Miss Primrose Part 11

And there she was!

There she stood in the smiling midst of them, smiling herself and giving me her hand--Cousin Dove--Cousin Dove McLean, at the first sight of whom my shyness vanished.

"Your tie, my son, seems a trifle--"

So _this_ was Cousin Dove?--this was the daughter of the golden waistcoat--this brown-eyed school-girl with brown--no, as I lived!--red hair.

VII

OF HAMADRYADS AND THEIR SPELLS

It was a golden summer that last of my youth at home, with Cousin Dove to keep us forever smiling. She was just eighteen and of that blessed temperament which loves each day for its gray or its sunny self. She coaxed Let.i.tia out-of-doors where they walked much in the mater's garden with their arms about each other's waist. Let.i.tia's pace was always deliberate, while Dove had the manner of a child restrained, as if some blithe and skipping step would have been more pleasant, would have matched better her restless buoyancy, her ever upturned beaming face as she confided in the elder woman--what? What do girls talk so long about?

I used to marvel at them, wondering what Dove could find so merry among our currant-vines. She was a child beside Let.i.tia. She had no memories to modulate that laughing voice of hers, no tears to quench the twin flames dancing in her eyes, and never an anxious thought in those days to cast its shadow there where her hair--red, I first called it; it was pure chestnut--brown, I mean, with the red just showing through, and wondrous soft and pretty on the margin of her fair white forehead, where it clung like tendrils of young scampering vine reddening in the April sun. Even Let.i.tia, whose Present seemed always twilit, was tempted by-and-by into claiming something of that heritage of youth of which she had been so long deprived. From mere smiling upon her gay young cousin she fell to making little joyous venturings herself into our frolics, repartees, and harmless badinage--"midsummer madness," father called it--a sort of scarlet rash, he said, which affected persons loitering on starlit evenings on the porch or wandering under trees. He was the soul of our table banter, and after supper sat with us on the steps smoking his cigar and "devilling," as he said, "you younger caps and bells."

Whom he loved he teased, after the fas.h.i.+on of older men, and Dove was the chief b.u.t.t of that rude fondness. It was not his habit to caress, but his eyes twinkled at his fair victim.

"And to think, Dove," he was wont to say-when she had charmed him, "that Bertram here swore that you carried prayer-books and had green eyes!"

"And what did you prophesy, Uncle Weatherby?"

"I? The truth."

"And what was that?"

"Why, _I_ said you were an angel, though a little frolicsome perhaps, and with beautiful auburn hair. Did I not, my son?"

"No, sir. You thought she would be a tomboy with red--"

"Precisely," he would interrupt. "You see, my dear, how in every particular I am corroborated by my son."

Into these quiet family tournaments, Let.i.tia, as I have said, was slowly drawn, but it was a new world to her and she was timid in it. Doctor Primrose had been endowed with wit, even with a quiet, subtle humor in which his daughter shared, but beneath their lighter moments there had flowed always an undercurrent of that sad gravity which tinged their lives together. If they were playful in each other's company, it was out of pity for each other's lot, his in his chair, hers by its side, rather than because they could not help the jest. It was meant to cheer each other--that kind of tender gayety which, however fanciful, however smiling, ends where it begins--in tears unshed. Waters in silent woodland fountains, all untouched by a single gleam from the sky above the boughs, lose sometimes their darker hues and turn to amber beneath the fallen leaves--but they are never golden like the meadow pools; they never flash and sparkle in the sun.

Let.i.tia was not yet thirty; life stretched years before her yet; so, coaxed by Cousin Dove and me, she gave her hands to us, half-delighted, half-afraid. Here now, at last, were holidays, games, tricks, revels, the mummery and masque, the pipe and tabor--all the rosy carnival of youth. Her eyes kindled, her heart beat faster as we led her on--but at the first romp failed her. It was beautiful, she pleaded--only let her smile upon it as from a balcony--she could not dance--she had never learned our songs.

We did not urge her. She sat with the mater and smiled gladly upon our mirth. In all the frolics of that happy summer her eyes were always on Cousin Dove, as if, watching, she were thinking to herself--enviously, often sadly, I have no doubt, but through it all lovingly and with a kind of pride in that grace and flowerness--

"There is the girl I might have been."

Dove, even when she seemed the very spirit of our effervescence, kept always a certain letter of that lovely quaintness which her name implied. She _was_ a dove, the mater said, reminding us for the hundredth time of her old prediction--a dove always, even among the magpies; meaning, I suppose, father and myself.

It was not all play that summer. I was to enter college in the fall, and I labored at exercises, helped not a little by a voice still saying:

"That's right, my boy. Remember what Dr. Primrose said when he gave you Horace."

Now was I under the spell of that ancient life which had held him thralled to his very end. Mine were but meagre vistas, it is true, but I caught such glimpses of marble beauty through the pergola of Time, as made me a little proud of my far-sightedness. Seated with Dove and Let.i.tia beneath a favorite oak, half-way up Sun Dial, I discoursed learnedly, as I supposed, only to find that in cla.s.sic lore the poet's daughter was better versed than I. She brightened visibly at the sound of ancient names; they had been the music of her father's world, and from earliest childhood she had listened to it. Seated upon the gra.s.s, I, the school-boy, expounded text-book notes. She, the daughter of "Old David Homer," as b.u.t.ters called him, told us bright tales of G.o.ds and heroes, nymphs and flowers and the sailing clouds sh.e.l.l-pink in the setting sun. They had been to her what _Mother Goose_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ had been to me; they had been her fairy stories, told her at eve ere she went to bed; and now as she told them, an eager winsomeness crept upon her, her voice was sweeter, her face was glorified with something of that roseate light in which her scenes were laid; she was a child again, and Dove and I, listening, were children with her, asking more.

She sat bolt-upright while she romanced for us. I lay p.r.o.ne before her with my chin upon my hands, nibbling gra.s.s-stalks. Dove, like Let.i.tia, sat upon the turf, now gazing raptly with her round brown eyes at the story-teller's face, now gazing off at the purple woodland distance or at Gra.s.sy Ford's white spires among the elms below.

"Why, Letty, you're a poetess," Dove once said, so breathlessly that Let.i.tia laughed. "And I," Dove added, "why, I don't know a single story."

"Why should you know one?" replied Let.i.tia, pinching Dove's rueful face.

"Why tell an idyl, when you can live one, little Chloe, little wild olive? You yourself shall be a heroine, my dear."

Idling there under distant trees for refuge from the August sun, which burns and browns our Gra.s.sy Fords.h.i.+re, crumbling our roads to a gray powder and veiling with it the green of way-side hedge and vine--idling there, Dove was a creature I had never seen before and but half-divined in visions new to me. Fair as she seemed under our roof-tree, there in the woodland she was far the lovelier. Young things flowered about us, their fragrance scenting the summer air. Like them her presence wore a no less subtle spell. It was an ancient glamour, though I did not know it then, it seemed so new to me--one which young shepherds felt, wondering at it, in the world's morning; and since earth's daughters, then as now, with all their fairness, could scarce be credited with such wondrous witchery, those young swains came home breathless from the woodland with tales of dryads and their spells. Maiden mine, in the market-place, you are only one among many women, though you be beautiful as a dream, but under boughs the birds still sing those songs the first birds sang--there it is always Eden, and thou art the only woman there.

On my nineteenth birthday three climbed Sun Dial as three had climbed it once before. Leaving the village we crossed the brook by that self-same ford of stones, and plunged at once into the forest and ancient orchard that clothed the slope. I was not leading now, but helping them, Dove and Let.i.tia, over the rocks and brambles and steeper places of the ascent. Threading as before that narrow trail I knew by heart, I broke the cob-webs and parted the fragrant tangle that beset our way, vines below, branches above us. It was just such another August noon, and the world was nodding; no birds sang, no squirrels chattered. We stopped for breath, resting upon a wall shaded by an ancient oak.

"The very spot!" I cried. "Do you remember, Let.i.tia, how you and Robin rested here?"

"Yes," she answered.

"Do you remember how I called to you, and came running back?"

"Yes."

"I'd been waiting for you under an apple-tree. How I should like to see old Robin now!"

"Who was Robin?" asked Cousin Dove, and so I told her of the Devons.h.i.+re lad. During my story Let.i.tia wandered, as she liked to do, searching for odd, half-hidden flowers among the gra.s.ses. Soon she was nowhere to be seen, nor could we hear her near us.

"Let.i.tia was fond of Robin, was she not?" asked Cousin Dove.

"Oh yes," I said. "So were we all."

"But I mean--don't you think she may have loved him?"

"Oh," I said, "I never thought of that; besides, Let.i.tia never had time for--"

Dove opened wide her eyes.

"Must you have time for--"

"I mean," I stammered, "she was never free like--you or me; we--"

"I see," she replied, coloring. "He must have been a splendid fellow."

"He was," I said.

"Dear Let.i.tia!" murmured Cousin Dove, gazing thoughtfully at the wilted flower she held. The wood which had been musical with voices was strangely silent now. It was something more than a mere stillness. It was like a spell, for I could not break it, though I tried. Dove, too, was helpless. There was no wind--I should have known had one been blowing--yet the boughs parted above her head, and a crown fell s.h.i.+ning on her hair!--her hair, those straying tendrils of it, warm and ruddy and now fired golden at that magic touch--her brow, pure as a nun's, beneath that veiling--the long, curved lashes of her hidden eyes--her cheeks still flushed--her lips red-ripe and waiting motionless.

She raised her eyes to me!--a moment only, but my heart leaped, for in that instant it dawned upon me how all that vision there--flesh, blood, and soul--was just arm's-length from me!

It was--I know.