was the mixture of foreign blood which their name denoted. Anything
of alien race was looked upon with a mixture of fear and aversion in
this village of people whose blood had flowed in one course for
generations. The Hautvilles were said to have French and Indian blood
yet, in strong measure, in their veins; it was certain that they had
both, although it was fairly back in history since the first
Hautville, who, report said, was of a noble French family, had
espoused an Iroquois Indian girl. The sturdy males of the family had
handed down the name and the characteristics of the races through
years of intermarriage with the English settlers. All the
Hautvilles--the father, the four sons, and the daughter--were tall
and dark, and straight as arrows, and they all had wondrous grace of
manner, which abashed and half offended, while it charmed, the stiff
village people. Not a young man in the village, no matter how finely
attired in city-made clothing, had the courtly air of these Hautville
sons, in their rude, half-woodland garb; not a girl, not even Dorothy
Fair, could wear a gown of brocade with the grace, inherited from a
far-away French grandmother, with which Madelon Hautville wore indigo
cotton.

Moreover, the whole family was as musical as a band of troubadours,
and while that brought them into constant requisition and gave them
an importance in the town, it yet caused them to be held with a
certain cheapness. Music as an end of existence and means of
livelihood was lightly estimated by the followers of the learned
professions, the wielders of weighty doctrines and drugs, and also by
the tillers of the stern New England soil. The Hautvilles, furnishing
the music in church, and for dances and funerals, were regarded much
in the light of mountebanks, and jugglers with sweet sounds. People
wondered that Lot and Burr Gordon should go to their house so much.