THE BREAKING OF THE STORM
During Stephen’s illness that followed, it was Mother Jeanne’s devoted
nursing that brought him back to health and her hard, brown, skilful
hands that tended him with untiring faithfulness. Illness was no new
thing to Stephen Sheffield, but this long healing of an ugly wound was
hard for him to bear when so much was passing in the world outside and
the problems of the Colonies growing graver every day.
“I will tell you nothing,” Doctor Thorndyke would say gruffly when
Stephen, as soon as the Doctor appeared in the doorway, would begin to
beg for news. “You fret yourself into a fever whenever I relate of some
new tom-foolery wrought by King George the Third and his bat-blind
ministers. Therefore I will say no more, since my first duty to my
country is to make Master Stephen Sheffield well again.”
But as soon as Doctor Thorndyke was gone, Clotilde would steal to
Stephen’s bedside and recount all the news of the day that she had
gathered from Miles Atherton, for she knew, better than did the gruff
Doctor, that it is wiser to tell a sick person the truth than to let him
fret for the want of it. She was his constant and cheering companion
through this time, since she was nearly as good a nurse as Mother Jeanne
and quite as devoted a one.
It was upon her strong young shoulder that he leaned that first morning
when he walked downstairs and out into the fresh air. He sat for a long
time on the bench in the Queen’s Garden, feeling the sun warm upon him
and watching the slow shadow of the sundial creep toward the hour.
“Do you see that?” he said to Clotilde, pointing to the steadily
lengthening shadow that stretched its dark finger across the dial. “You
can as easily stop the movement of that shadow as you can hold back the
disaster that threatens these Colonies. Yet many people think that they
can accomplish both the one and the other by the simple device of
shutting their eyes!”
As he grew stronger and once more took up his burden of public affairs,
it was Clotilde who sat by his side, wrote the letters that his wounded
arm still made impossible, ran his errands and delivered his orders. She
had been an apt pupil at the village school and, now that she was
growing toward womanhood, was quite capable of becoming a clever and
ready secretary. She and Stephen grew very close to each other during
his illness and their labours together afterward, and finally became far
more like father and daughter than like wealthy patron and humble French
orphan girl.
People of the town began to speak of her quite as often by the name of
Clotilde Sheffield as Clotilde Lamotte. What her real name was, remained
a never-solved mystery, for, although Stephen made many inquiries, no
clue was ever found as to who her parents might have been. Mother Jeanne
had always declared that the girl came of people of higher station than
herself, a truth that every one began to realise as Clotilde grew older.
In spite of her having lived in New England since before she could talk,
there was still retained in her speech and her deft, quick ways, a faint
flavour of the well-born Frenchwoman. Passionately as the girl loved her
old peasant foster-mother, it became more evident every year that the
birth and breeding of the two were not the same.
That she was becoming also a great comfort to Stephen Sheffield was very
plain to all who knew them. Without her, the big house would have seemed
empty indeed to him, although lonely such a man as he could never really
be. Friends, servants, acquaintances, all who came near him must love
him. Even now, when his hair had grown nearly white and his shoulders
were bowed with heavy cares, there was something about the eagerness of
his clear, blue eyes and the boyishness of his slow, sweet, friendly
smile that made all hearts turn to him. Mother Jeanne would have gladly
laid down her life for his sake and so, as she had already proved, would
Clotilde. He was reaping now the reward of his kindness to the homeless
Acadian woman and her charge, for he had the older woman’s faithful
service and Clotilde’s love, reverence and companionship. Friends who
had grieved much over his never having married, felt now that they need
be concerned no more, since Clotilde was as devoted to him and he to her
as though she had been a child of his own.
In spite of his being unable to resume his long journeys from Colony to
Colony, his share in the public affairs was still very great. Many grave
men of high importance came to consult with him, and every day, it
seemed, messengers arrived with packets of papers or great sealed
official letters that must be delivered in all haste to Master
Sheffield. While the answers were being made ready, the men would sit
before the kitchen fire, refreshing themselves with Mother Jeanne’s
substantial good cheer and giving, in return, news of what was going on
in the world outside Hopewell.
Clotilde, when her services as scribe were not needed in the study,
loved to stand by and listen to the strangers’ talk, of how such and
such a man had been put in jail for refusing the King’s officers the
right to search his house for smuggled goods, or of how such and such a
ship had been turned about and sent back to England because the
Americans would not pay the tax on her cargo of tea. With one conclusion
the tale invariably ended, no matter who it was that spoke to the little
audience gathered in the kitchen.
“If I were the King,” the men would always say, or “if I were William
Pitt,” or “if I were Governor of Massachusetts, I would do such—or such
a thing and all would be well.”
Once Stephen interrupted an address of this kind, when he came to the
kitchen door himself, the completed letter in his hand.
“There is much you can do in your own person, David Thurston,” he said
quietly. “This is a time when every man must act for the public good
without waiting until he become Governor or Prime Minister or King
George the Third.”
“God bless you, Master Sheffield, and I will strive to do as you say,”
the man replied. He went away laughing, but with a new determination in
his rugged face.
A scarlet-uniformed soldier, bringing a letter from the Governor, sat
upon the settle one day drinking gratefully, after his long ride, a
great mug of home-brewed cider. He heard Clotilde speaking in French
with Mère Jeanne and looked round at her in surprise.
“How come you to speak that tongue as though you were born to it?” he
asked. “There are not many of you New Englanders who have learned
French.”
“We are Acadians,” Clotilde told him, “and still cling to our own
speech, although it is many years now since the brave English soldiers
drove a harmless people from their homes.”
“Ay,” answered the soldier without anger at her words, “that is a
blunder for which England must answer some day. Wrong she did then,
perhaps even greater wrong she is doing now, so that there has come
between the New Country and the Old so wide a breach, I fear, that it
will never be healed. Belike they will pour into the gulph a few
thousands of us who wear the King’s red coat and that may end the
quarrel and it may not. Time will tell—and that right soon.”
Clotilde watched him ride away, cantering through the sunshine and
dappled shade of the long, tree-bordered avenue, with a great rattling
of spurs and creaking of saddle-leather. In spite of his words, and
although both were thinking of the future, neither he nor she had the
faintest dream of the strange circumstances under which they were to
meet again.
Other news she used to hear, too, from Miles Atherton, who was a member
of the Hopewell company of minute-men that drilled every morning in the
town square. He was nearly a man now, still sturdy and square and slow
of speech, but bearing the same stout heart as did his grandfather, the
Hugh Atherton who dared to speak out for justice in the famous witch
panic. Often, when he came of an evening, Stephen would call him into
the study to question him as to how people thought and felt in the
village, and how many had joined the band of minute-men. More often,
when there was distinguished company with the master of the house and
Clotilde had finished tending and serving the guests, she and Miles
would walk in the garden, their tongues still busy with talk of the King
and his ministers and the shameful tax on tea. They were only like all
the rest of New England, where people could think and talk of but little
now save the growing cloud that hung over the Colonies.
There were no longer those brilliant, festive gatherings in Stephen’s
dining hall, or laughing, gorgeously dressed companies grouped about
Master Simon’s wide fireplace in the drawing-room. Instead, grave-faced
men would sit late into the night around the table in Stephen’s study,
sit so long indeed that more than once Clotilde, slipping down to begin
her work in the first faint light of dawn, had found them still in their
places, the table covered with guttering candles and strewn with papers,
the faces of all looking white and weary and worn. On one such occasion
Stephen heard her pass the door and called her in to find some papers
that he had been unable to get together himself. In spite of the long
discussion, the talk was still going on as she stood searching in the
carved press.
“I tell thee, friend,” a stout grey-coated stranger was saying, “England
forgets that for long years she has sent the freedom-lovers to America
to be rid of them and has granted them many liberties as a bribe to them
to stay there. Now, in the third and fourth generation, the Mother
Country seeks to take back these privileges and to make us law-ridden
and yoke-bound like her own Englishmen, who have stopped at home. It is
a mistake that will cost the King dear.”
“Yea,” ejaculated a man beside him whose black clothes indicated that he
was a minister. “They sowed the wind, they will reap the whirlwind!” The
black-clad gentleman, it seemed, was on the point of delivering a long
sermon upon this text had not Master Sheffield, taking up the papers
that Clotilde gave him, rather adroitly cut the dissertation short, at
which the stout Quaker chuckled behind his hand.
Later in the morning Clotilde stood by Stephen in the porch watching the
broad back and wide grey hat of the stout visitor as he and his plump,
ambling white horse disappeared down the avenue.
“Look well at that man, Clotilde,” said Stephen, “he is a Quaker and
would, in Master Simon’s time have been whipped and stoned out of
Massachusetts. Now we are proud that we have speech with him and that he
has come all the long way from Pennsylvania to consult with us. We
Puritans have learned a little, a very little, in a hundred years.”
Clotilde sighed heavily and turned to go in. It seemed to her that she
cared little to hear of such progress when all the time her dear Master
Sheffield was growing thinner and whiter and that terrible war was
coming ever nearer. She felt as she often did when the clouds of a
summer thunderstorm were hanging lower and lower above the house, when
the light was of a weird unearthly brightness and the air so
terrifyingly still that, frightened as she was, she almost prayed for
the storm to break.
The Spring passed and the summer, while the rumblings and threatenings
of war still sounded loud. Then, through the autumn and winter there was
a lull, people began to look more cheerful, to talk of the possibility
of a peaceful settlement, of England’s understanding that the struggle
with the Colonies would be too long and bitter to be worth while. For
the work that Stephen had done toward bringing the provinces together,
those steady years of hopeful toil, had begun to bear fruit at last.
Committees of Correspondence had been formed, the Continental Congress
had met and the organisation of the Massachusetts minute-men had been
copied by similar bands all up and down the sea-board. The friends of
America in England, were pointing out to the headlong King George the
Third that he was facing a nation with an army, instead of a handful of
helpless rebels. So, for the winter at least, the King paused. And then
came Spring again.
It was an evening in April after a clear warm day, full of the sweet
scent of growing things. A dash of rain had pattered over the garden, to
be followed, just at sunset, by long, level shafts of light that shone
on fresh green grass and budding shrubs and trees. A robin, in the hedge
of the Queen’s Garden, was singing so loudly that Clotilde came to the
great open door to listen. The willow trees beyond the garden were
yellow with young leaves and the line of daffodils by the gate had
bloomed in a nodding row. Then suddenly as she stood there, the robin’s
little voice was drowned by a wild, fierce jangling of bells in the
village, and a tall red tongue of flame leaped up from behind the houses
on the hill. A thudding of hoof-beats came madly down the lane and a man
leaped from his horse and ran in through the white gate, leaving his
animal standing with the bridle trailing over its head. With hurried
feet he came up the path and mounted the stone steps two at a time.
“A letter for Master Sheffield,” he said, “and news, great news! The
British troops and the minute-men had a running fight from Concord to
Lexington and back again. The Americans were too much for the redcoats
and the bells are pealing forth the tidings of our first victory. The
people yonder in the town are burning the tavern sign of the ‘King’s
Arms.’ The war has begun!”
With his letter in his hand he vanished into Stephen’s study, the door
closing behind him.
“So this is the war at last!” thought Clotilde.
Her knees began suddenly to shake under her and she sat down upon the
step since she could no longer stand. It had begun, and where would it
end? Would it bring them liberty or only destruction? Would the death
and ruin that were bound to come be kept back, or would the tide rise
nearer and nearer, to sweep over dear Master Sheffield and Mother
Jeanne, over Miles Atherton and herself? Would it roll its devastating
way across Master Simon’s garden blooming so bright and fair in the last
glories of the April sunshine?
Later she heard fuller tidings, for Miles came up from the town and,
sitting on the steps beside her, gave an account of the battle in more
glowing and excited words than she had ever thought to hear from his
lips. The hero of the day, it seemed, was one Paul Revere, that
mild-faced silversmith who had come only last October to set in place
the silver knocker upon Stephen Sheffield’s front door. At his warning,
as he galloped all night across the countryside, so Miles said, the
minute-men had come tumbling out in an excited throng, half dressed but
wholly ready for the work in hand. When the sun rose, the British
soldiers had found themselves marching down what seemed to be a lane of
unseen enemies whom they could not see to resist, so that the march
became a run and the run a rout. It was a damp, hot Spring day and the
King’s men, oppressed with their heavy, clumsy coats and high padded
hats, had been soon spent with heat and fatigue, and had staggered and
reeled as they ran finally into the arms of their waiting comrades at
Lexington.
“Poor men!” was Clotilde’s one thought, which she spoke aloud. “Poor,
brave men!”
“What?” exclaimed Miles. “Poor men? Why, Clotilde, you are not sorry for
them? They were Britishers!”
“I do not mean to be sorry for them, but I am,” she answered. “They did
their best and it was not really their quarrel.”
“And to-morrow,” concluded Miles excitedly, “we are all to turn out, the
fighting-men all over New England, and march down to Boston to lay siege
to the British Army. Oh, it will be a merry time!”
“Merry!” cried out Clotilde, “you call it merry when you may have to
slay men and may never, never come back again yourself?”
“And if I should never come back,” said Miles, half laughing, half
sober, “would you be sorry, Clotilde?”
“Sorry?” She looked up at him, at dear, bright-eyed, stout-hearted Miles
with whom she had played, by whom she had been befriended ever since she
was big enough to play at all. At the thought of his never coming back,
a gush of tears rose to her eyes and ran unchecked down her cheeks. She
sprang up without speaking further and ran into the house.
The study door stood open so that within she could see Stephen sitting
in his big chair with his grey head bowed upon his hands. He looked, as
he sat there, pathetically weary and worn. She slipped into the room,
and dropped upon her knees beside his chair and laid her hand upon his.
“Dear Master Sheffield,” she said, “are you so grieved that the war has
come at last?”
“Ay, grieved I am,” he answered slowly as he put his arm about her,
“yet, in a measure, I am lighter of heart, now that the thing that we
have so long dreaded has finally come upon us. But, dear Clotilde, while
I would give all I have, house, lands, life itself, for the winning of
this struggle, yet I thank a kind Heaven that the war has found me old
and outworn, unable to go forth and slay my fellow men.”