“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,—