"There is nothing further to be said; you do not know what you have nipped in the bud."
"I suppose we never know that."
Dinah met them at the gate, her wind-blown curls and laughing eyes in striking contrast to the older face that had lost all its color. Tessa did not see that Mr. Hammerton"s eyes were studying the change in her face; she had no more care of the changes in her face with him than with Dinah.
"I"ll be in about eight," he said to Dinah, as Tessa brushed past him to enter the gate.
Another thing that influenced impressible Tessa this day, was a talk at the tea-table. They were sitting around the tea-table cozily, the four people who, in her mother"s thought, const.i.tuted all Tessa"s world. Mr.
Wadsworth in an easy position in his arm-chair was listening to his three girls and deciding that his little wife was really the handsomest and sprightliest woman that he had ever seen, that happy little Dine was as bewitching as she could well be, and that Tessa, the light of his eyes, was like no one else in all the world. Not that any stranger sitting in his arm-chair would have looked through his eyes, but he was an old man, disappointed in his life, and his three girls were all of earth and a part of heaven to him. They were all talking and he was satisfied to listen. "I believe that some girls are born without a mother"s heart," Mrs. Wadsworth said in reply to a story of Dine"s about a young mother in Dunellen who had slapped her baby, saying that she hated it and was nothing but a slave to it! "Now, here"s Tessa. _She_ has no motherliness. Only this morning Freddie Stone fell down near the gate and hurt his head; his screams were terrifying, but she went on working and let him scream. As I said it is all as girls are born."
"Yes," answered Tessa, in the deliberate way in which she had schooled herself to reply to her mother, "I know that your last a.s.sertion is true. There was a lady in school, a teacher of mathematics, she acknowledged that she did not love her own little girls as other mothers seemed to do. She stated it as she would have stated any fact in geometry; perhaps she thought that she was no more responsible for one than for the other. The mere fact of motherhood does not bring mother love within; any mother that does not give to her child a true idea of the mother-heart of G.o.d fails utterly in being a mother. She may be a nurse, a paid nurse, or a nurse upon compulsion; any hired nurse can wash a child"s face, can tie its sash and make pretty things for it to wear, and _any_ nurse, who was never mother to a child, can teach it what G.o.d means when He says, "as a mother comforteth." Miss Jewett could not be happier in her Bible cla.s.s girls if they were all her own children; she says so herself. Mary Sherwood said to her one day, "If my mother were like you, how different I should have been!""
"Such a case is an exception," returned Mrs. Wadsworth excitedly.
"Nineteen out of her twenty-three girls tell her their troubles when they would not tell their own mothers," said Dinah. "She has twenty-three secret drawers to keep their secrets in."
"She has time to listen to fol-de-rol. She advises them all to marry for some silly notion and let a good home slip, I"ve no doubt."
"I expect that twenty-one of her girls have refused John Gesner,"
laughed Mr. Wadsworth. "He will have to bribe Miss Jewett to let them alone."
"Only twenty, father," said Dine. "Tessa and Sue and I are waiting to do it."
"I will make this house too uncomfortable for the one of you that does refuse him."
"Mother! mother!" remonstrated Mr. Wadsworth gently.
"He"ll never have the honor," said Dine. "Mr. Lewis Gesner is the gentleman; I have always admired him. Haven"t you, Tessa?"
"Yes; I like to shake hands with him; he has a trustworthy face."
"So much for the mothers of Dunellen, Tessa; how about the fathers?
Would the girls like to have Miss Jewett for a father, too?"
"Oh, the fathers have the bread-winning to do. If the mothers do not understand, we can not expect the fathers to understand. There was a girl at school who had had a hard home experience; she told me that she never repeated the second word of the Lord"s prayer; that she said instead: Our Lord, who art in heaven?"
"Oh, deary me! How dreadful!" cried Dinah, moving nearer the arm-chair and dropping her head on her father"s shoulder. "Didn"t she _ever_ learn to say it?"
"Not while we were at school."
"Tessa, you can talk," said her mother.
"Yes," said Tessa, humbly, "I can talk."
"She was a very wicked girl," continued Mrs. Wadsworth. "I don"t see how she dared; I should think that she would have been afraid of dying in her sleep as a judgment sent upon her."
"Perhaps she did not repeat the prayer as a charm," answered Tessa, in her clearest tones.
Dinah lifted her head to laugh.
"You upheld her, no doubt," declared Mrs. Wadsworth.
"I sympathized with her as they who never had a pain can feel for the sick," said Tessa, smiling into her father"s eyes.
"How did you talk to her?" asked Dine.
"What is talk? I only told her to wait and she would know."
"It"s easy to talk," said Mrs. Wadsworth uncomfortably. "You can talk an hour about sympathy, but you didn"t run out to Freddie Stone."
"Why didn"t you?" inquired her father seriously.
Tessa laughed, while Dine answered.
"Mother was there talking as fast as she could talk, Bridget was there with a basin of water and a sponge, Mrs. Bird had run over, a carriage with two ladies, a coachman and a footman had stopped to look on, and oh, I was there too. He was somewhat b.l.o.o.d.y."
"You are excused, daughter. Save your energies for a time of greater need."
"Energies! Need!" tartly exclaimed Mrs. Wadsworth. "If she begins to be literary, she will care for nothing else."
"I see no evidence of a lessening interest yet," replied her father.
"Oh, I might know that you would encourage her. She might as well have the small-pox as far as her prospects go! A needle is a woman"s weapon."
"You forget her tongue, mother," suggested Dine. "Oh, Tessa, what is that about a needle; Mrs. Browning says it."
Tessa repeated:
""A woman takes a housewife from her breast, And plucks the delicatest needle out As "twere a rose, and p.r.i.c.ks you carefully "Neath nails, "neath eyelids, in your nostrils,-say, A beast would roar so tortured-but a man, A human creature, must not, shall not flinch, No, not for shame.""
"Some woman wrote that when she"d have done better to be sewing for her husband, I"ll warrant," commented Mrs. Wadsworth. Mr. Wadsworth looked grave.
"Oh she had a literary husband," replied Tessa, mischievously. "A word that rhymed with supper would do instead of bread and b.u.t.ter; and he cared more for one of her poems than he did for his b.u.t.tons."
"Literary men don"t grow on every bush; and they don"t take to literary women, either," said her mother.
"Mother, you forget the Howitts, William and Mary; what good, good times they have taking long walks and writing; like you and Gus, Tessa, and Mr. and Mrs. Browning-"
"You don"t find such people in Dunellen; _we_ live in Dunellen. Gus will choose a woman that doesn"t care for books, and so will Mr. Towne, mark my words! And so will Felix Harrison, even if he is killing himself with study."
"He is improving greatly," said Mr. Wadsworth, pulling one of Dine"s long curls straight. "He is going away Monday to finish his studies."
"I honor him," said Tessa, flushing slightly.
"Don"t," said Dine, "he sha"n"t have you, Tessa. Don"t honor him."
"That"s all you and your father think of-keeping Tessa. She needs the wear and tear of married life to give her character."
"It"s queer about that," rejoined Tessa in a perplexed tone, playing with her napkin ring. "If such discipline _be_ the best, why is any woman permitted to be without it? Why does not the fitting husband appear as soon as the girl begins to wish for him? In the East, where it is shameful for a girl not to be married at eleven, I have yet to learn that the wives are noted for strength or beauty of character."