It was the first day of spring, the season of swift changes. For the
first time the sky was lighter than the ground. Its brilliant clouds
threw heavy shadows on the earth, fugitive shadows which ran with the
warm wind, alert with colour. Nothing was quiet or hidden. There was not
yet sufficient life to cover or screen. Everything that had budded had a
world to itself and could be seen. Radiant, innocent, carolling,
self-revealing, the movement and action of spring were in the earth. The
running and glittering water, in winter so vivid a feature of the
fields, had become insignificant in comparison with the splendid and
vigorous sky. The noise of the wind, too, beat in one's ears louder than
the water. One had no time for meditation. One was hurried as the wind,
speeding as the sunshine. Yet the spring more than any other season is
the time when one thinks of the generations that pass--perhaps from the
very transitoriness of the visual images, their evanescence and
momentary changes reminding one so of the dead. In autumn the passage is
grave and decorous, like the advance of old age. In spring the image is
lovely and momentary, like the bright passage of those dead young.
Anne Hilton looked out to see what kind of weather it was for the
market, and with a sudden pang, she remembered her old father, and how,
on such a day, he would totter to the open door, and there sit in the
sunshine, grateful for the same warmth for which his old dog was
grateful. When she came home from the market, she would make a wreath of
white holly to put on the grave in which he rested. She thought of him
vividly, of the pathos of his last illness from which she had vainly
tried to drive the fear and soften the pain. She remembered his slow
laugh, and the knocking of his stick on the floor. Memory is keener in
bright sunshine than in the twilight, in vivid enjoyment more poignant
than in melancholy. The churchyard, with its unvisited green mound and
dwelling of the silent, became visible to Anne, and with it the dying
out of joy which returns with that vision and memory. The house, too,
was very quiet, as she drew in her head, with the stillness of a place
once lived in and now empty. She had become accustomed to thinking of
her father with tranquillity, satisfied to believe him at rest. Now the
pain of loneliness returned with memory.
She harnessed the pony to the cart, and stowed her baskets safely under
the seat. She was dressed in a purple merino skirt, kilted thickly, a
black mantle, with a bead fringe, and an antiquated straw bonnet. Round
her neck she had folded a man's linen handkerchief, and she had
elastic-sided boots on her feet. She locked the door, and put the keys
in her linen pocket tied round her waist under her skirt, and climbing
up by means of the wheel, seated herself on the board which did duty as
a seat, and took the reins. "Go on, Polly!" she said, and the pony, with
a good deal of tossing of head and tail, set off obediently towards the
high road. The clacking of its feet as it trotted on the hard road
overwhelmed all other sounds. At the corner of the roads an old woman
tending a cow nodded to her, and one or two field labourers raised
themselves to see who was going past, remaining upright and staring
longer than was necessary to satisfy their curiosity. At an open
field-gate she had to wait until two heavy wagons, their wheels a mass
of red, soft earth, had emerged, and turned in the direction of the
town. She passed them, and for some time met no one. An advancing cart
soon came in sight, accompanied by a great jangling of cans--a milk-cart
returning from the station, having sent off its supplies to the town,
now bringing back its empty cans. It was driven by a man whom Anne knew,
and, instead of drawing to one side to pass, he reined in his horse as
if to speak. "Good morning, Miss Hilton," he said. Anne checked her
horse which had gone a few paces past, and turning in her seat to look
over her shoulder, answered his greeting. The farmer's horse, impatient
of this check on the way home, made several attempts to start, and at
last, being held in by his master and scolded loudly, fell to pawing the
ground with one foot. Having quieted his horse, the farmer also turned
in his seat, and looking back at Anne said:
"I've just been up to the Union with the milk, Miss Hilton. They've had
a death this morning. I thought I'd tell you."
"Not Jane Evans?" said Anne, dropping the reins, but the next moment
retaking them as the pony had started off.
"Yes, it's Jane," said the man. "The child's living. It's a boy. She's
to be buried to-morrow seemingly. They soon put you where they want you
when you go in there."
Anne, who had been living all morning with the dead whom she knew to be
dead, stared helplessly as she heard that one whom she believed to be
alive was dead also. She had meant to go to the Union to-morrow. She was
speechless.
"She had a drouth on her it seems, and couldn't drag herself up again,"
said the farmer.
Anne remembered the room with its blue-covered beds, and the fire
burning beneath the lithograph of Queen Victoria, and the girl sitting
beside it whom she could not reach by speaking, and who was now indeed
dead.
"You'll perhaps be going up?" said the farmer, as if to lay on someone
else the responsibility of knowing about it also.
"I'll go up this afternoon," returned Anne, picking up the whip and
flicking the pony. The farmer said "Good morning," and the rattle of
milk cans once more filled the road as his horse set off at a gallop
towards home.