Читать книгу A Candle in the Wilderness - Irving Bacheller - Страница 3

Table of Contents

The sky is overcast. A day in early July, 1634, is near its end. Two young men are riding at breakneck speed on a country road between hedgerows in the east of England. They are pursued by a King’s officer. The Spirit of the Future is on the flying chestnut mares ahead. The Spirit of the Past is in the saddle behind them. He is lashing his lathered horse. Robert Heathers and William Heydon—sons of gentlemen in Lincolnshire, both twenty years of age—ride neck and neck into the falling night, leading by less than a pistol-shot.

They have been on a visit to their young friend, Sir Harry Vane, at Raby Castle, Durham, the ancient seat of the Nevilles. This brilliant youth was a shining example of the new spirit in the young gentry.

“Castles! Silks! Waving plumes! Gold braid and spurs!” he had exclaimed. “What have they done for England? After a thousand years of wars and toils our great city is London with less than one hundred and seventy thousand people in it. We need mills where there are castles, saws instead of silks, crowbars instead of plumes, work instead of idleness, doing instead of undoing, religion in the place of pomp, holding enough reality to give us peace.”

A number of wild foxes had been loosed in England and had run about with firebrands on their tails. They were men of courage, power and learning like John Cotton and Thomas Hooker, son of a yeoman who it was said “could put a king in his pocket.” The fire was spreading and even those of noble blood were helping it with the bellows of their own resentment.

Harry could be outspoken. His father had been the cofferer of Prince Charles and was now a member of the Privy Council. At court Harry was laughed at as a lad with a twist in his brain. William and Robert, now fleeing on the highway, had been even more rebellious than he. At a public meeting in the Wheat Sheaf, near Norwich, they had openly denounced the tyrannies of the crown. It turned out that a spy heard and reported their words. Having no friends at court they were not to be lightly dealt with. The High Commission had resolved to make them recant or suffer the pain of death. Now within a dozen miles of their home its officer had come upon them with a warrant.

The young men spurred their steeds while a pistol ball cut the air between them. The time lost in drawing and taking aim gave them a chance to get agoing and “to fill their sails.” A rain had fallen and the road was sloppy. They held their advantage. Other shots went wild above their heads in the dusk. They flew onward flinging a spatter of mud behind them. The cottagers along the way, excited by the stir and clatter, exclaimed: “Again the King and the Puritans! Good luck to short hair!”

The lighter horse of the officer began to fail. The space between pursuer and pursued slowly widened. When the latter came down into their familiar fenlands they were shrouded in darkness, and as they drew rein, the officer was so far behind that the hoof beats of his horse were out of hearing. They leaped a hedge and, at a slow gallop, crossed a broad pasture to a tenant’s cottage on the Heydon lands.

These young men were friends from the same neighborhood above and in sight of The Wash—blond, blue-eyed, comely youths nearly six feet tall—alike in experience and breeding, in height, weight and color. Their sunburnt, merry faces were of the same mold so that often one was taken for the other when they were apart. They had a like spirit also, and it was their fancy, growing out of their mutual regard, to help the resemblance by dressing in the same fashion. Yet those who knew them well could be subject to no confusion in meeting either. Will Heydon’s eyes were larger by a trifle and more amply screened by their lashes and milder in expression than those of Robert Heathers. Moreover Will had wavy hair and a slight scar on his right temple which had come of a skylarking duel.

The second sons of gentlemen they were a rash and heady pair of rebels. Their opinions were as common as short hair in their neighborhood, but generally spoken in a whisper among gentlefolk whose fortunes were indeed a part of the kingdom. These young men did no whispering. The soul of England and the courage of the young were in their voices.

On fresh horses they spent the night in travel disguised as the sons of yeomen in the use of whose dialect they had some skill. Next day they went aboard their ship whereon their goods had been safely stored. It was the Handmaid of one hundred eighty tons bound for Boston in the New World under the Puritan Captain, John Huddleston, who was privy to their plans and who had a heart for more than wind and weather. There was a touch of drama in their leaving the wharf at the last bell of the ship. A man in citizen’s clothes, with a small flag in his hand, asked them:

“Do you wish to earn three pounds in hard money?”

“It would pleasure us,” one answered.

“I suspect that two men are aboard that ship who are wanted for sedition. Their names are Robert Heathers and William Heydon. A King’s wherry will follow the ship out of the harbor. If you learn that they are aboard, wave this flag from the stern and you shall each have a pound and a half for your trouble.”

They kept their disguise until they had come to No Man’s Water. There were other small flags on the ship but there was no waving from the stern. The Commission had a very imperfect notion of the Puritan mind and the purchase power of its money.

The Handmaid was in a calm some fifty miles off the Isle of Wight. Captain Huddleston sat with a number of his passengers on the poop-deck one evening. They could hear the cattle bellowing below. In calm weather a strong stable odor seemed to wrap the ship. Robert Heathers wrote in a letter to Sir Henry, his father:

“The Captain, a big, portly, red-haired man with mighty forearms always bare, has sailed three times to the Plymouth colony.

“ ‘On my first trip I made the harbor with the Fortune in May, 1622,’ he said. ‘I looks up at the shore and what do I see? Trees, trees, trees, and a few little houses and one bigger than the others all made o’ tree-bodies and roofed with marsh grass on a hill in a palisade and about fifty men, women and children runnin’ down to the shore and wavin’ their handkerchiefs. We lowered a boat and took water, me and two sailors. It were a cold, barren strip o’ land. Satan was in the greenwood behind ’em, so big that it is like unto the sea—no man hath seen its end. The fiends o’ hell inhabit it. The bitter salt winds o’ the water waste land on the rocky slopes and plunge into the wilderness, knockin’ down the high trees in their haste. His enemies be that strong and many that the God o’ Heaven would ’a’ found it hard to keep a footin’ there even in the purest heart. I was o’ a mind to blubber, tough old dog that I am, when the women and the young ones ran upon us cryin’ and kissin’ our hands. Every face withered to the bones and brown as an old sail! They was half starved. It broke the heart o’ me to look at ’em. Did ye ever see a man come out to be hung? That’s the way the men looked—solemn and kind o’ wild. Their hands trembled when they shook my old rope hauler. Aye, it were a sight to wet the face o’ ye. You whose bellies have been filled with beef and mutton and rich capons and good beer or old wine, what think ye these people had been eatin’ to keep ’em alive? Roots, by the God o’ Israel! dug out o’ the wilderness, and dried berries and snails and mussels. I give ’em all the bread I could spare and flour—four ounces for each person a day to stead ’em until harvest time and some powder and bullets.

“ ‘Half o’ the whole ship’s load who had gone over two years before was underground, rotted by scurvy, burnt up by fever! But these that met me were in no mind to give in. I swear, by the beard o’ Pharaoh, I never seen the like o’ it. They had a covenant with God, so they told me. Their feet were soul-tied. When an Englishman thinks he’s right it’s easier to kill him than to change his mind.’

“I said to the Captain that I thought it a shameful thing to take women and children into such a land.

“ ‘Ye can’t make way without ’em,’ said the Captain. ‘Ye might as well say there shouldn’t have been an Eve in the Garden o’ Eden. Adam would have wore himself out searchin’ for happiness. Men will never behave orderly without women and children.

“ ‘Now there was Weston’s colony near the one at Plymouth—all able and lusty men. They were not agoin’ to have women and children to put up with. They bragged o’ what they would do and bring to pass. What happened? They stole the Indians’ fodder and got their sides stung with arrows and their heads smashed by tomahawks. They powered themselves out, blew up. Couldn’t stand it. Where there’s men there’s got to be women or afore long hell is ahead and the wind behind ye.’

“The Captain grew brusk over this quib. I asked him to tell us what he knew of the savages.

“He told how ambassadors went far out in the greenwood to meet a great sachem. They were fed on stinkin’ meat and gutty fish, and were put on the same bed with the sachem and his wife and dogs, to sleep in his filthy, smoky cabin. The sachem and his wife sang and yelled for an hour after goin’ to bed.

“This description of the meeting of barbaric and civilized man as unreconcilable as if they were of different planets, I shall not soon forget. I shall write more as opportunity offers and finish my letter when I get to Boston.”

It is not possible to quote more from this letter, a part of which had been drenched in sea brine. Only here and there, beneath the spread ink, may one make out a sentence. It was dispatched from Boston partly, no doubt, to show what had happened, with another letter telling of their battle with a hurricane and a sea gone wild with rage beneath it. Through its help and that afforded by the journal of another passenger one may piece out a sufficient story of the voyage.

There were the usual incidents of a long sea trip. The passengers were roughly tumbled about. Sudden lurches of the ship threw them against one another and turned the dining table into a place of peril for the person and garments of those able to take food. All moved with great caution, clinging to fixed objects for fear of having their bones broken. A high wave in a fret of wind burst a window at night and created a panic.

The passengers and even the Captain had a deep respect for whales. Huddleston told how, often, when he saw one of unusual size he threw overboard a tub or a barrel for the whale to play with so that he would not follow and perhaps injure the ship.

One prayer time they buried a man who had died, with a shot at his head and one at his feet. A stripling servant was whipped, naked at the cap stern, with a cat-o’-nine-tails for filching lemons.

They had been more than sixty days at sea when they came into a breathless calm. The Captain was worried as night fell. He said that he saw in the darkness a strange light resting for a moment on the mast. He was watching for it to reappear. It was a bad sign, he said, if it came not again. The passengers could hear distant thunder and a strange roaring beyond the horizon in the southwest. Then they were driven under hatches—all save Will Heydon, a favorite of the Captain. The young man had begged for the privilege of staying in the weather to lend a hand in case of need. By midnight the ship lay at hull in a mighty wind. A mast was cut down. Before daylight the waves had beat off the roundhouse. He who cund the ship had to be lashed to his place for fear of washing away. When the storm passed, the Handmaid was so foundered in the sea that none thought she could rise again. The frantic bellowing of the cattle which had been a part of the tumult had ceased. They were dead.

The sea was going down. All able-bodied men were summoned to the pumps. Three days and nights they were lifting water while the carpenters were making repairs. Soon the ship began to rise. Then all heard how William Heydon, lashed to the stern stays when a great wave swept the deck, had seized the Captain’s waist and kept him from going overboard. A fair wind favored them. They spread what sails they could carry. The wind quickened to a gale and sped them landward. In two more weeks on a flood-tide they swung into Portsmouth harbor. It was a warm bright day. The land odors and the look of the shore filled the adventurers with a great joy. They were all on deck. Many, having lost their clothes in the storm, were ragged and half clad. “Cap’n John,” as he was familiarly called, addressed them briefly as follows:

“The savages say o’ the whites that they are the people who talk with God. I reckon that you know why we do it. If you didn’t have it before you’re likely to get the habit comin’ over. When it’s the toss of a penny between port and a sea-grave nobody is careless in choosin’ between God and the Devil. In fact they’re apt to be careful a long time after that has happened. Now let us all bow our heads and do a little private talkin’.”

It seemed as if all the good people of Portsmouth were crowded about the landing, with furs, seashells, fish, Indian arrows and other merchandise, crying their wares.

Next day the young men and some others took water for Boston in a shallop with all their goods.