“We will be so cosy here by the fire,” she was saying, as she went to the next window, then, with a sudden exclamation, “Oh, look, look, Father; what can those lights mean?”
Master Simon came quickly to look over her shoulder. At the edge of the town moving lanterns were passing to and fro, with here and there the red flare of a pine-knot torch. Even as they watched more and more lights gathered and were carried back and forth in excited confusion while on the rising wind came the far-off sound of the town crier’s bell.
“Oh, what can it be?” faltered Margeret. “Do you—do you think it could be the Quakers again?”
She could never forget the winter evening, now three years past, when two women of that forbidden faith had passed through the village and had sought to spend the night at Hopewell’s little inn. They had been driven from the town and she, standing at the corner of the lane, had seen them fleeing with bent heads and upraised arms before the shower of stones hurled after them by the mob of angry Puritans. Master Simon had tried to stem the tide of his comrades’ fury, but for once had not prevailed. She could still remember the look on his face as the crowd went surging by them and how he had turned upon his heel muttering, “How long, O Lord, how long?”
“How can they do it?” she had gasped, as she, too, turned from the terrifying sight. “There are good Neighbour Allen and Dame Page shouting curses and even the children are flinging stones!”
“They are afraid not to, my child,” Master Simon had answered. “They dread the wrath of God should they suffer these women to remain here, and they think by this cruelty to save their own souls. It is so men are taught by the Gospel of Fear.”
It seemed that it was again the Gospel of Fear that drove forth the men of Hopewell that night. The lights were moving in wide tossing circles, they were bobbing about in the fields like will-o’-the-wisps and were advancing closer and closer as they spread across the meadows.
“Father,” Margeret cried wildly, “they are coming here!”
“It may be,” said Master Simon at last, “that some child is lost or some one is hurt. We had better go out to make sure that it is no such mischance as that.”
The wind and rain blew hard in their faces as they went down the garden path so that Margeret had to cling to her father’s arm to keep from losing him in the dark. The horn lantern in his hand winked and flickered but managed somehow to remain feebly alight as they struggled on against the storm. They had not gone far beyond the boundaries of their own land before they came upon a little group of searchers led by Goodman Allen. Their lights had all blown out and they were standing close together, their backs to the wind, trying, in breathless haste, to kindle a new flame.