There were not many days during the whole year, and there had hardly been a whole day for many a year, on which Miss Judy and Doris could not find some good and urgent reason for seeing one another.
XIII
THE DANCING LESSON
Miss Judy's ideas of chaperonage were very strict. It would have seemed to her most improper to allow Doris to take the dancing lesson alone. Not that she thought any harm of the dancing-master; Miss Judy thought no harm of any one. Her ideals were always quite apart from all considerations of reality. It made no difference to her that only the neighbors were usually to be met on the way, and that on the morning of the first lesson the big road lay wholly deserted when she passed out of her little gate with Doris by her side—she herself so small, so timid, so frail, and Doris so tall, so valiant, so strong. Yet the sense of guardianship, full of deep pride and grave delight, filled her gentle heart even as it must have filled the Lion's when he went guarding Una.
It was a pity that Lynn Gordon missed the pretty sight. He had passed Miss Judy's gate before she came forth with her charge, and now, all unconscious of his loss, strolled idly on in the opposite direction. Doris was in his mind as he went by the silver poplars, but he caught no glimpse of her through the thick foliage, and could barely see the snowy walls of the house. Slowly he walked on as far as the brow of the hill at the southern end of the village, as he had done once before, and stood for a moment again looking out over the land. Then, turning, he retraced his aimless steps.
The day was like a flawless diamond, melting into the rarest pearl where the haze of the horizon purpled the far-off hills. The sapphire dome of the heavens arched without a cloud. Below stretched the meadows, lying deep and sweet in new-cut grass and alive and vivid and musical with the movement, the color, and the song of the birds. He did not know the names of half of them; but there were vireos, and orioles, and thrushes, and bobolinks, and song-sparrows, and jay-birds, and robins—all wearing their gayest plumage and singing their blithest songs. Even the flickers wore their reddest collars and sang their sweetest notes, as if vying with the redwings which flashed their little black bodies hither and thither as flame bears smoke. The scarlet tanagers also blossomed like gorgeous flowers all over the wide green fields. And the bluebirds—blue—blue—blue—gloriously singing, seemed to be bringing the hue and the harmony of the radiant heavens down to the glowing earth.
The melodious chorus was pierced now and then by a note of infinitely sad sweetness, as a bird lamented the wreck of its hopes which had followed the cutting of the grass. But the mourner was far afield, so that its sweet lament was but a soft and distant echo of the world-pain which forever follows the passing of the Reaper. The young man heeded it as little as we all heed it, till our own pass under the scythe. He stopped to lean on the fence, drinking in the beauty and fragrance, thus unwittingly disturbing the peace and happiness of a robin family which was dwelling in a near-by blackberry bush. The head of this flowering house now flew out, protesting with every indignant feather against this unmannerly intrusion of a mere mortal upon a lady-bird's bower. Trailing his wings and ruffling his crest, he sidled away along the top of the fence as if there were nothing interesting among those blossoms for anybody to spy out—in a word, doing everything a true gentleman should do under such circumstances, no matter how red his waistcoat may be. Another robin sang what he thought of the situation, expressing himself so plainly from the other side of the big road, that even the young man understood; while still another robin, too far away to know what shocking things were going on, poured out a rapturous song as though all living were but revelling in sunshine.
Lynn Gordon turned away, thinking with a smile what a wonderful thing love must be, since it could so move the gentlest to fierceness, as he had just seen; and could bring the fiercest to gentleness, as he had often heard. Smiling at his own idle thoughts, he wandered on. The loosened petals of the blackberry bloom drifted before him like snowflakes wafted by the south wind. The rich deep clover field on the other side of the way was rosy and fragrant with blossoms. The wild grape, too, was in flower, its elusive aromatic scent flying down from the wooded hillsides, as though it were the winged, woodland spirit of fragrance.
Approaching the woods at the foot of the hills, Lynn saw a log cabin, which he had not seen before, although he knew that the land upon which it stood was a part of the Gordon estate; part of the lands which would one day be his own. As his careless glance rested on the cabin, strains of music coming from it caught and fixed his attention. Some one was playing an old-fashioned dance tune on a violin, and Lynn unthinkingly followed the stately measure till he found himself standing unobserved before the humble dwelling from which it came, free to gaze his fill at a scene revealed by the open passage between the two low rooms.