"I cannot, Lady Rebecca Rolfe." He, master of every situation put her in her place in this.
Ah, if one of her could walk demurely down the dull road to "Heacham Hall," clinging to John Rolfe's arm, and keep on with him to "Varina" near Powhatan, bearing other descendants for the pride of Rolfe and Powhatan, but if the other could wing away with Smith going far places! Tragabigzanda had tried to keep him in chains for herself; Pocahontas had saved him only to lose him. He was a man belonging to the world, but to no woman.
She had to be the staid English housewife, not the princess of the wild woods. As she had her wild dreams of a different way out, she looked into his sea-faring blue eyes, and found there no response, only respect for Anglo-Saxon domestic respectability.
"You are the Lady Rebecca, the toast of London."
Toast, that should be a foaming, intoxicating drink, not a staid, insipid dose. She was a sick woman, but even sicker at heart.
"It is not seemly that a poor explorer be familiar with a lady of your position."
Position, she would snap her fingers at it! She wanted yesterday in Virginia fields where the corn tassels tossed in the sunny breeze, or an impossible dazzling tomorrow, but must take dull today. She was in Christian London, where the bells in the church spires chimed monotonously, chastening the savage din in her ears.
She snatched up small Tom who had been gazing at the captain who had strode out of a story book into the room. They left the two men to their boasting--Rolfe of his tobacco crop in the new world, Smith of newer worlds he would set out to conquer.
So John Smith passed out of Pocahontas' life more finally than he had before, because he went deliberately. The hand of death was definitely upon her, not upon him, the more so because she scarcely resisted it. Her Christian resignation, more like that of an elderly saint, than a youthful worldling now gratified, now confounded her serious husband. Gone was her gay delight in the adulation of the London populace, and the frivolity of the court, which he had long since deplored. She had not minded the late hours, the murky London atmosphere, worsening her cough; nor the noise of the cobblestone streets, nor the roisterers beneath their lodgings before, but now she was as weary of London as he was.