"I shall not be sick," rising, and dropping the lid of her trunk. "Tell me about the night you overheard Gus talking to father on the piazza."
"I did tell you, didn"t I? He did not mind because John came tonight; didn"t you hear him tease me? About that night? Oh, I was asleep, and they were on the piazza; of course I don"t know how long they had been talking, nor what suggested it, but I heard him say,-really I"ve forgotten just what, it was so long ago,-but father said that he was so glad and happy about it, or it meant that. I suppose I may have missed some of it. Poor old Gus said that he knew I did not care for any one else. Isn"t it touching? Poor fellow! And I didn"t then. I never should if I hadn"t gone away and found John. Lucky for me, wasn"t it? Gus never looked at me as he did at you tonight, anyway; I guess he"s transferring."
Long after midnight Tessa fell asleep; her last thought shaping itself thus:
"I can not reason myself into loving or not loving, any more than I can reason the sun into shining or not shining."
On her way to the train the next morning, she mailed a letter addressed-
_"Ralph Towne, M. D., City."_
Her tender, pa.s.sionate, truth-loving, bewildered heart had poured itself out in these words:
"I am so afraid of leading you to think something that is not true; something that I may have to contradict in the future. When I am with you, I forget every thing but you; when I am alone, my heart rises up and warns me that I may be making another mistake, that I only _think_ I love you because I want to so much, and that I should only worry you with my caprices and doubts if I should marry you. You have been very patient with me, but you might lose your patience if I should try it too far. I _will_ not marry you until I am _sure_; I must know of a certainty that I love you with the love that hopes, endures, that can suffer long and still is kind. You do not know me, I am hard and proud; when I went down into the Valley of Humiliation because of believing that you loved me when you did not, I was not gentle and sweet and forgiving-I was hard and bitter; I hated you almost as much as I had loved you. Now I must think it all through and live through all those days, the days when I loved you and the days when I hated you, before I can understand myself. I could marry you and we could live a life of surface peace and satisfaction, and you might be satisfied in me and with me; but if _I_ felt the need of loving you more than I did love you, my life would be bondage. If the pride and hardness and unforgivingness may be taken away and I _may_ love you and believe in you as I did that day that you brought me the English violets, I shall be as happy-no, a thousand times happier than I was then. But you must not hope for that; it is not _natural_; it may be that of grace such changes are wrought, but grace is long in working in proud hearts. You are not bound to me by any word that you have spoken; find some one gentle and loving who will love you for what you are and for what you will be."
XXIII.-WHAT SHE MEANT.
In the weeks that followed, Tessa learned to the full the meaning of _homesickness_. No kindness could have exceeded the kindness that she hourly received from uncle and aunt and from the inmates of the cottage over the way; still every night, or rather early every morning, she fell asleep with tears upon her cheeks; she longed for her father, her mother, for Dine and Gus, for Miss Jewett, for Nan Gerard, and even poor, grief-stricken Sue; for Mrs. Towne"s dear face and dear hands she longed inexpressibly, and she longed with a longing to which she would give no sympathy for another presence, an un.o.btrusive presence that would not push its way, a presence with the aroma of humility, gentleness, and a shy love that persisted with a persistence that neither the darkness of night nor the light of day could dispel.
Lying alone in the darkness in the strange, low room, with a fading glow upon the hearth that lent an air of unreality to the old-fashioned furniture, she congratulated herself upon having been brave and true, of having withheld from her lips a draught for which she had so long and so despairingly thirsted; she had been so brave and true that she must needs be strong, wherefore then was she so weak? Sometimes for hours she would lie in perfect quiet thinking of Mr. Hammerton; but thinking of him as calmly as she thought about her father. There was no intensity in her love for him, no thrill, save that of grat.i.tude for his years of brotherly watchfulness; she would have been proud of him had he married Dine; his friendship was a distinction that she had worn for years as her rarest ornament; he was her intellect, as her father was her conscience, but to give up all the others for him, to love him above father, mother, sister-to give up forever the hope of loving Ralph Towne some day-she shuddered and covered her face with her hands there alone in the dark. Cheery enough she was through the days, sewing for Aunt Theresa and falling into her happiest talk of books and people, thoughts and things, reading aloud to Uncle Knox, and every evening reading aloud the pages of ma.n.u.script that she had written that day, and every afternoon, laying aside work or writing, to run across to the cottage for a couple of hours with Miss Sarepta.
Miss Sarepta at her window in her wheelchair watched all day the black, brown, or blue figure at her writing or sewing, and when the hour came, saw the pencils dropped into the box, the leaves of ma.n.u.script gathered, the figure rise and toss out its arms with a weary motion; then, in a few moments the figure with a bright shawl over its head would run down the path, stand a moment at the gate to look up and down and all around, and then, with the air of a child out of school, run across the street and sometimes around the garden before she brought her bright face into the watcher"s cosy, little world.
Miss Sarepta"s mother described Tessa as "bright, wide awake, and ready for the next thing."
Miss Sarepta told Tessa that while knowing that good things were laid up for her, she had no thought that such a good thing as Tessa Wadsworth was laid up for this winter"s enjoyment and employment.
It may be that the strain of the day"s living added to the feverishness of the night"s yearnings; for when darkness fell and the wind sounded in the sitting-room chimney, her heart sank, her hands grew cold, her throat ached with repressed tears, and when she could no longer bear it, the daily paper having been read aloud and a letter or two written, she would take her candle and bid the old people as cheery a good night as her lips could utter and hasten up-stairs to her fire on the hearth to reperuse her letters and to dream waking dreams of what might be, and when the fire burned low to lie awake in the darkness, till, spent in flesh and in spirit, she would fall asleep.
At the beginning of the third week, she took herself to hand; with a figurative and merciless gripe upon each shoulder she thus addressed herself: "Now, Tessa Wadsworth, you and I have had enough of this; we have had enough of freaks and whims for one lifetime; you are to behave and go to sleep."
Behaving and going to sleep took until midnight with the first attempt, and she dreamed of Dr. Lake and awoke crying. Was Sue crying, too? Sue had loved her husband, his influence would color all her life, she might yet become her ideal of a woman; _womanly_. Sue"s hand had been in his life; had not his hand with a firmer grasp tightened around her life?
Tessa did not forget to be metaphysical even at midnight with the tears of a dream on her eyelashes.
Was every one she loved asleep, or had some one dreamed of her and awoke to think of her?
"G.o.d bless every one I love," she murmured, "and every one who loves me."
The next night by sheer force of will she was asleep before the clock struck eleven, and did not dream of home or once awake until Hilda, the Swedish servant, pa.s.sed her door at dawn.
Her letters through this time were radiant, of course. Mrs. Towne only, with her perfect understanding of Tessa, detected the homesickness, or heartsickness. Tessa was wading in deep waters; she did not need her, else she would have come to her. She had learned that it was her characteristic to fight out her battles alone.
Had Ralph any thing to do with this? He had suddenly grown graver, not more silent; in the morning his eyes would have a sleepless look, the sunshine seemed utterly gone from them; once he said, apropos of nothing, after a long fit of abstraction: "It is right for a man to pay for being a fool and a knave, but it comes terribly hard."
"I suppose it must," she had replied, "until he learns how G.o.d forgives."
In her next letter to Tessa, Mrs. Towne had written, "Do you know how G.o.d forgives?" and Tessa had replied, "You and I seem to be thinking the same thought nowadays, and nowanights, for last night it came to me that loving _enough_ to forgive is the love that makes Him so happy."
This letter was the only one of all written that winter that Mrs. Towne showed to her son. It was not returned to her. Months afterward he showed it to Tessa, saying that that thought was more to him than all the sermons to which he had ever listened. "Because you didn"t know how to listen," she answered saucily, adding in a reverent tone, "I did not understand it until I _lived_ it."
The letter had been written with burning cheeks; if he might read it, she would be glad; it would reveal something that she did not dare tell him herself; but she had no hope that he would see it.
"Tessa is not so bright as she was," observed Miss Sarepta"s mother, "she"s more settled down; I guess that she has found out what she means; it takes a deal of time for young women to do that."
XXIV.-SHUT IN.
It was a trial to Sarepta Towne that the sun did not rise and set in the west, for in that case her bay window would have been perfect.
Dinah had named this window "summer time:" on each side ivy was climbing in profusion; on the right side stood a fuchsia six feet in height; opposite this an oleander was bursting into bloom; a rose geranium and a pot of sweet clover were placed on brackets and were Tessa"s special favorites; one hanging basket from which trailed Wandering Jew was filled with oxalis in bloom, another was but a ma.s.s of graceful and shining greens.
In the centre of the window on a low table stood a Ward"s case; into this Dinah had never grown tired of looking; Professor Towne had constructed it on his last visit at home, and one of the pleasures of it to Miss Sarepta had consisted in the talks they had while planning it together. Among its ferns, mosses, berries, and trailing arbutus they had formed a grotto of sh.e.l.ls and bits of rocks; the floor was bits of looking-gla.s.s; tufts of eye-bright were mingled with the mosses and were now in bloom, and Miss Sarepta was sure that the trailing arbutus would flower before Tessa could bring it home to her from the woods.
"This room is full of Philip and Cousin Ralph," Sarepta had said; "his picture is but one of the things in it and in this house to remind me of Cousin Ralph."
"Sarepta breathes Philip," her mother replied.
"We are twin spirits like Blaise and Jacqueline Pascal. Do you know about them, Tessa?"
"I know that he was a monk and she a nun."
"That is like me, and not like Philip," said Miss Sarepta; "he shall not be a monk because I am a nun!"
"His wife will be jealous enough of you, though," said Mrs. Towne; "not a mail comes that he does not send you something. How would she like that?"
"Philip could not love any one that would come between us. Tessa, do you admire my brother as much as I wish you to do?"
"I admire him exceedingly," said Tessa, looking up from her twenty-fifth block of the basket quilt; "he is my ideal. I knew that I had found my ideal as soon as I saw him; I did not wait to hear him speak."
And that he was her ideal she became more and more a.s.sured, for in February he spent a week at home and she had opportunity to study him at all hours and in any hour of the day. He had lost his fancied resemblance to Dr. Towne, or _she_ had lost it in thinking of him as only himself. The long talks, during which she sat, at Miss Sarepta"s side, on a foot cushion, work in hand, the basket blocks, or some more fanciful work for Miss Sarepta, she remembered afterward as one of the times in her life in which she _grew_. She told Miss Sarepta that she and her brother were like the men and women that St. Paul in his Epistles sent his love to. "He ought to marry a saint like Madame Guyon; I think that it would be easier to revere him as a saint than to marry him. I can"t imagine any woman forgiving him, or loving him because he _needs_ her love; he stands so far above me, I could never think of him as at my side and sometimes saying, "Help me, Tessa," or, "What do _you_ think?""
"Now we know your ideal of marriage," laughed Mrs. Towne. "Philip is a good boy, but he sometimes needs looking after."
"Stockings and shirt b.u.t.tons!"
"And other things, too. He is forgetful, and he"s rather careless. How much he is taken up with that reading cla.s.s!"
"In a monkish way," smiled Miss Sarepta. "He was full of enthusiasm about Ralph, too, mother."