CHAPTER XXIV.
AVERY’S FALL AND THACHER’S WOE.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, even as to-day, the betrothal of a young couple was cause of rejoicing and festivity among their friends, and three days after Lora and Betty had made what we may call their engagement call upon Bessie Partridge, the minister’s family with its guests, and Elder Brewster and the Aldens, were invited to supper at the captain’s. Not to afternoon tea, mind you; nay, not even to that old-fashioned tea-time still popular in the rural districts, where the guests sit down to a table loaded with hot bread and toast and all manner of sweets, with the choice of tea or coffee to wash down the heavy meal.
But Barbara Standish had never even heard the names of tea or coffee, and honestly called the last meal of the day “supper,” setting it at about seven o’clock, when the labors of the day were over and all men at leisure for social enjoyment. At that hour, therefore, the guests sat down to a feast which I dare not describe because I have already described so many, but content myself with saying that it in no wise discredited Mistress Standish’s housewifery, and that when Dame Partridge asked for the “resait” of the frosted cake, the hostess proudly replied that Lora had so improved upon the old formula that it was left in her hands altogether, and Lora modestly added that she should be more than glad to run over and show Mrs. Partridge exactly how she made it.
“I’m obliged to you, dear,” responded the parson’s wife; “for,” with a sly glance at the betrothed pair sitting very stiffly and formally at the right hand of their hostess, “I expect we shall have to be making up some cake pretty soon.”
But our concern is not so much with the feast, of which these friends partook with frank and honest appetites, as with the conversation that came after, while the women gossiped together in the house over a drop of mulled wine, and the men, pipes in mouth and tankards of sound ale at hand, sat under the trees carefully preserved upon the edge of the bluff when the land was cleared for building.
Two wooden armchairs, the only approach to luxurious seats to be found in the captain’s cottage, had been set forth for the elder and Parson Partridge, and the next best given to Anthony Thacher, while the host, with Alden and Jonathan Brewster, sat upon a rude bench formed between two beech-trees. Hobomok, never far from his beloved hero, lay upon the grass solemnly smoking, and the younger men, Wrestling Brewster, commonly called Ras, as a diminutive of ’Rastling, John and Joseph Alden, Alick Standish, and Thomas Thacher hung about the door and windows of the great south room where Bessie, Betty, and Lora flitted around their mothers like pretty kittens around sober Tabitha.
Then it was that Myles, after a moment’s thought and a dubious clearing of his throat, said tentatively,—
“Master Thacher, when I heard that you were to be sent deputy from your new town of Yarmouth to our court at Plymouth, I resolved within myself, if opportunity should offer, and your own mind prove toward the matter, that I would ask you to give me a particular account of your famous shipwreck upon the island men now call Thacher’s Woe from that disaster. Would it offend you if I now urge that petition?”
But even as the words left his mouth the captain regretted their utterance, for the man addressed cringed and started in his chair, as one who feels a touch upon a new wound, while the pallor of his singularly colorless face turned to ashen gray, and his light blue eyes dilated and wandered as those of one who sees a vision of terror.
“Nay”—resumed Myles hastily; but as hastily Thacher took the word out of his mouth.
“Not nay, but ay, good friend!” exclaimed he with an attempted smile. “I know well that the terror of those fearful hours has left its mark not only upon my outer man, but upon the forces of my mind, which are no longer altogether under mine own control, but, like a horse once well terrified at a certain spot, will still swerve and start in passing it, despite of his driver’s voice and rein. Albeit, even as it is well that the unruly steed should be often taken past the bugbear, which he will at last cease to dread, so it is well for me to talk of that day from time to time, and to tell its story as occasion shall befall, to friends who can enter into its solemnity.”
“You are right, my son,” said Elder Brewster quietly. “The unruly heart of man needs long and bitter discipline before it becomes truly meek.”
“Ne’ertheless, Master Thacher, I do withdraw my petition, and beg you instead of that story to tell us how you like our fashion of holding court by deputies rather than pro coram publico as hath been our wont until this year.”
“Nay, Captain Standish, one matter at a time an’t please you, and I have no mind to be balked of the glory of mine adventure. What say you, friends? Shall not I tell you of the shipwreck?”
“It would give me singular pleasure to hear it, Brother Thacher,” replied the parson, while the elder smiled approval, Jonathan Brewster murmured “Ay!” and the captain, lifting his shaggy beard and taking the pipe from his mouth, said with a merry gesture,—
“It were churlish to refuse to listen to a man who fain would tell his own adventures, so I will e’en put all scruples in my pocket and hearken with the rest of you.”
“Well spoke, mine host, and I can comfort you by saying truthfully that the qualm hath passed and I would rather tell the tale than be silent.
“You men of Plymouth have not forgotten the great storm of August in the year of grace 1635, for it was then that the French villain D’Aulney seized upon your rich trading-post at Castine which they now call Bragaduce, and turned John Willet adrift with only a shallop and a worthless due-bill. The terrific storm that wrecked Willet’s shallop and also the armed ship Angel Gabriel, bound to Boston in the Bay, overtook the humbler craft in which my cousin Dominie John Avery, his wife and six children, and I with my wife and four children, nine mariners, and other persons were making the voyage from Ipswich to Marblehead.”
“It was a bark of Isaac Allerton’s in which you voyaged, was it not?” asked Standish.
“Ay, he was owner, but not master.”
“Never mind who played master, if Allerton was owner, the boat was sure of ill luck,” growled Standish; but the Elder interposed serenely,—
“Your speech savors of superstition as well as uncharity, Captain Standish, and I had held you singularly free from both those vices.”
“I crave your pardon, Elder. I had clean forgot that Allerton was for a while your son-in-law. Go on an’ it please you, Master Thacher.”
But again the power of those memories he had so resolutely evoked overmastered the speaker, and it was in a hurried and broken voice and with a furtive gesture of the hand across the eyes that he again began:—
“I fain would tell you, but I cannot, what John Avery was, not to me alone who loved him better than David could love Jonathan, better than mine own brother who yet was dear to me, but to all the world; a man so good, so holy, so devout, that he seemed sent hither to remind us of the Man of Nazareth whose humble follower he was; and withal so keen of wit, and so sound of judgment, and so ready to help with heart and hand wherever he saw need, that I leaned upon him and yearned toward him in all difficulties as a little child with his mother. Verily I believe it was for the chastisement of mine own overweening love that this thing hath befallen.”
“Belike rather the God he served saw him fit for heaven, and so took him even as He did Elijah,” said the Elder reverently.
“It may be, venerable sir, it may be; but I cannot forget mine own arrogancy when John told me that the church at Marblehead had invited him, and he was fain to go, and I said, ‘Well and good, John, but you sha’n’t be rid of me, for I’ll go too, and naught but death shall part us.’ Ah me! Naught but death, says I, and verily ’t was naught but death!”
“Did it storm when you set forth?” asked Jonathan Brewster’s clear and somewhat cold voice; and Thacher, recalling himself with a start, replied in much the same tone:—
“No, although the weather looked threatening, and our master was in haste to sail, hoping to weather Cape Ann before the wind changed as he foreboded it would. But it was just off the Cape that it fell calm, and then all in a moment the storm burst, and the wind, veering to every point of the compass, caught us as if in a whirlpool, so that before the sailors could trim their sails they were torn from their hands, torn from the masts, or if they clung, only helped to tear the masts from the hull and the rudder from the stern. I am not shipman enough to tell you how it all befell, but this I know: that when the morning of Saturday, the 15th day of August in 1635, broke in such fury of wind and rain and raging waves as I never beheld before or since, our bark drove furiously upon a reef, and in the shock went all to pieces, carrying ten souls into eternity before one could cry God have mercy upon them! One of these was Peter Avery, a fine lad, who had gone aft to fetch a rope whereby to bind his mother to the stump of the foremast, and in that act of filial charity he died.”
“And his reward is with God,” murmured the Elder.
“We who survived,” continued Thacher, “speedily made our way from the crumbling wreck to the rock between whose horns our bows were jammed; and hardly were we all off when the last timber splintered beneath the hammer of the surge, and we were left, thirteen poor shivering wretches, two of them little babes in their mothers’ arms, clinging desperately to that naked rock, the helpless prey of white-headed waves that like wild beasts ran raging along the sides of our poor hold, and now and again with a victorious howl leaped up and seized first one and then another of those poor little ones whom neither a father’s arms nor a mother’s piteous embrace sufficed to save. One by one they went, those darlings of our lives, and as her infant was torn from her arms, Mary Avery, with a cry I shall never forget, grasped after it, and was carried away with it. Then my friend, who had followed them but that I held him back, struggled to his knees and prayed aloud. O my friends! when I remember those words, when I remember that face, drenched with the storm, blanched by the blow that brake his heart, yet luminous as was Stephen’s in his martyrdom, I feel like Paul who, being caught up to heaven, saw and heard what it is not lawful—nay, what it is not possible—for a man to repeat.”
“Nay, we would not have you try, my son,” whispered the Elder, while the captain folded his arms and grimly set his lips, and John Alden wept without disguise.
“The next thing I recall,” pursued Thacher softly, “is holding my cousin’s hand and saying over and over, ‘You shall not leave me, John, you shall not leave me! We will die together or we will live together!’ and I see once more amid the whirl and torment of the storm the smile wherewith he looked me in the face and said,—
“‘We will die together, Anthony, and please God we will live together!’ And then, while some loving cry to God rose afresh from his lips, came a giant wave and tore us asunder, and I knew no more until I was struggling in the waves with mine arm around my poor wife, and she clinging senseless to me.
“Then all His waves and storms went over me, and I yielded up my spirit to Him who gave it; but it was not yet purified enough to go where my friend was gone before, and God in mercy granted me yet another season of probation. When the Lord’s Day broke, it found me with my poor wife stretched like two corpses upon the strand of a little islet hard by the rock I have named Avery’s Fall, and beside us a poor goat, who all unaided or uncared for had come safe to land. My poor wife! when she recovered her senses and looked about her and knew our piteous case, who can blame her that she cried,—
“‘A wretched goat saved, and my four sweet babies drowned! Doth God then care for oxen?’”
“The Father of us all can forgive the misery of a mother’s heart,” said the Elder, but Jonathan Alden gravely turned away his head and looked out toward the sea.
“Not only the milch goat, but a cheese and a rundlet of beer were washed ashore,” pursued Thacher, “and oh, piteous sight! the cradle whence my wife had snatched her babe came floating safe ashore, with the covering wrought by my sister in England for our first darling, safe in the bottom. Like Noah’s ark with the dove flown to return no more, it seemed to us, and as I dragged the cradle ashore and my poor wife sank beside it and buried her head in that pretty covering, her mad despair gave way in gracious tears, and she wept until she was able to pray.
“Thus, then, our Lord’s Day passed, but with the Monday came rescue, and we two with our empty cradle and its fair-wrought spread, and the poor goat whose life had hung in the balance, were all brought first to Boston, and then to Yarmouth.”
“But Thomas was not with you, was he?” asked Partridge at last, breaking his intent silence.
“Nay, and there is a matter wherein the Elder may hold me as superstitious as the captain,” replied Thacher, forcing a smile; “but it has seemed to me that the Lord, not ready to take him, and not willing to try him by the sharp discipline vouchsafed to me, interposed with a special Providence in his behalf.
“Only the night before we were to sail, Thomas had a dream, and, like Belshazzar of old, he could not in waking remember its tenure, but only its terror. Of one thing, however, he seemed fully assured, and that was that he must not sail upon our voyage; and so strong and terrible was his dread that he would not so much as come to see us off, but as we went our way to the shore he struck into the forest and made the fifteen miles or so afoot.”
“And has he never recalled the dream?” asked Mr. Partridge, with a look askance at his prospective son-in-law just then trying to snatch a rose from his sweetheart’s hand.
“No; that is, he has always seemed so ill at ease in talking of the matter that we have let it drop. It runs in my mind that it is as much a puzzlement to him as it can be to others.”
“‘There be more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ or in mine, quoth my old gossip Will Shakespeare,” said the captain, and Anthony Thacher heartily replied,—
“And spake the truth as fairly as though he had worn gown and bands. A great student of men was that same gossip of yours, Captain.”
“Ay, and a rollicking good fellow. I knew him well, and something more than well, in the time I was in England after the peace of 1609, and in certain of his plays there’s many a quip and quirk shot at me and my poor achievements. Didst ever see a play called ‘Henry the Fourth’?”
“Nay, Captain, I was never in a playhouse in my life.”
“More’s your loss, friend. Well, in that play there’s a bit runs like this, or something so:—
—‘I remember, when the fight was done,
When I was dry with rage, and desprit toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat, trimly dressed,
Fresh as a bridegroom’—
Well, I’ll not give you the whole, if I remember it, and ’tis years since I thought on’t, but a little later it goes forward:—
‘I then, a’l smarting, with my wounds being cold,
To be so pestered with a popinjay,
Out of my grief and my impatience,
Answered full carelessly, I know not what;
He should or he should not; for ’t made me mad
To see him shine so brisk, and smell so sweet,
And talk so like a waiting gentlewoman
Of guns, and drums, and wounds, (God save the mark!)
And telling me the sovereign’st thing on earth
Was parmaceti for an inward bruise;
And that it was great pity, so it was,
That villainous saltpetre should be digged
Out of the bowels of the harmless earth,
Which many a good tall fellow had destroyed
So cowardly; and but for these vile guns,
He would himself have been a soldier.’
Oh, well, well, but I must laugh, and laugh again as I mind me of the day when Will Shakespeare first mouthed those lines at me, and I stood staring like a stuck pig to hear mine own words so bedded in his poesy, like flies in amber in very sooth, for ’twas a story I had told him of a matter that happened to myself in the Low Countries”—
“Alas, my son,” interposed the Elder, raising his hand, “such memories suit but ill with the lives of ‘pilgrims and strangers’ like ourselves.”
“And for that very reason, Elder,” replied Standish a little hotly, “when you and Master Partridge and the rest besiege me to become a church-member, I will listen to naught of it. The old leaven is still a-working by fits and starts, and I’ll do no such despite to the saints as to count myself into their company. ‘Nay, nay, mine ancient,’ says Will to me one time when we stood side by side in Paul’s Walk, and saw a grand procession pass us by, ‘’tis better to watch the lightning than to handle it.’”
With a mischievous glance at the Rev. Ralph Partridge, Standish resumed his pipe, and the parson wisely remained silent.