T
heexcitement vanished as it had come, in our tranquil air. A few keen April nights had been sufficient for the sentinels in the lilac-bushes, who wearied of yawning at St. Peter's silent and gloomy walls. Their ardor and the matrons' midnight coffee cooling together, they were withdrawn, and the Guards themselves, though they had no formal mustering-out, forgot their fears and countersigns and met no more. Friendships were renewed. Neighbors nodded again across their fences. Protestant housewives dropped Catholic-vended sugar into their tea, and while there were men like Shears, who still in dreams saw candles burning, St. Peter's arsenal became a quiet parish church again.
Untouched by the whirlwind's passing, Letitia's window-garden went onblooming red, her pictures still hung defiantly on the walls, and classic fiction tempted our youth to her corner shelf. Colonel Shears, however, in that single visit to the school-room, had found new texts for his loquacity, and, our courts failing as usual to furnish him with sufficient cases to engross his mind, he devoted himself with new ardor to our public welfare, and recalled eloquently, to those who had time to listen, the little, old, red school-house of their youth, the simpler methods of the old school-masters, who had no fads or foibles beyond the birch, and who achieved, he said—witness his hearers, to say nothing of his humble self—results to which the world might point with satisfaction if not with pride. Had the modern schools produced an Abraham Lincoln, he wished to know?
"Not by a jugful," was his own reply. "You may talk about your kindergartens, and your special courses, and your Froebel, and your Delsarte, and you may hang up your Eyetalian pictures on the wall, and stick up geraniums in your windows—but where is your Abraham? That's what I ask, gentlemen. I tell you, the schools they had when you and I were boys—gentlemen, they were ragged—they were ragged, as we were—but they turned out men! And you mark my words: there ain't anyold maid in Grassy Ford, with all her ancient classics, and her new methods, and her gimcracks and flower-pots, that'll ever—produce—an Honest—Abe!"
I am told that the crowd agreed with him so heartily and with such congratulatory delight that he was emboldened to announce himself then and there as a candidate for the school-board. Though he failed of election, there was always a party in Grassy Ford opposed to new-fangled methods in the schools. Letitia herself was quite aware that even among her fellow-teachers there were those who smiled at her geraniums, and there had been some criticism of her manner of conducting classes. Shears was fond of relating how a visitor to her room had found a class in fractions discussing robins' eggs! Letitia explained the matter simply enough, but the fact remained for the Colonel to enlarge upon.
"A lesson," he said, "in Robinson'sComplete Arithmetic, page twenty-seven, may end in somebody's apple-tree, or the top of Sun Dial, or Popocatapetl, or Peru! Gentlemen, I maintain that such dilly-dallying is a subversion of the—"
"Subversion!" growled old man Butters, who still came out on sunny days with the aid of his cane. "I calculate you mean it's not right."
"That," said the orator, suavely, "is the meaning I intended to convey, Mr. Butters."
"Well, then, you're wrong," grumbled the old man. "Why, that there girl"—he called her so till the day he died, this side of ninety—"that there girl's a trump, Sam Shears, I tell ye. She teaches Robinson and God A'mighty, too!"
Letitia was often now in the public eye; her teaching was made a campaign issue, though all her nature shrank from such contests. It was easy to attack her manner of instruction, and sometimes difficult to defend it—it had been so subtle in its plan, and so unusual in its execution, and, moreover, time alone could disclose what fruits would ripen from its flowery care. Old Mr. Butters had put roughly what Dr. Primrose himself had taught:
"Dearly beloved, in the fountains of learning, no less than in the water-brooks, His lilies blow."
"Wouldst thou love God?" he asked, in the last sermon that he ever wrote. "First, love His handiwork."
It was his daughter's motto. It hung on the walls of her simple chamber, with others from her "other poets," as she used to call them—little rubrics printed for her in red and gold at the "Pide Bull." That handiwork of God which she still called Grassy Fordshire was so full of marvels to this poet's daughter, there were so many flowers in it, the birds there sang so blithely, its waters ran with such tremulous messages echoed by woods and whispered by meadow-grasses, its skies, melting into glowing promises in the west, shone thereafter with such jewelled truths, she could hold no text-books higher than her Lord's.
It was not mere duty that drew her morn after morn, year after year, to the red-brick school-house. All the tenderness, all those eager hopes and fears which she lavished so upon her labor, meant life and love to her, for she truly loved them—those troops of laughing, heedless children, passing like flocks of birds, stopping with her for a little twittering season to seize her bounty and, as it seemed to her, fly on gayly and forget.
It may be that I write prejudiced in her favor, but I write as one knowing the dream of a woman's lifetime to set those young feetstraight in pleasant paths, to open those wondering eyes to the beauty of an ancient world about them, in every leaf of it, and wing—in the earth below and the sky above it, and there not only in the flawless azure, but in the rain-clouds' gloom.
"Dark days are also beautiful," she used to tell them. "Had you thought of that?"
They had not thought of it. It was one of those subtler things which text-books do not say; but Letitia taught them, and a woman of Grassy Ford, when sore bereft, once said to me: "Dark days, doctor, are also beautiful. Miss Primrose told us that, when we went to school to her. It was of clouds she spoke, but I remembered it—and now I know."
"Oh, Miss Primrose," Johnny Murray used to say. "Do you remember when I went to school to you? Do you remember where I sat—there by the window? Well, it's awfully funny, but do you know, I never add or multiply or subtract but I smell geraniums."
Perhaps, the Colonel would reply, that was why Johnny Murray deserted the ledgers he was set to keep—the scent of the flowers in them proved too strong for him. It may be so, forlittle things count so surely; it may be the reason he is today a sun-browned farmer instead of a lily-white clerk in his father's store. From the geraniums in a school-room window to a thousand peach-trees blooming in a valley is a long journey, but it was for just such journeys that Letitia taught, and not merely for that shorter one which led through her petty school-room to the grade above.
Letitia tells me that sitting there at her higher desk above those rows of heads, she used to think of them as flowers, and of her school-room as a garden. Often then it would come to her how pleasant a task it was to tend the roses there—golden-haired Laura Vane, and Alice Bishop, and Isabel Walton, and handsome, black-eyed Tommy Willis, whose pranks are famous in Grassy Fordshire still; then, at the doting thought of them, her heart would smite her, and she would turn to those other homelier flowers. It must have been in some such moment of repentance that Susan Leary, chancing to raise her eyes to her adored school-mistress, found Letitia smiling so amiably upon her that the girl blushed, and from that hour grew more mindful of her scolding looks; her freckled face wasscrubbed quite glossy after that, her dress was neater, her ribbons tied, till by-and-by, to Letitia's wonder and reward, she found in that beaming Irish face upturned to her, color and fragrance for her very soul.
Young Peter Bauer was a German sprout transplanted steeragewise to a corner of the garden, and slow in budding, his face as blank as the blackboard-wall he grew beside; but one fine morning, at a single question in the B geography, it burst into roseate bloom.
"Teacher, teacher, I know dot! Suabia ist in Deutschland. Mein vater ist in Deutschland! Ich bin—"
And after that Peter was a poppy on Friday afternoons, reading essays on his fatherland. Thus, honest gardener that Letitia was, she trained and pruned, disdaining nothing because of weediness, believing that what would bear a leaf would bear a flower as well. To leave at four o'clock, to return at nine and find one open which had been shut before!—is it not the gardener's morning joy?
It was not alone the plants which refused to grow for her that caused her pain. These at least she had never loved, however patientlyshe had cared for them. There were wayward beauties in her garden who on tenderer stalks bore longer thorns. She learned, in her way, the lesson mothers learn in theirs, who sometimes love and toil and sacrifice unceasingly, and wait, years or forever, for reward.
"Remember, Miss Primrose, you are not a mother," snapped a certain sharp-tongued matron of our town who had disagreed with her.
"Oh," said Letitia, "but I have loved so many children. I am a kind of mother."
"Mother!" cried the matron.
"Yes," Letitia answered. "I am a mother—without a child."
Had they been her children, it had been easier to forgive their thoughtlessness. Offended sometimes by her discipline, they said plain things of her lack of pretty youth; they whispered lies of her; she shed some tears, I know, over those scribblings which she intercepted or found forgotten on the school-room floor. Then her garden was the abode of shadows, her efforts vain there. Sometimes, for solace, she sought out Dove, but the habit of lonely thinking had grown upon her; it had been enforced by her maidenhood.
While I am not a herb-doctor by diploma, I am one by faith, simples have wrought such speedy cures in my own gray hours, and Grassy-Fordshire is so green with them that a walk by Troublesome or a climb on Sun Dial is in itself a marvellous remedy, aromatic and anodyne. In my drives to patients beyond the town, I have been seized suddenly by a kind of fever. There are no pills for it, or powders, or any drugs in all the bottles on my shelves—but a jointed fishing-rod and line kept in the bottom of a doctor's buggy is efficacious if applied in time. Often when that spell was on me I have turned Pegasus towards the nearest stream, and while he nibbled, one hour on a scented bank, fish or not—sixty drops from the grass-green phial of a summer's day—has restored my soul. Clattering home again at double-quick, Pegasus's ears on end, his nostrils quivering, my buggy thumping over thank-you-ma'ams, I would not be a city leech for a brown-stone front and a brass name-plate upon my door.
In some such pleasant hooky-hour in spring I had cast, sullenly enough, but was now humming to myself, in tune with Troublesome, when a twig snapped behind the willows. Some cow,thought I, and kept my eyes upon the stream. Another twig: I turned inquiringly. There, by the water-side, and all unmindful of my presence, was Letitia Primrose.
I bit my pipe clean through. I would have called at once, but something stopped me. She stood quietly by the brook, gazing at the stones on which it played and sang. Her shoulders drooped a little, her face seemed tired and pale. She turned and saw me.
"Bertram!" Her face was guilty.
"Hello!" I said, lighting my pipe.
"You here, Bertram?"
"Yes," I replied, casting again. "How is it you're here? No school, Letitia?"
She hesitated.
"No patients, doctor?" she asked, softly.
"No patients dying," I retorted. We eyed each other.
"I had a headache," she said, meekly, seating herself upon a log. "And I have a substitute."
"There are other doctors," I remarked.
Suddenly she rose.
"I think," she said, "I'll just stroll that way, if you don't mind, Bertram."
"Not at all," I replied. "I know how you feel, Letitia. That's why I come here."
"Do you?" she asked. "Then this isn't your first—"
"Nor my twentieth offence," I replied, laughing. She sighed.
"I'm glad of that. It's my first—really. I feel like a criminal."
I pointed with my broken pipe-stem.
"You'll find the best path there," I said.
"I think I'll stay, if you don't mind, Bertram."
"Stay, by all means," I replied, and went on fishing. Letitia was the first to speak.
"It's hard always trying to be—dominant," she remarked, "isn't it?"
"Why, I rather like it," I replied.
"You are a man," she said. "Men do, I believe. But I, I get so tired sometimes"—she bit her lip—"of being master." She laughed nervously. "That's why I ran away."
Presently she went on speaking.
"If we could only be surrounded by such things as these, always, how serene our lives might be. Don't smile. It's my old sermon of environment, I know; but why are you here?—and why am I? I try my best to keep the beautiful before my children's eyes, to tempt them into lovely thinking. Bertram, I believe, heart and soul, in the power of beauty. I am so sure of it, I know I should be a stronger teacher if I were young and beautiful myself—or even pretty, like Helen White."
"She is a mere wax doll," I said.
"But children like pretty faces," she replied. "Look! You have a fish!"
It was a snag, but while I was busy with it she rose. "Wait," I said, "I'll drive you home."
"No, thank you, Bertram. I'd rather walk. My head is better now. Good-bye."
I did not urge her. When she had gone I picked up a slip of paper from the path where she had passed. It was a crumpled half of a blue-ruled leaf torn from some pupil's tablet, and, scrawled upon it in a school-girl's hand, I read:
"Dear Edna,—Don't mind the homely old thing. Everybody says she's fifty if she's a day. No one would marry her, so she had to teach school."
"Dear Edna,—Don't mind the homely old thing. Everybody says she's fifty if she's a day. No one would marry her, so she had to teach school."
It was written, Dove told me afterwards, by one of the rose-girls in Letitia's garden.
M
yaunt Miranda, who was wise in many things, used to maintain that a woman ceased to be charming only when she thought she had ceased to be so; that age had nothing whatever to do with the matter—and so saying, she would smile so bewitchingly upon me that I was forced inevitably to the conclusion that she bore her fifty years much better than many women their paltry score. Letitia was not so sanguine; she laid more stress upon the spring-time. I have heard her say that there was nothing lovelier in the world than a fair young girl full of pure spirits as a rose-cup full of dew. She would turn in the street to look at one; she liked them to be about her; her own face grew more winning in such comradeship, and when she was given a higher school-room, where the girls wore skirts to their shoe-tops and put up their hair, it was an almost childish pleasure which she displayed. It was this very preference for exquisite maidenhood that explained her fondness for Peggy Neal. It was not scholarship which had won the teacher's heart, for Peggy was an indifferent student, as Letitia herself confessed, but she was a plump and brown-eyed, pink-cheeked country girl who always smiled and who had that grace of innocence and bloom of health which are the witchery of youth. She was a favorite with school-boys, a belle of theirs at straw-rides, dances, and taffy-pulls, and other diversions of our Grassy Fordshire teens, where, however, her gentle ways, her readiness to follow rather than to lead, her utter incapability of envy or spiteful speech made her beloved of girls as well. She was the amiable maiden whom men look twice at, yet whose sisters are never quite jealous, holding her charm to be mere pinkish prettiness and beneath the envy of superior minds like theirs. Peggy was the sort of girl Letitia had never been, roseate with the kind of youth Letitia had never known, and it enchanted her as a joy and beauty which had been denied.
Neal, the father, was a drunken farmer, whose wife was chiefly responsible for the crops they planted, and who, being strong and abler than her shiftless spouse, was usually to be seen in the field and garden directing and aiding the hired man. Peggy was the only child. She helped her mother in the kitchen, fed the chickens, skimmed the milk, sold the butter, and let her father in o' nights. He was a by-word in the village. Occasional revivalists prayed for him publicly upon their knees, but without effect. His wife could have told them how futile that method was; she had tried it herself in more hopeful years. She had tried rage also, but it left her bitter and sick of life, and Pat the drunker; so wisely she had fallen back upon resignation, though not of the apathetic sort, and had made herself mistress of the farm, where her husband was suffered to spend his nights if he chose, or was able to walk so far from the tavern where he spent his days.
For Peggy the mother had better dreams. She knew that the girl was beautiful, and she knew also what beauty, however born, might win for itself in a wider world than her own had been. Peggy, therefore, was to finish school,however the farm might suffer by her absence and the expense of such simple dress as her village friendships would require. Nature might marry Thrift or Money, thought the hard-faced woman in the faded sunbonnet; silk and lace and a new environment might make a queen of this beggar-maid, her last hope in a life of hopelessness. Proudly she watched her daughter flower into village fame, guarding that fairness with jealous eyes.
"Daughter," she would say, "where is your hat?"
"Mamma, I like the sun."
"Nonsense. Go straight and fetch it and put it on. Do you want to be speckled like your ugly old mother-hen?"
It was a care and pride that would have turned another and far less lovely head than Peggy's, yet in spite of it this country school-girl ripened sweetly. Driving on country visits I used to meet her by the way, walking easily and humming to herself the while, her books and luncheon swinging at her side—a perfect model for romantic painters who run to milk-maids, or, as Letitia used to say, the veritable Phyllis of old English song.
The mother rose at dawn; she toiled by sunlight and by lamplight; her face grew haggard, her figure gaunter, her voice sharper with bitter irony, her heart harder save in that one lone corner which was kept soft—solely for her child. Peggy, I believe, was the only living thing she smiled upon. Neighbors dreaded her cutting tongue; her husband was too dazed to care.
Time went by. In spite of that stern resolve in the woman's nature, and all her labor and frugal scheming, what with the failure of crops and her lack of knowledge of their better care, and an old encumbrance whose interest could be barely met on the quarter-days that cast their shadows on the whole round year, the farm declined. Letitia's gifts from her own wardrobe were all that kept Peggy Neal in school. It was a word from Letitia also that raised the cloud on the mother's face when despair was darkest there. Might not summer-boarders, Letitia asked, bear a surer, more golden harvest than those worn-out fields?
"Summer-boarders!" cried Mrs. Neal, with a grim irony in her voice. But she repeated it—"Summer-boarders," in a milder tone, and the plan was tried.
The first ones came in June. They descended noisily from the fast express, lugging bags and fishing-rods and guns. Some of them stared; some young ones whistled softly at the fair driver of that old two-seated buckboard waiting to bear them to the farm. They greeted effusively—for the daughter's sake—the hard-mouthed woman who met them at the door, striving her best to smile a welcome. She it was who showed them their plain but well-scrubbed chambers, while their minds were at the barn.
Pastures and orchards bore strange fruit that summer: white-faced city clerks in soft, pink shirts smoked cigarettes and browned in the sun; freckled ladies set up their easels in the cow-lot; high-school professors asked one another puzzling questions, balanced cannily on the topmost rail of the Virginia fence, and all—all, that is, to a man—helped Peggy carry in the milk, helped Peggy churn, helped Peggy bake, helped Peggy set the table, and clear it, and wipe the dishes, and set them safely away again in the dim pantry—helped Peggy to market, and Peggy to church: so rose her star.
The mother watched, remembering her owngirlhood. Its romance, seen through a mist of gloomy years, seemed foolish now. There might be happiness in human life—she had never known any. There was a deal of nonsense in the world called love, she knew, and there was a surer thing called money. Peggy should wait for it.
The mother watched, smiling to herself sardonically, secretly well-pleased—smiling because she knew quite well that these callow sprigs had far less money than negligèes; well-pleased because she guessed that soon enough a man with both would be hovering about sweet Peggy's dairy. It was a humorous thing to her that all these city men should think it beautiful—that dampish, sunless spot where the milk-cans stood waist-deep in cresses.
She kept sharp eyes upon her daughter, and farm-house duties filled Peggy's days to their very brim. There must be no loitering by star-light, either. Mother and daughter now slept together in the attic store-room, for the new farming had proved a prosperous thing.
The summer was not like other summers. There was life and gayety up at Neal's: strumming of banjos and the sound of laughter andsinging on the porch, much lingering in hammocks under the pine-trees, moonlit jaunts in the old hay-rick, lanterns moving about the barn and dairy, empty bowls on the buttery table when Mrs. Neal came down at dawn, and half-cut loaves in the covered crocks.
September came and the harvest had been gathered in. The last boarder had returned cityward. Peggy was in school again. One day, however, she was missing from her classes, and Letitia, fearing that she might be ill, walked to the farm after school was over. It was a pleasant road with a narrow path beside it among the grasses, and the day was cool with premonitions of the year's decline.
The farm seemed silent and deserted. She knocked at doors, she tapped lightly on the kitchen-windows, but no one was at home. At the barn, however, the horses were in their stalls, turning their heads to her and whinneying of their empty mangers. Surely, she thought, the Neals could not be gone. She stood awhile by the well-curb from which she could better survey the farm: it lay before her, field and orchard, bright with sunshine and golden-rod, yet she saw no moving thing but the crows inthe corn-stubble and the cows waiting by the meadow-bars. Then she tried the dairy, and there heard nothing but the brook whimpering among the cans and cresses, and she turned away.
Now a lane runs, grassy and strewn with the wild blackberry-vines, through the Neal farm to a back road into town, and Letitia chose it to vary her homeward way. It passes first the brook, over a little hoof-worn, trembling bridge, and then the vineyard, where the grapes were purple that autumn evening. There, pausing to regale herself, Letitia heard a strange sound among the trellises. It was a child crying, moaning and sobbing as if its heart would break. For a moment only Letitia listened there; then she ran, fearfully, stumbling in the heavy loam between the rows of vines, to the spot from which the moaning came. She found a girl crouching on the earth.
"Peggy!" she cried, kneeling beside her. "Peggy! Are you hurt? Peggy! Answer me!"
The girl shook her head and shrank away among the lower leaves.
"Oh, what is the matter?" Letitia begged, terrified, and gathered Peggy into her arms. "Tell me! Tell me, sweet!"
"Nothing," was the wretched answer. "Please—please go away!"
But Letitia stayed, brushing the dirt from the girl's dark hair, kissing her, petting her, murmuring the tenderest names, and gently urging her to tell. Peggy raised herself upon her knees, putting both hands to her temples and staring wildly with swollen eyes.
"Mamma's gone in, Miss Primrose," she said, brokenly. "She'll—she'll tell you. Please—please go away!"
She begged so piteously, Letitia rose.
"I'd rather stay, Peggy; but if you wish it—"
"Yes. Please go!"
"I'd rather stay."
"No. Please—"
Slowly, and with many misgivings, Letitia went. She knocked again at the farm-house, but got no answer, as before. She tried the doors—they were locked, all of them. Then her heart reproached her and she hurried back again to the lane. It was growing dusk, and in the vineyard the rows confused her.
"Peggy!" she called, softly.
Her foot touched a basket half-filled with grapes.
"Peggy! Where are you?"
She could hear nothing but the rustling leaves.
"Peggy!" she called. "Peggy!"
There was no answer, but as she listened with a throbbing heart, she heard cows lowing at the pasture-bars—and the click of the farmyard gate.
L
etitia'schurch, the last her father ever preached in, is a little stone St. Paul's, pine-shaded and ivy-grown, upon a hill-side. There are graves about it in the lawn, scattered, not huddled there, and no paths between them, only the soft grass touching the very stones. Above them in the untrimmed boughs swaying with every wind, the wild birds nest and sing, so that death where Dr. Primrose lies seems a pleasant dreaming.
"Our service," he used to say, "is the ancient poetry of reverence;" and every verse of it brings to Letitia memories of her father standing at the lecturn, while she was a child listening in the pews.
"I was very proud of him," she used to tell us. "His sermons were wonderful, I think. Youwill say that I could not judge them as a girl and daughter, but I have read them since. I have them all in a box up-stairs, and now and then I take one out and read it to myself, and all that while I can hear his voice. They are better than any I listen to nowadays; they are far more thoughtful, fuller of life and fire and the flower of eloquence. Our ministers are not so brimming any more."
She told us a story I had never heard, of his earnestness and how hard it was for him to find words fervent enough to express his meaning; how when a rich old merchant of Grassy Ford confessed to him a doubt that there was a God, dear Dr. Primrose turned upon him in the village street where they walked together and said, with the tears springing to his eyes:
"Gabriel Bond, not as a clergyman but as a man, I say to you, consider for a moment that apple-bloom you are treading on!" It was spring and a bough from the merchant's garden overhung the walk where they had paused. "Hold it in your hand, and look at it, and think, man,think! Use the same reason which tells you two and two make four—the same reason that made you rich, Gabriel—and tell me,if you can, there is no God! Why, sir—" and here Dr. Primrose's heart quite overcame him, and his voice broke. "Gabriel, you are not such a damned—"
And the merchant, Letitia said, for it was Bond himself who told her the story long after Dr. Primrose's voice was stilled—the merchant, astounded to find a clergyman so like another man struggling for stressful words for his emotion, picked up the bruised twig from beneath his feet and stuck it in her father's coat.
"Doctor," he said, quietly, "there's force, sir, in what you say," and left Dr. Primrose wondering on the walk. But the next Sunday he appeared at church, and every Sunday for many years thereafter, merely explaining to those who marvelled, that he had found a man.
It was not likely that the daughter of such a man would be much troubled with doubts of what he had taught so positively or what she had come to believe herself; if led astray it would be like her sex in general, through too much faith. While not obtrusive in her views of life in her younger years, Letitia, as she reached her prime, and through the habit of self-dependence and her daily duty of instructing undeveloped minds,grew more decisive in her manner, more impatient of opposition to what she held was truth, especially when it seemed to her the fruit of ignorance or that spirit of bantering argument so common to the humorously inclined. She liked humor to know its place, she said; it was the favorite subterfuge of persons championing a losing cause. In such discussions, finding her earnestness useless to convince, and scorning to belittle a theme dear to her with resort to jest or personalities, she would sit silenced, but with a flush upon her cheeks, and if the enemy had pressed too sharply on her orderly retreat, one would always know it by the tapping of her foot upon the floor.
She was no mean antagonist. For she read not only those volumes her father loved, but the books and journals of the day as well. Reading and theorizing of the greater world outside her little one, she was not troubled by those paradoxes which men meet there, which cause them to falter, doubt, and see two sides of questions where they had seen but one, till they fall back lazily, taking their ease on that neutral ground where Humor is the host, welcoming all and favoring none. We used to smile sometimes atLetitia's fervency; we had our little jests at its expense, but we knew it was her father in her, poet and preacher not dead but living still. In his youth and prime Dr. Primrose was ever the champion of needy causes, whose name is legion, so that his zeal found vent, and left him in his decline the mild old poet I remember. Would Letitia be as mild, I wondered?
"A few more needy causes," I used to say, "would soften that tireless spirit—say, stockings to darn and children to dress for school, and a husband to keep in order."
"Yet in lieu of these," Dove once replied, "she has her day's work and her church and books—"
"But are they enough for a woman, do you think?" I asked my wife. We were standing together by Robin's bedside, watching him as he slept. Dove said nothing, but laid her hand against his rose-red cheek.
Little by little we became aware of some subtle change in our Letitia. She took less interest in the mild adventures of our household world. She smiled more faintly at my jests, a serious matter, for I have at home, like other men, some reputation for a pretty wit uponoccasion. It was a mild estrangement and recluseness. She sat more often in her room up-stairs. She was absent frequently on lonely walks, sometimes at evening, and brought home a face so rapt, and eyes with a look in them so far away from our humble circle about the reading-lamp, we deemed it wiser to ask no questions. For years it had been an old country custom of ours, when we sat late, to seek the pantry before retiring, but now when invited to join us in these childish spreads, "No, thank you," Letitia would reply, and in a tone so scrupulously courteous I used to feel like the man old Butters told about—a poor, inadvertent wight, he was, who had offered a sandwich to an angel. I forget now how the story runs, but the man grumbled at his rebuff, and so did I.
"I know, my dear," Dove reproved me, "but you ought not to do such things when you see she's thinking."
"Thinking!" I cried, cooling my temper in bread-and-milk. "Is it thinking, then?"
"I don't know what it is," Dove sighed. "She isn't Letitia any more, yet for the life of me I can't tell why. I never dream now ofdisturbing her when she looks that way, and I cannot even talk to her as I used to do."
"She isn't well," I said.
"She says she was never better."
"She may be troubled."
"She says she was never happier."
"Well, then," I decided, sagely, "it must be thinking, as you say."
We agreed to take no notice of what might be only moody crotchets after all; they would soon pass. We no longer pressed her to join our diversions about the lamp, but welcomed her in the old spirit when she came willingly or of her own accord. Yet even then it was not the same: there was some mute, mysterious barrier to the old, free, happy intercourse. Some word of Dove's or mine, mere foolery, perhaps, but meant in cheerfulness, would dance out gayly across the table where we sat at cards, but slink back home again, disgraced. What could this discord be? we asked ourselves—this strange impassiveness, this disapproval, as it seemed to us—negative, but no less obvious for that?
There was a heaviness in the air. We breathed more freely in Letitia's absence. We grew self-conscious in that mute, accusing presence, whichI resented and my wife deplored. Dove even confessed to a feeling of guiltiness, yet could remember no offence.
"What have I done?" I asked my wife.
"What haveIdone?" asked she.
At meals, especially, we were ill at ease. The very viands, even those famous dishes of Dove's own loving handiwork, met with disfavor instead of praise. Letitia had abandoned meats; now she declined Dove's pies! Pastry was innutritious, she declared, meats not intended for man at all, and even of green things she ate so mincingly that my little housewife was in despair.
"What can I get for you, dear?" she would ask, anxiously. "What would you like?"
"My love," Letitia would reply, flushing with annoyance, "I am perfectly satisfied."
"But I'll get you anything, Letitia."
"I eat quite enough, my dear," was the usual answer—"quite enough," she would add, firmly, "for any one."
Then Dove would sink back ruefully, and I, pitying my wife—I, rebuked but unabashed and shameless in my gluttony, would pass my plate again.
"Give me," I would say, cheerfully, "athirdpiece of that excellent, that altogether heavenly cherry-pie, my dear."
It may sound like triumph, but was not—for Letitia Primrose would ignore me utterly. "Have you read," she would ask, sipping a little water from her glass, "New Eden, by Mrs. Lord?"
We still walked mornings to the school-house, still talked together as we walked, but not as formerly—not of the old subjects, which was less to be wondered at, nor yet of new ones with the old eloquence. I felt constrained. There was a new note in Letitia's comments on the way the world was going, though I could not define its pitch. She spoke, I thought, less frankly than of old, but much more carelessly. She seemed more listless in her attitude towards matters that had roused her, heart and soul, in other days. Me she ignored at pleasure; could it be possible, I wondered, that she was determined to renounce the whole round world as well?
It was I who had first resented this alienation, but it was Dove who could not be reconciled to a change so inscrutable and unkind. Time, I argued, was sufficient reason; age, I reminded her, cast strange shadows before its coming;our friend was growing old—perhaps like her father—before her time. But Dove was alarmed: Letitia was pale, she said; her face was wan—there was a drawn look in the lines of the mouth and eyes; even her walk had lost its buoyancy.
"True," I replied, "but even that is not unnatural, my dear. Besides, she eats nothing; she starves herself."
My wife rose suddenly.
"Bertram," she said, earnestly, "you must stop this folly. I have tried my best to tempt her out of it, but I have failed. It is you she is fondest of. It is you who must speak."
"I fear it will do no good," I answered, "but I will try." I have had use for courage in my lifetime, both as doctor and man, but I here confess to a trembling of the heart-strings, a childish faintness, a lily cowardice in these encounters, these trifling domestic sallies and ambuscades. Nor have I strategy; I know but one method of attack, and its sole merit is the little time it wastes.
"Letitia," I said, next morning, as we walked townward, "you are ill."
"Nonsense, Bertram," she replied.
"You are ill," I replied, firmly. "You are pale as a ghost. Your hands tremble. Your walk—"
"I was never stronger in my life," she interposed, and as if she had long expected this little crisis and was prepared for it. "Never, I think, have I felt so tranquil, so serene. My mind—"
"I am not speaking of your mind," I said. "I am talking of your body."
"Bertram," she said, excitedly, "that is just your error—not yours alone, but the whole world's error. This thinking always of earthly—"
"Now, Letitia," I protested, "I have been a doctor—"
"Illness," she continued, "is a state of mind. To think one is ill, is to be ill, of course, but to think one is well, is to be well, as I am—well, I mean, in a way I never dreamed of!—a way so sure, so beautiful, that I think sometimes I never knew health before."
"Letitia," I said, sharply, "what nonsense is this?"
"It is not nonsense," she retorted. "It is living truth. Oh, how can we be so blind! The body, Bertram—why, the body is nothing!"
"Nothing!" I cried.
"Nothing!" she answered, her face glowing. "The body is nothing; the mind is everything! It is God's great precious gift! With my mind I can control my body—my life—yes, my very destiny!—if I use God's gift of Will. It is divine."
"Letitia," I said, sternly, "those are fine words, and well enough in their time and place. I am not a physician of souls. I mend worn bodies, when I can. It is yours I am thinking of—the frail, white, half-starved flesh and blood where your soul is kept."
"Stop!" she cried. "You have no right to speak that way. You mean well, Bertram, but you are wrong. You are mistaken—terribly mistaken," she repeated, earnestly—"terribly mistaken. I am quite, quite able to care for myself. I only ask to be let alone."
She had grown hysterical. Tears were in her eyes.
"See," she said, in a calmer tone, wiping them away, "I have had perfect control till now. This is not weakness merely; it is worse: it is sin. But I shall show you. I shall show you a great truth, Bertram, if you will let me. Only have patience, that is all."
She smiled and paused in a little common near the school-house where none might hear us.
"I learned it only recently," she told me. "I cannot see how I never thought of it before: this great power mind has over matter—how just by the will which God has given us in His goodness, we may rise above these petty, earthly things which chain us down. We can risehere, Bertram—here on earth, I mean—and when we do, even though our feet be on Grassy Fordshire ground, we walk in a higher sphere. Ah, can't you see then that nothing can ever touch us?—nothing earthly, however bitter, can ever sadden us or spoil our lives! There will be no such thing as disappointment; no regret, no death—and earth will be Eden come again."
Her eyes were shining.
"Letitia," I said, "it is of another world that you are dreaming."
"No, it is all quite possible here," she said. "It is possible to you, if you only think so. It is possible for me, because I do."
"It seems," I said, "a monstrous selfishness."
"Selfishness!" she said, aghast.
"As long as you have human eyes," I said, "you will see things to make you weep, Letitia."
"But if I shut them—if I rise above these petty—"
"The sound of crying will reach your ears," I said. "How then shall you escape sadness and regret? What right have you to avoid the burdens your fellows bear?—to be in bliss, while they are suffering? It would be monstrous, Letitia Primrose. You would not be woman: You would be a fiend."
She shook her head.
"You don't understand," she said.
"At least," I answered, "I will send you something from the office."
She shut her lips.
"I shall not take it."
"It will make you stronger," I insisted.
"You can do nothing," she answered, coldly, "to make me stronger than I am."
I
fever woman had a tender heart, that heart was Dove's. I used to say, to her confusion, that a South Sea cannibal might find confessional in her gentle ear, were his voice but low enough; that she might draw back, shuddering at his tales of the bones he had picked, but if only his tears were real ones, I could imagine her, when he had done, putting her hand upon his swarthy shoulder and saying, earnestly:
"I know just how you feel!"
Such was the woman Letitia confided in, now that her tongue was loosened and the mystery solved, for her soul was brimming with those new visions—dreams so roseate as she painted them that my wife listened with their wonder mirrored in her round brown eyes, and dumb before that eloquence. Dove loved Letitia asa greater woman than herself, she said, worshipped her for her wider knowledge and more fluent speech, just as she wondered at it ruefully as a girl on Sun Dial listening to Letitia's tales of dryads and their spells. In return for all this rapt attention and modest reverence, Letitia formerly had been grace itself. It was a tender tyranny she had exercised; but now?—how should my simple, earthly Dove, mother and housewife, confide any longer her favorite cares, her gentle fears, her innocent regrets? With what balm of sympathy and cheer would the new Letitia heal those wounds? Would not their very existence be denied; or worse, be held as evidence of sin?—iniquity in my poor girl's soul, hidden there like a worm i' the bud, and to be chastened in no wise save by taking invisible white wings of thought, and soaring—God knows where?
The new Letitia was not unamiable, nor yet unkind, knowingly, for she smiled consistently upon all about her—a strange, aloof, unloving smile though, at which we sighed. We should have liked her to be heart and soul again in our old-time common pleasures, even to have joined us now and then in a fault or two—to havelooked less icily, for example, upon our occasional petty gossip of our neighbors, or to have added one wrathful word to our little rages at the way the world was straying from the golden mist we had seen it turn in, in our youth. As we watched her, wondering, laughing sometimes, sometimes half-angry at this new and awful guise she had assumed, it would come to us, not so much how sadly earthen we must seem to her, nor yet how strange and daft and airy her new views seemed to us in our duller sight—but how the old Letitia whom we had loved was gone forever.
"Bertram," said my wife one evening as we sat together by the lamp, "what do you think Letitia says?"
"I am prepared for anything, my dear."
Dove, who was sewing, laid down her work and said, gravely:
"She does not believe in marriage any more."
I raised my eyebrows. There was really nothing to be said.
"At least," my wife went on, resuming her sewing, "she says that the time will come when the race will have"—Dove paused thoughtfully—"risen above such things, I think she said. Ireally don't remember the words she used, but I believe—yes, therewillbe marriage—in a way—that is"—Dove knitted her brows—"a union of kindred souls, if I understand her."
"Ah!" I replied. "I see. But what about the perpetuation—"
My wife shook her head.
"Oh, all that will be done away with, I believe," she said, gravely.
"Done away with!" I cried.
"At least," Dove explained, "it will not be necessary."
My face, I suppose, may have looked incredulous.
"I don't quite comprehend what Letitia says sometimes," my wife explained, "but today she was telling me—"
Dove laughed quaintly.
"Oh, I forget what comes next," she said, "but Letitia told me all about it this morning."
I returned to my quarterly. Presently my wife resumed:
"She has four books about it."
"Only four!" I said. "I should think one would need a dozen at least to explain such mysteries."
"She says herself she is only at the beginning," Dove replied. "She's now in the first circle—or cycle, I've forgotten which—but the more she reads and the more she thinks about it, the more wonderful it grows. Oh, there was something else—what was it now she called it?—something about the—cosmos, I think she said, but I didn't quite grasp the thing at all."
"I'm surprised," I replied. "It's very simple."
"I suppose it is," Dove answered, quickly, and so humbly that I laughed, but she looked up at me with such a quivering smile, I checked myself. "I suppose itissimple," she replied. "I guess my mind—is not very strong, Bertram. I—I find it so hard to understand some—"
I saw the tears were coming.
"Don't trouble yourself about such things, my dear," I said, cheerfully. "It's a bonny mind you have, you take my word for it."
Dove wiped her eyes.
"No," she said; "when I listen to Letitia, I feel like a—"
"There, there, my dear," I said, "you have things a thousand times more vital and useful and beautiful than this cosmos Letitia talksabout. It's only another word for the universe, my love, if I remember rightly—I'm not quite sure myself, but it doesn't matter. It's easy to pronounce, and it may mean something, or it may mean nothing, but we needn't trouble ourselves about it, little one. You have work to do. You must remember Letitia has no such ties to bind her to the simple things, which are enough for most of us to battle with. I am tired of theories myself, dear heart. Work—everyday, humble, loving service is all that keeps life normal and people pleasant to have about. I see so much of this other side, it is always good to come home to you."
I went back to my medical journal—I forgot to say I had come around to my wife's side of our reading-table in settling this perplexing matter; I went back to my work, and she to hers, and we finished the evening very quietly, and in as good health and unruffled spirits as the cosmos itself must enjoy, I think, judging from the easy way it has run on, year after year, age after age, since the dark beginning.
T
heyears slip by so quietly in Grassy Ford that men and women born here find themselves old, they scarce know how, for are they not still within sound of the brooks they fished in, and in the shadow of the very hill-sides they climbed for butternuts, when they were young? The brooks run on so gayly as before, and why not they as well?
"Butters," Shears used to grumble, "never could learn that he was old enough to stop his jawing and meddling around the town, till they dug his grave for him; then he shut up fast enough."
"Well, then," said Caleb Kane, another character, "we'll sure enough have to send for the sexton."
Colonel Shears eyed Caleb with suspicion.
"What for?" he asked.
"Why, to get a word in edgewise, Sam'l," Caleb replied, and the Colonel rose, shifted his cigar, and sauntered homeward.
"Mostly comedies," said the one we call Johnny Keats, when I urged him to write the stories of his native town; yet, as I told him, there are tragedies a-plenty too in Grassy Fordshire, though the dagger in them is a slower torture than the short swift stab men die of in a literary way. Our heroic deaths are done by inches, as a rule, so imperceptibly, so often with jests and smiles in lieu of fine soliloquies, that our own neighbors do not always know how rare a play the curtain falls on sometimes among our hills.
If I do not die in harness, if, as I often dream of doing, I turn my practice over to some younger man—perhaps to Robin, who shows some signs of following in his father's steps—I shall write the story of my native town; not in the old way, embellished, as Butters would have termed it, with family photographs of the leading citizens and their houses and cow-sheds, and their wooden churches, and their corner stores with the clerks and pumpkins in array before them—notin that old, time-honored, country manner, but in the way it comes to me as I look backward and think of the heroes and heroines and the clowns and villains I have known. I shall need something to keep me from "jawing and meddling around the town"; why not white paper and a good stub pen, while I smoke and muse of my former usefulness. I suppose I shall never write the chronicle; Johnny Keats could, if he would; and I would, if I could—thus the matter rests, while the town and its tales and I myself grow old together. Even Johnny Keats, who was a boy when Letitia taught in the red brick school-house, has a thin spot in his hair.
Had Dove but lived—it is idle, I know, to say what might have been, had our Grassy Fordshire been the same sweet place it was, before she went like other white birds—"southward," she said, "but only for a winter, Bertram—surely spring comes again."
This I do know: that I should have had far less to tell of Letitia Primrose, who might have gone on mooning of a better world had Dove not gone to one, leaving no theories but a son and husband to Letitia's care. It was not to the oracle that she intrusted us, but to the woman—not to the new Letitia but to the old, who had come back to us in those vigils at my wife's bedside.
"This is not sin, Letitia," Dove said to her.
"Oh, my dear!" replied Letitia. "You must not dream that I could call it so."
"Still," Dove answered, "if I had your mind, perhaps—"
"Hush, dear love," Letitia whispered. "My sweet, my sweet—oh, if I had your soul!"
From such chastening moments Letitia Primrose was the mother she might have been. A tenderer, humbler heart, save only Dove's, I never knew, nor a gentler voice, nor a stronger hand, than those she gave us, man and boy bereft—not only in those first blank days, but through the years that followed. So easily that I marvelled did the school-mistress become the home-keeper, nor can I look upon a spinster now, however whimsical, that I do not think of her as the elder sister of that wife and mother in her soul.
A new dream possessed Letitia: it was to be like Dove. She could never be youthful save in spirit; she could never be lovely with that subtle poise and grace which cannot be feignedor purchased at any price, neither with gold nor patience nor purest prayer nor any precious thing whatever, but comes only as a gift to the true young mother at her cradle-side. She could not be one-half so perfect, she confessed humbly to herself, but she could keep the fire blazing on a lonely hearth, where a man sat silent with his child.
My girl's housewifeliness had seemed a simple matter when Letitia's mind was on her school and sky; it was now a marvel as she learned what Dove had done—those thousand little things, and all so easily, so placidly, that at the day's fag-end Letitia, weary with unaccustomed cares, wondered what secret system of philosophy Dove's had been. What were the rules and their exceptions? What were the formulæ? Here were sums to do, old as the hills, but strange, new answers! There must be a grammar for all that fluency, that daily smoothness in every clause and phrase—a kind of eloquence, as Letitia saw it now, marvelling at it as Dove had marvelled at her own. When she had solved it, as she thought, the steak went wrong, or the pudding failed her, or the laundry came home torn or incomplete, moths perhaps got intoclosets, ants stormed the pantry, or a pipe got stopped; and then, discomfited, she would have Dove's magic and good-humored mastery to seek again.
She had kept house once herself, it is true, but years ago, for her simple father, and not in Dove's larger way. The Primrose household as she saw it now had been a meagre one, for here in the years of Dove's gentle rule, a wondrous domestic ritual had been established, which it was now her duty to perform. That she did it faithfully, so that the windows shone and the curtains hung like snowy veils behind them, so that the searching light of day disclosed no film upon the walnut, who could doubt, knowing that conscience and its history? She kept our linen neatly stitched; she set the table as Dove had set it; she poured out tea for us more primly, to be sure, but cheerfully as Dove had poured it, smiling upon us from Dove's chair.
Robin grew straight of limb and wholesome of soul as Dove had dreamed. Letitia helped him with his lessons, told him the legends of King Arthur's court, and read with him thoseTales of a Grandfather, which I had loved as just such another romping boy—though not so handsomeand debonair as Dove's son was, for he had her eyes and her milder, her more poetic face, and was more patrician in his bearing; he is like his mother to this day. His temper, which is not maternal, I confess—those sudden gusts when, as I before him, he chafed in bonds and cried out bitter things, rose hotly sometimes at Letitia's discipline, though he loved her doubly now.
"You are not my mother!" he would shout, clinching his fists. "You are not my mother!"
Then her heart would fail her, for she loved him fondly, even in his rage, and her penalty would be mild indeed. Often she blamed herself for his petty waywardness, and feeling her slackening hand he would take the bit between his teeth, coltlike; but he was a good lad, Robin was, and, like his mother, tender-hearted, for all his spirit, and as quick to be sorry as to be wrong. When they had made it up, crying in each other's arms, Letitia would say to him:
"I'm not your mother, but I love you, and I've got no other little boy."
It was thus Letitia kept our home for us, tranquil and spotless as of old; and if at first I chose more often than was kind to sit ratheramong my bottles and my books and instruments, leaving her Robin and the evening-lamp, it was through no fault or negligence of hers I did it, for, however bright my hearth might glow, however tended by her gentle hands, its flame was but the ruddy symbol to me of a past whose spirit never could return.
"WhoisMiss Primrose?" strangers in Grassy Ford would ask.
"She's a sort of relative," the reply would be, "and the doctor's house-keeper."
For the woman who keeps still sacred and beautiful another woman's home, in all the language, in all our wordiness, there is no other name.