There was his mother's sweet pale face under the white coif, her busy fingers completing a last bit of stitchery for him. There was his father's fine, keen, kindly face bent over his account-books and coffers. There was pretty Genevieve, his sister, with her husband, Crispin Eyre. And there were the comrades of his boyhood, and the prating monk, and the unhappy lady with her white face framed in rich velvets and furs, and her piteous beseeching hands that were never still. Those faces, in the glow of the fire and the shine of tall candles in their silver sconces, were to be with him often in the months to come.
Edrupt came up just as a long Venetian galley went plowing out to sea, the great oars flashing in the sunlight, one rank above another. “They do not have to pray for a fair wind, those Venetians,” Nicholas commented idly.
“That galley's past praying for anything,” Edrupt said grimly. “You may be glad that your men fear neither wind nor seas—nor you. 'Tis an ill thing to sail the seas with those who serve only through fear.”
Nicholas had not thought of it in that way. He knew, of course, that the slaves who rowed the racing galleys were the offscouring of mankind, desperate men, drawn from all nations. It was as much as two men could do to handle one oar, and all must pull in unison as a huge machine. The Venetian dromond was to other merchant-ships as the dromedary to other camels. To make the speed required the rowers must put forth their whole strength, hour after hour, day after day.
Any work which makes men into parts of a machine is not likely to improve them as men. When they have no love for their work and no hope of reward, and do not even speak the same language, the one motive which can be depended upon to keep them going is fear. The whip of the overseer bred festering, burning hatred, but it kept the sweeps from breaking their monotonous unceasing motion. If the voyage were quick, the profits were the greater, and no one cared for anything else.
Thinking of the hard sea-bitten faces of the galley-slaves Nicholas rejoiced that rather than live so the crew of the Sainte Spirite would every man of them choose a clean death at sea.
Some days later it seemed as if they were fated to die so. A Biscay tempest caught them, and from dark to daylight they were buffeted by the giant battledores of wind and sea. Nicholas spent the sleepless hours in lending a hand and cheering the men as he could.
At last they sighted the great Rock of Gibraltar, fifteen hundred feet of it clear against the sky, like the gateway pillar of another world. Between Europe and Africa they passed into the blue Mediterranean,—blue with the salty sparkle beloved of all sea-lovers since Ulysses. Light warm winds, the scent of orange-groves and rose-gardens, a sky only less deep in its azure splendor than the sea itself—it seemed indeed another world.
But the Sainte Spirite had not come whole out of her struggle with the powers of the abyss. Timbers were sadly strained, a mast was gone, every man on board was weary and muscle-sore. And then a Levantine gale drove the crippled merchantman down on the Barbary coast.
The blackness of that storm ended, for Nicholas Gay, in a plunge into the black waters and a glimpse of the high lantern of his father's ship dancing above the tossing foam like a witch-fire, for an instant before she went down. When he came to himself he was lying on hot sand in the sunshine, and Edrupt and David Saumond were bending anxiously over him.