Chapter IV: Part II: The School-Mistress (2)

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.

"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 negligées; 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.

VIII

NEW EDEN

Letitia'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 grass 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 Letitia 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 brimming 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 Grassy Ford confessed to him a doubt that there was a God, 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 God! Why, sir--" and here Dr. Primrose's heart quite overcame him, and his voice broke. "Gabriel, you are not such a damned--"

And the merchant, Letitia 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 sex in general, through too much faith. While not obtrusive in her views of life in her younger years, Letitia, 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 Letitia'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 Letitia 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 Letitia. 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," Letitia would reply, and in a tone so scrupulously courteous I used to feel like the man old Butters 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 Letitia 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 pass. 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 impassiveness, 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 Letitia'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.

"What have _I_ done?" asked she.

At meals, especially, we were ill at ease. The very viands, even those famous dishes of Dove's own loving handiwork, met with disfavor instead of praise. Letitia had abandoned meats; now she declined Dove's pies! Pastry was innutritious, she declared, meats not intended for man at all, and even of green things she ate so mincingly that my little housewife was in despair.

"What can I get for you, dear?" she would ask, anxiously. "What would you like?"

"My love," Letitia would reply, flushing with annoyance, "I am perfectly satisfied."

"But I'll get you anything, Letitia."

"I eat quite enough, my dear," was the usual answer--"quite enough," she would add, firmly, "for any one."

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