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they been withdrawn too roughly.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?