CHAPTER XI IN WHICH I MEET AN ITALIAN DOCTOR
THE summer slipped away, and autumn came, with the purple of the grapeand the yellowing corn, the nuts within the forest, and the return ofthe countless wild fowl to the marshes and reedy river banks, and stillI stayed in Jamestown, and my wife with me, and still the Santa Teresarode at anchor in the river below the fort. If the man whom she broughtknew that by tarrying in Virginia he risked his ruin with the King, yet,with a courage worthy of a better cause, he tarried.
Now and then ships came in, but they were small, belated craft. Themost had left England before the sailing of the Santa Teresa; the rest,private ventures, trading for clapboard or sassafras, knew nothing ofcourt affairs. Only the Sea Flower, sailing from London a fortnightafter the Santa Teresa, and much delayed by adverse winds, brought aletter from the deputy treasurer to Yeardley and the Council. FromRolfe I learned its contents. It spoke of the stir that was made by thedeparture from the realm of the King's favorite. "None know where hehath gone. The King looks dour; 't is hinted that the privy council areas much at sea as the rest of the world; my Lord of Buckingham saithnothing, but his following--which of late hath somewhat decayed--is soincreased that his antechambers cannot hold the throngs that come towait upon him. Some will have it that my Lord Carnal hath fled thekingdom to escape the Tower; others, that the King hath sent him on amission to the King of Spain about this detested Spanish match; others,that the gadfly hath stung him and he is gone to America,--to search forRaleigh's gold mine, maybe. This last most improbable; but if 't is so,and he should touch at Virginia, receive him with all honor. If indeedhe is not out of favor, the Company may find in him a powerful friend;of powerful enemies, God knows, there is no lack!"
Thus the worthy Master Ferrar. And at the bottom of the letter, amongother news of city and court, mention was made of the disappearance of award of the King's, the Lady Jocelyn Leigh. Strict search had been made,but the unfortunate lady had not been found. "'T is whispered that shehath killed herself; also, that his Majesty had meant to give herin marriage to my Lord Carnal. But that all true love and virtue andconstancy have gone from the age, one might conceive that the saidlord had but fled the court for a while, to indulge his grief in somesolitude of hill and stream and shady vale,--the lost lady being rightworthy of such dole."
In sooth she was, but my lord was not given to such fashion of mourning.
The summer passed, and I did nothing. What was there I could do? I hadwritten by the Due Return to Sir Edwyn, and to my cousin, the Earlof Northumberland. The King hated Sir Edwyn as he hated tobacco andwitchcraft. "Choose the devil, but not Sir Edwyn Sandys!" had been hispassionate words to the Company the year before. A certain fifth ofNovember had despoiled my Lord of Northumberland of wealth, fame, andinfluence. Small hope there was in those two. That the Governor andCouncil, remembering old dangers shared, wished me well I did not doubt,but that was all. Yeardley had done all he could do, more than most menwould have dared to do, in procuring this delay. There was no furtherhelp in him; nor would I have asked it. Already out of favor with theWarwick faction, he had risked enough for me and mine. I could not fleewith my wife to the Indians, exposing her, perhaps, to a death byfierce tortures; moreover, Opechancanough had of late strangely taken toreturning to the settlements those runaway servants and fugitives fromjustice which before we had demanded from him in vain. If even it hadbeen possible to run the gauntlet of the Indian villages, war parties,and hunting bands, what would have been before us but endless forest anda winter which for us would have had no spring? I could not see her dieof hunger and cold, or by the teeth of the wolves. I could not do what Ishould have liked to do,--take, single-handed, that King's ship withits sturdy crew and sail with her south and ever southwards, before usnothing more formidable than Spanish ships, and beyond them blue waters,spice winds, new lands, strange islands of the blest.
There seemed naught that I could do, naught that she could do. Our Fatehad us by the hands, and held us fast. We stood still, and the days cameand went like dreams.
While the Assembly was in session I had my part to act as Burgess frommy hundred. Each day I sat with my fellows in the church, facing theGovernor in his great velvet chair, the Council on either hand, andlistened to the droning of old Twine, the clerk, like the droning of thebees without the window; to the chant of the sergeant-at-arms; to longand windy discourses from men who planted better than they spoke; toremarks by the Secretary, witty, crammed with Latin and traveled talk;to the Governor's slow, weighty words. At Weyanoke we had had troublewith the Indians. I was one who loved them not and had fought themwell, for which reason the hundred chose me its representative. In theAssembly it was my part to urge a greater severity toward those ournatural enemies, a greater watchfulness on our part, the need forpalisades and sentinels, the danger that lay in their acquisition offirearms, which, in defiance of the law, men gave them in exchange forworthless Indian commodities. This Indian business was the chief matterbefore the Assembly. I spoke when I thought speech was needed, and spokestrongly; for my heart foreboded that which was to come upon us too soonand too surely. The Governor listened gravely, nodding his head;Master Pory, too, the Cape Merchant, and West were of my mind; but theremainder were besotted by their own conceit, esteeming the very name ofEnglishman sentinel and palisade enough, or trusting in the smoothwords and vows of brotherhood poured forth so plentifully by that redApollyon, Opechancanough.
When the day's work was done, and we streamed out of the church,--theGovernor and Council first, the rest of us in order,--it was to findas often as not a red and black figure waiting for us among the graves.Sometimes it joined itself to the Governor, sometimes to Master Pory;sometimes the whole party, save one, went off with it to the guesthouse, there to eat, drink, and make merry.
If Virginia and all that it contained, save only that jewel of whichit had robbed the court, were out of favor with the King's minion, heshowed it not. Perhaps he had accepted the inevitable with a good grace;perhaps it was but his mode of biding his time; but he had shiftedinto that soldierly frankness of speech and manner, that genial,hail-fellow-well-met air, behind which most safely hides a villain'smind. Two days after that morning behind the church, he had removedhimself, his French valets, and his Italian physician from theGovernor's house to the newly finished guest house. Here he lived, cockof the walk, taking his ease in his inn, elbowing out all guests savethose of his own inviting. If, what with his open face and his openhand, his dinners and bear-baitings and hunting parties, his talesof the court and the wars, his half hints as to the good he might doVirginia with the King, extending even to the lightening of the tax uponour tobacco and the prohibition of the Spanish import, his known richesand power, and the unknown height to which they might attain if his starat court were indeed in the ascendant,--if with these things he slowly,but surely, won to his following all save a very few of those I hadthought my fast friends, it was not a thing marvelous or withoutprecedent. Upon his side was good that might be seen and handled; onmine was only a dubious right and a not at all dubious danger. I do notthink it plagued me much. The going of those who had it in their heartto wish to go left me content, and for those who fawned upon him fromthe first, or for the rabble multitude who flung up their caps and ranat his heels, I cared not a doit. There were still Rolfe and West andthe Governor, Jeremy Sparrow and Diccon.
My lord and I met, perforce, in the street, at the Governor's house,in church, on the river, in the saddle. If we met in the presence ofothers, we spoke the necessary formal words of greeting or leave-taking,and he kept his countenance; if none were by, off went the mask. Theman himself and I looked each other in the eyes and passed on. Once weencountered on a late evening among the graves, and I was not alone.Mistress Percy had been restless, and had gone, despite the minister'sprotests, to sit upon the river bank. When I returned from the assemblyand found her gone, I went to fetch her. A storm was rolling slowly up.Returning the long way through the churchyard, we came upon him
sittingbeside a sunken grave, his knees drawn up to meet his chin, his eyesgloomily regardful of the dark broad river, the unseen ocean, andthe ship that could not return for weeks to come. We passed him insilence,--I with a slight bow, she with a slighter curtsy. An hourlater, going down the street in the dusk of the storm, I ran against Dr.Lawrence Bohun. "Don't stop me!" he panted. "The Italian doctor is awayin the woods gathering simples, and they found my Lord Carnal in a fitamong the graves, half an hour agone." My lord was bled, and the nextmorning went hunting.
The lady whom I had married abode with me in the minister's house, heldher head high, and looked the world in the face. She seldom went fromhome, but when she did take the air it was with pomp and circumstance.When that slender figure and exquisite face, set off by as rich apparelas could be bought from a store of finery brought in by the Southampton,and attended by a turbaned negress and a serving man who had been to thewars, and had escaped the wheel by the skin of his teeth, appeared inthe street, small wonder if a greater commotion arose than had beensince the days of the Princess Pocahontas and her train of duskybeauties. To this fairer, more imperial dame gold lace doffed itshat and made its courtliest bow, and young planters bent to theirsaddlebows, while the common folk nudged and stared and had theirsay. The beauty, the grace, the pride, that deigned small responseto well-meant words,--all that would have been intolerable in plainMistress Percy, once a waiting maid, then a piece of merchandise to besold for one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco, then the wife of apoor gentleman, was pardoned readily enough to the Lady Jocelyn Leigh,the ward of the King, the bride to be (so soon as the King's Courtof High Commission should have snapped in twain an inconvenient andill-welded fetter) of the King's minion.
So she passed like a splendid vision through the street perhaps once aweek. On Sundays she went with me to church, and the people looked ather instead of at the minister, who rebuked them not, because his eyeswere upon the same errand.
The early autumn passed and the leaves began to turn, and still allthings were as they had been, save that the Assembly sat no longer. Myfellow Burgesses went back to their hundreds, but my house at Weyanokeknew me no more. In a tone that was apologetic, but firm, the Governorhad told me that he wished my company at Jamestown. I was pleased enoughto stay, I assured him,--as indeed I was. At Weyanoke, the thunderboltwould fall without warning; at Jamestown, at least I could see, comingup the river, the sails of the Due Return or what other ship the Companymight send.
The color of the leaves deepened, and there came a season of a beautysingular and sad, like a smile left upon the face of the dead summer.Over all things, near and far, the forest where it met the sky, thenearer woods, the great river, and the streams that empty into it,there hung a blue haze, soft and dream-like. The forest became a paintedforest, with an ever thinning canopy and an ever thickening carpet ofcrimson and gold; everywhere there was a low rustling underfoot and aslow rain of color. It was neither cold nor hot, but very quiet, and thebirds went by like shadows,--a listless and forgetful weather, in whichwe began to look, every hour of every day, for the sail which we knew weshould not see for weeks to come.
Good Master Bucke tarried with Master Thorpe at Henricus, recruitinghis strength, and Jeremy Sparrow preached in his pulpit, slept in hischamber, and worked in his garden. This garden ran down to the greenbank of the river; and here, sitting idly by the stream, her chin in herhand and her dark eyes watching the strong, free sea birds as they cameand went, I found my wife one evening, as I came from the fort, wherehad been some martial exercise. Thirty feet away Master Jeremy Sparrowworked among the dying flowers, and hummed:--
"There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies grow."
He and I had agreed that when I must needs be absent he should be withincall of her; for I believed my Lord Carnal very capable of intrudinghimself into her presence. That house and garden, her movements andmine, were spied upon by his foreign hirelings, I knew perfectly well.
As I sat down upon the bank at her feet, she turned to me with a suddenpassion. "I am weary of it all!" she cried. "I am tired of being pent upin this house and garden, and of the watch you keep upon me. And if I goabroad, it is worse! I hate all those shameless faces that stare at meas if I were in the pillory. I am pilloried before you all, and I findthe experience sufficiently bitter. And when I think that that man whomI hate, hate, hate, breathes the air that I breathe, it stifles me! If Icould fly away like those birds, if I could only be gone from this placefor even a day!"
"I would beg leave to take you home, to Weyanoke," I said after a pause,"but I cannot go and leave the field to him."
"And I cannot go," she answered. "I must watch for that ship and thatKing's command that my Lord Carnal thinks potent enough to make me hiswife. King's commands are strong, but a woman's will is stronger. Atthe last I shall know what to do. But now why may I not take Angela andcross that strip of sand and go into the woods on the other side? Theyare so fair and strange,--all red and yellow,--and they look very stilland peaceful. I could walk in them, or lie down under the trees andforget awhile, and they are not at all far away." She looked at meeagerly.
"You could not go alone," I told her. "There would be danger in that.But to-morrow, if you choose, I and Master Sparrow and Diccon will takeyou there. A day in the woods is pleasant enough, and will do none ofus harm. Then you may wander as you please, fill your arms with coloredleaves, and forget the world. We will watch that no harm comes nigh you,but otherwise you shall not be disturbed."
She broke into delighted laughter. Of all women the most steadfast ofsoul, her outward moods were as variable as a child's. "Agreed!" shecried. "You and the minister and Diccon Demon shall lay your musketsacross your knees, and Angela shall witch you into stone with her old,mad, heathen charms. And then--and then--I will gather more gold thanhad King Midas; I will dance with the hamadryads; I will find out Oberonand make Titania jealous!"
"I do not doubt that you could do so," I said, as she sprang to herfeet, childishly eager and radiantly beautiful.
I rose to go in with her, for it was supper time, but in a momentchanged my mind, and resumed my seat on the bank of turf. "Do you goin," I said. "There's a snake near by, in those bushes below the bank.I'll kill the creature, and then I'll come to supper."
When she was gone, I walked to where, ten feet away, the bank dippedto a clump of reeds and willows planted in the mud on the brink of theriver. Dropping on my knees I leaned over, and, grasping a man by thecollar, lifted him from the slime where he belonged to the bank besideme.
It was my Lord Carnal's Italian doctor that I had so fished up. I hadseen him before, and had found in his very small, mean figure clad allin black, and his narrow face with malignant eyes, and thin white lipsdrawn tightly over gleaming teeth, something infinitely repulsive,sickening to the sight as are certain reptiles to the touch.
"There are no simples or herbs of grace to be found amongst reeds andhalf-drowned willows," I said. "What did so learned a doctor look for inso unlikely a place?"
He shrugged his shoulders and made play with his clawlike hands, as ifhe understood me not. It was a lie, for I knew that he and the Englishtongue were sufficiently acquainted. I told him as much, and he shotat me a most venomous glance, but continued to shrug, gesticulate, andjabber in Italian. At last I saw nothing better to do than to take him,still by the collar, to the edge of the garden next the churchyard, andwith the toe of my boot to send him tumbling among the graves. I watchedhim pick himself up, set his attire to rights, and go away in thegathering dusk, winding in and out among the graves; and then I went into supper, and told Mistress Percy that the snake was dead.