“Who, lad?”
“Why, Miss Priscilla. ’Tis her time of day for doing on’t. Te-he, David! I hoicked yon chap fair grandly over th’ wall—Sunday clothes, and pritty-prat speech, and all. Nettles don’t sting i’ March, they say—but I’ve known ’em do that same.”
CHAPTER III
SPRING was abroad indeed these days. Garth village, good to see even in grey winter-time, grew to the likeness of a well-kept garden. The winding street—white at one time, then glistening-grey when the sun shone on it through April rain—moved lazily between the cottages and the yeomen’s square, substantial houses. And always, between the house-front and the highway, there was a garden, big or little. Sometimes—when the cottage was so small in itself that there seemed no room for a garden-space—there would be a strip, no more than two feet wide, fenced round to guard it from the wandering ducks and geese and dogs of Garth. Sometimes a bigger house would shrink, with disdainful pride, from too close a rubbing of shoulders with the street; and its garden would be wide and guarded by a grey stone wall, with a white-painted gate in the middle of the wall.
But always, right and left of the good street of Garth, there were gardens, and, whatever their size or shape might be, the same flowers bloomed in all. Crocuses still glowed yellow when the sun came out to waken them; but these were of the older generation, and daffodils were nodding already high above them with the effrontery of youth. Auriculas were showing the white miller’s-dust about their buds; the ladslove bushes pushed out green, fragrant spikes into this unexpected weather; primroses caught the laughter of the spring, and celandines looked humbly at the sunlight.
Priscilla of the Good Intent, as she came down the street, was no way out of keeping—so the kindly gossips said, standing each at her sunlit door—with the gardens and the weather. For it was true that not men only, but women, were reminded always of a flower when their eyes fell on Priscilla; and each was apt to choose his own favourite flower as Cilla’s namesake.
The village parliament, made up of men and women both, is seldom wrong when it passes judgment on a neighbour; and there was none in Garth who would deny off-hand that Priscilla of the Good Intent was rightly named, thanks to the title of the farm on which her father, and his fathers before him, had laboured thankfully.
“There goes slim Miss Good Intent,” said one cottager to another, across the quickset hedge that parted them.
“Ay! Sunshine all along the street,” the other answered. “Trust she’ll fall into a good man’s hands; for into some hands she’ll fall soon, or else a lad will just reach up and pluck her.”
Priscilla had smiled and nodded to them as she passed—nodded and smiled, indeed, the length of Garth Street, as if she were the lady of the village. She was no less, indeed, for she had that simple pride which knows its station and disdains no greeting on life’s highroad. Unspoiled as a primrose, opening to the warmth of spring, was Priscilla; and it seemed the pity of life that she should ever have to meet contrary winds.