Sir John Constantine by Prosper Paleologus Constantine

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Billy Priske's eyes had grown round in his head. Mr. Badcock, after
sitting in thought for a full minute, observed that the incident was
peculiar in many respects.

"Is that the end of the yarn?" I asked.

"I never met the lady again," confessed Mr. Fett. "As for the
story," he added with a sigh, "I am accustomed to have it
disbelieved. Yet let me tell you this. On my return I related it to
the company, who received it with various degrees of incredulity--all
but a youthful stroller who had joined us at Banbury and earned
promotion, on the strength of his looks, from 'walking gentleman' to
what is known in the profession as 'first lover.' On the strength of
this, again, he had somewhat hastily aspired to the hand of our
leading tragedy lady--a mature person, who knew her own mind.
My narrative seemed to dispel the atmosphere of gloom which had hung
about him for some days; and the next morning, having promised to
accompany his betrothed on a stroll up the river bank, he left the
inn with a light, almost jaunty, tread. From the balcony I watched
them out of sight. By-and-by, however, I spied a figure returning
alone by the towpath; and, concealing myself, heard young Romeo in
the courtyard carelessly demanding of the ostler the loan of a spade.
From behind my curtain I watched him as again he made his way up the
shore with the implement tucked under his arm. I waited in a
terrible suspense. Each minute seemed an hour. A thunderstorm
happening to break over the river at this juncture (as such things
do), the scene lacked no appropriate accessory. At length, between
two flashes of lightning, I perceived in the distance my two turtles
returning, and gave voice to my relief. They were walking side by
side, but no longer arm-in-arm. Young Romeo hung his head
dejectedly: and on a closer view the lady's garments not only dripped
with the storm but showed traces of earth to the waist. The rest
they kept to themselves. I say no more, save that after the
evening's performance (of 'All for Love') young Romeo came to me and
announced that his betrothal was at an end. They had discovered (as
he put it) some incompatibility of temper."

My father and Nat Fiennes had finished their game and come forward in
time to hear the conclusion of this amazing narrative. Billy Priske
stared at his master in bewilderment.

"A spade!" growled Billy, mopping his brow and letting his gaze
travel around the horizon again before settling, in dull wrath, on
Mr. Fett. "What's the use, sir, of makin' a man feel like a villain
and putting thoughts into his head without means to fulfil 'em?"

"Sit you quiet," said my father, "while I try to drive Mr. Fett's
story out of your head with an honester one."

"About a spade, master?"

"There is a spade in the story."

MY FATHER'S STORY OF THE SHIPWRECKED LOVERS.

"In the year 1416 a certain Portuguese sea-captain, Gonsalvez Zarco
by name, and servant of the famous Henry of Portugal, was cruising
homeward in a leaky caravel from a baffled voyage in search of the
Fortunate Islands. He had run into a fog off Cape Blanco in Africa,
and had been pushing through it for two days when the weather lifted
and the look-out spied a boat, empty but for one man, drifting a mile
and more to leeward. Zarco ran down for the boat, and the man, being
brought aboard, was found to be an escaped Moorish prisoner on his
way back to Spain. He gave his name as Morales, and said that he had
sometime been a pilot of Seville, but being captured by the Moors off
Algeciras, had spent close on twenty years in servitude to them.
In the end he and six other Christians had escaped in a boat of their
own making, but with few victuals. When these were consumed his
companions had perished one by one, horribly, and he had been sailing
without hope, not caring whither, for a day and a night before his
rescue came.

"Now this much he told them painfully, being faint with fasting and
light-headed: but afterwards falling into a delirium, he let slip
certain words that caused Captain Zarco to bestow him in a cabin
apart and keep watch over him until the ship reached Lagos, whence he
conveyed him secretly and by night to Prince Henry, who dwelt at that
time in an arsenal of his own building, on the headland of Sagres.
There Prince Henry questioned him, and the old man, taken by
surprise, told them a story both true and wonderful.

"In his captivity he had made friends with a fellow prisoner, an
Englishman named Prince or Prance (since dead, after no less than
thirty years of servitude), who had fallen among the Moors in the
manner following. In his youth he had been a seaman, and one day in
the year 1370 he was standing idle on Bristol Quay when a young
squire accosted him and offered to hire him for a voyage to France,
naming a good wage and pressing no small share of it upon him as
earnest money. The ship (he said, naming her) lay below at Avonmouth
and would sail that same night. Prince knew the ship and her master,
and judged from the young squire's apparel and bearing that here was
one of those voluntary expeditions by which our young nobles made it
a fashion to seek fame at the expense of our enemies the French; a
venture dangerous indeed but carrying a hopeful chance of high
profits. He agreed, therefore, and joined the ship a little after
nightfall. Toward midnight arrived a boat with our young squire and
one companion, a lady of extreme beauty, who had no sooner climbed
the ship's side than the master cut the anchor-cable and stood out
for sea.

"The names of these pretty runaways were Robert Machin and Anne
d'Arfet, wife of a sour merchant of Bristol; and all their care was
to flee together and lose all the world for love. But they never
reached France; for having run prosperously down Channel and across
from the Land's End until they sighted Ushant, they met a
north-easterly gale which blew them off the coast; a gale so blind
and terrible and persistent that for twelve days they ran before it,
in peril of death. On the thirteenth day they sighted an island,
where, having found (as they thought) good anchorage, they brought
the ship to, and rowed the lady ashore through the surf.
Between suffering and terror she was already close upon death.

"Now this man Prince said that 'though the seamen laid their peril at
her door, holding the monstrous storm to be a judgment direct from
Heaven upon her sin, yet not one of them, considering her childish
beauty, had the heart to throw her an ill word or so much as an
accusing look: but having borne her ashore they built a tabernacle of
boughs and roofed it with a spare sail for her and for her lover, who
watched beside her till she died.

"On the morning of her death the seamen, who slept on the beach at a
little distance, were awakened by a terrible cry: whereat, gazing
seaward--as a seaman's first impulse is--they missed all sight of
their ship. Either the gale, reviving, had parted her moorings and
blown her out to sea, or else the two or three left on board her
treacherously slipped her cable. At all events, no more was ever
heard of her.

"The seamen supposed then that Master Machin had called out for the
loss of the ship. But coming to him they found him staring at the
poor corpse of his lady; and when they pointed to sea he appeared to
mark not their meaning. Only he said many times, 'Is she gone?
Is she gone?' Whether he spoke of the ship or of the lady they could
not tell. Thereafter he said nothing, but turned his face away from
all offers of food, and on the fifth day the seaman buried him beside
his mistress and set up a wooden cross at their heads.

"After this (said Prince), finding no trace of habitation on the
island, and being convinced that no ship ever passed within sight of
it, the seamen caught and killed four of the sheep which ran wild
upon the cliffs, and with the flesh of them provisioned the boat in
which they had come ashore, and took their leave. For eleven days
they steered as nearly due east as they could--that being the quarter
in which they supposed the mainland to lie, until a gale overtook
them, and, drowning the rest, cast four of them alive on the coast
near Mogador, where the Moors fell on them and sold them into
slavery, to masters living wide apart. Yet, and howsoever the others
perished, in the mouth of this one man the story lived and came after
many days to ears that understood it.

"For Prince Henry, hearing the pilot's tale, believed verily that
this must be the island for which his sea-captains had been
searching, and in 1420 sent Zarco forth again to seek it, with the
old man on board. They reached Porto Santo, where they heard of a
dark line visible in all clear weather on the southern horizon, and
sailing for it through the fogs, came to a marshy cape, and beyond
this cape to high wooded land which Morales recognized at once from
his fellow-prisoner's description. Yes, and bringing them to shore
he led them, unerring, to the wooden cross above the beach; and
there, over the grave of these lovers, Zarco took seizin of the
island in the name of King John of Portugal, Prince Henry, and the
Order of Christ.

"From this," my father concluded, "we may learn, first, that human
passion, of all things the most transient, may be stronger and more
enduring than death; of all things the unruliest and most deserving
to be chastened, it may rise naked from the scourge to claim the
homage of all men; nay, that this mire in which the multitude wallows
may on an instant lift up a brow of snow and challenge the Divinity
Himself, saying, 'We are of one essence, Shall not I too work
miracles?' Secondly--"

"Your pardon, master," put in Billy, "but in all the fine speeches
about Love and War and suchlike that I've heard you read out of books
afore now, I could never make out what use they be to common fellows
like myself. Say 'tis a battle: you start us off with a shout, which
again starts off our betters a-knocking together other folks' heads
and their own: but afterwards, when I'm waiting and wondering what
became of Billy Priske, all the upshot is that some thousand were
slaughtered and maybe enough to set some river running with blood.
Likewise with these seamen, that never ran off with their neighbours'
wives, but behaved pretty creditable under the circumstances, which
didn't prevent their being spilt out of boats and eaten by fishes or
cast ashore and barbecued by heathen Turks--a pretty thing this Love
did for them, I say. And so to come to my own case, which is where
this talk started, I desire with all respect, master, that you will
first ease my mind of this question--be I in love, or bain't I?"

"Surely, man, _you_ must know that?"

Billy shook his head. "I've what you might call a feeling t'wards
the woman: and yet not rightly what you might call a feeling, nor yet
azactly, as you might say, t'wards her. And it can't be so strong as
I reckoned, for when she spoke the word 'marriage' you might ha'
knocked me down with a straw."

"Eh?" put in Mr. Fett, "was she the first to mention it?"

"Me bein' a trifle absent-minded, maybe, on that point," explained
Billy. His gaze happening to wander to the wheel, encountered
Captain Jo Pomery's; and Captain Jo, who had been listening, nodded
encouragement.

"Speakin' as a seafarin' man and the husband o' three at one time and
another," said he, "they always do so."

"My Artemisia," said Mr. Badcock, "was no exception; though a
powerful woman and well able to look after herself."

"'Tis their privilege," agreed Captain Pomery. "You must allow 'em a
few."

"But contrariwise," Billy resumed, "it must be stronger than I
reckoned, for here I be safe, as you may say, and here I should be
grateful; whereas I bain't, and, what's more, my appetite's failin'.
Be you goin' to give me something for it?" he asked, as Mr. Badcock
dived a hand suddenly into a tail pocket and drew forth what at first
appeared to be the neck of a bottle, but to closer view revealed
itself as the upper half of a flute. A second dive produced the
remainder.

"Good Lord! Badcock has another accomplishment!" ejaculated Mr. Fett.

"The gift of music," said Mr. Badcock, screwing the two portions of
the instrument together, "is born in some. The great Batch--John
Sebastian Batch, gentlemen--as I am credibly informed, composed a
fugue in his bed at the tender age of four."

"He was old enough to have given his nurse warning," said Mr. Fett.

"With me," pursued Mr. Badcock, modestly, "it has been the result of
later and (I will not conceal the truth, sirs) more assiduous
cultivation. This instrument"--he tapped it affectionately--"came to
me in the ordinary way of trade and lay unredeemed in my shop for no
less than eight years; nor when exposed for sale could it tempt a
purchaser. 'You must do something with it,' said my Artemisia--an
excellent housewife, gentlemen, who wasted nothing if she could help
it. I remember her giving me the same advice about an astrolabe, and
again about a sun-dial corrected for the meridian of Bury St.
Edmunds. 'My dear,' I answered, 'there is but one thing to be done
with a flute, and that is to learn it.' In this way I discovered
what I will go no further than to describe as my Bent."

Mr. Badcock put the flute to his lips and blew into it. A tune
resulted.

"But," persisted Billy Priske, after a dozen bars or so, "the latest
thing to be mentioned was my appetite: and 'tis wonderful to me how
you gentlemen are letting the conversation stray, this afternoon."

"The worst of a flute," said Mr. Badcock, withdrawing it from his
lips with obvious reluctance, "and the objection commonly urged by
its detractors, is that a man cannot blow upon it and sing at the
same time."

"I don't say," said Billy, seriously, "as that mayn't be a reas'nable
objection; only it didn't happen to be mine."

"You have heard the tune," said Mr. Badcock. "Now for the words--

"I attempt from love's sickness to fly, in vain,
Since I am myself my own fever and pain."

"Bravo!" my father cried. "Mr. Badcock has hit it. You are in love,
Billy, and beyond a doubt."

"Be I?" said Billy, scratching his head. "Well, as the saying is,
many an ass has entered Jerusalem."

CHAPTER XI.

WE FALL IN WITH A SALLEE ROVER.

"We laid them aboard the larboard side--
With hey! with ho! for and a nonny no!
And we threw them into the sea so wide,
And alongst the Coast of Barbary."
_The Sailor's Onely Delight_.

My father, checked in the midst, or rather at the outset, of a
panegyric upon love, could not rest until he had found an ear into
which to deliver it; but that same evening, after the moon had risen,
drew Nat aside on the poop, and discharged the whole harangue upon
him; the result being that the dear lad, who already fancied himself
another Rudel in quest of the Lady of Tripoli, spent the next two
days in composing these verses, the only ones (to my knowledge) ever
finished by him:

NAT FIENNES' SONG TO THE UNDISCOVERED LADY.

"Thou, thou, that art
My port, my refuge, and my goal,
I have no chart,
No compass but a heart
Trembling t'ward thee and to no other pole.

"My star! Adrift
On seas that well-nigh overwhelm,
Still when they lift
I strain toward the rift,
And steer, and hold my courage to the helm.

"With ivory comb,
Daylong thou dalliest dreaming where
The rainbow foam
Enisles thy murmuring home:
Home too for me, though I behold it ne'er!

"Yet when the bird
Is tired, and each little wave,
Aloft is heard
A call, reminds thee gird
Thy robe and climb to where the summits rave:

"Yea, to the white
Lone sea-mark shaken on the verge--
'What of the night?'
Ah, climb--ah, lift the light!
Ah, lamp thy lover labouring in the surge!

"Fray'd rope, burst sail,
Drench'd wing, as moth toward the spark--
I fetch, I fail,
Glad only that the gale
Breaks not my faith upon the brutal dark.

"Be it frost or fire,
Thy bosom, I believed it warm:
I did aspire
For that, and my desire--
Burn thou or freeze--fought thro' and beat the storm.

"Thou, thou, that art
My sole salvation, fixed, afar,
I have no chart,
No compass but a heart
Hungry for thee and for no other star."

"Humph!" said I, by way of criticism, when these verses were shown to
me. "Where be the mackerel lines, Captain Jo? There's too much
love-talk aboard this ship of yours."

"Mackerel?" said Captain Jo. "Why, where's your bait?"

"You shall lend me an inch off your pipe-stem," said I, and, to tease
Nat, began to hum the senseless old song:

"She has ta'en a siller wand
An' gi'en strokes three,
An' chang'd my sister Masery
To a mack'rel of the sea.
And every Saturday at noon
The mack'rel comes to me,
An' she takes my laily head
An' lays it on her knee,
An' kames it wi' a kame o' pearl,
An' washes it i' the sea--"

"Mackerel?" said Captain Pomery. "If ye found one fool enough to
take hold at the rate we're sailing, ye'd pull his head off."

"Why, then, he would be off his head," answered I: "and there are
plenty here to make him feel at home."

In truth I was nettled; jealous, as a lad in his first friendship is
quick to be. Were not Nat and I of one age? Then why should he be
leaving thoughts we might share, to think of woman? I had chafed at
Oxford against his precocious entanglements. Here on shipboard his
propensity was past a joke; with no goose in sight to mistake for a
swan, he must needs conjure up an imaginary princess for his
devotion. What irritated most of all was his assuming, because I had
not arrived at his folly, the right to treat me as a child.

South and across the Bay of Biscay the weather gave us a halcyon
passage; the wind falling lighter and lighter until, within ten
leagues of Gibraltar, we ran into a flat calm, and Captain Pomery's
face began to show his vexation.

The vexation I could understand--for your seaman naturally hates calm
weather--but scarcely the degree of it in a man of temperament so
placid. Hitherto he had taken delight in the strains of Mr.
Badcock's flute. Suddenly, and almost pettishly, he laid an embargo
on that instrument, and moreover sent word down to the hold and
commanded old Worthyvale to desist from hammering on the ballast.
All noise, in fact, appeared to irritate him.

Mr. Badcock pocketed his flute in some dudgeon, and for occupation
fell to drinking with Mr. Fett; whose potations, if they did not
sensibly lighten the ship, heightened, at least, her semblance of
buoyancy with a deck-cargo of empty bottles. My father put no
restraint upon these topers.

"Drink, gentlemen," said he; "drink by all means so long as it amuses
you. I had far rather you exceeded than that I should appear
inhospitable."

"Magnifshent old man," Mr. Fett hiccuped to me confidentially,
"_an'_ magnifshent liquor. As the song shays--I beg your pardon, the
shong says--able 'make a cat speak an' man dumb--

"Like 'n old courtier of the queen's
An' the queen's old courtier--"

Chorus, Mr. Bawcock, _if_ you please, an', by the way, won't mind my
calling you Bawcock, will you? Good Shakespearean word, bawcock:
euphonious, too--

"Accomplisht eke to flute it and to sing,
Euphonious Bawcock bids the welkin ring."

"If," said Mr. Badcock, in an injured tone and with a dark glance aft
at Captain Pomery, "if a man don't _like_ my playing, he has only to
say so. I don't press it on any one. From all I ever heard, art is
a matter of taste. But I don't understand a man's being suddenly
upset by a tune that, only yesterday, he couldn't hear often enough."

Out of the little logic I had picked up at Oxford I tried to explain
to him the process known as _sorites_; and suggested that Captain
Pomery, while tolerant of "I attempt from Love's sickness to fly" up
to the hundredth repetition, might conceivably show signs of tiring
at the hundred-and-first. Yet in my heart I mistrusted my own
argument, and my wonder at the skipper's conduct increased when, the
next dawn finding us still becalmed, but with the added annoyance of
a fog that almost hid the bowsprit's end, his demeanour swung back to
joviality. I taxed him with this, in my father's hearing.

"I make less account of fogs than most men," he answered. "I can
smell land; which is a gift and born with me. But this is no weather
to be caught in anywhere near the Sallee coast; and if we're to lose
the wind, let's have a good fog to hide us, I say."

He went on to assure us that the seas hereabouts were infested with
Moorish pirates, and to draw some dismal pictures of what might
happen if we fell in with a prowling Sallateen.

With all his fears he kept his reckoning admirably, and we
half-sailed, half-drifted through the Strait, and so near to the Rock
of Gibraltar that, passing within range of it at the hour of
reveilly, we heard the British bugles sounding to us like ghosts
through the fog. Captain Pomery here was in two minds about
laying-to and waiting for a breeze; but a light slant of wind
encouraged him to carry the _Gauntlet_ through. It bore us between
the invisible strait, and for a score of sea-miles beyond; then, as
casually as it had helped, it deserted us.

Day broke and discovered us with the Moorish coast low on our
starboard horizon. To Mr. Fett and Mr. Badcock this meant nothing,
and my father might have left them to their ignorance had he not in
the course of the forenoon caught them engaged upon a silly piece of
mischief, which was, to scribble on small sheets of paper various
affecting narratives--as that the _Gauntlet_ was sinking, or
desperately attacked by pirates, in such and such a latitude and
longitude--insert them in empty bottles, and commit them to the
chances of the deep. The object (as Mr. Fett explained it) being to
throw Billy Priske's sweetheart off the scent. For two days past he
had been slyly working upon Billy's fears, and was relating to him
how, with two words, a Moorish lady had followed Gilbert a Becket
from Palestine to London, and found him there--when my father,
attracted by the smell of pitch, strolled forward and caught Mr.
Badcock in the act of sealing the bottles from a ladle which stood
heating over a lamp. In the next five minutes the pair learnt that
my father could lose his temper, and the lesson visibly scared them.

"Your pardon, sir," twittered Mr. Fett. "'Twas a foolish joke, I
confess."

"I may lend some point to it," answered my father grimly, "by telling
you what I had a mind to conceal, that you stand at this moment at no
far remove from one of the worst dangers you have playfully invented.
The wind has dropped again, as you perceive. Along the coast yonder
live the worst pirates in the world, and with a glass we may all but
discern the dreadful barracks in which so many hundreds of our
fellow-Christians lie at this moment languishing. Please God we are
only visible from the hill-country, and coast tribes may miss to
descry us! For our goal lies north and east, and to fail of it would
break my heart. But 'twere a high enterprise for England some day to
smoke out these robbers, and I know none to which a Christian man
could more worthily engage himself."

Mr. Badcock shivered. "In our parish church," said he, "we used to
take up a collection for these poor prisoners every Septuagesima.
Many a sermon have I listened to and wondered at their sufferings,
yet idly, as no doubt Axminster folk would wonder at this plight of
mine, could they hear of it at this moment."

"My father, his wrath being yet recent, did not spare to paint our
peril of capture and the possible consequences in lively colours; but
observing that Nat and I had drawn near to listen, he put on a
cheerfuller tone.

"He will turn all this to the note of love, and within five minutes,"
I whispered to Nat, "or I'll forfeit five shillings."

My father could not have heard me; yet pat on the moment he rose to
the bet as a fish to a fly.

"Yet love," said he, "love, the star of our quest, has shone before
now into these dungeons, these dark ways of blood, these black and
cruel hearts, and divinely illuminated them; as a score of histories
bear witness, and among them one you shall hear."

THE STORY OF THE ROVER AND THE LORD PROVOST'S DAUGHTER.

"In Edinburgh, in the Canongate, there stands a tenement known as
Morocco Land, over the second floor of which leans forward, like a
figure-head, the wooden statue of a Moor, black and naked, with a
turban and a string of beads; and concerning this statue the
following tale is told.

"In the reign of King James or King Charles I.--I cannot remember
which--there happened a riot in Edinburgh. Of its cause I am
uncertain, but in the progress of it the mob, headed by a young man
named Andrew Gray, set fire to the Lord Provost's house. The riot
having been quelled, its ringleaders were seized and cast into the
Tol-booth, and among them this Andrew Gray, who in due course was
brought to judgment, and in spite of much private influence (for he
came of good family) condemned to die. Before the day of execution,
however, his friends managed to spirit him out of prison, whence he
fled the country; and so escaped and in time was forgotten.

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