"You do not need any," Mr. Hammerton had once said.
One morning in December she chanced upon a bundle of old letters in one of Dinah"s drawers, they were written during the winter that she had spent in the city two years ago.
She drew one from its envelope; it was dated December 22, just two years ago to-day; she ran through it eagerly. How often she had remembered that day as an era; the beginning of the best things in her uneventful life! The second perusal was more slow. "I have seen somebody new; he is a friend of Aunt Dinah"s, or his mother is, or was. Don"t you remember that handsome house near Mayfield, just above Laura"s? When they were building it, Laura and I used to speculate as to whom it belonged, and wonder if it would make any difference to us. She said she would marry the son (for of course there would be a handsome and learned son) and that I should come to live with her forever; and Felix said that he would buy it for me, some day; you and I used to play that we owned it but that we preferred to live nearer Dunellen and had left it in charge of our housekeeper! How often when the former owner was in Europe, I have stood outside the gates and peered in and planned how happy we would all be there. Father should rest and read, and enjoy all the beautiful walks and the woods and the streams in the meadow with the rustic bridge, and mother should have a coach and four, and you and Gus and I would have it all.
"All this preamble is to introduce the fact that the somebody new is the owner of Old Place. Isn"t that an odd name? I don"t like it; I should call it Maplewood; in the autumn it is nothing but one glory of maple.
His mother named it and they have become accustomed to its queerness.
His mother is wintering with a relative, an invalid, I believe; I think that she has taken the invalid to Florida and the son (the father died long ago) has come to spend the winter in the city. They say he is wise and learned (I do not see any evidence of it, however), but he certainly is a veritable Tawwo Chikwo, the beauty of the world. Get out my old Lavengro and read about him.
"He is almost as dark as a gypsy, too, his eyes are the brownest and sunniest. I never saw such eyes (a sunbeam was lost one day and crept into his eyes for a home), his hair, beard, and mustache are as brown as his eyes; as brown, but not at all bright.
"He looks like a big boy, but Aunt Dinah says that he is in the neighborhood of thirty; his life has left no trace in his face, or perhaps all that brown hair covers the traces of discipline. His manner is gentleness and dignity united. But he can"t talk. Or perhaps he won"t.
"His replies (he ventures nothing else) are simple, good, kind, and above all, _sincere_. I have a feeling that I shall believe every word he says. That is something new for me, too. He doesn"t think much of me.
He likes to hear me talk though; I have made several bright remarks for the pleasure of the sunbeam in his eyes.
"If I were his mother I should be sorry to do or say any thing to frighten it away.
"I know that he has never been in love; he could not be such a dear, grave, humorous, gentle, dignified, stupid big boy if some girl had shaken him up.
"If he were the talker that Gus Hammerton is, I should go into raptures over him. He is a doctor, too, but he has not begun practice; he has been travelling with his mother. Is it not lovely to be rich enough to do just what you like?
"Tell Gus that I will answer his letter sometime; you may let him read this if you like."
This letter she tore into atoms; she glanced over the others to find Ralph Towne"s name; not once did she find it.
"I will do something to commemorate this anniversary," she thought. "I will drop his photograph into the fire, and tear the fly-leaf out of the Mrs. Browning he gave me."
Her name and his initials were all that was written in the book; very carefully she cut out the entire page.
"Why, child! have you seen a ghost?" her mother exclaimed, meeting her in the hall.
"Yes, but it was only a ghost; there was nothing real about it."
That afternoon, having some sewing to do for her father, she betook herself to the chilliness of the parlor grate; her mother was in a fault-find frame of mind and Tessa"s nerves were ready to be set on edge at the least provocation.
That parlor! She would have wept over its shabbiness had she ever been able to find tears for such purposes. Wheeling an arm-chair near enough to the grate to be made comfortable by all the heat there was, she placed her feet on the fender and folded her hands over the work in her lap. It was a raw day, the sky over Mr. Bird"s house was unsympathetic, the bare branches in the apple orchard stretched out in all directions stiff and dry as if they were never to become green again; the outlook was not cheering, the inlook was little more so; but how could she wish for any thing more than her father was able to give his three dear girls!
This room had seemed pretty to her in the summer when the windows were open and she could have flowers everywhere; Ralph Towne always spoke of her flowers, and he had more than once leaned back in that worn green arm-chair opposite hers, as if that stiff, low room were the place of all places that he loved to be in. In dreary contrast with his own home, how poor and tasteless this home must be! How the carpet must stare up at him with its bunches of flowers and leaves upon its faded gray ground; how plain the white shades must appear after curtains of real lace; how worn and yellowish the green rep of the black-walnut furniture; how few the books in the small bookcase; and the photographs and engravings upon the walls, how they must shock him! How meagre and coa.r.s.e her dress must be to him after his mother"s rich attire!
She despised herself for pitying herself!
Sue Greyson said that Old Place was fairy-land, but in her catalogue of its attractions she had omitted the s.p.a.cious library; his "den," Mr.
Towne called it. In Tessa"s imagination he was ever in that room buried among its treasures.
Was her photograph in that room? What had he done with it? Where was he keeping it? How he had coaxed for it! She had had it taken unwillingly; it was altogether too much like giving herself away; but when she could refuse no longer she had given it to him. A vignette with all herself in it; too much of herself for him to understand; what would he do with it now? Burn it, perhaps, as she had burned his; but he would not be burning a ghost, it was her own self, that he had thrown away.
"I should have despised myself forever if I had not believed in him and been true," she reasoned. "I would rather trust in a lie than not believe the truth. And how could I know that he was not true!"
She took up her work and began to sew, her reverie running on and running away with her; an ottoman stood near her, she had laid needlework and scissors upon it: how many a.s.sociations there were cl.u.s.tering around it! It was an ugly looking thing, too; her mother had worked the cover one winter years ago when she was kept in by a cough; the wreath of roses was so unlike roses, and the parrot that was poised in the centre of the wreath, on a brown twig, was so ungainly! One night-how long ago it was-before she had ever seen Ralph Towne, Felix Harrison had been seated upon it while he told her with such a warm, shy glance that he never slept without praying for her. And Ralph Towne had scattered his photographs over it, and asked her to choose from among them, saying, "I should not have had them taken but for you."
The ugly old parrot was dear after all.
"I wonder," she soliloquized, taking slow st.i.tches, "if having lost faith in a person, it can ever be brought back again? If he should come and say that he has been wrong-"
The gate clicked, in an instant she was on her feet, _had_ he come to confess himself in the wrong? Oh, how she would forgive and forget! And trust him?
The tall thin figure had a stoop in its shoulders, Ralph Towne was erect; the overcoat was carelessly worn, revealing a threadbare vest and loose black necktie; it was only Dr. Lake, Dr. Greyson"s new partner.
She had been drawn to him the first moment of their meeting. As soon as he had left after his first call, she had said to Dinah: "I never felt so towards any one before; I shall be so sorry for him to go away where I can not follow him; I want to put my arms around him and coax him to be good."
"How do you know that he isn"t good?"
"I do know it. I do not know how I know. He hasn"t any "women folks"
either. He is as sensitive to every change in one"s voice as the thermometer is to changes in the atmosphere. I never saw any one like him before. When I make a collection of curiosities I find in Human Nature, I shall certainly take him for one of the rarest and most interesting. It would not take two minutes to convert him from the inquisitor to the martyr at the stake. I feel as if he were a little child crying with a thorn in his finger, and he had no mother to take it out."
"He was only here fifteen minutes and he was as full of fun as he could be; he ran down the piazza, and he whistled while he was unhitching his horse, and began to sing as he drove off. Oh, you are so funny! you hear a man talk slang-he is equal to Sue Greyson for that-ask mother about her cough, tell a funny story, and then think his heart is breaking with a thorn in his finger."
Tessa would not laugh. "I want him to stay; I don"t want ever to lose him."
"Isn"t he ugly? Such a tall, square forehead. Did you ever see such a forehead?"
"My first thought of him was, "oh, how homely you are.""
But that first thought never recurred; she was too much attracted by his rapid, easy utterance and sensitive voice to remember his plain face and careless attire.
She resumed her sewing with a new train of thought and had forgotten Dr.
Lake"s entrance, when Bridget came to the door with a request from Mrs Wadsworth; opening the door of the sitting-room, she found her mother leaning back in her sewing chair with a plaintive and childish expression, and Dr. Lake playing with her spools of silk, sitting in a careless att.i.tude of perfect grace at her side. Tessa was sorry to have the picture spoiled by his rising to greet her.
"Ralph Towne, M.D.," he was replying, "he was born with a gold spoon in his pretty mouth! It would have been better for him if it had been silver-plated like mine. Quit? He"s a mummy, a cloister, a tomb! I do not quarrel with any man"s calling," he continued, winding the black silk around his fingers, "circ.u.mstances have made me a physician.
Calling! It means something only when circ.u.mstances have nothing to do with it."
"Read the lives of the world"s best workers," said Tessa.
"A gla.s.s of water, an empty gla.s.s, and a spoon, if you please, Miss Tessa. Do you remember-I have forgotten his name-but I a.s.sure you that I am not concocting the story-he rose to eminence in the medical profession, several rounds higher in the ladder of fame than I expect to climb-and his mind was drawn towards medicine when he was a youngster by the display of gold lace that his father"s physician flung into the eyes of the world. Gold lace made that boy a famous doctor." Tessa brought the gla.s.ses and the water; in a leisurely manner he counted a certain number of spoonfuls of water into the empty gla.s.s. "I"m a commonplace fellow! I"m not one of the world"s workers! Neither is Ralph Towne! To have an easy life and not do _much_ harm is the most I hope for in this world; as for the next, who knows anything about that? I say, "Your tongue, please," and drop medicine and make powders all day long for my bread and b.u.t.ter. I have no faith in medicine."
"Then you are an impostor! You shall never see even the tip of my tongue."
He laughed as if it were such fun to laugh.
"What is medicine to you?" he asked after counting forty drops from a vial into the water. "A woman in a crowd once touched the border of a certain garment and through faith was healed; so I take the thing that He has ordained for healing, all created things are His garment; through His garment I come nearer to Him and am healed."
Mrs. Wadsworth looked annoyed. "So I may take cream instead of cod liver oil, doctor."
"If you prefer it," he answered carelessly. "Miss Tessa, you are a Mystic."
Tessa liked to watch the motion of his fingers; his hands were small, shapely, and every movement of them struck her as an apt quotation. She was learning as much of himself from his hands as from his face.
"Now I must go and scold Felix Harrison," he said rising. "A teaspoonful in a winegla.s.s of water three times a day, Mrs. Wadsworth! He had an attack last night and cheated me out of my dreams. Do you know him, Mystic? If he do not leave off brain work he will make a fool of himself. A gold spoon would not have hurt him."