the anchor had been weighed. If they were murderers and pirates, where were the witnesses to their murder and their piracy?
"Witnesses!" said the priest. "Good." He licked his lips again. "His Majesty has his witnesses."
Bowing, he clicked out some sounds and leyasu nodded.
"They have confessed all. Both of them." While the priest said this, two men were brought in, pale and travel-worn, still wide-eyed and a-tremble with their fever, ragged and haggard.
Adams and the Dutchman stared at them aghast; for they had left these same men, restless and scratching and mumbling on their mats, in the house at Oita.
"Master Gilbert de Conning," the priest said, "has made and signed a deposition. He is chief merchant of your ship."
"Chief merchant my—" said Adams. "He is a Huguenot, and a whoreson cook."
"Chief merchant," insisted the priest, "merchant of the goods you bought; receiver of the goods you stole. He has confessed and firmed his confession in writing. Witness thereto is Jan Abelson van Owater." The second man slunk a little forward.
"Bastards both," snorted Adams, and the chamber spun about him.
The Dutch language was shrunk too small and too thin for any further use. His mind flung away from it to the mother language spoken by that other William of his age, more famous than himself. Most of the lively, robustious words that have been cut, from time to time, out of the works of Shakespeare, tumbled over each other upon ears that understood them not but felt only the heat of the explosion that shot them forth. Other words came too, that would probably have been new and vastly interesting to Shakespeare himself—words peculiar to docks and wharves and bawdy-houses of the riverside; and words used only in the fo'c'stle of ships labouring at sea.
Santvoort recognised some of these and they gave him the spirit of the Pilot's discourse. In the specialised remarks of any Dutch seaman who had sailed with Spaniards, he added anything that Adams might have missed in his homely English.
Adams was still convalescent and the outburst left him pumped, and a little exhausted. It left him, too, with a sudden feeling of flat futility. The turbulence of speech in live words had given an illusion of the old, familiar world again wherein effort brought, sometimes, its result; where strife, sometimes, brought victory to the strivers. But the illusion was suddenly gone. Words, here, were meaningless and forceless, like water squirted over statues. Effort was a fantastic memory for naked men among men clad in swords.
The two renegades, de Conning the cook, and Owater whom Santvoort had cuffed a dozen times over the head, grinned in calm discomfort at each other. Thought of strife was thought of suicide. Adams shrugged his shoulders and abandoned it. leyasu himself was seen to have been studying this outburst —for was not the conduct of men but writing on the page of Life?
He straightened a little on his divan and spoke.
Adams and Santvoort were led back to their outhouse, where they lay down upon their mats and found, at their leisure, new words and new combinations of words to apply to the priest and to Conning and van Owater.
Their escort sat by the door, deaf as ever and dumb, filled with his own distant thoughts.
CHAPTER IV
IN the afternoon their accustomed escort was replaced by one they had not seen before.
Whereas the old one had regarded them no more than as if they had been pots of crockery or logs of timber, the new one—a younger man—sat nearer to them, regarding them as matters of some interest.
They fell again to speculation between themselves upon the priest. As their thoughts warmed again and the tone of their voices heightened they saw that their guard was squatting eagerly forward, straining towards their meaningless heat. They owed him an explanation. Santvoort gave it, by puffing out his cheeks, thrusting forward his lower lip and indicating, with his hands, a slack paunch. Then he bent his shoulders and chafed his hands together and cringed and rumbled in Portuguese. The escort's eyes disappeared in wrinkles of delight. He doubled up and straightened out and exploded in an abandonment to laughter that seemed, even to Santvoort, the maker of the joke, out of all proportion to the joke's quality. For all the Japanese laughter they had already seen from the visitors over-running their house in Oita, they did not yet realise that a convulsion to an amused Japanese is not much more than a smile to an Anglo-Saxon. It was therefore as new material for portent-reading that they took the outburst. Santvoort tried him again. He stood up to the pantomime; and as he mimicked the priest standing beside the Shogun's divan, bowing and scraping and rumbling at himself and Adams, he saw that another soldier had come to the door, attracted by the first one's laughter. He went through with it, thrusting out his stomach and folding his hands upon it. There were fresh peals of laughter; but this was not what Santvoort wanted. He summarised his sketch when the audience was calm again, cutting it down to a gesture or two, and ended it with what would have been to the blindest and deafest of mutes a string of curses. Baring and grinding his teeth, he shook his fist. The soldier at the door strolled away and the escort shrugged casually at the anger of Santvoort, and waved his hand.
"Gone?" Adams exclaimed, repeating the gesture incredulously.
The escort nodded and again indicated departure, and the priest as being no longer of any import.
Here indeed was food for thought—a portent of proper significance.
But which significance?
The fine reception of Santvoort's mimicry might have meant that the priest was without credit. The laughter could have meant equally that their guard's head was empty of wit and that the padre's departure meant that they were already doomed.
They fell silent again.
The original escort came back towards evening. The cheery deputy rose with some deference and seemed to make a brief report on his tour of duty, and was dismissed. The old one sat down, in the same spot, in the same position and in the same envelope of detachment and disregard that he had sat in through all their waking hours for two days.
The change cast a fresh gloom over the prisoners. Excitement was gone from them and the riddle was once more inscrutable and dead. All had slowly become confused again; points upon which three hours before they had had no doubts became freshly doubtful.
They doubted, by evening, even whether the priest was really gone. Santvoort tried his mimicry on the insensate guard mimicking the padre's bulk; he tried with gestures to indicate travel, and the question whether such travel was taking place. In his eagerness he talked while he moved and mimed.
The escort turned wholly towards him. The smile of his mask became the smile of a listening man. He spoke. In careful Dutch he said, "Speak in Portuguese or Spanish. I understand them better than Hollander, for I was but a short time in the island of Java."
"God!" the other two exclaimed together, with the hair suddenly wriggling on their scalps. "God!"
Santvoort collapsed out of his posturing and sat, hunched up on the mat.
"But you understand some Dutch? . . . Dutch? . . .You?" The surprise and the shock were still terrific. "You have heard —understood——"
"Not all," said the man. "But enough."
Again the other two said "God!"
"Listen then," said Adams, "the priest is a liar. A——Melchior, for
