The minister groaned heavily, but did not speak.
"He had left me insensible—left England, and gone no one would tell me where. My father was dumb regarding him. If he wrote letters, they never reached me."
"But he wrote them. As God liveth, William Phipps wrote to his young wife again and again, but received no answer. He told me so with his own lips," cried the minister. "It was for her he toiled and thought ever on the broad ocean, and while wresting treasures from the deep where they had been engulfed for centuries. He went back to England, possessed of enormous wealth, and received a title at the king's hand for the wonderful energy with which he had dragged silver and gold from the bosom of the ocean, discovering their hiding-place almost by a miracle. But all that he had done turned to dust in his hands, for when he went to that proud old man and demanded his wife, the stern father answered that she was dead."
"Did he mourn her, Samuel Parris? tell me, truly, did William Phipps mourn the death of his wife, or had he learned to live without her?"
Parris looked up, with rebuking fire in his eyes.
"Woman, thou knowest that he loved thee, even to human sinfulness. When William Phipps came back to this country, broken-hearted and alone, he was but the shadow of the brave youth whose hand I joined with thine that fatal night."
"Forgive me," pleaded Barbara, with plaintive humility. "I loved him, and am but a weak woman. Think how hard it was to yearn so for one word of comfort, and never dare ask it."
"Unhappy woman! thine has been a hard lot," cried the minister, clasping both her hands in his, and weeping over them like a child.
"Tell me again, kind old man—for I am so near death that it cannot harm me to know—did he in truth mourn my loss?"
"Poor martyr! he has never ceased to grieve over the ruin of his love."