In the end the old doctor was neither wholly right nor wholly wrong. Stephen was never again the square, sturdy lad that he had been before his terrible illness, but none the less he grew through an active boyhood and became a busy, useful man. If it ever was a bitter pain to him to see other boys swim and run and climb in a way that he could never do again, no one had known of it save perhaps his mother, or his good friend Sergeant Branderby who had so long ago returned to England. His hopes of being a soldier or a sailor were destroyed forever in that single moment when he slipped from the pine tree branch; instead he became a lawyer and made so brilliant a record that he should have had small time to grieve over vanished dreams.
While he was still little more than a boy he became the most honoured member of the Hopewell community; long before his hair was grey he began to be spoken of as one of the great men of the Colony. What Master Simon had been to his own little town, Stephen was beginning to be to all New England. Governors and King’s officers sought his advice, merchants and ship-masters and labouring men of every kind and degree laid their perplexities before him. That he was esteemed the wisest man in all Massachusetts was denied by no one save Stephen himself. With honest sincerity he laughed at all allusions to his greatness and thought of himself only as a humble man of law.
“If I have had good fortune,” he used to say, “it is because of the shoemaker’s luck-penny. If people come to me it is only because they know that I am a hampered fellow and cannot well go to them. It is kindness of heart and that alone that brings a portion of the great world past my doors.”
It was a strange and motley procession that went in and out of the great house, for half of his guests were dressed in frieze and homespun, while the other half came clad in satins and velvets and gold-laced scarlet coats.
Gone now were the old times of rigid economy and stern simplicity among the Puritans. Men wore bright-coloured uniforms, lace ruffles and great powdered wigs, while the women, with their jewels, their patches, their high, red heels and long brocaded trains, were as gorgeously arrayed as the ladies of the English court. There used to be noble gatherings in Stephen’s big dining-room, when the greatest men in the land sat about his board and the tall wax tapers shone upon the officers’ red coats and jewelled orders, upon the ladies’ powdered hair and diamonds and upon the more soberly rich garb of the wealthy Massachusetts citizens. A throng of black-faced servants, themselves decked out in livery and powdered wigs, would wait upon the company and later conduct them into the long white-panelled drawing-room whose open windows looked out across the garden to the sea. Or, if it were winter, the guests would gather about the fireplace which, although much of the house was new, was the same rough stone one built by Master Simon’s hands. Amid this gay crowd of friends moved Stephen, quiet-mannered and simply clad, the only ornament upon his dark coat a diamond star given him by the King of France.
That was a time, also, when the garden bloomed in greater glory than it had ever known before. Those to whom Stephen had done good, and these were a countless legion, could give him nothing in return in the way of money or high office, for such rewards he did not want. But the royal Governors could send him costly fruit-trees from their English estates, poor sailors could bring him rare plants from foreign lands and his good friends of Hopewell could offer him the best they had of flower or fruit. The gardener used to say that Master Sheffield gave away so many plants and flowers that soon there would be nothing left, but that is the usual talk of gardeners. This one, with his acres of many coloured blossoms could not say, generous as Stephen was, that the danger of stripping the garden was a great or an immediate one.
One portion was left unaltered, that planted by Master Simon; for beehives still stood in a row beneath the old, old apple trees, and daffodils in Spring and hollyhocks in summer still bloomed in a riot of colour beside the white gate. The Queen’s garden, too, was untouched by any change and here Stephen came often to sit on the bench under the linden tree and to ponder upon the more and more grave problems that must be solved by those who had the welfare of New England at heart. Troubled times were these, with greater difficulties plainly still to come. It was here that he was sitting, one summer day, knitting his brows over a letter with a great, red seal, when there came an interruption that was to mean much to all his after life.
The creak of the opening gate announced a visitor, its hurried bang as it closed again told plainly that the newcomer was in haste. Looking up from his letter, Stephen saw before him the town constable, his good-natured face clouded with perplexity, his brass-tipped staff, the badge of his office, held stiffly before him, a sure sign that public duty was weighing the good man down. He was followed by a middle-aged woman whose dark, weatherbeaten countenance was lined with grief and whose hair, under her odd, close-fitting starched cap was threaded with grey. She bore in her arms a bundle of what seemed to be nothing but delicately embroidered garments but which, suddenly beginning to stir and turn, revealed itself as a dark-eyed baby of possibly a year old. The woman dropped a deep curtsey and then stood waiting in silence.
“Please, Master Sheffield,” began the distressed constable, “this woman is one of the exiles from Acadia, who, as we all have heard, were landed seven days ago in Boston and who have been wandering all through the Colony. She has somehow come this far, but there is no one in the town who can tell what to do with her. She understands no word we say and, when I speak to her, only curtseys, weeps or breaks into some foreign jargon of her own.”
“From Acadia?” repeated Stephen. His clear eyes clouded at the name, for he knew and bitterly regretted the policy that had led British troops into occupying the French-speaking province of Acadia, and into driving all the peaceable inhabitants into exile. Hurrying them on board ship, they had sent them off anywhere and everywhere, in wild haste to be rid of them, little caring whether families were separated or children and their parents were lost to each other forever. Stephen, very gently and kindly, spoke to the woman in her own tongue.
Such a flash of joy as lighted up her poor worn face when she heard speech that she could at last understand, and such a flood of voluble French as she poured out when Stephen had finished! The constable looked on in amazement and finally heaved a long sigh of relief.
“I might have known enough to come to Master Sheffield in the first place,” he exclaimed. “He always knows what is best to do!”
Stephen, after talking a few minutes with the woman, turned to him.
“I will take the poor creature into my service,” he said, “there is need of another helper in the kitchen and there seems naught else to do with her. She can live, with the baby, in the cottage across the field yonder, it has been empty this year past. Take her up to the house, if you please, good Master Constable, and tell the servants to give her a meal and something for the baby. And bid Jason, who was with me in France and can speak a few words of her tongue, to go with her and show her where she is to abide. It is a good child you have,” he added in French to the woman, “is it a granddaughter or a grandson?”
“The baby is a girl, Monsieur,” she answered, “but not mine. Indeed I have no way of knowing to whom she belongs, for, just as I was being taken on board ship to be torn forever from my dear native land, I found this little one wailing on the beach, left behind, in the confusion, by the boat that must have carried away her parents. And I, who had lost all those belonging to me in the same way, gathered her into my arms and kept her with me through all the long, dreadful voyage. A good child she is indeed, and I have named her Clotilde, after my own little daughter that died twenty years ago. May Heaven bless you for taking pity on us and letting us bide where we can hear our own speech again.”
She was led by the constable up toward the house while Stephen returned to his letter. It had to do with a mission to England that all the worthies of Massachusetts were begging him to undertake. Once before this, he had gone to France on a weighty errand for the people of the province. He had come back with the mission well performed, with the good will of the French people and with the diamond star that the French King’s own hands had pinned upon his coat. And now his comrades were asking him to take up a still more difficult task, to do what he could toward healing the growing breach between the Colonies and the Mother Country.
Even as Sergeant Branderby had said, Kings and Queens had grown to be of less value now, so that, with the fading loyalty to the crown, there had diminished the regard of the New World for the Old. The dashing Stuart Kings had been beloved in a way, so had the simple-hearted, good Queen Anne, but these German princes who sat on the British throne, who possessed little power and who were half the time in Hanover, what bond had they with the Colonies? It was hard to be loyal to political governors, to the constantly changing ministers in London and to the Parliament that was ever piling up new laws that bore heavily on America. It was, therefore, to mend these difficult matters that Stephen Sheffield was begged to go to England.
“Ah, well,” he said at last, coming to the end of a long argument with himself, “my strength is not much, but if it is of any worth to my Colony I may as well give it while I can.”
So it happened that the little cottage that had once been Samuel Skerry’s had scarcely received its new French tenants before the great mansion on the hill was closed and its master had sailed away to England. Madame Jeanne Lamotte, or Mother Lamotte, as the Acadian woman came to be called in Hopewell, kept a watchful eye upon Stephen’s house and the negro servants who had been left to care for it. For the rest of the time, she was busy scrubbing and polishing in the shoemaker’s dilapidated cottage, and tending the rapidly-growing Clotilde. A merry, active little girl she soon grew to be, with yellow hair and great dark eyes, quick and dainty in her ways and looking, so the people of the village said, more like an infant angel than a foundling French child.
Slow-sailing ships and slow-dragging politics kept Stephen long away, so that it was more than two years before he returned to America. He brought with him, when at last he came, a priceless document, signed by His Majesty King George the Second, and, what was of far greater worth, by the new and powerful Prime Minister, William Pitt, assuring the Colonies of their rights and privileges for a time at least. But even now his travelling was not at an end, for he made long journeys up and down the seacoast, preaching a new political doctrine of which he had begun to see the desperate need, namely union for all of America. If the colonists were to guard their freedom, they must learn to act together, to band themselves into a nation of their own.
Friends remonstrated when they saw how much more frail and ill he began to look, how hollow his gay blue eyes were becoming and how grey his hair. But Stephen laughed like a boy at all they said, and put their warnings aside.
“Grudge me not my share of the game,” he would say. “If the fighting comes, you that are staunchly built and mighty of limb will then have your turn and mine will be over. Let me do my part while the time allows.”
It was only once during this long period that he saw the little Clotilde. The meeting occurred one late afternoon when he was abiding for a day or two in his own house and had walked out into the garden to enjoy the coolness, peace and quiet beauty. Guests were coming later among whom there would be much weighty discussion of urgent affairs, but now, for a little, there was rest and stillness.
As he passed down one of the grass-covered walks, he heard, behind the hawthorn bush, a sweet clear little voice singing an old French song. He turned the corner of the path and came upon the little Acadian girl, sitting beside a bed of white and yellow flowers and looking not unlike them herself, so fair and dainty was she with her fresh white kerchief, her snowy apron and her bright golden hair. Seeing Stephen, she jumped up, quite unabashed, and dropped him a prim little curtsey.
“Tell me, what are you doing here and what was it you were singing?” he asked with a smile.
“It was a French song that Mère Jeanne taught me,” was her reply, “and I come here often to sit by the flowers and sing to them.”
“You sing to the flowers?” he repeated, puzzled. “What leads you to do that and why to these especial ones?”
“The gardener told me that they came from our land,” she answered gravely, “and that the name men give them is ‘fair maids of France.’ So, since they are in exile as well as we, I come and sing my French songs to them, lest they grow lonely and weep as Mère Jeanne so often does.”
Stephen held out his hand and took her tiny one into it.
“You are a very little maid to be so loyal to your country, and to your fellow exiles,” he said, “and you are young indeed to know the sorrows of banishment. Suppose you lead me to that Mère Jeanne of yours, so that we may try to comfort her a little.”
That night Master Sheffield’s guests, although they were many and of high importance, had to wait in the long drawing-room, while their host, yonder across the misty field, sat on the bench before the shoemaker’s cottage and talked in French to Mother Jeanne Lamotte. She, poor soul, had learned but little English and found black Jason’s few halting words of French, very small comfort indeed. Now that she could pour her heart out to one who could understand her native speech, it seemed as though she would never have done. Stephen duly admired the neatness and strict order of her little dwelling but finally declared that it had grown too old and tumble-down for comfort and that she and Clotilde must come to abide in the great house, where, since his sisters’ marriages and the death of his parents he lived alone save for the black servants.
“There is room in abundance,” he said, “and the little maid will help t............