CHAPTER IX.
REVELATIONS.
When the Andros government came to an end, Edward Randolph had languished in jail for a brief time only. The Puritans were chiefly angered at his master, whom they had finally put aboard a ship and sent away from the country. Thus the more mischievous spirit, and author of many of their wrongs, escaped to work his malignant will upon them for years.
Randolph was so crafty, so insidious, and willing to remain so in the background, that until it was quite too late to redeem their position, the Puritans failed even to suspect him of the monstrous iniquities he induced them to commit upon one another. The witchcraft persecutions, which he fastened upon them, had not originated in his brain, fertile as that organ was for the growth of things diabolical. He got his cue from England, where thousands of persons perished, at the stake and otherwise, convicted on fantastic testimony of practising arts that were black and mysterious.
Randolph, realizing that Boston had been made too warm for active operations, began his work in Salem. That center offered him exceptional opportunities. The growth of the dread disease was appalling. History which would convey an adequate idea of this criminal fanaticism should be bound in charred human skin.
Boston was duly afflicted with the scourge. Randolph then returned, quietly, and so manipulated his work and his dupes, from behind his own scenes, that scores of old women were charged with and convicted of witchcraft, in Randolph’s hope of wreaking his vengeance thus on whatsoever old woman it might have been who had told Garde Merrill of his affair with Hester Hodder. Having never been able to ascertain that this person was Goody Dune, he was sweeping his net in all waters, to make sure of his prey, in the same merciless spirit that Herod slew all the male infants, to accomplish his terrible purpose.
When Governor Phipps, with Adam Rust and Increase Mather, arrived at Boston, in the frigate “Nonsuch,” in May, 1692, the prisons were crowded full of witches, for the smell of whose burning or rotting flesh scores of fanatical maniacs were clamoring.
All Massachusetts had known that William Phipps, the Governor who had risen so mightily from the ranks of the working men among them, was coming. The name of the lane wherein his house had been built was altered to Charter street, in his honor; the citizens beat their drums; the disciples of gladness in the stomach arranged for a banquet; the hordes marched in joy and with pomp and Puritan splendor, which lacked nothing in ceremony, as Sir William was conducted to his house and then to the public dinner. Even the fanatics waxed enthusiastic and developed symptoms of being yet more greatly pursued and bewitched by the witches whose incarceration they had already procured.
In the madness, confusion and excess of glee, two persons were more inwardly stirred than all the others, not by the arrival of William Phipps, but by that of Adam Rust. One was Garde, to whose ears and heart the story of Adam’s return came swiftly flying. The other was Edward Randolph, who saw an opportunity for deviltry for which he had waited so long that he had almost despaired of ever tasting its bitter-sweet. With his own eyes he beheld Adam Rust, and he grinned.
At the end of that long, fatiguing day, Rust retired to the privacy of his tavern apartments, secured haphazard, during one of the moments less filled than the others with pressing events. Here he sat him down for the purpose of thinking. He wondered why he had come to Boston again, and what he would do, now that at last he lived under the same sky with Garde, hearing the same sounds she was hearing, breathing the same fragrance of the Spring that stole to her. Should he try to see her? Perhaps. But to speak to her—no, he thought he could make no advance in this direction. But he could learn whether she had married, as of course she must have done, long before, and then—well, something in him ought to be satisfied—that something which had urged him so inexorably to return and to make this moment possible.
In the midst of his reveries, he heard a knock upon his door. It was poor old Halberd, doubtless, who had been so forlorn and so ill on the ocean. He had left him asleep, but, no matter, he would be glad to see him, privacy of thought notwithstanding.