The Path of the King [60]
"True, true!" Raleigh's mien was for a moment more lively. "That is a shrewd comment. After three-score years I know my own heart. I have been cursed with a devil of pride, Jasper. . . . Man, I have never had a friend. Followers and allies and companions, if you please, but no friend. Others-- simple folk--would be set singing by a May morning, or a warm tavern fire, or a woman's face. I have known fellows to whom the earth was so full of little pleasures that after the worst clouts they rose like larks from a furrow. A wise philosophy--but I had none of it. I saw always the little pageant of man's life like a child's peep-show beside the dark wastes of eternity. Ah, I know well I struggled like the rest for gauds and honours, but they were only tools for my ambition. For themselves I never valued them. I aimed at a master-fabric, and since I have failed I have now no terrestrial cover."
The night had fallen black, but the cabin windows were marvellously patined by stars. Raleigh's voice had sunk to the hoarse whisper of a man still fevered. He let his head recline again on the skins and closed his eyelids. Instantly it became the face of an old and very weary man.
The sailor Jasper Lauval--for so he now spelled his name on the rare occasions when he wrote it-- thought he was about to sleep and was rising to withdraw, when Raleigh's eyes opened.
"Stay with me," he commanded. "Your silence cheers me. If you leave me I have thoughts that might set me following Tom Keymis. Kit Marlowe again! I cannot get rid of his accursed jingles. How do they go?
"'Hell hath no limite, nor is circumscribed In one self-place, for where we are is hell And where hell is there must we ever be.'"
Lauval stretched out a cool hand and laid it on the Admiral's hot forehead. He had a curiously steadfast gaze for all his drooping left eye. Raleigh caught sight of the withered arm.
"Tell me of your life, Jasper. How came you by such a mauling? Let the tale of it be like David's harping and scatter my demons."
The seaman sat himself in a chair. "That was my purpose, Sir Walter. For the tale is in some manner a commentary on your late words."
"Nay, I want no moral. Let me do the moralising. The tale's the thing. See, fill a glass of this Irish cordial. Twill keep off the chill from the night air. When and where did you get so woefully battered?"
"'Twas six years back when I was with Bovill."
Raleigh whistled. "You were with Robert Bovill' What in Heaven's name did one of Coffyn blood with Robert? If ever man had a devil, 'twas he. I mind his sullen black face and his beard in two prongs. I have heard he is dead--on a Panama gibbet?"
"He is dead; but not as he lived. I was present when he died. He went to God a good Christian, praying and praising. Next day I was to follow him, but I broke prison in the night with the help of an Indian, and went down the coast in a stolen patache to a place where thick forests lined the sea. There I lay hid till my wounds healed, and by and by I was picked up by a Bristol ship that had put in to water."
"But your wounds--how got you them?"
"At the hands of the priests. They would have made a martyr of me, and used their engines to bend my mind. Being obstinate by nature I mocked them till they wearied of the play. But they left their marks on this arm and leg. The scar I had got some months before in a clean battle."
"Tell me all. What did Robert Bovill seek? And where?"
"We sought the Mountain of God," said the seaman reverently.
"I never heard o't. My own Manoa, maybe, where gold is quarried like stone."
"Nay, not Manoa. The road to it is from the shore of the Mexican gulf. There was much gold."
"You found it?"
"I found it and handled it. Enough, could we have brought it off, to freight a dozen ships. Likewise jewels beyond the imagining of kings."
Raleigh had raised himself on his elbow, his face sharp and eager.
I cannot doubt you, for you could not lie were it to win salvation. But, heavens! man, what a tale! Why did I not know of