I
Pacing together backwards and forwards, as they talked, John and his
friend Winthorpe presented a striking and perhaps interesting contrast.
John was tall, but Winthorpe seemed a good deal taller--though, (trifles
in these matters looming so large), had actual measurements been taken,
I dare say half an inch would have covered the difference. John was lean
and sinewy, but rounded off at the joints, and of a pliant carriage, so
that it never occurred to you to think of him as _thin_. Winthorpe's
spare figure, spare and angular, with its greater height, held
unswervingly to the plane of the perpendicular, appeared absolutely to
be constructed of nothing but bone and tendon. John's head, with its
yellow hair, its curly beard verging towards red, its pink skin, and
blue eyes full of laughter, might have served a painter as a model for
the head of Mirth. Winthorpe's,--with brown hair cropped close, and
showing the white of the scalp; clean-shaven, but of a steely tint where
the razor had passed; with a marked jaw-bone and a salient square chin;
with a high-bridged determined nose, and a white forehead rising
vertical over thick black eyebrows, and rather deep-set grey
eyes,--well, clap a steeple-crowned hat upon it, and you could have
posed him for one of his own Puritan ancestors. The very clothes of the
men carried on their unlikeness,--John's loose blue flannels and red
sailor's knot, careless-seeming, but smart in their effect, and showing
him careful in a fashion of his own; Winthorpe's black tie and dark
tweeds, as correct as Savile Row could turn them out, yet somehow, by
the way he wore them, proclaiming him immediately a man who never gave
two thoughts to his dress. If, however, Winthorpe's face was the face of
a Puritan, it was the face of a Puritan with a sense of humour--the
lines about the mouth were clearly the footprints of smiles. It seemed
the face of a sensitive Puritan, as well, and (maugre that high-bridged
nose) of a gentle--the light in his clear grey eyes was a kindly and
gentle light. After all, Governor Bradford, as his writings
show,--though he tried hard, perhaps, not to let them show it--was a
Puritan with a sense of humour; John Alden and Priscilla were surely
sensitive and gentle: and Winthorpe was descended from Governor
Bradford, and from John Alden and Priscilla. The two friends walked
backwards and forwards in the great open space before the Castle, and
talked. They had not met for nearly two years, and had plenty to talk
about.