.

Mrs. Jorham beckoned for him to come and eat but he could not.  He
felt decidedly dizzy and tired after the long day.  He wished the
ship would stay still.  It kept moving about HIM as the centre of
everything, sickeningly.  He began to talk to Mrs. Jorham in a low
voice through which now and then over his own monotone he could
catch the loud ticks of the clumsy chronometer.  It sounded like a
treadmill.  What she replied he could not remember.  After a while
he went on deck again.  In the darkness--he was glad of the
darkness--he was very sick.

The fit passed.  For a day or two he was dizzy, then very clear
again.  The motion of the ship no longer troubled him.  He was
going with it now.  He forgot it although the wind had increased if
anything.  Captain Jorham had added a storm staysail in the teeth
of it and the brig rode steadier.

Anthony often wondered what would have happened to them if Captain
Jorham had taken to his bunk before they were clear of the Straits.
For days now it had not been possible to get a sight of the sun.
The ship had been swept steadily westward in a smother of spume
half the time with a pall of rolling, dark clouds driving over her
and billowing down so low sometimes as to seem about to touch the
masts.  Through all this pother of the elements Captain Elisha
carried his ship by dead reckoning and sea instinct.  To him the
currents, the tides, the very colour of the water were guides.
They scarcely had a glimpse of the stars.  At last there were some
signs of a break in the gale.  The men in the tops watched eagerly
for a landfall.

It came suddenly, and unexpectedly to starboard.  One day at noon
the pall overhead lightened, the sun struggled through.  Before
them the wind seemed to be tearing the clouds to rags.  Without the
least warning, as if a curtain had been raised, long lines of snow-
capped mountains were seen marching on their right.  Sixty miles
inland the wild hills of the Sierra Nevadas rose above the brown
plains of Granada with continental fragments of dark cloud-bank
breaking against them, clouds rolling up in white mist, filing
through the passes, and being driven and harried westward along the
slopes.  An interplay of swiftly moving titanic shadows turned the
long coasts of Spain fading away before them to the southeast into
a Satanic country lit inland by infernal gleams.

"That's Cape Gata," said Captain Jorham, indicating a point of land
with a few white houses and a fierce surf leaping up about a small,
stone battery.  "And it's darn lucky if there ain't a British
frigate anchored under its lee."  He gave the Wampanoag a sharp
sheer to the south.  "We're too far north this time.  Sartin we
DID miss Algiers all right, by about two hundred miles, and
there's a nasty current along here that helps the British right up
to Port Mahon.  We'll jes' hev to run for it now.  Gib is about a
day's sail away."

He turned and whistled loudly through his fingers.

"Lord send this wind holds.  Mister, do you know what gettin'
through the Straits means?  Sounds simple na-ow, doesn't it?  Wall,
sir, in 'ninety-two I was hangin' out at Luff's boarding house at
Gib with five other skippers, mostly British, for six 'tarnal weeks
while the west wind bla-ew and bla-ew.  There's alers a five to six
knot current settin' in through the Straits but a long westerly
bla-ow makes it worse.  There's eddies then that jes' swallers
fishers and small craft.  Wall, the seventh week I says to myself,
''Lisha, you're gittin' barnacles on the sole o' your trousers,'
says I.  So I ups anchor and in two days I beats out after p'intin'
back and forth between Tarifa and Tangier till I thought I'd wear
out the gudgeons.  Y' see I knowed all o' them five other skippers
was up on O'Hara's Folly with glasses lawfin' like loons.  Y' see?
Na-ow somethin' happened to the current and one arternoon I jes'
sailed up to Trafalgar.  Nor that ain't all.  I got a cargo at
Cadiz and took it round to Lisbon.  'N I filled up with wine and
shoes there for the garrison and come back on the same wind, and
there was all five o' them Britishers still settin' ra-ound the
table at Luff's with corns on their tails.  'Officer, give me one
penny for de bread, I say, officer, give me one penny for de
bread,' says I, stickin' my knot in over the geraniums.  Wall,
SIR, there was enough crockery come through that winder to
furnish an admiral's galley.  And that's true, and that's the
Straits."  He whistled again through his fingers shrilly.  Collins
laughed.

Next morning Calpe and Abyla, the two immortal pillars, rose
superbly before them towering above the surrounding mountains.  The
gale was blowing itself out.  But there was a choppy sea tossing in
the Straits.  They passed a British ship of the line wallowing
drunkenly into Gibraltar with her topmasts housed and only her
courses set.  The great rollers swept her sides, now exposing her
gleaming copper and now leaping to her third line of gun ports,
smothering her in spray from time to time.  The Wampanoag fled past
her and down the narrow gulf with a line of mountains on either
side and the strong wind behind.  The topmasts were being sent up
again.  Before the Rock lay behind them the brig was once more a
tall ship.

They burst out into the Atlantic with long curtains of rain
overtaking them as the gale finally blew itself out in a succession
of dying squalls.  A rare display of rainbows grew and withered,
arching away into the hills toward Tangier.  Land birds came and
perched on the masts.  Gulls cried peevishly behind till a fierce
lanner came and drove them away.

"Golondrina, señor," said a Spanish sailor to Anthony, scooping up
a tired bird from the deck and warming him in his hands.  "From my
country, over there."  The man had a young, ardent face and
sensitive fingers that trembled over the bird.  Anthony felt sorry
for him.  The sailor stood leaning over the bulwarks gazing at the
white villages among the mountains.  Suddenly he pointed toward a
lighthouse with a small, red-roofed town clustered about it; orange
trees, and barren hills behind.  He took off his red, tasselled cap
and his eyes shone.

"My town," he cried, "Tarifa!  Pardon, señor.  Ah, the girls of
MY town!  They have the true gracia.  Have you seen the
Andalusian women yet?  No!  Your eyes have not yet then been
completed!"  He leaned over the bird in his hand.  "See, its head
is small but it has true wisdom there, señor.  It knows enough to
fly home.  El saber nunca ocupa lugar.  Fly, golondrina, to the
little house under the tower," he whispered.  Anthony could not
hear the rest.  The man smiled and cast it into the air.  It
circled and made off for Spain.  "The last point of Europe!" the
sailor cried stretching out his arms, "my town!  You return,
swallow, and I, I, Juan Garcia, I go to Cuba and there are no
graciosas there.  Ah, adiós, hermosa, bendita sea la tierra que tu
pesas."

"It IS a beautiful place," said Anthony looking after the
departing bird, "Europe, old and noble."

"Sí, sí, señor, sí, sí!"  The young sailor's face glowed.

"Pipe down, onion," shouted Collins from the wheel, glaring with
his cold, blue eyes.

The man's face darkened.  He turned with a magnificent gesture to
Anthony.  "Señor mío, le beso a usted la mano; y sí hay algo en que
le puedo servir tiene usted--aquí!"

"Belay that," thundered the voice.  But the youth stalked forward
ignoring the quartermaster.

"Don't let 'em hornswaggle ye, Mr. Adverse," warned Collins.  "I'm
tellin' ye.  A louse like him has enough garlic on his breath to
start a kippered herring fer home let alone a bird.  For a peso
he'd stick a knife in your back."

"It's a beautiful morning, isn't it, Collins?" said Anthony
suddenly, and looking him in the eye.  "I'm proud to be the first
officer of a ship on such a day.  Did you ever hear this, Collins?


     'Loud uttering satire, day and night, on each
      Succeeding race and little pompous work
      Of man.'


That you, Collins?"

"Not egg-ZACTLY, sir, not day and night, sir.  I wouldn't say
that."  The man shifted his quid.  "Sartainly not to the FIRST
officer on a beautiful mornin'."

He twisted his lock.  They looked at each other and laughed.  "All
right, then," said Anthony, "all RIGHT!"--and went below.
Collins gave a slight whistle, but not for more wind.  They were in
the Atlantic now and the only man on board who could use a sextant
was to be respected.  A little later Captain Jorham came up with
his glasses and swept the horizon.  His legs were behaving
independently and that was a bad sign.

Another bad sign was the topsails of a great English convoy coming
down from the direction of Cadiz.  Captain Jorham had no desire to
bring down some fast sloops of war to investigate his intentions.
He soon lost the convoy by cracking on every yard of canvas the
Wampanoag could carry.

The little brig bloomed out sail after sail till she towered from
deck to royalmasts with everything that would draw.  The stu'nsail
booms were got up and rigged.  The jibs were guyed out.  Above the
royals were skysails.  A balloon sail was the skipper's especial
pet.  It fluttered now and then when she luffed a little.  The
skipper sat on the bulwarks and kept his eye on it and, "Ease her,
ease her," and "now a rap full," he would say to the man at the
wheel, "and hold her there."

"Aye, aye," muttered the hand, nervously turning his quid.

"Yankee skipper, comin' down the river," hummed the captain to
himself, unconsciously patting the ship's rail.

"Now you're walking out like a flea onto the belly of the world,
old gel.

"There's nothin' but blue water between here and Bermudy.  Mister,
it's clearin' fine," he said, turning suddenly to Anthony.  "You
can take all the sights you want to na-ow.  That there promontory
to the south is Cape Spartel, and yonder north over the convoy is
Barbate.  We're just about the middle o' the entrance to the
Straits and that's so nigh exactly thirty-six North and six East
that you can mark that off on the chart and take it as your jumpin'
off place for the v'y'ge.  Na-ow lay a course for jes' west o' the
Azores, say, thirty-two--forty.  You might sight Corva.  Keep
nor'west of it if you do.  You'll pick up the Northeast Trade
thereaba-outs this time of year, and from then on it's plain dumb-
fool sailin' to the Indies.  You jes' let the wind push you.  Run
from any sail ye see and don't borrow no trouble.  Me--I've got a
good deal of trouble on my mind.  Na-ow I'm goin' below, and don't
you call me unless you're chased or it comes on to bla-ow.  Short
of suthin', call it nothin', and LEAVE ME WITH GOD!"

He collapsed his telescope with a final snap, and hitching a little
sideways scuttled below like a crab.

"Sounds to me like Old Stormalong's resignin'," said Collins as the
captain's shoulders disappeared into the cabin followed soon after
by Philadelphia with a steaming pot of coffee.  "But it'll take
more than coffee and a dog's nose to sniff us safe past the Azores
unless we want to fetch up on one o' them palmy isles.  I remember
oncet in the Pacific, when the skipper went off on a long spell
like this.  We jes' drifted round like the ark for a month, and no
doves never came back neither.  What do you Noah about that?"
chuckled the quartermaster closing one eye solemnly.  "Wall, he
finally sobered up and brought her round the Horn.

"Mr. Adverse, if I know the signs of the skipper's weather, 'n I
ort to, arter sailin' with him since 'eighty-two," continued
Collins hemming and hawing a little at having to discuss his
captain's vagaries, "it's goin' to be right wet from here to
Havaner.  And that leaves it pretty well up to you and me."  He
took a turn or two considering.

"Na-ow," he took another turn and hitched his trousers.

"Na-ow, how would it be if you left the deck to me and I left the
navigatin' to you, 'cept fer heavin' the log and markin' up the
slate and sich like.  I'm askin' you since you're mate now O-
fficially."

"Is it orders you want?" asked Anthony admiring the wise little
bantam of a man with a black silk handkerchief knotted dapperly
about his tanned neck and a silver whistle thrust in his pocket.

The quartermaster nodded.

"Very well then, take charge of the deck," said Anthony.  "I think
I can find out where we are.  I have my own sextant, you know."

"That's ONE blessin'," said Collins.  He tugged at his forelock.
"I'm glad you realize the sitooation, Mr. Adverse.  But I wonder if
you dew?  Let's git rid of ears yonder and I'll partikilarize."

He went to the wheel, and sending the man there forward, began to
con the ship himself, running his eyes over the sails constantly
and taking advantage of every puff and slant to get the most out of
her.  Presently he had Anthony in his place, directing him with one
hand on the wheel himself.

"Ye have to develop a feel for the thing and that comes slowly.
Steady na-ow, bear da-own, sir.  Ye keep a kind o' constant balance
against the pull.  It would never do to be taken aback carryin'
everything as we are now.  It might yank all the sticks out of her.
Ye have to watch like a hawk for squalls, tew.  A small cloud on
the horizon and white water comin' down fast, that's trouble!  I'm
going to strip some of the canvas off soon as we're sure the
skipper and the Almighty are tetertate like he indicated they would
be soon.  Less hurry the more speed when ye're short-handed like we
are.  The old hooker's a fast one though!"

Feeling the ship as it were in his grasp, Anthony stood fascinated
but with every sense alive, watching her sway over the long grey
seas; hearing the wash and gurgle about the rudder behind.  To the
quiet voice of Collins which continued in his ears the sea was
providing a half-musical accompaniment.

"Na-ow as I was sayin', when I sent the man for'd--every sailor has
ears and eyes in the back of his head, ye know--as I was sayin',
our sitooation AIN'T comical.  It's like this.  The skipper's off
again.  He usually goes on till he has the SQUEEGEES.  That may
take two weeks, or yet a month.  'Tain't snakes.  It's his dead
baby what comes back.  He hears her.  Na-ow it won't do to let the
crew get wind o' that, cause they'd SEE her.  Ye see I know.
This here is my 'steenth v'y'ge with the cap'n.

"He's a kind o' curious one.  There ain't a better skipper afloat.
He made a fortune or two on some Canton runs.  Then he married him
a wife--below now--and built a fa-ine house at Scituate, lookout
and all.  Meant to settle down.  Wall, they lost their only little
gal.  About three years old, she was.  And after that he started to
go to pot on land.  They dew say his house was baby-haunted.
Nobody won't live there since.  But I dunno.  Anyway him and his
wife up and cleared out.  He left her to home for one v'y'ge and it
was then I heard tell her baby came back.  Anyway the Missus
wouldn't stay on, and he'd drunk up his money or lost it on some
venture or other.  The Wampanoag is all he's got, for the house
can't be sold or rented.  There's lots of skippers laughs at him
for havin' his Missus aboard, but believe me, he needs her, and
I'll say she DEW look after him wonderful.  Besides, she never
said it, but I'm sure she's scairt to stay behind.

"Wall, you see how it is.  I said fer ye to look after the sun and
the charts, but you'll have the cabin on yer hands too, Mr.
Adverse.  That won't be easy.  YE GOT TO KEEP THE OLD MAN BELOW.
Give him liquor and humour him.  Git him over it.  If he gits on
deck there'll be hell to pay.  Wait till he begins to hear that
baby walkin'.  Paddlin' footsteps on the deck, Mr. Adverse!  Mrs.
Jorham'll do the rest.  She knows how to peter off after the
horrors.  A little less every day.  As fer me na-ow, I'll get the
ship to Havaner if ye can give me some notion where we are every
day or so.  Na-ow then I'll take her over, I expect."

He resumed the wheel and squared his shoulders as if he felt the
mantle of authority settling on them.

"Coil that loose end up, you swab," he roared at one of the
Britishers who was sitting on a pail near the galley.  "And git
for'd.  Step lively.  Ye're dead from yer ankles up and yer feet
are asleep.  Do you think ye can put yer bum on a bucket and let it
DRAW barnacles on this ship?  Send that man aft to the wheel
again."

The sailor slunk off shuffling his bare feet uncomfortably.
Anthony went below.  Already the cabin seemed more eery.  Now he
knew what they were waiting for.

When he came on deck some hours later to take the sun Collins had
already reduced sail considerably.  The skysail and royals were
gone and the balloon sail had vanished.  It was a clear day and he
managed to get a good sight.

"I forgot to tell ye that the nigger knows about things in the
cabin," said Collins looking on over the figures.  "He's been with
'em fer ten years.  They own him.  I don't want yer to mistake me,
Mr. Adverse, in sayin' what I did about the skipper.  Ye won't,
will ye?  I'm no sea-lawyer, ye know."  The man looked at him with
some doubt and anxiety in his honest eyes.

"You can depend on it I understand, Collins," said Anthony.

"Then we'll say no more unless we have tew.  Na-ow where do ye make
it today?"  They fell to over the chart with perfect understanding
of each other.

The seriousness and sheer necessity of the work they were doing and
the manifest trust and regard of the seasoned old sailor caused
Anthony to ponder a little as he went below to check over his
figures again and again.  This was the first bit of work he had
ever done which seemed vitally important, for a moment an end in
itself as well as a means.  Over that little sheaf of figures he
had completely forgotten everything else.  There was not anywhere
even a little rainbow of play lurking about it.  On that basis,
then, he and Collins had met.  Here was a platform that he could
stand on with many an honest man.  "With many another honest man,"
he corrected himself.

He was a man.  "By God," he thought, "I've grown up!  What a lucky
thing Mr. Bonnyfeather put that sextant in the chest.  What a
gift!"  Suddenly he saw that old gentleman from an entirely new
angle.  He HAD worked.  "I am his heir."  He made sundry good
resolutions.  On the chart of the Atlantic Ocean he marked down the
exact spot where he had overtaken his majority.




CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

THE SEED OF A MIRACLE


The passing of time on a long voyage Anthony soon discovered was
not announced to the inner-self by bells, chronometers, or even by
days and nights.  He could apprehend its duration only as a
succession of varying moods superinduced by the weather and the
latitude.  And in these moods, he also noticed, the ship herself,
as a positive personality with a certain will of her own, one to be
humoured rather than baldly controlled, seemed to participate.

The mood on starting from Genoa, for instance, had been a briskly
busy one gradually relaxing into routine and habit until the gale
had overtaken them.  Then from somewhere off the coast of Tripoli
to a spot in the Atlantic southwest of Gibraltar they had been
harried by the storm.  It was true they had profited in distance by
that harrying but the sky had been leaden and down-billowing, the
ship had been plunging and wallowing; rain, spray, and green water
had delayed them.  No one could be comfortable for a moment.  A
kind of business-like melancholy and glum endurance punctuated by
anxiety had gripped all alike.

But as they turned northward for the region of the trades, an
entirely new mood held the whole ship.  The wind piped only a
little, and quite merrily.  The brig still swept along but paused
now and then to dance a bit and to dash a capful of spray back
playfully.  The air was cool and the sun was bright.  Melancholy
had vanished.  A certain active ease and happy relief could have
been noted in the Wampanoag's log.  This, as they pressed west, and
the air became gradually hotter, lost its mercurial quality and
threatened to end in a vague feeling of sloth.  The wind faltered.
Off the Azores in late July one moved like the ship--reluctantly.
As yet they were not in the refreshing track of the trades.  A
sticky south wind came in puffs over the port bow.

Meanwhile--the time consisted mostly of meanwhiles--with no direct
responsibility for the ship, and with the course for the day agreed
upon, Anthony found time to ransack his chest from top to bottom
and to improvise a splendid, solitary mode of existence which was
so pleasing to his natural soul that it eventually caused him
alarm.  He left the madonna swaddled just as Faith had packed it.
Under the great-coat where Mr. Bonnyfeather had asked him to look
was a tight canvas roll containing one hundred guineas.  There was
also a large box of beautiful calfskin quartos which Mr.
Bonnyfeather had had newly bound for him.  These he proceeded to
devour from Addison to Zeno.

Now he was able to read what, when, and as long as he wanted to,
and to think things out even if it took half the day.  With an
almost complete cessation of events, and with no new people to meet
and adjust himself to, he had opportunity to think over his whole
existence; to arrange and to classify; to trace cause and effect;
and to evaluate.

His entire past now lay behind him in a distant perspective out of
which he could pick and choose.  In it he thought he saw himself as
he actually was.  Out of it he began to reconstruct himself as he
thought he would like to be.  Hence resolutions and resolves, heart
burnings and yearnings, regrets, hopes, a few tears and not a
little laughter as he lay in the shadow of a boat; lulled by the
slow motion of the ship, the sound of the wind and water, and the
disappearance of time.  All the sorrows and delights of comparative
solitude had become his.

Of a few things in his own nature he became acutely aware.  He no
longer merely accepted them as unchangeable.  Some things he would
change.  There was, for instance, his difficulty in seeing clearly
the difference between his own visions and the outside world.  Was
this because his senses laid hold of things so fiercely and yet so
delicately that the images of them were burned into and transformed
by his own nature into something else?  If so, how did that world,
that something else always becoming within him, correspond to
events without?  On what basis of reality could he proceed?  Which
world should he accept?  Was there a working compromise that he
could find?

So far there seemed only one place where the two worlds met.  It
was in that ideal, or state of being, which was represented to him
by the madonna.  He could see now that it was a personal accident
that she, his particular image of her, had become his visualization
of the being in which both inner and outer worlds met and by which
they were controlled.  Something must control both life and
reality, he saw, vision and fact, man and nature.  To that
something he felt akin as if some portion of it were in him.  Yet
HE was also in nature; yet the material world lay without!  It
was not only the motion of the ship which now caused him to reel as
he tried to understand all this.

He would not worry himself any more over the fact that his private
image of that in which his own nature and the world met was wrapped
up in a rag in his chest.  That might be absurd, or it might not.
It was convenient to have some image of this necessity.  He did not
have to be literal about it; he could accept it as his habit, as an
aid--and, as Father Xavier had suggested, the image might hold in
its arms further developments.

It was a very ancient image that men had found pregnant for
millenniums.  If he tried to make a new one it might become
mathematical, he felt, and he feared that.  Why? he wondered.
Figures represented thoughts only.  There was more to life than
thought.  Feelings!  A figure of a figure--zero was that!  So a
mathematical madonna would be more ridiculous than a clay madonna.
He could not apply even a pronoun to a mathematical image.  A word?

Could he make it a word?  Perhaps THE Thing WAS a word.  "In
the Beginning was the Word."  Ah! he had almost forgotten that.
The Word, eh?  But a man had written that?  Had God written it?
Suppose he had, what would be the difference in understanding it?
A man would have to understand it.  And a word must stand for
something.  This word then had no Image.  THE Word had no Image!
Why had it been said that way?  "In the Beginning was the Word and
the word was light."  What did, what could light have to do with
it?  In the shadow of the boat he stood up and prayed to be able to
see.  He groped, drawn by a great necessity to try to know all
things; all things in one.

All things in one!  In that idea there was some glimmering of hope,
he thought.  In his mind he marshalled what he had already thought.
He tried to put it together and go on.  Suddenly in his intensity
of feeling he felt that he had ceased to think by stages,
logically, one thing after another.  All of this process was
collapsing; telescoping as it were into one, a toneless, colourless
state of apprehension in which he understood without making
sentences for himself why the Word had no image.  In it objects and
what reflects them meet.  "IT IS" is alive, it is "I AM."

An intense feeling of exaltation accompanied the process of this
discovery and then a flashing shock.  He stood leaning against the
boat, tired, with his eyes closed.  Dazzling fire images chased
themselves over his darkened eyeballs as if he had been looking at
the sun.  "Some minute copy of this force that resolved both the
inner and the outer world into one must be inside myself.  Or I am
indeed undone," his lips moved.  The fire streaks on his retina
began to arrange themselves into a pattern like that of the
sunburst behind the madonna's head.  "That image again, always
that!"  He opened his eyes and looked at the sea to rest them.

"If the light hurts yer eyes ye ought to wear a sunshade," said
Mrs. Jorham, who, he now discovered, was sitting near and watching
him.  He had been absorbed in himself, he knew, but she must have
brought her rocking chair on deck almost noiselessly.  She must
have been sitting there a good while.  He resented it.

"It's NOT the sun," he said.

"Oh!"  She stopped rocking a minute to look at him.  "Jes' seein'
things, eh?  Didn't know ye was troubled that way."

"Well, I am, Mrs. Jorham," he replied a little tartly.

"Um!" she mumbled.

He hated to be questioned this way.  "Good Lord!"

"Wait till ye HEAR 'em," she said suddenly, dropping her
knitting.

Oh, yes, SHE heard things.  The woman had her troubles.  He
remembered now.  She took up her knitting again.

"I find a lot of comfort in this."  She held up the big socks with
the needles in it.  "It's kind o' like makin' the sheep go over the
stile, ye know.  Ye jes' keep countin'.  I'm sorry for ye, Mr.
Adverse, 'deed I am."

"Oh, thank you, Mrs. Jorham," said Anthony.  But she would not be
repulsed.

"Want to come and hold the yarn?" she said.  He shook his head.

"It's real bad then?  But sakes alive, I know something better than
this.  Come on down and I'll show ye my sewing."

At first he thought he could not, but she turned and looked at him
expectantly.  He laughed at himself and went.  After all why should
he, Anthony Adverse, be so superior?  Wasn't it only last night
that he had seen himself climbing into a bed with Miss Florence
Udney?  She had been there perfectly plainly.  Florence!  He had
touched her on the hips.  Round and smooth.  He could still feel
her by him today.  Very soft, well--  Perhaps he could afford after
all to look at Mrs. Jorham's sewing.  Anyway she was getting it out
of the basket.

"How wonderful women were!"  The basket was full of beautiful
things:  A quilt cover all puzzled together out of little triangles
of silk stitched microscopically; baby clothes; a fragment of lace
work on pins, showing a spider spinning its web.  What a design,
very delicate, quite spidery!  "Made with rows of single Brussels'
stitches," said Mrs. Jorham.  More baby clothes, a small cap
embroidered with tiny violets; that must be for a doll.  You could
hardly say.  Some babies were very small.  Table things worked with
blood-red roses and tawny leaves.  Doll clothes, undoubtedly doll
clothes, hemmed.  They must have been hemmed in Lilliput.  And
Captain Jorham's shirts having buttonholes worked in them and a big
"E. J." on the neck.

"Marvellous!"  What a good way this was to forget God.  "In the
beginning was the Word . . ." his mind seemed to echo.  Oh, bother!
Look at the sewing.

Mrs. Jorham put a worn, silver thimble on her finger and began to
select various needles and coloured threads out of her neat little
basket where ribbons and the eyes of four pairs of scissors stared
at one from the lid.  She laid out some square patches and began a
sort of monologue to herself about the art of sewing which Anthony
was allowed to overhear.  A man could be interested in it if he
wanted to be. . . .

"And the Word was God."  Ah, yes, he had forgotten THAT!  "The
Word was God."  That was where a personality, an image for the
Word, came in.  It was God said, "Let there be light.  And there
was light."  What did light have to do with it?  For goodness'
sake, Anthony, can't you listen to the poor woman?  She's talking.
Listen you . . . you . . .

"Sewin' is kinda like playin' on the harpsichord.  Ye got to get
yer fingers used to it jes' by plain practice.  There's the needle
and there's the thread.  Some of the stitches ye make look like
notes.  After a while ye can run 'em together without thinkin'
about it, and that's when ye begin to enjoy it.  That's when ye
begin to play whole tunes.  Looks like a melody, doesn't it?"  She
held up a pillow cover.  "Larned that out Canton way.  Them
butterflies are the same both sides.  This here vine's done on
linen with flax flourishin' thread.  Land, ye'd think that vine was
growin' there, wouldn't ye?  I used to do samplers, but that's too
easy.  Straight-stitch embroidery on tammy-cloth's nice.  But it's
appliqué work I like, flat stitch and outlining with back-stitch.
A few corded outlines and fancy stitches, or the ground with back-
stitch settin' in.  Some uses a goose or a weighted cushion but I
jes' hold my hands like this.  See!"  She made the needle fly and
the flower began to grow. . . .

"But what DID light have to do with it?" the obstinate voice
demanded.  "Hell's fire, wait and find out," he answered himself.
"Mrs. Jorham is doing the talking."

"Did ye ever think how many kinds of stitches there are?  Look
here, I'll show ye some on these patches.  Here's a plain running-
stitch.  Everybody tries that, even children.  Next is back-
stitchin'.  You take up six threads, draw it out, then you go three
threads back and pull it through six beyond.  Real fast!  This
way!"  Her needle seemed to devour the cloth.  "Right to left, of
course, only crazy people and Chinee go contrary.  Then there's
hemming.  You have to know how to fold the cloth.  There's plain
hems, and ornamental hems what runs along the edges and in and out
zigzagging over the sides, and then stitches with a loop.  And you
ought to know how to fasten threads off-and-on.  That patch is done
for.  Now give me two more.  This is sewing.

"An antique seam, and an open work seam, and you can make an open-
hemmed-double-seam.  Now let me have a big patch.  Gathering is
what I like."  She wrinkled the cloth and flashed the needle
through the little waves on the patch so fast he could see only a
darting point of light with the thread following.  "Na-ow ye pull
it together.  Ain't that nice?  WHEE!  Now if ye want ye can just
pick out yer crinkles into couples or fours and start smockin' 'em.
I used to make curtains for doll houses that a way; made some
for . . ."  She stopped.  "Land sakes, I've bruk the needle!  Give
me another, the big one.  I'll show ye how to galloon, but first
here's whipping. . . ."

"Whipping?" said the voice of Captain Elisha who raised his head
from the table where he had apparently been asleep.  "Whipping is
what ye ought to have.  It's ye that's temptin' her aboard this
ship na-ow with all yer makin' of doll clothes.  I know!  She'd
never have followed us if ye hadn't come along.  It's her mother
she wants.  Y're turnin' this cabin into a nursery.  Can't fool me.
I know y' aren't makin' them baby clothes for Abner's brats.  It's
for her.  Where's that doll?"

He got up and began to hunt around peevishly.

"Elisha, ye go and lay da-own.  It's bad enough without havin' ye
on my hands, TEW.  Ye know very well ye asked and begged me to
come.  And I told ye what would happen.  I told ye.  Didn't I?"

"Yes, woman, I ain't blamin' ye for losin' her.  But ye oughtn't to
be temptin' her on with that doll.  It's waitin' for her to come
fer it that does me in.  Give me a drink.

"God!" said he freezing to the spot where he stood.  "What's that
on deck now?"

"Only a rope end, Captain Jorham," said Anthony.  There was a stir
up above.  They heard the sheet and its tackle drag across the
stern bar.

"Sounds as if the wind's shiftin'," said Captain Elisha.  He
started for the door and then shrank back.  "YE go up and take
charge, mister.  Get on with ye.  Ye're in the trades now.  I got
real trouble da-own here."  He collapsed into his chair.  In a
great hurry Mrs. Jorham began to mix him a drink.  Anthony left the
atmosphere of terror which had momentarily gripped him too and
gladly ran on deck.  It was true.  The ship had already come about
and was headed due west with a steady, sweeping breeze behind her.
The trade winds at last!

"There's nothing ahead of us now but blue water for days and days,"
said Collins coming up looking relieved.  "We can sort of settle
da-own now.  It's wonderful how different jes' a few minutes of
these breezes makes a man feel!  A few minutes ago my shirt was
stickin' to my back, now look--" he let it billow out behind as he
stood looking astern with satisfaction.  "The old slant jes'
petered out.  I saw the jibs flap, and the next minute she was all
a-flutter.  Just had enough way on her to pay off.  Wall, the
skipper was about right.  We picked 'em up south a bit o' where he
said.  I'll lay her dead west till ye get yer sight tomorrow and we
can set the new course then.  If this wind holds, Mr. Adverse, we
won't have to start a rope till we git nigh to Barbados."  He
lowered his voice.  "How's things in the cabin?"

Anthony told him.

"'Pears to me like it's comin' on sooner that I expected.  So she's
givin' him liquor, eh!  Only does that when he's right nigh the
wust.  Ye can expect that baby aboard almost any day now I'd say.
Don't let it wear ye da-own.  Las' time I got so I was listenin'
for her myself.  Near the Andamans that was.  And a crack of
lightnin', tew.  Oh, the skipper told ye, did he?  Wall, ye can
stay on deck most of the time and jes' keep an eye down the
companion.  He's about paralysed na-ow I s'pose.  Na-ow I'll go and
git all sail set.  We can crack it on right."

Under the urge of Collins' voice the Wampanoag began to burgeon
again with stu'nsails and royals.  The jet before the cutwater
leaped high and higher as each new sail was flung out.  The brig
swept forward with a swift even motion.  All noises blent to an
even monotone.  They had entered upon the long, stable mood of the
western passage.

                            ----------

Collins had been too sanguine.  The captain showed few signs of
having reached a crisis.  He slept, awoke, grumbled; pretended to
turn a few pages of a large Bible laid open before him; drank
again, and laid his head on his arms.  A low sound like a saw in
difficulties drifted up the cabin ladder all day long.  Mrs. Jorham
knitted her sixth pair of socks and waited with a fixed, blue fear
in her eyes.  Before the heels of the next pair were woven she
expected a visitor.  When no one was looking she went to a drawer
in the sideboard, unlocked it, and took out a diaphanous doll.  On
its clothes she had lavished the last scintilla of her skill as a
needlewoman.  She hid it in her bunk and resumed knitting slowly.

To escape the tenseness of the cabin Anthony now spent most of his
time on deck.  He had a mattress brought up and slept by the cabin
door.  A good deal of the time he took the wheel.

It was a joy to con the ship over the smooth tables of sea towards
the dark line that receded ever before her.  There was scarcely any
perceptible motion to the water.  He became aware of the movement
of the ocean now as a rhythm felt rather than movement seen.  The
earth itself might have been breathing and the ship rising and
falling on her breast.  A mile ahead a long field of weed would
slowly rise and then sink again.  Many minutes later the ship would
answer in her turn as the horizon like a vast disk tilted slightly.
For days a great, white bird, whose name Anthony did not know,
followed them on motionless pinions hour after hour, as if it knew
the future and were waiting for something momentous to happen to
the ship.  One evening with a strange cry it departed swiftly over
the edge of the world in answer to a call.

As they drove westward the patches of weed increased.  Then there
would be great lakes of clear, blue water twinkling with a cobalt
light across which the ship seemed to hurry faster.  Out of one of
these virgin spaces, like motes out of an eye of space, a school of
porpoises suddenly rose one morning and began leaping in a
succession of infinite arches before the bow.  Jolly fellows with
mottled bellies, they preceded the vessel like heralds of her happy
royal progress across the depths.

When Anthony looked at the weed-patches with the small-glass he saw
crabs and strange urchins gesticulating there like fiddlers of the
ship's transit through their unknown realms.  All seemed calm and
happy in these latitudes.  A tunny that one of the men gaffed from
the chains, as though he had speared the spirit of these seas, died
in spasms of rainbow colours as if its fishy ghost could only
manifest itself exquisitely even in departure.  All day the flying-
fish scudded before them.  At night he heard them flop in the water
or fall with a bony clatter on the deck.  When someone with a
boathook fished up a branch of tree with nuts on it, it seemed to
be the herbage of another planet.  So far behind them now, so
infinitely remote before them was even the dream of land.

But if the ocean was beautiful beyond Anthony's utmost capacity to
feel, it yet furnished only half the mood of that super-equatorial
aisle of the earth-star.  Above them and above rose and towered the
unthinkable limpid and liquid with its lights appointed; glowing;
darkening; ever shifting against sameness, the impalpable womb of
clouds.  Islands of shadow, glittering groves of slanting rain shot
with rainbows appeared and vanished; shifted and melted on the
level, molten plains around about.  Once a waterspout trailed its
smoking skirts uncomfortably near, only to go spinning away to
leeward like some cosmic dervish weaving its wasp-like waist up
into the dark funnel of the pall above it.  Then there would be
days of intolerable blue with only wisps of cloud at dawn and
nothing but the noise of the sails and the whisper of the sea
punctuated startlingly by the clang of the ship's bell.

The men sat about the decks picking oakum or spinning rope yarn,
washing damp bundles of old clothes and hanging them up to dry,
singing now and then brief snatches, and talking in subdued lazy
tones.  Even Collins could not find enough for them to do.  All the
old sails were patched.  All the boats and bulwarks were painted,
the brasses polished, and the anchor chain made rustless.  The
standing rigging was slushed down.  And still they were only a
little over half-way across.

A small fiddle was permitted to squall away in the fo'c'sle and
even to come on deck.  But after a week it gave up.  The presence
of the vast silence through which the ship was moving made it too
absurd to be tolerated.  A game of banker began under the lee of
the galley and went on.  To Anthony at the wheel eddied back now
and then a whiff of burning olive wood from the galley fire,
bringing mornings in the cart with Angela vividly to mind.  Indeed,
the plains about Pisa sometimes seemed to mirage themselves before
him when the smoke was strong.  Mixed with it were vivid whiffs of
tobacco from the sailors' pipes.  In that weed he now began to find
a solitary solace himself.  Tobacco made his body content to be
still.

The intolerable vastness of things was now eating itself into his
mind.  At first it had been oppressive but now he began to feel as
if there were a window in the top of his skull that gave on
irreducible nothing.  A certain element of terror accompanied this.
In the vision of the universe which it opened up there was a gaunt
possibility of madness, a terror of space, that had drawn a little
too near.  He could not quite close it off.  He had once made the
mistake of climbing into the maintop and looking up too long at the
stars.  Suddenly direction had vanished and he found himself
clutching the mast.  The circles and circles beyond circles of his
geometry had for a while been a comfort.  But now he could no
longer bound nothing with a compass.  Always there was the maw of
more and more.  No compass opened wide enough.

The constant taking of observations and the necessity to think in
terms of arcs and spheres gave him, as he watched the horizon
before him, a palpable sense of the huge ball across which the ship
was slowly crawling.  That was tremendous enough.  But to recollect
that this frightful sphere was hurtling eastward, and that he was
going with it at a speed really beyond thought, made him feel like
clinging at times to the wheel, waiting as it were to be thrown off
into space like a drop of water from a grindstone.  Once under the
rising full moon as he looked astern he thought he saw the long,
silver streak of water racing; streaming steadily east into the
very mouth of the dead planet.  Slowly it rose above the line of
ocean, serene, but terrible.  And then he was being hurled along
under it going around again toward the sun.

That night he took a lunar for longitude.  Despite all he could do
he could not divest himself of a sense of horror as the disk of the
moon swept down over the fixed star he had chosen.  Through the
glass he saw the edge of the moon was sawtoothed.  There was
something about the motion of all these bodies in the sky,
especially at night, that was a little mentally sickening.  Strive
as he would he could not divest himself of an emotion about them
even when, as he had to assure himself, it was merely mathematics
he was practising.  Even to take a shy look at the infinite seemed
to cut him off from the entire ship's company.  To glimpse the mood
of it even for a few hours had, he felt, changed him somehow
permanently.  Something within him that he had not known was
imprisoned there had been fed with the raw meat of heaven.  It was
now aroused and clamouring for more.  Along with this went a sudden
increase in his apprehension of geometrical problems.  Theorems
which he had once been forced to prove to himself ponderously now
suddenly became axiomatic.  He became ambitious as a navigator and
determined to check his longitude by an observation of Jupiter's
satellites.  This was a matter of some little difficulty as it was
necessary to rig an improvised tripod for the captain's little
telescope and to wait for a perfectly calm night.

Collins accomplished the tripod.  But it was harder to persuade the
captain to let him have the glass, a good one once taken from a
prize.  He did so only after considerable cajoling.  Captain Jorham
had not been sleeping lately.  He was now very restless.  From time
to time that day Anthony had heard him and his wife talking.  When
he came into the cabin they always stopped.  There was an air of
great tension about both of them, Anthony noticed.  But he was now
so engrossed in his own little experiment on deck that he paid no
particular attention to it.  Matters had gone on so long in the
cabin he had come at last to take them for granted.  Besides--
tonight it was calm!  And tonight he was going to observe the
immersion of Jupiter's inner satellite.  How grand that sounded!
As he began to focus the glass the nice intricate reasoning behind
the observation and the way to use the tables kept running through
his head.

The planet hung like a distant lamp half-way to the zenith.  In the
glass at first he saw nothing but black, then a few sparks of
stars.  Now he was on it!  It was a great, grey, moon-shaped thing.
Out of focus of course!  He twisted the eye-piece toward him.  Now!
There it was, the whole beautiful system!  An intensely shining,
little disk with three bright sparks arranged in a line to the
right.  If the ship would only stay perfectly still!  That was a
little better now, clearer.  There was the other spark on the left.
Much farther out than he had thought.  God!  How beautiful they
were, silver, but silver that was alive.  Calm, orderly,
perpetually reordering themselves in repetition endlessly repeated
and shining that way forever, glorious, lovely--calm!  He could
never drink in enough of that light.  Let it keep sliding into his
eyes and become part of him.  This was mental drink.

He let Collins look.  "Four of 'em, eh!  Four moons!  That doesn't
seem right, does it?"  He went back and unlashed the wheel again.

It would take almost an hour yet before that little moon would
touch the planet's disk, if his calculations were anywhere near
right.  He began to walk up and down the deck stopping once in a
while to refocus.  "Why not hurry it up and be done with it?"
something prompted him.  "You fool," someone else replied.  He
laughed.  Yet his little moon evidently was moving.  And the sea
was very, very calm.  Almost no wind tonight.  The sails flapped.
She was just keeping way on her.  That was lucky.  They had had
only a few really calm nights.  This was one.  Very silent too.  He
rearranged the screened light near the chronometer so that he could
see the hands better.

Philadelphia went by carrying some hot water to the cabin, spilling
a little as he passed.  Anthony saw him return to the galley later.
He was sitting there with his hands on his knees, shaking a little
as if with a chill.  A big fire was going.  Two lanterns were
burning.  He was sorry for the darky.  The captain was wicked
enough in speech these days.  The man looked positively yellow,
Anthony thought.  As he passed the cabin door he heard Mrs. Jorham
crying monotonously; subdued.  She had not done that before.
Perhaps he had better take a look.  But he would try not to disturb
them.  He went around and looked through the starboard light.  No
sounds came to him there, only movement below in the clear
lamplight, a picture in a glow.  There was something cosmic about
this one, too.

The old man seemed to be up to some mischief.  He was going about
looking for something.  Evidently he could not find it.  Mrs.
Jorham slid into her bunk and closed the panel as if she were
afraid.  What was it all about?  Mere drunken folly?  Now he was
rearranging the things in the cabin meticulously.  All the plates
on the rail.  Exactly, just so.  He stood back to admire the
effect.  Now he put the tea canister on the sideboard in front of
the Virgin and bowed.  "Was the drunken ass saying his prayers to
her or making fun of her?"  You could hardly tell which.  He made
sacerdotal gestures.  It was funny and horrible at the same time.
Now he was peeping over the Virgin's cloak.  He was talking to the
baby!  Somehow he had recaptured the very look of a proud young
father.  His face had gone smooth.  He snapped his fingers and bent
down tenderly.  It seemed terrible enough now, poor old devil!
Better not spy on him.  But just then the whole implication of the
scene below shifted.  Captain Jorham had lifted his face out of the
big fold of the clay cloak with a look of preternatural cunning.
This was the man who could sell Spaniards their own tombstones at a
profit.

He looked about him like a cat about to jump on the table and lap
cream.

Then with an elaborate drunken cunning that would have defeated
itself if Mrs. Jorham had been peeping out of instead of crying in
her bunk, he tiptoed over to "Elisha" and took out of that chest a
long, narrow bottle of red wine.  He grinned knowingly at its ruby
flash as he crossed the cabin, reeling.  Good Lord, he was going to
smash the statue with it!  No, he was going to give it to the baby!
He slid the bottle down into the deep fold of the Virgin's cloak.
It was completely concealed.  Once again that evening Captain
Jorham stepped back with his head on one side to admire his nice
arrangements.  Then his real motive emerged.  With a look of grim
triumph he turned and shook his fist at the closed panel of his
wife's bunk.

Anthony could only laugh now.  He wondered if Captain Jorham would
remember that bottle when his wife began to cut down on his liquor
after the spree.  Hardly.  Perhaps it was just drunken cunning?
Then his grin suddenly faded.  The observation!

He ran to the telescope and began to readjust it frantically.  But
it was too late.  While he had been watching Captain Jorham hide a
bottle in the bosom of the Virgin another equally important event
in the cosmos had taken place.  The inner satellite of Jupiter had
immersed.

"You'll make a good first mate yet," said Collins with a touch of
admiration in his voice as he listened to Anthony's remarks.  "What
was that last language, Portegee?"

Anthony closed up the telescope and reduced his meticulous
preparations to debris.  He did not deign to reply.

"As for immersion," Collins went on, conning the ship elaborately
as a brief puff bellied out the sails, "I never did hold by it
nohow.  Nor feet washin' neither.  My family was Antipoedabaptists
and I sucked the milk o' pure doctrine from my mother's knee.
Better not kick the chronometer, sir."

A loud crackling sound came from the cabin.  The captain was
evidently demolishing something brittle.  They listened
forebodingly.

"I expect tonight's the night," whispered Collins.  "Na-ow I'll
send the watch for'd and ye hold the cabin da-own, Mr. Adverse.
Tain't helpful to discipline fer the crew to see the skipper bein'
chased.  Yep, I'll keep the wheel.  Philly can help if he has to."

Anthony gathered his paraphernalia and went below.  How important
it had seemed, and how serious about it he had been!  He could
chuckle now.

Fragments of a chair were scattered about the cabin but the captain
had disappeared.  Anthony stood looking about him.  The cabin was
absolutely silent.  The ship was just drifting before the lightest
of airs.  He heard the ripple along her keel as she picked up for a
moment.  Then it died away in subterranean gurgles.  Suddenly his
heart almost stopped.  A growling beast was trying to bite his leg.

From between the legs of the table the captain's head projected and
he was now barking like a dog.  It was an eerily perfect
performance.  Captain Jorham WAS a dog.  It went on for a while
and ended in three long death howls.

Despite himself Anthony's flesh crept.  With some ado he finally
enticed the captain to his feet again.  The commander of the
Wampanoag now began to walk about shuffling and reeling, doing a
nervous, spasmodic little clog each time he turned the corner of
the table.  He was trying to catch Anthony to see who he was.  His
face twitched and his limbs jerked.  An endless stream of talk
flowed from his mouth, now drawn to one side, as if all he said
were an aside to someone invisible.  Finally he captured his mate
and insisted on shaking hands.  The ugly gleam in his pupils
vanished.

"Swan ef it ain't Captain Jorham's macaroni mate!  Ye're a ri, ye
a-a-a-RI."  Anthony dodged the gargantuan fluke which was about
to descend on his back.  The captain staggered and reeled over into
his bunk.

"Thank God for that," thought Anthony.

"Polly wants a cracker, polly wants, wants, polly--l'olly, dolly.
Janie wants a dolly.  Little Jane wants her dolly.  Mrs. Jorham, do
ye hear, do ye hear?  Little Jane wants her dolly.  She's comin'
fer it, comin' ABOOORD!  Janie, baba!"  He waved and then began
to whisper.  The hulk of him quivered and twitched.

"Listen!"

Something gurgled under the keel.  The man's scalp crinkled up into
a point pulling his forehead smooth.

Mrs. Jorham opened her panel.  "Give him drink and get it over with
tonight.  Philly, Philly, some hot water!"

The darky descended warily.  He took in the situation at one glance
and scrambled out of the cabin as soon as he could.

"GIVE me that doll," said the captain making a sudden drunken
dash at his wife.  She closed the panel in his face.  With some
difficulty Anthony got him back to his bunk where he sat sweating.
He mixed him some hot grog and got him to lie down.  After a while
he seemed to sleep uneasily.  Anthony dimmed the light and crawled
into his own bunk.  He meant to stay awake.  The light flickered
and went out soon but he did not know it.

When he opened his eyes again it was absolutely dark and he was
instantly aware of being bathed in an atmosphere of inexplicable
terror.  Someone had called Philly again, he thought.  But no, it
was Captain Jorham talking.

"Listen, do ye hear that?" he whispered.

"Hush!" said his wife's voice.  "SSH!"

The captain's voice was pleading now.  "Give it to her, Jane.  Let
her have it."

A swift horrible scream tore the darkness.  It was impossible to
hear it and not to partake of a fear that went like cold to the
marrow.

"Listen!"

No one did anything else.

Now for the first time Anthony began to understand that Mrs. Jorham
might believe her child really was there.  It was her breathing.
He lay with eyes wide open in the dark, listening.  He could hear
now as he had never heard before.  Furthermore, he gradually became
sure himself that there was something at the door.  Despite all he
could do to reassure himself, he broke out in a sweat.  Something
WAS there.  He could hear it.

"God!" said the captain.

They were evidently sitting together over there in the captain's
bunk.  Presently he heard one of them moving.  It was Mrs. Jorham.
She crept past him slowly on her hands and knees in her white
night-dress.  Now she was going up the little ladder.  He heard her
gasp.  Something was tossed out onto the deck.  Mrs. Jorham was
lying prone there at the top of the cabin ladder.

Then Anthony had the shock of his life.  In the darkness overhead
he heard bare feet stirring very softly on the cabin roof.
Immediately afterwards Mrs. Jorham fled back to her bunk and closed
herself in.

This was more than he could stand.  Jumping up he wrapped a blanket
around him and went on deck.  No one was there except Collins
looking grim over the binnacle.

"Did you see anything?" asked Anthony.

Collins quietly pointed to the galley.  In there a bright fire was
still going.  He went forward and looked through the door.  The
stove was glowing cherry-red under one lid.  He lifted the grate
and saw the remains of Mrs. Jorham's doll twisting in the flames.
A smell of burning cloth and hair pervaded the place.  Philadelphia
was not there.  As he came out again Anthony saw the outline of the
darky's figure against the stars in the shrouds forward as far away
from the galley as he could get.  He sauntered forward and looked
up at him a while.  The cook was cowering there all hunched up.
They kept looking at each other.

"Lil missee gone?" the man finally whispered.

"All gone," said Anthony.

Even then the negro came down slowly and sat on the bulwark for a
while.

"Why did you burn it, Philly?" asked Anthony.

"She go way den."  He ran his sleeve over his forehead.  "Tell you
I allus knows troubles comin', Mr. Adverse, when I see dat ooman
gwine fer to dress a doll.  She start 'bout a month ago now.  Wish
I didn't b'long to folks wid a baby hant.  It jes' about done ruin
my kidneys."  He hitched himself uneasily.

"This is not the first time then?"

"No, SUH.  I done burn foh dollies!"

Anthony went aft and got the man a drink.  It must have taken great
courage, he thought, to creep up and get the doll.  So it was real
to them all.  Not until long after the fire had completely burned
out in the galley did Philadelphia return.

"I wouldn't mind a little myself, Mr. Adverse," said Collins.  He
looked at Anthony over the pannikin.  "Well, what do ye think of it
na-ow?" he asked.

"What do you stick by the ship for, Collins?" countered Anthony.

"Ye don't know the skipper, sir.  He's a grand man," replied
Collins wiping his lips.  "He'll be himself na-ow, ye see if he
ain't.  Everybody has their own funny places ye know, in here."  He
tapped his head.  "Ye can't tell how real they are neither.
Na-ow . . ."

But Anthony did not care to listen, any more than he cared to
return to the cabin.  He flopped down on some spare canvas; smoked.

One thing--he was not going to be dressing any more dolls himself!
The madonna could stay in the chest.  And he was glad he had taken
the stand he had with Father Xavier.  Toussaint had once laughed at
him for being superstitious.  And these people on board were
Protestants, too.  "Heretics."  But what was he?  A reasonable man,
a man of facts and figures, a navigator!  No more nonsense from now
on--by God!--his pipe went out and he failed to relight it--no more
childish nonsense!  He would strangle his dreams, his dolls.  A
philosopher-scientist.  Write Toussaint and tell him.  These new
ideas he had from looking at the stars, sailing the wide earth
under the sky had opened up his mind.  But mystery was there.  Of
course it was.  Something to do with time--or was it space?  He
couldn't remember now.  It was hard to think about that.  You
seemed to touch the bottom of things there--or the top.  Oh, yes,
that time on the masthead looking up, he had lost all sense of
direction.  What was that idea he had had then?  Other things
besides men, THINGS.  Yes, supposing I was a thing, or supposing
a thing knew itself as "I."  Oh, this is it.  The "I" of a thing
could have no sense of direction.  Say, the sun.  It would not know
east or west or up or down.  "I" felt that on the masthead looking
at the stars.  What of it?  This is an essential thought I am
certain of it.  It might lead to something--something, but not now,
not now.  I must rest.  How long, how long life is!  The end far-
off and I am sleepy now.  Alone.  Here . . .  He saw the moon's
disk again sweeping down dragon-toothed over a star.  Alone here in
this terrible vast desert of stars.  This cold-and-fiery endless
place!  Where are you, living one?  I am lost here.  I cannot find
you.  I am cold.

He moved uneasily and began to murmur something on the verge of
sleep.  Philadelphia came out of the cabin and threw a blanket on
him, seeing the dew on his face.

"Ah, warm again!  In bed at last!  Good night, then.  Good night to
you."  From the wall above him her face was looking down.  "Of
course she was always there.  I am glad.  Now she is talking to
me."

"What have you been doing all day, little boy?"

"Climbing the big tree.  I am tired."

"Did you reach the top?"

"Yes."

"What did you see there?"

"The stars, Mother I-am, the stars."

"What of them, child?"

"I looked among them and dreamed I had lost you.  I lost myself."

"But now that you are awake again you see I am here . . ."

What has become of the ship, the Atlantic Ocean and the stars above
it?  They, he, have vanished into something without space and time.
What is it breathing under the blanket? . . .

The man in the lookout thought he saw some stars setting in the
"west."  They touched the water like lights and went under;
disappeared.  He was quite sure of it.  In the "east" several more
came up.  He saw them with his own eyes.  Presently they were
followed by a great light.  The man now saw a cloud before him on
the horizon.  It looked far away, very silvery and stood up from
the sea like a cone.  Suddenly he saw a forest and three little
white houses in the middle of it.  The cloud rent opened up and the
land turned into a mountain with long scarves of mist trailing away
from it.  It certainly WAS a mountain.

"Land O," he roared.

"Belay that bellerin'," Collins roared back at him.  "That's Nevis,
and I seen it a half hour ago from the deck.  Get a pillow, ye
lubber, and turn over on yer other side.  Come da-own out o' that.
Philly, pass the word to the captain."

"Yes, suh," said that worthy delighted at the discomfiture of the
lookout.  "An' I'll jes' tote him a basin o' gruel."  He winked.

A considerable stir now went on and Anthony woke up.

"Landfall sooner than we expected, Mr. Adverse," said Collins
pointing.  "Yer latitude was exact but ye're way out on your
longitude.  I'VE been expectin' it watchin' the landbirds for
three days now.  And I'm right glad, for I'm nigh tuckered out with
double tricks at the wheel.  The skipper ul carry on na-ow.  He
comes back marvellous."

Anthony climbed the shrouds and sat feasting his eyes on his first
glimpse of tropical foliage.  A beautiful mountain, gleaming, dark-
green, strung with savannas and forests with here and there a
bright flash from a waterfall lay some miles ahead off the port
bow.  A long scarf of mist perpetually dissolving to leeward
trailed from the top.  He could see a cluster of white houses in a
town at its foot.  The crew stood about or lined the bulwarks in
small groups looking at it, too.  Suddenly they scattered.  Captain
Jorham had come on deck.

He had a chair brought for him and sat on the quarter-deck with a
blanket around his knees and a speaking trumpet in his hand.
Philadelphia kept bringing him hot coffee every few minutes.

Mrs. Jorham emerged once from the cabin with her curl-papers still
on, and going to the stern threw a lot of bottles into the sea.
Captain Jorham did not turn his head.  Anthony saw the bottles go
bobbing astern.  A large shark turned lazily on one side and
swallowed one.  Anthony laughed.  He knew of another bottle in safe
keeping.  Forgotten, he felt sure.  "On the knees of the gods!"

Nevis began to sink into the ocean astern.  Only a few days now and
they would be in Havana.  The new world at last.  He raised his
right hand holding the palm open in expectation.



END OF BOOK FOUR




BOOK FIVE

In Which the Necessary Alloy is Added




CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE HOUSE OF SILENUS


Down the long, blue coasts of Cuba sailed the Wampanoag with her
mate in the shrouds gazing inland as often and as long as the
August sun on the Tropic of Cancer would permit.

In the mornings, when he first heard the men begin to holystone the
decks and swish water about, he would go aloft with the small-glass
sticking out of his coat pocket.  Then crooking a knee about one of
the stays and steadying himself, he took deep lungfuls of the rich
land-breeze which lulled through the sails at that hour.

It was full of a thousand lush and exotic odours from the beaches,
lagoons, and high plateaus; Sargossa weed, juniper and lantana; the
fragrant quiebrahacha, tamarind, and rotting mastic leaves.  A
rank, musty sweetness rolled out from the sugar plantations and
fermenting lowlands.  His land-hungry nose seemed to taste rather
than to smell it.  In his mouth his tongue moved and became moister
as if in anticipation of a feast.

By the last hours of starlight the brig would always have drifted
close to the land.  The sea-breeze lasted all night, but as the
airs grew lighter she would make more and more leeway, until at
last the distant whisper of beaches was audible on deck.  It
sounded as though the tropical night were about to reveal its
secret; a softly sinister one.  Then suddenly the sails would
flutter, the yards would be braced around, and the land-breeze
would fatten the canvas out on the starboard tack.

It was at this moment that the fish bit most frantically.  A
ferocious barracuda or two, or a young shark would always be
slapping and slamming themselves on the wet deck.  But after the
first few mornings in the West Indies Anthony paid small attention
to that, for by the miracle of dawn in those regions smell,
hearing, and sight were in turn assaulted and overcome.

As soon as the warm odours of the land-breeze began to fan over the
deck the wind also brought with it a distant and mysterious cry
from the dark island beyond.  It was continuous; strangely
sustained.  It seemed to come in waves out of the east and to
scatter itself like spiritual rumours of good news discussed and
re-echoed here and there faintly and more faintly down into the
west.  To Anthony hanging in the rigging, rapt, looking out over
the dark ruffling water, it expressed perfectly his own deep and
eery joy at being alive on this star.

The first time he heard this half-harmonic chorus he was
nonplussed.  No other song was like it.  With a constant lyric
stream, in which no individual notes could be distinguished, all
the roosters in Cuba were blending their voices.  The king-cock of
them, he thought, with a million jubilant minions must be chanting
somewhere in the as yet invisible island hills.  This then was the
characteristic sound of land--of all habitable land.  He remembered
it on those mornings in Italy in the cart with Angela.  But this
was a more magnificent chorus.  It had the quality of laughter
transposed into some unknown scale, musical, but non-human.  At the
first hint of grey the paean rose to a kind of harmonized scream of
joy.

Then the parrots began, "chat-chat, chat-chat, chatter-chatter."
They seemed to wake an applause to accompany the cock-crow as if
they had been started somewhere by a single handclap.  The half-
heard thunder of billions of insects tuned in.  The morning voice
of Cuba swept into a crescendo.  It reached a climax that
maintained itself, a distant pandemonium that rapidly grew fainter
as the ship drew out to sea.

Meanwhile his eyes must also be at work.  The stars paled.  The
planets burned out like melting globes.  In a white, furnace-glow
astern the morning star disappeared moltenly.  At one leap the
light climbed half-way to the zenith.  The inevitable bank of low
clouds along the eastern horizon, as if they were in rapid
combustion, turned from black to dull red; to crimson; to
transparent, white gold.  Hot pencils of light thrust rods through
them and they suddenly sublimed.  A bright track of sea could be
seen racing eastward toward an incandescent spot.

Then the incredible forehead of the sun lifted itself out of the
water.  Red globules of mist ran down his fat cheeks.  The world
glared from rim to rim.  It was turning over.  For an instant, as
the sun's squat globe swam up from the water, the sea seemed to be
drawn after him into a huge bloody bead.  Then the black line of
the horizon cut through it.  It fell back, and you could no longer
look that way.  Already waves of heat were beating up into
Anthony's face.  After a while he would open his eyes again, after
the blindness passed, and look at the long coasts marching either
way into the intolerable, blue distance.

It was a mighty view.  He was never tired of sweeping his little
glass over it; now at some palm fronded headland or long reaching
cayo; now at a purple shadowed vale in the mountains, or a little
sunny patch with a peon's hut.  He felt like some poor sailor
standing in the rigging of the Niña or the Pinta, shading his eyes
for a glimpse of gold-roofed temples on that first, memorable
voyage.

They passed a hundred little, palm-lined rivers each with its
savannaed delta and a bar creaming at its blue mouth.  Where the
bluffs came down to the sea these streams cut back into the hills
mysteriously.  A light mist hung over them in the morning till the
sun looked directly at it.  He could even see, with a very clear
focus, a wilderness of ferns lining their gorges.  Once there was a
waterfall and a canoe under it fishing.  From the woods near by
rose a long feather of smoke.  And this was the new world!

To him it was HIS new world.  He had discovered it for himself.
And he knew now how vast the earth was; how wide its oceans.  Had
he not crossed a sea of space to get here?  Why must the ship
always go creeping out to sea as soon as the sun rose?  How long
would it be till he was walking the groves of this island?  "Use
the glass, Anthony, use the glass--Cuba, gloria del mundi!"

One step inland beyond the beaches salt-pans flashing like mirrors.
Then a wide, low plain, sandy, grassy; then trees; then a glorious
burst of palms and pines, plumed and festooned forest that swept up
over the hills into the blue mountains, gentle, rolling from peak
to peak with cloud shadows, feathered with giant royal palms
standing in groves or lonely, perpendicular, looking down on
everything else.  Cuba and the royal palm, the tall, wide-blowing
royal palm--he could imagine them rustling coolly in the trade
wind.  The sun burned his already brown face to black olive as he
stood thus in the rigging, sweeping his glass inland a hundred and
a thousand times to be rewarded at every trial by glows and glooms
and vistas of what had once rightly been taken to be Paradise.  The
sun bleached the ends of his hairs and the roots where they rose
out of his forehead until he looked like a grizzled, gilded youth
with a bronze body.

"Although," said a book of travels he had in his chest, "Europeans
have now pre-empted the soil of Cuba for three centuries, much of
the interior of the island has never been mapped and its precise
geography is vague."  Looking day after day at the wilderness of
hills and coastal islands that marched with the Wampanoag, he could
believe that.  Reluctantly, as the sun grew intolerable, he would
climb down at last.

At noon the sails drooped.  They ate under the shadow of a
tarpaulin in a sweat-provoking calm.  Mrs. Jorham groaned and began
to talk about iced root-beer, and frost on cranberry bogs.  The
captain said nothing.  He was doing penance now.  An hour later the
cool breeze came from the sea.  Then they would begin to tack out.
For Captain Jorham had no desire to be boarded at night by human
caymans from some boca, or Cayo del Coco.  The number of "wrecks"
even in calm weather along these coasts was remarkable.  It had
already engaged the unfavourable attention of the British Admiralty
for many years.

"Expulsis piratus, restitutio commercia," said Captain Elisha to
himself, taking out his lucky pocket-piece and surreptitiously
spitting on it.  So by evening they would be ten miles out, and the
coast a long, undulating dream of blue.  Then they would slowly
drift in again.  Thus in long diagonal slants the Wampanoag lazed
along.  One morning two breast-shaped hills hove in sight.

"Do ye see them there, Mr. Adverse?" said Collins twiddling the
wheel a quarter over and back to nurse every cupful of the fitful
land airs, "them's the Tits of Havana, and ye'll see the Morro
before night."

A tower with a banner on it rose out of the sea as they lay in the
noon calm.  Then the wind came shoreward and by evening they were
near enough to see the sulphur puff of the sunset gun from El
Morro.  An incredibly ragged pilot with a bouquet of flowers in
hand for the captain, and his mouth full of Spanish lies when he
was not chewing a fat, black cigar, rowed out and boarded them.  He
offered Anthony a cigar for which he accepted one dollar.

"From the vuelta abojo, señor, the very darkest leaf.  Now we have
exchanged gifts, bueno!"

Anthony lit the black torpedo expectantly.  He had heard of Havana
tobacco.  In a few minutes a light sweat burst out on his forehead
and the soles of his feet felt cold.  He pressed adventure no
further then, but tossed the thing overboard.  After a little he
felt calm and soothed; in rather an enviable state of mind.  It was
equivalent to strong wine but unique.

In the calmest of all lights, between a setting sun and a rising
moon, they slipped into the great sack-shaped bay between the
frowning batteries of La Punta and El Morro.  He had never seen so
many fortifications.  The walled city lay to starboard, and the
little Gibraltar of San Carlos, tier above tier of batteries with a
vicious-looking bristling parapet, along the water front to port.
Soon they were gliding along the bay front of the flat-roofed city
that thrust out its long peninsula between them and the sunset.  He
could hear the horses now trotting along the Paseo Alameda de Paula
and the noise of wheels.

What a welcome familiar sound was that, the striking of horseshoes
on good solid earth!  All these land noises were welcome.  How he
had missed them without knowing it!  How silent the open sea really
was!  Its tones were variations of only one voice.  The bay seemed
to be full of different voices all calling to him; cries, laughter,
carriages passing and repassing, the rumble of a town!  The
tremendous sour-sweet stench of a tropical city and a festering
harbour overwhelmed him as the pilot dropped anchor in the Bay of
Antares and demanded one hundred and twenty-five Mexican dollars
for the astounding feat.

The twang of Captain Elisha's "God A'mighties," and other Biblical
remarks to the pilot rolled up from the cabin to mix with curious
hails from passing boats and the thudding of hard fists on canvas
as the crew furled the sails and gossiped on the yards.  Tomorrow,
tomorrow they would be ashore, "Muchacha, muchacha" . . .  An hour
later the pilot left with ten dollars and buenas noches.

Mrs. Jorham came on deck to rock in the marvellous moonlight.  She
might have knitted, but the mosquitoes would not agree.  Anthony
climbed into the maintop above the pests and gazed inland at a
circle of unearthly hills.

A few hundred yards across the water at Regla, a thriving little
suburb with crowded docks and low, whitewashed houses, a lot of
banjos and guitars were going strong.  Some of the men started to
clog on the deck till Mrs. Jorham snorted.  They ceased.  She gave
a few vicious slaps at her wrists and went below.  He was left
alone with the banjos, guitars, and the moonlight.

And such mad, soft moonlight!  God, what a rhythm was that on
shore!  The feet in the dance hall at Regla stamped it through an
entire vacant interval of the rumba . . . now, NOW the frog-
voiced guitars chimed in again.  He waved his heels in the empty
air and his throat swelled.  "Habana, Llare del Nuevo Mundo y Ante
Mural de los Indios Occidentales," tunky, tunk tunk, plunk plunk-
plunk, the music went on.

The dew began to soak through his clothes.  He jumped to a stay and
slid down.

"Wall, ye wouldn't have come da-own that air way when ye come
aboard at Leghorn," said Collins with a hint of pride in his voice
as if he were responsible.  He lowered his voice.  "And na-ow she
has her hook safe in the mud at Havaner.  And I'll tell ye what,
Mr. Adverse, we kna-ow who brought her acrost ta pond, eh?"  He
finally succeeded in closing only one eye and held the wink at last
attained for some time.  His eye opened.  "Wall, ye'll be leavin'
us na-ow I expect."

They were silent for a minute.  A wave of homesickness at leaving
the ship swept over Anthony.  Collins looked grave.  "I know," he
said, "but barrin' the yellow jack and the stinks it's a fa-ine
ta-own TEW-W-W."  The last syllable twanged and twinged like a taut
preventer stay in a gale.  It lingered musically, a sad nasal
farewell.  Anthony went into the cabin and began to pack.  Captain
Jorham, who was just drawing off his socks, watched him
thoughtfully.  So far he had never alluded to any of the events of
the voyage.  Anthony took his sextant, oiled it, and put it away.

"Ye done right well with that, mister," said the captain picking
his toes.  He cleared his throat.  "We're all obleeged to ye."  He
went over to "Elisha" and taking out a bag counted out audibly
seventy silver dollars.  At the clink of coin Mrs. Jorham's night-
cap appeared through the slide.  She watched attentively.  The
captain arranged the coins in seven piles and stopped.

"There's five more comin'," said his wife.

He made another half pile a little regretfully.

"Them's yer wages, mister," he said.  "No argument, ye've arned 'em
. . . from all I hear tell.  Na-ow there's only one thing more I'm
askin'.  Even if ye're paid off, I'd like ye to try and help
dispose o' these holy figures and figurines ra-ound to some o' the
churches.  Ye've got the hang o' the priestly lingo.  You tell 'em
for me, will yer?"

"Indeed, I will, sir," said Anthony.  "You can count on me for
anything as long as you lie in port.  And I'll remember the marble,
too."

"Na-ow that's right pert of ye," replied the captain.  Mrs. Jorham
nodded.

It was on the tip of Anthony's tongue to warn the captain about the
hidden bottle.  He wondered if the Virgin on the sideboard still
had it.  He strolled over that way.  It was still there.  But he
did not want to bring up any embarrassing memories and refrained
from mentioning it.

The captain leaned back in his bunk and lit a pipe.  The mosquitoes
hummed.  He put the light out.  The captain dozed and slapped
automatically.  A patch of moonlight flooded the floor.  Presently
Mrs. Jorham emerged in her night-cap and a long gown with a small
vial in her hand.  A strong aromatic odour filled the cabin.  She
came over and spilled some drops on Anthony's pillow.

"It's penny-riyal," she said.  "Keeps the critters away."  Then
half hesitatingly she rubbed some on his forehead.

He was surprised to feel how soft and smooth her old fingers were.
They lingered.  She put some on his hair.

"Land sakes!" she sighed, "I ain't rubbed penny-riyal on sence Jane
died."  Her eyes glistened.  He took her old fingers and kissed
them.

"Good-bye," he said.

"We'll both hate to see ye go," she whispered.  "Take yer pay.
It's the old man's conscience money.  He's turrible ashamed.  Not
that ye didn't arn it."

"Mrs. Jorham, how would you like to have me take you around to some
of the churches and cemeteries here and translate the inscriptions
for you some day?" he said impulsively.

"Na-ow that ud jes' be LOVELY," she sighed.  "And we'll have a
keeriage."  She giggled.  Then she spilled some of the penner oil
on the captain's covers and went to bed.

Anthony got up and put the silver dollars into his chest.  When he
turned he saw the captain was looking on with satisfaction.  He
waved his hand generously in the moonlight.

"Sonny," said he, "let me tell ye suthin' about this ta-own.  Don't
ye patronize none of them places with stone benches they call
latrinas here.  Ye'll catch suthin' ul make ye think ye've been
spanked with a curry comb.  The muchachas air worse.  Na-ow in
'ninety-three . . ."  He lay back embarrassed.

Anthony waved his hand appreciatively and climbed back into his
bunk.  The penner oil was still cool on his forehead and the homely
odour of it permeated his dreams.  He felt very safe in the new
world.  Captain Jorham snored; Mrs. Jorham coughed softly.  It was
like having parents.

Very early next morning Collins came with a couple of sailors and
loaded Anthony's dunnage in the whaleboat.  Collins was taking the
first liberty party ashore.  The men were to be paid a quarter of
their wages and lined up eagerly.

Mrs. Jorham came to the rail with her knitting to say good-bye.
She and the captain looked down into the boat as it was lading,
talking with Anthony.

"You'll find me through Carlo Cibo, the factor at Regla, sir," said
Anthony.  "He's Mr. Bonnyfeather's agent here--just across the bay.
That pink house behind the stone dock, they say.  You see?"

"Aye, aye," said Captain Jorham.  "I've got my cabin supplies and
groceries from him many's the time.  Look out!  He's a bit of a
shark if he's not yer friend.  Keeps a fa-ine house for officers
boardin' on shore, or used to.  Ye won't forget the stat-oo-airy,
mister.  I'll be seein' ye soon I calalate."

"I won't forget, sir," Anthony replied looking up and smiling, "and
I have an appointment to keep with your wife, too.  All the
churches and graveyards."

"Oh-HO," chuckled the captain, "so ye HAVE, have yer?"  Both he
and Mrs. Jorham looked pleased.  "Wall, git along then."

"Shove off," roared Collins, "let fall!  Give way together."

The boat slid over the oily water of the bay that still seemed to
retain in its depths at that early hour the deep purple stain of
night.  A school of silver minnows rose and fell back like a shower
of raindrops before it.  Philadelphia stood in the shrouds waving
his apron, his face shining with a warmth superinduced by the glow
of five dollars in his pocket.  "Bes' luck, suh, bes' luck in de
world!"

Anthony stood up in the stern sheets and looked back at the
Wampanoag, a delicate tracery of spars and rigging against the rosy
city beyond.  The jolt and rumble of huge, solid-wheeled carts
drawn by oxen began to come to them from the alleys of Regla.  The
boat nosed into the stone jetty by the pink house and Anthony
jumped out onto terra firma with a little cold shiver up his spine
as his heels ground into the pebbles of the new world.

"I am going to collect what is owed to John Bonnyfeather," he said
to himself, standing still for a minute.  "Whatever comes, I am
going to get that money."  That he felt would constitute his
success.  His own eventual interest in the matter did not enter in,
he told himself.  It would all be for Mr. Bonnyfeather.

It pleased him to see that the men who piled his chests on the dock
were merely casually respectful as they would be to any other mate
going ashore.  Sorry that he was leaving the ship?  He wondered.
The young Spaniard who had released the swallow offered to stay and
watch his stuff on the dock.  Collins raised his eyebrows but
Anthony nodded.  Collins touched his hat and the boat made off for
Havana smartly.  Suddenly it stopped.  "Toss!"  The oars all
flashed into the air and stood upright.  Collins was standing up
waving his hat.  It was a nice compliment.  Anthony could have
asked nothing more.  The man on the chests grinned.

"You know Havana?" asked Anthony, turning to him as the boat sped
away again.

"Sí, sí, señor, like a Rodriguez," the man replied grinning.  "Like
you I leave the curséd ship of the heretics here.  Sí, sí, it is a
fine town.  I am your servant, señor.  I kiss your hands and feet."

Anthony laughed.  There was something about the man that he liked.
A lean, thin-faced young fellow, smooth-olive, and black-eyed, with
an orange neckcloth running down his chest like a flame.

"Very well then," said he.  "I will try you for a week at ship's
wages.  After that we shall see."

"Bueno!" cried the youth, "I am your hombre.  By the swallow I
swear it!"  He cast an invisible bird loose with his hands, kicked
his heels in the air, and lay back laughing.  To be on land again!

                            ----------

Leaving him with the chests, Anthony turned and began to walk
toward the rambling, shell-pink edifice before him.  Mr.
Bonnyfeather's letter crinkled in his pocket.  He swung his cane
and beat a lively tattoo on the wide double doors.  A stark naked,
young negro boy, not at all embarrassed by a hearty morning
erection, opened the gate.  Beyond was a wide patio full of other
naked children, mules, yellow curs, and a number of negro women
moving about in bright-coloured turbans.  An astonishing number of
pouter pigeons ran cooing about their feet, fluttered, and lit on
the shafts and spokes of several empty carts.  He beckoned to one
of the women and held up his letter with a small coin.

"For Il Signore Carlo Cibo," he said.

"The señor speaks Italian!  The master will see him then.  Wait."
She rolled up a barrel for him to sit on.

"Go long, you dirty devil!" she cried, catching the young porter
across the buttocks with a switch.  "Madre de Dios!" and she was
gone.

Anthony waited for half an hour.  Several shameless cherubs of both
sexes surrounded his barrel, looking at him with wide, brown eyes
while gnawing sugar cane.  He was finally offered some.  A little
girl swiftly swallowed the tiny coin he gave her in return.  She
was followed by the others regretfully.

"Doubtless," he reflected, "she will find it later on in safety."

A bull-like voice could now be heard bellowing from time to time in
some distant part of the buildings.  The women hustled and the
pigeons fluttered at each throaty note.  But they always settled
down again.  A last his messenger returned.

"This way, señor," she said, and led him out to the street again
and around the corner of an alley to a small yellow door with a
grille in it.  She unlocked this and took him upstairs onto a
veranda that overlooked another patio full of banana trees and
palms.  A huge man sat there in a hammock trying to comb out a mass
of tightly curled black hair.  A long, sweating, red clay jar swung
from the rafters beside him.  The woman drew up a cane chair and
vanished.  Presently the man in the hammock completed his toilet
and came forward holding out two fat, white hands.

"I am Carlo Cibo, Signore Adverse.  It is a pleasure indeed," said
he in excellent Tuscan, "to be able to speak to a compatriot."

"I have written you letters several times, signore, about Brazilian
coffee.  So our acquaintance is already one of old standing, I
believe," Anthony replied in his best professional manner.

"And will ripen into friendship I am sure," added Cibo.

They both laughed at the preciseness of it.

"Come, come," said the factor, "we are getting positively
Castilian.  'I kiss your hands and feet.'  But, aside from that,
have you had breakfast yet?  No?"

He did not wait for an answer but gave a roar that somehow included
the word "almorzar."  A parrot with a cloth thrown over it on a
stand near by took its head out from under its wing and began to
caw and cackle.  Eventually it clawed off the cloth and began to
cock its eye at Anthony.  It was the most gorgeous thing he had
ever seen.

"Almorzar solo, maestro?" said a soft feminine voice from the patio
below.

"Por dos," roared the man.

"Dos, dos, dos," cawed the parrot, preening itself.

Some children, evidently half-castes, peeped out of a room across
the veranda.  A little boy stepped out.

"Put your clothes on for the gentleman, you bastard," said Cibo
affectionately.  The boy returned, but a baby girl also in a state
of nature dashed out of the door and climbed onto the man's knees.

"Kiss my dolly, papa," she cried thrusting a costly doll dressed
like a lady of the French court into her father's teeth.  "Kiss
her."

"Ah, ha, Chiquilla!" he chuckled, tossing her up and making a loud
smack at the face of the doll.  He danced off with the doll on one
arm and the naked child on the other.  She shrieked with joy,
pulling his black curls awry and crooning over his shoulder at
every fat skip.

"Daddy Carlo," she cried looking at Anthony.  "Nice, bad daddy!"
The little boy ran out now in a shirt.

Suddenly Anthony remembered where he had seen Carlo Cibo before.
It was on an oval plaque over what had once been the door to the
old wine cellar at the Casa da Bonnyfeather.  Plump urchins were
capering after a good-natured, fat god.  A procession of them
staggered after him bearing a huge bunch of grapes.  And Carlo Cibo
was the man.  A naked child was laughing in his arm, too.  And that
fringed sash swishing over Cibo's fat buttocks cased in tight
nankeen, the gross calibre of the white linen socks ending in
small, black, varnished shoes that clicked on the veranda like
hoofs--yes, he had seen him before.

"Ha, ha," screamed the parrot, "ha, ha, wheee-ooooo."  It dragged
itself up the cane chair by its beak and perching on the back of
the settee looked into Anthony's face with a most knowing eye,
making conversational noises and clicking its beak.

Cibo came back and sat down breathless.  A purple cast slowly faded
from his face.  "Ah," he wheezed.  "I am getting a little older,
avejentado, avejentado!  It is very sad."  He fanned himself with
one hand.  The little girl still clung to him looking at Anthony.
Finally he was rewarded by her with a glittering smile.

"Ah," said Cibo kissing her.  "I like them this age.  I have many.
When they grow up I have more.  Always I have my babies to dance
with me on the veranda.  In the grocery business I can afford it."
He put the little girl down and told her to run along.

"Cuba, it is a good place.  I have done well here."  He leaned
forward and clapped Anthony on the knee.  "You should set up here
and try it, signore.  Do you know?"  He squirmed in his chair and
managed to point with his entire body to a tall mulatto girl who
was coming down the veranda with the breakfast.  "See I am already
giving you good advice."

Anthony looked up at the girl.  Under his gaze her gait altered
slightly.  A ghost of a smile was born on the lips of both of them.
He looked away telling himself it was nothing.  But Carlo Cibo's
"advice" had thrilled him.  The nights on the Wampanoag had been
lonely, he remembered.  Those dreams--about "Miss Udney."  That was
strange.  Florence, and not Angela had come to him.  Yet he had
made up his mind to be true to Angela, to remember her always.  His
eyes grew misty looking into green shadows of the banana leaves.
Cibo smiled to himself.

Breakfast had come on a little mahogany wagon.  There were two
identical trays.  On each was a brown jug of clear, black coffee,
the heart of a ripe pineapple, white loaf-sugar, which Anthony had
never seen before, and the saddle meat of some flaky, boneless fish
fried in olive oil with green peppers.  They took the trays upon
their laps and ate comfortably, Cibo with a delicacy which Anthony
could not help but notice.  His fingers played with the bright,
steel knife and the long, oval spoons skilfully.  His hands were
immaculate and white; ringless.  They would have been dainty if the
fingers had not been a little too stubby and luxurious.  The
pineapple was a dream of sunny flavour.  They lay back in their
chairs and lit mild, panetela cigars.

The sense of enjoying a delicious delusion overpowered Anthony.  He
seemed a thousand miles away from the Wampanoag and the blinding,
blistering bay.  Where was he?  How had he come here?  Cibo began
to talk in a far-off, reminiscent voice while the wreaths of blue
smoke drifted up to the ceiling from their cigars.  He fingered Mr.
Bonnyfeather's letter on the table beside him.

"You will pardon me, Signore Adverse, if I seem to have assumed too
much intimacy in what I have just said.  Your patron in this and
other letters has been very explicit and full.  He has explained to
me that you are, as it were, the junior member of his firm.  And I--
for fifteen years now, I have been the honoured agent en Habana
for the Casa da Bonnyfeather.  In vain I have tried to collect this
debt from the House of Gallego, for which I am responsible--in a
way."  He drummed on the table and faltered a little.  "Perhaps I
should begin at the beginning.

"We are both, as I understand it, under a peculiar debt to John
Bonnyfeather.  Of yours I have been told a little," he touched the
letter, "and I can guess more.  Many years ago I came here from
Livorno a ruined man.  I had been dismissed from the House of
Franchetti there in disgrace.  The chief clerk of that ancient
establishment had engaged in peculations to a great sum.  To cover
his tracks he involved some of the minor employees under him, of
whom I was but one.  I was innocent, but I could not be convincing.
With five others I was let go.  I sold a little house that had come
to me from my mother at Rosignano.  I came to Havana where in a
rash venture I soon involved what little I had.  In desperation I
wrote to Mr. Bonnyfeather, who had known me, and at whose memorable
table I had sometimes sat.  I told him my situation exactly, and
that unless I could prevail on someone to consign me a cargo on
commission I should soon perish of yellow fever in a Spanish
prison.  Signore, it was like a scene in a play.  The corchete in
his cocked hat had come for me when the news was brought that a
ship consigned to me by Mr. Bonnyfeather was lying in the bay.  I
do not believe in miracles, but that one occurred.  I disposed of
the cargo to the House of Gallego at great profit.  From that day
to this I have greatly prospered."  He knocked the long ash off his
cigar and continued even more earnestly.

"As the agent for the Casa da Bonnyfeather my reputation was made.
Other merchants from various places were also soon dealing with me.
I was cautious, and careful to remember the authorities in other
things than prayers.  After some years I became a Spanish subject
and went into the slave trade with old Señor Gallego.  Five years
of that made me richer than I have allowed anyone in Havana to
suspect.  But slaving is at best a risky business, and I have
gradually ceased to have anything to do with it.  I have cut down
all merchandising also and have gone in for nothing but the
importation of wines, table luxuries, and cabin groceries.  It
gives me a little something to do.  For some years captains and
ships' officers used to come and stay in this house, but even that
grew to be a nuisance, and I have had none here now for a long
time.  In fact, except for the luxury trade in fine groceries and
rare comestibles, the details of which a few trusted clerks manage,
I have, as you see, practically retired.  The only exception to
this has been when our good patron in Livorno consigned me a cargo.
That I have, of course, always disposed of as much to his advantage
as possible, mostly to my former partners the Gallegos.  The
profit, as you know, on merchandise for the slave trade is large,
although payment is sometimes delayed.  For various reasons, which
I shall explain to you later, the account with Gallego has become
involved.  But do not let us talk about that now.  I would say
something else.

"From what I have already said you will understand why it is that
you will have every assistance that I can offer in collecting the
sums due Mr. Bonnyfeather.  Also," he added smiling, "why it is
that YOU will stay here in my house in Regla as an honoured guest
even if you remain in Cuba a lifetime.  I should consider it as an
implication that I am destitute of gratitude should you go any
place else.  A slur on my honour!  Signore, we should have to meet!
My benefactor, I see from his letter, regards you with affection.
That is enough for me.  Besides, do not mistake me--but I believe
in first impressions--and I am disposed to be candid with you.  I
like you.  Come, come, Signore Toni," he laughed.  "Where are your
things?  Have you a servant?  Have them sent up.  Old Carlo does
not often beg."

Anthony would have replied sooner, but he was somewhat overwhelmed.
But no one could refuse to melt under the enthusiastic candour of
Cibo.  "It would be ungracious of me, signore--"  "Carlo," insisted
the man.  Anthony gulped a little.  "Carlo," said he, "to pretend
to refuse.  I am sure I am more lucky than I know.  I understand
you.  I also have a debt to Mr. Bonnyfeather--not only to collect
but to repay.  I am sure he would smile in his kindly way to know
what you have just said.  I shall write him that in Regla near
Havana is to be found what he once told me was very rare,
gratitude.  Carlo, I accept your hospitality with the same rarity."

"Bravo," cried Cibo leaning back in his chair.  "You are an orator,
friend Toni.  And a heartfelt one!  You should get along well.  I
prophesy it this lucky morning which brought you."

"Cheecha," he roared, throwing his cigar into the patio.  A quarrel
over the stump began below.

"Come, do you want to see my establishment?"  He rose suddenly from
his chair with a grunt.  "I have only one complaint with life you
see.  I am getting too fat.  It is a little difficult for me to
move one leg past the other.  I chafe.  Cheecha!"  He took off his
sash and hung it over the railing.

The girl made her appearance.

"Get me a dry sash and take these breakfast things away.  You know
they draw flies.  Tell 'Fonso to send for the gentleman's things.
From now on he lives here.  By the way, Signore Toni, where are
your chests?"

"On the dock where I landed them."

"Not unwatched, I hope.  Caramba, they will be rifled by this
time!"

"I have a man with them, a Spaniard off the ship whom I took on for
a week, perhaps rashly."

"No, no, you did well.  He can sleep below and look after you.  I
will have a look at him though.  Hurry, girl, MY SASH!"

When it came he draped it once or twice around his waist, and then
tucking a smooth fold of it between his legs he tied the end into
his belt.  "Now I can walk in comfort," said he, "the silk is
smooth and lets one fat chop pass the other."  He swished slightly
at every step as they walked down the long veranda.  "Yes, it is a
sweaty climate.  One perspires.  Come, come, after all it is much
too hot already to go over the establishment.  See, we have been
talking longer than I thought.  The sun is coming into the patio."
He leaned over the rail and began to unroll a split-cane awning
that fell like a curtain leaving them in a kind of cool, green
gloom.

"Cheecha!"

"Sí, sí, señor," replied the woman from below now a little
breathlessly.

"Take the cigar-end away from little Juan, and bring me limes and
sugar, and . . ." he collapsed into his chair again.  A roar from
the child below followed the woman's departure.  Presently the two
babies came up and began to play with the parrot.  The boy had
taken off his shirt again.

"Ah, it is best so," said his father peering down at him.  "August
in Havana, my friend!  Do you know what that means?  But, Dios,
take off your own coat!  You must forget that you have one.  You
must get linens.  A dozen suits.  You shall be measured
immediately, mañana.  No, you will not need a sash as I do--yet."

"I hope the debt will not take that long to collect, Carlo."
Already the name came easily to Anthony.--"Before I wear out twelve
linen suits . . ."

"Por Dios, you will use three suits a day or more.  Today--today in
that costume you will do nothing!  I shall do nothing.  We shall
sit here and talk, and drink, and smoke.  We shall eat and sleep.
What will be accomplished?  Much!  We shall have lived another day
comfortably.  No one can do more.  Have you ever spent a day like
that?  I bet you, not.  Try it."

"I remember doing so when I was very little," said Anthony.

"Do not remember, it requires an effort," cried Cibo, "do not
remember anything except that it is now.  Here is my recipe for
preserving the present."

By this time the girl had returned with the ingredients.  He mixed
some clear rum, sugar, and lime juice, and removing a small peg
from the hanging jar drew water.  "Here in the veranda the water
keeps always cold," he said, and dropped into the pitcher a bowl of
crushed fruit giving it a peculiar spiral shaking.  A delicate barm
appeared on the top, half effervescent.  Pomegranate juice had
tinged it red.  In each waiting glass was a coil of orange peel.
He covered this, and handing a glass to Anthony, poured a gobletful
down his own throat.

He poured it.  His throat responded rippling.  It was a drinker's
throat pliable clear down to the chest and with a good bulge to it.
Silenus, indeed, lacked only a few leaves in his hair.

Anthony sat turning over in his mouth small lumps of pineapple
reminiscent of rum.  When the breeze breathed through the veranda
now even from the street beyond it felt cool.  Safe behind the
green blinds in the cool enclave of the porch, the fierce light and
heat surrounded them, as the hours wore on, with a distinct menace.
Action of any kind became more and more impossible.  They dozed a
little, awoke, talked quietly but eagerly, and dozed again.  They
were both at home.

For Cibo had about him a gift, a physical and mental quality of
being that put you at your ease.  It was not exercised, it existed.
When it was exercised you grew merry, even hilarious.  In his house
it was impossible to be nervous or to worry about anything.  All
about you everything was quite obviously going well.  The springs
of abundance and fecundity seemed to have been tapped at some
mysterious source.  Nor did his abundance, or even a certain
careless prodigality that accompanied Carlo like a rich music
played with gusto, worry you.  It was natural and instinctive.  It
was right and spontaneous.

Cibo was not only interested in himself but in what others had to
say.  He was the prince of listeners, and therefore bore the
reputation of being a wit.  When you related an anecdote to him a
new quality was lent to memory.  The events of the past seemed to
have taken place in a halcyon glow of which, certainly up until the
time you had met Cibo, you had not been aware.  But now, as you
were talking with him, you became fully conscious of their
extraordinary significance and fine flavour.  You felt that you had
at last found the reflector of your own charming personality that
you had long been in search of; one who enhanced your experiences
without forcing you to exaggerate; one who could sympathize with
you in your own delightful and hitherto unappreciated ironies.
Yet, when you thought about it afterward, as you did when you
stepped into the now banal and garish street, you wondered.

For if you looked at Cibo casually there was only a pleasant,
curly-headed, middle-aged man with a sizable paunch seated in a
comfortable chair, a man who wore a bright silk scarf like an
alguacil.  Was it in the smooth eccentricity of the brilliant sash
that the charm was concealed?  Hardly.  Yet every person from the
Captain-General of Cuba to Cibo's latest slave just in from the Rio
Pongo and having his horny feet fitted with sandals to keep them
from blistering on the griddle stones of the patio, felt it and
expanded under it.

Despite Carlo's toast to "the present," it was the past, Italy,
Livorno, and Genoa, that they talked about after all.  With the
long pent-up eagerness of an exile there were a million things, a
thousand people, and a hundred places that Cibo wanted to know
about.  Anthony found himself, under the keen and amusing probe of
Cibo's questions, reconstructing the life of the community that he
had lived in.

Indeed, it was under such a searching that Anthony talked best.  He
had lately become aware of a certain reticence in himself that
frequently evoked confidences which he was not inclined to
reciprocate.  Perhaps it was the essential mystery of his own
origin which impressed him with the fact that in the final analysis
he could not convey who he was in any usual terms.  So, for the
most part, he listened and thought.  Yet he loved to talk, too.
And with Cibo he felt to the full the melody of his own favourite
keys.  It was--it was amusing.

Before the morning had passed he had found time to tell in full the
curious story of Captain Elisha's purchase of holy statuary at
Genoa and the queer events of the voyage out.  Cibo's belly moved
up and down at the thought of the big Madonna in the cabin clasping
to her heart a bottle of red wine.  The eery expression of a faun
laughing lengthened his jaws.  He sat up.

"Do you know," said he, "I shall have to help that skipper of yours
in disposing of his holy wares.  Between you and me, Toni, I am a
sad skeptic.  It is fortunate for me that since the occupation of
Havana by the English the Palace of the Inquisition is closed.
There are books on my shelves which even now I would not desire to
have advertised.  Did you know I was a great reader, a student even
in a desultory way, and OF COURSE a philosopher?  From what you
say of him, I agree with your friend Toussaint, though we should
differ sadly on politics.

"There is a Spanish priest in Regla who is a great friend of mine.
We have many an argument.  You must meet him.  Tonight!  It is only
upon food that we agree.  Like all Spaniards he is a provincial
heretic himself when it comes to wine--but on food, oh, on food"--
he smacked his lips--"we are both exquisitely orthodox.  So we meet
often in sweet agreement at the table.  During the past five years
we have buried our minor differences about the nature of the
spiritual world under mountains of dishes.  We understand each
other, Father Juan and I.  I call him Father Trajan.  Do you happen
to remember the busts of the Caesars, Toni?  When you see Father
Trajan you will understand.  It is that gallant old rascal of a
Spaniard come to life again.  A case of metempsychosis I insist.
It has even worried--Father Trajan.  Do you know the Catholic
doctrine of the soul?  No?  Well, it is too hot to go into it now,"
he took a long pull at the pitcher, "but it is essential.  And
Father Trajan comes from Segovia.  It is a very ancient, an old
Roman town.  Take one good look at his head when he comes.  But
don't let him see you do it.  And now where am I?--oh, yes--I will
tell you.  I shall buy that statue of the Madonna del Vino and
present it to Father Trajan's chapel, bottle and all.  It would be
an excellent jest a few years from now to ask him to look behind
her robe.  Did you say it was port?  All that time then he would
have been incensing a wine which he particularly dislikes.  Ha, by
the shade of Voltaire, I shall do it!  Let us ask your Yankee
captain to dinner tonight with Father Trajan.  All parties to the
deal will then be present.  What!  Ask the captain's lady, too?
Not so, my boy.  Why not?  A cause de la scandale, mon ami.  No, I
do not care if her face is hopeless.  In Havana gossip deals with
more basic considerations."  With the prospect of some excitement
ahead he burned up a full half inch on his fourth cigar.  After
that they slept.

Lunch came on the little wagon and was rolled away.  They did not
move much after eating it.  Carlo mixed some more planter's punch.
Outside the fierce heat threatened to sap its way into their shady
retreat.  Lime-white splotches of sunlight percolated through the
blinds.

Anthony looked down once into the patio and saw his sailor asleep
in a hammock under the dense shade of a palm.  A pickaninny was
fanning off the flies.  The only sound in the patio was the hum of
insects in the sun.  His chests had been brought up, he saw.

It was curious to think of his madonna being in this house.  In the
light of Carlo Cibo's proposed gift, for the first time in his life
he thought of her humorously.  How Cibo would laugh.  The parrot
gave him a wink and went on cracking seeds regularly.  Like too
long separated ticks of a clock they seemed to mark the passing of
a more ample kind of time; to accentuate the somnolent leisure of
the place.  His eyes lost themselves in the cool green of the date
and cocoa palms in the patio.  The lizards streaked and flicked
across the veranda.  Carlo's two little bastards got up and went
into a far corner and urinated.  They came back again, curled up
and went to sleep, the little girl with her head on her brother's
stomach.  Anthony lay back in his chair overpowered.  Somewhere far
away the huge carts were still jolting . . . somewhere . . .

At half past five the shadow of the patio wall suddenly seemed to
engulf it.  Almost instantly it was cool.  They got up; bathed.

In a high-ceilinged room furnished with bamboo furniture and a
mosquito net hanging ghostly from a suspended ring, Anthony dressed
himself in a spotless linen suit that some former guest of Cibo's
had left behind him.  The very touch of it was refreshing,
exhilarating.  After the long sleep and floods of orange juice he
felt light, very clear and cool, with a certain devil-may-care air
and a penchant for the macabre in his mood.  Downstairs the voice
of Captain Elisha could be heard rumbling true to form.  A
sonorous, clean Spanish that he took to be Father Trajan's rang
through the halls.  He heard Cibo laugh and hurried down.

They were already gathering about the table.  In this place you
seemed to do nothing but eat and sleep, and yet he was hungry.  He
found himself talking to, and at the same time half enthralled by
Father Trajan.  It was about fish.  Father Trajan would take him
fishing, mañana.  Mariana the Virgin was to be installed in Father
Trajan's chapel at Regla, the Chapel of St. Paul.  Most of Father
Trajan's parishioners were the wives of fishermen.  "Quite early
Christian in atmosphere," said Carlo, and sniffed.  Captain Elisha
did not see the point.  But it was a question whether he or the
priest was the more pleased over the affair of the Madonna.

"A good bargain for a heretic and a pious gift to the church by a
pagan--was there ever such a combination of circumstances before!"
laughed Cibo as his guests left late with everything arranged.

"Tomorrow you must certainly go fishing with the father," said Cibo
yawning.  "It will be an experience--for you.  And we can take up
that matter of the debt again.  Mañana, mañana," he stretched
himself and smiled.

"Good heavens," thought Anthony, "is the man going to sleep again?"
They both were!

"Well, how did you like your first day in Cuba?" queried Cibo?"  A
fine life, eh?"

"J'en suis ravi, monsieur," said Anthony, and meant it.

He climbed into bed and looked through his mosquito netting that
caught the broad moonlight in a silver gauze.  Outside, the guitars
and banjos were still going here and there.  A strange, sickly,
sweet odour of some blossom opening in the moonlight outside his
window in the patio drifted in to him.  He wished that Florence . . .
that Angela were with him now.  How it WOULD be--both of them!

What had done this?  Was it Havana?  Or was it Carlo Cibo's wine?
Mañana, mañana!  Oh, rare new world!




CHAPTER THIRTY

THE MIRACLE IN THE CHAPEL OF ST. PAUL, REGLA


Wrapped in one of Mrs. Jorham's patchwork quilts the Madonna del
Vino, as Carlo persisted in calling her when Father Trajan was not
around, was delivered early in the morning at the side door of the
bare Chapel of St. Paul in the suburb of Regla.

Collins and some of his crew brought her and took the crazy quilt
away again.  Carlo, Father Trajan, and Anthony were on hand, each
with a very different thought in his heart, as the Virgin was set
on the stone floor and unveiled by the rough sailors.

A mason had already slung his scaffold and was preparing to install
the statue in the niche behind the altar, where a poor little
plaster figure without either beauty or prestige had long been the
despair of Father Trajan.

Carlo was surprised by the serene beauty of the figure.  In the
shadows of the chapel the bright blue of her cloak was toned down
until it fell in folds about her like memories of evening.  He kept
taking Father Trajan back a little distance "to give perspective"--
and to prevent any chance of the priest's peering accidentally into
the deep folds of the mantle.

The truth was, Cibo would have been ashamed to have had the wine
bottle discovered now.  It would look as if he had put it there.

Father Trajan was much touched by the gift; secretly mollified for
many a remark of his table companion and sly dig at "the
superstitions of the age."  Now he would be able to obtain a grand
indulgence from the bishop for Cibo.  His friend's sins should be
forgiven him.  And there would be great joy amid the simple
parishioners when their new Virgin was consecrated.

Perhaps it was a little irregular to have the mason put her in the
niche this morning without notifying his superiors.  But after all
this was his parish.  What possible objection could there be?  And
he would be able to beg a new cassock now for his acolyte.  The
present one was almost scandalous.  Hey-ho! there would not be a
more beautiful Madonna in Havana.  He knelt down before her on the
pavement and made a little prayer silently.


"Mother of God, we are very simple and poor people who come to the
Chapel of the blessed apostle.  We must serve thee with our hearts
rather than with our gifts.  Forgive, and be merciful, gracious
Mary.  The candles are not of the best.  But thou livest in the
light of the Father.  Reflect his radiance upon us.  Fill the nets
of those who kneel before thee here with fish.  And remember thy
servant who is a fisher of men, and Brother François, who is
digging roots now in my garden.  Reward him for his merciful heart,
as thou art merciful, santa Madre de Dios."


He crossed himself and rose.

"Come, come, Carlo," whispered Anthony.  "You must never say a word
about that wine.  Did you see the father's face as he prayed?  You
must promise me.  It would be cruel.  I should feel I had
compounded at a sacrilege."

"Perhaps you are right," said Cibo.

"Perhaps!" said Anthony.

"Well, well, rest easy," retorted Cibo.  "I shall not try to be
funny by being cruel.  The priest is my friend, you know.  We are
really fond of each other.  My gift was kindly meant, too.  We
shall just forget that the bottle is there.  After all that is
nothing but a silly accident.  WE are not responsible for it.  I
might get the mason to remove it."

They were standing outside the little door by now talking in low
voices.

"Let it go," said Anthony.  "There would be awkward questions.  Let
well enough alone."  Cibo nodded but a little whimsically.

"A hundred years from now some curious verger will find some
remarkable port.  I would like to come back and be that man."  He
smacked his lips.

Inside the chapel Father Trajan and the workman lifted the Madonna
into her niche reverently.

"And mind you," said the priest, "I want the new stucco, where you
have had to remove the old, smooth, and coloured like the rest of
the walls.  You can decorate the panel below, can't you--a little?
I should like that."

"Sí, sí, padre, for two years now I have been working at the
decorations in the cathedral."  With the point of his heavy trowel
he began to indent rapidly a deft little intaglio design of vines
and flowers along the base.  He leaned back, looking down from the
scaffold for approval.

"You may go on," said the priest.  "But STOP--the cost!"

"I have been well paid by the generous señor grocer," the man
admitted a little reluctantly.  "A few more adobe flowers--" he
shrugged his shoulders.  "For a few prayers for my mother I will
add the whole vine."

"One for each leaf," said the padre.  "An acanthus.  You know?"

"Sí," muttered the man.  He began to mix.

"Do not forget to drop something in the box for the poor, my
friend," said the father as he left to rejoin Carlo and Anthony.

"Ah!  It is difficult to bargain with the clergy," muttered the
mason to himself.  "But I shall have the best of this bargain yet.
Grow, vine!  Burgeon my mother out of purgatory!"  The point of his
trowel and one finger flew.  A delicate acanthus tendril with a
thousand leaves began to unroll itself across the smooth face of
the panel at the Virgin's feet.  Outside, the voices of Father
Trajan and his companions died away.  The chapel was very close and
still.

The mason worked diligently and fast.  From time to time he laid
down his trowel and wiped the sweat out of his eyes.  At ten
o'clock he got down from the scaffold and quenched his thirst at a
cantina near by.  He returned a little unsteady and went on.  The
tendril of leaves was almost done now.

He modelled the last fine spray of closed buds with his thumbnail
and fingers.  The scaffold shook slightly.  The trowel which he had
laid aside crept nearer the edge.  Now--all but the last bud!  He
indented it in the stucco.  Suddenly there was a clink, a tinkle,
and the sound of gurgling fluid.  The man looked about him
uneasily, but he could see nothing amiss.  Well, he would scrape up
now and go.  Caramba!  His trowel was gone!

He hunted for it for some time.  It was not on the floor.  It was
not on the altar, under it or beside it.  It was not on the
scaffold.  He took that down.  It had not fallen into the mortar
bucket.  He removed his dripping hand and sloshed it off in
disgust.

"Madre de Dios!"  And a nice, new, little trowel well balanced with
lead he had let into the handle himself!  One would think those
little sneak-thieves and naked gamins would stay out of a church.
He had had a pious mother, thank God!  A fine generation it was
getting to be with the Inquisition suppressed!

He left, staggering away under a pile of buckets and scaffolding on
his back.

                            ----------

In the meanwhile Father Trajan's little party had threaded their
way through the fishing quarter of Regla to his house on the water
front.  A small coral point projected into the bay, and there amid
feathery trees at all angles, for the place was swept by winds at
certain seasons, lay the priest's house bowered in green and
surrounded by flowers and shrubs.  Over the wall across the neck of
land Anthony could see another priest hoeing vegetables in the
garden, a spare, distinguished looking man in the robes and sandals
of a Franciscan who evidently belonged to the Pauvres.

They walked into an alley of hibiscus mad with morning bloom, where
the scarlet flowers seemed to hiss at them with their protruding,
yellow-tipped tongues.  They tramped through the gloom of the house
and out of a blue square of doorway on the other side of it into
Father Trajan's dooryard.  Few who visited the priest were prepared
for the pure loveliness of that little spot.  It occupied the last
few hundred yards, the very tip of the point of land.  The house
which lay directly across the narrow promontory screened it
effectively from the town.

Here through the long years of undisturbed administration of his
little parish Father Trajan had gradually brought back from his
inland rambles every species of palm, fern, flowering bush, and
vine that had pleased his vernal fancy as his eye had ranged over
the estates and jungles of the Pearl of the Antilles.  The gift of
a rare flowering plant was to him more welcome than alms.  Then
too, his fishermen had brought him living shells for his beach and
curious sponges and sea ferns for his coral caves.  He had the gift
of planting.  Nearly everything he put down in either earth or
water was soon at home.

Viewed from his bayside doorway, the result was what seemed to be a
natural garden.  The eye flattered itself and fell back tired with
delight from the purple mass of a royal piñon to rest in a cool bed
of ferns.  Satiny lilies of plain and mottled colours looked at one
from unexpected spots.  There were smouldering clumps of anemones
sprouting from cavities in the coral rock.  Hanging from palms of
unexpected shapes were orchids no one could have imagined, and
against the faded coral-pink of the house itself bloomed four lusty
trees of yellow, Moorish roses.

Yet, although every one of these things, except a few giant trees,
had been planted by the padre, the place was still enchantingly
wild.  The glow of colour gradually ceased as the glance swept out
to the point.  Here was nothing but shadowy-green open spaces under
wide-stretching date palms, waving ferns, and finally, grass; grass
cut off clean and suddenly by the white circle of a tiny, moon-
shaped cove.

"El paradiso del padre," said Cibo waving his hand.

"Ah, friend Carlo, you must let me praise this myself," cried
Father Trajan, nevertheless colouring a little with pleasure at the
compliment.  "It is my one vanity.

"Come, señor," he continued, turning to Anthony, "I can see by your
face that you will listen to me while I talk of my flowers.  You
have eyes to see, and you see!  And there are some other things I
must show you.  We have an agreement to go fishing this morning,
too.  Carlo, will you join us?"

"What, broil myself for a basket of stupid fish I can buy for a
peso!" exclaimed Cibo with genuine horror.  "You know me better.  I
am for the veranda and my patio.  But go along, my boy, do not let
me prevent you.  You had best take my palm leaf hat.  Adiós then,"
he cried, doffing his hat with a wry face and exchanging it for
Anthony's Leghorn which was too small for him.  "And good luck.
There will be turtle for luncheon," he called back.  "Plenty for
both of you.  Never mind bringing the fish!"

"A heart of gold goes there," said the padre looking wistfully
after Cibo.  "What a pity that he injures his soul by the poor
thoughts of his head.  One should leave such matters to the church.
But pardon, señor, you are of the true faith, I trust."

"I was raised in a convent, padre," said Anthony, secretly dodging
the issue.  What faith had he now?  He wondered.  He felt the key
to his chest in his pocket--locked away there--safely?

"Oh, well then," said Father Trajan, as if there were a logical
connection, "come, let me show you my fish ponds."

They walked down a narrow, wandering path toward the point.

"But look," cried the padre stopping suddenly at the top of a small
knoll, "look!  You can just see it from here."

A low cloud seemed to be spreading itself along and below the tidal
bench that hid the beach from their eyes on the far side of the
point.  It looked as if a purple-tinged wisp of dawn mist had been
blown loose from its cloud-bank and had caught on the tip of the
little promontory that morning.

"I cannot imagine what it is," confessed Anthony.  Father Trajan
looked pleased.

"Hurry.  It is really worth seeing," he said.  "The most wonderful
thing in the island, I believe."

Their path led through a reach of tropical bracken and suddenly
emerged on the beach where a fishing boat was drawn up.  Here along
a low cliff for a surprising distance either way flaunted and
burned a giant Bougainvillea vine.  Where it had not climbed over
the wind-carved pillars of coral rock and pre-empted the
neighbouring trees and bushes, it was supported by the deck beams
and ribs of an old hulk.  This, stripped of its planks and half
buried in the sand, had become a gorgeous pergola.  There were
seats here and there beneath it; even a low cairn on which nets
were spread to be dried and mended.  From the smooth, bleached sand
of the natural floor below, the tremendous organ note of the vine's
resounding mass of colour was reverberated back again in a deep
imperial glow that harmonized ethereally with the body of bloom
above.

Farther under the pergola were stained glooms of purple and magenta
that shaded off near the front, where the glare of the beach
penetrated, into dim violet shimmers to be seen only when you
looked into the place directly.  Sidewise they lost themselves
beyond the range of vision into the colourless substance of the
air.  Yet even there Anthony felt them to be still going on.  They
might be faintly electric and account for something having raised
his goose-flesh.  Or they might have been transmuted into a rolling
sound.  For it was impossible to stand before this Bougainvillea
and think of it as a purely silent experience.  It had about it the
quality of a muffled kettle drum; of continuous, distant, tropical
thunder.

It was some moments before Anthony became aware of the fact that
Father Trajan seemed to be looking at the vine through his own
eyes.  For the priest was gazing at Anthony as if lost in the
expression of the young man who had gone a little pale under his
tan.  He stood wrapped in the vision.

"But who wouldn't be?" he thought.  "It is all I have felt and
dreamed about Cuba spoken in one word," he cried aloud.

"There are many ineffable thoughts like that in the forest, señor,"
said the padre quietly, "but none more beautiful.  To think of it!
I have been permitted to plant and tend this one with my own
hands!"  He held them up as if they did not belong to him but were
mere tools that had been lent him.  "Come under the leafy roof and
look up.  It makes even heaven more wonderful.  Indeed, I cannot
begin to say what I think about it.  You will understand that."

They went under the pergola and immediately transfigured
themselves.  Anthony began to look about him half unbelieving.  It
was then, and in that place, that for the first time he saw Brother
François face to face.

                            ----------

Seated, leaning back against a pile of old fish nets in a far
corner of the place, where he had at first escaped their notice,
was a barefooted monk in the brown garb of a Franciscan.  The robe
was brown in the sunlight, but in the light that filtered through
the pergola it had about it the tinge of old blood.  The man rose
as soon as he saw himself discovered and came forward courteously.
There was something distinguished and a little aloof about his
carriage and walk, even an austerity.  But no one could imagine
being repulsed by him after a single glance at his face.  On it was
stamped hauntingly the rare expression of one whose strong
sweetness of character had turned the indubitable marks of great
sorrow into a kind of holy joy.  Sympathy with him was evidently
both a wise and a strong passion.

"I would like to know how one can look like that," thought Anthony.
"He is not happy like a fool."

"Ah, Brother François, we have disturbed you I fear," said the
priest.  "We have found you out."

"Neither, I assure you, padre," said Brother François smiling.
"When I saw you were having visitors I slipped back here to my
favourite retreat.  It was my hour of contemplation, but that is
over now.  It is time again to commune with human friends.  May I
introduce myself?"

He stepped forward and did so with a charm that put even the padre,
who was somewhat awkward about such things, at his ease.  It was
the "monsieur" instead of the "señor" which gave Anthony his cue,
and he replied in French.

At the sound of that tongue a sombre delight smouldered in the
monk's eyes . . .  "and so it will be pleasant to chat a little in
French, if you will," said Anthony.  "The Spanish comes as yet only
practically.  The other world must be left out for me in that
language as yet."

"This one?" asked the monk half seriously, touching his forehead.

Anthony nodded.  "I am afraid so."  He noticed Brother François
continued to look at him keenly.  It was a little embarrassing, for
his eyes seemed full of a banked fire that might break into flame.

"You learned your French at Blois, didn't you?  It is an excellent
kind they speak there.  At Blois, I am sure.  Perhaps I have seen
you before?  Just now I felt certain of it."

"I have never been to France," said Anthony greatly pleased.  "My
master was, I believe, from some place on the Loire.  I am from
Livorno.  At least I was born there."

"Then I could never have known you.  Ah!  I remember now what it
is.  Yes, that IS curious!  But, your pardon, monsieur, it is
nothing but a remembrance I will not trouble you with.  And so you
are going fishing with the padre, I see.  I envy you.  He and I are
both fishers."

The padre was indeed already beginning to gather together his
tackle but several articles seemed missing.  With some annoyance
visible on his face he excused himself to return to the house for
the missing things.

Anthony and Brother François sat down under the arbour.

Evidently the opportunity to converse in French was a precious one
to the monk.  In the familiar accents of his own tongue he became
ardent and even confidential.  They exchanged news.  Anthony was
soon comparing notes with Brother François while mentally composing
a long pondered letter to Toussaint on the subject of the French
Revolution.  And here he found to his fascination was a man who had
been in the thick of it, one who had actually seen Robespierre.

There was something almost occult about this monk.  He stirred you
strangely.  He removed your reticences for he seemed to have none
himself.  It would be possible, very easy--there seemed to be a
spiritual compulsion upon one to succumb to his spell. . . .

"So you see, monsieur, I am after all not an émigré in the usual
meaning of the word.  To preach the gospel and really to live like
Christ--it was not more dangerous in Paris during the Terror than
it is here and now.  All of us who do that are exiles.  We are
merely passing through the strange countries of the world going
home to our Father.  In our souls is all of his kingdom that will
ever be here.  Yet just for that reason it might be everywhere and
now.

"I am not making you a homily, monsieur, or talking about myself.
You will pardon my excitement.  It is the remembrance of the past
few years in Paris that comes across my view.  One cannot, if one
knows, speak of them merely with the kitchen voice, 'Thérèse, a
little more gumbo in the soup!'--no, no,--that will not do.  That
is worse than being exquisite or gay about it.  Also I do not speak
to crowds or in them, whether in the plaza or dans l'eglise.
Always it is to the man, or to the woman or the child that I come,
and not always with words.  Man, mankind, the state, virtue, the
people, justice, fraternity--what are they?  Words that do not
correspond to anything but philosophers' dreams.  They are the worn
out table-talk of Greece and Rome.  Liberty?

"Monsieur Antoine, for two years I followed the tumbrils and I
stood on the scaffold.  I saw the keen knife of liberty fall and
rise to fall again, and each time on an individual's neck.  That is
the way of the state.  And those hundreds of eyes!  They looked
down into the basket at the eyes there that looked back.  It was
unthinkable that what lay in the basket was the end.  Those who
thought so died there, indeed.  For those who turned to me for some
confirmation of hope, I then shared what I had given me, the
Comforter.  Robespierre himself could not prevent it.

"Do you know I went to see that man.  Mais oui!  At the little
house of the cabinet-maker in the Rue St. Honoré--in April only two
years ago.  It seems a century ago.  It was the day after Danton,
Camille Desmoulins, and the others had passed under his window in
the carts.

"The two ruffians who guarded the tyrant came to the door when I
knocked.  I asked for Duplay, the furniture-maker, and got him to
carry my name to the little man upstairs.  Robespierre knew me.  We
both came from Arras.  My family was a very great one.  Monsieur
would know its name.  Robespierre knew that I might have been a
bishop but that I went into the country instead as a parish priest.
You see we had both read Rousseau together.  I remembered when de
Robespierre was a provincial dandy who read bad verses before the
'Rosati' at Arras.  He had a sweet voice then, and he had resigned
a criminal judgeship to avoid pronouncing a death sentence.  Think
of it!  It was the same voice that I afterwards heard raised in the
Convention, 'It is with regret that I pronounce the fatal truth,
Louis must die that the country may live!'  Ah, he was full of
regrets like that.  But anyway I was shown upstairs.

"He and Fleuriot-Lescaut were seated together.  Robespierre looked
very white.  The great voice of Camille Desmoulins shouting the
prophecy of his death under his window the day before had shaken
him.  I saw that he was afraid.  He was still the little dandy in
knee-breeches, silk socks, and powdered hair.  He turned down a
paper with a list of names on it that he and Lescaut were talking
over and looked up.

"'Well, citizen?' he said, 'what is it?  Ah!  I remember you now.'
He tried to smile.  That was terrible.

"'I have a very simple proposition to make to you,' I replied.
'You must be very sick of all this blood-letting and of being the
god of Catherine Théot.  Is it not so?  See where your philosophic
virtue has led you!  You will have to kill us all.  You alone will
remain, for soon you will be the only one who knows how to practise
virtue.  Another plan is needed.  I speak to you, FOR you, not
for France or any other dream, but for your own soul.  You believe
that is immortal?'

"'What do you propose, citizen?' Robespierre said.  He leaned
forward and looked at me with hungry eyes and a thin smile.

"'Simply that you leave this room now and come with me into the
country.  You can change your name and disappear.  Then we can go
about the world just as Christ would have done, doing good.  We
need nothing.  We need make no speeches or sermons.  Let us just go
out and let things happen to us as they will, and try to help and
comfort any man, woman or child who needs it.  Let us be kind, a
brother to this man and that.  Let us persuade no one, but pass on
taking whatever road lies before us and leaving a good deed done in
Christ's name wherever and whenever we can.  That is all.  It is an
old and simple plan, to do good to men with the spirit of God upon
one.  Do you not see by this time that it is the only plan that
will work?  Leave everything and follow me.  You remember that?'

"'Why do you come here to me, and TODAY, with a suggestion like
this?' he asked.  'Do you not know that France is pressed down upon
my shoulders, the hope of saving France, of the world!'  He got up
and moved about with Fleuriot-Lescaut gaping at him.

"'But you are mad,' he flung at me.  'You have lost relatives.  You
are an aristocrat, a ci-devant count.'

"'That is not so, citizen.  You know that even before the
Revolution I became a parish priest.  No, no, it is not I that am
mad.  I come to you because you are an idealist of sincerity.  I
can see that.  And you are wrong, you have chosen the wrong way to
help the world.  You are working through the state and through
institutions.  You have made reason your divinity.  See what it is
doing to make men divine.  You know.  Still within you, YOU
KNOW!'

"He made a furious gesture but I kept on.

"'You can disembarrass yourself of all this, citizen.  There is a
way to do good and to save yourself by forgetting yourself.  I have
found it.  I am living it, and it is in me.  Come!  Let the
Republic flourish as it may.  The Kingdom of God is just beyond the
door.  Leave Robespierre here, my brother, and come with me.'

"Many that I have spoken to thus, monsieur, have been greatly
surprised.  Under all that they pretend to be and through all their
bafflements I talk to THEM.  They see the way opening before
them.  In truth most men have thought of it.  But the world is too
much for them.  They keep their loss.  Prudence insists on just a
few chains to hold them fast to something tangible.  So they remain
anchored on their reef to be pounded to pieces on it when the tide
of life ebbs.  It was so with Robespierre.  For a minute he saw, he
remembered, he dared hope again.  Then his face worked, and I
thought he would spring at me.

"Monsieur, if Fleuriot-Lescaut had not given a great laugh just
then I should have been guillotined.  I believe in my heart he was
a merciful man.  His laugh saved me.

"'Come, citizen,' he said, 'have this simple fool thrown out.
Disembarrass yourself, as he says.  We have not time here to
argue with a mad parish saint.  A cabbage head,' he roared, 'a
green cabbage!'  He pretended to kick me downstairs.  I saw the
tyrant standing at the top with the list still in his hand.  It was
the first time he had laughed in weeks, I suppose.  I did make an
unfortunate noise falling down the stairs.  But do you know I still
think--almost I won.  'Almost thou persuadest me,' his eyes seemed
to say, and his hands shook.  But God had another way.  I only
offered myself as an instrument.  Did you see the padre when he
held up his hands and said they had been PERMITTED to tend this
glorious vine?  I heard that, too.  Ah! the padre is a poet.  A
thought of God he called his vine.  Well, it is best to think of
all of yourself as the padre thinks of his hands.  You will see
then how thoughts of God flourish."

He looked up so that the violet tinge of the light filtering
through the vine fell full on his face.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the impression which this
narrative had made on Anthony.  It seemed as if Brother François
had been pleading with him.  It was not so much what the monk had
said as how he said it.  Here was a man with an obviously
complicated knowledge and experience who was living by and pleading
for a great simplicity.  The manner of an aristocrat and a courtier
had been transmuted in him into a noble directness, a wise humility
that was without fear.  There was an ease about him that sprang
from an assurance which did not annoy you.  You simply understood
that he was at one with himself and the world.  Here was passion at
rest and yet potential.

"Follow me!"  Yes, follow along the way that child which the
madonna held in her arms had followed into manhood, into something
beyond, into the glory like the violet light on Brother Fraçois's
face.  Ah! what a way!  That was what the madonna was holding out
to you always in her arms--the child and his way.  The most simple
and direct one after all.  Why had he never realized that before?
What the monk had said had brought it home to him as a possible
experience.  Father Xavier had told him to think of the child.  He
saw what he meant now, he thought.  To take up your cross and . . .
THAT was not clear.  Anthony had no cross.  Life was delightful.
Like the light under this arbour, beautiful, and colourful, and
clear.  Was not his private communion with the madonna enough for
him?  And yet she was holding forth something else to him,
something that was very precious to her.  Yet she would share it.
It was a gift she seemed to hope you would take.

Yes, it meant that.  Religion was not merely to refrain, and to
worship, "to talk at night," as he used to call it.  He smiled and
he sighed too.  No, it was a way.  Had he really been travelling
that way?  Brother François had.  By his overtones he seemed to
make the music of that road clear.  The road was life along which
he went doing good.  Had he been pleading for a companion?  Why not
join him, Anthony?  It would all be simple and all very clear.  The
responsibility would be God's.

Simple things appeal sometimes even to complicated young men.
Anthony sat with his head on his hand looking at Brother François.

"Thou knowest," said the priest very quietly, "to whom I have been
talking.  Hast thou heard me?"

"Yes, I have understood," said Anthony.  But he could go no
further.

Brother François waited a while.  "Well, then--you have understood,"
he said.  "That is the beginning.  You must wait until you also
feel.  It is experience I mean.  Then you will know, and then . . .
then the answer will be yours to make and the road yours to take.
But I see that it is not now.  Only remember what I have said, if
you can, when the time comes.

"Ma foi!" he looked up suddenly breaking the tension between them,
"the sun is already overhead.  You will not be going fishing THIS
morning.  This morning is no more.  What can have detained the
padre?  He is--well, he is a fisherman, and there must have been a
reason.  Let us go and see."

They rose and sauntered down the path toward the house.  It was
very hot now.  Even under Cibo's palm leaf hat Anthony could feel
the exact spot of the sun.  The little suburb of Regla that lay
before them seemed extraordinarily quiet.  It was already absorbed
in its siesta.  Not even a cart jolted.  Suddenly with a startling
clangour the bell in the chapel began to ring.

"What can it be?" said Brother François wonderingly, as the excited
clangour continued.  "It is like an alarm."  They quickened their
pace and entered the house.  Father Trajan was leaning against the
jamb of his street door listening in a puzzled way.  He looked up
when they came in.

"Pardon, señor, for my not returning.  I will explain it shortly.
I was detained.  Mariana!  What I cannot explain now is the ringing
of my chapel bell.  Possibly someone has been drowned."

Already they could hear the sound of running feet in the alleys
beyond the hedge.  "Ah, I am afraid that is what it is.  See, here
they come now to fetch me."  A look of sadness overspread his
features.  "I had best get the oil, I suppose.  Who can it be this
time?"  He sighed.

Two women made their appearance at the gate breathless, and
calling, "Padre, padre!"

"Ah, what is it, Juana, my poor soul?" said the padre from the next
room with apprehensive sadness.

"Padre, padre," clamoured the two fisherwomen now at the door, "a
miracle has occurred!"

"A what?" said the padre.

"A miracle," clamoured the woman.

"Yes, yes, by the blood of God it is true!" bawled the other.

"What is all this silly excitement about?" said the priest coming
out of the room indignantly with the viaticum still in his hand.
"What are they ringing the bell of my chapel for?"

"A miracle," shouted both of the women.  "There is a new Madonna in
the chapel and . . ."

"Foolish women, I know it," countered the priest.  "Did I not see
her brought there this morning myself?  It is the pious gift of . . ."

"But she is bleeding!  Her merciful heart is bleeding red blood
drop by drop on the altar!  We have seen it!  A great crowd is
already there watching.  It is a blessed miracle from God!"

"Sí, sí, padre!  Sí, sí, it is true!  Come and see for yourself.
Juana and I, we alone have remembered to come and tell you."  They
stood crossing themselves and trembling.

"Come, padre, let us see what this is all about," said Brother
François.  "I thank you, my friends."  But the women had gone.

They hurried after them as fast as they could.  The town was
already alarmed by the bell.  People dashed past them toward the
chapel.  A good deal of confused shouting could be heard here and
there as the winds of rumour blew.

When they arrived at the door of the building it was already full
and a crowd was seething about the entrance.  With great difficulty
a way was made for the padre and his friends.  Inside the place was
silent.  Only the heavy breathing of the crowd and the clamour of
the bell above was audible.  Anthony could see that those near the
altar were on their knees while those further back were craning
their heads and staring as if fascinated.  All were looking in one
direction.

He became separated from the others and finally found himself
pressed back against the side wall.  Only after some difficulty
could he manage to get a glimpse of the front of the church.
Father Trajan was already before the altar kneeling.  Anthony saw
there was a red stain upon it.  The bell had stopped now.  You
could have heard a pin drop.  Suddenly there was a plop, a
distinct drip like falling water.  The stain on the altar ran over
and dripped onto the floor.  A universal sigh went up from the
whole place.  He raised his eyes to the statue in the niche above.
Some time passed.  Then he saw it himself.  Something trickled out
of the cloak of the virgin and splashed onto the altar.  In the
candlelight it was red, and it did look like blood.  The bell began
to clamour again madly.

Father Trajan turned to face his chapel, now jammed from wall to
wall.  Here everybody who could was kneeling.  He burst into the
"Magnificat."

A great thrill of joy ran through the crowd.  The simple faces of
fishermen, labourers, and negroes looked up at the miraculous
statue, filled with ecstasy and awe.  The face of Father Trajan was
glorified.  It shone with a proud benignity and utter conviction.

"In his own chapel!" Anthony thought.  "Poor man!  I should have
let Carlo take it away.  I did not think THIS would happen."

He assured himself he was innocent, but his heart smote him sorely.
There was not one unbelieving face present.  "Now," he told
himself, "no one must ever know.  I will see to that.  What a seed
Captain Jorham planted that night!  A miracle!"

Then, terrible as it was, he wanted to laugh.  Struggling with
himself in the intense excitement and the stifling atmosphere, for
the first and last time in his life he felt hysterical.  He wanted
to laugh and cry as the women were already doing.

The bell burst forth again into a mad peal.  Outside there was a
renewed shouting.  The whole town would soon be there.  How could
he get out?  The side door!  He looked across the chapel.  Standing
wedged helplessly against a pillar so that he seemed to tower above
those who knelt around him was the tall frame of Brother François.
He was looking with an expression of intense pity and sympathy at
the hundreds of faces staring ecstatically at the magical clay
breast of the Madonna del Vino.

An hour later Anthony finally gained the door.  The "miracle" was
still going on.

Wine seeps slowly through terra cotta.




CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

A DECENT MAMMALIAN PHILOSOPHY


It was about three o'clock when Anthony finally succeeded in
returning to Carlo Cibo's.  He had won his way out of the chapel
literally inch by inch, and he was tired and exhausted.  Whether
the heat or the excitement were the more intense would be hard to
say.  Already the news had spread far and wide.  Boats, carriages,
and caballeros were coming in from Havana.  The cantinas of Regla,
he observed, were doing a roaring business.  But in the patio all
was shade and quiet.  Carlo was asleep on the veranda in his chair,
his short legs dangling.

"Wake up, Carlo," said Anthony.  "A miracle has occurred.  Aren't
you ashamed, you old heathen, to be asleep while such things are
going on?"  It was some time before Carlo could be made to
comprehend.  When he did his belly moved up and down so fast as
finally to stop his laughing from sheer physical discomfort.  He
lay back in his chair and continued to snort with his hands on his
sash.

"Miracles should not be permitted to occur in the summer," he said
at last.  "They are dangerous to people like myself.  It is hard on
the heart.  I shall take it up with the ecclesiastical authorities.
Unfortunately the archbishop, who is a friend of mine, lives at
Santiago.

"But," continued he sitting up and laying his hand on his lips,
"seriously, let me tell you, my boy, you and I must keep a close
mouth about this.  If we are questioned we must know nothing.
NOTHING--do you understand?

"There will be a tremendous to-do over the affair.  The bishop in
Havana may even be annoyed with Father Trajan for being a little
too up and coming.  Or he may suspect me when he hears I am the
donor of the miraculous image.  He is no fool I can tell you, that
old man.  So mum's the word.  There will undoubtedly be an official
inquiry, depositions before notaries, and all that kind of thing.
The whole town is a witness.  But they won't press it too far I
feel sure.  It falls too pat into their hands.  With the population
on both sides of the bay stirred up it will be impossible, silly to
deny it.  There would be riots.  No, no, it will be confirmed.  As
you say--'A miracle has occurred!'"  He lay back again breathless.

"Cheecha!"

"Sí, sí."

"More limes and rum, mucha, mucha!  Turtle soup for the señor.
Hurry, delay not, haste!  The soup hot, with much fat, and sliced
limes.  Go!

"Ah, Madre de Dios, what a day!  Did I not say you were lucky,
Señor Toni?  See--you reek with luck!"  He spread out his fat hands
over the pitcher with utter conviction.  Even the lime peel dangled
from his fingers convincingly.

"And the curious thing about it is that this time all the
depositions and witnesses will be honest.  The poor bishop will
really be confused by that.  The miracle should have taken place at
the cathedral in Havana which they are just now redecorating.  The
bones of Columbus were brought there only last January.  But the
Madonna bleeds at Regla, in 'the suburb across the bay'!  All the
rules for miracles are disregarded."

A leer came into his eye.  "The future of Regla is made.  Peons
from Moron to Guanes will be making pilgrimages.  My house is
already twice as valuable as when you arrived . . .  Signore, I
thank you!  You are a public benefactor.  Por Dios, the rest of the
holy cargo of El Capitan Jor-HAM will now sell for ransoms!  Even
the black robes who are now lying low at Belén will scramble for
it.  A plain padre will have beaten them.  It is--it is simply
magnificent!  I drink your illustrious health."  He tilted an
entire pitcher of drink down his throat.  His voice came out of the
deep receptacle like an echo from a cave.

"Are you sure," said he, "your friend the captain does not remember
about his bottle?"

"I am certain," Anthony assured him.

The pitcher gurgled with a satisfied note.  Its angle became more
acute.  "How do you suppose," continued its sepulchral tones, "that
the bottle was broken?"

"A jar when the statue was put in place, perhaps," mused Anthony,
"or possibly some carelessness on the part of the mason.  But I
really don't know.  Do YOU?" cried he, suddenly suspicious.

"No, no," replied Carlo coming out of his eclipse with genuine
solicitude--and the mark of the pitcher on his face.  "I tell you I
had nothing to do with it.  I suspect it WAS the mason.  I had
already thought of that.  But it must have been an accident as you
say.  He would not tell.  I'll tell you what.  To make this miracle
beyond cavil you must again make sure of Captain Jorham.  Leave the
fragments of the bottle and the mason to me.  Tonight, late, I will
make sure of both.  I know a way.  They will examine the statue, of
course, and within a day or two.  Father Trajan--we are both
thinking of him, I know--dear man, he shall have his miracle
without a cloud.  When the confirmation comes from the archbishop I
shall give the finest dinner that Cuba has ever seen.  It too will
be a miracle.  You are the first invited."

"An invitation is the best way to make a witness remember.  I
noticed that at Mr. Bonnyfeather's table.  Invited guests never
forget," said Anthony.  He wondered if all events for Cibo
inevitably resulted in more and better food.

"I have known even UN-invited guests to remember my dinners,"
smiled Cibo.  "But that is really one of the greatest compliments a
host can receive.  I'll tell you what!  We shall have you, and
Captain Jorham, and Father Trajan--and myself . . ."

"And Brother François?" added Anthony impulsively.

"Ah, yes, the Frenchman!  He IS interesting.  Did you know he is
already in hot water with the authorities here for being a little
too literal in his ideas of what Christ would have one do for
slaves?  He goes about nursing poor people with yellow fever and
soothing the dying whether they are white or black.  It is over the
black that the trouble comes in, of course.  It scarcely does, you
know, after what has just happened in Santo Domingo, to have a man
like that loose.  The niggers might get the idea that God is sorry
for them.  Not in Cuba with a Spanish governor and garrison!  Did
you know the captain-general sent his aide to ask me to look the
man up?  Well, I did.  He has an interesting story I can tell you!
A little too interesting, and not regular enough.  I don't think
he'll be here long," said Cibo drawling a little.  He began to mix
more punch.

"Carlo, he is harmlessly extraordinary, isn't he?  Brother François
is a holy man if there ever was one," exclaimed Anthony.  "What
harm has he done?"

"Oh, he has been talking with you, I see," said Cibo.  His face
suddenly became quite serious.

"Yes, I agree with you, Toni.  Brother François IS a holy man.
That is the trouble.  He is not merely content to perform in the
ritual of the church.  He is one of your complicated primitives, a
man who has penetrated behind the scenery of religion, one who
intends to live the story which the ritual is supposed to
illustrate.  You see, he does not attack or interfere with the
drama.  That makes it a little difficult for his superiors.  He
does not provide them with an excuse to abolish him or thrust him
out.  On the contrary, as far as I can find out, he merely proposes
to carry out their own precepts.  That is, of course, profoundly
embarrassing--to them."

Anthony tried to say something but Cibo went on.

"Brother François and his kind are the men who have always made
Christianity a dangerous religion.  Just when the church is about
to be taken for a decorative and snugly-woven cocoon on a dead
branch of the sacred tree, a place for a few fat slugs to hibernate
where they have softly spun themselves in, pouf!--that cocoon
bursts and the beautiful, living psyche of Christianity emerges.
There is always a great running around then and waving of fine-
meshed theological and political nets.  The state is particularly
anxious about such lepidoptera getting loose.  Property! When the
state can't kill a specimen quietly in a corner before its wings
are dry, the church captures it and pins it on a card marked 'Saint
Somebody.'  Then the faithful come and see the body in a glass
case, usually the glass is coloured.  But there it is, catalogued,
and belonging to its proper order.  Now and then it may be
permitted to work a few harmless miracles.  A pile of crutches
accumulates, or the story of the poor butterfly edifies the piously
sentimental.  They imitate its flutterings.  Meanwhile the hard-
working caterpillars keep making more Gothic or Romanesque cocoons
for the slugs, always on the same closed pattern.  They, of course,
do not know yet what a Christian cocoon is really for."  Cibo took
another draw on the pitcher and ran on even a little more
incoherently.  "Now look at Jeanne d'Arc!

"The state is so frightfully careless and stupid about its
executions.  Executions, particularly the expunging of patriots or
moral reformers, should be conducted in profound secrecy.  To
dramatize, or to allow news about such takings-off to circulate,
whether the man is a criminal or a saint, is the best way for
sovereigns to commit suicide.  Yes, I often wonder at the
politicos.  They never seem to learn anything.  Just about the time
the world is getting bored by being asked by an enthusiast to adopt
some kind of a life that no mammals could survive--Ha! the police
descend!  A great trial with all the implications of a Greek
tragedy is staged.  Soldiers parade, judges pontificate, women
weep, priests snivel.  After which the hero is then boiled in oil,
or has his bowels let out, or is permitted to caper naked in the
flames, or is hanged--or what you will.  How can anybody forget him
then?

"For saints I myself favour a dangerous foreign mission,
transportation provided free.  I have already suggested that to the
captain-general.  For people are already beginning to follow this
Brother François about.  His dramatic disappearance into the Morro
would be embarrassing.  He has friends.  Whispers about him have
already passed over the hills from plantation to plantation."

"How can you talk so, Carlo?  It seemed to me just now that you
spoke of him with affection.  Don't you care?  You are asking him
to eat with you, too!"  Anthony was now much in earnest and sitting
up very straight.

"You do not understand me, Toni.  I view all these matters from the
outside, calmly.  I am an unromantic Italian, a real Roman.  I am
purely practical.  I am really the best friend Brother François
has.  Ah, you smile, but listen.  If he stays here his end is
certain.  He is, I must tell you, of a great French noble family.
He might have been a bishop under the old régime.  He left all that
and went into the country to be a parish priest.  Then during the
Revolution he drifted to Paris.  He took a minor part as a peasant
deputy in the beginning of the troubles there.  I think he believed
for a while that the state might help the people.  Then he saw
through all that and was horrified by the Terror.  The last pink
tinge of St. Jean-Jacques faded from his mind.  He then became a
literal follower of Christ.  How?  By joining the Franciscans, a
Pauvre.  He wandered begging into Spain.  A troop ship brought him
here.  The men were dying on board of the plague, they say, and he
swam out to nurse them at Cadiz.  So you see even the garrison
knows him.  That worries the authorities.  It is all frightfully
irregular, of course, and could only happen in times like these.
Now he is helping the slaves.  No, he doesn't preach.  He says
nothing.  But very shortly it will end in a tragedy for Brother
François.

"Now I know all this.  For years I have dealt among the natives and
foreigners here and I have played carefully with the authorities,
too.  Always I play to avoid great trouble.  The authorities have
come to trust me.  Yes, it has been profitable, but that is not
all.  You see, I like brave men.  I don't want to see them die.  I
prevent it when I can.  With Brother François it has gone like
this:  He has been ill.  I prevailed on the good padre to take him
in and nurse him in his garden.  During that time his dangerous
ministrations have ceased.  In the meanwhile the captain-general
has spoken to the bishop.  Our good brother will soon be recognized
for his work among the poor, and it will be arranged with the
proper local authorities of his order that he shall go to Africa,
to the field for which he has shown such aptitude!  Even now they
only await certain papers from Santiago.  I have by just a few
hints brought this about.  If I had not, my friend, your holy man
would have died before this of the yellow jack in a cell in the
Morro waiting for instructions from Spain.  They never come for
people like him.  Tell me now, AM I so cruel?  Or would you
rather I should let him compose his own epitaph in some more
romantic and heroic way?"

It was difficult for Anthony to reply.  He found a large part of
his emotions ready to applaud Brother François and yet he could not
protest entirely what Cibo had said.  He saw, too, that behind
Carlo's somewhat cynical outline of policy there lay a well-meant
human kindness.

"You do not intend to consult Brother François himself, I suppose?"
he said at last.

"By no means," replied Cibo emphatically.  "Your enthusiast who has
a complete solution for everything on tap is always the last man to
know what is good for himself.  Indeed, with the millennium always
just around the corner it is seldom that they take the trouble
either to support or to protect themselves.  They hook their chins
on a cloud and then walk bare foot over all the broken bottles and
old nails which those with a less lofty gaze easily avoid.  A
suggestion of shoes is hotly resented.  In this case I am merely
guiding the cloud-hooked gentleman out of a path, where a pit with
a sharp stake is just around the next turn, into a road with
perhaps a longer vista.  Eventually, no doubt, he will find his own
painful way to heaven.  Several people will doubtless be impressed.
Yes, speaking even as a disinterested pagan who wants all calvaries
at a distance, I think I can see the stigmata on Brother François's
hands."

Anthony's heart leaped strangely.  Against all the assurances of
Carlo there looked up at him as if out of a vision the face of
Brother François as he had seen it under the violet light of the
vine.  "I think you are right about the stigmata, Carlo," he said
after a while.  "Perhaps I AM romantic, but it did seem to me
this morning that there was something about the man that was--well--
shall I call it divine?  I mean that the quality which saves men
from being just animals has a greater share in him than in me.  It
seemed to dominate his body entirely.  I am not sure they can kill
that.  Are you?"

Cibo passed his hand over his eyes.  "No, I am not sure.  But I do
not want to watch anyone trying.  Well, you touch me there, Toni, I
will confess.  In speaking of executions I should have added that
ordinarily they get little attention, and for the most part do not
deserve it.  Men seem to have an instinct about them.  There is
seldom any vigorous protest over the mere slaying of so much meat.
It is only when someone gets into the toils who possesses notably
the quality of which you speak that the wrench is felt."

"It seems to me then you are not so pagan after all, Carlo."

The man stretched himself and laughed.  "We are talking a great
deal and it is getting late.  Also I have now had my third pitcher
today and that makes me voluble and illogical.  But what does it
matter what makes men talk if they convey their essential feeling?
Brother François seems to have succeeded in doing that this morning
to you.  Confess--you are disturbed by him more than you would like
to admit."

"Yes," said Anthony.  "He stirred something in me of which I had
not been aware."

"Exactly," said Cibo.  "You have grown quite heated about him while
we talked.  You really care, and you are even ready to accuse me of
being callous.  But I repeat it is NOT so.  Let me try to unfold
my own philosophy a little.  I think I see the basis of your
feeling under all this.  It is not merely a French priest we are
discussing, is it?  His unique personality, even briefly glimpsed
this morning, touched you mysteriously.  Didn't he?"

"I have already told you so.  Why do you . . ."  But Carlo was not
to be interrupted.

"You should ask yourself, Toni mio--'IS he really so unique?' You
are young!"  Cibo pointed his finger at him scornfully.

"When we are still young we think a great many people whom we meet
are extraordinary.  There is no one else in the world like them, we
feel sure.  Also our own precious selves are without parallel.  We
tell ourselves and each other, 'Neither we nor our friends, who are
so unusual, are understood.'  The world, we think, is not subtle
enough to understand us.  But we are wrong.

"The adult world is far too subtle to waste much time on us.  It
understands us instinctively by just remembering itself.  It has
thought through all our thoughts and is tired of our violent
emotions.  It does not need to care about youth because it knows
youth will get older.  Besides, it is too busy about the essentials
of existence to go in for theories and feelings about them.  Good
old world!  It is the young who do not understand it or themselves.

"From fifteen to twenty-five youth is busy talking about itself and
trying to hatch doorknobs by brooding over them in a fever.  Eggs--
I mean events.  They hatch themselves.  Fate laid them pregnant on
a warm beach.  Everything that survives the process grows up
according to the plan of its own egg.  You can't do much about it.
Not nearly as much as you think.  No, really you can't!

"Fate is a wise old turtle.  Imitate and accept her.  Otherwise you
will become feverish over the eggs you think you have hatched and
go clucking and scratching about in the dust for chickens only to
find that ducks must swim, and like it.  When you learn that you
are beginning to grow up.  Grow up as soon as you can.  It pays.
The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty,
provided of course you are healthy and don't die.  No, the young
are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets.  Only the
middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their
wits.  I," said he, helping himself again to the pitcher, "am
middle-aged; absolutely in my prime."

Anthony felt momentarily overpowered, almost an infant again.  Then
he saw how much Cibo was enjoying himself.

"My God!" continued Cibo lustily, taking another sustaining swig,
"did you ever think what a terrible mess a young man really is?  I
mean a youth.  That is--a kind of portable apparatus or attachment
to three troublesome globes, one who has just stopped being a mad
boy and has not yet been scared into being a decent man.  One feels
profoundly sorry for him.  The only peace he can get is for a few
hours after a girl has nearly killed him.  The rest of the time he
goes drifting about making a lot of noise like a ship upon which a
perpetual mutiny is going on.  He is always steered in the
direction which his bowsprit indicates.

"Young men think life is a game, you know, an adventure.  You hear
them say so.  Life is a mystery, not a game or an adventure.  Birth
and death are the only certain events in it.  Eggs, eggs both of
them!  Maybe life is an egg?  You can't tell what you're hatching.
I'm getting drunk but never mind.  (It's a wise man that knows how
foolish he is when he's sober.)  I'll tell you what wisdom is."  He
sat up earnestly and ponderously now.

"You now hear the most profound of all human oracles speaking.  It
alone holds the past and the future.  Hearken to it, Toni."

Anthony had winced.  It took him a few minutes to think of any
reply to this unexpected and outrageous attack upon him.

"Your tongue and your oracle both sound alike to me," he said at
last in desperation.

He was surprised and delighted to see that he had got home.  "I
always did think life was a mystery but not to be explained by a
blast from the bowels," he continued making the most of his brief
moment of victory.

"You underrate the guts," said Cibo at last.  "What is even a wise
book but a blast from the lungs made visible to the eyes?  Man only
makes foolish noises and smells in the face of mystery.  No, Toni,
do not get angry," he went on.  "Forgive me for being a man . . ."

"Forgive me for being a young man then," said Anthony.

"I do, I do!  Believe me, I like you for it in spite of all I have
said," cried Carlo.  "I shall even pretend now to be sober.

"Toni, I have been watching you.  You interest me.  You see and
feel things so vividly it is a pleasure.  Why then don't you let it
go at that?  Enjoy the fascination life has for you.  What more do
you want?  Why ask 'why'?  Why let your mind always be demanding of
you, 'Give me an understandable and valuable goal; explain to me
why I am here'?  That is dangerous.  That will eventually spoil the
fascination for you.  That is why Brother François interested you
this morning.  You thought he could provide answers for those
questions.  Is not that so?"

"Yes," said Anthony, "I thought this morning when he was talking to
me I saw a way open up to live by."

"The way to Calvary!  Come, come, Toni mio, you are not going to
try THAT way?"  He laughed.  "Nonsense, of course not!  You are
only dallying with a romantic idea.  I know.  You are going to live
life, all of it, for the sake of living.  It is worth while.
Besides, you can't avoid it, being what you are.  Listen, let us
not devote more time to our Brother François.  I want to talk to
you about the most interesting thing in the world, with perhaps one
exception.  Yes, despite all I have said, a young man.  One whom I
know better than he supposes.  For you see, as I was about to say
some time ago, as one gets older with a much broader basis for
judgment"--he patted his paunch--"every new person is no longer a
surprise.  Men and women fall into types.

"Now you are a type.  You are very practical, and yet, you are
always aware of the mystery of things.  You have not yet made up
your mind what the world is like or what you are.  You are not
quite sure what you would be, a mysterious or a practical man, and
you therefore cannot foretell how you are going to act.  Things
happen to you, and then you are always surprised by your own
possibilities and limitations.  Now am I right so far?"

"Very much so," murmured Anthony.  "I have sometimes thought so
myself."

"Very well then, it will help you to have someone else say so who
is not yourself.  Here, have another drink.  That is the least that
a host who likes an audience can provide.  I would like to hear you
talk more.  But, no, I know you will not.  You would rather listen
and think.  Very well then.  Now is your chance.

"What I meant to tell you is that unless you come to SOME
conclusion about yourself and the world you will be a mere
wanderer.  Not finding any surety within, you will unconsciously go
about the planet looking for yourself everywhere.  You will get
bored, or you will produce your own expelling explosions, and you
will go on saying, 'In the next place, over there, I shall be
happy.  There I shall be myself.  There I shall find the true
Anthony.'  But it will only be another small part of you in another
small place, not the whole man.  Or, worse than that, you will grow
desperate and become extreme.  You will try to pretend to yourself
that you are all spirit and the world is only a dream, or that you
are an animal only and the world is all real.  Both are possible
with you, for you will only believe things after you experience
them.  Ah! that is your trouble, a young man's trouble, the
experiences of others do not persuade you.  Nevertheless--take
another drink, for I am going to give you some advice.  If this
talk were not all about you, you would be bored, wouldn't you?"

Anthony laughed and drank deep.

"For SO much I can go on then," said Carlo, measuring the tumbler
at the level of his eyes as he resumed.

"Practise then what I call a decent mammalian philosophy.  Go in
for the body, my boy, but remember you are a man.  At one end of
your spine is a brain and at the other end something that needs
constant companionship.  The two extremities are utterly dependent
upon what is put into the vacancy.  About one half of the time the
brain is busy devising means to fill that hollow.  The other half
of the time is taken up with the matter of companionship--and the
complications which result.  The REMAINDER of the time"--Cibo
paused--"is given over to intellectual and spiritual affairs.
Other minor manifestations of man I need scarcely mention.  They
are merely notorious.

"Now MY ideal philosophy is one which admits what I have just
briefly sketched to be the basis of human nature.  I practise it
constructively.  For instance, my business is to distribute fine
groceries and minor edible luxuries in and about Havana.  But I do
not regard this as an end.  It simply provides me the means of
filling my own cavity by filling others, with sufficient overplus
to provide some amusement for my brain--and companionship for the
other extreme--also the means of travelling a little, comfortably--
but I don't want to.  It is impossible to get more out of life.
How can you?  Add to this that I have the respect and fear of my
fellow men in this vicinity, and you will see that my cup runs
over.  I do not interfere with them but I make trouble for them if
they interfere with me.  My code of honour consists of a few things
that I will not do.  There do not seem to be very many of them.
Pagan you say?  No!  For you see I really love my neighbours as I
love myself."  He finished the last of the newly mixed tumbler,
wiped his mouth with his hand, and went on.

"As for the peccadillo of the soul I leave that to the church;
heroics to the military.  I am fortunate, for I have no desire for
fame.  It appears to me to be a form of egoistic insanity.  I
prefer the mellow good-fellowship of the moment.  It is much more
real and infinitely more satisfactory.  It exists when and where
you are.  What will anything matter fifty years from now to Carlo
Cibo?  I do not care to see through the bottom of my last pitcher,"
he chuckled, "and for those who would make the world over by using
either religion or the state as an engine I have no use.  No
theories are sufficient to include life, and it is life and not
theories that I want to see get on.  It is difficult to live where
any one idea has it all its own way.  I don't want to see the
priests, the politicos, the merchants, or the slaves completely on
top.  Any one of them would make it hard for a man--for me.  I play
them off one against the other and go my own way.

"Well, you can draw your own conclusions about me and some for
yourself.  My suggestion to you is that you drop all of these minor
matters that have been troubling you and go in for being a decent,
thinking mammal--a man.  Thus you will avoid trying to live either
as a pure spirit or a dirty, stupid animal.  So you will get the
most out of life.  I do not know what your prospects are, but no
matter!  Take up some line of livelihood that will let you live,
and settle down to it where you can live by it and not for it.
Everything else you will find will eventually drop into its just
place."  Unconsciously he patted his paunch again.

There did not seem to be any ready reply to make to this.  Anthony
was surprised to find that while they were speaking both Brother
François and Carlo sounded equally convincing.

"You seem very sure of yourself, Carlo," he said half aloud at
last.

"I am," said Carlo, "you see I have tried it out."

On the basis of experience Anthony felt at a disadvantage.

"At least I am engaged in one very practical thing," he said
finally.  "I am determined whatever comes to collect that debt from
Gallego.  It is not only the money, but . . ."

"Good!  And it may take you far," interrupted Cibo.  "While you
have been performing miracles today, I have found out the latest
disposition of your own affairs.  They might take you to Africa.
How would you like that?"

"Carlo, are you trying to ship me off like Brother François?" asked
Anthony half anxiously and half in fun.  "I am no missionary."

"No, no," laughed Cibo, "but you may find it easier to convert your
bills in Africa than in Havana.  Most of Gallego's assets are now
on the Rio Pongo.  That is the only kind of conversion I had in
mind.  In any event we shall have to see the captain-general--
tomorrow, perhaps.  I will tell you about it then.  It is, to be
frank, a difficult mess.  But no more of it now.

"It is late.  Have your supper in your own room tonight.  I have
drunk enough to continue to talk you to death.  But," said he,
reaching up anxiously and laying hold of Anthony's arm, "do not
think I did not mean what I have said.  Think it over.

"Wait!  Is there anything you want?  Are you lonely?  Sometimes the
best way is to bury your trouble deep.  It leaves you then--
pleasantly."  He smiled reminiscently still holding Anthony's arm.
"There is for example--Cheecha."

"Not tonight I think, Carlo," said Anthony.  He had hesitated a
little.

"Ha, not tonight, NOT TONIGHT!  Adiós then, señor, at least I may
wish you pleasant dreams."  It was hard to tell whether Carlo's
tone was mocking or really as regretful as it seemed.

Anthony went to his room, bathed, and lay down.  Cheecha brought
the supper.  After he had eaten she rolled the little wagon into
the corridor.  Then she came back again.

"Is there anything else I can do for you, señor?" she asked.

He looked at her.  She stood huddled back against the wall a
little, but her intonation had been both submissive and hopeful.
He looked at her for a long while.  She giggled.  Finally he shook
his head.

"Adiós, Cheecha."

"Adiós, señor," she replied, her shoulders drooping disconsolately
as she wheeled the empty dishes down the hall.

It was very hot.  The mosquitoes droned outside the net.  The day
had excited him more than he thought.  Although he was tired it was
hard to relax.  In what seemed to be a state of wakefulness rather
than sleep he had a silly dream.

Captain Jorham's bottle of wine had fallen on his own madonna and
smashed it.  He felt unreasonably sorrowful.  It seemed
irreparable.  He thought he got up and went to his chest to make
sure.  It was very hard to get the covers off the statue.  Faith
had put them on.  They were tied up in intricate knots.  Finally he
came to the madonna herself.  Yes, there she was.  She was holding
the child out to him, extending it through the folds of the cloth.

The child emerged alive and came toward him out of the chest.
There was a violet light about it.  But suddenly it was not the
child.  It was just Brother François with the light of the vine on
his face.  He was trying to say something and was pointing out a
road they were both to travel together.  Just then Father Trajan
rushed in and bawled out, "A miracle, a miracle has occurred!"
Father Trajan thrust his hands into the chest and pulled out the
madonna proudly.  It was broken and streaming with wine.  The
statue could never be put together again.  It was full of pieces of
Captain Jorham's wine bottle.

"It is your miracle that has done this," shouted Anthony.  He was
furious at Father Trajan.

Brother François was standing by looking very sad at all this.  His
face was full of pity.  Then Anthony saw that Carlo Cibo was
sitting on the chest laughing.  "What difference does it make?" he
asked.  He was smoking a cigar.

"Brother François will mend it," Anthony heard himself exclaim, and
started up to give him the madonna.

"I cannot help you," said the monk and pointed to Cibo.  "He is
sending me away."

Nevertheless, Cibo and the monk began to struggle for the madonna.
She began to come apart in fragments.  An overwhelming sorrow
seized Anthony and he began to weep like a child.

Then, as is the way with dreams, the whole nature of the affair
changed without apparent cause while remaining to itself perfectly
rational.

The fragments of the madonna now scattered on the floor coalesced
and became Mrs. Jorham's doll.  Cibo and Brother François now
seemed to be fighting over nothing important at all.  A feeling of
great relief swept over Anthony.  The room appeared to be flooded
suddenly with sunshine.  Cibo and he and the monk were now on the
deck of the Wampanoag.  It was dawn and he could hear the noise of
cock-crow, a joyous sound.  "It is only a doll," he shouted.  "Give
it to Philadelphia and let him burn it."  Brother François
disappeared and left Cibo standing there whiffing his cigar.

"Only a doll?" said Cibo.  "You are mistaken!"

Instantly darkness returned.  The cock-crow was nearer now but
frightfully ominous.  Anthony was plunged into the full terror of a
nightmare.

He struggled to his feet to get away.  But he was back in the room
again.  Cibo and the terrible doll were there, too.  "Look," said
Cibo pointing with the glowing end of his cigar.  He could not help
but look.

The doll had become much larger.  She was towering against the
wall, growing.  In the deep gloom of the place she became gigantic.
Only the end of Cibo's cigar showed now.  It was going out.
Complete darkness descended except where the doll stood in a kind
of foul light.  The doll was turning into Cheecha, huge, naked,
with legs spread apart and rolling her stomach.  "Bury your
trouble," shouted Cibo, "bury it deep!"  He pushed Anthony by the
arm toward the black emanation in the corner.  His grasp hurt.
Anthony could smell her sweat now.  He gave a stifled cry and
struggled.  It was too much to stand.  It was loathing and terror
unmitigated.  He writhed, and awoke suddenly to find himself
kneeling on his own sea-chest and leaning half-way out of the
barred window into the patio.

All the roosters of Regla were crowing.  It was the hour of false
dawn.  Under the window some shrub in the patio emitted a
sickeningly sweet, musky scent.  His arm was caught in the iron
grille work.  If it had not been for that he would have plunged out
in his sleep into the garden below.  Even that fall he thought
would have been a relief from the dream.  But he drew back at last
cold and shuddering.

He cursed himself, and all the rest of them.  The dream had been so
vivid that he felt sure he had seen the actors in it as they really
were.  It was some time before he could shake it off.  He lit a
candle, drank a whole pitcher of water, and walked about.

Finally the mosquitoes drove him back to bed again, this time to an
exhausted and dreamless slumber.




CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

HONOUR AMONG THIEVES


With any important business in view the man Cibo shook off his
lethargy completely and exhibited a native energy against which no
climate could prevail.  While it took several bowls of black coffee
to clear Anthony's head of the wraiths of the night before, Carlo
rattled on gayly at breakfast and exhibited triumphantly a mason's
trowel and some pieces of a broken bottle.

"How did you get them?" exclaimed Anthony.  The shards of broken
glass seemed to have been retrieved from his dream.

"A few piastres in the right place also work miracles," replied
Cibo, "as you will soon find, my boy, when you come to do business
in Havana.  But in your case it may take more than a few.  By the
way, we go to the intendant's this morning and perhaps to the
Gallegos' later.  You should call first for the clothes for which
you were measured.  You look hot and worn already.  Let's be off
while it's still early and cool.  No business is done here after
eleven o'clock."

They crossed the harbour swiftly.  Cibo kept a smart cutter rowed
by four blacks dressed in bright, cotton drawers.  There was a
polished copper strake around the boat under its brass gunwale.
They both lolled back in cane seats in the stern in considerable
style.

"This kind of thing pays here," explained Cibo.  "Appearances count
as much with Spaniards as with the Chinese.  Even when I board a
foreign man-o'-war I get attention.  Mere bumboats are always told
to sheer off by the officer of the deck.  But all this, and my
sash, look official.  I have even been piped up the side.  Why not
have your man outfitted as an officer's servant?  I see you have
brought him along.  Juan," said Cibo sharply, "sit up!  Stop
dragging your hands over the side.  Your master is a rich man and
we call upon exalted persons today.  You must do him credit.  It is
the face we want."

The man dropped his handful of trailing gulf weed, squared his
shoulders and looked pleased.  "Sí, señor, I have noble blood.  My
mother . . ."

"Was a clever woman," said Cibo.  "Act like her son."  At the dock
Juan leaped out and made fast with a flourish.

"You see," said Cibo quietly, as they mounted the broad steps to
the Paseo.  "Now keep him coming along that way."

The old city wall rose before them.  Along it swept a broad, paved
avenue skirting the palm-fringed contours of the bay.  A number of
pony-drawn hacks driven by black Jehus dashed up avid for fares.
But Carlo would have none of them.  He dispatched one of his own
men on the run through the water gate near by.  While they were
waiting one of the disappointed ponies reached over and ripped
Anthony's sleeve from elbow to shoulder.

"They are carnivorous," said Cibo and laughed heartily.  "Do not
laugh, Juan, it is not permitted."

In a few minutes an upholstered carriage with a fair-looking team
rolled up.

"What do you mean, you rascal, by coming for me with rope traces?"
said Cibo scowling at the black driver.  "Go and return on your
master's time.  Pompons, buckles, and straw hats!  Do you want to
carry home a note with 'Six' in the corner?"

The man wheeled off to return in no time with his steeds in another
set of harness and with sunbonnets.  It gave them a smartly
indecent aspect as if the two mares were disguised streetwalkers.
Cibo motioned Juan onto the box and they drove off.

"There is a habit here when you are annoyed by a slave of simply
writing his name on your card with the number of lashes in the
corner and sending him home with it," remarked Carlo complacently.
"The card is usually returned later with thanks.  The custom
imparts a certain tone and discipline to a tropical community.
Remember it.  You do not have to know the master.  It is simply a
local form of noblesse oblige."  Cibo pointed to the now positively
decorous coachman in a clean, white jacket, and grinned.  A red
ribbon had been added to the whip.

"Already we have assumed nobility," said Cibo and leaned back.
"Voyez-vous, monseigneur!"

They rattled on through a labyrinth of narrow streets with endless,
heavy, flat-roofed parapets, whitewashed fronts and heavily grilled
windows; the inevitable patio.  Most of the gates were still
closed.

Havana discovered the same monotonous expression everywhere.  It
was a frown with a straight line over its eyebrows as if it had
acquired it from staring at the sun.  Behind the closed shutters
one sensed the sombreness of high, toneless chambers nursing the
shade.  A few slaves carrying baskets on their heads and balancing
from the hips passed each other miraculously on the narrow
sidewalks.  Women in black lace mantillas were still coming home
from mass.  Here and there a water carrier laid the dust before
some more pretentious mansion boasting a wrought-iron gate.  Yet
every languid activity was merely a prophecy of the certain coming
of the midday heat.

Suddenly they drew up before the tailor's.  It was a kind of cavern
in the street wall of a house.  Huge wooden shutters, now propped
up as awnings, closed it in at night.  A small, brown man who had
measured Anthony at Regla came out bowing.

"All is ready, señor, we have only delayed for your choice of
buttons.  That will take but a moment."  He produced a case of wood
and coral samples.  "But the English cloth button, or plain silver,
is now all the rage."

In this little spider-of-a-man Anthony thought he understood the
word "obsequious" for the first time.  He seemed to secrete thread
from his mouth, and his shiny lapels flashed with needles as he
bowed.  Against the rear wall of the place on a long table six
little men sat cross-legged, sewing valiantly.  On every head was a
black skull-cap.  They were memorable.  In all his stay in Havana
they were the only men not slaves that Anthony saw doing any manual
work.  Almost alone these tailors clothed the fashionable Catholic
town.  Thus even in Havana Abraham flourished as usual on his
natural monopoly of work.

The fitting took some time.  Cibo was particular.

Anthony remembered afterwards that it was here he finally became a
sans-culotte.  The knee breeches and long silk stockings of the
eighteenth century were done up in a bundle.  Except upon a few
formal and artificial occasions he never wore them again.  He
emerged from this hole in the wall in long, close-moulded, narrow-
waisted trousers cut with a wide Spanish flare from the calves
down.  There was a V-shaped slit over each ankle through which
peeped a crimson sock with a clock.  There was a short round jacket
with a high, rolled collar.  In Cuba there were no tails.  Your
caballero there haunted the saddle.  Underneath the coat was a
tight, white shirt with an open breast and pleated ruffles.  They
must be starched and stand up.  A wide, silk sash with fringed
tassels hung just to the left knee.  The tassels were a reminder of
the sword.  But even in Spanish America that was going out for
street wear.

The sensation of new clothes, which eludes final analysis,
metamorphosed Anthony.  For him the nineteenth century really began
four years ahead of the calendar in that hole in the wall in Havana
where the six Jews sat sewing.  He had literally shed his old skin.
He stood up light, and trim, and airy in the new suit of white
drill.  His loins were girded with the grateful clasp of the
slippery sash and his feet thrust into light pumps with silver
buckles which his buttons matched.  The sweaty and always
bedraggled lace of the old cuff was gone.  The new sleeve ended in
a clean line.  There were no garters at the knees.  His calves felt
protected.  His trousers flapped a little when he walked and they
pulled evenly.  It gave him a physical feel of confidence in his
lower extremities.  They were no longer ornamental.  This was a
costume in which one could do things.  No ribbons!

In all these details Cibo stood by taking a keen and sympathetic
interest.  It was pleasant to know someone who could understand how
he felt, Anthony thought.  It would take the profound simplicity of
an Italian to do that.  Here was an hour and a place where you
adapted yourself and made visible a shift in time.  Another mode
and mood of things had fallen upon the world.  You put it on and
then you lived it, henceforth another man.  He remembered a naked
child in the vestibule of the Casa da Bonnyfeather.  Clothes were,
he felt, the most intimate and internal things in the world.  How
tall and keen he was now, how supple and light, how able in this
armour to prevail!

"Ah! Carlo," he said turning himself about before a mirror--and
Carlo knew it was not vanity--"I shall collect that debt!"

"Good, good, you understand why we came here.  Flap your wings and
crow, my fine cockerel!" cried Cibo.

The Jew clucked over the unexpected English gold out of Mr.
Bonnyfeather's roll, and they all laughed.  Anthony felt the talons
of the little man touch him on the breast.

"White! white like a true caballero of the town," exclaimed the
tailor bowing them out.

"He means you are not burnt black like a rider on the sugar
plantations," said Cibo as they drove off.  "There is a ring where
your collar used to be.  But that will soon correct itself in this
glare."  Cibo hummed a little and laughed as he chatted away.  The
tailor amused him.  He kept talking about him.

"Your Jew sees everything and yet never draws a romantic inference.
He only flatters you by telling you that he does.  You are pleased
in spite of yourself and yet you know that he understands.  The
Gentile is nakedly revealed in the fiction which he lives by and
yet is truly flattered by the Jew.  So your feeling toward Jews is
one of soothed-irritation plus constant surprise.  That is why many
either pet or persecute them.  Very simple people cannot deal with
Abraham; they are either lured into his net or driven to seize the
club.  The complicated balance of emotions necessary to a prolonged
traffic with Jews cannot persist in peasants.  Peasants take one
extreme or the other.  So your Jew stays in towns.  I have dealt
with them a long time.  Many came here some time ago from Portugal.
Lisbon was too hot for them.  Your friend the tailor was one.  He
and I have managed a number of little matters together.  I trust
him.

"In dealing with Jews you should find out what they laugh at.  If
it is only at matters that occur below the belt let them alone.
Simply do not deal with them.  Most of that type have a kind of
rat's-eye view of life.  They see nothing but legs and their
appurtenances going by even when they look up.  But there are some
Hebrews who laugh at the way the world is made.  They are humorous
with God.  Beware!  They are wise.  Make friends with them.  They
become powers in the state.  Such men are wisely cruel and
unbelievably kind.  That is all included in the joke.  I once saw
the little man who just measured you driving in a closed carriage
with his wife along the Alameda de Paula.  He had introduced a new
style into Havana and was watching all the aristocrats preening
themselves along the Paseo.  Through the curtains I saw him,
sitting next to his moon-faced wife, laughing.  Ah, Toni, it was
terrible.  You see, he knew.  Most of the land-poor rich in Havana
and Pinar del Rio are in debt to him, not only for clothes, but for
jewels.  He makes loans.  If you want gold go to Moses of Cintra.
He and I laugh together and we get along."

They turned into the Calle Obispo.  Here were business
establishments and awnings over the sidewalks.  A languid flow of
traffic toward the Plaza de Armas was already under way.  At one
place they stopped and Cibo called the proprietor out to him,
giving instructions as to the outfitting of Juan with great
particularity.

"After you get yourself shaved," said Cibo to Juan, "wait for us
here.  Do not disappear in your new clothes, my friend.  The
convict quarries are always short-handed.  Very well, we trust you
then."  They drove on to the Caxa de Consolidación.

                            ----------

Upstairs in the hall of the intendant, where that personage seldom
if ever came, Cibo was at some pains to introduce Anthony to
several of the clerks, managing to indicate that any papers which
might pass through their hands with the señor's name upon them
would be accompanied by double fees.  "His business is my own,"
said Cibo and lifted his brows.  Assurances of extreme solicitude
over the señor's correspondence followed.

"They have annual cause to remember me," whispered Cibo crossing
the room.  "This is Herr Meyier, a Rhinelander, the only man not a
complete rascal in the place.  He is the chief clerk."

A pleasant conversation followed.  Herr Meyier warmed to Anthony
even over his bad German.  Anthony supplied him with all the German
news he could remember having overheard for some time past from
Vincent Nolte while Cibo sat by greatly relieved at so promising a
turn of affairs.  Cibo even pretended to like the beer which Meyier
sent out to have brought in from his own restaurant.  It was the
only beer in Havana, and it was warm.

The sympathy of Meyier having been aroused for the predicament of
his countrymen in Livorno, it was not difficult for Anthony to
enlist his interest in his own affairs.  They dropped into Spanish
so that Cibo could follow. . . .

"As I see it," said Meyier, "there are several people with whom you
must deal.  It would help greatly if you get an official admittance
of the debt from Gallego.  Without that it is a question, señor, if
you can succeed.  At least it would enormously hasten matters.
Merchants here under the old laws of the Indies are supposed to
import only from Spain.  Of course, of late years that has been
largely disregarded and winked at, and foreign bills must
eventually be paid or commerce would cease.  But there is no legal
way here for a foreign merchant to press his claims.  He must go
through the form of transferring his claim to a Spanish firm when
it is then presented as a domestic bill and payment allowed.

"Now it is a curious thing," said Herr Meyier smiling, "but there
is only one firm here whose foreign claims are ever successful in
court.  It is the firm of Cuesta and Santa María.  Señor Santa
María is a great friend of the intendant.  He has retired, but
lives, I am told, quite magnificently in the suburb of the Salú.
He is said to have remarked once to the bishop at a state dinner
that he was not very anxious to go to paradise for awhile since
only the pavements there are made of gold."

"We are not especially interested in improving the celestial
landscape for the señor," murmured Cibo.  "Is there no other way?"

Herr Meyier consumed very thoughtfully the last of his beer.  It
was very tepid.  He looked down the long, cheerless stone room--
where the sallow clerks sat in their shirt sleeves at heavily
gilded desks--with a hint of nausea in his pale blue eyes.

"Ach Gott, Cuba!" he said suddenly, and spread out his palms in
disgust.  "I am sorry for you, Señor Adverse.  What is the amount
owed by Gallego and Son to the Casa da Bonnyfeather?"

"About forty-five thousand dollars in round numbers," replied
Anthony.

Herr Meyier languidly calculated something and rang a small silver
bell.

"Engross that for me," he said to one of the clerks.

"Old Señor Gallego has recently died, hasn't he?" continued Herr
Meyier while waiting.  Anthony nodded.  "In that case there may be
complications.  You might have to levy on his estate."  He shook
his head.  "I am afraid that will never be granted.  Every
merchant-planter in the island would protest.  What is the son
doing?"

"He is in Africa," answered Cibo.  "Since the death of the father
the transactions of the firm have been in slaves.  Gallego's
schooner, the Ariostatica, is now outfitting in the harbour for
Africa."

"So," said Meyier, pursing his lips, "SO?"

"Would it be possible to attach the ship?" asked Anthony.  "In that
case we might come to some agreement with them, possibly an
assignment on the next cargo of slaves."

"Dunder!" exclaimed Meyier.  "I begin to see light."  He rang the
bell sharply twice.

"Bring me the papers in the case of the ship Black Angel--and of
the Ariostatica, Gallego, now fitting out."  His heavy bureaucratic
face grew suddenly animated.

"Now, señor," said he when all the papers had been brought, "come
into the bureau of the intendant."  He closed the door behind them,
listened for a full minute, and then walked to the far end of the
room.

They all sat down again about a magnificently furnished desk with
dust upon it.  Herr Meyier flicked it with his handkerchief and
laughed.  "It is not likely we shall be interrupted here," he said
sardonically, and spread the papers out before him.  "Now,
gentlemen, your attention if you please.  Let us see if we can't
avoid drowning the cat in cream.  El gato Santa María, you
understand.  Here is what my clerk has engrossed":


  $45,000 @ 18 piastres local legal exchange is 810,000 piastres.
  $45,000 @ 15 piastres current foreign exchange is 675,000 piastres.
  Hence, the difference between the legal and foreign exchange is
    135,000 piastres.
            (1/2 of 135,000 piastres is 67,500 piastres)


"The import of this is extremely simple," continued Herr Meyier.
"If you place your claim in the hands of Señor Santa María he will
collect it at eighteen piastres on the dollar, the legal rate, and
pay you only at fifteen.  That will place in his hands the
difference of one hundred thirty-five thousand piastres which he
and the intendant will divide.  I understand they split evenly.
For them, you see, a charming arrangement.  But that will not be
all.  In order to engage the noble interest of these gentlemen a
'retaining fee' of eighteen thousand piastres is customary.
Otherwise their valuable time might be wasted in ignoble pursuits.
In addition to this you will, of course, have to meet all the legal
fees.  A jingling argument is the only one really convincing to the
court.  And on that too the masters of ceremonies here will also
collect their percentage.  If you leave Havana in a year's time
with thirty-five thousand dollars you will be doing well.  You can
now see why sugar planting, for those who understand it, is so
profitable.  Very rich canes are usually crushed and squeezed twice
in case any juice remains."

Carlo whistled whimsically and looked at Herr Meyier, shaking his
head.

"You may well whistle, Cibo," said the German.  "There is the
possibility I think, however, of another way.  Would you care to
have me advise you, Señor Adverse?  As it would be entirely extra-
legal, a mere matter of policy as it were, perhaps you would care
to--er, ah, make use of my humble services under the circumstances.
I believe, if you saw fit to do so, you might not only collect the
amount due you without the embarrassing deductions required by
Señor Santa María, but finally emerge perhaps with a comfortable
margin of profit.  Call it interest on your long overdue account.
What do you think?"

"You would not, of course, be averse to participating in the
profits of so equitable an arrangement, Herr Meyier?" asked
Anthony.

Cibo beamed with approval.

"As a silent, a very silent partner," said the German.  "A
reasonable percentage to be agreed upon, say five per cent on your
claim, and ten per cent on any possible profits."

"And in any event two per cent on the claim," said Anthony.

"Did you say three?" murmured the German.

"Of course, how could you misunderstand me, Herr Meyier?  And
payable half in advance."

"Himmel! mein junger Herr, thou hast been nursed in the lap of
Reason."

"I will be surety," added Cibo.

"We go on then!" cried Meyier.  "Adiós, Señor Santa María!  Will
you condescend to look at these?

"They are the papers of the ship Black Angel, a slaver, which
cleared for Sierra Leone it so happens exactly seven years ago
today.  Now notice," said Meyier rearranging the file, "that up
until within three days of the time she sailed her papers are all
in the regular form.  Then what happens?  On August thirtieth,
seventeen-eighty-nine, an order of temporary sequestration of the
ship by the captain-general of Cuba issues.  A purser, sworn in as
agent of the Caxa de Consolidación, is put in charge to collect
certain sums due the colonial government by the owners.  That is,
you see, our purser accompanies the ship which is navigated by its
captain still employed by the owners.  BUT the cargo of slaves
waiting for it in Africa is seized by the crown agent.  Here, seven
months later are the bills of sale for the entire cargo at public
auction at Havana.  That is the point of it all.  The government
agent being on board has prevented the cargo from being taken to a
foreign colony, say, Barbados or Jamaica, and quietly run on shore
at night.  The sale takes place here as of government property.
The amount due the crown with all expenses is deducted, and the
remainder returned to the owners along with the ship.  Even at
that, I see, the owners came off fairly well."

"Why didn't the government seize the ship to begin with and sell
it?" asked Cibo.

"The answer is very simple, señor, for two reasons.  The ship would
not have satisfied the sum required, slavers are only worth a tithe
of their cargo, and there is no ordinance for the captain-general
to proceed upon an order to confiscate marine property.  His
maritime authority is limited.  No, no, I remember the case well!
It was when you spoke of the Gallegos being in the slave trade that
it flashed into my mind.  Old Señor Gallego has recently died and
his son is in Africa.  The estate is a huge one.  Undoubtedly there
will have been a lapse in inheritance fees and other dues and taxes
with the heir absent.  If not, trust me, I am a man of arithmetical
imagination.  Do you see my plan?"

"To use the case of the Black Angel as a precedent and seize the
Gallegos' schooner Ariostatica now in the bay?" asked Cibo.

"Exactly!" cried Meyier.  "An order will be issued of temporary
sequestration for the Ariostatica.  We shall swear in our young
friend here as the government agent in charge.  He will go to
Africa as supercargo, receive for the crown the cargo which Gallego
will have ready for his ship, and return to Havana where it will be
sold.  That sale, gentlemen, will be conducted by the Caxa da
Consolidación of which I have the honour to be chief clerk.  Señor
Gallego will have nothing to say about it.  After the sums due the,
er--GOVERNMENT--are deducted, any remainder will be scrupulously
returned to him.  I regret to say, however, that it looks to me as
if the entire proceeds of this particular voyage will be swallowed
up.  After all, Gallego will only be having his hand forced a
little to pay a just debt.  If in that process a certain profit is
realized, inadvertently as it were, only ourselves and the captain-
general will ever know.  I am sure, Señor Adverse, that if you
received the sum due you together with reasonable interest, your
curiosity at least would be satisfied.  You, you see, will have
done nothing but collect your debt plus, let us say, expenses.
Your time is of course--valuable.  Speaking frankly, I feel I am
entitled under the peculiar circumstances of the case to the small
premium we agreed upon."

"There can be no question about that, Herr Meyier.  Set yourself at
rest on that point.  But speaking frankly myself, and not from mere
curiosity, there are one or two points I do not quite understand
yet," Anthony replied.  Cibo leaned forward a little alarmed as
Anthony continued.

"In the first place, how and why will the captain-general be
interested enough to issue the order?  And what is there to assure
me, in case of your death, for instance, or your leaving here for
any cause, that I shall not be sent on a wild goose chase to
Africa?  Suppose I am successful and return with the cargo.  You
are gone.  It is sold, and the proceeds pocketed by--well, the
'government'--why not?  Indeed, speaking absolutely candidly, I
should feel much relieved if I thoroughly understood the real cause
of your interest in my case."

"Herr Meyier and I are old friends," interrupted Cibo, "we play, I
may say, very much into each other's hands.  The scheme is a little
more subtle than you suppose, Señor Toni.  Things in Havana have
ramifications all of which do not appear.  His word and mine that
you will receive the sum due you should be sufficient.  Don't you
think so?"

Anthony sat thinking for a moment.  He was aware that the
atmosphere was beginning to be a little tense.

"Yes," he said, "I shall accept either of your words, OF COURSE.
But I must insist at least on knowing the reasons why you will not
answer my questions."

Both Cibo and Meyier broke into a laugh.

"You might have been educated by the Jesuits, young man," said the
latter.

"I was," said Anthony.

"Ah!" said Cibo.  "To think of it!  And how I have talked!"

"For the same reason you can rely on my discretion where my own
interests are involved," interjected Anthony smiling.

Carlo snorted.  "Tell him, Herman," he said to Meyier, "or he will
find out for himself."

The German drummed on the desk for a minute.

"Ach Himmel!  You are both against me.  Then I shall a prophet be.
It is modesty, you see, señor, which has kept me from speaking out.
Carlo, is it for thee to laugh?  I will tell you, sir, why the
captain-general will issue the order.  It is because I shall ask
him.  Carlo, is it not so?"  The man puffed himself out.

"It is like this, Señor Toni," Meyier continued leaning forward and
becoming familiar and convincing at the same time.  "Have you ever
heard of the Prince of the Peace?  Yes!  Well, he is the real ruler
of Spain.  By many he is said to be only the queen's favourite.  He
is that, but also much more.  It is his desire to put vigour again
into the government, to destroy where he can the worm of
corruption."

"And to enjoy the increased revenues himself," interrupted Cibo.

Meyier made a deprecating gesture.

"Our friend is too cynical," he said.  "Nevertheless it is true
that in every part of the government some appointees of the Prince
of the Peace are now to be found.  They are put there for a purpose
and they are feared, for they enjoy the confidence of this great
minister at Madrid.  That is why I, a German, an accountant, and an
honest man, am now the head of the Caxa da Consolidación en Habana.
I," he repeated, scrawling his own initials dramatically on a piece
of paper, "am an appointee of the Prince of the Peace!  Without
these initials, no important government financial operation in Cuba
is undertaken.  With them much may be done.  Is it not so, Carlo?"

"You scarcely ever exaggerate," said Cibo.

"But that is not all, my young friend.  In Havana there are two
parties.  There is that of the captain-general and that of the
intendant-general.  It is a very curious situation.  Some years ago
the office of intendant-general was created over great protest to
bring about a fiscal reform here.  Most of the financial power of
the captain-general was placed in the intendants hands.  Pouf! what
happens?  The second intendant-general who is sent out is a blood
brother of Barabbas.  Compared with his the clutch of a Turkish
bashaw is like that of a gentle milkmaid.  The cow--Mein Gott! she
go dry!  The intendant is a dangerous man, a successful politician,
and he forms a powerful local party.  He and Señor Santa María and
the like had all but succeeded in diverting the revenues when I
arrived.  The poor old captain-general, he is alarmed.  In me he
sees an unexpected ally.  He sends for me and weeps on my shoulder.
'Permit me,' he says, 'to draw my own salary.  The intendant and
Señor Santa María have consolidated the Caxa da Consolidación.
They are patriots.  I am only a viceroy.'

"That was seven years ago, my boy.  The old captain-general goes
home still a poor man.  It is terrible.  But a new one arrives.  He
also is comparatively poor, but he is a great hidalgo and a very
cunning man.  Very quietly we collaborate on undermining the
intendant.  The soldiers are now paid out of the revenues.  I
became head of the Caxa da Consolidación.  SOME money goes home
to Spain.  We entrench ourselves in, ahem, a comparative honesty,
for we have to fight thieves and we intend to win.  Then the grand
reforms can take place.  But in the meanwhile there is the
intendant--and Señor Santa María.  They are still very popular with
certain merchants, with slave importers particularly.  They protect
them from foreign creditors.  Do you see now?  For this is where
you, my young friend, come in!

"As I listened to you this morning I had suddenly the great idea
inspired.  I see instantly what has long perplexed me.  I see how
to frighten the friends of the intendant, provide an independent
revenue for the captain-general, and permit foreign merchants to
collect their debts.  The mere threat of this will be sufficient.
Señor Gallego shall be merely an example.  It needed just your
particular case to enable me to put two and two together, the Black
Angel and the Ariostatica."  He slapped the papers.

"Señor, I am grateful.  The payment of your own debt is assured,
for it is upon that pretext that we shall proceed.  The authorities
in Spain and my master can be made to understand the situation.
Despite the old laws foreign merchants must be protected and
rascals suppressed.  Indeed, I shall regard the payment of your
claims as a kind of premium for your going to Africa to collect
them.  In a case like this it is only someone whose own interests
are vitally involved that we would care to trust.  Do you see?
Will you go?  Much depends on it.  Much!"  Herr Meyier looked
suddenly harassed.

"It may be a little dangerous, señor.  Keep your own council--and
ours.  The knife is not unknown here as a method of cutting Gordian
knots.  I myself . . ."  His mouth twitched a little--"Ja wohl!  It
is true that I may die at any moment!"  He ended on a note of
scorn.

"I will go," said Anthony.

Carlo patted him on the arm.  "Men are not always such rascals as
you think, my young Jesuit," he said.

"Oh, Carlo, you overdo that, believe me," said Anthony evidently
annoyed.  "I was right in asking Herr Meyier those questions!"

"What! what!  Must the old dogs and young ones always be snapping
at each other?" exclaimed Meyier.  He tucked his papers under one
arm and led them both toward the door with a certain air of
triumph.  "This is a lucky meeting, you know," he went on.  "Now
one thing more.  Get, that acknowledgment from Gallego's clerk if
you have to garrot him.  It is vital.  If you have trouble let me
know.  Ach, my friend Carlo, I rely upon YOU.  Let us work
together in this as in old times.  I myself will see the captain-
general tonight and let you know his decision.  I have small doubt
about it.  You must be prepared, Don Antonio, to visit the palace
later on yourself.  His Excellency insists upon knowing all his
agents personally."

"Would it not be a good precaution to make sure the Ariostatica
does not sail too soon, Herr Meyier?" asked Anthony.

"Ach, what a wise infant you have brought here today, Carlo!"
exclaimed Meyier.  "His words are dollars.  Ja wohl, I shall see to
it.  An order to the port authorities, quietly!  And now, auf
wiedersehen."  He opened the door and bowed them out past the
clerks with a formal and distant courtesy as if some purely routine
matter had been tritely disposed of.

Anthony walked down and climbed into the carriage with his heart on
fire.  "To Africa!" he said to the driver.  Carlo exploded--and
gave merely local directions.

                            ----------

On the way to the Gallegos' they picked up Juan.  He was standing
on the curb still in his sailor's garb but with a new, silver-
mounted guitar under his arm.  He looked foolish.

"What is the meaning of this?" inquired Cibo turning red.  But the
man addressed himself to Anthony.

"Pardon, Don Antonio, the money which you gave me to buy clothes--I
have spent for a guitar."  He ran his hands over its strings
caressingly.  "I do not know how I do such things.  It is terrible.
But I have a beautiful tenor voice.  I lack accompaniment.
Forgive!"  He was white at the lips.

"You rascal!" said Anthony.  Then he laughed.  "Jump up, Juan.
Driver, go on."

With the troubadour on the box they drove to the Gallegos'.

"You had better leave this to me," said Cibo, and went in.

It was sweltering sitting in the carriage under the leather top.

"Señor," said Juan looking around at Anthony with a dog-like
affection in his eye, "shall I sing to you while we wait?  I am
your hombre.  I would pour out my heart which is full of a
passionate gratitude."

"Later on, Juan," said Anthony.  "This is a respectable
neighbourhood."

"Sí, sí," said the man and sighed.

Carlo finally emerged with a scared, middle-aged clerk who rode
with them silently to the notary.  The man made a declaration there
setting forth that the sum demanded by Mr. Bonnyfeather was a just
debt contracted by Gallego & Son for value received.  He signed it
as chief clerk of the firm, and an attested copy of his power of
attorney to transact business during the absence of young Señor
Gallego was attached.  They left him still white about the gills.

"This paper has cost you five hundred dollars, Don Toni," said
Carlo as they drove on toward the water gate, "but it is worth it.
Never hire a chief clerk with a sombre past," he added.  "It makes
them too compliant with well-informed strangers."

A blue glimpse of the bay came in sight through the old water gate.

"Oh, I shall be glad to meet Cheecha with her little wagon on the
veranda," said Cibo.  "There is pompano today.  The one fish I . . ."

He was interrupted by a scream of agony that made them both wilt.
The thud of a whip, and the answering cries and moans of a number
of black women gathered about a gate the carriage was just passing
made a horrid chorus that accompanied spasmodically the whistling
of a lash.

"Jesús!" whispered Juan.  The strings of his guitar jangled
faintly.  The carriage stopped as if accosted by death.  They
looked through the gateway into the space beyond.

In the centre of a wide patio floored with blinding, white sand a
great, black grating seemed to erect its sinister gridiron
malevolently from the top of a little platform.  Lashed to this so
that he was spread-eagled helplessly against the blue sky beyond
was a black Hercules of a man.  His muscles bulged in huge knots
and his head hung back straining as if it would tear itself loose
and be gone.  Under each whistling blow he rippled from head to
foot and screamed hoarsely.

"O God!" said Anthony standing up.

It was just then that they saw Brother François.  He had emerged
suddenly from a little door and was crossing the white, sunlit
space to the gridiron in his bare feet and faded gown.  He cried
out and the sound of his voice filled the place with pity.  The man
with the whip turned.  His large, jowled countenance fell flat with
amazement.  Nothing but the moans of the man on the gridiron could
be heard.

"In the name of Christ," said the clear, quiet voice of Brother
François, "this man is your brother."  He took the whip from the
man's hand.  A dead silence followed.

Suddenly the man seemed to take in the situation.  He gave a roar
of astonished rage, and picking up Brother François like a child,
rushed with him to the gateway.  He hurled him into the gutter and
started to return.

"Do not interfere, my son!" cried the monk getting up calmly out of
filth.  He caught Anthony by the coat and dragged him back against
the wheel of the carriage.  He put his cool hands on his cheeks.
"This is for ME.  Remember, you do not understand yet."

When a kind of red darkness cleared from his eyes Anthony found
Cibo holding him down in the carriage.  Rage had loosened the caps
of his knees till he shook.

Brother François was half across the yard again.  He was following
the man and calling.  The fellow turned sullenly.  Brother François
advanced smiling, holding out his hand.  "My friend," he said.  The
man gave a confused bellow and rushed him.  He threw him down on
the sand and kicked him.  Then he turned to go again.

"My friend," said Brother François rising.  He advanced upon him
again still holding out his hand.  The performance repeated itself.

"Sit still, young ass," said Cibo holding Anthony.  "Let God
decide.  Who are you?"

Brother François was getting up again, slowly now.  He stood
swaying a little but he still smiled.  Suddenly he tottered forward
to the man.  He held up his little crucifix and pointed to the
negro on the grating.  Then he held out both his hands as if he
would give shelter to the dew-lapped head of the tormentor on his
own breast.  The figure on the grating gave a great cry and went
limp.  The man in the courtyard looked about him as if appealing to
the common sense of mankind and fled.  The whip lay on the sand.

"Now," cried Cibo.  "NOW!"  He laboured after Anthony and Juan
had dashed into the court where Brother François had fallen limp.
The three of them picked him up and carried him limp as he was to
the carriage.

"Go!" shouted Cibo.  "Whip your horses, you black fool!"

Juan caught hold of the carriage from behind as it whirled off down
the street.  A shriek of despair from the women at the gate
followed it as it wheeled around the next corner.

On the way back to Regla Brother François opened his eyes.  They
were pouring cool water on his face and hands.  He said nothing.  A
great sorrow seemed to engulf them all.  Ashamed of himself,
Anthony cried out at the sight of the battered lips which hurt
themselves to smile back at him.  A tumult as of great waters had
rushed through his soul.  He sat and wept.  Even Cibo was silent.

But at Regla Brother François insisted upon going home himself.  He
forbade them to come along.  They watched him go down the little
alley toward Father Trajan's, and as he turned the corner they saw
him lift a basket of fish from the head of a small negro child
whose legs wobbled under it.  He took her by the hand.  The negro
boatmen grunted.

"I am afraid that this is the end of Brother François," said Cibo
as they walked down the dock.  "I hope we got him away without
being recognized.  Do you know what the penalty is for interfering
with slaves who have been sent to the city-yard to be whipped?  A
monopoly of Señor Santa María, by the way.  No!  You do not know?
Well, then so much the better," he said as he swung the little door
into the cool green patio, "so much the better for your appetite
for lunch.  Cheecha!"




CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

A MANTILLA INTRUDES


Hot countries, Anthony discovered, had a curious effect upon him.
He had ebullitions of emotion; they passed, and left him much the
same as before, dreamfully contented, merely existing comfortably.
The crests did not disturb the form which was, after all, Cibo in
his chair on the veranda with rum and lime juice.  Then there was
tobacco.  He had begun to soak up a good deal of that into his
system, the dark Cuban leaf.  It made contentment easy and keenness
uncomfortable.  It prevented in a northerner the constant foolish
necessity of doing something.

Despite the tremendous impression which Brother François's
interference with the whipping had made upon him only a week ago--
what was it now?--only an event of the extremely remote past, he
thought as he sat smoking on the veranda with Cibo, while a half-
moon filtered into the patio and Juan fooled below on the strings
of his new guitar.  That lad DID have a voice undoubtedly.  A
half-mocking song, no doubt addressed to Cheecha, mixed its soft
chords with the moonlight and caused the parrot to shift sleepily
on its perch.  Tonight it was deliciously fragrant and cool.
Pretty late though.  Still you could not expect to sleep all the
afternoon and all the night as well.  The end of his cigar glowed
revealing Anthony's face a little whiter than when he arrived,
wrapt in a dreamful satisfaction.  Cibo smiled to himself.

Yes, on the whole, as Cibo said, he had been lucky.  His visit to
Havana might so far be called a promising success.  Brother
François was doing very well.  Getting about the garden again--that
man!  And as for Father Trajan--Anthony laughed as he thought of
his crowded chapel.  Carlo had certainly been most convincing with
the bishop.  It would take a long time, of course, to get the final
confirmation from Santiago.  Meyier seemed slow, too.  But you
couldn't hurry the captain-general.  You couldn't hurry anybody
here, not even yourself.  And the Ariostatica had been detained.

He began to wonder how his clothes that he was to wear at the
audience at the palace the next afternoon were coming on at the
tailor's.  Moses had promised them.  Why couldn't Meyier settle all
those details with the governor himself?  Curious old dog that
German!  Able, and honest according to his own lights.  Really
trying to do a difficult job here.  No one could live on a
government salary in Havana.  They weren't expected to.  Ah, well,
if Africa was like this it wouldn't be so bad.

"Good night, Carlo."  The cigar streaked into the patio, and he
went to bed.

Tomorrow morning he would have to take Mrs. Jorham to see the
tombs.  He wished now he hadn't promised her.  Promises made in one
mood could come back to haunt you in another.  "Damn the beetles!"
How they battered about the candle.  "Puff!"  In the darkness you
were yourself again.  No one on the wall . . . no, of course not
. . . in the chest.  And a good riddance . . .  Yes?  Mrs. Udney's
sheets, ah-a-a . . .

But once on the Wampanoag again next morning it was not so hard to
recapture the mood of only a few days before.  It no longer seemed
so far off.  And both Captain Elisha and Mrs. Jorham were so glad
to see him, and Collins dry as ever.  That solemn face!

"So ye're harbourin' our desartar, Mr. Adverse."

Captain Jorham made small bones about Juan, however.  The prices
which he had recived for his miracle-working statuary had been
miraculous.

"They're all gone but Jesus," he said.  "St. Lawrence yesterday,
fire and all, on an oxcart for some inland town.  I'm holdin' out
on the Saviour for eight hundred dollars with five hundred and
thirty offered and a vacant niche in the cathedral biddin' against
a new chapel at Cienfuegos."  He rubbed his hands.  "Say how DEW
ye suppose they fixed that Virgin at Regla?  Pretty slick, eh!  Got
any idears, mister?"

"Not a single one, captain," said Anthony gravely.

"SA-AY!" said the captain beating him on the back till he
coughed.  "But here comes the old lady all set for seein' the
t-umes."

Mrs. Jorham was indeed dressed for the occasion.  Long, fingerless,
black gloves projected from her India shawl which was caught with a
jet breast pin.  A straw bonnet upon which rested a grey dove still
glistened with camphor dust.  A small sunshade, and a palm-leaf
fan, as a slight concession to the climate, announced her upon
pleasure bent.  There was something eternal and widow-like in the
droop of her shawl.  But under her bonnet her face shone.  A neatly
bound copy of the Testament and four silver dollars distended her
reticule.

Anthony handed her into Cibo's boat with great formality.  She sat
on the cane seats rather doubtfully and raised a doll-sized
sunshade against the Cuban glare.  From a strictly female point of
view Mrs. Jorham was undoubtedly one of the most intriguing women
who had ever landed at the water gate at Havana.  The negro
washerwomen gathered there to discuss her.

Anthony hailed one of the carnivorous ponies.  In what appeared to
Mrs. Jorham to be a recklessly extravagant mode of travel they set
forth to do epitaphs.  But the churches were a flat disappointment
to the lady from Scituate.  What few tombs they contained were to
her sadly lacking in a sense of inevitable doom.  The smooth pomp
of marble and basalt conveyed a feeling of security in the
hereafter, even an aristocratic contempt for it which outraged her.
In the tone of the epitaphs she missed a single whine.  "Every
hour wounded; the last slew me.  I flinched not till I fell."
There were candles burning before that!  She turned away, longing
for some stone that recorded a snatch of thoroughly abject hymn
that a Protestant woman could sing with fearful conviction.  These
churches seemed to have been built by superior beings for man.  She
longed for her white wooden chapels with a fanlight over the door
and a cold, northern light inside.  Chapels that man had built for
God!  One could make up one's own mind about religion there.  Here,
as she looked about from one church to the other, she saw that
religion had long ago made up its mind about her.  She snorted and
waved her palm-leaf fan.

To Anthony, Mrs. Jorham was intensely interesting.  He was curious
to understand her sense of Protestant outrage.  They went to Santa
Catalina, San Agustín, and Santa Clara.  They saw the curious oil
paintings on the walls of La Merced.  In the bare, grey limestone
of old Santo Domingo they sat down on the floor and rested.  Here
for some reason or other Mrs. Jorham felt more at home.

"What was it made her so indignant?" he wondered, "and so grim?"
He would like to take her to the cathedral.  Poor soul, perhaps it
was her idea of pleasure that made her so sad?  He had a notion to
try on a good time for her benefit.  Havana with Mrs. Jorham!

He went out and hired a double carriage, only one of whose wheels
was very oval.  With her little mushroom sunshade projecting over
the back like the small targe of a defiant warrior they left the
churches and drove along the sea wall and the Alameda clear out to
the Cortina de la Reina, and out the Paseo de Tacón to El Principe.

"My!" said Mrs. Jorham, semi-approvingly, as the incomparable
gardens of Los Molinos burst on her view.

Good, she was thawing!

He himself felt like St. Lawrence and it was only ten o'clock.
Under an awning in the old Parque de la India they had claret
lemonade.  He took her to a luxurious shop on San Rafael Street and
bought her an expensive fan.  He whirled her around the monastery
of Belén at Luz and Compostela streets.  Dashing as recklessly as
he could prevail on the driver to dash, he finally wound up on
O'Reilly where he bought her a black mantilla and made her put it
on.  Why he did all this he could not tell, Mrs. Jorham had touched
off something of the devil in him.  Mrs. Jorham in a mantilla was
so gorgeous a solecism he almost began to make love to her.  He
finally bought her a chameleon on a chain.

"They live in cemeteries, Mrs. Jorham, and change colour," he
explained.  But she did not believe him.  She put the chameleon in
her bag with the Testament and the four silver dollars.  He felt
profoundly sorry for it.  In the great heat he felt sorry for a
chameleon in a reticule.  O God!  Here he was driving about in
Havana with an old woman.  He did not know any other woman in the
whole place.  Yes, Cheecha!  He bought another chameleon for
Cheecha.

"Mrs. Jorham, Mrs. Jorham," he hummed close by her ear as they
drove off again.

"What is the matter with ye, young man?" said Mrs. Jorham through a
mouthful of black lace.  He looked at her.  She was having a good
time!  He had a notion to let Cheecha's chameleon run up the back
of the driver.  The horses might run away then.  No!  Instead he
would take Mrs. Jorham to the cathedral and show her the tomb of
Columbus.

Mrs. Jorham sniffed disdainfully at the holy water from which the
mosquitoes rose as Anthony dipped his fingers in it.  The interior
of the cathedral was still full of scaffolding.  Some frescoers at
work held her attention.  She had never seen a painter at work
before.  She stood looking up till she was dizzy.  They went over
and sat down on unused stone blocks that had not yet been removed
before the Admiral's new tomb.  Several parties of fashionably
dressed people began to arrive while Mrs. Jorham sat fanning
herself.  It was certainly cool and restful here after the scalding
glare of the street.  A verger came and uncovered the font.

"I alers did think Columbus was the bravest of them all.  Crossin'
the ocean fer the first time!  It's bad enough now 'specially if
yer husband can't navigate.  Columbus believed in what he knew, of
course.  But it must have ban hard to get folks to do somethin' so
new."

The distant wail of a baby interrupted Mrs. Jorham.  She laid her
fan spasmodically on her chest as if she had caught her breath.
The organ started to play.  Anthony looked up.

He was surprised to see the number of people who had come in.  And
the sound of more carriages arriving at the door could still be
heard.

"There is going to be a christening, Mrs. Jorham, rather a
fashionable one I think.  Look, the bishop is here to bless the
child.  If we move over there in that corner we can see it all
without disturbing them.  Here by the big pillar."

"My!  This IS going to be worth while.  Look at the jewels and
laces and uniforms!" she exclaimed half to herself.

They drew back in their corner and waited while the family arranged
itself about the font.  The service began, evidently as long and
complete a one as wealth and influence could obtain.  Mrs. Jorham
watched the small howling bundle of lace being passed from hand to
hand, held up and waved about, sprinkled, and sung about in Latin.
So much to-do over a baby made her think better of the Catholic
Church.  But that was not what Anthony was looking at.

Between the responses he had fallen helplessly in love.

The girl was standing directly opposite him just across the nave.
And of such a witches' bundle and mad faggot of chances is fate
composed that if he had not happened to move a little to clear
himself of the pillar he might never have laid eyes on her at all.
Or, if he had seen her otherwhere he might not have fallen in love.
He might only have admired or yearned over her a little.  Or he
might not have really seen her.  Her image might only have fallen
upon his eyes with no penetration.  But he did move.

And as he stepped out from the pillar, at that instant, his pupils
were opened upon the extremely delicate and mysterious living
substance behind them.  Looking inward he beheld a divine image
within himself.  He could not have imagined it in all its
overpowering charm and living splendour.  It was something which
now drew upon reality and had its own independent vigour and
validity although it was nourished within him.  Looking into the
outer world he saw a Spanish girl in a mantilla, with nearly black-
blue eyes and pale gold-gleaming hair, regarding him over her fan.
And the outward and inner images became one.  The next instant
their eyes met.

Exactly what happened then he could not tell.  There was
undoubtedly a current that passed between them.  He had an
irrefutable intuition that what was going on in his own eyes was
also occurring in hers.  The effect upon his body was a kind of
relaxed and breathless suspense.  Unconsciously he leaned back
against the pillar for an instant and closed his lids.  When he
opened them again he saw that she was still studying his face.
Then a wave of colour rushed up from her neck and shoulders and she
disappeared behind her fan.

Heavens, would she never come out of that eclipse!  At the font the
sponsors were promising on behalf of the wailing baby impossible
things.  Several millenniums passed.  The fan spread a little.  It
came down as far as her chin.

Splendour of Angels!  Already he had forgotten how lovely she was.
You could only remember it when you really saw her.  He must always
be able to see her.  Always!  Why, she was smiling at him!  At
HIM!  Already there was a great secret between them.  He
straightened up and leaned forward a little.  She shook her head.
It was just the dream of a shake.  Ah!  She saw him now.  Who was
that dignitary beside her?  Her father or an uncle, no doubt!  Damn
his soul!  Surely that man could not be . . .  But be careful.  He
would just answer her smile.  He did so.  The fan seemed to touch
her lips.  No?  Well, he could not be sure.  Now it made a graceful
curve, opened out a little, and rested on her breast.  She might
have been fanning herself!  He put his own hand under his coat and
looked at her . . .  Then he hastily managed to turn that heartfelt
gesture into a trite continuation of removing his handkerchief from
his left pocket.  "Uncle's" eyes were taking him in coldly.

Everything that could be done for the baby was now completed.  As
an impeccable candidate for the communion of saints it and its
family and friends departed, leaving Anthony leaning against the
pillar hopelessly.  Suddenly he realized he was being left in
darkness.  He rushed out just in time to see her driving away.

"Señorita Dolores de la Fuente," said the verger.  He gave the man
a gold piece and never knew it.  Then he remembered Mrs. Jorham.
He rushed back again.  She was sitting again before the tomb of
Columbus.

"Mrs. Jorham, Mrs. Jorham," cried Anthony seizing her by both hands
and dragging her off a marble block.  "Mrs. Jorham, I'm in love!"

"Now look here, young man, now look here," she said, snatching at
her reticule.  "Ye BEHAVE yerself.  The idear!  But air ye in
love?" she said, "air ye?" peering out of her bonnet into his face.
"Swan to man, I believe ye be!"

The verger, scandalized, looked at them and then went away.  For
short of arson the donors of a gold piece were, so far as he was
concerned, invisible.

"You won't say anything, will you, Mrs. Jorham?" said Anthony as
the sober light of day overwhelmed him at the door.

"We'll just cancel secrets, mister, and call it square," said she.
"I never was one to talk much, except about sewing," she added,
laying her black glove on his arm.  "Na-ow," she gave a little
sigh, "ye might take me home.  Listenin' to that baby squallin'
kind of made me anxious over 'Lisha.  I guess ye know OUR
secret."

They found the crew of the boat from the Wampanoag waiting with
their jackets spread out on oars against the glare of the noon sun.
Anthony was keeping Cibo's boat until later.

"I did have a good time," said Mrs. Jorham as she arranged herself
in the stern sheets.  She gayly waved her hand with the black glove
on it.  Collins grinned back at Anthony as they pulled away.
Anthony saw her shawl fall out of its rigid folds into something
more natural.  At a little distance over the water she looked
smaller, even frail.  Suddenly he saw what Mrs. Jorham must have
looked like as a young girl.

That must be what was caught in Captain Jorham's eyes.  Yes, he
understood now.  Mrs. Jorham was going home.  That was what the
Wampanaog was!  Home!  Whenever on sea or land, whenever . . .

"Dolores, I must find you!"

He ran up the steps again and jumped into a carriage.  It was
terrible to have business to do when he did not even know where she
lived.

"Where, señor?"

"Ah, where indeed?  Perhaps the driver would know!"  But he could
not bring himself to mention her name to him.  Her name!  He felt
tears gathering behind his eyes.

"Señor?"

What the devil then!  To the tailor's?  His suit would not be
quite done yet.  But a last fitting before going to the captain-
general's . . .

"Moses of Cintra in the Calle Obispo."

"Sí, sí!  El judio."  The man whipped up and drove off.




CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

THROUGH A COPY OF VELASQUEZ


If Carlo had not warned Anthony to pay strict attention to the
advice of the little tailor he could scarcely have brought himself
to wear the suit which he found waiting for him at the cubicle of
Moses.  It was dark, but gorgeous, and of the style Incroyable
which the smart old Jew had just imported from Paris.  Such a
collar Anthony had never seen.

"I have made certain alterations," said Moses, "a concession to
local taste.  Those who go to an audience with His Excellency
should bear in mind that he prides himself on being a very modern
man.  It is not only in clothes but in government, señor, that to a
certain extent he admires the French taste.  'New times, new
fashions, and new minds,' is a favourite saying of his.  Permit me
to pin the waist a little tighter.  It is the Herculean bust, that
which looks so well on the orator when he gestures from the rostrum
with one hand in his breast, which has now come in.  Ah!  I am
always breaking my chalk.  More pins, Sabathio.  But I would not
advise you to orate to the governor.  Let him do the talking.

"Great men always talk a great deal," continued Moses, despite his
mouthful of pins.  "They realize by a lifetime of conversational
disappointments that others seldom have anything to say.  Have you
not found it so yourself, señor?  Pardon, I slipped with that pin.
And many are coming to believe here that Don Luis de las Casas is
really a great man.  In six years he has worked wonders.  The
Marqués de Someruelos who will shortly be sent out to succeed him
is also of the modern cast of mind, they say.  No, it would never
do to go to the palace resembling an old hidalgo.  They are out of
date here.  And the general will observe you keenly.  He will
question you without your knowing it.  It has been his method here
always to see personally those who are doing anything for him.  All
those who serve him must first be his friends.  It is thus that he
has made headway against the intendant.  By his Junta as it is
called, Señor Cibo, Herr Meyier, Mr. James Drake--even the bishop
and the military are of his party.  I myself have the honour of
making his clothes!  You can see you have been fortunate in Havana
in having your ends shaped by powerful hands.  There now!  I think
that will do.  Some last stitching and the iron!  Ah, the hot
goose!  What would tailors be without it?"  He grinned and spat out
the remaining pins.  "A dangerous conversation, you see, señor.  It
would not do to swallow my words."

While the last touches were going on they went over and sat down,
Anthony on a chair and Moses crosslegged on a table.

"Do you happen to know anything of a certain Señorita Dolores de la
Fuente?" asked Anthony.  "I should be glad of a little information
about her."  He was relieved to be able to say her name so
casually.

". . . y Someruelos!  Do not forget that!  Señorita Dolores de la
Fuente y Someruelos, a niece of the incoming captain-general!  Ah,
the señor is to be congratulated on his eyesight.  Yes, all Havana
knows.  She has preceded her uncle here with certain relatives and
domestics to set up his establishment at Los Molinos.  A lady with
the true gracia of old Castile.

"It is because the present governor has permitted her to move into
the palace that it is plain to all the world how the political wind
blows.  If the present and the newly-appointed captain-general were
not both liberals the señorita would have to wait.  As it is, the
palace will now be all ready for her uncle when he comes.
Extensive alterations are under way.  All of the domestics are to
have new liveries."  Moses rubbed his hands.

"At the palace!  I shall be under the same roof with her in a few
hours," Anthony said half aloud.

"Pardon me, señor; but I do not think you will see her at Los
Molinos," said Moses.  "Don Luis has taken her under his wing
like an eagle.  It is not the custom here, you know, for young
ladies . . ."

Anthony held up his hand.  "I understand," he said.

Nevertheless, as he put on his suit for the audience he felt fired
with hope.  "Dolores was at Los Molinos!"

Moses charged for advice as well as for his cloth, Anthony
discovered when he paid the bill.  But it was worth it, he felt, as
he drove on to Herr Meyier's small establishment in a street just
off the plaza.  And he was enjoying himself.  He wished Vincent
were along.  How he would gape at this raiment.  What had become of
Livorno, anyway?  In the vividness of the present his old days
seemed to belong to someone else.  Old clothes--he would have to
get into them again to remember what they felt like.  Even one's
contour changed.  He kicked the bundle of the suit he had worn to
the tailor's.  Then he remembered he had left his watch in it!
Well, he was already late for the appointment with Herr Meyier.  He
knew that.

Herr Meyier had a number of papers to go over carefully.  The order
for the temporary sequestration of the schooner was made out,
Anthony's appointment as government agent, and an authorization to
seize the slaves.  All of these already bore the seal of the Caxa
de Consolidación and lacked only the signature of the captain-
general.  Annexed to these were the long records of the process of
the government in the case of the Black Angel, the rescript of the
Council of the Indies confirming it, and a decision of the alcalde-
major dated the day before called "Processional Confirmation of
Precedent in Camera."

"All of these papers," said Meyier, "you will please notice, Don
Antonio, are in triplicate.  One set for you, one for my bureau,
and copies for the captain-general.  The last paper with the high-
sounding title is the most important of all.  It means that the
highest court in Cuba has certified that the case of the Black
Angel is a precedent upon which the executive government here can
act.  A 'procession' of other acts can now legally proceed from
this first one.  Do you see?  'In Camera' simply shows that the
decision has been made at the private request of the captain-
general and is confidential.  No public notice of it is required.
It is simply certified back to him as valid.  Perhaps you do not
fully appreciate the beauties of Roman Civil Law from the
standpoint of a government official.  From now on all that the
executive has to do to seize any slaver is to--well, seize it--and
certify that it is precedental with the case of the Black Angel.
The viceroy's signature makes it so.  It is then a fact in law.  To
re-establish possession for themselves the owners of slaves who
have been subjected to the process must prove conclusively that the
government is in error, that is, that the case is NOT a
precedent.  That is very difficult to do, and in the meantime the
slaves must remain in the government's possession and may be sold.
It is simply beautiful!

"I may say," said Herr Meyier getting up and walking about
excitedly, "that this puts a weapon in our hands for which we have
long been searching.  The slave interests are powerful and have
been the most active element behind the intendant and Señor Santa
María, 'the patriots,' as they call themselves.  Now they BELONG
to us.  Only one example will be needed.  Señor Gallego is
unfortunate.  But that first example we must have.

"You must therefore thoroughly understand all of this when you take
the papers to the captain-general to be signed.  He is a
penetrating and exacting man.  I have explained your mission here
to him and I have also stretched a point by indicating that it was
you to whom we should be grateful for suggesting this process.
That in a sense is true."  He waved his hand deprecatingly.
"Naturally I worked out the details, but let that go.  He will give
you the credit.  We shall all participate in the benefits."

"Are you sure the captain-general does want to see me?" asked
Anthony.

"I am not exactly certain why he INSISTS upon seeing you but I
think I know.  This case is a very important one.  Out of it may
proceed much revenue for the palace.  Don Luis would assure himself
that he is placing this matter in competent hands.  It will be for
you to convince him of that.  If he feels you can carry this
seizure through, your own reward, the matter of the Gallego debt,
will be a trifle.  But I am being frank.  If he does NOT like
you, he will find someone else and there will be nothing left for
you to do but to make your suit to Señor Santa María.  There is
much risk in all this for you.  I do not conceal that.  You must,
for instance, on the way to Africa avoid--well, avoid falling
overboard.  But I think I am right in feeling that you will not be
prevented easily or cavil at small things.  By God! señor, MAKE
the captain-general like you.  Become a convincing young man!  In
that case it may be possible the governor will have a further
proposition to make you.  If he does I advise you to accept.  If
not--" he shrugged his shoulders--"there is one thing more.  What
is your nationality?  Where were you born?"

"I do not know," said Anthony turning red.

"SO?" said Meyier looking at him appraisingly.  Then he laughed.

"Don Antonio Adverso, citizen of the Western Hemisphere, white, a
subject of God?  No, no, that will not do.  It is a legal fiction
you need in order to exist."

"I suppose I am English," said Anthony.

"Why, señor?"

"I cannot answer you, Herr Meyier, a matter of honour."

"Teufel!  Englishmen are seldom mysterious about being Englishmen.
But, we cavil unnecessarily.  Will you take an oath of allegiance
to the King of Spain in order that the law may be able to see you
favourably, and hence for your own protection?"

But Anthony hesitated visibly.  He felt very much the same about
this oath as he had felt about Father Xavier's wafer.  As he looked
at Herr Meyier he could see that he was both disgusted and
surprised.  He was losing ground with him--and there was the debt.
Should he sell himself to collect that?  But why put it that way?
This was only an earthly affair, himself and the King of Spain.  He
could bargain there.

"I will take the oath if you do not register it," said Anthony.

"Good!  I will only have it attested, to produce if necessary,"
grunted Meyier, and sent for a notary.  So Anthony swore with his
hand.

"It is," he told himself, "a compromise."

They packed the papers in one of Meyier's portfolios and put a lead
seal on it.  "Himmel!" Meyier had said at last, leaning into the
carriage.  "Do not let trivialities interfere with your success,
Don Antonio, even a citizen of the Western Hemisphere must live.
Yes!  No?"  Anthony had left Meyier grinning and waving good luck.

Incidents like these that threatened to uncover the merely vague
grounds for the supposition of his own existence were terribly
disconcerting.  They left him melancholy.  Herr Meyier's banter
about the oath had gone deep.  With Meyier the oath was a mere
formality.  Herr Meyier was a German.  He was sure of himself.  He
had been born into and turned out of a mould.  He was irrevocable
to himself and to all men.  He remained a German no matter what
oaths he took.  But Anthony--what of him?  "Citizen of the Western
Hemisphere, white!"  How deep that cut!  In all the inherited
loyalties of men he had no part.  At the table of the sun he drank
to no king.  He had no right to be there which was humanly visible.
Perhaps Cibo was right and he should attach himself to something.
But Mr. Bonnyfeather's legacy had made that difficult because it
was unnecessary.  He did not even need to go on playing at making a
living.  Life would be just a game with the means assured and no
ends to play for except to win.  Win what?  Undoubtedly he must
find something.  Suppose--suppose a citizen of the Western
Hemisphere proposed marriage to Señorita Dolores de la Fuente y
Someruelos.  What would he say, for instance, to the de la Fuentes
and the Someruelos?  He knew what he would say to Dolores.  That
would not be in the realm of logical argument--but to THEM?  And
he knew now that they would be there, too.  The best he could now
do would be to whisper something to Dolores in the moonlight--and
go away.  Someone like that baby this morning who had sponsors for
himself must be the final accredited cavalier.

Well, he would go on.  He would see.  Perhaps the Western
Hemisphere might be a mould.  Feeling vaguely English because he
looked it, and being sure himself that he was born, he would pour
himself out into the mould.  He would find out.  Now that the
madonna had gone she would also take his cradle of the pool in the
convent with her.  It was the only one he had had.  That--and a
certain face on a miniature which he must never speak of.

To hell with all that, then!

Here I am.  I know that.  I will try following up one practical
thing, call my object all, and see where it leads to.  Object, the
debt.  I WILL collect that.  I make an oath to myself.  The oath
to the King of Spain is purely contributory.  It is a means.
Result so far:  I have achieved nationality.  Supposing the debt to
be "x" I shall simply work out its value to me in the terms of what
happens while I collect it thus:


     y (The Wampanoag + Havana + Africa) = x


Now then, I make a note of that.  Memorandum for A. A.  He set it
all down--and


     y = the unknown factor of myself.


Let us see, are there any other factors?  Luck?  Oh, well, this is
a non-human equation, not a logical one.  To supply the value of
luck would require a constant unknown factor operating throughout.
To be able to know that would also imply being able to know "x" in
advance.

He put his notebook into his pocket rather pleased with his fancy.

"Hence you see," he told himself, "it follows . . . what follows?
That I am being drawn by two horses to see the Captain-General of
Cuba at Los Molinos and Dolores is THERE.  Very good, that!--
Driver, a little faster please.  I MUST be there by four o'clock.
So this is what carriages are about.  How reasonable!"

Yet what he really enjoyed, now that all the important business was
set down in a "mathematical" memorandum, was the mysterious and
easy pleasure of forward motion as he rolled along over the new
military road toward Los Molinos.  Having a constant series of
impressions follow each other in rapid succession without doing
anything to produce them gave him the sensation of having increased
life.  He was enjoying as a more powerful being might enjoy.  The
horses had accelerated fate and made the world change.  In the
collection of the debt, in solving "x," this would be one of the
most enhancing experiences he felt.

"Driver, faster!  Use your whip!"  They flew along now.

The gardens of Los Molinos with the summer palace of the captains-
general came in sight, a gleam of old ivory in a tossing sea of
palms.  In those living depths the wind blew the treetops back into
white, glistening spots that shivered in the sea of green like the
Caribbean lashing over a hidden reef.  A sentry emerged from a
gold-and-scarlet striped box and took his pass.  Ten minutes later
Anthony was ushered into the Hall of the Governors of Cuba.

                            ----------

At first he could not see anyone there.  The rather low room with
grey stone walls and a moulded stucco ceiling looked more like a
corridor than an apartment.  It ran clear across the front of the
main building with deep, recessed windows stretching from ceiling
to floor.  Through these, like reflections from the surface of a
lake, fell the shuffling lights and shades of the waving palm
fronds without which mirrored themselves and rippled aquidly upon
the gleaming, ebony floor.  Shifting spots of sunlight and half-
lights flowed along the grey walls and lent an almost liquid aspect
to the atmosphere of the room.

Indeed, it was no wonder that the eye at first lost itself in this
ancient apartment.  Had Anthony seen tropical fish come swimming
through the windows he would not have been surprised.  High, narrow
teakwood chairs, set at stately intervals; chairs upholstered in
faded red brocade shot through with tarnished silver threads died
away into the watery perspective as if all those who had sat on
them were dead and this was the cabin of a foundered galleon.  It
was not until his eyes adjusted themselves to the somnolent and
stealthy shifting of shadows that at last in the centre bay of the
windows he discovered the captain-general himself.

He was standing with his back turned looking out into the garden
and had evidently not heard the secretary announce him, for Anthony
could still see his card lying on a silver tray before the
governor's desk chair.

"Your Excellency," said Anthony.

General Las Casas turned with a slight twist of annoyance.  Seeing
it was not a lackey he hastily picked up the card, read it, and
immediately broke into a quiet smile.  Anthony could scarcely
restrain a start of surprise.  Here was the same gentleman who had
been standing beside Dolores in the cathedral.

"Come over, Don Antonio, I am glad to see you.  Have I kept you
waiting long?  Ah, I see.  Well, you are not the first who has not
been able to find me in this--aquarium."

He pointed Anthony to a chair by his escritoire, answering his bow
with an easy and winning courtesy.

"You must really co-operate with me in helping to set aside the old
formalities of a viceregal court," continued the general leaning
his head on one hand and looking at Anthony frankly and keenly.
"Personally I find it impossible to get anything done in Cuba by
insisting that this is the Escurial.  It has shocked some of the
old Castilians even here.  But formalities are not the end of life
any more.  Things have been happening in Paris, you know.  One must
admit they exist.  'New times, new fashions, and new minds,' I
often say.  I see you believe at least in cutting your clothes to
the year.  You will not be shocked, I trust, if I do not permit you
to kiss my hand?"

"Thank you, for breaking the ice of etiquette so thoroughly, sir,"
said Anthony.  "I confess to coming here with considerable
trepidation, despite the assurances of your many friends in
Havana."

"I was not aware my friends in Havana were so numerous," said the
governor.  "But it is pleasant to hear you say so.  You yourself,
Don Antonio, seem to have fallen into excellent hands.  Herr Meyier
and our good Carlo Cibo have both been talking to me about you.  I
have been given to suppose that it will not be difficult for us to
arrive at a conclusion about certain matters, and to our mutual
advantage.  You have already made a very happy suggestion, I am
told."  Anthony saw his eyes rest on him inquiringly.

"I shall be frank with Your Excellency.  A very small part of the
credit for that suggestion is due to me.  It was only something I
said inadvertently which enabled Herr Meyier to . . ."

"Tut, tut!" exclaimed the governor.  "You dispraise yourself.  But
I see you are honest even in claiming credit and that is, to say
the least, refreshing here.  Your inadvertency was a very happy
one.  Go on, make some more.  But Herr Meyier has entrusted you
with some papers, I believe?"

"Here," said Anthony laying the sealed portfolio on his desk.

"You may gain some insight into the conditions of this business,"
remarked the general as he extracted the documents and spread them
out, "when I tell you that it is only to a messenger whose own
interests are inseparable with their safe delivery here that these
papers would be entrusted.  Do you realize, my young friend,"
continued he opening his eyes a little wider, "that if certain
gentlemen here in Havana had known of the contents of this
portfolio neither you nor it would have arrived here this
afternoon?  As it is I have no doubt whatever that you are already
being watched."

"I am prepared to take the risks which will inevitably be involved
if Your Excellency sees fit to trust me," said Anthony.  "It is
true my own interests are involved in this affair but that is not
my main motive, sir.  I want you to know that.  No, there is
something more."  He hesitated.

"Go on," said the governor, "I am really curious now."

"It is the thing itself," Anthony burst out, "the difficulties that
are in the way, what will happen, my own determination to go
through with it.  I would find out for myself how I shall cope with
this affair.  But I suppose that is not what I should have told
YOU."

The governor answered with a quick flash of his white teeth.  He
drummed on the desk for a minute with the end of his pen.  Then he
started to sign the papers.

"On the contrary I am very glad you have said it, Don Antonio.  It
puts a new face on the matter.  We shall not simply be using each
other for so much cash.  It encourages me, in fact, to propose to
you something further since you are a caballero with whom gold is
not all.  What I shall say now is between us only, as men of
honour.  Is that agreeable?"

"You have my word, sir, but I reserve my decision as to your
proposal."

"Naturally.  Do not imagine I would inveigle you.  Quite the
contrary.  In fact, as you shall see, to a certain extent I shall
have to commit myself to your hands."  He leaned forward and began
to sand the papers for a minute.  Then he looked up frankly and
continued.

"Señor, in a few months I return to Spain.  I return there a poorer
man than when I arrived here six years ago.  It might have been
otherwise if I had cared to play the game here with the intendant
and Señor Santa María.  Meyier has told you of them?  So!  You
understand then.  But perhaps you do not understand fully.  The
'game' is to separate Cuba from the crown of Spain.  Troubled times
are now with us and more ahead.  With universal war brewing in
Europe we shall soon be separated for months from Madrid.
Insurrection gathers here.  My successor, the Marqués de
Someruelos, my cousin, will soon be left here alone to struggle
with those who call themselves patriots.  Need I add that their
conception of patriotism is the concentration of revenue in their
own hands?  The intendant is not without influence at home.  It has
been only with the greatest difficulty that I have succeeded in
having a loyal successor to myself appointed, a man of honour and
ability, a liberal, but loyal.  To smooth the way for himself he
has sent his niece out in advance to set up his household here at
Los Molinos.  Social prestige is very important in Cuba among the
great landholders.  I am a widower and have been handicapped.  But
with the arrival of the Señorita Dolores we have been co-operating
in building up the viceregal court.  When my successor arrives
there will be a court for the royalists to rally about.  It has
been very difficult for her.  She has had to disregard many
conservative customs.  But--as you seemed to observe this
afternoon in the cathedral--she is a señorita of singular charm."

He leaned back and laughed, enjoying Anthony's obvious confusion.

"I see to a certain extent you have already joined our party," he
continued.  "That is well.  Much serenading now takes place on
moonlit nights in the gardens of Molinos.  All the voices are
terrible so far, it is true.  But we have gained a number of the
influential young caballeros to our side, for the cult of Dolores
must also, by her decree, be the policy of the King of Spain.
There have been dinners--and duels.  Several troublesome patriots
have been removed--honourably.  It is now fashionable to come to
court on certain afternoons to kiss the hand of the captain-general
and that of the señorita afterward.  Her uncle when he arrives will
already be enormously popular.  Patriotism, which has only an
intendant and a mustachioed Señor Santa María, will soon be left
cold."

"Do you want me to come and join the choir in your park then,
general?" laughed Anthony.  "If so, you can count on me for
THAT."

"Do so by all means," laughed Las Casas.  "I shall instruct my
sentries not to fire on the night when you arrive.  Let your soul
overflow.  But we wander a little from the point.

"Under all of this, you know, I am really quite serious.  Would you
be interested, Don Antonio, for instance in being the agent for
providing the somewhat embarrassed Captain-General of Cuba with an
independent revenue?  You might, ahem, er, participate--to a
certain extent.  I should add that you would deserve to do so for
you would be providing the means for preserving intact the
interests of the crown here."

"You mean," said Anthony doing some fast thinking, "that once in
Africa you would like me to continue there for a while as your
confidential agent."

"Your surmise has hit the mark very closely, señor."

"I could never consider engaging in slaving as a permanent
business, sir, there is no need for me to do so, and besides I do
not . . ."

"Certainly, of course not, that is for any length of time or in the
usual way.  My thought was this: once arrived in Africa establish
yourself at Gallego's base and remain there long enough to ship me
and my successor sufficient cargoes to permit us to get the upper
hand here financially.

"We will undertake to provide you ships.  They will be temporarily
sequestrated from the friends of Señor Santa María.  Thus the thing
will work both ways to our benefit.  It will hamstring them and
provide us funds to pay the garrison and equip loyal colonial
forces.  I should say it would require some years to bring this
about, provided you can keep sending slaves.  It will not matter
then if we are cut off from Spain.  The commercial details of the
matter will be handled by Herr Meyier through our good friend the
rich grocer of Regla.  Any reasonable arrangement which you and
Cibo might care to make with the Caxa da Consolidación would, I am
sure, be approved of at the palace."  He smiled.

"You see the merit of the scheme is that the intendant and his
friends will not be able to lay their hands on the root of, the
trouble at first.  It will all be done quietly.  You are not known
here and it will be some time before they guess Cibo's connection,
if at all.  We shall take care to have the cargoes landed at
Santiago, say, and marched overland if necessary.  And slaves now
are at a premium.  I should hope for six or eight cargoes a year at
least."

He paused looking at Anthony earnestly, again drumming on the desk.
In the great room the sunlight was already beginning to fade.

"Can you give me a few men I can depend upon when the Ariostatica
sails?  It may be difficult to make this first seizure, in Africa,"
said Anthony.  "Suppose that Señor Gallego objects."

"Ah," said the governor shrugging his shoulders, "that I admit is
the rub.  Frankly I cannot help you there.  To put a crew on the
schooner and send them to Africa, I have no power.  My authority
ends three miles from these shores.  If I carried it with a high
hand and put men aboard, the cat would be out of the bag.  The
FIRST move must be perfectly legal and unsuspected.  I can arm
you with papers and nothing more.  Those papers give you authority
to tell the captain what to do and to attach Señor Gallego's
slaves.  You must contrive to do that and to establish yourself in
Africa if you can.  If this first move is protested I can simply
say I am carrying out the unofficial policy of the present ministry
to permit the collection of a foreign merchant's debt.  If you make
use of your opportunity and establish yourself, ah, then--THEN I
shall take some risks in seizing ships.  Until then why should I?
Apparently I should simply be compromising myself for you.  No one
would believe that.

"As it is now only four of us will know, and the marquis when he
arrives.  Indeed, I should not risk it with any Cuban.  They all
have local connections.  I wished to see you myself before I
broached the matter.  I believe you can succeed in this, Don
Antonio.  If you do, in two or three years you will be a rich man.
In any event you will be taking much the same risks just to collect
your present debt."

"It will take several years out of my life," mused Anthony.

"True, and very interesting ones they may prove to be," continued
the general.  "But there--I would not press you.  Either you will
want to do this as you say for its own sake, or not at all.  I can
understand that.  I see by these papers, however, we are both
serving the same master now--your oath of allegiance.  I have
always served my king well.  The profit has not always been great.
One does the best one can--and goes home.  You will forgive me for
having pressed all this upon you.  I am surrounded by rascals here
or incompetents.  It seemed our opportunity might be mutual in
several ways.  Well, let us seal these and go.  The señorita
receives informally in the garden this afternoon."  He looked up a
little sadly and gave the bell rope a pull.

At some distance the bell tinkled musically.  The door opened.

"Lights, Pedro, for a sealing."  Presently the lighted candles
came.

"There is always something childishly fascinating about this," said
the governor as he began to soften the wafers for the seals in a
little pan.  The pungent smell of lit wax made him cough.

Instantly before Anthony arose the library of Mr. Udney at Livorno.
He saw himself moving about there a ragged, stammering orphan with
a priest's hat under his arm.  That was who he was!  He remembered
now.  He must be making his own place in the world.  And now--he
was looking at the captain-general of Cuba sealing documents that
concerned that same orphan.  He had come for them half-way across
the world from the library of Mr. Udney eleven years ago.  Why not
gather in all that the wax might seal?  It was running now, as it
were, through the general's hands.  Soon they would be hardened,
those seals, once and for all.  Florence Udney . . .  No pigtails
now . . .  Mrs. David Parish thank you!  Dolores, how lovely you
are.  In three years I might . . . in three years, who knows?

"Your Excellency, I have joined your party," Anthony said quietly.

"Good!" said Las Casas, "all the better that you did not jump at
the first glimmer of a golden hook.  It is more than that, isn't
it?"

"Much more," said Anthony.  "ALL I think."

The governor smiled and pressed down on the last seal.

"Well," said he, "since you have joined MY party, I suppose you
will have no objection to joining the one going on downstairs.
No!"  He laughed and put Anthony's sealed copies back in the
portfolio.  "The rest of these papers remain here, and with Herr
Meyier.  I shall myself add a confidential memorandum for the
marqués when he comes.  Depend upon it he shall understand.  Now we
go down to the garden.  Don Antonio--" he looked at Anthony
fixedly.

"Your Excellency?"

"I congratulate you.  Permit me to introduce you to the Friends of
the King."

They walked across the room together, Anthony's heart beating fast.
To his surprise, however, they did not turn toward the door.

"How do you think I do as a politician?" said the governor.  "I
have had to learn it here," he grimaced.  "I am not the first
captain-general who found himself alone in Cuba, however.  Look
here!"  They had stopped before a full-length portrait of Don
Philip IV just opposite the governor's desk across the hall.

"It might," said Las Casas, "be a portrait of the old days here.
It is a copy of Velasquez.  A predecessor of mine had it hung here
almost a century ago."

From the deep shadows of a black velvet curtain behind him the pale
and utterly weary countenance of Don Philip looked out at them as
if they were not there.  The gold ringlets over his narrow, austere
brow shone with as cold a lustre as the fishy-blue of his eyes.
Disdainfully, with a smile that had nothing human about it except a
hint of cruelty, he was drawing on a pair of long, thin gloves.

"You see?" said Las Casas.  "It is the same king who once had a
soldier executed for catching him in his arms when he fell
downstairs.  High treason!  He had impeded the sovereign."  A look
of keen enjoyment passed over the face of the governor not unmixed
with regret.  "The king did not have to be a politician," he went
on.  "But it has been otherwise with viceroys in Cuba.  They have
sometimes thought that even a way of falling downstairs without
attracting attention might be convenient.  Even a century ago . . .
now . . ."

He put out his hand and pulled the picture toward him.  It swung
out like a door.  A narrow flight of stairs dived into the wall
behind it.  They descended these in two turns in the darkness and
came out suddenly into a tropical garden below.

The garden had been there so long that it had forgotten it was in a
patio.  The smooth, grey stems of giant palms sprang upwards to a
green clerestory above, a luminous Gothic ceiling which swam rather
than rested on the cleanly curved boles of its natural pillars
below.  The eye lost itself in the fronded arches of palm leaves or
wandered away through a maze of living columns to be reluctantly
halted at last by the time-darkened walls of the palace beyond.  It
was the old tilt-yard of Los Molinos which the genius of some
unknown architect had turned into a formal paradise for the
viceroys of Spain.

A series of low terraces bordered with stone banisters and lined
with ferns and giant cacti in green stone jars descended by regular
degrees till they finally enclosed the centre of the garden.  There
was a level stretch of intensely green grass and ferns from the
centre of which a fountain under great pressure lifted a constantly
waving plume of spray.  Water, indeed, was the secret of the place.
The deep runnels of subterranean channels murmured with a constant
moaning undertone as if the stream that had been diverted to
refresh the place still softly complained.  It was hard to tell
whether it was the voice of the wind in the palms above or the rush
of hidden water below that never ceased.  It was a monotone that
seemed to belong there and to be as natural as the cool shade of
the giant palms themselves.

"An ancient tribe of peacocks once inhabited here," said Las Casas
as they stood looking down a flight of broad Spanish steps that led
to the fountain below.  "The women's dresses moving about among the
trees there remind me of them.  It is a pity that hoops and brocade
are now going out.  We shall scarcely know what to do with places
like this soon I am afraid.  As for the peacocks--they had to go.
They made a noise in the morning like filing glass.  But come, I
see they are waiting for us."

They were met at the bottom of the stair by a very old man of
extreme Castilian gravity in a costume that might have done duty at
the Escurial some decades before.  Don Alonso de Guzman had been
master of ceremonies at Los Molinos during the administrations of
four preceding captains-general, and although he was now nearly
eighty, he still contrived to impress even on a garden party a
certain haughty air of mouldy etiquette that was only a memory even
in Spain.  To this personage Anthony was now delivered by Las Casas
and a round of formal introductions began.

There was old Doña Mercedes, the captain-general's mother, who sat
in a wheel-chair wrapped in heavy flaps of lace.  A marmoset with a
face like a bearded penny peeped out over her withered breasts.
Above the low hum of conversation, the sound of water and of sere
leaves, the dry, hacking cough of the old woman and the shrill
whimpering of the monkey rang out disturbingly from time to time.
As yet few of the younger generation had arrived.  Everybody seemed
to be waiting for the affair to begin.

In the meantime old Don Alonso struck his high, beribboned cane
into the ground before the bishop, a sardonic, olive-faced old
gentleman with a tight, churchly wig and a massive episcopal ring;
before the Comandante of Police, Colonel Jesús Blejo; before Señor
Gomez Calderón a rich planter, and Mr. James Drake, an English
merchant of much influence.  The old courtier bowed with the exact
degree of deference due to each while he introduced Anthony.

Several officers of the garrison now began to arrive dressed in
wide-brimmed, straw hats with heavy, silver lace bands.  These
Anthony thought looked anything but military.  Two or three of the
foreign consuls came in with their wives.  By the time Anthony had
made his rounds with Don Alonso it was understood that another
rich, young Englishman with letters was on his travels.  This
explanation of his presence seemed to have invented itself for him
and he gladly acquiesced.

"I suffer greatly from the dreadful humidity of Cuba," said old
Doña Mercedes, evidently touched that a young gentleman should have
expressed sympathy for her cough.  "How I shall survive the trip
back to Spain with Don Luis only the blessed Virgin knows.  His
Lordship here has promised me a hair of the blessed St. Teresa in a
bottle to take along.  Ah, he is a comfort, that man.  I am just
saying what a comfort you are, Your Lordship," she called out.  The
bishop came strolling over looking both saturnine and bored.  "You
will not forget the blessed bottle, will you?" she reminded him.

"You shall have it tomorrow," he said, and made an elaborate note
of it in a black notebook with a gold cross on it.  The old woman
looked at him dotingly while biting the pink ear of her marmoset
with her gums.

"As an Englishman, Don Antonio will scarcely understand how much
your kindness means to me," she said.

"Don Antonio is a good Catholic I hear," replied the bishop.  "It
was he who brought the miracle-working Madonna to Regla, I
understand."

"Scarcely that, sir," said Anthony.  "I merely arrived on the same
ship."

The old woman looked at them both with a live interest now and
began to chatter in an animated way about the happenings at Regla.
Evidently it was the talk of the town.  Through her pious
exclamations of admiration, wonder, and surprise, the bishop kept
trying to pump Anthony.  He walked all around the subject of the
miracle like a cat but he learned nothing beyond the facts that he
already knew.  He looked disappointed.

"You see, señor," said he after they had bowed and walked away from
Doña Mercedes, "frankly, I am glad to meet you here.  Let us sit
down for a minute.  Your name has been mentioned to me already--our
friend Señor Cibo.  Only this afternoon we have had a long talk.
What you say about the remarkable event at Regla confirms in every
way what he has just been telling me--" the bishop smiled blandly--
"I am much gratified.  I trust, however, that no more of the
statues which were so thoughtfully imported will prove to be
miraculous.  It would be somewhat embarrassing if the age of
miracles were to return by wholesale.  The faith of this generation
would scarcely be adequate to the occasion.  I trust you appreciate
my conservative attitude, señor.  What do you think?"  He leaned
forward putting his long upper lip over the gold knob of his cane
and stared out into the garden.

"I am sure Your Lordship has nothing more unusual to anticipate,"
said Anthony.  "The rest of the statues which Captain Jorham is now
disposing of are in no way remarkable except in price.  Of course,
I do not pretend to speak either with authority or inspiration,
only a certain prophetic instinct as it were."

"Ah, you relieve me greatly," sighed the bishop taking his lip off
the cane.  "All the ecclesiastical authorities want to do with
miracles is to be reasonable about them.  As it is there has been a
great deal of unauthorized religious enthusiasm in Havana now for
some time.  As the watchful shepherd of my flock I feel it should
be allayed.  By the way, señor, you were present at a recent
occasion when a French monk, whom I believe you know, interfered
with the punishment of a slave.  A very serious business!"

"Your Lordship seems to be very well informed of everything that
goes on in Havana!"

"VERY," said the bishop.  "It was also intimated to me this
afternoon, with great discretion I might add, that you were
expecting to travel to Africa shortly under somewhat favourable
circumstances."

"Carlo should scarcely have spoken of it," said Anthony somewhat
annoyed.

"Ah, do not say that, Don Antonio.  You see he knew to whom he was
speaking!  After all we are all of one party here."  He swept his
stick around.  "Under the circumstances I can even understand your
sympathy for Brother François.  You are very young yet after all.
But you will also, I trust, understand my own great forbearance and
the difficulty in which I find myself.  The civil authorities are
demanding I take some action about Brother François.  Such things
cannot go on."  He paused significantly.

"My son, it occurs to me that if you could make things comfortable
for Brother François on your approaching voyage you would be doing
him a great favour.  In fact I might add that I have arranged to
have him, er, transferred to the African province.  The captain-
general and I have just had a little talk.  He quite understands
and has suggested that I inform you myself as the matter may be
somewhat of a surprise to the good monk.  I understand you start
soon.  By the way, His Excellency would like to see you for a
minute before you leave this afternoon."  He rose.  "This has been
most gratifying, Don Antonio; you shall have my prayers for a
smooth voyage, I assure you."  Without waiting for any reply he
walked away smiling.

"I shall warn Brother François tonight," thought Anthony and rose
to greet Mr. Drake who passed just then with his wife on his arm.
They talked for some time.

"You hail from about Dundee, do you not, Mr. Adverse?" said the
Englishman.  "I think I detect certain--ah--Dundeeisms in your
accent."

But there was no time to reply.  The company suddenly began to
gather itself together on the lawn.  Those who had been strolling
about under the trees now suddenly appeared.  Old Doña Mercedes
broke into a violent fit of coughing to attract notice to herself.
But no one paid any attention to her.

The brittle, snapping sound of the sudden opening of fans revealed
several women advancing along a faint path through the ferns and
palm trees.  They seemed to appear suddenly out of the background
of greenery and were now standing by the fountain fanning
themselves, laughing and talking to those who crowded up to meet
them eagerly.

From the remoter vistas of the garden, where they had evidently
been concealing themselves and smoking to avoid the boring
preliminaries with the bishop and Doña Mercedes, five or six young
caballeros also hastened forward.  Several little wisps of blue
smoke amid the shrubbery discovered their former hiding places.
But all this Anthony caught out of the side of his eye.  For in the
centre of the group of señoritas by the fountain was Dolores.

He lost no time in hurrying forward himself, and it seemed to him a
particular act of grace on the part of Las Casas that he rescued
him from the formal clutches of Don Alonso to present him to
Dolores.

"Here, señorita," said he, "is a young gentleman whom I believe you
have seen before."  He seemed to be enjoying the slight evidence of
confusion in both of them which marked his words.  "Don Antonio has
brought us letters from important friends."  This was evidently for
the benefit of the young Cubans who were standing near waiting
their turn somewhat impatiently.

Anthony was aware of a sweetly modulated voice with a surprising
depth of tone saying something to the effect that Cuba was honoured
by the presence of so distinguished a traveller.  She was dressed
in shimmering green with something in bright scarlet that fell down
from her shoulders into long fringes.  On account of the light
which seemed to him to emanate from her garments their exact
outline remained vague.  He looked up to see her dark eyes smiling
at him gravely while she manipulated her fan.  A faint perfume
slept in the lazy breeze she evoked.

"It is I who am greatly and unexpectedly honoured," he managed to
reply not very happily.  Then they both smiled at the immense
gravity of this formal exchange--as if their meeting in the
cathedral had already put them far beyond that.  He saw the corners
of her lips twitch a little with amusement.

"Have you brought along with you the charming lady who accompanied
you this afternoon at the christening, Don Antonio, la inglesa?"
She looked at him half mockingly over her fan.

"I regret, señorita," he began.

"Ah, THAT is a great disappointment," she said, "frankly my
curiosity was aroused.  None of us had any idea that young English
caballeros were accompanied by duennas.  Come, enlighten us, señor,
who was she?  I hope you have not trusted yourself alone here!"  A
titter ran through the group of girls behind her, some of whom
Anthony now remembered having seen in the church.  They looked at
him archly awaiting his explanation.

"You do my moral character no great compliment, señorita, but you
underrate the strength of the temptation it finds here.  Can you
blame me for needing protection?  And besides it was I who was
protecting the lady from the ardent caballeros of Cuba.

"As a matter of fact," he hurried on making the most of having
turned the tables slightly, "I was merely showing the wife of a
Yankee captain the epitaphs and tombs of Havana.  She is a great
authority on cemeteries and visits them all over the world."

The explanation aroused a gratifying interest.  It was plain Mrs.
Jorham and her cavalier had caused a good deal of comment.  They
had even been seen taking lemonade together.  Anthony was presented
to the other señoritas.  The Cubans and several young officers now
crowded up.  The talk became general and extremely animated.

Evidently these garden parties of the Señorita Dolores were affairs
of the younger generation.  There could be no doubt that they
belonged to her.  She moved about here and there, always faithfully
followed; the object of much ingenious attention, and with a
dignity, a charm, and a serene enjoyment of her position which at
once dominated everybody and yet put them at their ease.

Even Don Alonso recognized this.  He withdrew quietly, accompanying
the chair of Doña Mercedes which was wheeled off somewhere, leaving
the light chatter and laughter of the group by the fountain
uninterrupted by her cough.  She and Don Alonso took coffee alone
and exchanged the court gossip of previous reigns for hours at a
time.

In the garden coffee and light confections were served by orderlies
of the Andalusian regiment in the garrison.  Anthony secured some
cakes representing a Jew in the flames.  He perched them on the
back of a stone bench with coffee and a napkin and managed to catch
the eyes of Dolores.  She nodded and he came forward bowing to her
cavalier.  He, however, still followed.

"May I not have the honour?" Anthony said to her, pointing to the
bench.  He smiled at her partner.  "I hope, señor, you will permit
me to intrude without offence.  You have often the valued privilege
of drinking coffee at Los Molinos, while I, I remain here for only
a few days.  I ask a great sacrifice I know, but imagine the memory
you will be conferring."

"If the señorita permits," said the young cavalryman who was with
her, half hopeful she would not.

"Tomorrow, Don Esteban, I promise you.  Don Antonio departs so
soon," she said.  "You would not be cruel!"  She tapped the young
soldier with her fan.

The lieutenant bowed with more courtesy than enthusiasm and went
off to light a cigarro philosophically.  Dolores and Anthony sat
down on the bench with only the Jewish martyr between them.

"I eat my cruel words, señor," she said.  "You are decidedly NOT
in need of a duenna.  Don Esteban is not easy to put off.  You see
I know."

His hand shook as he poured out her coffee.

"Are you really so much moved, Don Antonio?"  Her fan folded itself
together softly on her lap.  She sat back and watched him, studying
his face.

"Thou seest, señorita," he said boldly, looking up.  The blood
rushed to his face as he looked at her.  Her shoulders rose and
fell deeply.  At last she sipped her coffee taking her eyes from
his.  He picked up the cup and drank from it where she had put her
lips.

"He burns," said Dolores picking up one of the little cakes
laughingly.

"Would you have no mercy for a poor devil in the fire then?" asked
Anthony.  "It is true I must go in a few days.  Tell me, tell me at
least that you are not glad of that.  I believe you were glad to
see me, that we did truly SEE each other when we first met this
afternoon.  All my life I have been looking for you and when I
looked up, standing there by the pillar, I thought--I dared to
think--that at last I was no longer alone.  Just to have found you,
just to know you are alive . . ."

"Be careful," she whispered, "the intendant is coming this way."
They waited, sipping their coffee together while a dark, middle-
aged man with a jewelled court sword passed close to the bench
where they were sitting.  He bowed deeply to Dolores and gave
Anthony a keen glance.

"He knows he is not welcome here," she said.  "Go on, Don Antonio,
you were saying something, I believe."

"Was I, does it really interest you?" he asked.  He leaned forward
suddenly with his napkin drooped over the cake dish and took her
hand from her lap under cover of it.

"Do not crush it," she said at last.  Her eyes opened widely upon
him.  "Yes!--I shall keep this cake," she said.  She took it from
the plate with her other hand.  "Now you must let me fan myself,
señor!  Remember where we are!"

He sat back reluctantly trying to clear his eyes of a dazzling
golden light.  The muscles in his throat relaxed again.

"Could I not see you somewhere else than here?  Only for five
minutes, but alone?"

She shook her head doubtfully.  "It would be all but impossible."

"All BUT?" he said.

She laughed at him now.  His disappointment was so grim.

"You are serenaded, señorita, I am told.  Is it only the Cubans,
'the Friends of the King,' who are to be consoled?  Ah!  Sorrow of
the Flame, Dolores de la Fuente, por Dios, you are well named!"

He saw that she looked at him tenderly despite herself.  She
brought the fan up so that only her wide forehead with the pale,
golden ringlets curling over the delicate hollows in her temples,
and her eyes dark as violets at twilight looked at him like a
vision.  He remembered her that way; he remembered her always.  It
was like the forehead of the face in the miniature.

"Dolores," he said, "I do not burn.  Do not think that.  I love you
with my soul."

He heard her gasp.

They sat for almost a minute and both were thinking the same thing.
Across the garden they saw that General Las Casas and someone else
were strolling toward them.

"It would be very difficult," she said suddenly.  "There are many
who come to serenade in the outer park but my windows open into
this garden.  No one could climb the patio wall . . ."

"But if they did," he said.

"Quién sabe!" she replied.  "Here is the governor."

"Give me the rose in your hair, señorita, that at least to remember
you by.  I beg you . . ."

"Ah! your pardon, Don Antonio," said Las Casas.  "It is really
painful to interrupt under the circumstances," he bowed to Dolores,
"but I must detain you a minute.  How do you get on with
Englishmen, señorita?" he said.

"Very well, Your Excellency.  Indeed," said she, putting her hands
behind her head, and looking up at him from the bench with her head
thrown back in a charming defiance, while her fingers seemed to
rearrange her high, silver comb--"indeed, I wish they did not have
to leave Havana so soon."

"So!" said Las Casas, taking a pinch of snuff.  "Iay, señorita, I
am afraid we shall have to disappoint you."

"Adiós, then, Don Antonio," said Dolores with an exaggerated regret
as she stood just finishing rearranging her hair.  She gave him her
hand to kiss.  As he bent over it, in the folds of their fingers as
they met, he felt the petals of a rose.

"But will I ever see her again?" he wondered.




CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

THE TEMPORARY SEQUESTRATION OF THE "ARIOSTATICA"


Upon my word, señor, I am afraid I HAVE some bad news for you,"
said Las Casas to Anthony as they watched Dolores walk away.  She
disappeared down a path which Anthony did not fail to mark.  Now
and then, before she vanished entirely, he could still catch sight
of her black fan waving through the palms.  He turned to find that
he had kept the captain-general waiting.

"This is Don Jesús Blejo, el comandante de policia en Habana,"
continued Las Casas with a slight twist of amusement still visible
in his smile.  "The bad news, under the circumstances, is that you
will be leaving Havana about sunrise tomorrow morning, Don
Antonio."

Despite himself Anthony could not entirely conceal his surprise and
disappointment.  He stood crushing the rose in his fingers and
biting his lips.

"Por Dios!  It is high time you were on your way, I think,"
exclaimed the governor with a slight gesture of annoyance.
"Still," said he softening, "I do not blame you.  But we cannot
even for so charming a reason delay.  You may have noticed that the
intendant was here this afternoon?"

Anthony nodded, trying to look as if he cared.

"He came to complain of the detention of the Gallegos' schooner by
the port authorities.  To preserve appearances I was forced to give
poor Don Jesús here a thorough rating."  He turned to the man who
stood by rather uncomfortably with a look of surprised chagrin
still on his face.  "I trust you fully understand that now,
colonel."

"Since Your Excellency has been pleased to explain," he said.

Las Casas looked extremely annoyed.

"You see what subterfuges I am put to," he said striking his sword.
"So the Ariostatica has been released for tomorrow.  I had to
promise it, and even to pretend surprise that she had ever been
held.  We have only a few hours in which to act.  It must be
tonight or not at all.  I have given orders to Don Jesús to have
ten men and a boat in readiness at the Maestranza from midnight on.
Fortunately, due to his loyalty and care, you can rely upon those
he will pick for duty.  As soon after midnight as possible you will
row out and put yourself in possession of the schooner.  Allow no
one from her to return to shore.  After you have once served your
papers on the captain prevent all communication.  You should be out
of the harbour by sunrise.  Make out to sea as soon as possible.
The police will leave you and row in somewhere near Jibacoa.  After
that, señor, it depends on you.  I wish you luck."  He twirled his
moustache and looked at Anthony a little doubtfully.

"You have my word, Your Excellency, to do all I can," said Anthony.

"Bueno!" said Las Casas.  "This is a little more hurried than we
had expected but it may turn out for the best.  The intendant when
he inquires tomorrow will simply be informed that the Ariostatica
has been released as he demanded.  He will suppose that the captain
has lost no time in getting under way.  And in that supposition he
will be correct."  He twirled his moustache again with more
assurance now.

"You will be wanting a few hours to make your personal arrangements
for the voyage, Don Antonio.  Arm yourself," he added significantly.
"But you will also have to return to the palace tonight to receive
the final papers for the sequestration; the release to the port
authorities in due form.  I shall have my personal secretary make
them out this evening.  Return about eleven o'clock if possible.
They will be ready then and I shall sign them.  You will find Don
Esteban at work in the big hall, the 'aquarium,'" he laughed.  "Is
there anything further you can think of?  Ah, si! a pass for the
palace tonight, of course!  What!  There IS something?  I thought I
had covered it all."

"Not quite all, sir," said Anthony hesitating a little.

"Ah, excuse us for a moment, Don Jesús," said Las Casas.  He and
Anthony took a few turns up and down the path alone.  The
comandante stood waiting by the bench.

The governor at last gave a relieved laugh.  "I thought you were
going to withdraw at the last or make some final costly
stipulation," said he.  "I am used to that."

"No, no," replied Anthony, "I would not bargain with you for this.
I appeal to you as a man of understanding and sentiment.  I am
going--who knows to what?  A half hour only, Your Excellency.
Perhaps never again--quién sabe?"

"Ah, quién sabe?" echoed Las Casas.  "But what would the lady say?
I am not in authority THERE you know, señor."

Anthony opened his hand and showed him the rose.

"Madre de Dios! you are a dangerous man.  It is high time you were
on your way.  But it shall be your pass.  A half hour then--fifteen
minutes if you have a bad voice.  My windows also look into this
patio."

Anthony spoke earnestly again for a turn or two.  The governor
broke out laughing aloud and finally nodded.  "But I shall give
orders to search the guitar for lethal weapons," he said.  "That
will at least save the comandante's face--and perhaps a quarrel
between you.  He is a man of literal duty you know, a Basque.  By
the way, you will treat him with marked courtesy.  He is important
here in the scheme of things."

"What is the least which will not insult him, sir?"

"Not less than a hundred dollars I hazard," smiled Las Casas, "but
that is not all that I meant.  He is somewhat nettled at having
been transferred from his regiment to take over the police.  Pride--
you see?"

"It is a great pleasure to be associated in this enterprise with so
gallant a soldier," said Anthony as they rejoined the comandante by
the bench.  "His Excellency has been speaking of your invaluable
services here, Don Jesús, I am honoured."

The man's jacket bulged slightly about the breast as he bowed with
a sudden and very marked cordiality.  "I am at your disposal,
señor.  It is but for His Excellency--and you--to command."

Las Casas was secretly much pleased, too.  The police were his
chief reliance next to the garrison.

"Have passes made out to the palace for Don Antonio and his servant
tonight," said the governor--"and a guitar."  He smiled
whimsically.  "If the holders of the pass should be found during
the evening in the patio . . .  I trust you will not be alarmed,
Don Jesús.  The conspiracy is not aimed at me.  In fact I have
nothing to do with it."

"Except to bind me to your service with tender bonds," said Anthony
bowing deeply.

"Ah! that remains to be seen," said the governor.  "As you say,
quién sabe?  And now adiós, Don Antonio.  I wish you well in
several ways.  Do not let the moonlight delay you too long.  That
is all.  Don Jesús will accompany you now as far as Regla.  Make
what haste you can. Do not forget that other matter, colonel," he
called after them.  The soldier turned and saluted again.

Looking back from the top of the steps as they left the garden
Anthony saw the Captain-General of Cuba standing by the fountain
smoking a cigar.  An hour and a half later, after a breathless
drive and dash across the harbour, he broke in on Carlo on the
veranda with the news.

                            ----------

But Carlo refused to be hurried.  In the brief tropical twilight he
was comfortably having supper.  A large tureen with charcoal under
it simmered audibly.

"Sit down and have some pompano," he said.  "The most delicious of
fish.  The only one I really care for.  Some fried yams?  Yes!  I
insist!  What is a mere voyage to Africa compared to a supper like
this?  Ah!  What you will miss!  Tomorrow is the dinner I have
prepared for you and Father Trajan in celebration of the miracle.
And now you will be at sea instead!  Well, well, you must go well
prepared.  Now let me show you something, since you are going to
Africa, that land of servants.  Sit here and drink your wine.  It
is not necessary to move now merely because you are going on a
journey.  Cheecha, send Tambo, and Eunice, and three bright boys.
Also rouse Señor Rodríguez.  Fly now!"

In a few minutes the various persons white and black who had been
sent for appeared.  Leaning back in his chair with a glass of
Malaga in his hand Cibo gave his orders.

He had Anthony's chests brought out on the veranda and repacked by
the slave girls.  He had several other receptacles, iron-bound and
provided with heavy locks, carried up by the black boys.  From a
list which he wrote out by the light of a candle he began to fill
these with such a variety of articles, clothing, food, private
trading goods, luxuries and necessities, that Anthony was amazed.

"When you have boarded the schooner tonight and taken possession
hang a green light in the shrouds and I shall see that all this is
sent out to you immediately.  The boys will be waiting with the
boat laden at the wharf.  Have these chests stowed where you can
watch them.  Remember you are going to be moving from now on in a
world of thieves.  You are going to steal men, and in return you
can expect them to steal everything from you they can.  Do not
waste any time thinking about the morality or philosophy of it.
Use locks.  I shall send you everything you can need for a year's
stay.  It will be the first charge on our trading account.  It is
fortunate that Moses has delivered all your linen suits.  You will
need them.  The Rio Pongo alternates between a Turkish bath and a
furnace.  Sometimes the nights are cool."

For an hour Cibo continued to talk of nothing but slaving and
Africa.  He gave off a world of particulars and sound practical
advice.  He settled the last details of how he would act as agent
for dispatching further ships if Anthony was successful.  He drank
two bottles of wine and described the Gallego establishment on the
Rio Pongo near Bangalang, the tribes surrounding it, and the half-
caste Mohammedans who came down in caravans from the interior to
trade.  He even touched on the rising opposition to slavery in the
British House of Commons and its possible effect on the trade in
general.  At the end of his discourse, for it could be called
nothing less, he presented Anthony with two cases both of English
make.  The large one contained a pair of splendidly mounted pistols
and the smaller a set of razors, one for each day of the week.

"Use these," said he.  "When you begin to look and act like a
native it is time to leave Africa.  I give you two, at the most
three years.  That is longer than usual.  The blue medicine chest
there is mostly full of cinchona bark for the fever.  I will nail
directions inside.  Follow them or you will die.  Did it ever occur
to you that YOU can die?  No?  Well, you can.  In fact you will.
Delay it.  Immortality should be shunned with intelligent
forethought whether it is inevitable or not.  Quién sabe!  Cheecha,
another bottle of wine."

In the meantime the moon was flooding the patio with a deeper and
deeper light.  All the ropes were on the chests.  For good luck
Anthony took a last look at his own with the sextant in it.  He
settled the little madonna deeper into some soft things under his
great-coat and wedged her in.  How curious that she was going to
Africa, too!  If it had not been that Cibo was sitting near he
would have taken a peep at her.  But he was in no mood for quips
and raillery now.  It had been hard enough to listen to Cibo at all
with his own head dancing with Dolores, moonlight, and the
adventure of the night yet before him.  Only the man's immense
kindness and the inherent wisdom of what he had to say had held
him.  And now--now it was time to go.

He sent for Juan who appeared grinning in his new servant's
clothes.  "Sí, sí, señor, I am all ready.  Sí, I have the guitar."
Anthony wrapped his boat-cloak about him and turned to Cibo to say
good-bye.  Then he remembered something.

He undid the bundle of soiled clothes he had worn to the tailor's
that morning and from it took his watch.  He gave Cheecha the
chameleon on the little gold chain.  It kept coming up between her
breasts when she hung it about her neck, which was probably the
reason that made her both laugh and cry out while at the same time
she clutched a few coins he had given her.  Her stream of blessings
and thanks made him ashamed.  After all she was not the woman he
had seen in the dream.  That was something else.  Cibo laughed at
his serious face.

"Leaving a chameleon at a girl's breast is nothing to worry about.
Ha, Toni, what a tender conscience we have!  A glass now.
Something I have saved to the last."

He brushed some cobwebs off a small, green bottle with a
reverential gesture and carefully filled two tumblers.  It was a
very old and mellow Montrachet.

"May whatever gods there be go with you," he said.  They clinked.

Cibo walked down to the dock with Anthony.  He was to cross again
in the fast little boat.  The dark bodies of the rowers glistened
in the moonlight.  Someone was patting a tune drowsily.

"Do you understand that I am grateful, Carlo?" asked Anthony.  It
was hard to tell now whether it was water or the men's hands
slapping below the dock.  Cibo drew in his sash very tight.  He
suddenly looked younger with his faun-like face smooth under the
moon.

"All that is nothing," he said.  "We could not help being friends.
Remember me, your philosopher in exile."

"Adiós, Carlo.  Farewell, farewell!"

"You should have waited for the supper tomorrow night, a great
supper!  I will send along some of the wine.  Drink to . . ."
Carlo's voice called after them as the boat flashed out from the
dock.  The swift click of the oars and the rush of water drowned
his tones in the distance.  The black rowers grinned and pulled
together for the tip that was so soon due.  Anthony turned around
and waved his white hat.

It was a miraculous night.  Havana harbour was one blaze of silver
and the moon straight overhead.  The city lay before them twinkling
with a thousand little lights.  Juan unslung his guitar.  They
fairly flashed by a ship where the heads of the watch lined the
rail.  The rollicking voice of the young Spaniard made the six
negroes pull as one man.  At every stroke Anthony felt the light,
soft air cool against his cheeks.  "Dolores, Dolores!"  He had
forgotten all about the Ariostatica for the moment.

Before his eyes burned a vision of the pale face of the Spanish
girl.  It was not merely a vague pictorial thought of her.  As he
looked across the molten silver of the bay toward Los Molinos an
actual reflected image of her face seemed to be cast upon the water
just ahead of the boat.  The rich, full tones of her voice sounded
in his ears.  For a while she possessed him.  When his brain
cleared again he found himself still swinging to the rhythm of the
oars and Juan's barcarole while Havana suddenly sprang up before
him much nearer than it had been before.  The lights in the harbour
seemed to have shifted.

He took a deep breath of the warm salt air.  Tonight belonged to
him and to her.  He was living fully and all for now.  He was, he
felt, the captain of events for the first time in his life.  Things
had come his way in Havana remarkably well.  It would be his part
to continue to make them behave that way in the future.  His last
monitor had disappeared; had been left, talking, on the dock at
Regla.

He was glad to have left Cibo.  He liked him.  He was grateful.
Yes, but he was glad to be sitting in this boat bound on his own
affairs with the tiller in his hand.  The only one with him now was
a servant.  Bueno, that was as it should be.

And he would take and drive the Ariostatica to Africa.  How he did
not know.  But he felt sure of it, sure of himself as he sat there.
Cibo's wine gave just enough of a tinge of madness to turn the city
ahead and the harbour into something a little better than even the
moonlight could confer.  It was a slightly mad, transfigured world
of Dolores and untold adventure, all marvellous, all good, all
tinglingly vivid, that lay before him.  It had no end.  In it one
was immortal.  It was impossible to fail.  The pleasures of it were
as infinite as one's capacity to enjoy.  It was hard, and youthful
and real.  And yet--it was beautiful and dreamful; it was moonlight
and mad music over the water.

He sat up with an intense sureness and took active charge.  The
boat, which had been driving a little out of its course, he set
directly on the water-gate lights.  He stopped Juan and slowed the
rowers to a steadier but more time devouring speed.  The Wampanoag,
he noticed, had slipped her mooring and was riding far down the
harbour.  So Captain Jorham was on his way.  He must have sold all
his statuary.  Well, he had learned much from the Wampanoag he
could use now.  Adiós to her! Adiós to everything!

They glided into the slip by the water gate and he gave a gold
piece to the stroke oar for the crew.  A babble of African approval
and well-wishes seemed to waft him up the steps of the quay.  Two
minutes later he was being whirled through the dim, narrow streets
of the old city toward Los Molinos again.

Once beyond the walls of the town they began to trot swiftly and
more swiftly along the straight, white road awash with mad shadows
where the palm trees flaunted and rustled their lofty double row of
seething plumes down an infinite avenue.  There was a thin, gauzy
mist blowing by here in the valley; there was a hint of northern
coolness, the smell of heavy dew on grass and leaves, and a
blurred-glistening of green things in the foggy moonlight.  The
horses broke into a gallop thinking they were going home.  They
bolted.  To the expectation of happiness ahead was now added the
exhilaration of speed.  A divine recklessness rode with them.  The
tenor voice of Juan lifted itself in staves of some Andalusian love
song that rang out over the vacant plantations like the chorus of
an unearthly, lyrical hunt.  A few dogs barked and howled in the
distance.  At the open doorways of huts dark figures outlined in
the orange glow from within watched them streak past.  The driver
at last brought up his team beside a roadside fountain.

"He will founder them if he lets them drink now," said Juan.

"Let him," replied Anthony.  "As long as we get to the gardens I do
not care."

They sat listening to the beasts gulping and breathing and to the
fall of the spout.  A streak of moonlight fell full on a little
slide of water that came down a steep slope of fern and moss-
covered rocks just above the trough.  In the shady nook by the road
everything but the clear space by this spring was in shadow.  Their
eyes naturally came to rest on the brilliant little waterfall as if
it were a piece of miniature landscape illuminated.

It was only for a few seconds, but as Anthony watched this weird
little Niagara that seemed to be leaping forever out of a tropical
elfland through a haze of maidenhair ferns, a gorgeous coral snake
glided down to the brink of a still pool and began to drink.  Under
the moon its brilliant scarlet was turned to dark amber.  It was so
delicate in all its motions, so graceful, and so utterly wild that
there was not the slightest hint of anything sinister about it.
Its tongue like black, forked-lightning flickered into the silver
water making all but invisible ripples, and the moon glinted on its
small eye.  Suddenly, when one of the horses blew loudly on the
surface of the font just below, it was gone.

He had watched it without complications as Adam might have seen the
first serpent in Paradise before the fall.  It had, he felt, given
an expression and a meaning to the tropical night in a language
that lies behind words.

Juan proved to be no Cassandra.  The tough little horses did not
founder.  Ten minutes later they were at Los Molinos.

A glare of candles in the centre bay of the front windows of the
palace showed that the secretary was still at work, although it was
now past eleven o'clock.  In spite of the pass the sentinel on duty
was obstinate.  It was late, and he looked at them, but especially
at the guitar, with profound suspicion.  He insisted on searching
the instrument.  A sergeant came but he could not read.  It was
finally necessary to send for the comandante himself.  While they
waited Juan retuned his strings and groaned.  He was afraid he had
lost key.  Finally Don Jesús appeared and the gates were opened.

As they went up the broad stairs to the Hall of the Governors
Anthony took the occasion to press into the hand of the comandante
"the least sum which would not insult his honour."  Evidently Don
Jesús carried about him some receptacle for such contingencies, for
the roll of gold pieces disappeared, internally, as it were.  It
neither clinked nor bulged upon his person.  Except for a slightly
more familiar and affable manner, he remained exactly as he had
been before.  One eyelid, one epaulette, and a shoulder, all on the
left side, sagged.  His moustache also drooped in that direction
and he limped slightly.  Anthony wondered if it was on that side
that he carried gold.  Don Jesús had evidently expected Juan to
remain in the vestibule, but he made no protest at his not doing
so.

"When you have finished, señor, you will find me waiting below,"
said he.  "If possible we should be at the dockyard in two hours at
least.  Dawn is early still, and Don Esteban has already taken
longer with those papers than we expected.  I will, if necessary,
arouse His Excellency to sign them, but I trust you will be through
before he retires.  All is ready at the water front.  I made final
arrangements on returning from Regla some hours ago."  He threw
open the great door for them, and excusing himself, went downstairs
again.

The secretary in the alcove looked up and nodded as they came in.
He introduced himself a little nervously.

"It will take at least half an hour longer, Don Antonio," he said.
"It is the making of three copies which consumes so much time.
They must all be original to take the seal.  I am sorry to delay
you.  Will you be good enough to sit down for a while?  The chairs
are not very comfortable, I know."  He made a grimace and shifted
himself uneasily looking somewhat surprised at Juan and the guitar.
Then he snuffed the candles and resumed hastily.  Anthony thanked
him and seated himself and Juan on two chairs flanking the large
portrait of Don Philip IV.

The sound of the secretary's pen and the tread of the sentry below
were the only sounds in the great apartment.  Except for the bright
lights on the desk, where Don Esteban bent over his papers intent
on rapid and accurate copying, and a dim sconce by the door, the
rest of the room was in a flux of moonlight and the black, moving
shadows of the palms outside.


"To all officers, servants, and ships' commanders and to all loyal
subjects whomsoever of the Crown of Spain:  Know that, inasmuch as
the good ship Ariostatica of our port of Havana in Cuba . . ."


scraped the secretary's quill for the third time that evening.

Quietly opening the door which the portrait concealed, Anthony and
Juan disappeared down the dark, little stairs behind it.

                            ----------

Under the moon the shaded patio seemed to have suffered an
unearthly change from the garden of the afternoon before.  Long
pencils of silver light stole down through its palm-fronded
ceiling, turning the court into a kind of dream-forest where pools
of white mist gathered in the hollows of its paths.  Indeed, the
fountain in the centre remained the only familiar landmark.

Anthony had hoped to find some windows with lights in them.  But
beyond the thicket of palms, on every side the dark walls of the
palace loomed without a break of gleam.  He thought he knew on
which side her apartments lay--in the direction of the path which
she had taken that afternoon.  But he could not be sure.  He and
Juan went as far as the fountain.  Anthony looked about him again.
Not a human light.  Only a few fireflies winking here and there.
Well, he must risk it.

"Sing, Juan--your best now!"

"The lady is beautiful, señor, you say?"

"Lovely as the night," said Anthony with a catch in his voice and
trembling with eagerness.

"This then!" said Juan.

The strings began a low prelude.  Then the pleading tenor of the
young sailor suddenly filled the old tilt-yard of Los Molinos with
an even more ancient ballad.

In the middle of the second chorus Juan suddenly stopped.  They
both waited.  A light in a double window above a balcony flashed
out in the wall.  Outside the tread of the sentry had stopped.
They could feel the whole place listening.  Someone, Anthony felt
sure, had come out on the balcony.  He ran back up the steps to
look and caught the gleam of moonlight on gold epaulettes.  Las
Casas was standing on the balcony.  Ah, he had thought that was the
wrong direction for her room!  Juan was singing again.

Suppose after all she should give no sign!  How the governor would
laugh at him!  There was another light now.  But not here, not so
near the roof.  Juan had stopped again.  Anthony stood listening.
Nothing but his own blood throbbing.  Not a sound or a sign from
her.

Then at the other end of the patio he heard a faint clapping of
hands.

He dashed down the steps and taking the guitar from Juan tried to
pick his way as nearly as he could along the path over which
Dolores had vanished that afternoon.  Presently he saw a light as
if from one candle in a room on the second floor.  He came out of
the palms against the eastern wall of the patio abruptly.  There
was a dark gate with a heavy, wrought-iron grille just before him.
Above that shone the dim glow of the window.  Someone was standing
there.  He could just see her.  She was in white with something
dark over her hair.  He looked up and stirred the strings of the
guitar softly.  The light tapping of a fan on the windowsill
answered him.

"Señorita," he whispered, "I came to say good-bye and to thank you
for the rose."

"Is it really yourself, Don Antonio?  Where did you find your
voice?  I have another rose in my hair.  Sing again and I will make
a little snowstorm of the petals for you."

He came close under the wall and looking up saw her bare arm
holding out something over his head.  A few white petals floated
down like tired moths upon him.  Like a beggar he held up his hat
for more.

"You are already well paid," she whispered.  "No more without
another song."  He heard her laugh again.

"Ah, Dolores, for the love of God, do not tease me now.  Thou
knowest I have left my singing voice by the fountain.  Roses are
not enough tonight."

"You despise my flowers then?" she said.

He came closer under the window and stretched up his arms to her.

"Come down!" he whispered.

As if to mock him she let the flower fall onto his breast.

He caught it to him and began to plead with her.  A hundred
endearing names which he did not seem to have known before leapt
from his lips.  If she would only come down to him, come down, only
for an instant!

"Dolores, Dolores!  Do you not know the few minutes we might have
with each other in this life are passing.  I must go to the other
side of the world tonight.  Now!  In only a few seconds I must go.
Will you only stand there?  Come down, Sorrow of the Flame, do not
let my heart die when it is so young.  Dolores, Dolores!"  He kept
whispering her name.  Then his voice broke.  In the silence that
followed he heard her catch her breath sharply above him.

After all he would have to go then without . . . but she was
speaking.

"Take the guitar back to your man and tell him to sing . . ."

God! was that all then?  After all she . . . he leaned against the
wall weakly.

". . . they will think you are still by the fountain then.  That
will give us a few moments . . ."

Reprieved then!

". . . when you come back I shall be at the little gate below.
Hurry!"

The candle in the room above went out.  He picked up the guitar and
dashed back to Juan.  As he stumbled back once more over the little
path the voice by the fountain rang out again and went on.  She was
standing behind the grille in the gate.  Her face was outlined in a
frame of iron leaves.  He put his hands through the tracery and
clasped them behind her head, drawing her toward him softly.  Only
her weight resisted him.  For a long minute he kissed her on the
mouth.  After a while she unclasped his hands.  What moved him most
was that he discovered she had tears on her cheeks.

His hands sought her through the grille again but she laughed a
little and caught him by the wrists.

"Anthony!" she said, still holding him as if pleading for a
respite--he could feel her trembling--"you are wearing the wrong
kind of sleeve links.  See they are pearls!"  She held his wrists
up in a ray of moonlight.  "I should send you away."

"Is it so terrible then?" he asked anxiously.  "Tell me, tell me
what have I done?"

She came closer again as if she thought he might leave.  Presently
she was explaining to him with her cheek against his own.

"Don't you know that when a caballero's lady is away from him only
carnelians are worn?  It is a sign that his heart bleeds.  Pearls
mean that the innocent one is near."  She giggled.

"Mine do not lie then."

"Were you so sure as that?" she exclaimed pretending to try to draw
away from him.

"No, no, only my soul dared to hope.  And now tell me, tell me for
once and all.  Was I wrong?"

"Thou knowest," she said and clung to him.

"Promise you will not forget me, Dolores.  If I never see you
again, even if you know that I am lost, if you are married and I
can never even speak to you again, you will not forget that we love
each other?  If our lips can never say it again, still we shall
know.  Say it is so.  Say, at least, that we can go on remembering.
Tell me that if I ever can come to you, you will still be there."
He kissed her passionately.

"If you CAN," she said, and looked up at him with the resignation
of love in her face.  She hid against his breast--"if you ever
can."

They stood for a minute as close as they could, with the iron-work
cold between them.

"Ah, I am afraid," she whispered, "I am afraid it will always be
like this."  She reached up and touched the grille that separated
them.  He cried out and caught her hands to him again, kissing
them.

Just then they heard a warning whistle from the fountain.

"You must go!"  She thrust his hands out.

"Dolores, I will never see you again!"

"No, no," she exclaimed, "my soul will come back to me!"

He heard a key grate in the lock.  The grille swung open and she
was on his breast.  For a moment the world died to them
conclusively.  They had abandoned it and taken refuge in each
other's arms.

The low, shrill whistle of Juan revived time again.  They stood
with it ringing in their ears--that keen doom!  He cried out an
incoherent protest.  "Hush!" she said.  She kissed him and broke
away.  He heard the gate clash softly behind her and found himself
alone.  When he rushed to the grille again she had gone.

"Señor," said the tense voice of Juan, "señor!"

Anthony groaned.

"The governor has sent for you twice.  He is coming down the steps
now himself.  Hurry!"

They rushed back to the fountain.  Someone was sitting on the bench
smoking a cigar.  But to Anthony's great relief it was not the
governor but Don Jesús.

"His Excellency has signed the papers and has been waiting to see
you," the man said a little grimly.  "I trust you will be able to
explain to him your presence here?  I am responsible, you know, for
seeing that no intrusion occurs even by favoured persons!"  Don
Jesús looked considerably chagrined and eyed Juan in particular
with obvious doubt.

"I shall take the entire responsibility on myself," Anthony
hastened to say.  The man was obviously nettled.  "On account of my
immediate departure His Excellency has been particularly generous
tonight.  There were potent, reasons.  Surely, Don Jesús, as a
gallant caballero you will not ask me to EXPLAIN!"

Don Jesús bowed a little coldly but managed to smile.  "Permit me
to congratulate you on your remarkable voice," he said.  He still
looked puzzled about something.  They mounted the stairs together
with Juan behind them.  Suddenly, from the direction in which they
were going, it became evident that Don Jesús could know nothing of
the private stairs.

"So that was why he was angry and perplexed," thought Anthony.
Indeed, they went out by the big gate.  The comandante glared at
the sentry angrily.

"Your man had nothing to do with my entrance," said Anthony.  "On
my honour!  Set your mind at rest."  Don Jesús looked instantly
much relieved and nodded.

"Very well then," said he.  "Señor, I shall wait for you here.  We
should now be at the dockyard."

Anthony received the papers from Don Esteban who was waiting.  He
was somewhat more deferential than before.

"His Excellency requested me to wish you"--he looked at a paper
methodically--"as good luck and as much favour elsewhere as you
have found in Havana."

"Convey my profound gratitude and assurance of devotion to His
Excellency," said Anthony.  The formal little Spaniard wrote it
down.  Then he delivered the papers to Anthony, took a receipt and
bowed.

"Buenas noches, señor."

"Buenas noches."

Now he was whirling back again along the road to the city beside
Don Jesús with Juan on the box.  The moon was far west now.  It was
after three o'clock when the hoofs of their horses echoed under the
ancient stone arches of the Maestranza.

                            ----------

Don Jesús was no romanticist.  He had arrested Brother François in
the garden at Regla some hours before with as little compunction as
one removes a snail from a flower.  He was a Basque, and could any
other European have been introduced to what went on inside his
head, he would have been amazed at how absolutely four-square and
literal was the world which Don Jesús looked out upon.  It was this
which made him such a magnificent policeman.  His arrangements were
always ALMOST perfect.  They included and took into consideration
everything "as is."  Had he also been endowed with a little
imagination he might possibly have become a dictator.  But he was
not so endowed.  Hence, he was merely comandante of gendarmes for
General Las Casas; hence, the unexpected was to him enormously
puzzling.  Why, for instance, had a peaceable parish priest like
Father Trajan smitten four of his best bully boys full sore with
the stump of an oar last evening when he had arrested Brother
François in the garden?  And why had Brother François taken the oar
from Father Trajan and thrown it away?  How silly!  He had pondered
upon this on the drive from Los Molinos sitting next to the young
señor who had entered the patio at the palace apparently through
the wall.  Altogether it had been a confusing night.  He would be
glad when it was over.  The governor, he thought, had laughed at
him--quién sabe?--and even to Don Jesús the deserted dockyards of
the Maestranza looked a bit weary under a sinking moon.

Indeed, no building in the New World is so heavy with the futility
of the past as the Maestranza.  With a wisp of harbour mist
drifting through its squat belfry that had tolled the passing of
the treasure flotas of Spain, it seemed now in the silence of the
tropical night as if Fate were withdrawing her last skein of lucky
thread from the eye of a broken needle.  Only an occasional stray
waif of the royal Spanish navy came here now to refit amid curses
out of the doubtful pickings of the past.

The deserted dockyard sloped down to vacant quays piled high with
pyramids of whitewashed cannonballs and verdigrised cannon cast
long ago from moulds that no longer gave birth to anything.  In
these guns rats nested, squeaking in the sterile wombs of thunder.
Silent rope walks, and towering erections for weaving cordage swung
like tattered spider webs against the stars.  The watchmen
slumbered.  Here and there the bow of some abandoned and despairing
galleon thrust itself upward at a desperate angle.  A reek of low
tide, festering pitch, and rotting teak filled the nostrils of
Anthony as they threaded the mazes of this nautical cemetery where
the bones of a monarchy obtruded from the slime.

At the foot of a flight of broad, stone stairs glimmered a single
lantern that marked the presence of their waiting boat.  It proved
to be a large one rowed by eight manacled negroes.  Its passengers
were six bare-footed gendarmes in broad, cocked hats, and Brother
François, who lay bound in the stern sheets.

Anthony exclaimed when he saw him, an exclamation half of indignant
pity and half of self-reproach, for in the excitement of his
departure and the absorbing events of the hours which had followed
the garden party at Los Molinos he had forgotten all about Brother
François.  So the bishop had been as good as his word!  And he,
Anthony, had forgotten to warn Brother François.  He reproached
himself bitterly.  If it had not been for Dolores . . . !  Now it
was too late.  The best he could do was to prevail on Don Jesús to
loosen the monk's bonds, and he would not even do that till they
were well out from the dockyard and rowing down the harbour.  Cock-
crow had already begun.  What a paean it was this morning!  Brother
François looked at him and smiled.  There were red welts on his
wrists.

The Ariostatica lay across the harbour about a mile away.  The
barge drifted down upon her easily, swept along by the fast ebbing
tide.  "Señor," said Don Jesús, "from now on I am at your disposal.
Those are my orders."

Anthony stood up and looked at the beautiful schooner that now
loomed up before him like the vague outline of a great swan.  His
regrets vanished in excitement.  He took command jubilantly and
with assurance.  They stopped rowing and drifted down upon the ship
silently.

It was one of those breathless few minutes where much depends upon
the simple negative of NOT being heard.  The shadow of the
graceful slaver stretched out monstrously in the dawn as if the
black purpose of the ship with its vast consequences were
mystically mirrored in the quiet harbour.  Anthony looked down into
the clear water and drew back again with a start which he could not
entirely control.

Lying perfectly motionless scarcely a fathom beneath the surface
with its sinister head pointed toward the stern of the Ariostatica
was an immense hammerhead shark.  It rose slowly toward them as if
to see what of interest for it the drifting boat might contain.
The sickle curve of its dorsal fin broke rippling from the water.
It nosed the planks softly, sending a slight tremor through the
barge so that all within it trembled as if the water of the bay
itself had transferred to them the message of an earthquake.  For a
moment they could even see its long, grey flanks disappearing into
the belly-pallor beneath.  The brown, expressionless walnuts of its
eyes on their protruding, transverse sticks looked at the boat and
were satisfied.  Some promising picture of sharkful hope must have
mirrored itself in those black lozenges of pupils for the great
fish sounded and turned with a slight phosphorescent glimmer to
resume its station.  As it did so they had one brief and sufficient
glance into its utterly utilitarian mouth.

Don Jesús crossed himself automatically and nervously motioned to
the crew to give way.  The sound of the oars brought someone to the
taffrail of the schooner.  The man did not seem to realize at first
that they intended to board.  Only when they glided up and made
fast to the small boat drifted against the schooner's stern did he
suddenly straighten himself up.

"Hola, what do you want?" he said sleepily.  Then for the first
time he became aware of the armed men in the barge and half turned
as if to give an alarm.  Anthony rose in the stern sheets and
covered him with a pistol.  The man's jaw fell.

The fellow gaped stupefied at the little circle of the muzzle.  The
gendarmes swarmed in over the stern and secured the sleepy watch.
Except for the pad of bare feet on the empty decks of the schooner
there had been no sound.  A few sparks were coming from the ship's
galley.  Brother François sat forgotten in the stern sheets of the
barge with the shark just a few feet below and behind him.  The
slaves' manacles rattled a little as they passed about a single
cigar.  Anthony and Don Jesús stood on the quarter-deck with the
scared individual who proved to be the mate.  They looked about
them laughing a little.  It had been ridiculously easy.  The
growing dawn made the harbour metallic and the Ariostatica rosy.
She was theirs--and without even a shout.

"Where's the captain?" asked Anthony of the now sullen mate.

"In the cabin."

"Have the kindness to introduce me, señor," said Anthony.  "By the
way, what is your own name?"  He thrust the man before him down the
ladder without ceremony.

"What's that to you?" snarled the mate shaking him off roughly.

"Nothing much to me," said Anthony, "but THIS to you."  He gave
him a resounding kick in the tail.

They were standing in a low passageway leading aft.  A dirty
lantern burned there dimly.  As the man rubbed his posterior and
whimpered, Anthony could hear the rats scuttling in the hold.  The
fellow was evidently a futile coward.  His face was as yellow and
undecided as an omelette.  Anthony remembered how McNab had dealt
with such cattle.

"I have not yet the honor of knowing your name, señor," he said,
softly moving toward him again.

"María Magdalena Sóller," the fellow piped promptly enough now,
clapping his hands over his derrière again.

"Listen, Mary Magdalen," said Anthony.  "From now on I am in
command of this ship.  Do what I say instantly, and life will be
easy for you; fail, and I will kick you loose from your stern.  Do
you, as it were, understand?"  He smiled quietly.

"Sí, señor," whispered the man apathetically.  There was nothing in
him which even thought of resisting what lay behind the frosty look
in his antagonist's blue-grey eyes.  Besides, the tall frame and
shoulders of his new commander he now noticed almost filled the
passage-way.  On the deck he had looked slim and youthful, but not
here.  Por Dios, what a mule's foot!  Under his trousers the mate
felt sure he already resembled a pansy bed.

"El capitán está la," he muttered.

"Captain who?"

"Ramón Lull."

"Bueno!  Now go and hang a green light in the starboard shroud,"
said Anthony.  "Have you one?"

"Sí."

"Sí, señor!" prompted Anthony.  "And the green light quickly before
it gets too light!"

"Sí, señor," repeated the man submissively, and scrambled up the
ladder glancing hastily behind him.

Anthony went aft to the end of the passage and thumped on the door.
He was amused to see that it was painted a cream-white and had a
wreath of roses on its panel; a silver lock.

He looked about him.  All the fittings were equally sumptuous.
Evidently the Ariostatica had been built for a pleasure yacht.
There was even an inlaid ebony deck.  Christ, how elegant!--and
filthy!  Someone hummed a snatch of opera in a sleepy falsetto in
the cabin.  He banged on the door again with a will.  A volley of
shrill, Majorcan curses oozed through the panels like foul dew from
a dirty rose.  He gave the door the boot, springing the lady-like,
silver lock clear out of kelter, and entered.

A small man in a silk skull-cap, who evidently owned the falsetto
voice, for he was exhausting its abusive possibilities, sat up and
arranged his nightshirt with the fluttered air of a startled
canary.  Seeing Anthony was a stranger he stopped and rested two
white, smooth hands on the dirty sheet as if they had been
paralysed.  Behind him on the pillow Anthony could see the face of
a quadroon girl with a wave of kinky, dark curls spread behind her
like a fan.  Save for the dark rosy-tan of her cheeks and the too-
heavy lips, it might have been a face from a Greek coin that looked
out at him.  But the eyes ruined it.  They drooped and were heavy-
lidded as though tired with looking at a nightmare from which there
was no escape.  It was the countenance of a ruined angel.  For an
instant it made him so curiously uneasy that he forgot even the
errand he had come upon.  Then he laid his pistol and his papers on
the table.

"You are the captain of the Ariostatica, Don Ramón Lull?" he asked.

The man slipped two thin legs from the covers and thrust his feet
into a pair of ridiculously embroidered mules.

"Thou sayest it," he said managing to convey an insult.

"Do not 'thou' me, thou little man," said Anthony.  "Listen to
this."  He quietly read him the authorization for taking over the
Ariostatica.

The captain took it very calmly, too calmly in fact.  At first his
only reply was to hum a few staves of a popular air from time to
time.  Then he asked a few keen questions.

. . . "I see, I see.  I am still captain but you are in command.
And the police are now on deck you say?"

"Six of them and the comandante," said Anthony.

"What does Your Magnificence command then?  You see this is the
first time I have ever been, ahem, temporarily sequestrated.  I am
still a little confused.  I am sure Señor Gallego will be as
charmed as I am.  You will be ROYALLY received in Africa, señor,
as the representative of the crown."  He shifted the skull-cap back
on his head and grinned at Anthony in a way the latter did not
like.  Evidently Don Ramón would play a waiting game.  Anthony
determined to strike hard now.

"In the first place, my hospitable friend," said he, "I shall
require your cabin for my own use.  You will move out of it
immediately.  Also, even more immediately, you will go on deck and
get your ship under way."

"Impossible," said the captain.

"It starts to happen now," said Anthony taking up the letter he had
been reading and revealing his pistol under it.  "Or--shall I call
the comandante?"

The captain's face fell.  He looked about him as if for some way
out, shrugged his shoulders, and began to put on his clothes.  With
his shirt pulled half-way over his head he burst into another
volley of shrill curses.  An invisible little man swearing
helplessly in falsetto through a starched frill made Anthony rock.

"Ah, for the love of Mary do not laugh at me, señor," said Don
Ramón reappearing at last with tears of rage in his eyes.  "It is
bad enough to lose one's ship and one's cabin without being laughed
at too!"  He whined on a little.  "But you will permit me to keep
my own cabin boy in the second room.  I hope you will, señor," he
added plaintively while drawing on his shoes slowly.  The girl on
the bed stirred uneasily.  "You see I am much attached to him and
he is my property.  I cannot spare him."

"I have my own servant," said Anthony.

"It is a bargain then?" cried the man.

"Certainly," laughed Anthony, glad of peace at so cheap a
concession.

The captain began to move about more cheerfully now as if he were
well enough satisfied and had made his own terms.  He even showed
some alacrity and became voluble.

"In a minute, señor, in a minute.  Three of the crew are still
ashore.  But we shall not delay.  No, I assure you.  I shall be on
deck in a minute."  He began to put on a pair of preposterous,
green, satin breeches.  "In five minutes we shall be under way."
He put powder in his shoes.  "Polio, rouse yourself!  My essence,
the new scent bottle, where is it?"

The brown body of "Polio" now emerged from the berth somewhat
sullenly and without a change of countenance, walked over to a
chest and after some bending over and rummaging gave the captain a
small perfume bottle with a silver top.  Anthony sat in astonished
silence.  If it had not been for the evidence of nature before his
eyes he would still have thought that Polio was a girl.  Suddenly
an overpowering odor of tuberoses filled the cabin.  The captain
had removed the stopper from the bottle and was anointing his hair.
Anthony got up choking and drove the little man on deck with a
hearty curse.

Don Jesús spat over the side and grinned at the apparition from a
band box which now began to walk up and down the quarter-deck
giving shrill orders and humming operatic airs.  The order was
repeated each time by a huge negro in a green turban.  With much
confusion the anchor was finally weighed.  Polio came on deck.  Don
Jesús spat again.

Anthony stood by the wheel taking it all in.  He thought he had
never seen such a sorry crew.  There were some truly villainous
faces among them.  The best were a few blacks who all wore turbans.

"I do not envy you, Don Antonio," said the comandante.  Anthony
agreed.  But he was soon busy enough keeping one eye on the deck
and getting his own boxes on board.  Cibo's boat had arrived.  How
glad he was Juan was to be with him!

The sails went up by jerks one by one.  There was no wind yet but
the tide was taking the ship out.  In a few minutes they would be
passing the Wampanoag lower down.  He climbed into the shrouds and
waited till they were abreast of her.

"Collins," he roared.

A familiar figure lounging by the Wampanoag's galley suddenly
snapped to and looked about him with amazement.

"Here, Collins!  On the schooner!" he cried.  Collins ran to the
rail.

"Where be ye bound?" he shouted excitedly.

"Africa!"

"God help ye!"

Captain Elisha came up in his night-shirt.  Anthony saw them
talking and getting smaller as the water between the ships widened.
The captain cupped his hands.

"Wisht ye was aboard here."

Anthony waved helplessly.

"The Missus sends her regards.  She says Lord love ye."  He tried
to call something back to them but failed.  The captain waved his
old night-cap.  "And so say I," he roared.

It was too far to reply now.  He could see them still watching the
schooner, and he knew what they were saying about her sloppy sails.
Oh, if Collins were only aboard the Ariostatica.  How it would go
then!

He leaned over the taffrail and looked astern.  Cibo's boat had
cast loose and was making back for Regla.  Breakfast on the
veranda--how pleasant that was!  He wondered if Dolores were awake
yet, and stood gazing back at the hills about Los Molinos.

The swift ebb at the harbour entrance took the ship and drew her
out to sea.  The wind outside filled her sails as she turned
eastward, rising and falling slowly to the ground swell.  The two
boats that had drifted against her stern paid out behind and were
towed along.  The shackled rowers in the police barge were already
sprawled out on the thwarts, belly down.  Brother François was
still sitting alone in the stern where he had been left an hour
before.  He was motionless.  Anthony wondered if he was praying.
He himself, he remembered, could no longer do so.  He was alone
now.  There was absolutely nothing beyond for him to lean on.  Cibo
had put the last touch on that.  Nothing was left but the world and
Anthony.  He had his own will and his wits to cope with coming
events, and a bargain to keep.  He looked back again toward Havana
before turning to the deck and its business.

Following the ship a few lengths behind Brother François's barge he
saw the black fin of the giant shark which had attached itself to
the Ariostatica.



END OF BOOK FIVE




BOOK SIX

In Which the Bronze Goes Into the Fire




CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

A GRADUAL APPROACH TO AFRICA


Nine weeks--and they were only a little south of the Cape Verdes.
Much had happened in that time, although outwardly all was the same
on the Ariostatica.  She was a fast little topsail schooner with
plenty of space below decks.  It was only her dainty lines that
made men apply a diminutive to her instinctively.  But she had met
light, baffling airs from the coast of Puerto Rico onward and had
lazed across the broad belt of the world.  Only constant showers
had kept her crew from running short of water.  Some of them were
already showing the early symptoms of scurvy.

A thousand miles from land Brother François had come down with the
yellow fever.  That and the persistent presence of the shark which
had dogged them day and night were for some weeks the chief topics
of conversation for the crew.  Even the tense conflict which all on
board felt to be going on between Anthony and the captain paled
into insignificance before the persistence of the indomitable
hammerhead who had been dubbed "Old Faithful."  Every morning found
his black fin in precisely the same relative position as the
evening before.  At night it moved a little closer.  One attempt to
hook the monster had all but ended in a catastrophe.  After that
they let the big fish alone.  He seemed to know what he wanted when
he followed a slaver.

"When he gets his belly full he'll go," said one of the old hands,
"and not until then.  But it's white meat he wants eastward ho.  He
knows.  He's an old 'un."

Considerable humorous, but nevertheless nervous and superstitious
speculation as to who might provide the tidbit was rife.  Several
youngsters who were persistently nominated as scapegoats were ready
to fight.  The sickening of Brother François was to them at least
merely a providential designation of Jonah.  But to Anthony and
Juan, for the young sailor stood by manfully, it meant long hours
of perilous nursing and the contemplation of the monk's patient
agony.

Brother François had doubtless picked up the infection before
leaving Havana, where he had secretly nursed many among those who
were always being laid low by what amounted in that port to a
perpetual epidemic.  So when the headache and lassitude and the
muscular pains began the priest was the first to diagnose his own
symptoms.  The only remedy available was common table salt in water
and a purgative.  He drank large quantities of the former,
disregarding what effect it might have upon hastening the scurvy.
Nevertheless, in a few days his condition was pitiable.

The news of the nature of the priest's illness, which could not be
concealed, had a peculiar solvent effect upon the miniature world
of the Ariostatica.  Authority backed by a strong hand was the only
thing that might have held it together.  But in the noble captain,
Don Ramón Lull, authority did not reside.  He had neither the will
nor the courage necessary to enforce it.  On the same afternoon
that Brother François took to his cabin with Yellow Jack as a
bedmate, the realm Ariostatica divided into three distinct spheres
of influence.

Don Ramón, El Polio, and the estimable María Magdalena Sóller
betook themselves to the quarter-deck where two hammocks swung
under a piece of old sail sufficed temporarily for all three.
Luckily for them the weather was calm and balmy.  Only the shark
disturbed their large view of things occasionally.  But they did
not look his way often.  The captain's domestic arrangements might
even be described as "nice."  He and El Polio had the double
hammock.  A small sea chest of the captain's provided with drawers
was arranged near by with a silver mounted toilet set on the top.
This contrived to confer on the little quarter-deck of the schooner
a certain boudoir atmosphere unusual on the Atlantic to say the
least.  It wanted but one fresh breeze to ruin so fragile and
dapper an aspect, but that brisk breeze was long lacking.  Such was
the first kingdom on the ship where in reality only a titular
captain reigned.

The second kingdom was the fo'c'sle, the third was the cabin.  The
fo'c'sle quarantined both the cabin and the quarter-deck.  The
quarterdeck had already quarantined the cabin.  Mortal fear of
contagion, fear made physically visible by the genial presence of
"Old Faithful" just astern, was the effective warden of the
marches.

Anthony and Juan were left alone, strictly alone, with Brother
François in the cabin.  Indeed, they had now the entire suite of
cabins to themselves and the hold beneath it, although that
perhaps, together with the rest of the ship's lower regions, might
have been described as the neutral empire of the rats.

In the fo'c'sle seventeen temporarily affable, man-stealing
ruffians held forth and carried on in such manner as it pleased
them best to do.  Their reign of riot was aggravated rather than
tempered by the overshadowing influence of one Polyphème, a Gold
Coast Frenchman, possessed of one eye and one knife with either of
which he could fix his victims suddenly even at a distance.  This
man was constantly begetting the twins Trouble and Confusion by a
process of parthenogenesis.

So it was that in a few hours after it became news the illness of
Brother François had produced on the Ariostatica a condition of
static mutiny.  As usual there was not lacking a logical reason.
It was believed by all the Christians on the ship that the air,
particularly the night air, communicated the contagion.  Hence the
more air they could place between themselves the better for their
health.  Thus far logic and Christianity.  With the Mohammedans in
the vessel it was different.

They, as good followers of the Prophet, believed that death would
overtake them when Allah willed.  For that reason they did not care
into what portion of the ship they went, whether it was inhabited
by the sick or well.  All places were alike to them equally exposed
to the unreasonable arrows of fate.  Hence, as universal prisoners
they remained free.  The practical conduct of the ship soon fell
almost entirely into their hands by pure force of circumstance.
Captained by the giant Arab negro, Ali Bongo, they went where
common sense and the occasional frantic voice of Don Ramón
demanded.  That the captain still delivered orders from the
quarter-deck, some of which were still obeyed, either through
necessity or caprice was the chief reminder of the formal order of
nautical life.  Señor Sóller, the mate, made daily observations and
marked his charts there.  There the four Mohammedans also did their
tricks at the wheel in regular succession, oblivious of everything
but the double wages hastily promised them.

For this essential service they were despised by the free spirits
of the fo'c'sle and carefully shunned as possible carriers of
contagion.  For in quarantining itself from the quarter-deck, the
fo'c'sle had by no means been oblivious to certain privileges and
exemptions which Polyphème had pointed out would ensue.  These were
now enjoyed to the uttermost.  Any semblance of regular watches was
given up.  Cards, quarrelling, and boozy slumber were now the order
of both day and night.  The only systematic labour actually
indulged in was the plundering of the ship's stores in the main
hold.  When the languid breeze shifted, a few of the crew sometimes
condescended to trim the forward sails, but nothing more.  The only
exceptions to this delightful state of relaxation were the cook and
his boy, who were reconsecrated to continue their usual labour by
general acclamation and the violent laying on of hands.

Thus the drifting Ariostatica grew more and more a slattern day by
day.  Her standing rigging soon hung slack.  Rubbish accumulated on
her decks.  Even primary sanitary suggestions from the quarterdeck
were met by jeers.  Food in wooden kids was shoved at the officers
through the quarter-deck railing, and the cook retired.  The same
mess-kids were afterwards towed overboard in a bucket.  Unfortunately
the weather continued to favour this lax state of existence.  Half
the time it was dead calm or there were only fainthearted, little
breezes interspersed with warm rains.  About a hundred yards behind
the ship "Old Faithful" battened on the unusually succulent garbage
which now came his way.  A small folding chair which Don Ramón
hurled overboard in a rage went the same way and did not even
produce a flurry.

Meanwhile, Brother François was tended by Anthony and Juan in the
cabin.  In the general state of affairs which had so unexpectedly
developed Anthony felt himself temporarily helpless.  The captain,
indeed, did not fail to blame him for having weakened his
authority.  He frequently sat safely at the top of the hatch and
expressed himself on the subject of divided authority with a
laxative fluency.  That there was some truth in Don Ramón's profane
complaints Anthony recognized.  But it was also evident to him that
the captain was glad of the excuse and loaded upon its back all the
blame for the trouble which the man's own weaknesses had brought
about.  And then there was another curious thing about Don Ramón;
having once relieved his mind, he would return happily to the
quarter-deck.  There, despite his ridiculous position, he managed,
as Anthony could tell from the noises that went on just over his
head, to have a genuine good time.

For through the deck planks percolated into the cabin, where
Brother François lay, the mild strumming of a guitar at night, the
soft pad of the feet of El Polio in some heathenish dance, and the
falsetto of Don Ramón raised in song.  Such lyric outbursts were
often greeted from the fo'c'sle with an applause in which sarcasm
and genuine appreciation were inextricably mixed.  In the sound of
that mixture of vivas, howls, and catcalls, Anthony recognized what
was the real strength of his rival.  He understood from that bad
noise that while Don Ramón might be temporarily isolated, there was
yet a certain sense of brotherhood between him and the fo'c'sle, a
bad admiration for his open and unabashed enjoyment of an unmoral
existence.

Don Ramón's, indeed, was a simplicity of evil which those who still
suffered from dregs of conscience might well envy and admire.
Between men who were ambitious to be abandoned and to prosper by
it, it was a bond.  In any crisis Anthony felt that the captain and
the fo'c'sle would be found united against him.  And he began to
understand, too, that Don Ramón was cunning.

Perhaps his indulgence of the crew while the Ariostatica drifted to
Africa through the doldrums was, under the circumstances, somewhat
calculated.  Don Ramón expected to reap his own advantage from it
when the time came.  It was a little plainer now why the owners had
confided a ship to a man like Don Ramón.  Perhaps they knew their
own trade well enough to understand that the ideal captain of a
slaver was one who had no squeamishness at all.  At any rate the
captain would find his advantage in confusion while Anthony could
only prevail by bringing about an order in which legal authority
would be recognized.  That was the problem.  Whether the crisis
would arise during the voyage or upon their arrival at Gallego's
slave barracoon at Bangalang, he could not tell.  He must use his
wits.  That was all he had to depend upon.  He had already taken
precautions against purely sneaking violence.  He and Juan went
well armed and Don Ramón and Sóller knew it.  That was that.
Neither of them, he felt, would risk his own precious skin.
Meanwhile, the captain and Sóller played cards on the quarter-deck,
hoping that "yellow jack" would solve their difficulties by
removing all the unwelcome intruders in the cabin.  That was
another reason why the "quarantine" was so rigidly enforced.

"How do you like your temporary sequestration now?" grinned Señor
María Magdalena Sóller down the hatchway.  "It might be a permanent
one, you know."  He shrugged his shoulders.  Ali Bongo was
instructed to resist any possible émeute from the cabin.

It certainly seemed likely that Brother François at least would
leave the ship.  There were small means at hand for detaining him.
As the fever ran its inevitable gamut, Anthony sat by the priest's
bunk doing the best he could.  Compared with this trial his
experience on the Wampanoag had been nothing.

"Certainly," he thought, "I have no reason to be in love with
ships.  I have strange luck there.  It goes better with me on
land."  And for a time it went badly enough.  He and Juan settled
themselves as best they could to live through the state of siege.
After that? . . .  "But sufficient unto the day . . ." Anthony told
himself.  Certainly it was all weird enough.  Temporarily shoving
his own problem aside, which it was plain might wait while the good
weather lasted, he and Juan devoted themselves day and night to
Brother François.

They carried him out of the dark, little hole at the end of the
passageway, where he had been contemptuously dumped by Don Ramón,
into the big stern cabin from which the captain and his ami had
been excluded.  A large window of leaded bull's-eyes set in a kind
of battened casement ran clear across the stern.  After two o'clock
the place was flooded with sunlight.  There was still a vile, faded
carpet with an obscure coat of arms on the floor.  There was also a
large stain in one corner, deeper than all the others, about which
ugly stories were still told.

The Ariostatica was a woman with a past.  She had been built at
Marseilles for a rich and recently ennobled banker some years
before the Revolution.  She had been called La Vénus du Midi then.
It was said that on a cruise to Naples her first owner had murdered
his mistress--in proof of which there was the stain.  The story had
followed the ship persistently.  She had soon ceased to be an
instrument of luxury, and after several evil vicissitudes had
fallen to the Spanish slave trade cheaply enough.

Hence there was something undoubtedly sinister about the now queasy
luxury of her cabins in which those silver fittings which had not
been wrenched loose or battered away still glimmered through a film
of filth.

Anthony and Juan did their best to remedy this by such cleansing as
they could contrive.  But even in his misery when Brother François
was first carried into the place he sensed its atmosphere.

The Gallic humour of a ci-devant man of the world glimmered in his
eyes as he lay looking at the bourgeois cupids romping in sooty
roses on the smudgy, blue ceiling.  It amused him to think he was
being brought to die in an apartment faintly reminiscent of Don
Ramón's tuberose perfume, a cabin whose upholsterer must have had
about him a touch of debased genius, for he had managed to relate
in a series of damask panels the innocent story of Paul and
Virginia in a highly interesting way.  The story had even been
given a happy ending.

Just over the ship's bed that Brother François now occupied, Paul
and Virginia were to be seen in that full consummation of their
love which the too-pure and tragic pencil of their author had
originally denied them.  That such art is universal, the smudges
and prints of the dirty hands of the slaves who had been packed
into the cabin on the Ariostatica's last voyage from Africa
testified in a truly touching way.

The hand of one huge negro seemed to have striven to tear the body
of Virginia from the panel.  And through a hundred other wishful
blotches wandered the traces of a pair of wistful and delicate
finger tips which Anthony thought he recognized as those of the
youthful El Polio, the chicken.  Anthony imagined he could see that
arch youth locked in the cabin during his master's absence trying
to seize from the panel what Don Ramón had denied him.

All this amused Brother François, for even in his approaching agony
he still continued to be French.  When he was carried into the
cabin he managed to smile gallantly and to remark to Anthony that a
happy ending to every story was what the multitude always desired.

"See," said he, pointing to the panel above him.  "They have tried
to tear love out of the panel of imagination and to make it real
enough to handle with their poor dirty hands.  Yet it remains
apart.  Comedy, you see, is what this unhappy age demands.  Once I
wrote about such things as that.  It was long before the
Revolution, before I had entered into real life.  Paul and Virginia
then was still thought to be charming."  He sighed and settled back
with an air of finality into the blowzy pillows.

"Well, I shall TRY to live up to my own criticism by making a
proper end of it here.  If not, pardon me for the trouble I am
about to give you, mes amis."

Even then the fever was already upon him.  He was talking in the
accents of some former self.  It seemed to be a soldier rather than
a monk who lay there.  But that was only momentary.  He looked out
of the stern windows along the wake of the drifting ship and at the
tilting blue line of the horizon beyond.  Through the bubbles a
little behind the ship nosed the apocalyptic countenance of the
shark like an obscene emanation from the bottomless deep.  To the
priest's now disordered imagination it seemed that the shark's
mouth was so framed as to be able to utter only the word
"Golgotha."  He closed his eyes.  Then he opened them at sunset,
seeming to be able to gaze with a wide-pupilled, feverish glance
out of his shadowed sockets into the red orb itself.  The last
thing he saw in the brief twilight was the shark which had moved a
little nearer.  He shivered.

"Men would be like that, my son, if God had not given them mercy."

They were the last words he addressed consciously to Anthony before
the fever clutched his mind awry.  He then seemed to be using his
remaining conscious minutes to pray.

"If possible let this cup be taken from me . . .  Nevertheless . . ."
he muttered.  He motioned to close the window and shut out the
vision astern.  They lit a dim lamp.  "Let the Comforter be with us
here, my Father.  Where two or three are gathered together in Thy
name . . .  Thou rememberest . . ."  After that he held converse
only with unseen things.

Yet such was the vital and moving spirit of this man that even in
the days of delirium which ensued his personality expanded and
dominated by a kind of vibrant quality, not only Anthony and Juan,
but the dowdy appurtenances of the cabin itself.  Anthony found it
impossible to explain this impression to himself by this and that
or here and there.  It was too subtle to isolate, but it was not
too intangible to feel.  The quality of the man's being, now
strangely released, as if by the heat of the fever, evoked in those
near him a continuous state of high emotion.  In this condition
they were able to glimpse and even to share to some extent in the
exaltation in which it was now revealed to them Brother François
must habitually dwell.  Anthony, indeed, wondered now at the calm
exterior of the man even when his health had endured.

For that which dwelt in Brother François seemed to be coloured
like, and to move with the speed and force of the flame that jags
from sky to earth.  Yet there was nothing momentary about it.  Like
the vision of that flame seared upon the eyeballs it remained.  It
was not ephemeral.  It was the natural state and condition of the
man uncovered.  Anthony could apprehend now why it was that the
strong body of Brother François, despite its calm exterior, had
seemed to be worn and emaciated from within.  Recollecting him now
as he had been at Regla, he found that his mental impression of him
was that of something which emanated light.  Perhaps he had been
wrong in attributing all that quality to the vine alone.

How wonderful must be the strength of that gentleness which kept
such vivid potentialities in control!  Whence came the ability to
poise and balance them?  No wonder the world was afraid of such
men!  No wonder everyone from the captain-general to the
philosophic Cibo had been disturbed!  Had they felt a vesicle of
lightning near?  Suppose this force had been released to irradiate
a community, what then?  Anthony sat looking at him--where he lay
apparently dying in the murdered harlot's bunk--lost in wonder,
oblivious to all else.

For the drama of this spirit even in dissolution made all else seem
trivial; ordinary life flaccid.  Even though the light of this man
was now dimmed by the dark heat of his dreadful fever, though the
lightning motions of his thought were disordered by illness; while
he lay thus revealed by the weakness of the body, stripped
spiritually naked, no one near him could pay attention to anything
else.

"I am thy lamp," he muttered once, "behold the flame consumes the
oil of me.  Let it be acceptable."

After that he no longer seemed to realize his own predicament.
Through days of sustained delirium he tended only gradually toward
a state of exhausted unconsciousness.  Not until the third night
was the crisis passed.  Then the collapse came suddenly.

During this infernally and celestially illuminated period there
were few niches of Brother François's past experience which a
nursing listener was not forced to explore.  From the total-recall
which streamed incoherently from the monk's parching lips Anthony
was eventually able to reconstruct for himself the order of time
and place which the delirium ignored.  To the parentless listener
even the man's childish babble and talk with his mother was
breathless with a mysterious sweetness.

At some château in Picardy the two walked through an orchard and
spoke of the birds.  In a field placed only in space he plucked
flowers again with a shy little girl.  "Laugh again, Adèle, laugh
again," cried Brother François rising up to listen.  "Here are
daisies for your apron.  I have never forgotten you.  I knew you
were not really dead.  Here are the flowers.  See, they are fresh
still,"--and he plucked at the foul bedclothes.  Then there was his
gay but stern father, whose ridicule was smooth as polished
adamant.  "But it is here among our own people that I belong, mon
père."  In those days it seemed Brother François had besought God
to assure him he was not mad.  It had been revealed to him that he
was more fully sane than those about him.  This it seemed was the
cross he found hardest to bear.  He was always pleading with the
"blind," always.  Versailles had been horrible.  They were all
blind there.

On the second night in the midst of much vacant converse Brother
François became almost lucid again.  In a flood of semi-coherent
eloquence he was once more accompanying the tumbrils on their way
to the guillotine.  Not a few of the blind eyes of which he had
complained were then opened for a last look at life.  The
exhausting tension, the fierce ebullitions of frantic souls, the
last tender confidences--words spoken to those who clung to him
desperately for even a glint of hope--these were all fiercely
renewed as the days of the Terror became incandescent again in the
monk's fevered brain.  Anthony seemed to feel the lean shadows of
the buildings in the Paris streets falling across him as he rode in
the carts with Brother François and the doomed.

In the chill lamplight of the cabin, silent except for the metallic
cadences of the dying man's voice and the faint wash of the waves
below, these scenes took on for Anthony far more than the vague
outlines of a conversation.  He participated in them fully and yet
mystically as if at a distance.  The endless monodrama went on
interminably with all of the amazing detail of the mind which never
forgets released again into life.

Clenched hands, weapons, impassioned faces tossed up in the words
of the priest.  Out of the sea of the streets came things which had
long forgotten themselves.  With Brother François Anthony
overlooked the plains, the heights, and the abysses revealed by
impassioned men and women about to vanish.  He faced with them the
thunder of drums, the prayers, pleadings, weeping; the laughter,
the snarls, and the screams of the final act.  "Ascend to heaven;
son of St. Louis"--drums, and a tempest of jibes.  One needed to
have had faith, a true exaltation, to believe after that.

For the first time the desperate human necessity for hope beyond;
the impossibility of rejecting it entirely when the whole being is
really faced with the final riddle was flung into Anthony's face.

From such scenes the soul of Brother François seemed to turn with
paternal fondness--as if on a visit to a beloved daughter and her
children--to the people and the sylvan neighbourhood of his first
beloved parish.  For a while his spirit had found itself at home
there as a pastor of peasants.  His assumed patois itself was
touching.  His homely dialogues were compounded of a wise pathos,
laughter, and tears.  In all this, and in physical and mental
intimacies beyond trace, intimacies which resided in the tones of
his voice and the lines of his face--in all of them now poured out
for hours on end like the seemingly rational talk of a madman, he
seemed to be speaking only from the depths of some impersonal self.

Himself he did not remember, although he was occasionally vaguely
aware of Anthony and of Juan.  They bent over him giving him drink
now and then.  They rearranged his pillows and covers a thousand
times.  They plied him with a little food which he long refused.
They even held him down.  Once he caught Anthony's face between his
burning palms and exclaimed:

"I have seen you before.  Yes, I know who you are.  It was in the
face of that girl at the coach window that night at the inn that I
first saw you.  Do you know her?  Her husband killed the young man
in the courtyard.  You remember?  Surely you will remember what
happened to yourself!  That Spaniard with the virility of great
evil about him who drove away with her into the night--he is still
driving somewhere, I know.  Driving!  Such men go on and on.  It is
a great circle they move upon.  Be careful, he will return!
Remember!  Tell him I buried the young man.  He looked noble even
in the pit.  Only his horse missed him.  No one ever came.  Ah, do
you know there is more in that than you can see!  I am sure of it."

He rehearsed the scene again and again.  A duel in some forgotten
inn courtyard sprang into life.  Swords clashed in the twilight
while a woman looked on.  Brother François bore witness to the
saints against murder.  "And don't you remember?" he kept asking
Anthony--"and don't YOU remember?"

But Anthony did not remember.  The tablets of the past were razed
for him.  Even Brother François could not recall what the doors of
birth had closed upon.  Death might reveal them again, perhaps.

Overhead the strings of Don Ramón's guitar sometimes purred softly.
The eternal sound of water gurgling about the rudder washed in from
astern.  The long light of sunset after an interminable white
afternoon lit the little cabin redly.  From it, all that was banal
and trivial now seemed to have been banished.  Anthony saw nothing
but the blue leagues astern marching to the horizon and the burning
eyes of Brother François in his bed against the bulkhead.

The sick man had now slipped from all reminiscence and was
conversing with someone whom he saw standing in the cabin.  So
strong was his own delusion that those who were nursing him could
scarcely keep from sharing it.  They no longer dared to cross where
the last patch of sunlight slowly lessened about the centre of the
cabin floor.  From this presence the transported man derived an
infinite comfort.  An actual physical change for the better crept
into his face.  He no longer moaned as he talked in whispers but
grew calmer.  When Anthony brought him some water he drank it
eagerly for the first time.

"Courage," he whispered, "courage!  See!  I can take the cup now.
Yes, I will go.  I will drink it all."  He fell back again and
spoke no more in words.  The collapse had come.  It would be some
hours, Juan said, before they would know whether he would live or
die.

From then on it was only the sick man's body that spoke.  It seemed
to have been left to conduct the fight alone.  Its rumours of
internal and external wars and troubles were terrible.  The black
throat and tongue bleated.  The contorting muscles exacted from the
breath which passed them with difficulty a continuous toll of
unseemly sound.  The nose, which was now growing peaked, collapsed
flabbily about the nostrils, threatening to act as a fatal flutter
valve unless the mouth gasped to relieve it.  The bowels and
stomach banished with bestial rumblings and hellishly humorous
whistles from mouth and fundament gusts which all but overcame the
two unwilling and horrified auditors imprisoned in the same cabin.
It was necessary to rush again and again to the stern window to
escape from a stench which anticipated the grave.  And all this was
only air.

At midnight what was now only the frame or case of Brother
François, who had long been unconscious, rallied itself for a last
essay.  The fever mounted and became intolerable.  Then from every
possible vent of the body poured the liquids which discharged its
disease--a clear vomit that finally became black, floods of urine
darkly clouded and in unbelievable quantities, an irruption of
bloody stools, a viscid stream from the nose.

With all this the two faithful nurses could not cope fast enough.
They laid the discharging object on a succession of bedclothes on
the floor and from time to time flung the clothes overboard.  It
was not the least of the trials of this night-of-nights that the
shark ranged nearer and engulfed all that they threw into the sea.
Terrified and sick, Anthony saw the indifference of nature.

It came upon him that the life of the shark was the same as that in
the body of Brother François on the floor.  Certainly what he knew
as Brother François was in abeyance.  He could not look upon the
animated corpse of matter that now lay on the dirty carpet and
still call it the man he had known.  Something was withdrawn, he
thought.  What remained had only the life of the fleshly machine
that laboured on.  In the body of the man that animal life was weak
and sickly; in the body of the fish it was horribly vigorous.  But
it was the same.  One fed upon the other.  Both bodies profited by
the unspeakable exchange.

Early in the morning the body of the man seemed to deflate itself
and collapse.  It was the stadium of the fever, which now died
away.  They forced some wine through its lips.  They wrapped the
thing on the floor in blankets, for it now threatened to turn cold,
and put it back in the bed.  Nothing more could be done.  The skin
was smooth and dry and yellow, the eyes closed.  They themselves,
revolted and exhausted to the verge of staggering weariness, sat
down in chairs and slept.  When they wakened in the damp heat of
the little cabin, Brother François had returned.

"Water, my friends," he whispered.  "I am still with you again for
a while!"

Anthony looked at him and wept.  What now contained Brother
François seemed like a parchment lantern in which only a feeble
candle burned.  Yet as days went on the light there grew stronger.

                            ----------

It had not been easy for Anthony and Juan to subsist themselves
during this time.  Without the negro Ali Bongo, and the chests
which Cibo had contributed, they must have perished.  From Ali
Bongo, who was now the only person on the ship who would even hand
them objects through the cabin hatch, they received water and
occasional warm slops prepared by the cook.  From the chests of
Cibo came certain dainties, wines, and a few preserved delicacies
that had probably saved the monk's life.  Cibo had not been a fancy
grocer in vain.  Anthony now looked through these chests, which had
been deposited in the hold beneath the cabin, and was amazed at the
variety of useful articles and comfortable comestibles that they
contained.

In this dark hold, while the monk's convalescence progressed,
Anthony began to meet Ali Bongo who enjoyed pickles so much he
would even risk his life for them.  Here in the close atmosphere
raw with bilge, over a candle, in the darkness of the ship's
midriff where the beams and timbers obtruded internally in ribbed
shadows, he and the black Mohammedan discussed the predicament of
the Ariostatica and arrived after a week's time at a certain
understanding.

Ali Bongo was a primal but sensible character.  In the plan which
Anthony proposed he saw certain advantages to himself and his
fellow Foulah tribesmen which would not accrue to them by their
merely remaining loyal to the ostensible captain of the ship.  A
present of one of Cibo's silver mounted pistols sealed the bargain
and carried a fierce delight to the savage self-importance of Ali
Bongo's practical soul.  Here was a señor who knew better than to
treat one who had been to Mecca like a slave.  "By Allah, he would
soon be a chieftain again!"  He concealed the pistol in the folds
of his sash and returned smiling to the deck.  The only eye which
noted the bulge at his waist, and drew its own conclusions, was the
single one of Polyphème.  That worthy concluded that objects of
value were to be obtained by visiting the cabin hold.

The quarter-deck was somewhat nonplussed not to say disgruntled at
the new aspect of affairs.  Not only was it evident that neither
Anthony nor Juan was going to be obliging enough to die; Brother
François was actually getting well.  He and his two companions now
came on deck together.  Their first appearance there gave rise to a
violent altercation with the captain and the mate.  The crew looked
on afar-off with considerable interest, and did not fail to note
that over the captain's bluster Anthony quietly carried his point.
An appeal by Don Ramón to Ali Bongo, who was then at the wheel,
found that tall heathen neutral.  Brother François was carried up
every day thereafter to sit in a cushioned chair near the stern.
Anthony and Juan moved about as they liked, although constantly
warned to leeward by the captain and mate who kept up their
sanitary bluster.

Whether this bluster was sincere or fictitious now Anthony could
not for a time be certain.  Certainly both captain and mate were
afraid of the yellow fever.  But it was not long before it became
pretty plain to everybody that Brother François's illness was being
used as a thin excuse for a policy of isolation which had in view
another end than that of health.  What the fo'c'sle wanted, of
course, was license.  Why the captain also persisted in treating
the cabin as if it were still a pesthouse was revealed strangely
enough by the stars.

Anthony was now able to come on deck and renew his own
observations.  It was instantly clear to him that the position of
the ship as marked on the navigating chart by Sóller did not
correspond with fact.  According to Sóller the Ariostatica was
about one hundred leagues off the coast of Sierra Leone opposite
Freetown.  Anthony found her, after taking a lunar to check his
longitude, at about 20 North and 30 West.  A day's run further
convinced him they were making for the Cape Verde Islands.

No doubt at Praia it was Don Ramón's plan to make port, hoist a
signal of distress, and land those whom he would certify as
convalescent to the authorities.  There would certainly be a Lazar
house at Praia.  Who the "convalescents" would be, Anthony had
small doubt.  The schooner might have to lie in the roads for some
days to accomplish this.  But it would be too neat a way for Don
Ramón to rid himself legally of his unwelcome passengers to be
neglected.  The Portuguese would pay small attention to Anthony's
Spanish letters.  It would be a fine thing to have all his high
hopes end in quarantine in some filthy jail or dismal convent.  The
situation must be met instantly.

First making sure of Ali Bongo and his followers, who saw an end to
their own expectations should the ship leave Anthony at the Cape
Verdes, he approached the captain next morning on the quarterdeck
as near as that nervous gentleman would permit.  Don Ramón and
Sóller were as usual playing cards.  After some bluster they were
forced to stop and listen while he pointed out to them the
lamentable discrepancy between the ship's true position and the
chart.

Anthony had now some time to study the captain.  He had come to the
conclusion that under almost any circumstance Don Ramón would do
the easiest thing.  It was a natural conclusion drawn from his
cowardice and indolence.  If one ruse was uncovered he would simply
go on to another.  "Anything to avoid bringing things to an issue,"
would be the captain's motto.  In this case he therefore supplied
him with an easy way out of the predicament.

He simply assumed that the calculations of Sóller had been in
error.  Nor did he neglect to salve that individual by mentioning
that even an expert navigator and calculator frequently went astray
through some fault in the instruments.  That so accurate a
mathematical mind as Señor Sóller's, an expert card player too,
could have made an error of more than seven degrees in latitude was
unthinkable.  It was the instrument that was at fault!  Perhaps it
would be just as well hereafter to make use only of his own?  At
any rate, he himself intended to do so!

The captain and the mate turned a bit green at thus hearing their
little plan dusted out.  The mate was even inclined to argue.
Armed with his data, however, Anthony was firm.  He pointed out the
imminent danger of shipwreck on the island reefs if the present
course were continued.  He assumed that it would not be, and laid
out the correct one.

"The captain," he said after a little pause, "will be pleased to
give the proper directions to the man at the wheel."

An interval of tense silence ensued.  Don Ramón's hand remained
trembling slightly upon a card which he had been about to play
after a quarter of an hour's consideration.  Anthony continued to
look at him and smile.

"Don Ramón will recollect that by the letters issued under the seal
of the captain-general I am empowered to direct the course of this
ship.  Through the captain if POSSIBLE.  It would be a pity if I
were forced to take matters into my own hands."  He leaned forward
touching the pistol in his belt.  The captain looked up and saw Ali
Bongo grinning; Juan sauntering by.

Don Ramón scattered the cards from the board with an oath and gave
the orders to Ali Bongo at the wheel.  Sweeping almost a quarter
circle down the horizon, the bow of the Ariostatica turned south.

For the rest of the morning the skipper and his mate muttered
together pretending to be trying to reconstruct their game.
Perhaps they were.  What conclusions they arrived at Anthony did
not know, nor did he much care.  In the first crucial test he had
come off triumphant.  This was the ninth week out.  The Rio Pongo,
if the breeze held, could be only a few days away.  In those few
days he must get the ship into his own hands.  It was the breeze,
and Polyphème the single-eyed, that came unexpectedly to his aid.

A few hours after the interview with the captain, Polyphème was
caught red-handed plundering the chests stowed in the cabin hold.
Wine and fine biscuit being enjoyed by the fo'c'sle had aroused the
suspicions of Ali Bongo.  Hasty investigation showed that about
half the wine and spirit from Cibo's precious little store in the
hold had already gone.  Anthony and Juan took turns at sentry-go
there.  The bulkheads in the schooner were only temporary and
somewhat flimsy.  On return voyages the entire space was given up
to packing in the bodies of slaves.  All barriers were then
removed.  The place was hot and stank of bilge, negroes, sulphur
and vinegar, the last two having been used to cleanse it after a
manner in Havana.  Sitting there for three hours at a time was no
joke.  How the slaves endured it for weeks on end Anthony could not
imagine.  But he had his reward.

During his second trick as sentry he heard the sound of bare feet
approaching the bulkhead on the far side.  There were a few
stealthy shufflings and a loose plank in the bulkhead was removed.
A man's body came through the opening.  Presently the fellow
produced flint and steel, lit a candle--and found himself looking
down the pistol of Señor Adverse.  It was impossible not to admire
Polyphème a little then.  The expression on his face did not even
change.

Anthony made him crawl ahead of him through the hatch into the
cabin.  That was a mistake, as he soon found.  He should have
called for Juan.  He kept the man covered.  But as he himself
emerged from the drop which led into the little passage above, the
fellow dodged like a lizard, and threw a knife.  It had been aimed
for the heart and it pinned the inner edge of Anthony's left sleeve
to the combing.  Seeing he had failed, and that the pistol still
looked at him, the prisoner fell on his knees and began to plead.
From the expression on his captor's face he was afraid his time had
come.  And in this he was not far wrong.  If he had made one move
to escape, the finger on the trigger would have squeezed.  His one
eye rolled now and he squealed.

Anthony locked him in an empty cabin and stood by a few minutes
longer while Juan fitted him with irons from the ample supply
provided for slaves.  No one said anything.  It had all been
enormously easy, Anthony thought.  Those on the quarter-deck had
not even been disturbed in their siesta.  Warning Polyphème that
any noise on his part would bring Ali Bongo with a whip, Anthony
pocketed the key and went on deck.

He was delighted with himself for several reasons.  The capture of
Polyphème in so ignominious a manner was an enormous stroke of
luck.  More important, however, was a discovery about himself.  In
situations of great danger he did not grow weak and tremble; he
became strong from anger.  Even better than that, he did not get
confused.  The nerves he had inherited were good ones.  What an
inestimable gift!  He had actually been so much in command of
himself even when the knife came as not to shoot.

How curious it was that things like this should be happening to
HIM!  A man had actually thrown a knife at him!  He looked at
Brother François sitting back weakly in his chair near the stern.
He was lost in another world, poor man!  But Anthony--Anthony was a
part now of events.  He felt he could not even afford to talk too
much with Brother François.  No, Anthony was doing things!  Let
them be done then.  He felt suddenly sure of himself.  He could
bend those about him to his own ends.  Don Ramón dozing, curled up
in the shadow of a boat, filled him with contempt.  Certainly he
could outwit that man!  He turned suddenly hearing Ali Bongo
calling to him from the wheel.  The man was pointing astern.  Some
miles away a white squall was tearing down upon them, lines of
white caps racing before it.

Anthony began to shout warnings and orders to take in sail.  Juan
hustled Brother François below.  Ali Bongo and his men stripped the
mainmast while Anthony stood by at the wheel.  He meant to bring
the ship to, but the confusion in the fo'c'sle prevented him.
Instead of lowering away there, an argument ensued and the foresail
was reefed and set again.  Ali Bongo danced with rage.  A few
confused people were fumbling on the topsail downhauls when Don
Ramón sat up and confounded everything twice over by countermanding
the orders already given.  Missing Polyphème, the men forward were
at hopeless odds among themselves.  While she was in this state of
provocative déshabille the squall romped down uproariously upon the
Ariostatica.  Luckily Anthony did not try to throw her up into the
wind now.  He let her drive.

Even under the reefed foresail the schooner keeled over so far as
to ship combers down the hatches.  The jibs and loose square-
topsail beat about for a few seconds like the wings of a frantic
roc and then literally leapt clear of the bolts to disappear ahead
in a smother of foam.  The rigging shrieked.  Anthony saw the
eyeballs of the entire ship's company bent upon him at the wheel.
"Let go the foresheet," he roared.  It was fouled!  Ali Bongo
crawled forward and hacked it with a knife.  The boom swept around
like a whip lash against the lee shrouds, knocking four of the
gaping men cold.  Ali Bongo rolled into the scuppers.  For a minute
the Ariostatica shivered.

Then she slowly rose righting herself and slipping off the tons of
green water that had nearly foundered her.  Amidships there was a
lake where the cook and a large pot floated about with ashes and
firewood.  Then the bulwarks gave way there releasing the load.
The ship bolted ahead like a whipped horse.

By some miracle the reefed foresail held.  More surprising yet El
Polio ran forward and lashed the boom to the shrouds.  Holding with
all his might against the spokes Anthony was just able to keep the
schooner from broaching to.  With the aft sails and the jib gone,
the drag of the foresail against the helm was terrific.  Presently
two of the Foulah tribesmen came and relieved him at the wheel
which gave him a brief opportunity to look about.

He turned to find Don Ramón standing behind him with his legs
spread apart and his hands behind his back.  It looked as if
through the whole crisis the captain had been coolly giving him
orders.  Thus it was that with most of the men on the fo'c'sle Don
Ramón secured the credit for having saved the ship.

For an instant Anthony was overcome by rage.  He felt himself
losing control of his feet and hands.  A mad impulse to kick the
preposterous little hypocrite clear off the deck and down the
hatchway all but mastered him.  Then he determined to make use of
the captain's cunning for his own ends.

Seeing the man was really at a loss what to do, he descended upon
him and taking him unawares, half by threats in an undertone and by
loud firm suggestions, forced him to continue in the false part
which he had assumed.  Before two hours passed Captain Ramón Lull
had, as it were, been rushed off his feet into the command of his
own ship again.

Anthony was greatly aided in this process by the reappearance of
Ali Bongo who arose from under a chicken coop in the scuppers as if
from the dead, but with a large cut over one eye.  His countenance
was rendered sufficiently ferocious by blood and swelling to work
miracles by itself.  If any had been washed overboard it yet
remained to be seen.  The crew at any rate thought that Polyphème
had gone that way.  Without a leader they were temporarily reduced
to the condition of somewhat stubborn but confused sheep.

Under the inspired, piping falsetto of the captain, who by some
miracle they did not understand was now issuing sensible orders, a
new jib was broken out and bent on.  The ship felt the relief
sensibly and no longer threatened to lay to.  Axes were produced
and some wreckage on the fo'c'sle cleared away.  Anthony took the
risk of the tools being turned to weapons.  From the fo'c'sle the
men were worked aft.  Even the mate joined in and exerted his
authority.  "Under a decent captain he might have done well
enough," thought Anthony.  A small area of the mainsail was now
shown to the wind and the crew assigned to the mainmast were put to
work on the quarter-deck without further ado.  The tempest, indeed,
with its more pressing problems had banished the fear of plague
from their minds.

The squall blew itself out rapidly.  By twilight they were sweeping
along under a fine following breeze.  The regular watch was called
and those who failed to answer were used roughly enough.  With a
few curses and some grumbling the crew found themselves somehow at
their stations, and discipline was enforced through the remainder
of the night.  At dawn Don Ramón was roused too, to his vast
disgust.  It was a final test.  Juan stood behind him with a
pistol, hidden by the mast.  The captain was forced to issue orders
to clean decks.  Some of the crew came forward at this
unparallelled insult in an arrogant mood.  The turbaned Foulahs
descended upon them from the quarter-deck armed with the belaying
pins and began to crack heads.  It was enough.

When the sun rose it beheld the decks of the Ariostatica
holystoned.  The ropes were neatly coiled and the brass binnacle
glittered.  Anthony's ideal of the deck of the Wampanoag with
Collins and a rope-end skipping about it was at least approached.
If there had only been a little paint!  The yachtishness of the
Ariostatica emerged from years of grime.  "Sacred blood of a sow,"
said a pimply-faced Frenchman spitting on the deck surreptitiously
and looking at the stain with comfort, "and this is a slaver!"

Anthony sat in the cabin that morning immensely self-satisfied.  In
a few hours, through quick thinking and some luck he told himself,
he had broken up the captain's little scheme of isolation and
through him had assumed control of the ship.  Don Ramón sat across
the table too tired with rage to be angry any longer.  The
desertion of El Polio to the fo'c'sle had, indeed, reduced him to
tears.  His favourite was now bunking with the rest of the crew.
The shattered state of the highly nervous little captain was
scarcely understood by those about him.  His falsetto broke and ran
a gamut when he spoke.  The terrible Señor Adverso had threatened
to put him to bed in the fever bunk which Brother François had
occupied.  He collapsed at the thought.  He would do anything to
avoid that.  But he would also do anything to regain the solace of
El Polio.  The boy was his slave in law but Don Ramón was the boy's
slave in fact.  So far had his passion now carried him that he
really cared for little else.  The command of the Ariostatica was
to him merely the means of regaining Polio.  No one else in the
cabin could imagine that.  No one but the monk.

By long acquaintance and sad experience the passions of men were no
longer much of a secret to Brother François.  No excess of either
good or evil could surprise him.  The situation on the Ariostatica
was to him painfully plain.  Between the stalwart young man who had
evidently suspended his ideals in order "to do things," what
things, of course, he did not know, and Don Ramón who was mad with
the excess of a single unnatural affection, the ship, he felt, and
all the souls on her, was in a parlous way.

It might have surprised certain people to have known that in his
heart Brother François felt there was little to choose between the
baneful effects of obstinate, wrong human desires.  Anthony's in
fact he felt might in the end overwhelm more people than Don
Ramón's.  But he himself could do nothing.  He was too weak.
Scarcely able to move even in the chair in which he sat without
dangerous exhaustion, he could only sit and think.  What lay ahead
he did not dare to dwell upon as yet.  It would have stopped his
heart.  He lay and looked up at the bright colours of Spain that
flaunted themselves from the peak where they had been hoisted at
Havana.  The gold and blood of them, he remembered, had always been
associated with the banner of the cross.  In the inextricable
tangle of contradictions which this implied to him, for he believed
in Providence, he sat back inert and benumbed.  Only his own way
was clear.  But there was such a terrible light upon it that he
could only face it now by closing his eyes.  The body of him must
sleep yet.

During the day both Anthony and the captain came to him; Anthony to
try to make the invalid more comfortable, Don Ramón to obtain
comfort from the priest.

"My son," said Brother François to Anthony after thanking him for
some wine.  "Has it not occurred to you already that you have made
a bad bargain?"

Anthony went away angry.  He did not care to think of that.
Brother François was very sorrowful.

Don Ramón after much beating about the bush finally decided to risk
his body by approaching the convalescent in order to save his soul.
The monk's reassurances of all danger being past finally brought
him to his knees near the priest in the shadow of a boat that hid
them both from view.  There he confessed himself and begged
absolution.  Brother François would grant it provided he would give
up the youth.  Don Ramón could not do that.  He said so and wept.
Brother François was again sorrowful.

The Ariostatica sailed on toward Africa.  In a few hours Anthony
knew she would raise the coast.  At midnight she ran into an oily
calm.

That calm endured for fearful days.  Neither the water, the wind,
nor the ship shifted.  Only the lights of heaven had motion and a
few birds that flew about the Ariostatica and went away again.
Only they and the shark moved.  The shark was still there.  It
ranged alongside from time to time expectantly.  It nudged the ship
and scraped itself against her barnacles sending a light tremor
through her.  The men swore now that it was waiting for someone.
Half humorously they began again to throw dice and to draw lots.
There was little else to do.  The heat was intense.  The shark was
always there, by far the most interesting thing in their lives now.
His persistence fascinated them.  The lot one day fell for five
consecutive times on El Polio.  That night he heard some of the men
whispering about him.  In the darkness he crept out of the fo'c'sle
and fled back to Don Ramón.

The days of utter calm in which the company of the Ariostatica
seemed to have been condemned to the hell of their own society for
the rest of eternity remained always a nightmare to Anthony.  It
was plain to him that what had been gained during the squall and
the short time afterward was rapidly slipping out of his hands.  By
the fourth day of calm, with the glass still low but no change, no
one could make believe to be in charge of the ship.  The men
separated themselves to the fo'c'sle again and no longer even
pretended to pay attention to a hail from the quarter-deck.  Only a
half-pint a day of water could be allowed per man.  And even that
would soon exhaust the now depleted supply.  A hundred miles over
the horizon was land.  But the crew did not know this.  If they had
been told they might have taken to the boats.  Exactly what
happened to the minds of those marooned on the idle slaver Anthony
could not be sure.  The changeless colour of the sea, a kind of
breathlessness in the atmosphere, a perpetual expectation of
something about to occur which never happened, the utter silence
and the shark--produced the explosion that came.

There were a number of half-castes among the crew, all of whom,
white or brown, were deeply tinged with Africa.  What superstitious
and fearful whisperings went on forward night after night and day
after day as the wind failed to come, only those who put their
heads together in the fo'c'sle and listened desperately might know.

On the eighth day a surly deputation came aft demanding that
Brother François pray again for a breeze.  He did so but nothing
happened.  On the ninth the liquid ration was halved.  That
something had been resolved upon by the men was now patent to both
Anthony and the mate Sóller as they served out the water and rum
with Ali Bongo and his men standing by armed.  On these Mohammedans
Anthony now pinned his chief hope.  They belonged to a tribe in the
interior, the Foulahs, who frequently came to the coast in little
groups under some leader and made a fortune sufficient for the rest
of their lives by serving a few years at sea, usually on a slaver.

Anthony had, he thought, bound them to him by the present of two
chests of scarlet cloth, the promise of much more when they
arrived, and the cancelling of a year off their sea service.  At
the end of six months he had promised to dismiss them into the
interior again with presents of powder and firearms.  That was the
understanding, and for the most part they had stood by him.  But in
the mystery which was now afoot they stood aloof, he felt.  The
most he could get out of Ali Bongo was that whatever was toward did
not concern a good Mohammedan and he would not interfere.  The
outlook was by no means cheerful.  The cabin retired on the tenth
night thoroughly prepared, but not for sleep.

As the night wore on Anthony relieved Juan who was on watch on
deck.  He took his place in the shadow of the mast and leaned
against it.  No one was at the wheel.  There was not a breath
stirring.  The helm which had been lashed a week before, had
remained so.  Some distance astern a slight phosphorescent glimmer
proclaimed the presence of "Old Faithful."  All in the fo'c'sle
seemed asleep.  For a while he thought he was alone on the quarter-
deck.  In the moonlight he could hear the idle sails dripping dew.
Then he saw the head and shoulders of El Polio.  He was lying back
on some of Brother François' borrowed pillows in the stern sheets
of the captain's boat where it rested in its cradle on the quarter-
deck.

At first he thought the boy was asleep, but now he saw his eyes
open.  They closed slowly again.  The expression on the lad's dark
face held him spellbound.  There could be no doubt what was
happening.  He lay looking up at the stars with a film of ecstasy
on his lids.  His delicately beautiful features were flat and
strangely shrunken like some water-lily that had broken from its
stem and decayed a little from its first early bloom while drifting
helplessly downstream.  This stupor persisted for a long time.
Then the boy opened his mouth as if to bleat.  But no sound came
forth.  The jaw merely relaxed and hung down.  When a living
expression finally returned it was one of extreme terror.  He lay
absolutely still for so long that it was evident he was afraid to
move.

There was something Anthony could not understand about this.  The
boy lay with his hands behind his head.  If it had not been for
that Anthony would have put an end to the business.  But the sight
of so luxurious and self-hypnotized a dreamer had amazed and
fascinated him.  No other solution had occurred to him.  The face
alone had held him spellbound.  Watching it, he had become aware of
profound and hitherto unsuspected abysses in himself.  He too had
almost been hypnotized.  When the captain suddenly appeared above
the gunwale of the boat Anthony stood as if frozen.  Indeed, his
back grew cold.

Don Ramón looked about him and thinking the deck was clear stepped
out of the boat and began to sneak forward.  He was within a few
feet of Anthony before he saw him.  They stood looking at each
other.  Both of them knew instantly that the other was thinking of
the shark.  That was why the captain screamed.

Whether those who had planned what immediately followed that shrill
cry thought they had been discovered and rushed the quarter-deck
immediately, or whether the tone of it had merely shattered the
ten-day tension of the unbearable calm, Anthony could never be
sure.  They must have been waiting, perhaps even creeping up during
the minutes before the captain screamed.  Scarcely was the sound
past his lips when a half score of the crew were upon him.  Anthony
had just time to roll down the hatch.  They had not seen him
standing by the mast in the shadow.  He caught himself on the
ladder and drew his pistol aiming it at the moonlit square above.
Whatever came he meant to hold the cabin.  But no heads came into
the bright square above.  There was a hellish clamour on deck.

It was the falsetto voice of the captain.  Doubtless they were
going to murder him.  At any rate he was begging them not to do
something.  Well, he would not interfere for THAT man!  Not after
what he had just seen.  Certainly the agony was genuine now.  Don
Ramón could plead eloquently.  Then Anthony went cold all over
again.  Don Ramón was screaming to them not to throw the boy
overboard.

Anthony shouted to Juan desperately and started to climb up the
ladder.  A scream of terror beyond thought rang out above just as
his head and shoulders came out of the hatch.  The rest was over in
two seconds.

Someone dragged the boy out of the boat to which he clung
desperately, and clutching him about the waist raised him high in
the air.  The whole mad group precipitated itself toward the stern
like an avalanche.  For an instant he saw the still childish limbs
thrash in the moonlight as the boy was tossed outward.  There was a
splash just as Anthony leaped aft.  But he was met by a return rush
toward the fo'c'sle.  Rolling and milling about, his pistol went
off.

Yet even in the mêlée while trying to clutch somebody he heard the
voice from the water.  No one could listen to that and not go mad.
He started to club someone with his pistol but the man broke away.

When he rose to his feet again the grey decks of the sinister
little yacht were empty.  He stood there alone in the moonlight.
He was clutching a bunch of black chicken feathers in one hand.
That was all.

It must be a frightful dream.  He would wake up soon.  Yes, that
was it.  Chicken feathers!  He knew it was a dream.  Sailors do not
wear feathers in their hair.  He gave a weird laugh and found his
chest and ribs hurt him horribly.

"Ju-ju!" said a wild falsetto voice in his ear.  Don Ramón threw
his hands up above his head.  "No use," he cried.  "All over."  He
staggered and was bleeding at the mouth.

Anthony went and leaned over the taffrail.  Infinite miles of a
pool of quicksilver seemed to lie astern.  In all that glittering
level not a thing moved.  The shark had gone.  He cried out into
the night.  Whether it was a prayer or a curse he did not know.

Next morning a faint breeze began to push the Ariostatica along
toward Africa again.  By noon she had gathered considerable way.
They raised the low coast by evening and burned flares for a pilot
all night.  The red, funereal glare danced for miles over the black
water.  Finally a similar fire answered them from land.




CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

THE CREW GO ASHORE


All night the Ariostatica gradually drew in toward the land.  About
dawn she was standing off-and-on just keeping under way.  Nothing
could be done until they picked up the pilot.  Now and again the
ship lifted sullenly to black hills of water that surged under and
past her, marching in upon the coast.  Half an hour after some
unusual giant passed Anthony thought he could hear its cataclysmic
roar as it staggered against the mysterious continent still hidden
in darkness to leeward.

The sun rose suddenly out of a level, steaming jungle that
stretched eastward as far as the eye could reach.  While he
watched, the straight clouds brooding over it wilted.  Then, as the
air grew hotter and clearer, a million foggy wisps exhaled into the
morning as if the camp fires of night were going out.  The sun
licked the dampness up like a thirsty cat's tongue.  In an hour the
atmosphere was blue-white and quivering like the heart of a
furnace.

This, he saw, was a flat, a sullen and silent land.  No merry song
streamed upward from that stagnant sea of treetops to eastward such
as had risen from the gracious forests of Cuba to greet the sun.
The only voice here was that of Ocean.  Apparently quite calm, it
advanced relentlessly upon the strips of islands stretching away
over the long, flat horizon where endless miles of monotonous
lagoons dazzled the eyes.  As though balked of its prey by these
thin barriers the sea continued to wrinkle its angry lips along
their bone-white beaches, roaring with elemental appetite at the
forest beyond.

Although the Ariostatica was still several miles out, the hungry
crunch and smash of the breakers saluted her with a premonitory
snarl.

Only at one point was there to be seen any break in the seemingly
endless barrier reef that now lay directly before the ship.  It was
where the Rio Pongo, slipping silently out of the enormous forest,
slid into the sea.  Emerging from endless flats, the river was only
a convenient funnel for the tides with scarcely any noticeable
current of its own.  A sharp dent in the façade of the forest
beyond the lagoons and a surfless break in the barrier beaches
indicated the river's whereabouts.  This, and the blue dome of Cape
Palmas which loomed up faintly to the south were the only distinct
landmarks, in the entire region.  All else was a level sea either
of green water or of even greener vegetation.

Sóller pointed out the river mouth to Anthony.

"A good landfall, señor!"  He grinned a little sheepishly.  "We
ought to make Gallego's anchorage by noon.  Well, you will
certainly get a warm welcome THERE!"  He strolled over to the
rail and turned his back.  Anthony felt sure the mate was laughing.
He looked at the river gate ahead without enthusiasm.  What awaited
him there seemed as inscrutable as the dim arches from which the
Rio Pongo emerged.

Some time after sunrise a black dot, which the restless ocean had
been tilting into sight now and then for about an hour past,
resolved itself into the expected pilot's canoe.  It was paddled by
two Kru boys stark except for breech-clouts.  In the centre under a
palm hat of Korean proportions sat the pilot in a ragged, military
jacket, smoking a calabash pipe.

He knocked out this basin for tobacco as he came up the ship's
side, and much to Anthony's surprise hailed the quarter-deck in
English.  Sóller seemed positively disgruntled by this.  Evidently
he had been expecting another man.

The trouserless emanation from the deep, dressed exclusively in a
cast-off marine's jacket with four brass buttons over the tail,
proved to be from the factory of one Thomas Ormond, better known up
and down the slave coast and for many a mile inland as "Mongo Tom."

Sóller tried him persistently in both Spanish and Portuguese, but
the pilot shook his head.  For this he was heartily cursed at some
length in both tongues, a warm welcome, which as a free man he
resented.

"Me sabe go-go Bangalang alri'," he finally insisted, turning to
Anthony who turned him over to the good offices of Ali Bongo.  A
bargain was soon struck for taking the ship up to Gallego's
anchorage.

The mate grunted uneasily and went below, evidently to discuss this
unexpected development with the captain who had not yet ventured to
crawl on deck again.

The pilot took over the wheel without further ado and continued in
active conversation with Ali Bongo in some unknown jargon.  It
appeared that they had known each other.  After a while Anthony
managed to join in.  Ali Bongo did the honours.  Berak-Jaumee, he
assured Anthony, was one fine, fighting friend, honest man.

Jaumee proved to be very proud of his "English."  He had once made
a voyage on a British whaler, it appeared.  For that reason Mongo
Tom, the Englishman, had taken him on.  Jaumee was now not only the
best but the only pilot on the river, Anthony learned.  There were
only two slave factories on the Rio Pongo, Mongo Tom's and
Gallego's.  Both were near Bangalang, a Kru village.  Gallego's lay
a little upstream beyond the native huts; Mongo Tom's below.  Both
slavers had once kept pilots, but--

"Gallego pie-LOT no work no more."

"How come that?"

"Gallego no pay.  Gallego no pay numbody.  Him dade two moons.
Feber!  Gallego bery dade.  Him hareem go-go big woods."  Jaumee
grinned.

Here was news indeed, news which it might be just as well to keep
from the crew and the captain.  If Gallego was dead, Anthony
realized his only hope of getting matters in his own hands was a
tight hold on the ship, instantly.  Consequently he walked the deck
doing some fast thinking.

The crew would be with the captain, he felt, when it came to a
final showdown.  If he could only break that combination!  He sent
for Juan, and did some intense talking with him and Ali Bongo.  He
was delighted to see how at the mere prospect of a clash the lean,
black Mohammedan brightened up.  It promised well, he thought.  Ali
Bongo had peculiar eyes with golden pupils like those of an eagle.
Expressionless for the most part except of a constant fierce animal
pride, as he and Anthony stood by the taffrail discussing calmly
enough ways and means of taking over the schooner, Ali Bongo's eyes
smouldered in the sun.  It flashed upon Anthony for the first time
how absorbing the business of killing might be.  Nothing else could
be compared to it for interest.  It was the supreme gamble.  In a
ten-minute conversation with the big Mohammedan both of them had
forgotten themselves entirely in the tense business at hand.  Even
lack of language had been no barrier.  Where Ali Bongo's Spanish
failed his expressive gestures went on like a more eloquent though
silent tongue.  They parted having reached a complete understanding.

The ship was now passing through the narrow cleft in the barrier
beach.  The tide here ran like a mill race.  Thousands of square
miles of salt lagoons and an entire river basin were to be filled
in a few hours, and all through one lean nostril.  It appeared to
Anthony that the slight rise in the forest beyond was where the
earth was expanding its chest in order to inhale the tide.  The
water about the schooner boiled with white sand.  All sail had been
stripped from the ship, which now glided forward rapidly and
silently on the swiftly rising water floor.  They crossed the wide
lagoon behind the island in a few minutes and entered the boiling,
sucking mouth of the Rio Pongo.

Instantly on both sides the great forest closed in upon the little
ship.  The roar of the beaches was cut off as if the soft, oozy
mouth of the river had closed its lips over her.

Anthony had never dreamed of a forest like this.  Huge palms shot
up to unbelievable heights overtopping the ship's masts, he could
not guess how far.  The Ariostatica seemed to be slipping down a
throat lined with smooth, green vegetation into the mysterious maw
of the continent.  She swung around curves easily and majestically
as if driven by some power within her, bubbling along on the
advancing crest of the tide.

No one but an experienced pilot could have avoided the sandbars of
the sluggish river's innumerable turns.  Anthony glanced at Jaumee
glad to see that Ali Bongo was getting on so well with him.
Evidently they were about to reach an agreement.  In a few minutes
he witnessed a curious ceremony.  Each man produced a knife and
after repeating some formula each pricked his own thumb.  When a
drop of blood appeared they then thrust them each into the other's
mouth.  Then they exchanged knives.  Both spat upon the blades and
saluted each other.

The pilot then walked over and kicked the two naked Kru boys who
were stretched out asleep in the blinding sun.  He began to say
something to them . . .

"Time to serve out arms now, I think, señor."  It was Ali Bongo who
was speaking.  Anthony turned to him startled, the man had come
upon him so silently.  "I have just made a blood brother of the
pilot.  He and his two boys there are now with us.  You will have
to provide the three rolls of red cloth I have promised.  It is a
great gift but their help is worth it.  If the señor will act
quickly now I think he can secure the ship.  I will bring my men
aft.  The rest of the crew are at morning mess."  He gave a keen
whistle which brought the four other Mohammedans, who lived mostly
on rice, and who ate and cooked by themselves in the galley,
running aft.

Anthony looked about him mentally mustering his forces.  Besides
himself he had Juan, Ali Bongo and his four other Foulahs, the
pilot, and his two Kru boys.  It was possible that the cook and his
boy might be counted on to stay with the ship.  Brother François
was, of course, in event of any physical clash, neutral.  This was
twelve at best, probably only ten in fact, that could be counted on
to act together against the rest of the ship's company including
the captain and mate.  The odds were thus about three to one.  In
Anthony's favour was the rather unusual height of the schooner's
quarter-deck, which had only one narrow approach from the waist of
the ship, and the fact that most of the ammunition, although not
all of the arms, was stored in the cabin.

Anthony sent Juan and one of the Foulahs to bring up an arms chest.
Without attracting the notice of the crew weapons were quietly
served out to those on the quarter-deck.  Several loaded muskets
were concealed in the bunt of the half-furled mainsail.  As luck
would have it, just while this was going on the head and shoulders
of the mate Sóller appeared above the hatch combing.  He was about
to come on deck.  He took in the situation at a glance and bellowed
something down the hatch to the captain.  Just then Ali Bongo
clapped a pistol to his ear and hauled him on deck.  He bound him
to the mast and gagged him.  Anthony and Juan dived down the
hatchway.

They were too late, however.  A scuttling noise and the rattle of
irons in the cabin-hold told what was happening.  They were only in
time to see the manacled leg of Polyphème disappear through the
loose board in the bulkhead.  Leaving Juan to nail up the loose
plank, which he cursed himself for not having attended to before,
Anthony returned to the deck by way of the cabin.  The captain had
gone, too.  Evidently he had preceded Polyphème.  The crisis was at
hand then!  He ran for the deck.

As he poked his head up out of the hatch there was a deafening
smack, and a bullet, which shattered the top of the combing, filled
his cheek with wood splinters.  He saw the captain standing on the
fo'c'sle with a smoking pistol in his hand.  The little man dodged
behind the foremast and started to reload.

Everyone on the quarter-deck, including Ali Bongo, was now flat as
a card.  The pilot had let the wheel go and the bow of the
Ariostatica was pointing toward the bank.  The tide luckily enough
drifted her sidewise upstream.

Anthony seized the wheel and turned the ship's head up the river
again.  The captain was having great trouble reloading.  His hands
and arms waggled out from behind the mast, working feverishly.
Grabbing one of the muskets from the sail Anthony sent a bullet in
the captain's direction that tore a long piece out of the mast
behind which he stood.  The shot was too much for the captain.  He
let out a wailing whoop and dived for the fo'c'sle.  His appearance
there, which was greeted by an encouraging roar from the crew, had
been enormously accelerated by Ali Bongo's firing a pistol at him
as he fled.  All this had happened in less than two minutes.

Ali Bongo now came to life.  He even persuaded his "blood brother"
to return to the wheel.  Seeing they had leaders who meant
business, the rest of the men on the quarter-deck now ventured to
raise their heads above the bulwarks and to handle their arms
again.  It was hurriedly explained to them that any further
faltering on their part would result in their being hanged by the
captain, if, and as soon as, he regained the quarter-deck.  It was
now win or die.  This profound thought served to accelerate their
zeal considerably.  Even the Kru boys could understand it.

Indeed, their new flood of courage and enthusiasm over the success
of the first blow went too far.  The mere appearance of a head at
the entrance to the fo'c'sle was the signal for an unauthorized
hail of shots from the quarter-deck.  Some of these, fired from
behind Anthony, passed close to his ear.  The fo'c'sle howled like
a den of hyenas for a minute or two and then was quiet again.  Now
was the time to rush the quarter-deck if they had only known it.
Every weapon aft was empty.

It gave Anthony an attack of goose-flesh to think of that.  He
exerted himself strenuously to put some discipline in his mob.  The
muskets and pistols were reloaded hastily.  Some packing cases and
bales were brought up and disposed as a breastwork along the
forward rail of the quarter-deck.  The four Foulahs who were used
to muskets, to judge by the way they handled them, were placed
behind this hastily constructed but effective enough barrier with
instructions to shoot at anyone who appeared in the fo'c'sle door.
Spare muskets were provided.  One of the Kru boys was sent down to
reinforce Juan at watch below at the loose bulkhead.

That bulkhead caused Anthony a good deal of worry.  He did not want
to have to meet a sudden rush from behind up the cabin stairs.  The
danger was thoroughly impressed upon Juan who began to make certain
preparations.  His ingenuity, Anthony found later, was considerable.

In the meantime, the ship, as if nothing extraordinary were going
on, continued calmly enough to sweep on up the river with the tide.
A babble of voices occasionally burst from the fo'c'sle where a
kind of nautical town meeting continued to go on for several hours
that morning.  Considerable difference of opinion as to what should
be done under the circumstances must have developed between the
captain and the now thoroughly reckless Polyphème.  That was as
much as Anthony could make out.  An intermittent pounding and
smashing of glass, upon which Juan for some reason was engaged in
the cabin below, drifted up the hatch.

Anthony was glad now that Sóller and the captain had freed
Polyphème.  Doubtless that was why the mate had stayed below so
long that morning.  It must have taken some time to file the locks
on the Frenchman's irons.  He discovered later that the man's leg
chain had been cut through.  Sóller had evidently meant to come on
deck to make talk while the captain and Polyphème went forward to
bring back the crew.  What had been done, then, was just in the
nick of time.  Anthony had counted on the captain's waiting to act
till they reached Gallego's.  That had almost been a fatal mistake.
He drew a deep breath.  Where would he have been now if he had
waited?  A glance at the monster-haunted river did not reassure
him.

They were now passing rapidly enough up a long, straight stretch of
the stream.  Except for the muddy shallows along the banks the Rio
Pongo here resembled a broad canal rather than a river.  This reach
in particular was literally dragon-haunted.  From time to time,
disturbed by the passing of the ship, crocodiles launched
themselves from the banks with a resounding splash that sent flocks
of parrots screaming above the treetops.  From a reedy shoal the
pink, cavern mouth of a riverhorse opened suddenly and bellowed at
them.  A calf like a huge, fat grub appeared swimming at its
mother's side.  The smoke from the ship's galley had drifted into
their nostrils.  Monkeys let themselves down by the natural ropes
of vines that dangled and looped for interminable miles along the
vast living wall of trees.  They dipped their hands in the muddy
stream and drank, only to shrink back chattering as they saw the
ship, or a pair of saurian eyes looking at them from what appeared
to be a half-sunken log.  There was not a breath or any movement in
the leaves now.  The damp heat vibrated above the stream with
thousands of midges and living motes of things.  Clouds of stinging
flies made the men swear and stamp.  Butterflies only to be matched
by the cascades of bloom on the flowering vines that made the walls
of the forest both magic and impenetrable, fluttered down on the
deck and waved their wings slowly in the sun.  The dark, festering
swamp, from which this prototype of tropical forests drew
gargantuan life, smoked under dim arches at midday with little
wisps devoured by the sun.

Even in the midst of burning excitement Anthony looked at all this
with amazement.  To what place had he come?  While the four Foulahs
crouched ready behind their bales of cloth and packing cases he
smiled to see that neither the battle which had gone on above his
head nor the semi-infernal landscape through which the ship was
passing had prevented the cook from preparing his usual meal.  The
galley smoked as peacefully as its imperturbable occupant.  In the
copper caldrons the salt pork bubbled and sang.  At dinner time a
pair of white trousers on a stick was waved from the fo'c'sle.

After some preliminary parley Polyphème's face and single eye
appeared a little above the deck forward.

"You will not starve us, will you, señor?" he said taking off his
red cap and bowing with elaborate irony.  The four guns of the
Foulahs were trained at his chest but he paid no attention to them.
He stood there holding the ball and chain that was still attached
to his leg, grinning, and looking at those on the quarter-deck with
a malevolent eye.  He succeeded in making them all uneasy.

"Send the captain up.  I'll talk with him," said Anthony.

"_I_ am the captain now," replied the man putting his hand on his
heart and bobbing again while his chain clanked.  "If you have any
business to transact with the crew, monsieur, you must do it with
me.  Mais oui, you see I have just been elected."  He swaggered a
little, allowing the news to sink in.

"Put the captain on deck.  I talk only with him," snapped Anthony
in French.

"Ah, zat ees endeed unfortu-nate, Meester Adverse, ze cape-tain hav
chess now, what you call eet hexpire.  His noble heart hav stop
beat.  I tell you zat in your own goddam langweedge.  It ees ze
verity.  Let me talk wiz you.  I have ze bon pro-posal."  He
started to come aft.

"Careful, señor," whispered Ali Bongo.

Anthony halted the man just by the carronade amidships and kept him
covered.

"You and me, we get togezzer now ze captain ees dade . . ."  the
sailor began.

"You're lying, of course," interrupted Anthony.

The single eye narrowed to a slit.  "No!  I swear eet, on my heart,
monsieur."  He bowed again slightly.  His hand shot out of his
chest.  Anthony threw himself backward.  His pistol went off in the
air.  It was the handle instead of the blade of Polyphème's knife
which took him full in the chest.  A number of muskets went off
together like one gun.

The four Foulahs had fired straight into the fo'c'sle door.  It had
stopped the rush effectively.  Forward someone could be heard
screaming dismally.  Despite a fusillade of shots which followed
him, in the tense excitement Polyphème had dodged back again.

Anthony rose both bruised and foolish.  To have had the same trick
played on him twice!  He picked up the knife and threw it into the
sea.

It was just then that the noise broke out below.  Evidently a
scrimmage was going on in the hold.  Suddenly it stopped.  Then
there was one shot.  As he started down the ladder Anthony met Juan
coming up.  He was laughing.

"It's all over," Juan said.  "I don't think they'll come back."  He
began to laugh again.  "It was glass, señor.  Broken bottles!  I
spread them in the hold in front of the bulkhead and waited.  Dios!
You should have heard the noise they made when I fired through the
bulkhead.  They all rolled over each other in the most fertile
spot.  Bare feet, too, Madre!"

"Was it indeed 'all over'?" thought Anthony.  Unconsciously he
found himself thanking the madonna, his own madonna, that it was
not all over with him.  His wishbone creaked where the knife handle
had bruised him.  A fine place he had brought himself--and the
madonna to!  Then he found himself laughing with Juan from sheer
relief.  A few minutes later the voice of the captain was heard
begging for water for the wounded.

"They bleed down here badly, señor--for the love of Christ!"
Anthony allowed this request.  The return of the expedition from
the hold had evidently sickened the fo'c'sle pretty thoroughly.  He
let the cook take some food down to them.  Silence settled down
upon the Ariostatica now.  Her progress up the Rio Pongo was no
longer marked by volleys and the screaming millions of parrots that
rose in cloudy flocks.  The tide was nearing the flood.  The ship
moved upstream more and more sluggishly.

They drifted slowly past the establishment of Mongo Tom.  The
forest opened out suddenly and a vista of rice fields, sugar cane,
and plantains swept up to a large palisaded place, the slave pens.
On a knoll was a comfortable-looking thatched house with a far-
flung veranda.  Anthony sent Juan for his glass.  He could see a
large figure, apparently that of a white man dressed in a loose
garment of some kind, standing on the porch.  The man was also
looking at the ship with a hand telescope.  Anthony made a gesture
to him but he got no reply.  Strangely enough no one else could be
seen about.  The place seemed deserted.

"Mongo Tom no like him people come say how-do Gallego ship.  Many
man's there alri'," replied the pilot to Anthony's questions.

Evidently there had been no love lost between Mongo Tom and
Gallego.

"Him no like me bring up Gallego ship," continued Jaumee.  "Jaumee
free man," he added proudly.  "Me DO!  Me work Gallego ship!"

Anthony nodded approval of these independent sentiments.  "Me free
man, me do!" he thought and smiled.

A canoe appeared at a turn ahead, waved a paddle, and turned back
upstream.  A few minutes later the pulsing throb of distant
drumming seemed to emanate from the forest from all directions at
once.

"Bangalang," said Jaumee.

The drums went on.  The crew in the fo'c'sle began to call out.
What was going to happen to the garrison on the quarter-deck, and
Anthony, in particular when the ship reached Gallego's barracoon
was not only described graphically but with obscene originality.

It was Anthony's intention to nurse this delusion of the
approaching revenge of the defunct Señor Gallego.  It fitted in
with his plans for getting both the captain and the crew ashore
without further deck fighting when they reached the Gallego
establishment.  It was no part of his scheme, however, to permit
the crew to regain the deck before the ship anchored.  As they
approached Bangalang and several heads began to appear at the
fo'c'sle hatch from time to time, he had one of the Foulahs fire
another warning shot.

As the fo'c'sle hatch, a sliding door, was exactly opposite the
quarter-deck, which faced it at an elevation of about ten feet due
to the build of the ship, the effect of musketry from the quarter-
deck only half a ship's length away was to plunge bullets directly
into the fo'c'sle.  They spattered against the forward bulkhead
there with a devastating smack and a hail of oak splinters.

There was even a certain humour in this situation, provided one was
on the quarter-deck.  In order to protect themselves the crew had
to keep the vertical, sliding hatch to the fo'c'sle closed; in
order to sally forth or shoot back they had to open it.  The
opening of the hatch always announced itself by a loud screech of
its ungreased rollers.  By the time it was fully open, after
several squalling jerks from within, five or six muskets were
trained at the gaping door.  Anyone who wanted to come up the
fo'c'sle ladder then, and die at the top, was at liberty to do so.

Anthony reflected with a good deal of amusement and a curious
chagrin that upon the combination of these very simple physical
facts both his present and his future existence were entirely
dependent.  In several languages he could think of only one phrase
adequate to describe the situation.  "On les a."

When the drums began announcing the nearness of Bangalang and the
end of the voyage, the forward hatch had been slid back in order to
allow the profane advice of the fo'c'sle to reach the quarter-deck.
As the loudness of the drums increased, showing the Ariostatica was
nearly opposite the native town, the disposition of the crew to
sally forth became imminent.  A few heads were even risked above
the level of the deck.  At the same time a fleet of canoes making
for the schooner appeared around the bend of the river just ahead.
It was at this juncture that Anthony had caused the Foulahs to fire
again.  The demonstration was effective.  Silence from the fo'c'sle
and an outbreak of firing in the town around the bend greeted the
volley.

The firing from the town was merely by way of a happy greeting to
the long-expected ship.  Bangalang, according to Ali Bongo and the
pilot, was a village of Krus, a tribe of coastal negroes, mostly
fishermen, who were of great service to both the slave establishments
on the Rio Pongo.  They had consequently been let alone.  Slaves
came from the interior.  So there was nothing hostile in the
approaching canoes, quite the contrary.  Nevertheless, Anthony did
not intend to permit natives to board the ship at this time.  If
necessary he intended to skip a few shots over the water to make the
canoes sheer off.  A happier idea was supplied by Ali Bongo,
however.  Several small kegs of rum were tied to a spare spar and
set adrift.  The canoes when they approached were warned off and the
kegs pointed out.  A few minutes later as the Ariostatica drifted
past them, ten canoes were engaged somewhat violently in trying to
divide four kegs between them.  Muffled shouts from the fo'c'sle did
not attract their attention.

The river now widened out into a series of lake-like tidal marshes.
As the ship came in sight of the village, situated on an island
knoll about a mile away over the flats, the drums in the place
changed from a monotonous tum-tum, tum-tum, to a swift


     Bonk, bonkty-bonk-bonk,
     Bonk, bonkty-bonk-bonk.


endlessly repeated.  Horns and screams of welcome joined in.

It was just at this point that Anthony felt a final crisis with the
crew might occur.  Everything depended on reaching Gallego's
anchorage about four miles beyond the town.  At her present rate of
drifting it would take the ship an hour to do that, two hours
perhaps.  The tide was fast failing.  He now sent two of the
Foulahs forward to cover the fo'c'sle hatch point-blank and managed
to slip Juan up the forward ladder to set the jibs.  Over the miles
of open flats breezes now and then rippled the water, while in the
narrow river all had been dead calm.  The ship increased her way
considerably.

The rattle of the jib blocks on the deck and the drums of the
village caused Polyphème to make another attempt.  He raised his
head above the deck level and found the single eye of a musket
looking directly into his own.  It was sufficient to convince even
him utterly.

Nevertheless, the tension of that last hour was extreme.  It was
not until the schooner rounded a long, wooded point, and Anthony
could look across another bay in the forest to the long barracoons
of the late Señor Gallego, that he began to feel he might yet win.

A few minutes more, and he would have had to anchor below the point
and hold the crew below all night.  In the darkness almost anything
might happen.  As it was, assisted by some puffs that filled the
jibs for several blessed moments at a time, he just made it.

The Ariostatica was brought to anchor about seven hundred yards
from shore by a small anchor from the stern.  With several
possibilities in view Anthony was particular about this distance.

The tidal basin here was about a mile across.  Gallego's place
stretched along the water front where the stockaded barracoons
stood.  Various thatched houses attached to the establishment
extended up a low, steep hill just behind.  Many blacks, both men
and women, could be seen running about greatly excited.  On the
porch of one of the houses farther up the hill Anthony's heart sank
to see what was apparently the figure of a white man.  Could
Gallego be alive after all?  If so . . .

"Him Ferdinando, Gallego factor," said Jaumee.  "Him half-breed."
He spat on the deck.

It was curious that no boats were putting out for the ship, Anthony
thought.  There was not even a canoe by the docks.  Whatever the
reason was, it made things much simpler.  Without further ado he
intended to act.

He had the two whaleboats slung in the schooner's waist lowered and
towed up to the bow.  Sóller, who since his appearance on deck that
morning had been tied to the mast, was now unlashed.  In the
excitement of the past five hours he had been pretty well
forgotten.  He now staggered across the deck moaning for water.
When he found Anthony intended to send him ashore with the crew he
collapsed.  His plight was pitiable.  It was plain that he must
know that Gallego was dead.  He had heard Ali Bongo and the pilot
talking, it seemed, and had put two and two together.  He now
pleaded earnestly to be allowed to remain on the schooner.

"You will not send me to die like a dog on shore, will you, señor?
I see your game.  To turn me and the captain loose on shore with
those bastards below!  Dios, we shall be murdered!  I won't go!
I will serve you now.  I can be valuable to you.  I will be your
man . . ."  Anthony was forced to turn Sóller over to Brother François
who tended him in the cabin below.  The truth was the sun had
nearly finished him.  At any rate he was no good to negotiate with
the crew.  It must be either the captain or Polyphème.  The captain
would be easier to handle.  After a hundred reassurances and
seemingly helped by Polyphème from behind the little man was
finally persuaded to come on deck.

He was nervously shaken by the events of the last forty-eight
hours.  All his swagger was gone.  He stood blinking in the sun in
a sweaty, silk suit in which the colours had run.  Yet it was
strange to see how soon the ghost of his naturally cocky attitude
began to return when he found he was going to be sent ashore with
his crew.  Anthony could see that Don Ramón still thought him a
fool and could scarcely believe his ears or refrain from boasting
about what he was going to do when once ashore.

Anthony pretended to be driving a bargain.

"In return for letting you go I shall expect you to put my own
situation before Señor Gallego as--well, AS PLEASANTLY AS
POSSIBLE," said Anthony finally.

"Certainly, señor, of course, with absolute cordiality, depend upon
it.  Your generosity and tender treatment will be properly
reported, have no doubt.  I promise it on my honour."

"In this case I shall HAVE to believe you.  My situation, you
see, makes me dependent upon you from now on, captain.  I trust you
understand my precarious position with Señor Gallego."

"Believe me I do," grinned the captain in spite of himself.  "I
wonder you did not think of it before.  But I shall do my best," he
added hastily, seeing Anthony scowl.

"Have your crew pile their arms on the deck then, as I said, and
get into the boats one at a time.  As a gentleman of honour you may
keep your own sword."  Since the captain had lost his scampering
through the hold early that morning the last shot was between his
wind and water.  He winced, seemed about to reply, then thought
better of it and went below.

Some time passed during which a few laughs hastily suppressed
drifted up the hatch.  In rather short order the crew then began to
toss up on deck a heterogeneous collection of weapons.  These were
hastily gathered up and taken aft.  There was some parley over a
musket which had not yet appeared.  Finally it was tossed up with a
curse.

"One at a time now," said Anthony.  "At the first move . . ."

A decidedly bedraggled departure now took place.  As the men
emerged one by one from the fo'c'sle they were sent alternately to
one of the two boats and made to sit down on a thwart.  Those who
had bandaged and bloody feet from walking on Juan's broken bottles
looked especially glum and foolish.  Both the procession and the
boats were kept well covered by pistols and muskets.  As there were
twenty-eight men in all it took nearly half an hour, thirty as
tense minutes as Anthony ever lived through.  Looking down in the
boats, where the men were forced to sit with folded arms, he had no
doubt that both of them were loaded with a cargo of pure hate.
Polyphème and the captain came last.  The former still carried his
ball and chain, while the latter had found a cutlass far too long
for him.  He had taken Anthony at his word but tripped on the sword
as he went over the side.  Even his own men grinned at him.

The tide had turned during these proceedings and the bow of the
ship was now downstream.  The two boats, with the captain in charge
of one and Polyphème of the other, were both at a signal suddenly
cut loose.  The ebb swept them clear of the schooner.  They were
carried fifty yards before the tired, dazed men realized what had
happened.  Then there was a great scramble for oars.  A yell of
derisive triumph went up from those on the schooner and a few wild
shots which Anthony could not prevent spattered the water about the
boats.  Polyphème produced a pistol from somewhere and fired back.
His bullet crashed through the stern windows.  Yells, curses, and
threats were hurled back from the boats, which, thrashing the water
wildly, pulled out of range as fast as they could and made for the
landing by the barracoons.

It was not likely they would attempt to return immediately, Anthony
thought.  He counted on the confusion which would follow when they
learned that Gallego was no more.  Above all he counted on trouble
starting between the captain and Polyphème.  There were gorgeous
possibilities there.  He himself would play a defensive game.  He
had the schooner now and could wait.  He would consolidate his own
gang and stand off the others.  "Tomorrow," he thought, "--and
almost anything may happen on shore tonight--perhaps the final move
can be made."

How thankful he was the tide had served them to the last.
Undoubtedly he owed much to Jaumee's skill.  It would have been
impossible to keep the situation in hand if he had had to anchor
lower down and keep the crew below all night.  Things had been too
evenly balanced.  As it was, they had just come through by the
turn--of the tide.

But to wait was not necessarily to be apathetic.  He must keep
himself clear-minded and up to the mark, awake.  And he must now be
merciless, he felt.  Above all he must supply the energy to drive
things through.  Already his little garrison was drowsing about the
deck and dozing from heat and fatigue.

He stripped and poured several buckets of water over himself.  He
took a pull of brandy, and then lit a black cigar to quiet his
nerves.  He roused the men again by serving out some grub and a
good tot of rum to each.  Under Jaumee's supervision he set them to
work getting up boarding nettings while he and Ali Bongo put the
carronade amidships into working order.  Powder, round shot, and
grape were got up and placed handy.  As the ebb increased the
Ariostatica had dragged on her small stern anchor and increased her
distance from shore.  This was now brought up.  The large starboard
anchor was let go, and the ship's head brought upstream with only a
short length of cable put.  A few turns of the capstan would free
her now, yet the heavier anchor held her fast.

By five o'clock all was shipshape again.  The boarding nets were
rigged, cutlasses, and loaded pistols and muskets ready at hand.  A
number of lanterns and flares were made ready, and a large kettle
of boiling water kept steaming in the galley.  Anthony and Ali
Bongo had also spent some time training the carronade on various
objects.  It had very simple sights and one hand screw for
elevation.  They now recovered it, leaving the lashings off its
tarpaulin and the gun loaded.

It was now time to think of his men again.  He got up a ship's
chest and served out new clothes.  He gave the Kru boys their bolts
of red cloth and the Foulahs the merchandise he had promised them.
In addition he presented the Mohammedans with a small roll of lead
and a bullet mould apiece.  He gave Ali Bongo the captain's silver
watch, which he had left behind, and from a chest of trinkets
fished up a cuckoo clock for the pilot.  Another round of rice and
boiled meat followed.

While all now sat about on the deck with expressions for which
"satisfaction" was too lean a word, the fortune to be made by
sticking by the ship was made clear and the disasters of failure
again pointed out in strong terms.  A blatant dose of praise mixed
with a few cold threats for those who might shirk, or go to sleep
on watch, completed Anthony's first speech.  A burst of cuckooing
from the pilot's clock just at the end brought a roar of good-
humoured laughter from all hands.  The crew was divided into
watches under Ali Bongo and Jaumee and went willingly to their
stations.

So far nothing but distant shouts and the barking of a dog had come
from the shore.  The barking now reached a crescendo of excitement.

Leaving Juan in charge of the deck Anthony went below for his
glass.  He found Brother François attending Sóller who was now
better but still with a rather bad touch of sun.  Even the bullet
through the cabin windows had not disturbed him.  Brother François
returned to the deck with Anthony.  He showed no curiosity or
surprise.  He sat in his chair and looked out over the wide stretch
of jungle-lined water which the sun was now flooding with level
rays as it neared the western palm-tops.  He offered no comment.

Anthony wondered what he was thinking about.  How useless he seemed
here!  Perhaps the priest's seeming apathy was due to that; perhaps
he sensed his helplessness here himself.  The tremendous, brutal
lushness of the tropical landscape all about seemed to oppose
itself to Brother François.  Against the scale of things here he
seemed insignificant.

But when he had once focused the glass on the scene ashore Anthony
soon forgot all about the man who sat beside him.  The short
distance between the ship and the shore was only sufficient to
provide a dramatic perspective.  Through the glass everything, even
small objects, was very clear and apparently close at hand.  But he
could hear nothing except the dog barking.  The animal was now
frantic about something.  He began to search for it, running his
glass over the long barracoons along the water front and then up
the hill.  Now he was on it.

It was at the dwelling house half-way up.  What was going on there
was absorbing enough.




CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

A WHIFF OF GRAPESHOT


The dog, a small, lean animal whose capacity for clamour seemed out
of all proportion to its size, was tied to a pillar of the veranda,
straining at its leash.  The cause of its indignation and fury was
the approach of the main body of the crew.  They had now left the
barracoons and stockade below and were climbing the hill toward
what was evidently the master's quarters half-way up the first
slope.

It was a thatched building of generous proportions.  A number of
blacks, both men and women, could be seen leaving the place from
the rear carrying various belongings.  The exodus was a general and
hasty one.  The figure of the man Ferdinando appeared at the main
door once and then withdrew hastily again.  Then the captain came
out and stood with folded arms.  He still wore his cutlass.  The
foremost of the crew now tore a small gate off its hinges, and
followed by the rest rushed up a short garden path.  They stopped
short at the porch.  The hound was baying frantically.

Some argument now took place with the captain.  The little man
waved his arms wildly.  His words seemed to be having effect.  He
drew his sword.  Several of the men clinched and started to roll
over and over.  Whether fists or knives were being used Anthony
could not tell.  Suddenly Polyphème stepped out from the crowd and
drew his pistol.  The captain dropped his sabre and turned for the
door.  There was a puff of smoke and the captain crumpled.  Then
the crack of the pistol reached the Ariostatica.  The men swarmed
like hornets into the house.  The hound had apparently gone insane.
Outside two figures lay in the little garden path before the porch.

The crack of the pistol on shore had brought all hands to the
starboard rail of the schooner.  Some few seconds later two figures
dashed out of the house followed by some of the crew and made for
the barracoons below.  Anthony could not fix the glass on them, but
in one he thought he recognized Ferdinando.  The other seemed to be
a woman, a young and active one it appeared, for she outdistanced
her pursuers rapidly and disappeared into a clump of palms near the
river front.

The man was not so lucky.  He was headed off and hunted amid whoops
and a great clamour for some time about the sheds near the slave
pens.  His hiding place was evidently discovered once, for the
shouting broke out anew.  Then it quieted down.  Some of the crew
kept looking about, but in about ten minutes they gave it up and
trooped back to the house on the hill.

The cause of further lack of interest in their quarry was now
apparent.  A shed had been burst open and some barrels rolled out.
A number of kegs loaded on the backs of slaves were soon seen
ascending the hill to what was now quite patently the headquarters
of Polyphème and his gang.  That worthy soon appeared on the
veranda and had the captain rolled away and the kegs rolled in.  He
then, to judge by the noise, devoted a full five minutes to kicking
the hound to death.

It was curious, but the screams of the unfortunate animal did more
to weld the crew of the Ariostatica into a unit against Polyphème
and the men on shore than anything that had happened so far.  None
of the incidents of the fight coming up the river nor the miserable
sights of wounds and blood which it had produced could be compared
with it.  Anthony remembered the cries of the child which had been
trampled by the French cavalry at Livorno and their effect upon
Toussaint.  Evidently it was the voice and not the sight of
suffering which most moved men.  Ali Bongo who stood beside him at
the rail listening, clutched the shrouds till the veins on his
wrist stood out.  And he was a Mohammedan who held dogs accursed.
As the agonized voice finally ceased it now seemed to Anthony
himself that he was engaged in a holy war, and that behind the
taking of the schooner and the capture of the barracoon, which he
planned as a final object, there was now a splendid moral urge.
The cool murder of the captain seemed nothing in comparison with
the nerve-shattering death of the dog.  The captain had died
silently so far as those on the schooner were concerned, and he was
a man.  Polyphème, in short, had now given notice to all concerned
that he no longer kept even a sensible contract with nature.  All
WERE concerned.

"Señor," said Ali Bongo, "tomorrow we make One-eye go tell Allah
about that.  Allah can listen."  He drew his finger across his
throat significantly.  They nodded to each other with complete
understanding.

"Well, my son, how is your plan getting on with itself?" said
Brother François to Anthony a minute or two later.

"Very well!" snapped Anthony, who was still leaning over the side
looking shoreward.  Something ironical in the priest's voice had
aroused a host of questions in himself which he had thought were
asleep.  He was about to ask Brother François if he thought he
could do any better himself, under the circumstances, when three
men emerged from the shore sheds and started to make a bolt for it
toward the landing where the two whaleboats from the schooner now
lay without a guard.

A wild whoop from some of the crew on the hill gave notice that
they were seen.

The distance from the sheds, and from the house on the hill to the
dock was about the same.  The three fugitives, whoever they were,
had the advantage of a considerable start.  Unfortunately, however,
the two boats were not tied close together at the dock.  They had
only time to hurl themselves into the first and shove off before
the crew was swarming out of the barracoon gate just behind them
and making for the remaining boat farther down the dock.

The men in the boat pulled as rapidly for the ship as their
desperation could contrive.  They had already put a good stretch of
water behind them when the craft manned by Polyphème and his gang
shot out behind them pulling strong.

In the meantime, Anthony and Ali Bongo had snatched the tarpaulin
off the carronade and were trying desperately to bring it to bear
on the pursuing boat.

This was not so easy to do.  They had left the carronade at too
high an angle.  The hand screw which controlled its elevation
proved rusty and stiff.  Before the elevation could be shifted to
water level and the gun trained, the crew were gaining fast.  The
boat ahead, rowed awkwardly by only three oars, seemed about to be
overtaken and captured before the eyes of those on the schooner.
It was just at the moment when the gun finally came to bear full on
Polyphème's boat that Anthony remembered they had no lighted match.
He turned with a groan.  Ali Bongo was gone.

Just then he emerged from the galley tossing a blazing coal from
hand to hand.

"Keep her on!" he shrieked.

Anthony peered over the sights again.  His target in those few
seconds had rowed past.  He slewed the gun desperately at a guess.
Ali Bongo dropped the coal on the touch hole.

There was a terrific report and the carronade leaped back into the
air against its tackles.

A million waterfowl rose screaming from the marshes.  About ten
feet before Polyphème's boat a round shot struck the water a
stunning blow, half drowning its crew with sheets of spray and
caroming off into the wall of the barracoon beyond with a
tremendous crash of splitting wood.  For several minutes nothing
could be heard but the screams of myriads of birds and the wail of
women from the shattered building on shore.

Anthony could hear nothing at all.  He was deaf but he was
laughing.  All of Polyphème's men had "caught a crab" at the same
instant.  Their oars seemed to stick in the water and fight with
them.  Then they had rowed all ways at once.  Now they were making
back for the shore thrashing frantically.  If they could only get
there before those on the ship could reload the terrible gun!  They
did so.  Ali Bongo was dancing from the pain in his scorched
fingers.  Anthony was helpless.  About the same time that Polyphème
and his men raced back through the big gate of the barracoon the
boat they had been pursuing made fast to the ship.  Its three
exhausted rowers proved to be the half-breed Ferdinando and two
stout blacks.

Anthony welcomed them although he could just then hear nothing they
had to say.  Nevertheless, from the very first he liked Ferdinando.
Gallego's chief clerk, or factor, as he was called, carried himself
like a man.  Despite his pale lemon complexion, small features, and
dainty hands and feet, his main impression was one of intelligence
and energy.  His face was both refined and forceful and he
evidently took great care of himself.

Somewhat bedraggled now, his first care when they descended to the
cabin was to wash and put his dark curls in order.  A clean white
suit which Anthony lent him went far toward winning his heart.
Anthony did not realize it then, but to have been received thus by
the white man in charge of the ship with courtesy and solicitude
had reached the half-breed factor where he lived.  It had conquered
his pride.

The sun had sunk.  Darkness descended upon the forest-river lands
as if a curtain had been lowered.  A thousand mysterious noises
arose of night birds, monkeys, and an occasional deep bellow from
the river banks which drifted in through the cabin windows of the
schooner where Anthony, Brother François, and Ferdinando now sat at
their evening meal.  Downstream over the low point Anthony could
see the glow of the village fires waving in the sky and the
monotonous but frantic drumming gradually became audible again as
his ears cleared.

Juan kept a sharp lookout on deck and repeated that there was
nothing to be seen ashore except a few lights and an occasional
shout from the house on the hill.

Ferdinando joined genuinely in Brother François's brief grace.  He
regarded his own presence at that meal as little short of
marvellous.  A recital of events on shore that afternoon soon
confirmed the others in this opinion.

The captain upon landing had left the crew in the sheds below while
he had climbed the hill to Gallego's quarters.  His disappointment,
rage, and chagrin on learning that Gallego had been thoughtless
enough to die two months before were indescribable.  The factor
said he had never seen anything quite like it.

"It was a curious thing to watch, señor.  You can imagine my own
state of mind, too, with that one-eyed dog and his sons-of-bitches
hanging around about the sheds below--waiting.  At any moment they
might find out that Gallego was dead.  Both of us knew what would
happen without having to be told.  I can tell you, you came in for
some hearty cursing.  We were caught like pigs in a pit by your
little trick.  I suggested arming some of the slaves and started
some of the house servants hiding the valuables.  There was Señor
Gallego's big cash chest in which he kept the silver trade dollars.
We started to smuggle it out the back.

"It was just then we heard them coming, señor.  Either someone had
told them about Gallego, or they saw the chest.  I cannot
understand Don Ramón.  What kind of a man was he?  When we heard
them yell and the dog started to bark the captain was so frightened
he turned green.  'It is death!' he said.  Then he vomited all over
the room.  He had just had a bottle of red wine.  He fell down.
Then he got up again and took his sword.  'I have my honour,' he
shouted.  I laughed at him then, God forgive me!  He went out on
the porch and folded his arms.  Señor, he made the crew a grand
speech.  Some of them fought for him.  He died like a brave man.
You know how."  The factor crossed himself.

"As for me, I did not wait.  No use.  When I heard that pistol shot
I called my sister from her room and we made for the little creek
behind the palms.  Since Señor Gallego died we have had great
trouble here.  A number of our people kept slipping away at night
to the village.  I had all the boats and canoes towed around to the
creek and watched.  That is the reason no boats came out to you.
You see I have been much worried all along as to what would happen
when the Ariostatica arrived.  Well, it has been much worse than I
thought!"  He ran his slim fingers through his curls.  "Much worse!
Only the devil knows what that froth-of-hell will be up to tonight.
It is trade rum they broke into, fourth proof--barrels of it.
Madre!"

"Where is your sister now?"

"Well hidden, I trust, señor.  Ah, she is a clever girl, do not
worry!  She will not be caught like a chicken in a coop.  Besides
there are plenty of women in the barracoons.  It is fire that I am
worried about.  If it once gets started in the thatch!"  He put
down his glass, pausing at the thought.  "But who are you, señor,
and how did you come here?"  He looked up now a little apprehensively.

With great care, for he saw how valuable an ally this man could be,
Anthony explained his position and the events of the voyage.
Ferdinando sat listening amazed.  On the face of Brother François
now and then Anthony thought he detected a faint flicker of
amusement.  It did take a great deal of explaining.

"So it is your plan then, señor, to assume charge of the factory
here?" said Ferdinando at last.

"Since Señor Gallego is dead I can scarcely do anything else, can
I?  In fact I find myself in charge already, don't you think?"
Anthony replied.

The factor laughed a little wryly.  "Undoubtedly it is true," he
said.  Then he looked up turning a little white, but with
determination enough.

"And what of me?" he said.

"You will remain on as you are now," replied Anthony.  "I had
already made up my mind to that sometime ago.  I see that you are--
a gentleman!"

"You are the first that has ever said so!" said the half-breed
leaning forward over the table and looking Anthony in the face.  "I
shall never forget it!"

Anthony went on deck and left Ferdinando talking with Brother
François.  He was glad to see that Juan had bountifully fed the two
black boys who had come aboard with the factor.  They squatted by
the galley scooping rice out of a bucket with their own horn spoons
which they habitually wore in their hair.  They grinned at him and
he nodded back.  It was no small reinforcement he had gained.  The
odds against him were now only about two to one.

The night wore on quietly enough.  Ali Bongo and his watch relieved
Juan's.  Ferdinando came on deck and they talked for hours.  An
enormous amount of information was to be culled from the factor.
He was certainly a valuable man.  Yes, he had been born here--at
Bangalang.  His father had been the captain of one of old Señor
Gallego's ships.  "A gentleman, señor, a Castilian."  Of his mother
he said nothing, nor of his sister.  Anthony wondered how
Ferdinando could be so sure that all was going well with her on
shore.  If it had been Anthony's sister, for instance . . . or was
the half-breed merely indifferent?  The moon came up very late,
only a remnant of herself red and inflamed, looking through the fog
that settled over the treetops.  An increased roaring and howling
of tribes of monkeys inundated the night.  At Bangalang the
tireless tom-tomers and drummers changed their rhythms again.
Those drums!  Not a sign on shore yet.  Only the lights up at the
residence and a few drunken shouts now and then.  The barracoons
lay miserably dark and silent.

Anthony went below and got his boat cloak and a thin blanket for
Ferdinando.  There was a certain damp-coolness from the river
equivalent to cold.  One felt it in the lungs.  Ferdinando spoke of
the ague.  "You will probably die of that, señor.  They all do who
come here, sooner or later.  Do you smell the forest?  I do only
when I remember it.  It is that miasma that gets in your bones.  It
is a very unusual season here, the rains have been delayed;
intermittent.  Usually it pours for weeks at a time."

"You seemed to have survived," murmured Anthony.

"Ah, that is different.  A dash of . . ."  Ferdinando bit off
another cigar.  He enjoyed the fresh Havana immensely.

Anthony also inhaled slowly.  It kept him awake and soothed at the
same time.  He realized as he leaned back and began his fourth
cigar that night how much tobacco had come to mean to him.  Here he
could see it might come to mean even more.  One would need it.  A
little brandy was also helpful, he found--on a night like this--a
very little of course.  He passed the flask to his companion who
agreed.

Brother François went forward with a light and disappeared into the
fo'c'sle.  He stayed there a long time.  Finally he came aft again.

"Come," said he, flashing the lantern on the two leaning back in
the chairs apparently asleep.  "I want to show you something.  No,
YOU, my son."  He motioned the half-breed back.  Anthony followed
Brother François into the fo'c'sle.  The priest held up the
lantern.

There was someone huddled up in the forward bunk.  The blood on the
blankets was of a peculiar, dark purple colour, almost black, and
shiny.  It seemed terrible that the man's hair was still dark and
curly.  It seemed to have a life of its own.  The face was SO
dead--turned toward the wall and grey-ash coloured.  It was one of
the oldest of the crew.  Yet he had somehow the expression of an
infant now.  It was also monkey-like.  It needed life to make it
bearable.  Cold and only half awake as he was, Anthony felt the
fear of it, a repulsion to the clay of it leapt up in him.

"Who has done this?" something asked.  "This is really you--like
you.  It might happen to you.  Run away!  You will be overtaken by
this fate.  Beware"--and all the time he knew and tried to deny to
himself that he had caused this.  His mind to relieve him started
to show him a map design in the bloodstains.  There were the Cape
Verdes and just east of it a large black-purple stain.  A little
TOO heart shaped for Africa, not perfect, nature scarcely ever
did . . .  The lantern moved and the shadow of the bunk swooped
over the sleeper.  Anthony saw Brother François was looking at him.

"One of the crew," he said mechanically.  "I don't know.  They must
have left him here this afternoon.  He may not have been dead then.
They should have . . .  Damn it!  Do you think it is MY fault?"
he ripped out.  The priest's gaze angered him.  Brother François
did not reply. . . .

"Well, what else COULD I do?  You know the circumstances.  Would
you just have stood by and let them murder us?  Would you?"  He
felt sorry and angry now at the same time.

"What is it you are trying to do?" said Brother François.

"Collect a debt," snapped Anthony.  "Three shiploads of goods
were . . ."

"Look at the ledger now," said the priest.  He moved the lantern so
that the light fell into the bunk again.  Anthony looked.  They
stood silent for a moment.  The lantern guttered.

"What is the use of talking about it?" said he, and stalked on deck
again.  He felt vastly annoyed at Brother François.  Let him bury
the dead.  Now!  Why keep on being reminded?  He roused Ali Bongo
and gave directions.  "Put two shots in the shrouds . . .  Before
it gets light."  He was glad to be back on deck again.

A great deal of shouting was going on on shore.  He turned to watch
that.

"They must all be very drunk now," said Ferdinando coming and
leaning by him at the rail.  They stood smoking for almost half an
hour.  The door at the high house on the hill finally opened and
disgorged a yelling mob.  Several torches flared up from one.  Then
a lot of them together started to come downhill.  The shadows
danced weirdly clear out over the water.  A kind of Walpurgis
procession accompanied by flaring pine knots born by staggering and
capering figures was streaming downhill.  The crew stopped now and
then to shout hoarsely and argue with one another.  Something was
up.  They seemed to be pushing a cart.  The lights glinted on
metal.  About half-way down they all stopped short.  A shed roof
cut them off.  By climbing the shrouds, half-way up you could still
see them from the schooner over the top of one of the water-front
sheds.  It was hard to tell what they were up to at that distance
and in the waving light.

Suddenly a streak of red fire dirked into the night.  A round shot
screamed through the rigging like a banshee.  The loud slap of the
report followed.  On the hill a cloud of sulphur smoke drifted back
redly through the frantic torches.  A wild shout of glee went up.

"Madre de Dios," said Ferdinando, "it is the saluting cannon, a
five-pounder.  Gallego kept it dismounted in the warehouse."

They could hear a fierce clamour in the barracoons now.  Above this
the little gun spoke viciously again.  A loud cracking started
aloft followed by a dismal crash as the foretopmast tore loose and
smashed along the deck.  The hill clamoured with triumph.  It was
certainly the devil's luck of a shot.

"Get below," shouted Anthony.  There was no use exposing the men
now.

"The chances are in the darkness they won't hit us again," said he
to Ferdinando as they came down from the shrouds.

"No, but on the other hand we can't reach them," replied the
factor.  "You see from the deck here they are hidden up the slope
just behind the shed roof."  Anthony, Ferdinando, and Ali Bongo
gathered about the carronade.  Nothing but the dim glow of torches
showed over the shed on shore.

"Shoot through the roof, señor," suggested Ferdinando.

"No, that will carry clean over them I am afraid.  You see they are
down the hill a bit and dropping their shot on us over the shed
roof.  It would take a mortar to fetch them from here.  This long
gun will not give us the angle."

A shot plunged into the bay and ricocheted over the schooner.

"One mans on shore, him sober," said Jaumee, who just then came up
to join the nonplussed group coolly enough.

They all laughed a little wryly.

"What do, Jaumee?"

"Wait morning-light," grunted the laconic pilot wrapping his
blanket about him and sitting down in the lee of the bulwark.

The advice seemed good.  They could drop the ship downstream at
dawn if necessary.  It was uncomfortable sitting still, but risking
grounding on a flat in the darkness was worse.

The shooting continued for some time and then stopped.

"About an hour till dawn, I take it," said Anthony.

"A little longer I think, señor," replied Ferdinando.

Then he leaped to his feet.  A waving orange light was irradiating
the water front.

"They have fired the boat shed!" cried the factor.  "The powder!"

A long yellow flame licked through the thatch illuminating the
water and making the Ariostatica stand out darkly.  On her deck the
long shadows leaped to and fro.  The shed suddenly began to burn
fiercely as a tar barrel in it commenced to vomit flames.  The
whole bay danced with reflections now.

"Get the anchor up!  Juan," shouted Anthony.  The men began to
tumble up.  Strangely enough the shooting was not resumed yet from
shore.

"They are waiting for more light," said Ferdinando.  An explosion
of the gun followed as if in answer.

A maddening delay occurred getting the bars in the capstan.  Then
the clank-clank of the schooner's anchor chain coming in sounded
over the water.  An answering roar of voices came from the hill.
The flames from the burning shed at that instant leaped higher.  A
full half of it was on fire now.  A roaring and crackling came over
the bay.  Showers of sparks fled up into the stars.  A white light
beat along the water front.  The dock and the barracoons behind it
projected themselves clear as midday in a frame of blue darkness.

Suddenly the big timber gate at the water front was flung open and
some of the crew rushed out and started to shoot muskets at the
schooner.  They were gunning for the men about the capstan.  The
bullets splashed about.  A beam in the shed fell sending up a
fountain of sparks.

"Help, señor," shouted Ali Bongo.  "See!"

Anthony left the capstan and rushed to aid Ali Bongo at the
carronade.  Racing aft he glanced over his shoulder.  Through the
gate of the barracoon the rest of the crew was emerging rolling the
little five-pounder before them.

"Allah, Allah," shouted Ali Bongo.  He was stuffing the contents of
a trader's chest of notions into the carronade; copper bangles,
brass beads, knives, a small music box.  It began to play "Richard,
O mon roi."

"Out of the way, man, bring fire!"  Anthony laid the sight square
on the gate.  The crew were bunched there, swarming about the
little gun, a black writhing mass of men in the fatal glare.  This
time the match was ready.  He blew on it.  "Richard, Richard,
O mon . . ."

The two guns from ship and shore spoke at the same instant.
Splinters ripped from the bulwark of the schooner.  Anthony felt
the wind of the ball.  But he had eyes for nothing but the fiery
scene ashore.

In the gateway of the barracoon a wave of chains, toys, and slugs
had mowed the crew down like the blade of a whistling scythe.

Not a sound could be heard except the crackling of the flames.
Everyone stood rooted gazing shoreward.  A red arm leaped up out of
the shed into the sky; a thunderclap; a long roar.  The whole shed
vaulted into heaven bellowing.

In the intense glare of the powder explosion Anthony saw the whole
of Gallego's place stand out like a landscape in a thunderstorm;
the long sheds with the solemn dark palms drooping over them, the
residence with its wide porches, the black jungle-covered hills.

"Mine!" he cried.

Darkness swooped; sparks and hissing timbers rained into the bay.
He took a long, deep breath.  The air felt cool just before dawn.
He filled his lungs again to their usual rhythm.  That had been
disturbed only temporarily.  Life in this new place was going to go
on again.  What were swift events?  Merely an interlude.  As long
as the lungs and heart went on one went on with them.  That is, one
resumed.  And now at last he was master.  Let the new day come
quickly!  He leaned over the rail looking shoreward.

From the forward deck of the Ariostatica came the voice of Brother
François saying the office for the dead.  Presently there was a
splash.  Anthony turned and went below.  No matter what happened a
man had to sleep.  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?




CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

VIEWED FROM GALLEGOS


From the porch of the "Residence" at Gallegos there was a sweeping
view.  The establishment lay on the first rise of ground inland.
It was quite high enough to overlook the tallest treetops of the
coastal jungle on the plain below it.  At evening the sun could be
seen flashing on the distant silver of the Atlantic that bounded
its horizon westward.  Also, Gallegos was high enough to catch the
sea breeze at night.  That was what made Gallegos possible for
white men.

Southward, you looked out over Gallegos Reach, a kind of tidal lake
in the forest about a mile across, where the Rio Pongo widened out
swirling slowly when the tide changed.  You kept on looking--if it
was not midday and the waters below turned into an intolerable
blinding flash--over the mangroves on the long, low point where the
hawks nested to the wider reaches of the tidal flats and swampy
islands about Bangalang lower down.

The huts of the Kru settlement were built along a brief stretch of
sandy beach on a low island.  By day the long fisher canoes could
be seen drawn up on the sand in regular rows, and by night the
native fires wavered and twinkled through the river mists.  Over
the roofs of Bangalang, five or six miles away, the long slave pens
of Mongo Tom's establishment and the whitewashed house just above
them stood out boldly from the clearing on the river bank which it
occupied.  Indeed, with a small glass, from Gallegos the slaves
working in the manioc rows of the Mongo's fields could be seen
quite plainly.

All the rest of the world to be seen from Gallegos was forest.

A vast, flat sea of treetops marched northward hundreds of miles
toward the doubtful boundary of Sierra Leone, and Freetown.  The
same boundless ocean swept without an undulation southward toward
Cape Palmas far over the horizon.  Over this the eye ranged
monotonously, the only breaks in the flat roof of the forest below
were a few loops of the river west of Mongo Tom's where it suddenly
narrowed again and twisted tortuously to the sea.  Known to traders
as the "Rio Pongo" from early Portuguese times, the river was
called the Kavalli or Cavala by the various Kru peoples who
inhabited the coast.

Gallegos was in a great many ways a pleasant place at which to
live.  It was situated in a nest of low hills just where the river
finally emerged from the plateau behind it and debouched into the
lowlands.

The ground here rose in three distinct steps from the stream.

Along the river bank, on a flat a few hundred yards wide, were
situated the dock with the various stores and sheds attached to it,
and the long barracoons or slave pens, which occupied considerable
space.  From these the hill rose fairly steeply to a level
horseshoe-shaped inset containing some fifty or sixty acres of
rich, black soil.  Behind that again the crest of the little range
of hillocks was reached by a rather easy ascent.

There the upland jungle began and stretched away eastward towards
the unknown--or the "Mountains of the Moon"--if one preferred to
take on faith the first object besides elephants and lions marked
on the maps.  At any rate, it was at this point that the trail from
the interior emerged from the forest over which every year came
Arab caravans with their human and other merchandise, which
supplied the reason for Gallegos being a place at all.

Not long after taking over the establishment Anthony had built
himself a new residence.  The old one, which Ferdinando now
occupied, lay near the top of the lower rise and was constructed
with wattled clay walls and a palm-thatch roof.  One rainy season
spent beneath its dripping cover, and many harrowing experiences
with both white and red ants, had convinced Anthony of the
necessity of a better abode.

During the endless, dreary days when the rain fell for weeks at a
time he had amused himself by drawing elaborate and careful plans,
not only for his new "castle," as he called it, but for the
rehabilitation of the whole establishment which the last Gallego,
not much of a man he soon learned, had allowed to fall into
considerable disarray.

Labour was no consideration on the Grain Coast.  The slaves who
would otherwise have been confined to the barracoons were set to
work as soon as the dry season returned the first November after
Anthony's arrival.  In the meantime experience had taught him a
good deal about the country, and, as he sat late one afternoon on
the porch of the new residence overlooking his domain, he felt
justified in feeling that on the whole, for a new arrival, he had
then planned well.

Not that in the light of what he knew now, after longer
familiarity, he would not do some things differently.  The slave
pens should have been further enlarged, for instance, and the dock
extended.  It would save a great deal of time and worry to have the
ships tie up to the dock directly instead of anchoring in midstream
as they still had to do.  But who could have foreseen that things
would go as well with him at Gallegos as they had?

Indeed, there had been that anxious four months the first year when
he had not been sure that any ships would ever anchor at Gallegos
at all.  Old Mongo Tom, too, had certainly made all the trouble he
could.  Thank the stars that was over with, the old dog!  Well, he
was brought to heel now, and probably for good and all.  For all
practical purposes the entire landscape Anthony now looked over,
from the new veranda at Gallegos to the Mongo's fields six miles
away across the bay was a very--well, a very Adverse one.  Yes, on
the whole, a great deal had been accomplished since the Ariostatica
had pulled in three years before--a great deal!

He leaned back in the ample cane chair and threw his palm hat on
the floor.  It had been a hot day and he had been all over the
plantation.  It was two months till the autumn rains yet and things
were pretty dry.  But that was to be expected.  Also the irrigation
helped.  Now for a bath and a drink!--or a drink.  Why wait?  The
house servants brought back from Cuba had it too easy anyway.  They
needed a mistress.

"Cheecha."

"Sí, sí, señor."

"Rum, and limes!"

"Sí, sí."

It was like Cibo to have sent him that girl.  Well, he could well
afford to as far as that went.  Cibo had had his pick now out of
many a shipload.  Fourteen ships in three years!  And the fifteenth
swinging at anchor below there now, La Fortuna, a new one to the
trade.  He hoped Cibo had not forgotten to send the right kind of
trade goods.  Another caravan was due soon, despite the nearness of
the rainy season, and the stock in the warehouse was low.  Not a
slave in the pens and Mongo Tom had less than fifty, all old ones,
too!  The neighbouring country was pretty well worked out.

He lit a fresh Havana that had just come on La Fortuna--and enjoyed
it greatly.  The mould here did play the mischief with tobacco.
The smoke drifted straight up to the ceiling.  The sea-breeze would
not be in for an hour yet.  Twenty minutes after the sun went down
the wind changed, by the clock.  Gad, how well he knew the ways of
the place now; the seasons, the clouds, and the winds; their
rhythm; the very look and smell of things!

In a few weeks the cloudless sky would commence to become a little
hazy.  Already the river mists were thicker at night.  Then the
clouds would begin to pile themselves up higher day by day.  Great
cliffs and mountains of them would finally tower up height beyond
height till it was dizzying to look up into them.  The sunsets were
beyond thought then.  Soon there would be lightning at night; far-
off thunder muttering.  Then nights of a long battle-roll of it and
on into the day, and then--the clouds would approach each other and
exchange broadsides.  They would dissolve into one grey pall, a few
drops would fall, a shower, and--as if spigots had been turned on
above--one long month by month downpour.  It did not seem to rain
by drops.  For three months it slanted past, and furiously down, as
if each slant were an individual and perpetual jet from a hole in
the sky.

But it would be better this rainy season, the first in the new
house since it was finished.  It might even be comfortable, and
there would be a let-up in the perpetual man-hunt.  There would be
time to put things in order, to go over the accounts, and to make
plans for next year.

There would also be time to devote to Neleta!  No more
surreptitious meetings because of Ferdinando's pride.  That half-
breed!  So was his sister!  What of it?  No, they would live
together now in the same house!  Brother François could look as sad
as he wanted to.  Neleta would be housekeeper now.  Housekeeper!
He smiled, and drifted away on a vision that relaxed him in the
chair.

Ferdinando could not expect him to marry her.  Marry her?  He
laughed.

Ferdinando was making too good a thing of it as it was.  He was
sorry now he had allowed him head-money on every cargo.  It was
enough for Ferdinando to have the run of the place as factor--and
his sister was the mistress of the big house on the hill.  What a
fool he had been to wait so long to bring her up from her
brother's.  It had gotten to be like acting.  Let her come and live
with him.  He was master here.  Master!--a rich one, too.  To think
that only three years ago he had been trying to collect a debt for
Mr. Bonnyfeather--and now . . .

He let his eye wander over the ample plantation that lay just below
the house.

He had built the house well below the crest.  The shadow of the
hill behind it gave two extra hours of coolness in the morning.
All his planting was doing well; the coffee, the rows of cassava;
cocoa, maize, yams, rice and eleusine; pumpkins, gourds, cabbages,
sweet potatoes, and okra.  They flourished, and with only a little
tending.  Next year he would increase the acreage and put in
indigo, cotton, sugar cane, and ginger; enough manioc to supply the
whole establishment.  It would take a few more field hands but he
was not going to ship every last man, woman, and child that came
down with the caravans to Havana any more.

No, he was in a position to hold back now and dictate a little.  He
would build up a permanent establishment here and he would make it
self-supporting.  If anything happened to cut him off from Cuba he
would be able to go along then on his own account.  About twenty
field hands, ten Foulahs for a garrison, and a few more house
servants, well-trained ones, would do.  This year would see the
whole place stockaded.  It had been a big job, ten-foot tree trunks
from the crocodile creek behind the hill to the river front.  They
swept clear around the place in a convincing horseshoe.  With the
next gang that came down he would stockade the creek bank, too.
The thorn boma there was only good to keep out the chimpanzees.

It was a relief to get rid of those rascals and the monkeys.
Watching big Diana monkeys with the orange behinds ransack the new
fruit orchards had been a trial.  Shooting them from the front
porch was all right by day--but in the morning!  Well, he was
pretty well enclosed now, and by next summer he would have
quantities of oranges, limes, and lemons.  The papayas were already
prodigious and there were shiploads of bananas.  The cocoanuts,
avocado pears, and figs one had to wait for.  But not long.  Now
that the little zebra-goats couldn't get in and girdle the trees
any more!  They WERE devils.  He wondered if Cibo had sent him
the pineapple cuttings.  They ought to do well here.

Next spring, the wonderful spring after the rains, when the air
grew clear and the sun seemed to pull things up out of the earth by
their tips--spring would see Gallegos the little paradise he had
planned.  No place on the whole Grain Coast would be like it.  And
he would live here with Neleta and keep on accumulating.  Neleta
would look after the house as it should be looked after.  Some day
he would go back, rich.  He would settle in London or Paris, and
live!  He would invite Mr. and Mrs. David Parish to dinner--to a
very formal dinner under very fine chandeliers, a splendid place,
butlers and lackeys, the Bonnyfeather arms.  Why not?  Perhaps
Dolores would be at the other end of the table.  But to give all
this up now; Neleta, the house; not to see the growth next spring;
not to go up-country after being here three years!  Unthinkable!
Yes, it would be very lovely next spring, and it would pay, pay
highly, to stay.  After all, what would he be doing in Europe?
Really he couldn't imagine that.  One dinner with Florence was not
a life.

The wild fowl were going now, going south.  As he watched a great
flight of them lifted from the reach below and made off over Cape
Palmas way.  The handsome little sparrow-hawks that lived on the
rocky point above the mangroves seemed excited about it, too.  But
they stayed.  In the spring all the ducks would come back, and the
great black swans.  The rains certainly could not be far off.

He had forgotten the Christian calendar here.  He told time only by
the rhythms of the seasons.  The swinging back and forth over the
sky of the vast flocks of birds just before and after the rains,
the slow ranging and rearrangement of the clouds, the shifting of
the winds, and the gradual dying out of the intense green of the
forest below him as the dry season advanced marked the passing of
the year.  Even the stars failed him in these latitudes.  They were
all strange, and much inferior, he thought to the northern
constellations.  Only the wandering planets and the moon came back
like old friends.  The sun was so fierce it seemed another sun.
Gradually one learned things about the tropical sun; how friendly
and how deadly it could be.

Yes, he acknowledged to himself, he loved it all.  Gallegos had
become home.  This month--he knew it was February from the manifest
of La Fortuna--this month it had all, rather suddenly, become
"home."  He knew he was going to be here a long time now.  Perhaps
Neleta's coming to the house had something to do with it, but he
was not sure.  Perhaps?

He finished his drink, the early evening drink, that he had to
admit now he depended upon.  It made him feel himself again after
the day in the sun.  His face lost something of a certain mask-like
quality it had taken on.  The yellow tinge that had grown under his
tan faded.  His eyes grew bright and the small red veins at the
corners of them stood out a little.

He felt now, after the rum and lime juice and sugar had taken hold
of him, he felt as he had when he first came from Havana three
years ago.  Why was it though, he could no longer get as much done
in the day as he always planned to do the evening before--after the
drink?  By noon it did not seem to matter.  Last year it had not
been that way.  But, pshaw! how could he feel better than he did
now?  All bronze, not an ounce of fat on him!  He put down the
glass to watch the sunset.  A drowsiness overcame him.  The
darkening blue dome of the sky with the black lines of birds
streaming across it down to the lower range of the horizon beyond
the two lakes slowly faded.  The birds seemed to be going downhill
from the top of a bowl.  He closed his eyes.

Half an hour later he wakened chilled by the sea-breeze and went in
to change into dry clothes.  He shivered slightly.  Sitting in
sweaty clothes in the cool wind was the one thing you should not
do.  It was almost dark now; stars.  He looked out of the window at
the dank river mists gathering below.  Fever lurked there.  He took
his drench of cinchona bark.  Horrible stuff, bitter!  He killed
the taste with a good swallow of brandy.  Then he felt warm again.
His feet lightened under him.  He hustled into a heavy cotton
evening suit and put on a cravat.  The captain of La Fortuna was
coming up to dinner tonight.  Ferdinando would be up too to go over
the ship's manifests with him.  It would be the first dinner when
Neleta would sit at the table.  How would Ferdinando take it--and
Brother François?  Well, they could--TAKE IT.

He shrugged his shoulders and went into the eating room.




CHAPTER FORTY

THE MASTER OF GALLEGOS


Don Ruiz de la Matanza, the captain of La Fortuna, which now lay
anchored in Gallegos Reach, was a Toledan of ancient family who had
seen better days.  There was a decided but a native hauteur about
him.  Only in a way was he glad to find himself in the merchant
service--via a naval court-martial which could only be said to have
been lenient.

Even in the Spanish navy the practice of selling the cannon out of
king's ships for old bronze had to be discouraged, and the wrinkles
in the official forehead had frowned Don Ruiz into the streets
without even his sword left to protect his outraged honour.  The
terrible dilemma of begging for work had made even a Matanza
pliable, however, and after some years Don Ruiz wriggled himself
onto a merchantman's quarter-deck.

A fine full-rigged ship was now his, La Fortuna.  Originally built
for the Manila run, she had splendid cabins and great hold space
like the galleons on whose track she had followed.  As a balm to
his hurt pride Don Ruiz ran her like a king's ship in all ways--
except selling her cannon for about half what they cost.  He had
only consented to enter the slave trade, on account of the very
high profits, and by the clever solicitations of Carlo Cibo at
Havana.

Anthony could see as soon as he entered the eating room that
Captain Matanza was inclined to hold himself aloof.  Mere slavers
were evidently not his usual company.  The very way he emphasized
the "de la" in presenting himself showed that.  And he was
evidently nettled that only the factor Ferdinando had greeted his
distinguished arrival.

Anthony, however, had taken a leaf from the excellent book of John
Bonnyfeather in how to receive and entertain ship captains.  He no
longer met the ships as soon as they anchored but sent out
Ferdinando.  He then received a report as to the nature of the
ship's commander, read personal mail which the vessel brought him,
and with all necessary human and business details thus thoroughly
in mind sent an invitation to dine to the captain.

All this had its effect.  If it did nothing else, it induced the
more surly rascals among ships' officers to recollect what decent
manners their memories might still retain.  And it impressed all
newcomers with the fact that in dealing with the Master of Gallegos
familiarity was not in order, for as long as they lay at his
anchorage, he held not only the whip hand, but the face cards in
every little deal.  To be invited to dinner at the new residence
was therefore something to remember, and to talk about afterwards
in Havana.

Indeed, the approach to the new house had been planned somewhat for
its "diplomatic" effect.  A flight of broad steps hewn out of the
living rock of the hill led up from the sheds and barracoons on the
flat to a loopholed palisade on the level of the plantations.  From
this a straight road of beaten clay lined with giant funtumas
already twenty feet high, so rapid was their growth, gave a clear
vista to the house itself situated about an eighth of a mile across
the cultivated fields of the little plateau and half-way up the
final rise beyond.  Beyond that the pointed posts of the palisade
could be seen against the sky, crossing the hill in a bristling
arc.

The house itself was built of large, native brick made from the
same clayey soil in which coffee flourished so well.  It was
absolutely four-square and surrounded on all sides by a veranda of
noble proportions set on natural pillars of dracaena trees.  These
had been stripped of their bark, leaving the smooth, oily surface
beneath to harden and glisten in the sun.  The rafters of the roof
and the porch were the same, making one sheer start from the peak
of the roof to the eaves of the veranda.  Anthony had covered them
with red tiles which had been brought as ballast in an empty slaver
from Cuba.  Not only was this the only tile roof on the West coast,
it was also the only rain and snake-proof house-cover in that part
of Africa.  The outer walls of the place were whitewashed.

Seen from the anchorage, this house had the appearance of a large
white tent with a red roof, the flag pole projecting from the
centre court and the shadows under the poles of the veranda
completing the illusion.  It was only when it was approached
closely that its essential solidity and capabilities for defence
became apparent.  A small trench supplied with flowing water, that
was really only a defence against ants and other pests, completely
surrounded it and gave it somewhat the look of a moated grange.
The heavy shutters of the few outside windows might be seen by an
observing person to be loopholed, set at commanding angles in the
wall, and few and far between.  The door was small and would have
taken a cannon to dislodge it.  Indeed, the outer openings were
scarcely more than holes for ventilation, and the house depended
for both air and sunlight upon the large and beautifully planted
central patio, where a spring bubbled up, and to which the house
was open internally on all sides.

All these details had by no means been lost upon the ex-naval eye
of Don Ruiz de la Matanza as he ascended the hill with Ferdinando.
Nor did he fail to note the Foulah sentry protecting the stockade
parapet with an elephant gun, nor two heavy culverins in concealed
enclosures where a man kept watch night and day with a match
burning.  From their emplacement just a little below the house
round shot could be plunged onto the deck on any vessel below.  In
fact the whole establishment and the river bays for several miles
were subject to the muzzles of those guns.  Whatever else he might
be, Don Ruiz had already decided before he entered the house that
its owner was no fool.  His experience at supper that night
continued to strengthen this opinion.

His impression of Anthony when he entered the room was that of a
tall and powerfully slender young man, the quiet assurance of whose
bearing was rendered attractive and rather remarkable by his
extreme ease of movement.  A certain polished aloofness of manner,
which to anyone but a Spaniard would have seemed a trifle old-
fashioned, gave him a dignity that scarcely coincided with his
years.  This precocious gravity was really a projection of John
Bonnyfeather rather than Anthony's inward conviction of pride, but
it had the effect of making others feel at first a little puzzled
and uncomfortable and so constituted for Anthony at once a means of
attack and a hidden but powerful reserve.

His voice, when he spoke, which was not often, had now greatly
deepened.  It ranged when he was angry or scornful into the bass.
Ordinarily it remained quiet, mellow, and clear.  But he enunciated
his words now with a certain assurance and precision not altogether
pleasant.  In two years the master of Gallegos had acquired the
easy habit of command, but he had also lost a certain natural
persuasiveness which had once been a positive charm.  This, to tell
the truth, he was not at all aware of.

At first there seemed something hard-bitten about his face to a
newcomer like Don Ruiz.  It was very--almost too regular in
feature.  The finely chiselled nose would have been too sensitive
and feminine if it had not been for the hard chin beneath it and
for the nervous but firmly set mouth.  No one could tell what his
complexion had been, he was now burnt so black.  His eyebrows were
bleached white and his lids slightly puckered.  The whites of his
eyes were no longer boyishly clear but tinged slightly yellow.  His
large pupils seemed to veil themselves as if they had something to
conceal.  It was this quality of the eyes, always directed
somewhere else even when looking at you, that lent Anthony a
certain mystery which few who saw him failed to feel.  In the final
analysis it was hard to tell to whom you were talking.  It even
seemed as you came to know him better as though the gracefully
directed precision of the young man before you was somehow
controlled from otherwhere.

All the negroes noticed it.  Even the wide and pleasant forehead,
the now closely cropped but still wavy and sunny hair could not
overcome the impression.  Ferdinando had once mentioned it
jokingly.

"The niggers say a wizard has stolen your soul, señor."

Anthony's unexpected and electric outburst of fury had left the
half-breed a paler and a wiser man.

To Anthony it seemed that he was at last finding himself; at least
he told himself that.  Or perhaps he was creating a new self out of
the vivid incidents and the cruel, stark realities of the life
about him.  He was "doing things"; he was being a very practical
and a successful man in a situation that had required courage,
finesse, adaptability, and grim determination to carry through.  In
three years he had not only "collected" the debt due to Mr.
Bonnyfeather but he had also put himself in the way of being a
fairly rich man.  What had happened to the firm of Gallego & Son in
the process he did not know and he did not much care.  That some
payment as a sort of rental for the place on the Rio Pongo was made
to the Gallego heirs he had finally elicited from Cibo after
several inquiries.  "Herr Meyier is taking care of that out of
head-money, and the forced lease has been declared legal.  I advise
you to drop the matter forthwith as it annoys His Excellency.  You
have nothing to fear."  That was all there was to that.  He was
master of what the blast from the Ariostatica had won, and he did
not intend to go out by the same way he had come in.

Yet in growing into the kind of a mammal which Cibo had so strongly
advised, there was a part of Anthony which seemed to be withering
by the way.  It was the part of him which lay locked up with the
past in the fireproof storeroom he had built, where the chest which
had come from Livorno reposed with Mr. Bonnyfeather's books, the
sextant, some smaller, more youthful clothes, and his old madonna.
Not since he had arrived at Gallegos and buried fourteen of the
crew of the Ariostatica in Brother François's new graveyard, had he
once opened it.

Yet it was upon this part of him that his eyes looked when they
turned inward.  And it was the refusal to listen to certain old
promptings that turned his pupils stony and had given him a fixed
mask-like cast of countenance.  It was all that which turned him
white with fury when it had been suggested to him by his half-breed
factor that what lay locked up in the fireproof storeroom might be
his soul.

He had jumped the doubts as to which was the better man of the two,
the old self or the new Master of Gallegos.  His will was now all
on the side of the latter and it took less and less willing, he
thought, to keep himself the Master of Gallegos from day to day.
As that man he was devoid of visions.  There was no doubt what was
real and what was unreal to the newer man.  The things of the body
were now no longer merely on a par with dreams.  They already
mostly were, and might soon come to be altogether the whole world
in themselves.  It was difficult for him to have achieved this.
Two things above all helped him to maintain it; intercourse with
Neleta and what he poured into himself from a glass.  With only a
little stimulant, so far, he could attain for the time being what
seemed at least to be a solid basis of personality.  Indeed, it was
more than that, it was the sensation of a complete unity, of being
absolutely physical.  Tobacco soothed and allayed; wine stimulated
and completed.  Neleta was beyond all this, Neleta was indescribable
consummation of the flesh alone.  He did not need to think about
her.  He consumed with her.  Neleta was fire.

                            ----------

On the evening upon which the captain of La Fortuna had been bidden
to dine Anthony had finally decided to bring this fire to burn
openly as it were upon his own hearth.  The girl had so far lived,
ostensibly at least, with her brother Ferdinando in the factor's
house below.  She was now to be the mistress of the new residence,
and of its master, to run the domestic side of the establishment,
and to provide what Anthony had found only she could provide.  It
was not the nice moral code of the Grain Coast which had hitherto
prevented this arrangement from being consummated openly.  It was
only the hope on the part of Ferdinando that his sister might marry
a ship's captain and leave Africa, and a certain lingering
reluctance in Anthony to take on any open obligations when there
was no necessity for doing so.  But Neleta had become necessary and
he was now about to admit it.  He shook off the recollection of
Angela's "marriage breakfast" which occurred to him as they sat
down to Neleta's supper.  It had taken several glasses of
Constantia to effect that.

"It is a 'wyn' which the Dutch raise on the Cape, captain, better I
think than Malaga.  Certainly it is stronger," he remarked as they
sat down to supper.  "I secured a whole legger of the Drakenstein
of ninety-five for thirty pounds!" and he filled the captain's
glass for the third time before the meal from a squat, marble-
coloured magnum.

Under the urge of the sunny spirit imprisoned there, which was now
released around the whole table, the captain's reservations
vanished.  The manner of the strange señor inglés became more
cordial, he observed, as the meal advanced.  His host, as it were,
became more and more at home in his own house.

"You see, Don Ruiz, we manage to be fairly comfortable here on the
Rio Pongo.  We are not such terrible people as rumour, I hear,
sometimes paints us."

"I have already discerned that," replied the captain.  "Green
turtles are not the only attraction on the Grain Coast.  Other
things also go into making one's soup palatable here, I observe."
He smiled, looking at Neleta at the table's end, with more
admiration than respect.

"A great deal of sherry," murmured Anthony.  "It gives a certain
dryness which I mightily like."

The captain somewhat hastily returned to the former subject.

"I am really better prepared to find things as they are than you
might suspect, señor.  Our friend Carlo Cibo was quite glowing in
his accounts of your establishment here.  Under ordinary
circumstances I would not put La Fortuna into the slave trade.  She
is a very fine ship . . ."

"So I am informed," Anthony interrupted.  "Carlo was equally
glowing in his accounts of La Fortuna.  I might add that we are
both grateful, captain, at having a ship like La Fortuna, and a
responsible and understanding man like yourself, come out to
Gallegos.  When we began here we had to put up with what we could
get.  At that time, about three years ago, the captain-general
seized what ships he could at Havana and sent them along.  Some of
the specimens of both human and naval architecture which came to
the Rio Pongo then would make your eyes hang out on your shirt.  As
soon as I could I protested vigorously.  Most of the losses in this
business are through stupidity.  Brutality and dirt!  There is no
need for either.  'Send me fast ships with intelligent officers and
I will double your profits,' I wrote home.  'Charter them if
necessary.  What is the use of throwing your cargoes into the sea?'
It was a long time, however, before they could understand my
arithmetic.  So I can honestly say, that it is very gratifying to
see a ship like La Fortuna riding at anchor here and to be able to
entertain her captain as a gentleman deserves.  I trust you will
find your errand thoroughly worth while.  To your return, Captain
Matanza."

Don Ruiz clicked glasses and with evident satisfaction.

"To you, señor, and--to the lady," he replied rising to the
occasion.

They all drank to Neleta, standing, Brother François and
Ferdinando, too.  Anthony was thankful to them and Neleta radiant.
Across the table her sibilant monosyllables came bidding the
captain welcome to Gallegos graciously enough.

"Thou art a Catalan! . . . señorita?" he exclaimed.

Anthony overlooked his familiar address.  It would not do to press
things too far--probably no harm was meant.

"My father was from Barcelona, señor."

"Ah, then you know the Rambla there, perhaps?"

"Very well, indeed, I have played along it often.  When I was five
years old my father took me and my brother to live there.  We
LIVED for five years."

"You are dark for a Catalan, señorita.  There are many blondes in
Barcelona, but mostly the plump, sleepy kind," he laughed.
"Perhaps your mother was from Sevilla?  It is there the honey-
coloured señoritas are found at their best.  Pardon, but I admire
them greatly.  And you wear the shawl thrown over your arms, too.
Ah, it is my admiration which has carried me away.  Sí, the women
of Valencia are beautiful.  But let us talk of Barcelona sometime
again, señorita.  With the señor's permission, of course!"  He
added that hastily, having become aware of a sudden drop in the
temperature.  Ferdinando sat looking into his plate as if there
were worms in it.  He hated his negro blood.

Neleta murmured some politeness in reply and turned to Brother
François.  "How were his orphans coming on today?" . . .

"As I was saying, captain," continued Anthony, engaging that
gentleman's somewhat reluctant attention again, "we shall look
forward to your returning here often.  Now if you will follow my
method of storing your cargoes and taking care of them on the
voyage home, you will find them in better health when you arrive
than when you leave here.  It will also keep your ship sweet and
clean and I have persuaded Cibo to offer a higher bounty for a
healthy shipment delivered in prime shape.  He can well afford to
do that out of the higher price they will bring.  Due to the
invention of a cotton-picking machine I hear there is now a great
demand in North America for sturdy field hands."

The captain now began to prick up his ears.

"The hunters up-country have been instructed this time to bring
down as many Gora warriors as they can round up.  I should tell you
that we gather our cargoes here in three or four ways.  I depend
still for the most part on the caravans of slaves which the
Mohammedans bring down from the interior about the end of the dry
season.  You get all kinds from them, good and bad.  But you can
never be sure.  So this year I have also organized some raids of my
own under an Arab by the name of Ali Bongo, who is an excellent
man.  They are working now in virgin country north of the St. Pauls
among the Gora forest people.  They are a very fine race, totally
unlike these ugly coast niggers, the Krus and Gubos, Putus, Sikons
and whatnot.  The Gora are lighter in colour, of pleasing, almost
European features.  The lips, of course!  They make excellent
servants and respond to good treatment.  I hope to make up your
cargo for the most part from them.  My friend Mongo Tom across the
bay there works all the local country about here and up and down
the coast.  By a special arrangement I take them off his hands.
Between us we control all the trade on the river.  There are also
other ways of gathering slaves as you shall see before you go.  You
will probably have to lie here two or three weeks as the barracoons
are practically empty now and you have arrived before the caravans.
In that time, if you will, you can pick up a good deal of
information about the best method of handling your people on the
return voyage.  It would be to our mutual advantage, certainly
greatly to your own, if you will condescend to profit by our
experience.  A dirty ship and silly crowding, for instance, can cut
profits in half."

"Your able factor has already been telling me things, señor," said
the captain.  "I can well believe there are tricks in this trade as
in any other."

"Ferdinando IS an excellent man," said Anthony in a low tone.  "I
back him to the limit.  At the same time, captain, if you feel
obliged to come to me about anything, please be at liberty to do
so.  You will find me reasonable, and close-mouthed.  I run the
place and no one else."

"Thank you for that, señor.  You know the chief difficulty a ship
master has is with agents and subordinates from whom there is no
appeal except . . ."  He made a coin-counting motion.

"You do not need to fear that here, Don Ruiz."

The captain raised his brows a little and smiled.  "At least you
can count on me to follow out your suggestions and learn what I
can," he continued.  "I am genuinely anxious to do so.  My great
pride, señor, is my ship.  La Fortuna, ah, she is BEAUTIFUL!"
His face lit up as when he had been speaking of the women of
Seville a few minutes before.  "I would not have her filthy, have
her smell, her beautiful feathers all smeared, fah!"  He held his
nose.  "I have seen slavers that way.  But cargoes are hard to come
by now with this cursed war on.  I come here only because I must.
Ah, pardon me, I forget, but I do not criticize, señor.  Not you!
We all make our living as we must in this world, not as we should
like.  It is my ship!  I . . ."

Anthony laid his hand on the man's arm.  He had found out what the
man honoured most.  "A ship is not the worst God in the world," he
thought, "especially when she is a goddess."

"Come," said he.  "You are from Toledo I am told--of the family
Matanza!  Do you remember this?  It is luck that we have it--the
last ship in . . ." he drew the cork carefully and filled the
captain's glass.  The captain sipped.

"Peralta, señor, Dios de Dios!  You will be offering me trout from
the Tagus next.  Ah, that tinge like a remembrance of muscat, the
smell of it! It IS Toledo."  He closed his eyes.  "I can see the
Puerto del Sol!  Did you ever see the women of Toledo?  They walk
in black satin slippers over the sharp, sharp little paving stones
there.  And their arches never touch them.  Firm little bridges
over a million sharp diamonds!  Toledo!"  He opened his eyes
looking a little foolish.  The wine was gone.

Anthony filled his glass again.

"Gracia, gracia."

"A La Fortuna, sí?" said Anthony.

"Ah, Madre de Dios, señor," murmured the captain draining the
second glass of Peralta.  "Thou understandest!"

Anthony laughed and the captain hastened to explain.

"It is a relief to find things so."  He spread out his hands in a
gesture of glad acceptance.  "Of Africa and the trade I have heard
terrible things.  True, your Cibo was persuasive, and La Fortuna
was lying idle.  But I would scarcely have risked her, no, I am
sure I would not have come if I had not been asked by Cibo to see
the last cargo you sent landed.  Madre! the ship, that little San
Pablo was clean and the niggers all well and dancing.  It made me
laugh to see them.  They were so glad to be in Cuba.  You should
have been there.  They were each given a red cap and a blanket.
They forgot all about their friends and country, dancing about like
monkeys and putting on new clothes wrong side before.  Imagine it!
When a cart came they were overwhelmed by the horses.  They did not
know beasts could be made to work.  Then a black postilion in a
silver laced hat, sky-blue coat, and white breeches came riding up.
They could never get through feeling his polished jack-boots, and
watching him leap on and off his prancing horse while his spurs
rang.  He cracked his whip and told them what a fine thing it was
to be a slave of the white man.  And they believed him.  It was
better than anything they had ever known.  They all ran to snap
fingers with their lucky brother.  And the prices they brought next
day at the sale!  Ah! but in some ways that was NOT so good.  The
women will cry for their children."  He ended looking a little
grave.

"I have no doubt what you say is true," said Anthony.  "I have
never seen any of my cargoes landed in Havana but I know what kind
of a life they leave here, captain, and there is no doubt that they
go to a better place in Cuba.  You see what most people forget is
that these people are already slaves in Africa.  They have been
captured in war, or seized for debts, or condemned as criminals or
for witchcraft.  Any excuse is enough to make a man or woman a
slave here.  The powerful chiefs regard the weak or unfortunate as
just so much walking capital and they draw their interest by
putting them to work.  It is the way that this part of the world
not only does business but exists and it always has been that way.
On the whole, the life they go to on any plantation run by
Europeans in America is better than what they leave here.  They are
safer, more comfortable.  Even their hardships are comparative
luxuries.  The English, I believe, are the worst masters.  Jamaica,
they say, is a bad place to go, even worse for a slave than
Africa."

Anthony looked up to catch a smile on Ferdinando's face.

"Señor Adverse is eloquent sometimes, captain," said the factor.
"He should add that there would not be nearly so many slaves
captured if it were not for the temptations the white man brings in
the way of goods."

"Yes," said Anthony a little reluctantly, "that is true.  It is
curious to think that after all it is the desire of the European
merchants to sell cloth, firearms, rum, and various manufactured
articles that makes men slavers here.  That, and the necessity for
cheap labour in America and the West Indies.  That is what makes
the New World go."

"Go where?" interrupted Brother François who had been talking to
Neleta.

"Ah, father, I will not argue with you tonight," laughed Anthony.
"You are not a trader.  The father is opposed to all this," he
explained.  "He spends his time here making it as easy as he can
for those who are gathered in by the raiders.  I will show you his
good works tomorrow.  They are, well--remarkable.  I co-operate,
you know.  That is all I CAN do."  He frowned a little.  "Try
some of this Arab stew, captain.  It is curried lamb with rice
balls seethed in milk.  Do!"  He heaped Don Ruiz's plate for him
and refilled his glass.

The captain and Ferdinando now devoted themselves to their plates
and sundry items of commercial news.  Brother François had fallen
silent, Anthony observed.  Neleta ate quietly.  Only in her eating
did she betray her native origin, everything was managed with a
spoon and two fingers.  With apparently no effort she simply made
her food disappear as if by sleight of hand.

Anthony sat looking at her at the other end of the table
momentarily forgetful of everything but the coming night that they
would spend together.  It had been a long time now!  Occasionally
her eyes, that shone in the candles with a greenish flare, looked
out at him from under her long black lashes.  From time to time
they lightened like a leopard's half concealed in moonlight.  The
spidery-silk fringes of a Manila shawl drooped from her tawny arms
and its embroidered magenta roses seemed to clamber over her breast
and shoulders as if a tropical vine had found a strong, lithe young
tree to flaunt itself upon in some open glade of the jungle.  Under
the shadow of her yellow bodice her breast rose and fell slowly
with a deep visible motion that timed with a slight widening of her
keen nostrils or a flash of her large white teeth.

The colours that the girl wore would have overpowered most European
women; they would have been bizarre.  But there was something so
vivid about Neleta, so brilliantly passionate and virile without a
hint of nervousness, that the magenta roses in the gleaming white
shawl and the golden yellow of her dress were reduced by her to the
equivalent of more sombre tones.  What she put on, she made a part
of her.  Yet she triumphed over what she wore, for through the
folds of her shawl and the yellow silk of her dress her body shone
with even more luminous curves and lines.

Neleta was the crown of all this new life Anthony had carved out of
the forest and seized for himself.  She was the walking answer--and
how she could walk!--to the objections expressed and understood
which Brother François--that the mere presence of Brother François--
constantly posed.

It was still a puzzle to Anthony how Brother François could still
disapprove of him and yet be affectionate and kindly.  Indeed, it
was the affection in his disapproval that was hardest to stand.
But he would forget all that--tonight!  After he had gone over the
ship's mail and the invoices with Ferdinando--then--then he would
give himself to Neleta.  It was like that.  He would give himself
to her.  She would be waiting.

He leaned his head on his hand looking at her with the strong, calm
glow of wine thoroughly upon him.  In the light of the candles and
of the palm-oil lamps, where cotton wicks floated throwing a mellow
glow through the calabash rinds, the room swam with a soft suffused
pallor while Cheecha and her assistant girls came and went silently
on bare feet like ministering shadows.  One side of the place was
screened from the court by long strips of white muslin sewn
together and on this he could see the shadows of palm fronds moving
in the moonlight.  The spring gurgled in its stone basin beyond.
The red-striped native pottery stood out above the table-cloth in
startling patterns, and the faces and voices of his guests seemed
hazy and distant as he lost himself inwardly in a dream of
contented approval, wordless, and imageless except for what lay
vaguely before him.  It was a feeling of satisfaction and
equilibrium that he would allow no thoughts to mar.

It was Neleta who finally motioned to him.  The others had
finished.  She and Brother François left.  Ferdinando dumped the
mail pouch on the table.  With a bundle of black cigars before them
they spread out various papers and got down to the business of the
evening.

Anthony set aside the bundles of newspapers in various languages
which Cibo assiduously collected for him from ships' captains at
Havana.  They would serve to while away many a tedious afternoon
during the rainy season, although some of them were nearly a year
old.

The business of being a slaver, Don Ruiz could see, was an
intricate one.  Indeed, Anthony's long hours spent with accounts,
correspondence, and invoices at the Casa da Bonnyfeather now stood
him in good stead.  Most of the slavers on the Coast, he
discovered, had failed largely because they kept no books.  They
were always in debt when they closed out, or they got careless and
turned over the warehouses to clerks who robbed them.  Gallego had
left his keys to the old woman in charge of his harem.  Ferdinando
had been helpless under her pilfering.  Anthony had shipped her off
to Cuba as he did not wish to be poisoned.  She had gone aboard
ship foaming.  The rest of the seraglio had departed with her.  It
had been a memorable day.  He grinned remembering it, while he ran
his eye over the statement of the last voyage which Cibo had sent
him.


Carlo Cibo, Agent, Regla, Havana, Cuba, to the Master of Gallegos
        on the Rio Pongo of the Grain Coast, Africa.

Voyage Statement of the Schooner San Pablo, 90 tons burthen, Miguel
                         Gomez, Master.


                         1.  OUT COSTS

Fitting Out:

  New sails and extras..............................   956.43$
  Carpenter's bill.................................. 1,005.00
  Cooper's bill.....................................   684.22

Provisions:

  For crew..........................................   784.90
  For slaves (on return trip).......................   560.21

Wages Advanced:

  18 men before the mast @ 50$......................   900.00
  To captain, mate, boatswain, cook, and steward....   440.00

Trade Goods:

  Muslins, muskets, powder, lead, cigars, copper wire,
  beads, trinkets, mirrors, rum and 500 Maria Teresa
  dollars, etc...................................... 9,849.60

Gratifications:

  To Port Officials................................    150.00
  Clergy for blessing the ship.....................     25.00
  Police...........................................    200.00
  Governor's Secretary.............................     50.00

To owners for use of ship during temporary
  sequestration....................................  1,200.00
                                                    ----------
                                                    16,805.36$

Commission to Señor Carlo Cibo @ 10%...............  1,680.54
                                                    ----------
       Total for voyage out........................ 18,485.90$


                   2.  COSTS RETURN VOYAGE


Wages:

  Captain..........................................    225.00$
  First Mates......................................    175.00
  Second Mates.....................................    125.00
  Boatswains.......................................     90.00
  Cooks' and Stewards'.............................    257.00
  17 men before the mast...........................  1,872.00

Head-Money:

  Captain's @ 3$ a head............................    681.00
  Mate's @ 2$ a head...............................    454.00
  Other ship's officers @ 1$ a head................    454.00
  Water casks and medicines purchased from ship
  Mercedes at sea on return voyage.................     83.50
                                                     ---------
       Total for voyage home.......................  4,416.50$


                   3.  CHARGES AT HAVANA


Captain-General's honorarium.......................  1,000.00$
Gratification Herr Herman Meyier...................    500.00
Gratification Clerks at Caxa da Consolidación......    155.00
Havana pilot.......................................     10.00
Wharfage...........................................     25.00
Subsistence of slaves on shore before sale.........    136.00
227 slave dresses @ 2$.............................    454.00
Mid-wife's fee at lazeretto (twins)................      2.00
Coffin for mother..................................      5.00
Hire of wench for wet nurse........................      1.50
Sundries, purser's cash disbursements, and all extras  984.60
Sale announcements and barkers-up..................     32.00
Auctioneer's fee at 2%.............................  1,422.92
                                                     ---------
        Total charges at Havana....................  4,728.02$
        Total all expenses......................... 27,630.42$


                           4.  RETURNS


Proceeds of 221 slaves at auction.................. 71,146.00$
Proceeds of 5 female slaves by private view sales..  2,730.00
Proceeds twin infants born Havana..................     20.00
Proceeds gold dust, ivory, and palm oil............ 18,124.00
                                                    ----------
                                                    92,020.00$


                              RÉSUMÉ


        Total proceeds slaves and cargo............ 92,020.00$
        Total all expenses......................... 27,630.42
                                                    ----------
                Net profit on voyage............... 64,389.58$

J. Garvín, Clerk.


. . . You will see by this [Cibo's letter ran on] that business is
not half bad.  There is a great dearth here of slaves due to the
disturbed state of commerce since hostilities began, and healthy
ones especially bring large prices.  The Yankee brush with France
has blown over and there has been an influx of Yankee bidders for
the Carolina rice plantations and the Virginia cotton and tobacco
fields.  Bueno!  What do you think--your Jew tailor bought the
twins and is raising them in his back patio.  All Havana is
laughing at him.  Like most Shylocks he has a soft spot in a hard
heart.  His Excellency is also in a seventh heaven over additions
to his revenue.  I have, mon vieux, arranged to split with the
government on this cargo, their share three-quarters net proceeds
on the slaves.  In other words, you receive 11,566.40$ as all
expenses are charged against the slaves, and the government gets
the remainder.  This does not, of course, touch the proceeds from
the gold, ivory, etc., as that is disposed of quietly on the side
and is no one's business but our own.  You will therefore get a
total of 29,690.40$, less my 10% consignment commission which you
must admit, as a fellow mammalian, I deserve.  I am forwarding by a
sure carrier your share of these cargoes to Messers Baring Bros.
Co., as you requested a year ago, and I enclose the bills of
exchange on London.  I suggest that you write them to put part of
your now snug little fortune at interest.  Not all of it.  The
world sometimes turns upside down and only those with light, liquid
assets float to the top again.  Now as to "La Fortuna"--I have
chartered her.  She is not sequestrated.

An excellent large ship with a decent captain whom experience has
educated.  Trust him--distrustfully, I told you of him elsewhere
but I am glad to have secured him.  His ship is large and fast,
which cuts costs in the end, and will make fewer voyages necessary.
You can load twice as many niggers as on a small schooner.  I have
laid out heavily in the trade goods "La Fortuna" brings you, and
followed your advice carefully.  You should find everything you
requested except the muskets which are now at premium in Europe.  I
send you instead brandy, rum, and blankets.  You will have to do as
best you can with the Mexican silver dollars; no Austrian are to be
had.  Blame Buonaparte.  You will also find your pineapple
cuttings.  Let me know how they thrive.  I prophesy that the chief
monument of your existence will in a few years be pineapples in
Africa.  A sugary epitaph shall be thine--but who will remember
even if it is in every mouth?  The only lasting good we accomplish
is when we play with nature.  All else is vanity.  I have another
baby, the nineteenth.  According to Father Trajan God never runs
out of souls, and I am built like a bull.  Happy, happy world!

By the way, do not neglect to look in the little satin box in the
purser's pouch.  A lady at the palace was MOST PARTICULAR about
it.  She has asked me twice about you.  Why don't you write her?
You neglect your opportunities, I swear.  Or are you comforted?
How did you find Cheecha?  You do not say.  When do you come to
Havana again?  Never?  Your chair on the veranda yawns for you.
Send me some words of affection, my boy, I grow old--and lonely.
It is the fate of old bulls.  Adiós then till anon, thine.

CARLO.

Regla, the 7th of January, A. D. 1799.


As he leaned back reading this he could almost feel Carlo's warm,
fat hand grasping his own.  But the date chilled him.  Two months
ago now!  How far away it all was!  No, he had never written
Dolores.  Somehow he couldn't.  He undid the little box Cibo had
spoken of and sprung back the lid.  A pair of carnelian cuff links,
nothing else; no writing.  He closed the box again and after a
while put it aside.  He would send her an ivory comb.

Ferdinando and the captain were busy checking invoices.  A
discrepancy had arisen over two kegs of biscuit.  Bother!  "Charge
it to my account, Ferdinando."  The factor did so, saying nothing.
"A curious man," thought Anthony.  His negro blood made no
difference.  He was an accountant.  All he cared for was to balance
his accounts.  His sister was not that way, thank God!  Neleta!  It
was too heavy a mail to finish tonight.  He would only read a few
more letters, some from Livorno.  The rest could be finished--
mañana.

He bade the captain and Ferdinando good night.

"Tomorrow we can go over the place together.  It has been a
pleasure, Don Ruiz.  Let me know if there is anything you need.
Call on me!  The factor will see you aboard.  Certainly, I shall be
glad to convey your compliments to the señorita . . .  Ah! thank
you!  I heartily agree."  The ass, if he only knew!  Would he never
go?

The house seemed silent as their voices died away down the hill.
From a beam overhead a little wood dust trickled down on the table.
White ants again!  They must have been in the wood.  He would have
to remove that.  The devil!  He shook the dust off a letter a
little savagely and opened it.  McNab's writing.


. . . the maister canna hold the pen the noo.  His hands be sair
twisted and he walks seldom.  It gars him sair ye dinna come hame.
He says to me--"write and say--'There is plenty for you here.  Do
not tarry too long.  I would see you again, my son.  That would be
better than the monies you send.  I commend you nevertheless for
your care in that.  Come home.  The house is dark without you.'"

I say amen to that, Maister Anthony.  We (mysel', Mr. Toussaint,
and that FAITHFUL woman) are still here.  I draw salary for
nothing.  Mr. B. is lying in the great bed as I write.  He spends
much time there.  All of it soon.  Do ye ken what I mean?  Captain
Bittern of the "Unicorn" has taken many prizes.  We keep that
quiet.  My accounts await your return.  Young Mr. Vincent Nolte
calls for news of you oftener than we have it.  I trust your health
continues as mine does, and will last you home.

Your humble obd't servant,

WILLIAM McNAB.


"Home, come home!"  Would they never cease?  Where is home?  Italy
and the Casa da Bonnyfeather?  All Europe was like the Casa da
Bonnyfeather, he thought, a building with frescoes of old, lovely
dreamful things fading and flaking off its walls, where forgotten
gods feasted on oblivion overhead, and little men crawled
underneath keeping accounts and writing letters about things; where
Toussaints sat forever at desks and dreamed hopelessly of love, and
mumbled of freedom and of golden savages, and ate their hearts out
and were afraid of themselves.  Go back to that?  Go back to the
Villa Brignole and Father Xavier; to the dead gardens under the
moon and the music of the crazy woman; that opera that would never
be sung?

He did not belong to all that.  He belonged to a different and
better time, something that he remembered had brooded in the court
of the convent about the fountain; something that the bronze boy
was remembering as he looked at the water, that the leaves of the
great tree and the pigeons had spoken of before Father Xavier came
and explained it away as only a reflection in the fountain, a
dream.

It had been real once.  In the villages of Italy on those morning
drives with Angela he had caught glimpses of it, a world that
remained in fragments; that let itself be seen by segments out of
the corner of a wise young eye.  It was the world he had found once
with Angela; once, too late, a lost world.  He could not "go back"
to it.  He would have to find it, or make it here.  Here in the
forest where the germens of it remained.

He leaned forward a little over the table, seeing nothing but
light, and resting his chin on his hands.  It seemed to him that he
understood at last what the bronze boy by the fountain had gone
blind looking for in the ceaseless, monotonous change fulness of
the water that flowed past him like time.

It was what he himself was going blind looking for in the waters of
change that flowed past him forever and forever, the mysterious
fluid of events that looked so clear as it dashed for a moment into
the sunshine, streaming from some mysterious source and flowing
ever in one direction on into the unknown.  Yes, it was LIKE
that.

He himself might be the other bronze boy, the missing twin who had
disappeared from his brother's side by the fountain ages ago.
Perhaps he was?  Perhaps, he had only come back again to watch the
water for a while.  Perhaps, that bright vision of the beautiful
playmate, the boy whose face was in the fountain, the child who had
lain amid the branches and talked with him was real.  Perhaps, he
had been talking with himself then after all.  Who knows who I am?
What knows?  And who cares! . . .

The lovely madonna that had visited him that night with Angela, she
might have cared, would have . . . but no more.  In his being he
knew he would never find her again.  With Neleta all was dark as he
lay--nothing there but his frame.  But that remained!  That
REMAINED!  He would enjoy all he had left; prove to himself he
was still alive . . . feel.  Wine!  He poured himself another
glass.

                            ----------

The candles had long burned out now, even the palm-oil lamp was
waning.  He rose and swept aside the letters--from the world of
cobwebs.  Mañana!  What did they matter?  He blew out the light.
The distant howling-boom from the forests seemed to fill the
chamber.  It was always stronger on moonlight nights.  He breathed
heavily in the darkness, listening.  The little owls in the orchard
below kept bubbling.  Somewhere a mouse shrieked.  But beyond these
shrill, near noises constantly rose and fell, now in high chorus
and now in shattered undertones, the voice of the fathomless
jungles that surrounded Gallegos; the roaring of crocodiles in the
valley below, the far-off trumpeting of herds of elephants, the
howling of monkeys hurling themselves along their treetop avenues
through the moonlight, going nowhere.  At Bangalang someone was
comforting himself with a tom-tom.  The throb of it rather than the
sound came, a dim pulsation in the wind.  The stridulous cry of
quadrillions of insects made the night quiver.  He stood and
trembled with it.  Like a dancer lending himself to irresistible
music he gave himself to what seemed to be a tune remembered by his
bones and muscles rather than his mind.  The frame of him swayed to
it.  The warm air from the patio bathed him luxuriously and
wandered under his loose clothes.  He let them fall to the floor
listlessly and enjoyed the stimulating, soft freshness of it
caressing him from head to foot where he stood.  The rank, male
flowers of hundreds of papayas in the plantations below imparted a
tang to the breeze as if lemon blossoms were being crushed by his
feet.

He kicked the clothes under the table, and enjoyed the silent tread
of his bare feet while gliding down the corridor to his room at the
end of it.  There was not a sound in the house now.  Cheecha and
her girls slept in the wing on the other side of the court.  The
main door locked itself and closed by a weight.  Surprises in this
country might be final and fatal.  He had tried to eliminate
surprises by insects, animals, and men.  Only the terrible or
ingenious succeeded in finding privacy in Africa.  There was a
certain fascination in having attained it against the entire scheme
of things; in maintaining a successful defence against a perpetual
siege.  When he entered the room, completely at ease about his
understood isolation with the woman who shared it with him, Neleta
was asleep.

She lay on a light couch which she had pulled out from a corner and
placed for coolness close to the rush screen that formed the wall
of the apartment where it opened upon the court.  Through this the
moonlight penetrated covering part of the floor with a carpet of
small parallels of light and shade and the walls with a dim pallor.
She lay breast down, coverless, with her head resting lightly on
one arm flung easily before her as if she had been swimming in the
river of night and had paused in her stroke to dream awhile and
float down its tide.  The curious effect of parallel black stripes
and silver fell obliquely across her honey-coloured hips.

Although he was already tense with the certainty and anticipation
of finding her awaiting him, this peculiar pattern of light and
shadow with its background assumed for Anthony--as soon as it
arranged itself before his eyes where he stood naked in the dim
centre of the room--that supreme importance which the state of fire
always has everywhere in the universe.  All that he was, all the
world about him seemed to be drawn on a hurrying wind into the
living symbol before him and to be sublimed there.

The meaning of that symbol was to be understood only in terms of
feeling.  With it the individual mind of Anthony had little or
nothing to do.  For him the gears of existence were shifted
automatically by the signal of Neleta's naked hips from the
secondary and rational order of existence into the primary and
material.  To it his own part of the alphabet of the eternal word
answered convincingly.  Matter was about to get the necessary
business of its preservation in a certain form accomplished, and
the means to this end now violently emanated heat as a preliminary
to the process.  Anthony was aware of all this.  He did not think
of it in so many sentences as he stood for a minute looking upon
Neleta asleep in the barred moonlight; he apprehended it all as
though it were expressible in one deep-breathed word, the exquisite
hieroglyphic of which was the form of the woman before him with all
her secrets bare.

The meaning of it was action, the supreme action upon which all
other acts depend.  Perhaps the only thought he had as he moved
through the moony twilight to consummation was a realization that
only by the addition of his own body to hers could the letter of
the word be made complete.  But this realization could scarcely be
termed a thought, for the primal knowledge of it was accompanied by
so intense a glow of pleasure that it was completely resolved in
feeling alone.

He shifted her head slightly and she awoke looking up at him half
dreamfully, contentedly settling herself in her nest face down.  He
put his arms about her, locking his hands on her breasts and
letting his weight come upon her.  She sighed fondly, and locked
her legs about his own.

The union of Anthony and Neleta was physically a complete one.  It
was that of a mature man and woman who were together often; who
knew what was to be expected of each other, and how to act.
Neither had any doubt of self and each was wholly absorbed for the
time being in the other.  In this way they were able for
considerable intervals of time to escape completely from themselves
and to become another which was both of them.  Theirs was not that
ghastly wraith of love summoned forth from the grave of the body by
friction to die feebly with nervous gasps and hatred, nor was it
the spasmodic wriggling of curious younglings interested in
experimenting with themselves.  They were not furtively surprised
at last by a really intense, final throb of pleasure.  Nor was one
completed suddenly and the other left desperate.  Once having given
themselves to each other, everything else was taken care of for
them by forces over which they had, and desired to have, no
control.  Indeed, the supreme contentment of it all was that once
locked together all that followed was involuntary.  They
participated in and became one in another impersonal self.  The
reward of obedience to the will of that self beyond them was a long
continued and increasing ecstasy that just upon the verge of
becoming unbearable blessedly relieved itself and left them to rest
in each other's arms.

In the morning they would wake to see that the sun was making a
golden pattern through the screen where that of the moon had been
silver the night before.  They would hear Cheecha and her maids
moving about in the courtyard beyond with that peculiar rippling
quality of sunlight in the tones of their talk and laughter that
only the morning voices of Africans can convey.  They would get up
quietly without saying much, and giving each other a kiss of peace
and happiness, would put on some light clothes and go out to
breakfast in the courtyard.

After that the housegate was unbarred, the bridge of steps let down
over the little "ant-moat" before the veranda, and the work of the
day began.  Neleta busied herself with the house and its keeping,
in all the generously supplied details of which she took an immense
and efficient pleasure.  Anthony found himself pleasantly
overwhelmed by a thousand details that in the voluble persons of
blacks, whites, and yellows clambered for immediate attention and
decisions of considerable moment to many souls.  He used the cool
morning hours diligently.

On the morning after the supper with Captain Matanza of La Fortuna
the "barkers" came in from the hill country, saying they had
persuaded a large Arab caravan to come and trade at Gallegos.  All
was instantly in rapid preparation for its advent.  To give certain
direction to the guides, and to honour the approaching Arab mongo,
or chieftain, one of the cannons began to fire at regular
intervals.




CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

A GLIMPSE INTO THE FURNACE


It is quite unusual for a caravan to be coming to us at this time
of year," Anthony remarked to the captain as they sat smoking
together on the dock, watching La Fortuna's cargo being whipped out
of her hatches under the active superintendence of Juan.  The
squall of the winches and the shouts of the crew working block-and-
tackle came over the water.  Several large boats and rafts plied
back and forth.  The morning was sticky-hot and the river valley
breathless.  In the brown water the velvet shadows of the
barracoons wavered sullenly as the boats passed.  Anthony removed
his wide palm hat from time to time to mop his face.

"Like bronze beginning to sweat in the fire," thought Don Ruiz, who
had seen cannon melted, "just when the first drops begin to run.
After a while the metal collapses--suddenly."  He was feeling like
a rag himself this morning; inclined to be weakly reminiscent.  He
found it hard to be interested in anything.

"Oh," said he, "I thought caravans just kept coming."  He looked
faint.  Anthony laughed and passed him a flask . . .  They both
felt brighter now . . .

"No, usually they get here in November when the dry season begins.
La Fortuna is the magnet now.  You see some time ago I sent barkers
with special inducements to one of the chief Foulah mongos back in
the hill-country, the Ali Mami of Futa-Jaloon.  He is an Arab ruler
who lords it over a great reach of territory stretching, I do not
know how far, north-and-east up toward Timbo.  The boys who
returned this morning tell me the old scoundrel has been raiding
far-and-wide and has sent down his nephew, one Amah-de-bellah, in
charge of a big caravan.

"Amah, by the way, is a very intelligent and pleasant young
Mussulman; black, but a gentleman according to his lights.  I have
had some amicable and profitable dealings with him before.  Indeed,
he is anxious to convert me to his own faith and has even invited
me to visit his uncle's capital.  I may do it yet.

"But come, they will not be here for several hours yet--have
another pull at this--helps, eh? . . .  Well, we might as well see
what is going on and get you familiar with Gallegos.  I make it a
habit to go over the place every morning."  He shoved his hat back
on his head.  They rose, and chatting together, strolled down the
dock into the big warehouse.

"We rebuilt this after a fire when I first came," Anthony
explained.  "The smaller buildings up the slope are for storage,
too.  It is a good idea not to have all of one's cocoanuts on one
tree, you know.  This shed is where the actual trading goes on,
however."

In the grateful shadow of the place the captain now looked about
him with considerable interest.

The building was a long barn-like structure with lofts.  The
ceiling was provided with trap doors.  These were now hanging open,
and various bulky packages of trade-goods were being lowered in
preparation for the approaching caravan.  A bolt of striped cloth
suddenly escaped from someone's hands in the loft above and
streamed down out of the darkness like a flapping serpent.  Cries
and shrieks of raucous laughter arose.  Half the Kru boys on the
floor stopped trundling bales to help rewind the cloth.  They got
tangled in it.  It took Ferdinando with a cane to restore order.

Nevertheless, the shed continued to hum with excitement, loud talk,
songs, whistling, and a rhythmic stamping as the luxuriant cargo of
La Fortuna rolled in from the dock and was hoisted into the lofts
or trundled to the opposite end of the building.  There was an air
of triumph about it; the sheer joy of the Ethiopian at being
surrounded by plenty and largesse permeated the place.  The Kru
boys whooped.  A trolley on a travelling pulley ran from one end of
the shed to the other and was whisking back and forth, dangling a
net full of bales and clinging black boys who screamed with delight
at the spinal thrill of an aerial ride.  Like large liver-coloured
flies their bodies seemed struggling in a vast spider web as they
passed through the grotesque shadows of the beams and windows that
barred the place with transverse shadows and shafts of light.  The
air danced with dust in a thousand sun pencils, and the captain now
saw rather than heard the sound that permeated the whole
atmosphere, for the very motes in the air were leaping to the low
but swift and nervous lilt of drums.  Gay and humorous greetings
met the two as they continued along the warehouse floor, the
captain's brass buttons, fat legs and skin-tight trousers causing
many an eye to roll back till it showed as white as the grin
beneath it.

"Merry enough!" said Don Ruiz who was now feeling the effects of a
half-pint of brandy.

"It is the only way to get things done in a hurry here," replied
Anthony, "songs, and excitement.  If you get the right beat going
you can move mountains."  He pointed to two youngsters at the door
working away delightedly at small hand-drums.  A blue-black
Mandingo buck shuffled by doing a slide-and-slap under a
mountainous bale.

Don Ruiz burst into a laugh.  In the fellowship of humour the man
roared back like a gorilla.

"These stevedores and boatmen are all Mohammedans hired from near-
by coastal villages; mostly Krus," continued Anthony.  "It pays.
Their wages are less than what slaves would manage to steal."

They stopped for a moment at the extreme end of the shed in a
railed-off space.  Here under the eyes of Ferdinando chests were
being opened; bale covers were being ripped off and the contents
spread out for display or heaped in convenient piles while two
armed Foulahs watched every move.

"Samples, here," said Anthony.  "The chief traders, and petty
chiefs make their choice out of this stuff.  But we can't linger
too long now.  Come this way."

They stepped out of the factor's office, already brilliant with
striped cloths, brass jewelry, and rolls of copper wire, into a
long porch covered by half-transparent tarpaulins slushed with
beeswax.  The place basked in a kind of amber glow.  There was a
wide, beaten-clay floor under the awning, several stone blocks with
rings in them, an X-shaped whipping post.  A low bench provided
with mats for squatting extended the whole length of the place.

"The slaves are stood up and examined here before the goods are
paid over.  I watch that myself."

"Do you use the post much?" asked Don Ruiz.

"Not often, but now and again," said Anthony.  "The captured witch-
doctors sometimes need a little nine-tailed magic to convince them.
I leave that to Ferdinando.  He knows."  He passed the black post
rather hurriedly.  The tarpaulin-covered porch led directly into
the first of the barracoons that lined the water front for some
distance beyond it.

The barracoons were long sheds built of heavy, hardwood timbers
flat on two sides and driven into the ground so closely together
that not even a knife-blade could be inserted between them.  A wide
opening in the roof for air and sunlight extended down the centre.
The space for each slave was marked off with whitewashed lines on
the stone so that the floor in its semi-gloom looked like a board
upon which some giant game might be played with pieces six feet by
four.  Each space was provided with shackles to keep a pawn from
moving itself, however, and there was a wooden pillow, a stool, and
two earthen pots in every "square."  A more lavishly furnished
corner screened by mats with small, round windows in them marked
where the two overseers kept watch.

Four of these barracoons, each with its number given in red strokes
on the door, lay separated by about a twenty-yard interval.  But
they were so disposed that each formed one side of a square.  The
intervals between were heavily barricaded.  At Gallegos there were
two of these inclosed squares or slave pens.

"For the most part we shackle the slaves only at night," said
Anthony.  "In the day they exercise in these yards if the weather
permits.  That keeps the barracoons from getting musty.  We feed
them up well, make them bathe often, and get them fattened up for
the voyage."

"Why, you could house a regiment here!" exclaimed Don Ruiz.

"Yes?  Well, as a matter of fact, in the last three or four years
several regiments have passed through them.  Did it ever strike
you, captain, that a large part of the New World will inevitably be
rather African?  Hundreds of shiploads of these black people have
been going west now for hundreds of years.  And Africa is now being
poured out into America and the islands faster than ever before.
Yet they are still calling for more from Boston to Buenos Aires.
This war between England and Spain has only put up the price."

"Niggers don't count in America," said the captain tossing away a
cigar stump indifferently.

"Each counts one, and they might possibly have children," mused
Anthony.

"What the devil do we care!" grunted Don Ruiz.  "Isn't it
profitable?  You yourself seem to be making a pretty good thing out
of them.  What are you worrying about?  And yet, pardon me, but it
did seem strange to me, señor--last night I thought of it--that a
man like you should be slaving.  No offence, of course," he
hastened to add.  "It was merely a passing thought."

"It IS strange," replied Anthony laconically, looking about him
for a moment as if he found himself in a curiously unexpected
place.

The captain grinned.  "My mother intended ME for the priesthood,"
he said.

"Perhaps mine did, too.  Quién sabe?  But after all it is what we
do that makes us what we are, isn't it?" queried Anthony half to
himself.

"Quién sabe?" re-echoed the captain.  His eyes also for a moment
had become bleak.  Suddenly they both recognized each other's look
and laughed.

"Exiled, eh," thought Don Ruiz.  "Regretful," thought Anthony.

"Try one of these, amigo mio," said the captain producing his cigar
case.  "These long, black fellows from Havana make one forget.  The
real leaf!  I smoke ten a day.  By evening the ground under one's
feet becomes velvety.  It seems to give a little when you step out.
Even the prodding fingers of destiny are made blunt by tobacco.  It
was discovered just in time.  Think what we should be without it!
This age is like a busy mother-in-law to a man of feeling.  We can
no longer marry the world and be happy with it.  Madre!"  He struck
fire like a craftsman, and they ascended the hill together in a
cloud of blue smoke.

The little gun near the residence was still faithfully banging away
at intervals.  There was so little breeze even half-way up the
slope that the yellow powder-smoke drifted slowly in long ribbons
through the plantations.  After each explosion the parrots settled
back into the trees again.  Anthony paused suddenly beside a small
foot-path leading down from the road into a wooded hollow.

"Turn aside here with me for a moment and I'll show you what you
have forgotten," he said.  "It is more interesting than the
barracoons, I think."

                            ---------

They threaded a small thicket of date palms and fig trees, and soon
disappeared from the road amid the dense shade of an ever-more
luxuriant little oasis as the ground grew lower and damper.
Already it was getting cool.  Suddenly they came out into an open,
palm-lined, grassy place about an acre in extent.  A small stream
rushed down it babbling fondly.

The water gushed out from under a low cliff; raced for a few
hundred yards as though frightened by the sunlight, and then
disappeared into the hill again with a surprised gurgle through a
rock that parted its sandy lips to drink it in.  They both stooped
and drank eagerly of water so evidently pure from a manless world.
Refreshed, they rose and looked about them.

Before them half a dozen beehive huts were scattered about the
oval, green levels in a rough semi-circle, like straw dwellings of
enormous honey-gatherers.  At the upper end of the glade was a
Lilliputian chapel built into the rocky outcrop from which the
stream itself sprang.  There was a rude wooden cross before it,
large, out of all proportion.  There was even a miniature belfry in
which hung an old ship's bell upon which the sun struck with a
single brassy glint in the surrounding ocean of green.

Seated on a stool at the foot of his rood was Brother François in
his now much-faded gown, sandals, and a large planter's hat.  There
were nearly a score of young darkies about him.  They were
repeating in unison something he was teaching them and the high
murmur of their voices came to the two unobserved onlookers, where
they stood in the shadow of the palms at the edge of the clearing,
faintly and mixed with the responses of the stream--yet with the
universal accent of happy childhood.  It instantly reminded Anthony
of the fresh gales of young voices which had sometimes come through
the school windows at the convent while the pigeons and fountain
talked together in the court below.  It was a sound like the leaves
in that lost valley of the Moselle stirred long ago by a cool
morning breeze.  He remembered it.  For a while both he and the
captain forgot their cigars which accumulated a long ash while they
stood watching and listening.  Don Ruiz felt he might wake up at
any moment as a boy again in his room at Toledo with the vocative
Tagus gossiping a hundred feet below.

Both men, in fact, found something peculiarly affecting in the
little scene before them.

Yet the sheer reality of it, drenched as it was in the stark,
equatorial sunshine, the vividness of the black children dressed in
white cast-off rice bags lying about their master like so many
animated handkerchiefs on the glassy green of the grass conveyed
its own meaning in a deep and natural tone.  It was a bass note in
which there was not even the suggestion of a sentimental tremolo.

On account of the noisy stream neither Anthony nor Don Ruiz could
hear what Brother François was saying nor the children's replies.
But from time to time the man's face shone out from under his hat
when he looked up to speak, and the effect of his words could be
seen by the ripples and wriggles of his small congregation.  What
he had to say was evidently something they were glad to hear.  But
more than that--it was because he was saying it that they listened.

No one--Anthony felt sure--no one who had not seen the tenderness,
that strong and vivid look of affection upon Brother Francois's
face, could have imagined its gentle strength.  When he looked up
and spoke, his features succeeded in their own particular way in
giving a personal and living meaning to the general abstraction
called "mercy."

"Do not disturb him, señor," muttered the captain in a changed
voice.  "It is a saint we have seen."  He turned as if to go and
then stopped to look back again.  They both stood watching farther
withdrawn now under the airy groins of some date palms, like
cathedral sightseers, who, blundering upon a service in a side-
chapel, had shrunk back at the thought of disturbing prayers.

It did not seem to Anthony now that Brother François appeared
impotent against the world which surrounded him.  What the man was
doing there, what he was, looked permanent.  Because his work was
so invincibly humble as to escape notice, it seemed likely that it
might prevail.  It had, he thought, the delicate strength of
flowers that perish easily and are constantly being trampled upon,
but which succeed nevertheless in transmitting their unchanging
pattern of beauty through aeons of seasons.  Suddenly he thought of
Father Xavier, too--

And was instantly reminded of a fossil water-lily that he had once
seen in a cabinet somewhere; the cabinet was dark.  Oh, yes--he had
seen it at Maddalena Strozzi's.  But he always thought of Brother
François and light . . .

What was it he had been thinking about light that day on the
Wampanoag while Mrs. Jorham had been showing him her sewing?  What
was it, now?  Oh! . . . said let there be light and there was . . .
The Word . . .  or something.  Well, well--at least the captain
too was touched by this scene today, and he was no softy, God knows
. . . stole cannon, Cibo said . . .

Now in these dense forests all about Gallegos trees fell but the
light beat down and the forest went on.  The light healed wounds
and scars and nourished seedlings to fill up the places of trees
that fell in the forest . . . that fell there and rotted.  And all
the seedlings struggled up toward the light.  Those that couldn't
get out of the shade died.  But strange things lived in that
perpetual shade; their forms were nightmares, horrible . . . no
light!  "How is it, Anthony, you have been so long a lurker in
darkness, a mighty bringer down of trees--and men?  Brother
François has hidden these children from you."  Yes, he always begs
for the very young and sickly--"And now look!  Why are you
crouching here in the shadows . . . afraid of the light?"

"O Mother of . . . !

"Stop!  You must remember you cannot say it.  Carlo said . . .  And
I know."

The boom of the little gun on the hill above shattered his reverie
and the captain's simultaneously.

They turned without saying anything further and took a short-cut up
the hill.  Their path now led them directly to the foot of the low
cliff that hid the small valley from both the road and the
residence.  Indeed, from the house veranda the valley might not
have existed.  It might have been merely a dip in the hill over
which the eye shot directly to the barracoons below.  But just from
the top of the rocky outcrop, which otherwise hid it so well, all
of it was visible at one glance.  The cliff was not high but steep.
They stood breathing a moment after the climb and looked down.

They saw the small chapel again and a graveyard with white crosses
hidden in the trees, which they had not seen before.  There was a
surprising number of crosses--considering.  Women were moving about
the beehive huts with children hanging on their breasts.  From rows
of banana trees purple blossoms and ripe clusters also depended
heavily.  It was all intensely green, silent, fruitful.  The place
seemed to have dropped out of the world into a hollow.  For an
instant the spell of it clutched at them again.  There were no
shadows there.  High noon . . .

Just then the little bell rang out softly and clearly.

They watched it turn on its wheel.  Its clear notes fell out of the
silence like quicksilver dropping out of darkness into sheer light.
The captain crossed himself automatically.  Anthony stopped his own
hand just in time.  He saw all the children and people below there
kneel down.  From the chapel came a distant voice.  He knew what
that man in there was saying--those words--


                  "God have mercy upon us . . ."


he thought . . .

Suddenly from the hill above came a great shout and the crackle of
musketry.

A nasal singing and the mad beating of tom-toms could now be heard
emerging from the forest beyond the stockade and getting louder.
The little gun began to answer as rapidly as it could.

"Well, captain, your slave caravan has arrived," Anthony said.

"Mine?" laughed Don Ruiz looking a little startled.  "You are TOO
generous, señor!"  They went up again without looking behind them.
Anthony thought once that he could still hear the bell.  Yet it
must have stopped.  And hell was to pay about the stockade gate.
What a waste of powder!

                            ----------

At the residence all was now in final frantic activity, although
Neleta had been actively preparing for the advent of the caravan
since early dawn.  A portion of the veranda had been screened off
with mats and a huge cocoanut rug spread on the floor.  Chairs for
Anthony and the captain of La Fortuna, a prayer rug and a sheepskin
for the approaching mongo of the caravan completed the
arrangements, except for a half dozen Foulahs armed with flintlocks
and cutlasses who now disposed themselves as a guard of honour.
Behind the door Neleta stood ready to receive her guests, with
Cheecha and the other women slaves.  As the honourable mistress of
the house, she wore a long embroidered veil over her face and
shoulders.

Anthony and the captain had scarcely had time to snatch a cooling
drink and seat themselves on the veranda before the battery on the
slope below began to fire smoky salvos and the caravan was seen
filing through the stockade gate on the hill above.  As the nephew
of the Ali Mami of Futa-Jaloon, Amah-de-bellah was to be received
as a prince of the blood.  At the same time the ample defences of
Gallegos were also made sufficiently plain.

The procession which now began to unroll itself through the gate
and to advance down the slope toward the residence seemed to the
unaccustomed eyes of the captain bizarre if not positively weird.
So strange were the aspects of the men and beasts who walked and
stalked in it that it might have been an embassy from another
planet, he thought.

A crowd of painted Mandingo barkers preceded it.  They were dressed
only in breech-clouts, but armed with the deadliest weapons of
noise; enormous oboes that shrieked and grunted like pigs in the
flames, cymbals, tom-toms, jar-drums, bull whistles, and gourd
rattles on long sticks.  These, and fifty other hellish devices,
produced an atmospheric disturbance that, added to the salvos from
the cannon, raised the wild-fowl from the marshes for miles around.
And out of this immense volume of sibilant, wheezy, roaring, and
brassy noises combined throbbed a continuous syncopated undertone
of drumming and rattling to which the mob of naked heralds advanced
shuffling and stamping; meanwhile howling out like a pack of
lyrical hyenas the surpassing power and generosity of their
approaching chief.  Those who could no longer howl, droned.

Amah-de-bellah himself now appeared mounted on a fly-bitten but
stalwart grey barb reduced to its own skeleton by having dined for
two weeks past on nothing but tropical moss.  The chief was
followed by a fat, black dervish on a vicious mule.  The holy man
held a whip in one hand and a huge Koran wrapped in a prayer rug in
the other.  Three of Amah-de-bellah's wives in long white veils in
which there were only eye-holes appeared next like ghosts riding
upon diminutive donkies.  These little asses, which continually
brayed and sobbed, were driven forward by thorn whips in the hands
of the harem attendants who took turns at beating them, although
themselves loaded down with great-pots, mats, vast umbrellas,
bundles of apparel, and hut furniture.  Commerce having thus at
once advertised itself with its usual modesty and exhibited its
veiled cause, its inevitable and necessary armed escort followed.

In this case it consisted of a guard of some fifty or more
fanatical Foulahs dressed in the white robes of peace and their own
skinny, black legs.  They rushed through the gate in a body, firing
matchlocks, whirling, shrieking, capering, and waving bright
scimitars in the air.  The hair of this jungle militia was in each
case frizzed-up into a kind of cock's comb dyed purple-red by a
delicate solution of iron, urine, and lime.  As they streamed after
their leader in a mimic mêlée they managed to confer on the word
"ferocious" a new and more sinister meaning.

All of them, however, and the people who had just preceded them,
were now brought together half-way down the slope, where Amah-de-
bellah had halted to await the rest of his caravan before advancing
in state to the veranda.  An interval of unexpected and
consequently dramatic silence ensued.

In the midst of this, without any prelude whatever, a long, dark,
glistening body commenced to crawl through the gateway as though a
legendary serpent were sliding into the stockade.  It really seemed
at some distance to be one body.  As it came nearer, however, it
was seen to be composed of hundreds of naked, human bodies rubbed
shiny for their approaching sale with palm oil and rancid butter.
In the sun they glittered like ebony scales.  Bamboo withes
stretched from one tight neck-fork to another bound them together
into one interminable, twisting line.  Soon the small forms of
children could be made out darkening the intervals between the
passing legs of this huge millepede as it wound down the slope.
Hovering about it, and along its flanks, were white-robed Arabs
with rhinoceros-hide whips.  An occasional report like a pistol-
shot from one of these instruments helped to keep the worm crawling
fairly rapidly.

Although the best of all his merchandise had thus arrived on its
own legs, Amah-de-bellah did not at once advance to the veranda.
He delayed for nearly half an hour while various minor chiefs and
forest traders, each accompanied by his own slaves, native wares,
and pandemonium, came through the gate.  The bulk of the caravan,
indeed, consisted of these people.

In the meantime Anthony and Captain Matanza sat solemnly and
quietly smoking cigars.

"It would, of course," remarked Anthony, lighting another, "be far
beneath the dignity of such potentates as ourselves even to notice
the fact that so small a thing as a caravan of a thousand souls has
arrived in our back yard.  It is like having a policy toward an
earthquake.  It is not even to be thought about till it announces
itself."

"The best people at home treat a revolution in the same way," said
Don Ruiz.  "Until it sets fire to their houses, or cuts off their
heads, it does not exist."

"Precisely.  In the same way we should lose caste if we seemed to
notice that Amah's people are here.  As yet he is only 'about to
arrive.'  Nevertheless, there is no objection to my men
distributing the gifts of welcome in advance--as I see you have
noticed.  These 'gifts' are carefully calculated.  They are really
part of the trading and will later on be returned in kind.  I leave
this part of the preliminaries to some of my own Arabs, who
estimate carefully what each one of these small traders has to
offer and welcome him accordingly.  The liberality of the trader is
judged by this earnest of his desire to trade.  Amah and I have not
exchanged gifts yet.  We will do that at the big dantica, or trade-
talk, that will shortly take place here.  But here they come!"

A renewed outburst of mind-sickening noise now shattered the
silence.  Aided by men with bull-whips, Amah could be seen riding
along the flank of his motley host licking it into what might pass
in Africa for a semblance of order.  A large cock-ostrich at the
rear of the column gave the most trouble and dodged about with such
gargantuan effeminacy and nervousness in his mincing strides that
Anthony and the captain were hard put to it to remain solemn.  At
last having settled all to his liking, including the ostrich, Amah
rode to the head of the procession and tossed his cloak in the air.
At this signal the whole howling host precipitated itself toward
the residence like a dark flood.

The space before the veranda on the far-side of the little moat was
soon dense with a hustling, black mob.  The numerous petty chiefs
thrust and elbowed each other trying to press forward.  Fights and
jabbering ensued.  But for a few minutes nothing could be heard on
the porch except the thunderous chanting of Amah-de-bellah's
barkers answered by Anthony's men; each side trying to outpraise
their respective masters till wind was exhausted.  Presently the
armed Foulahs in the centre faced outward, and by beating on the
bare ground with their musket butts succeeded finally in clearing a
semi-circle at the expense of numerous sore toes.  Silence, except
for the braying of donkeys and the squalls of babies, was at length
restored.  Amah and his dervish now advanced into the centre of the
cleared space, where a prayer rug was spread by the latter.  On
this the chief knelt facing Mecca and returned thanks for the safe
arrival of his caravan.  As he rose hundreds of voices insisted in
bastard Arabic that there was only one God and Mohammed was his
prophet.

The captain was now more than ever amazed by a scene which had
become somewhat familiar to Anthony.  Behind the thin line of red-
combed, white-robed Foulahs clustered a forest of dark faces made
monstrous by lip disks and rings in their noses and ears; rose a
mountainous landscape, tier upon tier of grass-wrapped elephant
tusks, roped boxes, bundles, and mat-covered bales.  A shimmer of
copper bracelets, torques, and arm bands together with spearheads
and polished muskets caught the sun and tossed it from point to
point.  Long, cigar-shaped bundles of damp banana leaves smoked
wispily upon the heads of the fire-bearers.  On the hillside
beyond, rows of yoked and shackled captives looked on apathetically.
A fetid smell like that of a neglected monkey cage mixed with the
pungent odour of burning leaves caused Don Ruiz to cough and puff
hastily at his cigar.  Weaving back and forth over the fuzzy heads
of the multitude, the chinless face of the ostrich peered insanely,
blinking with pink and inflamed lids.

Prayers finished, Amah-de-bellah took the Koran from its bearer and
held it to his forehead in token that all he was about to say was
true.  Gifts were now exchanged between him and Anthony.  The
Mohammedan received a fine Mexican saddle with evident pleasure;
Anthony a small goat's horn filled with gold dust.  He was amused
to note, as he hefted it, that what it contained was worth almost
exactly what the saddle had cost.

The preliminaries having been settled Anthony came forward, and
bidding Amah welcome with much ceremony, conducted him to his
sheepskin on the veranda.  Here the captain was introduced and
cordially met, for with a happy impulse he took his watch out of
his vest pocket and presented it to the mongo.  A heavy, gold
bracelet from the chief's arm left both parties extremely
satisfied.  Neleta now appeared with a small silver dish and from
this before the whole assembly the three men on the veranda ate
dried rice cakes dipped in salt.

One of Anthony's Foulahs now advanced to the edge of the porch and
announced that the powerful Master of Gallegos and the mighty Mongo
having eaten salt together--as all might see--Gallegos bade the
servants of the Mongo welcome.  Five bullocks and innumerable sheep
had been slaughtered and were roasting at the fires below, where
ample camping space for all was to be had.  By the blessing of
Allah, trade would begin this afternoon--at the firing of a gun.  In
the meantime let all depart, find quarters, and refresh themselves
at the superb feast provided by the matchless generosity of the
Master of Gallegos.  The usual tribute to monotheism and its prophet
proclaimed that the dantica was over.

The crowd broke and raced down the slope, every petty trader trying
to outdistance the others to a choice camping place.  These had
been so arranged as to lie under the muzzles of the cannon on the
hill and the guns of the ship.  The armed Arabs, the bearers, and
slaves followed at a more leisurely pace, leaving the three on the
veranda alone.  Neleta had already conducted the wives of Amah to a
hut in the courtyard, nicely furnished, and erected that morning
out of new mats.  Neither Anthony nor the captain looked at the
three veiled apparitions which passed them.  Presumably they did
not exist.

It was amusing to Don Ruiz to see--once all ceremonies were
concluded--how easily Anthony and Amah conducted themselves.  They
fell into a long and friendly talk assisted by one of the Foulahs
who acted interpreter.  Anthony's "Arabic" was by no means
satisfactory yet.  The trade jargon of the Grain Coast, indeed, was
a compound of Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, and Mandingo in which
the first predominated.  Fingers, knuckles, and toes supplied
arithmetic.

This was the third caravan which Amah had led to Gallegos.  Anthony
and he had entered into what amounted to a partnership based on a
general admiration for each other's resourcefulness and the mutual
advantages of co-operation.  Amah watched the inland trails
constantly and swept into his net all the small traders going to
the coast, in the meanwhile carrying on a holy war against the
heathen upon his uncle's borders.  In this way he was able to
gather together large caravans of both slaves and traders, offering
to the latter his "protection," and incidentally watching that they
did not skip off to trade at the establishments on the Grand
Sestris, Timbo, or elsewhere.  For this "protection" he levied a
tax.  But unlike other leaders of caravans he collected the tax and
no more.  On the whole everybody was satisfied.

Amah was very anxious to have Anthony come inland with trade goods
to Futa-Jaloon in order to supply his uncle with arms, ammunition,
and European merchandise directly.  He had promised Anthony
protection and an ample supply of slaves at home-prices, and he had
been pressing in his invitation on his last visit a year before.
On the present occasion he now renewed this request with the
information that his uncle had promised to proclaim an annual
market at his capital and not to invite any other European traders
for a period of three years.

After an hour's talk, in which all the details for the journey were
settled and an ample escort promised to Anthony whenever he should
ask for it, Anthony in turn promised Amah to visit him at Futa-
Jaloon when the next dry season should set in.  Greatly pleased at
having obtained consent to his cherished project and at the account
of the fine cargo of La Fortuna, Amah retired to his mat hut in the
courtyard.  The separate shelter prevented him from living under
the same roof with slaves and Christian dogs.  Here he partook of
his own rations and solaced himself in retirement with his wives.
The little court was full of his furniture, animals, and servants,
and Neleta was consternated for her flowers.

At half past two the boom of the gun announced that trade had
begun.  Anthony, Don Ruiz, and Amah-de-bellah betook themselves to
the water front below.

                            ----------

The swiftness and orderliness of trade had been considerably
accelerated at Gallegos by reaching an agreement beforehand with
the leaders of caravans as to the prices to be paid for various
kinds of goods.  This did away with endless chaffering and making
dantica with swarms of small traders over every ox hide and piece
of ivory.  Slaves were another matter.

As a caravan must be entertained at the expense of the establishment
until trade was over, time was dollars.

The barkers now went about among the fires and camp huts announcing
prices.  Ferdinando threw open the small trade-window of his
storeroom while Amah and Anthony sat just outside with a scales
between them.  Several Foulahs armed with whips kept back the half-
frantic mob that now pressed forward.  The province of Amah was,
ostensibly, to see that none of his followers suffered short weight
or measure, but at the same time he took care to deduct the caravan
tax from each trader's return as it was paid out.  The storeroom
now began both to fill and to empty itself rapidly.

Hides, beeswax, palm oil; ivory in large tusks, lumps, and small
teeth; gold dust, and baskets of rice were weighed or measured and
disappeared into Ferdinando's window while barkers distributed in
return cotton cloth, bars of tobacco, powder, salt, rum, trade
dollars, and great quantities of copper wire which would later
appear on the arms and legs of forest belles in massive coils and
ornaments.  Meanwhile the purchase of bullocks, sheep, goats, and
poultry went on about the fires.

Profitable as this petty trade was, it was minor compared to the
trade in man himself which was to follow.  It was soon disposed of
and the examination and barter for slaves began.

Under the porch-like structure covered by tarpaulins the small
slave traders--who as men of some importance and property assumed a
dignified mien--had squatted along the low bench provided for that
purpose like so many dark, heavy-lidded Buddhas.  A beverage
concocted of goat's milk, eggs, sugar and rum was now served out in
great quantities, to which, despite religion, the Mohammedans were
partial, calling it "milk-sweet."  A gong was struck, loiterers
were cleared away, and Ferdinando threw open his sample-room where
the best of his goods were now arranged in tempting display.  The
crowd of traders then filed through the room to see what was on
hand and to receive a customary good-will gift.  A large bale of
London "beavers," which had been included in La Fortuna's cargo by
error or chance, proved to be unexpectedly popular.  The majority
of the traders returned to their places under the tarpaulin in high
hats.  Even Brother François, who was always present at these sales
of human bodies, went aside with Captain Matanza to laugh.

Amah-de-bellah designated the turn of each trader, and as he did so
the man had his merchandise walked-in and lined-up before the
block.  Every slave as his turn came was cut loose from his fellows
and stepped up onto the big square stone.  The examination and
appraisal was carried on by two expert Foulahs under the eyes of
Anthony and Amah.

The inspections proceeded rapidly but meticulously.  The slaves
were stark naked, and from the crown of their head to their toe-
nails they were thoroughly appraised.  They were made to squat, to
get up, to lean over; to dance and to walk about.  They were asked
a few swift questions and the tones and intelligence of their
replies noted.  Their mouths were pulled open and their teeth
examined; the whites of their eyes; their pulses, and the colour
and texture of their skins.

The two Foulahs had reduced the proceeding to a swift and efficient
but varied ritual.  They were alert for every possible symptom of
disease.  A swelling, an unsoundness or a malformation was spotted
by them off-hand.  In particular they were on the watch for slaves
who had been doctored up for the occasion.  And there were a
hundred clever tricks in that black art.

The number of those rejected was small.  By this time it was known
that "painted horses" could not be sold at Gallegos.  Both the
unerring rejection of the unfit and the exposure of tricks by the
examiners were now the occasions for derisive laughter.  The
traders enjoyed it particularly when some well-known old rascal of
their number, or a newcomer, was nicely shown-up.

The plight of the rejected slave, however, was terrible.  The rage
and chagrin of his luckless owner was usually extreme, and, as the
property had been officially pronounced worthless, it had been
found necessary to take care of such cases after a special manner
at Gallegos to prevent sickening tragedies.  Unfortunately, this
arrangement was peculiar to Gallegos.

Indeed, the very worst that could happen to a slave was to be
rejected as unfit; the best, since he had already suffered the huge
misfortune of being sold or captured, was to please both his old
and new owners by being valuable.  For that reason nearly all of
those who had wit enough to appreciate their own predicament tried
to appear attractive on the block.

                            ----------

To Brother François, who, seated on a stool, viewed these sales
from the crack behind Ferdinando's door--since his presence in the
sales-porch gave mortal offence to the pious Mohammedans--the
barter of human bodies for the goods piled just behind him in the
sample-room was an experience of inexpressible pathos and agony.

It was not only that he believed that his Master had given His body
for these dark children of the forests and that they were truly the
sheep of His fold, but having been born where and when he had been,
Brother François understood the meaning of the word "liberty" in
both its practical and abstract sense.  It was, in fact, the
favourite word of his age.  Consequently, every one of these scenes
was, for him at least, a Calvary.  The perspiration ran down in his
sleeves.  Occasionally he wiped his palms on his now almost
transparent robe.  If it had not been that he also believed that
violence was always both wrong and futile he would have rushed out
as his ancestors had once done to die fighting in the midst of
overwhelming numbers of paynims.  But this belief and the glimpse
of a certain face before him kept him temporarily inactive.  The
face was Anthony's.

To most of the others present, including the slaves themselves, the
occasion of their barter was merely one of more than usual
emotional interest.  But not much more.  Passions of all kinds,
especially the passion of greed, were unleashed, it is true, and
everyone participated to some extent even if unconsciously in the
drama of the occasion.  For even the fate of a slave is the fate of
a man or woman, and therefore potentially dramatic.  Hence, there
was even among some of the traders themselves a dim, half-conscious
sense of the tragedy of it all.  A note of relief in their jovial
and too-hearty laughter showed this when some trivial comic
incident cropped up; when some fat man tripped ascending the block,
or a black houri wriggled under an appraising slap on the buttocks.
They proved to themselves how funny, how very humorous it was.
"How they have to laugh together," thought Brother François, "the
laughter of merchants--where everything is for sale in a sad, bad,
merry world--and 'we' are getting our little profit out of the
joke.  'We,' who know that men and women can be traded for things,
we practical men.  Laugh, brothers, laugh!  For laughter shows we
are such good-fellows after all.  Who better than we when we get
together?  Who shall impugn 'Us?'  Is it not custom, commerce, and
therefore fate immutable?

"How shall I explain my plan to those who believe in trading men
for things to call it profitable.  Yet even these savage traders
have some dim feeling that something is wrong somewhere.  They
laugh to balance the depressed inner scales.  Is there no one here
to whom I can appeal?  That young man there with the rigid face--
Anthony?"--thus Brother François sweating on his stool.

                            ----------

At first Anthony had also smiled; had tried to.  But he could no
longer do that.  At this game of human barter his features
registered what he wished he could feel about it, nothing at all.
In the final analysis he did not really care for the goods which
trade brought him.  He told himself he only cared for the mode of
living trade made possible.  There was something in that.  A great
deal, he insisted--but not so much after all, he knew.  Otherwise
he would not have insisted upon it to himself.  For even a mode of
life was only living, doing.  And it was action and not gain which
was his profit.  Perhaps, it was the sense of power, then?  Yes,
that was the masculine secret, deeper than love of women, or
friendship--or God.  That was what women were always curious about
and would like to have--and lost it in getting it.  Power is what a
man keeps for its own sake and not for what it will do for him.
Power he was determined he would trade for nothing at all, but he
would trade all things even men for it.  That was what he meant by
"getting things done."  Let them be done then!  He would identify
himself with the power that can act--anyhow in all directions.  It
was that kind of a man he would be.  Having was only incidental to
doing.

Therefore, his expression was much the same whether the slaves wept
or the traders laughed--the same no matter what went on.  As the
cause of both tragedy and comedy he remained calm in the centre of
both.  His words were fewer than ever now; only necessary ones to
get things done.  Consequently he was respected as a strong, silent
man by nearly everyone about him--who also feared him because they
did not know what he wanted for himself or how he thought or felt.
The nature instead of the amount of his price was unknown.  How
could they alter his will--what bribe?  None apparently.  Hence, he
made the rules for, and directed the game of life on the Rio Pongo
as the one who was mysteriously best fitted to do so, and would and
could.

Not that he stated all this to himself as so much philosophy.  It
was rather more largely a program of instinctive action into which
he had drifted after being launched in that direction as a "citizen
of the Western Hemisphere," where so many of the world currents and
the tides in the affairs of men between Europe, Africa, and America
were carrying him along.  His association with Brother François had
so far tended to confirm him in the opinion that even the "subjects
of God" could do nothing about it.  And one had to live as--to be a
man.  That was what Cibo had insisted upon.  Be practical.  And
Anthony had felt that Cibo was right.  There was only one thing
which kept Anthony from feeling entirely successful, practical,--he
could not entirely stifle his feelings.  During a slave-barter he
always became peculiarly aware of that.  Somehow this trading in
men in the sales-porch seemed to be the whole crux of the matter.

"If what I be depends upon what I do--and this is what is being
done!  Then?"

His feelings rose up against him.  It was all he could do even to
conceal them outwardly on the days of slave-barter.  He therefore
looked more than usually self-possessed and grim, calm and
determined.  Yet what a dry, fiery oven was heating within him.

For as the afternoon advanced, adding incident after incident, as
one purchased body after another stepped from the stone block to
the barracoons--Anthony's state of feeling became all but
unbearable.  He was now beholding, he knew very well, the inmost
core, the essence of doing things in order to get them done.  The
process was as naked to him as the slaves who stepped onto the
block.  Each one of them in fact personified it, and the effect of
the afternoon's procession was cumulative.  He was at once
fascinated and tortured.  What if his state of feeling should
prevail over his will and become his whole state of being?  What
would he DO then?  What would become of Gallegos?

The slow friction of his determination and his emotions turning in
different directions, turning, as it were, on the pivot of his
personality, twisted it, threatened to tear it apart; generated a
slowly mounting heat.  That heat was of necessity kept smothered
within from the time the trade-gun fired till the porch was
emptied.  The irritation of it crept slowly along his nerves out to
the ends of his toes and fingers.  His hands and feet felt dry, and
his mouth parched.  He would sometimes send for a drink.
Nevertheless, he would feel a mounting impulse to discharge this
nervous pressure in outbursts of anger at trivial mishaps; to wreak
vengeance on something or somebody outside him for his own
miserable state within.  But policy forbade that.  He must remain
calm and sober, the Master of Gallegos, beginning with himself.  By
evening he would have dark circles under his eyes where the lower
lids had set up a minute twitching.  Then suddenly something would
collapse within him; give way.  Even tobacco was no help now.  It
rather sickened him.  Going home up the hill he would suddenly feel
small, and cold.  A slight shaking as of a weak ague made his steps
a little uncertain.  And how tired he was!  The climate would get
him yet, damn it!  Neleta would be waiting too, damn her!

While a caravan was at Gallegos, on those nights, even Neleta was
no solace.  After a day of burning he was left cold with her at
night.  Last time Amah had been here it was worse than ever.  He
had dreamed his old madonna was smothering in that chest where she
was locked up.  Somehow he was in there too and struggling
desperately with her to get out.  The bed covers had slipped over
his head and Neleta had wakened him, still struggling.  It
infuriated him to be going back to dreams like that again.  Great
God!

                            ----------

To Brother François, watching from the crack behind Ferdinando's
door, the expression on Anthony's face and the scenes on the block
were complementary to each other.  He understood the cause of that
expression.  He had seen the will and the emotions at war before,
turning men either into jovial pigs or iron masks.  It was, he
felt, one of the commonest symptoms of the moral disease of the
world he knew.  How to make both the will and the feelings of a man
work together so they shall both feel at ease at what he is doing--
how to be a whole man?  "What to do, and what not to do, in order
to be?"  That was his question.  "Or it might be--it might also be,
what not to have in order to be," he told himself.  There was only
one to whom he could look for perfect direction in how to be a
whole man, he had found.  And because he had found abundant life in
that direction, despite what might happen to the carcass of him, he
desired to share it and re-explain it by living it.  Seemingly the
most passive person at Gallegos, Brother François was in reality
one of the few people in the Western World who had positively
identified himself with the power to be.

The truth was that this extraordinary man did not feel that through
the crack of the door in Africa he was looking on at anything
unusual.  The slice of life he saw there seemed to him, although
presented in primitive and uncomplicated terms, to be quite an
ordinary one.  It was merely another case of where sympathy between
men had become inoperative because greed for the possession of
things and profit at the expense of others had reduced part of the
population to slavery.  In a place where things were valued more
than men it was inevitable, he saw, that men should be reduced to
the state of being less valuable than things.  In that case, what
more natural than that some men, those who could not help
themselves, should actually be traded for things?  "Sambo for three
kegs of rum and an ell of cloth," he thought, imagining himself to
be a trader.  "My helpless brother for my own happiness!  And
certainly with three kegs of rum--and an ell of cloth, certainly I
shall be happy.  Shall I not be rich and envied? . . .

"But how does this differ from the universal commerce of the world
for personal profit?  Is it not all a trading of my brother for an
ell of cloth or some more intoxicating substance?  Did not my own
father trade the bodies of his serfs for his ease, for his fine
clothes and court career, his library and his château?"

And how many merchants and bankers and statesmen were doing the
same thing.  Because their system was more complex was it
essentially different?  No.  What he saw here, if it differed at
all, differed in degree and not in kind, he told himself.

Perhaps, this door slit in Africa gave a really more penetrating
and genuine view of the system than if the door had been slightly
ajar and he seated on a stool behind it somewhere else.  For here
the slaves were called "slaves" and the things for which they were
expended were piled up in Ferdinando's sample-room all about him.
It was naked men for naked things, and the traders out there
bidding openly.

The cure for all this Brother François believed was only to be
brought about by awakening sympathy in the hearts of men, man by
man.  And there was only one way of doing that, he thought--by
presenting them with the opposite example of the way of his Master
and letting them see it work.  Words would not do; a billion
sermons had been preached since St. Paul began.  Theories and
philosophic concepts died because men could not or did not embody
them.  Only the example itself, the way of his Master embodied in a
man's life might avail.

In his humble and often faltering way, by the help of prayer and by
a hard-won sense of communion in which he sometimes seemed to touch
the fingers of Christ himself, Brother François stumbled blindly,
sometimes mistakenly, but always sincerely and constantly, along
the ineffably difficult way of being an exemplar.

If he sweated and sometimes wept as he looked through the crack of
the door at the world working for its own undoing, while at the
same time he felt the cold and faintly puzzled, but hostile eyes of
Ferdinando fixed upon the middle of his back, it was nothing new
and surprising to him.  Nothing was here which by the unexpected
shock of it could cause him to deliver himself over to his emotion
and nerves and break out in a desperate but futile demonstration.
The body-changers he knew could not be driven from the temple with
their own whips--if at all.  He had simply come to regard Gallegos,
and his own little garden-valley in particular, as a kind of
Gethsemane.  It was a place where after much agony he prayed and
waited, sure of the glory of failure--meanwhile doing what good he
might according to his plan.

At Gallegos this plan consisted in buying up, for whatever he could
get together or beg, the slaves rejected on the block; nursing the
sick ones till they died; or keeping the crippled and maimed in his
garden where their light labours sufficed in that climate to
support the little community.  A few of these unfortunates he had
even been able to rehabilitate completely, but not many.  Most of
them soon came to rest in the ever-growing graveyard.  In
particular, however, Brother François concerned himself with
children.

Many an exhausted black child, unable to follow the caravan any
longer, who had seen the long file in which its mother was yoked
disappear into the shades of the forest, now owed its existence to
him.  Lying in the forest waiting for darkness and the inevitable
end, dumb with exhaustion and fear, it had heard the leaves rustle,
screamed--and found itself in the arms of the good shepherd of
Gallegos.

"For I also," said Brother François, "hunt like a lion, and do seek
my meat from God."

He was followed upon these not infrequent man-hunts along the
trails of caravans by an old Susu warrior wise in forest ways whom
he had cared for till he could wield a spear again, and by a woman
he had once come across in a raided village with her breasts cut
off.  Yet because of that she was now the best of several nurses in
the cluster of beehive huts in the little valley; fierce and
fearless in her work of mercy.  On her expeditions into the forest
with Brother François and his guide she bore a basket on her back
to carry back the living meat which the leopards had not yet found.

What extra goods and help he needed to carry out his plans in the
valley, Brother François had always asked from Anthony.  It was
given to him without question, usually by a written order on
Ferdinando.

The little settlement attracted small notice and few visitors of
any kind.  There was nothing to be had by going there.  There were
orders against anyone disturbing it, and it remained a kind of
enclave of peace, an imperium in inferno, for the rescued
unfortunates and children who dwelt there.  In a few years by a
kind of natural evolution it had developed a self-sufficient
economy which was at once primitive, native, early Christian and
communistic.  Beyond a few iron tools, some wine for himself and
his sacrament, a little cloth, flour, and medicines, Brother
François asked nothing more than the privilege of being let alone.
The only opposition he met with was from Ferdinando, and this was
latent rather than active.

The truth is, that small as was the charity the priest required,
the method of charging it on the books puzzled Ferdinando.  The
half-breed, although he had acquired most of the outward manners of
civilization as a youth in Spain, had in reality only one vital
touch with it.  It was the very primitive and unemotional one of
commercial bookkeeping.  Except for his clothes, his European
manners, and his always perfectly kept books, Ferdinando was a
savage.  He did not know to what account to charge the small
sundries issued from time to time to Brother François.  It worried
him greatly.  He was enormously chagrined at finally having to ask
Anthony about it.  The latter's ironical suggestion that he should
start a new page headed "Losses by Acts of God and the Public
Enemy" only confused him the more.  When he came to balance his
books he had no idea how to handle a comparatively small but ever-
growing account which seemed to be a debit with no possible credit
to balance it.  How could one liquidate something which was
perpetually suspensory and ever increasing?  An element of
confusion was thus introduced into the fatuous order of
Ferdinando's confused mental world.  It finally became a rough
pebble in his mental shoe.  Shift it as he might, he could not get
rid of it.  By the spring of 1799 it had grown to the lump size of
126 pounds three shillings and sixpence.  The factor determined
that he would some time balance his books and show profit.  He had
a scheme.  As yet he had not said anything about it to Anthony.  It
could wait.  The charge went into "Accounts Temporarily Suspended."
It was impossible for even Brother François to guess that in so
simple a fact as that lay the Nemesis of his quiet valley.  He
continued to receive from time to time certain small benefits.

Small as this help was it had, nevertheless, enabled the monk to
accomplish much more than would otherwise have been possible.  And
it was a constant indication to him that Anthony had not altogether
succeeded in suppressing a part of himself which Brother François
still had hopes of resurrecting as the whole man.  During the three
years he had spent with Anthony at Gallegos he had become intensely
aware of the bitter struggle going on in the soul of a young friend
over whom from their first meeting his own spirit had yearned.  In
that time their intimacy, for the most part a rather silent one,
had, despite the frequent pain of it, deepened.  Nor could Brother
François forget the cabin of the Ariostatica.

There were a thousand little things that showed that this was so.
The priest could not make up his mind to abandon Anthony.  If he
left Gallegos, as he had often considered doing, it seemed to him
that he would be writing over its gate the hopeless inscription.
And within those gates dwelt a beloved friend.  "Not lost, not
lost," he whispered, watching him.

Alone among the many Europeans who now came and went on the Rio
Pongo, the monk was the only one cultivated and sensitive enough to
understand the tragic irony in Anthony's fate--that tendency in
affairs to enrich with things men who do not care for them.
Anthony, he saw, might well become one of those characters
abandoned by God and insulated from man who must find in the mere
conduct of business at once their rich material reward and their
utter spiritual poverty.

The face of Anthony reminded him now, while he stood by watching
the proceedings on the slave-block, of the features of several
other hopeful young men he had once known.  Men whom he had seen in
later manhood metamorphosed, or disguised to be great merchants,
financiers, subtle priests, or ministers of state.  What was once
living and mobile in their expressions had become firm and fixed;
what was formerly the strength of sweetness had become the power of
sternness.  Even now he felt that an appeal for mercy might be
answered from Anthony's lips by a negative good reason or put off
for expediency's dear sake.  The unconscious smile that had once
lurked on his mouth like sunlight striking through an open door had
vanished.  The door was tightly shut.  Such faces Brother François
knew could only be relaxed by a stroke of God--or the guillotine.
He prayed for the stroke, and yet, because he loved the man for
whom he prayed, he would avert it.  He closed his eyes.

But despite many memories and the thoughts which thronged upon him
out of the past, there was in this present scene before him a
purely incidental and very human fascination to which the monk was
thoroughly alive.  He would open his eyes again and lean forward
peering through the crack of the door.

Just over the block a section of the tarpaulin had been removed and
the light streamed down in a brilliant slant of white radiance on
the black bodies of the slaves as they stepped up one after another
while the afternoon wore on.  It was curious to see how under the
necessity of selling themselves for as high a price as possible
basic types of character emerged and all else vanished.  The
coquettish woman was now all smiles, even her muscles flinched
under the prodding fingers of the indifferent appraisers in an
alluring and half-playful way.  The frightened young girl seemed to
know now that virginity was her chief asset and trembled for her
modesty as touchingly as she could.  Youths and boys danced and
shouted to show how gay and active they were.  The notoriously
fecund Gbandi women stood huge and cow-like, as if ready to receive
whatever burdens were about to be laid within or upon them.
Mandingos, who made the most prized house servants in Havana, were
already compliant, a little furtive and too obsequious; ready to
answer even a painful whack with a laugh.  Mothers clung to their
babies apprehensively.  It was found easier to let them hold them
while they mounted the block where they were indifferent to all but
the child on the breast.  Even the Foulahs hesitated to waken the
tiger in them by handling the baby.  The very young trembled,
scared by something new.  The naked, sullen warrior looked about
him still using his last weapon, silent contempt.  In Africa, as
elsewhere, maternity and martial honour were the only things which
would not sell themselves, which rose supreme to all personal
misfortune.  Warriors Anthony occasionally secured for his personal
force on the plantation.  He bound them to him by giving them
weapons and their freedom.  When he spoke with them he felt at ease
again.

As the sun neared the edge of the western jungle and its level rays
struck with sudden revelation along the line of squatting traders
still waiting for their turns under the tarpaulin, Brother François
rose, and gathering up two unfortunates who were his for a little
tobacco and powder, led them uphill to his valley.  One of them was
an oldish man who had proved to be nearly blind and the other an
emaciated girl tottering with weakness.  The mercy which had
overtaken them they could not as yet comprehend.  The sounds of
twilight happiness in the little valley only bewildered them, for
they had forgotten the kind of sound that accompanies peace and
contentment.  What the bell meant they had yet to learn.

                            ----------

In the sales-porch the last batches for the day were being rapidly
worked off.  The amount due a trader was written on a chit by
Anthony and given to him.  A duplicate went to Ferdinando.  His
storeroom was kept open till late at night paying off in goods.
Already the lanterns were lit there and the bales coming down from
the lofts.  A sunset gun put an end to the day's proceedings.  The
last slaves were led off to the barracoons and the merchants
returned to their tents and huts.  Anthony and Amah-de-bellah
climbed to the house on the hill as twilight was falling.

While he stood alone on the veranda that night after supper,
Anthony told himself he had no cause to be dissatisfied.  The trade
had gone well.  He had also struck a good bargain with Amah for the
bulk of the slaves in the caravan.  La Fortuna could sail soon now,
loaded down.  From the courtyard came the weird wailing of some
outlandish wind instrument in Amah's huts.  It irritated him
greatly.  He could also hear the wild rejoicings about the camp
fires below.  They were just over the edge of the hill but the red
light of them beat up into the sky.  The fog-wraith over the river
reflected it back in a pulsing glow.  If the drumming could only be
stopped for tonight!  Tonight he was tired.

He was always tired after a day like this; depressed.  He hated
himself.  His face which had been so stern and fixed all day worked
in the darkness.  He was glad there was no one there to see him.
He shivered.  He felt as if he had been listening to a perfect
babble of reproachful voices for hours, and that they were right.
Perhaps after all he could not become what he had set out to be.
He leaned on the railing gazing at the lights on the ship in the
harbour.  The red light in the fog flickered as the fires waned and
leaped.  The hill fell away so steeply at night!  It seemed
suddenly as if he stood close to an abyss, the edge of the world.
Pandemonium was at the bottom.  The drums drummed and drummed and
drummed.  He was going to fall and he was right on the edge now.
"God . . .  I AM falling.  Ah--eeee . . ."

"Neleta!"

Twice before she had heard him cry out that way.  She was with him
in an instant, soothing him and reassuring him.  She felt sure
someone had bewitched him and was trying to steal his soul.  The
witch-doctors often did that.  She had seen the blacks dying when
their souls were stolen.  They looked strong but they just went out
and died in a few days for no reason at all.  She would see her old
aunt at Bangalang about this although Ferdinando had long forbidden
her to go there.

Perhaps it was only a touch of the fever!

But he looked so different tonight as she mixed him a strong drink
that she felt uneasy.  She put her arms around him and held him
closely to her in bed.  Yet she did not seem to possess him.  When
the moon rose she raised the net a little to look at him.  His face
was much younger now.  It was not like the face of the Master of
Gallegos.  It was not the face of the man she knew at all!

"Madre!"  Ferdinando or not, she would certainly see Aunt Ungah
about this.  After all her mother's people did know a thing or two!

Outside in the courtyard the wailing oboe still went on as if
someone had charmed a snake out of its basket and was afraid to
leave-off playing.




CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

THE VISION OF LIGHT


Ferdinando's books promised to show a startling profit in the
exchange of La Fortuna's cargo for the merchandise of Amah's
caravan.  There were three hundred and twenty-eight slaves in the
barracoons at Gallegos, and down-river Mongo Tom had unexpectedly
kicked in with forty more.  The ship was to pick them up on her way
out.  But she could not carry all of these people at once without
undue risk from plague and British privateers.  Anthony therefore
determined to split her cargo, leaving about a third of the number
to wait for the Ariostatica, which was expected back again in a
month or so.  Don Ruiz grumbled a good deal at seeing his profits
cut but was too well satisfied on the whole to be angry.

Still, all this was embarrassment of riches at worst, and the
entirely unsentimental Ferdinando could not understand why the
Master of Gallegos continued to look disgruntled while he studied
his factor's statement showing the flourishing state of their
tangible affairs.  The half-breed took a profound satisfaction in
it.  He had, in fact, done not a little toward bringing it about.
Besides, his own profit on head-money was considerable.

"Three hundred twenty-eight plus forty equals three hundred sixty-
eight dollars," he told himself.  He wished Anthony would ship the
whole batch on La Fortuna.

"When this cargo is turned into gold and bills of exchange at
Havana, señor . . ."  he pointed out.  But he received only a
lacklustre look.

"You have done very well, Ferdinando--I suppose," Anthony said
finally--and closed the big ledger with a bang.

"As Amah is always saying, 'It is written,'" he thought.
"Mohammedans seem to get both justification and comfort in that.
'It is written!'"  He glanced at the columns of Ferdinando's
meticulous figures again, and stalked out of the warehouse office
in a cloudy mood.

For Anthony found no comfort in the statement of his "profit."
This time, even after the departure of the caravan, his fit of
glumness had lasted.

The various small traders had departed early, disappearing into the
fathomless forest on the far-side of the stockade, silently, and
with no farewells.  In the morning their fires would be ashes and
they were gone.  Now they had all left but it made little
difference.  By day the heat and the silence that lay on the place
seemed intolerable.  Yet the wailing of the flute in Amah's hut at
night was even worse.

Amah and his three wives had lingered on in the courtyard.  At last
he left with a final "feu de joie" from all fifty of his Foulahs'
muskets; with gifts, and an urgent reminder to Anthony of his
promise to visit Futa-Jaloon.  At least it was a relief to get rid
of the flute, Anthony felt.  Neleta had the courtyard replanted.
She invited Don Ruiz up to dinner every night now in order to cheer
up Anthony about whom she was much worried.  He had somehow slipped
away from her.  Finally, she suggested a fishing expedition to the
barrier reefs.

He caught at the idea eagerly.  He was tired of Gallegos, he told
himself.  Neleta was right.  What he wanted was a change.  He would
arrange to go down-river on La Fortuna and stay at the out-islands
till the rains began--a week or two at most.  Some of the Krus
could come with him.  The clean sand and open sea were just what he
needed.  And it would soon be clouding up now.  A good drench of
fresh air untainted by the forest--sunlight!  Bueno!

Now that it seemed as if he too were going with the ship Anthony
began to press La Fortuna's departure with something of his old
zeal.  Ten days in barracoons had already done wonders for the
slaves in resting them up after their long march to the coast.
Most of them had begun to look sleek and even contented.  There was
not only lots of food but Ferdinando saw to it that there was also
drumming and dancing.  He held a dantica and told them about the
happy lot ahead of them in Cuba.  There was a great snapping of
fingers over that.  No sickness had developed.  So far so good.

On the day before the ship's departure, which was always one of
great feasting, the head of every man, woman, and child was shaved
smooth.  Finger-nails were pared down to the quick to prevent
scratching when the inevitable fights for sleeping room should take
place aboard ship.  La Fortuna took in her last water cask.  Lights
were doused early in the barracoons and silence rigidly enforced.
At the first grey of dawn the transfer to the ship began.

The slaves were taken out by batches of ten in boats and canoes.
As they stepped on the deck they were stripped of every rag; of
even the smallest article they might still possess.  Every bead and
the tiniest fetish and charm went overboard.  Buckets of water were
then dashed over them and they were mercilessly scrubbed by a gang
of Mandingo boys who enjoyed their job immensely and who were more
vigorous than gentle.  The gangs were now marched forward and their
shackles struck from them while they dried off and shivered.  Cries
and lamentations whether from children or adults were ruthlessly
suppressed.  The work proceeded with the greatest order and
dispatch.

Every slave was made to wash his mouth out with vinegar.  As each
approached the hatchway he was seized by a gang of tattooers,
thrown over a spare spar and had three white dots tattooed on his
back.  This was the Gallegos mark which had been substituted for
branding with a hot iron.  It was also, as a matter of fact,
indelible, and the ancient way of marking slaves on the Grain
Coast.  But there was more trouble over this proceeding than
anything else.  Many of the people as they were stretched over the
spar thought the end had come.  It required the attention of a
stripling armed with a large paddle both to stimulate and to quiet
them.  At this task the boy was an artist.

The slaves were next separated and led below.  Whip in hand the
mates and boatswains superintended the stowing of the cargo.  The
women were stowed on the starboard side of the ship facing forward;
the men on the port side facing aft.  All lay with their heads in
each other's laps and on their right sides as this was supposed to
favour the action of the heart.  A clear space along the centre of
the deck was kept open for the guards and for other necessary
passing to and fro.

Between-decks the ship had been scrupulously cleared of every loose
article from stem to stern.  Wherever possible even the bulkheads
had been removed.  Short of pulling up a plank or ripping out one
of the ship's timbers from its bolts, there was literally not a
single article in the hold of La Fortuna that could serve the
slaves as a weapon of any kind.  Small reed canes were served out
to certain chosen trusties, each one of whom was put in charge of a
gang of ten and held responsible for their discipline.  The reward
for this service was a little tobacco and an old, white shirt that
served to distinguish these "mess-leaders," as they were called,
from the black, naked mass of their fellows; a mass that now
rapidly filled the long decks of the ship from end to end.

Into the dark cavern of the ship's hold fell here and there streams
of pale daylight down the open hatches, each barred with a heavy
iron grating against which a lion might have hurled himself in
vain.

About these apertures, that served for both egress and ventilation,
black faces and forms stood out in startling silhouette and ranged
back, growing dimmer row after row until ebony blent with the
darkness.  In the remoter parts of this floating cave only the
flash of eyeballs and white teeth could be seen or it was flecked
here and there by the light shirts of the mess-leaders.  Between-
decks the slaves squatted by day or lay by night during the entire
voyage until they wore the planks smooth and greasy.  When the
weather permitted, and if they seemed docile, meals and certain
periods of exercise on deck were allowed.

Outbursts, or infractions of sanitary rules, quarrels or
lamentations were promptly visited either by the canes of the mess-
leaders or by the whips of the overseers.  For the furiously
recalcitrant or rebelliously sullen there were irons, and the deep,
solitary darkness of the regions of rats and bilge-water below.  It
was an absolute rule that no fire whether for lantern or tobacco
could ever be taken below.  So their nights were spent in pitch
darkness when not even the overseers ventured amongst them, and
their days in deep gloom.

Thus even before she left the anchorage at Bangalang the 'tween-
decks of La Fortuna, like every other slaver, had taken on for her
unwilling passengers all the aspects of a troubled, grotesque dream
in the darkness from which there is no escape even by waking.

The first effect upon coming aboard was to reduce even the African
temperament to silence.  A few women sat rocking on their hunkers
and crooning.  Here and there a deep guttural in some forest
dialect disturbed the gloom among the men.

Presently the ship cast off from her buoy and began to slip
downstream with the ebb tide.  The angles of light streaming down
the hatches shifted slightly.  The helm creaked.  The shock of the
saluting cannon jarred the ship and made everybody start.  One at a
time dark shadows began to slip forward to the latrines at the bow
and to return.  This traffic of nature was an incessant one.  It
was both enforced and restrained by the negro overseers with a cat-
o'-nine-tails lashed to their wrists, men who were known as the
"masters-of-the-hold."  Two of these were always on watch and were
regularly relieved.

Anthony stood on the quarter-deck with the captain while the
transfer was taking place, explaining and hastening the process.
Matters had gone very smoothly.  It was just after sunrise when the
ship cast loose and began to drift down the river, slowly at first,
but gathering way as the drag of the ebb became heavier.  Juan was
acting as pilot.  He knew every trick of the Rio Pongo now.  As
they doubled the long point that jutted out between Gallegos and
Bangalang, and La Fortuna was swept along by the full force of the
midstream current, Anthony could no longer conceal his elation that
seemed to grow in proportion as Gallegos was left behind.

When at last the palms on the point finally shut out the barracoons
and the residence a load seemed to have dropped from a basket that
had been pressing his head down between his shoulders.  He was
amazed at his own cheerfulness.  Don Ruiz also looked at him with
surprise.  He had not up until then met the free-and-easy young man
to whom he now found himself talking.

They went into the stern cabin of the ship and discussed an
excellent breakfast.  The stern windows of this high, Spanish-built
vessel were thrown wide open.  It was like floating along in a
wide, glass house well above the water.  They could look for miles
over the low islands and flat brown-coiling reaches of the river.
The morning sun touched the brass cabin lamps and the captain's
silver table-plate till it glittered.  Don Ruiz had a good steward
and drank a mixture of Java and Mocha that was heartening.  The
cabin was cool and airy.  Anthony looked about him at the neat
panelling and ship's furniture.  It was pleasant to be in touch
with civilization again.  In the forms of things in the cabin all
of Europe seemed to be concentrated.  Suddenly he was at home
again.

Don Ruiz enjoyed being host.  He talked engagingly of the dangers
and fascination of travelling in Spain.  With Anthony he forgot La
Fortuna--and her cargo.  Caramba!  This señor inglés was a
caballero!  One could afford to know him.  "More coffee, Pedro."
Anthony wished he too were going on to Havana and said so.  In the
grand Castilian manner he found himself presented with the ship and
entreated to remain on board as a perpetual passenger and owner.
It was hard not to accept.

They were passing Bangalang now.  From the beach below the little
fisher huts on stilts half a dozen canoes put off and raced past
the ship making for Mongo Tom's.  They were going to bring the rest
of the slaves aboard there.  Half an hour later the ship was lying-
to off the Mongo's establishment while the canoes plied back and
forth rapidly.  A noise like a porpoise breathing announced that
Mongo Tom was ascending the ship's side.  Loud, complaining rumbles
in a husky voice went on for some time on deck.

"He wants a salute fired," said Anthony listening.  The voice was
curiously exasperating.

"Come down," shouted Don Ruiz at last impatiently.

He was answered by an elephantine grunt.  Something not entirely
human appeared at the cabin door.  The presence which there heaved
itself into view was, in every sense of the word, overpowering.

Two large, negroid feet with projecting heels and long yellow toe-
nails, only one of which extremities was wrapped in a frayed rice-
straw sandal, provided a seemingly insufficient support for the
majestic belly that projected above and beyond them in a cosmic
periphery.  From this hung down in indescribably greasy and yellow
folds what had once (circa 1780) been a pair of white canvas
trousers.  But the action of time had long ago reduced these bracæ
to a state of filthy fluidity that Lazarus himself might have been
shy to own.  Furthermore, they were suspended from a startlingly
clean and brand-new piece of shiny Manila hemp tied in the middle
with a bud-like knot.  There was something shocking about this
sartorial item.  It seemed to mark the too cute, imaginary
equatorial belt of a Jovian planet that might laugh and discard it
at any moment.  It was artificial and unnatural.  To those who had
to talk with its owner for any length of time it was an irritation
rather than a comfort that the implied catastrophe which was always
imminent never finally occurred.

Indeed, it was difficult for the eye to pass much above the central
boundary of this human mass, for immediately above the small belt-
knot as if put there to remind the onlooker of what it had once
been like in infancy, was the navel of Mongo Tom now expanded by
the general distortion of his girth into the exact semblance of a
large, alert-looking ear.

It was to this, much to Anthony's amusement and his own dismay,
that Captain Matanza found himself addressing his remarks in too-
loud a voice while the Mongo lowered himself into a well-stayed
chair.  A wrinkling of the man's paunch in the vicinity of its ear
seemed to reply.

"Dios," said Captain Matanza looking at Anthony as if to ask, "Can
this be possible?"--"Have a cigar?"

"Carried nem con," said the presence whose portliness seemed
already to have made him the chairman of the little meeting in the
cabin.  He banged his fist on the table so that all the dishes
jumped . . .

"That is to say in Spanish, señor captain, 'there is no dissent
from your not unexpected proposal.'"

Don Ruiz bowed--to the ear apparently--and Anthony burst into a
roar of laughter.  Both of the others looked at him in surprise.
The captain's face flushed.  What might have been meant either for
a scowl or a smile wrinkled the fat, moonlike countenance of the
slaver as if a gelatin pastry had registered an earth-tremor that
had passed on leaving the pie intact.

He stuck the cigar in his mouth and lit it, exhaling smoke in a
series of whirling rings.  Out of this half-invisible megaphone the
voice of an habitual drunkard issued as though at a considerable
distance.

"Now he looks like a ham with a single clove driven into it,"
thought Anthony.  The voice continued in curiously correct English
as if it were wound up and running down.

"My father, sir, had two ambitions: the first was to circulate the
scriptures amongst the natives of these coasts, and the second to
introduce them to the noble amenities of parliamentary procedure.
It was he who once described their internecine bickerings as both
unreasonable and unnecessary.  In order to further his laudable
ambitions he allied himself with a princess of the Susus.  I am the
offspring of that union.  My father, sir, was an English doctor of
divinity."

"So I have heard some thirty times before," interrupted Anthony.
The Mongo emitted a number of rings.  Having re-created his
speaking trumpet he paid no attention to Anthony but went on.

"I have devoted myself to more concrete and practicable things,"
the voice did not seem now to belong to anyone at all.  It was both
debauched and cultivated--"With the exception of four years spent
in England in clerical company, as the pet of bishops in fact,
during which time I translated the Gospel according to St. Luke
into Susu, I have busied myself here with transferring the
benighted denizens of these forests to Christian lands where the
light of the gospel could shine with unadulterated fervour upon
'em.  This, in my very humble estimation, is preferable to sowing
seed among the tares in partibus infidelum."

Anthony had had to listen to this talk a number of times before.
Even the cadences he knew had been inherited from the Mongo's
father, a renegade missionary.  It was now only a fine formula, a
kind of dantica by which the Mongo felt he established himself with
white men as a respectable character.  One corner of the mouth now
lapsed and a succession of smoke rings emerged travelling at great
speed.

"The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and
His Grace of Canterbury have honoured me . . ."

"The captain does not understand English, Tommy," shouted Anthony.

The face with the cigar suddenly smoothed out and collapsed into a
kind of indeterminate human landscape down which the sweat poured
in copious streams.

"For Christ's sake, then, give me a glass of grog," it said.

The request having been complied with, and the bottle left on the
table, the rest of the interview went on in Spanish for the benefit
of the captain.

Don Ruiz thought he had never seen such a man as the Mongo.  His
coat, evidently donned for the occasion, stretched only half-way
across his shirtless chest.  But in the middle area between, nature
had supplied a frill in the form of a hirsute ridge that stretched
from just above the umbilical ear to the region below the neck.
Here the hair became exceedingly luxuriant and very red.  It was
also hard to tell whether the man suffered from elephantiasis or
was just enormously fat.  Even the top of his head was fat.  The
hair there had retreated into a number of puffy places like small,
wooded islands, and the inhabitants of this curious archipelago
could occasionally be glimpsed passing in a leisurely manner from
one island covert to another.  Mongo Tom stunk like a dead fish in
August, and no one on the Rio Pongo could recall what his colour
had been in early youth.  It was now a sort of yellow-mahogany
darkened by tobacco smoke.

His mind, however, when not totally obscured by drink, was
exceedingly clear about all his personal affairs.  This obscene
mountain could both boast and bargain.  It took as keen a half-hour
of dickering as Don Ruiz, who was a sharp man himself, had ever
listened to, before Anthony could complete the bargain for the
forty slaves which the Mongo had brought aboard.  In the process of
this they went on deck again and looked over the new arrivals.

"Sink me if they ain't as likely a flock of bucks and lasses as
you're likely to find," insisted the Mongo.  "'Ary a one over
twenty-five.  The pick of three villages up the Sestris.  Fine
gels!  I'd like to try 'em out myself."  He gave a throaty chuckle.
"Now what do you give for the lot?  What d-ye offer, Mr. Adverse?
What!"

He was finally lowered over the side clutching the price in his
huge, fat paw.  Anthony and the captain watched him being ferried
ashore as the ship again cast loose and began drifting toward the
sea.

"How long do you suppose you have to be in Africa to get like
that?" said Anthony.

Don Ruiz laughed.  "Don't worry, señor.  Several thousand
generations on your mother's side at least, it seems."

Anthony shook his head.  He had already thought of THAT.

"I must get out of this soon," he muttered.  He looked forward to a
glimpse of the open sea eagerly.  He hoped Neleta would not have
any children.  It was curious that she didn't.  He wondered about
it.  For three hours they twisted and drifted around the curves
through the jungle where the Ariostatica had once battled her way
going up.  It was all sadly familiar now.

This was his fourth trip to the coast.  The crocodiles did not seem
to have moved.  He shot at one from the deck and missed.  The women
with babies who were kept on deck in the bows cried out.  Suddenly
it began to get cooler; suddenly he could hear the whisper of the
sea.  La Fortuna slid down the last, straight, canal-like reach of
the Rio Pongo in the grip of the strong ebb and flung herself free
of the forest.

Across the beautiful, blue lagoons between the islands gulls were
flying.  Green and white glints with fiery opal hearts gleamed far
and near in the water as the clouds shifted.  There was a low mist
on the other side of the islands where the surf pounded, a stiff
salt breeze, white caps far out.  Look at the huge roller coming in
over the bar!  Oh, what a glorious clean-washed world!  Life again,
life!

He gave a glad cry that brought Juan running from the wheel.  He
raced back again before the ship could yaw, having caught the
infection of joy himself from Anthony.  He set his hat on his head
jauntily like the Juan of old times and gayly gave orders to set
the jibs.  The sound of the surf grew louder and louder as they
drew slowly across the broad lagoon.

The first batches of slaves came on deck and sat down about a
kettle to eat.  It was just ten o'clock then.  They were made to
say a brief Latin grace.  They would learn it soon.  A bucket of
salt water was passed into which they dipped their hands.  A kid of
farina and beans was placed before each gang.  At a motion from a
leader they dipped their hands into the food together; at another
signal they swallowed.  Attempts to snatch or to avoid eating
brought the canes into use.  All appetites were assumed to be the
same.  Both men and women were now given a whiff or two on a pipe
passed about rapidly.  They clapped hands, shouted "Viva la
Habana," and having received a pint of water apiece were sent back
into the hold again.

"Do not let too many at a time come on deck, captain," advised
Anthony.  "Wait till you find out their temper."

Don Ruiz nodded.  He was anxious now as the ship was rapidly
approaching the narrow inlet.  Anthony turned to hasten the
preparations of the Kru boys who were going to take him and Juan
ashore.  His light boat which could be paddled was slung out ready
to lower.  As usual a great moiling and bubbling of sand and muddy
water was going on in the cut through the barrier reef.  The pace
of the ship increased.  Suddenly La Fortuna was seized by the
violent current whirling through the tidal gulf and spewed out into
the open sea beyond.  She stood shivering a moment.  Then her jibs
filled again.

"You have her, captain," shouted Anthony.  "Adiós.  Come on, Juan!"

The boat was lowered with a rush and cast loose.  For a moment the
black bulk of the ship with her blind ports loomed hugely above
them.  Then came a great whispering mound of green water.  As the
boat rose the ship seemed to sink.  Through her wooden walls
Anthony heard a long muffled groan, the crack of whips . . . then
he was swept landward, boiling in on the crest of the mile-long
roller with the backs of the Kru boys before him bending
frantically to the paddles.  Juan lay back on the stern looking up
at the sky ecstatically.  The pace was terrific now.  Suddenly they
were hurled forward into a smother of foam.  The boys leaped out
and raced the boat up the shelving beach.  They all leapt out onto
the firm, clean sand.  He watched them carry the boat into the sand
dunes as if they were still impelled by the last wave.  And out
there--

La Fortuna hurried westward a glimmering mountain of sail with a
daylight moon looking at her wanly.

                            ----------

There is the fellowship and aid of human companionship, the
consolation and sustenance of religion, the healing and health-
giving power of certain land and seascapes.  All of these have
balms with which to poultice the slowly bleeding bruises and
contusions of life.  But they can rarely be invoked or singled out
like some chemical drug in the materia medica.  They occur like
wild, healing herbs sown accidentally and reaped by chance.  It is
a mistake to suppose them to be panaceas.  They are at best
palliatives or restoratives, but often excellent ones for the time
being, particularly if they are imbibed without the patient's being
fully aware that they are being administered.  His trip to the
coastal reefs long remained in Anthony's memory as one of those
curative experiences, an episode which, without being able to
explain, he regarded as having both prolonged and enhanced his
existence.

And there WAS something enormously clean and invigorating about
these islands washed by the tides and scoured by the sea winds;
there was nothing mysterious or shadowy.  They lay drenched and
soaked, quivering in eternal, tropical light.  He felt this as soon
as he stepped ashore.

For unknown miles before him the virgin beach of the narrow, barren
strip streamed northward.  It finally hid itself in the white surf-
mist that at some distance ahead glowed with rainbow patches now
and then when a league-long roller crackled and smashed.  Gulls
darted along under the curl of these translucent green combers and
miraculously escaped to go lilting off over the surface again.  The
wind blew keen and fresh, warm, but robbed of its dank forest
languor and the odour of rotting vegetation.  The salty tang of it
cleared the head.

Above all there was an overpowering sensation of the downpouring of
white light on the sand and water; of the upbeating of blue rays
again; of immense wastes and spaces of cobalt sea and robin's-egg
sky.  Beyond and beyond stretched the taut, black thread of the
horizon.  Here was boundary.  Otherwise it might have been
eternity.

Seaward, soapy flounces of green water wavered along the beach in
ever shifting patterns of melting curves.  Landward, marched a
mimic mountain range of dazzling white sand dunes crowned by a
miniature tropical table-land.  There was not even the memory of
man here.  Nothing living accompanied Anthony but flocks of
sandpipers that always flew a little ahead, alighted, and waited
for him to catch up with them again.  Then they would take wing
with a whirr and faint, shrill cries that only accentuated the
solitude.  They left dainty tracks fading into the wet marge.  And
there was a species of beach crab to be discerned only by its
shadow flitting across the sand.  In the glare their bodies were
invisible.  Thus to the sound of wings and waves, and in the midst
of a perpetually dissolving net of milky shadows that flowed away
before him he walked all that afternoon.

The hollower boom of the surf as it broke against the more abrupt
prism of the beach uncovered by the ebb at last warned him that it
was time to return.  He faced south and began to retrace his
footsteps.  He had covered two leagues or more.  Yet his elation on
landing was not yet expended.  He swung his arms and legs joyfully.
One could walk forever on the smooth silver of these firm sands.

The sun sank.  The brief, tropical afterglow faded leaving a bitten
remnant of the waning moon to pour grey glory along the strand
where castles of foam bubbled and flecked away like piles of
melting opals.  The white surf-mist became suddenly ghostly and
magical.  The returning tide began to sound a slowly ascending
scale.  Soft voices seemed to cry to him from the surf from time to
time.  His eyes widened and felt comfortable again.  Suddenly it
seemed as if his whole scalp had loosened.  In the first cool of
the evening he bathed in the beach pools and trotted along the edge
of the sea with the stinging salt water racing around his calves.

What a relief it was not to have the roaring and the howling of the
forests suddenly begin at twilight!  Here there was no sound except
the rhythmic boom of the breakers and the whisper and lisp of the
waves as they swished up the beach.  They seemed to wash his mind
as clean of memories and forebodings as they did sand and seaweed
from the interstices of protruding lumps of brain-coral that rose
here and there above the sand.  Yes, it was a timeless place.

Here he could live again for a while the untroubled life of a
healthy body using its mind for nothing but the needs of the
instant.  He was trotting along over the sand in the present only.
Even the thud of his feet no longer bothered him.  He seemed to
skim lightly, without an effort, shoved along as if he were on
vanes by the light, tingling thrust of his bare toes.

A mile ahead of him a yellow glow sprang up a little way inland
among the dunes where Juan and the four Kru boys had made camp.
Supper would be ready!  He was suddenly very hungry.  He took a
final plunge in the surf opposite the bivouac and came in hand-
over-hand in a glorious smother of foam.  He followed the men's
tracks up into the dunes.

There it was pleasantly warm again where the sand still gave off
the stored heat of the day.  From a little sand ridge he looked
down upon the camp.  A forked, orange flame kept the shadows
dancing in the hollow amid the scrub-palm thickets where they had
pitched for the night.  The five men lay sprawled about the fire,
their assegais thrust into the sand with the broad blades twinkling
in the firelight.  The sound of their murmuring voices and a low
laugh drifted up to him with the odour of roasting meat.  Thank
heaven there were no women here!  What need of them?  Here for a
while, here it would be like the garden before Eve and her
daughters came.  But it would not be lonely.  There would be the
strong, friendly, passionless existence of males with all the
million details that women were always bothering about left out,
dropped and forgotten.  Here they would kill and eat, sleep and
swim, talk when they listed or remain silent.  Here they would live
alone and clean in a brief, happy brotherhood of fishers and
hunters till the rains came.

Good then were these long, barren islands with the ocean on one
side and the wide, blue lagoon on the other; good the golden net of
unknown stars above and the peerings of the sun and moon in their
majestic transits.  Here the eternal sweep of the salt winds had
reduced the scrub thickets to something tame and manageable.  The
mischievous monkeys and the huge, hungry swallowers were absent.
Only beach rabbits and a tiny species of deer; only the sea-birds
haunted these coral rocks and pleasant groves.  On the landward
side the cocoanuts grew down to the border of mangroves.  Little
arms of the sea penetrated this ancient reef of time and ended in
coves bordered by silver, sickle-shaped beaches; strands untrodden,
unknown, strewn with glorious shells, secret and beautiful.  And it
would all be understood, it would not have to be put into words and
explained.  Down there by the firelight where his fellow Adams
awaited him--they knew already.  They waited for him with their
spears thrust into the sand.

He threw his useless clothes in the bushes and stepping out into
the moonlight gave them a hail.  Loud shouts of greeting came up to
him and the figures about the fire leaped into sudden, vigorous
life.

From a barrel sunk in the sand that afternoon Juan gave him a
clear, tasteless drink.  It was a freely-flowing fisherman's well
he now looked into.  They dined on beach-birds, and the roasted
carcass of one of the small deer speared that afternoon.  They
roasted some yams in the fire and ate them with a little salt.
Pipes were passed around.  One of the Kru boys told of adventures
spearing sharks.  They wrapped their blankets about them and
dropped off to sleep.

In the morning the place seemed to be washed and scoured by light.
It grew brighter, fiercer.  The blue sea through a dip in the dunes
became opalescent and luminous.  The shadows of hawks passed over
them.  The palm leaves clicked together in the breeze.

But they no longer heard the incessant voice of the ocean or the
clack of the little forest.  They had blent themselves with that
tune and had become a part of it.  It was eternal.  It was always
now.  They existed in warmth, health, infinite leisure and a
universal bath of light.  The mind of Anthony which had become a
place of gloomy shadows signalled to his body that all was well
again.  Suddenly he had become young and at peace with himself.

Juan looked up at him that morning while he plied the fire with dry
palm leaves.  The flame, which was invisible in the white light
that engulfed it, could be seen only by its orange tips and the
heat shadows streaming over the sand.  It was merely a part of the
burning day itself.  Light going back to light.  The dry leaves
returned to light in the process.  They returned to that from which
they had come.  There were no ashes.  It was quite an obvious
process.  You saw it without having to think about it, just as you
saw the water from tidal pools running back into the ocean again,
leaving perhaps a little sediment.

Juan had grown into a powerful man.  There was something a little
Gipsy-like about him.  He was intensely sensitive to the moods of
others, yet he himself was perennially gay.  He lay back now, as he
had lain that day on the dock at Regla, and kicked his naked heels
in the air.  A gay challenge to heaven it was, a kind of triumph in
the light over the silly shadows of things.

"What is gloom, my master?" he seemed to say.  "Do I not also live
in the eternal light in which I know, and knew from that morning
when you watched me send the swallow back, that your own being is
also bathed."  Pretending to strum a guitar he sang in his clear
tenor,


     "Wild, wild is the child
      In the vale of Bembibre
      As he leads his white flock
      Where the low willows grow.
      Where the steep river calls
      I have heard him at noonday
      Go down by the pools
      Of dark waters below.

     "And I heard him again
      When the glory of evening
      Beat red on the heights
      Where the wolf is his foe.
      Mad, mad are the songs
      Of the vale of Bembibre;
      Wild, wild is the voice
      Of the child of Minho."


That day they fished a little, swam, slept,--and when evening came
they slept again.  Anthony wakened once to watch the meteors
falling like tears of light down the dark cheeks of the sky.  The
moon had set.  That most mysterious of the constellations, the
Southern Cross, smouldered and winked.  Over the dunes the chant of
the surf sounded like deep basses intoning an elegy for a world
beautiful but forgotten ages ago.

At first Juan had kept a calendar by nicking a log every day with
an axe, but he forgot to do so after a while and the log was used
for firewood.  They knew, if they cared to know, what time of day
it was by the height of the source of glory, by the length of the
shadows of the dunes.  Yet night constantly surprised them as
morning always did.  To Anthony the nights and days had already
flowed into one thing that was a mere sense of continuance.
Something refreshed but not interrupted by sleep.

They took the boat out and chased great fish in the lagoons.  The
shadows of them could be seen through the colourless water,
stealing along against the white sand banks.  They would drift down
quietly and dart the harpoons into the blue mottled shade that had
suddenly resolved itself into a shark basking in the warmth.  A
terrific battle would begin.  They would play these great fish for
hours.  The boat would be towed along by them, with the water being
dyed behind by the dark banner of the monster's blood.  Sometimes
they would have to cut loose to avoid shipwreck.  Or, at long last,
the terrific face of the thing would be brought to the gunwale and
heaved up.  Then the assegais would plunge and hack.  It was sheer,
mad butchery.  Great and little fish would rush in from all sides
as the trail of blood seeped along the reefs.  From a hundred holes
in the coral, blunt, and parrot-nosed beings rushed forth to eat
and be eaten.  The snapping and tearing and the whirling would
rapidly become universal.  Then they would cut the still twisting
mass loose and watch it turning over and over, sinking in a great
whorl of feasting things, flashing, tearing, stabbing and writhing.

Once they pursued an apparition like a giant water-bird that waved
its way with wide, black wings through the liquid atmosphere.  It
was a large whipray and nearly proved their undoing.  They lanced
it and it started.  After one tremendous burst of speed that nearly
swamped them it turned and attacked the boat.  Its great liver-
coloured flukes came rushing up out of the water lifting the boat
half-way out of the element when it struck.  Then it sounded and
turned on them again.  But they did not wait.  They made at top
speed for the beach and watched the dark cloud dart into the
shallows after them.  There it floundered about for some time and
finally made off.  Juan spent the next day caulking the boat.

But all this was incidental, a sort of punctuation of the long,
dateless flow of days in the white dream of light.  Anthony liked
best to spend hours, angling off a rock with sand fleas for a
little rainbow-coloured fish that would seldom strike, or to wait
patiently with one of the Kru boys in a small sandy valley among
the dunes where the tiny deer, not much larger than great rabbits,
would finally approach the lure of a scarlet rag waving on a stick.
It would take them hours sometimes, but they would always come at
last.  Then the bow would twang, and supper transfixed by an arrow
would be kicking in the sand.  One of the boys could kill these
little fawn-coloured animals with his assegai.  It was the last
test of skill with the spear, for they ran like lightning in
zigzags.  Yet the spear guessed right nearly every time.

With four such Nimrods there was no use for firearms.  The single
musket they had brought was never used.  Food was no worry.  They
would drain a beach pool and fill a basket with mullet.  The rest
they left for the gulls and fish hawks which became absurdly tame.
And there were cocoanuts, groves of them, meat and drink.  And no
ants!  Only a few exhausted butterflies blown over from the
mainland reached the barren reefs across the protecting moat of the
far-flung, windswept lagoons.

There was one cove in particular which Anthony regarded as
peculiarly his own.  It was understood when he went there he was
not to be disturbed.  It was closed from the sea by a reef through
which nothing but small fish and water could penetrate.  It was a
clean, white basin with a few cocoa palms hanging over it from a
bank that curved inward overlooking a narrow beach just above the
reach of the ordinary tide.  Here he swam for hours and slept in
the shade of the bank.  Here he indulged an endless glowing day-
dream, peopling the beach with bright god-like figures that seemed
to come to him like visions of a forgotten world of light and song.
He was filled with an infinite, happy regret for this lost world,
the world which the antiphonal voices of the surf lamented at
night, singing together in sad, liquid basses as if they would have
it back again with the morning.

Even in the daytime the strange, far-off echoes of those watery
voices sounded incessantly in the hollow of the shell-like cove.
At last he thought about nothing.  He listened.  He saw the light
striking down through the limpid water, where, on the bottom, the
shadows of the waves moved in faint, grey etchings of the movement
of motion itself.  A few shells lay down there, twisted whorls of
things.  At first he thought they were dead and empty.  But as the
days passed and the utmost minutiae of his surroundings burnt into
his brain by the incessant stream of light he saw that they also
moved.  Their triangular relations to one another changed.

And it was light, light, light!--the perpetual tropical beat and
shimmer of it, the overpowering glare and the living, burning glory
of it in all its colours and angles and shades and airy and watery
prisms and essences that now at last saturated him until his very
blood ran with it; and the farthest, darkest chamber of his mind
admitted the effect of it.  The light was in him now.  He
understood one day, as he lay on the beach timelessly gazing into
the water of the cove where the light seemed to concentrate, that
he was like and one with the rocks and the trees and plants about;
one with the creatures that moved only a little down there on the
sand-floor under the water.  He saw that the whorls of their
shells, which now glimmered up to him greatly magnified, and the
whorls on the trunks of palm trees that marked the ascending helix
of their seasons were of the same signature, nature's tellurian,
the writing of the name of light.

And all that he had been thinking about light for years past, all
that had been going on in his mind about it when he did not know
it, coalesced.  As on that day on the Wampanoag when Mrs. Jorham
had interrupted his vision, he ceased again to think in
progressions.  He apprehended.  He thought all at once.  He saw.
He closed his eyes to see better. . . .

He was floating now in a boundless place without direction.  It was
absolutely dark.  He could no longer open his eyes.  Only his mind
existed in the gloom.  In his thought was stored the quality of
light.  "Let there be light!"  Instantly a flower of light bloomed
furiously in the void.  It was a day stream beautiful beyond
expression that spread outward in all ways at once, a sphere that
instantaneously pre-empted all of space and yet was forever
spreading.  Where it was not was nothing.  Where it reached was
light.  All things with bodies were part of and existed only in
this flower of light.  To watch the shifting of its endless petals
of things from stars to seashells was to peep at time.  To see the
whole flower itself ever expanding through the nothing of darkness
was to see all of time and to see it as one flash.  For though the
flower existed for eternity, that which looked at it as from a
great distance and apart from it saw it as one outgoing flash.
Instantaneously everything from the beginning to the end had
happened.

He opened his eyes and realized that he had closed them only an
instant before.  He was in his body again.  He moved his arms and
legs.  He felt painlessly exhausted; happy.  It was some time
before he could tell the difference between the voices of the surf
and the blood whispering in his own ears.  He began to play
aimlessly with a small palm-nut smooth to his fingers.  He started
tucking it into the sand.  "A tree will spring from it," he
thought.  "It is alive. . . ."

The thing came out of the ground like a snake.  It put out a leaf,
another.  Its leaves whirled around with the sun in a great
ascending spiral.  For an instant it waved its green hands fully-
grown against the light.  Then it dropped seeds.  The tree withered
to its base again.  It was gone.  He was still holding the seed in
his hand.  He finished tucking it into the ground.  "So that is the
way trees grow!  They and the seed are one.  To the master of the
flower-of-light they too are a flash.  I am.  All things are.  'A
thousand years in his sight are but a day.'  Aye, a billion aeons
of ages--one swift flash."

He thought no longer now.  He lay on the sand utterly quiet in
spirit and still in mind.  The feeling in his body was equivalent
to a long wordless prayer.  Without an image or mediator he
worshipped his maker, the creator of light.  Finally the tide came
up and lapped over his hands.  He left then and went home to the
fire.

That night a brief spatter of rain fell on them.  But Anthony did
not feel it.  He slept as if he had exhausted himself by a ten-mile
run.

Juan was worried.  The rainy season with its first storms must be
close at hand.  But he would say nothing about it, he decided.
What if they did get wet--mañana.  He pulled the blanket closer
while looking up at the hazy stars and hummed a soft, lilting tune.
Life was very pleasant here on these barrier beaches.  After a
while they would go back again.  The tune died away in his throat.
The voices in the surf sang on.




CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

THE IMAGE BEGINS TO MELT


To an epicure in odours the village of Bangalang just before the
rainy season closed down would have been an adventure without
illusions.  At that time even the native canoes plying between
Mongo Tom's and Gallegos passed it to windward.  There were great
piles of drying and putrefying fish on the beach, the kettles were
busy trying-out palm oil,--and the combination of fish-guts,
grease-wood, and rancid vegetable-butter was something that only
the inured inhabitants and the delighted buzzards of the vicinage
could stand.  Great clouds of these birds continued to arrive
daily, attracted by a place which advertised itself so well to
Buzzardom.  As a consequence, the palm thatch of the fishers' huts
showed, even at a distance, as if covered with melting patches of
snow.

The hut of Ungah-gola, Neleta's maternal aunt, occupied the most
salubrious site in the redolent town.  That is not to insist that
its environs suggested the jasmine in full bloom.  But the house
was built over the water, and what was thrown through the floor-
door, its only entrance, was regularly removed by the diurnal besom
of the tide instead of decomposing leisurely in a more normal
manner.  To a woman of eighty,--by far the oldest woman on the
Grain Coast, where the female life-span was usually brief--the
absence of flies was something, as was also the exclusion of both
rain and sunlight which the rather superior construction of the hut
afforded.

Ungah-gola, indeed, according to the standards of her neighbourhood,
was well-off.  In one corner of the hut she had an old ship's chest
full of cowrie shells.  Her battery of earthen pottery was
luxurious.  She had several large mirrors, one of which was
suspended from her neck, and the amount of copper wire wound about
her fat arms and legs was prodigious.  All this, and the ample
furnishings of her hut, she had accumulated slowly by the simple
process of outliving three husbands and telling fortunes.  For many
miles up and down the coast there were few Kru fishermen, whether
Mohammedan or pagan, who ventured upon any important undertaking
without first consulting the wise widow of Bangalang.

On a stifling afternoon toward the end of the dry season--which was
now so unusually protracted as to have caused the old woman to
mistake the droppings of buzzard dung on her roof for the first
spatter of the long-expected rains--Ungah-gola was awakened from
her half-comatose siesta by the sound of paddles rattling in a
canoe, which was evidently being moored to the piles beneath her
hut.

Some young fisherman in trouble, she supposed.

She sat up, and glancing in her mirror renewed the circles of white
paint about her eyes.  Presently the shaft of light in which she
was working was obscured, and the head of her niece Neleta appeared
coming through the trap in the floor.

A series of excited greetings and inquiries passed between the two
women, who had not seen each other for over two years.  Neleta was
made welcome with an unusually prolonged finger-snapping, which the
loose joints of old Ungah contrived to accentuate as if a skeleton
was acting host.  Neleta deposited her presents of food, cloth, and
brass jewelry at the old woman's feet, and while Ungah discussed a
soft pork pie with succulent sounds in the darkness, the young
mistress of Gallegos unfolded the secrets of her troubled bosom to
her invisible but highly audible aunt.

"Art thou not with child yet?" croaked the crone at last, choking
on a pig's knuckle.

"No," said Neleta, "that is one of the things I have come to talk
with thee about."

Her aunt grunted and sucked the marrow out of a bone with a loud
plop.  Neleta could see nothing but the white rings about her eyes.

"Is the white man without seed, then?" the crone queried
disdainfully.

"Nay," said Neleta.  "He is copious, and I am replenished often.
But he does not burgeon within me."

"Thou art like thy mother," said Ungah.  "Though her strong husband
strove with her nightly, she brought him only two children in ten
years.  We come of a rather barren race, you know.  I myself with
three husbands had only four children--but we live long," she
added.  "We live long!  Um-m-m."

She grunted, and threw the wooden base of the demolished pork pie
through the door.  They heard it splash in the water below.

"I have thought," said Neleta after a long silence, "that it is
because someone steals my husband's soul at night that we have no
children.  His body is perfect but his seed gives no life."

"And thou?" said Ungah, holding up a brand which she blew upon
while peering at her niece.

"I?--_I_ am a woman!" said Neleta proudly, standing up and
dropping her robe.  Her aunt peered at her and grunted.

"Come here," she said.

Under the fingers of the old woman the girl trembled.

"Tell me of all this," said Ungah, who appeared to be satisfied
with her niece and began a rice pastry soothing to her gums.

A long talk followed.  Neleta elaborated her theory:  In his sleep,
it seemed, Anthony became another person.  Brother François would
pay no attention to her fears.  And Neleta was alarmed.  Before
Anthony returned from the islands she was resolved to do something
about him.  Her mother's people, she felt, would understand.  Aunty
Ungah would give her a charm--or a drench.  Would she not?
Everyone knew witchcraft could only be fought with witchcraft.

Ungah grunted sympathetically and spat at the name of the Christian
priest.

It had been hard enough to slip away from Ferdinando, Neleta went
on.  He would have no further dealing with his mother's people.
Aunt Ungah softly cursed him.  "He would beat me," insisted Neleta,
"if he knew I was here now."  She appealed again to her aunt.
"Thou knowest from whom the rice and presents come.  Not from
Ferdinando," she said.  "And I am now mistress in the great house.
If I had a child.  Only just one!"  She started to moan like a
savage woman bereaved.  Her aunt determined to call in help.

She blew several toots on a conch shell and a few minutes later the
form of Mnombibi, the local wizard, her collaborator in many a
mysterious mischief, thrust through the floor-door.  The shells on
his ankles, filled with dried peas, rattled as he drew his feet
into the hut and he squatted peering into the darkness.  There were
now two pairs of white-rimmed eyes staring at Neleta.  They seemed
to be floating in the dark like ghostly spectacles.  After some
palaver the trouble was explained.  Would Mnombibi provide a charm
to keep Anthony's soul in him while he slept?

He would--for a consideration--and on his own conditions.  He must
have something belonging to Anthony, a nail-paring or hair, for
instance.  Also he must be allowed to visit Gallegos surreptitiously
and see for himself how the land lay there.  Especially, he must see
the artificial cave of the white wizard with the dead tree before
it.  He had heard much about it.  He questioned Neleta closely about
Brother François.

The half-breed girl felt herself between two fires here.  As a
nominal Christian she feared the priest; a savage at heart she
feared Mnombibi more.  Her answers conveyed nothing to the wizard
but further aroused his jealous suspicions of the white man's
magic.  It was said that those in the white wizard's charge, the
children, wore charms about their necks which prevailed over all
native spells.  They were freed, he had heard, from the spells of
the forest and river.  How was it done?  Who was the white man's
Duppee?  Mnombibi would find out.

Late afternoon saw Neleta and Mnombibi gliding back to Gallegos in
a swift canoe.  In the bottom of the boat was the wizard's kit.  It
consisted of two small bags tied at the neck, an ebony box, and a
shaggy cocoanut painted with a devil's face.  This occasionally
rocked itself from side to side as if alive, while from within came
clicking noises from time to time.  Neleta sat saying nothing, both
pleased and terrified.  Two scared, young fishermen shovelled the
canoe along rapidly.

They arrived at Gallegos an hour before sunset and considerably
ahead of Ferdinando, who had gone to visit Mongo Tom.  Neleta
sighed with relief.  It was easy enough to smuggle Mnombibi into
the big house.  She left the gate open at the man's bidding.  From
one of the bags he took out a dried baby's head and placed it on
the threshold with the wizened face looking inward.  It was a charm
which nothing African could pass.

Once in the house he tied on a hyena's tail behind and began
running about on all fours, sniffing in every room and corner.  He
nearly scared the maids to death, including Cheecha.  They cowered
grey-faced against the wall.  Over Cheecha he lingered for some
time.  Finally he thrust his hands into her breast and pulled out
something on a chain.  It was the chameleon Anthony had given her
in Havana, now large and fat.  He broke it from its link and went
on.  Cheecha collapsed.

Arrived in the room where Anthony and Neleta slept, Mnombibi was
doubly particular.  So far he had not been able to smell out
anything or anybody himself.  He intended to make doubly sure now.
The chameleon he suspected, but he knew how to dispose of it.  He
now opened his second bag, and bidding Neleta stand on a stool,
waited.

Presently the large, flat head of a blind snake rose from the sack.
There was a white fungous growth over its eyes.  It looked like
Mnombibi.  He addressed it as "my dear nose," and bade it smell
well for him.

The snake began to glide about the room.  With its black, forked
tongue it seemed to taste its way through space.  Finally, after
about fifteen minutes of apparent searching, it calmly returned to
its bag and subsided there in oily coils.

Mnombibi snorted.

It was as he thought.  The evil influence was not in the house.  He
would have to look outside.  As a precaution, however, he fed
Cheecha's chameleon to the snake.  For some minutes a double-headed
animal seemed to be peering from the bag.  The small arms and head
of the chameleon with rapidly blinking golden eyes protruded from
the snake's mouth.  Neleta still stood on the stool fascinated.

Mnombibi now spoke to her while he secured the snake.  She left the
stool and going over to a chest took out Anthony's hair brushes.
She plucked several brown strands from the bristles.  These she
delivered to Mnombibi.  He now opened his ebony box and rapidly
began to fashion from beeswax and ashes the rough semblance of a
pronouncedly male figure.  In the wax he carefully incorporated
Anthony's hair.

He now demanded double his fee and received it.  He was
sophisticated enough to know the value of gold coins.  Until they
were paid into his right hand he continued to hold the wax image in
his left.  Neleta had no doubt whatever that it was her man which
Mnombibi had in his clutches.  She was therefore glad to ransom him
at twice what she had at first promised.

Mnombibi next gave her some further directions, and the horn of a
black goat to hang under her bed.  He told her that if he could
prevail over the white wizard she should have a child.  Her
husband's soul, he said, would stay even at night as long as she
kept the figure safely.  He asked some further questions about
Brother François and warned her against going to him.  Any mention
of the afternoon's doings would break the spell, he said.

He finally left after removing the dried head from the threshold.
It had worked.  The maids, who had made a bolt for the gate as soon
as his back had been turned, had been stopped by it in the
courtyard.  He rattled the shells on his feet at them and promised
them baboons for husbands if they ever mentioned his visit.  He
showed them the painted cocoanut shell and they shrieked.  The last
they saw of him was his broad, evil grin disappearing through the
gate under the glare of his white spectacle-like eyes.

Neleta locked the wax figure of Anthony in her chest of drawers.  A
small spider that seemed to be spying on her she killed with her
slipper.  She was pleased to find that from that day forward her
slightest wish was law with the maids.

                            ----------

Ferdinando, who was returning from a day's visit with Mongo Tom,
stopped to light his pipe on the way up the hill just where the
path turned out to Brother Francois's little settlement.  He
stooped low behind a rock to keep the tinder in his box from
blowing away, and got out his flint and steel.  It was at that
moment that Mnombibi coming downhill passed him like a shadow and
disappeared in the thicket.  Ferdinando paused with his steel in
the air.  Then he realized he had not been seen by the witch-
doctor, whom he had recognized.  Full of curiosity, he slipped his
feet out of his pumps and followed noiselessly.

From time to time he caught sight of the black figure gliding
through the plantation.  Presently they both came to the edge of it
near the little chapel.  Mnombibi concealed himself in the long
grass.  Ferdinando crouched and watched Mnombibi.  Some minutes
passed.  The chapel seemed to be empty and no one was about.  A low
hum of conversation could be heard coming from the huts, and the
voice of the stream.  Ferdinando at last became impatient.  Why had
the witch-doctor come here?--he wondered.

Just then Mnombibi wriggled out of the tall grass like a snake.  He
passed over the short space of lawn on his belly and made for the
door of the chapel.  He was careful to avoid the shadow of the
cross that near sunset stretched long and black across the sward.
At the door he paused for an instant, pressed close to the wall and
peering in.

What Mnombibi saw was a perfectly smooth stone hut with one window,
the cross bars of which threw the same kind of a magic shadow on
the floor that rested on the lawn.  At the far end was a stone
table with candlesticks on it.  "Seven-headed snakes," thought
Mnombibi.  This was evidently the table upon which the Christians
ate their god.  He had heard of that.  The place was quite patently
an artificial cave in which the god was kept locked up.  There was
even one small light hanging from a chain so that the god could
see.  The lamp had a red eye.  Mnombibi was afraid of it.  It
seemed to watch him.  But he must have a look at the god,
nevertheless.  The place was half dark, too.  What was that against
the far wall over the table?

Braving the guardian eye, he wriggled in half-way to the stone
table, and looked up.  On the wall was the god of the white
magician stretched out and fastened by nails on a tree.

"So--that was the way they kept their god prisoner!  Perhaps, if
the white witch-doctor could be caught and nailed up that way . . .
eh!  Then one would have both the god and the man who kept him,
too.  Both safely nailed on a tree!  That would be a fine end to
the white man's rival magic.  And all the powers of the god on the
tree would be in the keeping of Mnombibi.  An idea--an idea to be
considered carefully!"  As a first trial of strength the witch-
doctor made a face at the crucifix.  That was carrying matters a
little too far, perhaps--considering that watchful eye.  He thought
he saw the figure squirm in the shadows.  It might get loose!  He
turned and crawled for the door.  Suddenly he heard men walking and
talking just outside.  He rose to make a bolt for it.

Just at the door he met Brother François and the old Susu hunter,
who acted as a sort of sacristan and was coming to ring the evening
bell.  For an instant the three stood as if petrified.  The red-
rimmed eyes of Mnombibi in their white circles glared devilishly at
Brother François.

Ferdinando stood up in sheer excitement to see better.  In his
confused mind, where the stiff Latin ritual of the cathedral at
Barcelona, seen in his boyhood, mixed with the earlier savage
memories of his mother's hut at Bangalang, he instantly saw
implicit in the group before him a trial of supernatural skill.  It
was the witch-doctor versus the priest.

Greatly startled by the sudden apparition at his chapel door the
priest made the sign of the cross.  Mnombibi instantly hurled the
painted cocoanut at him, dived into the grass, and wriggled away
like a snake, the grass rippling behind him.  Brother François was
so surprised at this curious procedure that he actually caught the
strange missile that had been hurled at him and stood holding it,
half-bewildered, turning it over in his hands.  The bestial face
painted on it glared up at him.  An extraordinary series of events
now took place.

The old Susu took one glance at the devil's head in Brother
Francois's hands, and giving vent to an angry and frightened howl
struck it from his grasp.  He kept shouting something in his
dialect, evidently a warning to the priest.  The nut rolled some
distance away.  Meanwhile, the old warrior kept dashing about
frantically looking for something.  Finally he darted to the bank
of the stream and returned with a heavy boulder.  He poised this
over the nut and brought it down with great force.  The thing
cracked open and a colossal tawny spider darted out.  It crouched
back in the grass fiddling with its mouth.  It emitted an
indescribable, locust-like sound.  The blood of all those looking
at it ran thick and cold.  Suddenly the Susu attempted to spring on
it and stamp it flat.  It ran up his leg.  The man flung himself
into the air, twisting and spinning.  A shrill, whistling scream
tore from his lips.  Brother François and Ferdinando saw the spider
leap from his extended arm while he was still in the air.  It made
for the ledge of rocks.

"Kill it, father," shouted Ferdinando, now darting forward.  "Kill
it!  Kill it!"

The priest was terribly startled.  He had not known Ferdinando was
there.

They seized sticks and made after the thing.  But it was too late.
Once they caught sight of it again, but it made off into a rift in
the rock strata.

"It has stolen the man's soul," shouted Ferdinando who gave some
signs of being hysterical and was twitching all over.

"Come, my son, you are too good a Christian to believe THAT.  Mon
Dieu!" said Brother François.  He laid his hand reassuringly on the
half-breed's shoulder.  Ferdinando shook it off.

"You will see, father.  Por Dios, you will see!" he snarled.  "You
cannot help him now."

They returned and found the old man lying on the grass face
downward.  He had blanched a slate-grey all over.  When they turned
him over there was foam on his lips.

"He will die," said Ferdinando, "in a few days.  That devil has
gone off with him.  This is only a breathing corpse."

Brother François, who had been horribly shaken, could not find a
mark on the man's body.  From sheer nervousness and pity he began
to shed a few tears.  Ferdinando looked at him with contempt.  They
carried the old warrior to a hut together.

"You will not say anything about this, will you?" said the priest
humbly.  "The people here would not understand."

"They would understand well enough," said Ferdinando.  He stood
watching Brother François working over the man.  "No use," he
added.  He stood a little longer.  Finally he shrugged his
shoulders.

"Good night, father."  He said it contemptuously, and left.

On the way up the hill a spatter of rain hit him in the face.  What
a tale he would have to tell Neleta at supper tonight!  There could
be no doubt that Mnombibi had won.  He felt a greater contempt than
ever for Brother François.  In this country a priest was no good.
What was he doing at Gallegos anyway?  He wished Anthony would come
back.  Caramba! he had better hurry himself!  It was coming on to
rain with a vengeance.  He started to run.

Over the steaming forest and plantation the roar of the oncoming
rains set in, modulated by growls of distant thunder.  Ferdinando
was soaked.  He drenched himself inside with rum and hot water that
night.  Neleta had to help him to bed.  She was greatly worried.
Anthony should have returned before this.  She took the little
image out of the drawer to look at it.  She had forgotten that her
chest of drawers stood all afternoon in the sunlight.  To her
horror the figure had partly melted.  She ran out on the porch in
her night-gown.  There was no sign of Anthony's canoe having
returned.

Westward toward the Atlantic the lightning snaked through the
clouds that now hung low over the coastal forests, vomiting rain.
Neleta shivered and went in.  The bed was cold.




CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

THE HARD METAL RUNS


The rain that had soaked Ferdinando overtook Anthony on the river
half-way to Gallegos.  He had delayed at the barrier beaches far
too long.

Nevertheless, the last morning there had dawned as clear and golden
as any that had preceded it--and the rains usually announced
themselves by several days of scud and showers driving before.

But not this time.  The vast, low-hanging cloud of the main deluge
had simply lifted itself over the horizon about noon and driven
down on them with lightning zigzagging along its inky front.
Thunder rumbled and stumbled along the coast for hundreds of miles.
The low, continuous mutter of it had been their first warning.
Then the cloud came with high, billowing thunderheads and cut off
the amber light like a sliding shutter.  Men wandered about under
it as if in an eclipse.  The world had instantly slumped from
clear, cheerful sunlight into grey gloom.  A steaming rain, which
grew colder hour by hour, slid down upon them in slanting cascades
that dashed off their shoulders faster and faster.

They had hastily packed their few belongings in the rowing canoe
and fled up-river before the cloud.  But not fast enough.  The
first full deluge and the violent squalls that always accompanied
it caught them toward evening ten miles below Gallegos on the Rio
Pongo.

It was dark as the inside of a tar barrel.  The forest moaned,
washed and crashed.  The gusts seemed to be trying to lift their
light boat out of the water and spattered the river around them
with torn branches and leaves.  They could steer only by flashes of
lightning as night came on, and the tide failed them long before
they could make Mongo Tom's.  To force the boat upstream against
both the ebb and the rapidly swelling current was soon impossible.
There was nothing for it but to try to land and wait for the turn
of the tide.  To tie up, or to drift and bail, would be to court
disaster from the lose débris of the forest that now began to
hurtle at them suddenly out of the darkness.

Landing was not to be so easily accomplished as thought of,
however.

The mild drainage ditch of the dry-season Rio Pongo could now
scarcely be recognized in the boiling, swirling current full of
dead trees and forest garbage which flashes of lightning revealed
streaming down upon them like a broad brown ribbon hurling itself
out of the darkness.  Already the river had overflowed its low
banks.  To be battered over the fallen trunks and root-knees in the
shallows was sure destruction.  They paddled anxiously along the
edge of the rapidly submerging forest looking for some slight rise
of ground but found none.  It was scarcely possible to make headway
now.  Then an eddy sucked them upstream, and a jagged bolt, that
seemed to strike the river itself just ahead, revealed a
grotesquely shaped sandbar with a few trees on top still rising
above the flood.

They paddled under the lee of it and flashed their one dim lantern
along its pitted banks.  A large hole under the great roots, and a
sickening smell of carrion caused one of the Kru boys to call out a
warning.  He was too late.  Anthony caught the gleam of the lantern
on two yellow eyes under the roots, and then the beast was on them.

A crocodile disturbed guarding its festering nest acts impulsively.
This one tried to climb into the boat.  One of the Krus thrust his
assegai into its mouth.  It swerved.  But the boat was half full of
water and the lantern out.  Then the tail of the monster came
around and struck the craft a shattering blow.

"Pull," roared Anthony.

Luckily the Krus stuck to the paddles.  Their last stroke shoved
them into the bank.  Everybody swarmed out and up over the roots
and stood on something flat and solid in the downpour.  Anthony
began to shout their names.  They were all near him--and all there--
somewhere in the darkness.

A great scrambling and thrashing broke out on the bank below.

"Madre!" screamed Juan.  "He's coming up after us!"

Another flash revealed the determined saurian coming across the low
plateau of the sandbank straight for them.  In the intense dazzling
glare the fanged, lizard smile, the flaring curve of the upper lip
and the swift preposterous waddle of the squat legs of the thing
seemed to be rushing upon them for an eternity.  Beyond was the
brown, bubbling slide of the river, and against it the bare
branches of dead trees thrashing despairing arms into the air.

Darkness swooped again.

Anthony found himself with that vision still seared on his eyeballs
while he sat high up in the limbs of one of the trees.  His action
had been absolutely automatic.  The tail of the beast went
battering about down below.  It jarred the thick tree perceptibly.
He felt it through his tightly gripping hands.  By God, that fellow
meant business!

Anthony and Juan were sharing the same tree with a young Diana
monkey.  It whooped and swore at them till the steadily descending
downpour, which varied from a drizzle to drowning cloudbursts that
drummed on the river, silenced it.  In lulls they heard its teeth
chattering and their own were soon joining in chorus.  In the
infrequent lulls of wind and thunder the miserable men in the trees
called to each other.  The voices of the Kru boys already sounded
weak and thin.  The hopeless twittering of these drenched and
shivering human birds first suggested to Anthony that they would
probably perish here miserably.  Hours passed while the mad rain
beat upon them.

A boat came down-river beating a gong.  They set up a noise like
the wailing of souls in purgatory but a squall drowned them out.
When it was over the boat had passed them and gone downstream.
Those on board would be looking for a light.

Morning it seemed would never come.  It was impossible, Anthony
felt, that only a few hours ago he had been warm and dreamfully
happy on the beaches shining with sunlight.  This was a different
world he was in now.  Its signs were darkness, furious rain, cold,
and the vision of the crocodile charging in the lightning glare.
How could one night leave him so weak?  He fastened himself to the
limb with a belt.

The wind died toward morning and the rain let up.  The light
finally filtered through a dark, bulging canopy softly flowing over
the tree-tops close above.  A new misery now developed.  In the
calm unnumbered swarms of gnats and mosquitoes fell on them.  A
Hindu god with fifty hands could not have defended himself.  They
were bitten till they felt they were going mad.  The mosquitoes lit
in grey patches and drew blood.

It was possible to see where they were now.  It was a flat sandbar
about a hundred yards long and twenty wide.  Its sharp nose pointed
upstream and its top was only a few feet above the flood.  It was
the cherished abode of scorpions and a caravanserai for crocodiles.
How they had ever landed safely in the dark and got as far as the
trees was a mystery.  As the water kept rising the number of
saurians large and small that came out from under the roots where
the sand was rapidly being washed away was astounding.  Five or six
of them started to roam around under the trees snapping at each
other.  All of the Krus had lost their spears.  Their boat was no
more.  The monkey looked about him and moaned scratching his
orange-coloured thighs.  Juan looked up from a lower limb with a
face so swollen and red that it looked like the ape's behind.  But
no one laughed.

"What next, master?" said Juan with swollen lips.

"Breakfast," said Anthony trying to grin.

"Sí, for the crocodile," said Juan.  He leaned against the tree a
symbol of swollen despair.  The Krus dripped from their branches
like so many black scarecrows on a grotesque gallows, silent.

Quite obviously there was nothing to do.  They did so.  They sat.
Anthony felt on fire all over, dull and feverish.  He moved into a
more comfortable crotch and tried to think.  He dozed instead.  The
wind had driven off the gnats.  But he was thoroughly poisoned.
His eyes were swelling shut.  Suddenly everybody began to shout at
once.  A constant dismal screeching went up from the treetops
punctuated by the howls of the monkey.  Down-river they had heard a
shot.

Suppose the boat should pass them again?  It might.  He could no
longer see.  Only a glimmer through his puffed cheeks.  He pulled
off his shirt and began to wave it and roar till he was hoarse.

The sound of the frantically beaten boat gong came to him as a
reprieve.  Then there were shouts and a great many guns went off.
The crocodiles hated to leave home.  It all seemed far away.  He
was too ill to care now.  His arms and legs were too swollen to
move.  He was afire from head to foot.  At last he felt himself
being lowered dizzily out of the tree.  Someone was pouring
something heavenly cool and soothing over him.  He choked on some
good Holland spirits.

"A man could lie down and sleep now.  No more lightning in the dark
forest or mosquitoes.  A man could lie down and sleep.  A man
could . . ."

Three hours later they were back at Bangalang and he was being
carried up the hill.  Neleta put him to bed weeping over him but he
couldn't see her.  It was she who had sent the boat.  He didn't
care.

"Let me sleep, I tell you, let me sleep."  He dozed off in a kind
of poisoned coma.

Two days later the swelling suddenly subsided and he was shortly
able to get about a little.  But he felt weak and had great white
circles under his eyes in a face that was otherwise like a mask of
bronze.  The sun, indeed, had burnt him bronze all over but most of
the good of the trip to the barriers had been undone by the night
on the sandbar.  And he would take no advice.  Ferdinando kept on
insisting that he take double potions of the cinchona drench to
ward off the fever.  But he was sick of the bitter stuff and began
to smoke cigars constantly and take large quantities of rum, sugar,
and hot water instead.  He used up most of the Cape wine and was
stupid after dinner.  In that way he would get some sleep.
Otherwise he would want to prowl at night with a cigar in his face.

Neleta was avid for him after his absence.  She used him now.  He
tried to get some passive solace out of her desire.  That only
seemed to madden her the more.  In the morning he would lie with
marks of her teeth all over his breast, too indifferent to get up.
Outside the rain streamed down for hours at a time.  The forests
steamed.  Once in a while the sun would come out for a few minutes
and turn the little courtyard and the room into a Turkish bath.
There was blue mould in his shoes in the morning.  His clothes were
clammy.

A week of unexpected and exceptional clear weather brought him a
little reaction of will power.  He went down to the docks to watch
the loading of the remainder of the slaves still in the pens onto
El Argonautico, a ship direct from Havana.  This cleaned the last
of the people out of the barracoons.  He felt relieved.  There
would not be any more for some months.  Caravans did not come in
what was usually the beginning of continuous rains.  There was a
heavy mail to go over, some of it from Livorno.

Mr. Bonnyfeather was dying--the letter was five months old.
Probably the old man was gone by this time.  He paused, surprised
to find that the news caused him almost no emotion of any kind.  He
couldn't feel anything any more.  He had some wine opened at the
warehouse and drank in Ferdinando's office which he had never done
before.  Two bottles of Malaga brought a faint sensation of sorrow.
Ferdinando kept worrying him about what to do in his books with the
material furnished to Brother François.  He cursed Brother François
and Ferdinando and opened letters listlessly.


. . . Mr. Bonnyfeather has directed me to write Captain Bittern at
Gibraltar to call at Gallegos for you and bring you back to
Livorno.  He is most desirous of seeing you before it is too late.
The "Unicorn" is expected at Gibraltar almost any time now.
Address Captain Bittern there, giving the latitude and longitude of
the Rio Pongo.  Be sure to communicate that data to him.  He does
not know the Grain Coast.  The "Unicorn" has been making many
prizes of late.  The war with Spain is profitable to British
privateers, etc. . . .  How do you find life with the golden
savages?  McNab and our mutual Faith are both well. . . .


It was Toussaint writing.  The rest of the letter was about
European politics.

"How did he find life with the golden savages?"  My God!  He spat
on the floor.  He was too tired to write Captain Bittern.  Let him
find the Rio Pongo if he could.  It was on the maps.

He turned over some letters from Havana.  Cibo was sending the
Ariostatica again in two months' time.  "His Excellency is most
desirous of slipping as many ships through the net of British
harriers as possible."

Humph!  Suppose the Unicorn should pick up a few of His
Excellency's ships and sell them for prizes?  He grinned at the
thought.  Would he go back with Captain Bittern if he appeared now?
He didn't know.  Probably not.  He couldn't make decisions any more
off-hand.  He felt like--like a fish left on a hot beach.

He swept the mail into the drawer and went back up the hill.
Perhaps it might help if he unburdened his soul to Brother
François.  He turned in at the little gate and found the priest
sitting disconsolate after having buried the old Susu some days
before.  Anthony had to listen to the whole story of the spider.
It horrified him strangely.

Brother François had not been able to do anything for the man.
After a while he had just stopped breathing.  A terror rested over
the little settlement since the event.  The priest felt helpless in
the face of superstition like this.  He looked it.  He kept on
protesting.  Anthony felt for the first time there was no help in
him any more.  He said nothing about his own troubles.  His soul
had been stolen too, he told himself half whimsically.  He stumbled
on up the hill.

In the sun the wine came on him strong.  He felt dizzy and there
were spots before his eyes.  Brother François was no good any more,
he told himself.  He went in to his bed, fell asleep, and wakened
with the shakes and fever.  That night on the sandbar!  Fever was
in his bones, he felt his joints grind.  The rains came on for good
that night.  Three days later he was nearly stricken to death
again.  The chills, the fever, and the rains went on.  Malaria
began to burn and freeze him.

                            ----------

For the rest of his life that long rainy season at Gallegos
remained in his mind as a vague but horrible nightmare.  He got
steadily worse.  It was always dark outside.  But within him it was
darker still.  In a few weeks the world appeared as if he were
sitting far back in a cave.  At a great distance, and in a
curiously blurred way, things went on happening at the entrance to
the cavern.  He himself was chained in there.  He began to wish he
were dead.

Every three days something invisible crept upon him in the darkness
and shook him like a rat.  His teeth chattered and clicked.  Then
he burned and sweated.  Liquor brought a temporary relief.  He
drank steadily, constantly, and increasingly.  He drank a great
deal at night.  He was soon utterly confused.  Neleta kept annoying
him by trying to keep him in bed.  He would fight with her, drive
her off.  Yet he knew he should not.  She meant well.  He hated her
now because she loved him.  She would not go away.  Ferdinando he
would not have in the room for a moment.

The factor, however, took this philosophically enough.  He was glad
to find himself to all intents and purposes the master of Gallegos.
Joseph soon introduced certain minor practices about the place
which Pharaoh would never have countenanced.

Brother François for one fared ill.  Neither Ferdinando nor Neleta
welcomed him at dinner.  Indeed, he would have ceased coming to the
house on the hill altogether if it had not been that he longed to
do all he could for Anthony.  He was not able to break the clutch
of the fever.  As he sat by Anthony's bed he was always conscious
of Neleta's eyes resting on him.  They were baleful.  She managed
on one pretext or another to exclude him as much as she could.  He
had no knowledge of what Mnombibi had told her, of course.  Nor did
he know that Neleta threw all of his medicines away.

Anthony for most of the time appeared to be in a stupor.  At any
rate he would say very little to Brother François.  He refused all
offers of spiritual help and a suggestion that he should receive
the wafer.  In a dim but deep way Anthony was conscious of the
struggle that was going on over him between Neleta and the priest.
The atmosphere of the sick room when Brother François was present
was very tense.  Anthony begged to be let alone.

When he could think at all clearly he felt sure he was going to
die.  As he grew weaker and could no longer get drink for himself
even at night the conviction grew upon him.  Neleta, in fact, had
gradually cut down altogether on the rum.  Although she had
undoubtedly saved him from killing himself more rapidly, and he
looked better, his sensation of suffering was now more conscious
and therefore more intense.

It was getting along toward the end of the rainy season.  His
chills and burning fever had continued for weeks on end.  He was
now frequently delirious.  Of those days of burning and weakness in
which external and internal events were hopelessly confused a few
things afterward remained in his memory with the startling clarity
of a prolonged, drugged dream.  What was illusion and what was fact
he could never entirely separate.  Both the possible and the
impossible seemed equally true.  The real and the unreal presented
themselves in a succession of ever-flowing images that merged one
into the other.  In them his moody thoughts were mirrored as if
they were taking place in space subject to the dissolving effect of
time.  They became the equivalent of events for many weeks.

Space seemed to have prolonged itself.  It was longer than it was
wide, and the length of it frequently varied.  Sometimes the ebony
foot-posts of his bed were very close to his face.  He could see
the strange Ethiopian gargoyles carved upon them grimacing at him,
now so close that the darting tongues of the grotesque beasts were
about to lick his face, now a hundred feet distant with his bed
stretching all the way between like a path to a gate.

Perhaps this triumph of length over breadth was aided by the fact
that Neleta's looking glass stood on her chest of drawers exactly
opposite him across the room.  In it he could see himself and
everything that went on in the room.  Neleta had once covered it
with a cloth, but the blankness before him he found intolerable and
begged her to take it off.  When she did so the world seemed to be
re-created again.  The concentration of light in the mirror seemed
to reflect itself back into the gloomy cavern behind his eyes where
he was now afraid to be left alone with himself in the darkness.

The glass was a large French mirror, the envy of all the maids.  He
had given it to Neleta when she had become mistress of the house.
By stepping back a little she could see all of herself in it.  The
drawers on her chest were built to recede like steps and so she
seemed to be standing before the glass at the foot of a low flight
of stairs.  Indeed, everything in the room led up to and found
itself re-created in the glass in a kind of golden atmosphere which
the glow coming through the lattice-blind from the courtyard
accentuated, or the candles by night.  All the life of the room
went on in the glass in a sort of dreamful penumbra.

It was there that Anthony saw himself lying on the bed with the
bronze colour gradually fading from his face as if the fever were
melting it away while his features became thinner, his skin sallow,
and his eyes large, staring, and haggard.  Now, indeed, he could
look into his own eyes for hours at a time, face to face with
himself.  In the mirror also sat Brother François who seemed to
gather about him the light that filtered in from the screen.  With
this the ethereal kindliness and bright unfaltering affection of
his smile blent as if of the same quality.  Years afterwards it was
the head of Brother François surrounded by light that came back to
comfort memory as the enduring image of the man.

He must frequently have sat by the bed of the sick man for hours,
for with this memory alone was there afterward any voice.  What it
had said Anthony could not remember.  But to it he had replied.
They had talked together.  Never a sentence of those surely ghostly
conversations afterwards came back to recollection.  But what was
Anthony stripped of all habiliments, stripped, indeed, almost of
the flesh itself, talked with Brother François.  The import of it
vanished but the comfort and refreshment remained.  It was always
Anthony's impression that it was this spiritual medicine which had
permitted him to survive.

When Brother François had gone he would then see Neleta again
moving panther-like about the room.  He would see her bending over
him, bringing him water, of which he now consumed enormous
quantities, tidying up the chamber, putting flowers by his bed,
smoothing his pillow and weeping sometimes when she turned away.
Yet there was always a certain fierceness about her, an air of
possession in her every movement.  She would often lie stretched
out on the bed beside him fanning him, dressed in a long spotted
silk gown.  She would raise the screen behind him whenever she
could and he could see the waving green leaves of the plants
reflected from the courtyard behind him.  In the mirror it seemed
as if there was a leopard lying in the forest by something
stretched out helplessly.  He would go to sleep with the cool
breath of the fan and the warm breath of her mouth alternately felt
upon his cheeks.  He had come now to accept her utterly.  Neleta
was in the mirror, too.

There also came and went other things and people.  The bearded face
of a stranger who came to bleed him.  He learned afterwards that
this was the new mate of the Ariostatica who was by way of being an
amateur surgeon.  At any rate the bearded man with the basin and
lancet came several times.  He felt quieter and weaker now.  In
fact after the third blood-letting he reached the nadir of
existence.  Luckily the Ariostatica and her "surgeon" sailed soon.
But he knew nothing about that at the time.

It was while he lay in what was all but a fatal lethargy after the
third bleeding that Brother François came for the last time.  Just
that day it was too much trouble to move his eyes to one side or
the other.  Besides, the world receded into a dizzy darkness
everywhere except straight ahead of him.  Brother François in the
mirror was greatly excited, animated, protesting.  He seemed to be
trying to get the man on the bed to do something.  Anthony saw it
all as happening to somebody else in the mirror.  Why did they
trouble HIM this way?  They might let HIM die in peace at
least.  He heard a sound of voices arguing.

"Oh, if he could only leave all this!"

Ferdinando and Neleta were in the picture now.  Brother François
was holding on to the bed in the mirror pleading.  Suddenly he saw
him rise and turn away.  His face went out.  It was quiet again.
Blessedly quiet.  Everything went out of the mirror shortly.  It
grew grey, the light faded.  Darkness was filling his eyes.  He lay
very still, on the balance, just breathing.  Something terrible had
happened, something for which he could not be forgiven.  Brother
François had gone.  Well, he would go, too.  "I will leave them."
He gave up.  The world suddenly ceased.

                            ----------

The poignant atmosphere of tragedy which had conveyed its emotional
contagion to the sick man so near the brink as to be numb and
insensate--lost, indeed, to all understanding of its cause and only
dimly aware of its emotional effect--had been the doing of
Ferdinando.

When the Ariostatica had arrived at Gallegos she found the slave
pens empty, the last of those brought by Amah's caravan having been
shipped on El Argonautico some months before.  Sóller who was in
charge of the schooner was impatient to return.  It was the middle
of the rainy season and no new supplies of captives could be
expected for some time.  Yet both Sóller and Ferdinando were
peculiarly anxious to make an excellent showing on the books for
Anthony when he should recover.  No ship had ever been known to lie
idle for long at Gallegos without receiving a cargo.  Ferdinando
was determined that the only case of one doing so should not occur
while he was in charge.  Sóller, who had been put in charge of the
Ariostatica after the death of the captain some years before, still
felt himself to be a doubtful case in the opinion of Anthony.  He
was now anxious to make good.  He and Ferdinando now put their
precious heads together.

Mongo Tom, it was found, had a number of young slaves in his pens.
They were scarcely more than children, left overs from the last
shipment, and he was anxious to get rid of them.  The youth of the
batch put an idea in Ferdinando's head as he and Sóller looked them
over.  Why not seize the children under Brother Francois's charge
and so make up a full cargo for the Ariostatica?  It would also
immediately provide a way to balance that irritating open account
on Ferdinando's books and show a nice profit on the goods supplied
to Brother François for some years past, goods the half-breed
considered to have been wasted.  Sóller was enthusiastic.  He even
saw an element of humour in carrying off the priest's flock.
Healthy children brought from $25 to $50 apiece since the trade had
been curtailed by the English war.  Bueno!

The longer Ferdinando thought of the scheme the better he liked it.
If Anthony recovered he felt his business acumen would be praised;
if not--if Anthony died, he, Ferdinando, would be temporarily at
least the Master of Gallegos.  Well, he would show his authority
while he had it anyway.  Brother François should be put in his
place as an impractical beggar and hanger-on.

Whereupon the practical Ferdinando put the Gallegos blacksmith to
work shrinking leg-irons to fit snugly about young shins.  Taking a
goodly supply of these in several buckets he and Sóller,
accompanied by four or five Foulahs, sneaked down the path toward
Brother Francois's little establishment on the evening before the
Ariostatica was to sail.

The peaceful sound of the bell came to them through the trees as
they neared the place and they found the entire population of the
beehive village gathered before the small chapel engaged in the
simple service which always marked the end of their day.

Even such entirely forthright and up-and-coming fellows as Sóller
and Ferdinando were given pause by the sight of the priest at his
own forest altar and engaged in prayer.  They waited till he had
finished and blessed his flock.  Sóller, indeed, now began to hold
back a little.  He had once been a choir-boy in Spain.  Ferdinando,
however, with the triumph of Mnombibi thoroughly in mind, gave no
signs of wilting.  He called out to his men, who, without mincing
matters, laid hold of those nearest and began fitting them with
leg-irons.  Startled by the appearance of so many strangers, some
of the youngest gathered about Brother François and began
whimpering.  The rest stood in scared silence.  Seeing the irons
one of the women groaned.

"What are you about?" said Brother François coming forward swiftly,
the colour mounting to his face.

Ferdinando drew back a little.  The priest kicked the irons out of
one of the Foulah's hands.  The rest stopped work and looked up at
Ferdinando who snarled at them to go ahead.  The sound of chains
and locking resumed.  One of the youngsters screamed.

"Do not interfere, padre," sneered Ferdinando.  "I am master here
now."

"You?" said the priest.

"I!" said the half-breed.  "_I_ am master now."

"He is dead then!" said Brother François.  "Why didn't you call me?
You heathen!"  His voice rose with a sudden scream.

Ferdinando shook his head.  "Not dead!" he said, and looked
defiantly at the priest.

"What does this mean, then?" said the priest.

"Cuba!" grinned Ferdinando.

"No! no!  In the name of God--NO!" shouted Brother François.  The
next instant Ferdinando went down under the solid impact of a blow
on the mouth that half stunned him.  The priest had apparently gone
mad.  He was beating the half-breed over the head with a bucket.
The little lawn before the chapel resounded with horrible cries and
childish screams of terror.  A worrying sound came from the throat
of the priest who was shaking Ferdinando like a great dog dealing
with a stoat.  The children rushed into the chapel.  Someone
tangled with the bell rope and a brazen clamour as of fire bells
broke out.

But the Foulahs, all lusty Mohammedans, now threw themselves on
Brother François and pulled him off Ferdinando.  The half-breed got
up spitting curses and teeth.  He ordered the priest bound.  Sóller
interfered.

"He is a white man, you know."

"Hold him, then," screamed Ferdinando stamping about crazy with
rage and pain, and wiping the blood off his lips.  "You might do
something yourself to get these brats down to the ship," he gasped
at Sóller.

"Never mind the irons, drive them down," cried the Spaniard.  "Use
canes!"  He broke off a section of bamboo and began to round up the
flock.  Some of them broke away and ran to the priest.  He cried
out without words and struggled.  Presently he grew calm and stood
weeping.  Ferdinando cursed him.

Unfortunately most of the children had taken refuge in the little
chapel.  These were now driven forth in charge of several big Arabs
with long sticks.  One or two others were rounded up after a chase
and scramble.  The entire flock was then herded pell-mell downhill.
Only a few old women and one or two sick men remained.

"Let them alone," said Sóller.  "They're no good."

"The curse of the Almighty God on you, Sóller," cried Brother
François.

"What!" said Sóller swaggering up.  "What's that!"

The two stood close together for a moment.  Gripped in the arms of
the two Foulahs, who were taking no chances, Brother François, who
had been leaning forward as if he would throw himself at Sóller
too, suddenly straightened up.  He stood looking directly into the
face of Sóller which was now poked close to his own, with a defiant
expression on it.

"You do not know what you are doing, do you, Sóller?" he said
almost gently.  A puzzled, clownish look spread half belligerently
over Sóller's coarse features.

"Well, I guess I know my business," he blurted out.  "I guess I
do."

"May Christ forgive you," said Brother François and let his
clenched hands fall by his side.

"Now that's what I call being a Christian," laughed Sóller, and set
off down the hill whistling.  He was secretly relieved at having
the curse removed.  Feeling quite sure that he had frightened the
priest into forgiving him, he swaggered somewhat in his walk.
Ferdinando had rushed off to bathe his face.

The two Foulahs, lacking further orders, and somewhat abashed at
holding a white man prisoner, now let go of Brother François and
walked away.  He sank down at the foot of his cross and lay there.
Presently he was joined by the woman with her breasts cut off.  She
began to make soft, hopeless sounds in the growing darkness.  In
the cluster of beehive huts there were no lights any more.  Only
the little stream continued to rush on through the valley filling
it with a sound of watery voices like those of children far-off and
at play.

Towards midnight Brother François rose and went into his chapel to
be alone.  He lit the candles and celebrated mass.

It was the following morning that he had gone to make his final
plea to Anthony.  The Ariostatica had not sailed yet.  She was
still swinging at anchor waiting for the down-tide.  Brother
François had small hope of finding Anthony in a condition to
interfere, or even understand, but he could not let even the slim
last chance of retrieving his flock go by.  It was then that
Anthony had seen him in the mirror for the last time.

But Anthony had been too ill to respond.  He had in fact lapsed
into unconsciousness while the priest, almost beside himself, had
pleaded with him to interfere.  Neleta much frightened, convinced
that Mnombibi was certainly correct and that Brother François was a
hostile influence, had called Ferdinando.  The two had literally
carried him from the room and thrust him from the door.  From the
hill he could see the Ariostatica getting under way.  He watched
her till her masts were veiled by the long point as she drifted
past Bangalang.  It was a half hour of sheer despair.

He went downhill to his deserted little hamlet.  He knelt for a
while in the chapel and was finally able to say, "Thy will, not
mine be done," with a sincere heart.  Then he called to the two old
men and the three women who still remained to him and told them to
pack up hastily.  Two small donkeys that grazed near by were caught
and loaded with a few pots, kettles, nondescript bundles, and the
meagre furniture of the little chapel.  The bell he threw into the
stream.  The wooden cross from before the chapel door he strapped
over the back of the largest ass.  He would not leave that at
Gallegos.

The small procession headed by Brother François, with the only
musket of the party over his shoulder, started uphill through the
trees and passed through the stockade gate.  The large cross on the
small donkey waggled with the beast's ears.  The Foulahs on guard
had often seen Brother François go and come.  They made no effort
to stop him.  They watched the priest, the donkeys, the two
crippled men armed with spears, and the three women with bundles on
their heads cross the rough clearing on the other side of the
stockade and descend toward the wall of the forest.  Half-way down
Brother François took off his sandals and shook the dust off them.

He put them on again, and disappeared into the jungle that
stretched toward the rising sun and had no end.




CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

THE BRONZE IS SUBLIMED


That peculiar quality of sunlight, at once soothing and cheerful,
which strikes through broad and lush green leaves, filled the eyes
and the room of the sick man when at last he became aware of his
surroundings again.

How long he had lain helpless he had no idea.  So deep was the
oblivion of weakness after the fever finally left him that he had
lost all sense of time.  Time did not seem to have been going on as
he had always felt it to be going on during the night while he
slept.  This time existence had paused, and he had awakened after a
distinct lapse.

But he was now fully conscious and rational again, he told himself,
conscious of the difference between what went on within him and
what occurred without.  Although, over neither the outer nor the
inner world did he as yet attempt to exert deliberate control.  He
was too weak.  Yet he was aware from the very first opening of his
eyes that afternoon, with the blind rolled up behind him and the
pleasant sunlight streaming in through the leaves, that what went
on in the mirror did not occur of itself but really took place in
the room.  And what he saw in the mirror was curious enough.

There was that night, for instance, when he had wakened and seen
the black witch-doctor from Bangalang talking with Neleta.  Both
were plainly in the room, although but one candle by the mirror was
dimly burning.  He could even hear the husky, bass voice of the
bearded negro whispering.  What was going on?  Why should he feel
afraid of this man?

After a while he remembered why.  This was the witch-doctor from
Bangalang that Brother François had told him about, the man who had
brought a spider to steal the old Susu's soul.  Brother François
had not believed that, nor had he when he first heard of it.  But
now--in his extreme weakness he was very much the child again.  He
was simply and unreasoningly afraid.  He lay still that night with
all the instinct to escape notice of a hunted thing.

Neleta took something out of a drawer under the mirror and showed
it to the man with the white spectacles painted about his eyes.
When you could not see him in the shadows you could still see his
eyes floating in the glass.  They came and went.  You lay still.
The man was much excited by what Neleta was showing him.  When he
moved about there was a sound as if a baby were playing with a
rattle somewhere; shuck-shucka-shuck, shuck-shucka-shuck.

He was squatted in front of the mirror now doing some kind of
monkey-business.  He waved his arms about and burned feathers.
There was a little fetish placed on Neleta's chest of drawers just
before him.  Mnombibi was making dantica to it.

How the burning feathers did smoke!  It was an outrage--making a
stench like that in a sick man's room.  An outrage!

"Neleta!"

He began to make protesting noises in his throat and coughed.  Then
he saw Mnombibi on his hands and knees crawl past the bed and
scuttle through the door.  He saw that, and it was not in the
mirror.  And yet here was Neleta soothing him and assuring him it
was nothing at all but a bad dream.

Well, well, perhaps?  But what was the stench of burning feathers
then?  And that damned little manikin before the mirror, where did
it come from?

It stayed there nearly all night.  He saw it again and again.  Yet
next morning it was gone.  It was all very confusing to a head
still swimming dizzily.

And he had thought he was getting so much better!

He pondered all this till he grew tired and gave it up.  Neleta
still swore that he must have been dreaming.  He lost confidence in
himself.  It gave him a decided set-back in recovery.  Thinking the
matter over, he decided he was not wholly rational yet after all.

He grew a little stronger day by day.  Nevertheless, it was a long,
tedious process.  Trying to sit up, the whole room had reeled.  He
lay back and decided not to force matters.  The man he saw looking
back at him from the glass was more like the youth of four years
ago than the bronzed Master of Gallegos who had greeted him there
only a few months back.  He was very thin again.  The hard lines in
his face had relaxed.  It was not nearly so mask-like and
determined.  Yes, he was more like--"like Anthony,"--he thought.
It reminded him of old times.

Neleta was silent.  She acted at times as if she were frightened or
was holding something back.  His mind dwelt meanwhile a good deal
on the past, the Casa da Bonnyfeather, and even the convent came
back vividly again.

In this moody vein it comforted his reminiscent fancy to insist on
having his madonna brought out and set up before the glass on the
chest of drawers.  Something so familiar would give him a
comforting sense of reality again.  There could be no doubt what
was before the mirror now.  If any fetish was to appear there
before his eyes, let it be one he knew--his own.

It was extraordinary how difficult it was to prevail on Neleta to
get the shrine and to have her put it just where he could see it
when he went to sleep as he had as a little boy.  Surely he was
entitled to so harmless a comfort, a souvenir of old times, he told
himself.  Yet he had to insist; to send for Ferdinando at last and
bid him open the chest in the fireproofed shed; TO GO AND GET IT,
and no more nonsense about it.

It was Cheecha who finally took off the cover in which Faith had
wrapped the shrine at Livorno.  Neleta would have nothing to do
with the madonna.  She even appeared angry and worried.  He had had
to caution her that he valued it highly and would not have it
touched.

So there she stood again.  He had forgotten how beautiful she was.
The blue of the heavenly little canopy, the gorgeous robe of the
Virgin, and the mother-of-pearl at her feet glowed in the bare
room.  He almost felt like talking to her again as to an old
friend; or that Father Xavier might come into the room at any
moment.  Would that he could, good man!  But where--

"Where was Brother François?"

Suddenly it struck him that he had not seen Brother François
lately.  Why didn't HE come to visit him?  How strange!

He had gone on a journey, said Neleta.  Doubtless he would be back
shortly.  She put Anthony off as best she could.  Brother François,
he remembered, had often been away for as much as a week or two at
a time.

"Very well then, ask him to see me as soon as he returns."

Neleta promised.  Both she and Ferdinando were now worried.  What
would Anthony do when he learned why Brother François had fled into
the forest?  Ferdinando said the returns from the sale for the
Ariostatica's cargo would come back on La Fortuna, which was
expected in soon.  Then he would be able to make a fine showing
with his books.  That would be an acceptable excuse, he felt sure.
At most there would be some grumbling, perhaps a perfunctory
reprimand.  He was complacently certain of it.

"You fool!" sneered Neleta.

Ferdinando felt uncomfortable again.  Neleta knew Anthony better
than he did.  He had learned that much.  Perhaps he had better
conceal the matter as long as he could.

Neleta was glad enough to have Brother François removed, even if it
should cost Ferdinando his place when Anthony found what had
happened.  But she felt that it was Mnombibi who had been the real
cause of Brother Francois's departure.  For a while the conjuring
and her plan had seemed to be working well.  Not only had the
Christian priest been driven out and his supposed influence over
Anthony removed, but Mnombibi on his last visit to the house had
reconstructed the melted man-fetish.  In this Neleta believed lay
her influence over Anthony and her hope to have a child by him.  It
was the Christian priest, of course, who had caused the wax to
melt.  But that set-back had now been overcome.  It HAD been
rather awkward to have Anthony wake up that night and find Mnombibi
in his room.  But she had been able to reassure him about that, she
thought.  All was going smoothly when Anthony had insisted on
having the madonna placed before her mirror.  She feared it.  In
that virgin image she instinctively beheld a threat to all
Mnombibi's conjuring of fecundity.  She determined to get more
advice at Bangalang.

As soon as she could she made another surreptitious visit to the
Kru town.  She and Aunt Ungah and Mnombibi had a long discussion
upon the new turn of affairs.  Neleta was for destroying the
madonna, but Mnombibi laid his interdict on that.

The witch-doctor was really greatly puzzled and somewhat afraid of
the white man's fetish that Neleta assured him was an important one
in Spain.  But although he saw in it the possibility of unknown
trouble, he also thought it would provide him another opportunity
to visit Gallegos with the usual reward in view.  However, it
seemed best to wait until he should hear what Brother François was
doing.  For the Christian witch-doctor was the power who might make
the new fetish dangerous.  Mnombibi had already set inquiries afoot
about the whereabouts of Brother François, whom he considered to be
his one dangerous rival and an interloper in the neighbourhood.
Yes, on the whole it would be best to delay.

He retired to his hut and kept Neleta waiting in Ungah's until it
was almost dawn.  He thumped his drum and made dantica with his
spirits.

Neleta was much bored.  She sometimes suspected both priests and
wizards.  The smell of fish was very strong for one who had become
used to a civilized house.  And there was nothing but a hard wooden
pillow to put her head on.  When Mnombibi finally emerged he
announced that if Neleta so much as touched the Virgin her own
fetish would fail.  She returned with a wry neck and gave Mnombibi
nothing for his trouble, at which he took to his drum again.

Mnombibi's was not the only drum along the coast by any means.
That spring there was a good deal of thumping and "wizard-talk"
from village to village, especially on dark nights.  Ferdinando
noticed it, and so did Anthony as he lay awake through the long
night hours.  That drum at Bangalang was interminable!  To
Mnombibi, however, came the news, tapped out and relayed over miles
of jungles from inland villages, that the white witch-doctor had
settled down in a new refuge established in the hills.  Runaway
slaves were welcomed and protected there.  The dead, black tree was
planted again before his door.  That was what Mnombibi wanted to
know.  So the tree WAS the main fetish after all!  The drums
suddenly ceased.  Mnombibi began to lay his plans.

At the house Neleta was mortally careful not to touch the madonna,
which she now disliked the more for being afraid of it.  The dry
season had set in again.  Anthony began to recover more rapidly.
The caravan from Futa-Jaloon came down from the hills.

Anthony had forgotten his promise to Amah-de-bellah to visit Futa-
Jaloon.  But the escort to take him back to the Ali Mami's capital
had been punctually provided.  He was confidently expected to
return with it.  Both the messages and gifts which had been sent
him were flattering.  If he accepted the welcoming-gifts he could
only do so as the approaching guest of the forest potentate.  If he
refused them it would be a deadly affront--and he was largely
dependent on these hill-people for his trade.  Indeed, Gallegos
might not be tenable without their friendship.  Certainly it would
be uncomfortable and dangerous.

Despite that, Anthony hesitated.  He was still weak and
comparatively helpless.  The journey up-country might finish him,
he felt.  Neleta was unalterably opposed to his going.  She clung
to him.  It was old Mehemet Ali, the leader of the caravan, who
finally persuaded him to leave.

He was a gay old fellow with a large paunch, a ribald sense of
humour, and an ingratiating smile.  A huge pair of horned
spectacles under a snow-white turban lent him, when occasion
required, an air of gravity and wisdom.  The combination of these
qualities was hard to resist.

He promised to provide a horse-litter for the trip up-country.  He
extolled the healthy air of the hills as the best way to recover
from fever.  He gave such an enticing account of the hospitality in
store at Futa-Jaloon that the difficulties of the hundred-league
trek through the jungle and hill-country rapidly took on the aspect
of a happy adventure.  Finally, with tears in his eyes, the old
rascal pleaded with Anthony not to be the death of him.  If he
returned without the expected guest, he said his head would no
longer remain in that happy conjunction with the lower parts of his
body which he claimed to have found highly satisfactory and hoped
to continue to enjoy.

"Do not, my son," said he, "be the cause of such a sad parting--and
remember, I cherish the only solace of twenty-one wives."

"My father, prepare the litter," said Anthony laughing, and despite
Neleta's vehement protests he gave orders to pack.

He sent for Ferdinando and gave him off-hand but minute
instructions as to the conduct of affairs at Gallegos during his
absence.  Ferdinando listened carefully, and decided to say nothing
then about Brother Francois's leaving.  He regarded Anthony's
departure as a happy solution of that difficulty.  Why bring it up
now?  He had already sent Juan on a trip up the river for ivory.
He now cautioned Neleta to behave herself and keep her mouth shut.

                            ----------

It was the middle of June when Anthony finally set out, and the
long, hot days had already turned the lowlands about Gallegos into
a vapour bath through which the stars glimmered only as blurred
lights when evening came.  It was high time to be breathing the
free air of the hills again, he thought as they wound day after day
along the narrow caravan trails through the steaming forests.  He
realized that in his debilitated condition he could never have
survived another miasmic summer on the coast.  An unconquerable
weakness and lethargy seized upon him.  He swung from side to side
helplessly in the cradle-like litter that had been contrived for
him.  Most of the time overcome by lassitude and the sleepy motion,
he slept.

They moved perforce very slowly.  Only after five days did they
begin to ascend.  On the sixth they camped at evening amid the
hills.

Their camp fires twinkled along a dry, rocky height under clear,
keen stars.  Anthony had not seen the constellations wink and
glitter that way for nearly four years.  A heavy stone seemed to
have been lifted off his chest.  His lungs no longer laboured.
They expanded eagerly and easily, drawing in the cool, dry air
faintly perfumed with sunburnt grasses.

All the sensations of his body responded and became a joy to him
again.  He lay in his tent experiencing a sensation of lightness
akin to intoxication.  He was still giddy when he moved about.  But
it was heavenly to lie quiet, feeling as if gravity itself had
relented.  Only a little more and it would release him entirely.
He remembered how a stranded boat seemed to become lighter as the
tide rose, till it floated away.

"I have escaped all that fever in the furnace below," he thought,--
"come up under the clean, clear stars again.  Perhaps I was not
melted and cast into hard bronze down there after, all.  Anyway, I
shall live and go on now.  I shall keep going on.  My other, my
real self is not going to die.  Tonight I feel something alive and
stirring within me as if it knew it will soon be set free to go on
with the tide."

For the first time in months he was able to merge into sleep
happily.  Like a healing spring he felt the waters of rest begin to
permeate him.

Presently he seemed to have made an unalterable decision--or it had
been made for him.  He could not state to himself exactly what it
was.  But he was utterly content with it.  In the space between
wakefulness and slumber he felt abundant joy flow through him, a
feeling of having come to a conclusion eternally right.  Energy
flowed into him from beyond himself.  It gradually flooded and
refreshed his being with a great sense of peace and well-being.
Why had he cut himself off from this refreshing river that flowed
from the same eternal source and was the spiritual counterpart of
light?  How long he had been using only a stagnant little part of
it!  His own will had shut the valves of his soul against it!  He
was tired, worn-out holding them closed.  Now he had given up and
life-giving waters swept through him.

Now he could let his body stretch out at peace with the life within
it; at one with its contained self.  He knew he would awaken from
sleep refreshed.  He would not have been holding himself against
the tide all night long, swept this way and that by evil dreams,
almost torn apart.  He would awaken one with himself.  And through
the day?--

No longer would he pass the daylight hours as at Gallegos--like an
actor in an endless play with a futile meaning and a logical little
plot; a play where every motion must be the result of consciously
exerted will.  Acting!  How tired, how exhausted that had left him!
What a vile stage was Gallegos, and how hollow was the animated
metallic figure that had moved upon it, worn out, burned out by
fever of mind and body, empty of itself.  That figure had melted
down at last and now lay almost sublimed.  Was it about to float
off leaving nothing but a few burnt-out ashes behind?

For he HAD succeeded in becoming that impervious, expressionless
bronze boy that stood watching the river of existence flow through
the fountain; not caring whence it came or where it went;
interested only in the interplay of shadows and pictures on the
little pool at his feet where for an instant the eternal water
flashed into the light for him alone.  And he had become tired of
it at last, because finally he could see nothing but his own shadow
falling there.  That shadow had blotted out all else.  Yes, he had
succeeded in becoming the Bronze Boy who had lost his living twin;
who stood looking at his own shadow on the water till his eyes had
gone blind.  He had succeeded in damning himself!  Yet tonight?

Surely tonight some mercy had been vouchsafed him!  He was being
swept on with the waters again; being bathed in their strength.  No
longer would he stand and only look across their surface.  They
were running deep now, down, down . . .

Very deep in him, just at the verge of sleep, lay the images which
expressed life to him.  They were the primary semblances of things
upon which his blank eyes had first feasted in infancy when he
played about the fountain in the convent courtyard under the plane
tree.  There the dream within the dream had first begun.

For him those images were always there.  In the daytime they might
be sunk beyond sight and crowded down, but still there; the unseen
ones who at the direction of the unknown master of the drama pulled
the moving strings of his emotions behind the scenes.  Yet they
could always be seen again when the depths of his being were
stirred.  And then they moved in a drama of their own, his drama,
having taken on the meanings of meaning for him through the
accumulated experience of years.

These subliminal dreams of his soul in which he saw his own life
mirrored and dramatized were not childish to him no matter what the
nature and appearance of the dreamful actors might be; no matter
how beautiful, grotesque, outrageous, or obscene the mimes became.
This play moved beyond the petty censorship of common sense, wrapt
forever from the carping of logic, under the rules of socialized
morality, safe from the wakeful world which it triumphantly
caricatured or glorified with the free imagery of a primal poetry
that transcended reality.  It was his glass of truth, like a mirror
provided by God.  The reflections upon this glass of sleep made him
laugh, weep, love, hate, burn with lust till the seed spouted of
itself from his loins.  They comforted him with visions of the
dead-alive again; they fascinated him with strangely glorious
landscapes, and forgotten things; they sent him reeling through
caverns pursued by dripping monsters of his own begetting,
shrieking with fear.  Any play is THE thing, the presentation of
life in the terms of life itself.  But there is also the play
within the play.

Anthony had always known this instinctively.  It was his faith IN
himself.  For the greater part of his existence he had lived by it.
The last three years at Gallegos he had tried to deny it utterly.

Tonight in the little tent under the stars, where he breathed the
light mountain air again after weeks of fever, the sudden release,
the sudden relief of having been rescued had almost cut him loose
from his physical moorings.  He was, in fact, at the crisis of his
inner and outer sickness, and what sustained him from within, that
which he had so long denied as true now threatened to withdraw.

His first impression of returning strength and renewed
determination as he went to sleep that night had been due to the
sensation of comfort experienced from a complete relaxation upon
being carried up into the cool hills.  It was due to weakness as
much as anything else, and that weakness now released him too far.
What had for a few minutes been a feeling of delicious ease soon
let him down into an utter lassitude, an increasing numbness that
began to verge upon nothing at all.  Almost asleep, as if something
had whispered a warning to him he began to realize the necessity of
a last desperate effort of the will to escape from approaching
oblivion.

He was gliding down a steep slope in the dark with sickening speed.
There was a tremendous cliff at the end.  Somewhere in the
billowing mists that filled the empty abyss at the end of the world
was a far-off glow, a smudged, cloudy glory in which the madonna
had wrapped herself.

If he could only speak to her she would save him.  But he had
refused to do so for so long that he was unable to cry out now.  He
filled his lungs to try.  A hand came down out of the darkness and
clamped itself over his mouth.  He struggled.  He was nearing the
verge . . .

"Madre . . ."  he choked.

Then he fell.  He kept on falling--

Down . . .

Down . . .

Down . . . ice-cold waters closed over his head.  He had finally
become the bronze boy and he sank like heavy metal.

He touched bottom and lay there . . .

Air!  He was drowning.  Give him one more breath!  One!

With a TREMENDOUS impulse he shot himself upward again through
the dark, cold water.

He came out!

He seemed to burst through and fill his lungs again.

The heavy dew had by now stretched tight as a drum the fabric of
the tent in which Anthony lay.  A late, cloud-troubled moon had
gradually climbed above the tops of the surrounding trees.  In the
shifting black-and-silver shadows in the tent, where the filtered
moonlight seemed to concentrate and congeal like a semi-gaseous
fluid, the man who had just hurled himself up from oblivion by a
last desperate effort now opened his eyes still filled with the
horror of his dream.

There had been an overpowering sensation of speed to his return.
As he opened his eyes the impulse of it seemed to be carried
forward into something else beyond him, and to leave him.
Something rose up from his body and was carried by the momentum of
his return into the misty light beyond as if he had projected it
out of himself.

It stood naked in the shifting moonlight.

He had seen it before--when it was younger.  It had had the face
then of the child who had laughed back at him from the fountain
before Father Xavier came and told him it was only a dream.  It was
"Anthony."  It was the dear first playmate, the lovely child who
had laughed down at him from the branches of the plane tree while
the filtered sunlight danced over him . . . that face in the
miniature . . .

But now it was older.  It stood naked in the mist, now wrapping
itself in shadow and now burning clearly in a figure of light
again.  The face of it, noble with a man's strength, was also sad
with unfulfilled desires and hopes; with dreamful eyes like wide,
undiscovered seas.  Flowing out dimly and more dimly into the
darkness, flickered its brush of burning hair.  In that nest a
phoenix might be reborn; might rise suddenly and soar away.

So for an instant it stood as if bewildered at having been cast
forth into the cold outer moonlight.  It shivered and turned to
look sadly at him, its eyes wide with a strange wonder like those
of a child looking upon a dead playmate; wild with a grief-stricken
and lonely surmise.  The lonely twin stood looking for a while at
its birth-fellow.  Then it turned to go . . .

He threw himself upon it.

He wrestled in the moonlight over the floor of the empty tent.  It
was more powerful than anything he had known.  He was in love with
what was choking him and struggling to be gone.  The breath of his
throat rattled as he struggled with it.  He wound his arms around
this strong impalpable thing more precious to him than a dying
child.  He clasped it close and felt it burning into him again.
The chest of it seemed to collapse into his own and to fill his
lungs with fire.  Every breath was a fiery agony . . .  His veins
glowed . . .

He cried out with a terrible voice, "Water!  Water!"

The hoarse, throaty cries from Anthony's tent filled all the
sleeping camp with alarm.  The sentries who had been on watch
against a possible lion came running.  They stood listening now to
the silence.  Old Mehemet Ali tore open the flap and found the
guest of his master lying exhausted on the floor of his tent with
the contents strewn about in intolerable disorder.

Finally they brought him a drink.  He COULD breathe now.  He was
going to live!

Old Mehemet stood by uneasily peering through his foolish, wise-
looking glasses.  "Now, my son," said he, "you will get better.
Those who come up into the mountain air to recover from swamp fever
are sometimes given to fits.  Your cries were terrible.  I thought
you were fighting with a lion."

"I was," said Anthony feebly.

"There, there," said the old man soothingly.  "We shall not leave
you alone again until you get much stronger."

It was near morning.  The camp did not go to sleep again.  The men
built up the fires and waited for dawn, getting what comfort they
could after such an eery alarm from the tones of their own voices
in casual conversation.  Here and there a few laughed at the white
man's nightmare.

All the rest of the way into the foothills Anthony slept.  Some
days later they heard the distant thunder of the snake-drums at
Futa-Jaloon throbbing their greeting.  It would be a long visit for
him, he knew.  He must really get well this time.  He steeled
himself for the indescribable tumult of an African welcome to an
Arab town.  Already the war-horns, the neighing of horses, the
drums and musketry sounded as if a battle were in progress.

                 *     *     *     *     *     *

Six months of the barbaric but bountiful life in the hill-country
about Futa-Jaloon had more than put Anthony on his feet again.
Indeed, it had put him on four feet, for he had been made free of
the splendid Arab stud kept by the Ali Mami.  For the first time he
had tasted to the full the joys and benefits of noble horsemanship.
Over the wide plateaus, the opulent valleys, and through the open
forests of the foothills surrounding the town he and Amah had
chased the deer, coursed antelope, and hunted leopards.  They had
camped under clear stars in thorn bomas about the leaping fires in
lion country.  They had returned to the little capital to
experience a literally royal welcome.  For while at Futa-Jaloon
Anthony had seen a palace revolution take place.  The old Ali Mami
had died and Amah-de-bellah had succeeded him, not without a little
street fighting marked by the timely demise of several nephews.
Now Amah sat on the ivory stool tasselled with ostrich plumes,
which passed for a throne.

But this unnoted ripple in an otherwise blank page of history had
caused little change in Anthony's status as a guest.  If anything,
it was for the better.  He and Amah-de-bellah had become, despite
the barriers of blood and language, very genuine and fast friends.
Language, indeed, had not stood between them long.  During his
convalescence Anthony had taken pains to master the bastard Arabic
of the Foulah hill-country, if one can be said to "master" a
dialect in which the vocabulary is strictly limited and most of the
grammar forgot.  As for blood--any strain that produced so splendid
a figure of a man as Amah deserved admiration.  In spite of the
fact that he really was one, Amah-de-bellah looked and acted like a
king.  That is, he was a free man, sovereign enough to impose his
will on his fellows and himself at the same time.  His was a good
will.

The bond between him and Anthony was one which, though nowadays
rare, once developed in more heroic states of society perhaps the
chief moral virtues in man.  It was friendship based upon an
essential compatibility in manful attitudes and pursuits; in war,
hunting, barter, and the frank relaxations and conversations of the
camp fire, the tent, and the town.

The Arab hill-town, to be sure, was neither heroic nor Utopian.
Outwardly it was merely a collection of a thousand or more white,
flat-roofed houses clustered about a large rambling building of
sunburnt bricks known as the "palace."  Through the centre of the
town ran a loud mountain stream, and there were pleasant enough
open squares shaded by palms.  The place was surrounded by a double
stockade with a packed earth parapet.  There were wooden watch-
towers over the gates and several miles of date trees, palm-nut
groves, and market gardens around about.  These were by far the
most pleasing feature of the Foulah capital.

Six or seven thousand Arabs of a very mixed strain, ruled over by a
few families of purer blood, lived here and dominated a surprising
extent of territory by continuous and ruthless raiding of their
darker, heathen neighbours.  Slaves for both domestic use and for
barter were a drug on the market.  They were, in fact, the debased,
sweated currency of a constantly fluctuating realm.

From Futa-Jaloon to the coast stretched about three hundred miles
of low, hot forest region largely unknown.  This was a no-man's-
land of obscure forest tribes who raided each other and in turn
were raided by the Foulahs whenever their own territory to the east
amid the high hills had been hunted out.

The climate of the place was salubrious; the soil ridiculously
fertile with the mixed abundance of a temperate hill region near
the equator, where crops succeed each other in an endless round.
In addition there were flocks of black native sheep, herds of
cattle, and immense droves of half-wild goats and swine.  Game of
all kinds abounded.

It was not altogether surprising, therefore, that Anthony had
remained at Futa-Jaloon month after month.

His hitherto retarded convalescence had here been rapid.  At the
end of half a year he was stronger than he had ever been before.
The six months at Futa-Jaloon marked a sort of mental pause in
existence for him.  The atmosphere of the place was timeless.  He
lived only for the day and had cast off for the first time in his
life cogitations about the past; plans and worries about the
future.  After his nearly fatal collapse and the struggle that
night in the tent on the way up from Gallegos he had realized that
he must devote himself to regaining his strength and becoming
thoroughly reintegrated, no matter what happened to his affairs.
Existence, and not the ways and means of it, was now the end in
view.

In this, Amah-de-bellah had proved himself an understanding and
solicitous friend.  There was no limit to the hospitality and
courtesies of the princely Mohammedan.  To the stranger who had
come ostensibly for purposes of trade, the house of his host soon
proved to be the most comfortable and hospitable roof under which
he had ever been.  Anthony was nursed back to health by Amah's
mother and sisters, who, though they never dropped their veils,
were none the less skilful and solicitous nurses.  Nor was it the
first case of complicated swamp fever they had dealt with.  They
purged him, fed him, and cheered him back to strength as if he had
been one of their own blood.

As he grew able and anxious to converse again Amah had come and
talked with him for hours, squatting on a low clay bench covered
with the skins of various beasts.  Dressed in the long white robes
of his tribe and rank, with the water-pipe bubbling musically at
his feet and the sweet smoke curling from his fine, clean-cut lips
half-parted in a pleasant open smile, Amah emanated a high-bred
courtesy and an engaging charm with every word and gesture.  This
was all the more striking due to the somewhat hawklike cast of his
features and his glittering black eyes that Anthony felt might just
as easily and naturally take on the pitiless stare of the falcon
who has been shown a swan.

Strong friendship begins with respect, traverses admiration, and
ends in a trust and affection which continues to combine the first
two.  The process is greatly accentuated if the friends in the
making are both willing to confer and receive favours without
conceiving them as obligations or weights on the scales of
influence which must ever be kept nicely readjusted and precisely
balanced.  A true friendship transcends this mere tit-for-tat game
of influence played between urbane self-seeking acquaintances.  It
finds its equipoise in the discovery that both parties have a trust
and belief in some eternal relationship beyond themselves.  Then,
no matter how differently they may approach that common centre,
they understand their actions and attitudes to be upon a mutually
permanent ground.

It was so with Anthony and Amah.  They had begun by respecting,
even by fearing each other a little.  They had opened their minds
to each other during the long hours of conversation and had each
been agreeably surprised and moved to admiration by the qualities
of the other.  And they had, as their reserve vanished by mutual
degrees, discovered that each had at some time in his life given
himself up for lost and knew that he still continued to exist as if
by an extended act of mercy and not by his own transcendent
strength and cleverness.  In this profound compromise of their
egos, differences of race, creed, and custom seemed trivial.

As became a Mohammedan, Amah's outlook upon things was somewhat
fatalistic.  He might strive and will; Allah would decide.  His
mortal dangers had been met and had passed him by in foray and
battle, for he had been a warrior since boyhood.  Arrows and spears
had been loosed at him and had been turned aside to quiver in the
hearts of others stronger and wiser than he.  Thus, said he, "God
has tempered my pride."

Anthony had won the same sense of his place as a servant of a
superior will by internal rather than external strife.  It was the
vision of light upon the barrier beaches which had finally brought
him to a mental acknowledgment and conviction of himself as a
living atom of the whole, but as an atom nevertheless possessed of
an atomic will of its own.  It was the struggle with himself in the
tent that night on the way up from Gallegos that had shown him how
to use that will.  That it had also been a struggle with death he
had no doubt.

But he had been permitted to return.  He had been permitted more
than that.  He had been permitted to see and to understand what
kind of a being he was; to recapture and retain himself.  That
curious entity that lies in so many of us forever unknown, an
entity that when outraged sometimes strikes back at us like a
mysterious enemy, or becomes weary to be gone--had been revealed to
him naked.  It was the quality of his mind so to see things--to see
them rather than to hear them and to make words about them.  The
emotional meanings of that vision of his outraged and departing
self were plain.  Plain also was the departing glow in the mist
which he had called upon but which had answered him no more.  The
temptation to become a mere ruthless doer for the sake of doing had
been passed.  Gallegos had passed him by like one of the arrows of
which Amah had spoken.  True, it had also like them fleshed itself
in the hearts of others and he was partly responsible for that.  He
had helped aim the arrow.

But the nearly vital wound which he had given himself was going to
heal.  Had, indeed, already closed.  His triumph in that was so
great as to preclude much thought of the wounds of others.  How he
could liquidate this experience, how close-out at Gallegos he did
not yet know.  The method, the impulse for that must be disclosed
by events.

For a while he was too weak and exhausted by his long fever and the
fever of the spirit that had accompanied it to make any practical
decisions.  Something must help him to that.  He prayed while he
still lay ill for something to strengthen his will to enable him to
make the break.  His will was weak and tired now after years of
forcing himself against himself.  In his heart he acknowledged this
weakness.  He was no longer the strong, self-sufficient Master of
Gallegos.  Knowing more now, seeing much more clearly--he felt he
might still fail.  But there seemed no immediate answer to this
impasse.  He left it, waiting.  For the time being he wiped the
slate of dreams and cogitations blank.

Thus it was that Futa-Jaloon became for him a kind of dateless
experience.  As he looked back at it afterwards, it remained
forever like a halt in time.  It had about it a bit of the calmness
of eternity, a place where he had slipped out of the swift troubled
rhythms of the West into the changelessness of the East.  Futa-
Jaloon, indeed, was a small outpost of the Orient.  And it was all
the more marked with that feeling because, for Anthony, it lay
between two distinct epochs of his life.

Early impulsive manhood had gone.  It had died, had been burnt out
in the fever; passed with the era of the Bronze Boy in the fierce
furnace of tropical heat and mad desire.  Henceforth he knew
himself not as merely becoming but as to a great extent become.

This inward conviction undoubtedly reacted upon him physically.
He not only grew well again, but the process went further.  Once
having conquered a constant internal doubt and conflict, he now
gave outward signs of inward rest, of greater strength and
assurance.  He became heavier and stronger, less brittle and
metallic in his body.  Yet more sinewy and tougher.  He became less
liable to be broken and shattered; more resilient and flexible.  By
day he was tireless, and at night he lay down and slept like a
child.

He thanked God for this.  He told himself that he had won through
onto the untroubled table-land of mature middle life.  It now
seemed to stretch before him to an unbroken horizon.  At least he
could not see beyond that imaginary line.  Meanwhile, he lingered
on the plateaus about Futa-Jaloon and in the house of Amah-de-
bellah, comforted at the world's end by unexpected and generous
hospitality; by trust, and as time wore on, by affection.  He
seemed suddenly to have found not only himself but a brother and a
family in that house.  He even had a horse and a dog.  He had never
known the dependence and devotion of animals before; how deeply it
tried and tested a man.  And here too he had not been found
wanting.  All the gold of the Indies could bring him no more.  All
that was wanting was a wife and children.  Amah on more than one
occasion had said so laughingly.  Soon he had grown more serious.

All this, however, was suddenly put an end to by the unexpected
appearance of Juan with disconcerting news from Gallegos.  Anthony
had heard only twice from Gallegos since he had come up into the
hills.  All had been "as usual" and "going well," according to the
quite literal Ferdinando.  But now his writing was different.

La Fortuna was lying in the reach again waiting for cargo.  Petty
trouble had developed between Don Ruiz and the factor, which, to
judge by both their letters, promised to become serious.  In the
midst of this an English ship called the Unicorn had suddenly
appeared in the Rio Pongo and now lay covering the channel below
Gallegos with her guns.  The English ship was commanded by a
horrid, determined gentleman by the name of Bittern who claimed to
have come to take Señor Adverse to Italy.  And he would not depart,
nor let anyone else depart, until he had seen the said Señor
Adverse to whom he insisted the Unicorn belonged.

Here Ferdinando's letter broke into a wail.  Was it possible that
this was true?  If so what was to become of them all at Gallegos,
with England and Spain at war, and an English armed ship owned by
their master in the river?  Wasn't this rather hard to explain?
Also what did Anthony think Neleta was doing all this time? etc.,
etc.  The factor permitted himself a few perplexed but rather tart
liberties.

At all this Anthony felt somewhat inclined to laugh.  Don Ruiz and
Ferdinando faced by the implacable Captain Bittern was not without
its humorous aspects.  But his smile faded as he read on.
Ferdinando had now seen fit, at a safe distance, to illuminate his
employer about the departure of Brother François.  Furthermore, the
cargo of children had been sold at a considerable profit.  This
point the factor took some pains to drive home.  Anthony was some
two hundred pounds better off by the transaction, he discovered--
when he was able to look at the paper and see the neat copper-plate
writing of his clerk again.


And [said Ferdinando, evidently sure of himself] it is on the
whole, señor, much better that we are rid of that padre once and
for all here at Gallegos.  He has attempted to set up again at some
place about the headwaters of the Rio Pongo, I hear.  This has
caused a great stir amongst the coast tribes whose slaves have been
slipping off to his crazy settlement.

So far has this matter gone since you left that our own trade is
being interfered with, too.  A great gathering of the coast tribes
recently took place at Bangalang and after a deal of drumming and
witch-finding set off yesterday inland.  I think this bodes no good
to the padre.  We wish him no harm, of course, but I did not think
it NECESSARY TO INTERFERE.  Mnombibi, of whom you have heard, is
his enemy, and I did not desire to antagonize the natives so near
at hand upon whom we must depend.  What we now fear is that on the
way back they will be crazed with the war-fever and attack the
settlement from the land side.  We shall then be between these
devils and the deep sea, with the Englishman waiting down river.
Come home, Señor Adverse.  We are short handed . . .


The letter ended in a thoroughly scared whine, a half-breed left
alone to his own resources!

Anthony flung the letter on the ground with a round curse and
looked up to see Juan's eyes resting upon him.

"Juan," said he, "it is my fault.  I have stayed away too long.  I
know . . ."

"Sí," answered Juan looking at him reproachfully.  "I have come
myself this time to be sure you hear the truth.  It is much worse
than you think.  That man Ferdinando is a half-breed wolf.  He
would sell his own children.  Everything!  He and his sister--
caramba!  She is a bitch without brats.  Someone should give her
some.  It is 'Cheecha, Cheecha,' all day long now--and the sound of
the whip at the house on the hill.  Ah, pardon, señor, but it is
true.  Sí!  I have come to tell you, and to bring you the letters
of Captain Matanza.  Without Don Ruiz we would be in a bad way.  I
have been living on La Fortuna myself for a month past.  Your
factor when he is drunk is the kind of a man that makes the knife
itch to go home, ugh!  If you are a man, señor, you will come back
now.  Brother François gave me this on the way up.  I found him!
From his hands I received the holy food.  He is well but . . ."

"You SAW him!" cried Anthony.  "Give it to me!"  He tore open the
small scroll of native matting.  Inside, written across the torn
page of a missal in some dim vegetable fluid that had run he made
out very faintly:


A moi, mon ami, for the love of Christ--and the peace of your own
soul.  I appeal to the last . . .


The rest was a hopeless blur.  But the import of it was like an
explosion in Anthony's brain.  "Mnombibi--Brother François."

                            ----------

Juan had reached him where he and Amah had come out to hunt some
leopards that had been causing the villagers trouble in the level
tract of country just below Futa-Jaloon.  It was a wide, park-like
plateau that stretched out from the foothills to plunge down
suddenly into the coastal jungles some leagues to the westward.
The hunt was to begin on the morrow.  It was a full-moon night.

Hyenas were laughing somewhere in the distance and the pack of
eager hounds they had brought with them was baying with melancholy
harmonies at the cloudless, copper disk just beginning to rise
redly through the trees and the smoke of the evening fires.

Anthony tossed Ferdinando's letter into the flames.

"Can you still ride, Juan--after your long journey?"

"If it is with you--homeward."

Anthony nodded and led the way to Amah's fire.  Something in his
gait and demeanor made Amah look up and grow tense.

"What has happened?" he asked.

"My brother," said Anthony, "the hand of God has been laid upon me.
I must go."

"Bismillah!" exclaimed Amah, "but you will not go alone!"

"No, lend me men and horses, my friend, I too will go hunting
tomorrow, but in the forest below for those who trouble a holy
man."

"Allah be with you then," said Amah, and gave a shrill whistle.  In
five minutes twenty men were armed, mounted, and waiting
expectantly just below the chief's fire.  They were used to forays
by night.  Anthony's horse was led up.

Amah rose suddenly and facing Anthony laid his hands on his
shoulders.

"My brother," he said, "for seven moons now we have eaten salt
together and we have deeply tasted the same savour.  Is it not so?"

"Allah reward you for it, Amah my friend," said Anthony much moved.
"The savour of your bread and salt has been sweet to the tongue."

"Ah!  It comes upon me suddenly I shall not see you again," said
Amah.  "May the glory of the face of Allah light your path
forever."  He raised his hands high above his head in a mantic
gesture seeming to release a sudden force as he opened his palms to
speed his blessing upon them.  The men waiting below shouted.

"Wait," said Amah, "there is something I would send with you."
Then he hesitated as if he had changed his mind.  "My friendship
will follow you," he said.

"Farewell," they both said it together and laughed.  Anthony
mounted.

"Go!" cried Amah.

They swept out over the level grass land with the fresh night-wind
in their faces, the little troop galloping hard, and close
together.

Amah saw them pass over the grey face of the rolling grass country
like a small, white cloud scudding under the moon.  "Kismet," he
murmured.

Presently he made a sign to one of his men.  "Loose Simba," he
said.  At the first halt, as they drew up to breathe the horses,
Anthony was overtaken by the powerful hound that he had been
hunting with for some time past.  It ran up and lay down at his
feet.  He knew it was a parting gift from Amah, who valued his
brave dogs more than his gold.  Amah's friendship would follow, as
he had said.

They were in the saddle again in a few minutes, speeding over the
gentle, mile-long waves of the hill pastures with only the next
horizon and clumps of trees here and there, like ships anchored on
a sea of moonlight, to guide them.  Shadows of antelopes and
jackals fled before them.  They galloped long and hard, they
rested--and galloped on again.

By morning they had come to the great escarpment where the plateau
fell away sheerly and then tumbled down through several miles of
eroded foothills to the low, coastal forest two thousand feet
below.  A grey cloud through which here and there, on a few
isolated high places, the tops of tall palms wrapped in mist thrust
themselves upward with a funereal effect, stretched as far as they
could see.  Three days westward through those orchid-hung, steaming
depths lay Gallegos.

Juan pointed out a range of low hills toward the far horizon which
was already beginning to shine in the dawn while all else still lay
drab and level as far as the eye could reach in that direction.  It
was there he said Brother François had made his refuge.  Those
hills lay a good ten hours' journey along the caravan trail to
Gallegos.  Anthony's heart smote him to think that he must have
passed them close-by on his journey up.  "If he could only have
known--have seen Brother François then!  Now, perhaps, it was too
late."

Reproachful voices seemed to rise up to him out of the forest
below.  He turned away sad and sick at heart; full of foreboding.
Those hills seemed far-off, dark as Calvary.  Yet he must not
permit himself the disconcerting luxury of remorseful reverie.  He
must save himself to press on.  If he could only arrive before
Mnombibi and his tribesmen!  IF he could only do THAT!--all
might still be well.

They settled themselves on the edge of the plateau for a brief
halt.  It was essential to let the horses rest and get their last
bellyful of the good grass before plunging into the leafy gulf
below.  Between them and the coast there was nothing but dark
forest.  It was the country where he had lost himself, Anthony
thought.  He longed for a glimpse of the sea beyond, for the free
path across which, under the clear stars, ships came and went.  In
one of them he could sail away.

But would he?

Would he, when he got home with Brother François safe again, have
the courage to make the final break from Gallegos?  Neleta, the
much cherished plantations, the whole order of the existence he had
built up for four years would be there--reaching out for him.  At
the top of the cliff, before he plunged back into the forest again,
he tossed in his blankets and wondered.  What would mere dreams in
the hills be when once more he lay in Neleta's arms in the castle
he had built for himself?  He was strong now, stronger than ever
before, and the fire of life beat in his veins.

As the first heat of the morning poured over the plateau and turned
the forest below into a thousand smokes, they rose, saddled their
beasts, and plunged downward through the bare, clay foothills.  An
hour later and the roof of the jungle had closed over them.

The narrow caravan trail, forever lost in glimmering half-lights,
led hither and yon.  It looped and twisted through swamps and made
detours to strike the muddy fords of black, sleepy streams.  Not a
ripple of breeze stirred the palm-tops a hundred feet above them.
Eternal silence, and the immemorial twilight of the primeval forest
bathed in stupefying heat closed them in.  Now and then they halted
while vines that had grown across the trail were being cut through.
It was evident that the trail followed the tops of slight ridges
through trackless reaches of swamp.  Bad as it was, it was one of
the best roads in Africa from the hill-country to the coast.
Horses could follow it if they could survive the flies and insects.
They halted at noon in a forest clearing, an inane paradise of
orchids and vines covering the fire-scarred sites of native huts.
It was here they heard drums.  They were very distant.  It was a
shaking of leaves rather than a sound.  It shook Anthony like the
leaves.

He now pressed his men and horses to the limit.  They began to rise
out of the swamp again.  About three o'clock Juan pointed out a
fork in the trail they might otherwise have passed.  They took this
and rose rapidly.  Evidently they were now among the nest of low
hills they had seen that morning.  Presently they could trot again.
They did so, stopping frequently to listen, and with scouts out
ahead.

Suddenly they emerged into a series of open glades.  Great springs
broke out clearly from under masses of black, volcanic rock.  Here
was the source of one of the main forks of the Rio Pongo, the
Foulahs said.  They turned sharply to the right still following
Juan's lead and entered an open, bowl-shaped valley.  At the upper
end the embers of what had been a cluster of huts only a few hours
before still shimmered with heat and smoked hazily into the
afternoon sunlight.

They were too late.

Anthony sat his horse drearily.  He cursed himself and his luck
darkly.  Here and there in the grass he saw the glimmer of dark
bodies.  Several vultures flapped away.  There was the busy noise
of flies.  Mnombibi's people must have raided the place some time
that morning.  It was the drums going down-river that they had
heard--after the raid!  Most of the people they would carry off.

"And that devil Mnombibi had been in his room that night with
Neleta!"  He ground his teeth.

But Brother François, Brother François, where was he?

Someone gave a dismal shout and pointed.

Against a black outcrop of cliff several hundred yards away Anthony
saw a white body apparently suspended in the air.  It did not move.
His spine crept.

He slid down the neck of his horse, which was cropping the grass,
and stumbled forward in a tumult of agonized horror.  He looked for
the rope.  The arms were held out stiffly.  At first he did not see
the dark beams of the cross against the black rock in the cliff's
shadow.  Now they suddenly seared themselves on his mind forever--
and the man hanging there.

The cross stood before a little cave which Brother François had
evidently made his chapel.  He ran and fell down by it.  He cried
out so that the hound which had followed him cowered and whimpered
and was afraid to come near.

After a while the man on the ground grew silent and lay still . . .

"Why did this have to happen to him?  It was more than he could
bear.  Now he was lost.  He was in hell NOW.  If time would only
pass.  Let it be a year from now, instantly!"  He tried to pray.

"Father," he cried, and looked up.

There were none of the comforting conventions of the carved
crucifix there.  The naked body, welted from the shoulders down,
was bound to the beams with thongs of rawhide.  These had drawn
tight in the morning sun, which had passed slowly, blistering the
tonsured head.  The dark, clotted locks hung down before the face
like a scorched curtain.  Through the hands and feet were thrust
long mimosa thorns that dripped slowly into black clots on the
stones below.  But the shadow of the cliff had now advanced beyond
the little cairn of rocks where the cross had been planted.
Already it was enveloped in advancing shade.  It grew cooler.

The man on the cross shivered and opened his eyes.

"I."

"Tonight thou shall be with me in paradise. . . ."

"I?"

Not yet!  This was the terrible earth yet.  Hands, feet, fire!

"A moi," he cried raising his face.  His head sunk again and he
looked down through his hair, hanging.

He heard a voice below him.  He saw dimly.  After a while he
remembered.

"Anthony," he whispered, "my son . . ."

The sound fell into the ears of the man below like dry burning
leaves.

"Alive yet!" cried Anthony.  He stood up.  He could do something.
He looked.

NOT too late . . . ?  Yes--yes, too late--and forever too
late. . . .  Oh!

"You are dying."

The leaves of sound began to fall again.  The cross shook.  The man
on it was trying to speak to him.  He looked up again at that
agony.  It was for him. HIS.  The wind blew the hair back from
the face.  It was only the body fighting there he saw--fighting.
Suddenly Brother Francois's face, the beloved face Anthony had
known, peered through it.  The lips moved not of themselves but to
the music of the mind.

"It is you who are dying.  Not I."

Anthony stood fixed, turned to stone.  He saw that face lift to the
sky.

"Remember me . . . Jesu . . . I still live . . ."

"I LIVE," he cried with a triumphant voice.

"GO!"

The body of him leaped upward against the thongs and thorns.  The
cross rocked against the sky.  Then it was still.

Silence again.

A column of ants approached and began to ascend the cross.

The man below stood looking up but seeing nothing.  After a while a
cloud seemed to be passing across the top of his mind.  He seemed
to be looking up from the bottom of a well.  Presently he knew it
WAS the sky he was looking at.  He fell backward out of eternity
into time, and caught himself.  He fled up the hill.

When he came to himself he was lying in the grass with a circle of
dark faces peering down at him and the hound Simba licking his
hands.

"Not worthy of that," he thought.  He caught them away.

Then he threw his arms about the animal and burst into an agony of
weeping.

It saved him from going mad.

They stayed in the valley all night and built great fires to keep
the beasts off.  It was necessary to appeal to the Foulahs for
help.  Luckily the only one of them who could read his Koran
remembered that Mohammed had said Christ was one of the prophets
who had come before him.  It might therefore be permitted to help
bury Christ's servants who had been slain by the heathen.  After
some urging, and the promise of gifts at Gallegos, they were
persuaded to set about gathering large stones for a tomb.  But they
would not touch the body on the cross.

Anthony and Juan were left alone to that.  In the flickering light
of the leaping fires they unbound the now shrunken form from the
tree where it had suffered.  They wrapped it in a rich cloak Amah
had given Anthony.  They laid it on the rough stone altar at the
end of the cave.  It was a naturally cloistered cavern.  They stood
the long cross lengthwise against the low wall of the place.  Juan
left and returned with some white rock-flowers he found near by.
He spread these about softly and wept.  Anthony saw that he had
left his shoes at the entrance.

"Look, señor," he whispered.  "They have stolen the silver crucifix
that the good padre kept over his altar.  There must have been
Christians among them."

Anthony shook his head.  He could neither weep nor speak.

The torches began to go out.  The night deepened.  Anthony thought
of Brother Francois's face under the light of the vine that day at
Regla.

"The light has taken him back to itself.  I saw him go," he
thought.  "It is well with him now.  I cannot bear it here any
more.  I am only a man."

"He will pray for us," said Juan when they stood outside under the
stars again.  "Our sins will be forgiven."  Anthony pressed the
simple fellow's hand.  He waited while Juan went for the Arabs.
They blocked the narrow entrance of the little cave, piling one
great rock on another.  They brought the earth down over the front.

The sound of the stones falling one on another was the language
that night of Anthony's thoughts as he sat alone with Simba by the
fire.  The others might sleep.  Yesterday had altered him beyond
the language of the tongues of men.  In an indescribable way he
felt himself to be a totally different man.  Like the blade of a
sword taken hot from the fire he had been suddenly plunged into
cold eternity for a moment and permanently tempered.  When he had
reeled back from the foot of the cross he had stumbled into time
again.  But his metal had been changed.

How this new man would act, who he was in fact, he must now find
out for himself.  Nor did he feel that the tempering of himself had
been the end intended for what had happened to Brother François.
"No, no, a thousand times no!"  He was beyond any egotistic
superstitions about this martyrdom which to his own inner world had
been like a cosmic catastrophe, a spiritual earthquake which for a
few moments had left him standing alone like the only man left on
earth, face to face with God.  It could have been intended for him
alone no more than an earthquake could have been aimed at him or a
storm at sea.

Yet he had been involved in it.  He had even been instrumental in
both a wilful and involuntary way in bringing it about.  Looking
into the embers of the dying fire in that valley of the shadow that
night, he faced all the implications.  And his own part in this
happening and the meaning of it to him, accidental as that might
be,--or providential if accidents were part of providence,--was
part of them.  The meaning of it remained with him alone.

Alone among those present he had had eyes and ears to understand.
The Foulahs could only gather stones to make a tomb.  The others
slept while he watched and in his own manner communed.

Even Juan slept.  Poor fellow, the marks of tears were still there
on his simple, peasant face.  In his handkerchief, wrapped up in
sweet-smelling leaves and hidden in his breast, were the three
thorns that had pierced Brother Francois's hands and feet.  He had
asked for them.  Anthony knew they would eventually go to the
little chapel overlooking the sea in Juan's native village in
Spain.  There the pious tale of the returned sailor would go round.
There would be pilgrimages from the local countryside, perhaps.  It
would be like the "miracle" at Regla.  Surely, surely THAT could
not be the end of Brother François--three thorns in a gold box on a
country altar?  No! no!  Someway, somehow, he must yet learn how,
he should carry that light farther.  When the time came he would
light it again.  He would take up the torch he had left burning out
in the cavern.  Perhaps Juan would take up the one he had left
there in his own way.  Perhaps, the thorns on the altar and
pilgrimage were one way of remembering, of keeping the torch lit.
But he must find his own way of shedding that light.  Now he knew
what the madonna had been holding out to him.  The child in her
arms had leaped into the man on the cross.

He wrapped his cloak about him closer in the darkness and gazed
into the dying embers, not asleep, but lost at last in a wordless
reverie.  The night passed.  The titanic fingers of the sun thrust
fanwise through the eastern clouds.  The tropical dawn came with a
single stride.  Suddenly the intolerable sun smote him on the eyes.

"Let there be light!"

"Go!"

"Go.  May the glory of the face of Allah light your way," Amah had
said.

"Go!"  It was the last utterance of Brother François, whether
addressed to his own spirit or to Anthony's, Anthony did not know.
It would have been like him to have thought of another even at the
last.  Now the entire universe seemed to be filled and to be
thundering that word accompanied by speeding bolts of light that
struck the hills themselves into day.

The beams sped on into the west where that word of action was the
way to salvation or damnation.  In Futa-Jaloon, in the east where
the dawn came from, men might sit and let the fate of Allah
overtake them.  They might wait for it there.  But he, Anthony, was
going back home.  He must go now.  He must GO!

He called to the sleepers and they rode out of the shadows of the
valley as if they could leave them behind forever.





CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

THE "UNICORN" CHARGES HOME


On the same morning that Anthony was slashing his way through the
forests toward Gallegos, Captain Bittern of the good ship Unicorn
was walking the quarter-deck with a faster tread and shorter turn
than usual.  He had been lying--and stewing--in the Rio Pongo for
over six weeks, and he was thoroughly fed-up with the landscape
just below Gallegos and immediately opposite Bangalang.  With this
view of things, a thoroughly monotonous one, the entire ship's
company was for once in exact agreement with their captain.

Only once since they had arrived in the Rio Pongo to fetch home
their new owner--about whom rumours were rife in the foc's'le--had
the prospect from the deck been changed, and then only enough to
shift the angles of things in the view very slightly.  Yet this
change, to the eyes of the captain at least, had been quite
important.

He had warped his ship about a half mile across the bay from her
first anchorage to take advantage of what is known to admirers of
the art of artillery as "defilade space."  In this case it simply
meant that the guns from the hill-battery at Gallegos would be
forced to overshoot the Unicorn in her new berth, due to the
prominence of a small rise of ground on the long point of land
between them and the ship.

Captain Bittern had picked out the one safe spot in the broad reach
between Gallegos and Mongo Tom's with the canny eye of a
privateers-man who had cut-out many a tall ship and felucca from
under the noses of barking Spanish shore batteries.  Although he
had now come on a peaceful private mission to an out-of-the-way
spot, he bore an English letter of marque, the Spanish flag waved
at Gallegos--and he was taking no chances.  He still regarded
minute protuberances in the landscape, such as now shielded him, as
small but important works of God in favour of British enterprise.
In a world where the majority of mankind persisted in disagreeing
with him and his countrymen about the superior nature of British
institutions, he had trained himself to see eye-to-eye with the
deity in regard to defilade space and other small matters--and, oh,
the difference to Captain Bittern!

Hence, from the quarter-deck of the Unicorn the view was not quite
so devoid of interest as it was from the fo'c'sle, where the
beauties of defilade space were not fully understood.  As the
captain paced back and forth he noted with some satisfaction that
the Unicorn was not only safe in the precise spot where he had
moored her bow-and-stern with springs on her cables, but that a few
turns on the capstan would bring her broadside to bear on the river
channel just where ships rounded the long point coming down from
Gallegos.  For a full half-mile or more he could simply "lack them
through and through" before he got a gun in reply.  And the same
would also be true for any hostile craft coming up the river to the
south of him.  Besides, both Mongo Tom's and Bangalang lay directly
across the flats within easy range of his guns.  Both places,
therefore, continued to furnish him with fish, green provisions,
fresh water, and other small comforts, with alacrity--but at prices
which were only less ruinous to them than finding themselves all
blown to hell, which was the alternative named.

Don Ruiz had taken all this in through a glass from the main top of
La Fortuna where she lay by the new quay at Gallegos.  If the
Englishman intended to blockade Gallegos until Señor Adverse came
back, he, Don Ruiz, could do nothing about it.  He would simply
wait until Señor Adverse returned to solve the difficulty.  In the
meantime, he would continue to take dinner every night at the big
house with Ferdinando and Neleta.  Perhaps, after all, it was
Neleta who kept the blockade from being broken.  La Fortuna was
more heavily armed than the Unicorn, and Don Ruiz was a brave man.

But this particular morning Captain Bittern was by no means
satisfied with the view.  He kept man-o'-war discipline on the
Unicorn, but the crew had just come aft in a body to inform him
respectfully that tomorrow would be New Year's Day, 1801, and the
articles under which they had shipped would "hexpire."  The
question was; should he try to wait any longer for the new owner of
the Unicorn, who seemed to have disappeared into the interior and
might be dead of fever, or should he up-anchor and make sail for
London, where considerable sums in prize-money as well as pay and
discharges awaited him and his crew?

"After all--what was he doing here?  And why should Captain Bittern
boil himself and his men any longer for what had been the whim of
an old man--and a dead man at that?  He had served John
Bonnyfeather faithfully for thirty-seven years, but now that he was
gone, and his affairs were being administered by Baring Bros. &
Co., why was he bound any longer to serve them or this young Mr.
Adverse, who was only the heir by law and no relation to his old
employer?  No!  Perhaps he had been a bit too grateful to the past
in undertaking to bring the Unicorn to the Rio Pongo.  And a devil
of a time he had had finding that muddy ditch.  The charts were
crazy.

"What luck some people had! Mr. Adverse--who was HE?  A pleasant
young dog who had been smart enough at learning his ships
accounting at Livorno, he remembered.  But, good Lord, the old man
must have left him a cool hundred thousand at least!  And Mr.
Adverse seemed to have been doing remarkably well here, too.  Maybe
there was more to it than appeared on the surface?  McNab had
hinted at something once over a demijohn or two.  Sandy McNab, that
grand old crab, and Toussaint--what would become of them all at
Livorno now?  Where would that woman Faith go?  She could take care
of herself, he'd warrant.  A very smooth piece, she was!  Perhaps
he should have spoken to the old man about her being in the house--
and all that.  A woman that would kneel down over a chair and let a
man . . . pshaw!  Whose business was that?  It had been a wonderful
night in the cabin.  And now they would be selling the ship at
auction soon.  The chair, that leather-padded monument of romance,
would have to go.  He might buy it in for about £2.  For £2?

"£2--£2--£2 . . . going.  £2 and 1.  Do I hear the sea-faring
gentleman with the rings in his ears say £2 and 1?  Good!  Ah, £2
and 2 now.  Thanks, father in Israel.  £2 and 2, £2 and 2 . . .
going . . . going.  Do I hear sixpence more?  The captain with the
rings in his ears again, do I hear 2 1/2?  Yes!  Going, going,
going, gaw--£2.3 . . .  Gone!--sold to the father in Israel for two
pounds and three shillings.  Take it away!

"Farewell chair, farewell.

"Captain Bittern has no more use for chairs--had only once, only
once.  He was raised up a pious man.  He has had his own reward.
Now he is going to live in a cottage in Chelsea with his niece and
her two yellow-haired 'orphans.'   SHE trusted in man.  Served
her right, served her right!  But they are nice little girls,
little girls.  No more chairs for Captain Bittern.  Of what use now
are chairs except to sit upon?

"On Sundays--on some Sundays--he would take them all in a hack to
the Muggletonian chapel at Spitalfields, where he had sat as a
wide-eared, wooden-faced youth and listened to the Prophetess
Johanna Heathcote expound the scriptures.  How mouse-like his
mother had been with a little brown tippet wrapped about her,
sitting meekly on the cold chapel benches.  A silk-weaver's
daughter, she was.  A mouse--he wondered now how his father had
ever got her with him.  It must have been a surprise to her, a
distinct nervous shock.  She wouldn't have believed there COULD
be a woman like that Paleologus girl.  She enjoyed it.  It wasn't
even sin with her.  Maybe the prophetess would have understood.
She had worn a deep, respectable bonnet too.  Prim you might call
her.  But now, now that he came to think of it, she was a fire-
ship, a fire-ship in disguise, by God, sir!  She would have drifted
down on you with the church pennant flying, and then--grappled with
you--and spouted flames in the dark.  Ha, ha . . ."

Mr. Spencer, the young gentleman purser, who had been taken aboard
at the request of Sir Francis Baring to represent the executors,
nearly stepped on his wrist as he heard the grim captain suddenly
burst out into a loon-like laugh.  He took the news forward.  It
might mean they were going home.  He opined hopefully.

Jenkers, the sailmaker, shook his head.

"You don't know 'im like hi do," he said.  "'E's jes thort o'
suthin' narsty.  'E's figurin'!  An' if we gets hall our prize-
money wen we gets t' Lunnon, we'll be bloody lucky, we will."

"I shall speak to the new owner about it when he comes aboard,"
said the purser loftily.

"Aye?" sniffed Jenkers, "WEN 'e comes aboard.  Wen will that be?
That's wot we hall warnts ter know.  You might himpart your
hinformation to the marines.  Tell 'em the ole man larfed."

"Now look here, Willum Jenkers . . ."

But it was just then that both Mr. Spencer and Jenkers heard the
sound of drums and tom-toms.  They were apparently away up-river
yet--but coming down.  They both leaned out of the port to listen.

"Belike it's them Bangalang 'eathens comin' 'ome again," said
Jenkers.  "You might tell that to the ole man.  'E's a bit deef, 'e
is."  Mr. Spencer returned aft.

Meanwhile Captain Bittern had come to a decision about going home.
He would wait the last day of the old year out and sail on the
morrow.  He could legally hold his crew to the end of the voyage.
But it would have to be a bona-fide voyage, under sail.  He
couldn't dawdle any longer in the Rio Pongo and pretend he was
cruising.  He might but he wouldn't.  It was time to go.  It would
take him some time to square things with the Barings when he got to
London, anyway.  The Unicorn had been out since '96 off and on, and
had made a lot of captures.  And now he would get his own share and
let the Barings settle with Mr. Adverse if they could find him.  He
couldn't--and he had done his best.

It was the Barings who had given him instructions when he had last
put in to Gib to sail for the Rio Pongo to get Mr. Adverse.  Sir
Francis Baring himself had written.  He was a schoolmate of John
Bonnyfeather and very anxious to find Mr. Adverse to do the right
thing by him, it appeared.  Spencer had also let slip that the
affairs of Mr. Adverse very much needed his return to Europe.  It
would pay him to give them personal attention, he said.  There was
Mr. Bonnyfeather's estate, there were the dozen or more prizes the
Unicorn had taken, and there were large sums of money which Mr.
Adverse had been smuggling through from Cuba by foreign bills of
exchange.

Well, whatever came, he would see that his crew got their pay and
their prize-money out of it.  Even if Mr. Adverse never showed up
it would be an admiralty and not a chancery case, thank God!  Four
years of privateering at the end of a long career, and the last of
the Bonnyfeather fleet!  He had kept the old house-flag flying to a
profitable tune on the Unicorn, long after it had been hauled down
at Livorno.  Well, it was all over now for him.  Mr. Adverse would
have to look after his own, and if he was dead . . .

"WELL, Mr. Spencer, what is it?"

"Drud--druda--drums, sir," shouted the purser.  "Coming down-river
fast, sir," he bellowed.

"Damn you, do you think I'm deaf?" said the captain.

He went to the taffrail to listen.  The Unicorn was swinging free
with her stern pointed up-river toward Gallegos.  It was a clear,
hot day and the long point stretched over the water a mile away
upstream like a sharp pencil laid on glass.

Captain Bittern heard the drums.

                            ----------

They were certainly loud and insistent enough.  There was a certain
triumphant slam in their rhythm that grumbled over the water
insolently.  A large fleet of war canoes was emerging from the
forest just where the river first swung east into the jungle above
Gallegos.  More and more kept coming around the bend.

On account of the point Captain Bittern could not see them yet.
But from the docks and hill at Gallegos they were soon in full
view.  From the decks of La Fortuna Don Ruiz counted three score
and four.  It was the combined armada of the Kru coastal villages
which Mnombibi had assembled for the crusade inland.  A number of
allies from Mandingo villages farther upstream could be picked out
by their longer spears and leaf-shaped paddles.  All were now
returning to celebrate at Bangalang the success of the expedition.

A formidable gathering which it would be best not to meddle with,
thought Ferdinando watching from the porch of the residence.  In
his time, even as a youngster at Bangalang, Ferdinando could not
remember seeing so many war canoes.  He was glad they were not
coming home by the land side.  He hoped devoutly they would pass
and go down-river without making trouble or asking for rum.  This
fellow Mnombibi had raised himself into the position of a war
prophet for the whole region.  He might be hard to deal with in the
future.  Yes, he certainly hoped that this fleet of war-maddened,
grotesquely-masked warriors, with blue light flashing from hundreds
of spears, with the thump of tom-toms and the roar of drums and
conch shells rolling over the water would go by.

Don Ruiz beat to quarters on La Fortuna--and Captain Bittern heard
that.

The canoes passed Gallegos with obscene gestures shoreward and loud
shouts of triumph.  Something had broken their fear of the white
man.  His prestige about Gallegos had vanished.  Ferdinando could
guess why.  On the bow of the long, black war canoe from Bangalang,
which had not been taken from its shed for a generation, capered a
man with a white-spectacled face, waving a silver crucifix in one
hand derisively.  The fleet bunched lower down where the current
swept them together in a slowly swirling eddy just before it
streamed around the point.  Here they gathered about Mnombibi's
canoe, with much boo-booing on conch shells and the roaring of
bull-whistles, to hold a palaver.

The success of Mnombibi's raid on Brother François, although
trivial from the standpoint of loot, had been immense in morale.
Some lack of plunder had been made good at the expense of several
unfortunate villages on the way back.  The witch-doctor's influence
was now paramount.  Not only had he nailed the white man's wizard
to his own tree, but he had carried off the white man's fetish and
now held it in his hand.  There it was, nailed down too.  It could
never get away.  All its strength was his now.  The secret power of
the white god had passed to Mnombibi.  It was Mnombibi and his
followers who were henceforth in possession of the white man's
magic superiority.  It was they who were now invincible.

Mnombibi believed this thoroughly, although with him the raid had
been a mere matter of professional etiquette and business.  Brother
François had set up a rival shop, and had paid the penalty.  But
some glimmerings of reasonable doubt had caused Mnombibi to pass by
Gallegos and the big ship there which had so many guns.  These
qualms he knew had disappointed his enthusiastic followers.  But he
had other plans.  There was the smaller ship in the reach below
just off Bangalang.  His suggestion that they should take the
Unicorn to the beach, burn her, and share her copper rivets as the
dividends of certain victory met with pandemoniac approval.

This decision, though popular at the time, must have been regarded
later by the small minority who survived it as mysteriously
unfortunate.  On Mnombibi's part the error was a theological rather
than a tactical one.  His acquaintance with the complex nature of
Christendom, with the doctrines of certain obscure Protestant sects
in particular, was sadly limited.  His plan was to drift down
easily upon the Unicorn and engulf her.  In much the same manner he
had quietly walked in upon Brother François--and there had been no
trouble at all.

But Captain Bittern was a Muggletonian.  There were only two
hundred and eighty-three of those Saints left alive in the entire
world on December 31, 1800.  Being in the minority, however, had
never troubled them.  Even in England not one of them had ever been
known to resort to compromise.  Nowhere in the inspired book of
Lodowicke Muggleton, The Divine Looking-Glass, which the captain
read every night, was the doctrine of non-resistance pressed upon
the Saints; quite the contrary.  It was not even mentioned.
Captain Bittern would no more have thought of submitting to
crucifixion, for instance, than it would have occurred to him to
preach a sermon to sea-gulls.

Curious as it may be--all this, when taken in conjunction with the
invention of the late Friar Bacon, held a bellyful of surprises for
Mnombibi and his sixty-four canoes.  As they rounded the point and
began to drift down upon the Unicorn, a voice resembling an annoyed
sea-lion's barked on her quarter-deck.

A sound like a large clock being wound up drifted across the still
water as the ship walked around to her anchor and faced the
flotilla.  The twelve eyes in her side opened all at once with a
small round pupil in each.  Like a beast of the Apocalypse she
gazed across the glassy sea at the approach of black Apollyon.

Mnombibi on the bow platform of the leading war canoe moved a
little uneasily.  But it was too late to turn back now.  His
prestige was hopelessly involved.  He began to take a few chaste
dance steps, mindful of his attendant spirits and the balance of
the canoe; and to chant softly to his twenty-four rowers, "Goling,
golah, ssh . . . goling, golah, ssh . . ."  The sharp overhanging
prow shoved across the flat water that whispered beneath his feet
at every stroke.  "Goling, golah"--five hundred yards . . .

A yellow cloud rolled out from the side of the Unicorn.  It
billowed higher and higher shot through with incandescent flashes
of red lightning accompanied by terrestrial thunder.  The
intolerable tattoo was both regular and incessant.  When the gun at
the stern was through firing the bow gun was ready to resume, and
the red flashes passed through the sulphur cloud exactly five
times.

Don Ruiz, who with the rest of his crew had scrambled into La
Fortuna's rigging, wild with excitement, now sat there green with
envy at the Englishman's gunnery.  Under the concentrated hail of
grapeshot that beat the river into foam and bloody spray the black
flotilla dissolved.  Only five or six canoes could now be seen
landing frantically at Bangalang.

In an interval of eery silence the smoke curtain slowly rose from
the Unicorn upon what proved to be the next act.

Her capstan began to clank again as she brought her unused
broadside to bear on the town.  Her twelve starboard guns let loose
as one.  The volley of chain-shot cut through the piles of the huts
at Bangalang as if a man had taken one long swing at that village
with a giant scythe.

Aunt Ungah-gola's shebang slipped slowly sidewise into the river
and then hung precariously on only one stake.  It was too well-
built to collapse.  So, she still sat in the high corner where she
had been cleaning fish just a moment before.  One of them flopped
gasping down the tilted floor and swam away.  The frame of the
house shook again.  This time Aunt Ungah screamed.  Through the
hole in the floor the genial, young crocodile which had flourished
for some years past upon her superior garbage was now coming home
with a fixed smile.

In the morning calm the smoke drifted slowly away from the now
silent Unicorn across the bay toward Mongo Tom's.  There was not
enough wind to scatter it.  The Mongo sat with a jug on the veranda
somewhat dazed by the rapidity of events taking place before his
rheumy eyes.  He scarcely knew what to make of them.  Trade would
certainly be ruined!  From time to time he scratched selected
islands on his head.  Suddenly out of the sulphur murk to windward
three canoes came tearing for his beach.  He called his overseer
and gave orders to lead the survivors to the nearest barracoon.
"It's an ill wind--" said the Mongo, "even on a calm day."

As Captain Bittern sat in his cabin that evening over a mess of
salt pork and palm cabbage, he quietly remarked to Mr. Spencer that
fresh fish from the river could not be considered a delicacy any
longer.  "Otherwise," said the captain, "they would go well with
these greens."

"Yes, sir," replied Mr. Spencer, turning a little green himself.

"Most of the mess that still floated went down with the tide, but
you never can tell."

"No, sir, you certainly can't," agreed the purser.

"Not that it will make much difference," mused the captain, "now
that we're leaving.  It's too bad we can't wait any longer for Mr.
Adverse.  But at least our visit here will be remembered.  I think--"

He bolted the centre of the cabbage.

"Quite!" exclaimed the clerk.

"Tell Mr. Sharp when he calls the larboard watch to ask Mr. Aiken
to step down to see me."

"Yes, sir."

"Good night to you," grunted the captain abruptly.

Mr. Spencer lingered a while over his errand.  He was much bored at
going to bed every night at eight o'clock.  He would rather have
messed in the steerage.  But as a gentleman representing the great
house of Baring Bros. & Co., Captain Bittern had done him the
honour of the cabin table and he could not help himself.  He knew
only too well that whatever the captain said was fate.  Mr. Spencer
after speaking to Mr. Sharp went to bed.

The captain snuffed the wicks on a pair of fat ship's candles and
sat down to read as usual.  He opened The Divine Looking-Glass at
the last page and took out a fringed canvas book mark.  On it his
mother had embroidered when he first went to sea:


                            A  1757  D
               Thou art responsible to God alone


The book had been printed in 1656, and the captain had divided the
unbroken, solidly-printed, square pages into 365 paragraphs by
ruling them across with red ink.  He read one paragraph every night
of the year, and either the first or the last paragraphs, which
were identical, he skipped on leap years.  Thus his spiritual as
well as his earthly navigation proceeded by regular observations,
and his exact position in both spheres could be precisely entered
in his brass-bound diary.  That book reposed, together with a King
James version of the Bible, in a rack with a strap across it.
Beside the Bible and the diary, there was room in the rack for The
Divine Looking-Glass, a table of logarithms, and a treatise on the
use of "Napier's Bones."

On this particular night the captain carefully printed, in a minute
script on the back of the canvas marker, "Finished reading for the
43rd time, 31st Dec. 1800"--and this time read the last paragraph
of the book of Lodowicke Muggleton, which now lay open before him:


And lo, and behold, the spirit within me was quickened and spake,
saying, "Thou art immortal from both before and after, and the
Kingdom of God on this earth is within.  Arise, recollect it, and
make thy share in it plain, lest thou be like unto a beast of the
field that remembereth not; neither is he remembered.  Behold the
grass springeth and the mark of the beast is washed away.  Enter
thou into the kingdom as becomes a man and remember what man is
like."  And I cried out, saying, "Lo I remember."  And the spirit
said unto me, "Take thy pen then and write."  And I saw two small
angels of God like unto manikins that did ride upon little saddles
upon my pen.  And one was a dark angel, an evil servant of the
Lord, and the other did glister like the bright waters of the
rivers of Heaven.  And the angels talked one with the other.  And
what they said I wrote, understanding not all of it but setting it
down, for those that sat upon the saddle rode hard, and faster than
I could follow.  And they did open up the heavens and the earth
unto me like unto a box of mirrors wherein the reflection of one
thing is cast upon the glass of another so that the origin of the
image is reflected back upon itself.  And therein I saw not my own
face but all things else.  And there was nothing about which the
angels spake together and pointed out to me that I could not
remember as though it were yesterday becoming his own tomorrow.
And this is the memory of the sons of God, and of men, and of the
heavens, and the earth and the oceans and the beasts thereof that I
have set down and sealed with my name that bare witness to it in
the divine looking-glass.


Not understanding these things, but being much moved thereby,
Captain Bittern, after a short entry in his diary covering an
eventful day, prepared to turn in.  He heard the watch called as he
did so.  The first mate stepped in.

"You have orders, sir?"

"High tide's about dawn tomorrow, Mr. Aiken.  Stand by to take the
ship down with the ebb.  Have your people get the stern anchor up
now.  You might outen the candles there.  Good night."

Mr. Aiken seemed to hesitate.

"Well?" said the captain looking through his night-shirt with which
he was having a terrible time.

"The new owner has just come aboard, sir."

"The devil you say!" snapped the captain.  "He must have been
damned quiet about it then."

"Yes, sir.  He and one man came up by the stern in a small boat.
And you're to send your gig up to Gallegos tomorrow to fetch a dog
aboard," said the mate with a ghost of a chuckle.

The beak of the captain suddenly rose triumphantly out of the
night-shirt.

"Did you leave him rotting on deck like an old sail?" he roared.

"Yes, sir," gulped the mate.

"Be damned to you, Aiken, THAT'S no way to treat your owner.
Pshaw!  Mr. Adverse, Mr. Adverse, where are you?" the captain
shouted going on deck in his night-gown.

"Standing on my own deck at last.  And thank God I am," said
Anthony.  "Is that your ghost, Captain Bittern?  You look like the
captain of the Flying Dutchman."

                            ----------

Anthony had heard the rumble of cannon early that morning while he
and his troop of Foulahs were slashing their way as best they could
through the jungle toward Gallegos.  He listened, filled with
misgivings, at the distant mutter of what to him was a mysterious
fusillade.  He wondered if Mnombibi's people were attacking the
establishment, or whether the Unicorn and La Fortuna had at last
fallen foul of each other.  He pressed on now even more rapidly
than before.  But the path which he had ordered Ferdinando to keep
clear for some miles inland was half overgrown through neglect, a
mass of vines and creepers piled with ants' nests.  The bridge at
the five-mile creek had been riddled by termites and they had to
make an exasperating detour through a swamp where the leeches clung
to the horses' legs.  Hurry as fast as they could, it was several
hours after dark when the well-known stockade finally loomed dimly
across the clearing and they rode through the open gate without
being challenged.  All this did not speak well for Ferdinando's
care and discipline.  Anthony's wrists beat anxiously at first at
the silence.  Then he saw all was well.  But it was plain from a
hundred signs of neglect that the Master of Gallegos had indeed
been away.

Yet how familiar it all was.  One glance from the hillcrest, and he
could tell even by the few lights burning here and there through
the trees and over the harbour that the place only awaited his
return, and in peace.  The moon began to rise.  Beyond the long
point he saw the Unicorn riding at anchor and his heart leaped.
They were taking in her stern anchor.  He was just in time then.
In time to go?  How beautifully the moonlight lay through the black
stems of his palm groves; how mellow were the golden squares of La
Fortuna's ports glowing by the quay.  The night breeze brought him
the heavenly perfume of orange trees in blossom.

Under the moon Gallegos lay like some Arabian Avalon asleep in its
palm groves, redolent of spices, twinkling with the green lanterns
of a million incredible fireflies carrying the intermittent lamps
of their dim loves through the silver blur of the nocturnal
atmosphere.  And all this enchanted garden he had made; planted the
trees, nursed the blossoms--and stolen the men.  How many bits of
paradise amid the forests had perished that his might be patched-
out here?  In the dark house there Neleta would be asleep now.  And
in the bay below lay the Unicorn.  And he was going to go?  He was
going to leave--Circe!  Yes, he had found the holy sprig of moly
hanging on the tree.  He would go now.  But, oh, he had forgotten
how lovely was the song of the Sirens in the moonlight.  And he had
not bound himself to the mast yet.  Quickly!  Let him do so, or
even now, even now it might be too late.

He told Juan to lead the Foulahs quietly to the little valley that
would be deserted now, and to see that they were well looked after
there.  The huts would be empty--very empty now!  He warned him not
to rouse Ferdinando nor to let it become known that he had come
back.  The tired men led their horses to the brook eagerly while he
turned in at the path to the house.

He had considerable trouble in getting anyone to unbar the
courtyard gate.  It was Cheecha who finally came.  She would have
cried out if he had not stopped her.  He told her to stay at the
gate and to waken no one.  He left her there weeping large
Ethiopian tears of joy at his return.  For the first time it came
upon him fully how faithful Cheecha had been.  Poor Cheecha, poor
soul!

And Neleta?

He turned down the hall quietly and entered the room.

Instantly the sheer familiarity of the place defied his resolution
to leave it.  Everything was exactly as it always had been.  The
same bars of moonlight fell across the same woman on the bed,
asleep, waiting.  Surely nothing could have happened to him since
he had seen her last.  No, he was only coming home at the end of
the day to go to bed as he had the night before--and the night
before that.  Tomorrow they would get up and have breakfast and he
would go on as usual.  Why, what had he been thinking about?  All
that had happened for months past, the entire experience in the
hills, seemed to have been suddenly cancelled.  He would simply go
to bed with her and take her in his arms.

How silent it was.  Only the forests far-off, roaring and grunting
to the moon.  They would go on forever.  Here in the room--

Her regular breathing coming and going deeply through the darkness
was the unbroken connecting thread of life and passion upon which
all these familiar things, and all the emotions and meanings that
surrounded them from one end of Gallegos to the other, were hung.
Neleta was the life and centre of Gallegos.  He felt suddenly that
she was the mysterious cause of it.  Without her it would never
have been.  He could not have made it.  It was Neleta who had made
him master of Gallegos, and Neleta was mistress of it all.

So he stood there haunted by her.  It was not desire alone.  The
magnet that drew him to her was more immense than that.  She was
simply the pole of it, of all the life of the Grain Coast.  In her
the lines of all its attractions met and centred.  And he felt them
now like palpable things pulling him toward her where she lay
asleep on the bed.  How could he be the negative to that?  He just
managed to look away--whether to begin from old habit throwing his
clothes across the well-known chair there or not, he never knew.
He sat down and began to take off his shoes--and he happened to
look up.

On Neleta's dresser across the room the moonlight gathered in the
mirror with a concentrated silver glow.  And in this dim
effulgence, dripping with a white, watery light, stood the madonna
just where he had left her months before.

She too was familiar.

But with the familiarity of other things, of past days and places,
that rushed into his mind now so that the room and all within it,
except the little statue with the dim glow about it, was driven
outside and lay plainly and objectively beyond him again.  He was
no longer merely a part of it.  He slipped his feet back into his
shoes and went over to the chest-of-drawers where the figure stood.

He remembered now.  He was going to take her away with him--along
with a hundred other little, personal things he could no longer
bear to be without--comforts, and remembrances which a man cannot
replace, things he had missed sorely time and again lately.  That
comfortable set of razors Cibo had given him.  Lord, how he had
missed THAT!  Certain favourite clothes--and the cuff links
Dolores had sent him.  Dolores!--where was she tonight?

Lost!  He had lost all of them.  Angela his lover, and sweet cool
Florence Udney--the feeling of northern spring and violets, the
cool strong burgeoning of innocence and youth.  What fire had
melted all those snows away that should have melted kindly to the
moon?  It was the hot tropical sun--and Neleta.

Why, he had staggered into her by chance like a drunken bee that
falls suddenly into a flesh-coloured orchid hanging on a hot wall!
And the flower-trap had closed over him; the little hairs of it
covered with honey dew and the great smooth inflamed petals with
tawny speckles on them.  God!  How he had lain there dying of
ecstasy with his wings folded and gummed.  Caught!  With the light
far-away, and the green forest beyond.  It was still roaring
tonight.  It would roar like that forever.  It was imitating the
sea . . .

"But the sea is my home," he said.  "And I will go."

He took a grip on himself and began looking for the tinder-box.  It
was not in the usual place.  He stumbled over Neleta's shoes.
Damn!  Cheecha had always put things away.  It was Cheecha who had
really run the house and made life physically tolerable.  Not
Neleta.  Neleta was legs in the spasm, eyes rolled back, confusion,
things in heaps, perfume--and a sudden witch-radiance at dinner
when the orchid hung over the wall.  My God! where HAD she put
the tinder-box now?  On her best shawl, of course,--and a great
hole burned in it--he lit the candles--the shawl from China.  Don
Ruiz had given her that.  Let him.  Anthony would make use of it
now.

He spread the madly figured shawl on the floor and began to throw
things into it helter-skelter.  After it was "packed" he would
waken Neleta and tell her . . . would he?  Yes.  But defer it now.
Pack.  Wait and see.  He began to ransack his chests like a burglar
working speedily--but not quietly.  The things were his--weren't
they?  The bundle grew.  So did the racket.  A lid fell with a
vicious smack.  He laughed.

Neleta opened her eyes.  She understood instantly what was
happening and without saying a word got up and threw herself on
him.

"No!  You are not going.  No!  No!"

Her passionate negative was as resolute as his positive intention
of leaving--more vehement.  It was much harder to go than he had
supposed.  It rapidly began to become doubtful as she clung to him,
pleading, commanding, suggesting, enticing with a thousand
variations and tones of "no."  This was not an argument.  It was
Neleta.  How to resist her in the flesh?  No, it was impossible
that he should do this thing.

At any rate he found himself dragged onto his knees and kneeling by
the bed; leaning over her with her arms around his neck.  She
begged now, whispering to him.  Pity for her began to overwhelm
him.  He put his head on her breast.  She began to smooth his hair
and draw him closer.  He felt tears on her cheeks.  Some of them
were his own.  His arms stole about her.  His hands went under the
pillow to bring her head closer to put his lips on hers again.

Then his fingers clutched something hidden under the pillow.

It seemed to be shaped like a forked radish, smooth, softer as he
held it--wax!  Suddenly he remembered Mnombibi rocking himself
before the mirror that night.  Could it be . . . he would see.

He rose with it in his hand, powerfully, tearing himself loose from
her.  Her coiled hair whipped smoothly across his neck as he drew
back.  He took the thing over to the candles where the madonna
stood.  Yes!  It was the witch-doctor's horrible little manikin, a
fetish with an enormous thing cocked up at him, a blind, silly
face.  He saw his own hairs running through the half-transparent
wax.

So it had been no dream that night.  Neleta HAD brought that
devil Mnombibi into his room.  She had procured this.  Somehow,
somehow Neleta had been the cause of horrible things.  Brother
François!  And Anthony had been sold to the devil, too--for what?
As he looked at the grinning fetish he turned sick.  A noise behind
him caused him to whirl about.

She was crawling over toward him through the moonlight.  She had
left the bed stealthily.  Some of the covers dragged behind her.
They came off.  She was naked, crouched, ready to spring.  It was
the fetish she wanted!  "To hell with it!"  He smashed it on the
floor and trod on it.  The next instant he was trying desperately
to prevent her doing the same to the madonna.

She carried him back for a minute.  She swarmed up him biting like
a great cat.  She wrapped her arms and legs about him.  She gave
the hated virgin figure on the bureau a kick.  It rolled over and
smashed.  She screamed with delight.  He held her off, wrestling
with her as he had wrestled that night in the tent.  A complete
horror and hate of her, a burst of fury gave him full strength.

What had he been born a man for?

He bore her back to the bed and bound her there hard and fast with
a twisted sheet.  It was degrading, even funny for an instant--and
painful.  Then it was fearful and horrible beyond usual experience.
The abysmal face of the dark woman looked up at him, thrown back,
the long white teeth longing for his throat.  Her eyes smouldered
with yellow and green glints.  The incomplete, man-eating soul of
her lay revealed twisting on the bed like an unformed thing half
torn out of its cocoon.  But dangerous, strong, hungry, furious.
Like Faith--witchcraft!

This was what he had been trying to mate with--a body alive.
Madre!  He might have had children by it.

She had forgotten her Spanish now and raved at him in some mad
gibberish.  His spine crept.  One of the candles burnt out.  God!
He would be left alone with her in the dark again.

He swept the madonna, and everything else on the floor and the
dresser, into the shawl.  The big mirror fell with a hard smash on
the remaining candle.  Pieces of it rained about his head as if
someone were hurling them at him.  He dashed out of the dark room
dragging the bundle after him like a thief.  Her voice followed him
down the hall.

Cheecha stopped him at the gate.  He stood there half-mad with rage
and the pain of his bitten arms.  He felt like wrecking the house.
For some time he did not know that Cheecha was clasping him about
the knees.  Then he shook her off.  He was looking for something to
kick . . . he stepped over her.

"Master, take me with you," she cried after him.  "Master . . ."

He turned around, touched by something desperate in the tones of
the woman's voice.  She had sunk back on her haunches in despair.

"Neleta will kill me now," she said looking up at him in a last
appeal.  "Tomorrow . . ."  horror convulsed her features.  "She
will think you care."

Poor Cheecha, poor soul!--he knew it was true.

"Go down to the docks, I will look after you.  Go now."  She fled
before him into the darkness.

A few minutes later he found her waiting dumbly.  He whistled for
Juan who came out of the shadows.  The three of them got into a
small boat and rowed out to La Fortuna while Cheecha held the
bundle, wrapped up in Neleta's shawl, like a child in her lap.  It
was all that Anthony was taking from Gallegos.  He made her leave
it in the boat, and whispering something to Juan, sent them
forward.

Don Ruiz was engaged in a game of solitaire.  For the sixth time he
had had an extraordinary run of luck with himself that night.  He
was amazed but genuinely glad and relieved to see Anthony.

"What had the cannonading that morning been about?"

"Oh, you should have been here, señor."  He explained at great
length and graphically while Anthony sat looking grim enough.  So
Captain Bittern had swallowed Mnombibi and his people at one gulp--
just as he remembered he used to drink soup.  That plate was clean.

Don Ruiz went on to say that things had been going from bad to
worse at Gallegos since Anthony had left.

While Anthony was putting himself into decent shape again after
Neleta's mauling, by the help of the captain's wardrobe, Don Ruiz
kept pouring complaints into his ears about Ferdinando.  Cibo, it
appeared, had been greatly put out over various transactions in
which the factor had overreached himself.  "Make a dog a king,
señor, and the whole court will soon be snarling."  Anthony
gathered that Don Ruiz and Cibo had become bosom friends in Havana.
He was glad of it.  It suited his plans.  He led up to the point he
had in mind by relating some recent events.

Don Ruiz, Anthony was glad to see, could still be shocked.  He was
all for hanging Ferdinando for murdering a saint.  Anthony shook
his head.

"I have thought of that," he said.  "But there must be no further
vengeance.  Brother François would not have it so.  The slaughter
this morning must have been horrible.  Under the circumstances I
cannot blame Captain Bittern--but no more.  Besides, such men as
Ferdinando are really savages.  I know that now.  According to his
light he tried at first to serve me.  The rest was my fault.  I was
deceived as to the man's real nature by his delicate manners.  But
he is a half-breed, you know, captain.  His mother came from a hut
in Bangalang.  As for his sister--"

Anthony paused.  Whether this was news to the captain he could not
tell.  Don Ruiz's expression did not change.  Anthony hurried on
while hastily donning a new shirt, his own having been ripped to
tatters.

"It is my intention, captain, to leave Gallegos tonight, to go
aboard the Unicorn and never to come ashore here again.  For many
reasons I am finished with Africa forever.  When I am gone there
will be nothing to prevent your taking over the establishment.
Ferdinando's blunders, as far as the ledgers go, are small ones.
In the main you will find a going concern in excellent shape.  You
and Carlo Cibo will have to handle the Havana end of the game
between you.  I shall write Carlo, of course, the first opportunity.
I shall from now on devote myself to my own affairs in Europe.  You
can count me out here as having left six months ago.  That is fair
enough.  Now what do you think?"

"One minute, señor.  Let me consider."  Don Ruiz who had been
walking up and down rapidly sat down and played out his uncompleted
game of solitaire.  Anthony went on dressing.

"That is extraordinary," said Don Ruiz after a little, "for the
seventh time tonight I have played out on the same card."  He held
up the queen of spades.  Then he reshuffled the cards slowly, laid
one out on the table and laughed.

"Yes," he said.  "I will do it.  Have you no stipulations, señor?"

"One or two personal ones," began Anthony, pausing now and then
while he carefully tied back his hair in European style again.
"The woman Cheecha who is now aboard, is to be taken to Havana on
this ship and turned over to Carlo Cibo to be given her freedom.  I
shall see that she is taken care of through him.  Also see that the
Foulahs who came down with me are properly entertained and sent
back with gifts to their hearts' content.  Later, from Europe, I
shall send you certain cases which I wish you to forward faithfully
by the first caravan to Futa-Jaloon.  They are for Amah-de-bellah.
By the way, cultivate his good-will."

"And the señorita?" said the captain drumming a little on the
table.

"Let her stay in the big house as long as she wants to.  I expect
to arrange for certain sums to be paid her quarterly through
Spanish bankers.  She can claim them at Havana if she has a mind
to.  They will come to her regularly, but it will take me some
months to arrange for them.  In the meantime--"

"Perhaps, she had best remain at Gallegos till La Fortuna sails--
after this next trip," suggested Don Ruiz.  Anthony agreed.

"That is all," he said.

They shook hands on it.

The captain's eyes took on a far-away look.

"It is not true, then, señor, that you married the lady just before
the padre left--when you were so ill?  Ferdinando gave me to
suppose . . . ah, pardon me.  I understand now.  Pardon."

"So that was the reason Ferdinando had been so anxious to get rid
of Brother François!  If I had died Neleta would still have been
mistress here.  No one could have contradicted them.  Ferdinando
again!  What shall I do with him?" he thought.

Nothing!  He would do nothing.  He would let that remain like his
own account, to be settled with Providence.  He was guilty himself.
He would not judge and punish Ferdinando.  No, he was done with
Gallegos and all its affairs.  He put on his coat and sent for
Juan.

"Don Ruiz," he said as they walked together to the ship's side, "I
am leaving you at the edge of the world here.  You can easily fall
off.  There is no law here except what men can find in themselves.
I tried to make my own and could not live by it--others died.  But
you are in charge now.  You can settle certain matters to suit
yourself.  I go for my reasons; you stay for yours--the cards, for
instance--but I warn you."  He paused by the binnacle and bared an
arm bitten from wrist to shoulder.  "And that is only one thing.
There are other marks, deeper.  These that you see are only on my
arm."

The captain of La Fortuna bowed and smiled.  "You are fair enough,
señor.  I thank you for the warning.  But I am not afraid.  In my
country there is a proverb, 'When you go among the women take your
whip along.'  But," he added hastily, "I am a man of honour, a
caballero."

"So I have been told," said Anthony a little bitterly.

Don Ruiz replied vehemently.  "Believe, believe me, I also have
learned by sorrowful experiences.  I know, for instance, that it is
not just the woman who is driving you away.  No, you go on account
of many things; because of yourself, to be a free man.  Is it not
so?--And you do not wholly credit me with knowing that.  I am a man
of feeling, too.  And there are many ways to feel.  My way may be
right for me."

"That is true," said Anthony.  "I beg your pardon."

They shook hands again.  "Good luck--good luck."

"Farewell, amigo," cried Don Ruiz looking over the side now.  "I
shall do the best I can.  It is my fortune here.  Yours there.  But
we shall not forget the good man we saw in the little valley that
day.  Never.  You know.  Adiós, adiós, but I won't say good-bye
forever.  Ah--quién sabe?"

They shoved off.

In the small boat with the bundle sitting alone in the middle of it
Anthony and Juan slid rapidly downstream and rounded the point.  A
few minutes later Anthony was standing on the well-remembered deck
of the Unicorn shaking hands with Captain Bittern.

There was only one thing he had forgotten.  It was the hound Simba.
He sent a boat back to Gallegos for him a little after dawn.  Don
Ruiz returned him a note.


I have everything in hand this morning and am holding hard.  Fire a
gun when you leave and you shall have from La Fortuna an honourable
farewell in reply.  Here is your Havana mail, which I forgot last
night.  Adiós.


But they weighed anchor quietly and slipped down with the gathering
ebb while the river was still misty.  Juan piloted them out.  The
Unicorn seemed to greet the open sea with delight.

"Look, señor," cried Juan, pointing happily to the long barriers
where they had spent the days of light together, "that was the best
of Gallegos.  Let us remember that--and the padre."  He crossed
himself.  "Now we are out in the open sea again, I turn the ship
over to you.  Ah!  We shall see Europe again, Spain!  You will let
me go home for a while, won't you?"

"If you will promise to come back to me," smiled Anthony.

"Sí, wherever you are I will come to you."

A few minutes later Anthony heard Juan's guitar on the deck below.
Beginning mournfully, it continued some time in a melancholy
strain.  Then suddenly the strings released themselves into a mad
tumble of lyric joy.  The voice of the hound Simba joined in,
whining with excitement.  Anthony held on at the wheel himself.  He
did not look back.  By noon the low coast lay behind the eastern
horizon.  He heard the ship's bell again marking the relentless
march of time--and went below for the midday meal with Captain
Bittern in the cabin.

Other things besides the dinging into his ears of time and tide
reminded him he was back in the midst of his own world again.  One
was the way Captain Bittern drank his soup.  He raised it on an
even keel to his exactly horizontal mouth; he looked across the
level surface of it as if he were taking an observation and saw ice
on the horizon.  The slit in his face opened.  The plate tilted and
the soup vanished.  It was gone!  Eating to Captain Bittern was
part of the grim business of life.  If he ever tasted anything, no
one, probably not even Captain Bittern, knew it.  There was no time
for it.  Anthony was swept back again to the remarkable gastronomic
legerdemain of the captain at Mr. Bonnyfeather's table.  The Casa
da Bonnyfeather rose up before him and all those who had sat about
the board there.  And the great pile of correspondence that awaited
his attention completed the sensation of having come back to the
world with a vengeance.

Baring Bros. & Co., Mr. Bonnyfeather's executors, were clamorous in
ink to have him come home.  Their agent awaited him at Livorno.  It
was now essential to close-out the affairs of the House of
Bonnyfeather in Italy and on the spot.  Anthony grinned at their
assurances as to the trustworthiness of their agent at Leghorn.


. . . Herr Vincent Nolte, a young man with a rising reputation for
able banking in difficult times, the heir of an ancient concern
with which we have long dealt.  You may have every confidence in
him, and he is authorized to advance you . . .


A long accounting followed.

He looked at the totals in amazement.  It was thrust upon him now
and at last with a full and keen realization that he was rather,
yes, decidedly, a rich young man.  He could go where he liked.  He
could do what he wanted to.  So the "lonely twin" was going to be
free.  Why had this favour been shown him? he wondered.  Through
what inexplicable channels the water of events took their way.
Where would they next break into the light again and spread out
before him?  Oh, let them run deep and quietly for a while
underground.  It had been a terrible pool into which that other
Bronze Boy had been plunged.  He at least was gone forever--only
the lonely twin remained.  He, by the grace of God, had somehow
been set free.

He leaned forward putting his head down on his arms amid the
clutter of his papers on Captain Bittern's table.  He shoved aside
The Divine Looking-Glass which the captain in his hurry had left
lying open the night before.  The canvas book mark with its broad,
black letters fell out under his eyes.  He read what was written
there with profound astonishment and considerable awe.

After all--what was an accident?

At any rate, he would not forget this one--either.  He felt the
ship quietly sweeping on.  Into another world again!  The bell on
deck began to strike musically. . . .



END OF VOLUME TWO



ANTHONY ADVERSE by HERVEY ALLEN



VOLUME THREE

The Lonely Twin




BOOK SEVEN

In Which a Worldly Brother Is Acquired




CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

REVERBERATIONS


Don Luis leaned back in the coach, which had been comfortably
repaired at Dijon only a month before, and inhaled the scent of the
vineyards about Livorno with considerable satisfaction.

He was nearing the end of a year's journey from Madrid by way of
Paris, and the certainty of resting his bones in a good bed that
night lent an additional charm to the admirable vistas along the
ancient highway between Pisa and Leghorn.

These, however, he was fully prepared to admire for themselves
alone.

After an absence of nearly twenty-five years upon his estates in
Spain, the Marquis da Vincitata was returning to visit Tuscany, the
land of his predilection.  And he was thinking, as he leaned back
in the luxurious, albeit somewhat faded upholstery that still lined
his old-fashioned coach, that a return to Italy must ever be to
every civilized European a home-coming.

He had even composed an epigram about it.

At the particular moment when he swept with a clatter of sixteen
hoofs through the hamlet of San Marco he was attempting to write
the epigram upon a small slate which he kept handy for the purpose.
It was not often possible to write when travelling, although the
coach was now slung upon the best steel springs.  But so level and
straight was the Roman highway, which had lately been repaired by
Bonaparte--so smooth was the stone pavement upon which the coach
was now rapidly and invincibly rolling, that in this instance Don
Luis had no difficulty whatever in writing upon the slate without
breaking the delicate point of his stone pencil.

At this triumph of modern engineering he looked up with an amused
and faintly-pleased expression about the eyes.  The crow's-feet on
the pouches under his heavy lids contracted a little ironically and
he started to drum with his thick, powerful fingers on the surface
of the slate which rested on his knee.  The scent of the vineyards
had caused him to remember something that interfered with his
epigrammatic style.  Finally, with an angry motion of his club-like
thumb, he obliterated what he had just written upon the slate.  He
looked at the smudge and laughed, for he had not really intended to
wipe out the epigram but to destroy only the uncomfortable memory
which had just been forced upon him.

During the course of his frequent journeys--and upon diplomatic
business he still travelled a great deal--the marquis had composed
several thousand epigrams.  He first set them down upon the slate
and later transferred them to an elegant, morocco-bound notebook
that reposed together with a pack of cards, the latest French
novel, some goat cheese, and a bottle of white wine in a small
locker on the side of the coach.  This alcove had once, long ago,
held a figure of the Madonna belonging to his girl-wife.

It was a bright memory of the dead woman, vividly but unconsciously
forced upon him by the odour of grape blossoms, that had interfered
with his writing.  He looked annoyed.  He brushed his hand over his
eyes, and went on again.

The peculiarly sardonic and sententious style in which Don Luis
composed his epigrams was a balm to his injured ego which had never
ceased to suffer from the wound inflicted upon it by the unfaithful
conduct of his wife.  It was for that reason that there were
thousands and not merely hundreds of epigrams now safely copied
into the morocco notebook.  Don Luis had thus taken his revenge on
fate by secretly continuing to drip vitriol upon everybody and
everything under the sun.  His sarcasm was a kind of spiritual pus
that he wiped away privately with page after page of the notebook.

Outwardly Don Luis had scarcely changed at all.  He even looked a
little better preserved.  Indeed, there was something about the
marquis that reminded some close observers of a living mummy.  One
almost crippling attack of the gout had brought a Spartan diet into
his regimen.  He lived principally upon sour wine, cheese, and
goat's milk.  And he knew exactly how to physic himself after those
banquets for which even a Spanish grandee and an old diplomat semi-
occasionally had to unbutton.

For a man well up in his sixties the conde de Azuaga, as he was
known in Spain, was really remarkable.  But the most remarkable
thing about him was that the world went on taking his spry,
youthful vigour and unimpaired energy as a matter of course.  It
did not, except in a few cases of old men who enviously failed
before him, remark his vigour at all.

In Estremadura, where Don Luis had spent a great deal of his time,
the life was both healthy and hardy.  Those who survived it in
infancy usually lived to a vigorous old age.  There were priests
there who had been known to have had children at the age of ninety.
And it was for that reason that the nobility in the neighbourhood
of Don Luis' estates frequently sent to Valencia, or other
provinces, for family confessors whose ripe old age was less likely
to break forth into ridiculous blossoms.  In Estremadura there
was,--yes, undoubtedly,--there was something in the air.  Don Luis
had breathed it in calmly, and preserved its fire.

After a decade of retirement in Estremadura the marquis had
gradually begun to resume his position of natural influence and
inevitable emolument at the then much disordered court of Spain.
For this he was excellently fitted by both inheritance and long
practice.  At the supine court of Charles IV he possessed an
enormous advantage over even the most selfish of timeservers; he
was no longer troubled by any social conscience whatever.  Over
those who matched him in this respect he was still superior, for
his own selfishness was complex and conservative while theirs was
simple and immediately voracious.  Those dull glimmerings of
virtue, which even the most lupine of statesmen occasionally employ
as beacons of direction in an otherwise purely opportunist
piloting, did not in the midnight oceans of Don Luis' soul mark
even a distant headland.  He steered only by the fixed star of
self-interest with a Machiavellian craft.  It was in this sense
that the conde de Azuaga was in a very real way a "prince" among
men.

The Marquis da Vincitata and conde de Azuaga had in fact been
endowed by an all-wise Providence, that accomplishes its mysterious
ends with the deadly foil of evil as well as the sword of justice,
with an awful and profound mind.  That the colour of his soul was
Stygian was only natural, for it is in the darkness of night that
mental lightning without thunder makes its finest display when it
strikes.  The marquis' self-interest consisted in what he was
interested in, and that can be described most laconically as a
passionate desire to hold back the hands on the clock of time.
With that end in view he had gradually thrown himself back into the
ways and places of influence, body and soul.

Don Luis had within him a strong sense of the trend of the age; of
the becoming of men and peoples in the stream of time.  And as
this, when combined with the practical ability to influence events,
is undoubtedly a trait of genius, the advent of the conde in his
gloomy coach at the Escurial just before the French Revolution
broke out had marked a distinct epoch of pause in the history of
his own peninsula.  He proposed to preserve it as a perfect
Christian Tibet, and for a time he succeeded.

He left no record of his strange and stilling influence.  He wrote
nothing, except the epigrams in his notebook.  His method was the
ancient, and often most effective one in human affairs, of a
devious personal influence.  He attached himself to the right men
and left them at exactly the right time.  He drove hither and yon
in his gloomy coach, which for many years had remained slung upon
the chains with which he had furnished it for his wife's martyrdom.
A call paid by the suave, and inevitably correct, conde in this
vehicle driven by a cat-like coachman was like receiving the
ambassador of smouldering subterranean powers whose force is known
but whose depth has never been plumbed.  Virtue and sanctimony were
forced to listen to his wisdom with respect, while the superficially
sinful were left both envious and scared.  A few ardent young
spirits who opposed him had been questioned as to the basis of their
curious opposition during the last ample days of the Holy Office.
Thus, opposition to Don Luis was always dangerous; co-operation
inevitably paid.  Consequently, the ends he fostered throve, and the
web, which the constantly widening circle of the peregrinations of
the coach left upon the map of Spain, found an ever more and more
powerful and alert spider sitting upon the faded rose-coloured
upholstery at its shifting centre.

Don Luis was not "popular," of course.  It had never occurred to
any mob to shout, "Long live Don Luis," or to any assembly of
notables to drink his health.  It would have seemed preposterous,
unnecessary.  He somehow carried with him everywhere, and under
every conceivable circumstance, the suggestion that he would
inevitably outlive and prevail over those with whom he dealt.  All
this was largely due to an unquenchable desire for revenge upon
life which now directed the movements of the marquis' soul.  He
would have liked to stop all other life than his own.  And in that
event he would have valued his own existence only because it would
have enabled him to watch over a universal calm.  The marquis was
therefore known as a "conservative."

Indeed, there was only one positive desire left in his still active
but negative nature.  It was an harassing sensuality that still
hoped for long-protracted and callous intercourse.  It constituted,
as it were, the secret, youthful vigour of his senility, and, when
actively exerted, held a certain kind of mysterious and unexpected
charm for older women.  It was for this reason that the marquis as
he made his rounds always kept at least one of his drooping eyelids
half open, and he was no longer at all particular as to where he
could slake a passion that was both dull and violent at the same
time.

His reactionary hopes, however, had not prevented him from making
those necessary outward concessions to change without which even a
"conservative" cannot conserve.  These were for the most part
exhibited in his astute political manoeuvres, his meticulous dress,
and in the constant, almost affectionate, rehabilitation of the
coach.

He liked to recall that he had won the coach from the Duc d'Orléans
at a lucky run of cards in what he looked back upon as better days.
For various reasons he had cherished it and rejuvenated it from
time to time.  The vehicle had almost become a part of him.  In the
course of time it received new tires, new wheels, new axle-trees
and new shafts.  It had been dragged over Spain, Portugal, and
France by horses and mules that had died in its service and left
the body of the coach behind them.  Only that had remained the
same.  In its lines were expressed the luxurious amplitude and the
heavy ruthlessness of the ancien régime.  Its cat-like coachman had
been promoted.  He still rode upon the box in a coat-of-many-capes
like a torn cat dressed in frills.  But Sancho was now Don Luis'
valet and general factotum, and the coach was driven by his son, a
young man with grey hair, a round, ocelot-shaped head, and wide,
greenish eyes.  This personage, known as the "Kitten" in Madrid,
flourished a whip and said nothing except to his horses or mules.
These he occasionally addressed in a tempest of lewd squalls, while
he drove with an uncanny skill that seemed to be reckless.

Towards the end of 1799 Don Luis had gone to Paris to try to
arrange the little matter of transferring the southern part of
Portugal to the prime minister of Spain.  He and the First Consul
Bonaparte had found that they understood one another.  Pourparlers
had rapidly changed into conversations during the course of which
the character of the Prince of the Peace, the queen's favourite,
and the general sorry mess of affairs at the court of Spain were
amply discussed.  These conversations were carried on with a
masterful directness on the part of the first consul and a
faultless, self-serving innuendo on the part of Don Luis that
rapidly brought about an understanding between these two men as
their admiration for each other increased.  Napoleon saw in the
marquis one whom it would be wise to favour in order to use; Don
Luis beheld in Bonaparte a man whom it was imperative to serve well
in order to profit amply.  They got on.

"What sort of a man is the Prince of the Peace?" asked Bonaparte
whirling about upon Don Luis, as he walked up and down looking out
upon the gardens of the Luxembourg which he was just about to leave
for the Tuileries.

"A man of large parts, citizen-general, necessary and assiduous in
the service of Her Majesty both day and night."

Bonaparte smiled wanly.

"I have heard that he is also the friend of the king," he said.
"Is there no one to whose interest it would be to enlighten His
Catholic Majesty as to the state of his own domestic affairs?"

"Several, now in exile, have made the attempt," replied Don Luis.
"But His Majesty's family party at the Escurial has been carefully
arranged to insure the royal peace of mind.  I might add that the
unique relation the Prince of the Peace holds to the king has
thrown a new and romantic light upon the power and privileges of a
viceroy."

Napoleon smiled again, this time not so wanly.  He began rapidly to
discuss the basis of a new treaty with Spain in which the payment
of a larger annual subsidy to France was the most important item.
It was at this interview that Don Luis first mentioned to Napoleon
the possibility of the cession of Louisiana to France.  He merely
suggested it, as it were.  It was difficult to transfer bullion
from Mexico to Spain on account of the British fleet but a
continent could be transferred at Paris, by a stroke of the pen.
Napoleon shook his head.  It was ready money he wanted.  But he
remembered the suggestion and turned it over in his planetary mind.

The upshot of several such conversations was surprising to several
persons.  The Prince of the Peace failed to get his Portuguese
principality but was assured of French support at the court of
Spain.  For this he could grind his teeth--and be thankful--to both
Don Luis and Bonaparte.  The precise way in which the gratitude was
to be shown was carefully provided for and understood beforehand.

The Duke and Duchess of Parma were also surprised.  It was agreed
that they should pack up and move their thrones to Florence, as
Napoleon had new arrangements for Italy in view and was graciously
willing to endow their Etrurian Majesties-to-be generously, at the
expense of a helpless ally.  Don Luis was commissioned to inform
them tactfully of the little surprise in store for them, after
arranging certain details beforehand through the Spanish ambassador
at Paris.

The mission to prepare the authorities at Florence was one which
for several reasons filled Don Luis with a peculiar satisfaction.
He liked moving royalties, who had to pretend to be thankful to
him, like figures in chess.  He liked returning to Italy, where the
Renaissance had been taken seriously, he said.  There was a
decidedly Roman pagan side to Don Luis.  He had finally reduced his
Christianity to nothing but ritual with no moral implications.  And
a trip to Tuscany in particular coincided exactly with certain
private business of his own in that region.

Thus, as usual, Don Luis was able to conduct his own and the public
business as one.  Before leaving Paris he had obtained certain
letters from the first consul which insured the return of his
confiscated estates in Tuscany.  The dilapidated castle and small
hill-town of Vincitata was nothing to Napoleon, who was therefore
glad to return it to Don Luis upon whom he counted for further
confidential advices when he should return to Spain.

In all of this Don Luis had been acting as the confidential agent
of the Prince of the Peace.  But he had seen fit to see eye to eye
with the first consul, because perforce he must, and because as a
matter of fact, it was in that way that he could make the best
terms for Spain.  At least he had obtained the promise of French
support for the policies of Godoy, the queen's favourite, who was
already anathema at home.  Don Luis was also casting an eye into
the future as every good diplomat should.  A vague but stupendous
outline of the plans of the young Corsican general with the Roman
head had begun to dawn upon Don Luis.  On one occasion the general
in the coat with green facings had honoured the marquis with one of
those metaphysical discourses on European affairs which so many
people had made the mistake of not taking seriously.  Don Luis did
not indulge in that error.  He had experienced a curious sensation
while he listened to Napoleon, one of having participated in a
similar interview somewhere else, very long ago.  It had, he told
himself, a kind of Trajanic ring about it.  Just why, Don Luis
could not be sure.  But the experience of recall had been a
powerful one.  He dismissed that, but he retained in his head the
vision of a great European empire with Paris as the new Rome.  This
suited the spiritual politics of Don Luis, and for the first time
in many years there stirred within him an emotion akin to
enthusiasm.  For a minute or so the two men, who were conversing
across a desk with the map of Italy laid out upon it, had been
bound together in a profoundly deep and naturally flowing
conversation as to the destinies of European civilization.  It was
above religion, national politics, and folk morals.  For a minute
or two what the Roman Empire had accomplished centuries before was
reconstituted in a room over the portico of the Tuileries in Paris
in 1800.  Two free and ruthlessly candid intellects had dropped the
petty conventions and prejudices of feudal provinces and looked
upon Europe as a whole.  Don Luis remembered afterward that
Napoleon had lapsed into Italian in the excitement of finding
himself understood, and he considered that to be the most majestic
compliment which could have been offered him.  Indeed, he looked
back upon that interview as the crowning moment of his career.  It
had had about it the flavour of a meeting of Roman augurs, but of
augurs who took themselves seriously and had eagles to unleash.
Don Luis was able to add a few quotations and observations from
some of the Sibylline books of the West.  Then, as it were, the
curtain had been withdrawn again.  The sense of immediate
communication in a mutual dream lapsed.  Napoleon went on in
French.

It was this that had caused Don Luis to smile ironically as he
swept over the Roman highway, recently improved by Napoleon.  It
was only a small spur of the great system that had once linked
Europe into one Latin whole.  It was possible, however, that the
whole system might now be repaved.  He hoped so.  It would give to
life in the West a principle of direction in which every individual
might participate with a sense not only of becoming, but of being
with a sense of having been.  At the present time society in Europe
was composed of innumerable tangents from a curve that had dropped
into a burst of shooting stars in the Renaissance and Reformation.
Every person who was possessed of anything more than a purely
conventional consciousness was now aware that he must steer by
himself alone.  Those remnants of the curve which still remained in
Italy and Spain were hanging in limbo.  It might be possible that a
French segment would complete the old; no, a new and more
magnificent Roman arch.  Britain could go to hell her own way.
What could be done with a people who had subordinated everything to
a desire to trade?  No, no, they were out of the arch forever.
Barbarous!  Don Luis reached for his slate again.  The horses
seemed to be galloping in hexameter.

It was at this point that the odour of grape blossoms had
interrupted him.  As an odour will, it recalled with extreme
vividness certain scenes of his own secret life.  The gears of his
mind were suddenly shifted from impersonal politics to purely
private considerations, as though a hand from without had been laid
upon them.  It was curious how those two seemingly disparate worlds
were bound into one and made inseparable by the rapid and unceasing
motion of the coach.  As the vehicle rounded the curve at the
southern end of the village of San Marco, Don Luis felt himself
pressed back into the upholstery by the invisible hand that laid
upon him the feeling of motion.  He leaned against the momentum and
stuck his head out of the window, bawling at Sancho not to go so
fast.  For some reason while the coach had swung him he felt angry.
But the mood soon passed and, as he looked out over the landscape
covered with vineyards in blossom, he was immediately presented
gratis with a view of a somewhat similar countryside on a spring
evening a quarter of a century before.

The coach he remembered was ascending a hill on a road through the
midst of vineyards, approaching the Château of Besance.  On the
very seat where he was now riding sat his wife Maria.  He
remembered how the sunset had dazzled in her golden hair.

He turned, almost expecting to find her sitting beside him, and
shivered a little at finding nothing there.  The now faded rose of
the old upholstery was merely touched into a sort of mockery of its
ancient splendour by the approaching sunset.  Here and there, over
the back of the carriage, moved a few spots of shifting pentecostal
fires.

The marquis felt suddenly as if he would like to get out of the
coach.  Where, after all,--where was it taking him?  He felt for a
minute that another hand than his own had really directed its
motion.  He had only collaborated with it.  Perhaps he had not done
so well in being sure he was always the master of its direction.  A
rare emotion crept upon him.  He felt a little fearful of being all
alone where only the lights and shadows of the outside world
flickered over the inside of the old carriage--exactly as his
thoughts flickered through his mind.  He stuck his head out of the
window again . . . "what, for instance, had become of Maria's
child?"  It might be a wise precaution to inform himself.  The
convent where he had left him was in the immediate neighbourhood--
the "Convent of Jesus the Child."  Don Luis smiled ironically again
and decided to pay a visit to the mother superior.  He could very
easily concoct an excuse.  Should he?

Just then they topped the rise of a small hill.  In the valley
beyond the marquis saw a large, rambling building with red roofs.
An immense plane tree rose out of its midst about whose top a flock
of pigeons was circling preparing to return for the night.  It was
this glimpse of the place which decided Don Luis to take advantage
of its vicinity.

He called to Sancho and pointed.  The man raised his eyes slightly
and nodded.  "So they WERE going to stop there again after all!"
Sancho had wondered if they would.  With the same grinding
reverberations that the tires of the coach had aroused from the
same stones twenty-five years before he caused the vehicle to pull
up before the lane leading to the convent.

This time the marquis was somewhat longer in transacting his
business at the convent than he had been on his previous visit.  He
had a long interview with the mother superior, whom he found to be
an able and evidently painfully discreet woman.  She was now
directing the most exclusive convent-school for aristocratic young
ladies in Tuscany.  Mistaking Don Luis for a wise parent with a
daughter to educate, she insisted upon showing him over the entire
establishment.  Don Luis was forced to be politely patient, and to
look at kitchens, laundry, and schoolrooms.  He reflected as he
went through the kitchens, as a revenge for being bored, that
everything that woman used even for cooking had been invented and
was made by man.  He afterwards entered this in his morocco book.
In the courtyard, however, he lingered with genuine admiration.
Never, he thought, had he seen so antiquely somnolent, so pagan and
classic a fountain.  The statue of the bronze boy, who stood
staring at the water with those peculiarly blind eyes that Phidias
had perfected in Western sculpture, caused the cold springs of the
marquis' internal aesthetic tears to melt discreetly.  He even
murmured a few words of admiration to Mother Marie José, who,
thinking them to be an ironical compliment, tried to hurry him
through what was now a long-deserted portion of the establishment;
one of which she was thoroughly ashamed.

As a matter of fact, Don Luis, as a connoisseur, would have liked
to own the statue.  He inquired as to the missing twin.  The mother
superior did not even know what he meant.  She looked at the statue
of the lusty young boy somewhat askance.  It was unnecessarily
exuberant, she believed.  Rather an unfortunate representation of
the Christ Child for a girls' school, she thought.  She could not
discuss that, however.  "Probably the twin was carried off and lost
during the Renaissance," reflected Don Luis; "lonely enough in some
modern garden even now, perhaps.  Ah, well, he could never hope to
find the twin."  They went on into the refectory where upwards of
thirty young ladies, dressed in elegant, but unbelievably prim
costumes stayed with whalebone, sat bolt upright saying nothing.
A sad-faced sister read to them of the blessed poverty of St.
Francis, while they ate an iced sherbet.

"The niece of the unfortunate Duchess of Parma," said Mother Marie
José indicating a gypsy-like girl near by . . . "The young Countess
of Monteficuelli," she whispered.

That young gypsy managed to look discreetly down her nose at Don
Luis.  Don Luis allowed the lace from his sleeves to droop a little
more elegantly, and bowed.  He might have been acknowledging the
presence of the Empress of Austria.  The compliment was at once
discreet, impeccable, and tremendous.  To a young girl overwhelming.
The breath of the world he brought in with him caused the envious
bosoms of the other young ladies to stretch tight against their
whalebones even in the Convent of Jesus the Child.  Mademoiselle
Monteficuelli blushed.  Don Luis felt suddenly much younger again.

". . . And we have many other noble names represented here," the
mother superior was saying.  It was her principal argument.
"Permit me to show you the rolls for some years past."  She had
often won her bid by laying her face cards upon the table.

It was exactly what Don Luis had hoped for but had been at a loss
to bring about.  Once having begun on the records, he pretended
great interest; he kept going back.  It was not difficult at first.
Every teacher will talk about her school, for since that is all of
life that she knows, she thinks that is all there is in life to
know how to talk about.  But finally Mother Marie José became
anxious.  There were certain entries in the 1770's which she was
NOT anxious for any prospective patron to see.  The curiosity of
the stranger, however, was insatiable.

"What is this?" said Don Luis, scowling, and looking somewhat
scandalized.  "An orphan boy, Anthony, apprenticed to the English
merchant John Bonnyfeather, what! what!"  Here his face darkened
like a thundercloud.  There could be no doubt he WAS shocked now.

"Dios!" thought Don Luis.  "Who would ever have thought THAT?  To
his own grandfather!  Impossible!  No, true!  Yes, it MUST have
been Maria's child.  Here was the receipt by the old merchant for
the little madonna and his own ten gold pieces.  Even the black bag
and the cloak.  Hers!"  He felt her cold hands in his own again as
on that night in the mountains.  A sudden chill went to his heart.
Life was not so simple as he had thought.  He wished now he had
left his wife's bastard in a basket in the mountains.  Nature has a
way with her.  This unlooked-for eventuality actually gave him a
headache as if he had received a blow between the eyes.

Mother Marie José felt much the same.  She had always feared that
entry would be misunderstood.  She hastened to explain the presence
of an orphan boy with the greatest detail.  Don Luis now saw all
the records.  She forced them upon him.  There could be no doubt
about it.  For a few moments he sat with an expression that almost
reduced the protesting mother superior to tears.  At last seeing
the effect he was producing on the good woman, he rapidly recovered
himself and reassured her.

"Believe me, I understand the matter FULLY," he said.

He determined to remove any unpleasant impression from her mind by
an act of generosity.  "After all the woman's worst failing is a
little profitable snobbery," he thought.  He would have to be
careful, therefore, how he offered to confer a gift.  The convent
was no longer the home of charity.  A way out of the difficulty
came aptly to his mind.

"You have evidently mistaken my motives in visiting here, madame,"
he explained.  "I myself am childless, but in former times my
family were among the many noble patrons of this holy place.  I
have not been in Italy for many years, but, as I was travelling
this way, I could not refrain out of a sentimental, yet I trust
pious, prompting of the heart from paying you a visit.  You will
understand, therefore, that my curiosity about your records was a
natural one, ahem . . . I might say an inherited one.  Permit me to
congratulate you upon your superbly judicious management; your
highly distinguished clientele."

Mother Marie José blushed.  The scar under her headdress burned
with pride.

"It was my hope," continued Don Luis, "to confer some passing
benefit upon you.  Charity, of course, is now out of the question.
Your excellent management!  But I feel sure, or rather I make bold
to hope, that you will not refuse a mere memento of my regard.
That old statue by the fountain now--" Don Luis could look
embarrassed when he liked--"it is . . . well, it is scarcely what
one would choose as an item of ecclesiastical decoration under your
present circumstances.  The ancients were of course naïve even in
their piety.  We have become more chaste.  More may now be left
safely even to the imagination of religious young ladies.  Do you
not agree with me?"

Mother Marie José lowered her head.

"Of course!  Well, it was my hope that you would permit me to have
an elegant, modern bambino in the best Florentine style installed,
and the--er--somewhat outmoded, not to say dilapidated statue now
in the courtyard removed.  I should make only one condition.  The
gift must be anonymous.  I am going on to Livorno tonight.  I will
send the workmen some time this week.  Do not give them anything,
the rascals.  They will be well paid."

He looked at her keenly.

The mother superior was making self-satisfied and pious noises in
her throat.  Not only had she swallowed the bait, she now seemed to
be chortling over the sinker.

As she parted from Don Luis at the door, she gave him her blessing
with such a genuine warmth and humility for having misjudged him
that he was forced to bend low to hide his natural emotions under
the touching circumstances.

In the coach it was not necessary to conceal them.  He sat there,
as evening fell and he began to approach Livorno, with a look of
mingled grimness, curiosity, and amusement.

In settling his connection with the Bonnyfeather estate and closing
up the old building which he had rented to his erstwhile father-in-
law, there might be more to settle than he had supposed.  Well, he
was ready for it.  In a very short time he would know.

Just as darkness came he drove into the courtyard of the old Casa
da Bonnyfeather and got out of the coach.  The place seemed to be
deserted.  He felt annoyed.  He had sent word of his arrival.  But,
no.  There was a light coming through the chink of a shutter.
Somebody, a female, was coming out.

"Good evening, my good woman," said Don Luis.

Faith Paleologus looked at him and smiled.




CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

OLD FRIENDS GROWN OLDER


The Unicorn had been battered about the Bight of Benim and
generally bedevilled by gales and head winds for many weeks after
leaving the Rio Pongo.  Captain Bittern finally fetched a
tremendous leg away across the Atlantic before he put-about and
beat back for Gibraltar, gradually edging north.  In early April he
at last made port at the Rock, where with two topmasts and most of
the rest of his top-hamper blown away, he had to refit and
revictual.

Anthony was at a loss what to do with the ship.  His own
nationality was so vague that he was afraid of serious legal
complications over her prizes when he finally came to settle his
affairs in London with Baring Brothers & Co.  It might be difficult
to explain to an English court how a gentleman who had taken an
oath of allegiance to the King of Spain, and had for long run an
establishment under the Spanish flag, also owned an English ship
that had been preying on French and Spanish commerce in the
meantime.

He finally decided to get rid of the Unicorn by sending her under
Captain Bittern to London and having the Barings sell her while
they were still acting as Mr. Bonnyfeather's executors.

This plan suited Captain Bittern to a "t."  He asked only for the
padded chair as a keepsake.  He received the entire cabin
furniture, plate and all.

"Very handsome, very handsome, indeed, Mr. Adverse," he said,
turning a little red in the face.  He had asked for the chair only
to save £2.3, he told himself.  He could never admit his one
romantic slip.  Somehow the wind had been taken out of his sails
with getting the chair, and so much else, gratis.  He almost wished
he had waited for the auction.  He was sure the chair would have
gone for,--well, just about £2.3.  Now it would only make a good
elder's seat at the chapel in Spitalfields.  Certainly not at the
cottage.  Certainly NOT!--after what had occurred on that chair.
He wound the chronometer--his now--thoughtfully.  It was a nice
chronometer--but it was too late now.  It would always be too late.
All the time left to him was bound now to be highly respectable.
Well, he had seen a good deal in his time--in the time that was
past.

While Captain Bittern refitted, Anthony began to find his way about
Gibraltar.  With a good-sized draft awaiting him from the Barings
and a fat letter of credit on London, there was not much trouble in
doing so.

It was amusing to see, as a sort of foretaste of what might come
later, that he easily and rapidly became a person whose importance
was taken for granted; whose antecedents were honourably involved
in property.  Already a door-opening rumour of his being a young
man of great wealth had gone the rounds.  The Unicorn was thought
to be his "armed yacht" which he had contributed to the cause of
king and country--and, if his patriotism had proved profitable, who
was there to cavil at that?  Before a week went by he was
"commanded" to dine with the governor.

Indeed, he found he might linger on at Gibraltar indefinitely,
passing the clear, spring days, that slipped over from Africa so
early with a breath of summer in them,--days that set the flowers
in the quarry gardens on the Rock to blooming madly,--seeing
people, eating dinners, riding, being introduced by and to hopeful
mothers, who tactfully withdrew leaving him "alone" in the
moonlight--while they watched.

He might go to tea every afternoon in neat, bare, little military
houses with green jalousies outside and pretty women within pouring
Bohea out of china more sinolesque than the Chinese.  Would he have
Scotch marmalade or ginger out of neat, blue jars covered with
rattan?  To tea or not to tea--that was the question.  People like
the Udneys, and cool, tall girls like Florence were everywhere.
And it was all very pleasant, very pleasant indeed to be back again
in this world of his own kind; a world of uniforms, bonnets, long
white gloves that wrinkled at the elbows; of white bread, yellow
butter; skirts with white, mousy slippers twinkling under them, and
always tea, jam, cards, whisky; the boom of artillery from the
heights, the ships' bells below, and the shouts of the stevedores.
Then there were Sundays when all the sailors marched to church.
And the purple-blue of the middle, mother-sea made a moat around it
all.

What with the ships of the fleet coming and going and a big wartime
garrison on the mysterious Rock, there were endless dances,
receptions, and affairs.  Innumerable boats were always going and
coming with dapper little "snotties" in charge, who sprang out on
the quay and drew their ridiculous dirks while they landed in
charge of a boat's crew of great bearded fellows in glazed hats
with a yard of ribbon falling over their left eye; men who could
pull, and pull all together.

Here was all the assurance of British official society, naval and
military, with its well-ordered social classes, the stratified
atmosphere in which it lived and breathed.  But with the dullness
of peace times worn off.  For these were stirring times.  Security
was given a fillip by the constant hazard of war surrounding it.
Respectability was hurried while lovers and husbands made love as
men who might never come back again to women who would be left
behind.  Everywhere was that unarguable moral fervour about "us and
ours" that it is the peculiar genius of the English to manufacture
and to store up in vast, static quantities before, during, and
after a national fight.  Like the sparks from a cat's fur, most
potent in bracing weather, it snaps at the least stroke the wrong
way in war time.  Then the lion is feeling his best with his mane
full of great and petty lightnings.

At first Anthony was almost taken-in by this inherent righteousness
and moral potentiality generated by the necessity to win.  It was
overpowering, especially in the wardrooms of the fleet, or at an
officers' mess ashore; over the port with the candles lit and gold
epaulettes drooping down the shoulders of scarlet tunics.  Then it
was especially convincing from its calm self-assurance and quiet
understood boasting and humour; in its ignorance of what it was
really opposed to.

It was especially convincing to Anthony, since it was carried on in
what he felt to be--more than any other--his native tongue.  Of
course, he was assumed to be of them, and therefore with them and
for them.  What other side could there be than "ours"?  And besides
it was not possible for them to understand one whose fate had
turned him into a mere European, a wanderer of the West which no
longer had even the ghost of an imperial political body in which to
contain its oversoul.  The age for that had gone by, or had not yet
come.  By accident he had fallen into that vanished age.  Its ideal
had been reinforced in him in Africa, where he had unconsciously
looked back upon Europe as one.  Now suddenly, suddenly as if into
a steaming hot bath, he had stumbled back into Europe at Gibraltar
to find it divided against itself and vapouring and seething in a
kind of prolonged explosion.

Even in a few days' time at this English outpost Anthony had found
himself both attracted and repulsed in an infinitely complex way by
his brothers of blood and tongue.  They were a delightful people,
but they seemed to have forgotten something which he remembered and
to be content not to look for something which he must find.  If he
had ever had any false spiritual pride he had left it in the valley
with Brother François, yet he could not help but feel that he
belonged to a larger unit than to any that all the stir of affairs
and the social order at Gibraltar had now to do with.  That society
was self-sufficient.  It was even too self-contained.  It was
insular, cut-off.  He must look for a larger, perhaps a more empty
country, he felt.

This was the essence he distilled from the total experience of
plunging back into the world of the West at a British post.  At
Gibraltar the light of the days he was living in was concentrated
into a narrow circle and made more intense by the broad sun-glass
of the nation focused behind the fortress.  Here England was
projected in all its various colours in the living prisms of its
garrison, men, women, and children.  He thought of this one bright
Sunday as he watched the garrison and the citizens of the English
town being paraded, and parading to church, the Church of England.

He went in and listened to the service.  He could do little more.
Here were many of the forms he knew, strangely preserved but
somehow having suffered a clammy sea-change.  The many things which
they were now about and still sought to embody were not the one
thing which they were once devised to show.  That supreme unity had
somehow vanished.  There was no doubt about it, only the god of
England dwelt there.  He was perhaps a captain, even an admiral in
the British service.  The Spirit of the World had gone.  God was no
longer Our Father, but the god of our fathers--and of "us"--our
fathers' precious children.  How had that happened?  He did not
know, but he felt it.  Then he remembered something else like it
otherwhere.

What was it Mrs. Jorham had felt uneasy about in the churches in
Havana?  Was that still another thing, too?

After the service he climbed with a party of officers up to the
pinnacle of the Rock--that is forever England's--and looked out
over Spain, and across the straits back and down into Africa.  And
he let his eyes wander freely over the blue sea and the arms of it
betwixt and between.  And again it all seemed equally good to him,
part of the great indivisible world, of which, despite an already
large dose of it, he knew he could never see and hear, taste and
smell--and feel and think about enough.  The range of cannon was
surely not the criterion of the boundaries of it for those who were
invisible spirits of another time; those who, even while the guns
muttered, could slip between.

They descended the Rock again to Sunday evening tea and potted-ham,
while a salute rang out in the harbour below.  For Anthony it was a
parting salute.  He still might have gone on to London in the
Unicorn.  Next day he let her sail for "home" under Captain
Bittern.  He sent Juan "on leave" to Tarifa, his native town,
nearby and regretfully sent Simba with him.

Taking the able little purser, Mr. Spencer, along with him, Anthony
found passage for Malta in a naval supply ship.  At Malta he hired
a fast felucca and its crew to slip him into Livorno.  They glided
into the harbour one dark night only a few hours after Don Luis had
dismounted from the coach in the court of the Casa da Bonnyfeather.

Anthony, Mr. Spencer, and a few chests and belongings, among which
was the bundle taken from his room at Gallegos that had not yet
been untied, were all quietly set ashore on the deserted quay of
the Darsena.

                           ----------

Anthony was standing again at the same corner where he and Father
Xavier had shared the orange between them over fifteen years ago.
He was sure now that he had received the larger half.  Along the
familiar water front the dark water lapped in the starlight.  But
the Darsena was well-nigh deserted.  Since the French and English
had been quarrelling, commerce had languished, especially by larger
craft.

It seemed curious not to be going home.  Surely, surely John
Bonnyfeather would come down the old steps at the casa to greet
him.  The fire would be blazing under the portrait of King James
and the misty room aglow.  But he was gone and the casa was only a
pile of stones now, one of a series of house fronts along the
quays.  Impossible!  He could not resist going to see.  It was only
a few hundred paces away.  He left Mr. Spencer sitting rather
disconsolately on the piled luggage.  Under the arches his heels
echoed.  This was the gate.

It was open, swinging a little in the night wind and creaking.
There was not a light in the court.  Overhead the stars burned like
lights on a sable pall.  The fountain was still.  It had been
turned off.  A mysterious air of fear seemed to rest over the whole
place.  It was like looking at a tomb.  What was that vast vague
outline against the stars, a vehicle of some kind, a hearse?

He tiptoed in, reluctantly, aware of a kind of hostility that
emanated from the great coach.  Perhaps it was due to its
strangeness, its great bulk, the dead windows agape in the night,
the funereal droop of the trappings from the driver's seat.  What
was this catafalque doing here?  In the vague starlight it took on
for him the outlines of the hieroglyph of warning.  It simply meant
"beware."  In the stables beyond a horse stamped three times
hollowly.  It seemed as if a curtain somewhere in the night was
about to go up.  He was vaguely aware of a stage lying behind it.
All the stir and expectancy of a play was there, waiting.  A cloud
passed and the stars shone through.  He turned away disappointed.
For a minute it seemed as if he had been about to see through.  The
feeling of something grisly and oppressive returned.  The Casa da
Bonnyfeather was positively hostile.  He had not expected that.  He
poked his head into the coach just to prove himself.  It smelled of
Malacca snuff.  He tiptoed out.  The gate creaked in the wind
behind him.  The arch boomed hollowly.

Mr. Spencer was still sitting on the luggage when he returned.

"Wait just a few minutes longer," Anthony said, "and I will get you
help."

Anthony took the familiar short cut to the square of the Mayoralty
and a few minutes later found himself knocking at the door of the
old Casa da Franco.  There was now nothing but a neat brass plate
on the door with the legend "Herr Vincent Nolte, Banking and
Foreign Exchange."  But a light streamed out over the threshold as
if there was someone living here and awake to welcome him.
Nevertheless, he had to knock several times.  He heard voices
calling in German upstairs.  Feeble steps approached and someone
fumbled at the door chain.  "Franko," the Swiss porter, stood
there.  "Why, he has grown old!"  The man recognized him.  "Mr.
Adverse!"  It was a glad cry, a welcome given unconsciously.  The
old fellow made quite a clamour over him.  Someone looked over the
banisters and giggled.  A tall woman with corn-coloured hair and
wide, blue eyes was coming down the stairs in a dressing gown and
slippers.  Anthony looked up at her rather startled.  She was like
a Valkyrie.

"Don't you know me?" she cried.

"Das kleine fräulein," whispered old Franko.

So it was.  It was his little mädchen who used to sit knitting by
the window.

"Du lieber!"

She came and kissed him laughingly on both cheeks.  She led him
upstairs holding onto his arm, stopping to tell him the family
gossip on every step.  By the time they got to the landing with the
brass rail about it and the statue of Frederick the Great in its
niche, they were both in gales of laughter.

"His Majesty Vincent is still asleep," she called out.

"The devil I am," sang out Vincent, his voice now grown richer and
deeper.  He had only waited to dress.  He came down holding out
both his hands.  "We've been expecting you for weeks!"  They stood
grasping each other by the elbows.  "My God!" said Anthony.

The tears sprang into their eyes as they looked at each other.
"Come up," said Vincent, "and see how you like the bedroom with the
new chintz curtains.  Anna has been getting it ready for you every
day for a month."

"I have not," she said.  "It's BEEN ready."

A faint reminiscence of beer and sauerkraut brought the room they
were about to enter to Anthony's view before the door opened.  And
there it was; the long table and carved chairs, the pewter, the
geraniums in the window and the bird cages with cloths over them.
Franko was hurrying about lighting candles.  One of the maids was
setting a corner of the table evidently for a midnight supper.  Old
Frau Frank hurried in out of the kitchen whence savoury odours
exuded.  The lines on the side of her nose were much deeper.  She
peered more under her moony glasses.  But the arms that came out of
her short-sleeved wrapper were still rosy and strong.  Her grey
hair and cap belied her.

"Ach--ach!"  Anyone would think Anthony had been her son.

"Do not kill the fatted calf, Frau Frank," he laughed.

"Nein, nein, shust a leetle snack.  Kaffee und . . ."  She
disappeared into the kitchen again.  The door banged on a clatter
of dishes.  A tray with Münchner and pretzels came.  Excuses, more
food would follow.

"Prosit."

Anthony, Vincent, and Anna.

They sat down and started to talk to one another all at the same
time.

Anna was going to be married soon--"think of it, little Anna--ja
wohl"--to a rich Düsseldorfer.  A look of bland happiness
overspread Anna's features suddenly making her look like a young
mother with milk in her breasts.  This approaching marriage was
somehow the most important news.  Anthony seemed to have come back
just to hear about it.  The girl described the home of her
betrothed at Düsseldorf.  Anthony sat watching and listening, all
at once feeling a touch of melancholy.  It was for this that his
little mädchen had been knitting and sewing even years ago; even
when she didn't know it.  How naturally and inevitably some women
fulfilled themselves!  And yet the quality of life was rich for
Anna.  Yes, he knew that.  There were tones in her voice, the way
her hands moved, and her feet--to music--to THE music.  Not
guitars in the moonlight.  No, no, heavily-strung viols auf dem
grünewald, deep, unhurried, low-toned instruments invisible where
the sunlight filtered through the oak branches and the Kobolds
could be heard clinking briskly in their smithies under the huge,
dark roots.  Sweet forest, strong and ancient and blithe.  Her
bracelets clinked like hammers on elf-gold.  He sat dreaming about
her, and the music welled up in his heart in a splendid chorus.  A
new experience.  More than a tune, full-throated, manifold.  She
tossed her head in the lamplight.  The suite ended at last with the
sound of birds in the branches, and a flute somewhere away off in
the cool, quiet glades.  Dear Anna!  He would give her something
beautiful for her wedding, and there would be gifts for all her
babies when they came.  She looked at him, and seeing he understood
the current of her life, suffused her eyes with his own.  Vincent
looked on in the current, too, and smiled.  The flute ceased.

Frau Frank had come in with a pot of steaming coffee.  She sat down
wiping her hands on her apron while two tears ran down the runnels
in her cheeks as she described Anna's trousseau.  Schön, sehr
schön.  They began to eat pigs' feet and sausage.  The wedding
dress just basted together was shown him in a ribboned box.  An
immense cake powdered with nuts and cinnamon was brought in; more
coffee, very black; more beer--wine.  The world became softly rosy;
the room delightfully bright and warm.  Every shining pewter and
silver thing duplicated it.

Vincent opened a new box of cigars with a small, gold knife on a
chain.  He rattled his seals.  He was as much of a dandy as ever.
But he dressed now with a careful solidity and a lambent good taste
about him that just managed to be impressive and colourful without
being crass.  He dressed as if someone were just about to strike a
beautifully polished brass gong--but had sounded a full rich tone
on a harp instead.  His was the latest French mode now.  He felt
the Continent was going that way--Bonaparte's.  The English were in
the offing for a while.  He lived by Paris and not by London.
While the armies and ships were deciding it between them--he lived
on the Continent and made loans.  He looked, and he was,
prosperous.

Yes, he was going to Paris--had been waiting for Anthony to join
him.  They must talk it over, tomorrow.  There was a great scheme
under way amongst the bankers for floating the next French loan.
Certainly he was in on it!  And he had a proposition to make to
Anthony.  He had the very best connections now in Paris--the very
best.  There were SOME people he wanted Anthony to meet in Paris
on his way to London.  He took it for granted Anthony was going to
London.  But they could go as far as Paris together.  "Think of it,
my boy, Paris!--travelling together--old times again!  Ach!"

"Herr Gott, Toni, I do luf you," he said suddenly overcome.  "What
a grand gentleman you have become.  And now you are rich, too!
Ooo--ooo--it is all coming true, everything we dreamed and more."
He started to cry into the beer from sheer happiness and the
tremendous, alcoholic sentimental implications of the divine past.
Everything in which he himself had taken part was romantic to
Vincent.  Consequently the future was magnificent by implication,
for some time in the future he would be looking back upon it as his
past.  The tears actually dropped into the foam on his dark beer.
And yet Vincent Nolte was in all details of business the most
practical of men.  He was a sheerly German combination of moonlight
playing across the hard marble of a banker's façade behind which
the owner counted his marks with a nosegay of forget-me-nots on his
counter.  He kept his accounts of interest due in an iron safe with
a knight painted on its oiled door, ate sausages--and cried or
laughed over his beer.  And in addition Vincent had spent most of
his youth in Italy.

"Ach, Toni, I have great plans.  You shall know them tomorrow."

They sat looking at each other very happy, pleased, agreeably
surprised with the changes of time.

Anthony saw that from Vincent the last of the pink, rabbit-like
impression was gone.  His hair prematurely verged toward grey and
stood up in a mane in which the ears were lost.  His mouth had
hardened.  The eyes could be cold as they were blue.  His high,
white stock made him positively impressive with the expanse of
splendid waistcoat beneath with a solid splurge of gold seals and a
heavy chain across it.  There was a round chin that might have been
voluptuous if business had not hardened it sufficiently to make it
look merely abundant and successful.  He emanated an optimistic but
convincing warmth.  An able man on the make.

To Vincent there was still something decidedly mysterious and
strongly reserved about Anthony.  But the suggestion that this
something might be vague and weak, in the final analysis not sure
of itself and incapable of action, had vanished.  As a banker
Vincent, had already acquired a considerable knowledge of people.
Some men he knew intended to do what they promised but could by no
means do it.  The signatures to the well-meaning promises of
incapable men were the hardest and most necessary things to watch
against.  He had, at the first, accumulated a number of small
signatures like that.  They had cost him dear.  "Bad paper."
Really one was safer in dealing with a rogue than with people who
under other circumstances become other men.  The world was too much
for them.  Anthony was not one of those.

One did not know exactly who or what he was--that was the aloofness
of him--but one was quite sure that Anthony himself knew what and
who he was now; that he was secure within himself and that "there
was good security there."  And Vincent felt instinctively as he
looked at him that evening with all the keenness and illumination
of a fresh view, while he was still a stranger, that Anthony had
seen much more of the world than he himself had.  Vincent was a
little jealous of that, and yet, he was proud of it, too.  One
could not place Anthony exactly as belonging to this class or to
that profession--or to just one nation.  He was fair and blue-eyed,
northern, but browned now; bitten deeply by some land of constant
sun.  How tall and strong he was.  And yet when he had first come
in Vincent had not noticed it.  It was the way he moved and dressed
that concealed it.  Obviously one could not think of Anthony's
clothes as being put on.  They seemed a part of him.  Vincent had
never quite been able to achieve that.  No, there were always
clothes on Vincent Nolte.  And he knew it.  He saw them himself.
Yes, "there is a difference between being a mere man of the world
and a gentleman at home in the universe," Vincent remembered.  He
had not read much lately--the new French loan, but it had been said
in a good German book.

But that smooth grey suit, almost silken in texture, the easy roll
of the collar, and the neat flamboyance of the cravat--how did it
all manage to sit so quietly upon Anthony from his varnished boots
to the grey pearl pin at the throat?  How the head rose up from the
wide shoulders that supported it!  Yet he had thought of him as
being slim.  He must have found a tailor at Gibraltar.  The English
were good at that.  "It will be interesting to see what he does
with all the money," thought Vincent.  "I wonder if he knows how
much he has?  Tomorrow," he began. . . .

The door at the end of the room opened and old Uncle Otto shuffled
in.  He was in slippers and a dirty dressing gown.  Anthony jumped
up to greet him.  It was a shock to find that the old man's mind
was nearly gone.  He remembered Anthony, but he did not know that
he had been away or that he had come back.  Only his general
kindliness remained as a vague sort of friendship for all that
moved.  He responded to the warmth of the greeting.  Here was an
occasion, a general-warmth.  He sensed that.  He even brightened a
little.  He clutched Anthony by the arms looking up at him, trying
to remember something.  "Thou," he said.  He smiled immensely
pleased at understanding so much.  His teeth were gone.  Then for a
minute a queer look of instinctive, childlike understanding came
into his face.  "Thou hast found the light," he cried.  "Thou hast
it!  Warm," he said.  He tried to lay his withered old head on
Anthony's shoulder.  They led him away.  Frau Frank was greatly
embarrassed.  She treated him like a child.  "Be polite," she said
and almost shook him.  Uncle Otto objected.

He sat in a chair and gesticulated and made noises.  It was
impossible not to look at him.  "Go to church," said he suddenly.
"It is there.  I found it.  My wife hung bedclothes over it,
sheets.  But it is there.  It shines through.  God has given it to
his little boy again.  And I am so small, so small."

"Uncle, uncle," said Anna.  "Here is a footstool.  Do sit up now."

"Ja, give it to me.  I will pray on it," he cried.  "Anna, my
little one, thou knowest, too.  Let me."

She held him up soothing him.  Vincent shook his head.

"We have had a hard time with him," he said.

"Die deutsche, evangelisch-lutherische, protestantische Kirche,"
exploded Uncle Otto.

"Ah, the poor little papa," said Frau Frank, wiping her eyes.  "Do
you know he seems to hate me now.  He says I am lost."  She could
not keep from weeping.  "It is terrible.  And I am the mother of
his children.  You would think he might remember that.  But no.  He
sits brooding.  You would think he saw something away off.  It is
nothing that he looks at.  Eyes like the sky, wide.  Ever since
Buonaparte came that day and he was arrested and locked up he has
withered.  Now he is just a moon-baby."

Anthony tried to comfort her.

"Buonaparte?" shouted the old man.  He shuddered and seemed to
wilt.  "Brigand," he muttered.  He looked around apprehensively and
collapsed into a sort of breathing heap.

Vincent was much annoyed at having the evening impinged upon this
way.  He bundled the old man back to his room.  But Frau Frank, who
went along with him, came back afterwards to listen and sit with
her hands folded in her lap, watching the young folks.  Anna
insisted on hearing from Anthony where he had been.  He began to
tell her something about it.  He had to go on, and the hours
slipped away rapidly.  Vincent and Anna sat spellbound.  Frau Frank
finally tiptoed to bed unseen.  They would not let him stop.  At
last the light began to come through the window.  The birds in the
cages began to stir.

"Good Lord," said Anthony, breaking away suddenly out of the midst
of Africa, "it's morning, and that poor fellow Spencer is still
sitting on my luggage at the quay!"

They roused Franko and sent him out with two boys, who returned in
a few minutes with the boxes and the young Englishman.  He drank
some warm coffee and staggered off to bed with a pale, reproachful
look.  Anna giggled.  They snuffed the candles and went to bed
themselves.

Outside the dawn began to break in the square of the Mayoralty at
Livorno.  Anthony could see two tall poplar trees, one on each side
of his window.  "The best thing about Europe," he thought, "is the
beds.  No, it is friends!  I am home."  He slept till noon.




CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

WHAT BANKING IS ABOUT


Vincent Nolte was now doing most of the banking and financing for
the port of Leghorn and the surrounding territory.  He had been
among the first to see that the struggle between England and France
was going to be a long one, and to arrange his business
accordingly.  Regular trading had almost ceased, but there was
considerable intermittent running of cargoes as the fortunes of war
varied in and about the Mediterranean.  Livorno had become the
centre of this activity.  Most of the travellers who came to Italy
or crossed it still landed there.  The profits on what cargoes did
come into the port were enormous, and there was a large fleet of
small craft, sloops and feluccas, that slipped from port to port,
from Italy to France to Spain, and back again.

Vincent had promptly closed up the old merchant firm of Otto Frank
and Co. about five years before and devoted himself to taking risks
on cargoes.  He made innumerable small loans to small shipowners at
high rates.  He took care of letters of credit, and slipped bills
of exchange through the blockade whether it was the British or the
French who were in the offing.  In a short time he had concentrated
in his hands a surprising volume of business.  People in Rome,
Florence, Genoa, and Venice depended upon him.  The ruling families
and bankers of the whole northern part of the peninsula now
corresponded with him to transact innumerable affairs, from
delivering letters to buying French wines or English manufactures
for them or selling their oil.  "Nolte can do it" rapidly became a
byword.

From this kind of petty business it had been only a natural step to
making larger loans of all kinds for short terms and at high rates.
In the high financing of the various petty states of Italy Vincent
was soon heavily involved.  Into his schemes he had drawn bankers
at Paris.  In short, he was now embarked upon the troubled but
interesting sea of European finance during the Napoleonic wars.

The whole lower part of what had been the old Frank warehouse was
now taken up by Vincent's clerks, and the ground floor of the
dwelling on the piazza was given over to his private bank, its
agents and secretaries.

On the morning after Anthony's arrival he had spent the time as
usual in his bureau, but at noon he informed his chief clerk he
would be "absent from the city" for a day or so, and went upstairs
to Anthony's room where they had luncheon together.  He brought
with him sheaves of papers.  Seated together, looking out on the
wide piazza, Vincent began to discuss with Anthony the state of his
own and his friend's affairs.  For the first time Anthony now had
the opportunity of reading John Bonnyfeather's will.

The old man's business acumen and foresight were abundantly plain.
For some years, prior to 1796, he had been busy rapidly converting
his assets into cash, both his ships and merchandise.  He had
deposited these sums with northern bankers at Hamburg, Rotterdam,
and London.  In doing all this he had sustained some inevitable
losses.  But at the time of his death toward the end of 1799, his
whole estate, which amounted as nearly as Vincent could then figure
it to about £93,000 sterling, was in liquid cash assets concentrated
in the hands of Baring Bros. & Co., of London, his executors.

The only items yet to be liquidated were the Unicorn, some
merchandise which still remained in the vaults of the Casa da
Bonnyfeather, and a lease on that building, which still had five
years to run at rather a heavy rental.  The fourteen prizes which
the Unicorn had "accumulated" rather complicated matters, since
nothing could be done with the funds which their sale had brought
until the estate was finally settled.  To do that "It will be
absolutely essential for Mr. Adverse to hasten to London, after he
settles his affairs at Leghorn, with as little delay as possible,"
wrote the Barings.

"Your affairs here," said Vincent, "consist in being identified and
accepted as the legal heir under the will according to the forms of
the local law.  There will be little trouble over that, I feel
sure, for I have retained your old friend Baldasseroni to look
after the matter.  But until you personally probate the will at
Livorno the Barings write that they can do nothing in London but
invest.  You must arrive there with all papers in due form for
proving your title as John Bonnyfeather's heir.  Here is a list of
the documents that will be necessary, sent on by their lawyers."

Anthony laughed to see that the Barings' solicitors were Messrs.
McSnivens, Williams, Hickey & McSnivens.  He now sent for Spencer
and had him bring up the accounts and correspondence which the
purser had brought with him from London.  Most of this consisted of
the accounts and disposition of the sums deposited from Havana for
Anthony's share of the Gallegos trading.  They amounted with
interest to £16,834.  Vincent whistled.

"You have lined your nest well, my boy," said he, not without a
touch of envy.  "I myself never know just where I stand as most of
what I have is constantly being loaned out, and the best security
is now liable to be swept out as the map changes.  However, I guess
I can take a risk on this."

He tossed the latest letter from the Barings across the table.


. . . we are greatly relieved to learn by your last advices that
you have heard from Mr. Adverse from Gibraltar and that he will
soon be in Leghorn.  It is also exceedingly satisfactory to learn
that you know him personally and are familiar with his antecedents
as he is, of course, a complete stranger to us.  Kindly advise him
to make all haste with his affairs in Italy and impress upon him
the convenient necessity of his repairing to London without delay.
It will greatly oblige us if you will explain to the gentleman our
desire to close-out our connection with the Bonnyfeather interests,
as we are primarily merchants and traders, and have consented to
act as executors of this estate only at the instance of the senior
member of the firm, Sir Thomas Baring, Bart.  He for personal
reasons of ancient friendship consented.  Our situation, however,
is somewhat anomalous.  Your good offices, Mr. Nolte, will be
greatly appreciated in making our position clear.  You may advance
Mr. Adverse any sum up to £1,000 on our security, should he desire
it, at the usual commission.

Latest advices from Paris indicate that a peace will probably be
negotiated shortly, etc., etc., etc.


"Well, how much do you want?" asked Vincent, rattling his seals.
"Shall we spend an hour or two haggling over the rate?"  They both
laughed.

"Wait for a while till I see," said Anthony.  "I brought a little
gold with me from Africa.  Now what else is there to do here
besides probate the will?  The merchandise still at the casa, of
course . . ."

"And the lease.  I advise you to buy out of that for a lump sum.
The property, as you know, belongs to the Marquis da Vincitata,
who, by the way, is now in town.  He has made it convenient to come
here to talk over with me certain details as to the forwarding and
refunding of the Spanish subsidy to France, through Leghorn.  You
see the British watch the French ports like hawks, and sending
bullion over the Pyrenees is a ticklish matter even when they can
get it from Mexico.  I have arranged a rather clever method of
exchange through a neutral state."  Vincent puffed himself a little
and they both laughed.  "Evidently the marquis wants to close out
his own affairs here too and you will have to see him.  He will
want to sell you the old casa, but don't buy.  Watch yourself, for
he is brilliantly canny.  Oh--there are also the legacies to some
of the old servants, under the will.  I see McNab comes off well.
Well, now, I should say you could close-out all these matters in a
week, get the will probated, and start with me for Paris, say, next
Sunday."

"Why Paris?"

"I will tell you.  Believe me, you are not the only one who has
been doing things since you left here.  I have a proposition to
make to you, Toni.  Now DO listen to me."  He ran his hand
through his hair in considerable excitement.

"You see, it is like this.  The expenses of a general European war
have surpassed the most spendthrift imaginations.  The royal
mistresses of the ancien régime with all their intrigues; our
formal old dynastic wars were positively impecunious adventures in
bankruptcy compared to what has been going on now more or less
continuously for over a decade.  People who based their calculations
of government expenditure on the experiences of other times cannot
even imagine the demands of the present.  To cope with modern
conditions it has taken men of a new cast of mind, men whose mental
and financial speculations leap across old national boundaries to
embrace the affairs of the whole world in a planetary economy.
Naturally, there have been only a few people capable of this scope
of thought and management among either bankers or politicians.
Certain Jews, of course, who have always understood the world to be
one market, have profited.  Then there is Pitt, and a few British
merchants and bankers like the Barings who have understood.  But
above all others in his capacity to keep the wheels of finance
moving under the brakes of war is G. J. Ouvrard, the great Parisian
banker.  That man is a genius.

"For some years now he has been finding the cash for both peaceful
and war-time operations of the French government.  I would also
mention a certain Monsieur P. C. Labouchère connected with the
important house of Hope & Co., at Amsterdam.  He is a son-in-law,
by the way, of Sir Francis Baring.  I want you to keep M.
Labouchère in mind--and--and there is also in the south of Europe,"
said Vincent with mock humility, "my humble self.  Ja wohl, there
is also Herr Vincent Nolte!"

In his excitement at this pleasant thought he offered Anthony a
pinch of snuff in his best professional manner employed after the
consummation of a successful deal.  He began to walk up and down
feeling his watch chain, while the tones of his voice became
heightened and more metallic.

Indeed, as he went on explaining the intricacies of the majestic
scheme he was engaged upon, the new and the old Vincent Nolte--the
happy-go-lucky youth who liked to bet and take a chance on
everything uncertain, and the new, staid young banker with a wise,
knowing gleam in the corner of his eyes--twinkled in and out and
played hide-and-go-seek with each other between the sentences as
they fell from his plump mouth.

At one instant he was the incorrigible, gambling boy sticking out
his tongue and licking his lips over some spicy anecdote of golden
profit reaped by your lucky great-ones, and at the next the
persuasive, solid, financial adviser and investor playing
hypnotically upon the open vowels and deep gutturals of sonorous
words as if a variation on his theme had emerged suddenly from a
nest of wood instruments.  Vincent was talking now in German and
now in Italian.  And frequently when he broke into the latter,
there would be a sudden little bubbling run on a piccolo, a kind of
plunging laughter.  Then he would be brought up short, stopped
suddenly by a feeling of boyish inferiority from the past as he
looked at Anthony.  He would be embarrassed, standing there
laughing at himself, with his heavy watch seal in his smooth, rosy
hand.

Anthony admired Vincent; was glad of his success and proud of his
friendship--and yet, as he sat watching and listening, he could not
help but wonder in the back of his head how it was that the affairs
of a continent tended to drift into the smooth, rosy hands of men
like Vincent.  To what was that manual gravitation due?  But
another thing he saw at the same time quite plainly.  It would not
do to laugh WITH Vincent when he laughed at himself.  He must
permit him to bury the ridiculous contrast between his past and the
so-important present which his own presence inadvertently evoked.
"Yes," thought Anthony, "I must be careful how I recall old times
to him.  He is not sure of himself yet.  The plaster of the
professional manner is only beginning to set.  It must not be
jarred loose or the lathing will show through.  I shall always,
with Vincent--until a good many years have passed--always take the
present enormously seriously."  So he sat grave and silent, looking
like a staid young merchant himself.  On this basis the two young
men continued to get along famously.

"And so," said Vincent all over again, but very much the banker
now, and determined to remain so, "you see it is like this:

"What all the governments must have is bullion in immense
quantities.  And at the present time that is exactly what they
haven't got.  England must have it to pay her sailors and her
subsidies to her allies to fight France: the French need it to pay
their soldiers and buy colonial produce from neutrals while they
fight England.  At home both governments make their paper money go
somehow.  The Bank of England suspended specie payment five years
ago, and French assignats also went clear out of business.  Now it
is francs.  But try to get metal for them--try it!  Yet both the
English and the French have to have hard money when it comes to
making their settlements abroad.  Only victory or peace will make
their paper money generally valuable, and no one knows who will
win.  No, they have to have cash--gold, silver.  And who has it?
Why, that placid old milch cow, Spain."

He nodded at Anthony wisely.

"But the money is not IN Spain.  Oh, no--that is the joke.
Bonaparte would have had it long ago if it had been there.  The
bullion--immense supplies of it--is locked up in Mexico.  For years
now the veins of Potosi have been bleeding into the Mexican
treasury and the great pool of silver lies dammed up there.  Spain
has not been able to tap it, for the British fleet sails between.
It was M. Ouvrard who was the first to get around the difficulty,
and more or less by accident.  Bonaparte had played a joke upon
him.

"Ouvrard had advanced great sums to the French treasury and had
through influence received the contracts to furnish both French and
Spanish fleets with supplies.  In payment for that he was given by
Bonaparte six useless Spanish royal drafts on the Mexican treasury
for the accumulated sum of four millions of piastres.  Finally
Ouvrard, who was nearly ruined by this, sent his brother of the
firm of Ouvrard De Chailles & Co., of Philadelphia, to Mexico.  He
reported that he had seen there the marked chests set apart as a
separate deposit for the liquidation of the six royal drafts in
Ouvrard's hands, and that besides that seventy-one millions of
coined silver dollars were lying idle in the Mexican fiscus waiting
to be shipped to Spain.  It was in the next stroke that Ouvrard
showed himself to be a financial genius.

"He knew that Pitt with his endless demands on the Bank of England
had put the governors at their wits' end to furnish coin even for
foreign subsidies, and he also knew that just at that time the East
India Company was under the necessity of obtaining great sums of
silver for Eastern trade.  He, therefore, approached Pitt, through
the neutral firm of Hope & Co., at Amsterdam--you remember I told
you that Labouchère there was the son-in-law of Sir Francis Baring--
and he was consequently able, through the pressure of the Barings
on the prime minister, to agitate the matter of permitting at least
some of the Mexican hoard to be released.

"Pitt was at first obdurate and blustered a good deal about trading
with the enemy.  But as hoarding continued and the stringency
increased, Pitt became more and more inclined to listen to the
representations of Sir Francis Baring.  At last the matter was
arranged, and although England was at war with Spain, four British
frigates were dispatched by secret arrangement to Vera Cruz with
orders on the Mexican treasury, supplied by Ouvrard through Hope &
Co., at Amsterdam, for many millions of silver dollars.  Just how
much no one here knows.  For these drafts on Mexico Ouvrard
received drafts to a like amount on British merchants for colonial
produce and merchandise, which was imported by way of Holland and
the Hopes into France.

"It was said that the six chests marked for him were also brought
over as 'tobacco.'  I am not sure of that, but I do know that he
sold the foreign merchandise all over Europe at enormous profit.
The British, of course, received the silver dollars in England and
some of them were restamped and put into circulation by the bank.
The rest were poured into Europe and India.  Those loosed in Europe
soon gravitated, due to the exactions of Bonaparte, to France.
Both the fiscal and commercial situations were relieved all round--
and the war could go on."

"How did Ouvrard get his Spanish drafts for such large amounts?"
asked Anthony.

"Oh, I thought I had made that plain," said Vincent.  "Spain has by
treaty been paying France an annual subsidy and Ouvrard took
Spanish drafts on the Mexican treasury, which had been sent to
France, in payment for his loans to Bonaparte.  Bonaparte was glad
to palm them off on him as they seemed uncollectable."  Vincent
laughed.

"Now bear with me," he continued, "and I will show you how WE
come in."  He looked significantly at Anthony.

"The relief already experienced by this welcome supply of Mexican
silver has been so considerable and profitable that the combination
of Ouvrard, Hope & Co., and the Baring Bros, contemplates further
action along similar lines.  They have now under way a plan to get
the bulk of the Mexican bullion to the United States and to reship
it, or the goods which it purchases, from that neutral territory to
England and Europe, chiefly, of course, through the Barings at
London or the Hopes at Amsterdam.  I may receive the southern
consignments here at Leghorn, and, if even a few cargoes reach me,
at the present price of colonial produce my fortune will be made.
Ouvrard, of course, will continue to furnish the capital in the
form of his drafts on Mexico, and the rest of the affair would be
carried on by either English or American ships sailing from one
neutral port to another.  Ships consigned to the Barings or to Hope
& Co., or their correspondents, and insured by Lloyds would run an
excellent chance of being allowed to proceed even if searched by
British cruisers.  It is really a remarkable plan, don't you see?
For those in the charmed circle the blockade is to be broken and
both England and France will profit by the silver.  That, of
course, is a dead loss to Spain, but somebody must pay for war.

"Now here is what I want to interest you in, Toni, my boy.  At
several places in the United States it will be necessary for the
Hopes, who are the go-between in this affair, to have confidential
agents-resident for the purpose of receiving the Mexican bullion,
shipping it, turning it into neutral goods, and investing it for
the time being until it can be safely and profitably transmitted to
Europe in the most advantageous way.  These agents will set up
business as regular merchant firms, correspondents of the Barings
and the Hopes, and the bullion will be turned over to them
ostensibly as their operating capital.  Naturally, as great sums
will be involved and the whole success of the operations will
depend upon the discretion, honesty, and ability of the agents-
resident in America, the posts would be filled with carefully
selected and marked young men.  I need not add that it will be
profitable--but above all it would be interesting.

"Your old friend David Parish, by the way, has been asked to go.
I have also been asked to take-over at New Orleans, which is in
Spanish territory, but a convenient place for receiving the
dollars.   I cannot go, however.  My operations here are already
too large and important to think of giving them up.  In short, I
have other plans.  But you, my dear fellow, would be ideal for the
post.  You are footloose, well-off.  You can speak English, French
and Spanish.  You have already engaged in deals with Spanish
colonial officials and you are now on your way to see Sir Francis
Baring himself in London.

"You see it all seems to point to you as the ideal man for the New
Orleans post, and I believe you would like it.  You always used to
say you wanted to see the world.  Well, here is a marvellous chance
to go on seeing it and to engage in its affairs honourably, and I
have no doubt with great profit.  Why not, why not?  Don't just
shake your head.  Herr Gott!  Do you know, I have written about you
already to Ouvrard, and to Labouchère at Amsterdam.  I want you to
meet them, the French bankers particularly, and that is the reason
that I especially want you to go with me to Paris.  Now DO!  It
is only tentative as yet.  At least come along and talk it over
with them.  That can do you no harm.  That will be seeing--meeting--
the world, Toni.  And what else would you be doing anyway?"

"Ah, yes, that is true," thought Anthony, who was not over-
persuaded.  "What else shall I be doing?"  At last he promised
Vincent to think it over with more enthusiasm than he felt.

"So David Parish was still alive.  Curious he should put it THAT
way.  And he might be seeing him again--see HIM?  How many
children did Florence have now?" he wondered, and sighed.

"Oh, it won't be as bad as that, REALLY," said Vincent a little
nettled.

"Dear Vincent," said Anthony, "I was thinking about something else.
I appreciate all your thought of me.  I--I was thinking of little
Florence Udney."  They both laughed together now.  And this
laughter was always a bond between them.

"Aha.  I always suspected something there," said Vincent.  "Well,
Parish has not done so badly.  Entertains Talleyrand at Hamburg, I
hear.  Mrs. Udney has been living with them.  I'll bet she never
plays 'Malbrouk' to Florence any more."

He whistled a snatch of the old tune that unexpectedly trickled
like moonlight into Anthony's thoughts.  Vincent smiled at his
friend's expression.  A clerk opened the door.

"His Excellency the Marquis da Vincitata is in the case asking to
see Herr Nolte.  We thought we had best tell you, sir," said the
boy still looking a little pale about something.

"That's right," said Vincent.  "Come on, Anthony.  Let's go down.
We both have business with him.  Let's tackle this old fox
together."

                            ----------

Don Luis was sitting leaning forward on his gold-knobbed stick in
the rather handsome room Vincent had fitted up for himself as his
office.  He managed to convey the impression to the two young men
as they came in that they and not he were being received.  Anthony
was at first rather fascinated by the older man, whose manners were
so suave, formal and polished as to carry even into the little case
looking out into the square at Leghorn the atmosphere of the court
of Spain.  He treated Vincent with a consideration that was
evidently flattering, though not without an ironical twinkle at
times.  And in his sardonic gravity Anthony was somewhat surprised
to find himself included.

Vincent introduced Anthony by name, which conveyed nothing to Don
Luis, and mentioned that Mr. Adverse was the young "Englishman"
about whom--"you may remember, Your Excellency, we had some
correspondence at Paris relative to his taking over the post as
resident at New Orleans."

The marquis bowed a little more condescendingly than before.

"His Excellency, of course, is fully familiar with the Mexican
matter I have just been explaining," added Vincent to Anthony, and
then turned to Don Luis again.  "I thought it might be well to
invite Mr. Adverse to sit in with us on our discussion today before
you and he take up the little matter of the Bonnyfeather lease.  He
is the heir, you know.  I am anxious," smiled Vincent, "to enlist
Mr. Adverse in the Mexican matter.  You can rely on his . . ."

The marquis had started slightly.  He turned half about in his
chair to look at Anthony who was now sitting in the window with the
afternoon sunlight streaming in from the square beyond.  Anthony
looked up.  He was suddenly aware of a vital interest in the old
man's stare.  The old eyes licked over him from head to foot, half-
veiled under their heavy lids.  Anthony felt himself turning a
little cold.

There was an instant's silence, extremely tense and awkward for
some reason.

"You have no objection I hope, sir," added Vincent quite anxiously.

Don Luis recovered himself.

"Certainly, certainly NOT," he muttered.  "No, proceed!" he added
with sudden fervour.

"One would think he was giving directions to his coachman," thought
Vincent, angered at the tone.

A curious uneasiness had now gripped everybody in the little room.
Vincent's caution was awakened by it.  He wrote something on a
card, and calling one of the clerks, sent him out hot-foot for the
advocate Baldasseroni.  "The old fox!  One can't be too careful,"
he thought, and began to discuss with Don Luis some of the Spanish
ramifications of the plan to import bullion from Mexico.

In this scheme Don Luis was strongly interested.  He had recently
had long interviews with Ouvrard at Paris and he began to recount
at some length the turn that affairs had taken there.

". . . As for the arrangements for the cargoes and the minted money
which are to be landed here at Leghorn, you must make your own
terms with M. Ouvrard in Paris yourself.  He and I have come to a
very satisfactory understanding, I might add, as to the honorarium
to myself and the Prince of the Peace.  We shall deduct that at
Madrid," smiled the marquis.  "All that arrives here you can figure
on as net for yourself in computing your own percentage.  I trust a
FAIR part of the original value finally gets to Paris, Herr
Nolte.  We leave that to your discretion.  Remember there will be
more than one cargo."  He grinned a little wanly, and continued.

"It has also occurred to me that the matter of shipping produce
from the Spanish West Indies direct could be arranged--possibly--by
securing from the Spanish authorities themselves certain licenses
to trade made out in blank, you know.  I forgot to mention that to
M. Ouvrard in Paris.  Will you do me the honour of suggesting it to
him when you see him as a proposition coming from me?  Neither of
us need suffer if M. Ouvrard cares to perfect such an arrangement.
Assure him, please, that I can bring it about.  Someone who speaks
Spanish well should come on to Madrid sooner or later to negotiate
the matter.  In the meantime . . ."

For nearly half an hour Vincent and Don Luis continued to discuss
the details of trade, finance, and politics involved in the
combination of M. Ouvrard, the Hopes, the Barings, and Herr Nolte.

Anthony listened surprised at the ramifications of the scheme; at
Vincent's grasp of details and quick suggestions, which evidently
kept Don Luis on the qui vive.

As time went on, however, he began to become more and more aware of
Don Luis, and in an unpleasant way.  The man filled him with an
unaccountable dis-ease and an unreasonable hostility.  Here was
someone who, without the slightest reasonable cause for doing so,
he felt was an enemy; a being to beware of.

As he sat in the window listening to the discussion the feeling
became stronger and stronger.  It was absurd, he told himself.  The
old man had hardly said two words to him as yet; had only favoured
him with a few sidelong glances.  Yet he was sure, was perfectly
sure there was a hostile appraisal in those eyes.  He felt toward
him very much as he had felt toward Mnombibi that night when he had
seen him in the glass.  But why?  There was something a bit toad-
like, something of the sardonic Punchinello countenance in the
older man.  But why should that make him loathe the very way he
wore the buckles at his knees?

His spine crept a little coldly as he looked again.  He was glad of
the sunlight striking warmly through the window onto his own coat.
Well he would NOT look at him then.  He would look away.  Where
was it he had felt that way recently; eerily repulsed--warned off?
Ah yes in the courtyard at the casa the night before--and with
Mnombibi.

Now that he came to think of it, now that he was looking away, he
still seemed to be seeing Don Luis in a glass somewhere, somewhere--
an ugly little fellow.  The noise of the talk grew far away and
buzzing--an ugly fellow, spider-like--"pshaw!"

He turned to the window and began to look over some bound
magazines.  Why did Vincent keep old things like that lying about?
Some old consignment probably that had miscarried.  The European
Magazine--April--nine years ago!  Good Lord!  He turned it over and
began to read with one part of his mind:


This extraordinary young man's taste for fame was so early
displayed, that a female relation of his persists to say, that at
the age of five years, when a relation of theirs had made him a
present of a Delf bason with a lion upon it, he said, he had rather
it had been an angel with a trumpet to blow his name about.

On quitting this female relation to go to London, he said, "I wish
I knew Greek and Latin."

"Why," replied she, "Tom, I think you know enough."

"Aye, but," said he, "if I knew Greek and Latin, I could do
anything; but as it is, my name 'will live two hundred years at
least'."--Chatterton used to say, that . . .


A sound in his ears like a distant pistol shot made Anthony
suddenly look up.  The marquis had sprung back the lid of his
patent snuff box.  The conversation with Vincent was evidently
over.  Don Luis took a pinch and brushed some loose grains off his
vest.  He snapped the lid to again.  A faint odour of Malacca snuff
drifted through the room.  Instantly the coach in the courtyard and
the clouded, starry sky of the night before came into the part of
Anthony's mind which was not reading.

Don Luis was speaking to him.

At the other side of his mind, as if in a glass pressed close to
the corner of his eye, a vision of the coach with light flashing
from its windows streamed off into starry space against a rack of
wild-looking clouds . . . "the . . ."  he turned the page


. . . THE greatest oath by which a man could swear was, by the
honour of his ancestors.


The type on page 286 of the old European Magazine slipped uphill
into oblivion as he closed it quickly, suddenly aware that the
conversation which he was about to begin with the marquis was a
dangerous one and concerned him vitally.  At the very first tones
of Don Luis' voice he had been instinctively on his guard.  He had
almost flinched as he heard them.

It had been no small test of Don Luis' now nearly automatic finesse
that in the conversation with Vincent he had never fumbled once,
although a great many ideas had been kept going.  His mind too,
had, as it were, divided into two parts.  That facet directed
toward Vincent was compact of politics, finance, and calm caution;
that turned toward Anthony was in a rage and a secret turmoil.  For
when Vincent had introduced Anthony as Mr. Bonnyfeather's heir it
had instantly occurred to the marquis that this was also the
apprentice from the convent--Maria's child.  It would be just like
fate to play a grim trick like that on him.  He went hot and cold
at the thought.  "Just like the humour of Beelzebub!"

During the talk with the young banker Don Luis had occasionally
stolen glances from under his heavy lids at the other young man who
sat in the window where the sunlight fell across his hair.  And it
had given the marquis a sick feeling about the heart to notice that
the ends of that young man's curls, where they were thin and the
light came through them, twinkled with red and golden glints as he
bent over his book there--"damn him."  For an instant Don Luis saw
the face of Maria sitting in the coach bathed in the light of
sunset as they rode along; as they rode along and along toward the
Château of Besance twenty-five years ago.  O God, how he had loved
her--and hated her!  And here was the son of the young Irishman
seized of his grandfather's estate by an act of God--or the devil,
who knew which,--reading a book.  Oh, splendour of the white Corpse
of God!  It was true.

At that instant Don Luis felt that the Controller of Fate hated
him--and he returned that sensation cordially.  He hated the world,
and he determined, as he had never determined before, to throw
himself against it.  In a way which only a Latin European could
understand he took the course of events as a personal insult.  Fate
had outwitted him.  He would be even with it yet.  He writhed a
little in his chair.  Then he steadied himself, took a pinch of
snuff--and turned to Anthony who had just closed his magazine.

"I understand you are to be congratulated as a VERY fortunate
young man, señor," he began in a silken tone.  "It is not every
orphan who finds a benefactor and manages to inherit his estate.
No doubt, if your parents were alive, they too would be charmed by
your felicity."  He smiled a little.  Somehow he had managed to be
insulting.  The blood rushed to Anthony's face.

"I have been fortunate in some respects, sir.  But I had no idea
until shortly before the death of John Bonnyfeather that I was to
be his heir.  And I have no relatives I know of, no one to share
with me in what you have been good enough to style my 'felicity.'"

"Of course, I did not intend to insinuate that you were a designing
young person," resumed Don Luis.  "My interest in you is, after
all, a natural one.  Perhaps you may recall that I had at one time
the peculiar honour of being your benefactor's son-in-law?"

"And might have been his heir," thought Vincent pricking up his
ears.

"I had never heard THAT," said Anthony obviously astonished.

"Do you mean to say," said Don Luis icily, getting out his pocket
spectacles and looking Anthony over as if he were a curiosity,
"that your--a--guardian never mentioned to you that the Marquis da
Vincitata was his son-in-law?"

"NEVER," said Anthony, looking that nobleman over so calmly that
Don Luis could scarcely sit still.

"The cool young liar," thought he.

"I heard your name mentioned once or twice casually as the owner of
the premises upon which Mr. Bonnyfeather conducted his business.
But nothing more."

"I will ruin you for that remark," thought Don Luis--and in the
intense struggle of his inner feelings permitted himself an
instinctive question which he would ordinarily have carefully
suppressed.  He seldom laid himself open to rebuff.

"Did the old Scotchman never mention his daughter to you at all?"

A thousand speculations were rushing through Anthony's head.  He
felt himself on the edge of a gulf into which if he could only look
he might know his own mystery, but . . .  "the greatest oath by
which a man could swear . . ."  and he seemed to hear the grave
tones of the old man's voice in the courtyard that day exacting his
promise.  "Why was it?  Why had Mr. Bonnyfeather made him promise?
Who am I?" he thought.  For an instant he looked with a peculiar
speculation at Don Luis, with an expression of self-struggle that
the marquis noted instantly as he leaned forward a little and
gripped the arms of his chair.

"That is a point which it is a matter of honour with me never to
discuss," said Anthony.  "I am sure that Your Excellency will
understand me if I put it THAT way."

"He knows," thought Don Luis.  "I 'will understand,' eh--I DO!"

The implacable look with which he favoured Anthony was not lost
upon Vincent, either, who saw at the bottom of everything a
financial trap.  Doubtless Don Luis had in mind the possibility of
contesting the will.

"I might add," said Vincent suavely in what was meant to be a
soothing voice, "that the matter of probating the will has, of
course, been carefully attended to."

"'YOU might add,'" repeated Don Luis witheringly, while preparing
to go.  "Well, adding is quite in your line, isn't it, Herr Nolte?"
He turned swiftly.

"Good day, Don Antonio Adverso, perhaps we shall have the honour of
meeting again."  He bowed mockingly but with a grave face.

"Ah, who knows?" said Anthony in Spanish.  The lines about Don
Luis' mouth contracted a little.  He took his stick and went out.

"Now what the devil?" said Vincent after he had left.

Anthony was striding up and down.  "How those noblemen of the old
school do despise us bankers!  Well, I shall show him a thing or
two."  He called into the office to send up Signore Baldasseroni,
the advocate.  "Now as soon as this lawyer fellow shows up go out
and get the matter of proving the will attended to instantly, my
dear fellow.  I hope that you do not mind my having lied a little
for you.  The old one is evidently on your trail."

"Do you think so, too?"

"I am quite sure of it," said Vincent.  "If ever I saw one man hate
another--"

"My God, what have I DONE?" said Anthony with a half-humorous,
half-serious quirk.

"What is the use of moral speculations?" asked Vincent.  "The thing
to do now is to register the will.  Will that lawyer NEVER get
here?"

The door opened and a fat, little man with a limp, carrying his hat
in one hand and mopping his brow with a flaming orange bandanna,
entered quite out of breath.

"Why, Signore Adverse," he panted, "this IS a pleasure, an
unexpected pleasure.  I haven't seen you for years.  La la, how
you've thickened up!"

He went limping about, very effusive, clapping his hand to his tail
every now and then.  "Of course, I remember you."  He made a wry
face.  "You were there when that M. Toussaint put a bullet in my
behind.  A sad, a memorable occasion, very sad."  He launched out
into a description of his acute sufferings as a cripple, meanwhile
laughing and hopping about like a wren.  The whole atmosphere of
the room cheered up.  The sulphur reek which Don Luis seemed to
have left behind him was blown away by the breeze that had puffed
in through the door with gay Signore Baldasseroni.

Vincent soon cut him short and explained the situation.  Signore
Baldasseroni produced a huge watch and noted that the office of
registry would close in twenty-two minutes.  He and Anthony
gathered their papers together hastily and tore out.  Down the
sunlit street they went and across the piazza to the Mayoralty,
with the little advocate hopping along with his hand on his hip and
chattering.

They registered the will.  For an increased fee the clerks kept the
office open beyond the usual sacred closing hour.  Every paper was
stamped.  Signore Baldasseroni produced the most grave and
respectable witnesses, whom he seemed to keep on tap.  "They will
swear to anything," he whispered.  "I hold them for a small monthly
retainer.  I trust, Mr. Adverse, you will see fit to repose your
legal business at Livorno in my hands.  My retainer is reasonable,
my refreshers modest, my reputation unblemished.  This I admit,
signore, rests upon the questionable evidence of my own applause,
but you may verify it if you will.  Permit me to call one of my
witnesses, Beppo."

Anthony laughed and clapped the little man on the back.  "I feel
quite safe in your hands," he said.  "I shall instruct Herr Nolte
to remember you from time to time on my account.  What I want is
someone who will keep an eye to my interests and not turn up as the
counsel for the other side, witnesses and all.  You know that
SOMETIMES happens here.  But we, you know, have been through an
affair of honour together and I am the star witness to your
constancy during trials."

Tears sprang into the eyes of Signore Baldasseroni.  "Ah, thou
alone knowest to the full my bravery," he cried.  "Toussaint and
McNab they always laugh when we meet.  If you would only tell the
clerks here, signore, it would enhance my reputation."

"Some time when it will not embarrass your modesty as it would now,
I shall do so," whispered Anthony.

They crossed the street together--friends for life--while the
clerks looked over their gold coins and locked the big bronze door.
In Vincent's case Anthony paid the spry little advocate a great
many compliments and an astonishing retainer.  They all had a
bottle of wine together.

"You have done well," said Vincent after Baldasseroni had left.
"You can depend on him now in the matter of the lease and
everything else.  And that is important.  For Don Luis might
otherwise persuade him to change clients.  It is the curse of law
practice here.  Baldasseroni keeps a whole boarding-house full of
witnesses, with costumes.  He always wins my cases.  Our old friend
Signora Bovino, by the way, makes a wonderful witness in cases
involving domestic disputes."  Vincent grinned and put his feet
over the arm of his chair.  "Well, let's go up and see what the
women are sewing on now.  Anna's preparations are a triumph."

For the rest of the afternoon Anthony sat in the window under the
bird cages while Anna, Frau Frank, and Vincent chattered; while the
women and two sempstresses sat stitching at Anna's trousseau.
There was something so bright and airy in the room, so domestic and
homelike with the constant flashing of white thread and needles,
with gold thimbles on white fingers twinkling in and out through
soft folds of delicate cloth, that the two young men from time to
time looked at each other in mutual enjoyment of peace, happiness,
and home.

"After all, this is what banking is about, isn't it?" laughed
Anthony as Vincent passed him to light his pipe in the kitchen.

"Ja wohl!" said Vincent.

Anna smiled quietly over her embroidery and held it up to the
light.

"See," said she, "it is a white dove with a red rose in its mouth.
Now what colour must I make its eyes?"

On the perch just above her, where the warm rays of the afternoon
poured through the open window and the curtains waved in the
breeze, a canary began to blow golden bubbles of sound from its
throat.  It sang as if its heart would burst.

"Ach," said Anna, "Ach, mein Gott!  I am so happy."

Anthony looked out into the empty piazza.  In the breast of his
coat the proven will of John Bonnyfeather, merchant, of sound mind
and sound body, crackled drily.  A lump came into his throat.

In a few days all this would be gone forever.  For some reason or
other, just why he could not remember now, he was going to London.

The canary sang again and again.




CHAPTER FIFTY

DON LUIS REFLECTS BY CANDLELIGHT


The inn of the "Blue Frog" had for several generations been one of
the best kept caravansaries of the Mediterranean littoral.  Perhaps
more than any other institution in Livorno--and it was an
institution--it had realized the original dreams of the Medicean
founders of the free port by attaining a complete cosmopolitanism.

Like all really great inns, it had not depended for support nor
derived its atmosphere from a purely genteel clientele, which is so
dully alike everywhere.  It had catered to everybody, from
travelling cardinals to sailors getting rid of their pay.  And it
had done so by sprawling out along the piazza, into various
pavilions where each kind of man could find others like himself
gathered together eating and drinking, playing and talking
according to his nationality and class.  In that respect the "Blue
Frog" was unique.

But its reputation depended upon, and had been spread abroad
chiefly by distinguished travellers; by prosperous ship captains
and merchants who had tarried under its roof memorably.  And the
common item in their universal praise of the "Blue Frog" was always
its abundant and tempting fare.

It was the boast of its proprietor, one Lanzonetti, that any guest
at his inn could obtain there, not only the best in Italy, but that
no matter from what remote portion of the globe the traveller
hailed the inn kitchen could also supply him with his favourite,
native dish.  Lanzonetti had been able to do this by gradually
assembling a bevy of remarkable cooks from sundry regions and by
collecting from every traveller--who either condescended to take an
interest in his "universal menu" or to order a strange dish--a
recipe, which the innkeeper immediately proceeded to enter in a
carefully cherished book, to experiment with and to improve upon.

A cellar of inspiring proportions and catholic selection contained
everything from the rice wine of China to Canary vintages.  It was
especially rich in importations from England and Germany of brewed
beverages of all kinds.  In the next cave was a museum of choice
sausages.  Lanzonetti's main success as a host, however, had been
due to two cardinal principles of cookery; he never permitted a
woman to enter his kitchens, and he had a whole battalion of
saucepans always bubbling over innumerable small fires.

In the late 1770's the "Blue Frog" had been at the height of its
prosperity and glory.  The art of eating and drinking had during
that decade attained among the privileged classes in Europe a high
crest of perfection from which it afterward for many confused
decades declined.  The traveller of the day was usually a landed,
frequently a titled gentleman, with leisure and elegant discretion;
possessed of taste as well as appetite.  The nice craft of
purveying to him might be rewarded by reputation as well as gold.
Lanzonetti had won both.  His recipes were much sought after and
went out to all the world like tracts of a society for the
propagation of the gastronomic gospel in foreign parts.  As far
away as "Strawberry Hill" Horace Walpole had learned how to coddle
eggs in mulled wine.

Don Luis had stopped at Lanzonetti's at that, to him, regrettable
period of his life when he had been making the arrangements for his
marriage.  On account of his present abstentious diet he remembered
the place with more than the usual pleasure of an old epicure.  It
was only natural upon his return to Livorno even after a quarter of
a century that he should again put up there.  But alack and alas--
the good "Blue Frog" had meanwhile suffered a sorrowful
transformation.

To be sure, the main building of the inn still looked across the
piazza at the establishment of Herr Nolte directly opposite, but it
was no longer known as the "Blue Frog."  It existed, or rather it
languished, under the now fatal name of the Osteria del Inglese.  A
recent hasty attempt had obviously been made to obliterate the
unlucky designation by painting out the last word of it with the
device "Français."  But the older letters were again showing
through, and the now nearly ruined proprietor, a tall, thin Tuscan
by the name of Fratelli Rabazzonie, could not even afford a little
new gold-leaf to repair what amounted to a serious political error
on the part of his sign.  Indeed, in his own spare body the
proprietor seemed to personify the lean and sickly times he had
fallen upon.

Upon the night of his arrival Don Luis had looked Rabazzonie over
doubtfully.  He did not believe in thin innkeepers, and there was
dirt on the man's apron.  Nevertheless, since it was late he risked
taking the front chamber on the second floor overlooking the
piazza.  He was quite tired, and although the room smelled mouldy
and the bed was a distinct disappointment, he slept tolerably well.
The marquis had left the coach at the Casa da Bonnyfeather, after
having refused to stay there despite the preparations and the
rather pointed welcome of Faith.  For it had suddenly occurred to
Don Luis as he descended from the coach in the courtyard that the
matter of terminating the old lease had not yet been negotiated and
he MIGHT be laying himself open to a technical charge of trespass
by staying in the house.  The horses, however, he had risked
leaving in the deserted stables under the care of the Kitten.  He
brought Sancho along to the inn.

Don Luis was awakened shortly after dawn the next morning by the
arrival of luggage under the charge of some noisy porters at Herr
Nolte's just across the square.  Breakfast was poor, luncheon
terrible, and the unexpected encounter with Anthony that afternoon
unnerving.  On the evening of his second night in Livorno Don Luis
sat in his dingy chamber at the Osteria del Inglese confronted with
what for a man in his condition was a "ferocious" supper.  The blue
veins on his forehead stood out even farther than usual as he rang
violently and demanded the proprietor.

"Landlord," said he, when that individual had entered and sat down
without permission,--"another evidence of degenerate times,"
thought Don Luis,--"landlord, this food and this room," he swept
his arm around overturning a decanter, "MIGHT be considered
hospitality by shipwrecked sailors with desperate appetites and
sea-sore bodies, but by no one else.  Do you call this supper?  The
oil is rancid, the wine sour"--he went on for two minutes--"the
servants decrepit and the beds Procrustean."

"No one has ever complained of being bitten by anything but fleas
before," said the surprised host.  "I tell you, citizen . . ."

"Citizen?" roared Don Luis.  "Citizen of what?  Don't you know they
don't talk that way any more--not even at Paris?"  (Twenty years
ago, he reflected, he would have caned the man for a similar
ignorant impertinence.)  "But what the devil HAS happened to this
inn?  One used to be received here as a Christian gentleman instead
of like a relapsed heretic at a country branch of the Holy Office.
The bed!  Do you expect to charge patrons for the privilege of
being put to the question?  Holy Zacharias--and Bellerophon . . ."

In the course of a quarter of an hour the landlord, who had at
first sought to defend himself, was reduced to a few stealthy tears
for his own misery and a lurid description of his misfortunes in
order to stem the tide of steady abuse that flowed into his ears as
if they had been manholes in a flooded street.

The man's misfortunes it so happened interested Don Luis, who now
felt a little relieved at having successfully vented his spleen
upon him.  And he also saw in his story a certain confirmation of
his own opinions as to the recent decline of civilization.  Any
inn, he felt, was a social barometer; this one in particular had
been so for all Europe.  And its glass was now low, ergo.
Condescending to indulge himself in a bottle of fine, old Greek
wine fetched by the landlord's suggestion from the last rack in the
cellar, he finally put the tips of his stubby fingers together,
leaned back, and listened to his host's recital with a philosophical
air of "God help us all."

"It is the times, signore," said the man, coughing a little and
spitting into his handkerchief,--"the terrible times that are
responsible for your pitiable supper in what was once the abode of
cooking.  You remember it otherwise, you say.  But consider, how
can I help it?  My wife, when I married her, was a woman well-off.
It was her ALL that went to purchase this inn for me from the
retiring owner, Lanzonetti.  He agreed to help me supervise the
business for a year.  But he was a smooth one, that fellow, and he
hated to see another going about in his place.  He died only three
months after I came--and would you believe it, sir,--but the
jealous dog took his famous book of recipes into the grave with
him.  He had it buried in his coffin, clasped to his breast.  It is
with him now--in hell.  My trade fell off--naturally!  Distinguished
Englishmen, for example, who ordered turtle soup and received frogs'
legs instead, became violent.  With my wife always in the kitchen,
the old cooks soon left.  To retrench my losses I gradually closed
up one after the other the various extra pavilions along the square.
The inn--he shrinks inward towards his great warm heart in the
kitchen, year by year.  In seventeen-ninety nothing but the main
house is left.  The frog has lost his legs!  I change his name and
hire me all new servants who remember not the times before.
Seventeen-ninety-four--most of the men go with the army.  No one
remains to serve here but old women.  The English have stopped
coming.  Seventeen-ninety-six--the GREAT General Bonaparte, he
arrives.  Ah!--ALL business ceases then.  I am forced by decree to
keep open.  To live I must sell the fine, old wines to soldiers.  I
change the name again.  But no good.  All Frenchmen are in the army.
No one travels.  My wife goes off with an Austrian hussar to Vienna.
Only two crones are left who stay on for bed and board.  Eighteen-
hundred-one--'the very distinguished gentleman from Spain' arrives
and complains of his 'despicable' supper."  He shrugged his
cadaverous shoulders hollowly--"What would you, signore?  What can I
do?"

"There will be a peace shortly, I think," said Don Luis,
sympathetic in spite of himself.  "Your trade may pick up again."

"It will be too late," cried the innkeeper, letting his long hands
fall loosely on his sharp knees.  "I have the terrible sickness of
the lungs.  Long before peace comes I shall be hunting that
swindler Lanzonetti with his book of recipes through hell."

"You will find him frying in his own grease in the most comfortable
spot there," said Don Luis.  "But tut-tut, man, it's not so bad as
you think.  (It's a great deal worse.)  Cheer up.  At least you are
rid of your wife."

"Si?" said the man.

"Si!" said Don Luis.

He had been moved by certain items in this tale of woe and now
wished to offer a certain modicum of sympathy.  He dismissed him
with more kindness than the man expected after paying him on the
spot and right nobly for the wine, which had been offered as a
present.  The innkeeper could not resist gold, however.  Wishing
Don Luis good night in a mournful voice, he left him alone with the
cobwebbed bottle and one candle.

"At least the fellow had enough sense to understand the delicacy of
a disguised gratuity," thought the marquis.  "He might have been a
democrat and SO insulted.  Well, good luck to him--in hell.

"Yes," thought Don Luis, "he and I have lived through some strange
times the last two decades or so.  It was a better world when we
were born.  Nowadays the wives of innkeepers--and others--go off--
ahem--with hussars.  'Eighteen-hundred-one,' as that fellow says,
June twenty-third my own dear wife's bastard so unexpectedly turns
up."  He clenched his hands.

"'Anthony,' eh,--takes after his sainted mother.  Has his father's
reach.  Leave him to Providence?  Shall I?  I suppose the sins of
the fathers may still . . . I might try to help that idea along a
little, circumspectly, of course.  No more errors, no more going
too much out of my way.  Let opportunity serve."  He sipped his
wine slowly.

He did not mind so much finding that Anthony had inherited his
grandfather's estate.  He regarded that as merely a gratuitous
insult, a quizzical prank of fate--a--a long deferred slap on the
jowl after he had carefully and patiently wiped away the spittle of
outrage from a too-trustful eye.  Probably he might expect that in
the nature of things.  No, it was meeting again with the young
gentleman at all that had upset him.  He had done his best to
prevent that.  It had, in spite of him--occurred.  And how much did
the "young gentleman" know?  Everything?

He gulped another glass of wine and wiped his lips, which were
still red and a little too full like over-ripe cherries with a worm
at the heart.

A number of frantic moths were circling rapidly about the big glass
candle-shade on the table before him.  To Don Luis they seemed to
be making visible rings in the air as his eyes grew heavier and a
little bleary.  Behind them his mind was strangely active.
Indignation and old Greek wine are peculiar stimulants.  When he
felt as he did tonight he often found relief in venting his
thoughts on the morocco notebook.  It was better than sheep over a
stile at any rate.

Futile anger is the base counterfeiter of epigrams, he wrote.  His
hand trembled a little--and then:  Three things never elicit any
enthusiasm: a pregnant bride, a reasonable religion, soup without
seasoning.  "Perhaps I am drawing too much on my own past
experience," he thought, "but the soup tonight was saltless.  Why
must everything be personal?"  He dipped his pen again.

Men say they can discuss their affairs dispassionately in the terms
of general propositions.  But let a man make a remark about the
enormous amount of quackery in medicine, for instance, and a woman
will immediately wonder how much he owes his physician.  In nine
cases out of ten the woman is right.  It is the tenth man, a
genuine philosopher, however, whom she will set down as a fool.
She understands the others.  Why is it, then, that women seldom or
never write poetry, which is the art of talking about one thing in
the terms of another?  There is a reason:  In poetry women are
talked about in the terms of something else.  That appears to them
to be a waste of time.

"Prolix," thought Don Luis.  "I am tired, and ordinary in thought
tonight.  I HAVE had better nights.  Let me see."  He fluttered
the pages of the book backward scanning it listlessly. . .


                     "Education of the Young"


Boys should be kept in a monastery until they are old enough to be
condemned to the galleys for life.  Girls . . . "damn them!"  He
flipped a solid inch of pages and nearly broke the back of the
book.  The writing he was looking at now was firmer than usual.
His hand had not trembled when he wrote this:  Once tangle the
threads of two lives firmly together, and no matter how apparently
remote and disparate their future courses may become, it is quite
likely that it will require the good offices of the blind lady with
the shears to cut the final tangle.

Certainly the meeting this afternoon tended to confirm him there,
he thought.

He dropped his quill and lay back pondering.  He was in a state
where, with his body too sleepy to write, his mind nevertheless
galloped on; speculating; throwing off grand, shadowy visions;
coining figures of speech and tags of phrases; watching itself and
talking to itself about what was always going on in the old house
just under the thatch.

"--which is now getting rather thin in spots under your wig," said
a disgruntled voice with a note of suppressed terror in it.

"What is the use of thinking about THAT?" demanded another.

"In fact what is the use of thinking at all?" a whole crowd seemed
to shout.  A single-toned voice went on like the blood in the
listener's ears:

"What you THINK is a candle there with the moths going around it--
and around and around it--is really the planet Saturn."

"Yes, and wouldn't it just be a good idea to blow out Saturn and go
to bed--be in a dark room, tired eyes."

"A dark room?  Yes!  With the Dutch countess whom you met
travelling once, at Besançon--the dark room there, ah--here it
would smooth out that inner palsy that you are still shaking with
after being so angry this afternoon."

"HE was there this afternoon."

"Well, we have not decided what to do about him yet.  What--to do?"

"Let by--the countess was five years ago.  And how are you now?"

"CAN I still?"

"I?"

"Not a doubt--never!"

"Let's all get in the old coach then and drive around to the Casa
da--Palazzo Gobo tomorrow where SHE is.  Let's try."

"It's rather shameful at your age, though."

"Never think of it.  No one need know.  Who cares now if . . ."

"Get the lease arranged.  Never mind HIM.  Stay at your own
house.  She is still there.  Do you remember you asked her when you
were first seeing Maria what she was doing there--and she smiled
just the same way?  Why not?  It will not be long now until no more
beds--no beds at all--but one."

"Stop that.  Think--what?"

"Why, how uncomfortable the bed here is.  How the old house has
tumbled down."

"Yes, it is like Europe.  All the nice arts of living are being
forgotten--and in a mad effort to make everybody comfortable and
happy."

"But why NOT spread things out?"

"There never was enough to go round for everybody to have enough.
No, it will all end in everybody, even those that have something
now, having nothing--or getting things they don't want.  What is
life without land, rank, honour?  Bonaparte, I tell you, has the
right recipe for such philosophy--you stop it with soldiers.  How
to make them obey?--he knows."

"Aye, can't you see the inn 'shrinking,' as that fellow said?  He
didn't know why it was happening to him.  Only a phrase, a name,
'Bad times, Bonaparte.'  But it was that explosion in Paris that
started to do away with the 'Blue Frog'--and other things--things I
regret.  Oh, what an ass was the sixteenth Louis!  To let them come
to Versailles.  Even that day at the Tuileries the Swiss could
still have stopped it.  It was inevitable?  Versailles had changed
them into ceremonial kings.  They couldn't act--only act.
Versailles was a crest.  Versailles was getting like something
Hindu, Eastern, something completely conventional in art and life.
It was a way, and something that could go on that way by itself.
The West will never see anything like it again.  Already they are
forgetting what it was in itself.  Bonaparte should have been--be
king."

"I dedicate myself to making him so!"

"Don't be pompous."

"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the
government shall be upon his shoulders . . ."

"Rejoice, rejoice, the prince of war is born, eh?"

"Now you are being silly and impious."

"Not to myself.  _I_ know what I mean."

"Not to myself--umph!"

"None of this is meant for the book.  No, no, don't rouse me--the
me that writes.  I know what I think.  I pin my old hopes on this
new man from the past.  I talked with him in Paris.  I remember.
He is inevitable."

"It is all inevitable.  The past is always inevitable.  How could
it have happened any other way than it did?"

"Is the future inevitable?  Can't it happen any way?"

"No, it only seems to be open for anything.  In reality it is
already as inevitable as the past."

Here a wizened old man with very white hair and beard, who looked a
good deal as Don Luis might at ninety, suddenly thrust up a wide,
flat stone under which Don Luis KNEW he was always hiding.  He
stuck out his tongue and shouted, "You are a fatalist!" whereupon
the stone fell down on him like a lid again.  Some of the white
hairs of his beard were caught under it.  They kept on twitching in
a horrible way, especially one pointed tuft.

Don Luis stirred uneasily in his chair.  He had been expecting this
to happen--he remembered now.  The old party under the stone
usually presaged trouble.  He could orate the marquis into a
nightmare when once aroused.  Don Luis therefore hurriedly began an
argument that he pretended was meant for himself alone.  But out of
respect for the head, which he knew was still listening under the
flat stone, he addressed himself to himself in his suavest and most
diplomatic manner.

"Let us, then, take an example," said he.  "WAS it inevitable
that King Louis should stop the Swiss firing on the people that day
at the Tuileries?"

The beard caught under the stone twitched violently.  (Don Luis'
face twitched in the candlelight.)  He gasped.  The old man was
looking at him again.

"How can you ever know enough to argue THAT?" said the greybeard,
and began raising the stone farther back like a lid.  Don Luis
suddenly slumped lower down in his chair.

"Well," said Don Luis defiantly, "let us take something I AM
thoroughly familiar with, then,--something from my book, for
instance."

"OUR book," corrected the head, his white throat beating like
that of a snake or a frog when breathing.

"OURS," repeated Don Luis hastily, afraid the lizard body of the
old man would appear, too.  It was nevertheless some satisfaction
to be corrected by someone who looked like himself.

"Ours--I will repeat the passage for you, Once tangle the threads
of two lives together, and no matter how remote and disparate the
course . . .

"I remember it," hissed the head testily, and threw the stone back
with a bump.  Don Luis felt a distinct ground-shock as if a distant
powder magazine had exploded somewhere.  It annoyed him.  (He had
just slipped off the chair onto the floor.)  He shouted indignantly.

"I was merely going to apply the passage specifically to test the
truth of it.  I was merely going to ask myself how it is that after
I, as a reasonable man, take all precautions to prevent it, this
bastard turns up again.  Don't you see that the truth of the
passage WE have written AND the idea of inevitability, past and
future, are bound up in that?"

"Certainly I see THAT," said the old man emerging triumphantly
now and snatching the argument out of Don Luis' mouth--"since you
ask me--" he added softly.

Don Luis groaned.  He MUST get this terrible old man out of his
head.  He tried to brush him away like a fly.  It was almost
impossible to move his hands.  He just managed to touch his
forehead--and knocked off his wig.

"CERTAINLY I can see that," continued the old man not at all
disturbed.  "It is all perfectly simple.  Any event will do in a
case like this, either King Louis's Swiss or your own meeting with
the young gentleman this afternoon.  All events in history are
equally mysterious.  They simply happen.  We, as it were, merely
stumble across them.  One thread crosses another.  But let us take
your meeting this afternoon. WHY did it happen?  But you admit it
is futile to ask WHY.  HOW then?  Well, I am not so sure you
could show me how it happened.  Let me see:

"By following your separate threads of existence backward and
forward across the pattern of events it might be barely possible to
see how the encounter this afternoon happened.  But only partially.
You do not know all the facts.  It is quite true that your lives
were once looped together long before when the child was born.  For
a short time they even ran in parallel lines, which, I might point
out to you, became visible in the ruts made by your coach between
the mountain inn where Maria died and the hole in the convent wall
through which you, sir, so trustfully thrust the black bag, and the
stuff that was in it, back onto the loom of God.

"You thought the parallel lines might safely be allowed to diverge
and become lost in the general pattern of Europe after that.  You
were willing to chance that they might come together at infinity.
You could settle the account then, you thought.  Perhaps you forgot
how deep and how far the heavy wheels of your coach have cut those
lines-parallel into the roads of the past.

"With a little larger view of the nature of things, at the time,
Don Luis, you might even have allowed for the tendency of threads
which have once been brought so closely together by the teeth of
the weaver's shuttle to run across each other again at some other
point in the pattern.  After all it is by an infinite number of
such crossings that the dots in the pattern are made, and it is an
infinite number of those dots, where one individual thread crosses
another in the warp and woof of events, out of which whole scenes
in the tapestry of history are woven.

"That web, a tapestry, or pattern--whatever one may conveniently
call it, when considering it as a cross-section of a sliding future
passing across a flat page,--is constantly being created and
interwoven out of the stuff of human lives.  It is now, at this
instant, as it always has been before, made up of an incalculable
number of separate threads marking the course of lives.  These have
in themselves each a certain amount of free will that resides in
the essential tensile strength and the calibre to which they have
originally been spun; in the colours of character in which they are
dyed.  And between the compulsion of the weaving shuttles and the
free will of the threads there is always a certain amount of
interplay in order that this piece of weaving with living matter
upon the loom of history may proceed.  For as every weaver knows,
there must always be due allowance for unexpected give and take.
It is only where the threads cross one another that they are firmly
interlocked and loop-stitched together; tied up in a knot.

"But that living web must also proceed out of the past by some
living compulsion dictated by a tendency in the general scheme of
things akin to the particular compulsion in an egg or seed to
change only along certain peculiar lines into what is always
becoming something else, but always within certain bounds; never
the maple into the oak tree.  Thus as in the particular thing, so
in the great general Thing of history--the huge exuding, creeping,
weaving proceeding eternally and mysteriously goes on.

"This living web, which slides mysteriously out of the past from
beyond the vaguest, fabled memory of things remembered, extends
into the future complexly, strangely; utterly transcending the
mightiest powers of even immediate anticipation.  It grows, that
is; it changes.  And on either side invisible binding filaments of
it extend beyond our human senses like the cords on the side of a
piece of weaver's work that are afterwards cut off.  These are what
hold it on the frame of things and they are not even known to us.
So now you have the loom backward and forward and from side to
side.

"From above and underneath it is forever being worked upon by the
moving shuttles that go and come and never pause, and by the wheels
of direction that rack and shove the fabric on, always in one
irrevocable direction.  And now, you see, you have the loom from
all sides.

"Thus any particular crossing of the threads, or knot in the
fabric, any event, is merely a point at the centre of a sphere
which has been tied or has come to pass because of forces working
upon it from all sides at once.  How then say that one thing is a
cause and another an effect, when each is alternatively the other
according to how we call it?  Above all, on a flat page, how show
conclusively how one knot in two threads got tied, much less
project a general pattern?

"How, for instance, convince yourself, my dear sir, because you
once carried a child in a coach from the hole in his mother's side
to a hole in a convent wall that you must inevitably meet that
child again when he has grown to be a man--and on a particular day
in a certain banker's office in Leghorn, Italy?  Or, to put it the
other way, how could you be sure when you abandoned him to God that
you would or would not meet him again?  In fact, how can you be
sure you will not keep on meeting him again, or never see him at
all?  Is it fate, or is it chance, is it cause and effect?  Well,
that depends finally upon the nature of the Eternal Weaver and his
method of procedure.  By the way, what DO you think of Him, Don
Luis?  For it is upon your conception of his nature that you will
act and conceive all other men to be acting.  Not upon what he is,
but upon what you conceive him to be.  That is where your interplay
as a thread in the fabric comes in, isn't that true?  Well, what
DO you think of Him after all?"

To this demand of the voice there was in the soul of Don Luis no
answer at all, only the sound of chanting in a cathedral.

The little man upon his stone now became visible again.  He laughed
and jumped up and down upon it till Don Luis struggled in his
sleep.  "So, you prefer to stick to your own particular little
question and let the major premises alone.  That makes action easy,
of course.  Even if it ends in disaster.  Those who trouble the
gods have little time for men.  Now THERE is something for Your
Excellency's morocco book."  The shrill laughter of the little man
with the beard caused the man slumped down beside his chair to
groan in his sleep.

"Go back to hell," he said aloud.  The chill echoes of his mumble
boomed through the mouldy chamber of the old inn.

The little man suddenly flipped the stone upside down and
disappeared into the earth.  On what had been the bottom of the
stone Don Luis now began to see a dull phosphorescent glow that
slowly took on, while he watched it as if hypnotized, the changing,
shifting character of the web he had been dreaming of.

On the table the candle which was now nearly burnt out began to
jump and flicker.  The wick fell flat and burst momentarily into a
broader flame.  The moths began circling more rapidly about it.

On the now glowing map before him Don Luis began to follow among a
thousand other visions the future track of the coach.  It led
straight toward an immense range of mountains whose snowy pinnacles
glittered distantly in an unearthly moonlight.  The coach drove on
across the plain.  He and someone else were in it.  Suddenly the
face of the housekeeper at the Casa da Bonnyfeather looked out of
it much painted and bedizened and with a supercilious, satisfied
expression of vulgar pride that caused him to laugh.  A look at the
range of saw-toothed mountains ahead served to silence him.

His dream now gathered up into an overpowering sensation of speed.
There was a chasm just ahead.  The speed became unbearable.  Don
Luis felt himself in the coach, falling.  He braced himself for the
crash.  It came as a nervous shock that half opened his eyes.  The
coach had hurtled off into space and burst against the opposite
wall of the gorge amid a shower of sparks and little lights that
twinkled out from and all over the map on the stone before him.
This had now suddenly grown gigantic as if he were looking at a
whole hemisphere at once.  Its shifting outlines were so huge and
so writhing with life as to be terrifying beyond thought.  On it
the gigantic mountains into which the coach had recently fled were
now only tiny, glittering lines like a clump of glow-worms seen by
their own light.  All about them rolled and tossed the twinkling
camp fires of armies.  The red glare of burning cities coloured the
night.  Here and there puffs of white powder smoke shot through
with vivid red lightnings broke out.  Into the midst of these Don
Luis was suddenly plunged.  The smoke reek was intolerable.  Men
were killing each other in the darkness on all sides.  A tremendous
salvo of artillery burst out just above him.  He tried to scream
but could not.

Clear over the face of the map, usurping it and taking its place,
sprang out the Roman features of the little Corsican general to
whom he had been talking in Paris across the desk only a short time
before.  It was like looking at a Caesar's head on an Augustan
cameo ten miles high.  The laurel wreath on the brows glowed
intolerably as with the concentrated blue light of millions of
diamonds.  The mouth opened to speak.  Another terrific crash of
artillery which lit the head with lambent flames woke Don Luis from
his sleep.

He had slumped down onto the floor and was leaning in an agonizing
position against the slipping chair behind him.  A thunder-storm
accompanied by violent bursts of wind and sheet lightning was
passing over Livorno.  The rain spattered through the shutters.
On the table the draught had thrown the wick onto the candle
drippings.  Inside the big glass shade the table-cloth had taken
fire and was smoking and rapidly running holes with sparks.

Don Luis dashed the lees of the wine over it.  Muttering a few
sleep-drugged imprecations upon everything in general, he staggered
stiffly to his bed, stepping on his wig as he did so.

He was awakened next morning by the glare from the piazza beyond
striking through a broken lattice of the decrepit shutters directly
into his eyes.  It was still quite early.

He rose, dashed a little cold water on his face, and going to the
window with the towel still in hand threw the offending shutter
open and looked out.

As fair and clear a June day as ever dawned on Italy after a
thunderstorm filled the square at Livorno with sparkling light.
The sky overhead was a faultless blue bowl.  Against the wall of
Herr Nolte's establishment opposite, someone in dressing gown and
slippers was seated leaning over a cane in the sunlight and
drinking in the first warmth of the morning with all the hunched-
placidity of a crouching and withered old man.  Don Luis looked at
him while wisps of the dream of the night before gradually cleared
from his head.  To see someone so much older than he freezing in
the sunlight while he still felt as strong and vigorous as he did
that morning, unconsciously filled him with sudden joy.

"It is going to be a good day," he said and flipped the towel.
"There is one old fellow over there whose thread in the general
pattern has nearly ravelled out.  What an idea the web was.  I wish
I could catch it up in a sentence or two for the book.  Por Dios!
what tricks the brain plays on us when it is going to sleep.  Does
it?--or do you SEE your ideas then?  I shall have to tell
Bonaparte about Europe and his head."  He laughed, and then turned
a little pale.  "Madre!  I must be getting senile myself.  I shall
soon be relating my dreams.  Can't you see them muttering, 'Here he
comes!'  Old?  Not yet, by Lazarus!  There are a good many
surprises left in this old carcass."

He began to rub his arm vigorously with the towel.  A number of
gamins gathered below looked up and pointed in his direction.  In
the sardonic features of the figure moving in the square of the
window above, one of them had suddenly seen a likeness to
Punchinello.  A burst of laughter followed to which Don Luis paid
no attention.

Carts laden with vegetables and flowers, with their wheels muddy
from country roads and the storm of the night before, began to call
upon their customers and to cross and recross the piazza, leaving a
pattern of wheel marks on the washed flagstones of the square.  The
interlaced designs rapidly grew more intricate.  A flock of milch
goats making its morning round left here and there the seal of a
small cloven hoof.

A convoy of convalescent soldiers going home rolled rapidly across
the square, the wounded riding on caissons, wagons, and nondescript
vehicles requisitioned from the countryside.  Some sat silent,
holding bandaged arms clasped to them painfully, others smoked.  A
small group on one wagon broke into a snatch of song.  A peculiarly
brazen trumpet rang out the notes of "Column right."  Don Luis
started.  He had been looking at the growing pattern on the
flagstones fixedly for some minutes now.  It was hopelessly
intricate; beginning to fade in the sun.  He turned, rang for
Sancho, and gave him orders to prepare his breakfast himself.  "The
food here," said he, "gives me the vapours.  Or perhaps, it was
that Greek wine last night."

"Your Excellency should drink only what we have brought along,"
said Sancho picking up the wig and removing the burnt table-cloth
without comment.  He tied a large napkin around Don Luis as if he
had been a child.  "Foreign wines give you indigestion now.  You
must remember, sir."

Don Luis leaned back and looked up at his whiskered servant,
laughing a little.

"The bottle last night was in memory of my honeymoon here--some
time ago.  You remember, Sancho?"

"No, señor," replied the man looking at him solemnly.

"Thou art a comfortable servant, Sancho," said Don Luis.

"What would you think if I asked someone to travel with me in the
coach back to Madrid, Sancho?"

"A duenna for your nieces?  One is greatly needed.  Certainly--an
excellent idea."

Only Don Luis smiled now.  "Have the coach around at nine this
morning.  I have some legal business to transact--about that
lease."

"Sí," said Sancho and blew out a small spirit-lamp under the
breakfast bowl.

"And tell that señorita at the casa to prepare for me after all.  I
can't stand it here any longer.  The beds at the casa are at least
comfortable."

"Sí," whispered Sancho.

"Now then--" said Don Luis.

Sancho raised the bowl of chocolate to his master's lips and held
it there.  His master's gnarled hands, like the paws of a
monumental lion, lay heavily on the table as he leaned forward.
The chocolate was exactly the right temperature.

Don Luis sighed.




CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

THE COACH AND THE BERLIN


In the cobbled area behind what had once been the ample stables of
the "Blue Frog," Anthony and Vincent suddenly emerged from the door
of the old coach-house, tugging together at the long shaft of a
four-wheeled carriage.

The vehicle followed reluctantly out of the gloomy arch as though
indignant at being forced into the light of day again.

"Come forth, Lazarus," shouted Vincent, heaving mightily.

Answering, ghostly squeaks from the rusty axles caused Anthony to
explode.  Just then the front wheels came upon the incline, and to
a sound like that of a cat running across an organ keyboard an old
berlin galloped its two frantic steeds in shirt-sleeves into the
alley below.  They swung the pole just in time to avoid being
crashed into the wall opposite.  The old carriage, its windows hung
with cobwebs, came to a halt with a despairing screech.

Even the dying Rabazzonie--who for once had made a fortunate deal
and sold something for more than it was worth--laughed until he
coughed violently.  He looked at the scarlet spray on his
handkerchief--and put the coach-house keys back in his pocket,
still surprised at finding them jingling on something else metallic
there.

Having brushed off the straw and dust amid a good deal of back-
slapping and mutual banter, the new owners of the old berlin
resumed coats and began to examine their purchase with rueful faces
and an occasional chuckle.

"I warned you not to buy it in the dark," said Vincent.

"YOU warned ME!" replied Anthony hotly.  "Why, you were so
anxious to get it yourself that you kept bidding against me in
there.  No wonder Rabazzonie wouldn't take it into the light,
though."

"Toni, it was mad of you to give hard coin for it.  Look at it!"

"Not so bad after all," sniffed Anthony.  "Wait till I'm through
with it."

Yet he was forced to grin with Vincent, too.

For the relic of antiquity which stood resurrected before them was
like all dilapidated old carriages in having about it an air of
insufferable complacency.  "In me," it seemed to say, "you behold
the ne plus ultra of something that has SO unfortunately passed.
In me you behold the fate of all particular styles.  Some day your
own wheels will stand still in time."

Meanwhile, the spiders and cockroaches abandoned it to run back
into darkness, as if they too knew where the past had gone, while
the carriage remained to stick out its tongue at the present.

The green paint clung to it in scales and its mouldy leather
curtains hung limply like folded bats' wings.  Its roof was sadly
buckled and swaybacked.  Two large, dusty lanterns glared like a
stage-dragon's eyes, one on each side of the box whose moth-eaten
hangings hung down in elf-lock fringes.  Behind, a high, hooded
seat cocked itself up like an extravagant pump-handle tail, while
the shaft in front burrowed into the ground.  Standing there in the
bright sunlight of the silent alley, the old berlin resembled a
cross between a griffin and a snipe that had been disturbed
hibernating but had now comfortably gone to sleep again in the very
act of digging up a worm.

Anthony and Vincent kept on joking about it despairingly with the
full, flat irony of young men while they continued to scramble in
and out of it as if trying to wake it up; slamming its chattering
doors, examining its wheels and axles, poking its cushions from
which the mice leaped.  Then with as much gravity as if they were
driving to Schönbrunn for an audience they sat down in it together
and burst into peals of laughter at their own expense.

"At least the wheels are all right," insisted Anthony.

"Yes, but we just CAN'T go to France in it," groaned Vincent.
"They will arrest us for émigrés trying to return disguised as
ghosts in the family coach."

"It was you who suggested it," replied Anthony, poking him in the
ribs.  "'Member?  You said that after the battle a year ago the
Austrians requisitioned everything on wheels to retreat in and the
French came and took everything that was left--or something logical
like that--and that you can't sit a horse--and that this old berlin
was a great idea--and that you were the only one that remembered
its existence--and we should certainly be captured if we went by
sea--and--"

Vincent groaned again.  "That's right, rub it in."

"Of course," continued Anthony, now enjoying himself greatly, "it
WILL look strange for that prosperous young banker, Herr Nolte,
to drive into Paris in what looks like Richelieu's désobligeante
exhumed."  He bit off the end of one of his much prized Havana
cigars philosophically and gave another to Vincent as a consolation.

Vincent sat back puffing it, gloomy enough.  All that he had said
about getting a carriage this side of the Alps was true.  And he
had set his heart on making the trip to Paris with Anthony not only
in comfort but in privacy and luxury.  The old berlin, which he
knew had been accidentally overlooked by frantic quartermasters,
was a last hope.  The Tuscan posts were not only impossible, they
were improbable.

And a saddle did give him piles.  No doubt Anthony thought that was
funny.  It wasn't.

Having now reached an impasse on the subject of the berlin, they
continued to sit in it quietly for some minutes, smoking their
cigars in the warmth of the brick alleyway which was pleasant
enough at that hour in the morning.  Vincent was trying to
rearrange his plans for getting to Paris.  He was greatly
disappointed at finding the old carriage hopeless.

It was all very well, he thought, for Anthony to sit there blowing
smoke out of the windows as if they were already on the way.  But
he, Vincent Nolte, had important international business to transact
at Paris.  He had an appointment to keep with M. Talleyrand, and
several bankers.  And, as usual, he was being left to make all the
practical plans.  Undoubtedly friend Anthony was still somewhat of
a dreamer.  From the expression on his face now you would think he
was a boy again playing coach--looking out of the window that way!
Well, that would never get them to Paris--never!

"As a practical man of affairs, Vincent, did you ever consider the
philosophy of modern travel?" asked Anthony suddenly.  Vincent
stirred uneasily.

"No."

"Well, it goes something like this:  None of us are content any
longer to live in the present and to enjoy things just as they are.
We are always thinking about the past or the future; trying to
readjust what has already happened to us or making plans ahead.
The present under those circumstances hardly ever exists for us.
It is always, in our days at least, just a time-between.  In other
words, we never ARE, we are always just about to be.

"Travel is the one exception to this perpetual uneasiness of always
becoming.  It is only when we are travelling that we exist as we
were meant to exist; in the present.  Everything then becomes quite
vivid and real.  We have left the past behind us and the future
must wait.  There is nothing to be done about it.  So just for a
little, in transit, we give up our dear rôle of being our own tin
fates and live.  Suddenly it is now--for a while.  And we are
happy; surprised how pleasant it is to live, to be ourselves.  I
have noticed that a great many people can find each other and be
friends when they are travelling, but let them once arrive and they
lose themselves and each other again.  They wonder, 'How could I
have ever found THAT fellow interesting on the ship or in the
coach?'

"Do you know, when I first set out to see the world I thought it
existed only in the places I was going to.  I was in danger of
becoming a series of deferred destinations.  Now I know that
travel, that 'in-between' is the time when one lives.  I am going
to try to turn all destinations into part of one journey, the long
journey from the beginning to the end, you know."

"What a philosopher you are getting to be, Toni," laughed Vincent.
"And just like all the rest of them.  Here you are philosophizing
about travel, and all that, while sitting still in a funny, old-
fashioned, useless coach that won't go.  No, I haven't thought
about 'travel.'  But I notice that I shall have to make the
practical plans for this journey.  It's lucky you know one or two
men of affairs, my boy.  But I have a little business to transact
at the bank this morning."  He started to go.

"Now, MY SON," said Anthony making him sit down, and returning
his paternal manner with interest.  "You're quite mistaken.  The
trouble is you are just like all the rest of the bankers, you can't
even apply philosophy at second-hand."

"FO!" said Vincent.

"No?  Well, I'm going to prove it to you!  'As a matter of fact'--
as you always say in your letters--I have a little surprise in
store for you this morning.  I am going to show you what money
CAN do.  You know you laughed at my making a strict, eight
o'clock appointment with Rabazzonie, who, you say, has more time
than anybody in Livorno.  He hasn't; he has very little time left
in Livorno.  Didn't you see the red spots on his handkerchief?  I
took no chances and bought the berlin last night--cheap.  I just
let you bid it up this morning in your excitement and gave him the
difference.  After all, what are a few measly scudi more or less to
a rising young banker?  Now wait a minute.  That isn't all.  The
play really begins at nine o'clock.  I have arranged for a little
meeting here, a kind of post-mortem over our deceased friend the
berlin.  They ought to be here soon."

"Who are THEY?" demanded Vincent a little sulkily.

"Our old friend McNab for one.  I put this little matter into his
hands."

"Oh, you know how to pick your agents well enough," yawned Vincent,
pretending to be greatly bored and stretching his feet out on the
opposite seat resignedly.  "McNab can make a Spanish dollar weigh
an English pound.  Toni, you're an old fox to make me give
Rabazzonie twelve scudi extra.  I'll charge it on your account as
expenses.  I certainly will."

"He needs it," replied Anthony.  "Call it charity."

They both grinned now.  Since Anthony had come back he and Vincent
had been matching wits in several directions.  This was a rather
unexpected score.  They were now about even.  They sat waiting for
McNab and his work-gang to appear, smoking contentedly.

"Almost nine, now," said Anthony, taking out Mr. Bonnyfeather's
watch.

"What a turnip it is," remarked Vincent.  "And all that spread of
heavy seals on the chain.  I don't envy you that part of your
legacy.  A little old-fashioned, eh?"

"Tut, tut," said Anthony.

A rat scuttled along the ancient brick pavement of the alley and
stopped to look them over.  It was very quiet in the old berlin
with the leather flaps hanging down.  Vincent jogged Anthony's
elbow.  Through a slit in the front they could see that someone had
entered the end of the alley from the square.  He was standing
relieving himself against the brick wall.  It was Don Luis.  They
laughed.  He was so furtive and yet hearty about it.

"The old goat," whispered Vincent.  "Look how he stamps around.
It's still a positive pleasure to him.  If you want to know what a
man's like, watch him against a wall, when he isn't looking.
There's philosophy for you."

But just then Don Luis looked up suddenly becoming the marquis
again.  He had smelled cigar smoke.  Glancing down the alley, he
saw the grotesque old berlin with wisps of smoke curling up from
it.  Its lamps positively stared at him.  He had a good mind to
rout out the boys who must be in it, apprentices smoking their
masters' cigars.  "And the best Habana at that.  The young
thieves!"  He gripped his cane.

In the berlin Vincent and Anthony held their breaths.

"Pshaw!" said Don Luis, and strode out of the alley.  He was busy
that morning getting the antique statue from the convent safely
shipped off to Spain.  They heard the door of a coach slam and the
heavy wheels rolling away.

"Would you have run if he'd come after us?" laughed Vincent.

"Yes," said Anthony.  "Do you know, I hate that man, Vincent."

"Why?"

"It's unreasonable, I know, but I hate him just the same.  He makes
me feel desperately uncomfortable and insecure.  I can't help it.
Damn him!  I want to fight him--if he only wasn't too old."

"It's just as well then you let Baldasseroni close that matter of
the lease with him instead of having a personal interview--even if
you didn't come off so well."

"Oh, well, let him keep the stuff in the cellar, and the old
furniture!  The last time I went to the Casa da Bonnyfeather, the
evening I landed, I walked up to the old place and looked around.
And there was that great coach of his standing like a hearse in the
court.  Do you know, I felt warned-off.  The coach smelled of
snuff, and when I got the first sniff of it next day when I met the
man in your case . . ."

"Oh, you're getting to be an old woman," said Vincent.  "But here
comes McNab.  Now what is all this about?  Here's the great Signore
Terrini, too."

Not only were McNab and Terrini coming down the alley but half the
master workmen in Livorno as well.  There was Beppo Tulsi the
blacksmith, Garnarlfie the cabinet-maker, and the little
upholsterer with his apprentices.  Their shoes clattered like a
squad of soldiers.  McNab spoke up rather proudly.

"It was na sae easy as you maun think, t' gather a' the great-
hearts ye now see before ye togither for a tryst the morn, Mr.
Anthony.  They're a' sae bashfu' an' min at trustin' a body the
noo.  Sin' the French came every ass maun hae his hock in guid
siller laid doon in his ain fist.  Min' yoursel' or they'll be
playin' nieve-nieve-nich-nack wie ye.

"Mon!" he cried, giving a start as his eyes for the first time took
in the complete decrepitude of the berlin.  "You'll no' be
bamboozled into throwin' away guid, bright siller on yon negleckit,
auld-warld trumbler, will ye?  I wouldna ride a leaguer-lady o'er
the plainstanes in it."

"Now, now, Sandy, hold your horses," laughed Anthony, "the money's
not spent yet, and--"

"Na, na, but it's ABOOT to be," cried McNab, "and I'll hae na
more to do wi' it."  He continued to stay, however, out of
curiosity.

"Terrini," said Anthony leaning out of the window and tapping that
now shabby artist on the shoulder, "do you remember that sketch of
me you did in Mr. Udney's library years ago, when I was a boy?"
Terrini nodded uncomfortably.  "Well, you have been using it ever
since, haven't you, for the body and hands in the portrait of every
merchant's brat you have daubed in Leghorn.  I know how your best
talents lie.  Well, take the body of the old berlin and work it up
into a fine modern portrait.  Something fit to carry a prince of
the blood travelling incognito through foreign dominions, something
that will convey--without attracting undue notice--a sense of
wealth, stability, and the utmost modern good taste.  That's all I
want you to do with the old lady, Terrini."

Vincent lay back beating a little dust out of the seat before him
with his cane, whistling softly.

"I give you carte blanche, Terrini, as to materials, wages, and
your own designs."

"Mon!" exclaimed Sandy as a last protest.

"The only stipulation is that you submit all your accounts to McNab
for approval after the work is done."

Sandy grinned.  "There, there," he said to the artist whose face
had fallen.  "I won't be cutting your own profit more than half and
the costs two-thirds, rely upon it."

They all had to laugh, for McNab knew them and they knew McNab.  He
had not lived in Leghorn for half a century without learning the
fiscal peculiarities of his neighbours.

Leaving the smith looking about under the carriage and the rest
gathered about Terrini in earnest consultation, Anthony, Vincent
and McNab strolled over toward Vincent's case across the square.

"Well, are you satisfied, Vincent?" asked Anthony.  "Sandy here
will, I hope, be able to find us some horses somewhere."  They were
all talking in Italian now.

"Aye," said Sandy with a rueful shake of the head.  "But I hate to
see you leaving Livorno again, Master Anthony."

"I'd take you along if you knew where you wanted to go, Sandy."

"Thank you, sir," replied the Scot, his face becoming sad and
perplexed, "but there's the rub.  Since you've distributed the old
master's legacy, Faith is the only one of all the old crew left at
the casa that knows what she wants.  It's curious, but none of us
seemed to realize that the old life there was really over until
Baldasseroni settled that lease for you and the old landlord took
over the place again.  It was too bad about the furniture.  I've
slept in that bed of mine for two and forty years."

"I'm sorry about that," said Anthony.  "I should have thought of
it."

"No, no, there's nothing to reproach yourself about, sir.  The old
master left us all enough to buy--mony a guid bed and a wee house
to put them into."  He broke into Scotch for a phrase or two,
apparently a little excited about something.  "But there'll be
nobody to lie in them but ourselves and it WILL be a bit lonely--
for me at least," he added significantly.  "You don't mean to say
that Faith and Toussaint--" said Anthony.

"Aye," said Sandy.

"Was he happy?" asked Anthony.

"Like a boy with his first girl--for a while."

Anthony suddenly felt cold.

"Mon!" cried Sandy forcibly, "yon's a terrible woman.  It must be
inside the skull of her.  Past middle-age and every new moon she's
like a goat on the hills again.  Did you ever see her eyes then,
peerin' oot o' that great bonnet o' hers when she goes out?  Do you
know, Mr. Anthony?"  They had come to a stop now.  Vincent gave
them a look and walked on.  He was not in this, he saw.

"Yes, I know," said Anthony.  McNab was still looking at him.  His
gaze became more searching.

"You don't mean to tell me that she bothered you when you were a
boy, sir?"  Anthony did not reply.  He had grown silent again.

"Puir laddie!" exclaimed McNab.  "Why didna ye come to me?"

"You know why," said Anthony looking at McNab.  He had just guessed
why himself.

"Aye," said the old man lowering his eyes.  "We all paid there.
And she's my ain cousin, too.  But when she gave me the go-by and
took up with Captain Bittern that time--"

"Oh, DID she?" said Anthony.  Suddenly they both laughed.

"By gad, she must have been sent into the world for educational
purposes!" Anthony exclaimed.  Somehow he suddenly felt relieved at
what McNab had let slip.  Since so many had shared in Faith she
became a cosmic experience.  He and McNab, and Toussaint, and
Captain Bittern--and--and--were brothers.  He linked his arm in
McNab's and they went across the square.  For the first time in
their lives they were really talking to each other.

"Yes, sent into the world," replied McNab, "but not by God, by auld
hornie.  It's not her Scotch blood, of course."

Anthony grinned.

"Well, well," continued Sandy, "I suppose it's the mixture then.
She's a kind of she mule, you know.  Some mule mares are always in
heat but Percheron, stallion or jackass makes no difference, they
never gender.  I suppose," speculated Sandy, "they want something
they haven't got and keep trying for it.  Yon woman's verra
parseestant.  It's the cradle and the grave with her."  They had
come to the steps of the office now and stopped.

"Will you come and have a talk; stay for dinner?" asked Anthony.
"The Noltes, you know them from old times, they'd want you."

"No, no, thank you, sir, I'm moving to my new lodgings this
afternoon.  But I wish you'd send for Toussaint and talk with him,
Mr. Anthony.  You see the landlord, the marquis, is coming to stay
at his own house.  Toussaint and I have to get out but Faith is
staying on, sir."

"What!"

"Yes, sir, there's no doubt of it.  There's something up.  Long
before you came to the casa, in the old days, I think there was
something between them.  She was Maria Bonnyfeather's maid, and
when the marquis came a-courting the old man's daughter, well,
Faith was around, too.  And--"

"I see," said Anthony.  "Well, I shall send for Toussaint to come
round for supper tonight.  I wondered why I had been seeing so
little of him.  Good luck to you, Sandy, you know any time you . . .
that is if you ever--"

"I know, sir, I know.  And I'll keep in touch.  It's the old blood
that calls to us all.  Good luck to YOU, Mr. Anthony--Adverse."

He shook hands and left Anthony standing on the steps pondering.
The closed door again!  He shook his head as if to clear it of
cobwebs.

Anna called down the stairs to him.  "Come up, Toni, I want you to
meet somebody."  They were all talking German and laughing up there
excitedly.

"So her prince from Düsseldorf had come, had he?"

Why was it as he ascended the stairs he began to think of Angela?
Something in Anna's voice, he supposed.

Pearls!

Why hadn't he thought of it before?  That was exactly the wedding
gift for--Anna.

                            ----------

In the courtyard of the Casa da Bonnyfeather, where the foul
remains of stagnant water in the fountain were fast being licked up
by the sun, leaving a film of green slime behind it, Toussaint
Clairveaux was loading two small chests onto a cart.  One contained
his clothes and the other his library of second-hand books.

These, a few clothes, and the small legacy left him by Mr.
Bonnyfeather were all that he had accumulated during about half a
century of labour and existence.  The legacy he had invested in a
small cottage on the outskirts of Leghorn.

Faith stood on the steps watching the chests being carried out in
the same mood that she had watched the departure of Mr. William
McNab some hours before; that is, with considerable satisfaction.
She had quietly completed her arrangements with Don Luis for
remaining on as his housekeeper, and she was now seeing the last of
the old régime depart with a complacency that bordered on
enthusiasm.

The fact that for some time past she had allowed Toussaint, faute
de mieux, an easy access to her bed made no difference to her
feelings of relief at his departure.  They had merely been left
alone together with the establishment practically closed up, and it
had amused and soothed her to allow Toussaint to think that his
lifetime of devotion was being rewarded.  McNab had merely laughed
and let them alone.

Toussaint as usual had built up a romantic and blissful future on
the basis of what he considered to be Faith's surrender to his long
siege.  "Her heart's citadel has at last capitulated," he assured
McNab.

"Just temporarily starved-out," replied Sandy, and went his own
way, waving off the demands of Toussaint for an apology as one
would placate a child or a madman.

Toussaint on his part had bought the little cottage with vines
about it some time before and furnished it charmingly.  Since the
great revolution had somehow failed, he and Faith would now live
apart in a dream of happiness close to the heart of nature in the
hills.  He had even tried to read Emile to Faith.  The embrace
which followed after one paragraph he could never forget, never!

He now wiped the sweat from his forehead after lugging out the
chest of books and arranged a sack on the seat.

"Tiens," said he.  "All is ready, mademoiselle.  Have you packed
your bag?  We can return for the trunks later."  He stood waiting
for her in a dramatic stance.

Twenty years before there had been something hawk-like and gallant
about the little Frenchman, a kind of ardour which only the young
intellectual fanatics who had brought on the revolution for the
rights of man had possessed.  It was their mode, the peculiar sign
of their class and generation.  It had not been funny then, because
it was dangerous., genuine, and new.  In his own mind Toussaint was
still one of those, who, if you would only listen to him, could
bring the golden-age out of a cocked hat.  He extended his own, now
frayed and worn-out, toward Faith, and stood waiting with his brown
cloak at just the right droop from shoulder to ankle although it
was a hot day.  The "consummation of his love" had given him all
his old confidence.  The hat was even arrogant.

"Come, mademoiselle," said he.

To Faith the little man standing in the courtyard had nothing
hawklike about him.  He looked to her like an old bantam cock
crowing defiantly upon a deserted dunghill.  She smiled, and
deliberately began to close the big double doors.  She took out a
great key from the ring on her belt.

"You may leave it in the keyhole," called Toussaint, climbing into
the cart himself.

"MAY I!" she said and burst into a peal of mocking laughter.

He looked up startled--just in time to see the door close her in
and him out, and to hear the lock shoot home.

The man on the cart burst into a roar of laughter.  "Pretty neat
that!"  He hated the French anyway.  They had taken his other
horse.

Toussaint ran up the steps and beat at the big doors frantically.

No answer.  He poured through the keyhole the kind of eloquence
that was out of date.  That it came from his heart made no
difference to the closed doors.  Only the echoes in the courtyard
replied to him.  He heard them now.  He heard his own voice.  For
the first time he recognized it for something frantic and
ridiculous; something which even the stones hurled back.  It struck
him down.  He lay on the steps and writhed while his ego withered.
Then he lay still.

The man on the cart got down after a while, picked him up and
dumped him like a sack into the back of the cart beside his chests.
Toussaint, the works of Rousseau, and sundry out-of-date garments
were drawn out into the country and deposited at the vine-covered
cottage.  The carter gave no change for the gold piece which the
small man, with his head sunk on his breast, proffered mechanically
while he sat on his library by the roadside.  It was a hot day.

About twilight Toussaint got up and went into the silent, little
house.

He sat there for some hours with his head in his hands.  A full
moon began to peer at him through the window.  "Clair de lune,"
said he, and spat.

He went out now to one of the chests and opened it.  From a
compartment on one side of his books he took out one of a pair of
duelling pistols.  It had not been fired since his affair of honour
with Signore Baldasseroni.

"I shall do even better this time," he said.

He removed the charge carefully and cocked the piece.

"Meldrun!" said Toussaint Clairveaux to the moonlight, and put a
bullet through his brain.

About the same time at the Casa da Bonnyfeather Don Luis was
climbing into the bed of his late father-in-law with almost pious
grunts of satisfaction.  Outside, the shadow of the coach stretched
half-way across the court in the moonlight.  The bed was
undoubtedly a good one and the sheets smelt of lavender.  Indeed,
the marquis had every confidence in his new housekeeper.

He had even left the door of his room open.

                            ----------

For Anthony, the news of Toussaint's mad little tragedy served to
give a dark poignance to rejoicings at the Casa da Nolte over the
marriage of Anna to her Düsseldorfer and to the brightly concealed
agony of Frau Frank at her only daughter's departure with her
husband.  Anthony said nothing about it until Anna had gone.  But
he could less than ever abide the thought of the strange new order
at the Casa da Bonnyfeather.  There was now something distinctly
gruesome about it.  With Anna away, the life of the Franks' house
seemed to have vanished, too.

The whole past at Livorno lay heavily upon him.  He wished to be
rid of it forever now and to settle his affairs in England.  With a
growing impatience he awaited the revamping of the old berlin by
Signore Terrini.  Some days went by.  Uncle Otto continued to sit
in the sun and mumble.  Then late one afternoon Terrini himself
drove around in the rejuvenated berlin and even McNab had to admit
that the "siller" had been well spent.  The carriage was a little
masterpiece, much too smart, indeed, for the sturdy but rather
plebeian nags harnessed to it.

The ridiculous high seat behind was gone.  The vehicle had been
slung evenly on new "C" springs so that it no longer seemed to be
always about to bury its nose in the earth.  The wheels were
lacquered jet-black with bronze lions' heads worked on the hubs.
The remodelled body was decorated with oval panels and the glass of
the windows and the door was set in the same graceful shape.  The
top was no longer sway-backed but hip-roofed.  And the whole
carriage was enclosed with the fine, grained leather, enamelled in
blue, for which Leghorn was famous.  Furthermore, the top was so
contrived that the rear half of it would let down as a hood,
otherwise kept in place by two polished metal rods.  All the seams
of the leather were held together by a bronze filigree that traced
itself over the entire upper half of the carriage as a metal vine.
The box was covered with grey felt ending in dark blue tassels, and
there were two bronze side-lamps held in the beaks of eagles, which
Terrini himself had designed and cast.

The little artist, who for a long time had found no work in Leghorn
except the designing and decorating of coaches, had surpassed
himself, and he was obviously proud of his chef-d'oeuvre.

"Of course, signore, with cost no consideration!--"  He waved his
hands as if the berlin could take wing and might be shooed away.

And indeed he had managed to express in its lines a lightness and
grace that were astonishing.  The long sweeping curve of the back
with the platform for the trunks had bronze handles for the footman
to cling to.  It gave the final effect of a piece of flying light-
artillery with metal gleaming in the sun.

"There will be nothing like it in Paris, Toni, not even the
aimables who drive out in their 'Anglo-cavalcados' to Chantilly can
rival you," said Vincent, who was a little envious.

"That is what I thought," replied Anthony and smiled a little.  "I
told Terrini here to give me the latest mode, and he has done so."

"Yes, I have done so.  The Greek mode is going out.  It is the
Roman effect I have striven for," gratulated Terrini.  "Look at the
bronze chains on the poles and the harness fittings, classic.  You
must get better horses in France."

"We shall.  But we might as well begin now on the present team here
and the postilion and try to smarten them up."

Next day little Beppo, the Florentine vetturino, who had been
engaged as one familiar with the passes over the Alps, was lifted
out of his large jack-boots and leather coat and provided instead
with a smart livery of bottle-green and a half-moon cocked hat with
a tricolour cockade.  He was also induced to drive from the box,
although he preferred to ride one of the horses.  That, however,
was too old-fashioned to be tolerated.

Beppo drew double wages, for they had decided to go light and not
to take on a footman until the other side of the mountains.
Consequently he was effervescent with his unbelievable good luck in
a slack time.  In a few days he could manage his team like a
charioteer even from the box.  He cracked his bronze-handled whip
while he rolled through the now comparatively deserted streets of
the town on practice drives in the early morning.  The blinds would
be opened a little and excited voices behind them would comment
upon the dashing appearance of the little berlin as it whisked by.
Some oil meal, a clipping, a tail docking, and the removal of what
had at first appearance looked like mops over the horses' feet,
vastly improved them.  At least they looked as if they might show a
clean pair of heels.

Vincent attended to the passports.  He had official friends.
Otherwise there might have been difficulty for Anthony, who could
not prove that he had been born.  Described as a Tuscan gentleman
on pleasure bent, he and Vincent set forth early one August morning
in high spirits.  There was an ample hamper of delicacies cooked by
old Frau Frank, who kissed them both and saw them off with her
blessing and tears.

As they trotted down the ancient street the last thing Anthony saw
was the Swiss porter Franko bowing his affectionate thanks at the
open door, and the already corpse-like face of Uncle Otto with his
mouth open, asleep in the sun.

In the cool of the morning the horses whirled the little berlin on
its slickly greased axles across the worn flagstones of the
Mayoralty and flashed into the Strada Ferdinanda.

The team had just settled into a good spanking trot when a coach-
and-four going at breakneck speed dashed out of a side alley and
recklessly bore down on the berlin.  The driver of the coach had
evidently lost control of his horses and for some minutes the two
vehicles galloped side by side, racing together down the Strada
Ferdinanda toward the north gate.  Poultry, and unfortunate fruit
and flower vendors scattered before them like leaves in a gale.

Beppo had swerved only just in time.  He was now doing all he could
to rein in his own team, badly frightened, excited, and all for
making a bolt of it.  In this resolve they were much encouraged by
the four splendid, coal-black horses racing beside them neck and
neck.  Ears laid back, eyes straining, and foam flying from their
bits, the four galloped as one in their black collars, drawing
after them easily and with a steady pull a huge, black coach piled
high with luggage.  It rolled along evenly upon its heavy iron
tires that sang as they struck the paving like a dull bell.

There was something both ominous and thrilling in those iron tones.
Anthony and Vincent had at first braced themselves for the crash
that it seemed must inevitably follow.  Then, as nothing happened,
they sat back again tight-lipped, watching the familiar houses
flash past and listening to the alarming, staccato tattoo of the
galloping horses' hoofs.  They were both thinking of the same
thing.  The arch of the Porta Pisa a short mile ahead was wide
enough to admit only one vehicle at a time.  Presently Anthony
leaned back and laughed.  Vincent looked at him as if he had just
discovered he was riding with a madman.

The coach and the berlin, as though attracted by some invisible
force, now gradually began to draw nearer to each other as they
rushed down the middle of the broad avenue; dust rolling behind;
spokes glimmering in a mist of speed.

The madness of the horses had spread its nervous contagion to both
drivers, who were now exalted by excitement above all ordinary
cares about life, limb, or happiness.  They had now but one fatal
end in view--to get to the narrow city gate first.  Meanwhile, they
began to abuse each other in the most provocative Spanish and
Italian filth,--grandly pianissimo and fortissimo--and to pray
profanely to the horses to burst their wheezing guts, but to get
first to the gate.  A mile of heartbreak had already made the
sobbing nostrils of the poor beasts look like the bells of inflamed
trumpets--then breed and skilful driving began to tell and the
light berlin, which had a small lead, slowly but inevitably began
to lose ground while the heavy coach gained.

A wail of all but feminine despair from Beppo, a tempest of
chuckling squalls like the triumphant cries of a victorious tom cat
from the box of the coach led the mere owners of the two racing
carriages to suppose that they might now POSSIBLY be able to
register an opinion with the drivers as to the immediate necessity
of their deaths.

It was for that reason that both Anthony and Don Luis thrust their
heads out of the precisely opposite windows of the coach and the
berlin at the same moment--and found themselves looking searchingly
into each other's faces.  At the same instant the wheels of both
carriages struck the smooth granite ramp that led to the narrow
arch of the Porta Pisa.

"Good morning," called Anthony, leaning nearer.  "We seem to be
bound to meet."

Don Luis looked at Vincent, who was lying back in the berlin with a
pale face; glanced at the black tunnel of the gate, where the guard
was now beginning to run about frantically, and peered at Anthony
again.  In the three seconds which had thus passed the horses had
taken as many strides nearer the inevitable crash.

The face of the young man only a few inches from the marquis was
nevertheless quite calm and smiling.  He seemed to be enjoying the
situation.  A reluctant gleam of approval widened the fixed smile
on Don Luis' lips.  The tires continued to sing brazenly.  It was
quite plain the coach could not gain enough in the short distance
that remained to avoid collision.

"Well?" said Anthony.

"YOU pull up," shouted Don Luis.  "I can't.  'My horses--"  The
rest was lost as the coach again forged ahead slightly.

"Beppo!" roared Anthony, "pull up."

The little Florentine, who was letting his horses rush toward the
archway with the bits in their teeth, while he sat staring at death
hypnotically, was suddenly awakened from his trance and stood up,
jerking the heads of his team violently.

The coach passed the berlin in a flash.

It made straight for the archway.  A sentry who was just running
across the roadway with a chain suddenly thought better of it and
darted back.

The whip licked out like a snake over the backs of the four coal-
black horses.  It burst like a series of pistol shots under the
echoing vault of the arch through which the coach, now rocking
frantically, disappeared with a sullen roar.

A tremendous running about of the military, in the same kind of a
flurry that follows the disappearance of a fox from a raided hen
yard, marked its transit.

The tardy fury of the guard was now vented upon the berlin which
dashed up just in time to be halted by the chain.  Vincent's well-
meant and really profound thanks for the obstacle which had finally
stopped them was taken for sarcasm.  Both he and Anthony were
arrested and rearrested as one sleepy officer after another was
aroused to come down, rubbing his eyes and cursing at being
awakened at dawn.  The captain, who came down last, was chagrined
at finding no one but the well-known banker Herr Nolte and his
friend, both with passports in order, being detained apparently for
nothing.  He in turn cursed the guard and returned to bed.  The
runaway having been explained, drink money distributed, and the
horses rested, the berlin was now permitted to proceed while a
disappointed crowd dispersed.

The last familiar object which Anthony saw as they topped the first
rise on the way to Pisa was the tree above the convent with the
pigeons circling about it.  "Contessina--where was she?" he
wondered.  He might stop--but it was only a passing thought.
Vincent was in no mood for whims just now.  Still pale, Vincent
applied himself from time to time to a sumptuous array of silver
flasks in a leather chest on the seat before him.  His colour and
eventually his high spirits began to return.  Long before they
reached Pisa his own remarkable calmness in the face of danger was
thoroughly re-established in his own mind.  As he looked at the
place from a distance, not only the tower but the Baptistry seemed
to be leaning.

They were approaching the walls and jumbled roofs of the town after
sunset.  It seemed fitting that they should drive through its
grass-grown streets in the twilight.  For Pisa appeared to Anthony
to be a town glimmering upon the confines of sleep; the few cloaked
citizens they passed, to be wandering somewhere in a detached
dream.

Vincent had to be helped into the inn, Grande Albergo Accademia, a
deserted, rambling place about whose doors a throng of whining
beggars instantly gathered.  They started up from holes and byways;
they came gliding out of the dusk, exhibiting their sores, withered
arms, crippled babies and filthy rags in the rays of the dim
lanterns of the berlin, till their numbers became alarming.
Vincent's ill-timed, drunken generosity brought more.  The
innkeeper at last fell on them with Beppo's whip and cleared a
passage to his own door, shouting a warning to Beppo to keep a
sharp eye on the luggage.

Supper, such as it was, being over, and Vincent asleep on a table,
Anthony took a short turn in the starlight of the old square where
the tower leaned and the dimly striped front of the Duomo and
Baptistry, from which the town seemed to have receded in order to
leave them alone to their own peculiar beauty as things memorable
and apart from the ordinary affairs of mankind, served only in some
sort to compose his mind.  He felt curiously disgruntled tonight.

The first day of the trip by which he had set such great store had
been disappointing.  He had listened to Vincent talking, trying to
reinstate himself after the fright of the runaway.  He had listened
mile after mile.  He hoped by tomorrow that Vincent would be able
to live with himself without talking about it.  He decided if
necessary to give him a day to sleep it off.  He had something to
do at Pisa that he did not wish to be disturbed in.

Perhaps, though, it was Italy that was disappointing.  He had never
realized how poor and how barren Italy was.  Could it be he would
find all of Europe like that?  Africa and the West Indies had given
him new eyes.

These old lands where people had lived for untold ages seemed
worked-out.  Or was it the climate?  The soil itself seemed tired.
Plants and animals were scarce.  Travellers always talked about
"the luxuriance of Italy."  Where was it?  People existed here on a
round of the comparatively few things they could grow, grapes,
wheat, poultry, and some reluctantly slaughtered domestic animals.
They were ingenious in making many combinations of a few things.
But underneath was poverty, the poverty of nature.  He remembered
the genuine luxuriance, the abundance of the plantations at
Gallegos.  And there were no taxes there either.  Here the cost of
being oppressed and thwarted was frightful.  The supper tonight!--
sour wine and macaroni--the crowd of beggars at the inn door--
ancient, festering misery.  He had never in the worst slave gangs
seen anything like that.

These beggars could, of course, feast their eyes every day on del
Sarto's St. Agnes in the Duomo--where Angela had sat on the steps
starving, and had found Debrülle.

"Why had John Bonnyfeather asked to be buried in Pisa?" he
wondered.

A wave of homesickness for the hill at Gallegos, with the moon on
his palm trees and La Fortuna's lights twinkling in the river
below, swept over him.  Or--he would like to be going home to a
good rum drink in Cibo's patio at Regia.  And tobacco--Europe knew
nothing about tobacco.  What was snuff?  A mere whiff.  He lit one
of his precious, black cigars and felt better.  Havana--there was a
town that knew what plenty meant!  He sauntered back to the inn
followed by a shadow that near the window, seeing he was a
stranger, began to whine and hold out a hand.  He turned about to
curse it, man or woman.  And then remembering Brother François,
gave the hand a piastre he found in his pockets from old times.

Very tired, he slept soundly and cleanly on the rear seat of the
berlin and was awakened by the loud crowing of the poultry in the
stable yard.  Vincent was not up yet.  Except for a poisonous old
woman who brewed him some coffee, there was no one about.  He went
into the square and looked about again.  Surely this was another
place, not the town of the night before.

On that magnificent early August morning Pisa was magical.  Light
with a red-purple tinge streamed from its stones.  He thought he
had never seen anything so fantastically beautiful as the Duomo and
Baptistry alone there across the square.  And the reason for the
leaning tower was now self-evident.  It gave the last, perfect,
wizard touch.  No, there was nothing like this anywhere.  He took a
deep breath of the cool morning air and plunged his head in the
fountain where two young girls, one with her jar on her head, stood
watching him with smouldering brown eyes.  They went away laughing.

"Si può far 'un píccolo gíro della città, signore," said a mild-
voiced old man, peering up at him from under the wreck of an
incredible felt hat.  Anthony finished drying his face.

"No," he said, and then relented.  There was something curiously
prepossessing about the figure of the old man before him, who was
dressed exclusively in patches and had only one stocking.

"The other went yesterday," explained the old gentleman, for such
he was by his accent.  "It was silk, and you know, signore, even
the aged MUST eat occasionally.  True, I have not yet been able
to stain my other leg.  But I scarcely hoped to find custom this
morning.  Heaven has sent you.  Accept me as I am.  For a soldo I
will--"

"Done," cried Anthony.  "Do you know the Campo Santo?"

The old man raised his head and smiled.  "Si," he whispered.  "It
is where the rich are sometimes buried even yet."

They slowly walked across the square talking; old harlequin in
patches proving by every careful intonation and nice usage--as
genteel poverty having worn out its good clothes must do--that he
was the product of better days.  His face looked drawn and
transparent and he tottered a little.  They sat down on the
cathedral steps for a moment.

"Perhaps you will breakfast with me?" said Anthony after an erudite
little talk about the beauties of the Duomo died away faintly.

The old man could not deny his Adam's-apple a twinge of
anticipation.

"A glass of wine now?"

"Thank you, signore, I shall accept your first invitation with
pleasure, but only after we return from the Campo Santo.  To tell
the truth, I have not eaten--at least not this morning," he added
hastily.  "Let us go while it is still cool."

Anthony accepted this compromise with the old man's pride.  He rose
and walked less hastily.

"Perhaps," said he after a little, "a host might be permitted to
offer his guest an arm."

It was gratefully accepted.  And with age leaning thus on youth
they entered the frescoed cloisters of the Campo Santo with its low
green mounds, where long shadows and the bright glints of morning
mingled together along the grass and under the peaceful arcades
like memories of grief and joy resolved.

And Anthony knew at once why John Bonnyfeather had asked to be
buried at Pisa.  Here the past could never be disturbed.  Here he
was deeply lapped in it forever.  He had retired into the still
green walls.

"Don't bury me at Leghorn near to that fellow Smollett," he had
once said, as usual veiling his gentle humour in a half-serious
joke.  "I do not like his vibrant, Protestant twang.  It would
disturb me.  Give me consecrated and silent earth."  Anthony
remembered now.

He stopped the old man from telling him how the earth in the place
had been brought from Mount Calvary.

"Yes, I know," he said.  "I am looking for a grave."

"If it is a new one I shall know where it is," said his companion.
"There are not many who can afford to be buried here now," he added
with a strange touch of pride.

"About a year ago," explained Anthony.

"Ah, the old merchant from Leghorn!  Yes, he was the last.  A very
quiet funeral.  It is over here, signore, close by the way out."

The grass had already covered the mound that they now stood looking
down upon.  In the crumbling remains of a low brick wall that
crossed the place, probably the ancient foundations of some
forgotten tomb, was set a new white stone.  The inscription was in
Latin, not of the best:


                     Near Here Rests in Peace
                   A Caledonian of Noble Blood,
                       The Last of his Name,
                   A Faithful and Loyal Subject
                               of
                            James III
                King of England, Ireland, Scotland
                            and France

                        ------- : -------

           He lost his titles but conserved his honour.
               God prospered him and he remembered
               In turn the poor and the fatherless.
                          Pray for him


In trying to carry out the last request on the stone, Anthony found
himself at last addressing his verbal thoughts to John Bonnyfeather.
He could not think of him as dead.  He seemed merely to have
withdrawn himself into this quiet place as if he had gone down the
hall at home and shut the doors of his room behind him.  In the back
of Anthony's mind arose a half-conscious impulse to knock at the
stone and enter.  He would find Mr. Bonnyfeather seated at his desk
writing with a plume pen, or with his slippers on reading a book.
Something in Latin.  It would be cool and quiet there.  And he would
ask a question.

What was the strange tie that bound him to John Bonnyfeather?  Was
it blood?--"noble blood?"  "The last of his name"--said the stone.
Perhaps his race still went on.  That smiling girl's face in the
miniature--who was she?  Something deeper than he could understand,
something essentially mysterious but real linked him with this dust
asleep in the Campo Santo at Pisa.  He was sure of it now.  What
was it that he had promised never to try to know?  Faith knew.
That sardonic old marquis knew--something.  HE had been John
Bonnyfeather's son-in-law.  Great God!  Could that man be his
father . . . ?  No, no, impossible!  He knew his own body well
enough to know he was not of that flesh.  "To . . . the fatherless,"
said the speaking stone.  Blessed comfort in that line of script.

It was curious, it was not grief he was feeling as he stood thus
whirling a thousand things from the past through his mind, it was
transcendental respect, an abysmal regret that he would never be
able to make the old man know that his boy had grown up and come
back again wise and feeling enough to understand and to be
grateful.  That was what he would have liked to try to whisper to
him down through the short grass on his new grave; and to say:
"Yes, I know NOW that honour is the best of all things and the
hardest to keep, and that you were the most honourable of men.  No
dross could buy your sacred dreams and no vicissitudes purloin your
self-respect,--and so I more than love you for it."

Then came grief.  For he suddenly saw that such complete things can
be said only to the dead when the caricature of the body has gone,
leaving the portrait of the spirit clear and luminous; when we
cannot even catch at their hands again to ask to be forgiven or to
cry out that in all charity now--with the sorrow of life upon us
and with the love of Christ, and of man, and of woman, and little
children in our hearts--we too understand, forever, and too late.

A sigh from the old guide, whom he had utterly forgotten, roused
Anthony.  With a look of complete weariness and exhaustion the old
gentleman had just sat down on one of the grass mounds to wipe a
bead of sweat from his forehead.

"I am sure," said he after a little, fanning himself weakly with
his faded hat while looking up and smiling, "that whoever is
beneath this mound will not grudge me just a moment's rest out of
his easeful eternity.  I AM a little tired this morning."  His
mouth trembled faintly as he put on his hat again.

Anthony's heart troubled him that he had kept so pleasant an old
man standing so long in the sun.  There was a touch of half-
ghastly, old-world grace about him and his patches.  It was, he
thought, a little like talking to the ghost of John Bonnyfeather
disguised as a respectable Lazarus.  A little like him--out of the
corner of one's eye--a sort of ragged-glimmering of lost, coffined
gallantries.

"Come," said Anthony, "did you think I had forgotten my breakfast
invitation?"

"By no means," replied the old gentleman, again frankly grateful
for the support of a young arm.  "But you must not suppose I was
thinking ONLY of that, signore.  I was truly,"--and he looked up
ingenuously--"I was truly thinking of you.  I, you see, have my own
dead here in the Campo Santo.  And I so much desire to speak of
them this morning," he hurried on, "that I thought, as I looked at
you--I thought you would understand how the hunger of the heart is
sometimes greater than that of the belly, and that you would let me
tell you their names just so they might be on the lips of the
living again, in the morning light.  Will you?"

"Why, yes,--of course," said Anthony.

"Well, then," said the old man, "lean down . . ."  He whispered two
names.

"My little girls, you know."  He straightened up proudly as if the
syllables had renewed his strength.  "Here they are--only a few
steps--this way.  And we can go out that gate there.  Here they
are!"

It was quite evident that the old man was looking beyond the carpet
of tenderly cared-for flowers that covered two small mounds side by
side--that--to judge by the light in his face--he saw angels
sitting in the tomb.  His parchment-like skin shone with a
reflected glow.

They stood there quietly for a minute or two.

"Thank you," said the old gentleman, as they went on out the gate
and across the square.  "To me you are no longer a stranger here,"
he continued still holding on to Anthony's arm.  "The dust of both
our families mingles in Pisa, signore.  For me that gives you the
freedom of my city.  If I still had my own house, you should be my
guest.  It was that one over there."  He pointed to what had once
been a fine dwelling, now much dilapidated.  "I come of an ancient
family here, the Raspanti," he muttered.  "And, I also am the last
of my name."

For a moment before going into the inn they stood at the door and
looked at the old house, where a collapsing balcony once
beautifully carved staggered across a blind, shuttered front of
flaking pink plaster.  "None of us have ever been beggars, signore--
may I ask your name?"

"Adverse," said Anthony.  "But come, Signore Raspanti, it is only
fortune that makes you my guest this morning. MY good fortune,"
and he made the old man that stiff, old-fashioned bow that Father
Xavier had taught him at the convent years before.  He thought he
had forgotten it.

The old man removed his hat with the true, antique flourish and put
it under his left arm.  He placed his right hand over his heart.

"You are very hospitable, a man of honest feeling, Signore
Adverso," said he, and entered the inn with a sigh.

Vincent was already up and about with his high spirits renewed.
Beppo was shaving him in a chair while he urged on the old woman
who sat in the corner to hasten her plucking of several newly
killed fowls.  Vincent gave a shout as Anthony came in, and with
the soap still on his face rose to meet Signore Raspanti with a gay
formality.  He shouted through the lather.

"Toni, we are going to begin our journey all over again today.
That damned runaway shall not count as part of it.  It was just bad
luck."

"No, no," said Beppo.  "They meant to drive us down.  They flashed
out on us from the alley on purpose like--THAT."

"Look out," roared Vincent, "you will cut my throat.  Jesus!"

"But I am RIGHT, signore," insisted Beppo.

"Perhaps he is!" mused Anthony.  "Here, landlord, a glass of wine
for Signore Raspanti, my guest,--and some biscuits.  Until
breakfast comes, you know," he said to the old man, who looked
grateful.

"Nonsense," roared Vincent.  "It was just the horses.  Anyway we
are going to start all over again from Pisa this morning on top of
a worthy and a proper, soul-sustaining breakfast.  Ah, we are good
at breakfast, aren't we, Toni?  Do you remember?  Some Asti,
landlord.  Look alive, man, get your spit going."

He sat up now looking fresh and pink after Beppo's scraping,
rubbing his fat, full chin half comically and laughing from sheer
inward good-nature just as he had when a boy.  His spirits were
catching to all.

A slight tinge of colour like rouge on a wax rose began to show
even on the yellow parchment face of old Signore Raspanti.  He
sopped his biscuits in his wine and let them rest against his gums
while he sucked without making a noise, noblesse oblige.  He
instinctively disliked disturbing noises.  He hoped that the
ticking of Signore Adverso's watch, for instance, which he had
stolen from him in the cemetery, and which was now making an
alarmingly vulgar noise in his own tattered waistcoat, would not
disturb any ear but his own.  One MUST think of others.  He
instinctively put his hand back over his heart in that gallant,
old-fashioned way.

The landlord came in from the court dragging one of his half-naked
brats by the hair, who whimpered as he was set to work at the spit.

"Four chickens!  One apiece," bawled Vincent.  "One for the guest
and Beppo!"  He waved toward Signore Raspanti, who rose and bowed,
with his hand still on his heart in grateful but careful
acknowledgment.

The landlord smiled.  He began to lay the table for four.  If the
gentleman wished to eat with his servant, he had drunk enough wine
that morning to have his eccentricities catered to.  Before Signore
Raspanti, however, he left only wooden spoons, and smiled again.
Three law students from the university dropped in for coffee before
lecture and sat looking on.

The old woman who had just split open the fourth chicken broke into
a lament.  It was a laying-hen full of ripe eggs.  Everybody
laughed at her dismay and profane lamentations.

"Put them in the gravy, mother," said a fat priest from the Duomo
who just then wandered in.  He gave everybody his blessing,
including the law students who laughed at him, too.

"The father watches the inn chimney, signore," said one of them to
Vincent.  "When he sees smoke he comes over to extend the blessing
of the church to those who are able to make the spit turn."  The
priest grinned sheepishly but with great good-nature.

"Even the light haze of an omelette will bring me running now," he
admitted.  "Since the French burned my little farm I grow lean."
He took in slack on the immense rope about his waist.  "That will
do, I think, Pietro," said he to the urchin at the spit.  "Let me
see."  He rose and going over to the fire twisted a wing from one
of the chickens without even stopping the wheel.  "Yes, it is quite
done.  Just at the turn, signore," he cried, turning to Vincent.
"I like mine not too dry.  Do you?"  Everybody laughed at his cool
impudence.

It was impossible not to include everybody.  Indeed, nearly
everybody was just waiting to be included.

"Draw the tables together--here," said Anthony.

"Gentlemen, will you join us?" shouted Vincent to the three law
students.  They looked at one another as the younger generation
will when bidden too heartily by their elders, even to a feast.

"Do," said Anthony, "join us in our little celebration.  It will
have the blessing of the church, I am sure."  He winked at the
young men.  Hesitation vanished.  There was a great scraping of
chairs being dragged over the tiles.

"What are your favourite wines, my friends?" asked Anthony.  A
babble of local vintages drove the old woman to the cellars with
her hands over her ears.

"Two bottles apiece," roared Vincent after her.  The students now
looked impressed.

"Father," said Anthony, grinning.

The priest gabbled something in Latin while the steam from the
fowls curled up from the table under his nose.  It was a laconic
grace.

The meal began with a clash.  In a corner by the spit the young
urchin looked on gnawing dreamfully on a drumstick.

The discovery of the morning proved to be the students and the new
wine to which they introduced the company.  It was the first of the
local harvest and only lately pressed.

"In a few days, sir, it will be acid and ordinary," said the oldest
of the trio, a tall lad with flashing eyes, a restless air, and an
immense mane of jet-black hair that he continually tossed back out
of his eyes.  "But just at this stage of working it is full of
bubbles and creams as you drink it."  His gay talk in a strong
French accent ran off the surface of things very much as the
bubbles effervesced from the wine.  The priest stuck to Canary and
smiled.  He had a good reason.  The new wine was light to the taste
but proved heady.  In a short time the table was seething with talk
and beggars were gathering about the inn, attracted by the noise
and rumour of plenty.

"Open the door and let in the sunlight," bawled Vincent.

"And the rabble, too?" inquired the innkeeper.  "Father, can't
YOU do something?" the man asked, seeing the crowd outside.

The priest went out and closed the door behind him.  They heard his
voice for some time but could not hear what he said.  When he came
back he left the door open and no one was there.

The innkeeper nodded his acknowledgment and admiration of the
father's powers of speech.

There was a sudden lull of talk as the sunlight streamed over the
table.

"Saints and angels!  What time is it?" queried the youngest and
palest student anxiously.  "Remember, you Jacopo, there is a
lecture in the porch at nine."

"On the Code Justinian," mumbled the dark-headed boy into his mug.
"Dry, oh dry!"  He poured the remainder of the priest's wine into
his own glass and drank to the company, giving the two "illustrious
signori from Livorno" a neatly turned toast of thanks.

"Have you ever rolled in the dust of the civil law, signori?  You
would know then how I hate to leave this--and you," said he,
putting down his glass.  "But it must be almost nine, isn't it?"

Anthony fumbled for his watch.

The bell of the campanile began to toll the hour.  Shouting to one
another and calling their hasty farewells, the three students
dashed out and raced down the street.  They took the life of the
party with them.

Silence fell on the little common-room of the inn.  Anthony sat
looking across the table at Signore Raspanti, who was apparently
watching a spider on the opposite wall.

"You look ill, Toni," said Vincent.  "Has the new wine been . . . ?"

Anthony waved him off and continued to stare at the old man.

"What time is it, Signore Raspanti?" he asked.

"The bell has just struck nine, I believe," answered the old
gentleman with a little quaver.  "Shall I go out and see?" he
added, rising hopefully.

They were all looking at him now.  The seconds ticked out by the
stolen watch against the ribs of the old man measured his heart
beats.  His mouth fell open and he shook.

"Have you by any chance lost your watch, my friend?" said the
priest to Anthony.

Anthony nodded.  A rush of blood clouded his face.

"Give it to him, Raspanti," said the priest harshly.

The old man brought the watch with its dangling seals out of his
breast and slowly pushed it across the table toward Anthony.  Then
he collapsed, weeping hopelessly with his head in the gravy plate.

"Pig!" shouted Beppo, jumping up and starting to shake him.

Vincent pulled him off.  "Leave him to the police," he growled.
"Go and get the horses harnessed and wait.  We leave shortly."

"A word with you, signori," said the priest.  He took them both
over to a corner.

"Do not call the police, I beg you.  Let me tell you something
about this old man.  He is a pitiable case.  He married unhappily.
His wife left him with two baby daughters.  They both died on the
same day, and as he had no means left but his house, he sold that
to bury them both together in the Campo Santo.  Otherwise it would
have meant the common pit.  He did not turn beggar as he might, but
for years has acted as cicerone in Pisa.  When travellers came here
in the days before the war he made just enough to exist--and to get
one of his daughters out of purgatory.  Now only a few travellers
come.  He starves.  Maria is in heaven and Euphemia in the fires.
He says they both suffer at being parted, and it is his fault.  Can
you imagine that?  It is only lately he has begun to take things.
When a traveller comes now he gets what he can.  The tick of your
watch, you see, would have been heard in eternity."

"Hum!" said Vincent.

"Forgive him, signori, for the love of Christ."  The fat priest's
face worked painfully.  "I am not his confessor, you know, or--" he
put his hand over his mouth.  "He goes to one of the canons at the
cathedral.  I saw the seals dangling from your waistcoat this
morning, signore, when you went across the square with old
Raspanti, and I thought--yes, when you came out of the Campo Santo
with NO seals dangling from your waistcoat, I thought--'Euphemia
will soon be in paradise, provided I do not inform the canon.  And
if I inform the kindly looking young signore, Euphemia will not go
to paradise and old Raspanti will go to jail.'  I really came over
here to see you both.  The old man was hungry, too, no doubt of it.
Well, you know what has happened.  But I do not think the police
are going to help.  Anyway, you have your watch back, and--Well, he
will be hanged, you know."

They all looked again at the old man lying with his head in the
plate of gravy.  He did not move.

"How long have his children been dead?" asked Vincent.

"Over ten years," replied the priest reluctantly.

"Gott im himmel! and all that time this canon what's-his-name has
been sharing the poor old devil's tips.  What do you make of that,
Toni?" shouted Vincent.  "The lousy swine!"

The priest put his fat hands over his ears now.  Anthony pulled
them down again.

"How much?" said he, "to get Euphemia out of THE CANON'S hands?"

"About twenty soldi will see her through--now, I think."

"You think?  Perhaps I had best go to your metropolitan here."

"No, no, I am sure of it."

"You will tell him so before I leave?"

A reluctant nod gave assent.

Anthony went over to Raspanti and raised him up on his chair.  He
wiped the tears and giblets off his twitching old face.  Then he
took his watch and put it back into the old scarecrow's waistcoat.
Then he threw his cloak around his shoulders.

"You make a mock of me, signore?" gasped the old man.  "I did not
LIE to you in the cemetery.  They ARE my children there."

"I love you," said Anthony and kissed his dirty, smeared old face.

"Great God!" said Vincent in complete disgust.

"Now, father, you TELL HIM!" insisted Anthony.

"Landlord, landlord," shouted Vincent, "the bill!"

"Come on, Vincent.  He'll find us soon enough," cried Anthony, and
rushed out still sick at heart.

"You're drunk," laughed Vincent as he stumbled down the corridor
after him.

They climbed into the berlin just as the anxious landlord dashed
out after them waving both his apron and the bill frantically.  He
was paid.

Anthony detained him, talking to him for some minutes in rapid
Tuscan.  Money changed hands.  "Si, si, si, si, si.  A place at my
own table from now on.  A bed.  The Scotchman from Leghorn will see
to it, you say.  Have no fear . . .  Yes, certainly it was the
priest.  The canon! that IS a good one.  The French hanged him a
year ago.  The wrong man, you say.  No, they were right there, too.
But here comes the one they missed."

The priest rushed out of the door, his face a fiery red.  "Gone?"
he shouted to the landlord.  "You let them go when . . ."  Then
seeing the berlin he stopped short and tried to grin.

Some beggars began to close in about the coach whining.

"Here are your twenty-FIVE soldi," said Anthony, pouring them
into the priest's hands.

"Five extra for possible accidents in limbo," he growled.

"Signore, signore, stop, let me thank you," screamed old Raspanti,
coming down the corridor.  "My children are in paradise.  I
thought . . ."

"Get on, Beppo, drive off," Anthony shouted.

"Alms, alms, for the love of Christ, alms . . ."

The berlin dashed out of the beggars circling about the fat father,
who held up his hands in terror.

"Would you rob the church, you swine?  You black . . ."

They heard no more.  Looking back, Vincent saw the old man with a
smeared face, with Anthony's cloak flopping behind him, trying to
run after the berlin while he waved his tattered hat wildly.

He looked at Anthony who said nothing.

"Did you give him Mr. Bonnyfeather's seals, too?" asked Vincent.

"No, I kept those," replied Anthony, taking them out of his pocket
and looking at the old crest on the middle one.

"You weren't as drunk as I thought then," grumbled Vincent.  "But
that is the last time, my boy, that I buy YOU any new wine,
anywhere."




CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

OVER THE CREST


In the marble porch of the Via Emilia Professor Monofuelli was
droning away in Latin to about a dozen sleepy students upon the
inexhaustible subject of the Civil Law.

During the recent French and Austrian struggles over Italy the
University of Pisa had almost closed its doors.  The restless times
had drawn away many of its students, contracted its revenues, and
even scattered the faculty.  Professor Monofuelli had come over
from Padua to lend a helping hand.

He felt, however, that he was not being fully appreciated.  Five
students had slept through his entire--and celebrated--lecture on
the Pandects only the afternoon before.  And it was not much better
this morning.

To be sure it was both sultry and shady under the old, marble
porch, open on one side to the empty and grass-grown street.  The
benches in the hall near by had gone to make Austrian soldiers warm
only the winter before.  But certainly it was hot enough now.  The
professor wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and brushed the
snuff that fell out of it off his faded peach-coloured, velvet
coat.

Perhaps he was just the least bit sleepy himself.  He had given
only an hour to the distinction between fas and jus, but without
his usual enthusiasm.  And three students had been late.  They had
missed fas entirely.  Well, it was a distinction that those who
merely expected to practise law could ignore.  But historically--
historically fas was important.  It was all very well for Dentelli
at Bologna to ignore fas, but there could be no doubt about it that
fus had developed out of fas.  He would give it to his students.
He would repeat it for that fellow Aristide Pujol, one of the late
ones.  He had come in late with two others, at a quarter after nine
at least.  They had been drinking somewhere (he knew)--new wine!
That was all very well, but then--then there was fas.  He rapped on
the desk and reversed the hour glass.  The red sand in it began to
run the other way.

"Signore Pujol--signore!"

That young gentleman sat up.

"Aha! signore, attention!  I am about to repeat something for you.
It is not my custom to repeat myself."

"Only your lectures," thought Pujol.

"You are from beyond the Alps, my young friend, aren't you?"

"A Frenchman, Excellence," grumbled Pujol proudly.

"Ahem, all the more reason then that you should not waste your time
in Italy in sleep.  How many times does the distinction of fas
appear on the twelve tables, my friend from Gaul?"

"Once, I think," grumbled Pujol.

"You think?  Well, you are correct.  Repeat the passage--the law
itself."

The young fellow did so.

"Not so bad for a barbarian, I must admit, Pujol.  But the accent,
your Latin accent is terrific.  It is worse than that of the
barbarians from the schools in Britain.  Now listen, that
denunciation goes like this."  The professor filled his lungs.

"Patronus, si dienti fraudent faysit, sacer esto."

But the professor was startled by the flat effect of his own voice.
He was used to lecturing in a room with a dome in it at Padua.
There he could tell the difference between the Latin of Ulpian and
the Latin of Gaius by the sound in the dome.  His own genuine
accent came back to him.  But here--here there was nothing; no
return; no sonorous, encouraging effect.  Only sleepy students
gaping up at him.  And that young Frenchman laughing at him,
laughing!  In his indignant disappointment he absent-mindedly
reversed the hour glass again.  In a few seconds the sands ran out.
A gust of applause swept the porch, the first he had received since
arriving at Pisa.  He cleared his throat for a philippic contra
Aristide.  It should be remembered and remembered, but--

At that moment the sound of rapidly approaching wheels turned every
head away from him.

A smart, an extraordinarily handsome, little carriage was coming
down the street.  Just then the back hood was let down by an arm
reaching around out of the window.  It revealed two quite young but
evidently very prosperous gentlemen sitting side by side on the
rear seat.  One was tall and spare with a peculiarly ardent
expression, golden-brown hair, and a pair of eyes that looked
searchingly out of a sun-browned face.  It was a face so regular
and yet so alive and mobile that you remembered it.  The other
young man was astonishingly blond, white and pink.  And you felt
that some day he would be fat and contented.  Just now he was
laughing, with his arm thrown back over the open hood, displaying
inadvertently a handsome ring and a positively gorgeous expanse of
waistcoat.  Both young men were wearing high, English hats of
remarkable mould under the wide brims of which their hair curled
and flopped.  The bronze, and blue leather upholstery of the
carriage glittered; the horses approachedat a spanking trot; the
driver flourished his whip in a decidedly intoxicated manner.

There was something so gay about the whole equipage, such a
debonair assurance seemed to accompany it, that Professor
Monofuelli instinctively consigned it to hell in one erudite
malediction while he rapped for order and a return to fas.

The sound of his well-worn gavel was the signal for the Frenchman
Aristide Pujol to rise, throw his books down the steps, and rush
out of the porch just as the little berlin was passing.

He ran along beside it for a few yards--"just like a beggar,"
exclaimed the professor later on in disgust--and then leaping on
the step began to talk to Anthony, who leaned forward to catch what
he was saying.

"You are going to Paris, aren't you, signore?  I heard you say so
this morning."  His eyes shone with excitement.

"Yes, can we take a letter for you?"

"No, signore, but--"

"But what?"

"Will you take ME?"

"Why!--well, there is hardly room."

"I could go on the box, sir.  I can drive.  I will do anything you
ask on the way.  Serve you and the signore.  Take me.  I am rotting
here at Pisa.  I must go--GO!"

"Go?" said Anthony.

The young fellow nodded, tears in his eyes.

"We can't delay for you, you know."

"No, no, just as I am, now."

"Well, Vincent?"

"Why not?" said Vincent.

"Climb up," said Anthony.  "Stop a moment, Beppo."

By this time all the students in the porch had rushed out onto the
steps and were craning their necks after the carriage.  They broke
out into a clamorous shout when Aristide climbed onto the box.  But
he did not look back.  He went on.  His former classmates returned
to the lecture and threw themselves down on the hard stone benches
rather desperately.

"Great things are doing in France, Excellence," said one of them as
the little man began to rearrange his much-fluttered notes.

"So I have heard," said the professor opening his book again.  He
sighed audibly.  "But, that our conversation may return to the
point from which our Gaulish friend has just digressed--let us
ourselves return to the law.  As Cicero has so aptly said for us:
'Though all the world exclaim against me, I will say what I think:
that simple little book of the Twelve Tables, if anyone look to the
fountain and sources of laws, seems to me, assuredly, to surpass the
libraries of all the philosophers . . .'"

                           ----------

The berlin trotted out of Pisa into the green, rolling country
beyond and took the road for Florence at a more rapid pace.  Beppo
began to sing as the hills about his native place began to become
familiar.

At Florence they stayed only long enough to rest the horses, to
arrange for some travelling papers for Aristide, and get him a few
clothes.  He had left in his vest and shirt-sleeves.

Both Anthony and Vincent were glad they had given way to impulse
and taken Aristide along.  A merrier, a keener, and more willing
helper they could scarcely have found.  And he was painfully
grateful.  His constant, half-impudent but always good-natured
comments from the box amused and sometimes convulsed them.  He had
also, Anthony soon discovered, the faculty of causing things to get
done.  "My mother was from Gascony," he said, "and my father from
Auvergne.  I therefore understand how gullible, how selfish, and
how kindly in little things most men and women are.  You make them
laugh, and then--omelette."  He could drive well, and he understood
not only the civil law but horseflesh.  "At Milan, signore, if
possible, we should get other and more horses.  These were not
good-enough even for Austrians to retreat on."

Soon they were heading north again and leaving Tuscany behind.  The
first certain notice of it was the change in the type of roadside
shrines and the shorter horns of the cattle.

That Tuscan type of shrine, where every article used at the
Crucifixion from hammer and nails to spear and sponge is displayed
with terrible, literal exactitude, while the figure of Christ
himself is omitted or made conventional as a mosaic in St. Sophia,
began to give way to more naturalistic representations of the
Passion.  At these, no matter what their mode, Anthony tried not to
look.  For his own reasons the sight of any cross was a peculiarly
painful reminder.  Indeed, it is doubtful if any traveller for
centuries had passed casual, wayside crosses with such a living
knowledge of the reality of the scene they attempted to represent.
Yet he could not ignore them.  And they constantly gave rise to
certain trains of thought which for his own mental health he
desired for a while to let lie dormant.

He had come to the conclusion that he must for a year or two at
least try to obscure in normal human companionship, at not too
highly emotional a level, the incandescent light of the visions of
his African experience, which still dazzled him, especially at
night.

He had not opened the bundle from Gallegos with the madonna in it.
That was to wait for a while, although it was along with him even
now, travelling in the dark boot of the berlin, just as the
knowledge and the harvest of all the memories in the bundle
travelled in the closed box of his mind, waiting.  When he looked
at that little figure again he must be able to do so with a whole
and healed soul; with tender but level eyes.

Yet reminders of Brother François were constantly leaping out upon
him in Italy.  They staggered him at times; almost forced him into
hysterical, dramatic--and hence he was sure--eventually foolish
action.  He had kissed the genteel old thief at Pisa and given him
his cloak in return for stealing his watch.  And Vincent had said
he was drunk on new wine.  Well, he HAD been drunk, but not on new
wine.  "Wine of the vintage of A. D. thirty-three," he thought as
he looked up to catch the shadow of a cross arm falling across the
carriage.  Yes, that was the trouble.  He must not be "drunk," not
even upon old wine.  Wine should be sustaining:  "Give us this day
our daily bread."

He was glad that Vincent understood.  How much he needed a
practical, happy, able friend like Vincent, who loved him and yet
loved the world, too.

He had told him all.  Vincent had wept, and yet he could laugh at
you when you were "drunk"--and get you along over the particular
roads of the world which you had to travel, towards Paris--or
London, or whatever was the immediate rational goal.  Yes, thank
God for Vincent!--and let the horses trot now,--where was it they
were going?--oh, yes, towards Milan, with that good-natured, keen,
human, young Pujol on the box next to the ridiculous Beppo.

He gave himself up to being a traveller and nothing else.

He enjoyed the halts; the women about the town fountains; the inns,
half stables, half human dwellings with something of the antique
world left over that he had glimpsed and shared once with Angela.
Certainly in the inns of Italy the fragments of it were scattered
over her hills and along her still half-Roman by-ways.  Antiquia--
that was a good world, refreshing, real, and primitive.  He enjoyed
waking up mornings to its sounds; the loud peasant dialects,
children playing, and the comfortable noises of cattle, lambs,
doves, and chickens.  In Africa he had missed the sparrows, he
found.

But he was not to see much of Lombardy.  As they emerged onto the
level and often swampy plains a cool wind had come down from the
snowy mountains to contend with the summer heat.  The whole country
was veiled in mist.  Long rows of poplars loomed through it.  It
lifted only occasionally for bright, plangent gleams of level,
green meadows and white towns.  They heard the muffled bells of
unseen chapels ringing through it.  Or carts loomed up suddenly and
were swallowed like wraiths, as they trotted on into denser fog and
cooler weather.

And it was now that they first began to hear the voice of bugles
and to meet frequently with French troops.  An occasional column of
them forced them to draw up and pull aside.  Their trumpets shouted
afar off, echoing.

"It is the voice of France," cried Pujol.  "Soon, soon I shall be
chez moi."  He began to shout and sing.

They could see nothing of Milan as they approached it.  It was late
one evening and the moon over the city was only a bright, fleecy
blur in a world of silver fog that veiled the houses and the
cathedral spires from sight.  Milan was nothing but glimpses of the
legs of passers-by from the knees down in the light of blurred
lanterns; moonlight along the bases of walls, and link boys making
a red smudge drifting through the mist.  But the inn near the Scala
was a good one.  No fog could veil that.  They stayed for several
days.

They sold the old team and bought four new horses.  None too many
to pull even the light berlin over the Simplon, which pass they had
decided to take instead of the Great St. Bernard, followed by
Napoleon only the year before, but since then cut to pieces by
supply trains and artillery.

From being little better than a dangerous wagon track only
sometimes passable, the Simplon, over which Bonaparte had chosen to
maintain his communications with Italy in the future, had already
been made practicable for troops and carriages in all but the worst
winter weather.  The French idea was to make the Simplon available
for artillery and wagon trains at all times, and to that end they
had already pierced tunnels and galleries on the Lombard side and
were at work in great force on the Swiss slope grading and
constructing avalanche shelters.

"If you can get the permission of the French commandant here to
take the route, signore, I would do so," said the innkeeper.  "By
far the better you will find."  Vincent had little difficulty in
having their papers stamped "par la nouvelle route militaire."

Aristide had also proved himself such an able diplomat in
negotiating the deal in horses that Vincent told him he had already
earned his way to Paris and supplied him with suitable clothes.  In
fact, the whole party was now provided with rugs, gloves, and heavy
coats that seemed incredible to Anthony after years in the tropics
and in the present Turkish bath atmosphere of August in Milan.

It finally cleared up a little on the last day of their stay and
they drove out on the Corso to try out the new horses with Aristide
handling the reins.  Beppo, with his troubles doubled, was now only
too willing to ride behind, his new, braided coat-tails flapping in
the wind quite à la mode.

On the Corso, despite a decided wispiness that still draped itself
along that magnificent drive, the Milanese fashionables and
nobility were already out, driving in the handsome turnouts for
which the city had been famous for two centuries at least.  The
berlin was accompanied through the gate by a tumult of other
carriages.

Indeed, driving on the Corso, rain or shine, peace or war, was the
chief test of social position in Milan.  One either drove and lived
or did not drive and vaguely existed.  Noble families impoverished
by the troubled times, often reduced to an abject poverty indoors,
nevertheless frequently managed to maintain, at the expense of
appetite and clothes, a vehicle of some kind with two beasts to
draw it.  One would not do.  One old marchesa who was known to be
nearly starved, anaemic from nothing but cabbage soup and crusts,
was much admired and pointed out when she drove daily in the still
tolerable family coach with crest and running footmen.  When one of
her horses died the local assembly of nobles had provided her
another by subscription.  All this was current gossip even at the
inn.

There was certainly something very Spanish about the Milanese,
Anthony thought as they drove along the Corso with the sun
glittering on the spokes of varnished wheels and the jewels of
heavily veiled women.  Spain was to be seen not only in this
inevitable custom of the evening drive after the siesta but in
Milanese manners and talk.  The stately salutations, the
simultaneous removal of hats by gentlemen, and the fluttering of
black lace and painted ivory fans as the carriages passed and
repassed reminded him of the Alameda de Paula at Havana.  And the
town was full of Spanish architecture.

He long remembered this drive with peculiar pleasure; the sun
falling in trembling pencils and half-mystical gleams through the
melting mist about the ghostly scarved poplars, with the dark
prickly mass of the great cathedral dominating the town behind; the
river of carriages streaming along to the sound of subdued feminine
laughter and the sharp snap of fans; to the gleam of jewels in the
sunset.  What a splendid river it was, the most civilized he had
ever seen.

And not a little of the pleasure came from being an acceptable,
even a notable part of it.  For the little berlin with its blue
leather traced with bronze leaves, its four fine horses now in
spick and span military harness with scarlet blinkers, caused many
a head to crane on its neck.

Whether the young men who sat looking out over the lowered hood,
smoking black Cuban cheroots,--which they had accidentally
discovered, created almost a furor wherever they went,--were found
as acceptable as the berlin, they had not time enough in Milan to
discover.  But a number of eyes that examined them over the tops of
fans seemed more friendly than critical.  And the fans reminded
Anthony of Dolores.  In fact, for some reason or other, Milan, as
he explained it to Vincent, made him homesick for Dolores.

"There is no use going through the world thinking of cities in the
terms of women one has loved and lost," said Vincent, a little
jealous as he was forced to listen for the second time to a tale of
Dolores and dolour.  "If you do, when you once get to Paris, you
will never be able to admire another town."

"How do you know, Vincent?" said Anthony, who really had some
doubts of Vincent as a cavalier.

"My boy," said Vincent, "when we do get to Paris I am going to take
you around to a little house on the Rue de Vielle du Temple.  It
was formerly the hôtel of an ancient and respectable, a noble
family.  But it now belongs to a certain young banker from Livorno.
I want you to look it over and consider its--well, modern
advantages.  In fact, I have hopes you will like the place so much
that you might decide to acquire another near by.  Several kinds of
business, mundane and even semi-domestic, can be transacted most
satisfactorily in one of these refurnished, family hôtels.  Since
the Terror they are all the rage.  You might send for Neleta--or
Dolores--or--"

"Dolores is not the kind one sends for," interrupted Anthony
considerably irritated, "and as for Neleta, I am done with all that
kind of thing I told you."

"Tut, tut, mon vieux, you speak as if you were feeble and
travelling from one source of hot restorative waters to another,
and in vain.  You will presently recollect yourself.  Why, if you
don't look out, you will be talking of marriage like an impotent
young man or a debauched ancient.  Remember you are not a POOR
bachelor."

"I HAVE been thinking of marriage."

"But not of getting married, I hope," groaned Vincent.  "That is
quite another thing."

The argument, for it developed rapidly into that, continued until
they had made the turn on the Corso several times and were
returning for supper.

It was now late twilight, and the mist was beginning to settle
again.  Aristide lit the lamps.  A number of belated carriages, as
though seen through a curtain of thin, silver gauze behind which a
procession of lights was taking place, likewise hurried rapidly
home toward the city gates.  The effect of a carnival in
Brociliande was soon heightened by multitudes of fireflies and the
rising of a harvest moon.

Aristide drove rapidly.  They began to overtake one carriage after
another and to pass them swiftly.  Vincent and Anthony both leaned
over the sides of the open hood, letting the cool evening rush into
their faces while feasting their eyes on what was a truly
marvellous scene.  A glow of torches moved on the distant
battlements where the night guard was being posted, and wisps of
mist caressed their cheeks from time to time with smooth, cool
fingers.  As they drove into and out of these fog pockets, suddenly
the whole scene as if by art-magic would be cut off and then
renewed before their eyes.  They exclaimed to each other with
astonishment and delight.  It was like watching a feast of lights
in elfland through a magician's milky crystal where the vision was
now clear and now clouded by less tangible dreams.

Then, suddenly, as they flashed out of a streak of fog, a familiar
shape loomed up before them.  To Anthony it seemed in a curious way
to be the centre of all those other dreams driving through the
mist.  And although he had come across it suddenly and recognized
it instantly, he felt that he had been looking at it for a long
time before; that it had been waiting for him behind the curtain of
mist; that it was inevitable that on this particular drive he
should overtake the coach of Don Luis.

This time he would pass him or know the reason why.  He touched
Vincent on the arm and felt immediately that he had electrified him
with his own unreasonable excitement.

"Get on, Pujol, get on, PASS THAT COACH, and don't let it
overtake you.  Hold tight, Beppo," he cried.

The whip cracked.  The startled horses leaped ahead, going at
headlong speed while Aristide stood up.

Don Luis, also going at a fast clip, heard a carriage coming up
behind him at such a pace that he turned to look back.  He was in
no mood to race on the Corso, but he hated to be passed.  Like
THAT!  For just as he leaned out the berlin flashed by.  The
coach lamp glared into the berlin; the lights of the berlin shone
for a moment into the faintly rosy interior of the coach.  Sitting
upon the faded upholstery in the moonlight with her arm in Don
Luis', Anthony saw Faith Paleologus dressed in the extremity of
fashion with a necklace of emeralds smouldering about her neck.
She gave a faint scream as she looked into the berlin and Don Luis
burst out with an oath.  Both of them were as startled as Anthony.
Then the berlin passed the coach.

They heard the coach picking up speed behind them, the whip
snapping, and the lumbering of wheels.  The two vehicles streamed
down the Corso with the fireflies swirling behind them, regardless
of protesting cries from other drivers.

But this time it was the berlin that flashed through the city gate
and left Don Luis to the indignant welcome of the guard.

To have a lot of smoky lanterns poked into the coach and flashed
over himself and his mistress until the whole carriage stank of
tallow, of garlic and sour wine from the candid mouths of French
conscripts caused him positively to flow with profanity.  He
considered the incident to be a deadly insult.  He began to
recollect who he was and "what" had caused it.  He sent Sancho out
to find where Anthony and Vincent were staying.  From midnight on,
a smug little man with grey whiskers watched the inn.

                            ----------

The berlin set out for the mountains about daybreak.  It was
followed a few hours later by the coach with four horses and two
lead mules that ate out of the Kitten's hand like tame rabbits.  As
usual Don Luis had a plan, and, as usual, the plan was not entirely
impractical.

Don Luis leaned back well pleased with it.  Before they were over
the mountains he hoped in several directions to have solved for all
time his long standing and harassing domestic problems.  It was
still foggy and he occasionally poked his head from the window to
make Sancho stop and listen for a carriage ahead.  Behind him the
wheel tracks of the coach and berlin stretched out in lengthening
parallel lines.

Meanwhile the berlin, about ten miles ahead, had ascended out of
the fog and was rocking along at a steady trot with the jagged,
snow-glittering pinnacles of the confused, cloud-haunted Alps ahead
and the golden statue on the tip of the cathedral spire behind
losing itself rapidly in the blue sky with an occasional parting
flash.  The plains of Lombardy far below were nothing but a smooth
lake of mist, with poplars on hilltops sticking up as if fishermen
had staked out their nets here and there in the placid sea.  Just
before nightfall the hearts of all the travellers in the berlin
were at once rested and uplifted by the fantastically beautiful
islands of Lake Maggiore springing from water turquoise in the
sunset and in the midst of archangelic scenery.

"Nothing in the world is so unbelievable as Isola Bella by
moonlight," said Vincent as they left it behind after supper to
push on to Duomo d'Ossola at the foot of the pass.  They arrived
there with tired horses towards midnight.  Aristide insisted that
there must be ample rest for the animals before they began the
ascent.  "They will be able to start tomorrow evening," he said.
"That will give us full daylight towards the summit.  And the
ascent par la clair de lune, messieurs," he said--for he had soon
discovered with joy that he might just as well speak French as
Italian to his friends and employers--"c'est merveilleux.  I have
seen it that way before, superbe, ravissant, incomparable,
virginal."  Having paid the Alps the greatest compliment possible
in French, he went off to examine the shoes of his horses,
whistling in the half-frosty air.

Already the breath of the mountains had brought back to Anthony a
feeling of light, boyish vigour that he had forgotten since some
cold winters in Livorno years before.  He began to enter fully now
into Vincent's high spirits and Pujol's gayety, even to surpass
them.  He was in fact entering upon the long, sustaining vigour of
ripened manhood verging toward its crest.

He stood out in the roadway that night at Duomo d'Ossola under the
stars and the now preternaturally clear moon just beginning to wane
but with its black markings clear as an etched plate, and listened
to the rush and whisper of the snow-fed Ticino that filled the air
with a continuous, low melody that came from no direction at all.
The others had already gone indoors to find what cheer they might
at that late hour.  And as he stood there listening to the lonely
voice of the mountains implicit in the snow water that forever fled
away somewhere into the night, the mood of a great and yet a calm
and serene exaltation fell upon him, lifting him out of himself and
comforting him.

And it too had its own music that also came from nowhere.

Without effort, as if he were only a listener, began a magnificent
concord of the abstractions of innumerable sounds.  The voices of
the great heights and ramping crevasses, of the snowy pinnacles
glittering in moonlight uttered themselves through him, plucking
from his heart-strings an inconceivably majestic and complicated
harmony addressed to the stars and the black mountain sky beyond.
The hymn died away at last with a soft, satisfactory, almost human
melancholy, somehow exquisitely pleasurable as if the heights
murmured regretfully now of their memories of past ages to the
plains below.

It was a purely personal, an automatic, an incommunicable
experience.  It did not occur to him that some men attempted to set
such things down.  He knew nothing of staff and clef.  "Music," he
said, "go on."  But the thing was not to be summoned.  It occurred.
All that he knew was that in that moment the meaning of the night
enriched with all his past experiences of solitude, passion, grief,
love, and joy had suddenly been transmuted for him and made
understandable in the terms of sound.

There was no motif or prelude in this experience as there had been
in that concord of wood sounds that he had heard as he looked at
Anna that night, now ages past in Livorno, it seemed.  His music
tonight had been full, complete; devoid of weak longings and
little regrets.  It was the cry of his being at the full.

"Well, so let it be then for a while."  He turned and followed the
others into the inn.

"Tomorrow," he thought, just as he swung the door open, "we shall
be going over the crest and on, down into France."

The osteria, or "hôtel" as it was now called, at Duomo d'Ossola was
immemorial.  Apparently the only change that had afflicted it since
the elder Pliny had come that way gathering magical, Alpine plants
was in the numbers and generations of its fleas.  The hams and
flitches of bacon hanging amid its rafters were contemporaneous
with its ancient oaken beams, and as tough.  But there was no doubt
about their being well smoked.  For the fireplace consisted of a
great pile of stones large enough to roast a whole ox, over which a
cave-like cupola of baked, red clay led upwards, presumably in the
direction of several flues.

It was true that some smoke, on the principle that accidents will
occasionally happen, escaped by this Gargantuan yet ridiculous
chimney.  But for the most part it lingered infernally and
habitually about the shoulders and knuckles of hams, the leeks, the
garlic, and the sooty bottles and crocks in basketry containers
that perpetually threatened the guests who moved beneath them with
a fatal rain of preserved-plenty should the roof ever collapse--a
contingency not so remote as the landlady was disposed to think.

At night the sole light in this hell's-kitchen was from a small
flame lost in the huge fireplace.  About this, as Anthony entered,
Vincent, Pujol, and Beppo were seated on three-legged stools.  They
were impatiently waiting while several sleepy and well-smoked girls
and an old woman with complexions like the hams were attempting,
with all of the usual clamour, lament, and confusion of primitive
females trying to perform a simple domestic action--to scramble
some eggs.  All that was lacking was the eggs.  Beppo had kindled
the fire.

A long consultation in mountain dialect, an argument, an outburst
of fury on the part of the oldest woman, a loud slap in the face
for the youngest granddaughter--finally began to produce results.
The older women climbed into a loft leaving the girl who had been
slapped to do the honours.  A hen under, or rather over, the
delusion of raising a family was loudly disturbed in one corner by
the slapped maiden and relieved of six of her prospective cares.
These mixed with some herbs in a pan were put over the fire.  But
the hen proved to have been right after all.

It was Aristide who confirmed her.  He had volunteered to take what
he called les haruspices.  He sputtered, holding his nose, and
dumped the sacrifice out into the fire.

Frau Frank's hamper was now drawn upon and still proved itself
triumphantly adequate.  The girl, who had attempted the omelette,
and who still sat wretchedly upon her stool, was invited to share
in the cold sausage, bread and wine.  She was soon not only
comforted but by far the most amiable of the party.  Rugs were
spread upon some benches, Beppo flung himself upon the floor, and
the party entered upon a gallant attempt to rest.

From his bench in a far corner Anthony watched the grotesque
shadows leaping amid the rafters.  The place was like a witches'
brothel.  In the centre on the stone "altar" by which the girl
still sat with her unbraided elf-locks snaking about her face, the
fire leaped fitfully, now flickering out into the darkness of the
room with a smoky-yellow tongue and now licking the inflamed, sooty
sides of its terra-cotta cavern when the draught veered up the
chimney.  From the benches where Vincent and Pujol were stretched
out, and from the lean curs on the floor, arose occasional
lightning movements denoting fleas stabbing home.  Presently the
daughter of the house got up and looked about her.

After considering the several benches deliberately, she walked
quietly over to that upon which young Pujol was resting and began
to climb in under his blankets.

A foot placed firmly on her stomach, and propelled forward by a
vigorous straightening of the young man's knee, hurled her back
toward the hearth, where she gracefully collapsed upon a stool and
passed a few interesting moments trying to inhale.  She then
resumed her expression of rapt contemplation, finally arriving at
the conclusion that apparently she had been repulsed.

Everyone in the room except the snoring Beppo was now watching her,
secretly convulsed.  After a while she got up again, rubbed her
stomach, and obviously began to consider once more the now rather
nice question of--"with what man shall this young woman sleep?"

"Love is a wonderful thing, Toni," whispered Vincent.  "Did you
keep your boots on?  You may need them."

"Monsieur is jealous," hissed Pujol.

"YOU interfered with nature, Aristide," muttered Anthony.

These mutterings and groans not sounding inviting, the girl decided
that the united opinion of the bench was against her.  She made no
appeal.  She walked over and quietly inserted herself under the
horse-blanket on the floor with Beppo.  A few sleepy grunts of
surprise, ending in a dying fall, and sighs of settling satisfaction
showed that a delicate situation had been gratefully accepted by
Beppo.

Nevertheless, the benches proved to be by no means lonely couches.
Each traveller soon shared them with cohorts of fleas.  In a short
while a spirit seemed to move all three at the same time toward the
inn yard.  Here they met amid oaths and laughter to engage in a
mutual hunt by lantern light.  Beppo was either immune or was
solaced beyond mere flea bites.

The berlin they found soaked with dew.  They dragged some straw
from the stables and spreading their rugs upon it again attempted
to rest.  Looking up at the familiar northern stars, fresher and
clearer against the black mountain sky than he had ever seen them
before, in spite of the moon, Anthony finally counted himself to
sleep by trying to number the infinite.


Perhaps it was unfortunate that he did so, for some time between
midnight and morning Don Luis quietly passed through the village in
the coach.

                            ----------

A few hours' rest farther down at Arona had apparently sufficed for
Don Luis' horses.  He had guessed that the berlin would stop over
at Duomo d'Ossola, most travellers did so, and he made sure of it
by sending Sancho to have a quiet look at the inn yard.  There
Sancho had not only seen the berlin empty, but its crew all laid
out on straw in the moonlight like so many corpses.  He reported as
much to his master, who nodded contentedly and drove on.  By
daybreak the coach was miles ahead and making good time up the Val
di Ticino toward the pass.

As he looked down onto the plains a little later, Don Luis was
delighted to see a violent thunder-shower moving down the valley
far below him and sweeping out toward Ossola with blowing arcs of
rain.  He could have asked nothing more than that the tracks of the
coach should be erased.  It had not occurred to him that they might
be.  He had had to chance that, and now--  This time, at least, the
gods seemed to be with him.

He remarked to the Paleologus, who was sitting beside him, that it
was raining in the valley.  It was the only general remark he had
made to her since leaving Milan.  She acquiesced to the weather--
and his opinions about it.  Otherwise their conversation was nil.
Faith understood her position exactly.  Her rôle was not that of a
talkative companion.

At Milan, in a renaissance of almost youthful bravado during this
unexpected Indian-summer honeymoon it had been the noble marquis'
whim to flaunt Faith before the world on the Corso as his mistress.
For that he had bought her some astonishing costumes and jewels.
She had carried them well.  She had carried it off with just the
requisite amount of subdued impudence toward respectability and
enough triumphant vulgarity to proclaim that she was his mistress
and not a female relative.

In short, she had allowed herself with a cunning blatancy to be
seen for exactly what she was, a handsome middle-aged harpy with
something genuinely mysterious about her inherent in a look of
suffering about her deep eyes and wide brows as if her daemon had
led her through fiery landscapes looking for a rare incandescent
blossom that she had never found.

Such was the mistress with whom, at the age of sixty-eight, Don
Luis found solace, comfort, and an unexpected release for fires
that still smouldered warmly under the hard, cool lava of his own
exterior; fires that were still capable of darting forth in a
subterranean pit flashes of yellow flame as if a deposit of sulphur
had suddenly sublimed after having nearly boiled away.

Over the meeting of two such volcanic natures there was bound to be
a certain amount of stench released which might possibly arouse the
hostility of nose-holding neighbours ploughing in greener and more
domestically-fertile, in less scoriac fields.  Perhaps, that is one
reason why such women as Faith invariably reek of perfume.  She had
chosen for hers a combination of musk and sweet-poppy that was
slowly but surely overcoming the odour of stale Malacca snuff with
which the coach had long stunk.

For stenches, moral or otherwise, Don Luis now cared very little,
however.  Indeed, he rather enjoyed their piquancy.  He had found
what he wanted, and, without any undue commotion, he intended to
enjoy it before he died.  An event, by the way, which still seemed
remote to him.

In Italy, where he was now known in a few official quarters only,
it had pleased him to be perfectly open about his affair after
leaving Livorno.  Going through France, and upon his return to
Spain, he intended to be a little more circumspect; to let his new
star dawn slowly upon his more intimate friends and relatives
rather than to have it burst suddenly out of a cloud which might
throw some of its shadow on him.

Sancho's suggestion had therefore been followed out and Faith was
now dressed with a taste and restraint that might indicate a duenna
being brought from Italy for the instruction of certain young
grand-nieces in Madrid.  She had accepted this temporarily less
glamorous rôle with alacrity and understanding.

It still permitted her to make Don Luis thoroughly comfortable
wherever they went in a hundred small ways that he had never known
or had long forgotten.  He realized, now, that with great means he
had long been living a kind of Spartan camp-life under the rather
stern care of Sancho.  In short, he had much needed a woman to look
after him.  Now he had found one who, without disturbing his
thoughts or threatening any legal or social complications
whatsoever, comforted the man.  In personal service Faith was
solicitous by day and ingenious at night.  And it so happened that
she was the only person in the world who could sympathize over Don
Luis' past without at the same time wounding the proud marquis'
honour.

The Paleologus on her part knew all this.  She wanted security.  In
finding it in Don Luis she felt her cup ran over and she did not
intend to drop it or spill it lightly.  This was her last chance,
and she played for it consummately.  As they drove over the Simplon
they were supremely well-pleased with each other.

Don Luis did not intend to have his plans interfered with a second
time, particularly by the son of the man who had wrecked them
before.  He intended to put a final stop to trouble from that
quarter.  The trivial incident of the race on the Corso at Milan
had outraged him beyond all ordinary imagining.  He planned to act
this time so that, whether he succeeded or not, no blame could
attach to him.  But he was now a little superstitious about Maria's
son.  He might fail.  Experience had taught him that.  If so, he
determined to be still in a position to bide his time.

It was with these thoughts in his mind that he continued to ascend
the pass as rapidly as his four horses and two mules could be
persuaded to drag the coach toward the clouds.

                            ----------

The violent thunder-storm accompanied by pelting globes of hail had
struck Duomo d'Ossola shortly after dawn and driven in the tired
sleepers in the courtyard.  They found an even more elemental
disturbance going on inside.  The old grandmother had descended
early to get breakfast for the party and had stumbled over Beppo
and her granddaughter as one object.  When Anthony and the others
rushed in shaking the hailstones and rain off their hats and
clothes, she was beating her granddaughter with a convenient piece
of firewood till the girl's ribs resounded.  She had also just
finished-off Beppo who was dazedly looking on from a far corner by
the single light of his one, as yet, unclosed eye.  The girl was
now screaming more with terror than with pain, for it looked as if
her grandmother meant to kill her.  The dogs barked and howled, and
the imprecations of the old woman rushed out of her mouth like the
sound of the hail against the tiles.

Seeing that the gentlemen were not for murder before breakfast, she
finally left-off to sink down exhausted, weeping by the ashes of
her hearth fire.  The girl, feeling her bruises and sobbing,
attempted to rearrange the tattered remnants of her bodice which
had been nearly clawed off.  In this she was gallantly assisted by
Pujol, who felt a genuine remorse for having brought this trouble
upon her by his repulse of the night before.

"I should have sacrificed myself.  As a Frenchman I should have
managed it sans scandale," he assured Anthony.  "Now look!"  He
pointed to the girl, the old woman, and Beppo all in misery.

Beppo it was plain would be of little use going over the pass.
Both his eyes were now closed.  For him the old woman had nothing
but curses.  She spat at him like a lynx when he blundered near.

"Now it is the fourth generation.  HIS brat!  I shall soon be
having travellers driven away from the roof by its squalls.  May
the evil-eye wither your womb like a dried tripe, harlot, little
bitch," she screamed, seizing her club again.  The girl shivered.
"Pig, stunted boar," she screeched at Beppo, waving her stick.

"Why don't you keep him on here, mother?" suggested Vincent.

"I have kept too many men in my time," said the woman.  "What they
want is a fire, a bed, and something to eat.  The less they have to
move on their feet after a while, the better they like it.  Soon
they are flabby and nothing but a mouth.  The breasts of my mercy
for them are dry."

"But this fellow is a vetturino and you need one about an inn like
this.  We already owe him a hundred soldi and we will leave him as
much more for the girl's dot.  That is something, isn't it?"

The old woman still muttered but sat considering.

Beppo groaned.

"Make it two hundred, Vincent," added Anthony.  "I will go half."

"Two hundred soldi," said Vincent reluctantly.

"That is something," admitted the old woman.  "I need a horse,
too . . ."

"Otherwise we shall just take him and drive on," said Vincent.

"Three hundred soldi, altogether?" asked the crone looking up.

"Si," murmured Beppo, "my wages, too."

The old woman clucked with her gums.  "Come here, girl," she said
at last.  "Get down the dog-grease and set your betrothed to work
on your back.  He might as well learn now how to salve a morning's
beating so you can get breakfast."

The swollen-eyed Beppo without further comment began to rub the
dog-grease into his future wife's back.  Secretly he was well
satisfied, but he did not intend to admit it.  His had been, he
thought, an excellent night's work.  The woman in Florence could
shift for herself now.  Well, he wasn't married to her.  What did
she expect?

Pujol was delighted.  There would be one less man to haul over the
mountains.  Vincent had been quick at getting off for less than it
would have cost to keep the useless Beppo in France.  Anthony felt
he had assisted at making peace.  Breakfast such as it was passed
off well enough.

Pujol was ready to start earlier with a lightened load.  As soon as
the roads ceased to be torrents he gave notice of harnessing up.
The storm rumbled on into the plains behind.  The old woman sat
counting over her three hundred soldi by the rekindled fire.

No one would have recognized her as Lucia, the kindly, pleasant
maid of Maria Bonnyfeather less than thirty years before.  In that
time she had had three husbands and thirteen children.  The inn at
Ossola she had bought with the last of Don Luis' gold pieces after
much wandering about amid Swiss villages in the Italian cantons.
She had no more idea who Anthony was than why the French had eaten
her out of house and home the year before and given her only paper
money.  As she attempted to bite some of the more doubtful looking
soldi she regretted her teeth.  She put aside one soldo.  It was to
send to her first husband's cousin to put edelweiss on Maria's
sunken grave.  No soldo, no edelweiss; she knew the Swiss.  Now
that her little slut of a granddaughter had a man she would take
these soldi and go back to Tuscany.  She would like to be buried
where the sun was warm.  Holy mother, the snow in these mountains!
It gave her bones the shivers.  And that little fool would have
given herself away just for the fun of it.  But what was to be
expected, with soldiers about the place the whole year before?  She
would leave the happy couple--her blessing.  She wrapped a few
yellow-grey locks about a peg of a comb that seemed to be fixed in
her skull, scoured her sooty face off with the under-side of her
second petticoat and went to the door to watch the berlin start.

                            ----------

"How do you suppose people ever come to be as horrible as these?"
asked Anthony, looking about for the last time at Duomo d'Ossola
and its inn.

"It's their own fault," grumbled Vincent comfortably.  "They don't
have to be here.  Just bad human nature, I suppose."

"Perhaps," replied Anthony, unaware that the reason he was sitting
in the luxurious little berlin was because Don Luis had decided not
to let him stay on the knees of the filthy old woman peering out of
the door and trying to curtsy to him as well as her lumbago would
permit.  "But I suppose fate does have something to do with it."

"Not much, Toni.  It's what a man does for himself that makes him
what he is.  What can you expect of these people though?  Look at
those two brats there, for instance."

Two half-naked boys were peering at the varnished doors of the
berlin which reflected their delighted grimaces.

The view which included a number of lean, rooting sows was
certainly not encouraging.  From every crazy balcony with a
tottering stairway rotting up to it, from every eccentric hovel
along the street,--terrific scarecrows male and female, gaunt and
starved faces, rheumy-eyed and goitred carlines and fearfully-
peaked children could be glimpsed gathered to see the rich
travellers leave.  The bolder or more desperate beggars were also
gathering.

"I am starving, signore.  The soldiers have left nothing." . . .
"Signore, I want something to eat.  I tell you I am hungry, my
belly grinds." . . . "I fought for the Austrians--and now look,"
said an old soldier revealing a seethed stump.  "Dear and very
charitable milords of England, I have a dislocated hip," drooled an
old woman.  And she had.  "Dear and very charitable milords, rich
and gracious signori, my hip has kept me in hell for twenty years.
My hip, sweet and kindly signori, for the love of God and his
saints, signori, my poor old hip.  I can neither lie, stand, nor
sit, signori.  I am hungry and in great pain.  It is true."  Her
palsied hand slid into the window, shaking, and gnarled as a
griffin's paw--"My hip, milords of England, rich and high-born
gentlemen of God, my poor old hip, my hip . . ."

"Get on, Pujol, you rascal," roared Vincent.  "Never mind that
little buckle."

The babble for alms grew threatening and clamorous.  They were
forced to throw out some small coins to get the horses through the
mewing mob.

"God bless you," screamed old Lucia, secure in her soldi.  The
beggars scrambled and cursed.  The berlin strained forward through
the mud.  Children ran up the street after it holding out their
hands and screaming.  One persistent little urchin who raced with
them half a mile finally got a coin the size of his little toe
nail.

"Farewell!" he shouted with his last breath, and collapsed by the
roadside clutching the picaillon.

"That is the last of Italy," said Vincent.  "Why, Toni, what's the
matter?  You look pale."

"It's the high air I guess," replied Anthony, and looked out of the
window at the incredible mountains just ahead.

The last of the Italian hamlets was left behind as they started
upward more noticeably.  Soon they could look back at miles of
little villages apparently asleep in the warm sunlight below.  The
sound of cow bells ceased.  The roar of the snow rivers became
louder.  They climbed up a slanting plateau through an inferno of
wind-tortured trees which were already shedding their leaves.
Already it was noticeably colder.  Remnants of the morning hail-
storm glittered along the roads and in tree boles like fresh-broken
glass.  The wink from these beds of scattered diamonds answered the
blink from the snow-fields above.  The breath of the horses became
faintly visible.

Now the way pitched upward violently.  All roads travelled before
seemed to have been level.  They were dragged through a region of
bare rocks, pebbles, and boulder-débris where the horses panted and
struggled.  The angry tumult of a river suddenly leapt myriad-
voiced out of the earth.  The road became a skidding track along
the edge of a gorge filled with mad, rushing froth and uptossed
arms of spray hundreds of feet below.  They crossed the torrent on
a new bridge over its raving water and struck into the living stone
of the mountain between two walls of rock.

It was a mere cleft with the daylight leaking down greyly as if
through a crack in a vault overhead.  Even the gloom failed them as
they headed for a cavern where their voices and the sound of the
struggling hoofs were lost completely in the subterranean thunder
of a cataract that hurled itself close by into an invisible cleft.
Only the weight of the water could be felt making the earth
shudder.  The mist rose before the mouth of this newly-pierced
tunnel in spectral veils.  It coated the leather of the cushions
and their clothes with pearls of moisture as they entered its
darkness lit only by the foggy rays of the lanterns.  Here the road
took its upward way along a cliff with the river bellowing a sheer
quarter of a mile below.

They spun out of this cave into full day to cross over another
dizzy bridge.  The road contorted up and up through the fierce
barbaric gorge of Gondo overshadowed by black-fronted terraces and
the smooth lowering foreheads of precipices that put their heads
close together a thousand feet above as if plotting some
overwhelming mischief while throwing cyclopean gloom and staggering
shadows along perpendicular miles.

"You should have seen this by moonlight," shouted Aristide, while
he breathed the horses.  "That is a real test of driving.  The pass
is not what it used to be.  The work of the French engineers has
already made a great difference."

But Anthony was glad they had come by day after all.  There was
still plenty of opportunity for Aristide to prove his skill in
tooling along the horses.  And the grandeur of full light on the
infinite view was beyond all expression and experience.

They were ascending the last rugged ravines of the pass, now
overlooking planetary wastes of black rock; peering down valleys
floored with clouds that opened suddenly to reveal further eagle-
haunted wells of space full of clear, slippery air with toy
villages in a lake of sunlight at the bottom.  Yet they were still
looking up at Gargantuan heights over smooth, rosy snow-fields
lying in the wrinkled patterns of hollows and crevasses.  And from
these half-frozen beds of moisture torrents slipped away to foam
down the faces of cliffs.  They leaped sheerly into nothing,
hanging in tremendous sliding beards of water that smoked into
pointed, swaying clouds of vapour still unsupported a mile below.

Here and there the arcs of more distant waterfalls glittered like
the bow of promise, and directly above and beyond them, filling the
whole moon-like landscape with a reduplicated bellowing roar, the
main stream of the Gondo took at one leap the abyss out of which
for many hours they had now been climbing.

It was frequently necessary to breathe the horses now.  It was
piercingly cold.  They walked often beside the berlin both to ease
the beasts and to keep warm.  Their red mufflers floated out behind
them in a keen, icy blast that howled and shuddered.  The bronze
vine against the blue leather of the carriage was now etched in
white frost.  Despite the great altitude and the difficulty of
breathing which they stopped often to overcome, they were
exhilarated, intoxicated by infinity below and around them and by
the crisp, clean lightness of the frosty air.  They shouted with
pigmy voices and sang.  The impalpable glaze of some infinitely
thin but slightly opaque substance seemed to have been lifted from
their eyes and brains, permitting sight and feeling to become
utterly clear.  A hitherto unnoticed weight was gone from their
shoulders.

Towards the middle of the afternoon they emerged upon the smooth
snow-field at the summit of the pass, scurrying with wreaths and
wraiths of snow.  Here the wheels sank into the drifts and the
horses floundered.

The French were building a hospice a short distance beyond.  Black
figures gathered like numbed bees in the snow about the already
frozen foundations.

"Winter has set in a month early up here," said a young corporal
who approached them and examined their papers before one of several
timbered huts whose chimneys smoked invitingly.  "We will give you
a lift over the crest.  The first shelter for the night is about
five miles below.  The engineers for the new road are staying
there.  You will find good company and wine.  The first consul is
impatient--'le canon quand passera-t-il le Simplon?' he keeps
asking, they say.  Now there is a man who makes things go.  All
marches when he but speaks."

They went into one of the shelters for some brandy and warmth while
a team of oxen with old army blankets on them was being driven up
and hooked to the pole of the berlin.  Then they set out for the
last haul through the drifts up to the crest marked by a rude,
wooden cross.

Neither Vincent nor Anthony spoke as they trudged up the final
slope in the track broken by the carriage.  Already the western
lights were beginning to redden.  Over the plains of Lombardy the
thunderstorm of the morning had grown into a vast, rolling cloud-
pall washing against the domed fronts of the Apennines.  It was a
sea of ink clouded with silver.  From it, at a seemingly infinite
distance, the rays of the sun were dashed back onto the snows of
the summits with infernal tinges of red that turned them violet.
Here and there long pencils of light searched down into red,
lighted patches of the valley floor streaked with silver rivers,
infinitely, unutterably far, and sheerly below.

Towards the arc of the crest the titanic skyline of the Alpine
ranges with snowy domes, with the sheer, wind-fretted needles of
superior peaks, began to dawn upon them as they raised the view
into Switzerland beyond.

They stood for some time on the ridge of one of the world's high
gables, just where the track passed the rude cross of the ridge
itself, and looked about them.

"That," said Vincent, "is France down there."  He pointed westward
as though towards the plains of another planet that appeared in a
dim golden haze beyond a riot of peaks where the earth dipped away
into nothing.

Anthony looked eagerly.  He was seeing the world at last.  This was
the top of the tree of life again.  Below in the golden haze was
the great courtyard.

It was their whim to ride over the crest.  They went back a little
and climbed into the berlin from which the oxen were now unyoked
and standing with their breath blowing out beyond them like
patient, fiery monsters stalled in the snow.  The nostrils of the
horses smoked too while their coats steamed faintly.

"You will find it not such bad going from here down," said the
sous-officier.  "The snow is less on the other side just now, and
then--it IS going down.  Merci, merci bien, messieurs."  He threw
up his hand in farewell.

"Allons," shouted Pujol.

The horses plunged forward through the snow, seeming to know that
relief was just ahead.  The berlin came to the crest, slanted, and
began to slide downward on the other side of the pass.




CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE


THE FORCE OF GRAVITY


Travellers who have been ascending a mountain in a carriage and
have long felt the force of gravity pulling against them are
invariably surprised and relieved when they finally top the crest
and begin to roll down the other slope, aided instead of hindered.
They now have the impression of being personally favoured by a new
and friendly power after having overcome the unreasonable
opposition of the old.  That this impression is unconsciously taken
for granted by them is only to say that it is the more profound.
Then, to this fundamental feeling of release and relief is
immediately added speed; speed, which confers an added illusion of
freedom and power.

It was certainly so with the passengers of the berlin.  Their
sudden access of good spirits upon topping the pass lasted them
half-way down the first descent.  The night spent in the company of
the French engineers near the crest did nothing to take the edge
off their exhilaration; quite the contrary.  But they were no
longer so impressed by the tremendous height.  It had become
external.  Their passage next morning through the new, arched ways
under the glaciers, where icicles hung like dripping stalactites,
became merely a novelty, an adventure in the realm of ice.  The
galleries of shelter for voiding avalanches were only a clever
convenience whose pillars threw amusing effects of swiftly
alternating light and shade into the berlin.  The brakes seemed to
be answering the nasal twang of the detachments of General
Turreau's sapeurs doing their best to make the way smooth for
cannon before winter came.  With these ragged soldiers lately
detached from the Army of the Rhine Pujol exchanged a hundred
carnal remarks about their scarecrow appearance.  Remarks which, as
it proved later, were to be remembered against him.  But nothing
could now dampen the high spirits of the young Aristide, a
Frenchman returning to France.

Below the regions of snow the road had been temporarily completed,
and they no longer met any troops.  They met with no one at all.
Perhaps it was for that reason that they gradually became more
silent as the day wore on and they began to realize the berlin as
nothing but a small fly-like object crawling over precarious
bridges, down the sheer faces of granite cliffs, and through the
twilight of horrible ravines toward the gorge of the Saltine, which
roared louder and ever more ominously below.

They could only hear the river.  The gorge was covered by a
stagnant, grey cloud that seemed to have taken refuge there from
the wind which continually ravelled away one end of it, where it
extended out into the clear area of the lower valley.  As they
descended into the cloud's upper mists the day gradually became
darker, and in the gorge itself the white river whirled and swayed
downward over its riven blocks and boulders to disappear in the
twilight beyond as if it would lure those who followed the road
along its banks to inevitable destruction.

The cloud, which had been a grey floor from above, was, seen from
below, a dark, glimmering ceiling leaking and dripping a kind of
pearly rain into the canyon.  And this misty-drift was also flowing
downward toward the mouth of the gorge, draping the bold
escarpments and Gothic rock pinnacles with funereal scarves of
strangely glowing mist.  A more gloomy and purgatorial vista could
scarcely be imagined.  And it was all the more impressive and
depressing to those in the berlin, who were suddenly plunged into
it as though they had been flung into a limbo where darkness was
hiding, because they knew that above and below them the snowy
mountains and the green valleys were still bathed in cheerful
light.

The adventure which overtook the berlin in the gloomy gorge of the
Saltine always seemed to Anthony to have happened in a dream.  That
it came suddenly, was fatal,