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Adair, or of the games and the songs and haply the contradances that might be permitted when the church-members had withdrawn; and Lucretia Brewster, with her daughter Mary and Love’s wife Sarah, and such fantastic aid as Gillian had chosen to bestow, had been for a week busy in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.