II
“Dear Lady Judith, may I have the honour of a morning call?”
“Do come, you little ray of sunshine. Your Lady Judith’s sky is overcast, and she is in sore need of cheer.”
“Don’t you go bothering Mrs. Ascott this morning,” Theo’s mother cried sharply from the pantry window. “You ought to know enough not to wear out your welcome.”
“No danger,” Judith assured her. She did not perceive the look of sharp displeasure on the older woman’s face, but the voice affected her disagreeably, and she turned for relief to the anomalous reproduction of Lavinia, who was already nestling confidently at her side, on the oaken settle. The child spread upon her knee two sheets of paper, on which many lines had been written. A casual glance betrayed the agony of composition. Words had been discarded by the device of an impatient pen stroke. Others had been consigned to oblivion by means of carefully drawn lines. Phrases had been transposed and rhyming terminals changed.
“It’s a poem. I thought it would help to cheer you up. Mamma wouldn’t like it, and neither would Mrs. Stevens—because it doesn’t hop along on nice little iambic feet. It has to say ‘te-tum, te-tum, te-tum,’ or they think it isn’t poetry. Eileen writes some that are wilder than this one; but she never lets mamma see them. She wrote one on Love, last Sunday morning, when she ought to have been listening to the sermon, and ... what do you think! Left it in the hymn book! And Kitten Henderson found it, and sent it to Dan Vincel as her own composition.”
Mrs. Ascott took the copy, scanning the first page with crescent interest. She had not thought of Eileen as a poet. Yet such intense musical feeling.... The musician is seldom a poet of marked quality or distinction. The godlike gifts of rhythm, cadence, imagery, these may not flow with equal volume in double channels. Yet the verses, however crude, would shed another light on a nature too complex for ready analysis. There was no title, no clue to the impulse that promoted the writing. There was no need of such. A girl in Eileen’s rhapsodic mental state would not go far in search of inspiration.
“Birth, Hope, Ambition, Love,
These four the minor half of life compose:
The sylvan stream to broadening river flows,