With the apple blossoms came Tessa's birthday. She had lived twenty-five
years up-stairs and down-stairs in that white house with the lilac
shrubbery and low iron fence. Twenty-five years with her father and
mother, nineteen with her little sister, and almost as many with her old
friend, Mr. Hammerton; twenty years with Laura and Felix and Miss
Jewett, and not quite three years with the latest friend, the latest and
the one that she had most believed in, Ralph Towne.
She was counting these years and these friends as she brushed out her
long, light hair and looked into the reflection of the fair, bright,
thoughtful face that had come to another birthday.
Nothing would ever happen to her again, she was sure; nothing ever did
happen after one were as old as twenty-five. In novels, all the
wonderful events occurred in earlier life, and then--a blank or bliss or
misery, any thing that the reader might guess.
Would her life henceforth be a blank because she was so old and was
growing older?
In one of her stories, Miss Mulock had stated that the experience of
love had been given to her heroine "later than to most" and _she_ was
twenty-four!
"Not that that experience is all one's life," she mused; "but it is just
as much to me as it is to any man or woman that ever lived; as much as
to Cornelia, the matron with her jewels, or Vittoria Colonna, or Mrs.
Browning, or Hypatia,--if she ever loved any body,--or Miss Jewett,--if she
ever did,--or Sue Greyson, or Queen Victoria, or Ralph Towne's mother! I
wonder if his father were like him, so handsome and gentle. I have a
right to the pain and the blessedness of loving; perhaps I _have_ been
in love--perhaps I am now! He shut the door that he had opened and he has
gone out; I would not recall him if I could do it with one breath--
"'No harm from him can come to me
On ocean or on shore.'
"Well," smiling into the sympathetic eyes, "if nothing new ever happen
to me, I'll find out all the blessedness of the old."
For she must always find something to be glad of before she could be
sorrowful about any thing.
She ran down-stairs in her airiest mood to be congratulated by her
father in a humorous speech that ended with an unfinished sentence and a
quick turning of the head, to be squeezed and hugged and kissed by
Dinah, and dubbed Miss Twenty-Five, and then to have her mood changed,
all in the past made dreary, and all in the future desolate, by one of
her mother's harangues.
Mr. Wadsworth had kissed his three girls and hurried off to his
business, as he had done in all the years that Tessa could remember;
Dinah had pushed her plate away and was leaning forward with her elbows
on the table-cloth, her face alight with the mischief of teasing Tessa
about being "stricken in years." Tessa's repartees were sending Dinah
off into her little shouts of laughter when their mother's voice broke
in:
"I had been married eight years when I was your age, Tessa."
"It will be nine years on my next birthday," said Tessa.
"Yes, just nine; for I was married on my seventeenth birthday; your
father met me one day coming from school and said that he would call
that evening; I curled my hair over and put on my garnet merino and
waited for him an hour. I expected John Gesner, too. But your father
came first and we set the wedding-day that night. I was seventeen and he
was thirty-seven!"
"I congratulate you," said Tessa. "I congratulate the woman who married
my father."
"Girls are so different," sighed Mrs. Wadsworth. "Now _I_ had two offers
that year! Aunt Theresa wanted me to take John Gesner because he was two
years younger than your father; but John was only a clerk in the Iron
Works then, and so was Lewis. Lewis is just my age. How could I tell
that he would make a fortune buying nails?"
"You would have hit the nail on the head if you had known it," laughed
Dinah.
"And here's Dine, now, _she_ is like me. You are a Wadsworth through and
through! Young men like some life about a girl; how many beaux Sue
Greyson has! All you think of is education! There was Cliff Manning, you
turned the cold shoulder to him because he couldn't talk grammar. What's
grammar? Grammar won't make the pot boil."
"Enough of them would," suggested Dinah.
"Mr. Towne came and came till he was tired, I suppose. I hope you didn't
refuse him."
"No, he refused me."
Her tone was so gravely in earnest that her mother was staggered. Dinah
shouted.
Mrs. Wadsworth went on in a voice that was gathering indignation: "You
may laugh now; you will not always laugh. 'He that will not when he may,
when he will he shall have nay.' Mrs. Sherwood told me yesterday that
she hoped to have Nan Gerard back here for good, and Mary looked as if
it were all settled. Mr. Towne did not do much _last_ winter, Mary said,
beside run around with Naughty Nan. I'm hearing all the time of somebody
being married or engaged, and you are doing nothing but shilly-shally
over some book or trotting around after poor folks with Miss Jewett."
"She will find a prince in a hovel some day," said Dinah. "He will be
struck with her attitude as she is choking some bed-ridden woman with
beef-tea and fall down on his knees and propose on the spot. 'Feed me,
seraph,' he will cry."
"He wouldn't talk grammar, or he couldn't spell or read Greek, and she
will turn away," laughed Mrs. Wadsworth. "Tessa, you are none of my
bringing up."
"That is true," replied Tessa, the sorrowfulness of the tone softening
its curtness.
"You always _did_ care for something in a book more than for what I
said! You never do any thing to please people; and yet, somehow,
somebody always _is_ running after you. I wish that you _could_ go out
into the world and get a little character; you are no more capable of
self-denial and heroism than an infant baby; for getting along in the
world and making a good match, I would rather have Sue Greyson's skin--"
"Her father understands anatomy, perhaps you can get it, mother."
"_She_ knows how to look out for number one. Her children will be
settled in life before Tessa is engaged. You needn't laugh, Dine, it's
her birthday, and I'm only doing a mother's duty to her."
Tessa's eyes laughed although her lips were still. Her sense of humor
helped her to bear many things in her life.
"You have never had a trial in your life, Tessa, and here you are old
enough to be a wife and mother!"
"If she lived in China she could be a grandmother," said Dinah.
"I have always kept trouble from you; that is why, at your mature age,
you have so little character. In an emergency you would have no more
responsibility than Nellie Bird. If you had studied arithmetic instead
of always writing poetry and compositions, you might have been teaching
now and have been independent."
"Father isn't tired of taking care of her," said Dinah, spiritedly.
"It's mean for you to say that."
"Why don't you write a novel and make some money?"
"I don't know how."
"Can't you learn?"
"I study all the time."
"Why don't you write flowery language?"
"I don't know how."
"It is Gus that has spoiled you; he has nipped your genius in the bud.
What does he know, a clerk in a bank? I know that he tells you to leave
out the long words; and it is the long words that take. I shouldn't have
had my dreadful cough winter after winter if I hadn't worked hard to
spare your time that winter you wrote those three little books for the
Sunday School Union; I lay all my sickness and pain to that winter."
Mrs Wadsworth had brought this charge against Tessa several times
before, but she had never shivered over it as she did this birthday
morning.
"And what did you get for them? Only a hundred dollars for the three.
Your father made a great fuss over them, and he really cried (his tears
come very easy) over that piece you called 'Making Mistakes.' I couldn't
see any thing to cry over; I thought you made out that making mistakes
was a very fine thing."
"Four people from away off have written to thank her, any way," exulted
Dinah.
"People like your father I suppose."
Dinah sprang up and began to rattle the cups and saucers; she could not
bear the look in Tessa's eyes another second.
"Dinah, I can't talk if you make so much noise. You are very rude."
"Oh, I forgot to tell you," cried Dinah, standing still with two cups in
her hands. "It's great fun! Nan Gerard refused Mr. John Gesner while she
was here."
"I don't believe it," exclaimed Mrs Wadsworth. "Those brothers are worth
nearly a million."
"Naughty Nan didn't care."
"She'll jump out of the frying-pan into the fire, then; for the Townes,
mother and son, are not worth a quarter of it."
"What does she care? Mr. Lewis Gesner is a gentleman, and he knows
something."
"He said once that I was only a little doll," said Mrs. Wadsworth. "I
never liked him afterward."
"I like him," said Dinah; "he doesn't flirt with the girls; he always
talks to the old ladies."
"What are you going to do to-day, Tessa?" inquired Mrs. Wadsworth,
ignoring Dinah's remark.
"Oh, I don't know," she answered, "and don't care" was the unspoken
addition.
There was one thing she was sure to do. On her way to the ten o'clock
mail she would take a moment with Miss Jewett for a word, a look; for
something to set her heart to beating to a cheerier tune. Ten minutes
before mail time she found Miss Jewett as busy as a bee.
"Oh, Tessa," glancing up from her desk, "I knew you would come. I had a
good crying spell on my twenty-fifth birthday and I've looked through
clear eyes ever since. I wish for you that your second quarter may be as
full of hard work as mine."
Tessa felt as if the sun were shining warm again. At the office she
received her birthday present; the one thing that she most wished for;
if ever birthday face were in a glow and birthday heart set to dancing,
hers were when her fingers held the check for one hundred and
sixty-eight dollars and fifty cents, and when her eyes ran through the
brief, friendly letter, with its two lines of praise.
"I am taken with your book. It gives me a humbling-down feeling. I
hardly know why."
"Oh, it's too good! it's too good," she cried, with her head close to
Miss Jewett's at the desk over the large day-book. "I was feeling as if
nobody cared, and now he wants another book. As good as this, he says."
Tessa lived in fairy-land for the next two hours. No, she lived in
Dunellen on a happy birthday.
"Well! well! well!" exclaimed her father, taking off his spectacles to
wipe his eyes, "this is what I call fine. So this is what you grew pale
over last winter," he added, looking down into a face as rosy and wide
awake as a child's waking out of sleep.
"What shall you do with so much money?"
"Spend it, of course. I have spent it already a hundred times."
"You must return receipt and reply to the letter."
"I had forgotten that."
"You will find every thing on my desk. Write your name on the back of
the check and I will give you the money."
"I don't want to do that. I want to take it into the bank and surprise
Gus with it. His face will be worth another check."
She wrote her name upon the check, her father standing beside her.
Theresa L. Wadsworth. He was very proud of this name among his three
girls.
"And you expect to do this thing again?"
"I do. Many times. All I want is a nook and a lead pencil."
"Daughter, I would like something else better."
"I wouldn't. Nothing else. I shall not change my mind even for a knight
in helmet and helmet feather."
Mr. Hammerton's face _was_ worth another check; he looked down at her
from his high stool in a grave, paternal fashion. She remained
decorously silent.
"How women _do_ like to spend money," he said. "At six o'clock you will
not have a penny left."
"How can I? Father is to have a farm in Mayfield, mother is to go to
Europe, and Dine is to have diamond ear-rings!"
"And I?"
"I will buy you a month to go fishing! And myself brains enough to write
a better book. Isn't it comical for me to get more for my book than
Milton got for Paradise Lost?"
Tessa laughed as she counted her money at tea-time; there was a twenty
dollar bill and seventy-five cents! But in her mother's chamber stood a
suite of black-walnut with marble tops, in one of Dine's drawers,
materials for a black and white striped silk, on the sitting-room table
a copy of Shakespeare in three Turkey morocco volumes, for her father;
she had also sent a gold thimble to Sue Greyson, several volumes of
Ruskin to Mr. Hammerton, Barnes on _Job_ to Miss Jewett, and had
purchased a ream of foolscap, a pint of ink, a pair of gloves, and _The
Scarlet Letter_ for herself!
"Is there any thing left in the world that you want?" her father asked.
"Yes, but twenty dollars will not buy it," she replied, thinking of Dr.
Lake's anxious face as she had seen it that day.
At night, alone in the darkness, there were a few tears that no one
would ever know about. Her joy in her accepted work was nothing to Ralph
Towne. He did not know about her book and if he knew--would he care?