Part 15 (2/2)
”Damaris, Damaris, rain!” she cried.
And the ”little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand,” was rising on the horizon.
Before bedtime the sky was overcast, and the blessed, the prayed-for rain began to fall. Without wind or lightning, quietly it fell, as if the angels of G.o.d were sent to open the phials of the delicious wetness and pour it steadily upon Plymouth. As the night went on the rain increased, one of the soft, steady, soaking rains that penetrate to the depths of the sun-baked earth, find the withered rootlets, and heal and revivify.
Plymouth wakened to an earth refreshed and moistened by a downpour so steady, so generous, so calm that no rain could have seemed more like a direct visitation of Heaven's mercy than this, which the reverent and awe-stricken colony, even to the doubting Indians, so received. For by it Plymouth was saved.
It was two weeks later that Doctor Fuller came hastily to Stephen Hopkins's door.
”Friends,” he said, with trembling voice, ”the Anne is coming up! Mistress Fuller and my child are aboard, as we have so often reminded one another. Constance, you promised to go with me to welcome this fateful s.h.i.+p.”
”Have I time to make a little, a very small toilette, doctor mine?” cried Constance, excitedly. ”I want to look my prettiest to greet Mistress Fuller, and to tell her what I--what we all owe to you.”
”You have a full half hour, yet it is a pleasure to watch the s.h.i.+p approach. Hasten, then, vain little Eve of this desolate First Abiding Place!” the doctor gave her permission.
Constance ran away and began to dress with her heart beating fast.
”I wonder why the Anne means so much to me, as if she were the greatest event of all my days here?” she thought.
Her simple white gown slipped over her head and into place and out of its thin, soft folds her little throat rose like a calla, and her face, all flushed, like a wild rose.
She pinned a lace neckerchief over her breast, and laid its ruffles into place with fluttering fingers, catching it with a delicate hoop of pearls that had been her mother's. For once she decided against her Puritan cap, binding her radiant hair with fillets of narrow blue velvet ribbon, around and over which its little tendrils rose, wilful and resisting its shackles.
On her hands she drew long mitts of white lace, and she slipped her feet into white shoes, which had also once been worn by her mother in far-away days when she danced the May dances in Warwicks.h.i.+re.
Constance's gla.s.s was too small, too high-hung, to give her the effect of her complete figure, but it showed her the face that scanned it, and what it showed her flushed that lovely face with innocent joy in its loveliness, and completed its perfection.
She got the full effect of her appearance in the eyes of the four men in the colony whom, till this day, she had loved best, her father, Giles, Doctor Fuller, and Myles Standish, as she came down the winding stairway to them.
They all uttered an involuntary exclamation, and took a step toward her.
Her father took her hand and tucked it into his own.
”You are attired like a bride, my wild rose,” he said. ”Who are you going to meet?”
”Who knows!” cried Constance, gaily, with unconscious prophecy. ”Mistress Fuller, but who can say whom else beside?”
The Anne came up with wide-spread canvas, free of the gentle easterly breeze. Her coming marked the end of the hardest days of Plymouth colony; she was bringing it much that it needed, some sixty colonists; the wives and children of many who had borne the brunt of the beginning and had come on the Mayflower; new colonists, some among Plymouth's best, some too bad to be allowed to stay, and stores and articles of trade abundantly.
As the coming of the Anne marked the close of Plymouth's worst days, so it meant to many who were already there the dawn of a new existence.
Doctor Fuller took into his arms his beloved wife and his child, with grateful tears running down his face.
He turned to present Mistress Fuller to Constance, but found, instead, Captain Myles Standish watching with a smile at once tender, melancholy, and glad another meeting. A young man, tall, browned, gallant, and fearless in bearing, with honest eyes and a kindly smile, had come off the Anne and had stood a moment looking around him. His eyes fell upon Constance Hopkins on her father's arm, her lips parted, her eyes dilated, her cheeks flushed, a figure so exquisite that he fell back in thrilled wonder. Never again could he see another face, so completely were his eyes and heart filled by this first sight of Constance Hopkins, unconsciously waiting for him, her husband-to-be, upon the sh.o.r.e of the New World.
Damaris was clinging to her hand; Giles and her step-mother were watching her with loving pride; it was easy to see that all those who had come ash.o.r.e from the Anne were admiring this slender blossom of Plymouth.
But the young man went toward her, almost without knowing that he did so, drawn to her irresistibly, and Constance looked toward him, and saw him for the first time, her pulses answering the look in his eyes.
Myles Standish joined them; he had learned the young man's name.
”Welcome, Nicholas Snowe, to Plymouth,” he said. ”We have borne much, but we have won our fight; we have founded our kingdom. Nicholas Snowe, this is a Plymouth maid, Constance Hopkins.”
”I am glad you are come,” said Constance; her voice was low and the hand that she extended trembled slightly.
”I, too, am glad that you are here, Nicholas Snowe,” added Stephen Hopkins. ”Yes, this is Constance Hopkins, a Plymouth maid, and my dearest la.s.s.”
THE END.
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