Chapter II: Part ONE: The Pride of the Colonies (1)

Some five years later, the merchantman, "Pride of the Colonies," bound out of New York for St. Augustine, was running before a fresh breeze down the blue, sparkling plain of the Atlantic. The single passenger she carried, a young man named Andrew Beard, was seated in a sort of improvised chair by the lee-rail, watching the milk-streaked ribbon of her wake dwindle out continually along the broad, endless back of the sea, with that idle, rather pleasant monotony of mind which comes to those who have been many days on the water without much active occupation. A small, brown, dumpy copy of Mr. Pope's translation of the Iliad lay in his lap, and his forefinger mechanically kept the place where he had left off reading. He had been drawn from the book by a certain, inert curiosity as to whether the color of the waters of any ocean might fitly be compared with the color of wine--and having decided, sleepily, that not even the palest vintages of the Rhine, beheld through green Venetian glass, could match the occasional streaks of lucid emerald where the trace of the ship's wake grew faint as the imprint of a feather on velvet, had excused himself from further concern at present with the doings of the well-greaved Achæans.

He had never felt either so well or so lazy and New York and the life he had led till this voyage began seemed very small and distant--a diminutive red city with paper snow on its gables, imprisoned in a glass bubble that the sea had washed away. To-morrow, Captain Stout had said, they were likely to sight the lighthouse on Anastasia Island, and journey's end--but at the moment the journey still seemed infinite. It was impossible to think that in a little while the last sound in his head as he fell asleep at night would not be the strain of the breeze in the cordage and the complaint of wood against wind and water or that he would ever rise again in the morning to look out upon a solid and unfluctuating world. Nevertheless, these things would be so, and swiftly. It behooved him, against his will, to think of what lay in store for him beyond the horizon, and why he had lived all this time with a seashell held close to his ear.

A series of inconsecutive pictures passed before his eyes. He was a little boy, stiffly seated in a high, banister-backed chair before a gleaming mirror, his eyes sober with excitement, as that most impressive of men, his father's barber, who lived in a shop full of sweet-smelling bottles with a great gold basin hung over the front door, arranged upon his shorn head with deft, pale, long fingers the tiny, marvellous wig that had come in a box from London, and, wonder of wonders, crowned it at last with a little laced hat, just like his older brother's even to its Kevenhuller cock.

He smiled--how proud he had been of that ridiculous wig and what a fight he had had with the butcher's boy who had asked him jeeringly if old Sandy Beard was setting up for a Lord. Fashions had changed, and little boys could wear their own hair now, even when their fathers were as important merchants as Alexander Beard. The thought called up an image of his father's huge, cool storehouses down by the water and a gang of negroes, singing together in rich, deep, mournful voices, as they unloaded merchandise consigned to Alexander Beard and Son from a ship just come to port from strangely-painted corners of the map. Wherever the commerce of New York Colony voyaged, Alexander Beard's name was known and his signature good.

The storehouses disappeared, and in their place, for some reason, Andrew saw the silver-sanded floor of a Dutch kitchen. He was munching an oelykoek and Gerrit Jans was telling him stolidly of the wonders of St. Nicholas who stuffed the wooden shoes of godly little boys in Holland with crullers and toy windmills and silver skates on his name-day.... The heavy, flowery scent of the catalpa-trees outside the King's Arms, on Broadway between Crown and Little Prince Streets, where the officers came from Fort George, mixed, somehow, with the odor of mignonette and sweet-william in his mother's garden in the country. She was walking along the bricked path on a hot, Spring morning, with her green calash shading her stern, fine face, and a small painted basket of seeds in her hand.

Then he was one of a group of boys running home past the Fort on a chill, green winter evening, not daring to look aside lest Governor Sir Danvers Osborne, who had hanged himself on the palisade after five days of office, should suddenly be dangling there to appal them, with his silk-handkerchief noosed around his neck ... he was sitting on his brother Lucius's knees watching the historic cockfight out on the Germantown road when Massachusetts Boy had beaten and killed Mr. Signet's long-undefeated Cock of the North ... he was walking with his father underneath the arches of the Exchange, unspeakably proud at being allowed to hold his father's gold-headed cane and see him converse with the great ones of the city.

The images faded. He sighed, lazily. Boyhood had been a good time. If he had never been as dashing as Lucius, he had always admired Lucius far too much to envy him and had been well content to take second place. As for Peggy, poor child, he certainly did not envy her--with her stiff, buckram stays clamped on her round, adolescent body, and the long needle stuck upright in the front of her dress for an hour each day to teach her to hold her chin erect as a young girl of quality should. Somewhere among his baggage he had the letter case stitched with red and green silk that had been her damp, parting gift to him--and how she had begged him to bring her home a little alligator from the Floridas! He smiled amusedly. He felt quite old enough to be Peggy's grandfather, now that he was travelling alone on important business for his father--though he was only twenty-one and she was fourteen.

By the way, he must look at his new case of pistols again. He had been warned particularly against letting the sea-air rust them. But the thought of the pistols brought up the troubled state of the times to his mind, and his eyes narrowed. It seemed to him that through all the years of his boyhood, New York had been in a constant turmoil of celebrations and protests and placards on the walls. The Stamp Act--the Liberty poles--the repeal of the Stamp Act and the new gilded statue of a togaed King George ramping upon a fat, embarrassed charger in the Bowling Green--the liberty boys with their rowdy songs and their continual scuffles with the soldiers--this tea business, now. Lucius, too--he knew that his father suspected Lucius, for all his dandyism, of secret affiliations with the more fashionable wing of the so-called Friends of Liberty--young Gouverneur Morris and some of the Livingston set. He himself did not care so much for young Gouverneur Morris. His celebrated King's College oration upon Wit and Beauty might be of as marbled an elegance as the conversation of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia--but he wore a conscious little air of prodigy that irked Andrew's soul.

Andrew stirred, uneasily, and wondered what the latest news was from the madmen in Boston. He remembered his father's bitter description of that troublesome John Hancock--"a rattle-tongued spendthrift who has wasted two fortunes on fine clothes and sedition"--mincing along the streets at noonday in a scarlet velvet cap, red morocco slippers and a blue damask gown. It would have been fun, if you had been unlucky enough to be born in Boston, to paint yourself up like an Indian and dump tea chests into grey water. But it was a boy's exploit, for all that, hardly worth the attention of a level-headed New Yorker. When the New York tea-ship arrived, the world would see how a really civilized colony dealt with such matters. He was sorry to be out of it all--the meeting of protest at the City Hall had been most impressive, though noisy. Still, it was quite unthinkable that the present tangle would lead to anything really serious. They would repeal the tea-tax as they had repealed the Stamp Act--such pushing Massachusetts gentry as Hancock and Sam Adams would be taught a lesson--the Livingston faction sing smaller for a while--and people drive out in Italian chaises to Turtle Bay for fish-suppers to the end of time.

He yawned, and turning his head, took in the steady eyes and the broad, leathery chest of the helmsman of the ship. For a boyish moment he envied the man completely the easy strength of his hands, and the blue tail of the tattooed mermaid disappearing under his shirt. Then he told himself sternly that he had pistols in his cabin, and at twenty-one, was already the master of an errand that could command the bodies of a dozen such able seamen. He tried over a phrase or two of textbook Spanish in his mind and then, sailor and errand alike dismissed for the moment, settled back to reading Mr. Pope's Homer at the passage where Hector bids Andromache farewell in the choicest of Addisonian English.

2.

Nevertheless, in the privacy of his cabin that night, as he lay on one arm, staring out through the open porthole at stars that seemed already tropical and soft in a languid heaven, certain fragments of his last long conversation with his father recurred to his mind to trouble it obscurely. For one thing, not one of the many excellent reasons for his present journey to the South had seemed particularly urgent till the trouble over the tea-tax grew to a head.

He had suffered from colds and occasional fever for some two winters, and the doctor had diagnosed a weakness of the lungs and recommended a sea-voyage toward warmer climates--that was true enough. And it was undoubtedly true that, since his health had not permitted him to finish his course of studies at King's College, he should begin to learn the ins and outs of the great merchant-house of Alexander Beard and Son. But there had been something in his father's eyes, when they talked together of the trip, that had disquieted him. For one thing he had never conceived before that his father might be uncertain of or puzzled by anything on earth.

He had started out firmly enough with, "Andrew--how's your cough?"

"About the same, sir," said Andrew, coughing.

"H'm--sit down, lad--I thought so. Well, my son, you'll be rid of it shortly, if Dr. Summerall knows his business. Can you sail on the "Pride of the Colonies" for St. Augustine two weeks from now--on my business?"

"Yes sir," said Andrew, at once dumbfounded and very flattered. It was the first time in his life that his father had treated him entirely as an equal.

"Good son," said Alexander Beard and played with the feathers of a goose-quill a moment. "It may be business of weight, Andrew. I would go myself if," he hesitated, "if times were more settled, d'ye see?--yes--I might go myself--but as things are--" He frowned and lost himself in staring at something dubious he seemed to see in the wood of the table. After a while, "You may think it strange I don't send your brother," he said.

Here was something that Andrew, in the innocence of his heart, had never even considered. The glittering Lucius seemed to him far too splendid an adornment of the house of Beard to be spared for any such errand. He said something of the sort.

"Your obleeged servant sir, I'm sure, but Lucius is a damned macaroni!" said Alexander Beard abruptly, then, as Andrew grew rigid with loyalty, "Sorry, boy--I lost my temper then--but your brother, Lucius--if you can inform me why your brother Lucius" (the goose-quill rapped on his knuckles) "makes such friends of the pack of ranting Mohocks that set up barber's poles to Liberty all over the town--"

"My brother, sir," said Andrew, stiffly, "has his own political opinions, but--"

"But, but, but," said his father impatiently, "Oh your brother's a damned fine fellow--but he'll marry that Livingston wench before he's done and set the De Lanceys against him for good and all--if he doesn't do worse and go to bed with some Boston madam who thinks Sam Adams is God Almighty because he talks like a codfish. A plague on them all, I say--a plague out of Egypt--" He threw the snapped goose-quill aside.

Andrew was silent--his father's tempers were rare, but when they came, they had to run their course. He tried not to hear what his father was saying about the Livingstons and the De Lanceys. His father's passionate reverence for James De Lancey, the dead ex-Governor, had always irked him queerly, and he had never been able to see the great, stately family coach roll by behind its famous white horses without a secret feeling of discontent. He remembered the time it had drawn up before their own door and the arrogant, courteous, languid gentleman who was carried like a phial of holywater inside it had descended to take a glass of Malaga with an Alexander Beard whose hands and manner were suddenly and definitely obsequious. That had happened when Andrew was only a small boy, but the imprint of it had remained in his mind. He had not been sorry, a little later, to stand in the crowd and watch the long black worm of the funeral procession wind slowly, with its gilt-escutcheoned hearse, toward Trinity Church, while the minute guns from Copsey Battery tolled out the fifty-seven years of the dead man's life.

"A great gentleman," his father was saying. He sighed. "And yet one that would drink his glass of wine in my house and never once--" He checked himself.

Andrew stirred rebelliously. "Father! But why should not even a gentleman like Governor De Lancey take wine in our house?"

"Why not indeed?" said his father, and smiled. "Why not indeed?"

The words were gently-spoken, but at their implication, Andrew felt the steady world rock under his feet.

"But, Father, we--we've always been--gentle--haven't we?"

"Gentle enough, of a surety," said his father, with eyes averted. "Or why should my eldest son be able to carry a sword?"

"But--the Beards of Westmoreland, sir--" said Andrew, horrified. Somehow, he had always taken gentility for granted. Now, in a brief moment, the very fabric of pleasant existence grew infirm.

"Aye," said his father, quietly. "The Beards of Westmoreland. Of a truth no one can say that there are not Beards in Westmoreland," and he actually chuckled. For an instant Andrew was appalled to find himself almost hating him. In his mind, he had walked through the green, English park of that Westmoreland estate a thousand times--he had rubbed the brown dust away with his finger from the names of the tombs in the chapel that ran back before Elizabeth. And yet, now that he came to think of it, park and manor-house and chapel alike had all been built of the insubstantial stuff of his own imagination. His father had never told him one word about his people. Now, suspicion once awake, he could see those imaginary ancestors and their signs of honor, crumble slowly to ash before him--leaving only a shopkeeper's family, uneasy with new-got riches, their backs supple whenever a gentleman passed in the street--and he felt naked and ashamed.

Something of what he felt and thought must have been written in his face, for "Dinna hurt yourself so, laddie," said his father now, his speech slipped suddenly back to the burr of the countryman, "That's the benefit of a new country. A man starts more even. And your mother's folk are gentle--and--well--we can all say with right that we're gentle, now. But nevertheless--no, ye wouldn't understand--but when Governor De Lancey came to my house--"

He left the words in the air, seeing their uselessness. What he said was true. Andrew could not understand. He could not look back through the years and see what his father saw--the little boy in the rough fur cap and the blue-yarn stockings staring round-eyed from the door of the catchpenny shop to see the fine gentleman's coach whirl past in a glory of gilt and glass and trampling white horses--the lank, burningly-ambitious, young man with ink on his fingers who had found in James De Lancey a patron worthy of worship. The little boy and young man had come a long and hazardous way to the impressive new house on the right side of Wall Street, with its fashionable cupola and the Turkey carpets on its floors--but the stages of that epic were hidden from Andrew, and father and son looked at each other across a barrier that would not fall.

"Well, sir," said his father at last, breaking the deep silence, "As to this matter of the Floridas--"

The ensuing conversation helped Andrew back on his feet again at the time, though, remembered, certain things rose in a cloud of silver bubbles to fret him. He had always known his father's business interests wide, but now, for the first time, he saw them unroll before him like a parti-colored map on the dark table, and it made him proud. Even down in that strange, hot, spicy peninsula so lately Spain's, his father's eyes saw the long rows of indigo, cut down in the moment of flowering, and counted the profit of traffic with swamp Indians, hidden like alligators in the marshes, and the yield of fields of sugar cane he had never seen in the flesh.

It appeared that his father had had some dealings already with this Scotch Dr. Hilary Gentian who had brought his mixed cargo of Minorcans, Greeks and Italians to colonize the hammock-lands below St. Augustine. "An ingenious man, sir, but pressed for money--and the men in London never understand that. They think a colony grows as easily as a thistle patch, once it's seeded--'tis more like an asparagus-bed--you can't expect returns for the first few years." Yet there had been some returns already--the indigo alone had brought in three thousand pounds during the last year. "Then there are his sugar works--and the hemp and maize and barilla. But they began with over two thousand souls to feed and were much harassed by sickness, I understand. You must be free with your glass, boy, when you reach there--they say a free glass wards off the fevers."

Andrew listened dazzled, seeing the strange landscape rise before him with its blue sea and its tufted palms and its smell of alien blossoms. And yet the deep-seated reason, if there were one, for his immediate departure remained unexplained to him. Dr. Gentian had been warned of his probable arrival--that made Andrew blink a little--his father had never really mentioned the project before. He was to remain at New Sparta for a number of months at least--half-guest, half-apprentice in the ways of such a plantation, always his father's agent. "I would have you write me most fully of all that comes to your mind--particularly as to whether such a venture as Dr. Gentian's might be profitably copied by other gentlemen of sufficient fortune."

Now what had his father meant by that? Surely he could not be thinking of transferring part of his interests to the distant Floridas? But there was more. "Also, sir, and most particularly, I would have you note the temper of the colony toward these scatterbrains your brother admires so greatly. I have heard that of all the colonies the Floridas alone feel no whistle-belly grievance against the Crown. If that be so--and these Gadarene swine that call themselves sons of Liberty start running their path to the sea--"

"But, sir, you cannot really think that--"

"I do not know," said his father, sombrely, "I do not know. God knows there's no reason--but there. I only know where the De Lanceys will stand--if it comes to more than speechifying. And their interest is mine."

"But why must your interest go with any other man's interest?" said Andrew, touchily--the sting still in the old wound his father had reopened.

"Because it must, boy. The one sure loser in any conflict is your neutral--and we're not patroons. It's lucky the Patroon's a minor--they'll be out of it whatever happens. They'd think me mad at the Coffee House if I told them what's at the back of my mind, but let a few years pass and--if your mother could see it as plain as I do and were better able to stomach the trials of a new venture--But 'tis little use talking of that and things may better somehow--You'll need a new fowling-piece and some light sort of gear--they say the sun is hot, though not deadly as it is in India--"

So the conversation had flickered out into a discussion of Andrew's wardrobe and the climate, leaving him with a feeling of mingled insecurity and pride. The abrupt extinction of those long-cherished kinsfolk, the Beards of Westmoreland, rankled now and then, but he could feel no scornful challenge to the accepted dignity of the house of Beard in the air of the city; and a fowling-piece with silver mounts soon wiped out the freshness of the hurt. On the whole he was too anxious to acquit himself well and too awed by the vague magnitude of his responsibilities, to give excessive thought to the gentility of his lineage, or the lack of it.

It occurred to him more than once that his father might be sending him away on a pretext to keep him from mixing too intimately with those friends of Lucius' who met every Thursday to drink toasts of a porcupine saddle, a cobweb pair of breeches and a long gallop to all enemies of Liberty. But even if the queer constraint of Lucius' farewell seemed to bear this theory out--he could not really believe in it when he thought it over. And it was equally impossible to believe with reason that his father actually considered abandoning the house on Wall Street and the cavernous storehouses by the docks for a palmetto-hut by a white-shawled strip of sand just because a row of wigs in a vague House of Parliament over the water had decided to impose a duty on certain, small, black dried leaves. And yet--

The days of the voyage gave him time to follow many such speculations to no conclusion. Of only one thing could he be sure. The fabric of life had always seemed secure and definite before--now he felt it give under his feet like a floor of fresh pine-boughs and saw things begin to grow unfamiliar that had always been familiar as water and light.

He gave the problem up and began to wonder drowsily just what he would find at New Sparta, Dr. Gentian had a Greek wife and a pair of daughters--or was it a daughter? He saw a tall, high-breasted girl with the face of Nausicaa--then her features sharpened--feathers came on her arms--was she harpy or eagle?--He did not know, but there was a soft thunder of wings about him for an instant, that passed away into the rumble of a cart over the paving-stones, a cart bringing sweet water to the house from the Tea-Water Pump--a blackamoor got out of it, dressed in his brother Lucius' best scarlet coat and was offering him a basket of indigo in the name of Liberty as he fell asleep.

3.

The rumble of the cart was in his ears again as he woke, but he translated it swiftly into accustomed sounds. Bare feet ran on the deck above him to the piping whine of the bosun's whistle--cries answered a bawling voice. He jumped out of his bunk and felt something knock at his heart. Through the round porthole, like a picture held in the circle of a Spyglass, was the white stone thumb of a lighthouse and a crawling line of foam on a beach--then, across more water, the vivid green of unexpected pines and the solid bones of land. The land had been an indented, meaningless line to starboard before, vanishing and reappearing again like a casual, evanescent mark scrawled hastily on the surface of the universal sea--now it lay broad across the path in a continent, and the sea shrank back again from the illimitable and savage world into measurable blue water, fretting the sides of a cup of rock and sand. He dressed hastily, in a mounting excitement and ran up on deck.

"Have to anchor outside the bar, sir," said Captain Stout, "The Pride's a lady--she draws more'n eight feet of water, she does--Now if she was one of your nasty little French baggages, which she ain't--"

Andrew nodded sagely, paying little attention. Now the actual land lay so plump before them, he felt a vast, unreasonable impatience at the various petty motions that must be gone through before they could set foot on it. The air seemed to him to smell of oranges already and he stared through the captain's spyglass feverishly, as if doing so would transport him at once to the shore.

"That's the Fort," said the Captain, pointing, "Spanishy-looking affair, _I_ call it--see the lobsterback walking post? Cathedral's over there--don't know as you can make it out--" He chuckled, "Queer souls, Spaniards, and that's a fact," he confided, "No spit and polish about them--no, sir. Don't even have any Christian sort of a bellringer in the church--just a lame old codger to rattle the bells with a stick."

Andrew turned to him with a thousand questions on his tongue.

"How soon before we--"

"Oh, they know we're here," said the Captain, chuckling again. "See that boat, Mr. Beard? Shouldn't be surprised if Dr. Gentian was aboard her." His throat suddenly became a leather trumpet. "_Aye, Mister Mate?_" he roared. He turned away.

The black, struggling bug in the waves jumped into a longboat as Andrew put the glass to his eye again. He could see the sweat start on the backs of the eight negro rowers as their oars rose and fell in thrashing dumb-show. But the figure in the stern-sheets was what held his gaze--if it could be Doctor Gentian.

He had expected such a different personage. A Scotch army-surgeon turned planter suggested, somehow, a tall, rawboned, iron-mouthed dragoon in patched kilts and a palmetto hat. This spruce, erect little figure with the chin and eyes of Cæsar was dressed in black superfine broadcloth, with Mechlin ruffles at the throat and wrists. His wig was freshly powdered, his gold-laced hat cocked in the fine extreme of fashion--even Lucius, Andrew thought, might have been a little awed by the sombre perfection of his attire. Andrew suddenly realized the incongruity of his own apparel with a start. He had dressed hastily, in the clothes he had worn during most of the voyage. After one glance through the spyglass at his host, the glazed hat borrowed from a sailor on his own head, the loose shirt and wide breeches he had thought so aptly nautical, made him feel as if he had strolled into White's in London painted like a Seneca chief. He cast a wild glance around him, but it was too late. They were lowering the Jacob's ladder already. In a moment Dr. Gentian would be aboard.

"Ahoy, Pride of the Colonies!" came a sharp clear voice from the water. "Ahoy, Captain Stout!"

"Ahoy sir!" called the Captain, "Stand by the ladder for Dr. Gentian, you sons of sweeps, or by God I'll--We've a passenger aboard for ye, Doctor!"

The spruce little Cæsar in black broadcloth called back something that the wind blew away. Then he was coming up the Jacob's ladder as nimbly as a fly. Andrew shivered with annoyance and embarrassment. Why hadn't the Captain told him the Doctor was like this?

"Mr. Beard?" said the man whom Andrew had visualized as a kilted dragoon. There was a fresh breeze blowing, but not a drop of spray seemed to have spotted his black silk stockings and he stepped across the spattered deck with the quick daintiness of a cat. "Your obliged, obedient servant, Mr. Beard." A ring winked on his outstretched hand.

"Nay, yours, sir," said Andrew, diffidently, and stood staring.

He liked Dr. Gentian at first sight--there was something very merry about his mouth. Moreover, he had obviously taken in Andrew's strange attire at one rapid glance, and yet the sight had not perceptibly increased his merriment.

Captain Stout came bumbling up in a sort of respectful fury.

"Servant, Doctor Gentian--so you've met your passenger?--good, sir. You'll find him a bit broadened out since he started to voyage with us--none of your night-sweats now, eh, Mr. Beard?--and if you could have seen him set to his victuals after the first natteral squeamishness, sir--By God, the first day out, I thought he'd puke the very anchor up--but after that--"

Andrew felt with abhorrence that his ears were reddening, but Dr. Gentian saved him.

"The sea plays odd tricks on the best of us," he said easily, "I have seen an Admiral of the Blue hold his head in his cabin and wish himself a turnip-patch back on land--the first day out." He turned to Andrew, "I am glad to hear our good captain is so excellent a victualler. Do you snuff, Mr. Beard?"

"Thank you, sir," said Andrew gratefully, his fingers fumbling at fine rappee in a gold-and-tortoise shell box. The little act somehow set himself and Dr. Gentian apart from the effusive Captain in a world where the immodest allusions of such captains to nausea and victuals were the permitted liberties of old family servants.

"A weakness of mine, I fear," sighed Dr. Gentian, after an elegantly-managed sneeze. Andrew's sneezes had been far less elegant but he noted gratefully that Dr. Gentian had not been critical. Now, though, he grew a little brisk.

"But we must have you ashore, Mr. Beard, as soon as may suit your convenience. Have you breakfasted?"

"Not yet," said Andrew, suddenly conscious that he wished to very much.

Dr. Gentian put his palms together softly. "Excellent. Then you must do me the honor of breakfasting with me at Judge Willo's--we must set out for New Sparta, tomorrow, I fear, but meanwhile it is only fit you should meet some of the gentry of the town. Perhaps Captain Stout would favor us, also--"

"Thankee, Doctor." Somehow the captain had deflated in the last few minutes and seemed awkwardly aware of it. "But I shan't get ashore much before noon, you know--"

"You deprive us of a pleasure, I assure you." The Doctor was smiling again, "Mr. Beard, I venture to hope, will not be so harsh."

"Delighted--certainly--Doctor Gentian," stammered Andrew confusedly, "but--my luggage--"

"I am sure our good captain can send what you find most necessary with us--the heavier luggage can follow later. I have already settled for the services of a barber for you, in case you should need him. A sea-voyage is always trying to one's razors. If there is anything else--you have only to command me--I have a little business to transact with the captain--but if you could be ready to go ashore with your small baggage in half an hour--Your servant till then, sir."

"Yours," said a slightly bewildered but flattered Andrew, and stumbled down below to strip himself hastily of the glazed hat in which he had taken such pride and to thank his stars that he had abandoned the transient idea of having the bosun tattoo the Royal Arms of Great Britain in blue across his chest.

4.

The evening air was light with the frail sweetness of crepe-myrtle; a little wind stirred in the trees like the ghost of a humming-bird. In Judge Willo's dining-room, the cloth had long been drawn and the branched silver candlesticks at either end of the table cast shadowy pools of light that seemed to sink into the grain of the dark mahogany. The wreck of the dessert lay scattered like the relics of a battlefield--a great china punchbowl of bombo had succeeded the St. Lucar wine and gentlemen were beginning to be flushed and loquacious. Andrew, seated between Judge Willo and Dr. Gentian in the post of honor, sipped slowly at the cool deceptive compound of grated nutmeg, sugared water and Antigua rum, and felt a great indefinite affection for all humanity in general and the Floridas in particular rise in his heart.

He was wearing his best India-muslin cravat, his hair was clubbed and powdered, he felt clean and gay and at ease. Already he loved this little, lazy city whose trees were hung with the golden balls of oranges and whose houses were built of a multitude of tiny seashells weathered into stone. He would be sorry to leave it in the morning--the projecting balconies of the old Spanish dwellings had printed their shape on his heart. Many times, in the dreams before dawn, in the cold hour, he would wander the narrow swept streets, for years unmarred by the track of any wheeled vehicle, where the Spanish ladies in the old time had walked in their satin ball-slippers, at evening, with a languid grace.

He finished his glass of bombo with an air of wise melancholy--life was like that. The glass was refilled--he drank again, abstractedly, musing on the world. Life was like that, yes. Life was an orange-tree--an orange-tree in flower--and he was getting a little drunk.

Only two things marred his perfect content--his interview with the Governor and the fact that his best shoe-buckles had been slightly tarnished by the sea-air. The Governor was a petulant, worried person who had treated him like a boy. But Dr. Gentian had behaved to the man with freezing civility and apologized for him to Andrew later. "An honest gentleman, Mr. Beard, but alas, no friend of mine." "Then no friend of mine, sir, I'll warrant you!" Andrew had cried sagaciously and Dr. Gentian had thanked him gravely and explained. It appeared that the best of St. Augustine was with them in lacking the Governor's approval.

The candles were growing very bright. Judge Willo's voice in his ear besought him to tell the company again the ridiculous tale of Governor Tryon's escape in his shirt from his burning house and how only the heavy snow on the roofs of the city had saved New York from a general conflagration that winter. It was an effort to find the proper words, but when he did, he was well repaid, for all the gentlemen laughed like thunder and Dr. Gentian clapped him on the back and called him a very Harry Fielding for choiceness of wit. Then he tried to repeat some verse of Phillis Wheatley's, the young negro poetess who had just made such a stir, but broke down in the middle and only saved himself by saying that he hoped they understood he had meant no disrespect to Governor Tryon by his story.

"Governor Tryon's worthy gentleman," he heard himself repeating "They called him the Black Wolf in the Carolinas--but he's for the King! And we're all for the King here, aren't we--and damnation to liberty-boys? Who isn't for the King here?" he asked uncertainly, but his query was drowned in a roar of applause as they all stood up and drank to the King. Andrew, drinking too, felt the tears come to his eyes at the thought of such splendid loyalty to the King. He tried to picture the King to himself--he felt he should--but the features kept getting more and more uncertain.

A second bowl of bombo succeeded the first and, some time later, Andrew found himself by a window, gazing out into the garden. His legs seemed subject to occasional, inexplicable wabblings, but the night air, cool on his forehead, was a great refreshment. He glanced back at the room--a stertorous huddle of scarlet on the floor must be that pleasant Major from the garrison, succumbed at last to bombo and the force of gravity--the gentleman in plum-colored velvet whose name he could not remember was asleep with his head in a bowl of nuts--Judge Willo seemed to be making indefinite attempts at song. Andrew felt a great pride that he was still soberly on his feet.

"They say our moonlight here is brighter than yours in the North," said the serene voice of Dr. Gentian in his ear.

"'Tis very bright, in all conscience," said Andrew a little thickly. The Doctor's glass had been filled as often as any, but he seemed as yet quite untouched by the revel. The small, demure, merry mouth was composed and peaceful, the calm face showed only a tinge of added color, the slight pressure of the fingers on Andrew's elbow was firm and springy as a vise of tough, light whalebone.

"Shall we stroll in the garden a moment and let the air freshen us?"

Andrew assented, with an effort, but a fuddled cry of "Gentian! One moment, Gentian!" called the Doctor away for a moment and Andrew remained at the window, gazing up at the sky and trying to keep a sparkling wheel from whirring about in his head.

The moonlight was bright indeed, the moon huge and pale, the garden crowded with silver trees and flowers. At its foot grew a single bush of Spanish bayonet which seemed to Andrew, as he stared, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, for it too was in flower, and the single stalk of waxen petals rose out of the green spikes of the plant like a cold plume set upon a barbarous crest. Andrew filled his eyes with the sight of it--it seemed to him, suddenly, as if he had run his hand into the very soil of this new country and touched its heart. Not even the orange-groves could so explain the nature of the land, for they were fruitful and, after a fashion, tamed, but this bush of thorns gave nothing to man but a single bloom of moonlight, serene, careless and wholly pure. More northern latitudes could not suffer such a creation--only in the hot night of the south could the ivory frond arise from among edged blades to challenge a tropic star.

As Andrew considered this, he felt just on the edge of some great discovery--some immense understanding--some gift of tongues--but Dr. Gentian's hand was lightly imperious on his arm again, and he was being led outside to have his eyes dazzled by the moon. The half-made discovery slipped away--the gift of tongues was forgotten. There remained only a leaden body and a flight of stairs unnaturally steep and limitless, up which he was being assisted to lie down at last in a bed that whirled into spinning darkness.

5.

Three days later the events of that evening were forgotten phantasmagoria, and only the shape of the Spanish bayonet stood out distinct and fruitful in Andrew's memory. To have been drunk in good company was nothing to be ashamed of--but the long next day in the saddle had been torment, in spite of all Dr. Gentian's solicitude--and the following one had found Andrew sober enough, but stiff and sore. The third day, however, almost made him regret that they would reach the end of their journey at evening. The air had been flawless since dawn, his first saddle-weariness had abated a little, and he had begun to notice the details of the land.

All morning they had ridden through low barrens, smelling of pine-needles--then the road had turned to swampier country, where red cane fringed the edge of the spongy bay-galls and a thrown stone went in with a sucking sound. Over languid creeks bridged with cedar-planking the road took its way--past swamps where mosquitoes buzzed and alligators slept and rotting ancient trees were hung with Spanish moss like witches' hair--then wound up into the woods again.

They had passed a woodrat's disorderly house of sticks and seen the rat run chattering up a tree with a young rat hanging to its tail. They had slept in the green russell chamber of a manor-house whose furnishings would not have shamed the Patroon and whose master entertained them with music upon the German flute; they had plucked dwarf wild-oranges from stunted, untended trees and ridden, at evening, up a grassy avenue heavy with the sweetness of magnolia-bloom; and once Andrew had seen a cinnamon-colored Indian stare at them for a moment out of the tangled underbrush with eyes black as obsidian beads, to vanish among the leaves as noiselessly as a puff of dandelion seed. Now the shadows were long with late afternoon, the road skirted the river, and New Sparta was near.

"There," said Dr. Gentian as they came to a fork in the road.

Andrew followed the line of his hand and made out a clot of white among distant trees. "The upper road is ours, Mr. Beard--the lower goes down to the colony itself. You shall see it soon enough. For the present," he smiled, "I imagine you have ridden hard enough these last days to postpone the pleasure. The best lands are farther down the river--that is why you see no signs of our industry here."

"I thought you lived in the colony itself, sir," said Andrew, making conversation.

"Not precisely," Dr. Gentian was very amiable, "My own house is over a mile from the wharves--you see, indigo needs space and we have more than a thousand souls in the settlement itself--there were more at first but one always loses a number when men are transplanted to a new climate--"

He chatted on, describing his newly-finished sugar-mill and the system of irrigation he had recently completed. Andrew fell more and more under the spell of that easy, Cæsarean voice. Beside this man, with his tales of strange travel in the Indies and the Greek Islands, with his casual chat of the great ones of London and Paris, even Alexander Beard began to seem a little provincial. Now he quoted a passage from the Georgics to illustrate a point in husbandry, and turned from that to a discussion as to whether Dr. Goldsmith's "She Stoops to Conquer," witty though it was, might fitly be compared to the best of the comedies of Plautus. Andrew felt his own mammoth ignorance descend upon him like a heavy velvet pall and thought humbly that Lucius should have come in his place. He resolved to write to Lucius for the best edition of Plautus procurable at Garret Noel's bookshop before the week was out.

He was so engaged in trying to listen intelligently that he did not notice how the road stole away from the river again; and the goal of their three days' ride was almost upon him before he realized it. The great, white coquina house stood on a slight rise of ground, its stables and outbuildings massed behind it. There were lights in its windows, for twilight had fallen, and as the tired horses pricked their ears and whinnied at the thought of oats, servants came running out with lanterns and hubbub. Andrew knew suddenly that he was very tired and struggled from his saddle at last with the stiff awkwardness of a marionette. He was glad to throw the horse's reins to a grinning little boy, but too weary to pay much attention to the bustle about him.

"My dear," said Dr. Gentian and kissed a tall woman with a proud nose and a secret mouth delicately upon the cheek. "This is our young friend from New York, Mr. Beard, my dear," and Andrew made his manners dutifully to a worn comely hand and words of greeting that had a foreign slur in them. Then there was another hand, warm and pleasant to touch, and he was being introduced to a yellow-haired girl with eyes grey and changing as winter cloud--"My daughter--Miss Sparta Gentian." But she was not at all like his image of Nausicaa and Andrew felt vaguely disappointed. Then he only knew that he was hobbling up the steps of the porch in a disgracefully ungenteel manner, but he could not help it for each of his boots was made of solid stone.

Strength and curiosity returned to him with food and wine, and at last, seated alone with Dr. Gentian while the Madeira passed between them the way of the sun, he began to appraise the circumstances of his new environment.

"You will find we live in simple rusticity, Mr. Beard," Dr. Gentian had said--but if these were Florida notions of simple rusticity! It was true that the servants were not in livery and that the dress of the Gentian ladies was not quite in the latest mode, but otherwise, from the old silver plate on the sideboard to the new forte-piano with Lord Kelly's Overtures upon it in the drawing-room, Andrew might have thought himself enjoying the famous hospitality of a Philipse or a William Walton the elder. That was certainly a fruit-piece by Vandermoulen on the wall, and the Indian chintz hangings of his own bedroom could not have been bettered at the fashionable upholsterer, Joseph Cox's.

His eye was caught by the flash of a green stone on Dr. Gentian's finger. There was cold, precious light in the stone like the light at the bottom of the eyes of a great cat.

"A quaint setting," said his host, politely, "I had it when I served in India. The Begum happened to think me a practitioner in the black arts." He rose, "Shall we join the ladies?"

In the flowered drawing-room, the tall woman with the proud nose and the secret mouth was embroidering upon catgut-gauze with a needle tiny as a fairy's spear and the grey-eyed girl who was not like Nausicaa was seated at the forte-piano, playing. She broke off as they came in.

"I beg you will not cease your playing, Miss Gentian," said Andrew, awkwardly, "I am devoted to the forte-piano," he added, feeling the words were foolish as soon as they were out of his mouth.

"Then I shan't dare continue," said the girl carelessly. "My strumming must sound like a rigadoon on a milkpan to the ears of such a connoisseur--from New York--"

"Miss Gentian--I implore you," said Andrew, embarrassed.

"Oh, if you'll promise me no criticism, I'll play, sir--or sing perhaps--'tis too hot for playing alone--the piano sounds like a locust in August--heat--heat--heat--" she drummed it out on the keys, impatiently, "But sing, sing, what shall I sing? Shall it be Charley over the Water, father, to remind you of the Forty-Five--or let me see--'Bobby Shaftoe,' for Mr. Beard--'Bobby Shaftoe's come from sea--Silver buckles on his--shoon--" she hummed with gipsy impertinence and Andrew winced as he saw her eyes fixed mockingly on his shoe-buckles--"Come, fine ladies and gentlemen--what d'ye lack--lack--"

"Sing 'Beauty Retire,' daughter," said her father quietly. His eyes were intent upon hers and it seemed to Andrew as if he were witnessing some obscure and inaudible struggle of wills between them--a struggle watched by the tall woman in the chair with great weariness of mind.

"That old thing? Oh, very well--I'm a dutiful daughter. You'll pardon our rusticity Mr. Beard--we have none of your New York novelties here in songs or ladies--" She struck a chord on the forte-piano as if she hated it, and began to sing.

"Beauty retire--retire--" she sang,

"Retire--retire, thou dost my pity move
Believe my pity and then trust my love--"

Her voice was extraordinarily pure and moving. Andrew, listening, thought of skeins of rock-crystal, flecked through and through with tiny flakes of the softest gold--of a golden box where a crystal bird beat and beat its wings in trammelled, scornful delight. Her face had turned grave as she sang, and a little drowsy, as if some excess of vitality came to her through the act of singing and suffused the veins of her heart with a sleepy power. She was like a child now, Andrew thought--a beautiful, daunting child--

The song ceased, and Andrew, back in his chair again, stammered some sort of compliment. But she would not sing again. Instead she professed an interest in paduasoys and cordova-water and the genuineness of the reported mode in sage-green cloaks trimmed with ermine. Andrew, trying vainly to remember the cut of the sleeves on the last fashion doll from London, made but heavy weather of it. But he did not mind, for the girl seemed to have forgotten her obvious first intention of being rude to him, and he was able to watch the play of her smooth hands as she talked. Her foreign strain came out in that, he thought--no New York girl of his acquaintance would have gestured with such fluid deftness. He saw her hands for a moment as separate and living creatures, molding Tanagra clay to the shape of a precious urn.

Then at last Dr. Gentian was offering him a candlestick and he was bidding them all good night. He happened to say good night to the daughter last of all and the warm touch of her hand went with him all the way up the stairs, as if he had dipped his fingers in quicksilver for an instant and seen them come out silvered. Dr. Gentian accompanied him to his door.

"Good night, Mr. Beard. You will find the mosquito-net at the foot of your bed a necessity. We are not so much troubled with them here as down at the colony--but they have a particular passion for strangers."

"Many thanks for the warning, sir," Andrew smiled. "Good night."

The smiling little Cæsar in black broadcloth passed down the long corridor with a wavering flame in his hand and disappeared. Andrew turned toward his own door, yawning. A spot of hot wax fell on the back of his hand--he swore and dropped his candle, which fuffed and went out. He groped blindly for it in the sudden pitch a moment and then stood up. Another will-o'-the-wisp of light trembled far down the corridor, and came nearer. He waited--perhaps the Doctor had noted his misadventure and was coming back with a new candle for him.

The will-o'-the-wisp grew and became a candle held in the hands of a girl. For a moment he thought, with a beat in his heart, that it might be Sparta Gentian, but it was not. This girl seemed about Miss Gentian's age and height but the faint, deceptive flame she carried illuminated dark brows and darker eyes, a skin tinctured with the sun, a mouth ripened by it. Seen thus, in a weak halo of light which defined no more than head and shoulders and hands, the features were startling like those of some worn young Madonna of olivewood in the stone niche of a Spanish church, and Andrew excused himself easily enough for watching from his dark doorway.

No, she was not beautiful as Sparta Gentian was, in the way of a golden rose, but she had her qualities. The face was at once more reticent and more untamed--the manner had an odd dignity as of one who lives in oppression but is not afraid. He thought of the Spanish bayonet, in flower in Judge Willo's garden, under the swimming moon. Then he realized with a little shock, as the girl drew nearer, that from her dress she must be a servant in the house, and stepped forward abruptly to borrow light from her taper.

"Can you--" he began, but got no further, for the girl saw him suddenly, cried out, and dropped her candle, which went out instantly, leaving the corridor a pit of black velvet. He heard footsteps running away from him and called again, but there was no reply. He stayed futilely in the corridor for some time, cursing himself for forgetting that any serving-wench might well be frightened at a strange voice speaking suddenly out of gloom, and waiting for sounds that would tell him his idiocy had aroused the house. But the running footsteps ceased after a brief moment as if they had plunged into quicksand, and were followed by no sound at all. At first he was more than glad of this--then the continued quiet began to finger at his spine.

The girl had made noise enough to wake any ordinary set of sleepers, yet no one seemed to have stirred. And why had she cried out just once, when he first spoke to her and not again--a frightened maid in most houses would have screamed her throat dry. He stood uneasily in his doorway till doing so began to seem ridiculous, of a sudden feeling insecure and a stranger in a soft and hostile night. Then he went into his room and shut his door very carefully as if to shut out entirely the deeper darkness in the corridor. But he had an uncanny feeling that it seeped in after him, and would have given a gold Johannes to be able to find his tinder-box. Presently, though, his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom. He thought of the clear stream of Sparta Gentian's voice as it flowed over golden sand in "Beauty Retire" and hummed to himself as he undressed in the dark.

6.