The warning, called forth anxiously by Goodwife Allen, leaning over her half-door, was quite unheeded by rebellious Margeret, who hurried out of the gate, swinging her burden quite as recklessly as before.
She felt herself to be in a very rash mood that morning, for was she not already in disgrace both at home and abroad? She had committed a very terrible offence on the day before, the Sabbath, after she had been sitting long on the hard bench in the meeting-house, shuffling her feet, kicking her heels together and watching the sand of the pulpit hourglass drop slowly, grain by grain, as though it would never mark the sermon’s end. When Master Hapgood, as though in absence of mind, had turned the glass over, a signal that his talk would last for perhaps an hour more, she had heaved a long, loud sigh that resounded, in a pause of the speaker’s, to the furthest corner of the meeting-house. Many of the Puritan maids giggled openly, and more than one man, including Master Simon, smiled behind his hand, although the pastor’s black frown would have made any but the most abandoned child bow her head in shame. Yet even to her mother’s sorrowful chiding on the way home, Margeret had not replied meekly as a Puritan maid should.
This morning, when she had been sent with a bundle of herbs to Goodwife Allen’s and had been directed to come quickly home again, she was openly loitering on the road and planning to stop when she reached the wide, sunny marsh and gather some of the gorgeous wild flowers that she had noticed when she passed. She was weary, she told herself, of all these strict rules, never to run and romp in the lanes, never to wear gay ribbons or bright dresses, always to sit quiet on the hard benches through the long, long, Sunday sermons. Presently, as she reflected thus and swung her basket in time to her rebellious thoughts, one of the duck eggs rolled over the edge and smashed in the dusty road.
“I don’t care,” cried Margeret, stamping her foot, although there was no one to hear or see. “I don’t care!”
She might just as well have broken them all for, when she reached home, an hour later, laden with an armful of bright marsh flowers, her mother asked her for the eggs and she suddenly recollected that she had set the basket down upon a tussock as she waded in the swamp and had left it there.
“There is no time to go back to seek it now,” was all Mistress Radpath said.
Margeret knew that she ought to declare that she was sorry, but naughtiness and impatience seemed to have fastened upon her that day and she kept silent.
“Bring out your spinning-wheel, my child,” said her mother a little later. “Neighbour Deborah Page is ill and we must spin for her as well as ourselves to-day.”
The little girl had just seen her father go past the door with his gardening tools on his shoulder and had been planning to follow and help him work among the flowers in the warm June sun. It was a pleasant day of clean-washed air and fresh salt breezes, one that she could scarce bear to think of spending within doors. She obeyed her mother very reluctantly, brought her wheel from its corner and sat down to spin. Her fingers were clumsy and her temper short so that in a moment she had tangled her thread and jerked the treadle so roughly that it snapped. Her mother’s look of mute reproach was more than she could bear.
“I care not at all,” she cried loudly and bitterly. “I wanted to break the hateful wheel. Little girls must play sometimes!”