"No patients, doctor?" she asked, softly.
"No patients dying," I retorted. We eyed each other.
"I had a headache," she said, meekly, seating herself upon a log. "And I have a subst.i.tute."
"There are other doctors," I remarked.
Suddenly she rose.
"I think," she said, "I"ll just stroll that way, if you don"t mind, Bertram."
"Not at all," I replied. "I know how you feel, Let.i.tia. That"s why I come here."
"Do you?" she asked. "Then this isn"t your first--"
"Nor my twentieth offence," I replied, laughing. She sighed.
"I"m glad of that. It"s my first--really. I feel like a criminal."
I pointed with my broken pipe-stem.
"You"ll find the best path there," I said.
"I think I"ll stay, if you don"t mind, Bertram."
"Stay, by all means," I replied, and went on fishing. Let.i.tia was the first to speak.
"It"s hard always trying to be--dominant," she remarked, "isn"t it?"
"Why, I rather like it," I replied.
"You are a man," she said. "Men do, I believe. But I, I get so tired sometimes"--she bit her lip--"of being master." She laughed nervously.
"That"s why I ran away."
Presently she went on speaking.
"If we could only be surrounded by such things as these, always, how serene our lives might be. Don"t smile. It"s my old sermon of environment, I know; but why are you here?--and why am I? I try my best to keep the beautiful before my children"s eyes, to tempt them into lovely thinking. Bertram, I believe, heart and soul, in the power of beauty. I am so sure of it, I know I should be a stronger teacher if I were young and beautiful myself--or even pretty, like Helen White."
"She is a mere wax doll," I said.
"But children like pretty faces," she replied. "Look! You have a fish!"
It was a snag, but while I was busy with it she rose. "Wait," I said, "I"ll drive you home."
"No, thank you, Bertram. I"d rather walk. My head is better now.
Good-bye."
I did not urge her. When she had gone I picked up a slip of paper from the path where she had pa.s.sed. It was a crumpled half of a blue-ruled leaf torn from some pupil"s tablet, and, scrawled upon it in a school-girl"s hand, I read:
"DEAR EDNA,--Don"t mind the homely old thing. Everybody says she"s fifty if she"s a day. No one would marry her, so she had to teach school."
It was written, Dove told me afterwards, by one of the rose-girls in Let.i.tia"s garden.
VII
PEGGY NEAL
My aunt Miranda, who was wise in many things, used to maintain that a woman ceased to be charming only when she thought she had ceased to be so; that age had nothing whatever to do with the matter--and so saying, she would smile so bewitchingly upon me that I was forced inevitably to the conclusion that she bore her fifty years much better than many women their paltry score. Let.i.tia was not so sanguine; she laid more stress upon the spring-time. I have heard her say that there was nothing lovelier in the world than a fair young girl full of pure spirits as a rose-cup full of dew. She would turn in the street to look at one; she liked them to be about her; her own face grew more winning in such comradeship, and when she was given a higher school-room, where the girls wore skirts to their shoe-tops and put up their hair, it was an almost childish pleasure which she displayed. It was this very preference for exquisite maidenhood that explained her fondness for Peggy Neal. It was not scholarship which had won the teacher"s heart, for Peggy was an indifferent student, as Let.i.tia herself confessed, but she was a plump and brown-eyed, pink-cheeked country girl who always smiled and who had that grace of innocence and bloom of health which are the witchery of youth. She was a favorite with school-boys, a belle of theirs at straw-rides, dances, and taffy-pulls, and other diversions of our Gra.s.sy Fordshire teens, where, however, her gentle ways, her readiness to follow rather than to lead, her utter incapability of envy or spiteful speech made her beloved of girls as well. She was the amiable maiden whom men look twice at, yet whose sisters are never quite jealous, holding her charm to be mere pinkish prettiness and beneath the envy of superior minds like theirs. Peggy was the sort of girl Let.i.tia had never been, roseate with the kind of youth Let.i.tia had never known, and it enchanted her as a joy and beauty which had been denied.
Neal, the father, was a drunken farmer, whose wife was chiefly responsible for the crops they planted, and who, being strong and abler than her shiftless spouse, was usually to be seen in the field and garden directing and aiding the hired man. Peggy was the only child. She helped her mother in the kitchen, fed the chickens, skimmed the milk, sold the b.u.t.ter, and let her father in o" nights. He was a by-word in the village. Occasional revivalists prayed for him publicly upon their knees, but without effect. His wife could have told them how futile that method was; she had tried it herself in more hopeful years. She had tried rage also, but it left her bitter and sick of life, and Pat the drunker; so wisely she had fallen back upon resignation, though not of the apathetic sort, and had made herself mistress of the farm, where her husband was suffered to spend his nights if he chose, or was able to walk so far from the tavern where he spent his days.
For Peggy the mother had better dreams. She knew that the girl was beautiful, and she knew also what beauty, however born, might win for itself in a wider world than her own had been. Peggy, therefore, was to finish school, however the farm might suffer by her absence and the expense of such simple dress as her village friendships would require.
Nature might marry Thrift or Money, thought the hard-faced woman in the faded sunbonnet; silk and lace and a new environment might make a queen of this beggar-maid, her last hope in a life of hopelessness. Proudly she watched her daughter flower into village fame, guarding that fairness with jealous eyes.
"Daughter," she would say, "where is your hat?"
"Mamma, I like the sun."
"Nonsense. Go straight and fetch it and put it on. Do you want to be speckled like your ugly old mother-hen?"
It was a care and pride that would have turned another and far less lovely head than Peggy"s, yet in spite of it this country school-girl ripened sweetly. Driving on country visits I used to meet her by the way, walking easily and humming to herself the while, her books and luncheon swinging at her side--a perfect model for romantic painters who run to milk-maids, or, as Let.i.tia used to say, the veritable Phyllis of old English song.
The mother rose at dawn; she toiled by sunlight and by lamplight; her face grew haggard, her figure gaunter, her voice sharper with bitter irony, her heart harder save in that one lone corner which was kept soft--solely for her child. Peggy, I believe, was the only living thing she smiled upon. Neighbors dreaded her cutting tongue; her husband was too dazed to care.
Time went by. In spite of that stern resolve in the woman"s nature, and all her labor and frugal scheming, what with the failure of crops and her lack of knowledge of their better care, and an old enc.u.mbrance whose interest could be barely met on the quarter-days that cast their shadows on the whole round year, the farm declined. Let.i.tia"s gifts from her own wardrobe were all that kept Peggy Neal in school. It was a word from Let.i.tia also that raised the cloud on the mother"s face when despair was darkest there. Might not summer-boarders, Let.i.tia asked, bear a surer, more golden harvest than those worn-out fields?
"Summer-boarders!" cried Mrs. Neal, with a grim irony in her voice. But she repeated it--"Summer-boarders," in a milder tone, and the plan was tried.
The first ones came in June. They descended noisily from the fast express, lugging bags and fishing-rods and guns. Some of them stared; some young ones whistled softly at the fair driver of that old two-seated buckboard waiting to bear them to the farm. They greeted effusively--for the daughter"s sake--the hard-mouthed woman who met them at the door, striving her best to smile a welcome. She it was who showed them their plain but well-scrubbed chambers, while their minds were at the barn.
Pastures and orchards bore strange fruit that summer: white-faced city clerks in soft, pink shirts smoked cigarettes and browned in the sun; freckled ladies set up their easels in the cow-lot; high-school professors asked one another puzzling questions, balanced cannily on the topmost rail of the Virginia fence, and all--all, that is, to a man--helped Peggy carry in the milk, helped Peggy churn, helped Peggy bake, helped Peggy set the table, and clear it, and wipe the dishes, and set them safely away again in the dim pantry--helped Peggy to market, and Peggy to church: so rose her star.
The mother watched, remembering her own girlhood. Its romance, seen through a mist of gloomy years, seemed foolish now. There might be happiness in human life--she had never known any. There was a deal of nonsense in the world called love, she knew, and there was a surer thing called money. Peggy should wait for it.
The mother watched, smiling to herself sardonically, secretly well-pleased--smiling because she knew quite well that these callow sprigs had far less money than negligees; well-pleased because she guessed that soon enough a man with both would be hovering about sweet Peggy"s dairy. It was a humorous thing to her that all these city men should think it beautiful--that dampish, sunless spot where the milk-cans stood waist-deep in cresses.
She kept sharp eyes upon her daughter, and farm-house duties filled Peggy"s days to their very brim. There must be no loitering by star-light, either. Mother and daughter now slept together in the attic store-room, for the new farming had proved a prosperous thing.
The summer was not like other summers. There was life and gayety up at Neal"s: strumming of banjos and the sound of laughter and singing on the porch, much lingering in hammocks under the pine-trees, moonlit jaunts in the old hay-rick, lanterns moving about the barn and dairy, empty bowls on the b.u.t.tery table when Mrs. Neal came down at dawn, and half-cut loaves in the covered crocks.
September came and the harvest had been gathered in. The last boarder had returned cityward. Peggy was in school again. One day, however, she was missing from her cla.s.ses, and Let.i.tia, fearing that she might be ill, walked to the farm after school was over. It was a pleasant road with a narrow path beside it among the gra.s.ses, and the day was cool with premonitions of the year"s decline.
The farm seemed silent and deserted. She knocked at doors, she tapped lightly on the kitchen-windows, but no one was at home. At the barn, however, the horses were in their stalls, turning their heads to her and whinneying of their empty mangers. Surely, she thought, the Neals could not be gone. She stood awhile by the well-curb from which she could better survey the farm: it lay before her, field and orchard, bright with sunshine and golden-rod, yet she saw no moving thing but the crows in the corn-stubble and the cows waiting by the meadow-bars. Then she tried the dairy, and there heard nothing but the brook whimpering among the cans and cresses, and she turned away.