CHAPTER III

Weary Waiting at the Gates

"Call Giles hither. I need help to strap these blankets to carry safely, Mr. Hopkins," said Dame Eliza Hopkins, bustling up to her husband two hours after the _Mayflower_ had made anchorage.

"To carry whither, wife?" asked Mr. Hopkins, with the amused smile that always irritated his excitable wife by its detached calmness.

"Will you not need the blankets at night? Truth to tell this Cape Cod air seems to me well fit for blankets."

"And for what other use should they be carried ashore? Or would they keep us warm left on the ship?" demanded Mistress Eliza. "Truly, Stephen Hopkins, you are a test of the patience of a saint!"

"Which needs no testing, since the patience of the saints has passed into a proverb," commented Stephen Hopkins. "But with all humility I would answer 'yes' to your question, _Eliza_: the blankets would surely keep you warmer when on the ship than if they were ashore, since it is on the ship that you are to remain."

"Remain! On the ship? For how long, pray? And why? Do you not think that I have had enough and to spare of this ship after more than two months within her straitened cabin, and Oceanus crying, poor child, and wearing upon me as if he felt the hardship of his birthplace? Nor is Mistress White's baby, Peregrine, happier than my child in being born on this _Mayflower_. When one is not crying, the other is and oftener than not in concert. Why should I not go ashore with the others?" demanded Mistress Eliza, in quick anger.

"Ah, wife, wife, my poor Eliza," sighed Mr. Hopkins, raising his hand to stem the torrent. "Leave not all the patience of the saints to those in paradise! You, with all the other women, will remain on the ship while certain of the men--the rest being left to guard you--go in the shallop to explore our new country and pick the fittest place for our settlement. How long we may be gone, I do not know. Rest assured it will not be an absence wilfully prolonged. You will be more comfortable here than ashore. It is likely that when you do go ashore to begin the new home you will look back regretfully at the straitened quarters of the little ship that has served us well, in spite of sundry weaknesses which she developed. Be that as it may, this delay is necessary, as reflection will show you, so let us not weary ourselves with useless discussion of it."

Mistress Hopkins knew that when her husband spoke in this manner, discussion of his decision was indeed useless. She had an awe of his wisdom, his amused toleration of her, of his superior birth and education, and, though she ventured to goad him in small affairs, when it came to greater ones she dared not dispute him. So now she bit her lip, as angry and disappointed tears sprang to her eyes, but did not reply.

Stephen Hopkins produced from his inner pocket an oblong packet sewn in an oilskin wrapper.

"Here, Eliza," he said, "are papers of value to this expedition, together with some important only to ourselves, but to us sufficiently so to guard them carefully. The public papers were entrusted to me just before we sailed from Southampton by one interested in the welfare of this settlement. My own papers relate to the English inheritance that will be my children's should they care to claim it. These papers I must leave in your care now that I am to go on this exploring party ashore. I will not risk carrying them where savages might attack us, though I have kept them upon me throughout the voyage. Guard them well. Not for worlds would I lose the papers relating to the community, sorry as I should be to lose my own, for those were a trust, and personal loss would be nothing compared to the loss of them."

He handed the packet to his wife as he spoke and she took it, turning it curiously over and about.

"I hope the English inheritance will one day come to Damaris and Oceanus," she said, bitterly, her jealousy of the two children of her husband's first wife plain to be seen. "Here's Giles," she added, hastily thrusting the packet into her bosom with a violence that her husband noted and wondered at.

"Father," said Giles, coming up, "take me with you."

Gloom and discontent were upon his brow. Giles's face was fast growing into a settled expression of bitterness. His stepmother's dislike for him, and for his sister, Giles bore less well than Constance. The natural sweetness of the girl, her sunny hopefulness, led her ceaselessly to try to make things pleasant around her, to be always ready to forget and begin again, hoping that at last she might win her stepmother's kindness. But Giles never forgot, consequently never could hope that the bad situation would mend, and he returned Mistress Eliza's dislike with compound interest. He was a brave lad, capable of strong attachments, but the bitterness that he harboured, the unhappiness of his home life, were doing him irreparable harm. His father was keenly alive to this fact, and one of his motives in coming to the New World with the Puritans, with whose strict views he by no means fully sympathized, was to give Giles the opportunity to conquer the wilderness, and in conquering it to find a vent for his energy, happiness for himself.

Mr. Hopkins turned to the boy now and sighed, seeing that he had heard his stepmother's expression of hope that _her_ children would receive their father's English patrimony. But he said only:

"Take you with me where, Giles?"

"Exploring the country. I am too old, too strong to stay here with the women and children. Besides, I want to go," said Giles, shortly.

"But few of the men are to go, my son; you will not be reckoned among the weaklings in staying," said Mr. Hopkins, laying his hand upon the boy's shoulder with a smile that Giles did not return. "Enough have volunteered; Captain Standish has made up his company. You are best here and will find enough to do. Have you thought that you are my eldest, and that if we met with savages, or other fatal onslaught, that you must take my place? I cannot afford to risk both of us at once. You are my reliance and successor, Giles lad."

The boy's sullen face broke into a piteous smile; he flushed and looked into his father's eyes with a glance that revealed for an instant the dominant passion of his life, his adoring love for his father.

Then he dropped his lids, veiling the light that he himself was conscious shone in them.

"Very well, If you want me to stay, stay it is. But I'd like to go. And if there is danger, why not let me take your place? I should not know as much as you, but I would obey the captain's orders, and I am as strong as you are. Better let me go if there's any chance of not returning," he said.

"Your valuable young life for mine, my boy? Hardly that!" said Stephen Hopkins with a comradely arm thrown across the boy. "I shall always be a piece of drift from the old shore; you will grow from your youth into the New World's life. And what would my remnant of life be to me if my eldest born had purchased it?"

"You are young enough, Father," began Giles, struggling not to show that the expression of his father's love moved him as it did.

Mistress Eliza, who had been watching and listening to what was said with scornful impatience, broke in.

"Let the lad go. He will not be helpful here, and your little children need your protection, not to speak of your wife, Mr. Hopkins."

At the first syllable Giles had hastened away. Stephen Hopkins turned on her. "The boy is more precious than I am. It is settled; he is to stay. Take great care of the packet I have entrusted to you," he said.

For four days the ship's carpenters had busied themselves in putting together and making ready the shallop which the _Mayflower_ had carried for the pilgrims to use in sailing the shallow waters of the bays and rivers of the new land, to discover the spot upon which they should decide to make their beginning.

The small craft was ready now, and in the morning set out, taking a small band of the men who had crossed on the _Mayflower_, as much ammunition and provisions as her capacity allowed them, to proceed no one knew whither, to encounter no one knew what.

Constance stood wistfully, anxiously, watching the prim white sail disappear.

Humility Cooper and Elizabeth Tilley--the cousins, who, though Constance's age, seemed so much younger--and Priscilla Mullins--who though older, seemed but Constance's age--were close beside her, and, seated on a roll of woollen cloth, sat Rose Standish, drooping as now she always drooped, often coughing, watching with her unnaturally clear eyes, as the girls watched, the departure of the little craft that bore their beloved protectors away.

The country that lay before them looked "wild and weather-beaten." All that they could see was woods and more woods, stretching westward to meet the bleak November sky, hiding who could say what dangers of wild beasts and yet more-savage men?

Behind them lay the heaving ocean, dark under the scudding clouds, and which they had just sailed for two months of torture of body and mind.

If the little shallop were but sailing toward one single friend, if there were but one friendly English-built house beside whose hearth the adventurers might warm themselves after a handclasp of welcome! Desolation and still more desolation behind and before them! What awful secrets did that low-lying, mysterious coast conceal? What could the future hold for this handful of pilgrims who were to grapple without human aid with the cruelties of a severe clime, of preying creatures, both beast and human?

Rose Standish's head bent low as the tipmost point of the shallop's mast rounded a promontory, till it rested on her knees and her thin shoulders heaved. Instantly Constance was on her knees before her, gently forcing Rose's hands from her face and drawing her head upon her shoulder.

"There, there!" Constance crooned as if to a baby. "There, there, sweet Rose! What is it, what is it?"

"Oh, if I knew he would ever come back! Oh, if I knew how to go on, how, how to go on!" Rose sobbed.

"Captain Myles come back!" cried Constance, with a laugh that she was delighted to hear sounded genuine.

"Why, silly little Rose Standish, don't you know nothing could keep the captain from coming back? Wouldn't it be a sorry day for an Indian, or for any beast, when he attacked our right arm of the colony? No fear of him not coming back to us! And how to go on, is that it? In your own cozy little house, with Prissy and the rest of us to help you look after it till you are strong again, and then the fair spring sunshine, and the salt winds straight from home blowing upon you, and you will not need to know how to go on! It will be the rest of us who will have to learn how to keep up with you!"

"Kind Constance," whispered Rose, stroking the girl's cheek and looking wistfully into her eyes as she dried her own. "You keep me up, though you are so young! Not for nothing were you named Constantia, for constant indeed you are! I will be good, and not trouble you. Usually I feel sure that I shall get well, but to-day--seeing Myles go----. Sometimes it comes over me with terrible certainty that it is not for me to see this wilderness bloom."

"Just tiredness, dear one," said Constance, lovingly, and as if she were a whole college of learned physicians. "Have no fear."

Mistress Hopkins came in search of them, carrying the baby Oceanus with manifest protest against his weight and wailing.

"I have been looking for you, Constantia," she said, as if this were a severe accusation against the girl. "You are to take this child. Have I not enough to do and to put up with that I must be worn threadbare by his crying? And what a country! Your father has been tormenting me with his mending and preparation for this expedition so that I have not seen it as it is until just now. Look at it, only look at it! What a place to bring a decent woman to who has never wanted! Though I may not have been the fine lady that his first wife was, yet am I a comfortable farmer's daughter, and Stephen Hopkins should not have brought me to a coast more bleak and dismal than the barrens of Sahara. Woods, nothing but woods! And full of lions, and tigers, and who knows what other raving, raging wild vermin--who knows? What does thy father mean by bringing me to this?"

Constance pressed her lips together hard, a burning crimson flooding her face as she took the baby violently thrust upon her and straightened his disordered wrappings, reminding herself that his mother was not his fault.

"Why as to that, Mistress Hopkins," said Priscilla Mullins in her downright, sensible way, "Mr. Hopkins did not bring you. We all came willingly, and I make no doubt that all of us knew quite well that it was a wilderness to which we were bound."

"There is knowing and knowing, Priscilla Mullins, and the knowing before seeing is a different thing from the knowing and seeing. Stephen Hopkins had been about the world; he even set sail for Virginia, which as I understand is somewhere not far from Cape Cod, though not near enough to give us neighbours for the borrowing of a salt rising, or the trade of a recipe, or the loan of a croup simple should my blessed babe turn suffocating as he is like to do in this wicked cold wind; and these things are the comforts of a woman's life, and her right--as all good women will tell thee before thou art old enough to know what the lack is in this desolation. So it is clear that Stephen Hopkins had no right to bring me here, innocent as I was of what it all stood for, and hard enough as it is to be married to a man whose first wife was of the gentry, and whose children that she left for my torment are like to her, headstrong and proud-stomached, and hating me, however I slave for them. And your father, Constantia Hopkins, has gone now, not content with bringing me here across that waste o' waters, and never is it likely will come back to me to look after that innocent babe that was born on the ocean and bears its name according, and came like the dove to the ark, bearing an olive branch across the deluge. But much your father cares for this, but has gone and left me, and it is no man's part to leave a weak woman to struggle alone to keep wild beasts and Indians from devouring her children; and so I tell you, and so I maintain. And never, never have I looked upon a scene so forsaken and unbearable as that gray woodland that the man who swore to cherish me has led me into."

Constance quite well knew that this hysterical unreason in her stepmother would pass, and that it was not more worth heeding than the wind that whistled around the ship's stripped masts. Mistress Eliza had a vixenish temper, and a jealous one. She frequently lashed herself into a fury with one or another of the family for its object and felt the better for it, not regarding how it left the victim feeling.

But though she knew this, Constance could not always act upon her knowledge, and disregard her. She was but a very young girl and now she was a very weary one, with every nerve quivering from tense anxiety in watching her father go into unknown danger.

She sprang to her feet with a cry.

"Oh, my father, my father! How dare you blame him, my patient, wise, forbearing father! Why did he bring you here, indeed! He--so fine, so noble, so hard-pressed with your tongue, Mistress Hopkins!--I will not hear you blame him. Oh, my father, my dear, dear, good father!" she sobbed, losing all sense of restraint in her grief.

Suddenly on hearing this outburst, Mistress Hopkins, as is sometimes the way of such as she, became as self-controlled as she had, but a moment before, been beside herself. And in becoming quiet she became much more angry than she had been, and more vindictive.

"You speak to me like this?--you dare to!" she said in a low, furious voice. "You will learn to your sorrow what it means to flout me. You will pay for this, Constantia Hopkins, and pay to the last penny, to your everlasting shame and misery."

Constance was too frightened by this change, by this white fury, which she had never seen before in her stepmother, to answer; but before she could have answered, Doctor Fuller, who had strayed that way in time to hear the last of Dame Eliza's tirade, Constance's retort, and this final threat, took Constance by the arm and led her away.

"Quiet, my dear, quiet and calm, you know! Don't let yourself forget what is due to your father's wife, to yourself, still more to your conscience," he warned her. "And remember that a soft answer turneth away wrath."

"Oh, it doesn't, Doctor Fuller, indeed it doesn't!" sobbed Constance, utterly unstrung. "I've tried it, tried it again and again, and it only makes the wrath turn the harder upon me; it never turns it away! Indeed, indeed I've faithfully tried it."

"It's a hard pilgrimage for you at times I fear, Constance, but never turn aside into wrong on your part," said the good doctor, gently.

"Oh, I'm sorry I flared up, I am sorry I spoke angrily. But my father! To blame him when he is so patient, and has so much to endure! Must I beg his wife's pardon?" said Constance, humbly.

Doctor Fuller concealed a smile. Sorry as he was for Constance, and indignant at her stepmother's unkindness, it amused him to note how completely in her thoughts Constance separated herself from the least connection with her.

"I think it would be the better course, my dear, and I admire you for being the one to suggest it," he answered, with an encouraging pat on Constance's sleeve.

"Well, I will. I mean to do what is right, and I will," Constance sighed. "But I truly think it will do no good," she added.

"Nor I," Doctor Fuller agreed with her in his thoughts, but he took good care not to let this opinion reach his lips.