The Heart

With that she bade my brother John get some cool water from the

jailer, and she bathed my head and arranged my bandages with that

same skill which she had showed at the time when I was bruised by

the mad horse, and my brother looked on as if only half pleased, yet

full of pity. And Catherine, as she bathed my head, told me how

Major Beverly and Sir Humphrey were yet confined on shipboard, and

Dick Barry was in the prison not far from me, and Nick and Ralph

Drake were in hiding, but my Lord Estes was scot-free on account of

his relationship to Governor Culpeper and had been to Drake Hill,

but Mary would not see him. And she said, furthermore, that her

grandmother did not know that I was to be set in the stocks, and

they dared not tell her, as she was grown so feeble since the

riot--at one time inveighing against me for my disloyalty, and

saying that I should never have Mary, though I was cleared of my

disgrace and no more a convict, and at another time weeping like a

child over her poor Harry, who had already suffered so much and was

now in prison.

Catherine in that way, which none but a woman hath, since it

pertains both to love and authority, brought me to my senses, and I

grew both brave and shamed at the same time, and yet after she had

gone, never was anything like the sting of that ignominy which was

prepared for me on the morrow. Many a time had I seen men in the

stocks, and passed them by with no ridicule, for that, it seemed to

me, belonged to the same class of folk as the culprits, but with a

sort of contempt which held them as less than men and below pity

even. The thought that some day I, too, was to sit there, had never

entered my head. I looked at my two feet upholding the coverlid, and

pictured to myself how they would look protruding from the boards of

the stocks. I recalled the faces of all I had ever seen therein, and

wondered whether I would look like this or that one. I remembered

seeing them pelted by mischievous boys, and as the dusk thickened,

it seemed alive with jeering faces and my ears rang with jibes. I

said to myself that now Mary Cavendish was farther from me than ever

before. Some dignity of wretchedness there might be in the fate of a

convict condemned unjustly, but none in the fate of a man who sat in

the stocks for all the people to gaze and laugh at.