Miss Primrose: A Novel

by Roy Rolfe Gilson

I

THE OLDER LETITIA

P

recisely at half-past seven there was a faint rustling on our staircase and a moment later Letitia Primrose appeared at our breakfast-table smiling "Good-morning." She was dressed invariably in the plainest of black gowns with the whitest of ruching about her wrists and throat, and at the collar a pin which had been her mother's, a cameo Minerva in an antique setting of vine leaves wrought in gold. The gown itself—I scarcely know how to style it, for no frill or foible of the day was ever visible in its homely contour, or if existing there, had been so curbed by the wearer's modesty as to be quite null and void to the naked eye. Every tress of her early whitening hair lay smoothly back about her forehead, and behind was caught so neatly beneath her comb, it might be doubted how or if she ever slept upon it. Just so immaculate, virginal, irreproachable did the older Letitia come softly down to us every week-day morning of her life, and taking her chair between Dove's seat and mine, she would adjust her gold-rimmed glasses to better see how the night had dealt with us, and beaming upon us with one of the pleasantest of inquiring smiles, would murmur—

"Well?"

She ate little, and that so unobtrusively, I used to wonder if she ate at all. I can remember her lifting her cup, but do not recall that it ever reached her lips. She had, I think, some trick of magnetism, some power of the eye that held yours at the crucial moment, so that you never really saw her sip or bite, and she never chewed, I swear, yet I never heard of her bad digestion. Eating in her was a chaste indulgence common only, I believe, to spinsterhood—a rite, communionlike, rather than a feast.

When the clock struck eight, we would rise together—I for my office, Dove for farewells, Letitia for the school-room; I with a clattering chair, Dove demurely, Letitia noiselessly, to put on a hat as vague and unassuming as that decorous garment in which she cloaked herself from the outer world—a kind of cape and jacket, I think it was, in winter, but am not quite sure. In summer it was a cashmere shawl. Then slipping on a pair of gloves, black always and always whole, however faded, she would take up her small pearl-handled parasol, storm or shine, and that linen bag of hers, a marvellous reticule for books and manuscripts with a separate pocket in the cover-flap for a comb and mirror and extra handkerchief—though not to my knowledge; I am merely telling what was told. Nor am I telling all that was said of Letitia's panoply and raiment, the manner of which at every season, at every hour of the night and day, was characterized—if I have understood the matter—not so much by a charm of style as of precaution, a modest providence, a truly exquisite foresight and readiness for all emergencies, however perilous, so that fire nor flood nor war's alarms nor death itself, however sudden, should find her unprepared. Fire at night would merely have illumined a slender, unobtrusive figure descending a stair or ladder unabashed, decently, even gracefully arrayed in a silk kimono which hung nightly on the foot-board of her bed; and since for other purposes it was never worn, it remains unscorched, and, indeed, unblemished, to this very day. But for that grim hand the moment of whose clutch can never be foretold with certainty, nothing could exceed Letitia's watchfulness and care. She dressed invariably, I have said, in the plainest black, but I have heard, and on authority I could not question, that however simple and inexpensive those outer garments were, the inner vestments were of finest linen superimposing the softest silk. Thus—for a tendency to some heart-affection was hereditary in the Primrose family—thus could no sudden dissolution or surrender, such as might occur in an absence from home and the ministration of loving friends, be attended ever by any post-mortem embarrassment or chagrin, but rather would disclose a pride and delicacy of taste and consideration, the more remarkable and worthy of approval and regret, because it could never otherwise have been revealed. Nothing I know of in the way of gifts was more acceptable to Letitia Primrose than those black silk ones which she took such pains to purchase and secrete.

It was a wondrous reticule, that linen pouch of which I spoke, bearing "L. P." embroidered on its outer side. I say its outer, for so she carried it always; and in years, so many I will not count them, I never knew that monogram turned in, or down. She met me with it in the doorway from which Dove watched us till we had left the gate. Mornings, for years, we went to our work together, save when an urgent matter summoned me earlier or compelled me, against my will and exercise, to drive. Morn after morn we walked together to the red brick school-house, talking of village news and the varying moods of our fickle northern weather, or perhaps of books, old ones and new ones, or of those golden memories that we shared. They were not perfunctory as I recall them, those morning dialogues. There was no abstraction about Letitia, no cursory, unweighed chattering of things so obvious as to need no comment. Every topic might be a theme for her mild eloquence. It might be of Keats that she discoursed to me, or Browning or Alfred Tennyson or perhaps the Corsican, whom she hated, partly for tyranny, partly because he made her "look at him," she said; it might be the Early Church, whose records she had read and read again, though not one-half so much for Cuthbert's holiness, I told her, as for Fuller's quaintness, which she loved; or it might be a March morning that we walked together, while she spoke like a poet's daughter of the first pink arbutus some grinning farm-boy had laid but yesterday upon her desk.

Why no one ever wooed and won such fervor seemed passing strange to Dove and me. With all the grace of goodness and gentle courage in which she faced the world alone, in all those years which had followed her father's death, she had never, to Dove's ken or mine, won a single suitor. Those burdens of care and sacrifice laid too soon upon her frail, young shoulders had borne early fruit—patience, wisdom, and a sweet endurance beyond her years—but on such harvest young men set small store. A taste for it comes late. It made her pleasing to her elders, but those of her own years shrank instinctively from its very perfectness. She had matured too soon. How then should any one so coolly virtuous know trial or passion? Surely so young a saint could have no warm impetuous hours to remember, no sweet abandonment, no pretty idyls—had she even a spring-time to recall?