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 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 favourite 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 tiny 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-coloured dreams that flushed her soul.
Anthony put in the last wooden peg, and taking up his violin called,
“Davy, boy, 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 say, dear?” asked Anthony, turning to his wife.
Love and content 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 as if the Spring
was singing softly to herself because she held the baby Summer in her
arms.”
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.