CHAPTER III.
THE GERM OF A PASSION.
A BONNIE little Puritan maid, Mistress Garde Merrill, stood in the open doorway at her home, fervently hugging her kitten. The sunlight seemed almost like beaten gold, so tangibly did it lay upon the house, the vines that climbed the wall, and the garden full of old-fashioned flowers.
A few leaves, which had escaped from the trees, in a longing to extend their field of romping, were being whirled about in a brisk zephyr that spun in a corner. A sense of warmth and fragrance made all the world seem wantoning in its own loveliness.
Little Garde, watching the frolic of the leaves, and thinking them pretty elves and fairies, dancing, presently looked up into the solemn visage of a passing citizen, who had paused at the gate.
“Mistress Merrill,” he said, gravely, after a moment’s inspection of the bright, enchanting little face, “your eyes have not the Puritan spirit of meekness.” Thereupon he departed on his way, sadly shaking his head.
Garde’s eyes, in all truth, were dancing right joyously; and dancing was not accounted a Puritan devotion. Such brown, light-ensnaring eyes could not, however, constrain themselves to melancholy. No more could the apple-red of her smooth, round cheeks retreat from the ardor of the sun. As for her hair, like strands on strands of spun mahogany, no power on earth could have disentangled its nets wherein the rays of golden light had meshed and intermeshed themselves. In her brightness of color, with her black and white kitten on her arm, the child was a dainty little human jewel.
She was watching a bee and a butterfly when a shadow fell again into the yard, among the flowers, at the entrance. Garde felt her attention drawn and centered at once. She found herself looking not so much at a bareheaded boy, as fairly into the depths of his very blue and steadfast eyes.
The visitor stood there with his hands clasping two of the pickets of which the gate was fashioned. He had seen everything in the garden at one glance, but he was looking at Garde. His eyes began laughingly, then seriously, but always frankly, to ask a favor.
“I prithee come in,” said Garde, as one a little struck with wonder.
The boy came in. Garde met him in the path and gave him her kitten. He took it, apparently because she gave it, and not because he was inordinately fond of cats. It seemed to Garde that she knew this boy, and yet he had on a suit that suggested a young sailor, and she had never made the acquaintance of any sailors whatsoever. If he would only look elsewhere than at her face, she thought, perhaps she could remember.
“See them,” she said, and she pointed to where the leaves were once more capering in the corner.
The boy looked, but his gaze would swing back to its North, which it found in two brown eyes.
“I saw you that day in Plymouth,” he said. “And I got out of their old jail, and I didn’t see anybody else that looked kind or nice among all those people.”
“Oh!” said Garde, suddenly remembering everything, “oh, you were—that boy marching with the old Indian. I was so sorry. And I am so glad that you got away. I am real glad you came to see me. Grandfather and I were down there for a visit—so I saw you. Oh dear me!” She looked at her young visitor with eyes open wide by amazement. It seemed almost too much to believe that the very boy she had seen and so pitied and liked, in that terrible procession at Plymouth, should actually be standing here before her in her grandfather’s garden! “Oh dear me!” she presently said again.
“I hate Plymouth!” said the boy, “but I like Boston.”
“I am so glad,” said Garde. “Will you tell me your name? Mine is Garde Merrill.”
The boy said: “My name is Adam Rust.”
“I was named for all my aunts,” the maid imparted, as if eager to set a troublesome matter straight at once, “Gertrude, Abigail, Rosella, Dorothy and Elizabeth. The first letters of their names spell G-A-R-D-E, Garde.”
Her visitor was rendered speechless for a moment. “Metacomet and all the Indians used to call me Little-Standing-Panther,” he then said, boyishly, not to be outdone in the matter of names.
“Metacomet—King Philip? Oh, then you are the boy that used to live with the Indians, and that was how they got you!” gasped the little maid. “Grandfather told auntie all about it. Oh, I wish I could live with the Indians! I am very, very sorry they got you! But I am glad you came to see me.”
Adam flushed with innocent and modest pride, thus to impress his small admirer, who was named so formidably. He thought that nothing so pleasant had ever happened in all his life.
“It is too sad to live with Indians,” he answered. A mist seemed to obscure the light in his eyes and to cast a shadow between them and the sweet face at which he was looking with frank admiration. The cloud passed, however, as clouds will in the summer, and his gaze was again one of illuminated smiles. “I am a sailor now,” he said, with a little boast in his voice. “To-morrow morning we are going to start for Hispaniola.”
“Oh dear me!” said Garde, in sheer despair of an adequate expression of her many emotions. Then she added contritely: “I mustn’t say ‘Oh dear me!’ but—oh dear—I wish I might.”
“I shan’t mind,” said Adam.
“I wish I could go to Hispaniola, too,” said Garde, honestly. “I hate to be kept here as quiet as a clock that doesn’t go. I suppose you couldn’t take me? Let’s sit down with the kitten and think it over together.”
“I don’t think we could take any girls,” said Adam, seating himself at her side on the porch, “but I could bring you back something when I come.”
“Oh, let’s talk all about what we would rather have most,” Garde responded.
So their fingers mingled in the fur of the kitten and they talked of fabulous things with which the West Indies were reported to abound. His golden hair, and her hair so darkly red, made the picture in the sunlight a thing complete in its brightness and beauty. The wind floated a few stray filaments, richly red as mahogany, from the masses on Garde’s pretty brow, across to the ringlets on Adam’s temple. To and fro, over these delicate copper wires, stretched for its purpose, the sweet love that comes first to a lad and a maid, danced with electrical activity.
“If you are going to-morrow,” said Garde, “you must see all the flowers and everything now.” She therefore took him by the hand and led him about the garden, first she, then he, and then she once more carrying the kitten.
They were still in the midst of their explorations of the garden, which required that each part should be visited several times, when the gate opened and in walked Garde’s tall, stern-looking grandfather.
David Donner rubbed his eyes in amazement, hardly believing that his senses could actually be recording a picture of his granddaughter, hand in hand with some utter stranger of a boy, in his own precincts. He came quickly toward the pair, making a sound that came within an ell of being a shout.
Garde looked up in sudden affright. Adam regarded the visitor calmly and without emotion. Having first dropped the young sailor’s hand, Garde now resolutely screwed her little warm fingers back into the boy’s fist.
“Grandfather,” she said boldly, “I shall sail to-morrow for Hispaniola.”
David Donner, at this, was so suddenly filled with steam pressure, which he felt constrained to repress, that his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.
“Go away, boy,” he said to Adam. “Mistress Merrill, your conduct is quite uncalled for.”
Having divined that his sister had deserted her post and gone, as was her wont, to the nearest neighbor’s, for a snack of gossip, he glared at Adam, swooped down upon Garde and caught her up in his arms abruptly, kitten and all.
Her hold on Adam’s hand being rudely wrenched asunder, Garde felt her heart break incontinently. She began to weep without restraint, in fact, furiously. She also kicked, and was also deporting herself when the door was slammed behind the forms of herself, her kitten and her grandfather, a moment later.
Adam looked once where she had gone. His face had assumed a stolidity which he was far from feeling. He walked to the gate and went away, without once turning to look back at the house.
Mistress Garde, confronted by David Donner at close quarters, soon regained her maidenly composure and wept surreptitiously on the stomach of the kitten. At length she looked up in defiance at the silent old man.
“I have changed the name of my kitten,” she said. “His name is Little-Standing-Panther!”
Her grandfather, to whom this outbreak seemed something of an indication of mental disorder, on her part, stared at the child dumbly. Not without some justification for her deductions, Garde thought him quelled. In a spirit of reckless defiance, and likewise to give some vent to her feelings, she suddenly threw her arms about the bedewed kitten, on its pillow, pressed her face against its fur and said to it, fervently:
“Little-Standing-Panther, I love you, and love you and love you!”
Grandfather Donner looked up in alarm. “Tut, tut, my child,” said he, “love is a passion.”