Читать книгу Standish of Standish - Jane G. Austin - Страница 8

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The "little bird," probably John Alden, constant companion of Standish, had sung truly in Priscilla's ear of a second exploring party about to leave the Mayflower in quest of a favorable site for the town and colony the Pilgrims had come forth to found.

To this step they were urged not only by their own wishes, but by the importunities of Captain Jones, who having obeyed his Dutch employers and brought his passengers to a point well removed from the Virginian or Manhattan shores whereon they intended to land, was now only desirous to put them ashore almost anywhere, and make sail for England while the winter storms held off and his provisions lasted. His own interest, therefore, made him zealous in the Pilgrims' service, and so heartily had he offered his men, boats, and provisions for the expedition that the Pilgrims had made him its leader, some of them still believing in his honesty and friendliness, and some others feeling that the surest way to effect their plans was to induce the surly commander to make them his own. The event proved their shrewdness, for Jones accepted the appointment with great satisfaction, and told off ten of his best seamen to add to the four-and-twenty sound men who were nearly all that the Pilgrims could muster, since, thanks to the secret councils of Rose Standish and her associates, all sick or weakly candidates were weeded out from the volunteers, and the Tilley brothers, William Molines, James Chilton, William White, and several others were kindly bidden to remain on board and nurse their strength for the next expedition.

About noon the tide serving, the four-and-thirty adventurers, divided between the ship's long-boat and their own pinnace, took the sea in teeth of a freezing northeasterly gale, and under low-lying clouds whose gray bosoms teemed with snow and sleet.

Thomas English, a mariner engaged as master of the shallop, held the helm, while as many willing hands as could grasp the oars pulled lustily in the direction of what is now called the Pamet River, a stream discovered some days previously by a foot expedition under charge of Standish, and considered as a possible seat for their colony. The crowded state of the boats and the head wind rendered the sails useless, and oars proved inefficient to propel so large a boat as the pinnace, while the sea, rapidly rising with the rising wind, broke so dangerously over the quarter that English refused to proceed, and it was hastily resolved to run into what is now called East Harbor, land the passengers, and allow the long-boat to return to the ship, while the pinnace lay to until the gale moderated. This was done, but owing to the shoals, the men were obliged to wade knee-deep to reach land, and the cold was now so intense that their clothes froze upon them as they resumed their journey on foot. Well may we believe what William Bradford later said: "Some of our people who are dead took the original of their death on that day."

Marching six or seven miles on foot, the party encamped, building a barricade, or as they called it a "randevous," of pine boughs to protect them from savage beasts or men, and within it kindling a fire beside which they sat down to eat such provisions as they had brought, and to solace themselves with modest draughts of the strong waters they used but not abused.

The next day the exploration was continued both by sea and land, the hardy adventurers marching through snow six inches deep, or upon the loose sands of the beach where the wind flogged them with lashes of icy spray and stinging shards. In passing through a belt of woods traces of human presence were to be seen, especially certain young trees bent down and their tops made fast to the earth. Stepping aside to examine one of these, William Bradford suddenly found his leg inclosed in a noose, while the tree, released and springing upward, would have carried him ignominiously with it had not he seized the trunk of another sapling, and lustily shouted for help. His comrades came running back, and not without laughter and some grim pleasantries released him. Stephen Hopkins alone understood the trap, and cutting from it a piece of smooth fine cord twisted of wood fibres handed it to Bradford, saying—

"Here, man, keep it by way of horn-book to teach thee wood-lore in these salvage countries. It is the moral of what we used to see among the Bermoothes some ten years gone by. Ay, and the traps too. I've seen many a wild thing, deer or what not, jerked up by the leg and hanging from a tree like Absalom, until its master came along to cut its throat and dress it, as it hung."

"Glad am I that no such master came to release me," said Bradford laughing ruefully as he rubbed his leg and limped along.

"So thou wert in the Bermudas, Hopkins?" asked Standish who was of the walking party; "wast buccaneering?"

"Nay, Captain, all men do not follow thy trade," replied Hopkins with his boisterous laugh. "Mine was quite another office, for I was lay-reader to Parson Buck, and he was chaplain to Gates who was to be governor of a Virginia colony an' he could have reached it. But like our own adventure it miscarried, and we were wrecked on the Bermoothes. We abode there six months, and the Indians showed us how to trap deer just as Bradford was trapped but now, ho, ho!"

"Lay-reader wast thou?" asked Standish surveying the burly veteran with whimsical interest. "Well, now, I'd never take thee for a parson's lieutenant, Hopkins! I can hardly fancy thee meek and mild with bands under that unkempt beard, and a gown over thy buff jacket. Wert meek and mild in those days, Hopkins, and thy tongue, was 't innocent of strange oaths?"

"A truce to thy jibes, master Captain," retorted Hopkins not half pleased at receiving the jests he so freely offered. "If thou didst but know, my voice was more for war than peace, sith it seemed to me then even as it did before we landed here, that an expedition gone astray is an expedition ended, and that all compacts cease when their conditions cannot be fulfilled. We shipped to go to Virginia, and Gates was to be our governor; well and good, but here we were wrecked on Bermuda, and my rede was that every man was thus released from his promises and free to set forth anew for himself."

"So! Yonder threatening on the Mayflower was not thy first experience in raising sedition and discontent, and trying to turn a God-fearing community into a nest of pirates!" exclaimed Standish scornfully. "Well, what came of it in that instance?"

"Why, Gates called a court-martial, tried me for treason by an authority I denied, and sentenced me to death."

"Ay, and what then?"

"Then Parson Buck who could ill spare me, since I writ half his discourses, and the admiral who would not see murder done under cloak of law, they went to Gates and so wrought upon his temper that he set me free and bade me begone, and I went right merrily."

"Thou mindst me of an officer under me, down there by Utrecht," said Standish meditatively. "He, too, was for setting up every man for himself in the plunder of a village we had taken, and I had given orders about."

"And what became of him?" asked Hopkins, as the captain seemed to have finished.

"Oh, there was no parson just there to make use of him, and no admiral to judge about my authority, and he was shot," replied Standish quietly. Hopkins scowled and laid his hand upon his sword hilt, but Bradford, who had listened with both interest and amusement to the conversation, deftly interposed with some question about the route, and Hopkins, who prided himself upon his wood-lore, took the lead, and conducted the party by the easiest route to the spot where they would rejoin their brethren of the boat.

The Pamet River, reached at length, proved unsatisfactory for a settlement, but at its mouth were found sundry matters of interest—the remains of a palisade formed apparently by civilized hands, the ruins of a log hut, quite different from the wigwams of the savages, and a large mound which when opened proved full of Indian corn, some shelled, some on the ear, the yellow kernels variegated with red and blue ones, like the maize still grown in that vicinity. The snow upon the ground would have concealed this "barn," as rustic John Rigdale called it, had not the previous expedition noted and marked it, and the ground was so hard frozen that it must be hewed with the stout cutlasses and axes of the Pilgrims, and the clods pried up with levers. Standish drew his sword with the rest, but after watching for a moment thrust it back into the sheath, saying to Alden who as usual was close beside him—

"Nay, I'll none of it! What mine own thews and sinews may compass, I'll undertake right joyfully, but I'll never ask Gideon to risk his edge or his backbone in such rude labors as yon. Every man to his trade, and these are the sappers and miners with whom he has no concern."

"Is Gideon the name of your sword then, Master?" asked Alden half timidly, for Standish had the habit of command and was impatient of much questioning.

Alden however was a favorite, and the captain, like a lover, was won by the admiring glance the young man threw at the sword, as its owner unsheathed it and laid the blade fondly across his palm.

"Why ay," replied he smiling down at it, "I have christened him so; but methinks, like other converts, he finds the new name sit uneasily at times, and would fain hear the old one."

"And what might that be?"

"Ah, that is what no man alive can tell. He who forged it of that rare metal which now and again falls from the skies, and he who first wielded and named it, have lain in the dust well nigh a thousand years, if old tales be true."

"A thousand years! But what is its story—if you will tell it, Master Standish?" and the young man's face grew bright with excitement as he glanced from the soldier's face to the blade glittering across his palm, and seeming to laugh in the wintry sunshine.

"Well, it was an old armorer in Ghent for whom I had done some service in protecting his daughter and saving some mails which my men would have plundered, and the old man was more grateful than need be, and came one night to my lodgings bringing this sword wrapped in his mantle, to offer me as a gift, for he said he would not sell it, valuing it above all price."

"And still you would have him take a price," suggested Alden exultantly, but Standish answered gently—

"Nay, John, that is but poor pride that cannot allow another to be its benefactor. I took the old man's gift and thanked him heartily. Later on, as chance befell, I did him a good turn in a contract for arms, while he knew it not. But that is beside the matter, which is the sword. He told me, that old man did, a story fit to set in the ancient romaunts of chivalry, how he as a young fellow full of heart and lustihood went out to fight the Turks or some other heathen of those parts, and was a prisoner, and a lady loved him and he loved her not, having a sweetheart waiting for him at home. And she had a noble heart and forgave him his despite, and set him free at risk of her own life, nor gave him freedom only, but a purse of gold and this sword, which she averred had been captured from the Persian people hundreds of years before, and was a true Damascus blade forged from meteor iron, and of the curious tempering now forgotten. And she said, moreover, that there was a charm upon it that made him who carried it invincible and scathless, and she, poor maid, had robbed her father's house of this great treasure, and brought it to him who loved another woman better than her, and so with tears and smiles she gave it over, and he for very ruth gave her a tender kiss, and thus they parted."

"Nay, I pity her not. She was overbold to offer her love before it had been asked," said Alden hastily.

"Ah, boy, thou 'rt in all the hardness of thy callow youth, and nought's more hard. Wait some fifteen years till thou comest to my age, and thou 'lt pity the poor heathen maid as I do to-day. Well, my armorer took the sword and played it some forty years or more, and then, too old to wield arms, he took to dealing in them, but never sold this, for it had proved all that the lady claimed for it, and had slain his enemies, and fended his friends, and saved his own head more times than he could number, and now he gave it to me who had, he said, saved more than his life."

"And these outlandish signs and marks upon the blade?" asked Alden, peering down at the sword.

"There, now, thou callest for another tale," replied Standish smiling good-naturedly. "But as they seem to need us not in disemboweling yon granary, and here we are guard against surprise from whoever may rightly own the treasure and come to claim it, I will e'en tell thee the rest.

"Thou knowest Pastor Robinson of Leyden, though thou wast never out of England thyself?"

"I know his fame as a pious teacher and a learned man, well beloved of his people."

"Beloved? Ay, none more so," exclaimed Standish heartily. "I ever wished I might see him in some great peril and prove my love by cutting down a round dozen of his foes. And learned! Why, man, he disputed with the most learned among their Dutch scholars openly in the big church, and left them not a leg to stand on, or a tongue to wag. Why, 't Isa no more to him to read Hebrew than for me to spell out my Bible. So then, knowing his learning and his love of all that is old and curious, I one day showed him my sword and asked if he could rede me fairly the mystical texts or whatever they might be upon the blade. But mind thee I said naught to him of any charm or amulet about it, lest I might wound his conscience, which is tender as a maid's. Thou shouldst have seen the dear old man, barnacles on nose, peering and peeping and muttering over the queer device, all at one as he were a wizard himself and working some spell. But at the last he heaved a mighty sigh, and gave me back the sword saying, nay, he could not make out more than that there were two legends in two different tongues and by different hands, and that the effigies of the sun and moon and stars pointed, he feared, to idolatrous emblems, and were not such as a Christian man might safely deal withal. So I asked him would it be better should I have the Holy Rood wrought above them as did the Crusaders of old, and beshrew me, but this device seemed to please him less than the other."

"Nay, our teachers like not the look of the Cross, nor use it as our fathers used. It savoreth of Popery, they say," interposed Alden glancing at the captain's face for sure approval, but to his surprise he saw it overcast and frowning.