Sir Mortimer

VI

Now Neptune keep the plate-fleet at Cartagena!" whistled Arden. "When I go home I'll dress in cloth of gold, eat tongues of peacocks, and drink dissolved pearls!"

"When I go home I'll build again my father's house," cried Henry Sedley.

"In Plymouth port there's a bark I know," quoth Baldry. "When I go home she's mine,—I'll make of her another Star!"

"When I go home—" said Sir Mortimer, and paused. The early light was on his face, a deeper light within his eyes that saw the rose which he should gather when he went home. Then, since he would not utter so deep and dear a thought—"When we go home," he said, and began to speak—half in earnest, half in relief from the gravity of the past council—of that returning. By degrees the fire burned, and he whose spirit the live coal touched as it touched Sidney's and, more rarely, Walter Raleigh's, bore his listeners with him in a rhapsody of anticipation. Long fronds of palm drooped without the room which held them, Englishmen in a world or savage or Spanish, but their spirits followed the speaker to green fields of Kent or Devon. They saw the English summer, saw the twilight fall, heard the lonely tinkle of far sheep-bells, heard the nightingales singing beneath the moon that shone on England. Friends' homes opened to them; Grenville welcomed them to Stowe, Sidney to charmed Penshurst. Then to London and the Triple Tun! Bow Bells rang for them; they drank in the inn's long-room; their names were in men's mouths. What welcome, what clashing of the bells, when they should sail up the Thames again—the Mere Honour, the Cygnet, the Marigold, and the Phoenix—with treasure in their holds, and for pilot that bright angel Fame! What should they buy with their treasure? what should they do with their fame? Treasure should beget stout ships, stout hearts to sail them; fame, laid to increase, might swell to deathless glory! Sea-captains now, sea-kings would the English be, gathering tribute from the waters and the winds, bringing gifts to England—frankincense of wealth, myrrh of knowledge, spikenard of power!—till, robed and crowned, she rose above the peoples, Joseph's sheaf, Joseph's star!

On went the charmed words, each a lantern flashed on thought, grave, poetic, telling of triumph, yet far removed from gross optimism, not without that strange, melancholy note sounding now and again amongst the age's crashing chords. Abruptly his voice fell, but presently with a lighter note he broke the silence in which his listeners gazed upon the stately vision he had conjured up. "Ah, we will talk to Frank Drake of this night! Canst not hear Richard Hawkins laugh in the Triple Tun's long-room? The Queen, too, in her palace will laugh,—like a man with the flash in her eye and her white hand clenched! And they whom we love.... What is the word for to-night, John Nevil? I may give it? Then—Dione!"

It was the red dawn after his vigil on the fortress hill: in the great room of the stone house the leaders of the expedition had followed, line by line, his sword point as it drew upon the flagging a plan of attack, to which they gave instant adoption; Master Francis Sark had been dismissed, and to the Admiral's grave hint of possible treachery Ferne had answered, "Ay, John Nevil, I also think him a false—hearted craven, Spaniolated and perverse, a huckster, whose wares do go to the highest bidder! Well, with our hand at his throat we do not bid the highest?"

Now as he raised his tankard to thirsty lips, suddenly from the square below, shattering all the languid stillness of the tropic dawn, brayed a trumpet, arose a noise of hurrying steps and hasty voices. Baldry, at the window, wheeled, color in his cheeks, light in his deep eyes.

"War is my mistress! Down the hillside come those to whom I can speak—can speak as well as thou, Sir Mortimer Ferne!" The door was flung open, and Ambrose Wynch, a mighty man in a battered breastplate and morion, looked joyfully in upon them.

"The Dons supped so well last night, Sir John, that now they're coming to breakfast! 'Tis just a flourish—no great sortie. Shall a handful of us go out against them?"

That sally from the fortress was led by Mexia, who somewhat burned to wipe out the memory of his lost battery at the river's mouth. And as blind Fortune's dearest favor flutters often to the lackey while the master snatches vainly, so it befell in this case, for Mexia's chance raid, a piece of mere bravado to which De Guardiola had given grudging consent, was productive of results. Bravado for bravado, interchange of chivalric folly, of magnificence that was not war,—forth to meet the Spaniard and his company must go no greater force of Englishmen! Luiz de Guardiola, Governor of Nueva Cordoba, kept his state in his fortress; therefore, Sir John Nevil, Admiral of the English and of no less worth than the Castilian, remained for this skirmish inactive. On both sides their captains played the game.

Sir Mortimer Ferne and Robert Baldry at the head of threescore men, some mounted, some on foot, deemed themselves and this medley sufficient for Pedro Mexia. Nor can it be said that their reckoning was at fault, since Mexia, deep in curses, had at last to make hasty way across the strip of plain between Nueva Cordoba and its fortress. Too easily did the English repel an idle sortie, too eagerly did they follow Mexia in retreat, for suddenly Chance, leaving all neutrality, threw herself, a goddess armed, upon the Spanish side. In the very shadow of the hill, the mounted English, well ahead of those on foot, Mexia's disordered band making for the shelter of the tunal, a Spaniard turned, raised his harquebus and fired. The great bay steed which bore Sir Mortimer Ferne reared, screamed, then fell, hurling its rider to earth, where he lay, senseless, stark in black armor, with a knot of rose-colored velvet in his crest.

No hawk like De Guardiola was Pedro Mexia, but when luck pinioned his prey his talons were strong to close upon it. Now on the instant he wheeled, swooped with all his might upon the disordered vanguard of the English. Baldry and those with him fought madly, the English on foot made all haste; the prostrate figure, pinned beneath the dying bay, became the centre of a wild melee, the hotly contested prize of friend and foe! Then burst from the tunal, came at a run down the hill, re-enforcements for Mexia....

Erelong, Don Luiz de Guardiola sent to inform Sir John Nevil that he had for his prisoner one of the latter's captains. It appeared to the Governor of Nueva Cordoba that the English held the man in some esteem,—perchance even that he was their leader's close friend. Sir John Nevil would understand that to a Spanish soldier and good son of the Church the prisoner was, inevitably, mere pirate and heretic, to be dealt with as such.

To this announcement John Nevil returned curt answer. Nueva Cordoba lay in the hollow of his hand, and at his disposal were some Spanish lives perhaps not altogether valueless in the eyes of Don Luiz de Guardiola, since their kindred and friends and Spain herself might hold him responsible for their sudden and piteous taking off.

When an hour had dragged itself away the fortress spoke again, and its speech was of a piece with the Governor's mind. The peril of the town and the lives within it were ignored. Bluntly, the price of Sir Mortimer Ferne's life was this—and this—and this!

The Admiral made reply that Honor was too dear a price for the life of any English gentleman. He and Sir Mortimer Ferne declined the terms of Don Luiz de Guardiola. The safety of his friend should, however, ransom a city. Deliver the captive sound in life and limb, and the English would withdraw from Nueva Cordoba, and proceed with their ships upon their way. Reject this offer, let harm befall the prisoner, and Don Luiz de Guardiola should see how John Nevil mourned his friends!

The Governor answered that his terms held. The evening before, the English leader had been pleased to announce that if by moonrise of this night he had not in hand fifty thousand ducats, Nueva Cordoba should lie in ashes; now Don Luiz de Guardiola, more generous, gave Sir John Nevil until the next sunrise to heap upon the quay at the Bocca all gold and silver, all pearls, jewels, wrought work and other treasure stolen from the King of Spain, to withdraw every English soul from the galleon San José, leaving her safe anchored in the river and above her the Spanish flag, to abandon town and battery and retire to his ships, under oath, upon the delivery to him of the prisoner, to quit at once and forever these seas. Did the first beams of the sun find the English yet in Nueva Cordoba, then the light should also behold the death with ignominy of the prisoner.

"He will not die with ignominy," spoke the Admiral when the herald had come and gone. "Death cannot wear a form so base that he, nobly dying, will not ennoble."

"Do you purpose, then, that he shall die?" demanded Baldry, roughly.

"I purpose that if he lives I may look him in the face," answered the other. "We may not buy his life with the dishonor of us all." His stern face working, he covered his bearded lips with his hand. "But as God lives, he shall not die! We have until the next sunrising."

"There is more in it than meets the eye," said Arden. "These monstrous conditions!... One would say that the Spaniard means there shall be no rescue."

Henry Sedley broke in passionately. "Ay, that is it! Did you not hear their talk last night?"

"For many a year, as I have gone jostling up and down, I have studied the faces of men," pursued Arden. "With this Governor the cart draws the horse, and his particular quarrel takes precedence of his public duty. I think that in the wreaking of a grudge he would stand at nothing."

The Admiral paced the floor. Arden, eying him, spoke again with emotion.

"Mortimer Ferne is as dear to me as to you, John Nevil!... I think of the men of the Minion and of John Oxenham."

In the silence that followed his words each man had his vision of the men of the Minion and of John Oxenham. Then Baldry spoke, roughly and loudly, as was his wont:

"I think not of the dead, for whom there's no help. For the living man, he and I have yet to meet! There is to-night—there is the path he found—no doubt he counts upon our attacking as was planned! He is subtle with his words—no doubt he'll hold them off—insinuate—make them look only to the seaward—"

The Admiral, coming to the table, leaned his weight upon it. "Gentlemen, you all do know that this is my friend, whom I love as David of old loved Jonathan. Of the value of his life, of that great promise which his death would cut short, I will not speak. I also think that this Governor, believing himself, the treasure, and his men-at-arms secure, careth naught for the town whose protector he is called. Therefore an we would save the man who is dear to us and to England from I know not what fate, from the fate perhaps of John Oxenham, this night must we take by storm the fortress, using the plan of attack, the hour, ay and the word of the night, which he gave us. If it is now less simple a thing, if this Spaniard will surely keep watch and ward to-night, yet there is none to tell him that, offering at his face, we do mean to strike him in the back. If our onslaught be but swift and furious enough we may, God willing, bring forth in triumph both the treasure and the man whose welfare so outweighs the treasure."

"Amen to that," answered Arden; "but I have a boding spirit. It seems to me that the blessed sun himself hath shrunken, and I would I might wring the neck of yonder yelling bird!... That Englishman, that Francis Sark—he is well guarded?"

"Ralph Walter guards him," said the Admiral, briefly. "There is but the one door—the window is barred and too narrow for the passage of a child.... Yea, I grant, as did Mortimer Ferne, his knavery, but now, as nearly as we can sail to the wind of the truth, the man, desiring restitution and reward, speaks plain honesty."

"He spoke 'plain honesty' after the taking of the San José," muttered Arden. "Yet we found a hawk where we looked for a wren's nest. Oh, I grant you there were explanations enough to stand between him and the yard-arm, and that Fortune, having turned her wheel in our favor, apparently left her industry and fell asleep! She awakened this morning."

"Wring thine own neck for a bird of ill omen!" began Baldry, to be cut short by the Admiral's grave "Where all's danger, whatever course we shape, who gives a safer chart?" Then, as no one spoke: "To our loss we have found both shoal and reef between us and yonder castle. Think you not that I know, as knew Sir Mortimer Ferne, that we are shown a doubtful channel by a shifty pilot? But beyond is the open sea of all our hopes. Fortune and her wheel, Giles Arden!—nay, rather God and His hand over the issues of life and death!"

Up in his white fortress that same hour De Guardiola heard in silence the Admiral's message of defiance, then when he and Mexia were again alone frowned thoughtfully over a slip of paper which by devious ways had shortly before reached his hand. With all their vigilance not every hole and crevice could the English stop; Spanish was the town and Spanish the overhanging fortress, and the former was the place of many women and priests. The conquerors strove to secure the place as with a fowler's net, yet now and again a bird of the air fluttered through their meshes. The paper which Don Luiz held ran as follows: "May not a countryman of heretics choose his own king? When Death peers too closely—as was the case upon the galleon San José—may not a man turn his coat and send Death seeking elsewhere? Death gone by, may not the man be willing (if it be so that he is not well entreated of his new masters) to take again the colors to which on a Corpus Christi day of which you wot he swore fealty? At sunrise this morning the English laid toils for you. I have knowledge to sell. Will you buy my wares with five thousand pesos of silver and the letter to Cartagena which I desired?... I wrap this in a fig-leaf and drop it from the window to Dolores laughing with the seamen below. If you will buy, then raise above the battery a pennant of red that may be seen from the room with the hidden door in the Friar's House."

"The dog! I thought that he perished with Antonio de Castro!" spoke Mexia.

"That he did not," answered the Governor. "He is so false that were there none else with whom to play the traitor, his right hand would betray his left.... The English called him Francis Sark."

"You'll pay?"

"He shall think I'll pay," said the other. "So they lay their toils!—it needs not this paper to tell me that;" he tapped it as it lay before him. "Somewhat will this Englishman, this Nevil, do to-night. He hath his game in his mind,—his hand on this piece, his eye on that, these pawns in reserve, those advanced for action." De Guardiola leaned back in his chair and studied the ceiling. "Ha, Pedro! we must discover what he would do! When I know his dispositions, blessed Mother of God, what check may I not give him!"

"But if Desmond escapes not," began the duller Mexia, "we may learn not at all, or we may learn too late. Then all's conjecture. They fight like fiends, and day by day we lose. What if they overbear us yet?"

Don Luiz brought his gaze from the ceiling to meet the look of the lesser man. Mexia fidgeted, at last burst forth: "There are times when the devil dwells in your eye and upon your lip! 'Twas so you smiled in the Valdez matter and when that slave girl died! What do you mean?"

"Mean?" answered De Guardiola, still smiling. "I mean, my friend, that we must know what traps they bait down yonder." He called to those who waited without, wrote an order and sent it to the officer in command at the battery. "Up goes one traitor's signal!... Good Pedro, when Fate gives to you your enemy; says, 'Now! Revenge yourself to the uttermost!'—what do you do?"

"Why, I take his life," answered Mexia. "Then shall he trouble me no more."

"Now I," said Don Luiz, "I give him memories of me. Mayhap the dead do not remember. So live my foe! but live in hell, remembering the brand upon thy soul and that it was I who set it glowing there!"

"Well, I am thy friend, am I not?" quoth Mexia, comfortably. "I am not Englishman nor Valdez nor Cimmaroon slave, and so I fear not thy smile. It is twelve of the clock.... Do you think that Desmond knows so much?"

"Not more than one other," answered De Guardiola, and called for a flask of wine.

The day wore on in heat and light, white glare from the hill, and from the sea fierce gleams of blue steel. The coasts loomed, the plain moved in the hot air. Here the plain was arid, and there yellow flowers turned it to a ragged Field of Cloth of Gold. The gaunt cacti stood rigid, and the palms made no motion where they dropped against the blue. In cohorts to and fro went the colored birds; along the sandy shores, rose pink and scarlet and white, crowded the flamingoes. Crept on the noonday stillness; came the slow afternoon, the sun declined, and every hour of that day had been long, long! One would have said that it was the longest day of the year. Throughout it, dominant upon its ascending ground, white, impregnable, and silent as a sepulchre, rose the fortress. Before the fortress, slumberous also, couched the long, low fortification of stone and earthwork commanding in its turn the road through the tunal. In the town below, alcalde and friar waited trembling upon the English Admiral with representations that the quality of mercy is not strained. The slight rills of gold yet hidden in Nueva Cordoba burst forth and began to flow fast and more fast towards the English quarters. From the churches, Dominican and Franciscan, wailed the miserere, and the women and children trembled beneath the roofs which at any moment might no longer give them sanctuary. For all the blazing sunshine, the place began to wear a look of doom.

During the day the English dragged Mexia's conquered guns to the edge of the town, and under their cover threw up earthworks and planted their artillery where it might speak with effect. Spanish soldiery appeared before the battery, and, according to the tactics of the time, began to make thorny with abattis, poisoned stakes, and other devices the way of the enemy across the open space which it guarded. English marksmen picked them off, others took their place; they falling also, one great gun from the fort bellowed defiance. Its echoes ceasing, silence again wrapped the white ascent and all that crowned it. For days now each antagonist had that knowledge of the other that ammunition was the pearl of price only to be fully shown by warrant of circumstance.

The sun in sinking cast a strange light. It stained the sea, and the air so partook of that glow that town and fortress sprang into red significance. The river also, where swung the dark ships, was ensanguined, as was every ripple upon the shore, where now the birds grew very clamorous. There were no clouds; only the red ball of the sun descending, and a clear field for the stars. The evening wind arose; at last the day died; unheralded by any dusk, on came the night. Color of blood changed to color of gold, gleamed and glistened the sea, sparkled the fire-flies, shone the deep stars; over the marsh flared the will-o'-the-wisp like a torch lit to bad ends.

Nueva Cordoba was held by two-thirds of the English force; now for the Spaniards' greater endangering down from each ship's side came, man by man, wellnigh all of that division which looked to the safety of the fleet. So great was the prize, so intolerable any idea of defeated purpose, that for this night—this night only—the balances could not be evenly held. Precaution lifted from one side added weight to the other, and the borrowing from Peter became of less moment than the paying of Paul. Day by day, north and east and west, watchmen in the tops of the Mere Honour, the Cygnet, the Marigold, and the Phoenix had seen no hostile sail upon the bland and smiling ocean. The river ran in mazes; undulating like a serpent it came from hidden sources, and its heavy borders of tamarind and mangrove sent long shadows out towards midstream. The watchmen looked to the river also; but no greater thing ever appeared than some Indian canoe gliding down from illimitable forests. Now the ships were left maimed for what was meant to be the briefest while. The sick manned them; together with a handful of the unhurt they looked down from the decks and whispered envious farewells to their comrades in the boats below. High above the boats towered the black hulls; the topmasts overlooked sea and land; the bold figureheads, that had drunk the brine of many a storm and looked unmoved upon strange sights, gazed into the darkness with inscrutable, blank eyes.

Silently the boats made landing, swiftly and silently through the darkness two hundred men crossed the little plain, and their leader was Robert Baldry. Out from Nueva Cordoba, stealing through the ruined and depopulated quarter of the town, came a shadowy band, and they from the town and they from the river met at the base of the long, westward slope of the hill. Thence they climbed to the rocky plateau where, the night before, Sir Mortimer Ferne had made pause. Here they halted, while Henry Sedley and ten men went on to the tunal as, the night before, one man had gone. By the signs that Ferne had given them they found the entrance which they sought, and when they had thrust aside the curtain of branch and vine, saw the clearing through the tunal. It lay beneath the stars, a narrow defile much overgrown, walled on either side by impenetrable wood. On went Sedley and his men, cautiously, silently, until they had wellnigh pierced the tunal, that was scarce wider, indeed, than an English copse. Before them, quiet as the tomb, rose the fortress—no sound save their stealthy movement and the stir of the life that was native to the woods, no sign of sentience other than their own. Back they went to the plateau and made report, then with Baldry and half of all the English force waited for the Admiral's attack upon that notable fortification which guarded the known entrance through the tunal.

Rising ground and the bulk of the fortress hid from them the battery; they would hear, not see, John Nevil's onslaught, so now they watched the east for the silver signal of attack. Not long did they watch. Above the waters the firmament became milk white; an argent line appeared, thickened:—one moment of the moon, then tumult, shouting, the blast of a trumpet, the sound of small arms, and the roar of those guns which must be rushed upon and silenced! Noises of bird and beast had the tropic night, all the warfare and the wrangling with which life exacts tribute from life, but now the feud of man with man voiced itself to the stars. So great and stern was the uproar that it seemed as though John Nevil might oversweep with his iron determination that too formidable battery and unaided seize upon the fortress.

No tarrying after the burst of sound and light made Baldry and his men. Up the steep ground they swept towards that pale, invulnerable castle borne upon the shoulder of the hill, faintly outlined against the pallid east. On they came, a long thin line of men of England to that secret path through the tunal. Devon was there, and Kent and Sussex, and many a goodly shire beside. Men of land-fights and of sea-fights were they, and of old adventures to alien countries, strong of heart and frame, and very fiercely minded towards the fortress of Nueva Cordoba. It withheld from them the gold they wanted, and now within its grasp was a life they valued. To-night their will was set to take the one and rescue the other. They saw the treasure heaped and gleaming, and they saw the face and waved hand of Mortimer Ferne. They heard him laugh and gayly cry his thanks.

They entered the defile. To the right and the left rose the impenetrable wood; before them wound a path thorny and difficult, where not more than three men might go abreast; beyond, was the mass of the fortress. On through the impeding growth, where passage was just possible, rushed Baldry and his men. The way was not long, larger loomed the fortress, louder grew the noise of attack and defence. At last the edge of the tunal was reached, and they in the van, freed from hindrance and delay, sprang forward over open ground, marked here and there by low bushes and some trailing growth, sweeping around the fortress to the rear of the battery, and apparently of a solidity with the universal frame of things.

Suddenly, beneath the footing of the foremost, the earth gave way and a line of men stumbled, and pitched forward into a trench which had been digged, which had been planted with pointed stakes, which had been cunningly covered over by a leafy roof so thin that a child had broken through. Not until towards the sunset of that day had Don Luiz de Guardiola received information which enabled him to lay snares, but since that hour he had worked with frantic haste. Now he knew the moment when his springe would be trodden upon, the number of them who would come stealthily through the tunal to that gin, the nature of Nevil's attack upon the front, what guard had been left in the town, what upon the ships. His information was minute and accurate, and, hawk and serpent, he acted upon it with fierceness and with guile.

The onward rush of the English had been impetuous. They in the rear of the first upon that frail bridge, unable to stay their steps, plunged also into the trench; those who were latest to clear the tunal surged forward in consternation and confusion. Suddenly, from a low earthwork hastily raised in the shadow of the fortress wall, and masked by bushes, burst a withering fire of chain-shot from cannon and culverin, of slighter missiles from falcon and bastard and saker, caliver and harquebus. The trench, dug in a half-circle, either end touching the tunal, made with the space it enclosed, and which was now crowded by the English, an iron trap, into which with thunder and flame the Spanish ordnance was pouring death.

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