“Why not?” returned Miss McCox sharply. “Babies aren’t much trouble, God knows! It’s the grown-ups make me sick!”
So Bertram Aurelius came to live at Thorpe, and was rapidly absorbed into the life on the farm. He was a good and cheerful infant, and anyone could take charge of him. He was equally contented, whether viewing the world over Ruth’s shoulder while she inspected the farm, or in his cradle in the corner of the kitchen listening to curious noises called singing, which Miss McCox, to the amazement of the whole establishment, produced for his benefit. He would lie among the hay in a manger, even as the Babe of all time, while Ruth and the cowman milked, or on his crawler on the terrace, guarded by Sarah and Selina, who took to him much as if he had been one of those weird black and white puppies of Sarah’s youthful indiscretion. And Gladys, his mother, worked cheerfully and indefatigably to please, sitting at Miss McCox’s feet for instructions, and the peace and comfort of Thorpe deepened and broadened day by day.
It was now near mid-June, and the fine weather still held. Day after day broke to unclouded sunshine, a world full of flowers and the rhythmic life of growing things. The seeds and baby plants cried for rain, the hay and fruit crops would suffer, but Ruth, her heart torn both ways, could not regret. It was all so beautiful, and when the rain came, who could tell? It might be all the real summer weather of the year, this wonderful May and June.
To-day, little ever-so-soft white clouds broke the clear blue of the sky, but there was still no sign of change. The wild roses and the broom were in perfection, and everywhere was the honey and almond scent of gorse; the buttercup glory was over but the ox-eyed daisies were all out, turning their sweet moon faces to the sun.
From where she sat Ruth could see the rose-red roofs of Thorpe with the white pigeons drowsing in the heat. Her cottages were to be equally beautiful on a smaller scale. She dreamt, as she sat in the warmth and the sweetness, with Bertram Aurelius cooing softly in her lap, visualizing pictures such as were growing in the minds of many in the great year of Peace, seeing beautiful homes where the strong man and the mother, with sturdy round-limbed children, should live, where the big sons and comely daughters should come in and out, in the peace of plenty and to the sound of laughter. It might all be so wonderful, for the wherewithal is ours, is here with us. The good brown earth, the sun and the rain, fire and water, all the teeming life of nature, all ours to mould into a life of beauty for ourselves and our children.
Dreams? Yes. But such dreams are the seeds of the beautiful, which shall, if they find soil, blossom into beauty in the time to come, for the little children lying on our knees, clutching at our hearts.
Presently there intruded into Ruth’s dreams the large presence of Mr. Pithey, and she discovered him standing in the white dust of the road in front of her. Disapproval and curiosity both appeared together in his little sharp eyes. According to Mr. Pithey’s ideas it was distinctly unseemly for a person in Ruth’s position to sit by the roadside “like a common tramp,” as he expressed it to Mrs. Pithey later on. To his mind, somehow, the baby in her lap accentuated the unseemliness, and it made the thing worse that she was both hatless and gloveless. Had she been properly dressed for the roads, the rest might have been an accident.
“I should think you’d get a sunstroke, sitting by the road like that without your hat,” he said.
Mr. Pithey himself was expensively dressed in pale grey with a white waistcoat and spats. On his head he wore a five-guinea panama, and his general appearance forcibly reminded Ruth of an immaculately groomed large, pale yellow pig. Her grey eyes smiled at him out of her sun-browned face. She had a disarming smile.
“I believe I was nearly asleep,” she said, and dug her knuckles into her eyes much as a child does.