CHAPTER IV.
“Oh, wanton malice! deathful sport!
Could ye not spare my all?
But mark my words, on thy cold heart
A fiery doom will fall.”
The incident recorded in the last chapter, resulted in benefit to two of the actors. It gave a spring to the dormant energies of Helen, and a check to the vengeance of Mittie.
The winter glided imperceptibly away, and as imperceptibly vernal bloom and beauty stole over the face of nature.
In the spring of the year, Miss Thusa always engaged in a very interesting process—that is, bleaching the flaxen thread which she had been spinning during the winter. She now made a permanent home at Mr. Gleason’s, and superintended the household concerns, pursuing at the same time the occupation to which she had devoted the strength and intensity of her womanhood.
There was a beautiful grassy lawn extending from the southern side of the building, with a gradual slope towards the sun, whose margin was watered by the clearest, bluest, gayest little singing brook in the world. This was called Miss Thusa’s bleaching ground, and nature seemed to have laid it out for her especial use. There was the smooth, fresh, green sward, all ready for her to lay her silky brown thread upon, and there was the pure water running by, where she could fill her watering pot, morning, noon and night, and saturate the fibres exposed to the sun’s bleaching rays. And there was a thick row of blossoming lilac bushes shading the lower windows the whole breadth of the building, in which innumerable golden and azure-colored birds made their nests, and beguiled the spinster’s labors with their melodious carrolings.
Helen delighted in assisting Miss Thusa in watering her thread, and watching the gradual change from brown to a pale brown, and then to a silver gray, melting away into snowy whiteness, like the bright brown locks of youth, fading away into the dim hoariness of age. When weary of dipping water from the wimpling brook, she would sit under the lilac bushes, and look at Miss Thusa’s sybilline figure, moving slowly over the grass, swaying the watering-pot up and down in her right hand, scattering ten thousand liquid diamonds as she moved. Sometimes the rainbows followed her steps, and Helen thought it was a glorious sight.
One day as Helen tripped up and down the velvet sward by her side, admiring the silky white skeins spread multitudinously there, Miss Thusa, gave an oracular nod, and said she believed that was the last watering, that all they needed was one more night’s dew, one more morning sun, and then they could be twisted in little hanks ready to be dispatched in various directions.
“I am proud of that thread,” said Miss Thusa, casting back a lingering look of affection and pride as she closed the gate. “It is the best I ever spun—I don’t believe there is a rough place in it from beginning to end. It was the best flax I ever had, in the first place. When I pulled it out and wound it round the distaff, it looked like ravelled silk, it was so smooth and fine. Then there’s such a powerful quantity of it. Well, it’s my winter’s work.”