"Then let me lay my hand in thine. There, then, good-night."
"Good-night, mine own."
And while the winter night lapsed through hours of deadly chill and darkness into the sad twilight of early morning the soldier sat motionless, holding that fragile hand, gazing upon that lovely face, lovely yet so changed from the cherubic beauty that had won his heart amid the summer fields of Man but three short years before.
What he thought, what he felt in those hours, he could not himself have revealed, for a man's emotion is usually in inverse proportion to its expression, and Myles Standish was essentially a man of action and not of words; but God only knows how these strong inarticulate natures suffer in the agony that divides bone from marrow, and yet leaves the sufferer conscious of the capacity to live and to suffer yet again and again.
In some respects this vigil resembled that of Bradford in hearing of Dorothy's death, in some it was widely different, for with Bradford's grief was mingled self-reproach and keen introspection; he weighed his own life, he found it wanting, he condemned it, and offering his suffering as righteous penance, he extolled the justice of God, and submitted himself as a culprit to the scourge.
But Standish thought neither of the justice of God nor of his own demerits, nor had he skill or practice for introspection. "A man under authority and having soldiers under him," he both rendered and expected obedience, prompt, entire, and unquestioning. His was a nature of loyalty so magnificent as to need no buttresses of reason, or of self-distrust, a loyalty so sweet as to be unconscious of itself, a loyalty so entire that the soul could not get outside of it to consider it objectively.
The order came from the King of kings, and it was to be obeyed, or endured; the King could do no wrong.
Nor indeed had he been skilled to search, could Myles have found matter for self-reproach in all his dealings with the child dying at his side.
Busy from his boyhood in the pursuit of arms, and loving his mother with all the force of his great nature, the man had cared little for other women, turning with scorn from the meretricious charms of those he encountered in camp or among his comrades, and finding no time or inclination to seek others, so that except for the light fancies of an hour, or the calm affection for his cousin Barbara, whom he found on one of his visits to his home in Chorley giving a daughter's tendance to his mother, Standish had passed his three and thirtieth birthday ignorant of the nature of love, and mocking at its power.
But the first glance at the lovely girl weeping beside her mother's grave warned him that a new hour had struck, and a new foe opposed him; nor was he long in making full and frank surrender to an authority as strong as it was gentle, and as tyrannous as sweet.