"I don't think she ought to have given it," said the steward's wife, who was waiting for her husband to drive her home. "She'll need help herself if she gives away like that. She always must be different from other people."
Anne Hilton was walking home in the cool night air. The stars were so clear that they seemed to rest on the fields and tree-tops, and the rustle of the sleepless corn passed behind every hedge. She walked with a certain carefulness as of one who had unexpectedly escaped a physical danger; but the peril from which she was conscious of fleeing was spiritual. She had been threatened by avarice which had prompted her to give a small sum instead of the sovereign, and the evangelist had been right in his intuition. It had needed a good deal of "making up her mind" to give away the greater part of her earnings, even under the warmth of human appeal. She had conquered, but narrowly, and there was as much shame as satisfaction in her heart as she left the building, and more than all a great fear lest it should be talked about.
CHAPTER XVII
It was the first day of spring, the season of swift changes. For the first time the sky was lighter than the ground. Its brilliant clouds threw heavy shadows on the earth, fugitive shadows which ran with the warm wind, alert with colour. Nothing was quiet or hidden. There was not yet sufficient life to cover or screen. Everything that had budded had a world to itself and could be seen. Radiant, innocent, carolling, self-revealing, the movement and action of spring were in the earth. The running and glittering water, in winter so vivid a feature of the fields, had become insignificant in comparison with the splendid and vigorous sky. The noise of the wind, too, beat in one's ears louder than the water. One had no time for meditation. One was hurried as the wind, speeding as the sunshine. Yet the spring more than any other season is the time when one thinks of the generations that pass—perhaps from the very transitoriness of the visual images, their evanescence and momentary changes reminding one so of the dead. In autumn the passage is grave and decorous, like the advance of old age. In spring the image is lovely and momentary, like the bright passage of those dead young.
Anne Hilton looked out to see what kind of weather it was for the market, and with a sudden pang, she remembered her old father, and how, on such a day, he would totter to the open door, and there sit in the sunshine, grateful for the same warmth for which his old dog was grateful. When she came home from the market, she would make a wreath of white holly to put on the grave in which he rested. She thought of him vividly, of the pathos of his last illness from which she had vainly tried to drive the fear and soften the pain. She remembered his slow laugh, and the knocking of his stick on the floor. Memory is keener in bright sunshine than in the twilight, in vivid enjoyment more poignant than in melancholy. The churchyard, with its unvisited green mound and dwelling of the silent, became visible to Anne, and with it the dying out of joy which returns with that vision and memory. The house, too, was very quiet, as she drew in her head, with the stillness of a place once lived in and now empty. She had become accustomed to thinking of her father with tranquillity, satisfied to believe him at rest. Now the pain of loneliness returned with memory.
She harnessed the pony to the cart, and stowed her baskets safely under the seat. She was dressed in a purple merino skirt, kilted thickly, a black mantle, with a bead fringe, and an antiquated straw bonnet. Round her neck she had folded a man's linen handkerchief, and she had elastic-sided boots on her feet. She locked the door, and put the keys in her linen pocket tied round her waist under her skirt, and climbing up by means of the wheel, seated herself on the board which did duty as a seat, and took the reins. "Go on, Polly!" she said, and the pony, with a good deal of tossing of head and tail, set off obediently towards the high road. The clacking of its feet as it trotted on the hard road overwhelmed all other sounds. At the corner of the roads an old woman tending a cow nodded to her, and one or two field labourers raised themselves to see who was going past, remaining upright and staring longer than was necessary to satisfy their curiosity. At an open field-gate she had to wait until two heavy wagons, their wheels a mass of red, soft earth, had emerged, and turned in the direction of the town. She passed them, and for some time met no one. An advancing cart soon came in sight, accompanied by a great jangling of cans—a milk-cart returning from the station, having sent off its supplies to the town, now bringing back its empty cans. It was driven by a man whom Anne knew, and, instead of drawing to one side to pass, he reined in his horse as if to speak. "Good morning, Miss Hilton," he said. Anne checked her horse which had gone a few paces past, and turning in her seat to look over her shoulder, answered his greeting. The farmer's horse, impatient of this check on the way home, made several attempts to start, and at last, being held in by his master and scolded loudly, fell to pawing the ground with one foot. Having quieted his horse, the farmer also turned in his seat, and looking back at Anne said:
"I've just been up to the Union with the milk, Miss Hilton. They've had a death this morning. I thought I'd tell you."
"Not Jane Evans?" said Anne, dropping the reins, but the next moment retaking them as the pony had started off.
"Yes, it's Jane," said the man. "The child's living. It's a boy. She's to be buried to-morrow seemingly. They soon put you where they want you when you go in there."
Anne, who had been living all morning with the dead whom she knew to be dead, stared helplessly as she heard that one whom she believed to be alive was dead also. She had meant to go to the Union to-morrow. She was speechless.