“O-oh,” gasped Stephen, wriggling in delighted excitement, although the sudden movement cost him a sharp reminder of his recent fall; “oh, what happened then?”
“She screamed aloud with terror, thinking she was in the presence of a ghost, and he too gave a startled cry as he stepped down from the chair and dropped something that rolled ringing and jingling across the floor. But in a moment he turned upon her with eager questionings, about Master Simon and Roger Bardwell and my grandmother, Margeret Radpath. And over and over he asked, ‘But Master Simon’s garden, does it bloom as fair as once it did?’ Something he said also of a message, having to do with Master Simon, that he had come all the long way across the sea to leave with the minister of Hopewell, yet what such an errand might be he would not say. In the end he gave her the silver coin that had fallen jingling upon the floor, saying, ‘I found this in my old hiding-hole behind the cupboard where it chanced to be left behind after my hasty flight. They say that money long lost and found again brings good luck, so keep it to buy your silence concerning my visit here.’ She took the coin and bent to examine it in the firelight, for it was one of the clumsy old shillings of the Colony’s first coinage. When she looked up again—he was gone. She came running back to the kitchen door of our big house and burst in among the other servants crying that there were ghosts and witches in the shoemaker’s hut and that she would never enter its door again. Nor did she! But the coin she held in high reverence as a lucky charm and insisted upon giving it to me when I was eight years old.”
“Do you believe she really saw the shoemaker?” asked Stephen. “Did you never hear more of his visit than that?”
“My grandfather, Roger Bardwell, listened to her tale and forbade her telling it to any one further. He questioned the minister next day however, who admitted that he had had such a visitor but was sworn to secrecy concerning his errand. And in the graveyard on the hill there were fresh footprints in the snow leading up to the spot where Master Simon sleeps. So it must have been Samuel Skerry that came, but whether his purpose was good or evil no one can tell. He may have been plotting some new villainy, yet I think—yes, I have thought it often—that in his years of loneliness in a foreign land the little shoemaker came at last to repent of his jealousy and ill-will and returned finally to make tardy amends. But what his errand was, or what message he left with the Hopewell minister is a secret still unrevealed.”