Part 3 (1/2)
A deep murmur arose when the last person was landed, and it happened that Constance Hopkins was the last to step from the boat to the rock on which the landing was made, and to jump light-heartedly to the sand, amid the tall, dried weeds that waved on the sh.o.r.e.
”Praise G.o.d from whom all blessings flow,” said Elder Brewster, solemnly. The pilgrim band of colonists sang the doxology with bowed heads.
Three days later the sh.o.r.es of the harbour echoed to the ring of axes, the sound of hammers, as the first house was begun, the community house, destined to shelter many families and to store their goods.
”Merry Christmas, Father!” said Constance, coming up to her father in the cold of the early bleak December morning.
”S-s-s.h.!.+” warned her father, finger upon lip. ”Do you not know, my daughter, that the keeping of Christmas is abjured by us as savouring of popery, and that to wish one merry at yuletide would be reckoned as unrighteousness among us?”
”Ah, but Father, you do not think so! You do not go with all these opinions, and can it be wrong to be merry on the day that gladdened the world?” Constance pleaded.
”Not wrong, but praiseworthy, to be merry under our present condition, to my way of thinking,” said Stephen Hopkins, glancing around at the drab emptiness of land and sky and harbour beyond. ”Nay, child, I do not think it wrong to rejoice at Christmas, nor do I hold with the severity of most of our people, but because I believe that it will be good to begin anew in a land that is not oppressed, nor torn by king-made wars and sins, I have cast my lot, as has Myles Standish, who is of one mind with me, among this Plymouth band, and we must conform to custom. So wish me Merry Christmas, if you will, but let none hear you, and we will keep our heresies to ourselves.”
”Yet the first house in the New World is begun to-day!” laughed Constance. ”We are getting a Christmas gift.”
”A happy portent to begin our common home on the day when the Prince of Peace came to dwell on earth! Let us hope it will bring us peace,” said her father.
”Peace!” cried Constance, with a swift and terrified remembrance of the accusation which her stepmother had threatened bringing against herself and Giles.
CHAPTER V.
The New Year in the New Land.
The new year came in bringing with it a driving storm from the Atlantic. The h.o.a.ry pines threw up their rugged branches as if appealing to the heavens for mercy on the women and little children without shelter on the desolate coast. But the gray heavens did not relent; they poured snow and sleet down upon the infant colony, coating the creaking pines with ice that bent them low, and checked their intercession.
As fast as willing hands could work, taking it in continuous s.h.i.+fts by night as well as day, the community house went up. But the storm was upon the colonists before the shelter was ready for them, and even when the roof covered them, the cold laughed it to scorn, entering to wreak its will upon them.
Sickness seized one after another of the pilgrim band, men and women alike, and the little children fought croup and pneumonia, nursed by women hardly more fit for the task than were the little victims.
Rose Standish, already weakened by the suffering of the voyage, was among the first to be prostrated. She coughed ceaselessly though each violent breath wracked her frail body with pain. A bright colour burned in her cheeks, her beautiful eyes were clear and dilated, she smiled hopefully when her companions in exile and suffering spoke to her, and a.s.sured them that she was ”much, much better,” speaking pantingly, by an effort.
The discouragement with which she had looked upon the coast when the Mayflower arrived, gave place to hope in her. She spoke confidently of ”next spring,” of the ”house Captain Myles would build her,” of all that she should do ”when warm weather came.”
Constance, to whom she most confided her plans, often turned away to hide her tears. She knew that Doctor Fuller and the more experienced women thought that for this English rose there would be no springtime upon earth.
Constance had other troubles to bear as well as the hards.h.i.+ps and sorrows common to the sorely beset community. She seemed, to herself, hardly to be a young girl, so heavily weighted was she with the burden that she carried. She wondered to remember that if she had stayed in England she should have been laughing and singing like other girls of her age, skating now on the Sherbourne, if it were frozen over, as it well might be. Perhaps she might be dancing, if she were visiting her cousins in Warwicks.h.i.+re, her own birthplace, for the cousins were merry girls, and like all of Constance's mother's family, quite free from puritanical ideas, brought up in the English Church, so not debarred from the dance.
Constance had no heart to regret her loss of youthful happiness; she was so far aloof from it, so sad, that she could not rise to the level of feeling its charm. Dame Eliza Hopkins had carried out her threat, had accused Giles of the theft of his father's papers, and Constance of being party to his wrong-doing, if not actually its instigator.
It had only happened that morning; Constance heavily awaited developments. She jumped guiltily when she heard her father's voice speaking her name, and felt his hand upon her shoulder.
She faced him, white and shaken, to meet his troubled eyes intently fastened upon her.
”The storm is bad, Constance, but it is not warm within. Put on your coat and come with me. I must speak with you,” he said.
In silence Constance obeyed him. Pulling over her head a hood that, like a deep cowl, was attached to her coat, she followed her father into the storm, and walked beside him toward the marshy sh.o.r.e whither, without speaking to her, he strode.
Arrived at the sedgy ocean line he halted, and turned upon her.
”Constance,” he began, sternly, ”my wife tells me that valuable papers which I entrusted to her keeping have disappeared. She tells me further that she had dropped them--carelessly, as I have told her--into the hammock in which your little sister slept and that you saw them there, commenting upon it; that you soon called Giles to set right some slight matter in the hammock; and that shortly after you and he had left her, she discovered her loss. What do you know of this? Tell me all that you know, and tell me the truth.”
Constance's fear left her at this word. Throwing up her head she looked her father in the eyes, nearly on a level with her own as she stood upon a sandy hummock. ”It needs not telling me to speak the truth, Father. I am your daughter and my mother's daughter; it runs not in my blood to lie,” she said.
Stephen Hopkins touched her arm lightly, a look of relief upon his face.
”Thank you for that reminder, my girl,” he said. ”It is true, and Giles is of the same strain. Know you aught of this misfortune?”
”Nothing, Father,” said Constance. ”And because I know nothing whatever about it, in answering you I have told you all that I have to tell.”
”And Giles----” began her father, but stopped.
”Nor Giles,” Constance repeated, amending his beginning. ”Giles is headstrong, Father, and I fear for him often, but you know that he is honourable, truth-telling. Would your son steal from you?”
”But your stepmother says no one entered the cabin after you had left it before she discovered her loss,” insisted Stephen Hopkins. ”What am I to think? What do you think, Constance?”
”I think that there is an explanation we do not know. I think that my stepmother hates Giles and me, especially him, as he has the first claim to the inheritance that she would have for her own children. I think that she has seized this opportunity to poison you against us,” said Constance, with spirited daring. ”Oh, Father, dear, dear Father, do not let her do this thing!”
”Nay, child, you are unjust,” said her father, gently. ”I confess to Mistress Eliza's jealousy of you, and that there is not great love for you in her. But, Constance, do you love her, you or Giles? And that she is not so base as you suspect is shown by the fact that she has delayed until to-day to tell me of this loss, dreading, as she hath told me, to put you wrong in my eyes. Fie for shame, Constance, to suspect her of such outrageous wickedness, she who is, after all, a good woman, as she sees goodness.”
”Father, if the packet were lost through her carelessness, would you not blame her? Is it not likely that she would s.h.i.+eld herself at our cost, even if she would not be glad to lower us, as I am sure she would be?” persisted Constance.
”Well, well, this is idle talk!” Stephen Hopkins said, impatiently. ”The truth must be sifted out, and suspicions are wrong, as well as useless. One word before I go to Giles. Upon your sacred honour, Constantia Hopkins, and by your mother's memory, can you a.s.sure me that you know absolutely nothing of the loss of this packet of papers?”
”Upon my honour and by my mother's memory, I swear that I do not know so much as that the packet is lost, except as Mistress Hopkins says that it is,” said Constance. Then with a swift change of tone she begged: ”Oh, Father, Father, when you go to Giles, be careful, be kind, I pray you! Giles is unhappy. He is ill content under the injustice we both bear, but I with a girl's greater submission. He is ready to break all bounds and he will do so if he feels that you do not trust him, listen to his enemy's tales against him. Please, please, dear Father, be gentle with Giles. He loves you as well as I do, but where your distrust of me would kill me, because I love you, Giles's love for you will turn to bitterness, if you let him feel that you are half lost to him.”
”Nonsense, Constance,” said her father, though kindly, ”Giles is a boy and must be dealt with firmly. It will never do to coddle him, to give him his head. You are a girl, sensitive and easily wounded. A boy is another matter. I will not have him setting up his will against mine, nor opposing discipline for his good. It is for him to clear himself of what looks ill, not resent our seeing the looks of it.”
Constance almost wrung her hands.
”Oh, Father, Father, do not go to Giles in that way! Sorrow will come of it. Think how you would feel to be thus suspected! A boy is not less sensitive than a girl; I fear he is more sensitive in his honour than are we. Oh, I am but a girl, but I know that I am right about Giles. I think we are given to understand as no man can how to deal with a proud, sullen boy like Giles, because G.o.d means us to be the mothers of boys some day! Be kind to Giles, dear Father; let him see that you trust him, as indeed, indeed you may!”
”Let us go back out of the storm to such shelter as we have, Constance,” said Stephen Hopkins, smiling with masculine toleration for a foolish girl. ”I have accepted your solemn a.s.surance that you are ignorant of this theft, if theft it be. Be satisfied that I have done this, and leave me to deal with my son as I see fit. I will not be unjust to him, but he must meet me respectfully, submissively, and answer to the evidence against him. I have not been pleased of late with Giles's ill-concealed resistance.”
This time Constance did wring her hands, as she followed her father, close behind him. She attempted no further remonstrance, knowing that to do so would be not only to harm Giles's cause, but to arouse her father's quick anger against herself. But as she walked with bent head through the cutting, beating storm, she wondered why Giles should not be resistant to his life, and her heart ached with pitying apprehension for her brother.
All that long day of darkening storm and anxiety Constance did not see Giles. That signified nothing, however, for Giles was at work with the men making winter preparations which could not be deferred, albeit the winter was already upon them, while Constance was occupied with the nursing for which the daily increase of sickness made more hands required than were able to perform it.
Humility Cooper was dangerously ill, burning with fever, struggling for breath. Constance was fond of the little maid who seemed so childish beside her, and gladly volunteered to go again into the storm to fetch her the fresh water for which she implored.
At the well which had been dug, and over which a pump from the s.h.i.+p had been placed and made effective, Constance came upon Giles, marching up and down impatiently, and with him was John Billington, his chosen comrade, the most unruly of all the younger pilgrims.
”Well, at last, Con!” exclaimed Giles. ”I've been here above an hour. I thought to meet you here. What has kept you so long?”