Читать «Cup of Gold (Золотая чаша)» онлайн - страница 24

There were a great many people in the room sitting at the long tables or leaning against the walls; some, even, were seated on the floor. A little serving girl went among them with a tray of liquors. Some were Italians from the ships of Genoa and Venice, come with rare woods and spices that had been carried overland on camel back from the Indian Ocean to Byzantium. Frenchmen were there from the wine boats of Bordeaux and Calais, with an occasional square-faced, blue-eyed Basque among them. Swedes and Danes and Finns were in from the whalers of the north ocean, dirty men who smelled of decaying blubber; and at some of the tables were cruel Dutchmen who made a business of carrying black slaves from Guinea to Brazil. Scattered among these foreign men were a few Cambrian farmers, looking frightened and self-conscious and alone. They had brought pigs and sheep from the country for victualing the ships, and now were bolting their food so that they might get home again before nightfall. These looked for security to three man o' war's men wearing the King's uniform who talked together by the door.

Young Henry lost himself in the lovely clamor of the room. He was hearing new speech and seeing new sights: the earrings of the Genoese; the short knife-like swords of the Dutch; the colors of faces from beet red to wind-bitten brown. All day he might have stood there with no knowledge in him of the passing of time.

A big hand took his elbow, a hand gloved in calluses; and Henry looked down into the broad, guileless face of an Irish seaman.

"Will you be sitting here, young man, alongside of an honest sailor out of Cork named Tim?" As he spoke he squeezed violently against his neighbor, flinging him sideways and leaving a narrow space on the bench end for the boy. There are no men like the Irish for being brutally gentle. And Henry, as he took the seat, did not know that the sailor out of Cork bad seen his gold piece.

"Thank you," he said. "And where is it that you go sailing?"

"Ah! any place that ships go I do be sailing," replied Tim. "I'm an honest sailor out of Cork with no fault on me save never having the shine of a coin to my pocket. And I wonder, now, how I'm to be paying for the fine breakfast, and me with never a shine," he said slowly and emphatically.

"Why, if you have no money, I'll buy your breakfast-so you will be telling me of the sea and ships."

I knew it was a gentleman you were," Tim cried. "I knew it the minute my eyes landed on you soft like-And a small drink to be starting with?" He shouted for his drink without waiting for Henry's consent, and when it came, raised the brown liquor to his eyes.

"Uisquebaugh, the Irish call it. That means water of life; and the English call it 'Whiskey'-only water.

Why! if water had the fine body and honest glow of this, it's sailing I would give up and take to swimming!" He laughed uproariously and tipped the glass up.

"I'm going to the Indies," Henry observed, with thought to bring him back to talking of the sea.