As he put a footstool to her feet he caught the question she so easily transmitted by her eyes.
“P’raps madam can hunderstand that after doin’ things all my life for people as is used to ’em I’ve ’ad a kind o’ cryvin’ to do ’em for them as ’aven’t ’ad nothink, and who could enjoy them more. I told madam yesterday I was somethink of a anarchist, and that’s ’ow I am—wantin’ to give the poor a wee little bit of what the rich ’as to throw awye.”
Later he brought her an old red book, open at a page on which she read, The Little Mermaid.
Her heart leaped. It was from this volume that Miss Pye had read to the Prince when he was a child. She let her eyes run along the opening words.
“Far out in the sea the water is as blue as the petals of the cornflower, and clear as the purest glass.”
She liked this sentence. It took her into a blue 129 world. It was curious, she thought, how much meaning there was in colors. If you looked through red glass the world was angry; if through yellow, it was lit with an extraordinary sun; if through blue, you had the sensation of universal happiness. She supposed that that was why blue flowers always made you feel that there was a want in life which ought to be supplied—and wasn’t.
She remembered a woman who had a farm near them in Canada, who grew only blue flowers in her garden. The neighbors said she was crazy; but she, Letty, had liked that garden better than all the gardens she knew. She would go there and talk to that woman, and listen to what she had to say of Nature’s peculiar love of blue. The sea and sky were loveliest when they were blue, and so were the birds. There were blue stones, the woman said, precious stones, and other stones that were little more than rocks, which said something to the heart when pearls and diamonds spoke only to the eyes. In the fields, orchards, and gardens, white flowers, yellow flowers, red flowers were common; but blue flowers were rare and retiring, as if they guarded a secret which men should come and search out.
To this there was only one exception. Letty would notice as she trudged back to her father’s farm that along the August roadsides there was a blue flower—of a blue you would never see anywhere else, not even in the sky—which grew in the dust, and lived on dust, and out of the dust drew elements of beauty such as roses and lilies couldn’t boast of. “That means,” the crazy woman said, “that there’s nothing so dry, or 130 parched, or sterile, that God can’t take it and fashion from it the most priceless treasures of loveliness, if we only had the eyes to see them.”
Letty never forgot this, and during all the intervening years the dust flower, with its heavenly color, had been the wild growing thing she loved best. It spoke to her. It not only responded to the ache she felt within herself, but gave a promise of assuagement. She had never expected the fulfilment of that promise, but was it possible that now it was going to be kept?
With her eyes on the fire she saw the color of the dust flower close to the flaming wood. It was the closest of all the colors, the one the burning heart kept nearest to itself. It seemed to be, as the crazy woman said, dear to Nature itself, its own beloved secret, the secret which, even when written in the dust of the wayside, or in the fire on the hearth, hardly anyone read or found out.