Beggars on Horseback

by F. Tennyson Jesse

But when the tussle over terms was ended and Lemaire had gone forth, Elderkin swore to himself that it was the mate who should never again see the Islands rise above the rim of the sea. He cursed, and for a few moments as he sat at the chart-room table, he allowed himself the luxury of hating the course on which he had embarked. A man cannot give his soul into the keeping of any one idea, whether that idea be embodied in another person or in a mode of life, without suffering a profound disturbance if he violently part from it; and for many years now Elderkin's soul had been one with his ship. She was ugly, cranky, she bore a name as a hell-ship that he had earned for her, but together they had won through much; men had died on her, blood run upon her decks, misery and pride and drunkenness and strange doings permeated her very frame. She was as the flesh of his flesh, and only that dream-ship of his own which floated in a mirage before his mind could have made him unfaithful to her. He was in the position of a man who has lived with a despised but deeply felt mistress, and who at last thinks he holds the ideal woman, the bride, the untouched, within his grasp, at the price of the severance of the old ties. And, like a reproachful ghost, as though she were dead already, the appeal of the old reprobate of the seas kept pricking at him, day and night, throughout the ordered watches that drew her towards her end.

He had sold his soul to gain his soul, a not altogether uncommon bargain. "If I can only have this one thing I will Be Good ever after," is a cry that must have caused amusement above and below as many times as there are mortals upon the earth. In Elderkin's case the "one thing" was a ship of his own, and now that she loomed at last over his horizon, he found that it was this old Hagar of the high seas, the mistress and not the wife, who, in spite of himself, absorbed his consciousness. All the ugliness of his betrayal of her was thrown sharply into notice by the compact with his mate; and, shot by a sharper distaste than ever before, he covered his eyes for a minute, in an attempt to focus his will undistracted. It was successful; Elderkin, little as he knew it, was an idealist, however perverted a one, and idealism was with him in this venture, beckoning to him in the dip and curtsy of a dream vessel, her bright canvas burning with perpetual sunlight. . . . He dropped his hands and straightened himself, and his eye fell on the Bible in which he had made his calculations, and where he had also noted down his covenant with Lemaire. It had fallen open, by the chance movement of his arms, at a different place, and he found he was reading a few lines before he knew what he was about.

Too imperceptibly for him to have noticed the progress of it, the light had strengthened in the chart-room, for a stormy sun had penetrated the gloom, and the heavy black letters stood out distinctly on the yellowed page. A sudden flash of memory leapt through Elderkin's mind—the memory of a day long ago in his childhood.

He had been brought up in New England by a rigid old grandmother until he ran away to sea, his Nova Scotian blood too strong for him. But his mother's Puritan strain was with him nevertheless, had held by him if in nothing else but a certain Biblical flavour in his oaths. Now there flashed across his mind a dreary Sunday when he was a little boy—one of many like it, but this particular one had stuck in his memory. And, probably because of the yellow light flooding the chart-room, the memory surged up at him, for on that Sunday he had escaped to the barn, although with no better spoils than a book of Old Testament stories, and lain there, heels in the air and elbows on the straw, reading the story of the Flood in just such a stormy yellow glow as this. A gale had followed, rain-laden, and his childish mind had half-feared, half-hoped, that a flood was coming, down which he could float triumphantly in some makeshift ark . . . as to his grandmother, he might rescue her and he might not, but if he did, of course, she would be so overcome with gratitude and admiration that she would never again abase his dignity with a certain limber cane. Then, in a lull of the gale, the gleam had shone out once more, and by its light he read on; read how God had promised there should never come a flood over all the earth again, and had made a rainbow as a sign of it. Rather dull of God, he thought in his disappointment. The storm raged so that he dared not slip back to the house, not because of any fear of the elements, but because his grandmother would notice if his clothes got wet; so he had stayed on, his mind thronged with imaginary adventures, till the storm was over. Then he had gone back to the house, feeling curiously flat after the excitement wind always produced in him. A faint yet, pictorially, a vivid memory of that strained hour of varying emotions swept across him now in a moment's space, as he gazed at the page before him. The next moment he understood why—it was not only the light that reproduced that afternoon of long ago, but also the words at which he was looking—the two things together had fused a section of time from thirty years earlier into a section of the present. He read the verses through, but a few phrases knocked at his mind to the exclusion of the rest. The word "covenant," especially, so hard upon his pact with Lemaire, seemed to stare up at him. . . .

"And I will establish a covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood. . . . And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you, and every living creature that is with you. . . . I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be the token of a covenant. . . . And it shall come to pass when I shall bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud, and I shall remember the covenant which is between me and you. . . ."

Elderkin sat at gaze like a man in a trance, unable for a few moments to disassociate that hour in the barn from the present—not sure which was the present, so vivid was the illusion and so sharp the knock on his dormant spiritual sense. His hands, which were trembling oddly, went out to grasp the edge of the table, not for the physical support, but more that a common sensation should reassure his mind. Then he rose, and backing away from the Book as though it would spring at him, he went out.

The wind had dropped, but the Spirito Santo was rolling her bulwarks—those solid structures which were traps for all the water shipped—into the confused sea that the dead wind had left. She was travelling badly, her heavy load robbed her of the elasticity which would have enabled her to rise to the onslaught of each successive wave.

The Spirito Santo boasted no bridge, the roof of the chart-room, which was situated on the poop, just forward of the mizzen-mast, doing duty instead. The wheel, which was uncovered, was set at the break of the poop, between the rail and the chart-house. Elderkin climbed the ladder to the top of the chart-house, and then stood there, struck to sudden stillness. He never glanced at the binnacle to see if the man were keeping the course, or noted the wiry figure of the mate as he tramped back and forth; his whole being was arrested by the portent which held the sky. And all the long-dormant but never wholly cast-off beliefs of his childhood awoke in his blood.

A curtain of luminous, ashen-pink cloud was drawn across the sky from horizon to zenith, absolutely smooth and unbroken, and against it arched a rainbow, spanning the horizon and coming down mistily into the sea. So close the opalescent feet of it looked that it seemed as though the ship's bows were heading through the phantom portals of some new world, but high in air the summit of the curve, clear and burnished as cut-glass, looked infinitely far away. As Elderkin stood at gaze, particles of sun-bright cloud floated slowly across the right of the arch, like little morsels of golden wool.

Elderkin, his fingers clutching a wet stanchion, was aware of a curious feeling coming over him. He felt he had seen just that effect before—that curtain of ashen pink, the rainbow against it, the flock of little golden-bright morsels, floating slowly across it . . . and had seen it in connexion with something of vital importance. Yet, try as he would, he could not capture the thought—memory—dream—whatever it was, of which he was so sure in the back of his mind that he felt it waiting for him to recognize it every moment. . . . All sorts of bewildering little half-memories flitted across his mind, and refused to be captured or placed. Queer, irrational little things they were, incongruous and wildly senseless; he felt dizzy chasing them, but he knew if he gave up concentrating even for an instant, the whole thing would be gone. Yet piece together these half-memories that pricked at him he could not, they were elusive as moths and as unsubstantial. He knew that there was one key to them and that if he could only find it they would become sense, though not sense of this world—it was as though they were in a different focus and on a different plane, but they would become clear if only he could find the key. . . .