Under a lilac the ground seemed moister and more promising for vermicular investigation; she drew on her gloves, dug a few holes with the trowel, extracted an angleworm, frowned slightly, holding it between gloved fingers, regarding its contortions with pity and aversion.
To bait a hook was not agreeable to the girl; she managed to do it, however, then shouldering her pole she walked across the road and down to the left, through rank grasses and patches of milkweed, bergamot, and queen’s lace, scattering a cloud of brown and silver-spotted butterflies. 51
Alder, elder, and Indian willow barred her way; rank thickets of jewelweed hung vivid blossoming drops across her path; woodbine and clematis trailed dainty snares to catch her in their fairy nets; a rabbit scurried out from behind the ruined paper mill as she came to the swift, shallow water below the dam.
Into this she presently plumped her line, and the next instant jerked it out again with a wriggling, silvery minnow flashing on the hook.
Carrying her pole with its tiny, glittering victim dangling aloft, Rue hastily retraced her steps to the road, crossed the bridge to the further end, seated herself on the limestone parapet, and, swinging her pole with both hands, cast line and hook and minnow far out into the pond. It was a business she did not care for—this extinguishing of the life-spark in anything. But, like her mill work, it appeared to be a necessary business, and, so regarding it, she went about it.
The pond above the half-ruined dam lay very still; her captive minnow swam about with apparently no discomfort, trailing on the surface of the pond above him the cork which buoyed the hook.
Rue, her pole clasped in both hands between her knees, gazed with preoccupied eyes out across the water. On the sandy shore, a pair of speckled tip-ups ran busily about, dipping and bobbing, or spread their white, striped wings to sheer the still surface of the pond, swing shoreward with bowed wings again, and resume their formal, quaint, and busy manners.
From the interstices of the limestone parapet grew a white bluebell—the only one Rue had ever seen. As long as she could remember it had come up there every year and bloomed, snow-white amid a world of its blue comrades in the grass below. She looked for it now, 52 saw it in bud—three sturdy stalks sprouting at right angles from the wall and curving up parallel to it. Somehow or other she had come to associate this white freak of nature with herself—she scarcely knew why. It comforted her, oddly, to see it again, still surviving, still delicately vigorous, though where among those stone slabs it found its nourishment she never could imagine.
The intense blue of the sky had altered since noon; the west became gradually duller and the air stiller; and now, over the Gayfield hills, a tall cloud thrust up silvery-edged convolutions toward a zenith still royally and magnificently blue.