And as the governor with an axe on his shoulder strode away down Market Street and across the brook to Watson’s Hill, Dame Alice, a kerchief over her head, once more ran up the hill to Priscilla Alden’s.
As the great gun upon the hill boomed out the sunset hour, and Captain Standish himself carefully covered it from the dews of night, Alice Bradford stood in the great lower room of her house and looked about her. All was done that could be done to put the place in festal array, and although the fair dame sighed a little at the remembrance of her stately home in Duke’s Place, London, with its tapestries and carvings and carpets and pictures, she bravely put aside the regret, and affectionately smoothed and patted the fine damask “cubboard cloth” covering the lower shelf of the sideboard, or, as she called it, the “buffet,” at one side of the room, and placed and replaced the precious properties set out thereon:—
A silver wine cup, a porringer that had been her mother’s, nine silver teaspoons, and, crown of all, four genuine Venetian wine-glasses, tall and twisted of stem, gold-threaded and translucent of bowl, fragile and dainty of shape, and yet, like their as dainty owner, brave to make the pilgrimage from the home of luxury and art to the wilderness, where a shelter from the weather and a scant supply of the coarsest food was all to be hoped for.
But Dame Bradford, fingering her Venice glasses, and softly smiling at the touch, murmured to herself and to them, “’Tis our exceeding gain.”
“What, Elsie, not dressed!” cried Priscilla Carpenter’s blithe voice, as that young lady, running down the stairs leading to her little loft chamber, presented herself to her sister’s inspection with a smile of conscious deserving.
“My word, Pris, but you are fine!” exclaimed Dame Alice, examining with an air of unwilling admiration the young girl’s gay apparel and ornaments. It was indeed a pretty dress, consisting of a petticoat of cramoisie satin, quilted in an elaborate pattern of flowers, leaves, and birds; an open skirt of brocade turned back from the front, and caught high upon the hips with great bunches of cramoisie ribbons; a “waistcoat” of the satin, and a little open jacket of the brocade. Around the soft white throat of the wearer was loosely knotted a satin cravat of the same dull red tint with the skirt, edged with a deep lace, upon which Alice Bradford at once laid a practiced finger.
“Pris, that jabot is of Venise point! Where did you get it?”
“Ah! That was a present from”—
“Well, from whom?”
“Nay, never look so cross on’t, my lady sister! Might not I have a sweetheart as well as you?”