Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/53

Rh ended; the sun sank; on came the invader night. Ferne took the lute and slowly swept its strings.

"How much, how little of it all is peacock's folly," he said; "who knoweth? Life and Living, Love and Hate, and Honor the bubble, and Shame the Nessus-robe, and Death, which, when all's done, may have no answer to the riddle!—Where is the fixed star, and who knoweth depth from shallow, or himself, or anything?" He struck the lute again, drawing from it a lingering and mournful note.

"Now out upon the man who brought melancholy into fashion!" ejaculated Arden. "In danger the blithest soul alive, when all is well you do ask yourself too many questions! I'll go companion with Robert Baldry, who keeps no fashions save of Mars's devising."

"Why, I am not sad," said Ferne, rousing himself. "Come, I'll dice with thee for fifty ducats and a gold jewel—to be paid from the first ship we take!"

On sailed the ships through tranquil seas, until many days had fallen into their wake, slipping by them like painted clouds of floating seaweed or silver-finned vagrants of the deep. Great calms brooded upon the water, and the sails fell idle, flag and pennant drooped; then the trade-wind blew, and the white ships drove on. They drove into the blue distance, towards unknown ports—known only in that they would surely prove themselves Ports of All Peril. At night the sea burned; a field of gold it ran to horizons jewelled with richer stars than shone at home. Above them, in the vault of heaven, hung the Great Ship, blazed the Southern Cross. Every hour saw the flight of meteors, and their trains, golden argosies of the sky, faded slowly from the dark-blue depths. When the moon arose she was ringed with colors, but the men who gazed upon her said not, "Every hue of the rainbow is there." They said, "See the red gold, the pearls and the emeralds!" The night died suddenly and the day was upon them, an aureate god, lavish of splendor. Thoy hailed him with music; as they pulled and hauled, the seamen sang. Other winds than those of heaven drove them on. High purpose, love of country, religious ecstasy, chivalrous devotion, greed of gain, lust of aggrandizement, lust of power, mad ambitions, ruthless intents — by how strong a current, here crystal clear, there thick and defiled, were they swept towards their appointed haven! In cruelty and lust, in the faith of little children and the courage of old demi-gods, they went like homing pigeons; and not a soul, from him who gave command to him who, far aloft, looked out upon the deep, recked or cared that another age would call him pirate or corsair, raising brow and shoulder over the morality of his deeds.

In the realms which they were entering. Truth, shattered into a thousand gleaming fragments, might be held in part, but never wholly. There man's quarry was the false Florimel, and she lured him on and he saw with magically anointed eyes. Too suddenly awakened, the imagination of the time was reeling; its sap ran too fast; wonders of the outer, revelations of the inner, universe crowded too swiftly; the heady wine made now gods, now fools of men. The white light was not for the heirs of that age, nor yet the golden mean. Wonders happened, that they knew, and so like children they looked for strange chances. There was no miracle at which their faith would balk, no illusion whose cobweb tissue they cared to tear away. Give but a grain whereon to build, a phenomenon before which started back, amazed and daunted, the knowledge of the age, and forthwith a mighty imagination leaped upon it, claimed it for its own. There had been but a grain of sand, an inexplicable fact—lo! now, a rounded pearl shot with all the hues of the morning, a miracle of grace or an evidence of diabolic power, to doubt which was heresy!

Adventurers to the Spanish Main believed in devil-haunted seas, in flying islands, in a nation of men whose eyes were set in their shoulders, and of women who cut off the right breast and slew every male child. They believed in a hidden city, from end to end a three days' march, where gold-dust thickened the air, and an Inca drank with his nobles in a garden whose plants waved not in the wind, whose flowers drooped not, whose birds never stirred upon the bough, for all alike were made of gold. They