She went often of an evening to her mother's grave, and, sitting beside it, reflected how it was in keeping with the general sadness of things that there should be no prospect of any change for her in all the years of her life, no change from the present weary round of aunt and cousins, of sterile duties and insipid pleasures.
And there, by her mother's grave, came the very change she was sighing for. She sat on the sward, musingly watching the square tower of the church grow gray against the delicate, flushed sky, when she became aware of a stranger going from stone to stone in the fading light, examining the inscriptions. At first she was afraid. While she debated whether to hide or flee, the stranger approached, and in a foreign voice and accent asked some common question about the place. She could not answer readily for a foolish shame mixed with terror. She got to her feet, blushing, then turning pale. It could be none other than the astonishing fiddler who had played the night before in the hall at Colthorpe, and who could, they said, make your hair rise on end by the power of weird, unearthly music, or your eyes dissolve with tenderness—as he chose. She stared without speech into his dark, peculiar face. And he, seeing that she was discomfited, instead of apologizing and withdrawing, undertook, in a tone as persuasive as his violin's, to set her at ease. And when a few days later he disappeared from that part of the world, the violet eyes disappeared too.
Aunt Lucretia in time received a letter, asking her forgiveness and announcing Emmie's marriage.
She did not grant her forgiveness until several years later, after due savoring of sad, black-bordered letters from Emmie, imploring kindness. Her husband, after a brief illness, was dead; her little boy and she were left alone, without anything in the world. She acknowledged her fault so humbly; she owned so freely that her marriage had been excessively—deservedly—wretched; she longed so desperately to be taken back into her old home, that Lucretia found herself relenting. Her daughters were now married and lived at a distance; she felt daily more and more the need of a female companion. Her son, after reading the young widow's pitiful appeals, protested that it would be inhuman to refuse her a shelter. It was decided that she should be allowed to come, and in time the big, blunt Gregory, of whom she had been afraid in old days, went a long stretch of the journey to meet her, for that had seemed to him requisite, though to his mother superfluous. He even crossed the arm of sea that she must presently be crossing, with no apparent purpose but to cross it again with her.
When the boat was well out at sea and the passengers had disposed themselves in patience about the deck, he marched up and down, as did several of the others, and, while avoiding to look like one in search, sought diligently the remembered face of his cousin.
It was a cheerless gray day. The sea was quiet; the boat pitched but slightly. He was not long unsuccessful; when he had satisfied himself that she was not in the crowd on the windside, he went to lee and saw her sitting almost alone. She might have gone there for warmth. She did not seem to notice that cinders and fine soot were raining down upon her. He found himself disinclined to accost her at once; he went to lean where he could watch her without pointed appearance of curiosity.
She looked mournful in her black things—not the new, crisp crape of well-to-do bereavement, but a poor gentlewoman's ordinary shabby black. Her cheeks had lost their pretty roundness; the effect of her eyes was more than ever melancholy. The pale little face, set in its faint-colored hair, framed in its black bonnet, might pass a hundred times unnoticed: it had little to arrest the attention; but attention, by whatever chance once secured, must be followed by a gentle, compassionate interest in the breast of the beholder. This emotion felt Gregory.
She sat on one of the ship's benches, hugging her black wrap about her, hiding in it her little gloveless hands. A bundle was on her lap, at her feet a large bag. She looked wearily off over the crumpled leaden plain, and now and then called: "Dorastus! Dorastus!"
At that, a toddling bundle came towards her, never near enough to be caught, and toddled off again, coming and going busily, with muttered baby soliloquy. He was a comical little figure, clumsily muffled against the cold, with a pointed knit cap drawn well down over his ears. If he ignored her call, she rose and fetched him, shaking his little hand and bidding him not to go again so far from mother. He dragged at his arm, squealing the while she exhorted, and almost tumbled over when she let him loose. Then he resumed his interrupted play.
After a time he seemed to tire of it. He came to his mother and, touching the bag at her feet, unintelligibly demanded something. She shook her head. He seemed to repeat his demand. "No, no, Dorastus—mother can't!" she said, fretfully. Then this dot of humanity made himself formidable. Gregory watched in surprise the little imperious face become disquietingly like an angry man's. He hammered with both small fists on his mother's knee, and stamped and loudly sputtered. She caught his arms for a moment and held them quiet; mother and child looked each other in the face, his strange, unbabyish, heavy-browed eyes flaming, hers lit with a low smouldering resentment. He struggled from her grasp, and at last, as his conduct was beginning to attract attention, she stooped, vanquished, and, bruising her fingers on the awkward buckles, undid the bag.