Читать «Cup of Gold (Золотая чаша)» онлайн - страница 25

"The Indies? Why, so am I, tomorrow in the morning; and for Barbados with knives and sickles and dress goods for the plantations. It's a good ship-a Bristol ship-but the master's a hard man all stiff with religion out of the colony at Plymouth. Hell-file he roars at you and calls it prayer and repentance, but I'm thinking there's joy in all the burning to him. We'll all burn a good time if he has his way. I do not understand the religion of him; there's never an Ave Mary about it, and so how can it be religion at all?"

"Do you think-do you think, perhaps-I could go in your ship with you?" Henry asked chokingly.

The lids drew down over the ingenuous eyes of Tim.

"If it was ten pound you had," he said slowly, and then, seeing the sorrow on the boy's face, "five, I mean-"

"I have something over four, now," Henry broke in, with sadness.

"Well, and four might do it, too. You give me your four pound, and I'll be talking with the master. It's not a bad man when you get to be knowing him, only queer and religious. No, don't be looking at me like that. You come along with me. I wouldn't run off with the four pound of a boy that bought my breakfast at all." His face bloomed with a great smile.

"Come," he said; "let's be drinking that you go with us in the Bristol Girl. Uisquebaugh for me and wine of Oporto for you!" Then breakfast arrived and they fell to eating. After a few mouthfuls Henry said: "My name is Henry Morgan. What is your other name besides Tim?"

And the sailor laughed heartily.

"Why, if there was ever a name to me but Tim you might find it kicking around in a wheel rut at Cork.

The father and mother of me did not wait to be telling me my name. But Tim was on me without giving.

Tim is a kind of free name that you can just take and no one to mention it, like the little papers the Dissenters be leaving in the streets, and they scuttling off not to be seen with them. You can breathe Tim like the air, and no one to put hand on you."

Breakfast over, they went into the street, busy with the trade of carters and orange boys and peddling old women. The town was crying its thousand wares, and it seemed thatdel icate things fro the far, unearthly corners of the world had been brought by the ships and dumped like clods on the dusty counters of Cardiff: lemons; cases of coffee and tea and cocoa; bright Eastern rugs; and the weird medicines of India to make you see things that are not, and to feel pleasures that fly away again. Standing in the streets were barrels and earthen jugs of wine from the banks of the Loire and the Peruvian slopes.

They came again to the docks and the beautiful ships. The smell of tar and sunburned hemp and the sweetness of the sea breathed in to them from off the water. At last, far down the row, Henry saw a great black ship, and Bristol Girl painted in letters of gold on her prow. And the town and all the flat hulks became ugly and squalid beside this beauty of the sea. The curved running lines of her and the sensuous sureness of her were tonic things to make you gasp in your breath with pleasure. New white sails clung to her yards like long, slender cocoons of silk worms, and there was fresh yellow paint on her decks. She lay there lifting slightly on a slow swell, champing, impatient to be flying off to any land of your imagination. A black Sheban queen she was, among the dull brown boats of the harbor.