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"And supposing," was Lilac's next remark, "as how I was to make up my mind, I couldn't never do it for myself. I should be scared." This difficulty the energetic Agnetta was quite ready to meet. She would do it. Lilac had only to run down to the farm early next morning, and, after she was made fashionable, she could go straight on to the artist.
"Friends," he said, "I knew Lilac's mother well, and I call to mind this evening what she often said to me: `I want my child to grow up self-respecting and independent. I want to teach her to stand alone and not to be a burden on anyone. And then, poor soul, she died sudden, and the child was left on your hands.
Since the day when he had gone away from her so suddenly, frightened by her tears, they had had several talks together, although the speech was mostly on Lilac's side. She shrank from him no longer, and sometimes when the real Peter came up from the depths where he lay hidden, and showed a glimpse of himself through the dull mask, she thought him scarcely ugly. Would he sell None-so-pretty?
The allusions to Lincoln and to the funeral are but a word or two merest suggestions of the tragedy. But grief, overwhelming grief, is in every line of it, the grief which has been transmuted into this sensitiveness to the landscape, to the song of the thrush, to the lilac's bloom, and the sunset. Here is truth to life of the kind to be found in King Lear or Guy Mannering, in Æschylus or Burns.
'Tain't the best as gets the most praise." "I declare," added Bella bitterly, "it's a thankless task to get up anything for the people here. They're so ignorant they don't know what's what. To think of passing over Charley's recitation and encoring a silly old song like Lilac's. It's a good thing Mr Busby didn't come, I think he wouldn't 'a been appreciated."
Swiftly all this rushed into Mrs White's mind, as she stood looking with surprise and horror at Lilac's altered face. Finding her voice as she arrived at the last conclusion, she asked coldly: "What made yer do it?" Lilac locked her hands tightly together and made no answer. She would not say anything about Agnetta, who had meant kindly in what she had done.
They were on comparatively level ground now, with gently sloping fields in front of them and the sharp shoulder of the hill rising at their back. There, within a stone's throw stood the Wishings' cottage, and a little farther on Lilac's own home. How quiet, how very still it all looked!
Soon her aunt and Bella came into the yard, but their attention was immediately fixed on the chairs, which Ben had now unloaded and placed in a long row by Lilac's side. "Where were they to go?" asked Molly. In the living-room, Mrs Greenways thought, where they were short of chairs. "In the bedrooms," said Bella contemptuously. "Common-looking things like them."
She nodded and smiled good-naturedly; Joshua should see there was no stint at the farm. "Be back afore dusk," she called after Lilac as she watched her from the gate. So there was nothing to spoil the holiday or to damp Lilac's enjoyment in any way, and she felt almost as merry as she used to be before she came to live in the valley, and had begun to have cares and troubles.
Outside the window he saw how the lilac's dully varnished buds had swollen and where the prophecy of snow-drop and crocus under the buckthorn hedge might be fulfilled on the morrow.
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