It was one day towards the end of the month, when the last film of snow had evaporated from many a field and slope, and the vivid green of grass appeared for the first time to gladden the eyes, although many an ice-wreath and snowy hollow still lay between. On such a day the sight of a folded head of saxifrage from which the pearls are just breaking makes the heart of man bound with a pleasure that has certainly no rational cause which is adequate.
Caius came up from the western shore, where he had been watching a distant ship that passed on the other side of the nearer ice-floes, and which said, by no other signal than that of her white sails, that winter was gone. The sea, whose rivers and lakes among the ice had of late looked so turbid by reason of frozen particles in the water, was clear now to reflect once more the blue above it, and the ice-cakes were very white in the sunshine. Caius turned his back upon this, and came up a stony path where large patches of the hill were green; and by chance he came upon O'Shea's wife, who was laying out linen to bleach at some distance from her own house. Close to her Caius saw the ledge of rock on which the first flowers of the year were budding, and straightway fell in love with them. Knowing that their plants would flourish indoors as well as out, he stooped to lift the large cakes of moss in which their roots were set. The woman, who wore a small pink shawl tied over her head and shoulders, came near to where he was stooping, and made no preface, but said:
"He's dead, sir; or if he isn't, and if he should come back, O'Shea will kill him!"
Caius did not need to ask of whom she spoke.
"Why?" he asked. "Why should O'Shea want to kill him?"
"It would kill her, sir, if he came back to her. She couldn't abide him no ways, and O'Shea says it's as good one murder should be done as another, and if he was hung for it he wouldn't mind. O'Shea's the sort of man that would keep his word. He'd just feel it was a kind of interesting thing to do, and he worships her to that extent. But I feel sure, sir, that Le Maître is dead. God would not be so unkind as to have me and the children bereft in that way."
Her simple belief in her husband's power to settle the matter was shocking to Caius, because he felt that she probably knew her husband perfectly.
"But why," said he again, "would it kill her if he came back?"
"Well, what sort of a decent man is it that would have stayed away from her all these years, poor lamb? Why, sir, she wasn't but a child at the convent when her father had them married, and she back to school, and he away to his ship, and never come to see her since."
Caius turned as he knelt upon the grass, and, holding the emerald moss and saxifrage plants in his hand, looked up at her. "He went away two years ago," he said, repeating defiantly what he believed he had heard.