Stephen Sheffield stepped out of the coach and, leaning on her arm, made his way, without speaking, through the gate and across what had once been the garden. Only a tall stone chimney, standing upright in the midst of a heap of smoking embers, showed where the great white house had stood. The fire that had consumed it had swept across the lawns, burning flowers and hedges and the dry, frost-killed grass. Of Master Simon’s garden there was nothing left save the littered gravel paths, the blackened linden tree and the stone-based sundial upon which the watery autumn sunlight was faintly marking the hour of noon.
CHAPTER XIV
COUSIN BETSEY ANNE
Every door in Hopewell flew open wide to offer shelter to Master Sheffield now that he was homeless, but it was Samuel Skerry’s little cottage that, in the end, became his abode. It had been rebuilt three years before, for use when the great house was over-filled with guests, and it was now warm, cosy and comfortable, although a trifle narrow in its limits.
“A man had best abide under his own roof,” Stephen had said when Mother Jeanne pointed out to him the discomforts of living through the winter in so small a place. So there they dwelt, Stephen, Clotilde, Mère Jeanne and black Jason, while the other servants were lodged in the village.
Little by little, they learned the story of how the house and garden had been destroyed. It was plain that the soldiers had acted upon well-understood orders for they had stopped but a few moments, had given no time to robbery or pillage but, once convinced that Stephen was not there, had set fire to the house and stayed only to see that it was well ablaze. They had seemed to know, also, that the garden was the love and pride of its owner, for they had piled straw among the flowerbeds and about the hedges and trees, had laid the torch to this inflammable fuel and then had marched on again, leaving the whole place a mass of drifting smoke and evil, licking flames. Only the memory of Stephen’s stern command as he drove through the town had kept the people of Hopewell from falling upon the destroyers and giving them battle there in the streets.
“As it was, we could only turn our energy to the saving of your gear,” said one of the narrators, a lean old man who lived, in abject poverty, at the outskirts of the village and who, by Stephen’s charity alone, was kept from starving. “We rescued what we could, and with a right good will, but we would rather have been dealing out death to those rascally heathen-speaking soldiers of King George.”
“And if you had,” commented Stephen, “there would have been fifty houses burned instead of one, and many a goodwife to-day mourning the loss of her husband or her son, rather than one man grieving for his house and garden.”
“I came so quickly when I saw the smoke,” resumed the old fellow, “that not all of the soldiers were yet gone. One company, it seemed, had marched behind the rest and only came up when the house was all ablaze. The young officer who led them seemed sorely angered at what the Hessians had done; I heard him say hotly to his superior in command,
“‘Such wanton destruction is a sin and a shame, sir.’