"Had I any reason to doubt your word?"
"You must not take literally all I say," he answered with irritation.
"I have learned that. I have studied the world"s arithmetic, but I do not use it to solve any word of yours, any more than I have supposed that you would use it to find the meaning of any problem you might discover in my att.i.tude towards you."
"It is best not to dig and delve for a meaning, Miss Tessa; society sanctions many phrases that you would not speak in sincerity."
"Society!" she repeated in a tone that brought the color to his forehead. "Is society my law-giver?"
It was very pleasant to be loved by a woman like this woman; he could not understand her, but she touched him like the perfume of the white rose, or the note of the thrush. His next words were sincere and abrupt.
"You asked me some time since to burn the package of poems you have written for me. If I had done as much for you, would you destroy them?"
A flush, a dropping of the eyes, and a low laugh answered him.
He arose quickly, with a motion of tossing off an ugly sensation. "I am very much engaged; I do not know when I can come again. We are going west for the winter."
She could not lift her eyes, or speak, or catch her breath. She arose, slowly, as if the movement were almost too great an effort, and stood leaning against the tall chair, her fingers fumbling with the fringe of the tidy; the room had become so darkened that the white fringe was but a dark outline of something that she could feel.
"Sue Greyson is to accompany my mother; I shall be much away, and I do not like to leave her with strangers."
"Sue is pleasant and lively." She had spoken, and now she could, not quite clearly yet, but a glance revealed the blood surging to his forehead, the veins swollen in his temples, even through the heavy mustache she discerned the twitching of his lips. The pain in her heart had opened her eyes wide. Had he come to make the parting final? What had she done that he should thus thrust her away outside of all the interests in his life? Did he know how she cared, and was he so sorry?
Was he trying to be "patient," as his mother had advised-patient with her for taking him at his word?
Dunellen had called her proud; this instant she was as humble as a child.
Slowly and sorrowfully she said, "Come again-some time."
"Yes," he said, as slowly and as sorrowfully, "I will."
He was very sorry for this woman who had been so foolish as to think that his words had meant so much.
She had closed the street door and was on the first step of the stairs when her mother called to her from the sitting-room.
"What did Sir Dignified Undemonstrative have to say for himself?"
"He does not talk about himself."
"It is your turn to get tea! It is Bridget"s afternoon out."
Mrs. Wadsworth was a little lady something less than five feet in height, as slight as a girl of twelve, and prettier than either of her daughters; with brown hair, brown eyes, and the sprightliest manner possible.
"Young enough to be Tessa"s sister," Dunellen declared.
But she was neither sister nor mother as her elder daughter defined the words.
"If you get him, Tessa, you"ll get a catch," remarked Mrs. Wadsworth watching the effect of her words.
The first sound of her mother"s voice had brought her to herself, her self-contained, cautious and, oftentimes, sarcastic self.
"Have you any order about tea?"
Her studied respect toward her mother, was pitiful sometimes. It was hard that she could not attain somewhat of her ideal of daughterhood.
"No, but I want you to do an errand for me after tea. I forgot to ask Dine to do it on her way from school."
"Very well," she a.s.sented obediently.
She stumbled on the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs, and found the kitchen so dark that she groped her way to a chair and sank into it, dropping her head on the table. She could hear nothing, see nothing, feel nothing-the whole earth was empty!
Where was G.o.d? Had He gone, too?
Through the open windows floated the sound of girls" voices, as Norah and Dinah chatted and laughed in the garden. But the sound was far off; the engine whistled and screamed, but the sound was not in her world; carriages rolled past, the front gate swung to, her father"s step was on the piazza over her head, and he was calling, her dear old father, "Where are you all, my three girls?"
His fulfilled hope was bitterer than all her disappointments ever could be.
"I don"t wonder," she said with a sob in her throat, as she arose and pushed her hair back, "I don"t wonder that he can not love me; but oh, I wish that he had not told me a lie!"
October pa.s.sed; the days hurried into November; there was no more leaf-hunting for her, no more long walks down the beautiful country road, no more tripping up and down stairs with a song or a hymn on her lips, no more of life, she would have said, for every thing seemed like death. She did not die with shame, as at first she was sure that she would do; she could not run away to the far end of the earth where she would never again see his face; where every face would be a new face, where no voice would speak his name; she could not dig a hole in the earth and creep into it; she could not lie down at night and shut her tired eyes, with both hands under her cheek, as she always fell asleep, and never awake again, as she would love best of all to do; she could cry out, but she could not hear the answer, "Oh, please tell me when I _meant_ to be so good, why it had to be so hard."
No; she had to live in a world where people would laugh at her if they only knew; how she would shiver and freeze if her mother should once begin to harp upon the sudden break. She could not bemoan herself all the time; she was compelled to live because she had been born, and she was compelled to thrive and grow cheery; there were even moments when she forgot to be ashamed, for her mother"s winter cough set in with the cold winds, and beside being nurse, she was in reality the head of the small household. Dinah was preparing to be graduated in the summer and was no help at all; instead, an hour or two every evening Tessa was asked to study with her, for she did not love study and was not quick like her sister.
And then she had her own special work to do, for she was a scribbler in prose and rhyme; the half dozen weeklies that came to the house contained more than once or twice during the year sprightly or pathetic articles under the initials T. L. W.
But few knew of this her "literary streak," as her mother styled it, for she dreaded any publicity.
Miss Jewett, her father, and Mr. Hammerton were her sole encouragers and advisers; Mr. Towne was not aware that she dipped her pen in ink for any one"s pleasure but his own. Beside this work there were friends to entertain, half the girldom in Dunellen were her friends or had been at some time.
Ralph Towne often wondered how she was "taking" it; he could have found no sign of it in her face or in her life. Her father feared that she was being overworked. Mr. Hammerton"s short-sighted eyes noticed a shadow flit across her eyes, sometimes, when she was talking to him, and said to himself, "I see her often; I see a change that is not a change; there is something happening that no one knows."
III.-THE LAST NIGHT OF THE OLD YEAR.
All her life she had longed for personal beauty; she loved every beautiful thing and she wanted to love her own face. It was Ralph Towne"s perfect face that had drawn her to him, his voice, and his eyes, like the woods in October.
She had studied her face times enough by lamplight and sunlight to know it thoroughly, but she could not discover the sweetness that Miss Jewett saw, or the intelligence that delighted her father; she could find without much searching the freckles on her nose, the shortness of her upper lip, the two slight marks that infantile chicken-pox had dented into her forehead, the upward tendency of her nose, and the dimple that was only half a dimple in her chin.
She was as pretty and as homely as any of the fair, blue-eyed girls in Dunellen or elsewhere: with lips that shaped themselves with every pa.s.sing feeling; with eyes that could grow so bright and dark that one could forget how bright they were; with the palest of chestnut hair, worn high or low, as the little world of Dunellen demanded; with hands slight and characteristic; a figure neither tall nor slender, but perfectly proportioned, rounded and graceful; arrayed as neatly and becomingly as she could be on her limited allowance, usually in plain colors, often in black of a soft texture with a ribbon of some pale tint at her throat and among her braids. A stranger might have taken her for any one of the twenty-three girls in Miss Jewett"s Bible cla.s.s; that is any one of the blue-eyed ones who wore gray vails and gray walking suits.
But you and I know better.
With her self-depreciation she was one thing that she was not likely to guess-the prettiest talker in the world.
Felix Harrison had told Miss Jewett so years ago.
"I haven"t any accomplishments," she often sighed.