"Do you not hear the drums beat and the trumpets blow--far away, far away? Let me whisper--there's one that comes home in triumph.... Ay, your Grace, 'twas I that took Santo Domingo in Hispaniola, and on the mainland the very rich cities of Puerto Cabello, Santa Marta, La Guayra, Cartagena, Nombre de Dios and San Juan de Ulloa. Manoa I reserve,--'tis a secret city, and all who know a secret must keep it, else.... Robin! Robin, rid me of these babblers. She's coming!--all in white--like blown spray--but she bears no roses. Lilies, lilies!--white samite like her robe--but her eyes are turned away. Let her pass, ye fools! She's the word of the night!" He staggered to his feet, swaying forward, clutching at the empty air as at a man's throat, and again his laugh rang through the cabin. "So you twisted it from me, Spanish dog!--so I raved out my heart as to a woman? Then, Don Sathanas, we'll go home together and all the soldiery of hell shall not unlock our embrace!" He grappled with an invisible foe--bent him backward farther and farther over the brink of the world--went down with him into unplumbed darkness....
They judged not the Captain of the Cygnet for a craven and a traitor, for, day after day and day after day, he lay in the Admiral's cabin, so ill a man that the coasts of Death seemed nearer than those of England, and man's condemnation an idle thing, seeing that so soon he must face another Justiciar. So near at times to that ultimate shore did he drift that those who watched him saw the shadow on his face. When the shadow was deep they waited with held breath; when it somewhat lifted they sorrowed that the tide had brought him back. He was of those changelings from a fortunate land to whom Love clings when Faith has covered her head and turned away. They that in heaviness of heart loved him still grieved that he might not touch the dark shore. Better, far better, to lay hold of it so, to go quietly in the not unhappy fever-dream, wandering of old days, recking naught of the new. So the matter might be adjudged elsewhere, but in this world glozed and softened.
The days went on and still Fate played with him, drew him forward, plucked him back. What fancies he had; what wild excursions he made into dizzy, black, and horror-haunted regions; what æons he lived beneath the seas that stifled; by what winds he was whirled, through space, past burning orbs that neither warmed nor lighted the all-surrounding night; in what Titanic maze he was lost, lost forever, he and Pain that was his brother from whom he might not part;--the sick brain made a hell and languished in the world it had created! At other times, when the dark coasts were near and the current very swift, pale paradises opened to him where he lay for centuries, nor hot nor cold, neither waking nor sleeping, not in joy and not in sorrow. Then the stopped pendulum swung again, and the dreams came fast and faster. At times his brain turned from its mad clash with gigantic, formless, elemental things to rest in the beaten ways. They that listened heard the adventurer speak, heard the courtier and the poet and the lover, but never once the traitor. Of the fortress of Nueva Cordoba and of what had happened therein, of a Spaniard, noble but in name, of an English knight and leader who had not endured, who, where many a simple soul had stood fast to the end, had redeemed his body with his honor, the man who raved of all things else made no mention. Now with the sugared and fantastic protestation demanded by court fashion and the deep, chivalric loyalty of his type he spoke to the Queen of England, and now he was with Sidney at Penshurst, Platonist, poet, Arcadian. Now he lived over old adventures, old voyages, past battles, wrongs done and wrongs received, unremembered loves and hatreds, and now he walked with Damaris Sedley in the garden of his ancient house of Ferne.
Then at last he came to a land where he lay and watched always a small round of azure wave and sky, lay idly with no need of thought or memory, until after a lifetime of the sapphire round it occurred to him to put forth a wasted hand, touch a sun-embrowned one, and whisper, "Robin!" It was a day later, the ships nearing the Grand Canary, and land birds flying past his circlet of sky and ocean, when, after lying in silence for an hour with a faint frown upon his brow, he at last remembered, and turned his face to the wall.
VIII
n a small withdrawing-room at Whitehall an agreeable young gentleman pensioner, in love with his own voice, which was in truth mellifluous, read aloud to a knot of the Queen's ladies. The room looked upon the park, and the pale autumn sunshine flooding it made the most of rich court raiment, purple hangings, green rushes on the floor, lengths of crimson velvet designed for a notable piece of arras, and kindled into flame the jewels upon white and flying fingers embroidering upon the velvet the history of King David and the wife of Uriah.
"'It is not the color that commendeth a good painter,'" read the gentleman pensioner, "'but the good countenance; nor the cutting that valueth the diamond, but the virtue; nor the gloze of the tongue that tryeth a friend, but the faith,'"
Mistress Damaris Sedley put the needle somewhat slowly through the velvet, her fancy busy with other embroidery, not so much listening to the spoken words as pursuing in her mind a sweet and passionate rhetoric of her own.