In which I Meet an Italian Doctor
The summer slipped away, and autumn came, with the purple of the grape
and the yellowing corn, the nuts within the forest, and the return of
the countless wild fowl to the marshes and reedy river banks, and still
I stayed in Jamestown, and my wife with me, and still the _Santa Teresa_
rode at anchor in the river below the fort. If the man whom she brought
knew 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. The most
had left England before the sailing of the _Santa Teresa_; the rest,
private ventures, trading for clapboard or sassafras, knew nothing of
court affairs. Only the _Sea Flower_, sailing from London a fortnight
after the _Santa Teresa_, and much delayed by adverse winds, brought a
letter from the deputy treasurer to Yeardley and the Council. From Rolfe
I learned its contents. It spoke of the stir that was made by the
departure from the realm of the King's favourite. "None know where he
hath gone. The King looks _dour_; 'tis hinted that the privy council are
as much at sea as the rest of the world; my Lord of Buckingham saith
nothing, but his following--which of late hath somewhat decayed--is so
increased that his antechambers cannot hold the throngs that come to
wait upon him. Some will have it that my Lord Carnal hath fled the
kingdom to escape the Tower; others, that the King hath sent him on a
mission 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 for
Raleigh's gold mine, maybe. This last most improbable; but if 'tis so,
and he should touch at Virginia, receive him with all honour. If,
indeed, he is not out of favour, 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, among
other news of city and court, mention was made of the disappearance of a
ward of the King's, the Lady Jocelyn Leigh. Strict search had been made,
but the unfortunate lady had not been found. "'Tis whispered that she
hath killed herself; also, that his Majesty had meant to give her in
marriage to my Lord Carnal. But that all true love and virtue and
constancy have gone from the age, one might conceive that the said lord
had but fled the court for a while, to indulge his grief in some
solitude of hill and stream and shady vale,--the lost lady being right
worthy 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 had
written by the _Due Return_ to Sir Edwyn, and to my cousin, the Earl of
Northumberland. The King hated Sir Edwyn as he hated tobacco and
witchcraft. "Choose the devil, but not Sir Edwyn Sandys!" had been his
passionate words to the Company the year before. A certain fifth of
November had despoiled my Lord of Northumberland of wealth, fame, and
influence. Small hope there was in those two. That the Governor and
Council, 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 men would have dared to do, in procuring this delay. There was no
further help in him; nor would I have asked it. Already out of favour
with the Warwick faction, he had risked enough for me and mine. I could
not flee with my wife to the Indians, exposing her, perhaps, to a death
by fierce tortures; moreover, Opechancanough had of late strangely taken
to returning to the settlements those runaway servants and fugitives
from justice which before we had demanded from him in vain. If even it
had been possible to run the gauntlet of the Indian villages, war
parties, and hunting bands, what would have been before us but endless
forest and a winter which for us would have had no spring? I could not
see her die of hunger and cold, or by the teeth of the wolves. I could
not do what I should have liked to do,--take, single-handed, that King's
ship with its sturdy crew and sail with her south and ever southwards,
before us nothing 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 Fate
had us by the hands, and held us fast. We stood still, and the days came
and went like dreams.
While the Assembly was in session I had my part to act as Burgess from
my hundred. Each day I sat with my fellows in the church, facing the
Governor in his great velvet chair, the Council on either hand, and
listened to the droning of old Twine, the clerk, like the droning of the
bees without the window; to the chant of the sergeant-at-arms; to long
and windy discourses from men who planted better than they spoke; to
remarks by the Secretary, witty, crammed with Latin and travelled talk;
to the Governor's slow, weighty words. At Weyanoke we had had trouble
with the Indians. I was one who loved them not and had fought them well,
for which reason the hundred chose me its representative. In the
Assembly it was my part to urge a greater severity toward those our
natural enemies, a greater watchfulness on our part, the need for
palisades and sentinels, the danger that lay in their acquisition of
fire-arms, which, in defiance of the law, men gave them in exchange for
worthless Indian commodities. This Indian business was the chief matter
before the Assembly. I spoke when I thought speech was needed, and spoke
strongly; for my heart foreboded that which was to come upon us too soon
and too surely. The Governor listened gravely, nodding his head; Master
Pory, too, the Cape Merchant, and West were of my mind; but the
remainder were besotted by their own conceit, esteeming the very name
of Englishman sentinel and palisade enough, or trusting in the smooth
words and vows of brotherhood poured forth so plentifully by that red
Apollyon, Opechancanough.
When the day's work was done, and we streamed out of the church,--the
Governor and Council first, the rest of us in order,--it was to find as
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 guest
house, there to eat, drink, and make merry.
If Virginia and all that it contained, save only that jewel of which it
had robbed the court, were out of favour with the King's minion, he
showed 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 shifted into
that soldierly frankness of speech and manner, that genial,
hail-fellow-well-met air, behind which most safely hides a villain's
mind. Two days after that morning behind the church, he had removed
himself, his French valets, and his Italian physician from the
Governor's house to the newly finished guest house. Here he lived, cock
of the walk, taking his ease in his inn, elbowing out all guests save
those of his own inviting. If, what with his open face and his open
hand, his dinners and bear-baitings and hunting parties, his tales of
the court and the wars, his half hints as to the good he might do
Virginia with the King, extending even to the lightening of the tax upon
our tobacco and the prohibition of the Spanish import, his known riches
and power, and the unknown height to which they might attain if his star
at 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 had
thought my fast friends, it was not a thing marvellous or without
precedent. Upon his side was good that might be seen and handled; on
mine was only a dubious right and a not at all dubious danger. I do not
think it plagued me much. The going of those who had it in their heart
to wish to go left me content, and for those who fawned upon him from
the first, or for the rabble multitude who flung up their caps and ran
at his heels, I cared not a doit. There were still Rolfe and West and
the 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 of
others, we spoke the necessary formal words of greeting or leave-taking,
and he kept his countenance; if none were by, off went the mask. The man
himself and I looked each other in the eyes and passed on. Once we
encountered on a late evening among the graves, and I was not alone.
Mistress Percy had been restless, and had gone, despite the minister's
protests, to sit upon the river bank. When I returned from the assembly
and 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 sitting
beside a sunken grave, his knees drawn up to meet his chin, his eyes
gloomily regardful of the dark broad river, the unseen ocean, and the
ship that could not return for weeks to come. We passed him in
silence,--I with a slight bow, she with a slighter curtsy. An hour
later, 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 away
in the woods gathering simples, and they found my Lord Carnal in a fit
among the graves, half an hour agone." My lord was bled, and the next
morning went hunting.
The lady whom I had married abode with me in the minister's house, held
her head high, and looked the world in the face. She seldom went from
home, 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 apparel
as 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 the wars, and had escaped the wheel by the skin of his
teeth, appeared in the street, small wonder if a greater commotion arose
than had been since the days of the Princess Pocahontas and her train of
dusky beauties. To this fairer, more imperial dame gold lace doffed its
hat and made its courtliest bow, and young planters bent to their
saddle-bows, while the common folk nudged and stared and had their say.
The beauty, the grace, the pride, that deigned small response to
well-meant words,--all that would have been intolerable in plain
Mistress Percy, once a waiting maid, then a piece of merchandise to be
sold for one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco, then the wife of a
poor 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 Court of
High Commission should have snapped in twain an inconvenient and
ill-welded fetter) of the King's minion.
So she passed like a splendid vision through the street perhaps once a
week. On Sundays she went with me to church, and the people looked at
her instead of at the minister, who rebuked them not, because his eyes
were upon the same errand.
The early autumn passed and the leaves began to turn, and still all
things were as they had been, save that the Assembly sat no longer. My
fellow-Burgesses went back to their hundreds, but my house at Weyanoke
knew me no more. In a tone that was apologetic, but firm, the Governor
had told me that he wished my company at Jamestown. I was pleased enough
to stay, I assured him,--as indeed I was. At Weyanoke, the thunderbolt
would fall without warning; at Jamestown, at least I could see, coming
up the river, the sails of the _Due Return_, or what other ship the
Company might send.
The colour of the leaves deepened, and there came a season of a beauty
singular 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, the
nearer woods, the great river, and the streams that empty into it, there
hung a blue haze, soft and dream-like. The forest became a painted
forest, with an ever-thinning canopy and an ever-thickening carpet of
crimson and gold; everywhere there was a low rustling underfoot and a
slow rain of colour. It was neither cold nor hot, but very quiet, and
the birds went by like shadows,--a listless and forgetful weather, in
which we began to look, every hour of every day, for the sail which we
knew we should not see for weeks to come.
Good Master Bucke tarried with Master Thorpe at Henricus, recruiting his
strength, and Jeremy Sparrow preached in his pulpit, slept in his
chamber, and worked in his garden. This garden ran down to the green
bank of the river; and here, sitting idly by the stream, her chin in her
hand and her dark eyes watching the strong, free sea birds as they came
and went, I found my wife one evening, as I came from the fort, where
had been some martial exercise. Thirty feet away Master Jeremy Sparrow
worked 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 within
call of her; for I believed my Lord Carnal very capable of intruding
himself into her presence. That house and garden, her movements and
mine, 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 sudden
passion. "I am weary of it all!" she cried. "I am tired of being pent up
in this house and garden, and of the watch you keep upon me. And if I go
abroad, it is worse! I _hate_ all those shameless faces that stare at
me as if I were in the pillory. I _am_ pilloried before you all, and I
find the experience sufficiently bitter. And when I think that that man
whom I hate, hate, hate, breathes the air that I breathe, it stifles me!
If I could fly away like those birds, if I could only be gone from this
place for 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 that
King's command that my Lord Carnal thinks potent enough to make me his
wife. King's commands are strong, but a woman's will is stronger. At the
last I shall know what to do. But now why may I not take Angela and
cross that strip of sand and go into the woods on the other side? They
are so fair and strange,--all red and yellow,--and they look very still
and peaceful. I could walk in them, or lie down under the trees and
forget awhile, and they are not at all far away." She looked at me
eagerly.
"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 take
you there. A day in the woods is pleasant enough, and will do none of us
harm. Then you may wander as you please, fill your arms with coloured
leaves, 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 of
soul, her outward moods were as variable as a child's. "Agreed!" she
cried. "You and the minister and Diccon Demon shall lay your muskets
across your knees, and Angela shall witch you into stone with her old,
mad, heathen charms. And then--and then--I will gather more gold than
had King Midas; I will dance with the hamadryads; I will find out Oberon
and make Titania jealous!"
"I do not doubt that you could do so," I said, as she sprang to her
feet, childishly eager and radiantly beautiful.
I rose to go in with her, for it was supper time, but in a moment
changed my mind, and resumed my seat on the bank of turf. "Do you go
in," 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 dipped to
a clump of reeds and willows planted in the mud on the brink of the
river. Dropping on my knees, I leaned over, and, grasping a man by the
collar, lifted him from the slime where he belonged to the bank beside
me.
It was my Lord Carnal's Italian doctor that I had so fished up. I had
seen him before, and had found in his very small, mean figure, clad all
in black, and his narrow face with malignant eyes, and thin white lips
drawn 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 and
half-drowned willows," I said. "What did so learned a doctor look for in
so unlikely a place?"
He shrugged his shoulders and made play with his clawlike hands, as if
he understood me not. It was a lie, for I knew that he and the English
tongue were sufficiently acquainted. I told him as much, and he shot at
me a most venomous glance, but continued to shrug, gesticulate, and
jabber 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, and
with the toe of my boot to send him tumbling among the graves. I watched
him pick himself up, set his attire to rights, and go away in the
gathering dusk, winding in and out among the graves; and then I went in
to supper, and told Mistress Percy that the snake was dead.