It was one of the few pretentious houses in all three of the Gileads, Gilead Green, Gilead Centre, and Gilead Post Office. For seven generations it had been in the Ellis family. The Judge had a ponderous volume bound in heavy red morocco, setting forth the history of Windham County, and the girls loved to pore over it. Seven men with their families, bound westward towards Hartford in the colonial days of seeking after home sites, had seen the fertile valley with its encircling hills, and had settled there. One was an Ellis and the Judge had his sword and periwig in his library. As for the rest, all one had to do was go over to the old family burial ground on the wood road and count them up.
During the fall, this had been a favorite tramp of the Greenacre hikers, and Jean loved to quote a bit from Stevenson, once they had come in sight of the old grass grown enclosure, cedar shaded, secluded and restful:
“There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.”
Here they found the last abiding place of old Captain Ephraim Ellis with his two wives, Lovina Mary and Hephzibah Waiting, one on each side of him. The Captain rested betwixt the two myrtle covered mounds and each old slate gravestone leaned towards his.
“Far be it from me,” Cousin Roxy would say heartily, “to speak lightly of those gone before, but those two headstones tell their own story, and I’ll bet a cookie the Captain could tell his if he got a chance.”
Every Legislature convening at Hartford since the olden days, had known an Ellis from Gilead. Only two of the family had taken to wandering, Billie’s father and Gideon, one of the old Captain’s sons. The girls wove many tales around Gideon. He must have had the real Argonaut spirit. Back in the first days of the Revolution he had run away from the valley home and ended up with Paul Jones on the “Bonhomme Richard.”
Billie loved his memory, the same as he did his own father’s, and the girls had straightened up his sunken slatestone record, and had planted some flowers, not white ones, but bravely tinted asters for late fall. Billie showed them an old silhouette he had found. Mounted on black silk, the old faded brown paper showed a boy with sensitive mouth and eager lifted chin, queer high choker collar and black stock. On the back of the wooden frame was written in a small, firm handwriting, “My beloved son Gideon, aged nineteen.”
The old house sat far back from the road with a double drive curving like a big “U” around it. Huge elms upreared their great boughs protectingly before it, and behind lay a succession of all manner and kind of buildings from the old forge to the smoke house. One barn stood across the road and another at the top of the lane for hay. Since Cousin Roxy had married the Judge, it seemed as if the sunlight had flooded the old house. Its shuttered windows had faced the road for years, but now the green blinds were wide open, and it seemed as if the house almost smiled at the world again.
“I never could see a mite of sense in keeping blinds shut as if somebody were dead,” Cousin Roxy would say. “Some folks won’t even open the blinds in their hearts, let alone their houses, so I told the Judge if he wanted me for a companion, he’d have to take in God’s sunshine too, ’cause I can’t live without plenty of it.”
Kit and Doris were the first to run up the steps and into the center hall, almost bumping into Billie as he ran to meet them. Behind him came Mrs. Ellis in a soft gray silk dress. A lace collar encircled her throat, fastened with an old pink cameo breast-pin. Helen had always coveted that pin. There was a young damsel on it holding up her full skirts daintily as she moved towards a sort of chapel, and it was set in fine, thin old gold.