Chapter 6: A Possible Acquaintance

DOROTHEA built a good deal upon the promised call from Mrs. Effingham. As one day after another passed, and nobody came, she began to feel flat. Not knowing the old lady’s address, she could not ask after her, so nothing remained but to wait.

Three days after Christmas, the frost broke up and a spell of mild weather set in. Dorothea had her morning rambles pretty regularly, but she found the long afternoons and evenings hard to get through, whether alone, or in wordless attendance on her occupied father. What he was always so busy about, Dorothea could not make out. He sent her upstairs or downstairs for books, and sometimes he set her to work copying dry extracts, but he gave no reasons or explanations.

She could not flatter herself that he grew less silent. All her efforts to call out his interest and sympathy were at present a failure.

The oppression of this continual silence was creeping over Dorothea herself. She could not persist in talk which had no response. Silent walks, silent meals, silent tête-à-têtes with the Colonel, —these were steadily subduing her young spirits. At thirty or forty, she could have struck out her own way of life, could have made her own work and interests. At eighteen, she was not free.

A Christmas card had come from Mrs. Kirkpatrick, but no letter. Dorothea, had begun to long with actual heart-sick craving for a letter, a word, a smile, from somebody. Anything to break the dead monotony of her present existence. Yet when New Year’s Day brought from happy schoolfellows eager scrawls about their home delights, she had a little shower of tears over them. Her own lot was so different.

“Have you seen St. Paul’s?” demanded Colonel Tracy next day at lunch.

“Seen St. Paul!” The girl had not fallen yet into London colloquialisms, and a sudden question from her father always had a bewildering effect.

“Cathedral.”

“No, never.”

“I’ll take you this afternoon—by omnibus. Get ready sharp, you know.”

“O father, can we stay to the Service?”

“What for?”

“I should so like it.”

“Don’t know. I must be back by half-past four.”

No hope then. But any innovation in the daily round was delightful, and Dorothea had never been satiated with sight-seeing. She made short work of her dressing, and Colonel Tracy looked in surprise at her bright face.

“You like going about!” he said.

“O yes, indeed.”

“Well—we’ll do Westminster Abbey some day. Monuments worth looking at there.”

Dorothea thought they were worth looking at in St. Paul’s. She would have liked to dream over each in succession, and to spend a quiet hour studying the outlines of the great expanse:—not a solitary hour, for she had too much of solitude, but a quiet reverent hour, with her father by her side, feeling—if that had been possible—that he felt with her.

Colonel Tracy’s notions of “doing a cathedral” admitted of no dreams. He whisked his daughter through the aisles and past the monuments in the most approved British style. “That’s so-and-so, my dear; and that’s so-and-so,” came in quick succession. The whispering gallery was remarkable in his estimation—”best thing in the Cathedral,” he asserted.

Reaching home before five o’clock, they were met in the hall by Mrs. Stirring. “There’s been callers, Miss,” the little woman said, swelling with gratification. “Callers, Miss—a lady and a gentleman. And they come together, and the lady she was that disappointed to find you out. I did say it was a thousand pities, for you wasn’t scarcely never out, and such a dull life too! And she hopes you’ll be sure and go to see her, Miss Tracy.”