the other side of the isle, he came upon a little shady beach, which, beneath a bank of stone some six feet high, fringed the edge of a perfectly still and glassy bay. Ten yards farther, the cataract fell sheer in thunder: but a high fern-fringed rock turned its force away from that quiet nook. In it the water swung slowly round and round in glassy dark-green rings, among which dimpled a hundred gaudy fish, waiting for every fly and worm which spun and quivered on the eddy. Here, if anywhere, was the place to find the owner of the canoe. He leapt down upon the pebbles; and as he did so, a figure rose from behind a neighboring rock, and met him face to face.
It was an Indian girl; and yet, when he looked again,–was it an Indian girl? Amyas had seen hundreds of those delicate dark- skinned daughters of the forest, but never such a one as this. Her stature was taller, her limbs were fuller and more rounded; her complexion, though tanned by light, was fairer by far than his own sunburnt face; her hair, crowned with a garland of white flowers, was not lank, and straight, and black, like an Indian’s, but of a rich, glossy brown, and curling richly and crisply from her very temples to her knees. Her forehead, though low, was upright and ample; her nose was straight and small; her lips, the lips of a European; her whole face of the highest and richest type of Spanish beauty; a collar of gold mingled with green beads hung round her neck, and golden bracelets were on her wrists. All the strange and dim legends of white Indians, and of nations of a higher race than Carib, or Arrowak, or Solimo, which Amyas had ever heard, rose up in his memory. She must be the daughter of some great cacique, perhaps of the lost Incas themselves–why not? And full of simple wonder, he gazed upon that fairy vision, while she, unabashed in her free innocence, gazed fearlessly in return, as Eve might have done in Paradise, upon the mighty stature, and the strange garments, and above all, on the bushy beard and flowing yellow locks of the Englishman.
He spoke first, in some Indian tongue, gently and smilingly, and made a half-step forward; but quick as light she caught up from the ground a bow, and held it fiercely toward him, fitted with the long arrow, with which, as he could see, she had been striking fish, for a line of twisted grass hung from its barbed head. Amyas stopped, laid down his own bow and sword, and made another step in advance, smiling still, and making all Indian signs of amity: but the arrow was still pointed straight at his breast, and he knew the mettle and strength of the forest nymphs well enough to stand still and call for the Indian boy; too proud to retreat, but in the uncomfortable expectation of feeling every moment the shaft quivering between his ribs.
The boy, who had been peering from above, leaped down to them in a moment; and began, as the safest method, grovelling on his nose upon the pebbles, while he tried two or three dialects; one of which at last she seemed to understand, and answered in a tone of evident suspicion and anger.
“What does she say?”
“That you are a Spaniard and a robber, because you have a beard.”
“Tell her that we are no Spaniards, but that we hate them; and are come across the great waters to help the Indians to kill them.”
The boy translated his speech. The nymph answered by a contemptuous shake of the head.
“Tell her, that if she will send her tribe to us, we will do them no harm. We are going over the mountains to fight the Spaniards, and we want them to show us the way.”
The boy had no sooner spoken, than, nimble as a deer, the nymph had sprung up the rocks, and darted between the palm-stems to her canoe. Suddenly she caught sight of the English boat, and stopped with a cry of fear and rage.
“Let her pass!” shouted Amyas, who had followed her close. “Push your boat off, and let her pass. Boy, tell her to go on; they will not come near her.”
But she hesitated still, and with arrow drawn to the head, faced first on the boat’s crew, and then on Amyas, till the Englishmen had shoved off full twenty yards.
Then, leaping into her tiny piragua, she darted into the wildest whirl of the eddies, shooting along with vigorous strokes, while the English trembled as they saw the frail bark spinning and leaping amid the muzzles of the alligators, and the huge dog- toothed trout: but with the swiftness of an arrow she reached the northern bank, drove her canoe among the bushes, and leaping from it, darted through some narrow opening in the bush, and vanished like a dream.
“What fair virago have you unearthed?” cried Cary, as they toiled up again to the landing-place.
“Beshrew me,” quoth Jack, “but we are in the very land of the nymphs, and I shall expect to see Diana herself next, with the moon on her forehead.”
“Take care, then, where you wander hereabouts, Sir John: lest you end as Actaeon did, by turning into a stag, and being eaten by a jaguar.”
“Actaeon was eaten by his own hounds, Mr. Cary, so the parallel don’t hold. But surely she was a very wonder of beauty!”
Why was it that Amyas did not like this harmless talk? There had come over him the strangest new feeling; as if that fair vision was his property, and the men had no right to talk about her, no right to have even seen her. And he spoke quite surlily as he said–
“You may leave the women to themselves, my masters; you’ll have to deal with the men ere long: so get your canoes up on the rock, and keep good watch.”
“Hillo!” shouted one in a few minutes, “here’s fresh fish enough to feed us all round. I suppose that young cat-a-mountain left it behind her in her hurry. I wish she had left her golden chains and ouches into the bargain.”
“Well,” said another, ” we’ll take it as fair payment, for having made us drop down the current again to let her ladyship pass.”
“Leave that fish alone,” said Amyas; “it is none of yours.”
“Why, sir!” quoth the finder in a tone of sulky deprecation.
“If we are to make good friends with the heathens, we had better not begin by stealing their goods. There are plenty more fish in the river; go and catch them, and let the Indians have their own.”
The men were accustomed enough to strict and stern justice in their dealings with the savages: but they could not help looking slyly at each other, and hinting, when out of sight, that the captain seemed in a mighty fuss about his new acquaintance.
However, they were expert by this time in all the Indian’s fishing methods; and so abundant was the animal life which swarmed around every rock, that in an hour fish enough lay on the beach to feed them all; whose forms and colors, names and families, I must leave the reader to guess from the wondrous pages of Sir Richard Schomburgk, for I know too little of them to speak without the fear of making mistakes.
A full hour passed before they saw anything more of their Indian neighbors; and then from under the bushes shot out a canoe, on which all eyes were fixed in expectation.
Amyas, who expected to find there some remnant of a higher race, was disappointed enough at seeing on board only the usual half- dozen of low-browed, dirty Orsons, painted red with arnotto: but a gray-headed elder at the stern seemed, by his feathers and gold ornaments, to be some man of note in the little woodland community.
The canoe came close up to the island; Amyas saw that they were unarmed, and, laying down his weapons, advanced alone to the bank, making all signs of amity. They were returned with interest by the old man, and Amyas’s next care was to bring forward the fish which the fair nymph had left behind, and, through the medium of the Indian lad, to give the cacique (for so he seemed to be) to understand that he wished to render every one his own. This offer was received, as Amyas expected, with great applause, and the canoe came alongside; but the crew still seemed afraid to land. Amyas bade his men throw the fish one by one into the boat; and then proclaimed by the boy’s mouth, as was his custom with all Indians, that he and his were enemies of the Spaniards, and on their way to make war against them,–and that all which they desired was a peaceable and safe passage through the dominions of the mighty potentate and renowned warrior whom they beheld before them; for Amyas argued rightly enough, that even if the old fellow aft was not the cacique, he would be none the less pleased at being mistaken for him.
Whereon the ancient worthy, rising in the canoe, pointed to heaven, earth, and the things under, and commenced a long sermon, in tone, manner, and articulation, very like one of those which the great black-bearded apes were in the habit of preaching every evening when they could get together a congregation of little monkeys to listen, to the great scandal of Jack, who would have it that some evil spirit set them on to mimic him; which sermon, being partly interpreted by the Indian lad, seemed to signify, that the valor and justice of the white men had already reached the ears of the speaker, and that he was sent to welcome them into those regions by the Daughter of the Sun.
“The Daughter of the Sun!” quoth Amyas; “then we have found the lost Incas after all.”
“We have found something,” said Cary; “I only hope it may not be a mare’s nest, like many another of our finding.”
“Or an adder’s,” said Yeo. “We must beware of treachery.”
“We must beware of no such thing,” said Amyas, pretty sharply. “Have I not told you fifty times, that if they see that we trust them, they will trust us, and if they see that we suspect them, they will suspect us? And when two parties are watching to see who strikes the first blow, they are sure to come to fisticuffs from mere dirty fear of each other.”
Amyas spoke truth; for almost every atrocity against savages which had been committed by the Spaniards, and which was in later and worse times committed by the English, was wont to be excused in that same base fear of treachery. Amyas’s plan, like that of Drake, and Cook, and all great English voyagers, had been all along to inspire at once awe and confidence, by a frank and fearless carriage; and he was not disappointed here. He bade the men step boldly into their canoes, and follow the old Indian whither he would. The simple children of the forest bowed themselves reverently before the mighty strangers, and then led them smilingly across the stream, and through a narrow passage in the covert, to a hidden lagoon, on the banks of which stood, not Manoa, but a tiny Indian village.
CHAPTER XXIV
HOW AMYAS WAS TEMPTED OF THE DEVIL
“Let us alone. What pleasure can we have To war with evil? Is there any peace
In always climbing up the climbing wave? All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave In silence; ripen, fall, and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.”
TENNYSON.
Humboldt has somewhere a curious passage; in which, looking on some wretched group of Indians, squatting stupidly round their fires, besmeared with grease and paint, and devouring ants and clay, he somewhat naively remarks, that were it not for science, which teaches us that such is the crude material of humanity, and this the state from which we all have risen, he should have been tempted rather to look upon those hapless beings as the last degraded remnants of some fallen and dying race. One wishes that the great traveller had been bold enough to yield to that temptation, which his own reason and common sense presented to him as the real explanation of the sad sight, instead of following the dogmas of a so-called science, which has not a fact whereon to base its wild notion, and must ignore a thousand facts in asserting it. His own good sense, it seems, coincided instinctively with the Bible doctrine, that man in a state of nature is a fallen being, doomed to death–a view which may be a sad one, but still one more honorable to poor humanity than the theory, that we all began as some sort of two-handed apes. It is surely more hopeful to believe that those poor Otomacs or Guahibas were not what they ought to be, than to believe that they were. It is certainly more complimentary to them to think that they had been somewhat nobler and more prudent in centuries gone by, than that they were such blockheads as to have dragged on, the son after the father, for all the thousands of years which have elapsed since man was made, without having had wit enough to discover any better food than ants and clay.
Our voyagers, however, like those of their time, troubled their heads with no such questions. Taking the Bible story as they found it, they agreed with Humboldt’s reason, and not with his science; or, to speak correctly, agreed with Humboldt’s self, and not with the shallow anthropologic theories which happened to be in vogue fifty years ago; and their new hosts were in their eyes immortal souls like themselves, “captivated by the devil at his will,” lost there in the pathless forests, likely to be lost hereafter.
And certainly facts seemed to bear out their old-fashioned theories; although these Indians had sunk by no means so low as the Guahibas whom they had met upon the lower waters of the same river.
They beheld, on landing, a scattered village of palm-leaf sheds, under which, as usual, the hammocks were slung from tree to tree. Here and there, in openings in the forest, patches of cassava and indigo appeared; and there was a look of neatness and comfort about the little settlement superior to the average.
But now for the signs of the evil spirit. Certainly it was no good spirit who had inspired them with the art of music; or else (as Cary said) Apollo and Mercury (if they ever visited America) had played their forefathers a shabby trick, and put them off with very poor instruments, and still poorer taste. For on either side of the landing-place were arranged four or five stout fellows, each with a tall drum, or long earthen trumpet, swelling out in the course of its length into several hollow balls from which arose, the moment the strangers set foot on shore, so deafening a cacophony of howls, and groans, and thumps, as fully to justify Yeo’s remark, “They are calling upon their devil, sir.” To which Cary answered, with some show of reason, that “they were the less likely to be disappointed, for none but Sir Urian would ever come to listen to such a noise.”
“And you mark, sirs,” said Yeo, “there’s some feast or sacrifice toward. “I’m not overconfident of them yet.”
“Nonsense!” said Amyas, “we could kill every soul of them in half- an-hour, and they know that as well as we.”
But some great demonstration was plainly toward; for the children of the forest were arrayed in two lines, right and left of the open space, the men in front, and the women behind; and all bedizened, to the best of their power, with arnotto, indigo, and feathers.
Next, with a hideous yell, leapt into the centre of the space a personage who certainly could not have complained if any one had taken him for the devil, for he had dressed himself up carefully for that very intent, in a jaguar-skin with a long tail, grinning teeth, a pair of horns, a plume of black and yellow feathers, and a huge rattle.
“Here’s the Piache, the rascal,” says Amyas.
“Ay,” says Yeo, “in Satan’s livery, and I’ve no doubt his works are according, trust him for it.”
“Don’t be frightened, Jack,” says Cary, backing up Brimblecombe from behind. “It’s your business to tackle him, you know. At him boldly, and he’ll run.”
Whereat all the men laughed; and the Piache, who had intended to produce a very solemn impression, hung fire a little. However, being accustomed to get his bread by his impudence, he soon recovered himself, advanced, smote one of the musicians over the head with his rattle to procure silence; and then began a harangue, to which Amyas listened patiently, cigar in mouth.
“What’s it all about, boy?”
“He wants to know whether you have seen Amalivaca on the other shore of the great water?”
Amyas was accustomed to this inquiry after the mythic civilizer of the forest Indians, who, after carving the mysterious sculptures which appear upon so many inland cliffs of that region, returned again whence he came, beyond the ocean. He answered, as usual, by setting forth the praises of Queen Elizabeth.
To which the Piache replied, that she must be one of Amalivaca’s seven daughters, some of whom he took back with him, while be broke the legs of the rest to prevent their running away, and left them to people the forests.
To which Amyas replied, that his queen’s legs were certainly not broken; for she was a very model of grace and activity, and the best dancer in all her dominions; but that it was more important to him to know whether the tribe would give them cassava bread, and let them stay peaceably on that island, to rest a while before they went on to fight the clothed men (the Spaniards), on the other side of the mountains.
On which the Piache, after capering and turning head over heels with much howling, beckoned Amyas and his party to follow him; they did so, seeing that the Indians were all unarmed, and evidently in the highest good humor.
The Piache went toward the door of a carefully closed hut, and crawling up to it on all-fours in most abject fashion, began whining to some one within.
“Ask what he is about, boy.”
The lad asked the old cacique, who had accompanied them, and received for answer, that he was consulting the Daughter of the Sun.
“Here is our mare’s nest at last,” quoth Cary, as the Piache from whines rose to screams and gesticulations, and then to violent convulsions, foaming at the mouth, and rolling of the eyeballs, till he suddenly sank exhausted, and lay for dead.
“As good as a stage play.”
“The devil has played his part,” says Jack; “and now by the rules of all plays Vice should come on.”
“And a very fair Vice it will be, I suspect; a right sweet Iniquity, my Jack! Listen.”
And from the interior of the hut rose a low sweet song, at which all the simple Indians bowed their heads in reverence; and the English were hushed in astonishment; for the voice was not shrill or guttural, like that of an Indian, but round, clear, and rich, like a European’s; and as it swelled and rose louder and louder, showed a compass and power which would have been extraordinary anywhere (and many a man of the party, as was usual in musical old England, was a good judge enough of such a matter, and could hold his part right well in glee, and catch, and roundelay, and psalm). And as it leaped, and ran, and sank again, and rose once more to fall once more, all but inarticulate, yet perfect in melody, like the voice of bird on bough, the wild wanderers were rapt in new delight, and did not wonder at the Indians as they bowed their heads, and welcomed the notes as messengers from some higher world. At last one triumphant burst, so shrill that all ears rang again, and then dead silence. The Piache, suddenly restored to life, jumped upright, and recommenced preaching at Amyas.
“Tell the howling villain to make short work of it, lad! His tune won’t do after that last one.”
The lad, grinning, informed Amyas that the Piache signified their acceptance as friends by the Daughter of the Sun; that her friends were theirs, and her foes theirs. Whereon the Indians set up a scream of delight, and Amyas, rolling another tobacco leaf up in another strip of plantain, answered,–
“Then let her give us some cassava,” and lighted a fresh cigar.
Whereon the door of the hut opened, and the Indians prostrated themselves to the earth, as there came forth the same fair apparition which they had encountered upon the island, but decked now in feather-robes, and plumes of every imaginable hue.
Slowly and stately, as one accustomed to command, she walked up to Amyas, glancing proudly round on her prostrate adorers, and pointing with graceful arms to the trees, the gardens, and the huts, gave him to understand by signs (so expressive were her looks, that no words were needed) that all was at his service; after which, taking his hand, she lifted it gently to her forehead.
At that sign of submission a shout of rapture rose from the crowd; and as the mysterious maiden retired again to her hut, they pressed round the English, caressing and admiring, pointing with equal surprise to their swords, to their Indian bows and blow-guns, and to the trophies of wild beasts with which they were clothed; while women hastened off to bring fruit, and flowers, and cassava, and (to Amyas’s great anxiety) calabashes of intoxicating drink; and, to make a long story short, the English sat down beneath the trees, and feasted merrily, while the drums and trumpets made hideous music, and lithe young girls and lads danced uncouth dances, which so scandalized both Brimblecombe and Yeo, that they persuaded Amyas to beat an early retreat. He was willing enough to get back to the island while the men were still sober; so there were many leave- takings and promises of return on the morrow, and the party paddled back to their island-fortress, racking their wits as to who or what the mysterious maid could be.
Amyas, however, had settled in his mind that she was one of the lost Inca race; perhaps a descendant of that very fair girl, wife of the Inca Manco, whom Pizarro, forty years before, had, merely to torture the fugitive king’s heart, as his body was safe from the tyrant’s reach, stripped, scourged, and shot to death with arrows, uncomplaining to the last.
They all assembled for the evening service (hardly a day had passed since they left England on which they had not done the same); and after it was over, they must needs sing a Psalm, and then a catch or two, ere they went to sleep; and till the moon was high in heaven, twenty mellow voices rang out above the roar of the cataract, in many a good old tune. Once or twice they thought they heard an echo to their song: but they took no note of it, till Cary, who had gone apart for a few minutes, returned, and whispered Amyas away.
“The sweet Iniquity is mimicking us, lad.”
They went to the brink of the river; and there (for their ears were by this time dead to the noise of the torrent) they could hear plainly the same voice which had so surprised them in the hut, repeating, clear and true, snatches of the airs which they had sung. Strange and solemn enough was the effect of the men’s deep voices on the island, answered out of the dark forest by those sweet treble notes; and the two young men stood a long while listening and looking out across the eddies, which swirled down golden in the moonlight: but they could see nothing beyond save the black wall of trees. After a while the voice ceased, and the two returned to dream of Incas and nightingales.
They visited the village again next day; and every day for a week or more: but the maiden appeared but rarely, and when she did, kept her distance as haughtily as a queen.
Amyas, of course, as soon as he could converse somewhat better with his new friends, was not long before he questioned the cacique about her. But the old man made an owl’s face at her name, and intimated by mysterious shakes of the head, that she was a very strange personage, and the less said about her the better. She was “a child of the Sun,” and that was enough.
“Tell him, boy,” quoth Cary, “that we are the children of the Sun by his first wife; and have orders from him to inquire how the Indians have behaved to our step-sister, for he cannot see all their tricks down here, the trees are so thick. So let him tell us, or all the cassava plants shall be blighted.”
“Will, Will, don’t play with lying!” said Amyas: but the threat was enough for the cacique, and taking them in his canoe a full mile down the stream, as if in fear that the wonderful maiden should overhear him, he told them, in a sort of rhythmic chant, how, many moons ago (he could not tell how many), his tribe was a mighty nation, and dwelt in Papamene, till the Spaniards drove them forth. And how, as they wandered northward, far away upon the mountain spurs beneath the flaming cone of Cotopaxi, they had found this fair creature wandering in the forest, about the bigness of a seven years’ child. Wondering at her white skin and her delicate beauty, the simple Indians worshipped her as a god, and led her home with them. And when they found that she was human like themselves, their wonder scarcely lessened. How could so tender a being have sustained life in those forests, and escaped the jaguar and the snake? She must be under some Divine protection: she must be a daughter of the Sun, one of that mighty Inca race, the news of whose fearful fall had reached even those lonely wildernesses; who had, many of them, haunted for years as exiles the eastern slopes of the Andes, about the Ucalayi and the Maranon; who would, as all Indians knew, rise again some day to power, when bearded white men should come across the seas to restore them to their ancient throne.
So, as the girl grew up among them, she was tended with royal honors, by command of the conjuror of the tribe, that so her forefather the Sun might be propitious to them, and the Incas might show favor to the poor ruined Omaguas, in the day of their coming glory. And as she grew, she had become, it seemed, somewhat of a prophetess among them, as well as an object of fetish-worship; for she was more prudent in council, valiant in war, and cunning in the chase, than all the elders of the tribe; and those strange and sweet songs of hers, which had so surprised the white men, were full of mysterious wisdom about the birds, and the animals, and the flowers, and the rivers, which the Sun and the Good Spirit taught her from above. So she had lived among them, unmarried still, not only because she despised the addresses of all Indian youths, but because the conjuror had declared it to be profane in them to mingle with the race of the Sun, and had assigned her a cabin near his own, where she was served in state, and gave some sort of oracular responses, as they had seen, to the questions which be put to her.
Such was the cacique’s tale; on which Cary remarked, probably not unjustly, that he “dared to say the conjuror made a very good thing of it:” but Amyas was silent, full of dreams, if not about Manoa, still about the remnant of the Inca race. What if they were still to be found about the southern sources of the Amazon? He must have been very near them already, in that case. It was vexatious; but at least he might be sure that they had formed no great kingdom in that direction, or he should have heard of it long ago. Perhaps they had moved lately from thence eastward, to escape some fresh encroachment of the Spaniards; and this girl had been left behind in their flight. And then he recollected, with a sigh, how hopeless was any further search with his diminished band. At least, he might learn something of the truth from the maiden herself. It might be useful to him in some future attempt; for he had not yet given up Manoa. If he but got safe home, there was many a gallant gentleman (and Raleigh came at once into his mind) who would join him in a fresh search for the Golden City of Guiana; not by the upper waters, but by the mouth of the Orinoco.
So they paddled back, while the simple cacique entreated them to tell the Sun, in their daily prayers, how well the wild people had treated his descendant; and besought them not to take her away with them, lest the Sun should forget the poor Omaguas, and ripen their manioc and their fruit no more.
Amyas had no wish to stay where he was longer than was absolutely necessary to bring up the sick men from the Orinoco; but this, he well knew, would be a journey probably of some months, and attended with much danger.
Cary volunteered at once, however, to undertake the adventure, if half-a-dozen men would join him, and the Indians would send a few young men to help in working the canoe: but this latter item was not an easy one to obtain; for the tribe with whom they now were, stood in some fear of the fierce and brutal Guahibas, through whose country they must pass; and every Indian tribe, as Amyas knew well enough, looks on each tribe of different language to itself as natural enemies, hateful, and made only to be destroyed wherever met. This strange fact, too, Amyas and his party attributed to delusion of the devil, the divider and accuser; and I am of opinion that they were perfectly right: only let Amyas take care that while he is discovering the devil in the Indians, he does not give place to him in himself, and that in more ways than one. But of that more hereafter.
Whether, however, it was pride or shyness which kept the maiden aloof, she conquered it after a while; perhaps through mere woman’s curiosity; and perhaps, too, from mere longing for amusement in a place so unspeakably stupid as the forest. She gave the English to understand, however, that though they all might be very important personages, none of them was to be her companion but Amyas. And ere a month was past, she was often hunting with him far and wide in the neighboring forest, with a train of chosen nymphs, whom she had persuaded to follow her example and spurn the dusky suitors around. This fashion, not uncommon, perhaps, among the Indian tribes, where women are continually escaping to the forest from the tyranny of the men, and often, perhaps, forming temporary communities, was to the English a plain proof that they were near the land of the famous Amazons, of whom they had heard so often from the Indians; while Amyas had no doubt that, as a descendant of the Incas, the maiden preserved the tradition of the Virgins of the Sun, and of the austere monastic rule of the Peruvian superstition. Had not that valiant German, George of Spires, and Jeronimo Ortal too, fifty years before, found convents of the Sun upon these very upper waters?
So a harmless friendship sprang up between Amyas and the girl, which soon turned to good account. For she no sooner heard that he needed a crew of Indians, than she consulted the Piache, assembled the tribe, and having retired to her hut, commenced a song, which (unless the Piache lied) was a command to furnish young men for Cary’s expedition, under penalty of the sovereign displeasure of an evil spirit with an unpronounceable name–an argument which succeeded on the spot, and the canoe departed on its perilous errand.
John Brimblecombe had great doubts whether a venture thus started by direct help and patronage of the fiend would succeed; and Amyas himself, disliking the humbug, told Ayacanora that it would be better to have told the tribe that it was a good deed, and pleasing to the Good Spirit.
“Ah!” said she, naively enough, “they know better than that. The Good Spirit is big and lazy; and he smiles, and takes no trouble: but the little bad spirit, he is so busy–here, and there, and everywhere,” and she waved her pretty hands up and down; “he is the useful one to have for a friend!” Which sentiment the Piache much approved, as became his occupation; and once told Brimblecombe pretty sharply, that he was a meddlesome fellow for telling the Indians that the Good Spirit cared for them; “for,” quoth he, “if they begin to ask the Good Spirit for what they want, who will bring me cassava and coca for keeping the bad spirit quiet?” This argument, however forcible the devil’s priests in all ages have felt it to be, did not stop Jack’s preaching (and very good and righteous preaching it was, moreover), and much less the morning and evening service in the island camp. This last, the Indians, attracted by the singing, attended in such numbers, that the Piache found his occupation gone, and vowed to put an end to Jack’s Gospel with a poisoned arrow.
Which plan he (blinded by his master, Satan, so Jack phrased it) took into his head to impart to Ayacanora, as the partner of his tithes and offerings; and was exceedingly astonished to receive in answer a box on the ear, and a storm of abuse. After which, Ayacanora went to Amyas, and telling him all, proposed that the Piache should be thrown to the alligators, and Jack installed in his place; declaring that whatsoever the bearded men said must be true, and whosoever plotted against them should die the death.
Jack, however, magnanimously forgave his foe, and preached on, of course with fresh zeal; but not, alas! with much success. For the conjuror, though his main treasure was gone over to the camp of the enemy, had a reserve in a certain holy trumpet, which was hidden mysteriously in a cave on the neighboring hills, not to be looked on by woman under pain of death; and it was well known, and had been known for generations, that unless that trumpet, after fastings, flagellations, and other solemn rites, was blown by night throughout the woods, the palm-trees would bear no fruit; yea, so great was the fame of that trumpet, that neighboring tribes sent at the proper season to hire it and the blower thereof, by payment of much precious trumpery, that so they might be sharers in its fertilizing powers.
So the Piache announced one day in public, that in consequence of the impiety of the Omaguas, he should retire to a neighboring tribe, of more religious turn of mind; and taking with him the precious instrument, leave their palms to blight, and themselves to the evil spirit.
Dire was the wailing, and dire the wrath throughout the village. Jack’s words were allowed to be good words; but what was the Gospel in comparison of the trumpet? The rascal saw his advantage, and began a fierce harangue against the heretic strangers. As he maddened, his hearers maddened; the savage nature, capricious as a child’s, flashed out in wild suspicion. Women yelled, men scowled, and ran hastily to their huts for bows and blow-guns. The case was grown critical. There were not more than a dozen men with Amyas at the time, and they had only their swords, while the Indian men might muster nearly a hundred. Amyas forbade his men either to draw or to retreat; but poisoned arrows were weapons before which the boldest might well quail; and more than one cheek grew pale, which had seldom been pale before.
“It is God’s quarrel, sirs all,” said Jack Brimblecombe; “let Him defend the right.”
As he spoke, from Ayacanora’s hut arose her magic song, and quivered aloft among the green heights of the forest.
The mob stood spell-bound, still growling fiercely, but not daring to move. Another moment, and she had rushed out, like a very Diana, into the centre of the ring, bow in hand, and arrow on the string.
The fallen “children of wrath” had found their match in her; for her beautiful face was convulsed with fury. Almost foaming in her passion, she burst forth with bitter revilings; she pointed with admiration to the English, and then with fiercest contempt to the Indians; and at last, with fierce gestures, seemed to cast off the very dust of her feet against them, and springing to Amyas’s side, placed herself in the forefront of the English battle.
The whole scene was so sudden, that Amyas had hardly discovered whether she came as friend or foe, before her bow was raised. He had just time to strike up her hand, when the arrow flew past the ear of the offending Piache, and stuck quivering in a tree.
“Let me kill the wretch!” said she, stamping with rage; but Amyas held her arm firmly.
“Fools!” cried she to the tribe, while tears of anger rolled down her cheeks. “Choose between me and your trumpet! I am a daughter of the Sun; I am white; I am a companion for Englishmen! But you! your mothers were Guahibas, and ate mud; and your fathers–they were howling apes! Let them sing to you! I shall go to the white men, and never sing you to sleep any more; and when the little evil spirit misses my voice, he will come and tumble you out of your hammocks, and make you dream of ghosts every night, till you grow as thin as blow-guns, and as stupid as aye-ayes!”*
* Two-toed sloths.
This terrible counter-threat, in spite of the slight bathos involved, had its effect; for it appealed to that dread of the sleep world which is common to all savages: but the conjuror was ready to outbid the prophetess, and had begun a fresh oration, when Amyas turned the tide of war. Bursting into a huge laugh at the whole matter, he took the conjuror by his shoulders, sent him with one crafty kick half-a-dozen yards off upon his nose; and then, walking out of the ranks, shook hands round with all his Indian acquaintances.
Whereon, like grown-up babies, they all burst out laughing too, shook hands with all the English, and then with each other; being, after all, as glad as any bishops to prorogue the convocation, and let unpleasant questions stand over till the next session. The Piache relented, like a prudent man; Ayacanora returned to her hut to sulk; and Amyas to his island, to long for Cary’s return, for he felt himself on dangerous ground.
At last Will returned, safe and sound, and as merry as ever, not having lost a man (though he had had a smart brush with the Guahibas). He brought back three of the wounded men, now pretty nigh cured; the other two, who had lost a leg apiece, had refused to come. They had Indian wives; more than they could eat; and tobacco without end: and if it were not for the gnats (of which Cary said that there were more mosquitoes than there was air), they should be the happiest men alive. Amyas could hardly blame the poor fellows; for the chance of their getting home through the forest with one leg each was very small, and, after all, they were making the best of a bad matter. And a very bad matter it seemed to him, to be left in a heathen land; and a still worse matter, when he overheard some of the men talking about their comrades’ lonely fate, as if, after all, they were not so much to be pitied. He said nothing about it then, for he made a rule never to take notice of any facts which he got at by eavesdropping, however unintentional; but he longed that one of them would say as much to him, and he would “give them a piece of his mind.” And a piece of his mind he had to give within the week; for while he was on a hunting party, two of his men were missing, and were not heard of for some days; at the end of which time the old cacique come to tell him that he believed they had taken to the forest, each with an Indian girl.
Amyas was very wroth at the news. First, because it had never happened before: he could say with honest pride, as Raleigh did afterwards when he returned from his Guiana voyage, that no Indian woman had ever been the worse for any man of his. He had preached on this point month after month, and practised what he preached; and now his pride was sorely hurt.
Moreover, he dreaded offence to the Indians themselves: but on this score the cacique soon comforted him, telling him that the girls, as far as he could find, had gone off of their own free will; intimating that he thought it somewhat an honor to the tribe that they had found favor in the eyes of the bearded men; and moreover, that late wars had so thinned the ranks of their men, that they were glad enough to find husbands for their maidens, and had been driven of late years to kill many of their female infants. This sad story, common perhaps to every American tribe, and one of the chief causes of their extermination, reassured Amyas somewhat: but he could not stomach either the loss of his men, or their breach of discipline; and look for them he would. Did any one know where they were? If the tribe knew, they did not care to tell: but Ayacanora, the moment she found out his wishes, vanished into the forest, and returned in two days, saying that she had found the fugitives; but she would not show him where they were, unless he promised not to kill them. He, of course, had no mind for so rigorous a method: he both needed the men, and he had no malice against them,–for the one, Ebsworthy, was a plain, honest, happy- go-lucky sailor, and as good a hand as there was in the crew; and the other was that same ne’er-do-weel Will Parracombe, his old schoolfellow, who had been tempted by the gipsy-Jesuit at Appledore, and resisting that bait, had made a very fair seaman.
So forth Amyas went, with Ayacanora as a guide, some five miles upward along the forest slopes, till the girl whispered, “There they are;” and Amyas, pushing himself gently through a thicket of bamboo, beheld a scene which, in spite of his wrath, kept him silent, and perhaps softened, for a minute.
On the farther side of a little lawn, the stream leapt through a chasm beneath overarching vines, sprinkling eternal freshness upon all around, and then sank foaming into a clear rock-basin, a bath for Dian’s self. On its farther side, the crag rose some twenty feet in height, bank upon bank of feathered ferns and cushioned moss, over the rich green beds of which drooped a thousand orchids, scarlet, white, and orange, and made the still pool gorgeous with the reflection of their gorgeousness. At its more quiet outfall, it was half-hidden in huge fantastic leaves and tall flowering stems; but near the waterfall the grassy bank sloped down toward the stream, and there, on palm-leaves strewed upon the turf, beneath the shadow of the crags, lay the two men whom Amyas sought, and whom, now he had found them, he had hardly heart to wake from their delicious dream.
For what a nest it was which they had found! the air was heavy with the scent of flowers, and quivering with the murmur of the stream, the humming of the colibris and insects, the cheerful song of birds, the gentle cooing of a hundred doves; while now and then, from far away, the musical wail of the sloth, or the deep toll of the bell-bird, came softly to the ear. What was not there which eye or ear could need? And what which palate could need either? For on the rock above, some strange tree, leaning forward, dropped every now and then a luscious apple upon the grass below, and huge wild plantains bent beneath their load of fruit.
There, on the stream bank, lay the two renegades from civilized life. They had cast away their clothes, and painted themselves, like the Indians, with arnotto and indigo. One lay lazily picking up the fruit which fell close to his side; the other sat, his back against a cushion of soft moss, his hands folded languidly upon his lap, giving himself up to the soft influence of the narcotic coca- juice, with half-shut dreamy eyes fixed on the everlasting sparkle of the waterfall–
“While beauty, born of murmuring sound, Did pass into his face.”
Somewhat apart crouched their two dusky brides, crowned with fragrant flowers, but working busily, like true women, for the lords whom they delighted to honor. One sat plaiting palm fibres into a basket; the other was boring the stem of a huge milk-tree, which rose like some mighty column on the right hand of the lawn, its broad canopy of leaves unseen through the dense underwood of laurel and bamboo, and betokened only by the rustle far aloft, and by the mellow shade in which it bathed the whole delicious scene.
Amyas stood silent for awhile, partly from noble shame at seeing two Christian men thus fallen of their own self-will; partly because–and he could not but confess that–a solemn calm brooded above that glorious place, to break through which seemed sacrilege even while he felt it a duty. Such, he thought, was Paradise of old; such our first parents’ bridal bower! Ah! if man had not fallen, he too might have dwelt forever in such a home–with whom? He started, and shaking off the spell, advanced sword in hand.
The women saw him, and springing to their feet, caught up their long pocunas, and leapt like deer each in front of her beloved. There they stood, the deadly tubes pressed to their lips, eyeing him like tigresses who protect their young, while every slender limb quivered, not with terror, but with rage.
Amyas paused, half in admiration, half in prudence; for one rash step was death. But rushing through the canes, Ayacanora sprang to the front, and shrieked to them in Indian. At the sight of the prophetess the women wavered, and Amyas, putting on as gentle a face as he could, stepped forward, assuring them in his best Indian that he would harm no one.
“Ebsworthy! Parracombe! Are you grown such savages already, that you have forgotten your captain? Stand up, men, and salute!”
Ebsworthy sprang to his feet, obeyed mechanically, and then slipped behind his bride again, as if in shame. The dreamer turned his head languidly, raised his hand to his forehead, and then returned to his contemplation.
Amyas rested the point of his sword on the ground, and his hands upon the hilt, and looked sadly and solemnly upon the pair. Ebsworthy broke the silence, half reproachfully, half trying to bluster away the coming storm.
“Well, noble captain, so you’ve hunted out us poor fellows; and want to drag us back again in a halter, I suppose?”
“I came to look for Christians, and I find heathens; for men, and I find swine. I shall leave the heathens to their wilderness, and the swine to their trough. Parracombe!”
“He’s too happy to answer you, sir. And why not? What do you want of us? Our two years vow is out, and we are free men now.”
“Free to become like the beasts that perish? You are the queen’s servants still, and in her name I charge you–
“Free to be happy,” interrupted the man. “With the best of wives, the best of food, a warmer bed than a duke’s, and a finer garden than an emperor’s. As for clothes, why the plague should a man wear them where he don’t need them? As for gold, what’s the use of it where Heaven sends everything ready-made to your hands? Hearken, Captain Leigh. You’ve been a good captain to me, and I’ll repay you with a bit of sound advice. Give up your gold-hunting, and toiling and moiling after honor and glory, and copy us. Take that fair maid behind you there to wife; pitch here with us; and see if you are not happier in one day than ever you were in all your life before.”
“You are drunk, sirrah! William Parracombe! Will you speak to me, or shall I heave you into the stream to sober you?”
“Who calls William Parracombe?” answered a sleepy voice.
“I, fool!–your captain.”
“I am not William Parracombe. He is dead long ago of hunger, and labor, and heavy sorrow, and will never see Bideford town any more. He is turned into an Indian now; and he is to sleep, sleep, sleep for a hundred years, till he gets his strength again, poor fellow–“
“Awake, then, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light! A christened Englishman, and living thus the life of a beast?”
“Christ shall give thee light?” answered the same unnatural abstracted voice. “Yes; so the parsons say. And they say too, that He is Lord of heaven and earth. I should have thought His light was as near us here as anywhere, and nearer too, by the look of the place. Look round!” said he, waving a lazy hand, “and see the works of God, and the place of Paradise, whither poor weary souls go home and rest, after their masters in the wicked world have used them up, with labor and sorrow, and made them wade knee- deep in blood–I’m tired of blood, and tired of gold. I’ll march no more; I’ll fight no more; I’ll hunger no more after vanity and vexation of spirit. What shall I get by it? Maybe I shall leave my bones in the wilderness. I can but do that here. Maybe I shall get home with a few pezos, to die an old cripple in some stinking hovel, that a monkey would scorn to lodge in here. You may go on; it’ll pay you. You may be a rich man, and a knight, and live in a fine house, and drink good wine, and go to Court, and torment your soul with trying to get more, when you’ve got too much already; plotting and planning to scramble upon your neighbor’s shoulders, as they all did–Sir Richard, and Mr. Raleigh, and Chichester, and poor dear old Sir Warham, and all of them that I used to watch when I lived before. They were no happier than I was then; I’ll warrant they are no happier now. Go your ways, captain; climb to glory upon some other backs than ours, and leave us here in peace, alone with God and God’s woods, and the good wives that God has given us, to play a little like school children. It’s long since I’ve had play-hours; and now I’ll be a little child once more, with the flowers, and the singing birds, and the silver fishes in the stream, that are at peace, and think no harm, and want neither clothes, nor money, nor knighthood, nor peerage, but just take what comes; and their heavenly Father feedeth them, and Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these–and will He not much more feed us, that are of more value than many sparrows?”
“And will you live here, shut out from all Christian ordinances?”
“Christian ordinances? Adam and Eve had no parsons in Paradise. The Lord was their priest, and the Lord was their shepherd, and He’ll be ours too. But go your ways, sir, and send up Sir John Brimblecombe, and let him marry us here Church fashion (though we have sworn troth to each other before God already), and let him give us the Holy Sacrament once and for all, and then read the funeral service over us, and go his ways, and count us for dead, sir–for dead we are to the wicked worthless world we came out of three years ago. And when the Lord chooses to call us, the little birds will cover us with leaves, as they did the babies in the wood, and fresher flowers will grow out of our graves, sir, than out of yours in that bare Northam churchyard there beyond the weary, weary, weary sea.”
His voice died away to a murmur, and his head sank on his breast.
Amyas stood spell-bound. The effect of the narcotic was all but miraculous in his eyes. The sustained eloquence, the novel richness of diction in one seemingly drowned in sensual sloth, were, in his eyes, the possession of some evil spirit. And yet he could not answer the Evil One. His English heart, full of the divine instinct of duty and public spirit, told him that it must be a lie: but how to prove it a lie? And he stood for full ten minutes searching for an answer, which seemed to fly farther and farther off the more he sought for it.
His eye glanced upon Ayacanora. The two girls were whispering to her smilingly. He saw one of them glance a look toward him, and then say something, which raised a beautiful blush in the maiden’s face. With a playful blow at the speaker, she turned away. Amyas knew instinctively that they were giving her the same advice as Ebsworthy had given to him. Oh, how beautiful she was! Might not the renegades have some reason on their side after all.
He shuddered at the thought: but he could not shake it off. It glided in like some gaudy snake, and wreathed its coils round all his heart and brain. He drew back to the other side of the lawn, and thought and thought–
Should he ever get home? If he did, might he not get home a beggar? Beggar or rich, he would still have to face his mother, to go through that meeting, to tell that tale, perhaps, to hear those reproaches, the forecast of which had weighed on him like a dark thunder-cloud for two weary years; to wipe out which by some desperate deed of glory he had wandered the wilderness, and wandered in vain.
Could he not settle here? He need not be a savage, he and his might Christianize, civilize, teach equal law, mercy in war, chivalry to women; found a community which might be hereafter as strong a barrier against the encroachments of the Spaniard, as Manoa itself would have been. Who knew the wealth of the surrounding forests? Even if there were no gold, there were boundless vegetable treasures. What might he not export down the rivers? This might be the nucleus of a great commercial settlement–
And yet, was even that worth while? To settle here only to torment his soul with fresh schemes, fresh ambitions; not to rest, but only to change one labor for another? Was not your dreamer right? Did they not all need rest? What if they each sat down among the flowers, beside an Indian bride? They might live like Christians, while they lived like the birds of heaven.–
What a dead silence! He looked up and round; the birds had ceased to chirp; the parroquets were hiding behind the leaves; the monkeys were clustered motionless upon the highest twigs; only out of the far depths of the forest, the campanero gave its solemn toll, once, twice, thrice, like a great death-knell rolling down from far cathedral towers. Was it an omen? He looked up hastily at Ayacanora. She was watching him earnestly. Heavens! was she waiting for his decision? Both dropped their eyes. The decision was not to come from them.
A rustle! a roar! a shriek! and Amyas lifted his eyes in time to see a huge dark bar shoot from the crag above the dreamer’s head, among the group of girls.
A dull crash, as the group flew asunder; and in the midst, upon the ground, the tawny limbs of one were writhing beneath the fangs of a black jaguar, the rarest and most terrible of the forest kings. Of one? But of which? Was it Ayacanora? And sword in hand, Amyas rushed madly forward; before he reached the spot those tortured limbs were still.
It was not Ayacanora, for with a shriek which rang through the woods, the wretched dreamer, wakened thus at last, sprang up and felt for his sword. Fool! he had left it in his hammock! Screaming the name of his dead bride, he rushed on the jaguar, as it crouched above its prey, and seizing its head with teeth and nails, worried it, in the ferocity of his madness, like a mastiff- dog.
The brute wrenched its head from his grasp, and raised its dreadful paw. Another moment and the husband’s corpse would have lain by the wife’s.
But high in air gleamed Amyas’s blade; down with all the weight of his huge body and strong arm, fell that most trusty steel; the head of the jaguar dropped grinning on its victim’s corpse;
“And all stood still, who saw him fall, While men might count a score.”
“O Lord Jesus,” said Amyas to himself, “Thou hast answered the devil for me! And this is the selfish rest for which I would have bartered the rest which comes by working where Thou hast put me!”
They bore away the lithe corpse into the forest, and buried it under soft moss and virgin mould; and so the fair clay was transfigured into fairer flowers, and the poor, gentle, untaught spirit returned to God who gave it.
And then Amyas went sadly and silently back again, and Parracombe walked after him, like one who walks in sleep.
Ebsworthy, sobered by the shock, entreated to come too: but Amyas forbade him gently,–
“No, lad, you are forgiven. God forbid that I should judge you or any man! Sir John shall come up and marry you; and then, if it still be your will to stay, the Lord forgive you, if you be wrong; in the meanwhile, we will leave with you all that we can spare. Stay here and pray to God to make you, and me too, wiser men.”
And so Amyas departed. He had come out stern and proud; but he came back again like a little child.
Three days after Parracombe was dead. Once in camp he seemed unable to eat or move, and having received absolution and communion from good Sir John, faded away without disease or pain, “babbling of green fields,” and murmuring the name of his lost Indian bride.
Amyas, too, sought ghostly council of Sir John, and told him all which had passed through his mind.
“It was indeed a temptation of Diabolus,” said that simple sage; “for he is by his very name the divider who sets man against man, and tempts one to care only for oneself, and forget kin and country, and duty and queen. But you have resisted him, Captain Leigh, like a true-born Englishman, as you always are, and he has fled from you. But that is no reason why we should not flee from him too; and so I think the sooner we are out of this place, and at work again, the better for all our souls.”
To which Amyas most devoutly said, “Amen!” If Ayacanora were the daughter of ten thousand Incas, he must get out of her way as soon as possible.
The next day he announced his intention to march once more, and to his delight found the men ready enough to move towards the Spanish settlements. One thing they needed: gunpowder for their muskets. But that they must make as they went along; that is, if they could get the materials. Charcoal they could procure, enough to set the world on fire; but nitre they had not yet seen; perhaps they should find it among the hills: while as for sulphur, any brave man could get that where there were volcanoes. Who had not heard how one of Cortez’ Spaniards, in like need, was lowered in a basket down the smoking crater of Popocatepetl, till he had gathered sulphur enough to conquer an empire? And what a Spaniard could do an Englishman could do, or they would know the reason why. And if they found none–why clothyard arrows had done Englishmen’s work many a time already, and they could do it again, not to mention those same blow-guns and their arrows of curare poison, which, though they might be useless against Spaniards’ armor, were far more valuable than muskets for procuring food, from the simple fact of their silence.
One thing remained; to invite their Indian friends to join them. And that was done in due form the next day.
Ayacanora was consulted, of course, and by the Piache, too, who was glad enough to be rid of the rival preacher, and his unpleasantly good news that men need not worship the devil, because there was a good God above them. The maiden sang most melodious assent; the whole tribe echoed it; and all went smoothly enough till the old cacique observed that before starting a compact should be made between the allies as to their share of the booty.
Nothing could be more reasonable; and Amyas asked him to name his terms.
“You take the gold, and we will take the prisoners.”
“And what will you do with them?” asked Amyas, who recollected poor John Oxenham’s hapless compact made in like case.
“Eat them,” quoth the cacique, innocently enough.
Amyas whistled.
“Humph!” said Cary. “The old proverb comes true–‘the more the merrier: but the fewer the better fare.’ I think we will do without our red friends for this time.”
Ayacanora, who had been preaching war like a very Boadicea, was much vexed.
“Do you too want to dine off roast Spaniards?” asked Amyas.
She shook her head, and denied the imputation with much disgust.
Amyas was relieved; he had shrunk from joining the thought of so fair a creature, however degraded, with the horrors of cannibalism.
But the cacique was a man of business, and held out stanchly.
“Is it fair?” he asked. “The white man loves gold, and he gets it. The poor Indian, what use is gold to him? He only wants something to eat, and he must eat his enemies. What else will pay him for going so far through the forests hungry and thirsty? You will get all, and the Omaguas will get nothing.”
The argument was unanswerable; and the next day they started without the Indians, while John Brimblecombe heaved many an honest sigh at leaving them to darkness, the devil, and the holy trumpet.
And Ayacanora?
When their departure was determined, she shut herself up in her hut, and appeared no more. Great was the weeping, howling, and leave-taking on the part of the simple Indians, and loud the entreaties to come again, bring them a message from Amalivaca’s daughter beyond the seas, and help them to recover their lost land of Papamene; but Ayacanora took no part in them; and Amyas left her, wondering at her absence, but joyful and light-hearted at having escaped the rocks of the Sirens, and being at work once more.
CHAPTER XXV
HOW THEY TOOK THE GOLD-TRAIN
“God will relent, and quit thee all thy debt, Who ever more approves, and more accepts Him who imploring mercy sues for life,
Than who self-rigorous chooses death as due, Which argues over-just, and self-displeased For self-offence, more than for God offended.”
Samson Agonistes.
A fortnight or more has passed in severe toil, but not more severe than they have endured many a time before. Bidding farewell once and forever to the green ocean of the eastern plains, they have crossed the Cordillera; they have taken a longing glance at the city of Santa Fe, lying in the midst of rich gardens on its lofty mountain plateau, and have seen, as was to be expected, that it was far too large a place for any attempt of theirs. But they have not altogether thrown away their time. Their Indian lad has discovered that a gold-train is going down from Santa Fe toward the Magdalena; and they are waiting for it beside the miserable rut which serves for a road, encamped in a forest of oaks which would make them almost fancy themselves back again in Europe, were it not for the tree-ferns which form the undergrowth; and were it not, too, for the deep gorges opening at their very feet; in which, while their brows are swept by the cool breezes of a temperate zone, they can see far below, dim through their everlasting vapor-bath of rank hot steam, the mighty forms and gorgeous colors of the tropic forest.
They have pitched their camp among the tree-ferns, above a spot where the path winds along a steep hill-side, with a sheer cliff below of many a hundred feet. There was a road there once, perhaps, when Cundinamarca was a civilized and cultivated kingdom; but all which Spanish misrule has left of it are a few steps slipping from their places at the bottom of a narrow ditch of mud. It has gone the way of the aqueducts, and bridges, and post-houses, the gardens and the llama-flocks of that strange empire. In the mad search for gold, every art of civilization has fallen to decay, save architecture alone; and that survives only in the splendid cathedrals which have risen upon the ruins of the temples of the Sun, in honor of a milder Pantheon; if, indeed, that can be called a milder one which demands (as we have seen already) human sacrifices, unknown to the gentle nature-worship of the Incas.
And now, the rapid tropic vegetation has reclaimed its old domains, and Amyas and his crew are as utterly alone, within a few miles of an important Spanish settlement, as they would be in the solitudes of the Orinoco or the Amazon.
In the meanwhile, all their attempts to find sulphur and nitre have been unavailing; and they have been forced to depend after all (much to Yeo’s disgust) upon their swords and arrows. Be it so: Drake took Nombre de Dios and the gold-train there with no better weapons; and they may do as much.
So, having blocked up the road above by felling a large tree across it, they sit there among the flowers chewing coca, in default of food and drink, and meditating among themselves the cause of a mysterious roar, which has been heard nightly in their wake ever since they left the banks of the Meta. Jaguar it is not, nor monkey: it is unlike any sound they know; and why should it follow them? However, they are in the land of wonders; and, moreover, the gold train is far more important than any noise.
At last, up from beneath there was a sharp crack and a loud cry. The crack was neither the snapping of a branch, nor the tapping of a woodpecker; the cry was neither the scream of the parrot, nor the howl of the monkey.
“That was a whip’s crack,” said Yeo, “and a woman’s wail. They are close here, lads!”
“A woman’s? Do they drive women in their gangs?” asked Amyas.
“Why not, the brutes? There they are, sir. Did you see their basnets glitter?”
“Men!” said Amyas, in a low voice, “I trust you all not to shoot till I do. Then give them one arrow, out swords, and at them! Pass the word along.”
Up they came, slowly, and all hearts beat loud at their coming.
First, about twenty soldiers, only one-half of whom were on foot; the other half being borne, incredible as it may seem, each in a chair on the back of a single Indian, while those who marched had consigned their heaviest armor and their arquebuses into the hands of attendant slaves, who were each pricked on at will by the pike of the soldier behind them.
“The men are mad to let their ordnance out of their hands.”
“Oh, sir, an Indian will pray to an arquebus not to shoot him; he sure their artillery is safe enough,” said Yeo.
“Look at the proud villains,” whispered another, “to make dumb beasts of human creatures like that!”
“Ten shot,” counted the business-like Amyas, “and ten pikes; Will can tackle them up above.”
Last of this troop came some inferior officer, also in his chair, who, as he went slowly up the hill, with his face turned toward the gang which followed, drew every other second the cigar from his lips, to inspirit them with those pious ejaculations to the various objects of his worship, divine, human, anatomic, wooden and textile, which earned for the pious Spaniards of the sixteenth century the uncharitable imputation of being at once the most fetish-ridden idolaters and the most abominable swearers of all Europeans.
“The blasphemous dog!” said Yeo, fumbling at his bow-string, as if he longed to send an arrow through him. But Amyas had hardly laid his finger on the impatient veteran’s arm, when another procession followed, which made them forget all else.
A sad and hideous sight it was: yet one too common even then in those remoter districts, where the humane edicts were disregarded which the prayers of Dominican friars (to their everlasting honor be it spoken) had wrung from the Spanish sovereigns, and which the legislation of that most wise, virtuous, and heroic Inquisitor (paradoxical as the words may seem), Pedro de la Gasca, had carried into effect in Peru,–futile and tardy alleviations of cruelties and miseries unexampled in the history of Christendom, or perhaps on earth, save in the conquests of Sennacherib and Zingis Khan. But on the frontiers, where negroes were imported to endure the toil which was found fatal to the Indian, and all Indian tribes convicted (or suspected) of cannibalism were hunted down for the salvation of their souls and the enslavement of their bodies, such scenes as these were still too common; and, indeed, if we are to judge from Humboldt’s impartial account, were not very much amended even at the close of the last century, in those much-boasted Jesuit missions in which (as many of them as existed anywhere but on paper) military tyranny was superadded to monastic, and the Gospel preached with fire and sword, almost as shamelessly as by the first Conquistadores.
A line of Indians, Negroes, and Zambos, naked, emaciated, scarred with whips and fetters, and chained together by their left wrists, toiled upwards, panting and perspiring under the burden of a basket held up by a strap which passed across their foreheads. Yeo’s sneer was but too just; there were not only old men and youths among them, but women; slender young girls, mothers with children, running at their knee; and, at the sight, a low murmur of indignation rose from the ambushed Englishmen, worthy of the free and righteous hearts of those days, when Raleigh could appeal to man and God, on the ground of a common humanity, in behalf of the outraged heathens of the New World; when Englishmen still knew that man was man, and that the instinct of freedom was the righteous voice of God; ere the hapless seventeenth century had brutalized them also, by bestowing on them, amid a hundred other bad legacies, the fatal gift of negro-slaves.
But the first forty, so Amyas counted, bore on their backs a burden which made all, perhaps, but him and Yeo, forget even the wretches who bore it. Each basket contained a square package of carefully corded hide; the look whereof friend Amyas knew full well.
“What’s in they, captain?”
“Gold!” And at that magic word all eyes were strained greedily forward, and such a rustle followed, that Amyas, in the very face of detection, had to whisper–
“Be men, be men, or you will spoil all yet!”
The last twenty, or so, of the Indians bore larger baskets, but more lightly freighted, seemingly with manioc, and maize-bread, and other food for the party; and after them came, with their bearers and attendants, just twenty soldiers more, followed by the officer in charge, who smiled away in his chair, and twirled two huge mustachios, thinking of nothing less than of the English arrows which were itching to be away and through his ribs. The ambush was complete; the only question how and when to begin?
Amyas had a shrinking, which all will understand, from drawing bow in cool blood on men so utterly unsuspicious and defenceless, even though in the very act of devilish cruelty–for devilish cruelty it was, as three or four drivers armed with whips lingered up and down the slowly staggering file of Indians, and avenged every moment’s lagging, even every stumble, by a blow of the cruel manati-hide, which cracked like a pistol-shot against the naked limbs of the silent and uncomplaining victim.
Suddenly the casus belli, as usually happens, arose of its own accord.
The last but one of the chained line was an old gray-headed man, followed by a slender graceful girl of some eighteen years old, and Amyas’s heart yearned over them as they came up. Just as they passed, the foremost of the file had rounded the corner above; there was a bustle, and a voice shouted, “Halt, senors! there is a tree across the path!”
“A tree across the path?” bellowed the officer, with a variety of passionate addresses to the Mother of Heaven, the fiends of hell, Saint Jago of Compostella, and various other personages; while the line of trembling Indians, told to halt above, and driven on by blows below, surged up and down upon the ruinous steps of the Indian road, until the poor old man fell grovelling on his face.
The officer leaped down, and hurried upward to see what had happened. Of course, he came across the old man.
“Sin peccado concebida! Grandfather of Beelzebub, is this a place to lie worshipping your fiends?” and he pricked the prostrate wretch with the point of his sword.
The old man tried to rise: but the weight on his head was too much for him; he fell again, and lay motionless.
The driver applied the manati-hide across his loins, once, twice, with fearful force; but even that specific was useless.
“Gastado, Senor Capitan,” said he, with a shrug. “Used up. He has been failing these three months!”
“What does the intendant mean by sending me out with worn-out cattle like these? Forward there!” shouted he. “Clear away the tree, senors, and I’ll soon clear the chain. Hold it up, Pedrillo!”
The driver held up the chain, which was fastened to the old man’s wrist. The officer stepped back, and flourished round his head a Toledo blade, whose beauty made Amyas break the Tenth Commandment on the spot.
The man was a tall, handsome, broad-shouldered, high-bred man; and Amyas thought that he was going to display the strength of his arm, and the temper of his blade, in severing the chain at one stroke.
Even he was not prepared for the recondite fancies of a Spanish adventurer, worthy son or nephew of those first conquerors, who used to try the keenness of their swords upon the living bodies of Indians, and regale themselves at meals with the odor of roasting caciques.
The blade gleamed in the air, once, twice, and fell: not on the chain, but on the wrist which it fettered. There was a shriek–a crimson flash–and the chain and its prisoner were parted indeed.
One moment more, and Amyas’s arrow would have been through the throat of the murderer, who paused, regarding his workmanship with a satisfied smile; but vengeance was not to come from him.
Quick and fierce as a tiger-cat, the girl sprang on the ruffian, and with the intense strength of passion, clasped him in her arms, and leaped with him from the narrow ledge into the abyss below.
There was a rush, a shout; all faces were bent over the precipice. The girl hung by her chained wrist: the officer was gone. There was a moment’s awful silence; and then Amyas heard his body crashing through the tree-tops far below.
“Haul her up! Hew her in pieces! Burn the witch!” and the driver, seizing the chain, pulled at it with all his might, while all springing from their chairs, stooped over the brink.
Now was the time for Amyas! Heaven had delivered them into his hands. Swift and sure, at ten yards off, his arrow rushed through the body of the driver, and then, with a roar as of the leaping lion, he sprang like an avenging angel into the midst of the astonished ruffians.
His first thought was for the girl. In a moment, by sheer strength, he had jerked her safely up into the road; while the Spaniards recoiled right and left, fancying him for the moment some mountain giant or supernatural foe. His hurrah undeceived them in an instant, and a cry of “English! Lutheran dogs!” arose, but arose too late. The men of Devon had followed their captain’s lead: a storm of arrows left five Spaniards dead, and a dozen more wounded, and down leapt Salvation Yeo, his white hair streaming behind him, with twenty good swords more, and the work of death began.
The Spaniards fought like lions; but they had no time to fix their arquebuses on the crutches; no room, in that narrow path, to use their pikes. The English had the wall of them; and to have the wall there, was to have the foe’s life at their mercy. Five desperate minutes, and not a living Spaniard stood upon those steps; and certainly no living one lay in the green abyss below. Two only, who were behind the rest, happening to be in full armor, escaped without mortal wound, and fled down the hill again.
“After them! Michael Evans and Simon Heard; and catch them, if they run a league.”
The two long and lean Clovelly men, active as deer from forest training, ran two feet for the Spaniard’s one; and in ten minutes returned, having done their work; while Amyas and his men hurried past the Indians, to help Cary and the party forward, where shouts and musket shots announced a sharp affray.
Their arrival settled the matter. All the Spaniards fell but three or four, who scrambled down the crannies of the cliff.
“Let not one of them escape! Slay them as Israel slew Amalek!” cried Yeo, as he bent over; and ere the wretches could reach a place of shelter, an arrow was quivering in each body, as it rolled lifeless down the rocks.
“Now then! Loose the Indians!”
They found armorers tools on one of the dead bodies, and it was done.
“We are your friends,” said Amyas. “All we ask is, that you shall help us to carry this gold down to the Magdalena, and then you are free.”
Some few of the younger grovelled at his knees, and kissed his feet, hailing him as the child of the Sun: but the most part kept a stolid indifference, and when freed from their fetters, sat quietly down where they stood, staring into vacancy. The iron had entered too deeply into their soul. They seemed past hope, enjoyment, even understanding.
But the young girl, who was last of all in the line, as soon as she was loosed, sprang to her father’s body, speaking no word, lifted it in her thin arms, laid it across her knees, kissed the fallen lips, stroked the furrowed cheeks, murmured inarticulate sounds like the cooing of a woodland dove, of which none knew the meaning but she, and he who heard not, for his soul had long since fled. Suddenly the truth flashed on her; silent as ever, she drew one long heaving breath, and rose erect, the body in her arms.
Another moment, and she had leaped into the abyss.
They watched her dark and slender limbs, twined closely round the old man’s corpse, turn over, and over, and over, till a crash among the leaves, and a scream among the birds, told that she had reached the trees; and the green roof hid her from their view.
“Brave lass!” shouted a sailor.
“The Lord forgive her!” said Yeo. “But, your worship, we must have these rascals’ ordnance.”
“And their clothes too, Yeo, if we wish to get down the Magdalena unchallenged. Now listen, my masters all! We have won, by God’s good grace, gold enough to serve us the rest of our lives, and that without losing a single man; and may yet win more, if we be wise, and He thinks good. But oh, my friends, remember Mr. Oxenham and his crew; and do not make God’s gift our ruin, by faithlessness, or greediness, or any mutinous haste.”
“You shall find none in us!” cried several men. “We know your worship. We can trust our general.”
“Thank God!” said Amyas. “Now then, it will be no shame or sin to make the Indians carry it, saving the women, whom God forbid we should burden. But we must pass through the very heart of the Spanish settlements, and by the town of Saint Martha itself. So the clothes and weapons of these Spaniards we must have, let it cost us what labor it may. How many lie in the road?”
“Thirteen here, and about ten up above,” said Cary.
“Then there are near twenty missing. Who will volunteer to go down over cliff, and bring up the spoil of them?”
“I, and I, and I;” and a dozen stepped out, as they did always when Amyas wanted anything done; for the simple reason, that they knew that he meant to help at the doing of it himself.
“Very well, then, follow me. Sir John, take the Indian lad for your interpreter, and try and comfort the souls of these poor heathens. Tell them that they shall all be free.”
“Why, who is that comes up the road?”
All eyes were turned in the direction of which he spoke. And, wonder of wonders! up came none other than Ayacanora herself, blow- gun in hand, bow on back, and bedecked in all her feather garments, which last were rather the worse for a fortnight’s woodland travel.
All stood mute with astonishment, as, seeing Amyas, she uttered a cry of joy, quickened her pace into a run, and at last fell panting and exhausted at his feet.
“I have found you!” she said; “you ran away from me, but you could not escape me!” And she fawned round Amyas, like a dog who has found his master, and then sat down on the bank, and burst into wild sobs.
“God help us!” said Amyas, clutching his hair, as he looked down upon the beautiful weeper. “What am I to do with her, over and above all these poor heathens?”
But there was no time to be lost, and over the cliff he scrambled; while the girl, seeing that the main body of the English remained, sat down on a point of rock to watch him.
After half-an-hour’s hard work, the weapons, clothes, and armor of the fallen Spaniards were hauled up the cliff, and distributed in bundles among the men; the rest of the corpses were thrown over the precipice, and they started again upon their road toward the Magdalena, while Yeo snorted like a war-horse who smells the battle, at the delight of once more handling powder and ball.
“We can face the world now, sir! Why not go back and try Santa Fe, after all?”
But Amyas thought that enough was as good as a feast, and they held on downwards, while the slaves followed, without a sign of gratitude, but meekly obedient to their new masters, and testifying now and then by a sign or a grunt, their surprise at not being beaten, or made to carry their captors. Some, however, caught sight of the little calabashes of coca which the English carried. That woke them from their torpor, and they began coaxing abjectly (and not in vain) for a taste of that miraculous herb, which would not only make food unnecessary, and enable their panting lungs to endure that keen mountain air, but would rid them, for awhile at least, of the fallen Indian’s most unpitying foe, the malady of thought.
As the cavalcade turned the corner of the mountain, they paused for one last look at the scene of that fearful triumph. Lines of vultures were already streaming out of infinite space, as if created suddenly for the occasion. A few hours and there would be no trace of that fierce fray, but a few white bones amid untrodden beds of flowers.
And now Amyas had time to ask Ayacanora the meaning of this her strange appearance. He wished her anywhere but where she was: but now that she was here, what heart could be so hard as not to take pity on the poor wild thing? And Amyas as he spoke to her had, perhaps, a tenderness in his tone, from very fear of hurting her, which he had never used before. Passionately she told him how she had followed on their track day and night, and had every evening made sounds, as loud as she dared, in hopes of their hearing her, and either waiting for her, or coming back to see what caused the noise.
Amyas now recollected the strange roaring which had followed them.
“Noises? What did you make them with?”
Ayacanora lifted her finger with an air of most self-satisfied mystery, and then drew cautiously from under her feather cloak an object at which Amyas had hard work to keep his countenance.
“Look!” whispered she, as if half afraid that the thing itself should hear her. “I have it–the holy trumpet!”
There it was verily, that mysterious bone of contention; a handsome earthen tube some two feet long, neatly glazed, and painted with quaint grecques and figures of animals; a relic evidently of some civilization now extinct.
Brimblecombe rubbed his little fat hands. “Brave maid! you have cheated Satan this time,” quoth he; while Yeo advised that the “idolatrous relic” should be forthwith “hove over cliff.”
“Let be,” said Amyas. “What is the meaning of this, Ayacanora? And why have you followed us?”
She told a long story, from which Amyas picked up, as far as he could understand her, that that trumpet had been for years the torment of her life; the one thing in the tribe superior to her; the one thing which she was not allowed to see, because, forsooth, she was a woman. So she determined to show them that a woman was as good as a man; and hence her hatred of marriage, and her Amazonian exploits. But still the Piache would not show her that trumpet, or tell her where it was; and as for going to seek it, even she feared the superstitious wrath of the tribe at such a profanation. But the day after the English went, the Piache chose to express his joy at their departure; whereon, as was to be expected, a fresh explosion between master and pupil, which ended, she confessed, in her burning the old rogue’s hut over his head, from which he escaped with loss of all his conjuring-tackle, and fled raging into the woods, vowing that he would carry off the trumpet to the neighboring tribe. Whereon, by a sudden impulse, the young lady took plenty of coca, her weapons, and her feathers, started on his trail, and ran him to earth just as he was unveiling the precious mystery. At which sight (she confessed) she was horribly afraid, and half inclined to run; but, gathering courage from the thought that the white men used to laugh at the whole matter, she rushed upon the hapless conjuror, and bore off her prize in triumph; and there it was!
“I hope you have not killed him?” said Amyas.
“I did beat him a little; but I thought you would not let me kill him.”
Amyas was half amused with her confession of his authority over her; but she went on–
“And then I dare not go back to the Indians; so I was forced to come after you.”
“And is that, then, your only reason for coming after us?” asked stupid Amyas.
He had touched some secret chord–though what it was he was too busy to inquire. The girl drew herself up proudly, blushing scarlet, and said:
“You never tell lies. Do you think that I would tell lies?”
On which she fell to the rear, and followed them steadfastly, speaking to no one, but evidently determined to follow them to the world’s end.
They soon left the highroad; and for several days held on downwards, hewing their path slowly and painfully through the thick underwood. On the evening of the fourth day, they had reached the margin of a river, at a point where it seemed broad and still enough for navigation. For those three days they had not seen a trace of human beings, and the spot seemed lonely enough for them to encamp without fear of discovery, and begin the making of their canoes. They began to spread themselves along the stream, in search of the soft-wooded trees proper for their purpose; but hardly had their search begun, when, in the midst of a dense thicket, they came upon a sight which filled them with astonishment. Beneath a honeycombed cliff, which supported one enormous cotton-tree, was a spot of some thirty yards square sloping down to the stream, planted in rows with magnificent banana-plants, full twelve feet high, and bearing among their huge waxy leaves clusters of ripening fruit; while, under their mellow shade, yams and cassava plants were flourishing luxuriantly, the whole being surrounded by a hedge of orange and scarlet flowers. There it lay, streaked with long shadows from the setting sun, while a cool southern air rustled in the cotton-tree, and flapped to and fro the great banana-leaves; a tiny paradise of art and care. But where was its inhabitant?
Aroused by the noise of their approach, a figure issued from a cave in the rocks, and, after gazing at them for a moment, came down the garden towards them. He was a tall and stately old man, whose snow-white beard and hair covered his chest and shoulders, while his lower limbs were wrapt in Indian-web. Slowly and solemnly he approached, a staff in one hand, a string of beads in the other, the living likeness of some old Hebrew prophet, or anchorite of ancient legend. He bowed courteously to Amyas (who of course returned his salute), and was in act to speak, when his eye fell upon the Indians, who were laying down their burdens in a heap under the trees. His mild countenance assumed instantly an expression of the acutest sorrow and displeasure; and, striking his hands together, he spoke in Spanish:
“Alas! miserable me! Alas! unhappy senors! Do my old eyes deceive me, and is it one of those evil visions of the past which haunt my dreams by night; or has the accursed thirst of gold, the ruin of my race, penetrated even into this my solitude? Oh, senors, senors, know you not that you bear with you your own poison, your own familiar fiend, the root of every evil? And is it not enough for you, senors, to load yourselves with the wedge of Achan, and partake his doom, but you must make these hapless heathens the victims of your greed and cruelty, and forestall for them on earth those torments which may await their unbaptized souls hereafter?”
“We have preserved, and not enslaved these Indians, ancient senor,” said Amyas, proudly; “and to-morrow will see them as free as the birds over our heads.”
“Free? Then you cannot be countrymen of mine! But pardon an old man, my son, if he has spoken too hastily in the bitterness of his own experience. But who and whence are you? And why are you bringing into this lonely wilderness that gold–for I know too well the shape of those accursed packets, which would God that I had never seen!”
“What we are, reverend sir, matters little, as long as we behave to you as the young should to the old. As for our gold, it will be a curse or a blessing to us, I conceive, just as we use it well or ill; and so is a man’s head, or his hand, or any other thing; but that is no reason for cutting off his limbs for fear of doing harm with them; neither is it for throwing away those packages, which, by your leave, we shall deposit in one of these caves. We must be your neighbors, I fear, for a day or two; but I can promise you, that your garden shall be respected, on condition that you do not inform any human soul of our being here.”
“God forbid, senor, that I should try to increase the number of my visitors, much less to bring hither strife and blood, of which I have seen too much already. As you have come in peace, in peace depart. Leave me alone with God and my penitence, and may the Lord have mercy on you!”
And he was about to withdraw, when, recollecting himself, he turned suddenly to Amyas again–
“Pardon me, senor, if, after forty years of utter solitude, I shrink at first from the conversation of human beings, and forget, in the habitual shyness of a recluse, the duties of a hospitable gentleman of Spain. My garden, and all which it produces, is at your service. Only let me entreat that these poor Indians shall have their share; for heathens though they be, Christ died for them; and I cannot but cherish in my soul some secret hope that He did not die in vain.”
“God forbid!” said Brimblecombe. “They are no worse than we, for aught I see, whatsoever their fathers may have been; and they have fared no worse than we since they have been with us, nor will, I promise you.”
The good fellow did not tell that he had been starving himself for the last three days to cram the children with his own rations; and that the sailors, and even Amyas, had been going out of their way every five minutes, to get fruit for their new pets.
A camp was soon formed; and that evening the old hermit asked Amyas, Cary, and Brimblecombe to come up into his cavern.
They went; and after the accustomed compliments had passed, sat down on mats upon the ground, while the old man stood, leaning against a slab of stone surmounted by a rude wooden cross, which evidently served him as a place of prayer. He seemed restless and anxious, as if he waited for them to begin the conversation; while they, in their turn, waited for him. At last, when courtesy would not allow him to be silent any longer, he began with a faltering voice:
“You may be equally surprised, senors, at my presence in such a spot, and at my asking you to become my guests even for one evening, while I have no better hospitality to offer you.”
“It is superfluous, senor, to offer us food in your own habitation when you have already put all that you possess at our command.”
“True, senors: and my motive for inviting you was, perhaps, somewhat of a selfish one. I am possessed by a longing to unburthen my heart of a tale which I never yet told to man, and which I fear can give to you nothing but pain; and yet I will entreat you, of your courtesy, to hear of that which you cannot amend, simply in mercy to a man who feels that he must confess to some one, or die as miserable as he has lived. And I believe my confidence will not be misplaced, when it is bestowed upon you. I have been a cavalier, even as you are; and, strange as it may seem, that which I have to tell I would sooner impart to the ears of a soldier than of a priest; because it will then sink into souls which can at least sympathize, though they cannot absolve. And you, cavaliers, I perceive to be noble, from your very looks; to be valiant, by your mere presence in this hostile land; and to be gentle, courteous, and prudent, by your conduct this day to me and to your captives. Will you, then, hear an old man’s tale? I am, as you see, full of words; for speech, from long disuse, is difficult to me, and I fear at every sentence lest my stiffened tongue should play the traitor to my worn-out brain: but if my request seems impertinent, you have only to bid me talk as a host should, of matters which concern his guests, and not himself.”
The three young men, equally surprised and interested by this exordium, could only entreat their host to “use their ears as those of his slaves,” on which, after fresh apologies, he began:
“Know, then, victorious cavaliers, that I, whom you now see here as a poor hermit, was formerly one of the foremost of that terrible band who went with Pizarro to the conquest of Peru. Eighty years old am I this day, unless the calendar which I have carved upon yonder tree deceives me; and twenty years old was I when I sailed with that fierce man from Panama, to do that deed with which all earth, and heaven, and hell itself, I fear, has rung. How we endured, suffered, and triumphed; how, mad with success, and glutted with blood, we turned our swords against each other, I need not tell to you. For what gentleman of Europe knows not our glory and our shame?”
His hearers bowed assent.
“Yes; you have heard of our prowess: for glorious we were awhile, in the sight of God and man. But I will not speak of our glory, for it is tarnished; nor of our wealth, for it was our poison; nor of the sins of my comrades, for they have expiated them; but of my own sins, senors, which are more in number than the hairs of my head, and a burden too great to bear. Miserere Domine!”
And smiting on his breast, the old warrior went on:
“As I said, we were mad with blood; and none more mad than I. Surely it is no fable that men are possessed, even in this latter age, by devils. Why else did I rejoice in slaying? Why else was I, the son of a noble and truthful cavalier of Castile, among the foremost to urge upon my general the murder of the Inca? Why did I rejoice over his dying agonies? Why, when Don Ferdinando de Soto returned, and upbraided us with our villainy, did I, instead of confessing the sin which that noble cavalier set before us, withstand him to his face, ay, and would have drawn the sword on him, but that he refused to fight a liar, as he said that I was?”
“Then Don de Soto was against the murder? So his own grandson told me. But I had heard of him only as a tyrant and a butcher.”
“Senor, he was compact of good and evil, as are other men: he has paid dearly for his sin; let us hope that he has been paid in turn for his righteousness.”
John Brimblecombe shook his head at this doctrine, but did not speak.
“So you know his grandson? I trust he is a noble cavalier?”
Amyas was silent; the old gentleman saw that he had touched some sore point, and continued:
“And why, again, senors, did I after that day give myself up to cruelty as to a sport; yea, thought that I did God service by destroying the creatures whom He had made; I who now dare not destroy a gnat, lest I harm a being more righteous than myself? Was I mad? If I was, how then was I all that while as prudent as I am this day? But I am not here to argue, senors, but to confess. In a word, there was no deed of blood done for the next few years in which I had not my share, if it were but within my reach. When Challcuchima was burned, I was consenting; when that fair girl, the wife of Inca Manco, was tortured to death, I smiled at the agonies at which she too smiled, and taunted on the soldiers, to try if I could wring one groan from her before she died. You know what followed, the pillage, the violence, the indignities offered to the virgins of the Sun. Senors, I will not pollute your chaste ears with what was done. But, senors, I had a brother.”
And the old man paused awhile.
“A brother–whether better or worse than me, God knows, before whom he has appeared ere now. At least he did not, as I did, end as a rebel to his king! There was a maiden in one of those convents, senors, more beautiful than day: and (I blush to tell it) the two brothers of whom I spoke quarrelled for the possession of her. They struck each other, senors! Who struck first I know not; but swords were drawn, and– The cavaliers round parted them, crying shame. And one of those two brothers–the one who speaks to you now–crying, ‘If I cannot have her, no man shall!’ turned the sword which was aimed at his brother, against that hapless maiden–and– hear me out, senors, before you flee from my presence as from that of a monster!–stabbed her to the heart. And as she died–one moment more, senors, that I may confess all!–she looked up in my face with a smile as of heaven, and thanked me for having rid her once and for all from Christians and their villainy.”
The old man paused.
“God forgive you, senor!” said Jack Brimblecombe, softly.
“You do not, then, turn from me, do not curse me? Then I will try you farther still, senors. I will know from human lips, whether man can do such deeds as I have done, and yet be pitied by his kind; that so I may have some hope, that where man has mercy, God may have mercy also. Do you think that I repented at those awful words? Nothing less, senors all. No more than I did when De Soto (on whose soul God have mercy) called me–me, a liar! I knew myself a sinner; and for that very reason I was determined to sin. I would go on, that I might prove myself right to myself, by showing that I could go on, and not be struck dead from heaven. Out of mere pride, senors, and self-will, I would fill up the cup of my iniquity; and I filled it.
“You know, doubtless, senors, how, after the death of old Almagro, his son’s party conspired against Pizarro. Now my brother remained faithful to his old commander; and for that very reason, if you will believe it, did I join the opposite party, and gave myself up, body and soul, to do Almagro’s work. It was enough for me, that the brother who had struck me thought a man right, for me to think that man a devil. What Almagro’s work was, you know. He slew Pizarro, murdered him, senors, like a dog, or rather, like an old lion.”
“He deserved his doom,” said Amyas.
“Let God judge him, senor, not we; and least of all of us I, who drew the first blood, and perhaps the last, that day. I, senors, it was who treacherously stabbed Francisco de Chanes on the staircase, and so opened the door which else had foiled us all; and I– But I am speaking to men of honor, not to butchers. Suffice it that the old man died like a lion, and that we pulled him down, young as we were, like curs.
“Well, I followed Almagro’s fortunes. I helped to slay Alvarado. Call that my third murder, if you will, for if he was traitor to a traitor, I was traitor to a true man. Then to the war; you know how Vaca de Castro was sent from Spain to bring order and justice where was naught but chaos, and the dance of all devils. We met him on the hills of Chupas. Peter of Candia, the Venetian villain, pointed our guns false, and Almagro stabbed him to the heart. We charged with our lances, man against man, horse against horse. All fights I ever fought” (and the old man’s eyes flashed out the ancient fire) “were child’s play to that day. Our lances shivered like reeds, and we fell on with battle-axe and mace. None asked for quarter, and none gave it; friend to friend, cousin to cousin– no, nor brother, O God! to brother. We were the better armed: but numbers were on their side. Fat Carbajal charged our cannon like an elephant, and took them; but Holguin was shot down. I was with Almagro, and we swept all before us, inch by inch, but surely, till the night fell. Then Vaca de Castro, the licentiate, the clerk, the schoolman, the man of books, came down on us with his reserve like a whirlwind. Oh! cavaliers, did not God fight against us, when He let us, the men of iron, us, the heroes of Cuzco and Vilcaconga, be foiled by a scholar in a black gown, with a pen behind his ear? We were beaten. Some ran; some did not run, senors; and I did not. Geronimo de Alvarado shouted to me, ‘We slew Pizarro! We killed the tyrant!’ and we rushed upon the conqueror’s lances, to die like cavaliers. There was a gallant gentleman in front of me. His lance struck me in the crest, and bore me over my horse’s croup: but mine, senors, struck him full in the vizor. We both went to the ground together, and the battle galloped over us.
“I know not how long I lay, for I was stunned: but after awhile I lifted myself. My lance was still clenched in my hand, broken but not parted. The point of it was in my foeman’s brain. I crawled to him, weary and wounded, and saw that he was a noble cavalier. He lay on his back, his arms spread wide. I knew that he was dead: but there came over me the strangest longing to see that dead man’s face. Perhaps I knew him. At least I could set my foot upon it, and say, ‘Vanquished as I am, there lies a foe!’ I caught hold of the rivets, and tore his helmet off. The moon shone bright, senors, as bright as she shines now–the glaring, ghastly, tell- tale moon, which shows man all the sins which he tries to hide; and by that moonlight, senors, I beheld the dead man’s face. And it was the face of my brother!
. . . . . . .
“Did you ever guess, most noble cavaliers, what Cain’s curse might be like? Look on me, and know!