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Title: Three Heroines of New England Romance - Their true stories herein set forth by Mrs Harriet Spoffard, - Miss Louise Imogen Guiney, and Miss Alice Brown
Author: Spofford, Harriet Prescott, Guiney, Louise Imogen, Brown, Alice
Language: English
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THREE HEROINES OF NEW ENGLAND ROMANCE
[Illustration]
[Illustration: “_with her sweeping brocades and a cushion towering upon
her powdered head_”]
[Illustration]
THREE HEROINES OF NEW ENGLAND ROMANCE
[Illustration]
THEIR true stories herein set forth by Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford
Miss Louise Imogen Guiney and Miss Alice Brown
With many little picturings
authentic and fanciful by
Edmund H Garrett and published
by Little Brown and
Company Boston 1894
[Illustration]
_Copyright, 1894,_
BY EDMUND H. GARRETT.
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
CONTENTS
PRISCILLA 15
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.
AGNES SURRIAGE 63
ALICE BROWN.
MARTHA HILTON 109
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY.
NOTES 137
EDMUND H. GARRETT.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
LIST OF DRAWINGS
Martha Hilton. “With her sweeping brocades and a cushion
towering upon her powdered head” _Frontispiece._
Priscilla at the spinning wheel 14
“In his rough cradle by the sounding sea” 17
Rose Standish 21
“The daring and spirited girl” 25
“Or in calmer moments reading the blessed promises of His word” 29
Miles Standish 33
“Up and down the sands I’d pace” 36
“Her respected parent” 37
“There, too, came Priscilla” 41
“Ponds set like jewels in the ring of the green woods” 43
“First happened on the Mayflower” 45
“The blushing Sabbatia” 47
John Alden 49
“Silvers its wave, its rustling wave” 51
The wedding procession 53
Grape-vine 56
Woodbine 57
The ships of the merchants 59
“Up-stairs and down-stairs ran the streets” 64
“Houses set ‘catty cornered’” 65
“An old Marbleheader” 67
“The solid dignity of the old Town House” 69
“The old graveyard” 71
“The wild azalea” 74
“The blackberry clings and crowds” 75
Butterfly 75
“Again he came riding” 77
“Bravely attired in small clothes and wigs” 81
“She learned to play on the harpsichord” 83
Frankland 85
“Tragic battlings of heart and conscience” 87
“All the more did she turn to Frankland” 89
“The giant box and a few ancient trees” 92
“At the banquets” 93
“His ancestral home” 95
“The opera was the finest on the continent” 97
Agnes Surriage 99
“They again visited Lisbon” 102
“Married a wealthy banker of Chichester” 104
“The little figure with the swishing bucket” 108
“Sly damsels in Puritan caps” 110
“Gold laced dandies at Newport” 111
“Nor need link herself with the neighboring yokel whom
Providence had assigned her” 113
Where Governor Wentworth was born 114
“A fishmonger in London” 115
“He had the mortification to see her prefer one Shortridge,
a mechanic” 117
“His snuff-boxes and his bowls” 118
Governor Benning Wentworth 119
Wentworth house at Little Harbor 121
“Her strategic eye upon master’s deciduous charms” 123
“The great buck of his day” 127
“Fiddling at Stoodley’s far into the morning” 131
“Wharves now rotting along the harbor-borders” 133
Old houses 139
An old English church 139
Picturesque barns 140
The Weston flag-staff 141
“Houses sheltered by great elms” 142
“Past fertile farms” 142
“Over picturesque stone bridges” 143
“Here is a noble elm” 144
The Wayside Inn, Sudbury 145
Great elms at Hopkinton 149
Shirley Place 151
The Royall House, Medford 153
Medford Square 155
Street leading to Moll Pitcher’s 156
Moll Pitcher’s house and the graveyard 157
Some fishermen’s hats 159
Circle Street and Floyd Ireson’s house 161
“This is where the sailors in pigtails and petticoats
used to be” 165
St. John’s, Portsmouth 168
The Gardiner House and the linden 169
Stoodley’s 171
Plymouth, the home of Priscilla 172
A country road 173
Decorative designs Title, 7, 8, 9, 12, 105, 106, 134, 175
Initials 15, 63, 109, 137
[Illustration]
PRISCILLA
[Illustration: _Priscilla_]
“The swallow with summer
Will wing o’er the seas,
The wind that I sigh to
Will visit thy trees.
The ship that it hastens
Thy ports will contain,
But me—I shall never
See England again!”
I OFTEN fancy John Alden, and others, too, among his companions of
kindly fame, wandering down the long Plymouth beach and murmuring to
themselves thoughts like these. And I like to look in the annals of the
gentle Pilgrims and the sterner Puritans for any pages where one may
find muffled for a moment the strain of high emprise which wins our awe
and our praise, but not so surely our love, and gain access on their
more human side to the men and women who lived the noblest romance in
all history.
[Illustration: “‘_In his rough cradle by the sounding sea_—’”]
So one comes on the story of the Lady Arbella, and her love and
death, with the sweet surprise one has in finding a fragile flower
among granite ledges. So the Baby Peregrine’s velvet cheek has the
unconscious caress of every mother who thinks of him rocked to sleep
in his rough cradle by the sounding sea. So the thought deals tenderly
with Dorothy Bradford, who crossed the mighty darkness of the deep only
to fall overboard from the “Mayflower,” and be drowned in harbor, and
would fain reap some harvest of romance in the coming over sea, three
years afterward, of Mrs. Southworth, with her young sons, Constant and
Thomas, to marry the Governor, who had loved her as Alice Carpenter
lang syne. And so the story of John Alden’s courtship is read as if
we had found some human beings camped in the midst of demigods.
[Illustration: ROSE STANDISH]
Certainly Miles Standish was not of the demigods, if he was of the
heroes. No Puritan ascetic he, by nature or belief. One might imagine
him some soul that failed to find incarnation among the captains and
pirates of the great Elizabeth’s time, the Raleighs and Drakes and
Frobishers, and who, coming along a hundred years too late, did his
best to repair the mistake. A choleric fellow, who had quarrelled
with his kin, and held himself wronged by them of his patrimony; of
a quarrelsome race, indeed, that had long divided itself into the
Catholic Standishes of Standish and the Protestant Standishes of
Duxbury; a soldier who served the Queen in a foreign garrison, and of
habits and tastes the more emphasized because he was a little man;
supposed never to have been of the same communion as those with whom
he cast in his lot,—it is not easy to see the reason of his attraction
to the Pilgrims in Holland. Perhaps he chose his wife, Rose, from
among them, and so united himself to them; if not that, then possibly
she herself may have been inclined to their faith, and have drawn
him with her; or it may have been that his doughty spirit could not
brook to see oppression, and must needs espouse and champion the side
crushed by authority. For the rest, at the age of thirty-five the love
of adventure was still an active passion with him. That he was of
quick, but not deep affections is plain from the swiftness with which
he would fain have consoled himself after the death of Rose, his wife;
and, that effort failing, by his sending to England for his wife’s
sister Barbara, as it is supposed, and marrying her out of hand. That
he was behind the spirit of the movement with which he was connected
may be judged by his bringing home and setting up the gory head of his
conquered foe; for although he was not alone in that retrograde act,
since he only did what he had been ordered to do by the elders, yet
the holy John Robinson, the inspirer and conscience of them all,
cried out at that, “Oh that he had converted some before he killed
any!” Nevertheless, that and other bloody deeds seem to have been
thoroughly informed with his own satisfaction in them. His armor, his
sword, his inconceivable courage, his rough piety, that “swore a prayer
or two,”—all give a flavor of even earlier times to the story of his
day, and bring into the life when certain dainties were forbidden, as
smacking of Papistry, a goodly flavor of wassail-bowls, and a certain
powerful reminiscence of the troops in Flanders.
That such a nature as the fiery Captain’s could not exist without the
soothing touch of love, could not brook loneliness, and could not
endure grief, but must needs arm himself with forgetfulness and a new
love when sorrow came to him in the loss of the old, is of course to
be expected. If he were a little precipitate in asking for Priscilla’s
affection before Rose had been in her unnamed grave three months,
something of the blame is due to the condition of the colony, which
made sentimental considerations of less value than practical ones,—an
evident fact, when Mr. Winslow almost immediately on the death of his
wife married the mother of Peregrine White, not two months a widow,
hardly more a mother.
Apparently there were not a great many young girls in the little
company. The gentle Priscilla Mullins and the high-minded Mary Chilton
were the most prominent ones, at any rate. One knows instinctively
that it would not be Mary Chilton towards whom the soldier would be
drawn,—the daring and spirited girl who must be the first to spring
ashore when the boat touched land. It is true that John Alden’s
descendants ungallantly declare that he was before her in that act;
but no one disputes her claim to be the first woman whose foot touched
shore; and that is quite enough for one who loves to think of her and
of the noble and serene Ann Hutchinson as the far-away mothers of the
loftiest and loveliest soul she ever knew.
[Illustration: _The daring and spirited girl_]
One can well conjecture Mary Chilton as comforting and supporting
Priscilla in the terrors of that voyage, in such storms as that
where the little ship, tossed at the waves’ will, lay almost on
her beam-ends, and the drowning man who had gone down fathoms deep
clutched her topsail-halyards and saved himself; or in calmer moments
reading the blessed promises of His word. Young girls willing to
undertake that voyage, that enterprise, and whose hearts were already
so turned heavenward as the act implied, must have been of a lofty
type of thought and nature; they must often have walked the narrow
deck, exchanging the confidences of their hopes and dreams. I see them
sitting and softly singing hymns together, on the eve of that first
Sunday on the new coast, sitting by that fragrant fire of the red
cedar which Captain Standish brought back to the ships after the first
exploration of the forest. Priscilla might have sung, “The Lord is my
shepherd,” and the voice of Rose may have added a note of sweetness to
the strain. But that gentle measure would never have expressed the
feelings of the Captain, whose God was “a man of war.” If, out of the
tunes allowed, there were one that fitted the wild burden,—and unless
their annexation to the book of Common Prayer caused the disapproval
of “All such Psalms of David as Thomas Sternholde, late Grome of the
Kinges Majestyes Robes, did in his lyfe-tyme drawe into Englyshe
Metre,”—I can feel the zest with which the Captain may have roared out,—
“The Lord descended from above,
And bowed the heavens high,
And underneath His feet He cast
The darkness of the sky.
On seraph and on cherubim
Full royally He rode,
And on the wings of mighty winds
Came flying all abroad!”
[Illustration: “_Or in calmer moments reading the blessed promises of
His word_”]
One might suppose that Priscilla, gentle as tradition represents
her, would have been attracted by the fire and spirit of the brave
Captain. But perhaps she was not so very gentle. Was there a spice
of feminine coquetry in her famous speech to John Alden, for all her
sweet Puritanism? Or was it that she understood the dignity and worth
of womanhood, and was the first in this new land to take her stand upon
it?
The whole story of the courtship which her two lovers paid to her is a
bit of human nature suddenly revealing itself in the flame of a great
passion,—a mighty drama moving before us, and a chance light thrown
upon the stage giving the life and motion of a scene within a scene.
There is a touching quality in the modest feeling of the soldier; he is
still a young man, not at all grizzled, or old, or gray, as the poet
paints him,—perhaps thirty-five or thirty-six years old. Daring death
at every daily exposure of the colony to dangers from disease, from the
tomahawk, from the sea, from the forest, always the one to go foremost
and receive the brunt, to put his own life and safety a barrier against
the common enemy,—yet he shrank from telling a girl that she had fired
his inflammable heart, and would fain let her know the fact by the
one who, if he has left no record of polished tongue or ready phrase,
was the one he loved as the hero loves the man of peace, the one who
loved him equally,—the youth of twenty-three whose “countenance of
gospel looks” could hardly at that time have carried in its delicate
lineaments much of the greatness of nature that may have belonged to
the ancestor of two of our Presidents.
[Illustration: Miles Standish]
For the purposes of romance, fathers and mothers are often much in
the way; and the poet and the romancer, with a reckless disregard of
the life and safety of Mr. William Mullins, her respected parent,
represent Priscilla as orphaned while her father was yet alive. It was
to Mr. Mullins that John Alden, torn between duty and passion, and
doubtless pale with suffering, presented the Captain’s claims. If the
matter was urged rather perfunctorily, Mr. Mullins seems not to have
noticed it, as he gave his ready consent. But we may be confident that
Priscilla did; and that, after all, maidenly delicacy would never
have suffered her to utter her historic words, “Why don’t you speak
for yourself, John?” if the deadly sinking of his heart had not been
evident in his downcast face. Does it need any chronicle to tell us
what a flame of joy shot through John Alden’s heart at the instant of
those words,—what an icy wave of despair quenched it,—what a horror of
shame overcame Priscilla till her blushes became a pain? For when she
had dared so much, and dared in vain, what else but shame could be her
portion?
They must have been dark days that followed for the two young lovers.
Can you not see John Alden trying to walk away his trouble on the
stretch of the long beach, to escape his sense of treachery, his sorrow
in his friend’s displeasure, his joy and his shame together?
“There, my cloak about my face,
Up and down the sands I’d pace,
Making footprints for the spray
To wash away.
. . . . . .
“Up and down the barren beaches,
Round the ragged belts of land,
In along the curving reaches,
Out along the horns of sand.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration: “Her respected parent”]
There, too, came Priscilla, without much doubt, when the closeness
of the little cluster of log huts, within a few feet of one another,
grew too oppressive, or the notion that others looked askance at her,
lest in any recklessness of desperation the Captain, the mainstay
of the colony, threw his life away in the daily expeditions he
undertook,—came not as girls stroll along the shore to gather shells,
to write their names on the sand, to pick up the seaweed with hues like
those
“Torn from the scarfs and gonfalons of Kings
Who dwell beneath the waters,”
as very likely she had done ere this, but to forget her trouble, to
diffuse and lose it. For here, added to homesickness and horror and
impending famine, was a new trouble, worse perhaps than all the rest.
If her lover had been lost at sea, she might have watched for his sail,
“And hope at her yearning heart would knock
When a sunbeam on a far-off rock
Married a wreath of wandering foam.”
[Illustration: “There too came Priscilla”]
[Illustration: “Ponds set like jewels on the ring of the green woods”]
But this was more unbearable than loss: she had dishonored herself in
his eyes; she had betrayed herself, and he had scorned her; and she
came to the sea for the comfort which nearness to the vast and the
infinite always gives. Even that was not solitude; for there, a mile
away, lay the “Mayflower,” still at anchor, where the spy-glass made
her prisoner, while it was not safe for a lonely girl to tread the
shore at night, watching the glow of the evening star or the moonswale
on the sea. Perhaps, with Mary Chilton by her side, or with some of the
smaller children of the colony, she climbed a hill, protected by the
minion and the other piece of ordnance, which were afterwards mounted
on the roof of the rude church, and looked down over the cluster of
cabins where now the fair town lies, and thought life hard and sorry,
and longed, as John Alden himself did, for the shelter of Old England.
Perhaps she had no time for lovesick fancies, anyway, in the growing
sickness among the people, which tasked the strength and love of all;
and when, watching with the sick at night, she thrust aside a casement
latticed with oiled paper, or chanced to go outside the door for fresh
water to cool a fevered lip, she saw a planet rising out of the sea,
or the immeasurable universe of stars wheeling overhead, over desolate
shore, and water, and wilderness, she felt her own woe too trivial
to be dwelt upon; and when on the third of March her father died and
was laid in the field where the wheat was planted over the level graves
for fear of the Indians, we may be sure that she saw her trouble as
part of the cross she was to bear, and waited in patience and meekness
either till the rumor came of the death of Miles Standish in the Indian
skirmish,—of which we know nothing,—or till John Alden had made it up
with his conscience and found his chance, not in the crowded little log
huts, not on the open shore, but within the leafy covert of the freshly
springing woodside, with none but the fallow deer to see them, to put
an end to her unrest.
[Illustration: “First happened on the Mayflower”]
[Illustration: The blushing Sabbatia]
Probably that period of bliss now dawned which makes most lovers
feel themselves lifted into a region just above the earth and when
they tread on air. It was in the hallowed time of this courtship, on
the skirts of the deep pine forests, that they first happened on the
mayflower, the epigea, full of the sweetest essence of the earth which
lends it her name, and felt as if love and youth and joy and innocence
had invented a flower for them alone,—the deeply rosy and ineffably
fragrant mayflower that blooms only in the Plymouth woods in its
pink perfection, and whose breath must have seemed like a breath blown
out of the open doors of the new life awaiting them together. If they
had ventured as far as any of the numberless ponds, set like jewels in
the ring of the green woods about them, something later in their new
year, they would have found the blushing sabbatia in all its pristine
loveliness,—the flower most typical of Priscilla herself; the flower to
which some fortunate fate, in view of the sabbatical character of the
region, gave the name of an old Italian botanist, as if it were its own
from the beginning; a flower which is to-day less rare around Plymouth
than elsewhere. Now, in the soft spring evenings, too, it may be that
they strolled along the beach, and watched the phosphorescence of the
waters playing about the sacred rock with which the continent had gone
out first to meet them, all unweeting that it was the “corner-stone of
a nation.” Now,—for lovers will be lovers still, although the whole
body of Calvinism be behind them, and the lurking foe of the forest
before,—they sat on the Burial Hill by night, and watched such a scene
as William Allingham has pictured,—
[Illustration: John Alden.]
[Illustration]
“Above the headlands massy, dim,
A swelling glow, a fiery birth,
A marvel in the sky doth swim,
Advanced upon the hush of earth.
“The globe, o’erhanging bright and brave
The pale green-glimmering ocean-floor,
Silvers its wave, its rustling wave
Soft folded on the shelving floor.
“O lonely moon, a lonely place
Is this thou cheerest with thy face;
Three sand-side houses, and afar
The steady beacon’s faithful star”—
only, instead of the three sand-side houses it was “the Seven Houses of
Plymouth,” and all the beacon was the light in the “Mayflower’s” or
the “Fortune’s” shrouds.
That the betrothal did not impair the friendship of the lovers with the
impetuous Captain Standish, we can understand from the fact that when,
subsequently, the Captain built his house over on Duxbury Hill, John
Alden’s house stood near it; and that later,—and unhindered, for aught
we know,—John Alden’s daughter married the Captain’s son. It pleases me
to think that the dear daughter-in-law, by whom, in his last will and
testament, the old Captain desired to be buried, was the daughter of
Priscilla Mullins.
[Illustration]
Priscilla and John must have had time enough for this sweet acceptance
of life and nature together, for although in other instances courtship
was brief, yet we know that their wedding certainly did not take
place till May, as Governor Winslow then married Mrs. White, and that
marriage was recorded as the first in the colony. There is indeed some
probability that the engagement of the young people was of quite
another character from the incomprehensibly brief one just mentioned.
Perhaps John Alden was building his house, and it may be that it had to
be more or less commodious, since he probably became the protector of
the family which Mr. Mullins left, and which is registered as numbering
five persons upon landing. But if we accept the legend regarding the
wedding journey, we might have to postpone the bridal for some seasons,
as it was not until three years after their arrival that Edward
Winslow, having gone to England and returned with cattle, made such a
thing possible as that traditional ride on the back of the gentle white
bull with its crimson cloth and cushion.
[Illustration]
In fact, the incidents of real occurrence and the traditions of real
descent, concerning the courtship of Priscilla, are very few. We know
that Rose Standish died; that the Captain sent John Alden to urge his
suit before Mr. Mullins, who replied favorably; that Priscilla asked
him why he did not speak for himself; that Mr. Mullins presently
died; that Captain Standish presently married elsewhere; and that John
eventually married Priscilla, lived in the neighborhood of the Captain,
married his daughter to the Captain’s son, and died in his old age,
being known to the end as a severe and righteous and reverend man.
These are the bare facts; all the rest is coloring and conjecture. Yet
one has the right to surround these facts with all the possibilities of
human emotion, alike in any age and with any people, which go to the
making of romance and poetry, and which will do so as long as hearts
beat, lips tremble, and souls desire companionship.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: “The ships of the merchants”]
It is because we like to make these people, looming large through the
mists of time, and on the stage of their mighty drama, real enough for
our sympathies, that we love Mr. Longfellow’s version of their story.
Nothing more skilful, gentle, and beautiful has ever been written
concerning the Pilgrims than the beloved poet’s verses. Every incident
in their pages is absolutely true to the life of the period, and
although the anachronisms are many, yet they do not exceed the province
of poetic license,—they are perhaps necessary to it; and many of the
events are those which actually took place, if not at the stated time.
Thus, for instance, it was at a later season than the poem intimates
that the gory head of the savage was brought home; yet it was brought
home. It was at another date that the rattlesnake skin filled with
arrows was sent; yet it was sent. It was Governor Bradford and not
Captain Standish who returned it stuffed with powder and shot; yet it
was returned. It was much later than represented that property was held
in severalty, and individuals owned their dwellings; yet they did do
so in time. It was much later than the first autumn that the ships of
the merchants brought cattle; yet they did bring cattle. But whether
the cattle came early or late, that snow-white bull with his crimson
saddle-cloth gives occasion for one of the most beautiful pictures in
literature. Europa herself, fleeing over the meadow on her white bull,
flecked with warm sunshine, with shadows of leaves and flowers, all
white and rosy loveliness as she fled, is not a fairer picture to the
mind than this exquisite one of the bridal procession, where
“Pleasantly murmured the brook as they crossed the ford in the forest,
Pleased with the image that passed, like a dream of love, through its bosom,
Tremulous, floating in air, o’er the depths of the azure abysses.
Down through the golden leaves the sun was pouring his splendors,
Gleaming on purple grapes that, from branches above them suspended,
Mingled their odorous breath with the balm of the pine and the fir-tree,
Wild and sweet as the clusters that grew in the valley of Eshcol,
Like a picture, it seemed, of the primitive pastoral ages,
Fresh with the youth of the world.”
AGNES SURRIAGE
“_Misled by Fancy’s meteor ray,
By Passion driven,
But yet the light that led astray
Was light from Heaven”_
[Illustration: down-stairs ran the streets]
ONE of the few perfect jewels of romance, needing neither the craft
of imagination nor cunning device of word-cutting lapidary, is that
of Agnes Surriage, so improbable, according to every-day standards,
so informed with the truest sentiment, and so calculated to satisfy
every exaction of literary art, that even the most critical eye might
be forgiven for tracing its shifting color to the light of fancy,
and not of homely truth. Even at the present day, when the “Neck” is
overrun by the too-civilized cottager, to whose gilded ease summer
life everywhere most patiently conforms, Marblehead is one of our coast
wonders,—a fortress perennially held by beauty, and dedicated to her
use; but let the reminiscent gaze wander back a century and a half,
and how entirely fitted to the requirements of fancy would it find the
quaint town, the vagrant peninsula, and serenely hospitable harbor!
The town itself was fantastically builded, as if by a generation of
autocratic landowners, each with a wilful bee in his bonnet. Upstairs
and downstairs ran the streets; they would have respected not my
lady’s chamber. Their modest dwellings seem by no means the outcome of
a community governed by common designs and necessities; rather do they
voice a capricious and eccentric individualism.
[Illustration: “Houses set catty cornered to the street”]
[Illustration]
“Well, you see,” said an old Marbleheader, indulgently, “they built the
houses fust, an’ the streets arterwards. One man says to himself, ‘I’m
a-goin’ to set here; _you_ can set where you’re a mind to.’ But,” he
added, in loyal justification of his forbears, “I tell ye what ’tis,
they done the best they could with what they had to do _with_!”
For they were governed by no inexplicable and crazy fancy,—these
sturdy fishermen of Marblehead; they were merely constrained by the
rigid requirements of their chosen site. Building on that stony
hillside, they were slaves of the rock, dominated by it, pressed
into corners. The houses themselves were founded upon solid ledges,
while the principal streets followed the natural valleys between;
and with all such rioting of irregularity, that long-past generation
was doubtless well content. A house set “catty-cornered” to the
world at large, sovereign over its bit of a garden, was sufficient
unto itself, overtopped though it were by the few great colonial
mansions, upspringing here and there, or by the solid dignity of the
old Town-House. The smaller dividing paths, zigzag as they would, led
to all the Romes of local traffic, and presently the houses followed
the paths, the paths developed into rocky streets, and lo! there was
Marblehead, a town dropped from the skies, and each house taking root
where it fell.
[Illustration: The solid dignity of the old Town House]
[Illustration]
But if any one reading the tale of these wilful dwellings should
soberly doubt the common interests of the people, let him climb the
rocky eminence in their midst to the old graveyard, where stood
the little church, the oldest of all; here the first settlers
worshipped, and here, in comforting nearness, they buried their dead,
within the niches spared them by the rock. It was set thus high,
this homely tabernacle of faith, to overlook land and water, that no
stealthy Indian band might creep upon the worshippers unaware,—for
those were the days of the church militant in more than a poetic
sense. An admirable spot this for the antiquary, wherein to pursue his
loving labor of coaxing forward a reluctant past! Ancient headstones
will salute his eye, and of these said one local lingerer, garrulous
as he who discoursed on Yorick’s skull, “I can tell the date of ’em
all, jest as I could a buildin’, by the architectur’!” But let him not
conclude that in scanning the slabs erected two centuries ago he has
seen all,—for here lies many an unrecorded grave. “They had to send to
England for their stones then,” said the Oldest Inhabitant. “Poor folks
couldn’t afford that, an’ most of ’em went without.”
[Illustration: “The wild azalea”]
[Illustration: “The blackberry clings and crowds”]
[Illustration: Butterfly]
Across the little harbor, at nightfall populous with white sails,
stretches the “Neck,” once a lonely, rock-defended treasury of beauty,
besieged by wave, and alternately lashed and caressed by the fickle,
but persistent foam. Well fitted are its girdling citadels for
enduring warfare; their towers outlast the feet that climb them, and
their masonry crumbles not below, save slowly, through the infinite
patience of the eternally tossing sea. And when the eye tired of this
majesty of the illimitable, when it wearied of ocean spray, spouting
column-like through some gigantic cleft, and found itself oppressed by
the rhythm of rolling foam, what would it have seen, on turning inland
from Castle Rock, that century and a half agone? A stretch of green
pasture-land, becoming yellow as August marches on,—the “Neck” itself.
Then, wandering on unwearied, still traversing the “Neck,” sweet,
bosky hollows, where lie to-day such treasures of shining leaf and
soft-lipped flower as Paradise might claim. These are the wild, sunken
gardens on the road to Devereux, glowing in the gold of a royal tansy,
greenly odorous of fern, and sweet with the wild azalea,—honey-smeared
and pollen-powdered, loved of the bee, and his chief tempter to drunken
revels on the way from market. The button-bush holds aloft her sign of
cool white balls; loosestrife stars the green undergrowth with yellow;
and over stick and stone the blackberry clings and crowds. There the
wild rose lives and blooms, fed on manna brought by roving winds and
fleeting sunlight, never unblest, even when the purveyors of honey
come winging by, to rifle her sweets, and leave her to the ripening of
maturity and the solid glow of her red-hipped matron-hood. And on the
left again, still facing south, is the insistent sea, dragging down its
pebbly beach, and on the right, the dimpling harbor, reddened, for him
who is wise enough to wander that way at sunset, with flaming banners
of the sky. To cross the harbor again, and follow the mainland back
to a point nearly opposite the lighthouse of the Neck, is to find,
neighbored by the old graveyard, ruined and grassy Fort Sewall, to-day
the lounging-place for village great-grandfathers, or vantage-ground
for overlooking a yacht race, but in 1742, when Charles Henry Frankland
was Collector of the Port of Boston, just a building. And one day in
the previous year, the gallant young Collector, smartly dressed in
the fine feathers of the period, and no doubt humming a song,—since
he seems to have fulfilled all the conditions of an interesting
young galliard,—came riding down on some business connected with the
prospective fort. He stopped at the Fountain Inn for a draught,—not so
innocent, perhaps, as that from the clear well still springing near
the spot,—and, scrubbing the tavern floor, there knelt before him, in
lovely disarray, the sweet beggar-maid destined to be crowned at once
by the favor of this careless Cophetua. Let that phrase be swiftly
amended! Agnes Surriage was no beggar-maid, but the honest daughter
of hard-working fisher-folk, and patient under her own birthright of
toil. Her beauty was something rare and delicate, calculated to arrest
the eye and chain the heart; the simple dignity of her demeanor was
no more to be affected through her menial task than a rose by clouded
skies. Her fair feet were naked, and blushed not at their poverty, but
Frankland’s heart ached with pity of them, and he closed her fingers
over a coin, to buy shoes and stockings. Then he gave her “good-day,”
and rode away,—but not to forget her; only to muse on her grace, and
to start at the vision of her eyes, shining between him and his bills
of merchandise and lading. Again he came riding that way, and again he
found her, still barefooted; but when he reproached her for having
failed to put his coin to its destined use, she blushed, and answered
in the homely dialect of Marblehead, which yet had no power over the
music of her voice, that the shoes and stockings were bought, but that
she kept them to wear to meeting. And now the young Collector went
often and more often to Marblehead, until the day came when he obtained
her parents’ permission to become her guardian, and take her away to
be educated. So the wild bird entered voluntarily into the life of
cages, to learn the demeanor and song-notes which were approved by the
fashionable Boston of the day.
[Illustration: “again he came riding”]
[Illustration]
The quaint, village-like, and yet all-regal Boston of the past! Perhaps
this was one of the most interesting pages of its life history, before
the royal insolence had roused in it an answering manhood; when fashion
scrupulously followed a far-away court over sea, and the daily life of
luxurious British officials was so distinct from that of the Puritan
stratum of society. In England, public affairs seesawed between the
policies of George II. and Walpole, and from the world of letters,
Richardson and Fielding were amusing the young bloods of the day, and
by no means toughening their moral fibre. The leisure of the bold
Britons who ruled over us was not for a moment poisoned by fear of
American defection from the royal mother-land. Rather, for men like
Frankland, was this loitering in western airs their _Wanderjahr_, a
pleasant exile, whence they would some day return, with treasures
of new experience, to sit down beside the English hearthstone, and,
Othello-like, rehearse the wonders they had seen. Meantime, they walked
the streets, bravely attired in small-clothes and wigs, discussing the
troubles brewing with the French, and seeking, so far as they might,
to build up a miniature England within the savage-girdled settlements
of the New World. Sir Harry Frankland stands out from the faint
portraiture of the time as one of the most knightly souls of all.
He was young, blest with an attractive presence, and his tastes
were those of the gentleman and the scholar. That he was sensitive
and refined even to the point of evincing that feminine strain of
temperament so fascinating in a manly man, is very apparent from the
fragmentary records of his life, but he lacked no sturdiness of temper
or demeanor.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Frankland]
[Illustration]
Agnes Surriage responded at once to the new influences about her.
Indeed, she was of those to whom borrowed graces are external and
almost unnecessary: Nature had dowered her with the riches of beauty,
nobility, and modesty of mien; and to adorn her by artifice was merely
to remove the rose from its garden bed, and set it in a silver vase.
From God’s lady, fitted to scrub the tavern floor and lose no charm
thereby, she became a dame who might have been commended to courts and
palaces. She learned to sing, to play on the harpsichord, and dance;
for painting, embroidery, and all the fragile accomplishments of the
day, she had a surprising aptitude. She was surrounded by luxuries
which might have proved bewildering to a less simple and noble nature,
and, last of all, she stooped to receive the crown of her guardian’s
love. Alas! poor maid of Marblehead! for this was a crown that smirched
the brow and stung as with nettles, no matter how bravely its blossoms
nodded above. Frankland loved her, but he was bound by the fetters of
an ancestral pride; he owed all to his family, and nothing to his own
manly honor,—and he could not marry her. It is pitiful to guess
with what tragic battlings of heart and conscience her overthrow must
have been accomplished, but even she could scarcely have counted the
cost,—the daily torture, the hourly pinch of circumstance, when one
after another of Boston’s best, who had not failed to recognize the
fisher-girl, rich in nothing but her dower of beauty and character,
refused to countenance the fine lady, so ironically favored of Fortune.
In the humble home at Marblehead, her name became the keynote of
shame; for though these fisher-folk were rude of speech almost beyond
belief, though they caroused wildly half the year, preparatory to their
summer voyaging, they had a hard hand and a rough word ready for one
who was light o’ love. She had given all for the one jewel, and both
her little worlds, of birth and adoption, trembled from their centres.
All the more did she turn to Frankland, as to her sun of happiness, and
in the unfailing warmth of his affection she alternately drooped and
smiled.
[Illustration: “All the more did she turn to Frankland”]
Then began the second and more glowing chapter of this dramatic tale.
Sir Harry must have been bitterly moved by the social ostracism of his
ward and lady, and he shortened the period of her expiation by the only
possible device left him, save one, and took her away. He had bought a
large tract of land in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and there he proceeded
to build a manor-house, where, in a humble fashion, life might copy
the abundance and solid magnificence of England’s ancestral homes. The
country itself was a wonder of hill and valley,—hills where the
loftier beauty of Wachusett and Monadnock might be viewed, valley where
a happy village nestled, and where clear, cool streams flowed lightly
to their outlet. Sir Harry was a clever purveyor of the good things of
life; he made his manor-house commodious and fair to see, and erected
a comfortable farm-house for his laborers; his great hall roof was
supported by fluted columns, and its walls were hung with tapestry,
rich of hue and texture. The house was approached by a long and stately
avenue cut through magnificent chestnut-trees; the ground sloped down
in commanding terraces of blooming sward, and the gardens and orchards
were marvels of growth and abundance. In his gardening he took delight,
but, alas for human pride and power! only the giant box of his borders
and a few ancient trees have seen the present century, to attest his
vanished life.
[Illustration: “The giant box and a few ancient trees.”]
[Illustration: “At the banquets”]
Here the two must have lived Arcadian days, in all but lightness
of heart. The lovely maid, for whom no labor had been too menial,
reigned the queen, of this lavish domain. She was the mistress of negro
slaves, she walked in silk attire; and local gossip assures us that her
tastes and those of Sir Harry were in the most perfect harmony. They
rode together through their own plantation or over the fascinatingly
unbroken country without; they read the latest consignment of books
from England; and Sir Harry hunted the fox and fished for trout in the
cold streams, possibly while Agnes did a bit of graceful and ladylike
sketching on her own account,—for it must not be forgotten that she
belonged to that unexacting era when large eyes and sloping shoulders
were much in vogue, and when the work of womankind was all the more
attractive for being a trifle thin and “very pretty.” Probably her
accomplishments were all the more entrancing for matching “lady’s
Greek, without the accents.” Here in their primeval wilderness,
primeval morals were more to be tolerated, and the autocrats of Boston
did not disdain to visit them—undoubtedly without their wives! At
least Sir Harry did not lack society; and there is a tale that at the
banquets, enlivened by the choice wines which came in his way by virtue
of his collectorship, he, canny man! drank from a glass cunningly made
shallow, so that he could toss off an equal number of potations with
his guests, and yet remain sober while they slid imperceptibly under
the table. For in these days, it was almost incumbent upon gentlemen to
conclude a banquet by lying reclined “like gods together, careless of
mankind.”
[Illustration: “His ancestral home”]
[Illustration: “The opera was the finest on the continent”]
But the swiftly moving drama could not be stayed; and Sir Harry, called
to England by imperative duties, carried his treasure with him to
his ancestral home. At least there was this to be said in his favor,
during these doubtful days,—he was not of those who love and ride away,
and his loyalty to the one chosen woman never suffered reproach. In
England, either defiant or strangely obtuse to the values of their
relation, he introduced Agnes to his family; but neither her beauty
nor accomplishments redeemed her unhappy standing, and she was made
to suffer that social ignominy which is so absolutely blighting to a
sensitive spirit. The strange irony of her position is very dramatic in
retrospect. A lovely and loving woman, bound to the man who should have
been her husband, by all the most holy vows of nature, she was destined
to an unrelieved and bitter expiation; and though Sir Harry doubtless
suffered with her, yet, in obedience to the laws that govern womankind,
Agnes must have endured a desolation of misery entirely unimagined by
him. Again they went into happy exile, and made the grand tour of the
Continent, ending at Lisbon, at that time a species of modern Sybaris.
Enriched by Brazilian gold, the court was supported in a magnificence
then unparalleled in Europe. The opera was the finest on the Continent,
and one pageant succeeded another, obedient to the whims of any
ever-regnant luxury. Here, too, on the eminence of the seven hills, a
colony of wealthy English merchants had congregated, and spent their
fairy gold, flowing back through the magic portals leading to the New
World, with a prodigality emulating that of the court. Here Frankland
gave himself up to the fair god of Pleasure; he lived as if there were
to be no morrow, and lo! the morrow came, and with it the judgment of
God. On All Saints’ Day, 1755, the sun rose in splendor over the city
of Lisbon; and all its inhabitants, from courtier to beggar, took their
way churchward, for the celebration of High Mass. Frankland, in his
court dress, was riding with a lady, when without warning the earth
surged sea-like under them, and a neighboring house fell, engulfing
them in its ruins. The lady (who was she, O Historic Muse? and was
their talk light or sober, that care-free day in Lisbon?), this unnamed
lady, in her agony and terror, bit through the sleeve of Frankland’s
cloth coat, and tore a piece of flesh from his arm. And for him, he lay
helpless, reading the red record of his sins, and adjudging himself in
nothing so guilty as the wrong to the woman who loved him. Strange and
awful scenes had driven the city frantic. Churches and dwellings had
fallen; the sea swelled mountain-high, and swallowed the quay, with
its thousands of bewildered fugitives. Lisbon went mad, and beat its
breast, beseeching all the saints for mercy. But to one great spirit,
even the insecurity of the solid earth was as nothing compared with
the danger of her beloved mate. Agnes Surriage, aflame with anxiety
for Frankland, ran out, as soon as the surging streets would give her
foothold, and rushed about the desolated city in agonizing search. By
some chance, strange as all the chances of her dramatic life, she came
upon the very spot of his fearful burial. She tore at the rubbish above
him with her tender hands; she offered large rewards, so purchasing the
availing strength of others, and Frankland was saved.
[Illustration: Agnes Surriage]
To court and people, the earthquake voiced the vengeance of an angry
God; to Frankland, it had been a flaming finger, writing on the
wall a sentence for him alone, and in security he did not forget
its meaning. Waiting only for the healing of his wounds, he at last
besought the blessing of holy church upon his love; and Agnes Surriage
under went a radiant change into the Lady Agnes Frankland. And now for
a time her days became gleaming points in a procession of happiness.
Her husband returned with her to England, where she was received as a
beloved daughter of the house, and enshrined in those steadfast English
hearts, where fealty, once given, so seldom grows cold; and after a
tranquil space, the two set sail again for America. Even amid the
scenes of her former martyrdom, Agnes was no longer to be regarded as
an alien and social outcast. She walked into Boston society as walks a
princess entering her rightful domain, and there took up the sceptre
of social sway at the aristocratic North End. Frankland had purchased
the most lordly mansion there, of which the fragmentary descriptions
are enough to make the antiquary’s mouth water. The stairs ascending
from the great hall were so broad and low that he could ride his pony
up and down in safety; there were wonderful inlaid floors, Italian
marbles, and carven pillars. There Agnes lived the life of a dignified
matron, and a social leader whose fiats none might gainsay. Indeed,
from this time forward her story is that of the happy women whose
deeds are unrecorded, and is only to be guessed through scanning the
revelations of her husband’s journal. His health seems to have guided
their movements in great measure; for they again visited Lisbon, and
then came home to England, where he died, in 1768.
[Illustration: “They again visited Lisbon”]
[Illustration]
Lady Frankland returned to Hopkinton, and there she lived through
uneventful days, with her sister and sister’s children, overseeing her
spacious estate, and entertaining her hosts of friends, until 1775,
that fiery date of American story. A jealous patriotism was rife;
and it was not unnatural that the widow of an officer of the Crown,
herself a devotee of the Established Church, should become an object
of local suspicion, hand in glove as she was with the British invaders
of our peace. Like many another avowed royalist, she judged it best
to leave her undefended estate at Hopkinton, and place herself under
military protection in Boston, and there she arrived, after a short
detention by some over-zealous patriot, in time to witness the battle
of Bunker Hill from the windows of her house, and to receive some of
the wounded within its shelter. Thence she sailed for England, as our
unpleasantness with the mother-country increased in warmth, and at
this point she becomes lost to the romance-loving vision,—for, alas
for those who “love a lover,” and insist upon an ideal constancy! Lady
Frankland was married, in the fourteenth year of her widowhood, to John
Drew, a wealthy banker of Chichester, and at Chichester she died, in
one year’s time. But after all, on that sober second thought which is
so powerful in regilding a tarnished fancy, does not her remarriage
suit still better the requirements of romance? For instead of dying a
staid Lady Frankland, her passions merged in the vital interests of
caps and lap-dogs, she transmutes herself into another person, and
thus fades out into an unrecognized future. Since neither the name of
Surriage nor Frankland is predominant in its legend, even her tomb
seems lost; and the mind goes ever back in fancy to her maiden name,
her maiden state, when she was the disguised and humble princess of
Marblehead.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
MARTHA HILTON
[Illustration: “The little figure with the swishing bucket.”]
[Illustration: Sly damsels in puritanical caps]
[Illustration]
NEW ENGLAND had her spurts of human nature in old times, whenever she
was not taken up with the witches and the Tories, and could afford a
nine-days’ wonder over so simple a thing as a marriage between high and
low. For we had not got then to a professional denial of difference
between high and low; not as yet had the bell of Philadelphia cracked
its heart, like the philosopher Chilo, with public joy, and proclaimed
the crooked ways straight, and the rough places plain. When some sweet
scrub of an Agnes Surriage captured a Sir Harry, at the end of a moving
third act, there was a thrill of awe and satisfaction: and forthwith
the story went into our folk-lore, and very properly; since it had
incidents and character. Sly damsels in Puritan caps made the most of
a shifting society, full of waifs and strays from the foreign world.
Royal commissioners were yet to be seen, and gold-laced Parisian barons
at Newport and Norwich, and pirate Blackbeards tacking from the Shoals,
and leaving sweethearts to wring ghostly hands there to this day. So
that no lass had too dull an outlook upon life, nor need link herself
with the neighboring yokel whom Providence had assigned her, while
such splendid fish were in the seas. Let her but wed “above her,” and
she shall be a fountainhead of precedent and distinction, and the
sister ideal of King Cophetua’s beggar-bride.
[Illustration: Gold laced dandies at Newport]
[Illustration: Nor need link herself with the neighbouring yokel whom
Providence had assigned her]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Where Governor Wentworth was Born]
[Illustration: “A fishmonger in London”]
[Illustration: He had the mortification to see her prefer one
Shortridge, a mechanic]
[Illustration]
Poor Agnes of Marblehead, as faithful as the Nut-Browne Maid herself,
adorns her romantic station with living interest; but Martha Hilton,
who figures in true histories and in Mr. Longfellow’s pretty ballad,
is a heroine of the letter, rather than of the spirit. We hear nothing
of her deserts; we hear merely of her success. She became Lady
Wentworth (all personable Madams were Ladies then and awhile after,
even in the model republican air of Mount Vernon!) and she had been
a kitchen-wench. But she was also the descendant of the honorable
founder of Dover, “a fishmonger in London,” even as the great and gouty
Governor, her appointed spouse, was grandson to a noblest work of God,
who, in 1670, got “libertie to entertayne strangers, and sell and brew
beare.” In that house of beer, the hearty-timbered house planted yet
by a Portsmouth inlet, with one timid bush to be seen over against
the door, was Benning Wentworth born. Having subdued the alphabet,
grown his last inch, looked about, married, and buried his sons and
Abigail his wife, he enters upon our tale “inconsolable, to the minuet
in _Ariadne_.” He had played a game, too, and lost, since his weeds
withered. Having proposed himself and his acres to young Mistress
Pitman, he had the mortification to see her prefer one Shortridge, a
mechanic. The sequel shows that Benning’s Excellency could rise
grandly to an occasion, and also that he had an amorphous turn for the
humor of things; for he had the obnoxious mechanic kidnapped and sent
to sea, “for seven years long,” like the child in the fairy-lay. This
stroke of playfulness insured him nothing but a recoil of fate. Events
restored the lovers to each other, and he was left to console himself
with his restless colony, with his snuff-boxes and his bowls. And into
that lonely manor of his, malformed and delightful, sleeping over
against Newcastle, meekly as befits her menial office (though it is to
be suspected that she was always a minx!) enters Martha Hilton, late
the horror of the landlady of the Earl of Halifax. That well-conducted
Juno of Queen Street, beholding a shoeless girl fetching water from
the decent pump of Portsmouth, in a bare-shouldered estate sacred only
to the indoor and adult orgies of the aristocracy, did not content
herself, as the poet hath it, with
“O Martha Hilton, fie!”
[Illustration: His snuff boxes and his bowls]
[Illustration: Gov. Benning Wentworth]
Her comment had greater vivacity, and was pleasingly metrical. “You
Pat, you Pat, how dare you go looking like that?” There seems to be no
doubt that the pseudo-Hibernian did reply with a prophecy, and, better
yet, that she made it her business to have spoken true. Seven years,
according to the verses in question, did Martha serve her future lord;
and it is not for this oracle, on whatever computation, to dispute
with a son of Apollo. There she shed her clever childhood, and took
her degree in the arts of womankind; busy with pans and clothes-lines,
the sea-wind always in her hair, her strategic eye upon master’s
deciduous charms, and perhaps, provisionally, upon master’s only son,
“a flower too early faded” for any mortal plucking. The latter was not
fore-doomed, either, to be a stepson. He died; and in March of 1760,
one year after, a moment of historic astonishment befell the Reverend
Arthur Brown, shared by the painted Strafford on the wall, when the
good rector of St. John’s, having dined sumptuously at Little Harbor,
heard his host proclaim:—
“This is my birthday; it shall likewise be
My wedding-day, and you shall marry me!”
[Illustration: Wentworth house at Little Harbour]
(Ah, no; he marrified him, did that Reverend Arthur Brown from the
north of Ireland, who had so much to do, first and last, with the
matrimonial oddities of the Wentworths.) And the victress, as all the
world knows, was “You Pat,” suddenly found standing in the fine old
council-chamber, appropriately vested, and radiant with her twenty
years. Abruptly were they joined, these wondrous two, and literally
“across the walnuts and the wine.” And now Martha had her chariot, as
foretold, and her red heels, and her sweeping brocades, and a cushion
towering on her powdered head, and a famous beautiful carven mantel,
on which to lean her indolent elbow. By able and easy generalship is
she here, with him of a race of rulers, aged sixty-five and terrible in
his wrath, for her gentle orderly, her minion. The rustling of Love’s
wings is not audible in the Governor’s corridors, perhaps would be
an impertinence there, like any blow-fly’s; but domestic comfort was
secured upon one side, and power, swaggering power, upon the other,—a
heady draught of it, such as might well turn a novice giddy.
Tradition saith that very shortly after her elevation, Martha dropped
her ring, and summoned one of her recent colleagues to rescue it from
the floor. But the colleague, alas! became piteously short-sighted, and
could offer no help worth having, until my lady, with great acumen,
dismissed her, and picked it up.
[Illustration: and her strategic eye upon master’s deciduous charms”]
For a full decade she rolled along, behind outriders, through the fair
provincial roads, with kerchiefed children bobbing respectfully at
every corner. The strange, stout, splenetic being to whom she owed her
meridian glory, disgusted with events, and out of office, was gathered
presently to his fathers, and left all his property in her hands. With
instant despatch, the scene shifts. The Reverend Arthur Brown beholds
the siren of Hilton blood again before him, with an imported Wentworth
by her side: one red-coated Michael of England, who had been in the
tragic smoke of Culloden. For three years now, in shady Portsmouth,
he has been striding magnificently up and down, and fiddling at
Stoodley’s far into the morning, for pure disinterested enthusiasm
that the dancing might not flag; a live soldierly man, full of bluster
and laughter, equal to many punches, and to afternoon gallops between
the hills of Boston and his own fireside! The fortunate widow of
one Georgian grandee became the wife of this other, his namesake;
and save that Colonel Michael Wentworth was a much more suave and
flexible person, besides being the “great buck” of his day, there was
small divergence in him from the type of his predecessor. Men of that
generation fell into a monotony: if they were rural, they were given
to hunting, bousing, and swearing; the trail of Squire Western is over
them all. Well did Martha, tamer of lions, know her _métier_.
[Illustration: “The great buck of his day.”]
Unto this twain gloriously reigning, came Washington, in 1789, rowed by
white-jacketed sailors to their vine-hung, hospitable door. They were
the mighty in the land; they had somehow weathered the Revolution;
they were peers of—
“The Pepperells, the Langdons, and the Lears,
The Sparhawks, the Penhallows, and the rest,”
with their stately Devon names; and none could more fitly honor the
Father of the Country. He went about the town, indeed, in a visible
halo, weaving the web of peace; and his smile was called as good as
sunshine, and his Sunday black velvet small-clothes elegant in the
extreme. There was a younger Martha in the house, curtseying to this
kind guest, who had grown up to play the spinet by the open window
in lilac-time, and who, later, tautologically bestowed her hand on
a Wentworth, and passed with him to France. Her father’s cherry
cheeks paled gradually, before he gave up his high living, and took
to a bankrupt’s grave, in New York, in 1795. It was feared that he
checkmated too hard a fate by suicide. “I have eaten my cake,” he said
at the end, with a homely brevity. What was in his mind, no chronicler
knoweth; but it is not unlawful to remember that in that eaten cake
Martha Hilton was a plum.
[Illustration: Fiddling at Stoodley’s far into the morning]
[Illustration: Wharves now rotting along the harbor-borders]
Legends such as hers have truth and rustic dignity, and they tell
enough. It will not do to be too curious, to thirst for all that
can be guessed or gleaned. Let Martha herself remain a myth, not to
be stared at. _Il ne faut pas tout corriger._ Breathe it not to the
mellower civilizations that a myth of New England can have a daughter
only forty years dead! That, after all, is not the point, and is
useful to recall only inasmuch as it assures sceptics that the myth
was, in its unregenerate days, a fact. It rode in stage-chairs which
performed once a week for thirteen-and-six; it held babes to a porphyry
baptismal font stolen by heretics from Senegal; it looked upon the busy
wharves now rotting along the harbor-borders; it produced love-letters
on lavender-scented paper, and with an individual spelling which the
brief discipline of a school for “righters, reeders, and Latiners” was
not calculated to blight. Martha must have done these things! and
it is no matter at all if they be suppressed. Gossip concerns itself
exclusively with her first daring nuptial campaign, an event of epic
significance, and in the practical manner of that immortal eighteenth
century. Is it so long ago that the shouting sailors in pigtails and
petticoats lounged under the lindens, along the flagged lanes of
Portsmouth, fresh from the gilded quarter-galleries and green lamps
of the Spanish ships? It is not so to anybody with a Chinese love of
yesterday; which is an emotion somewhat exotic, it is to be feared,
on our soil. Near to politics, if not to poetry, are the patriot
pre-revolutionary mutterings of our seaboard cities, reaching the ears
of the surly nightwatch, before the stocks were swept away. And it was
in that immediate past of effigy-burning, and tea-throwing, and social
panic, that
“Mistress Stavers in her furbelows”
shook her fat finger at the little figure with the swishing bucket, not
dreaming how it should blend with what we have of dearest story and
song. The life back of our democracy is unsensational enough. The saucy
beauty from the scullery is one of its few dabs of odd local color, and
therefore to be cherished. She is part forever of the blue Piscataqua
water, the wildest on the coast, and of the happy borough which shall
never be again.
[Illustration: End of Chapter motif]
NOTES
’TIS hard, methinks, that a man cannot publish a book
but he must presently give the world a reason for it,
when there is not one book of twenty that will bear a
reason.
SIR ROGER L’ESTRANGE.
[Illustration]
SO I do now offer my excuses, and leave a generous public to the
decision whether this book may be regarded as the one of all the
twenty, or shall be counted among the unhappy nineteen. Very many there
are who never hear a story but they must at once know if it be true;
and if it be but partly true, they fain would know just how much is
fact and how much fancy. It is to satisfy such curious folk, so far as
relates to three New England heroines, that these true histories have
been written. The proverb runs that “Truth is stranger than fiction;”
and true it is that truth is ofttimes more romantic, and does little
violence, withal, to our delight in a tale.
He who reads “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” and, later, learns
something of the true lives of its characters, must confess to a slight
shock in the discovery that the scholarly John Alden, of Longfellow’s
lines, was but a cooper at Southampton. Then, too, the romance that
surrounds the martial Miles Standish is somewhat dulled, when one reads
of his parley with the Indians and of his killing of some of them. And
so, though we must confess that the tale is not wholly true, we may
adopt the Italian saying, “So much the worse for truth.”
Sharp eyes might see, even were it not here confessed, that Priscilla
alone bears not the dignity of her full name on the half-titles of this
book. Despite the eloquence of Juliet, one cannot feel the need of
Mullins.
Yet, after all is said, we cannot love the poem less, but love the
poet more. His genius the brighter shines, the while our curiosity is
satisfied. Curiosity is a quality denied to few, and it is pleasant to
satisfy; and so three New England girls have written these three true
histories, while I, the artist, have wandered here and there, with an
eye to such picturesque bits as may have escaped calamity and progress.
This the excuse for the book, and now the story of the artist’s quest.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
First to Hopkinton, from Winchester, by bicycle,—a way which lay by
the “Wayside Inn.” Nothing is more disappointing than such a search
for oldtime scenes, but yet it is a joy, for one sees so much that is
delightful, if not closely related to the object of the quest. The road
wound always to new beauties. The way led by old houses and picturesque
barns, shaded by lofty trees, past fertile farms and modern dwellings,
bristling with gables and rising among green, smooth-shaven lawns. A
season earlier I had spent in England; and when Weston was reached,
with its quaint stone church, the thought arose of those village
churches of Old England with their ivy-covered towers, and, all about,
God’s acre.
[Illustration]
But here no manor-house rose proudly above the trees, no coat-of-arms
was sculptured over the cottage doors. Indeed, the picturesque
cottages themselves were missed, and in their stead were the plainest
of dwellings; but upon the green rose something far prouder than a coat
of arms, the flag-staff, and, at its head, the flag streaming in the
breeze.
[Illustration]
This is the one distinctive feature of the typical New England village.
Always upon the village green is seen the flag-staff, although the
town-pump may have long ago gone, and the bandstand not yet come.
[Illustration]
The ride continued, and still I found comparisons between Old and New
England, but not to the discredit of either. Now are more old houses
sheltered by great elms; stone walls, green fringed; merry children
coming from school; pastures, with grazing cattle; and so lies the
way through Wayland, by the fields and rivers, over picturesque stone
bridges, up hill and down, until we come to Sudbury.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Sudbury is connected with our Martha Hilton, for her story makes one
of the “Tales of the Wayside Inn.” The old hostelry does not look
particularly antique now. It reminds me of what a friend of mine once
said, “’Tis wonderful what one can do with a little putty and paint.”
There are some who would, doubtless, prefer to see the old inn without
that fresh coat of yellow; and yet all will commend that generous
public spirit which is preserving for us this shrine of the muse. And
it may be that it will longer resist the attacks of time, protected by
its jacket of yellow, than it would be able to, did it wear Nature’s
soft mantle of gray. But yet the place is one of interest, and all
about is beautiful. The inn has, at least, one merit, inasmuch as it
leaves much to be imagined, and it is well worthy of a visit.
[Illustration]
From thence to Hopkinton is a matter of a dozen miles, the last four of
which are exceedingly rough and hilly. At Ashland, it is said that it
is four miles to Hopkinton, and three miles back. From this it may be
inferred that the village is one of those which, “set on a hill, cannot
be hid.” Little of bygone days is left for the sight of the pilgrim to
this village. Here is a noble elm, said to measure twenty-five feet in
circumference. It is said to have been brought from England, and set
out by the fair hands of Madam Elizabeth Price, whose husband, then
rector of King’s Chapel, was a close friend of Frankland. It was in
their house that Agnes Surriage found shelter while she and Frankland
were building their home.
[Illustration: The Wayside Inn, Sudbury]
The Frankland mansion stood upon the old highway, now a country road,
pleasant and shady, midway between Hopkinton and Ashland. The old
mansion was destroyed by fire in 1858, and in its place now stands a
modern structure, said, though questionably, to bear a resemblance to
the original building. A bit of the ancient woodwork is seen in a shed,
at the rear; and at the side is a beautiful and gigantic flower vase,
made from the upturned stump of one of Frankland’s great trees. This
is the tree to which Dr. Holmes refers in his poem, “Agnes,” where he
says,—
“Three elms, high arching, still are seen,
And one lies stretched below.”
This elm, too, is said to have had a girth of twenty-five feet.
Indeed, this is the legend which attaches to all of the ancient
trees hereabout, so that I concluded that it was a figure of speech
equivalent to the forty-eleven of my boyhood and the _trente-six_ of
the French. The fine, noble elms at the west of the lawn, said by Dr.
Chadwick to have been planted by the lovers, cast a broad curtain of
shade over the drive and lawn. Dr. Nason,[1] writing in 1865, records
the circumference of the largest two of these as twelve feet each, but
doubtless by this time they have reached the conventional girth of
twenty-five.
[Illustration: Great Elms, Hopkinton]
Since Dr. Nason’s time the old box of Sir Harry’s borders, described as
having a height of ten or twelve feet, has nearly disappeared except
a few plants remaining before the house, and on the terraces built by
Sir Harry’s slaves. One who knew some of the descendants of Agnes and
Frankland well says that, in her youthful days, the young girls were
wont to gather this box, for Christmas greens, with which to deck the
old church. A bright, sunny day will serve to dispel the terrible ghost
of Dr. Nason’s early days, and the bewitched pump no longer displays
its weird waywardness, but yields, instead, a cool, refreshing
draught.
[Illustration]
The pilgrim to the places that knew Agnes would naturally first
visit Marblehead, her birthplace; yet, on my quest, I reached it
last. Others, in a similar pilgrimage, would go first where fancy or
opportunity leads; and this is the true spirit of roaming. So next to
Roxbury, to visit Shirley Place. The reader remembers how delightfully
Mr. Bynner introduced Mrs. Shirley into his romance, and will recall
his story of Agnes’s ride there, in the collector’s coach. In my
boyhood days in Roxbury, the old mansion was called the Eustis House,
and it stood in a great field given over to goats and burdocks. There
are those living who remember it when Madam Eustis still lived there.
This grand dame wore a majestic turban; and the tradition still lingers
of madam’s pet toad, on gala days decked with a blue ribbon. Now the
old house is sadly dilapidated. It is shorn of its piazzas, the
sign “To Let” hangs often in the windows, and the cupola is adorned
with well-filled clothes-lines. Partitions have cut the house into
tenements. One runs right through the hall, but the grand old staircase
and the smaller one are still there, and the marble floor, too, in the
back hall. A few of the carved balusters are missing, carried away by
relic-hunters.
“’Tis a great city,” said Goody Surriage, as she peered at Colonial
Boston, over the shoulders of Agnes and Mrs. Shirley. Now, it is truly
a great city, wreathed in smoke and steam; and all about are churches,
school-houses, and factories, while the “broomstick train” of Dr.
Holmes’ fancy whirls along, close by the ancient mansion. The engraving
is from a sketch made many years ago. Since then the old house has been
entirely surrounded by modern dwelling-houses. The pilgrim who searches
for it will leave the Mt. Pleasant electric car at Shirley Street.
[Illustration: The Royall House Medford]
In Medford is a house often visited by Sir Harry and Agnes, known as
the Royall House. This house, also, to-day shelters more than a single
tenant. Here is a little drawing of this home of hospitality, which was
forsaken so hastily by its fleeing owner, the Colonel, alarmed by
the too near crack of the guns at Lexington. “A Tory against his will;
it was the frailty of his blood, more than the fault of his judgment.”
The electric cars from Boston to Medford pass the door of the old
mansion, as it stands near the corner of Royall Street. Medford has a
picturesque town square; and it is only a pleasant walk to the Craddock
House, built in 1632, now converted into a museum, and thus, after many
vicissitudes, rescued from the usual fate of ancient landmarks.
[Illustration: Medford Square]
And now to Marblehead, by road or by rail as one chooses. Perhaps the
pleasantest route is from Lynn or Salem by electric car. By either
route, the ride is a pleasure, and although little remains to tell of
Agnes in her girlhood, there is much that is quaint and picturesque;
and to visit the old town is well worth one’s time. Arrived at
Marblehead, the visitor walking down the main road to Orne Street, and
ascending the hill to the old burying-ground, will see by the wayside
the old houses, “set catty-cornered,” as the quaint old saying is,
and the bright gardens. Now upstairs and now down run the streets,
and likely enough the visitor will meet “many an old Marbleheader,”
pictures in themselves.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Just where the road turns to skirt the burying-ground at the left, is
Moll Pitcher’s house. Whittier draws the portrait of our New England
witch in one of his poems, handling her no more gently than he does her
fellow-townsman, old Floyd Ireson. This house is the home of her youth;
as a witch, she flourished in Lynn. I have often heard stories of her
predictions, and one of my cherished possessions is a small square of
yellow quilted silk, which once formed a part of Moll’s brave array.
Across the way stood the Fountain Inn. Here, upon its site, and
overlooking the harbor, are two cottages, in front of which is the
well of the old hostelry, from whence Agnes drew the draught of water
which she offered to Sir Harry. This fountain has been recently brought
to light, and still refreshes the traveller as of yore. Beneath the
apple-trees which shade it is found a restful seat, from which one may
look out over a scene of singular beauty. As often as one looks upon
this scene, it meets the eye with an added charm.
We little realize the beauty of our sea. In summer time it is ofttimes
as blue as the waters of the Mediterranean, a dark, intense blue,
broken by purple patches, by beautiful streaks of emerald, dotted with
warm, glowing rocks, and accentuated by snowy, foaming breakers. Below
the hill, to the left, are some fishermen’s huts, surrounded by nets,
drying in the sunshine, boats ashore, old lobster-pots, and anchors,
all in picturesque confusion, ready to be sketched and painted.
Away up above the well and the cottages, is the old burying-ground,
with restful benches here as well. Here, one can look across the little
harbor to old Fort Sewall, and here, just at the base of the fort, so
says Mr. Bynner, is the probable site of the home of Agnes Surriage.
[Illustration]
A walk to the old fort is full of interest. Many shady spots are there,
in which to rest, and watch the waves breaking on the rocks below. From
this point it is but a step to the terminus of the electric cars, at
the foot of Circle Street. In this street, upon the right, is old Floyd
Ireson’s house, dark and weather-beaten. But the tourist is advised not
to ask too many questions concerning him, of the old Marbleheaders;
for it is a tender point with them, and it is whispered that Mr.
Whittier’s ballad is more fraught with fancy than with fact.
From this point, it is interesting to walk up the hill, following the
windings and turnings of the street. Let the traveller not fail to
look into the queer old back-yards, and at the gardens, filled with
old-fashioned flowers, gorgeous in their splendor, nor to turn and
view the prospect toward the town. The quaint streets here are filled
with old and picturesque houses. Some are fine examples of colonial
architecture, and some are interesting as the birthplaces of eminent
men. These places should be preserved and marked with appropriate
tablets.
Now cross over to the hill on which sits the Abbott memorial. Here are
many stately old houses, well worth the attention of the sight-seer.
The electric cars or the steam railway are near at hand, on the other
side of the hill, and to return to Boston by way of Salem is a pretty
ride.
So much for Agnes and Marblehead. Her stately house at the North End in
Boston, from the windows of which she watched the battle of Bunker
Hill, has long since gone; but Copp’s Hill burying-ground, the Old
North Church, Paul Revere’s house, and many other old houses are still
there.
[Illustration: Circle Street and “Old Flud Orson’s” House]
And now, of Martha Hilton. Portsmouth was her home and the scene of her
brilliant matrimonial campaign. This is one of the most picturesque
of our New England towns. Aldrich’s “An Old Town by the Sea” should
be read by the pilgrim on his way. No one loves the old town more,
or knows it better than he. Much remains, here, to tell of Martha
Hilton, but a day well suffices to see it all. A short walk from the
railway-station is a pleasant, old-fashioned market square. At times
it is filled with wagons of hay and loads of wood, while, all about,
is a subdued bustle. From this square leads Pleasant Street, well
named, and, only a few steps away, it is crossed by State Street, once
Queen Street, at the foot of which once stood Stavers’ Inn, the “Earl
of Halifax.” It was in the doorway of this inn that Mistress Stavers
“fied” Martha Hilton _circa anno Domini_ 1754. No print or picture of
this old inn is known to exist. Beyond State Street is Court Street,
with interesting old houses, and some of the ancient flagging here
and there. On the cross streets is more of this, with sometimes a
gutter in the middle of the street. All of this portion of the town
is interesting, dirty, primitive, and full of memories. Parallel with
Pleasant Street are Washington and Water streets, from which, at right
angles, run a dozen lanes, not a whit altered since Martha’s time. Here
is where the sailors in pig-tails and petticoats used to gather. At the
corner of Water and Gardiner streets, let the visitor notice the great
golden linden, overshadowing a house as old and as lovely as the tree
itself.
The neighborhood is full of old houses, with hip roofs and gables. The
Point of Graves, a stone’s throw away, is sadly neglected. Children
sometimes play on a large, flat tombstone, and curiosity-seekers skip
from one headstone to another, in search of the oldest date. The
old stones are sculptured with grim skulls and cross-bones, or with
humorous cherubs. One thinks of the days Tom Bailey spent here, when he
was a blighted being. Let us hope that it was a more secluded spot then
than now.
Close by is Manning Place, very short, and at the corner is the square,
strong house, built prior to 1670, where Benny Wentworth and his
sires were born. A grand place this once was, with its lawn extending
to Puddle Dock. Once this was a fair inlet, but now no one will dispute
the rightfulness of its name.
[Illustration: “This is where the sailors in pigtails and petticoats
used to be.”]
From this point it is a pleasant walk to the old Wentworth mansion,
where Martha came, slaved and conquered, even receiving as her guest
the Father of his country. Skirt around the Point of Graves, and follow
along the water side, by the Gardiner House and its big linden, over
the bridge, and past the Proprietors’ burying-ground; everywhere it
is picturesque. From thence let the traveller follow the left fork
of the road in full view of the river for a portion of the way, and
thence pass through pine groves and between great bowlders, until,
with a sudden descent, a fair prospect seaward bursts upon the vision.
At one’s feet, toward the left, is the old house, “malformed and
delightful.” I well remember when it was venerable in appearance and in
its rooms were to be seen the old spinet, the Strafford portrait, and
many other things so delightful to the antiquary. But, alas! it now is
“spick-span” in yellow and white paint, and set back in a well-groomed
lawn.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: The Gardiner House and the Linden]
The visitor will, of course, wish to see St. John’s. It has an
interesting interior. Here is the old plate, the “Vinegar” Bible, and
other quaint and curious things. The steeple is modern. All about are
fine old houses and great spreading trees. Stoodley’s, too, one will
wish to see, where the gallant captain “fiddled far into the morning.”
It is the brick building, marked “Custom House,” and it stands at the
corner of Daniel and Penhallow streets.
[Illustration]
These are the principal points of interest connected with the life of
Martha Hilton, but Portsmouth old and quaint affords much more to which
the eye of the lover of the antique will surely turn.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Every one visits Plymouth, the home of Priscilla. There is little
need to dwell upon this place here. A Plymouth pilgrimage, if by sea,
is easy and pleasant. Of guide-books there is no lack, and all that
remains of the Puritan maiden’s time is readily found. Even Plymouth
Rock is carefully enclosed; and rightly, too, else it would long
since have been carried away in fragments. On the hill is the old
burying-ground, from which fine views may be had of the old town and
of the harbor where the “Mayflower” lay at anchor, the sweeping coast
here low in sandy dunes, now high in bolder bluffs. The electric car
is here also, which takes one the length of the town and far beyond,
passing the Memorial Hall, where are so many relics of old colony days.
Plymouth, indeed, is easily to be seen. It is the Mecca, to-day, of
many pilgrims. What has been done for Plymouth, I have tried to do for
the other old towns into whose histories are woven the lives of our
heroines. Many of these old houses will soon have passed away. Many
have disappeared within a few years past. Let us hope, however, that
the little now left to us will long remain, and especially may we hope
will be preserved all that serves to remind us of these Three Heroines
of New England Romance.
[Illustration: THE END]
FOOTNOTE:
[1] “Sir Charles Henry Frankland, or Boston in the Colonial Times.”
Elias Nason, M. A. Albany, N. Y.: J. Munsell.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Note: Repeated major section titles were removed. Varied
hyphenation was retained as printed. The list of illustrations and
the captions on the illustrations varied widely. This was retained.
The illustrations were moved to stop them interrupting the middle of
paragraphs so the page numbers in the list will often not match the
actual location of the illustration mentioned.
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