Part 12 (2/2)
The Well-Conned Lesson.
Giles took a new place in Plymouth after his emba.s.sy to the Narragansetts. No longer a boy among his fellow pilgrims, he fulfilled well and busily the offices that were his as one of the younger, yet mature men.
He was given the discipline of the squadron, that, pursuant to Captain Standish's plan for guarding the settlement, was the largest and controlled the most important gate of the stockade which was rapidly put up around the boundary of Plymouth after the defiance of the Narragansetts. Though that had come to naught, it had warned the colonists that danger might arise at an unforeseen moment.
There was scarcity of provisions for the winter, the thirty-five dest.i.tute persons left the colony by the Fortune being a heavy additional drain upon its supplies. Everyone was put upon half rations, and it devolved upon Giles and John Alden to apportion each family's share. It was hard to subsist through the bitter weather upon half of what would, at best, have been a slender nourishment, yet the Plymouth people faced the outlook patiently, uncomplainingly, and Giles, naturally hot-headed, impatient, got more benefit than he gave when he handed out the rations and saw the quiet heroism of their acceptance.
He grew to be a silent Giles, falling into the habit of thoughtfulness, with scant talk, that was the prevailing manner of the Plymouth men. Between his father and himself there was friendliness, the former opposition between them, mutual annoyance, and irritation, were gone. Yet there they halted, not resuming the intimacy of Giles's childhood days. It was as if there were a reserve, rather of embarra.s.sment than of lack of love; as if something were needed to jostle them into closer intercourse.
Constance saw this, and waited, convinced that it would come, glad in the perfect confidence that she felt existed between them.
She was a busy Constance in these days. The warmth of September held through that November, brooding, slumberous, quiet in the suns.h.i.+ne that warmed like wine.
Constance and her stepmother cut and strung the few vegetables which they had, and hung them in the sunny corner of the empty attic room.
They spread out corn and pumpkins upon the floor, instructing the willing Lady Fair to see to it that mice did not steal them.
Dame Eliza, also, had grown comparatively silent. Her long tirades were wanting; she showed no softening toward Constance, yet she let her alone. Constance thought that something was on her stepmother's mind, but she did not try to discover what--glad of the new sparing of her sharp tongue, having no expectation of anything better than this from her.
Damaris had been sent with the other children to be instructed in the morning by Mrs. Brewster in sampler working and knitting; by her husband in the Westminster catechism, and the hornbook.
In the afternoon Damaris was allowed to play quietly at keeping house, with Love Brewster, who was a quiet child and liked better to play at being a pilgrim, and making a house with Damaris, than to share in the boys' games.
”Where do you go, lambkin?” Constance asked her. ”For we must know where to find you, nor must it be far from the house.”
”It is just down by that little patch, Connie; it's as nice as it can be, and it is the safest place in Plymouth, I'm sure,” Damaris a.s.sured her earnestly. ”You see there is a woods, and a hollow, and a big, big, great tree, and its roots go all out, every way, and we live in them, because they are rooms already; don't you see? And it's nice and damp--but you don't get your feet wet!” Damaris antic.i.p.ated the objection which she saw in Constance's eye. ”It's only--only--soft, gentle damp; not wetness, and moss grows there, as green as green can be, and feathery! And on the tree are nice little yellow plates, with brown edges! Growing on it! And we play they are our best plates that we don't use every day, because they are soft-like, and we didn't care to touch them when we did it. But they make the prettiest best plates in the cupboard, for they grow, in rows, with their edges over the next one, just the way you set up our plates in the corner cupboard. So please don't think it isn't a nice place, Constance, because it is, and I'd feel terribly afflicted, and cast down, and as nothing, if I couldn't go there with Love.”
Constance smiled at the child's quoting of the phrases which she had heard in the long sermons that Elder Brewster read, or delivered to them twice on Sunday, there being no minister yet come to Plymouth.
”You little echo!” Constance cried. ”It surely would be a matter to move one's pity if you suffered so deeply as that in the loss of your playground! Well, dear, till the warmth breaks up I suppose you may keep your house with Love, but promise to leave it if you feel chilly there. We must trust you so far. Art going there now?”
”Yes, dear Constance. You have a heart of compa.s.sion and I love you with all of mine,” said Damaris, expressing herself again like a little Puritan, but hugging her sister with the natural heartiness of a loving child.
Then she ran away, and Constance, taking her capacious darning bag on her arm, went to bear Priscilla Alden company at her mending, as she often did when no work about the house detained her.
Giles came running down the road when the afternoon had half gone, his face white. ”Con, come home!” he cried, bursting open the door. ”Hasten! Damaris is strangely ill.”
Constance sprang up, throwing her work in all directions, and Priscilla sprang up with her. Without stopping to pick up a thread, the two girls went with Giles.
”I don't know what it is,” Giles said, in reply to Constance's questions. ”Love Brewster came running to Dame Hopkins, crying that Damaris was sick and strange. She followed him to the children's playground, and carried the child home. She is like to die; convulsions and every sign of poison she has, but what it is, what to do, no one knows. The women are there, but Doctor Fuller, as you know, is gone to a squaw who is suffering sore, and we could not bring him, even if we knew where he was, till it was too late. They have done all that they can recall for such seizures, but the child grows worse.”
”Oh, Giles!” groaned Constance. ”She hath eaten poison. What has Doctor Fuller told me of these things? If only I can remember! All I can think of is that he hath said different poisons require different treatment. Oh, Giles, Giles!”
”Steady, Sister; it may be that you can help,” said Giles. ”It had not occurred to any one how much the doctor had told you of his methods. Perhaps Love will know what Damaris touched.”
”There is Love, sitting crouched in the corner of the garden plot, his head on his knees, poor little Love!”
Constance broke into a run and knelt beside the little boy, who did not look up as she put her arms around him.
”Love, Love, dear child, if you can tell me what Damaris ate perhaps G.o.d will help me cure her,” she said. ”Look up, and be brave and help me. Did you see Damaris eat anything that you did not eat with her?”
”Little things that grow around the big tree where it is wetter, we picked for our furniture,” Love said at once. ”Damaris said you cooked them and they were good. So then she said we would play some of them was furniture, and some of them was our dinner. And I didn't eat them, for they were like thin leather, only soft, and I felt of them, and couldn't eat them. But Damaris did eat them.”
”Toadstools!” cried Constance with a gasp. ”Toadstools, Love! Did they look like little tables? And did Damaris call them mushrooms?”
”Yes, like little tables,” Love nodded his head hard. ”All full underneath with soft crimped----”
But Constance waited for no more. With a cry she was on her feet and running like the wind, calling back over her shoulder to Giles: ”I'll come quick! I know! I know! Tell Father I know!”
”She hath gone to Doctor Fuller's house,” said Priscilla, watching Constance's flying figure, her hair unbound and streaming like a burnished banner behind her as she ran to get her weapon to fight with Death. ”No girl ever ran as she can. Come, Giles; obey her. Tell your father and Mistress Hopkins that mayhap Constance can save the child.”
They turned toward the house, and Constance sped on.
”Nightshade! The belladonna!” she was saying to herself as she ran. ”I know the phial; I know its place. O, G.o.d, give me time, and give me wit, and do Thou the rest!” Past power to explain, she swept aside with a vehement arm the woman who found needed shelter for herself in Doctor Fuller's house, and kept it for him till his wife should come to Plymouth.
Into the crude laboratory and pharmacy--in which the doctor had allowed her to work with him, of the contents of which he had taught her so much for an emergency that she had little dreamed would so closely affect herself when it came--Constance flew, and turned to the shelf where stood, in their dark phials, the few poisons which the doctor kept ready to do beneficent work for him.
”Belladonna, belladonna, the beautiful lady,” Constance murmured, in the curious way that minds have of seizing words and dwelling on them with surface insistence, while the actual mind is intensely working on a vital matter.
She took down the wrong phial first, and set it back impatiently.
”There should be none other like belladonna,” she said aloud, and took down the phial she sought. To be sure that she was right, though it was labelled in the doctor's almost illegible small writing, she withdrew the cork. She knew the sickening odour of the nightshade which she had helped distil, an odour that dimly recalled a tobacco that had come to her father in England in her childhood from some Spanish colony, as she had been told, and also a wine that her stepmother made from wild berries.
Constance shuddered as she replaced the cork.
”It sickens me, but if only it will restore little Damaris!” she thought.
Holding the phial tight Constance hastened away, and, her breath still coming painfully, she broke into her swift race homeward, diminis.h.i.+ng nothing of her speed in coming, her great purpose conquering the pain that oppressed her labouring breast.
When she reached her home her father was watching for her in the doorway. He took her hands in both of his without a word, covering the phial which she clasped, and looking at her questioningly.
”I hope so; oh, I hope so, Father!” she said. ”The doctor told me.”
Stephen Hopkins led her into the house; Dame Eliza met her within.
”Constance? Connie?” Thus Mistress Hopkins implored her to do her best, and to allow her to hope.
”Yes, yes, Mother,” Constance replied to the prayer, and neither noted that they spoke to each other by names that they had never used before.
The first glimpse that Constance had of Damaris on the bed sent all the blood back against her heart with a pang that made her feel faint. It did not seem possible that she was in time, even should her knowledge be correct.
The child lay rigid as Constance's eyes fell on her; her lips and cheeks were ghastly, her long hair heightening the awful effect of her deathly colour. Frequent convulsions shook her body, her struggling breathing alone broke the stillness of the room.
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