Mary Colton was one of the most esteemed women possible in any
country-side. She had scarcely been beyond the few miles which
surrounded her home, and since she was a girl had never set foot in a
train. She had not been born blind, but had had her sight until she was
seventeen, when an illness darkened the world for ever. "A pretty girl
she was too," said those who remembered. Of the prettiness she retained
now only the essence, that of her pleasant goodness, yet her appearance
was still attractive in spite of her thick figure and contracted brows.
She had not that unearthly exalted expression so familiar to one in the
blind, who look upwards for the light and search in vain. Rather, unless
one looked narrowly, one would take her for a middle-aged woman of good
health and steady temper, who was a little short-sighted. She used a
stick out of doors, and when she went very long distances she took with
her a small terrier, which warned her of the difficult parts of the
road. But indoors she moved about freely, knowing to an inch how much
room each piece of furniture occupied, and seldom knocking against
anything as she moved about her work.
She lived entirely alone and supported herself, not by any of the
special kinds of work which are supposed generally to be possible to the
blind, but by exactly the same means as other women of her age and
class. All the work in the house was done by herself, even to the making
of the toffee and bulls'-eyes, which she sold at the cricket-matches and
fairs of the districts. She kept hens and turkeys, and worked in her
garden, feeling her way about the beds and bushes with her feet. She
sold the vegetables and the currants and gooseberries which grew in the
little patch of garden, and her friend, Anne Hilton, carried her eggs to
the market-town for her every week, where she disposed of them to a
provision-dealer of the same denomination. Even the hen-run had been
made by the blind woman, who was a continual source of astonishment and
questioning from the neighbours. But in this wonder, she not unnaturally
found a pathetic pleasure.
"How do you know when you've got all your hens in?" asked a child once.
"I count them at night when they're asleep on their perches," answered
Mary, with a joyful little chuckle.
"But it's dark!" objected the child.
"So it is," replied Mary. "I didn't think of that."
She never referred to her blindness, and so complete a victory over
misfortune and circumstance gained its fit respect in the country. No
one considered that it was "doing a charity" to Mary to drive past her
cottage on the way from market to give her news of a football match or
fair about to be held in the district. Women would send their children
on their way to school to give similar news, and the boy who brought her
the roll of newspapers, which she sold at the station every morning,
would often wheel her barrow for her. She had a large, clumsy chest on
the frame of an old perambulator, in which she wheeled about her store
of aerated waters, toffee, and newspapers. She would place herself at
the gate of the cricket ground on Saturday afternoon. The sliding lid of
her chest made a counter on which she set her scales and her neatly cut
pile of paper for wrapping up the toffee. She had no rivals in the
district, for the most avaricious small shop-keeper would have been
ashamed to confuse or trouble the simple, good, courageous woman.
Perhaps the most complete sign of her triumph over her disability was,
that no one dreamed of calling her "Poor Mary." Like her friend, Anne
Hilton, she was a member of the little wayside chapel, which, with all
that it meant, made a centre of warmth and fellowship for both lonely
women.