Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (299 page)

It was Edward Colman who had brought her to this shame; it was he who had wronged her; it was he who had caused her to wish for revenge upon him. And how could she be avenged upon him, but by lying? She prayed that the curse of Job, the unrest of Alaliel, the ceaseless thirst of Ixion might be his lot, and suddenly she fell to beating her mule about the head to make it hasten.

When they came to her lodging in the Tower it was nearing twilight, and she cried out that she was frozen, and, indeed, her teeth chattered still more than ever with passion and with desire. When she went up the stone stair to her little stone chamber she cried out that she would have a great fire, and she ran about in the little space, clinching her hands and grinding her teeth, her eyes glittering, whilst the constable’s wife’s maid brought billets of wood and blew the coals, trembling at the wildness that was behind her back as she knelt.

The fireplace was a little square opening in the thick wall, the flames licked up it out of sight; it was already dark there, because the window was so tiny, though outside it was still dusk. Anne Jeal drew the bolt against the servant, and ran to the oak closet with circles curved upon it, where she kept her belongings. She drew from her breast the iron key, she unlocked the black lid and drew out a little bundle, wrapped in rags of silk that she had stolen from the bed-hangings at Little Tonbridge. These, purple and green and red, she unswathed and the little hideous image, like a waxen faked radish, yellowish and shaded with streaks of pink, lay in her hand. It was the fourteenth day since she had made it, and she trembled because this was the first time that ever she had done this sorcery.

The fire was very hot, and roared like the sea in a high wind; she must hold one hand before her eyes when she sat herself before it upon a stool. She quivered and shook: it seemed to her that she held life — a human child, a baby — in the hand that she stretched to the coals and logs. She implored unseen powers for strength to do this thing, looking round upon the bare stone walls, upon the pallet that was covered with a cloth and upon the great bible chained to a staple above a wooden lectern near the barred window. The wax of the little image was very old — thirty years and more, and the blood of hers that she had mixed with it made it slow to melt.

She closed her eyes.

“What maketh lads so cruel be!” she cried out, and she thought of how Edward Colman, far away beyond the seas, should have joined himself to her, for he belonged to her because of her great wishes for him.

A great wail, a moan, a sob like the cry of a child struggling for speech whirled round in the little, tiny cell.

“Fire here, oh God! in my throat, in my limbs,” she heard, and she sprang from the stool and crouched against the wall, far away from the fire. Her fingers were sticky with wax, as if it had been blood, and she scraped at them with her nails. She screamed out; in the dancing light of the fire the little image lay among the rushes on the floor where she had cast it down, it seemed to her to writhe and to turn; but, since she could not see the rushes move, she thought her eyes must deceive her.

It had melted very suddenly between her fingers, and at the head part, which she had held downwards, one whole cheek had run away in a huge drop. This drop lay on the bricks before the hearth, as big as a crown piece, and with little spatters all around it in a circle. She crouched for a long time against the wall, dreading lest she should have killed Edward Colman, for, if she had stayed for much longer, she thought, the image would have melted clean away. And the thought that she might have done this filled her with an intolerable dread and longing, with an unbearable feeling of fear and horror, so that all her limbs felt drawn together and cramped.

But, when the fire died down, she assuaged this feeling by falling upon her hands and knees and holding her face over the little image in the rushes. She gazed at it for a long time, and at last cried out —

“I have heard thee speak! I have heard thee speak!”

It seemed to her at once a triumphant fact, and yet it was intolerably pitiful that to hear him speak she must cause him so great pain. And she lifted up the image and bathed it with water, and anointed it with an ointment that she had for making her hands white, and she wrapped it round with cloths and set it to lie in her bed upon the pallet. One of its eyebrows was melted clean away.

She remained in this state of apathy for fourteen days, and she was kept closely by two guards, who walked the courtyards beside her, and there was trouble about the expense of her lodging, for she was now half a prisoner, but she cared little and spent much of her time in washing her hands.

CHAPTER II
.

THEY were fourteen days out from Amsterdam, and had got only to the northward of Lerwick in Scotland before Edward Colman fully perceived that he had nearly lost sight of his left eye and was very deaf in the ear on that side. He was made most fully aware of that because he saw that the crew of the
Half Moon
drew to that side of him, when they were minded to utter certain things that they said with grimaces and afterwards laughed at.

There were fourteen men of them all told, together with the captain, who was called Vanderdonk, and had an impediment in his speech and spoke very slowly. And, with the exception of the old man who wore the jerkin with the pentagon on the breast, all these men were dressed from head to heel in black broadcloth and had hats of black cloth half-a-yard high in the crown. They had an extraordinary slowness of gait, the younger men of them being clean-shaven, and it was for Edward Colman the oddest thing in the world to see one of these fellows bent down over a yard, with his black locks falling down, and his black cloak ends falling down, and his black hat-peak pointing at the waves.

They passed the northern end of Scotland, going always more northerly towards Iceland, till a great wind, into which they could not sail, drove them southwards once more towards Ultima Thule, where it was said that there dwelt anthropophagi and men with very broad noses. It was always very cold, and they never saw the sun; the sea was grey and heavy so that it seemed like the end of the world, and islands and capes peered out at them ever and anon or remained on the horizon for day after day as they beat wearily against the north-west winds.

But Henry Hudson would come up from the cabin-way and stand in the door of the sterncastle that was gilded and carved like the great leaves of the mullein. And he would hold his great hand over his eyes and look at the foot of Iceland and laugh and swear it was all famous.

It was April still, and never so early in the year had he been so far to the northward, and never had he had a boat so fast nor sailors so ready at their work. These last words surprised Edward Colman, for he had never seen men so deliberate in their motions or so surly in their answers.

“Aye,” Hudson answered him, “but let us be just in all things. I can see trouble a-brewing; but if you will mark me who have sailed many voyages you will never find quicker mariners than these Hollanders — for they waste no time with showing that they hurry, yet each man’s hand goeth surely to his appointed rope’s end as into his breeches pockets. Only trouble will come.” He looked again at the tail of Iceland, scratched his forehead and went back again to his cabin.

The wind held steadily from the northwards, and all that night Edward Colman was upon his legs carrying orders from the navigator to the ship’s captain where he was upon the poop. Hudson sat nearly always within the cabin, playing backgammon with Edward Colman or schooling his white mice to be sailors, for he had a great love of animals, and had brought with him a little cage of white mice and a little model of a ship with tiny flags upon sticks. And, with an endless patience, he set little grains of wheat here and there in the riggings, and with tiny whistlings between his teeth he encouraged the furry dwarfs to run up to the maincastle, the Jew’s peak or the high-mast, bearing flags between their sharp teeth and clinging sedulously to the tiny cordage as the
Half Moon
rolled on the cross seas. By morning they were well up to eastward of the Iceland coast; by next nightfall they were well up to the northeast; by the next day at dawn they were standing across the constant wind to the coast of Norway and the sea was very high.

Henry Hudson sat in the cabin always, and gave his orders through Edward Colman to the Captain Vanderdonk. Once he asked whether ever the captain had said anything, and when Colman answered that the captain had said that if they sailed north and east at this rate they would have to go over Greenland to make any North-West Passage, Hudson laughed inwardly. And it was plain to Edward Colman that the captain said truth, for, according to such maps as were nailed up in the cockpit, Iceland was a little island level with the foot of Greenland and the head of Norway, and at present they must lie between the north of Iceland and the northernmost coasts of Norway, so that all Greenland, a very continent, lay between them and any passage to the north of the New World. And they were heading always more and more to the north. They had counted forty days of sailing by that day at supper-time.

Their little consort, the
Good Hope
, sailed foot for foot as they did, keeping a distance more or less of a mile and a half; at night they led her with lanthorns, and still with the zig-zag of their course into the wind they were never at dawn far enough away from her not to make out the grey triangle of her sails a little to the south of them. At noon of the fourth day after they had passed Iceland’s foot she bore down towards them — for she sailed closer to the wind than the
Half Moon
— and putting her sails across, they dropped a boat that came dancing terribly and tiny in the furry seas, rowed by three men in black cloaks, and with a fourth in her stern sheet.

The fourth man was her master; he was a young Dutchman from Sluys, and he had very long hair that tossed upon his shoulders, and a yellow, shaven face. He stamped his boots upon the deck where he stood there, and wished the captain of the
Half Moon
a good-day. The Captain Vanderdonk had a copper-coloured face, agate blue eyes and a tuft of black hair upon his chin which protruded as if it were a weapon he was offering to attack you with. This captain and this Master Outreweltius stood for a long time exchanging compliments and questions as to whether their water was still fresh or their store of beef bade fair to hold out the voyage. The crew of the
Half Moon,
all the fourteen of them, save the helmsman, who was the old man with the pentagon upon his breast, leaned against the bulwark in a silent row; their cloaks flapped nearly down to their knees, and they were of all shapes and sizes, like a row of black crows, and they looked nearly all at their shoes or at the horizon. The three in the boat of the
Good Hope
rose sometimes high above the rail and sometimes disappeared from sight.

Suddenly the master of the
Good Hope
asked whither they were bound.

Hudson’s voice rose up through the skylight of the cabin; he was singing a Devonshire catch to his own huge contentment.

“For,” said the Master Outreweltius, “with this heavy weather and these dark nights they might well part company, and it were a fitting and a proper thing to have some spot appointed where they might join in agreement to wait the one for the other.”

“Master Outreweltius,” the captain said, “what you ask is very prudent and well beseems the cautious seafarer that you are.”

It was plain that all the crew listened very intently, though their eyes remained upon the planking of the deck.

“But,” Captain Vanderdonk spoke, “you are acquainted with the terms of our service. We are in this navigator’s hands; we wander upon the waters; I can give you no help.”

The Master Outreweltius looked sedately at the wrinkled skins of his boats that had been painted with pitch; the voice of Hudson came up through the sky-light singing, “To-rol-dilly-to-rol,” and there was a blank disfavour in the faces of all these Dutchmen as if this were a very drunken sacrilege.

“Captain Vanderdonk,” the master asked, “give me permission to ask the navigator these serious questions.”

“Oh, master,” the captain said, “are you not acquainted that this navigator has not our tongue? We may not speak with him.” He spoke always very slowly to avoid the impediment in his speech; but he could outshout a gale of wind.

Outreweltius looked upon Edward Colman.

“Captain Vanderdonk,” he uttered, “here is the navigator’s interpreter. Shall we ask of him whither we are bound?”

“He will not know it more than you or I, Master Outreweltius,” the captain answered.

This grave colloquy that was uttered within a yard of Edward Colman’s face where he leaned against the cabin-house door, filled Edward Colman with a desire to laugh. He pressed his elbow upon the gilt crank of the door and slipped backwards down the stairs, whilst the two captains looked into each other’s eyes.

“Ho, he shall have his rendezvous,” Hudson laughed, when Edward Colman gave him his news. He set down the black jack from which he had been drinking, and rising to his feet shook himself like a bear. “It has come, then!” he said. “Body of God!” He was by no manner of means drunk, but he was very merry. He put his hands jovially with a great weight upon Edward Colman’s shoulder, he pushed him through the cabin door and up the companion, which was lined with tulip wood — a dark timber from the New World that the Dutchmen loved.

“Gossip,” he said; “set very carefully each word that I say into Hollandish. I will show thee how to manage these Dutch dogs.”

Before the doorway he blinked a little in the open air, for he had not been out of the cabin for two whole days. He kept his hands upon Edward Colman’s shoulder and laughed.

“Which is your deaf side? For you are very deaf upon one side.”

The crew had surrounded the captains in a halfmoon behind them; two of the men had come up out of the boat. Hudson wore a blue suit and Colman one mostly green, that he had had seven years’ wear of. Both these Englishmen smiled, Edward Colman subtly and with curiosity, Hudson masterfully and showing his little strong teeth. The Dutchmen nearly all scowled a little. Hudson looked upon them for a long space till one of them began to fidget his legs. Suddenly he roared out —

“Master Outreweltius, and you two of the
Good Hope
, get you upon your knees for you be mutineers,” and Edward Colman translated his words swiftly and in a low voice.

Outreweltius looked at the planks of the deck; his sallow, shaven face became of a copper-colour with the blood that ran into it. He made no motion at all, and no man stirred save as the ship swayed them to and fro. Hudson, balancing himself somewhat difficultly on his broad feet — for he was not a very good sailor — ran his little eyes perpetually from face to face; he chuckled, and seemed to swallow something in his huge throat. He scratched his chin nonchalantly, and whispered to Edward Colman —

“My beard itches; the wind will change soon.” But he uttered no more words to be translated.

Outreweltius looked at the Captain Vanderdonk. Vanderdonk kept his eyes away over the seas at where, in the grey windward, an iceberg appeared to be like a long castle with three square towers; the wind made a very ungodly moaning amongst the thick cordage of the high mast.

“This is good waiting,” Hudson said in English, “we are like to see the Pole soon if the wind change.”

“Will you say no more?” Edward Colman asked him, but he only laughed and uttered —

“Watch the Guy Fawkes’ face. He knoweth I may hang him and will.”

Hudson looked steadfastly into Outreweltius’s face and then up to the fixed yard of the high mast, from which in Dutch ships any hangings were done. A spasm of motion like a wave passed over Outreweltius’s sallow features, and suddenly he felt beneath his cloak. He drew out a yellow handkerchief; he bent till the top of his black hat nearly touched the boards of the deck, and began to wipe the planking..

“Oh,” Hudson said to Edward Colman, “our voyage and, I think, our lives are saved.”

“Why,” Edward Colman asked, “are our lives in danger?”

Outreweltius was rolling his eyes round the horizon.

“Ned,” Hudson answered, “our lives are always in danger. But these Dutchmen have seen so many men die in the Spanish persecutions — and so many poor women — that they think it less to take a life than we.”

Suddenly, with the action of a camel that gives way at the knee as if its joints were broken, Outreweltius got swiftly on to his knees; but as if he disliked this solitude he looked behind him. The two boatmen from the
Good Hope
came close behind him and, each with the same stiffness, fell upon one knee. One of them was fat and laughed as if he were ashamed, one was almost a dwarf and had a black beard like a desperado’s all around his face. He was called Hieronymus, and was more than half a Spaniard in blood. All three knelt in a little knot, their cloaks on to the deck, their hats forming a peak each, like haycocks turned black.

Hudson was, in an astonishing time for so fat a man, right upon them; with three muffled blows he had sent their hats spinning on to the feet of the
Half Moon’s
crew. Their locks blew out in the wind.