University of Virginia Library

21. CHAPTER XXI.
THE BRUISED FLAX-FLOWER.

THE next day broke calm and fair. The robins
sang remorselessly in the apple-tree, and were
answered by bobolink, oriole, and a whole tribe
of ignorant little bits of feathered happiness that
danced among the leaves. Golden and glorious
unclosed those purple eyelids of the East, and
regally came-up the sun; and the treacherous sea
broke into ten thousand smiles, laughing and dancing
with every ripple, as unconsciously as if no
form dear to human hearts had gone down beneath
it. Oh! treacherous, deceiving beauty of
outward things! beauty, wherein throbs not one
answering nerve to human pain!

Mary rose early and was about her morning
work. Her education was that of the soldier, who
must know himself no more, whom no personal
pain must swerve from the slightest minutiæ of
duty. So she was there, at her usual hour, dressed
with the same cool neatness, her brown hair parted
in satin bands, and only the colorless cheek and
lip differing from the Mary of yesterday.

How strange this external habit of living! One
thinks how to stick in a pin, and how to tie a
string, — one busies one's self with folding robes,
and putting away napkins, the day after some
stroke that has cut the inner life in two, with the
heart's blood dropping quietly at every step.

Yet it is better so! Happy those whom stern
principle or long habit or hard necessity calls from
the darkened room, the languid trance of pain, in
which the wearied heart longs to indulge, and
gives this trite prose of common life, at which
our weak and wearied appetites so revolt! Mary
never thought of such a thing as self-indulgence;
— this daughter of the Puritans had her seed
within her. Aerial in her delicacy, as the blue-eyed
flax-flower with which they sowed their fields,
she had yet its strong fibre, which no stroke of
the flail could break; bruising and hackling only
made it fitter for uses of homely utility. Mary,
therefore, opened the kitchen-door at dawn, and,
after standing one moment to breathe the freshness,
began spreading the cloth for an early breakfast.
Mrs. Scudder, the mean while, was kneading
the bread that had been set to rise over-night;
and the oven was crackling and roaring with a
large-throated, honest garrulousness.

But, ever and anon, as the mother worked, she
followed the motions of her child anxiously.

“Mary, my dear,” she said, “the eggs are giving

out; hadn't you better run to the barn and
get a few?”

Most mothers are instinctive philosophers. No
treatise on the laws of nervous fluids could have
taught Mrs. Scudder a better rôle for this morning,
than her tender gravity, and her constant expedients
to break and ripple, by changing employments, that
deep, deadly under-current of thoughts which she
feared might undermine her child's life.

Mary went into the barn, stopped a moment,
and took out a handful of corn to throw to her
hens, who had a habit of running towards her
and cocking an expectant eye to her little hand,
whenever she appeared. All came at once flying
towards her, — speckled, white, and gleamy with
hues between of tawny orange-gold, — the cocks,
magnificent with the blade-like waving of their
tails, — and, as they chattered and cackled and
pressed and crowded about her, pecking the corn,
even where it lodged in the edge of her little
shoes, she said, “Poor things, I am glad they enjoy
it!” — and even this one little act of love to
the ignorant fellowship below her carried away
some of the choking pain which seemed all the
while suffocating her heart. Then, climbing into
the hay, she sought the nest and filled her little
basket with eggs, warm, translucent, pinky-white
in their freshness. She felt, for a moment, the
customary animation in surveying her new treasures;

but suddenly, like a vision rising before her,
came a remembrance of once when she and James
were children together and had been seeking eggs
just there. He flashed before her eyes, the bright
boy with the long black lashes, the dimpled cheeks,
the merry eyes, just as he stood and threw the hay
over her when they tumbled and laughed together,
— and she sat down with a sick faintness, and then
turned and walked wearily in.