The Heart's Highway: A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

And verily Mary Cavendish did for a minute seem to blush as she cast a glance at herself in the mirror and saw her marvellous rose of a face, but the next minute the mirror flashed in the grass and her arms were about Cicely Hyde's neck. "'Tis the dearest face in Virginia, Cicely," said she, in her sweet, vehement way, and laid her pink cheek against the other's plain one. And Cicely laughed, and took her face in her two hands and held it away that she might see it.

"What matters it to poor Cicely whether her own face be fair or not, so long as it is dear to thee, and so long as she can see thine!" she cried as passionately as a lad might have done, and I frowned, not with jealousy, but with a curious dislike to such affection from one maid to another, which I could never understand in myself. Had Cicely Hyde had a lover, she would have said that fond speech to him instead of Mary Cavendish, but lover she had none.

But all at once the two maids nudged one another, and turned their faces, all convulsed with merriment, and I looked and saw that the poor little black lass had crept on hands and knees to where the mirror flashed in the grass, and was looking at her face therein with such anxiety as might move one at once to tears and laughter, to see if the dew had washed her white.

But Mary Cavendish ceased all in a minute her mirth, and went up to the black child and took the mirror from her, and said, in the sweetest voice of pity I ever heard, "'Tis not in one May dew nor two, nor perchance in the dews of many years, you can wash your face white, but sometime it will be."

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?

I reasoned it out within myself that one cause might lie in that distrust and suspicion of his neighbour as to his good-will and identical interest with himself which is inborn with every man, and in most cases strengthens with his growth. When a movement of rebellion against authority is on foot, he eyes all askance, and speaks in whispering corners of secrecy, not knowing when he strikes his first blow whether his own brother's hand will be with him against the common tyrant, or against himself.

Were it not for this lamentable quality of the human heart, which will prevent forever the perfect concerting of power to one end, such a giant might be made of one people that it could hold all the world and all the nations thereof at its beck and call. But that cannot be, even in England, which had known and knows now and will know again that division of interest and doubts, every man of his brother's heart, which weaken the arm against the common foe.