“I verily believe he would have set his own men to putting out the fire had they not been commanded to go forward at once. I was made bold by seeing that there was one kind heart amongst them and called after, ‘Never fear, sir, we will care for our good Master’s property,’ and he turned and waved his hat to me as he galloped away. I went up to look at the prisoners when they were marched into Hopewell next day, but he was not with them. I thank Heaven that he was the single one that escaped.”
“You did well,” said Stephen. “I hear from all sides how much you and your comrades saved.”
“There is not a house in Hopewell,” replied the man, “that has not within it somewhat that belongs to you, linen, portraits, silver—all that we could carry we bore away. I sought to save your great Bible which lay just inside the door, but it was all in flames when I seized it. I had only a glimpse of an open page and upon it a black figure with outstretched arms, and then the whole crumbled to ashes.”
“So there is a fitting end to Jeremiah Macrae,” said Stephen, “one that would have pleased the old Puritans most mightily. Now we need never again think of that evil prophecy of his.”
“I saved something further,” went on the man, “for at my house I have—”
“Hush,” whispered Stephen, as Clotilde came up the path toward the cottage door, her head drooping, her eyes upon the ground. “We will talk of that matter no more. The little maid grieves so sorely over the loss of the house and garden that I like not to speak of it before her. What you have you must keep for a space, since here we have no room for aught beside our immediate needs. So do you guard my rescued property until I ask for it.”
So the old man went away, shaking his head sadly over the listless greeting that Clotilde bestowed upon him when they met at the door. It was true indeed that she thought of little else but Master Sheffield’s loss and grieved so, that all the people of Hopewell who knew and loved her looked after her in despair when she passed by.
“The maid is fair sick with her sorrow,” they said to each other. “One would think she were of Master Simon’s own blood, so stricken is she.”
Although Clotilde was not of Master Simon’s race and kindred, she loved his memory as dearly as though she were. There was not one story of the staunch old Puritan and his brave children and grandchildren that she had not heard Stephen tell a dozen times. And now to see perish that precious work of Master Simon’s own hands, the garden that had bloomed through four generations—it was seemingly a greater grief than she could bear. Gone was the bed of blazing tulips that every year renewed the memory of that first coming of the Indian ambassadors, gone were the rows of herbs that had soothed and healed so many ills, burned to a few blackened twigs was the huge hawthorn bush that Master Simon had grown from a tiny slip brought from England. Roses, hollyhocks, lilies, fair maids of France, all had their stories and all were dead. More than once Clotilde had slipped out, in the dusk of the autumn twilight, laid her cheek against the charred bark of the linden tree and sobbed out her grief alone.
“It was all the fault of that wicked Scotch minister,” she burst out one day to Stephen. “That his prophecy has been fulfilled and the garden destroyed and even his likeness burned, makes me think that he was, as people used to say, in league with the Devil!”