CHAPTER XLII.
LITTLE RUSES, AND WAITING.
WHEN she had recovered somewhat of her calm again, Garde found herself confronted by several difficulties with which she would be obliged to cope. In the first place she had ruined Adam’s letter to Henry Wainsworth, crumpling the sheets and permitting her tears to fall upon their surfaces, till no one save herself, aided by love, could have deciphered some of the sentences at all.
In the second place, if Henry had really intended to ask her hand in marriage, as she could not avoid believing, there might be complications in that direction at an early date. She could only resolve, upon this point, that she must not, under any circumstances, permit Henry to make his proposal, either orally or through the medium of another letter.
As to this letter, from Adam to Henry, it was certainly of a private character, but Henry had asked her to read it, and now she could not have disguised the fact that she had done so. She could not see how she could possibly return it to Henry at all, under the circumstances. She could not bear to think of letting him see the evidence of her emotions, wrought upon it. Moreover, it was precious to her. She felt entitled to own it. To her it meant far more than it possibly could to any other person in the world. She resolved to make a fair copy of it, for Henry, while she herself would retain the original—in Adam’s own writing.
Her third proposition was the most vital of them all. She could not think of what she should do to repair the harm which she alone, after all, had done, when she sent Adam away with that little word “Forever!” How should she let him know of the infamous story which she had been made to believe? How should she convince him, even supposing she could reach him with a word, that the story had left no room in her mind for doubt of its truth? How could she manage to persuade him that she had loved him always; that she knew at last of the wrong she had done him; that she begged his forgiveness; that she should wait for him even longer than the fifty years of which he had spoken on that last agonizing night?
He might not forgive her, she told herself. It might be too late already. She knew not where he had gone, or what he had done. He too might have thought of marriage with somebody else—to try to forget.
As a result of her brain cudgeling, to know what she would do to make Adam aware that she had made a great mistake and desired his forgiveness, she determined to write him a letter. Having decided, she wrote at once. Had she waited a little longer, her letter might have been more quiet in its reserve, but it could not then have been so utterly spontaneous, nor expressive of the great love she bore him, kept alive during all those months of doubt and agony.
As it was, the little outburst was sufficiently dignified; and it was sweet, and frank. She told him that she had read his letter to Henry, and that suddenly she had known of the great wrong she had done him. She mentioned that a dreadful story had been fastened upon him, with all too terrible semblances of truth and justice. She begged his forgiveness in a hundred runes. Finally, when she had finished, she signed it “Garde—John Rosella,” in memory of her walk with him through the woods, from near Plymouth to Boston.
Not without blushes and little involuntary thrills of delight did she add the name which confessed the tale of that wonderful walk, but she felt that Adam would know, by this very confession, how deep for him must be her love and trust and how contrite was the spirit in which she desired his forgiveness.
This epistle having at length been disposed of to her satisfaction, she made the fair copy of Adam’s letter to Henry and sent it to Wainsworth at once, with a short note of explanation that some moisture having fallen upon the original, making it quite illegible and indeed destroying it utterly, for his use, she felt she could do no less than to make this reparation. She likewise expressed the compliment she felt it was to herself that Henry had desired her to know of this sad affair in the life of his brother, but that she had been so affected by the tale that she must beg him not to permit her to read any further letters for some time to come.
This was a masterly composition, for poor Wainsworth destroyed the proposing epistle he had written at such infinite pains, and for a time, wholly abandoned any thought of speaking of marriage. He was exceedingly mortified to think he had made such a blunder as to give her the letter which he had guarded so cautiously. Timidity settled upon him, especially as he noted another, altogether incomprehensible change in Garde’s demeanor, when next they met.
Having despatched her letter to Adam, Garde felt a happiness grow and expand in her bosom daily. She expected the wait to be a long one, till a letter, or some other manner of a reply, could come from Adam. Goodwife Phipps, of whom she had artfully contrived to get the rover’s address, had assured her of the very great number of weeks that elapsed between communications from William, in answer to the fond little flock of letters which she was constantly launching forth to the distant island across the sea. But when weeks became months, and time fled onward inexorably, with never a sign or a word in return for what she had written, she had many moments in which sad, vain regrets and confirmed despair took possession of her thoughts.
She was a resigned, patient girl, however, with her impulses curbed, for the sadness of the times, aside from her own little affairs, cast a gloom upon the colony which seemed to deepen rather than to promise ever to dissolve.
Her heart felt that the fifty years had passed many times over her head, when, after a longer time than Mrs. Phipps had mentioned as sufficient to bring even a delayed reply had passed, and nothing had come from Adam Rust. Garde watched for the ships to come, one by one, her hopes rising always as the white sails appeared, and then falling invariably, when no small messenger came to her hand. She lived from ship to ship, and sent her own little argosies of thought traveling wistfully across the seas, hoping they might come to harbor in Adam’s heart at last and so convey to him her yearning to hear just a word, or to see him just once again.
In the meantime, she could not endure the thought that either Henry Wainsworth or Piety Tootbaker should even so much as think of her as if they stood in Adam’s place. She therefore went to work with all her maidenly arts, to render such a situation impossible, in the case of either of the would-be suitors.
Thus she contrived to tell the faithful Henry that Prudence Soam was very fond of him indeed. For this she had a ground work of fact. She then conveyed to Prudence the intelligence that Henry was thinking upon her most fondly. This also began soon to be true enough, for Henry had been flattered, not a little, by the news he heard and did look at Prudence with a new and wondering interest. He likewise underwent a process of added intelligence in which he realized that Garde was not for him, howsoever much he might have dreamed, or would be able to dream in the future. It was remarkable, then, how soon the timid Henry and the diffident Prudence began to understand one another. Prudence, who had never had a sweetheart before, blossomed out with pretty little ways and with catching blushes and looks of brightness in her eyes that made her a revelation, not only to Henry but to Garde herself. And Henry became really happy and almost bold.
For Piety, alas, there was no Prudence available. Garde racked her brains for a plan to fit the case of Tootbaker’s state of mind. At length, when John Soam began to talk to his wife about the colony patriots again desiring that money which had never been used to send David Donner abroad, for the purpose of sending somebody else, in the spring, Garde knew exactly what to do.
She would manage to send Piety Tootbaker away to England. She went to work in this direction without delay. Her success was not a thing of sudden growth. It took no little time and persuasion to fire Piety with an ambition to serve his country by going so far from his comfortable home and his equally comfortable wooing, in which he believed he was making actual progress.
For their agent extraordinary, to plead their cause at the Court of King James, the colonists selected Increase Mather, a man at once astute, agreeable and afflicted with religious convictions which had every barnacle of superstition that ever lived, attached upon them. Piety Tootbaker was to go as his clerk and secretary.
The preparations for sending Mather abroad were conducted with no small degree of secrecy. Nevertheless Edward Randolph became aware of what was being contemplated, for his hypocritical Puritan agents were everywhere and in all affairs of state, or even of private business.
Permitting the scheme to ripen, Randolph waited until almost the moment for Mather’s sailing. He then swooped down upon the enterprise and attempted to arrest Mather, on the process of some sham prosecution. The patriots, incensed almost to the point of rebellion, played cunning for cunning. They delayed the departure of the ship, the captain of which was a staunch “American,” and then hustled Mather aboard under cover of darkness, and so sent him off on his mission.
For a week after Piety had gone, Garde felt such a sense of relief that she almost persuaded herself she was happy in her long wait for Adam, or for a word which might finally come. But the months again began their dreary procession, and her fear that Adam was lost to her forever deepened and laid its burden more and more upon her heart.
Yet there came a day when, a ship having arrived in the harbor, and her hope having greeted it wistfully, only to flutter back to her own patient bosom again, a letter did actually come to her hand.
It was not particularly neat; it looked as if it might have been opened before it came to her possession, but her heart bounded wildly when she saw it, and her fingers trembled as she broke it open to read its contents.
Then her joy vanished. The letter was from Piety Tootbaker. He announced, as if to break the intelligence to her frankly, that the voyage had made him so exceedingly ill that he had determined never to trust himself upon the billows again. He would therefore reside hereafter in England, which was “a pleasing countrie and much more merrie than Boston.”
“I shall never, never get an answer to my letter,” said Garde to herself, made sadder by the arrival of Piety’s letter, which proved that letters could actually come from over the sea. “He will never, never reply, I know.”
She was not far mistaken, for Adam had never received her letter. It had fallen into the hands of Edward Randolph, who had constituted himself censor of communications sent abroad from Massachusetts. Malignantly he was keeping those love-scented sheets, against the day of his vengeance.