"We don't see you often any more, Bertram," her father said to me one day.

"No," I stammered. "I'm--"

"Busy studying, I suppose," he said.

"Yes, sir; and ball-games," I replied.

"How do you get on with your Latin?" he inquired, feebly.

"We're still in Virgil, sir."

"Ah," he said, but without a trace of the old vigor the cla.s.sics had been wont to rouse in him. "That's good--won'erful writer--up--"

He was pointing with his bony fore-finger.

"Yes?" I answered, wondering what he meant to say. He roused himself, and pointed again over my shoulder.

"Up there--on the--s'elf."

He was so ghastly white I thought him dying and called Let.i.tia.

"'S all right, Bertram," he rea.s.sured me, patting my hand. I suppose he had seen the terror in my face. He smiled faintly. "'M all right, Bertram."

Outside the apple-trees were blooming, I remember, and he lived, somehow, to see them bloom again.

My conscience winces, as I say, to think how I twirled my cap by my old friend's bedside, longing to be gone; yet I comfort myself with the hope that he did not note my eagerness, or that if he did he remembered his own boyhood and the witchery of bat and ball. Not only was the poet's life-lamp waning, not only was Let.i.tia burdened with increasing cares, fast aging her, the mater said, but I was a child no longer; a youth, now, mindful of all about me, and seeing that neighbor household with new and comprehending eyes.

The very house grew dismal to me. The boughs outside were creeping closer--not to shelter it, not to cool it and make a breathing nook for a lad flushed with his games in the summer sun. It was damp there; the air seemed mouldy under the lindens; there was no invitation in the unkempt gra.s.s; toads hopped from beneath your feet, bird-songs came to you, but always, or so it seemed to me, they came from distance, from the yards beyond.

There within, across that foot-worn threshold which had been a goal for me in former years, there was now a--not a poet any longer, or Rugby boy, but only a sick old man. Upon a table at his side his goblets stood, covered with saucers, and a spoon in each. His drugs were watery; there was no warmth in them, no sparkle even when the sun came straggling in, no wine of life to be quaffed thirstily--only a tepid, hourly spoonful to be feebly sipped, a sop to death.

Even with windows open to the breeze the air seemed stifling to the lad I was. The sunlight falling on the faded carpet seemed always ebbing to a kind of shadow of a glow. The clock, that ugly box upon the shelf, ticked dreadfully as if it never would strike a smiling hour again. The china ornaments at its side stood ghastly mute, and hideous flowers--_ffff!_ those waxen faces under gla.s.s! If not quite dead, why were they kept so long a-dying there? Would no kind, sunny soul in mercy free them from their pallid misery? I was a Prince of Youth! What had I to do with tombs? I fled.

Even Let.i.tia, kind as ever to me, seemed always busy and preoccupied--sweeping, dusting, baking, cleansing those everlasting pots and pans, or reading to her father, who listened dreamily, dozing often, but always waking if she stopped. Content to have her at his side because discontent to have her absent, even for the little while her duties or the doctor's orders led her, though quite unwillingly, away.

Impatience for her return would make him querulous, which caused her tears, not for its failing consciousness of her devotion, but for its warning to her of his gentle spirit's slow decline despite her care.

"Where have you been so long, Let.i.tia?"

"So long, father? Only an hour gone."

"Only an hour? I thought you would never come."

"See, father, I've brought you a softer pillow," she would say, smiling his plaints into oblivion. It was the smile with which she had caught the grape-thief by the fence, the one with which she had charmed a Devonshire lad, now gone three years and more--the tenderest smile I ever saw, save one, and the saddest, though not mournful, it was so genuine, so gentle, and so unselfish, and her eyes shone lovingly the while. Its sadness, as I think now of it, lay not so much in the smile itself as in the wonder of it that she smiled at all.

The mater--was she not always mother to the motherless?--was Let.i.tia's angel in those weary days, carried fresh loaves of good brown bread to her, a pot of beans, or a pie, perhaps, pa.s.sing with them through the hole in the picket-fence. I can see her now standing on Let.i.tia's kitchen doorstep with the swathed dish in her hands.

"The good fairy," Let.i.tia called her; and when she was for crying--for cry she must sometimes, though not for the world before her father's eyes--she shed her tears in the kitchen in the mater's arms. So it was that while I was yet a school-boy an elder sister was born unto our house and became forever one of the Weatherbys by a tie--not of blood, I have said before, yet it was of blood, now that I come to think of it--it was of gentle, gentle human blood.

There was an old nurse now to share Let.i.tia's vigils, but only the daughter's tender hands knew how to please. She scarcely left him.

Doctor or friends met the same answer, smiling but unalterable: she would rather stay. Not a night pa.s.sed that she did not waken of her own anxiety to slip softly to his bedside. He smiled her welcome, and she sat beside him with his poor, thin hand in hers, sometimes till the dawn of day.

Day by day like that, all through the silent watches of the darkened world, that gentle handmaiden laid her sacrifice upon the altar of her duty, without a murmur, without one bitter word. It was her youth she laid there; it was her girlhood and her bloom of womanhood, her first, her very last young years--sparkle of eyes, rose and fulness of maiden cheeks, the golden moments of that flower-time when Love goes choosing, playtime's silvery laughter and blithe, untrammelled song.

"'t.i.tia," he said to her, "there's no poem--'alf so beaut'ful--'s your love, m' dear."

The words were a crown to her. He set it on her bowed head with his trembling fingers.

"Soft--brown 'air," he murmured. He could not see how the gray was coming there.

Spring came, scenting his room with apple blooms; summer, filling it with orient airs--but he was gone.

VI

COUSIN DOVE

Up in the attic of the Primrose house one day, I was helping Let.i.tia with those family treasures which were too antiquated for future usage, but far too precious with memories to cast out utterly--discarded laces, broken fans, pencilled school-books, dolls and toys that had been Let.i.tia's, the very cradle in which she had been rocked by the mother she could not remember, even the little home-made pieced and quilted coverlet they had tucked about her while she slept. She folded it, and I laid it carefully in a wooden box.

"How shall we fill it?" I asked her, gazing at the odds and ends about my feet.

"With these," she said, bringing me packages of old newspapers, each bundle tied neatly with a red ribbon, too new and bright ever to have been worn. I glanced carelessly at the foolish packages, as I thought them--then suddenly with a new interest.

"Why," I said, "they're papers from Bombay!"

"Yes," she answered.

"Where Robin is?" I asked.

There was no reply from the garret gloom.

"Did Mr. Bob send them?"

She was busy in a chest.

"What did you ask, Bertram?" she inquired, absently.

"Did Mr. Bob send these Bombay papers?"

"Oh," she answered, "those?"

She paused a moment.

"No," she told me.

"Oh," said I, much disappointed, "I thought he might. They're last year's papers, too, some of them."