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.