CHAPTER XXVIII.
A SALT-FISH DINNER.
“Nay, Betty, flout me not! ’Tis an honest word I’ve said to you, and I look to have it answered honestly.”
“I know not what you call honest, Master Alexander Standish”—
“There, now! You can’t even speak without a gibe at my high-sounding name. I count it right down unkind, Betty”—
“Then if I don’t please you, there’s the road home. Isn’t your name Alexander in very sooth, or is that a by-name your mother calls you for short?”
“It seems to me, Mistress Alden, that your humor is a little shrewish.”
“There, that will do! Never speak to me again so long as you’ve breath to speak at all.”
“Nay, Betty, I crave your pardon. ’Twas rude of me, but you put me past my patience.”
“Which is such a straitened foothold the least jostle will drive you from it.”
“Betty, I love you. Will you be my wife?”
“Trust a modest man for impudence, when once he makes a start.”
“Betty, I pray you lay aside this mood, and answer me seriously. ’Tis my just due, maiden, and John Alden’s daughter should be honest.”
“Well, then, Alick, in all sadness I will answer you—no.”
“Do you mean it, Betty?”
“As I mean to be saved.”
“And will you so far humor your oldest friend as to tell him why?”
“You do not love me as the man I wed must love, nor do I love you save as a dear friend of childhood, and as such I shall ever love you. As such and no more.”
“I do not love you, say you, lass?”
“No. You fain would marry some one out of hand, because Gillian has fooled you, and you’re longing to show her that you care as little as she.”
“What—who—did she say such a thing, Betty?”
“Nay. Oh, Alick, I must laugh,—you look so red and so befogged!—like the sun rising on a misty morning.”
“Who told you—what puts it in your head that I care for Gillian?”
“I said not you cared for her; I said she’d fooled you; and ’twas mine own eyes and mother wit told me, and no one else. She’s played with you as my Tabby does with a mouse, only at the last she let you slip from under her claws, not quite killed, and you ran to your old gossip to have the wound salved; that’s all!”
“And do you believe it was all put on? Do you truly think she cared nothing at all for me?”
“No more than she did for your brother Josias, or my brothers David and Joseph, or Constant Southworth, or, or—the rest”—
“The rest! Oh, you mean Will Pabodie, don’t you? You’ve noted how of late she’s all eyes and ears for him.”
“Nay, I’ve noted naught.” The words were few and the voice was cold, but something in the tone made Alick Standish look keenly into the face of his old friend. It was scarlet, and the brave brown eyes were full of tears; but as Betty caught his look she returned it with one of right royal defiance.
“Poor David!” said she, steadying her voice with a mighty effort, “he has not got over Tabby’s love-pats yet. He’s worse off than you, Alick. But here we are at home. Come in and have a mug of cider or a noggin of milk after your walk, won’t you, lad?”
“I’ll have the milk and thank you kindly. Isn’t that Sally peeping out of the dairy window?”
“Yes, she’s dairy-maid this week, and will give you the milk. You’ll catch her in her short gown and petticoat.”
“Won’t she be vexed?” asked the young man, with a smile anything but heart-broken.
“She’ll not eat you if she is. Open the door of a sudden and catch her at work,” whispered Betty; and Alick, the smile broadening into mischief, sharply pushed back the cleated door, revealing the figure of a tall girl, who, with arms bare to the shoulders, was at that moment tossing a great mass of yellow butter high into the air, her lithe form well displayed as she leaned back and held up her hands to catch her ponderous plaything. A linen cloth pinned around the forehead just above the brows formed a piquant frame for the rosy, dimpling Greuze face, with its sweet blue eyes and pure but tender lips; a lovely innocent maiden, and as Alick Standish looked at her as if for the first time, while she, suffering the butterball to drop upon the stone slab in front of her, would fain have pulled her kirtle straight, but dared not touch it with her moist hands, and half cried in her pretty confusion, he knew as by a revelation that all his other fancies had been but dreams and follies, and here before him stood the woman, whom out of all the world he would choose to be his wife,—the woman whom he could love, and love to the end.
But while the man’s heart leaped up within him, like his who, searching for mica, suddenly comes upon diamonds, all that rose to the lips was a little laugh, and the prosaic petition,—
“Might I have a noggin of milk?”
“Surely. Betty shall give it you— Nay, she’s gone. Well, wait but till I wash my hands and put my butter down in the cellar hole. Mayhap you’ll lift up the trap for me.”
“Of course I will! Where is it?”
“Just here.” And tapping with one foot, Sally Alden showed an iron ring set into the floor, and evidently intended to raise a big trap door in the middle of the dairy. Throwing it back so that it rested upon the floor, Alick looked down the steep steps into the little deep and cool cellar, which in those days imperfectly forestalled the refrigerator of to-day.
“Let me carry down the butter for you, Sally,” said he. “’Tis too steep.”
“’Tis no steeper than it was last week, or will be next,” laughed Sally in a sweet tremor of bashful joy; for Alick was her hero, and hitherto had only treated her as one of the children. “But if you like, you may hand me the dish after I am down.”
“Yes, indeed. It looks like the head of John Baptist on a charger, as ’tis seen in the Elder’s big Bible.”
“And so it does,” replied the girl, glancing with a new interest at the great ball of butter in the middle of the pewter platter, which Alexander held aloft in mimicry of the picture both had seen as children.
Then presently, the butter deposited, the trap door closed, and the noggin of milk presented and quaffed, the two came through the long passage dividing the dairy from the kitchen, and were met by the mistress of the house, our Priscilla, a little older, but still as charming as when we first knew her, and showing among her daughters like the rose among its buds, the glorious fulfillment of a gracious promise.
“Good-morrow to you, Alick. Go into the sitting-room, you and Betty,—or no; Sally, you’ve been busy while Betty was on her travels, you go and make Alick miserable till dinner’s dished”—
“Nay, dame, I’m beholden to you, but I must go”—
“Surely you must go, but not without your dinner, my lad. ’Tis Saturday and salt-fish dinner, you know, and I’ll warrant me your mother’s ’ll be no better than I shall give you.”
“My mother’d be the first to say she’s no match for Mistress Alden in delicate cookery.”
“There, there, go say your pretty things to the girls, Sally or Betty, it matters not which, but don’t whet your wit on an old woman like me. Be off with you!”
Laughing and well pleased that fortune so favored his half-formed wishes, Alick followed Sally through the sitting-room to the front door, standing wide open to the summer; and then, sitting on the threshold, their feet upon the great natural doorstone which their children’s and their children’s children’s feet should press, the man and the maid entered into that fairyland we all pass through once in our lives.
“And some give thanks, and some blaspheme,
And most forget, but either way,
That and the child’s forgotten dream
Are all the light of all our day.”
“Alick! Sally! Come to dinner!” cried Betty’s blithe voice; but as the young man arose and turned his glowing face toward her, she stared at it for a moment in astonishment, and then turned sharply away to hide the smile that would in her own despite curl her lips.
“They’re stronger than we women in some ways, but they’re wondrously weak in others,” was the thought beneath that smile.
In the great airy kitchen, where no fire was made in the warm weather, a table was spread large enough to accommodate, besides the heads of the family, their eight children, and the two men and a woman who lived in the house really as “help,” and not servants.
A fourteenth seat was now placed for the guest between Betty and her brother Joseph, still his mother’s true lover and helper, but Alick noted with pleasure that Sally sat opposite, and gave him the opportunity to study her face, which he seemed never to have seen before.
The long grace ended, and the clatter of chairs and feet upon the bare floor a little subsided, John Alden, viewing with satisfaction the great codfish lying at full length upon the platter yet longer than itself, said,—
“George Soule has had more than ordinary luck with his dunfish this season; don’t they say so at your house, Alick?”
“Yes, sir, a small share, if you please.”
Alden stared, and his wife interposed:—
“He says he’ll have some, father. Did you know that George Soule had set up as dry-salter for the town, Alick?”
“Yes, I heard so. Indeed, father bought a quintal of dun and another of white fish of him,” replied Alick, wondering what Betty and Sally were laughing about.
“Now I don’t see why the captain portioned them that fashion,” mused John Alden, rapidly distributing the fish into fourteen empty trenchers. “For doubtless he knows as well as I, or rather your mother knows as well as our housewife here, that the only way to cook your fish aright is to bind a good dunfish carefully between two whitefish, and steep the three all night in lukewarm water; then in the morning to cast out that water and put in fresh, and again steep it so nigh the fire that it ever tries to boil yet never makes out. Finally, when all else is ready, master dunfish is released from his bondage, and carefully laid upon a platter unbroken, while his bedfellows the whitefish are thrown to the ducks or the pigs”—
“Or made into a mince wherein no man can tell the white from the dun fish,” interposed Priscilla. “Why, father, I should suppose you’d been ship’s cook all your youth, and major-domo ever since. I never mistrusted you knew how a salt codfish should be cooked.”
“I see a mort of things I don’t talk about,” retorted Alden quietly, “and if you knew not more than most women, I could tell you just how master tomcod should be served.”
“Try it, father!” cried Betty, who was her father’s darling and might say what she liked, because she never liked to say anything amiss. “Tell us now without looking around the board, tell us what should lie on it to be eaten with salt codfish.”
“Well, there must be a white sauce, compounded of cream and wheaten flour and butter; and there must be pork-scraps cut in dice and fried of a dainty brown; and there must be beets boiled tender, but not cut to let out the color; and there must be parsnips and turnips and onions; and there must be brown bread and white bread; and there must be sallet oil and mustard; and above all, there must be a good flagon of cider, and another to back it.”
“Right, right! Here’s every one of the things you told about and more, for here’s a dish of those roots John Howland got in Boston of the sloop trading to the Carolinas. Molly begged so hard for them that mother cooked some, but I doubt if they will suit with salt fish.”
“Father told of eating some in Boston, but we’ve had none as yet,” said Alick, and Sally, taking up one of the sweet potatoes, broke it in two and handed a piece across the table to Alick, who, eating it skin and all, as if it were a fruit, declared it with sincerity to be the most delicious morsel he had ever tasted.
“I’ve an apple pasty to follow,” announced Priscilla, as her husband pushed away his plate. “Rachel, you and Timothy may take away the trenchers and bring some fresh ones; and Sally, have you a jug of cream and a morsel of cheese for us in your dairy?”
“Yes, indeed, mother,” and Sally, glad to escape Alick’s scrutiny, jumped up and retreated to the dairy.
“While John Howland was in Boston he saw Ras Brewster,” said Joseph to keep up the conversation, which rather lagged through Betty’s preoccupation and her mother’s housewifely cares.
“He has been at Kennebec all this time, hasn’t he?” asked Alick with somewhat languid interest.
“Yes, but Master Winslow sent for him to company him to England. Will they make any stay there, father?”
“The Lord only knows, my son,” returned Alden with a ponderous sigh. “The Bay people, that is to say the authorities, have to my mind done an ill-advised thing in tolling Edward Winslow away from us. They say he has a skillful tongue and good acquaintance with the ways of courts; and so he hath, so he hath, but also he has a home, and comrades of old time who look to him for comfort and aid, the more that so many of the old stock are removed by death or distance. It is not well done of the Bay people, and much do I hope that Winslow will not deeply engage himself in their concerns.”
“And Wrastle has gone with him?” asked Alick in a low voice of Joseph, who nodded assent, adding presently, as his father lapsed into silence,—
“He’ll be writer and keep the papers,—a secretary, Master Winslow called it; and Ras said there was no knowing when he might come back.”
“Now here’s the pie, and the cheese, and the cream, and some fresh nutcakes, and some metheglin; so cease your lament, John, and be merry while you may!” cried Priscilla, cutting the pie, which was baked in a great iron basin, and was more of a pudding than a pie, as it needed to be, since fourteen hungry mouths were to feed upon it.