QUEEN ELEANOR—"...Some
Flowers, they say, if one pluck deep enough.
Bleed as you gather."
BOUCHARD—"That means love, I think.
You gather it, and there's the blood at root."
Winter was softening to spring. It was the dismal transition period, when half-frozen mud and icy slush take the place of snow. The deep drifts of the winter were gone; only in the fence-corners there yet remained darkened icy ridges, showing their outline.
The fields were bare, but the discolored snow still lay in patches on the roads, where it had been beaten hard. The world never looks so desolate and disreputable as at this time, when the earth, looking up inquiringly to a comfortless sun, pleads—or so it would seem—for heat, that its nakedness may be clothed with verdure.
The tree-tops in the woodlands clashed together, and the blows seemed to start the sap within them, for their buds began to swell, and all along their branches the satiny receptacles, wherein were coiled the first leaves, glistened.
The sugar maples sparkled night and morning with tiny icicles, where the sweet sap that oozed out at noon froze in the colder breath of evening. Every schoolboy in Jamestown had swollen lips from eating these icicles—dainty morsels they were, too, their flavor the very essence of sweetness.
All the trees in the forest seemed to stand at "attention," awaiting the command of the sun to leap to life. Only the low-growing witch-hazel, that uncanny tree, associated with the Black Art from time immemorial, had taken upon itself to bedeck its limbs with fuzzy little yellow and brown tufts of bloom.
But none of the other trees followed its example. They waited the heat of the sun. From all accounts, the root of the witch-hazel seeks less celestial fires to draw its life from. At any rate, this overwise tree knows all subterranean secrets, all the wonders of the water, all the wind's weird whisperings. Passed along the surface of the earth, does it not divine where, far beneath, the hidden springs gush forth? Launched upon the water, does it not stop and tremble where the drowned one lies? Before the coming of the storm, do its leaves not dance, and nod, and rustle, though moved by no perceptible influence save the intoxication of their own evil sap? Besides, what magical mysteries, what eerie orgies, does it not share with hairs from black cats' tails, and moss from gravestones, and teeth of dead people? Ugh! It is no wonder that its deep, deep roots know where to seek for warmth.
The moss upon the rocks that faced the lake front was vividly green. Last year's dead leaves had rotted beneath the snows, and the empty seed-vessels of the tall weeds served as bells for the jesting wind.
Whatever suggestions of bygone beauty, whatever anticipations of unborn flowers lurked in the woods, the village at this time looked depressingly squalid. Relying upon the snow's charity in covering a multitude of sins, the untidy housekeepers had imposed upon it. Now they were shamed. The melting snow left exposed all the debris of the winter. Heaps of tea-leaves cast forth by careless hands beside the doors, ashes flung out hastily, bones, broken crockery, and the heads of decapitated chickens bestrewed the streets.
Outwardly, at least, Jamestown had been quite a decent village before the snow melted; now, it showed like a hypocrite from whom the robe has been torn away.