I

THE HOME-KEEPER

T

he 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.