Cup of Gold Read online

  The Crag-top house was round like a low gray tower with windows letting sight on the valley and on the mountains. Some said that it was built by a beleaguered giant, centuries ago, to keep his virgins hidden while they were in that state; and others, that King Harold had fled there after Hastings to live out his life ever watching and peering, with his one eye, down the valley and over the mountains for the coming of Normans.

  Merlin was old now; his hair and long, straight beard were white and soft as spring clouds. There was much about him of an ancient Druid priest with clear, far-seeing eyes which watched the stars.

  The pathway narrowed on young Henry as he climbed. Its inward side was a stone wall cutting into the heavens knife-like, and the misshapen, vague images along the way made it seem the rock temple of some old, crude god whose worshipers were apes.

  There had been grass at first, and bushes, and a few brave, twisted trees; but upward all living things died of the rock loneliness. Far below, the farmhouses huddled like feeding bugs and the valley shrank and drew into itself.

  Now a mountain closed in on the other side of the trail, leaving only a broad chasm to the sky. A fierce, steady wind poured out of the blue heavens and shrilled toward the valley. Upward, the strewn rocks were larger and more black and dreadful— crouched guardian things of the path.

  Henry climbed tirelessly on. What could old Merlin have to tell him, or, perhaps, to give him? A lotion to make his skin tough and proof against arrows? Some charm? Words to protect him from the Devil’s many little servants? But Merlin was to talk and he to listen; and what Merlin said might cure young Henry of his yearnings, might keep him here in Cambria for always. That could not be, for there were outland forces, nameless foreign ghosts, calling to him and beckoning from across the mysterious sea.

  There was no desire in him for a state or condition, no picture in his mind of the thing to be when he had followed his longing; but only a burning and a will overpowering to journey outward and outward after the earliest risen star.

  The path broke on a top of solid stone, semi-spherical like the crown of a hat; and on the peak of its rise was the low, round house of Merlin, all fitted of irregular rough rocks, and a conical roof on it like a candle-snuffer.

  The old man met him at the door before he could knock.

  “I’m young Henry Morgan, sir, and I’m going outward from here to the Indies.”

  “Indeed, and are you? Will you come in and talk to me about it?” The voice was clear and low and lovely as a young wind crooning in a Spring-time orchard. There was the music of singing in it, the quiet singing of a man working with tools; and underneath, half-heard or completely imagined, there rang the seeming of harp strings lightly touched and left to thrill.

  The single room was thick carpeted in black, and on the walls were hung harp and spear-head, harp and spear-head, all the way around; small Welsh harps and the great bronze leaf spears of the Britons, and these against the unfinished stone. Below these were the all-seeing windows wherefrom you might look out on three valleys and a mighty family of mountains; and lower still, a single bench circled around the room against the wall. There was a table in the center loaded with tattered books, and beside it a copper brazier, set on a Greek tripod of black iron.

  The great hound nuzzled Henry as he entered so that he drew away in fright, for is there anything under the blue cup so deadly as the merest notice of a red-eared dog?

  “You are going to the Indies. Sit here, boy. See! you can watch your home valley now, so that it go not flying off to Avalon. ” The harps caught up his tones and hummed an answering faint resonance.

  “My father said I was to come here and tell you of my going and listen to your speech. My father thinks your speech may keep me here.”

  “Going to the Indies,” Merlin repeated. “Will you be seeing Elizabeth before you go and making grand promises to flutter the heart of her and strangle the breath in her, after you’re gone, from thinking of the things you will bring back to her?”

  Henry blushed deeply. “Who told you I thought at all of the little rat?” he cried. “Who is it says at all that I care for her?”

  “Oh, the wind whispered something,” said Merlin; “and then there was some word of it in your talking cheeks and your blustering just now. I think you should be speaking to Elizabeth, not to me. Your father should have known better.” His voice died away. When he spoke again it was with sad earnestness.

  “Must you leave your father, boy—and he so sure alone in the valley of men who are not like him? Yes, I think that you must go. The plans of boys are serious things and unchangeable. But what can I say to you to keep you here, young Henry? Your father sends me a task difficult to fulfill.

  “I went out on a tall Spanish ship a thousand years ago—it must be more than that, or perhaps I did not go at all and only dreamed it. We came at last on these green Indies, and they were lovely but unchanging. Their cycle is a green monotony. If you go there you must give up the year; must lose the pang of utter dread in the deep winter with its boding that the world has fled solar fealty to go careening into lonely space so that Spring may never come again. And you must lose that wild, excited quickening when the sun turns back, the joy of it flooding over you like the surge of a warm wave and choking you with pleasure and relief. No change there; none at all. Past and future mingle in an odious, eternal now.”

  “But there is no change here,” young Henry interposed. “Year on top of year are the crops put in and new calves licked by their mothers; year on top of year is a pig slaughtered and the hams smoked. Spring comes, surely, but nothing happens.”

  “True enough, blind boy; and I see that we are talking of different things.” Merlin looked out of his windows to the mountains and the valleys, and a great love for the land shone in his eyes; but when he turned back to the boy there was the look of pain in his face. His voice took on the cadence of a song.

  “I will plead with you for this dear Cambria where time is piled mountain high and crumbling, ancient days about its base,” he cried passionately. “Have you lost your love of wild Cambria that you would leave it when the blood of your thousand ancestors has gone soaking into the soil to keep it Cambria for always? Have you forgotten that you are of the Trojan race? Ah, but they wandered too, didn’t they, when Pergamus fell in?”

  Henry said, “I have lost no love, sir, but my dream is over the sea that I do not know. I know Cambria.”

  “But, boy, here great Arthur lived who drove his standards into Rome and sailed away undying to dear Avalon. And Avalon itself lies off our coasts, somewhere over the sunken cities; there it floats endlessly. And have you not heard them, Henry, the ghosts of all those good, brave, quarrelsome, inefficient men—Llew Llaw Giffes and Belerius and Arthur and Cadwallo and Brute? They walk like clouds through the land and guard it from the high places. There are no ghosts in the Indies, and no Tylwyth Teg.

  “In these wild, black hills there are a million mysteries. Have you found out the Chair of Arthur or the meaning of the circling stones? Have you heard the voices that cry out triumph in the night, and the hunters of souls with their screaming horns and their packs of blue hounds who rush into the villages on the storm?”

  “I have heard them,” said Henry, shuddering. He glanced shyly at the dog asleep on the floor and spoke in a lower tone. “The Curate says these things are lies. He says the Red Book is a book for little children before the fire and a shame for men and big boys to be believing in. He told us at church school these were lying tales, and unchristian. Arthur was an unimportant chieftain, he said, and Merlin, whose name you bear, a figment of the mad brain of Geoffrey of Monmouth. He even spoke ill of the Tylwyth Teg and of the corpse-candles, and of such as his Honor, your dog, here.”

  “Oh, the fool!” cried Merlin in disgust. “The fool to be breaking these things! And he offers instead a story given to the world by twelve collaborators with rather slovenly convictions in some matters. Why must you go, boy? Do you not see tha
t the enemies of Cambria fight no more with the sword, but with little pointed tongues?” The harps sang his question, then slowly ceased their throbbing, and there was silence in the round house.

  Henry studied the floor with drawn brows. At last he said, “There is so much bother about me. I cannot seem to talk of this thing, Merlin. I will come back. Surely I will when this burning for new things is quenched. But don’t you see that I must go, for it seems that I am cut in half and only one part of me here. The other piece is over the sea, calling and calling me to come and be whole. I love Cambria, and I will come back when I am whole again.”

  Merlin searched the boy’s face closely. Sadly he looked up at his harps. “I think I understand,” he said softly. “You are a little boy. You want the moon to drink from as a golden cup; and so, it is very likely that you will become a great man—if only you remain a little child. All the world’s great have been little boys who wanted the moon; running and climbing, they sometimes caught a firefly. But if one grow to a man’s mind, that mind must see that it cannot have the moon and would not want it if it could—and so, it catches no fireflies.”

  “But did you never want the moon?” asked Henry in a voice hushed with the room’s quiet.

  “I wanted it. Above all desires I wanted it. I reached for it and then—then I grew to be a man, and a failure. But there is this gift for the failure; folk know he has failed, and they are sorry and kindly and gentle. He has the whole world with him; a bridge of contact with his own people; the cloth of mediocrity. But he who shields a firefly in his hands, caught in reaching for the moon, is doubly alone; he only can realize his true failure, can realize his meanness and fears and evasions.

  “You will come to your greatness, and it may be in time you will be alone in your greatness and no friend anywhere; only those who hold you in respect or fear or awe. I am sorry for you, boy with the straight, clear eyes which look upward longingly. I am sorry for you, and—Mother Heaven! how I envy you.”

  Dusk was stealing into the mountain creases, filling them with purple mist. The sun cut itself on a sharp hill and bled into the valleys. Long shadows of the peaks crept out into the fields like stalking gray cats. When Merlin spoke, it was with a little laugh.

  “Do not think deeply of my words,” he said, “for I myself am not at all sure of them. Dreams you may know by a quality we call inconsistency—but how could you classify the lightning?” Now the night was closing in quickly, and Henry jumped to his feet.

  “Oh, but I must be going! The dark is in!”

  “Yes, you must go, but do not think closely of my words. I may have been trying to impress you with these words. Old men need a certain silent flattery when they have come to distrust that which is spoken. Only remember that Merlin talked with you. And if you come on the Welsh folk anywhere, singing my songs that were made so long ago, tell them that you know me; tell them that I am a glorious creature with blue wings. I don’t want to be forgotten, Henry. That is greater horror to an old man than death—to be forgotten.”

  Henry said, “I must be going now; it’s really dark. And thank you, sir, for telling me these things, but you see, I must be sailing outward to the Indies.”

  Merlin laughed softly. “Of course you must, Henry. And catch a big firefly, won’t you. Good-by, child.”

  Henry looked back once as the black silhouette of the house sank behind the crag’s shoulder, but no light had flashed behind the windows. Old Merlin sat there pleading with his harps, and they echoed him jeeringly.

  The boy quickened his steps down the path. All below was a black lake, and the farm lights stars’ reflections in its deep. The wind had died, leaving a thick silence on the hills. Everywhere the sad, soundless ghosts flitted about their haunting. Henry walked carefully, his eyes on the path which glimmered pale blue before him.

  IV

  On the path there in the dark, Henry’s mind went back to the first speech of Merlin. Should he see Elizabeth before he went sailing away? He did not like her; sometimes he thought he had discovered hatred for her, and this he nursed and warmed only to feel it grow to a desire to see her.

  She was a thing of mystery. All girls and women hoarded something they never spoke of. His mother had terrific secrets about biscuits, and cried, sometimes, for no known reason. Another life went on inside of women—some women—ran parallel to their outward lives and yet never crossed them.

  A year before, Elizabeth had been a pretty child who whispered to the other girls and giggled and pulled hair when he was about; and then suddenly she had changed. It was nothing Henry could see, exactly, but rather he felt that a deep, quiet understanding had been given her. It frightened him, this wisdom which had come all at once to Elizabeth.

  Then there was her body—different somehow from his, and capable, it was whispered, of strange pleasures and alchemies. Even this flowering body she kept a secret thing. A time ago they had gone together to swim in the river, and she had been unconscious of it; but now she covered herself carefully from him and appeared stricken with the thought that he might see. Her new character frightened and embarrassed Henry.

  Sometimes he dreamed of her, and waked in agony lest she should ever know his dream. And sometimes it was a strange, shadowy composite of Elizabeth and his mother that came to him in the night. After such a dream, the day brought loathing of himself and her. He considered himself an unnatural monster and her a kind of succubus incarnate. And he could tell no one of these things. The people would shun him.

  He thought perhaps he would like to see her before he left. There was a strange power in her this year, a drawing yet repelling power which swayed his desire like a windblown reed. Other boys might have gone to her in the night and kissed her, after they had boasted a little of their going; but then, the other boys did not dream as he did, nor did they think of her, as he sometimes did, as a loathsome being. There was surely something monstrous about him, for he could not distinguish between desire and disgust. And then, she could embarrass him so easily.

  No, certainly, he would not go to her. Where had Merlin— where had any one—caught the idea that he cared a farthing for her, the daughter of a poor tenant? Not worth bothering about!

  Footsteps were coming down the path behind him, loud clashes in the quiet night, and soon a quick, thin figure came up with him.

  “Might it be William?” Henry asked politely, while the road-mender stopped in the path and shifted his pick from one shoulder to the other.

  “It’s William right enough. And what are you doing on the path, and the dark come?”

  “I’ve been to see Merlin and to hear him talk.”

  “Pest on him! That’s all he ever does now. Once he made songs—good, sweet songs as I could repeat to you if I’d a mind to—but now he roosts up on that Crag-top like an old molted eagle. Once when I was going past I spoke to him about it, too, as I can prove by him. I’m not a man to be holding my tongue when I’ve been thinking.

  “ ‘Why are you making no more songs?’ I said to him in a tone like that. ‘Why are you making no more songs?’ ‘I have grown to be a man,’ he answered, ‘and there be no songs in a man. Only children make songs—children and idiots.’ Pest on him! It’s an idiot himself, is the thought is on me. But what did he say to you, the old white-beard?”

  “Why, you see, I’m going to the Indies and—”

  “The Indies, and are you? Ah, well—I was at London once. And all the people at London are thieves, dirty thieves. There was a man with a board and little flat sticks on it. ‘Try your skill, friend?’ he says. ‘What stick has a black mark on the underside of it?’ ‘That one,’ says I; and so it was. But the next time—Ah, well, he was a thief, too; all of them thieves.

  “People there are at London, and they do nothing but drive about and about in carriages, up one street and down another, bowing to each other, while good men sweat out their lives in the fields and the mines to keep them bowing there. What chance have I or you, say, with all the fine, soft p
laces taken up by robbers? And can you tell me the thieving price of an egg at London?”

  “I must take this road now,” said Henry. “I must go home.”

  “Indies.” The road-mender sighed with longing. Then he spat in the trail. “Ah, well—I’ll stake it’s all thieves there, too.”

  The night was very black when Henry came at last to the poor hut where Elizabeth lived. There was a fire in the middle of the floor, he knew, and the smoke drifted up and tried to get out at a small hole in the thatch. The house had no flooring, but only rushes strewn on the packed ground, and when the family slept they wrapped themselves in sheepskins and lay in a circle with their feet to the fire.

  The windows were not glazed nor curtained. Henry could see old black-browed Twym and his thin, nervous wife, moving about inside. He watched for Elizabeth to pass the window, and when at last she did, he whistled a shrill bird-call. The girl stopped and looked out, but Henry was quiet in the dark. Then Elizabeth opened the door and stood framed against the inside light. The fire was behind her. Henry could see the black outline of her figure through her dress. He saw the fine curve of her legs and the swell of her hips. A wild shame filled him, for her and for himself. Without thought and without reason he ran away into the dark, gasping and almost sobbing under his breath.

  V

  Old Robert looked up hopefully when the boy came into the room, and then the hope died away and he turned quickly to the fire. But Mother Morgan jumped from her seat and went angrily to Henry.

  “What is this foolishness? You going to the Indies!” she demanded.