Prisoners of Hope: A Tale of Colonial VirginiaJohnston, Mary
History
Prisoners of Hope: A Tale of Colonial Virginia
Johnston, Mary
Virginia -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- Fiction
spires flashed light, and the slow ringing changed to mad peals from joy
bells. Some one had been restored--to drop balm upon the bleeding heart
of a nation, to bring light to them that sit in darkness,--so said the
joy bells.... He saw a loathsome prison, and the man who had sat in the
dingy chamber lying therein under accusation of a crime which he had not
committed. He saw him pining there, week after week, month after month,
untried, forgotten, at the mercy of an enemy to his house whose day had
come with the Restored One.... The prison vanished, and the waves that
tossed around him were the waves of the Atlantic. A ship ploughed her
way through them. He saw into her hold,--a horrible place of stench and
filth and darkness,--a place where hounds would not have kenneled. Men
and women were there who cursed and fought for the scanty, worm-eaten
food that was thrown them. Some wore gyves: they were heavy upon the
wrists and ankles of the man of his vision. He saw a face looking down
upon this man, a handsome supercilious face, with insolent amusement in
the languid eyes and in the curves of the lips. The hatches were
battened down upon the cargo of misery, and the ship with its brutal
captain and its handful of gold-laced, dicing, swearing passengers
vanished.... He saw a sandy, grass-grown street, and a row of mean
houses, and a low, brick building with barred windows. There was a crowd
before this building, and a man standing upon the platform of a pillory
was selling human flesh and blood. He saw the boy who had stood beneath
the yews of the old Hall, who had fought at Worcester beneath his
father's eye; the man who had lain in prison and in the noisome hold of
the ship, put up and sold to the highest bidder. He saw him carried away
with other merchandise to the home of his purchaser. He saw a Virginia
plantation lying fair and serene beneath a Virginia heaven; and a wide
porch, and standing therein an angelic vision, all grace and beauty,
vivid youth and splendor.
The picture vanished into the night that raved about him, and with a
long shaken sigh he let his eyes fall from the watery steeps to the face
of the woman who lay within his arms. He had not looked at her before,
conceiving that she might be awake and feel his glance upon her. Now he
could tell from her breathing that she slept. He gazed upon the pure
pale face with the golden hair falling about it, in a passion of pity
and tenderness. She moaned now and then in her sleep, or turned uneasily
in his arms. Once she spoke a few words, and he bent eagerly to catch
them, thinking that she had awakened and was speaking to him. They
were:--
"Ah, your Excellency! where I reign there shall be only good Churchmen
and loyal Cavaliers--no Roundheads, no rebel or convict servants!" and
she laughed in her sleep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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