"Now, what was it?" he asked, lightly touching the young girl's cheek when they had passed beyond the hearing of Constance's two demure little companions. "Homesick, my lass?"
"Heartsick, rather, Captain Myles," said Constance, with a sob. "Mistress Hopkins hates me!"
"Oh, fie, Connie, how could she?" asked the captain, lightly, but he scowled angrily. There was much sympathy between him and Stephen Hopkins, neither of whom agreed with the extreme severity of most of the pilgrims; they both had seen the world and looked at life from their wider experience.
Captain Standish knew that Giles's and Constance's mother had been the daughter of an old and honourable family, with all the fine qualities of mind and soul that should be the inheritance of gentle breeding. He knew how it had come about that Stephen Hopkins had married a second time a woman greatly her inferior, whose jealousy of the first wife's children saddened their young lives and made his own course hard and unpleasant. Prone to speak his mind and fond of Giles and Constance, the impetuous captain often found it hard to keep his tongue between his teeth when Dame Eliza indulged in her favourite game of badgering, persecuting her stepchildren. Now, when he said: "Fie, how could she?" Constance looked up at him with a forlorn smile. She knew the captain was quite aware that her stepmother could, and did dislike her, and she caught the anger in his voice.
"How could she not, dear Captain Myles?" she asked. Then, with her pent-up feeling overmastering her, she burst out sobbing.
"Oh, you know she hates, she hates me, Captain!" she cried. "Nothing I can do is pleasing to her. I take care of Damaris—sure I love my little sister, and do not remember the half that is not my sister in her! And I wait on Mistress Hopkins, and sew, and do her bidding, and I do not answer her cruel taunts, nor do I go to my father complaining; but she hates me. Is it fair? Could I help it that my father loved my own mother, and married her, and that she was a lovely and accomplished lady?"
"Do you want to help it, if by helping you mean altering, Connie?" asked Captain Myles, with a twinkle. "No, child, you surely cannot help all these things which come by no will of yours, but by the will of God. And I am your witness that you are ever patient and dutiful. Bear as best you can, sweet Constantia, and by and by the wrong will become right, as right in the end is ever strongest. I cannot endure to see your young eyes wet with tears called out by unkindness. There is enough and to spare of hard matters to endure for all of us on this adventure not to add to it what is not only unnecessary, but unjust. Cheer up, Con, my lass! It's a long lane—in England!—that has no turning, and it's a long voyage on the seas that ends in no safe harbour! And do you know, Connie girl, that there's soon to be a turn in this bright weather? There's a feeling of change and threatening in this soft wind."
Constance wiped her eyes and smiled, knowing that the captain wished to lead her into other themes than her own troubles, the discussion of which was, after all, useless.
"I don't know about the weather, except the weather I'm having," she said. "Ah, I don't want it to storm, not on the mid-seas, Captain Myles."
"Aye, but it's the mid-seas of the year, Connie, when the days and nights are one in length, and at that time old wise men say a storm is usually forthcoming. We'll weather it, never fear! If we are bearing westward a great hope and mission as we all believe—not I in precisely the same fashion as these stricter saints, but in my own way no less—then we are sure to reach our goal, my dear," said the captain cheerfully.