CHAPTER IX.REVELATIONS.
Whenthe Andros government came to an end, Edward Randolph had languished in jail for a brief time only. The Puritans were chiefly angered at his master, whom they had finally put aboard a ship and sent away from the country. Thus the more mischievous spirit, and author of many of their wrongs, escaped to work his malignant will upon them for years.
Randolph was so crafty, so insidious, and willing to remain so in the background, that until it was quite too late to redeem their position, the Puritans failed even to suspect him of the monstrous iniquities he induced them to commit upon one another. The witchcraft persecutions, which he fastened upon them, had not originated in his brain, fertile as that organ was for the growth of things diabolical. He got his cue from England, where thousands of persons perished, at the stake and otherwise, convicted on fantastic testimony of practising arts that were black and mysterious.
Randolph, realizing that Boston had been made too warm for active operations, began his work in Salem. That center offered him exceptional opportunities. The growth of the dread disease was appalling. Historywhich would convey an adequate idea of this criminal fanaticism should be bound in charred human skin.
Boston was duly afflicted with the scourge. Randolph then returned, quietly, and so manipulated his work and his dupes, from behind his own scenes, that scores of old women were charged with and convicted of witchcraft, in Randolph’s hope of wreaking his vengeance thus on whatsoever old woman it might have been who had told Garde Merrill of his affair with Hester Hodder. Having never been able to ascertain that this person was Goody Dune, he was sweeping his net in all waters, to make sure of his prey, in the same merciless spirit that Herod slew all the male infants, to accomplish his terrible purpose.
When Governor Phipps, with Adam Rust and Increase Mather, arrived at Boston, in the frigate “Nonsuch,” in May, 1692, the prisons were crowded full of witches, for the smell of whose burning or rotting flesh scores of fanatical maniacs were clamoring.
All Massachusetts had known that William Phipps, the Governor who had risen so mightily from the ranks of the working men among them, was coming. The name of the lane wherein his house had been built was altered to Charter street, in his honor; the citizens beat their drums; the disciples of gladness in the stomach arranged for a banquet; the hordes marched in joy and with pomp and Puritan splendor, which lacked nothing in ceremony, as Sir William was conducted to his house and then to the public dinner. Even the fanatics waxed enthusiastic and developed symptoms of being yet more greatly pursued and bewitchedby the witches whose incarceration they had already procured.
In the madness, confusion and excess of glee, two persons were more inwardly stirred than all the others, not by the arrival of William Phipps, but by that of Adam Rust. One was Garde, to whose ears and heart the story of Adam’s return came swiftly flying. The other was Edward Randolph, who saw an opportunity for deviltry for which he had waited so long that he had almost despaired of ever tasting its bitter-sweet. With his own eyes he beheld Adam Rust, and he grinned.
At the end of that long, fatiguing day, Rust retired to the privacy of his tavern apartments, secured haphazard, during one of the moments less filled than the others with pressing events. Here he sat him down for the purpose of thinking. He wondered why he had come to Boston again, and what he would do, now that at last he lived under the same sky with Garde, hearing the same sounds she was hearing, breathing the same fragrance of the Spring that stole to her. Should he try to see her? Perhaps. But to speak to her—no, he thought he could make no advance in this direction. But he could learn whether she had married, as of course she must have done, long before, and then—well, something in him ought to be satisfied—that something which had urged him so inexorably to return and to make this moment possible.
In the midst of his reveries, he heard a knock upon his door. It was poor old Halberd, doubtless, who had been so forlorn and so ill on the ocean. He had left him asleep, but, no matter, he would be glad to see him, privacy of thought notwithstanding.
“Come in,” he said. “Come in.”
The door opened, not as Halberd was wont to perform an act so simple, and Adam was conscious that a stranger had intruded upon him. He looked up, winked his eyes and looked more intently, as if absolutely incredulous that he was awake and sane.
His visitor was Edward Randolph.
“Mr. Rust, I am glad to see you again in Boston,” said the man, coming forward in a tentative manner and smiling by sheer force of effort. “You didn’t expect me, but I have taken this early opportunity of calling, to say I know what a great wrong I did you in the past, and to make what reparation I can.”
“The devil could do no more,” said Adam, looking him over calmly. “And I doubt if the devil ever had your impertinence.”
“You do me wrong,” Randolph assured him, meekly. “I could do no less than to come here and tender what apologies I may, and to do you a small favor. I was grossly misled, concerning your worth and your courage, by spiteful persons who had, as I now understand, some personal grudge.”
“As I knew but two men in the town, when first I had the honor of appraising you for a rascal,” said Adam, “your tale pleases me but indifferently well. As for favors, I have none to ask of you, and none to grant.”
“Yet, if only in a Christian spirit,” the fellow insisted, “you must permit me to beg your pardon for my errors of the past. I have long regretted my grievous mistake of judgment, and for that long I havedesired an opportunity of showing my mortification and doing you the one kindness in my power.”
“In the spirit of the Christian crusaders,” said Rust, “I feel that I could deny you little. You would do well, sir, to retire in good order while my indisposition to throw you through the window is still upon me.”
“But, my dear Mr. Rust, you don’t know what an injury you are doing to yourself,” the visitor went on. “If you knew how cruelly we were both wronged, almost at the same time and by the same person, you would listen, if only for that one compassion.”
“I have been wronged in Boston,” Adam agreed, ominously, “and shatter my hilt if I know why I hesitate to redress myself while I may.”
“But I did you no wrong to your heart, sir. Our injuries were both of the heart,” Randolph reiterated, persistently. “Look, sir, I had a heart, six years ago, and I felt it cruelly trampled under foot—the same foot that trampled upon yours, and here——”
“Beware!” Adam growled. “I shall cut out your tongue, for little more. Begone, sir, and thank your God at every step you take, that you still live—if you value your life at all; and this I am driven to doubt.”
“Here, here!” replied Randolph, nervously, and with shaking fingers he drew from his pocket a packet of paper folded in the form of a letter. “You will never believe me till I show you this. But I lay my heart open—I expose my wounds, to prove how you wrong me. Read it, read it—the letter she sent me—and then I shall be willing to bide by your answer.”
Adam could not fail to be impressed by the man’stenacity of purpose. Being a just man, he had a faint suspicion dart through his head that, after all, the man might not have known what he was doing when he committed all his fiendish acts, years before. There had never been any sufficient reason for what he had done, that Adam knew. He took the letter, briefly to see what it was the fellow meant and wanted.
He began to read, and then to feel that the man had obviously undergone some trial, severe and not readily to be forgotten. It was Garde’s own letter to himself he was reading.
“She sent me that and then broke my heart after,” said Randolph, speaking in a low, emotional voice, while Adam looked at the letter. “As if she had not shattered my life sufficiently before.”
“I’m sorry for you,” said Rust, after a moment. “Here, I don’t care to pry into your letter. Take it, and go in peace.”
“But read it, read it. You don’t know who wrote it,” said Randolph, who was white with excitement. “I shouldn’t have come to you here with my mortifying apologies, if there had not been a bond between us.”
Adam gave him a look, as of one baffled by an inscrutable mystery. He could not comprehend his visitor’s meaning. Then suddenly a flush leaped into his face, as he remembered something he had heard in those by-gone days, when he walked with that youth, whose very name he could not recall, from Plymouth to Boston.
He read the letter again with a new interest, a terrible interest. He had gone away from Garde—sentaway—with a stab in his heart, from which he had never been able to recover. He had thought at first she sent him away as a renegade, a fugitive from pseudo-justice, whom to have loved openly would be a disgrace. He had thought then that perhaps she loved Wainsworth, or even this Randolph. He had thought till he nearly went crazy, for circumstances had compelled him to flee from Boston for his life, and therefore to flee from all explanations which might have been made. Garde having released him from jail, he had been driven to think she believed him innocent. She had said she could do no less. Then he had been left no belief to stand on but that of her loving some one else more than she did himself. She had admitted that something had happened. Cornered thus, he had found the case hopeless, and thoughts of return to Boston then had seemed to him madness.
This letter, now in his hand, confirmed all those more terrible thoughts and beliefs. She had done some wrong to Randolph, too, as she here confessed in her letter. She had believed some infamous story against him, and now prayed his forgiveness. And what, in God’s name, had she then added to this first wrong to the man, that Randolph now was so bitter?
Terribly stirred, he raced his glance over the pages and so to the little quaintly affectionate ending. Then he read her signature, “Garde—John Rosella.”
John Rosella!—the name of that youth! She! Garde!
He felt he should suddenly go mad. That boy he had so learned to love—had been Garde! She had written this letter—she had signed that name, which meant somuch to him and to her, and so little to any one else!
He made a strange little sound, and then he began to read the letter over again, from the first, letting every word, every syllable, sink into his soul with its comfort and its fragrance of love. He forgot that Randolph stood there before him. He was oblivious of everything. He was on that highroad again. He was standing with Garde in the garden at midnight, her kisses still warm on his lips.
“You see there is a bond between us,” said Randolph.
Adam ceased reading, galvanically. But for a second he did not raise his eyes. He folded the letter and held it in his hand. He arose to his feet and slowly moved between Randolph and the door.
“There is a bond between us,” he agreed, speaking with nice deliberation. “It is something more than a bond. It’s a tie of blood and bone and suffering.”
“I thought you would see it,” said Randolph. “This was all I came to tell you,—this, and my sense of having done you wrong.”
“Oh yes, I see it,” said Adam, turning the key in the lock and putting it calmly in his pocket, “I see it all clearly. By the way, sir, who is John Rosella, if I may ask?”
Randolph had become pale. His eyes were growing wild. He had watched Rust lock the door with quaking dread.
“John Rosella?” he repeated, with a sickening sense of having overlooked something important, which he had thought an insignificant trifle; “why, that ismerely the—her middle names. Her full name is Garde John Rosella Merrill.”
“I trust you are gentleman enough to fight,” said Rust, placing the letter in his pocket, “for I shall tell you, sir, that you are a liar, a scoundrel, a murderous blackguard.”
Walking up to the staring wretch, calmly, Adam slapped his face till the blow resounded in the room and Halberd came hastening to the door to know what could be the matter.
“I rang the bell,” said Rust, who opened the door with great deliberation. “Bring a sword for one. The gentleman wishes to fight.”
“What do you mean, sir?” said the trembling coward. “Give me back my letter. I shall leave this place at once!”
“Will you jump through the window?” Adam inquired, with mock concern. “Don’t call that letter yours again, or I may not let you off with a mere killing.”
Halberd came with his sword. Adam drew his own good blade from the battered scabbard he had always retained, and looked at the edge and the point, critically.
“I refuse to fight you!” said Randolph, who had once seen that terrible length of steel at play. “I demand to be released from this place!”
Rust went up and slapped him again. “Get up just manhood enough to raise that sword,” Adam implored. “Take it and strike any sort of a foul blow at me—one of your foulest—do! you dog.”
The craven tried to make a run at the door. Adampushed him back and kicked him again toward the center of the room.
“This is murder! I refuse to fight with such a villain!” cried the fellow. “Let me out, or I shall call for help.”
“You wouldn’t dare to let anybody know you are in town,” said Rust, contemptuously. “Howl, do howl, and let me tell the public what you are. Halberd, alas, there is no manhood in it. Therefore fetch me the whip I saw in your apartments, for a sad bit of business.”
To all of Randolph’s protests and wild chatterings of fear and hatred, Rust was deaf. He took the whip, which Halberd presently brought, and proceeded to cut Randolph across the face, the legs, the shoulders and the hands till the craven smarted with a score of purple welts.
“Halberd, you may clean your boots afterward,” Adam said at last. “Be good enough to kick the dog from the room.”
Halberd placed but two of his aids to departure, and then, Rust opening the door, the craven flew madly out and away, a maniac in appearance, an assassin in his state of mind.