"You did see him, just yesterday," insisted Smith.
"He did not look as much like a king as our Powhatan. And he didn't give
me a present. You gave Powhatan a white dog, which Powhatan fed as
himself; but your king gave me nothing, and I am better than your white
dog." He had long since given up counting white men since he was quickly
weary of that task.
Smith could not do anything about that, but he could and did go calling
on the Rolfes, having no idea that Pocahontas considered him long under
the sod. He knew that now as the pet of society in London, she must have
changed, but he had not known how much, and he was impressed with her
formal appearance when he went to Brentford to see her.
"The Lady Rebecca!" he greeted her with a flourishing bow.
Suddenly the Lady Rebecca in her stiff, swishing London costume
vanished, and only a forlorn little maid was left. Her beating heart,
like her frivolous London mood, nearly stopped with pain at this spectre
from the past! There stood the one she had thought dead, come alive,
too late to be alive for her. She who had saved him, and lost him, had
found him too late, once again--or was it? Her heart seemed bare and
wounded, although she was not disillusioned in the stocky figure in the
shabby clothes of this man who was old in his thirties, because he had
lived too many lives in one. His figure was paunchy and his eyes
bloodshot, but she was blind to imperfections in her hero, for she saw
him only in the colors of her caressing brush. He had come true in the
make-believe world where he was the greatest wonder of all for the
little princess, but this boon which she craved most was probably not
for her.
"They told me you were dead," she muttered dully.
She rushed from the room, and it took her hours to compose herself. When
she would have flung her arms about his neck, his cool English eyes had
reproved her, calling her rebellious heart to a halt. For her there
should be retreat from the Captain, who always had everything under
control, including his own heart. Hers was bleeding unstaunched, for a
red woman, when she has given her heart does not take it back. What they
call Indian-giving was not the heart of Pocahontas, for its pulse
measured out time, that of a country and its founder, if not of herself.
She was not aged, pious and resigned like Moses looking into
unobtainable Canaan. She was a young, wild thing, untamed and hopeful
yet.
When she came back she had washed away her hot tears, powdered and
painted her face, trying to match her stiff London clothes. She was like
a bird with its gay feathers taut and drawn, winging away no more ...
unless some merciful human opened a window. She reproached him, looking
as sad as if death was in the house, as it was in her heart.
"They did always tell us that you were dead, and I did not know that you
were not until after I came to England. Only Powhatan did not believe
that you were, and ordered Tacomoco to seek you out because he said your
people always lie so much."
He smiled, silent for once, and she went on hurting him who had hurt her
so much. "You promised Powhatan that what was yours should be his, and
he promised the same to you. You called him yours when you were a
stranger in his country, and now that I am here in yours, I will call
you 'Father'."
Again he thrust her shameless heart back behind her London lady's mask.
"You mustn't do that. You are a king's daughter, and I am a poor man
looking for a boat."
She reproached him yet again. "You were not afraid to go into my
father's country and put fear into all his people but myself." Perfect
love, she knew casteth out fear--with the simple wisdom of a child of a
childish people. "But now you are afraid to let me call you father. I
tell you that I will, and that you shall ever call me your child, and
remember that you and I are of one people, and that we are fellow
countrymen."
"I cannot, Lady Rebecca Rolfe." He, master of every situation put her in
her place in this.
Ah, if one of her could walk demurely down the dull road to "Heacham
Hall," clinging to John Rolfe's arm, and keep on with him to "Varina"
near Powhatan, bearing other descendants for the pride of Rolfe and
Powhatan, but if the other could wing away with Smith going far places!
Tragabigzanda had tried to keep him in chains for herself; Pocahontas
had saved him only to lose him. He was a man belonging to the world, but
to no woman.
She had to be the staid English housewife, not the princess of the wild
woods. As she had her wild dreams of a different way out, she looked
into his sea-faring blue eyes, and found there no response, only respect
for Anglo-Saxon domestic respectability.
"You are the Lady Rebecca, the toast of London."
Toast, that should be a foaming, intoxicating drink, not a staid,
insipid dose. She was a sick woman, but even sicker at heart.
"It is not seemly that a poor explorer be familiar with a lady of your
position."
Position, she would snap her fingers at it! She wanted yesterday in
Virginia fields where the corn tassels tossed in the sunny breeze, or an
impossible dazzling tomorrow, but must take dull today. She was in
Christian London, where the bells in the church spires chimed
monotonously, chastening the savage din in her ears.
She snatched up small Tom who had been gazing at the captain who had
strode out of a story book into the room. They left the two men to their
boasting--Rolfe of his tobacco crop in the new world, Smith of newer
worlds he would set out to conquer.
So John Smith passed out of Pocahontas' life more finally than he had
before, because he went deliberately. The hand of death was definitely
upon her, not upon him, the more so because she scarcely resisted it.
Her Christian resignation, more like that of an elderly saint, than a
youthful worldling now gratified, now confounded her serious husband.
Gone was her gay delight in the adulation of the London populace, and
the frivolity of the court, which he had long since deplored. She had
not minded the late hours, the murky London atmosphere, worsening her
cough; nor the noise of the cobblestone streets, nor the roisterers
beneath their lodgings before, but now she was as weary of London as he
was.
She was meekly ready to accompany him to "Heacham Hall," his family's
seat in Norfolk, where the sunny air seemed to him the healthiest
atmosphere for a cough like hers. While his doubts about mating with a
strange woman were long past, he wanted to set the seal of his family's
approval upon her. Had there been any doubt about that, news of her
London reception had dispelled it.
Sister Pocahontas was not nearly so savage as they had feared, and her
amenability to their tutelage gratified their provincial vanity. She was
willing to learn how primly a Rolfe wife should fold her hands in church
of a Sabbath morning, and tastefully gather roses and stocks from the
flower borders to arrange them in the parlor mantel vases. It was
important too, to sew a fine seam, or mend to the last thread. Adept
needle-women themselves, the Rolfe sisters made a picture in needlepoint
of Pocahontas and little Tom. She would learn how to bake a steak and
kidney pie, or a goodly pound cake as John liked it.
Strange that whatever they subsisted on over there agreed with John and
little Tom, and after a while John decided that nothing else except
Virginia air would revive his ailing wife. She was not acclimated to
this small, neat isle. Only when she rode horseback, as she had longed
to do, reining in beside the trim stable back of the substantial stone
house was there the wild gay vein in her eyes that had ever led him
where she would. Then she had raced away a while from the broken health
and the broken heart.
Soon she was too ill for the rides, and Rolfe arranged passage on
Argall's boat, _The George_, which was embarking from Gravesend. Its
pitiful passenger was immediately on her deathbed, where her resignation
and Christian testimony inspired the beholders: the ministering foreign
women and the men, Argall and Rolfe reading scriptures. She was buried
beneath the chancel at St. George's Church where her dust rests, some
think, out of place.