Now, in the light of that explanation, she wondered with burning cheeks how she could have thought for one instant that it was good. She could see, herself, that it was crude and childish and ineffectual; not the style in which it was written. Betty was sure of her ability there. She was as conscious that her diction and composition measured up to the best standards, as an athlete is conscious of his strength. It was her view-point of life that had amused the great publisher. He hadn't ridiculed it in words, but she felt his covert smile at her schoolgirl attempt to deal with the world's big problems, and the knowledge that he had been amused cut her like a knife.
Pushing the package aside, she took out the last volume of her diary, and from force of habit made an entry, the record of the return of her manuscript. "It has come back to me, the little bark that the girls launched so gaily, with ceremony and good wishes. It has come back a shipwreck! It was almost easier to face blindness than it is to face this failure. How can I give up this hope that has grown with my growth till it means more than everything else in the world to me? How can I live all the rest of my life without it? Somehow for years I have felt that the Lord wanted me to write. The feeling was like the King's call to Edryn, and I have gone on answering it as he did:
"'Oh list!
Thou heart and hand of mine, keep tryst,
Keep tryst or die!'
"Of course it would be folly for me to go on now, when it has been proved beyond all doubt that I am not able to keep the great tryst worthily, and yet—life seems so empty with this one high hope and purpose taken out of it, that I am not brave enough to face it cheerfully."
It had long been a habit of Betty's, formed in the early days at the Cuckoo's Nest, to comfort herself when things went wrong by imagining how much worse they might have been. Now there was a drop of consolation in the fact that she had never displayed her pride in her book to any but the girls. It had been a temptation to show it to her godmother and Papa Jack and the Colonel, especially after the girls had applauded it so enthusiastically; but the wish for them to see it at its best had made her withhold it in its manuscript form. The climax of her triumph was to be when she placed in their hands a real, full-fledged book. Their criticism might have spared her the humiliation of a rejected manuscript, but she acknowledged to herself that it was easier to have the sentence passed on it by a stranger than by the three whose opinion she valued most.
Tiptoeing noiselessly around the room in order not to disturb any one at that late hour, she undressed slowly, and creeping into bed sobbed herself to sleep. Betty had always been a sensible little soul, taking her small troubles like a philosopher, and next morning, when she was awakened by the first bird-calls and lay watching the light creep up the wall, the old childish habit of thought asserted itself, bringing an unexpected balm to her sore heart. She had always loved allegories. At the Cuckoo's Nest she had helped herself over all the rough places in her road by imagining that she was Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress," and that no matter how hard a time she was having then, the House Beautiful and the Delectable Mountains and the City of the Shining Ones lay just ahead.
Now in her greater trouble it was the allegory of Edryn that brought comfort, because he, too, had heard the King's call and striven to keep tryst, and she remembered that when he knelt to receive his knighthood, something else besides pearls and diamonds flashed on his vestment above his heart, to form the letters "semper fidelis."
"An amethyst glowed on his breast in purple splendour to mark his patient meeting with Defeat!"
"Maybe without that amethyst he couldn't have spelled all the motto perfectly," thought Betty. She sat up in bed, her face alight with the inspiration of the thought. She had met defeat and she had fallen into a grievous Dungeon of Disappointment, but she needn't stay in it. She sprang out of bed echoing Edryn's words: "Full well I know that Heaven always finds a way to help the man who helps himself, and even dungeon walls must harbour help for him who boldly grasps the first thing that he sees and makes it serve him!"