THE WOLF AT THE DOOR.
Midsummer was upon the land, and the heat and drought were intense. Day
after day the sun rose fierce and pitiless, drinking up at a draught
what scanty dews had distilled in a night so brief and heated that it
brought no refreshment to herbage or to man. Day after day wistful eyes
searched the horizon for a cloud if no bigger than a man's hand, and
still only the hard blue above and the palpitating horizon line stared
blankly back. The crops languished in the field, some already dead, and
the scanty store saved from the seed corn quite gone. Many a day a few
clams, a lobster, or a piece of fish without bread or any vegetable, was
a family's whole subsistence.
Early in July the ship Plantation had touched at Plymouth having on
board two hogsheads of dried peas for sale, but seeing the bitter need
of the colonists the shipmaster raised the price to £8 per hogshead, and
although they had the money, the Fathers refused to submit to the
extortion, and the peas sailed southward.
It is but forty miles from Plymouth to Boston Harbor, where about a
hundred and fifty years later the women signed a declaration that they
would forego the use of tea rather than submit to extortion, and their
fathers and husbands and lovers flung a goodly cargo into the sea.
But a stout spirit although it keeps a man up puts no flesh on his
bones, and soon it became a piteous sight to stand in the Town Square
and mark the faces and figures of those who passed by. Strong men
staggered from weakness as they walked, women glided along like mournful
white wraiths, even the little children in their quaint garb looked worn
and emaciated. Standish, who relying upon his iron constitution and long
training in a soldier's endurance, had regularly divided his rations
with some woman or child, had grown so gaunt and worn that he might well
have posed as The Skeleton in Armor, when he held his monthly muster,
and Mistress Brewster, although some private provision was made for her,
wasted away piteously.
"Where is the ship spoken by the master of the Plantation?" was the
daily cry, and daily Hobomok climbed the great tulip-tree on the crest
of Watson's Hill and swept the horizon line with eyes keener than any
white man's.
"The Lord abaseth us for our sins," declared the elder. "Call a solemn
assembly, proclaim a fast, let us entreat our God to have mercy, and our
Lord to pardon. Who can tell but He yet may turn and have compassion,
and spare the remnant of His people. Even as a servant looketh to the
hand of his master even so let us wait upon our God, beseeching that He
spare, that He pardon, that He restore us, who for our sins are
appointed to die."
So spake the elder after the evening prayers of a day even more
exhausting than its predecessors, and Myles Standish, leaning against
the wall for very weakness, muttered,--
"Nay, what sin have these women and children wrought? What odds between
a God like that and the Shietan of the salvages? Nay, Elder, thou hast
not bettered the faith my mother lived and died by."
But the fast was appointed for the next day, which fell on a Thursday,
and as the sun sprang up with even an added blaze of pitiless heat, he
saw a mournful procession winding up the hill to the Fort, now so
completed as to offer a large lower room for purposes of devotion or of
refuge, while the ordnance mounted on the roof gained a wider range, and
presented a more formidable aspect.
At the head walked Elder Brewster, but the shadowy form of Mary his wife
reclined in the old chair set beside the window, whence she could watch
the procession she was unable to join except in spirit. Then came the
Governor and the Captain, Allerton and Winslow, Warren and Fuller,
Hopkins and Howland, Alden and Browne, and the rest of the glorious
band, the least of whom has his name written in the Libro d'Oro of the
men posterity delighteth to honor. After the men came the women, meek
and gentle, yet strong and courageous, and the children, poor little
heroes and heroines, involuntary martyrs like the Holy Innocents of
Bethlehem.
"Get thee to the roof, Hobomok," ordered the captain, "and say the
prayers the elder hath so painfully taught thee; but mind me, lad, keep
thine eyes upon the horizon and watch for the answer, whether it be a
sail, or whether it be a rain cloud. Shalt play the part of Elijah's
servant, and the elder is the very moral of the stern old prophet."
No morsel of food, no drop of drink, had passed the lips of that wan
company since the pittance of the night before, and yet for nine long
hours of that fearful day, the air so heated that it hardly fed the
lungs, and the sun blazing so pitilessly upon the log structure that a
faint odor of parching wood mingled with the torrid air within the Fort,
yes, for nine long hours the elder prayed, or preached, or recited aloud
the deep abasement of the penitential psalms, and the wail of the
prophets, proclaiming, yet deprecating, the wrath of an offended God.
In the intervals others spoke; Doctor Fuller, himself a deacon in the
church, and Bradford, whose petition less abject than that of the elder,
called confidently for help, upon Him who twice fed a starving
multitude, who promised that no petition in His name should go
unanswered, who hungering in the wilderness knew the extremity of
famine, who cried aloud, I Thirst, who has promised to be with His own
in all time till Time shall be no more.
Standish, like the statue of a sentinel in bronze, stood at the door
leaning upon his snaphance, listening intently to all, and breathing a
deep-throated Amen to the governor's prayer.
Noon blazed overhead, and Priscilla, ah, poor white, attenuate
Priscilla, crept down the hill to the elder's house, and gathering a
handful of fire-wood warmed some broth made from a rabbit snared by
Alden the day before, and silently brought a cup to the mother, who
drank it with the tears brimming over her patient, faded eyes.
"I am not worthy to fast with the rest of you. I am an unprofitable
servant," whispered she handing back the cup and covering her face.
"Oh, mother, mother, do not break my heart," cried the girl, whom the
smell of food had turned sick and faint. "It is not so, dear saint. The
Lord will not have thee fast because He knows thou art already
perfected"--
"Hush, hush, my child; thy words are both wild and wicked. Get thee back
to the House of Prayer, and beg our God to forgive thy sin of
presumption. Fare thee well--nay, one moment,--doth,--doth the elder
look sadly spent?--he is not over strong--and Jonathan? Didst mark him
and the boys? Wrestling is but puny."
"They are all in such strength as can be looked for, mother dear, and
will hold out as well as any." And Priscilla wanly smiled in the poor
pinched face, adjusted the cushions and the foot-rest, and without so
much as a drop of cold water for herself, wearily climbed the hill. The
captain making room for her to pass looked with anxious sympathy into
her face, but spake no word, and again the withering hours passed on,
and the elder prayed in a husky and broken whisper, and his hearers
muttered an Amen, hollow and mournful as the echo from an open tomb.
Three o'clock, and Hobomok scrambled down from the roof, and stood in
the open doorway. His master saw and went out to him. In a moment he
came again, and passing between the banks of rude benches stood before
the elder, who, pausing suddenly, fixed upon him a gaze of piteous
inquiry, while a little movement among the hundred starving souls
watching and praying heralded his news.
"The answer has come, Elder," announced the soldier briefly. "A full
rigged ship has just cleared Manomet headland, and a cloud black with
rain is rolling up out of the Southwest."
"Let us pray!" said the elder softly; and Standish bowed his head with
the rest as the holy man, his voice strong and fervent once more, poured
out for himself and his people such gratitude as perhaps is only
possible from those "appointed to die," and suddenly rescued by the hand
of a merciful Father.
A few moments later, as the procession wound down the hill, somewhat
less formally than it had gone up, the southern and western sky were
black with clouds already veiling the sun, and within an hour a soft and
tender rain began to fall, soaking quietly into the earth gaping all
over with the wounds of drought, and reviving, as Bradford quaintly
phrased it, both their drooping affections and their withered corn.
"The white man's God is better than the red man's," remarked Hobomok
privately to Wanalancet, who was visiting Plymouth. "When our powahs
pray for rain, and cut themselves, and offer sacrifice, it comes
sometimes, but in noisy floods that tear up the earth, and beat down the
maize, and do more harm than good. Wanalancet better turn praying Indian
like Hobomok."