The virgin of the sun

by George Chetwynd Griffith

As the light grew stronger under the low-brooding canopy of clouds which for many weeks had hung unbroken over the misty sea and the rain-lashed, wind-swept island, a man crawled out from under a wretched shelter of twisted boughs and ragged, sodden sail-cloth among the rocks on the western shore. He rose wearily to his feet and stretched himself with the slow, painful motion of one whose joints are stiff with wet and cold. Then he pushed the dank, black, matted hair back from his white, wrinkled brow, and his hands, thin and brown and knotted, trembled somewhat as he did so.

“Another day! Mother of God, how long is this to last? Ah, well, it is breakfast time, and one must eat even in a place like this. Come, comrades, rouse ye! it is daylight again. Perchance the ship will come to-day, if it pleases the merciful Saints to send her.”

He turned his head back towards the rocks as he said these last words, and with an effort that would have been manifest to one who heard it, raised his voice, the harsh, husky voice of a man well-nigh done to death by hunger and the sickness of body and soul that comes of bitter hardship and hope long deferred.

Then he made his way with slow, limping, dragging steps over the sloping strip of wet, much-trampled sand down to the water’s edge, and there, just out of reach of the upwash of the waves, he fell on his knees and began to dig with a little piece of stick.

Presently other figures crept out of the rocks and shook and stretched themselves just as wearily as he had done, a few of them exchanging gruff, half-murmured, half-spoken greetings, and then went and fell to at the same task until some two score or more of as woe-begone looking wretches as the unkindly Fates ever mocked at in their misery were scattered along the shore, grubbing on their knees in the spongy sand amidst the spume of the out-going waves for the sand-worms and crabs and such other shellfish as relenting Fortune might deign to send to them for their morning meal.

There were high-born gentlemen of Spain among them, haughty gallants who had lorded it with the proudest in Seville and Cordova and Madrid, who would once have run a man through the body rather than yield him an inch of the footway, who had feasted and drunk and danced and diced and made love till only a remnant of their fair estates was left to them, and that they had staked on one last throw with Destiny—life, and honour, and every hope they had against a share of the fairy gold of El-Dorado, long dreamed of and never found.

There were rude sailors, too, and outlawed adventurers, cut-throats and cut-purses, criminals fleeing from justice, and debtors from their creditors; husbands who had wearied of their wives, and scapegrace sons who had been driven from the homes they had dishonoured—and here they all were, ragged and starving, racked with ague and smitten with scurvy, scraping shellfish and worms out of the sand wherewithal to make the pangs of famine a little more endurable, for the hand of misery had fallen heavily upon them and crushed them all down level with the beasts that eat and take no thought for the morrow.

On a little plateau among the rocks, some twenty feet or so above the beach, a rude flagstaff had been fixed, propped up by a cairn of stone, and from the top of it flew a tattered flag that had once borne the proud arms of Spain, Mistress of the West and heiress of all its unknown wealth and mysterious glories, and, pacing with slow steps up and down the little platform in front of the cairn, was a man whose worn and work-stained dress distinguished him but little from the wretches who were digging on the sands below him.

Though but a few years past middle age the storm and the stress of a long life of travail might well have passed over his stooping shoulders and down-bent head. His long black hair and ragged beard were streaked with grey, and his face was pinched with hunger and seamed and lined with the furrows of ever-present care; and yet his eyes, as he raised them every now and then to gaze out over the misty sea, as though striving to pierce the dense cloud-curtain in which sky and water were lost on every side, were still bright and proud and fearless as befitted the leader of the forlornest hope a soldier of fortune had ever led.

And yet his thoughts, as he paced that narrow strip of rock and muddy soil, were dark enough to have quenched the light in the eyes of most men, for they were thoughts of long and bitter toil which so far had brought no guerdon save failure and debt and dishonour.