The red beneath the brown stain was too ardent to be hidden. Garde’s gaze fell before his admiring look.
“You—haven’t told me your name,” she faltered, heroically striving to stand stiffly and to conjure a voice to change the subject withal.
“So I haven’t,” Adam agreed. “I asked you for yours first, but no matter. I am a mad lover, on my way to Boston. My name is Rust, with a spice of the old Adam thrown in. If you are going in the same direction, I shall be glad of your company.”
Garde was going in the same direction. She had never reached so far as Plymouth. Footsore and weary, she had trudged along, going less than ten miles a day, stopping at night with the farming people, the wives of whom she had found most kind, and so at last had arrived at a farm near by these cross-roads, unable to go any further. She had therefore rested several days, and only this very morning she had learned, by word from another traveler, that David Donner, suddenly afflicted by the double woe of finding her gone and himself cursed by Randolph, who had immediately set in motion his machinery for depriving Massachusetts of its charter, was on his back, delirious and ill, perhaps unto death.
She was going back, all contritely, yearning over the old man, who had taken the place of her parents for so many years, and weighted down with a sense of the wretchedness attending life. It was not that her resolution to escape Randolph had abated one particle of its stiffness, that she was turning about to retrace her steps, it was merely that her womanly love, her budding mother-instinct, her loyalty and gratitude for her grandfather’s many years of kindness and patience,—that all these made no other thought possible.
And now to learn that Adam was traveling to Boston also, that she should have him for her strong protector and comrade, this filled her with such a gush of delight that she with difficulty restrained herself from crying, in joy, and the tendency to give up and lean upon his supporting arm.
At sight of him, indeed, before her mortification had come upon her, for the costume, in which it seemed to her she would rather be seen by any other person in the world than Adam, she had nearly run to his arms and sobbed out her gladness. It would have been so wholly sweet to obey this impulse. Her love for the big, handsome fellow had leaped so exultantly in her breast, again to see him and to hear his voice, when she had been so beset with troubles. But she had denied herself splendidly, and now every moment strengthened her determination to play her part to the end. Yet what joy it would be to travel back to Boston, through the greenwood, by his side.
And being not without her sense of humor, Garde conceived many entertaining possibilities which might be elicited from the situation, the standpoint of man to man being so wholly different from anything heretofore presented to her ken.
“Yes,” she said, in answer to Adam’s last remark, “I am going to Boston—or near there,—but you may find that I cannot walk fast, nor very far, in a day. My walking will doubtless prove to be like my fighting. So that if you are so mad with—with love, and so eager to hasten, perhaps——” and she left the sentence unfinished.
“Well,” said Adam, pulling his mustache smartly, “I confess I am a bit hot on foot, and so you would be, young man, if by any good fortune you knew my sweetheart, yet I like you well enough, and my lady has such a heart that she would counsel me to go slower, if need be, to lend any comfort or companionship to a youth so gentle as yourself.”