Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/358

332 many people in huts and some chiefs of tribes, all very savage and dark-haired, in their skin and fur mantles, with long spears and heavy-headed clubs, but loving their women and children with a simple passion which was tenderer by contrast with their keen ferocity. Little they cared for ships and silken sails and merchandise, but they much desired the sharp swords, bronze helmets and gold breastplates, and the shields of tooled leather, and other arms brought them from Phœnicia; wherefore they welcomed the Eastern traders, and gave them whole cargoes of tin in fair exchange. Ibrahim sent five caravans a year, two into Egypt, two into Persia, and one to Greece, outladen with dyes and colored cloth and glasses and beaten brass, inladen with gold and manuscripts and the latest news of the great wars. But in twenty years of camel trade there was not the profit which derived to him from a single voyage to Britain after tin. Because as yet the Britons trusted none from the East but Ahab, and Ahab they loved as fierce dogs love their master.

ANY dark-haired folk trooped to meet Ahab on the shore, and some of them climbed down the cliff's steep face to the narrow sands below and waded to his boat, shouting quick greetings to him and his crew, and calling already for the captain of the ships to know what he had brought by way of trade this voyage. And above, the women clustered, gossiping to the strangers, and ridiculing, too, yet very eager to set eyes upon the cargoes of the ships.

"Hast thou brought us the reddish robes, and the turbans,—and the enamelled silver?" they cried, in their own strange tongue.

"Truly," answered the sailors, in theirs, "and the gold chains for your pretty necks and for your ankles—"

But the women, laughing, fled, fearing to understand too much. No tongue is foreign when a woman bargains.

But one among them lingered until Ahab reached the top of the cliff, watching him at first with large eyes, and cheeks that grew red as the scarlet of his sail, and then waited, half pale again, to see if he should remember her and maybe speak her name,—a lovely, slender maid, whose yellow hair and deep-blue eyes, in contrast with the darker looks about her, blazed like a star in the Northern sky.

For she was Bertha, of unknown parentage, adopted by the tribe since, as a babe, the Britons found her drifting on a ship's wreck twenty years before, tied fast with thongs to a great sword of strange make. And she was much beloved, and a little feared, for the white-bearded old priests, around their flat altar-stones beneath the oak-trees, said she was daughter of a noble race in the North, and some said she was a child of the gods and that the sword was a god's sword. So they hung the sword in the Great Hall and made much of Bertha.

Ahab, smiling at the throng of women, who esteemed him as a brother to them all, saw Bertha standing by and went to her.

"Bertha," he said, and took both her hands as fathers do, "is it thou of all these who canst speak my native tongue, yet hast no word of it for me?"

"Nay, my lord," she said, in gentle protest, and his heart was glad because she spoke so well the language he had taught her, "I did but wait thy notice. Thou hast been gone a year,—and—"

"And might have forgotten thee,—is it that, my child?" Ahab laughed and put both her hands together in his own, and as he held them so, he said: "Bertha, thou art lovely. I know many lovely women, but thou hast some strange light behind thy eyes; a deep, mysterious radiance lies about thy face. Tell me, art thou—"

"Oh, my lord!" she cried, "all the women see us!"

Ahab turned. All the women, and indeed the men, were now grouped there, regarding them with eyes half fond, half anxious. The seasoned man of the world read their simple candor in one sweeping view. And so, for he had learned to love these savage folk, he led Bertha toward them and said, in their rude language,

"Hath Ahab once proved false to ye, my friends?"

"Never!" they cried, and the men beat their spears together for clamor, and