“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.