“Your speech savors of superstition as well as uncharity, Captain Standish, and I had held you singularly free from both those vices.”
“I crave your pardon, Elder. I had clean forgot that Allerton was for a while your son-in-law. Go on an’ it please you, Master Thacher.”
But again the power of those memories he had so resolutely evoked overmastered the speaker, and it was in a hurried and broken voice and with a furtive gesture of the hand across the eyes that he again began:—
“I fain would tell you, but I cannot, what John Avery was, not to me alone who loved him better than David could love Jonathan, better than mine own brother who yet was dear to me, but to all the world; a man so good, so holy, so devout, that he seemed sent hither to remind us of the Man of Nazareth whose humble follower he was; and withal so keen of wit, and so sound of judgment, and so ready to help with heart and hand wherever he saw need, that I leaned upon him and yearned toward him in all difficulties as a little child with his mother. Verily I believe it was for the chastisement of mine own overweening love that this thing hath befallen.”
“Belike rather the God he served saw him fit for heaven, and so took him even as He did Elijah,” said the Elder reverently.
“It may be, venerable sir, it may be; but I cannot forget mine own arrogancy when John told me that the church at Marblehead had invited him, and he was fain to go, and I said, ‘Well and good, John, but you sha’n’t be rid of me, for I’ll go too, and naught but death shall part us.’ Ah me! Naught but death, says I, and verily ’t was naught but death!”
“Did it storm when you set forth?” asked Jonathan Brewster’s clear and somewhat cold voice; and Thacher, recalling himself with a start, replied in much the same tone:—
“No, although the weather looked threatening, and our master was in haste to sail, hoping to weather Cape Ann before the wind changed as he foreboded it would. But it was just off the Cape that it fell calm, and then all in a moment the storm burst, and the wind, veering to every point of the compass, caught us as if in a whirlpool, so that before the sailors could trim their sails they were torn from their hands, torn from the masts, or if they clung, only helped to tear the masts from the hull and the rudder from the stern. I am not shipman enough to tell you how it all befell, but this I know: that when the morning of Saturday, the 15th day of August in 1635, broke in such fury of wind and rain and raging waves as I never beheld before or since, our bark drove furiously upon a reef, and in the shock went all to pieces, carrying ten souls into eternity before one could cry God have mercy upon them! One of these was Peter Avery, a fine lad, who had gone aft to fetch a rope whereby to bind his mother to the stump of the foremast, and in that act of filial charity he died.”
“And his reward is with God,” murmured the Elder.