MUTATIONS.
WHILE Garde, heart-broken, pale and ill, was restoring her uncle’s keys
to their accustomed hook, in the morning, Adam and his retinue were
taking a much-needed sleep in the woods.
Having recovered his own good sword and his leather jerkin, from the
place where he had concealed them, on the evening of his capture, he had
led the beef-eaters into a maze of trees where no one in Boston could
have found them, and here he was doing his best to prove himself a
cheerful and worthy companion, to share their natural distresses.
Refusing at first to eat of the luncheon provided by Garde, the rover
finally yielded to the importunities of his companions, and thereby got
much-needed refreshment. By noon they were far on their way toward New
Amsterdam, their only safe destination. They kept close to the edge of
the woods, as they went, remaining thereby in touch with the farms, on
which they depended, in their penniless condition, for something to eat.
By sheer perversity, Adam wore away his lameness. He bathed his foot
often and he also wrapped it in leaves, the beneficent qualities of
which he had learned from the Indians, years before, and this did as
much, or more, than his doggedness to make repairs in the injured
tendons.
They were many days on this wearisome march which contrasted, for Adam,
so harshly with that other stroll, to Boston, from Plymouth. On many
occasions they went hungry for a day and a night together. But what with
cheer and good water, they lost nothing of their health.
With boots beginning to gape at the toes, and with raiment dusty and
faded, they arrived, at last, at the modest house, at the corner of
Cedar and William streets, in New Amsterdam, where Captain William Kidd
resided with his wife. Here they were made welcome. On behalf of himself
and his comrades, Adam presently secured a working passage to
Hispaniola, where he meant to rejoin William Phipps, in the search for
the sunken treasure. He could think of nothing else to do, and he had no
longer the slightest desire to remain on American soil.
Prior to sailing, however, he wrote a long, detailed account of his
finding the man and his Indian child, with all the incidents related
thereto, which he forwarded straight to Henry Wainsworth. This concluded
his duties. He only regretted, he said in his letter to Henry, that he
could not apprise him of what disposition had been made of the body of
the little man, Henry’s nephew, when the minions of Randolph took it in
their charge.
This letter came duly into Henry Wainsworth’s possession. Having been
aware, as no other man in Massachusetts was, that his refugee brother
was living his isolated life in the woods, Henry was much overcome by
this sad intelligence. He made what cautious inquiries he dared, with
the purpose of ascertaining what had become of the little body. He then
made a pilgrimage into the woods, stood above the grave which Adam had
made, and then, taking a few worthless trinkets, as mementoes, from the
deserted cabin, he came sadly away.
But not Henry’s sadness, nor yet that of Garde, served to do more than
to signalize the sense of affliction which the citizens of the colony
felt had come upon them. They had been a joyless people, with their
minds and their bodies dressed in the somber hues suggested by a morbid
condition of religious meditation, but at least they had enjoyed the
freedom for which they had come so far and fought so persistently. With
their charter gone, and the swift descent upon them of the many things
which they had found intolerable in England, they were a melancholy,
hopeless people indeed.
But even as Garde’s sorrow typified that of her fellow-beings, so did
the fortitude and uncomplaining courage, with which she endured her
burden, typify the stolid suffering of the citizens of Massachusetts, in
this hour of their first great “national” woe.
The summer ripened and passed. The autumn heralded the ermine-robed King
Winter, with glorious pageantry. The trees put on their cloth of gold
and crimson, and when the hoary monarch came, the millions of leaves
strewed his path, and, prostrate before his march, laid their matchless
tapestry beneath his merciless feet.
During all this time Randolph had made no sign toward his revenge upon
Garde, for the scorn with which she had cast him from her side. No petty
vengeance would gratify his malignant spirit. The whole colony must
suffer for this indignity, and Garde and her grandfather should feel his
hand mightily, when all was ready. He prepared his way with extreme
caution. He was never hurried. He laid wires to perform his mischief far
ahead. Indeed he lingered almost too long, in his greed to prolong his
own anticipation of what was to be.
Thus in December of that year, 1686, the frigate “Kingfisher,” from
England, brought to the colony their newly-appointed Governor, Sir
Edmund Andros, who assumed the reins of power with an absolute
thoroughness which left Randolph somewhat shorn of his capacity for
working evil.
Andros, who had formerly been Governor for New York, for a matter of
three years, was a person of commendable character, in many respects,
but the policy which he had come to put into being and force was stupid,
oppressive and offensive to the people he had to govern. Being the
thorough Tory that he was, he enforced the policy with a vigor which
brought upon him the detestation of the Puritans, who visited the errors
he was ordered to commit upon his own less guilty head.
The Puritans, in the extremes to which they had fled, in their
separation from the English forms of worship, had adopted a rigid
simplicity in which the whole fabric of ceremonials had been swept away
bodily. They rang no bells for their divine service; they regarded
marriage as a civil contract, purely; they observed no festivals nor
holidays of the church; they buried their dead in stolid silence. They
abhorred the English rites.
Governor Andros inaugurated countless ceremonies. That very Christmas
the English party of Boston held high revel in the city. The Puritans
refused to close their shops, or to join either in rites or merriment.
They brought in their fire-wood and went about their business,
grim-faced and scowling darkly upon the innovations come among them,
with their fascinations for the young and their enchantment of the
frivolous.
The offenses against their rigid notions increased rapidly. In February
they beheld, with horror, the introduction of a new invention of the
devil. One Joseph Mayhem paraded in the main street of Boston with a
rooster fastened on his back,—where it flapped its wings
frantically,—while in his hand the fellow carried a bell, on which he
made a dreadful din as he walked. Behind him came a number of ruffians,
blindfolded and armed with cart-whips. Under pretense of striking at
Mayhem and the chanticleer, they cut at the passers-by, roaring with
laughter and otherwise increasing the attention which their conduct
attracted. This exhibition was thought to smack of Papacy and the hated
days of Laud.
The church itself was invaded. There was as yet no Church of England in
the town. Governor Andros therefore attended with the Puritans, at their
own house of meeting, but to their unnameable horror, he compelled
Goodman Needham, the sexton, to ring the bell, according to English
usage.
Rebellion being impossible, the Puritans nursed their grievances in
sullen stolidity. They were powerless, but never hopeless of their
opportunity still to come.
Taxation came as a consequence of the pomp in which the new Governor
conceived it to be his right to exist, as well as the natural result of
his glowing reports to England that the people could be made to disgorge
and would not resist.
To crown their heritage of woe, Edward Randolph, profiting by their
already established fanaticism and ripeness for the folly, subtly
introduced and finally fastened upon them that curse of superstitious
ignorance, which was doomed to become such a blot upon their page of
history—the “detection” of and persecutions for witchcraft.
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