Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/54

50 believed in a fair fountain, hard indeed to find, but of such efficacy that the graybeard who dipped in its shining-waters stepped forth a youth upon ever-vernal banks.

So with these who like an arrow now clave the blue to the point of danger. In this strange half of the world where nature's juggling hand dealt now in supernal beauty, now in horror without a name, how might they, puppets of their age, hold an even balance, know the mirage, know the truth? Inextricably mingled were the threads of their own being, and none could tell warp from woof, or guess the pattern that was weaving or stay the flying shuttle. What if upon the material scroll unrolling before them God had chosen to write strange characters? Was not the parchment His, and how might man question that moving finger?

One day they discerned an island, fair and clear against the horizon—undoubtedly there, although no chart made mention of it. All saw the island; but when one man cried out at the amazing height of its snowy peak another laughed him to scorn, declaring the peak a cloud, and spoke of sand-dunes topped with low bushes. A third clamored of a fair white city, an evident harbor, and the masts of great ships; a fourth, every whit as positive, stood out for unbroken forests and surf upon a lonely reef. While they contended, the island vanished. Then they knew that they had seen Saint Brandon's Isle, and in his prayer at the setting of the watch the chaplain made mention of the matter. On a night when all the sea was phosphorescent, Thynne the master saw in the wake of the Cygnet a horned spirit, very black and ugly, leaping from one fiery ripple to another, but when he called on Christ's name, rushing madly away, full tilt into the setting moon. Again, Ferne and young Sedley, pacing the poop beneath a sky of starry splendor, and falling silent after talk that had travelled from Petrarch and Ariosto to that Faerie Queene which Edmund Spenser was writing, heard a faint sweet singing far across the deep. "Hark!" breathed Sedley. "The strange sweet sound surely mermaiden singing!"

"I know not," replied Ferne, his hands upon the railing. "Perchance 'tis so. They say there are fair women The sound is gone. I would I might hear thy sister singing."

"How silver and how solemn is the sky!" said his companion. "Perhaps it was the echo of some heavenly strain. There goeth a great star! They say that the fall of such stars is portentous, speaking to men of doom."

His Captain laughed. "Hast added so much astrology to thy store of learning? Now, goodwife Atropos may cut her thread by the light of a comet; but when the comet has flared away and the shearer returned to her shearing, then in the deep darkness, where even the stars shine not, the shorn thread may feel God's thumb and forefinger, may know He hath yet His place How all the sea grows phosphorescent! and the stars do fall so thickly that there may be men a-dying. Well, before long there will be other giving of swords to Death!"

In the silence which followed his words, lightly spoken as they were, young Sedley, who indeed owed very much to Mortimer Ferne, laid impulsively his hand upon his Captain's hand. "On the night you give your sword to Death, how great a star shall fall! An I go first, I shall know when the trumpet sounds for your coming."

"When I give my sword to Death," said Ferne, absently. "Ay, lad, when I give my sword to Death There again, do you not hear the singing? It is the wind, I think, and not the people of the sea. It hath a mocking sound When I give my sword to Death."

From the tops above them fell a voice of Stentor. "Sail ho! sail ho!" Upon which, sea-kings as they were, they gave for the remainder of the tropic night small attention to verse or philosophy. With the morning the three ships counted to the general gain the downright sinking of a small fleet from Hispaniola, and the taking therefrom porcelain, many bales of rich silk and rosaries of gold beads, a balass-ruby, twenty wedges of silver, and a chest well lined with ducats.

With this treasure to hark them forward, on and on sailed the ships; and now land birds came to them, and now they passed, floating upon the water, the leafy branch of a strange tree with red, cuplike