Читать книгу Tessa Wadsworth's Discipline - Mrs. Nathaniel Conklin - Страница 4

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It was nearly six weeks after the day that she had watched him as far as the clump of willows that he came again. Sue Greyson had driven him into Dunellen that morning and had stopped at the gate on her return to tell her about her “grand splendid, delightful times” at Old Place.

“Cousin Grace has gone away; how we miss her music! Mr. Ralph did not care for it, but Mrs. Towne and I cared. Mrs. Towne says that I ought to have a music teacher; but I never did practice when I had one. I can’t apply my mind to any thing; Mr. Ralph says that I learn by observation. I wonder why wise men choose silly wives always,” she added consciously, playing with the reins.

“Do they?” asked Tessa, picking a lilac leaf from the shrubbery.

“Is not this what we usually call the Indian summer?” said Tessa, as she extended her hand.

“Cousin Grace says so. I wish I knew what ails Mr. Ralph. His mother says that he is having a worry; she always knows when he is having a worry by his eyes; they do look very melancholy, and last night I overheard him say to Mrs. Towne, ‘A man has to keep his eyes pretty wide open not to step on peoples’ toes.’ I didn’t think much of that, but he said afterward, ‘A man may do in an hour what he can’t undo in a lifetime.’ He never talks much, so I know that something is on his mind, or he would not have talked so long. She said that he must be patient and do right.”

“Why, Sue, you did not listen!”

“Of course not. They were in the library, and I was on the balcony outside the window. I heard his voice—he was walking up and down, and, I confess, I did want to know what it was all about! I thought that it might be about me, you know. But I can’t stay here all day; Mrs. Towne is to take me to spend the day with the Gesners. It is splendid there. Mr. John Gesner I don’t like, but Mr. Lewis Gesner treats me so respectfully and talks to me as if he liked to hear me talk. And Miss Gesner is loveliness personified! Mr. Towne said that he had a call to make this afternoon, and would walk home. He will be up in the four o’clock train.”

“A call to make!”

The words were in her ears all day; she dressed for her walk, then concluded to stay at home. How could he undo what he had so thoughtlessly, so mercilessly, done? Would he come and talk to her as he had talked to his mother? Would he say, “I am sorry that you have misinterpreted my words?” Misinterpreted! Did they not both speak English? Sincere, straightforward, frank English? It was the only language that she knew. In what tongue had he spoken to her?

Her fluttering reverie was brought to a sudden and giddy end; the sound of a firm tread on the dried leaves under the maple-trees outside the gate, a tall figure in plain, elegant black,—the startled color in her eyes told the rest; she sprang to her feet, dropped her long, white work, shook off all outward nervousness, brushed her hair, fastened a bow of blue ribbon down low on her braids, questioned her eyes and lips to ascertain if they were safe, and then passed down the stair-way with a light, sure tread, and stood on the piazza to welcome Ralph Towne; her own composed, womanly self, rather more self-repressed than usual, and with a slight stateliness that she had never assumed with him. But he only noted that she appeared well and radiant; he understood her no more—than he understood several other things. Ralph Towne had been called “slow” from his babyhood.

“Is not this what we usually call the Indian summer? We have not had frost yet, I think,” she said easily.

His dark face crimsoned, he answered briefly, and dropped her hand.

If he had ever prided himself upon his tact, he was aware that to-day it would be a most miserable failure. How could he say, “You have misunderstood me,” when perhaps it was he who had misunderstood her? He had come to her to-day by sheer force of will, not daring to stay away longer—and what had he come for? To assure her—perhaps he did not intend to assure her any thing; perhaps it was not necessary to assure her any thing. Not very long ago he had assured her that he could become to her her “ideal of a friend,” if she would “show” him how. Poor Tessa! This showing him how was weary work. “Yes,” he replied, wheeling a chair nearer the open window, “the country is beautiful.”

That look about her flexible lips was telling its own story; she was just the woman, he reasoned, to break her heart about such a fellow as he was.

“I have very little time for any thing outside my work,” he said, running on with his mental comments. All a man had to do to make himself a hero was to let a woman like this fall in love with him.

“What have you been doing?” he asked in his tone of sincere interest.

“All my own doings,” she said lightly. “Mr. Hammerton and I have been writing a criticism upon a novel and comparing notes, and I have sewed, as all ladies do, and walked.”

“You are an English girl about walking.”

“I know every step of the way between Dunellen and Mayfield. Do you walk?”

“No, I drive. My life has a lack. My book is falling through. I do not find much in life.”

“Our best things are nearest to us, close about our feet,” she answered.

He did not reply. Ralph Towne never replied unless he chose.

He opened his watch; he had been with her exactly ten minutes.

“I have an engagement at six,” he said.

The flexible lips stiffened. “Do not let me detain you.”

He was regarding her with a smile in his eyes that she could not interpret; her graceful head was thrown back against the mass of fluffy white upon the chair, the white softening the outlines of a face that surely needed not softening; the clear, unshrinking eyes meeting his with all her truth in them; the blue ribbon at her throat, the gray cashmere falling around her, touched him with a sense of fitness; the slight hands clasping each other in her lap, slight even with their strength, partly annoyed, partly baffled him. Mr. Hammerton had told her that she had wilful hands.

Regarding Tessa Wadsworth as regarding some other things, Ralph Towne thought because he felt; he could not think any further than he thought to-day, because he had not felt any further.

There was another friend in her life who with Tessa Wadsworth as with some other things felt because he thought, and he could not feel any further than he felt to-day because he had not thought any further.

For the first time since she had known Ralph Towne, she was wishing that he were like Gus Hammerton. It had never occurred to her before to wish that he would change.

Each smiled under the survey. He was thinking, “I wish I loved you.” She was thinking, “You are a dear, big boy; I wish you were more manly.”

“You did not send me the poem you promised.”

“You said you would come soon.”

“Did you expect me?”

“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 attitude 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 assented obediently.

She stumbled on the basement 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 God? 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 passed; 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.”