Miss Primrose: A Novel

Then Dove would sink back ruefully, and I, pitying my wife – I, rebuked but unabashed and shameless in my gluttony, would pass my plate again.

"Give me," I would say, cheerfully, "a third piece of that excellent, that altogether heavenly cherry-pie, my dear."

It may sound like triumph, but was not – for Letitia Primrose would ignore me utterly. "Have you read," she would ask, sipping a little water from her glass, "New Eden, by Mrs. Lord?"

We still walked mornings to the school-house, still talked together as we walked, but not as formerly – not of the old subjects, which was less to be wondered at, nor yet of new ones with the old eloquence. I felt constrained. There was a new note in Letitia's comments on the way the world was going, though I could not define its pitch. She spoke, I thought, less frankly than of old, but much more carelessly. She seemed more listless in her attitude towards matters that had roused her, heart and soul, in other days. Me she ignored at pleasure; could it be possible, I wondered, that she was determined to renounce the whole round world as well?

It was I who had first resented this alienation, but it was Dove who could not be reconciled to a change so inscrutable and unkind. Time, I argued, was sufficient reason; age, I reminded her, cast strange shadows before its coming; our friend was growing old – perhaps like her father – before her time. But Dove was alarmed: Letitia was pale, she said; her face was wan – there was a drawn look in the lines of the mouth and eyes; even her walk had lost its buoyancy.

"True," I replied, "but even that is not unnatural, my dear. Besides, she eats nothing; she starves herself."

My wife rose suddenly.

"Bertram," she said, earnestly, "you must stop this folly. I have tried my best to tempt her out of it, but I have failed. It is you she is fondest of. It is you who must speak."

"I fear it will do no good," I answered, "but I will try." I have had use for courage in my lifetime, both as doctor and man, but I here confess to a trembling of the heart-strings, a childish faintness, a lily cowardice in these encounters, these trifling domestic sallies and ambuscades. Nor have I strategy; I know but one method of attack, and its sole merit is the little time it wastes.

"Letitia," I said, next morning, as we walked townward, "you are ill."

"Nonsense, Bertram," she replied.

"You are ill," I replied, firmly. "You are pale as a ghost. Your hands tremble. Your walk – "

"I was never stronger in my life," she interposed, and as if she had long expected this little crisis and was prepared for it. "Never, I think, have I felt so tranquil, so serene. My mind – "

"I am not speaking of your mind," I said. "I am talking of your body."

"Bertram," she said, excitedly, "that is just your error – not yours alone, but the whole world's error. This thinking always of earthly – "

"Now, Letitia," I protested, "I have been a doctor – "

"Illness," she continued, "is a state of mind. To think one is ill, is to be ill, of course, but to think one is well, is to be well, as I am – well, I mean, in a way I never dreamed of! – a way so sure, so beautiful, that I think sometimes I never knew health before."

"Letitia," I said, sharply, "what nonsense is this?"

"It is not nonsense," she retorted. "It is living truth. Oh, how can we be so blind! The body, Bertram – why, the body is nothing!"

"Nothing!" I cried.

"Nothing!" she answered, her face glowing. "The body is nothing; the mind is everything! It is God's great precious gift! With my mind I can control my body – my life – yes, my very destiny! – if I use God's gift of Will. It is divine."

"Letitia," I said, sternly, "those are fine words, and well enough in their time and place. I am not a physician of souls. I mend worn bodies, when I can. It is yours I am thinking of – the frail, white, half-starved flesh and blood where your soul is kept."

"Stop!" she cried. "You have no right to speak that way. You mean well, Bertram, but you are wrong. You are mistaken – terribly mistaken," she repeated, earnestly – "terribly mistaken. I am quite, quite able to care for myself. I only ask to be let alone."

She had grown hysterical. Tears were in her eyes.

"See," she said, in a calmer tone, wiping them away, "I have had perfect control till now. This is not weakness merely; it is worse: it is sin. But I shall show you. I shall show you a great truth, Bertram, if you will let me. Only have patience, that is all."

She smiled and paused in a little common near the school-house where none might hear us.

"I learned it only recently," she told me. "I cannot see how I never thought of it before: this great power mind has over matter – how just by the will which God has given us in His goodness, we may rise above these petty, earthly things which chain us down. We can rise here, Bertram – here on earth, I mean – and when we do, even though our feet be on Grassy Fordshire ground, we walk in a higher sphere. Ah, can't you see then that nothing can ever touch us? – nothing earthly, however bitter, can ever sadden us or spoil our lives! There will be no such thing as disappointment; no regret, no death – and earth will be Eden come again."

Her eyes were shining.

"Letitia," I said, "it is of another world that you are dreaming."

"No, it is all quite possible here," she said. "It is possible to you, if you only think so. It is possible for me, because I do."

"It seems," I said, "a monstrous selfishness."

"Selfishness!" she said, aghast.

"As long as you have human eyes," I said, "you will see things to make you weep, Letitia."

"But if I shut them – if I rise above these petty – "

"The sound of crying will reach your ears," I said. "How then shall you escape sadness and regret? What right have you to avoid the burdens your fellows bear? – to be in bliss, while they are suffering? It would be monstrous, Letitia Primrose. You would not be woman: You would be a fiend."

She shook her head.

"You don't understand," she said.

"At least," I answered, "I will send you something from the office."

She shut her lips.

"I shall not take it."

"It will make you stronger," I insisted.

"You can do nothing," she answered, coldly, "to make me stronger than I am."

IX

A SERIOUS MATTER

If ever woman had a tender heart, that heart was Dove's. I used to say, to her confusion, that a South Sea cannibal might find confessional in her gentle ear, were his voice but low enough; that she might draw back, shuddering at his tales of the bones he had picked, but if only his tears were real ones, I could imagine her, when he had done, putting her hand upon his swarthy shoulder and saying, earnestly:

"I know just how you feel!"

Such was the woman Letitia confided in, now that her tongue was loosened and the mystery solved, for her soul was brimming with those new visions – dreams so roseate as she painted them that my wife listened with their wonder mirrored in her round brown eyes, and dumb before that eloquence. Dove loved Letitia as a greater woman than herself, she said, worshipped her for her wider knowledge and more fluent speech, just as she wondered at it ruefully as a girl on Sun Dial listening to Letitia's tales of dryads and their spells. In return for all this rapt attention and modest reverence, Letitia formerly had been grace itself. It was a tender tyranny she had exercised; but now? – how should my simple, earthly Dove, mother and housewife, confide any longer her favorite cares, her gentle fears, her innocent regrets? With what balm of sympathy and cheer would the new Letitia heal those wounds? Would not their very existence be denied; or worse, be held as evidence of sin? – iniquity in my poor girl's soul, hidden there like a worm i' the bud, and to be chastened in no wise save by taking invisible white wings of thought, and soaring – God knows where?

The new Letitia was not unamiable, nor yet unkind, knowingly, for she smiled consistently upon all about her – a strange, aloof, unloving smile though, at which we sighed. We should have liked her to be heart and soul again in our old-time common pleasures, even to have joined us now and then in a fault or two – to have looked less icily, for example, upon our occasional petty gossip of our neighbors, or to have added one wrathful word to our little rages at the way the world was straying from the golden mist we had seen it turn in, in our youth. As we watched her, wondering, laughing sometimes, sometimes half-angry at this new and awful guise she had assumed, it would come to us, not so much how sadly earthen we must seem to her, nor yet how strange and daft and airy her new views seemed to us in our duller sight – but how the old Letitia whom we had loved was gone forever.

"Bertram," said my wife one evening as we sat together by the lamp, "what do you think Letitia says?"

"I am prepared for anything, my dear."

Dove, who was sewing, laid down her work and said, gravely:

"She does not believe in marriage any more."

I raised my eyebrows. There was really nothing to be said.

"At least," my wife went on, resuming her sewing, "she says that the time will come when the race will have" – Dove paused thoughtfully – "risen above such things, I think she said. I really don't remember the words she used, but I believe – yes, there will be marriage – in a way – that is" – Dove knitted her brows – "a union of kindred souls, if I understand her."

"Ah!" I replied. "I see. But what about the perpetuation – "

My wife shook her head.

"Oh, all that will be done away with, I believe," she said, gravely.

"Done away with!" I cried.

"At least," Dove explained, "it will not be necessary."

My face, I suppose, may have looked incredulous.

"I don't quite comprehend what Letitia says sometimes," my wife explained, "but today she was telling me – "

Dove laughed quaintly.

"Oh, I forget what comes next," she said, "but Letitia told me all about it this morning."

I returned to my quarterly. Presently my wife resumed:

"She has four books about it."

"Only four!" I said. "I should think one would need a dozen at least to explain such mysteries."

"She says herself she is only at the beginning," Dove replied. "She's now in the first circle – or cycle, I've forgotten which – but the more she reads and the more she thinks about it, the more wonderful it grows. Oh, there was something else – what was it now she called it? – something about the – cosmos, I think she said, but I didn't quite grasp the thing at all."

"I'm surprised," I replied. "It's very simple."

"I suppose it is," Dove answered, quickly, and so humbly that I laughed, but she looked up at me with such a quivering smile, I checked myself. "I suppose it is simple," she replied. "I guess my mind – is not very strong, Bertram. I – I find it so hard to understand some – "

I saw the tears were coming.

"Don't trouble yourself about such things, my dear," I said, cheerfully. "It's a bonny mind you have, you take my word for it."

Dove wiped her eyes.

"No," she said; "when I listen to Letitia, I feel like a – "

"There, there, my dear," I said, "you have things a thousand times more vital and useful and beautiful than this cosmos Letitia talks about. It's only another word for the universe, my love, if I remember rightly – I'm not quite sure myself, but it doesn't matter. It's easy to pronounce, and it may mean something, or it may mean nothing, but we needn't trouble ourselves about it, little one. You have work to do. You must remember Letitia has no such ties to bind her to the simple things, which are enough for most of us to battle with. I am tired of theories myself, dear heart. Work – everyday, humble, loving service is all that keeps life normal and people pleasant to have about. I see so much of this other side, it is always good to come home to you."

I went back to my medical journal – I forgot to say I had come around to my wife's side of our reading-table in settling this perplexing matter; I went back to my work, and she to hers, and we finished the evening very quietly, and in as good health and unruffled spirits as the cosmos itself must enjoy, I think, judging from the easy way it has run on, year after year, age after age, since the dark beginning.

PART III

Rosemary

I

THE HOME-KEEPER

The years slip by so quietly in Grassy Ford that men and women born here find themselves old, they scarce know how, for are they not still within sound of the brooks they fished in, and in the shadow of the very hill-sides they climbed for butternuts, when they were young? The brooks run on so gayly as before, and why not they as well?

"Butters," Shears used to grumble, "never could learn that he was old enough to stop his jawing and meddling around the town, till they dug his grave for him; then he shut up fast enough."

"Well, then," said Caleb Kane, another character, "we'll sure enough have to send for the sexton."

Colonel Shears eyed Caleb with suspicion.

"What for?" he asked.

"Why, to get a word in edgewise, Sam'l," Caleb replied, and the Colonel rose, shifted his cigar, and sauntered homeward.

"Mostly comedies," said the one we call Johnny Keats, when I urged him to write the stories of his native town; yet, as I told him, there are tragedies a-plenty too in Grassy Fordshire, though the dagger in them is a slower torture than the short swift stab men die of in a literary way. Our heroic deaths are done by inches, as a rule, so imperceptibly, so often with jests and smiles in lieu of fine soliloquies, that our own neighbors do not always know how rare a play the curtain falls on sometimes among our hills.

If I do not die in harness, if, as I often dream of doing, I turn my practice over to some younger man – perhaps to Robin, who shows some signs of following in his father's steps – I shall write the story of my native town; not in the old way, embellished, as Butters would have termed it, with family photographs of the leading citizens and their houses and cow-sheds, and their wooden churches, and their corner stores with the clerks and pumpkins in array before them – not in that old, time-honored, country manner, but in the way it comes to me as I look backward and think of the heroes and heroines and the clowns and villains I have known. I shall need something to keep me from "jawing and meddling around the town"; why not white paper and a good stub pen, while I smoke and muse of my former usefulness. I suppose I shall never write the chronicle; Johnny Keats could, if he would; and I would, if I could – thus the matter rests, while the town and its tales and I myself grow old together. Even Johnny Keats, who was a boy when Letitia taught in the red brick school-house, has a thin spot in his hair.

Had Dove but lived – it is idle, I know, to say what might have been, had our Grassy Fordshire been the same sweet place it was, before she went like other white birds – "southward," she said, "but only for a winter, Bertram – surely spring comes again."

This I do know: that I should have had far less to tell of Letitia Primrose, who might have gone on mooning of a better world had Dove not gone to one, leaving no theories but a son and husband to Letitia's care. It was not to the oracle that she intrusted us, but to the woman – not to the new Letitia but to the old, who had come back to us in those vigils at my wife's bedside.

"This is not sin, Letitia," Dove said to her.

"Oh, my dear!" replied Letitia. "You must not dream that I could call it so."

"Still," Dove answered, "if I had your mind, perhaps – "

"Hush, dear love," Letitia whispered. "My sweet, my sweet – oh, if I had your soul!"

From such chastening moments Letitia Primrose was the mother she might have been. A tenderer, humbler heart, save only Dove's, I never knew, nor a gentler voice, nor a stronger hand, than those she gave us, man and boy bereft – not only in those first blank days, but through the years that followed. So easily that I marvelled did the school-mistress become the home-keeper, nor can I look upon a spinster now, however whimsical, that I do not think of her as the elder sister of that wife and mother in her soul.

A new dream possessed Letitia: it was to be like Dove. She could never be youthful save in spirit; she could never be lovely with that subtle poise and grace which cannot be feigned or purchased at any price, neither with gold nor patience nor purest prayer nor any precious thing whatever, but comes only as a gift to the true young mother at her cradle-side. She could not be one-half so perfect, she confessed humbly to herself, but she could keep the fire blazing on a lonely hearth, where a man sat silent with his child.

My girl's housewifeliness had seemed a simple matter when Letitia's mind was on her school and sky; it was now a marvel as she learned what Dove had done – those thousand little things, and all so easily, so placidly, that at the day's fag-end Letitia, weary with unaccustomed cares, wondered what secret system of philosophy Dove's had been. What were the rules and their exceptions? What were the formulæ? Here were sums to do, old as the hills, but strange, new answers! There must be a grammar for all that fluency, that daily smoothness in every clause and phrase – a kind of eloquence, as Letitia saw it now, marvelling at it as Dove had marvelled at her own. When she had solved it, as she thought, the steak went wrong, or the pudding failed her, or the laundry came home torn or incomplete, moths perhaps got into closets, ants stormed the pantry, or a pipe got stopped; and then, discomfited, she would have Dove's magic and good-humored mastery to seek again.

She had kept house once herself, it is true, but years ago, for her simple father, and not in Dove's larger way. The Primrose household as she saw it now had been a meagre one, for here in the years of Dove's gentle rule, a wondrous domestic ritual had been established, which it was now her duty to perform. That she did it faithfully, so that the windows shone and the curtains hung like snowy veils behind them, so that the searching light of day disclosed no film upon the walnut, who could doubt, knowing that conscience and its history? She kept our linen neatly stitched; she set the table as Dove had set it; she poured out tea for us more primly, to be sure, but cheerfully as Dove had poured it, smiling upon us from Dove's chair.

Robin grew straight of limb and wholesome of soul as Dove had dreamed. Letitia helped him with his lessons, told him the legends of King Arthur's court, and read with him those Tales of a Grandfather, which I had loved as just such another romping boy – though not so handsome and debonair as Dove's son was, for he had her eyes and her milder, her more poetic face, and was more patrician in his bearing; he is like his mother to this day. His temper, which is not maternal, I confess – those sudden gusts when, as I before him, he chafed in bonds and cried out bitter things, rose hotly sometimes at Letitia's discipline, though he loved her doubly now.

"You are not my mother!" he would shout, clinching his fists. "You are not my mother!"

Then her heart would fail her, for she loved him fondly, even in his rage, and her penalty would be mild indeed. Often she blamed herself for his petty waywardness, and feeling her slackening hand he would take the bit between his teeth, coltlike; but he was a good lad, Robin was, and, like his mother, tender-hearted, for all his spirit, and as quick to be sorry as to be wrong. When they had made it up, crying in each other's arms, Letitia would say to him:

"I'm not your mother, but I love you, and I've got no other little boy."

It was thus Letitia kept our home for us, tranquil and spotless as of old; and if at first I chose more often than was kind to sit rather among my bottles and my books and instruments, leaving her Robin and the evening-lamp, it was through no fault or negligence of hers I did it, for, however bright my hearth might glow, however tended by her gentle hands, its flame was but the ruddy symbol to me of a past whose spirit never could return.

"Who is Miss Primrose?" strangers in Grassy Ford would ask.

"She's a sort of relative," the reply would be, "and the doctor's house-keeper."

For the woman who keeps still sacred and beautiful another woman's home, in all the language, in all our wordiness, there is no other name.

II

JOHNNY KEATS

The one we call Johnny Keats is well enough known as Karl St. John. He was a Grassy Fordshire boy and Letitia's pupil, as I have said, till he left us, only to like us better, as he once told me, by seeing the world beyond our hills. He went gladly, I should say, judged by the shining in his eyes. He was a homely, slender, quiet lad, except when roused, when he was vehement and obstinate enough, and somewhat given, I am told, to rhapsody and moonshine. He read much rather than studied as a school-boy, and was seen a good deal on Sun Dial and along Troublesome where he never was known to fish, but wandered aimlessly, wasting, it was said, a deal of precious time which might have been bettered in his father's shop. Letitia liked him for a certain brightness in his face when she talked of books, or of other things outside the lessons; otherwise he was not what is termed in Grassy Ford a remarkable boy. We have lads who "speak pieces" and "accept," as we say it, "lucrative" positions in our stores.

Karl drifted off when barely twenty, and as time went by was half forgotten by the town, when suddenly the news came home to us that he had written, and what is sometimes considered more, had published, and with his own name on the title-page, a novel! —Sleepington Fair, the thing was called. There are those who say Sleepington Fair means Grassy Ford, and that the river which the hero loved, and where he rescued a maid named Hilda from an April flood, is really our own little winding Troublesome, widened and deepened to permit the wellnigh tragic ending of the tale. You can wade Troublesome; Hilda went in neck-deep. They say also that the man McBride, who talks so much, is our old friend Colonel Shears; the fanciful McBride is tall in fact, and the actual Shears is tall in fancy. Be that as it may, the book was excellent, considering that it was written by a Grassy Fordshire boy, and it set at least two others of our lads, and a lady, I believe, to scribbling – further deponent sayeth not.

Sleepington Fair was read by the ladies of the Longfellow Circle, our leading literary club. Our Mrs. Buhl, acknowledged by all but envious persons to be the most cultured woman in Grassy Ford, pronounced it safely "one of the most pleasing and promising novels of the past decade," and, in concluding her critical review before the club, she said, smilingly: "From Mr. St. John —our Mr. St. John, for let me call him so, since surely he is ours to claim – from our Mr. St. John we may expect much, and I feel that I am only voicing the sentiments of the Longfellow Circle when I wish for him every blessing of happiness and health, that his facile pen may through the years to come trace only what is pure and noble, and that when, as they will, the shadows lengthen, and his sun descends in the glowing west, he may say with the poet – "

What the poet said I have forgotten, but the words of Mrs. Buhl brought tears to the eyes of many of her auditors, who, at the meeting's close, pressed about her with out-stretched hands, assuring her that she had quite outdone herself and that never in their lives had they heard anything more scholarly, anything more thoughtfully thought or more touchingly said. Would she not publish it, she was asked, pleadingly? No? It was declared a pity. It was a shame, they said, that she had never written a book herself, she who could write so charmingly of another's.

"Ladies! Ladies!" murmured Mrs. Buhl, much affected by this ovation, but her modest protest was drowned utterly in a chorus of —

"Yes, indeed!"

Sleepington Fair aroused much speculation as to its author's rise in the outer world, chiefly with reference to the money he must be making, the sum being variously estimated at from five to twenty-five thousand a year.