So Judith got out the jars and filled them with great bunches of the dogwood, which gives such a Japanesque effect of blossom on bare branch, and with the apple blossoms, the wild iris mingling its dainty mauve equally well with each. Then she leaned back against the door jamb (she was sitting on the doorstep), and dreamily listened to Mrs. Morris.
What a strange medley of criticism, information, prophecy and humour the talk of such a woman is, all given forth with no coherence, no sequence of ideas, the disjecta membra of a thousand gossipy stories, the flotsam and jetsam of the slow-flowing stream of country life; now and then hitting off, as if by chance, a word or two which is a complete characterization of a person or place; now and then piercing to the heart of some vital human truth; now and then sowing a seed of scandal to bring forth bitterness; now and then by a pause, a sigh or a word revealing the griefs of a homely heart, and always perpetuating a hundred harmless conceits of fancy, signs, warnings, and what Mrs. Morris called, "omings that mean something."
Mrs. Morris was popularly considered the most talkative woman in Ovid, always excepting Bill Aikins' wife who had so far distanced the others as to fairly outclass them. Sometimes Mrs. Morris wearied Judith to death with her tongue, but out of the resources of her generous heart, which always could furnish excuses for everybody, Judith found palliation for Mrs. Morris' fault. There was a certain plot in the unkempt little graveyard in Ovid, wherein were five tiny graves; over each was a coverlet of straggly clove pinks, and each of the little sleepers had been borne away from the farm-house by the woods. Now and then, but rarely, Mrs. Morris spoke of these babies. Their united ages would not have numbered half a dozen years; but Mrs. Morris, with the strange divination of motherhood, had seen in their infantile ways the indications of distinctive character, so that each of these dead children had as individual a place in her memory as though it had worked and wept and wearied itself into old age. And to Judith this seemed excuse enough for poor chattering Mrs. Morris. All the breath other mothers use in speaking to their children, all the time they spend in silent thought about them and for them, was barren to this lonely old woman. "Who could wonder then that she wants to talk a bit?" Judith one day said to Andrew, wistfully, when he was laughing at Mrs. Morris' tongue. Indeed, Judith's tender eyes pierced deep down into the depths of these people's hearts. The ugly gossip, the sneering spite, the malignant whisperings she heard, filled her with a pity divine enough to drown the disgust which their backbiting and meanness awakened. The pity of it! she thought, looking at the miracle of the summer fields beneath the summer sky: the upward aspiration of every blade of grass, of every tiny twig, of every little Morning Glory seedling, striving to lift itself up, stretching forth its tendrils towards anything that would bear it higher: everything reaching towards the light. And these people, surrounded by the strong silent stimulus of nature, going with their eyes fixed upon the clods, or at most raised but to the level of their own heads, striving to grasp some puny self-glorification, letting the real gold of life run through their fingers like sand, whilst with eager palms they snatched at the base alloys which corroded their hands!
When Judith heard one woman say of another, "She's a most terrible nice woman. She works like a horse," she did not feel as much like laughing at the narrowness of the vision which pronounced such judgment, as weeping, that life had ways which people trod wherein brutish physical exertion seemed the highest good. It will be seen that Judith had a tender and discerning eye to penetrate the pains and sorrows of others, but she could not decipher her own heart yet. It is hard to get one's self in true perspective. It would indeed be a gift from the gods if we could see ourselves.
CHAPTER VI.
"He who sings
To fill the highest purpose, need not soar
Above the lintel of the peasant's door."
Before the Morris house there stretched a space of unkempt grass, broken by three or four irregular flower beds, upon which the grass encroached, from which the flowers sometimes strayed afield. In these beds were clumps of jonquils—"yeller petticoats," Mrs. Morris called them—and there were heavy headed daffodils, which, to Judith's delight, she dubbed daffdowndillies. There were patches of purple iris, too, and through one of the beds the sturdy roseate stems of the common pæony were pushing their way. A big bush of flowering currant was covered with its yellow flowers, murmurous with hundreds of bees, for they are very sweet. The stems of the florets are bitten off by children to get a drop of honey in each, just as in the florets of a clover bloom.
Up and down the sanded pathway leading to Mrs. Morris' front door paced Judith Moore, two days after Andrew's visit. She had on a brown frock, girdled with a filigreed belt of silver gilt; a bunch of jonquils at her bosom caught together the folds of some soft old lace; her heels added a good two inches to her stature, and she felt herself to be very well turned out.
It was warm: the robins were building nests. Presently one flew by with a scrap of brilliant red wool, and in a moment or two flew down from the gable of the house, and regaled itself with a long worm which it had spied from afar. It despatched its lunch with gusto, cocked its head on one side, preened the feathers of its wings with its foot, as one would run the hand through the hair, and then started in on its house-building again. "From labour to refreshment," thought Judith.