She was quite astonished when, for answer, Master Simon burst into a hearty laugh.
“My child,” he said, “that is almost the very question that was asked me forty years ago by my elderly Aunt Matilda of whom I was that moment thinking. And with that scowl upon your face, you look not unlike the severe dame herself as she asked it.”
“Ah, tell me about it,” begged Margeret, the scowl disappearing and the last of her anger quite swept away. She loved her father’s stories, especially those that had to do with his boyhood and that fierce and redoubtable Aunt Matilda.
Master Simon turned to the bench under the linden tree, at the edge of the little enclosed garden, and took her upon his knee.
“And so,” he queried, “that gust of temper is all gone by and you are willing to be friends with your father and mother again? What was it that put you into such a sudden passion? I did not know that you hated so to spin.”
“It was not just the spinning,” returned Margeret, hanging her head. “It was because I was weary of working so much and being so dull and sober. It was because”—here was so terrible a confession that she could scarce bring it forth—“because I did not like to be a Puritan maid and did not want to be good.”
Her father only laughed and held her close.
“We all of us have that same thought at times,” he said, “and in every heart there stirs, now and then, an impatience with the strict and bare Puritan life. We, who, when children, saw some of the glitter and gorgeousness of that golden age in England, the reign of Queen Elizabeth, cannot but feel a longing, sometimes, for that splendid pomp and show from which we have turned aside. It would be odd did not the echoes of our hidden desire still sound in the hearts of our sons and daughters. I can never forget how the great Queen once made a royal progress through the town near which I dwelt, and how I ran in the dust beside her procession, staring with all my eyes at the glittering array. Such shining soldiers, such ladies clad in velvet and cloth of gold, such heavy banners fluttering in the hot air! No Queen in a fairy tale could have shown a more splendid picture. And when I went back to the cottage where I lived with my uncle and aunt, saw him in his dark coat and Aunt Matilda in her scant grey dress, and looked about at the bare walls and the rough furniture, then I, like you, felt suddenly that it was a dreary business this of trying to be a good Puritan. Yet the following of our faith is not all, thank Heaven, in wearing a sober coat and going to meeting six hours every Sabbath.”
“Did you ever see the Queen again?” asked Margeret.
“Yes, I saw and spoke with her once, when I was still a little boy and she was an old woman. How I chanced to see her, and how my staid uncle broke through our strictest Puritan law, are both parts of the story that I was to tell you. Well, we will have the story first and then talk a little further of this grievous business of being a Puritan.