“What, mine own old house? ’Tis going to ruin already, is it not, and yet ’tis no more than seventeen years since these hands with John Alden’s aid laid it beam to beam.”
“And why does it go to ruin, Myles?”
“Why? Why, because no man careth for it, I suppose.”
“Ay, you’ve answered me, friend. No man careth for that home, nor for John Alden’s hard by, nor for Edward Winslow’s, and the Elder’s great house is now but a half-hearted home, for he is more at Duxbury than here. I speak not of the rest, for they are of less account to me; and that is a fault which I confess, but nature is strong, and the carnal heart of man clings to its own.”
“And why should not a man’s heart cling to his old friends and comrades, Will, and why should not you value the Elder, and Winslow, and Alden, and a few more of us more than you do all these nimble Jacks that have sprung up to push us old ones from our places? Be a saint an’ you please, old comrade, but don’t strive to cease to be a man.”
“And here is the Fort you loved so well, Myles. Shall you have a new Fort at Duxbury?”
The captain stopped, and squaring round laid a finger upon the governor’s breast, and fixed his keen brown eyes upon the other’s fairer face.
“Friend,” said he in a tenderer voice than was his wont, “where a man is all but as good and as godly as a woman, he is apt to have some trace of woman’s faults and follies, and that last speech of yours savors of woman’s jealousy and spite. Play the man, Will, play the man, and smite me with thy fist an’ thou lik’st not what I do and say, but never lower thyself to stinging with thy tongue.”
The Governor of Plymouth turned his back and steadfastly looked over toward Manomet, green and glowing in the sunset of a June afternoon, her graceful young trees in their tender foliage as airy and as gay, and her forest monarchs as stately, as they had been before the white men saw these shores, or as they are to-day when Bradford and Standish are dust and ashes, and as they will be when the hand that writes and the eyes that read are even as those of the fathers. We love Nature so passionately and so persistently because it is an unrequited affection; at the most she only holds up the cheek for us to kiss.
This little interlude is but a piece of delicacy that Bradford may have time to recover himself, and now he turns, and folding Standish’s patrician hand in a larger grasp slowly says,—