At the gate the two met a visitor, Goody Parsons, leaning on her cane and moving slowly, but still not too old and stiff to come with her good wishes and a wedding gift.
“Let me not keep you,” she said as they stopped and would have turned back. “I will set that which I have brought within, and abide with Master Simon until you return. I have heard much of the glory of this garden made ready for your wedding, Mistress Margeret, and I can take my time at seeing the flowers while you are gone. Nay, I will not step inside the gate until you go forth; I have no wish to keep you from your errand.”
So Margeret and Roger continued on their way up the lane while Goody Parsons limped across the grass toward the house.
“She has come on another mission, too,” Margeret told Roger, “for she told me some days since, that my marriage would not be lucky if I neglected to tell the bees of my wedding day. She was a wonderful bee-mistress once, so people say, and she has told me many a charm and spell to bring honey to the hive. When I said that telling the bees was mere superstition she was greatly troubled, and she has, I think, toiled hither to do it for me and is glad that we should be away.”
Goody Parsons had indeed come upon just that errand, yet first she hobbled into the kitchen where she set down her wedding gift. A blue and white china teapot it was, that had voyaged across the sea from England and was a rare and precious thing in Hopewell, where nearly every one must still use wood or metal or rough earthenware for household utensils. It had long been the old woman’s most valued treasure.
“There is not a great time left for me to use it,” she said in answer to Master Simon’s remonstrances, “and who should I wish to have it after me rather than my dear Mistress Margeret?”
She freed it from its wrappings and set it upon the table with a smile of happy pride.
“Now,” she added, “I am going out-of-doors for a little. No, sit you here, good friend, what I wish most is to go alone.”
She stepped forth into the garden, a dim fragrant place full of black shadows, but beginning to be faintly lit by a rising moon. Slowly she moved up and down the paths, laying her gnarled old fingers lovingly upon the roses and syringas. She broke off a twig of the hawthorn and tucked it into the bosom of her threadbare gown.