Cup of Gold [Золотая чаша] Read online

  “I will take Maracaibo,” he cried in desperation. “I will drown this lusting in a bowl of horror. I will pillage Maracaibo, tear it to pieces, and leave it bleeding in the sand.

  (There is a woman in the Cup of Gold, and they worship her for unnamable beauties.)

  “Make the gathering at the Isle de la Vaca! Call in true hearts from the corners of the sea! We go to riches!”

  His ships flew out to thebayof Maracaibo and the town was frantic in defense.

  “Run into this bottle harbor! Yes, under the guns!”

  Cannon balls cried through the air and struck up clouds of dirt from the walls, but the defense held ground.

  “It will not fall? Then take it in assault!”

  Powder pots flew over the walls, tearing and maiming the defenders in their burst.

  “Who are these wolves?” they cried. “Ah, brothers! we must fight until we die! We must ask no clemency, brothers.

  If we fall, our dear city-”

  Ladders rose against the fort, and a wave of roaring men swarmed over the walls.

  “Ah, San Lorenzo! hide us! bear us away! These are no men, but devils. Hear me! Hear me! Quarter!

  Ah, Jesus! where art thou now?”

  “Throw down the walls! Let no two stones stand together!”

  (There is a woman in the Cup of Gold, and she is lovely as the sun.)

  “Grant no quarter! Kill the Spanish rats! Kill all of them!”

  And Maracaibo lay pleading at his feet. Doors were torn from the houses, and the rooms gutted of every movable thing. They herded the women to a church and locked them in. Then the prisoners were brought to Henry Morgan.

  “Here is an old man, sir. We are sure he has riches, but he has hidden them away and we can never find any.”

  “Then put his feet in the fire! — why, he is a brazen fool! Break his arms! — He will not tell? Put the whip-cord about his temples! — Oh, kill him! kill him and stop his screaming-Perhaps he had no money-”

  (There is a woman in Panama-)

  “Have you scratched out every grain of gold? Place the city at ransom! We must have riches after pain.”

  A fleet of Spanish ships came sailing to the rescue.

  “A Spanish squadron coming? We will fight them! No, no; we shall run from them if we can get away.

  Our hulls lag in the water with their weight of gold. Kill the prisoners!”

  (-she is lovely as the sun.)

  And Captain Morgan sailed from broken Maracaibo. Two hundred and fifty thousand pieces of eight were in his ships, and rolls of silken stuffs and plates of silver and sacks of spices. There were golden images from the Cathedral, and vestments crusted with embroidery of pearls. And the city was a fire-swept wreck.

  “We are richer than we could have hoped. There will be joy in Tortuga when we come. Every man a hero! We shall have a mad riot of a time.”

  (La Santa Roja is in Panama.)

  “Ah, God! then if I must, I must. But I fear I go to my death. It is a dreadful thing to be attempting. If this is my desire, I must, though I die.” He called young Coeur de Gris to him.

  “You have distinguished yourself in this fight, my friend. “

  “I have done what was necessary, sir. “

  “But you fought finely. I saw you when we engaged. Now I have made you my lieutenant in the field, my second in command. You are brave, you are sagacious, and you are my friend. I can trust you, and who among my men will bear this trust if it be worth his while to fail?”

  “It is a great honor, sir. I will pay you, surely, with my fidelity. My mother will be very pleased.”

  “Yes,” said Captain Morgan; “you are a young fool, and that is a virtue in this business as long as one has a leader. Now the men are straining to get back that they may spend their money. If it were possible they would be pushing the ships to hurry them. What will you do with your money, Coeur de Gris?”

  “Why, I shall send half to my mother. The remaining sum I shall divide in two. Part I shall put away, and on the other I expect to be drunk for a few days, or perhaps a week. It is good to be drunk after fighting.”

  “Drunkenness has never been a pleasure to me,” the captain said. “It makes me very sad. But I have a new venture turning in my brain. Coeur de Gris, what is the richest city of the western world? What place has been immune from the slightest gesture of the Brotherhood? Where might we all make millions?”

  “But, sir, you do not think-Surely you cannot consider it possible to take-”

  “I will take Panama-even the Cup of Gold.”

  “How may you do this thing? The city is strongly guarded with walls and troops, and the way across the isthmus is nigh impassable but for the burro trail. How will you do this thing?”

  “I must take Panama. I must capture the Cup of Gold.” The captain’s jaw set fiercely.

  Now Coeur de Gris was smiling quietly.

  “Why do you grin at me?” demanded Captain Morgan. “I was thinking of a chance remark I made a little time ago, that Panama was like to go the way of Troy town.”

  “Ah! this nameless woman is in your mind. Dismiss her! It may be there exists no such woman.”

  “But then, sir, we are rich enough of this last spoil.”

  “It would be no evil thing to grow richer. I am tired of plundering. I would rest securely.”

  Coeur de Gris hesitated a time, while his eyes were covered with a soft veil.

  “I am thinking, sir, that when we come to Panama every man will be at his friend’s throat over the Red Saint.”

  “Oh, you may trust me to keep order among my men-strict order-though I hang half of them to do it.

  A while ago I sent word to Panama that I would go there, but I did it as a joke. And I wonder, now, whether they have been fortifying themselves. Perhaps they, too, thought it a joke. Go, now, Coeur de Gris, and speak to no man of this. I make you my ambassador. Let the men throw their gold away.

  Encourage gambling-here-now-on the ship. Give them an example at the taverns-an expensive example. Then they will be driven to go out with me. I must have an army this time, my friend, and even then we may all die. Perhaps that is the chief joy of life-to risk it. Do my work well, Coeur de Gris, and it may be one day you will be richer than you can think.”

  Young Coeur de Gris stood musing by the mast.

  “Our captain, our cold captain, has been bitten by this great, nebulous rumoring. How strange this pattern is! It is as though the Red Saint had been stolen from my arms. My dream is violated. I wonder, when they know, if every man will carry this feeling of a bitter loss-will hate the captain for stealing his desire.”

  Sir Edward Morgan led forces against St. Eustatius, and, while the battle raged, a slim, brown Indian slipped up and drove a long knife into his stomach. The Lieutenant-Governor set his lips in a straight, hard line, and crumpled to the ground.

  “My white breeches will be ruined,” he thought. “Why did the devil have to do it, just when we were getting on so nicely. I should have got special thanks from his Majesty, and now I shall not be here to receive them. Heaven! he chose a painful place!” And then the full tragedy struck him.

  “An ordinary knife,” he muttered; “and in the stomach. I should have preferred a sword in the hand of an equal-but a knife-in the stomach! I must look disreputable with all this blood and dirt on me. And I cannot straighten up! Christ! the wretch struck a sensitive spot.”

  His men sadly bore him to Port Royal.

  “It was unavoidable,” he told the Governor; “slipped up on me with a knife and stabbed me in the stomach. Such a little devil he couldn’t reach any higher, I suppose. Report the affair to the Crown, will you, Sir? And please do not mention the knife-or the stomach. And now will you leave me with my daughter? I shall be dying soon.”

  Elizabethstood over him in a darkened room.

  “Are you hurt badly, father?”

  “Yes, quite badly. I shall die presently.”

  “Nonsense, papa; you are
only joking to excite me.”

  “Elizabeth, does it sound like nonsense-and have you ever heard me joke? I have several things to speak of, and the time is very short. What will you do? There is little money left. We have been living on my salary ever since the King made his last general suggestion for a loan.”

  “But what are you talking about, papa! You cannot die and leave me here alone and lost in the colonies.

  You cannot, cannot do it!”

  “Whether I can or not, I shall die presently. Now let us discuss this matter while we can. Perhaps your cousin who has come to such fame through robbery will care for you, Elizabeth. I am pained at the thought, but-but-it is necessary to live-very necessary. And after all, he is your cousin.”

  “I will not believe it. I simply will not believe it. You cannot die!”

  “You must stay with the Governor until you can meet your cousin. Tell him the exact standing of the matter; no fawning-but do not be too proud. Remember he is your own blood cousin, even though he is a robber. ” His heavy breathing filled the room. Elizabeth had begun to cry softly, like a child who cannot quite tell whether or not it is hurt. Finally words were forced from Sir Edward’s lips.

  “I have heard that you can tell a gentleman by the way he dies-but I should like to groan. Robert would have groaned if he had wished. Of course, Robert was queer-but then-he was my own brother-he would have shrieked if he had felt like it. Elizabeth, will you-please-leave the room. I am sorry-but I must groan. Never speak of it-Elizabeth-you promise-never-never to speak of it?”

  And when she came again, Sir Edward Morgan was dead.

  Spring had come to Cambria, welling up out of the Indies and out of the hot, dry heart of Africa, and this the fifteenth Spring since Henry went away. Old Robert liked to think, and then came curiously to believe, that his son sent the Spring to Cambria out of the tropic places. There was a green fur climbing up the hills, and the trees were testing new, fragile leaves in the winds.

  Old Robert’s face had grown more set. Around his mouth lived less a smile and more a grimace, as though some ancient, anguished smile had frozen there. Ah! the years had been lonely, barren things, with nothing left in their arms for him. He knew the meaning, now, of Gwenliana’s words-that age brought nothing with it save a cold, restless waiting; a dull expectancy of a state that might not be imagined with any assurance. Perhaps he waited for the time when Henry would come to him again. But that could scarcely be so. He was not at all sure that he wanted to see Henry any more. It would be disturbing.

  When one is old, one hates disturbing things.

  For a long time he had wondered, “What is Henry doing now? what seeing now?” And then the boy had faded slightly, had come to be like people in old books-not quite real, yet real enough to be remembered. But Robert thought often of this abstract person, his son, of whom he heard wavering rumors now and again.

  With waking on the fine morning of the Spring, Robert had said, “I will climb up to see Merlin today.

  Strange how that old man lives under the growing pressure of his years. There must be more than a hundred of them now. His body is a thin wisp-nothing more than a suggestion that here was once a body. But William says, if you can be picking thought out of William’s speaking, that his voice is golden and strong as always, and that he still talks tremendous nonsense that would not be tolerated at London.

  It is amazing how this road-mender has his whole life curled like a kitten around four days in London. But I must be going to Merlin. It is not likely that I shall go again.”

  The steep, rocky path was a thing of torture to him; more a cruel thing because of his memory of lithe, powerful legs, and lungs as tireless as bellows. Once he had led all comers in the mountain race, but now he climbed a bit, then rested on a stone, and climbed again-up and up into the cleft and over the rock shoulder. It wasnoon when he came at last to Crag-top.

  Merlin met him at the door before he had time to knock, and Merlin had no more changed than the harps and spear-heads hanging to his walls. He seemed to have discarded time like a garment. Merlin came to Robert with no surprise. It was as though he had known of this slow pilgrimage a thousand years before the day had happened.

  “It is very long, Robert, since you climbed the path to me, and long since I went down it.” And “down, down” sang the harps. He spoke the language of the strings, and they responded like a distant choir in high mass of the mountains.

  “But it’s an old man who climbs to you now, Merlin. The trail is a beast enemy to wrestle with. You seem no older. I wonder when you will come to die. Do not your years sometimes argue that question with you?”

  “Why, to speak truthfully, Robert, I have taken it in my mind several times-but always there were too many things to think about. I could not take the time to die. If I did, I might not be able to think ever again.

  “For up here, Robert, that furtive hope the valley men call faith becomes a questionable thing. Oh, without doubt, if there were a great many about me, and they all intoning endlessly the chant, ‘There is a wise, kind God; surely we shall go on living after death,’ then I might be preparing for the coming life. But here, alone, halfway up the sky, I am afraid that death would interrupt my musing. The mountains are a kind of poultice for a man’s abstract pain. Among them he laughs-oh, far more often than he cries.”

  “You know,” said Robert, “my mother, the old Gwenliana, made a last, curious prophecy before she died. ‘This night the world ends,’ she said, ‘and there will be no more earth to walk upon.’ “

  “Robert, I think she spoke truth. I think her dying words were truth, whatever may have been her other auguries. This gnawing thought comes visiting, sometimes, and because of it I am afraid to die-horribly afraid. If by my living I give life to you, and fresh existence to the fields and trees and all the long green world, it would be an unutterable deed to wipe them all out like a chalk drawing. I must not-yet awhile.

  “But enough of these foreboding things. There is no laughter in them. You, Robert, have been too long in the valley of men. Your lips laugh, but there is no amusement in your heart. I think you place your lips so, like twigs over a trap, to conceal your pain from God. Once you tried to laugh with all your soul, but you did not make the satirist’s concession-that of buying with a little amusement at yourself the privilege of laughing a great deal at others.”

  “I know that I am defeated, Merlin, and there seems to be no help for it. Victory, or luck, or whatever you wish to call it, appears to lie hidden in a chosen few as babies’ teeth hide under the gums. Of late years this God has a hard, calculating game with me. There have been moments when I thought he cheated.”

  Merlin spoke slowly: “Once I played against a dear young god with goat’s feet, and that game was the reason for my coming here. But then, I made the great concession and signed with sad laughter. Robert, did I not hear a long time past that you were roving in your mind? Surely William stopped by and told me you had grown insane. Did you not do reprehensible things in your rose garden?”

  Robert smiled bitterly. “That was one of this God’s tricks,” he said. “I will tell you how it was. One day, when I was pulling the dead leaves from my roses, it came upon me to make a symbol. This is no unusual thing. How often do men stand on hill tops with their arms outstretched, how often kneel in prayer and cross themselves. I pulled a bloom and threw it into the air, and the petals showered down about me. It seemed that this act gathered up and told the whole story of my life in a gesture. Then the loveliness of white petals on black earth absorbed me, and I forgot my symbol. I threw another and another, until the ground was snowed with rose leaves. Suddenly I looked up and saw a dozen men standing about laughing at me. They had come by from church. ‘Hee!’ they said, ‘Robert has lost his mind. Hee! his sense is slipping out of him. Ho! he is a child again, throwing rose petals.’ It seemed a crazed God who could allow this thing.”

  Merlin was shaking with a silent glee.

  “Oh, Rober
t! Robert! why must you blame the world when it protects itself against you? I think God and the world are one to you. If there were ten people in the valley below who liked the look of rose leaves on the ground, you would only be a very queer person, interesting and something of a curiosity. They would bring strangers to your house on Sunday afternoons and exhibit you. But, since there are none, of course you are a radical who must be locked up or hanged. Judgment of insanity is truly the hanging of a man’s mind If it be whispered of him that his brain wanders, then nothing he can say will matter to any one ever again, except as a thing to laugh at.

  “Can you not see, Robert? People have so often been hurt and trapped and tortured by ideas and contraptions which they did not understand, that they have come to believe all things passing their understanding are vicious and evil-things to be stamped out and destroyed by the first corner. They only protect themselves, thus, against the ghastly hurts that can come to them from little things grown up.”

  “I know,” said Robert; “I know all that, and I do not cry out against it. My great complaint is that the only possession I carry about with me is a bag of losses. I am the owner solely of the memory of things I used to have. Perhaps it is well-for I seem to love them more now that I have them not. But I cannot understand how this fortune may be born hidden in a chosen few. My own son assaults and keeps each one of his desires, if the winds tell truth.”

  “You had a son, Robert; I remember now. I think I prophesied that he would rule some world or other if he did not grow up.”

  “And so he does. News of him comes out of the south on a light, inaccurate wind. Rumor has wings like bats. It is said that he rules a wild race of pirates; that he has captured towns and pillaged cities. The English are elated, and call him a hero and a patriotic man-and so do I, sometimes.

  But I fear if I were a Spaniard, he would be only a successful robber. I have heard-though I do not believe it; I do not want to believe it-that he has tortured prisoners.”