Lyddy had very few callers during her first month as a property owner
in Edgewood. Her appearance would have been against her winning friends
easily in any case, even if she had not acquired the habits of a
recluse. It took a certain amount of time, too, for the community to get
used to the fact that old Mrs. Butterfield was dead, and her niece
Lyddy Ann living in the cottage on the river road. There were numbers
of people who had not yet heard that old Mrs. Butterfield had bought the
house from the Thatcher boys, and that was fifteen years ago; but this
was not strange, for, notwithstanding aunt Hitty's valuable services in
disseminating general information, there was a man living on the Bonny
Eagle road who was surprised to hear that Daniel Webster was dead, and
complained that folks were not so long-lived as they used to be.
Aunt Hitty thought Lyddy a Goth and a Vandal because she took down
the twenty silver coffin plates and laid them reverently away. “Mis'
Butterfield would turn in her grave,” she said, “if she knew it. She
ain't much of a housekeeper, I guess,” she went on, as she cut over
Dr. Berry's old trousers into briefer ones for Tommy Berry. “She gives
considerable stuff to her hens that she'd a sight better heat over and
eat herself, in these hard times when the missionary societies can't
hardly keep the heathen fed and clothed and warmed--no, I don't mean
warmed, for most o' the heathens live in hot climates, somehow or
'nother. My back door's jest opposite hers; it's across the river, to
be sure, but it's the narrer part, and I can see everything she does as
plain as daylight. She washed a Monday, and she ain't taken her clothes
in yet, and it's Thursday. She may be bleachin' of 'em out, but it
looks slack. I said to Si last night I should stand it till 'bout
Friday,--seein' 'em lay on the grass there, but if she didn't take 'em
in then, I should go over and offer to help her. She has a fire in the
settin'-room 'most every night, though we ain't had a frost yet; and
as near's I can make out, she's got full red curtains hangin' up to her
windows. I ain't sure, for she don't open the blinds in that room till
I get away in the morning, and she shuts 'em before I get back at night.
Si don't know red from green, so he's useless in such matters. I'm going
home late to-night, and walk down on that side o' the river, so't I can
call in after dark and see what makes her house light up as if the sun
was settin' inside of it.”
As a matter of fact, Lyddy was reveling in house-furnishing of a humble
sort. She had a passion for color. There was a red-and-white straw
matting on the sitting-room floor. Reckless in the certain possession
of twenty dollars a month, she purchased yards upon yards of turkey red
cotton; enough to cover a mattress for the high-backed settle, for long
curtains at the windows, and for cushions to the rockers. She knotted
white fringes for the table covers and curtains, painted the inside
of the fireplace red, put some pots, of scarlet geraniums on the
window-sills, filled newspaper rack with ferns and tacked it over an
ugly spot in the wall, edged her work-basket with a tufted trimming of
scarlet worsted, and made an elaborate photograph case of white crash
and red cotton that stretched the entire length of the old-fashioned
mantelshelf, and held pictures of Mr. Reynolds, Miss Elvira Reynolds,
George, Susy, Anna, John, Hazel, Ella, and Rufus Reynolds, her former
charges. When all this was done, she lighted a little blaze on the
hearth, took the red curtains from their hands, let them fall gracefully
to the floor, and sat down in her rocking-chair, reconciled to her
existence for absolutely the first time in her forty years.
I hope Mrs. Butterfield was happy enough in Paradise to appreciate and
feel Lyddy's joy. I can even believe she was glad to have died, since
her dying could bring such content to any wretched living human soul.
As Lydia sat in the firelight, the left side of her poor face in shadow,
you saw that she was distinctly harmonious. Her figure, clad in plain
black-and-white calico dress, was a graceful, womanly one. She had
beautifully sloping shoulders and a sweet wrist. Her hair was soft
and plentiful, and her hands were fine, strong, and sensitive. This
possibility of rare beauty made her scars and burns more pitiful, for
if a cheap chrome has smirch across its face, we think it a matter of no
moment, but we deplore the smallest scratch or blur on any work of real
art.
Lydia felt a little less bitter and hopeless about life when she sat in
front of her own open fire, after her usual twilight walk. It was her
habit to wander down the wooded road after her simple five-o'clock
supper, gatherings ferns or goldenrod or frost flowers for her vases;
and one night she heard, above the rippling of the river, the strange,
sweet, piercing sound of Anthony Croft's violin.
She drew nearer, and saw a middle-aged man sitting in the kitchen
doorway, with a lad of ten or twelve years leaning against his knees.
She could tell little of his appearance, save that he had a high
forehead, and hair that waved well back from it in rather an unusual
fashion. He was in his shirt-sleeves, but the gingham was scrupulously
clean, and he had the uncommon refinement of a collar and necktie. Out
of sight herself, Lyddy drew near enough to hear; and this she did every
night without recognizing that the musician was blind. The music had
a curious effect upon her. It was a hitherto unknown influence in her
life, and it interpreted her, so to speak, to herself. As she sat on
the bed of brown pine needles, under a friendly tree, her head resting
against its trunk, her eyes half closed, the tone of Anthony's violin
came like a heavenly message to a tired, despairing soul. Remember that
in her secluded life she had heard only such harmony as Elvira Reynolds
evoked from her piano or George Reynolds from his flute, and the
Reynolds temperament was distinctly inartistic.
Lyddy lived through a lifetime of emotion in these twilight concerts.
Sometimes she was filled with an exquisite melancholy from which there
was no escape; at others, the ethereal purity of the strain stirred her
heart with a strange, sweet vision of mysterious joy; joy that she had
never possessed, would never possess; joy whose bare existence she never
before realized. When the low notes sank lower and lower with their soft
wail of delicious woe, she bent forward into the dark, dreading that
something would be lost in the very struggle of listening; then, after
a, pause, a pure human tone would break the stillness, and soaring,
bird-like, higher and higher, seem to mount to heaven itself, and,
“piercing its starry floors,” lift poor scarred Lydia's soul to the very
grates of infinite bliss. In the gentle moods that stole upon her in
those summer twilights she became a different woman, softer in her
prosperity than she had ever been in her adversity; for some plants only
blossom in sunshine. What wonder if to her the music and the musician
became one? It is sometimes a dangerous thing to fuse the man and his
talents in this way; but it did no harm here, for Anthony Croft was his
music, and the music was Anthony Croft. When he played on his violin,
it was as if the miracle of its fashioning were again enacted; as if the
bird on the quivering bough, the mellow sunshine streaming through the
lattice of green leaves, the tinkle of the woodland stream, spoke in
every tone; and more than this, the hearth-glow in whose light the
patient hands had worked, the breath of the soul bending itself in
passionate prayer for perfection, these, too, seemed to have wrought
their blessed influence on the willing strings until the tone was laden
with spiritual harmony. One might indeed have sung of this little red
violin--that looked to Lyddy, in the sunset glow, as if it were veneered
with rubies--all that Shelley sang of another perfect instrument:--
“The artist who this viol wrought
To echo all harmonious thought,
Fell'd a tree, while on the steep
The woods were in their winter sleep,
Rock'd in that repose divine
Of the wind-swept Apennine;
And dreaming, some of Autumn past,
And some of Spring approaching fast,
And some of April buds and showers,
And some of songs in July bowers,
And all of love; and so this tree--
O that such our death may be!--
Died in sleep, and felt no pain,
To live in happier form again.”