The Heart

Then the black wench burst into tears, and begged in that thick,

sluggishly sweet tongue of hers to know if ever the May dew would

wash her black away, and Mistress Mary answered as seriously as if

she were in the pulpit on the Sabbath day that it would sometime

most surely and she should see her face in the glass as fair as any.

Then the two maids, Mary Cavendish and Cicely Hyde, went into the

house, and left me, as I said before, to wonder at that spirit of

youth which can all in a minute disregard care and anxiety and risk

of death for the play of vanity. But, after all, which be stronger,

wars and rumours of wars or vanity? And which be older, and which

fathered the other?

After the house door had shut behind the maidens, I too went out,

but not to wash my grim man's face in May dew, but rather for a

stroll in the morning air, and the clearing of my wits for

reflection; for much I wondered what course I should take regarding

my discovery of the night before. I went down the road toward

Jamestown, and struck into the path to the wharf, the same that we

had taken the day before, but there were no masts of the Golden Horn

rising among the trees with a surprise of straightness. She had

weighed anchor and sailed away over night, and possibly before. The

more I reflected the more I understood that Mistress Mary Cavendish,

with her ready wit and supply of money through her inheritance from

her mother, might have concocted the scheme of bringing over

ammunition from England to enable us to make a stand against the

government; but the plot in the first of it could not have been hers

alone. Assuredly Ralph Drake was concerned in it, and Sir Humphrey

Hyde, and no one knew how many more. The main part for Mistress Mary

might well have been the furnishing of the powder and shot, for

Ralph Drake was poor, and lived, it was said, by his good luck at

cards; and as for Sir Humphrey Hyde, his mother held the reins in

those soft hands of hers, which would have been sorely bruised had

they been withdrawn too roughly.

I sat me down on a glittering ridge of rock near the river-bank, and

watched the blue run of the water, and twisted the matter this and

that way in my mind, for I was sorely perplexed. Never did I feel as

then the hamper of my position, for a man who was held in such

esteem as I by some and contempt by others, and while having voice

had no authority to maintain it, was neither flesh nor fowl nor

slave nor master. Madam Cavendish treated me in all respects as the

equal of herself and her family--nay, more than that, she

deferred to me in such fashion as I had never seen in her toward any

one, but Catherine treated me ever with iciness of contempt, which I

at that time conceived to be but that transference of blame from her

own self to a scapegoat of wrong-doing which is a resort of ignoble

souls. They will have others not only suffer for their own sin, but

even treat them with the scorn due themselves. And not one man was

there in the colony, excepting perhaps Sir Humphrey Hyde and Parson

Downs and the brothers Nicholas and Richard Barry, which last were

not squeamish, and would have had me as boon companion at Barry

Upper Branch, having been drawn to me by a kindred boldness of

spirit and some little passages which I had had with the Indians,

which be not worth repeating. I being in such a position in the

colony, and considering the fact that Madam Cavendish and Catherine

were staunch loyalists, and would have sent all their tobacco to the

bottom of the salt sea had the king so ordained, and regarded all

disaffection from the royal will as a deadly sin against God and the

Church, as well as the throne, and knowing the danger which Mary

Cavendish ran, I was in a sore quandary. Could I have but gone to

those men whom I conceived to be in the plot, and talked with them

on an equal footing, I would have given my right hand. But I

wondered, and with reason, what hearing they would accord me, and I

wondered how to move in the matter at all without doing harm to

Mistress Mary, yet feared greatly that the non-movement would harm

her more. As I sat there I fell to marvelling anew, as I had

marvelled many times before, at that yielding on the part of the

strong which makes the power of those in authority possible. At the

yielding of the weak we marvel not, but when one sees the bending of

staunch, true men, with muscles of iron and hearts of oak, to

commands which be manifestly against their own best interests, it is

verily beyond understanding, and only to be explained by the working

of those hidden springs of nature which have been in men's hearts

since the creation, moving them along one common road of herding to

one common end. As I sat there I wondered not so much at the plot

which was simply to destroy all the young tobacco plants, that there

be not an over-supply and ruinous prices therefor next year, as at

the fact that the whole colony to a man did not arise and rebel

against the order of the king in that most infamous Navigation Act

which forbade exportation to any place but England, and load their

ships for the Netherlands, and get the full worth of their crops.

Well I knew that some of the burgesses were secretly in favour of

this measure, and why should one man, Governor Culpeper, for the

king, hold for one minute the will of this strong majority in

abeyance?