CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE HILT OF A RAPIER.
“Voysye! Hold on, man! Here, come along back!”
“Belay your jaw, you landlubber! I’m bound to overhaul that clipper before she gets away! Cast off your grapnel, or”—
And twisting his arm away from Francis Billington, with whom he had been drinking until both men had had more than enough, Richard Voysye, seaman of the Golden Fleece, set out to overtake the female figure which had just flitted past them in the twilight. Billington, not so tipsy as the sailor, lunged forward in pursuit, and once more grasping his arm exclaimed,—
“’Tis the young dame your captain is going to marry, I tell you, and ’twill go hard with the man that affronts her”—
“Hang the captain, and you too! There, then, you fool—take that!”
Delivering, as he spoke, a cruel blow in the face of his opponent, Voysye felled him to the ground, and pursuing Gillian, who hearing the scuffle had paused to look behind her, threw a rude arm around her waist, crying,—
“Come, now, I’ll have one kiss, if I die for’t.”
But Gillian, lithe as a cat, struggled and fought after her kind, so successfully that the ruffian had not been able to snatch his kiss before a heavy foot reached him with a kick, and a furious voice roared in his ear,—
“Avast there, you”—but the epithets are not writable, and in these days no man, however angry, would use them in a woman’s presence. They were, however, effectual, for with an oath quite as furious and quite as unmentionable, Voysye quitted his hold upon the girl’s waist and, turning, aimed at Cromwell’s face a buffet which, however, only reached his shoulder. Angered, not so much at the assault as the insubordination, the captain seized his sheathed rapier, and dealt with the hilt a blow upon the sailor’s head which prostrated him, bleeding and senseless, at Gillian’s feet.
“You’ve killed him, and they’ll hang you for murder!” cried she. “Hide him, and get away with your vessels before it’s found out.”
“And would you go with me?” demanded Cromwell, gazing curiously in the girl’s fierce, flushed face.
“Yes—no—yes, if you could get clear, and save your neck and your money,” returned Gillian with cynical frankness.
“Ay, I thought as much, Mistress,” retorted the sailor, “and I’m a fool to care for such a woman; but still I do, and when I go you shall go too, or if I’m hung you shall have the price of a soul. Thirty pieces satisfied Judas, didn’t it?”
“Here’s another man coming,” replied Gillian coldly, and with no more words she walked away, while Cromwell, turning to the new-comer, said,—
“Well, Higgins, I’m beholden to you for setting me on his track, and here he is. He lifted his hand on me, and I felled him with a tap of my cutlass hilt. See if he’s hurt.”
Higgins, a man of few words, stared for a moment into his captain’s face, looked after the retreating figure of Gillian, and then kneeling beside his comrade fingered the wound awhile, mumbling, “Hurt, I should say! ’Tis a shrewd wound i’faith! A parlous cut! ’Tis life and death, and nigher death than life, to my mind.”
“Nonsense, man,” replied Cromwell a little uneasily. “A great hulking fellow like that don’t die of a tap on his numskull. Run you into the village and fetch a surgeon. Hasten, now, and when you’ve sent him, see about some sort of litter, that we may take him to Cole’s tavern.”
“’Tis no use,” grumbled Higgins, but still scrambled to his feet, and set off at such good speed that in half an hour Doctor Matthew Fuller, nephew and successor of our old friend Doctor Samuel, was on the spot and encouraging the wounded man’s efforts toward consciousness. But so soon as he could sit up and speak, Voysye, true to his nature, paid his surgeon’s bill with a curse, responded to his captain’s rough expressions of amity with sulky silence, and scorning the litter, or even the support of a friendly arm, staggered off toward the shore, and as soon as possible got aboard ship and comforted his wound with as much Santa Cruz rum as he could obtain, seasoning it with dire threats of vengeance against Higgins, who prudently kept out of his way.
“’Tis an ill wind blown over,” reported Cromwell to his sweetheart that night; and so it might have proved but that Voysye, waking next morning in the dispositions natural to a man who has a fevered wound across his head, and has gone to bed very drunk, insisted upon going ashore to find and fight with Higgins, who had, as he knew, reported him to the captain. In the captain’s absence all discipline had fallen into such disrepute that nobody opposed the half-delirious movements of the wounded man, who went ashore, roved around for a while, and finally, just as he had discovered Higgins and was pointing a pistol at his head, was seized with convulsions, and twenty-four hours later lay a dead man in an upper chamber of Cole’s tavern.
So serious a matter as this could not be suffered to pass unnoticed by the authorities, and with some grave expressions of regret and an assurance of honorable treatment, Captain Cromwell was placed under arrest and lodged in the strong-room of the Fort under guardianship of Lieutenant Holmes, while a messenger was dispatched to Captain’s Hill to summon Standish to a conference with the governor and the others of his council; for the sailor had requested to be tried by a court martial, and who but the General Officer of all the Colonies could organize and head it? With the great captain came Lieutenant Nash, and Ensign-bearer Constant Southworth, with Hatherley, Alden, Willett, Cudworth, and other of the Duxbury men, so that for some days Plymouth assumed the air of a garrisoned place in time of war, much to the delight of Gillian, and perhaps some other of the lonely maids of the almost deserted town.
The court martial, formal and dignified in its proceedings and absolutely just in its dealings, lasted for a whole day, and much testimony to Cromwell’s generous and humane treatment of his men was rendered, as well as a good deal most unfavorable to the character of the dead man, who seems to have been a very drunken and brutal fellow. The only possible testimony as to the rencontre was that of Gillian, and this she was most anxious to be permitted to give in person before the court; but here both Bradford and Brewster interposed, and insisted that a written affidavit made and sworn before the governor should be accepted, a course indorsed by Standish with great alacrity.
In the end Cromwell was acquitted, but not without an exhortation from Parson Rayner, the Chaplain of the Commission, to greater reverence and tenderness for human life, to which the prisoner listened respectfully, but Standish with a covert smile playing around the sadness of his mouth, as he recalled a similar reproach long ago made to him by John Robinson, now many years gone to his rest.
Perhaps as a mark of respect to the court martial that had tried and acquitted him, possibly as a late testimony to his tenderness for human life, Cromwell’s first act as a free man was to order a military funeral for Voysye, and to request the presence of the train band of Plymouth, to every member of which he presented a piece of black taffeta to make a mourning cloak.
“And now I will marry you,” said Gillian, when next she saw her lover alone; but he, with a queer smile, replied,—
“Think better of it, my dear! my money is well-nigh spent, and I feel it in my bones that the next court martial will order me to be shot. You’ll make a poor bargain, and that’s not to your mind.”
“A poor bargain indeed!” retorted Gillian, her temper flaming up; and as John Alden’s boat was over from Duxbury she begged a passage in it, and an hour later was on her way to visit Betty Pabodie, as she pretended, but really to torment Sarah Brewster, who felt that she had no right to refuse her willful kinswoman shelter whenever she claimed it.
A few days later Cromwell sailed for Boston, where he remained for some months, presented Governor Winthrop with an elegant sedan-chair, taken out of one of his prizes, and was much admired and petted. Whether Gillian joined him there and was openly married to him, or whether the innate romance pervasive of the sea moved Cromwell to plan and execute an elopement for the girl, whose relatives would have been only too glad to give her to any worthy husband, we cannot tell; but that in some way they at last came together is evident, and also that they were married, since she was allowed to inherit his property. The manner of his death was one of those marvels which men then regarded as a direct judgment from heaven, but which we moderns are content to call a strange coincidence.
It was in the late autumn, and Cromwell, after a merry feast at the house of a boon companion in Dorchester, was riding rapidly homeward, when his horse slipped upon an icy slope, and threw his rider violently over his head. The night passed, and in the morning a wayfarer found the faithful beast standing pensive and patient beside his master’s prostrate body, now cold and stiff; and when he was brought into the town and carried to his lodgings a wild-eyed woman rushed to meet him, and staring at the wound whence his lifeblood had drained away, shrieked, “’Tis Voysye’s hurt over again,” and fell in a swoon across the body.
John Higgins, who had followed his captain’s body home, started in terror at that word, and coming forward drew away the hair from the wound, stared at it as Gillian had done, and hoarsely asked,—
“Was’t Voysye’s spook did it?”
“Nay, man,” impatiently answered the man who had found him. “See you not that ’twas the hilt of the poor gentleman’s own rapier did it? When I came upon him, the brass was bedded in the wound, and you may see the blood and hairs upon it now. See!”
“Ay, I see,” replied Higgins heavily. “And well do I know, without seeing, whose hand it was that urged the hilt to just that spot upon my poor captain’s head. Wow! But I wish I might have seen the tussle that befell when the old man got free of his carcase and fell upon Voysye man to man; nay, spook to spook. Would they still be at it, think you?”
In a month or so more, Gillian, a very wealthy young widow, sailed for England, where she married a pious and passing rich old Covenanter, whom she also survived, and became one of the gayest and least prejudiced ladies of the Court of Charles the Second, where we will leave her.