Chapter XX: The Ship of the Golden Cross

The strange craft which Marian had seen from the beach of her island lay, perhaps, a quarter of a mile from the shore. It had three masts, whereof two were very short, while the third was lofty and capped with a great golden crucifix which shone glitteringly in the crimson light of the setting sun. A brown jib, half lowered, flapped to the fitful breeze; and a vast mainsail, resembling in many ways the lateen sails of the South, half hid the decks from view. Marian observed that the colour of the vessel’s hull was a dull white, ornamented with many crimson crosses and with that which she thought must be an inscription, though her eyes could not read the lettering. At the same time she could make out the figures of many men standing together upon the poop of the ship; and a long white boat, which had carried four of its crew to the beach, now lay with its bow upon the sands and its stern rolled by the breaking waves. Of the four men who rowed the boat, three sat still at their oars, but the other stood in close talk with the recluse whom Marian had watched and feared earlier in the day. She could see that the two men were asking the meaning of her visit to the island, for they pointed often to her own boat and walked a little way to examine it more closely.

Her first thought was to go out and speak with them, telling, if she could, of her condition, and begging them to give her passage to some more friendly shore. But a subtle instinct, which spoke of the unfathomable superstition of the Finns and of their cruelty when those superstitions were aroused, held her a little while to her place of shelter behind the great boulder, and therefore she watched the men. Much to her surprise, she perceived that the recluse was no old man, as she had thought, but one still in the springtime of life. His long flowing locks of black hair, and the coarse robe which clothed him, deceived her. She had never imagined a young monk. As for the other, he also wore the rough habit of brown stuff, but his hair was short and crisp, and his face was the face of an intelligent man. That he read the story of the visit aright she could not doubt. He pointed often towards the distant Gulf with a gesture which seemed to tell her that the secret, not only of her presence upon the island, but also of her flight from Kronstadt, was known to him; and this sent her back to the shelter of the higher rocks, where she stood trembling with a vague dread, not so much of the discovery as of the men.

The last of the day was ebbing at this time; the fitful dusk of northern latitudes gave gray hues to all things about her, so that the men upon the distant ship were as figures moving in shadow. A haze of night floated above the waters. She seemed to be the habitant of a strange world, an unreal world of fear and fantasy. The visit of the cowled friars to her shore accentuated her loneliness. She crouched upon the rocks and cried despairingly for her lover, as though some miracle would wing her voice across the sea. Never until that moment had she realised how this love had grown about her heart protectingly, so that without it the very fount of life ebbed and was dried up.

“Paul, my husband,” she cried. “Come to me--I am alone--alone!”

Voices answered her, but not the voice of him she called. She raised her pretty head to listen, and she heard sweet, melodious music floating to her from the distant ship. It rose and fell as a song of the placid sea; a harmony of many voices united in the evening hymn. The rocks gave it back in lingering echoes. It was as though nereids had come up from the depths to hymn the setting sun, to greet the darkness and the hour of their amours. When the last note died away she continued still to hunger for those sweet sounds; but other singers raised their voices in turn to chant a dirge-like litany, and this was a true hymn to the darkness, so weird, so mournful, so full of the suggestion of death and after.

Marian shuddered at this new song, for it carried her back to the place of shadows. When she had listened to it a little while, the harmonies became more clear, the note of the sonorous voices deeper. She awoke to the fact that the singers, whoever they were, had left the ship and were coming to shore. Lanterns now cast their yellow light upon the pulsing swell. A flame of torches illumined weirdly the rugged faces of a company which seemed to have voyaged from some monastery of the ultimate seas. Anon, three boats touched the sands, and a band of men, all garbed in the pilgrim’s dress, began to gather upon the shore and to congregate about some dark object which the shadows hid from the watcher’s eyes. She perceived, to her surprise, that an acolyte in a cassock and cotta carried a brazen crucifix on high. Torch-bearers walked at his side. Thurifers swung censers, from which an odorous smoke floated perfumingly on the still air. Presently a procession was formed and began to wind its way to the cliff of the island. The dirge-like chant arose again. The burden which the men carried was no longer hidden from the watcher’s eyes. She saw that it was a coffin. The monks had come ashore to bury their dead.

The procession advanced slowly, for the thurifers turned often to cense the coffin and the priest to sprinkle it with holy water. Solemnly and deliberately the singers set out for the grass plateau by the well from which Marian had drunk earlier in the day. She on her part stood white and trembling in the shadow of the cliff. Though it was plain to her that the men had not come to the island in quest of her, she feared the visitation as she had never feared anything in all her life. The hour, the misty twilight, the brown habits, tortured her imagination. She did not ask herself wherefrom such strange voyagers had come; her thought was to escape them, even at the risk of discovery. But escape was not to be. So close to her did the procession pass that she could have touched the cross-bearer with her hand. She beheld the faces of the monks and read in them the visual record of fasting and of an emaciating faith. One by one they passed her; here an old man bent with the penance of years, there a youth

whose eyes were aflame with the light of visions; here a face that spoke of the withered flesh, there lips which had fed upon the luxuries of life and still hungered for them. And when the monks were gone up, others followed in the grim train--old men hobbling, women weeping, even children. Marian looked at the faces of these, and her heart seemed to be stilled. The mission of the ship was a mystery to her no more.

“They are the lepers!” she cried, and so tried to draw back from them, as though God would open the rocks behind her and hide from her terrified eyes the awful sights they looked upon.