Miss Primrose: A Novel

She raised her eyes to me! – a moment only, but my heart leaped, for in that instant it dawned upon me how all that vision there – flesh, blood, and soul – was just arm's-length from me!

It was – I know.

PART II

The School-Mistress

I

THE OLDER LETITIA

Precisely at half-past seven there was a faint rustling on our staircase and a moment later Letitia Primrose appeared at our breakfast-table smiling "Good-morning." She was dressed invariably in the plainest of black gowns with the whitest of ruching about her wrists and throat, and at the collar a pin which had been her mother's, a cameo Minerva in an antique setting of vine leaves wrought in gold. The gown itself – I scarcely know how to style it, for no frill or foible of the day was ever visible in its homely contour, or if existing there, had been so curbed by the wearer's modesty as to be quite null and void to the naked eye. Every tress of her early whitening hair lay smoothly back about her forehead, and behind was caught so neatly beneath her comb, it might be doubted how or if she ever slept upon it. Just so immaculate, virginal, irreproachable did the older Letitia come softly down to us every week-day morning of her life, and taking her chair between Dove's seat and mine, she would adjust her gold-rimmed glasses to better see how the night had dealt with us, and beaming upon us with one of the pleasantest of inquiring smiles, would murmur —

"Well?"

She ate little, and that so unobtrusively, I used to wonder if she ate at all. I can remember her lifting her cup, but do not recall that it ever reached her lips. She had, I think, some trick of magnetism, some power of the eye that held yours at the crucial moment, so that you never really saw her sip or bite, and she never chewed, I swear, yet I never heard of her bad digestion. Eating in her was a chaste indulgence common only, I believe, to spinsterhood – a rite, communionlike, rather than a feast.

When the clock struck eight, we would rise together – I for my office, Dove for farewells, Letitia for the school-room; I with a clattering chair, Dove demurely, Letitia noiselessly, to put on a hat as vague and unassuming as that decorous garment in which she cloaked herself from the outer world – a kind of cape and jacket, I think it was, in winter, but am not quite sure. In summer it was a cashmere shawl. Then slipping on a pair of gloves, black always and always whole, however faded, she would take up her small pearl-handled parasol, storm or shine, and that linen bag of hers, a marvellous reticule for books and manuscripts with a separate pocket in the cover-flap for a comb and mirror and extra handkerchief – though not to my knowledge; I am merely telling what was told. Nor am I telling all that was said of Letitia's panoply and raiment, the manner of which at every season, at every hour of the night and day, was characterized – if I have understood the matter – not so much by a charm of style as of precaution, a modest providence, a truly exquisite foresight and readiness for all emergencies, however perilous, so that fire nor flood nor war's alarms nor death itself, however sudden, should find her unprepared. Fire at night would merely have illumined a slender, unobtrusive figure descending a stair or ladder unabashed, decently, even gracefully arrayed in a silk kimono which hung nightly on the foot-board of her bed; and since for other purposes it was never worn, it remains unscorched, and, indeed, unblemished, to this very day. But for that grim hand the moment of whose clutch can never be foretold with certainty, nothing could exceed Letitia's watchfulness and care. She dressed invariably, I have said, in the plainest black, but I have heard, and on authority I could not question, that however simple and inexpensive those outer garments were, the inner vestments were of finest linen superimposing the softest silk. Thus – for a tendency to some heart-affection was hereditary in the Primrose family – thus could no sudden dissolution or surrender, such as might occur in an absence from home and the ministration of loving friends, be attended ever by any post-mortem embarrassment or chagrin, but rather would disclose a pride and delicacy of taste and consideration, the more remarkable and worthy of approval and regret, because it could never otherwise have been revealed. Nothing I know of in the way of gifts was more acceptable to Letitia Primrose than those black silk ones which she took such pains to purchase and secrete.

It was a wondrous reticule, that linen pouch of which I spoke, bearing "L. P." embroidered on its outer side. I say its outer, for so she carried it always; and in years, so many I will not count them, I never knew that monogram turned in, or down. She met me with it in the doorway from which Dove watched us till we had left the gate. Mornings, for years, we went to our work together, save when an urgent matter summoned me earlier or compelled me, against my will and exercise, to drive. Morn after morn we walked together to the red brick school-house, talking of village news and the varying moods of our fickle northern weather, or perhaps of books, old ones and new ones, or of those golden memories that we shared. They were not perfunctory as I recall them, those morning dialogues. There was no abstraction about Letitia, no cursory, unweighed chattering of things so obvious as to need no comment. Every topic might be a theme for her mild eloquence. It might be of Keats that she discoursed to me, or Browning or Alfred Tennyson or perhaps the Corsican, whom she hated, partly for tyranny, partly because he made her "look at him," she said; it might be the Early Church, whose records she had read and read again, though not one-half so much for Cuthbert's holiness, I told her, as for Fuller's quaintness, which she loved; or it might be a March morning that we walked together, while she spoke like a poet's daughter of the first pink arbutus some grinning farm-boy had laid but yesterday upon her desk.

Why no one ever wooed and won such fervor seemed passing strange to Dove and me. With all the grace of goodness and gentle courage in which she faced the world alone, in all those years which had followed her father's death, she had never, to Dove's ken or mine, won a single suitor. Those burdens of care and sacrifice laid too soon upon her frail, young shoulders had borne early fruit – patience, wisdom, and a sweet endurance beyond her years – but on such harvest young men set small store. A taste for it comes late. It made her pleasing to her elders, but those of her own years shrank instinctively from its very perfectness. She had matured too soon. How then should any one so coolly virtuous know trial or passion? Surely so young a saint could have no warm impetuous hours to remember, no sweet abandonment, no pretty idyls – had she even a spring-time to recall?

Men admired her for her mind and heart, but in her presence secretly were ill at ease. Her self-dependence rendered useless their stronger arms accustomed to being leaned upon. She smiled upon them, it is true, but not as men like to be smiled upon – neither as a child, trustingly, nor as a queen, confident of their homage and gallant service. She appealed neither to their protection nor to their pride. She awoke the friend, but not the lover, in them; and so the years slipped by and she won no chivalry, because she claimed none. She had but asked and but received respect.

Our raillery, harmlessly meant, was not always kind, as I look back at it. It is scarcely pleasant to be reminded that among one's kind one is not preferred, yet Letitia bore all our jesting with steadfast pleasantry.

"Do I look forlorn? Do I look so helpless?" she would ask. Her very smile, her voice, her step, seemed in themselves an answer. "What do I want with a husband then?"

"Why," Dove would say, "to make you happy, Letitia."

"You child: I am perfectly happy."

"Well," Dove would answer, stubbornly, "to make you happier, then."

I have forgotten Letitia's answers – all but one of them:

"I lived so long with my scholar-love," she once said, sweetly, of her father, "I fear I never should be content with an ordinary man."

Dove declared that no one in Grassy Fordshire was half worthy of her cousin; at least, she said, she knew but one, and he was already wedded – and to a woman, she added, humbly, not half so good or wise or wonderful as Letitia. Dove stoutly held that Letitia could have married, had she wished it, and whom she would. Father would shake his head at that.

"No," he would say, "Letty is one of those women men never think of as a bride."

"But why?" Dove would demand then, loyally. "She is the very woman to find real happiness in loving and self-sacrifice. Adversity would never daunt her, and yet," my wife would say with scorn rising in her voice, "the very men who need such help and comprehension and comradeship in their careers, would pass her by, and for a chit of girl who would never be happy sharing their struggles – but only their success!"

"My dear," father would reply, sagely, "a man glories in his power to hand a woman something she cannot reach herself. Letty Primrose has too long an arm."

"But if a man once married Letitia – " Dove would protest, and father would chuckle then.

"Ah, yes, my dear, if one only would! But there's the rub. Doubtless he would find Letitia much like other women, quite willing he should reach things down to her from the highest shelf. But he must be a wise man to suspect just that – to guess what lies beneath our Letty's apparent self-sufficiency."

"An older man might," Dove once suggested. "A general, or a great professor, or a minister plenipotentiary."

"Doubtless," he answered, "but our Grassy Ford is a narrow world, my dear. The young sprigs in it are only silly lads, and the elder bachelors are very musty ones, I fear – and not an ambassador among them. I doubt very much if Letitia will ever meet him – that man you mean, who might choose Letty's love through wisdom, and whose wisdom she might choose through love."

Dove's answer was a sigh.

"Bertram," she said, "you must make some real nice, elderly bachelor doctor friends, and we'll ask them to visit us."

It seemed a likely plan, but nothing came of it, and the silly lads and the musty ones alike left our Letitia more and more to friendships beyond her years. From being so much in the company of her elders, she grew in time to be more like them. Her modesty became reserve; reserve, in turn, a certain awkwardness or shy aloofness in the presence of the other sex – primness, it was called. She had not forgotten how to smile; her talk was blithe enough with those she knew, and was still colored by her love for poetry, but it fast grew quainter and less colloquial; there was a certain old-fashioned care and subtlety about it, a rare completeness in its phrases not at all like the crude, half-finished ones with which our Grassy Ford belles were content. It added to her charm, I think, but to the evidence as well of that maturity and self-complacency which all men seemed to fear and shun, not one suspecting that the glow beneath meant youth – youth preserved through time and trial to be a light to her, or to Love belated.

Her brown hair turned to gray, her gray to white, and she still came down to us smiling good-morning; still worshipped Keats, still scorned the upstart who made her look; taught on, year after year, in the red brick school-house, wearing the wild flowers farm-boys gathered in the hills. Her life flowed on like a stream in summer, softly in shadow and in sun. She seemed content – no bitter note in her low voice, no glance of envy, malice, or chagrin in those kind gray eyes of hers, which beamed so gently upon others' loves; we used to wonder how they might have shone upon her own.

One day in August – it was again that anniversary birthday around which half my memories of her seem to cling – she gave me a copy of In Memoriam, and bought for herself the linen for another reticule. Neatly, and in the fashion of our grandmothers' day, she worked upon it her initials, L. and P., in Old-English letters, old-rose and gold.

"What," I asked, "is the figure meant for?"

"The figure? Where?"

"In the background there – the figure seven, in the lighter gold."

She bent to study it.

"There is a seven there," she said. "I must have used a lighter silk."

"Then shall you alter it?" I asked.

"No," she answered. "It is now too late."

"She means the figure," I explained to Dove.

"The letters also," Dove murmured, softly, as we turned away.

II

ON A CORNER SHELF

At five minutes to four o'clock the red school-house gave no sign of the redder life beating within its walls. The grounds about it, worn brown by hundreds of restless feet and marked in strange diagrams, the mystic symbols of hop-scotch, marbles, and three-old-cat, were quite deserted save for sparrows busy with crumbs from the mid-day luncheon-pails. Five minutes later, one listening by the picket-fence might have heard faintly the tinkling of little bells, and a rising murmur that with the opening of doors burst suddenly into a tramping of myriad feet, while from the lower hallway two marching lines came down the outer stair, primly in step, till at the foot they sprang into wild disorder, a riot of legs and skirts, with the shouts and shrieks and shrill whistlings of children loosed from bondage. When the noisy tide had swept down the broad walk into the street, Letitia might be seen following smilingly, her skirts surrounded by little girls struggling for the honor of being nearest and bearing her reticule.

At the end of happy days Letitia's face bore the imprint of a sweet contentment, as if the love she had given had been returned twofold, not only in the awkward caresses of her little ones, but in the sight of such tender buds opening day by day through her patient care into fuller knowledge of a great bright world about them. She strove earnestly to show them more of it than the school-books told; she aimed higher than mere correctness in the exercises, those anxious, careful, or heedless scribblings with which her reticule was crammed. In the geography she taught there were deeper colorings than the pale tints of those twenty maps the text-book held; greater currents flowed through those green and pink and yellow lands than the principal rivers there, and in the plains between them greater harvests had been garnered, according to her stories, than the principal products, principal exports – principal paragraphs learned by rote and recited senselessly.

Drawing, in Letitia's room, it was charged against her by one named Shears, who had the interests of the school at heart and jaw, had become a subterfuge for teaching botany as well.

"For draggin' in a study," as he told a group on the corner of Main and Clingstone streets, "not included in the grammar-grade curriculum!"

He paused to let the word have full effect.

"For wastin' the scholars' time and gettin' their feet wet pokin' around in bogs and marshy places, a-pullin' weeds! And for what? – why, by gum, to draw 'em!"

His auditors chuckled.

"What," he asked, "are drawin'-books for?"

His fellow-citizens nodded intelligently.

"And even when she does use the books," cried Mr. Samuel Shears, "she won't let 'em draw a consarned circle or cross or square, without they tell her some fool story of Michael the Angelo!"

The crowd laughed hoarsely.

"And who was Michael the Angelo?" asked Mr. Shears, screwing his face up in fine derision and stamping one foot, rabbit-like, by way of emphasis to his scorn. "Who was this here Michael the Angelo?"

Four men spat and the others shuffled.

"A Dago!" roared Shears, and the crowd was too much relieved to do more than gurgle. "What does my son care about Michael the Angelo?"

Letitia admitted, I believe, that his son didn't.

"And furthermore," said Mr. Shears, insinuatingly, "what I want to know is: why has she got them pitchers a-hanging around the school-room walls? Pitchers of Dago churches and Dago statures – and I guess you know what Dago statures are – I guess you know whether they're dressed like you and me! – I guess you fellows know all right – and if you don't, there's them that do. And, in conclusion, I want to ask right here: who's a-payin' for them there decorations?"

Mr. Shears spat, the crowd spat, and they adjourned.

Now, there may have been a dozen prints relieving the ugliness and concealing the cracks in the school-room walls, but all quite innocent, as I recall them: "Socrates in the Market-Place," "The Parthenon," "The Battle of Salamis," "Christian Martyrs," a tragic moment in the arena of ancient Rome, "St. Peter's," I suppose, "St. Mark's by Moonlight," and of statues only one and irreproachable, the "Moses" of Michael Angelo. His "David" was Letitia's joy, but she never dreamed, I am sure, of its exhibition in a grammar-school, though I have heard her declare (shamelessly, Mr. Shears would say) that were it not for a Puritan weakness of eyesight hereditary in Grassy Ford, that lithe Jew's ideal figure would be a far better lesson to her boys than all the text-books in physiology.

"Might it not incite them to sling-shots?" queried Dove, softly.

"I don't agree with you," said Letitia, lost in her theme, and noting only the fact, and not the nature, of the opposition. "I don't agree with you at all. It would teach them the beauty of manly – Why do you laugh?"

If Shears could have heard her! His information, such as it was, had been derived from his only son, a youth named David, "not by Angelo," Letitia said, and hopelessly indolent, whose only fondness was for sticking pins into smaller boys. He was useful, however, as a barometer in which the rise or fall of his surly impudence registered the parental feeling against her rule.

Shears and his kind held that the proper study of mankind was arithmetic. What would he not have said at the corner of Main and Clingstone streets, had he known that Letitia was trifling with Robinson's Complete? – that between its lines, she was teaching (surreptitiously would have been his word), an original, elementary course in ethics, a moral law of honesty, fair-dealing, and full-measure, so that all examples, however intricate, were worked out rigidly to the seventh decimal, by the Golden Rule!

Red geraniums bloomed in her school-room window, and on a corner-shelf, set so low that the children easily might have leaned upon it, lay Webster and another book – always one other; though sometimes large and sometimes small, now green, now red, now blue, now yellow, but always seeming to have been left there carelessly. Every volume bore on its fly-leaf two names – "David Buckleton Primrose," written in a bold, old-fashioned script in fading ink, and below it "Letitia Primrose," in a smaller, finer but no less quaint a hand. That book, whatever its name and matter, had been left there purposely, you may be sure. Letitia remembered how young Keats drank his first sweet draught of Homer and became a Greek; how little lame Walter poured over border legends to become the last of the Scottish minstrels; and how that other, that English boy, swam the Hellespont in a London street, to climb on its farther side, that flowery bank called poesy. It was her dream that among her foster-children, as she fondly called them, there might be one, perhaps, some day – some rare soul waiting rose-like for the sun, who would find it shining on her school-room shelf. So she dropped there weekly in the children's way, as if by accident, and without a word to them unless they asked, books which had been her father's pride or her own young world of dreams – books of all times and mental seasons, but each one chosen with her end in mind. They were beyond young years, she admitted frankly, as school years go, but when her Keats came, she would say, smiling, they would be bread-and-wine to him; milk and wild-honey they had been to her.

"Suppose," said Dove, "it should be a girl who bears away sacred fire from your shelf, Letitia?"

"Yes, it might be a girl," replied the school-mistress. "Perhaps – who knows? – another 'Shakespeare's daughter'!" And yet, she added, and with the faintest color in her cheeks, knowing well that we knew her preference, she rather hoped it would be a boy.

Few could resist that book waiting by the dictionary; at least they would open it, spell out its title-page, flutter its yellowing leaves, looking for pictures, and, disappointed, close it and turn away. But sometimes one more curious would stop to read a little, and now and then, to Letitia's joy, a lad more serious than the rest would turn inquiringly to ask the meaning of what he found there; then she would tell its story and loan the volume, hoping that Johnny Keats had come at last.

No one will ever know how many subtle lures she set to tempt her pupils into pleasant paths, but men and women in Grassy Ford today remember that it was Miss Primrose who first said this, or told them that, and while her discipline is sometimes smiled at – she was far too trusting at times, they tell me – doubtless, no one is the worse for it, since whatever evil she may have failed to nip, may be balanced now by the good of some lovely memory. Bad boys grown tall remembering their hookey-days do not forget the woman they cajoled with their forged excuses; and it is a fair question, I maintain, boldly, as one of that guilty clan, whether the one who put them on an honor they did not have, or, let us say, had mislaid temporarily – whether the recollection of Letitia Primrose and her innocence is not more potent now for good than the crimes she overlooked, for evil.

Sometimes I wonder if she was half so blind as she appeared to be, for as we walked one Sabbath by the water-side, with the sun golden on the marshes, and birds and flowers and caressing breezes beguiling our steps farther and farther from the drowsy town, I remember her saying:

"It is for this my boys play truant in the spring-time. Do you wonder, Bertram?"

For the best of reasons I did not. I was thinking of how the springs came northward to Grassy Fordshire when I was a runaway; and then suddenly as we turned a bend in Troublesome, there was a splash, and two bare feet sank modestly into the troubled waters. There was a bubbling, and then a head emerged dripping from all its hairs. Young David Shears had dived in the nick of time.

III

A YOUNGER ROBIN

When our boy was born we named him Robin Weatherby, after that elder Robin who had charmed my youth. If his babyhood lacked aught of love or discipline, it was neither Dove's fault nor Letitia's, for Robin's mother had ideas and a book on childhood, and dear Letitia did not need a book. In fact, she clashed with Dove's. I, as physician-in-ordinary to my child – for in dire emergencies in my own family I always employ an old-fogy, rival – was naturally of some little service in consultation with the two ladies and the Book. Of the characters of these associates of mine, I need only say that Dove was ever an anxious soul, the Book a truthful but at times a vague one, while Letitia was all that could be desired as guide, philosopher, and friend. Alarming symptoms might puzzle others, but never her; they might, even to myself, even to the Book, bode any one of twenty kinds of evil; to her they pointed solely, solemnly to one – that one, alas! which had carried off some dear child of her school.

Dove, I am sure, had never been impatient with Letitia, but now, such was the tension of these family conferences and such the gravity of the case involved, there were times, I noted, when the cousins addressed each other with the most exquisite and elaborate courtesy, lest either should think the other in the least disturbed. For example, there was that little affair of consolation – a sort of rubber make-believe with which young Robin curbed and soothed his appetite and invited pensiveness. Microbes, Letitia said, were —

Dove interposed to remind her that the things were boiled just seven —

Germs, Letitia argued, were not to be trifled with.

"Just seven times a week, my dear," said Dove, triumphantly.

"And besides," Letitia continued, undismayed, "they will ruin the shape of the child's mouth."