“Mitty and Joel,” she said leisurely, “shall I tell you a secret? You are not the only ones who are in love. For these two friends here are like to be married before you are.”
Dear little Mitty in her starched white muslin frock—I can see her now, how she blushed and lifted her shy eyes. Mitty was the daughter of a laundress in the Low Grounds and I remember the scrupulous purity of her white, threadbare gown. Miss Deborah had told us that her very hair looked ironed and that it had long been her opinion that her mother starched her flaxen braids. And Joel, in his open-throated blue blouse, could no more have kept the adoration from his eyes when he looked at Mitty than he could have kept his shifting brown hands quiet on his knees. They belonged to the little wild-bird people, a variety that I have since come to love and to seek out.
“And why,” Pelleas asked then, “are we likely to be married first? For I’m afraid we have a whole year to wait.”
I recall that Miss Deborah tried to turn aside that question by asking us quickly how we had been amusing ourselves; and when Pelleas told her that we had been sitting before our Wonderful Picture she talked about the picture almost as if she wished to keep us silent.
“Up at the Governor’s house,” said Miss Deborah, “they have wanted for years to buy it. The Governor saw it when I had it in town. But the picture is yours now, for all that. Don’t you think that is a pretty picture, Mitty?” she asked.
At this little Mitty looked up, proud and pleased to be appealed to, and turned shyly to our Wonderful Picture—the picture that gave Pelleas and me a new sense of happiness whenever we looked at it; and she said with an hesitation that was like another grace:—
“Yes’m. It’s the loveliest green, all over it. It’s the colour of the moss on the roof of our woodshed.”
Ah, poor little Mitty, I remember thinking almost passionately. Why was it that she was shut out from the kind of joy that came to Pelleas and me in our picture? It was as if their love were indeed of another world, in another sense than we had thought. For this picture that had opened a kind of paradise to us was to these other lovers merely suggestive of Mitty’s woodshed roof down in the Low Grounds.
“Shall you be married by the autumn?” Pelleas asked of them then somewhat hurriedly.
And at that Miss Deborah fell silent as if she had done her best to make us understand; and Mitty answered him.