Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/219

. 14, 1863.]

“ you have seen the sea!” said Richard Knightley to his young bride, as they stood looking abroad from a point of the Cornish coast, at sunset, one bright April evening of 1635. “Now you have seen the sea at last!”

“At last!” repeated the young bride who, at seventeen, felt as if she had been longing to see the sea for an immeasurable length of years. Aware that her husband looked to her for an opinion on the spectacle, she observed:

“It is very beautiful; but—”

“But not so grand as you had imagined. That is what I felt when my father took me to the coast, to see the company sail for the Plantations.”

“That was from Plymouth.”

“Yes; but my father came hither on a visit to Sir John Eliot; and we saw much of the coast as we travelled. I grew more afraid of the great ocean as I saw more of it, in winds and on cloudy days; and, being little better than a child then, I suffered under a torture of fear in hearing my father and Sir John Eliot discourse of the lot of those who went to the Plantations, and of the expediency of others following, if the times should grow too hard for honest men. Every night, after hearing these discoursings, I made a venture to pray that my father’s mind might be turned from carrying me away over the wide sea.”

“I thank God that it was!” the young wife whispered. “I was but a young child then; and if you had gone away—”

“We might yet have been married,” said Richard Knightley, smiling. “If Sir Richard Knightley and Sir John Eliot had emigrated, Mr. Hampden would not have been left behind. You and I should have understood each other on the voyage, and have been betrothed and married in some wild forest conventicle in Massachusetts; and we should now be looking forward to troubles from Indian chiefs, instead of our headstrong King. I should have been an office-bearer in the nearest township; and my Margaret would have had to spend her days in the dairy and at the spinning-wheel, instead of tending her flower garden at Fawsley. How would you have liked to entertain squaws, instead of the ladies of Northamptonshire squires?”

Margaret shuddered. She would have been glad to be satisfied that her father would not