was not taken up with the witches and the Tories, and could afford a
nine-days’ wonder over so simple a thing as a marriage between high and
low. For we had not got then to a professional denial of difference
between high and low; not as yet had the bell of Philadelphia cracked
its heart, like the philosopher Chilo, with public joy, and proclaimed
the crooked ways straight, and the rough places plain. When some sweet
scrub of an Agnes Surriage captured a Sir Harry, at the end of a moving
third act, there was a thrill of awe and satisfaction: and forthwith
the story went into our folk-lore, and very properly; since it had
incidents and character. Sly damsels in Puritan caps made the most of
a shifting society, full of waifs and strays from the foreign world.
Royal commissioners were yet to be seen, and gold-laced Parisian barons
at Newport and Norwich, and pirate Blackbeards tacking from the Shoals,
and leaving sweethearts to wring ghostly hands there to this day. So
that no lass had too dull an outlook upon life, nor need link herself
with the neighboring yokel whom Providence had assigned her, while
such splendid fish were in the seas. Let her but wed “above her,” and
she shall be a fountainhead of precedent and distinction, and the
sister ideal of King Cophetua’s beggar-bride.
[Illustration: Gold laced dandies at Newport]
[Illustration: Nor need link herself with the neighbouring yokel whom
Providence had assigned her]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Where Governor Wentworth was Born]
[Illustration: “A fishmonger in London”]
[Illustration: He had the mortification to see her prefer one
Shortridge, a mechanic]
[Illustration]
Poor Agnes of Marblehead, as faithful as the Nut-Browne Maid herself,
adorns her romantic station with living interest; but Martha Hilton,
who figures in true histories and in Mr. Longfellow’s pretty ballad,
is a heroine of the letter, rather than of the spirit. We hear nothing
of her deserts; we hear merely of her success. She became Lady
Wentworth (all personable Madams were Ladies then and awhile after,
even in the model republican air of Mount Vernon!) and she had been
a kitchen-wench. But she was also the descendant of the honorable
founder of Dover, “a fishmonger in London,” even as the great and gouty
Governor, her appointed spouse, was grandson to a noblest work of God,
who, in 1670, got “libertie to entertayne strangers, and sell and brew
beare.” In that house of beer, the hearty-timbered house planted yet
by a Portsmouth inlet, with one timid bush to be seen over against
the door, was Benning Wentworth born. Having subdued the alphabet,
grown his last inch, looked about, married, and buried his sons and
Abigail his wife, he enters upon our tale “inconsolable, to the minuet
in _Ariadne_.” He had played a game, too, and lost, since his weeds
withered. Having proposed himself and his acres to young Mistress
Pitman, he had the mortification to see her prefer one Shortridge, a
mechanic. The sequel shows that Benning’s Excellency could rise
grandly to an occasion, and also that he had an amorphous turn for the
humor of things; for he had the obnoxious mechanic kidnapped and sent
to sea, “for seven years long,” like the child in the fairy-lay. This
stroke of playfulness insured him nothing but a recoil of fate. Events
restored the lovers to each other, and he was left to console himself
with his restless colony, with his snuff-boxes and his bowls. And into
that lonely manor of his, malformed and delightful, sleeping over
against Newcastle, meekly as befits her menial office (though it is to
be suspected that she was always a minx!) enters Martha Hilton, late
the horror of the landlady of the Earl of Halifax. That well-conducted
Juno of Queen Street, beholding a shoeless girl fetching water from
the decent pump of Portsmouth, in a bare-shouldered estate sacred only
to the indoor and adult orgies of the aristocracy, did not content
herself, as the poet hath it, with
“O Martha Hilton, fie!”
[Illustration: His snuff boxes and his bowls]
[Illustration: Gov. Benning Wentworth]
Her comment had greater vivacity, and was pleasingly metrical. “You
Pat, you Pat, how dare you go looking like that?” There seems to be no
doubt that the pseudo-Hibernian did reply with a prophecy, and, better
yet, that she made it her business to have spoken true. Seven years,
according to the verses in question, did Martha serve her future lord;
and it is not for this oracle, on whatever computation, to dispute
with a son of Apollo. There she shed her clever childhood, and took
her degree in the arts of womankind; busy with pans and clothes-lines,
the sea-wind always in her hair, her strategic eye upon master’s
deciduous charms, and perhaps, provisionally, upon master’s only son,
“a flower too early faded” for any mortal plucking. The latter was not
fore-doomed, either, to be a stepson. He died; and in March of 1760,
one year after, a moment of historic astonishment befell the Reverend
Arthur Brown, shared by the painted Strafford on the wall, when the
good rector of St. John’s, having dined sumptuously at Little Harbor,
heard his host proclaim:—
“This is my birthday; it shall likewise be
My wedding-day, and you shall marry me!”
[Illustration: Wentworth house at Little Harbour]
(Ah, no; he marrified him, did that Reverend Arthur Brown from the
north of Ireland, who had so much to do, first and last, with the
matrimonial oddities of the Wentworths.) And the victress, as all the
world knows, was “You Pat,” suddenly found standing in the fine old
council-chamber, appropriately vested, and radiant with her twenty
years. Abruptly were they joined, these wondrous two, and literally
“across the walnuts and the wine.” And now Martha had her chariot, as
foretold, and her red heels, and her sweeping brocades, and a cushion
towering on her powdered head, and a famous beautiful carven mantel,
on which to lean her indolent elbow. By able and easy generalship is
she here, with him of a race of rulers, aged sixty-five and terrible in
his wrath, for her gentle orderly, her minion. The rustling of Love’s
wings is not audible in the Governor’s corridors, perhaps would be
an impertinence there, like any blow-fly’s; but domestic comfort was
secured upon one side, and power, swaggering power, upon the other,—a
heady draught of it, such as might well turn a novice giddy.
Tradition saith that very shortly after her elevation, Martha dropped
her ring, and summoned one of her recent colleagues to rescue it from
the floor. But the colleague, alas! became piteously short-sighted, and
could offer no help worth having, until my lady, with great acumen,
dismissed her, and picked it up.
[Illustration: and her strategic eye upon master’s deciduous charms”]
For a full decade she rolled along, behind outriders, through the fair
provincial roads, with kerchiefed children bobbing respectfully at
every corner. The strange, stout, splenetic being to whom she owed her
meridian glory, disgusted with events, and out of office, was gathered
presently to his fathers, and left all his property in her hands. With
instant despatch, the scene shifts. The Reverend Arthur Brown beholds
the siren of Hilton blood again before him, with an imported Wentworth
by her side: one red-coated Michael of England, who had been in the
tragic smoke of Culloden. For three years now, in shady Portsmouth,
he has been striding magnificently up and down, and fiddling at
Stoodley’s far into the morning, for pure disinterested enthusiasm
that the dancing might not flag; a live soldierly man, full of bluster
and laughter, equal to many punches, and to afternoon gallops between
the hills of Boston and his own fireside! The fortunate widow of
one Georgian grandee became the wife of this other, his namesake;
and save that Colonel Michael Wentworth was a much more suave and
flexible person, besides being the “great buck” of his day, there was
small divergence in him from the type of his predecessor. Men of that
generation fell into a monotony: if they were rural, they were given
to hunting, bousing, and swearing; the trail of Squire Western is over
them all. Well did Martha, tamer of lions, know her _métier_.
[Illustration: “The great buck of his day.”]
Unto this twain gloriously reigning, came Washington, in 1789, rowed by
white-jacketed sailors to their vine-hung, hospitable door. They were
the mighty in the land; they had somehow weathered the Revolution;
they were peers of—
“The Pepperells, the Langdons, and the Lears,
The Sparhawks, the Penhallows, and the rest,”
with their stately Devon names; and none could more fitly honor the
Father of the Country. He went about the town, indeed, in a visible
halo, weaving the web of peace; and his smile was called as good as
sunshine, and his Sunday black velvet small-clothes elegant in the
extreme. There was a younger Martha in the house, curtseying to this
kind guest, who had grown up to play the spinet by the open window
in lilac-time, and who, later, tautologically bestowed her hand on
a Wentworth, and passed with him to France. Her father’s cherry
cheeks paled gradually, before he gave up his high living, and took
to a bankrupt’s grave, in New York, in 1795. It was feared that he
checkmated too hard a fate by suicide. “I have eaten my cake,” he said
at the end, with a homely brevity. What was in his mind, no chronicler
knoweth; but it is not unlawful to remember that in that eaten cake
Martha Hilton was a plum.
[Illustration: Fiddling at Stoodley’s far into the morning]
[Illustration: Wharves now rotting along the harbor-borders]
Legends such as hers have truth and rustic dignity, and they tell
enough. It will not do to be too curious, to thirst for all that
can be guessed or gleaned. Let Martha herself remain a myth, not to
be stared at. _Il ne faut pas tout corriger._ Breathe it not to the
mellower civilizations that a myth of New England can have a daughter
only forty years dead! That, after all, is not the point, and is
useful to recall only inasmuch as it assures sceptics that the myth
was, in its unregenerate days, a fact. It rode in stage-chairs which
performed once a week for thirteen-and-six; it held babes to a porphyry
baptismal font stolen by heretics from Senegal; it looked upon the busy
wharves now rotting along the harbor-borders; it produced love-letters
on lavender-scented paper, and with an individual spelling which the
brief discipline of a school for “righters, reeders, and Latiners” was
not calculated to blight. Martha must have done these things! and
it is no matter at all if they be suppressed. Gossip concerns itself
exclusively with her first daring nuptial campaign, an event of epic
significance, and in the practical manner of that immortal eighteenth
century. Is it so long ago that the shouting sailors in pigtails and
petticoats lounged under the lindens, along the flagged lanes of
Portsmouth, fresh from the gilded quarter-galleries and green lamps
of the Spanish ships? It is not so to anybody with a Chinese love of
yesterday; which is an emotion somewhat exotic, it is to be feared,
on our soil. Near to politics, if not to poetry, are the patriot
pre-revolutionary mutterings of our seaboard cities, reaching the ears
of the surly nightwatch, before the stocks were swept away. And it was
in that immediate past of effigy-burning, and tea-throwing, and social
panic, that
“Mistress Stavers in her furbelows”
shook her fat finger at the little figure with the swishing bucket, not
dreaming how it should blend with what we have of dearest story and
song. The life back of our democracy is unsensational enough. The saucy
beauty from the scullery is one of its few dabs of odd local color, and
therefore to be cherished. She is part forever of the blue Piscataqua
water, the wildest on the coast, and of the happy borough which shall
never be again.
[Illustration: End of Chapter motif]
NOTES
’TIS hard, methinks, that a man cannot publish a book
but he must presently give the world a reason for it,
when there is not one book of twenty that will bear a
reason.
SIR ROGER L’ESTRANGE.
[Illustration]
SO I do now offer my excuses, and leave a generous public to the
decision whether this book may be regarded as the one of all the
twenty, or shall be counted among the unhappy nineteen. Very many there
are who never hear a story but they must at once know if it be true;
and if it be but partly true, they fain would know just how much is
fact and how much fancy. It is to satisfy such curious folk, so far as
relates to three New England heroines, that these true histories have
been written. The proverb runs that “Truth is stranger than fiction;”
and true it is that truth is ofttimes more romantic, and does little
violence, withal, to our delight in a tale.
He who reads “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” and, later, learns
something of the true lives of its characters, must confess to a slight
shock in the discovery that the scholarly John Alden, of Longfellow’s
lines, was but a cooper at Southampton. Then, too, the romance that
surrounds the martial Miles Standish is somewhat dulled, when one reads
of his parley with the Indians and of his killing of some of them. And
so, though we must confess that the tale is not wholly true, we may
adopt the Italian saying, “So much the worse for truth.”
Sharp eyes might see, even were it not here confessed, that Priscilla
alone bears not the dignity of her full name on the half-titles of this
book. Despite the eloquence of Juliet, one cannot feel the need of
Mullins.
Yet, after all is said, we cannot love the poem less, but love the
poet more. His genius the brighter shines, the while our curiosity is
satisfied. Curiosity is a quality denied to few, and it is pleasant to
satisfy; and so three New England girls have written these three true
histories, while I, the artist, have wandered here and there, with an
eye to such picturesque bits as may have escaped calamity and progress.
This the excuse for the book, and now the story of the artist’s quest.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
First to Hopkinton, from Winchester, by bicycle,—a way which lay by
the “Wayside Inn.” Nothing is more disappointing than such a search
for oldtime scenes, but yet it is a joy, for one sees so much that is
delightful, if not closely related to the object of the quest. The road
wound always to new beauties. The way led by old houses and picturesque
barns, shaded by lofty trees, past fertile farms and modern dwellings,
bristling with gables and rising among green, smooth-shaven lawns. A
season earlier I had spent in England; and when Weston was reached,
with its quaint stone church, the thought arose of those village
churches of Old England with their ivy-covered towers, and, all about,
God’s acre.
[Illustration]
But here no manor-house rose proudly above the trees, no coat-of-arms
was sculptured over the cottage doors. Indeed, the picturesque
cottages themselves were missed, and in their stead were the plainest
of dwellings; but upon the green rose something far prouder than a coat
of arms, the flag-staff, and, at its head, the flag streaming in the
breeze.
[Illustration]
This is the one distinctive feature of the typical New England village.
Always upon the village green is seen the flag-staff, although the
town-pump may have long ago gone, and the bandstand not yet come.
[Illustration]
The ride continued, and still I found comparisons between Old and New
England, but not to the discredit of either. Now are more old houses
sheltered by great elms; stone walls, green fringed; merry children
coming from school; pastures, with grazing cattle; and so lies the
way through Wayland, by the fields and rivers, over picturesque stone
bridges, up hill and down, until we come to Sudbury.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Sudbury is connected with our Martha Hilton, for her story makes one
of the “Tales of the Wayside Inn.” The old hostelry does not look
particularly antique now. It reminds me of what a friend of mine once
said, “’Tis wonderful what one can do with a little putty and paint.”
There are some who would, doubtless, prefer to see the old inn without
that fresh coat of yellow; and yet all will commend that generous
public spirit which is preserving for us this shrine of the muse. And
it may be that it will longer resist the attacks of time, protected by
its jacket of yellow, than it would be able to, did it wear Nature’s
soft mantle of gray. But yet the place is one of interest, and all
about is beautiful. The inn has, at least, one merit, inasmuch as it
leaves much to be imagined, and it is well worthy of a visit.
[Illustration]
From thence to Hopkinton is a matter of a dozen miles, the last four of
which are exceedingly rough and hilly. At Ashland, it is said that it
is four miles to Hopkinton, and three miles back. From this it may be
inferred that the village is one of those which, “set on a hill, cannot
be hid.” Little of bygone days is left for the sight of the pilgrim to
this village. Here is a noble elm, said to measure twenty-five feet in
circumference. It is said to have been brought from England, and set
out by the fair hands of Madam Elizabeth Price, whose husband, then
rector of King’s Chapel, was a close friend of Frankland. It was in
their house that Agnes Surriage found shelter while she and Frankland
were building their home.
[Illustration: The Wayside Inn, Sudbury]
The Frankland mansion stood upon the old highway, now a country road,
pleasant and shady, midway between Hopkinton and Ashland. The old
mansion was destroyed by fire in 1858, and in its place now stands a
modern structure, said, though questionably, to bear a resemblance to
the original building. A bit of the ancient woodwork is seen in a shed,
at the rear; and at the side is a beautiful and gigantic flower vase,
made from the upturned stump of one of Frankland’s great trees. This
is the tree to which Dr. Holmes refers in his poem, “Agnes,” where he
says,—
“Three elms, high arching, still are seen,
And one lies stretched below.”
This elm, too, is said to have had a girth of twenty-five feet.
Indeed, this is the legend which attaches to all of the ancient
trees hereabout, so that I concluded that it was a figure of speech
equivalent to the forty-eleven of my boyhood and the _trente-six_ of
the French. The fine, noble elms at the west of the lawn, said by Dr.
Chadwick to have been planted by the lovers, cast a broad curtain of
shade over the drive and lawn. Dr. Nason,[1] writing in 1865, records
the circumference of the largest two of these as twelve feet each, but
doubtless by this time they have reached the conventional girth of
twenty-five.
[Illustration: Great Elms, Hopkinton]
Since Dr. Nason’s time the old box of Sir Harry’s borders, described as
having a height of ten or twelve feet, has nearly disappeared except
a few plants remaining before the house, and on the terraces built by
Sir Harry’s slaves. One who knew some of the descendants of Agnes and
Frankland well says that, in her youthful days, the young girls were
wont to gather this box, for Christmas greens, with which to deck the
old church. A bright, sunny day will serve to dispel the terrible ghost
of Dr. Nason’s early days, and the bewitched pump no longer displays
its weird waywardness, but yields, instead, a cool, refreshing
draught.
[Illustration]
The pilgrim to the places that knew Agnes would naturally first
visit Marblehead, her birthplace; yet, on my quest, I reached it
last. Others, in a similar pilgrimage, would go first where fancy or
opportunity leads; and this is the true spirit of roaming. So next to
Roxbury, to visit Shirley Place. The reader remembers how delightfully
Mr. Bynner introduced Mrs. Shirley into his romance, and will recall
his story of Agnes’s ride there, in the collector’s coach. In my
boyhood days in Roxbury, the old mansion was called the Eustis House,
and it stood in a great field given over to goats and burdocks. There
are those living who remember it when Madam Eustis still lived there.
This grand dame wore a majestic turban; and the tradition still lingers
of madam’s pet toad, on gala days decked with a blue ribbon. Now the
old house is sadly dilapidated. It is shorn of its piazzas, the
sign “To Let” hangs often in the windows, and the cupola is adorned
with well-filled clothes-lines. Partitions have cut the house into
tenements. One runs right through the hall, but the grand old staircase
and the smaller one are still there, and the marble floor, too, in the
back hall. A few of the carved balusters are missing, carried away by
relic-hunters.
“’Tis a great city,” said Goody Surriage, as she peered at Colonial
Boston, over the shoulders of Agnes and Mrs. Shirley. Now, it is truly
a great city, wreathed in smoke and steam; and all about are churches,
school-houses, and factories, while the “broomstick train” of Dr.
Holmes’ fancy whirls along, close by the ancient mansion. The engraving
is from a sketch made many years ago. Since then the old house has been
entirely surrounded by modern dwelling-houses. The pilgrim who searches
for it will leave the Mt. Pleasant electric car at Shirley Street.
[Illustration: The Royall House Medford]
In Medford is a house often visited by Sir Harry and Agnes, known as
the Royall House. This house, also, to-day shelters more than a single
tenant. Here is a little drawing of this home of hospitality, which was
forsaken so hastily by its fleeing owner, the Colonel, alarmed by
the too near crack of the guns at Lexington. “A Tory against his will;
it was the frailty of his blood, more than the fault of his judgment.”
The electric cars from Boston to Medford pass the door of the old
mansion, as it stands near the corner of Royall Street. Medford has a
picturesque town square; and it is only a pleasant walk to the Craddock
House, built in 1632, now converted into a museum, and thus, after many
vicissitudes, rescued from the usual fate of ancient landmarks.
[Illustration: Medford Square]
And now to Marblehead, by road or by rail as one chooses. Perhaps the
pleasantest route is from Lynn or Salem by electric car. By either
route, the ride is a pleasure, and although little remains to tell of
Agnes in her girlhood, there is much that is quaint and picturesque;
and to visit the old town is well worth one’s time. Arrived at
Marblehead, the visitor walking down the main road to Orne Street, and
ascending the hill to the old burying-ground, will see by the wayside
the old houses, “set catty-cornered,” as the quaint old saying is,
and the bright gardens. Now upstairs and now down run the streets,
and likely enough the visitor will meet “many an old Marbleheader,”
pictures in themselves.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Just where the road turns to skirt the burying-ground at the left, is
Moll Pitcher’s house. Whittier draws the portrait of our New England
witch in one of his poems, handling her no more gently than he does her
fellow-townsman, old Floyd Ireson. This house is the home of her youth;
as a witch, she flourished in Lynn. I have often heard stories of her
predictions, and one of my cherished possessions is a small square of
yellow quilted silk, which once formed a part of Moll’s brave array.
Across the way stood the Fountain Inn. Here, upon its site, and
overlooking the harbor, are two cottages, in front of which is the
well of the old hostelry, from whence Agnes drew the draught of water
which she offered to Sir Harry. This fountain has been recently brought
to light, and still refreshes the traveller as of yore. Beneath the
apple-trees which shade it is found a restful seat, from which one may
look out over a scene of singular beauty. As often as one looks upon
this scene, it meets the eye with an added charm.
We little realize the beauty of our sea. In summer time it is ofttimes
as blue as the waters of the Mediterranean, a dark, intense blue,
broken by purple patches, by beautiful streaks of emerald, dotted with
warm, glowing rocks, and accentuated by snowy, foaming breakers. Below
the hill, to the left, are some fishermen’s huts, surrounded by nets,
drying in the sunshine, boats ashore, old lobster-pots, and anchors,
all in picturesque confusion, ready to be sketched and painted.