She stood in the same position with her arms folded for the next half hour. How could Dine know what love was? How could she give up a man like Gus Hammerton for a light-haired boy who talked of making life a glorious success? He had his heartache now; it had come at last after all his years of watching Dine growing up: and no one could help him, he must fight it out alone; she remembered what he had said about quoting from a book for Dr. Lake. What “book man” could help him to-night? Would he open a book or fall upon his knees?
Was he sorrowful to-night too, Ralph Towne? How gentle he had been with her and how patient! They had met several times since; once, in his mother’s presence, when he had spoken to her as easily as usual; at other times in the street; he had lifted his hat and passed on; the one glimpse of his eyes had been to reveal them very dark and very stern. She could hear Mr. Hammerton’s voice calling back to her father from the gate; they both laughed and then his quick tramp sounded on the planks.
The tramp kept on and on for hours; the moon arose late; he walked out into the country, now tramping along the wayside and now in the road; it was midnight when he turned his face homeward and something past one when he silently unlocked the door with his night-key and found his way to his room. There was a letter there from Dinah; his sister had laid it on his bureau. It was brief, formal, and ambiguous; she had subscribed herself “Your young, old friend, D.” She did not say that she was glad of his letter, she did not ask him to write again. “She thinks that she must not write to me,” he thought, “darling little Dine! I would like to see that John Woodstock!”
XX.—SEVERAL THINGS.
The November sky was full of clouds; Tessa liked a cloudy sky; the dried leaves whirled around her and rustled beneath her feet, fastening themselves to her skirt as she walked through them; she had stepped down into the gutter to walk through the leaves because they reminded her of her childish days when she used to walk through them and soil her stockings and endure a reprimand when her mother discovered the cause of it; then she had liked the sound of the leaves, now she only cared for them, as she did for several other things,—for the sake of the long ago past! She imagined herself a ten-year-old maiden with big blue eyes and long, bright braids hanging down her back and tied together at the ends with brown ribbon; she was coming from school with a Greenleaf’s Arithmetic (she ciphered in long division and had a “table” to learn), “Parker’s Philosophy” and “Magnall’s Questions” in her satchel. The lesson to-morrow in that was about Tilgath-pilneser; she had stumbled over the queer name, so she would be sure to remember it. There were crumbs in the napkin in the satchel, too, she had had seed cake for lunch; and a lead pencil that Felix Harrison had sharpened for her at noon, when he had come down-stairs to ask Laura for his share of the lunch, and there was a half sheet of note paper with her spelling for to-morrow from “Scholar’s Companion” written on it; perhaps there was a poorly written and ill-spelled note from Gus Hammerton’s cousin, Mary Sherwood, and there might be a crochet needle and a spool of twenty cotton!
She smiled over the inventory, lingering over each article; oh, if she only were going home from school with that satchel, to help her mother a little, play with Dine, and in the evening to look over her lessons sitting close to her father and then to coax him for a story. And then she would go to bed at eight o’clock to awake in the morning to another day. Mr. Hammerton said that it was a premature “Vanitas vanitatem” for her to declare that “growing up” was as bad as any thing a girl could dream!
But then he did not know about poor Felix, and he could never guess what she had dreamed that she had found in Ralph Towne—and how empty life was because of this thing that had mocked her. Empty with all its fulness because of something that never had been; something that never could be in him.
In those satchel-days her greatest trouble had been an interminable scolding from her mother, or the having to give to Dine her own share of cup-custard, when one chanced to be left from tea.
It was a raw day; the wind played roughly with her veil; the fields were bleak, and the long lines of fence, stretching in every direction and running into places that she did not know and would not care for, gave her a feeling of homesickness. Homesickness with the home she had lived in all her life not a mile distant, with every one that she loved or ever had loved within three miles; every one but Dine, and Dine was as blithe and satisfied as any girl could be.
Still she was homesick; she had been homesick since that evening by the fire in Mrs. Towne’s sitting-room. Homesick because she had dreamed a dream that could never come true; now that he had asked her in plain, straightforward, manly words to love him and become his wife, her heart had opened, the light shone in, and she read all that the three years had written; she had loved him, but the love had been crushed in shame—in shame for her mistake.