I
twas evening when we set out, not without trepidation, to find Peggy Neal. We had dined—over-dined—in a room of gilt and mirrors and shining silver, watching the other tables with their smiling groups or puzzling pairs; some so ill-assorted that we strove vainly to solve their mystery, others so oddly mannered for a public place, we thought—the men so brazen in their attentions, the women so prinked and absurdly gowned and unabashed, Letitia at first was not quite sure we were rightly there.
"Still," she said, "therearenice people here—why, even children!"
"The place is famous," I protested.
"I suppose it must be respectable," she replied, "but I never saw such amixture!"
She gazed wonderingly about her.
"I suppose it must be New York," she said.
It was half-past eight when we entered the street again. We drove at once to the number Mrs. Neal had given, riding silently and a little nervously, but still marvelling at the scene we had left behind us, a strange setting for two such elder village-folk as we, making us wonder if we had missed much or little by living our lives so greenly and far away.
"I hope she will be at home," said Letitia. "Every one seemed to be going to the theatre."
"For my part," I confessed, "I rather hope we shall not find her."
"But why, Bertram?"
I could not say. The cab stopped. There were lights in the house, and, leaving Letitia, I went up the steps and pulled the bell. The household was at home, apparently, for I heard voices and the music of a piano as I stood waiting at the door. It was one of the older streets, ill-lighted and lined monotonously by those red-brick fronts so fashionable in a former day.
The door was opened by a colored maid, and there was a gush of laughter and the voices ofmen and women, with the tinkling undercurrent of a waltz.
"Is Miss Neal at home?" I asked.
"Miss who?"
"Miss Neal."
"Miss Neal?"
"Miss Peggy Neal."
She hesitated. "I'll see," she said. "Will you come in, suh?"
"No," I replied. "I'll wait out here."
She returned presently.
"Did you say Miss Peggy Neal, suh?"
"Yes," I replied, "Miss Peggy Neal."
"Don't any such lady live heah, suh."
"Strange," I murmured, and was about to turn away when a woman clad in a floating light-blue robe, her face indefinite in the dimly illumined hallway, but apparently young and pretty, or even beautiful, perhaps, and with an amazing quantity of golden hair, slipped through the portiéres and pushed aside the maid.
"I am Peggy Neal," she said, in a low voice. "What is wanted?"
"You!" I gasped, but Letitia had left the carriage and was at my shoulder.
"Peggy!" she said.
"Miss Primrose! And this is—Dr. Weatherby!"
"Dear Peggy," Letitia murmured, kissing the astonished girl on both powdered cheeks. "But how you've changed! You're so pale, Peggy—and your eyes—and your hair—Peggy, whathaveyou done to your hair?"
"Yes, my hair," murmured Peggy.
"Why, it used to be jet," Letitia said. "But you don't ask us in, my dear—and here we've come all the long way from Grassy Ford to see you."
"Hush!" said Peggy, and Letitia paused, for the first time noting the voices in the inner rooms.
"Oh," she whispered, "I see: you have a party."
"Yes," Peggy answered. "We—we have a party."
"I think we should go, Letitia," I interposed, but she did not hear me.
"I can't get over your hair," she murmured, holding Peggy at arm's-length from her and then turning her head a little to look about her. "Do they smoke at your parties?" she asked.
"Oh yes," laughed Peggy, "all the men smoke, you know."
"But I thought," said Letitia, "I saw a woman with a cigarette."
"It may have been a—candy cigarette," Peggy answered.
"That's true," said Letitia, "for I've seen them at Marvin's in Grassy Ford."
The portiéres before which Peggy stood, one hand grasping them, parted suddenly behind her head, and the face of another girl was thrust out rudely behind her own and staring into mine. It was a rouged and powdered face, with hard-set eyes that did not flinch as she gazed mockingly upon me, crying in a voice that filled the hall with its harsh discords:
"Aha! Which one to-night, Suzanne?"
Then she saw Letitia, and with a smothered oath, withdrew laughingly. The music and talking ceased within. It was not in the room behind the curtains, but seemingly just beyond it, and I could hear her there relating her discovery as I supposed, though the words were indistinct.
"How I hate that girl!" hissed Peggy, her eyes black with anger.
"Then I wouldn't have her, my dear," said Letitia, soothingly. "I should not invite her."
There was a burst of laughter within, followed by subdued voices, and I heard footsteps stealthily approaching. Peggy heard them too, no doubt, though she was answering Letitia's questions, for she grasped the curtains more tightly than before, one hand behind her and the other above her head. As she did so the loose sleeves of her robe slipped down her arm, disclosing a spot upon its whiteness.
"Peggy, dear," Letitia said, anxiously, "you have hurt yourself."
"Yes," was the answer, "I know. It's a bruise."
It was a heart, tattooed. She hid it in her hair.
"We must go, Letitia," I urged. "We must not keep Peggy from her friends."
"Yes," she assented. "But I had so much to ask you, Peggy, and so much to tell."
The curtains parted again, this time far above Peggy's head, and I saw a man's eyes peering through. She appeared to be disengaging the flounces about her slippered feet, but I saw her strike back savagely with her little heel, and he disappeared. But other faces came, one by one, though Letitia did not see them. Her eyeswere all for her darling Peggy whom she plied with questions. How had her health been? How did she like New York? Did she never yearn for little old Grassy Ford again? Was she quite happy?
"Yes," Peggy murmured, "quite; quite happy."
She spoke in a hurried, staccato voice, in an odd, cold monotone. There was no kindness in her eyes.
The door-bell rang, and we stepped aside as the maid answered it. Two young men swaggered in, flushed and garrulous, nodding, not more familiarly to the servant than to Peggy herself, who parted the curtains to let them pass. They gazed curiously at her guests.
"Why, they kept on their hats!" Letitia said, in a shocked undertone. "Is it customary here, Peggy?"
"Everything," was the bitter answer, "is customary here. How is my mother?"
"It was your mother, Peggy, who asked me to find you." Letitia spoke, gently. "She wants to see you. She is not very strong since your father's—"
She paused.
"Is my father dead?"
"Didn't you know?"
"No; but I thought as much; he was such a boozer."
Letitia stared. "Peggy!" she said.
"Oh, I know what you think," the girl replied, wearily, seating herself upon the stairs, and putting her chin upon her hands. She did not ask us to be seated.
"Letitia," I said, firmly, "come; we must go." I put my hand upon the door-knob.
"Doctor," said Peggy Neal, rising again, "you won't mind waiting outside a moment? I have something to say to dear Miss Primrose."
"Certainly," I replied. "Good-bye, Miss—Neal."
She gave her hand to me. "Good-bye, doctor." Then she looked me strangely in the eyes, saying, in an undertone, "Mind, I shall tell her nothing"—and paused significantly, adding in a clearer tone again—"but the truth."
I waited anxiously upon the steps. Five minutes passed—ten—twenty—thirty—and I grew impatient. Then the door opened, and Letitia appeared with Peggy, and radiant though in tears.
"Good-bye," she said, kissing her, "dear,dearPeggy. Oh, Bertram, I have heard such a wonderful story!"
"Indeed?"
"Yes," Peggy said from the doorway, "Miss Primrose is the same enthusiast she used to be when I went to school to her."
"It is like a novel," declared Letitia; "but we must go. You must forgive me for keeping you so long away—from your newer friends."
"It is nothing," was the answer. "I'm so glad you came."
"Remember your promise, Peggy!"
"Oh yes—my promise," Peggy murmured. "Good-bye, Miss Primrose. Good-bye, doctor. Good-bye. Good-bye."
The carriage-door had scarcely closed upon us when Letitia seized my arm.
"Bertram," she said, "itisa story! I thought it was only in books that such things happened. I would not have missed this visit for the world!"
"But," I said, "do you trust—"
"Trust her? Yes. A woman never cries like that when she's lying, Bertram. Listen: she came to New York from Grassy Ford. He was nowhere to be found. He had given her a falseaddress. Then a little girl was born—dead. Oh, you can't imagine what that child's been through, Bertram—the disgrace, the sorrow, the rags and poverty, hunger even—and only think howwewere eating and sleeping soundly in Grassy Ford, all that time she was starving here! Then temptations came in this miserable, this wicked, wicked place! Oh, how can man—Well—she did not dare to come home, but stayed on here. It was then she took the name Suzanne, to hide her real one. Twice—twice, Bertram—she went down to the river—"
Letitia's voice was breaking.
"Oh, I can't tell you all she told me. But just when it all seemed darkest, she met this good, kind woman with whom she lives."
"What!" I said. "Did she tell you that?"
"Bertram, that woman saved her!—saved her from worse than death—took her from the very street—clothed her, fed her, and nursed her to health again. Did you see her dress? It was finest silk and lace. Did you see the rings on her fingers? One was a diamond, Bertram, as large as the pearl you wear; one was an opal, set in pearls; another, a ruby—and she told me she had a dozen more up-stairs."
"Who is this woman?"
"She did not tell me. I forgot to ask."
"What was the promise she made you?"
"To visit us—to come next summer to Grassy Ford."
"Us, Letitia?"
"Yes; I made her promise it. She refused at first, but I told her there were hearts as loving in Grassy Ford as in New York—oh, I hope there are, Bertram; I hope there are! She will go first to the farm, of course, to see her mother, and then, before she comes back to this new mother, who makes me burn, Bertram, when I ask myself if any woman in Grassy Ford would have done as much—then she will visit us. It will mean so much to her. It will set that poor, spoiled life right again before our petty, little, self-righteous world. Oh, I shallmakethem receive her, Bertram! I shall make themtake her in their arms!"
She paused breathlessly, but I was silent.
"I thought you wouldn't mind," she said.
Still I could not speak.
"Tell me," she urged, "did I presume too much? Was I wrong to ask her without consulting you?"
"No," I answered—but not through kindness as Letitia thought, let me confess it; not through having the tenderest man's heart in the world, as she said, gratefully, but because I knew—how, she will always wonder—that Peggy would never come.
I
have never seen an English lane, but I have a picture of one above the fireplace, and I once smelled hawthorn blooming. A pleasant, hedgerow scent, it seemed to me, with a faint suggestion of primroses on the other side—I say primroses, but Letitia smiles when I declare I can smell them still, or laughs with Robin: they have been in England.
"Are you quite sure about it, Bertram?"
"They do have primroses," I reply, defiantly.
"But are you sure they are primroses?" she demands.
"Smell again, father!" cries my son.
"Yes," I retort; "or violets; they may be violets beyond the hedge."
It is then they laugh at me, and they make a great point of their puzzling questions: am Icertain—for example, that the primrose is fragrant enough to be smelled so far, and is it in flower when the hawthorn blooms? That is important, they insist. It is not important, I reply—inmyEngland.
"YourEngland!" they cry.
"To be sure," I say. "In my England—and I see it as plainly as you do yours—the hawthorn and primrose is always flowering. In my England it is always spring."
It is summer in theirs. It is always cool and fragrant and wholly charming in my Devonshire. It was rather hot when they got to theirs—that is, the sunny coast of it they brag of was a little trying, sometimes, I suspect, in midsummer, though neither will confess.
"But not the moors!" they say.
"Oh, well—the moors—no; I should think not," I answer. "I am not such a fool as to think that moors are hot."
"How coolarethe moors?" they then inquire, innocently, but I see the trick; I hear the plot in their very voices, and am wary.
"Oh," I reply, "as cool as usual."
"But there are dense forests on the moors," Robin suggests. "Regular jungles—eh, father?"
I am not to be taken without a struggle.
"Hm," I reply.
"Hm—what, father?"
"Well, I prefer the coast myself."
"The dear white coast," says Letitia, slyly.
"The dearredcoast!" I cry in triumph, but they only sigh:
"Ah, it was a wonderful, wonderful journey! One could never imagine it—or even tell it. One must have been there."
It was a wonderful journey, I then admit, and I do not blame them for their pridefulness, but what, I ask, would they have done without my map?
I am bound by honesty to confess, however, that fair as my Devon is with the vales and moorlands I have never seen, Letitia's Devon must be fairer. She found it lovelier far than she had thought, she tells me, and she smiles so happily at the mere sound of its magic name—what, I ask, must a shire be made of to stand the test of that woman's dreams?
"Here we have hills," I tell her.
"But not those hills, Bertram."
"Have we not Sun Dial?" I protest.
"Yes, we have Sun Dial," she admits.
"We have winds," I say, "and singing waters, in Grassy Fordshire."
She shakes her head.
"You never heard the Dart or Tamar or the Tavy. You never stood on the abbey bridge."
"And where," I ask, "was that?"
"That was at Tavistock," she replies, "at dear little Tavistock after a rain, with the brown water rushing through the arches where the moss and fern and ivy clings—rushing over bowlders and swirling and foaming and falling beyond over a weir; then racing away under elm-trees and out into meadows—oh, you never heard the Tavy, Bertram."
"We have Troublesome," I insist.
"Yes," she replies, but her mind is absent. "We have Troublesome, to be sure."
Then I rouse myself. I fairly menace her with her treason.
"Surely," I cry, "you do not prefer old Devon to Grassy Fordshire!"
It is a question she never answers.
"Grassy Fordshire is your native heath," I remind her, jealously.
"Devon was my father's," she replies, "and mother's, too."
"Still," I insist, "you do not prefer it to your own?"
"It is beautiful," is her answer.
Had ever man so exasperating an antagonist? She declines utterly to be convinced; she talks of nothing but that ruddy land as if it always had been hers to boast of, is forever telling of ancient villages cuddled down in the softest corners of its hills and headlands to doze and dream in the English cloud-shadows and the sun—some of them lulled, she says, by the moorland music of winds among the granite tors, and waters falling down, down through those pastoral valleys to the sea; some lapped by the salt waves rippling into coves blue and tranquil as the sky above them, and others still in a sterner setting, clinging to edges in the very clefts of a wild and rugged coast, like weed and sea-shells left there by the fury of the autumn storms. So, she tells me, her Devon is; so I picture it as we sit together by the winter fire, while for the thousandth time she tells her story: how she and Robin, with my map between them, made that long journey which, years before it, the gypsy had found forewritten in her hand. It was the very pilgrimage that as a boy I planned andpromised for myself when I should come to be a man, but have found no time for—yet my son has seen it, that land of the youth whose name he bears, so that, listening, I take his glowing word, as I took that of the youth before him, for its moorland heather and its flashing streams.
Robin, it seems, preferred north Devon—Lynton and Lynmouth and their crags and glens. Letitia, I note, while yet agreeing with his wildest adjectives, leans rather towards the south.
"But think," he says, "of Watersmeet and the Valley of Rocks, Aunt Letty!"
"I do think of them," she answers, "but think of Dartmoor, my dear."
"And so I do," is his reply.
"That day the wind blew so," she calls to mind, "that morning when we rode to Tavistock."
"Tavistock?" I always ask. "Tavistock? Where have I heard that name? Do all Devonshire roads lead up to Tavistock?"
She only smiles.
"You should see Tavistock," she says, and resumes her memories. I sit quite helpless between the combatants. They differ widely, one might think, to hear their voices rising and falling in warm debate, yet listening to their words I detect nothing but a rivalry of praise, an effort on the part of each to outdo the other, as I tell them, in pæans and benisons on what I am led inevitably to believe is the fairest of earthly dwelling-places.
When Robin withdraws his youthful vigor and goes off to bed, or if he is away at school, from which he writes such letters as I wish Dove could but see, the talk is tranquil by our hearth, or little by little drops quite away.
"Such lands breed men," observes Letitia for the hundredth time. It is her old, loved theory, the worth and grace of a rare environment, of which she speaks, sewing in the fire-light. "The race must be hardy to wring its living from such shores and heights."
"True," I answer, thinking of the wreckers and smugglers who haunted those creeks and coves in years gone by—more lawless summers than the quiet one which found a woman on the very sands their heels had furrowed, or choosing flowers to press on the very cliffs they climbed with their spray-wet booty. I think vaguely of the soldiers and sailors who fought the battles whose dates and meanings it was Letitia's joyto teach in the red-brick school-house. I think more vividly of great John Ridd and Amyas Leigh, and then—a clearer vision—I remember that other, that later Devonshire lad who was flesh and blood to me; and sitting here by my Grassy Fordshire fire, a man grown gray who was once a boy eating the slice two lovers spread for him, I keep their covenant.
You go up from Plymouth, Letitia tells me, and by-and-by you are on the moors, marvelling; and you like everything, but you love Tavistock. It is in a valley, with the Tavy running beneath that bridge of which she is forever dreaming, for, as she stood there watching the waters playing, and listening to their song, she said:
"Here Robert Saxeholm was a boy. How often he must have stood here!"
"Robin Saxeholm?" asked a clear voice almost at her side; and Letitia turned. A pretty English lady stood there smiling and offering her hand.
"Yes," said Letitia, "did you know him, too?"
The lady smiled—a sad little smile it was. She was in black.
"He was my husband," she replied, "and this"—turning to the blue-eyed,fair-haired girl beside her "is Letitia Saxeholm."
"Why," my Robin cried—"why, that's—"
Letitia Primrose stopped him with a glance, and turning swiftly to that little English maid—
"Letitia?" she said, taking those pink cheeks gently between her hands, and kissing them wellnigh with every word she uttered. "Letitia—what a sweet—sweet name!"
Transcriber's Note:There were a few unnecessary quotation marks within the text that have been removed.The spelling of two words has been changed. Apent is now spent and valeys is now valleys.