The euthanasia of the fading blossoms filled her shallow skep half-a-dozen times over, and, to anyone ignorant (to his shame) of the art which our first ancestor surely learned from his mother, and loved, it might have seemed that Mrs. Chigwin used her scissors with a too unsparing hand. But the happy old soul knew what she was about. The evening was closing in, and she had cut both the flowers whose beauty had passed away and those which would have been wrinkled and flabby before the morning, knowing full well that only so can you reckon on the perfection of beauty from day to day.
"There, now," she said, when her last basketful was disposed of, "I have done. And if old Squire Jermyn, who first laid out this garden, was to come to life again to-morrow, there would be nothing in Martha Chigwin's little plot to make his hair stand on end."
She threw her eyes comprehensively round the ring of cottages which encircled the village green, with a sniff of defiant challenge, as though she would dare any of her neighbors to make the same boast; and then she came and sat down on the garden-seat, and said to her old friend and companion,
"What do you think about it, Elizabeth?"
"You are right, Martha; right as you always are," said Mrs. Bundlecombe, in a feeble voice. "And I was thinking as you went round, cutting off the flowers that have had their day, that if you had come to me and cut me off with the rest of them, there would have been one less poor old withered thing in the world. Here have I been a wretched cripple on your hands all the summer, and surely if the Lord had had any need for me He would not have broken my stalk and left me to shrivel up in the sunshine."
"Now, Bessy," said Mrs. Chigwin, severely, "do you want to put out the light of peace that we have been enjoying for days past? Fie, for shame! and in a garden, too. Where's your gratitude—or, leastways, where's your patience?"
"There, there, Martha, you know I did not mean it. But I sit here thinking and thinking, till I could write whole volumes on the vanity of human wishes. Cut me off, indeed, just at this moment, when I am waiting to see my dear boy once more before I die!"
Mrs. Bundlecombe was silent again, and the other did not disturb her, knowing by experience what the effort to speak would be likely to end in.
Things had not gone well at Birchmead in the last six months. The news of Alan's arrest on the charge of wife-murder—that was the exaggerated shape in which it first reached the village—was a terrible blow to poor Aunt Bessy. She was struck down by paralysis, and had to keep to her bed for many weeks, and even now she had only the partial use of her limbs. Mrs. Chigwin, buckling to her new task with heroic cheerfulness, had nursed and comforted her and lightened the burden of her life so far as that was possible. As soon as the cripple could be dressed and moved about, she had bought for her a light basket-chair, into which she used to lift her bodily. Whenever the weather was fine enough she would wheel her into the garden; and she won the first apology for a laugh from Mrs. Bundlecombe when, having drawn her on the grass and settled her comfortably, she said,
"Now, Bessy, I have repotted you and put you in the sun on the same day as my balsams, and I shall expect you to be ready for planting out as soon as they are."