He sat down upon the stool in the chimney corner and, when she once more attempted to blow the fire, took the bellows gravely from her and in a moment had the flames leaping high, flooding the kitchen with ruddy light. Margeret filled her pewter bowl brimful with steaming porridge and watched with pleasure as her guest ate with unconcealed hunger. She brought bread and cheese and a cup of milk which she set upon the bench beside him, and then busied herself about the kitchen lest she should seem to be staring at her unwonted visitor. Each eyed the other shyly when occasion offered, but looked away quickly when their glances happened to meet. He seemed to be watching her golden hair shining in the firelight, while she, by peeping into the old round mirror that hung upon the wall, could see how black were his hair and eyelashes and how dark blue were the eyes with which he stared at her when her back was turned. She felt friendly enough and anxious to put her companion at his case, and so, apparently, did he, but neither knew what to say and so the meal was finished in silence. It was Mistress Radpath’s footstep on the stair that roused him suddenly to speech.
“Oh, I must go,” he cried, springing up. “Samuel Skerry will be awake and waiting for me this long time. He will want to strike me for my delaying.”
And out of the door he sped, in greater terror, it seemed however, of Margeret’s mother than of his master, the shoemaker. The little girl, watching him through the window as he crossed the white field, realised suddenly that she had not even thought to ask his name. Often after that day she wondered who he could be, and many times looked wistfully across the waste of snow toward the neighbouring cottage. Although she saw him now and then, passing in and out of the distant doorway, he did not come near their house again. Goodman Allen’s wife, who came to sew with Mistress Radpath, dropped a bit of gossip concerning him.
“We are all wondering who that shoemaker’s apprentice can be,” she said. “He is no kin of Samuel Skerry’s, of that you may be sure, for he is far too pleasant-faced and gentle-mannered. The town officer went to ask, as was his duty, but could get no information from the boy’s master. Skerry said the lad was named Roger Bardwell, that he would answer for him and that was all. We all wonder where the boy can have come from; there is not one of us who does not like him.”
That, it seemed, was the sum of Hopewell’s knowledge of the shy, ragged, handsome lad.
Early in December there came, suddenly, a furious storm of wind and snow, that covered the fields, blocked the roads and drifted so deep about the houses that many of them were buried to the very eaves. It was the worst that the Colonies had ever known in all of their short history. For three days the gale shrieked about the staunch little cottages and roared down the chimneys, while those who dwelt within toiled unceasingly to build the fires up and keep the bitter cold at bay. When finally the storm had died away, when paths had been dug and people were able to go to and fro again, the strangest news suddenly went racing through the village. The Scotch minister, who had been upsetting the peace of all New England, had disappeared. He had set forth, people said, on a journey from Boston to Salem, travelling alone as was his custom, and, save for one man who had met him at the edge of the forest, struggling along in the face of the rising gale, no mortal eye had ever seen him again. That he had lost his way and perished among the drifts, was easy enough to believe, but the good people of Hopewell had another thing to say.
“The Devil came to take his own again,” many of them declared openly, for in those rough times the Devil was a more familiar figure than in later days and more than one of the Pilgrim Fathers laid claim to having seen him, horns and hoofs and tail and all. And while some folk were not quite so free-spoken as to agree with the opinion of their bolder neighbours, yet they too shook their heads and said:
“Watch Master Simon’s garden, there will his burning words be proven, whether true or false.”
For the thought that, unspoken, filled to the brim every good heart in Hopewell was:
“Where was Master Simon through all that bitter storm and will he ever come back to tend his garden again? We can spare a dozen Scotch ministers, but never one Simon Radpath.”