“Have you found La Santa Roja? I will hang all of you if she is harmed. “
“No one has seen her, sir. The men, except a few, are drunk. “
All through the night-With each confession of wealth concealed, the victim was led out by a party of searchers, and soon they would return, bearing cups and silver plates, jewels, and clothing of colored silk. The glowing treasure in the Hall of Audience was becoming one enormous heap.
And Captain Morgan, wearily: “Have you found the Red Saint?”
“We have not found her, sir, but we are seeking and inquiring over the whole city. Perhaps in the daylight, sir-”
“Where is Coeur de Gris?”
“I think he is drunk, sir, but-” He looked away from Henry Morgan.
“But what? What do you mean?” the captain cried.
“Nothing; I mean nothing at all, sir. It is almost certain that he is drunk. Only it takes such gallons of wine to make him drunk, and perhaps he has found a friend in the meantime.”
“Did you see him with any one?”
“Yes, sir, I saw him with a woman, and she was drunk. I could swear that Coeur de Gris was drunk, too.”
“Did you think the woman might have been La Santa Roja?”
“Oh, no, sir; I am sure it was not she. Only one of the women of the town, sir.”
There was a clash of golden service thrown on the pile.
A yellow dawn crept out of the little painted hills of Panama and grew bolder as it edged across the plain.
The sun flashed up from behind a peak, and its golden rays sought for their city. But Panama had died, had felt the quick decay of fire in one red night. But then, as the sun is a fickle sphere, the seeking beams found joy in the new thing. They lighted on the poor ruins, peered into upturned dead faces, raced along the cluttered streets, fell headlong into broken patios. They came to the white Palace of the Governor, leaped through the windows of the audience chamber, and fingered the golden heap on the floor.
Henry Morgan was asleep in the serpent chair. His purple coat was draggled with the mud of the plain.
The gray-clad rapier lay on the floor beside him. He was alone in this room, for all the men who had helped to pick the city’s bones during the night had gone away to drink and to sleep.
It was a high, long room, walled with panels of polished cedar. The beams of the ceiling were as black and heavy as old iron. It had been a court of justice, a place of wedding feasts, the hall where ambassadors were toasted or murdered. One door opened on the street; the other, a broad, arched opening, let into a lovely garden about which the Palace lay curled. In the middle of the garden a little marble whale spouted its steady stream into a pool. There were giant plants in red glazed pots, plants with purple leaves and flowers whose petals bore arrow heads or hearts or squares in cardinal. There were shrubs, lined with harsh tracery in the mad colors of the jungle. A monkey no larger than a rabbit picked over the gravel of the path, looking for seeds.
On one of the stone seats of the garden a woman was sitting. She pulled a yellow flower to bits while she sang fragments of a tender, silly song-“I would pluck the flower of the day for you, my love, where it grows in the dawning.” Her eyes were black, but opaque. They were the rich, sheening, shallow black of a dead fly’s wings, and under the lids there were sharp little lines. She could draw up the under lids of her eyes so that they shone with laughter, though her mouth remained harsh and placid. Her skin was very pale, her hair straight and black as obsidian.
Now she looked at the sun’s inquisitive light, and now at the arched doorway of the Hall of Audience.
Her singing stopped. She listened intently a moment, then started the gentle song again. There was no other sound save the distant cracklings of the fire which still burned among the palm slave huts on the outskirts of the city. The little monkey came at a funny, crooked gallop along the path. He stopped in front of the woman and raised his black paws above his head as though in prayer.
The woman spoke softly to him. “You have learned your lesson well, Chico. Your teacher was a Castilian with a fearful mustache. I am well acquainted with him. Do you know, Chico, he wants what he considers my honor. He will not be satisfied until he has added my honor to his own, and then he will be almost boastful. You have no idea of the size and weight of his honor even as it is. But you would be satisfied with a nut, wouldn’t you, Chico?” She dropped a piece of her flower to the tiny beast, whereupon he seized it, put it in his mouth, and spat in disgust.
“Chico! Chico! you forget your teacher! That is all wrong. You will get no woman’s honor by it. Place the flower over your heart, kiss my hand with a loud snapping sound, and then stride off like a fierce sheep out searching for wolves.” She laughed and glanced again toward the doorway. Although there was no sound, she rose and walked quickly toward the Hall of Audience.
Henry Morgan had turned slightly in his chair, and his turning allowed the sunlight to beat upon his eyelids. Suddenly he sat up and stared about him. He looked with satisfaction at the heap of treasure on the floor, then gazed full in the eyes of the woman standing under the broad arch.
“And have you ruined our poor city enough for your satisfaction?” she asked.
“I did not burn the city,” Henry said quickly. “Some of your Spanish slaves set the torch.” The words had been forced from him. He remembered that he was surprised. “Who are you?” he demanded.
She moved a step into the hail. “My name is Ysobel. It was said that you sought me.”
“Sought you?”
“Yes. I have been called La Santa Roja by certain young idiots,” she said.
“You-the Red Saint?”
He had prepared a picture in his mind, a picture of a young girl with blue, seraphic eyes that would fall before the steady stare of a mouse. These eyes did not fall. Under their soft black surfaces they seemed to be laughing at him, making light of him. This woman’s face was sharp, almost hawk-like. She was beautiful, truly, but hers was the harsh, dangerous beauty of lightning. And her skin was white-not pink at all.
“You are the Red Saint?”
He was not prepared for this change of idea. He was staggered at such a revolt against his preconceptions. But, said his mind, twelve hundred men and more had broken their way through the jungle, had dashed on the city like a brutal wave. Hundreds of humans had died in the agony of wounds, hundreds were crippled, the Cup of Gold was a ruin; and all these things had been done that Henry Morgan might take La Santa Roja. With all this preparation, it must be certain that he loved her. He would not have come if he had not loved her. Whatever the shock of her appearance, he could not circumvent the logic that he loved her. It must be so. Always he had thought of the “Saint” in her name; and now he perceived the reason for the adjective. But a queer feeling was seeping in on him-no logical feeling at all. He remembered such sensations from a time long gone; he was drawn, yet repelled by this woman, and he felt her power to embarrass him. Morgan closed his eyes, and the figure of a slender little girl with golden hair stood in the darkness of his brain.
“You are like Elizabeth,” he said, in the dull monotone of one dreaming. “You are like, and yet there is no likeness.
Perhaps you master the power she was just learning to handle. I think I love you, but I do not know. I am not sure.”
His eyes had been half closed, and when he opened them there was a real woman before him, not the wraith-like Elizabeth. And she was gazing at him with curiosity, and perhaps, he thought, with some affection. It was queer that she had come to him when no one had forced her to come. She must be fascinated. He reached into his memory for the speeches he had built on his way across the isthmus.
“You must marry me, Elizabeth-Ysobel. I think I love you, Ysobel. You must come away with me and live with me and be my wife, under the protection of my name and of my hand.”
“But I am already married,” she interposed; “quite satisfactorily married.”
He had even foreseen this.
During the nights of the march he had planned this campaign as carefully as he might have planned a battle.
“But is it right that two, meeting and flaming white fire, should go apart for stark eternity, should trudge off into bleak infinity; that each of these two should bear black embers of a flame that has not burned itself to death? Is there anything under heaven to forbid us this burning? Heaven has given the deathless oil; each of us carries a little torch for the other. Ah, Ysobel-deny it, or shrink from the intruding knowledge if you will. You would vibrate to my touch like the fine body of an old violin.
“You are afraid, I think. There is in your mind a burrowing apprehension of the world; the prying world, the spiteful world. But do you not be fearsome, for I say to you that this world is a blind, doddering worm, knowing three passions only-jealousy, curiosity, and hate. It is easy to defeat the worm, so only you make the heart a universe to itself. The worm, having no heart, cannot conceive the workings of a heart. He lies confounded by the stars of this new system.
“Why do I tell you these things, Ysobel-knowing you will understand them? You must understand them. Perhaps I know by the dark, sweet music of your eyes. Perhaps I can read the throbbing heart-beats on your lips. Your beating heart is a little drum urging me to battle with your fears. Your lips are like twin petals of a red hibiscus.
“And if I find you lovely, am I to be put in fear by a dull circumstance? May I not speak my thought to you whom it most concerns next to myself? Do not let us go apart bearing black embers of a flame that has not burned itself to death.”
When he had started to speak she listened carefully to his words, and then a little pain had flitted across her face; but when he had done there was only amusement in her eyes-that and the lurking ridicule under their surfaces.
Ysobel laughed softly.
“You forget only one thing, sir,” she said. “I do not burn. I wonder if I shall ever burn again. You do not carry a torch for me-and I hoped you did. I came this morning to see if you did. And I have heard your words so often and so often in Paris and Cordova. I am tired of these words that never change. Is there some book with which aspiring lovers instruct themselves? The Spanish men say the same things, but their gestures are more practiced, and so a little more convincing. You have much to learn.”
She was silent. Henry looked at the floor. His amazement had raised a fog of dullness in his brain.
“I took Panama for you,” he said plaintively.
“Ah-yesterday I hoped you did. Yesterday I dreamed you had, but today-I am sorry.” She spoke softly and very sadly.
“When I heard of you and your blustering up and down the ocean, I thought of you, somehow, as the one realist on an earth of vacillation. I dreamed that you would come to me one day, armed with a transcendent, silent lust, and force my body with brutality. I craved a wordless, reasonless brutality. The long thought of it bore me up when I was paraded by my husband. He did not love me. He was flattered with the thought that I loved him. It gave him importance and charm in his own eyes, neither of which were his. He would take me through the streets and his eyes would say, ‘See what I have married! No ordinary man could marry such a woman; but then, I am not an ordinary man.’ He was afraid of me-a little man, and afraid of me. He would say, ‘With your permission, my dear, I shall exercise the prerogative of a husband.’
Ah, the contempt I have for him!
“I wanted force-blind, unreasoning force-and love not for my soul or for some imagined beauty of my mind, but for the white fetish of my body. I do not want softness.
I am soft. My husband uses scented lotions on his hands before he touches me, and his fingers are like thick, damp snails. I want the crush of hard muscles, the delicious pain of little hurts.”
She searched his face closely, as though looking once more for a quality which had been lost.
“I thought richly of you once, you grew to be a brazen figure of the night. And now-I find you a babbler, a speaker of sweet, considered words, and rather clumsy about it. I find you are no realist at all, but only a bungling romancer. You want to marry me-to protect me. All men, save one, have wanted to protect me. In every way I am more able to protect myself than you are. From the morning of my first memory I have been made sick with phrases. I have been dressed in epithets and fed endearments.
These other men, like you, would not say what they wanted. They, like you, felt it necessary to justify their passion in their own eyes. They, like you, must convince themselves, as well as me, that they love me.”
Henry Morgan had sunk his head, seemingly in shame. Now he started toward her.
“But I will force you then,” he cried.
“It is too late-I would perforce think of you standing there, declaiming your considered words. While you wrenched at my clothing, I would picture you fawning before me, blurting out your words. And I should laugh, I’m afraid. I might even protect myself-and you, who should be somewhat an authority on rape, must know the consequence of that. No, you have failed-and I am sorry of your failure.”
“I love you,” he said miserably.
“You speak as though it were some new, tremendous thing. Many men have loved me; hundreds have said they did. But what are you going to do with me, Captain Morgan?
My husband is in Peru, and my inheritance is there also.”
“I–I do not know.”
“But am I to be a slave-a prisoner?”
“Yes; I must take you away with me. The men would laugh at me, else. It would ruin discipline.”
“If I must be a slave,” she said, “if I must go away from my own country, I hope I shall be your slave-yours or the property of a charming young buccaneer I met last night. But I do not think you will take me, Captain Morgan.
No; I do not think you will force me to go, for I will, perhaps, twist the knife I have already in your breast.”
Henry Morgan was aroused.
“Who was this young buccaneer?” he asked crossly.
“Ah, you perceive the knife,” said Ysobel. “And how do I know the fellow? But he was charming, and I should like to see him again.”
The captain’s eyes were flaming with rage.
“You will be locked up,” he said harshly. “You will remain in a cell until the time when we go again to Chagres. And we shall see whether this knife you speak of is sharp enough to keep you here in Panama.”
As she followed him across the garden to her jail, her clear laughter rang out. “Captain Morgan, it has just occurred to me-I have begun to see that a great many different kinds of men make the same kind of husband.”
“Get to your cell,” he ordered her.
“Oh-and Captain Morgan, you will find an old woman on the steps of the Palace. My duenna, she is.
Send her to me, please. And now, good-by for the time, sir; I must get to my devotions. The sin to be dissolved, Captain Morgan, is truthfulness. It is a bad thing for the soul, truthfulness.”
He went slowly back to his chair in the Hall of Audience.
He was filled with a kind of shame for his manhood.
It was as though she had plucked his rapier from its scabbard and scratched his face with it while he stood helpless before her. She had beaten him without apparent effort. Now he quailed before the knowledge of his men’s laughter when they discovered his embarrassment. There would be snickering when his back was turned. Groups of pirates would be silent as he passed, and when he had gone they would break into sharp laughter. This hidden ridicule was terrifying to Henry Morgan. His hates began to raise their heads; hatreds not for Ysobel, but for his town men who would laugh at him; for the people of Tortuga who would tell the story in the taverns; for the whole Indian Coast.
Now from the little prison across the garden came a shrill voice praying to the Virgin. The penetrating sound charged the whole Palace with a fervent cacophony. Henry Morgan listened with shame-sharpened ears for mockery in the words or in the tone, but there was no mockery. Over and over, a shrill Ave Maria; the tone
of a fearful, pleading sinner-Ora pro nobis. A shattered world, and the black skeleton of a golden city-Ora pro nobis. No mockery at all, but brokenhearted repentance reading its poor testimony on the dropping beads. A shrill woman’s voice, piercing, insistent-it seemed to be digging at a tremendous, hopeless sin. She had said it was the sin of truthfulness. “I have been honest in my being, and that is a black lie on the soul. Forgive my body its humanity. Forgive my mind which knows its limitations. Pardon my soul for being anchored this little time to both. Ora pro nobis.”
The mad, endless rosary cankered in Henry’s brain. At last he seized his rapier and his hat and ran from the hail into the street. Behind him the treasure lay smiling under the slanting sun.
The streets about the Governor’s Palace had not been touched by the fire. Captain Morgan walked along the paved way until he came to the ways of ruin. Here blackened walls had spilled their stones into the road. Those houses which had been made of cedar were vanished into the frames of smoking ashes which marked their places. Here and there lay murdered citizens grinning their last agony into the sky.
“Their faces will be black before the night,” Henry thought. “I must have them removed or the sickness will come.”
Dallying clouds of smoke still arose from the city, filling the air with the sickly odor of damp things burning. The green hills beyond the plain seemed incredible to Henry Morgan. He regarded them closely and then looked back at the city. This destruction which had seemed so complete, so awful, during the night, was, after all, a pitifully small and circumscribed destruction. Henry had not thought of the hills remaining green and standing. This conquest, then, was more or less unimportant. Yes, the city was in ruins. He had destroyed the city, but the woman who had drawn him to the Cup of Gold eluded him.
She escaped while she still lay in his power. Henry winced at his impotence, and shuddered that other people should know it.
A few buccaneers were poking about in the ashes, looking for melted plate which might have escaped the search of the night before. Turning a corner, Henry came upon the little Cockney Jones, and saw him quickly thrust something into his pocket. A flame of rage arose in Captain Morgan. Coeur de Gris had said that there was no difference between this epileptic dwarf and Henry Morgan.
Cup of Gold [Золотая чаша] Page 15