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.
VII
ARGALL'S ship had put into Gravesend to have Pocahontas buried in St. George's Church. The vestry-book recorded her name erroneously: "Rebecca Wrothe, Wyffe of Thomas Wrothe, a Virginia-lady born here was buried in ye chancell." While the faded writ remains wrong to this day, it was preciously bound in white leather and kept in a vault, and the church building therefore became a shrine, although the argument as to where she lies there, or whether she should be brought here will be interminable.
Thomas was the name of her son, and the child's illness on the George, as it put to sea again, distracted John Rolfe, who remembered how he had lost another wife and child almost within grasp of the waves. Again the ship returned to English shores, this time to Plymouth, where the frantic father sought out Sir Lewis Stewkley and persuaded him to take care of the little lad until Henry Rolfe, a London merchant, could take his nephew in charge. Stewkley who was to betray his own cousin, Sir Walter Raleigh, still proved worthy of Rolfe's trust.
At that moment John Smith, who was trying to get support for a New England colony, bustled about Plymouth unsuccessfully, and then tried London. Pocahontas was lost to her own country, but her ambitious Johns both coveted it still for themselves.
Rolfe, in spite of the buffetings of disaster and grief, was a man who got things done as long as he was alive to do them. Without Smith's brilliant, antagonistic and fascinating temperament he, if not Smith, got on to America since that was his aim, and there he took his third wife, Jane, daughter of William Pearce, Captain of James Fort.