Beyond rose the bare masts
of the George. The Santa Teresa rode no more forever in the
James. The King's ship was gone home to the King without the
freight he looked for. Three days, and the George would spread her
white wings and go down the wide river, and I with her, and the
King's ward, and the King's sometime favorite. I looked down the
wind-ruffled stream, and saw the great bay into which it emptied,
and beyond the bay the heaving ocean, dark and light, league on
league, league on league; then green England, and London, and the
Tower. The vision disturbed me less than once it would have done.
Men that I knew and trusted were to be passengers on that ship, as
well as one I knew and did not trust. And if, at the journey's end, I
saw the Tower, I saw also his Grace of Buckingham. Where I
hated he hated, and was now powerful enough to strike.
The wind blew from the west, from the unknown. I turned my
head, and it beat against my forehead, cold and fragrant with the
essence of the forest, - pine and cedar, dead leaves and black
mould, fen and hollow and hill, - all the world of woods over
which it had passed. The ghost of things long dead, which face or
voice could never conjure up, will sometimes start across our path
at the beckoning of an odor. A day in the Starving Time came back
to me: how I had dragged myself from our broken palisade and
crazy huts, and the groans of the famished and the plague-stricken,
and the presence of the unburied dead, across the neck and into the
woods, and had lain down there to die, being taken with a sick fear
and horror of the place of cannibals behind me; and how weak I
was! - too weak to care any more.
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