Chapter III: Part ONE: The Pride of the Colonies (2)

The morning was so bright and calm, that he could afford to laugh at his fears of the night. He found one of the light striped-cotton suits that Mr. Windlestraw at the Sign of the Needle and Shears had assured him were all the fashion in the Southern Colonies and put it on. From his window he could see Dr. Gentian walking about his garden. The merry-mouthed Doctor seemed all content this morning, he was whistling a tune as he walked and now and then paused to smell at a flower or chirrup to a bird. He wore a broad leaf-hat and a flowered dressing-gown and looked more comfortably like the planter of Andrew's imagination. When Andrew bade him good morning, he found him observing a hedged-in patch of cactus on which tiny, red and brown insects crawled like baby ladybugs.

"Observe an industry that shames lazy fellows like you and myself, Mr. Beard," he called gayly as Andrew came up to him, "Those are cochineal insects--they have but two ends in life--to eat and make dye for our garments. I am experimenting with them now--perhaps next year we can produce the dye in quantities worth your London merchants' notice. Strange, is it not, that a little bug should carry royal colors in its belly?"

He delicately shook a few of the insects in his cupped palm and extended it for Andrew's inspection. They ran about it like tiny drops of blood, in an intent, blind busyness. Andrew looked at them with interest, feeling it strange that they did not stain the Doctor's white hand. The man was certainly a compound of the most diverse interests. Now one of the insects fell from the enclosing hand. The Doctor set his foot on it, idly. Andrew shivered.

"After breakfast you shall make the grand tour of our settlement," promised the Doctor, replacing the other insects on their fleshy green feeding-place with exquisite care.

Two things stuck in Andrew's mind particularly from that first confused trip of inspection--the babbling sound of water in the network of irrigation-canals that made New Sparta like a tropical Venice of palmetto and coquina--and the stink of the rotting indigo in the great vats in the fields where it was steeped and beaten and settled. He had never encountered such an overpowering and all-pervasive stench or such clouds of flies. "You may understand now, why my own house is built some distance from the fields," said the Doctor, offering Andrew the gilt pomander he carried in his hand, and Andrew, putting it gratefully to his nose, understood indeed.

"I don't see how your men endure it," he confessed.

"Oh--they grow accustomed," said the Doctor, carelessly. He addressed a question in lilting Italian to a bronzed statue whose naked neck crawled with flies. The statue grinned nervously with white teeth and replied.

"He says it stinks no worse than a Minorcan," translated the Doctor, smiling, "You would think that when men came to a new country they might give up the narrower prejudices of race--but not so. My Italians hate my Minorcans and my Greeks hate them both. There is always bad blood between one or the other. Of course they intermarry, too, but that only makes things worse."

He spoke casually, as of a herd of serviceable but unruly animals, and Andrew sympathized with him. The headship of a mixed colony such as this, must be a constant balancing upon thorns, though the Doctor did not seem bowed down. He walked among his men with the easy grace of a beast-tamer, and yet, Andrew noticed, with the same alert and penetrating eye.

"But which are the Minorcans?" said Andrew, vaguely looking for some odd, distinctive type of body or skull, as they passed along.

The Doctor smiled. "There is one," he said, pointing. "That fellow testing the vat. I forget his name."

Andrew looked. Four men with their trousers rolled above their knees and their legs stained with dye-water were churning the liquor in the beating-vat with a lever that had two bottomless square buckets at either end; and a younger man, at the side, was stooping over occasionally to dip out some of the liquor in a wooden cup and test it. Andrew caught his breath as he looked at this man; he thought he had never seen so fine a human creature. The fellow was of the middle height and seemed of Andrew's years--but so perfectly and aptly proportioned was he that Andrew felt himself clumsy and rudely-fashioned in comparison. The sun, which had fairly blackened the skins of many of the colonists, had only browned him to the deep tawniness of fine Spanish leather, his face wore the aloof dignity of a sombre prince, and every movement of his body was as deft as a gymnast's. Andrew could have visualized him far more easily dispensing justice from a stone chair of state or riding a horse to war clad in antique armor, than stirring indigo-muck. He said something of the sort.

"A good man, though sullen like most of them," Dr. Gentian agreed. "All the Mahonese are a fine-looking lot. Meaninglessly fine. The Greeks are much sharper. But that fellow knows his business. Few of them can judge a test rightly--and judgment's the secret of indigo-culture--for if the beating and churning there is stopped too soon some of the dye-matter stays in solution and if beat too long it begins to dissolve again. Either way you get bad indigo. This is the second cutting now--we hope for five cuttings this season if all goes well. The profit will mean we can finish our fort and add to the sugar-works. The fort will lie over there--it commands the wharves and the storehouses--"

Andrew looked across fields checkered with irrigation and beheld vast raw foundations of coquina.

"I should not have thought you needed so large a defensive work in a peaceable colony," he said, somewhat astonished. He had already noted the colony's guard-house with its garrison of eight bored soldiers--but this new work would hold a company, at least, and was planned for cannon.

"We had trouble here two years ago," said Dr. Gentian briefly. "The ringleaders were hanged in St. Augustine. And then--most of the Indians are peaceable enough--but Cowkeeper, the Creek Chief, is a mischief-maker. Ah, Mr. Cave," as a heavy-set man in his thirties, with a red, sweating face and odd, crumpled-looking ears, came toward them with his broad hat in his hand.

"This is Mr. Beard, Mr. Cave--the young gentleman I was speaking of before I went to St. Augustine. Mr. Cave, our chief overseer, Mr. Beard--"

"Servant, I'm sure," grunted Mr. Cave in a piggy voice and stared at Andrew intently. His eyes were a dull, hard blue, with reddened rings about them, and Andrew felt uncomfortable under their gaze.

"Mr. Cave comes from an English family," said Dr. Gentian pleasantly. "He is my right hand."

He laid his fingers on Mr. Cave's bare forearm, as if in acknowledgment of Mr. Cave's abilities, and Andrew saw the muscles twitch an instant under that light touch.

"Dr. Gentian's very kind," said Mr. Cave defiantly. "He knows how to treat a man, Dr. Gentian does."

"Mr. Cave flatters me sadly," said the Doctor, sniffing his pomander. "He is aware how indispensable he is to us all. You and Mr. Cave must be better acquainted, Mr. Beard. We must have Mr. Cave to supper--tonight, perhaps," he continued reflectively. "Will you sup with us tonight, Mr. Cave?'

"Thank you sir. You're very kind indeed," said Mr. Cave, again with that strange rebelliousness in his voice. Andrew thought him a queer, ungenteel sort of person and wondered at the Doctor's tolerance of his eccentricities. But doubtless he made a good chief-overseer.

"And, by the way," said Dr. Gentian, amiably, "You must be provided with a body-servant, Mr. Beard--I grieve I did not think of it before. Perhaps Mr. Cave would recommend us one. Shall it be a Greek, Mr. Cave--or an Italian--or one of your favorite Mahonese?"

"Don't ask me, sir," growled Mr. Cave with a bull-like shake of his head. "They all look alike to me--the lot of them. Not one of them's worth a sucked sugar cane, if you want my advice."

"Come, come, Mr. Cave, we must not belittle our good colonists," said the Doctor in light reproof that made Mr. Cave's muscles twitch anew. He turned to Andrew. "What preference have you, Mr. Beard?"

"I am confident that anyone Mr. Cave recommends," said Andrew, a little puzzled. Mr. Cave gave a brief, uncivil bark of laughter. "But I did not understand--I thought they were all free colonists--I mean--I did not think they would be willing to do body-service for a--"

"Oh, we'll have no trouble with that," said Dr. Gentian, briskly. "All free colonists, of course--but lazy fellows, you know, Mr. Beard--lazy fellows like most of us--" he chirrupped in tones of mock condemnation. "Any one of them would be only too glad to get out of the fields for a while and take life easy in the cool of the big house. I admit it was not my first intention to use them for such work. I had a shipload of negroes on the way--but the ship was wrecked," he sighed, "and the sea ate up my poor blackamoors--a pity--a great pity--I've not felt justified in expending further monies on slaves since then, so we've had to scratch along as best we could. By the way," he continued airily, "I understand you had an encounter with my daughter's maid last night--she's a Mahonese."

"I beg to assure you sir--it was very clumsy of me--" said Andrew, flushing.

"Not at all," said Dr. Gentian, "Don't trouble your mind with it further, I beg of you. The poor silly girl was frightened and took you for a ghost--they're very superstitious. I assure you she won't behave in such a foolish manner again." He tapped his pomander and looked at Andrew.

"A hot, dogged wench--that Minorca piece," said Mr. Cave with ugly abruptness, and Andrew decided then and there that he definitely disliked Mr. Cave.

His behaviour at supper that evening did not make Andrew like him any better, though it did produce a certain tinge of contemptuous pity for him. The man fumbled absurdly with his food, through the meal, in a dour silence, his reddened brow bent on his plate, in spite of all the genial Doctor's attempts to draw him out. Occasionally he would steal a queer, hostile, glance at Miss Gentian and address a few loutish words to her to be repaid with an iced gentility. Andrew could not blame Miss Gentian for her aloofness, but he felt sorry for Mr. Cave nevertheless. He himself was in fine feather and described the hanging of Lieutenant Governor Golden in effigy, during the Stamp Act riots, with the devil whispering in his ear, and the unparalleled musical clock but recently exhibited in Hull's assembly rooms, in a manner to win the concerted smiles of both the Gentian ladies.

After supper they retired to the drawing room again, and again Sparta Gentian's voice breathed gold through a crystal instrument in the strains of "Beauty Retire." The occasion was marred for Andrew only by the fact that Mr. Cave had obviously taken too much wine in the interval before joining the ladies, and now sat in a brooding, red-browed silence like a stupefied bear, with his drooping-lidded eyes stupidly intent upon Sparta Gentian's averted face. When the song was ended he got up abruptly, almost overturning his chair, and without a word went over to the open window at the other end of the room and remained standing there with his back to the company.

Andrew seemed to read a message in Dr. Gentian's face--he rose too, and went over to the window himself. He stood for a moment at Mr. Cave's side--the man was staring out into darkness and did not notice him. Then he laid his hand lightly on Mr. Cave's arm to attract his attention, as he had seen Dr. Gentian do that morning.

All Mr. Cave's stolid composure dropped from him on the instant.

"Don't touch me!" he said in a fierce whisper, shaking off Andrew's hand as if it stung him, "Don't touch me, I tell you!"

"But my dear sir--" said Andrew astounded. Then he paused, for he had seen the man's eyes, and the watery madness in them. For an instant Andrew felt on his body the impact of a blow that was not given--a blow like a hammerstroke. Then the bloody color died from Mr. Cave's eyes and his mouth ceased to quiver like an angry child's.

"I--I am very sorry, Mr. Beard," he said, recovering himself with visible effort, "The heat--and Miss Gentian's singing--I am not very well with the heat and I--I cannot endure to have a stranger touch me suddenly--don't think too hardly of me because of it, Mr. Beard--"

He was almost fawning now. Andrew did not know which aspect of the man he found more distasteful--the sudden, lunatic rage of a minute ago or this present and horrible obsequiousness.

"Pray think no more of it," said Andrew, haughtily, trying to copy Dr. Gentian's tone, "Miss Gentian is about to sing again--shall we hear her?" He led the way back into the room. But he was relieved when, after Mr. Cave had taken his bearish departure, Dr. Gentian explained the reason for his singular behaviour.

"You have my thanks for treating Mr. Cave so courteously," he said gravely. "A strange, bitter creature, Cave--but loyal and devoted, so we must put up with his strangeness." He lowered his voice, "He comes of good enough stock--but you see it's by the left hand--and that frets him, whenever he's in company."

"If he had his rights he'd be rich. Rich," said Sparta Gentian suddenly in her thrilling voice.

"You were going to play us something of Handel's, my dear," said her father, and the girl turned back to the forte-piano with an impatient jerk of her head. Under cover of the music, Dr. Gentian went on in snatches.

"I found him in London--what an exquisite passage, my pet--very bitter against the world. Well, I'd known his father. A hard man. I thought perhaps in a country where nobody knew the story--but I fear the wound is too old and deep. One cannot blame him too much. In his place, who would not be strange? Ah, bravo, daughter!" and he clapped his hands.

Surely, thought Andrew, here was a gentleman of the most comprehensive benevolence and understanding, and as he looked at the beauty of Sparta Gentian's face, a little flushed now from the exertion of playing, he resolved that the morrow would find him more than courteous to unlucky Mr. Cave.

7.

The morrow came--and other morrows. A month slipped down the curve of the year without Andrew's realizing how quickly it had vanished--the indigo was in its third cutting--then in its fourth. Soon it was time for hoarfrost to whiten the doorstep of the house on Wall Street and autumn to gild and redden the trees on the Boston road. Here it was hard to believe in snow feathering from a leaden caldron of sky and the cries of skaters on the black ice of Lispenard's Pond. The news from the North was scant and disturbing, but its message, to Andrew, very tiny and far away, a troubled voice hardly heard through heavy glass, the faint disturbance of cannon and drums on a ship anchored beyond the horizon.

The tea-ships had been sent back from New York in orderly protest--ships along the Northern seaboard hoisted their colors at halfmast when the news of the closing of the port of Boston came, and in Philadelphia, the bells of the churches were muffled and tolled all day. In the city Andrew had left, the Committee of Fifty One was organized and began to quarrel internally at once. The call for the First Continental Congress went forth, and from all the colonies but Georgia the delegates began to assemble. Dust-powdered riders jogged along bad roads, north and south, to Philadelphia--John Adams and the other delegates from defiant Massachusetts were received along their way with the state and circumstance of dukes or convicted felons. The Congress sat and deliberated--adopted a declaration of rights--resolved to import no British merchandise after the first of December--ended with a stately but ineffective petition to the king. John Adams found the Philadelphia ladies charming but deplored the general extravagance of the city--the Congress dissolved, to meet again the following May, having made its gesture.

A cloud formed in the sky and grew--behind it a masked and indifferent figure of chaos sharpened certain lightnings and saw that his thunders were in voice. But cloud and figure were alike unperceived by the plump, stupid king who still thought of his obedient subjects of New York Colony, and by those subjects who still stood ready to drink his health in broken glass on his birthday and wish him better advised. Only Chatham in the increasing weakness of his age saw a little--and a few men in America who had helped push a stone to the edge of a steep slope, perceived now where that bounding missile would strike in the valley, and caught their breath. But Andrew was not one of those few.

He was honestly concerned at the tone of his father's letters, however. At first they were stiff and a little magniloquent, now they grew hasty and brief, with odd gaps in them as if the writer were too constantly fretted in mind to drive quill along paper for long at a time. One strange, sparse missive had come from Lucius--he had left the house on Wall Street and the business of Alexander Beard and Son, and remained Andrew's affectionate brother, with no address. Andrew had written him at once, asking for the details of the estrangement, but had got no reply except a bundle of the more violent manifestoes of the Sons of Liberty, which he had read with a queer detachment. Lucius' name dropped abruptly out of his father's letters and was not alluded to again, while every letter was full of eager, almost querulous queries as to the details of plantation-management. Andrew pictured his father as a man at sword's-points with an invisible enemy, forced back and back into a shadow. He took his courage in both hands and wrote him formally for permission to come home--sons did that, then. But the letter he got in answer was even briefer and stranger than the rest, and adjured Andrew, by every tie of filial duty, to remain where he was for a time. "My dear Son--I implore you by all I hold most holy to remain yet a while in the Floridas--I have reasons for this request you know not of, my Dear Son--and if you would be the Staff of my Age, I conjure you to obey me in this--. Your mother is not Well and I am everywhere beset by difficulty--"

So it ran, in part, and Andrew, perplexed and sorry, could not but obey. Besides, there were other reasons for his staying. He had fallen deeply in love with Sparta Gentian and as deeply in hate with the uncouth Mr. Cave.

The first complete passion of the heart may be written in water for its permanency, but it leaves a cicatrice few care to have the wind blow on, even when iron has grown over the scar. Andrew had known women before, or their flesh, as a part of his coming of age--a circumstance of as definite, physical importance as the acquisition of a new watch by Green of London or the ability to curse a servant adequately. But the fashionable bawdy-house by the docks which he had visited a trifle shrinkingly in Lucius' company, with its ton of syrup-voiced female meat who rapped her trollops' knuckles with an iron key-ring to make them be civil to the young gentlemen, had as little to do with this present fever as the stiff exchange of high compliment with suitably marriageable daughters, minikin-mouthed, in green lutestring gowns. This was burning and ague at once, an arrow in the veins, a bitter gold in the mind.

He had realized it first some weeks ago, overseeing a gang of Greeks sickle the tall indigo with shining, leisurely strokes while the flies buzzed and the mown swathe gave out a scent of crushed herb. An incongruous moment, but most high moments are incongruous. Something had passed before his eyes like the shadow of a sea-gull in flight; then he knew; and the rest of the afternoon he had let his Greeks soldier as they would, while he stared at a visionary image through eyes that saw the field he stood in and the men who worked in that field as meaningless silhouettes cut out of colored paper.

Then he went back to the house and, after washing the smell of the fields from his body with unusual thoroughness, descended to supper and was tongue-tied and inept whenever he looked at Sparta. But gradually the first sheer bedazzlement passed, and he began to think and suffer.

He was so thoroughly acclimated to New Sparta by now that at times it seemed as if he never had led any other life. He could test the indigo in the beating vats as expertly as Dr. Gentian himself; and knew why no sun must fall upon it while it lies in the drying-shed; and the differences between the light, pure indigo called flotant or flora, the _gorge-de-pigeon_ sort, and the copper-colored, heavier stuff that is used for dying woolens and the coarser fabrics. The smell of the rotting plant no longer revolted him, he had become inured to it, and if not inured, accustomed at least to the mosquitoes and flies in the fields.

He had long ago acquired his body-servant--a slim, silent, olive Minorcan lad with melancholy eyes. Also, he had begun to take a considerable interest in many of the other men and see the colony much more clearly as a whole. Some things he saw made him wince--but it was a hard-handed age, and he gradually fell into the way men have of overlooking little uncomfortable incidents that would have given him pause six months before. Whatever happened, Dr. Gentian was never to blame. The Doctor could not be everywhere, and if, occasionally he seemed to overlook occurrences that made Andrew hot behind the eyes, the abundant, evident prosperity of the settlement was ample testimony for the general wisdom and justice of his policy. Besides, and always now, he was Sparta's father.

Mr. Cave, though, was a brute and an unpleasant one. In regard to him, Andrew could not but feel that Dr. Gentian carried a point of generosity too far. The friction between himself and Mr. Cave had begun the very morning after the scene between them at the window. Mr. Cave was giving him his first lesson in the ways of the plantation, and Andrew had certainly intended all scrupulous courtesy towards him. But after an hour or so of contemptuous, ursine explanations on Mr. Cave's part and eager questions on Andrew's, Mr. Cave stopped suddenly as they were crossing a field together.

"What did he tell you about me, last night, after I was gone, hey?" he said hoarsely, jerking his thumb in the general direction of the great house.

Andrew felt trapped. "I do not recall that we discussed any one of your qualities in particular," he said finally. The man galled him, but he was resolved to be civil.

"Qualities!" said Mr. Cave, scornfully. "Qualities, hell. He told you I was a bastard--didn't he now? A London lawyer's bastard without even a decent name to his back?" His voice was vinegary. He looked Andrew up and down with red, peering eyes.

"I assure you, Mr. Cave," said Andrew, still grasping at civility, "that even if Dr. Gentian did happen to refer to the--the unhappy circumstances of your birth--"

"Listen to me!" said Mr. Cave with sudden violence, "You can't talk fine to me--I don't want any of your stinking New York sop! I'm a bastard, all right--I knew he'd tell you--well, if I am--" he beat his fist in his palm, "I don't want any damn cocked-hat pity from you or him neither--savvy? I take care of myself--savvy? I could stake the two of you out in the sun to dry there for boucan--savvy? All right--now you go and snigger about me with him over your wine as much as you damn well want to!"

The hoarse, brief explosion of his rage left Andrew stunned for an instant. He felt as if he had stretched out his hand in the dark and put it upon a toad.

"Oh--go to the devil!" he said, rather impotently, and started to walk away in a fog of anger. But already the man's fit had passed and he was running after him with apologies.

"Mr. Beard! Mr. Beard! I didn't mean anything, sir--I swear I didn't! I get a fit like that every now and then--Dr. Gentian knows it--he never pays any attention to it. You aren't going to tell him, Mr. Beard? You aren't going to--"

The tawdry tears were actually running down his cheeks. It took some time for Andrew, loathing them both, to quiet him with promises and assurances. Then the man relapsed into his usual heavy sullenness and the tour of instruction proceeded. But even the crowded months since then had not been able to obliterate the shoddy scene from Andrew's memory.

Then there was the time, a month or so later, when Mr. Cave had been about to take the whip to the Minorcan. The Minorcan was the fine-looking fellow whom Andrew had noticed on his first day at New Sparta, and Andrew had stopped the projected whipping in short order, for he was used to his work by then, and conscious of Dr. Gentian's favor. But again, he would not easily forget the Minorcan's clenched face as Mr. Cave had whistled the rawhide lash in his hands in preparation to strike, nor Mr. Cave's dull fury when Andrew had intervened.

That matter had gone up to Dr. Gentian and Mr. Cave had been cautioned, though, as Dr. Gentian explained, there were times when the whip--"A new colony must live its first decade under what, to all purposes, is martial law, Mr. Beard, if it is to survive. Take away the punitive power--even the power of life and death--from its governors and--well, you've heard of the first days at Jamestown--"

Andrew agreed. Dr. Gentian, as usual, had reason and experience on his side. But he thought Mr. Cave should be discharged and said so.

"Some time, perhaps--if I could find him another post," mused Dr. Gentian, gravely. "But just now--well--we are short of men, Mr. Beard, and after all, if I did discharge him, where would the wretched fellow go? I could not turn him out naked to pig it with the Indians."

Andrew saw the justice of that, and the air cleared again. At least, he thought, the incident had been of some value, for it won him the friendship of the Minorcan concerned and he began to be popular among the palmetto-huts.

The Minorcan's name was Sebastian Zafortezas, and Andrew discovered, with that curious pleasure the mind takes in tiny coincidences, that they had been born in the same year. He began to visit Sebastian's hut, now and then--it was on the edge of the Minorcan quarter and cleaner and better kept than those of his Greek neighbors. As the acquaintanceship grew, Sebastian began to teach him Mahonese Spanish--hesitatingly at first, for he had only a little English to begin on. But soon they were really able to talk to each other--and Andrew began to learn about the deserted hut near the Altar of the Gentiles and the long sick voyage from Port Mahon.

Gradually, Andrew slipped into the way of frequenting Sebastian's hut as often as circumstance allowed. Conversation with Dr. Gentian was always instructive--but he found that at times he missed the fellowship of men near his own age more than he had thought--and Mr. Cave was the only other possibility. Colonial and Mahonese exchanged knives and minor confidences and began to feel secure in each other's company. Andrew discovered that Sebastian was passionately fond of tobacco and repaid his language lessons with pipefuls of rank Virginia, while the two chatted and the blue smoke wavered in the evening air, and the Barbary ape that Sebastian was so proud of bringing alive from Minorca chattered to itself in a corner. Andrew thought a dozen times of transferring Sebastian from the fields to the coquina house, as his body servant, but something held him back--he suspected his friend of a pride of race as great as any De Lancey's and feared to wound him.

They were seated so, one afternoon in early March when work was over, smoking in comparative silence, for both were tired. Andrew was thinking that it was nearly a year since he had sailed from New York, that he had had no news from home for almost two months now, and that the little hollow at the base of Sparta Gentian's throat was the most lovely of all created things.

He had long ago confided his passion to Sebastian and had received a grave, laconic sympathy in return. Sometimes he wondered at himself for revealing the most hidden trouble of his heart so easily to a foreign laborer--but that ghost of snobbery was quickly laid. His friend understood him, that was enough. But he wondered sometimes, if he understood his friend.

The other had told him many things--he could see the barren island of ringdoves and eagles rise before him out of the sea, in Sebastian's words, like a city long-drowned--he could hear the soft slur of the dancers' feet in the rocky streets of Mahon--but the secret springs of Sebastian's mind remained unrevealed. Occasionally, in a chance word or a casual idiom, he could catch a glimpse of some alien, resolved purpose, hidden under the surface of Sebastian's talk like the gleam of a fish, seen far down, in very deep water, but that was all. Still, Andrew decided, he did not like Sebastian any the less for it. He shook out the dottel from his pipe, stretched his arms, and spoke.

"She is beautiful as a golden rose," he said in Spanish. "Beautiful. Is she not beautiful, my friend?"

Sebastian nodded gravely. "All women are beautiful, but only one to a lover," he said, reflectively, "It is well, so. When do you speak to her father, amigo?"

"Soon," said Andrew, "As soon as I have any notion there is hope for me in her mind."

"You must serenade her more often," said Sebastian smiling.

"No." Andrew smiled, too. "I have told you we have not the custom of the serenade."

"That is bad," said Sebastian seriously. "Guitar-music comes like a child to a woman's heart--it can enter where a man must stay out in the darkness. I would get you a guitar, my friend, if you had need of it. Tonight is a night for love and the guitar."

"That is true," said Andrew, nodding, "But you, Sebastian--how do you know? Have you never been in love?"

Sebastian regarded the bowl of his pipe.

"Yes. I have been in love," he said.

"But I've never seen you with a girl."

"No," said Sebastian. "You have never seen me with a girl." His face was masked.

"And yet--what happened, Sebastian?--Are you still, perhaps--"

"It is possible," said Sebastian, smiling. "Let us talk no more of it, my friend. Let us talk of your love instead--and wish you good fortune."

Andrew felt rebuffed, but he respected the other's reticence. Besides, it was so very much more interesting to pour his own doubts and fears in Sebastian's sympathetic ear.

"Perhaps, I will find my rose tonight," he said, tossing a pebble idly in his hand, "Perhaps."

"May you wear it many years," said Sebastian with courteous dignity.

"Dr. Gentian sets out for St. Augustine soon," went on Andrew, thinking aloud. "He will be gone some time. If I do not speak before then--"

"Ah," said Sebastian and muttered something to himself in Spanish.

"_Que?_" said Andrew, eagerly. He had not caught the words.

"I said nothing," said Sebastian, holding out his hand before the door of his hut to try the direction of the wind. "The air is heavy. We will have rain before morning. Rain and thunder."

"Nonsense, Sebastian," said Andrew and laughed. "The sky's as clear as a bell and it rained only two days ago."

"Perhaps," said Sebastian, staring into a distance. His eyes were veiled. "But for all that, we will have rain soon enough, and thunder. There is thunder in the air, my friend--thunder coming up from the sea."