Standish of Standish Part 27

"Would I were a man!"

"Thou a man my Desiree!" exclaimed Priscilla turning upon her eyes sparkling with fun, although a suspicious red lingered around the lids.

"Wouldst woo me for thy wife?"

"Thou 'rt ever looking for every man to woo thee, but I'd have thee know there's one man, and his house not so far away, that's as near wooing me as thee."

"Oh cruel, cruel Desiree to wound my fond hopes so savagely," began Priscilla; but Mary ever more practical than humorous interrupted her,--

"Why dost want to be a man, Desire?"

"Because we women were not asked would we accept Master Jones's hospitality and go home, and so I had no chance to say 'Ay and thank y'

sir?'"

"Would you have so said Desiree?" asked Priscilla serious in a minute.

"Why sure I would," replied the girl pettishly. "Why should any of us want to stay? There's plenty of hard work and plenty of prayers I grant you, and when you have said that you've said all. No decent housen, no butcher's meat, or milk, or garden stuff, or so much as a huckster's shop where one might cheapen a ribbon or a stay-lace--what is there here to live for?"

"Naught for thee, my poor Desiree, I'm afraid," said Priscilla almost tenderly. "And I wish thou couldst go home, but a maid may not venture herself alone."

"I know she may not, and I tried to make my cousin Carver think as I do, that so she might persuade the Governor to go, but wow! at the first word she fell upon me with such a storm of words"--

"Sweet Mistress Carver storm!" cried the two girls derisively, and Priscilla added more gravely,--

"I can fancy what she tried to make thee feel, Desiree; but thou couldst not feel it, and mayhap most young maids like us could not, but thou seest Mary and I are different; our fathers and our mothers came hither with their lives in their hands to do a work, and we came to help them.

Well, the lives were paid down and the work was not done, so we who remain, simple maids though we be, are in a manner bound to carry on that work, and not let them have died quite in vain. And their graves are here."

Mary Chilton bowed her head upon her knees, and for a moment there was a great silence, then Desire said querulously,--

"Well, but what is there for me to do?"

"Come home and help me cook the dinner!" cried Priscilla jumping to her feet, while practical Mary added, "And I dare say some man will marry thee, Desire, and thou mayest have children."

"I! I'll marry no man here--save one!" protested Desire tossing her head and rising more slowly.

"Save one! Now is that happy he named John Howland?" asked a merry voice at her elbow, and Desire with a start and a laugh exclaimed,--

"Fie on thee, John, to take a poor maid at her word so shortly."

"Thou shouldst not shout thy resolves into a man's ear didst not thou want him to hear them," replied John carelessly, and forgot the idle words which were to bear an ill and unexpected crop for him at no distant date.

CHAPTER XIX.

SOWED AND REAPED IN ONE DAY.

"Bradford thou wast bred to the land wast not?" demanded Hopkins bursting into the house where William Bradford, ill and crippled with rheumatism in his "huckle-bone" or hip-joint, sat beside the fire reading an old Latin copy of the Georgics.

"Bred to the land? Well, my forbears were husbandmen, and the uncle who cared for me as an orphan boy was a yeoman, but as I had some estate and not very rugged health, they aye left me alone with my books in my young days. But why?"

"Didst thou ever hear then, or didst thou ever read in thy books, of planting fish along with corn?"

"Nay. Didst thou?"

"That is what I am coming at. A lot of the men are talking with this Squanto about the place and time and manner of setting corn. Naturally the poor brute knoweth somewhat of the place and its customs, seeing that he hath always lived here, and still it irks me to see a salvage giving lessons to his white masters. He saith too that corn is to be planted when the oak leaves are as large as a mouse's ear. Such rotten rubbish!"

"But doth he aver that his people were used to plant fish with the corn?"

"Ay, and he went down to the brook yester even and set some manner of snare, and this morning hath taken a peck or so of little fish, for all the world like a Dutch herring only bigger, and of these he says two must go into every hill of the corn, that is, this corn of theirs, for of wheat or rye or barley he knoweth nothing."

"By way of enrichment, I suppose."

"Ay, for in his gibberish he saith that corn hath been raised hereabout again and again, and now the land is hungry. Ha, ha, man, fancy the salvage calling the dead earth hungry, as if it were alive."

"Our dear mother Earth dead, sayst thou!" exclaimed Bradford smiling dreamily and glancing at his Virgil. "Nay, man, she is the vigorous fecund mother of all outward life, and when she dieth, the end of all things hath come."

"A pest on thy dreaming and thy bookish phantasies!" roared Hopkins kicking the smouldering log upon the hearth until a river of sparks flowed up and out of the wide chimney. "Dost thou agree to putting fish to decay amid the corn we are to eat by and by?"

"We are not to live by what we plant, but by what we reap, friend Hopkins," replied Bradford still smiling in the inscrutable fashion of a man who pursues his own train of thought far down beneath his surface conversation.

"Dost thou agree to the herring?" roared Hopkins smiting the table with his brawny fist.

"Why yes, Hopkins, if it needs that I give my sanction. It striketh my fancy that the man who hath raised and eaten his bread on this spot for some thirty years is like to know better how to do it than we who have just come. But what matter as to my opinion?"

"Oh ay, I did not tell it as I should, but the governor sent me out of the field to ask thee, knowing that thou wast yeoman born."

"Then I pray thee tell the Governor that in my poor mind it were well to follow the native customs in these matters at least for the first. I would that I could get a-field and do my share of the work."

"Thou 'rt as well off here. 'T is woundy hot on that hill-side. I've known July cooler than this April."

"And still my rheumatism hugs the fire," said Bradford taking up the tongs and readjusting the scattered logs, while bustling Dame Hopkins hung her dinner-pot upon the crane in the farthest corner, and began a clatter of tongue before which her husband fled apace.

That night when the men came home from the field all spoke of the unusual and exhaustive heat of the weather, for it was now one of those periods of unseasonable sultriness which from time to time afflict our spring season, as on April 19, 1775, when the wheat stood high enough above ground to bend before the breeze, and the British soldiers fell down beside the road, overcome by heat in their rapid flight from the "embattled farmers" of Concord and Lexington. But the next morning rose even sultrier and more debilitating, and Mistress Katharine Carver following her husband to the door laid a hand upon his shoulder saying,--

"Go not a-field to-day, John. It is even more cruelly hot than yesterday, and thou art overborne with toil already. Stay with me, I pray thee."

"Nay, Kate, I were indeed unfit for the leader of the brethren could I send them forth to labor that I counted too heavy for myself. Let me go, sweetheart, and if thou wilt, say a prayer that I faint not by the way."

"That will I truly, and yet"--

The rest died on her lips for he was gone, yet for a few minutes longer she stood watching the tall figure as it disappeared up the hill path and listening to the murmur of a spinning-wheel in Elder Brewster's house, fitfully accompanied by a blithe tune lilted now and again by the spinner.

"Priscilla is early at her work," thought the dame. "I would I might sing and spin like that!" and with a little sigh she leaned her head against the door-post and closed her eyes; a sweet, pale face, colorless and pure as an Easter lily, and eyes whose blueness seemed to show through the weary lids with their deep golden fringe. A fair woman, a lovely woman, delicately bred, for her father was one of those English bishops whose authority her husband and his friends so resolutely denied, and both she and her sister, Pastor Robinson's wife, had "lain in the lilies and fed on the roses of life" until love led them to ardent sympathy with the Separatist movement, and they had wed with two of its most powerful leaders, while their brother, Roger White, became one himself.

"From heat to heat the day increased," and Katharine Carver lay faint and exhausted upon a settle drawn close beside the open door, when a strange sound of both a.s.sured and stumbling feet drew near, and as she started up it was to meet John Howland, half leading, half supporting her husband, whose face, deeply flushed, lay upon the other's shoulder.

"Be not over startled, dear lady!" exclaimed Howland. "The governor findeth himself a little overborne by the heat, and hath come"--