VII.—THE LONG DAY.

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?