About his waist a strong cord was wound, and a dagger hung in the cord. He laid the dagger on the table. Then he took a key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock of the escritoire. He let down the flap. The pigeonholes were stuffed with papers bound together by tape. Other papers lay upon the ledge beneath the pigeonholes — the last details of the equipment of the last ships to be mobilized for the Enterprise of England. Robin took them over to the table. There was paper enough and to spare littered upon it. Robin gathered some sheets and set them ready at one end. He had a pen with him and a small bottle of ink slung on a black cord about his shoulders. He drew a wooden stool up to the table and, sitting down upon it, began to copy the documents which he had taken from the bureau.
“Italy with the Levant Islands, under Martine de Vertendona, ten Galeons, eight hundred mariners, two thousand soldiers, three hundred and ten great pieces,” he began to write, and so followed on with the particulars of each ship. What store of biscuit each ship carried so that each man might have a quintal a month for six months, how many pipes of wine, how many quintals of bacon, how many of cheese and fish, of oil and vinegar, of peas and rice. How many barrels of fresh water, what number of spades and lanterns, of spare sails and ropes, of oxhides and lead plates to mend the damage done by the cannon of the enemy. Then came the number of bullets and quintals of powder for each gun, of the muskets and calivers for the fighting tops, the partisans and the halberts for the boarders. Robin wrote the particulars down with the name of each ship against them, whether great ship or caravel. And the night waned as he wrote. Each of the official documents he set back on the ledge of the bureau in its original place as soon as he had copied it. And at four o’clock in the morning, when one more hour would have seen his year’s work done with, his head nodded on his shoulders, his eyes willy-nilly closed and reopened and closed again, and as he sprawled forward on the table his elbows slid out. One of them touched his dagger and pushed it to the table’s edge. Robin drew a long breath, his head was on his hands, his whole body relaxed in a delicious, irresistible relief. His arms spread just a fraction farther apart, and the dagger clattered upon the oaken elbow of Santa Cruz’s great chair and tumbled with a thud upon the floor.
For a moment Robin wondered whether the clatter was a noise in a dream. But he saw the dagger on the floor. As he picked it up he heard a great thump on the ceiling above his head, and his blood stood still in his veins.
Santa Cruz had heard it too. The catastrophe, foreseen and guarded against through so many nights, had caught him at the last.
A feeling of despair descended like a cloak upon Robin’s shoulders, muffling for a moment his every sense, so that he remained on his stool in a paralysis. And over his head he heard Santa Cruz dragging himself about his room.
During the first moments that activity returned to him Robin acted like an automaton, but he acted quickly; so carefully had he rehearsed each successive thing which he must do if this mischance befell. He put back the requisition which he was copying into the bureau and locked the flap and slipped the key into his pocket. He folded and placed within the bosom of his shirt the copies which he had been making. He set the stool against the wall, and he heard the thump of the old sailor’s stick on the floor and a door whine upon its hinges. He thrust the pen between the buttons of his doublet and fixed the stopper in the ink bottle about his neck. Santa Cruz would be upon the stairs now, but he could only move slowly and with great care, lest with his huge weight he should fall. Robin could hear him shaking the house.
Robin replaced the big candle in its socket, blew out his own and thrust it into his pocket. Was it his own voice which he heard coming and going in sobbing breaths? He had come so near to the end of his service, and now disaster and death!
But he was wide awake now. He placed the dagger between his teeth. He slipped across the room and drew down the mat at the door until his fingers told him that it lay flat. He went out by the window, setting the latch at an angle, and closed the glass doors behind him. With the thin edge of his dagger inserted between the doors he dropped the latch into its socket. He went out onto the balcony and closed the shutters, just as he had closed the windows. He was on the balcony now, but there was neither safety nor concealment yet; and through the lattices he heard the door of the room flung open and saw the flicker of a candle held in an unsteady hand.
CHAPTER XVII. Death of Santa Cruz
JUST WITHIN THE doorway of the room old Santa Cruz was standing, his swollen leg crisscrossed with bandages, his great bulk muffled in a crimson robe. He leaned upon a thick oak stick, and in his left hand he held above the level of his eyes a candlestick with a lighted candle. Under his left armpit was tucked a naked sword. It was not fear which made his hand shake, though the grease from his candle bespattered the floor. For he looked as dangerous and angry as a bull, a bull with the strength sapped by the banderilleros. His eyes travelled about the room warily, truculently. Something had clattered in this room, bounced and clattered again and then fallen with a soft thump. By the mercy of God he had been awake. For the first time he thanked Him that old men can’t sleep. For not one of his mouldy lack-linen scullions would have heard it; or done aught if he had heard it but bury his craven head under his blanket. No, not even the soft-footed, smooth-faced lackey who could nurse him like a woman and sustain him like a man. Dastards, sheep, quicksilver at the sight of a cut finger!
The old man dragged himself across the room to the table. He dropped rather than laid his candlestick upon it. He lifted his oak stick onto it and clung to the back of his armchair, breathing in great difficult gusts which wrenched his body and made a horrible loud sound in that empty room. When he had recovered a little he bent over the chair and felt the cushions on the seat. No, no one had sat there. He reached forward and felt the big round candles. The wax of both of them was hard and cold. No one had lighted them. Yet something had fallen in this room, something had struck and clattered.
“What? . . . Who? . . . Answer me!” he bullied, and he thumped the table with his fist.
All this time he had been holding the sword under his arm, and it shone in the wavering candlelight from its great basket hilt to the point, now bright and blinding like sunlight on a mirror and now blood red. He lurched along the table and over the matting to the glass doors of the window. The latch fitted into its socket, fitted home; and the day of fingerprints had not yet come. He raised the latch and let it fall back again into its place.
It might be — yes. Fingers which were not heavy with age or crippled with rheumatics, fingers which were cunning and deft, fingers which he would cut off at the knuckles there on that table with this sword he carried under his arm, might have shot that latch down into its socket. He should have bidden Giuseppe change that latch for a bolt. No, Giuseppe should have changed it without any bidding at all. Mother of God, what were servants for! . . .
Unless — yes, unless Giuseppe’s fingers were the fingers he was going to mutilate. The rascal was on the balcony. Good! Well, he must be deft and cunning himself. He wanted to see those hands stretched on the table flat on their palms, yes, and above them a rogue’s white face and frightened eyes, and a foolish chattering mouth slobbering for mercy. But he must be cunning and quick and just for a minute — God vouchsafe that miracle if ever for his master he had done good work! — just for a minute move with the nimbleness of youth, the nimbleness of Giuseppe Marino.
Very quietly he unlatched the glass doors. At a touch they swung noiselessly into the room. Santa Cruz listened. He could hear nothing. The rogue was outside those shutters holding his breath, cowering in a corner of the balcony! Santa Cruz took his sword now by the hilt into his right hand. Good! He felt twice the man he had been a minute ago. Now for that moment of youth! He gathered his great frame together, he drew a long breath like a diver before he dives. And the miracle happened. He sprang. Heavy and awkward and grotesque, he sprang with all his force and all his weight against the shutters. They splinte
red and burst like so much tissue paper. Old Santa Cruz was carried forward by his weight and flung against the balustrade of the balcony, and his sword rattled against the stone. He could turn no quicker than a charging rhinoceros. “The rogue has me,” he gasped.
Upon that balcony he was at the mercy of anyone with a dagger in his hand, whether he cowered in a corner or not. But nothing happened. No steel blade slid cold and sharp into the fat of his back. He turned himself about — even that movement was difficult now — and stood amazed. There was no one on the balcony.
Then Santa Cruz swayed like a drunkard. His head swam, the stars in the dark sky whirled in a mad dance before his eyes.
“Mother of God, what’s happening to me?” he wailed, suddenly pitiful and afraid like a child. Something was happening to him, something quite new, something quite stupendous, but what it was he couldn’t think. He was too dizzy to think at all.
A sharp touch in the night air gradually brought him round. He drew it into his lungs and the stars, having had their fling, settled themselves again in their orderly pattern. Santa Cruz took a hold upon himself.
“This won’t do . . . I can’t afford it. No, Spain can’t afford it either. . . . There’s my sword on the floor of the balcony — I’ll not leave it there! No, I’ll not leave it there to shame me.”
But some instinct of prudence warned him not to stoop. Or rather, not to try to stoop. Try as he might, he knew that he could never reach that sword with his hand. His crimson night robe was gathered about his body in a girdle of twisted silk. He unwound the girdle and, turning about so that his buttocks rested against the balustrade, doubled it and with the loop angled for the hilt of his sword. Once he had caught it, but only by an ornament, and he had not raised it more than a few inches from the ground when it slipped and clanged once more against the stone. But the old man was obstinate. He would not leave it. It had been too good a friend to be thus disrespectfully treated. Left to rust in the dews of the morning, the sword which had seen Lepanto and Terceira and was to catch and cast back the sunlight from the white cliffs of England at the Narrows? No indeed. Never did a schoolboy angle for a trout in a brook with greater seriousness than this old gentleman of Spain for his sword on his balcony over the Tagus. But he succeeded in the end. The loop caught the weapon below the basket hilt, and a moment afterwards Santa Cruz was fondling and pinching the blade as though he were a boy again and the hilt the soft palm of his mistress.
But he was cold now. There was a dampness in the air which crept into the marrow of his bones. He was shivering, and with such sharp spasms that the blade of his sword beat a tattoo against the stone balustrade. And he had still something to do before he could make sure whether or no his secrets had been stolen. Clutching at the window frame, he drew the shutters close behind him, then stared downwards at his left foot rather stupidly. “There’s something woundily odd,” he said aloud.
There was no feeling in his left leg at all. It wouldn’t hold him up. It wouldn’t do anything. It wouldn’t even hurt him any more. Somehow he managed to lumber into the room on one leg; and, now clinging to a chair, now to the edge of the table, he dragged himself laboriously and painfully to his bureau. He had the key in the pocket of his dressing gown, and he unlocked it and let down the lid. The papers on the top? Yes, they recorded the equipment of the Santa Ana, galleon from the Levant. She was short of her big culverins. Yes, there was the note which he had written in the margin that very night. Nothing had been disturbed.
Santa Cruz locked up his bureau again and, coming to his table, dropped heavily into his great chair. Was it possible, he wondered, that his senses were playing him false? He had imagined that clatter and thump upon the floor? But if he heard amiss, why tomorrow he might see amiss, and from that what catastrophes might come? If over there, in the mists of the Channel, he were to see ships where there were no ships, hear the roar of cannon where there were no cannons and set his battle array accordingly? What then of Spain? He threw out his arms wide and so dropped his hand palm downwards on the table; and he felt the palm of his right hand grow wet.
Wet?
He lifted it and looked. There was a black smudge upon the skin. He bent sidewards and stared at the table. There it was, the proof that his senses had not played him false, the sure sign that his bureau had been rifled: a smear of ink which had not yet dried. With a bellow the old man rose to his feet and fell back again, and so sat stiff and upright with horror glazing his eyes.
For the stupendous sensation which had frightened him on the balcony was coming back upon him, and this second time it was even more real, more appalling. All the great joys except one had passed away from him: the joy of women, the joy of a great ship rolling down the seas before a strong wind, the joy of choice food delicately cooked, the joy of hunting days in the marshes by the side of the Guadalquivir. But one joy remained and swamped even the memory of the others — the joy of the Enterprise of England. He railed at Philip his master, cursed his penny wisdom and his slow meticulous brooding over details and particulars which were the proper concern of underlings. But he served him with a ferocious loyalty.
The Enterprise of England was to set so rich a crown upon his head as not even Imperial Rome had dreamed of. And he, Santa Cruz, alone could have done it, for he alone amongst the admirals knew what great stuff the English were made of, what hard fighters they were, what great leaders sprang from nowhere to command them, and how from the Scotch border to the Channel ports a passion for liberty and faith was ringing like one deep note of a gong.
The joy of that vast Enterprise was forsaking Santa Cruz now. It was fading away. Even the anguish that he who should have led would have no share in it at all, was fading away behind a red mist which every instant grew denser and redder and was flecked with fire like the discharge of cannon. Santa Cruz could not move, and in his wide-opened eyes the awful look of horror stayed long after his heart was still.
CHAPTER XVIII. Meanwhile
AND MEANWHILE WHAT of Robin? The balcony on which he had taken refuge was supported upon two strong brackets of fretted stone which ended in straight columns with projecting feet carved to resemble the heads of dolphins. These columns descended into the air just below the two exterior corners of the balcony. Robin had looked down upon them from the balcony many a time with a shrinking heart. The columns were about five feet in height, and below the dolphins’ heads at the end of them he could see the waves breaking upon the rocks a hundred and fifty feet beneath. On one of those heads he would have to balance himself if need befell. And need had befallen.
He uncoiled the rope from about his waist, leaving the last loop securely tied about his middle. The coping of the balcony was stretched upon stone columns separated one from the other by a space of six inches. Robin dared not yet make fast the loose end of his rope to one of these columns, since if he did so the rope must pass over the top of the ledge and betray him. He bestrode the ledge and, bending down, doubled the rope round one of the columns from the outside. Then, commending his soul to God, he swung down upon the doubled rope and with his feet felt for and found the dolphin’s head. There he stood clinging desperately to the rope and dizzy as a drunkard. He dared not look down; he closed his eyes. If he slipped on the smooth stone beneath his feet! If his hands loosened their grip. Almost they did; almost the desire to loose his hold and have done with it mastered him. But there was too much at stake for cowardice long to have its way with him. There was England, his uncompleted work, Walsingham’s faith in him, and Cynthia — the Cynthia he had seen in his library, dominating her fears and her full heart, her lovely face alive with courage. Robin renewed his spirit from the strong image of her in his thoughts.
He reached up, he opened his eyes wide, and balancing himself upon his tiny perch he tied the loose end of the rope with a clove hitch round a column. After a second or two he looked down below the tiny pedestal on which he stood.
But he was not safe from detection even now. Santa Cruz had bu
t to bend his head over the balcony and he would be seen. He would be caught in as helpless a position as could be imagined. A blow from Santa Cruz’s great stick, a cut from Santa Cruz’s long sword, and he would go hurtling down through the void onto the rocks below.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 675