NEW ENGLAND had her spurts of human nature in old times, whenever she 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[111]
[112]
[113] 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.

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[115]
[116]
[117] 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!”

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[119]
[120]
[121] 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:—

(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[123]
[124]
[125] 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.

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.

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[127]
[128]
[129] somehow weathered the Revolution; they were peers of—

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.

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![131]
[132]
[133] 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.