Just Sixteen Part 20

She was an interesting perplexity to her family, who were contented, reasonable folk, of the sort which, happily for the world, is called commonplace. To her younger sisters, especially, Felicia was a never-failing and exciting conundrum, the answer to which they were always guessing, but never could find out. For days together she would be as cheerful as possible, full of fun and contrivance, and the life of the house; then, all of a sudden, gloom would envelop her like a soft fog, and she would retire to her room with "In Memoriam," or some other introspective volume, and the fat jug of lemonade, lock the door, and just "drink and weep for hours together," as her sister Jenny expressed it. It was really unaccountable.

All her books were deeply scored with lines against the woful pa.s.sages, and such pencilled remarks as "Alas!" and "All too true!" She sat in church with a carefully arranged sad smile on her face; but this, as unsuitable to her natural expression, was not always a success. Felie was much aggrieved one day at being told, by an indiscriminating friend, that her face "seemed made to laugh,--no one could imagine it anything but bright." This, for a girl who was posing for "Patience on a monument smiling at grief," was rather a trial; but then the friend had never seen her reading "King John," and murmuring,--

"Here I and sorrow sit--"

with a long brown stick of cinnamon, in process of crunch, occupying the other corner of her mouth. But perhaps the friend might have found even this funny,--there are such unfeeling people in the world!

Felie's letters were rather dull reading, because she told so little of what she had said or done, and hinted so liberally at her own aching heart and thwarted hopes. But her correspondents, who were mostly jolly school-girls, knew her pretty well, and dismissed these jeremiads as, "Just Felie's way. She does love to be miserable, you know, but n.o.body is better fun than she when she doesn't think it her duty to be unhappy."

Felie didn't come down to tea on the evening of the day on which our story opens. An afternoon of lemonade had dampened her appet.i.te, but at bedtime she stole out in her dressing-gown and slippers, helped herself to a handful of freshly baked cookies and a large green cuc.u.mber pickle, and, by the aid of these refreshments, contrived to stave off the pangs of hunger till next morning, when she appeared at breakfast cheerful and smiling, with no sign upon her spirits of the eclipse of the day before.

Her family made no allusion to that melancholy episode,--they were used to such,--only Mr. Bliss asked, between two mouthfuls of toast, "Where were you gadding to last night, child? I didn't hear you come home."

"I was not out. I didn't feel very--very bright, and went to bed early."

"Oh!"--Mr. Bliss understood.

"He who makes truth unlovely commits high treason against virtue," says an old writer; but he who simulates grief, and makes it ridiculous, commits an almost equal crime against true feeling. Felie had been playing at sorrow where no sorrow was. That very day a real sorrow came, and she woke up to find her world all changed into a reality of pain and puzzle and bewilderment, which was very different from the fict.i.tious loss and the sham suffering which she had found so much to her mind.

She had no idea, as she watched her father and mother drive off that afternoon, that anything terrible was about to happen. Only the "seers"

of the Scotch legends could see the shroud drawn up over the breast of those who are "appointed to die" suddenly; the rest of us see nothing.

The horse which Mr. Bliss drove was badly broken, but he had often gone out before and come back safely. It was only on this particular day that the combination of circ.u.mstances occurred which made the risky horse dangerous,--the shriek of the railroad-whistle, the sharp turn in the road, the heap of stones. There was a runaway, an overset, and two hours from the time when the youthful sisters, unexpectant of misfortune, had watched their parents off, they were brought back, Mr. Bliss dead, Mrs.

Bliss with a broken arm, and injuries to the spine so severe that there was little chance of her ever being able to leave her bed again. So much can be done in one fatal moment.

It is at such dark, dark times that real character shows itself. Felie's little affectations, her morbid musings and fancies, fell from her like some light, fantastic drapery, which is shrivelled in sudden heat. Her real self--hopeful, self-reliant, optimistic--rose into action as soon as the first paralyzing shock of pain was past, and she had taken in the reality of this new and strange thing. All the cares of the house, the management of affairs, the daily wear and tear of life, which has to be borne by _some one_, fell upon her inexperienced hands. Her mother was too shaken and ill to be consulted, the younger girls instinctively leaned on what they felt to be a strength superior to their own. It was a heavy load for young shoulders, and Felie was not yet eighteen!

She made mistakes of course,--mistakes repented of with bitter crying and urgent resolutions. She was often tried, often discouraged; things did not smooth themselves easily, or the world go much out of its usual course, because Felie Bliss was perplexed and in trouble. There were no mornings to spare for tragedy, or Tennyson. Felie's eyeb.a.l.l.s often longed for the relief of a good fit of tears; that troublesome little lump would come into her throat which is the price of tears resolutely held back, but there was too much to do to allow of such a weakening self-indulgence. Mother must be cared for, the house must be looked after, people on business must be seen, the "children," as she called her sisters, must not be suffered to be too sad. And then, again, "In Memoriam," beautiful as it is, and full of sweet and true and tender feeling, did not satisfy Felie now as it had done when she was forced to cultivate an artificial emotion outside of herself.

"If I had time and knew how to write poetry, I could say a great many things that Tennyson never thought of," she told Jenny, one day. It is so with all who suffer. No poet ever voiced the full and complete expression of our own personal pain. There is always something beyond,--an individual pang recognized and understood only by ourselves.

So the years went on, as years do even when their wheels seem weighted with lead. The first sharpness of their loss abated. They became used to the sight of their father's empty chair, of his closed desk; they ceased to listen for the sound of his step on the porch, his key in the door.

Mrs. Bliss gradually regained a more comfortable measure of health, but she remained an invalid, the chief variation in her life being when she was lifted from bed to sofa, and back again from sofa to bed. Felie was twenty-four, and the younger ones were no longer children, though she still called them so. Even Dimple wore long dresses, and had set up something very like a lover, though Felie sternly refused to have him called so till Dimple was older. Felie was equally severe with Dr.

Ernest Allen, on her own account. "She was a great deal too busy to think of such a thing," she declared; but Dr. Allen, who had faith in time, simply declared that he "didn't mind waiting," and continued to hang his hat on the hat-tree in the Bliss's entry three times a week.

Indeed, looking at Felicia Bliss, now that she had rounded physically and mentally into what she was meant to become, you would not wonder that any man should be willing to wait a while in hope of winning such a prize. A certain bright cheer and helpfulness was her charm. "The room grew pleasanter as soon as she came into it," Dimple declared. Certainly Dr. Allen thought so; and as a man may willingly put off building a house till he can afford to have one which fronts the sun, so he considered it worth while to delay, for a few years, even, if need be, and secure for life a daily s.h.i.+ning which should make all life pleasanter. He had never known Felie in her morbid days, and she could never make him quite believe her when she tried to tell of that past phase of her girlhood.

"It is simply impossible. You must exaggerate, if you have not dreamed it," he said.

"Not a bit. Ask Dimple,--ask any of them."

"I prefer to ask my own eyes, my own convictions," declared the lover.

"You are the most 'wholesome' woman, through and through, that I ever knew. A doctor argues from present indications to past conditions. I am sure you are mistaken about yourself. If I can detect with the stethoscope the spot in your lungs where five years back pneumonia left a trace, surely I ought to be able to make out a similar spot in your nervous temperament. The idea is opposed to all that you are."

"But not to all that I was. Really and truly, Dr. Allen, I used to be the most absurd girl in the world. If you could have seen me!"

"But what cured you in this radical and surprising manner?"

"Well," said Felie, demurely, "I suppose the remedy was what you would call homeopathic. I had revelled in a sort of imaginary sorrowfulness, but when that dreadful time came, and I tasted real sorrow, I found that it took all my strength to meet it, and I was glad enough of everything bright and cheering that I could get at to help me through.

"I wonder if there are many girls in the world who are nursing imaginary miseries as I used to do," she went on. "If there are, I should like to tell them how foolish it is, and how bad for them. But, dear me, there are so many girls and one can't get at them! I suppose each must learn the lesson for herself and fight her fight out somehow, and I hope they will all get through safely, and learn, as I have, that happiness is the most precious thing in the world, and that it is so, _so_ foolish not to enjoy and make the most of it while we have it. Because, you know, _some_ day trouble must come to everybody. And it is such a pity to have to look back and know that you have wasted a chance."

IMPRISONED.

The big house stood in the middle of a big open s.p.a.ce, with wide lawns about it shaded by cherry-trees and lilac-bushes, toward the south an old-fas.h.i.+oned garden, and back of that the apple-orchard.

The little house was on the edge of the grounds, and had its front entrance on the road. Its doors were locked and its windows shuttered now, for no one had lived in it for several years.

Three little girls lived in the big house. Lois, who was eight years old, and Emmy, who was seven, were sisters. Kitty, their cousin, also seven, had lived with them so long that she seemed like another sister.

There was, besides, Marianne, the cook's baby; but as she was not quite three, she did not count for much with the older ones, though they sometimes condescended to play with her.

It was a place of endless pleasure to these happy country children, and they needed no wider world than it afforded them. All summer long they played in the open air. They built bowers in the feathery asparagus; they knew every bird's-nest in the syringa-bushes and the thick guelder-roses, and were so busy all the time that they rarely found a moment in which to quarrel.

One day in July their mother and father had occasion to leave home for a long afternoon and evening.

"You can stay outdoors till half-past six," Mrs. Spenser said to her little girls; "then you must come in to tea, and at half-past seven you must go to bed as usual. You may play where you like in the grounds, but you must not go outside the gate." She kissed them for good-by.

"Remember to be good," she said. Then she got into the carriage and drove away.

The children were very good for several hours. They played that little Marianne was their baby, and was carried off by a gypsy. Lois was the gypsy, and the chase and recapture of the stolen child made an exciting game.

At last they got tired of this, and the question arose: "What shall we do next?"

"I wish mother would let us play down the road," said Emmy. "The Noyse children's mother lets them."

"I'll tell you what we'll do," said Lois, struck by a sudden bright idea. "Let's go down to the shut-up house. That isn't outside the gate."

"O Lois! yes, it is. You can't go to the front door without walking on the road."

"Well, who said anything about the front door? I'm going to look in at the back windows. Mother never said we mustn't do that."

Still, it was with a sense of guilt that the three stole across the lawn; and they kept in the shadow of the hedge, as if afraid some one would see and call them back. Little Marianne, with her rag doll in her arms, began to run after them.

"There's that little plague tagging us," said Kitty.

"Go back, Marianne; we don't want you." Then, when Marianne would not go back, they all ran away, and left her crying.

The shut-up house looked dull and ghostly enough. The front was in deep shadow from the tall row of elms that bordered the road, but at the back the sun shone hotly. It glowed through the low, dusty window of a cellar, and danced and gleamed on something bright which lay on the floor within.

"What do you suppose it is?" said Emmy, as they all stooped to look. "It looks like real gold. Perhaps some pirates hid it there, and no one has come since but us."

"Or perhaps it's a mine," cried Lois,--"a mine of jewels. See, it's all purple, like the stones in mother's breastpin. Wouldn't it be fun if it was? We wouldn't tell anybody, and we could buy such splendid things."

"We must get in and find out," added Kitty.

Just then a wail sounded close at hand, and a very woful, tear-stained little figure appeared. It was Marianne. The poor baby had trotted all the long distance in the sun after her unkind playfellows.

"Oh, dear! You little nuisance! What made you come?" demanded Emmy.