PART III

_Rosemary_

I

THE HOME-KEEPER

The years slip by so quietly in Grassy Ford that men and women born here find themselves old, they scarce know how, for are they not still within sound of the brooks they fished in, and in the shadow of the very hill-sides they climbed for butternuts, when they were young? The brooks run on so gayly as before, and why not they as well?

"Butters," Shears used to grumble, "never could learn that he was old enough to stop his jawing and meddling around the town, till they dug his grave for him; then he shut up fast enough."

"Well, then," said Caleb Kane, another character, "we'll sure enough have to send for the sexton."

Colonel Shears eyed Caleb with suspicion.

"What for?" he asked.

"Why, to get a word in edgewise, Sam'l," Caleb replied, and the Colonel rose, shifted his cigar, and sauntered homeward.

"Mostly comedies," said the one we call Johnny Keats, when I urged him to write the stories of his native town; yet, as I told him, there are tragedies a-plenty too in Grassy Fordshire, though the dagger in them is a slower torture than the short swift stab men die of in a literary way. Our heroic deaths are done by inches, as a rule, so imperceptibly, so often with jests and smiles in lieu of fine soliloquies, that our own neighbors do not always know how rare a play the curtain falls on sometimes among our hills.

If I do not die in harness, if, as I often dream of doing, I turn my practice over to some younger man--perhaps to Robin, who shows some signs of following in his father's steps--I shall write the story of my native town; not in the old way, embellished, as Butters would have termed it, with family photographs of the leading citizens and their houses and cow-sheds, and their wooden churches, and their corner stores with the clerks and pumpkins in array before them--not in that old, time-honored, country manner, but in the way it comes to me as I look backward and think of the heroes and heroines and the clowns and villains I have known. I shall need something to keep me from "jawing and meddling around the town"; why not white paper and a good stub pen, while I smoke and muse of my former usefulness. I suppose I shall never write the chronicle; Johnny Keats could, if he would; and I would, if I could--thus the matter rests, while the town and its tales and I myself grow old together. Even Johnny Keats, who was a boy when Letitia taught in the red brick school-house, has a thin spot in his hair.

Had Dove but lived--it is idle, I know, to say what might have been, had our Grassy Fordshire been the same sweet place it was, before she went like other white birds--"southward," she said, "but only for a winter, Bertram--surely spring comes again."

This I do know: that I should have had far less to tell of Letitia Primrose, who might have gone on mooning of a better world had Dove not gone to one, leaving no theories but a son and husband to Letitia's care. It was not to the oracle that she intrusted us, but to the woman--not to the new Letitia but to the old, who had come back to us in those vigils at my wife's bedside.

"This is not sin, Letitia," Dove said to her.

"Oh, my dear!" replied Letitia. "You must not dream that I could call it so."

"Still," Dove answered, "if I had your mind, perhaps--"

"Hush, dear love," Letitia whispered. "My sweet, my sweet--oh, if I had your soul!"

From such chastening moments Letitia Primrose was the mother she might have been. A tenderer, humbler heart, save only Dove's, I never knew, nor a gentler voice, nor a stronger hand, than those she gave us, man and boy bereft--not only in those first blank days, but through the years that followed. So easily that I marvelled did the school-mistress become the home-keeper, nor can I look upon a spinster now, however whimsical, that I do not think of her as the elder sister of that wife and mother in her soul.

A new dream possessed Letitia: it was to be like Dove. She could never be youthful save in spirit; she could never be lovely with that subtle poise and grace which cannot be feigned or purchased at any price, neither with gold nor patience nor purest prayer nor any precious thing whatever, but comes only as a gift to the true young mother at her cradle-side. She could not be one-half so perfect, she confessed humbly to herself, but she could keep the fire blazing on a lonely hearth, where a man sat silent with his child.

My girl's housewifeliness had seemed a simple matter when Letitia's mind was on her school and sky; it was now a marvel as she learned what Dove had done--those thousand little things, and all so easily, so placidly, that at the day's fag-end Letitia, weary with unaccustomed cares, wondered what secret system of philosophy Dove's had been. What were the rules and their exceptions? What were the formulæ? Here were sums to do, old as the hills, but strange, new answers! There must be a grammar for all that fluency, that daily smoothness in every clause and phrase--a kind of eloquence, as Letitia saw it now, marvelling at it as Dove had marvelled at her own. When she had solved it, as she thought, the steak went wrong, or the pudding failed her, or the laundry came home torn or incomplete, moths perhaps got into closets, ants stormed the pantry, or a pipe got stopped; and then, discomfited, she would have Dove's magic and good-humored mastery to seek again.

She had kept house once herself, it is true, but years ago, for her simple father, and not in Dove's larger way. The Primrose household as she saw it now had been a meagre one, for here in the years of Dove's gentle rule, a wondrous domestic ritual had been established, which it was now her duty to perform. That she did it faithfully, so that the windows shone and the curtains hung like snowy veils behind them, so that the searching light of day disclosed no film upon the walnut, who could doubt, knowing that conscience and its history? She kept our linen neatly stitched; she set the table as Dove had set it; she poured out tea for us more primly, to be sure, but cheerfully as Dove had poured it, smiling upon us from Dove's chair.

Robin grew straight of limb and wholesome of soul as Dove had dreamed. Letitia helped him with his lessons, told him the legends of King Arthur's court, and read with him those _Tales of a Grandfather_, which I had loved as just such another romping boy--though not so handsome and debonair as Dove's son was, for he had her eyes and her milder, her more poetic face, and was more patrician in his bearing; he is like his mother to this day. His temper, which is not maternal, I confess--those sudden gusts when, as I before him, he chafed in bonds and cried out bitter things, rose hotly sometimes at Letitia's discipline, though he loved her doubly now.

"You are not my mother!" he would shout, clinching his fists. "You are not my mother!"

Then her heart would fail her, for she loved him fondly, even in his rage, and her penalty would be mild indeed. Often she blamed herself for his petty waywardness, and feeling her slackening hand he would take the bit between his teeth, coltlike; but he was a good lad, Robin was, and, like his mother, tender-hearted, for all his spirit, and as quick to be sorry as to be wrong. When they had made it up, crying in each other's arms, Letitia would say to him:

"I'm not your mother, but I love you, and I've got no other little boy."

It was thus Letitia kept our home for us, tranquil and spotless as of old; and if at first I chose more often than was kind to sit rather among my bottles and my books and instruments, leaving her Robin and the evening-lamp, it was through no fault or negligence of hers I did it, for, however bright my hearth might glow, however tended by her gentle hands, its flame was but the ruddy symbol to me of a past whose spirit never could return.

"Who _is_ Miss Primrose?" strangers in Grassy Ford would ask.

"She's a sort of relative," the reply would be, "and the doctor's house-keeper."

For the woman who keeps still sacred and beautiful another woman's home, in all the language, in all our wordiness, there is no other name.

II

JOHNNY KEATS

The one we call Johnny Keats is well enough known as Karl St. John. He was a Grassy Fordshire boy and Letitia's pupil, as I have said, till he left us, only to like us better, as he once told me, by seeing the world beyond our hills. He went gladly, I should say, judged by the shining in his eyes. He was a homely, slender, quiet lad, except when roused, when he was vehement and obstinate enough, and somewhat given, I am told, to rhapsody and moonshine. He read much rather than studied as a school-boy, and was seen a good deal on Sun Dial and along Troublesome where he never was known to fish, but wandered aimlessly, wasting, it was said, a deal of precious time which might have been bettered in his father's shop. Letitia liked him for a certain brightness in his face when she talked of books, or of other things outside the lessons; otherwise he was not what is termed in Grassy Ford a remarkable boy. We have lads who "speak pieces" and "accept," as we say it, "lucrative" positions in our stores.

Karl drifted off when barely twenty, and as time went by was half forgotten by the town, when suddenly the news came home to us that he had written, and what is sometimes considered more, had published, and with his own name on the title-page, a novel!--_Sleepington Fair_, the thing was called. There are those who say Sleepington Fair means Grassy Ford, and that the river which the hero loved, and where he rescued a maid named Hilda from an April flood, is really our own little winding Troublesome, widened and deepened to permit the wellnigh tragic ending of the tale. You can wade Troublesome; Hilda went in neck-deep. They say also that the man McBride, who talks so much, is our old friend Colonel Shears; the fanciful McBride is tall in fact, and the actual Shears is tall in fancy. Be that as it may, the book was excellent, considering that it was written by a Grassy Fordshire boy, and it set at least two others of our lads, and a lady, I believe, to scribbling--further deponent sayeth not.

_Sleepington Fair_ was read by the ladies of the Longfellow Circle, our leading literary club. Our Mrs. Buhl, acknowledged by all but envious persons to be the most cultured woman in Grassy Ford, pronounced it safely "one of the most pleasing and promising novels of the past decade," and, in concluding her critical review before the club, she said, smilingly: "From Mr. St. John--_our_ Mr. St. John, for let me call him so, since surely he is ours to claim--from our Mr. St. John we may expect much, and I feel that I am only voicing the sentiments of the Longfellow Circle when I wish for him every blessing of happiness and health, that his facile pen may through the years to come trace only what is pure and noble, and that when, as they will, the shadows lengthen, and his sun descends in the glowing west, he may say with the poet--"

What the poet said I have forgotten, but the words of Mrs. Buhl brought tears to the eyes of many of her auditors, who, at the meeting's close, pressed about her with out-stretched hands, assuring her that she had quite outdone herself and that never in their lives had they heard anything more scholarly, anything more thoughtfully thought or more touchingly said. Would she not publish it, she was asked, pleadingly? No? It was declared a pity. It was a shame, they said, that she had never written a book herself, she who could write so charmingly of another's.

"Ladies! Ladies!" murmured Mrs. Buhl, much affected by this ovation, but her modest protest was drowned utterly in a chorus of--

"Yes, indeed!"

_Sleepington Fair_ aroused much speculation as to its author's rise in the outer world, chiefly with reference to the money he must be making, the sum being variously estimated at from five to twenty-five thousand a year.

"Too low," said Shears. "Suppose he makes half a dollar on every book, and suppose he sells--well, say he sells one hundred thousand--"

"One hundred thousand!" cried Caleb Kane. "Go wan!"

"Why, darn your skin," said Colonel Shears, "why not? _The Old Red Barn_ sold _five_ hundred thousand, and only out two years. Saw it myself in the paper, the other day."

"No!"

"I say _yes_! Five hundred thousand, by cracky!"

"Oh, well," said Caleb, "that thing was written by a different cuss."

When it was learned one morning that Karl had returned under cover of night for a visit to Grassy Ford, those who had known the boy looked curiously to see what manner of man he had become. And, lo! he was scarcely a man at all, but a beardless youth, no laurel upon his head, no tragic shadow on his brow!--a shy figure flitting down the long main street, darting into stores and out again, and nodding quickly, and hurrying home again as fast as his legs would take him--to dodge a caller even there and wander, thankful for escape, on the banks of Troublesome.

"Well, you 'ain't changed much," said Colonel Shears, when he met the author.

"No," said Karl.

"Look just as peaked as ever," was the cheerful greeting of Caleb Kane.

"Yes," said Karl.

"Don't seem a day older," said Grandma Smith.

"No?" said Karl.

"Why, Karl," said Shears, "I thought you'd change; thought you'd look different, somehow! Yes, sir, I thought you'd look different--but, I swan, you don't!"

"No," said Karl, and there was such honest chagrin in the faces of those old-time friends, he was discomfited. What had they expected, he asked at home?

"Why," said his mother, "don't you know? Can't you guess, my dear? They looked at least for a Prince-Albert and a stove-pipe hat."

"Silk hat! Prince-Albert!"

"Why, yes," said his father. "The outward and visible sign of the soul within."

Karl's clothes, it is true, were scarcely the garb to be hoped for in so marked a man. The dandies of Grassy Ford noted complacently that his plain, gray, wrinkled suit did not compare for style and newness with their own, while they wore at their throats the latest cravats of emerald and purple loveliness. Karl's tie was black, and a plain and pinless bow which drooped dejectedly. His hat was a mere soft, weather-beaten, shapeless thing, and he walked on Sunday with gloveless hands. Miss Johnson, a reigning belle, tells how he once escorted her from the post-office to her father's gate, talking of Wordsworth all the way, and all unconscious of the Sun Dial burrs still clinging to his coat!

Letitia, for one, declared that she was not disappointed in the author of _Sleepington Fair_. In honor of her old pupil she gave a dinner, and spent such thought upon its menu and took such pains with its service, lest it should offend a New-Yorker's epicurean eye, it is remembered still, and not merely because it was the only literary dinner Grassy Ford has known. There was some agitation among the invited guests as to the formality involved in a dinner to a lion--even though that lion might be seen commonly with burrs in his tail. The pride and honor of Grassy Ford was at stake, and the matter was the more important as the worthy fathers of the town seldom owned dress-suits in those days. For a time, I believe, when I was a boy, Mr. Jewell, the banker, was the sole possessor, and became thereby, no less than by virtue of the manners which accompany the occasional wearing of so suave a garment in so small a town--our first real gentleman. In his case, however, the ownership was the less surprising in that he was known to enjoy New York connections, on his mother's side.

Now, to those who consulted Letitia as to the precise demands of the approaching feast, she explained, gracefully, that they would be welcome in any dress--adding, however, for the gentlemen's benefit, and hopefully no doubt, for she had the occasion in heart and hand, that the conventional garb after six o'clock was a coat with tails. As a result of the conference two guests-to-be might have been seen through a tailor's window, standing coatless and erect upon a soap-box, much straighter than it was their wont to stand, much fuller of chest, robin-like, and with hips thrown neatly back--to match, as the Colonel said. Two other gentlemen of the dinner-party told their wives bluntly that they would go "_as_ usual," or they would be--not go at all, before which edicts their dames salaamed.

Letitia counted on five dress-suits, at least, including the author's and my own. Mine I must wear, she said, or she would be shamed forever; so I put it on when the night arrived, wormed my way cautiously into its outgrown folds, only to find then, to my pain, that an upright posture alone could preserve its dignity and mine.

The hour arrived, and with it the Buxtons, old friends and neighbors; Dr. Jamieson, homoeopathic but otherwise beyond reproach, and Miss Jamieson, his daughter, who could read Browning before breakfast, much, I suppose, as some robust men on empty stomachs smoke strong cigars; the Gallowses, not wanted over-much, but asked to keep the white wings of peace hovering in our hills; the Jewells, and some one I've forgotten, and then the Buhls--Mr. Buhl smiling, but unobtrusive to the ear, Mrs. Buhl radiant and gracious, and pervading the assemblage with a dowagerial rustling of lavender silk. To my mind the quieter woman in the plain black gown adorned only by an old-lace collar and antique pin, her hair the whiter for her cheeks now rosy with agitation, her eyes shining with the joy of the first great function she had ever given, was the loveliest figure among them all.

Last came two plain, unassuming folk, though proud enough of that only son of theirs, and then--

"_Oh!_" cries Mrs. Buhl, so suddenly, so ecstatically that the hum ceases and every head is turned. "_Mister_ St. John!"

It is indeed the author of _Sleepington Fair_. And behold the lion!--a slight and faltering figure, pausing upon the threshold, burrless indeed, but oh!--in that old sack suit of gray!

Letitia bore the shock much better than might be expected. She changed color, it is true, but the flush came back at once, and, standing loyally at his side, she led the lion into the room.

It was a trying moment. He was an Author--he had written a Book--but we were thirteen to his one, and four dress-suits besides! Thirteen to one, if you omit his parents, and four dress-shirts, remember, bulging and crackling before his dazzled eyes! New York wavered and fell back, and the first skirmish was Grassy Ford's.

At the same instant it was whispered anxiously in my ear that the ices had not arrived, but I counselled patience, and dinner was proclaimed without delay. The lion and Letitia led the procession to the feast, and I have good reason for the statement that he was a happier lion when we were seated and he had put his legs away. Still, even then he could scarcely be called at ease. Once only did he talk as if he loved his theme, and then it was solely with Letitia, who had mentioned Troublesome, out of the goodness of her heart, as I believe. His face lighted at the name, and he talked so gladly that all other converse ceased. What was the lion roaring of so gently there? Startled to hear no other voices, he stopped abruptly, and, seeing our curious faces all about him, dropped his eyes, abashed, and kept them on his plate. Then Mrs. Buhl, famous in such emergencies, came to the rescue.

"Oh, Mr. St. John," she said, while we all sat listening, "I've wanted to ask you: how did you come to write _Sleepington Fair_?"

"Oh," he replied, reddening, "I--I wanted to--that was all."

"I see," she replied.

"Do you like 'Sordello'?" asked Miss Jamieson, in the awkward silence that ensued.

"Well, really--I cannot say; I have never read it," was his confession.

"Not read 'Sordello'!"

"No."

"Let's see, that's Poe, isn't it?" asked a young dress-shirt, swelling visibly, emboldened to the guess by the lion's discomfiture.

"Robert Browning," replied the lady, with a look of scorn, and the dress-shirt sank again.

"New York is a great place, isn't it?" volunteered Jimmy Gallows.

"Yes," said the lion.

"Been up the Statue of Liberty, I suppose?" Jimmy went on.

"No," said the lion.

"What!" cried the chorus. "Never been up the--"

"What did he say?" asked Mrs. Jewell, who was deaf. Mr. Buxton solemnly inclined his lips to her anxious ear and shouted:

"_He has never been up the Statue of Liberty._"

"Oh!" said the lady.

The silence was profound.

"What, _never_?" piped Jimmy Gallows.

"Never," said the lion, shaking his mane a little ominously. "I have never been a tourist."

Letitia mentioned Sun Dial, and would have saved the day, I think, had not Mrs. Buhl leaned forward with the sweetest of alluring smiles.

"Oh, Mr. St. John," she said, "I've been going to ask you--in fact, for a long, long time I have wanted to know, and I wonder now if you won't tell me: how do authors"--she paused significantly--"how do authors get their books accepted?"

A dress-shirt crackled, but was frowned upon.

"What did he say?" asked the lady who was deaf.

"_He hasn't said anything yet_," roared Mr. Buxton.

"Oh!"

"Do tell us," urged Mrs. Buhl. "Do, Mr. St. John. I almost called you Karl."

"Was it a conundrum?" inquired the deaf lady, perceiving that it had been a poser.

"_No. Question: how do authors get their books accepted?_"

"Yes--how do they?" urged Mrs. Buhl.

"Why," said the lion at last, for all the table hung upon his answer, "by writing them well enough--I suppose."

It was a weak answer. There was no satisfaction in it, no meat, no pith at all, nothing to carry home with you. Mrs. Buhl said, "Oh!"

"To what, then," piped Jimmy Gallows, "do you attribute your success?"

He was a goaded lion, one could see quite plainly; the strain was telling on his self-control.

"It is not worth mentioning, Mr. Gallows," he replied, stiffly.

"Mr. St. John," Letitia interposed, in a quiet voice, "was just now telling me that there is no music in all New York to compare with Troublesome's. Shall we go into the other room?"

That night, when the last guest had departed, I asked Letitia, "Well, what do you think of the author?"

"_I_ am not disappointed," she replied.

"Not much of a talker, though?" I suggested.

"He does not pretend to be a talker," she replied, warmly. "He is a writer. No," she repeated, "I am not disappointed in my Johnny Keats."

Next day, I think it was, in the afternoon, he asked Letitia to walk with him to the banks of Troublesome, to a spot which she had praised the night before. His heart was full, and as they lingered together by those singing waters he told her of his struggles in the city whose statue he had never climbed. He told her of his black days there, of his failure and despondency, of his plans to leave it and desert his dreams, but how that mighty, roaring, dragon creature had held him pinioned in its claws till he had won.

"And then," he told her, "when I saw my book, I looked again, and it was not a dragon which had held me--it was an angel!"

Seeing that her eyes were full of tears, he added, earnestly:

"Miss Primrose, I wanted you to know. You had a part in that little triumph."

"I?"

"You. Don't you remember? Don't you remember those books you left for us?--in our old school-room?--on the shelf?"

III

THE FORTUNE-TELLER

Autumn comes early in Grassy Fordshire. In late September the nights are chill and a white mist hovers ghostly in the moonlight among our hills. The sun dispels it and warms our noons to a summer fervor, but there is no permanence any longer in heat or cold, or leaf or flower--all is change and passing and premonition, so that the singing poet in you must turn philosopher and hush his voice, seeing about him the last sad rites of those little lives once blithe and green as his own was in the spring.

Ere October comes there are crimson stains upon the woodlands. "God's plums, father!" Robin cried, standing as a little boy on Sun Dial and pointing to the distant hills. A spell is over them, a purple and enchanted sleep, though all about them the winds are wakeful, and the sumac fire which blazed up crimson in the sun but a moment gone, burns low in the shadow of white clouds scudding before the gale. Here beneath them the bloom of the golden-rod is upon the land; fieldsful and lanesful, it bars your way, or brushes your shoulders as you pass. Only the asters, white and purple and all hues between, vie here and there with the mightier host, but its yellow plumes nod triumph on every crest, banks and hedgerows glow with its soldiery, it beards the forest, and even where the plough has passed posts its tall sentries at the furrow's brim.

In the lower meadows there is still a coverlet of summer green, but half hidden in the taller, rusting grasses, whose feathery tops ripple in the faintest wind, till suddenly it rises and whips them into waves, now ruddy, now flashing silver, while a foam of daisies beats against the gray stone hedges like waters tumbling on a quay.

There is cheerful fiddling in these dying grasses, and crickets scuttle from beneath your feet; there is other music too--a shrill snoring as of elder fairies oversleeping; startled insects leap upon you, flocks of sparrows flee from interrupted feasts, squirrels berate you, crows spread horrid tales of murder stalking in the fields.

Then leave the uplands--tripping on its hidden creepers; part the briers of the farthest hedgerow, and descend. Down in the valley there is a smell of apples in the air, pumpkins glow among the wigwams of the Indian-corn, and deeper still runs Troublesome among the willows, shining silver in the waning sun. There in the sopping lowlands they are harvesting the last marsh hay. A road leads townward, the vines scarlet on its tumbling walls; the air grows cooler--

"Oh, it is beautiful!" says Letitia, sadly--"but it is fall."

I observe in her always at this season an unusual quietness. She is in the garden as early as in the summer-time, and while it is still dripping with heavy dew, for she clings tenderly to its last flowers--to her nasturtiums, to the morning-glories on the trellis, and the geraniums and dahlias and phlox and verbenas along the path; but she gives her heart to her petunias, and because, she says, they are a homely, old-fashioned flower, whom no one loves any more. As she caresses them, brushing the drops from their plain, sweet faces, she seems, like them, to belong to some by-gone, simpler time. Some think her an odd, quaint figure in her sober gown, but they never knew the girl Letitia, or they would see her still, even in this elder woman with the snow-white hair.

Every fall gypsies camp in the fields near Troublesome on their way southward. It is the same band, Letitia tells me, that has stopped there year after year, and Letitia knows: she used to visit them when she was younger and still had a fortune to be told. It was a weakness we had not suspected. She had never acknowledged a belief in omens or horoscopes, or prophecies by palms or dreams, though she used to say fairies were far more likely than people thought. She had seen glades, she told us, lawn or meadow among encircling trees, where, long after sundown, the daylight lingered in a fairy gloaming; and there, she said, when the fire-flies danced, she had caught such glimpses of that elf-land dear to childhood, she had come to believe in it again. There was such a spot among our maples, and from the steps where we used to sit, we would watch the afterglow pale there to the starlit dusk, or that golden glory of the rising moon break upon the shadowy world, crowning the tree-tops and quenching the eastern stars. Then, sometimes, Dove and Letitia would talk of oracles and divination and other strange inexplicable things which they had heard of, or had known themselves; but Letitia never spoke of the gypsy band till three giggling village maids, half-fearful and half-ashamed of their stealthy quest, found their school-mistress among the vans! She flushed, I suppose, and made the best of a curious matter, for she said, simply, when we charged her with the story that had spread abroad:

"They are English gypsies, and wanderers like the Primroses from their ancient home. That is why they fascinate me, I suppose."

How often she consulted them, or when she began or ceased to do so, I do not know, but when I showed her the vans by the willows and the smoke rising from the fire, last fall, she smiled and said it was like old times to her--but she added, quaintly, that palms did not itch when the veins showed blue.

"Nonsense," I said, "we are both of us young, Letitia. Let us find the crone and hear her croak. I am not afraid of a little sorcery."

Paying no heed to her protestations I turned Pegasus--I have always a Pegasus, whatever my horse's other name--through the meadow-gate. A ragged, brown-faced boy ran out to us and held the bridle while I alighted, and then I turned and offered Letitia a helping hand. She shook her head.

"No, I'll wait here."

"Come," I said, "have you no faith, Letitia?"

"Not any more," she replied. "This is foolishness, Bertram. Will you never grow up?"

"It's only my second-childhood," I explained. "Come, we'll see the vans."

"Some one will see us," she protested.

"There is not a soul on the road," I said.

Shamefacedly she took my hand, glancing uneasily at the highway we had left behind us, and her face flushed as we approached the fire. An ugly old woman with a dirty kerchief about her head, was stirring broth for the evening meal.

"Tripod and kettle," I said. "Do you remember this ancient dame?"

"Yes," said Letitia, "it is--"

"Sibyl," I said. "Her name is Sibyl."

Letitia smiled.

"Do you remember me?" she asked, offering her hand. The old witch peered cunningly into her face, grinning and nodding as if in answer. Two or three scraggy, evil-eyed vagabonds were currying horses and idling about the camp, watching us, but at a glance from the fortune-teller, they slouched streamward. The crone's entreaties and my own were of no avail. Letitia put her hands behind her--but we saw the vans and patted the horses and crossed the woman's palm so that she followed us, beaming and babbling, to the carriage-side. There we were scarcely seated when, stepping forward--so suddenly that I glanced, startled, towards the camp--the gypsy laid a brown hand, strong as a man's, upon the reins; and turning then upon Letitia with a look so grim and mysterious that she grew quite pale beneath those tragic eyes, muttered a jargon of which we made out nothing but the words:

"You are going on a long journey," at which the woman stopped, and taking a backward step, stood there silently and without a smile, gazing upon us till we were gone.

Letitia laughed uneasily as we drove away.

"Did she really remember you?" I asked.

"No, I don't think so--which makes it the more surprising."

"Surprising?"

"Yes; that she should have said again what she always told me."

"And what was that?"

"That I was going on a long journey."

"Did she always tell you that?"

"Always, from the very first."

"Perhaps she tells every one so," I suggested.

"No, for I used to ask, and very particularly, as to that."

Why, I wondered, had she been so curious about long journeys? I had never known travel to absorb her thoughts. Why had she inquired, and always so very particularly, as she confessed, about that single item of gypsy prophecy, and the very one which would seem least likely to be verified? Never in my knowledge of Letitia's lifetime had there been any other promise than that of the fortune-teller that she would ever wander from Grassy Ford. I might have asked her, but she seemed silent and depressed as we drove homeward, which was due, I fancied, to the gypsy's rude alarm. For some days after she continued to remark how strangely that repetition of the old augury had sounded in her ears, and smiling at it, she confessed how in former years she had laid more stress upon it, and had even planned what her gowns would be.

"Did you guess where you were going?" I ventured to inquire.

"Well, I rather hoped--"

"Yes?" I said.

"You know my fondness for history," she continued. "I rather hoped I should see some day what I had read about so long--castles and things--and then, too, there were the novels I was fond of, like _Lorna Doone_. I always wanted to see the moors and the Doone Valley, and the water-slide that little John Ridd had found so slippery, when he first saw Lorna."

"You wanted to see England then," I said.

"Yes, England," she replied. "England, you know, was my father's country."

"The Doone Valley," I remarked, "would be Devon, wouldn't it?"

"Yes," she replied, "and it was Devon where father was a boy."

"And our old friend Robin Saxeholm came from Devon, you know," I said.

"So he did," she answered. Then we talked of Robin and his visit to Grassy Fordshire years ago, and what Letitia had forgotten of it I recalled to her, and what I could not remember, she supplied, so that it all came back to us like a story or a summer dream.

When she had gone up-stairs I sat for a long time smoking by the dying fire, and musing of some old-time matters which now came back to me in a clearer light. From thinking of my own youth, little by little, I came to Robin's--I mean the younger, who was now so soon to be a man. Tall and fair like the youth he was named for, though not red-haired, he had all but completed that little learning which is a "dangerous thing": he was a high-school senior now, and overwhelmed sometimes with the wonder of it, but a manly fellow for all that, one whom my eyes dwelt fondly on more often than he knew. In the spring-time he would have his parchment; college would follow in the fall--college! What could I do to give my son a broader vision of the universe, lest with only Grassy Ford behind him, he should think the outside world lay mostly within his college walls?

"You are going on a long journey."

The gypsy's words came back unbidden as I rose by the embers of the fire. "A long journey," I repeated; "and why not?"

IV

AN UNEXPECTED LETTER

During the winter a great piece of news stirred Grassy Ford, and in spite of the snow-drifts on our walks and porches furnished an excuse for a dozen calls that otherwise would never have been made so soon. Old Mrs. Luton was discovered in a state of apoplexy on our steps, but on being brought in and divested of her husband's coon-skin cap, a plush collar, a scarf, a shawl, a knitted jacket, and a newspaper folded across her chest, recovered her breath and told her story. Mrs. Neal, so Mrs. Luton said, had been heard to say, according to Mrs. Withers, who had it from Mrs. Lowell, who lived next door to Mrs. Bell--who, as the world knows, called more often than anybody else at the Neal farm-house, feeling a pity for the lonely woman there, as who did not?--Mrs. Neal had been heard to say, what Mrs. Luton would not have repeated for the world to any one but her dear Miss Primrose, who could be trusted implicitly, as she knew, and she had said it in the most casual way--Mrs. Neal, that is--but secretly very well pleased, though, Heaven knows, she, Mrs. Luton--

"Won't you have some coffee?" asked Letitia, for the breakfast was not yet cold.

"Yes, thank you, I _will_, for I'm as cold as can be," exclaimed her visitor, laughing hysterically, and she was profuse in her praise of Letitia's beverage, and inquired the brand. Her manner of sipping it as she sat in an easy-chair before the fire did away with all necessity for a spoon, but was a little trying to a delicate sense of hearing like Letitia's, and was responsible beside for what was wellnigh a disastrous deluge when in the midst of a copious ingurgitation she suddenly remembered what she had come to tell:

"_Ffff_--Peggy Neal's a-living in New York!" she splashed, her eyes popping. It would be impossible to relate the story as Mrs. Luton told it, for its ramifications and parentheses involved the history of Grassy Ford and the manifold relationships of its inhabitants, past and present, to say nothing of the time to come, for in speculations Mrs. Luton was profound.

Mrs. Neal, it seems, had broken her long silence and had been heard to allude to "my daughter Peggy in New York." Some years had passed since the farm-gate clicked behind that forlorn and outcast girl, and in all that time the mother had never spoken the daughter's name, nor had any one dared more than once to question her. Letitia had tried once, but once only, to intercede for the pupil she had loved, the manner of whose departure was well enough understood in the town and country-side, though where she had gone remained a mystery.

On leaving the farm that September evening, Peggy, with a desperate and tear-stained face, had been met by a neighbor girl, who as a confidant in happier hours, was intrusted with the story. It was not a long one. The mother had pointed to the gate.

"Look there!" she cried. "_He_ went that way. I guess you'll find him, if you try, you--"

Then her mother struck her, Peggy said. She did not know it was the name which felled her.

Now after silence which had seemed like death to the lonely woman in the hills, Peggy had written home to her, to beg forgiveness, to say that in a life of ease and luxury in a great city, she could not help thinking of the farm, which seemed a dream to her; she could never return to it, she said, but she wondered if her father was living, and if her mother had still some heart for her wayward daughter, and would write sometimes. She said nothing of a child. That she was still unmarried seemed evident from the signature--"Your loving, loving Peggy Neal." That some good-fortune had befallen her in spite of that sad beginning in her native fields, was quite as clear, for the paper on which she had scrawled her message was of finest texture and delicately perfumed; and, what was more, between its pages the mother had found a sum of money, how much or little no one knew.

It was observed that the mother's face had relaxed a little. That she had answered her daughter's message was asserted positively by Mrs. Bell, though what that answer was, and whether forgiveness or not, she did not know. It was assumed, however, to have been a pardon, for the mother seemed pleased with the daughter's progress in the world, which must have seemed to her the realization, however ironical, of her discarded hopes; and it was she herself who had divulged the contents of the letter. To the cautious curiosity manifested by elderly ladies of Grassy Ford, who called upon her now more often than had been their wont, as she took some pleasure in reminding them, to their obvious discomfiture, and to all other hints and allusions she turned her deafer ear, while to direct questions she contented herself with the simple answer:

"Peggy's well."

"You hear from her often, I suppose?" some caller ventured. The reply was puzzling:

"Oh, a mother's apt to."

She said it so sadly, looking away across the farm, that Letitia's informant as she told the story burst into tears.

"She's a miserable woman, Miss Letitia, depend upon it. She's a miserable, broken-down, heart-sick creature for what she's done. 'You hear often, I suppose?' said I. 'A mother's apt to,' says she, and turned away from me with a face so lonesome as would break your heart."

For myself, as Letitia told me, I had my own notion of the mother's sad and evasive answer, but I held my peace.

It was the coldest winter we had known in years. For weeks at a time our valley was a bowl of snow, roads were impassable, and stock was frozen on the upland farms. Suddenly there came a thaw: the sun shone brightly, the great drifts sank and melted into muddy streams, and early one morning Farmer Bell, his shaggy mare and old top-buggy splashed with mire and his white face spattered, stopped at the post-office and called loudly to the passers-by.

"Old Neal's dead and I want the coroner."

To the crowd that gathered he told the story. Neal's wife, waiting up for him Christmas night, had made an effort to reach the Bells to ask for tidings, but the wind was frightful and the drifts already beyond her depth. She had gone back hoping that he was safe by his tavern fire, but she sat by her own all night, listening to the roaring of the wind and the rattling windows through which the snow came drifting in. At dawn, from an upper chamber, she peered out upon a sight that is seldom seen even in these northern hills. The storm was over, but the world was buried white; roads and fences and even the smaller trees were no longer visible, and the barn and a neighbor's cottage were unfamiliar in their uncouth hoods. For days she remained imprisoned on the lonely farm. She cut paths from the woodshed to the near-by barn and saved the cattle in their stalls. Then the thaw came, and she reached the Bells.

Hitching his mare to his lightest buggy, for the roads were rivers, the farmer drove through the slush and the remnant drifts to the corner tavern where Neal had been. The bartender stared blankly at his first question.

"Neal?" he stammered out at last.

"Yes, Neal! _John_ Neal, confound you! Can't you speak?"

The man laid the glass he was wiping upon the bar.

"Neal left here Christmas day--along about four in the afternoon, when the storm began."

As Bell drove homeward he saw two figures at the Neal farm-gate--that gate which Peggy had closed behind her--and, coming nearer, he made out his own man Tom and the widow, lifting the body from the melting snow.

Peggy Neal did not come to her father's funeral. Letitia herself would have written the news to her, for the woman, dry-eyed and dumb and sitting by the coffin-side, had aged in a day and was now as helpless as a child.

"Shall I write to Peggy?" Letitia asked her, but she did not hear. Twice the question was repeated, but they got no answer, so Letitia wrote, and laid the letter on the casket, open and unaddressed. It was never sent.

V

SURPRISES

Jogging homeward from a country call one afternoon in May, I was admiring the apple-orchards and the new-ploughed fields between them, when I chanced upon my son Robin with a handful of columbine, gathered among the Sun Dial rocks.

"Oh," said he, "is that you, father?" It is an innocent way of his when he has anything in particular to conceal.

"At any rate," I replied, "you are my son."

He smiled amiably and I cranked the wheel, making room for him beside me.

"Columbine," I remarked.

"Yes."

"Letitia will be pleased," I said.

Now I knew it was for the Parker girl--Rita Parker, who blushes so when I chance to meet her that I know now how it feels to be an ogre, a much-maligned being, too, for whom I never had any sympathy before.

"I just saw a redstart," remarked my son.

"So?" I replied. "Did you notice any bobolinks?"

"_Did_ I?" he answered. "I saw a million of them."

"You did?"

"Down in the meadows there."

"A million of them?"

"Almost a million," he replied. "Every grass-stalk had one on it, teetering and singing away like anything."

"Why, I didn't know Rita was with you."

"Rita!" he exclaimed, reddening.

"Why, yes," I said. "You saw so many birds, you know."

It was a little hard upon the boy, but I broke the ensuing silence with some comments on the weather, and having him wholly at my mercy then, I chose a subject which so long had charmed me, I had been on the point of telling him time and again, yet had refrained.

"Robin," said I, "you will be a graduate in a day or two. What do you say to a summer in England, boy?"

He caught my hand--so violently that the rein was drawn and Pegasus turned obediently into the ditch and stopped.

"England, father!"

"If we are spared," I said, getting the buggy into the road again.

"All of us!" he cried.

"No."

"But you'll come, father?" He said it so anxiously that I was touched. It isn't always that a boy cares to lug his father.

"I should like to," I said, "but--no."

"Why not?"

"I cannot leave," I replied. "Jamieson's going. We can't both go."

"Oh, bother Jamieson!" Robin exclaimed. "What does he want to choose _our_ year for? Why can't he wait till next?"

"It's his wife," I explained. "She's ill again. But you go, Robin, and take Letitia."

"When do we start?"

"In June."

"_This_ June?"

"Next month. I've laid out the journey for you on a map, and I've got the names of the inns to stop at, and what it will cost you, and everything else."

"But when did you think of it?" asked my son.

"Last fall."

"Last fall! Does Aunt Letty know?"

"Partly," I said. "She knows you're going, but not herself. It's a little surprise for her. You may tell her yourself, now, while I stop at the office."

He scrambled out and hitched my horse for me, so I held the flowers. He flushed a little as he took them.

"Father, you're a trump," he said.

I bowed slightly: it is wise to be courteous even to a son. I had stopped at the office to get the map, and an hour later Letitia met me in our doorway.

"Bertram!" she said, taking my hand.

"Robin told you?"

"Yes. Oh, it's beautiful, Bertram, but I cannot go."

"Nonsense," I said.

"But you?"

"I shall do very nicely."

"But the cost?"

"Will be nothing," I said. "The boy must not go alone."

"That's not the reason you are sending me, Bertram."

"It's a good one," I replied.

"No," she insisted, shaking her head.

"You have been good to the boy, Letitia," I explained. "This is only a way of saying that I know."

"You do not need to say it," she replied. "I have done nothing."

"You have done everything, Letitia--for us both."

The tears ran down her cheeks. My own eyes--

"You have loved Dove's husband and son," I told her. "We shall not forget it."

Her face was radiant.

"It has been nothing for me to do," she said. "Loving no one in particular, I have had the time to love every one, don't you see? Why, all my life, Bertram, I've loved other people's dogs, and other people's children"--she paused a moment and added, smiling through her tears--"and other people's husbands, I suppose."

"You will go?" I asked.

"I should love to go."

"You will go, Letitia?"

"I will go," she said.

That evening I took from my pocket a brand-new map of the British Isles--I mean brand-new last fall. Many a pleasant hour I had spent that winter at the office with a red guide-book and the map before me on my desk. With no little pride I spread it now on the sitting-room table which Letitia had cleared for me.

"What are the red lines, father?" asked my son. He had returned breathless from telling the Parker girl.

"Those in red ink," I replied, "I drew myself. It is your route. There's Southampton--where you land--and there's London--and there's Windsor and Oxford and Stratford and Warwick and Kenilworth--and here," I cried, sweeping my hand suddenly downward to the left--"here's Devonshire!"

"Where father was a boy," Letitia murmured, touching the pinkish county tenderly with her hand.

Ah, I was primed for them! There was not a question they could ask that I could not answer. There was not a village they could name, I could not instantly put my finger on. Those winter hours had not been spent in vain. I knew the inns--the King's Arms, the Golden Lion, the White Hart, the Star and Anchor, the George and Dragon, the Ring o' Bells! I knew where the castles were--I had marked them blue. I knew the battle-fields--I had made them crimson. For each cathedral--a purple cross. Each famous school--a golden star. Never, I believe, was there such a map before--for convenience, for ready reference: one look at the margin where I made the notes--a glance at the map--and there you were!

"Oh, it is beautiful!" exclaimed Letitia.

"Isn't it?" I cried.

"You should have it patented," said my son.

"Suppose," I suggested, "you ask me something--something hard now. Ask me something hard."

I took a turn with my cigar. Robin knitted his brows, but could think of nothing. Letitia pondered.

"Where's--"

She hesitated.

"Out with it!" I urged.

"Where's Tavistock?" she asked.

I thought a moment.

"Is it a castle?"

She shook her head.

"Is it a battle-field?"

"No."

"Is it just a town, then?"

"Yes, just a town."

"Did anything famous happen there?"

She hesitated.

"Well," she said, "perhaps nothing very famous--but it's an old little town--one that I've heard of, that is all."

Well, she did have me. It was not very famous, and only a--an idea came to me.

"Oh," I said, shutting my eyes a moment, "that town's in Devon."

Letitia nodded.

"See," I said. Adjusting my glasses, and peering a moment at the pinkish patch, I tapped it, Tavistock, with my finger-nail. "Right here," I said.

We made a night of it--that is, it was midnight when I folded my map and locked it away with the guide-book and the table of English money I had made myself. There was one in the book, it is true, but for ready reference, for convenience in emergencies, it did not compare with mine--mine worked three ways.

A fortnight later I had the tickets in my hand--ss. _Atlantis_, date of sailing, the tenth of June. I myself was to steal a day or two and wave farewell to them from the pier. Robin already had packed his grip; indeed, he repacked it daily, to get the hang of it, he said. It was a new one which I had kept all winter at the office in the bottom of a cupboard, and it bore the initials, R. W., stamped on the end. And he had a housewife--a kind of cousin to a needle-book--stuffed full of handy mending-things, presented by the Parker girl. The boy was radiant, but as June drew nigh I saw he had something heavy on his mind. A dozen times he had begun to speak to me, privately, but had changed the subject or had walked away. I could not imagine what ailed the fellow. He seemed restless; even, as I fancied, a little sad at times, which troubled me. I made opportunities for him to speak, but he failed to do so, either through neglect or fear. I saw him often at the office, where he was always bursting in upon me with some new plan or handy matter for his precious bag. He had bought a razor and a brush and strop.

"But what are they for?" I asked, amazed. A blush mantled his beardless cheeks.

"Those? Oh--just to be sure," he said.

Now what could be troubling the lad, I wondered? It was something not always on his mind, for he seemed to forget it in preparations, but it lurked near by to spring out upon his blithest moments. His face would be shining; an instant later it would fall, and he would walk to the window and gaze out thoughtfully into the street, in a way that touched me to the heart, for, remember, this was to be my first parting with the boy. The more I thought of it, the more perplexed I was; and the more I wondered, the more I felt it might be my duty to speak myself.

"Robin," I said one day, and as casually as I could make my tone, "did you want to tell me anything? What is it? Speak, my boy."

We were alone together in my inner office and the door was shut. He walked resolutely to the desk where I was sitting.

"Father," he said, "I have."

My heart was beating, he looked so grave.

"Well," I remarked, "you have nothing to fear, you know."

"Father," he said, doggedly, "it's about--it's about--"

"Yes?" I encouraged him.

"It's about this trip."

"This trip?"

"Yes. It's about--father, _you'll_ tell her--"

"Tell her?" I repeated.

"Yes. You tell her."

"Tell whom? Tell what?"

"Why, Aunt Letty."

"Aunt Letty! Tell Aunt Letty what?"

He blurted it fiercely:

"About her hat."

"Her hat! Her hat! Good Lord, what hat?"

"Why, her Sunday hat!"

"You mean her--"

"Why, yes, father! You know that hat."

I knew that hat.

"Do you object," I asked, "to your aunt's best Sunday hat?"

His scowl vanished and his face broke into smiles.

"That's it," he said.

"Don't be alarmed," I assured him, keeping my own face steady--no easy matter, for, as I say, I knew the hat. "Don't be alarmed, my son. She shall have a new one, if that will please you."

His smiles vanished. He seemed suspicious. His tone was cautiousness itself.

"But who will buy it?" he asked.

"Why, you!" I said.

He leaped to my side.

"_I?_"

"You," I repeated.

He laughed hysterically--whooped is the better word.

"You wait!" he cried, and, fairly dancing, he seized his cap and rushed madly for the door. It shut behind him, but as swiftly opened again.

"Oh, dad," he said, beaming upon me from the crack, "it'll be a stunner! You'll see."

It was.

VI

AN OLD FRIEND OF OURS

"Oh, I know the town," I had told them confidently--had I not been there in 18--? But no, it was not my town. It was not my New York at all that we found at our journey's end, but belonged apparently to the mob we fell among, bags and bundles, by the station steps, till from our cabman's manner, when I mildly marvelled at the fare he charged us, the place, I suspected, belonged to him. Four days and nights we heard it rumbling about us. Robin got a mote in his eye, Letitia lost her brand-new parasol, and I broke my glasses--but we saw the parks and the squares and the tall buildings and the statue which Johnny Keats never climbed. Reluctantly, for the day was waning as we stood on the Battery looking out at it across the bay, we followed his example. On the third afternoon Letitia proposed a change of plans. Her eyes, she confessed, were a little tired with our much looking. Why not hunt old friends?

"Old friends?" I asked. "Whom do we know in New York, Letitia?"

"Why, don't you remember Hiram Ptolemy and Peggy Neal?"

"To be sure," I said--"the Egyptologist! But the addresses?"

"I have them both," she replied. "Mrs. Neal came to the house crying, and gave me Peggy's, and begged me to find her if I could. And Mr. Ptolemy--why can I never remember the name of his hotel?"

"You have heard from him then?"

She blushed.

"Yes," she replied. "It's a famous hotel, I'm sure. The name was familiar."

"Hotel," I remarked. "Hiram must be getting on then?"

"Oh yes," she said, fumbling with her address-book. "It's the Mills Hotel."

"And a famous place," I observed, smiling. "So he lives at a Mills Hotel?"

"I forgot to tell you," she continued, "I have been so busy. He wrote me only the other day, that, after all these years--mercy! how long it has been since he fed us lemon-drops!--after all these years of tramping from publisher to publisher, footsore and weary, as he said, he had found at last a grand, good man."

"One," I inferred, "who will give his discovery to the world."

"Oh, more than that," explained Letitia, "this dear, old, white-haired--"

"Egyptologist," I broke in.

"Publisher," she said, with spirit, "has promised him to start a magazine and make him editor--a scientific magazine devoted solely to Egyptology, and called _The Obelisk_."

"Well, well, well, well," I said. "We must congratulate the little man. Perhaps you may even be impelled to recon--"

"Now, Bertram," began Letitia, in that tone and manner I knew of old--so I put on my hat, and, freeing Robin to likelier pleasures, we drove at once to "the" Mills Hotel. Letitia's address-book had named the street, which she thought unkempt and cluttered and noisy for an editor to live in, though doubtless he had wished to be near his desk.

"Is Mr. Hiram Ptolemy in?" inquired Letitia.

"I'll see," said the clerk, consulting his ledgers.

He returned at once.

"There is no one here of that name, madam."

"Strange!" she replied. "He was here--let me see--but two weeks ago."

"No madam," he said. "You must mean the other Mills Hotel."

"Is there another Mills Hotel?" she asked.

"Yes," he replied. "Hotel number--"

"I _thought_," said Letitia, "this place seemed--"

She glanced about her.

"But," said I, "the address is of this one."

"True," she replied. "Did you look in the P's?" she inquired, sweetly.

"Why, no; in the T's. You said--"

"But it's spelled with a P," she explained. "P-t-o-l--"

Then her face reddened.

"Never mind," she said. "You are right--quite right. It _is_ the other hotel. But can you tell me, please, if Mr. Hiram De Lancey Percival lives here?"

The clerk smiled broadly.

"Oh yes," he said. "Mr. Percival does, but he's out at present. You will find him, however, at this address."

He wrote it down for her and she took it nervously.

"Thank you," she said, glancing at it. "Don't be silly, Bertram. Yes, it's the publisher's. Let us go. Good-day, sir."

It was not a large publisher's, we discovered, for the place was a single and dingy store-room in a small side street. Its walls were shelved, filled from the floor to the very ceiling--volume after volume, sets upon sets, most of them shopworn and bearing the imprints of by-gone years. Between the shelves other books, equally old and faded, and offered for sale at trifling prices, lay on tables in that tempting disarray and dust which hints of treasures overlooked and waiting only for recognition--always on the higher shelf, or at the bottom of the other pile. The window was filled with encyclopædias long outgrown by a wiser world, and standing beside them, and looking back towards the store-room's farther end, was a melancholy vista of discarded and forgotten literature.

"Who buys them?" asked Letitia.

"Who wrote them?" I replied.

A bell had tinkled at our entrance, but no one came to us, so we wandered down one narrow aisle till we reached the end. And there, at the right, in an alcove hitherto undiscernable, and at an old, worm-eaten desk dimly lighted by an alley window, sat our old friend Ptolemy, writing, and unaware of our approach. It was the same Hiram, we observed, though a little shabbier, perhaps, and scraggier-bearded than of old, but the same little, blinking scientist we had known, in steel-bowed spectacles, scratching away in a rickety office-chair. He was quite oblivious of the eyes upon him, lost, doubtless, in some shadowy passage of Egyptian lore.

I coughed slightly, and he turned about, peering in amazement.

"Miss Primrose! Dr. Weatherby! I do believe!" he exclaimed, and, dropping his pen, staggered up to us and shook our hands, his celluloid cuffs rattling about his meagre wrists and his eyes watering with agitation behind his spectacles.

"_You_--in New York!" he piped. "I--why, I'm astounded--I'm astounded--but delighted, too--de_light_ed to see you both! But you mustn't stand."

I looked curiously at Letitia as he brought us chairs, setting them beside his desk. She was a little flushed, but very gracious to the little man.

"Miss Primrose," he said, fidgeting about her, "allow me--allow me," offering what seemed to be the stabler of the wooden seats. She had accepted it and was about to sit, when he stopped her anxiously with a cry, "Wait!--wait, I beg of you!" and replaced it with his own. His was an elbow chair whose sagging leathern seat had been reinforced with an old green atlas, its pasteboard cover still faintly decorated with a pictured globe.

Seating himself again beside his desk, he turned to us beaming with an air of host, and listened with many nervous twitchings and furtive glances at Letitia, while I explained our presence there.

"It's a grand journey--a grand journey, Miss Primrose," he declared. "I only wish I were going, too."

"Tell us," said Letitia, kindly, "about _The Obelisk_. Is the first number ready yet?"

He sat up blithely, wetting his lips, and with that odd mannerism which recalled his visit to Grassy Ford, he touched with one finger the tip of his celluloid collar, and thrust out his chin.

"Almost," he said. "It's almost ready. It'll be out soon--very soon now--it'll be out soon. I've got it here--right here--right here on the desk."

He touched fondly the very manuscript we had surprised him writing.

"That's it," he said. "_The Obelisk_, volume one, number one."

"And the great stone of Iris-Iris?" queried Letitia.

He half rose from his chair, and exclaimed, excitedly, pointing to a drawer in the paper-buried desk:

"Right there! The cut is there!--cut of the inscription, you know. It's to be the frontispiece. Here: page one--my story--story of the translation and how I made it, and what it means to the civilized world. Don't fail to read it!"

He wiped his glasses.

"When," I asked, "will it be out?"

"Soon," he replied. "Soon, I hope. Not later than the fall."

"That's some time off yet," I remarked.

"You do not understand," he replied, anxiously. "You do not understand, Dr. Weatherby. A magazine requires great preparation--great preparation, sir--and particularly a scientific magazine, Dr. Weatherby."

"Ah," I said. "I see."

"_Great_ preparation, sir," the little man went on, leaning forward and tapping me on the knee. "There must be subscribers, sir."

"To be sure," I assented. "They are quite essential, I believe."

"Very," said Hiram Ptolemy. "Very, sir. We must have fifty at the fewest before we go to press. My publisher is obdurate--fifty, he says, or he will not invest a penny--not a penny, sir."

"And you have already--?" I inquired. I was sorry afterwards to have asked the question. It was not delicate. I asked it thoughtlessly, intending only to evince my interest in the cause. Coloring slightly, he wet his lips and cleared his throat before replying.

"One, sir; only one, as yet."

"Then put me down number two," I said, eager to retrieve my blunder.

His face lighted, but only for a moment, and turning an embarrassed countenance upon Letitia, and then on me, he stammered:

"But I--"

"Oh, by all means, Bertram," said Letitia, "we must subscribe."

The Egyptologist swallowed hard.

"I think--" he began.

"Bertram Weatherby is the name, Mr. Percival," said Letitia, in a clear, insistent tone, and at her bidding the little man scrawled it down, but so tremulously at first that he tore up the sheet and tried again.

"And the subscription price?" I inquired, opening my pocket-book.

"You--you needn't pay now, doctor," he replied.

"Is one dollar a year," said Letitia, promptly, and I laid the bill upon the desk.

Hiram Ptolemy touched it gingerly, fumbled it, dropped it by his chair, and, still preserving his embarrassed silence, fished it up again from the cluttered floor. Ten minutes later, when we said farewell to him, he still held it in his hand.

"What was the matter with him?" I asked Letitia, as we drove away, glancing back at that odd and shamefaced figure standing wistfully in the doorway.

"The other subscriber," she replied. "Didn't you guess?"

"What!" I said. "You, Letitia?"

She smiled sadly.

"Poor little man!"

VII

SUZANNE

It was evening when we set out, not without trepidation, to find Peggy Neal. We had dined--over-dined--in a room of gilt and mirrors and shining silver, watching the other tables with their smiling groups or puzzling pairs; some so ill-assorted that we strove vainly to solve their mystery, others so oddly mannered for a public place, we thought--the men so brazen in their attentions, the women so prinked and absurdly gowned and unabashed, Letitia at first was not quite sure we were rightly there.

"Still," she said, "there _are_ nice people here--why, even children!"

"The place is famous," I protested.

"I suppose it must be respectable," she replied, "but I never saw such a _mixture_!"

She gazed wonderingly about her.

"I suppose it must be New York," she said.

It was half-past eight when we entered the street again. We drove at once to the number Mrs. Neal had given, riding silently and a little nervously, but still marvelling at the scene we had left behind us, a strange setting for two such elder village-folk as we, making us wonder if we had missed much or little by living our lives so greenly and far away.

"I hope she will be at home," said Letitia. "Every one seemed to be going to the theatre."

"For my part," I confessed, "I rather hope we shall not find her."

"But why, Bertram?"

I could not say. The cab stopped. There were lights in the house, and, leaving Letitia, I went up the steps and pulled the bell. The household was at home, apparently, for I heard voices and the music of a piano as I stood waiting at the door. It was one of the older streets, ill-lighted and lined monotonously by those red-brick fronts so fashionable in a former day.

The door was opened by a colored maid, and there was a gush of laughter and the voices of men and women, with the tinkling undercurrent of a waltz.

"Is Miss Neal at home?" I asked.

"Miss who?"

"Miss Neal."

"Miss Neal?"

"Miss Peggy Neal."

She hesitated. "I'll see," she said. "Will you come in, suh?"

"No," I replied. "I'll wait out here."

She returned presently.

"Did you say Miss Peggy Neal, suh?"

"Yes," I replied, "Miss Peggy Neal."

"Don't any such lady live heah, suh."

"Strange," I murmured, and was about to turn away when a woman clad in a floating light-blue robe, her face indefinite in the dimly illumined hallway, but apparently young and pretty, or even beautiful, perhaps, and with an amazing quantity of golden hair, slipped through the portières and pushed aside the maid.

"I am Peggy Neal," she said, in a low voice. "What is wanted?"

"You!" I gasped, but Letitia had left the carriage and was at my shoulder.

"Peggy!" she said.

"Miss Primrose! And this is--Dr. Weatherby!"

"Dear Peggy," Letitia murmured, kissing the astonished girl on both powdered cheeks. "But how you've changed! You're so pale, Peggy--and your eyes--and your hair--Peggy, what _have_ you done to your hair?"

"Yes, my hair," murmured Peggy.

"Why, it used to be jet," Letitia said. "But you don't ask us in, my dear--and here we've come all the long way from Grassy Ford to see you."

"Hush!" said Peggy, and Letitia paused, for the first time noting the voices in the inner rooms.

"Oh," she whispered, "I see: you have a party."

"Yes," Peggy answered. "We--we have a party."

"I think we should go, Letitia," I interposed, but she did not hear me.

"I can't get over your hair," she murmured, holding Peggy at arm's-length from her and then turning her head a little to look about her. "Do they smoke at your parties?" she asked.

"Oh yes," laughed Peggy, "all the men smoke, you know."

"But I thought," said Letitia, "I saw a woman with a cigarette."

"It may have been a--candy cigarette," Peggy answered.

"That's true," said Letitia, "for I've seen them at Marvin's in Grassy Ford."

The portières before which Peggy stood, one hand grasping them, parted suddenly behind her head, and the face of another girl was thrust out rudely behind her own and staring into mine. It was a rouged and powdered face, with hard-set eyes that did not flinch as she gazed mockingly upon me, crying in a voice that filled the hall with its harsh discords:

"Aha! Which one to-night, Suzanne?"

Then she saw Letitia, and with a smothered oath, withdrew laughingly. The music and talking ceased within. It was not in the room behind the curtains, but seemingly just beyond it, and I could hear her there relating her discovery as I supposed, though the words were indistinct.

"How I hate that girl!" hissed Peggy, her eyes black with anger.

"Then I wouldn't have her, my dear," said Letitia, soothingly. "I should not invite her."

There was a burst of laughter within, followed by subdued voices, and I heard footsteps stealthily approaching. Peggy heard them too, no doubt, though she was answering Letitia's questions, for she grasped the curtains more tightly than before, one hand behind her and the other above her head. As she did so the loose sleeves of her robe slipped down her arm, disclosing a spot upon its whiteness.

"Peggy, dear," Letitia said, anxiously, "you have hurt yourself."

"Yes," was the answer, "I know. It's a bruise."

It was a heart, tattooed. She hid it in her hair.

"We must go, Letitia," I urged. "We must not keep Peggy from her friends."

"Yes," she assented. "But I had so much to ask you, Peggy, and so much to tell."

The curtains parted again, this time far above Peggy's head, and I saw a man's eyes peering through. She appeared to be disengaging the flounces about her slippered feet, but I saw her strike back savagely with her little heel, and he disappeared. But other faces came, one by one, though Letitia did not see them. Her eyes were all for her darling Peggy whom she plied with questions. How had her health been? How did she like New York? Did she never yearn for little old Grassy Ford again? Was she quite happy?

"Yes," Peggy murmured, "quite; quite happy."

She spoke in a hurried, staccato voice, in an odd, cold monotone. There was no kindness in her eyes.

The door-bell rang, and we stepped aside as the maid answered it. Two young men swaggered in, flushed and garrulous, nodding, not more familiarly to the servant than to Peggy herself, who parted the curtains to let them pass. They gazed curiously at her guests.

"Why, they kept on their hats!" Letitia said, in a shocked undertone. "Is it customary here, Peggy?"

"Everything," was the bitter answer, "is customary here. How is my mother?"

"It was your mother, Peggy, who asked me to find you." Letitia spoke, gently. "She wants to see you. She is not very strong since your father's--"

She paused.

"Is my father dead?"

"Didn't you know?"

"No; but I thought as much; he was such a boozer."

Letitia stared. "Peggy!" she said.

"Oh, I know what you think," the girl replied, wearily, seating herself upon the stairs, and putting her chin upon her hands. She did not ask us to be seated.

"Letitia," I said, firmly, "come; we must go." I put my hand upon the door-knob.

"Doctor," said Peggy Neal, rising again, "you won't mind waiting outside a moment? I have something to say to dear Miss Primrose."

"Certainly," I replied. "Good-bye, Miss--Neal."

She gave her hand to me. "Good-bye, doctor." Then she looked me strangely in the eyes, saying, in an undertone, "Mind, I shall tell her nothing"--and paused significantly, adding in a clearer tone again--"but the truth."

I waited anxiously upon the steps. Five minutes passed--ten--twenty--thirty--and I grew impatient. Then the door opened, and Letitia appeared with Peggy, and radiant though in tears.

"Good-bye," she said, kissing her, "dear, _dear_ Peggy. Oh, Bertram, I have heard such a wonderful story!"

"Indeed?"

"Yes," Peggy said from the doorway, "Miss Primrose is the same enthusiast she used to be when I went to school to her."

"It is like a novel," declared Letitia; "but we must go. You must forgive me for keeping you so long away--from your newer friends."

"It is nothing," was the answer. "I'm so glad you came."

"Remember your promise, Peggy!"

"Oh yes--my promise," Peggy murmured. "Good-bye, Miss Primrose. Good-bye, doctor. Good-bye. Good-bye."

The carriage-door had scarcely closed upon us when Letitia seized my arm.

"Bertram," she said, "it _is_ a story! I thought it was only in books that such things happened. I would not have missed this visit for the world!"

"But," I said, "do you trust--"

"Trust her? Yes. A woman never cries like that when she's lying, Bertram. Listen: she came to New York from Grassy Ford. He was nowhere to be found. He had given her a false address. Then a little girl was born--dead. Oh, you can't imagine what that child's been through, Bertram--the disgrace, the sorrow, the rags and poverty, hunger even--and only think how _we_ were eating and sleeping soundly in Grassy Ford, all that time she was starving here! Then temptations came in this miserable, this wicked, wicked place! Oh, how can man--Well--she did not dare to come home, but stayed on here. It was then she took the name Suzanne, to hide her real one. Twice--twice, Bertram--she went down to the river--"

Letitia's voice was breaking.

"Oh, I can't tell you all she told me. But just when it all seemed darkest, she met this good, kind woman with whom she lives."

"What!" I said. "Did she tell you that?"

"Bertram, that woman saved her!--saved her from worse than death--took her from the very street--clothed her, fed her, and nursed her to health again. Did you see her dress? It was finest silk and lace. Did you see the rings on her fingers? One was a diamond, Bertram, as large as the pearl you wear; one was an opal, set in pearls; another, a ruby--and she told me she had a dozen more up-stairs."

"Who is this woman?"

"She did not tell me. I forgot to ask."

"What was the promise she made you?"

"To visit us--to come next summer to Grassy Ford."

"_Us_, Letitia?"

"Yes; I made her promise it. She refused at first, but I told her there were hearts as loving in Grassy Ford as in New York--oh, I hope there are, Bertram; I hope there are! She will go first to the farm, of course, to see her mother, and then, before she comes back to this new mother, who makes me burn, Bertram, when I ask myself if any woman in Grassy Ford would have done as much--then she will visit us. It will mean so much to her. It will set that poor, spoiled life right again before our petty, little, self-righteous world. Oh, I shall _make_ them receive her, Bertram! I shall make them _take her in their arms_!"

She paused breathlessly, but I was silent.

"I thought you wouldn't mind," she said.

Still I could not speak.

"Tell me," she urged, "did I presume too much? Was I wrong to ask her without consulting you?"

"No," I answered--but not through kindness as Letitia thought, let me confess it; not through having the tenderest man's heart in the world, as she said, gratefully, but because I knew--how, she will always wonder--that Peggy would never come.

VIII

IN A DEVON LANE

I have never seen an English lane, but I have a picture of one above the fireplace, and I once smelled hawthorn blooming. A pleasant, hedgerow scent, it seemed to me, with a faint suggestion of primroses on the other side--I say primroses, but Letitia smiles when I declare I can smell them still, or laughs with Robin: they have been in England.

"Are you quite sure about it, Bertram?"

"They do have primroses," I reply, defiantly.

"But are you sure they are primroses?" she demands.

"Smell again, father!" cries my son.

"Yes," I retort; "or violets; they may be violets beyond the hedge."

It is then they laugh at me, and they make a great point of their puzzling questions: am I certain--for example, that the primrose is fragrant enough to be smelled so far, and is it in flower when the hawthorn blooms? That is important, they insist. It is not important, I reply--in _my_ England.

"_Your_ England!" they cry.

"To be sure," I say. "In my England--and I see it as plainly as you do yours--the hawthorn and primrose is always flowering. In my England it is always spring."

It is summer in theirs. It is always cool and fragrant and wholly charming in my Devonshire. It was rather hot when they got to theirs--that is, the sunny coast of it they brag of was a little trying, sometimes, I suspect, in midsummer, though neither will confess.

"But not the moors!" they say.

"Oh, well--the moors--no; I should think not," I answer. "I am not such a fool as to think that moors are hot."

"How cool _are_ the moors?" they then inquire, innocently, but I see the trick; I hear the plot in their very voices, and am wary.

"Oh," I reply, "as cool as usual."

"But there are dense forests on the moors," Robin suggests. "Regular jungles--eh, father?"

I am not to be taken without a struggle.

"Hm," I reply.

"Hm--what, father?"

"Well, I prefer the coast myself."

"The dear white coast," says Letitia, slyly.

"The dear _red_ coast!" I cry in triumph, but they only sigh:

"Ah, it was a wonderful, wonderful journey! One could never imagine it--or even tell it. One must have been there."

It was a wonderful journey, I then admit, and I do not blame them for their pridefulness, but what, I ask, would they have done without my map?

I am bound by honesty to confess, however, that fair as my Devon is with the vales and moorlands I have never seen, Letitia's Devon must be fairer. She found it lovelier far than she had thought, she tells me, and she smiles so happily at the mere sound of its magic name--what, I ask, must a shire be made of to stand the test of that woman's dreams?

"Here we have hills," I tell her.

"But not those hills, Bertram."

"Have we not Sun Dial?" I protest.

"Yes, we have Sun Dial," she admits.

"We have winds," I say, "and singing waters, in Grassy Fordshire."

She shakes her head.

"You never heard the Dart or Tamar or the Tavy. You never stood on the abbey bridge."

"And where," I ask, "was that?"

"That was at Tavistock," she replies, "at dear little Tavistock after a rain, with the brown water rushing through the arches where the moss and fern and ivy clings--rushing over bowlders and swirling and foaming and falling beyond over a weir; then racing away under elm-trees and out into meadows--oh, you never heard the Tavy, Bertram."

"We have Troublesome," I insist.

"Yes," she replies, but her mind is absent. "We have Troublesome, to be sure."

Then I rouse myself. I fairly menace her with her treason.

"Surely," I cry, "you do not prefer old Devon to Grassy Fordshire!"

It is a question she never answers.

"Grassy Fordshire is your native heath," I remind her, jealously.

"Devon was my father's," she replies, "and mother's, too."

"Still," I insist, "you do not prefer it to your own?"

"It is beautiful," is her answer.

Had ever man so exasperating an antagonist? She declines utterly to be convinced; she talks of nothing but that ruddy land as if it always had been hers to boast of, is forever telling of ancient villages cuddled down in the softest corners of its hills and headlands to doze and dream in the English cloud-shadows and the sun--some of them lulled, she says, by the moorland music of winds among the granite tors, and waters falling down, down through those pastoral valleys to the sea; some lapped by the salt waves rippling into coves blue and tranquil as the sky above them, and others still in a sterner setting, clinging to edges in the very clefts of a wild and rugged coast, like weed and sea-shells left there by the fury of the autumn storms. So, she tells me, her Devon is; so I picture it as we sit together by the winter fire, while for the thousandth time she tells her story: how she and Robin, with my map between them, made that long journey which, years before it, the gypsy had found forewritten in her hand. It was the very pilgrimage that as a boy I planned and promised for myself when I should come to be a man, but have found no time for--yet my son has seen it, that land of the youth whose name he bears, so that, listening, I take his glowing word, as I took that of the youth before him, for its moorland heather and its flashing streams.

Robin, it seems, preferred north Devon--Lynton and Lynmouth and their crags and glens. Letitia, I note, while yet agreeing with his wildest adjectives, leans rather towards the south.

"But think," he says, "of Watersmeet and the Valley of Rocks, Aunt Letty!"

"I do think of them," she answers, "but think of Dartmoor, my dear."

"And so I do," is his reply.

"That day the wind blew so," she calls to mind, "that morning when we rode to Tavistock."

"Tavistock?" I always ask. "Tavistock? Where have I heard that name? Do all Devonshire roads lead up to Tavistock?"

She only smiles.

"You should see Tavistock," she says, and resumes her memories. I sit quite helpless between the combatants. They differ widely, one might think, to hear their voices rising and falling in warm debate, yet listening to their words I detect nothing but a rivalry of praise, an effort on the part of each to outdo the other, as I tell them, in pæans and benisons on what I am led inevitably to believe is the fairest of earthly dwelling-places.

When Robin withdraws his youthful vigor and goes off to bed, or if he is away at school, from which he writes such letters as I wish Dove could but see, the talk is tranquil by our hearth, or little by little drops quite away.

"Such lands breed men," observes Letitia for the hundredth time. It is her old, loved theory, the worth and grace of a rare environment, of which she speaks, sewing in the fire-light. "The race must be hardy to wring its living from such shores and heights."

"True," I answer, thinking of the wreckers and smugglers who haunted those creeks and coves in years gone by--more lawless summers than the quiet one which found a woman on the very sands their heels had furrowed, or choosing flowers to press on the very cliffs they climbed with their spray-wet booty. I think vaguely of the soldiers and sailors who fought the battles whose dates and meanings it was Letitia's joy to teach in the red-brick school-house. I think more vividly of great John Ridd and Amyas Leigh, and then--a clearer vision--I remember that other, that later Devonshire lad who was flesh and blood to me; and sitting here by my Grassy Fordshire fire, a man grown gray who was once a boy eating the slice two lovers spread for him, I keep their covenant.

You go up from Plymouth, Letitia tells me, and by-and-by you are on the moors, marvelling; and you like everything, but you love Tavistock. It is in a valley, with the Tavy running beneath that bridge of which she is forever dreaming, for, as she stood there watching the waters playing, and listening to their song, she said:

"Here Robert Saxeholm was a boy. How often he must have stood here!"

"Robin Saxeholm?" asked a clear voice almost at her side; and Letitia turned. A pretty English lady stood there smiling and offering her hand.

"Yes," said Letitia, "did you know him, too?"

The lady smiled--a sad little smile it was. She was in black.

"He was my husband," she replied, "and this"--turning to the blue-eyed, fair-haired girl beside her "is Letitia Saxeholm."

"Why," my Robin cried--"why, that's--"

Letitia Primrose stopped him with a glance, and turning swiftly to that little English maid--

"_Letitia?_" she said, taking those pink cheeks gently between her hands, and kissing them wellnigh with every word she uttered. "Letitia--what a sweet--sweet name!"

* * * * *

Transcriber's note:

There were a few unnecessary quotation marks within the text that have been removed.

The spelling of two words has been changed: Apent is now spent and valeys is now valleys.

The oe ligature has been expanded.