“Barbara! Wife!”
“I am here, Myles, straining the milk. I shall make some furmety for supper. Even Lora begins to beg for it, and the boys dote upon it, little knaves!”
“Let the furmety wait for a bit, and come out here to see old Manomet in the evening light. ’Tis a sight I never tire of.”
“Ay, ’tis very fair,” replied Barbara coldly, as she came and sat for a moment upon the bench at the cottage door, where Myles was wont to smoke his pipe, and muse upon many matters never brought to words.
A little lower down the hill Alick and his brother Myles were playing with John and Joseph Alden, while Betty, a stick in her hand, drove all four boys before her, she with mimic airs of anger and they of terror.
“Very fair!” echoed the captain irritably. “You know naught and care less for Nature, Bab. Your thought never gets beyond your furmety pot or Alick’s breeches.”
“And that’s all the better for you and Alick, Myles,” replied the wife in her usual placid tones; but then, with one of those sudden revulsions by which placid people occasionally surprise their friends, she drew in her breath with something between a sob and a groan and burst out:
“Oh, Myles! Myles! Nature do you call it, and I not love the face of Nature do you say! Nay, man, this is not Nature, these dark woods and barren sands and lonesome hills, with never a chimney in sight,—that’s not the Nature I love and long for. My heart goes back to the pleasant fields and good old hills of Man. There are mountains grander by far than yon dark Manomet, as you call it, and yet pranked all over with cottages, where honest folk find a home and the stranger is ever welcome. And then the fair valleys between, with the peaceful steads where men are born and die in sight of their fathers’ graves, and the old thatched roofs, and the stonecrop on the walls, and the roses clambering over the casements, and oh, the little kyloe cows coming home at night, and the poultry”—
She paused abruptly and threw her apron over her face. Myles carefully knocked the ashes out of his pipe, laid it upon a ledge above the bench, and taking his wife by the arm led her into the house where he might seat her upon his knee with no risk of scandalizing chance spectators. Then he calmly said,—
“The worst of quiet creatures like you, Bab, is that a man never knows the fire’s alight till the house is in a blaze. Now as you, or was it Priscilla Alden, said once of me, ‘A little pot’s soon hot,’ and all the world is forced to know it, but you,—art homesick for the old country, lass?”
“Nay, Myles, there is no home to be sick for; all is changed there; but I would like it better if we had a little holding of our own, and our own cow, and some ducks, and a goose fattening for Michaelmas.”
“But you share the great red cow with Winslow’s folk, and have milk enough for your furmety, sweetheart!” And the grim warrior smiled as tenderly as a mother upon the flushed wet face so near his own. Barbara smiled too, and wiping away the tears sat upright, but was not allowed to leave her somewhat undignified position upon her husband’s knee.
“There, Myles, ’tis past now, and I will be more sensible”—
“Prythee don’t, child! I like thee better thus.”
“Nay, but we’re growing old folk, goodman, and it behooves us to be sober and recollected”—
“Nonsense, nonsense, Bab; there’s no lass among them all that shows so fair a rose upon her cheek, or such a wealth of sunny hair, as my Bab, and as for thine eyes, lass, they are a marvel”—
“Now! now! now! well then, dear, I’ll behave myself, after all that sweet flattery, and—come, let us go out and look at Manomet.”
“Nay. Your longing for a place you may call your own, and have your kine and poultry and all that about you, marries so well with a thought I’ve been turning over and over in my mind for a month or more, that I’ll e’en give it you now, and Manomet and the furmety may wait another ten minutes, or so.”
“Well, then, let me but take my knitting”—
“No. You shall do naught but listen, and you shall sit where you are! For once I’ll have your whole mind”—
“For once, Myles!”
“Ay, for once,—look as grieved as you may out of those eyen of yours! Well enough do you know that Alick, and little Myles, and now Mistress Lora have well-nigh pushed their poor old dad out of their mother’s heart”—
“Myles! Dost really think it, love?”
The captain held his wife as far from him as her seat upon his knee would allow, and eagerly read her fair troubled face, her tender blushes, quivering lips, and lovely, loving eyes, where the tears stood and yet were restrained from falling—read and read as men devour with incredulous eyes some voucher of almost incredible good fortune. Then he slowly said,—
“Truly God has been very good to me, my wife. His name be praised.”
It was a rare aspiration from those bearded lips, not innocent of the strange oaths and fierce objurgation well known to the soldiery of that day,—‘our army in Flanders,’—and over Barbara’s face came a look of such joy and peace as transformed its quiet comeliness to true beauty. But it was she who with woman’s tact dropped a veil over that moment’s exaltation before it should degenerate into commonplace.
“What is your plan, dear?” asked she, and her husband, with a half-conscious feeling of relief, drew a long breath, and said,—
“Oh—yes. Well, Bab, I, as well as you, would be content to live a little farther from some of our townsfolk; it is not here as it was at first, or even when you came. Then we were all of one mind and one interest, and if I could not belong to their church as they call it, at least I respected their beliefs, and they let mine alone. But now, amid all this bickering with Lyford and Oldhame”—
“But Oldhame has gone, and so has Lyford, and are forbidden to come hither again,” interposed Barbara, and her husband slowly and dubiously replied, “I know, Bab, I know; but for all that somewhat of ill feeling in the town has grown out of that affair, and though there’s no man on God’s earth so near to me as William Bradford, and none I reverence more than the Elder, or had rather smoke a pipe with than Surgeon Fuller, there are others that are to my temper like a red rag to a bull, and it’s safer all round that we should not day by day be forced to rub shoulders. So the long and short on’t is, Bab, for I’m not good at speechifying, it needs Winslow for that, I have spoken to Bradford about taking possession of that sightly hill across the bay”—
“The one you fired a cannon at, the other day?” interrupted Barbara slyly.
“Yes—that is, you goose, I fired toward it, just to see how far the saker would carry.”
“Nay, I think it was a sort of salute you were giving to some fancy of your own, Myles, anent that hill.”
“Well, then, since you will have me make myself out no older than Alick, I had been marking how the headland stood up against the gold of the western sky, and it minded me so of Birkenclyffe at Duxbury, and of my boyhood at Chorley and Wigan, and of fair days gone by”—
He paused, and Barbara knew that his thought was of Rose, the sweet blossom of his youth, Rose, whom he had carried in his pride to the neighborhood of the stately domain that ought to have been his and hers, and spent there with her almost the only idle month of his life. She knew, and her heart contracted with a slow, miserable pang, but she only said,—
“Yes, it does look like Birkenclyffe. And you think you could be happy in living there, Myles?”
“Happy!” echoed the soldier moodily. “I should be happy if the wars would break out afresh, and Gideon and I might hear once more the music that we love. We rust here, we two.”
“But the children, Myles! The boys so like their father, and Lora—would you have them orphans, and me”—
“Ah, Lora! I did not tell you when I came home from England, wife, for I did not want to hear any jibes and gainsaying”—
“Oh, Myles, do I jibe at you?”
“Well, no,—no Bab, not jibes; but you know, lass, we never were quite of a mind about the Standish dignities”—
“Dear heart, we have left all that behind us in the Old World! Here we Standishes have dignity and observance in full measure, because we belong to thee, love. Captain Standish, head of the colony’s strong men, is the founder of a new race in this New World.”
“Nay, nay, Barbara, you talk but as a woman, and you never did rise up to the lawful pride of your birth”—
And the captain all unconsciously put his wife off his knee, and rising, strode up and down the room, tugging at his red beard, and frowning portentously. Barbara, her hands folded in her lap, and a sad smile upon her lips, sat watching him.
“It is as well to tell you now as to keep it for years,” broke out the captain suddenly. “Nothing will change it, that is, nothing but Alexander’s death”—
“Alexander’s death! Not our boy, Myles!”
“No, no, no, child! Alexander, son of my cousin Ralph Standish of Standish Hall. When I was in England I went to see him as I told you.”
“Yes, dear.”
“I went to enforce upon him, newly come to the estates, my just and honest claim to my grandfather’s inheritance which Ralph’s grandfather juggled out of the orphan boy’s hands, and which they have kept ever since.”
“I supposed that was your errand, but as I saw naught had come of it I asked you no questions, Myles.”
“And therein showed yourself the kindly sensible woman you ever were, wife. But there is more to the matter. Ralph is an honest fellow, and after some days of looking into the matter he confessed the justice of my claim. I tell you, Bab, we went through those old parchments like two weasels from the Inns of Court; Morton of Clifford’s could have been no subtler; we had out the old deeds from the muniment-room, and sent to Chorley Church for the registry book, where are set down the marriage of my father and mother and my own birth and baptism; and I showed him Queen Bess’s commission to her well-beloved Myles Standish, born on that same date, and at the last, over a good pottle of sack, he confessed to me that I was in the right, but added, with a smile too sly for a Standish to wear, that I should find it well-nigh impossible to prove the matter at law, for, as he was not ashamed to say to my beard, neither he nor his lawyers would help me, and he knew, though he had the decency not to say it, I have no money to tickle the palms of the judges, the commissioners, the court officials, and the Lord Harry alone knows who they are, but all too many for me.”
“Then your cousin is a knave and a robber!”
“Nay, nay, Bab! Nay, I know not that one could expect a man to strip himself of half his estate if the law bade him keep it”—
“You would, Myles.”
“Ah, well, I was ever a thriftless loon, with no trader’s blood in my veins to show me how to keep or to get money. Ralph’s grandmother was fathered by a man who made his money in commerce.”
And the captain smiled as one well content with his own chivalrous incapacity, then hastily went on. “But though Ralph would not give me mine own, nor even let me take it if I tried, he had an offer to make on his part. His oldest son, Alexander by name, was then an infant of two years, a sturdy little knave already scorning his petticoats, and Ralph proposed that we should solemnly betroth him then and there to our Lora”—
“But Lora was not born when you were in England five years ago, Myles.”
“No; but I knew that our two little lads must in course of time have a sister, and counted on her. Truth to tell, Barbara, Ralph and I picked a name for her off the family tree. Lora.”
“If I had known it, the child never should have borne the name, and if I could I would change it now!”
And Barbara, seriously angry, rose from her chair and would have left the room, but her husband detained her.
“There, look you, now! I knew you would take it amiss, and told Ralph so, and he bade me keep it to myself, at all odds till the girl was born and named, and so I have. And yet I do not see what angers you so, Barbara, except that you ever favored your mother’s family, and held your Standish blood too cheap.”
“That quarrel well-nigh parted us ere ever we came together, Myles. Haply it had been better if we had been content to rest simply cousins and never married.”
“Commend me to a good woman for thrusts both deep and sure when once she is angered,” cried Myles, flinging out of the house and up the hill to his den in the Fort.
But when Alick and Betty Alden raced each other thither to tell him that supper was ready, the choleric captain had fully recovered his temper, and found his wife so placid and quietly cheerful that he supposed she also had both forgiven and forgotten.
Which shows that the great Captain of Plymouth understood the strategy of battle better than that of a woman’s heart. Nor did he ever note, that from that day Barbara never spoke her daughter’s name if it could possibly be avoided, calling her generally “my little maid,” and as the child grew, addressing her as May, the sweet old English contraction of maiden.
A few weeks later, as Barbara set the stirabout that sometimes served instead of furmety upon the table, her husband entered, and throwing his hat into Lora’s lap said in a tone of well deserving,—
“There, Bab, I’ve bought out Winslow’s share in the red cow for five pounds and ten shillings, to be paid in corn, and I’ve satisfied Pierce and Clark for their shares with a ewe lamb apiece, so now it is mine, and I give it to you. She’s not the kyloe cow you were longing for, but she’s your own.”
“Thank you, Myles,” replied Barbara, flushing with pleasure. “And is it quite settled that we are to go over to the Captain’s Hill as they begin to call it?”
“Duxbury, I mean to call it in due time. Yes, dame, the men and I are going over to-morrow morning to fell timber, and you shall have some sort of shelter of your own over there before you’re a month older.”