“Good job of yours in Panama,” the King observed. “It was better to burn it now than later, and I have no doubt we should have had to do it later.”
“I thought of that when I set the torch, Sire. These hoggish Spaniards want to overrun the world.”
“You know, Captain, piracy—or, to be delicate, free-booting—has been a good thing for us, and a bad thing for Spain. But the institution grows to be a nuisance. I spend half of my time making excuses to the Spanish Ambassador. I am going to commission you Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica.”
“Sire!”
“No thanks! I am acting on the advice of an adage. Piracy must be stopped now. These men have played at little wars long enough.”
“But, Sire, I myself was a buccaneer. Do you want me to hang my own men?”
“That is what I inferred, sir. Who can track them down better than you who know all their haunts?”
“They fought with me, Sire.”
“Ah; conscience? I had heard that you were able to do about as you pleased with your conscience.”
“Not conscience, Sire, but pity.”
“Pity is misplaced in a public servant or a robber. A man may do what it is profitable to do. You yourself have demonstrated two of these premises. Let us see you labor with the third,” the King said acidly.
“I wonder if I can.”
“If you wonder, then you can,” John Evelyn put in.
The King’s manner changed.
“Come! drink!” he said. “We must have life, and perhaps later, song. Tell us a tale, Captain, and drink while you tell it. Wine adds capitals and asterisks to a good tale—a true story.”
“A tale, Sire?”
“Surely. Some story of the colonial wenches; some little interlude in piracy—for I am sure you did not steal only gold.” He motioned a servant to keep Henry’s glass filled. “I have heard of a certain woman in Panama. Tell us about her.”
Henry drained his glass. His face was becoming flushed. “There is a tale about her,” he said. “She was pretty, but also she was an heiress. I confess, I favored her. She would inherit silver mines. Her husband offered one hundred thousand pieces of eight for her. He wanted to get his hands on the mines. Here was the question, Sire, and I wonder how many men have been confronted with one like it? Should I get the woman or the hundred thousand?”
The King leaned forward in his chair. “Which did you take? Tell me quickly.”
“I remained in Panama for a while,” said Henry. “What would Your Majesty have done in my place? I got both. Perhaps I got even more than that. Who knows but my son will inherit the silver mines eventually.”
“I would have done that,” cried the King. “You are right. I would have done just that. It was clever, sir. A toast, Captain—to foresight. Your generalship, sir, runs to other matters than warfare, I see. You have never been defeated in battle, they say; but tell me, Captain, were you ever defeated in love? It is a good scene—an unusual scene—when a man admits himself bested in love. The admission is so utterly contrary to every masculine instinct. Another glass, sir, and tell us about your defeat.”
“Not by a woman, Sire— But once I was defeated by Death. There are things which so sear the soul that the pain of it follows through life. You asked for the story. Your health, Sire.
“I was born in Wales, among the mountains. My father was a gentleman. One summer, while I was a lad, a little princess of France came to our mountains for the air. She had a small retinue, and being lively and restless and clever, she achieved some freedom. One morning I came upon her where she bathed alone in the river. She was naked and unashamed. In an hour—such is the passionate blood of her race—she was lying in my arms. Sire, in all my wanderings, in the lovely women I have seen and the towns I have taken, there has been no pleasure like the days of that joyous summer. When she could escape, we played together in the hills like little gods. But this was not enough. We wanted to be married. She would give up her rank and we would go to live somewhere in America.
“Then the Autumn came. One day she said, ‘They are ready to take me away, but I will not go.’ The next day she did not come to me. In the night I went to her window and she threw a little note to me, ‘I am imprisoned. They have whipped me.’
“I went home. What else could I do? I could not fight them, the stout soldiers who guarded her. Very late that night there was a pounding on the door and cries, ‘Where is a doctor to be had? Quick! The little princess has poisoned herself.’ ”
Henry lifted his eyes. The King was smiling ironically. John Evelyn drummed the table with his fingers.
“Yes?” said the King. “Yes?” He chuckled.
“Ah, I am old—old,” Henry moaned. “It is a lie. She was a pleasant child, the daughter of a cottager.”
He staggered to his feet and moved toward the door. Shame was burning in his face.
“Captain Morgan, you forget yourself.”
“I—forget—myself?”
“There are certain little courtesies. Custom demands that you render them to our person.”
“I plead pardon, Sire. I plead your permission to leave. I—I am ill.” He bowed himself from the room.
The King was smiling through his wine.
“How is it, John, that such a great soldier can be such a great fool?”
Said John Evelyn, “How could it be otherwise? If great men were not fools, the world would have been destroyed long ago. How could it be otherwise? Folly and distorted vision are the foundations of greatness.”
“You mean that my vision is distorted?”
“No, I do not mean that.”
“Then you imply—”
“I wish to go on with Henry Morgan. He has a knack for piracy which makes him great. Immediately you imagine him as a great ruler. You make him Lieutenant-Governor. In this you are like the multitude. You believe that if a man do one thing magnificently, he should be able to do all things equally well. If a man be eminently successful in creating an endless line of mechanical doodads of some excellence, you conceive him capable of leading armies or maintaining governments. You think that because you are a good king you should be as good a lover—or vice-versa.”
“Vice-versa?”
“That is a humorous alternative, Sire. It is a conversational trick to gain a smile—no more.”
“I see. But Morgan and his folly—”
“Of course he is a fool, Sire, else he would be turning soil in Wales or burrowing in the mines. He wanted something, and he was idiot enough to think he could get it. Because of his idiocy he did get it—part of it. You remember the princess.”
The King was smiling again.
“I have never known any man to tell the truth to or about a woman. Why is that, John?”
“Perhaps, Sire, if you would explain the tiny scratch I see under your right eye, you could understand. Now the scratch was not there last night, and it has the distinct look of—”
“Yes—yes—a clumsy servant. Let us speak of Morgan. You have a way, John, of being secretly insulting. Sometimes you are not even conscious of your insults. It is a thing to put down if you are to be around courts for any length of time.”
III
Sir Henry Morgan sat on the Judge’s Bench at Port Royal. Before him, on the floor, lay a slab of white sunlight like a blinding tomb. Throughout the room an orchestra of flies sang their symphony of boredom. The droning voices of counsel were only louder instruments against the humming obbligato. Court officials went about sleepily, and the cases moved on.
“It was the fifteenth of the month, my lord. Williamson went to the Cartwright property for the purpose of determining—determining to his own satisfaction, my lord, whether the tree stood as described. It was while he was there—”
The case sang to its monotonous conclusion. Sir Henry, behind his broad table, stirred sleepily. Now the guards brought in a sullen vagrant, clothed in rags of old sail.
“Charged with stealing four biscuits and a mirror from So-and-So, my lord.”
“The proof?”
“He was detected, my lord.”
“Did you, or did you not, steal four biscuits and a mirror?”
The prisoner’s face became even more sullen.
“I told ‘em.”
“My lord,” the guard prompted.
“My lord.”
“Why did you steal these articles?”
“I wan’ed ‘em.”
“Say my lord.”
“My lord.”
“What did you want with them?” “I wan’ed the biscuits for to eat.”
“My lord.”
“My lord.”
“And the mirror?”
“I wan’ed the mirror for to look at myself in.”