Women of the Country | Page 7

straight on towards her, until the latter said with evident pleasure--
"It's you, Mary!"
"Yes!" answered Mary, with a slight start.
"How are you?"
"Quite well," said Sarah. "Here's the door." She laid her hand over that of the other woman and set it on the side of the post, at the same time taking her basket, which was full of eggs, and only partially covered by a cloth.
"How many?" she asked. "Have you counted?"
"Four dozen," replied Mary. "Have you finished your butter?"
"It's coming," said Anne, taking the handle again.
"Let me try," said Mary. "I often think I could manage butter nicely."
"Don't get too clever," said Anne. "You do a wonderful lot already. Stop and sit a bit, won't you? Let me see if you know where your chair is."
The woman stepped into the dairy, turned to the left of the door, and sat down without hesitation in the chair which Sarah had moved on first perceiving her approach, and as she did so one could see that the frown, so out of place on her steady and tranquil face, had an origin of tragedy. She was blind.
CHAPTER V
Mary Colton was one of the most esteemed women possible in any country-side. She had scarcely been beyond the few miles which surrounded her home, and since she was a girl had never set foot in a train. She had not been born blind, but had had her sight until she was seventeen, when an illness darkened the world for ever. "A pretty girl she was too," said those who remembered. Of the prettiness she retained now only the essence, that of her pleasant goodness, yet her appearance was still attractive in spite of her thick figure and contracted brows. She had not that unearthly exalted expression so familiar to one in the blind, who look upwards for the light and search in vain. Rather, unless one looked narrowly, one would take her for a middle-aged woman of good health and steady temper, who was a little short-sighted. She used a stick out of doors, and when she went very long distances she took with her a small terrier, which warned her of the difficult parts of the road. But indoors she moved about freely, knowing to an inch how much room each piece of furniture occupied, and seldom knocking against anything as she moved about her work.
She lived entirely alone and supported herself, not by any of the special kinds of work which are supposed generally to be possible to the blind, but by exactly the same means as other women of her age and class. All the work in the house was done by herself, even to the making of the toffee and bulls'-eyes, which she sold at the cricket-matches and fairs of the districts. She kept hens and turkeys, and worked in her garden, feeling her way about the beds and bushes with her feet. She sold the vegetables and the currants and gooseberries which grew in the little patch of garden, and her friend, Anne Hilton, carried her eggs to the market-town for her every week, where she disposed of them to a provision-dealer of the same denomination. Even the hen-run had been made by the blind woman, who was a continual source of astonishment and questioning from the neighbours. But in this wonder, she not unnaturally found a pathetic pleasure.
"How do you know when you've got all your hens in?" asked a child once.
"I count them at night when they're asleep on their perches," answered Mary, with a joyful little chuckle.
"But it's dark!" objected the child.
"So it is," replied Mary. "I didn't think of that."
She never referred to her blindness, and so complete a victory over misfortune and circumstance gained its fit respect in the country. No one considered that it was "doing a charity" to Mary to drive past her cottage on the way from market to give her news of a football match or fair about to be held in the district. Women would send their children on their way to school to give similar news, and the boy who brought her the roll of newspapers, which she sold at the station every morning, would often wheel her barrow for her. She had a large, clumsy chest on the frame of an old perambulator, in which she wheeled about her store of aerated waters, toffee, and newspapers. She would place herself at the gate of the cricket ground on Saturday afternoon. The sliding lid of her chest made a counter on which she set her scales and her neatly cut pile of paper for wrapping up the toffee. She had no rivals in the district, for the most avaricious small shop-keeper would have been ashamed to confuse or trouble the simple, good, courageous woman. Perhaps the most complete sign