Miss Primrose Part 6

"You don't say so," mumbled the delighted editor. "Shouldn't wonder.

Shouldn't wonder now at all. I believe there was an 's' tacked on our name, some time or other, now that I come to think of it, and printer's ink always did run in the b.u.t.ters blood, by George!"

He even meditated hanging up a sign with a pied bull upon it--or so he said--but rejected the plan as too Old English for Gra.s.sy Ford. He never ceased, however, to refer to "my old cousin--Shakespeare's publisher, you know," and in the occasional dramatic criticisms that embellished the columns of the _Gazette_, all plays presented at our Grand Opera-House in the Odd Fellow's Block were compared, somehow, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, to _King Lear_.

b.u.t.ters of "The Pide Bull," I say, first told me how that young Crusader with the tear-wet face had delivered "Jerusalem," saving it from the stern fate which had awaited it and setting it proudly among the immortal "Gems." Then I sought Let.i.tia, whose briefer, more reluctant version filled in wide c.h.i.n.ks in the b.u.t.ters narrative, while my knowledge of them both, of their modesty and their tender-heartedness, filled in the others, making the tale complete.

I was too young when the poet wrote his masterpiece to know or care about it, or how it found its way to the wondering world of Gra.s.sy Ford--nay, to the whole round world as well, "two hemispheres," as old man b.u.t.ters used to remind me with offended pride in his voice, which had grown gruffer with his years. Did he not send _Gazettes_ weekly, he would ask, to Mrs. Ann Bowers's eldest son, a Methodist missionary in the Congo wilds, and to "that woman in Asia"? He referred to a Gra.s.sy Ford belle of other days who had married a tea-merchant and lived in Chong-Chong.

Who knows what befell the edition of that memorable _Gazette_ which contained "Jerusalem," set solid, a mighty column of Alexandrine lines?

One summer's afternoon, tramping in an Adirondack wilderness, I came by chance upon the blackened ashes of a fire, and sitting meditatively upon a near-by log, poking the leaf-strewn earth with my stick, I unearthed a yellow, half-burned corner of an old newspaper, and, idly lifting it to read, found it a fragment of some Australian _Times_. Still more recently, when my aunt Matilda, waxing wroth at the settling floors of her witch-colonial house in Bedfordtown, had them torn up to lay down new ones, the carpenters unearthed an old rat's nest built partially of a New York _Tribune_ with despatches from the field of Gettysburg.

"Sneer not at the power of the press," old man b.u.t.ters used to say, stuffing the bowl of his black pipe from my tobacco-jar and casting the match into my wife's card-tray. "Who knows, my boy? Davy Primrose's 'Jerusalem' may turn up yet."

It is something to ponder now how all those years that I played away, Let.i.tia, of whom I thought then only as the young lady who lived next door and occasional confidante of my idle hours, was slaving with pretty hands and puzzling her fair young mind to bring both ends together in decent comfort for that poor dependent one. Yet she does not sigh, this gray Let.i.tia among the petunias, when she talks of those by-gone days, but is always smiling back with me some happy memory.

"You were the funniest boy, Bertram," she tells me, "always making believe that it was old England in Gra.s.sy Ford, and that you were Robin Hood or Lord Somebody or Earl Somebody Else. How father used to laugh at you! He said it was a pity you would never be knighted, and once he drew for you your escutcheon--you don't remember? Well, it had three books upon it--_Tom Brown's School-days_, _Tales of a Grandfather_, and the _Morte d'Arthur_."

Then I remind her that Robin Saxeholm was half to blame for my early failure as an American. He was a Devons.h.i.+re lad; he had been a Harrow boy, and was a Cambridge man when he came, one summer of my boyhood, to Gra.s.sy Ford to visit the Primroses. His father had been the doctor's dearest friend when they were boys together in Devons.h.i.+re, and when young Robin's five-feet-eleven filled up the poet's doorway, Let.i.tia tells me, the tears ran down the doctor's cheeks and he held out both his arms to him:

"Robin Saxeholm!--you young Devon oak, you--tell me, does the Dart still run?"

"_He_ does, sir!" cried the young Englishman, speaking, Let.i.tia says, quite in the Devon manner, for those who dwell upon the banks of that famous river find, it seems, something too human in its temper and changeful moods to speak of it in the neuter way.

They sat an hour together, the poet and his old friend's son, before Let.i.tia could show the guest to the room she had prepared for him.

_That_ was a summer!

Robin taught me a kind of back-yard, two-old-cat cricket with a bat fas.h.i.+oned by his own big hands. Sometimes Let.i.tia joined us, and the doctor watched us from his chair rolled out upon the garden walk, applauding each mighty play decorously, in the English fas.h.i.+on, with clapping hands. Robin Goodfellow, the doctor called our captain, "though a precious large one, I'll be bound," he said. Let.i.tia called him Mr.

Saxeholm, first--then Mr. Robin, and sometimes, laughingly, Mr.

Bobbin--then Robin. I called him Mr. Bob.

I made up my mind to one thing then and there: I should be happier when I grew old enough to wear white cricket flannels and a white hat like Mr. Bob's, and I hoped, and prayed too on my knees, that _my_ skin would be as clear and pinkish--yes, and my hair as red. Alas! I had begun all wrong: I was a little beast of a brunette.

I taught Mr. Bob baseball, showed him each hill and dale, each whimpering brook of Gra.s.sy Ford, and fished with him among the lilies in shady pools while he smoked his pipe and told me of Cambridge and Harrow-on-the-Hill and the vales of Devon. He had lived once, so he told me, next door to a castle, though it did not resemble Warwick or Kenilworth in the least.

"It was just a _cah-sle_," said Mr. Bob, in his funny way.

"With a moat, Mr. Bob?"

"Oh yes, a moat, I dare say--but dry, you know."

"And a drawbridge, Mr. Bob?"

"Well, no--not precisely; at any rate, you couldn't draw it up."

"But a portcullis, I'll bet, Mr. Bob?"

"Well--I _cahn't_ say as to that, I'm sure, Bertram."

He had lived next door to a castle, mind you, and did not know if it had a portcullis! He had never even looked to see! He had never even asked!

Still, Mr. Bob was a languid fellow, Bertram Weatherby was bound to admit, even in speech, and drawled out the oddest words sometimes, talking of "trams" and "guards" and "luggage-vans," which did seem queer in a college man, though Bertram remembered he was not a Senior and doubtless would improve his English in due time. Indeed, he helped him, according to his light, and the credit is the boy's that the young Britisher, after a single summer in Gra.s.sy Ford, could write from Cambridge to Let.i.tia: "I guess I will never forget the folks in Gra.s.sy Ford! Remember me to the little kid, my quondam guide, philosopher, and friend."

Robin was always pleasant with Let.i.tia, helping her with her housework, I remember, wiping her dishes for her, tending her fires, and weeding her kitchen-garden. There never had been so many holidays, she declared, gratefully, and she used to marvel that he had come so far, all that watery way from Devon, yet could be content with such poor fare and such humble work and quiet pleasures in an alien land so full of wonders. Yet it must have been cheerful loitering, for he stayed on, week after week.

He had come intending, he confessed, to "stop" but one, but somehow had small hankering thereafter to see, he said, "what is left of America, liking your Gra.s.sy Fords.h.i.+re, Bertram, so very well." Perhaps secretly he was touched by the obvious penury and helplessness of his father's friend, as well as by the daughter's loving and heavy service, so that he stayed on but to aid them in the only un.o.btrusive way, overpaying them, Let.i.tia says, for what he whimsically called "tuition in the quiet life," as he gently closed her fingers over the money which she blushed to take. Then he would quote for her those lines from Pope:

"... Quiet by day, Sound sleep by night; study and ease Together mixt, sweet recreation, And innocence, which most doth please With meditation."

He read Greek and Latin with Dr. Primrose, and many an argument of ancient loves and wars I listened to, knowing by the keen-edged feeling of my teeth when the fray was over that my mouth had been wide open all the while. Let.i.tia, too, could hear from the kitchen where she made her pies, for it was a conversational little house, just big enough for a tete-a-tete, as Dr. Primrose used to say, and when debate waxed high, she would stand sometimes in the kitchen doorway, in her gingham ap.r.o.n, wiping the same cup twenty times.

"Young Devon oak," the doctor called him, sometimes half vexed to find how ribbed and knotty the young tree was.

"We'll look it up, then," he would cry, "but I know I'm right."

"You'll find you are mistaken, I think, doctor."

"Well, now, we'll see. We'll see. You're fresh from the schools and I'm a bit rusty, I'll confess, but I'm sure I'm--here, now--hm, let's see--why, can that be possible?--I didn't think so, but--by George!

you're right. You're right, sir. You're right, my boy."

He said it so sadly sometimes and shut the book with an air so beaten, lying back feebly in his chair, that Robin, Let.i.tia says, would lead the talk into other channels, merely to contend for ground he knew he could never hold, to let the doctor win. It was fine to see him then, the roused old gentleman, his eyes s.h.i.+ning, sitting bolt upright in his chair waving away the young man's arguments with his feeble hand.

"I think you are right, doctor, after all. I see it now. You make it clear to me. Yes, sir, I'm groggy. I'm down, sir. Count me out."

And you should have seen the poet then in his triumph, if victory so gracious may be called by such a name. There was no pa.s.sing under the yoke--no, no! He would gaze far out of the open window, literally overlooking his vanquished foe, and delicately conveying thus a hint that it was of no utter consequence which had conquered; and so smoothing the young man's rout, he would fall to expatiating, soothingly, remarking how natural it was to go astray on a point so difficult, so many-sided, so subtle and profound--in short, speaking so eloquently for his p.r.o.ne antagonist, expounding so many likely arguments in defence of that lost cause, one listening would wonder sometimes who had won.

Evenings, when Let.i.tia's work was done, she would come and sit with us, Robin and me, upon the steps. There in the summer moonlight we would listen to his tales, lore of the Dartmoor and Exmoor wilds, until my heart beat strangely at the shadows darkening my homeward way when the clock struck ten. Grape-vines, I noted then, were the very place for an ambush by the Doones, of whom they talked so much, Robin and Let.i.tia!

Later, when the grapes were ripe, a Doone could regale himself, leisurely waiting to step out, giant-wise, upon his prey! There were innumerable suspicious rustlings as I pa.s.sed, and in particular a certain strange--a dreadful _brus.h.i.+ng_ sound as of ghostly wings when I squeezed, helpless, through the worn pickets!--and then I would strike out manfully across the lawn.

One day in August--it was August, I know, for it was my birthday and Robin had given me a rod and line--we took Let.i.tia with us to the top of Sun Dial, a bald-crowned hill from which you see all Gra.s.sy Fords.h.i.+re green and golden at your feet. Leaving the village, we crossed a brook by a ford of stones and plunged at once into the wild wood, forest and ancient orchard that clothed the slope. I was leading--to show the way.

Robin followed with Let.i.tia--to help her over the rocks and brambles and steeper places of the long ascent, which was far more arduous than one might think, looking up at it from the town below.

I strode on proudly, threading the narrow hunter's trail I knew by heart, a remnant of an old wagon-lane long overgrown. I strode on swiftly, I remember, breaking the cob-webs, parting the fragrant tangle that beset the way--vines below, branches above me--keeping in touch the while, vocally, when the thickets intervened, with the pair that followed. I could hear them laughing together over the green barriers which closed behind me, and I was pleased at their troubles among the briers. I had led them purposely by the roughest way. Robin, stalking across the ford, had made himself merry with my short legs, and I had vowed secretly that before the day was out he should feel how long those legs could be.

"I'll show you, Mr. Bob," I muttered, plunging through the brushwood, and setting so fast a pace it was no great while before I realized how faintly their voices came to me.

"h.e.l.lo-o!" I cried.

"H'lo-o!" came back to me, but from so far behind me I deemed it wiser to stop awhile, awaiting their approach.

The day was glorious, but quiet for a boy. The world was nodding in its long, midsummer nap, and no birds sang, no squirrels chattered. I looked in vain for one; but there were berries and the mottled fruit of an antique apple-tree to while the time away--and so I waited.

I remember chuckling as I nibbled there, wondering what Mr. Bob would say of those short legs which had outstripped him. I fancied him coming up red and breathless to find me calmly eating and whistling between bites--and I did whistle when I thought them near enough. I whistled "Dixie" till I lost the pucker, thinking what fun it was, and tried again, but could not keep the tune for chuckling. And so I waited--and then I listened--but all the wood was still.

"h.e.l.lo-o!" I cried.

There was no answer.

"h.e.l.lo-o!" I called again, but still heard nothing in reply save my own echo.