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!”
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!”