Reuben merely nodded after him as he went, for he had grown too tired to answer. A curious stillness—half happiness, half indifference—was stealing over him, and he watched as in a dream, the blue figure of old Adam hobble over the sun-flecked path through the orchard. A few minutes later Molly flitted after the elder, and Reuben's eyes followed her with the cheerful look with which he had faced seventy years of life. On a rush mat in the sunshine the old hound flicked his long black ear at a fly of which he was dreaming, and from a bower of ivy in the eaves there came the twitter of sparrows. Beyond the orchard, the wind, blowing from the marshes, chased the thin, sketchy shadows over the lawn at Jordan's Journey.
While he sat there Reuben began to think, and as always, his thoughts were humble and without self-consciousness. As he looked under the gnarled boughs of the orchard, he seemed to see his whole life stretching before him—seventy years—all just the same except that with each he appeared a little older, a little humbler, a little less expectant that some miracle might happen and change the future. At the end of that long vista, he saw himself young and strong, and filled with a great hope for something—he hardly knew what—that would make things different. He had gone on, still hoping, year by year, and now at the end, he was an old, bent, crippled man, and the miracle had never happened. Nothing had ever made things different, and the great hope had died in him at last as the twenty seeds of which old Adam had spoken had died in the earth. He remembered all the things he had wanted that he had never had—all the other things he had not wanted that had made up his life. Never had a hope of his been fulfilled, never had an event fallen out as he had planned it, never had a prayer brought him the blessing for which he had prayed. Nothing in all his seventy years had been just what he had wanted—not just what he would have chosen if the choice had been granted him—yet the sight of the birds in the apple trees stirred something in his heart to-day that was less an individual note of rejoicing than a share in the undivided movement of life which was pulsing around him. Nothing that had ever happened to him as Reuben Merryweather would he care to live over; but he was glad at the end that he had been a part of the spring and had not missed seeing the little green leaves break out in the orchard.
And then while he sat there, half dreaming and half awake, the stillness grew suddenly full of the singing of blue birds. Spring blossomed radiantly beneath his eyes, and the faint green and gold of the meadows blazed forth in a pageant of colour.
"I'm glad I didn't miss it," he thought. "That's the most that can be said, I reckon—I'm glad I didn't miss it."
The old hound, dreaming of flies, flapped his long ears in the sunshine, and a robin, hopping warily toward a plate of seed-cakes on the arm of Reuben's chair, winged back for a minute before he alighted suspiciously on the railing. Then, being an old and a wise bird, he advanced again, holding his head slightly sideways and regarding the sleeping man with a pair of bright, inquisitive eyes. Reassured at last by the silence, he uttered a soft, throaty note, and flew straight to the arm of the chair in which Reuben was sitting. With his glance roving from the quiet man to the quiet dog, he made a few tentative flutters toward the plate of cake. Then, gathering courage from the adventure, he hopped deliberately into the centre of the plate and began pecking greedily at the scattered crumbs.
CHAPTER XIX
TREATS OF CONTRADICTIONS
As Molly passed down the Haunt's Walk, it seemed to her, also, that the spring had suddenly blossomed. A moment before she had not known that the path she trod was changing to emerald, that the meadows were spangled with wild-flowers, that the old oaks on the lawn were blushing in rose and silver. For weeks these miracles had happened around her, and she had not noticed. As oblivious to them as old Adam Doolittle was, she had remembered only that her birthday came on the seventeenth of April, when, except for some luckless mishap, the promise of the spring was assured.
A red-winged blackbird darted like a flame across the path in front of her, and following it into the open, she found Kesiah gathering wild azalea on the edge of the thicket.
At the girl's approach, the elder woman rose from her stooping posture, and came forward, wearing a frown, which, after the first minute, Molly saw was directed at the sunlight, not at herself. Kesiah's long, sallow face under the hard little curls of her false front, had never appeared more grotesque than it did in the midst of the delicate spring landscape. Every fragile blossom, every young leaf, every blade of grass, flung an insult at her as she stood there frowning fiercely at the sunbeams. Yet only five minutes before she had suffered a sharp recrudescence of soul—of that longing for happiness which is a part of the resurrection of the spring, and which may survive not only the knowledge of its own fruitlessness, but a belief in the existence of the very happiness for which it longs. All the unlived romance in her heart had come to life with the young green around her. Middle-age had not deadened, it had merely dulled her. For the pang of desire is not, after all, the divine prerogative of youth, nor has it even a conscious relation to the possibility of fulfilment. Her soul looked out of her eyes while she gazed over the azalea in her hand—yet, in spite of the songs of the poets, the soul in her eyes did not make them beautiful.