CHAPTER XVII

The Well-Conned Lesson

Giles took a new place in Plymouth after his embassy to the Narragansetts. No longer a boy among his fellow pilgrims, he fulfilled well and busily the offices that were his as one of the younger, yet mature men.

He was given the discipline of the squadron, that, pursuant to Captain Standish's plan for guarding the settlement, was the largest and controlled the most important gate of the stockade which was rapidly put up around the boundary of Plymouth after the defiance of the Narragansetts. Though that had come to naught, it had warned the colonists that danger might arise at an unforeseen moment.

There was scarcity of provisions for the winter, the thirty-five destitute persons left the colony by the _Fortune_ being a heavy additional drain upon its supplies. Everyone was put upon half rations, and it devolved upon Giles and John Alden to apportion each family's share. It was hard to subsist through the bitter weather upon half of what would, at best, have been a slender nourishment, yet the Plymouth people faced the outlook patiently, uncomplainingly, and Giles, naturally hot-headed, impatient, got more benefit than he gave when he handed out the rations and saw the quiet heroism of their acceptance.

He grew to be a silent Giles, falling into the habit of thoughtfulness, with scant talk, that was the prevailing manner of the Plymouth men. Between his father and himself there was friendliness, the former opposition between them, mutual annoyance, and irritation, were gone. Yet there they halted, not resuming the intimacy of Giles's childhood days. It was as if there were a reserve, rather of embarrassment than of lack of love; as if something were needed to jostle them into closer intercourse.

Constance saw this, and waited, convinced that it would come, glad in the perfect confidence that she felt existed between them.

She was a busy Constance in these days. The warmth of September held through that November, brooding, slumberous, quiet in the sunshine that warmed like wine.

Constance and her stepmother cut and strung the few vegetables which they had, and hung them in the sunny corner of the empty attic room.

They spread out corn and pumpkins upon the floor, instructing the willing Lady Fair to see to it that mice did not steal them.

Dame Eliza, also, had grown comparatively silent. Her long tirades were wanting; she showed no softening toward Constance, yet she let her alone. Constance thought that something was on her stepmother's mind, but she did not try to discover what--glad of the new sparing of her sharp tongue, having no expectation of anything better than this from her.

Damaris had been sent with the other children to be instructed in the morning by Mrs. Brewster in sampler working and knitting; by her husband in the Westminster catechism, and the hornbook.

In the afternoon Damaris was allowed to play quietly at keeping house, with Love Brewster, who was a quiet child and liked better to play at being a pilgrim, and making a house with Damaris, than to share in the boys' games.

"Where do you go, lambkin?" Constance asked her. "For we must know where to find you, nor must it be far from the house."

"It is just down by that little patch, Connie; it's as nice as it can be, and it is the safest place in Plymouth, I'm sure," Damaris assured her earnestly. "You see there is a woods, and a hollow, and a big, big, great tree, and its roots go all out, every way, and we live in them, because they are rooms already; don't you see? And it's nice and damp--but you don't get your feet wet!" Damaris anticipated the objection which she saw in Constance's eye. "It's only--only--soft, gentle damp; not wetness, and moss grows there, as green as green can be, and feathery! And on the tree are nice little yellow plates, with brown edges! Growing on it! And we play they are our best plates that we don't use every day, because they are soft-like, and we didn't care to touch them when we did it. But they make the prettiest best plates in the cupboard, for they grow, in rows, with their edges over the next one, just the way you set up our plates in the corner cupboard. So please don't think it isn't a nice place, Constance, because it is, and I'd feel terribly afflicted, and cast down, and as nothing, if I couldn't go there with Love."

Constance smiled at the child's quoting of the phrases which she had heard in the long sermons that Elder Brewster read, or delivered to them twice on Sunday, there being no minister yet come to Plymouth.

"You little echo!" Constance cried. "It surely would be a matter to move one's pity if you suffered so deeply as that in the loss of your playground! Well, dear, till the warmth breaks up I suppose you may keep your house with Love, but promise to leave it if you feel chilly there. We must trust you so far. Art going there now?"

"Yes, dear Constance. You have a heart of compassion and I love you with all of mine," said Damaris, expressing herself again like a little Puritan, but hugging her sister with the natural heartiness of a loving child.

Then she ran away, and Constance, taking her capacious darning bag on her arm, went to bear Priscilla Alden company at her mending, as she often did when no work about the house detained her.

Giles came running down the road when the afternoon had half gone, his face white. "Con, come home!" he cried, bursting open the door. "Hasten! Damaris is strangely ill."

Constance sprang up, throwing her work in all directions, and Priscilla sprang up with her. Without stopping to pick up a thread, the two girls went with Giles.

"I don't know what it is," Giles said, in reply to Constance's questions. "Love Brewster came running to Dame Hopkins, crying that Damaris was sick and strange. She followed him to the children's playground, and carried the child home. She is like to die; convulsions and every sign of poison she has, but what it is, what to do, no one knows. The women are there, but Doctor Fuller, as you know, is gone to a squaw who is suffering sore, and we could not bring him, even if we knew where he was, till it was too late. They have done all that they can recall for such seizures, but the child grows worse."

"Oh, Giles!" groaned Constance. "She hath eaten poison. What has Doctor Fuller told me of these things? If only I can remember! All I can think of is that he hath said different poisons require different treatment. Oh, Giles, Giles!"

"Steady, Sister; it may be that you can help," said Giles. "It had not occurred to any one how much the doctor had told you of his methods. Perhaps Love will know what Damaris touched."

"There is Love, sitting crouched in the corner of the garden plot, his head on his knees, poor little Love!"

Constance broke into a run and knelt beside the little boy, who did not look up as she put her arms around him.

"Love, Love, dear child, if you can tell me what Damaris ate perhaps God will help me cure her," she said. "Look up, and be brave and help me. Did you see Damaris eat anything that you did not eat with her?"

"Little things that grow around the big tree where it is wetter, we picked for our furniture," Love said at once. "Damaris said you cooked them and they were good. So then she said we would play some of them was furniture, and some of them was our dinner. And I didn't eat them, for they were like thin leather, only soft, and I felt of them, and couldn't eat them. But Damaris did eat them."

"Toadstools!" cried Constance with a gasp. "Toadstools, Love! Did they look like little tables? And did Damaris call them mushrooms?"

"Yes, like little tables," Love nodded his head hard. "All full underneath with soft crimped----"

But Constance waited for no more. With a cry she was on her feet and running like the wind, calling back over her shoulder to Giles:

"I'll come quick! I know! I know! Tell Father I know!"

"She hath gone to Doctor Fuller's house," said Priscilla, watching Constance's flying figure, her hair unbound and streaming like a burnished banner behind her as she ran to get her weapon to fight with Death. "No girl ever ran as she can. Come, Giles; obey her. Tell your father and Mistress Hopkins that mayhap Constance can save the child."

They turned toward the house, and Constance sped on.

"Nightshade! The belladonna!" she was saying to herself as she ran. "I know the phial; I know its place. O, God, give me time, and give me wit, and do Thou the rest!" Past power to explain, she swept aside with a vehement arm the woman who found needed shelter for herself in Doctor Fuller's house, and kept it for him till his wife should come to Plymouth.

Into the crude laboratory and pharmacy--in which the doctor had allowed her to work with him, of the contents of which he had taught her so much for an emergency that she had little dreamed would so closely affect herself when it came--Constance flew, and turned to the shelf where stood, in their dark phials, the few poisons which the doctor kept ready to do beneficent work for him.

"Belladonna, belladonna, the beautiful lady," Constance murmured, in the curious way that minds have of seizing words and dwelling on them with surface insistence, while the actual mind is intensely working on a vital matter.

She took down the wrong phial first, and set it back impatiently.

"There should be none other like belladonna," she said aloud, and took down the phial she sought. To be sure that she was right, though it was labelled in the doctor's almost illegible small writing, she withdrew the cork. She knew the sickening odour of the nightshade which she had helped distil, an odour that dimly recalled a tobacco that had come to her father in England in her childhood from some Spanish colony, as she had been told, and also a wine that her stepmother made from wild berries.

Constance shuddered as she replaced the cork.

"It sickens me, but if only it will restore little Damaris!" she thought.

Holding the phial tight Constance hastened away, and, her breath still coming painfully, she broke into her swift race homeward, diminishing nothing of her speed in coming, her great purpose conquering the pain that oppressed her labouring breast.

When she reached her home her father was watching for her in the doorway. He took her hands in both of his without a word, covering the phial which she clasped, and looking at her questioningly.

"I hope so; oh, I hope so, Father!" she said. "The doctor told me."

Stephen Hopkins led her into the house; Dame Eliza met her within.

"Constance? Connie?" Thus Mistress Hopkins implored her to do her best, and to allow her to hope.

"Yes, yes, Mother," Constance replied to the prayer, and neither noted that they spoke to each other by names that they had never used before.

The first glimpse that Constance had of Damaris on the bed sent all the blood back against her heart with a pang that made her feel faint. It did not seem possible that she was in time, even should her knowledge be correct.

The child lay rigid as Constance's eyes fell on her; her lips and cheeks were ghastly, her long hair heightening the awful effect of her deathly colour. Frequent convulsions shook her body, her struggling breathing alone broke the stillness of the room.

"She is quieter, but it is not that she is better," whispered Dame Eliza.

Priscilla Alden stood ready with a spoon and glass in one hand, water in a small ewer in the other, always the efficient, sensible girl when needed.

Constance accepted the glass, took from it the spoon, gave the glass back to Priscilla and poured from the dark phial into the spoon the dose of belladonna that Doctor Fuller had explained to her would be proper to use in an extreme case of danger.

"How wonderful that he should have told me particularly about toadstool poisoning, yet it is because of the children," Constance's dual mind was saying to her, even while she poured the remedy and prayed with all her might for its efficacy.

"Open her mouth," she said to her father, and he obeyed her. Constance poured the belladonna down Damaris's throat.

Even after the first dose the child's rigor relaxed before a long time had passed. The dose was repeated; the early dusk of the grayest month closed down upon the watchers in that room. The neighbours slipped away to their own homes and duties; night fell, and Stephen Hopkins, his wife, Giles, and Constance stood around that bed, feeling no want of food, watching, watching the gradual cessation of the wracking convulsions, the relaxation of the stiffened little limbs, the fall of the strained eyelids, the quieter breathing, the changing tint of the skin as the poison loosed its grip upon the poor little heart and the blood began to course languidly, but duly, through the congested veins.

"Constance, she is safe!" Stephen Hopkins ventured at last to say as Damaris turned on her side with a long, refreshing breath.

Giles went quickly from the room, and Constance turned to her father with sudden weakness that made her faint.

Constance swayed as she stood and her father caught her in his arms, tenderly drawing her head down on his shoulder, as great rending sobs shook her from relief and the accumulated exhaustion of hunger, physical weariness, anxiety, and grief.

"Brave little lass!" Stephen Hopkins whispered, kissing her again and again. "Brave, quick-witted, loving, wise little lass o' mine!"

Dame Eliza spoke never a word, but on her knees, with her head buried in the bright patch bedspread, one of Damaris's cold little hands laid across her lips, she wept as Constance had never dreamed that her stepmother could weep.

"Better look after her, Father," Constance whispered, alarmed. "She will do herself a mischief, poor soul! Mother, oh--she loves me not! Father, comfort her; I will rest, and then I shall be my old self."

"You did not notice that Priscilla had come back," her father said. "She is in the kitchen, and the kettle is singing on the hob. Go, dear one, and Priscilla will give you food and warm drink. Let me help you there. My Constance, Damaris would be far beyond our love by now had you not saved her. You have saved her life, Constance! What do we not all owe to you?"

"It was Doctor Fuller. He taught me. He is wise, and knew that children might take harm from toadstools, playing in the woods as ours do. It was not due to me that Damaris was saved," Constance said.

She was not conscious of how heavily she leaned on her father's arm, which lovingly enfolded her, leading her to the big chair in the inglenook. The fire leaped and crackled; the steam from the singing kettle on the crane showed rosy red in the firelight; Hecate, Puck, and Lady Fair basked in the warmth, and Priscilla Alden knelt on the hearth stirring something savoury in the saucepan that sat among the raked-off ashes, while John Alden, who had brought Priscilla back to be useful to the worn-out household, sat on the settle, leaning forward, elbows on knees, the bellows between his hands, ready to pump up wind under a flame that might show a sign of flagging.

"Dear me, how cosy it looks!" exclaimed Constance, involuntarily, her drooping muscles tautening to welcome the brightness waiting for her. "It does not seem as though there ever could come a sorrow to threaten a hearthstone so shut in, so well tended as this one!"

"It did not come, my dear; it only looked in at the window, and when it saw the tended hearth, and how well-armed you were to grapple with it, off it went!" cried Priscilla, drawing Constance into the high-backed chair. "Feet on this stool, my pretty, and this napery over your knees! That's right! Now this bowl and spoon, and then your Pris will pour her hot posset into your bowl, and you must shift it into your sweet mouth, and we'll be as right as a trivet, instanter!"

Priscilla acted as she chattered, and Constance gladly submitted to being taken care of, lying back smiling in weary, happy acquiescence.

Priscilla's posset was a heartening thing, and Constance after it, munched blissfully on a biscuit and sipped the wine that had been made of elder too brief a time before, yet which was friendly to her, nevertheless.

Constance's lids drooped in the warmth, her head nodded, her fingers relaxed. Priscilla caught her glass just in time as it was falling, and Constance slept beside the fire while John and Priscilla crept away, and Giles came to take their place, to keep up the blaze in case a kettle of hot water might be needed when Damaris wakened from her first restoring sleep.

At dawn Doctor Fuller came in and Constance aroused to welcome him.

"Child, what an experience you have borne!" the good man said, bending with a moved face to greet Constance. "To think that I should have been absent! Your practice was more successful than mine; the squaw is dead. And you remembered my teaching, and saved the child with the nightshade we gathered and distilled that fair day, more than two months ago! 'Twas a lesson well conned!"

"'Twas a lesson well taught," Constance amended. "Sit here, Doctor Fuller, and let me call my father. You will see Damaris? And her mother is in need of a quieting draught, I think. The poor soul was utterly spent when last I saw her, though I've selfishly slept, nor known aught of what any one else might be bearing."

Constance slipped softly through the door as she spoke, into the bedroom where Damaris lay. The little girl was sleeping, but her mother lay across her feet, her gloomy eyes staring at the wall, her face white and mournful.

"Doctor Fuller is come, Stepmother," whispered Constance. "Shall he not see Damaris? And you, have you not slept?"

"Not a wink," said Dame Eliza, rising heavily. "To me it is as if Damaris had died, and that that child there was another. I bore the agony of parting from her, and now must abide by it, meseems, for I cannot believe that she is here and safe. Constance, it is to you----." She stopped and began again. "I was ever fond of calling you your father's daughter, making plain that I had no part in you. It was true; none have I, nor ever can have. But in my child you have the right of sister, and the restorer of her life. Damaris's mother, and Damaris is your father's other daughter, is heavily in your debt. I do not know----." She paused. She had spoken slowly, with difficulty, as if she could not find the words, nor use them as she wished to when she had found them. Young as she was, Constance saw that her stepmother was labouring under the stress of profound emotion, that tore her almost like a physical agony.

"Now, now, prithee, Mistress Hopkins!" cried Constance, purposely using her customary title for her stepmother, to avoid the effect of there being anything out of the ordinary between them. "Bethink thee that I have loved Damaris dearly all her short life, and that her loss would have wounded me hardly less than it would have you. What debt can there be where there is love? Would I not have sacrificed anything to keep the child, even for myself? And what have I done but remember what the doctor taught me, and give her drops? Do not, I pray thee, make of my selfishness and natural affection a matter of merit! And now the doctor is waiting. Will you not go to him and let him treat you, too?--for indeed you need it. And he will tell you how best to bring Damaris back to her strength. I am going out into the morning air, for my long sleep by the hot fire hath made me heavy. I will be back in a short time to help with breakfast, Stepmother!"

Constance snatched her cloak and ran out by the other door to escape seeing the doctor again and hearing her stepmother dilate to him upon the night's events.

The sun was rising, resplendent, but the air was cold.

"And no wonder!" Constance thought, startled by her discovery. "Winter is upon us; to-day is December! Our warmth must leave us, and then will danger of poisoning be past, even in sheltered spots, such as that in which our little lass near found her death!"

She spread her arms out to the sun rays, and let the crisp, sea wind cool her face.

"What a world! What a world! How fair, how glad, how sweet! Oh, thank God that it is so to us all this morning! Never will I repine at hardships in kind Plymouth colony, nor at the cost of coming on this pilgrimage, for of all the world in Merry England there is none to-day happier or more grateful than is this pilgrim maid!"