Kitabı oku: «Miss Primrose: A Novel», sayfa 12

VIII
IN A DEVON LANE

I have never seen an English lane, but I have a picture of one above the fireplace, and I once smelled hawthorn blooming. A pleasant, hedgerow scent, it seemed to me, with a faint suggestion of primroses on the other side – I say primroses, but Letitia smiles when I declare I can smell them still, or laughs with Robin: they have been in England.

"Are you quite sure about it, Bertram?"

"They do have primroses," I reply, defiantly.

"But are you sure they are primroses?" she demands.

"Smell again, father!" cries my son.

"Yes," I retort; "or violets; they may be violets beyond the hedge."

It is then they laugh at me, and they make a great point of their puzzling questions: am I certain – for example, that the primrose is fragrant enough to be smelled so far, and is it in flower when the hawthorn blooms? That is important, they insist. It is not important, I reply – in my England.

"Your England!" they cry.

"To be sure," I say. "In my England – and I see it as plainly as you do yours – the hawthorn and primrose is always flowering. In my England it is always spring."

It is summer in theirs. It is always cool and fragrant and wholly charming in my Devonshire. It was rather hot when they got to theirs – that is, the sunny coast of it they brag of was a little trying, sometimes, I suspect, in midsummer, though neither will confess.

"But not the moors!" they say.

"Oh, well – the moors – no; I should think not," I answer. "I am not such a fool as to think that moors are hot."

"How cool are the moors?" they then inquire, innocently, but I see the trick; I hear the plot in their very voices, and am wary.

"Oh," I reply, "as cool as usual."

"But there are dense forests on the moors," Robin suggests. "Regular jungles – eh, father?"

I am not to be taken without a struggle.

"Hm," I reply.

"Hm – what, father?"

"Well, I prefer the coast myself."

"The dear white coast," says Letitia, slyly.

"The dear red coast!" I cry in triumph, but they only sigh:

"Ah, it was a wonderful, wonderful journey! One could never imagine it – or even tell it. One must have been there."

It was a wonderful journey, I then admit, and I do not blame them for their pridefulness, but what, I ask, would they have done without my map?

I am bound by honesty to confess, however, that fair as my Devon is with the vales and moorlands I have never seen, Letitia's Devon must be fairer. She found it lovelier far than she had thought, she tells me, and she smiles so happily at the mere sound of its magic name – what, I ask, must a shire be made of to stand the test of that woman's dreams?

"Here we have hills," I tell her.

"But not those hills, Bertram."

"Have we not Sun Dial?" I protest.

"Yes, we have Sun Dial," she admits.

"We have winds," I say, "and singing waters, in Grassy Fordshire."

She shakes her head.

"You never heard the Dart or Tamar or the Tavy. You never stood on the abbey bridge."

"And where," I ask, "was that?"

"That was at Tavistock," she replies, "at dear little Tavistock after a rain, with the brown water rushing through the arches where the moss and fern and ivy clings – rushing over bowlders and swirling and foaming and falling beyond over a weir; then racing away under elm-trees and out into meadows – oh, you never heard the Tavy, Bertram."

"We have Troublesome," I insist.

"Yes," she replies, but her mind is absent. "We have Troublesome, to be sure."

Then I rouse myself. I fairly menace her with her treason.

"Surely," I cry, "you do not prefer old Devon to Grassy Fordshire!"

It is a question she never answers.

"Grassy Fordshire is your native heath," I remind her, jealously.

"Devon was my father's," she replies, "and mother's, too."

"Still," I insist, "you do not prefer it to your own?"

"It is beautiful," is her answer.

Had ever man so exasperating an antagonist? She declines utterly to be convinced; she talks of nothing but that ruddy land as if it always had been hers to boast of, is forever telling of ancient villages cuddled down in the softest corners of its hills and headlands to doze and dream in the English cloud-shadows and the sun – some of them lulled, she says, by the moorland music of winds among the granite tors, and waters falling down, down through those pastoral valleys to the sea; some lapped by the salt waves rippling into coves blue and tranquil as the sky above them, and others still in a sterner setting, clinging to edges in the very clefts of a wild and rugged coast, like weed and sea-shells left there by the fury of the autumn storms. So, she tells me, her Devon is; so I picture it as we sit together by the winter fire, while for the thousandth time she tells her story: how she and Robin, with my map between them, made that long journey which, years before it, the gypsy had found forewritten in her hand. It was the very pilgrimage that as a boy I planned and promised for myself when I should come to be a man, but have found no time for – yet my son has seen it, that land of the youth whose name he bears, so that, listening, I take his glowing word, as I took that of the youth before him, for its moorland heather and its flashing streams.

Robin, it seems, preferred north Devon – Lynton and Lynmouth and their crags and glens. Letitia, I note, while yet agreeing with his wildest adjectives, leans rather towards the south.

"But think," he says, "of Watersmeet and the Valley of Rocks, Aunt Letty!"

"I do think of them," she answers, "but think of Dartmoor, my dear."

"And so I do," is his reply.

"That day the wind blew so," she calls to mind, "that morning when we rode to Tavistock."

"Tavistock?" I always ask. "Tavistock? Where have I heard that name? Do all Devonshire roads lead up to Tavistock?"

She only smiles.

"You should see Tavistock," she says, and resumes her memories. I sit quite helpless between the combatants. They differ widely, one might think, to hear their voices rising and falling in warm debate, yet listening to their words I detect nothing but a rivalry of praise, an effort on the part of each to outdo the other, as I tell them, in pæans and benisons on what I am led inevitably to believe is the fairest of earthly dwelling-places.

When Robin withdraws his youthful vigor and goes off to bed, or if he is away at school, from which he writes such letters as I wish Dove could but see, the talk is tranquil by our hearth, or little by little drops quite away.

"Such lands breed men," observes Letitia for the hundredth time. It is her old, loved theory, the worth and grace of a rare environment, of which she speaks, sewing in the fire-light. "The race must be hardy to wring its living from such shores and heights."

"True," I answer, thinking of the wreckers and smugglers who haunted those creeks and coves in years gone by – more lawless summers than the quiet one which found a woman on the very sands their heels had furrowed, or choosing flowers to press on the very cliffs they climbed with their spray-wet booty. I think vaguely of the soldiers and sailors who fought the battles whose dates and meanings it was Letitia's joy to teach in the red-brick school-house. I think more vividly of great John Ridd and Amyas Leigh, and then – a clearer vision – I remember that other, that later Devonshire lad who was flesh and blood to me; and sitting here by my Grassy Fordshire fire, a man grown gray who was once a boy eating the slice two lovers spread for him, I keep their covenant.

You go up from Plymouth, Letitia tells me, and by-and-by you are on the moors, marvelling; and you like everything, but you love Tavistock. It is in a valley, with the Tavy running beneath that bridge of which she is forever dreaming, for, as she stood there watching the waters playing, and listening to their song, she said:

"Here Robert Saxeholm was a boy. How often he must have stood here!"

"Robin Saxeholm?" asked a clear voice almost at her side; and Letitia turned. A pretty English lady stood there smiling and offering her hand.

"Yes," said Letitia, "did you know him, too?"

The lady smiled – a sad little smile it was. She was in black.

"He was my husband," she replied, "and this" – turning to the blue-eyed, fair-haired girl beside her "is Letitia Saxeholm."

"Why," my Robin cried – "why, that's – "

Letitia Primrose stopped him with a glance, and turning swiftly to that little English maid —

"Letitia?" she said, taking those pink cheeks gently between her hands, and kissing them wellnigh with every word she uttered. "Letitia – what a sweet – sweet name!"