Cup of Gold Read online

  “But, Mother, I must go; truly I must—and father understands. Can’t you hear how the Indies are calling to me?”

  “That I cannot! It’s wicked nonsense is in it. A little child you are, and not to be trusted from home at all. Besides, your own father is going to tell you it may not be.”

  The strong jaw of the boy set like a rock and the muscles stood out in his cheeks. Suddenly there came a flash of anger into his eyes.

  “Then, Mother, if you will not understand, I tell you that I am going the morrow—in spite of all of you.”

  Hurt pride chased incredulity from her face, and that, too, passed, leaving only pain. She shrank from the bewildering hurt. And Henry, when he saw what his words had done, went quickly to her.

  “I’m sorry, Mother—so very sorry; but why can you not let me go as my father can? I don’t want to hurt you, but I must go. Won’t you see that?” He put his arm about her, but she would not look at him. Her eyes stared blankly straight in front of her.

  She was so sure that her view was right. Throughout her life she had insulted and browbeaten and scolded her family, and they had known her little tyranny to be the outcropping of her love for them. But now that one of them, and he the child, had used the tone she spoke with every hour, it made a grim hurt that might never be quite healed again.

  “You spoke with Merlin? What did he say to you?” asked Robert from the hearth.

  Henry’s mind flashed quickly to Elizabeth. “He talked of things that are not in my belief,” he said.

  “Well—it was only a chance,” murmured Robert. “You’ve hurt your mother badly, boy,” he went on. “I’ve never seen her so—so quiet.” Then Robert straightened himself and his voice became firm.

  “I have five pounds for you, son. It’s little enough; I suppose I might give you a small matter more, but not enough to help much. And here is a letter recommending you to my brother, Sir Edward. He went out before the king was murdered, and for some reason—perhaps because he was quiet—old Cromwell has let him stay. If he is there when you come to Jamaica, you may present this letter; but it’s a cold, strange man who takes great pride in his rich acquaintance and might be a little annoyed with a poor relative. And so I do not know that good will come of this letter. He would dislike you unless you were able to see nothing funny in a man who looks like me, only strides about with a silver sword and plumes on his head. I laughed once, and he has not been a near brother to me since. But keep the letter; it may help you with other people if not with your uncle.”

  He looked at his wife sitting huddled in the shadow. “Will we not have supper, Mother?”

  She made no sign that she heard him, and Robert himself poured the pot and brought the food to the table.

  It is a cruel thing to lose a son for whom you have lived continuously. Somehow, she had imagined him always beside her—a little boy, and always beside her. She tried to think of the coming days, and Henry not there, but the thought was shattered on the bleak wall of a lean imagination. She attempted to consider him ungrateful so to run away from her; she recalled the harsh blow he had dealt her—but always the mind snapped back. Henry was her little boy, and, naturally, he could not be mean nor treacherous. In some way, when all this talk and pain had drifted into the thin air, he would be yet beside her, deliciously underfoot.

  Her mind which had been always a scalpel of reality, her imagination which dealt purely with the present outsides of things, went fondling back to the baby who had crawled and stumbled and learned to talk. She forgot that he was going away at all, so deeply was she laved in a revery of the silver past.

  He was being baptized in a long white dress. All the water of baptism collected in one big drop and rolled down his blobby nose, and she, in her passion for tidiness, wiped it off with a handkerchief and then wondered if he shouldn’t be baptized again. The young Curate was perspiring and choking over his words. He was lately come to the parish and was only a local boy anyway. He was really too young, she thought, to be trusted with an affair of this importance. Perhaps it wouldn’t take. He might get the words in the wrong order or something. And then—Robert had made a mess of his waistcoat again. He never could get the right button in the right hole to save him. It made him look all wracked to one side. She must go and tell Robert about his waistcoat before people in the church noticed it. Small things like that were surest to cause talk. But could she trust this foolish young curate not to let the baby fall while she went?

  Supper was over, and aged Gwenliana rose from the table to struggle back to her seat before the fire. Quietly she was slipping back into her friendly future.

  “What time will you be starting, the morning?” asked Robert.

  “Why, about seven, I think, father.” Henry tried to sound casual.

  The ancient woman paused in her journey and looked sharply at him.

  “Now where is Henry going?” she asked.

  “Why, don’t you know? Henry is going away from us in the morning. He is going to the Indies.”

  “And not coming back again?” she questioned anxiously.

  “Not for a time, anyway. It’s a great distance.”

  “Why, but—I must lay the future before him then, that’s what I must do—before him like the white pages of an open book,” she exclaimed in pleased excitement. “I must tell him of the future and the things in it. Let me look at you, boy.”

  Henry went to her and sat at her feet while she talked. There is truly a spell in the ancient Cumric tongue. It is a speech made for prophecy.

  “Of course,” Gwenliana said, “if I had only known of this to-day I should have got the shoulder bone of a new-killed sheep. It’s a means of greater antiquity and better thought of than just snap-prophecy. And since I have grown old and rusty and lame I cannot go about any more to meet the spirits that wander the high-road. You cannot do as well if there is not the means in you to walk among the strolling dead and listen to their thoughts. But I shall give you a thorough life, grandson, and as fine a future as I ever pondered on.”

  She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, but if one had looked closely he might have seen their glint below the lids where they peered out at the set face of the boy. A long time she sat entranced, and it seemed that her old brain combed out the tangles of the past to make a straight, tellable future. At length she spoke in the low, hoarse, chanting voice that is reserved for dread things.

  “This is the tale out of Abred, when earth and water battled. And from the impact of their clash was born a little, struggling life to squirm upward through the circles toward Gwynfyd, the sheening Purity. In that first blundering flesh is written the world’s history and the world’s journey through the Void.

  “And thou—often has Annwn set its fanged maw to entrap the little pinch of life thou carryest about, but thou hast made thy path to go around its snaring. A thousand centuries hast thou lived since earth and sea struggled in thy generation, and a thousand eons shalt thou carry about the little pinch of life that was given thee, so only thou shelterest it from Annwn, the Chaos.”

  Always she began her prophecies thus. It was a thing taught her by a wandering Bard, to whom it had come, from Bard to Bard, back and back to the white Druids. Gwenliana paused to let her words find footing in the boy’s brain. She continued:

  “This is the tale of thy present wandering. Thou shalt become a great shining for the Divine, teaching the things of God.” Her secret eyes saw the boy’s face fall in disappointment, and she cried:

  “But wait a moment! I go too far ahead. There shall be fighting and shedding of blood, and the sword shall be thy first bride.” Henry’s face lighted up with pleasure. “The whisper of thy name shall be a foregathering command to the warriors of the world. Thou shalt sack the cities of the infidel and spoil him of his plunderings. The terror will precede thee like a screaming eagle over the shields of men.” She knew, now, that her forecast was a success, but she hastened on to greater glories.

  “The governmen
t of islands and continents shall be thine, and thou shalt bring justice and peace to them. And at last, when thou art girded with honor and repute, thou shalt marry a white-souled maiden of mighty rank—a girl of good family, and wealthy,” she finished. Her eyes opened and she glanced about for their approbation.

  “I could have done better with a sheep’s shoulder,” she said plaintively, “or if I could be walking about on the high-road now and then; but age robs you of your little pleasures and leaves you with only a cold, quiet waiting.”

  “Ah, well, mother, it was a good prophecy,” said Old Robert; “as good as I ever heard you make. You are just coming to the peak of your occult strength, I think. And you have taken away my dread and reassured me about Henry’s going. Now I am only proud of what my boy is to be. Only I wish he didn’t have to kill people.”

  “Well, then—if you think it was really good!” said Gwenliana happily. “It did seem to me that the air was propitious and my eyes clear to-night. Still, I should have liked a sheep’s shoulder. ” She closed her eyes contentedly and went to dozing.

  V I

  All night Old Robert tossed nervously in his bed, and his wife lay motionless beside him. At last, when the darkness was changing to silver gray in the window, she rose quietly.

  “What? Have you not been sleeping, Mother? And where are you going?”

  “I am going to Henry, now. I must talk with him. Perhaps he will listen to me.” Only a moment she was gone, and then she returned and laid her head on Robert’s arm.

  “Henry is gone,” she said, and her whole body stiffened a little.

  “Gone? But how could he do that? Here is his first cowardice, Mother. He was afraid to say good-by to us. But I am not sorry for his fear, because it holds the sureness of his sorrow. He could not bear to hear the thing of his feeling in words.”

  “Why, Mother!” He was startled at her silence and her coldness. “He will come back to us, Mother, in a little; perhaps when the spring grass is lifting out. Surely he will come back to us. I swear it. Can’t you believe it? He is gone only for a week—a few days. Oh, believe me!

  “The years are gone from us surely, dear, and now we are as we were—do you remember?—only closer—closer of all the things that have been. We are rich with all the little pictures of the past and the things he played with. They can never go from us while life is here.”

  She did not weep nor move nor even seem to breathe.

  “Oh, my wife—Elizabeth—say that you will believe in his coming, very soon—soon—before you have missed him,” he cried wildly. “Do not lie there silently and lost. He will be here when the Spring comes in. You must believe it, dear—my dear.” Very softly he stroked the still cheek beside him with his great tender fingers.

  VII

  He had crept from the house in the false dawn, and started briskly walking on the road to Cardiff. There was a frozen, frightened thing in his heart, and a wondering whether he wanted to go at all. To his mind the fear had argued that if he waited to say good-by he would not be able to leave the stone house, not even for the Indies.

  The sky was graying as he went by pastures where he had tossed and played, and by the quarry where was the cave in which he and his friends acted the delightful game of “Robbers, ” with Henry always the Wild Wag, Twym Shone Catti, by acclamation.

  The mountains stood sharply before him, like cardboard things, and along their rims a silver fringe. A little wind of dawn blew down the slopes, fresh and sweet smelling, bearing the rich odor of moistened earth and leaves. Horses whinnied shrilly at him as he passed, then came close and gently touched him with their soft noses; and coveys of birds, feeding on belated night crawlers in the half dark, flew up at his approach with startled protests.

  By sun-up there were new miles behind him. As the yellow ball slid from behind the peaks, coloring all the tattered clouds of the mountains, Henry drew a thick curtain down against the past. The pain and loneliness that had walked with him in the dark were pushed back and left behind him. Cardiff was ahead. He was coming to new country which he had never seen before, and below the morning horizon, faint and glorious, seemed to glow the green crown of the Indies.

  He passed through villages whose names were unknown to him; friendly little clusters of rude huts, and the people staring at him as at a stranger. It was a joyous thing to young Henry. Always he had stared at others who were strangers, dreaming their destinations and the delicious mystery that sent them forth. The name of Stranger made them grand beings with mighty purposes. And now he was a stranger to be thought about and stared at with a certain reverence. He wanted to shout, “I’m on my way to the Indies,” to widen their dull eyes for them and raise their respect. Silly, spineless creatures, he thought them, with no dream and no will to leave their sodden, dumpy huts.

  The land changed. He was coming out of the mountains to a broad, unbounded country of little rolls and flat lands. He saw large burrows like the holes of tremendous gophers, and dirty black men coming out of them with sacks of coals on their backs. The miners emptied their sacks in a pile on the ground and then walked back into the burrows. He noticed that they stooped when they walked as though the heavy bags were still bearing them down.

  Mid-day came, and a long, clear afternoon, and still he trudged on. There was a new odor in the air, the sweet, compelling breath of the sea. He wanted to break into a run toward it like a thirsty horse. In the late afternoon an army of black clouds drew over the sky. A wind rushed out with snow in its breath, and the grasses bowed before it.

  Still he went on into the gathering storm until it was armed with sleet which pricked his face viciously, and until the cold went piercing through his jacket. There were occasional houses to either side of the road, but Henry would seek shelter and food at none of them. He did not know the customs of this place, nor the prices of things, and his five pounds must be intact when he came at last to Cardiff.

  At length, when his hands were blue and his face raw with the wild sleet, he crawled into a lonely, stone barn filled with the summer’s hay. It was warm, there, and quiet after the screaming of the wind in his ears. The hay was sweet with the honey dried in its stems. Henry burrowed into the soft bed and slept. It was dark night when he awakened. Half-dreaming, he remembered where he was, and at once the thoughts which he had shut from him the day before thronged back with clamoring, strident voices.

  “You are a fool,” said one. “Remember the big room and the pikes and the bright fire! Where are they now? Oh, you will not see them any more. They are gone out like things of dreams, and you do not even know where dreams go. You are a fool!”

  “No, no; listen to me! Think of me! Why did you not wait for Elizabeth? Were you afraid? Yes, you were afraid. This boy is a coward, brothers. He is afraid of a small girl with yellow hair—a tenant’s daughter.”

  A sad, slow voice broke in. “Think of your mother, Henry. She was sitting straight and still when you last saw her. And you did not go to her. You only looked from the doorway as you went. Perhaps she has died in her chair, with the look of hurt in her eyes. How can you tell? And Robert, your own father— Will you think of him, now—lonely, and sad, and lost. It’s your doing, Henry; because you wanted to go to the Indies you did not think of any one else.”

  “And what do you know of the future?” asked a tiny, fearful voice. “It will be cold, and perhaps you will freeze. Or some stranger may kill you for your money, little as it is. Such things have happened. Always there has been some one to look after you and to see that you were comfortable. Oh, you will starve! you will freeze! you will die! I am sure of it!”

  Then the noises of the barn edged in among his tormentors. The storm was past, but a breeze sighed around corners with infinite, ghostly sadness. Now and again it voiced a little wail of sorrow. There was a creaking in the hay as though every straw squirmed and tried to move stealthily. Bats flitted about in the dark gnashing their tiny teeth, and the mice were screaming horribly. Bats and mice seemed to
be glaring at him from obscurity with small, mean eyes.

  He had been alone before, but never so thoroughly alone, among new things, in a place he did not know. The terror was growing and swelling in his breast. Time had become an idling worm which crawled ahead the merest trifle, stopped and waggled its blind head, and crawled again. It seemed that hours passed over him like slow, sailing clouds while he lay shivering with fright. At last an owl flew in and circled above him, screeching maniacally. The boy’s overstrung nerves snapped, and he ran whimpering from the barn and down the road toward Cardiff.

  CHAPTER 2

  For more than a century Britain had watched with impatience while Spain and Portugal, with the permission of the Pope, divided the New World and patrolled their property to keep out interlopers. It was a bitter thing to England there imprisoned by the sea. But finally Drake had burst the barrier and sailed the forbidden oceans in his little Golden Hind. The great red ships of Spain considered Drake only a tiny, stinging fly, an annoying thing to be killed for its buzzing; but when the fly had gutted their floating castles, burned a town or two, and even set a trap for the sacred treasure train across the Isthmus, they were forced to alter their conception. The fly was a hornet, a scorpion, a viper, a dragon. They named him El Draque, and a fear of the English grew up in the New World.

  When the Armada fell before the English and the angry sea, Spain was terrified at this new force which emanated from such a very little island. It was sad to think of these bright carven ships lying on the bottom or torn to fragments on the Irish coast.

  And Britain thrust her hand into the Caribbean; a few islands came under her power—Jamaica, Barbados. Now the products of the home island could be sold in colonies. It added prestige to a little country to have colonies, provided they were strongly populated; and England began to populate her new possessions.