Miss Primrose: A Novel

Letitia told Dove there was a wondrous dignity in the little man as he spoke those words. Then he paused in his eloquence.

"Miss Primrose," he said, "permit me to pay you a great compliment: I have never in my life had the privilege – of meeting a woman – of such understanding as your own. You are remarkably – remarkably like your learned and lamented father."

"Oh, Mr. Percival," Letitia said, flushing, "you could not say a kinder thing."

"And yet," said the scientist, "you – you are quite unattached, are you not?"

"Quite – what, Mr. Percival?"

"Unattached," he repeated, "by ties of – the affections?"

"Oh, quite," she answered, "quite unattached, Mr. Percival."

"But surely," he said, "you still have – "

He paused awkwardly.

"Oh," said Letitia, "I shall never marry, Mr. Percival – if you mean that."

He bowed gravely.

"Doubtless, dear madam – you know best."

V

A. P. A

One spring a strange infection spread through the land and appeared suddenly in our corner of it. First a rash became a matter of discussion in our public places, but was not thought serious until the journals of the larger cities brought us news that set our town aflame with apprehension. Half our citizens broke out at once in a kind of measles, not, however, of the common or school-boy sort – that speckled cloud with a silver lining of no-more-school-till-it's-over – nor yet that more malignant type called German measles. It was, in fact, quite Irish in its nature, generally speaking, and in particular it was what might be termed anti-papistical – for, hark you! it had been discovered that the Catholics were arming secretly to take the world by storm!

There are many Romanists in Grassy Ford. St. Peter's steeple, tipped with its gilded cross, towers higher than our Protestant spires, and on the Sabbath a hundred farmers tie their horses beneath its sheds and follow their womenfolk and flocks of children in to mass. In those days Father Flynn was the priest, a youngish, round-faced man, who chanted his Latin with a rich accent derived from Donegal, and who was not what is called militant in his manner, but was, in fact, the mildest-spoken of our Grassy Ford divines. He held aloof from those theological disputes which sometimes set his Protestant brethren by the ears, declining politely all invitations to attend the famous set debates between our Presbyterian and Universalist ministers, which ended, I remember, in a splendid God-given victory for – the one whose flock you happened to be in. Father Flynn only smiled at such encounters; he was not belligerent, and while his parish might with some good reason be described as coming from fine old fighting stock, it had never given evidence, so far as I am aware, of any desire to use cold steel, its warm, red, hairy fists having proven equal to those little emergencies which sometimes arise – more particularly on a Saturday night, at Riley's. But when it was whispered, then spoken aloud, and finally charged openly on the street corners and even in letters to the Gazette, then edited by Butters's son, that Father Flynn was training a military company in the basement of St. Peter's church, that the young Romanists had been armed with rifles, and that ammunition was being stored stealthily and by night under the very altar! – and this by order from the Vatican, where a gigantic plot was brewing to seize the New World for the Pope! – then it was shrewdly observed by those who held the rumors to be truth that Father Flynn did have the look of a conspirator and that he walked with a military ease and swing.

The priest and his flock denied the charges with indignant eloquence, but without convincing men like Shears, who argued that the guilty were ever eager to deny. Shears himself was of no persuasion, religious or otherwise, but belonged by nature to the great party of the Opposition, whose village champion he was, whether the issue was the paving of a street or a weightier matter like the one in hand, of protecting the nation, as he said, from the treason of its citizens and the machinations of a decaying power eager to regain its ancient sway! He was a lawyer by profession, but one whose time hung heavily on his hands, and, frequenting village shops where others like him gathered daily to argue and expound, he would hold forth glibly on any theme, the chief and awe-inspiring quality of his eloquence being an array of formidable statistics, culled Heaven knows where, but which few who listened had the knowledge or temerity to oppose. He was now brimming with figures concerning Rome – ancient, mediæval, or modern Rome: "Gentlemen, you may take your choice; I'm your man." He was armed also, by way of climax and reserve, should statistics fail to convince his auditors, with some strange stories having a spicy flavor of Boccaccio, which he told in a lowered voice as illustrations of what had been and what might be again should priests prevail.

To hear him pronounce the Eternal City's name was itself ominous. His mouth, always a large one, expanded visibly as he boomed out "R-rome!" discharging it as from a cannon's muzzle, and with such significance and effect that many otherwise sanguine men began to suspect that there might be truth in his solemn warnings. Lights had been seen in St. Peter's church at night! Catholic youths did hold some kind of drill there on certain week-day evenings! And, lastly, it was pointed out, Father Flynn himself had ceased denials!

"And why?" Shears asked. "Why, gentlemen? I'll tell ye! —I'll tell ye! – orders from R-rome! You mark my words – orders from Rome!"

Apprehension grew. A society was formed, with Shears at its head, to protect the village, and assist, if need be, the State itself. Meetings were held – secret and extraordinary sessions – in the Odd Fellow's Block. Watches were set on the priest's house and on St. Peter's. Resolute men stood nightly in the shrubbery near the church lest guns and cartridges should be added to the stores already there. Zealous Protestant matrons of the neighborhood supplied hot coffee to the midnight sentinels. All emergencies had been provided for. At a given signal – three pistol-shots in quick succession, and the same repeated at certain intervals – the Guards of Liberty would assemble, armed, and march at once in two divisions, a line of skirmishers under Tommy Morgan, the light-weight champion of Grassy Fordshire, followed by the main body in command of Shears. No one, however, was to fire a shot, Shears said – "not a shot, gentlemen, till you can see the whites of their eyes. Remember your forefathers!"

Every night now half the town pulled down its curtains and opened doors with the gravest caution.

"Who's there?"

"Peters, you fool."

"Oh, come in, Peters. I thought it might be – "

"I know: you thought it might be the Pope."

It was considered wise to take no chances. Assassination, it was widely known, had ever been a favorite method with conspirators, especially at Rome, and Shears made it plain, in the light of history, that "the vast fabric," as he loved to call the Romish world, was composed of men who, certain of absolution, would murder their dearest friends if so commanded by cipher orders from the Holy See!

Meanwhile, in Grassy Ford, friendships of years were crumbling. Neighbors passed each other without a word; some sneered, some jeered, some quarrelled openly in the street, and there were fisticuffs at Riley's, and in the midst of this civil strife some one remembered – Shears himself, no doubt – that Dago pictures hung shamelessly on the walls of a public school-room!

"Michael the Angelo" had been a Catholic!

What if Letitia Primrose were the secret ally of the Pope!..

"But she's not a Catholic," said one.

"She's Episcopalian," said another.

"What's the difference?" inquired a third.

"Mighty little, I can tell ye," said Colonel Shears. "The thing's worth seein' to."

A knock on Letitia's door that afternoon was so peremptory that she answered it in haste and some trepidation, yet was not more surprised by the sudden summons than by the man who stepped impressively into the school-room. The pupils turned smilingly to David Shears.

"Your father!" they whispered.

It was, indeed, Colonel Samuel Shears, of the Guards of Liberty. He declined the chair Letitia offered him.

"No," he said, majestically, "I thank you. I prefer" – and here he thrust up his chin by way of emphasis – "to stand."

The school giggled.

"Silence!" said Letitia. "I am ashamed."

Colonel Shears coolly surveyed the array of impudent youths before him, or perhaps not so much surveyed it as turned upon it, slowly and from side to side, the calm defiance of his massive jowls. He was well content with that splendid mug of his, which he carried habitually at an angle and elevation well calculated to spread dismay. Upon occasion he could render it the more remarkable by a firm compression of the under-lip, pulled gravely down at the corners into what old Butters used to say was a plain attempt "to out-Daniel Webster." The resemblance ended, however, in the regions before described. His brow, it should be stated, did not attest the majesty below them, nor did his small eyes glower with any brooding, owl-like light of wisdom, as he supposed, but bulged rather with a kind of fierce bravado, as if perpetually he were saying to the world:

"Did I hear a snicker?"

Colonel Shears surveyed the school, and then, more slowly, the pictures on the walls about him, turning sharply and fixing his gaze upon Letitia.

[Point One: She was clearly ill at ease.]

[Point Two: A guilty flush had overspread her features.]

"These pictures – " said Colonel Shears, with a wave of his hand in their direction. "Who – if I may be so bold" – and here he raised his voice to the insinuating higher register – "who, may I inquire, paid for them?"

"I did, Mr. Shears," Letitia answered.

"A-ah! You paid for them?"

"I did."

"Very good," he replied. "And now, if I may take the liberty to – "

"Pray don't apologize, Mr. Shears."

The Colonel's crest rose superior to the interruption.

"If I may be permitted," he said, "to repeat my humble question – may I ask, was it your money – that bought – the pictures?"

"It was."

"Your own?"

"My own."

"You are remarkably generous, Miss Primrose."

"I think not," said Letitia, with increasing dignity. "You will pardon me, Mr. Shears, if I continue with my classes. After school I shall be at liberty to discuss the matter. Meanwhile, won't you be seated?"

Colonel Shears for the second time declined, but asked permission, humbly he said, to examine the works of art upon the walls. His request was granted, and Letitia proceeded with her class. When the inspector had made a critical circuit of the room, and not without certain significant clearings of his throat and some sharp glances intended to catch Letitia unawares, he sniffed the geraniums in the window and picked up a book lying on the corner shelf. He glanced idly at its title and – started! – gasped! – and then, horrified, and as if he could not believe his bulging eyes, which fairly pierced the covers of the little volume, he read aloud, in a voice that echoed through the school-room:

"The Lays of Ancient Rome– by Thomas – Babington – Macaulay!"

Letitia, whose back was turned, jumped at the unexpected roar behind her, and the Colonel, perceiving that evidence of what he had suspected, now strode forward with an air of triumph, tapping the Lays with his heavy fore-finger.

"Pardon me," he said, his countenance illumined by a truly terrible smile of accusation, "but when, may I ask, did these here heathen tales become a part of the school curriculum?"

"They are not a part of it," replied Letitia.

"Ah! They are not part of it! You admit it, then? Then may I ask when you made them a part of it, Miss Primrose?"

"The stories of Roman heroes – " Letitia began.

"That is not my question. That is not my humble question. When did these here Romish – "

"Mr. Shears," Letitia interposed, flushed, but speaking in a quiet tone she sometimes used, and which the Colonel might well have heeded had he known her, "I observe that you are not familiar with Macaulay. I shall be pleased to loan you the volume, to take home with you and read at leisure. You will find it charming."

She turned abruptly to the class behind her.

"We will take for to-morrow's lesson the examples on page one hundred and thirty-three."

The Colonel glared a moment at the stiff little back before him, and then at the book, which he slipped resolutely into his pocket. A dozen strides brought him to the door, where he turned grandly with his hand upon the knob.

"I bid you," he said, with a fine, ironical lowering of the under-lip, and bowing slightly, "good-day, ma'am," and the door closed noisily behind him. There was a tittering among the desks. Young David Shears, red-faced and scowling, dropped his eyes before his school-mates' gaze. Letitia tapped sharply on her bell.

That evening the president of the school-board called and talked long and earnestly with Letitia in our parlor. Mr. Roach was a furniture dealer by trade, a leading citizen by profession – a tight, little, sparrow-like man, who had risen by dint of much careful eying of the social and political weather to a place of honor in the village councils. He was considered safe and conservative, which was merely another way of saying that he never committed himself on any question, public or private, till he had learned which way the wind was blowing. He smiled a good deal, said nothing that anybody could remember, and voted with the majority. Out of gratitude the majority had rewarded him, and he was now the custodian of our youth – the sentinel, alert and fearful of the slightest shadow, starting even at the sound of his own footfall on the Ramparts of the Republic, as Colonel Shears once called our public schools. He had come, therefore, under the shadow of the night, but out of kindness, as he himself explained, to advise the daughter of an old friend – and in a voice so low and cautious that Dove, seated in the room beyond, heard nothing but a soothing murmur in response to Letitia's spirited but respectful tones. In departing, however, he was heard to say:

"Oh, by-the-way – er – I think you had better not mention my calling, Miss Primrose. Better not mention it, I guess. It – er – hum – might do harm, you know. You understand."

"Perfectly," replied Letitia. "Good-night." When the door was closed she turned to Dove.

"What do you think that little – that man wants?" she asked.

"Don't know, I'm sure."

"Wants me to take down all my pictures – "

"Your pictures!"

"Yes – and remove all books but text-books from the school-room. And listen: he says my geraniums – fancy! my poor little red geraniums! – are 'not provided for in the curriculum.'"

"The curriculum!" cried Dove, hysterically.

"The curriculum," replied Letitia, without a smile. "Do you know what I asked him?" She leaned her chin upon her hands and gazed at Dove's laughing face across the table. "Do you know what I asked that man?"

"No."

"I asked him if Samuel Luther Shears was provided for in the curriculum."

"You didn't say Luther, Letitia!"

"I did – I said Luther."

"Darling! And what did he say to that?"

Letitia smiled.

"What could he say, my love?"

VI

TRUANTS IN ARCADY

The excitement vanished as it had come, in our tranquil air. A few keen April nights had been sufficient for the sentinels in the lilac-bushes, who wearied of yawning at St. Peter's silent and gloomy walls. Their ardor and the matrons' midnight coffee cooling together, they were withdrawn, and the Guards themselves, though they had no formal mustering-out, forgot their fears and countersigns and met no more. Friendships were renewed. Neighbors nodded again across their fences. Protestant housewives dropped Catholic-vended sugar into their tea, and while there were men like Shears, who still in dreams saw candles burning, St. Peter's arsenal became a quiet parish church again.

Untouched by the whirlwind's passing, Letitia's window-garden went on blooming red, her pictures still hung defiantly on the walls, and classic fiction tempted our youth to her corner shelf. Colonel Shears, however, in that single visit to the school-room, had found new texts for his loquacity, and, our courts failing as usual to furnish him with sufficient cases to engross his mind, he devoted himself with new ardor to our public welfare, and recalled eloquently, to those who had time to listen, the little, old, red school-house of their youth, the simpler methods of the old school-masters, who had no fads or foibles beyond the birch, and who achieved, he said – witness his hearers, to say nothing of his humble self – results to which the world might point with satisfaction if not with pride. Had the modern schools produced an Abraham Lincoln, he wished to know?

"Not by a jugful," was his own reply. "You may talk about your kindergartens, and your special courses, and your Froebel, and your Delsarte, and you may hang up your Eyetalian pictures on the wall, and stick up geraniums in your windows – but where is your Abraham? That's what I ask, gentlemen. I tell you, the schools they had when you and I were boys – gentlemen, they were ragged – they were ragged, as we were – but they turned out men! And you mark my words: there ain't any old maid in Grassy Ford, with all her ancient classics, and her new methods, and her gimcracks and flower-pots, that'll ever – produce – an Honest – Abe!"

I am told that the crowd agreed with him so heartily and with such congratulatory delight that he was emboldened to announce himself then and there as a candidate for the school-board. Though he failed of election, there was always a party in Grassy Ford opposed to new-fangled methods in the schools. Letitia herself was quite aware that even among her fellow-teachers there were those who smiled at her geraniums, and there had been some criticism of her manner of conducting classes. Shears was fond of relating how a visitor to her room had found a class in fractions discussing robins' eggs! Letitia explained the matter simply enough, but the fact remained for the Colonel to enlarge upon.

"A lesson," he said, "in Robinson's Complete Arithmetic, page twenty-seven, may end in somebody's apple-tree, or the top of Sun Dial, or Popocatapetl, or Peru! Gentlemen, I maintain that such dilly-dallying is a subversion of the – "

"Subversion!" growled old man Butters, who still came out on sunny days with the aid of his cane. "I calculate you mean it's not right."

"That," said the orator, suavely, "is the meaning I intended to convey, Mr. Butters."

"Well, then, you're wrong," grumbled the old man. "Why, that there girl" – he called her so till the day he died, this side of ninety – "that there girl's a trump, Sam Shears, I tell ye. She teaches Robinson and God A'mighty, too!"

Letitia was often now in the public eye; her teaching was made a campaign issue, though all her nature shrank from such contests. It was easy to attack her manner of instruction, and sometimes difficult to defend it – it had been so subtle in its plan, and so unusual in its execution, and, moreover, time alone could disclose what fruits would ripen from its flowery care. Old Mr. Butters had put roughly what Dr. Primrose himself had taught:

"Dearly beloved, in the fountains of learning, no less than in the water-brooks, His lilies blow."

"Wouldst thou love God?" he asked, in the last sermon that he ever wrote. "First, love His handiwork."

It was his daughter's motto. It hung on the walls of her simple chamber, with others from her "other poets," as she used to call them – little rubrics printed for her in red and gold at the "Pide Bull." That handiwork of God which she still called Grassy Fordshire was so full of marvels to this poet's daughter, there were so many flowers in it, the birds there sang so blithely, its waters ran with such tremulous messages echoed by woods and whispered by meadow-grasses, its skies, melting into glowing promises in the west, shone thereafter with such jewelled truths, she could hold no text-books higher than her Lord's.

It was not mere duty that drew her morn after morn, year after year, to the red-brick school-house. All the tenderness, all those eager hopes and fears which she lavished so upon her labor, meant life and love to her, for she truly loved them – those troops of laughing, heedless children, passing like flocks of birds, stopping with her for a little twittering season to seize her bounty and, as it seemed to her, fly on gayly and forget.

It may be that I write prejudiced in her favor, but I write as one knowing the dream of a woman's lifetime to set those young feet straight in pleasant paths, to open those wondering eyes to the beauty of an ancient world about them, in every leaf of it, and wing – in the earth below and the sky above it, and there not only in the flawless azure, but in the rain-clouds' gloom.

"Dark days are also beautiful," she used to tell them. "Had you thought of that?"

They had not thought of it. It was one of those subtler things which text-books do not say; but Letitia taught them, and a woman of Grassy Ford, when sore bereft, once said to me: "Dark days, doctor, are also beautiful. Miss Primrose told us that, when we went to school to her. It was of clouds she spoke, but I remembered it – and now I know."

"Oh, Miss Primrose," Johnny Murray used to say. "Do you remember when I went to school to you? Do you remember where I sat – there by the window? Well, it's awfully funny, but do you know, I never add or multiply or subtract but I smell geraniums."

Perhaps, the Colonel would reply, that was why Johnny Murray deserted the ledgers he was set to keep – the scent of the flowers in them proved too strong for him. It may be so, for little things count so surely; it may be the reason he is today a sun-browned farmer instead of a lily-white clerk in his father's store. From the geraniums in a school-room window to a thousand peach-trees blooming in a valley is a long journey, but it was for just such journeys that Letitia taught, and not merely for that shorter one which led through her petty school-room to the grade above.

Letitia tells me that sitting there at her higher desk above those rows of heads, she used to think of them as flowers, and of her school-room as a garden. Often then it would come to her how pleasant a task it was to tend the roses there – golden-haired Laura Vane, and Alice Bishop, and Isabel Walton, and handsome, black-eyed Tommy Willis, whose pranks are famous in Grassy Fordshire still; then, at the doting thought of them, her heart would smite her, and she would turn to those other homelier flowers. It must have been in some such moment of repentance that Susan Leary, chancing to raise her eyes to her adored school-mistress, found Letitia smiling so amiably upon her that the girl blushed, and from that hour grew more mindful of her scolding looks; her freckled face was scrubbed quite glossy after that, her dress was neater, her ribbons tied, till by-and-by, to Letitia's wonder and reward, she found in that beaming Irish face upturned to her, color and fragrance for her very soul.

Young Peter Bauer was a German sprout transplanted steeragewise to a corner of the garden, and slow in budding, his face as blank as the blackboard-wall he grew beside; but one fine morning, at a single question in the B geography, it burst into roseate bloom.

"Teacher, teacher, I know dot! Suabia ist in Deutschland. Mein vater ist in Deutschland! Ich bin – "

And after that Peter was a poppy on Friday afternoons, reading essays on his fatherland. Thus, honest gardener that Letitia was, she trained and pruned, disdaining nothing because of weediness, believing that what would bear a leaf would bear a flower as well. To leave at four o'clock, to return at nine and find one open which had been shut before! – is it not the gardener's morning joy?

It was not alone the plants which refused to grow for her that caused her pain. These at least she had never loved, however patiently she had cared for them. There were wayward beauties in her garden who on tenderer stalks bore longer thorns. She learned, in her way, the lesson mothers learn in theirs, who sometimes love and toil and sacrifice unceasingly, and wait, years or forever, for reward.