第53章

"It is time we were away," I said, with a laugh. "If your reverence will keep your hand upon the tiller and your eye upon the gentleman whom you have made our traveling companion, I'll put up the sail."

I was on my way to the foremast, when the boom lying prone before me rose. Slowly and majestically the sail ascended, tapering upward, silvered by the moon, - the great white pinion which should bear us we knew not whither. I stopped short in my tracks, Mistress Percy drew a sobbing breath, and the minister gasped with admiration. We all three stared as though the white cloth had veritably been a monster wing endowed with life.

"Sails don't rise of themselves!" I exclaimed, and was at the mast before the words were out of my lips. Crouched behind it was a man. I should have known him even without the aid of the moon.

Often enough, God knows, I had seen him crouched like this beside me, ourselves in ambush awaiting some unwary foe, brute or human; or ourselves in hiding, holding our breath lest it should betray us. The minister who had been a player, the rival who would have poisoned me, the servant who would have stabbed me, the wife who was wife in name only, - mine were strange shipmates.

He rose to his feet and stood there against the mast, in the old half-submissive, half-defiant attitude, with his head thrown back in the old way.

"If you order me, sir, I will swim ashore," he said, half sullenly, half - I know not how.

"You would never reach the shore," I replied. "And you know that I will never order you again. Stay here if you please, or come aft if you please."

I went back and took the tiller from Sparrow. We were now in mid-river, and the swollen stream and the strong wind bore us on with them like a leaf before the gale. We left behind the lights and the clamor, the dark town and the silent fort, the weary Due Return and the shipping about the lower wharf. Before us loomed the Santa Teresa; we passed so close beneath her huge black sides that we heard the wind whistling through her rigging. When she, too, was gone, the river lay bare before us; silver when the moon shone, of an inky blackness when it was obscured by one of the many flying clouds.

My wife wrapped her mantle closer about her, and, leaning back in her seat in the stern beside me, raised her face to the wild and solemn heavens. Diccon sat apart in the bow and held his tongue.

The minister bent over, and, lifting the man that lay in the bottom of the boat, laid him at full length upon the thwart before us. The moonlight streamed down upon the prostrate figure. I think it could never have shone upon a more handsome or a more wicked man. He lay there in his splendid dress and dark beauty, Endymion-like, beneath the moon. The King's ward turned her eyes upon him, kept them there a moment, then glanced away, and looked at him no more.

"There's a parlous lump upon his forehead where it struck the thwart," said the minister, "but the life's yet in him. He'll shame honest men for many a day to come. Your Platonists, who from a goodly outside argue as fair a soul, could never have been acquainted with this gentleman."

The subject of his discourse moaned and stirred. The minister raised one of the hanging hands and felt for the pulse. "Faint enough," he went on. "A little more and the King might have waited for his minion forever and a day. It would have been the better for us, who have now, indeed, a strange fish upon our hands, but I am glad I killed him not."

I tossed him a flask. "It's good aqua vit‘, and the flask is honest.

Give him to drink of it."