When the day's work was done, and we streamed out of the church,
- the Governor and Council first, the rest of us in order, - it was to
find as often as not a red and black figure waiting for us among the
graves. Sometimes it joined itself to the Governor, sometimes to
Master Pory; sometimes the whole party, save one, went off with
it to the guest house, there to eat, drink, and make merry.
If Virginia and all that it contained, save only that jewel of which
it had robbed the court, were out of favor with the King's minion,
he showed it not. Perhaps he had accepted the inevitable with a
good grace; perhaps it was but his mode of biding his time; but he
had shifted into that soldierly frankness of speech and manner, that
genial, hail-fellow-well-met air, behind which most safely hides a
villain's mind. Two days after that morning behind the church, he
had removed himself, his French valets, and his Italian physician
from the Governor's house to the newly finished guest house. Here
he lived, cock of the walk, taking his ease in his inn, elbowing out
all guests save those of his own inviting. If, what with his open
face and his open hand, his dinners and bear-baitings and hunting
parties, his tales of the court and the wars, his half hints as to the
good he might do Virginia with the King, extending even to the
lightening of the tax upon our tobacco and the prohibition of the
Spanish import, his known riches and power, and the unknown
height to which they might attain if his star at court were indeed in
the ascendant, - if with these things he slowly, but surely, won to
his following all save a very few of those I had thought my fast
friends, it was not a thing marvelous or without precedent.
Pages:
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133