CHAPTER XXV.
JEPHTHAH’S DAUGHTER.
St. Martin’s summer was in the land; that lovely parting smile of the year, so full of love, so full of reminiscence and of promise, so full of pathos and of that vague yearning that lies at the core of every heart, and which I fancy Bossuet means when he speaks of “the inexorable weariness which lurks at the foundations of all our lives.”
The door of Standish’s cottage stood wide, and between it and the lattice opening upon the sea, letting in the sweet breath of marigolds and thyme basking in the southern sun, Barbara stepped lightly back and forth, spinning from her great wheel the fine yarn that would be woven or knit into the winter garments of the household.
A shadow across the floor made her turn, quick yet fearless as a bird building in a tree above a house whose inmates never have threatened it.
A tall, good-looking young man stood in the doorway, and with his eyes searched the room before he said,—
“Good-morrow, dame. Is Lora somewhere at hand?”
“Oh, good-morrow, Ras! Lora has gone to the top of the hill for a breath of evening air. It has been so warm to-day.”
“Yes, Hobomok calls it the Indian’s summer because it comes just before winter,” replied Wrestling Brewster absently; and then after another moment of hesitation he pulled off his wide hat, and coming close to the spinner’s side fixed his eyes upon hers with a shy appeal while he asked,—
“Do you think, dame, I might ask her?”
“Ask her what, Ras?”
“Oh, Dame Barbara, you know full well what I fain would ask.”
“There’ll be an apple-bee at your house or at Jonathan’s this week, will there not?”
“Ay, at Jonathan’s on the Thursday, and Lucretia bade me invite you all.”
“Well, then, you foolish boy, sure that is your errand to Lora, and you’ll find her on the hill, most like at what she calls her sunset seat.”
“’Twas I that made it for her,” said Wrestling eagerly, and Barbara, smiling in the way matrons smile at transparent youth, replied,—
“Then you know where it is. Go, and God go with you.”
“My grateful duty to you, dame,” murmured the young fellow, and went like an arrow from a bow.
A half hour later Barbara, setting her wheel aside, stepped to the door to look toward the hill, and to judge by the position of the sun how near the hour might be to supper time.
Coming up from the shore she saw her husband, and at the first glance knew that he was ill-pleased; with this conviction came a foreboding that made her turn her eyes again toward the hill, but now it was the daughter, and not the sun, for which she looked.
“Where’s Lora, wife?” inquired the captain so soon as he was within speaking distance.
“She went out an hour or so agone for a stroll,” replied the mother mildly. “She has been so steadily stitching at your new shirts, Myles, that I sent her to get a breath of fresh air.”
“Belike it’s she I saw upon the hill; ’twas a white gown, at all events.”
“And like you no longer to see her in white?” asked Barbara, apparently in great surprise. “Why, ’tis to please you she wears it, though it makes a mort of washing for poor Hepsey. But where hast been thyself, goodman?”
“To Plymouth, and Alice Bradford sends you a clutch of eggs from her new brought fowls.”
“Nay, but that’s more than kind!” cried Barbara. “And how fares she, and is it true that Prissie Wright will marry Manasses Kempton? And did you get the grist ground, and what said Miller Jenney of not having it yesterday?”
“Come, come, dame, ’tis not for naught your tongue wags like Priscilla Alden’s all of a sudden. Tell me what man is on the hill with our Lora, and what ’tis you’re keeping from me,—or would if you could. Out with it, Bab! who’s the man I saw up there?”
“Nay, Myles, that’s no tone for you to take towards me! ’Tis not one of the children nor one of the servants you’re speaking to.”
“What! ruffling her feathers like a Dame Partlet if you try to steal the chickens from under her! Nay, wife, that mood’s as strange to you as the chattering one, and both are but put on to turn my mind from its course; but ’tis no use, Bab, no use at all. Come, now, stop these manœuvres and ambushes and false sallies and all your simple strategy, and meet me in the open field. Was it Wrestling Brewster that I saw sitting with Lora on her sunset seat?”
“I know not what you saw, Myles, but I know that Wrestling Brewster went up there to find Lora something like a half hour ago.”
“And you knew it?”
“I sent him.”
“You sent him! And for what?”
“For naught more than to find her, but I can guess his errand though he told it not.”
“Oh! And might the father of the maid venture so much as to ask what this errand might be?”
“Nay, Myles, be not so bitter! If I cannot go with you in this matter, ’tis because I love my child even more than you can love her.”
“Love your child! Love your own way and your own will, as you ever have done! Woman, do you defy me?”
“Oh, Myles, Myles!” And fearlessly approaching the angry man, Barbara laid a hand upon his arm and looked straight into his face with all her brave and noble soul shining out of those eyes whose wonderful charm time had not clouded in the least. The captain met them, and the terror of his frown subsided into an angry laugh.
“Well—you should not thwart me if you would not see me thwarted. But honestly, Barbara, have you forgotten or do you despise my constant wish for Lora’s future? Must I mind you once more of my contract with my cousin Ralph whereby his eldest son is to marry our daughter, and so to her and her children shall be restored the fair domain which his grandsire stole from mine? Know you not that naught in all this world sits nearer to my heart than this scheme, and that only last month I wrote to Ralph and told him that Lora was now turned eighteen, and if his boy was ready to fulfill the contract I would come to England with the maid, and see her seated at Standish Hall? Mind you all that, Mistress Barbara?”
“Ay, Myles, I mind it well, and I mind too that you did not tell me of that letter till ’twas gone.”
“Haply not, but what of that? Is a man bound to lay all his business before his wife, or to ask her leave to write to his own kinsman?”
“’Tis my kinsman in the same degree, mind you, husband. And because I too am born of Standish I have a right to speak, I have a right to know, and to decide in this matter,—yes, as good a right as yours, Myles.”
“Oho! ’Tis a cartel of battle, is it? Partlet against Chanticleer, eh? Well, our cousins the Standishes of Duxbury carry a gamecock for their crest, and I’ll e’en borrow his spurs.”
“Oh, Myles, Myles! This over-weening ambition of thine hath turned thy brain! When till now didst ever treat me thus?”
“Nay, I’ll not be wheedled with soft touch, nor tearful eyen, nor broken voice. There, there, let go mine arm and wipe thy tears away! Why, thou foolish lass, dost not know I’d liever face a tribe of Pequods than see thee weep? Tut, tut, silly wench, give me a kiss and be done with it. What chance hath Samson when Delilah cries?”
“But, dear my lord, listen now that your mood is somewhat softened. How can you be so sure that this great marriage will make our dear maid happy? You know how tender and how sensitive she is; you know how she clings to love, and seems to draw her life from us as the flowers do from the sun; sure am I, as sure as of to-day’s breath, that parted from home and father and mother and brothers and friends and all she has ever loved and clung to, our Lora would droop and die just as that sea-bird did that the boys caught and tried to tame.”
“And if she did!” cried the captain, flaming again into sudden wrath, the reflex perhaps of a stinging pain driven through his heart by his wife’s last words. “Had not she better die as mistress of Standish Hall and be buried with her ancestors in the tomb of the Standishes than to vegetate here as the wife of Wrestling Brewster and fill a nameless grave in these wilds?”
“Since God has forsaken you and the Evil One seized upon your mind, I have naught more to say,” returned Barbara, thoroughly angry on her own side; and as she turned into the house Standish, with a black frown darkening his whole presence, strode away toward the hill.
Almost an hour earlier Wrestling Brewster, making his way softly over the fallen leaves and ripe mosses of the hillside path, had stolen unawares upon as fair a picture as Captain’s Hill has ever seen, or ever shall while time and earth endure.
Very nearly where the monument stands to-day, there then grew a clump of oaks, and between two of them had been fixed a commodious bench, with a back quaintly carved and ornamented with a border of red cedar. From this vantage-point could be seen a fairer view than that of to-day, for man had not yet conquered Nature, nor substituted his uncouth and commonplace works for her perfection.
Clark’s Island, still covered with its primeval cedars and with its northern headland unwasted and majestic, lay like a bower upon the great field of flowing water, and matched Saquish, still an island, but beginning to throw out tentative arms toward the Gurnet’s Head, where six hundred years before Thorwald, brother of Leif, wounded unto death by the savages, desired to be buried, with a cross at his head and another at his feet, directing that the headland should thenceforth be known as Krossness. Toward these yearned the loving arm thrown out by Manomet toward the Duxbury shore,—that arm now reduced to a barren sandspit, but then a green and fruit-laden peninsula; and within it glittered in the evening light the harbor, deep enough at that day to float not only the Mayflower, but Captain Pierce’s Lyon, which now lay snugly anchored there, while the governor’s barge rowed away toward the town, bearing Bradford and Winslow home with the jolly mariner as their guest. Blue smoke-wreaths floating idly upward from Plymouth cottages told of housewives busy with the evening meal, and upon the crest of Burying Hill a twinkling gleam now and again showed that Lieutenant Holmes did not suffer the brasswork of the colony’s guns to grow dim now that they had come under his care.
But closer at hand than these things stretched the marshes, the beautiful Duxbury marshes with their grasses full grown and ripe, reposing under the sunset light like a fair garden, where great masses of color lay in harmonious contrast, and the heavy heads of seed bent, and rippled, and rustled to the evening breeze, murmuring sweet secrets that he carried straight out to sea and buried there.
O man, man! Lay out your modern gardens, and mass your pelargoniums and calceolarias and begonias and salvias and the rest, in beds of contrasting color, and then, if you would note your improvement upon ancient methods, go in the autumn and look at the marshes of the Old Colony, laid out by Mother Nature before Thorwald selected Krossness first as his chosen home, and then his chosen grave.
So fair, so wonderful, so entrancing, lay the view that evening at the foot of Captain’s Hill, yet Wrestling Brewster, albeit a man of singular delicacy of perception, never saw it; saw nothing, in fact, but the lissome form of a young maid clothed in white samite, with pale golden hair wound around her head and held by quaint silver pins with crystal heads that now and again caught the light and sent it flashing back like the aureole of a saint. The great gray eyes, wide open beneath their level brows, were steadfastly fixed upon some point far out at sea, the vanishing point of earth’s curve, the point where the straightforward look of human eyes glides off the surface of the globe and penetrates the ether beyond. What vision arose before the maiden’s eyes in that dim horizon realm? What thought or what dream parted the soft mouth, and tinged the pure pallor of the cheek? What meant the sigh that just stirred the flower at her throat?
So asked the heart of the young man standing motionless and devout in the edge of the little grove, until with the feeling of one who intrudes upon sacred mysteries he withdrew his gaze, and rustled the twigs of the shrub beside him. The girl turned quickly, and as she met his eyes smiled gently.
“Oh, is it you, Ras? I’m glad you came.”
“Are you, Lora? Are you glad I came? And I am glad that you are glad.”
“’Tis so fair, so heavenly a scene that I would all I love might enjoy it as well as I.”
“Lora! All you love, say you? Oh, Lora, do you love me?”
“Ras! Nay, let us not speak of just ourselves; we are so little and the sky is so great.”
“The sky, dear? But the sky and the sea and the forest, they are always here, and we may look at them all our lives long,—all our lives, Lora, our two lives that might be one.”
The gray eyes, still full of dreams, still questioning the far-off depths of the skies beyond the sea, reluctantly turned and rested fearlessly upon the eager and troubled face of the young man.
“What is it, Ras dear? Why are you so—so troubled is it? Why don’t you sit down here beside me and look as we have looked so often upon all this beauty? It was so good of you, Ras, to make this seat for me. It is the happiest place I know in all the world.”
“Then make it happiest to me, darling, by letting it be the place of our betrothal. Oh, Lora, I thought you knew,—I thought you understood, and—and—yes, I even dared to hope that you, just in some far-off maidenly, saintly fashion, felt somewhat the love that devours me like death until I know for certain that it is returned, and then indeed shall I pass from death unto life. Speak, Lora,—speak for God’s dear sake, speak to me.”
“But why are you so moved, Ras, and why after all these years of love and friendliness do you beg me as if I were some stranger to say that I love you?”
“Lora! Lora! You break my heart!”
“Oh, Ras, dear dear Ras! Don’t look so, don’t speak so! There are very tears in your eyes, and see, they call the tears to mine! Why truly, dear Ras, I love you, I love you dearly, as well as I love Alick or Josias,—as well as I love Betty Alden, who is the dearest friend I have, as well as”—
“Stop, stop, for pity’s sake! I thought I suffered before, but oh, Lora, you have given me my deathblow.”
“Nay, what is it, what is it I have done? What a wicked wretch I am to grieve you so, but how is it, dear? Indeed I do love you, Ras, I do indeed!”
“Yes, you love me as a child loves, as an angel loves, as you loved me years ago when I, already come to man’s estate, watched you growing to womanhood like a sweet flower, and vowed that you, and none but you, should be my wife; and for the sake of that vow and for love of you,—yes, an ever growing love of you, mine own sweet love,—I have never looked upon a maiden’s face save as a woman might. I have cared so little for their company that they flout me”—
“Yes, they call you the old bachelor,” interrupted Lora, half merrily and half penitently. “But I never once dreamed it was for love of me you held yourself so strange to all the others. But now I do know, Ras, it seems no more than honest that you should have what you have waited for, and if you want me for your wife, and my father and my mother make no objection, why I will please you thus far.”
“You will—you will be my wife!” exclaimed Wrestling. “Oh, Lora, do you mean it? Do you really, really mean that you will be my wife?”
“It seems to me, young man, that I have somewhat to say in this matter,” broke in a strident voice, and Lora looked up in dismay at her father’s face, very angry, very ominous, yet not turned upon her. At a later day Myles Standish was glad to remember that even in this extremity he never spoke one angry word, or cast one angry look to the child who was the idol of his life.
“Oh—Captain Standish!” stammered Wrestling, springing to his feet.
“Yes, Master Brewster, Captain Standish at your service, who ventures to suggest that you might have done better to ask his leave before urging his daughter to defy his wishes.”
“Oh, father!” And Lora, rising to her slender height, stepped forward and fearlessly slid a soft little hand into the captain’s brawny half-closed fist. “Defy you, father!” murmured she, looking into his face with eyes of loving reproach, “nay, I never could do that.”
“I know it, my pet, I know it; but there, make you home as soon as ever you may—mother is waiting for you—run away, child, run.”
“Nay, father, but I fain would know first why you are so angry with my dear friend Ras. He says he loves me very much, and he wants me to be his wife, and I love him too, and if you please to have it so, I said I would marry him”—
“As you might have said you would take a sail with him!” exclaimed the captain with angry fondness in his tone; but the fondness died away as his eyes turned from the fair face of his daughter to the flushed and anxious one of her suitor, while he said,—
“You may see for yourself, Wrestling Brewster, that this child knows not the meaning of marriage love. She is no fonder of you than of—say Betty Alden, or mayhap her pet cat”—
“Nay, nay, father, I must not let that go unsaid! Not love Ras better than I do Moppet! Oh, but I do!”
“Lora, if you will stay here, do not speak again until I speak to you,” commanded the father sternly.
“I would not be harsh upon you, young sir, for you are son of mine honored friend, Elder Brewster, and I believe a worthy son, but you did amiss, yes, shrewdly amiss, in speaking to my daughter before you did to me.”
Wrestling’s lips opened and closed again. He was about to say that Lora’s mother knew of his suit, but in the captain’s mood, that plea might only have brought down wrath upon his wife’s head.
“I have not found it fitting to tell all my affairs to all my neighbors,” pursued Standish haughtily. “But I have mine own intent with regard to my daughter, and that intent is not to marry her in this colony. Let that be answer enough for you, Master Wrestling, and if you like, you may advertise any other aspiring youth that designs to honor my daughter with an offer that it is but needless mortification, for my answer will be to all as it is to you,—nay, nay, nay!”
And with the last word Myles placed his daughter’s hand under his arm and led her down the hill, leaving Wrestling to cast himself prone upon the sunset seat, his face hidden upon the back of it, and his eyes smarting with the tears his manhood refused to allow to flow.
Almost at home, Standish, looking with anxious love into the lily face at his shoulder, said,—
“Poppet, you’re not over-sorry, are you? Why don’t you speak to me?”
“You bade me not speak until you spoke to me, father dear. Nay, but I am sorry, heartily sorry, you should have chided Ras so hardly. Poor lad! He was fit to cry when we left him.”
“But you do not really care for him, dear child? You are not set upon becoming his—his wife?”
“Nay, father, I do not care to be any man’s wife. I would far fainer stay at home with you and mother, but Ras seemed so keen upon the matter and declared I loved him not, that to make him content I said yes; for indeed I do love him, father, more than I love any man after you and the boys.”
“Ha, ha! My little lass, there’ll come a day when the boys, and haply your poor old dad as well, will fly down the wind like thistledown before the love that still lieth sound asleep in my maid’s pure heart.”
“Nay, father, not asleep, but too dear and too holy to be spoken of,” murmured Lora, a soft flush upon her cheek, a tender light in her eyes as she raised them to her father’s face.
“What! what!” stammered he, half affrighted lest the girl had lost her senses. “You love some one already!”
“Oh, father, so much, so dearly! ’Tis for that I love to go and sit all alone there upon the brow of the hill, where I may see the beauty He has made and gaze away and away into the heavens where He lives. Sure the hills of Judah were not so lovely as this place, and who can tell but some day He may descend and stand visibly upon them”—
“Aha!” breathed the captain, stopping short and gazing appalled upon the face of the girl, set seaward, with a half smile upon its lips and a look of yearning love in the unfathomable eyes. But as he gazed she turned, and throwing an arm around his neck hid her face upon his breast with a sobbing sigh.
“Oh, father dear, I’m sorry I tried to speak about what no words can tell. Don’t talk to mother or to any one, will you, dear, and please do not ask me again. ’Tis so precious and so wonderful, and ’tis all the love I ever want beyond my home loves. You won’t talk about it, daddy dear, will you?”
“One word, Lora. You mean that your love is given to God alone?”
“To Him who loved me and gave Himself for me—to Him who is chief among ten thousand and altogether lovely—to the King in his beauty in the land that is very far off.”
“My child, my child!” groaned the father, drawing the girl’s form close to his thickly beating heart and pressing his lips upon her brow, while Jephthah’s agony turned him sick and white, and his eyes rose with an almost angry protest to the skies.