The Project Gutenberg EBook of Three Heroines of New England Romance, by Harriet Prescott Spofford and Louise Imogen Guiney and Alice Brown This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. 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: Harriet Prescott Spofford Louise Imogen Guiney Alice Brown Illustrator: Edmund H. Garrett Release Date: January 20, 2017 [EBook #54028] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE HEROINES--NEW ENGLAND ROMANCE *** Produced by Emmy, MWS and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
THEIR true stories herein
set forth by Mrs.
Harriet Prescott Spofford
Miss Louise Imogen Guiney
and Miss Alice Brown
Copyright, 1894,
By Edmund H. Garrett.
University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.
Priscilla | 15 |
Harriet Prescott Spofford. | |
Agnes Surriage | 63 |
Alice Brown. | |
Martha Hilton | 109 |
Louise Imogen Guiney. | |
Notes | 137 |
Edmund H. Garrett. |
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 |
[10]“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 |
[11]“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 |
[12]“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 |
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[16] 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[17]
[18]
[19]
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[20]
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[21]
[22]
[23]
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[24] 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[28] 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,—
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[29]
[30]
[31]
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[32] 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;[33]
[34]
[35]
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, 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[37]
[38]
[39]
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
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,
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[40]
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,[41]
[42]
[43]
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[44]
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[45]
[46]
[47]
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[48]
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,—
only, instead of the three sand-side houses it was “the Seven Houses of Plymouth,” and[52] 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.
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[53]
[54]
[55]
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.
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[56] 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,[57] 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.
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,[58] 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[59] 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[60] 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
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[64]
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[65]
[66]
[67]
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.
“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,[68] 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.
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[69]
[70]
[71]
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[72]
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.”
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,[73]
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,[74]
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[75]
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,[76]
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[77]
[78]
[79]
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.
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[80]
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[81]
[82]
[83]
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.
Agnes Surriage responded at once to the
new influences about her. Indeed, she was
of those to whom borrowed graces are external[84]
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[85]
[86]
[87]
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[88]
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.
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[89]
[90]
[91]
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.
Here the two must have lived Arcadian days, in all but lightness of heart. The lovely maid, for whom no labor had been[92] 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.[93] 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[94] 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.”
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[95] 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[96] 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[97] 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[98] 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.
To court and people, the earthquake voiced
the vengeance of an angry God; to Frankland,
it had been a flaming finger, writing on[99]
[100]
[101]
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.[102]
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[103]
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[104] 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[105] 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.
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[110]
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[111]
[112]
[113]
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[114]
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[115]
[116]
[117]
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[118]
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[119]
[120]
[121]
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:—
(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[123]
[124]
[125]
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[126] 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[127]
[128]
[129]
somehow weathered the Revolution; they
were peers of—
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;[130] 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![131]
[132]
[133]
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[134]
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.
’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.
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[138] 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.[139] 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[140] 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[141] 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[144] 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[145]
[146]
[147]
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,—
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[148] 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,[149]
[150]
[151]
but yields, instead, a cool, refreshing
draught.
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[152] 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.
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[153]
[154]
[155]
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.
And now to Marblehead, by road or by rail as[156] 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[157] the visitor will meet “many an old Marbleheader,” pictures in themselves.
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[158] 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.
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[160] 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[161]
[162]
[163]
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.
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[164] 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[165]
[166]
[167]
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.
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.
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.[169]
[170]
[171]
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.
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.
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[173]
[174]
[175]
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.
[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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