Part 5

"For His sake, not for mine," repeated Tessa, wonderingly. "How can I ever attain to that? I am very selfish."

"Do you remember about David, whose heart was fashioned like yours, how careful he was once and what happened?"

Miss Jewett was speaking in her brisk, working voice; the troubled face had become alight.

"Now we will read about one who made a sorry mistake by being so careful that he forgot to find out God's way of doing a certain thing. He did the thing that he wanted to do after a style of his own."

Tessa arose and went into Miss Jewett's bedroom; she knew that the Bible she loved best, the one pencilled and interlined, was always kept on a stand near the head of her bed. While Miss Jewett was opening it, Tessa said hurriedly and earnestly "I knew that if it were anywhere in the Bible--that if any one in the world had suffered like me--that you would know where to find them. You said last Sunday that God had written something to help us in every perplexity; but I studied and studied and could not find any thing about second opportunities. Perhaps mine is only a foolish little trouble; not a grand one like David's."

"Do you think that God likes to hear you say that?"

"No," confessed Tessa. "I will not even think it again."

"Have you forgotten how David attempted to bring the Ark into the city of David, and how he failed? What a mortifying and distressing failure it was, too. Now I'll read it to you."

One of Tessa's pleasures was to listen to her reading the Bible; she read as if David lived across the Park, and as if the city of David were not a mile away.

Tessa kept her head in its old position and listened with intent and longing eyes.

"'And David consulted with the captains of thousands and hundreds and every leader. And David said unto all the congregation of Israel, If it seem good unto you, and that it be of the Lord our God, let us send abroad unto our brethren everywhere, that are left in all the land of Israel, and with them also to the priests and Levites which are in their cities and suburbs, that they may gather themselves together unto us: and let us bring again the Ark of our God to us: for we inquired not at it in the days of Saul. And all the congregation said that they would do so: for the thing was right in the eyes of all the people. So David gathered all Israel together from Shihor of Egypt even unto the entering of Hemath, to bring the Ark of God from Kirjath-jearim. And David went up and all Israel to Baalah, that is to Kirjath-jearim, which belonged to Judah, to bring up thence the Ark of God the Lord, that dwelleth between the cherubim whose name is called on it. And they carried the Ark of God in a new cart--' In a _new_ cart, Tessa; see how careful he was!"

"Yes."

"'--Out of the house of Abinadab; and Uzza and Ahir drave the cart.' That was all right and proper, wasn't it?"

"It seems so to me."

"'And David and all Israel played before God with all their might, and with singing, and with harps, and with timbrels, and with cymbals, and with trumpets.' They were joyful with all their might. Were you as joyful as that?"

"Yes: fully as joyful as that."

"Now see the confusion, the shame, and the fear that followed those harps and timbrels and trumpets. 'And when they came unto the threshing-floor of Chidon, Uzza put forth his hand to hold the Ark; for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzza, and He smote him, because he put his hand to the Ark: and he died before God. And David was displeased, because the Lord had made a breach upon Uzza: wherefore that place is called Perez-uzza, to this day. And David was afraid of God that day, saying, How shall I bring the Ark of God home to me?'"

"I should think that he _would_ have been afraid," said Tessa; "and after he had been so sure and joyful, too."

Miss Jewett read on: "'So David brought not the Ark home to himself to the city of David, but carried it aside to the house of Obed-edom the Gittite.'"

Tessa raised her head to speak. "I can not understand where his mistake was; how could he have been too careful of such a treasure. Oh, how terrible and humiliating his disappointment must have been! How ashamed he was before all the people! I can bear any thing better than to be humiliated."

"My poor, proud Tessa."

Tessa's tears started at the tone; these first words of sympathy overcame her utterly; she dropped her head again and cried like a child, like the little child Tessa who had had so many fits of crying.

The eyes above her were as wet as her own; once or twice warm lips touched her forehead and cheek.

"Did _he_ have another opportunity?" asked Tessa, at last. "I can understand how afraid he was. I was troubled because I gave thanks for the thing that was taken away from me. Did he find an answer to his 'How'?"

"He was thankful, sincere, and careful."

"I should think that was enough," exclaimed Tessa, almost indignantly; "but I know that there was sin somewhere, else the anger of the Lord would not have been kindled. They went home without the Ark. That is saddest of all."

"It was kept three months in the house of Obed-edom, and during those three months humbled David studied the law and found that his cart, new as it was, was not according to the will of God.

"'Then David said, None ought to carry the Ark of God but the Levites; for them hath the Lord chosen to carry the Ark of God, and to minister unto Him forever.'"

"And he _could_ have known that before," cried Tessa.

"'And David gathered all Israel together to Jerusalem, to bring up the Ark of the Lord unto his place, which he had prepared for it, and David assembled the children of Aaron and the Levites and said unto them, Ye are the chief of the fathers of the Levites: sanctify yourselves, both ye and your brethren, that ye may bring up the Ark of the Lord God of Israel unto the place that I have prepared for it. For because ye did it not at the first, the Lord our God made a breach upon us, for that we sought Him not after the due order."

"Oh, how can we know every thing to do at the first?"

"How could David have known? Now he had found the right way to do the right thing. 'So the priests and the Levites sanctified themselves to bring up the Ark of the Lord God of Israel. And the children of the Levites bare the Ark of God upon their shoulders with the staves thereon as Moses commanded, according to the word of the Lord. And David spake to the chief of the Levites to appoint their brethren to be the singers with instruments of music, psalteries and harps and cymbals, sounding, by lifting up the voice with joy. So David, and the elders of Israel, and the captains over thousands, went to bring up the Ark of the covenant of the Lord out of the house of Obed-edom with joy.'"

"He was not afraid now," said Tessa. "I think that he was all the more joyful because he had been so humiliated and afraid. I will think about that new cart."

"And those three months in which he was finding out the will of God. 'And it came to pass, when God helped the Levites that bare the Ark of the covenant of the Lord that they offered seven bullocks and seven rams.' He could not help them the first time because their way was not according to His law; their joy, their thankfulness, their sincerity, their carefulness availed them nothing because they kept not His law. Uzza was a priest and should have known the law; David was king and he should have known the law."

"But he had his second opportunity, despite his mistake."

"And so, if your desire be according to His will may you have yours; it may be months or years, half your lifetime, but if you study His word and ask for your second opportunity through the intercession of Christ, I am sure that you will have it."

"Sometimes I am angry, sometimes bewildered, sometimes there is hatred in my heart because I have been deceived and humiliated--sometimes I do not want it back--"

"My dear," said Miss Jewett, gravely, "discipline is better than our heart's desire."

"Is it? I don't like to think so."

When the clock in the church-tower struck midnight Tessa lay awake wondering if she could ever choose discipline before any heart's desire.

Then she crept closer to Miss Jewett and kissed her.

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?

VIII.--A NOTE OUT OF TUNE.

The blossom storm came and blew away the apple blossoms, the heavy fragrance of the lilacs died, and the shrubbery became again only a mass of green leaves and ugly, crooked stems; but amid this, something happened to Tessa; something that was worth as much to her as any happenings that came before it; something that had its beginning when she was a little school-girl running along the planks and teasing Felix Harrison. How much certain jarring words spoken that day and how much a certain bit of news influenced this happening, she, in her rigid self-analysis, could not determine!

She arose from the breakfast table at the same instant with her father, saying: "Father, I will walk to the corner with you."

"We were two souls with one thought," he replied. "I intended to ask you for a few minutes."

They crossed the street to the planks. She slipped her arm through his, and as he took the fingers on his arm with a warm grasp, she said; "I never want any lover but you, my dear old father."

"Nonsense, child! Only girls who have had a heart-break say such things to their old fathers, and your heart is as good as new, I am sure. Tessa, I want to see you married before I die."

"May you live till you see me married," she answered merrily. "What an old mummy you will be!"

"I have been thinking of something that I want to say to you. I am an old man and I am not young for my age--"

"Now, father."

"I may live a hundred years, of course, and grow heartier each year, and like the 'frisky old girl,' die at the age of one hundred and ten, and 'die by a fall from a cherry-tree then,' but, still there's a chance that I may not. And now, Daughter Tessa"--his voice became as grave as her eyes, "I want you to promise me that you will always take care of your poor little mother; poor little mother! You are never sharp to her like saucy Dine, and she rests in you like an acorn in an acorn cup, although she would be the last to confess it."

"I promise to do my best," Tessa said very earnestly.

"But that is only a part of it. Promise me that if she wishes to marry again, and her choice be one that _you_ approve--"

"Approve!"

"Approve," he repeated, "that you will not hinder but rather further it, and keep Dine from making her unhappy about it."

"I will not promise. You shall not die," she cried passionately. "How can you talk so and break my heart?"

"Dr. Watts says that we all begin to die as soon as we are born, so I have had to do it pretty thoroughly; but he was a theologian and not a medical man. Have you promised?"

"Yes, sir," speaking very quietly, "I have promised."

With her hand upon his arm, they kept even step for ten silent minutes.