Beyond loomed the fortress, all its lineaments blurred, softened, qualitied like a dream by the flooding moonlight. A snake stretching across their path, Sir Mortimer drew his sword, but the creature slipped away, kept before them for a while, then turned aside into its safe home. They came to the place they were seeking. Here was the cactus, taller than its fellows, and gaunt as a gallows-tree, and here the projecting end of a fallen cross. Between showed no vestige of an opening; dark, impervious, formidable as a fortress wall, the tunal met the eye. Ferne, attacking it with his sword, thrust aside a heavy curtain of broad-leaved vine, came upon a network of thorn and spike and prickly leaf, hewed this away, to find behind it a like barrier. Evidently the man had lied!--to what purpose Sir Mortimer Ferne would presently make it his business to discover.... There overtook him a sudden revulsion of feeling, depression of spirit, cold and sick distaste of the place. Tom and breathless, in very savagery over his defeated hope and fool's errand, he thrust with all his strength at the heart of this panoplied foe. His blade, piercing the swart curtain, met with no resistance. With an exclamation he threw himself against that thick-seeming barrier, and so, with Robin-a-dale behind him, burst into a narrow, secret way, masked at entrance and exit, and winding like a serpent through the tunal which surrounded the fortress of Nueva Cordoba.
VI
ow Neptune keep the plate-fleet at Cartagena!" whistled Arden. "When I go home I'll dress in cloth of gold, eat tongues of peacocks, and drink dissolved pearls!"
"When I go home I'll build again my father's house," cried Henry Sedley.
"In Plymouth port there's a bark I know," quoth Baldry. "When I go home she's mine,--I'll make of her another Star!"
"When I go home--" said Sir Mortimer, and paused. The early light was on his face, a deeper light within his eyes that saw the rose which he should gather when he went home. Then, since he would not utter so deep and dear a thought--"When we go home," he said, and began to speak--half in earnest, half in relief from the gravity of the past council--of that returning. By degrees the fire burned, and he whose spirit the live coal touched as it touched Sidney's and, more rarely, Walter Raleigh's, bore his listeners with him in a rhapsody of anticipation. Long fronds of palm drooped without the room which held them, Englishmen in a world or savage or Spanish, but their spirits followed the speaker to green fields of Kent or Devon. They saw the English summer, saw the twilight fall, heard the lonely tinkle of far sheep-bells, heard the nightingales singing beneath the moon that shone on England. Friends' homes opened to them; Grenville welcomed them to Stowe, Sidney to charmed Penshurst. Then to London and the Triple Tun! Bow Bells rang for them; they drank in the inn's long-room; their names were in men's mouths. What welcome, what clashing of the bells, when they should sail up the Thames again--the Mere Honour, the Cygnet, the Marigold, and the Phoenix--with treasure in their holds, and for pilot that bright angel Fame! What should they buy with their treasure? what should they do with their fame? Treasure should beget stout ships, stout hearts to sail them; fame, laid to increase, might swell to deathless glory! Sea-captains now, sea-kings would the English be, gathering tribute from the waters and the winds, bringing gifts to England--frankincense of wealth, myrrh of knowledge, spikenard of power!--till, robed and crowned, she rose above the peoples, Joseph's sheaf, Joseph's star!
On went the charmed words, each a lantern flashed on thought, grave, poetic, telling of triumph, yet far removed from gross optimism, not without that strange, melancholy note sounding now and again amongst the age's crashing chords. Abruptly his voice fell, but presently with a lighter note he broke the silence in which his listeners gazed upon the stately vision he had conjured up. "Ah, we will talk to Frank Drake of this night! Canst not hear Richard Hawkins laugh in the Triple Tun's long-room? The Queen, too, in her palace will laugh,--like a man with the flash in her eye and her white hand clenched! And they whom we love.... What is the word for to-night, John Nevil? I may give it? Then--Dione!"
It was the red dawn after his vigil on the fortress hill: in the great room of the stone house the leaders of the expedition had followed, line by line, his sword point as it drew upon the flagging a plan of attack, to which they gave instant adoption; Master Francis Sark had been dismissed, and to the Admiral's grave hint of possible treachery Ferne had answered, "Ay, John Nevil, I also think him a false--hearted craven, Spaniolated and perverse, a huckster, whose wares do go to the highest bidder! Well, with our hand at his throat we do not bid the highest?"