Miss Primrose Part 21

Now a lane runs, gra.s.sy and strewn with the wild blackberry-vines, through the Neal farm to a back road into town, and Let.i.tia chose it to vary her homeward way. It pa.s.ses first the brook, over a little hoof-worn, trembling bridge, and then the vineyard, where the grapes were purple that autumn evening. There, pausing to regale herself, Let.i.tia heard a strange sound among the trellises. It was a child crying, moaning and sobbing as if its heart would break. For a moment only Let.i.tia listened there; then she ran, fearfully, stumbling in the heavy loam between the rows of vines, to the spot from which the moaning came. She found a girl crouching on the earth.

"Peggy!" she cried, kneeling beside her. "Peggy! Are you hurt? Peggy!

Answer me!"

The girl shook her head and shrank away among the lower leaves.

"Oh, what is the matter?" Let.i.tia begged, terrified, and gathered Peggy into her arms. "Tell me! Tell me, sweet!"

"Nothing," was the wretched answer. "Please--please go away!"

But Let.i.tia stayed, brushing the dirt from the girl's dark hair, kissing her, petting her, murmuring the tenderest names, and gently urging her to tell. Peggy raised herself upon her knees, putting both hands to her temples and staring wildly with swollen eyes.

"Mamma's gone in, Miss Primrose," she said, brokenly. "She'll--she'll tell you. Please--please go away!"

She begged so piteously, Let.i.tia rose.

"I'd rather stay, Peggy; but if you wish it--"

"Yes. Please go!"

"I'd rather stay."

"No. Please--"

Slowly, and with many misgivings, Let.i.tia went. She knocked again at the farm-house, but got no answer, as before. She tried the doors--they were locked, all of them. Then her heart reproached her and she hurried back again to the lane. It was growing dusk, and in the vineyard the rows confused her.

"Peggy!" she called, softly.

Her foot touched a basket half-filled with grapes.

"Peggy! Where are you?"

She could hear nothing but the rustling leaves.

"Peggy!" she called. "Peggy!"

There was no answer, but as she listened with a throbbing heart, she heard cows lowing at the pasture-bars--and the click of the farmyard gate.

VIII

NEW EDEN

Let.i.tia's church, the last her father ever preached in, is a little stone St. Paul's, pine-shaded and ivy-grown, upon a hill-side. There are graves about it in the lawn, scattered, not huddled there, and no paths between them, only the soft gra.s.s touching the very stones. Above them in the untrimmed boughs swaying with every wind, the wild birds nest and sing, so that death where Dr. Primrose lies seems a pleasant dreaming.

"Our service," he used to say, "is the ancient poetry of reverence;" and every verse of it brings to Let.i.tia memories of her father standing at the lecturn, while she was a child listening in the pews.

"I was very proud of him," she used to tell us. "His sermons were wonderful, I think. You will say that I could not judge them as a girl and daughter, but I have read them since. I have them all in a box up-stairs, and now and then I take one out and read it to myself, and all that while I can hear his voice. They are better than any I listen to nowadays; they are far more thoughtful, fuller of life and fire and the flower of eloquence. Our ministers are not so br.i.m.m.i.n.g any more."

She told us a story I had never heard, of his earnestness and how hard it was for him to find words fervent enough to express his meaning; how when a rich old merchant of Gra.s.sy Ford confessed to him a doubt that there was a G.o.d, dear Dr. Primrose turned upon him in the village street where they walked together and said, with the tears springing to his eyes:

"Gabriel Bond, not as a clergyman but as a man, I say to you, consider for a moment that apple-bloom you are treading on!" It was spring and a bough from the merchant's garden overhung the walk where they had paused. "Hold it in your hand, and look at it, and think, man, _think_!

Use the same reason which tells you two and two make four--the same reason that made you rich, Gabriel--and tell me, if you can, there is no G.o.d! Why, sir--" and here Dr. Primrose's heart quite overcame him, and his voice broke. "Gabriel, you are not such a d.a.m.ned--"

And the merchant, Let.i.tia said, for it was Bond himself who told her the story long after Dr. Primrose's voice was stilled--the merchant, astounded to find a clergyman so like another man struggling for stressful words for his emotion, picked up the bruised twig from beneath his feet and stuck it in her father's coat.

"Doctor," he said, quietly, "there's force, sir, in what you say," and left Dr. Primrose wondering on the walk. But the next Sunday he appeared at church, and every Sunday for many years thereafter, merely explaining to those who marvelled, that he had found a man.

It was not likely that the daughter of such a man would be much troubled with doubts of what he had taught so positively or what she had come to believe herself; if led astray it would be like her s.e.x in general, through too much faith. While not obtrusive in her views of life in her younger years, Let.i.tia, as she reached her prime, and through the habit of self-dependence and her daily duty of instructing undeveloped minds, grew more decisive in her manner, more impatient of opposition to what she held was truth, especially when it seemed to her the fruit of ignorance or that spirit of bantering argument so common to the humorously inclined. She liked humor to know its place, she said; it was the favorite subterfuge of persons championing a losing cause. In such discussions, finding her earnestness useless to convince, and scorning to belittle a theme dear to her with resort to jest or personalities, she would sit silenced, but with a flush upon her cheeks, and if the enemy had pressed too sharply on her orderly retreat, one would always know it by the tapping of her foot upon the floor.

She was no mean antagonist. For she read not only those volumes her father loved, but the books and journals of the day as well. Reading and theorizing of the greater world outside her little one, she was not troubled by those paradoxes which men meet there, which cause them to falter, doubt, and see two sides of questions where they had seen but one, till they fall back lazily, taking their ease on that neutral ground where Humor is the host, welcoming all and favoring none. We used to smile sometimes at Let.i.tia's fervency; we had our little jests at its expense, but we knew it was her father in her, poet and preacher not dead but living still. In his youth and prime Dr. Primrose was ever the champion of needy causes, whose name is legion, so that his zeal found vent, and left him in his decline the mild old poet I remember. Would Let.i.tia be as mild, I wondered?

"A few more needy causes," I used to say, "would soften that tireless spirit--say, stockings to darn and children to dress for school, and a husband to keep in order."

"Yet in lieu of these," Dove once replied, "she has her day's work and her church and books--"

"But are they enough for a woman, do you think?" I asked my wife. We were standing together by Robin's bedside, watching him as he slept.

Dove said nothing, but laid her hand against his rose-red cheek.

Little by little we became aware of some subtle change in our Let.i.tia.

She took less interest in the mild adventures of our household world.

She smiled more faintly at my jests, a serious matter, for I have at home, like other men, some reputation for a pretty wit upon occasion.

It was a mild estrangement and recluseness. She sat more often in her room up-stairs. She was absent frequently on lonely walks, sometimes at evening, and brought home a face so rapt, and eyes with a look in them so far away from our humble circle about the reading-lamp, we deemed it wiser to ask no questions. For years it had been an old country custom of ours, when we sat late, to seek the pantry before retiring, but now when invited to join us in these childish spreads, "No, thank you,"

Let.i.tia would reply, and in a tone so scrupulously courteous I used to feel like the man old b.u.t.ters told about--a poor, inadvertent wight, he was, who had offered a sandwich to an angel. I forget now how the story runs, but the man grumbled at his rebuff, and so did I.

"I know, my dear," Dove reproved me, "but you ought not to do such things when you see she's thinking."

"Thinking!" I cried, cooling my temper in bread-and-milk. "Is it thinking, then?"

"I don't know what it is," Dove sighed. "She isn't Let.i.tia any more, yet for the life of me I can't tell why. I never dream now of disturbing her when she looks that way, and I cannot even talk to her as I used to do."

"She isn't well," I said.

"She says she was never better."

"She may be troubled."

"She says she was never happier."

"Well, then," I decided, sagely, "it must be thinking, as you say."

We agreed to take no notice of what might be only moody crotchets after all; they would soon pa.s.s. We no longer pressed her to join our diversions about the lamp, but welcomed her in the old spirit when she came willingly or of her own accord. Yet even then it was not the same: there was some mute, mysterious barrier to the old, free, happy intercourse. Some word of Dove's or mine, mere foolery, perhaps, but meant in cheerfulness, would dance out gayly across the table where we sat at cards, but slink back home again, disgraced. What could this discord be? we asked ourselves--this strange impa.s.siveness, this disapproval, as it seemed to us--negative, but no less obvious for that?

There was a heaviness in the air. We breathed more freely in Let.i.tia's absence. We grew self-conscious in that mute, accusing presence, which I resented and my wife deplored. Dove even confessed to a feeling of guiltiness, yet could remember no offence.

"What have I done?" I asked my wife.