It was a long way home, and a lonely way, along a road of frozen mud,
bordered by empty fields and trees stripped bare in the autumn winds.
The short November day was coming to a close, and the fields seemed vast
in the gathering dusk. Only at the top of the hill lingered a streak of
wild, unearthly yellow light, in a sky of flying clouds.
Bess climbed the hill steadily, her eyes fixed upon that transient
glory; and she repeated to herself bits of poems she had learned in
school:
“Count that day lost whose low descending sun
Views from thy hand no worthy action done.”
A most characteristic sentiment! The frosty air had brought a fine color
into her cheeks, and her hair, in the sunset light, shone like copper
where the wind had blown it loose under her tam-o’-shanter. She was a
solitary little figure in a desolate world, but invincibly gallant and
earnest.
At an early age she had become enamored of Longfellow’s “A Psalm of
Life,” and her diary was prefaced by the quotation:
Life is real! Life is earnest!
She had always felt like that. She had been left motherless when she was
a very tiny girl, and the chief influence of her childhood had been that
of her father, a man whom nobody could accuse of undue frivolity. He
believed that life was real, and earnest, and pretty awful--especially
now, when he was a ruined man.
Bess, however, being only nineteen, could not see things quite as he
did. She was very grave about the situation, and desperately anxious to
help him. Just now she was on her way home from the village post office,
where she had mailed a letter to an old school friend, politely but
firmly refusing an invitation for a week-end. She realized that things
were very bad, but she could not help thinking that they might take a
better turn at any time.
Her father thought this attitude half-hearted. He was a ruined man, and
he wished to do the thing thoroughly--wished to be completely and
properly a ruined man. He refused to cherish any illusions, any false
hopes. When ruin came, he had sold their old house in Connecticut, and
they had moved into the lower half of a two-family building in a New
Jersey suburb. Bess suffered quite as much as he did from this
uprooting, only she pretended to like it, so that he should not reproach
himself so bitterly. Whenever the least thing went wrong, he would say
in his most hopeless voice that all this was entirely his fault.
As a matter of fact, it was. He was a professor who had written
philosophic essays, pointing out the pitiful follies of the human race,
and he should have known better than to trust persons who were
enthusiastic about oil wells. He did know better now, but it was too
late.
Bess had almost reached the top of the hill now, and a ray of the sun,
shining upon a broken bottle, sidetracked her thoughts. It looked like a
piece of ice.
“I bet there’s skating,” she thought.
She thought of last winter--only last winter--and of all the girls
skating on the little lake in the school grounds. In her heart there
echoed the sound of their laughing voices, the strange, ringing hum of
skates on ice. She could feel again her own quiet content in the
companionship of her friends, the satisfaction of an orderly and
purposeful life.
“But all that was just--a preparation,” she said to herself, valiantly.
“This is the real thing. I’m really useful now.”
She repeated her very favorite verse:
“Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.”
That was what she intended to do, certainly. The pursuing and laboring
part was not so hard, but the waiting--