Unaccustomed to obey the whims of any monarch, except those of her father, her eyes blazed and her features contracted. Smith instinctively stepped back. Before him stood not the gentle Pocahontas, but the savage Powhatan.
Then she spoke in a deep voice of scornful anger. “Were you not afraid to come into my father’s country and cause fear in him and all his people but me; and fear you I shall call you father?” Then stamping her foot she cried, “I tell you I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will be forever and ever your country-woman.” Her voice broke as she added, “They did tell us always you were dead, and I knew no other till I came to Plymouth; yet Powhatan did commend Vetamatominakin to seek you and know the truth, because your countrymen will lie much.”
Smith gently put her off with veiled words and turned the conversation to a less painful theme.
“How is my father Powhatan, and what has become of Opechancanough?”
Picking up the little boy, he petted and fondled him, while Pocahontas gave news of her tribe. Seeing his tender attentions to her boy, she calmed down into the gentle frank maiden he had known so well.
After an hour’s conversation he took his departure, evading deftly a promise to come again, for he had marked the look in Rolfe’s eyes when Pocahontas had called him father.
As he walked away he said to himself, “I must not endanger their wedded bliss”; then bitterly, “Jealousy and suspicion dog my lonely footsteps and will follow me to the grave.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
A year of court life, filled with a continual round of hunting, masques, theater-going and dancing, failed to dim the brightness of the wild rose of the west. Enjoying what was noble and pure with the unspoiled freshness of a child, the Lady Rebecca’s eyes passed unseeingly over the coarse and degraded elements mingling with the good.