They and an able support soon took the whole audience
captive, and all, fashionable and unfashionable alike, hung with
breathless attention upon the play. Robert forgot absolutely
everything around him, Willet was carried back to days of his youth,
and Master Benjamin Hardy, who at heart was a lover of adventure and
romance, responded to the great speeches the author has written for
his characters. Tayoga did not stir, his face of bronze was unmoved,
but now and then his dark eyes gleamed.
In reality the influence of the tragedy upon Tayoga was as great as it
was upon Robert. The Onondaga had an unusual mind and being sent at an
early age to school at Albany he had learned that the difference
between white man and red was due chiefly to environment. Their hopes
and fears, their rivalries and ambitions were, in truth, about the
same. He had seen in some chief a soul much like that of humpbacked
Richard, but, as he looked and listened, he also had a certain feeling
of superiority. As he saw it, the great League, the Hodenosaunee, was
governed better than England when York and Lancaster were tearing it
to pieces. The fifty old sachems in the vale of Onondaga would decide
more wisely and more justly than the English nobles.
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