Part 1

THREE HEROINES OF NEW ENGLAND ROMANCE

THREE HEROINES OF NEW ENGLAND ROMANCE

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

_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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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,—

“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.