Читать «Cup of Gold (Золотая чаша)» онлайн - страница 11

"I'm young Henry Morgan, sir, and I'm going outward from here to the Indies."

"Indeed, and are you? Will you come in and talk to me about it?" The voice was clear and low and lovely as a young wind crooning in a spring-time orchard. There was the music of singing in it, the quiet singing of a man working with tools; and underneath, half-heard or completely imagined, there rang the seeming of harp strings lightly touched and left to thrill.

The single room was thick carpeted in black, and on the walls were hung harp and spear-head, harp and spear-head all the way around; small Welsh harps and the great bronze leaf spears of the Britons, and these against the unfinished stone. Below these were the all-seeing windows wherefrom you might look out on three valleys and a mighty family of mountains; and lower still, a single bench circled around the room against the wall. There was a table in the center loaded with tattered books, and beside it a copper brazier, set on a Greek tripod of black iron.

The great hound nuzzled Henry as he entered so that he drew away in fright, for is there anything under the blue cup so deadly as the merest notice of a red-eared dog?

"You are going to the Indies. Sit here, boy. See! You can watch your home valley now, so that it go not flying off Avalon." The harps caught up his tones and hummed an answering faint resonance.

"My father said I was to come here and tell you of my going and listen to your speech. My father Thinks your speech may keep me here."

"Going to the Indies," Merlin repeated. "Will you be seeing Elizabeth before you go and making grand promises to flutter the heart of her and strangle the breath in her, after you're gone, from thinking of the things you will bring back to her?"

Henry blushed deeply. "Who told you I thought at all of the little rat?" he cried. "Who is it says at all that I care for her?"

"Oh, the wind whispered something," said Merlin; "and then there was some word of it in your talking cheeks and your blustering just now. I think you should be speaking to Elizabeth, not to me. Your father should have known better?' His voice died away. When he spoke again it was with sad earnestness.

"Must you leave your father, boy-and he so sure alone in the valley of men who are not like him? Yes, I think that you must go. The plans of boys are serious things and unchangeable. But what can I say to you to keep you here, young Henry? Your father sends me a task difficult to fulfill.

"I went out on a tall Spanish ship a thousand years ago-it must be more than that, or perhaps I did not go at all and only dreamed it. We came at last on these green Indies, and they were lovely but unchanging. Their cycle is a green monotony. If you go there you must give up the year; must lose the pang of utter dread in the deep winter with its boding that the world has fled solar fealty to go careening into lonely space so that Spring may never come again. And you must lose that wild, excited quickening when the sun turns back, the joy of it flooding over you like the surge of a warm wave and choking you with pleasure and relief. No change there; none at all. Past and future mingle in an odious, eternal now."