Garde still failed to believe she heard her grandfather correctly. She still hoped his impatience would abate sufficiently for her to tell of what she had seen. It could not be possible that a Puritan, so high-minded and strict for moral conduct, could know what she knew and still insist upon this infamous marriage. To her, at that moment, it was virtue and honor that were all important to be saved, the charter and the colony that had become insignificant.
“If you had touched that little dead baby,” she said. “If you had heard Hester begging, Grandther—oh, you would have kept your promise,—you would never coerce me in this terrible——”
“Stop! stop!” cried Donner, madly, angered almost beyond control by this appeal, which was so unbearably remindful of her mother. “I have not coerced you, never! You made your promise freely. The honor of the colony, and more than that, the safety of the charter, now hang upon your faith in keeping your own agreement. And you shall keep it—for the family pride—for the colony’s good name! This story—what is the woman?—what is her child?—what is anything, when our liberty and independence tremble in the balance? No more—I’ll hear no more of this,—not a word!”
Garde brushed a wisp of her red-black hair from her forehead. Her great brown eyes were fastened wide open by amazement. Her lips alone contained any color. How red they seemed against the white of her oval face! Her eyebrows seemed like two curved black brands on her brow. She looked at her grandfather in silence. It was positively incredible that he had said what she had heard, she thought. If Hester and her child and “everything” were held of so little worth, why—what of herself? Had it come to this? Was it admittedly and shamelessly a sacrifice of her very soul, to a creature only waiting to have his way first before destroying the charter later?
To the pure, natural mind of the girl, Randolph had become as translucent as water, in his plotted perfidies. It appeared impossible that any man could still believe in his lies. She would have spoken of this, but the sight of the fanatical old man before her, sealed her lips. She recognized the light in his eyes at last. At any other moment her pity would have fluttered forth to him, yearningly, her little mother instinct would have taken her on the wings of concern to smooth the care-channeled wrinkles from his brow, but now all these tenderer emotions had fled away, in fear and awe. She said nothing further. There was nothing left to say, nothing that would have any weight against mania. At length even her gaze fell before the wild look with which David Donner confronted her, insanely.
“Now then,” said the old man, at length, in a voice made raucous by his recent passions, “you may go to bed and prepare your mind for obedience.”
“Good night, dear Grandther,” said Garde, by force of habit, and with nothing more, she passed from the room.
CHAPTER XXIII.
GOODY’S BOY.
The right of Spring to exercise idiosyncrasies of weather was conceded, doubtless, by the first man. Spring is well known to be female, for this very proclivity of changing her mind as to what she will do next. Having been a spitfire nearly all night, Spring smiled in the morning, as balmy as if she had caught the fancy of some tropical zephyr, that hastened rashly northward to catch her for a kiss.