Alpha Aaron

I would wish to declare, at the beginning of this story, that I shall never regard that cluster of islets which we call Bermuda as the Fortunate Islands of the ancients.  Do not let professional geographers take me up, and say that no one has so accounted them, and that the ancients have never been supposed to have gotten themselves so far westwards.  What I mean to assert is this—that, had any ancient been carried thither by enterprise or stress of weather, he would not have given those islands so good a name.

  That the Neapolitan sailors of King Alonzo should have been wrecked here, I consider to be more likely.  The vexed Bermoothes is a good name for them.  There is no getting in or out of them without the greatest difficulty, and a patient, slow navigation, which is very heart-rending.  That Caliban should have lived here I can imagine; that Ariel would have been sick of the place is certain; and that Governor Prospero should have been willing to abandon his governorship, I conceive to have been only natural.  When one regards the present state of the place, one is tempted to doubt whether any of the governors have been conjurors since his days.

Bermuda, as all the world knows, is a British colony at which we maintain a convict establishment.  Most of our outlying convict establishments have been sent back upon our hands from our colonies, but here one is still maintained.  There is also in the islands a strong military fortress, though not a fortress looking magnificent to the eyes of civilians, as do Malta and Gibraltar.  There are also here some six thousand white people and some six thousand black people, eating, drinking, sleeping, and dying.

The convict establishment is the most notable feature of Bermuda to a stranger, but it does not seem to attract much attention from the regular inhabitants of the place.  There is no intercourse between the prisoners and the Bermudians.  The convicts are rarely seen by them, and the convict islands are rarely visited.  As to the prisoners themselves, of course it is not open to them—or should not be open to them—to have intercourse with any but the prison authorities.

There have, however, been instances in which convicts have escaped from their confinement, and made their way out among the islands.  Poor wretches!  As a rule, there is but little chance for any that can so escape.  The whole length of the cluster is but twenty miles, and the breadth is under four.  The prisoners are, of course, white men, and the lower orders of Bermuda, among whom alone could a runagate have any chance of hiding himself, are all negroes; so that such a one would be known at once.  Their clothes are all marked.  Their only chance of a permanent escape would be in the hold of an American ship; but what captain of an American or other ship would willingly encumber himself with an escaped convict?  But, nevertheless, men have escaped; and in one instance, I believe, a convict got away, so that of him no farther tidings were ever heard.

For the truth of the following tale I will not by any means vouch.  If one were to inquire on the spot one might probably find that the ladies all believe it, and the old men; that all the young men know exactly how much of it is false and how much true; and that the steady, middle-aged, well-to-do islanders are quite convinced that it is romance from beginning to end.  My readers may range themselves with the ladies, the young men, or the steady, well-to-do, middle-aged islanders, as they please.

Some years ago, soon after the prison was first established on its present footing, three men did escape from it, and among them a certain notorious prisoner named Aaron Trow.  Trow’s antecedents in England had not been so villanously bad as those of many of his fellow-convicts, though the one offence for which he was punished had been of a deep dye: he had shed man’s blood.  At a period of great distress in a manufacturing town he had led men on to riot, and with his own hand had slain the first constable who had endeavoured to do his duty against him.  There had been courage in the doing of the deed, and probably no malice; but the deed, let its moral blackness have been what it might, had sent him to Bermuda, with a sentence against him of penal servitude for life.  Had he been then amenable to prison discipline,—even then, with such a sentence against him as that,—he might have won his way back, after the lapse of years, to the children, and perhaps, to the wife, that he had left behind him; but he was amenable to no rules—to no discipline.  His heart was sore to death with an idea of injury, and he lashed himself against the bars of his cage with a feeling that it would be well if he could so lash himself till he might perish in his fury.

And then a day came in which an attempt was made by a large body of convicts, under his leadership, to get the better of the officers of the prison.  It is hardly necessary to say that the attempt failed.  Such attempts always fail.  It failed on this occasion signally, and Trow, with two other men, were condemned to be scourged terribly, and then kept in solitary confinement for some lengthened term of months.  Before, however, the day of scourging came, Trow and his two associates had escaped.

I have not the space to tell how this was effected, nor the power to describe the manner.  They did escape from the establishment into the islands, and though two of them were taken after a single day’s run at liberty, Aaron Trow had not been yet retaken even when a week was over.  When a month was over he had not been retaken, and the officers of the prison began to say that he had got away from them in a vessel to the States.  It was impossible, they said, that he should have remained in the islands and not been discovered.  It was not impossible that he might have destroyed himself, leaving his body where it had not yet been found.  But he could not have lived on in Bermuda during that month’s search.  So, at least, said the officers of the prison.  There was, however, a report through the islands that he had been seen from time to time; that he had gotten bread from the negroes at night, threatening them with death if they told of his whereabouts; and that all the clothes of the mate of a vessel had been stolen while the man was bathing, including a suit of dark blue cloth, in which suit of clothes, or in one of such a nature, a stranger had been seen skulking about the rocks near St. George.  All this the governor of the prison affected to disbelieve, but the opinion was becoming very rife in the islands that Aaron Trow was still there.

A vigilant search, however, is a task of great labour, and cannot be kept up for ever.  By degrees it was relaxed.  The warders and gaolers ceased to patrol the island roads by night, and it was agreed that Aaron Trow was gone, or that he would be starved to death, or that he would in time be driven to leave such traces of his whereabouts as must lead to his discovery; and this at last did turn out to be the fact.

There is a sort of prettiness about these islands which, though it never rises to the loveliness of romantic scenery, is nevertheless attractive in its way.  The land breaks itself into little knolls, and the sea runs up, hither and thither, in a thousand creeks and inlets; and then, too, when the oleanders are in bloom, they give a wonderfully bright colour to the landscape.  Oleanders seem to be the roses of Bermuda, and are cultivated round all the villages of the better class through the islands.  There are two towns, St. George and Hamilton, and one main high-road, which connects them; but even this high-road is broken by a ferry, over which every vehicle going from St. George to Hamilton must be conveyed.  Most of the locomotion in these parts is done by boats, and the residents look to the sea, with its narrow creeks, as their best highway from their farms to their best market.  In those days—and those days were not very long since—the building of small ships was their chief trade, and they valued their land mostly for the small scrubby cedar-trees with which this trade was carried on.

As one goes from St. George to Hamilton the road runs between two seas; that to the right is the ocean; that on the left is an inland creek, which runs up through a large portion of the islands, so that the land on the other side of it is near to the traveller.  For a considerable portion of the way there are no houses lying near the road, and, there is one residence, some way from the road, so secluded that no other house lies within a mile of it by land.  By water it might probably be reached within half a mile.  This place was called Crump Island, and here lived, and had lived for many years, an old gentleman, a native of Bermuda, whose business it had been to buy up cedar wood and sell it to the ship-builders at Hamilton.  In our story we shall not have very much to do with old Mr. Bergen, but it will be necessary to say a word or two about his house.

It stood upon what would have been an island in the creek, had not a narrow causeway, barely broad enough for a road, joined it to that larger island on which stands the town of St. George.  As the main road approaches the ferry it runs through some rough, hilly, open ground, which on the right side towards the ocean has never been cultivated.  The distance from the ocean here may, perhaps, be a quarter of a mile, and the ground is for the most part covered with low furze.  On the left of the road the land is cultivated in patches, and here, some half mile or more from the ferry, a path turns away to Crump Island.  The house cannot be seen from the road, and, indeed, can hardly be seen at all, except from the sea.  It lies, perhaps, three furlongs from the high road, and the path to it is but little used, as the passage to and from it is chiefly made by water.

Here, at the time of our story, lived Mr. Bergen, and here lived Mr. Bergen’s daughter.  Miss Bergen was well known at St. George’s as a steady, good girl, who spent her time in looking after her father’s household matters, in managing his two black maid-servants and the black gardener, and who did her duty in that sphere of life to which she had been called.  She was a comely, well-shaped young woman, with a sweet countenance, rather large in size, and very quiet in demeanour.  In her earlier years, when young girls usually first bud forth into womanly beauty, the neighbours had not thought much of Anastasia Bergen, nor had the young men of St. George been wont to stay their boats under the window of Crump Cottage in order that they might listen to her voice or feel the light of her eye; but slowly, as years went by, Anastasia Bergen became a woman that a man might well love; and a man learned to love her who was well worthy of a woman’s heart.  This was Caleb Morton, the Presbyterian minister of St. George; and Caleb Morton had been engaged to marry Miss Bergen for the last two years past, at the period of Aaron Trow’s escape from prison.

Caleb Morton was not a native of Bermuda, but had been sent thither by the synod of his church from Nova Scotia.  He was a tall, handsome man, at this time of some thirty years of age, of a presence which might almost have been called commanding.  He was very strong, but of a temperament which did not often give him opportunity to put forth his strength; and his life had been such that neither he nor others knew of what nature might be his courage.  The greater part of his life was spent in preaching to some few of the white people around him, and in teaching as many of the blacks as he could get to hear him.  His days were very quiet, and had been altogether without excitement until he had met with Anastasia Bergen.  It will suffice for us to say that he did meet her, and that now, for two years past, they had been engaged as man and wife.

Old Mr. Bergen, when he heard of the engagement, was not well pleased at the information.  In the first place, his daughter was very necessary to him, and the idea of her marrying and going away had hardly as yet occurred to him; and then he was by no means inclined to part with any of his money.  It must not be presumed that he had amassed a fortune by his trade in cedar wood.  Few tradesmen in Bermuda do, as I imagine, amass fortunes.  Of some few hundred pounds he was possessed, and these, in the course of nature, would go to his daughter when he died; but he had no inclination to hand any portion of them over to his daughter before they did go to her in the course of nature.  Now, the income which Caleb Morton earned as a Presbyterian clergyman was not large, and, therefore, no day had been fixed as yet for his marriage with Anastasia.

But, though the old man had been from the first averse to the match, his hostility had not been active.  He had not forbidden Mr. Morton his house, or affected to be in any degree angry because his daughter had a lover.  He had merely grumbled forth an intimation that those who marry in haste repent at leisure,—that love kept nobody warm if the pot did not boil; and that, as for him, it was as much as he could do to keep his own pot boiling at Crump Cottage.  In answer to this Anastasia said nothing.  She asked him for no money, but still kept his accounts, managed his household, and looked patiently forward for better days.

Old Mr. Bergen himself spent much of his time at Hamilton, where he had a woodyard with a couple of rooms attached to it.  It was his custom to remain here three nights of the week, during which Anastasia was left alone at the cottage; and it happened by no means seldom that she was altogether alone, for the negro whom they called the gardener would go to her father’s place at Hamilton, and the two black girls would crawl away up to the road, tired with the monotony of the sea at the cottage.  Caleb had more than once told her that she was too much alone, but she had laughed at him, saying that solitude in Bermuda was not dangerous.  Nor, indeed, was it; for the people are quiet and well-mannered, lacking much energy, but being, in the same degree, free from any propensity to violence.

“So you are going,” she said to her lover, one evening, as he rose from the chair on which he had been swinging himself at the door of the cottage which looks down over the creek of the sea.  He had sat there for an hour talking to her as she worked, or watching her as she moved about the place.  It was a beautiful evening, and the sun had been falling to rest with almost tropical glory before his feet.  The bright oleanders were red with their blossoms all around him, and he had thoroughly enjoyed his hour of easy rest.  “So you are going,” she said to him, not putting her work out of her hand as he rose to depart.

“Yes; and it is time for me to go.  I have still work to do before I can get to bed.  Ah, well; I suppose the day will come at last when I need not leave you as soon as my hour of rest is over.”

“Come; of course it will come.  That is, if your reverence should choose to wait for it another ten years or so.”

“I believe you would not mind waiting twenty years.”

“Not if a certain friend of mine would come down and see me of evenings when I’m alone after the day.  It seems to me that I shouldn’t mind waiting as long as I had that to look for.”

“You are right not to be impatient,” he said to her, after a pause, as he held her hand before he went.  “Quite right.  I only wish I could school myself to be as easy about it.”