← catalogue

To Have and to Hold

by Mary Johnston · English · Gutenberg #2807 · 638,770 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of To Have and to Hold
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: To Have and to Hold

Author: Mary Johnston


        
Release date: September 1, 2001 [eBook #2807]
                Most recently updated: March 11, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2807

Credits: Produced by David Reed, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TO HAVE AND TO HOLD ***




Produced by David Reed





TO HAVE AND TO HOLD

By Mary Johnston


     TO
     THE MEMORY OF
     MY MOTHER



CONTENTS

     CHAPTER I. IN WHICH I THROW AMBS-ACE
     CHAPTER II. IN WHICH I MEET MASTER JEREMY SPARROW
     CHAPTER III. IN WHICH I MARRY IN HASTE
     CHAPTER IV. IN WHICH I AM LIKE TO REPENT AT LEISURE
     CHAPTER V. IN WHICH A WOMAN HAS HER WAY
     CHAPTER VI. IN WHICH WE GO TO JAMESTOWN
     CHAPTER VII. IN WHICH WE PREPARE TO FIGHT THE SPANIARD
     CHAPTER VIII. IN WHICH ENTERS MY LORD CARNAL
     CHAPTER IX. IN WHICH TWO DRINK OF ONE CUP
     CHAPTER X. IN WHICH MASTER PORY GAINS TIME TO SOME PURPOSE
     CHAPTER XI. IN WHICH I MEET AN ITALIAN DOCTOR
     CHAPTER XII. IN WHICH I RECEIVE A WARNING AND REPOSE A TRUST
     CHAPTER XIII. IN WHICH THE SANTA TERESA DROPS DOWN-STREAM
     CHAPTER XIV. IN WHICH WE SEEK A LOST LADY
     CHAPTER XV. IN WHICH WE FIND THE HAUNTED WOOD
     CHAPTER XVI. IN WHICH I AM RID OF AN UNPROFITABLE SERVANT
     CHAPTER XVII. IN WHICH MY LORD AND I PLAY AT BOWLS
     CHAPTER XVIII. IN WHICH WE GO OUT INTO THE NIGHT
     CHAPTER XIX. IN WHICH WE HAVE UNEXPECTED COMPANY
     CHAPTER XX. IN WHICH WE ARE IN DESPERATE CASE
     CHAPTER XXI. IN WHICH A GRAVE IS DIGGED
     CHAPTER XXII. IN WHICH I CHANGE MY NAME AND OCCUPATION
     CHAPTER XXIII. IN WHICH WE WRITE UPON THE SAND
     CHAPTER XXIV. IN WHICH WE CHOOSE THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS
     CHAPTER XXV. IN WHICH MY LORD HATH HIS DAY
     CHAPTER XXVI. IN WHICH I AM BROUGHT TO TRIAL
     CHAPTER XXVII. IN WHICH I FIND AN ADVOCATE
     CHAPTER XXVIII. IN WHICH THE SPRINGTIME IS AT HAND
     CHAPTER XXIX. IN WHICH I KEEP TRYST
     CHAPTER XXX. IN WHICH WE START UPON A JOURNEY
     CHAPTER XXXI. IN WHICH NANTAUQUAS COMES TO OUR RESCUE
     CHAPTER XXXII. IN WHICH WE ARE THE GUESTS OF AN EMPEROR
     CHAPTER XXXIII. IN WHICH MY FRIEND BECOMES MY FOE
     CHAPTER XXXIV. IN WHICH THE RACE IS NOT TO THE SWIFT
     CHAPTER XXXV. IN WHICH I COME TO THE GOVERNOR'S HOUSE
     CHAPTER XXXVI. IN WHICH I HEAR ILL NEWS
     CHAPTER XXXVII. IN WHICH MY LORD AND I PART COMPANY
     CHAPTER XXXVIII. IN WHICH I GO UPON A QUEST
     CHAPTER XXXIX. IN WHICH WE LISTEN TO A SONG




TO HAVE AND TO HOLD



CHAPTER I IN WHICH I THROW AMBS-ACE


THE work of the day being over, I sat down upon my doorstep, pipe in
hand, to rest awhile in the cool of the evening. Death is not more still
than is this Virginian land in the hour when the sun has sunk away, and
it is black beneath the trees, and the stars brighten slowly and softly,
one by one. The birds that sing all day have hushed, and the horned
owls, the monster frogs, and that strange and ominous fowl (if fowl it
be, and not, as some assert, a spirit damned) which we English call the
whippoorwill, are yet silent. Later the wolf will howl and the panther
scream, but now there is no sound. The winds are laid, and the restless
leaves droop and are quiet. The low lap of the water among the reeds is
like the breathing of one who sleeps in his watch beside the dead.

I marked the light die from the broad bosom of the river, leaving it
a dead man's hue. Awhile ago, and for many evenings, it had been
crimson,--a river of blood. A week before, a great meteor had shot
through the night, blood-red and bearded, drawing a slow-fading fiery
trail across the heavens; and the moon had risen that same night
blood-red, and upon its disk there was drawn in shadow a thing most
marvelously like a scalping knife. Wherefore, the following day being
Sunday, good Mr. Stockham, our minister at Weyanoke, exhorted us to be
on our guard, and in his prayer besought that no sedition or rebellion
might raise its head amongst the Indian subjects of the Lord's anointed.
Afterward, in the churchyard, between the services, the more timorous
began to tell of divers portents which they had observed, and to recount
old tales of how the savages distressed us in the Starving Time. The
bolder spirits laughed them to scorn, but the women began to weep and
cower, and I, though I laughed too, thought of Smith, and how he ever
held the savages, and more especially that Opechancanough who was now
their emperor, in a most deep distrust; telling us that the red men
watched while we slept, that they might teach wiliness to a Jesuit, and
how to bide its time to a cat crouched before a mousehole. I thought
of the terms we now kept with these heathen; of how they came and went
familiarly amongst us, spying out our weakness, and losing the salutary
awe which that noblest captain had struck into their souls; of how many
were employed as hunters to bring down deer for lazy masters; of how,
breaking the law, and that not secretly, we gave them knives and arms, a
soldier's bread, in exchange for pelts and pearls; of how their emperor
was forever sending us smooth messages; of how their lips smiled
and their eyes frowned. That afternoon, as I rode home through the
lengthening shadows, a hunter, red-brown and naked, rose from behind a
fallen tree that sprawled across my path, and made offer to bring me my
meat from the moon of corn to the moon of stags in exchange for a gun.
There was scant love between the savages and myself,--it was answer
enough when I told him my name. I left the dark figure standing, still
as a carved stone, in the heavy shadow of the trees, and, spurring my
horse (sent me from home, the year before, by my cousin Percy), was soon
at my house,--a poor and rude one, but pleasantly set upon a slope of
green turf, and girt with maize and the broad leaves of the tobacco.
When I had had my supper, I called from their hut the two Paspahegh lads
bought by me from their tribe the Michaelmas before, and soundly flogged
them both, having in my mind a saying of my ancient captain's, namely,
“He who strikes first oft-times strikes last.”

Upon the afternoon of which I now speak, in the midsummer of the year of
grace 1621, as I sat upon my doorstep, my long pipe between my teeth and
my eyes upon the pallid stream below, my thoughts were busy with these
matters,--so busy that I did not see a horse and rider emerge from the
dimness of the forest into the cleared space before my palisade, nor
knew, until his voice came up the bank, that my good friend, Master John
Rolfe, was without and would speak to me.

I went down to the gate, and, unbarring it, gave him my hand and led the
horse within the inclosure.

“Thou careful man!” he said, with a laugh, as he dismounted. “Who else,
think you, in this or any other hundred, now bars his gate when the sun
goes down?”

“It is my sunset gun,” I answered briefly, fastening his horse as I
spoke.

He put his arm about my shoulder, for we were old friends, and together
we went up the green bank to the house, and, when I had brought him a
pipe, sat down side by side upon the doorstep.

“Of what were you dreaming?” he asked presently, when we had made for
ourselves a great cloud of smoke. “I called you twice.”

“I was wishing for Dale's times and Dale's laws.”

He laughed, and touched my knee with his hand, white and smooth as a
woman's, and with a green jewel upon the forefinger.

“Thou Mars incarnate!” he cried. “Thou first, last, and in the meantime
soldier! Why, what wilt thou do when thou gettest to heaven? Make it too
hot to hold thee? Or take out letters of marque against the Enemy?”

“I am not there yet,” I said dryly. “In the meantime I would like a
commission against--your relatives.”

He laughed, then sighed, and, sinking his chin into his hand and softly
tapping his foot against the ground, fell into a reverie.

“I would your princess were alive,” I said presently.

“So do I,” he answered softly. “So do I.” Locking his hands behind his
head, he raised his quiet face to the evening star. “Brave and wise and
gentle,” he mused. “If I did not think to meet her again, beyond that
star, I could not smile and speak calmly, Ralph, as I do now.”

“'T is a strange thing,” I said, as I refilled my pipe. “Love for your
brother-in-arms, love for your commander if he be a commander worth
having, love for your horse and dog, I understand. But wedded love! to
tie a burden around one's neck because 't is pink and white, or clear
bronze, and shaped with elegance! Faugh!”

“Yet I came with half a mind to persuade thee to that very burden!” he
cried, with another laugh.

“Thanks for thy pains,” I said, blowing blue rings into the air.

“I have ridden to-day from Jamestown,” he went on. “I was the only
man, i' faith, that cared to leave its gates; and I met the world--the
bachelor world--flocking to them. Not a mile of the way but I
encountered Tom, Dick, and Harry, dressed in their Sunday bravery and
making full tilt for the city. And the boats upon the river! I have seen
the Thames less crowded.”

“There was more passing than usual,” I said; “but I was busy in the
fields, and did not attend. What's the lodestar?”

“The star that draws us all,--some to ruin, some to bliss ineffable,
woman.”

“Humph! The maids have come, then?”

He nodded. “There's a goodly ship down there, with a goodly lading.”

“Videlicet, some fourscore waiting damsels and milkmaids, warranted
honest by my Lord Warwick,” I muttered.

“This business hath been of Edwyn Sandys' management, as you very well
know,” he rejoined, with some heat. “His word is good: therefore I hold
them chaste. That they are fair I can testify, having seen them leave
the ship.”

“Fair and chaste,” I said, “but meanly born.”

“I grant you that,” he answered. “But after all, what of it? Beggars
must not be choosers. The land is new and must be peopled, nor will
those who come after us look too curiously into the lineage of those
to whom a nation owes its birth. What we in these plantations need is
a loosening of the bonds which tie us to home, to England, and a
tightening of those which bind us to this land in which we have cast our
lot. We put our hand to the plough, but we turn our heads and look
to our Egypt and its fleshpots. 'T is children and wife--be that wife
princess or peasant--that make home of a desert, that bind a man with
chains of gold to the country where they abide. Wherefore, when at
midday I met good Master Wickham rowing down from Henricus to Jamestown,
to offer his aid to Master Bucke in his press of business to-morrow, I
gave the good man Godspeed, and thought his a fruitful errand and one
pleasing to the Lord.”

“Amen,” I yawned. “I love the land, and call it home. My withers are
unwrung.”

He rose to his feet, and began to pace the greensward before the door.
My eyes followed his trim figure, richly though sombrely clad, then fell
with a sudden dissatisfaction upon my own stained and frayed apparel.

“Ralph,” he said presently, coming to a stand before me, “have you ever
an hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco in hand? If not, I”--

“I have the weed,” I replied. “What then?”

“Then at dawn drop down with the tide to the city, and secure for
thyself one of these same errant damsels.”

I stared at him, and then broke into laughter, in which, after a space
and unwillingly, he himself joined. When at length I wiped the water
from my eyes it was quite dark, the whippoorwills had begun to call, and
Rolfe must needs hasten on. I went with him down to the gate.

“Take my advice,--it is that of your friend,” he said, as he swung
himself into the saddle. He gathered up the reins and struck spurs into
his horse, then turned to call back to me: “Sleep upon my words, Ralph,
and the next time I come I look to see a farthingale behind thee!”

“Thou art as like to see one upon me,” I answered.

Nevertheless, when he had gone, and I climbed the bank and reentered the
house, it was with a strange pang at the cheerlessness of my hearth,
and an angry and unreasoning impatience at the lack of welcoming face or
voice. In God's name, who was there to welcome me? None but my hounds,
and the flying squirrel I had caught and tamed. Groping my way to the
corner, I took from my store two torches, lit them, and stuck them into
the holes pierced in the mantel shelf; then stood beneath the clear
flame, and looked with a sudden sick distaste upon the disorder which
the light betrayed. The fire was dead, and ashes and embers were
scattered upon the hearth; fragments of my last meal littered the table,
and upon the unwashed floor lay the bones I had thrown my dogs. Dirt
and confusion reigned; only upon my armor, my sword and gun, my hunting
knife and dagger, there was no spot or stain. I turned to gaze upon
them where they hung against the wall, and in my soul I hated the piping
times of peace, and longed for the camp fire and the call to arms.

With an impatient sigh, I swept the litter from the table, and,
taking from the shelf that held my meagre library a bundle of Master
Shakespeare's plays (gathered for me by Rolfe when he was last in
London), I began to read; but my thoughts wandered, and the tale seemed
dull and oft told. I tossed it aside, and, taking dice from my pocket,
began to throw. As I cast the bits of bone, idly, and scarce caring to
observe what numbers came uppermost, I had a vision of the forester's
hut at home, where, when I was a boy, in the days before I ran away to
the wars in the Low Countries, I had spent many a happy hour. Again I
saw the bright light of the fire reflected in each well-scrubbed crock
and pannikin; again I heard the cheerful hum of the wheel; again the
face of the forester's daughter smiled upon me. The old gray manor
house, where my mother, a stately dame, sat ever at her tapestry, and an
imperious elder brother strode to and fro among his hounds, seemed less
of home to me than did that tiny, friendly hut. To-morrow would be my
thirty-sixth birthday. All the numbers that I cast were high. “If I
throw ambs-ace,” I said, with a smile for my own caprice, “curse me if I
do not take Rolfe's advice!”

I shook the box and clapped it down upon the table, then lifted it,
and stared with a lengthening face at what it had hidden; which done, I
diced no more, but put out my lights and went soberly to bed.



CHAPTER II IN WHICH I MEET MASTER JEREMY SPARROW


MINE are not dicers' oaths. The stars were yet shining when I left the
house, and, after a word with my man Diccon, at the servants' huts,
strode down the bank and through the gate of the palisade to the wharf,
where I loosed my boat, put up her sail, and turned her head down the
broad stream. The wind was fresh and favorable, and we went swiftly down
the river through the silver mist toward the sunrise. The sky grew pale
pink to the zenith; then the sun rose and drank up the mist. The river
sparkled and shone; from the fresh green banks came the smell of the
woods and the song of birds; above rose the sky, bright blue, with a few
fleecy clouds drifting across it. I thought of the day, thirteen years
before, when for the first time white men sailed up this same river,
and of how noble its width, how enchanting its shores, how gay and sweet
their blooms and odors, how vast their trees, how strange the painted
savages, had seemed to us, storm-tossed adventurers, who thought we had
found a very paradise, the Fortunate Isles at least. How quickly were
we undeceived! As I lay back in the stern with half-shut eyes and tiller
idle in my hand, our many tribulations and our few joys passed in review
before me. Indian attacks; dissension and strife amongst our rulers;
true men persecuted, false knaves elevated; the weary search for gold
and the South Sea; the horror of the pestilence and the blacker horror
of the Starving Time; the arrival of the Patience and Deliverance,
whereat we wept like children; that most joyful Sunday morning when we
followed my Lord de la Warre to church; the coming of Dale with that
stern but wholesome martial code which was no stranger to me who had
fought under Maurice of Nassau; the good times that followed, when
bowl-playing gallants were put down, cities founded, forts built, and
the gospel preached; the marriage of Rolfe and his dusky princess;
Argall's expedition, in which I played a part, and Argall's iniquitous
rule; the return of Yeardley as Sir George, and the priceless gift he
brought us,--all this and much else, old friends, old enemies, old toils
and strifes and pleasures, ran, bitter-sweet, through my memory, as the
wind and flood bore me on. Of what was before me I did not choose to
think, sufficient unto the hour being the evil thereof.

The river seemed deserted: no horsemen spurred Along the bridle path on
the shore; the boats were few and far between, and held only servants
or Indians or very old men. It was as Rolfe had said, and the free and
able-bodied of the plantations had put out, posthaste, for matrimony.
Chaplain's Choice appeared unpeopled; Piersey's Hundred slept in the
sunshine, its wharf deserted, and but few, slow-moving figures in the
tobacco fields; even the Indian villages looked scant of all but squaws
and children, for the braves were gone to see the palefaces buy their
wives. Below Paspahegh a cockleshell of a boat carrying a great white
sail overtook me, and I was hailed by young Hamor.

“The maids are come!” he cried. “Hurrah!” and stood up to wave his hat.

“Humph!” I said. “I guess thy destination by thy hose. Are they not
'those that were thy peach-colored ones'?”

“Oons! yes!” he answered, looking down with complacency upon his
tarnished finery. “Wedding garments, Captain Percy, wedding garments!”

I laughed. “Thou art a tardy bridegroom. I thought that the bachelors of
this quarter of the globe slept last night in Jamestown.”

His face fell. “I know it,” he said ruefully; “but my doublet had more
rents than slashes in it, and Martin Tailor kept it until cockcrow.
That fellow rolls in tobacco; he hath grown rich off our impoverished
wardrobes since the ship down yonder passed the capes. After all,” he
brightened, “the bargaining takes not place until toward midday, after
solemn service and thanksgiving. There's time enough!” He waved me a
farewell, as his great sail and narrow craft carried him past me.

I looked at the sun, which truly was not very high, with a secret
disquietude; for I had had a scurvy hope that after all I should be
too late, and so the noose which I felt tightening about my neck might
unknot itself. Wind and tide were against me, and an hour later saw me
nearing the peninsula and marveling at the shipping which crowded its
waters. It was as if every sloop, barge, canoe, and dugout between Point
Comfort and Henricus were anchored off its shores, while above them
towered the masts of the Marmaduke and Furtherance, then in port, and of
the tall ship which had brought in those doves for sale. The river with
its dancing freight, the blue heavens and bright sunshine, the green
trees waving in the wind, the stir and bustle in the street and market
place thronged with gayly dressed gallants, made a fair and pleasant
scene. As I drove my boat in between the sloop of the commander of
Shirley Hundred and the canoe of the Nansemond werowance, the two
bells then newly hung in the church began to peal and the drum to beat.
Stepping ashore, I had a rear view only of the folk who had clustered
along the banks and in the street, their faces and footsteps being with
one accord directed toward the market place. I went with the throng,
jostled alike by velvet and dowlas, by youths with their estates upon
their backs and naked fantastically painted savages, and trampling the
tobacco with which the greedy citizens had planted the very street. In
the square I brought up before the Governor's house, and found myself
cheek by jowl with Master Pory, our Secretary, and Speaker of the
Assembly.

“Ha, Ralph Percy!” he cried, wagging his gray head, “we two be the only
sane younkers in the plantations! All the others are horn-mad!”

“I have caught the infection,” I said, “and am one of the bedlamites.”

He stared, then broke into a roar of laughter. “Art in earnest?” he
asked, holding his fat sides. “Is Saul among the prophets?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I diced last night,--yea or no; and the
'yea'--plague on 't--had it.”

He broke into another roar. “And thou callest that bridal attire, man!
Why, our cow-keeper goes in flaming silk to-day!”

I looked down upon my suit of buff, which had in truth seen some
service, and at my great boots, which I had not thought to clean since I
mired in a swamp, coming from Henricus the week before; then shrugged my
shoulders.

“You will go begging,” he continued, wiping his eyes. “Not a one of them
will so much as look at you.”

“Then will they miss seeing a man, and not a popinjay,” I retorted. “I
shall not break my heart.”

A cheer arose from the crowd, followed by a crashing peal of the bells
and a louder roll of the drum. The doors of the houses around and to
right and left of the square swung open, and the company which had
been quartered overnight upon the citizens began to emerge. By twos and
threes, some with hurried steps and downcast eyes, others more slowly
and with free glances at the staring men, they gathered to the centre of
the square, where, in surplice and band, there awaited them godly Master
Bucke and Master Wickham of Henricus. I stared with the rest, though I
did not add my voice to theirs.

Before the arrival of yesterday's ship there had been in this natural
Eden (leaving the savages out of the reckoning) several thousand Adams,
and but some threescore Eves. And for the most part, the Eves were
either portly and bustling or withered and shrewish housewives, of age
and experience to defy the serpent. These were different. Ninety slender
figures decked in all the bravery they could assume; ninety comely
faces, pink and white, or clear brown with the rich blood showing
through; ninety pair of eyes, laughing and alluring, or downcast with
long fringes sweeping rounded cheeks; ninety pair of ripe red lips,--the
crowd shouted itself hoarse and would not be restrained, brushing aside
like straws the staves of the marshal and his men, and surging in upon
the line of adventurous damsels. I saw young men, panting, seize hand or
arm and strive to pull toward them some reluctant fair; others snatched
kisses, or fell on their knees and began speeches out of Euphues; others
commenced an inventory of their possessions,--acres, tobacco, servants,
household plenishing. All was hubbub, protestation, frightened cries,
and hysterical laughter. The officers ran to and fro, threatening and
commanding; Master Pory alternately cried “Shame!” and laughed his
loudest; and I plucked away a jackanapes of sixteen who had his hand
upon a girl's ruff, and shook him until the breath was well-nigh out of
him. The clamor did but increase.

“Way for the Governor!” cried the marshal. “Shame on you, my masters!
Way for his Honor and the worshipful Council!”

The three wooden steps leading down from the door of the Governor's
house suddenly blossomed into crimson and gold, as his Honor with the
attendant Councilors emerged from the hall and stood staring at the mob
below.

The Governor's honest moon face was quite pale with passion. “What a
devil is this?” he cried wrathfully. “Did you never see a woman before?
Where's the marshal? I'll imprison the last one of you for rioters!”

Upon the platform of the pillory, which stood in the centre of the
market place, suddenly appeared a man of a gigantic frame, with a strong
face deeply lined and a great shock of grizzled hair,--a strange thing,
for he was not old. I knew him to be one Master Jeremy Sparrow, a
minister brought by the Southampton a month before, and as yet without
a charge, but at that time I had not spoken with him. Without word of
warning he thundered into a psalm of thanksgiving, singing it at the
top of a powerful and yet sweet and tender voice, and with a fervor and
exaltation that caught the heart of the riotous crowd. The two ministers
in the throng beneath took up the strain; Master Pory added a husky
tenor, eloquent of much sack; presently we were all singing. The
audacious suitors, charmed into rationality, fell back, and the broken
line re-formed. The Governor and the Council descended, and with pomp
and solemnity took their places between the maids and the two ministers
who were to head the column. The psalm ended, the drum beat a thundering
roll, and the procession moved forward in the direction of the church.

Master Pory having left me, to take his place among his brethren of
the Council, and the mob of those who had come to purchase and of the
curious idle having streamed away at the heels of the marshal and his
officers, I found myself alone in the square, save for the singer, who
now descended from the pillory and came up to me.

“Captain Ralph Percy, if I mistake not?” he said, in a voice as deep and
rich as the bass of an organ.

“The same,” I answered. “And you are Master Jeremy Sparrow?”

“Yea, a silly preacher,--the poorest, meekest, and lowliest of the
Lord's servitors.”

His deep voice, magnificent frame, and bold and free address so gave
the lie to the humility of his words that I had much ado to keep from
laughing. He saw, and his face, which was of a cast most martial,
flashed into a smile, like sunshine on a scarred cliff.

“You laugh in your sleeve,” he said good-humoredly, “and yet I am but
what I profess to be. In spirit I am a very Job, though nature hath
fit to dress me as a Samson. I assure you, I am worse misfitted than is
Master Yardstick yonder in those Falstaffian hose. But, good sir, will
you not go to church?”

“If the church were Paul's, I might,” I answered. “As it is, we could
not get within fifty feet of the door.”

“Of the great door, ay, but the ministers may pass through the side
door. If you please, I will take you in with me. The pretty fools yonder
march slowly; if we turn down this lane, we will outstrip them quite.”

“Agreed,” I said, and we turned into a lane thick planted with tobacco,
made a detour of the Governor's house, and outflanked the procession,
arriving at the small door before it had entered the churchyard. Here we
found the sexton mounting guard.

“I am Master Sparrow, the minister that came in the Southampton,” my
new acquaintance explained. “I am to sit in the choir. Let us pass, good
fellow.”

The sexton squared himself before the narrow opening, and swelled with
importance.

“You, reverend sir, I will admit, such being my duty. But this gentleman
is no preacher; I may not allow him to pass.”

“You mistake, friend,” said my companion gravely. “This gentleman, my
worthy colleague, has but just come from the island of St. Brandon,
where he preaches on the witches' Sabbath: hence the disorder of his
apparel. His admittance be on my head: wherefore let us by.”

“None to enter at the west door save Councilors, commander, and
ministers. Any attempting to force an entrance to be arrested and laid
by the heels if they be of the generality, or, if they be of quality,
to be duly fined and debarred from the purchase of any maid whatsoever,”
 chanted the sexton.

“Then, in God's name, let's on!” I exclaimed “Here, try this!” and I
drew from my purse, which was something of the leanest, a shilling.

“Try this,” quoth Master Jeremy Sparrow, and knocked the sexton down.

We left the fellow sprawling in the doorway, sputtering threats to the
air without, but with one covetous hand clutching at the shilling which
I threw behind me, and entered the church, which we found yet empty,
though through the open great door we heard the drum beat loudly and a
deepening sound of footsteps.

“I have choice of position,” I said. “Yonder window seems a good
station. You remain here in the choir?”

“Ay,” he answered, with a sigh; “the dignity of my calling must be
upheld: wherefore I sit in high places, rubbing elbows with gold lace,
when of the very truth the humility of my spirit is such that I would
feel more at home in the servants' seats or among the negars that we
bought last year.”

Had we not been in church I would have laughed, though indeed I saw that
he devoutly believed his own words. He took his seat in the largest
and finest of the chairs behind the great velvet one reserved for the
Governor, while I went and leaned against my window, and we stared at
each other across the flower-decked building in profound silence, until,
with one great final crash, the bells ceased, the drum stopped beating,
and the procession entered.



CHAPTER III IN WHICH I MARRY IN HASTE


THE long service of praise and thanksgiving was well-nigh over when I
first saw her.

She sat some ten feet from me, in the corner, and so in the shadow of a
tall pew. Beyond her was a row of milkmaid beauties, red of cheek, free
of eye, deep-bosomed, and beribboned like Maypoles. I looked again, and
saw--and see--a rose amongst blowzed poppies and peonies, a pearl amidst
glass beads, a Perdita in a ring of rustics, a nonparella of all grace
and beauty! As I gazed with all my eyes, I found more than grace and
beauty in that wonderful face,--found pride, wit, fire, determination,
finally shame and anger. For, feeling my eyes upon her, she looked up
and met what she must have thought the impudent stare of an appraiser.
Her face, which had been without color, pale and clear like the sky
about the evening star, went crimson in a moment. She bit her lip and
shot at me one withering glance, then dropped her eyelids and hid the
lightning. When I looked at her again, covertly, and from under my hand
raised as though to push back my hair, she was pale once more, and her
dark eyes were fixed upon the water and the green trees without the
window.

The congregation rose, and she stood up with the other maids. Her dress
of dark woolen, severe and unadorned, her close ruff and prim white
coif, would have cried “Puritan,” had ever Puritan looked like this
woman, upon whom the poor apparel had the seeming of purple and ermine.

Anon came the benediction. Governor, Councilors, commanders, and
ministers left the choir and paced solemnly down the aisle; the maids
closed in behind; and we who had lined the walls, shifting from one heel
to the other for a long two hours, brought up the rear, and so passed
from the church to a fair green meadow adjacent thereto. Here the
company disbanded; the wearers of gold lace betaking themselves to seats
erected in the shadow of a mighty oak, and the ministers, of whom there
were four, bestowing themselves within pulpits of turf. For one altar
and one clergyman could not hope to dispatch that day's business.

As for the maids, for a minute or more they made one cluster; then,
shyly or with laughter, they drifted apart like the petals of a
wind-blown rose, and silk doublet and hose gave chase. Five minutes saw
the goodly company of damsels errant and would-be bridegrooms scattered
far and near over the smiling meadow. For the most part they went man
and maid, but the fairer of the feminine cohort had rings of clamorous
suitors from whom to choose. As for me, I walked alone; for if by chance
I neared a maid, she looked (womanlike) at my apparel first, and never
reached my face, but squarely turned her back. So disengaged, I felt
like a guest at a mask, and in some measure enjoyed the show, though
with an uneasy consciousness that I was pledged to become, sooner or
later, a part of the spectacle. I saw a shepherdess fresh from Arcadia
wave back a dozen importunate gallants, then throw a knot of blue ribbon
into their midst, laugh with glee at the scramble that ensued, and
finally march off with the wearer of the favor. I saw a neighbor of
mine, tall Jack Pride, who lived twelve miles above me, blush and
stammer, and bow again and again to a milliner's apprentice of a girl,
not five feet high and all eyes, who dropped a curtsy at each bow. When
I had passed them fifty yards or more, and looked back, they were still
bobbing and bowing. And I heard a dialogue between Phyllis and Corydon.
Says Phyllis, “Any poultry?”

Corydon. “A matter of twalve hens and twa cocks.”

Phyllis. “A cow?”

Corydon. “Twa.”

Phyllis. “How much tobacco?”

Corydon. “Three acres, hinny, though I dinna drink the weed mysel'. I'm
a Stewart, woman, an' the King's puir cousin.”

Phyllis. “What household plenishing?”

Corydon. “Ane large bed, ane flock bed, ane trundle bed, ane chest, ane
trunk, ane leather cairpet, sax cawfskin chairs an' twa-three rush, five
pair o' sheets an' auchteen dowlas napkins, sax alchemy spunes”--

Phyllis. “I'll take you.”

At the far end of the meadow, near to the fort, I met young Hamor,
alone, flushed, and hurrying back to the more populous part of the
field.

“Not yet mated?” I asked. “Where are the maids' eyes?”

“By--!” he answered, with an angry laugh. “If they're all like the
sample I've just left, I'll buy me a squaw from the Paspaheghs!”

I smiled. “So your wooing has not prospered?”

His vanity took fire. “I have not wooed in earnest,” he said carelessly,
and hitched forward his cloak of sky-blue tuftaffeta with an air. “I
sheered off quickly enough, I warrant you, when I found the nature of
the commodity I had to deal with.”

“Ah!” I said. “When I left the crowd they were going very fast. You had
best hurry, if you wish to secure a bargain.”

“I'm off,” he answered; then, jerking his thumb over his shoulder,
“If you keep on to the river and that clump of cedars, you will find
Termagaunt in ruff and farthingale.”

When he was gone, I stood still for a while and watched the slow sweep
of a buzzard high in the blue, after which I unsheathed my dagger, and
with it tried to scrape the dried mud from my boots. Succeeding but
indifferently, I put the blade up, stared again at the sky, drew a long
breath, and marched upon the covert of cedars indicated by Hamor.

As I neared it, I heard at first only the wash of the river; but
presently there came to my ears the sound of a man's voice, and then a
woman's angry “Begone, sir!”

“Kiss and be friends,” said the man.

The sound that followed being something of the loudest for even the most
hearty salutation, I was not surprised, on parting the bushes, to find
the man nursing his cheek, and the maid her hand.

“You shall pay well for that, you sweet vixen!” he cried, and caught her
by both wrists.

She struggled fiercely, bending her head this way and that, but his hot
lips had touched her face before I could come between.

When I had knocked him down he lay where he fell, dazed by the blow,
and blinking up at me with his small ferret eyes. I knew him to be one
Edward Sharpless, and I knew no good of him. He had been a lawyer in
England. He lay on the very brink of the stream, with one arm touching
the water. Flesh and blood could not resist it, so, assisted by the toe
of my boot, he took a cold bath to cool his hot blood.

When he had clambered out and had gone away, cursing, I turned to face
her. She stood against the trunk of a great cedar, her head thrown back,
a spot of angry crimson in each cheek, one small hand clenched at her
throat. I had heard her laugh as Sharpless touched the water, but now
there was only defiance in her face. As we gazed at each other, a
burst of laughter came to us from the meadow behind. I looked over my
shoulder, and beheld young Hamor, probably disappointed of a wife,--with
Giles Allen and Wynne, returning to his abandoned quarry. She saw, too,
for the crimson spread and deepened and her bosom heaved. Her dark eyes,
glancing here and there like those of a hunted creature, met my own.

“Madam,” I said, “will you marry me?”

She looked at me strangely. “Do you live here?” she asked at last, with
a disdainful wave of her hand toward the town.

“No, madam,” I answered. “I live up river, in Weyanoke Hundred, some
miles from here.”

“Then, in God's name, let us be gone!” she cried, with sudden passion.

I bowed low, and advanced to kiss her hand.

The finger tips which she slowly and reluctantly resigned to me were
icy, and the look with which she favored me was not such an one as poets
feign for like occasions. I shrugged the shoulders of my spirit, but
said nothing. So, hand in hand, though at arms' length, we passed from
the shade of the cedars into the open meadow, where we presently met
Hamor and his party. They would have barred the way, laughing and making
unsavory jests, but I drew her closer to me and laid my hand upon my
sword. They stood aside, for I was the best swordsman in Virginia.

The meadow was now less thronged. The river, up and down, was white with
sailboats, and across the neck of the peninsula went a line of horsemen,
each with his purchase upon a pillion behind him. The Governor, the
Councilors, and the commanders had betaken themselves to the Governor's
house, where a great dinner was to be given. But Master Piersey, the
Cape Merchant, remained to see the Company reimbursed to the last leaf,
and the four ministers still found occupation, though one couple trod
not upon the heels of another, as they had done an hour agone.

“I must first satisfy the treasurer,” I said, coming to a halt within
fifty feet of the now deserted high places.

She drew her hand from mine, and looked me up and down.

“How much is it?” she asked at last. “I will pay it.”

I stared at her.

“Can't you speak?” she cried, with a stamp of her foot. “At what am I
valued? Ten pounds--fifty pounds”--

“At one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco, madam,” I said dryly. “I
will pay it myself. To what name upon the ship's list do you answer?”

“Patience Worth,” she replied.

I left her standing there, and went upon my errand with a whirling
brain. Her enrollment in that company proclaimed her meanly born, and
she bore herself as of blood royal; of her own free will she had crossed
an ocean to meet this day, and she held in passionate hatred this
day and all that it contained; she was come to Virginia to better her
condition, and the purse which she had drawn from her bosom was filled
with gold pieces. To another I would have advised caution, delay,
application to the Governor, inquiry; for myself I cared not to make
inquiries.

The treasurer gave me my receipt, and I procured, from the crowd around
him, Humfrey Kent, a good man and true, and old Belfield, the perfumer,
for witnesses. With them at my heels I went back to her, and, giving her
my hand, was making for the nearest minister, when a voice at a little
distance hailed me, crying out, “This way, Captain Percy!”

I turned toward the voice, and beheld the great figure of Master
Jeremy Sparrow sitting, cross-legged like the Grand Turk, upon a grassy
hillock, and beckoning to me from that elevation.

“Our acquaintance hath been of the shortest,” he said genially, when the
maid, the witnesses, and I had reached the foot of the hillock, “but I
have taken a liking to you and would fain do you a service. Moreover, I
lack employment. The maids take me for a hedge parson, and sheer off
to my brethren, who truly are of a more clerical appearance. Whereas if
they could only look upon the inner man! You have been long in choosing,
but have doubtless chosen”--He glanced from me to the woman beside me,
and broke off with open mouth and staring eyes. There was excuse, for
her beauty was amazing. “A paragon,” he ended, recovering himself.

“Marry us quickly, friend,” I said. “Clouds are gathering, and we have
far to go.”

He came down from his mound, and we went and stood before him. I had
around my neck the gold chain given me upon a certain occasion by Prince
Maurice, and in lieu of other ring I now twisted off the smallest link
and gave it to her.

“Your name?” asked Master Sparrow, opening his book.

“Ralph Percy, Gentleman.”

“And yours?” he demanded, staring at her with a somewhat too apparent
delight in her beauty.

She flushed richly and bit her lip.

He repeated the question.

She stood a minute in silence, her eyes upon the darkening sky. Then she
said in a low voice, “Jocelyn Leigh.”

It was not the name I had watched the Cape Merchant strike off his list.
I turned upon her and made her meet my eyes. “What is your name?” I
demanded. “Tell me the truth!”

“I have told it,” she answered proudly. “It is Jocelyn Leigh.”

I faced the minister again. “Go on,” I said briefly.

“The Company commands that no constraint be put upon its poor maids.
Wherefore, do you marry this man of your own free will and choice?”

“Ay,” she said, “of my own free will.”

Well, we were married, and Master Jeremy Sparrow wished us joy, and Kent
would have kissed the bride had I not frowned him off. He and Belfield
strode away, and I left her there, and went to get her bundle from the
house that had sheltered her overnight. Returning, I found her seated
on the turf, her chin in her hand and her dark eyes watching the distant
play of lightning. Master Sparrow had left his post, and was nowhere to
be seen.

I gave her my hand and led her to the shore; then loosed my boat and
helped her aboard. I was pushing off when a voice hailed us from the
bank, and the next instant a great bunch of red roses whirled past me
and fell into her lap. “Sweets to the sweet, you know,” said Master
Jeremy Sparrow genially. “Goodwife Allen will never miss them.”

I was in two minds whether to laugh or to swear,--for I had never
given her flowers,--when she settled the question for me by raising the
crimson mass and bestowing it upon the flood.

A sudden puff of wind brought the sail around, hiding his fallen
countenance. The wind freshened, coming from the bay, and the boat
was off like a startled deer. When I next saw him he had recovered his
equanimity, and, with a smile upon his rugged features, was waving us
a farewell. I looked at the beauty opposite me, and, with a sudden
movement of pity for him, mateless, stood up and waved to him vigorously
in turn.



CHAPTER IV IN WHICH I AM LIKE TO REPENT AT LEISURE


WHEN we had passed the mouth of the Chickahominy, I broke the silence,
now prolonged beyond reason, by pointing to the village upon its bank,
and telling her something of Smith's expedition up that river, ending by
asking her if she feared the savages.

When at length she succeeded in abstracting her attention from the
clouds, it was to answer in the negative, in a tone of the supremest
indifference, after which she relapsed into her contemplation of the
weather.

Further on I tried again. “That is Kent's, yonder. He brought his wife
from home last year. What a hedge of sunflowers she has planted! If you
love flowers, you will find those of paradise in these woods.”

No answer.

Below Martin-Brandon we met a canoe full of Paspaheghs, bound upon a
friendly visit to some one of the down-river tribes; for in the bottom
of the boat reposed a fat buck, and at the feet of the young men lay
trenchers of maize cakes and of late mulberries. I hailed them, and when
we were alongside held up the brooch from my hat, then pointed to the
purple fruit. The exchange was soon made; they sped away, and I placed
the mulberries upon the thwart beside her.

“I am not hungry,” she said coldly. “Take them away.”

I bit my lip, and returned to my place at the tiller. This rose was set
with thorns, and already I felt their sting. Presently she leaned back
in the nest I had made for her. “I wish to sleep,” she said haughtily,
and, turning her face from me, pillowed her head upon her arms.

I sat, bent forward, the tiller in my hand, and stared at my wife in
some consternation. This was not the tame pigeon, the rosy, humble,
domestic creature who was to make me a home and rear me children. A sea
bird with broad white wings swooped down upon the water, now dark and
ridged, rested there a moment, then swept away into the heart of the
gathering storm. She was liker such an one. Such birds were caught at
times, but never tamed and never kept.

The lightning, which had played incessantly in pale flashes across the
low clouds in the south, now leaped to higher peaks and became more
vivid, and the muttering of the thunder changed to long, booming peals.
Thirteen years before, the Virginia storms had struck us with terror.
Compared with those of the Old World we had left, they were as cannon to
the whistling of arrows, as breakers on an iron coast to the dull wash
of level seas. Now they were nothing to me, but as the peals changed to
great crashes as of falling cities, I marveled to see my wife sleeping
so quietly. The rain began to fall, slowly, in large sullen drops, and I
rose to cover her with my cloak. Then I saw that the sleep was feigned,
for she was gazing at the storm with wide eyes, though with no fear in
their dark depths. When I moved they closed, and when I reached her the
lashes still swept her cheeks, and she breathed evenly through parted
lips. But, against her will, she shrank from my touch as I put the cloak
about her; and when I had returned to my seat, I bent to one side and
saw, as I had expected to see, that her eyes were wide open again. If
she had been one whit less beautiful, I would have wished her back at
Jamestown, back on the Atlantic, back at whatever outlandish place,
where manners were unknown, that had owned her and cast her out. Pride
and temper! I set my lips, and vowed that she should find her match.

The storm did not last. Ere we had reached Piersey's the rain had ceased
and the clouds were breaking; above Chaplain's Choice hung a great
rainbow; we passed Tants Weyanoke in the glory of the sunset, all
shattered gold and crimson. Not a word had been spoken. I sat in a humor
grim enough, and she lay there before me, wide awake, staring at the
shifting banks and running water, and thinking that I thought she slept.

At last my own wharf rose before me through the gathering dusk, and
beyond it shone out a light; for I had told Diccon to set my house in
order, and to provide fire and torches, that my wife might see I wished
to do her honor. I looked at that wife, and of a sudden the anger in my
heart melted away. It was a wilderness vast and dreadful to which she
had come. The mighty stream, the towering forests, the black skies and
deafening thunder, the wild cries of bird and beast the savages, uncouth
and terrible,--for a moment I saw my world as the woman at my feet must
see it, strange, wild, and menacing, an evil land, the other side of the
moon. A thing that I had forgotten came to my mind: how that, after our
landing at Jamestown, years before, a boy whom we had with us did each
night fill with cries and lamentations the hut where he lay with my
cousin Percy, Gosnold, and myself, nor would cease though we tried both
crying shame and a rope's end. It was not for homesickness, for he
had no mother or kin or home; and at length Master Hunt brought him to
confess that it was but pure panic terror of the land itself,--not of
the Indians or of our hardships, both of which he faced bravely enough,
but of the strange trees and the high and long roofs of vine, of
the black sliding earth and the white mist, of the fireflies and the
whippoorwills,--a sick fear of primeval Nature and her tragic mask.

This was a woman, young, alone, and friendless, unless I, who had sworn
to cherish and protect her, should prove myself her friend. Wherefore,
when, a few minutes later, I bent over her, it was with all gentleness
that I touched and spoke to her.

“Our journey is over,” I said. “This is home, my dear.”

She let me help her to her feet, and up the wet and slippery steps to
the level of the wharf. It was now quite dark, there being no moon, and
thin clouds obscuring the stars. The touch of her hand, which I perforce
held since I must guide her over the long, narrow, and unrailed trestle,
chilled me, and her breathing was hurried, but she moved by my side
through the gross darkness unfalteringly enough. Arrived at the gate of
the palisade, I beat upon it with the hilt of my sword, and shouted to
my men to open to us. A moment, and a dozen torches came flaring down
the bank. Diccon shot back the bolts, and we entered. The men drew
up and saluted; for I held my manor a camp, my servants soldiers, and
myself their captain.

I have seen worse favored companies, but doubtless the woman beside
me had not. Perhaps, too, the red light of the torches, now flaring
brightly, now sunk before the wind, gave their countenances a more
villainous cast than usual. They were not all bad. Diccon had the
virtue of fidelity, if none other; there were a brace of Puritans, and
a handful of honest fools, who, if they drilled badly, yet abhorred
mutiny. But the half dozen I had taken off Argall's hands; the Dutchmen
who might have been own brothers to those two Judases, Adam and Francis;
the thief and the highwayman I had bought from the precious crew sent
us by the King the year before; the negro and the Indians--small wonder
that she shrank and cowered. It was but for a moment. I was yet seeking
for words sufficiently reassuring when she was herself again. She
did not deign to notice the men's awkward salute, and when Diccon, a
handsome rogue enough, advancing to light us up the bank, brushed by her
something too closely, she drew away her skirts as though he had been a
lazar. At my own door I turned and spoke to the men, who had followed us
up the ascent.

“This lady,” I said, taking her hand as she stood beside me, “is my true
and lawful wife, your mistress, to be honored and obeyed as such. Who
fails in reverence to her I hold as mutinous to myself, and will deal
with him accordingly. She gives you to-morrow for holiday, with double
rations, and to each a measure of rum. Now thank her properly.”

They cheered lustily, of course, and Diccon, stepping forward, gave us
thanks in the name of them all, and wished us joy. After which, with
another cheer, they backed from out our presence, then turned and made
for their quarters, while I led my wife within the house and closed the
door.

Diccon was an ingenious scoundrel. I had told him to banish the dogs, to
have the house cleaned and lit, and supper upon the table; but I had
not ordered the floor to be strewn with rushes, the walls draped with
flowering vines, a great jar filled with sunflowers, and an illumination
of a dozen torches. Nevertheless, it looked well, and I highly approved
the capon and maize cakes, the venison pasty and ale, with which the
table was set. Through the open doors of the two other rooms were to be
seen more rushes, more flowers, and more lights.

To the larger of these rooms I now led the way, deposited her bundle
upon the settle, and saw that Diccon had provided fair water for her
face and hands; which done, I told her that supper waited upon her
convenience, and went back to the great room.

She was long in coming, so long that I grew impatient and went to call
her. The door was ajar, and so I saw her, kneeling in the middle of the
floor, her head thrown back, her hands raised and clasped, on her face
terror and anguish of spirit written so large that I started to see it.
I stared in amazement, and, had I followed my first impulse, would
have gone to her, as I would have gone to any other creature in so dire
distress. On second thoughts, I went noiselessly back to my station in
the great room. She had not seen me, I was sure. Nor had I long to wait.
Presently she appeared, and I could have doubted the testimony of my
eyes, so changed were the agonized face and figure of a few moments
before. Beautiful and disdainful, she moved to the table, and took
the great chair drawn before it with the air of an empress mounting a
throne. I contented myself with the stool.

She ate nothing, and scarcely touched the canary I poured for her.
I pressed upon her wine and viands,--in vain; I strove to make
conversation,--equally in vain. Finally, tired of “yes” and “no” uttered
as though she were reluctantly casting pearls before swine, I desisted,
and applied myself to my supper in a silence as sullen as her own. At
last we rose from table, and I went to look to the fastenings of door
and windows, and returning found her standing in the centre of the room,
her head up and her hands clenched at her sides. I saw that we were to
have it out then and there, and I was glad of it.

“You have something to say,” I said. “I am quite at your command,” and I
went and leaned against the chimneypiece.

The low fire upon the hearth burnt lower still before she broke the
silence. When she did speak it was slowly, and with a voice which was
evidently controlled only by a strong effort of a strong will. She
said:--

“When--yesterday, to-day, ten thousand years ago you went from this
horrible forest down to that wretched village yonder, to those huts that
make your London, you went to buy you a wife?”

“Yes, madam,” I answered. “I went with that intention.”

“You had made your calculation? In your mind you had pitched upon
such and such an article, with such and such qualities, as desirable?
Doubtless you meant to get your money's worth?”

“Doubtless,” I said dryly.

“Will you tell me what you were inclined to consider its equivalent?”

I stared at her, much inclined to laugh. The interview promised to be
interesting.

“I went to Jamestown to get me a wife,” I said at length, “because I had
pledged my word that I would do so. I was not over-anxious. I did not
run all the way. But, as you say, I intended to do the best I could for
myself; one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco being a considerable
sum, and not to be lightly thrown away. I went to look for a mistress
for my house, a companion for my idle hours, a rosy, humble, docile
lass, with no aspirations beyond cleanliness and good temper, who was to
order my household and make me a home. I was to be her head and her law,
but also her sword and shield. That is what I went to look for.”

“And you found--me!” she said, and broke into strange laughter.

I bowed.

“In God's name, why did you not go further?”

I suppose she saw in my face why I went no further, for into her own the
color came flaming.

“I am not what I seem!” she cried out. “I was not in that company of
choice!”

I bowed again. “You have no need to tell me that, madam,” I said. “I
have eyes. I desire to know why you were there at all, and why you
married me.”

She turned from me, until I could see nothing but the coiled wealth of
her hair and the bit of white neck between it and the ruff. We stood so
in silence, she with bent head and fingers clasping and unclasping,
I leaning against the wall and staring at her, for what seemed a long
time. At least I had time to grow impatient, when she faced me again,
and all my irritation vanished in a gasp of admiration.

Oh, she was beautiful, and of a sweetness most alluring and fatal! Had
Medea worn such a look, sure Jason had quite forgot the fleece, and with
those eyes Circe had needed no other charm to make men what she would.
Her voice, when she spoke, was no longer imperious; it was low pleading
music. And she held out entreating hands.

“Have pity on me,” she said. “Listen kindly, and have pity on me. You
are a strong man and wear a sword. You can cut your way through trouble
and peril. I am a woman, weak, friendless, helpless. I was in distress
and peril, and I had no arm to save, no knight to fight my battle. I do
not love deceit. Ah, do not think that I have not hated myself for the
lie I have been. But these forest creatures that you take,--will they
not bite against springe and snare? Are they scrupulous as to how they
free themselves? I too was in the toils of the hunter, and I too was not
scrupulous. There was a thing of which I stood in danger that would
have been bitterer to me, a thousand times, than death. I had but
one thought, to escape; how, I did not care,--only to escape. I had a
waiting woman named Patience Worth. One night she came to me, weeping.
She had wearied of service, and had signed to go to Virginia as one of
Sir Edwyn Sandys' maids, and at the last moment her heart had failed
her. There had been pressure brought to bear upon me that day,--I had
been angered to the very soul. I sent her away with a heavy bribe, and
in her dress and under her name I fled from--I went aboard that ship. No
one guessed that I was not the Patience Worth to whose name I answered.
No one knows now,--none but you, none but you.”

“And why am I so far honored, madam?” I said bluntly.

She crimsoned, then went white again. She was trembling now through her
whole frame. At last she broke out: “I am not of that crew that came
to marry! To me you are the veriest stranger,--you are but the hand at
which I caught to draw myself from a pit that had been digged for me.
It was my hope that this hour would never come. When I fled, mad
for escape, willing to dare anything but that which I left behind,
I thought, 'I may die before that ship with its shameless cargo sets
sail.' When the ship set sail, and we met with stormy weather, and there
was much sickness aboard, I thought, 'I may drown or I may die of the
fever.' When, this afternoon, I lay there in the boat, coming up this
dreadful river through the glare of the lightning, and you thought I
slept, I was thinking, 'The bolts may strike me yet, and all will be
well.' I prayed for that death, but the storm passed. I am not without
shame. I know that you must think all ill of me, that you must feel
yourself gulled and cheated. I am sorry--that is all I can say--I am
sorry. I am your wife--I was married to you to-day--but I know you not
and love you not. I ask you to hold me as I hold myself, a guest in your
house, nothing more. I am quite at your mercy. I am entirely friendless,
entirely alone. I appeal to your generosity, to your honor”--

Before I could prevent her she was kneeling to me, and she would not
rise, though I bade her do so.

I went to the door, unbarred it, and looked out into the night, for
the air within the room stifled me. It was not much better outside. The
clouds had gathered again, and were now hanging thick and low. From the
distance came a rumble of thunder, and the whole night was dull,
heavy, and breathless. Hot anger possessed me: anger against Rolfe
for suggesting this thing to me; anger against myself for that unlucky
throw; anger, most of all, against the woman who had so cozened me. In
the servants' huts, a hundred yards away, lights were still burning,
against rule, for the hour was late. Glad that there was something I
could rail out against, I strode down upon the men, and caught them
assembled in Diccon's cabin, dicing for to-morrow's rum. When I had
struck out the light with my rapier, and had rated the rogues to
their several quarters, I went back through the gathering storm to the
brightly-lit, flower-decked room, and to Mistress Percy.

She was still kneeling, her hands at her breast, and her eyes, wide and
dark, fixed upon the blackness without the open door. I went up to her
and took her by the hand.

“I am a gentleman, madam,” I said. “You need have no fear of me. I pray
you to rise.”

She stood up at that, and her breath came hurriedly through her parted
lips, but she did not speak.

“It grows late, and you must be weary,” I continued. “Your room is
yonder. I trust that you will sleep well. Good-night.”

I bowed low, and she curtsied to me. “Good-night,” she said.

On her way to the door, she brushed against the rack wherein hung my
weapons. Among them was a small dagger. Her quick eye caught its gleam,
and I saw her press closer to the wall, and with her right hand
strive stealthily to detach the blade from its fastening. She did not
understand the trick. Her hand dropped to her side, and she was passing
on, when I crossed the room, loosened the dagger, and offered it to her,
with a smile and a bow. She flushed scarlet and bit her lips, but she
took it.

“There are bars to the door within,” I said. “Again, good-night.”

“Good-night,” she answered, and, entering the room, she shut the door. A
moment more, and I heard the heavy bars drop into place.



CHAPTER V IN WHICH A WOMAN HAS HER WAY


TEN days later, Rolfe, going down river in his barge, touched at my
wharf, and finding me there walked with me toward the house.

“I have not seen you since you laughed my advice to scorn--and took it,”
 he said. “Where's the farthingale, Benedick the married man?”

“In the house.”

“Oh, ay!” he commented. “It's near to supper time. I trust she's a good
cook?”

“She does not cook,” I said dryly. “I have hired old Goody Cotton to do
that.”

He eyed me closely. “By all the gods! a new doublet! She is skillful
with her needle, then?”

“She may be,” I answered. “Having never seen her with one, I am no
judge. The doublet was made by the tailor at Flowerdieu Hundred.”

By this we had reached the level sward at the top of the bank. “Roses!”
 he exclaimed,--“a long row of them new planted! An arbor, too, and
a seat beneath the big walnut! Since when hast thou turned gardner,
Ralph?”

“It's Diccon's doing. He is anxious to please his mistress.”

“Who neither sews, nor cooks, nor plants! What does she do?”

“She pulls the roses,” I said. “Come in.”

When we had entered the house he stared about him; then cried out,
“Acrasia's bower! Oh, thou sometime Guyon!” and began to laugh.

It was late afternoon, and the slant sunshine streaming in at door and
window striped wall and floor with gold. Floor and wall were no longer
logs gnarled and stained: upon the one lay a carpet of delicate ferns
and aromatic leaves, and glossy vines, purple-berried, tapestried
the other. Flowers--purple and red and yellow--were everywhere. As we
entered, a figure started up from the hearth.

“St. George!” exclaimed Rolfe. “You have never married a blackamoor?”

“It is the negress, Angela,” I said. “I bought her from William Pierce
the other day. Mistress Percy wished a waiting damsel.”

The creature, one of the five females of her kind then in Virginia,
looked at us with large, rolling eyes. She knew a little Spanish, and I
spoke to her in that tongue, bidding her find her mistress and tell her
that company waited. When she was gone I placed a jack of ale upon the
table, and Rolfe and I sat down to discuss it. Had I been in a mood
for laughter, I could have found reason in his puzzled face. There were
flowers upon the table, and beside them a litter of small objects, one
of which he now took up.

“A white glove,” he said, “perfumed and silver-fringed, and of a size to
fit Titania.”

I spread its mate out upon my palm. “A woman's hand. Too white, too
soft, and too small.”

He touched lightly, one by one, the slender fingers of the glove he
held. “A woman's hand,--strength in weakness, veiled power, the star in
the mist, guiding, beckoning, drawing upward!”

I laughed and threw the glove from me. “The star, a will-of-the-wisp;
the goal, a slough,” I said.

As he sat opposite me a change came over his face, a change so great
that I knew before I turned that she was in the room.

The bundle which I had carried for her from Jamestown was neither small
nor light. Why, when she fled, she chose to burden herself with such
toys, or whether she gave a thought to the suspicions that might be
raised in Virginia if one of Sir Edwyn's maids bedecked herself in silk
and lace and jewels, I do not know, but she had brought to the forest
and the tobacco fields the gauds of a maid of honor. The Puritan dress
in which I first saw her was a thing of the past; she clothed herself
now like the parrakeets in the forest,--or liker the lilies of the
field, for verily she toiled not, neither did she spin.

Rolfe and I rose from our seats. “Mistress Percy,” I said, “let me
present to you a right worthy gentleman and my very good friend, Master
John Rolfe.”

She curtsied, and he bowed low. He was a man of quick wit and had been
at court, but for a time he could find no words. Then: “Mistress Percy's
face is not one to be forgotten. I have surely seen it before, though
where”--

Her color mounted, but she answered him indifferently enough. “Probably
in London, amongst the spectators of some pageant arranged in honor of
the princess, your wife, sir,” she said carelessly. “I had twice the
fortune to see the Lady Rebekah passing through the streets.”

“Not in the streets only,” he said courteously. “I remember now: 't
was at my lord bishop's dinner. A very courtly company it was. You were
laughing with my Lord Rich. You wore pearls in your hair”--

She met his gaze fully and boldly. “Memory plays us strange tricks at
times,” she told him in a clear, slightly raised voice, “and it hath
been three years since Master Rolfe and his Indian princess were in
London. His memory hath played him false.”

She took her seat in the great chair which stood in the centre of the
room, bathed in the sunlight, and the negress brought a cushion for her
feet. It was not until this was done, and until she had resigned her fan
to the slave, who stood behind her slowly waving the plumed toy to and
fro, that she turned her lovely face upon us and bade us be seated.

An hour later a whippoorwill uttered its cry close to the window,
through which now shone the crescent moon. Rolfe started up. “Beshrew
me! but I had forgot that I am to sleep at Chaplain's to-night. I must
hurry on.”

I rose, also. “You have had no supper!” I cried. “I too have forgotten.”

He shook his head. “I cannot wait. Moreover, I have feasted,--yea, and
drunk deep.”

His eyes were very bright, with an exaltation in them as of wine.
Mine, I felt, had the same light. Indeed, we were both drunk with her
laughter, her beauty, and her wit. When he had kissed her hand, and
I had followed him out of the house and down the bank, he broke the
silence.

“Why she came to Virginia I do not know “--

“Nor care to ask,” I said.

“Nor care to ask,” he repeated, meeting my gaze. “And I know neither her
name nor her rank. But as I stand here, Ralph, I saw her, a guest, at
that feast of which I spoke; and Edwyn Sandys picked not his maids from
such assemblies.”

I stopped him with my hand upon his shoulder. “She is one of Sandys'
maids,” I asserted, with deliberation, “a waiting damsel who wearied of
service and came to Virginia to better herself. She was landed with her
mates at Jamestown a week or more agone, went with them to church and
thence to the courting meadow, where she and Captain Ralph Percy, a
gentleman adventurer, so pleased each other that they were married
forthwith. That same day he brought her to his house, where she now
abides, his wife, and as such to be honored by those who call themselves
his friends. And she is not to be lightly spoken of, nor comment
passed upon her grace, beauty, and bearing (something too great for her
station, I admit), lest idle tales should get abroad.”

“Am I not thy friend, Ralph?” he asked with smiling eyes.

“I have thought so at times,” I answered.

“My friend's honor is my honor,” he went on. “Where his lips are sealed
mine open not. Art content?”

“Content,” I said, and pressed the hand he held out to me.

We reached the steps of the wharf, and descending them he entered his
barge, rocking lazily with the advancing tide. His rowers cast loose
from the piles, and the black water slowly widened between us. From over
my shoulder came a sudden bright gleam of light from the house above,
and I knew that Mistress Percy was as usual wasting good pine knots. I
had a vision of the many lights within, and of the beauty whom the world
called my wife, sitting erect, bathed in that rosy glow, in the great
armchair, with the turbaned negress behind her. I suppose Rolfe saw the
same thing, for he looked from the light to me, and I heard him draw his
breath.

“Ralph Percy, thou art the very button upon the cap of Fortune,” he
said.

To myself my laugh sounded something of the bitterest, but to him, I
presume, it vaunted my return through the darkness to the lit room and
its resplendent pearl. He waved farewell, and the dusk swallowed up him
and his boat. I went back to the house and to her.

She was sitting as we had left her, with her small feet crossed upon the
cushion beneath them, her hands folded in her silken lap, the air from
the waving fan blowing tendrils of her dark hair against her delicate
standing ruff. I went and leaned against the window, facing her.

“I have been chosen Burgess for this hundred,” I said abruptly. “The
Assembly meets next week. I must be in Jamestown then and for some time
to come.”

She took the fan from the negress, and waved it lazily to and fro. “When
do we go?” she asked at last.

“We!” I answered. “I had thought to go alone.”

The fan dropped to the floor, and her eyes opened wide. “And leave me
here!” she exclaimed. “Leave me in these woods, at the mercy of Indians,
wolves, and your rabble of servants!”

I smiled. “We are at peace with the Indians; it would be a stout wolf
that could leap this palisade; and the servants know their master too
well to care to offend their mistress. Moreover, I would leave Diccon in
charge.”

“Diccon!” she cried. “The old woman in the kitchen hath told me tales of
Diccon! Diccon Bravo! Diccon Gamester! Diccon Cutthroat!”

“Granted,” I said. “But Diccon Faithful as well. I can trust him.”

“But I do not trust him!” she retorted. “And I wish to go to Jamestown.
This forest wearies me.” Her tone was imperious.

“I must think it over,” I said coolly. “I may take you, or I may not. I
cannot tell yet.”

“But I desire to go, sir!”

“And I may desire you to stay.”

“You are a churl!”

I bowed. “I am the man of your choice, madam.”

She rose with a stamp of her foot, and, turning her back upon me, took
a flower from the table and commenced to pull from it its petals. I
unsheathed my sword, and, seating myself, began to polish away a speck
of rust upon the blade. Ten minutes later I looked up from the task,
to receive full in my face a red rose tossed from the other side of the
room. The missile was followed by an enchanting burst of laughter.

“We cannot afford to quarrel, can we?” cried Mistress Jocelyn Percy.
“Life is sad enough in this solitude without that. Nothing but trees and
water all day long, and not a soul to speak to! And I am horribly afraid
of the Indians! What if they were to kill me while you were away? You
know you swore before the minister to protect me. You won't leave me to
the mercies of the savages, will you? And I may go to Jamestown, may n't
I? I want to go to church. I want to go to the Governor's house. I want
to buy a many things. I have gold in plenty, and but this one decent
dress. You'll take me with you, won't you?”

“There's not your like in Virginia,” I told her. “If you go to town clad
like that and with that bearing, there will be talk enough. And ships
come and go, and there are those besides Rolfe who have been to London.”

For a moment the laughter died from her eyes and lips, but it returned.
“Let them talk,” she said. “What care I? And I do not think your ship
captains, your traders and adventurers, do often dine with my lord
bishop. This barbarous forest world and another world that I wot of are
so far apart that the inhabitants of the one do not trouble those of the
other. In that petty village down there I am safe enough. Besides, sir,
you wear a sword.”

“My sword is ever at your service, madam.”

“Then I may go to Jamestown?”

“If you will it so.”

With her bright eyes upon me, and with one hand softly striking a rose
against her laughing lips, she extended the other hand.

“You may kiss it, if you wish, sir,” she said demurely.

I knelt and kissed the white fingers, and four days later we went to
Jamestown.



CHAPTER VI IN WHICH WE GO TO JAMESTOWN


IT was early morning when we set out on horseback for Jamestown. I rode
in front, with Mistress Percy upon a pillion behind me, and Diccon on
the brown mare brought up the rear. The negress and the mails I had sent
by boat.

Now, a ride through the green wood with a noble horse beneath you, and
around you the freshness of the morn, is pleasant enough. Each twig had
its row of diamonds, and the wet leaves that we pushed aside spilled
gems upon us. The horses set their hoofs daintily upon fern and moss
and lush grass. In the purple distances deer stood at gaze, the air rang
with innumerable bird notes, clear and sweet, squirrels chattered, bees
hummed, and through the thick leafy roof of the forest the sun showered
gold dust. And Mistress Jocelyn Percy was as merry as the morning. It
was now fourteen days since she and I had first met, and in that time
I had found in her thrice that number of moods. She could be as gay and
sweet as the morning, as dark and vengeful as the storms that came up of
afternoons, pensive as the twilight, stately as the night,--in her there
met a hundred minds. Also she could be childishly frank--and tell you
nothing.

To-day she chose to be gracious. Ten times in an hour Diccon was off
his horse to pluck this or that flower that her white forefinger pointed
out. She wove the blooms into a chaplet, and placed it upon her head;
she filled her lap with trailers of the vine that swayed against us, and
stained her fingers and lips with the berries Diccon brought her; she
laughed at the squirrels, at the scurrying partridges, at the turkeys
that crossed our path, at the fish that leaped from the brooks, at old
Jocomb and his sons who ferried us across the Chickahominy. She was
curious concerning the musket I carried; and when, in an open space in
the wood, we saw an eagle perched upon a blasted pine, she demanded my
pistol. I took it from my belt and gave it to her, with a laugh. “I will
eat all of your killing,” I said.

She aimed the weapon. “A wager!” she declared. “There be mercers in
Jamestown? If I hit, thou 'lt buy me a pearl hatband?”

“Two.”

She fired, and the bird rose with a scream of wrath and sailed away. But
two or three feathers came floating to the ground, and when Diccon had
brought them to her she pointed triumphantly to the blood upon them.
“You said two!” she cried.

The sun rose higher, and the heat of the day set in. Mistress Percy's
interest in forest bloom and creature flagged. Instead of laughter, we
had sighs at the length of way; the vines slid from her lap, and she
took the faded flowers from her head and cast them aside. She talked no
more, and by and by I felt her head droop against my shoulder.

“Madam is asleep,” said Diccon's voice behind me.

“Ay,” I answered. “She'll find a jack of mail but a hard pillow. And
look to her that she does not fall.”

“I had best walk beside you, then,” he said.

I nodded, and he dismounted, and throwing the mare's bridle over his arm
strode on beside us, with his hand upon the frame of the pillion. Ten
minutes passed, the last five of which I rode with my face over my
shoulder. “Diccon!” I cried at last, sharply.

He came to his senses with a start. “Ay, sir?” he questioned, his face
dark red.

“Suppose you look at me for a change,” I said. “How long since Dale came
in, Diccon?”

“Ten years, sir.”

“Before we enter Jamestown we'll pass through a certain field and
beneath a certain tree. Do you remember what happened there, some years
ago?”

“I am not like to forget, sir. You saved me from the wheel.”

“Upon which you were bound, ready to be broken for drunkenness, gaming,
and loose living. I begged your life from Dale for no other reason, I
think, than that you had been a horse-boy in my old company in the Low
Countries. God wot, the life was scarcely worth the saving!”

“I know it, sir.”

“Dale would not let you go scot-free, but would sell you into slavery.
At your own entreaty I bought you, since when you have served me
indifferently well. You have showed small penitence for past misdeeds,
and your amendment hath been of yet lesser bulk. A hardy rogue thou wast
born, and a rogue thou wilt remain to the end of time. But we have lived
and hunted, fought and bled together, and in our own fashion I think we
bear each other good will,--even some love. I have winked at much, have
shielded you in much, perhaps. In return I have demanded one thing,
which if you had not given I would have found you another Dale to deal
with.”

“Have I ever refused it, my captain?”

“Not yet. Take your hand from that pillion and hold it up; then say
after me these words: 'This lady is my mistress, my master's wife, to be
by me reverenced as such. Her face is not for my eyes nor her hand for
my lips. If I keep not myself clean of all offense toward her, may God
approve that which my master shall do!'”

The blood rushed to his face. I watched his fingers slowly loosening
their grasp.

“Tardy obedience is of the house of mutiny,” I said sternly. “Will you,
sirrah, or will you not?”

He raised his hand and repeated the words.

“Now hold her as before,” I ordered, and, straightening myself in the
saddle, rode on, with my eyes once more on the path before me.

A mile further on, Mistress Percy stirred and raised her head from my
shoulder. “Not at Jamestown yet?” she sighed, as yet but half awake.
“Oh, the endless trees! I dreamed I was hawking at Windsor, and then
suddenly I was here in this forest, a bird, happy because I was free;
and then a falcon came swooping down upon me,--it had me in its talons,
and I changed to myself again, and it changed to--What am I saying? I am
talking in my sleep. Who is that singing?”

In fact, from the woods in front of us, and not a bowshot away, rang out
a powerful voice:--

    “'In the merry month of May,

     In a morn by break of day,

     With a troop of damsels playing

Forth I went, forsooth, a-maying;'” and presently, the trees thinning
in front of us, we came upon a little open glade and upon the singer. He
lay on his back, on the soft turf beneath an oak, with his hands clasped
behind his head and his eyes upturned to the blue sky showing between
leaf and branch. On one knee crossed above the other sat a squirrel with
a nut in its paws, and half a dozen others scampered here and there over
his great body, like so many frolicsome kittens. At a little distance
grazed an old horse, gray and gaunt, springhalt and spavined, with ribs
like Death's own. Its saddle and bridle adorned a limb of the oak.

The song went cheerfully on:--

    “'Much ado there was, God wot:

     would love and she would not;

     said, “Never man was true.”

     He said, “None was false to you.”

“Give you good-day, reverend sir!” I called. “Art conning next Sunday's
hymn?”

Nothing abashed, Master Jeremy Sparrow gently shook off the squirrels,
and getting to his feet advanced to meet us.

“A toy,” he declared, with a wave of his hand, “a trifle, a silly old
song that came into my mind unawares, the leaves being so green and the
sky so blue. Had you come a little earlier or a little later, you would
have heard the ninetieth psalm. Give you good-day madam. I must have
sung for that the very queen of May was coming by.”

“Art on your way to Jamestown?” I demanded. “Come ride with us. Diccon,
saddle his reverence's horse.”

“Saddle him an thou wilt, friend,” said Master Sparrow, “for he and I
have idled long enough, but I fear I cannot keep pace with this fair
company. I and the horse are footing it together.”

“He is not long for this world,” I remarked, eyeing his ill-favored
steed, “but neither are we far from Jamestown. He'll last that far.”

Master Sparrow shook his head, with a rueful countenance. “I bought him
from one of the French vignerons below Westover,” he said. “The fellow
was astride the poor creature, beating him with a club because he could
not go. I laid Monsieur Crapaud in the dust, after which we compounded,
he for my purse, I for the animal; since when the poor beast and I have
tramped it together, for I could not in conscience ride him. Have you
read me Aesop's fables, Captain Percy?”

“I remember the man, the boy, and the ass,” I replied. “The ass came
to grief in the end. Put thy scruples in thy pocket, man, and mount thy
pale horse.”

“Not I!” he said, with a smile. “'T is a thousand pities, Captain Percy,
that a small, mean, and squeamish spirit like mine should be cased like
a very Guy of Warwick. Now, if I were slight of body, or even if I were
no heavier than your servant there”--

“Oh!” I said. “Diccon, give his reverence the mare, and do you mount his
horse and bring him slowly on to town. If he will not carry you, you can
lead him in.”

Sunshine revisited the countenance of Master Jeremy Sparrow; he swung
his great body into the saddle, gathered up the reins, and made the mare
to caracole across the path for very joy.

“Have a care of the poor brute, friend!” he cried genially to Diccon,
whose looks were of the sulkiest. “Bring him gently on, and leave him at
Master Bucke's, near to the church.”

“What do you do at Jamestown?” I asked, as we passed from out the
glade into the gloom of a pine wood. “I was told that you were gone to
Henricus, to help Master Thorpe convert the Indians.”

“Ay,” he answered, “I did go. I had a call,--I was sure I had a call.
I thought of myself as a very apostle to the Gentiles. I went from
Henricus one day's journey into the wilderness, with none but an Indian
lad for interpreter, and coming to an Indian village gathered its
inhabitants about me, and sitting down upon a hillock read and expounded
to them the Sermon on the Mount. I was much edified by the solemnity of
their demeanor and the earnestness of their attention, and had
conceived great hopes for their spiritual welfare, when, the reading
and exhortation being finished, one of their old men arose and made me
a long speech, which I could not well understand, but took to be one
of grateful welcome to myself and my tidings of peace and good will.
He then desired me to tarry with them, and to be present at some
entertainment or other, the nature of which I could not make out. I
tarried; and toward evening they conducted me with much ceremony to an
open space in the midst of the village. There I found planted in the
ground a thick stake, and around it a ring of flaming brushwood. To
the stake was fastened an Indian warrior, captured, so my interpreter
informed me, from some hostile tribe above the falls. His arms and
ankles were secured to the stake by means of thongs passed through
incisions in the flesh; his body was stuck over with countless pine
splinters, each burning like a miniature torch; and on his shaven crown
was tied a thin plate of copper heaped with red-hot coals. A little to
one side appeared another stake and another circle of brushwood: the one
with nothing tied to it as yet, and the other still unlit. My friend, I
did not tarry to see it lit. I tore a branch from an oak, and I became
as Samson with the jaw bone of the ass. I fell upon and smote those
Philistines. Their wretched victim was beyond all human help, but I
dearly avenged him upon his enemies. And they had their pains for naught
when they planted that second stake and laid the brush for their hell
fire. At last I dropped into the stream upon which their damnable
village was situate, and got safely away. Next day I went to George
Thorpe and resigned my ministry, telling him that we were nowhere
commanded to preach to devils; when the Company was ready to send shot
and steel amongst them, they might count upon me. After which I came
down the river to Jamestown, where I found worthy Master Bucke well-nigh
despaired of with the fever. Finally he was taken up river for change of
air, and, for lack of worthier substitute, the Governor and Captain West
constrained me to remain and minister to the shepherdless flock. Where
will you lodge, good sir?”

“I do not know,” I said. “The town will be full, and the guest house is
not yet finished.”

“Why not come to me?” he asked. “There are none in the minister's house
but me and Goodwife Allen who keeps it. There are five fair large rooms
and a goodly garden, though the trees do too much shadow the house. If
you will come and let the sunshine in,”--a bow and smile for madam,--“I
shall be your debtor.”

His plea pleased me well. Except the Governor's and Captain West's, the
minister's house was the best in the town. It was retired, too, being
set in its own grounds, and not upon the street, and I desired privacy.
Goodwife Allen was stolid and incurious. Moreover, I liked Master Jeremy
Sparrow.

I accepted his hospitality and gave him thanks. He waved them away, and
fell to complimenting Mistress Percy, who was pleased to be gracious to
us both. Well content for the moment with the world and ourselves, we
fared on through the alternating sunshine and shade, and were happy
with the careless inhabitants of the forest. Oversoon we came to the
peninsula, and crossed the neck of land. Before us lay the town: to
the outer eye a poor and mean village, indeed, but to the inner the
stronghold and capital of our race in the western world, the germ from
which might spring stately cities, the newborn babe which might in time
equal its parent in stature, strength, and comeliness. So I and a few
besides, both in Virginia and at home, viewed the mean houses, the
poor church and rude fort, and loved the spot which had witnessed much
suffering and small joy, but which held within it the future, which was
even now a bit in the mouth of Spain, a thing in itself outweighing all
the toil and anguish of our planting. But there were others who saw only
the meanness of the place, its almost defenselessness, its fluxes and
fevers, the fewness of its inhabitants and the number of its graves.
Finding no gold and no earthly paradise, and that in the sweat of their
brow they must eat their bread, they straightway fell into the dumps,
and either died out of sheer perversity, or went yelping home to the
Company with all manner of dismal tales,--which tales, through my Lord
Warwick's good offices, never failed to reach the sacred ears of his
Majesty, and to bring the colony and the Company into disfavor.

We came to the palisade, and found the gates wide open and the warder
gone.

“Where be the people?” marveled Master Sparrow, as we rode through
into the street. In truth, where were the people? On either side of the
street the doors of the houses stood open, but no person looked out from
them or loitered on the doorsteps; the square was empty; there were no
women at the well, no children underfoot, no gaping crowd before gaol
and pillory, no guard before the Governor's house,--not a soul, high or
low, to be seen.

“Have they all migrated?” cried Sparrow. “Are they gone to Croatan?”

“They have left one to tell the tale, then,” I said, “for here he comes
running.”



CHAPTER VII IN WHICH WE PREPARE TO FIGHT THE SPANIARD


A MAN came panting down the street. “Captain Ralph Percy!” he cried.
“My master said it was your horse coming across the neck. The Governor
commands your attendance at once, sir.”

“Where is the Governor? Where are all the people?” I demanded.

“At the fort. They are all at the fort or on the bank below. Oh, sirs, a
woeful day for us all!”

“A woeful day!” I exclaimed. “What's the matter?”

The man, whom I recognized as one of the commander's servants, a fellow
with the soul of a French valet de chambre, was wild with terror.

“They are at the guns!” he quavered. “Alackaday! what can a few sakers
and demiculverins do against them?”

“Against whom?” I cried.

“They are giving out pikes and cutlasses! Woe's me, the sight of naked
steel hath ever made me sick!”

I drew my dagger, and flashed it before him. “Does 't make you sick?” I
asked. “You shall be sicker yet, if you do not speak to some purpose.”

The fellow shrank back, his eyeballs starting from his head.

“It's a tall ship,” he gasped, “a very big ship! It hath ten culverins,
beside fowlers and murderers, sabers, falcons, and bases!”

I took him by the collar and shook him off his feet.

“There are priests on board!” he managed to say as I set him down. “This
time to-morrrow we'll all be on the rack! And next week the galleys will
have us!”

“It's the Spaniard at last,” I said. “Come on!”

When we reached the river bank before the fort, it was to find confusion
worse confounded. The gates of the palisade were open, and through them
streamed Councilors, Burgesses, and officers, while the bank itself was
thronged with the generality. Ancient planters, Smith's men, Dale's men,
tenants and servants, women and children, including the little eyases we
imported the year before, negroes, Paspaheghs, French vignerons, Dutch
sawmill men, Italian glassworkers,--all seethed to and fro, all talked
at once, and all looked down the river. Out of the babel of voices these
words came to us over and over: “The Spaniard!” “The Inquisition!” “The
galleys!” They were the words oftenest heard at that time, when strange
sails hove in sight.

But where was the Spaniard? On the river, hugging the shore, were many
small craft, barges, shallops, sloops, and pinnaces, and beyond them the
masts of the Truelove, the Due Return, and the Tiger, then in port; on
these three, of which the largest, the Due Return, was of but eighty
tons burthen, the mariners were running about and the masters bawling
orders. But there was no other ship, no bark, galleon, or man-of-war,
with three tiers of grinning ordnance, and the hated yellow flag
flaunting above.

I sprang from my horse, and, leaving it and Mistress Percy in Sparrow's
charge, hastened up to the fort. As I passed through the palisade I
heard my name called, and turning waited for Master Pory to come up. He
was panting and puffing, his jovial face very red.

“I was across the neck of land when I heard the news,” he said. “I ran
all the way, and am somewhat scant of breath. Here's the devil to pay!”

“It looks another mare's-nest,” I replied. “We have cried 'Spaniard!'
pretty often.”

“But this time the wolf's here,” he answered. “Davies sent a horseman at
a gallop from Algernon with the tidings. He passed the ship, and it was
a very great one. We may thank this dead calm that it did not catch us
unawares.”

Within the palisade was noise enough, but more order than without. On
the half-moons commanding the river, gunners were busy about our sakers,
falcons, and three culverins. In one place, West, the commander, was
giving out brigandines, jacks, skulls, muskets, halberds, swords, and
longbows; in another, his wife, who was a very Mary Ambree, supervised
the boiling of a great caldron of pitch. Each loophole in palisade and
fort had already its marksman. Through the west port came a horde of
reluctant invaders,--cattle, swine, and poultry,--driven in by yelling
boys.

I made my way through the press to where I saw the Governor, surrounded
by Councilors and Burgesses, sitting on a keg of powder, and issuing
orders at the top of his voice. “Ha, Captain Percy!” he cried, as I came
up. “You are in good time, man! You've served your apprenticeship at the
wars. You must teach us how to beat the dons.”

“To Englishmen, that comes by nature, sir,” I said. “Art sure we are to
have the pleasure?”

“Not a doubt of it this time,” he answered. “The ship slipped in past
the Point last night. Davies signaled her to stop, and then sent a ball
over her; but she kept on. True, it was too dark to make out much; but
if she were friendly, why did she not stop for castle duties? Moreover,
they say she was of at least five hundred tons, and no ship of that size
hath ever visited these waters. There was no wind, and they sent a man
on at once, hoping to outstrip the enemy and warn us. The man changed
horses at Basse's Choice, and passed the ship about dawn. All he could
tell for the mist was that it was a very great ship, with three tiers of
guns.”

“The flag?”

“She carried none.”

“Humph!” I said. “It hath a suspicious look. At least we do well to be
ready. We'll give them a warm welcome.”

“There are those here who counsel surrender,” continued the Governor.
“There's one, at least, who wants the Tiger sent downstream with a white
flag and my sword.”

“Where?” I cried. “He's no Englishman, I warrant!”

“As much an Englishman as thou, sir!” called out a gentleman whom I had
encountered before, to wit, Master Edward Sharpless. “It's well enough
for swingebuckler captains, Low Country fire-eaters, to talk of holding
out againt a Spanish man-of-war with twice our number of fighting men,
and enough ordnance to batter the town out of existence. Wise men know
when the odds are too heavy!”

“It's well enough for lily-livered, goose-fleshed lawyers to hold their
tongues when men and soldiers talk,” I retorted. “We are not making
indentures to the devil, and so have no need of such gentry.”

There was a roar of laughter from the captains and gunners, but terror
of the Spaniard had made Master Edward Sharpless bold to all besides.

“They will wipe us off the face of the earth!” he lamented. “There won't
be an Englishman left in America! they'll come close in upon us! they'll
batter down the fort with their culverins; they'll turn all their
swivels, sakers, and falcons upon us; they'll throw into our midst
stinkpots and grenades; they'll mow us down with chain shot! Their
gunners never miss!” His voice rose to a scream, and he shook as with
an ague. “Are you mad? It's Spain that's to be fought! Spain the rich!
Spain the powerful! Spain the lord of the New World!”

“It's England that fights!” I cried. “For very shame, hold thy tongue!”

“If we surrender at once, they'll let us go!” he whined. “We can take
the small boats and get to the Bermudas, they'll let us go.”

“Into the galleys,” muttered West.

The craven tried another feint. “Think of the women and children!”

“We do,” I said sternly. “Silence, fool!”

The Governor, a brave and honest man, rose from the keg of powder. “All
this is foreign to the matter, Master Sharpless. I think our duty is
clear, be the odds what they may. This is our post, and we will hold it
or die beside it. We are few in number, but we are England in America,
and I think we will remain here. This is the King's fifth kingdom, and
we will keep it for him. We will trust in the Lord and fight it out.”

“Amen,” I said, and “Amen,” said the ring of Councilors and Burgesses
and the armed men beyond.

The hum of voices now rose into excited cries, and the watchman
stationed atop the big culverin called out, “Sail ho!” With one accord
we turned our faces downstream. There was the ship, undoubtedly.
Moreover, a strong breeze had sprung up, blowing from the sea, filling
her white sails, and rapidly lessening the distance between us. As yet
we could only tell that she was indeed a large ship with all sail set.

Through the gates of the palisade now came, pellmell, the crowd without.
In ten minutes' time the women were in line ready to load the muskets,
the children sheltered as best they might be, the men in ranks, the
gunners at their guns, and the flag up. I had run it up with my own
hand, and as I stood beneath the folds Master Sparrow and my wife came
to my side.

“The women are over there,” I said to the latter, “where you had best
betake yourself.”

“I prefer to stay here,” she answered. “I am not afraid.” Her color was
high, and she held her head up. “My father fought the Armada,” she said.

“Get me a sword from that man who is giving them out.”

From his coign of vantage the watch now called out: “She's a long
ship,--five hundred tons, anyhow! Lord! the metal that she carries!
She's rasedecked!”

“Then she's Spanish, sure enough!” cried the Governor.

From the crowd of servants, felons, and foreigners rose a great clamor,
and presently we made out Sharpless perched on a cask in their midst and
wildly gesticulating.

“The Tiger, the Truelove, and the Due Return have swung across channel!”
 announced the watch. “They 've trained their guns on the Spaniard!”

The Englishmen cheered, but the bastard crew about Sharpless groaned.
Extreme fear had made the lawyer shameless. “What guns have those
boats?” he screamed. “Two falcons apiece and a handful of muskets, and
they go out against a man-of-war! She'll trample them underfoot! She'll
sink them with a shot apiece! The Tiger is forty tons, and the Truelove
is sixty. You 're all mad!”

“Sometimes quality beats quantity,” said West.

“Didst ever hear of the Content?” sang out a gunner.

“Or of the Merchant Royal?” cried another.

“Or of the Revenge?” quoth Master Jeremy Sparrow. “Go hang thyself,
coward, or, if you choose, swim out to the Spaniard, and shift from thy
wet doublet and hose into a sanbenito. Let the don come, shoot if he
can, and land if he will! We'll singe his beard in Virginia as we did at
Cales!

    'The great St. Philip, the pride of the Spaniards,

     Was burnt to the bottom and sunk in the sea.

     the St. Andrew and eke the St. Matthew

     We took in fight manfully and brought away.'

And so we'll do with this one, my masters! We'll sink her, or we'll take
her and send her against her own galleons and galleasses!

    'Dub-a-dub, dub-a-dub, thus strike their drums,

    Tantara, tantara, the Englishman comes!'”

His great voice and great presence seized and held the attention of all.
Over his doublet of rusty black he had clapped a yet rustier back and
breast; on his bushy hair rode a headpiece many sizes too small; by his
side was an old broadsword, and over his shoulder a pike. Suddenly, from
gay hardihood his countenance changed to an expression more befitting
his calling. “Our cause is just, my masters!” he cried. “We stand here
not for England alone; we stand for the love of law, for the love of
liberty, for the fear of God, who will not desert his servants and his
cause, nor give over to Anti-Christ this virgin world. This plantation
is the leaven which is to leaven the whole lump, and surely he will
hide it in the hollow of his hand and in the shadow of his wing. God of
battles, hear us! God of England, God of America, aid the children of
the one, the saviors of the other!”

He had dropped the pike to raise his clasped hands to the blue heavens,
but now he lifted it again, threw back his shoulders, and flung up his
head. He laid his hand on the flagstaff, and looked up to the banner
streaming in the breeze. “It looks well so high against the blue, does
n't it, friends?” he cried genially. “Suppose we keep it there forever
and a day!”

A cheer arose, so loud that it silenced, if it did not convince, the
craven few. As for Master Edward Sharpless, he disappeared behind the
line of women.

The great ship came steadily on, her white sails growing larger and
larger, moment by moment, her tiers of guns more distinct and menacing,
her whole aspect more defiant. Her waist seemed packed with men. But no
streamers, no flag.

A puff of smoke floated up from the deck of the Tiger, and a ball from
one of her two tiny falcons passed through the stranger's rigging. A
cheer for the brave little cockboat arose from the English. “David
and his pebble!” exclaimed Master Jeremy Sparrow. “Now for Goliath's
twenty-pounders!”

But no flame and thunder issued from the guns aboard the stranger.
Instead, from her deck there came to us what sounded mightily like
a roar of laughter. Suddenly, from each masthead and yard shot out
streamers of red and blue, up from the poop rose and flaunted in the
wind the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew, and with a crash trumpet,
drum, and fife rushed into

     “Here's to jolly good ale and old!”

“By the Lord, she's English!” shouted the Governor.

On she came, banners flying, music playing, and inextinguishable
laughter rising from her decks. The Tiger, the Truelove, and the Due
Return sent no more hailstones against her; they turned and resolved
themselves into her consort. The watch, a grim old sea dog that had
come in with Dale, swung himself down from his post, and came toward
the Governor at a run. “I know her now, sir!” he shouted. “I was at the
winning of Cales, and she's the Santa Teresa, that we took and sent home
to the Queen. She was Spanish once, sir, but she's English now.”

The gates were flung open, and the excited people poured out again
upon the river bank. I found myself beside the Governor, whose honest
countenance wore an expression of profound bewilderment.

“What d' ye make of her, Percy?” he said. “The Company does n't send
servants, felons, 'prentices, or maids in such craft; no, nor officers
or governors, either. It's the King's ship, sure enough, but what is she
doing here?--that 's the question. What does she want, and whom does she
bring?”

“We'll soon know,” I answered, “for there goes her anchor.”

Five minutes later a boat was lowered from the ship, and came swiftly
toward us. The boat had four rowers, and in the stern sat a tall man,
black-bearded, high-colored, and magnificently dressed. It touched the
sand some two hundred feet from the spot where Governor, Councilors,
officers, and a sprinkling of other sorts stood staring at it, and at
the great ship beyond. The man in the stern leaped out, looked around
him, and then walked toward us. As he walked slowly, we had leisure to
note the richness of his doublet and cloak,--the one slashed, the other
lined with scarlet taffeta,--the arrogance of his mien and gait, and the
superb full-blooded beauty of his face.

“The handsomest man that ever I saw!” ejaculated the Governor.

Master Pory, standing beside him, drew in his breath, then puffed it out
again. “Handsome enough, your Honor,” he said, “unless handsome is as
handsome does. That, gentlemen, is my Lord Carnal,--that is the King's
latest favorite.”



CHAPTER VIII IN WHICH ENTERS MY LORD CARNAL


I FELT a touch upon my shoulder, and turned to find Mistress Percy
beside me. Her cheeks were white, her eyes aflame, her whole frame
tense. The passion that dominated her was so clearly anger at white heat
that I stared at her in amazement. Her hand slid from my shoulder to the
bend of my arm and rested there. “Remember that I am your wife, sir,”
 she said in a low, fierce voice,--“your kind and loving wife. You said
that your sword was mine; now bring your wit to the same service!”

There was not time to question her meaning. The man whose position in
the realm had just been announced by the Secretary, and of whom we had
all heard as one not unlikely to supplant even Buckingham himself, was
close at hand. The Governor, headpiece in hand, stepped forward; the
other swept off his Spanish hat; both bowed profoundly.

“I speak to his Honor the Governor of Virginia?” inquired the newcomer.
His tone was offhand, his hat already back upon his head.

“I am George Yeardley, at my Lord Carnal's service,” answered the
Governor.

The favorite raised his eyebrows. “I don't need to introduce myself, it
seems,” he said. “You've found that I am not the devil, after all,--at
least not the Spanish Apollyon. Zooks! a hawk above a poultry yard could
n't have caused a greater commotion than did my poor little ship and my
few poor birding pieces! Does every strange sail so put you through your
paces?”

The Governor's color mounted. “We are not at home,” he answered stiffly.
“Here we are few and weak and surrounded by many dangers, and have need
to be vigilant, being planted, as it were, in the very grasp of that
Spain who holds Europe in awe, and who claims this land as her own. That
we are here at all is proof enough of our courage, my lord.”

The other shrugged his shoulders. “I don't doubt your mettle,” he said
negligently. “I dare say it matches your armor.”

His glance had rested for a moment upon the battered headpiece and
ancient rusty breastplate with which Master Jeremy Sparrow was bedight.

“It is something antique, truly, something out of fashion,” remarked
that worthy,--“almost as out of fashion as courtesy from guests, or
respect for dignities from my-face-is-my-fortune minions and lords on
carpet considerations.”

The hush of consternation following this audacious speech was broken by
a roar of laughter from the favorite himself. “Zounds!” he cried, “your
courage is worn on your sleeve, good giant! I'll uphold you to face
Spaniards, strappado, rack, galleys, and all!”

The bravado with which he spoke, the insolence of his bold glance and
curled lip, the arrogance with which he flaunted that King's favor which
should be a brand more infamous than the hangman's, his beauty, the pomp
of his dress,--all were alike hateful. I hated him then, scarce knowing
why, as I hated him afterward with reason.

He now pulled from the breast of his doublet a packet, which he
proffered the Governor. “From the King, sir,” he announced, in the
half-fierce, half--mocking tone he had made his own. “You may read it at
your leisure. He wishes you to further me in a quest upon which I have
come.”

The Governor took the packet with reverence. “His Majesty's will is our
law,” he said. “Anything that lies in our power, sir; though if you come
for gold”--

The favorite laughed again. “I've come for a thing a deal more precious,
Sir Governor,--a thing worth more to me than all the treasure of the
Indies with Manoa and El Dorado thrown in,--to wit, the thing upon which
I've set my mind. That which I determine to do, I do, sir, and the thing
I determine to have, why, sooner or later, by hook or by crook, fair
means or foul, I have it! I am not one to be crossed or defied with
impunity.”

“I do not take your meaning, my lord,” said the Governor, puzzled,
but courteous. “There are none here who would care to thwart, in any
honorable enterprise, a nobleman so high in the King's favor. I trust
that my Lord Carnal will make my poor house his own during his stay in
Virginia--What's the matter, my lord?”

My lord's face was dark red, his black eyes afire, his mustaches working
up and down. His white teeth had closed with a click on the loud oath
which had interrupted the Governor's speech. Honest Sir George and his
circle stared at this unaccountable guest in amazement not unmixed with
dismay. As for myself, I knew before he spoke what had caused the oath
and the fierce triumph in that handsome face. Master Jeremy Sparrow had
moved a little to one side, thus exposing to view that which his great
body had before screened from observation,--namely, Mistress Jocelyn
Percy.

In a moment the favorite was before her, hat in hand, bowing to the
ground.

“My quest hath ended where I feared it but begun!” he cried, flushed and
exultant. “I have found my Manoa sooner than I thought for. Have you no
welcome for me, lady?”

She withdrew her arm from mine and curtsied to him profoundly; then
stood erect, indignant and defiant, her eyes angry stars, her cheeks
carnation, scorn on her smiling lips.

“I cannot welcome you as you should be welcomed, my lord,” she said in a
clear voice. “I have but my bare hands. Manoa, my lord, lies far to the
southward. This land is quite out of your course, and you will find here
but your travail for your pains. My lord, permit me to present to you my
husband, Captain Ralph Percy. I think that you know his cousin, my Lord
of Northumberland.”

The red left the favorite's cheeks, and he moved as though a blow had
been dealt him by some invisible hand. Recovering himself he bowed
to me, and I to him, which done we looked each other in the eyes long
enough for each to see the thrown gauntlet.

“I raise it,” I said.

“And I raise it,” he answered.

“A l'outrance, I think, sir?” I continued.

“A l'outrance,” he assented.

“And between us two alone,” I suggested.

His answering smile was not good to see, nor was the tone in which he
spoke to the Governor good to hear.

“It is now some weeks, sir,” he said, “since there disappeared from
court a jewel, a diamond of most inestimable worth. It in some sort
belonged to the King, and his Majesty, in the goodness of his heart,
had promised it to a certain one,--nay, had sworn by his kingdom that
it should be his. Well, sir, that man put forth his hand to claim his
own--when lo! the jewel vanished! Where it went no man could tell. There
was, as you may believe, a mighty running up and down and looking into
dark corners, all for naught,--it was clean gone. But the man to whom
that bright gem had been promised was not one easily hoodwinked or
baffled. He swore to trace it, follow it, find it, and wear it.”

His bold eyes left the Governor, to rest upon the woman beside me; had
he pointed to her with his hand, he could not have more surely drawn
upon her the regard of that motley throng. By degrees the crowd had
fallen back, leaving us three--the King's minion, the masquerading lady,
and myself--the centre of a ring of staring faces; but now she became
the sole target at which all eyes were directed.

In Virginia, at this time, the women of our own race were held in high
esteem. During the first years of our planting they were a greater
rarity than the mocking-birds and flying squirrels, or than that weed
the eating of which made fools of men. The man whose wife was loving and
daring enough, or jealous enough of Indian maids, to follow him into
the wilderness counted his friends by the score and never lacked for
company. The first marriage in Virginia was between a laborer and a
waiting maid, and yet there was as great a deal of candy stuff as if it
had been the nuptials of a lieutenant of the shire. The brother of my
Lord de la Warre stood up with the groom, the brother of my Lord of
Northumberland gave away the bride and was the first to kiss her, and
the President himself held the caudle to their lips that night. Since
that wedding there had been others. Gentlewomen made the Virginia voyage
with husband or father; women signed as servants and came over, to marry
in three weeks' time, the husband paying good tobacco for the wife's
freedom; in the cargoes of children sent for apprentices there were many
girls. And last, but not least, had come Sir Edwyn's doves. Things had
changed since that day--at the memory of which men still held their
sides--when Madam West, then the only woman in the town with youth and
beauty, had marched down the street to the pillory, mounted it, called
to her the drummer, and ordered him to summon to the square by tuck of
drum every man in the place. Which done, and the amazed population
at hand, gaping at the spectacle of the wife of their commander (then
absent from home) pilloried before them, she gave command, through
the crier, that they should take their fill of gazing, whispering, and
nudging then and there, forever and a day, and then should go about
their business and give her leave to mind her own.

That day was gone, but men still dropped their work to see a woman pass,
still cheered when a farthingale appeared over a ship's side, and at
church still devoted their eyes to other service than staring at the
minister. In our short but crowded history few things had made a greater
stir than the coming in of Sir Edwyn's maids. They were married now,
but they were still the observed of all observers; to be pointed out to
strangers, run after by children, gaped at by the vulgar, bowed to with
broad smiles by Burgess, Councilor, and commander, and openly contemned
by those dames who had attained to a husband in somewhat more regular
fashion. Of the ninety who had arrived two weeks before, the greater
number had found husbands in the town itself or in the neighboring
hundreds, so that in the crowd that had gathered to withstand the
Spaniard, and had stayed to welcome the King's favorite, there were
farthingales not a few.

But there were none like the woman whose hand I had kissed in the
courting meadow. In the throng, that day, in her Puritan dress and amid
the crowd of meaner beauties, she had passed without overmuch comment,
and since that day none had seen her save Rolfe and the minister, my
servants and myself; and when “The Spaniard!” was cried, men thought of
other things than the beauty of women; so that until this moment she
had escaped any special notice. Now all that was changed. The Governor,
following the pointing of those insolent eyes, fixed his own upon her
in a stare of sheer amazement; the gold-laced quality about him craned
necks, lifted eyebrows, and whispered; and the rabble behind followed
their betters' example with an emphasis quite their own.

“Where do you suppose that jewel went, Sir Governor,” said the
favorite,--“that jewel which was overnice to shine at court, which set
up its will against the King's, which would have none of that one to
whom it had been given?”

“I am a plain man, my lord,” replied the Governor bluntly. “An it please
you, give me plain words.”

My lord laughed, his eyes traveling round the ring of greedily intent
faces. “So be it, sir,” he assented. “May I ask who is this lady?”

“She came in the Bonaventure,” answered the Governor. “She was one of
the treasurer's poor maids.”

“With whom I trod a measure at court not long ago,” said the favorite.
“I had to wait for the honor until the prince had been gratified.”

The Governor's round eyes grew rounder. Young Hamor, a-tiptoe behind
him, drew a long, low whistle.

“In so small a community,” went on my lord, “sure you must all know
one another. There can be no masks worn, no false colors displayed.
Everything must be as open as daylight. But we all have a past as well
as a present. Now, for instance”--

I interrupted him. “In Virginia, my lord, we live in the present. At
present, my lord, I like not the color of your lordship's cloak.”

He stared at me, with his black brows drawn together. “It is not of your
choosing nor for your wearing, sir,” he rejoined haughtily.

“And your sword knot is villainously tied,” I continued. “And I like not
such a fire-new, bejeweled scabbard. Mine, you see, is out at heel.”

“I see,” he said dryly.

“The pinking of your doublet suits me not, either,” I declared. “I could
make it more to my liking,” and I touched his Genoa three-pile with the
point of my rapier.

A loud murmur arose from the crowd, and the Governor started forward,
crying out, “Captain Percy! Are you mad?”

“I was never saner in my life, sir,” I answered. “French fashions like
me not,--that is all,--nor Englishmen that wear them. To my thinking
such are scarcely true-born.”

That thrust went home. All the world knew the story of my late Lord
Carnal and the waiting woman in the service of the French ambassador's
wife. A gasp of admiration went up from the crowd. My lord's rapier was
out, the hand that held it shaking with passion. I had my blade in my
hand, but the point was upon the ground. “I'll lesson you, you madman!”
 he said thickly. Suddenly, without any warning, he thrust at me; had
he been less blind with rage, the long score which each was to run up
against the other might have ended where it began. I swerved, and the
next instant with my own point sent his rapier whirling. It fell at the
Governor's feet.

“Your lordship may pick it up,” I remarked. “Your grasp is as firm as
your honor, my lord.”

He glared at me, foam upon his lips. Men were between us now,--the
Governor, Francis West, Master Pory, Hamor, Wynne,--and a babel of
excited voices arose. The diversion I had aimed to make had been made
with a vengeance. West had me by the arm. “What a murrain is all this
coil about, Ralph Percy? If you hurt hair of his head, you are lost!”

The favorite broke from the Governor's detaining hand and conciliatory
speech.

“You'll fight, sir?” he cried hoarsely.

“You know that I need not now, my lord,” I answered.

He stamped upon the ground with rage and shame; not true shame for that
foul thrust, but shame for the sword upon the grass, for that which
could be read in men's eyes, strive to hide it as they might, for the
open scorn upon one face. Then, during the minute or more in which we
faced each other in silence, he exerted to some effect that will
of which he had boasted. The scarlet faded from his face, his frame
steadied, and he forced a smile. Also he called to his aid a certain
soldierly, honest-seeming frankness of speech and manner which he could
assume at will.

“Your Virginian sunshine dazzleth the eyes, sir,” he said. “Of a verity
it made me think you on guard. Forgive me my mistake.”

I bowed. “Your lordship will find me at your service. I lodge at the
minister's house, where your lordship's messenger will find me. I am
going there now with my wife, who hath ridden a score of miles this
morning and is weary. We give you good-day, my lord.”

I bowed to him again and to the Governor, then gave my hand to Mistress
Percy. The crowd opening before us, we passed through it, and crossed
the parade by the west bulwark. At the further end was a bit of rising
ground. This we mounted; then, before descending the other side into the
lane leading to the minister's house, we turned as by one impulse
and looked back. Life is like one of those endless Italian corridors,
painted, picture after picture, by a master hand; and man is the
traveler through it, taking his eyes from one scene but to rest them
upon another. Some remain a blur in his mind; some he remembers not; for
some he has but to close his eyes and he sees them again, line for line,
tint for tint, the whole spirit of the piece. I close my eyes, and I
see the sunshine hot and bright, the blue of the skies, the sheen of the
river. The sails are white again upon boats long lost; the Santa Teresa,
sunk in a fight with an Algerine rover two years afterward, rides
at anchor there forever in the James, her crew in the waist and the
rigging, her master and his mates on the poop, above them the flag.
I see the plain at our feet and the crowd beyond, all staring with
upturned faces; and standing out from the group of perplexed and
wondering dignitaries a man in black and scarlet, one hand busy at his
mouth, the other clenched upon the newly restored and unsheathed sword.
And I see, standing on the green hillock, hand in hand, us two, myself
and the woman so near to me, and yet so far away that a common enemy
seemed our only tie.

We turned and descended to the green lane and the deserted houses. When
we were quite hidden from those we had left on the bank below the fort,
she dropped my hand and moved to the other side of the lane; and thus,
with never a word to spare, we walked sedately on until we reached the
minister's house.



CHAPTER IX IN WHICH TWO DRINK OF ONE CUP


WAITING for us in the doorway we found Master Jeremy Sparrow, relieved
of his battered armor, his face wreathed with hospitable smiles, and a
posy in his hand.

“When the Spaniard turned out to be only the King's minion, I slipped
away to see that all was in order,” he said genially. “Here are roses,
madam, that you are not to treat as you did those others.”

She took them from him with a smile, and we went into the house to find
three fair large rooms, something bare of furnishing, but clean and
sweet, with here and there a bow pot of newly gathered flowers, a dish
of wardens on the table, and a cool air laden with the fragrance of the
pine blowing through the open window.

“This is your demesne,” quoth the minister. “I have worthy Master
Bucke's own chamber upstairs. Ah, good man, I wish he may quickly
recover his strength and come back to his own, and so relieve me of the
burden of all this luxury. I, whom nature meant for an eremite, have no
business in kings' chambers such as these.”

His devout faith in his own distaste for soft living and his longings
after a hermit's cell was an edifying spectacle. So was the evident
pride which he took in his domain, the complacence with which he pointed
out the shady, well-stocked garden, and the delight with which he
produced and set upon the table a huge pasty and a flagon of wine.

“It is a fast day with me,” he said. “I may neither eat nor drink until
the sun goes down. The flesh is a strong giant, very full of pride and
lust of living, and the spirit must needs keep watch and ward, seizing
every opportunity to mortify and deject its adversary. Goodwife Allen is
still gaping with the crowd at the fort, and your man and maid have not
yet come, but I shall be overhead if you need aught. Mistress Percy must
want rest after her ride.”

He was gone, leaving us two alone together. She stood opposite me,
beside the window, from which she had not moved since entering the room.
The color was still in her cheeks, the light in her eyes, and she still
held the roses with which Sparrow had heaped her arms. I was moving to
the table.

“Wait!” she said, and I turned toward her again.

“Have you no questions to ask?” she demanded.

I shook my head. “None, madam.”

“I was the King's ward!” she cried.

I bowed, but spoke no word, though she waited for me.

“If you will listen,” she said at last, proudly, and yet with a pleading
sweetness,--“if you will listen, I will tell you how it was that I--that
I came to wrong you so.”

“I am listening, madam,” I replied.

She stood against the light, the roses pressed to her bosom, her dark
eyes upon me, her head held high. “My mother died when I was born; my
father, years ago. I was the King's ward. While the Queen lived she kept
me with her,--she loved me, I think; and the King too was kind,--would
have me sing to him, and would talk to me about witchcraft and the
Scriptures, and how rebellion to a king is rebellion to God. When I was
sixteen, and he tendered me marriage with a Scotch lord, I, who loved
the gentleman not, never having seen him, prayed the King to take the
value of my marriage and leave me my freedom. He was so good to me then
that the Scotch lord was wed elsewhere, and I danced at the wedding with
a mind at ease. Time passed, and the King was still my very good lord.
Then, one black day, my Lord Carnal came to court, and the King looked
at him oftener than at his Grace of Buckingham. A few months, and my
lord's wish was the King's will. To do this new favorite pleasure he
forgot his ancient kindness of heart; yea, and he made the law of no
account. I was his kinswoman, and under my full age; he would give my
hand to whom he chose. He chose to give it to my Lord Carnal.”

She broke off, and turned her face from me toward the slant sunshine
without the window. Thus far she had spoken quietly, with a certain
proud patience of voice and bearing; but as she stood there in a silence
which I did not break, the memory of her wrongs brought the crimson
to her cheeks and the anger to her eyes. Suddenly she burst forth
passionately: “The King is the King! What is a subject's will to clash
with his? What weighs a woman's heart against his whim? Little cared
he that my hand held back, grew cold at the touch of that other hand
in which he would have put it. What matter if my will was against that
marriage? It was but the will of a girl, and must be broken. All my
world was with the King; I, who stood alone, was but a woman, young and
untaught. Oh, they pressed me sore, they angered me to the very heart!
There was not one to fight my battle, to help me in that strait, to show
me a better path than that I took. With all my heart, with all my soul,
with all my might, I hate that man which that ship brought here to-day!
You know what I did to escape them all, to escape that man. I fled from
England in the dress of my waiting maid and under her name. I came to
Virginia in that guise. I let myself be put up, appraised, cried for
sale, in that meadow yonder, as if I had been indeed the piece of
merchandise I professed myself. The one man who approached me with
respect I gulled and cheated. I let him, a stranger, give me his name. I
shelter myself now behind his name. I have foisted on him my quarrel.
I have--Oh, despise me, if you will! You cannot despise me more than I
despise myself!”

I stood with my hand upon the table and my eyes studying the shadow
of the vines upon the floor. All that she said was perfectly true,
and yet--I had a vision of a scarlet and black figure and a dark and
beautiful face. I too hated my Lord Carnal.

“I do not despise you, madam,” I said at last. “What was done two weeks
ago in the meadow yonder is past recall. Let it rest. What is mine is
yours: it's little beside my sword and my name. The one is naturally at
my wife's service; for the other, I have had some pride in keeping it
untarnished. It is now in your keeping as well as my own. I do not fear
to leave it there, madam.”

I had spoken with my eyes upon the garden outside the window, but now I
looked at her, to see that she was trembling in every limb,--trembling
so that I thought she would fall. I hastened to her. “The roses,” she
said,--“the roses are too heavy. Oh, I am tired--and the room goes
round.”

I caught her as she fell, and laid her gently upon the floor. There
was water on the table, and I dashed some in her face and moistened
her lips; then turned to the door to get woman's help, and ran against
Diccon.

“I got that bag of bones here at last, sir,” he began. “If ever I”--His
eyes traveled past me, and he broke off.

“Don't stand there staring,” I ordered. “Go bring the first woman you
meet.”

“Is she dead?” he asked under his breath. “Have you killed her?”

“Killed her, fool!” I cried. “Have you never seen a woman swoon?”

“She looks like death,” he muttered. “I thought”--

“You thought!” I exclaimed. “You have too many thoughts. Begone, and
call for help!”

“Here is Angela,” he said sullenly and without offering to move, as,
light of foot, soft of voice, ox-eyed and docile, the black woman
entered the room. When I saw her upon her knees beside the motionless
figure, the head pillowed on her arm, her hand busy with the fastenings
about throat and bosom, her dark face as womanly tender as any English
mother's bending over her nursling; and when I saw my wife, with a
little moan, creep further into the encircling arms, I was satisfied.

“Come away!” I said, and, followed by Diccon, went out and shut the
door.

My Lord Carnal was never one to let the grass grow beneath his feet.
An hour later came his cartel, borne by no less a personage than the
Secretary of the colony.

I took it from the point of that worthy's rapier. It ran thus: “SIR,--At
what hour to-morrow and at what place do you prefer to die? And with
what weapon shall I kill you?”

“Captain Percy will give me credit for the profound reluctance with
which I act in this affair against a gentleman and an officer so high
in the esteem of the colony,” said Master Pory, with his hand upon his
heart. “When I tell him that I once fought at Paris in a duel of six
on the same side with my late Lord Carnal, and that when I was last
at court my Lord Warwick did me the honor to present me to the present
lord, he will see that I could not well refuse when the latter requested
my aid.”

“Master Pory's disinterestedness is perfectly well known,” I said,
without a smile. “If he ever chooses the stronger side, sure he has
strong reasons for so doing. He will oblige me by telling his principal
that I ever thought sunrise a pleasant hour for dying, and that there
could be no fitter place than the field behind the church, convenient as
it is to the graveyard. As for weapons, I have heard that he is a good
swordsman, but I have some little reputation that way myself. If he
prefers pistols or daggers, so be it.”

“I think we may assume the sword,” said Master Pory.

I bowed.

“You'll bring a friend?” he asked.

“I do not despair of finding one,” I answered, “though my second, Master
Secretary, will put himself in some jeopardy.”

“It is combat... outrance, I believe?”

“I understand it so.”

“Then we'd better have Bohun. The survivor may need his services.”

“As you please,” I replied, “though my man Diccon dresses my scratches
well enough.”

He bit his lip, but could not hide the twinkle in his eye.

“You are cocksure,” he said. “Curiously enough, so is my lord. There
are no further formalities to adjust, I believe? To-morrow at sunrise,
behind the church, and with rapiers?”

“Precisely.”

He slapped his blade back into its sheath. “Then that's over and done
with, for the nonce at least! Sufficient unto the day, etcetera. 'S
life! I'm hot and dry! You've sacked cities, Ralph Percy; now sack me
the minister's closet and bring out his sherris I'll be at charges for
the next communion.”

We sat us down upon the doorstep with a tankard of sack between us, and
Master Pory drank, and drank, and drank again.

“How's the crop?” he asked. “Martin reports it poorer in quality than
ever, but Sir George will have it that it is very Varinas.”

“It's every whit as good as the Spanish,” I answered. “You may tell my
Lord Warwick so, when next you write.”

He laughed. If he was a timeserver and leagued with my Lord Warwick's
faction in the Company, he was a jovial sinner. Traveler and student,
much of a philosopher, more of a wit, and boon companion to any beggar
with a pottle of ale,--while the drink lasted,--we might look askance at
his dealings, but we liked his company passing well. If he took half a
poor rustic's crop for his fee, he was ready enough to toss him sixpence
for drink money; and if he made the tenants of the lands allotted to
his office leave their tobacco uncared for whilst they rowed him on
his innumerable roving expeditions up creeks and rivers, he at least
lightened their labors with most side-splitting tales, and with bottle
songs learned in a thousand taverns.

“After to-morrow there'll be more interesting news to write,” he
announced. “You're a bold man, Captain Percy.”

He looked at me out of the corners of his little twinkling eyes. I sat
and smoked in silence.

“The King begins to dote upon him,” he said; “leans on his arm, plays
with his hand, touches his cheek. Buckingham stands by, biting his lip,
his brow like a thundercloud. You'll find in to-morrow's antagonist,
Ralph Percy, as potent a conjurer as your cousin Hotspur found in
Glendower. He'll conjure you up the Tower, and a hanging, drawing, and
quartering. Who touches the King's favorite had safer touch the King.
It's _lese-majeste_‚ you contemplate.”

He lit his pipe and blew out a great cloud of smoke, then burst into
a roar of laughter. “My Lord High Admiral may see you through. Zooks!
there'll be a raree-show worth the penny, behind the church to-morrow, a
Percy striving with all his might and main to serve a Villiers! Eureka!
There is something new under the sun, despite the Preacher!” He blew out
another cloud of smoke. By this the tankard was empty, and his cheeks
were red, his eyes moist, and his laughter very ready.

“Where's the Lady Jocelyn Leigh?” he asked. “May I not have the honor to
kiss her hand before I go?”

I stared at him. “I do not understand you,” I said coldly. “There
's none within but Mistress Percy. She is weary, and rests after her
journey. We came from Weyanoke this morning.”

He shook with laughter. “Ay, ay, brave it out!” he cried. “It's what
every man Jack of us said you would do! But all's known, man! The
Governor read the King's letters in full Council an hour ago. She's the
Lady Jocelyn Leigh; she 's a ward of the King's; she and her lands are
to wed my Lord Carnal!”

“She was all that,” I replied. “Now she 's my wife.”

“You'll find that the Court of High Commission will not agree with you.”

My rapier lay across my knees, and I ran my hand down its worn scabbard.
“Here 's one that agrees with me,” I said. “And up there is Another,”
 and I lifted my hat.

He stared. “God and my good sword!” he cried. “A very knightly
dependence, but not to be mentioned nowadays in the same breath with
gold and the King's favor. Better bend to the storm, man; sing low while
it roars past. You can swear that you did n't know her to be of finer
weave than dowlas. Oh, they'll call it in some sort a marriage, for the
lady's own sake; but they'll find flaws enough to crack a thousand such
mad matches. The divorce is the thing! There's precedent, you know. A
fair lady was parted from a brave man not a thousand years ago, because
a favorite wanted her. True, Frances Howard wanted the favorite, whilst
this beauty of yours”--

“You will please not couple the name of my wife with the name of that
adulteress!” I interrupted fiercely.

He started; then cried out somewhat hurriedly: “No offense, no offense!
I meant no comparisons; comparisons are odorous, saith Dogberry. All at
court know the Lady Jocelyn Leigh for a very Britomart, a maid as cold
as Dian!”

I rose, and began to pace up and down the bit of green before the door.
“Master Pory,” I said at last, coming to a stop before him, “if, without
breach of faith, you can tell me what was said or done at the Council
to-day anent this matter, you will lay me under an obligation that I
shall not forget.”

He studied the lace on his sleeve in silence for a while; then glanced
up at me out of those small, sly, merry eyes. “Why,” he answered, “the
King demands that the lady be sent home forthwith, on the ship that gave
us such a turn to-day, in fact, with a couple of women to attend her,
and under the protection of the only other passenger of quality, to wit,
my Lord Carnal. His Majesty cannot conceive it possible that she hath
so far forgotten her birth, rank, and duty as to have maintained in
Virginia this mad masquerade, throwing herself into the arms of any
petty planter or broken adventurer who hath chanced to have an hundred
and twenty pounds of filthy tobacco with which to buy him a wife. If she
hath been so mad, she is to be sent home none the less, where she will
be tenderly dealt with as one surely in this sole matter under the spell
of witchcraft. The ship is to bring home also--and in irons--the man
who married her. If he swears to have been ignorant of her quality, and
places no straws in the way of the King's Commissioners, then shall he
be sent honorably back to Virginia with enough in his hand to get him
another wife. Per contra, if he erred with open eyes, and if he remain
contumacious, he will have to deal with the King and with the Court of
High Commission, to say nothing of the King's favorite. That's the sum
and substance, Ralph Percy.”

“Why was my Lord Carnal sent?” I asked.

“Probably because my Lord Carnal would come. He hath a will, hath my
Lord, and the King is more indulgent than Eli to those upon whom he
dotes. Doubtless, my Lord High Admiral sped him on his way, gave him the
King's best ship, wished him a favorable wind--to hell.”

“I was not ignorant that she was other than she seemed, and I remain
contumacious.”

“Then,” he said shamelessly, “you'll forgive me if in public, at least,
I forswear your company? You're plague-spotted, Captain Percy, and your
friends may wish you well, but they must stay at home and burn juniper
before their own doors.”

“I'll forgive you,” I said, “when you 've told me what the Governor will
do.”

“Why, there's the rub,” he answered. “Yeardley is the most obstinate man
of my acquaintance. He who at his first coming, beside a great deal of
worth in his person, brought only his sword hath grown to be as very a
Sir Oracle among us as ever I saw. It's 'Sir George says this,' and 'Sir
George says that,' and so there's an end on't. It's all because of that
leave to cut your own throats in your own way that he brought you last
year. Sir George and Sir Edwyn! Zooks! you had better dub them St.
George and St. Edwyn at once, and be done with it. Well, on this
occasion Sir George stands up and says roundly, with a good round
oath to boot: 'The King's commands have always come to us through the
Company. The Company obeys the King; we obey the Company. His Majesty's
demand (with reverence I speak it) is out of all order. Let the Company,
through the treasurer, command us to send Captain Percy home in irons to
answer for this passing strange offense, or to return, willy nilly, the
lady who is now surely his wife, and we will have no choice but to
obey. Until the Company commands us we will do nothing; nay we can do
nothing.' And every one of my fellow Councilors (for myself, I was busy
with my pens) saith, 'My opinion, Sir George.' The upshot of it all
is that the Due Return is to sail in two days with our humble
representation to his Majesty that though we bow to his lightest word as
the leaf bows to the zephyr, yet we are, in this sole matter, handfast,
compelled by his Majesty's own gracious charter to refer our slightest
official doing to that noble Company which owes its very being to its
rigid adherence to the terms of said charter. Wherefore, if his Majesty
will be graciously pleased to command us as usual through the said
Company--and so on. Of course, not a soul in the Council, or in
Jamestown, or in Virginia dreams of a duel behind the church at sunrise
to-morrow.” He knocked the ashes from his pipe, and by degrees got his
fat body up from the doorstep. “So there's a reprieve for you, Ralph
Percy, unless you kill or are killed to-morrow morning. In the latter
case, the problem's solved; in the former, the best service you can do
yourself, and maybe the Company, is to walk out of the world of your
own accord, and that as quickly as possible. Better a cross-roads and a
stake through a dead heart than a hangman's hands upon a live one.”

“One moment,” I said. “Doth my Lord Carnal know of this decision of the
Governor's?”

“Ay, and a fine passion it put him into. Stormed and swore and
threatened, and put the Governor's back up finely. It seems that he
thought to 'bout ship to-morrow, lady and all. He refuseth to go without
the lady, and so remaineth in Virginia until he can have his will. Lord!
but Buckingham would be a happy man if he were kept here forever and a
day! My lord knows what he risks, and he's in as black a humor as ever
you saw. But I have striven to drop oil on the troubled waters. 'My
lord,' I told him, 'you have but to posses your soul with patience for a
few short weeks, just until the ship the Governor sends can return. Then
all must needs be as your lordship wishes. In the meantime, you may find
existence in these wilds and away from that good company which is the
soul of life endurable, and perhaps pleasant. You may have daily sight
of the lady who is to become your wife, and that should count for
much with so ardent and determined a lover as your lordship hath shown
yourself to be. You may have the pleasure of contemplating your rival's
grave, if you kill him. If he kills you, you will care the less about
the date of the Santa Teresa's sailing. The land, too, hath inducements
to offer to a philosophical and contemplative mind such as one whom his
Majesty delighteth to honor must needs possess. Beside these crystal
rivers and among these odoriferous woods, my lord, one escapes much
expense, envy, contempt, vanity, and vexation of mind.'”

The hoary sinner laughed and laughed. When he had gone away, still in
huge enjoyment of his own mirth, I, who had seen small cause for mirth,
went slowly indoors. Not a yard from the door, in the shadow of the
vines that draped the window, stood the woman who was bringing this fate
upon me.

“I thought that you were in your own room,” I said harshly, after a
moment of dead silence.

“I came to the window,” she replied. “I listened. I heard all.” She
spoke haltingly, through dry lips. Her face was as white as her ruff,
but a strange light burned in her eyes, and there was no trembling.
“This morning you said that all that you had--your name and your
sword--were at my service. You may take them both again, sir. I refuse
the aid you offer. Swear what you will, tell them what you please, make
your peace whilst you may. I will not have your blood upon my soul.”

There was yet wine upon the table. I filled a cup and brought it to her.
“Drink!” I commanded.

“I have much of forbearance, much of courtesy, to thank you for,” she
said. “I will remember it when--Do not think that I shall blame you”--

I held the cup to her lips. “Drink!” I repeated. She touched the red
wine with her lips. I took it from her and put it to my own. “We drink
of the same cup,” I said, with my eyes upon hers, and drained it to the
bottom. “I am weary of swords and courts and kings. Let us go into the
garden and watch the minister's bees.”



CHAPTER X IN WHICH MASTER PORY GAINS TIME TO SOME PURPOSE


ROLFE coming down by boat from Varina, had reached the town in the dusk
of that day which had seen the arrival of the Santa Teresa, and I had
gone to him before I slept that night. Early morning found us together
again in the field behind the church. We had not long to wait in the
chill air and dew-drenched grass. When the red rim of the sun showed
like a fire between the trunks of the pines came my Lord Carnal, and
with him Master Pory and Dr. Lawrence Bohun.

My lord and I bowed to each other profoundly. Rolfe with my sword and
Master Pory with my lord's stepped aside to measure the blades. Dr.
Bohun, muttering something about the feverishness of the early air,
wrapped his cloak about him, and huddled in among the roots of a
gigantic cedar. I stood with my back to the church, and my face to the
red water between us and the illimitable forest; my lord opposite me,
six feet away. He was dressed again splendidly in black and scarlet,
colors he much affected, and, with the dark beauty of his face and the
arrogant grace with which he stood there waiting for his sword, made a
picture worth looking upon.

Rolfe and the Secretary came back to us. “If you kill him, Ralph,” said
the former in a low voice, as he took my doublet from me, “you are to
put yourself in my hands and do as you are bid.”

“Which means that you will try to smuggle me north to the Dutch. Thanks,
friend, but I'll see the play out here.”

“You were ever obstinate, self-willed, reckless--and the man most to my
heart,” he continued. “Have your way, in God's name, but I wish not to
see what will come of it! All's ready, Master Secretary.”

Very slowly that worthy stooped down and examined the ground, narrowly
and quite at his leisure. “I like it not, Master Rolfe,” he declared at
length. “Here is a molehill, and there a fairy ring.”

“I see neither,” said Rolfe. “It looks as smooth as a table. But we can
easily shift under the cedars where there is no grass.”

“Here's a projecting root,” announced the Secretary, when the new ground
had been reached.

Rolfe shrugged his shoulders, but we moved again.

“The light comes jaggedly through the branches,” objected my lord's
second. “Better try the open again.”

Rolfe uttered an exclamation of impatience, and my lord stamped his foot
on the ground. “What is this foolery, sir?” the latter cried fiercely.
“The ground's well enough, and there 's sufficient light to die by.”

“Let the light pass, then,” said his second resignedly. “Gentlemen,
are you read--Ods blood! my lord, I had not noticed the roses upon your
lordship's shoes! They are so large and have such a fall that they
sweep the ground on either side your foot; you might stumble in all that
dangling ribbon and lace. Allow me to remove them.”

He unsheathed his knife, and, sinking upon his knees, began leisurely to
sever the threads that held the roses to the leather. As he worked, he
looked neither at the roses nor at my lord's angry face, but beneath his
own bent arm toward the church and the town beyond.

How long he would have sawed away at the threads there is no telling;
for my lord, amongst whose virtues patience was not one, broke from him,
and with an oath stooped and tore away the offending roses with his
own hand, then straightened himself and gripped his sword more closely.
“I've learned one thing in this d----d land,” he snarled, “and that is
where not to choose a second. You, sir,” to Rolfe, “give the word.”

Master Pory rose from his knees, unruffled and unabashed, and still with
a curiously absent expression upon his fat face and with his ears cocked
in the direction of the church. “One moment, gentlemen,” he said. “I
have just bethought me”--

“On guard!” cried Rolfe, and cut him short.

The King's favorite was no mean antagonist. Once or twice the thought
crossed my mind that here, where I least desired it, I had met my match.
The apprehension passed. He fought as he lived, with a fierce intensity,
a headlong passion, a brute force, bearing down and overwhelming most
obstacles. But that I could tire him out I soon knew.

The incessant flash and clash of steel, the quick changes in position,
the need to bring all powers of body and mind to aid of eye and wrist,
the will to win, the shame of loss, the rage and lust of blood,--there
was no sight or sound outside that trampled circle that could force
itself upon our brain or make us glance aside. If there was a sudden
commotion amongst the three witnesses, if an expression of immense
relief and childlike satisfaction reigned in Master Pory's face, we knew
it not. We were both bleeding,--I from a pin prick on the shoulder,
he from a touch beneath the arm. He made a desperate thrust, which I
parried, and the blades clashed. A third came down upon them with such
force that the sparks flew.

“In the King's name!” commanded the Governor.

We fell apart, panting, white with rage, staring at the unexpected
disturbers of our peace. They were the Governor, the commander, the Cape
Merchant, and the watch.

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!” exclaimed Master
Pory, and retired to the cedar and Dr. Bohun.

“This ends here, gentlemen,” said the Governor firmly. “You are both
bleeding. It is enough.”

“Out of my way, sir!” cried my lord, foaming at the mouth. He made a mad
thrust over the Governor's extended arm at me, who was ready enough to
meet him. “Have at thee, thou bridegroom!” he said between his teeth.

The Governor caught him by the wrist. “Put up your sword, my lord, or,
as I stand here, you shall give it into the commander's hands!”

“Hell and furies!” ejaculated my lord. “Do you know who I am, sir?”

“Ay,” replied the Governor sturdily, “I do know. It is because of that
knowledge, my Lord Carnal, that I interfere in this affair. Were you
other than you are, you and this gentleman might fight until doomsday,
and meet with no hindrance from me. Being what you are, I will prevent
any renewal of this duel, by fair means if I may, by foul if I must.”

He left my lord, and came over to me. “Since when have you been upon my
Lord Warwick's side, Ralph Percy?” he demanded, lowering his voice.

“I am not so,” I said.

“Then appearances are mightily deceitful,” he retorted.

“I know what you mean, Sir George,” I answered. “I know that if the
King's darling should meet death or maiming in this fashion, upon
Virginian soil, the Company, already so out of favor, might find some
difficulty in explaining things to his Majesty's satisfaction. But I
think my Lord Southampton and Sir Edwyn Sandys and Sir George Yeardley
equal to the task, especially if they are able to deliver to his Majesty
the man whom his Majesty will doubtless consider the true and only rebel
and murderer. Let us fight it out, sir. You can all retire to a distance
and remain in profound ignorance of any such affair. If I fall, you have
nothing to fear. If he falls,--why, I shall not run away, and the Due
Return sails to-morrow.”

He eyed me closely from under frowning brows.

“And when your wife's a widow, what then?” he asked abruptly.

I have not known many better men than this simple, straightforward,
soldierly Governor. The manliness of his character begot trust, invited
confidence. Men told him of their hidden troubles almost against their
will, and afterward felt neither shame nor fear, knowing the simplicity
of his thoughts and the reticence of his speech. I looked him in the
eyes, and let him read what I would have shown to no other, and felt no
shame. “The Lord may raise her up a helper,” I said. “At least she won't
have to marry him.”

He turned on his heel and moved back to his former station between us
two. “My Lord Carnal,” he said, “and you, Captain Percy, heed what I
say; for what I say I will do. You may take your choice: either you will
sheathe your swords here in my presence, giving me your word of honor
that you will not draw them upon each other before his Majesty shall
have made known his will in this matter to the Company, and the Company
shall have transmitted it to me, in token of which truce between you you
shall touch each other's hands; or you will pass the time between this
and the return of the ship with the King's and the Company's will in
strict confinement,--you, Captain Percy, in gaol, and you, my Lord
Carnal, in my own poor house, where I will use my best endeavors to
make the days pass as pleasantly as possible for your lordship. I have
spoken, gentlemen.”

There was no protest. For my own part, I knew Yeardley too well to
attempt any; moreover, had I been in his place, his course should have
been mine. For my Lord Carnal,--what black thoughts visited that fierce
and sullen brain I know not, but there was acquiescence in his face,
haughty, dark, and vengeful though it was. Slowly and as with one motion
we sheathed our swords, and more slowly still repeated the few words
after the Governor. His Honor's countenance shone with relief. “Take
each other by the hand, gentlemen, and then let 's all to breakfast at
my own house, where there shall be no feud save with good capon pasty
and jolly good ale.” In dead silence my lord and I touched each other's
finger tips.

The world was now a flood of sunshine, the mist on the river vanishing,
the birds singing, the trees waving in the pleasant morning air.
From the town came the roll of the drum summoning all to the week-day
service. The bells too began to ring, sounding sweetly through the clear
air. The Governor took off his hat. “Let's all to church, gentlemen,” he
said gravely. “Our cheeks are flushed as with a fever and our pulses run
high this morning. There be some among us, perhaps, that have in their
hearts discontent, anger, and hatred. I know no better place to take
such passions, provided we bring them not forth again.”

We went in and sat down. Jeremy Sparrow was in the pulpit. Singly or
in groups the town folk entered. Down the aisle strode bearded men,
old soldiers, adventurers, sailors, scarred body and soul; young men
followed, younger sons and younger brothers, prodigals whose portion had
been spent, whose souls now ate of the husks; to the servants' benches
came dull laborers, dimly comprehending, groping in the twilight; women
entered softly and slowly, some with children clinging to their skirts.
One came alone and knelt alone, her face shadowed by her mantle. Amongst
the servants stood a slave or two, blindly staring, and behind them all
one of that felon crew sent us by the King.

Through the open windows streamed the summer sunshine, soft and
fragrant, impartial and unquestioning, caressing alike the uplifted
face of the minister, the head of the convict, and all between. The
minister's voice was grave and tender when he read and prayed, but
in the hymn it rose above the people's like the voice of some mighty
archangel. That triumphant singing shook the air, and still rang in the
heart while we said the Creed.

When the service was over, the congregation waited for the Governor to
pass out first. At the door he pressed me to go with him and his party
to his own house, and I gave him thanks, but made excuse to stay away.
When he and the nobleman who was his guest had left the churchyard, and
the townspeople too were gone, I and my wife and the minister walked
home together through the dewy meadow, with the splendor of the morning
about us, and the birds caroling from every tree and thicket.



CHAPTER XI IN WHICH I MEET AN ITALIAN DOCTOR


THE summer slipped away, and autumn came, with the purple of the grape
and the yellowing corn, the nuts within the forest, and the return of
the countless wild fowl to the marshes and reedy river banks, and still
I stayed in Jamestown, and my wife with me, and still the Santa Teresa
rode at anchor in the river below the fort. If the man whom she brought
knew that by tarrying in Virginia he risked his ruin with the King, yet,
with a courage worthy of a better cause, he tarried.

Now and then ships came in, but they were small, belated craft. The
most had left England before the sailing of the Santa Teresa; the rest,
private ventures, trading for clapboard or sassafras, knew nothing of
court affairs. Only the Sea Flower, sailing from London a fortnight
after the Santa Teresa, and much delayed by adverse winds, brought a
letter from the deputy treasurer to Yeardley and the Council. From
Rolfe I learned its contents. It spoke of the stir that was made by the
departure from the realm of the King's favorite. “None know where he
hath gone. The King looks dour; 't is hinted that the privy council are
as much at sea as the rest of the world; my Lord of Buckingham saith
nothing, but his following--which of late hath somewhat decayed--is so
increased that his antechambers cannot hold the throngs that come to
wait upon him. Some will have it that my Lord Carnal hath fled the
kingdom to escape the Tower; others, that the King hath sent him on a
mission to the King of Spain about this detested Spanish match; others,
that the gadfly hath stung him and he is gone to America,--to search for
Raleigh's gold mine, maybe. This last most improbable; but if 't is so,
and he should touch at Virginia, receive him with all honor. If indeed
he is not out of favor, the Company may find in him a powerful friend;
of powerful enemies, God knows, there is no lack!”

Thus the worthy Master Ferrar. And at the bottom of the letter, among
other news of city and court, mention was made of the disappearance of a
ward of the King's, the Lady Jocelyn Leigh. Strict search had been made,
but the unfortunate lady had not been found. “'T is whispered that she
hath killed herself; also, that his Majesty had meant to give her
in marriage to my Lord Carnal. But that all true love and virtue and
constancy have gone from the age, one might conceive that the said
lord had but fled the court for a while, to indulge his grief in some
solitude of hill and stream and shady vale,--the lost lady being right
worthy of such dole.”

In sooth she was, but my lord was not given to such fashion of mourning.

The summer passed, and I did nothing. What was there I could do? I had
written by the Due Return to Sir Edwyn, and to my cousin, the Earl
of Northumberland. The King hated Sir Edwyn as he hated tobacco and
witchcraft. “Choose the devil, but not Sir Edwyn Sandys!” had been his
passionate words to the Company the year before. A certain fifth of
November had despoiled my Lord of Northumberland of wealth, fame, and
influence. Small hope there was in those two. That the Governor and
Council, remembering old dangers shared, wished me well I did not doubt,
but that was all. Yeardley had done all he could do, more than most men
would have dared to do, in procuring this delay. There was no further
help in him; nor would I have asked it. Already out of favor with the
Warwick faction, he had risked enough for me and mine. I could not flee
with my wife to the Indians, exposing her, perhaps, to a death by
fierce tortures; moreover, Opechancanough had of late strangely taken to
returning to the settlements those runaway servants and fugitives from
justice which before we had demanded from him in vain. If even it had
been possible to run the gauntlet of the Indian villages, war parties,
and hunting bands, what would have been before us but endless forest and
a winter which for us would have had no spring? I could not see her die
of hunger and cold, or by the teeth of the wolves. I could not do what I
should have liked to do,--take, single-handed, that King's ship with
its sturdy crew and sail with her south and ever southwards, before us
nothing more formidable than Spanish ships, and beyond them blue waters,
spice winds, new lands, strange islands of the blest.

There seemed naught that I could do, naught that she could do. Our Fate
had us by the hands, and held us fast. We stood still, and the days came
and went like dreams.

While the Assembly was in session I had my part to act as Burgess from
my hundred. Each day I sat with my fellows in the church, facing the
Governor in his great velvet chair, the Council on either hand, and
listened to the droning of old Twine, the clerk, like the droning of the
bees without the window; to the chant of the sergeant-at-arms; to long
and windy discourses from men who planted better than they spoke; to
remarks by the Secretary, witty, crammed with Latin and traveled talk;
to the Governor's slow, weighty words. At Weyanoke we had had trouble
with the Indians. I was one who loved them not and had fought them
well, for which reason the hundred chose me its representative. In the
Assembly it was my part to urge a greater severity toward those our
natural enemies, a greater watchfulness on our part, the need for
palisades and sentinels, the danger that lay in their acquisition of
firearms, which, in defiance of the law, men gave them in exchange for
worthless Indian commodities. This Indian business was the chief matter
before the Assembly. I spoke when I thought speech was needed, and spoke
strongly; for my heart foreboded that which was to come upon us too soon
and too surely. The Governor listened gravely, nodding his head;
Master Pory, too, the Cape Merchant, and West were of my mind; but the
remainder were besotted by their own conceit, esteeming the very name of
Englishman sentinel and palisade enough, or trusting in the smooth
words and vows of brotherhood poured forth so plentifully by that red
Apollyon, Opechancanough.

When the day's work was done, and we streamed out of the church,--the
Governor and Council first, the rest of us in order,--it was to find
as often as not a red and black figure waiting for us among the graves.
Sometimes it joined itself to the Governor, sometimes to Master Pory;
sometimes the whole party, save one, went off with it to the guest
house, there to eat, drink, and make merry.

If Virginia and all that it contained, save only that jewel of which
it had robbed the court, were out of favor with the King's minion, he
showed it not. Perhaps he had accepted the inevitable with a good grace;
perhaps it was but his mode of biding his time; but he had shifted
into that soldierly frankness of speech and manner, that genial,
hail-fellow-well-met air, behind which most safely hides a villain's
mind. Two days after that morning behind the church, he had removed
himself, his French valets, and his Italian physician from the
Governor's house to the newly finished guest house. Here he lived, cock
of the walk, taking his ease in his inn, elbowing out all guests save
those of his own inviting. If, what with his open face and his open
hand, his dinners and bear-baitings and hunting parties, his tales
of the court and the wars, his half hints as to the good he might do
Virginia with the King, extending even to the lightening of the tax upon
our tobacco and the prohibition of the Spanish import, his known riches
and power, and the unknown height to which they might attain if his star
at court were indeed in the ascendant,--if with these things he slowly,
but surely, won to his following all save a very few of those I had
thought my fast friends, it was not a thing marvelous or without
precedent. Upon his side was good that might be seen and handled; on
mine was only a dubious right and a not at all dubious danger. I do not
think it plagued me much. The going of those who had it in their heart
to wish to go left me content, and for those who fawned upon him from
the first, or for the rabble multitude who flung up their caps and ran
at his heels, I cared not a doit. There were still Rolfe and West and
the Governor, Jeremy Sparrow and Diccon.

My lord and I met, perforce, in the street, at the Governor's house,
in church, on the river, in the saddle. If we met in the presence of
others, we spoke the necessary formal words of greeting or leave-taking,
and he kept his countenance; if none were by, off went the mask. The
man himself and I looked each other in the eyes and passed on. Once we
encountered on a late evening among the graves, and I was not alone.
Mistress Percy had been restless, and had gone, despite the minister's
protests, to sit upon the river bank. When I returned from the assembly
and found her gone, I went to fetch her. A storm was rolling slowly up.
Returning the long way through the churchyard, we came upon him sitting
beside a sunken grave, his knees drawn up to meet his chin, his eyes
gloomily regardful of the dark broad river, the unseen ocean, and
the ship that could not return for weeks to come. We passed him in
silence,--I with a slight bow, she with a slighter curtsy. An hour
later, going down the street in the dusk of the storm, I ran against Dr.
Lawrence Bohun. “Don't stop me!” he panted. “The Italian doctor is away
in the woods gathering simples, and they found my Lord Carnal in a fit
among the graves, half an hour agone.” My lord was bled, and the next
morning went hunting.

The lady whom I had married abode with me in the minister's house, held
her head high, and looked the world in the face. She seldom went from
home, but when she did take the air it was with pomp and circumstance.
When that slender figure and exquisite face, set off by as rich apparel
as could be bought from a store of finery brought in by the Southampton,
and attended by a turbaned negress and a serving man who had been to the
wars, and had escaped the wheel by the skin of his teeth, appeared in
the street, small wonder if a greater commotion arose than had been
since the days of the Princess Pocahontas and her train of dusky
beauties. To this fairer, more imperial dame gold lace doffed its
hat and made its courtliest bow, and young planters bent to their
saddlebows, while the common folk nudged and stared and had their
say. The beauty, the grace, the pride, that deigned small response
to well-meant words,--all that would have been intolerable in plain
Mistress Percy, once a waiting maid, then a piece of merchandise to be
sold for one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco, then the wife of a
poor gentleman, was pardoned readily enough to the Lady Jocelyn Leigh,
the ward of the King, the bride to be (so soon as the King's Court
of High Commission should have snapped in twain an inconvenient and
ill-welded fetter) of the King's minion.

So she passed like a splendid vision through the street perhaps once a
week. On Sundays she went with me to church, and the people looked at
her instead of at the minister, who rebuked them not, because his eyes
were upon the same errand.

The early autumn passed and the leaves began to turn, and still all
things were as they had been, save that the Assembly sat no longer. My
fellow Burgesses went back to their hundreds, but my house at Weyanoke
knew me no more. In a tone that was apologetic, but firm, the Governor
had told me that he wished my company at Jamestown. I was pleased enough
to stay, I assured him,--as indeed I was. At Weyanoke, the thunderbolt
would fall without warning; at Jamestown, at least I could see, coming
up the river, the sails of the Due Return or what other ship the Company
might send.

The color of the leaves deepened, and there came a season of a beauty
singular and sad, like a smile left upon the face of the dead summer.
Over all things, near and far, the forest where it met the sky, the
nearer woods, the great river, and the streams that empty into it,
there hung a blue haze, soft and dream-like. The forest became a painted
forest, with an ever thinning canopy and an ever thickening carpet of
crimson and gold; everywhere there was a low rustling underfoot and a
slow rain of color. It was neither cold nor hot, but very quiet, and the
birds went by like shadows,--a listless and forgetful weather, in which
we began to look, every hour of every day, for the sail which we knew we
should not see for weeks to come.

Good Master Bucke tarried with Master Thorpe at Henricus, recruiting
his strength, and Jeremy Sparrow preached in his pulpit, slept in his
chamber, and worked in his garden. This garden ran down to the green
bank of the river; and here, sitting idly by the stream, her chin in her
hand and her dark eyes watching the strong, free sea birds as they came
and went, I found my wife one evening, as I came from the fort, where
had been some martial exercise. Thirty feet away Master Jeremy Sparrow
worked among the dying flowers, and hummed:--

    “There is a garden in her face,

     Where roses and white lilies grow.”

He and I had agreed that when I must needs be absent he should be within
call of her; for I believed my Lord Carnal very capable of intruding
himself into her presence. That house and garden, her movements and
mine, were spied upon by his foreign hirelings, I knew perfectly well.

As I sat down upon the bank at her feet, she turned to me with a sudden
passion. “I am weary of it all!” she cried. “I am tired of being pent up
in this house and garden, and of the watch you keep upon me. And if I go
abroad, it is worse! I hate all those shameless faces that stare at me
as if I were in the pillory. I am pilloried before you all, and I find
the experience sufficiently bitter. And when I think that that man whom
I hate, hate, hate, breathes the air that I breathe, it stifles me! If I
could fly away like those birds, if I could only be gone from this place
for even a day!”

“I would beg leave to take you home, to Weyanoke,” I said after a pause,
“but I cannot go and leave the field to him.”

“And I cannot go,” she answered. “I must watch for that ship and that
King's command that my Lord Carnal thinks potent enough to make me his
wife. King's commands are strong, but a woman's will is stronger. At
the last I shall know what to do. But now why may I not take Angela and
cross that strip of sand and go into the woods on the other side? They
are so fair and strange,--all red and yellow,--and they look very still
and peaceful. I could walk in them, or lie down under the trees and
forget awhile, and they are not at all far away.” She looked at me
eagerly.

“You could not go alone,” I told her. “There would be danger in that.
But to-morrow, if you choose, I and Master Sparrow and Diccon will take
you there. A day in the woods is pleasant enough, and will do none of
us harm. Then you may wander as you please, fill your arms with colored
leaves, and forget the world. We will watch that no harm comes nigh you,
but otherwise you shall not be disturbed.”

She broke into delighted laughter. Of all women the most steadfast of
soul, her outward moods were as variable as a child's. “Agreed!” she
cried. “You and the minister and Diccon Demon shall lay your muskets
across your knees, and Angela shall witch you into stone with her old,
mad, heathen charms. And then--and then--I will gather more gold than
had King Midas; I will dance with the hamadryads; I will find out Oberon
and make Titania jealous!”

“I do not doubt that you could do so,” I said, as she sprang to her
feet, childishly eager and radiantly beautiful.

I rose to go in with her, for it was supper time, but in a moment
changed my mind, and resumed my seat on the bank of turf. “Do you go
in,” I said. “There's a snake near by, in those bushes below the bank.
I'll kill the creature, and then I'll come to supper.”

When she was gone, I walked to where, ten feet away, the bank dipped
to a clump of reeds and willows planted in the mud on the brink of the
river. Dropping on my knees I leaned over, and, grasping a man by the
collar, lifted him from the slime where he belonged to the bank beside
me.

It was my Lord Carnal's Italian doctor that I had so fished up. I had
seen him before, and had found in his very small, mean figure clad all
in black, and his narrow face with malignant eyes, and thin white lips
drawn tightly over gleaming teeth, something infinitely repulsive,
sickening to the sight as are certain reptiles to the touch.

“There are no simples or herbs of grace to be found amongst reeds and
half-drowned willows,” I said. “What did so learned a doctor look for in
so unlikely a place?”

He shrugged his shoulders and made play with his clawlike hands, as if
he understood me not. It was a lie, for I knew that he and the English
tongue were sufficiently acquainted. I told him as much, and he shot
at me a most venomous glance, but continued to shrug, gesticulate, and
jabber in Italian. At last I saw nothing better to do than to take him,
still by the collar, to the edge of the garden next the churchyard, and
with the toe of my boot to send him tumbling among the graves. I watched
him pick himself up, set his attire to rights, and go away in the
gathering dusk, winding in and out among the graves; and then I went in
to supper, and told Mistress Percy that the snake was dead.



CHAPTER XII IN WHICH I RECEIVE A WARNING AND REPOSE A TRUST


SHORTLY before daybreak I was wakened by a voice beneath my window.
“Captain Percy,” it cried, “the Governor wishes you at his house!” and
was gone.

I dressed and left the house, disturbing no one. Hurrying through the
chill dawn, I reached the square not much behind the rapid footsteps
of the watch who had wakened me. About the Governor's door were horses,
saddled and bridled, with grooms at their heads, men and beasts gray and
indistinct, wrapped in the fog. I went up the steps and into the hall,
and knocked at the door of the Governor's great room. It opened, and I
entered to find Sir George, with Master Pory, Rolfe, West, and others of
the Council gathered about the great centre table and talking eagerly.
The Governor was but half dressed; West and Rolfe were in jack boots and
coats of mail. A man, breathless with hard riding, spattered with swamp
mud and torn by briers, stood, cap in hand, staring from one to the
other.

“In good time, Captain Percy!” cried the Governor. “Yesterday you called
the profound peace with the Indians, of which some of us boasted, the
lull before the storm. Faith, it looks to-day as though you were in the
right, after all!”

“What 's the matter, sir?” I asked, advancing to the table.

“Matter enough!” he answered. “This man has come, post haste, from the
plantations above Paspahegh. Three days ago, Morgan, the trader, was
decoyed into the woods by that Paspahegh fool and bully, Nemattanow,
whom they call Jack of the Feather, and there murdered. Yesterday, out
of sheer bravado, the Indian turned up at Morgan's house, and Morgan's
men shot him down. They buried the dog, and thought no more of it. Three
hours ago, Chanco the Christian went to the commander and warned him
that the Paspaheghs were in a ferment, and that the warriors were
painting themselves black. The commander sent off at once to me, and I
see naught better to do than to dispatch you with a dozen men to bring
them to their senses. But there 's to be no harrying nor battle. A show
of force is all that 's needed,--I'll stake my head upon it. Let them
see that we are not to be taken unawares, but give them fair words. That
they may be the sooner placated I send with you Master Rolfe,--they'll
listen to him. See that the black paint is covered with red, give them
some beads and a knife or two, then come home. If you like not the
look of things, find out where Opechancanough is, and I'll send him an
embassy. He loves us well, and will put down any disaffection.”

“There's no doubt that he loves us,” I said dryly. “He loves us as a
cat loves the mouse that it plays with. If we are to start at once, sir,
I'll go get my horse.”

“Then meet us at the neck of land,” said Rolfe.

I nodded, and left the room. As I descended the steps into the growing
light outside, I found Master Pory at my side.

“I kept late hours last night,” he remarked, with a portentous yawn.
“Now that this business is settled, I'll go back to bed.”

I walked on in silence.

“I am in your black books,” he continued, with his sly, merry, sidelong
glance. “You think that I was overcareful of the ground, that morning
behind the church, and so unfortunately delayed matters until the
Governor happened by and brought things to another guess conclusion.”

“I think that you warned the Governor,” I said bluntly.

He shook with laughter. “Warned him? Of course I warned him. Youth would
never have seen that molehill and fairy ring and projecting root, but
wisdom cometh with gray hairs, my son. D' ye not think I'll have the
King's thanks?”

“Doubtless,” I answered. “An the price contents you, I do not know why I
should quarrel with it.”

By this we were halfway down the street, and we now came upon the guest
house. A window above us was unshuttered, and in the room within a light
still burned. Suddenly it was extinguished. A man's face looked down
upon us for a moment, then drew back; a skeleton hand was put out softly
and slowly, and the shutter drawn to. Hand and face belonged to the man
I had sent tumbling among the graves the evening before.

“The Italian doctor,” said Master Pory.

There was something peculiar in his tone. I glanced at him, but his
broad red face and twinkling eyes told me nothing. “The Italian doctor,”
 he repeated. “If I had a friend in Captain Percy's predicament, I should
bid him beware of the Italian doctor.”

“Your friend would be obliged for the warning,” I replied.

We walked a little further. “And I think,” he said, “that I should
inform this purely hypothetical friend of mine that the Italian and his
patron had their heads mighty close together, last night.”

“Last night?”

“Ay, last night. I went to drink with my lord, and so broke up their
tete-a-tete. My lord was boisterous in his cups and not oversecret.
He dropped some hints”--He broke off to indulge in one of his endless
silent laughs. “I don't know why I tell you this, Captain Percy. I am
on the other side, you know,--quite on the other side. But now I bethink
me, I am only telling you what I should tell you were I upon your side.
There's no harm in that, I hope, no disloyalty to my Lord Carnal's
interests which happen to be my interests?”

I made no answer. I gave him credit both for his ignorance of the very
hornbook of honor and for his large share of the milk of human kindness.

“My lord grows restive,” he said, when we had gone a little further.
“The Francis and John, coming in yesterday, brought court news. Out of
sight, out of mind. Buckingham is making hay while the sun shines. Useth
angel water for his complexion, sleepeth in a medicated mask such as the
Valois used, and is grown handsomer than ever; changeth the fashion of
his clothes thrice a week, which mightily pleaseth his Majesty. Whoops
on the Spanish match, too, and, wonderful past all whooping, from the
prince's detestation hath become his bosom friend. Small wonder if my
Lord Carnal thinks it's time he was back at Whitehall.”

“Let him go, then,” I said. “There's his ship that brought him here.”

“Ay, there 's his ship,” rejoined Master Pory. “A few weeks more, and
the Due Return will be here with the Company's commands. D' ye think,
Captain Percy, that there's the slightest doubt as to their tenor?”

“No.”

“Then my lord has but to possess his soul with patience and wait for the
Due Return. No doubt he'll do so.”

“No doubt he'll do so,” I echoed.

By this we had reached the Secretary's own door. “Fortune favor you with
the Paspaheghs!” he said, with another mighty yawn. “As for me, I'll
to bed. Do you ever dream, Captain Percy? I don't; mine is too good a
conscience. But if I did, I should dream of an Italian doctor.”

The door shut upon his red face and bright eyes. I walked rapidly on
down the street to the minister's house. The light was very pale as yet,
and house and garden lay beneath a veil of mist. No one was stirring. I
went on through the gray wet paths to the stable, and roused Diccon.

“Saddle Black Lamoral quickly,” I ordered. “There's trouble with the
Paspaheghs, and I am off with Master Rolfe to settle it.”

“Am I to go with you?” he asked.

I shook my head. “We have a dozen men. There's no need of more.”

I left him busy with the horse, and went to the house. In the hall I
found the negress strewing the floor with fresh rushes, and asked her
if her mistress yet slept. In her soft half English, half Spanish, she
answered in the affirmative. I went to my own room and armed myself;
then ran upstairs to the comfortable chamber where abode Master Jeremy
Sparrow, surrounded by luxuries which his soul contemned. He was not
there. At the foot of the stair I was met by Goodwife Allen. “The
minister was called an hour ago, sir,” she announced. “There's a man
dying of the fever at Archer's Hope, and they sent a boat for him. He
won't be back until afternoon.”

I hurried past her back to the stable. Black Lamoral was saddled, and
Diccon held the stirrup for me to mount.

“Good luck with the vermin, sir!” he said. “I wish I were going, too.”

His tone was sullen, yet wistful. I knew that he loved danger as I
loved it, and a sudden remembrance of the dangers we had faced together
brought us nearer to each other than we had been for many a day.

“I don't take you,” I explained, “because I have need of you here.
Master Sparrow has gone to watch beside a dying man, and will not be
back for hours. As for myself, there's no telling how long I may be
kept. Until I come you are to guard house and garden well. You know what
I mean. Your mistress is to be molested by no one.”

“Very well, sir.”

“One thing more. There was some talk yesterday of my taking her across
the neck to the forest. When she awakes, tell her from me that I am
sorry for her to lose her pleasure, but that now she could not go even
were I here to take her.”

“There 's no danger from the Paspaheghs there,” he muttered.

“The Paspaheghs happen not to be my only foes,” I said curtly. “Do as I
bid you without remark. Tell her that I have good reasons for desiring
her to remain within doors until my return. On no account whatever is
she to venture without the garden.”

I gathered up the reins, and he stood back from the horse's head. When
I had gone a few paces I drew rein, and, turning in my saddle, spoke to
him across the dew-drenched grass. “This is a trust, Diccon,” I said.

The red came into his tanned face. He raised his hand and made our old
military salute. “I understand it so, my captain,” he answered, and I
rode away satisfied.



CHAPTER XIII IN WHICH THE SANTA TERESA DROPS DOWNSTREAM


AN hour's ride brought us to the block house standing within the forest,
midway between the white plantations at Paspahegh and the village of the
tribe. We found it well garrisoned, spies out, and the men inclined to
make light of the black paint and the seething village.

Amongst them was Chanco the Christian. I called him to me, and we
listened to his report with growing perturbation. “Thirty warriors!”
 I said, when he had finished. “And they are painted yellow as well as
black, and have dashed their cheeks with puccoon: it's _l'outrance_,
then! And the war dance is toward! If we are to pacify this hornets'
nest, it's high time we set about it. Gentlemen of the block house, we
are but twelve, and they may beat us back, in which case those that are
left of us will fight it out with you here. Watch for us, therefore, and
have a sally party ready. Forward, men!”

“One moment, Captain Percy,” said Rolfe. “Chanco, where's the Emperor?”

“Five suns ago he was with the priests at Uttamussac,” answered the
Indian. “Yesterday, at the full sun power, he was in the lodge of
the werowance of the Chickahominies. He feasts there still. The
Chickahominies and the Powhatans have buried the hatchet.”

“I regret to hear it,” I remarked. “Whilst they took each other's
scalps, mine own felt the safer.”

“I advise going direct to Opechancanough,” said Rolfe.

“Since he's only a league away, so do I,” I answered.

We left the block house and the clearing around it, and plunged into
the depths of the forest. In these virgin woods the trees are set well
apart, though linked one to the other by the omnipresent grape, and
there is little undergrowth, so that we were able to make good speed.
Rolfe and I rode well in front of our men. By now the sun was shining
through the lower branches of the trees, and the mist was fast
vanishing. The forest--around us, above us, and under the hoofs of the
horses where the fallen leaves lay thick--was as yellow as gold and as
red as blood.

“Rolfe,” I asked, breaking a long silence, “do you credit what the
Indians say of Opechancanough?”

“That he was brother to Powhatan only by adoption?”

“That, fleeing for his life, he came to Virginia, years and years ago,
from some mysterious land far to the south and west?”

“I do not know,” he replied thoughtfully. “He is like, and yet not like,
the people whom he rules. In his eye there is the authority of mind; his
features are of a nobler cast “--

“And his heart is of a darker,” I said. “It is a strange and subtle
savage.”

“Strange enough and subtle enough, I admit,” he answered, “though I
believe not with you that his friendliness toward us is but a mask.”

“Believe it or not, it is so,” I said. “That dark, cold, still face is
a mask, and that simple-seeming amazement at horses and armor, guns and
blue beads, is a mask. It is in my mind that some fair day the mask will
be dropped. Here's the village.”

Until our interview with Chanco the Christian, the village of the
Paspaheghs, and not the village of the Chickahominies, had been our
destination, and since leaving the block house we had made good speed;
but now, within the usual girdle of mulberries, we were met by the
werowance and his chief men with the customary savage ceremonies. We had
long since come to the conclusion that the birds of the air and the fish
of the streams were Mercuries to the Indians.

The werowance received us in due form, with presents of fish and
venison, cakes of chinquapin meal and gourds of pohickory, an uncouth
dance by twelve of his young men and a deal of hellish noise; then, at
our command, led us into the village, and to the lodge which marked its
centre. Around it were gathered Opechancanough's own warriors, men from
Orapax and Uttamussac and Werowocomoco, chosen for their strength and
cunning; while upon the grass beneath a blood-red gum tree sat his
wives, painted and tattooed, with great strings of pearl and copper
about their necks. Beyond them were the women and children of the
Chickahominies, and around us all the red forest.

The mat that hung before the door of the lodge was lifted, and an
Indian, emerging, came forward, with a gesture of welcome. It was
Nantauquas, the Lady Rebekah's brother, and the one Indian--saving
always his dead sister--that was ever to my liking; a savage, indeed,
but a savage as brave and chivalrous, as courteous and truthful, as a
Christian knight.

Rolfe sprang from his horse, and advancing to meet the young chief
embraced him. Nantauquas had been much with his sister during those her
happy days at Varina, before she went with Rolfe that ill-fated voyage
to England, and Rolfe loved him for her sake and for his own. “I thought
you at Orapax, Nantauquas!” he exclaimed.

“I was there, my brother,” said the Indian, and his voice was sweet,
deep, and grave, like that of his sister. “But Opechancanough would go
to Uttamussac, to the temple and the dead kings. I lead his war parties
now, and I came with him. Opechancanough is within the lodge. He asks
that my brother and Captain Percy come to him there.”

He lifted the mat for us, and followed us into the lodge. There was the
usual winding entrance, with half a dozen mats to be lifted one after
the other, but at last we came to the central chamber and to the man we
sought.

He sat beside a small fire burning redly in the twilight of the room.
The light shone now upon the feathers in his scalp lock, now upon the
triple row of pearls around his neck, now upon knife and tomahawk in his
silk grass belt, now on the otterskin mantle hanging from his shoulder
and drawn across his knees. How old he was no man knew. Men said that he
was older than Powhatan, and Powhatan was very old when he died. But
he looked a man in the prime of life; his frame was vigorous, his skin
unwrinkled, his eyes bright and full. When he rose to welcome us, and
Nantauquas stood beside him, there seemed not a score of years between
them.

The matter upon which we had come was not one that brooked delay. We
waited with what patience we might until his long speech of welcome was
finished, when, in as few words as possible, Rolfe laid before him our
complaint against the Paspaheghs. The Indian listened; then said, in
that voice that always made me think of some cold, still, bottomless
pool lying black beneath overhanging rocks: “My brothers may go in
peace. The Paspaheghs have washed off the black paint. If my brothers go
to the village, they will find the peace pipe ready for their smoking.”

Rolfe and I stared at each other. “I have sent messengers,” continued
the Emperor. “I have told the Paspaheghs of my love for the white man,
and of the goodwill the white man bears the Indian. I have told them
that Nemattanow was a murderer, and that his death was just. They are
satisfied. Their village is as still as this beast at my feet.” He
pointed downward to a tame panther crouched against his moccasins. I
thought it an ominous comparison.

Involuntarily we looked at Nantauquas. “It is true,” he said. “I am
but come from the village of the Paspaheghs. I took them the word of
Opechancanough.”

“Then, since the matter is settled, we may go home,” I remarked, rising
as I spoke. “We could, of course, have put down the Paspaheghs with one
hand, giving them besides a lesson which they would not soon forget, but
in the kindness of our hearts toward them and to save ourselves trouble
we came to Opechancanough. For his aid in this trifling business the
Governor gives him thanks.”

A smile just lit the features of the Indian. It was gone in a moment.
“Does not Opechancanough love the white men?” he said. “Some day he will
do more than this for them.”

We left the lodge and the dark Emperor within it, got to horse, and
quitted the village, with its painted people, yellowing mulberries, and
blood-red gum trees. Nantauquas went with us, keeping pace with Rolfe's
horse, and giving us now and then, in his deep musical voice, this or
that bit of woodland news. At the block house we found confirmation of
the Emperor's statement. An embassy from the Paspaheghs had come with
presents, and the peace pipe had been smoked. The spies, too, brought
news that all war-like preparations had ceased in the village. It
had sunk once more into a quietude befitting the sleepy, dreamy, hazy
weather.

Rolfe and I held a short consultation. All appeared safe, but there was
the possibility of a ruse. At the last it seemed best that he, who
by virtue of his peculiar relations with the Indians was ever our
negotiator, should remain with half our troop at the block house, while
I reported to the Governor. So I left him, and Nantauquas with him, and
rode back to Jamestown, reaching the town some hours sooner than I was
expected.

It was after nooning when I passed through the gates of the palisade,
and an hour later when I finished my report to the Governor. When he at
last dismissed me, I rode quickly down the street toward the minister's
house. As I passed the guest house, I glanced up at the window from
which, at daybreak, the Italian had looked down upon me. No one looked
out now; the window was closely shuttered, and at the door beneath my
lord's French rascals were conspicuously absent. A few yards further on
I met my lord face to face, as he emerged from a lane that led down to
the river. At sight of me he started violently, and his hand went to his
mouth. I slightly bent my head, and rode on past him. At the gate of the
churchyard, a stone's throw from home, I met Master Jeremy Sparrow.

“Well met!” he exclaimed. “Are the Indians quiet?”

“For the nonce. How is your sick man?”

“Very well,” he answered gravely. “I closed his eyes two hours ago.”

“He's dead, then,” I said. “Well, he 's out of his troubles, and hath
that advantage over the living. Have you another call, that you travel
from home so fast?”

“Why, to tell the truth,” he replied, “I could not but feel uneasy when
I learned just now of this commotion amongst the heathen. You must know
best, but I should not have thought it a day for madam to walk in the
woods; so I e'en thought I would cross the neck and bring her home.”

“For madam to walk in the woods?” I said slowly. “So she walks there?
With whom?”

“With Diccon and Angela,” he answered. “They went before the sun was
an hour high, so Goodwife Allen says. I thought that you--” “No,” I
told him. “On the contrary, I left command that she should not venture
outside the garden. There are more than Indians abroad.”

I was white with anger; but besides anger there was fear in my heart.

“I will go at once and bring her home,” I said. As I spoke, I happened
to glance toward the fort and the shipping in the river beyond.
Something seemed wrong with the prospect. I looked again, and saw what
hated and familiar object was missing.

“Where is the Santa Teresa?” I demanded, the fear at my heart tugging
harder.

“She dropped downstream this morning. I passed her as I came up from
Archer's Hope, awhile ago. She's anchored in midstream off the big
spring. Why did she go?”

We looked each other in the eyes, and each read the thought that neither
cared to put into words.

“You can take the brown mare,” I said, speaking lightly because my heart
was as heavy as lead, “and we'll ride to the forest. It is all right, I
dare say. Doubtless we'll find her garlanding herself with the grape, or
playing with the squirrels, or asleep on the red leaves, with her head
in Angela's lap.”

“Doubtless,” he said. “Don't lose time. I'll saddle the mare and
overtake you in two minutes.”



CHAPTER XIV IN WHICH WE SEEK A LOST LADY


BESIDE the minister and myself, nothing human moved in the crimson
woods. Blue haze was there, and the steady drift of colored leaves, and
the sunshine freely falling through bared limbs, but no man or woman.
The fallen leaves rustled as the deer passed, the squirrels chattered
and the foxes barked, but we heard no sweet laughter or ringing song.

We found a bank of moss, and lying upon it a chaplet of red-brown oak
leaves; further on, the mint beside a crystal streamlet had been trodden
underfoot; then, flung down upon the brown earth beneath some pines, we
came upon a long trailer of scarlet vine. Beyond was a fairy hollow, a
cuplike depression, curtained from the world by the red vines that hung
from the trees upon its brim, and carpeted with the gold of a great
maple; and here Fear became a giant with whom it was vain to wrestle.

There had been a struggle in the hollow. The curtain of vines was
torn, the boughs of a sumach bent and broken, the fallen leaves groun
underfoot. In one place there was blood upon the leaves.

The forest seemed suddenly very quiet,--quite soundless save for the
beating of our hearts. On every side opened red and yellow ways, sunny
glades, labyrinthine paths, long aisles, all dim with the blue haze like
the cloudy incense in stone cathedrals, but nothing moved in them save
the creatures of the forest. Without the hollow there was no sign. The
leaves looked undisturbed, or others, drifting down, had hidden any
marks there might have been; no footprints, no broken branches, no token
of those who had left the hollow. Down which of the painted ways had
they gone, and where were they now?

Sparrow and I sat our horses, and stared now down this alley, now down
that, into the blue that closed each vista.

“The Santa Teresa is just off the big spring,” he said at last. “She
must have dropped down there in order to take in water quietly.”

“The man that came upon her is still in town,--or was an hour agone,” I
replied.

“Then she has n't sailed yet,” he said.

In the distance something grew out of the blue mist. I had not lived
thirteen years in the woodland to be dim of sight or dull of hearing.

“Some one is coming,” I announced. “Back your horse into this clump of
sumach.”

The sumach grew thick, and was draped, moreover, with some broad-leafed
vine. Within its covert we could see with small danger of being seen,
unless the approaching figure should prove to be that of an Indian. It
was not an Indian; it was my Lord Carnal. He came on slowly, glancing
from side to side, and pausing now and then as if to listen. He was so
little of a woodsman that he never looked underfoot.

Sparrow touched my arm and pointed down a glade at right angles with
the path my lord was pursuing. Up this glade there was coming toward
us another figure,--a small black figure that moved swiftly, looking
neither to the right nor to the left.

Black Lamoral stood like a stone; the brown mare, too, had learned what
meant a certain touch upon her shoulder. Sparrow and I, with small
shame for our eavesdropping, bent to our saddlebows and looked sideways
through tiny gaps in the crimson foliage.

My lord descended one side of the hollow, his heavy foot bringing down
the dead leaves and loose earth; the Italian glided down the opposite
side, disturbing the economy of the forest as little as a snake would
have done.

“I thought I should never meet you,” growled my lord. “I thought I had
lost you and her and myself. This d-d red forest and this blue haze are
enough to”--He broke off with an oath.

“I came as fast as I could,” said the other. His voice was strange, thin
and dreamy, matching his filmy eyes and his eternal, very faint smile.
“Your poor physician congratulates your lordship upon the success that
still attends you. Yours is a fortunate star, my lord.”

“Then you have her safe?” cried my lord.

“Three miles from here, on the river bank, is a ring of pines, in which
the trees grow so thick that it is always twilight. Ten years ago a man
was murdered there, and Sir Thomas Dale chained the murderer to the tree
beneath which his victim was buried, and left him to perish of hunger
and thirst. That is the tale they tell at Jamestown. The wood is said
to be haunted by murdered and murderer, and no one enters it or comes
nearer to it than he can avoid: which makes it an excellent resort for
those whom the dead cannot scare. The lady is there, my lord, with your
four knaves to guard her. They do not know that the gloom and quiet of
the place are due to more than nature.”

My lord began to laugh. Either he had been drinking, or the success of
his villainy had served for wine. “You are a man in a thousand, Nicolo!”
 he said. “How far above or below the ship is this fortunate wood?”

“Just opposite, my lord.”

“Can a boat land easily?”

“A creek runs through the wood to the river. There needs but the
appointed signal from the bank, and a boat from the Santa Teresa can be
rowed up the stream to the very tree beneath which the lady sits.”

My lord's laughter rang out again. “You're a man in ten thousand,
Nicolo! Nicolo, the bridegroom's in town.”

“Back so soon?” said the Italian. “Then we must change your lordship's
plan. With him on the ground, you can no longer wait until nightfall to
row downstream to the lady and the Santa Teresa. He'll come to look for
her.”

“Ay he'll come to look for her, curse him!” echoed my lord.

“Do you think the dead will scare him?” continued the Italian.

“No, I don't!” answered my lord, with an oath. “I would he were among
them! An I could have killed him before I went”--

“I had devised a way to do it long ago, had not your lordship's
conscience been so tender. And yet, before now, our enemies--yours and
mine, my lord--have met with sudden and mysterious death. Men stared,
but they ended by calling it a dispensation of Providence.” He broke
off to laugh with silent, hateful laughter, as mirthful as the grin of a
death's-head.

“I know, I know!” said my lord impatiently. “We are not overnice,
Nicolo. But between me and those who then stood in my way there had
passed no challenge. This is my mortal foe, through whose heart I would
drive my sword. I would give my ruby to know whether he's in the town or
in the forest.”

“He's in the forest,” I said.

Black Lamoral and the brown mare were beside them before either moved
hand or foot, or did aught but stare and stare, as though men and horses
had risen from the dead. All the color was gone from my lord's face,--it
looked white, drawn, and pinched; as for his companion, his countenance
did not change,--never changed, I believe,--but the trembling of the
feather in his hat was not caused by the wind.

Jeremy Sparrow bent down from his saddle, seized the Italian under the
armpits, and swung him clean from the ground up to the brown mare's
neck. “Divinity and medicine,” he said genially, “soul healer and body
poisoner, we'll ride double for a time,” and proceeded to bind the
doctor's hands with his own scarf. The creature of venom before him
writhed and struggled, but the minister's strength was as the strength
of ten, and the minister's hand held him down. By this I was off Black
Lamoral and facing my lord. The color had come back to his lip and
cheek, and the flash to his eye. His hand went to his sword hilt.

“I shall not draw mine, my lord,” I told him. “I keep troth.”

He stared at me with a frown that suddenly changed into a laugh, forced
and unnatural enough. “Then go thy ways, and let me go mine!” he cried.
“Be complaisant, worthy captain of trainbands and Burgess from a dozen
huts! The King and I will make it worth your while.”

“I will not draw my sword upon you,” I replied, “but I will try a fall
with you,” and I seized him by the wrist.

He was a good wrestler as he was a good swordsman, but, with bitter
anger in my heart and a vision of the haunted wood before my eyes, I
think I could have wrestled with Hercules and won. Presently I threw
him, and, pinning him down with my knee upon his breast, cried to
Sparrow to cut the bridle reins from Black Lamoral and throw them to me.
Though he had the Italian upon his hands, he managed to obey. With my
free hand and my teeth I drew a thong about my lord's arms and bound
them to his sides; then took my knee from his chest and my hand from his
throat, and rose to my feet. He rose too with one spring. He was very
white, and there was foam on his lips.

“What next, captain?” he demanded thickly. “Your score is mounting up
rather rapidly. What next?”

“This,” I replied, and with the other thong fastened him, despite his
struggles, to the young maple beneath which we had wrestled. When the
task was done, I first drew his sword from its jeweled scabbard and laid
it on the ground at his feet, and then cut the leather which restrained
his arms, leaving him only tied to the tree. “I am not Sir Thomas Dale,”
 I said, “and therefore I shall not gag you and leave you bound for an
indefinite length of time, to contemplate a grave that you thought
to dig. One haunted wood is enough for one county. Your lordship will
observe that I have knotted your bonds in easy reach of your hands, the
use of which I have just restored to you. The knot is a peculiar one;
an Indian taught it to me. If you set to work at once, you will get it
untied before nightfall. That you may not think it the Gordian knot and
treat it as such, I have put your sword where you can get it only when
you

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2807