Davy's sickness was a lingering one. Mrs. Buck came for two or three
hours a day, but Lyddy was the self-installed angel of the house; and
before a week had passed the boy's thin arms were around her neck, his
head on her loving shoulder, and his cheek pressed against hers. Anthony
could hear them talk, as he sat in the kitchen busy at his work. Musical
instruments were still brought him to repair, though less frequently
than of yore, and he could still make many parts of violins far better
than his seeing competitors. A friend and pupil sat by his side in the
winter evenings and supplemented his weakness, helping and learning
alternately, while his blind master's skill filled him with wonder and
despair. The years of struggle for perfection had not been wasted; and
though the eye that once detected the deviation of a hair's breadth
could no longer tell the true from the false, yet nature had been busy
with her divine work of compensation. The one sense stricken with death,
she poured floods of new life and vigor into the others. Touch became
something more than the stupid, empty grasp of things we seeing mortals
know, and in place of the two eyes he had lost he now had ten in every
finger-tip. As for odors, let other folks be proud of smelling musk and
lavender, but let him tell you by a quiver of the nostrils the various
kinds of so-called scentless flowers, and let him bend his ear and
interpret secrets that the universe is ever whispering to us who are
pent in partial deafness because, forsooth, we see.
He often paused to hear Lydia's low, soothing tones and the boy's
weak treble. Anthony had said to him once, “Miss Butterfield is very
beautiful, isn't she, Davy? You haven't painted me a picture of her yet.
How does she look?”
Davy was stricken at first with silent embarrassment. He was a truthful
child, but in this he could no more have told the whole truth than
he could have cut off his hand. He was knit to Lyddy by every tie of
gratitude and affection. He would sit for hours with his expectant face
pressed against the window-pane, and when he saw her coming down the
shady road he was filled with a sense of impending comfort and joy.
“NO,” he said hesitatingly, “she isn't pretty, nunky, but she's sweet
and nice and dear, Everything on her shines, it's so clean; and when
she comes through the trees, with her white apron and her purple calico
dress, your heart jumps, because you know she's going to make everything
pleasant. Her hair has a pretty wave in it, and her hand is soft on your
forehead; and it's most worth while being sick just to have her in the
house.”
Meanwhile, so truly is “praise our fructifying sun,” Lydia bloomed into
a hundred hitherto unsuspected graces of mind and heart and speech.
A sly sense of humor woke into life, and a positive talent for
conversation, latent hitherto because she had never known any one who
cared to drop a plummet into the crystal springs of her consciousness.
When the violin was laid away, she would sit in the twilight, by Davy's
sofa, his thin hand in hers, and talk with Anthony about books and
flowers and music, and about the meaning of life, too,--its burdens and
mistakes, and joys and sorrows; groping with him in the darkness to find
a clue to God's purposes.
Davy had long afternoons at Lyddy's house as the autumn grew into
winter. He read to her while she sewed rags for a new sitting-room
carpet, and they played dominoes and checkers together in the twilight
before supper time,--suppers that were a feast to the boy, after Mrs.
Buck's cookery. Anthony brought his violin sometimes of an evening, and
Almira Berry, the next neighbor on the road to the Mills, would drop
in and join the little party. Almira used to sing Auld Robin Gray, What
Will You Do, Love, and Robin Adair, to the great enjoyment of everybody;
and she persuaded Lyddy to buy the old church melodeon, and learn to
sing alto in Oh, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, Gently, Gently Sighs the
Breeze, and I know a Bank. Nobody sighed for the gayeties and advantages
of a great city when, these concerts being over, Lyddy would pass crisp
seedcakes and raspberry shrub, doughnuts and cider, or hot popped corn
and molasses candy.
“But there, she can afford to,” said aunt Hitty Tarbox; “she's pretty
middlin' wealthy for Edgewood. And it's lucky she is, for she 'bout
feeds that boy o' Croft's. No wonder he wants her to fill him up, after
six years of the Widder Buck's victuals. Aurelia Buck can take good
flour and sugar, sweet butter and fresh eggs, and in ten strokes of her
hand she can make 'em into something the very hogs 'll turn away from. I
declare, it brings the tears to my eyes sometimes when I see her coming
out of Croft's Saturday afternoons, and think of the stone crocks full
of nasty messes she's left behind her for that innocent man and boy to
eat up.... Anthony goes to see Miss Butterfield consid'able often.
Of course it's awstensibly to walk home with Davy, or do an errand or
something, but everybody knows better. She went down to Croft's pretty
nearly every day when his cousin from Bridgton come to house-clean.
She suspicioned something, I guess. Anyhow, she asked me if Miss
Butterfield's two hundred a year was in gov'ment bonds. Anthony's
eyesight ain't good, but I guess he could make out to cut cowpons
off.... It would be strange if them two left-overs should take an'
marry each other; though, come to think of it, I don't know's 't would
neither. He's blind, to be sure, and can't see her scarred face. It's a
pity she ain't deef, so't she can't hear his everlastin' fiddle. She's
lucky to get any kind of a husband; she's too humbly to choose. I
declare, she reminds me of a Jack-o'-lantern, though if you look at the
back of her, or see her in meetin' with a thick veil on, she's about the
best appearin' woman in Edgewood.... I never see anybody stiffen up as
Anthony has. He had me make him three white shirts and three gingham
ones, with collars and cuffs on all of 'em. It seems as if six shirts at
one time must mean something out o' the common!”
Aunt Hitty was right; it did mean something out of the common. It meant
the growth of an all-engrossing, grateful, divinely tender passion
between two love-starved souls. On the one hand, Lyddy, who though she
had scarcely known the meaning of love in all her dreary life, yet was
as full to the brim of all sweet, womanly possibilities of loving and
giving as any pretty woman; on the other, the blind violin-maker, who
had never loved any woman but his mother, and who was in the direst need
of womanly sympathy and affection.
Anthony Croft, being ministered unto by Lyddy's kind hands, hearing
her sweet voice and her soft footstep, saw her as God sees, knowing the
best; forgiving the worst, like God, and forgetting it, still more like
God, I think.
And Lyddy? There is no pen worthy to write of Lyddy. Her joy lay deep
in her heart like a jewel at the bottom of a clear pool, so deep that
no ripple or ruffle on the surface could disturb the hidden treasure.
If God had smitten these two with one hand, he had held out the other in
tender benediction.
There had been a pitiful scene of unspeakable solemnity when Anthony
first told Lyddy that he loved her, and asked her to be his wife. He had
heard all her sad history by this time, though not from her own lips,
and his heart went out to her all the more for the heavy cross that
had been laid upon her. He had the wit and wisdom to put her affliction
quite out of the question, and allude only to her sacrifice in marrying
a blind man, hopelessly and helplessly dependent on her sweet offices
for the rest of his life, if she, in her womanly mercy, would love him
and help him bear his burdens.
When his tender words fell upon Lyddy's dazed brain she sank beside
his chair, and, clasping his knees, sobbed: “I love you, I cannot help
loving you, I cannot help telling you I love you! But you must hear the
truth; you have heard it from others, but perhaps they softened it. If I
marry you, people will always blame me and pity you. You would never ask
me to be your wife if you could see my face; you could not love me an
instant if you were not blind.”
“Then I thank God unceasingly for my infirmity,” said Anthony Croft, as
he raised her to her feet.
*****
Anthony and Lyddy Croft sat in the apple orchard, one warm day in late
spring.
Anthony's work would have puzzled a casual on-looker. Ten stout wires
were stretched between two trees, fifteen or twenty feet apart, and each
group of five represented the lines of the musical staff. Wooden
bars crossed the wires at regular intervals, dividing the staff into
measures. A box with many compartments sat on a stool beside him, and
this held bits of wood that looked like pegs, but were in reality whole,
half, quarter, and eighth notes, rests, flats, sharps, and the like.
These were cleft in such a way that he could fit them on the wires
almost as rapidly as his musical theme came to him, and Lyddy had
learned to transcribe with pen and ink the music she found in wood and
wire, He could write only simple airs in this way, but when he played
them on the violin they were transported into a loftier region, such
genius lay in the harmony, the arabesque, the delicate lacework of
embroidery with which the tune was inwrought; now high, now low, now
major, now minor, now sad, now gay, with the one thrilling, haunting
cadence recurring again and again, to be watched for, longed for, and
greeted with a throb of delight.
Davy was reading at the window, his curly head buried in a well-worn
Shakespeare opened at Midsummer Night's Dream. Lyddy was sitting under
her favorite pink apple-tree, a mass of fragrant bloom, more beautiful
than Aurora's morning gown. She was sewing; lining with snowy lawn
innumerable pockets in a square basket that she held in her lap. The
pockets were small, the needles were fine, the thread was a length of
cobweb. Everything about the basket was small except the hopes that she
was stitching into it; they were so great that her heart could scarcely
hold them. Nature was stirring everywhere. The seeds were springing in
the warm earth. The hens were clucking to their downy chicks just out of
the egg. The birds were flying hither and thither in the apple boughs,
and there was one little home of straw so hung that Lyddy could look
into it and see the patient mother brooding her nestlings. The sight of
her bright eyes, alert for every sign of danger, sent a rush of feeling
through Lyddy's veins that made her long to clasp the little feathered
mother to her own breast.
A sweet gravity and consecration of thought possessed her, and the
pink blossoms falling into her basket were not more delicate than the
rose-colored dreams that flushed her soul.
Anthony put in the last wooden peg, and taking up his violin called,
“Davy, lad, come out and tell me what this means!”
Davy was used to this; from a wee boy he had been asked to paint the
changing landscape of each day, and to put into words his uncle's music.
Lyddy dropped her needle, the birds stopped to listen, and Anthony
played.
“It is this apple orchard in May time,” said Davy; “it is the song of
the green things growing, isn't it?”
“What do you say, dear?” asked Anthony, turning to his wife.
Love and hope had made a poet of Lyddy. “I think Davy is right,” she
said. “It is a dream of the future, the story of all new and beautiful
things growing out of the old. It is full of the sweetness of present
joy, but there is promise and hope in it besides. It is like the Spring
sitting in the lap of Winter, and holding a baby Summer in her bosom.”
Davy did not quite understand this, though he thought it pretty; but
Lyddy's husband did, and when the boy went back to his books, he took
his wife in his arms and kissed her twice,--once for herself, and then
once again.