Landless rose from his seat, and strode to and fro through the hut. His pulses beat to bursting; there was a tingling at his finger-tips; to his startled senses the hut seemed to expand, to become a cavern, interminable and unfathomable, wide as the vaulted earth, filled with awful, shadowy places and strange, lurid lights. The mender of nets became a far-off sphinx-like figure.
Godwyn watched him in silence. He had a large knowledge of human nature, and he saw into the mind and heart of the restless figure. He himself was a philosopher, and wore his chains lightly, but he guessed that the iron had entered deeply into the soul of the man before him. The sturdy peasants, indented servants with but a few short years to serve, better fed and better clad than their fellows at home, found life on a Virginia plantation no sweet or easy thing; the political and ecclesiastical offenders enjoyed it still less, while the small criminal class found their punishment quite sufficiently severe. To this man the life must be a slow peine fort et dure, breaking his body with toil, crushing his soul with a hopeless degradation. The thought of escape must be ever present with him. But escape in the conventional manner, through pathless forests and over broad streams, was a thing rarely attained to. Ninety-nine out of a hundred failed; and the last state of the man who failed was worse than his first.
Landless strode over to the table, and leaned his weight upon it.
"Listen!" he said. "God knows I am a desperate man! My attempt to escape failing, there is naught but his word between me and the deepest pool of these waters. I am no saint. I hate my enemies. Restore to me my sword, pit me against them one by one, and I will fight my way to freedom or die.... A fair fight, too, a rising of the people against oppression; a challenge to the oppressor to do his worst; a gallant leading of a forlorn hope.... But a slave insurrection! a midnight butchery! There was one who used to tell me tales of such risings in the Indies. Murder and rapine, fire rising through the night, planters cut down at their very thresholds, shrieking women tortured, children flung into the flames,—a carnival of blood and horror!"
"We are not in the Indies," said the other quietly. "There will be no such devil's work here. Sit down and listen while I put the thing before you as it is. There are, most iniquitously held as slaves in this Virginia, some four hundred Commonwealth's men, each one of whom, at home and in his own station, was a man of mark. Many were Ironsides. And each one is a force in himself,—cool, determined, intrepid,—and wholly desperate. With them are many victims of the Act of Uniformity, godly men, eaten up with zeal. For their freedom they would dare much; for their faith they would spill every drop of their blood."
"They are like our friend, the Muggletonian, fanatics all, I suppose," said Landless.
"Possibly. Your fanatic is the best fighting machine yet invented. Do you not see that these two classes form a regiment against which no trainbands, no force which these planters could raise, would stand?"
"But they are scattered, dispersed through the colony!"
"Ay, but they can be brought together! And to that end, seeing how few there are upon any one plantation, upon the day when they rise, they must raise with them servants and slaves. Then will they overpower masters and overseers, and gathering to one point, form there a force which will beat down all opposition. It is simple enough. We will but do that which it was proposed to do ten years ago. You know the instructions given by the Parliament to the four commissioners?"
"They were to summon the colony to surrender to the Commonwealth. If it did so, well and good; if not, war was to be declared, and the servants invited to rise against their masters and so purchase their freedom."