“Ah, well! It could not last. The gods slay happiness in jealousy. Nothing good can last. A gang of bastard sailors roved through the land and carried me off—a little boy to be sold for a slave in the Indies. It was a bitter thing to lose Elizabeth—a bitter thing the years cannot forget.” And he was weeping softly by her side.
Paulette was bewildered by the change in him. She stroked his hair and his eyes, until his breath came more calmly. Then she began again, with almost helpless patience, like a teacher questioning a dull child.
“But—do you love Paulette?”
He leaped up and glared at her.
“You? Love you? Why, you are just a little animal! a pretty little golden animal, for sure, but a form of flesh— no more. May one worship a god merely because he is big, or cherish a land which has no virtue save its breadth, or love a woman whose whole realm is her flesh? Ah, Paulette! you have no soul at all! Elizabeth had a white winged soul. I love you—yes—with what you have to be loved—the body. But Elizabeth—I loved Elizabeth with my soul.”
Paulette was puzzled.
“What is this soul?” she asked. “And how may I get one if I have not one already? And where is this soul of yours that I have never seen it or heard it at all? And if they cannot be seen, or heard, or touched, how do you know she had this soul?”
“Hush!” he cried furiously. “Hush! or I box your mouth and have you whipped on the cross. You speak of things beyond you. What can you know of love that lies without your fleshly juggling?”
VI
Christmas came to the Hot Tropics, the fourth Christmas of Henry’s servitude. And James Flower brought him a small box done up with colored string.
“It is a gift of the season,” he said, and his eyes sparkled with delight while Henry untied the package. There was a little teakwood box, and in it, lying on the scarlet silk of its lining, the torn fragments of his slavery. Henry took the shreds of paper from the box and stared at them, and then he laughed unsteadily and put his head down on his hands.
“Now you are no longer a servant, but my son,” the planter said. “Now you are my son, whom I have taught strange knowledges—and I shall teach you more, far more. We will live here always and talk together in the evenings.”
Henry raised his head.
“Oh! but I cannot, cannot stay. I must be off a-buccaneering.”
“You—you cannot stay? But, Henry, I have planned our life. You would not leave me here alone.”
“Sir,” said Henry, “I must be off a-buccaneering. Why, in all my years it has been the one aim. I must go, sir.”
“But, Henry, dear Henry, you shall have half my plantation, and all of it when I am dead—if only you will stay with me.”
“That may not be,” young Henry cried. “I must be off to make me a name. It is not given that I live a planter. Sir, there are plannings in my head that have grown perfect with pondering. And nothing may be allowed to interfere with them.”
James Flower slumped forward in his chair.
“It will be very lonely here without you. I don’t quite know what I shall do without you.”
Henry’s mind carried him back to that old time, with Robert smiling into the fire and saying these same words—“It will be so lonely here without you, son.” He wondered if his mother still sat coldly upright and silent. Surely she would have got over it. People always got over the things they feared so much. And then he thought of small Paulette who would be crying with terror in her hut when he told her.
“There is a little servant girl,” he said; “little Paulette. I have protected her. And if I have ever pleased you, will you do these things for me? Always, always keep her in the house and never let her be sent to the fields, nor whipped, nor bred with any of the blacks. Will you do these things for me surely?”
“Of course I will,” James Flower said. “Ah, but it has been good to have you here, Henry—good to hear your voice in the evening. What will I do in the evening now? There is none to take your place, for you have very truly been my son. It will be lonely here without you, boy.”
Said Henry, “The toiling I have done in your service has been more than repaid with the knowledge you have poured into my ears these same evenings. And I shall miss you, sir, more than I can say. But can’t you understand? I must go a-buccaneering and take a Spanish town, for the thought is on me that if a man planned carefully, and considered his chances and the men he had, the thing might well be done. I have studied the ancient wars, and I must be making a name for myself and a fortune. Then, when I have the admiration of men, perhaps I shall come back to you, sir, and we may sit and talk again in the evenings. You will remember my wish about Paulette?”
“Who is Paulette?” the planter asked.
“Why, the servant girl I mentioned. Never let her go with the slaves, because I am fond of her.”
“Ah, yes! I remember! And where do you go now, Henry?”
“To Jamaica. My uncle, Sir Edward, has long been Lieutenant-Governor there in Port Royal. But I have never seen him—well, because I was a bond-servant, and he is a gentleman. I have a letter to him that my father gave me years past. Perhaps he will help me to buy a ship for my plundering.”
“I would help you buy a ship. You have been very good to me,” the planter said hopefully.
Now Henry was dipped in a kind of shame, for in the box under his bed there glistened a pile of golden coins—over a thousand pounds.
“No,” he said, “no; I have more payment in your teaching and in the father you have been to me than money could ever equal.” Now he was going, Henry knew that he had grown to love this red-faced, wistful man.
Strong, glistening blacks pulled at the oars of the canoe, and it went skimming toward an anchored ship, a ship commissioned by the States-General to carry black slaves from Guinea to the islands. James flower, sitting in the canoe’s stern, was very red and very silent. But as they neared the ship’s side, he lifted up his head and spoke pleadingly to Henry.
“There are books on the shelves that you have never read.”
“I shall come back, one day, and read them.”
“There are things in my mind I have never told you, boy.”
“When I have the admiration of men, I shall come to you and you shall tell them to me.”
“You swear it?”
“Well—yes, I swear.”
“And how long will it take you to do these things, Henry?”
“I cannot tell; one year—or ten—or twenty. I must make a very admirable name.” Henry was climbing over the ship’s side.
“I shall be lonely in the evenings, son.”
“And I, too, sir. Look! we cast off! Good-by, sir. You will remember Paulette?”
“Paulette?—Paulette?—Ah, yes; I remember.”
VII
Henry Morgan came to the English town of Port Royal and left his baggage on the beach while he went looking for his uncle.
“Do you know where I may find the Lieutenant-Governor?” he asked in the streets.
“His Palace is yonder, young man, and who knows he may be in it.”
His Palace—it was like a British gentleman become an official far from home. It was like the man Robert Morgan had described. His letters dated from the Palace of the Lieutenant-Governor. Henry found the Palace, a low grubby house with walls of whitewashed mud and a roof of red tiles badly molded. There was a gaudy halberdier standing at the door, holding his great, ineffectual weapon rigidly before him, the while he maintained a tortured decorum in the face of a swarm of enemy flies.
The halberd lowered across the pathway as Henry approached.
“I am looking for Sir Edward Morgan.”
“What do you wish with His Excellency?”
“Why, you see, sir, he is my uncle, and I wish to speak with him.”
The soldier scowled suspiciously and stiffened his hold on the halberd. Then Henry remembered his lessons of the plantation. Perhaps this man, for all his red coat, might be something of a slave.
“Get out of my way, you damned pup,” he cried. “Get out of my way or I’ll see you hanged.”
The man cowered and almost dropped his weapon. “Yes, sir. I’ll send your word, sir.” He blew a little silver call, and when a servant in green lace came to the door, he said: