As I have said, Miss Darry and I differed about Annie Bray. Yet her words, having the weight of her greater knowledge of the world, and really strong, though prejudiced mind, made their impression upon me. Instead of regarding Annie with the old brotherly interest, I looked critically now to see if any sign of rude origin betrayed itself in look or speech. I found only the wayside bloom and sweetness quite peculiar to herself, and many a quaint, rare fancy born of lonely rambles in field and wood; but at fourteen, with no outward stimulus to act upon her life, she was an undeveloped being, a child to be loved and petted, but no friend for my growing and restless manhood.
In the evenings I worked hard, endeavoring both to improve myself intellectually and to progress in my art. I was supplied with constant reading from the Hillside library; but I had never been there since the evening when I had driven Miss Darry home. The impression made upon me at that time by Mr. Lang had not been wholly pleasant. Notwithstanding his words at the forge, I felt as though he had in some way contended for making me feel the drawbacks of my position.
One mild day in April, the Spring sun lay warm upon the earth, and the wind brought from the woods the delicious scent of early flowers. I had worked very steadily for several days in sole charge of the smithy; for Mr. Bray had been away to visit a sister who lived some thirty miles off. I had handed him quite large profits that morning; so I ventured to ask for a half-holiday. It was granted, and after dinner I went up to my room to prepare for it. I had practised in water-colors for the last few weeks, and intended to surprise Miss Darry with a picture from Nature as the result of the afternoon's work. So I thrust my paint-box into the pocket of my portfolio, took a tin cup for water, and ran down stairs.
Annie was sitting on the door-step studying Gray's Botany, which at odd moments in the winter I had attended to with her. My heart smote me for that egotistic contemplation of myself and my prospects which had led me to neglect her.
"Come, Annie," I said, "bring your Botany into the woods. We will find plenty of wild-flowers there, and you shall help me, besides, to paint my first picture."
The little face which had looked so dull a moment before brightened at once. She gained her mother's permission, and was soon walking by my side.
On the slope of the hill which led to the stone house where so many of my dreams centred, we found innumerable bloodroot and anemone blossoms, with a few buds of trailing arbutus just blushing at their edges.
Annie had a wonderful fellowship with Nature, liking even its wildest, most uncouth forms. The snakes, with shining skin and sinuous movement, glistening like streams of water, or lying coiled like stagnant pools amid the rank luxuriance of grass and flowers, were as eagerly watched by her as the most brilliant butterfly that ever fanned a blossom. She had a faculty for tracing resemblances in the material creation, akin to that, perhaps, which causes many to see points of likeness in faces, so that they, as it were, carry their home about with them, and see their friends in the new costume of every land.
Childhood and genius alike look through and over the lattice-work which separates the regions of the natural and the supernatural. She had firm faith in midnight revels in the woods, held by those elves, fairies, and satyrs who come down to us from the dim and shaded life of earlier ages, and whose existence she had eagerly accepted when I hinted its possibility. Her theory of the mutability of species exceeded Darwin's; for she fancied that the vegetable world was occasionally endowed with animal life, and that the luxuriant and often poisonous vines, which choked by their rude embrace so many tenderer forms of life, waked up, under some unknown influence, into the snakes, of which she felt as little fear.
As for me, I encouraged this tangle of woodland dreams across her brain, and liked to think she dwelt apart, blind and deaf to all contamination through its simple power.