She winked boldly at me with the eye that was turned from Mr. Milton, which I answered with half a smile; and I rose up and went over to Mr. Milton, who did not take me in his arms and give me the hearty kiss that any other man in his place would have given me, but stepped a pace back. He said: “Mistress Marie, before ever I set my lips to yours in token of spiritual union, or set my seal beneath a civil contract of marriage, I must insist upon hearing from your own lips that you are verily what you pretend to be.”
I feigned not to understand his drift. I answered: “Sir, I cannot think that I have ever made any pretension to you of accomplishments worthy of your esteem. I am not good with the needle; I thrum the guitar indifferent well, though my voice be true; of my household management my mother is better able to speak than I—”
He broke out impatiently: “Nay, nay, my meaning is, are you the maid I take you for?”
I resented his question and answered it thwartly: “If you mean to ask whether I am my father’s daughter, that is a matter upon which I cannot positively enlighten you; but I have ever believed my mother to be an honest woman.”
My mother laughed aloud at this, and “Alas, Daughter, it is true,” she said. “No great lord lay with me before your birth, and though your hair is Moulton hair, I fear that your nose and chin are sadly Powell. Your suitor, I think, wishes to hear from your own lips whether we are selling you with a cracked maidenhead or no. I tell him that it is a case of caveat emptor—for there is no sending of you back again to us (once you have bedded with him) on the ground that you are not what we warranted you to be. However, if such an advertisement content him, you need have no shame in assuring him that no man has been admitted there before him where he would fain go. Come, say the words after me: ‘I, Marie Powell, do swear by Almighty God—’”
Mr. Milton hastily interposed that he required no such vain oath from me, but only a simple declaration before witnesses that I came to him as an unspoilt virgin.
“Why, sir,” I answered, smiling, “if it please you, I am an unspoilt virgin; but I will not swear to it, since you excuse me the oath.”
“This is no smiling matter, Mistress,” he said, ruffling up again.
“Is it not, sir?” I answered. “Cry pardon! My easy conscience smiled, not I.”
He had to rest content with the ambiguous phrase I gave him, but I could see that he was ill-content with it, for he said: “Since you have made this solemn declaration, in the company of five of your kindred, that you have never yet loved a man or known him carnally, I will kiss you and take you for my wife.” Then he drew me to him by the shoulders and kissed me, and though I did not protest, yet I did not return the kiss: for the words that he had put into my mouth, namely, that I had never loved a man, were untrue in fact.
After this there followed gratulations and compliments, and my Uncle Jones drew the cork of his bottle of Cyprus wine and poured out. We all drank, but Mr. Milton excused himself, saying that he never took wine except a little at meals, for his stomach’s sake; where-at my mother made a face, for she held that a man, however severe in his diet he may be, must not stand upon a crotchet when civility demands that he waive it. The others pledged our healths, and my Aunt Jones pressed a biscuit into Mr. Milton’s hand, which he took and ate absently; but then thrust his finger into his mouth and hooked out the piece he had bitten off and tossed it through the open window to the birds.
My mother opened her eyes very wide at this and reached for a biscuit, saying to my aunt: “These seem to be excellent good biscuits!” Yet when she had put a piece of one into her own mouth she began to choke and, going to the window, spat the biscuit out again. She clapped Mr. Milton on the shoulder and said: “Son John, I am glad to see that you put good sense before civility. Only a fool or a knight-errant would have swallowed that biscuit. I dare swear it had lain so long in my Sister Jones’s cupboard as the wine in my Brother Jones’s cellar. Come, Mary, confess, when was it baked? In the year that you first wore your preposterous old balloon hat, or two years before that?”
My poor Aunt Jones began to weep. “Why, had I known in good time that you were coming to-day, I should have baked fresh. I trusted that they were still good, for I had kept them close in a wooden box. I baked them for you a week before Lent, when you undertook to ride over to see us, but you did not come.”
Then we were all very merry together over my Aunt Jones’s February biscuit, which was our first and only point of common agreement, Mr. Milton nicknaming her Dame Joan of Cappadocia, for it seems that one John of Cappadocia, a Chief Quartermaster, provided ill biscuit for the Roman soldiers when they sailed against the Vandals of Carthage, so that five hundred of them perished of the colic. But the time for our return journey had come and we took our leave of Mr. Milton, who informed us that he was to be found at Oxford at the house of his friend Mr. Rous, the librarian to the University; and that he would ride out to see us in two or three days’ time, if the weather and his studies permitted.
Thus ended John Milton’s courtship of me, and it pleased me that he had not made love to me in the sugary and adulatory manner that I might have expected of a Cambridge poet, for I could not have remained patient; and it argued well for his honesty that he had scanned me with a sharp, unloving and yet covetous eye, as a husbandman scans a fair-seeming plot of ground that is offered to him in quittance of a debt.
CHAPTER TWELVE
My Marriage
As we made ready for supper this same evening, I said, off-hand, in a railing speech to my sister Zara upon her unkindness to me: “By the bye, I shall require you for my bridemaid in about a month’s time. I hope you will not disgrace me in the church, nor put stale crumbs between the sheets when you deck my bridal bed.”
She laughed at me, for as yet she knew nothing of the match, nor of the purpose of my ride to Sandford. “Oh, yes, indeed,” she drolled. “I suppose you are to marry your sweetheart, Mr. Tiresias Milton.”
“Whom else?” I asked tartly. “You have so persistently linked us together with your idle quips these twelve months or more, and made such a coil of the matter that you have brought it at last to sober earnest. The man dotes on me.”
“Pooh,” she said, “I hate your jests; they have no bottom to them. You could never gull even little Betty with such extravagant nonsense as that.”
“Nay, Sister,” said I, “there you are at fault. It is no nonsense, I assure you upon my word.”
“I do not accept your word,” she said; “you have forsworn yourself too often for that. However, I will accept a fair wager upon the point.”
“What will you wager?” I asked her. “Come, you doubting she-Thomas, I am ready for you.”
“My jasper locket against your pearl locket that I have long coveted,” she cried at once. “Now strike hands upon it, if you dare!”
“I am not loath,” said I.
We struck hands and at once she caught me by the arm and lugged me downstairs to my brother James and, said she: “Here’s Marie has accepted a wager of her pearl locket against my jasper; she declaring that she is to marry Mr. Milton this coming month, and I that it is a nonsensical lie.”
For answer James reached over and unhooked the locket from Zara’s chain and then, putting it into my hand, clasped my fingers over it. Zara screamed at him for a base, cowardly confederate and tried to snatch the locket from me again, but I kept it. When she saw that she could do nothing by main force she ran off to make a complaint against me to my father, who laughed in her face; and she concluded that the whole household had entered into conspiracy to rob her. I presented the locket to my sister Ann, who had no trinket of her own at all, not even a ring; but she pitied Zara and after a time restored it to her.
On the third day we saw Mr. Milton again, which was the Sunday that the banns were asked in Church for the first time; and he sat beside my father to hear them. There was a great stir when my name was read out in accouplement with Mr. Milton’s, and a buzz of talking, and everyone craned h
is neck for a closer sight of the gentleman seated in our pew. At sermon-time the Reverend Proctor was kind enough to make amends to my parents and myself, for his injuries to us, by enlarging on the Scripture of the woman taken in adultery: “Where are now they that condemn thee? Neither do I condemn thee. Go and sin no more.”
My mother drew a sharp breath, clamped her teeth and bristled up her crest when she heard him read out the text; but he continued very prudently with his discourse and no scandal ensued. For now that this fine gentleman had dropped out of the sky (as the people whispered) to make an honest woman of me, the Reverend Proctor would do nothing in hindrance of his project. Indeed, he split his text very easily and charitably, his conclusions being that since God can condone neither fornication nor adultery, which are deadly sins, worthy of hell-fire everlasting; and since also our Lord, being God, had more perfect knowledge of the woman’s case than the Jews, her accusers—then, either we must believe that she had lain with a man who was, in truth, her husband, though this was not commonly known; or else that she had not lain with him, but that these Jews mistook culpable but silly frivolity for filthy copulative intercourse. The moral with which he bound up this edifying faggot was that careless women, using familiar words and gestures to men who are neither their husbands nor their kinsfolk; or timorous women who marry in hugger-mugger (for fear of their kinsfolk) and continue to pass for virgins—that all such foolish hussies must expect to be reproached for whores when they are catched.
As we came out of Church Mr. Milton complained to my father, who inquired of him, why did he not seek Church preferment, that though he had from childhood been intended for Holy Orders by his father, he was prevented in this by his conscience from taking them, because of the Bishops and the Liturgy; he also said that he who would take Orders must subscribe “slave” and take an oath withal, which would be, for himself, rank perjury. Yet if this were true (as my brother James said, after Mr. Milton had departed the house), how came it that his conscience had not kecked at the customary oath, when he became a Master of Arts at Cambridge University, and later when he was admitted to a degree at Oxford? For there he willingly and ex animo confessed that the King’s Majesty, under God, was the sole spiritual authority in his Dominions; that the Book of Common Prayer and of Ordering of Bishops contained nothing in it contrary to the Word of God; and that the whole Thirty-Nine Articles (with their ratification) made in the year 1562 were agreeable to the Word of God.
On that afternoon Mr. Milton proposed to my mother that he and I should go out riding together and become better acquainted, but asked that for decency’s sake my brother James should ride with us. My mother pleasantly agreed to this and the horses were fetched. When we were already mounted and come to the gate by the road my brother James inquired whither we were bound. Mr. Milton answered: “To Wheatley, to see the lands of my inheritance, which I sold to your father, but which are mortgaged to me since two years ago.”
I said nothing, though this matter was new to me; my father, I suppose, not having wished to confess to me that he had mortgaged to Mr. Milton an estate already mortgaged to Mr. Ashworth. This mortgage to Mr. Milton was doubtless made in confirmation of his old debt under statute-staple; but doubtless also Mr. Ashworth still had a claim upon the land until the interest due to him by his mortgage should be paid; which interest, reckoned at 8 per centum, must be now risen to near £300, which was the amount of the original loan.
For awhile we three walked or trotted our horses side by side; and it was a cold, dull day with more of November in it than May. At first Mr. Milton discoursed to James upon the Latin and Greek poets, commending this one and condemning that, until James said: “I confess, sir, that though, for my studies, I must needs acquaint myself with these old Greeks and Romans, yet I love better by far the poets of our own tongue and century. I regret often that I am not of an age to have assisted at the gatherings held at the Devil Tavern by Temple Bar in the days when old Ben Jonson held court there. Since, sir, I learn that you dwelt in a house not far from The Devil and that you wrote verses precociously, I expect to hear from you that you were ‘sealed of the tribe of Ben’; and that you were familiarly acquainted with many of those whom I hold in reverence, as, among dramatic poets, John Ford and John Webster and, among satirists—”
Mr. Milton interrupted him: “Nay, Boy James, you have mightily mistaken your brother-to-be, who was never sealed of any man’s tribe, but is as truly his own priest and ancestor as Adam was. I deny not that once or twice I was a visitant at the Apollo Room at The Devil, drawn there by the hope of meeting with some particular person with whom I desired discourse; but there were many several things that I disliked in the management of the society that gathered there. First, the idolatrous adulation paid to that rugged-faced canary-swilling monster Ben Jonson, who, though learned enough and a skilful contriver of plays, was neither omniscient nor civil, and could not bear to come off second-best in any amicable trial of wit; did any young man dare to contradict this Polyphemus in a point of learning, there rose up minions ready to huff and hustle him out of the room as though he were a vulgar church-brawler. Second, the familiar manner of address in use in the Apollo Room, with every Thomas a Tom, and every Robert a Robin; since I have never answered to any name but my baptismal name of John, I would not be a Jack to please them. Third, that by the rules of the society learned women were admitted; I hold learning not to be a requisite in a woman and dangerous when it cocks her up to argue rationally with men upon such questions of art and science as were there debated. Fourth, that of old Ben’s favorite sons, the most were drunkards and many were raddled with the pox (as his now-laureate successor, William Davenant, one of your Oxford she-men, yet perhaps inheriting something of the wit of his godfather, William Shakespeare, whose bastard he is commonly said to be); or else they stank of the claps so that I could not relish then-company. Indeed, ‘The greater part, beasts were in life and women were in heart.’ Fifth, that they bandied across the tables, where they sat, boorish and fescennine jests, mingled with vain interjections of God’s name. Sixth, that old Simon Wadloe, the host, charged for wine above the legitimate price and every night called for a collection of money that palsied old Ben might fuddle himself into insensibility at the common cost. Seventh—let me roundly conclude with a seventh—that on the few occasions when I was present I heard nothing, either spoken or recited or sung, that was worth a wise man’s crossing the street to hear; why, at my last visit all the praise was for the swinish rough rhymes of one John Skelton, a scandalous buffoon, by our Eighth Henry in merriment styled his Vicar of Hell, and for the amatory poems of evil John Donne, sometimes Dean of St. Paul’s, whom, most crack-patedly, Ben cried up as ‘the first poet of the Age in some things, above Edmund Spenser even’—which put me into so great a choler that I went out.”
James tried Mr. Milton with another question, saying: “Yet, sir, since I believe that poets are wont to seek out the company of poets, doubtless you made one of the select company that met often, a few years since at my Lord Falkland’s house of Great Tew, which lies beyond Woodstock, where no man presided magisterially over his fellows, not even my Lord himself—”
“Nay, for how could he have so presumed upon the accident of his birth?” cried Mr. Milton. “A little black-eyed, flaggy-haired, scurvy-visaged poetaster with an ill-attuned voice in which he smatters of many sciences, having mastery of none. He did at one time indeed make a handsome show of throwing open his house to men of eminent parts and faculties who might study there in his well-stocked library; but either he had poor judgment in his choice of whom he called thither, or else they abused his hospitality; for upon my word, scarce one came to Tew whose parts or faculties I could admire. I remember that there was a great session, or convivium of London Wits once held there (an overflow from the Devil Tavern). Old Ben himself was somehow conveyed to the house, drunk as a wheelbarrow, dressed in his old slit coat, like a coachman’s, and all untrussed, with a rabble of Carews and Wallers a
nd Sucklings and Montagues and such trash following after. I myself was not bidden to come; the which I accepted for a compliment rather than resented as a slight; for Ben’s way was ever to engross the whole stage, vapouring only of himself. Lately, I hear, the Lord Falkland has thrown over these pretended poets and dabbles with philosophy instead, putting himself under the discipline of one Chillingworth, a saturnine Oxford man, who preens himself as a theologian (having, forsooth, been godson to that little red-faced crop-head, Archbishop Laud) and who was, for a while, a Papist, and is now, on account of a foolish book he has written, cried up as a second Richard Hooker—as though one Ecclesiastical Polity were not idol enough for the time! This is the same man who turned spy and informer to the Archbishop when my former schoolmaster, Mr. Gill, spoke some sharp words against the King in your College buttery of Christ Church.”
“I am well acquainted with Mr. William Chillingworth,” said James, “who is my godfather, as the Archbishop was his, and shows an extraordinary kindness towards me.”
Yet Mr. Milton paid no heed, and ran on: “Besides this Chillingworth, the Lord Falkland called in Dr. Sheldon of All Souls College, a shrewd man of business, who jests at religion except as it be used as an instrument of State, and pretty Jack Hales who is so tenderhearted that he has avouched that he would renounce the Church to-morrow if he were obliged by it to believe that any other Christian should be damned for holding a contrary view to his own! Like his master the Lord Falkland, he is suspected to be a Socinian, after the detestable school of Racow in Poland, now happily broken up. Out upon the little short-arsed ninny-hammer!”
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