Spencervale gossip always said that “Old Lady Lloyd” was rich and mean
and proud. Gossip, as usual, was one-third right and two-thirds wrong.
Old Lady Lloyd was neither rich nor mean; in reality she was pitifully
poor--so poor that “Crooked Jack” Spencer, who dug her garden and
chopped her wood for her, was opulent by contrast, for he, at least,
never lacked three meals a day, and the Old Lady could sometimes achieve
no more than one. But she WAS very proud--so proud that she would have
died rather than let the Spencervale people, among whom she had queened
it in her youth, suspect how poor she was and to what straits was
sometimes reduced. She much preferred to have them think her miserly and
odd--a queer old recluse who never went anywhere, even to church, and
who paid the smallest subscription to the minister’s salary of anyone in
the congregation.
“And her just rolling in wealth!” they said indignantly. “Well, she
didn’t get her miserly ways from her parents. THEY were real generous
and neighbourly. There never was a finer gentleman than old Doctor
Lloyd. He was always doing kindnesses to everybody; and he had a way of
doing them that made you feel as if you was doing the favour, not him.
Well, well, let Old Lady Lloyd keep herself and her money to herself
if she wants to. If she doesn’t want our company, she doesn’t have to
suffer it, that’s all. Reckon she isn’t none too happy for all her money
and pride.”
No, the Old Lady was none too happy, that was unfortunately true. It
is not easy to be happy when your life is eaten up with loneliness and
emptiness on the spiritual side, and when, on the material side, all you
have between you and starvation is the little money your hens bring you
in.
The Old Lady lived “away back at the old Lloyd place,” as it was always
called. It was a quaint, low-eaved house, with big chimneys and square
windows and with spruces growing thickly all around it. The Old Lady
lived there all alone and there were weeks at a time when she never saw
a human being except Crooked Jack. What the Old Lady did with herself
and how she put in her time was a puzzle the Spencervale people could
not solve. The children believed she amused herself counting the gold in
the big black box under her bed. Spencervale children held the Old Lady
in mortal terror; some of them--the “Spencer Road” fry--believed she
was a witch; all of them would run if, when wandering about the woods
in search of berries or spruce gum, they saw at a distance the spare,
upright form of the Old Lady, gathering sticks for her fire. Mary Moore
was the only one who was quite sure she was not a witch.
“Witches are always ugly,” she said decisively, “and Old Lady Lloyd
isn’t ugly. She’s real pretty--she’s got such a soft white hair and big
black eyes and a little white face. Those Road children don’t know what
they’re talking of. Mother says they’re a very ignorant crowd.”
“Well, she doesn’t ever go to church, and she mutters and talks to
herself all the time she’s picking up sticks,” maintained Jimmy Kimball
stoutly.
The Old Lady talked to herself because she was really very fond of
company and conversation. To be sure, when you have talked to nobody but
yourself for nearly twenty years, it is apt to grow somewhat monotonous;
and there were times when the Old Lady would have sacrificed everything
but her pride for a little human companionship. At such times she felt
very bitter and resentful toward Fate for having taken everything
from her. She had nothing to love, and that is about as unwholesome a
condition as is possible to anyone.
It was always hardest in the spring. Once upon a time the Old Lady--when
she had not been the Old Lady, but pretty, wilful, high-spirited
Margaret Lloyd--had loved springs; now she hated them because they hurt
her; and this particular spring of this particular May chapter hurt her
more than any that had gone before. The Old Lady felt as if she could
NOT endure the ache of it. Everything hurt her--the new green tips on
the firs, the fairy mists down in the little beech hollow below the
house, the fresh smell of the red earth Crooked Jack spaded up in her
garden. The Old Lady lay awake all one moonlit night and cried for very
heartache. She even forgot her body hunger in her soul hunger; and the
Old Lady had been hungry, more or less, all that week. She was living on
store biscuits and water, so that she might be able to pay Crooked Jack
for digging her garden. When the pale, lovely dawn-colour came stealing
up the sky behind the spruces, the Old Lady buried her face in her
pillow and refused to look at it.
“I hate the new day,” she said rebelliously. “It will be just like all
the other hard, common days. I don’t want to get up and live it. And,
oh, to think that long ago I reached out my hands joyfully to every
new day, as to a friend who was bringing me good tidings! I loved the
mornings then--sunny or gray, they were as delightful as an unread
book--and now I hate them--hate them--hate them!”
But the Old Lady got up nevertheless, for she knew Crooked Jack would
be coming early to finish the garden. She arranged her beautiful, thick,
white hair very carefully, and put on her purple silk dress with the
little gold spots in it. The Old Lady always wore silk from motives of
economy. It was much cheaper to wear a silk dress that had belonged to
her mother than to buy new print at the store. The Old Lady had plenty
of silk dresses which had belonged to her mother. She wore them morning,
noon, and night, and Spencervale people considered it an additional
evidence of her pride. As for the fashion of them, it was, of course,
just because she was too mean to have them made over. They did not dream
that the Old Lady never put on one of the silk dresses without agonizing
over its unfashionableness, and that even the eyes of Crooked Jack cast
on her antique flounces and overskirts was almost more than her feminine
vanity could endure.
In spite of the fact that the Old Lady had not welcomed the new day, its
beauty charmed her when she went out for a walk after her dinner--or,
rather, after her mid-day biscuit. It was so fresh, so sweet, so virgin;
and the spruce woods around the old Lloyd place were athrill with busy
spring doings and all sprinkled through with young lights and shadows.
Some of their delight found its way into the Old Lady’s bitter heart
as she wandered through them, and when she came out at the little plank
bridge over the brook down under the beeches, she felt almost gentle and
tender once more. There was one big beech there, in particular, which
the Old Lady loved for reasons best known to herself--a great, tall
beech with a trunk like the shaft of a gray marble column and a leafy
spread of branches over the still, golden-brown pool made beneath it by
the brook. It had been a young sapling in the days that were haloed by
the vanished glory of the Old Lady’s life.
The Old Lady heard childish voices and laughter afar up the lane which
led to William Spencer’s place just above the woods. William Spencer’s
front lane ran out to the main road in a different direction, but this
“back lane” furnished a short cut and his children always went to school
that way.
The Old Lady shrank hastily back behind a clump of young spruces. She
did not like the Spencer children because they always seemed so afraid
of her. Through the spruce screen she could see them coming gaily down
the lane--the two older ones in front, the twins behind, clinging to the
hands of a tall, slim, young girl--the new music teacher, probably. The
Old Lady had heard from the egg pedlar that she was going to board at
William Spencer’s, but she had not heard her name.
She looked at her with some curiosity as they drew near--and then, all
at once, the Old Lady’s heart gave a great bound and began to beat as it
had not beaten for years, while her breath came quickly and she trembled
violently. Who--WHO could this girl be?
Under the new music teacher’s straw hat were masses of fine chestnut
hair of the very shade and wave that the Old Lady remembered on another
head in vanished years; from under those waves looked large, violet-blue
eyes with very black lashes and brows--and the Old Lady knew those eyes
as well as she knew her own; and the new music teacher’s face, with all
its beauty of delicate outline and dainty colouring and glad, buoyant
youth, was a face from the Old Lady’s past--a perfect resemblance in
every respect save one; the face which the Old Lady remembered had
been weak, with all its charm; but this girl’s face possessed a fine,
dominant strength compact of sweetness and womanliness. As she passed by
the Old Lady’s hiding place she laughed at something one of the children
said; and oh, but the Old Lady knew that laughter well. She had heard it
before under that very beech tree.
She watched them until they disappeared over the wooded hill beyond the
bridge; and then she went back home as if she walked in a dream. Crooked
Jack was delving vigorously in the garden; ordinarily the Old Lady
did not talk much with Crooked Jack, for she disliked his weakness for
gossip; but now she went into the garden, a stately old figure in her
purple, gold-spotted silk, with the sunshine gleaming on her white hair.
Crooked Jack had seen her go out and had remarked to himself that the
Old Lady was losing ground; she was pale and peaked-looking. He now
concluded that he had been mistaken. The Old Lady’s cheeks were pink and
her eyes shining. Somewhere in her walk she had shed ten years at least.
Crooked Jack leaned on his spade and decided that there weren’t many
finer looking women anywhere than Old Lady Lloyd. Pity she was such an
old miser!
“Mr. Spencer,” said the Old Lady graciously--she always spoke very
graciously to her inferiors when she talked to them at all--“can you
tell me the name of the new music teacher who is boarding at Mr. William
Spencer’s?”
“Sylvia Gray,” said Crooked Jack.
The Old Lady’s heart gave another great bound. But she had known it--she
had known that girl with Leslie Gray’s hair and eyes and laugh must be
Leslie Gray’s daughter.
Crooked Jack spat on his hand and resumed his work, but his tongue went
faster than his spade, and the Old Lady listened greedily. For the first
time she enjoyed and blessed Crooked Jack’s garrulity and gossip. Every
word he uttered was as an apple of gold in a picture of silver to her.
He had been working at William Spencer’s the day the new music teacher
had come, and what Crooked Jack couldn’t find out about any person in
one whole day--at least as far as outward life went--was hardly worth
finding out. Next to discovering things did he love telling them, and it
would be hard to say which enjoyed that ensuing half-hour more--Crooked
Jack or the Old Lady.
Crooked Jack’s account, boiled down, amounted to this; both Miss Gray’s
parents had died when she was a baby, she had been brought up by an
aunt, she was very poor and very ambitious.
“Wants a moosical eddication,” finished up Crooked Jack, “and, by jingo,
she orter have it, for anything like the voice of her I never heerd.
She sung for us that evening after supper and I thought ‘twas an angel
singing. It just went through me like a shaft o’ light. The Spencer
young ones are crazy over her already. She’s got twenty pupils around
here and in Grafton and Avonlea.”
When the Old Lady had found out everything Crooked Jack could tell
her, she went into the house and sat down by the window of her little
sitting-room to think it all over. She was tingling from head to foot
with excitement.
Leslie’s daughter! This Old Lady had had her romance once. Long
ago--forty years ago--she had been engaged to Leslie Gray, a young
college student who taught in Spencervale for the summer term one
year--the golden summer of Margaret Lloyd’s life. Leslie had been a
shy, dreamy, handsome fellow with literary ambitions, which, as he and
Margaret both firmly believed, would one day bring him fame and fortune.
Then there had been a foolish, bitter quarrel at the end of that golden
summer. Leslie had gone away in anger, afterwards he had written, but
Margaret Lloyd, still in the grasp of her pride and resentment, had sent
a harsh answer. No more letters came; Leslie Gray never returned; and
one day Margaret wakened to the realization that she had put love out of
her life for ever. She knew it would never be hers again; and from that
moment her feet were turned from youth to walk down the valley of shadow
to a lonely, eccentric age.
Many years later she heard of Leslie’s marriage; then came news of his
death, after a life that had not fulfilled his dreams for him. Nothing
more she had heard or known--nothing to this day, when she had seen his
daughter pass her by unseeing in the beech hollow.
“His daughter! And she might have been MY daughter,” murmured the Old
Lady. “Oh, if I could only know her and love her--and perhaps win her
love in return! But I cannot. I could not have Leslie Gray’s daughter
know how poor I am--how low I have been brought. I could not bear that.
And to think she is living so near me, the darling--just up the lane
and over the hill. I can see her go by every day--I can have that dear
pleasure, at least. But oh, if I could only do something for her--give
her some little pleasure! It would be such a delight.”
When the Old Lady happened to go into her spare room that evening, she
saw from it a light shining through a gap in the trees on the hill. She
knew that it shone from the Spencers’ spare room. So it was Sylvia’s
light. The Old Lady stood in the darkness and watched it until it went
out--watched it with a great sweetness breathing in her heart, such as
risen from old rose-leaves when they are stirred. She fancied Sylvia
moving about her room, brushing and braiding her long, glistening
hair--laying aside her little trinkets and girlish adornments--making
her simple preparations for sleep. When the light went out the Old
Lady pictured a slight white figure kneeling by the window in the soft
starshine, and the Old Lady knelt down then and there and said her own
prayers in fellowship. She said the simple form of words she had always
used; but a new spirit seemed to inspire them; and she finished with
a new petition--“Let me think of something I can do for her, dear
Father--some little, little thing that I can do for her.”
The Old Lady had slept in the same room all her life--the one looking
north into the spruces--and loved it; but the next day she moved into
the spare room without a regret. It was to be her room after this; she
must be where she could see Sylvia’s light, she put the bed where she
could lie in it and look at that earth star which had suddenly shone
across the twilight shadows of her heart. She felt very happy, she
had not felt happy for many years; but now a strange, new, dream-like
interest, remote from the harsh realities of her existence, but none the
less comforting and alluring, had entered into her life. Besides, she
had thought of something she could do for Sylvia--“a little, little
thing” that might give her pleasure.
Spencervale people were wont to say regretfully that there were no
Mayflowers in Spencervale; the Spencervale young fry, when they wanted
Mayflowers, thought they had to go over to the barrens at Avonlea, six
miles away, for them. Old Lady Lloyd knew better. In her many long,
solitary rambles, she had discovered a little clearing far back in the
woods--a southward-sloping, sandy hill on a tract of woodland belonging
to a man who lived in town--which in spring was starred over with the
pink and white of arbutus.
To this clearing the Old Lady betook herself that afternoon, walking
through wood lanes and under dim spruce arches like a woman with a glad
purpose. All at once the spring was dear and beautiful to her once more;
for love had entered again into her heart, and her starved soul was
feasting on its divine nourishment.
Old Lady Lloyd found a wealth of Mayflowers on the sandy hill. She
filled her basket with them, gloating over the loveliness which was to
give pleasure to Sylvia. When she got home she wrote on a slip of paper,
“For Sylvia.” It was not likely anyone in Spencervale would know her
handwriting, but, to make sure, she disguised it, writing in round, big
letters like a child’s. She carried her Mayflowers down to the hollow
and heaped them in a recess between the big roots of the old beech, with
the little note thrust through a stem on top.
Then the Old Lady deliberately hid behind the spruce clump. She had put
on her dark green silk on purpose for hiding. She had not long to
wait. Soon Sylvia Gray came down the hill with Mattie Spencer. When she
reached the bridge she saw the Mayflowers and gave an exclamation of
delight. Then she saw her name and her expression changed to wonder.
The Old Lady, peering through the boughs, could have laughed for very
pleasure over the success of her little plot.
“For me!” said Sylvia, lifting the flowers. “CAN they really be for me,
Mattie? Who could have left them here?”
Mattie giggled.
“I believe it was Chris Stewart,” she said. “I know he was over at
Avonlea last night. And ma says he’s taken a notion to you--she knows
by the way he looked at you when you were singing night before last. It
would be just like him to do something queer like this--he’s such a shy
fellow with the girls.”
Sylvia frowned a little. She did not like Mattie’s expressions, but
she did like Mayflowers, and she did not dislike Chris Stewart, who had
seemed to her merely a nice, modest, country boy. She lifted the flowers
and buried her face in them.
“Anyway, I’m much obliged to the giver, whoever he or she is,” she said
merrily. “There’s nothing I love like Mayflowers. Oh, how sweet they
are!”
When they had passed the Old Lady emerged from her lurking place,
flushed with triumph. It did not vex her that Sylvia should think Chris
Stewart had given her the flowers; nay, it was all the better, since she
would be the less likely to suspect the real donor. The main thing was
that Sylvia should have the delight of them. That quite satisfied the
Old Lady, who went back to her lonely house with the cockles of her
heart all in a glow.
It soon was a matter of gossip in Spencervale that Chris Stewart was
leaving Mayflowers at the beech hollow for the music teacher every other
day. Chris himself denied it, but he was not believed. Firstly, there
were no Mayflowers in Spencervale; secondly, Chris had to go to Carmody
every other day to haul milk to the butter factory, and Mayflowers grew
in Carmody, and, thirdly, the Stewarts always had a romantic streak in
them. Was not that enough circumstantial evidence for anybody?
As for Sylvia, she did not mind if Chris had a boyish admiration for
her and expressed it thus delicately. She thought it very nice of him,
indeed, when he did not vex her with any other advances, and she was
quite content to enjoy his Mayflowers.
Old Lady Lloyd heard all the gossip about it from the egg pedlar, and
listened to him with laughter glimmering far down in her eyes. The egg
pedlar went away and vowed he’d never seen the Old Lady so spry as she
was this spring; she seemed real interested in the young folk’s doings.
The Old Lady kept her secret and grew young in it. She walked back to
the Mayflower hill as long as the Mayflowers lasted; and she always hid
in the spruces to see Sylvia Gray go by. Every day she loved her more,
and yearned after her more deeply. All the long repressed tenderness of
her nature overflowed to this girl who was unconscious of it. She was
proud of Sylvia’s grace and beauty, and sweetness of voice and laughter.
She began to like the Spencer children because they worshipped Sylvia;
she envied Mrs. Spencer because the latter could minister to Sylvia’s
needs. Even the egg pedlar seemed a delightful person because he brought
news of Sylvia--her social popularity, her professional success, the
love and admiration she had won already.
The Old Lady never dreamed of revealing herself to Sylvia. That, in her
poverty, was not to be thought of for a moment. It would have been very
sweet to know her--sweet to have her come to the old house--sweet to
talk to her--to enter into her life. But it might not be. The Old Lady’s
pride was still far stronger than her love. It was the one thing she had
never sacrificed and never--so she believed--could sacrifice.