it his business to discover....  There overtook him a sudden revulsion of feeling, depression of spirit, cold and sick distaste of the place.  Tom and breathless, in very savagery over his defeated hope and fool’s errand, he thrust with all his strength at the heart of this panoplied foe.  His blade, piercing the swart curtain, met with no resistance.  With an exclamation he threw himself against that thick-seeming barrier, and so, with Robin-a-dale behind him, burst into a narrow, secret way, masked at entrance and exit, and winding like a serpent through the tunal which surrounded the fortress of Nueva Cordoba.

VI

“Now Neptune keep the plate-fleet at Cartagena!” whistled Arden.  “When I go home I’ll dress in cloth of gold, eat tongues of peacocks, and drink dissolved pearls!”

“When I go home I’ll build again my father’s house,” cried Henry Sedley.

“In Plymouth port there’s a bark I know,” quoth Baldry.  “When I go home she’s mine,—­I’ll make of her another Star!”

“When I go home—­” said Sir Mortimer, and paused.  The early light was on his face, a deeper light within his eyes that saw the rose which he should gather when he went home.  Then, since he would not utter so deep and dear a thought—­“When we go home,” he said, and began to speak—­half in earnest, half in relief from the gravity of the past council—­of that returning.  By degrees the fire burned, and he whose spirit the live coal touched as it touched Sidney’s and, more rarely, Walter Raleigh’s, bore his listeners with him in a rhapsody of anticipation.  Long fronds of palm drooped without the room which held them, Englishmen in a world or savage or Spanish, but their spirits followed the speaker to green fields of Kent or Devon.  They saw the English summer, saw the twilight fall, heard the lonely tinkle of far sheep-bells, heard the nightingales singing beneath the moon that shone on England.  Friends’ homes opened to them; Grenville welcomed them to Stowe, Sidney to charmed Penshurst.  Then to London and the Triple Tun!  Bow Bells rang for them; they drank in the inn’s long-room; their names were in men’s mouths.  What welcome, what clashing of the bells, when they should sail up the Thames again—­the Mere Honour, the Cygnet, the Marigold, and the Phoenix—­with treasure in their holds, and for pilot that bright angel Fame!  What should they buy with their treasure? what should they do with their fame?  Treasure should beget stout ships, stout hearts to sail them; fame, laid to increase, might swell to deathless glory!  Sea-captains now, sea-kings would the English be, gathering tribute from the waters and the winds, bringing gifts to England—­frankincense of wealth, myrrh of knowledge, spikenard of power!—­till, robed and crowned, she rose above the peoples, Joseph’s sheaf, Joseph’s star!