Unknown - "The World English Bible (WEB): Revelation"

William Shakespeare - "The Tragedie of Julius Caesar"

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - "The Sorrows of Young Werther"

Mary Cole - "Trials and Triumphs of Faith"

To Have and To Hold:

M >> Mary Johnston >> To Have and To Hold:






CHAPTER XXV IN WHICH MY LORD HATH HIS DAY


I AND Black Lamoral were leading a forlorn hope. With all my
old company behind us, we were thundering upon an enemy as
thick as ants, covering the face of the earth. Down came Black
Lamoral, and the hoofs of every mad charger went over me. For a
time I was dead; then I lived again, and was walking with the
forester's daughter in the green chase at home. The oaks stretched
broad sheltering arms above the young fern and the little wild
flowers, and the deer turned and looked at us. In the open spaces,
starring the lush grass, were all the yellow primroses that ever
bloomed. I gathered them for her, but when I would have given
them to her she was no longer the forester's daughter, but a proud
lady, heiress to lands and gold, the ward of the King. She would
not take the primroses from a poor gentleman, but shook her head
and laughed sweetly, and faded into a waterfall that leaped from a
pink hill into a waveless sea. Another darkness, and I was captive
to the Chickahominies, tied to the stake. My arm and shoulder
were on fire, and Opechancanough came and looked at me, with
his dark, still face and his burning eyes. The fierce pain died, and I
with it, and I lay in a grave and listened to the loud and deep
murmur of the forest above. I lay there for ages on ages before I
awoke to the fact that the darkness about me was the darkness of a
ship's hold, and the murmur of the forest the wash of the water
alongside. I put out an arm and touched, not the side of a grave,
but a ship's timbers. I stretched forth the other arm, then dropped it
with a groan. Some one bent over me and held water to my lips. I
drank, and my senses came fully to me. "Diccon!" I said.

"It's not Diccon," replied the figure, setting down a pitcher. "It is
Jeremy Sparrow. Thank God, you are yourself again!"

"Where are we?" I asked, when I had lain and listened to the water
a little longer.

"In the hold of the George," he answered. "The ship sank by the
bows, and well-nigh all were drowned. But when they upon the
George saw that there was a woman amongst us who clung to the
poop deck, they sent their longboat to take us off."

The light was too dim for me to read his face, so I touched his arm.

"She was saved," he said. "She is safe now. There are
gentlewomen aboard, and she is in their care."

I put my unhurt arm across my eyes.

"You are weak yet," said the minister gently. "The Spaniard's ball,
you know, went through your shoulder, and in some way your arm
was badly torn from shoulder to wrist. You have been out of your
head ever since we were brought here, three days ago. The
chirurgeon came and dressed your wound, and it is healing well.
Don't try to speak, - I'll tell you all. Diccon has been pressed into
service, as the ship is short of hands, having lost some by fever and
some overboard. Four of the pirates were picked up, and hung at
the yardarm next morning."

He moved as he spoke, and something clanked in the stillness.
"You are ironed!" I exclaimed.

"Only my ankles. My lord would have had me bound hand and
foot; but you were raving for water, and, taking you for a dying
man, they were so humane as to leave my hands free to attend
you."

"My lord would have had you bound," I said slowly. "Then it's my
lord's day."

"High noon and blazing sunshine," he answered, with a rueful
laugh. "It seems that half the folk on board had gaped at him at
court. Lord! when he put his foot over the side of the ship, how the
women screeched and the men stared! He 's cock of the walk now,
my Lord Carnal, the King's favorite!"

"And we are pirates."

"That 's the case in a nutshell," he answered cheerfully.

"Do they know how the ship came to strike upon that reef?" I
asked.

"Probably not, unless madam has enlightened them. I did n't take
the trouble, - they would n't have believed me, - and I can take my
oath my lord has n't. He was only our helpless prisoner, you know;
and they would think madam mistaken or bewitched."

"It 's not a likely tale," I said grimly, "seeing that we had already
opened fire upon them."

"I trust in heaven the sharks got the men who fired the culverins!"
he cried, and then laughed at his own savagery.

I lay still and tried to think. "Who are they on board?" I asked at
last.

"I don't know," he replied. "I was only on deck until my lord had
had his say in the poop cabin with the master and a gentleman who
appeared most in authority. Then the pirates were strung up, and
we were bundled down here in quick order. But there seems to be
more of quality than usual aboard."

"You do not know where we are?"

"We lay at anchor for a day, - whilst they patched her up, I
suppose, - and since then there has been rough weather. We must
be still off Florida, and that is all I know. Now go to sleep. You'll
get your strength best so, and there's nothing to be gotten by
waking."

He began to croon a many-versed psalm. I slept and waked, and
slept again, and was waked by the light of a torch against my eyes.
The torch was held by a much-betarred seaman, and by its light a
gentleman of a very meagre aspect, with a weazen face and small
black eyes, was busily examining my wounded shoulder and arm.

"It passeth belief," he said in a sing-song voice, "how often
wounds, with naught in the world done for them outside of fair
water and a clean rag, do turn to and heal out of sheer perversity.
Now, if I had been allowed to treat this one properly with scalding
oil and melted lead, and to have bled the patient as he should have
been bled, it is ten to one that by this time there would have been a
pirate the less in the world." He rose to his feet with a highly
injured countenance.

"Then he's doing well?" asked Sparrow.

"So well that he could n't do better," replied the other. "The arm
was a trifling matter, though no doubt exquisitely painful. The
wound in the shoulder is miraculously healing, without either
blood-letting or cauteries. You'll have to hang after all, my friend."
He looked at me with his little beady eyes. "It must have been a
grand life," he said regretfully. "I never expected to see a pirate
chief in the flesh. When I was a boy, I used to dream of the black
ships and the gold and the fighting. By the serpent of Esculapius,
in my heart of hearts I would rather be such a world's thief,
uncaught, than Governor of Virginia!" He gathered up the tools of
his trade, and motioned to his torchbearer to go before. "I'll have to
report you rapidly recovering," he said warningly, as he turned to
follow the light.

"Very well," I made answer. "To whom am I indebted for so much
kindness?"

"I am Dr. John Pott, newly appointed physician general to the
colony of Virginia. It is little of my skill I could give you, but that
little I gladly bestow upon a real pirate. What a life it must have
been! And to have to part with it when you are yet young! And the
good red gold and the rich gems all at the bottom of the sea!"

He sighed heavily and went his way. The hatches were closed after
him, and the minister and I were left in darkness while the slow
hours dragged themselves past us. Through the chinks of the
hatches a very faint light streamed down, and made the darkness
gray instead of black. The minister and I saw each other dimly, as
spectres. Some one brought us mouldy biscuit that I wanted not,
and water for which I thirsted. Sparrow put the small pitcher to his
lips, kept it there a moment, then held it to mine. I drank, and with
that generous draught tasted pure bliss. It was not until five
minutes later that I raised myself upon my elbow and turned on
him.

"The pitcher felt full to my lips!" I exclaimed. "Did you drink
when you said you did?"

He put out his great hand and pushed me gently down. "I have no
wound," he said, "and there was not enough for two."

The light that trembled through the cracks above died away, and
the darkness became gross. The air in the hold was stifling; our
souls panted for the wind and the stars outside. At the worst, when
the fetid blackness lay upon our chests like a nightmare, the hatch
was suddenly lifted, a rush of pure air came to us, and with it the
sound of men's voices speaking on the deck above. Said one, "True
the doctor pronounces him out of all danger, yet he is a wounded
man."

"He is a desperate and dangerous man," broke in another harshly.
"I know not how you will answer to your Company for leaving him
unironed so long."

"I and the Company understand each other, my lord," rejoined the
first speaker, with some haughtiness. "I can keep my prisoner
without advice. If I now order irons to be put upon him and his
accomplice, it is because I see fit to do so, and not because of your
suggestion, my lord. You wish to take this opportunity to have
speech with him, - to that I can have no objection."

The speaker moved away. As his footsteps died in the distance my
lord laughed, and his merriment was echoed by three or four harsh
voices. Some one struck flint against steel, and there was a sudden
flare of torches and the steadier light of a lantern. A man with a
brutal, weather-beaten face - the master of the ship, we guessed -
came down the ladder, lantern in hand, turned when he had
reached the foot, aud held up the lantern to light my lord down. I
lay and watched the King's favorite as he descended. The torches
held slantingly above cast a fiery light over his stately figure and
the face which had raised him from the low estate of a doubtful
birth and a most lean purse to a pinnacle too near the sun for men
to gaze at with undazzled eyes. In his rich dress and the splendor
of his beauty, with the red glow enveloping him, he lit the darkness
like a baleful star.

The two torchbearers and a third man descended, closing the hatch
after them. When all were down, my lord, the master at his heels,
came and stood over me. I raised myself, though with difficulty,
for the fever had left me weak as a babe, and met his gaze. His was
a cruel look; if I had expected, as assuredly I did not expect, mercy
or generosity from this my dearest foe, his look would have struck
such a hope dead. Presently he beckoned to the men behind him.
"Put the manacles upon him first," he said, with a jerk of his thumb
toward Sparrow.

The man who had come down last, and who carried irons enough
to fetter six pirates, started forward to do my lord's bidding. The
master glanced at Sparrow's great frame, and pulled out a pistol.
The minister laughed. "You'll not need it, friend. I know when the
odds are too great." He held out his arms, and the men fettered
them wrist to wrist. When they had finished he said calmly: " 'I
have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a
green bay tree. Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I
sought him, but he could not be found.' "

My lord turned from him, and pointed to me. He kept his eyes
upon my face while they shackled me hand and foot; then said
abruptly, "You have cords there: bind his arms to his sides." The
men wound the cords around me many times. "Draw them tight,"
commanded my lord.

There came a wrathful clank of the minister's chains. "The arm is
torn and inflamed from shoulder to wrist, as I make no doubt you
have been told!" he cried. "For very shame, man!"

"Draw them tighter," said my lord, between his teeth.

The men knotted the cords, and rose to their feet, to be dismissed
by my lord with a curt "You may go." They drew back to the foot
of the ladder, while the master of the ship went and perched
himself upon one of the rungs. "The air is fresher here beneath the
hatch," he remarked.

As for me, though I lay at my enemy's feet, I could yet set my teeth
and look him in the eyes. The cup was bitter, but I could drink it
with an unmoved face.

"Art paid?" he demanded. "Art paid for the tree in the red forest
without the haunted wood? Art paid, thou bridegroom?"

"No," I answered. "Bring her here to laugh at me as she laughed in
the twilight beneath the guesthouse window."

I thought he would murder me with the poniard he drew, but
presently he put it up.

"She is come to her senses," he said. "Up in the state cabin are
bright lights, and wine and laughter. There are gentlewomen
aboard, and I have been singing to the lute, to them - and to her.
She is saved from the peril into which you plunged her; she knows
that the King's Court of High Commission, to say nothing of the
hangman, will soon snap the fetters which she now shudders to
think of; that the King and one besides will condone her past short
madness. Her cheeks are roses, her eyes are stars. But now, when I
pressed her hand between the verses of my song, she smiled and
sighed and blushed. She is again the dutiful ward of the King, the
Lady Jocelyn Leigh - she hath asked to be so called" -

"You lie," I said. "She is my true and noble wife. She may sit in the
state cabin, in the air and warmth and light, she may even laugh
with her lips, but her heart is here with me in the hold."

As I spoke, I knew, and knew not how I knew, that the thing which
I had said was true. With that knowledge came a happiness so deep
and strong that it swept aside like straw the torment of those cords,
and the deeper hurt that I lay at his feet. I suppose my face altered,
and mirrored that blessed glow about my heart, for into his own
came a white fury, changing its beauty into something inhuman
and terrifying. He looked a devil baffled. For a minute he stood
there rigid, with hands clenched. "Embrace her heart, if thou
canst," he said, in a voice so low that it came like a whisper from
the realm he might have left. "I shall press my face against her
bosom."

Another minute of a silence that I disdained to break; then he
turned and went up the ladder. The seamen and the master
followed. The hatch was clapped to and fastened, and we were left
to the darkness and the heavy air, and to a grim endurance of what
could not be cured.

During those hours of thirst and torment I came indeed to know
the man who sat beside me. His hands were so fastened that he
could not loosen the cords, and there was no water for him to give
me; but he could and did bestow a higher alms, - the tenderness of
a brother, the manly sympathy of a soldier, the balm of the priest
of God. I lay in silence, and he spoke not often; but when he did
so, there was that in the tone of his voice - Another cycle of pain,
and I awoke from a half swoon, in which there was water to drink
and no anguish, to hear him praying beside me. He ceased to
speak, and in the darkness I heard him draw his breath hard and his
great muscles crack. Suddenly there came a sharp sound of
breaking iron, and a low "Thank Thee, Lord!" Another moment,
and I felt his hands busy at the knotted cords. "I will have them off
thee in a twinkling, Ralph," he said, "thanks to Him who taught my
hands to war, and my arms to break in two a bow of steel." As he
spoke, the cords loosened beneath his fingers.

I raised my head and laid it on his knee, and he put his great arm,
with the broken chain dangling from it, around me, and, like a
mother with a babe, crooned me to sleep with the twenty-third
psalm.



CHAPTER XXVI IN WHICH I AM BROUGHT TO TRIAL


MY lord came not again into the hold, and the untied cords and the
broken chain were not replaced. Morning and evening we were
brought a niggard allowance of bread and water; but the man who
carried it bore no light, and may not even have observed their
absence. We saw no one in authority. Hour by hour my wounds
healed and my strength returned. If it was a dark and noisome
prison, if there were hunger and thirst and inaction to be endured,
if we knew not how near to us might be a death of ignominy, yet
the minister and I found the jewel in the head of the toad; for in
that time of pain and heaviness we became as David and Jonathan.

At last some one came beside the brute who brought us food. A
quiet gentleman, with whitening hair and bright dark eyes, stood
before us. He had ordered the two men with him to leave open the
hatch, and he held in his hand a sponge soaked with vinegar.
"Which of you is - or rather was - Captain Ralph Percy?" he asked,
in a grave but pleasant voice.

"I am Captain Percy," I answered.

He looked at me with attention. "I have heard of you before," he
said. "I read the letter you wrote to Sir Edwyn Sandys, and thought
it an excellently conceived and manly epistle. What magic
transformed a gentleman and a soldier into a pirate?"

As he waited for me to speak, I gave him for answer, "Necessity."

"A sad metamorphosis," he said. "I had rather read of nymphs
changed into laurel and gushing springs. I am come to take you,
sir, before the officers of the Company aboard this ship, when, if
you have aught to say for yourself, you may say it. I need not tell
you, who saw so clearly some time ago the danger in which you
then stood, that your plight is now a thousandfold worse."

"I am perfectly aware of it," I said. "Am I to go in fetters?"

"No," he replied, with a smile. "I have no instructions on the
subject, but I will take it upon myself to free you from them, - even
for the sake of that excellently writ letter."

"Is not this gentleman to go too?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I have no orders to that effect."

While the men who were with him removed the irons from my
wrists and ankles he stood in silence, regarding me with a scrutiny
so close that it would have been offensive had I been in a position
to take offense. When they had finished I turned and held Jeremy's
hand in mine for an instant, then followed the new-comer to the
ladder and out of the hold; the two men coming after us, and
resolving themselves above into a guard. As we traversed the main
deck we came upon Diccon, busy with two or three others about
the ports. He saw me, and, dropping the bar that he held, started
forward, to be plucked back by an angry arm. The men who
guarded me pushed in between us, and there was no word spoken
by either. I walked on, the gentleman at my side, and presently
came to an open port, and saw, with an intake of my breath, the
sunshine, a dark blue heaven flecked with white, and a quiet
ocean. My companion glanced at me keenly.

"Doubtless it seems fair enough, after that Cimmerian darkness
below," he remarked. "Would you like to rest here a moment?"

"Yes," I said, and, leaning against the side of the port, looked out
at the beauty of the light.

"We are off Hatteras," he informed me, "but we have not met with
the stormy seas that vex poor mariners hereabouts. Those sails you
see on our quarter belong to our consort. We were separated by the
hurricane that nigh sunk us, and finally drove us, helpless as we
were, toward the Florida coast and across your path. For us that
was a fortunate reef upon which you dashed. The gods must have
made your helmsman blind, for he ran you into a destruction that
gaped not for you. Why did every wretch that we hung next
morning curse you before he died?"

"If I told you, you would not believe me," I replied.

I was dizzy with the bliss of the air and the light, and it seemed a
small thing that he would not believe me. The wind sounded in my
ears like a harp, and the sea beckoned. A white bird flashed down
into the crystal hollow between two waves, hung there a second,
then rose, a silver radiance against the blue. Suddenly I saw a
river, dark and ridged beneath thunderclouds, a boat, and in it, her
head pillowed upon her arm, a woman, who pretended that she
slept. With a shock my senses steadied, and I became myself
again. The sea was but the sea, the wind the wind; in the hold
below me lay my friend; somewhere in that ship was my wife; and
awaiting me in the state cabin were men who perhaps had the will,
as they had the right and the might, to hang me at the yardarm that
same hour.

"I have had my fill of rest," I said. "Whom am I to stand before?"

"The newly appointed officers of the Company, bound in this ship
for Virginia," he answered. "The ship carries Sir Francis Wyatt, the
new Governor; Master Davison, the Secretary; young Clayborne,
the surveyor general; the knight marshal, the physician general,
and the Treasurer, with other gentlemen, and with fair ladies, their
wives and sisters. I am George Sandys, the Treasurer."

The blood rushed to my face, for it hurt me that the brother of Sir
Edwyn Sandys should believe that the firing of those guns had
been my act. His was the trained observation of the traveler and
writer, and he probably read the color aright. "I pity you, if I can
no longer esteem you," he said, after a pause. "I know no sorrier
sight than a brave man's shield reversed."

I bit my lip and kept back the angry word. The next minute saw us
at the door of the state cabin. It opened, and my companion
entered, and I after him, with my two guards at my back. Around a
large table were gathered a number of gentlemen, some seated,
some standing. There were but two among them whom I had seen
before, - the physician who had dressed my wound and my Lord
Carnal. The latter was seated in a great chair, beside a gentleman
with a pleasant active face and light brown curling hair, - the new
Governor, as I guessed. The Treasurer, nodding to the two men to
fall back to the window, glided to a seat upon my lord's other
hand, and I went and stood before the Governor of Virginia.

For some moments there was silence in the cabin, every man being
engaged in staring at me with all his eyes; then the Governor
spoke: "It should be upon your knees, sir."

"I am neither petitioner nor penitent," I said. "I know no reason
why I should kneel, your Honor."

"There 's reason, God wot, why you should be both!" he exclaimed.
"Did you not, now some months agone, defy the writ of the King
and Company, refusing to stand when called upon to do so in the
King's name?"

"Yes."

"Did you not, when he would have stayed your lawless flight, lay
violent hands upon a nobleman high in the King's favor, and,
overpowering him with numbers, carry him out of the King's
realm?"

"Yes."

"Did you not seduce from her duty to the King, and force to fly
with you, his Majesty's ward, the Lady Jocelyn Leigh?"

"No," I said. "There was with me only my wife, who chose to
follow the fortunes of her husband."

He frowned, and my lord swore beneath his breath. "Did you not,
falling in with a pirate ship, cast in your lot with the scoundrels
upon it, and yourself turn pirate?"

"In some sort."

"And become their chief?"

"Since there was no other situation open, - yes."

"Taking with you as captives upon the pirate ship that lady and that
nobleman?"

"Yes."

"You proceeded to ravage the dominions of the King of Spain,
with whom his Majesty is at peace" -

"Like Drake and Raleigh, - yes," I said.

He smiled, then frowned "Tempora mutantur," he said dryly. "And
I have never heard that Drake or Raleigh attacked an English
ship."

"Nor have I attacked one," I said.

He leaned back in his chair and stared at me. "We saw the flame
and heard the thunder of your guns, and our rigging was cut by the
shot. Did you expect me to believe that last assertion?"

"No."

"Then you might have spared yourself - and us - that lie," he said
coldly.

The Treasurer moved restlessly in his seat, and began to whisper to
his neighbor the Secretary. A young man, with the eyes of a hawk
and an iron jaw, - Clayborne, the surveyor general, - who sat at the
end of the table beside the window, turned and gazed out upon the
clouds and the sea, as if, contempt having taken the place of
curiosity, he had no further interest in the proceedings. As for me,
I set my face like a flint, and looked past the man who might have
saved me that last speech of the Governor's as if he had never
been.

There was a closed door in the cabin, opposite the one by which I
had entered. Suddenly from behind it came the sound of a short
struggle, followed by the quick turn of a key in the lock. The door
was flung open, and two women entered the cabin. One, a fair
young gentlewoman, with tears in her brown eyes, came forward
hurriedly with outspread hands.

"I did what I could, Frank!" she cried. "When she would not listen
to reason, I e'en locked the door; but she is strong, for all that she
has been ill, and she forced the key out of my hand!" She looked at
the red mark upon the white hand, and two tears fell from her long
lashes upon her wild-rose cheeks.

With a smile the Governor put out an arm and drew her down upon
a stool beside him, then rose and bowed low to the King's ward.
"You are not yet well enough to leave your cabin, as our worthy
physician general will assure you, lady," he said courteously, but
firmly. "Permit me to lead you back to it."

Still smiling he made as if to advance, when she stayed him with a
gesture of her raised hand, at once so majestic and so pleading that
it was as though a strain of music had passed through the stillness
of the cabin.

"Sir Francis Wyatt, as you are a gentleman, let me speak," she said.
It was the voice of that first night at Weyanoke, all pathos, all
sweetness, all entreating.

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