In spite of her good share in Miles’ happiness, the world seemed now very empty and forlorn to Clotilde, for Mère Jeanne had slipped away during the dark, stormy days of the winter and had left her adopted child to face life all alone. Only Stephen’s last request, “not to disappoint Master Simon” availed to keep up her failing courage. She had a new task before her this Spring, one to which she could turn unhindered at last, since starvation no longer threatened the poor of Hopewell. And so, with a heavy heart, she bent her energies to the replanting of Master Simon’s garden.
“But it will not be his garden now,” she reflected drearily. “It will be a place like any other, since I who plant it am not even one of his own children. All that belonged to him has perished utterly.”
When the place was ready, however, when the old beds had been dug and the former lawns sown with grass again, she bethought her of at least one flower that she could plant and know it was still Master Simon’s. Up on the forest hillside was that wonderful group of daffodils, set out by his hand and waiting all these years to return to the garden whence they came. With old Jason beside her, she toiled through the muddy lanes and up through the wood, where buds were bursting on the trees and Mayflowers were opening under the dry leaves. There she found what she sought, the dear yellow flowers, flinging their gold down the slope like long drifts of Spring sunshine. Two great basketfuls they brought home, and set the sturdy plants in a long row by the fence where daffodils had always grown since the first year that the Colony was settled.
And then there began a miracle, so it seemed, a wonder wrought only by simple love and friendliness, but a miracle just the same. She was lingering over the task of putting the last clump of daffodils in place when through the gate came young Giles Thurston, twelve-year-old brother to the good soldier David. To his house more than to any other she had gone, during the years of want, and had given help when otherwise starvation would have come very close.
“Please, Mistress,” said Giles, laying upon the ground a great awkward bundle that he had been carrying in both arms, “I heard that you were planting your garden and I have been wishing so much that I might bring you something to grow there. Our own garden is bare and planted with turnips and cabbages of which you surely have enough already, but up on the hill is a tumble-down empty cottage with a rose vine growing all over its broken walls. My mother says that an old woman named Goody Parsons used to dwell there a long, long time ago and that the rose once grew in Master Simon’s garden. See, I have brought you a root of it. Mother put a slip into the ground the very first Spring after your garden was burned. And here, too, is a part of Goody Parsons’ hawthorn bush that I think must also have come from Master Simon.”
Poor old Goody Parsons, dead so many years and gone to that Heaven that was to be like Hertfordshire, how she would have rejoiced to know that her memory still lived and had offered back the gift that Master Simon had given.
Most joyfully did Clotilde accept what the boy had brought and together they went quickly to find the very place where the former plants had grown. They set the rose below the easement window of the drawing-room and the hawthorn bush close to the edge of the Queen’s garden.
“Now,” exclaimed Clotilde, “though all the rest be only mine, I can feel that part of the garden at least still belongs to those who planted it.”
Giles Thurston was not the only one, however, who had an offering to bring. Nearly every day some woman would present her with a bag of seeds, saying:
“These are of the pink and white hollyhocks that have flourished in our dooryard ever since Mistress Margeret Bardwell gave my grandmother the first plants.”