THE KYLOE COW.
“Barbara! Wife!”
“I am here, Myles, straining the milk. I shall make some furmety for
supper. Even Lora begins to beg for it, and the boys dote upon it,
little knaves!”
“Let the furmety wait for a bit, and come out here to see old Manomet
in the evening light. ’Tis a sight I never tire of.”
“Ay, ’tis very fair,” replied Barbara coldly, as she came and sat for
a moment upon the bench at the cottage door, where Myles was wont to
smoke his pipe, and muse upon many matters never brought to words.
A little lower down the hill Alick and his brother Myles were playing
with John and Joseph Alden, while Betty, a stick in her hand, drove all
four boys before her, she with mimic airs of anger and they of terror.
“Very fair!” echoed the captain irritably. “You know naught and care
less for Nature, Bab. Your thought never gets beyond your furmety pot
or Alick’s breeches.”
“And that’s all the better for you and Alick, Myles,” replied the
wife in her usual placid tones; but then, with one of those sudden
revulsions by which placid people occasionally surprise their friends,
she drew in her breath with something between a sob and a groan and
burst out:
“Oh, Myles! Myles! Nature do you call it, and I not love the face of
Nature do you say! Nay, man, this is not Nature, these dark woods and
barren sands and lonesome hills, with never a chimney in sight,--that’s
not the Nature I love and long for. My heart goes back to the pleasant
fields and good old hills of Man. There are mountains grander by far
than yon dark Manomet, as you call it, and yet pranked all over with
cottages, where honest folk find a home and the stranger is ever
welcome. And then the fair valleys between, with the peaceful steads
where men are born and die in sight of their fathers’ graves, and the
old thatched roofs, and the stonecrop on the walls, and the roses
clambering over the casements, and oh, the little kyloe cows coming
home at night, and the poultry”--
She paused abruptly and threw her apron over her face. Myles carefully
knocked the ashes out of his pipe, laid it upon a ledge above the
bench, and taking his wife by the arm led her into the house where
he might seat her upon his knee with no risk of scandalizing chance
spectators. Then he calmly said,--
“The worst of quiet creatures like you, Bab, is that a man never knows
the fire’s alight till the house is in a blaze. Now as you, or was it
Priscilla Alden, said once of me, ‘A little pot’s soon hot,’ and all
the world is forced to know it, but you,--art homesick for the old
country, lass?”
“Nay, Myles, there is no home to be sick for; all is changed there; but
I would like it better if we had a little holding of our own, and our
own cow, and some ducks, and a goose fattening for Michaelmas.”
“But you share the great red cow with Winslow’s folk, and have milk
enough for your furmety, sweetheart!” And the grim warrior smiled
as tenderly as a mother upon the flushed wet face so near his own.
Barbara smiled too, and wiping away the tears sat upright, but was not
allowed to leave her somewhat undignified position upon her husband’s
knee.
“There, Myles, ’tis past now, and I will be more sensible”--
“Prythee don’t, child! I like thee better thus.”
“Nay, but we’re growing old folk, goodman, and it behooves us to be
sober and recollected”--
“Nonsense, nonsense, Bab; there’s no lass among them all that shows so
fair a rose upon her cheek, or such a wealth of sunny hair, as my Bab,
and as for thine eyes, lass, they are a marvel”--
“Now! now! now! well then, dear, I’ll behave myself, after all that
sweet flattery, and--come, let us go out and look at Manomet.”
“Nay. Your longing for a place you may call your own, and have your
kine and poultry and all that about you, marries so well with a thought
I’ve been turning over and over in my mind for a month or more, that
I’ll e’en give it you now, and Manomet and the furmety may wait another
ten minutes, or so.”
“Well, then, let me but take my knitting”--
“No. You shall do naught but listen, and you shall sit where you are!
For once I’ll have your whole mind”--
“For once, Myles!”
“Ay, for once,--look as grieved as you may out of those eyen of yours!
Well enough do you know that Alick, and little Myles, and now Mistress
Lora have well-nigh pushed their poor old dad out of their mother’s
heart”--
“Myles! Dost really think it, love?”
The captain held his wife as far from him as her seat upon his knee
would allow, and eagerly read her fair troubled face, her tender
blushes, quivering lips, and lovely, loving eyes, where the tears stood
and yet were restrained from falling--read and read as men devour with
incredulous eyes some voucher of almost incredible good fortune. Then
he slowly said,--
“Truly God has been very good to me, my wife. His name be praised.”
It was a rare aspiration from those bearded lips, not innocent of the
strange oaths and fierce objurgation well known to the soldiery of that
day,--‘our army in Flanders,’--and over Barbara’s face came a look of
such joy and peace as transformed its quiet comeliness to true beauty.
But it was she who with woman’s tact dropped a veil over that moment’s
exaltation before it should degenerate into commonplace.
“What is your plan, dear?” asked she, and her husband, with a
half-conscious feeling of relief, drew a long breath, and said,--
“Oh--yes. Well, Bab, I, as well as you, would be content to live a
little farther from some of our townsfolk; it is not here as it was
at first, or even when you came. Then we were all of one mind and one
interest, and if I could not belong to their church as they call it, at
least I respected their beliefs, and they let mine alone. But now, amid
all this bickering with Lyford and Oldhame”--
“But Oldhame has gone, and so has Lyford, and are forbidden to come
hither again,” interposed Barbara, and her husband slowly and dubiously
replied, “I know, Bab, I know; but for all that somewhat of ill feeling
in the town has grown out of that affair, and though there’s no man on
God’s earth so near to me as William Bradford, and none I reverence
more than the Elder, or had rather smoke a pipe with than Surgeon
Fuller, there are others that are to my temper like a red rag to a
bull, and it’s safer all round that we should not day by day be forced
to rub shoulders. So the long and short on’t is, Bab, for I’m not good
at speechifying, it needs Winslow for that, I have spoken to Bradford
about taking possession of that sightly hill across the bay”--
“The one you fired a cannon at, the other day?” interrupted Barbara
slyly.
“Yes--that is, you goose, I fired toward it, just to see how far the
saker would carry.”
“Nay, I think it was a sort of salute you were giving to some fancy of
your own, Myles, anent that hill.”
“Well, then, since you will have me make myself out no older than
Alick, I had been marking how the headland stood up against the gold of
the western sky, and it minded me so of Birkenclyffe at Duxbury, and of
my boyhood at Chorley and Wigan, and of fair days gone by”--
He paused, and Barbara knew that his thought was of Rose, the sweet
blossom of his youth, Rose, whom he had carried in his pride to the
neighborhood of the stately domain that ought to have been his and
hers, and spent there with her almost the only idle month of his life.
She knew, and her heart contracted with a slow, miserable pang, but she
only said,--
“Yes, it does look like Birkenclyffe. And you think you could be happy
in living there, Myles?”
“Happy!” echoed the soldier moodily. “I should be happy if the wars
would break out afresh, and Gideon and I might hear once more the music
that we love. We rust here, we two.”
“But the children, Myles! The boys so like their father, and
Lora--would you have them orphans, and me”--
“Ah, Lora! I did not tell you when I came home from England, wife, for
I did not want to hear any jibes and gainsaying”--
“Oh, Myles, do I jibe at you?”
“Well, no,--no Bab, not jibes; but you know, lass, we never were quite
of a mind about the Standish dignities”--
“Dear heart, we have left all that behind us in the Old World! Here
we Standishes have dignity and observance in full measure, because we
belong to thee, love. Captain Standish, head of the colony’s strong
men, is the founder of a new race in this New World.”
“Nay, nay, Barbara, you talk but as a woman, and you never did rise up
to the lawful pride of your birth”--
And the captain all unconsciously put his wife off his knee, and
rising, strode up and down the room, tugging at his red beard, and
frowning portentously. Barbara, her hands folded in her lap, and a sad
smile upon her lips, sat watching him.
“It is as well to tell you now as to keep it for years,” broke out
the captain suddenly. “Nothing will change it, that is, nothing but
Alexander’s death”--
“Alexander’s death! Not our boy, Myles!”
“No, no, no, child! Alexander, son of my cousin Ralph Standish of
Standish Hall. When I was in England I went to see him as I told you.”
“Yes, dear.”
“I went to enforce upon him, newly come to the estates, my just and
honest claim to my grandfather’s inheritance which Ralph’s grandfather
juggled out of the orphan boy’s hands, and which they have kept ever
since.”
“I supposed that was your errand, but as I saw naught had come of it I
asked you no questions, Myles.”
“And therein showed yourself the kindly sensible woman you ever were,
wife. But there is more to the matter. Ralph is an honest fellow, and
after some days of looking into the matter he confessed the justice of
my claim. I tell you, Bab, we went through those old parchments like
two weasels from the Inns of Court; Morton of Clifford’s could have
been no subtler; we had out the old deeds from the muniment-room, and
sent to Chorley Church for the registry book, where are set down the
marriage of my father and mother and my own birth and baptism; and I
showed him Queen Bess’s commission to her well-beloved Myles Standish,
born on that same date, and at the last, over a good pottle of sack, he
confessed to me that I was in the right, but added, with a smile too
sly for a Standish to wear, that I should find it well-nigh impossible
to prove the matter at law, for, as he was not ashamed to say to my
beard, neither he nor his lawyers would help me, and he knew, though he
had the decency not to say it, I have no money to tickle the palms of
the judges, the commissioners, the court officials, and the Lord Harry
alone knows who they are, but all too many for me.”
“Then your cousin is a knave and a robber!”
“Nay, nay, Bab! Nay, I know not that one could expect a man to strip
himself of half his estate if the law bade him keep it”--
“You would, Myles.”
“Ah, well, I was ever a thriftless loon, with no trader’s blood in my
veins to show me how to keep or to get money. Ralph’s grandmother was
fathered by a man who made his money in commerce.”
And the captain smiled as one well content with his own chivalrous
incapacity, then hastily went on. “But though Ralph would not give me
mine own, nor even let me take it if I tried, he had an offer to make
on his part. His oldest son, Alexander by name, was then an infant of
two years, a sturdy little knave already scorning his petticoats, and
Ralph proposed that we should solemnly betroth him then and there to
our Lora”--
“But Lora was not born when you were in England five years ago, Myles.”
“No; but I knew that our two little lads must in course of time have a
sister, and counted on her. Truth to tell, Barbara, Ralph and I picked
a name for her off the family tree. Lora.”
“If I had known it, the child never should have borne the name, and if
I could I would change it now!”
And Barbara, seriously angry, rose from her chair and would have left
the room, but her husband detained her.
“There, look you, now! I knew you would take it amiss, and told Ralph
so, and he bade me keep it to myself, at all odds till the girl was
born and named, and so I have. And yet I do not see what angers you so,
Barbara, except that you ever favored your mother’s family, and held
your Standish blood too cheap.”
“That quarrel well-nigh parted us ere ever we came together, Myles.
Haply it had been better if we had been content to rest simply cousins
and never married.”
“Commend me to a good woman for thrusts both deep and sure when once
she is angered,” cried Myles, flinging out of the house and up the
hill to his den in the Fort.
But when Alick and Betty Alden raced each other thither to tell him
that supper was ready, the choleric captain had fully recovered his
temper, and found his wife so placid and quietly cheerful that he
supposed she also had both forgiven and forgotten.
Which shows that the great Captain of Plymouth understood the strategy
of battle better than that of a woman’s heart. Nor did he ever note,
that from that day Barbara never spoke her daughter’s name if it could
possibly be avoided, calling her generally “my little maid,” and as the
child grew, addressing her as May, the sweet old English contraction of
maiden.
A few weeks later, as Barbara set the stirabout that sometimes served
instead of furmety upon the table, her husband entered, and throwing
his hat into Lora’s lap said in a tone of well deserving,--
“There, Bab, I’ve bought out Winslow’s share in the red cow for five
pounds and ten shillings, to be paid in corn, and I’ve satisfied Pierce
and Clark for their shares with a ewe lamb apiece, so now it is mine,
and I give it to you. She’s not the kyloe cow you were longing for, but
she’s your own.”
“Thank you, Myles,” replied Barbara, flushing with pleasure. “And is
it quite settled that we are to go over to the Captain’s Hill as they
begin to call it?”
“Duxbury, I mean to call it in due time. Yes, dame, the men and I are
going over to-morrow morning to fell timber, and you shall have some
sort of shelter of your own over there before you’re a month older.”