CHAPTER IV.
Andrew was eager to see Miss Moore again,—although he felt a masculine irritation against her for taking umbrage at well-meant and thoroughly sensible advice. Perhaps at the bottom of this there lay a soupçon of annoyance with himself, that he had spoken so abruptly to her upon the subject, mingled with a compassionate remembrance of what Mr. Morris had told him of her delicacy. He was very glad to find an excuse to go up to his woods, where they stretched past the Morris house; and a pretence that he was looking for suitable trees to cut down for foundations for his hay-stacks, justified him in his own eyes for strolling among his trees in very leisurely, but apparently disinterested fashion. He must, however, have been paying some attention to the house on his right, for when Mrs. Morris ran out from the old orchard behind the house to the barns, calling, "Father, Father, where are you? Come here, quick, do, hey Father!" Andrew promptly responded, leaping over the fence and speedily reaching her side.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"Land of love! But I'm glad you've come, if she did call you long-legged: all the better for her now if you be. I hope she ain't fell by this time. Wonder where Father is. I never seen such a man; always gone when he's wanted. I declare it beats me where he gets to. It's enough to drive—"
"What is it, Mrs. Morris?" demanded Andrew, his heart misgiving him. "Can't I help?"
"'Deed you can! And to think of her calling you long-legged, and the very next day having to depend on you for her life, may be, or to save one of her own legs being broke—"
Mrs. Morris got no further. A little faint cry struck Andrew's ears, coming from the direction of the orchard.
"For heaven's sake, come on, and show me what's wrong," he cried. "Don't stand there palavering."
"Why, sakes alive! Don't you know? Miss Moore got up in a tree and—"
But by this time they were in the orchard. A glance explained the situation to Andrew.
High up on an apple-tree branch stood Miss Moore, clinging with both arms round a limb above her, her face white as death, her eyes dilated with fear. A ladder's head was within six inches of her feet. Andrew was up it in an instant. He knew the trouble. Only last year a hired man of his had ascended a tree to pick fruit. He was seized with this ague of dizzy fear, and flinging himself against a stout limb, had held on like grim death. It took two men to get him down; his terror made him clasp the tree convulsively. It was days before he was well again.
Miss Moore had evidently not seen him, nor heard his coming. As he slipped his arms about her, she gave a great start, and turned to look at him with eyes which seemed to expect some tangible shape of horror, evolved out of her illogical and intangible fear.
When she saw who it was, her eyes filled and her lips trembled.
"Oh, take me down. Do take me down."
"Yes, indeed, I will," said Andrew, with quiet assurance. "Let go of the branch."
She shuddered. The spell of the vertigo was yet upon her. Her arms tightened upon the bough.
"Do take me down," she pleaded childishly. "I'm frightened."
"My dear, you must loose your hold," said Andrew, steadily.
Then, with one arm about her, he reached up and one by one undid the clinging fingers, gathering them into his palm as he did so. With a force that seemed cruel, he pulled down the slender wrist and placed her hand upon his shoulder. Her face expressed the agony of dizziness. With blind instinct she put her other arm about his neck and clasped it close. He felt her form relax, and braced himself in time to sustain her dead weight as she fainted.
The descent of the ladder was easy enough. Andrew had carried many a bag of wheat up and down his steep granary stairs. The principle of balancing an inert woman is much the same. He carried her into the house and laid her down upon the broad home-made couch, covered with dark brown calico, that stood in the kitchen. Mrs. Morris had talked volubly during these proceedings, but only after he laid Judith down, did Andrew begin to hear what she was saying.
"She does look gashly!" said Mrs. Morris. "Whatever would I do if she was to be took! And this minute she looks fit for laying out."
"Goodness alive," said Andrew. "Can't you do anything to bring her to? Bathe her face, or something?"
Mrs. Morris flew for water and brought it, trembling. "I say, Andrew, can't you do it? I'm so shook—I never could bear to touch corpses, and—"
Andrew gave her a venomous look, dipped his handkerchief in the water, and began clumsily to bathe the girl's brow. Her senses were already reasserting themselves. She put up her hands to her face: they fluttered nervously. Andrew caught one of them and held it between his own brown ones, noting that her wrists were red, almost bruised, creased in rough outline of the apple-tree's bark.
"Will you give me some water?" she asked.
Mrs. Morris brought a blue and white cup. Andrew, kneeling on the braided mat before the couch, slipped his arm under Judith and put the cup to her lips. She took a mouthful, and fell into a shivering fit of cold.
Mrs. Morris rose to this emergency. Ague was an old familiar friend; "shakes" had no terrors for her. In a moment she had found a thick coverlet and placed it over Judith.
"You stay by her," she said to Andrew, "and I'll make her a draught of hot elderberry syrup in two shakes."
Then she was off to the lean-to kitchen, and they heard her rattling among her kettles. Andrew still knelt upon the mat holding Judith's hand with praiseworthy absent-mindedness.
"Are you better now?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, her chin quivering as she tried to keep her teeth from chattering. "It was so good of you to take me down. So awfully good. I'm very stupid, but I couldn't help it."
"Of course you couldn't. I had a man who behaved much worse than you did in the same situation. Ever so much. Indeed, you behaved very well."
There was silence; then Judith began: "Mr. Cutler, I—er—called you a name to Mrs. Morris the other day."
"Did you? What did you call me?"
"Will you forgive me?"
"Tell me what you called me first."
"Oh!"
"Forgiveness is worth that, isn't it?"
"Oh, yes. I called you—long-legged, and—I think, I said you were rude."
Andrew suppressed an inclination to laugh, being minded not to belittle the value of his absolution.
"Well," he said, "I'll forgive the first part of it because you see it's so awfully true, and as for the second, well—I think you meant 'sensible'; anyhow, I forgive you for it all."
Miss Moore experienced a mental sensation she would have called "curling up." A pretty cool specimen, this young farmer! She had thought he would have fallen into faltering excuses. She was really ill, though faint—cold. Mrs. Morris came in with the steaming cup of black syrup. Judith had forgotten till that moment that Andrew held her hand: of course, Andrew had been unconscious of it all along. But as Mrs. Morris appeared in the door a swift intuition of the state of affairs came to Judith. She gave a little gesture of withdrawal, and Andrew released her lingers slowly, rising with praiseworthy calmness to get himself a chair.
While Judith tried to drink the hot syrup, Mrs. Morris explained that Miss Moore had never seen a bird's nest with eggs in it, and there being an oriole's nest in the apple-tree, "Father" had put up the ladder for her to see it, and—Andrew knew the rest.
"Tree fright is a lot worse than stage fright," said Miss Moore: oracularly, but this was a dark saying to both her listeners. Mrs. Morris talked and talked. Miss Moore had long since lain back on the big brown pillow; her face was flushed, her eyes sleepy. Andrew would have listened to Mrs. Morris forever, provided he could have watched Miss Moore at the same time. But at length Mrs. Morris rose and moved towards her summer kitchen, intimating that her chores needed tending to, so Andrew perforce had to take his leave.
"Good-bye, just now," he said. "May I come back and take you to see some birds' nests nearer the ground?"
"Oh, do," she said. "And I haven't thanked you half enough for helping me to-day."
"Indeed you have. Good-bye, just now."
"Good-bye," she said softly.
He was just at the door, when a soft but interrogative "Ahem" from the couch attracted his attention. He turned. Miss Judith Moore did not look at him, but with cautious precision she drew the dark blue coverlet up a tiny bit. His eyes became riveted upon the point of a bronze slipper that gradually grew from the shadow of the covering until a whole foot was revealed—a foot at a defiant pose and wearing a little bronze slipper with an exaggeratedly high heel. Andrew's eyes grew daring, and he half turned.
Miss Moore seemed to telescope, for head and foot disappeared beneath the coverlet at once. He paused a moment, and then departed.
As he went across the fields he thought of the little scene he had left, and, more shame to him, his thoughts were not concerned wholly with the bad effects of wearing high heels, nor yet of the impropriety of Miss Moore's retaliation for his high and mighty granting of forgiveness. Indeed, as he sat for a moment kicking his heels on the top bar of the first fence, he was speculating solely as to whether "they" were open-work or not! He was thinking he would have given his best gun to be able to tell, and summed up his reflections with a dissatisfied little growl, "Of all the mean, miserable, stingy glimpses!"
As he walked along, his face changed. After climbing the hill-side to his garden wall, he passed an apple-tree in hill bloom at the gate. He paused beneath it. His face was pale and serious, his eyes tender. He thought of Judith's russet head as it had leaned upon his shoulder: he looked down at his old velvet coat, where it had rested, and fancied some vague perfume rose from it to his face. He remembered he had held her in his arms, and recalled the red marks upon her delicate wrists. Those wrists had been curved about his neck.
He could not realize the full height and depth of what had come to him, but his whole being groped for the truth even as he stood beneath the tree.
As he walked slowly up the narrow bricked walk to the house, he noticed how the chestnut roots and the frost together had heaved up the bricks and rendered the walk irregular. He wondered anxiously if she could walk over it in those shoes, and as he reached his door, which stood open under its old-fashioned porch, revealing a dusky cool vista beyond, he suddenly saw, as in a vision, a woman's shape stand between the lintels, waiting for him!—a woman with slender hands outstretched in welcome, grave grey eyes, soft hair, tender lips: the woman he loved: his own. As this last thought, the sweetest thought man's heart holds, formulated itself in his mind, Andrew knew the truth. He turned down the path, past the apple-tree, through the lindens again, and across his fields, until once more he looked upon the house wherein she rested. He looked at it long from the shelter of his trees, his whole existence resolved into a chaos of uncertain self-communings, until a voice like an angel's seemed to whisper of comfort and to sing of hope.
Then he went home, and at four o'clock betook himself to the school-house to attend the meeting in regard to appointing a new teacher.
The village school-house stood at the end of the street farthest away from the Cutler homestead. It was a bleak, stone building, with a wooden porch—a gaunt, bare, uninviting-looking building, with none of those picturesque adjuncts of climbing vines and overarching trees, associated so often with thoughts of a country school.
It had a perky, self-satisfied little bell-house on top, and its date, 1865, was rudely carved on a big stone in the peak of the north gable. It had eight windows—three at each side, two at one end. In winter, the wood for the box stove was always piled up outside before these. There were always complaints of the school-house being dark in winter, yet it never occurred to any one to select a different site for the wood-pile.
The interior of the school-house corresponded in dinginess to the outside. The plaster walls were sadly soiled, particularly beneath the broad window seats, where the children sat kicking their heels whilst they ate their lunches at noon, for the scholars were drawn principally from the outlying farm-houses. A long length of irregularly jointed pipes led the smoke from the box stove at the end to an exit over the teacher's desk. Little tin pails were hung at intervals along this, to catch the black liquid distilled from the soot. The other adornments of the room consisted of a long blackboard, a globe, and some big lettered tablets, round which the teacher was wont to gather the infant class and teach them their letters.
In the politics of a little village like Ovid, the smallest public measures became magnified to grotesque importance. The usual custom was for the school trustees to sit in private session first, when any particular business was to be arranged, say, the selection of a teacher, and when this was arranged the doors were flung wide and the meeting was "open." These open school meetings were always well attended. They were the classes in which embryotic statesmen acquired the political alphabet, the ABC of political procedure, the manner of putting a motion, taking a vote, making a nomination, and the correct order of precedence governing the motions and amendments. There too, was acquired the first great requisite of a politician,—the art of saying non-committal things in a most convincing tone of voice, and of treating with much politeness those whom one held in secret abhorrence.
There were two offices, those of school trustee and pathmaster, and these two were equal in power and glory. True, they were barren honours, but they ofttimes led to better things. The school trustee had the higher position in one respect: he was chosen by the people at first hand. The pathmaster, upon the contrary, was appointed by the Council. It is needless to say the school trustee smiled in calm superiority at the pathmaster, and the latter in turn felt the making of the roads wherein the whole community walked, was as holy an office as the task of guiding the juvenile wanderers into the school, and seeing that when there, they trod the common road to knowledge, it being well known that there is no royal road thereto.
When Andrew arrived at the school-house, the other two trustees, Hiram Green who kept the village store, and Hen Braddon, were present. They immediately entered upon a discussion of the teacher question. The application of Sam Symmons' Suse lay upon the table, written out upon foolscap paper, in big round hand, with many flourishing capitals, rejoicing in "shaded" heads and beautifully involved tails.
"I tell you Suse is a good list with a pen," said Hen Braddon, with conviction, and the other two agreed. "She ain't no slouch at spelling either," said Hiram Green. The other two agreed with this also. Then Andrew took up his parable.
"Yes," he said, "Suse is quite smart, and being bred right here in Ovid seems to give her a claim to the school. I suggest we just appoint her."
"Well, it's as well to be cautious," said Hiram Green.
"It'll save advertising," said Hen Braddon.
"Suppose we just decide on it then," said Andrew.
"Well," said Hiram Green, "well, I ain't got no objections to Suse as Suse, but what I think is, two hundred and fifty is enough to pay a woman for what a man got three hundred."
Andrew sneered. He didn't have a sweet expression when he did that.
"Don't you think," he said, gravely—"don't you think Suse might include cleaning the school-house and lighting the fires in winter for the two-fifty, being she's a woman?"
"No," said Hiram, reflectively; "old Mrs. Slick has done it so long."
"But it would save twenty-five dollars," argued Andrew, with meek persuasion.
"Well," said Hiram, "Mrs. Slick needs that. She's owin' already, and she might's well draw the money off the school taxes as off the council."
"Oh, Mrs. Slick is owing, is she?" queried Andrew, with solicitude. "I hope she pays you all right. Well, about Suse. Being she's a woman, don't you think you could fix it so's she'd chop the wood for winter? That would save twelve dollars."
A nasty red flickered up to Hiram's face. He had thought Andrew's proposition about the taking care of the school thoroughly genuine.
"Oh," he said, "I ain't particular whether she gets the three hundred or the two-fifty, though I hope you won't deny when nomination comes round that you deliberately threw away fifty dollars of the people's money."
"You maybe quite sure I won't deny anything that's true," said Andrew, hotly. "And as for throwing away the people's money, well—some of the teachers, so far as I can recollect, got their salaries raised pretty frequently. Of course, I wasn't on the School Board then, so I only heard why it was done. I can't say of my own knowledge."
The fact was that Mr. Hiram Green had several unappetizing daughters, and, as he had been school trustee almost ever since any one remembered, it seemed good in his sight that the teachers, over whom he wielded such paternal authority in such a parental way, should return the compliment by adopting a filial rôle, and become sons not only in spirit but in name. But, alas, for the vanity of human wishes! the perfidious teachers had accepted all Hiram's kindness, had slept in the best bedroom and partaken of his best fruit, had ridden by him to town and accompanied the Misses Green to tea-meetings and festivals, had abode in the Green household over Sundays, had gone with them to church, and at choir practice had faithfully served them, and then, with the extra money they had been able to save through Hiram's hospitality and the fortuitous "raise" in their salaries, they had shaken the dust of Ovid from off their feet, and departed to fresh fields and pastures new, to marry the girls they had been engaged to all along or to study for one of the higher professions. Never a one of them all left a love gauge with a Miss Green, and in the bosom of the Green family many were the revilings cast upon those teachers, who, with a goodly countenance and a better appetite, had devoured Mrs. Green's layer cakes and preserves, feasted upon Hiram's peaches and driven his horses upon the false pretences of "intentions." However, in fairness to the teachers, one must remember that "some have greatness thrust upon them." Foolish, indeed, would be the man who deliberately offended his trustees, and Hiram's hospitality was usually somewhat pressingly proffered.
This last teacher—bad luck to him!—had described himself in his application as a single man, when at the beginning of the summer vacation he sent in his certificates for consideration in response to Hiram's advertisement, and before these holidays had passed he married and came alone to Ovid to take up school in the autumn, and had eaten five teas and two dinners at Hiram Green's before he asked the eldest daughter, with whom he frequently found himself alone, where she thought he could rent a suitable house for himself and wife.
"This is very sudden," murmured Miss Green.
"Well, I don't know," he said, in a practical tone of voice, "I've been nearly two weeks away from her now, and I can't stand it much longer."
Miss Green gathered his meaning then, and never another tea did that teacher sit down to in Hiram Green's, and indeed the atmosphere of Ovid had been made so frigid for the little smooth-haired, blue-eyed girl he had married, that he soon sent her away, and finding he could not do without her, finally sent in his own resignation. The Greens had a big family connection, and Ovid was made a cold place for those whom they did not like. The Cutler house on the hill and poor old Sam's stubborn door were about the only portals in Ovid that an enemy of the Greens might pass.
Henry Braddon acted as a soft, effective buffer between Hiram and Andrew, who both always wanted their own way, and wanted it at once.
"Best let Suse have the three hundred," said he: "old Reilly will be foreclosing on Sam soon if he don't raise the money somehow." Now, Reilly was the local usurer, the one hard-hearted, close-fisted old Shylock so often found in rural districts; the one man within a radius of twenty miles who had made a fortune. He was reputedly worth seventy or eighty thousand dollars; possibly he was worth fifty thousand. But when that is divided into mortgages, ranging from two or three hundred dollars up to, perhaps, one or two of five thousand, one can realize what a power he was in the country side; how many heart-strings he had tangled in his grasping fingers; from how many couches his shadowy outstretched hand banished sleep; at how many tables his hollow, gaping palm was seen, as the children put out their hands for food; before how many hearths his spectral presence ever sat with a look of anticipatory proprietorship. He was as cruel as the grave, and as relentless as time. Not one ten minutes of grace did ever any one get from old Reilly. The children looked at him with awe as he drove past in his old-fashioned buggy, a hatchet-faced old man, thin, cold-blooded, with big knuckly hands holding the reins. Hen Braddon knew what he was doing when he referred to him. The week before, Hiram Green's brother had been turned neck and crop out of his farm by this same Reilly. No fear that Hiram would let him get another "haul" off old Sam if he could help it.
"That's so," said Hiram, with alacrity. "Andrew, you just make out the appointment, will you? and you post it, Hen, when you go home."
Andrew having gained his point, was generously sorry that he had twitted Hiram about the salary matter, so in the subsequent open meeting he let Hiram do all the talking, looking the while at a dark stain on the ceiling, which a coat of whitewash, put on yearly since he was a boy, had failed to obliterate. He would never forget how that ink went up, and that might be the very same old box stove over in the corner, the one upon which he set that tightly corked bottle of frozen ink to thaw, taking precaution at the same time to be out of the road when it exploded. It had been a particularly brilliant "go off" that—straight up to the ceiling and down in a shower of black spatters. Andrew could see the fun of it yet, and found himself involuntarily looking at his palms, as though some traces of the blisters the teacher's rawhide had raised might still be there. Andrew recalled many other such like exploits, and looked at his smooth, brown palms, thinking how many thorough thrashings he had had, when suddenly a line of poetry he had read some days before, came into his head:
"Lay thy sweet hands in mine, and trust to me."
He sat through the meeting quite oblivious of what was going on, missing what was one of the finest oratorical flights of Hiram Green's career. He was speaking of the departing teacher, and he made many scathing remarks anent the legends and pictures upon the walls, which, as he brilliantly put it, "indicated an entire and deplorable lack of discipline upon the part of the present teacher." The said teacher smiled and said nothing. Had Hiram looked closely at the pictures he would have found that a good many of the drawings were caricatures of himself and his family. In one rude picture the four Misses Green were represented as having hold of a man, who struggled in the midst. By means of certain facial peculiarities, exaggerated as only a genius or a school-boy would dare exaggerate, any one in Ovid could have identified the Misses Green and their victim, a former teacher. One of the ladies held a coat sleeve she had rent off; another a portion of a coat-tail; and over this group the artist had printed in fair round script, "For his garment they cast lots." Under the circumstances the applicability of this would have been a credit to Du Maurier, and be it said in defence of the school-boy artist, it was probably written with no thought of being impious. Your school-boy caricaturist catches the spirit of the times.
The participants in the school meeting were just departing from the school-house doors, when to them came old Sam Symmons. He had just been told by Suse of her application, and an almost stifling eagerness was filling his heart. If she got it, it meant so much: but he presented his usual suave, smiling old face to Hen Braddon and Hiram Green, and said nothing. As Andrew passed the old man looked at him. That look of age to green manhood, how pitiful it is! Andrew paused a moment. "We're going to have an Ovid teacher this time," he said. "You'll tell Suse, won't you, Mr. Symmons, that her appointment is in the mails?"
Poor old Sam! It was harder for him to carry off good fortune with nonchalance than it was to remain impassive in the face of bad. He had had so much more practice in the latter form of self-control. He drew his breath deeply, and his lips quivered a little. Andrew saw this.
"Don't forget to tell her, Mr. Symmons," he added, and went on his way.
Forget!
"Meeting over, Mr. Braddon? Meeting over?" Sam queried, falling into the irregular ranks of the moving men. "Well, well I remember the time your grandfather and I were school trustees, and he was a shoemaker, and a better man with lasts than letters. In his young days he used to go about from house to house making the shoes. He had regular places for calling; two pairs a year was the allowance—well, that custom has long gone by. Anyhow, we were both trustees, and one day we went out to the Beechwood School, section No. 6 now. Well, the minister was there, too, and Squire Harkness—both long dead now—brothers they were. One of the children handed up her slate for your grandfather to look at, and he, holding it in front of him at arm's length, said, with consideration seemingly to its merits, 'Fair, very fair,' which was right enough truly; but when your grandfather held it over to the rest of us, 'twas plain to be seen he had had the slate upside down. Yes, he was ambitious, too, your grandfather was, and got on well in the world; he even bought him a big silver watch. Watches weren't so plentiful in those days. You didn't get a watch in the pocket of every suit of clothes you bought then, as the papers would show you do now. And when we asked your grandfather what time it was, as we would frequently do, being minded to please him, he would take out his watch, look at it with consideration, and hold it out to us saying, 'Who'd ha' thought 'twas that time o' day,' in surprise seemingly, which was right smart, for he never learned to read time, your grandfather didn't. But a good business man he was, and a good neighbour, as many a poor body knew."
Old Sam and his following straggled in twos and threes up the street, past Bill Aikins' house, where Bill stood in the doorway smoking, having just helped his wife Kate, née Horne, hang up the day's washing, school meetings being in his wife's opinion too provocative of idleness, the idleness which the devil improves, to be indulged in by Bill.
Bill's house, albeit small, had a particularly aggressive look. It had a door in the centre, and a window with red-painted sash on either side. These windows always shone effulgently clean. Whether this brilliancy of pane or the vermilion paint produced the effect, it is difficult to say, but certain it is that Bill's house always looked as though it were about to spring on the road, which was, figuratively, much the same as the attitude of Bill's wife towards him.
Bill Aikins had originally been a boy brought out by one of the benevolent English societies, which gather up the scum of their own cities and trust to the more sparkling atmosphere of the New World to aerate it into "respectable and useful citizens." Bill Aikins had taken French leave of the minister with whom the Horne had placed him. A plenitude of prayers and a paucity of what Bill had called "hot wittles," decided him upon this step. He wandered to Ovid, and for many years had been "hired man" to the various farmers within ten miles of the village. He was a good worker, but lacked ballast, and was rapidly degenerating into a sot when Kate Horne married him, and, as the boys expressed it, "brought him up standing."
The men greeted Bill pleasantly, and Bill responded genially, trying to look as if he was unconscious of Kate's criticisms upon the men passing—a somewhat difficult thing to accomplish, as Kate spoke so loudly from the room behind that her remarks were perfectly audible to the subjects of them.
One by one the crowd dwindled away, and then old Sam "putting his best foot foremost," as he would have said, hurried home and told Suse of her good fortune. She was very elated, was Suse, and kept murmuring to herself, "I'll just show them Greens what's what."
* * * * * *
Long after the last light had twinkled out in the village, a shaft of light streamed across the old garden of the house on the hill. For all the calm of Andrew's heart was gone. The peace of the first acceptance of the fact that he loved this stranger girl had vanished. He got down on his knees, reached under the bed and pulled out an old, old-fashioned little chest, covered with untanned cowhide, whose brown and white patches were studded with rows of big brass nails. It held the books over which his mother's pretty dark head had bent so often, close by that other proud one, which soon lay humbly enough in its kindred dust. It was no unusual thing for Andrew to spend half the night poring over these books. There was a fat little copy of Shakespeare, with ruinously small print; a quaint little leather volume of Francis Quarles, George Herbert's poetry; Suckling's and a subscription copy of the Queen's Wake, "dedicated to the Princess Charlotte by a shepherd in the Highlands of Scotland." These, with a few others, had formed his mother's library. Getting them out, he looked for certain passages he knew well—passages that had wrung his heart before this with their description of unattainable sweetness and love—passages that had almost made him despair, and yet, not wholly, for he had dreamed a dream of one day going forth to seek and find a Beatrice, a Juliet, a Desdemona, a Rosalind—all in one divine combination of womanhood, worthy to have been addressed in the immortal sonnets. And, lo! the spring had brought her—would the summer give her to him? The kindly summer that gives the flower to the bee, the sun to the flower, the blue sky to the sun, and all the earth to joy. Surely—and but a mile away Judith slept, dreaming, but not of song. And over the waters that quickened with insect life, through the air all astir with the scents and savours of spring, athwart the earth that was quivering with the growth of all things green—summer came one day nearer.
CHAPTER V.
"Sweet Spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My Musick shows ye have your closes,
And all must die."
Judith Moore, the operatic singer, was not an ailing woman usually. In fact, she had very sweet and well-balanced health, but in her make-up the mental and physical balanced each other so well, and were so closely allied that any joy or grief—in short, any emotion—reacted strongly upon her physical organism. Heart and brain, sense and spirit were close knit. Delicately strung as an Æolian harp, she vibrated too strongly to the winds that swept over her. As strings grow lax or snap from being over-taut, so her nerves had failed under the tension of excitement, and effort, and triumph. Two years before she had made her début upon the operatic stage in Germany, stepping from the strictest tutelage to an instant and unquestioned success. Even yet when she thought of that night her cheeks would flush, her eyes dilate, her head poise itself more proudly. She recalled it so well. Her manager's eagerness, that made his dark face almost livid: her own fright: the mascot thrust hastily into her hand by an old attaché of the play-house. She remembered all the details of this performance better than any other—the orchestra and the people: the peculiar, loving droop of the shoulder with which one of the 'cello players bent above his sonorous instrument. Then came her effort, and it seemed the next moment the thunderous applause, the flowers, the deep-throated Hoch! Hoch! and the joyous cursing of her manager behind the scenes.
Yes, that was life.
And as she lived her triumphs over again, she felt the supreme exaltation of a genius in a great gift, the God-like thrill of mastery, the glorious certainty of capacity, the birth-pang of creation. There is no gift so marvellous, so maddening, so divine as the gift of song—none so evanescent, none so sad.
This woman inhaled the common ether of a prosaic world, mingled it with her breath and sent it forth glorified as sound—sound such as nothing made with men's hands in all the world can produce. She created something divine, which died even as it was born, and passed into the silence—silence that has absorbed so many sweet and terrible things. She sang; she sent forth her heart, her being, her soul from her lips, like a beautiful unseen dove seeking a sign; and there returned to her—silence. From all the glorious "choir invisible" that had gone before there came back no word. And the wonder, and triumph, and pity of it grew upon her, so that she began to eat her heart out with loneliness.
Her voice lifted her up to the gods; when she returned to earth, there was no loving breast for her to rest upon, no strong hands to sustain her, no lips to kiss the pain of music from her own, none to seal the bliss of singing into abiding joy.
Two years of this, and Judith Moore left it all, and came, in the summer preceding her American début, to this little Canadian village. She had told her manager, the only person she knew well enough to write to, that he was not to write. He knew where she was: she would let him know if she needed him. Let her rest, for just a little, she pleaded. And he agreed.
She owed everything she was to this man, who had been a friend of her father's. Passing through the little town where they were, he had come to visit them. He found his old friend's funeral leaving the house. He came back to see the desolate girl. Then followed the discovery of her voice, and his investment in her as a good speculation. It was going to prove one, too, though the anxiety of it had given him a grey hair or two in his black head. Yes, it had been a good speculation already, for the two years' singing abroad had recouped him for all his outlay of money. The American season would repay his patience, and the South American tour, and the winter in Russia—the impresario's plans stretched far into the future through golden vistas of profit. That Judith might have other dreams he never considered.
She herself had no well-defined thought but to excel in her art. She did not in the least understand what was amiss with her. Not but what in many dreams by night, and visions by day, she had thought of a passion that was to transfigure her life; but so used was she to passing from the reality of life to the dream on the stage, that the visions and the verities became sadly confused, and so she grew day by day more eager to attain, more anxious to achieve the highest in her art, more unsparing of her own efforts, always trembling just on the threshold of the unknown, always feeling one more upward effort of her wings would take her to the very pinnacle of song. There surely grew the balm of sweet content, of satisfaction, of peace. Poor Judith! For her the real content lay in a green valley, far, far below these perilous peaks upon which she tottered; whereon no woman may safely stand, it seems, without a stronger soul beside her to sustain in time of need. Her happiness lay in a valley where love springs and happiness flows in streams about the feet, and as she aspired higher and higher, and rose farther and farther into the rarefied air which solitary success breathes, she left the Happy Valley farther and farther behind.
Had she been less evenly balanced, had her soul been less true, her heart less tender, she might in time have frozen the woman completely, and crystallized into the artiste only—or—but to think of Judith Moore sullying her wings is sacrilege.
She was full of womanly tenderness and womanly vanities. She had a thousand little tricks of coquetry and as many balms to ease their smart. She took a good deal of satisfaction out of her pretty gowns and her finger nails, and the contemplation of her little feet becomingly shod had been known to dry her tears. She was essentially the woman of the past, the woman who created a "type" distinct from man: the womanly woman, not the hybrid creature of modern cultivation; the woman of romance. To balance this (for nowadays this doubtless needs excuse) she had a fund of sympathy great enough to endow every living thing that suffered with pity. She had certainly that charity without which all other virtues are as "sounding brass." She sent away those who came in contact with her the better for their meeting, and from her eyes there shone a purity of soul that had abashed some men whose eyes had long forgotten shame.
Such was Judith Moore.
When Andrew approached the Morris house, the next day after the apple-tree episode, he saw from afar a figure in white sitting perched upon the weather-beaten rail fence which separated his woodland from the Morris farm. He hastened his steps, his heart beating hotly. Judith was in a repentant and somewhat shame-faced mood. Upon reflection it had occurred to her that her behaviour the day before had been little less than bold. Judith had felt badly over it, and had even cried a bit, as foolish women will. She was, of course, prepared to make Andrew suffer for her misdeeds if he in any way showed a recollection of the incident, and had decided to assume a very haughty mien if he dared say "feet."
Andrew's intuitions were not slow, even if he was only a farmer, and when he greeted her, and she suddenly, sweetly, strangely blushed and looked up at him half inquiringly, he interpreted it aright. He had been amused, perhaps aroused, by her impertinence; he was touched by her unexpressed penitence.
Miss Judith had on an artful frock: most of her frocks were artful and well put on, too, which is this great thing. Judith never considered time thrown away that was spent adorning her "perishing person." This particular frock was of sheer white wool, and because she had a waist of the unhygienic type (and rejoiced thereat exceedingly, be it told, for she was thoroughly unregenerate), she had it girdled with a ribbon, wound round and round her. It had huge loose sleeves of a kind not known in Ovid. "Sort of night-gowny looking," Andrew said afterwards, in describing her appearance to his aunt. How Miss Moore would have raged at that! Paquin, no less, had made those sleeves.
She was careful to keep her very toes out of sight this morning, and when she thought Andrew was not looking, she gave anxious little tugs at her skirt to cover them yet more securely. Every one of these tugs Andrew saw, and they raised within him a spirit of deep indignation. "I wish that skirt would come off in her hand—serve her right if it did," he said to himself, aggrievedly, whilst apparently listening to Miss Moore's prophecies regarding the weather.
"Going to rain in three days?" he said. "How do you know?"
"Oh," said Miss Moore, with an indescribable look of wisdom, "there was a big ring round the moon last night, enclosing three stars. That means in three days it will storm—of course, rain—you'd hardly expect snow, would you?" Miss Moore spoke a little resentfully as she concluded, for Andrew did not look impressed.
"Well, no," agreed Andrew. "Did Mr. Morris tell you that?"
"Yes: we're going to shear sheep to-morrow."
"What?" Andrew was amused at the "we."
"That," said Judith, who in spite of her air of knowledge was somewhat nervous and not quite certain whether she had put it rightly or not. ("Shear sheep" did sound queer.)
"Oh, you are. What else?"
"I'm going to learn to make butter. Mrs. Morris says I have real 'butter hands.' They're so cool. Feel." She laid her hand on his.
"Yes, lovely," said Andrew, fervently: "but don't you think you ought to get well before you do all this? Stick to prophesying for a while. It's easier."
"Oh, if you're going to laugh at me—"
"No, indeed." (Miss Moore's brows were knitted.) "I'm not really, honestly: never thought of such a thing." Then, persuasively, "Don't you want to come and see a bird's nest?"
Miss Moore's attempt at bad temper collapsed.
"I should think I did," she said.
"Come on, then," said he.
"Oh, is it on that side? How do I get over?"
"Let me lift you."
"No, indeed! Turn your back, and I'll jump."
"Let—"
"No!"
Andrew wheeled on his heel. There was a soft thud and a scramble. He turned like a flash, but Miss Moore had regained her feet, and stood waiting with an expression of exaggerated patience on her face.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
"Oh, waiting," she answered, with emphasis.
That walk was the first they ever had together. Neither of them ever forgot it. At the moment, it seemed to pass in light-hearted chatter: but beneath all this there was a substratum of eagerness—Judith trying to get in touch with this new creature at her side, this strong, unconventional, natural soul, so different from the artificial creatures she had known; and Andrew feeling his heart going out beyond control to this girl who walked so unsteadily at his side, stumbling every now and then from the unaccustomed roughness of the way. These little feet had evidently had all paths smoothed to them. (He could not guess how chill those carven pathways were.) How tender her eyes grew over the wild flowers, and how sweet her lips when, for a moment, a serious thought came to her!
The wild flowers were in full luxuriance, and Judith gathered an armful. They passed a dogwood tree that stood sheeted in its white blossoms, their petals of the texture of white kid. Andrew got her some great branches of it, and she insisted upon carrying it herself, holding all her spoil against her breast with one hand, using the other to lift her gown now and then, or to pluck more flowers.
Her face looked out from the flowers with a kind of rapt eagerness upon it that illumined it like a light. Her enjoyment was so intense as to be almost painful. They had gone quite a distance from the Morris house, half the length of Andrew's woods, when they came to a little hollow. A stream ran through it, but so blocked was its way by the burrows of moles that it zigzagged across and across the hollow, seeming almost to form loops at some points. All along its course grew the tall, pale-mauve water-flag, its spikes of bloom rising from clumps of sword-like leaves that grew in the stream's edge. At the farther side of the hollow a mass of wild crab-apple trees were covered with their fragile pink blooms, and heaped up at one end of the hollow was a great mass of loose stones, piled there as they had been gathered from the fields. Dog-tooth violets, which love moisture, grew thickly about their feet, their yellow and brown blossoms springing from between pairs of spotted leaves. Where the leaves grew singly, there were no flowers. Here and there could be seen a blossom of the rarer white variety, the back of its recurved petals delicately tinged with pink. Close by the roots of some stumps there were velvety cushions of the thick green moss so often found in Canadian woods; bryony vines strayed over these, making a rich brocade in tones of green. Tufts of coarse ferns grew in the clefts of the stumps, their last year's fronds withering beside them, the fresh ones just beginning to uncurl. And framing all this in, there was the curtain of trees in the first freshness of foliage.
For a moment, in Judith's mind dream and reality became confused. The little glade so exactly simulated a well-set scene. There was something artificial in the piled-up stones: in the stream which made so much of itself in going such a short distance. It was so usual for her to stand before the footlights with her arms full of flowers. And the man at her side—she looked at him, and in a moment realized how completely and artistically he was in accord with his environment. His strong, bronzed face, his lithe, tall form, his expression, his dress, the look of utter comprehension with which his eyes took in the scene, over which her eyes lingered in detail—all this was apparent to her at once. She was well used to considering the "value" of this or that upon the scene, and she told herself the unities were surely satisfied now.
"Are you pleased?" he asked.
"I'm simply charmed," she said. "It is too beautiful to be real."
"Ah," he said, "that's where you make a mistake. It is only beautiful enough to be real."
She looked at him.
"You are tired," he went on, without waiting for an answer. "I've brought you too far. Will you sit down?"
"Yes, I think so. I really am awfully strong, only I soon get tired."
"Exactly; one of the signs of great strength. Oh, come, don't get cross."
"I hate being laughed at; you're bad to me," she said pettishly.
Andrew was smitten to the heart. He began to think he'd been a brute.
He took off his coat, making no apology therefor. It did not occur to him that there was anything wrong in shirt sleeves. He spread it at the foot of a stump.
"You sit down there and rest," he said, "and I'll go get you some more flowers."
"Don't you want to rest?" she inquired solicitously.
"No, I'm not tired," he answered gravely. He wouldn't laugh at her again in a hurry!
"Well, hurry back."
So she watched him pick his way across the little hollow to the twisted and gnarled crab trees. And as she watched there stole over her eager spirit the first whiff of that peace which was soon to settle so sweetly upon her heart—a restful recognition of the joy of calm; and all was blended with the bitter sweet scent of the crab blossoms and the ineffable savour of spring woods.
Andrew was soon back at her side with a sheaf of flag lilies and big branches of apple blooms; and Judith for the first time held real crab-apple blossoms in her hands, with their perfume, that mingling of Marah and myrrh, rising to her as incense from a censer. She had long known the distilled perfume; how different this living fragrance was. Something of this she told Andrew.
"Yes," he said, "I understand you exactly. You won't like the manufactured stuff any more. I never could eat canned salmon after eating the real article fresh from the stream where I'd caught it."
Miss Moore looked at him.
He laughed outright at her expression of disgust.
"Was it very awful to liken crab blooms to salmon? They're much of the same colour."
"Don't dare say another word," said Miss Moore. "You're horrid."
Andrew reddened and looked a little stiff.
Miss Moore eyed him furtively. "Mr. Cutler?"
"Yes."
"Would you like me to sing to you?"
Like a child Miss Moore proffered her biggest bribe first.
"Rather," said Andrew, with emphasis, forgetting his dignity. "I should think I would."
Seeing him so eager, Miss Moore was minded to postpone his pleasure a bit. "What shall I sing?" she asked.
"Anything—your favourite, anything you like, only sing." And she sang a song by Rosetti, beginning—
"A little while, a little love
The hour yet bears for thee and me
Who have not drawn the veil to see
If still our heaven be lit above."
And which ends—
"Not yet the end; be our lips dumb
In smiles a little season yet,
I'll tell thee, when the end is come,
How we may best forget."
When it was over he turned and looked at her as at a marvel. What manner of woman was this? The one moment a curious child, the next a proud woman; again, a poor, little tired girl, and then—how should he name this singing angel.
Miss Moore was used to homage and applause, and wont to see people moved by her singing, but never a tribute had been more sweet to her than the look in this countryman's eyes.
"I will sing again," she said, and began a little Scotch song.
Afterwards Miss Moore was sorry about this, and thought bitterly that she could not, even for an hour, put aside the rôle of the opera singer seeking to play upon her public. For she had been taught the value of appealing to sentiment as a factor towards success, and many a night, after singing the most intricate operas, she had responded to the encore by singing "Home, Sweet Home" or "Annie Laurie," or some other simple peasant ballad that touches the heart. It is a trick prima donnas all have.
The song she sang Andrew was "Jock o' Hazeldean": the story of the high-born girl who loved Jock o' Hazeldean. Who was he, we wonder. This fascinating Jock, of Hazeldean, smacks more of the Merrie Greenwood than of broad domains. But at any rate he must have been right worthy to be loved, else such a leal, brave-hearted, beautiful girl had not loved him. Torn, too, she was between two thoughts—her family, her plighted troth, riches and—Jock—so that
"Whene'er she loot
The tears doon fa'
For Jock o' Hazeldean."
For she had made up her mind evidently to give him up, but these treacherous tears betrayed themselves whenever she bent her head, and when a woman's heart is breaking she cannot always hold her head high. And in the end they nearly married her to the "Lord of Errington." But—
"The kirk was decked at morning tide,
The tapers glimmered fair,
Both priest and bridegroom wait the bride,
And dame and knight were there.
They sought her then by bower and ha';
The lady wasna seen—
She's ower the border, and awa
With Jock o' Hazeldean."
Well Judith Moore sang the words of the song, but she did more. Her vibrant voice expressed all the pathos, the romance, the tenderness, that lives between the words; and in the last two lines there was a sort of timorous triumph, as of one who has gained victory over the world, her family, her own fears, and won to her lover's breast, and yet trembles in her triumph. Women do not give themselves even to their best beloved without tears.
This was in reality the great charm of Judith's singing—a charm no perfection of method, no quality of tone could have produced. She felt the full significance of everything she sang, and had that sympathetic magnetism which creates its own moods in others. That is fascination. That is the secret of these women at whose power the world has wondered, whose loves have been the passions of history, whose whims have legislated the affairs of kingdoms.
"Don't sing any more," Andrew said when she finished. "I've had enough for one day. I—"
"You feel my music as I do myself," she said softly. "It is almost pain."
Presently they went back through the woods, more silently than they had come, and yet happier. Judith looked up at him once or twice with no veil of laughter on her eyes. He was thrilled with the expression he found there; now it seemed a steadfast ray of unselfish resolution, again a yearning so poignant that it almost unnerved him. He showed her the nest on the furrows.
"In a little while there will be birds in the nest," he said.
"Oh, I'll come and watch it every day."
"You must not come too often or stay too long," he said, "or the bird will get frightened and forsake her nest—fly away and never come back."
"Oh, surely not fly away from that nest," Judith cried. To her that rough little wisp of coiled grass and horsehair represented the perfection of bird architecture.
"If you would only come to the house—my house over there on the hill," said Andrew, flushing a little and very eager; "my aunt would like you to so much, and I would show you a lot of nests. We have more birds there" (suddenly feeling very proud of this fact) "than anywhere else in the county."
"Oh, I'd like to ever so much," said Judith. "Your aunt?"
"Suppose I send my aunt over to see you?" said Andrew, quite ignorant of the etiquette of calls, but hitting it off well in his ignorance. "She'll come to visit Mrs. Morris, and then, of course, if you care to see her, she'll be so glad to ask you to come over."
"Does your aunt visit the Morrises?" asked Judith, with some surprise.
"Why, of course: we only live a mile away," said Andrew, entirely oblivious of the compliment to himself.
"Oh, yes, of course," said Judith, hastily, feeling mean.
Finally they said "Good-bye." Andrew had gone but a few steps when she called him.
"Wait a moment. When do you think your aunt will come?"
"Soon; not to-morrow, she's going to town. Perhaps next day. Why?"
"Oh, I want to put on a pretty frock," she said candidly.
"Well," said Andrew, with conviction, "you can't beat that one."
Miss Moore went back to the house. A weather-beaten frame house it was, with a weather-vane in the shape of a horse on top. When the horse's nose pointed over Judith's window, the wind was east; when it seemed to gallop in the direction of the kitchen, it was west; when it made for the village, it was south, and when it looked with a longing eye, apparently, at the stables, it was north. Mr. Morris explained this to Judith on an average once a day, but she always got it mixed.
Mrs. Morris was vigorously making pies when Judith entered.
"Baking?" said Judith.
"Yes," said Mrs. Morris, breaking the crisp stalks of rhubarb into little pieces. "Yes, I'm sure I'm going to have company" (she broke the last piece of rhubarb with a snap and commenced rolling out her paste with soft thuds). "Yes, company's coming sure. I dropped my dishcloth three times this morning, and then the old brahma, he just stood on that doorstep and crowed for all he was worth. I never knowed that bird to crow on that doorstep without strange feet soon stood on it."
Mrs. Morris covered her pie, and then holding the pie plate upon the fingers of one hand, dexterously ran a knife around the edge, trimming off a ring of paste that fell on her arm; then she dabbed it with a fork and put it in the oven.
"I want something to put my flowers in," said Judith. "May I take some of those big earthen jars out there?" pointing to the open door of the pantry, within which stood some old-fashioned, rough, grey crocks.
"Yes," said Mrs. Morris, absent-mindedly, as she carefully "tried" a cake with a straw from the broom to see if it was done; "yes"—then coming back to sublunary matters as she shut the oven door, "But sake's alive, child, you don't want them things to put them in! I'll get you the scissors and some string so you can cut the blows off them apple branches and make good round bunches, and there's some posy pots I bought in town one day. I'll get them to put them in."
Judith's heart sank. She was too afraid of hurting Mrs. Morris' feelings to say anything, but when that busy woman appeared with some hideous blue and green and gilt atrocities, a bright thought struck her.
"Oh, Mrs. Morris," she said, "those are too nice altogether. Just let me use the jars; those might get broken."
"Well," said Mrs. Morris, pausing in the door of the sitting-room, "they be only wild crabs and dogwood blows. It would be a pity to risk it, maybe." So she took back the vases and replaced the bouquets of everlastings in them, feeling she had done her duty to her boarder, but glad that matters had arranged themselves as they had.
So Judith got out the jars and filled them with great bunches of the dogwood, which gives such a Japanesque effect of blossom on bare branch, and with the apple blossoms, the wild iris mingling its dainty mauve equally well with each. Then she leaned back against the door jamb (she was sitting on the doorstep), and dreamily listened to Mrs. Morris.
What a strange medley of criticism, information, prophecy and humour the talk of such a woman is, all given forth with no coherence, no sequence of ideas, the disjecta membra of a thousand gossipy stories, the flotsam and jetsam of the slow-flowing stream of country life; now and then hitting off, as if by chance, a word or two which is a complete characterization of a person or place; now and then piercing to the heart of some vital human truth; now and then sowing a seed of scandal to bring forth bitterness; now and then by a pause, a sigh or a word revealing the griefs of a homely heart, and always perpetuating a hundred harmless conceits of fancy, signs, warnings, and what Mrs. Morris called, "omings that mean something."
Mrs. Morris was popularly considered the most talkative woman in Ovid, always excepting Bill Aikins' wife who had so far distanced the others as to fairly outclass them. Sometimes Mrs. Morris wearied Judith to death with her tongue, but out of the resources of her generous heart, which always could furnish excuses for everybody, Judith found palliation for Mrs. Morris' fault. There was a certain plot in the unkempt little graveyard in Ovid, wherein were five tiny graves; over each was a coverlet of straggly clove pinks, and each of the little sleepers had been borne away from the farm-house by the woods. Now and then, but rarely, Mrs. Morris spoke of these babies. Their united ages would not have numbered half a dozen years; but Mrs. Morris, with the strange divination of motherhood, had seen in their infantile ways the indications of distinctive character, so that each of these dead children had as individual a place in her memory as though it had worked and wept and wearied itself into old age. And to Judith this seemed excuse enough for poor chattering Mrs. Morris. All the breath other mothers use in speaking to their children, all the time they spend in silent thought about them and for them, was barren to this lonely old woman. "Who could wonder then that she wants to talk a bit?" Judith one day said to Andrew, wistfully, when he was laughing at Mrs. Morris' tongue. Indeed, Judith's tender eyes pierced deep down into the depths of these people's hearts. The ugly gossip, the sneering spite, the malignant whisperings she heard, filled her with a pity divine enough to drown the disgust which their backbiting and meanness awakened. The pity of it! she thought, looking at the miracle of the summer fields beneath the summer sky: the upward aspiration of every blade of grass, of every tiny twig, of every little Morning Glory seedling, striving to lift itself up, stretching forth its tendrils towards anything that would bear it higher: everything reaching towards the light. And these people, surrounded by the strong silent stimulus of nature, going with their eyes fixed upon the clods, or at most raised but to the level of their own heads, striving to grasp some puny self-glorification, letting the real gold of life run through their fingers like sand, whilst with eager palms they snatched at the base alloys which corroded their hands!
When Judith heard one woman say of another, "She's a most terrible nice woman. She works like a horse," she did not feel as much like laughing at the narrowness of the vision which pronounced such judgment, as weeping, that life had ways which people trod wherein brutish physical exertion seemed the highest good. It will be seen that Judith had a tender and discerning eye to penetrate the pains and sorrows of others, but she could not decipher her own heart yet. It is hard to get one's self in true perspective. It would indeed be a gift from the gods if we could see ourselves.
CHAPTER VI.
"He who sings
To fill the highest purpose, need not soar
Above the lintel of the peasant's door."
Before the Morris house there stretched a space of unkempt grass, broken by three or four irregular flower beds, upon which the grass encroached, from which the flowers sometimes strayed afield. In these beds were clumps of jonquils—"yeller petticoats," Mrs. Morris called them—and there were heavy headed daffodils, which, to Judith's delight, she dubbed daffdowndillies. There were patches of purple iris, too, and through one of the beds the sturdy roseate stems of the common pæony were pushing their way. A big bush of flowering currant was covered with its yellow flowers, murmurous with hundreds of bees, for they are very sweet. The stems of the florets are bitten off by children to get a drop of honey in each, just as in the florets of a clover bloom.
Up and down the sanded pathway leading to Mrs. Morris' front door paced Judith Moore, two days after Andrew's visit. She had on a brown frock, girdled with a filigreed belt of silver gilt; a bunch of jonquils at her bosom caught together the folds of some soft old lace; her heels added a good two inches to her stature, and she felt herself to be very well turned out.
It was warm: the robins were building nests. Presently one flew by with a scrap of brilliant red wool, and in a moment or two flew down from the gable of the house, and regaled itself with a long worm which it had spied from afar. It despatched its lunch with gusto, cocked its head on one side, preened the feathers of its wings with its foot, as one would run the hand through the hair, and then started in on its house-building again. "From labour to refreshment," thought Judith.
She herself was in a state of tremulous happiness; her being, freed from all artificial restraints, released from all conventional bonds, was unfolding, as naturally as the flower buds to the sunshine; her thoughts no longer bent exclusively upon her art, no longer dwelling upon the next triumph, found for themselves new and unexpected pathways. For the first time she gave herself up to the perilous pleasure of introspection. In "sessions of sweet silent thought" her fragmentary dreams and ideals of life, love and nature, were attuning themselves to a true and eager aspiration to be worthy the best gift of each. Her heart—well, her heart had not been awakened yet. Like the great white lilies in Miss Myers' garden, it was yet half asleep, but stirring within it was the sweetness of spring, of springing life, and love, and the first poignant sweetness of self-consciousness. The lilies were yet only putting forth feeble leaves, as if to test what manner of upper world wooed them to put forth a blossom. So the little tender impulses of Judith's heart were yet very timorous. But the lilies would bloom in good time—and the heart?
Judith was still pacing back and forth when a tall, angular figure, in a black cashmere gown and a broad black shade hat, appeared in the gateway, followed decorously by a melancholy red setter, whose melancholy and good manners vanished simultaneously as a cat, walking speculatively round the corner of the house, caught his eye. Rufus vanished, with the cat in a good lead. Rufus' acceptance of the possibilities of the situation had been so prompt, the cat's transition from a dreamer to a fugitive had been so sudden that Judith forgot the propitiatory smile with which she had intended to greet Miss Myers, and gave a regular peal of laughter.
Miss Myers had come to call, or, as she herself put it, had "come to visit a spell with Mrs. Morris."
"Oh, the poor cat!" said Judith, not knowing very well what to say, and getting rather red.
"Is it your cat? I'm real sorry. Rufus is always hard on cats. There's one cat in the village though—but there, you must be the boarder. I'm real glad to see you."
"Yes," said Judith, "I'm Judith Moore, and you must be Miss Myers; I know you by the dog."
Then a quick sense of the vision she had just had of Rufus, the eager outstretched nose, the flying heels whisking past the side of the house, the cat's hysteric spitting as she turned and fled—this made Judith catch her breath.
Miss Myers laughed grimly. It was her fortune always to look grim, even when she wept. Afterwards, Judith knew that Miss Myers had thoroughly appreciated the humour of the situation, and had loved Judith "from the minute I set eyes on her," as Miss Myers said. Perhaps, out of loyalty to Andrew, Miss Myers exaggerated a little her first feeling toward Judith, but for that kindly exaggeration one could gather her in one's arms.
Great indeed must be the love of that woman who is willing to accept, nay, even help, to win the woman who is to displace her in the affections of one with whom she has from babyhood been first. And that is the doom of all women who rear children, whether their own or not; to nurse them, watch them, pray for them, painfully perhaps: keep them as pure as may be; make them as true as possible: and then some day have them bring a stranger, a boy or girl, of whom they have bereft some other woman, and say, "Look, this is my best beloved." Is not that a great reward for which to fast, and thirst, and labour? And yet that is the good guerdon gained by many a woman whose name, if but granted the right meed of praise, would be written in letters of gold on a silver sky.
Recognizing this; what tenderness should not be felt towards such women, what gratitude accorded them for the good gift they have rendered up?
Mrs. Morris came fussily to the door. "Miss Myers, let me make you acquainted with Miss Moore. Come right in; sit down. Won't take off your things? Well, now, that's real mean! I quite expected you'd come for a good visit. Whatever be these dogs a-yelping at? Well, it beats all! Just look at 'em," pointing out at the sitting-room window, which gave a view of the orchard.
In the cleft of an apple-tree, just beyond the reach of the dogs' leaps, sat the cat, an insulting indifference expressed in every line of her crouching shape, turning a calm countenance to her impotent foes. The collie, seduced by the example of Rufus, had cast aside the veneer of amity overlying his natural instinct, and now careered round and round the tree trunk, making futile leaps at the cat; whilst Rufus stood uttering the characteristically mournful bark of his breed, and waving his feathery tail as if courtesy might induce the cat to descend and be worried. However, the cat was an old-stager. Her narrowed eyes gleamed venomously, and she thought evil thoughts, but that was all.
"Old Tab 'll tire them dogs out before they get through with her," said Mrs. Morris, placidly; and sometime later, when the ladies looked forth again, the cat was delicately walking along the top of the board fence, and the two dogs were in full cry after a squirrel. It is probable that those dogs, before they slept that night, wondered many a time and oft what trees were created for, if not specially intended to deprive decent dogs of a little legitimate sport.
Mrs. Morris, when she had no company, occupied her spare time in "teaming" the wool shorn from the sheep, preparatory to sending it to the woollen mill; but she did not bring this work into the sitting-room. She brought in her braided mat. First she sewed strips of cloth together, and when she had three differently coloured balls made, she braided them into a flat strand, then she sewed that round and round, till it grew into a mat. All the rag carpets in Mrs. Morris' house were bestrewn with these mats, placed at irregular intervals, but practice and instinct so guided Mrs. Morris' feet, that she never, by any chance, no matter how engrossed she might be in other matters, stepped upon a space of carpet. There was something very interesting about this. She did it so unconsciously, so accurately, like an erratic automaton. It is true this practice did not conduce to a Delsartean evenness of step: and indeed, Mrs. Morris, when walking through the fields, or along the road, carried in her gait the replica of the floor plan of her first three rooms. Through the front room, the sitting-room, the kitchen, that was the course she mapped upon the road she travelled again and again. The wily Vivien would not have won readily the secret of Mrs. Morris' woven paces.
Miss Myers took off her shade hat and held it on her lap. Judith sat prettily erect, bending forward now and then, as if alert to answer Miss Myers' commonplaces—a flattering attitude that. Mrs. Morris braided her strands firmly, looking benignantly over her spectacles, which, having slipped down to the very point of her nose, by some miracle preserved a tentative hold. Their precarious position gave Miss Myers "nerves." She clasped her thin hands tightly "to stiddy herself up."
They talked of the every-day incidents of their homely lives. The first question that came up was house-cleaning, a very vital matter to the country housewife in spring and autumn. Of course, these two women, being notable house-keepers, had theirs done long ago, but there were others—well, neither of these ladies wished to make remarks, least of all about their neighbours, still—
Then they discussed the proper time for picking the geese (that is, denuding the live geese of the feathers they would otherwise lose), and both had often noticed the wilful waste of the Greens, in letting their geese go unplucked, so that the village street was snowed with wasted feathers which floated about in the air, or sailed, the most fragile of crafts, in the little water-cressed stream. This led naturally to the mysterious disappearance of Hiram Green's twelve geese, a story retold for Judith's benefit.