For God and Gold

by Julian Stafford Corbett

'Tush!' said he, 'what is there to fear?'

'Nothing for you to fear, I know well,' I answered; 'it is not that. It is what I fear. I have a most evil foreboding that if you go on this venture we shall never see you again.'

'Well, and what matter?' he laughed; 'a man must die once.'

'Yes,' said I, 'but he need not rot to death in a Spanish prison, or die before his time. The Spanish shallops will be scouring all the coast, and must of a certainty pick you up like half-drowned rats ere ever you reach the Cabeças. Why should you do this when there is no need—you who of us all have most to live for?'

'And what have I to live for,' he answered, with clouding brow, 'that others have not?'

'You know! you know!' I said. 'Give me not the pain or shame of saying what. Nay, hear me then,' I went on, as I saw a bitter reply rising to his lips; and then, determined to leave no means untried to preserve him to the woman I had so cruelly wronged, I told him how I had gone back to Ashtead after that terrible night; how I had seen through the window his dear wife kissing his letter and weeping over his child; how I had marked a hundred signs whereby I knew her love for him was only the more pure and ardent for the trial it had undergone.

God be praised! if it was He that put the burning words in my mouth with which I told my tale and pleaded my cause. Long had I kept it pent up in my heart, for want of courage to tell him, as well as for fear of increasing his grief and his hate for me; and now it flowed with the full strength of the gathered flood which his long coldness had frozen up in me.

What joy was in my heart I cannot tell in words when, ere I had done, he seized my hand in his manly way and said, 'Have your will, brother! Go in my place. If we ever meet again we shall be brothers indeed once more, and brothers we should never have ceased to be had I known you as I should. Let what I do be a token to you. I know the danger of this service as well as you, and never did I think for any man I could turn back from such an attempt when I had offered myself and been chosen. To you, brother, and her, I sacrifice thus my honour in token of how high beyond all words I value this love you have both given me, who deserve it so little.'

Bright shone the sun in my heart, bright as the mid-day fire over our heads, as to the music of a hearty cheer we dropped down the river in our frail bark. Frank was steering her with a rude oar which had been shaped from a young tree, the two Frenchmen stood by with poles in case of need, and I managed the biscuit-bag whereof we had made our sail.

The Cimaroons had bitterly lamented not coming with us, but them Frank would have stay to succour those who remained, since there we had greatest need of them.