Miss Primrose: A Novel

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.

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."