WHEN the intelligence of the almost unparalleled crime spread with terror and awe in its wake through Boston, in the morning, Garde heard it like a knell—a fatality almost to have been expected, when she and Adam had been at last so happy. She did not faint. Not even a moan escaped her lips. She turned white and remained white.
“Grandther,” she said to the old man who owed his restoration to health and almost complete soundness of mind to her ministrations, “I am betrothed to this friend of our new Governor’s. I shall go to attend him.”
She left her grandfather staring at her in wonder, and with only her shawl on her head, she went to the “fair brick house” which William Phipps had built for his wife at the corner of Salem and Charter streets in the town.
“I am betrothed to Adam Rust,” she repeated, simply. “I have come to attend him.”
As if poor Garde had not already, in six years of waiting and hoping and vain regrets, sufficiently suffered for a moment’s lack of faith in her lover, the anguish now came upon her in a flood tide. Adam no sooner recovered a heart-beat strong enough to give promise of renewed steadiness, than he lapsed from his unconscious condition into one of delirium.
Had Garde been wholly in ignorance of his past and his life of many tragedies, she would have been doomed to learn of all of it now. He lived it all over, a hundred times, and told of it, brokenly, excitedly, at times with sallies of witty sentences, but for the most part in the sighs with which his life had filled his heart to overflowing, but to which he had never before given utterance.
She knew now what the boy had suffered when King Philip, the Sachem of the Wampanoags, was slain, with the people of his nation. She felt the pangs he had felt when, on first returning to Boston, he had believed himself supplanted in Garde’s affections by his friend Henry Wainsworth. She heard him croon to the little Narragansett child, as he limped again through the forest. And then she sounded the depths of a man’s despair when the whole world and the woman he loves drive him forth, abased.
Yet much as she suffered with him in this long rehearsal of his heartaches, there was still one little consolation to her soul.
The one name only that he spoke, and spoke again and again, in murmurs of love and in heart-cries of agony, was—Garde.
Having acquired her skill in the harsh school where her grandfather’s illness had been the master, Garde could almost have rejoiced in this reparation she was making to Adam for what she had contributed to his pangs in the past, had it not been that his hovering so at the edge of death frightened all other emotions than alarm from her breast. Nevertheless she believed he would live. He could not die, she insisted to herself, while she gave him a love so vast and so sustaining.
This feeling was fairly an instinct. And the truth in which it was grounded came struggling to the fore, one morning, when Adam opened his eyes, after his first refreshing sleep, and laughed at her gayly, if a little weakly, to see her there, bending down above him.
“John Rosella,” he said, “I have been dreaming of you—the sweetest boy that ever lived.”
“Oh, Adam,” said Garde, suddenly crimsoning. “Oh—now you—you mustn’t talk. You must go back to sleep at once.”
Adam was drowsy, despite himself. “I remember—every word—we said,” he murmured, “and every—look of your sweet—sweet face.” And then he fell again into peaceful slumber.
Arrived so far as this toward recovery, he made rapid progress. Healthy and wholesome as he was, sound, from habits of clean, right living, he mended almost too fast, according to Garde’s ideas of convalescence, for she feared he would rise in revolt, over soon, and do himself an injury by abandoning care and comfort before she could pronounce him quite himself.
In reality there had been but little more than his loss of blood to contend with, save that his state of mind had engendered a fever, as a result of all he had undergone, so that when this latter was allayed and the wound in his neck was healing with astonishing rapidity, his strength came back to his muscles and limbs by leaps and bounds. Therefore, despite her solicitude, Garde was soon happy to see him again on his feet and making his way about the house, his face a little wan and white, but the twinkle in his eye as merry as the light in a jewel.
He could furnish no accurate or reliable information as to whom his murderous assailants had been. He could only conjecture that Randolph had been at the bottom of the affair, from motives of vengeance. This was the truth. But the disappearance of Randolph from Boston was reckoned so variously, as having taken place anywhere from two days to three years before, that nothing could be reliably determined.
Moreover, it sufficed for Adam and Garde that they were here, in the land of the living, together, and though it made the rover feel sad to think of the loss of his last beef-eater, the faithful old Halberd.