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Standish of Standish, a novel by Jane Goodwin Austin |
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Chapter 24. The Mysterious Grave |
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_ CHAPTER XXIV. THE MYSTERIOUS GRAVE "A fair and goodly day!" exclaimed Standish ever sensitive to the aspects of nature, although never allowing himself to be mastered by any extremity of weather. "Ay," replied Bradford. "And yet methinks that cloud rising over Manomet hath a stormy look." "Let us once weather the Gurnet's Nose, and a south wind will not harm us," ventured Billington, whose out-of-door prowlings had at least made him weatherwise. "Ay, if south wind is all that it means," said Doctor Fuller gravely. "But to my mind yon cloud is of no common kind. It minds me shrewdly of those whirlwind or cyclone clouds that used to fright us in the China Seas when I sailed them as a lad." "Say you so, Surgeon!" replied Bradford looking uneasily at the cloud rapidly rising and enlarging in the southern horizon. "Be ready with the sheets, Peter Browne and Cooke, and Francis Eaton had best stand with Latham at the helm." "Look! Look you there! 'T is a waterspout!" cried Fuller, pointing excitedly at the cloud, which, driven on with furious force by an upper current of wind unfelt below, was now bellying in a marked and abnormal fashion, while from the lowest point of the convexity appeared a spiral column of dense vapor rapidly elongating itself toward the sea whose waters assumed a black and sullen aspect, disturbed by chopping counter currents of short waves, which gradually, as the waterspout neared them, fell into its rotary motion, rising at the centre of the whirlpool into a column of foaming water, a liquid stalagmite climbing to meet the stalactite bending to it from above. "If we had but a heavy gun!" cried Warren. "They say to hit the waterspout in the centre where it joins the other from below will disperse it." "Knocks the wind out of it," explained Billington. "But we have nothing better than these bird guns," cried Standish contemptuously touching with his foot the pile of weapons covered with a tarpaulin lying in the bottom of the boat. "And it drives down upon us like a charge of horse. Here, let me to the helm." "There is no way upon the boat, Captain," expostulated Eaton. "No man can steer without a wind." "Thou 'rt right, friend," replied the captain gravely, as he felt the rudder give beneath his hand. "There's naught to do but tarry until Master Waterspout declareth his pleasure." "Until God declareth His pleasure," amended Bradford quietly. "Men, let us pray." And baring his head the governor poured forth a strong and manful petition to Him who rideth upon the wings of the wind and reigneth a King forever over His own creation. Standish standing upright beside the useless tiller bared his head and listened reverently, but always with an eye to the waterspout and to the clouds, and as a deep-throated Amen rose from his comrades he gave the tiller a shove and joyously cried,-- "A puff, a breath! Enough to steer us past!" And the boat feeling her helm again careened gently to the little gust of wind out of the west, and slid away upon her course, while the waterspout, more furious in its speed at every instant, swept past and out to sea, where it presently broke and fell with a thunderous explosion. "Another crowning mercy!" exclaimed Bradford devoutly, and Standish answered with his reticent smile,-- "Had Master Jones of the Mayflower been here, he would have more than ever felt 't is better to be friends than foes with prayerful men." To the waterspout succeeded light and baffling winds so that labor as they might, it was fully dark when the Pilgrim pinnace entered what is now Barnstable, then Cummaquid Harbor. Anchoring for safety, they lay down to get such rest as the position afforded, and woke betimes in the morning to find themselves high and dry in the centre of the harbor, the channel encircling them and making up toward the land. Upon the shore as seen across this channel appeared some savages gathering clams and muscles. Bradford at once dispatched Squanto and Tockamahamon, who had come along as guides and interpreters, to interview these men and barter for some of the shellfish, but in a very short time the envoys came splashing merrily back with an invitation for the white men to land and breakfast with Janno, the chief of the Mattakees, who was, the fishermen said, close at hand. They also corroborated the statement that the missing boy had gone down the Cape with the Nausets, and would be found at Eastham, Aspinet's headquarters. "I see no reason for gainsaying such a comfortable proposal," said Bradford turning with a smile to Standish who cheerily replied,-- "Nor I, so that they leave hostages aboard, and we carry every man his piece ashore." "We must e'en wade for it, sith there is neither dry ground for footing nor water for swimming," suggested Browne stripping off hose and shoon; but as Bradford and Standish began to follow his example they were prevented by the Indians, who offered each a back to the two chiefs, at the same time intimating to the others that if they would but wait all the company should be similarly accommodated. The doctor accepted, but Browne and the rest preferred their own legs as a dependence, and the whole party presently reached shore, where Janno, the handsome and courteous young chief of the Mattakees, stood with several of his pnieses or nobles around him ready to receive them. Squanto at once stood forth as interpreter, and so flowery and mellifluous were the phrases of welcome that he interpreted, that the captain edging toward Bradford muttered,-- "I hope Master Warren will look well after the hostages left aboard, for all this is too sweet to be wholesome. I mistrust treachery, Governor." "Nay, I mistrust Squanto, Captain," replied Bradford laughing. "The poor fellow doth glorify himself at some cost to the truth, I fancy." "Beshrew me but before another month I'll know enough of their jargon to need no lying interpreter," muttered Standish, and he kept his word. The Indian breakfast, already nearly ready, proved both toothsome and plentiful. It consisted of lobsters, clams, and muscles, both cooked and raw, ears of green maize roasted in the husk, and no-cake, that is to say, pounded corn mixed with water and baked in the ashes, the germ and animus of hoe-cake, bannocks, Johnnycake, and all the various forms of maize-bread so well known throughout our land. Breakfast over Janno rather timidly inquired if the white chiefs would permit the visit of an old squaw of his tribe who much desired to see them. "Surely if the good woman hath occasion to speak with us," replied Bradford amiably. "Why doth the chief seem to mistrust our willingness?" "Squaw no speak to brave in council," explained Squanto with an air of shocked propriety; but before he could further explain a bowed and decrepit figure emerged from one of the little huts on the edge of the woods and slowly approached the white men who stepped forward to meet her, desiring Squanto to assure her of welcome. Coming so close to the little group that Standish muttered, "Sure she is minded to salute us," the poor old crone peered into the face of one after another of the white men, then wofully shook her head and began to mutter in her own tongue with strange gesticulations, but as he heard them Squanto uttered a shrill cry of terror, and the sachem stepping forward spoke some words of stern command, before which the old woman humbly bowed and became silent. "What is it? Would she curse us? What is her grievance? What is her story?" demanded Bradford half indignantly, and Squanto, after some conference with the sachem, informed them that this woman, once called Sunlight-upon-the-Waters, but now known as The-Night-in-Winter, had been mother of seven tall sons who filled her wigwam with venison, and shared their corn and tobacco with her; but three of these sons were among the captives entrapped and sold to slavery by Hunt, and the other four had perished in the plague brought down upon the red men by the curse of The-White-Fool who died about the same time; and thus The-Night-in-Winter, having just cause, hated the white men as she hated death and the devil, and wished to curse them as The-White-Fool had cursed her people, but the sachem would not let her, and now she was doubly bereft of her children, since she might not even avenge them. "'T is a piteous tale," said Bradford gently when Squanto had finished. "And we cannot be amazed that this poor heathen mother should thus feel. There is warrant for it among the classics, Surgeon; Medea and others were moved in the same fashion. But Squanto, explain to her that we and all honest white men abhor the course of Master Hunt, and had we found him at such commerce we would have delivered her sons, and thee too, Squanto, out of his hands. Tell her our mind is to deal honestly and Christianly by all men, and here, give her this fair chain, and this length of red cloth. Tell her that she would do ill to curse us, for we are friends to her and her people." "And ask who was The-White-Fool, and what his story," demanded Standish as Squanto finished rendering the governor's message. "Squanto know that in himself. Every Pokanoket know that," replied Squanto, while Janno muttered gloomily in his own tongue,-- "All red men know The-White-Fool's curse. All feel it." So Squanto in his broken yet picturesque phrases told how "many snows ago" a large French ship was wrecked farther down the Cape and nearly everything aboard was lost. Several of her crew, however, came safely ashore and made a sort of camp with some earthwork defenses on the mouth of the Pamet River. "Why men, we saw it, and mused upon the marks of European skill and training," exclaimed Standish. "Ay, and the house hard by, and the marvelous grave with the fair-haired man and infant so curiously embalmed," added Fuller. "Truly, this is passing strange!" murmured Bradford. "But get on with thy story, Tisquantum." The Frenchmen were quiet and peaceable enough, Tisquantum could not but allow, and yet his people would not permit them to dwell unmolested, perhaps from some vague fear of ancient prophecy that a pale-faced race should come from the rising sun and drive the red men into the western seas; perhaps from some race-hatred lying below the savage's power of expression; at any rate, as Tisquantum finally declared with a significant gesture,-- "Sagamore, powahs, pnieses, braves, all men say, It is not good for pale men with hair like the sunrise to live among the red men whose hair is like the night. Let them be gone!" "And what did the red men do about it, Squanto?" asked Standish sternly, while in his eyes kindled the danger light before which Squanto quailed, yet sullenly replied,-- "Red man find what you call wolf around his wigwam, red man send arrow through his head." "Do you mean, you heathen, that you murdered these helpless, shipwrecked white men? Murdered them in cold blood?" demanded Standish, seizing Gideon's hilt and half drawing him from his scabbard. "Tisquantum not here. Tisquantum not Mattakee, not Nauset; Tisquantum Patuxet, where white men live," hastily replied Squanto; while Bradford suggested in a rapid aside, "Best leave go thy sword and restrain thy wrath, Captain, or we be but dead men. Look at the faces of those men behind the sachem. Already they finger their tomahawks." "More like, thy timidity will give the savages courage to fall upon us, and we shall share the fate of these, who though naught but Frenchmen were at least white, and wore breeches," retorted Standish angrily. The color flashed into Bradford's cheek, but after an instant's silence he quietly replied,-- "Thou knowest well enow, Standish, that my timidity is not for myself but for these, and yet more for the helpless ones we have left behind. I trust when it comes to blows, the Governor of Plymouth will be found where he belongs, next to her fiery Captain." "Be content, Will, be content. Once more thou 'rt right and I all wrong. 'T is not the first time nor the last, but let us ask in all patience what these fellows mean with their White-Fool. Sure they have not made me out so suddenly as this, have they?" "Nay, Myles, I trow no man but thyself will ever call thee fool, nay, nor overly white, either!" and glancing at the Captain's bronzed face lighted once more by its smile of grim humor, Bradford turned to Squanto and bade him explain in the hearing of both savages and white men the meaning of this reference, and also the fate of the French mariners cast ashore at Eastham. Squanto nothing loth to display his oratory struck an attitude, and with native eloquence and much gesticulation described, first, the storm which four years ago had driven the French brig upon the sands; then the efforts of the mariners to launch their boats, their defeat, and the breaking up both of boats and brig; then the arrival upon shore of thirteen men, two of whom died of wounds and exhaustion. The eleven survivors finding some wreckage upon the beach proceeded the next morning to build themselves a shelter, and finally erected the cabin and threw up the earthwork discovered by the Pilgrims in their second exploration. Up to this point the Indians had been content to curiously watch the proceedings of these interlopers, but finding that they were establishing themselves permanently, they held a council and resolved that they should die, partly in atonement for the outrage done to the red men some two years before by Hunt the kidnapper, and partly from some vague fear lest the strangers with their superior knowledge and appliances should conquer and injure the proper owners of the soil. Not choosing to assault them openly, for the men were brave, alert, and well armed, the Indians laid in wait around the spring where they must daily go for water, watched them as they went afield in pursuit of game, in fact harassed them at every turn, until of the eleven but three were left alive, and they, so broken in strength, courage, and hope, that they were easily captured and reduced to slavery. One remained here at Nauset, and the other two were sent, one to the Massachusetts, the other to the Namasket tribes, where they were kept as the mock and victims of the brutal sport of the savages. The one who remained at Nauset was the best looking, and evidently the most attractive of the three, and from Squanto's description seemed to have been an officer, and a very attractive young man. The-White-Birch, sister of Aspinet, chief of the Nausets, having fixed her regards upon the prisoner, discovered these peculiarities, and one day when the boys of the village were amusing themselves with seeing how near they could shoot their blunted arrows to the prisoner's eyes without putting them out, she stepped forward, and, Pocahontas-like, announced that she took this man for her husband, and as such claimed his release from torture. Her demand was complied with, and the half dead victim unbound and informed of his new honors; but it was too late--want, misery, and cruelty had done their work, and the poor fellow's wits had fled. He accepted the tender care and affection of The-White-Birch as a child might have done, but the joyous gallantry of the debonair young French officer was a thing of the past, and the bridegroom had become as completely the child of nature as his bride. He was adopted into the tribe, and the Indian name given him, in no spirit of taunt or contempt, but simply as a descriptive appellation, meant The-White-Fool. They were married, these two strange lovers, and lived in the cabin built of ship's planks by The-White-Fool's dead comrades. In due time a son was born to them, the idol of his mother's heart, and the constant companion of the father, who seemed to find in the child some link with his own stray wits; but when the boy was about three years old the poor exile was seized with a fever, and in his delirium escaping from his tender nurse stalked naked through the village proclaiming in the native tongue that the wrath of God hung over this people and this land, because of the cruel wrong they had done to him and to his comrades; and he foretold that before seven snows had covered his grave, white men from over the sea should come like the wildfowl in the spring and settle down upon the creeks and ponds, and fill the forest with their cry, and the red men should melt away as the snow melts and their place be no more seen. It was really worth something to hear Squanto declaim this wild prophecy with the shrill voice and fevered gestures of the delirious captive; and as they caught his meaning the pnieses around Janno stirred in their places, laid hand upon the tomahawk at each man's girdle, and cast menacing looks upon the strangers. "Have a care, Squanto! Say no more on that head, or thou 'lt stir up strife afresh," muttered Bradford in the interpreter's ear, while Standish fixed his eyes upon Janno ready to sacrifice him at the first hostile movement. But the young chief casting a meaning glance around the circle said quietly,-- "The-White-Birch was of the blood of Aspinet my brother, and The-White-Fool was her husband." "Well said, Chief!" exclaimed Standish who had already mastered much of the Indian language, and in accordance with his late resolve soon became the most expert interpreter in the colony, while Bradford nodding said, "Go on, Squanto!" Little however remained to tell. The ill-starred Frenchman died within a few hours of his prophecy, and hardly had The-White-Birch laid him in his honored grave when she was called to bury her little boy, whom the father had named Louis, along with him. Then she set off alone to find the comrades of her lost love at Namasket, and Shawmut, that they might with her lament his death; but whether illness came upon her and she crept aside to die, or haply some wild creature slew and devoured her, or in her maze of grief she strayed away and starved in the limitless woods, none ever knew; she never was heard of again. "And the other two captives?" inquired Standish. "The Feast-of-Green-Corn before the last one, Captain Dermer carried them away in his ship," replied Squanto proud of his English and his information. "Ay, ay, and now we understand why these Nauset Indians attacked us at the First Encounter," said Standish. "Especially as they had probably watched us stealing their corn," added Fuller dryly. "Borrowing, not stealing, Surgeon," retorted Bradford briskly. "And a part of our errand to the First Encounter is to satisfy our creditor for the debt. Let us be going." An hour later the shallop, now riding gayly upon the flood tide, put forth from Barnstable Harbor, carrying not only its own crew, but Janno with several of his followers, he having volunteered as guide and negotiator with Aspinet for the restoration of little Billington. The voyage prospered, and before night the boy, decked with strings of beads and various savage ornaments, was restored to his guardians by Aspinet himself; while the first red man allowed to come on board the shallop was the owner of the corn "borrowed" by the Pilgrims, who now repaid its value twofold by an order for goods to be delivered at Plymouth. But more important than boy or corn, at any rate to the ears of Standish, was a report here received that the Narragansetts, their friend Massasoit's neighbors and deadly foes, had made a raid upon his domains and carried him away prisoner. Also that one of Massasoit's pnieses called Corbitant had become an ally of the Narragansetts, and was now at Namasket, only fourteen miles from Plymouth, trying to raise a revolt against both his chief and the white men their allies. He was also fiercely denouncing Squanto, Hobomok, and Tockamahamon as renegades and traitors to their own people, who should be at once put to death. This news was so alarming that without waiting for trade, or for the feast offered to them, the Pilgrims at once set sail, and after stormy weather and sundry adventures arrived safely at home toward night of the third day from their departure. John Billington was received with vociferous joy by his mother, treated to a lithe bundle of birch rods by his father, and assaulted by his brother, who at once fought him for the possession of the bead necklaces and other gauds he had brought home. The men of the colony were meantime hearing the report brought in by Nepeof, a sachem just from Namasket, of the treacherous proceedings there, and before they had been three hours at home Squanto and Hobomok were dispatched to discover the truth of the matter, while Nepeof was held as a hostage. _ |
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