PEEPING TOM AND HIS BROTHER.
Dame Alice Bradford sat alone in her fair bedroom, its latticed windows
swinging wide to admit the flower-laden breeze that, young and fresh
as when we saw it peeping in at the council of the fathers and the
stitching of the little maids, peeped now at the still figure of the
matron, sitting for once quite idle, her hands folded listlessly upon
her lap. She was thinking, as it chanced, of that very morning, long
ago, when the green footstool cover was finished, and her little Mercy
and Desire Howland had admired it so much, and each begun one like it;
and now Mercy, her one daughter, her little ewe lamb as she called her
in thought, was Mistress Vermayes, with a home in Boston and a grand
future before her, and Desire Howland was married to John Gorham; and
although her two boys William and Joseph were as good sons as a mother
need ask, they were sons, and not daughters, nor was Dame Alice in
haste to see them bring daughters home to her.
A few slow, meek tears gathered in her eyes and overflowed just as
the door opened and the governor came in with a letter in his hand. A
glance at his wife showed him her case, and he said tenderly,--
“Is it the empty nest, sweetheart, that grieves you?”
“Nay, Will, how can I be lonesome while you are left to me?”
“Well and bravely said, my wife, and yet I blame thee not, I blame thee
not. I miss the dear maid myself oftener than I would like to say.
But you know how oft we’ve spoke of your sister Mary Carpenter in her
lonely estate since her mother died”--
“And my mother as well as hers,” suggested Alice with a little sob.
“Why surely, dear heart, and I know well that you grieve for her; but
now I’ve written to Mary, bidding her come and make her home with us,
and offering to pay the charges of her voyage, since she is left in
such straitened case, and here’s the letter all ready to send by Kenelm
Winslow, who is summoned by his brother to England to receive some
instructions. Kenelm will go to Bristol and see Mary, but I have bidden
her not to wait for his escort back, but to come so soon as she can
light of safe company, since you need her here.”
“Oh, Will dear, which shall I praise first, your tender thought for me,
or your goodness to my sister?”
“Well, for that matter, dame, I fancy it all comes under one head, for
if it were not to pleasure you I know not that I should urge Mistress
Carpenter across the seas to bear me company.”
“There’s a young gentlewoman below asking to see our dame,” said the
voice of Tabitha Rowse at the door, and Alice, with a gentle look of
love and thanks in her husband’s face, followed the girl downstairs,
and entering the new parlor said pleasantly,--
“Oh, it is you, Mistress Gillian, is it? I should think Tabitha would
have remembered you.”
“I have not been in Plymouth more than once or twice since the dear
Elder’s funeral,” said Gillian sorrowfully.
“The dear Elder, yes,” replied Dame Alice. “He’s been mourned but once
among us, for the first mourning hath not ceased, nor will it soon with
those who knew and loved him.”
“Yet none loved him like me, for he was the best friend, the only
friend I had in all the world!” And in a burst of emotion honest
enough, and yet more uncontrolled than the emotions of most persons
of that place and time, Gillian sobbed and cried, and hid her face
upon the cushion of the great chair beside which she had sunk, until
the dame, laying a hand upon the round shoulder whence the cape had
slipped, said kindly yet reprovingly,--
“Nay, Gillian, ’tis not meet to give way to even the worthiest grief
in such fashion as this. Dry up your eyes now, while I go to fetch you
some orange-flower water, and when you have drunk it we will speak of
other matters.”
“Nay, dear lady, I want no orange-flower water, nor to keep you longer
than need be, but I have come to you a beggar, and would fain make my
petition ere my courage fails.”
“A petition, maiden? Well, now, what is it? Something that I can grant,
I hope, for I love to pleasure young maids for my dear daughter’s sake.”
“Ah, sweet Dame Alice, if I might come and be a daughter to you!
There’s my petition all in one word,--that I may come and live with
you. Am I overbold?”
“To live with me, Gillian? Why, how do you mean, child?”
“Let me come and be in the place of a daughter and yet not claim a
daughter’s love or rights, unless, indeed, I serve you so well that
you cannot but love me a little, and so comfort your own heart. I have
no home, and I know no one with whom I am so fain to live as with you,
dear dame.”
“But your aunt, Lucretia Brewster”--
“They are going to Connecticut as soon as may be, and my aunt says
she needs me not, if I can find another home, and Love Brewster and
his wife treat me ill, and since the dear, dear old Elder died I have
no one left to say one kind or careful word to me; and oh, dame, I do
wish, and more than once or twice, that I lay beside my mother”--
“Poor child, poor orphan child!” murmured Alice Bradford, laying a hand
upon the girl’s silken tresses as the head rested against her knee in
all the abandonment of grief. “Yes, you shall come and stay with us for
a while, at least, if the governor consent, as I am sure he will, and
if your kinsfolk make no objection. Love and Sarah are here to-day, are
they not?”
“Yes; Sarah’s father, Master Prence, is removing his chattels left in
the house he used while he was governor, and Love and Sarah came to
help him.” And Gillian, her end attained, rose gracefully to her feet,
straightened her dress and smoothed back her ruddy hair, while Dame
Alice, gazing out of the window toward the harbor, sadly thought of
the bereavement Plymouth that day was suffering; for a colony of some
of her best men, headed by Thomas Prence, with Nicholas Snow and his
wife, once Constance Hopkins, Cook, Doane, Bangs, and others, were
embarking with all their cattle and household goods for Nauset on the
Cape, there to found the town of Eastham, fondly dreaming it should
become the successor of Plymouth, which by successive emigrations,
deaths, and shrinkage of values seemed threatened with extinction, dull
and lifeless. As Bradford himself wrote that day in the journal so
invaluable to us all,--
“Thus was this poor church left like an ancient mother, grown old and
forsaken of her children, until she that had made many rich herself
became poor.”
Fighting against the depression of spirits and want of interest in what
remained that assailed his spirit, the governor gladly consented to
accept Gillian Brewster, as everybody called her, as an inmate of his
house, and a few days later she was installed in the pretty bedroom
first occupied by Priscilla Carpenter, now a portly and sedate matron,
wife of John Cooper, of Barnstable, and at a later date by Mercy
Bradford, lately become Mistress Vermayes. Nor did her new patrons
regret their generosity for some time to come, since the girl, warned
perhaps by late misadventures, restrained the “wicked lightnings of her
eyes” to such flashes of summer lightning as only served to startle and
amuse the beholder, or at most to suggest electrical forces beneath the
surface, and to arouse a certain interest in the nature that concealed
them. Sometimes, to be sure, the governor’s serious and intent gaze
would rest upon the girl’s face until she turned uneasily away, and
sometimes Dame Alice would speak in her gentle and pure-toned voice
of the beauty of modesty and reserve in a maiden’s character; but
William and Joseph noticed her hardly more than they did their mother’s
kitten, and when occasionally she tried some little coquetries upon
them, William would look bored and absent-minded, and Joseph laugh in
a satirical fashion hard for Gillian’s hot temper to endure. One word
between the brothers may explain much that to the girl herself never
was explained. It was spoken in the first days of Gillian’s sojourn
under their father’s roof, when the two young men, gun on shoulder,
were traversing the hills about Murdock’s Pond in search of birds to
tempt their mother’s languid appetite. It was Joseph who said, wiping
his brow and resting his “piece” upon a crotched tree, for the day was
warm,--
“Bill, this maid Gillian is the one David Alden spoke of last harvest,
isn’t she?”
“Ay, is she. And mind you, Joe, what he said of her?”
“That she would wile a bird off a bough; yes, that’s what Dave said,
and Betty Alden, she puts in, ‘Allowing ’twas a male bird, so she
would.’”
“Ay, Betty’s keen as a needle, and as straight. Well, Joe, if
she’s made a fool of a score, there’s no call for us to make it
two-and-twenty, is there?”
“Indeed there’s not, and I wouldn’t vex the dear mother for a cargo of
red-gold heads like hers.”
“Nor for any other. So, that’s settled, Joe, and you’re breathed by
now. Come on.”
An hour later the young men, worn, weary, and sore athirst, welcomed
the sound of rushing waters, heard but not seen through the thick
foliage, and Joseph, in the advance as usual, cried out,--
“Hullo! Here’s Jenney’s Mill close at hand. We’ve got enough birds
for a famous stew, so let’s stop and rest awhile, and speak with the
miller’s folk.”
“‘Folk’ standing for Abby and Sally and Sue Jenney,” said William
provokingly.
“And Sam and his new wife, who was a great friend of yours, Master
Bill, while she was called Nanny Lettice, and the Widow Jenney, who to
my mind is better company than the girls.”
“Ho! Ho! Well, there’s naught like a sober mind to recommend a young
fellow, and I’m glad to see it cropping up in your field, Father
Joseph. Well, we’ll make a neighborly call upon the widow, and
while you talk about Parson Chauncey’s notions of immersion and Mr.
Ainsworth’s psalmody I’ll e’en say a word of a lighter sort to the
young gentlewomen.”
“Have your jest, Will, have your jest,” returned the younger brother
coolly, “but I know somewhat you don’t.”
“Think you do, I dare say! A wise man in his own conceit is Joe
Bradford.”
But seeing that his brother, instead of being teased, was holding
himself very quiet and peeping through the branches of the young maples
crowding down to the brink of the little river Plymouth modestly calls
The Town Brook, William stepped softly behind him, and with something
of the guilty joy of Actæon, looked upon almost as fair a sight as he
did.
No prettier spot was then, or until very lately, to be found in the
dear old town which is mother of us all, than Holmes’s Dam, or as it
then was called Jenney’s Mill, where in the midst of a dense wood The
Town Brook, rushing toward the sea, found itself at a very early date
impeded by a dam, more or less artificial and effectual according to
the owner, but always sufficient to turn the big wheel of the gristmill
first erected by Stephen Dean, husband of that Betty Ring who inherited
so little of her mother’s great estate, and afterward carried on by
burly John Jenney, who sat as Assistant at the council board when
Duxbury wrung consent for separate identity from the mother town.
And now John slept, although _not_ with his English fathers, and his
widow jointly with her son Samuel administered the mill and ground the
grain not only of Plymouth, but of Duxbury, Sandwich, and several other
towns. With so wide a custom the miller’s was a flourishing business,
and might have been still more so had it been more carefully carried
on, but alas! John Jenney was a shipowner, and aspired to setting up
salt-works at Clark’s Island, and in fact had a soul above the pottles
of meal by which he was supposed to live; and when his widow succeeded
to his estate the customers complained that they were forced to share
their grain with rats and mice, and that the miller’s widow was too
easy tempered to be very efficient. Now, however, that the oldest son
was married and the daughters were grown up, things went better, and
the mill became a popular resort for the young people, especially in
hot weather.
But all this time the governor’s sons are peeping through the boscage,
and we peeping with them see four young girls, their kirtles of blue
and white homespun linen drawn about their knees, while with bare
feet they comfortably paddle in a little pool formed by a bend of
the stream, floored with beach sand and bordered by a grassy bank,
whereon the four damsels sit, and chat with all the sweet volubility of
blackbirds. The rays of the morning sun sifting through the branches of
the young oaks overhead dance merrily upon heads of gold and brown, and
the flaxen locks that curl around Susan Jenney’s head, while her eyes,
blue as the blossom of the flax, gleam beneath as she says,--
“We wouldn’t do this to-night, girls, would we?”
“I dare say the lads wouldn’t say nay, if we asked them to a wading
match,” replied her sister Sally with a twinkling laugh, while Abby,
older than the rest, looked sharply among the bushes, saying,--
“Who knows but we’re spied upon! I feel a creep up my back.”
“’Tis Harry Wood, be sure on’t!” cried Susan with a little flirt of her
white toes that sent the water into her sister’s face, while William
Bradford, softly pulling Joseph backward, whispered in his lowest
tones,--
“Betty Alden’s there, and she’d never forgive us if she knew we’d spied
on them.”
“Here goes, then!” and Joseph, laughing silently, pointed his gun at
the sky and pulled the trigger, then hastily turned back to his post of
observation, clinging to Will’s arm and shaking with an earthquake of
suppressed merriment, as if he would go to pieces.
“’Tis like a plump of white ducks that hear the shot pattering around
them,” whispered William; but Joe was beyond speech, and could only
gasp and shake with laughter as he watched the girls, who with little
shrieks and screams and exclamations clung to each other, staring
wildly around, and then gathering their feet up under their skirts
wriggled backward in some mysterious feminine fashion, until gaining
the shelter of the undergrowth they stood up and looked around them in
timid defiance for a moment, and then, no foe presenting himself, Abby,
as oldest and bravest, darted out, and seizing the shoes and stockings
lying in a heap, bore them triumphantly under shelter.
Some fifteen minutes later, William and Joseph Bradford, dignified
and grave as two young parsons, arrived at the door of the mill and
were received by Abby and Sally Jenney, demure and self-possessed as
possible, but with eyes on the alert for any indication that these were
the peeping Toms whom they suspected.
“We’ve a surprise for you, William,” remarked Abby, as steps were heard
descending the stairs. “Who do you suppose is visiting us from out of
town?”
“Is anybody visiting you? I had not heard of it.”
“Well, here she is. Betty, you did not think we’d have company so soon
to bid you welcome, did you, now?”
“Nay, Betty, heed her not,” exclaimed William, rising to claim the
privilege of a salute. “’Tis no company, but only two of your old
playmates. Why, you’re looking fresh as the morning, Betty, isn’t she,
Joe?” And both young men gravely surveyed the blushing girl from head
to foot, noticing especially the white thread hose and dainty buckled
shoes that covered the feet but now so rosy white in the water of the
little pool.
“How long is it since I saw you, Betty?” demanded Joseph presently, and
William paused in a speech to Sally to hear the reply.
“I really do not know, Joe; don’t you?”
“I can’t say, Betty, can’t say at all;” and Betty, casting a hasty
glance at his face, was met by so serene a smile that she comfortably
assured herself, “It was not they, or they didn’t see.”
“We’re going to have a little company to-night, and some games in the
old mill,” said Abby presently. “Will you both come? And if the young
gentlewoman at your house would like to make one of the guests, we’re
more than happy to have her.”
“My mother is beholden to you for remembering her companion, but
I doubt if Gillian Brewster can be spared,” said William a little
hastily, and perhaps a little haughtily, for he shrank from seeing
the siren who had wrought such mischief among some of his friends
introduced to others under shelter of his mother’s name. But Joseph,
heedless of his brother’s tone and only half hearing his words, replied
almost in the same breath,--
“You’re very thoughtful, Abby, and I doubt not Gillian will like to
come. I’ll bring her in my boat.”
“Gillian Brewster!” murmured Betty in a tone of dismay that drew
William Bradford’s attention to her face, suddenly pale and disturbed,
and going close to the girl who had been to him almost a sister for
the first ten years of their lives, he whispered, “Shall I prevent it,
Betty?”
“No, no, Will! Why should I care? She’s naught to me.”
“Nay, I thought”--
“’Tis a poor custom, Will; better break it off while you can.”
“The custom of thinking?”
“Ay. How is Mercy, and when did your mother hear from her last?”
Half an hour soon ran away, and so did the great stone pitcher of cider
which the miller’s wife insisted upon producing, and the young men took
leave, promising to be ready at an early hour for the evening’s frolic.