Part 3

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.

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.

MARTHA HILTON

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.

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!”

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!”

(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.

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_.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.