Читать книгу Miss Primrose: A Novel - Gilson Roy Rolfe - Страница 5

Robin gone, I saw but little of Letitia, I was so busy, I suppose, with youth, and she with age. The poet's lamp had burned up bravely all that summer-time, its flame renewed by Robin's coming – or, rather, it was the brief return of his own young English manhood which he lived again in that fine, clean Devon lad. Robin gone, he felt more keenly how far he was from youth and Devonshire, what a long journey he had come to age and helplessness, and his feeble life burned dimmer than before.

Two or three years slipped by. The charm was gone which had drawn me daily through the hole in our picket-fence. Even the doctor's Rugby tales no longer held me, I knew them so by heart. When he began some old beginning, my mind recited so much more glibly than his faltering tongue, I had leaped to the end before he reached the middle of his story. He was given now to wandering in his narratives, and while he droned there in his chair, my own mind wandered where it listed, or I played restlessly with my cap and tried hard not to yawn, longing to be out-of-doors again. Many a time has my conscience winced, remembering that eagerness to desert one who had been so kind to me, who had led my fancies into pure-aired ways and primrose paths – a little too English and hawthorn-scented, some may think, for a good American, but we meant no treason. He, before Robin, had given my mind an Old-World bent never to be altered. Only last evening, with Master Shallow and a certain well-known portly one of Windsor fame, I drank right merrily and ate a last year's pippin with a dish of caraways in an orchard of ancient Gloucestershire. Before me as I write there hangs a drawing of pretty Sally of the alley and the song. Between the poet and that other younger Devonshire lad, they wellnigh made me an English boy.

We heard from Robin – rather, Letitia did. He never wrote to me, but sent me his love in Letitia's letters and a book from London, Lorna Doone, for the Christmas following his return. Letitia told me of him now and then. She knew when he left Cambridge and we sent him a present – or, rather, Letitia did —Essays of Emerson, which she bought with money that could be ill-spared, and she wrote an inscription in it, "From Grassy Fordshire, in memory of the Seventh Slice." She knew when he went back home to Devon, and then, soon afterwards, I believe, when he left England and went out to India. Now, she did not tell me that wonderful piece of news till it was old to her, which was strange, I thought. I remember my surprise. I had been wondering where Robin was and saying to her that he must be in London – perhaps in Parliament! – making his way upward in the world, for I never doubted that he would be an earl some day.

"Oh no," Letitia said, when I mentioned London. "He is in India."

"India! Mr. Bob in India?"

"Yes. He went – why, he went last autumn! Didn't you know?"

No, I did not know. Why, I asked, and as reproachfully as I could make the question – why had she never told me?

She must have forgotten, she replied, penitent – there were so many things to remember.

True, I argued, but she ought at least to have charged her mind with what was to me such important news. Mr. Bob and I were dear, dear friends, I reminded her. He had gone to India, and I had not known!

She knew it, she said, humbly. She would never forgive herself. I did not go near her for days, I remember, and long afterwards her offence still rankled in my mind. Had she not spread that slice on Sun Dial, never to forget? When next I saw her I made a rebuking point of it, asking her if she had heard from Robin. She shook her head. Months passed and no letter came.

"We don't see you often any more, Bertram," her father said to me one day.

"No," I stammered. "I'm – "

"Busy studying, I suppose," he said.

"Yes, sir; and ball-games," I replied.

"How do you get on with your Latin?" he inquired, feebly.

"We're still in Virgil, sir."

"Ah," he said, but without a trace of the old vigor the classics had been wont to rouse in him. "That's good – won'erful writer – up – "

He was pointing with his bony fore-finger.

"Yes?" I answered, wondering what he meant to say. He roused himself, and pointed again over my shoulder.

"Up there – on the – s'elf."

He was so ghastly white I thought him dying and called Letitia.

"'S all right, Bertram," he reassured me, patting my hand. I suppose he had seen the terror in my face. He smiled faintly. "'M all right, Bertram."

Outside the apple-trees were blooming, I remember, and he lived, somehow, to see them bloom again.

My conscience winces, as I say, to think how I twirled my cap by my old friend's bedside, longing to be gone; yet I comfort myself with the hope that he did not note my eagerness, or that if he did he remembered his own boyhood and the witchery of bat and ball. Not only was the poet's life-lamp waning, not only was Letitia burdened with increasing cares, fast aging her, the mater said, but I was a child no longer; a youth, now, mindful of all about me, and seeing that neighbor household with new and comprehending eyes.

The very house grew dismal to me. The boughs outside were creeping closer – not to shelter it, not to cool it and make a breathing nook for a lad flushed with his games in the summer sun. It was damp there; the air seemed mouldy under the lindens; there was no invitation in the unkempt grass; toads hopped from beneath your feet, bird-songs came to you, but always, or so it seemed to me, they came from distance, from the yards beyond.

There within, across that foot-worn threshold which had been a goal for me in former years, there was now a – not a poet any longer, or Rugby boy, but only a sick old man. Upon a table at his side his goblets stood, covered with saucers, and a spoon in each. His drugs were watery; there was no warmth in them, no sparkle even when the sun came straggling in, no wine of life to be quaffed thirstily – only a tepid, hourly spoonful to be feebly sipped, a sop to death.

Even with windows open to the breeze the air seemed stifling to the lad I was. The sunlight falling on the faded carpet seemed always ebbing to a kind of shadow of a glow. The clock, that ugly box upon the shelf, ticked dreadfully as if it never would strike a smiling hour again. The china ornaments at its side stood ghastly mute, and hideous flowers —ffff! those waxen faces under glass! If not quite dead, why were they kept so long a-dying there? Would no kind, sunny soul in mercy free them from their pallid misery? I was a Prince of Youth! What had I to do with tombs? I fled.

Even Letitia, kind as ever to me, seemed always busy and preoccupied – sweeping, dusting, baking, cleansing those everlasting pots and pans, or reading to her father, who listened dreamily, dozing often, but always waking if she stopped. Content to have her at his side because discontent to have her absent, even for the little while her duties or the doctor's orders led her, though quite unwillingly, away. Impatience for her return would make him querulous, which caused her tears, not for its failing consciousness of her devotion, but for its warning to her of his gentle spirit's slow decline despite her care.

"Where have you been so long, Letitia?"

"So long, father? Only an hour gone."

"Only an hour? I thought you would never come."

"See, father, I've brought you a softer pillow," she would say, smiling his plaints into oblivion. It was the smile with which she had caught the grape-thief by the fence, the one with which she had charmed a Devonshire lad, now gone three years and more – the tenderest smile I ever saw, save one, and the saddest, though not mournful, it was so genuine, so gentle, and so unselfish, and her eyes shone lovingly the while. Its sadness, as I think now of it, lay not so much in the smile itself as in the wonder of it that she smiled at all.

The mater – was she not always mother to the motherless? – was Letitia's angel in those weary days, carried fresh loaves of good brown bread to her, a pot of beans, or a pie, perhaps, passing with them through the hole in the picket-fence. I can see her now standing on Letitia's kitchen doorstep with the swathed dish in her hands.

"The good fairy," Letitia called her; and when she was for crying – for cry she must sometimes, though not for the world before her father's eyes – she shed her tears in the kitchen in the mater's arms. So it was that while I was yet a school-boy an elder sister was born unto our house and became forever one of the Weatherbys by a tie – not of blood, I have said before, yet it was of blood, now that I come to think of it – it was of gentle, gentle human blood.

There was an old nurse now to share Letitia's vigils, but only the daughter's tender hands knew how to please. She scarcely left him. Doctor or friends met the same answer, smiling but unalterable: she would rather stay. Not a night passed that she did not waken of her own anxiety to slip softly to his bedside. He smiled her welcome, and she sat beside him with his poor, thin hand in hers, sometimes till the dawn of day.

Day by day like that, all through the silent watches of the darkened world, that gentle handmaiden laid her sacrifice upon the altar of her duty, without a murmur, without one bitter word. It was her youth she laid there; it was her girlhood and her bloom of womanhood, her first, her very last young years – sparkle of eyes, rose and fulness of maiden cheeks, the golden moments of that flower-time when Love goes choosing, playtime's silvery laughter and blithe, untrammelled song.

"'Titia," he said to her, "there's no poem – 'alf so beaut'ful – 's your love, m' dear."

The words were a crown to her. He set it on her bowed head with his trembling fingers.

"Soft – brown 'air," he murmured. He could not see how the gray was coming there.

Spring came, scenting his room with apple blooms; summer, filling it with orient airs – but he was gone.