"Why as to that, Mistress Hopkins," said Priscilla Mullins in her downright, sensible way, "Mr. Hopkins did not bring you. We all came willingly, and I make no doubt that all of us knew quite well that it was a wilderness to which we were bound."
"There is knowing and knowing, Priscilla Mullins, and the knowing before seeing is a different thing from the knowing and seeing. Stephen Hopkins had been about the world; he even set sail for Virginia, which as I understand is somewhere not far from Cape Cod, though not near enough to give us neighbours for the borrowing of a salt rising, or the trade of a recipe, or the loan of a croup simple should my blessed babe turn suffocating as he is like to do in this wicked cold wind; and these things are the comforts of a woman's life, and her right—as all good women will tell thee before thou art old enough to know what the lack is in this desolation. So it is clear that Stephen Hopkins had no right to bring me here, innocent as I was of what it all stood for, and hard enough as it is to be married to a man whose first wife was of the gentry, and whose children that she left for my torment are like to her, headstrong and proud-stomached, and hating me, however I slave for them. And your father, Constantia Hopkins, has gone now, not content with bringing me here across that waste o' waters, and never is it likely will come back to me to look after that innocent babe that was born on the ocean and bears its name according, and came like the dove to the ark, bearing an olive branch across the deluge. But much your father cares for this, but has gone and left me, and it is no man's part to leave a weak woman to struggle alone to keep wild beasts and Indians from devouring her children; and so I tell you, and so I maintain. And never, never have I looked upon a scene so forsaken and unbearable as that gray woodland that the man who swore to cherish me has led me into."
Constance quite well knew that this hysterical unreason in her stepmother would pass, and that it was not more worth heeding than the wind that whistled around the ship's stripped masts. Mistress Eliza had a vixenish temper, and a jealous one. She frequently lashed herself into a fury with one or another of the family for its object and felt the better for it, not regarding how it left the victim feeling.
But though she knew this, Constance could not always act upon her knowledge, and disregard her. She was but a very young girl and now she was a very weary one, with every nerve quivering from tense anxiety in watching her father go into unknown danger.
She sprang to her feet with a cry.
"Oh, my father, my father! How dare you blame him, my patient, wise, forbearing father! Why did he bring you here, indeed! He—so fine, so noble, so hard-pressed with your tongue, Mistress Hopkins!—I will not hear you blame him. Oh, my father, my dear, dear, good father!" she sobbed, losing all sense of restraint in her grief.
Suddenly on hearing this outburst, Mistress Hopkins, as is sometimes the way of such as she, became as self-controlled as she had, but a moment before, been beside herself. And in becoming quiet she became much more angry than she had been, and more vindictive.
"You speak to me like this?—you dare to!" she said in a low, furious voice. "You will learn to your sorrow what it means to flout me. You will pay for this, Constantia Hopkins, and pay to the last penny, to your everlasting shame and misery."
Constance was too frightened by this change, by this white fury, which she had never seen before in her stepmother, to answer; but before she could have answered, Doctor Fuller, who had strayed that way in time to hear the last of Dame Eliza's tirade, Constance's retort, and this final threat, took Constance by the arm and led her away.
"Quiet, my dear, quiet and calm, you know! Don't let yourself forget what is due to your father's wife, to yourself, still more to your conscience," he warned her. "And remember that a soft answer turneth away wrath."