In a Mysterious Way. Warner Anne
acute for any words to relieve, sat still beside her, and knew nothing for the time being but a fearful throbbing in her temples – a black cloud smothering her whole brain – and tears.
It was Lassie who broke the silence at last, trying hard to speak evenly. "But, Alva, I never knew … when did you learn to love him … why – " her voice died again just there, and she buried her face on the other's shoulder.
Alva laid her hand upon the little hand that shook under a fresh stress of emotion, and said gently, her tone one of deepest pity: "Shall I tell you all about it? Would you like to know the whole story?"
"Oh, yes, yes, – so much."
"You'll try to be patient and give yourself time to really see how things may be to one who is altogether outside of your way of thinking, won't you, dear? You won't pass judgment too quickly?"
"I'll try. Indeed, I will, as well as I can – "
Alva pressed the hand. "Dear little girl," she said, very tenderly, "you see I look at even you with quite different eyes from those with which the ordinary person sees you. If you could only see things as I do, you'd see everything so much more clearly. How can I put it all straight for you? When even my love for you is not at all what any other gives you."
Lassie lifted up her head. "How do you mean?"
"There are two Lassies to me, dear, – the pretty, sweet-looking girl, and the Lassie who loves me. Most people confuse the two, and think them one and the same; I don't. No matter what happened to you, the Lassie whom I love could never alter – she is unchangeable. She is not subject to change; she doesn't belong to this world; she cannot die. And just as I feel about you, I feel about everybody. What I can see and touch in those I love is what I love least in them."
"Oh, Alva!" it was like a little moan – the girl's voice.
"That is my earnest belief. Bodies and what they suffer don't count. That has come to me bit by bit under the pressure of these last years. But it has come in its completest form in the end. I am entirely satisfied as to the only truth in the universe being the fact that only Truth is eternal. Please try to remember all this, while you listen to my story; try not to forget it. You will, won't you?"
"I'll try, but it isn't clear to me."
"No, I don't suppose so – " Alva sighed – "but do your best, my dear;" she paused a moment, then drew the hand that she held close between her own two, and went on slowly; "I must tell you first of all that I have never seen him but three times in my life. Just think – only three times!"
"Only three – " Lassie looked up in surprise.
"Only three times. And hardly any one knows that I saw him even those times. No one knows to-day that we love one another, or that we are to be married, except the surgeons and nurses, who had to be told, of course. It's a very great secret."
"Tell me how it all began, Alva."
"I don't know when I first heard his name. It all began here, dear, five years ago. When I stopped off for a few days to visit the Falls. I've always loved this country, and from the time that I was born I've always been here for a few days now and then. I always had a queer feeling that something drew me here. I have those queer feelings about things and places and people, you know, and out there on the bridge has always seemed to me a sort of pivot in my life. Every time I go there, the clock seems to strike some hour for me – " she stopped.
Lassie opened and shut her free hand with a sensation of being very uneasy; the suspicion that Alva was not quite sane just lightly crossed her mind. It certainly was not sane to talk as she did.
"So I came here again, on my way home from New York, just five years ago now. And he was here then, staying at Ledge Park, and I saw him for the first time; we met out there on the bridge;" she stopped for just a second or so, then went steadily on. "I think I read about him in the papers. I had learned to admire him intensely – who could help it? – but of course I'd never for one instant thought of loving him. He was like a sort of a story-hero to me; he never seemed like a man; I never thought of any woman's loving him. He just seemed to be himself, all alone – always alone. He had seemed quite above and apart from all other men to me. He interested me; I wanted to learn all that I could about him and his work, and I did learn a great deal, but I'd never dreamed of meeting him face to face, of really speaking to him, of having his eyes really looking at me; he seemed altogether beyond and away from my existence. As if he lived on another world. And then I met him that evening on the bridge, in just the simplest sort of way. Oh, it was very wonderful."
"Did you know him right off?"
"Yes, he looked just like his picture; but then I knew him in another way, too. I can't describe it; it was all very – very strange. It doesn't seem strange to me now, but it would seem almost too strange to you."
"Won't you try to tell me?"
"I will some day, dear, perhaps. I can't tell you now, I couldn't explain it all to you; but, anyway, we met and I looked at him and he looked at me – " she pressed the hand within her own yet closer, adding simply, "I believe that love – real love – comes like that, first of all that one look, and then all the past rushes in and makes the bridge to all the future. Oh, Lassie," her voice sank to a whisper, "when I think of that meeting and of all that it brought me, I am so happy that I want to take the whole wide world into my confidence, and beg every one not to play at love or to take Love's name in vain; but to be patient, and wait, and starve, or beg, or endure anything, just so as to merit the joy which may perhaps be going to be. I never had thought of what love might be; at least I had never been conscious of such thinking. My life all these years had been bound so straitly and narrowly there at home. How could I think of anything that would take me from those duties! And yet I see now that it was all preparation, all the getting ready. If I had only known it, though, – if I had only known it then! It would all have been so much easier."
The whisper died away; she sat quite still looking out over the hills. Lassie's eyes gazed anxiously upon her; nothing in her own spirit tuned to this key; instead, flashes of recollection kept lighting up the present with forgotten paragraphs out of the newspaper accounts of the accident. She shivered suddenly.
Alva did not notice. After a while she went on again.
"Some day you'll learn to love some one, and then you'll know something of what I feel. I don't want you to suffer enough to know all that I feel. But, believe me, whatever one suffers, love is worth it. In that first instant I learned – that first look showed me – that it can mean all, everything, more even than happiness itself; oh, yes, a great, great deal more than happiness itself. In one way they're not synonymous at all, love and happiness. I have been happy without love all my life, and now I shall love without being what the world calls 'happy'; but I shall be happy – happy in my own way, just as I am happy now in something that makes you tremble only to think of."
She paused; her eyelids fell over her eyes and the lashes quivered where they lay on her cheeks, but her hand continued to hold Lassie's, warm and close. There was another long pause. And then another sigh.
"So in that first hour – it was only one hour – I learned the beginning of life's biggest lesson – what life may be, what love may be, and also what for me could never be. For just as soon as I really saw him, I saw why he had remained alone. It was perfectly plain to me. It was that he didn't live for himself; he lived to carry out his purpose. One reads of such people, but I never had met any one who was unable to see himself in his own life before. It was a tremendous lesson to me. It was like opening a door and looking suddenly out upon a new order of universe. Everything whirled for the first minutes, and then I saw that my own life had been sufficiently unselfish to have made me capable of comprehending his. It rose like a flood through my soul, that everything has a reason, and that my blind, stupid, hopeless years there at home had all been leading straight up to that minute. It was such a revelation, and such a new light on all things. I was born anew, myself; I have never been the same woman since. Never, never!"
Lassie's brows drew together; the revelation did not appeal to her personal reason as reasonable.
"We talked for quite a while – not about ourselves – we understood each other too well to need