“We were but three months married,” she cried to Clotilde, who had come to see her, but who was not allowed to enter her cottage door. “Your husband took my man from me and they will never come back. You were a wicked woman to let him do so; why did you not keep him safe at home?”
“Were you able to keep your husband when he thought that he must go?” Clotilde asked, and Agnes shook her head. “Then why think you that I could keep mine either, or that I was less unhappy than you at the thought of his going? Try to have courage and think of the day when they come back.”
“That will never be!” sobbed the other, and she ran inside, slamming the door when her visitor would have followed to comfort her.
The days passed so slowly that it did, indeed, seem at times as though the period of waiting would never have an end.
“Nine—ten—eleven months we may be gone,” Gerald had said, “and should the time lengthen to a year you are not to be afraid.”
But the year passed, Spring came again and filled Master Simon’s garden with flowers, yet its winds blew no great merchant ship into the harbour. The roses bloomed and died, the midsummer crickets and katydids sang in the long grass, the autumn flowers opened and the maples and birches in the forest began to show their scarlet and yellow.
“He will come, he will come!” Clotilde would cry fiercely to herself every day, but it had reached a point when she alone in all of Hopewell believed it. A foreign sailor coming in on an English vessel brought a tale of how, all the coast of Africa, a ship answering all descriptions of the Mistress Margeret had been seen, drifting idly with all sail set and apparently no one on board.
“Just a moment we saw her in the fog,” he said, “for the mist lifted and there she was like a picture, every sail hoisted and never a living soul in sight upon her decks. I doubt not she has gone to the bottom long before now.”
Yet still Clotilde went on hoping. Agnes Twitchell wore black and openly mourned her husband as dead. She screamed after Clotilde upon the street one day and, when people sought to hush her, only cried out the louder.
“Her husband murdered my good man,” she shrieked, frantic in her grief. “Shall I not then cry out to reproach her?”