CHAPTER V.
HOW MISTRESS ALICE BRADFORD INTRODUCED HER SISTER PRISCILLA CARPENTER TO PLYMOUTH SOCIETY.
“Goodman, I’ve heavy news for you; so set your mind to bear it as best you may.”
“Nay, goodwife, your winsome face is no herald of bad news, and certes, I’ll not cross the bridge until it comes in sight.”
“Well, then, since words won’t daunt you, here’s a fact, sir! We are to have a merry-making, and gather all the young folk of the village, and Master Bradford will have to lay off the governor’s mantle of thought and worry, that he may be jocund with the rest.”
“Nay, then, Alice, ’tis indeed heavy news!” And the governor pulled a long face, and looked mock-miserable with all his might. “And is it a dispensation not to be gainsaid? Is there good cause that we should submit ourselves to an affliction that might, as it would seem, be spared?”
“Well, dear, you know that my sister Pris has come”—
“Do you tell me so! Now there is news in very deed! And how did Mistress Priscilla Carpenter reach these parts?”
“Now, Will! if you torment me so, I’ll e’en call in Priscilla Alden to take my part. She’ll give you quip for crank, I’ll warrant me.”
“Nay, nay, wife, I’ll be meek and good as your cosset lamb, so you’ll keep me under your own hand. Come now, let us meet this enemy face to face. What is it all?”
Alice, who, tender soul that she was, loved not even playful and mock contention, sighed a little, and folding her hands in her lap gently said,—
“It is all just as thou pleasest, Will, but my thought was to call together all the young people and make a little feast to bring those acquainted with Pris, who, poor maid, has found it a trifle dull and straitened here, after leaving her merry young friends in England.”
“Ever thinking of giving pleasure to others even at cost of much toil to thyself, sweetheart!” And the governor, placing a hand under his wife’s round chin, raised her face and kissed it tenderly again and again, until the soft pink flushed to the roots of the fair hair.
“Do as thou wilt, darling, in this and everything, and call upon me for what thy men and maids cannot accomplish.”
“Nay, I’ve help enough. Christian Penn is equal to two women, and sister Pris herself is very notable. Then Priscilla Alden will kindly put her hand to some of the dainty dishes, and she is a wonder at cooking, as you know.”
“Yes, she proved it in—early days,” interrupted Bradford, the smile fading off his face. “Had it not been for her skill in putting a savory touch to the coarsest food, I believe some of our sick folk would have died,—I am sure Dame Brewster would.”
“Oh, you poor souls! How you suffered, and I there in England eating and drinking of the best, and—oh, Will, you should have married good dear Priscilla to reward her care of what I held so carelessly.”
“Wonderful logic, madam! I should, to reward Mistress Molines for her care, have married her, when she loved another man, and I another woman, which latter was to thus be punished for carelessness in a matter she knew naught about!”
And with a tender little laugh, the governor pressed another kiss upon his wife’s smooth cheek, before he went out to his fields, while she flew at once to her kitchen and set the domestic engine throbbing at double-quick time. Then she stepped up the hill to John Alden’s house, and found Priscilla, her morning work already done, washing and dressing her little Betty, while John and Jo watched the operation with unflagging interest.
“Come and help you, Alice? I shall be gay and glad to do it, dear, just as soon as Betty is in her cradle, and I have told Mary-à-Becket what to do about the noon-meat. John, you and Jo run up the hill to the captain’s, and ask Mistress Standish if Alick and Myles may come down and play with you in front of the governor’s house so I may keep an eye on you.”
“Two fine boys, those of Barbara’s,” said the governor’s wife, and then affectionately, “yet no finer than your sturdy little knaves.”
“Oh, ours are well enough for little yeomen, but the captain says his Alick is heir to a great estate, and is a gentleman born!” And the two young women laughed good-naturedly, while Priscilla laid her baby in the cradle, and Alice turned toward the door saying, “Well, I must be at home to mind the maids.”
“And I’ll be there anon. I trust you’ve good store of milk and cream. We did well enow without it for four years, but now we’ve had it for a while, one might as well be dead as lack it.”
“I’ve plenty, and butter beside, both Dutch and fresh,” replied Alice from outside the door, and in another ten minutes the wide kitchen recently added to William Bradford’s house on the corner of Leyden Street and the King’s Highway, now called Main Street, hummed again with the merry sounds of youthful voices, of the whisking of eggs, and grinding of spices, and stirring of golden compounds in wooden bowls, and chopping suet, and stoning raisins, and slicing citron, and the clatter of pewter dishes, which, by the way, with wooden ware were nearly all the “pottery” the Pilgrims possessed, hypothetical teapots and china cups to the contrary; for, since we all know that tea and coffee were never heard of in England until about the year 1666, and the former herb was sold for many years after at from ten to fifteen dollars per pound (Pepys in 1671 mentions it as a strange and barbaric beverage just introduced), it is improbable that either tea, teapot, or teacups ever reached America until after Mary Allerton, the last survivor of the Mayflower, rested upon Burying Hill.
All that day and part of the next the battle raged in the Bradford kitchen, for delicate appetites were in those times rather a defect than a grace, and hospitality largely consisted in first providing great quantities and many varieties of food, and then over-pressing the guests to partake of it. An “afternoon tea” with diaphanous bread and butter, wafer cakes, and Cambridge salts, as the only solid refreshment, would have seemed to Alice Bradford and her guests either a comic pretense or a niggardly insult, and very different was the feast to which as many as could sat down at a very early hour of the evening of the second day.
The company was large, for in the good Old Colony fashion it included both married and single persons, and would, if possible, have made no distinctions of age or position, but this catholicity had in the growth of the colony become impossible, and Mistress Bradford’s invitations were, with much searching of spirit and desire to avoid offense, confined principally to young persons, married and unmarried, likely to become associates of her sister Priscilla, a fair-haired, sweet-lipped, and daintily colored lass, reproducing Dame Alice’s own early charms.
“The Brewster girls must come, although I cannot yet be reconciled to Fear’s having married Isaac Allerton, and calling herself mother to Bart, and Mary and Remember—great grown girls!” exclaimed the hostess in consultation with her husband, and he pleasantly replied,—
“Oh, well, dame, we must not hope to guide all the world by our own wisdom; and certes, if Fear’s marriage is a little incongruous, her sister Patience is well and fitly mated with Thomas Prence. It does one good to see such a comely and contented pair of wedded sweethearts.”
“True enough, Will, and your thought is a rebuke to mine.”
“Nay, wife, ’tis you that teach me to be charitable.”
And the two, come together to reap in the glorious St. Martin’s summer of their days the harvest sown amid the chill tears of spring, looked in each other’s eyes with a smile of deep content. The woman was the first to set self aside, and cried,—
“Come, come, Sir Governor! To business! Mistress Allerton, and her daughters, Mary and Remember, Bartholomew, and the Prences, Constance Hopkins with Nicholas Snow, whom she will marry, the Aldens, the captain and his wife”—
“He is hardly to be ranked with the young folk, is he?”
“No, dear, no more than Master Allerton, or, for that matter, the governor and his old wife; but there, there, no more waste of time, sir! Who else is to come, and who to be left at home?”
“Nay, wife, I’m out of my depth already and will e’en get back to firm land, which means I leave all to your discretion. Call Barbara and Priscilla Alden to council, and let me know in time to put on my new green doublet and hose, for I suppose I am to don them.”
“Indeed you are, and your ruffles and your silk stockings that I brought over. I will not let you live altogether in hodden gray, since even the Elder goes soberly fine on holidays.”
“Well, well, I leave it all to you, and must betake myself to the woods. Good-by for a little.”
“Good-by, dear.”
And as the governor with an axe on his shoulder strode away down Market Street and across the brook to Watson’s Hill, Dame Alice, a kerchief over her head, once more ran up the hill to Priscilla Alden’s.
As the great gun upon the hill boomed out the sunset hour, and Captain Standish himself carefully covered it from the dews of night, Alice Bradford stood in the great lower room of her house and looked about her. All was done that could be done to put the place in festal array, and although the fair dame sighed a little at the remembrance of her stately home in Duke’s Place, London, with its tapestries and carvings and carpets and pictures, she bravely put aside the regret, and affectionately smoothed and patted the fine damask “cubboard cloth” covering the lower shelf of the sideboard, or, as she called it, the “buffet,” at one side of the room, and placed and replaced the precious properties set out thereon:—
A silver wine cup, a porringer that had been her mother’s, nine silver teaspoons, and, crown of all, four genuine Venetian wine-glasses, tall and twisted of stem, gold-threaded and translucent of bowl, fragile and dainty of shape, and yet, like their as dainty owner, brave to make the pilgrimage from the home of luxury and art to the wilderness, where a shelter from the weather and a scant supply of the coarsest food was all to be hoped for.
But Dame Bradford, fingering her Venice glasses, and softly smiling at the touch, murmured to herself and to them, “’Tis our exceeding gain.”
“What, Elsie, not dressed!” cried Priscilla Carpenter’s blithe voice, as that young lady, running down the stairs leading to her little loft chamber, presented herself to her sister’s inspection with a smile of conscious deserving.
“My word, Pris, but you are fine!” exclaimed Dame Alice, examining with an air of unwilling admiration the young girl’s gay apparel and ornaments. It was indeed a pretty dress, consisting of a petticoat of cramoisie satin, quilted in an elaborate pattern of flowers, leaves, and birds; an open skirt of brocade turned back from the front, and caught high upon the hips with great bunches of cramoisie ribbons; a “waistcoat” of the satin, and a little open jacket of the brocade. Around the soft white throat of the wearer was loosely knotted a satin cravat of the same dull red tint with the skirt, edged with a deep lace, upon which Alice Bradford at once laid a practiced finger.
“Pris, that jabot is of Venise point! Where did you get it?”
“Ah! That was a present from”—
“Well, from whom?”
“Nay, never look so cross on’t, my lady sister! Might not I have a sweetheart as well as you?”
“Priscilla, I’m glad you’re here rather than with those gay friends of yours in London. I suppose Lady Judith Carr or her daughters gave you these clothes, did they not?”
“Well, I earned them hard enough putting up with all my lady’s humors and the girls’ jealous fancies,” pouted Pris. “I was glad enough when you and brother Will wrote and offered me a home,—not but what Lady Judith was good to me and called me her daughter; but, Elsie, ’twas not they who gave me the laced cravat, ’twas—’twas”—
“Well, out with it, little sister! Who was it, if not our mother’s old friend?”
“Why, Elsie, ’twas a noble gentleman that I met with them down at Bath, and—sister—he is coming over here to marry me right soon.”
“Nay, then, but that’s news indeed! And what may be his name, pet?”
“Sir Christopher Gardiner, and he’s a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre.”
And Pris, fondling the lace of her cravat, smiled proudly into her sister’s astonished face; but before either could speak, Barbara Standish and Priscilla Alden appeared at the open door, the latter exclaiming in her blithe voice,—
“What, Alice, still in your workaday kirtle! Barbara and I came thus betimes to see if aught remained that we might do before the folk gather.”
“Thank you, both; I—I—nay, then, I’m a little put about, dear friends; I hardly know,—well, well! Priscilla Carpenter, come you into my bedroom and help me do on my clothes, and if you two will look about and see what is ready and what is lacking, I shall be more than grateful. Come, Pris!”
“Something has chanced more than we know about!” suggested Priscilla Alden, as the bedroom door closed behind the sisters.
“Likely. But ’tis their affair and not ours,” replied Barbara quietly. “Now let us see. Would you set open the case holding the twelve ivory-handled knives?”
“Yes, they’re a rarity, and some of the folk may not have seen them. Alice says that in London they put a knife to every man’s trencher now, and nobody uses his own sheath-knife as has been the wont.”
“You tell me so! Well, one knife’s enough for Myles and me, yes, and the boys to boot. But then I cut the meat in morsels, and spread the bread with butter, or ever it goes on the table.”
“Of course; so we all do, I suppose. Well there, all is ready now, and here come the folk; there’s Patty Brewster, or Patience Prence as she must now be called, and along with her Fear Allerton and Remember and Mary,—her daughters indeed! Marry come up! I might have had Isaac Allerton for myself, but”—
“And there is Constance Hopkins, and Nicholas Snow,” interrupted Barbara, who was a deadly foe to gossip, “and John and Elizabeth Howland; then there’s Stephen Dean with Betsey Ring, and Edward Bangs and Lyddy Hicks, and Mary Warren and Robert Bartlett, three pair of sweethearts together, and here they all are at the door.”
But as the more lively Priscilla ran to open it, the governor’s hearty voice was heard without, crying,—
“Welcome! Welcome, friends! I was called out for a moment, but have come home just in the nick of time and brought the captain with me.”
“Now I do hope Myles has put on his ruff, and his other doublet that I laid out,” murmured Barbara in Priscilla’s ear. “When the governor and he get together, the world’s well lost for both of them.”
“Nay, he’s all right, and a right proper man, as he always was,” returned Priscilla, with a quick glance at the square figure and commanding head of the Captain of Plymouth, as he entered the room and smiled in courtly fashion at Dame Bradford’s greeting.
“And here’s your John, a head and shoulders above all the rest,” added Barbara good-naturedly, as Alden, the Saxon giant, strode into the room and looked fondly across it at his wife.
Another half hour and all were gathered about the three long tables improvised from boards and barrels, but all covered with the fine napery brought from Holland by Alice Bradford, who had the true housewife’s love of elegant damask, and during Edward Southworth’s life was able to indulge it, laying up such store of table damask, of fine Holland “pillowbers”[1] and “cubboard cloths,” towels of Holland, of dowlas, and of lockorum, and sheets of various qualities from “fine Holland” to tow (the latter probably spun and woven at home), that the inventory of her personal estate is as good reading to her descendants as a cookery book to a hungry man.
Plenty of trenchers both of pewter and wood lined the table, and by each lay a napkin and a spoon, but neither knives nor forks, the latter implement not having yet been invented, except in the shape of a powerful trident to lift the boiled beef from the kettle, while table knives, as Priscilla Alden had intimated, were still regarded as curious implements of extreme luxury. A knife of a different order, sometimes a clasp-knife, sometimes a sheath-knife, or even a dagger, was generally carried by each man, and used upon certain pièces de resistance, such as boar’s head, a roasted peacock, a shape of brawn, a powdered and cloved and browned ham, or such other triumphs of the culinary art as must be served whole.
Such dishes were carried around the table, and every guest, taking hold of the morsel he coveted with his napkin, sliced it off with his own knife, displaying the elegance of his table manners by the skill with which he did it. But as saffron was a favorite condiment of the day, and pearline was not yet invented, one sighs in contemplating the condition of these napkins, and ceases to wonder at the store of them laid up by thrifty housekeepers.
Ordinarily, however, the meat was divided into morsels before appearing on the table, and thus was easily managed with the spoon,—or with the fingers.
Between each two plates stood a pewter or wooden basin of clam chowder, prepared by Priscilla Alden, who was held in Plymouth to possess a magic touch for this and several other dishes.
From these each guest transferred a portion to his own plate, except when two supped merrily from the same bowl in token of friendly intimacy. This first course finished and the bowls removed, all eyes turned upon the governor, who rose in his place at the head of the principal table, where were gathered the more important guests, and, looking affectionately up and down the board, said,—
“Friends, it hardly needs that I should say that you are welcome, for I see none that are ever less than welcome beneath this roof; but I well may thank you for the cheer your friendly faces bring to my heart to-night, and I well may pray you, of your goodness, to bestow upon my young sister here the same hearty kindness you have ever shown to me and mine.” A murmur of eager assent went round the board, and the governor smiled cordially, as he grasped in both hands the great two-handled loving-cup standing before him,—a grand cup, a noble cup, of the measure of two quarts, of purest silver, beautifully fashioned, and richly carved, as tradition said, by the hand of Benvenuto Cellini himself; so precious a property that Katharine White, daughter of an English bishop, was proud to bring it as almost her sole dowry to John Carver, her husband. With him it came to the New World, and was used at the Feast of Treaty between the colonists and Massasoit, chief of the native owners of the soil. Katharine Carver, dying broken hearted six weeks after her husband, bequeathed the cup to William Bradford, his successor in the arduous post of Governor of the Colony, and from him it passed down into that Hades of lost and all but forgotten treasures, which may, for aught we know, become the recreation-ground for the spirits of antiquarians.
Filled to the brim with generous Canary, a pure and fine wine in those days, it crowned the table, and William Bradford, steadily raising it to his lips, smiled gravely upon his guests, adding to his little speech of welcome,—
“I pledge you my hearty good-will, friends!” then drank sincerely yet modestly, and giving one handle to Myles Standish, who sat at his left hand, he retained his hold at the other side while the captain drank, and in his turn gave one handle to Mistress Winslow, who came next, and so, all standing to honor the pledge of love and good-will, the cup passed round the board and came to Elder Brewster, at the governor’s right hand; but he, having drank, looked around with his paternal smile and said,—
“There is yet enough in the loving-cup, friends, for each one to wet his lips, if nothing more, and I propose that we do so with our hearty welcome and best wishes to Mistress Priscilla Carpenter.”
Once more the cup went gayly round, and reached the Elder so dry that he smiled, as he placed it to his lips, with a bow toward Pris savoring more of his early days in the court of Queen Bess than of New England’s solitudes.
“And now to work, my friends, to work!” cried the governor. “I for one am famished, sith my dame was so busy at noontide with that wonderful structure yonder that she gave me naught but bread and cheese.”
Everybody laughed, and Alice Bradford colored like a red, red rose, yet bravely answered,—
“The governor will have his jest, but I hope my raised pie will suffer roundly for its interference with his dinner.”
“Faith, dame, but we’ll all help to punish it,” exclaimed Stephen Hopkins, gazing fondly at the elaborate mass of pastry representing, not inartistically, a castle with battlements and towers, and a floating banner of silk bearing an heraldic device. “Standish! we call upon you to lead us to the assault!”
“Nay, if Captain Standish is summoned to the field, my fortress surrenders without even a parley,” said Alice Bradford, as she gracefully drew the little banner from its place, and, laying it aside, removed a tower, a bastion, and a section of the battlement from the doomed fortress, and, loading a plate with the spoils of its treasury, planted the banner upon the top, and sent it to the captain, who received it with a bow and a smile, but never a word.
“Speak up, man!” cried Hopkins boisterously. “Make a gallant speech in return for the courtesy of so fair a castellaine.”
“Mistress Bradford needs no speech to assure her of my devoir,” replied the captain simply, and the governor added,—
“Our captain speaks more by deeds than words, and Gideon is his most eloquent interpreter. You have not brought him to-day, Captain.”
“No; Gideon sulks in these days of peace, and seldom stirs abroad.”
“Long may he be idle!” exclaimed the Elder, and a gentle murmur around the board told that the women at least echoed the prayer.
But Hopkins, seated next to Mistress Bradford, and watching her distribution of the pie, cared naught for war or peace until he secured a trencher of its contents, and presently cried,—
“Now, by my faith, I did not know such a pye as this could be concocted out of Yorkshire! ’Tis perfect in all its parts: fowl, and game, and pork, and forcemeat, and yolks of eggs, and curious art of spicery, and melting bits of pastry within, and stout-built walls without; in fact, there is naught lacking to such a pye as my mother used to make before I had the wit to know such pyes sing not on every bush.”
“You’re Yorkshire, then, Master Hopkins?” asked John Howland, who with his young wife, once Elizabeth Tilley, sat opposite.
“Yes, I’m Yorkshire, root and branch, and you’re Essex, and the captain and the governor Lancashire, but all shaken up in a bag now, and turned into New Englanders, and since the Yorkshire pye has come over along with us I’m content for one.”
A general laugh indorsed this patriotic speech, but Myles Standish, toying with the silken banner of the now sacked and ruined fortress, said in Bradford’s ear,—
“All very well for a man who has naught to lose in the old country. But for my part I mean to place at least my oldest son in the seat of his fathers.”
The governor smiled, and then sighed. “Nor can I quite forget the lands of Austerfield held by Bradfords and Hansons for more than one century, and the path beside the Idle, where Brewster and I walked and talked in the days of my first awakening to the real things of life”—
“Real things of life, say you, Governor?” broke in Hopkins’s strident voice; “well, if there is aught more real in its merit than this roasted suckling, I wish that I might meet with it.”
And seizing with his napkin the hind leg of the little roasted pig presented to him by Christian Penn, the old campaigner deftly sliced it off with his sheath-knife and devoured it in the most inartificial manner possible.
It was probably about this epoch that our popular saying, “Fingers were made before forks,” took shape and force.
To the chowder, and the “pye,” and the roasted suckling succeeded a mighty dish of succotash, that compound of dried beans, hulled corn, salted beef, pork, and chicken which may be called the charter-dish of Plymouth; then came wild fowl dressed in various ways, a great bowl of “sallet,” of Priscilla Alden’s composition, and at last various sweet dishes, still served at the end of a meal, although soon after it was the mode to take them first.
“Oh, dear, when will the dignities stop eating and drinking and making compliments to each other?” murmured Priscilla Carpenter to Mary Warren at the side table where the girls and lads were grouped together, enjoying themselves as much as their elders, albeit in less ceremonious fashion.
“There! Your sister has laid down her napkin, and is gazing steadfastly at the governor, with ‘Get up and say Grace’ in her eye,” replied Mary, nudging Jane Cooke to enforce silence; whereat that merry maid burst into a giggle, joined by Sarah and Elizabeth Warren, and Mary Allerton, and Betsey Ring, while Edward Bangs, and Robert Bartlett, and Sam Jenney, and Philip De la Noye, and Thomas Clarke, and John Cooke chuckled in sympathy, yet knew not what at.
A warning yet very gentle glance from Dame Bradford’s eyes stifled the noise, and nearly did as much for its authors, who barely managed to preserve sobriety, while the governor returned thanks to the Giver of all good; so soon, however, as the elder party moved away, the painfully suppressed giggle burst into a storm of merriment, which as it subsided was renewed in fullest vigor by Sarah Warren’s bewildered inquiry,—
“What are we all laughing at?”
“Never mind, we’ll laugh first, and find the wherefore at our leisure,” suggested Jane Cooke, and so the dear old foolish fun that seems to spring up in spontaneous growth where young folk are gathered together, and is sometimes scorned and sometimes coveted by their elders, went on, and, after the tables were cleared, took form in all sorts of old English games, not very intellectual, not even very refined, but as satisfactory to those who played as Buried Cities, and Twenty Questions, and Intellectual Salad, and capping Browning quotations are to the children of culture and æsthetics.
The elders, meanwhile, retiring to the smaller room at the other side of the front door, seated themselves to certain sober games of draughts, of backgammon, of loo, and beggar-my-neighbor, or picquet, while Elder Brewster challenged the governor to a game of chess which was not finished when, at ten o’clock, the company broke up, and with many a blithe good-night, and assurance of the pleasure they had enjoyed, betook themselves to their own homes.
Thus, then, was Priscilla Carpenter introduced into Plymouth society.