Sir John Constantine by Prosper Paleologus Constantine

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Then, as the ketch heaved and heaved again in the light of the flames
that ran up the tarry rigging, at one stride the dawn was on us; with
no flush of sunshine, but with a grey, steel-coloured ray that cut
the darkness like a sword. I had managed to hoist myself again to
the bowsprit, and, straddling it, had time in one glance aft to take
in the scene of ruin. Yet in that glance I saw it--the yawning hole,
the upheaved jagged deck-planks, the dark bodies hurled to right and
left into the scuppers--by three separate lights: by the yellow light
of the flames in the rigging, by the steel-grey light of dawn, and by
a sudden white-hot flush as the lightning ripped open the belly of
heaven and let loose the rain. While I blinked in the glare, the
mizzen-mast crashed overside. I cannot tell whether the lightning
struck and split it, or whether, already blasted by the explosion, it
had stood upright for those few seconds until a heave of the swell
snapped the charred stays and released it. Nay, even the dead beat
of the rain may have helped.

In all my life I have never known such rain. Its noise drowned the
thunderclap. It fell in no drops or threads of drops, but in one
solid flood as from a burst bag. It extinguished the blaze in the
rigging as easily as you would blow out a candle. It beat me down
prone upon the bowsprit, and with such force that I felt my ribs
giving upon the timber. It stunned me as a bather is stunned who,
swimming in a pool beneath a waterfall, ventures his head into the
actual cascade. It flooded the deck so that two minutes later, when
I managed to lift my head, I saw the bodies of two Moors washed down
the starboard scuppers and clean through a gap in the broken
bulwarks, their brown legs lifting as they toppled and shot over the
edge.

No wind had preceded the storm. The lightning had leapt out of a
still sky--still, that is, until jarred and set vibrating by the
explosion. But now, as the downpour eased, the wind came on us with
a howl, catching the ship so fierce a cuff, as she rolled with
mainsail set and no way on her, that she careened until the sea ran
in through her lee scuppers, and, for all the loss of her
mizzen-mast, came close to being thrown on her beam ends.

While she righted herself--which she began to do but slowly--I leapt
for the deck and ran aft, avoiding the jagged splinters, in time to
catch sight of my father's head and shoulders emerging through the
burst hatchway.

"Hullo!" he sang out cheerfully, lifting his voice against the wind.
"God be praised, lad! I was fearing we had lost you."

"But what has happened?" I shouted.

Before he could answer a voice hailed us over stern, and we hurried
aft to find Billy Priske dragging himself towards the ship by the
raffle of mizzen-rigging. We hoisted him in over the quarter, and
he dropped upon deck in a sitting posture.

"Is my head on?" he asked, taking it in both hands.

"You are hurt, Billy?"

"Not's I know by," answered Billy, and stared about him.
"What's become o' the brown vermin?"

"They seem to have disappeared," said my father, likewise looking
about him.

"But what on earth has happened?" I persisted, catching him by the
shoulder and shouting in his ear above the roar of a second sudden
squall.

"I--blew up--the ship. Captain wouldn't listen--academical fellows,
these skippers--like every one else brought up in a profession.
So I mutinied and blew--her--up. He's wounded, by the way."

"Tell you what," yelled Billy, staggering up, "we'll be at the bottom
in two shakes if somebody don't handle her in these puffs.
Why, where's the wheel?"

"Gone," answered my father. "Blown away, it appears."

"_And_ she don't right herself!"

"Ballast has shifted. The gunpowder blew it every way. Well,
well--poor old John Worthyvale won't mourn it. I left him below past
praying for."

"Look here, Master Prosper," shouted Billy. "If the ship won't steer
we must get that mains'l in, or we're lost men. Run you and cast off
the peak halliards while I lower! The Lord be praised, here's Mike,
too," he cried, as Mike Halliday appeared at the hatchway, nursing a
badly burnt arm. "Glad to see ye, Mike, and wish I could say the
same to poor Roger. The devils knifed poor Roger, I reckon."

"No, they did not," said my father, in a lull of the wind.
"They knocked him on the back of the head and slid his body down the
after-companion. The noise of him bumping down the ladder was what
first fetched me awake. He's a trifle dazed yet, but recovering."

"'Tis a short life he'll recover to, unless we stir ourselves."
Billy clutched my father's arm. "Look 'ee, master! See what they
heathens be doin'!"

"We have scared 'em," said my father. "They are putting about."

"_Something_ has scared 'em, sure 'nough. But if 'tis from us they
be in any such hurry to get away, why did they take in a reef before
putting the helm over? No, no, master: they know the weather
hereabouts, and we don't. We've been reckonin' this for a
thunderstorm--a short blow and soon over. They know better, seemin'
to me. Else why don't they tack alongside and finish us?"

"I believe you are right," said my father, after a long look to
windward.

"And I'm sure of it," insisted Billy. "What's more, if we can't
right the ballast a bit and get steerage way on her afore the sea
works up, she'll go down under us inside the next two hours.
There's the pumps, too: for if she don't take in water like a basket
I was never born in Wendron parish an' taught blastin'. Why, master,
you must ha' blown the very oakum out of her seams!"

My father frowned thoughtfully. "That's true," said he; "I have been
congratulating myself too soon. Billy, in the absence of Captain
Pomery I appoint you skipper. You have an ugly job to face, but do
your best."

"Skipper, be I? Then right you are!" answered Billy, with a cheerful
smile. "An' the first order is for you and Master Prosper here to
tumble below an' heft ballast for your lives. Be the two specimens
safe?"

"Eh?" It took my father a second, maybe, to fit this description to
Messrs. Badcock and Fett. "Ah, to be sure! Yes, I left them safe
and unhurt."

"What's no good never comes to harm," said Billy. "Send 'em on deck,
then, and I'll put 'em on to the pumps."

We left Billy face to face with a job which indeed looked to be past
hope. The wheel had gone, and with it the binnacle; and where these
had stood, from the stump of the broken mizzen-mast right aft to the
taffrail, there yawned a mighty hole fringed with splintered
deck-planking. The explosion had gutted after-hold, after-cabin,
sail-locker, and laid all bare even to the stern-post. `Twas a
marvel the stern itself had not been blown out: but as a set-off
against this mercy--and the most grievous of all, though as yet we
had not discovered it--we had lost our rudder-head, and the rudder
itself hung by a single pintle.

"Nevertheless," maintained my father, as we toiled together upon the
ballast, "I took the only course, and in like circumstances I would
venture it again. The captain very properly thought first of his
ship: but I preferred to think that we were in a hurry."

"How did you contrive it?" I asked, pausing to ease my back, and
listening for a moment to the sound of hatchets on deck.
(They were cutting away the tangle of the mizzen rigging.)

"Very simply," said he. "There must have been a dozen hammering on
the after-hatch, and I guessed they would have another dozen looking
on and offering advice: so I sent Halliday to fetch a keg of powder,
and poured about half of it on the top stair of the companion.
The rest Halliday took and heaped on a sea-chest raised on a couple
of tables close under the deck. We ran up our trains on a couple of
planks laid aslant, and touched off at a signal. There were two
explosions, but we timed them so prettily that I believe they went
off in one."

"They did," said I.

"My wits must have been pretty clear, then--at the moment.
Afterwards (I don't mind confessing to you) I lay for some minutes
where the explosion flung me. In my hurry I had overdone the dose."

We had been shovelling for an hour and more. Already the ship began
to labour heavily, and my father climbed to the deck to observe the
alteration in her trim. He dropped back and picked up his shovel
again in a chastened silence. In fact, deputy-captain Priske (who
had just accomplished the ticklish task of securing the rudder and
lashing a couple of ropes to its broken head for steering-gear) had
ordered him back to work, using language not unmixed with
objurgation.

For all our efforts the _Gauntlet_ still canted heavily to leeward,
and as the gale grew to its height the little canvas necessary to
heave-to came near to drowning us. Towards midnight our plight grew
so desperate that Billy, consulting no one, determined to risk all--
the unknown dangers of the coast, his complete ignorance of
navigation, the risk of presenting her crazy stern timbers to the
following seas--and run for it. At once we were called up from the
hold and set to relieve the half-dead workers at the pumps.

All that night we ran blindly, and all next day. The gale had
southerned, and we no longer feared a lee-shore: but for forty-eight
hours we lived with the present knowledge that the next stern wave
might engulf us as its predecessor had just missed to do. The waves,
too, in this inland sea, were not the great rollers--the great kindly
giants--of our Atlantic gales, but shorter and more vicious in
impact: and, under Heaven, our only hope against them hung by the two
ropes of Billy's jury steering-gear.

They served us nobly. Towards sunset of the second day, although to
eye and ear the gale had not sensibly abated, and the sea ran by us
as tall as ever, we knew that the worst was over. We could not have
explained our assurance. It was a feeling--no more--but one which
any man will recognize who has outlived a like time of peril on the
sea. We did not hope again, for we were past the effort to hope.
Numb, drenched, our very skins bleached like a washerwoman's hands,
our eyes caked with brine, our limbs so broken with weariness of the
eternal pumping that when our shift was done, where we fell there we
lay, and had to be kicked aside--we had scarcely the spirit to choose
between life and death. Yet all the while we had been fighting for
life like madmen.

Towards the close of the day, too, Roger Wearne had made shift to
crawl on deck and bear a hand. Captain Pomery lay in the huddle of
the forecastle, no man tending him: and old Worthyvale awaited
burial, stretched in the hold upon the ballast.

At whiles, as my fingers cramped themselves around the handle of the
pump, it seemed as though we had been fighting this fight, tholing
this misery, gripping the verge of this precipice for years upon
years, and this nightmare sat heaviest upon me when the third morning
broke and I turned in the sudden blessed sunshine--but we blessed it
not--and saw what age the struggle had written on my father's face.
I passed a hand over my eyes, and at that moment Mr. Fett, who had
been snatching an hour's sleep below--and no man better deserved it--
thrust his head up through the broken hatchway, carolling--

"To all you ladies now at land
We men at sea indite,
But first would have you understand
How hard it is to write:
Our paper, pen, and ink and we
Roll up and down our ships at sea,
With a fa-_la_-LA!"

"Catch him!" cried my father, sharply; but he meant not Mr. Fett.
His eyes were on Billy Priske, who, perched on the temporary
platform, where almost without relief he had sat and steered us,
shouting his orders without sign of fatigue, sank forward with the
rudder ropes dragging through, his hands, and dropped into the hold.

For me, I cast myself down on deck with face upturned to the sun, and
slept.

I woke to find my father seated close to me, cross-legged, examining
a sextant.

"The plague of it is," he grumbled, "that even supposing myself to
have mastered this diabolical instrument, we have ne'er a compass on
board."

Glancing aft I saw that Mike Halliday had taken Billy's place at the
helm. At my elbow lay Nat, still sleeping. Mr. Badcock had crawled
to the bulwarks, and leaned there in uncontrollable sea-sickness.
Until the gale was done I believe he had not felt a qualm. Now, on
the top of his nausea, he had to endure the raillery of Mr. Fett,
whose active fancy had already invented a grotesque and wholly
untruthful accusation against his friend--namely, that when assailed
by the Moors, and in the act of being kicked below, he had dropped on
his knees and offered to turn Mohammedan.

That evening we committed old Worthyvale's body to the sea, and my
father, having taken his first observation at noon, carefully entered
the latitude and longitude in his pocket-book. On consulting the
chart we found the alleged bearings somewhere south of Asia-Minor--to
be exact, off the coast of Pamphylia. My father therefore added the
word "approximately" to his entry, and waited for Captain Pomery to
recover.

Though the sea went down even more quickly than it had arisen, the
pumps kept us fairly busy. All that night, under a clear and starry
sky, we steered for the north-east with the wind brisk upon our
starboard quarter.

"I have no chart,
No compass but a heart,"

quoted I in mischief to Nat. But Nat, having passed through a real
gale, had saved not sufficient fondness for his verse to blush, for
it. We should have been mournful for old Worthyvale, but that night
we knew only that it was good, being young, to have escaped death.
Under the stars we made bad jokes on Mr. Badcock's sea-sickness, and
sang in chorus to Mr. Fett's solos--

"With a fa-la, fa-la, fa-la-la!
To all you ladies now at land . . ."

Next morning Captain Pomery (whose hurt was a pretty severe
concussion of the skull, the explosion having flung him into the
panelling of the ship's cabin, and against the knee of a beam)
returned to duty, and professed himself able, with help, to take a
reckoning. He relieved us of another anxiety by producing a
pocket-compass from his fob.

My father held the sextant for him, while Nat, under instructions,
worked out the sum. With a compass, upon a chart spread on the deck,
I pricked out the bearings--with a result that astonished all as I
leapt up and stared across the bows.

"Why, lad, by the look of you we should be running ashore!"
exclaimed my father.

"And so we should be at this moment," said I, "were not the reckoning
out."

Captain Pomery reached out for the paper. "The reckoning is right
enough," said he, after studying it awhile.

"Then on what land, in Heaven's name, are we running?" my father
demanded testily.

"Why, on Corsica," I answered, pointing with my compass's foot as he
bent over the chart. "On Corsica. Where else?"

It wanted between three and four hours of sunset when we made the
landfall and assured ourselves that what appeared so like a low cloud
on the east-north-eastern horizon was indeed the wished-for island.
We fell to discussing our best way to approach it; my father at first
maintaining that the coast would be watched by Genoese vessels, and
therefore we should do wisely to take down sail and wait for
darkness.

Against this, Captain Pomery maintained--

1. That we were carrying a fair wind, and the Lord knew how long
that would hold.

2. That the moon would rise in less than three hours after dark, and
thenceforth we should run almost the same risk of detection as by
daylight.

3. That in any case we could pass for what we really were, an
English trader in ballast, barely escaped from shipwreck, dismasted,
with broken steerage, making for the nearest port.

"Man," said Captain Pomery, looking about him, "we must be a poor set
of liars if we can't pitch a yarn on _this_ evidence!"

My father allowed himself to be persuaded, the more easily as the
argument jumped with his impatience. Accordingly, we stood on for
land, making no concealment; and the wind holding steady on our beam,
and the sun dropping astern of us in a sky without a cloud, 'twas
incredible how soon we began to make out the features of the land.
It rose like a shield to a central boss, which trembled, as it were,
into view and revealed itself a mountain peak, snowcapped and
shining, before ever the purple mist began to slip from the slopes
below it and disclose their true verdure. No sail broke the expanse
of sea between us and the shore; and, as we neared it, no scarp of
cliff, no house or group of houses broke the island's green monotony.
From the water's edge to the high snow-line it might have been built
of moss, so vivid its colour was, yet soft as velvet, and softer and
still more vivid as we approached.

Within two miles of shore, and not long before dark, the wind (as
Captain Pomery had promised) broke off and headed us, blowing cool
and fresh off the land. I was hauling in the foresheet and belaying
when a sudden waft of fragrance fetched me upright, with head thrown
back and nostrils inhaling the breeze.

"Ay," said my father, at my elbow, "there is no scent on earth to
compare with it. You smell the _macchia_, lad. Drink well your
first draught of it, delicious as first love."

"But somewhere--at some time--I have smelt it before," said I.
"The same scent, only fainter. Why does it remind me of home?"

My father considered. "I will tell you," he said. "In the corridor
at home, outside my bedroom door, stands a wardrobe, and in it hang
the clothes I wore, near upon twenty years ago, in Corsica.
They keep the fragrance of the _macchia_ yet; and if, as a child, you
ever opened that wardrobe, you recall it at this moment."

"Yes," said I, "that was the scent."

My father leaned and gazed at the island with dim eyes.

Still no sign of house or habitation greeted us as we worked by short
tacks towards a deep bay which my father, after a prolonged
consultation of the chart, decided to be that of Sagona. A sharp
promontory ran out upon its northern side, and within the shelter of
this Captain Pomery looked to find good anchorage. But the
_Gauntlet_, after all her battering, lay so poorly to the wind that
darkness overtook us a good mile from land, and before we weathered
the point and cast anchor in a little bight within, the moon had
risen. It showed us a steep shore near at hand, with many grey
pinnacles of granite glimmering high over dark masses of forest
trees, and in the farthest angle of the bight its rays travelled in
silver down the waters of a miniature creek.

The hawser ran out into five fathoms of water. We had lost our boat:
but Billy Priske had spent his afternoon in fashioning a raft out of
four empty casks and a dozen broken lengths of deck-planking; and on
this, leaving the seamen on board, the rest of us pushed off for
shore. For paddles we used a couple of spare oars.

The water, smooth as in a lake, gave us our choice to make a landing
where we would. My father, however, who had taken command, chose to
steer straight for the entrance of the little creek. There, between
tall entrance rocks of granite, we passed through it into the shadow
of folding woods where the moon was lost to us. Sounding with our
paddles, we found a good depth of water under the raft, lit a
lantern, and pushed on, my father promising that we should discover a
village or at least a hamlet at the creek-head.

"And you will find the inhabitants--your subjects, Prosper--
hospitable, too. Whatever the island may have been in Seneca's time,
to deserve the abuse he heaped on it in exile, to-day the Corsicans
keep more of the old classical virtues than any nation known to me.
In vendetta they will slay one another, using the worst treachery;
but a stranger may walk the length of the island unarmed--save
against the Genoese--and find a meal at the poorest cottage, and a
bed, however rough, whereon he may sleep untroubled by suspicion."

The raft grated and took ground on a shelving bank of sand, and Nat,
who stood forward holding the lantern, made a motion to step on
shore. My father restrained him.

"Prosper goes first."

I stepped on to the bank. My father, following, stooped, gathered a
handful of the fine granite sand, and holding it in the lantern's
light, let it run through his fingers.

"Hat off, lad! and salute your kingdom!"

"But where," said I, "be my subjects?"

It seemed, as we formed ourselves into marching order, that I was on
the point to be answered. For above the bank we came to a causeway
which our lanterns plainly showed us to be man's handiwork; and
following it round the bend of a valley, where a stream sang its way
down to the creek, came suddenly on a flat meadow swept by the pale
light and rising to a grassy slope, where a score of whitewashed
houses huddled around a tall belfry, all glimmering under the moon.

"In Corsica," repeated my father, leading the way across the meadow,
"every householder is a host."

He halted at the base of the village street.

"It is curious, however, that the dogs have not heard us.
Their barking, as a rule, is something to remember."

He stepped up to the first house to knock. There was no door to
knock upon. The building stood open, desolate. Our lanterns showed
the grass growing on its threshold.

We tried the next and the next. The whole village lay dead,
abandoned. We gathered in the street and shouted, raising our
lanterns aloft. No voice answered us.

[1] Phosphorescence.

CHAPTER XIII.

HOW, WITHOUT FIGHTING, OUR ARMY WASTED BY ENCHANTMENT.

"ADRIAN. The air breathes upon us here most sweetly. . . .
GONZALO. Here is everything advantageous to life.
ANTONIO. True: save means to live."

"CALIBAN. Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt
not."
_The Tempest_.

Upon a sudden thought my father hurried us towards the tall belfry.
It rose cold and white against the moon, at the end of a nettle-grown
lane. A garth of ilex-oaks surrounded it; and beside it, more than
half-hidden by the untrimmed trees, stood a ridiculously squat
church. By instinct, or, rather, from association of ideas learnt in
England, I glanced around this churchyard for its gravestones.
There were none. Yet for the second time within these few hours I
was strangely reminded of home, where in an upper garret were stacked
half a dozen age-begrimed paintings on panel, one of which on an idle
day two years ago I had taken a fancy to scour with soap and water.
The painting represented a tall man, crowned and wearing Eastern
armour, with a small slave in short jacket and baggy white breeches
holding a white charger in readiness; all three figures awkwardly
drawn and without knowledge of anatomy. For background my scouring
had brought to light a group of buildings, and among them just such a
church as this, with just such a belfry. Of architecture and its
different styles I knew nothing; but, comparing the church before me
with what I could recollect of the painting, I recognized every
detail, from the cupola, high-set upon open arches, to the round,
windowless apse in which the building ended.

My father, meanwhile, had taken a lantern and explored the interior.

"I know this place," he announced quietly, as he reappeared, after
two or three minutes, in the ruinous doorway; "it is called Paomia.
We can bivouac in peace, and I doubt if by searching we could find a
better spot."

We ate our supper of cold bacon and ship-bread, both slightly damaged
by sea-water--but the wine solaced us, being excellent--and stretched
ourselves to sleep under the ilex boughs, my father undertaking to
stand sentry till daybreak. Nat and I protested against this, and
offered ourselves; but he cut us short. He had his reasons, he said.

It must have been two or even three hours later that I awoke at the
touch of his hand on my shoulder. I stared up through the boughs at
the setting moon, and around me at my comrades asleep in the grasses.
He signed to me not to awake them, but to rise and follow him softly.

Passing through the screen of ilex, we came to a gap in the stone
wall of the garth, and through this, at the base of the hillside
below the forest, to a second screen of cypress which opened suddenly
upon a semicircle of turf; and here, bathed in the moon's rays that
slanted over the cypress-tops, stood a small Doric temple of
weather-stained marble, in proportions most delicate, a background
for a dance of nymphs, a fit tiring-room for Diana and her train.

Its door--if ever it had possessed one--was gone, like every other
door in this strange village. My father led the way up the white
steps, halted on the threshold, and, standing aside lest he should
block the moonlight, pointed within.

I stood at his shoulder and looked. The interior was empty, bare of
all ornament. On the wall facing the door, and cut in plain letters
a foot high, two words in Greek confronted me--

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