L
etitia's church, the last her father ever preached in, is a little stone St. Paul's, pine-shaded and ivy-grown, upon a hill-side. There are graves about it in the lawn, scattered, not huddled there, and no paths between them, only the soft grass touching the very stones. Above them in the untrimmed boughs swaying with every wind, the wild birds nest and sing, so that death where Dr. Primrose lies seems a pleasant dreaming.
"Our service," he used to say, "is the ancient poetry of reverence;" and every verse of it brings to Letitia memories of her father standing at the lecturn, while she was a child listening in the pews.
"I was very proud of him," she used to tell us. "His sermons were wonderful, I think. You will say that I could not judge them as a girl and daughter, but I have read them since. I have them all in a box up-stairs, and now and then I take one out and read it to myself, and all that while I can hear his voice. They are better than any I listen to nowadays; they are far more thoughtful, fuller of life and fire and the flower of eloquence. Our ministers are not so brimming any more."
She told us a story I had never heard, of his earnestness and how hard it was for him to find words fervent enough to express his meaning; how when a rich old merchant of Grassy Ford confessed to him a doubt that there was a God, dear Dr. Primrose turned upon him in the village street where they walked together and said, with the tears springing to his eyes:
"Gabriel Bond, not as a clergyman but as a man, I say to you, consider for a moment that apple-bloom you are treading on!" It was spring and a bough from the merchant's garden overhung the walk where they had paused. "Hold it in your hand, and look at it, and think, man, think! Use the same reason which tells you two and two make four—the same reason that made you rich, Gabriel—and tell me, if you can, there is no God! Why, sir—" and here Dr. Primrose's heart quite overcame him, and his voice broke. "Gabriel, you are not such a damned—"
And the merchant, Letitia said, for it was Bond himself who told her the story long after Dr. Primrose's voice was stilled—the merchant, astounded to find a clergyman so like another man struggling for stressful words for his emotion, picked up the bruised twig from beneath his feet and stuck it in her father's coat.
"Doctor," he said, quietly, "there's force, sir, in what you say," and left Dr. Primrose wondering on the walk. But the next Sunday he appeared at church, and every Sunday for many years thereafter, merely explaining to those who marvelled, that he had found a man.
It was not likely that the daughter of such a man would be much troubled with doubts of what he had taught so positively or what she had come to believe herself; if led astray it would be like her sex in general, through too much faith. While not obtrusive in her views of life in her younger years, Letitia, as she reached her prime, and through the habit of self-dependence and her daily duty of instructing undeveloped minds, grew more decisive in her manner, more impatient of opposition to what she held was truth, especially when it seemed to her the fruit of ignorance or that spirit of bantering argument so common to the humorously inclined. She liked humor to know its place, she said; it was the favorite subterfuge of persons championing a losing cause. In such discussions, finding her earnestness useless to convince, and scorning to belittle a theme dear to her with resort to jest or personalities, she would sit silenced, but with a flush upon her cheeks, and if the enemy had pressed too sharply on her orderly retreat, one would always know it by the tapping of her foot upon the floor.
She was no mean antagonist. For she read not only those volumes her father loved, but the books and journals of the day as well. Reading and theorizing of the greater world outside her little one, she was not troubled by those paradoxes which men meet there, which cause them to falter, doubt, and see two sides of questions where they had seen but one, till they fall back lazily, taking their ease on that neutral ground where Humor is the host, welcoming all and favoring none. We used to smile sometimes at Letitia's fervency; we had our little jests at its expense, but we knew it was her father in her, poet and preacher not dead but living still. In his youth and prime Dr. Primrose was ever the champion of needy causes, whose name is legion, so that his zeal found vent, and left him in his decline the mild old poet I remember. Would Letitia be as mild, I wondered?