Weep no more—Oh, weep no more!
Young buds sleep in the root’s white core.”
“Do you mean that for me, Father?” I asked.
“For you—yes. And many like you.”
My heart swelled. I looked about me. Buttercups were gilding the sod—the pussy willows were in bloom along the river. It was the spring.
I went home and raked the dead leaves and pine needles away from under the trees in the Dingle. A few yellow violets were springing up. From beyond the syringa thicket a faint “witchery, witchery, witchery,” greeted my ears.
I went forward cautiously. Peering through the interlaced branches I saw the songster. He was swinging on a thorn bush, a wonderfully brilliant little chorister in his black cap and yellow stole. I whistled. He cocked his head on one side, fixed me with his bright eye, then flew to a willow tree and favored me with another burst of song. This time he seemed to oft repeat, “Which way, oh?” He sang it so persistently that presently I replied, “Straight on, sir.”
I went to the cabin and consulted the calendar. It was the last day of March.
My spirit, that had seemed earthward crushed for months, grew lighter in the sweet spring days that followed. I took the return of April as a long-fore-gone right. I ploughed and planted, I made bird houses and arranged bird-baths in the groves hard by the cabin. I paddled in my canoe on the river, and fished in the adjacent creeks. And I went with Wanza through the woods on many a trillium hunt.
Sometimes almost to breathlessness I felt Wanza’s charm, the galvanism she could always transmit to those with her intensified by some new strange quality I could not name. It was like a fillip given my dispassion. When she laughed and chirped to the squirrels, when she carried a wounded bird in her breast, when she stood on tip-toe, her face like a taper-flame, to greet the whole outdoors with wide-flung arms, I caught my lip between my teeth and watched her with observant eyes. Her beauty grew. Even Father O’Shan remarked it. The gowns of pink she wore once served to deepen the rose tint in her fair cheeks; but her cheeks needed no such service now; they were like a red-rose heart. She had taken to smoothing and banding her hair and twisting it back behind her small ears with big shell pins. Her head seen thus was as lovely a shape as any Greuze ever painted. She frequently wore thin blouses of white, and I seldom saw her feet in sandals—she had a sleeveless black gown that she wore to a country dance one evening when I was her escort. Looking at her that night I could scarcely believe it was Wanza, my old friend and playmate whom I was in attendance upon, and I paid her some rather silly compliments and was promptly rebuked for my gallantry.