IV
A yellow dawn crept out of the little painted hills of Panama and grew bolder as it edged across the plain. The sun flashed up from behind a peak, and its golden rays sought for their city. But Panama had died, had felt the quick decay of fire in one red night. But then, as the sun is a fickle sphere, the seeking beams found joy in the new thing. They lighted on the poor ruins, peered into upturned dead faces, raced along the cluttered streets, fell headlong into broken patios. They came to the white Palace of the Governor, leaped through the windows of the audience chamber, and fingered the golden heap on the floor.
Henry Morgan was asleep in the serpent chair. His purple coat was draggled with the mud of the plain. The gray-clad rapier lay on the floor beside him. He was alone in this room, for all the men who had helped to pick the city’s bones during the night had gone away to drink and to sleep.
It was a high, long room, walled with panels of polished cedar. The beams of the ceiling were as black and heavy as old iron. It had been a court of justice, a place of wedding feasts, the hall where ambassadors were toasted or murdered. One door opened on the street; the other, a broad, arched opening, let into a lovely garden about which the palace lay curled. In the middle of the garden a little marble whale spouted its steady stream into a pool. There were giant plants in red glazed pots, plants with purple leaves and flowers whose petals bore arrow heads or hearts or squares in cardinal. There were shrubs, lined with harsh tracery in the mad colors of the jungle. A monkey no larger than a rabbit picked over the gravel of the path, looking for seeds.
On one of the stone seats of the garden a woman was sitting. She pulled a yellow flower to bits while she sang fragments of a tender, silly song—“I would pluck the flower of the day for you, my love, where it grows in the dawning.” Her eyes were black, but opaque. They were the rich, sheening, shallow black of a dead fly’s wings, and under the lids there were sharp little lines. She could draw up the under lids of her eyes so that they shone with laughter, though her mouth remained harsh and placid. Her skin was very pale, her hair straight and black as obsidian.
Now she looked at the sun’s inquisitive light, and now at the arched doorway of the Hall of Audience. Her singing stopped. She listened intently a moment, then started the gentle song again. There was no other sound save the distant cracklings of the fire which still burned among the palm slave huts on the outskirts of the city. The little monkey came at a funny, crooked gallop along the path. He stopped in front of the woman and raised his black paws above his head as though in prayer.
The woman spoke softly to him. “You have learned your lesson well, Chico. Your teacher was a Castilian with a fearful mustache. I am well acquainted with him. Do you know, Chico, he wants what he considers my honor. He will not be satisfied until he has added my honor to his own, and then he will be almost boastful. You have no idea of the size and weight of his honor even as it is. But you would be satisfied with a nut, wouldn’t you, Chico?” She dropped a piece of her flower to the tiny beast, whereupon he seized it, put it in his mouth, and spat in disgust.
“Chico! Chico! you forget your teacher! That is all wrong. You will get no woman’s honor by it. Place the flower over your heart, kiss my hand with a loud snapping sound, and then stride off like a fierce sheep out searching for wolves.” She laughed and glanced again toward the doorway. Although there was no sound, she rose and walked quickly toward the Hall of Audience.
Henry Morgan had turned slightly in his chair, and his turning allowed the sunlight to beat upon his eyelids. Suddenly he sat up and stared about him. He looked with satisfaction at the heap of treasure on the floor, then gazed full in the eyes of the woman standing under the broad arch.
“And have you ruined our poor city enough for your satisfaction?” she asked.
“I did not burn the city,” Henry said quickly. “Some of your Spanish slaves set the torch.” The words had been forced from him. He remembered that he was surprised. “Who are you?” he demanded.
She moved a step into the hail. “My name is Ysobel. It was said that you sought me.”
“Sought you?”
“Yes. I have been called La Santa Roja by certain young idiots,” she said.
“You—the Red Saint?”
He had prepared a picture in his mind, a picture of a young girl with blue, seraphic eyes that would fall before the steady stare of a mouse. These eyes did not fall. Under their soft black surfaces they seemed to be laughing at him, making light of him. This woman’s face was sharp, almost hawk-like. She was beautiful, truly, but hers was the harsh, dangerous beauty of lightning. And her skin was white—not pink at all.
“You are the Red Saint?”
He was not prepared for this change of idea. He was staggered at such a revolt against his preconceptions. But, said his mind, twelve hundred men and more had broken their way through the jungle, had dashed on the city like a brutal wave. Hundreds of humans had died in the agony of wounds, hundreds were crippled, the Cup of Gold was a ruin; and all these things had been done that Henry Morgan might take La Santa Roja. With all this preparation, it must be certain that he loved her. He would not have come if he had not loved her. Whatever the shock of her appearance, he could not circumvent the logic that he loved her. It must be so. Always he had thought of the “Saint” in her name; and now he perceived the reason for the adjective. But a queer feeling was seeping in on him—no logical feeling at all. He remembered such sensations from a time long gone; he was drawn, yet repelled by this woman, and he felt her power to embarrass him. Morgan closed his eyes, and the figure of a slender little girl with golden hair stood in the darkness of his brain.
“You are like Elizabeth,” he said, in the dull monotone of one dreaming. “You are like, and yet there is no likeness. Perhaps you master the power she was just learning to handle. I think I love you, but I do not know. I am not sure.”
His eyes had been half closed, and when he opened them there was a real woman before him, not the wraithlike Elizabeth. And she was gazing at him with curiosity, and perhaps, he thought, with some affection. It was queer that she had come to him when no one had forced her to come. She must be fascinated. He reached into his memory for the speeches he had built on his way across the isthmus.
“You must marry me, Elizabeth—Ysobel. I think I love you, Ysobel. You must come away with me and live with me and be my wife, under the protection of my name and of my hand.”
“But I am already married,” she interposed; “quite satisfactorily married.”
He had even foreseen this. During the nights of the march he had planned this campaign as carefully as he might have planned a battle.
“But is it right that two, meeting and flaming white fire, should go apart for stark eternity, should trudge off into bleak infinity; that each of these two should bear black embers of a flame that has not burned itself to death? Is there anything under heaven to forbid us this burning? Heaven has given the deathless oil; each of us carries a little torch for the other. Ah, Ysobel—deny it, or shrink from the intruding knowledge if you will. You would vibrate to my touch like the fine body of an old violin.
“You are afraid, I think. There is in your mind a burrowing apprehension of the world; the prying world, the spiteful world. But do you not be fearsome, for I say to you that this world is a blind, doddering worm, knowing three passions only—jealousy, curiosity, and hate. It is easy to defeat the worm, so only you make the heart a universe to itself. The worm, having no heart, cannot conceive the workings of a heart. He lies confounded by the stars of this new system.
“Why do I tell you these things, Ysobel—knowing you will understand them? You must understand them. Perhaps I know by the dark, sweet music of your eyes. Perhaps I can read the throbbing heartbeats on your lips. Your beating heart is a little drum urging me to battle with your fears. Your lips are like twin petals of a red hibiscus.
“And if I find you lovely, am I to be put in fear by a dull circumstance? May I not speak my thought to you whom it most concerns next to myself? Do not let us go apart bearing black embers of a flame that has not burned itself to death.”
When he had started to speak she listened carefully to his words, and then a little pain had flitted across her face; but when he had done there was only amusement in her eyes—that and the lurking ridicule under their surfaces. Ysobel laughed softly.
“You forget only one thing, sir,” she said. “I do not burn. I wonder if I shall ever burn again. You do not carry a torch for me—and I hoped you did. I came this morning to see if you did. And I have heard your words so often and so often in Paris and Cordova. I am tired of these words that never change. Is there some book with which aspiring lovers instruct themselves? The Spanish men say the same things, but their gestures are more practiced, and so a little more convincing. You have much to learn.”
She was silent. Henry looked at the floor. His amazement had raised a fog of dullness in his brain.
“I took Panama for you,” he said plaintively.
“Ah—yesterday I hoped you did. Yesterday I dreamed you had, but today—I am sorry.” She spoke softly and very sadly.
“When I heard of you and your blustering up and down the ocean, I thought of you, somehow, as the one realist on an earth of vacillation. I dreamed that you would come to me one day, armed with a transcendent, silent lust, and force my body with brutality. I craved a wordless, reasonless brutality. The long thought of it bore me up when I was paraded by my husband. He did not love me. He was flattered with the thought that I loved him. It gave him importance and charm in his own eyes, neither of which were his. He would take me through the streets and his eyes would say, ‘See what I have married! No ordinary man could marry such a woman; but then, I am not an ordinary man.’ He was afraid of me—a little man, and afraid of me. He would say, ‘With your permission, my dear, I shall exercise the prerogative of a husband.’ Ah, the contempt I have for him!
“I wanted force—blind, unreasoning force—and love not for my soul or for some imagined beauty of my mind, but for the white fetish of my body. I do not want softness. I am soft. My husband uses scented lotions on his hands before he touches me, and his fingers are like thick, damp snails. I want the crush of hard muscles, the delicious pain of little hurts.”
She searched his face closely, as though looking once more for a quality which had been lost.
“I thought richly of you once, you grew to be a brazen figure of the night. And now—I find you a babbler, a speaker of sweet, considered words, and rather clumsy about it. I find you are no realist at all, but only a bungling romancer. You want to marry me—to protect me. All men, save one, have wanted to protect me. In every way I am more able to protect myself than you are. From the morning of my first memory I have been made sick with phrases. I have been dressed in epithets and fed endearments. These other men, like you, would not say what they wanted. They, like you, felt it necessary to justify their passion in their own eyes. They, like you, must convince themselves, as well as me, that they love me.”
Henry Morgan had sunk his head, seemingly in shame. Now he started toward her.
“But I will force you then,” he cried.
“It is too late—I would perforce think of you standing there, declaiming your considered words. While you wrenched at my clothing, I would picture you fawning before me, blurting out your words. And I should laugh, I’m afraid. I might even protect myself—and you, who should be somewhat an authority on rape, must know the consequence of that. No, you have failed—and I am sorry of your failure.”
“I love you,” he said miserably.
“You speak as though it were some new, tremendous thing. Many men have loved me; hundreds have said they did. But what are you going to do with me, Captain Morgan? My husband is in Peru, and my inheritance is there also.”
“I—I do not know.”
“But am I to be a slave—a prisoner?”
“Yes; I must take you away with me. The men would laugh at me, else. It would ruin discipline.”
“If I must be a slave,” she said, “if I must go away from my own country, I hope I shall be your slave—yours or the property of a charming young buccaneer I met last night. But I do not think you will take me, Captain Morgan. No; I do not think you will force me to go, for I will, perhaps, twist the knife I have already in your breast.”
Henry Morgan was aroused.
“Who was this young buccaneer?” he asked crossly.
“Ah, you perceive the knife,” said Ysobel. “And how do I know the fellow? But he was charming, and I should like to see him again.”
The captain’s eyes were flaming with rage.
“You will be locked up,” he said harshly. “You will remain in a cell until the time when we go again to Chagres. And we shall see whether this knife you speak of is sharp enough to keep you here in Panama.”
As she followed him across the garden to her jail, her clear laughter rang out. “Captain Morgan, it has just occurred to me—I have begun to see that a great many different kinds of men make the same kind of husband.”
“Get to your cell,” he ordered her.
“Oh—and Captain Morgan, you will find an old woman on the steps of the palace. My duenna, she is. Send her to me, please. And now, goodbye for the time, sir; I must get to my devotions. The sin to be dissolved, Captain Morgan, is truthfulness. It is a bad thing for the soul, truthfulness.”
He went slowly back to his chair in the Hall of Audience. He was filled with a kind of shame for his manhood. It was as though she had plucked his rapier from its scabbard and scratched his face with it while he stood helpless before her. She had beaten him without apparent effort. Now he quailed before the knowledge of his men’s laughter when they discovered his embarrassment. There would be snickering when his back was turned. Groups of pirates would be silent as he passed, and when he had gone they would break into sharp laughter. This hidden ridicule was terrifying to Henry Morgan. His hates began to raise their heads; hatreds not for Ysobel, but for his own men who would laugh at him; for the people of Tortuga who would tell the story in the taverns; for the whole Indian Coast.
Now from the little prison across the garden came a shrill voice praying to the Virgin. The penetrating sound charged the whole palace with a fervent cacophony. Henry Morgan listened with shame-sharpened ears for mockery in the words or in the tone, but there was no mockery. Over and over, a shrill Ave Maria; the tone of a fearful, pleading sinner—Ora pro nobis. A shattered world, and the black skeleton of a golden city—Ora pro nobis. No mockery at all, but brokenhearted repentance reading its poor testimony on the dropping beads. A shrill woman’s voice, piercing, insistent—it seemed to be digging at a tremendous, hopeless sin. She had said it was the sin of truthfulness. “I have been honest in my being, and that is a black lie on the soul. Forgive my body its humanity. Forgive my mind which knows its limitations. Pardon my soul for being anchored this little time to both. Ora pro nobis.”
The mad, endless rosary cankered in Henry’s brain. At last he seized his rapier and his hat and ran from the hall into the street. Behind him the treasure lay smiling under the slanting sun.
The streets about the Governor’s Palace had not been touched by the fire. Captain Morgan walked along the paved way until he came to the ways of ruin. Here blackened walls had spilled their stones into the road. Those houses which had been made of cedar were vanished into the frames of smoking ashes which marked their places. Here and there lay murdered citizens grinning their last agony into the sky.
“Their faces will be black before the night,” Henry thought. “I must have them removed or the sickness will come.”
Dallying clouds of smoke still arose from the city, filling the air with the sickly odor of damp things burning. The green hills beyond the plain seemed incredible to Henry Morgan. He regarded them closely and then looked back at the city. This destruction which had seemed so complete, so awful, during the night, was, after all, a pitifully small and circumscribed destruction. Henry had not thought of the hills remaining green and standing. This conquest, then, was more or less unimportant. Yes, the city was in ruins. He had destroyed the city, but the woman who had drawn him to the Cup of Gold eluded him. She escaped while she still lay in his power. Henry winced at his impotence, and shuddered that other people should know it.
A few buccaneers were poking about in the ashes, looking for melted plate which might have escaped the search of the night before. Turning a corner, Henry came upon the little Cockney Jones, and saw him quickly thrust something into his pocket. A flame of rage arose in Captain Morgan. Coeur de Gris had said that there was no difference between this epileptic dwarf and Henry Morgan. No difference, indeed! This man was a thief. The rage changed to a fearful lust to hurt the little man, to outrage him, to hold him up to scorn as Henry Morgan had been scorned. The cruel desire made the captain’s lips grow thin and white.
“What have you in your pocket?”
“Nothing—nothing, sir.”
“Let me see what you have in your pocket.” The captain was pointing a heavy pistol.
“It’s nothing, sir—only a little crucifix! I found it.” He drew out a golden cross studded with diamonds, and on it a Christ of ivory. “You see, it’s for my wife,” the Cockney explained.
“Ah! for your Spanish wife!”
“She’s half Negro, sir.”
“You know the penalty for concealing spoil?”
Jones looked at the pistol and his face grayed. “You would not—Oh, sir, you would not—” he began chokingly. Then he seemed to be clutched by invisible, huge fingers. His arms dropped stiffly to his sides, his lips sagged open, and a dull, imbecilic light came into his eyes. There was a little foam on his lips. His whole body twitched like a wooden dancing figure on a string.
Captain Morgan fired.
For a moment the Cockney seemed to grow smaller. His shoulders drew in until they nearly covered his chest, like short wings. His hands clenched, and then the whole contracted mass fell to the ground, convulsing like a thick, animate jelly. His lips drew back from his teeth in a last idiot snarl.
Henry Morgan stirred the body with his foot, and a change stirred in his mind. He had killed this man. It was his right to kill, to burn, to plunder—not because he was ethical nor even because he was clever, but because he was strong. Henry Morgan was the master of Panama and all its people. There was no will in Panama save Henry Morgan’s will. He could slaughter every human in the country if he so chose. All this was true. No one would deny it. But in the palace back there was a woman who held his power and his will in contempt, and her contempt was a stronger weapon than his will. She fenced at his embarrassment and touched him at her convenience. But how could that be? he argued. No one was master in Panama but himself, and he had just killed a man to prove it. Under the battering of his arguments the power of Ysobel waned and slowly disappeared. He would go back to the palace. He would force her as he had promised. This woman had been treated with too much consideration. She did not realize the significance of slavery, nor did she know the iron of Henry Morgan.
He turned about and walked back toward the palace. In the Hall of Audience he threw off his pistols, but the gray rapier remained at his side.
Ysobel was kneeling before a holy picture in her little whitewashed cell when Henry Morgan burst upon her. The dried duenna shrank into a corner at the sight of him, but Ysobel regarded him intently, noted his flushed face, his half-closed, fierce eyes. She heard his heavy breathing, and with a smile of comprehension rose to her feet. Her laughter rang banteringly as she drew a pin from her bodice and assumed the position of a fencer. One foot forward, her left arm held behind her for balance, the pin pointed before her like a foil.
“En garde!” she cried. Then the captain rushed at her. His arms encircled her shoulders and his hands were tearing at her clothing. Ysobel stood quite still, but one hand darted about with its pin—striking, striking—like a small white serpent. Little spots of blood appeared on Henry’s cheeks, on his throat.
“Your eyes next, Captain,” she said quietly, and stabbed him thrice on the cheekbone. Henry released her and stepped away, wiping his bloody face with the back of his hand. Ysobel laughed at him. A man may beat—may subject to every violation—a woman who cries and runs away, but he is helpless before one who stands her ground and only laughs.
“I heard a shot,” she said. “I thought perhaps you had killed someone to justify your manhood. But your manhood will suffer now, will it not? Word of this encounter will get about somehow; you know how such things travel. It will be told that you were beaten with a pin in the hands of a woman.” Her tone was gloating and cruel.
Henry’s hand slipped to his side, and the lean rapier crept from its sheath like a frozen serpent. The light licked viciously along its lank blade. At last the needle point came out, and the steel turned and pointed at the woman’s breast.
Ysobel grew sick with terror. “I am a sinner,” she said. Then a dawning relief came into her face. She motioned the aged duenna to her and spoke in rapid, clattering Spanish.
“It is true,” said the old woman. “It is true.”
At the end of her speaking, Ysobel thriftily drew aside the webby lace of her mantilla that it might not be spotted with blood. The duenna began interpreting.
“Sir, my mistress says that a true Catholic who dies at the hand of an infidel goes to heaven. This is true. Further, she says that a Catholic woman who dies protecting her holy marriage vow goes straightway to heaven. This also is true. Lastly, she thinks that such a woman might, in course of time, be canonized. Such things have happened. Ah, sir! Captain, be kind! Permit me to kiss her hand, now, before you strike. What grace to have kissed the hand of a living saint! It may do much for my own sinful soul.”
Ysobel spoke to her again.
“My mistress bids you strike; more, she urges it, pleads for the blow. The angels are hovering about her head. She sees the great light, and the holy music is sounding in her ears.”
The rapier point lowered. Henry Morgan turned away and gazed out into the sunlit garden. Little Chico came galloping along the path and sat down in the open doorway. The little beast clasped his paws and raised them above his head as though in prayer. The lean rapier made a sharp swishing sound as it drove into its scabbard. And Captain Morgan stooped to pick up the tiny monkey. He walked away stroking Chico’s head with his forefinger.