And Stephen had smiled and cordially shaken the German’s great rough hand.
There was no lack of material for the new dwelling, since that was amply supplied by the ships sent out to raid upon the English commerce. Among them was the Mistress Margeret, built by public subscription and bearing the famous mainmast made from King James’ Tree. These raiders had brought in more than one brick-laden vessel, carrying its cargo to some Tory planter of Georgia or Carolina, who had planned a new dwelling with no thought of a long-lasting war. The loads of bricks, of tall, white, fluted pillars, carved mantels and door-lintels were sold at auction in the seaport towns of New England and many of them bought by Stephen’s agents. Some wealthy Loyalist of the South, no doubt, looked long and anxiously out to sea that year, wondering why the duly ordered material for his new house never came to port and little guessing that, far off in New England, there was rising upon the site of Master Simon’s rough little cottage and Roger Bardwell’s big white-painted house, a mansion such as had never been seen in that neighbourhood before.
Had this rebuilding meant the outpouring of money needed for other things, Stephen would have lived to the end of the war, and longer, in Samuel Skerry’s little cottage. But material, as has been said, was abundant, and many a poor man, beside the Hessians, stood sorely in need of work. Mother Jeanne frowned often over Stephen’s threadbare coat and rusty hat, but she could persuade him to spend no single penny upon himself, when all of New England was in want.
“Monsieur pays those idle workmen twice too much,” she would storm, for she had become a privileged character in the household and was suffered to speak her mind with blunt directness when her feelings became too much for her. “He is of such a poverty himself as to his clothes, that, were it not for his gold-headed cane, no one could tell which was master and which was man!”
“Our coats are of a like shabbiness, I own,” Stephen would return, untroubled, “but there is one further difference; the man needs the money at this moment and the master does not.”
Day by day, therefore, the house went up. The big white stone steps were the same that Roger Bardwell had had put in place, and the wide chimney was that one that Master Simon had built for his first dwelling, but beyond these all was to be new, the walls this time being built of clear-hued mellow brick instead of wood.