Donner nodded at him, for this sounded frank. But the old man’s thoughts were afield, wandering, for the proposition came home to him with tremendous significance.
“But,” resumed Randolph, “any man can conceive that an agent must do, to the best of his ability, that which he honestly believes to be his duty, howsoever unpleasant the task imposed upon him may finally appear.”
“True,” said David, still vaguely.
“I have done my work as well as I could,” the man went on. “I have accumulated matter of vast significance. I am almost sorry that I have done so thoroughly well, the task appointed me, and still all this work might make me the better fitted for citizenship among you, if I follow out your suggestion.”
Donner was not insensible of the threat which this artful speech implied, the threat that all this accumulated matter and knowledge would be used against the colony and the charter, if this man were not made one of their number. But Garde was not to be lightly weighed in the balance. Randolph’s frankness partially disarmed the old man; and the life of the charter, he felt, was the life of their independence, their manhood, their very being. The tiny roots and tendrils of American patriotism grew from the very hearts of those early fathers of liberty.
“This is a matter which would much concern Mistress Merrill,” said Donner. “I made the error of trying to coerce her mother. I shall never coerce Garde.”
“I trust not,” replied his guest. “And yet I hope you will think upon the matter and mayhap speak to Mistress Merrill in this regard, for although I am in a conflict, ’twixt my duty to my King and the high regard which I have been constrained to place with you and your people, through Mistress Merrill, yet I fear I am eager to be remiss with Charles, rather than a traitor to my own heart.”
“I will think upon it,” said David, slowly.
Randolph thanked him, spoke of the rose again and went his way. He was a gardener himself, and having planted his seed, knew enough not to dig it up to see if it had yet begun to sprout.
David Donner sat down to think, not of Garde and not of all that Randolph’s visit signified, but of Garde’s mother and his harshness when her heart had burgeoned with aspirations for itself, and of the pain and wretchedness he had brought to all concerned. He thought of the mad little elopement into which he had driven his daughter, which had ended so disastrously to the honest but poverty-overtaken father of her child. Then he thought of the home-coming, the birth of Garde and the death of the forlorn little mother. He could hear again her faint words of forgiveness; he could see again her wan smile on her faded lips; he could still feel the weak, white hands that raised to slip themselves about his neck and which, when he had put them down, he folded on her breast, still forever.