Читать книгу Four Bells: A Tale of the Caribbean - Ralph D. Paine - Страница 10

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The steamer sighted Cartagena in the rosy mists of dawn. It seemed to rise from the sea and float like a mirage. It was a mass of towers, domes, and battlements, of stone houses tinted pink and yellow with tiled roofs that gleamed and wavered. The surf broke against the wall of enduring masonry which marched around this ancient city of the conquistadores, a mighty wall broken here and there by massive gateways and bastions.

Defiantly facing the sea, secure of itself, this proud stronghold of Cartagena de Indias had been increasingly fortified until it had become impregnable to the foes who, in the very early days, had harried and plundered it. These walls and escarpments, the flanking towers and the guardian forts looming from the nearby hills and forelands, had cost the kings of Spain untold millions drained from the fabulous mines of Potosi. They had been determined to make this Caribbean seaport the Gibraltar of the New World.

The Tarragona changed her course and moved to the southward of the city, past the tall palms clustered on the hot, white beaches. What appeared to be a wide entrance to the harbor was soon revealed, but the breakers frothed against a barrier that ran athwart it like a reef. On the chart this reef was a curiously straight line, as if laid down with a ruler. Richard Cary was shading his eyes with his hand when the chief officer remarked:

“If the Colombians had any get-up and gumption they would blow a hole in that submerged wall and open the old ship channel. It was built across there, God knows how long ago, to keep the buccaneers out. Some building job, that! There must be almost a mile of it.”

“Yes, it was put there after the Englishmen sailed in past the forts and sacked the town,” quickly exclaimed Cary. “It wasn’t there when Drake took Cartagena. He used this Boca Grande.”

It was necessary for the Tarragona to proceed seven miles to the southward and enter the narrow passage of the Boca Chica, tortuous and difficult, and then to make her way through the reaches of a blue lagoon. She passed between the outermost forts, gray and grass-grown, but still resisting the slow processes of decay. On the port side was the Castillo de San Fernando with its crenelated walls and deep embrasures in which rested dismounted brass carronades. In the lee of the lofty water-gate rode a Colombian trading schooner. A few Indian canoes were drawn up on the beach.

On the starboard side, the Castillo de San Juan jutted from the sea like a huge rock. Patches of verdure had found root in the crumbling counterscarps. Flowering vines wreathed the round sentry boxes.

Steaming slowly through the placid lagoon, the Tarragona found a circuitous path to Cartagena. The wharf, the corrugated iron cargo sheds, the railway tracks, were ugly and modern. Looking away from them, however, one saw only the stately seaport of the vanished centuries. Behind its ramparts the galleried streets and shaded plazas drowsed through the heat of the day until the breeze came sweeping from the sea with the setting sun.

The Tarragona had much freight to discharge before resuming the voyage to Santa Marta and filling her holds with bananas. Richard Cary had to be an efficient second mate with his mind on the job while the clattering winches plucked the rope slings filled with cases, bales, and casks from the open hatches. At the noon hour he found leisure to loaf under an awning.

Teresa Fernandez found him there. She had something to say. One of her swift and supple gestures indicated a swarthy Colombian in a handsome military uniform who reclined in a steamer chair on the promenade deck. He was gaunt, grizzled, and harsh-featured. Just now his eyes were closed. His hands were comfortably clasped across his belt. He was enjoying a brief siesta after a bountiful luncheon in the saloon as the guest of the ship.

“You see that fellow?” exclaimed Teresa, with a shrug that betokened disfavor. “All his brass buttons and medals? He is the Comandante of the Port, Colonel Fajardo. The boss of the custom-house police and things like that. What do you think of him?”

“Is he a friend of yours?” Dick Cary cautiously parried.

“Last voyage that Colonel Fajardo asked me to marry him,” candidly answered Teresa. “Yes, that fellow told me he was in love with me. He is not as old as he looks, unless he is a big liar. Forty-two years old he says.”

Cary glowered at the somnolent Comandante of the Port. In a way, this was startling news. Next he fixed a questioning eye on the charming Teresa whose demeanor hinted that, as a suitor, the colonel had not been finally disposed of on that last voyage. She flashed a brilliant smile, furtively caressed Cary’s hand, and deigned to explain:

“It was just like this, Ricardo. This Colonel Fajardo is a very important man in Cartagena. The Fruit Company must treat him nice and pat him on the back or he will make trouble for the ships. He can find something wrong with the papers and delay the sailings or maybe a poor sailor is caught smuggling some cigarettes ashore. You see, I am in the Company’s employ and I must not make this Colonel Fajardo mad with me. It is best to be diplomatique, to jolly him along, you understand?”

“It sounds well enough,” growled Richard Cary, by no means appeased, “but what about this voyage? Has that buzzard proposed to you again?”

“Oh, yes, as soon as he came aboard this morning. He was waiting, very impatient. He had told me he had plenty of money and a very good house. His pay is not much, you know, except what he can steal. I asked my uncle in Cartagena to find out about this Colonel Fajardo. My uncle he cannot come down to the ship to-day, but he sends me a letter. This fine Comandante is a false alarm, Ricardo. He has spent all his money on women and his house is mortgaged up to the neck. He is no good at all. Bah! Why should I marry that fellow, even if I am a poor girl that has to go to sea and work very hard?”

“Have you told him so?” sternly demanded Dick Cary. Her nonchalance rather staggered him.

“Yea, I could not string him along any more,” serenely confessed Teresa Fernandez.

“But if he had all kinds of money, what then?”

“Never, Ricardo. He disgusts me. That last voyage, when I told him to wait, you had not kissed me then.”

“You are my sweetheart,” he passionately exclaimed. “And I’ll take care of that Colombian blackguard if he pesters you again.”

“You would kill him, Ricardo, because you love me?” happily sighed Teresa Fernandez. “But, listen, don’t you go making trouble with that man if he acts jealous. I will be glad when the ship sails for Santa Marta to-morrow.”

Richard Cary’s laugh was lightly scornful. He held the amorous Colonel Fajardo in very small esteem. By this time the latter gentleman had awakened from his siesta. He yawned and blinked at the harbor upon whose oily surface a small sailing vessel drifted becalmed in the blistering heat. Then his gaunt frame uprose from the steamer chair and he stiffly straightened himself in the frogged white uniform with the ornate gold shoulder-straps.

He was not a man to be dismissed with a careless laugh. A visage tanned to the hue of brown leather was bitten deep with the lines of a hard and cruel temper. The thin lips and jutting nose were predatory. One thought of him as perhaps a soldier who had seen more arduous service than this lazy billet of Comandante of the Port. He had the air of command, but sloth and dissipation were corroding him as rust destroys a good weapon.

Yawning, Colonel Fajardo lighted a cigarette and smoothed the wrinkles from his tunic. Then he twisted the ends of a mustache that was prematurely flecked with gray. He sauntered forward, to the gangway, and swore viciously at two of his custom-house guards who had retreated to the shade of a deck-house. One of them he kicked by way of emphasis. From this part of the ship he caught sight of Teresa Fernandez under the awning with the huge, yellow-haired young second mate of the Tarragona.

At a glance it was easy to perceive that they found this dalliance agreeable. Excessively and infernally agreeable, in the opinion of this interested Colonel Fajardo. It was a mordant sight for him to behold. He felt suddenly feverish. It was, indeed, like a touch of calentura.

A certain thing was revealed to him. It displayed itself beyond a shadow of doubt. Teresa Fernandez had considered his offer of marriage. Yes, she had been favorable, his vanity led him to believe, delaying the answer until the ship had returned to Cartagena.

Now she had rejected him; the humble stewardess of the Tarragona rejecting the renowned Colonel Fajardo, Comandante of the Port, who might have had so many other young and beautiful women. It was because she had found a Yankee lover. Little devil, would she so wantonly flaunt this great, stupid beast of a sailor before the eyes of Colonel Fajardo? It was amusement for those two.

The Colonel’s lean fingers quivered as he lighted a fresh cigarette. The thin lips twitched beneath the martial mustache. He turned on his heel and strolled aft to the smoking-room. There he slumped upon a cushioned settle and rested his elbows upon the table. He ordered a whiskey and soda and drank it very slowly. Another Colombian official joined him, a loquacious person who babbled about various matters and was indifferent to the brooding, ungracious demeanor of Colonel Fajardo. After a while this acquaintance departed.

The colonel continued to drink, steadily and alone, until the chief engineer drifted in for a cold bottle of beer. He was sweaty and dirty and his legs ached. For sociability’s sake he sat down at the table with the Comandante of the Port. It was an error, as he presently discovered. The morose gentleman of the gold shoulder-straps contributed no more than an occasional grunt or a bored, “Si, señor.”

His eyes were slightly bloodshot and failed to focus. Otherwise his sobriety could not be challenged. He brightened only when about to plunge his predatory beak into another whiskey and soda. Having prudently slaked his own thirst, the chief engineer betook himself back to the task of tinkering with a balky condenser in a temperature that would have made Hades seem frigid. Later in the afternoon, when he emerged on deck for air, he accosted Richard Cary.

“Hearken to me, shipmate. If you insist on sparking the beautiful stewardess, I suggest that you suspend operations until Cartagena is in the offing. What I mean to say is, a little discretion wouldn’t be half bad.”

“Thanks, Mac, but if you had just as soon mind your own damn business,” was the discourteous retort, “I can hearken a lot easier. How did you get this way?”

“By using a normal intelligence and powers of observation in which you are so colossally lacking,” was the unruffled reply. “You have already driven Colonel Fajardo to drink. He has been at it ever since luncheon, according to Jimmy, the barkeep. No, he isn’t drunk, but, my word, his disposition is ruined. He may be chewing glass by this time.”

“Humph! You read too many novels, Mac. Trying to stage a melodrama?”

“This from you, Dick Cary? You wild ass! After boring me with your fantastic nonsense about buried memories of the Spanish Main? Accuse me of being stagey when I offer a friendly bit of common sense? Oh, very well, if you get a knife in your ribs or a bullet in your back, you needn’t expect me to hold your hand and listen to your last words. I have heard gossip in Cartagena, that this Colonel Fajardo has bumped off one or two sprightly young caballeros who got in his way.”

“And you listen to such rot?” scoffed Dick Cary. “The drunken counterfeit! Somebody ought to call his bluff. I wish he would give me a chance.”

“The Devon lad? Spaniards are good hunting,” quizzed McClement. “Up, my hearties, and at ’em.”

Instead of dining at his favorite café in Cartagena, Colonel Fajardo remained on board the Tarragona. He swayed just a trifle as he walked into the saloon, but his bearing was haughty and sedate. He held his liquor well, did this seasoned soldier of the tropics. A man of blood and iron! More accurate, perhaps, to say that he had a copper lining. Whatever emotions may have tormented him, his appetite for food was not blighted. He ate enormously and gulped down cup after cup of black coffee.

This treatment was sobering. The colonel’s eyes were again in focus. They expressed an intelligence alert and sinister. His gait was normal when he returned to the promenade deck. He posted himself where he could observe the gangway steps that led down to the wharf. It was not long before Teresa Fernandez appeared. As he suspected, she had been warily avoiding him. Just now she failed to see him because she was looking elsewhere, forward, where the stairs led down from the officers’ quarters on the boat deck.

This was a woman of a very different aspect from the industrious stewardess of the Tarragona in her white garb so severely trim and plain. The wide black hat framed a face girlish and piquant. The gown was of some gray stuff, thin and shimmering. It revealed the soft contours of her shoulders, of her slenderly modeled arms. The ancestry which could boast of a Don Juan de Fernandez, captain of the great galleon of the plate fleet, had survived in Teresa’s small-boned wrists, in the curves of her slim silken-clad ankles. Greedily did the lustful Colonel Fajardo gaze at her. Damnation! Never had he so greatly desired to possess a woman. In proof of this he had been even willing to marry her.

She gayly waved a hand, but not at him. The second officer of the ship was hastening to join her, the great, insolent ox of a Yankee sailor. He, too, was in shore-going clothes, a jaunty Panama with a crimson band, cream-colored suit of pongee, a bamboo stick crooked on his arm. He was so flagrantly the happy lover off for a holiday hour ashore that Colonel Fajardo muttered blasphemies the most picturesque. The intention was to annoy him, to make him beside himself. It was odious.

The perfidious Teresa Fernandez hung on the arm of Richard Cary as they descended to the wharf and walked to the custom-house gate beyond which waited a group of little open carriages, plying for hire. The drivers raised their voices in clamorous persuasion, naming extortionate prices. Teresa scolded them in voluble Spanish as piraticos and children of the Evil One. They meekly subsided. The carriage with the least bony and languorous nag rattled over the cobblestones in the direction of the nearest gateway through the city wall.

Colonel Fajardo moved to the gangway. He halted to think. His hard, worn face was not so angry as perplexed. It was to be surmised that things had taken a disappointing turn. Possibly it would have pleased him more had the second officer gone ashore alone. The fact that Teresa Fernandez had accompanied him intruded a certain awkwardness. In a way, it was unforeseen. In previous voyages she had declined to leave the ship after dark.

Colonel Fajardo absently fingered a scar on his chin. The circumstances were regrettable, but he was not one to neglect a matter of importance so long as there was the remotest chance of success. Immediately he made his way down to the wharf and strode as far as the office of the customs. He entered this small building, locked the door, and talked softly into the telephone. The conference was brief. His language was so guarded that it could mean nothing at all if overheard. The message was a masterpiece of circumlocution. It was understood, however, by a certain sallow young man who had been playing a guitar in a café of shady repute in a dingy street of Cartagena.

He had been waiting for a message. In the afternoon a dusty urchin had come from the wharf with a few unsigned words scrawled on a bit of paper advising him to hold himself in readiness for orders.

In employing the telephone, Colonel Fajardo displayed the modern spirit. In certain aspects of his private affairs he harked back to earlier centuries. From the wharf he returned to the ship and sought the smoking-room. With a mien of somber abstraction he applied himself to a whiskey and soda.

Meanwhile the shabby open carriage had rattled through a cavern of a gateway in the wall. Cartagena by moonlight! Richard Cary was glad he had waited until night. All traces of garish modernity were banished by the sorcery of the silver moon. In the shadows of the winding streets, gallants whispered at grated windows. The tall houses with overhanging balconies that almost met across these narrow streets were gravely beautiful. In the stones above their doors were chiseled the crests of conquering hidalgos whose bones had been dust these hundreds of years.

There was almost no traffic. Strollers loitered in the grateful breeze, a group was singing as it passed. There was the hum of voices from the balconies, the distant music of a band in a plaza. To Richard Cary it was like the ghost of a city, untouched by change or dissolution, which dwelt with memories great and tumultuous. He gave himself over to its spell.

Teresa Fernandez also was silent. When she spoke, it was to say, with deep emotion:

“It is so wonderful to be with you, Ricardo, away from the ship and all those noisy people. To-night we seem to belong right here in my old Cartagena, you and I. This is like a beautiful dream, but, ah, dreams never last very long. Will you love me for more than a little while?”

“Aye, Teresa mine; forever and ever. McClement calls me crazy, but I feel as though I had loved you in Cartagena long ago.”

“Santa Maria, do I look as old as that?” she rippled. “And I thought I had made myself muy dulce for you. If you will stay crazy about me, I don’t care how crazy that old chief engineer thinks you are.”

When deeply stirred, Ricardo was not one to turn a ready compliment. She was satisfied, however, with his smile of fond approval, with his manifest pride in her slender and elegant beauty. One thought made them wistful. To forsake the open carriage and wander at their will, to a stone bench in the shadows of the Plaza Fernandez de Madrid, or to the murmuring beach, this was their desire. But they could not remain long away from the ship.

Teresa had petulantly explained that there was no evading a call at the house of her uncle, Señor Ramon Bazán. It was a promise, made last voyage, and she was a woman of her word. Besides, this funny old guy of an uncle, said she, had vowed to leave her all his money when he was dead. It was necessary to be nice to him while he was alive. Ha, not one dollar would he give her until he was dead, not if she begged him on her knees. A terrible tightwad was the Señor Ramon Bazán.

Richard Cary made no comment. He felt sorry for the girl who had been compelled to travel rough roads of life, courageously battling for survival. She was not sordid, but anxious. Money was a weapon of self-defense. She had been compelled to think too much of it.

The carriage halted in front of the frowning residence of Uncle Ramon Bazán. The iron-studded door was stout enough to have stopped a volley of musket balls. It was swung open by a barefooted Indian lad in ragged shirt and trousers. Teresa brushed him aside and led the way into the patio, open to the sky, where a fountain tinkled and flamboyant flowers bloomed. A little brown monkey scampered up a trellis and swung by its tail. A green parrot screeched impolite Spanish epithets from a cage on the wall.

The Indian youth shuffled into the patio and timidly informed the señorita that her uncle had gone out on an errand and would soon return.

“I hope he forgets to come back, Ricardo,” said Teresa. “Now we can sit down by the oleander tree and I will show you the bell of the old galleon Nuestra Señora del Rosario.”

They crossed the moonlit square of the patio. Cary saw a heavy framework of Spanish oak timbers, more durable than iron. From the cross-piece was suspended the massy bell whose elaborately chased surface was green with time and weather. By the flare of a match, Cary discovered a royal coat of arms in high relief and the blurred letters of an inscription, presumably the name of the galleon and of the port whence she had hailed.

Teresa Fernandez groped for the clapper and let it swing against the flaring rim. The bell responded with a note sonorous and musical. Lingeringly vibrant, the sound filled the patio. With more vigor Richard Cary swung the clapper. The voice of the galleon’s bell swelled in volume. The air fairly quivered and hummed. It was unlike any ship’s bell that Richard Cary had ever heard at sea or in port. And yet its timbre thrilled some responsive chord in the dim recesses of his soul. It was such a bell as had flung its mellow echoes against the walls of Cartagena, of Porto Bello, of Nombre de Dios when the tall galleons of the plate fleet had ridden to their hempen cables.

The sound of the bell had died to a murmur when Teresa spoke. The quality of her voice was attuned in harmony with it, or so it seemed to the listening Richard Cary.

“When I was a little girl,” said she, “I liked to come and play with the old bell. I had to stand up on my toes and push the clapper with my two hands. Dong! Dong! It sang songs to me. They made me feel like you say you do when you hear the wind in the palm trees, Ricardo. There is something about this bell—very queer, but just as true as true can be. You will not laugh, like the other Americanos. If anything very bad is going to happen to the one it belongs to, this bell of the Nuestra Señora del Rosario it strikes four times. Dong! dong!—Dong! dong! Four bells, like on board a ship. When there is going to be death or some terrible bad luck! It has always been like that, ’way, ’way back to my ancestor Don Juan Diego Fernandez.”

Richard Cary nodded assent. It was not for him to find fault with a legend such as this. Teresa, encouraged by his sympathy, went on to say:

“Yes, it was heard the night before the two little English ships, the Bonaventure and the Rose of Plymouth, came sailing into Cartagena harbor. Dong! dong!—Dong! dong! There was no Spanish sailor near at all on deck when it struck four bells. A hundred years ago there was a General Fernandez who fought with Bolivar in the revolution against Spain. His wife she sits right here in this patio and waits for news from her brave husband. One night it is very quiet and everybody is asleep. She is waked up. What does she hear? Not so loud, but very sad and clear. Dong! dong!—Dong! dong! Four bells!

“This poor woman knows her husband must be dead in some battle for the flag of Bolivar. Pretty soon a soldier comes from the Magdalena with a message, but she has had her message already. Another time, my Ricardo, it was a Fernandez that got drowned in a ship. It went down in a hurricane off Martinique. The bell told his mother. Now I have told you enough gloomy stuff, Ricardo. Maybe that old bell will belong to me some day. I think I will throw it in the harbor. It is a Jonah.”