Not until the next afternoon did Priscilla Alden allow her husband to report the patient ready to receive the visitors who awaited her summons, but when the governor, the captain, the Elder, and the doctor were finally admitted they found him a very different looking person from the captive driven into town by the Indians, who had already been paid their reward and dismissed.
Like most of the colonists, John Alden had enlarged his house from the rude shelter of the earliest years to a dwelling suited to a growing and thrifty family, so that at the other side of the door opening into the great cheerful kitchen with its southern and eastern windows lay a new room, more carefully finished than the first, its floor nearly covered with rugs of Priscilla’s own manufacture, its fireplace decorated with Dutch tiles, its woodwork painted, and its casement window set with real glass in leaden bands, instead of the oiled paper or linen which sufficed for the kitchen windows.
Here were collected the few pieces of furniture which William Molines and his wife had managed to bring over from France, Holland, and England, the three homes of their years before the Pilgrimage. The deep and wide carved chest of black oak, with cunningly wrought hinges and a key nearly as large as that of the Bastile, stood on one side of the fireplace, its depths well stored with damask and napery, bed linen and window curtains, some of Priscilla’s own spinning and some of her mother’s, while certain articles of fine damask wrought upon looms of Flanders, and bought even there at a great price, were hereditary treasures.
On the other side of the fireplace stood a “buffet,” of English make and quaintly carved with heads of beasts and gaping gargoyles which were the terror of Betty and her brothers on the rare occasions when they were allowed to penetrate the solemn solitudes of this state apartment. This buffet was not as well supplied as that of the governor’s wife, and boasted no Venetian glass, although there were four plain glass tumblers, or rummers, as they were then called, and a few pieces of Delft ware with a china bowl so precious that Priscilla seldom dared to look at it. Around the neck of one of the gargoyles projecting from the cornice of the buffet hung a string of curious Indian, or rather Ceylonese beads, each carved into semblance of an idol’s head, a fact happily unguessed by their owners, or indeed by Plymouth, which would have demanded an auto-da-fé of them in the town square; but by some unconscious cerebration Priscilla had decorated the other gargoyle with a string of wampum, thus balancing the superstition of oldest eastern idolatry with that of newest, or rather latest discovered, western. Later on, this string of wampum became quite an appreciable bit of property, but at present it was scarcely more than a curiosity; for although it had been recommended to the Pilgrims some four years previous to this date by Isaac de Razières, the delightful Dutchman who visited Plymouth with overtures of friendship and menace from New Amsterdam, it had not as yet become the circulating medium it did later, since both the New England Indians and the New England colonists had to be educated to its use,—a use invented by those unhappy Pequots and Narragansetts upon whose shore the quahaug shells were found in perfection. The thrifty Dutchman in his visit to Plymouth had brought a quantity of wampum for sale, and the Pilgrims, after listening to his account of its uses and value, invested fifty pounds with him at the rate of a penny for three bits of the blue, or six of the white shell, this price bringing the blue pieces nearly to the value of a cent of our currency.
But we must linger no longer over the description of Priscilla’s “withdrawing” room, as it might very literally be called, but stand aside to allow the Fathers of Plymouth to enter and find Sir Christopher Gardiner seated in an invalid-chair beside the fire, writing in a little pocket-book which at their entrance he closed and hid in his breast.
Grave salutations passed, the guests were seated, and Alden, who had ushered them in, would have left the room, but was bidden to remain by the governor, while Standish with one of his rare smiles added,—
“I can answer for my friend John’s discretion as for mine own.” At which pleasant word the giant looked foolishly glad, for it was the most friendly speech Standish had vouchsafed since the night when Alden’s ill-timed slumbers had so nearly dishonored his captain.
“And now, sir,” began Bradford in a tone finely mingled of magisterial authority and benevolent hospitality, “if you are sufficiently recovered from the hardships of your journey hither, we should be glad to hear some account of your coming into such straits, and especially of what complaint the rulers of the Bay Colony may have against you.”
“A truly reasonable inquiry, Master Governor, and one which I shall find joyful content in gratifying,” replied the knight, assuming an easier position, and stretching his shapely legs, clad in a pair of John Alden’s best hose, toward the fire. The action attracted Bradford’s notice, and, with Pris Carpenter’s fancies in his mind, he scrutinized his guest with more attention than men generally bestow upon one another’s personal appearance.
Tall, dark, with a hawk’s eyes, and an eagle’s nose above an enormous mustache, which could not, however, conceal a riotous and sensual mouth, with dark floating hair now carefully dressed, and a smooth-shaven cleft chin telling of both will and courage, the knight was beyond controversy a handsome man in spite of his forty or fifty years, and one well suited to turn the brain of a romantic girl. His expression of reckless and jeering self-assertion, thinly veiled under a mask of deference and deprecation, was less propitious than his features, but as Bradford shrewdly told himself was by no means the expression he would wear in conversation with a young maiden whom he wished to please.
“Yes, I shall be most happy, most content, to tell you whatever in your opinion, sir, it imports you to know of my poor history,” pursued Sir Christopher in a vague fashion, as if inwardly employed in concocting a romance to serve instead of the truth. “But I know not well where to begin. Shall I tell you that my father is a wealthy gentleman of Gloucester in England, and is, or was, poor man, nephew of that Bishop Gardiner, Lord of the see of Winchester, who did God service under Queen Mary”—
“Peace, ribald!” broke in the stern voice of Elder Brewster. “If indeed you are of kin to that bloody persecutor and servant of a yet more murderous mistress, boast not of it here among those who have fled into the wilderness to escape the cruelties of the Scarlet Woman and those who serve her.”
“Lo you now! I do most humbly crave your pardon, most worthy—nay, then, what do they call men who are no priests, and yet take upon them the priest’s office under John Calvin and his fellows?”
“Sorry should I be to seem discourteous or inhospitable to a wounded man,” exclaimed Bradford indignantly, “but men have been set in the bilboes and worse for less offense than such words.”
“Do I not know it?” retorted Gardiner. “Did not I, with these eyes, see mine own friend Thomas Morton set in the bilboes and direfully insulted in yon village of Boston, for less,—nay, for naught—for naught—but scaring a pack of saucy Indians by firing some hail-shot over their heads to fright them into bringing him a canoe? And did I not see him, less than two months gone by, haled down to the quay and put by main force aboard a skiff which rowed him out to the Handmaid, a crank leaky old tub, not half victualed or half found, and no provision for his comfort, nay, for his very life, but a handful or two of corn out of his own provision, stolen out of his house at Merry Mount before it was set afire? Yes, sirs, set afire as the Handmaid sailed out of port, as a taunt and a gibe to a helpless prisoner! Ha, ha, though! That word ‘helpless’ minds me of a merry joke even in the midst of such dolor. When our friends yonder had got poor Morton into their boat, and rowed him to the side of the Handmaid,—and marry, she’s much such a handmaid as Hagar of the Bible, turned out into the wilderness with neither meat nor water enough to keep poor Ishmael alive”—
“Profane man! Do you dare”—began Brewster, but with an uplifted hand and deprecatory bow the knight interrupted him:—
“Pardon, your reverence, though ’t was a most apposite quotation and surely more scriptural than profane,—but let it pass. As I was saying, when the boat reached the Handmaid’s rotund sides and a rope was thrown over, Morton was bidden to seize it and climb aboard; but, as he himself might say, he put in a demurrer, and represented that having no business on board the Handmaid he hesitated to intrude where perhaps he was not wanted. The tipstaves persisted, Morton desisted, until in the end the rope was drawn up and a noose let down instead, wherein they netted him and so hoysed him on board, he laughing like a fiend at their toil and rage.”
“They should have put the noose around his neck, and not hasted to pull him inboard,” growled Standish; and Sir Christopher, turning airily upon him, cried,—
“Say you so, Captain Sh—nay, Captain Standish? Well, and truly there’s little love lost ’twixt you and Morton. He had a story that you pleaded hard for leave to shoot him with your own hand, when he was down here at Plymouth a prisoner as I am now.”
“I would have been glad enough to meet him man to man, and let him who was the better marksman shoot the other.”
“And a very pretty main it would be between two such fighting cocks as”—
“Enough of this!” exclaimed the governor, silencing with a gesture not only the captain, who had sprung to his feet, but the Elder, who with a slow red mounting to his cheek where it showed like the color in a hardy apple frozen and withered, yet clinging to the parent tree, seemed about to speak.
“Sir Christopher Gardiner, if that is indeed your name and degree, we men of Plymouth claim no titles, nor are we courtiers, skilled in cunning fence of word, but we have our own dignity as rulers of this little commonalty, and our self-respect as men. Be pleased, therefore, to lay aside all these quips and cranks, and tell us briefly who you are, and why you are found fleeing from the Bay, even at risk of your life.”
Somewhat impressed by the simple dignity of Bradford’s manner, and perhaps a little ashamed of his own levity, the knight at once threw it off, sat more upright in his chair, and fixing his eyes steadily upon Bradford’s face as if to avoid the challenge of Standish’s eager gaze, replied courteously,—
“I have already told you, Sir Governor, that I am Christopher Gardiner, son of a worthy gentleman of Gloucester in England. Early in youth I wandered away from home, and sojourned so many years among Jews, Turks, and other infidels, as the Prayer Book hath it, that my father disinherited me and gave my estates to a brother who clung to him—and to them. On the other hand, a certain potentate whose name you love not made me a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre and a Cavalier of the Milizia Aureata, commonly called the Golden Melice.”
“The Pope of Rome has no power to appoint a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre!” exclaimed Brewster, recalling worldly lore which he had thought forgotten. Gardiner bowed low and mockingly.
“Pardon! No doubt, reverend sir, you are better acquainted with His Holiness than I can be, but I go on with mine account of myself. Coming back to England after well-nigh thirty years’ absence, I find my father dead, my brother and his brood in possession, and naught left for the poor exile, should he ever return, but a beggarly thousand crowns and a nook beside the hall-fire so long as he should behave himself!
“Well, well, ’t is not good for me to dwell on those days; so to cut the matter short, I took my thousand crowns, and a few more that had hidden among the tatters of my knightly robes, and came hither to the New World, hoping to escape from men and the weariness of their ways. I bought a bit of land from a copper-colored gentleman calling himself Chickatawbut who professed to own it, and who made much complaint that the men of Plymouth had stolen from his mother’s grave the choice bearskins laid over it to keep the good gentlewoman warm through the storms of winter”—
“We bought some bearskins of a native, but knew not where he got them,” said Bradford with an air of annoyance, and Sir Christopher’s great mustache stirred in malicious glee at seeing that the pin-prick had reached the quick.
“I bought my land, and I built mine house, and I planted my garden, and I hired some Indian guides to show me the haunts of the game and fish, and I began to live much such an innocent and beneficent life as that of Adam in Paradise”—
“With yon fair lady as your Eve?” demanded Standish. The knight turned his eyes upon him and the spark kindled in their depths, but again Bradford interposed,—
“Leaving aside tropes and metaphors, Sir Christopher, may we ask what relation the gentlewoman we found at your house sustains toward yourself?”
“She is my cousin, my housekeeper, my poor little friend. Ah, indeed, gentlemen, you may leave her alone with no fear but she will suffer enough both for her own peccadillos and mine, since those gloomy bigots of the Bay have seized and hold her close prisoner, with low diet, and questionings like those of the Holy Office, day by day.”
And the man’s voice took on so genuine a tone of pain and fear as he thought upon his helpless companion that even Brewster forbore to press the subject further, and Bradford not unkindly inquired,—
“And why didst thou flee from this poor paradise of thine?”
“I heard by my friendly Indians, the same who afterward told me that Mary was a prisoner, that there was mischief plotting against me in the council chamber at Boston, and one fine morning when I saw a boat filled with tipstaves and bum-bailiffs crossing the river half a mile or so from my house”—
“Neponset the Indians call it,” murmured John Alden; and Gardiner nodded good-humoredly.
“Ay, so they do, yet at that moment I tarried not to discover if Winthrop’s men had learned its name as well as its navigation, but, throwing my shot-pouch and powder-flask around my neck, thrusting my compass into one pocket and a full flask into the other, I bade my poor little cousin good-by, and well armed, as you may be assured, I plunged into the forest, and set out for the New Netherlands, some sixty or seventy leagues to the southwest of Boston Bay.”
“They thought you would try to reach Piscataqua, where Hilton and others are seated. Church of England men, they, and more of your own fashion.”
“Why, of course they so thought, Master Governor, and that is why I went not thither; nor did I seek to come here because I felt myself in need of some air less pure and less attenuate than that which circles round a conventicle; I pined for the company of ordinary mortals like myself.”
“You hardly reached the New Netherlands, however,” suggested Bradford dryly.
“No. I fell sick the first night, from sleeping on the bare ground in a pitiless storm of rain and sleet, and I rested for a day or so with some natives whom I knew. Besides, had they much harmed her I left behind, I would have gone back and revenged her by at least John Winthrop’s life.”
“Come, now, that’s spoken man fashion!” exclaimed Standish, and the two soldiers exchanged an almost friendly glance and smile. But the smile quickly faded from the knight’s face as his thoughts went back to his terrible experience in the wilderness, and resting his elbow on his knee, with his chin in the cup of his hand, he stared gloomily into the fire, and went on:—
“I heard once and again from Boston, and I sent a token to my poor girl, bidding my messenger lie, and say that I was safe and well; then I went on, and wandered for days, nay, for weeks, up and down, hither and yon, fevered, wounded, helpless, yet unbroken. I met natives who told me of a great river in the Pequod country,—Canaughticott they called it; but I could not cross it save by the favor of those savages, the most bloody and the most implacable of any in the country, and I saw it would be but madness to attempt it. Then I was minded to linger about in the forest until summer, when I might make my way north to Piscataqua, or perhaps ship aboard some vessel bound to the New Netherlands, or even come hither and ask shelter,—in very truth I knew not what I would be at, for every way seemed barred, and I was too dazed and fevered much of the time to concoct a plan beyond the next meal, or the next lodging. At last the Massachusetts runner who had dogged the path to Piscataqua for two or three weeks tried another trail and came upon me. I since hear that he would have murthered me but for your influence, and I am beholden to you, one and all; for, sad as is my plight, I am not yet ready to make venture of a country even stranger to me than New England. But since the Bay had set a reward upon my head it might not safely rest even upon the dank leaves of the forest; and two days ago, while Samson so slept, the Philistines came upon him; that is to say, I wakened suddenly with a most uncomely savage bending over me, and trying to steal my snaphance which I hugged close to my breast. Alive in a moment, I sprang to my feet, dashed my fist into the fellow’s mouth and heard his teeth split off like icicles, even as I sprang for the other side of the thicket to make ready to shoot him. Now beyond that thicket lay a stream whose name I know not, but broader than the Thames at London”—
“Taunton River, we have named it,” again suggested Alden.
“Ay? Well, there lay a canoe pulled up on the bank, with the paddles in it. To seize that canoe and paddle across the river was my game, and haply so reach the New Netherlands; but as I put my shoulder to the bows the enemy fell upon me, a half dozen at least of hellish whooping savages with all their murderous motives uppermost. With one mighty heave I pushed off and sprang in, at the same moment presenting my piece now at this, now at that one of the savages. Well I knew that any one of them might hide behind a tree and pick me off with an arrow, and I found time to marvel that they did not, for how was I to know that they had been ordered to take me alive and unharmed? but even as the canoe felt the stream and swerved away from the shore, even as a delusive hope of escape danced before my eyes, the stern of the tittlish craft ran upon a rock, and presto! I was in the water, and what is worse, my piece and my rapier were at the bottom of the stream! I stooped to grope for the good blade, but it lay too deep, and as I rose they were upon me, yelling like fiends. One weapon remained, my little dagger of Venice, which I would not have lost for a gold piece, sith it is a dagger of happy memories and hath carved me many a puzzling knot, even as the great Alexander untied the Gordian knot with his own good blade”—
“Your dagger is safe, and shall be restored. I pr’ythee get on,” remonstrated Bradford.
“Sir, your impatience is flattering to my poor powers of narration, and sooth to say, I found myself much interested in the story as it went on. Well, I drew the dagger and I shook it in their faces after a most terrible fashion, and I swore most roundly that the first man who came within reach should taste its point; and so fearful and so truthful was my mien that they slunk back, and I even began to cast lightning glances toward the canoe as it lay stranded not many feet away, when some direct emissary of Satan whispered a plan to those imps of the same master, and two of them, retiring to the bushes, cut half a dozen or so of long poles and stripped them of their leaves and little shoots; then each man seizing one, they began to try to knock the dagger out of my hands, and as I swiftly changed it from side to side, and turned every way to shelter it, their dastardly blows rained down upon my hands and arms until the sleeves were cut to tatters and the skin beneath to ribbons of most unseemly hue. I held on so long as a man’s will may conquer flesh and blood, for I fancied that, knowing me to be a man of some daring and endurance they fain would take me alive to test my courage under torture, and I had liever provoke them to kill me then and there; but in the end, when the dagger was beaten out of my numb and swollen fingers, they closed in upon me like foul wolves upon a wounded stag, and all was over.
“They bound my arms, as Master Alden can tell you, most cruelly, and so soon as themselves were refreshed—although not so much as a drop of water gave they me until at night I managed to drink from a pool where we lay for a few hours—they set off for Plymouth; and the rest you know.”
“And the man is over-weary for safety. ’Tis best to leave him to rest, and to Mistress Alden’s ministrations.”
So spake Samuel Fuller, the kindly surgeon and physician of the Pilgrims; and Bradford cordially replied,—
“Yes and indeed, Doctor. Sir Christopher, we do not make you any answer just now, except that we are beholden to you for your courteous reply to our inquiries, and we will now leave you to repose. To-morrow we shall know better what to reply. We wish you good-e’en.”
“Good-evening, Sir Governor, and each of you gentlemen. Captain Standish, it would please me much if by and by you would waste an hour in talk with me of the stirring adventures we both have known in those realms of heathenesse beyond the seas.”
“It will give me singular pleasure so to do, Sir Christopher,” replied Standish; and so in amity and sympathy parted two men who with equal pleasure would have fought hand to hand until one lay dead upon the field, or, as they that evening did, over a tankard of strong ale, rehearsed for each other’s benefit their battles of old time.