“He has,” she said. “And you know it.”
“If you will not see truth, you must learn truth; and you too, my sailor. . . .
“You, as I understand it,” he said, turning to Sard, “were for saving her from danger in Las Palomas. Did you save her? . . .
“Did you save your ship from danger? Why, do you suppose, did I go in your ship amid all that I most despise? Your ship, I say, but I mean your owner’s ship, which you were bought to keep afloat: you, a man, being slave to a thing.”
“The thing obeyed its slaves,” Sard said.
“For a while,” the Holy One said. “For a while it gave satisfaction; the slaves earned a dividend for their employers. But then I came, I, the Holy One, who am appointed by my Master to bring down all this order which he most loathes. I came to that ship to lay her low, as an offence, and to smite her brains with numbness. They were slave-brains, thinking of nothing but of keeping their prisons clean. Their one joy was the pothouse, their sole art the music-hall; their religion, what was that, you, who reckon yourself their leader?”
“Their religion is to risk their lives and mortify their flesh in order to bring bread to their fellows,” Sard said. “In doing that, they make iron swim and dead-weight skim and the dead thing to be beautiful. Show me a finer religion, you who are already carrion for the want of one.”
“They had no religion,” Sagrado answered. “They were slaves who made pennies for pot-houses while their work made pounds for peers. I, the Holy One, came among them, and scattered among them the seeds of terror. Would that you had been there, my second mate, to watch that terror growing; the geraniums, the birds, then one by one the brains; I, with a little drug, putting my hand on the heart of your so boasted machine. It was a work of art, my second mate, a symphony of horror. I drew out what notes I wished, I struck what chords I loved, and the instruments which I disliked, I destroyed. Your Cary, I destroyed. I numbed him and killed him. With my own dose, in his own stronghold, I gave him Death.”
“You weren’t allowed to bury him,” Sard said.
It was a shot which went home. Plainly, the burial of Captain Cary by the murderer in the priest’s clothes would have given a relish to the crime.