Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/356

330 it to her mouth—Ahab leaped hungrily to her side—"this flower I would give to a man who wieldeth sword,—not merely weareth one. If a man hath fought for his life and won, I could love him, I think. Ahab, where is thy sword to-day?"

For a minute he stood close to her, looking into her face so fixedly she winced with sudden fear. Then he sprang away, and threw his purple robe across his shoulders so that his arms, the muscles hillocking the brown skin and the amulets of gold set with blue enamel and rare gems, showed bare.

"Scorn me if thou wilt, Elissa!" he said, a high dignity keeping down his anger well. "I am off for Britain this day. Perhaps I shall find a sword there for thee."

"I may find one here whilst thou art there!" laughed the maiden, and Ahab was gone.

She watched the eight black ships her father sent to Britain as they made sail and left their moorings in the curving harbor's horn. And when seven of them were in the offing their captains held them in the wind and their rowers quit their oars, so that they lay in a long line, their sails of hide flapping from the single yards. Then the eighth black ship came out, being rowed swiftly and with no sail set. Her hull was polished like real ebony, reflecting the sunshine upon the water as a glass. A narrow band of white ran from where a golden bull's-head marked the bow, to stern, a sword's length from the water-line. Just under it were the oar-ports, ten on either side, and the long oars of pure ash wood were black and polished like the hull, but that the blades were deep blood-red, and there was a rim of figured brass where those two colors met. And the eighth ship had one short mast, with a heavy yard slung near the top; and on the yard a sail, furled closely. But by the mast a youth stood with cords ready to loose the sail, and Elissa knew this was the ship of Ahab the Pilot, the swiftest in the Phœnician fleets, and as fine as the great barge of the King; and that the sail was of wondrous striped silk, which none other might spread, even if he had wealth to buy one.

Ahab stood on the high stern of his black ship while the rowers drove her through the lively sea. Looking down through the beams of the open deck, he saw twenty stark Egyptians at the oars, soon to be unshipped when the sail had been raised. He lifted his hand. The youth released the cords, and the sail of striped silk fell gracefully into the arms of the waiting winds, where it dallied briefly until pulled taut by the ready crew. And then the eighth ship took her place at the head of the line, first passing before the others as if to say, "Have good look at me; for you shall reach no Britain but in my wake."

Elissa, on shore, saw Ahab gazing toward the gardens of Ibrahim in search of some sign from her. "He is a fool to care so much," she said. "I do not love these merchantmen." So she gave no sign. And while she watched, day closed. The gray and unhewn walls of Tyre turned softly pink beneath the slanting sun. The light in the gardens changed from pearl to a dense and dusky red. Soft music stopped the rumble of the carts, and the shrill call of the sheepmen dropped away; while along the sea there were shades of vast purpureal depths, and the majestic mystery of evening fell upon the spot where last were seen the ships of Ibrahim.

HERE is a village church now where the Great Hall of the Britons stood gray guard upon the headlands and looked off southward to the sea; the level farms, beginning at the very brink, run back beneath the elms and oaks, and willows line the brooksides near the small white houses and the barns. Hedgerows, in fair insistence, mark the ways in which men's feet must go, and often by the road the eye is held and the nostril blessed by well-made clumps of fragrant blooms set off in grass by red-cheeked wives along the dusty way. But when Ahab came here with the seven ships of Ibrahim no farms and barns were there, but the Great Hall of the Britons, made with stone blocks set in a white mortar, and not loose like the thick Phœnician walls, and with oaken beams above and hardened turf held with wood pins for a roof. Behind the Great Hall lived