The Heart

Often one cut a finger, but went on with blood flowing, and their

hair begun to fly loose, and they smeared their faces with their cut

hands, and as for the two black women, they pounced upon those green

plants with fierce swashes of their gleaming knives, and though they

could have sensed little about the true reason for it all, worked

with a fury of savagery which needed no motive only its first

impetus of motion.

Captain Jaynes rode hither and thither striving to keep the mob in

order, and enjoining silence upon them, and now and then lashing out

with his long riding whip, but he had set forces in motion which he

could not stop. Fire and flood and wind and the passions of men,

whether for love or rage, are beyond the leading of them who invoke

them, being the instruments of the gods.

Sir Humphrey Hyde, who was beside me, slashing away at the plants,

whispered: "My God, Harry, how far will this fire which we have

kindled spread?" but not in fear so much as amazement.

And I, bringing down a great ring of the green leaves, replied, and

felt as I spoke as if some other than I had my tongue and my voice: "Maybe in the end, before it hath quite died out, to the destroying

of tyranny and monarchy, and the clearing of the fields for a new

government of equality and freedom."

But Sir Humphrey stared at me.

"Sure," he said, "it can do no more than to force the king to see

that his colony hath grown from infancy to manhood, and hath an arm

to be respected, and compel him to repeal the Navigation Act. What

else, Harry?"

Then I, speaking again as if some other moved my tongue, replied

that none could say what matter a little fire kindleth, but those

that came after us might know the result of that which we that night

begun.

But Sir Humphrey shook his head.

"If but Nat Bacon were alive!" he sighed. "No leader have we, Harry.

Oh, Harry, if thou wert not a convict! Captain Jaynes is sure out of

his element in defending the rights of the oppressed, and should be

on his own quarter-deck with his cutlass in hand and his

rapscallions around him, slaying and robbing, to be in full feather.

Naught can he do here. Lord, hear those women shriek! Why did they

let women come hither, Harry? Sure Nick Barry is in his cups. Not

thus would matters have been were Bacon alive. The women would have

been at home in their beds, and no man in liquor at work, for I

trust not the militia. Would Captain Bacon were alive, as he would

have been, had he not been foully done to death."