Betty bounded away and gave the message to Aunt Lydia over the whitewashed fence of the garden. “They've sent a bonnet from New York for you to look at, Aunt Lydia,” she cried. “It came all wrapped up in tissue paper, with mamma's gray silk, and it's got flowers on it—a lot of them!” with which parting shot, she turned her back upon the startled old lady and dashed off to join the boys and Big Abel, who, with their fishing-poles, had gathered in the cattle pasture.
Miss Lydia, who was lovingly bending over a bed of thyme, raised her eyes and looked after the child, all in a gentle wonder. Then she went slowly up and down the box-bordered walks, the full skirt of her “old lady's gown” trailing stiffly over the white gravel, her delicate face rising against the blossomless shrubs of snowball and bridal-wreath, like a faintly tinted flower that had been blighted before it fully bloomed. Around her the garden was fragrant as a rose-jar with the lid left off, and the very paths beneath were red and white with fallen petals. Hardy cabbage roses, single pink and white dailies, yellow-centred damask, and the last splendours of the giant of battle, all dipped their colours to her as she passed, while the little rustic summer-house where the walks branched off was but a flowering bank of maiden's blush and microphylla.
Amid them all, Miss Lydia wandered in her full black gown, putting aside her filmy ruffles as she tied back a hanging spray or pruned a broken stalk, sometimes even lowering her thread lace cap as she weeded the tangle of sweet Williams and touch-me-not. Since her gentle girlhood she had tended bountiful gardens, and dreamed her virgin dreams in the purity of their box-trimmed walks. In a kind of worldly piety she had bound her prayer book in satin and offered to her Maker the incense of flowers. She regarded heaven with something of the respectful fervour with which she regarded the world—that great world she had never seen; for “the proper place for a spinster is her father's house,” she would say with her conventional primness, and send, despite herself, a mild imagination in pursuit of the follies from which she so earnestly prayed to be delivered—she, to whom New York was as the terror of a modern Babylon, and a Jezebel but a woman with paint upon her cheeks. “They tell me that other women have painted since,” she had once said, with a wistful curiosity. “Your grandmamma, my dear Julia, had even seen one with an artificial colour. She would not have mentioned it to me, of course,—an unmarried lady,—but I was in the next room when she spoke of it to old Mrs. Fitzhugh. She was a woman of the world, was your grandmamma, my dear, and the most finished dancer of her day.” The last was said with a timid pride, though to Miss Lydia herself the dance was the devil's own device, and the teaching of the catechism to small black slaves the chief end of existence. But the blood of the “most finished dancer of her day” still circulated beneath the old lady's gown and the religious life, and in her attenuated romances she forever held the sinner above the saint, unless, indeed, the sinner chanced to be of her own sex, when, probably, the book would never have reached her hands. For the purely masculine improprieties, her charity was as boundless as her innocence. She had even dipped into Shakespeare and brought away the memory of Mercutio; she had read Scott, and enshrined in her pious heart the bold Rob Roy. “Men are very wicked, I fear,” she would gently offer, “but they are very a—a—engaging, too.”
To-day, when Betty came with the message, she lingered a moment to convince herself that the bonnet was not in her thoughts, and then swept her trailing bombazine into the house. “I have come to tell you that you may as well send the bonnet back, Julia,” she began at once. “Flowers are much too fine for me, my dear. I need only a plain black poke.”
“Come up and try it on,” was Mrs. Ambler's cheerful response. “You have no idea how lovely it will look on you.”
Miss Lydia went up and took the bonnet out of its wrapping of tissue paper. “No, you must send it back, my love,” she said in a resigned voice. “It does not become me to dress as a married woman. It may as well go back, Julia.”
“But do look in the glass, Aunt Lydia—there, let me put it straight for you. Why, it suits you perfectly. It makes you look at least ten years younger.”
“A plain black poke, my dear,” insisted Aunt Lydia, as she carefully swathed the flowers in the tissue paper. “And, besides, I have my old one, which is quite good enough for me, my love. It was very sweet of you to think of it, but it may as well go back.” She pensively gazed at the mirror for a moment, and then went to her chamber and took out her Bible to read Saint Paul on Woman.
When she came down a few hours later, her face wore an angelic meekness. “I have been thinking of that poor Mrs. Brown who was here last week,” she said softly, “and I remember her telling me that she had no bonnet to wear to church. What a loss it must be to her not to attend divine service.”
Mrs. Ambler quickly looked up from her needlework. “Why, Aunt Lydia, it would be really a charity to give her your old one!” she exclaimed. “It does seem a shame that she should be kept away from church because of a bonnet. And, then, you might as well keep the new one, you know, since it is in the house; I hate the trouble of sending it back.”