“Enough, enough, man!” cried Standish, starting to his feet. “I cannot listen to so many words. I care naught for commentators or texts. Tell me as man to man, may I go and kill mine enemy or no!”
“Well, then, no! You shall here and now kneel down and lay your revenge at the foot of Christ’s cross and leave it there. Man! Has your enemy hurt you more than those who drove the spikes through his hands and feet, what time He prayed ‘Father, forgive them; they know not what they do’? and bethink you how easy vengeance would have been to Him.”
“Ay. Knew not what they did!” muttered Standish. “Knowing it or not, that man slew my child, for had it not been for the contract, I would have let her marry Brewster, and she might have been to-day a happy wife and mother.”
“And if you will reckon in that fashion,” replied Bradford sternly, “it was surely you who slew Wrestling Brewster, since it was because he might not have Lora that he went to England and found his death. Should not God and our dear Elder have required his blood at your hand?”
A great silence was the only answer, and presently Bradford spoke again, and now in the tone of assured conviction and well-grounded authority that in some moods the human soul yearns to hear, especially an ardent, impetuous, and loving soul like that of Standish; a nature that, while the impulse lasts, will dare heaven and hell and earth to achieve its purposes, and when the revulsion comes distrusts all that is within, and turns like a drowning man to some external authority. Such a man makes a good soldier, for as he says, “Go here, and go there!” to those beneath him, he is ready to add, “For I also am a man under authority.”
And in this need, characterizing some of the strongest souls that animate humanity, masculine and feminine, lies the yearning for confession and guidance, absolution and penance, that has for centuries been the strongest weapon in the hand of the Catholic Church.
“No, my friend, you shall not carry this controversy away from this spot. It is Satan who buffets you so sorely, and if you will fight, it is with him the combat shall be. Which is the stronger, you, or that great dragon, that old serpent, whom Michael, of old, fought and conquered? Fight him in the name of the Lord, and with Gideon if you will, but here and now relinquish all, yes, every iota of the desire for your brother’s blood. Destroy that letter,—yes, tear it in pieces here beside Lora’s grave, and bury the remembrance of it as you have buried her. You have left it to me, Myles, and I have been given this to say to you. Take it, in the name of God who hears us.”
“I take it as I took her message,” replied Standish in a low voice, and rising to his knees, for he had been lying prone beside the grave, he sought about for a moment, and finding a bit of stick began carefully to remove one of the turfs at the foot of the new-made grave. Laying it at one side, he took the letter from under his knee, where he had held it, and quietly tore it into fragments, which he held in his left hand, while with the right he scooped a hollow in the loose loam beneath the sod; but in deepening the cavity his fingers encountered some foreign substance, and drawing it out, held up to the moonlight a little package enveloped in a strip of the cloth-like inner bark of the birch-tree, and bound around with cord twisted of fibres of the hackmatack.
“Some of Hobomok’s work,” murmured Standish, carefully unrolling the bark, and disclosing a curiously shaped and much worn stone of a peculiarly hard and dense quality, fashioned at one end into a neck by which it could be securely carried, and at the other sharpened to a curved edge capable of cutting wood.
“Why, ’t is Hobomok’s totem!” exclaimed Standish, turning it over and over. “He always wore it about his neck, and for all he calls himself a praying Indian, I sorely mistrusted he prayed as much to his totem as to any other god, nor would he ever let us see him use it, or take it in our hands, though the boys have urged him more than enough. The dear maid used to talk to him in her gentle way, and try to make a good Christian of him, just as she used to set up her dolls and play go to meeting with them, and with as great results. But now,—did he bury it here for a charm to keep away the afrits, or did he lay it at her feet to show that in her sweet patience of death she had conquered his unbelief even as she conquered that other savage, her father?”