Under a lilac the ground seemed moister and more promising for
vermicular investigation; she drew on her gloves, dug a few holes with
the trowel, extracted an angleworm, frowned slightly, holding it
between gloved fingers, regarding its contortions with pity and
aversion.
To bait a hook was not agreeable to the girl; she managed to do it,
however, then shouldering her pole she walked across the road and down
to the left, through rank grasses and patches of milkweed, bergamot,
and queen's lace, scattering a cloud of brown and silver-spotted
butterflies.
Alder, elder, and Indian willow barred her way; rank thickets of
jewelweed hung vivid blossoming drops across her path; woodbine and
clematis trailed dainty snares to catch her in their fairy nets; a
rabbit scurried out from behind the ruined paper mill as she came to
the swift, shallow water below the dam.
Into this she presently plumped her line, and the next instant jerked
it out again with a wriggling, silvery minnow flashing on the hook.
Carrying her pole with its tiny, glittering victim dangling aloft, Rue
hastily retraced her steps to the road, crossed the bridge to the
further end, seated herself on the limestone parapet, and, swinging
her pole with both hands, cast line and hook and minnow far out into
the pond. It was a business she did not care for--this extinguishing
of the life-spark in anything. But, like her mill work, it appeared to
be a necessary business, and, so regarding it, she went about it.
The pond above the half-ruined dam lay very still; her captive minnow
swam about with apparently no discomfort, trailing on the surface of
the pond above him the cork which buoyed the hook.
Rue, her pole clasped in both hands between her knees, gazed with
preoccupied eyes out across the water. On the sandy shore, a pair of
speckled tip-ups ran busily about, dipping and bobbing, or spread
their white, striped wings to sheer the still surface of the pond,
swing shoreward with bowed wings again, and resume their formal,
quaint, and busy manners.
From the interstices of the limestone parapet grew a white
bluebell--the only one Rue had ever seen. As long as she could
remember it had come up there every year and bloomed, snow-white amid
a world of its blue comrades in the grass below. She looked for it
now, saw it in bud--three sturdy stalks sprouting at right angles
from the wall and curving up parallel to it. Somehow or other she had
come to associate this white freak of nature with herself--she
scarcely knew why. It comforted her, oddly, to see it again, still
surviving, still delicately vigorous, though where among those stone
slabs it found its nourishment she never could imagine.