Page:Cup of Gold-1929.djvu/17

was a damned Papist; but then, so was Pierre le Grand, I think.

“Some we pushed into the sea with their breast plates shining and shimmering as they went down — grand Spanish soldiers and bubbles coming out of their mouths. You can see deep into the water there.” Dafydd ceased and looked at the floor.

“You see, I don’t want to be hurting you with these things, Robert, but it’s like something alive hidden in my chest under my ribs, and it’s biting and scratching to get out of me. I’m rich of the venturing sure, but most times that doesn’t seem enough; I’m richer, maybe, than your own brother, Sir Edward.”

Robert was smiling with tightened lips. Now and then his eyes wandered to the boy where he knelt on the hearth. Henry was taut with attention, gluttonously feeding on the words. When Robert spoke, he avoided Dafydd’s eyes.

“Your soul’s burdening you,” he said. “You’d best have a talk with the Curate the morning—but about what I don’t know.”

“No, no; it’s not my soul at all,” Dafydd went on quickly. “That soul leaks out of a man the very first thing in the Indies, and leaves him with a dry, shrunken feeling where it was. It’s not my soul at all; it’s the poison that’s in me, in my blood and in my brain. Robert, it’s shriveling me up like an old orange. The crawling things there, and the little flying beasts that come to your fire of nights, and the great pale flowers, all poisonous. They do horrible things to a man. My blood is like cold