Or a man would stop at the gate to say:
“I have carried hither a clump of sweet-william that perhaps you may like to have. It is a matter of pride with us that Master Simon himself gave the first plants to one of our family. They say he brought them from England.”
So it went on, Stephen’s flowers, Alisoun’s, Margeret’s and Master Simon’s all were to be found growing somewhere, so many had been the gifts and so grateful the friends who had received them. Fraxinella, wallflowers, peonies and fair maids of France, all were there to grow anew in memory of the brave old Puritan and his children. Clotilde dropped a few tears as she set out the fair maids of France. What a long, long time it was since Stephen had found her sitting beside the bed to sing to them, how swift the years had been and how happy until so little a time ago!
The most wonderful gift of all came at the very end of the replanting. It was brought by the minister of Hopewell, who since the very beginning of the war had been away and had only just now come home again. What he gave her was a little bag of gold and an old, torn yellow letter.
“These were left in my hands,” he explained to Clotilde, “by the pastor before me, who had received them in turn from the man who came before him. It was only as I was on my way home that I heard full news of the burning of the garden and realised that the assistant that I had left here did not know that the letter had to do with just such a disaster. Indeed, so old is the trust that I had well-nigh forgotten it myself.”
Clotilde, standing by the open window in Stephen’s study, slowly opened the worn, yellow missive. It bore the crabbed signature of Samuel Skerry and contained these words:
“If ever Simon Radpath’s garden be destroyed, I know now that it will not be God’s judgment, as Jeremiah Macrae has sought to make us think, but that it will be the work of evil alone. Therefore, in the hands of the minister of Hopewell I am leaving this money, the half of all I have, so that if that living memorial to Master Simon should come to harm, this will help to build it up again.
“I might have known that I could not hate him forever, might have realised, when in a fit of jealous rage I sought to destroy his garden that it was of no use. A garden such as his, that is planted in the hearts of his fellow men, can never perish. As I have sat at my cobbler’s bench through all these years, toiling for my living in an alien land, I have fought against the thought of Master Simon and of all the good he did to me and to others, but I have fought in vain. The memory grew and grew within my heart, choking out my evil and bitter thoughts, just as his clumps of blossoming plants used to grow until there was no room left for weeds. So I have come back to do what justice I can at last ere I die, and to struggle through the snow to look at his gravestone where he sleeps up yonder on the hillside. I would that I had earned, like him, such peaceful, true repose.”
The tears rained down Clotilde’s cheeks as she refolded the letter. So that was why Samuel Skerry, old and broken as he was, had travelled all the way from Holland to New England, spurred by his longing to make amends for the wrong that he had done.
The minister emptied the contents of the bag upon the table.