were masses of fine chestnut hair of the very shade and wave that the Old Lady remembered on another head in vanished years; from under those waves looked large, violet-blue eyes with very black lashes and brows — and the Old Lady knew those eyes as well as she knew her own; and the new music teacher’s face, with all its beauty of delicate outline and dainty colouring and glad, buoyant youth, was a face from the Old Lady’s past — a perfect resemblance in every respect save one; the face which the Old Lady remembered had been weak, with all its charm; but this girl’s face possessed a fine, dominant strength compact of sweetness and womanliness. As she passed by the Old Lady’s hiding place she laughed at something one of the children said; and oh, but the Old Lady knew that laughter well. She had heard it before under that very beech tree.
She watched them until they disappeared over the wooded hill beyond the bridge; and then she went back home as if she walked in a dream. Crooked Jack was delving vigorously in the garden; ordinarily the Old Lady did not talk much with Crooked Jack, for she disliked his weakness for gossip; but now she went into the garden, a stately old figure in her purple, gold-spotted silk, with the sunshine gleaming on her white hair.
Crooked Jack had seen her go out and had remarked to himself that the Old Lady was losing ground; she was pale and peaked-looking. He now concluded that he had been mistaken. The Old Lady’s cheeks were pink and her eyes shining. Somewhere in her walk she had shed ten years at least. Crooked Jack leaned on his spade and decided that there weren’t many finer looking women anywhere than Old Lady Lloyd. Pity she was such an old miser!
“Mr. Spencer,” said the Old Lady graciously — she always spoke very graciously to her inferiors when she talked to them at all—”can you tell me the name of the new music teacher who is boarding at Mr. William Spencer’s?”
“Sylvia Gray,” said Crooked Jack.
The Old Lady’s heart gave another great bound. But she had known it — she had known that girl with Leslie Gray’s hair and eyes and laugh must be Leslie Gray’s daughter.
Crooked Jack spat on his hand and resumed his work, but his tongue went faster than his spade, and the Old Lady listened greedily. For the first time she enjoyed and blessed Crooked Jack’s garrulity and gossip. Every word he uttered was as an apple of gold in a picture of silver to her.
He had been working at William Spencer’s the day the new music teacher had come, and what Crooked Jack couldn’t find out about any person in one whole day — at least as far as outward life went — was hardly worth finding out. Next to discovering things did he love telling them, and it would be hard to say which enjoyed that ensuing half-hour more — Crooked Jack or the Old Lady.
Crooked Jack’s account, boiled down, amounted to this; both Miss Gray’s parents had died when she was a baby, she had been brought up by an aunt, she was very poor and very ambitious.
“Wants a moosical eddication,” finished up Crooked Jack, “and, by jingo, she orter have it, for anything like the voice of her I never heerd. She sung for us that evening after supper and I thought ‘twas an angel singing. It just went through me like a shaft o’ light. The Spencer young ones are crazy over her already. She’s got twenty pupils around here and in Grafton and Avonlea.”
When the Old Lady had found out everything Crooked Jack could tell her, she went into the house and sat down by the window of her little sitting-room to think it all over. She was tingling from head to foot with excitement.
Leslie’s daughter! This Old Lady had had her romance once. Long ago — forty years ago — she had been engaged to Leslie Gray, a young college student who taught in Spencervale for the summer term one year — the golden summer of Margaret Lloyd’s life. Leslie had been a shy, dreamy, handsome fellow with literary ambitions, which, as he and Margaret both firmly believed, would one day bring him fame and fortune.
Then there had been a foolish, bitter quarrel at the end of that golden summer. Leslie had gone away in anger, afterwards he had written, but Margaret Lloyd, still in the grasp of her pride and resentment, had sent a harsh answer. No more letters came; Leslie Gray never returned; and one day Margaret wakened to the realization that she had put love out of her life for ever. She knew it would never be hers again; and from that moment her feet were turned from youth to walk down the valley of shadow to a lonely, eccentric age.
Many years later she heard of Leslie’s marriage; then came news of his death, after a life that had not fulfilled his dreams for him. Nothing more she had heard or known — nothing to this day, when she had seen his daughter pass her by unseeing in the beech hollow.
“His daughter! And she might have been MY daughter,” murmured the Old Lady. “Oh, if I could only know her and love her — and perhaps win her love in return! But I cannot. I could not have Leslie Gray’s daughter know how poor I am — how low I have been brought. I could not bear that. And to think she is living so near me, the darling — just up the lane and over the hill. I can see her go by every day — I can have that dear pleasure, at least. But oh, if I could only do something for her — give her some little pleasure! It would be such a delight.”
When the Old Lady happened to go into her spare room that evening, she saw from it a light shining through a gap in the trees on the hill. She knew that it shone from the Spencers’ spare room. So it was Sylvia’s light. The Old Lady stood in the darkness and watched it until it went out — watched it with a great sweetness breathing in her heart, such as risen from old roseleaves when they are stirred. She fancied Sylvia moving about her room, brushing and braiding her long, glistening hair — laying aside her little trinkets and girlish adornments — making her simple preparations for sleep. When the light went out the Old Lady pictured a slight white figure kneeling by the window in the soft starshine, and the Old Lady knelt down then and there and said her own prayers in fellowship. She said the simple form of words she had always used; but a new spirit seemed to inspire them; and she finished with a new petition—”Let me think of something I can do for her, dear Father — some little, little thing that I can do for her.”
The Old Lady had slept in the same room all her life — the one looking north into the spruces — and loved it; but the next day she moved into the spare room without a regret. It was to be her room after this; she must be where she could see Sylvia’s light, she put the bed where she could lie in it and look at that earth star which had suddenly shone across the twilight shadows of her heart. She felt very happy, she had not felt happy for many years; but now a strange, new, dreamlike interest, remote from the harsh realities of her existence, but none the less comforting and alluring, had entered into her life. Besides, she had thought of something she could do for Sylvia—”a little, little thing” that might give her pleasure.
Spencervale people were wont to say regretfully that there were no Mayflowers in Spencervale; the Spencervale young fry, when they wanted Mayflowers, thought they had to go over to the barrens at Avonlea, six miles away, for them. Old Lady Lloyd knew better. In her many long, solitary rambles, she had discovered a little clearing far back in the woods — a southward-sloping, sandy hill on a tract of woodland belonging to a man who lived in town — which in spring was starred over with the pink and white of arbutus.
To this clearing the Old Lady betook herself that afternoon, walking through wood lanes and under dim spruce arches like a woman with a glad purpose. All at once the spring was dear and beautiful to her once more; for love had entered again into her heart, and her starved soul was feasting on its divine nourishment.
Old Lady Lloyd found a wealth of Mayflowers on the sandy hill. She filled her basket with them, gloating over the loveliness which was to give pleasure to Sylvia. When she got home she wrote on a slip of paper, “For Sylvia.” It was not likely anyone in Spencervale would know her handwriting, but, to make sure, she disguised it, writing in round, big
