Miss Primrose: A Novel

Now the yellow waistcoat, whose name was George – Cousin George McLean – had a daughter Dove, or Cousin Dove, as Letitia called her, concerning whom we always used to smile and wonder, so that in course of time myths had grown up about the girl whom none of us had ever seen and of whom we had no notions save the idle fancies suggested by her odd, sweet, unforgettable little name.

The mater had always said that she must be a quaint and demure little thing – in short, dovelike.

That, my father argued, was quite unlikely, since he had never known a child to mature in keeping with a foolish, flowery, or pious Christian name. He had never known a human Lily to grow up tall and pale and slender, or a Violet to be shy and modest and petite, or a Faith or Hope or Patience to be singularly spiritual and mild. For example, there was Charity B – , of Grassy Ford, who hinted that heaven was Presbyterian, and that she knew folks, not a thousand miles off, either, who would never be – Presbyterians, my father said; and so, he added, it was dollars to dough-nuts that Cousin Dove was not at all dovelike, but a freckled and red-haired, roistering, tomboy little thing.

Letitia had a notion, she scarce knew how or why, that Cousin Dove was not birdlike, but like a flower, she said – a white-and-pink-cheeked British type with fluffy yellow hair and a fondness for candy, trinkets, and even boys.

As for myself, I had two notions as a boy – one for the forum, the other for my cell. The first was simply that Cousin Dove was pale and tall and frigid beyond endurance. I could see her, I declared, going to church somewhere with two little black-and-gilt books held limply in her hand – and she had green eyes, I said. On the other hand, privately, I kept a far different portrait in mind – a gilded one, rather a golden vision by way of analogy, I suppose, for was not Dove the veritable daughter of a gorgeous, saffron-hued brocade? From yellow waistcoat to cloth of gold is but a step for a bookish boy. She was tall and stately, I told myself; and as I saw her then, her mediæval robe clung lovingly about her, plain but edged with pearls (seed-pearls I think they called them in the old romances), and she had a necklace of larger pearls, loops of them hanging a golden cross upon her bosom. Her face was radiant, her eyes blue, her hair golden, and she wore a coronal of meadow flowers. I do not mean that I really fancied Cousin Dove was so in flesh and blood, but such to me was the spirit of her gentle name, the spell of which had conjured up for me in some rare moment of youthful fancy this Lady of the Marigolds, this Christmas-card St. Dove.

In the midst of Letitia's sad uprooting of her old garden, as she called the only home she had ever known, a letter came from the yellow waistcoat conveying surprising news. Dove herself was leaving for Grassy Ford to persuade her cousin to return with her and dwell henceforth with the McLeans. A thrill ran through our little household at the thought of that approaching maid of dreams. Now we should know, the mater said, that the girl was dovelike. "Humpf!" was my father's comment. Letitia trembled, she said, with a return of her childish awe of the yellow waistcoat. I myself was stirred – I was still in teens, and dreaded girls I had never met.

On the July morning that was to bring her, I rose early, I remember, and took down my fishing-rod.

"Not a bad idea, either," remarked my father, as he stood watching me. "Still," he added, "there's no hurry, Bertram. She'll want to change her dress first, you know."

I made no answer.

"It's a bit selfish though," he continued, "to be carrying her off this way the very first morning."

"Mother," I said, coolly, "will you put up some sandwiches? I may not be back till dark."

"Why, Bertram! Going fishing on the day – "

"I don't really see what that's got to do with it," I interrupted. "Must I give up all my fun because a mere girl's coming?"

"No, Bertram," said my father, in his kindest tones. "Go, by all means, and here [he was rummaging in the bookcase drawer] – here, my son, take these along, these old field-glasses. They may come handy. You can see our yard, you know, from the top of Sun Dial – and the front porch. Splendid fishing up on Sun Dial – "

But I was off.

"Bertram! Bertram!" called my mother, but I did not heed her. I stopped at a grocery for cheese and crackers, and strode off to the farthest brook – farthest, I mean, from Sun Dial. Troublesome Brook, it was called, not so much for the spring freshets that spread it over the lower meadows as for the law-suits it had flowed through in its fickle course between two town-ships and good farm-lands. Under its willows I cooled my wrath and disentangled my knotted tackle. The stream flowed silently. There was no wind, no sound, indeed, but the drone of insects; all about me was a world in reverie, mid-summer-green save for the white and blue above and the yellow wings of vagrant butterflies and the sun golden on the meadows. Many a time I have fished in that very spot. It is a likely one for idleness and for larger fish than any I ever caught there, and waiting for them as a boy I used to read in the little pocket-fitting books I dote on to this day – they fit the hand so warmly, unlike their bigger brethren, who at the most give you three-fingers' courtesy. There on that same moist bank I have sounded deeper pools than Troublesome's, and have come home laden with unlooked-for spoil that glistens still in a certain time-worn upper creel of mine.

But I had no book that day, having forgotten one in my hurried parting, and I had not yet mastered that other tranquil art of packing little bowls with minced brown meditation – so I was restless. The world seemed but half awake. I chafed at the stillness. Before, I had found it pleasant; now it nettled me. I frowned impatiently at my cork dozing on the waters. I roused it savagely, and gazed up at the sun.

"Queer," I said to myself. "Queer it should be so late this morning" – but I did not mean the sun.

Trains from the West glide into Grassy Ford on a long curve following the trend of Troublesome and the pastoral valley through which it runs. It is a descending grade down which the cars plunge roaring as though they had gathered speed rather than slackened it, and as though they would run the gantlet of the ugly buildings and red freight-cars that, from the windows of the train, are all one sees of our lovely town. Now the Black Arrow was the pride of the X., Y. & Z., and all that summer had arrived in the nick of its schedule time.

"Funny," said I to myself, looking at the sun. "Funny it should be late this morning."

I pulled up my hook and cast it in again. My cork shook itself – yawned, I was about to say, and settled down again as complacently as before. Leisurely the ripples widened and were effaced among the shadows.

What right had any one to assume that I had not long planned to go a-fishing that very morning?

I pulled up my line again.

Even a father should not presume on the kinship of his son.

I dropped my bait into a likelier hole.

Besides, I was not a child any longer, to be bullyragged by older people. Had I not gone fishing a hundred times? – yet no one had ever deemed it odd before.

My float drifted against a snag. I jerked it back.

It was the only unpleasant trait my father had.

Again I squinted at the sun. "Queer," said I, "it should be so late this morning." I pulled up my —

Hark! That was a whistle! There would be just time to reach the open if I ran!

I ran.

Breathless, I made the meadow fence and clambered up – and saw her train go by. Yes, I – I waved to it. Suppose she had seen me! I was only some truant farm-boy on a rail.

Her train ran by me in a cloud of dust and clattered on among the freight-cars. I heard the rumble die away, but the bell kept ringing. The brakeman, doubtless, would help her off – Letitia would be waiting with out-stretched arms – girls are such fools for kissing – and then father would take her bag, and the surrey would whisk her off to the mater, bareheaded at the gate. Rails are sharp sitting; let us look at the cork again.

It was calm as ever and nestling against a snag. I pulled up my line till the bait emerged, limp, unnibbled. Savagely I swished it back – it caught in the willows. I pulled. It would not budge. In a sudden rage I whipped out my pocket-knife, severed the cord as high above me as I could reach, and wrapping the remnant about my rod, turned townward.

A dozen yards from the faithless stream, I remembered my cheese and crackers, and went back for them, and started off again, purposeless. Never before had vagabondage on a golden morning seemed irksome to me. It was not that I wished to see Cousin Dove, but merely that I had no desire to do anything else – a different matter. Only one way was really barred to me, since in point of pride I could not go homeward till the sun sank, yet all other ways seemed shorn somehow of their old delights, I knew so well every stick and stone of them.

While I was dallying thus, irresolute, I thought of "The Pide Bull" and my old friend Butters. It was inspiration. In twenty minutes (mindful of my father's eyes meanwhile) I had reached the shop.

"Hello," he growled, as I appeared. "You here again?"

"Yep."

"What do you want?"

"Nothing."

"Humpf! Help yourself, then."

"Mr. Butters, what kind of type is this?"

"What type?"

"This type."

"What good '11 it do to tell you? You won't remember it, if I do."

"Yes, I will."

"You won't know ten minutes after I tell you."

"Go on, Mr. Butters. Tell me."

"Well, if you must know, it's b'geois."

"B-what?"

"B'geois, I tell you, and I won't tell you again, either."

"How do you spell it, Mr. Butters?"

"Say, what do you think I am? I haven't got time to sit here all day and answer questions."

"But how do you spell it, Mr. Butters?"

"Dictionary's handy, isn't it?"

"You ought to know how to spell it," I remarked, fluttering the dictionary.

"Who said I didn't know how to spell it?"

"You told me to look it up."

"Did, hey? And what d' I do it for? D' you think I've got time to be talking to every young sprig like you?"

"Here it is, Mr. Butters. It's spelled b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s."

"Precisely," said the editor – "b-o-u-r-g-o-i-s, bur-joyce."

"No – g-e-o-i-s, Mr. Butters."

"Just what I said."

"You left out the 'e.'"

"Why, confound you, what do you mean by telling me I don't know my own business?"

"I was only fooling, Mr. Butters. You did say the 'e,' of course."

"You're a liar!" he promptly answered. "I didn't say the 'e,' and you know it!"

He broke off into a roar of triumphant laughter, but well I knew who had won the day. He was mine – he and "The Pide Bull," and the story of his wife's uncle's old yellow rooster, and the twenty legends of Tommy Rice, the sexton, who "stuttered in his walk, by George!" – yes, and the famous narrative of how Mr. Butters thrashed the barkeep – all, all his darling memories were mine till sunset if I chose to listen.

He took me to luncheon at the Palace Hotel near by his shop, and afterwards mellowed perceptibly over his pipe, as we sat together in the clutter of paper about his desk waiting for the one-o'clock whistle to blow him to work again.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Eighteen," said I, half ashamed I was no more.

"Beautiful age," he mused, nodding his head and stroking his warm, black bowl. "Beautiful age, my boy." He spoke so mildly that I waited, silent and a little awed to have come so near him unawares, and feeling the presence of some story he had never told before.

But the whistle blew one o'clock and he rose and put on his apron, and went back to his case again, talking some nonsense about the weather; and though I lingered all afternoon, he was nothing but the old, gruff printer, and never afterwards did I catch him nooning and thinking of the age he said was beautiful.

It was six when I took up my fishing-tackle and went home to supper, whistling. I found the mater in the kitchen.

"Ah," she said. "What luck, Bertram?"

"None," I replied. "The fish weren't biting."

"Oh, that's too bad. You must be tired."

"I am, and hungry. Is father home?"

"Not yet. Come, you must meet – "

But I ran up the kitchen staircase to the hall above. Safe in my room, I could hear a murmuring from Letitia's. Hers was a front room, mine a rear one, and a long hall intervened, so I made nothing of the voices.

I scrubbed and lathered till my nose was red and shining beautifully. Then I drew on my Sunday suit, in which I always stood the straighter, and my best black shoes, in which I always stamped the louder, and my highest, whitest collar, and my best light silk cravat – a Christmas present from Letitia, a wondrous thing of pale, sweet lavender, 'in which not Solomon – though it would hike up behind. It was not like other ties, and while I was struggling there I heard the supper knell. I pulled fiercely. The soft silk crumpled taut – and the bow stuck up seven ways for Sunday. So I unravelled it again – looped it once more with trembling fingers, for I heard the voices on the stairs, and jerked it into place – but what a jumble!

"Bertram! Bertram!" It was father's voice. "Supper, Bertram."

"In a minute."

The face in the glass was red as a sunset in harvest-time. The eyes I saw there popped wildly.

"Bertram!"

"Yes; I hear you! [Confound it.]"

"Supper, Bertram. We are all waiting."

I deigned no answer.

Then father rang. Oh, I knew it was father. I looped desperately and hauled again like a sailor at his cordage, and so, muttering, wrung out a bow-knot. Then in the mirror I took a last despairing look, leaped for the doorway, slipped, stumbled, and almost fell upon the stairs, hearing below me a lusty warning – "Here he comes!" – and so emerged, rosy, a youth-illumined, with something lavender, they tell me, fluttering in my teeth (and something blood-red, I could tell them, trembling in my heart).

And there she was!

There she stood in the smiling midst of them, smiling herself and giving me her hand – Cousin Dove – Cousin Dove McLean, at the first sight of whom my shyness vanished.

"Your tie, my son, seems a trifle – "

So this was Cousin Dove? – this was the daughter of the golden waistcoat – this brown-eyed school-girl with brown – no, as I lived! – red hair.

VII

OF HAMADRYADS AND THEIR SPELLS

It was a golden summer that last of my youth at home, with Cousin Dove to keep us forever smiling. She was just eighteen and of that blessed temperament which loves each day for its gray or its sunny self. She coaxed Letitia out-of-doors where they walked much in the mater's garden with their arms about each other's waist. Letitia's pace was always deliberate, while Dove had the manner of a child restrained, as if some blithe and skipping step would have been more pleasant, would have matched better her restless buoyancy, her ever upturned beaming face as she confided in the elder woman – what? What do girls talk so long about? I used to marvel at them, wondering what Dove could find so merry among our currant-vines. She was a child beside Letitia. She had no memories to modulate that laughing voice of hers, no tears to quench the twin flames dancing in her eyes, and never an anxious thought in those days to cast its shadow there where her hair – red, I first called it; it was pure chestnut – brown, I mean, with the red just showing through, and wondrous soft and pretty on the margin of her fair white forehead, where it clung like tendrils of young scampering vine reddening in the April sun. Even Letitia, whose Present seemed always twilit, was tempted by-and-by into claiming something of that heritage of youth of which she had been so long deprived. From mere smiling upon her gay young cousin she fell to making little joyous venturings herself into our frolics, repartees, and harmless badinage – "midsummer madness," father called it – a sort of scarlet rash, he said, which affected persons loitering on starlit evenings on the porch or wandering under trees. He was the soul of our table banter, and after supper sat with us on the steps smoking his cigar and "devilling," as he said, "you younger caps and bells." Whom he loved he teased, after the fashion of older men, and Dove was the chief butt of that rude fondness. It was not his habit to caress, but his eyes twinkled at his fair victim.

"And to think, Dove," he was wont to say-when she had charmed him, "that Bertram here swore that you carried prayer-books and had green eyes!"

"And what did you prophesy, Uncle Weatherby?"

"I? The truth."

"And what was that?"

"Why, I said you were an angel, though a little frolicsome perhaps, and with beautiful auburn hair. Did I not, my son?"

"No, sir. You thought she would be a tomboy with red – "

"Precisely," he would interrupt. "You see, my dear, how in every particular I am corroborated by my son."

Into these quiet family tournaments, Letitia, as I have said, was slowly drawn, but it was a new world to her and she was timid in it. Doctor Primrose had been endowed with wit, even with a quiet, subtle humor in which his daughter shared, but beneath their lighter moments there had flowed always an undercurrent of that sad gravity which tinged their lives together. If they were playful in each other's company, it was out of pity for each other's lot, his in his chair, hers by its side, rather than because they could not help the jest. It was meant to cheer each other – that kind of tender gayety which, however fanciful, however smiling, ends where it begins – in tears unshed. Waters in silent woodland fountains, all untouched by a single gleam from the sky above the boughs, lose sometimes their darker hues and turn to amber beneath the fallen leaves – but they are never golden like the meadow pools; they never flash and sparkle in the sun.

Letitia was not yet thirty; life stretched years before her yet; so, coaxed by Cousin Dove and me, she gave her hands to us, half-delighted, half-afraid. Here now, at last, were holidays, games, tricks, revels, the mummery and masque, the pipe and tabor – all the rosy carnival of youth. Her eyes kindled, her heart beat faster as we led her on – but at the first romp failed her. It was beautiful, she pleaded – only let her smile upon it as from a balcony – she could not dance – she had never learned our songs.

We did not urge her. She sat with the mater and smiled gladly upon our mirth. In all the frolics of that happy summer her eyes were always on Cousin Dove, as if, watching, she were thinking to herself – enviously, often sadly, I have no doubt, but through it all lovingly and with a kind of pride in that grace and flowerness —

"There is the girl I might have been."

Dove, even when she seemed the very spirit of our effervescence, kept always a certain letter of that lovely quaintness which her name implied. She was a dove, the mater said, reminding us for the hundredth time of her old prediction – a dove always, even among the magpies; meaning, I suppose, father and myself.

It was not all play that summer. I was to enter college in the fall, and I labored at exercises, helped not a little by a voice still saying:

"That's right, my boy. Remember what Dr. Primrose said when he gave you Horace."

Now was I under the spell of that ancient life which had held him thralled to his very end. Mine were but meagre vistas, it is true, but I caught such glimpses of marble beauty through the pergola of Time, as made me a little proud of my far-sightedness. Seated with Dove and Letitia beneath a favorite oak, half-way up Sun Dial, I discoursed learnedly, as I supposed, only to find that in classic lore the poet's daughter was better versed than I. She brightened visibly at the sound of ancient names; they had been the music of her father's world, and from earliest childhood she had listened to it. Seated upon the grass, I, the school-boy, expounded text-book notes. She, the daughter of "Old David Homer," as Butters called him, told us bright tales of gods and heroes, nymphs and flowers and the sailing clouds shell-pink in the setting sun. They had been to her what Mother Goose and Robinson Crusoe had been to me; they had been her fairy stories, told her at eve ere she went to bed; and now as she told them, an eager winsomeness crept upon her, her voice was sweeter, her face was glorified with something of that roseate light in which her scenes were laid; she was a child again, and Dove and I, listening, were children with her, asking more.

She sat bolt-upright while she romanced for us. I lay prone before her with my chin upon my hands, nibbling grass-stalks. Dove, like Letitia, sat upon the turf, now gazing raptly with her round brown eyes at the story-teller's face, now gazing off at the purple woodland distance or at Grassy Ford's white spires among the elms below.

"Why, Letty, you're a poetess," Dove once said, so breathlessly that Letitia laughed. "And I," Dove added, "why, I don't know a single story."

"Why should you know one?" replied Letitia, pinching Dove's rueful face. "Why tell an idyl, when you can live one, little Chloe, little wild olive? You yourself shall be a heroine, my dear."

Idling there under distant trees for refuge from the August sun, which burns and browns our Grassy Fordshire, crumbling our roads to a gray powder and veiling with it the green of way-side hedge and vine – idling there, Dove was a creature I had never seen before and but half-divined in visions new to me. Fair as she seemed under our roof-tree, there in the woodland she was far the lovelier. Young things flowered about us, their fragrance scenting the summer air. Like them her presence wore a no less subtle spell. It was an ancient glamour, though I did not know it then, it seemed so new to me – one which young shepherds felt, wondering at it, in the world's morning; and since earth's daughters, then as now, with all their fairness, could scarce be credited with such wondrous witchery, those young swains came home breathless from the woodland with tales of dryads and their spells. Maiden mine, in the market-place, you are only one among many women, though you be beautiful as a dream, but under boughs the birds still sing those songs the first birds sang – there it is always Eden, and thou art the only woman there.

On my nineteenth birthday three climbed Sun Dial as three had climbed it once before. Leaving the village we crossed the brook by that self-same ford of stones, and plunged at once into the forest and ancient orchard that clothed the slope. I was not leading now, but helping them, Dove and Letitia, over the rocks and brambles and steeper places of the ascent. Threading as before that narrow trail I knew by heart, I broke the cob-webs and parted the fragrant tangle that beset our way, vines below, branches above us. It was just such another August noon, and the world was nodding; no birds sang, no squirrels chattered. We stopped for breath, resting upon a wall shaded by an ancient oak.

"The very spot!" I cried. "Do you remember, Letitia, how you and Robin rested here?"

"Yes," she answered.

"Do you remember how I called to you, and came running back?"

"Yes."

"I'd been waiting for you under an apple-tree. How I should like to see old Robin now!"

"Who was Robin?" asked Cousin Dove, and so I told her of the Devonshire lad. During my story Letitia wandered, as she liked to do, searching for odd, half-hidden flowers among the grasses. Soon she was nowhere to be seen, nor could we hear her near us.

"Letitia was fond of Robin, was she not?" asked Cousin Dove.

"Oh yes," I said. "So were we all."

"But I mean – don't you think she may have loved him?"

"Oh," I said, "I never thought of that; besides, Letitia never had time for – "

Dove opened wide her eyes.

"Must you have time for – "

"I mean," I stammered, "she was never free like – you or me; we – "

"I see," she replied, coloring. "He must have been a splendid fellow."

"He was," I said.

"Dear Letitia!" murmured Cousin Dove, gazing thoughtfully at the wilted flower she held. The wood which had been musical with voices was strangely silent now. It was something more than a mere stillness. It was like a spell, for I could not break it, though I tried. Dove, too, was helpless. There was no wind – I should have known had one been blowing – yet the boughs parted above her head, and a crown fell shining on her hair! – her hair, those straying tendrils of it, warm and ruddy and now fired golden at that magic touch – her brow, pure as a nun's, beneath that veiling – the long, curved lashes of her hidden eyes – her cheeks still flushed – her lips red-ripe and waiting motionless.