She took a stumbling step forward, her hand on Perrin’s arm, then paused, and faced Margaret. “You think, Charles. You think, because. Because I’m not very happy. That I shall not notice. But I see. Oh, I see so well. You wish to poison me against Tom. You wish me to think. That. That. Him guilty.”
“Quiet, Margaret,” said Howard. “Mrs. Stukeley, it’s my duty to tell you that your husband is guilty. Better now than later,” he added to Margaret in a low voice. “She can’t have two scenes like this. It’d kill her. It is true, Mrs. Stukeley,” he continued. “If he returns to England, he will be hanged. Now you two, take her out. She’s stunned. Take her out before the flunkies notice. Get to sea. Don’t wait. Into the boat with her. Get to sea. Get to the devil.”
The two men supported the dazed creature to the boat. Howard watched them from his pleasaunce, with an air of weary boredom. “Like clubbing a kitten,” he said to himself. “But nervous women are. They are.”
He watched them pass away into the night, the oars grunting through the darkness, the voice of the coxswain sounding very clear. He noted it as a sign of rain. Afterwards he heard the feet tramping round the capstan, amid yells and screams and pistol-shots. “There are the men of war. The buccaneers,” he said cynically. “My reputation’s gone. I forgot them.” He stood amid his flowers, watching the fireflies, waiting for the end. He saw dimly the jib of the great ship cloaking a star. Then among the screams of many drunken men, with laughter, and shots, and oaths, the topsails jolted up, the parrels groaning, to a ditty about a girl in Paradise Street. The roaring chorus woke the ships in harbour. The crews answered, cheering, beating their bells. The bell of the Broken Heart was rung like the alarm of fire. He smiled to hear them, repeating the phrases he had planned for his official report. “She stole away, unnoticed, in the night,” he repeated. “So that I could not give effect to the Honourable Board’s command.” “It’s getting chilly,” he said. “I must go in. She’s gone. She’s out of sight.” From very far away came the words of a chorus, the cat-fall chorus, sung by men so drunk that they had to take the cat-fall to the capstan:—
Blow, my bullies, blow
For Springer’s Key, ay O.
There’s plenty of gold,
So I’ve been told,
On the banks of the Rio Diablo.
It was the last of her farewells. Howard went indoors, to his game of cribbage with Mrs. Prinsep. “They have gone to found an empire,” he said to himself. “That song is an imperial hymn. Men of the Breed. Eh?”
X.
THE LANDFALL
“We are arrived among the blessed islands,
Where every wind that rises blows perfumes,
And every breath of air is like an incense;
The treasure of the sun dwells here.”
The Island Princess.
“This new come Captain
Hath both a ship and men.”
The Sea Voyage.
The Broken Heart made a poor passage. The eighteen hundred miles of sea between the Capes and the Samballoes were dragged through wearily, in calms, in light airs, in head winds, during six weeks of torment. Through the Florida Channel, across a sea of brass; through the Yucatan Channel, hugging the Cuban side; then launching out, past Grand Cayman, past Providence, she rolled and drove, foul with her months at sea. Her gilt was battered off, her paint peeled; her once white decks were crossed with tar marks, where the seam-tar, sticking to shoes, had been impressed crosswise as the seamen walked. An awning was over her poop. Her boys splashed her decks continually with salt water. The men about decks did their work languidly. At night they lay among the booms, sheltered from the dew, sleeping in their watches, their eyes covered lest the moon should blast them.
A ship driving to the south, with all her sails set, her side a little bowed, whitening a line along her fo’c’s’le, is beautiful to see, noble, an image of wonder. She should be allowed to pass, swaying her beauty in a rhythm; for beauty is enough; one should not question beauty. If one question, then in that stately ship may be found a hell. Men mutinous, officers overdriven, boys in misery, the captain drunk; wasted men forward, flying from justice; broken men aft, carrying their incompetence to other lands, to breed it there unchecked; the rigging rotten, the sails threadbare, all the hull of the ship in outcry, a decay, a fraud; down in the hold a fire smouldering, a little red glow, a fireball, not flame yet, waiting, charring the beams, blackening in the bales, till the wind fan it to a crackling triumph, to a blaze, a mastery, amid the screams of men, amid death. Even such a ship was the Broken Heart, as she drove on to the south, her sails slatting. Within her were many tortured hearts, each heart a chamber in hell, in the hell of the wicked or the weak, where the prisoned soul atoned, or added to the account to be paid later. At the galley door, waiting for the cook to let them light their pipes, their one pleasure, the seamen watched the gentry, envying them, talking bitterly of them, angry at the world’s injustice to themselves, angry at the ease which they would lack, though they lived to be old men, always working hard.