Kitabı oku: «Miss Primrose: A Novel», sayfa 7

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 Their ardor and the matrons' midnight coffee cooling together, they were withdrawn, and the Guards themselves, though they had no formal mustering-out, forgot their fears and countersigns and met no more.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.

"Remember, Miss Primrose, you are not a mother," snapped a certain sharp-tongued matron of our town who had disagreed with her.

"Oh," said Letitia, "but I have loved so many children. I am a kind of mother."

"Mother!" cried the matron.

"Yes," Letitia answered. "I am a mother – without a child."

Had they been her children, it had been easier to forgive their thoughtlessness. Offended sometimes by her discipline, they said plain things of her lack of pretty youth; they whispered lies of her; she shed some tears, I know, over those scribblings which she intercepted or found forgotten on the school-room floor. Then her garden was the abode of shadows, her efforts vain there. Sometimes, for solace, she sought out Dove, but the habit of lonely thinking had grown upon her; it had been enforced by her maidenhood.

While I am not a herb-doctor by diploma, I am one by faith, simples have wrought such speedy cures in my own gray hours, and Grassy-Fordshire is so green with them that a walk by Troublesome or a climb on Sun Dial is in itself a marvellous remedy, aromatic and anodyne. In my drives to patients beyond the town, I have been seized suddenly by a kind of fever. There are no pills for it, or powders, or any drugs in all the bottles on my shelves – but a jointed fishing-rod and line kept in the bottom of a doctor's buggy is efficacious if applied in time. Often when that spell was on me I have turned Pegasus towards the nearest stream, and while he nibbled, one hour on a scented bank, fish or not – sixty drops from the grass-green phial of a summer's day – has restored my soul. Clattering home again at double-quick, Pegasus's ears on end, his nostrils quivering, my buggy thumping over thank-you-ma'ams, I would not be a city leech for a brown-stone front and a brass name-plate upon my door.

In some such pleasant hooky-hour in spring I had cast, sullenly enough, but was now humming to myself, in tune with Troublesome, when a twig snapped behind the willows. Some cow, thought I, and kept my eyes upon the stream. Another twig: I turned inquiringly. There, by the water-side, and all unmindful of my presence, was Letitia Primrose.

I bit my pipe clean through. I would have called at once, but something stopped me. She stood quietly by the brook, gazing at the stones on which it played and sang. Her shoulders drooped a little, her face seemed tired and pale. She turned and saw me.

"Bertram!" Her face was guilty.

"Hello!" I said, lighting my pipe.

"You here, Bertram?"

"Yes," I replied, casting again. "How is it you're here? No school, Letitia?"

She hesitated.

"No patients, doctor?" she asked, softly.

"No patients dying," I retorted. We eyed each other.

"I had a headache," she said, meekly, seating herself upon a log. "And I have a substitute."

"There are other doctors," I remarked.

Suddenly she rose.

"I think," she said, "I'll just stroll that way, if you don't mind, Bertram."

"Not at all," I replied. "I know how you feel, Letitia. That's why I come here."

"Do you?" she asked. "Then this isn't your first – "

"Nor my twentieth offence," I replied, laughing. She sighed.

"I'm glad of that. It's my first – really. I feel like a criminal."

I pointed with my broken pipe-stem.

"You'll find the best path there," I said.

"I think I'll stay, if you don't mind, Bertram."

"Stay, by all means," I replied, and went on fishing. Letitia was the first to speak.

"It's hard always trying to be – dominant," she remarked, "isn't it?"

"Why, I rather like it," I replied.

"You are a man," she said. "Men do, I believe. But I, I get so tired sometimes" – she bit her lip – "of being master." She laughed nervously. "That's why I ran away."

Presently she went on speaking.

"If we could only be surrounded by such things as these, always, how serene our lives might be. Don't smile. It's my old sermon of environment, I know; but why are you here? – and why am I? I try my best to keep the beautiful before my children's eyes, to tempt them into lovely thinking. Bertram, I believe, heart and soul, in the power of beauty. I am so sure of it, I know I should be a stronger teacher if I were young and beautiful myself – or even pretty, like Helen White."

"She is a mere wax doll," I said.

"But children like pretty faces," she replied. "Look! You have a fish!"

It was a snag, but while I was busy with it she rose. "Wait," I said, "I'll drive you home."

"No, thank you, Bertram. I'd rather walk. My head is better now. Good-bye."

I did not urge her. When she had gone I picked up a slip of paper from the path where she had passed. It was a crumpled half of a blue-ruled leaf torn from some pupil's tablet, and, scrawled upon it in a school-girl's hand, I read:

"Dear Edna, – Don't mind the homely old thing. Everybody says she's fifty if she's a day. No one would marry her, so she had to teach school."

It was written, Dove told me afterwards, by one of the rose-girls in Letitia's garden.

VII
PEGGY NEAL

My aunt Miranda, who was wise in many things, used to maintain that a woman ceased to be charming only when she thought she had ceased to be so; that age had nothing whatever to do with the matter – and so saying, she would smile so bewitchingly upon me that I was forced inevitably to the conclusion that she bore her fifty years much better than many women their paltry score. Letitia was not so sanguine; she laid more stress upon the spring-time. I have heard her say that there was nothing lovelier in the world than a fair young girl full of pure spirits as a rose-cup full of dew. She would turn in the street to look at one; she liked them to be about her; her own face grew more winning in such comradeship, and when she was given a higher school-room, where the girls wore skirts to their shoe-tops and put up their hair, it was an almost childish pleasure which she displayed. It was this very preference for exquisite maidenhood that explained her fondness for Peggy Neal. It was not scholarship which had won the teacher's heart, for Peggy was an indifferent student, as Letitia herself confessed, but she was a plump and brown-eyed, pink-cheeked country girl who always smiled and who had that grace of innocence and bloom of health which are the witchery of youth. She was a favorite with school-boys, a belle of theirs at straw-rides, dances, and taffy-pulls, and other diversions of our Grassy Fordshire teens, where, however, her gentle ways, her readiness to follow rather than to lead, her utter incapability of envy or spiteful speech made her beloved of girls as well. She was the amiable maiden whom men look twice at, yet whose sisters are never quite jealous, holding her charm to be mere pinkish prettiness and beneath the envy of superior minds like theirs. Peggy was the sort of girl Letitia had never been, roseate with the kind of youth Letitia had never known, and it enchanted her as a joy and beauty which had been denied.

Neal, the father, was a drunken farmer, whose wife was chiefly responsible for the crops they planted, and who, being strong and abler than her shiftless spouse, was usually to be seen in the field and garden directing and aiding the hired man. Peggy was the only child. She helped her mother in the kitchen, fed the chickens, skimmed the milk, sold the butter, and let her father in o' nights. He was a by-word in the village. Occasional revivalists prayed for him publicly upon their knees, but without effect. His wife could have told them how futile that method was; she had tried it herself in more hopeful years. She had tried rage also, but it left her bitter and sick of life, and Pat the drunker; so wisely she had fallen back upon resignation, though not of the apathetic sort, and had made herself mistress of the farm, where her husband was suffered to spend his nights if he chose, or was able to walk so far from the tavern where he spent his days.

For Peggy the mother had better dreams. She knew that the girl was beautiful, and she knew also what beauty, however born, might win for itself in a wider world than her own had been. Peggy, therefore, was to finish school, however the farm might suffer by her absence and the expense of such simple dress as her village friendships would require. Nature might marry Thrift or Money, thought the hard-faced woman in the faded sunbonnet; silk and lace and a new environment might make a queen of this beggar-maid, her last hope in a life of hopelessness. Proudly she watched her daughter flower into village fame, guarding that fairness with jealous eyes.

"Daughter," she would say, "where is your hat?"

"Mamma, I like the sun."

"Nonsense. Go straight and fetch it and put it on. Do you want to be speckled like your ugly old mother-hen?"

It was a care and pride that would have turned another and far less lovely head than Peggy's, yet in spite of it this country school-girl ripened sweetly. Driving on country visits I used to meet her by the way, walking easily and humming to herself the while, her books and luncheon swinging at her side – a perfect model for romantic painters who run to milk-maids, or, as Letitia used to say, the veritable Phyllis of old English song.

The mother rose at dawn; she toiled by sunlight and by lamplight; her face grew haggard, her figure gaunter, her voice sharper with bitter irony, her heart harder save in that one lone corner which was kept soft – solely for her child. Peggy, I believe, was the only living thing she smiled upon. Neighbors dreaded her cutting tongue; her husband was too dazed to care.

Time went by. In spite of that stern resolve in the woman's nature, and all her labor and frugal scheming, what with the failure of crops and her lack of knowledge of their better care, and an old encumbrance whose interest could be barely met on the quarter-days that cast their shadows on the whole round year, the farm declined. Letitia's gifts from her own wardrobe were all that kept Peggy Neal in school. It was a word from Letitia also that raised the cloud on the mother's face when despair was darkest there. Might not summer-boarders, Letitia asked, bear a surer, more golden harvest than those worn-out fields?

"Summer-boarders!" cried Mrs. Neal, with a grim irony in her voice. But she repeated it – "Summer-boarders," in a milder tone, and the plan was tried.

The first ones came in June. They descended noisily from the fast express, lugging bags and fishing-rods and guns. Some of them stared; some young ones whistled softly at the fair driver of that old two-seated buckboard waiting to bear them to the farm. They greeted effusively – for the daughter's sake – the hard-mouthed woman who met them at the door, striving her best to smile a welcome. She it was who showed them their plain but well-scrubbed chambers, while their minds were at the barn.

Pastures and orchards bore strange fruit that summer: white-faced city clerks in soft, pink shirts smoked cigarettes and browned in the sun; freckled ladies set up their easels in the cow-lot; high-school professors asked one another puzzling questions, balanced cannily on the topmost rail of the Virginia fence, and all – all, that is, to a man – helped Peggy carry in the milk, helped Peggy churn, helped Peggy bake, helped Peggy set the table, and clear it, and wipe the dishes, and set them safely away again in the dim pantry – helped Peggy to market, and Peggy to church: so rose her star.

The mother watched, remembering her own girlhood. Its romance, seen through a mist of gloomy years, seemed foolish now. There might be happiness in human life – she had never known any. There was a deal of nonsense in the world called love, she knew, and there was a surer thing called money. Peggy should wait for it.

The mother watched, smiling to herself sardonically, secretly well-pleased – smiling because she knew quite well that these callow sprigs had far less money than negligèes; well-pleased because she guessed that soon enough a man with both would be hovering about sweet Peggy's dairy. It was a humorous thing to her that all these city men should think it beautiful – that dampish, sunless spot where the milk-cans stood waist-deep in cresses.

She kept sharp eyes upon her daughter, and farm-house duties filled Peggy's days to their very brim. There must be no loitering by star-light, either. Mother and daughter now slept together in the attic store-room, for the new farming had proved a prosperous thing.

The summer was not like other summers. There was life and gayety up at Neal's: strumming of banjos and the sound of laughter and singing on the porch, much lingering in hammocks under the pine-trees, moonlit jaunts in the old hay-rick, lanterns moving about the barn and dairy, empty bowls on the buttery table when Mrs. Neal came down at dawn, and half-cut loaves in the covered crocks.

September came and the harvest had been gathered in. The last boarder had returned cityward. Peggy was in school again. One day, however, she was missing from her classes, and Letitia, fearing that she might be ill, walked to the farm after school was over. It was a pleasant road with a narrow path beside it among the grasses, and the day was cool with premonitions of the year's decline.

The farm seemed silent and deserted. She knocked at doors, she tapped lightly on the kitchen-windows, but no one was at home. At the barn, however, the horses were in their stalls, turning their heads to her and whinneying of their empty mangers. Surely, she thought, the Neals could not be gone. She stood awhile by the well-curb from which she could better survey the farm: it lay before her, field and orchard, bright with sunshine and golden-rod, yet she saw no moving thing but the crows in the corn-stubble and the cows waiting by the meadow-bars. Then she tried the dairy, and there heard nothing but the brook whimpering among the cans and cresses, and she turned away.

Now a lane runs, grassy and strewn with the wild blackberry-vines, through the Neal farm to a back road into town, and Letitia chose it to vary her homeward way. It passes 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, Letitia 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 Letitia 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?" Letitia begged, terrified, and gathered Peggy into her arms. "Tell me! Tell me, sweet!"

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

But Letitia 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, Letitia 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, Letitia 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.