“Thank you,” she said, on a sob. “You planted the roses, Charles? You thought of it.”
He did not answer. He turned his head, to look out over Tolu. The ship was moving slowly, heading out over the gulf; the fiery town was dwindling; the wake whirled pale bubbles about the rudder.
“I think no other man would have thought of it,” she said quietly.
“Ah,” he said, sighing.
“Charles,” she said, “tell me now, will you. That’s over. That part. What happened in the town?”
“The men got drunk, Olivia, and set the town on fire. They sacked the place. When I came back to the Plaza. Oh, I can’t. I can’t.”
“You sent off the wounded, then, did you not?”
“Yes.”
“I helped them, down in the ward-room. Oh, poor fellows. I asked them about the battle. I think I’ve. I think, Charles, I’ve come very near to the world in these last days. They told me a little. Then I heard firing. We were busy below, with a sheet over the ports to keep out the sun. Some of them are dreadfully hurt. I couldn’t see what was happening. But I knew you were attacked. Then the cannon overhead began. The ship shook. Then a wounded man came down. He said you were dead, Charles. It was like the end of everything.”
“It was, Olivia,” he said.
“I know now, Charles, what war is.”
“You didn’t see that water,” he answered. “Oh, not that water. My act and deed. All of it. All of it by me. And there was a girl in the Plaza. I’m disgraced. Oh, I shall never. It’s all over. All over after to-day.”
“No, Charles. Don’t say that. You. At Springer’s Key. You can begin again there. With better men.”
“Springer’s Key will be a failure, too,” he said bitterly. “Oh, Olivia,” he added, going off into an hysterical laugh, “that water gets on my nerves. There were two upset boats, and they can’t right them.”
“Charles,” she said, frightened. “You’re hurt. You’re hit again.”
“I think my old wound has broken out,” he said.
“Lie down,” she answered, rising swiftly, to lay the relics on the table. “I’ll see to it at once. Why didn’t I think?”
“I’ll get Perrin,” he said. “Don’t you. You mustn’t. Oh, Olivia, you’ve enough without me.”
She ripped the coat of soiled linen with the scissors in her chatelaine. The old negro, coming in with chocolate, brought hot water for her. Together they dressed the wound with balsam and pitoma leaf, binding it with Indian cotton. The steward brought in fruit and bread. They ate and drank together, mechanically, not as though they wanted food.
“Olivia,” Margaret said, “you are in great sorrow. Some of it, Olivia, perhaps all of it, is due to me. I want you. I want you to feel that I feel for you. Feel deeply. Oh, my God. I’m sorry for you. You poor woman.”
“Charles,” she said, “you mustn’t think. You’ve no right. You mustn’t think that. That what has happened was due to you. Don’t, Charles. You won’t, I know. I see too clearly what happened. I see your mind, Charles, all along. I understand.” She knelt very swiftly and kissed his hand. “There,” she said, very white. “I understand.”
Margaret closed his eyes, then looked at a gleam of flame far distant, and at the blue band on the bows of Tucket’s sloop, plunging the sea into milk within hail of him.
“You were right, Olivia,” he said, in a shaking voice. “I shall never reap my plantations yonder.”
“No,” she answered. “Nor I.”
There was silence between them for a little while.
“Charles,” she added, “we both had Darien schemes.”
“Yes, Olivia.”
“They came to nothing. Because. There. We were too wild to see what, what we were building with.”
“Yes, Olivia. And you reap sorrow. And I dishonour.”
“Not that, Charles. We reap the world.”
“Ah no, Olivia. This is the end of everything. For me it is.”
“No, Charles,” she said. “We were living in one little corner of our hearts, you and I. In fool’s paradises. We were prisoners. This is not the end. We only begin here.”
He sighed, thinking of the shame of the morning’s work in Tolu. “My father’s sword,” he thought. “In that cause.”
“Charles,” she asked, “haven’t you. Something more to tell me?”
He thought for a moment, dully, wondering in his blurred brain if she wished to hear more of the battle.
“No,” he said. “No. That is the end.”
She stood up, facing him, her great eyes looking down on him.
“I must go now to the wounded,” she said softly. “Edward and the doctor will be wanting me. God bless you, Charles.”
“God bless you, Olivia. And comfort you.”
Before she left the cabin she turned and spoke again.
“He was married, Charles,” she said. “You never told me that.”
“Yes, Olivia, he was married.”
“I knew that, Charles. I saw him so clearly. With a woman with a cruel face. Oh, I knew it. It was generous of you not to tell me. But I knew all the time.”
Late that night, in the darkened cabin, Olivia leaned upon the port-sill, looking out over the rudder eddies, as they spun away in fire rings, brightening and dying. She propped the cushions at her back, so that she might rest her head. The nightmare of the past was ashes to her. That evil fire had burned out, as Tolu had burned out. The past and Tolu lay smouldering together somewhere, beyond Fuerte there, beyond the Mestizos. The embers lay red there, crusted in ash.
She had come to see clearly in the pain of her sorrow. She saw her life laid bare and judged. She saw the moral values of things. Great emotions are our high tides. They brim our natures, as a tide brims the flood-marks, bringing strangeness out of the sea, wild birds and amber. She had relics in her hand; rosebuds and a pebble, “feathers and dust.” The rosebuds had spilled their petals. She looked at them there, turning them over with her fingers, holding them to the open port to see them. There was no moon; but the great stars gave the night a kind of glimmering clearness. The sea heaved silvery with star-tracks. Fish broke the water to flame. The scutter of a settling sea-bird made a path of bright scales a few yards from her. She laid the relics on the port-sill, near the open window. Very gently she pushed the pebble into the water, leaning forward to see the gleam of its fall. One by one she pushed the rosebuds over, till they were all gone too. She watched the petals float away into the wake, chased by the sea-birds. They were out of sight in a moment, but the gulls mewed as they quarrelled over them, voices in the darkness, crying in the air aloft. Olivia leaned there, looking after them, for many minutes. Then she drew close the window and covered her eyes with her hands.
It took them five days to win back to the Samballoes. They entered Springer’s Drive a little before noon, eagerly looking out towards the anchorage. No ships lay there, no guns greeted them from the fort. Margaret and Cammock, walking the poop together, knew that Pain had been before them. A thin expanse of smoke wavered and drifted in films among the trees. When it drove down into the palms, after rising above their level, it scattered the macaws, making them cry out. The flagstaff lay prone, like a painted finger, pointing down the spit to the sea. Tucket’s sloop was fifty yards ahead of the ship, plunging in a smother. There was a cockling sea that morning, the reefs were running white, they gleamed milky for fifty yards about them. There was no other sign of life about the island. The smoke was so thin that it was like mist. The beach, which had so lately been thronged, was busy now with crabs, which scuttled and sidled, tearing at the manchineel trees. A wounded man limped down the sand and waved to them. Margaret, going in in his boat, saw that it was the seaman West.
“I been here two days, sir,” he said, “waiting for you. I been living on sapadillies. There been awful times, sir.”
“What has happened, man?”
“I came from the town, Tolu town, in one of the sloops, sir,” the man answered. “The Lively, as they called her. When we come here, Captain Pain got all the men you left, all the guard like, to sign on with him. Then he set the town on fire, and scoffed all your gear, the guns and powder and that. So I got away and hid in the wood. I was afraid they want me to join ’em, or put a knife into me. Then I saw ’em flog that Don Toro, and two other Indians. He flog ’em on the beach, and sent ’em back to the Main, sir. He said that would put all them Indians off giving you a hand in the future.”
“What a devil the man must be,” Margaret said.
“So I stayed hidden, sir, ever since, hoping no Indians would come over and find me.”
“So that’s the end,” said Margaret to himself. He would not go ashore there. He could see the ruins of his city, a mass of fallen earth, a heap of ashes, a sprouting crop blasted. He would never set foot there again. That dream had ended like the other, in savagery, in waste, in cruelty. He would let it end. The fallen gabions of the fort would soon be tangled with grasses. In three months there would be shrubs on the city site. The key would be jungle again, the Indians would be savage again, the privateers would be plundering vagabonds again. The dream was over. All that he could do now was to proceed to Jamaica, to sell his goods there, before sailing for England, a beaten man, threatened by the law.
Tucket’s men helped his crew to fill fresh water. Tucket offered to take seven of the slightly wounded men in his ship in exchange for five unhurt men from his own crew. As the men were willing to exchange, this brought the Broken Heart’s complement to twenty men; enough, at a strain, for the passage to Jamaica, if no enemy threatened and no storm arose. When the water had been filled, and the manger stacked with wood, the men gathered stores of fruit. They were ready to sail then. Margaret gave the Indian Robin enough goods to make him a chief in his own land. He made gifts to all of Tucket’s crew. To Tucket himself he gave a pair of pistols, choice weapons, made by the best artist in Paris. Tucket asked for his address, in writing.
“I shall come and look you up, one day,” he said, as he put the paper in his pocket. “I shall be coming home to set up dyer. We’ll have a great yarn, that day.”
“I shall expect you,” Margaret said. “You shall dye for me. But won’t you come home now, captain? With me?”
“No, sir,” he answered. “I want to get that green the Indians get. Then I’ll come home.”
“I’m sorry,” Margaret said. “Good-bye, then, Captain Tucket. I wonder if we shall ever meet again.”
“Well. We met. Haven’t we? We neither of us expected to.”
“Good-bye, then. Let me hear from you, if a ship is going home from here?”
“I will, indeed, sir. So long. So long, Lion.”
“So long,” said Cammock.
They were under way again, close-hauled to the breeze, going out of Springer’s Drive to the east of Caobos. All the Holandès keys were roaring with surf. The palms were bending. The smoke from the key astern trailed in a faint streamer towards the Grullos. That was the last picture which Margaret formed of the keys. The sun bright, the palms lashing, the noise of the surf like a battle, the welter of the surf like milk on the reefs. Tucket was in his sloop now, with all hands gathered on deck, their faces turned to him. The men of the Broken Heart were gathered at the hammock nettings. Margaret thought of the sadness of parting. Two men had shaken hands only a moment before. Now there was this gulf of sea between them. To-morrow they would be many miles apart; and who knew whether they would ever meet again, for all their wandering.
The bells of the ships rang out together, a furious peal. Cammock, standing on a gun, took off his hat, and called for three cheers for the sloop. The sloop’s men cheered the ship. The men of the Broken Heart answered with a single cheer. The bells rang out again, the colours dipped, the guns thundered, startling the pelicans. Tucket had turned away now, to help to secure his guns. His helmsman let the sloop go off three points. She was slipping fast away now, bound towards Zambo-Gandi. Now the figures of the men could no longer be recognized. She was hidden behind the palms of Puyadas. Tucket was gone. Margaret never saw him again.
“That breaks the neck of that,” said Cammock. “All gone, main-topgallant yard?”
“All gone, main-topgallant yard, sir.”
“Then hoist away.”
Under all sail the Broken Heart swayed seawards, treading down the rollers, creaming a track across the sea, dark now in its blueness, with crinkling wind-ruffles. When the night fell, shutting out the Main, and the stars climbed out, solemn and golden, she was in the strength of the trade, rolling to the northward, circled by the gleams of dolphins, hurrying in sudden fires.
After dark that night Margaret sat on the locker-top, looking at the wake, as it shone below him about the rudder. He was thinking over his manifold failure, feeling disgraced and stained, a defeated, broken man. Olivia entered quietly from the alleyway. He only felt her enter. There was no light in the cabin. The steward was busy with the wounded.
“Is that you, Olivia?” he asked, knowing that it was she. He felt in his heart the gladness which her presence always gave to him. Life could always be noble, he thought, with that beautiful woman in the world.
“Yes, Charles,” she answered. “I’ve been with the wounded. They’re better. How are your wounds?”
“Better, thanks. They’re always better at night.”
She drew up a chair and sat down beside him.
“Charles,” she said, “I want you not to brood. Not to grieve. That’s all over, Charles.”
“Not the dishonour,” he said. “That will never be over.”
“There is no dishonour, Charles. You failed. The only glory is failure. All artists fail. But one sees what they saw. You see that in their failure.”
“Ah. Sometimes.”
“I see that in yours, Charles.”
“Thank you, Olivia.”
“I shall always see that, Charles, when I see you.”
“My city.”
“Yes. Your city, Charles.”
“It was for you, Olivia. My city.”
“I am proud,” she said humbly.
“It failed, Olivia. It’s in ruins. Yonder.”
“Charles,” she said, kneeling, taking both his hands, hiding her face against him, “it is in my heart. That city. Our city.”
She trembled against him, drawing her breath. He held her with his unhurt arm, waiting till the dear face would lift, pale in that darkness, to the laying of the gold foundation.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
The Grant Richards edition (London, 1908) was consulted for most of the changes listed below.
Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. alleyway/alley-way, gold dust/gold-dust, etc.) have been preserved.
Alterations to the text:
Formatting: abandon the use of drop-caps.
Punctuation: quotation mark pairings/nestings and missing commas.
[Chapter III]
Change “Hands up anchor, bosum.” to bosun.
“looking aloft at the boy on the maintopgallantyard” to maintopgallant yard.
“Whereever that vague perfume lingers, something of the old” to Wherever.
[Chapter V]
“We’ll, go on with this at Accomac, Stukeley.” delete first comma.
“That man up on the yard there was once a slave in Virgina” to Virginia.
[Chapter VI]
(“It’ll annoy old Brandy-face,” he thought.) to Brandyface.
“The long chase-guns were trained athwart-ships” to athwartships.
“The table was rimmed with a patten to keep the plates from falling” to batten.
[Chapter IX]
“and so they lose, either way, But you know, Olivia, you are” change second comma to a period.
“so that the dicussion came to an end before it had well begun” to discussion.
[Chapter XI]
“Margaret knocked the lance aside with difficultly” to difficulty.
[Chapter XII]
(said another rower, “this oar’l go in the slings.) to oar’ll.
“As they pased away, crowding all sail, foaming at the bows” to passed.
[End of text]