“But they shall not have gone too far,” cried the founder, flushing up, and stamping his foot with rage, “I’ll hear no more. Look ye here, Captain Gil, you’re in a passion now, so let me see no more of you for seven days. Then, perhaps, we can meet and talk calmly. Meantime, go and think.”
As he said these words Jeremiah Cobbe, the founder of Roehurst, went into his empty furnace-house, and Gil Carr walked slowly away to think of his dismissal—now, when a man whom he already looked upon as an enemy was in the place; and the young man’s face darkened as imagination began to be busy, filling his mind full of strange fancies, strongly opposed to the words he had spoken but a short time since to Mace as they parted at the house.
How the Founder set a Trap to catch a Lover.
Nature seems to have ordained that the stricken ones should seek solitude to find solace for their wounds. The deer injured by the shot of the hunter plunges into the depths of the forest, and the human being cut to the heart hides away from his kind to brood and think and wait until time shall soften the pain.
So it was now with Gil Carr, for his steps led him slowly into the forest depths of the old weald, where, coming at length, by means of a cart-track, to an opening where the woodman’s axe had been at work and a hollow blackened with dust and dotted with curious little fungi, showed where the charcoal burners had been busy, he seated himself upon a stump, and began to think over the past—of the days when a boy he had been his father’s companion on shipboard, when he used to be shut down in the cabin below water-line when some attack was to be made upon a Spanish ship or fort in the Carib sea; of the love the stern, sun-browned, grizzled man bore him, and how he had been the rough sailors’ plaything. Then of that dreadful day when lying below half wandering with fever, when the air that came through the little cabin window seemed burning hot, he had felt his head throb, and listened to the noise of cannons, wondering whether they were real or only the fancies of his aching brain. Of how he had at last with swimming head crawled from his berth and painfully climbed on deck, where his feet slid from under him, and he fell in a pool of blood, after which he crawled to pass, one after the other, half a score of dead and wounded men, to where a group was standing round one who lay upon the deck, dark with the shades of approaching death, and with his head supported by Wat Kilby, who was crying like a child.
How plainly it all came back as he sat there in the forest shades, with the glowing sunbeams that flashed through the leaves and burnished the silvery-green of the great bracken fronds, seeming like the swords that glittered under the tropic sky, and the gleaming armour that the stout adventurers wore when they made way for him to crawl to his father’s side.
That pale, stern face lit up—how well he remembered it!—and one feeble hand was raised to be laid upon his head, as with his dying breath the smitten captain, one of Elizabeth’s adventurous spirits, who fought the Spaniards under the English flag, half raised himself and cried—
“Brave lads—God’s will—this is your captain now!”
And then, as he flung himself wildly upon his father’s breast, there was a loud hurrah, for the fighting-men and crew flashed their swords over his head, and swore they would follow him to the death. Over his head, for he was alone upon the deck with the dead.