THREE HEROINES OF
NEW ENGLAND
ROMANCE
THEIR true stories herein
set forth by Mrs.
Harriet Prescott Spofford
Miss Louise Imogen Guiney
and Miss Alice Brown
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 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 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 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,—
“The Lord descended from above,
And bowed the heavens high,
And underneath His feet He cast
The darkness of the sky.
On seraph and on cherubim
Full royally He rode,
And on the wings of mighty winds
Came flying all abroad!”
