Providing himself with a small parcel of food, at one of the taverns, Adam was soon striding through a street of the town, which he remembered vividly as one wherein he had walked on a former occasion, as a captive boy, in a procession of fanatical Puritans. The memory was far from being pleasant.
He would have avoided the place, had he known his way sufficiently well, but before he knew it was so very near, he had come to that square in which the stake with King Philip’s head upon it had once been set.
He looked at the plain surroundings of the locality with a reminiscence of melancholy stealing upon him. He fancied he saw the precise spot where the stake had stood. It brought back a flood of memories, of his days spent with the Wampanoags, his companionship with King Philip, the war and then the end. The sequent thought was of his first glimpse of Garde, held in her grandfather’s arms and looking across the bank of merciless faces with a never-to-be-forgotten sympathy in her sweet, brown eyes. Dwelling then in fondness upon the recollection of his first meeting with William Phipps, the rover felt that, as his last sadness here had been an augury of better times to come, so this present moment might presage a happiness even greater. With this comforting thought to spur him on to Boston, he quitted the square and was soon leaving the outskirts of Plymouth behind him.
Spring seemed to be getting ready for some great event. She was trimming herself with blossoms and virgin grass, and she was warm with all her eagerness to make herself lovely. Adam opened his mouth to breathe in the fragrance exhaled by flirt Nature. He walked swiftly, for there was resilience under foot as well as in his being.
“If Garde were somewhere near, the day could hardly be lovelier,” he said, half aloud. “She must be breathing in this direction.”
His glance was invited here and attracted there. Wherever it rested, Nature met it with a smile. Adam felt like hugging a tree, yet no single tree was that elusive spirit of Nature which he so longed to clasp and to hold in his arms. But if he was mocked by the ethereal presence of beauty too diffuse to be held, by a redolence too subtle to be defined, and by bird notes too fleeting to be retained, yet he was charmed, caressed, sublimated by the omnipresence of Nature’s loveliness.
At noon he was ten good miles from Plymouth and trailing his sword through a wood, where one could feel that some goddess of intangible and exquisite entity had just escaped being seen, by fleeing into the aisles of the trees, leaving an aroma of warmth, pine-breath and incense to baffle bees behind her. Where a little brook tinkled upon pebbles, for cymbals, he got down on his knees and had a long drink. Hearing voices, where some party seemed approaching, he arose and went forward, presently coming to a cross-road in the forest, where he beheld a scene that aroused his momentary indignation.
It amounted to little. Three young country clods had evidently been pursuing a fourth young fellow, who was scarcely more than a boy, and shorter than any in the group, and now, having come up to him, at the cross-roads, had “cornered” him up against a tree and were executing something like an Indian war-dance about him, as he stood attempting to face all three at once.
They began to yell and to run in at their captive, who was striking at them awkwardly and not more than half-heartedly with a stick, in order, apparently, to prevent them from snatching away his hat. It was entirely too unequal, this sham combat, to accord with Adam’s notions of fair play. He started to run toward the group.
“Here!” he shouted. “Here, wait a bit,—I’ll take a hand, to make it even.”