Miss Primrose: A Novel

Roy Rolfe Gilson

Miss Primrose: A Novel

PART I

A Devonshire Lad

I

LETITIA

All little, white-haired, smiling ladies remind me of Letitia – Letitia Primrose, whom you saw just now in a corner of our garden among the petunias. You thought her odd, no doubt, not knowing her as I or as the children do who find her dough-nuts sweet after school is done, or their English cousins, those little brown-feathered beggars waiting on winter mornings in the snow-drifts at her sill. As for myself, I must own to a certain kinship, as it were, not of blood but of propinquity, a long next-doorhood in our youth, a tenderer, nameless tie in after years, and always a fond partiality which began one day by our old green fence. There, on its Primrose side, it seems, she had parted the grape-vines, looking for fruit, and found instead —

"Why! whose little boy is this?"

Now, it happened to be Bertram, Jonathan Weatherby's little boy – it being a holiday, and two pickets off, and the Concords purple in a witchery of September sheen – though at first he could make no sign to her of his parentage, so surprised he was, and his mouth so crammed.

"Will I die?" he asked, when he had gulped down all but his tongue.

"Die!" she replied, laughing at his grave, round eyes and pinching his nearer cheek. "Do I look like an ogress?"

"No," he said; "but I've gone and swallowed 'em."

"The grapes?"

"No – yes – but I mean the pits," whereat she laughed so that his brow darkened.

"Well, a man did once."

"Did what?"

"Died – from swallowin' 'em."

"Who told you that?"

"Maggie did."

"And who is Maggie?"

"Why, you know Maggie. She's our hired girl."

"How many did you swallow?"

"Five."

"Five!"

"Or six, I guess. I'm not quite sure."

"What made you do it?"

"I didn't. You did."

"I made you swallow them?"

"Why, yes, 'cause, now, I had 'em in my mouth – "

"Six all at once!"

"Yes, and you went and scared me. I forgot to think."

"Mercy! I'm sorry, darling."

"My name isn't darling. It's Bertram."

"I'm sorry, Bertram."

"Oh, that's all right," he forgave her, cheerfully, "as long as I don't die like the man did; you'll know pretty soon, I guess."

"How shall I know?"

"Well, the man, he hollered. You could hear him 'cross lots, Maggie says. So, if you listen, why, pretty soon you'll know."

And it is due partly to the fact that Letitia Primrose, listening, heard no hollering across lots, that I am able here to record the very day and hour when I first met her; partly that, and partly because Letitia has a better memory than Jonathan Weatherby's little boy, for I do not remember the thing at all and must take her word for it.

She was not gray then, of course. It must have been a pink, sweet, merry face that peered at me through the grape-vines, and a ringing laugh in those days, and two plump fingers that pinched my cheek. Her hair was brown and hung in braids, she tells me. She may have been fourteen.

I do not remember her so young. I do remember hugging some one and being hugged, next door – once in the bay-window by the red geraniums, whose scent still bears to me some faint, sweet airs of summers gone. It was not a relative who hugged me; I know by the feeling – the remembered feeling – for I was dutiful but not o'er keen in the matter of kissing our kith and kin. No, it was some one who took me by surprise and rumpled me, some one who seemed, somehow, to have the right to me, though not by blood – some one too who was nearer my age than most of our relatives, who were not so young and round and luring as I recall them. It was some one kneeling, so that our heads were even. The carpet was red, I remember. I had run in from play, I suppose, and she was there, and I – I may have been irresistible in those days. At least I know it was not I, but Eve who —

That must have been Letitia. I have never asked, but it was not Cousin Julia, or the Potter girl, or Sammy's sister. Excluding the rest of the world, I infer Letitia. And why not kiss me? She kissed Sammy, that fat, little, pudding-head Sammy McSomething, who played the mouth-organ. Since of all the tunes in the world he knew but one (you know which one), it may seem foolish that I cared; but, remember, I played none! And she kissed him for playing – kissed him, pudgy and vulgar as he was with the fetty-bag tied to his neck by a dirty string to ward off contagions! Ugh! I swore a green, green oath to learn the accordion.

That night in bed – night of the day she kissed him – with only the moon-lamp burning outside my window, I felt that my cheeks were wet. I had been thinking. It had come to me awfully as I tossed, that I had been born too late – for Letitia. Always I should be too young for her. Dear Letitia, white and kneeling even then, perhaps, at your whiter prayers, or reading after them, before you slept, in the Jane Eyre which lay for years beneath your pillow, you did not dream that you also were a heroine of romance. You did not dream of the plot then hatching in the night: plot with a villain in it – oh, beware, Letitia, of a pudgy, vulgar, superstitious villain wearing a charmed necklace of assafœtida to ward off evils, but powerless, even quite odorless against that green-eyed one! For, lo! Letitia: thy Hero standing beneath thy chamber-window in the moonbeams, is singing soprano to the gentle bellowsings of early love!

No, I do not play the accordion, nor did I ever. I never even owned one, so I never practised secretly in the barn-loft, nor did I ever, after all my plotting, lure young Sammy to play "Sweet Home" to our dear lady in the moonshine, only to be eclipsed, to his dire confusion and everlasting shame, by me. It may have been that I had no pocket-money, or that Santa Claus was short that year in his stock of wind-instruments, or that Jonathan Weatherby had no ear for melody about the house, but it is far more likely that Letitia Primrose never again offended, to my knowledge, in the matter of pudgy little vulgar boys.

Now, as I muse the longer of that fair young lady who lived next door to us, as I see myself crawling through the place with the pickets off, and recall beyond it the smell and taste of the warm Concords in my petty larcenies of a dozen autumns, then other things come back to me, of Letitia's youth, of its cares and sacrifice and its motherlessness. The Rev. David Primrose, superannuate divine, bard and scholar, lived mostly in a chair, as I recall him, and it was Letitia who wheeled him on sunny days when other girls were larking, who sat beside it in the bay-window, half-screened by her geraniums, reading to him when his eyes were weary, writing for him, when his hand trembled, those fine fancies that helped him to forget his sad and premature decay. She was his only child, his only housemaid, gardener, errand-boy, and "angel," as mother said, and the mater went sometimes to sit evenings with him lest Letitia should never know joys of straw-rides and taffy-pulls and church-sociable ice-cream and cake.

He had a fine, white, haggard face, too stern for a little child to care for, but less forbidding to a growing school-boy who had found by chance that it softened wonderfully with memories of that Rugby where Tom Brown went to school; for Dr. Primrose had conned his Xenophon within those very ivied-walls, and, what was more to Bertram Weatherby, under those very skies had fled like Tom, a hunted hare, working fleet wonders in the fields of Warwickshire.

"A mad March hare I was, Bertram," he would tell me, the light of his eyes blazing in that little wind of a happy memory, only to sink and go out again. Smoothing then with his fine, white hands the plaid shawl which had been his wife's and was now a coverlet for his wasted knees, he would say, sadly:

"Broomsticks, Bertram – but in their day there were no fleeter limbs in Rugby."

There on my upper shelf is an old, worn, dusty copy of the Odes of Horace, which I cannot read, but it bears on its title-page, in a school-boy's scrawl, the name and date for which I prize it:

"David Buckleton Primrose, Rugby, a. d. 18 – ."

He laughed as he gave it to me.

"Mark, Bertram," said he, "the 'a. d.'"

"Thank you, sir," I replied, tremulously. "You bet I'll always keep it, Mr. Primrose."

"Dr. Primrose," he reproved me, gently.

"Doctor, I mean. Maybe Tom had one like it."

"Likely," he replied. "You must learn to read it."

"Oh, I will, sir – and Greek."

"That's right, my boy. Remember always what Dr. Primrose said when he gave you Horace: that no gentleman could have pretensions to sound culture who was not well-grounded in the classics. Can you remember that?"

Twice he made me repeat it.

"Oh yes, sir, I can remember it," I told him. "Do you suppose Tom put in his name like that?"

"Doubtless," said Dr. Primrose, "minus the a. d."

"I didn't know you had a middle name," I said.

"Buckleton was my mother's maiden name," he explained. "She was of the Wiltshire Buckletons, and a very good family, too."

"David Buckleton Primrose," I read aloud.

"Lineal descendant of Dr. Charles Primrose, Vicar of Wakefield," added the minister, so solemnly that I fairly caught my breath. I had no notion then of whom he spoke, but there was that in the chant of his deep voice and the pleasant, pompous sound he gave the title, which awed me so I could only stare at him, and then at Horace, and then at him again, as he lay back solemnly in his chair, regarding me with half-shut eyes. Slowly a smile overspread his features.

"I was only jesting. Did you never hear of the Vicar of Wakefield?"

"No," I said.

"There: that little yellow book on the third shelf, between the green ones. He was its hero, a famous character of Oliver Goldsmith's. He also was a clergyman, and his name was Primrose."

"Oh," I said, "and did he go to Rugby, sir?"

Now, though the doctor laughed and shook his head, somehow I got that notion in my noddle, and to this very day must stop to remember that the vicar was not a Rugby boy. I have even caught myself imagining that I had read somewhere, or perhaps been told, that his middle name was Buckleton. One thing, of course, was true of both Primroses: they lived a. d.

II

LITTLE RUGBY

Hunting fox-grapes on a Saturday in fall, or rambling truantly on a fair spring morning, and chuckling to hear the school-bells calling in vain to us across the meadows, it was fine to say:

"Gee! If there was only a game-keeper to get into a row with!"

And then hear Peter's answer:

"Gee, yes! Remember how Velveteens caught Tom up a tree?"

It was fine, I say, because it proved that Peter, too, knew Tom Brown's School Days, and all about Slogger Williams and Tom's fight with him, all about East and Arthur and Dr. Arnold, and Tom in the last chapter standing alone in the Rugby chapel by the doctor's grave.

One night in winter I remember keeping watch – hard-pressed was Cæsar by the hordes of Gaul – a merest stripling from among the legions, stealthily deserted post, braving the morrow's reckoning to linger in delicious idleness by his father's shelves. There, in a tattered copy of an old Harper's, whose cover fluttered to the hearth-rug, his eyes fell upon a set of drawings of a gate, a quadrangle, a tower door with ivy over it, a cricket-field with boys playing and scattering a flock of sheep, a shop (at this his eyes grew wider) – a mere little Englishy village-shop, to be sure, but not like others, for this, indeed, was Sallie Harrowell's, where Tom bought baked potatoes and a pennyworth of tea! And out of one full, dark page looked Dr. Arnold – a face as fine and wise and tender as Bertram Weatherby had fancied it, so that he turned from it but to turn back again, thinking how Tom had looked upon its living presence in more wondrous days. Cæsar's deserter read and looked, and looked and read again, beside the hearth, forgetting the legions in the Gallic wilds, forgetting the Roman sentry calls for the cries of cricketers, and seeing naught but the guarded wickets on an English green and how the sheep browsed peacefully under the windows in the vines.

Schoolward next morning Rugby and Cæsar nestled together beneath his arm. He found his Little Rugby on a hill – a red brick school-house standing awkwardly and solemn-eyed in its threadbare playground, for all the world like a poor school-master, impoverished without, well stocked within. It was an ugly, mathematical-looking Rugby, austere and angular, and without a shred of vine or arching bough for birds or dreams to nest in, yet Bertram Weatherby hailed it joyfully, ran lightly up its painted steps, and flung wide open its great hall-door. A flood of sound gushed forth – laughter, boisterous voices, chatter of girls, and the movement of restless feet. Across the threshold familiar faces turned, smiling, familiar voices rose from the tumult, his shoulders tingled with the buffets of familiar hands.

"Hello, Bildad!"

"Hello, old saw-horse!"

"Hello, yourself! Take that!"

But suddenly, in the midst of these savage greetings, that gentle pressure of an arm about him, and Peter's voice:

"Hello, old man!"

Bertram would whirl at that, his face beaming; they had met but yesterday – it was as years ago – "Hello, old man! Look, Peter!"

But a gong clanged. Then all about them was the hurry and tramp of feet upon the stairs. Lost in the precious pages, they climbed together, arm in arm, drifting upward with the noisy current and through the doors of the assembly-hall.

"See, Bertram – the cricket-bats on the wall!"

"Yes; and the High Street – and Sallie Harrowell's!"

"And the doctor's door!"

Through another door just then their own masters were slowly filing, their own doctor last and weightiest of all, his smooth, strong face busy with some chapel reverie.

"The Professor's like Arnold," Bertram told Peter as they slipped together into their double seat.

The last gong clanged. There was a last bang of seats turned down, a last clatter of books upon the desks, the last belated, breathless ones fluttered down aisles with reddened cheeks, while the Professor waited with the Bible open in his hand.

"Let us read this morning the one-hundred-and-seventh Psalm – Psalm one hundred seven."

Peter was in Rugby, hidden by the girl in front. The boy named Bertram fixed his gaze upon the desk before him. Fair and smooth it was – too smooth with newness to please a Rugbeian eye. During the Psalm, with his pocket-knife he cut his initials in the yellow wood, and smiled at them. In days to come other boys would sit where he was sitting, and gaze and puzzle over that rude legacy, and, if dreams came true, might be proud enough to sprawl their elbows where a famous man had lolled. They might even hang the old seat-top upon the wall, that all who ran might read the glory of an alma mater in the disobedience of a mighty son. Bertram Weatherby gazed fondly upon his handiwork and closed his knife. Time and Destiny must do the rest.

"Let us pray."

For a moment the Professor stood there silently with lowered eyes. Bertram and Peter, their shoulders touching, bowed their heads.

"Our Father in heaven…"

There was no altar – only a flat-topped desk; no stained-glass windows – only the sunshine on the panes; and there a man's voice, deep and trembling, and here a school-boy's beating heart.

" … Help us, O Father, to be kinder…"

How you loved Peter, the Professor, and your ugly Rugby on its hill!

" … Lead us, O Father, to a nobler youth…"

Ay, they should know you for the man you were, deep down in your hidden soul.

" … Give us, O Father, courage for the battle…"

Wait till the next time Murphy bumped you on the stairs!

" … to put behind us all indolence of flesh and soul…"

You would study hard that term.

" … all heedlessness and disobedience…"

You would keep the rules.

" … for Jesus' sake – Amen."

"Peter, did you see the sheep…"

"If the two young gentlemen whispering on the back seat – "

You flushed angrily. Other fellows whispered on back seats. Why, always, did the whole school turn so knowingly to you?

Sitting, one study-hour, in the assembly-hall, Bertram's eyes wandered to the top of the Commentaries, strayed over the book to the braids of the Potter girl beyond, and on to the long, brown benches. The hum of recitations there, whispering behind him, giggling half suppressed, and the sharp rat-tat of the teacher's warning pencil came to him vaguely as in a dream. Through the tall windows he saw the spotless blue of the sky, the bright-green, swaying tips of the maples, and the flight of wings. Out there it was spring. Two more months of Cæsar – eight more dreary weeks of legions marching and barbarians bending beneath the yoke – then summer and the long vacation, knights jousting in the orchard, Indians scalping on the hill. Eight weeks – forty days of school.

Behind a sheltering grammar Peter was reading Hughes. Over his shoulder Bertram could make out Tom, just come to Rugby, watching the football, and that cool Crab Jones, fresh from a scrimmage, with the famous straw still hanging from his teeth. He read to the line of Peter's shoulder, then his eyes wandered again to the school-room window. It was spring in Grassy Ford – it was spring in Warwickshire…

"If the young gentleman gazing out of the window – "

"Tertia vigilia eruptionem fecerunt" – third watch – eruption – they made. Eruptionem– eruption – pimples – break out – sally. They made a sally at the third watch. Tertia vigilia, ablative case. Ablative of what? Ablative of time. Why ablative of time? Because a noun denoting – oh, hang their eruptionem! They were dead and buried long ago. Why does a fellow learn such stuff? Help his English – huh! English helps his Latin – that's what. How does a fellow know eruptionem? Because he's seen pimples – that's how. No sense learning Latin. Dead language – dead as a door-nail…

Bertram Weatherby drew a picture on the margin of his book – a head, shoulders, two arms, a trunk – and trousered legs. Carefully, then, he dotted in the eyes – the nose – the mouth – the ears beneath the tousled hair. He rolled the shirt-sleeves to the elbows – drew the trousers-belt – the shoes. Then delicately, smiling to himself the while, his head tilted, his eyes squinted like a connoisseur, he drew a straw pendent from the figure's lips.

"Peter, who's that?"

"Sh! not so loud. She'll hear you."

"Who's that, Peter?"

"Hm – Crab Jones."

"Now, if the idle young gentleman drawing pictures– "

"Tertia vigilia eruptionem fecerunt" – oh, they did, did they? What of that?..

"Rugby," said the Professor, who had a way of enlivening his classes with matters of the outer world – "Rugby, as I have heard my friend Dr. Primrose say, who was a Rugby boy himself, is very different from our public schools. Only the other day he was telling me of a school-mate, a professor now, who had returned to England, and who had spent a day there rambling about the ivied buildings, and searching, I suppose, for the ancient form where he had carved his name. Dr. Primrose told me how, as this old friend lingered on the greensward where the boys played cricket, as he himself had done on that very spot – fine, manly fellows in their white flannels – he heard not a single oath or vulgar word in all that hour he loitered there. One young player called to another who ran too languidly after the ball. 'Aren't you playing, Brown?' he cried, with a touch of irony in his voice."

The Professor paused.

"I have heard stronger language on our playground here."

He paused again, adding, impressively:

"We might do well to imitate our English cousins."

"Just what I say," whispered young Bertram Weatherby.

"The Prof.'s all right," Peter whispered back.

And so, down-town, after school that day, behold! – sitting on stools at Billy's Palace Lunch Counter, in the Odd Fellow's Block – two fine, manly chaps, not in white cricket flannels, to be sure, but —

"It's some like Sallie Harrowell's," one mumbled, joyously, crunching his buttered toast, and the other nodded, taking his swig of tea.

So it came to pass that they looked reverently upon the Professor with Rugbeian eyes, and more admiringly as they noted new likenesses between him and the great head-master. There was a certain resemblance of glowing countenance, they told themselves, a certain ardor of voice, as they imagined, and over all a sympathy for boys.

"Well," he would say, stopping them as they walked together arm in arm, "if you seek Peter, look for Bertram – eh?" giving their shoulders a bantering shake which pleased them greatly as they sauntered on.

Listening to his prayers in chapel, hearing at least the murmur of them as they bowed their heads, their minds swayed by the earnestness of the great man's voice rather than by the words he uttered, they felt that glow which comes sometimes to boys who read and dream. Then Bertram loved the touch of Peter's shoulder, and, with the memory of another doctor and another school-boy, he loved his Rugby, little and meagre and vineless though it was upon its threadbare hill. When he had left it he would return some day, he thought; he would stand like Tom in the last chapter; he would sit again at his old brown desk, alone, musing – missing his mate, and finding silence where happy whisperings and secret play had been – but still in the pine before him he would trace the letters he had cut, and, seeing them, he would be again the boy who cut them there.

One morning, such was the fervor of the Professor's voice, there was some such dream, and when it ended, prayer and dream together —

"After these exercises – "

It was the Professor's voice.

" – I wish to see in my office Bertram Weatherby and Peter Wynne."

They heard aghast. The whole school turned to them. The Past rose dreadfully before their startled vision, yet for once, it seems, they could find no blemish there.

Down-stairs, quaking, they slipped together through the office door. The Professor had not arrived. They took their stations farthest from his chair, and leaned, wondering, for support against the wall. There was a murmur of assembling classes overhead, a hurry of belated feet, and then – that well-known, awful tread. Peter gulped; Bertram shifted his feet, his heart thumping against his ribs, but they squared their shoulders as the door flew open and the Professor, his face grave, his eyes flashing, swooped down upon them in the little room.

"Bertram!"

"Yes, sir."

"Peter!"

"Yes, sir."

"I have sent for you to answer a most serious charge – most serious, indeed. I am surprised. I am astonished. Two of my best pupils, two whom I have praised, not once but many times, here in this very room – two, I may say, of my favorite boys found violating, wilfully violating, the rules of this school. I could not believe the charge till I saw the evidence with my own eyes. I could not believe that boys like you – boys of good families, boys with minds far above the average of their age, would despoil, openly despoil – yes, I may say, ruthlessly despoil – the property of this school, descending – "

"Why, sir, what prop – "

"Descending," cried the Professor, "to vandalism – to a vandalism which I have again and again proscribed. Over and over I have said, and within your hearing, that I would not countenance the defacing of desks!"

Bertram Weatherby glanced furtively at Peter Wynne. Peter had sighed.

"Over and over," said the Professor, "I have told you that they were not your property or mine, but the property of the people whose representative I am. Yet here I find you marring their tops with jack-knives, carving great, sprawling letters – "

"But, sir, at Rug – "

"Great, ugly letters, I say, sprawling and slashed so deeply that the polished surface can never be restored."

"At Rug – "