On the Sabbath day that Margeret was eighteen, she was still thinking, as she sat in the meeting-house, of the peril that had hung over them so long. Master Hapgood, the minister, was bringing to its close a sermon grown no shorter than of old, although age had bowed his shoulders and weakened his mighty voice. The pale yellow of a winter sunset showed for a few minutes behind the windows, gilded the blank white walls and faded away again. A dank chill crept over the meeting-house, children drew their feet up under them and men and women wrapped themselves closer in their grey cloaks.
“And now, brethren,” Master Hapgood was saying, “there is time left for contribution, wherefore, as God has prospered you, so freely offer.”
One by one the little congregation went forward, each to deposit his gift; first the Assistants, then the Tything Men, then the humbler goodmen of the town. Some laid down money, more, such produce as they could spare, corn or fruit or fresh eggs. Samuel Skerry, shuffling down the aisle, brought as small a copper coin as the currency afforded and looked at it regretfully as he laid it down. Roger Bardwell, at the end of the line because he was the youngest of all the householders, brought a basket of dried corn of his own growing. He no longer dwelt with the shoemaker, but had built himself a little cottage and was coming to prosperity by tending fields of his own.
After the men had gone back to their seats there went forward those women who had no husbands or fathers or brothers there to carry the offering for them. Old Goody Parsons, limping and sighing, was still able to toil up the aisle with her contribution, a pair of stout knitted hose; behind her came Goodwife Page whose husband was away at sea. Last of all walked Margeret Radpath, slight, erect and fair, bringing her offering since there was no one to do it for her. How did she know, she who kept her eyes upon the ground as she went, that of the many glances that followed her, Roger Bardwell’s was the most earnest gaze of all, never leaving her face even after she came back to sit alone upon the bench beneath the window?
And where were Master Simon and Mistress Radpath? Margeret’s mother had died the year before, and slept now in the windswept grave-yard on the hillside, while Master Simon, upon whom old age had seemed to come overnight after his wife’s death, sat at home, too worn and feeble to leave his own fireside. His unbroken spirit, however, still shone warm and bright within him, and to his house still came all who were in need or trouble, to seek advice and help. Under his directions and by means of Margeret’s busy hands and Roger Bardwell’s, the garden still bloomed as fair as ever.
“’Tis the flowers have the best of us,” Master Simon would say when now and then on summer days he could limp forth to see the rows of blossoms and the tall-growing shrubs. “The old age of a garden is fairer and lustier than its youth, and it comes to its greatest glory when tended by the children’s children of the man who planted it.”
Since Master Simon’s fields must be tilled by other hands now, and their living therefore had grown less abundant, Margeret had become mistress at the little school, built beyond the meeting-house at the end of a winding lane. It was hard often for her to sit so many hours within doors, listening to the children droning away at their lessons, when she was so used to being in the fresh air the live-long day. She made a good school-mistress, nevertheless, as was proved by the lessons so well learned under her careful eye, although the bundle of birch rods, the former master’s most familiar tool, lay upon its pegs above the door, so little used that a delicate spider web, spun between the tips of its twigs, had hung there the whole year through. The children came laughing and romping down the schoolhouse lane with many a tribute of flowers and red apples for the teacher they loved. One day, a pleasant, growing, Spring day, when she was most impatient to be outside, she had seen the little daughter of Goodwife Page, playing with a long, dusty sunbeam that fell from the high window across her spelling-book. When the child looked up anxiously, fearing reproof, Margeret had only smiled in return and the little girl had gone happily back to her work.
“After all,” Margeret thought, as she looked about her at the fresh, bright faces, “this is only another kind of a garden.”
And often, on summer days, when the air was quiet and the children’s voices filled the room with a busy humming like a hive of bees, she would think of the lives and characters that they were building up for themselves and remember Master Simon’s line:
“The singing masons building roofs of gold.”