So saying, she rushed out of the door slamming it to behind her. She saw Master Simon standing on the path, looking gravely and sorrowfully after her, but she did not give him time to speak. Taking refuge behind the great hawthorn bush she buried her face in the grass and burst into hot, angry tears.
After she had cried for some time and had, in part at least, washed away her wrath, she sat up to look about her and to wonder how, after all, she could have been so wicked. Across the meadow, filled with bobolinks, she could look down to the harbour where the full June tide was running in. A little boat, sailed she knew by Roger Bardwell, the shoemaker’s apprentice, in such moments as he could steal from his harsh master, was flying joyously before the gay, warm wind. She could sniff a bewildering sweetness that filled the air, for the linden tree had bloomed the day before, driving Mistress Radpath’s bees nearly mad with joy. She had heard them humming in the branches nearly the whole night through and to-day again their song was loud in her ears. Indeed, as she listened, the buzzing and whirring grew so insistent that she began to realise something had happened.
“Why,” she exclaimed, “I believe that they are swarming.”
Leaving her refuge behind the hawthorn bush, she peeped over the hedge of the little enclosed garden where the sundial stood and where the peacock had once dwelt. Yes, there beyond, under the apple trees stood her mother, with eager eyes and cheeks pink with excitement, as she held up the new hive and sought to lure the bewildered bees within. The air seemed full of their black whirring little bodies, which bye and bye, however, gathered close and finally settled in a huge dark mass, hanging from the linden tree like some strange, gigantic fruit. Then must Mistress Radpath exercise all her wiles, find the queen-bee and persuade her to enter the hive, to be followed at last by her train of black, buzzing courtiers.
“Now that was as skilfully managed as ever I saw it!” exclaimed Master Simon. “Scarce could I have done better myself.”
He chuckled as he spoke for it was a well-known joke in the household that Master Simon, although equal to any other emergency that might arise, could not come in too great haste to call Mistress Radpath, once the bees swarmed. He took the hive from her now and bent to kiss the successful bee-mistress before he went to put it in place beneath the apple-trees.
“Goody Parsons says I shall never have true skill until I learn to whisper charms and spells over the hives, as she does,” returned Mistress Radpath. “She says—but oh, my spinning, I shall never have it done!”
She went quickly into the house, leaving Master Simon to set the hive in its place at the end of the long row that stretched across the back of the garden. Some of the hives, those that had been brought from England, were trim and blue-painted, the others were roughly framed out of wood cut in the forest. It chanced that the one just put into place was the best and most elaborate of all, for it had a pane of glass in its side through which one could see the newcomers already turning to the work that would result in the building up of a golden honeycomb. Margeret, her anger almost forgotten now, slipped across the grass and stood at her father’s side, watching too. As she came near he murmured to himself a line that she had heard him quote before:
“The singing masons, building roofs of gold.”
“Father,” she said, putting her hand into his and speaking hesitatingly, as she was not quite sure how she would be received, “what do those words mean and where did you first hear them?”