Sard Harker: A novel

by John Masefield

To me who had a price upon my head.”

Sard was overwhelmed. “So,” he thought, “here is Captain Cary’s monument. I wonder if he knew of it; he never mentioned it. I hope that he knew of it. He must have known of it.”

The model had been made in England by skilled craftsmen working under someone who had known the Venturer intimately. Little special matters, such as the make of the truss of the fore-yard, the lead of the braces, the design stencilled on the deckhouse, the use of brass pins in the poop fiferails, all showed that one of the old Venturers had been engaged in the work. “Flackwell, the bo’sun, helped in this,” he thought, “there is Flackwell’s gadget of the broom-rack in the bo’sun’s locker.”

By this time the sun was behind the Sierra; the ships were dim against the bay and men were hoisting the riding lights. Sard could hear the blocks creak as they swayed them up. He went along the water-front to the end, and then climbed the great white marble staircase, between the lines of orange trees, to the Plaza of the Martyrdoms. He had never ceased to be amazed and exalted by the beauty of the new work. That stair, ten years before, had been palm-stems pinned into the earth like the rungs of a ladder. Now it was all Otorin stone, white and exquisite, with marvellous busts of the martyrs at intervals along the balustrades: Carlotta, Jane Jennings, Pascual Mestas, Celedonio Vigil, Agapito Chavez, Luciano Sisneros, Inocencio Chacon; then Carlotta and Jane Jennings again, with those five of the Heroic Six who had been killed in the bay. The faces leaned from among the dark green of the orange trees. In the groves behind them there were fountains.

He reached the Plaza at the top of the stairs. There at least the Houses of the Last Sighs were as they had been. They looked dingy and evil in that place of brightness: they looked as if they would not have any life of their own until all the lights were turned out. They were inhabited still, for a little smoke came from one of the chimneys. Sard wondered that anybody should live still in them; but he had heard that they were let at cheap rates, being supposed to be haunted, and that they were to stand thus, unpainted, till the last of the Don Lopez faction, Don José and one Rafael, had been shot there like their victims.

There were three houses together, a big one in the centre, flanked on each side by a smaller. On the wall of each of the smaller houses, at breast-height, were the chippings of bullets, under the legend, painted in white,

Hic ceciderunt.

He did not need to be told that, for he had seen the prisoners dragged thither to be shot after Don Manuel’s defeat. He had seen two or three hundred men shot there by the Lopez faction. He had watched it all from the Venturer’s cross-trees: batch after batch, volley after volley: not men only, but many women, and some children. He had seen the accursed Reds drag their victims out of houses. It had not been the suppression of a rising, but a massacre of all whose virtue shamed them.

Hic ceciderunt.

He could not see the words without a prayer, that those who had fallen there had found peace, and that those who had killed them there might find justice.