Permitting the scheme to ripen, Randolph waited until almost the moment for Mather’s sailing. He then swooped down upon the enterprise and attempted to arrest Mather, on the process of some sham prosecution. The patriots, incensed almost to the point of rebellion, played cunning for cunning. They delayed the departure of the ship, the captain of which was a staunch “American,” and then hustled Mather aboard under cover of darkness, and so sent him off on his mission.
For a week after Piety had gone, Garde felt such a sense of relief that she almost persuaded herself she was happy in her long wait for Adam, or for a word which might finally come. But the months again began their dreary procession, and her fear that Adam was lost to her forever deepened and laid its burden more and more upon her heart.
Yet there came a day when, a ship having arrived in the harbor, and her hope having greeted it wistfully, only to flutter back to her own patient bosom again, a letter did actually come to her hand.
It was not particularly neat; it looked as if it might have been opened before it came to her possession, but her heart bounded wildly when she saw it, and her fingers trembled as she broke it open to read its contents.
Then her joy vanished. The letter was from Piety Tootbaker. He announced, as if to break the intelligence to her frankly, that the voyage had made him so exceedingly ill that he had determined never to trust himself upon the billows again. He would therefore reside hereafter in England, which was “a pleasing countrie and much more merrie than Boston.”
“I shall never, never get an answer to my letter,” said Garde to herself, made sadder by the arrival of Piety’s letter, which proved that letters could actually come from over the sea. “He will never, never reply, I know.”
She was not far mistaken, for Adam had never received her letter. It had fallen into the hands of Edward Randolph, who had constituted himself censor of communications sent abroad from Massachusetts. Malignantly he was keeping those love-scented sheets, against the day of his vengeance.
PART III.