“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.
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.