“Perhaps we should be resting here,” he said. “The men are exhausted.”
“But no. We must go on and go on,” Coeur de Gris replied. “If we stop here, the men will only be weaker when we start again.”
Henry Morgan mused: “I wonder why you are so avid in my mission. You move forward when even I begin to doubt myself. What is it that you expect to find in Panama, Coeur de Gris?”
“I expect to find nothing,” the young man said. “Are you trying to trap me into a statement of disloyalty? I know the prize is yours before we arrive. I admit it, sir. But, you see, I am like a great, round stone set in motion down a hill, so much reason have I for going to Panama. You, sir, set me in motion.”
“It is strange that I should so want Panama,” Henry said.
The flushed face of the lieutenant turned on him in anger.
“You do not want Panama. It is the woman you want, not Panama.” His voice was as bitter as his words, and now he was pressing his palms against his temples.
“It is true,” the captain murmured. “It is true that I want the woman; but that is still more strange.”
“Strange?” Wild resentment broke out in Coeur de Gris. He shouted, “Strange? Why is it strange to be lusting after a woman who is known to be beautiful? Would you call each one of these men strange, or every male thing on earth strange? Or are you endowed with a godlike lust? Do you bear the body of a Titan? Strange! Yes, surely, my Captain; copulation and its contemplation are things completely unique among men!”
Henry Morgan was bewildered, but there was a little terror in him also. He seemed to have witnessed the walking of a loathsome, unbelievable ghost. Could it be that these men felt as he did?
“But I think there is more than lust,” he said. “You cannot understand my yearning. It is as though I strove for some undreamed peace. This woman is the harbor of all my questing. I do not think of her as a female thing with arms and breasts, but as a moment of peace after turmoil, a perfume after rancid filth. Yes, it is strange to me. When I consider the years that are gone away, I am bewildered at my activity. I went to mighty trouble for silly, golden things. I did not know the secret which makes the earth a huge chameleon. My little wars seem the scrambling of a person strange to me, a person who did not know the ways of making the world change color. I mourned, in the old time, when each satisfaction died in my arms. Is it any wonder they all died? I did not know the secret. No, you cannot understand my yearning.”
Coeur de Gris was grasping his aching temples between his hands. “I do not understand!” he cried scornfully. “Do you think I do not understand? I know; to your mind your feelings are new things, discoveries of fresh importance. Your failures are unprecedented. This gigantic conceit will not allow you to believe that this Cockney behind you—yes, he who sometimes rolls on the ground in fits—might have the same hopes and despairs as yourself. You cannot believe that these men feel as deeply as you do. I suppose it would surpass your wildest thought if I should say I want the woman as much as you do, or that I could be telling sweet sentences to La Santa Roja, perhaps, better than you could.”
Captain Morgan had flushed under the lash of words. He did not believe it. It was monstrous to think that these men could feel as he did. Such a comparison made him, somehow, unworthy.
“You wonder why I say these things?” Coeur de Gris continued. “I will tell you. The pain has made me mad, and I am going to die.” He walked on silently for a little distance, then suddenly he screamed and fell heavily to the ground.
For a full minute Captain Morgan looked at him. Then a great, harsh wave seemed to break forth in his chest. He knew that minute how much he had come to love the young lieutenant, knew that he could not bear to lose young Coeur de Gris. Now he had dropped to his knees beside the silent figure.
“Water!” he cried to the nearest buccaneer, and when the fellow only stared at him: “Water! bring water—water!” His hand was hysterically jerking at a pistol in his belt. They brought him water in a hat. All the pirates saw their cold captain kneeling on the ground, stroking the damp, shining hair of Coeur de Gris.
The young man’s eyes opened slowly and he tried to rise.
“I am sorry, sir. The pain in my head, you know—The sun sucked out my wits. But you must get up, sir! The men will lose respect for you if they see you kneeling here.”
“Lie still, boy! Lie quietly! You must not move yet. I am afraid. In a moment I thought you were dead, and all the world shriveled. Lie quietly! Now I am glad. You must not move. Now we will take the Cup of Cold together, and it shall be a chalice of two handles.” He lifted Coeur de Gris and carried him to the shade of a huge tree. The buccaneers rested on the ground while their lieutenant regained his strength.
Coeur de Gris was leaning back against the tree. He was smiling at the captain with a queer womanish affection.
“Am I like the Cockney?” Henry Morgan asked a little wistfully; “like the Cockney with fits?”
Coeur de Gris laughed.
“You know nothing at all about the man. You might be proud to resemble him. I will tell you, for I know that to you he is only a figure of wood to take orders. The man’s name is Jones. All his life he has wanted to be a preacher of the Gospel. He thought his fits were visitations of the Holy Ghost, testing him for some divine mission. Once he stood on a corner and spoke to the people of London, and the watch came upon him as he talked. The law took him as a vagrant and shipped him to the islands.
“This Jones, after his term was done, became a pirate to keep from starving. There was a division of spoil from a raid, and to his share fell a woman slave, a Spaniard with Negro blood. He married her to save her reputation. He did not know how little was left to save. You see, sir, his wife is a Catholic. She will not let him read the Bible when he is at home. And do you know, sir, he truly believes that thievish circumstance has robbed him of success; not success as you and I know it, but the success that comes of God’s especial favor. He imagines he might have been a Protestant Savonarola.”
“But his fits—” said Henry Morgan. “His horrible fits— I have seen them.”
Again the young man laughed.
“The fits? Ah, the fits are a gift—an heirloom.”
“And you think he feels?”
“Yes, perhaps he does. Remember, he married her to save her name, and kept her with him when he found what that name was. And you will see him bashfully claim a crucifix at the division of spoil. He will take her a crucifix from Panama. Think, man! He is a Separatist from the church. He abhors crucifixes!”
III
Onward the buccaneers drove themselves toward Panama. They had eaten leather and bitter jungle roots, rodents and snakes and monkeys. Their cheeks were shallow cups under their cheek bones; their eyes glittered with fever. Now that their enthusiasm was gone, they were dragged onward by the knowledge of their captain’s infallibility. Morgan could not fail because he never had failed. Surely he had a plan which would put the gold of the New World in their pockets. And the word gold, though it had lost its meaning of reality, was more important than the word hunger.
On the eighth morning a scout came to Captain Morgan.
“The way is blocked, sir. They have thrown up a little earthwork in front of us and mounted cannons.”
At a command, the head of the wriggling column swung to the left and began to gnaw its way through thicker underbrush. In the evening they came to the top of a small, round hill, and there below them was Panama laved in the golden light of the western sun. Each man searched his neighbors’ face to be assured that this was not his own personal hallucination.
One pirate moved to the hill’s edge. He stopped still and shouted crazily, and then his companions saw him running down the hill, dragging at his sword as he ran. A herd of cattle was feeding in the hollow below them, left there by some blundering Spaniard. In a moment the whole fourteen hundred men were stampeding down the hill. They killed the cows with their swords; they lunged and slashed at the frightened animals. Soon, very soon, the blood was dripping down the beards of the famished men, the red drops falling on their shirts. During that night they gorged themselves into unconsciousness.