Skerry broke out in sudden anger as though he could not bear even the mention of Master Simon.
“A pest on you and your father!” he cried. “Do I not hear enough in the village of Master Simon this and Master Simon that, without having to see his own daughter coming to my house to tell me what I should do? Begone from my door and come not here again with your chattering and your tempting my boy into idleness.”
Margeret made no delaying but turned at once to flee. Roger, however, followed her beyond the door and spoke hastily in an undertone.
“You must not mind the shoemaker’s sharp words, little Mistress,” he reassured her. “He seems indeed to bear ill will toward your father, but still I sometimes see him at our door, watching Master Simon in his garden with a look so gentle, almost wistful, that I know not what to think. The boots shall be mended safely, and when they are done I will bring them back. I fear that the scant welcome you have received will make you desire little to come hither again.”
“When he brings the boots,” Margeret reflected, as she walked back through the field, “my father must question him and perhaps can find a way to help him.”
It was just then the season for candle making, the task that Margeret loved above all others of the year. Beyond Master Simon’s garden was a stretch of waste land reaching down to the water’s edge, where grew in a thick tangle, the dark bayberry bushes that so many of the Puritans had thought best to root out of their fields. Master Simon, however, had kept his and had found that from their abundant fruit could be made the green, sweet-smelling tapers that were of such service through the long winter. Tallow was still scarce in the little Colony, and wax candles brought from England far too costly, so this was a brave discovery indeed. Every autumn when the first tang of frost was in the air, all the children of Hopewell gathered to pick Master Simon’s bayberries and a merry task they made of it. Then, for days after, would come the sorting of the fruit, the boiling and skimming and the dipping of the wicks. Slowly the candles would take shape until the moment that was to Margeret a breathlessly exciting one when the first pair were placed in the copper candlesticks on the mantel and were lighted to see if all had been properly done and the tapers burned clear, steady and fragrant as they should.
“I trust,” said Mistress Radpath, as they began the first evening to sort and select the berries, “that this season our task may be completed in peace. Last year, do you remember, I slipped and hurt my arm so that you had to do the work with no help but my directions. And well indeed you did it!”
“And the year before,” added Margeret, “neighbour Deborah Page was ill and you ran in and out between the boilings and skimmings trying to attend to her.”
“Ay, so it goes,” her mother said. “Some mishap each season all the way back to the year when your father was away among the Indians and we made the candles wondering whether he would ever come back to see them burn. But this year, surely all is peaceful and quiet and our task should be carried safely to its end.”
Mistress Radpath spoke too soon for, as it proved, never before was a candle making season so full of disturbing and long-remembered events. To begin with, the very next day when the first kettleful of berries had just been swung over the fire, a mounted man stopped at the gate and came in to tell them that a cousin in the next town was taken with a fever and begged for help. So, with scarce half-an-hour’s delay, Mistress Radpath went off, seated on the pillion behind the messenger and leaving Margeret to face the candle making alone.