American Captain

CHAPTER 23 King's Country

Winds blew, sails filled, heathen stems cut the water much like Christian stems. Hardly nine weeks after our departure from Suakin, the two dhows rounded the Cape of Good Hope into view of Cape Town. I went below to don some of the garments I had bought at the moribund Portuguese settlement at Sufala. I had not tried them on until now, and to my amazement I had forgotten how to put on a shirt, tie a lace, or fasten a button. When I had finished the labor, we were putting into port. My heart stood still at the sight of a church like those of the old Dutch settlements on Long Island Sound and at what looked like a village green.

Most of the white men I saw on the wharfs were bearded Dutch, soberly dressed, but not as quaintly as I. When the dhows had docked, Jim came and stood beside me, dressed in a flowing aba. We waited motionless and silent, remote and apart from the people passing by.

Two young Englishmen, one dressed in what must be the latest London fashion and the other in the undress uniform of the Royal Navy, stopped to gaze at the dhows and spoke in something near to my native tongue.

"What do you make of yon scarecrow in Don Quixote's clothes?" the more languid and elegant of the pair asked his fellow.

"1 don't like the cut of his jib."

"It's true it would frighten the little ones from their porridge, but he's no kind of Dutchman I've seen, and that black with him is from back of beyond. I think they must have come from Mozambique."

"There—or from the tomb."

The pair laughed and walked on. A few seconds later I saw them both gazing seaward, patently to avoid speaking to another young Englishman walking briskly in my direction. The newcomer did not let them know he felt or even noticed the slight, but he could not hide from me the bitter set of his lips or the stiffening of his stride. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, rather delicately made, he walked like a horseman. His clothes, once good, had worn almost to shabbiness. He stopped near me, ostensibly to look at the dhows, then turned suddenly, as by a feat of will.

"I say, can you speak English?" he asked.

"I can."

"I had a feeling you could. There's a hint of English stock about the eyes. Good God, but you've been through hell."

"I don't know that country." But I once saw its fires in the eyes of a leopard dying in my arms.

"Please don't resent my speaking to you. I'd like to ask you some questions. They might benefit us both."

"You can try."

"Is this your first visit to Cape Town?"

"Yes."

"You've been in the Bush a long time. Longer than any renegade I've ever seen. Most men couldn't have lived that long in the Bush."

I did not answer.

"The word's out that those dhows are loaded down with ivory-something like forty tons. By any chance could it belong to you?"

"There are thirty-six tons, and they belong to me."

"Jove, what a joke on Sidney! I mean the fine buck that just snubbed me, along with Ensign Wells. Sidney is a kind of office boy to tlie governor. If he'd known you had thirty thousand quid of tusks, he would have been the first to make you welcome to this latest jewel in King George's crown."

"I didn't know either I had thirty thousand quid of tusks."

"They'll bring forty pounds per hundredweight from the buyers here, but the pot can't call the kettle black. I came to that ivory like a cat to a pan of milk."

"Before you explain that, I'll ask you a question. When you speak of King George, do you mean George IV?"

"Sir, there isn't any George IV—yet. George III is still king in name, although he's mad, and the crown prince is regent."

"I can hardly believe it. George III was king twenty years before I was born "

"That's about right. You're not over forty. He came to the throne in 1760 and has worn the crown nearly sixty years."

I liked the young man's earnest way.

"Now I'll explain the questions—whether or not I justify them," he went on. "If you're a stranger here, I can serve you until you get acquainted with the town. I can help you order more suitable clothes —arrange good quarters for you—find you good servants—run your errands. I'll charge you for it, of course—I need the money very badly—but I won't rob you."

"What's your name?"

"Alan Ridgeley."

"What will you charge me per day?"

"I'd like to ask a pound—"

"That's not too much if I engage you. You seem an educated man of good family. Why do you need such work?"

"I got into trouble with the military, and my brother, who's a lord and controls the purse strings, booted me down here. Now he's written me I can come back or go to the devil, but he's through with me. I'm trying to live until I can work my way back on a ship."

"You're engaged. Your first duty will be to find the harbor master and see about the unloading of my ivory. I want it put in a warehouse that can be locked and guarded. Is there a bank in Cape Town?"

"The Bank of Amsterdam had a factor here for fifty years. Now the banking is done by Baring's, in London, hand in glove with the East India Company. You haven't told me your name, sir."

"Holgar Blackburn." It came easily to my lips and I had the sense, intangible and strange, of speaking truth.

"You've got to be from someplace, in filling out the forms."

"My last address was a workhouse in Tavistock. I ran away when I was fourteen."

"Well, I'll get the worthy."

The harbor master, Mr. Barneveld, was as Dutch as his name. He did not offer me his hand—as though he feared I might crush it in mine—but he welcomed me to the port in broken English and promised that a work crew of thirty Hottentots would unload my ivory at once. I asked that great care be taken that none of the tusks be dropped and broken.

"If one of dos Kaffir drop yus one, I give him hunnerd lashes on his black back," the master said.

"That won't mend the break," I answered, at which Alan looked at me in some surprise.

When the tusks had been stored, Alan took me to a kind of boarding house catering to officers and travelers. A pink-cheeked Dutch girl looked at me with dismay, but rented me one of the best rooms and set a small table for me, away from the long board, in the dining room. Of many pointed reminders of my frightening appearance, this was the most sharp so far; but it did not pierce my skin. It came to pass that Jim took the dishes from the waiters' hands and served me himself. He asked to do it through some law of his own, and I made no protest.

I slept that night in a deep, clean featherbed, Jim on a cot in the anteroom. In the morning I bade Alan request the presence of an East India Company official, an officer of the government, a merchant of standing, and a minister of the gospel at an important meeting in the warehouse. Alan's eyes asked if, after all, I was mad.

"I can't promise they'll come," he told me.

"I'll present each of them with a bottle of the best schnapps in town, and if any of them find the matter beneath his notice, I'll give him half a ton of ivory of my own choosing."

He looked at me and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I doubt if you'll have to pay up."

I felt sure that curiosity, if nothing else, would bring the four witnesses whereby my possession of the gold would become a public fact. Meanwhile I had Jim borrow a saw used by ivory workers for cutting billiard-ball pieces. When the four men arrived, worthies all, the minister was boyishly excited, the merchant and the company official were more impressed than they wished anyone to know, and only the government officer, Mr. Gerry, took a superior attitude. However, he bowed politely enough when Alan introduced me, and no one wanted to be caught listening to the witticisms he whispered behind his hand.

"Now, now, Mr. Blackburn," he said to me. "You've asked us to come here, and we've obliged you, so oblige us by making the business short. What's all this mystery about?"

"Will each of you gentlemen be kind enough to select one of the tusks from the stacks? My factor, James Porter, will lay them to one side."

This was done. The four tusks were laid in an open space in the warehouse. When I nodded to Jim, he began to saw one of them about where the hollow ended in solid bone. Near the center the saw-blade met an obstruction. This he sawed around and broke off. Each part of the tooth now showed a small yellow core that glimmered in the shadowy room. Jim dug around each with his knife. He extracted two hunks of gold, one about four inches long and the shape of a goat horn, the other twice as long and more like a bullock's horn with a blunted end. The two pieces, a total weight of about twenty pounds, Jim laid in my hands.

"Sir, do you know what these are?" I asked Mr. Gerry, putting the objects in his hands.

"Good God, they're gold," he answered.

"This is no time to take the Lord's name in vain," the minister intoned with great solemnity; and in spite of my heavy heart—longing to be back on the Atbara—I could not help but grin.

The gold passed from hand to hand. An intent, almost anguished look was on every face, and the staring eyes looked glazed. No one spoke a word as Jim began sawing the second tusk. This time he bethought himself and cut nearer the base of the tusk than before, about at the top instead of the bottom of the deposit, an ivory-saving process that had not crossed my mind until now. By breaking the cement and chipping the pulp, he soon loosened the gold and brought it out in one nicely curved and tapered piece. He had begun on the third tusk when the banker, breathing hard, got himself in hand.

"Mr. Blackburn, are we to understand that all those tusks have gold in 'em?"

"Every one."

"Then there's tons of it."

"Between five and six tons, I think."

"Why, damn, that's half a million pounds!"

"I don't think it will disturb the even tenor of Alex Baring's bank in London," the merchant remarked.

"He's Mr. Alexander Baring, if you please. Sir, if I may ask, whose gold is it?"

"Mine."

"But can you prove it?" Mr. Gerry asked. "That's what I want to know." He looked to the others for approval on this well-taken stand.

"He doesn't have to prove it," the merchant, Mr. Walters, remarked with some acerbity. "Possession is nine points in the law—even government officials are supposed to know that. Unless someone can prove he lifted it off him—and it had better be a white man, not some naked heathen—he can keep it."

The banker meditated a moment and wiped his face with his handkerchief. Everyone waited for his pronouncement.

"What Mr. Walters said is perfectly true. Mr. Blackburn has brought his gold into an English port—beneath the English flag—and common sense tells me he brought it out of the Bush, where other men have made their fortunes. Mr. Blackburn, do you care to tell us the source of this gold?"

"A mine in a native state on the Upper Nile."

"Mr. Blackburn, I've not the slightest reason to dispute your ownership of it, and I won't. I'll accept it, and give you drafts on Baring's Bank in exchange. I'll have company workmen get it out of the tusks, working in guarded shifts, and will have it in our main vault before dark. Also, I wish to be the first to congratulate you. You—whom the Honorable Alan Ridgeley told me began life in a workhouse in Devonshire—are now one of the rich men of the Empire."

I wondered if Alan had gained face in these last few minutes along with me.

"I have a request to make, Mr. Blackburn," the minister broke in. "The first Christian symbol your eyes lighted upon as you returned from exile among the heathen was the bell tower of my church. The building needs new roofing. Will you contribute the contents of merely one of these tusks—what I estimate as twenty pounds of gold —to that cause?"

"No, sir, but I'll give a ton of ivory, worth nearly as much."

"A tablet will be set in the wall, acknowledging your gift for all time to come."

I mused on Holgar Blackburn's name being inscribed on that tablet, and what he would think if he knew. The scene changed, and again I was under the iron hook in the wall of the Sepulcher of Wet Bones, and Holgar was speaking to me in a voice hoarse with longing.

"Ask if they'll let you do it. Big Yank. . . . Those bully boys of Sidi's are edgy and will bitch it sure. . . . You're strong as a lion—and you ought to see one jump over a six-foot boma with a man in his jaws..."

That scene seemed the present reality and this the dream. But it slowly faded, and I was back with Jim and Alan and the four worthy burghers of Cape Town who were talking in low, awed tones.

By Alan's arrangements, the best tailor in Cape Town worked all night at making me a proper-looking broadcloth suit, but he would not have it ready in time for my call on the governor. Lord Charles Somerset.

The invitation brought by a uniformed Negro was, as Alan put it, virtually a command. Disturbed over the figure I would cut, Alan wanted me to borrow more suitable clothes from some of the burghers or buy some second hand; I told him not to worry, since I would feel perfectly comfortable in my old-fashioned rig. Actually, I wished I could care a little about royal governors' opinions of me except as it served Jim's and my future undertaking. It would be better for me if I winced within when a now familiar expression came into people's faces at sight of me: I could then believe I was one of the people, instead of a stranger from some other world on a fated mission. More ominous than indifference was a secret satisfaction I had begun to take in these responses. It could mean that a shadow that dogs every man's soul had caught up with mine—but I believed it meant something else.

After waiting in the splendid hall of the castle, I could not help but grin, for the secretary who came to escort me into the governor's presence was none other than the foppish young man who had remarked on my appearance on the dock. Of dim imagination, he had made the almost incredible mistake of failing to connect his scarecrow with the fabulous Mr. Blackburn. At sight of me, his jaw dropped.

"Are you ill?" I asked..

"I've seen you somewhere, sir."

"Is that any reason to lose your aplomb?"

"No, sir."

"Perhaps the governor has little children I may frighten from their porridge."

"If you tell him I said that, I'll get the sack."

"I doubt if you'll be brought into any conversation involving half a million guineas." For I thought of other outlanders whom his careless contempt could sting.

"I'm properly rebuked, so please let it go."

A gray-haired man of patent distinction, elegantly garbed in black plush, Lord Somerset received me civilly enough. Also an experienced diplomat, he did not at once ask me the question that was the purpose of my summoning; and as he spoke pleasantly of Devonshire, I thought to put one to him. Truly, I could hardly find the courage. There were two possible answers, one as likely as the other; and the difference to me would be immeasurable. The question had risen often to my mind in the early years of my slavehood, but I had learned to set it aside—rather, to distract myself from it. Ever since I had Isabel it had been only a haunting deep in my brain. Even if the answer was No, I still could not have Isabel again—I could not return to Africa, to joy and safety and complete freedom—but how changed would be the whole future pattern of my life; with what scope I could set my course!

Is Sir Godwine Tarlton alive?

I did not ask it in this form. I waited my chance...

"I dare say you've had enough of the country and will live in London," Lord Somerset was saying.

"Perhaps so. I've no one left in Tavistock."

"You'll enjoy the sporting life, I know. I could give you letters to several good fellows. Do you know anyone there?"

"No, unless some of my boyhood friends have gone there. One of our local squires went there to live when I was a boy, but I can't recall his name. Then there was a bigwig from the next shire who spent most of his time in London—I saw him at Bodwin, and his being a captain in the Royal Navy impressed me greatly. It's just possible you know him. His name was Tarlton."

The blood did not rush to my head; the floor stayed solid under my feet; my voice sounded a little strained, but not enough to attract the governor's attention; I doubted if there was any visible change in my face.

"I don't believe I recall him," he answered after a polite, thoughtful pause.

"Perhaps he's long passed to his reward."

"By any chance do you mean Lord Tarlton?"

"I think not. This gentleman might have been a knight—"

"Lord Tarlton was a knight before being made a baron-Sir Godwine Tarlton was his name then—and now I think of it, he had a long career in the Navy. Why, I admire him intensely. He was the only gentleman of high position who refused to meet that upstart, Beau Brummell. The Prince of Wales was put out with him for years, but came to realize he was right, and when he broke with Beau, what did he do but elevate Tarlton to the peerage! At least that was the story—quite in keeping with our Regent's character—although of course Tarlton's service against the Americans, in that little ruckus of 1812, was the official excuse."

"Is he as rich and prominent as the country people thought?"

"One of the first gentlemen of London. A great sportsman, he wears his sixty years like a younker."

I had known it all the time. My soul had confided there was no need to ask. He looked, not like an eagle, but like a phoenix, that ever rises laughing from the fire.

"You have a highly individual countenance, Mr. Blackburn," Lord Somerset remarked.

"That's a mild way to put it."

"Ordinarily I am good at reading faces. It's part of my training as a servant of the king. I must confess that yours baffles me. Some expression passed across it a moment ago, but again it's like—what shall I say—"

"Please say what comes to your mind. It won't offend me, you may be sure."

"Flint, with one gouge of a chisel across the left cheek. But 'tis better that, than to look like every Tom, Dick, and Harry. In some pursuits it might be an advantage."

"That of a professional pugilist, perhaps."

Lord Somerset laughed nervously. "I see you're plain-spoken and your feet are on the ground. I'm sure you'll get on well in the sporting world of London. As to Lord Tarlton, I could give you a letter to him, but being so very English, he's a bit aloof."

"I won't take any letters, thank you kindly. Since I'm humbly born, I'd better make my own way."

"Now I think of it, Tarlton and you might get on famously. Mark you, he's a great blood. Although his title, Baron Tarlton of Grindstone, is quite new, his lineage is ancient. But he conforms to fashion as much as he pleases, and no more. He flaunts his bastard son in the best society. To put it in a nutshell, he lives by his own law."

Now that Lord Somerset had mentioned his son, there was no reason that I couldn't speak of his daughter. But I did not.

"Grindstone, did you say? That's an odd designation."

"It was his own choice, largely speaking. It is often so with newly created peers—or else the king suggests some appellation out of sentiment. As I remember it, Grindstone is an island near North America that was the scene of a sea battle between his ship and an American vessel during the Rebellion."

"That's very interesting. And since you've given me so much of your time—"

"There's one other matter I wish to mention. If I send a secretary to your lodgings, will you draw a map for him showing the position of the mine that produced your gold? His Majesty's government would like to know, in view of future developments."

"Sir, it was in Southern Nubia, a country that's been mined over for thousands of years. My gold was a small deposit overlooked by earlier seekers, and there's no use to search any further."

His face flushed with anger, but as he looked upon my face, he did not speak. A moment later he gave me a cold but not stinted bow.

It might be I could now explain the deeply troubled satisfaction I had found myself taking in my gaunt form and stony visage, but the explanation appalled me as much as the fact itself. Perhaps I perceived at last it could be used as a weapon against my enemies. Along with my sword of gold, it might help my cause.

But when the need of my heart came round, what would I do for friends?

CHAPTER 24 In Remembrance

My impulse and temptation was to keep Jim near me all the time. I felt a distinct loss when we were out of sound of each other's voices; when he had been away, my heart lightened to hear his step. So two ghosts might feel in a throng of living—or two of the quick cast by shipwreck on an island of the dead. The fact remained that in the immediate future he had more important work to do than being my counselor and servant.

When dealing with English-speaking people he was at a disadvantage because of his color and dialect. The fact remained that he had come far from the simple man whom I had known aboard the Vindictive; the ordeal in Africa had developed his resources, his mind had broadened, his character had strengthened, and the struggle to survive had taught him subtlety and cunning. He spoke the Kalam wati—the Arabic vernacular—fluently. In Berber dress he would attract no undue attention about the docks of Malta. The Arab-speaking emigrants and migrants would probably suspect that he was not of the Faithful; but he could catch many a fish with a silver hook.

I was a marked man, and he was not. This was another and clinching reason why he, not I, must undertake a necessary mission in Malta. And it was in view of parting with him at Lisbon for several months at least that the idea came to me to engage Alan as a general secretary and agent. He knew London well, had had a good deal of experience in English upper-class society, possessed an alert, keen, although not powerful, mind, and seemed to me honest and capable of such loyalties as I would require of him.

"Would you care to tell me about the scrape you got in?" I asked him one evening in my quarters. "As you said to me when you first questioned me, you might find it to your advantage."

"I'd rather someone else told you. You might get a truer account."

"I'll take a chance on yours."

"I had a commission in an old and rather swagger rifle regiment. I hated the whole business, and especially fighting. A good many people say I was afraid to fight, and it might very well be true. Especially I hated fighting the Americans in 1812. My grandpa, the first Lord Ridgeley, was born in Virginia, and he had stood with Chatham and Wilkes and Barre in '76 in the Colonies' defense. Still, that may have been only my excuse to get out of a dirty job."

Alan paused, as if to ask me whether to go on. I nodded.

"Ever since we lost the War of the Revolution, we've pretended we didn't lose it and those great states are still our plantations and the Americans are a pack of rebel dogs. I doubt if we—the English Upper-class, I mean, to which I was born—will ever get the notion clean out of our heads. Yet by bad luck my regiment was under General Ross in the raid up the Patuxent River on Washington. By the worst of luck, I was ordered to command a detail to set fires. I refused and was court-martialed for disobedience and cowardice. The cowardice charge didn't stick, but I was cashiered for the other, and might have been shot if the burning of the capital hadn't begun to smell bad clear across Europe. The London bucks wanted me hanged for a traitor. I was expelled from all my clubs and my old schoolfellows erased my name from their rolls. I could have helped Napoleon escape from Elba without incurring such wrath from my own kind."

"What's its real cause? Hatred of the American Republic?"

"In a large measure. The toffs don't like the idea of English people —they think of Americans as English—getting along well without a king and all that pertains to a king. The idea of freedom and equality in the American sense of the terms is obnoxious in the extreme—the swain no longer doffing his cap to the squire—Tom no longer a cut below Dick and Dick three cuts above Harry—with wealth and personal achievement taking the place of rank. Often the feeling's merely resentment or pretended scorn. Sometimes it's deadly malice. And I'm afraid it will last a long time."

Plainly Alan was trying to answer my questions fully and intelligently. No doubt he suspected what was in my mind, but still he put a damper on his hopes. I could see it in his face.

"You told me that you hoped to work your way back to England," I said. "Have you any employment there?"

"I hoped to find some. I love the island dearly. I don't think I'm cut out for a colonial."

"Would you like to work for me in a position of secretary? I would expect you to live at my establishments for the time being and travel with me on some of the journeys I intend to make, so your salary of three hundred guineas a year would be largely found."

He turned pale in the face, then red. "It would be heaven," he answered.

"Then you can start tomorrow."

"I will—if after I tell you something—give you a warning—you still want me." He was trembling so he could hardly speak. "Although technically speaking I belong to the aristocracy, I'd be a Liability to you instead of an asset in the matter of you getting on in English society."

"I don't want anything from English society except what I buy and pay for. English society will want nothing of me except my gold. I can assure you, you won't get in my way."

"That settles it, Mr. Blackburn."

"My factor Jim, yourself, and I will sail from Cape Town on the first England-bound vessel having accommodations for passengers. Make tlie necessary arrangements."

Early in October we put out in a fine East Indiaman of eight hundred tons burden. My hired cabin was nearly as large as Captain Phillips's on the Vindictive; Alan and Jim had cubbies larger than the little room where I had first slept aft the mast. Neither fast nor yare, she was staunch and steady; and without once heaving to in heavy weather, we made Lisbon in forty-five days. Here I gave Jim a money belt, a letter of credit on an English bank in Syracuse, and some long-mulled instructions. Wearing western clothes of a plain sort and with Arabic raiment in his chest, he set sail for Gibraltar on his way to Malta. I did not expect to lay eyes on him for six months at least and probably a year.

Sailing on, we passed Cape Finisterre and the very waters where we had lost Thomas Childers, whereby I had become bosun and Ezra Owens had signed on the ill-starred ship, the last comer, the next of the last to die of all those gone. The last time I had seen this land was in the spring of 1801—the days already numbered before I should go into slavery—and this was the year's end, 1817. Our next landfall was Ouessant Island, which we rounded to enter the English Channel; and on a raw, chill, gray morning in early January, 1818, we came up on the tide to London.

While Alan attended to our baggage, I walked across the dank-smelling wharf up to the street. My clothes tailored in Cape Town and my hat and greatcoat bought in Lisbon proclaimed me a man of substance, although not yet of fashion, so only a few urchins, ready to run, remarked openly and pointedly on my appearance. "Coo, 'ere's Jack Ketch, dressed like a toff," cried one, more imaginative than the rest. Most passers-by gave me troubled glances. No beggars came near me.

I hardly noticed these expressions. All my thoughts and musings and perceptions busied seeking an answer to a vital question. I had come here in smoldering anger against England. It seemed to have no bearing as yet on my attitude toward a little knight I had once known, which was cold as a stone; but it would worry Captain Phillips if he knew of it. The fact remained that twice within fifty years English soldiers had ravaged my native land. In the first war the)' had hanged our patriots and employed red Indians with scalping knives to murder our frontiersmen, and in the second war they had burned our capital to the ground. In the years between the Royal Navy had impressed our seamen and the bigwigs of the government had treated us like dirt beneath their feet. Although I remembered pleasantly most of the Englishmen whom I had met in the hospital at Malta, I recalled too clearly some high-handed doctors and arrogant officers. Now I wanted to go and look at some plain English people. Maybe they would mitigate the bitterness in my heart.

So I walked about and watched them—sailors, deck hands, costermongers, shivering pinched-faced clerks, custom officers, merchants, housewives with market baskets, artisans with their tools— an endless eddying river of humanity in the streets and alleys. Although an occasional lordling in his coach or carriage seemed not to care whom he ran over and the high-handedness of some of the officials reached the point of insult, I got over my feeling of being in enemy country. The governor of Cape Town had spoken of Lord Tarlton as being "so very English." I did not think he was a perceptible fraction as English as an apple-cheeked woman selling "Irish lice." On the whole the people seemed as kindly disposed as the folk of Naples or Syracuse, almost as polite as the Maltese, and as warmly human as the crowds at the Khartoum fair.

I need no longer fear dissipating my energies and emotions in the coming struggle. By the bearings I had taken, I could chart my course.

Until now I had considered going to Tavistock as soon as London tailors could array me suitably for my mission there. Now I decided to wait until I had completed more pressing business in America, then undertake all my English affairs in unbroken order. My preparations went forward swiftly. During my absence Alan would undertake various missions.

"Keep in mind that my favorite sports will be gaming, steeple-chasing, fox hunting, gunning, and cockfighting in the company of die best bloods in England," I told him.

He gave me a great wondering glance.

I was greatly tempted to take passage on a Yankee ship. In the end I chose an English vessel, with no very good reason other than that most traveling Englishmen did so, and for more practice in English ways.

Then up rose Beacon Hill, crowned by a great edifice of red brick, and the tower of Christ Church on Copp's Hill, where hung the lanterns that sped Paul Revere on his famous way; but the city had spread and grown so, I would have hardly known it; and my heart could not lift in pride because of its load of loneliness.

"I have no one in my homeland any more," I had told Isabel, "but I have everyone." I had hardly known what I was saying and did not know my meaning, and maybe the words were empty. Maybe the people had changed in this long while and some great dream had died. Maybe the righting of one old wrong as far as it could be righted by two men's mighty striving was a hollow dream.

Standing on the dock, I began to hear familiar accents and to see faces reminiscent of those I had known in my childhood. From hence I re-embarked for Newburyport, at the mouth of the Merrimac River, and after that I knew I had come home.

Long sharp ships, to the yare manner born, were a-building in her yards. About her docks hung codgers and lobsterers with crinkled eyes and red faces who spoke with a nasal twang. Men as lean and light of movement as the Tuareg, with something of the same grace of gesture and even beauty of facial bone spoke together of sparms and bowheads, crow's-nests and harpoons, and the "grounds" off Greenland, but these grounds were icy-blue and icy-cold. There was such a thing as aristocrats among human kind, and there they stood. Of all the great equestrian orders, they lived the most daring and beauty-flooded lives. Riding the most gallant of horses-of-tree, they hunted Leviathan.

My main business in Newburyport was to seek Sparrow's sister Bessie and his aunt, Calesta Peck, and, if I found them, to give them an important message. I could not find Calesta, she having gone to lie in the churchyard eight years before. But I found Bessie, a small, tidy woman with quick movements and a lively countenance, and the ghost of Sparrow rose before my eyes.

I told her what Sparrow had said—that he had never done any great wrong, such as murder or treason, and he loved her to the last. Without explaining my dealings with him, I assured her that he had lived and died true to his flag, his ship, and his mates. Then it came to pass that my first raising of a cairn over the bones of my shipmate could be an especially notable one. Bessie and her husband and little ones had lately come upon hard times. The brig Molly Stark, of which they owned half, had been lost off Hatteras; just before then they had rashly gone into debt for a share in another vessel building in Putnam's Yard. I arranged for them to pay this debt, buy a controlling interest, and name her the Enoch Sutler. Thus his name would be remembered on the seven seas. Bessie wept in grief-torn joy as I made my lonely way by the budding elm trees.

At an inn in my native town of Bath I heard the name of a living man that caused my face to burn as though I had come into a warm fo'c'sle from a winter gale. It was none other than Joshua Tyler, the second officer of the Vindictive until he left us to take command of a Salem sloop. Having married Mary Greenough, sister of George and Will Greenough, he had been persuaded to quit the sea and take the position of harbor master. Here was another besides Jim and me who knew our every yard and spar. Appointed to his berth, I had bought some of his clothes and worn them when I sat at meat with Sir Godwine Tarlton.

In the morning I waited on Captain Tyler at his office, finding him somewhat stouter than I had seen him last, and not as graceful of movement or keen of face. That was natural enough—he had not been whittled down by the knives of the wind for many a winter-but no one could doubt his high intelligence and character, and he looked much younger than his forty-five years. At sight of me his eyes became slightly narrowed and sharply alert—often the first response of those whom I came on suddenly—then filled with thought. But it got him nowhere, and soon he let it go.

"My name is Holgar Blackburn, and I've an account to settle with some sailors' families living in these parts," I told Captain Tyler. The men were lost nearly twenty years ago on a vessel you had served on, as second officer, and I hoped you might know them. She was the Vindictive."

He sat so still that it gave the effect of a start. I thought there were little pluckings by his spirit inside his brain. But my face did not change under his searching gaze, and his visions faded away.

"Pardon me, Mr. Blackburn. I had divined somehow you were going to speak of the Vindictive—one of those promptings no one can explain. As for the families, I've kept track of them as far as I could. I did so out of natural feeling. We were under a great captain. We had a friendship crew."

"In Gibraltar there occurred an incident I'll mention briefly. The ship's crew, roaming the waterfront at midnight, saved the life of a traveler who'd been set upon by footpads, and took him aboard to mend his hurts. He swore that if the chance ever came, he would reward them generously. Since then, fortune has been kind to him, and he would like to give half a tithing, in equal shares, to their surviving kinfolk."

"Do tell!" remarked Captain Tyler. He spoke softly and without emphasis, yet adequately expressed his profound astonishment.

Perhaps the end of the story I had told was not very likely. Perhaps most men, however rich, would never forget such a rescue, but the glow of gratitude would have dimmed in these long years, the list of names misplaced, the good resolve undermined by the habit of self-partiality, the effort enfeebled by time. But I remembered Suli-man and a horsehair band; whereby I looked straight into Captain Tyler's face, and my voice had the ring of truth.

"The sum is ten thousand dollars," I announced, essaying a businesslike tone.

"To be divided among the men?"

"No, sir, that sum is apportioned to each of the fifteen souls aboard the ship when she touched Gibraltar. In the case of those who've left no needy kindred, the money is to be used for an appropriate memorial. I have dealt directly with the heirs of Enoch Sutler, and will do the same as to James Porter and Farmer Blood."

"Farmer Blood." Captain Tyler's eyes became very bright.

"I think his shipmates called him that."

So I read off the list, my voice holding steady. The money would be well spent in every case. The Greenough boys would be remembered by a school for orphans of men 'fore the mast. Only when I came to Ezra Owens's name was Captain Tyler at a loss. He had never been able to find one kinsman or friend of this fourth from the last to die. Yet perhaps his soul, the soul of a windy man of common birth, a former jailbird, might have been the haughtiest soul of us all.

"If I'm not mistaken, he wanted to be a doctor," I said.

"He did. You speak truth. Good God, he did."

"Will you take the trouble to have a tenth of the sum spent on some monument to him—say a public drinking fountain, suitably inscribed, in the city of Philadelphia—and divide the rest among nine poor boys of promise who wish to study medicine?"

"None of the cases will be any trouble to me—only very great pleasure. I'd like to make one comment. You know that the man given my berth—Homer Whitman—was not on the ship at the time you mention, but was lost with the rest."

"I've heard as much.''

"Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word 'know.' Sometimes those whom we mourn as lost, return. Mr. Blackburn, may I dare speak what comes into my heart?"

"Aye, sir, you may."

"My heart is faint, and I fear I'm white in the face. It seems to me there's a little change in your face, too. Sir, I believe you're Homer Whitman, returned from the grave."

1 drew a long, aching breath. "Do I favor him in any way?" I asked.

"No way that I can see with my eyes."

"Is my form like his?"

"Not in the slightest. He weighed one hundred and sixty, all bone and muscle."

"What of my voice?"

"I don't—know."

"Could his face have ever come to be like mine?"

"Not by any course of event I can imagine. If it bore the stamp of great guilt, I could believe it—for who knows what awful guilt may come to lie on a human soul? Instead, it is like the face of Lazarus."

"Lazarus lay four days in the grave."

"I think you lay there four years or more. But that's my last word on the subject. I'll follow your directions, Mr. Blackburn, as well as I'm able."

I had one more pilgrimage of great joy. It was to go by riverboat and a good plug to Poultney, Vermont. I had never seen a lovelier spot than the valley of the Battenkill River, flowing to the Hudson. Near by gleamed Lake Catherine, a deep-blue jewel in the green hills; and with the rich valley land producing grain, potatoes, honey, and apples, the upland pasture cropped by cattle and sheep, maple groves for sugar, and birch and beech and hickory and butternut woods to range and hunt, it was no wonder that Farmer Blood grew to a mighty man.

Sitting at the farmhouse dinner table with his still-vigorous parents and numerous brothers, sisters, and kinsmen, I heard how his motlier, the one to say, wished his money disposed.

"My son Ethan—Farmer, you call him, and I reckon it fitted him well—would be mighty proud if you'd send it to the Quakers to use in fighting slavery."

My neck prickled fiercely, and I could not speak.

"You see, Mr. Blackburn, Vermont was the first of the states to forbid slavery," the patriarch told me, as though I might think the proposal a foolish one. "My son Ethan was mighty proud of that; and I don't doubt he boasted of it, 'mongst his shipmates."

"Yes, sir, he did. But aren't any of his kinsmen in need?"

"They're not, and if they were, they'd get in and scratch," Stella Blood answered. "If they become truly bad off, we others will pitch in and help them. None is rich, but all of us have enough, and the young'ns have hope and opportunity galore. You can give me five hundred to save for a rainy day—I'll pass it out where it's most needed and 'twill go the farthest. The rest we'd like to send to the Quakers and to Doctor Rushmore's Society in Pennsylvania, in their fight for all men to be free."

To be free! Suddenly I was looking again into the face of Zoan, chief of the Tuareg. He had told me that the chains I had worn would be hung in their camps on the desert, to remind them of how I had been a slave, and in token of their pledge never again to hold their fellow men in slavery. But I could not look upon these eager faces here about me, because my eyes had overflowed with tears.

Farmer Blood, we will fight on till Captain's gone—and he will never leave us in this world.

I had been off watch awhile, but now I must go back. On the excuse of a sight-seeing with a little fishing on the side, I chartered a lugger with a well-salted crew of four. At my whim, we cruised eastward across the Bay of Fundy, northeastward along the long Nova Scotian coast, northwestward through the Gut of Canso, and a hundred miles north until we lay off the Magdalen Islands, looking like a pair of leg bones on a chart, rough, chill—thinly peopled by fishermen, wood cutters, and shepherds. One of the islands was named Grindstone. I decided to go ashore and stretch my legs.

"A kinsman of mine, Cap'n Ezra Fairbank, was lost off this isle when I was a babe," I remarked to a halibuter on a dank little dock.

"Do tell!" he commented politely, an exclamation that I had thought confined to New England.

"He was captain of the Yankee privateer Saratoga, and he fell foul of the English sloop of war, Our Eliza. The Yankee was sunk with all hands."

" 'Pears like I heared about that fight from some 'n."

"Do you suppose there's anyone on the island that would remember it?"

"That, there is! Uncle Jake Tate can remember everything that ever happened here since Wolfe came into the Gulf to take Quebec, and before that, I reckon. Would you like to talk to him? His house is not five minutes' walk from here."

We found the old trawler sawing wood, and my first satisfaction lay in his firm, ruddy face, keen eyes, and youthful movements. Actually he was about seventy-five—by that reckoning he had been a youth of sixteen when Wolfe died on the plains of Abraham overlooking the Saint Lawrence, so young was America, so short was her history compared to the story of the Nile.

"Uncle Jake, this gentleman wants to know if you remember a sea fight off here, between an American privateer and an English sloop of war during the rebellion."

"As though it was yesterday," the gaffer answered briskly. "I and my three boys climbed yon crest to watch. We didn't know their names at the time, but we found out later they were Our Eliza, under Cap'n Tarlton, and the Saratoga, in command of Cap'n Fairchild."

"Fairbank, sir."

"Thank 'ee. 'Twas a slip of the tongue. Cap'n Ezra Fairbank, if my memory fails me not. Twas a hard-fought fight. They lay broadside, laying it on."

"When the Saratoga went down, did Our Eliza put out boats to pick up survivors?"

"The Saratoga didn't go down during the fight where we could see."

"What?"

"Mark you, I had to leave the lookout 'cause of some duty, but my boys stayed up thar. The Saratoga struck her colors. That was what we heard later. But my boys thought it was the sloop of war what asked for quarter. The two ships had got out a good way and a light mist had come up; still it was hard to believe my sharp-eyed sons had made a mistake, and you could knock us all down with a feather when the news came in. I had to lam my oldest son, Matt, for holdin' out that the Yankee had won—he being so certain he 'sputed the post boy. But neither ship was sunk. They quit firing and lay side by side awhile, and I got back to the lookout in time to see the Yankee making east with the sloop about a sea mile in her wake. They passed clean out of sight."

"East?" I heard myself ask softly.

"Why, yes."

"If the Englishman had won, why didn't he and his prize make west?"

"I reckon he meant to round Cape Breton Island down to Halifax."

"Where was the wind?"

"Out of the east, and right brisk."

"Would the English captain take his prize into the teeth of a contrary wind instead of running full sail into Quebec?"

" 'Tis odd when you think of it."

"If the Yankee had won, she'd make eastward hard as she could tack, get out to sea, and double back to Boston."

"That may be so, but Our Eliza came to port—in Halifax like I told ye—and the Saratoga was never seen again."

"The story was that Our Eliza sank her in the fight."

"Well, she didn't. That much I know. What I pictured was, she was leaking bad and her seams gave way and she went down all of a sudden, soon after me and my boys lost sight of her. It amounted to the same as her going down in the fight, and 'twas the way the story got out, and I reckoned Cap'n Tarlton didn't bother to set it straight."

"No, sir, it didn't amount to the same thing, because the prize crew Tarlton had put aboard would have gone down with her."

"Yes, unless he rescued 'em, and if he did that, he'd have picked up some Yankees, too."

The old bright-blue eyes confronting mine had become deeply troubled. I waited patiently. I thought Uncle Jake Tate would have something more to say.

"I'll pass on to you something my youngest sister told me," he went on at last. "She got it from a beau of hers, Sam Lincoln, trapping on Saint Paul Island. He said two ships came out of the west, and all of a sudden the foremost one, a three-masted Yankee, blowed up in one big burst of flame. He thought her powder magazine had caught fire somehow."

"How did he know she was a Yankee?"

"She was flyin' the Stars and Stripes from her masthead. But the vessel follerin' didn't show her colors."

"What happened then?"

"The hindmost ship started to the scene, but soon turned broadside to the wind and fell off a ways. After a while she swung about and tacked up thar, but she didn't put out no boats—there was no use, I reckon—and went on her way."

"Didn't it occur to you they were the same ships?"

"Yes, sir, but by then the news was out that the sloop of war had won, and if they was the same ships, the Yankee wouldn't be flying her flag—that is, if the news was true, and who could doubt it? Marthy said he'd seen the flag as plain as day. Also, the victory ship would stay to the wind'ard of her prize, and again it was the Yankee windward of t'other. I puzzled about it for a while, but let it go."

"Did you ever talk to Sam about it?"

"I can't say as I did. I only seen him two or three times after that when we didn't have no chance, then he moved to Saint John, in New Brunswick."

"Is Sam Lincoln still alive?"

"That, he is. The last time I heared."

"If I paid you a hundred dollars now, would you come with me on the lugger and try to find him, with another hundred if you succeed, and pay your own way back?"

"That, I would."

"Then get your kit bag, and we'll put out."

Uncle Jake Tate proved a most engaging companion on om- voyage into the Bay of Fundy. He had the kind of memory that had made Kerry the fascinating consort and mentor that he was to me— far-ranging, ready, positive, and sharp as things seen by lightning. Opposed to that pleasure, the business we were on begloomed my spirits and haunted my dreams, and of all the towns in Canada I wished least to visit, it was Saint John, called Parr Town in my infant days, and settled by Tories who had quit my native land in order to keep their king. But the haters left alive were growing old now, perhaps they were a little mellowed and had not passed the hatred to their sons.

I did not go ashore and instead tried to sweeten my imagination, not with an ounce of civet—the unforgettable proposal of an aged, mad king—but by fishing for chicken halibut in the harbor. Meanwhile Jake moved spryly, getting track of Sam Lincoln the first afternoon, finding him the next morning, and bringing him to see me in the cool of the evening. Sam had begun life as a trapper and hunter, given most of it to trawling, and now earned his bread making dories as fine as Yarmouth's. A man cannot train his hands without schooling his mind. I could not want a better witness than this tough-grained, lean, quiet-voiced Canuck, the survivor of sixty-five winters, none of them mild.

In reply to my questions, he repeated to me what he had told Jake Tate, but my hearing it first-hand made a deal of difference. I, too, saw the Stars and Stripes flying in triumph over the foremost of the two ships, then, all of a sudden, the vessel bathed in fire.

'What day was this, Mr. Lincoln?"

"The day after Christmas, 1781."

"Are you sure?"

"Just as sure as I'm sitting here. Pa and me hadn't much of a Christmas dinner, and I'd thought to get some heath hen with my fowling piece. Twas why I climbed the hill."

"Did you ever hear that the Saratoga and Our Eliza fought on Christmas Day?"

"Yes, sir, I did."

"Could you escape the conclusion that they were the same ships?"

"They answered the description, and I couldn't doubt it."

"How did you reconcile that to the report of Our Eliza's victory heralded through the empire?"

"I couldn't reconcile it, but I was a poor trapper in the back woods, and if I said anything, who'd listen to me, and wouldn't I be going against the king? I reckoned them lords of the government had seen fit to hide the truth to cheer the people up after Cornwallis's surrender."

"Have you since imagined what might have been happening when Our Eliza started to run down to pick up survivors, then came broadside to the wind?"

"I knew there was no hand on her wheel, but I let it go at that."

"Thank you for your information. I'd like to pay you a hundred dollars and assure you it will make no trouble for you or Mr. Tate. This was a private inquiry concerned with sentiment."

My two informants accepted their fees, looked at me with sweat-beaded faces, and went their ways. I thought to fish awhile in the morning before I turned back, but it would take a deal of sunlit water to burn the shadows of these long-ago events out of my eyes.

Present your sword to your conqueror, little nobleman. You have fought a good fight—only two of your white officers are left alive—the crude Yankee skipper has never seen so great an aristocrat—he is greatly impressed by your courtly manner—he will not want to be outdone in courtesy. Surrender him your sword, and he will give it back. You need never wear it again except in ceremony. You can carry a little stick.

He will parole you because he doesn't know what is in your heart. He will parole also your two officers, for Cornwallis has surrendered, and the war is almost over anyway, and he doesn't know they are two Loyalists from Maryland who had fought their own countrymen. Your lascars will be confined to quarters; he will not be so rude as to put them in irons. The prize crew that he puts aboard your limping Eliza, outsailed and outfought and bound for the bottom if the fight had gone on, have orders to treat you with the greatest deference and to deal kindly with your crew of dark-skinned mercenaries. That a great aristocrat would break parole was unthinkable, let alone lie awake all night, planning, plotting, hating. . . .

Little lord, great lord, the stars fight on your side! On the morrow the Saratoga blows up in an empty sea, out of sight of land except for what you deem an uninhabited island. When the prize crew aboard your beloved Eliza start to run down to pick up survivors, you see your chance. Their guard over your lascars was too trusting to be strict. They are half out of their minds over the sudden loss of their mother ship. And one command in that wintry rattling voice of yours brings your long-haired heathen swarming up the hatch with such weapons as they can seize. You are a born commander, pretty little fellow, or you would not captain a sloop of war at twenty-four. You lost your command for a little while—you lost your ship to a Yankee hooker manned by chaw-bacons fighting their king—but now you're again on her quarter-deck, calling orders in that terrifying voice.

The Yankee lubbers, taken by unbelieving surprise, fight desperately. For a little while the ship lurches with the wind—as Sam Lincoln perceived from his lookout, there's no hand on the tiller. But the rebel swine are outnumbered and soon overwhelmed. Order is restored. Dark hands are on the wheel. The ship's bow swings into the wind, and she can now resume her eastward sail, but not to a Yankee port in captivity and disgrace. She can make for Halifax with her flag flying.

The trouble is, a few, a mere handful of the prize crew are still alive. Some are wounded, some surrendered to overwhelming numbers. What's to be done with them, pretty little lord?

Why, that's an easy riddle, sink me if it ain't. These aren't prisoners of war, but mutineers to start with, traitors to the king. Hang 'em to the yardarm, every rebel bastard, then weigh 'em by the heels and heave 'em overside. Don't waste good canvas and hemp keeping out conger eels and sea lice. And may God deal the same with all their like!

And thereby only some dark-skinned Indians, who can't speak a word of English, will ever know the truth. But you know it, Captain Tarlton, and also your two officers. They changed into Barbary pirates. What did you change into?

CHAPTER 25 Runaway's Return

When I took ship for Plymouth, England, out of New York, and watched the shores of my native land draw away distant and dim, I did not know when, if ever, I would lay eyes on them again.

From Plymouth I made up the North Road by stagecoach, lay the night at Callenden, and on the following day went by chaise to Tavistock. It was a pretty town, my adopted natal place, lying at the edge of Dartmoor in the valley of the Tavy; and what remained of the Abbey of Saint Mary and Saint Ruman, now used as a public library, was an impressive sight. It had been founded by Orgar, Earl of Devon, no doubt Holgar's namesake in the tenth century. On my telling the parish clerk that I wished to pursue a genealogical inquiry, he let me consult the records.

By no great search I found the short and simple annals of the Blackburn family. Bruce Blackburn and wife Arme, emigrants from Wiltshire, were listed as tenants to George Russell, Esq., whom I took to be kin of John Russell, the great Duke of Bedford, the largest landowner in this part of England. Holgar was their oldest child, and when I read the date of his birth, the short hairs rose on my neck. It was on Monday, December 25, 1781, the very day that proud Our Eliza struck her flag to the upstart Saratoga.

It had only happened so. It was not by the devil's scheming. Perhaps Anne Blackburn's baby had been born before midnight of the twenty-fourth or in the early morning hours of the twenty-sixth and she had told a Little lie to win for him some special notice from the curate. Yet it came to me with a little cold shiver in my soul that the linking of the two events would prove of use to me before my course was run.

Holgar had had five brothers and sisters born about two years apart. I took note of their names and need never consult the record again. In the winter of 1793 there came the smallpox; these five and their parents had been wiped out in one fell swoop. Shakespeare comes to haunt the mind. That phrase brought up the rest of the quotation, as fitting to this case, all his pretty chickies and their dam had been taken from Bruce Blackburn before he turned over and died.

Below, in a different and more elegant handwriting than that of the other entry, perhaps no less than the rector's very own, I read:

"This family suffered more from the disease than any other in the parish. Since it is well known that God employs such maladies to punish the wicked, and since Bruce Blackburn was of a stubborn and rebellious nature, often failing in respect to his betters, and leading his fellow tenants in public demonstrations of discontent with the wages paid them by their masters, let this be a lesson to all who are tempted to the same iniquities. God's mercy was shown in His sparing of the oldest son, Holgar. Over his parent's objections, he had been sent to lodge with another tenant five miles distant, to help with wood-cutting. He will be given a home in the parish workhouse, there to be taught honesty, humility, and industry, whereby he may grow to worthy manhood."

When I returned the records to the clerk, I pointed out the entry.

"I was interested in this birth, because it's my own," I said.

The little gray man read it over, then looked at me with unbelieving eyes.

"You are Holgar Blackburn!"

"That's my name."

"The same that ran away from the workhouse twenty-three years ago?"

I showed him a burned X on the back of my hand.

"You've had a hard time—I can see that—yet you've come back in a costly carriage, wearing fine clothes!"

There was no righteous indignation in his face over this upset, not the least malice, only a wild hope.

"Why not?" And I glanced at a handsome gold watch that I had bought before leaving London and wore fixed to a gold chain by a horsehair band.

"You don't mean, do you, sir—please pardon my presumption in asking—you've come home rich?"

"I stink with money," I answered, grinning into his eyes.

"Oh, will you stay awhile here? Will you let some of the gentry see you, and his reverence, and his grace the Duke? Oh, if you'd not be averse to making a vulgar show—gold flung about like water—a coach and four—servants bowing and scraping—maybe a great festivity to celebrate your home-coming. Oh, you don't know how 'twould do my heart good!"

"Yes, yes," I cried to him, as though speaking to a heart-hungry child. "Wait and see. It will be the most vulgar display of wealth the shire has ever seen."

The Sepulcher of Wet Bones was a far more terrible institution than the workhouse from which my name-giver had run away, but the two had similarities. The inmates of both labored from dawn to dark on barely sufficient food; they were whipped for any real or imagined offense, herded like animals, and their humanity insulted at every turn; and, after long terms in either prison, their bodies, minds, and souls were permanently damaged. Sunlight flooded our roofless palisade most of the day, but it barely crept through the broken or dangling shutters of the three-story ramshackle tenement where, by average count, forty aged or ailing men and women or destitute children lived a dim half-life.

Mr, Peters, the parish clerk, was about to be retired from his office with a modest pension. More eager to please me, who might reward him, than to avoid angering some of the local bigwigs who had never exchanged a cordial word with him, he did not hesitate to tell me that the house was owned by a Mr. Hudson, the son of the wielder of the branding iron in 1795. Now counted a gentleman, he did not condescend to hold his father's office, but rented out the ruin to a board of guardians for a hundred pounds per annum, about three times its worth. Also, Mr. Peters was not loath to institute some further inquiries. Thus I learned that a good farm of three hundred and twenty acres close to Holgar's birthplace, with two rambling houses whose combined room was greater than the present tenement, was being offered for sale for three thousand pounds. After driving out to see it and liking its lay, I asked Mr. Peters to engage me an honest lawyer.

I did not stay for the completion of the business, but would be present at its upshot; on arriving in London I straightway sent Alan to see how it fared. During his absence I lived at the Albion Hotel, saw the town, and looked at various houses from which I might choose my London abode. The owners, solicitors, and agents whom I met in this connection invariably started at my appearance, but treated me with an intense land of respect.

Alan returned from Tavistock in a fortnight, pleased with his attainments. These he recited to me in his terse way.

"I gave the old clerk, Mr. Peters, a hundred pounds. The lawyer you hired, Shirley, paid thirty pounds earnest money on the Mar-wood farm as you directed him. Then he wrote the workhouse guardians, offering it to them for twenty years at one guinea rental a year. One or two were quite ill over cutting Mr. Hudson off from his hundred quid per annum for his ratty tenement—one raised the point that clean quarters and healthy farm labor instead of picking oakum would pamper the paupers to their ruin—but the worthies damned well knew what the rate-payers would say if they refused the offer, so they accepted it with all the grace they could muster. I paid the balance of the sum and got the deed in your name. The paupers are going to move in on July first. The fete is scheduled for July fourth, as you wished it."

"Do you think you can complete your other arrangements on time?"

"In half the time. Money makes tlie mare go, as the saying is. Mr. Blackburn, does it occur to you that July fourth is a rather odd day to hold a great fete in England?"

"I don't believe it will worry those who come to the party."

"I request that you give it on the third."

"Well, what the Americans celebrate on July fourth is an outgrowth of an English idea. The Great Charter antedates the Declaration of Independence and is of similar stuff. Your request is granted."

The party was upon us almost before we knew it; but Alan had done his work well. Everybody in the parish was invited by bill and proclamation; people from neighboring parishes would not be turned away. No one need bring food or drink, no hats would be passed or subscriptions solicited. By sunrise our tables were spread and pavilions erected, with fifty footmen brought from Plymouth and Bristol to serve ham, bacon, cheese and bread, cakes and cookies, and iced tea, lime-and-lemonade, coffee, and French chocolate without stint. Besides these good things, there had come by stagecoach, wains, and carts three bands, one of them decidedly Dutch, the best troupe of acrobats touring England, jugglers, clowns, mimics, ventriloquists, and magicians, an excellent dog-and-pony show, Toto the Diving Dog with ladder and tank complete, hand-organists with their monkeys, and several marionette shows including the immortal Punch and Judy. Six-horse teams had brought merry-go-rounds—and I remembered a carnival on Malta which Sophia and I had visited and fled. There were no dancing bears because I could not look at the pitiful brutes. No ale or stronger drinks were served because this party was for children and for those who might return to childhood for a little while.

The walkers began to stream into the grounds soon after sunrise. Families from as far as Launcestan arrived in farm wagons, and strange-speaking shepherds with their fey-looking wives and wide-eyed little ones came riding shaggy ponies or behind them in high-wheeled carts from the wild wastes of Dartmoor. By noon the bright-eyed laughing throngs moving from one merriment to another numbered a good five thousand. Not one so far ranked among the gentry; the whole crowd could be lumped off with dreadful insolence and sacrilege as "The Great Unwashed." But I had forgotten of late that little children could be enchanting. My cold heart glowed again at sight of youth and maiden, graced by God, often made gawky and awkward by the supercilious gazings of their betters, but in this hour beautiful beyond words, walking hand in hand. All this was man. It was the earthly body of God.

I stayed out of sight as much as possible, hanging off the fringes of the crowds and in easy reach of Alan if he needed instruction. My happiness was as full as some remembered from long ago and in the beauty-haunted hours with Isabel, and often I had a far-away feeling of sharing it with Holgar Blackburn, gone somewhere beyond all the deserts and all the seas. Yet he remained part and parcel with every child who played, every parent who beamed. The mystery was deep and moving in my soul.

A clown doing tricks of legerdemain before a delighted throng caught sight of me away on the outskirts and, having not the slightest notion who I was, beckoned to me.

"Come up and join us, Mister Stork," he called jovially. "The gov'-nor asked me to find out how much bacon you've hid in your hat!"

"That's my secret, and I'll keep it," I shouted back,

"Come up unless you're a-feared," the clown persisted. "Ain't that a rabbit you've poached, wigglin' under your coat? Make way for him, friends. Why, blast me, I think he's Dick Turpin, the famous road knight!"

The bright-faced crowd parted obediently. It occurred to me to wave and walk away; then I remembered that I stood for Holgar Blackburn, and I had promised to make him a good showing in Tavistock.

But as I advanced, the laughing throng grew still. The clown's face fell as I neared him; then a little girl's voice rose clear and pure as the notes of a flute.

"Mama, is en a ogre?" she asked in cheerful curiosity.

I laughed at her; then the crowd shouted with laughter. It had hardly stilled when a young woman raised a shrill cr)'.

"Coo, 'tis Holgar Blackburn hisself!"

"Why, so 'tis," some deep-voiced countryman, a natural leader, broke forth in the breathless hush. "Folk, let's give en a cheerl"

They gave it with great vehemence and in the English fashion, and since they counted me one of them, the name they shouted at the end of the three hip, hip, hurrays was Holgar only. But a giant young farmer, in rollicking humor, was not content.

"Once more," he yelled, "and see that ye name en right!"

Again the cheer roared forth, to be heard a mile,

"Hip, hip, hurray,

Hip, hip, hurray.

Hip, hip, hurray,

OGRE!"

Afterward the people laughed loudly but nervously. I wished I could tell them that I perceived their delicate motive, that they had done a wonderfully considerate thing which most of their betters could not have conceived, that there was no danger of my misunderstanding their great sociability and philanthropy. Perhaps only the lowly—and a few of those so high that they need not always stand on guard—can be truly sociable. Look to these to learn good manners!

I could only laugh with them, wave my long arms, and walk away. Afterward I grinned over a curious sequence of names—Homer, Omar, Holgar, Ogre. Fate loves conceits of this sort, I thought; she is fond of puns and witticisms of all kinds. But very rarely does she complete a first-rate poem. So often her composition begins with a noble stanza, then falls apart.

The guardians of the workhouse arrived in a body. It was their duty, and they did it, and I grinned at their three-horned dilemma: their necessity of showing one another disapprobation of this sort of goings-on, their anxiety not to offend me, and an irrepressible human and boyish desire to share in the fun. They had not brought their wives or daughters; dash it all, there was a limit to what could be expected of them; and it was best that I understand this right from the start. It turned out, however, they were not properly supported in this virtuous stand. Not one of them was higher than a knight; while nothing less than an earl, with his countess and his children and two nurses and a footman, arrived presently in a coach, and the whole kaboodle ranged the grounds, eating free lunch and seeing the shows with every sign of delight. Before the afternoon was over, there was a definite sprinkling of nobility and gentry amid the throng.

One gentleman, a bluff sort with no nonsense about him, sought me out.

"A damned fine thing you're doing here, Mr. Blackburn, and I don't care who hears me say so," he told me.

"Thank you, thank you."

"I'm that Sir Thomas Wilson-Walch, whose name you may have heard—if you saw it in the public prints, it had B-a-r-t-period written after it. We can't keep our names out of the newspapers these days, and why should we try? After all, the common sort have a natural curiosity about our sort."

"Our" could have a flattering meaning in this case, but I decided not to stake on it.

"You're quite right, of course."

"There are some, Mr. Blackburn, who look down on men who've made their own way, but I'm not one of 'em. My hat's off to 'em, sir. What they lack in the little refinements, they make up in grit and pluck. I, for one, welcome you back to your native land."

"That's very good of you. Sir Thomas Wilson-Walch."

"Are you plarming to buy a seat here? A country seat, I mean."

"Not at present."

"What are you going to collect? Almost every man of means I know collects something—in the way of hobby, y'understand."

"I hadn't thought about it yet."

"It occurred to me you'd like to acquire a collection already made —save you a lot of trouble and time. Now I've made a collection of walking sticks and canes. I've every kind you could think of—sword canes, sticks from every country in the world, canes carried by kings and conquerors I paid a pretty penny for, I'll tell you that. For instance Richard III. He was an English king of three centuries and more ago, and a bit crippled. I have an oaken walking stick with a silver handle with his monogram on it plain as day. I dare say you've never heard of Tamerlane—the name means Timur the Lame—but he was as renowned in his day as Napoleon. I have his favorite crutch—ivory with a gold knob, with a dragon engraved on it. It happens my sons and daughters have taken other hobbies and I've no one to leave this priceless collection to, so I asked myself, why not sell it to Mr. Blackburn?"

"What price would you ask, Sir Thomas?"

"Now that's a joke, Blackburn—a man of your wealth asking the price of anything! Just say you want the collection, and there'll be no trouble about the price."

"Would it be under a thousand guineas?"

"Not much over that, I'm sure. Although you'd not believe it, one of my canes is made of rhinoceros hide and looks like amber. There's another—"

Suddenly the grim fun was over. I remembered a whip made of rhinoceros hide, known as the kurbash. It had repeatedly fallen with an awful sound when there came to the real Holgar Blackburn an impulse he could not resist.

"I'll take all you've said under advisement," I told the baronet. Quickly retreating, I left him flushed with anger.

No ghosts were made to rise and walk by this nincompoop; the momentary sharpness passed away; and having been shown a valuable sample of what was waiting for me, I could try to steer clear of the main. What told upon me far more was a glimpse I had of a young girl—about eighteen, I thought, in the company of a slightly younger girl, a boy of twelve or so whom I took to be the latter's brother, and a tall, erect elderly man, with a finely chiseled face, who I did not doubt belonged to the nobility. It was the girl's carriage that first caught my eyes—I could almost believe she had acquired it from carrying water jars on her head. On gazing at her idly, I thought warmly of Sophia. Then as I looked at her in growing pleasure and surprise, she reminded me of Isabel Gazelle.

It was not merely a matter of a long free stride and a high-held head and the childish way she beamed on the performers. I could not doubt that she was of ancient lineage, her form and face and dress indicating good breeding and wealth, but I thought she was highborn in the only sense I believed, as are poets and men of high bravery and women of great beauty. It was a mystery of the spirit's manifestation in mortality. Her linking in my mind with the tall brown maiden who followed me at the Wells of the Rising Moon did not fail because of her bright blondness. Many English blondes appeared colorless, as though bleached instead of tinted; on this girl color had been poured as on the feathers of a golden pheasant. She shone in a crowd or would glimmer in the forest, and she was always a little conscious and proud of it, as was Isabel of her royalty.

I watched her with flooding joy until she happened to catch my eye. Her face fell as had the clown's, so I quickly turned away. But later I asked Alan if he had seen her, and if so, what was her name?

"No one could help but see her," he replied. "No, I don't know her name, but I can find out. She was with Lord Bray's granddaughter—the Brays live near Milton Abbey—I suppose she's visiting her."

"It was idle curiosity, so don't bother to inquire."

The last of the day's events was most strange. It happened late in the afternoon when the throngs were thinning out, and its meaning that I grasped seemed only part of a greater meaning beyond my ken. I stood among some trees, out of the way of the crowds, when a farm wife of about forty, ordinary-looking to a casual glance, dropped behind her children and husband and came to me with a hurried step. I noticed now a deep sensitivity in her face and rather strange wide eyes.

"Mr. Holgar Blackburn?" she asked.

"Yes."

"You're not, you know."

"What?"

"Holgar lived neighbor to us. We were only childhood sweethearts, but I never loved anyone as I loved him. I knew his walk. It was like no other. I know he's dead and you've taken his name, but not his riches because he could never have none."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"Nothing. I won't tell nobody in this world. I don't know what your reason is, but I know it's a good reason. Good-by."

She turned quickly and vanished in the throng.

CHAPTER 26 The Baring of the Blade

In the Weald, on the border between Kent and Surrey, by the village of Hudleigh, and not far from the fashionable resort of Tun-bridge Wells, lay the manor of Elveshurst, the most desirable of all the country seats which Alan had surveyed. It lay only thirty crow-flight miles from London Bridge. It contained five thousand acres, a thousand of which were in crop, the rest being wild pasture, forest, and ponds. Several streams offered trout fishing and otter hunting, and these debouched into a short, bold tributary of the Medway, the best salmon waters hereabouts. Water fowl were abundant in season; snipe used the fens in great numbers; and the seat was famous in seven shires for its countless coveys of partridge. Since time immemorial, the Carronade Hunt, whose M.F.H. was Squire Hudleigh of Hudleigh, had counted on Elveshurst for its strongest foxes and best runs.

Its price was so moderate that I saw little chance of loss. Still I did not close the deal at once, for Jim was enroute to England. He arrived in early August, looking fine and fit and almost venerable in his old-fashioned broadcloth suit. At the Albion Hotel after supper, I asked him to tell his story in his own way.

"The fust thing I done was to send word to the Beni Kabir to take El Stedoro to Alexander, like the old sheik promised you. The last thing was to go to Alexander, to see if he'd done come. He had, and I fixed for him to be shipped on an East Indiaman comin' into London in about two week."

"How was he?"

"He looked mighty big and raw-boned, and he wa'n't no beauty, but I never seen a boss cay hisself like he do."

"He's six years old and ought to be getting into his prime. Did you hear any news of the Beni Kabir?"

"The only one I talked to was Zaal, the sheik's nephew. He say the people all doin' fine."

"I don't doubt they are."

"Now I'll tell you what I found out at Malta. I hung around the Turkish quarter till I got acquainted good. Pretty soon I beared of a Greek, what dey call Paulos, who used to be clerk to de harbor mas'. In 'em days he made a lot o' money on de side. One of de Turk hint 'at he make it passin' on to spies whey de ships gwine when dey leave Malta. Paulos, he take to smokin' bhang and down in de gutter, but I go see him and buy him some bhang but not 'nuff to satisfy him. When he want mo', I get him to talk pitty good. His mind clear as a bell when de bhang take hold, he 'member heap o' t'ing. De main spy was a Spaniard workin' for de French. But wif my keepin' at him, 1 find out dey was a Maltese, dey call him Julius, who spy for de reis effendis in Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers. De bad luck was, dis Julius, he daid."

"There was bound to be some bad luck. Go on."

"When Julius hear something de pirate want to know, he send word by a real fast boat, who make out she a Dago fisherman, to Linosa, de island at lay only a night's sail if de wind fair. All de pirates pass by Linosa, and de Dago's pard, he signal from de shore wif mirrors or lights plain as writin' on a paper. Sometime when it look safe, de pirate come up to Gozo in de night, not two hours' run from Valletta. Murad Reis, he done it the day before we sail. De Dago done carry him word 'at de huntin' gwine to be good."

"How do you know, Jim?"

"De Dago 'fess it if I give him a hundred pounds. But if I ever tell de provost it was my word agin his. And 'twas de Dago 'at tell him to watch for us by Aegadian Island."

Jim looked down, unspeakable sadness in his face, twirling a ring he had made from the Pharaoh's gold on whose seal he had engraved the letter V.

"Did the Dago tell you who sent the messages?"

"He say he know mighty well it was de little lord, but he can't prove it. De one who deal wif him was de Maltese dey called Juhus, and he daid."

I thought of something like a distant move in a game of chess.

"How did you find out JuHus was dead?"

"I didn't have no easy time findin' it out. Dago thought he was alive somewheres. De Greek JPaulos, he say Julius went to Syracuse, and maybe he die in de plague, but he change his name 'fore then, and Paulos didn't know for sho. I went to Syracuse, lookin' for him, and it was jus' a piece of luck I run into a Turkish opium peddler who knowed JuHus. He say Julius git away from de plague but was stabbed to death and robbed in Athens. He seen his corpse wif his own eyes."

"Did you tell Paulos or the Dago?"

"No, Cap'n. Bof of 'em would be too glad to know it."

"Is there anything more?"

"A small dark young man meet Juhus about free o'clock in the morning of de day befo' we sail in a wine shop in Notabile. De Dago say he was de lord's son, Dick."

"Had Harvey Alford, Sir Godwine's aide, anything to do with it?"

"Dey was a young EngHshman, wif yaller hair, mighty handsome, who come along and hang outside de wine shop when Dick talk to Julius."

"What was the name of the wine shop?"

"De Don John of Austria."

"Did you ask leading questions? Was there any likelihood of the Dago telling you what you wanted to hear and pay for?"

"Not one little bit. I say to him, 'Who tol' Julius we was coming, and where we was gwine? Was it de Greek Paulos, clerk to the harbor mas'?' Dat was what I say to him, not to give him no lead. He say to me, it wa'n't him dis time. It was de little dark man who do de runnin' back and fort', and de word, it come from a English captain who carry a little stick instead of a sword. He wore powdered hair and he walk wif his feet straight in front of him. How do Dago know? 'Cause he saw him once talkin' to Julius. Later on, Julius he brag about dealin' wif de big gun. He say de big gun give him a hundred guineas, beside what Murad Reis send him."

"Then what was your decision on this part. Say it in plain words."

"In plain words, Cap'n, de little lord, his name Sir Godwine Tarlton, betray us to de pirate as sho as God's in heaven, and his son help him."

"Had he ever betrayed any other American ships?"

"The Dago say he did, but he can't prove it."

"Could he understand why?"

"Once he tell Julius dat dey gwine be another war wif what he call de Colonies—to make 'em come back under de English flag and all de ring leaders in de rebellion hung by de neck—and de more ships de pirates capture, de fewer for de English to have to fight. But Julius say 'at only a 'scuse. De real reason was, he hate Unity States wif poison hate."

"Then half of the duty Cap'n Phillips laid on me is done."

"Aye, sah, the truf's been 'stablished, as he done told you."

"The other half was, if he's guilty, to bring him to lawful judgment. Do you think it can ever be done?"

"Cap'n, as far as bringin' him to de bar of justice in the cou't, de Ribba Nile will freeze over bank to bank befo' we can do 'at."

"I never really hoped we could do it. We were in prison too long. Jim, do you know any other kind of lawful justice operating on this earth except that of the courts?"

"No, sah, unless de Lawd lean down and do it. What dey call de unwritten law ain't law at all."

"I don't know of any, either, but there may be such a thing. Long ago the Greeks had a goddess whose name was Nemesis. Her name came to mean punishment by the gods. They had some reason to think that the gods punished evil—perhaps there was some law of nature operating that we don't understand—it may be that great evil brings its own punishment. Many noble minds have accepted that belief. I don't deny it."

"I reckon 'at's what I meant when I said de Lawd lean down. But he don't always seem to, and 'at's where de trouble he. I can't bear to t'ink of 'at pretty little cap'n who came on de boat 'at night, wif his stick and his powder hair and his voice wif de east wind in it. De blood of our boys is on his little white hand, de black of de treachery in his soul, but what he care? De hate of freedom in his heart—for 'at what he hate when he come down to it; he want men to be his slaves, not his brothers. You swore you wouldn't take no vengeance on him—hke tiackin' him down and kihin' him. But Cap'n Wliitman, can't you do nothin' toward rightin' de ter'ble wrong?"

"I'm going to try. We'll stay in England until we succeed or have to give up. I'll seek the acquaintance of Lord Tarlton—for that's his name now. He shall see much of me."

As Jim gazed into my face, his eyes grew slowly round.

It was no great feat for an upstart with a sword of gold to hew his way into the sporting world of England and even to the fabulous province of the London buck.

To begin with, it made no small stir in the Weald when I bought Elveshurst. Moreover, my neighboring nobility and gentry soon perceived me as an unpresuming soul, knowing my place, never known to push, respectful to all, and generous with my salmon and trout waters, snipe and duck marshes, and peerless partridge cover. Mention was made that I shot quite well myself-actually, wing-shooting with shotguns proved, an easy adaption from rifle-shooting at moving game from horseback or camelback, and I had no nerves to make me flinch or fly off—but I never flaunted the skill, invariably gave my guests the best butts or walking-up, and hung modestly in the background. Meanwhile the breakfasts served before the beats, the refreshments between, and the lunches brought smoking to the field were the best that clever Alan and our highly competent kitchen staff could furnish.

Any farmer who wished could ride with the Carronade Hunt, and in addition to a great gray stallion that only my hands and tenants ever saw, my stables housed half a dozen well-chosen hunters. But I did not presume to a pink coat, was far from a thruster, and never rode over crop; so no untoward attention was drawn to the fact that almost always I was among those present at the kill.

The gray stallion had made the journey in good fettle. When I met him in Portsmouth he sniffed me uncertainly for a few seconds, then began to whinny in an agony of emotion. Presently I slipped my hand between his jaws. When he closed gently upon it with his great teeth, I knew that our long parting had been bridged and our old bond held yet.

The lords and gentlemen who hunted or angled or shot at Elveshurst began to say I was not a bad sort, considering my beginnings. A few remarked on my having done a rather handsome thing at my birthplace, in the way of the new workhouse; and it was quite decent, the way I kept my ugly face from being conspicuous. Seeing that I did not embarrass them by seeking invitations to their homes or any acquaintance with their womenfolk, they treated me with great civility when I ran across them in London.

Here I kept a rather small, quite elegant menage on Charles Street. Meeting a fellow fowler at Tattersall's, where I hung a good deal, he offered to nominate me for the Jockey Club. The turf as well as the game room was always a leveling force in English society, and this club prided itself on a man-to-man fellowship; still it numbered many a fine buck. Among the names I read that of Dick Tarlton. Although a lord's son, he was not listed as "honorable." Breeders and backers of horses think well of established stud.

Whether I would be elected would make a good bet—say three to one against—at White's. In my favor, I knew a horse from a hayrick, picking up several tidy bits at Tattersall's auctions, and had shown a good fellow at turf and paddock. Also, I had the backing of several horsemen of no mean ilk and name. What appeared most against me, my face and form and the story of humble birth, actually told for me in the upshot, since my admission to the club was such a conspicuous demonstration of true sportmanship and a rebuke to rival clubs.

Swiftly upon my election, 1 was caricatured in the Universal Magazine as a skeletonlike jockey riding a bony nag, Jim following as my groom, in a desperate race against General Smith, an upstart who had made his fortune in dubious ways in India; the goal was the glittering doorway of the Brighton Pavilion, favorite resort of the Regent. Actually the shot missed its mark. Several gentlemen stopped me to express their indignation at the "vicious" attack and to praise me for keeping my head well and my feet on the ground. It was quite possible that had I sought election in one of the great gambling clubs such as White's or Brook's, I might have obtained the honor.

I continued to frequent Almack's Assembly Rooms in King Street and Saint James CoflFee House, where anyone with a shilling in his purse could put it to hazard. Here I played deeply but carefully, and no one observed that my opponents were invariably men of great wealth, who need not quail at their losses—this in respect to my own desires and in memory of the one who had armed me with a golden sword. Still, it did not take long for me to become known as a ready gamester. I preferred faro, since it presented the most difficulty to the sharper, but was agreeable to basset and macao; and for fast play, sometimes bewildering my opponent, there was nothing better than the dice box and old-fashioned hazard.

While I waited in this strange ambush for my prey, I was asked to join another club—perhaps the strangest in London. It was called the Ugly Man's Club, exactly what it purported to be. Only those deemed of remarkably ugly visage were invited to join; great corpulence or emaciation or any other mark of disease disqualified the candidate; scars were disparaged unless natural ugliness set them off. In the way of social position, members ranged from an earl of ancient name, one of the great noblemen of his age, through a Jewish rabbi, to a low-born, high-minded gunsmith. Gaming being forbidden at the meetings, bibbling kept in bounds, our main entertainment was conversation, the most eager and frank, and quite possibly the most stimulating, to be heard in any London club. I did not know why, unless during this brief breach of loneliness, every man let his soul flow free.

Every man but one. Enjoying the talk and sometimes taking part in it, I remained alone as when I walked the streets in fog.

When I cast my accounts at the end of the year 1818, I had good reason to be pleased with my progress. I had not yet laid eyes on Lord Tarlton or made the slightest effort to do so, but our paths were drawing closer and they would surely cross before long. I had seen Dick Tarlton at the Jockey Club and at race meets, small, dark, carelessly dressed, and remarkably young-looking as far as I could tell from a distance; and with no apparent effort I had learned much of his goings and comings, his affairs and his ways, to stand me in good stead in our future dealings. Never mentioning the name of Harvey Alford—wishing I need never hear it—dreading any involvement with him and wish-thinking him innocent, still I had happened to hear that his wife's name was Sophia, and darkly knew we would soon come face to face.

My losses at gaming had been slight, considering how deeply I had played—amounting to not much more than the hosts' fees for "services." At the turf I was a slow but steady winner, and might have won heavily had I been willing to show my hand.

I could read a pedigree as well if not better than most; my eyes and instincts were fully as sharp in viewing horseflesh; and my great advantage lay in perceiving an animal's mettle just before a race. This was something Timor had taught me. He had pointed out the signs a thousand times—the eagerness of glance, the set of the ears, the carriage of the head, the arch of the neck, the spring of the step, and, curiously enough, the movements of the tail. Often the impression ran contrary to all my other judgments; yet if it were strong enough, it usually picked the winner. Sometimes it failed utterly.

Yet it was at gaming that I bared for the first time the edge of my golden sword.

I had come into Almack's late at night. Some desultory playing went on, but the main event, bursting on my pupils still wide from darkness, was a dice game between a heavy-set, florid man of my own age, suggesting a country squire lately drawn to the lights of London, and a small, superbly dressed, elegant little figure of a man whom I would know in any passage of years or sweep of distance. Some of the arresting vividness of the scene may have been a trick of my eyes; but some was an effect of brilliant lighting and part was its innate drama, apparent to all the people in the room. These watched with locked gaze in silence. An old man's hand jerked back and forth every time the younger player, he who had dared contest Godwine, Lord Tarlton, shook the dice box. The aged Dick Vernon cackled in senile glee. A magnificently built yet effeminate-acting youth laughed shrilly whenever the little lord won, meanwhile gazing at him with sickening ardor.

After the first impact of the scene on my unready eyes and brain, I turned cold and picked up its details with great care, one by one.

Lord Tarlton sat in a large, luxurious chair placed sideways to the table, and his white hand, looking almost tiny emerging from lace cuffs, rolled the dice with a graceful motion over its right arm. He wore a black coat and knee breeches of a somewhat antique style, glossy dark blue hose, black slippers with silver buckles, and a white satin cravat adorned with one large pearl. A Malacca walking stick leaned against the left arm of his chair. He need no longer powder his hair, and worn rather long and brushed back, it called attention to the beautiful structure of his head and face. His small prim mouth bore the merest suggestion of a smile. I could not see the winter-sky blue of his eyes, but their gaze seemed only half attentive to the -game. The thing that set my spine a-crawl was his look of youth. There were no lines on his face, no hollows under his eyes, no loosening of the skin on his cheeks and delicate jaws. It was as though Age had not dared lay hand on him.

His opponent, if I could call him that, sat in a straight, plain chair squarely facing the table. Something went on in his face that puzzled and then frightened me. I could soon identify it as conflict between bravado and terror. As he took the dice box, he postured unmistakably—showing the crowd that he, too, could be lordly in his own fashion—but when he counted the pips I saw a rounding of his eyes and a tension around his mouth, as though he were gazing past the immediate moment to some future he dared not believe. No doubt he had had too much to drink, but the symptoms were not strong enough to impugn his opponent's sportsmanship in the crowd's sight. Anyway, who could question any conduct of such a great aristocrat as Lord Tarlton?

"Who's winning?" another newcomer asked an acquaintance in my hearing.

"You can guess, can't you? Lord Tarlton's already into him for a thousand guineas, and Bozy's just matched it, all or nothing."

"He'd better shed that silly grin."

"Let him have it. It may be his last."

I had heard of Bozy—his last name was Barnes—as a shallow player and would-be buck. Tonight he had got beyond his depth, and I wondered what pressures had made him do so. He rolled with a last trace of bravado. His eyes glazed with hope as he looked at the pips; although I stood twenty feet away, the whispers told me almost instantly he had thrown an eight. It was one of the easiest points to make; but he threw thrice more without it coming up, or the deadly seven either. Then he breathed into the box, shook it prayerfully, and rolled out the little cubes of bone.

He looked at them and turned white. "Seven," someone intoned. When he had set the box down, his arms dropped to his side.

"An unfortunate throw, my friend," the little lord said gravely.

Bozy Barnes could only shake his head.

"You owe me two thousand guineas, and it's for you to say whether we play on."

"Two thousand guineas! Good God in heaven. Oh, I'll match you once more. This can't go on forever."

"All or nothing?" Lord Tarlton asked quietly.

"Yes, yes."

"I must remind you that twice two thousand guineas is four thousand, no trifling sum. But of course, it cuts both ways."

"I'll play. I said I would."

"Then be so kind as to pass me the dice box."

Lord Tarlton took it, dropped in the dice, shook them once, and rolled them lightly on the table.

"My lord has thrown a ten," a self-appointed scorekeeper announced to the now-breathless watchers. It being one of the hardest points to make, I could almost make myself believe he would not succeed and that a seven would come up instead. There was something very like beauty in his face as he played for his point, one easy roll after another. I had seen it once before when he had toasted Our Eliza in Lepanto Palace.

"Four," the announcer intoned, "... six .. . two . . . five . . . nine!"

Lord Tarlton paused, glanced at his watch, wiped his lips with a silk kerchief, and gave a little smile to the beautifully built youth with the effeminate airs. Then he dropped the dice slowly in the box, gave it one violent, vicious shake, and threw.

"Ten!" the announcer shouted.

Lord Tarlton leaned gracefully in his chair as he waited for Bozy Barnes to speak. The latter could only shake his head, his pale face beaded with sweat.

"Does that mean you don't care to play any more?" the nobleman asked in his softest voice.

"I've nothing left to play with. I'm ruined."

"I'm sure you've enough to meet the obligation, or you wouldn't have played." There was just a trace of a wintry rattle in the sound.

"I'll meet it. It will take me a few days. Be a little patient with me, my lord, and you'll get every penny."

Meanwhile I had moved quietly through the gaping throng to the table.

"Lord Tarlton?"

His eyes moved slowly to mine. Not a trace of expression came into his face.

"That is my name, sir."

"I seek the honor of taking Mr. Barnes's place for one cast, all or nothing."

"You wish to hazard four thousand guineas against Mr. Barnes's debt?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Sir, I've not the pleasure of your acquaintance, and perhaps you'll not take kindly by my knowing who you are from previous description by others."

"My lord, I'm quite used to that."

"I regret that your cognomen slips my mind."

"It's Holgar Blackburn."

"Then you're the one without fail. Why, sink me if I wasn't in Cornwall, staying at my first wife's family seat, when you gave your fete in Tavistock—and the report brought to me was, it was a jam up. Since then I believe you've bought Elveshurst and the best rough shooting in sixty miles of London. If so, I don't doubt you're financially competent to play."

"My lord, I'll write an order on Baring's Bank beforehand and put it in the stakeholder's hand."

"Why, blow me down, that's plain dealing, what I like in a man. Take Bozy's seat there, and we'll roll for high dice, and the one that wins will take the box to win or crap."

There was not a sound, not even a wheeze from old Dick Vernon gazing at me with bleary eyes, as I took the seat. The Greek god with Cupid's airs stared into my face, as though trying to frighten me.

"My lord, if it meets your favor, we'll throw high dice for the main sum."

"One cast?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, I've risked more than that on a single shot. Will you roll first?"

"Gladly."

The dice rattled in the box and rolled out. I had shot an eight.

" 'Tisn't very good," I told my adversary, restoring the dice to the box and handing it to him. "My luck has been but middling ever since my birthday, happening on Christmas."

His hand paused briefly. "On Christmas, say you?"

"Yes, my lord, and since Christmas fell on Monday on the year that I was born, I should be 'fair of face.'"

He sat gracefully but very still. I wondered if others saw an obscure change of expression.

"You're about forty-four—" he ventured.

"No, sir, I'm thirty-seven according to the book. I was born on Christmas, 1781."

"So?"

But he shook the box too hard and the dice rolled out before he was ready. By the laws of chance that could not increase or decrease his chances of winning by the least jot. Yet he hated himself as he looked down and saw he had thrown a four and a three.

"That would have won for you, my lord, if we were playing hazard," I remarked.

"Now that's consolation worth having." He turned to Bozy Barnes, standing there gaping; the east wind was in his voice again and his pupils looked immense and black.

"Sir, you may pay your debt to Mr. Blackburn."

"No, he needn't," I broke in.

"What in the devil's hell do you mean?" Lord Tarlton demanded.

"I wish to call it square, as the Yankee saying goes. You've lost nothing but your winnings of the evening, I've lost nothing, so why not share our good luck with our friend?"

"I can't do it," Barnes stammered. "It's not sporting—"

"I played your turn for you, sir, and it was my pleasure to win for you, and you'll offend me if you refuse, and by heaven, I'll challenge you to a duel!"

"Then I'll not refuse! No matter what the bucks say about me. I thank you and bless you—" He covered his face with his hands.

"A touching scene," the little lord remarked. "We haven't seen its like since the late Beau Brummell—pardon me, I believe he's still alive—won fifteen hundred pounds for Tom Sheridan. Mr. Blackburn, are we to consider you a candidate for the Good Samaritan?"

"No, sir, but I thought you'd misjudged his condition, or you'd not have played with him."

"Why, blast it, you're a cool one. Twenty-odd years my junior, and spending most of your life 'mongst naked savages according to what I heard, yet better able than I to judge drunk or sober. You used a Yankee expression just now. Maybe you've Yankee wits as well."

"My lord, I hope you won't take me to task. If you're the Lord Tarlton whom I think you are, I came nigh to being named for you."

"How did that happen, if you'll tell me?"

"I wasn't christened for two months after my birth, and if some great feat of arms in the war with America had happened on my natal day, my father intended to name me for its hero. The first report was, you'd sunk a Yankee vessel on the morning of that day. But when he chanced to discover that the Saratoga went down late on the following day, I lost out on the honor."

The little lord drew his breath to speak, then let it go and stared. Perhaps this roomful of bucks and their hangers-on had never seen him stare in quite this way before. Its suggestion was too powerful to resist. One pair of eyes after another fixed on my face. It had no expression they could read; it seemed roughly carved of flint, unfinished and jagged, with a deep chisel stroke across my cheek. Yet when they looked back to the elegant figure in the big chair, there were strange questions never raised before in their searching eyes.

"You astonish me," he remarked at last—perhaps the first guarded words he had spoken in many years.

"But may I yet gain the honor of your presence at Elveshurst before very long?" I asked. "Snipe and duck are plentiful, the partridge have not yet paired off, and fox scent holds well in our damp woods. And if your son Dick and your son-in-law Mr. Alford would care to come, they'd both be welcome."

"We'll welcome the invitation, Mr. Blackburn."

"Then I'll bid you all good night."

In making for the door I must pass the young Adonis who had eyed me with such fury a few minutes before, and I was half afraid he might strike me. Instead he looked into my eyes with a revolting smile.

CHAPTER 27 Echoes Resounding

Until after my game with Lord Tarlton, I had never questioned Alan about him or shown any interest in him. While this was vaguely in accordance with my general strategy, on the whole it was a secretiveness I could not entirely explain, shot through with superstition. But when I told Alan of my winnings, he fell easily into discussing the little nobleman.

"It's not often that he loses—I'll tell you that," Alan said. "Even in games of pure chance such as yours last night—well, it's as though the dice don't dare go counter to him. And if anyone succeeds in beating him, that fellow had better look out, for Tarlton's going to get it back twofold—tenfold—once a hundredfold."

"His manners last night were most agreeable."

"I've seen them when they weren't! Still, he's a great blood. It's generally agreed that the Hanovers are upstarts compared to him."

"If you think he's going to seek revenge, you'd better tell me about him. Has he a family?"

"He has a daughter by his first wife, a lovely woman who married Lieutenant the Honorable Harvey Alford. Since Alford sold his commission in the Royal Navy, they've been living in Cornwall at an old seat, Celtburrow, that his wife inherited from her mother's family, but have very recently come to London. Tarlton has also a natural son, Dick, somewhat older, whom you may have seen at the Jockey Club—a terrific horseman and a rather hard case. His mother is Countess Isabel of Harkness, and it was quite an affair even in the good old days, when bastardy was rampant."

"Has his daughter Sophia any children?"

"No. By the way, did I mention her name? I don't recall doing so."

"I've heard it somewhere."

"You have very sharp ears, sir, and a remarkable memory. I was going on to say that about twenty years ago, Lord Tarlton—Sir Godwine Tarlton he was then—married again. As I heard the story, he was on leave from duty at sea and fell in love with a girl from Jersey—no family, no money, but with great beauty and dash. He left her at Celtbtirrow while he served in Malta: the affair was kept very quiet. Later there was talk of her leaving him—perhaps she liked the lights of London—but she was drowned in a boating accident."

"Perhaps I heard her name also,' I said with a tingle along my spine. "Was it Elizabeth?"

"It was Elspeth, the Scotch form. And his other daughter is named Eliza."

"His other daughter—"

"Elspeth bore him one less than a year after the marriage. I've heard she's the apple of his eye, and he keeps her tucked away in the old pile, in fear of some young blade making off with her. I dare say he'll bring her out before long. I doubt if he can hide her much longer, for she's about nineteen."

I doubted if any young blade would make off with her without Lord Tarlton's consent. He would smile a little smile—and Eliza would obey him. I was haunted more by thoughts of a beautiful girl from Jersey, without money or name, married to the pretty little knight, going to bed with him, delivered of a child by him, then going to bed in the sea.

Two days after the game, I received an invitation brought by a powdered footman to attend a rout given by Lydia White, whose fetes were as famous in London as the debaucheries of old Q., who lately had passed to his reward. Certainly this notice taken of me was the direct result of my exploit at Almack's; whether someone wishing to meet me again had proposed it to the famous dame, I could only guess.

The affair began with late tea, to be followed by a play. I skipped both of these and arrived at the mansion in time for the spread. Through a vast doorway I saw an elegant little man with white hair, carrying a little stick, and walking with his toes straight in front of him like an Indian. On his arm was a woman who signaled her beauty to me across the great glittering room and down the years.

Her hair was dusky, and presently the lights picked up a gleam in its midst that I took for a wreath of pearls. I did not go near her yet, but watched her walk, and thought of her long coming up the beach, barefoot, with her boots in her hand. That was midsummer, 1801, before I came two-and-twenty. This is late winter, 1819. I had not seen her since except in flickering dreams.

When she and Lord Tarlton had dined, they took chairs near a faro table in a game room almost as large as White's, adjoining the ballroom. But they did not play, and after they had greeted some of their friends, I strolled toward them.

It was as though I walked into the past under deep cloud. Old scenes, old signs, returned to give strange dimensions and meanings to these scenes and signs. I saw Sophia's beauty then and I saw it now, the last a culmination of the first, its outgrowth in a harsh climate. Not many others in the throng perceived it at all, I thought; but I had loved her with great passion and I loved her still in my heart. Her beauty was the kind transmuted and not destroyed by fire. It had greatly changed, but not dimmed in the long years.

I could not see that she looked much older. Poignance and not time had remolded her lovely face. The curved line at one corner of her mouth, deeper than on the other even then, had become a cruel mark. The smile that I occasionally saw, that had touched me in such strange ways, came more commonly now—almost every time Lord Tarlton spoke to her. Her eyes that had appeared lighter of color than her pale olive skin, brightened still more by dense black lashes, had darkened. She still walked with lonely grace.

As I came nigh to Lord Tarlton, I gave him a grave bow. He had not noticed me until then, or had pretended to overlook me—for I had come to doubt his naturalness, a quality everyone seemed to attribute to him—but now his gaze fastened on my face, and he looked pleasantly surprised.

"Why, it's Mr. Blackburn, or you can blow me down. Pray stop with me a minute, sir, if you've the time. I didn't know you frequented these petticoat affairs."

"It's my first one, sir, and an eye-opener," I answered, pausing politely.

"You'll excuse me not rising, since I've years on my back, but my daughter shall rise, if I may have the pleasure of presenting you to her. Sophia, here's the buck who took me for four thousand guineas. Mr. Blackburn, Mrs. Harvey Alford."

Sophia had observed me before Lord Tarlton spoke. I had seen an expression of dismay come into her face. Now she rose lightly, and as her eyes met mine, it must be that certain memories, strangled like unwanted babes, stirred and plucked at her spirit, for she blurted out an ill-mannered question.

"Mr. Blackburn, have we met before?"

"I apologize for her, sir," Lord Tarlton said quickly with his pale, faint smile. "She was raised on the moors of Cornwall and has not been schooled in the niceties of polite behavior."

"I spent some years in a workhouse and am ignorant of the art, so I must ask the reason for the apology," I said as Sophia flushed.

"Since it didn't offend you, I'll ask you let it pass."

"It did not, nor does your apology, which, of the two, is the blunter reminder of my disturbing appearance."

"Why, sink me, Sophia, but he's a man of spirit, and I'd swear, a man of the world! Anyhow, you've come up in the world since those days you speak of. May I praise your language? It's not Tavistock rustic by a long shot—in fact, I listen in vain for any note of the West Country I know so well—and what could I expect, when you've been gone so many years?—but it's as good as Boston Yankee when it comes to grammar, and your accent is much like it, which I'm told is second to none. Now sit down a minute, if you'll favor us."

"I'm the one that's favored." I took the nearest chair.

"Sophia, here's a man of parts! He's made himself one, along with a million pounds, and ain't that proof of what the Americans maintain?"

"That's twice you've mentioned America, Papa, without Mr. Blackburn showing any interest in the subject. Perhaps polite behavior requires you change it."

"You said something like that before a long time ago. Where in the devil was it? Anyhow, Mr. Blackburn, I'll get on with what's on my mind. At our gaming t'other night, you made a remarkable statement. That the engagement of my ship, Our Eliza, with the Yankee Saratoga, occurred, not early on Christmas morning, but on the following day. I didn't wish to discuss it before that crowd—we English are too mortally afraid of blowing our own horns, sometimes to the loss of our fair deservings—but 'twas an odd misapprehension, and my curiosity was aroused how you'd fallen into it, or rather how your pa did. I'm an old-fashioned sailor who looks well to the log, so pray humor me."

Sat he well in his chair as he spoke, with no sign of strain. His voice was low and pleasant to the ear; his face looked serene; a common man who had made a trifling mistake could be flattered at his friendly interest in it. But I had been expecting the question and I saw him jiggle the walking stick lightly held in his white hand.

"My lord, I don't think it was ever questioned that the battle between the two ships occurred on Christmas morning. The report was, that the Yankee vessel didn't go down till the following afternoon."

Sophia was watching me with oddly guarded eyes.

"She didn't, damn me!" the little lord broke out. "Sophia, was I under the table all that time? Pardon my levity, Mr. Blackburn, and let's get on with this queer business. Did the report say that the Yankee was leaking and finally foundered?"

"No, sir. She blew up."

He stiffened slightly, and I saw the white knuckles of his hand holding the cane.

"Now what kind of a Yankee lie is that?"

"It came from Canada, sir, if I'm not mistaken. Perhaps it was a letter from an old friend. I'd have to look it up and see. It's still in my possession."

He hesitated, then spoke against his will.

"After all these years?"

"It was among a few trifles I took with me when I ran away from the workhouse. I saved it because—well, somehow I had gotten the idea it was important. My father spoke several times of publishing it, but I think was afraid to do so. Actually, I can't recall reading it after reaching the age to understand it. But if you are interested in it, in the way of a side light on the battle, however mistaken, I'll gladly look it up."

"Pray don't trouble yourself. I won't indulge idle curiosity that far."

"It would be no trouble, my lord. I myself would be entertained, perusing the old document."

"I'll give you better sport than that, before long, with the dice.*

"Sir, wasn't the battle fought in an east wind?"

"Why, yes!"

"Off the coast of Grindstone, a Canadian island. I remember that much. Also that the vessel went down off Saint Paul Island, one hundred miles eastward."

"As my daughter suggested a while ago, let's change the subject." With great elegance Lord Tarlton took snuff.

"Your pardon for carrying it farther than you wished. No doubt I dwell too much on ships going down, having sailed on one that went down. Mrs. Alford, the dances I knew before I went into exile are out of fashion, and I may not partake of the waltzing, but I hear it's a pretty dance to watch, and if Lord Tarlton will excuse you, I request your company, a little while, in the ballroom."

"I accept with pleasure." She rose with a kind of spring that I remembered.

"I've not excused you yet," the little lord said gravely. "Mr. Blackburn's manners are better than yours. By God, they're better than I'd expect of a rough-and-ready miner; I'll praise 'em along with his language. But I will excuse you, for I've some things to think about, at comfort and leisure."

The wintry rattle had come back into his voice, and his eyes were blue ice.

"Among others, pray consider coming to Elveshurst on Tuesday to stay until Saturday, bringing as many of your family as can come," I said.

"Thank 'ee kindly. I'm fond of sport when it's that and no more, and I'll answer you soon."

I gave Sophia my arm. As we walked across the brilliant chamber into the ballroom, her other walkings at my side rose up from the dim dark past, and I could hardly believe they did not haunt her, too. Once we had walked hand in hand up a long beach. Once we had followed a clifftop path toward a witch's cave. Once we had climbed steps to a minister's house with a little parlor and an organ and a picture of the king; and there came a bleakness on my soul and sorrow past any healing in my heart. Why do I think of you now, Ezra Owens? Do I wish Sparrow and Jim and I had played the game you proposed, and which, at my stern refusal, you played alone? If I had, I would have never found Isabel Gazelle. I would have never ridden with the Beni Kabir and found fellowship among the Tuareg. But what did you find, Sparrow, except agony and death?

Yet you died proud, as did all the Vindictive men who died, and the debt is on me, and I'll pay it.

I led Sophia to a high-backed sofa out of hearing of anyone. For a moment or two we watched the dancing—lovely at its best, only a little pitiful at its worst, the posturings of the fops and the ladies of fashion made up for by the innocence of a few yet young who had somehow been included in the rout—tall, gangling boys and pretty wistful girls; and the German music was romantic and yearning.

"Do you enjoy dancing?" I asked Sophia, whose eyes had misted with tears.

"I've never done much of it. Papa told the truth when he said I was raised on the moors. The old house is near Bodmin. Perhaps you know that's not very far from Tavistock, which Papa mentioned as your home."

"I've been near Bodmin." It was true—long ago I had told Sophia of our putting in at Boscastle and seeing Bodmin moor. Holgar also had visited the region. As an urchin, he had seen Celtburrow and Sophia's grandmother. He had told me so in prison.

"I'm wondering if you could have been the boy who stole flowers from our garden when I was a little girl. You know how impressionable children are—how they remember little things. One of the gardeners caught him and was going to flog him, but my grandmother rescued him. When she asked why he had done it, he said he couldn't help doing it."

"An irresistible impulse," I remarked.

"Grandma said he was from near Tavistock and his name was— Holgar."

"I was the one."

"Good heavens. But I only saw you through a window—you couldn't have been more than ten. That couldn't account for my feeling I'd met you before."

"Not very logically. Do you still have the feeling?"

"No. . . .Yes, I do."

"That's a queer answer."

"I've been trying to deny it—why, I don't know. What queer things go on in our minds! They play tricks on us, don't they? Well, I have an irresistible impulse—as you put it—to tell you something. I heard what happened at Almack's. Papa told me, and my husband, Harvey, told me, too, as he heard it from a friend. It's very unusual for Papa to lose, and he took it especially hard. I mean, it jarred him more than you would expect—more than I can quite account for. Perhaps your giving the money back to the poor oaf—and suggesting he wasn't in condition to play—made it worse. I hate to go to social affairs without Harvey—I lean on him much more than I should—and he was engaged tonight—but I asked Papa to bring me, and the real reason was, I wanted to speak to you."

"What made you think I would be here?"

"Well, you'd attracted attention, which is never lost on Lydia White."

"Did you think your father had asked her to invite me?"

Sophia's eyes darted to mine. "You are very—perspicacious. Yet your guessing that makes it easier for me to tell you what I wanted to tell you. It was to advise you not to play with Papa any more. I suppose you think that's very odd behavior in a daughter—to a stranger."

"No, I can't say that I do."

"I say it. I can't offer any explanation except you gave the money back—and Harvey said it saved the man from ruin—so I'm on your side in this affair, instead of Papa's. I was sure he was going to entice you into a game—whist, most likely, at which he's deadly. He knows how to goad his opponents into rash play. Once he took ten thousand guineas from a man to whom he'd lost only one hundred-it took that much to balm his hurt pride. I'll try to be honest—I don't think hint pride is the right term, but I don't know what to call it. Papa is a very complex man. I shouldn't say he's vindictive—"

"Vindictive?"

"It's a rather hard word to use."

"Its root is vindicate, to claim or to defend or justify. In olden times it meant to set free. The old meaning of vindictive was only punitive, not revengeful."

She sat very still, her lips parted, her eyes fixed on my face. Then she came to herself with a start.

"Pardon me. Someone told me that—something very like it—a long time ago. It was an American sailor—his ship was named the Vindictive. How strange that I'd remember."

"In getting back at a player who'd won from him, would your father use loaded dice?" I asked.

"Oh, you've no right to ask me that, when I came here to warn you. Yet I opened myself to it. Papa is incredibly lucky with honest dice— I suppose lucky is the right word, since it must be pure chance. The devil doesn't help people. No rational person believes that."

"I can't say. I don't know the nature of evil."

"Well, I've told you what I intended to—if Papa knew it, he wouldn't hit me, but he'd be angry and make me very sorry. And now I feel it was—unnecessary."

"Why?"

"I felt it even before I told you—but I went ahead. This situation is different than I thought. I've decided Papa didn't intend to get you to play tonight. He had Lydia ask you for some other purpose."

"Can you guess what?"

"No."

"Do you think I can?"

"Yes, I think you know. I think, too, that you're capable of looking out for yourself, and I've never thought that of anyone before—in connection with Papa. Yes, I did think the same about another man —a long time ago—but all the dice went against him, and he's dead. Now please take me back to Papa."

We started back through the throng. Her dark red lips that I had loved were pale, and her eyes looked haunted, and she wanted to say something more. Only when we came in sight of the little lord did she blurt it out.

"Maybe you can do more than just look out for yourself, and that frightens me."

"That isn't very plain."

"When you talked with him about the sea fight, it wasn't just talk and it wasn't self-defense, which is all I'm used to in people who deal with Papa. It was attack."

"Did you think so?"

"Instead of taking sides with you—because you were in the right at Almack's—I may have to take sides with him."

"Could you explain that?"

"You've come here out of Africa. You deal with things that happened long ago. You're bringing back to life things that are dead. And you see—I'm afraid of those things. I want to shut out the past. It's dangerous to all I have left."

I wanted to say, "I'll never harm you, Sophia," but I could not. We were almost in hearing of Lord Tarlton. And it might not be true.

He was playing a sociable game of whist with two ladies and a gentleman of high station. He smiled at Sophia and bowed his head tome.

"So you're back! The game's tight, so sit down or what you will—"

"Thank you, but I'm otherwise engaged," I answered.

"Then, Sophia, wait a bit, and play my next hand. Blackburn, I'll accept with pleasure your invitation for Tuesday next, and I'll speak the same for my son Dick and my son-in-law, Harvey Alford, unless you hear to the contrary."

"That's good news."

"I accept also, Mr. Blackburn," Sophia said clearly.

"Oh, blast it, Sophia, Blackburn doesn't want ladies around, for rough shooting in winter weather."

"On the contrary, you'll be very welcome," I told her quickly. "It's too early for angling, the sport you love, but you can look over the water, and later the salmon will be as fat and sporting as those you used to take on the Cornish moors."

"Sophia, you've been boasting, if not lying," the little lord remarked.

"Oddly enough, I've done neither," Sophia answered in low tones.

"Pray come early, all of you, so as not to miss any sport."

Their eyes fixed on my face. The gentleman waiting Lord Tarlton's play uttered a nervous laugh. I bowed and departed.

Lydia White's rout was on Wednesday. Before the week was out, three incidents of varying unusualness became linked in my mind and excited my imagination. None deserved the merest mention in the newspapers, although there might be a handful of people in London who, if they knew of it, would muse over the first of the three, hold it in their memories all their lives, tell of it perhaps when they grew old, and even write it down in books.

Walking the cold streets late Thursday night, I thought to take refuge from the bleak and biting wind in a coffee house in the Poultry. As I turned toward its glowing door, three young men emerged and came face to face with me under the streetlight. Two hurried on, but the youngest, no more than twenty-four, stopped and stared, and a most strange expression, beautiful and touching, came into his face. I saw it was a remarkable face, flushed now with wine and, I suspected, with fever. Also I noticed he was dressed rather shabbily as well as inadequately to the weather.

He addressed me in poetry,

What doth ail thee, scarred knight, Alone and palely loitering The sedge is withered by the lake And no birds sing.

At once he hurried after his friends. Instead of entering the inn, I walked on. The verse haunted me, and I wanted to be alone with it awhile. Recalling it with care, I soon fixed it in my memory.

On Saturday afternoon I had a caller who sent in the name Walt Chalker. I had heard it before in some pleasant connection and told the haughty footman to conduct him to the parlor.

"I'll tell you right 'ere, 'e's not a proper person to be let in the front rooms," the servant remonstrated. "He ought to be made to wite in the entry."

"It's too cold to wite there with 'im," I replied, "so kindly show 'im in."

As I opened the parlor door, a shrill outcry, as from a termagant, appeared to ring out behind me.

"Come on back here, hubby, or I'll whack ye with this here broom."

My visitor laughed boyishly at the start he had given me, and instantly I recognized him as one of the star performers of the fete I had given at Tavistock. There he had put on a most realistic Punch and Judy, as well as feats of ventriloquism with a manikin dressed as a jack-tar between shows. Small and swarthy as a gypsy, he had a wonderfully mobile countenance. Although no doubt humbly born, he was not afraid of footmen, had an easy manner, and when he wished, could employ good English.

His business with me was not to beg or borrow but to seek employment. This was his slack season; and the next time I entertained my friends, he would like to show them what he could do. If only gentlemen were present, he would take off the House of Commons acting on a motion to do away with itself, the show being somewhat ribald. If ladies came, a more refined act could be substituted, mainly of ventriloquism and imitations. He had served his turn on the stage and could bring back David Garrick and Colley Cibber from the grave.

I pressed a guinea upon him and asked him to hold open the following Wednesday. Yet the idea of employing him in my solemn pursuit was so distasteful to me, smacking of artifice and dangerous as well, that I had little intention of doing so and probably would not have, except for the chance opening of a book on rainy, darkling, lonely Sunday afternoon. For the first time since I was in the hospital in Malta, I read Hamlet. The prince's stratagem in employing the company of players to disclose the king's guilt struck me with peculiar force; and suddenly I was ashamed of my false nicety. Was I playing a sociable game of whist with Lord Tarlton and his lieutenants, or trying to carry out Captain Phillips's orders at any cost or by any means at hand?

So when I had talked over the matter with Jim, I sent for Walt Chalker and told him exactly what I wanted him to do. Was he capable of it, without histrionics or indignity or exaggeration?

"I reckon this is something mighty close to your heart," he said before he rephed.

"Yes, sir, it is."

"Well, I never told you so, but what you did at Tavistock was close to my heart. I, too, was a workhouse boy."

"I'm glad you told me."

"Even at the time, the gentlemen may guess it's a plant, the best I can do, and they're almost sure to, afterward."

"That doesn't matter."

"I'll do my best, and you won't be ashamed of yourself or of me."

"That's all I need to know."

Jim and I took carriage to Elveshurst on Monday to make ready for our guests, a cart behind us bringing a large quantity of iced delicacies hard to find in the Weald. Lord Tarlton, Sophia, Dick, and Harvey Alford arrived by coach-and-six on Tuesday afternoon with a maid and valet in attendance in addition to a footman on the driver's seat, and a man-of-war's man, the little lord's man Friday, riding his favorite hunter. Until I greeted them, I had seen Dick only at a distance and Harvey not at all since my return, and I could not help but expect great changes in seventeen years, eight months, and several days.

That is about the age of a locust native to Maine. After seventeen years of sleep and perhaps dreams in his secret place, he comes forth full of vigor and appetite. But Dick and Harvey had been out and around and alive; fools or physicians by now, and looking into their faces, I was baffled and perplexed. I could read almost nothing there because almost nothing was there to read. Dick was a projection of Lord Tarlton, of darker skin, careless instead of meticulous of dress, weaker and hence less dangerous in the long run, more dangerous in any one crossing; he would be more likely to strike out recklessly, while his father would bide his time. I could not doubt that he was a formidable rider. Recklessness and cruelty do not make a finished and rounded horseman, but can win many races. He looked at me with ill-concealed disdain.

I remembered hearing that he had never married. Loving him and wishing to retain him, Lord Tarlton had no doubt frowned on the notion—or else given it his pale, terrifying smile. He had never loved Sophia and was glad to get shed of her, but had got his price for her just the same—a young man whose appearance and manner and name fitted him for his entourage, and whom he had expected to use. This last had not worked out very well, I thought. He was not too strong, but too weak, and Sophia had somehow interfered. But she, too, could make nothing of him except a companion in desperate loneliness; she had not even been able to have children by him, perhaps because of a yearning for suicide. Lord Tarlton looked at him with barely concealed disdain.

But there was much to read in the face of Pike, the little lord's body servant. He had the voice, the strut, and something of the spruceness that the Royal Navy imbues in its petty offcers. His heavy-lidded, three-cornered eyes, suggestive of a swane's and somewhat common to pugilists, were of stony blue; one ear had been battered out of shape. He was inclined to glower at all except his master; at him he gazed with a kind of dumb worship and the dull visage became wildly animated when the lord addressed him. He was not very tall but of great strength and endurance; he had a short bull-neck, heavy jaws, a squat nose, stiff sandy hair cut short, hairy wrists, and short, thick, powerful hands. Lord Tarlton ordered him about in a somewhat brutal tone which evidently reassured the man and which he loved to hear.

Along a lagoon followed by water fowl in their evening flight, I had built half a dozen dry platforms, with reed-enclosed sides—duck-blinds, as they were called in Maine. After refreshments, my guests changed to rough clothes, and v^th their guns and gillies—the latter of my supplying except in the case of Pike, who attended his master —they got into the shelters to shoot high-climbing widgeon, darting teal, air-boring prochard which come and are gone with incredible swiftness, and noble, wary mallards.

I had given Lord Tarlton the best blind, and, taking the next one in the row, let pass all ducks making in his direction. To compensate for this flattery, I fired only at those he had fired at and missed, not only calling attention to these misses but frequently "wiping his eye," in the parlance of hunters—a trial to his temper and self-control. My only motive was pleasure. It was good sport to confuse and needle him—until sport would be over and work began.

The five guns brought down twenty-five birds in an hour's shooting—good fare for all hands. Harvey proved to be high gun, and perhaps for the first time in many years. Lord Tarlton was low.

These trivia passed from my mind when, at eight o'clock, I met with my guests at dinner. We five who had dined together in Malta had met once more about a glimmering board, and what long-laid ghosts rose up by sympathetic magic? No one knew but I. Sophia glimpsed them just around the corner of her eye, and her eyes grew haunted and her face pale except for a crimson circle on each cheek. Still she could not make out their shapes or hear their whisperings.

The dining room of Elveshurst Hall could not compare in splendor with the great chamber of Lepanto Palace, but had somewhat the same style. Although the spread of plate and crystal was not half as fine, it picked up and mingled the countless gleamings of candles, causing a kind of aura over the lace cloth. No fault could be found with my meat and drink as to quality or variety. The service of my new-hired, high-paid footmen from London was as skillful as that of old family retainers. In all this I took grim pleasure.

"How did this pleasant manor come by its name?" Lord Tarlton asked when his face was flushed with wine.

He spoke softly, but silence set in, and Sophia brought her hand quickly to her hps, as though to hold them closed. Only she and I, I thought, remembered the asking of a similar question in regard to Lepanto Palace by her Yankee lover in a scene of hate and evil remote in time and space; but there came a groping within the lordling's brain, to judge from his indrawn eyes; and Dick's eyes glittered with excitement he did not understand.

"My lord, I believe that first is a West Saxon word meaning wood,'" I answered. "No doubt they thought that these woods were peopled by elves."

"Why, I like your learning the lore of the country, or you can blow me down. You ought to put down roots here—marry and found a house. You'll reap some of the harvest yourself, and your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be great in the land."

"He must have his portrait painted, too," Dick said, the devil in him raised by the wine. He looked with exaggerated seriousness at Harvey.

"I'd advise Lawrence," Harvey replied in a weighty tone.

These two being up to their old tricks was an unexpected development that cast a new and eerie light on the whole scene. As though time had really rolled back, reality became hard to grasp and the mind wandered strangely. This was so with me and, I felt sure, with Sophia; and she was more haunted than I because she remained in the dark. Nor was Lord Tarlton's mind at rest. He had drunk more than either, and a sense of power, with its accompanying arrogance, crept through him; but there was something in the wind that he scented and did not like. He had only minimized, not yet overborne, the awkward fact of my knowing too much about the sea fight. He did not want to be bothered by it now—not now, when the three of them were getting drunk together on a rarer drink than wine—but he dared not forget it. He believed I did not know enough to make him any trouble, even if I should try. The fact remained that I was a rich man of unknown aims who showed no fear of him. He had more respect for money itself than the younger men, which comes with age, experience, and disillusionment.

It seemed that I knew the brew these three men were sharing in dreadful fellowship and glory, and it was evil. I did not know evil's nature or its substance, but I had learned to recognize some of its aspects. Wherever three or more are gathered together, there is an altar and a god; and the congregation of these three was ancient and terribly wicked. It belonged to the devil as surely as the bond between the Vindictive men belonged to God. I thought it had begun with their joint denial of the first law and platform of God, which by some mystery may be the essence of God—the brotherhood of man. There are many who mocked it and despised it, and since proof of it ever rose before their eyes, they came to hate it with a deadly hate.

The United States, breaking with feudalism, had been dedicated to that law and was an experiment in its practice. Although it fell woefully short of the ideal, yet the ideal remained; the run and ruck of Americans felt it in their hearts; no other nation in the history of mankind was so nobly founded and offered such good evidence of the law's truth. Its faults were the faults of individual men, not of evil concepts passed down from the sad, dark past. Those who held by those concepts, who did not want the humbly born to raise their heads, those whose own preferments became endangered by men walking free, and the greedy, the hateful, and the base found in America a mighty enemy and hence a positive object of hate. Within Lord Tarlton's cankered soul it had turned into malignance neither sane nor insane, but inhuman, and of the stuff of evil.

I thought I knew when it had happened. With one terrible act he embraced evil, as not a few, but a frightful many, had done before him. It had proven the key to power and place, almost to godhead it seemed to him, and he had come to love it and glory in it. Dick had been suckled in its creed. Sophia had had the protection of her grandmother and the wild moors inhabited by beasts and birds and a few shepherds' families who had no dealings with evil. Harvey had been a proselyte, I thought, and not a very staunch one. His loss of an uncle and an estate in the Revolutionary War had prepared him for the doctrine; he had been under Tarlton's thumb and was a snob of the silly sort without real self-faith, and was, in fact, self-dubious, like so many English snobs. Sophia had kept him away from his master and fellow as much as possible; but again, in their company a great scorn came back upon him, he sat in the high seats, he knew the thrill of power and immunity to punishment; in his face was half-hidden mirth that only his brothers could share or even understand.

Lord Tarlton had made at least three other converts, if I guessed right. Two were American Loyalists who had become Barbary pirates. One was Pike who, although humbly born, was allowed a share in the glory.

This was the second time, once as Homer Whitman and now as Holgar Blackburn, that I had become their laughingstock, antagonist, and, they hoped, their prey. What seemed uncanny coincidence confused me a little while; then I perceived it was not this at all. It was merely the recurrence of event under almost identical circumstances. Before they saw me as an upstart Yankee, one of a hated nation, who dared presume to equality with them and who had got in their way. Now they saw me as an upstart Englishman, one of a class tolerated as long as it was servile, but hated monstrously when it tried to rise, one who lately had made too bold and had got in their way. I did not think they consciously recalled the dinner at Lepanto Palace, but I could not be sure; certainly Sophia was haunted by its memory, and it made unrecognized suggestions to the others. The outcome of that dinner had been a triumph. The Yankee sailor and a good number of his ilk had their hash properly settled. Something told them that Holgar Blackburn's hash would not go unsettled very long.

"Have you gone into the genealogy of your family?" Dick asked, with overdone gravity.

"Not yet."

"You should, by all means. It's quite possible that your paternal ancestors had a coat of arms. If so, you'd be perfectly justified in reviving it. If some branch of the distaff had one, you might get permission to adopt it. Or possibly the king would award you your own."

"The last would be my preference—to start fresh."

"There's the true Englishman for you," Lord Tarlton cried. "He don't want to wear borrowed plumes. When he's hauled himself up by his own bootstraps, he'll honor those bootstraps, by God!"

"Harvey, what do you think would be a suitable device?" Dick asked.

"A lion rampant, certainly. That would mean his fortune was made in Africa, infested with hons. A miner's pick could be emblazoned on the shield, and a shock of wheat to indicate strong, upstanding yeoman stock. A proper motto is most important—what do you think of 'Blackburn bears brunt'?"

"That's awfully silly, Harvey," Sophia broke in.

"What's silly about it? Doesn't a coat of arms granted in the year 1819 deserve as much care as one of three hundred years ago?"

"How about 'Blackburn bears brands'?" I asked. "I've one on the back of my hand."

"I doubt if you mean that seriously," Sophia said. "Just the same, it's a good motto—too fine a motto to put on a coat of arms." Her eyes were too bright.

"I thank you kindly. Lord Tarlton, you suggest I marry and start a family. In your opinion, should I take a girl in my own class, the sturdy yeomanry, or try to marry into the gentry?"

"I'd say, betwixt and between. In the old days we had franklins—above yeomen, and not quite gentlemen. Certain people in trade and in the so-called professions have the same rank now. Then there'd not be such a gap as to mar felicity, and yet the children would be started on their way."

"You don't think there are impoverished ladies—real ladies-open to marriages of convenience? If she were a widow, she might have children whom I'd make my heirs. Or possibly she might have a well-born lover who could attend to that. Surely I shouldn't complain if thereby I could found a house of honor in the shire!"

A hush fell over the board, and the mock-sober faces changed expression.

"I don't think you're quite in earnest, Mr. Blackburn," the little lord remarked.

"Our host's a bit of a wag," cried Harvey, who was getting quite drunk.

At that moment Jim, dressed in sober black, filled my champagne glass. This was according to his rule. When the hired footmen had served the others, I turned again to Lord Tarlton.

"My lord, as the ranking person here, will you offer the toast of obligation?"

"I'd be pleased to." And when we had risen with him: "To George III—old, mad, but still the king!"

When we had seated, I rose again.

"I would like to have you join me in a toast to the head of the other great English-speaking nation of the world. To James Monroe, President of the United States."

"Oh, that happened before!" Sophia burst out.

"What in the devil do you mean?" her father demanded.

"The other dinner. You can pretend you don't remember it, but you do. You asked Homer and he came. It was exactly like this. It's come again."

"Are you mad?"

"I'm not far from it."

"Pardon my daughter's erratic behavior, Mr. Blackburn. I think she refers to a dinner to which I invited an American seaman with whom she thought she was in love. His name was Homer—yours is Holgar, enough like it to jog her memory—and quite true, he offered a toast to his president, perfectly proper conduct. A few days later he was lost at sea—which she took rather hard."

Still without rising, the pretty nobleman reached for and fondled the ivory knob of the light cane leaning against his chair.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Now for this toast you offer. I must remind you that after the toast to the king, it's customary to drink to the Regent. However, Mr. Monroe is the acknowledged head of a state with whom the king is presently at peace, and if you wish to vary the procedure, why, we'll rise and join you."

"Thank you, I do,"

"Then I'd add this—may he lead the Yankees in the way they should go!"

"You said that before, too," Sophia murmured.

"You must harbor a deep admiration for Mr. Monroe," Lord Tarlton said when we were seated.

"I know very little about him, my lord, but I greatly admire America."

"After the Americans have waged two wars against their rightful king? That takes a good deal of tolerance."

"I take it that all the people of my class admire America, and most of them wanted her to win."

"You amaze me. I wonder how they'll feel after the third war. Then we won't be busy with Napoleon, and the outcome may surprise all admirers of America. I remind you that no revolt against the throne ever endured for long, from the peasants' uprising under Watt Tyler, through Monmouth's, through the Civil War, clean down to the peasants' rebellion under Washington. The latter has lasted forty-two years. That seems a long time—but the mills of the gods grind slowly. We shall see."

Dick sprang to his feet, his face darkly flushed.

"I drink to a ship that did her part in teaching traitors a lesson," he cried. "To Our Eliza."

"I'll join you in it, but let it go at that," Lord Tarlton replied.

"I remember meeting one of her crew," I said when the table had stilled again.

Again it stilled until the nobleman spoke. "Is that possible?"

"He was an East Indian who had settled in Africa," I went on. "Before then he had been a lascar, serving under you on the sloop of war Our Eliza. He had learned to speak English and told me of the battle."

"He did?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Is that where you got the impression that the Saratoga sank on the following evening? For I thought you said it was some sort of letter—"

"I had disremembered, as we say in Tavistock."

"I doubt if the expression is Devon. It sounds more like Yankee."

"Puran told me that two other survivors of the fight were in Africa," I went on. "Both were American Tories who became officers under you. One, Hamed Reis, became a pirate captain under the Sultan of Morocco. The other, called Murad Reis, served the Pasha of Tripoli. It was he who ambushed and sank the American schooner the Vindictive off the Aegadian Isles. Her course had been betrayed to him by someone in Malta."

Harvey turned slowly pale, Dick had a witless stare, and I could not look at Sophia. But Captain Godwine, Lord Tarlton, sat gracefully in his chair, a look almost of beauty on his face, his lips pursed a little, as though from thought.

"You've picked up some odd stories in your comings and goings about Africa, Mr. Blackburn," he remarked at last.

"I'll try to remember them in detail on a later occasion."

"If I'm not mistaken—Sophia will correct me in that case—the Vindictive was the ship on which her suitor—the one she called Homer —was lost."

Sophia stared at her plate. "Shake not—your gory locks—at me," she gasped, her hand at her throat.

"If you can't talk sense, Sophia, please don't talk at all."

"Then I won't talk at all. I never have." She leaped up and ran away, weeping.

"Didn't you speak too harshly to her, my lord?" I asked. "She was merely quoting Shakespeare. You remember the speech, I know— Macbeth's to the ghost of Banquo."

"I remember it well. You're a very cultivated man. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll see about my daughter."

With his cane in his small white hand and his feet straight before him, he walked out of the room as might a phoenix newly risen from ashes.

"Now there's nothing to stop us from having a good old-fashioned brandy bout," Dick told Harvey.

CHAPTER 28 Ghosts Walking

The bout had lasted only a round or two when both contestants took the count, one with his head pillowed on his arms on the table, the other gently sliding from his chair to the floor. The hired footmen lugged them to their beds. Jim did not have to touch them.

They were down at nine, helping themselves liberally to the kidney pudding, fried herring, curried eggs, and other breakfast dishes, none the worse for their dissipations, indeed, remarkably fresh of face and bright of eye. It was doubtful whether they remembered some discomforting remarks I had made at the dinner or wondered if they had dreamed them. Sophia looked wistful and touching and quite beautiful. It seemed that she kept away from me when I stood alone, but invariably came up when I talked to Harvey in ill-hidden protectiveness.

Lord Tarlton appeared in half an hour, blaming the years on his back for his tardiness, but by all sign impervious to their weight-graceful, pretty, and courtly. No concern over last night's events appeared to cross his mind. He spoke of the good food and the fine wines without mark of study. I could be sure he would not speak of the long past until again I raised the subject; and only if he were brought to bar before a jury of his peers need he answer questions. But he could not deny that terrifying possibility—he did not know my weapons or my intent—and I was not troubled by his seeming complacence, and felt an inkling that all went well.

My guests had dressed for the field. When I had placed them in butts behind a hedge in a stubble field, a line of boys beat out a wide strip of partridge cover, flushing out the coveys which settled in thick woods. Their task was now to close in, and advancing slowly and carefully under the direction of the keeper, to drive them over the guns. Each guest had a pair of double-barreled pieces and a loader. As before, Lord Tarlton was attended by Pike.

"Blackburn, aren't you going to set us a good example?" he asked when I hung back of the butts.

"I may shoot a little when the drive's well underway."

"In the meantime I'll ask a favor, I shot badly yesterday afternoon —I didn't think I was flinching from the trigger, but perhaps I was. Will you seat yourself about ten feet back of Pike and watch a few shots? I think you're gunner enough to spot my fault."

"I doubt it, but will try, with pleasure."

I did not sit down but crouched, and not more than six feet behind the stocky tar. Firing at the first flight, the nobleman jerked at the trigger, missing with both barrels.

"You flinched rather badly that time, my lord," I said.

"I was afraid so. See if this is not better."

Firing again, he flinched at the first shot, but got off the other smoothly and dropped his bird. As flock after flock came over, he shot with varying smoothness, cursing when he missed, greatly elated when he killed clean, meanwhile questioning me as to his form. It seemed a remarkable exhibition of his personality and, under ordinary circumstances, I would have found it intensely interesting. But these circumstances were not ordinary; and I gave him only the outer fringe of my attention.

A scene pregnant with terrible event may have a strange beauty. Covey after covey of partridge broke from the woods in search of shelter; trustfully they flew until they came suddenly in sight of the guns; at this betrayal by their familiar haunts, they swerved in terror, some of them surviving to fly again, some darting into the unseen swishing pellets. I remembered the grapeshot's terrible sound as it broke over a deck. I saw the birds ineffably alive, borne swiftly on God-given miraculous wings, and I saw that life end, all over in an unguarded and undreamed instant, innocence and beauty ceasing; and I heard the thuds on the frost-hardened ground. The shots rang out with a kind of festiveness. Two of the shooters became wildly animated, calling back and forth, but the naked trees stood one and one, incommunicant with one another, and looked drear.

I felt sure the moment I was waiting for was near. It was not undreamed and unguarded like the instant of the partridges' sudden darkness and downward pitch. Lord Tarlton had fired one barrel and was holding the fire of the other until a target offered; Pike had finished loading the alternate gun, but was fingering the hammer and mumbling to himself.

He turned his head and spoke to me.

"Your honor, have ye got a penknife?"

"Yes."

"Loan it to me, your honor." Meanwhile he was turning toward me, the gun held in both hands. "There's a piece of trash stuck "

At that instant I struck the barrel of his gun with mine. It was too late for him to stop the quickening action of his hands, and both barrels roared almost simultaneously. The charges struck the ground fully thirty feet distant. The man turned yellow-white and almost dropped the piece. He did not speak nor did I, but Lord Tarlton spoke. Without looking over his shoulder, he talked in a tone of chill reproof.

"You blasted my ears, Blackburn, and I wish you'd warn me, hereafter, before you shoot."

No doubt he prided himself on that speech, brilliantly conceived and perfectly delivered. He had pictured himself repeating it to a coroner in what would appear as a commendably forthright account of a fatal accident at a cut-and-dried inquest. Dick would be sitting among the unimportant witnesses, looking very grave; at this point he and Harvey would exchange solemn glances.

"I didn't shoot, my lord."

Now the little lord turned and looked. His eyes were round, as he had never intended to let anyone see them; his pretty mouth was drawn; his delicately tinted cheeks had paled. One of the barrels of his piece remained cocked and primed, so I held mine handy in my arms for him to see. He did not know that by some law I did not understand, but must obey, my gun was unloaded.

"What the devil happened?" he burst out, but though he spoke with vehemence, there was no wintry rattle in his voice.

"Pike fired both barrels by accident."

"He did, did he? Did the charge come near you?"

"Not at all."

"You stupid dog," he cried, turning on Pike. "You careless swine! Take that!"

Lord Tarlton struck him in the jaw, then kicked him in the knee.

"I didn't go for to do it," Pike yelled.

"Nobody said you did, you clumsy fool."

There fell a slight pause. Lord Tarlton kept from looking at me, but he waited for me to speak.

"No, Pike, nobody said you did," I said.

"But I've told him a thousand times—" Snatching up his cane that was always close at hand—today it was a light rattan—he cut the fellow thrice across the shoulders.

"What's the brabble?" Dick cried, running up.

"Pike was careless with my gun and has been punished for it."

Dick made no display, and I was reasonably certain that the event had taken him by surprise. That need not surprise me; the pretty nobleman found pleasure and also played as safe as possible in plotting alone, acting with trusted tools. He loved a fait accompli. Pike rubbed his jaw, his knee, and his shoulder in turn, his doglike gaze fixed on his master's face. I doubted if I had impressed him with my ready and swift guard—exactly what had happened had fogged over in his mind—but from now on he would take more pains not to bitch his master's business. Didn't en larrup him rightl Wa'n't en a daizy!

"While you're getting on with the sport, I'll send for a round of brandies," I suggested. And when Pike looked at me, grinned, and wiped his mouth, "There'll be one for you, too."

For it would be too grim a joke to soothe the little lord's upset nerves and neglect his bully boy's. But I did not go at once to the refreshment wagon. Instead I made for the line of beaters about to enter a second strip of cover and spoke privately to the keeper. Thereby my guests would have dull sport the rest of the drive.

I did that, and then had nothing to do of any profit or comfort. While I had run no great risk in my sudden craving for direct and violent action, the course had been ill-charted, and its outcome empty. My hopes had taken a great fall. I was in no mood to believe that my future strokes would be any more telling. To play cat-and-mouse with my great enemy was wildly exciting; but often the game itself made me forget the goal; and the devil laughed. If he struck again, again the blow would be indirect, stealthy, unpunishable. He was too cunning, too secure, to be frightened into desperate attack. Unless I could find his Achilles heel...

My thoughts were interrupted by a movement in the brushwood down a little road. Then into the clearing rode one of my grooms with a young lady in a stylish riding habit. I perceived at once that he was taking her to the shooting butts; but what her errand might be, important enough to bring her here in person, I could not imagine.

She had not yet seen me, for I stood in shadow, while the pale winter sunlight showed her plain. My first impression was of bright color. Her horse was a bright bay, her skirt buff, and her jacket green, and the hair unhidden by her low-crowned hat was glimmering gold. Then I was astounded to realize I had seen her once before. That occasion was so utterly dissociated with this one that I could scarcely believe my eyes. It was at the fete I had given at Tavistock nine months before. She had ranged the grounds and enjoyed the entertainments in the company of an English lord and his family. I remembered her coloring, high as a golden pheasant's. Alan had named the people she was with, but did not know her.

She caught a first glimpse of me and spoke in low tones to Perkins, the groom. "Aye, en's the master," I heard him answer. Then as she looked straight at me, intending to speak to me, I saw the same expression of dismay come into her bright face that I had seen when she returned my glance before.

She got rid of it and rode up to me. I touched my hat.

"I recognize you now," she said. "You're Mr. Holgar Blackburn. I saw you the great day at Tavistock."

"I saw you, too," I answered.

"Well, I've done a cheeky thing, but I couldn't help it. Didn't you invite me to come down here with the others? Sophia—Mrs. Alford—told me you did."

"I invited Lord Tarlton and his family."

"Papa said I could come, and then they slipped off when I was at dancing school."

"You must be Lord Tarlton's daughter Eliza."

"Of course I am. I thought you recognized me, too. I'm Eliza Tarlton. I went with some other people to Tunbridge Wells and then rode over alone. But if it's inconvenient—"

"It's not inconvenient, and your coming has given me great pleasure."

"It won't give Papa any, or Dick, but I want you to tell them what you just told me."

Still another memory came, dim and pale, one which at first I could not quite seize. But that was because it had come so far in time and space; and in a second or two it glazed like the morning star on the deserts of Baeed. Far away on those deserts, long ago when I was yet a slave, a beautiful young girl who looked to be carved with a sword liked to ride with old Timor and me. When we slipped off from her for what we thought was a good reason, it was not long before we saw her following us. She would ride into the wind, kick up dust to blow in our faces, then join us with a toss of head and a wide smile.

Eliza Tarlton reminded me of Isabel Gazelle.

"I'm sure you're mistaken about your father and half brother being displeased."

"Dick's jealous of how Papa loves me. There's no harm in telling you—you'd see it yourself in five minutes—everyone knows it. But Papa wants to keep me a little girl. He's penned me up at Celtburrow and hardly ever lets me come to London. I dare say he's old and eccentric—though he seems young to me—and desperately afraid something will happen to me. Did you ever hear of anything so absurd?"

She seemed anxious to ingratiate herself with me. Talking rapidly in a gay tone, she had been looking about her, taking in the scene with sparkling eyes, patting her horse, listening to the desultory shooting. But as she asked the question, she gazed again into my face.

Her eager expression swiftly faded. Her gray eyes widened.

Beautiful beyond denial, with the generosity that beauty gives—like to that which bravery gives—she looked for beauty's reflection everywhere and wanted to find it in everyone. Since my appearance distressed and dismayed her, she made a special effort to be sociable, her eyes skipping me the while. As she talked with great girlish animation, I had a chance to drink her in.

I was not surprised that Godwine, Lord Tarlton, had sired two beautiful daughters and that neither of them looked like him in any perceptible degree or hardly like each other. In contemplating and in observing him, I could never feel that he loved woman—that would have stood between him and evil—and the few he had ever pursued since his affair with the Countess Isabel had been great rareties whose conquest fed his vanity. Sophia's mother had been of the ancient house of Linden, Eliza's mother Elspeth had come from the isle of Jersey, had been poor and of obscure family, yet had dazzled everyone, a tremendous prize. He had won her in his custom of winning prizes, but not cheaply: he had given her his great name. To her babe he had given the name of largest bearing upon his soul of any in the world with the possible exception of his own. The first ship over which he held absolute command, whereby his devouring lust for power was first relieved—a ship that made the winds of heaven serve his will, that buffeted great gales and soared across the vast, dark, fearsome, unplumbable deeps of ocean —was named Our Eliza. The baby was My Eliza.

The wild moors about Celtburrow served her as they had served Sophia. But a great difference had lain between their conditions of confinement. Sophia had been kept there so that Lord Tarlton could be rid of her, Eliza so that he could keep her for his own. He almost lost her once, I thought. Proud and unmasterable Elspeth had determined to leave him and take her daughter with her when the sea took her instead. The sea had taken another who had balked him, the Saratoga—again, just in time. It must seem to him that he were god of the sea.

My mind had been groping for the basic bond between Eliza and Isabel Gazelle. Both had been given grace, elegance, honesty-, and the great manner which is natural when it is not consciously ceremonial. Isabel Gazelle was of ancient lineage. Eliza was not so on her mother's side, and a train of thought had set me to doubting whether her father's descent was as high as he believed, but that made little difference if one were raised in a royal environment and had not the least self-doubt. For the rest, she had long, clean lines—in this like Isabel, too—was yare like her, wide and childish of smile, blithe of voice, beautifully muscled and boned, and superbly alive.

Thus endowed, it was almost inevitable that she would spring off her horse and walk beside me down the road.

"The country people still talk about your fete," she was saying. "I think that giving thousands of people such a wonderful day was almost as important as giving forty people a decent home."

"That's an interesting viewpoint."

"You remember how they cheered youl"

"I haven't forgotten it."

She gave me a quick glance. "I wish I could say something—"

"Please say anything you like."

"That last cheer. Lord Bray—I was visiting his daughter—is a kind man and was afraid it would hurt your feelings. I didn't think so— but if it did, you took it wrongly. They were trying to put out their hands to you. It was so beautiful I almost cried."

"I didn't take it wrongly, Eliza, I took it rightly."

"I'm so glad. And I like to have you call me by my first name. You wouldn't if I weren't welcome. Aren't given names the important ones, instead of last names? A whole clan may bear the same last name—all are born with it, and that's that. But those who love you give you a first name for your very own."

"I never thought of it that way."

"I am Eliza. As much as I love Papa, I don't want to be Papa, I want to be me. When anyone calls me Miss Tarlton, I feel more his daughter than I feel myself."

"Kings and queens are of similar mind. They are Charles or Elizabeth, maybe with a numeral, but nothing about Stuart or Tudor. I knew a princess in Africa who had no last name."

"A black princess?"

"A brown one, and you remind me of her."

"What was her first name?"

"Isabel."

"Isn't that strange?"

"I think so."

"I want to hear all about her when we have time. Would you like to have me call you Holgar? I knew you before any of the others—at least, I was your guest. It would sort of break the ice—"

I was afraid she would go into complicated explanations and embarrass herself.

"I'd be greatly pleased."

"I'm so glad. And it will give Dick a jar! Papa, too, may be taken aback—although I never know how the cat will jump, as we say in the West Country." Her brow clouded a little, and she went on in a voice not as glowing as before. "After having that wonderful time at Tavistock, of course I couldn't bear to miss this affair, and there was another reason I wanted to come. I've been a little worried about Papa."

"Is that possible?"

"It doesn't seem possible, does it? He's so—infallible. But in the last few days—specially since Lydia White's rout—he hasn't been himself. He paces the floor at night or sits very still for an hour or more and has even spoken sharply to me, an unheard of thing. I wanted to be with him and see that he doesn't overdo. I do hope he won't be angry—"

"I'm afraid you won't find him in an amiable mood. There was a little accident today that upset him."

"What was it?"

She had spoken quickly and off guard.

"A fowling piece went off by accident."

"Did the charge almost hit him? I pity the poor oaf who did it!"

"No, it would have hit me if I hadn't knocked aside the barrel."

The free swing of her stride was briefly broken. "Whose gun was it?"

"Lord Tarlton's, but Pike was holding it."

"Pike was holding it," she echoed, not knowing she had spoken.

"He was loading for his master and turned to me to borrow a knife. One hand must have touched the trigger."

She stopped and appeared to be looking at the butts, only a hundred yards distant now. The shooters had gathered about the refreshment wagon and had not noticed us yet.

"I can't read your face, but there's something in your voice," she said in great strain. "I'm going to ask you a strange question, and it's necessary you give me a straight answer. Did you suspect he did it on purpose?"

"Why should he?"

"That wasn't what I asked. Oh, please tell me."

"The question rose in my mind, of course."

"Had you done anything to make him angry? I'll tell you the kind of thing I mean—won a great deal of money off Papa or made Papa trouble or even said something to him that Pike might think was insulting. Pike is a terribly dangerous man. He worships Papa like a dog—more like a tamed wolf—and of course Papa has no right to have him around, but won't get rid of him. I know that once he had to keep him from killing someone—a drunken fool who slapped Papa's face. If you're the one who's causing him this trouble—and I just now thought you might be—well, you'd better stop or keep out of Pike's way."

The threat came suddenly, unpremeditated and passionate. As she gave it, she looked full into my face.

"I think you may misjudge Pike—in a curious way."

"What do you mean?"

"I think he may be capable of murder. But he had nothing to do with my being behind him and in easy reach."

"If you happened by and he saw his chance—"

"I didn't happen by. Lord Tarlton said he's been flinching and asked me to sit there, to help him correct it. He said to sit ten feet behind Pike. Happily, I sat only six feet behind him—otherwise I couldn't have knocked aside his gun barrel."

Eliza uttered one little "Oh!" as though I had struck her, then walked rapidly toward her people. When they saw her come into the open field and turned and stared, she waved in well-feigned gaiety.

Without hurrying, I was close enough behind her to watch her reception. Dick turned his back on her in open disdain. From Sophia it was warm—I felt sure she loved her—while Harvey looked anxiously from her to Lord Tarlton. The little nobleman gazed from her to me, and it must be that some inner force failed him for a few seconds, for suddenly he looked old. The debility passed, and he spoke to Eliza in an exasperated but not harsh tone.

"What in the devil are you doing here?"

"I was invited, and you practically promised I could come. Holgar said he was glad to have me, didn't you, Holgar?"

"I certainly did, Eliza."

But this frivolous interplay was forced and out of place, as she knew full well. Meanwhile, she could not look at Pike, and instead gazed at Lord Tariton—small, perfect, delicate but indestructible, his hunting habit handsome as a fop's, but stronger than the thorns; his white hair gracing his pretty face, and his white hand toying with his stick; but the east wind at his call, and the icy blue of winter sky serving his glance. Was she reassured? Although lost and forgotten things sometimes cast their shadows over her ways, she could never doubt his love. Believing in that, how could she doubt him?

Yet I watched her in deepening anxiety and suspense. Meanwhile, the face of nature began to change. Her mood became dark and her voice sorrowful and her signs ominous. The yellow stubble lost its cheerful winter color under cloud-shadows. The rising wind made the boughs of the gaunt trees rattle.

"Blackburn, has my daughter your permission to address you by your given name?"

"My lord, we've both agreed to employ first names, since she's been my guest before."

"Well, miss, I don't think your stay will be very long. There's a change of weather coming, unkind to bones as old as mine. If it turns out as I think, I'll have to forego our host's good cheer and return to London tomorrow."

"I think you should. Papa, since you look worn and nervous, but you'll have Pike and the servants to look after you, so I don't see why we others shouldn't stay on."

She spoke in a clear young voice, without hint of entreaty, her head high, her eyes fixed on his and very bright, and a high flush on her cheekbones. Her little gesture of defiance against the evil and tragedy thickening about her should have cut to the quick even Godwine and his malign son.

He doesn't love you, Eliza. Evil can love nothing but itself. He only covets you and wants to command you as he did your namesake. It is too late for Sophia to escape. Is it too late for you?

What if I should love you, a last hostage-giving to fortune? I could learn to easily, for love of woman is the mother spring of my nature and manhood, and you are woman in her young and declared beauty. You grace the ground on which you tread. I could easily see you as personifying the beaut)' of woman everywhere, the thrill of life, the joy of youth. And you remind me of Isabel Gazelle.

Such love might be only an ideal which I would cherish in the days to come and smile over by my lonely hearth. Thus it could not harm you, and in the final fury of the storm just now beginning to break, it might save you. But fate is not satisfied with this kindly and due conclusion. You are lovely and touching, but your color is very bright. You have golden hair and snowy skin which flushes crimson and wide red lips and luminous gray eyes. As you stand there, fearing my gaze, you cause a brightness in the lowering gloom.

There are surgings through me of great power. I cannot deny them, I do not try to master them. Like wild horses I have roped and would ride across the desert, I give them free rein.

The wind shrilled, and some kestrels, seeking shelter from a gale breaking on the rugged Kentish coast, cried overhead.

"Why, Eliza, if you and the others wish to stay a few days, I'd have no objection, and would get along well," the nobleman had answered.

"We'll talk it over later," This soon she was penitent.

"Now let's go to the fire," Sophia said with a little shiver.

"Eliza, if you want to walk with your father, I'll have Perkins take your horse to the stable."

"Thank you, I do."

"We can pass the stables without going out of our way, and I'll show you a gray stallion almost as handsome as your bright-bay mare. Lord Tarlton, I've been wondering how he'd run against your magnificent black—in some not too-distant future. Perhaps you'd like to see him, too."

"There are few sights I like better than a good horse."

I had Perkins turn El Stedoro into the paddock and he came whinnying to the gate where I stood. He was in fine fettle, his dappled skin like satin, and the wind made him skittish and tossed his black mane and tail; still he was too big, raw-boned, and ungainly-looking to please these lovers of the classic type of English hunter. As they took in his long, gaunt neck, big feet, block-shaped head, and Roman nose, they did not know what to say.

"Look at those quarters!" Lord Tarlton exclaimed. "He's a 'chaser, or blow me down! But you called him handsome!"

"I think that was Blackburn's little joke," Dick said.

"What is he, if you'll tell me. There's a hint of Arab about the ears and the tail, and those shoulders are pure English."

"An agent of mine got him in Alexandria. His name is El Stedoro, and though he's not much to look at, I've gained a deal of confidence in him when the going's rough. If you're a little cold, maybe you'd like to warm yourself and Donald Dhu, setting him a pace." Donald Dhu, meaning Black Donald, was Tarlton's great 'chaser.

"I'm not cold in the least, but amenable to the suggestion."

"A good course is down this road, across the brook, over the pasture gate, on the grass to the hedge, jump it and return—straight out and back just over a mile. You took all three jumps riding to the duck blinds yesterday afternoon."

"That's not too hard for me, but Dick rides in my place when the course is long and the jumps cruel. Both nags need a sweating, and 1 a limbering. Shall we put a small premium on coming in first?"

"That would be agreeable."

"Would a hundred guineas suit you?"

I expected him to say ten guineas at the most. He had been over the course, but had never run it.

"It would suit me well."

"Then, Pike, get him out here; and I'm glad you thought of it, Blackburn, to round out the day."

El Stedoro and I had learned to communicate freely concerning my riding and his running. I could give a good show of letting him go while he understood perfectly he must hold back from his most furious bounds to save strength for some trial beyond. I had plotted to let Donald Dhu win, then have the excuse of seeking revenge. Now, although Lord Tarlton's wager was intended to persuade me he hoped and expected to win, I was quite sure he was out to lose, in preparation for a coup de main. He was an old turfman who ran no foolish risks. He had a higher opinion of my mount and me than the rash bet would have me believe.

So I decided to come in first provided I could do so without turning the gray brute loose, and if I could not, the game was not worth the candle.

In a few minutes Dick cried, "Go!" I had already known that Donald Dhu was a superhunter, the supreme product of the English and Irish stud farms, developing the type, and hence one of the great 'chasers of the age. His pedigree was awesome, a returning again and again of the blood of the Byerly Turk and the Darley Arabian, with the magic name of Eclipse mixed with parvenus of great achievement. He and his few peers took turns at beating one another—the slightest mishap or fault by horse or rider could decide the issue—and only the phenomenal horse could put him in the shade. I owned a phenomenal horse, unless the hard-bitten horsemen of the Beni Kabir missed their guess. Both Donald Dhu and his lordly owner would be surprised to know that the gray fright was the splendid black's cousin on both sides of the family.

In the brisk run of a mile with six easy jumps, I held El Stedoro more than a shade under his top speed, his performance being impressive nonetheless. I was quite sure that Lord Tarlton's hands had been light on the whip, heavy on the rein, despite his manner of surprise and chagrin when the gray won by a length. Eliza appeared relieved, as though this little victory had closed my account with him. Harvey raised his eyebrows to Dick, a piece of stupidity that Dick rebuffed by looking away. For reasons I could not calculate, Sophia looked ill.

The flames in the big fireplace of the drawing room crackled and cavorted, charming the eyes with sunset colors alive and leaping, and the cozy warmth of the body lulled the mind; but the windows darkened before their time and sometimes rattled in the wind, and now and then the sitters heard the elm trees cough.

I did not sit with them, having left them to their silences, their sporadic talk, and their secret speculations. Only when the gloom of early night had infiltrated unseen the heavy shadows of late afternoon, and they were dreading going to their chill rooms to dress by a hasty fire, did I come with a welcome proposal. It was to have the evening meal served on small tables set about the hearth, and we to partake in our warm field clothes. Except in battle and during storms at sea. Lord Tarlton had changed for dinner as regularly as a chicken molts, but he was the first to agree.

The many dishes lost no savor, glasses brimmed with cheer. Only Sophia and Eliza remained sharply on guard, ever the woman's part; warmth and insinuant wine lulled the three men. But when brandy glowed in the crystal decanter, a footman brought me a message.

"There's a fellow witin' in the kitchen entry what gives 'is name as Peebles, a woodcutter from Ashdown Wood. 'E says you sent for 'im."

"See that his hands are clean and his clothes brushed and show him in." Then to the others, "This is quite a remarkable man—one of the last of the witch masters, if I can believe my tenants."

An instant later the great ventriloquist, Walt Chalker, entered the room.

I could hardly believe this was the same man. I could not have possibly recognized him if he had taken me by surprise, and I lost all fear of Eliza associating him with the amazing showman she had watched at Tavistock. His clothes were a hard weave of undyed wool with boots of undressed hide, three days' growth of black stubble covered his lips and jowls, and without the dark rings under his eyes that I thought were walnut stain, he could be taken for either a forest hermit or a gypsy. He came shyly toward me, his cap in his hands, without the slightest trace of showmanship.

"Thank 'ee honor, for ye've a'n't forgot ye bade me coom along," he said in perfect and uninscribable imitation of the country speech.

"I'm glad you've come. Matt Peebles. And what can you do to entertain my guests?"

"I can tell fortunes with cards. The ladies like that. I can read palms, too."

"They've seen that before."

"Sometimes, I can prophesy. The spirit won't come on me every time and sometimes an evil spirit speaks through my Ups, and I prophesy false. But it takes a deal out o' me, your honor, and shakes me to the marrow of my bones."

Lord Tarlton, playing with his stick, spoke in mock sympathy.

"No doubt you're not up to the morrow's labor, and deserve an extra fee,"

"Nay, your lordship. I charge naught for what comes to me from I know not where. But if the yarbs I dig in the wood helps a sick body, or drives off pain from a liddle child, I'll take red money for 'em if the folk be poor, or white if they're well off." And it came to me that Walt Chalker was living his part.

"Is it second sight, that you knew I was a lord?"

"Nay sir, I've seen you pass, in your coach, on the road to Tun-bridge Wells. The country folk know well your face, and that of your son."

"Do you think the spirit would come to you tonight?" I asked.

" "Tis a good night for't, your honor, bitter and dark, with the east wind raving. Horses stamp in their stalls on such nights, and the wild things cannot rest, and it must be them we can't see, go abroad. But your honor, these be great folk here tonight. And if ye want me to prophesy, some of 'em will have to clasp hands with me."

"I'll be one, Matt," Sophia said quickly.

"I'll be the other," I told him. "Do we sit in a ring?"

"Aye, with the lamps out, but the fire will give light enough. And ye must sit still a liddle while, and be patient."

When we began to form the ring, Lord Tarlton took Sophia's other hand, with Dick on his other side. Harvey sat next, which left Eliza between him and me. She seemed loath to give me her hand. When she did, it felt chill. But it was a lovely, silken, shapely hand, stronger than I had thought, and reminding me of Isabel's.

I had told the footman not to enter the room, so the fire went unmended. But the light receded so imperceptibly that no one noticed the growing shadow on the performer's face. Reclining his head, he seemed to go straight to sleep; in about five minutes he stirred and moaned as though in a bad dream.

Then he spoke in a strained and halting tone.

"Harvey! Harvey!"

"Yes?"

"There's a soldier here—an officer—he's been wounded in the breast. His name is Edgar—Edmund—Edward. He bids you mind the Indian bow and quiver you found in the old trunk."

"I had an uncle of that name," Harvey said in a trembling voice. "I found the bow and arrows he'd sent from America when I was a babe."

"He wants you to know he wasn't murdered by his captors after the battle at Freedom—Freeman's farm. He was brought in sorely wounded, and cared for kindly, until he died."

This last was the fruit of an easy investigation I had had made in America. Sophia had told me of the bow and quiver a little boy had prized.

"Great God!" Harvey breathed.

"Dicky! Dicky!" the supposed witch master moaned. "There's an old woman—her name is Bertha—she was your nurse."

"I never had a nurse named Bertha," Dick snarled.

"Yes, you did, Dick," Sophia breathed.

Then what seemed a woman's voice rose from the dimness across the room.

"Don't deny me, Dicky."

"There's someone—this fellow's confederate—in this room."

"Look and see, Dick," I said.

"What is it? What does she want?"

"She begs you to have no more dealings with Jules—Julian—Julius. It will cause your death."

"Who's Julius? I never heard of Julius.'

"She says you met him—was it last night?—at a wine shop in— Notabile." The performer pronounced this name clearly. "It's on an island. The women wear black drapes on their head. The name of the shop is—Don John of Austria. She says that your brother—your sister's suitor—waited outside. And because you dealt with him, many died."

"Of all the lying—"

"Nay, nay, 'twas not last night. She don't know when it was. And now one who died from that dealing has come here. He wants to speak to Sophia."

"To me?"

"He asks, Have you forgotten the witch's cave?"

"What is his name?"

"Homer—Whitman."

"I've had enough of this trumpery," Lord Tarlton burst out, breaking the circle.

Then a deep voice, with the twang of a New England skipper's, rose just at hand—as though the speaker were standing by the hearth.

"Wait a minute. Captain Sir Godwine Tarlton!"

"That's trumpery, too!"

"Trumpery, is it? I'm Captain Phillips of the Vindictive, that you betrayed to Murad Reis. For that you'll die on a gibbet, and go to hell."

It was a remarkable but patent feat of ventriloquism. Godwine, Lord Tarlton, sprang to his feet and seized an iron poker. As he turned on the limp figure in the chair, I caught his little wrist in a grip like iron. All the rest were on their feet, and now every movement was arrested by a sudden writhing of the man's body and his deep, harrowing groan. A fallen ember blazing up showed his eyes wide open in a stare like death's and his face pale and flaccid as in death.

His lips began to move in great travail. Forth came a voice that seemed from a vast distance, speaking words sacred to me that I had never repeated to a human soul.

"Fight on. . . till. . . Cap'n's gone."

Lord Tarlton had raised his free hand to strike me when he saw the pallor of my face. The iron he had held dropped clanging on the stones of the hearth.

CHAPTER 29 Parry and Thrust

Shortly after my home-coming at Tavistock I had had Alan call upon Lloyd's in London on the matter of buying an American ship. The great association of underwriters had the inside track in the news and gossip of shipping; and one of its agents offered to pursue the inquiry for a reasonable fee. Since autumn I had been told of several vessels being available and had looked at two.

I had hardly returned from Elveshurst after Lord Tarlton's visit there when the agent sent a commissaire to my house on Charles Street. I was to meet him at once at Blackwall to see something pretty. Since he himself loved ships, I was sure he would not disappoint me, and on arriving there, I was surprised only by the moderation of his language. No palace in England was more beautiful to my sight than the long, low, sharp brig not long from Boston.

Her master and owner had died two days out from Land's End, and her competent mate, Mr. Blain, had brought her into port. He was of the opinion that his widow, English-born and accompanying her husband for a visit to her old home, would like to sell the ship and remain in her native land and never take to the seas again. So Jim and I surveyed her with great care.

She was of three hundred and ten tons, rather large to come down a New England ways considering she was built to fetch and carry, but small compared to an East Indiaman. The flare of her hull and her clean lines and her deck plan represented the best Yankee shipbuilding unsurpassed, if equaled, in the world; her masts were sweeping, in a style so new that Lloyd's had never seen it; her timbers were hand-picked, and if it came to outriding a hurricane, I would trust her before a great ship of the line five times her tonnage.

Her price was twenty thousand American dollars, which I paid without question. Appointing Mr. Blain to brevet captaincy, I bade him sail her between French and English Channel ports in what was little better than packet running, putting into London whenever handy until further notice. "And de good Lawd make de time pass soon," Jim prayed.

It might pass sooner than we had thought, bequeathing us dire defeat. Before the week was out. Lord Tarlton sent word to me at my house in Charles Street that he had business with me of signal importance, and could he wait upon me, accompanied by two gentlemen, within the hour? The message was brought, not by a respectable servant or commissaire but by brutal, murderous Pike, which fact alone heralded his master's mood of arrogance, and whose leer was arrogance's grotesque reflection. I was sitting down to dinner when the tidings came. As Jim carved me a final slice of venison roast, a footman announced my visitors' arrival.

"Since I haven't quite finished and don't want to keep them waiting, invite them in here for a glass of brandy," I replied.

"Cap'n, do you want me to stay and serve 'em?" Jim asked when the footman had left the room. "I don' mind."

"No, old shipmate. I know you wouldn't mind, if it was needed, but I don't want to see it. Besides, if you stay here, they might guard their words. But take a good look at them through the port hole."

This last was Jim's word for an aperture, about three feet square, between the butler's pantry and the dining room, through which dishes and trays could be passed. It afforded a straight view of the table, but since it opened at the end of the immensely long room-actually a banquet hall—the distance was nearly thirty feet from my chair and too far for easy hearing of low-voiced conversation between diners.

Jim set a brandy decanter and glasses on the table and went to his pantry. Lord Tarlton entered first, leaning a little on his cane, walking not like an eagle, as Sophia had once said, but like a phoenix. He was beautifully dressed, his hair silver, his lips pursed thoughtfully, a meditative expression on his small, beautifully molded face. Behind him strode a tall man whom I recognized as Sir Edwin Thatch, an official of considerable elevation in the Foreign Office. In the rear came a gross figure in resplendent dress, boozy and close to sixty, whose coarse, malign face caused me to see ghosts. I did not yet recognize it. It was associated in my mind with the Sepulcher of Wet Bones and those who had died there; but it was not the face of the quarry master or the foreman or any of the guards whom I could recall. I would place it in a moment, though—my memory was moving in great surges—and meanwhile I was grateful for the flint of my own face.

"We meet again, Mr. Blackburn, and I owe you an apology," Lord Tarlton said in his softest voice when I had risen and bowed.

"You needn't apologize for coming at this time. I'm through my meal, and hope all of you will join me in a glass."

"'Tis in regard to another matter, which I'll unfold when I've introduced these gentlemen, but I fear we've not time for tippling. Perhaps you've met Sir Edwin Thatch."

"No, my lord, I've not, but I know of his eminence."

"The other gentleman is Captain Henry Holmes, a former sailor like myself, but now home from the sea, and staying in Lincolnshire. You may be surprised to know you've met him before."

"I can't for the moment recall him to mind."

"You will in a minute," the man answered, with a knowing glance at the little lord.

"Meanwhile, will all of you sit?"

"Yes, while I convey my apology."

"And while you're about it. Lord Tarlton, why not accept the glass that Blackburn offers us?" the man introduced as Captain Holmes asked, with a longing glance to the decanter. "The weather's right for it, and we might as well make the business pleasant. If no one will join me, I'll help myself."

"Pray do."

"Wait one instant, Captain Holmes," Lord Tarlton ordered, at which the reaching hand stopped still. "You can positively identify this gentleman, our present host, as Holgar Blackburn?"

"Beyond all question of doubt."

"To be plain with you, Blackburn, there was a time I doubted it. You see, you didn't sound West Country to me, as I mentioned to you, and I was half-persuaded you were a Yankee traitor, taking that guise for purposes I couldn't guess. But Cap'n Holmes spent nigh half his lifetime in North Africa, and he saw you at the town of Nulat, some two hundred miles from Tripoli, about twelve years ago."

I looked once more at this Captain Holmes, and now I remembered our meeting. It was not at Nulat, where I had never been, but on the deck of a Barbary pirate not far from the Aegadian Isles. At Tripoli I had seen the last of him until now. If his name were ever Henry Holmes, it was the one he had borne as an American Loyalist serving under Captain Godwine Tarlton on Our Eliza against his native land. I had known him as Murad Reis.

Although I heard grapeshot swish again over the Vindictive's deck and saw my shipmates fall again, one by one, my face, my voice, and my least movement gave no sign.

"I don't recall the occasion," I answered Lord Tarlton.

"You don't?" Murad Reis broke in, in vicious mockery. "I guess when you got gold fever it fogged your memory."

"It wasn't a very happy occasion, Blackburn," the little lord went on, "but I dare say you'll have to call it to mind, for the Foreign Office of His Majesty's government has taken an interest in it. It came about through a remark I made in all innocence to my former lieutenant. But it's only fair that Sir Edwin should hear your account of it before any steps are taken, so what if we three subjects of the king—Mr. Holmes has sworn allegiance to the Pasha of Tripoli—retire to the drawing room?"

"I'll stay here with the brandy," Murad Reis agreed quickly.

Sir Edwin Thatch looked relieved. Evidently he couldn't stomach the half-drunk renegade. This Lord Godwine had clearly perceived. His own manner toward me was courteous to a fault.

"Mr. Blackburn, I'd like to ask a question which you may answer if you see fit, or decline to answer," Sir Edwin began, when we were seated just outside the great open door of the dining room. "Were you once a member of the elite corps of Mamelukes serving the Pasha of Tripoli?"

I hesitated only long enough to recall what my prisonmate had told me of this matter, and that was no longer than "water could flow out from a broken jar."

"If I did, sir, it was a part of a past I don't wish to disclose, so I respectfully decline to answer."

"Henry Holmes—for many years one of the Pasha's reis—says that you did. He states further that you'd been put in a position of trust and were about to embrace Islam when you made off with the paymaster's chest, containing ten thousand silver rupees. He has it you fled through Nulat, and he saw you there, although he wasn't aware at the time of the alleged crime. After this, if we are to believe him, you made your way to Central Africa with these ill-gotten gains, went into the slave and ivory trade, and made an immense fortune."

"Sir, I take note of what you say," I remarked when the diplomat paused.

Meanwhile my thoughts flew fast. If Murad Reis knew this much, he knew that Holgar Blackburn had been caught at Nulat and sentenced to living death in the Sepulcher of Wet Bones. Why had he not said so, and proclaimed me a fugitive from the prison? I thought that the answer might be twofold. In the first place, the Sepulcher did not officially exist. All men sent there were listed as dead, and the only records kept of them were the day book of the harbor master and the secret fists of the Reis Effendi. In the second place, any story of Holgar's capture and the recovery of the pay chest would spike one of Lord Tarlton's guns—perhaps the heaviest he had any real hope of bringing to bear upon me. If it were believed that my riches began with robbery and had been multiplied by trade in slaves, my own guns would be spiked or silenced.

Murad Reis had stood high in the confidence of the Reis Effendi.

Since he knew the beginning of Holgar's story, likely he knew its end —death on the iron hook. In this case, Lord Tarlton knew it, too, whereby my real identity became an easy—although unprovable— guess. Hence his apology for doubting that I was Holgar—his opening lines in today's play—became not merely a fine piece of histrionics but irony worthy of his strange and terrible mind.

But I could hardly give him the credit he deserved this particular moment because of the actions of my own mind. I had heard a soft sound, not readily amenable to common explanation, in the next room.

"Lord Tarlton encountered Captain Holmes in London, and in speaking of you, chanced to mention that you wore a brand on your hand," Sir Edwin Thatch went on. "This caused Holmes to recall the theft of the chest, and charge you with it. Furthermore, since the thief is still wanted by his Pasha, dead or alive—his escape still irking that North African prince—Holmes intended to report to him at once. This he could do by letter or in person. The Pasha's nearest official representative is a minister—I should say an agent—in Lisbon; but this man has access to His Majesty's government through our ambassador there, and it's through him that he would attempt to obtain your extradition into the Pasha's hands."

Sir Edwin spoke in level, courteous tones. At the last he rubbed his hands lightiy together in a gesture of distaste.

"But that would be very difficult, wouldn't it, Sir Edwin?" Lord Tarlton asked. "To have a British subject extradited to a pirate king—"

"His Majesty's government has a consulate in Tripoli. Thus we cannot refuse to recognize his sovereignty or to hear his demands. A demand that a British subject be delivered there to answer a charge of theft would greatly distress the Foreign Office and create an awkward situation. Hence, although I cannot officially concur with the suggestion you wish to make to Mr. Blackburn, I'll not interfere."

"What was the suggestion. Lord Tarlton?" I asked.

"You ask me, and I'll tell you," the little lord answered, caressing the handle of his cane. "You admit you are Holgar Blackburn—you can't deny it now—and the Pasha wants to hang you on an iron hook. You've recently bought a ship—whether you expected trouble and wished to be able to take French leave, I can't say. What I do say is —the best advice I know, and given to you straight—is this." His voice changed a little and the east wind blew through it. "Get the hell out of England and stay there."

He did not know why I smiled into his eyes; and he would like to know, very much. It was to the diplomat that I spoke.

"Sir Edwin, may I ask if Mr. Holmes has as yet made any depositions to the Foreign Office?"

"No, sir. He's no longer a subject of the king, and must deal through representatives of his Pasha. My visit here today is at the request of my old friend, Lord Tarlton. My hope was, that a situation awkward to the Foreign Office could be forestalled."

"I think perhaps it can. If he'll answer it, I've a question to put to Mr. Holmes. Let's return to the dining room."

But at the door of the dining room, the diplomat stopped. Lord Tarlton took three rapid steps forward, then he stopped, too. Perhaps their first fleeting impression was that Henry Holmes—Murad Reis—had been overcome by brandy. Hard drinkers had been known to slump in their chairs in this way—arms flung down on the table, head resting between. But the liquid staining the cloth and dripping on the floor was more red and more viscid than any spilled brandy they had ever seen.

A second or two later both saw what I had looked for and seen at the first glance. From the neck of Murad Reis there were two curious projections. One, about eight inches long, could be the wooden or bone handle of a carving knife. The other, on the opposite side, looking like shining silver dotted with red drops, was undoubtedly the tip-end of a long blade.

The little nobleman whirled on me, chalk white, and shaking with fury.

"You'll hang for this, God damn you."

I did not need to answer, for Sir Edwin spoke in low, well-modulated tones.

"Don't talk rot, my lord."

Beside himself, Lord Tarlton rushed to the kitchen door and flung it open. Through the doorway I caught a glimpse of Jim, putting glasses into a cabinet, and a footman.

"You did it, you black devil, at your master's orders," rose the rasping, frantic voice.

"Did what, please, suh?"

"You there, you footman—you know when he left this room. You saw him come back and wash his hands. Come out with it. Don't try to shield him or you'll get it too—"

"Your ludship, 'e ain't left the room since you gentlemen was at table, and that's the truest word I ever spoke," the pale footman answered.

"Can you swear to that?" Sir Edwin broke in.

"Aye, I can, your honor, and burn me if I lie, and Tilly there will tell you the same." He pointed to a gasping kitchen maid.

"We've all three been 'ere, your honor, talking of this and that—" the girl stammered.

"Sir Edwin, I was partially to blame for leaving that carving knife where Captain Holmes could get hold of it," I broke in. "They say there's nothing like guilt, abetted by strong drink, to induce self-destruction."

Evil was in my mouth as I spoke: the devil's unction was on my tongue, and I could feel it draw my lips in a barely hidden, mocking smile. But there was no evil in Jim's heart, and by this grace I might yet be saved.

One path of thought that my mind had taken had caused me to wonder what kind of man Godwine Tarlton was before he took command of Our Eliza. The inkling had come to me that he might have been a puny man in his own eyes—his captaincy obtained by preferment—and not much more than that in other eyes. Was it thereafter that the rattle of sleet came into his voice, that his bearing grew princely, his eyes wintry blue, his smile terrifying? This would require no miracle of the devil. The vision of himself that a man sees in the mirror comes to be his real self, or else he goes mad. Men grow or change or deteriorate according to their self-opinion. Immense and unshakable conceit is only second to great achievement in winning public acclaim.

In these studies, I had Alan make an extensive—and expensive-inquiry. To do so, he had to engage several professional genealogists —some of them former underlings in the College of Heralds, others retired curates who had made a hobby of the strangely unchristian pursuit—who supplied pedigrees for burghers newly rich in trade. They were a pack of genteel liars, on the whole, but in this operation Alan demanded strict truth. Its purpose was to determine whether Lord Tarlton was of the inordinately high descent to which all ascribed him, and which he himself appeared to believe.

Compared to him—so I had often heard—the Hanovers were upstarts. The saying had become a catchword in London society, in the ear and out the mouth, and hence highly suspect in my mind. Still, I was somewhat astonished at the facts brought out in the search. Then a new problem rose—what use, if any, should I make of them? I had no real interest in them now that my curiosity was satisfied; I had taken not a grain of satisfaction in having my suspicions confirmed; the matter seemed to me completely irrelevant to future issues. Even so, they might prove useful as a weapon. In that case I could not afford to let them lie.

So I called at Lord Tarlton's town house, a redoubtable mansion on West Piccadilly. A footman informed me that his lordship was out, but expected to return within the hour. Then could I pay my addresses to either of his daughters, Mrs. Alford or Miss Eliza Tarlton? Leaving me in a sumptuous hall, he went straightway to see.

Presently he returned and showed me into a quite wonderful library, its shelves lined by books in many colored leathers, its chairs deep and luxurious, its oak fire blazing. In only a few minutes Sophia, clad very simply and strikingly in dark brown, came with great quietude into the room.

"What is your will with me, Mr. Blackburn?" she asked, white in the face.

"Isn't that a strange question to put to a visitor—at least a peculiar wording? I presume to ask because I'm unacquainted with the ways of polite society and desire to learn."

"Pray sit down." And when we were both seated, "No, I don't regard it as strange under the circumstances. I'm very anxious about the purpose of your call. What your will is in regard to me, as well as to others in our family, has become a question of great moment to me."

"Do you mean, what I want you to do?"

"Yes, and what will happen to us if we don't obey?"

"That's a surprising remark, too."

"Why should it surprise you, Mr. Blackburn? My father can't make it to you because he's too proud. He would have forbidden me to make it if he'd had any notion I would so humble myself; but women can humble themselves without great agony of soul if the consequences serve those whom they love. Yet my father, too, would give a great deal to know the answers I seek. And, by your pardon, I doubt if you're surprised. I believe you expected me to come out with it."

"How could I expect that?"

"By knowing me very well."

372

"How could I have known you very well?"

"That I can't answer."

"Do you mean you are unable to answer, or you could if you would?"

"Your using that expression—I could if I would—indicates you know me very well. That 'if was once a great issue in my life, the most consequential step—or misstep—I've ever taken hinged upon that. But that's aside from the main question."

"You must love your father very much."

"I don't dare refuse to reply to your remarks, no matter how personal. It may be you've already been told—long ago—how I regard my father; but I'll speak again. I love my husband very much. If my father falls, one of its worst effects on me would be my husband falling with him, which I fear would happen."

"You ask what is my will with you and your family, and what will happen if you don't obey it. What would be your opinion?"

"There are two possible answers to the first part—only two. One is that you want something—perhaps a large sum of money. My father wants to believe that's the case. The other is, that you intend to ruin him—perhaps destroy him utterly—because of some evil done to you or to those you love. That's what I believe."

"Blackmail or revenge?"

"It could be reparations instead of blackmail, and retribution instead of revenge."

"Are you interested in whether or not they are deserved?"

"No, sir, I'm not. Not now. I can't interest myself in that. Too much is at stake."

"Are you truly interested in who I am, whether a runaway from a Devon workhouse, or some other?"

She gazed a long time into the fire before she answered.

"I think of you not as a person but as a force. It's what you've become, whether you know it or not—if you can ever be a person again, it will be after all this is over. But you were once a person, although I try not to think who. If I knew for sure, it wouldn't help us—there could be nothing I could do about it—and it might weaken me. Because—if you were a certain person—the one that my heart tells me you were—I, too, did you a great wrong. So even if you tell me you were that person, I won't accept it as fact. It might be only part of your campaign."

"Do you mean Homer Whitman, from whom the little woodman brought you a message?"

"The little woodman was a ventriloquist."

"You haven't answered my question."

"And I must answer your questions—I'm afraid not to. Of course I mean Homer Whitman."

"Does Lord Tarlton believe I was ever he?"

"I've never asked him. I was careful not to. But he gave me his opinion anyway—or what he pretended was his opinion. He said you couldn't possibly be he. The confidential records of the Admiralty showed that the Vindictive went down with all hands. But perhaps he changed his mind after Holmes, that awful renegade, came here. It was the first time they had met since May, 1801—I heard him say so— and the ship was sunk in June, and Papa left Malta in July. Captain Holmes may have told him there were survivors. But if so, Papa was so triumphant over some turn of the affair that he didn't care who you were—perhaps he would be glad to have you be Homer whom I had loved—until, of course, you had the man killed. I think he's gone back to beliving you're a blackmailer, one of the greatest in history. You can ask him if you like. I've just heard him come in."

"Instead I'll repress my ill-mannered curiosity."

"Before he comes, I'll tell you something. You haven't won yet. Papa hasn't broken—he's a man of wonderful stamina and will power. Losing Holmes was a stunning blow, but he revived. He's also a terrible and cunning fighter. In a last-ditch fight it may be you who'll be destroyed, not he. Think of that before you press too hard. If he'll compromise, meet him halfway."

A moment later I heard the tap of his stick. A servant opened the door for him; he came in walking like an Indian. I could detect no deterioration in him. He answered my bow gravely and with grace.

"Your coming here has saved me writing you a note," he remarked when we were seated. "It would be in apology of my rash and improper behavior when poor Holmes was killed. You see, he was the last of my two oflBcers who survived the sea fight off Grindstone Island, and was bound up in the loves and hates of my youth. Although he became a Barbary pirate, he did so honorably. He did not wish to become subject to a king who made peace with traitors, and his great passion was to catch those traitors in his haunts and send them to the bottom or into slavery."

A wintry rattle was in his lordship's voice and his blue eyes looked stone cold.

"I had heard that was his passion," I answered.

"His sudden death was a piece of luck for you," the pretty nobleman went on. "No doubt a demand for your extradition will be made —the Pasha's agent in Lisbon is certain to hear soon that Holgar Blackburn is alive and in England—but it will take months to be acted upon."

"I doubt if it will ever come up, Lord Tarlton. I don't think any accredited representative of the Pasha will care to rake over old coals. Only Holmes, of other loyalties, could have made me any trouble."

"Perhaps you're right. Who knows?"

"I'm here today as a result of a suggestion made by your son Dick. Since the matter might concern your daughter Eliza, perhaps you would care to summon her."

His hesitation was so brief as to almost escape the eye, then he nodded gravely. "Anyway, she will be pleasant to look upon."

A footman answered the bell and ran the errand. Eliza appeared at once, her hair and eyes and flesh tints luminous in the half-bright room, her green dress auguring spring on a wintry day. She gave me a grave bow.

"Now you may go ahead," Lord Tarlton said.

"Dick proposed, as you may recall, that I look into the history of the Blackburn family, to see what honors I could find and wear. But I wanted no rosy myths, and feared for the honesty as well as the competence of the paid genealogists. So I decided to put them to an exacting test."

"Excellent," Eliza remarked when I paused. I did not know what she meant.

"It was simply to have them establish the pedigree of some gentleman of high descent, who would be kind enough to compare their report with his own knowledge. In choosing someone, inevitably I thought of you—you who'd refused to meet Beau Brummell, the son of a clerk and the grandson of a shopkeeper, and who regarded the house of Hanover as your social inferiors."

"How did you come by that last supposition?"

"I was told so, long ago, by someone who knew you well. In any case, I've had their report, and will dispatch it to you. It evidenced that your family has borne arms for five generations."

"Five?" he asked, smiling faintly.

"Yes, my lord. According to this report, your great-great-grandfather adopted the arms when he took the name of his former patron, Godfrey Tarlton, Earl of Ballinderry. His real name was Thomas Snow. It was a time of strife in Ireland, and the son of Thomas, enriched by the wars and settling in England, claimed to be the earl's grandson, on the cadet branch. Meanwhile the title, by no means ancient, had become one of the disused titles of the Marquis of Leath, and the claim was never disputed."

As I spoke, Lord Tarlton toyed with his stick, apparently not listening. When I paused, there fell a deep silence; then he looked up as though startled.

"Pardon me, Mr. Blackburn. Will you please continue?"

"These investigators were unable to establish that your mother was descended from Godwine, earl of the West Saxons in the eleventh century, although the mistake would be a natural one. Her family name was Gorman. When it first appears, in the early sixteenth century, the family were yeomanry. When they became franklins a hundred years later, on what were once Godwine lands in the Severn Valley, it was changed to Godwine. Not long thereafter they were recognized as gentry. In fact, your maternal greatgrandfather married the daughter of a baronet."

"Quite a feather in our family cap," Eliza broke in.

"And what is the meat of the coconut?" Lord Tarlton asked. But his voice trembled and his lips were pale.

"Only this. If this report is true, you're an English gentleman beyond all doubt, but both sides of your family have elevated themselves by their own bootstraps in no very ancient time. Therefore, I thought you might like to reconsider some advice that you gave me."

"What was it, please?"

"That I should not marry a lady of name, but attempt only a minor rise in this respect, and leave it to my more remote posterity to obtain honor in the land."

"If I withdraw that advice, what then?"

"I wish to ask your opinion of a possible match. There is a beautiful young woman to whom I'm attracted, considerably my junior, but about the age of my African bride, whom I've lost forever. The latter was of authentic royalty, while this girl is only the daughter of a newly created baron. It's quite possible that if I could win her hand, I'd stay away from London, making a home with her at Elveshurst or Tavistock."

Lord Tarlton half rose from his chair. "What in the devil do you mean?"

"You know exactly what he means," Eliza said quietly. "So please compose yourself."

Instead the little lord lifted his cane and struck at my face. I caught the little stick, broke it in my hands, and tossed it into the fire.

"Will you let me hear from you within a fortnight?" I asked as I rose, "I wish to settle my affairs—some of them pending since June, 1801—as soon as possible."

When Sir Godwine could not speak, Eliza spoke gravely in his place.

"You will hear from my father, without fail."

CHAPTER 30 The Great Question

Although heavy inroads had been made upon my enemy, as yet I had no real reason to believe that I could destroy him by attrition, or cause him to shatter himself against me by attack.

Toward the latter aim, I turned the screw once more. Summoning Walt Chalker, well-acquainted with the waterfront, I asked if he knew any actor who could pass himself off as an English-speaking sailor from some Mediterranean country for a short and not too difficult engagement. He knew several, he said; better yet, he was acquainted with a genuine Italian sailor, presently in port, who could speak broken English, and was at least a skillful liar. Walt knew him as Alberto and never doubted that he would be up and equal to any reasonable escapade not involving him with the law.

I directed that Alberto should find Pike at the Vintry mughouse where he liked to loaf, and offer to tell him something, greatly to his advantage, for the sum of five pounds. In response to Pike's questions, he was to let fall that the business concerned Lord Tarlton, not Pike himself, but Alberto had not known how to approach the big gun, and had been tipped off that Pike could be trusted to represent his master faithfully and generously. He had found out something that he believed Lord Tarlton would pay Pike ten pounds—perhaps a great deal more—to know. It concerned two men whom Alberto had met in a Gibraltar stews, who were at present on their way to London to make trouble. He, Alberto, did not know what kind of trouble it was, but one of them had mentioned a Negro, known as Jim, who had paid their passage.

Alberto could continue to lower his price as the talk continued and the glasses passed. In case the deal was made, Alberto's information would be nothing more than the names by which the two men had been known in Malta—Julius and the Dago—and two fictitious names under which they averredly traveled.

Three days later Walt called on me to make his report. Pike had taken the bait, had paid two pounds for it, and appeared to regard the sum as well spent. I sent three pounds more to Alberto—more than this might have wakened dangerous dreams of avarice—and gave Walt five pounds.

If Lord Tarlton was convinced that Julius and the Dago would soon be in London to testify to a deal made in Malta nearly eighteen years before—testifying before the Admiralty at my behest—and he thought that I remained unaware of him finding it out, I believed he would take the risk of positive action without delay.

So it did not surprise me when, on the following afternoon, Dick Tarlton called. On being admitted to my study room, he gave me a somewhat sheepish grin. He was a graceful and, when he chose, an engaging fellow. I seated him where I could grab him, if the need arose; actually, there seemed to me no likelihood of such a development. It was interesting to consider how readily he would take to murder if in his opinion the stakes justified the risk. It seemed probable he had taken to it already, since it has always been the sharpest, surest tool of ambitious men who do not hold by law, human or divine. Those who deny the brotherhood of man have nothing but practical problems between them and the great gains obtainable by murder.

The fact remained that Dick was something of a sportsman. He would not cavil over the odds. A little more or less risk cut no ice with him. If the game was' good enough, he'd play it.

"What can I do for you, Dick?" I asked—that usually kindly intentioned but often ill-mannered inquiry people make to dubious visitors.

"First of all, a nip," he answered. "The weather's rotten, and I'm on a damned delicate mission."

I did not doubt this last, and my main hope was he would execute it well. Unless the scheme was brilliant, the trap beautifully screened, and the bait made enticing. Lord Tarlton would doubt my gullibility, and be on guard against a counter-stroke.

"I came here in behalf of my father, my two half sisters, and my half—is that right?—brother-in-law," Dick went on, after the drink. "Does 'behalf include myself? Anyway, I'm one of the petitioners."

"I doubt if it's the right word," I said when he paused.

"Not far from it, by God! Let me put it this way. When you play chess, your king is never taken—he's merely demobilized and dispotentiated. Since the renegade Holmes so conveniently turned up his toes, my old gentleman's king is in that fix or very close to it. True, we see the situation in somewhat different lights. And I'd better say first that I don't intend to answer the charges that you've made, directly or indirectly. I won't confess them or deny them either. But I'll take the first steps toward what I hope will be a satisfactory settlement."

It was a good beginning. No fault could be found with it. Dick's face was in repose, his eyes full of thoughts. He glanced at me, I nodded, and he went on.

"One of the stumbling blocks to any settlement has been that face of yours. It never changes—truly it suggests stone—and it was hard for us to see a man behind it, Sophia won't—or can't—see it yet. She thinks of you as some sort of retributive force, like Nemesis. But she's wildly imaginative and I'm not. If there isn't a man behind it, I'm wasting my time and yours, but I believe there is."

"Yes, sir, there certainly is,"

"What man? Much hangs on that. Are you Holgar Blackburn or Homer Whitman? Whichever you are, you know the story of the other one. Until he talked to Captain Holmes, my father was convinced you were Whitman, turned into an implacable avenger. There would be no settling with such a being, he thought. Unless you were killed or somehow forced to leave England, our jig was up. When Papa asked you to sit behind him and correct his errors at the butts, was he surprised when Pike's gun went off by accident? I doubt it."

"I appreciate your frankness, Dick, and I'll confess that your father appeared greatly surprised."

"Well, maybe he was. Let it go, please. When Captain Holmes came, he told him three men of the Vindictive s crew had been taken alive, one of them Homer Whitman, one a small-sized sailor whose name he'd forgotten, and one an American Negro. You'd think that would have confirmed Papa in his belief—but Captain Holmes also stated that beyond any particle of doubt both white men were dead. The little one died in the Jebel quarries. The other two escaped, but only the Negro got clean away—Homer Whitman died fighting. But for years before he died he had been thrown with a pay-chest thief, Holgar Blackburn, and had told him his story. When some of Holgar's friends among the Mamelukes enabled him to escape— I'm guessing now—he made a pile of money, either in slave and ivory trading, or by blackmail. Then he came to England for purposes not yet quite clear. Perhaps it was to avenge his old friend Homer Whitman. Perhaps he had some more practical aim."

"Such as doubling his fortune—which may not be as great as rumor makes it out—and getting into high society?"

"Both would be completely human and understandable, especially in a runaway from an English workhouse. What poor boy in England, tipping his cap to the squire—bowing and scraping to his lordship—doesn't yearn with passionate yearning to have the shoe on the other foot? Papa found out that Blackburn had been branded on the back of his hand with an X. It was almost unbelievable that Whitman would go to such lengths as to brand himself to maintain an identity of no real use to him. That's not all. Papa's agent hunted up a childhood sweetheart of Blackburn. The old people told him about her—it was quite a rural idyl. This woman saw you in Taxistock. She swears before heaven that you're Holgar Blackburn, returned from the grave."

I was not as composed as before. As I poured Dick another glass, I could hardly keep my hands from trembling. It was impossible to doubt that the woman who had loved Holgar more than anyone in the world and who knew his walk and knew I was not he, had sworn that I was he. She had promised me she would not expose my masquerade and had kept that promise: was that such a wonderful thing? It was as wonderful as a star burning in infinite lonely vigil in the heavens.

"If I'm Holgar Blackburn, what then?" I asked.

"I think you'll deal with me."

"What if I'm Homer Whitman?"

"You'd still be a human being with red blood in your veins."

"Yes, and that blood shed on the deck of the Vindictive has washed mighty thin by now."

I said it without a shudder. It was easy when I was saying it for Captain Phillips, for Sparrow and Farmer Blood and Ezra Owens and the rest, and for men tricked out of their lives by a little lordling's pretty ways after a sea fight by Grindstone Island. It did not beslime my mouth when I spoke for all these, and for Holgar Blackburn who was branded on the hand by brutal arrogance and blasphemy.

At that instant, Dick believed he had won the victory.

"What would be your notion of a settlement, if you'd care to say?" Dick ventured.

"I'll leave that to you."

"We're not as rich as report has it. If you could clear a cool hundred thousand pounds—on a race or a roll of the dice or by some face-saving device—would you let bygones be bygones?"

"We'll never get anywhere with that, Dick. I've all the money I need."

"I told the old man so. I told him you were a man who meant just what you said."

"In this case, I do."

"You said you wanted Eliza. Papa's tried to punch holes in that perfectly plain statement, trying to believe it some sort of bluff, but the two girls, who heard you make it, and I—we've about brought him to his senses. I'll ask you this. What if Eliza doesn't take to the idea? You're twice her age—not exactly an Adonis—and there are other barriers in a young girl's eyes. What would be your position in that case?"

"The negotiations would be dropped."

"That makes it pretty thick."

"I'd consider a so-called marriage of convenience with your half sister Eliza. I have great wealth, she has position and name. I probably could make several just as good, especially if the families needed money. It would begin as a marriage of convenience. If I was able to make something more of it as time went on, well and good. In any case my position in society would be assured. My children would be among those who inherit the earth. And Eliza is different from every other unmarried girl in one respect—an appeal I find irresistible."

"I can't imagine what it might be, and that's the truth."

"She's Lord Tarlton's daughter."

His eyes rounded slightly, and I thought he was taken aback.

"Well, I should have seen that. I suppose I did see it—but didn't pin it down. Nothing else could give you such a complete sense of victory."

"But if Eliza is unalterably averse, this is a needless discussion."

"I didn't say she was. The truth is, she took it better than any of us—unless it was I, who am very hard to jar. In the first place, she loves Papa deeply. I don't see why she should—she's been his prisoner more than his daughter—but the fact remains. She's romantic enough to want to save him regardless of his deeds—if only as a kind of beau geste. To be married to the Ogre of Elveshurst—that's your current name among the bucks—would be quite novel. Finally, she'll need the money."

"That surprises me."

"There was only one large estate in the family—my father's mother's. Papa enjoys the income, but at his death it goes to Sophia— quite a jar when the will was read, ten years ago. I have nothing except five hundred quid a year from the Countess of Harkness. Papa supplies the rest. Eliza's a demure little thing—butter wouldn't melt in her mouth—but she doesn't intend for her nest to go unfeathered."

"May I take it you're encouraging me to sue?"

"Not exactly. I wouldn't go that far. But come down to Celtburrow to see what develops. She's gone back—Papa went frantic and sent her—but you'll be invited there for a week's sport—I can promise that much—and the surroundings will be much more favorable than here in London. Bring the big gray, if it's not too much trouble. Eliza was greatly taken with him. While you're there, don't hide your light under a bushel when it comes to shooting and riding. You're top flight in both-we were fools not to see it straight off-and she'll champion you against me. You know she hates me like poison."

I did not answer, being almost unable to speak.

"Put me in the shade if you can," Dick went on. "I won't slack the game—it would be against my sporting instincts—and the show would be worth seeing. The woodcock will be moving northeast in great numbers; show her what you can do. Take Papa for some stiff bets. Then when the time's ripe, state your case—not too gingerly— and see what she'll say."

"I'll heed your advice, Mr. Tarlton."

"I'm Dick—and I hope to God this can be the answer. What's that line from Shakespeare about someone having somebody on the hip?"

"I recall it vaguely." Actually I knew it word for word.

"It's not a pleasant position for the latter cove, I do assure you. Mr. Blackburn, you'll be hearing from us soon."

In a few seconds he had gone. I felt as though just waking from an evil dream. But it was not a dream, and the mouse that ran under a curtain was only a little rodent of flesh and blood.

Five days before owe day of departure, I had Perkins, the good hostler, leave from Elveshurst on horseback, leading El Stedoro for Celtburrow but on no business except to attend to his feeding, watering, currying, and petting. Seven days would do it, but I allowed them eight. Thirty or less miles a day in good, cool, misty riding weather would merely keep Perkins limber and the gray stallion in good fettle.

My bags were packed and the carriage waiting at my door in Charles Street when Alan burst into the little reading room where I waited for Jim.

"You didn't summon me, sir, but I had to come," he said, very white, and with his hands clenched to still their tremor.

"I was going to summon you, to bid you good-by, and to have you witness a document before Jim and I go to the dock."

"There would be others present then, and I couldn't say what I wished. Not what I wished—what I felt I had to say—what I can't keep from saying. I hope you'll excuse the presumption."

"There is none."

"Well, then, I hoped you'd take me with you. The reason I hoped it especially was, I've a feeling you're going into danger. I wanted to be with you in that case. I don't know if I could make the danger any less, but I wanted to try. You've made me a man again. It might pay a little of the debt I owe you."

"You were a man all the time."

"Then you've given me my pride again—that a man can't live without. If you can't take me—and I know you would if you could —will you let me speak out of my place?"

"Every man has the right to speak until he speaks what's unfit for a man—I was taught that, long ago."

"Sir, are you armed?"

"I'll have my fowling pieces."

"You're not carrying a pistol?"

"No."

"Don't you realize you're going to danger?"

"In becoming the guest of Lord Tarlton and his family in the old seat in Cornwall? That doesn't seem to make sense."

"I don't know what sense it makes. I only know it's true. A shotgun went off in the hands of Pike, Tarlton's bully. His daughter Sophia asked him how it happened when they were all standing about the refreshment wagon, so of course I heard about it. You knocked aside the barrel just in time. Tarlton came here with an official from the Foreign Office and a renegade from Africa, and Jim threw a knife through the aperture—no jury would believe it, but that's what happened. Now you're going to their very nest. I think very possibly you'll be killed, and you and Jim think the same. Yet you won't take me with you and you won't even take a pistol."

"No, I can do neither of those things."

"To what are you trusting to save your life from that elegant little monster and his malign son and his bully boy and that precious son-in-law, and that angel-haired witch who may be as bad as the rest? Are you trusting Providence?"

"One thing at a time. Lord Tarlton is not a monster—if he were, he wouldn't be half so frightening. He's merely a man who's renounced God in favor of logic—his own logic, of course. I doubt if Eliza is a witch. She's Lord Tarlton's daughter, but also a daughter of a woman named Elspeth and of nature and the moors. No, I don't trust Providence to save me from being killed. It's not possible for all men to live until tomorrow—some must die today—and I doubt if any man should trust Providence to put him in one of the groups instead of the other. If he tries to kill me, and I shoot him down with a pistol, Jim and I haven't succeeded in our undertaking. We're carrying out some orders that put us into danger, but we're not authorized to kill: we're not accredited officers pursuing criminals; as Jim once told me, unwritten law is not law at all. Am I trusting that goddess—again a personification—to protect our lives? She punished evil, but I never heard of her rewarding good. But we put a good deal of confidence in our ability to survive. We've had long practice at it."

I had talked too long. I had tried too hard to explain. My heart had grown heavy.

"I'd like to ask one question more."

"All right."

"If either one or both of you are killed in this undertaking—put to death in your enemy's den—may it bring victory to your cause?"

"I think very likely it will. If so, we've carried out our orders. If not, we've done all we could and gone off watch for good. We may die, and lose. We may die, and win. What we hope is—a long-enduring, solid hope—we may win and live."

"I think you will." Alan was trembling so he could hardly speak, "It may be a false vision, yet I believe it."

"If that vision would fail, you'll find a signed and notarized communication in the locked drawer of my secretary, to which you have the key. A signed copy is in the hands of the lawyer at Tavistock, another on deposit with Baring's Bank; still another has been posted to Captain Tyler, at Bath, in the Maine District of Massachusetts. All copies contain directions for its use; and a sum of money has been provided for expenses involved. Also, there is a private communication, with an enclosure, addressed to you, in the same drawer."

Alan's eyes slowly filled with tears, and he did not attempt to speak.

"Now ask Jim to step in—I wish to get his consent to the deposition I've asked you to witness—and remain in call."

Jim came in, and on my bidding him seat himself-his manner with me was generally that of a Yankee seaman before the mast with his captain—he did so. I brought out a paper I had written the night before.

"Whether one or both of us are alive or dead in June, 1821, we'll have done all we can to carry out Cap'n Phillips's orders."

" 'At's more 'an two years from now, twenty years in all. I reckon 'twill be settled long before 'at."

"If we're alive when that time comes, we'll go aboard the Dolly Madison—I think she'll have a different name—and set sail. If I'm dead, you'll go alone. If you're dead, I'll go alone. But I agree with you we may sail much before then—perhaps in a few days—if we're to sail at all."

"Cap'n, I believe it in my bones."

"That being the case, I've made my will. It makes provision for certain things we wanted carried out. It provides you with a home and a job on board the vessel for as long as she stays afloat or as you wish; and a living on any count. It sets up a fund of a hundred thousand American dollars for you to buy and free slaves—your old acquaintances and a few you can help. But there are millions of slaves in the Americas alone, and our money wouldn't be a drop in the bucket in trying to buy their freedom. Still, if used wisely, it can strike a good strong blow at slavery."

"How would 'at be, Cap'n?"

"In America and all over Europe tlie Quakers are fighting slavery. They're fighting it well, joining hands with other antislavery societies. So the remainder of our gold—the great bulk of it, including what this house and Elveshurst will bring—all except the special bequests and the ship—I've willed to them for that use. Does that suit you, Jim?"

"It couldn't suit me no better."

"The gold was never ours, except to use for Captain Phillips and our mates and what they stood for. If we live, we'll keep the ship for our own—I the master, you the cook—we're entitled to it in lieu of reasonable earning. But when we leave England to go home—in a few days, a few months, a little over two years at most—I want to make the same disposal of all the rest as in this will."

Jim's face grew strained, and I thought he might break down; instead he gave me a great, radiant smile.

"There ain't no harm in 'at, as 'em Arabs useter say."

"Jim, do you remember the morning we rode out after Tembu Emir?"

"When I forgit 'at, I won't be no breathin' man or no ha'nt neither."

"He tried to kill me, as was his right, and death came very close. There was no evil in him, nor in Tui whom I fought in the grass, even though the fires of hell shone in his eyes. In a few days death will come close again, this time at evil's bidding. I won't have a gun to use against him, or even a stone rolled into reach of my hand. The issue wall be very close; and you won't be able to save me as you did once—twice—before. But let's go forth in good cheer and high hope. Whatever happens, we won't go back into slavery."

"I'll be of good cheer and high hope, too, like when we went after Tembu. And if 'em mens kill you, wif me still alive—but 'at ain't no business I have wif you, Cap'n Whitman."

"Whom do you have it with?"

"'At business is wif my own soul, de soul of a black man, but a man right on, doin' de best he can."

I started to speak, but found I had nothing to say. Instead I called Alan and bade him collect two freemen employed in the house, to witness my will.

I was not made welcome at Celtburrow; neither was I rebuffed. The amenities were pointedly observed by Lord Tarlton, Dick, and Harvey Alford; we exchanged bows but never touched hands; we talked of dogs and horses, birds and guns, and they answered courteously my questions regarding the manor and the countryside, but no one laughed or spoke a light word. The air was like that of the meeting place of enemy commanders when, after a bitter war of attrition, an armistice had been proposed. Dick and Harvey no longer exchanged knowing glances. Rattling sleet came no more into Lord Tarlton's voice; his usual bluff speech remained stiffly polite. Only now and then the blue of eyes changed in tone and became frightening as he played with his cane.

Sophia's manner toward me was not so correct. More than once she caught her breath and turned color; and when Harvey spoke of walking up woodcock in the woods—a sport I should try soon—a desperate expression came into her face that I feared the rest would see. I was sure she would soon speak to me in private. Her chance came when she found me in the gun room, admiring gold, silver, and brass-mounted pieces of bygone days.

"What shall I call you, sir?" she asked, standing beside me and speaking in low tones.

"What you please."

"May I call you Homer? I can talk plainer if I do."

"That suits me well enough."

"Why have you come here? Is it true you want Eliza? Dick says you do, and if you can have her, you'll let us go."

"Do you believe it?"

"It's possible. She's beautiful and bright as a rainbow, and you've lived in Africa nearly twenty years and your face is like stone. I wouldn't blame you if it's true. It would be a human thing, while the rest you've done to us is inhuman. I hope it's true."

"If it lay in your hands, could I have her?"

"Yes—if then you'd let us go. In that way she would save us, though we're not worth saving—not one of us. She would find great happiness in that—paying all her debts of love—and be rid of us besides. Would she be happy with you? Why not? You'd love her, wouldn't you? How could you help it? And if you didn't—if she was unhappy— she'd leave you."

"Do you believe for one moment she might agree to it?"

"Ask her, not me. It's her right to tell you, not mine. But you see, Homer—that wouldn't settle anything. The decision won't lie with her any more than it hes with me. It lies with Papa—and with you."

"I don't understand that fully."

"You understood one night in a little mission house in Malta."

"I know what you refer to."

"Look at me."

Sophia drew up one corner of her lip in a strange and eerie imitation of Lord Tarlton's malign smile.

"Don't do that."

"I don't know what Papa has told her; whatever it is, she expects to do it. I think it was to accept your proposal. But did he mean it? Is it a trick to put you off guard while Pike rigs the guns?"

I glanced at the door in sudden alarm. It was thick and close-fitting and not amenable to eavesdropping. The window was closed, and I stopped to look at the mists blowing through the naked trees. Sophia stood close to my side. She was a daughter of the moors and of tragic destiny, and there was deathless beauty in her face. The fire crackled and the mystery of destiny came upon me swift and deep,

"Sophia, this is evil—deep, immeasurable evil."

"Don't I know it?"

"How did we get into it?"

"We fell into the pit."

"So did an elephant. He wore a great white brand on his side and had been sent into exile in the thorn to wait for me. I killed him, and he went home."

"Are you mad?"

"Yes, but I'll be made sane if the salt spray is flung into my face."

"I could have gone with you—but I didn't."

"Does Eliza know?"

"Evil? No. But she dreams of it sometimes."

"You won't tell her about the guns?"

"No. What would be the good?"

"You said her going with me lies with him, Godwine, Lord Tarlton, and with me."

"You may not take her. Perhaps you've never even wanted her. How do I know what you've become in these eighteen years? What have I got to judge you by? Not a sailor who walked with me down a long beach—who swam with me to Calypso's cave—who took me to his ship. Your saying you want her may be just a trick, and what you really want is death."

"That doesn't stand to my reason."

"Why should it? It's quite possible you want to die, if you can take Papa with you or have him follow you soon. Many people ache to die, not all of them insane. Do you think I've forgotten the Eagle of Maine striking the rock?"

"There's many a day—many a night—that Homer Whitman would have liked to know you remembered it and sometimes thought of it."

"How could you doubt me so? But I know—you needn't tell me."

"His shipmates made up a great part of his loss. A girl he loved at Malta healed the wound."

Saying that, I went back to the time and place. I saw the harbor lights as Sophia and I came down from the town and went out to the ship. From thence we went into my little cabin and found beauty and wonder and healing. The spell of that hour was on me.

"How many shipmates were there on the Vindictive?" Sophia asked.

"The marine records give the company as sixteen."

"How many are left alive?"

"There may be two."

"You and one more. Do you long to join the rest? Who else have you loved who went away and left you here? Holgar Blackburn was one. You can hardly bring yourself to admit he's gone. No, that isn't like you, not to face truth—it must be for some other reason you make him live on in you." Suddenly her eyes grew very wide and dark. "Did you kill him?"

"If I did, it's a secret between him and me." But I did not know what I was saying.

"I think you did. You did it to save him from something awful beyond words. Either you loved him beyond the power of ordinary people or you owed him a tremendous debt. It wouldn't be otherwise. Were there any more besides your family, and your shipmates, and Holgar?"

"Among those who died, there could have been one more. His name was Kerry, and he was Homer Whitman's workmate. They shook hands at the brink of the cliff. Kerry's hand was cold and wet with sweat, but his face was wet with tears. The chains rattled loudly as he jumped."

"Did you want to follow him?"

"That was unthinkable, since it was Homer's watch."

"What do you mean by that?"

"He'd been given the duty."

"Has the time come for him to go off watch?"

"It may be very near."

"Now let me say something very important. Suppose Pike is rigging the guns, as I said. Papa's the one who told him to, but would Papa pull the trigger? You know he wouldn't. He's never got blood on his little white hand, I doubt if he's had the stain of gunpowder. He remains on the quarter-deck and others do what he tells them. He lost his head when he seized the iron poker the night at Elveshurst—the same when he tried to hit you with his little stick; but he's over all that. He's very calm. He's either resigned to something—it might be to losing Eliza—or has great confidence in something. And the one whom you'd least fear—the most likely to catch you with your guard down—would be Harvey."

"I'll look out for him. For your sake I'll stay out of the way."

"Why not for your own sake? Isn't that the part of wisdom?"

"It might be. I can't tell what's wise or foolish. I know that my staying out of his way can't deliver him from evil—only God can do that—and it can't fight evil. If victory falls to me, I'll spare him all I can. And I think that completes the business you had with me."

She did not go out. Instead she walked to the end of the room and looked through the window. Then she returned to me and gazed out the window by which I stood.

"That's the garden—but how bare it looks," she said.

"It must be beautiful in summertime."

"Summer stays such a little while. Look at the gaunt trees with the mists blowing through them and the dark sky."

"I'd like to see it as a little boy saw it thirty years ago. It was so beautiful he had to break in and steal flowers."

"That little boy's gone, and those years are dead. Now the other window gives a view of the paddock and a glimpse of Bodmin moor. It's a rather bleak view even in summer. But there's someone standing by the paddock gate—there was a minute ago—and that brightens it up."

She led me there by the hand. I saw some dark yew trees lining a driveway and, dimmed by mist, the gray moor beyond. But by the paddock gate, giving sugar to a magnificent black stallion, stood a tall girl dressed in a green riding habit, her hair shining as though the sun were out. It was like a shore light, I thought, in storm.

"If Papa will give her to you, will you take her and go your way?" Sophia's low voice came, charging me to answer.

"I can't go my way until the debt's paid."

"Maybe you'll be sent on your way with empty hands into the cold and dark."

"That's quite true."

"If the debt's paid, and she'll still go with you, will you take her in lieu of me?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"I can't tell you what I mean, but I'll tell you this. I love her more than anyone in the world."

"I believe that."

"And next to her, I love you."

After looking long into my face, she turned slowly, drew her hand through her dark hair, opened the heavy door, and went out. For a moment the evil dream that I was living had grown thin, but in the solitude and silence it thickened and ran on.

CHAPTER 31 The Answer

Coming up to Eliza was like walking in the dusk toward a light. The bright green of her costume and the wind-blown gold of her hair and the almost scarlet flush on snow-white skin had an effulgent effect on this dark day. Her first warning of my approach was the stallion's scenting me and dashing off across the paddock. Eliza turned her gray eyes on me, and I thought she tried to smile, but gave up the attempt and faced me gravely. The way she stood, an upspring in her feet and her head high, made me think of Isabel Gazelle.

"I'm sorry I scared off your good friend," I said.

"He's just being skittish. I can hardly claim he's my friend, but he acts more friendly with me than with anyone else in the family. I think he admires Dick—they go together with such dash. All horses are mortally afraid of Papa—there's no harm in telling you—almost everyone knows it. Even Donald Dhu sweats and trembles when he comes near."

Sophia had told me this same remarkable thing. "Yet he ran well that day, with your father up."

"He obeys him, as we all do."

"Even a black proud chieftain has to obey someone."

"How did you know what his name meant?"

"A well-educated Irishman told me. He could speak Gaelic."

"A willful girl has to obey someone, too."

"Is that so?"

"Donald Dhu is much more gentle than when I first began to make up to him. But stallions can hardly ever be gentled like mares and geldings."

"I doubt if that's true, Eliza. It takes more time and effort, though. The Arabs make pets of their mares—a hand-raised mare tags her master about and tries to sleep with him and often will fight for him— while they dislike stallions and the beasts seem to know it. Yet El Stedoro responded to my affection for him and is as gentle as any old plug."

"Do you like horses?" As she waited my reply, she averted her face.

"I admire them, and I like them mostly in their relations with people."

"What kinds of horses and people?"

"I thrill over wild horses, and glory in great runners and jumpers and chargers. I have a brotherly feeling toward El Stedoro. In general, the horses that warm my heart the most are workhorses— who plow men's fields and draw their wagons—and old nags that children can climb under and ride on or behind."

"You don't think a high-bred horse is better than a low-bred person?"

"I wouldn't like to think such an evil thought as that."

"Evil?"

"Terribly evil."

"You won't get on very well in upper-class society, Mr. Blackburn."

"I'm afraid not."

"Are you going to try?"

"No."

"What you said when I saw you last gave the impression that you were."

"I've decided that after winding up some affairs in England, I'll make my home in America."

"Then why do you want to marry a girl—a woman—of high position?"

"I've decided that I don't care what her position is if we can be happy together."

"This is the first time I've seen you since you came. Papa led me to believe you'd devote a good deal of time to me. That was to be expected after what you said at our house in London. But perhaps you've changed your mind about that."

"I haven't changed my mind about you—you are most beautiful and desirable—but I don't think you have anything to fear from me."

"I find that I don't fear you. Papa does—and I never knew him to fear anyone before—and so does Harvey. I don't think Dick does-he's almost incapable of fear. Papa wouldn't dream of telling me to be nice to you—to encourage you to pay court to me, you of common birth and more than twice my age—if he didn't fear you terribly." She turned and looked me in the face. "The only possible reason is that you have it in your power to ruin him. That could happen in only two ways—he owes you a great debt, or you owe him a great debt. The first would be money, the second revenge. So I do fear you—but for his sake and for Sophia's. I look at you, and I don't think you are cruel, or wicked, or base. My life has never been like other girls' of my class, and I don't expect it ever will be. So whatever he tells me to do in regard to you—if it can save him and save Sophia's husband—I can stand to do."

"You must love your father very much."

"I don't think I do. I don't think it's possible. I think all the women in his life found that out. But he loves me very much. It's being loved, not loving, that creates the unavoidable obligation. And he's a great captain—a great chieftain."

"I didn't expect you to speak so frankly."

"I have to. There's so much at stake—perhaps more than I have any idea. All of you know more than I do. I'll ask you one thing. You wouldn't want me, would you, if I were unwilling to go?"

"At least I wouldn't take you."

"There's a degree of willingness, or unwillingness. One is more, and the other's less than before."

"I'm glad of that, but I don't think you'll have to concern yourself with either one. I believe there'll be another outcome."

Her eyes drew again to mine, and her bright tints changed.

"I'm relieved in one way, but more frightened."

"Why?"

"What you proposed might have worked out much better than I thought at first. It could be a marriage of convenience, as you said. I'd begun to think it might be the luckiest outcome possible. There's awful bad luck—something worse than that—in the air."

"I hope it won't strike you, Eliza. Look out, for it's very near."

Eliza followed my glance to Lord Tarlton and Dick, making toward us down the driveway. Both were in riding habits, but Lord Tarlton carried a black thornwood cane instead of a crop, and Dick had a racing bat. Eliza turned smiling. Again like Isabel Gazelle, she had good ability to dissemble. I thought that the little lord's delicately molded face became ennobled if not beautified on beholding her, and he walked with princely bearing. There was a sheen on Dick's eyes I had not seen before.

"So here you are," Lord Tarlton said. "Admiring Donald Dhu."

"Who could help it?" I asked.

"But he needs exercise, Blackburn, and Dick and I were just saying that we weren't satisfied with the showing he made against your gray at Elveshurst. Eliza, were you satisfied?"

"It wasn't a conclusive test, if that's what you mean," Eliza answered.

"Donald and I were on a course we'd ridden only once. Well, Blackburn would be in the same fix if he'd care to prove to us 'twas no accident that the gray won before. But as the saying goes, turn-about is fair play."

"I maintain it was no accident, my lord," I answered. "If you want proof of it. El Stedoro will supply it with good cheer. As for the course being new, I'll take him over the ground and the jumps beforehand, let him look at them good and smell them, and then if we lose, we'll have no fault to find."

"Dick, here's a buck!"

"But Papa, the course we spoke of is three times as long as t'other if we go out and back," Dick said. "Maybe that's too long for the gray, considering he's newly walked from London. I dare say we could cut it in half—"

"That's not necessary, sir," I broke in when Dick paused. "That walk from London, taking his time, put him in good fettle."

"Then I know nothing to stop a good race," Lord Tarlton said. "It's too long for my old bones, but Dick will do the honors, and Donald puts his best foot for'ard for him, as you'll see. And now, what of a wager or two, to spice the dish? First, Eliza, I'll lay one with you. You told me the gray was a cleaner jumper than Donald Dhu—"

"I don't remember telling you that—"

"Well, you did, and here's your chance to back it. I'll lay five pounds with you my Donald will win by a length."

"Shall I take him, Holgar?"

"All he'll put down and you can cover."

"Then I'll make it ten."

"Done for ten. But that's in the family—I'd be swindled out of 'em anyhow—and I'U make no such bet with you, Blackburn, my honored guest. Against you, it's not a length I'll undertake to win by, but one hair of the nose, I'll stand on one side of the home gate, with Eliza and your Jim on t'other, and if we disagree who's over first, majority rules. Does that suit you?"

"Perfectly, my lord."

"No doubt you'll like to lay a wager, so kindly name the sum."

"Why, I'd like to make it worth my while to make El Stedoro hustle, so what would you say of five thousand pounds?"

"By God, Blackburn," Lord Tarlton cried, looking at me as though in startled admiration. "You take my breath!"

I paid no attention to that. It was part of a show in which, at this point, I took little interest. What arrested me was Eliza turning white.

"Don't bet that much, Holgar," she told me in low tones.

"Come, Eliza—" That was Tarlton's voice, with a rasp in it.

"It's not sporting, and you know it isn't, when he's your guest. Holgar, it isn't gentlemanly, considering Papa is your host."

"I bow to your better taste. What sum do you suggest?"

"A thousand pounds would be a tremendous bet. That's what our old hostler, Quigley, has earned in—in twenty years. And if you'll make it a hundred, I'll give you my glove to carry."

"Then a hundred it will be."

"A sweet little spoil-sport you are!" Dick burst out, his rage barely controlled.

I'm proud of her, sink me if I ain't," Tarlton reproved him. "Dick, sometimes you and I let our acquisitiveness get out of hand. Eliza, get your bright bay and show Blackburn the old closed road. Once across Dolmen Brook, turn and come back. Then, Blackburn, you can rest your horse and have a bite of lunch. You and Dick can run about three, when the sun's begun to pitch and the light's soft."

I wondered if Eliza's interference with the betting had increased or reduced my danger. Neither seemed very likely. I would carry her glove to win with and I would remember awhile how she looked, standing snowy-white between her father and me.

I wished I could have her for my own. Instead the dark inkling came to me that except for unknown forces moving in my behalf—fate or luck or hidden law or uncomprehended love—I would take another bride.

The road had been closed many years before, and there was no sign of cart tracks on the grassy ground. This was good, firm ground, frostbitten and sere except for patches of low heather, and more open than I had hardly hoped. A few yews and birch stood lonely along the way, but only one narrow strip of woods obscured the view and permitted any meddling with the jumps. This was a dense covert of larches running at right angles to the course; and without apparent rhyme or reason, the roadway through was obstructed by a heavy wooden gate. This was the first jump beyond the starting gate, and less than a hundred yards farther on the road turned sharply, which meant that near the end and in the heat of the run we would come upon it rather suddenly, with no time for a careful survey.

Of the five other jumps, only the last was dangerous—a brook with steep, unstable banks. El Stedoro took them all with composure. Eliza's bay followed in good form except for the water gap; in this case she found an easier jump a furlong up the brook.

I could hardly bring myself to speak to my lovely sunny-haired companion, and we rode in frostbitten silence.

The time passed until two in the afternoon. Then I went into El Stedoro's stall and gave him some bread that might make him recall the bread flaps of his colthood, and some milk not tasting like camel's milk which he drank in its lieu, and then I petted him in ways he liked, especially putting my hand into his mouth and letting him gently press it with his great teeth; and I talked to him in Arabic, the sound of which might recall happier days. Jim had groomed him until he glistened, then saddled and bridled him, using a straight, gentle bit.

"You cay him out and you cay him back, and I'll deckirate your bridle with two silver stars," I heard Jim murmur in his ear.

When Jim led him into the paddock, Eliza was waiting at the gate for me. At once she handed me a riding glove.

"For good luck," she told me.

Long ago it had meant more than that. It would have meant that her hand joined with mine in the endeavor.

"I'll try to win you that ten pounds," I answered.

Her throat worked, and she spoke again in almost inaudible tones.

"About that other matter. Is it off?"

"It was mostly sword-rattling to start with."

"You say mostly. For my curiosity, what was the little rest?"

"Some lost dreams."

"It being off won't make it worse for Papa and Sophia?"

"Have no fear of that."

"I never believed it anyway. The Ogre of Elveshurst is not up to scratch."

"I know whom you'll marry," I said, haunted by a dream.

"Yes, tell my fortune."

"A youth with laughter in his mouth and sunlight in his eyes, and a great rider and hunter."

"Someone said that to you. Some girl like me. The one whom you mentioned to me?"

"She was very much like you."

Lord Tarlton came up to instruct Eliza in her duties as judge. Dick, carelessly dressed, dark, graceful, a racing bat in his small, hard hand, took the moment to speak to me.

"You and I don't have to humor Eliza," he said in tones just low enough to escape the others' hearing. "We can make a private bet."

"For how much?"

"Not five thousand pounds but ten thousand."

"That's very handsome, but it's too late—"

"You needn't put it in writing. Your word's good enough. We'll not bother with witnesses. If you lose, it's nothing to you. If I lose, I'm in hock the rest of my life. But if I win—win fair—I'li take my winnings and clear out for the Antipodes. My shadow will no longer darken these pretty scenes. You'll have only Papa to contend with then. Harvey's a reed and you'll probably win, and if you want Eliza along with your revenge, you can get her. What do you say?" His eyes burned into mine.

It was too late in a larger sense than my excuse had meant. Fate spoke through my helpless lips.

"I'll let the other bet stand."

"Just as you say, Squire Blackburn. Well, shall we up and at it?"

I nodded and turned to mount. Lord Tarlton spoke in unfeigned amazement.

"Blackburn, I can't stop wondering at that raw-boned brute. He recalls another gray I've seen—had the same black-ringed dapples— but for the moment—"

"Perhaps it was Ottoman, El Stedoro's paternal grandfather."

"Great guns! Of course it was. I saw Ottoman sweep the field. He was sold to a Barbary prince. Who was El Stedoro's dam?"

"Farishti, a pure-bred Arab."

"Doesn't Farishti mean 'angel? I picked up a few Oriental words when I served in Malta. What does El Stedoro mean?"

"As near as I could hit it. The Vindictive.'"

The little silence falling was almost unnoticeable.

"A name I've heard before. She was a horse-of-tree, I think, sunk by a pirate off the Aegadian Isles." Lord Tarlton glanced at his handsome repeater, carried on a gold chain in the pocket of his buff waistcoat. "It's time for the race."

Dick and I took our places outside the gate of the course. Dick s hand appeared light, yet he kept the high-strung black stallion in remarkably good control. Like most horses hand-raised among the Bedouin, El Stedoro had been taught to stand statuesque as a trooper's charger on review. When Eliza's clear high voice cried, "Go!" I touched him with my boot and he and Donald Dhu cleared the gate side by side.

Hooves drummed and I felt the mighty thrust of El Stedoro's thighs that hurled him up and forward, and the brace of his big shoulders as his forelegs bore the brunt of his descent. But I did not give him leave to bound his greatest, as when he had raced with his dam Farishti on the dun pastures of his native land. That would come much later, if at all.

The road curbed, we passed out of sight of the little cluster of people, and drew nigh the wooden gate closing the roadway through the woods. Being easy to approach in stealth by a waylayer in the dense larch growth, it was the jump I most feared. I saw^ it sharply —low heather spread out and covering the course on the other side, greener than its wont in this damp weather, set off every board— and took a swift, searching glance at Dick's hands and feet. He was not holding back to let me go over first; as though to take it on the fly, he quickened the black's singes by light, rhythmic blows of his bat. Unless all signs failed—his form and balance and the beast's approach—he meant to clear it cleanly, not knock it askew to throw me. The next second he was up and over. El Stedoro hard on Donald s heels.

But this was only tlie first jump beyond the starting gate, and its first essaying, not its last. Anyway, a treason worthy of my great antagonist, standing so high in his order, almost himself a prince, would not take this simple, uncertain form. Not he, my little lord, his white hand on his walking stick, would stoop to a horse coper's jobbery. Sophia had told me something with bearing on this when I was young. I wish I could remember what it was...

Surely the most likely deadfall was the water gap, dangerous to start with, far from the watchers, out on the bleak moor. Yet every jump was suspect of ambuscade; no footroom on the course promised safety; I must not overlook one little adverse sign. My mind on this, my soul was free to stray. I dreamed of other fateful races I had run, always against the same opponent. One, with El Stedero under me, had seemed to be with Farishti, bearing Suliman, Sheik el Beni Kabir. We had sped behind the greyhounds, shouting and laughing, and I had not seen the dread spirit gliding beside us until he smote my chieftain amidst his mirth.

On a silver night under the moon I had raced him again, to see which of us would be the first to find a traveler, loveliest of all on whom the moon looked down, and take her for his own. Isabel Gazelle, do you remember? Wherever you are, will you pause a moment, and think of me, and perhaps know my terrible need, and help me? My babe is hardly old enough to leave your arms. You have taken a husband, of youth and beauty and laughter, but remember our rite on the desert, and how your kisses transfigured my jagged face of stone. Mount Farishti and ride once more with me!

Death, whom I had met while flying from the Sepulcher, later among the mimosa trees, later amid the thorn, glided beside me once more. I could not see him, but now and then his shadow flicked across my path as some warning I could not quite seize plucked at my brain. The two mighty stallions, night-black and ocean-gray, seemed more primordial forces than tamed beasts, and they had become wildly aroused by signs beyond my ken. Their pace was too fast for so long a run, yet I checked El Stedoro only enough to keep him at Donald's heels. If the race was not stopped by some interference, both great hearts might fail.

Yet reach after reach of the course dropped behind us. We came to the water gap, and as the black set foot on the far bank the gray flew in mid-air. "Good jump!" came Dick's voice, blithe, close to exultant as he checked to turn. He looked small as huge Donald Dhu reared up, wheeling, but graceful and gay, and the pair made one centaur of fantastic proportions.

As he took off, boldly back across the jump as when he had gone forth, I was not as afraid as before. Partly this came of an insistent working of my mind. The bet Dick had asked me to make would have been uncollectible unless I survived the race. It seemed incredible that he could either rig or unrig a deadfall between then and the start. The course itself was not very hazardous, possibly but not readily lending itself to ambuscade; and he knew I would be on guard. It seemed far more likely that the race was intended to reassure me until the moment I could be taken by surprise.

Thus the war would go on. My enemies could choose the time and place to strike or, discovering my impotence, brush me from their path. I had dreamed that this wintry race across the dismal moors was the last trick that Jim and I must stand; then we could go off watch. But the gods had not come down. There was no goddess named Nemesis, ever the stars looked down and never cared; today the skies grayed, and the mists drifted in ghostly clouds. The wind had run with me on the outward run. Now it beat into my face, its low wailing in my ears.

As we began the long turn making toward the gap in the woods, Donald Dhu seemed to be near collapse. With a savage look on his face, Dick struck him at every surge. I was watching this in great chaos of mind when El Stedoro took fright at something and went into his fastest pace, thundering down the track in prodigious bounds. It was as though he shared my sudden horror of that drawn, dark face and contorted form and flailing bat, and was striving to escape their malign presence. I had the impression of trying to check him, but knew I had not exerted great strength. His ears laid back as we swept by, then pricked forward as we rounded the bend in sight of the jump.

It looked different than when I had seen it less than four minutes ago. Its top had a crook in it and not as much light came through the gaps in the boards. El Stedoro was driving toward it full force. He meant to take it in a great proud leap. But when we were fifty yards away, rushing through low heather that crackled like fire—when I still had time to force him off the track into rough ground and over a gully beyond—I saw that the only change was a branch of a larch tree fallen or laid across its top board.

Gazing at it in perplexity and dread, I had not seen a brown serpent in the heather. It had lain close to the ground at first—perhaps I would not have seen it anyway. Hardly his length in front of El Stedoro's flying hooves, the deadfall sprang into view. It was a heavy, rusted wire, held rigid a foot off the ground. I did not know then how it was secured, for there was no time to look; but there seemed to be time for a memory from long ago to flash and burn. Would the little lord with his little stick stoop to a horse coper's trick? Sophia had told me by Calypso's cave he would play it without stooping.

El Stedoro struck the wire and appeared to break like a billow against a reef. He pitched head first and somersaulted on, I trying to fall clear. That try, instinct-driven, largely succeeded. Only one leg was caught under the fallen giant, and the saddle left enough space that it was not crushed or broken. And although stunned and half blind and seeing streaks of fire, I did not lose consciousness for one instant. I dared not let the haze in my brain wipe out my sense, and in the first rallying of my inward forces, I clambered to my feet.

Even so, it was a feeble and useless effort. Down upon me rode Dick, a horrid grin on his face and his racing bat upended and winging. He struck at my head with murderous fury. Its leaded knob missed my crown, but grazed my temple and flayed my cheek. The blow knocked me to my knees. I tried to lift my arms to shield my head, but they hung limp at my side. I tried to rise, but my muscles failed. I perceived the flame of my spirit burning very low, foretelling it would soon expire. The smell of my blood had caused the black stallion to shy away, but Dick was wheeling him back with a masterly hand, the bat raised and ready. I saw him take good aim. If one blow was not enough, he would dismount and give me a sufficiency; it was as though he had told me so. My head would look as though it were crushed by a flying hoof. I could almost hear the little lord telling the people...

Instead I heard sound terrible and real. It was somewhat like a human scream, but louder and invoked by fury beyond measure. I looked up out of blood-filled eyes in time to see El Stedoro rushing upon Dick. He had gained his feet in one raging bound; his ears were laid back, his eyes white, his great teeth bared and agape.

I saw them close in Dick's arm. Jerking him out of the saddle, he shook him in his jaws as a terrier shakes a rat, then flung him with frightful force to the ground. Up he rose then, high and higher, screaming with fury; down lashed the terrible front hooves.

It was not enough to vent his hate, his only answer to a blow against one he greatly loved, and the smell of the blood it had made flow. Again his teeth closed in the shoulder of the now supine form; whirling, he flung it with a great snatch of his neck clear across the track. Running up, he struck and pawed and trampled it until it was a blood-soaked blob, hardly recognizable as a human form. Only then did my voice cut through his screams and balm his maddened brain.

He ran up to me, whinnying. By clutching first the stirrup and then his mane, I pulled myself to my feet. To quiet him more, I stroked his head and then slipped my hand into his bloodied jaws. When the great teeth closed on it gently, I knew that hate had gone out of his heart and he had forgotten what it was, and all he remembered was love, and it was his law.

Although I could not clearly remember seeing him, I had been aware of someone springing up from the bushy gully and running into the woods. It was almost certainly Pike, appointed to the task of raising the wire already bighted about the tree beside which he lay. This part he had done well, with perfect timing, and holding the bighted end in his powerful hands. Beyond doubt his further orders had been to loose the wire from its hitch on a tree trunk across the track and to make away with it. These he had failed to carry out in terror of El Stedoro.

He would certainly report to his master as soon as possible. However, I had little doubt that Lord Tarlton was already started to the scene. The terrible outcries had carried far, unmistakably the screams of a maddened stallion; and although he might still hope for the best, his heart must be cramped in the vise of terror of the worst.

Too weak to stand and shaking with fear, yet I managed to clamber on to El Stedoro's back. I had hardly wiped the blood from my eyes when I saw Lord Tarlton rounding the bend on Eliza's bay. Behind him rode only Harvey. It seemed certain that he had forbidden his daughters to come on the scene, as well as any hostlers or servants. However, there would be one more witness as well as guard over me. Jim had run toward the scene by the shortest cut, which had brought him to the edge of the wood ahead of the rest. He had plunged through and took his post as Lord Tarlton rode up. It was about thirty feet from me. In his belt was the hunting knife he had brought from Africa. I knew now he had carried it concealed throughout our stay at Celtburrow.

The meeting of us four was creepily quiet. Lord Tarlton saw me mounted, Donald Dhu riderless, the wire still on the track, and something else at which he stared with glassy eyes. Then he asked a question in a low, incredulous tone.

"Is that Dick?"

"It's what's left of Dick's body."

"God in heaven."

It was a strange invoking. Deathly white, he got down and walked there and bent over and gazed. He did not reel and fall, but the thorn cane he carried dropped out of his hand. Then he looked at the forelegs of El Stedoro, bloody to the knees, and spoke once more.

"Your horse has the right name."

I shook my head, knowing only that this was not quite true.

"Ride him in and have Jim come with you. Harvey and I will bring in—Dick. Then I'll meet you in the drawing room. I'll give all you ask —accept any terms you impose. Only let me go—to the gallows or where you will—where I won't see your face."

I nodded and signaled to Jim. With him beside me, I rode to the stables; then while he stood guard, I washed the blood from El Stedoro's legs and hooves and muzzle. As I started up the stone steps of the manor house, Jim followed still.

"I want you with me, Jim, but unless Lord Tarlton goes mad, there's nothing more to fear."

"I ain't sho, Cap'n."

In my dressing room I bathed and changed my clothes, Jim standing at the door. Then when I had packed my belongings, I descended to the drawing room, not knowing yet what I would say to Lord Tarlton—aware of nothing I could say of any use, since I could do no more. There, too, I meant to speak to Sophia and Eliza. I would do so because I could not bring myself to leave without doing so, and because I hoped that when I saw them, something would come to my lips that would be worth saying. The great chamber was at present deserted. Jim posted himself at the door and once entered to tell me that a newcomer had just arrived on an almost exhausted horse. Jim had seen him through a window and thought he recognized him as a carriage driver from Lord Tarlton's establishment in London. I was too weary to take much interest in the incident, although surmising that it might have a part in the last play.

Exerting far more sway upon my mind was an object—a curio—indeed a palladium of the house I had seen before. It was the ship model in a glass case that had reposed on a teakwood table in the great chamber of Lepanto Palace, when first I went to dine with Captain Tarlton. Again it had the place of honor in the room. Once more I marked its perfect workmanship. She was a sloop of war under full sail, and a beautiful commemoration of Our Eliza.

In a few minutes Sophia and the vessel's namesake came into the room. Both looked white, their eyes big and dark-looking, their contrasted beauty unmistakable and touching. I rose and bowed my head.

"Will you sit, sir?" Sophia asked.

"Thank you."

They took seats, and Sophia tried again to speak, but her throat filled and then her eyes and she could not. Eliza spoke instead.

"We know fairly well what happened—long ago, and today," she said. "There's nothing we can say to express our sorrow and our shame. Sophia and I have had a dreadful shock today, but we're glad, a thousandfold, that Dick was killed instead of you. Papa has taken a wound from which he'll never recover. You may think it's light punishment for what he did, and although he lost his only son, you lost all those you loved and your youth and all you had. Still we ask you to be satisfied with this retribution, and be merciful."

As she said this last, my attention became divided. Facing me, with their backs to the open hallway door where Jim stood on guard, they did not see him turn to me and raise his hand in warning. At the same time I heard quick, light steps.

"We beg you, Holgar—" Eliza went on.

She was interrupted by Lord Tarlton brushing past Jim and making a regal entrance into the room. His skin looked gray and his white hands were empty and unsteady, but his eyes were coldly brilliant and his lips were curled in a malign smile dreadful to see. Behind him, pale with fright, came Harvey.

"You beg him, do you, silly child," said the little lord, in a bleak, biting voice. "My daughter begging a Yankee traitor. That's what he is. The only reason he didn't fight the king—and run with the rest of the pack when we burned their capital—he was a slave in Africa. His name's not Holgar Blackburn. It's Homer Whitman, as Sophia knows full well. Well, Yankee Doodle, what do you say now? Your horse went berserk after his spill and killed my son. Why he didn't pick you, with your Yankee stink, the devil only knows. 'Twas a bad blow to me, but it's the last. The next time you make trouble for me, I'll shoot you down, and the law will uphold me in it. Now, Homer Whitman, what do you say to that?"

"I think you've gone mad."

"Mad, am I? I was mad to believe that Julius was still alive on his way to London, but now I know he's dead, and I call your bluff. Eliza, that's a game the Yankees play. They're good at it, they think, making out that they carry cannon when all they've got is pop guns. What can you do now, Yank? You saw the wire, but who'd believe you and your black man? Do you think Pike would turn king's evidence? Eliza, hark to me and believe me. When I sent word to Lieutenant Holmes—master then of a Barbary frigate—to lay for the Vindictive, I was standing for our own kind against a pack of traitors. When a dog I thought was dead came back and tried to ruin us, anything I did was too good for him. I never intended—the devil take me if I did—for you to go with him. I let you think so for fear you'd give the game away—you were the bait to get him down here. My plans went wrong, and I've lost Dick, but I still have you, my joy, my life, my beautiful Eliza! You need never leave me now. We'll sail together to the last."

Lord Tarlton dropped into the chair, breathing hard. Then almost to my surprise I heard my voice rise in the hushed room.

"Eliza?"

The stricken girl half-wakened from her evil dream and looked at me.

"What is it?"

"It's true you never had to go with me, but you can go, if you wish."

"What's that?" Lord Tarlton demanded, gripping the arms of his chair. "Answer him, Eliza, as he deserves. Don't be a lady. It would be wasted on him. Spit in his ugly face!"

"Be still." Then, the glassy stare fading from her eyes, life coming back into her inert form, she spoke to me in a low, wondering voice. "Would you wish it, Holgar?"

"My name is Homer. I wish it very much."

"Why?"

"That I may live again."

"The main reason isn't to crush Papa?"

"That doesn't come into it at all."

"If I went with you, where would we go?"

"To America."

"Would we be very rich?"

"We'd not be rich at all. I've arranged to give back—it was taken from slaves and it will be used to fight slavery—all I have except my ship."

"We would live on board?"

"Except between journeys."

"What will be her name?"

"The Vindication."

"You're twice my age."

"Yes."

"People find you fearful to look at."

"Maybe they won't, so much, when I come back to life. Anyway, it's how you look at me that matters."

"I think that's true. Sophia, you had a chance to go with him when he was young."

"When we both were young, Eliza."

"Why didn't you do it?"

"Captain Sir Godwine Tarlton—that was his name then—didn't want me to go."

"Couldn't you have gone anyway?"

"Yes."

"Didn't you know he was a madman—driven mad by hate?"

"No, I didn't know it. I don't know it now. I only know that he has great power to do evil. Only if you leave him will it be broken."

"Are you sure?"

"He'll have lost Our Eliza for good. He'll stand on the quarter-deck no more. His flag will be struck."

"Do you want me to go, Sophia?"

"It's my dearest wish. It's your greatest chance for happiness-per-haps your only chance. Go with him, Eliza. What does all the rest matter? Go to the new land, the land of hope. Go where men are free-where soon all will be free. Leave the old, unhappy shores to their shadows of the past. Bear him children who can look all men in the face and know they are brothers in the sight of God. He tried to show me that—I knew it was true—but I lost my chance. Don't lose your chance, Eliza."

"What did he promise you, Sophia, if you would come?"

"He promised me adventure."

"Homer, will you promise me adventure?"

"On land and on the sea."

"There's something I've got to find out before I can answer. I'm a woman, Homer, and can't deny my needs."

I remembered a tall young girl, with an equal beauty, who had to find out something by the Wells of the Rising Moon.

"Very well."

Eliza rose, came in hope and dread, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me on the lips.

"Oh, they're warm!" she burst out, then hid her streaming eyes in her hands.

"Now will you go with me and love me?"

"I will love you and I'll go with you."

Lord Tarlton, who had listened with drawn face and indrawn gleaming eyes, rose like a king from his throne.

"Hell and fire!" he cried. "May they take you all! May the ship that carries my turncoat daughter burn to the waterline with every soul aboard. May this house with all of you in it fall down in flame. I'll not set foot in it again. Harvey, will you leave the whore you call your wife and follow me? She lay with the Yankee Jack before you wedded her, and his tar is on her, and she loves him still. I'll make you a peer o' the realm!"

"No, sir, I will not," Harvey answered.

"Rats desert a sinking ship, but mine will make port yet. You'll see, God damn you all."

He went to the center table and took the ship model from its glass case and put it under his arm. Then he walked with his toes in front of him to one of the fireside couches where leaned a rattan cane he used indoors, and no doubt had left there when, carrying a stick of thorn, he had gone to the paddock. As he leaned to pick it up, his precious charge started to up-end. In trying to hold it level, it slipped out of his grasp and fell to the floor with a crash. It must be that its glue had weakened in long years, for he looked down, his eyes glazed, to see it in utter ruin.

"Devil and damnation," he muttered. "But it serves her right, for she failed me when I needed her most, that cursed Christmas Day. Why, I knew it all the time. I've worshiped a false god. Down to hell with her, I say! I'm done."

He was done and would die soon. I saw death, my familiar adversary, take his small, white hand. He did not pick up the cane, but still like a phoenix risen from the ashes, he walked with high head and princely mien out of our sight and our fives.

And now die time would pass quickly until Jim and I and my beautiful and redeeming one could set sail with our shipmates. Again I would know the winds of heaven, the rolling waves, the deep blue of ocean that is our mysterious mirror of the holy sky. I would foil the conspiracies of the fog. I would live at risk with the reefs of death. I would follow pilot stars through the seven seas, and they would not deny shipway to my gallant prow. I would feel again the flung spray in my face.

In time the clean and stinging drops would wear away the stone and show human flesh beneath. And in my hand, joined with my hand, I would hold the hand of love.