Her grandfather, in the meantime, waxed more and more impatient. It had been his habit from early manhood to have his own way. In avoiding precisely the difficulties into which he had fallen with Garde’s mother, he felt that he was on the safe side in his promise not to coerce his grandchild. This gave him the greater latitude in which to bring pressure upon her from what he conceived to be another standpoint. Yet that repression of his feelings and passions which he had practised for long among the Puritans, made him more patient with Garde’s indecision than would otherwise have been the case. He became childishly eager, more than harshly insistent, in this frame of mind. He coaxed her many times in a day, to see what her bravery and loyalty could do.
Christmas and New Year were long past, and still Garde had made no decision. In the spring, when she could make no more excuses for delaying, she told her grandfather how gladly she would comply with his wishes, if only she could know, absolutely, that Randolph would keep faith with the colonists and secure them their charter against all need for anxiety. This was her honest word. It came from her heart as if every word had been jagged, leaving her wounded and all but ill.
“Let Mr. Randolph prove that he will work for our good with the King,” she said. “Let him secure us but one year of ease from this constant worry—let him show us a year of the favor he can win from Charles, and then I shall be content. This is not much that I ask. If his heart is so set upon me as he says, surely he could wait this time and do these things. A true regard could wait for as many years as Jacob served for Rachel.”
With this decision, which he regarded as a binding promise, and which he represented to Randolph as a betrothal, David Donner had to be content. Randolph could not, without betraying intended perfidy, object to conditions so wisely conceived. Argument was precluded. Grimly shutting his jaws, the man consented to the arrangement, for else he must have abandoned his quest altogether.
As the months wore on, he went regularly to South Church, there to sit out the service, which he detested like poison, for the purpose of fixing his eyes upon Garde, as if he had been a beauty-vulture, only to be satisfied by gazing upon her until he was all but self-hypnotized. As for Garde, conscious as she was that the man thus stared in her direction, she never so much as once gave his eyes an answering glance. She did not love him; there should never be any pretense, come what might, that she did. Her thoughts and her heart beats were true to Adam, and so should remain to the end.
David Donner told his colleagues in triumph of what he had done, of the answer Garde had made and of the hope they had for the future. He had justified himself in remaining in Boston.
The measure of the power wielded, even at the throne of England by Edward, Randolph could never have been estimated in Massachusetts, but month after month slipped away while the charter remained intact and the men of that anxious colony breathed with a sense of relief which none had felt before, in nearly a score of years.
Garde, with what hope her year’s respite inspired, began her lonely wait and watch for Adam’s return.