Goody Parsons had indeed come upon just that errand, yet first she hobbled into the kitchen where she set down her wedding gift. A blue and white china teapot it was, that had voyaged across the sea from England and was a rare and precious thing in Hopewell, where nearly every one must still use wood or metal or rough earthenware for household utensils. It had long been the old woman’s most valued treasure.
“There is not a great time left for me to use it,” she said in answer to Master Simon’s remonstrances, “and who should I wish to have it after me rather than my dear Mistress Margeret?”
She freed it from its wrappings and set it upon the table with a smile of happy pride.
“Now,” she added, “I am going out-of-doors for a little. No, sit you here, good friend, what I wish most is to go alone.”
She stepped forth into the garden, a dim fragrant place full of black shadows, but beginning to be faintly lit by a rising moon. Slowly she moved up and down the paths, laying her gnarled old fingers lovingly upon the roses and syringas. She broke off a twig of the hawthorn and tucked it into the bosom of her threadbare gown.
“Eh, it is many a long year,” she said, “since I walked in the lanes of Hertfordshire before my marriage day and thought the world was abloom for me alone. Yet it might have been yesterday save for the memory of him who has been so long dead.”
She rested at last upon the bench under the linden tree, dreaming of the never-to-be-forgotten beauty of that still June evening in England, fifty years ago.
“But who can call it so far gone by,” she said to herself at last, “when the same rose that I plucked that night from the vine on the cottage wall, still blooms beside my doorstep here in the New World. It is a good God that gives us the flowers to hold our youth and old age together.”
She sat for some little time, her chin upon her hand, looking across the banks of white flowers and sniffing at the fragrance that filled the warm air, but finally rose with a determined mien.
“I sit dreaming here like a foolish old crone,” she muttered, “and forget my errand so that those two young things will be coming back to laugh at me and my old-fashioned ways. Ah, but I mind how my mother stood in the bright Spring sunshine and told the bees of my wedding day, while Jock Parsons and I sat laughing upon the doorstep and said it was no use. That is the way of youth!”