The apple-bee at Jonathan Brewster’s house by the Eagle’s Tree, where The Nook merges into Harden Hill, was in full tide, and one could hear the merry voices of men and maidens, and the cheerful shrilling of matrons talking above the din, before one reached the house. Beneath a clump of trees surrounding the great cedar known as the Eagle’s Tree a number of horses were tied with comfortable measures of corn and trusses of hay before them, and in the little cove lay half a dozen or so boats uneasily tumbling upon the incoming tide. These conveyances had brought the remoter dwellers in the new town of Duxbury and its neighborhood: the Aldens from Eagle Tree Pond, the De la Noyes from Stony Brook, the Soules from Powder Point, the Constant Southworths from North River, the Howlands from Island Creek, the Bassetts from Beaver Pond, and the Abraham Samsons from Bluefish River where they lived neighbors to the Aldens and intermarried with them.
Of The Nook people who came on foot, the Standishes, and Brewsters, and Pabodies, and Prences, and Colliers, and Doctor Comfort Starr, the new physician, with his family, and the Partridges, and Wadsworths, and others, had mustered strong and in every variety of condition, age, and sex; for our ancestors, having far fewer opportunities of amusement than we have, made a great deal more of each one as it came along, and not only sucked the juice from their orange, but ate every bit of the pulp. The apple-bee was but a prelude to the evening’s entertainment, and for weeks before, every young girl in the colony had planned her dress and simple ornaments, and dreamed of some face or voice that should belong to her own especial Robin Adair, or of the games and the songs and haply the contradances that might be permitted when the church-members had withdrawn; and Lucretia Brewster, with her daughter Mary and Love’s wife Sarah, and such fantastic aid as Gillian had chosen to bestow, had been for a week busy in preparing the house and a big shed just finished, for the reception of the expected guests and their steeds.
Gillian! Well, Gillian! And when one has said her name the subject widens until it becomes impossible to handle. Niece of Lucretia Brewster, whose sister had married a Spaniard, this Gillian, left a deserted orphan in some foreign port, had drifted back to England, and thence to New England, where a year or so before the apple-bee she had arrived by hand of Captain William Pierce, consigned along with a present of kersey and Hollands linen to Jonathan Brewster by a cousin who claimed that, as Lucretia was the girl’s nearest relative, her maintenance should fall upon Lucretia’s husband. At first the charge was joyfully accepted, for Gillian was just the age of Mary, Jonathan’s only daughter, and would be a sister to her, as they said. But as the weeks and months went on both Mary and her mother grew silent upon the subject of the new sister, while Jonathan, and his sons William and Jonathan and Benjamin, never ceased to congratulate the women and each other upon the joy and delight of her presence; the father especially often calling upon his wife to recognize how in this case virtue had brought its own reward, and their benevolence to the orphan received a blessing of singular richness almost in the first moments of its exercise.
To these pious thanksgivings Lucretia Brewster, who was a very discreet woman, never offered any contradiction; but when next her husband found some little matter essential to his comfort neglected, or some detail of the rigid family rule calmly set aside, the gentle explanation was, “I left it to Gillian to do;” or, “It was Gillian who chose to do it in spite of all I said.”
On these occasions Gillian sometimes came by a little reprimand, not half as severe, so Mary jealously remarked, as was administered to her very lightest offense, but apparently more than Gillian could bear, for before it was half over she would fall into such a passion of tears and sobs as seemed fit to rend her white throat asunder, and either crouch moaning upon the floor in some corner like a wounded creature, or rush headlong from the house to the woods, where she would hide all day long, and once all night long, although Brewster and his three sons searched and called for her till sunrise, when she appeared on the edge of a thicket, her wonderful deep red hair hanging all matted and tangled, with briers around her shoulders, her great passionate Spanish eyes dilated and full of gloomy fire, and her mouth, that bewildering, tempting, ripe red mouth, with its myriad expressions and suggestions, its curves and dimples, and its little laughing teeth, all drawn and pale.
Is it to be wondered at that, after the first few times, the uncle and guardian ceased to attempt even the discipline of a reproof, especially as for days after one of these passions the girl would shrink out of his presence with every mark of terror, and if he spoke to her, reply in hurried, timorous accents, with the air of one who dreads to give offense, and fears unmerited blame or misunderstanding.
So at last it came to pass that Gillian did what she would, and left undone what she chose, and quietly setting at naught all Lucretia’s admonitions or attempts at control, was ever bright and charming to her uncle, and remained a wonder and a fascination to the boys, who were all wildly in love with her, a condition shared by nearly every unmarried man in the Old Colony.
As for Mary, good, homely, ungraceful, slow moulded Mary Brewster, she wore herself thin and peevish in struggling against the innate depravity of her own heart which continually urged her to hate Gillian with a bitter hatred, more especially when John Turner, of Scituate, came a-wooing, and Gillian, having contemplated his courtship during a few visits, picked him up as a kitten might a great lumbering beetle, tossed him hither and yon, patted him with her velvet paws, suddenly thrust sharp claws through the velvet, gave him one or two contemptuous buffets to this side and to that, and finally walked away, purring serene indifference.
John Turner was perhaps the only man at the apple-bee who saw nothing to admire in Gillian, and Mary never looked her way. But Betty liked her, and now, as the girl flitted into the great kitchen where around the baskets and piles of apples, brought together from all the neighborhood for Lucretia Brewster to dry in her own superlative fashion, crowded the maids and matrons, who pared and cored, and quartered or sliced, the rosy fruit, it was Betty Alden who cried,—
“Oh, Jill, is that you? Come help me string these slices. These are our own apples, and mother wants to keep them separate from the rest, so Sally and Ruthy and I are doing them.”
“Did your brother Jo pick them?” asked Gillian, sinking down in her peculiar and graceful fashion upon the floor, beside Betty, but not offering to take the needle threaded with coarse flax that Sally held toward her.
“Jo and David picked them, you naughty girl, and talked of naught but you while they did it.”
“Betty, Betty, here’s Alick Standish coming this way, and don’t you blush; now mind you, Betty, don’t you blush! Fie! but you do! What makes her hate Alick so, Sally?” asked Gillian maliciously.
“Who hates Alick?” asked the cheery voice of the good-looking “heir apparent” of Myles Standish, who had obeyed a glance of Gillian’s eyes and joined the group.
“Who but the one who colors red as fire with vexation when he draws nigh,” replied the girl coolly; and Standish, curiously regarding the faces of the three, perceived that both Betty’s and Sally’s faces were aflame, while Gillian’s cream-white skin looked cool as a calla lily.
“Are you paring the apples I picked, Gillian?” asked another voice as David Alden joined the group.
“Nay, for ’twas Satan who first plucked an apple for a woman,” replied Jill, with a mocking little laugh; and Alick whispered in her ear, “There’s ne’er a son of Adam would refuse if you offered him the apple, Gillian.”
“What! not if he lost Paradise thereby?”
“The paradise of your love would”—
“Oh, Master Pabodie, do come and reason with these terrible blasphemers who are talking of Satan and nobody can tell what else. Say to Master Pabodie what you were saying to me, Alick!”
Thus dared, the young man looked half of mind to accept the challenge, but John Pabodie, shrewdly glancing at the audacious girl, replied, “Nay, mistress, I’m twenty years too old and haply twenty years too young to cope with such a matter. But here’s my son William just come home from Boston and farther, and I’ll leave him to fill the place of Paris, if one may quote the old mythologies in a Christian land.”
“Surely, when such a Helen rises before one’s eyes,” added a sonorous young voice, as Gillian suddenly stood up, her sinuous and suggestive figure displayed in a gown of creamy mull clinging to every curve, and covering yet not concealing the exquisite roundness of arms and shoulders white with that peculiar mat whiteness never seen save in persons of Latin blood.
“Who was Helen?” asked Gillian very slowly, while the velvety darkness of her eyes rested with infantile confidence upon the handsome face of William Pabodie, who, after the pause of an instant, said significantly,—
“The handsomest woman that ever lived.”
A little silence ensued, and all eyes turned upon Gillian, who, nothing daunted, softly replied,—
“She must have been well pleased when Paris told her so.”
“Welcome home, William Pabodie!” cried Lucretia Brewster’s wholesome voice, scattering as with a puff of west wind the strained and bewildering atmosphere that seemed stifling the little group around the Spanish girl. “You know all these lads and lasses, your old neighbors, and I see that you have already made acquaintance with my niece Gillian,—Gillian Brewster, as we call her”—
“My name is Gillian de Cavalcanti,” interposed Gillian quietly, but Lucretia, flushing angrily, continued without looking at her, “If you will come with me, Will, I will take you to Mary and some other friends, Lora Standish and her guest, Mercy Bradford from Plymouth.”
“My sister Anice well-nigh raves over Mistress Lora Standish,” replied the young man, following his hostess, but even as he did so turning to look once more at Gillian, whose eyes, soft and dewy as a chidden child’s, followed him with a vague appeal that sent a tremor through the young man’s heart.
“Can it be that her aunt does not treat her well?” asked he of himself, and his next reply to Lucretia was so cold that she turned and looked at him, and then remembering said to herself,—
“The poison works quickly.”
The apples were pared, cored, quartered, or sliced, and, threaded upon twine, hung in festoons upon a frame erected for the purpose on the south side of the house; the cores and skins and smaller apples were heaped into the cider-press, which on the morrow would begin its work of reducing them to the cheerful and wholesome beverage as essential to our forefathers’ comfort as tea and coffee are to ours; the bountiful supper had been eaten and merrily cleared away by a committee of bustling matrons, and at last the great houseplace, the shed, and a platform extending for some distance from the house were “sided off” and swept, to make room for the frolics which to the young people were the true meaning of the whole affair. “Kissing games” were in that day not more objectionable than round dances are now, and perhaps that visitor from Jupiter to whom we sometimes refer for impartial judgment would have found them less so. Both classes of amusement depend very much upon who indulges in them, and when Gillian’s soft warm lips frankly pressed William Pabodie’s mouth a quick flush mounted to the young man’s temples, and he cast a startled glance into the dark eyes upraised to his with a look of fathomless meaning. Lucretia Brewster saw that look, and her own matronly cheek colored angrily. Later in the evening she sat herself down beside her sister-in-law, with whom she was on very affectionate terms.
“Tired, ’Cretia?” asked Mistress Love Brewster with a pleasant smile.
“No, not to say tired, Sally, but a good deal worked up.”
“About what?”
“Well, one thing and another. You know my Mary’s to be married Thanksgiving Day, and John Turner joins hands with her in begging me to go to Scituate along with them and set her off in her housekeeping. You know, being the only girl, she never’s quite let go of mammy’s apron string; and for that matter, I’m as loath to part with her as ever she can be with me.”
“Then, why not go?” asked Sarah sympathetically. “I’m sure the change will be good for you, and you’ve had a mort of work and worry lately.”
“Yes, I know, but—well, I’ll tell you, Sally. I don’t want to go away and leave Jonathan and the boys with nobody to do for them.”
“Why, there’s Jill and your Indian woman Quoy.”
“Yes, Quoy knows all about the house, and can get the meals and all that as well if I was away as if I was here; but Gillian”—
“Why—yes, I suppose I know what you mean, ’Cretia. You’d be just as well content if Gillian wasn’t here, eh?”
“Full as well,” replied Lucretia with emphasis, and gazed full in her sister’s face. Then both turned and looked at the girl who, crying, “Button, button, who’s got the button?” was daintily trying to pry open the stalwart fist of Josias Standish, while Mary Dingley looked uneasily on.
“Yes,” said Sarah softly, as if answering some unspoken appeal. “And you don’t want to take her?”
“Take her, no! I believe Mary wouldn’t be married at all if it was to carry that girl along with her.”
“Well, ’Cretia, I’ll take her, for a while at least. You know the Elder is with us more than he is at Plymouth, and I’ll lay she won’t carry on lightly under his eyes. I never knew any man like Father Brewster in my life! He’d make the Old Boy behave himself, I believe, and never say a hard word to him neither; and my boys are but boys, and I’ll risk Love.”
“Oh, it isn’t Jonathan I’m afraid of,” said Jonathan’s wife quickly. “But”—
“Oh, don’t you say a word,” interrupted Sarah with a little laugh. “I know all about it, and it’s just as it should be; but it would be main lonesome for a young maid here with none but men for company, and I’ll ask her to come and make me a visit.”
“Will you? Now that’s comfortable of you, Sally, right comfortable and friendly,” replied Lucretia, rising to attend her summons, but with a face so relieved from care and worry that Jonathan, meeting her, whispered softly,—
“I’d liever look at thee than any of the young lasses, sweetheart.”