Lady Enville sat fanning herself in smiling complacency, No flattery could be too transparent to please her.
“I pray your Lordship, is any news come touching Sir Richard Grenville, and the plantation which he strave to make in the Queen’s Highness’ country of Virginia?” asked Sir Thomas.
Barbara listened again with interest. Sir Richard Grenville was a Devonshire knight, and a kinsman of Sir Arthur Basset.
“Ay,—Roanoke, he called it, after the Indian name. Why, it did well but for a time, and then went to wrack. But I do hear that he purposeth for to go forth yet again, trusting this time to speed better.”
“What good in making plantations in Virginia?” demanded Jack, loftily. “A wild waste, undwelt in save by savages, and many weeks’ voyage from this country,—what gentleman would ever go to dwell there?”
“May-be,” said Lord Strange thoughtfully, “when the husbandmen that shall go first have made it somewhat less rough, gentlemen may be found to go and dwell there.”
“Why, Jack, lad! This country is not all the world,” observed his father.
“’Tis all of it worth anything, Sir,” returned insular Jack.
“Thy broom sweepeth clean, Jack,” responded Lord Strange. “What, is nought worth in France, nor in Holland,—let be the Emperor’s dominions, and Spain, and Italy?”
“They be all foreigners, my Lord. And what better are foreigners than savages? They be all Papists, to boot.”