Margeret shivered as she stood listening to their honest neighbour’s words. It was quite true that the strange minister had haunted her own dreams for many a night.
“Some folk,” the man went on, “say that he speaks like one of the prophets of old, come back to earth again. But I say,” here he dropped his voice and glanced anxiously about the shadowy kitchen; “I say that he may not be a prophet, but the Devil himself that we have in our midst. We will mark well his words concerning Master Simon’s garden, and if they come true, then will we know what to think.”
It appeared to Margeret, through all that autumn, that the world went very much awry. It was only a part of the general sadness of all things that, when she went one day to carry a basket of apples to Goody Parsons, she found the old woman sitting on the bench before her door in the pale autumn sunshine, weeping bitterly. The climbing rose that she had brought with her from England and that had grown to the very top of her cottage door, had drooped all summer and now trailed forlornly across the grey logs, dead beyond any doubt.
“Great, fragrant white roses it bore,” said the old woman, choking over her words, “roses that I carried in my hand the day I was married, and that my three daughters carried too, on their wedding days, each in her turn. The dearest memory that I have is of our little cottage in Hertfordshire, where the beehives stood in a long, sun-warmed row beside the hedge and the rose vine climbed to the very eaves, covering the whole wall with leaf and blossom. And now my rose is dead, a punishment, I can well see, for the harm I did your good father by means of my idle, gossiping tongue.”
“But listen,” Margeret said, “do you not remember that my father once told you that this rose was finer than any in our garden and you gave him some of the shoots to plant among our own? We have one now, climbing high on our house wall and the others I know are still growing down by the hedge. So to-morrow you shall have a new plant of the very same rose, to grow as tall and bloom as gaily as the last.”
“Bless me now,” cried Goody Parsons, a smile breaking through her tears. “You are your father’s own good daughter, little Mistress, and have almost made me happy again. But I never can be quite so until I can forget the harm my chattering has done or until I see Master Simon come safe home out of that terrible wilderness.”
The new little rose took most kindly to the transplanting that Margeret so skilfully accomplished, and stood strong and sturdy beside the door, its twigs still green long after the leaves had fallen from the trees and the misty Indian summer had taken possession of the land.
“I believe that when Spring comes it will grow as fast as that stocking you are knitting,” laughed Margeret one day, when she came to inspect its progress.
The old woman nodded and smiled.
“I hope to see it climb to the top of my door again before I die,” she answered. “Heaven grant me time for that and to end my evil gossiping ways. Do you know that neighbour Allen—” she checked herself suddenly and added, with a sigh, “There I go again! Take heed, my lass, and see how hard it is to mend a fault when you have grown old.” And she closed her lips with firmness and fell to knitting furiously.