CHAPTER XIII.
GOODY IN THE TOILS.
THE worthy Puritan citizens of Boston fêted Governor Phipps in one breath and asked him to make concessions of his powers to his council in the next. They worked themselves weary with enthusiasm over his advent and then they wore him out with exactions, with their epidemic of persecuting witches and with the faults they found with his methods of life and government.
Sir William had not been long in his new harness, when he was heard to wish he again had his broadax in hand and were building a ship of less dimensions than one of state. A little of his old love for his calling and the men it had gathered about him was expressed in a dinner which he gave to ship-carpenters, from whose ranks he was proud to have risen, as he told them and told the world. He had a hasty temper, as a result of having been so long a captain on the sea, accustomed to absolute obedience at the word of command. Yet his squalls of anger were soon blown over, leaving him merry, honest and lovable as before.
Unfortunately Governor Phipps was largely under the influence of Increase Mather and his son, the Reverend Cotton Mather, who were both as mad fanatics on the topic of religion and witchcraft as one could have found in a day’s walk. The influence over Phipps had been gained by the elder Mather in England, where he and Sir William were so long associated in their efforts to right their colony and its charter.
Witchcraft persecutions, having fairly run amuck in England, Increase Mather had enjoyed exceptional opportunities for observing the various phenomena developed by this dreadful disease. He arrived in Boston after Randolph had succeeded far beyond the dreams of his own malice in starting the madness on its terrible career. The field offered an attraction not to be withstood, by either of the Mathers. They were soon fairly gorging themselves on the wonders of the invisible world, testimonies and barbarous punishments.
Lieutenant-Governor Stoughton was an active figure in all this lamentable business. Phipps was dragged into the maelstrom bodily. He pitied the frightened wretches in the prisons and secretly instructed his jailers to be remiss in their duties of chaining, ironing and otherwise inflicting needless punishment on these helpless mortals.
The more effectually and quietly to turn the fearful tide, so appallingly engulfing the minds of the wrought-up populace, Phipps organized a court of Oyer and Terminer, wherein he sat himself, with seven magistrates, to try the wretched old women, dragged screaming to the farcical examinations. At these trials, devilish children swore away the lives of fellow-creatures, abandoned alike by their kind and by their God. In this court of his own making, William Phipps was slowly and surely putting a stop to the mania, for the horrors of some of the executions sent a thrill of fright and dread through the whole of Boston.
Exercising his power of pardoning, and then expending his own money to assist them to flee from the state, William Phipps saved so many defenseless women that he fairly broke the fabric of the awful mania in twain. Early after his arrival, however, he was called away to Plymouth. No sooner was his back turned than the zealots pounced, tooth and nail, upon a new crop of witches and hailed them before the court, on trial for their lives, in haste before the Governor should return to work his leniency upon them.
Thus it came about that Garde, having exhausted the small supply of simples possessed by herself and Goodwife Phipps, went to Goody Dune’s and there witnessed the work of a witch-hunting mob.
It was a warm, summery morning, fit jewel for the year’s diadem of things beautiful. Cries, yells, of pretended fear, and harsh, discordant prayers, screamed into the air, assailed Garde’s ears before she could yet see the little flower-surrounded hut where Goody lived. She felt a sudden misgiving strike through her heart as she hastened onward.
She came upon the scene in a moment. Nearly fifty men and boys, with a sprinkling of mere girls and one or two women, were storming the small stronghold of the old wise woman, who had done so much for those afflicted by ailments and troubles. Indeed in the crowd there were many citizens who had blessed her name and the wisdom by which she had mended their bodily woes. But all now were mad with excitement. Some were purposely frothing at the mouth. A dozen leaped frantically about, declaring they were being pinched and bitten by the demons that Goody was actuating to malice. Young boys slily put nails and pins in their mouths and then spat them forth, to show what evils were then and there being perpetrated upon them.
The tidy little garden was trampled to pitiable wreckage of flowers and vines. The house was being boldly entered by a few lusty knaves, with Psalms Higgler and Isaiah Pinchbecker in their midst. Sounds of wild beating, upon the pans and kettles inside, made half the assembled people turn pale with self-induced fear, which they loved to experience.
Suddenly Goody’s old black cat came bounding forth. The men, boys and women fell down in affright, screaming that the devil was upon them. To add to their horror and superstitious dismay, the jackdaw, Rex, came flying out. He perched for a moment on the ridge and then circled once or twice about the house. He was wounded, for the ruffians in the cottage had beaten him savagely, with sticks and whips. He was bedraggled; for they had thrown water upon him. His feathers were all awry. He was altogether a sorry spectacle.
“B-u-h-h—it’s cold,” called the bird. “Fools, fools, fools!” and flapping his ragged wings so that they clapped against his sides as he flew, he started straight for the woods and was soon out of sight.
If the witch-hunters had been smitten with delightful fear before, they were appalled by this terrible bird. They fell down upon their knees and wept and prayed and made a thousand and one mysterious signs by which evil could be averted. Those who knew in their hearts that the whole thing, up to this, had been humbug and fraud, now quaked with a fear that was genuine. The devil himself had said some horrible, unthinkable rigmarole which would doubtless cast a spell upon them such as they would never be rid of again in their lives. Their children would be born with fishes’ tails, with asses’ legs, with seven heads. Above the wails of anguish, which arose on the air, came the shouts of the captors of Goody Dune. They were now seen dragging her forth with hooks, which were supposed to insulate the operator from the evils which a witch could otherwise pronounce upon her enemies with dire and withering effect. And then it was seen what the shouting of triumph was.
Each of the captors bore a Bible in his hand from which he read, haphazard, at the top of his voice as he walked, thus disinfecting himself, or fumigating himself, as it were, to prevent him from catching the evil which was hovering about the witch, like an aureole of dangerous microbes of the devil’s own breeding.
No sooner did old Goody’s well-known form appear than the fanatics in the garden fled in a panic for the gate, howling and wailing their prayers more loudly than before, but pushing and jostling one another and falling endways, as they tried to run and to look behind them at the same time. They must see everything, whatever the cost.
The men were seen to be armed with pitchforks. There is nothing in the way of a weapon which your devil so abhors as a pitchfork, in the hands of any one save himself.
This noisy, mad procession moved in great disorder out into the highway, where Garde had paused, dismayed and concerned for Goody. She saw the wise old woman walking calmly along with her captors, for Goody, unlike the witches of lesser wisdom, knew too much to cry out wild protests against this infamy, and so to convict herself of uttering curses, spells and blasphemies on the public roads. She looked about her, at men and women she had relieved of pains, and at children whose early ailments she had exorcised with her simples.
They were all now possessed of the devil, in good faith, for the mad capers they cut to show that Goody was all potent to produce the most fiendish and heinous results upon them could only have been invented out of the sheer deviltry which is one of the component parts of the human animal.
Helpless, terrified by these maniacs about her, Garde could only lean against the fence and hold her place while the running, neck-twisting people went by.
“Oh, poor dear Goody,” she murmured to herself, involuntarily.
The old wise woman looked across the bank of bobbing heads about her and half smiled, in a weary, hopeless manner that sent a pang straight to Garde’s heart. She knew that Goody was saying, “Never mind me, dear,” and this only made it all the more unendurable.
Goody had been hustled by in a moment. The dust arose from the scurrying feet. The hobble-de-hoy pageant went rapidly toward the town, its numbers being momentarily augumented, as fresh persons heard the disturbance rising and coming near, on the summer air, and joined the throng.
Unwilling to let her friend be conveyed thus away without her even knowing where she was now to be taken, Garde followed the last of the stragglers, and so saw the crowd become a mob, in the more populous streets of the town, and finally beheld Goody hurried to one of the prisons and shut out of sight behind the doors.
The jail was the one into which, six years before, Adam Rust had been so infamously thrown.