for a
second, for Mary, also casting a glance at me, then about her at the
utter loneliness and silence of the world, fled in her turn. Then I
went to my room, but not to sleep nor to think altogether of love,
for my Lord Culpeper was to sail that day, and the next night was
appointed for the beginning of the plant cutting.

XVI

I know not if my Lord Culpeper had any inkling of what was about to
happen. Some were there who always considered him to be one who
feathered his own nest with as little risk as might be, regardless
of those over and under him, and one who saw when it behooved him to
do so, and was blind when it served his own ends, even with the
glare of a happening in his eyes. And many considered that he was in
England when it seemed for his own best good without regard to the
king or the colony, but that matters not, at this date. In truth his
was a ticklish position, between two fires. If he remained in
Virginia it was at great danger to himself, if he sided not with the
insurgents; and on the other hand there was the certainty of his
losing his governorship and his lands, and perhaps his head, if he
went to tobacco-cutting with the rest of us. He was without doubt
better off on the high sea, which is a sort of neutral place of
nature, beyond the reach for the time, of mobs or sceptres, unless
one falls in with a black flag. At all events, off sailed my Lord
Culpeper, leaving Sir Henry Chichely as Lieutenant-Governor, and
verily he might as well have left a weather-cock as that
well-intentioned but pliable gentleman. Give him but a head wind
over him and he would wax fierce to order, and well he served the
government in the Bacon uprising, but leave him to his own will and
back and forth he swung with great bluster but no stability. None of
the colony, least of all the militia, stood in awe of Sir Henry
Chichely, nor regarded him as more than a figure-head of authority
when my Lord Culpeper had set sail.

The morning of the day after the sailing, the people of Jamestown
whom one happened to meet on the road had a strange expression of
countenance, and I doubt not that a man skilled in such matters
could have read as truly the signs of an eruption of those forces of
human passion in the hearts of men, as of an earthquake by the
belching forth of smoke and fire from the mouth of a volcano.
Everybody looked at his neighbour with either a glare of doubt and
wariness, or with covert understanding,