“But you did not wish to go before,” Gerald answered.
“Ay, that I know,” replied the sailor, “and I curse my folly now and would give both my eyes to have been among your crew. For the news of your safe return is running like wildfire through the country, it will be all over New England in another day, while here in Hopewell there are already a hundred seafaring men ready for a new voyage. And as for the merchants, there is not one within fifty miles, which is as far as the tale has gone as yet, but is looking through his stock and setting aside the goods that he is going to venture in the new East India trade.”
“But there is only one ship that has gone and come back again,” said Gerald. “Has that been sufficient to convince you all?”
“It is enough,” returned the man; “that has convinced us along with an old saying that, they tell us, was first current in Master Simon’s time and has now begun to go round again. It is that ‘Wherever a Radpath goes, there it is no bad thing to follow!’”
CONCLUSION
It is many and many a long year now since Gerald and Clotilde walked together down the high-hedged paths, but Master Simon’s garden still blooms green and fair upon the hillside. Ships coming past the rocky headlands of the harbour steer, by night, for the light streaming from that little round window of the great brick mansion, for that is an older landmark than the tall white lighthouse near the entrance of the bay. They are not now the mighty East India merchantmen that luff and tack in the narrow channel, for they, with their tall masts and towering white sails have vanished from the seas forever. Along the shore, nevertheless, you can still see the endless wharves and great, empty warehouses clinging to their rotting piles and almost slipping into the lazy, lapping tide. They manage, somehow, still to stand and tell all people who go by how great was once the trade that brought prosperity back to Hopewell. If you peep within you will see only bare, vacant floors and a long dusty sunbeam or two, dropping from rifts in the sagging roof, but you will sniff a vague scent of fruit and spices as a reminder of the days of the clipper ships of Hopewell, laden with the world’s goods and following Gerald Radpath’s long sea-road to China.
Although those wharves are idle and the warehouses empty, you need not think, however, that the products of America stop at home. No, they are carried by different ships, swift steel vessels that drop long trails of smoke behind them as they speed upon their way, they go out through different harbours, but, just the same, New England goods and New England men find their way to the very ends of the world.
The hum of the spinning-wheel and the creak of the loom that once you could hear in the warm noontide, through the open cottage doors, has increased now a thousand-fold, for rows of great brick factories crown the hill and, far out to sea, the fishermen can see, hanging over Hopewell, the cloud of smoke from hundreds of spouting chimneys. The tiny log but where Goody Parsons planted her rose, the cottage where Samuel Skerry plied his trade, even the house with its white-painted doorway where Miles Atherton used to live, have all vanished to make room for newer, greater buildings. The little meeting house still stands, but is overshadowed by a great stone church, where a huge organ has taken the place of the droning psalm-singing, and where the pastor has now neither time nor need for planting potato fields to eke out his living. Yet amid all the stately buildings about it, schools, library, church and Court House, the old grey log house is the most precious of all, for it stands as a monument to the brave men who reared it and who carried their love of freedom into a new world.
At the bend in the stream where the little Jesuit priest had built his woodland chapel and decked his altar, there is now a busy humming factory town, called by his name and driving its noisy spinning-wheels by means of the river that once babbled past his door. Rows of toiling men and women can look out through their tall windows down upon the grave of Jeremiah Macrae where the Indians set up a rough white stone at the bidding of their dearly loved French father.
In the midst of all this change and growth and bustle of new business, Master Simon’s garden is still untouched. The roses and lilies, the pink peonies and white hollyhocks, bloom on, undisturbed, year after year. The great house of mellow brick, covered now with vines to the very roof, looks out over the sea, unchanged. In the garden, romping down the paths and tumbling on the grass, play Master Simon’s children to a far generation. For but a few years, it seems, they frolic there among the flowers and then, grown to men and women, they set off to do their share of the world’s labour. And there, in June, when the linden tree blooms and the bees hum loud in the branches, they sit upon the bench in the Queen’s Garden and hear the story of Master Simon. Over and over, the tale is told, by mother to daughter, by father to son, a long, long story now, for it reaches back to the times of great Queen Elizabeth, and it will go forward, who can tell how far. Each generation has something new to add, some record of danger faced, of hardship endured, of work well done for the good of all. And they who hear it, those growing boys and girls, store it away as a memory to serve in time of need, so that, when the time comes, they may do their part in the labour of the world, that they may take up Master Simon’s work and bear it a little further, that they may build higher and yet higher the roofs of gold.