Cup of Gold [Золотая чаша] Read online

  She laid her snare for him on his first night back from sea-a large stone flagon filled with Peruvian wine, and a priest, bribed with a stolen coin, waiting in the shadow of a tree. Henry was very tired. He had gone out short-handed and helped to work the ship himself. The little vine-clothed hut was a pleasant, restful place to him. A full white moon cast silver splashes in the sea below and strewed the ground with scarves of purple light. Sweetly there sang a little jungle breeze among the palms.

  She brought the wine and filled a cup for him. “Do you love Paulette?”

  “Ah, yes! as God sees me, I love Paulette; dear, sweet Paulette.” Another cup, and still, persistently-“Are you so sure you love Paulette?”

  “Paulette is a little star hanging to my breast by a silver chain.”

  Another cup.

  “Do you love none other save only your Paulette?”

  “I came longingly to find Paulette; the thought of her sailed on the sea with me.” And his arms locked tightly around her little golden waist.

  Another and another and another; then his arms fell away from her and his hands clenched. The girl cried fearfully, “Oh! do you love Paulette?” for Henry had grown morose and strange and cold.

  “I shall tell you of an old time,” he said hoarsely. “I was a little boy, a joyous little boy, yet old enough to love. There was a girl-and she was named Elizabeth-the daughter of a wealthy squire. Ah! she was lovely as this night about us, quiet and lovely as that slender palm tree under the moon. I loved her with that love a man may exercise but once. Even our hearts seemed to go hand in hand. How I remember the brave plans we told-she and I, there, sitting on a hillside in the night. We were to live in a great house and have dear children growing up about us. You can never know such love, Paulette.

  “Ah, well! It could not last. The gods slay happiness in jealousy. Nothing good can last. A gang of bastard sailors roved through the land and carried me off-a little boy to be sold for a slave in the Indies.

  It was a bitter thing to lose Elizabeth-a bitter thing the years cannot forget.” And he was weeping softly by her side.

  Paulette was bewildered by the change in him. She stroked his hair and his eyes, until his breath came more calmly. Then she began again, with almost helpless patience, like a teacher questioning a dull child.

  “But-do you love Paulette?”

  He leaped up and glared at her.

  “You? Love you? Why, you are just a little animal! a pretty little golden animal, for sure, but a form of flesh-no more. May one worship a god merely because he is big, or cherish a land which has no virtue save its breadth, or love a woman whose whole realm is her flesh? Ah, Paulette! you have no soul at all! Elizabeth had a white winged soul. I love you-yes-with what you have to be loved-the body.

  But Elizabeth-I loved Elizabeth with my soul.”

  Paulette was puzzled.

  “What is this soul?” she asked. “And how may I get one if I have not one already? And where is this soul of yours that I have never seen it or heard it at all? And if they cannot be seen, or heard, or touched, how do you know she had this soul?”

  “Hush!” he cried furiously. “Hush! or I box your mouth and have you whipped on the cross. You speak of things beyond you. What can you know of love that lies without your fleshly juggling?”

  Christmas came to the Hot Tropics, the fourth Christmas of Henry’s servitude. And James Flower brought him a small box done up with colored string.

  “It is a gift of the season,” he said, and his eyes sparkled with delight while Henry untied the package.

  There was a little teakwood box, and in it, lying on the scarlet silk of its lining, the torn fragments of his slavery. Henry took the shreds of paper from the box and stared at them, and then he laughed unsteadily and put his head down on his hands.

  “Now you are no longer a servant, but my son,” the planter said. “Now you are my son, whom I have taught strange knowledges-and I shall teach you more, far more. We will live here always and talk together in the evenings.”

  Henry raised his head.

  “Oh! but I cannot, cannot stay. I must be off a-buccaneering.”

  “You-you cannot stay? But, Henry, I have planned our life. You would not leave me here alone.”

  “Sir,” said Henry, “I must be off a-buccaneering. Why, in all my years it has been the one aim. I must go, sir.”

  “But, Henry, dear Henry, you shall have half my plantation, and all of it when I am dead-if only you will stay with me.”

  “That may not be,” young Henry cried. “I must be off to make me a name. It is not given that I live a planter. Sir, there are plannings in my head that have grown perfect with pondering. And nothing may be allowed to interfere with them.”

  James Flower slumped forward in his chair.

  “It will be very lonely here without you. I don’t quite know what I shall do without you.”

  Henry’s mind carried him back to that old time, with Robert smiling into the fire and saying these same words-“It will be so lonely here without you, son.” He wondered if his mother still sat coldly upright and silent. Surely she would have got over it. People always got over the things they feared so much. And then he thought of small Paulette who would be crying with terror in her hut when he told her.

  “There is a little servant girl,” he said; “little Paulette. I have protected her. And if I have ever pleased you, will you do these things for me? Always, always keep her in the house and never let her be sent to the fields, nor whipped, nor bred with any of the blacks. Will you do these things for me surely?”

  “Of course I will,” James Flower said. “Ah, but it has been good to have you here, Henry-good to hear your voice in the evening. What will I do in the evening now? There is none to take your place, for you have very truly been my son. It will be lonely here without you, boy.”

  Said Henry, “The toiling I have done in your service has been more than repaid with the knowledge you have poured into my ears these same evenings. And I shall miss you, sir, more than I can say. But can’t you understand? I must go a-buccaneering and take a Spanish town, for the thought is on me that if a man planned carefully, and considered his chances and the men he had, the thing might well be done. I have studied the ancient wars, and I must be making a name for myself and a fortune. Then, when I have the admiration of men, perhaps I shall come back to you, sir, and we may sit and talk again in the evenings. You will remember my wish about Paulette?”

  “Who is Paulette?” the planter asked.

  “Why, the servant girl I mentioned. Never let her go with the slaves, because I am fond of her.”

  “Ah, yes! I remember! And where do you go now, Henry?”

  “To Jamaica. My uncle, Sir Edward, has long been Lieutenant-Governor there in Port Royal. But I have never seen him-well, because I was a bond-servant, and he is a gentleman.

  I have a letter to him that my father gave me years past. Perhaps he will help me to buy a ship for my plundering.”

  “I would help you buy a ship. You have been very good to me,” the planter said hopefully.

  Now Henry was dipped in a kind of shame, for in the box under his bed there glistened a pile of golden coins-over a thousand pounds.

  “No,” he said, “no; I have more payment in your teaching and in the father you have been to me than money could ever equal.” Now he was going, Henry knew that he had grown to love this red-faced, wistful man.

  Strong, glistening blacks pulled at the oars of the canoe, and it went skimming toward an anchored ship, a ship commissioned by the States-General to carry black slaves from Guinea to the islands. James flower, sitting in the canoe’s stern, was very red and very silent. But as they neared the ship’s side, he lifted up his head and spoke pleadingly to Henry.

  “There are books on the shelves that you have never read.”

  “I shall come back, one day, and read them.”

  “There are things in my mind I have never told you, boy.”

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nbsp; “When I have the admiration of men, I shall come to you and you shall tell them to me. “

  “You swear it? “

  “Well-yes, I swear. “

  “And how long will it take you to do these things, Henry? “

  “I cannot tell; one year-or ten-or twenty. I must make a very admirable name.” Henry was climbing over the ship’s side.

  “I shall be lonely in the evenings, son. “

  “And I, too, sir. Look! we cast off! Good-by, sir. You will remember Paulette? “

  “Paulette? — Paulette? — Ah, yes; I remember. “

  Henry Morgan came to the English town of Port Royal and left his baggage on the beach while he went looking for his uncle.

  “Do you know where I may find the Lieutenant-Governor?” he asked in the streets.

  “His Palace is yonder, young man, and who knows he may be in it.”

  His Palace-it was like a British gentleman become an official far from home. It was like the man Robert Morgan had described. His letters dated from the Palace of the Lieutenant-Governor. Henry found the Palace, a low grubby house with walls of whitewashed mud and a roof of red tiles badly molded. There was a gaudy halberdier standing at the door, holding his great, ineffectual weapon rigidly before him, the while he maintained a tortured decorum in the face of a swarm of enemy flies.

  The halberd lowered across the pathway as Henry approached.

  “I am looking for Sir Edward Morgan.”

  “What do you wish with His Excellency?”

  “Why, you see, sir, he is my uncle, and I wish to speak with him.”

  The soldier scowled suspiciously and stiffened his hold on the halberd. Then Henry remembered his lessons of the plantation. Perhaps this man, for all his red coat, might be something of a slave.

  “Get out of my way, you damned pup,” he cried. “Get out of my way or I’ll see you hanged.”

  The man cowered and almost dropped his weapon. “Yes, sir. I’ll send your word, sir.” He blew a little silver call, and when a servant in green lace came to the door, he said: “A young gentleman to see His Excellency.”

  Henry was led into a little room made dark with thick, gray hangings edged with dull gold. There were three dim portraits on the walls, in black frames; two cavaliers in plumed bats, holding their swords horizontally so they looked like stiff, slender tails, and a pretty lady with powdered hair and a silken gown which left her shoulders and half her breasts uncovered.

  From some place beyond the curtained doorway there came the thin twanging of a harp slow struck.

  The servant took Henry’s letter and left him alone.

  And he felt very much alone. It was a house of cold, precise hair-splitting. One was aware of a polite contempt even in the pictured faces on the wall. The British arms were embroidered on the curtains of the door, the lion on one side, holding half the shield, and the unicorn, with his half, on the other. When the curtains hung straight the design was complete. In this room, Henry began to fear his uncle.

  But all these thoughts of his were shocked from his brain when Sir Edward appeared. It was his father as he remembered him, and yet never his father. Old Robert would never have had a mustache like an eyelash, and nothing in Robert’s life could have made him pinch his lips together until they were as thin as the mustache. These two might have been born alike as beans, but each had created his own mouth.

  Robert had spoken truth; this man was his strutting counterpart. But Sir Edward was like an actor, who, though cast in a ridiculous role, yet makes his part seem the correct thing and all others absurd. His purple coat with lace at the neck and wrists, the long rapier, lean as a pencil in a scabbard of gray silk, the gray silk stockings and soft gray shoes with bowed ribbons on them, seemed to Henry the highest type of proper wear. His own good clothing was shabby by comparison.

  His uncle had been looking at him steadily, waiting for Henry to speak first.

  “I am Henry Morgan, sir-Robert’s son,” he began simply.

  “I see you are. There is a resemblance-a faint likeness. And what may I do for you?”

  “Why, I–I don’t know. I came to call on you and inform you of my existence.”

  “That was kind of you-ah-very kind.”

  It was difficult to broach speech into this field of almost sneering courtesy. Henry asked, “Have you heard any single thing of my parents in the long five years I have been out?”

  “Five years! What have you been doing, pray?”

  “I was a bond-servant, sir. But of my parents?”

  “Your mother is dead.”

  “My mother is dead,” Henry repeated in a whisper. He wondered if she had died soon after he had gone. He did not feel very badly about it, and yet the words sounded such tremendous things, such final things. This was the end of something that might never be again. “My mother is dead,” he murmured.

  “And my father?”

  “I have heard that your father does peculiar things in his rose garden. Squire Rhys wrote me of it. He plucks the full flowers and casts them into the air like one amazed. The ground is covered with petals and the neighbors stand about and laugh at him. Robert was never normal; indeed, he was never quite sane, or he might have gone far with James I. I, for one, always thought he would come to some disgrace or other. He revered nothing worthy of reverence. Why must he do this thing in the open, with the people jeering? It brings ridicule on his-ah-relatives.”

  “And do you think he is really insane, Uncle?”

  “I do not know,” Sir Edward said, and added with a touch of impatience, “I merely quoted Squire Rhys’ letter. My position does not allow me time for vain conjecture-nor much time for idle conversation,” he said pointedly.

  The methodic twanging of the harp had ceased, and now the curtain of the door was thrust aside and a slender girl entered the room. It was difficult to see her in this dark place. It was plain she was not beautiful, but rather proudly pretty. She was softly dressed and her face was pale. Even her hair was pale fragile gold. Altogether she seemed a wan, tired echo of Sir Edward.

  The girl was startled at seeing Henry there, and he found that he was a little afraid of her in the same manner that he was growing to fear Sir Edward. She looked at Henry as though he were some distasteful food which only the strict rules of courtesy prevented her from pushing away from her place.

  “Your cousin Henry,” Sir Edward said shortly; and, “My motherless daughter, Elizabeth.” Then, nervously, as though no good could possibly come of this contact, “Hadn’t you better practice your music a little longer, my dear?”

  She dropped a suggestion of a curtsey to Henry, and in a voice like her father’s, greeted him.

  “How d’ye do. Yes, sir, I think I had better practice. That last piece is difficult but beautiful.” And she disappeared behind the curtain whence came again the slow, accurate striking of the harp.

  Henry gripped his resolve, though he was afraid of this man.

  “There is a thing I wish to speak of, sir. I want to go a-buccaneering, Uncle-on the sea, in a great ship with guns. And when I have taken prizes, and a cloud of men gather to my reputation, then I would be capturing a Spanish town for plunder and ransom. I am a good sailor, my uncle. I can navigate in any sea, I think; and I have it in me to plan carefully my campaign. I have read a great lot on the ancient wars.

  The buccaneers have never been the force I mean to make them. Why, I could form armies and navies of them, my dear uncle. In time I would lead the whole Free Brotherhood of the Coast, and it would be an armed power to reckon with.

  “These things I have considered in the long years of my slavery. There is a crying in my heart to do these things. I think the end of all my dreaming is a great name and a great fortune. I know my powers. I am twenty years old; I have had several years at sea; and I have a thousand pounds. The man who helps me now-who goes with me as partner-I will make rich. I am so very sure I can do these things-so very sure.

  “I ask you, my uncle, to ad
d to my thousand pounds enough so that I may buy a fitted ship and gather the free, brave spirits about me to do my will. If you will place another thousand pounds in my hands, I swear to make you richer than you are.”

  The harp was no longer sounding. At the beginning of the boy’s outburst, Sir Edward had held up his hand as though to stop him, but the words plunged on. And when the harp had been silenced, Sir Edward looked uneasily toward the door. Now he seemed to bring his interest back to Henry.

  “I have no money to risk in unsure ventures,” he said sharply. “And I have no more time for talk. The Governor is coming to consult with me in a moment. But I would say that you are a wild, careless boy who is like to come to hanging of your ventures. Your father is like you, only his is a wildness of the mind.

  “And I must inform you that there is peace between Spain and England; not very good feeling, it is true, but still, peace. If you go marauding it will be my duty to see you punished, sorry for it though I may be.

  The Roundheads are no longer in power and those wild things that Cromwell overlooked are carefully watched now. Remember what I say, for I would not like to hang my nephew. Now I must really bid you good day.”

  Tears of resentment stood in Henry’s eyes.

  “Thank you for coming to see me,” his uncle said. “Good-by.” And he went through the curtained doorway.

  In the street, Henry walked moodily along. He saw his cousin a short distance ahead of him, a tall Negro attendant upon her. He continued slowly that she might leave him behind, but the girl lagged on her way.

  “Perhaps she wishes to speak with me,” Henry thought, and quickened his steps to come up with her.

  He saw, incredulously, what the darkened room had hidden. She was only a little girl, not more than fourteen at the most. Elizabeth looked up as he came beside her.

  “Do you find interesting things to be doing here in the Indies?” Henry asked.

  “As many as one might expect,” she replied. “We have been here a good while, you know.” And touching her slave’s arm with her little parasol, she turned into a crossing street, and left young Henry looking after her.