In a Mysterious Way

While Mrs. O'Neil went for a shawl and to tell Mary Cody, Alva sought her big cape. Then they went out together into the frost, for the frost was sharp in the air.

"The woods will soon end being beautiful," the little woman said.

Alva walked swiftly on and made no reply. In less than five minutes they stood out over the gorge and looked down on its matchless glory of silver illuminating blackest shadow.

"I hope that the dam won't spoil all this," the girl said suddenly.

"You like to look at it, don't you?" Mrs. O'Neil said softly.

"Living here on its banks, as you do, I don't believe you can appreciate it!" Alva exclaimed. "Can it possibly mean to any one what it does to me, I wonder."

"I think it's pretty and I love so to look at it," said Mrs. O'Neil in gentlest sympathy.

Alva caught her hand and pressed it hard in both her own. "Do you know, Mrs. O'Neil, if I were very happy I should love best to be happy here, and if more sorrow were to be, I would choose to have that here, too. I am so close to God when I live in His country."

She took the warm hand that she held and pressed it close against her heart.

"I wish that every one was so good as you are," Mrs. O'Neil said, impulsively.

"Every one is better than we give them credit for being."

"Even those two?"

"Yes, even those two."

"I can't quite believe that," said the little woman.

"Wait and you'll see."

Then they stood quiet, until a cold wind, coming down the gorge, smote them bitterly.

"We must go in," Alva said, regretfully; "the wind comes so strongly here."

They turned and were only a few steps on their way when Alva stopped suddenly.

"Do you believe in signs?" she asked.

"Why – I don't know."

Alva put both hands up to her head. "That cold wind was a sign," she said, her voice trembling. "Oh, I feel so strangely. Something strong and fearful is sweeping into my life to-night."

In her heart she hoped that it was only the shock of learning that Lassie loved.

But in her soul she knew that it must be something else. The long strain of the waiting days had worn anxiety to its sharpest edge. When Truth mercifully veils itself, Time – the softener – wears the veil thin until at last, when we have gained strength enough to bear, we have learned to know.

CHAPTER XX

SHIFTING SUNSHINE AND CLOUDS

Ingram and Lassie went out but not on the bridge; they did not even turn their heads that way.

"Alva says that she can see the gorge even when it's pitch-dark," Lassie said. "She says she shall see it plainly to the end of her life, wherever she may be in the world." She felt quite safe now that they were alone; she didn't even mind that embarrassing speech of Mrs. Ray's.

"Yes," said Ingram; they went calmly and happily up the road. He didn't mind the speech either, now.

"Alva and I never walk this way," Lassie said after a minute. "We always walk the other, except just a little bit to the post-office, of course."

"Yes," said the man again, and they went on, up the hill.

The peculiar charm of the ordinary mode of falling in love is that it is so simple; it requires so little effort, so to speak. If it was harder work, it might produce bigger results – results nearer the millennium than those we are now getting. Perhaps, however, the results are a lesson to be learned, and we are still so deep in the primer of that learning, that love remains the cheapest, easiest, and most common of all its tasks.

Ingram thought Lassie's remarks fascinating, and she thought his two "Yes's" both clever and original. They were each thoroughly satisfied with one another, and were deeply interested each minute. Ingram had never tramped along a country road in starlight with this pretty young girl before, and Lassie had never walked anywhere, with any man, in all her life. It was not perhaps remarkable that what had happened was happening. Not at all.

"How fast the time has gone," Lassie said, as they mounted the Wiley hill; "to think that I have been here over a week!"

"And to think of all that has happened," said Ingram.

"I know; isn't it strange?"

"I shall be awfully lonesome after you go."

This sounded so mournful and pathetic that it brought a lump into her throat and she could not speak for a minute.

"Alva will go, too," Ingram went on, presently.

"But she'll come back."

"Let us hope so."

They walked over the Wiley hill.

"Poor Mrs. Lathbun and her daughter won't go chestnutting any more after to-morrow," Lassie said, after they passed under the heavy shadows cast by Mrs. Wiley's huge trees. "I think that we ought to go back now, the mail will be in."

They turned around to walk back and enjoyed every step of the way. There is really nothing that lights up a lack of conversation like being in love.

As they passed the post-office they saw Mrs. Ray standing on the porch, tucked up in her shawl.

"There was a wreck," she called; "the mail's late."

"All right!" Ingram called in response.

Mrs. Ray watched them vanish out of the light cast by her open door, and then turned, went inside, and shut it. "I like that young man," she said to herself; "he's got a good face. I wish we were as sure of getting the dam as he is of getting that girl. We need the dam full as much as he thinks he needs her. It'll bring men and lots of money to this section, and this section needs men and money. All we've got around here is women and land, and women and land can't get very far without men and money. It's about time we was getting some show at prosperity. I do wonder how Sammy's getting along with his hens!"

Arrived at the hotel, Ingram bade Lassie good night and she went up-stairs, one trembling tumult of tangling sentiments as to the conversation now to ensue.

Alva's room was dark, but when Lassie whispered her name at the door, the answer came quickly.

"Is that you, dear? come to me. Lassie, how I have wanted you!"

Lassie crossed to the bed, from whence the voice came. She thought she knew why she was wanted, but she only said: "What is it, dear?"

"I am in the grip of an awful fear."

The girl stood still, much startled.

"Alva! What do you mean? What has happened?"

"I don't know. I went out on the bridge for a minute after you left, and it came blowing down the gorge – a wind of horrid presentiment; oh, I am beside myself, I don't know what to do. There is no mail to-night – " she stopped, and Lassie felt that she was weeping. Finally she added: "I ought to have stayed there at the hospital. I should not have obeyed his wishes or what the surgeon said. I ought to have obeyed my own heart. I ought to have stayed with him!"

The young girl was frightened, silent.

Finally she managed to stammer:

"But you said that he was not conscious – that it was not possible for you to stay there – that no purpose could be served. Oh, what do you fear? What do you think may have happened?"

Alva controlled herself and drew Lassie down beside her upon the bed. "Dear, I don't know; but I do know that I shall go away to-morrow!"

"To-morrow!"

"I shall, dear. I must see him; I have telegraphed – " Again tears choked her.

"You think something has happened?" Lassie faltered.

"Yes, something warns me. It has come over me heavily to-night. I must go and face it. What is the reason of my love, if it seems to fail him when the strain comes. It shall not fail. They shall not trick me into failing. Perhaps they are trying to spare me or shield me, but I'll go to receive the blow. An instant swept him out of his life-work – I saw his spirit of resignation – I will be resigned, too – "

Lassie felt the bed shaken by the fierceness of sobs. She was dumb, not knowing what to say. The orbit of Alva's love was so infinitely greater than that of her own, that the feebler suffered eclipse in that hour. She saw herself and Ingram completely swept aside, and was not even conscious of the fact.

"It is my heart that suffers," Alva pressed on after a minute, "only my heart, Lassie; my soul is strong, very strong. There is nothing else for my spirit to learn, but half of my being still suffers; it cannot remember every second how it was when I knelt beside him and he told me in whispers that he was content and that if I loved him I also would be content. I have tried to be content, I have been content until to-day – until to-night. But now, as I lay here in the dark, it seemed as if content had fled not only me but the whole universe. I feel as if content had ceased to exist. Rebellion is in the air. In some strange way I'm sure that he has abjured resignation and renunciation; I feel that he is in the throes of something – he is suffering, suffering agony; and I want to be with him. I must be with him! I shall leave to-morrow!"

Lassie trembled; she had never seen any one like this before.

"When do you want me to go, Alva," she whispered, presently.

"Could you go to-morrow at four, and I will take the train the opposite way at eight?"

"I'll be ready; don't mind about me a bit, dear."

"We must go. Oh, listen to that wind coming down the gorge; doesn't it sound as if some spirit were in travail? So sad, so melancholy! Something tremendous is taking place, and I am far from him while he endures."

The wind was surely rising, and its moan shook the window sash.

"I'm going mad," Alva exclaimed, springing from the bed; "why did I leave him? No matter what they said, I should have stayed there. My place was there. Oh, I have been cast in so many moulds these last years; I have taken so many prizes, only to find them dust in my hands; and now God will not – must not take this one from me! I have learned the folly of the material, I have bent my head beneath the yoke enough to be spared another lash of the goad. I pray – oh, I pray – that this cup may pass me by."

Lassie sat still, now quite terrified.

Alva paced up and down the little room. "I have been dragged – or I have managed to drag myself – up one step above the ordinary. I had accepted the loneliness that comes when one gets where no one else stands. I learned not to expect companionship. But we are not the less lonely because we go our way alone, – we are not the less lonely. And that same rule holds all through. Lassie, I tell you, that one does not crave companionship the less because one chooses to marry a dying man; one does not crave caresses the less when one loves as I do." She wrung her hands miserably. "I'm weak – weak – weak! This is the test and I am failing. I, who have worked so far, am being carried down – down – down – now – to-night. Oh, the struggle, the tragedy, the lesson! Life's lessons are always so terrible." Then, her emotions seeming for the moment to exhaust all her strength, she came back to the bed, and said, with some approach to calmness:

"Perhaps it is that I preached too much to you, dear, or was too sure of myself. Perhaps my joy was a selfish joy, or perhaps I did wrong in planning to leave my parents, even for a little while. Just in proportion as one rises, so do the subtlety of their problems increase. To love a man whose life was too big for any one to share unless she could give herself wholly – that was hard but I learned that lesson; I would have given my life wholly. Then to have my duty chain me away from him – that was terrible but I accepted that, too. Then to have him struck down – I thought that that was the worst of all, but something held me up through that. But – but," she broke out in a wail of absolute, heartbroken desolation, "but if he is going to leave me before we – " and there she stopped short, shivered violently, and became stilly rigid.

Lassie dared to put her arms about her.

"Why do you think such dreadful things? You don't know that anything has happened."

Alva drew a long, sharp breath. "But I do know it," she said; "something has happened. You will see in the morning. Oh, I would have given up my life while he was giving up his, and minded it so little; but to have to give him up! What shall I do? I wanted those weeks, even if they shrank to days – to hours. It seemed to me that we had earned the right to a little, so little, happiness. The memories would have given me strength to bear the hereafter. If I could only be a soul, and a brave one, like him, – but to-night I am all heart, all quivering fear." She paused to control her voice again.

"But, Alva, let me give you back your own speeches in comfort. How often you've told me how only his soul counted, and how that was yours for eternity, and how, because of that, you found yourself equal to all things. And you've told me, too, dear, how his renunciation, how his exchange of power, strength and life for weakness and death – and all without a murmur – made you quite confident that you would never fail, either."

"Yes," Alva murmured, "yes, I remember, but – "

"And you said that the way that he ignored his poor, crushed body and looked straight towards another future life of fresh labor made you full of courage, too. You remember."

"Yes, yes, I remember." Then she tried to dry her eyes. "I won't admit that the world has a right to shudder, and yet I am shuddering myself," she said, sadly. "I must learn to be braver. I can't fight down foreboding, but I must be braver. But, dear, I do so love him – I have so wanted him – he is so dear to me. I have so lived upon the picture of our hours together. That little house across the river is full of him for me. I saw him in it well and strong of spirit, fighting against the desecration of the gorge, and showing me how I might help on the work when he was gone. I meant to give him the joy of one more crusade, and one more victory to his credit. He would have known how to act, even if his only sympathizers were the poor and those yet to be born. He understood the claims of the poor and the unborn; he gave his life for them."

Lassie enfolded her in her tender arms; the little star was in eclipse, yet even in eclipse it was gathering power on high. Alva leaned her cheek against the head on her shoulder.

"How I suffer," she murmured. "Lassie, I feel that I have entered into a maelstrom – a whirlwind. I seem to hear a dirge in that wind outside. I must go to-morrow – we must go to-morrow."

"Yes, we'll go," said Lassie, soothingly.

"It is my heart, just my heart. It is so hard to strike an even balance between the heart and the soul. My poor, thin, trembling flesh has ruled to-night, truly."

"Let me sleep with you," Lassie pleaded; "let me hold you fast and love you dearly."

Alva smiled in the dark. "Come, then," she said; "I fancy that I shall sleep if my hand clasps yours – and if I know that we leave to-morrow."

Later, after Lassie had slept thus for some hours, she was awakened by Alva's rising and going to the window.

"What is it, dear, you are not faint?"

Alva turned, the pale, early sunrise illuminated her face.

"Some riddle has been solved somewhere, dear," she said; "I'm quite calm now. The struggle for him as well as for me is over."

"Then come back and sleep with my arms tight round your neck," said the friend, stretching forth her arms.

Alva came back like an obedient child, crept in close beside her, and in a few minutes was sleeping as a child sleeps.

Later, when the real morning came and the real, enduring wakefulness with it, it was Alva who roused first again, and, sitting up in bed, put back her hair with both hands and smiled into her friend's eyes.

"You're all right, now?" Lassie said, joyfully.

"Very right, dear; the crisis is over. Forget last night. I shall never be like that again."

Lassie turned her face towards the window; looking out from where she lay she could see the valley one burst of flame, its wave of color sweeping off afar and the hoar frost sparkling over all the glory. "I feel as if I never had seen anything so beautiful in all my life before," the girl exclaimed; "I don't know what it makes me think of, but it is as if my soul were growing, I am so happy to see you happy again."

Alva sat there with the white coverlet heaped about her and smiled. "Thank you, dear," she said, with simplicity. "I am happy, and last night and this morning have caused both our souls to grow."

"It's too beautiful!" the girl said, after a long pause; "the valley is more beautiful than I ever realized before."

Presently Alva left the bed and went to close the window. "There's a mist lying low in the valley," she said then; "it lies there like an emblem of peace. Omens are curious. That cold, sad wind last night had its message, and the morning mist has another. I know that some change is at hand, but I know that whatever it is its burden is good. I feel equal to anything this morning. I feel as if God had come to me in the night and told me that he was charging Himself with my care."

Lassie looked at her with freshly awakened anxiety.

"Oh, don't look at me that way," she begged; "that is the very hardest of all – to have those to whom you talk regard you as if you were mad."

"But you astonish me so. Last night you were so frightened."

"Last night some struggle was on, my dear; this morning it is settled." She stopped and spoke very slowly. "I think, perhaps, that he knows now that he can never come to the house," she said, and although her lips quivered slightly her voice was clear and composed.

"Alva," Lassie cried, in sudden horror, "you think that he is dead – that is what you think."

As soon as the words had passed her lips, she was frightened at her own temerity; but Alva, whose back was towards her, now turned towards her smiling.

"He is not dead," she said; "he was thinking of me all last night and this morning. He is not dead. That I know."

"How can you be sure?"

"When people love as we do, they can be very sure. I was awfully shaken last night, Lassie; I confess it. Something big, that we shall know all about later, hung in the balance and I trembled. But it's settled now."

There came a tap at the door just then, announcing Mary Cody with their hot water.

"They're still asleep," she said in a whisper; "if the letter from the lawyer don't come in this morning's mail, Mr. O'Neil is going to eject them. Only think!"

Naturally this remark gave quite a new turn to the conversation.

"Unless they pay, you know," Alva reminded Mary Cody.

"How do you eject people?" Lassie asked, rejoicing in the cheerfulness of the commonplace. "If he puts them out the front door and they just walk around and come into the kitchen, what can any one do?"

"I don't know," said Mary Cody, apparently thunderstruck at the mental vision of the O'Neil House besieged by Mrs. and Miss Lathbun, trying to get in again. "I don't know what we could do. There's seven doors to this house."

"Will Mr. O'Neil pull them out, or push them out?" Lassie asked further; "or will he just drive them out?"

"I don't know," said Mary Cody; "everybody in town'll be up at the post-office waiting to see if the letter from the lawyer comes, I expect. If it doesn't come, Mr. O'Neil is going to Ledge Centre and get a warrant."

"Oh, dear," said Lassie.

"You won't get any mail this morning," said Mary Cody; "there's a wreck on the road. Two coal trucks and a car of cabbages. There'll be no eastern mail till noon."

Then Mary Cody went away again.

"Isn't it strange that all this should happen just during the little time that we're here?" Lassie said; "it's made it very exciting."

Alva went on brushing her hair.

Lassie looked at her then, and saw that she bore many traces of her violent emotion of the night before.

"You won't try to go to-day, will you?" she said, suddenly.

"Oh, yes, I shall go." Then she turned and looked straight into the girl's eyes. "I must go," she said; "something has happened."

CHAPTER XXI

THE POST-OFFICE

From 8.30 A.M. on, the tide of travel in Ledge always tended towards the post-office, but on the famous morning when Mrs. Lathbun expected to hear from her lawyer, the post-office's vicinity resembled nothing so much as its own appearance upon Election Day. Every one that ever had received a letter intended to be there to see if Mrs. Lathbun would get hers. Long before train time not only the office itself, but the adjoining rooms and the porch outside, were comfortably crowded with a pleasantly anticipative collection of interested observers.

"The United States Government doesn't allow me to interfere in politics, or I'd come right square out with my views," said Mrs. Ray, who held public interest with a tight rein, while awaiting the mail. "My views may be uninteresting, but I hit enough nails on the head to box up a good many people a year."

"What do you think?" some one asked.

"I don't think anything," said Mrs. Ray; "I know!"

"Well, what do you know, then?"

"I know that a letter-getter stays a letter-getter, and the reverse the reverse. Just as I know that case-knives are suspicious and that picking chestnuts may be a bunco game as easy as anything else. I've found it nothing but a bunco game, myself. I've never made my chestnuts pay, just because they were so easy picked up by other people; and you can't hire boys to do your nutting for you, – boys eat up all the profits and most of the chestnuts into the bargain. Yes, indeed. And as for those two up at Nellie's – they'll get no letter. Wait and see."

"But what will happen to them then?" asked Joey Beall, aching to discuss the details of the arrest and the journey to Geneseo.

"I don't know, but I can tell you one piece of news, and it isn't gossip either; it come straight from Nellie O'Neil herself; she's been here this morning."

"Have they found out anything new?"

"Not about them; but her other two is leaving."

"What!"

"Yes, going this afternoon." Mrs. Ray folded her arms and leaned back against the shelves containing her grocery business.

The sensation caused by this extra and wholly unexpected bit of news was thorough and sincere. Everybody looked at everybody else.

Mrs. Dunstall pressed forward. "Haven't they paid, either?" she asked, with horror in her voice.

"Oh, yes, they've paid." Mrs. Ray was quickly reassuring on this point. "But with them, it's something else. I don't know for sure just what, but I guess that eldest one's beginning to see that it's no use as far as she's concerned; but she'll have to do something with that house she was fixing up to live in. Sarah Catt told me she never heard anything so crazy as building a house to live in while a dam that Mr. Ledge don't want built is being built. She says her husband says that dam never will be built. She says Mr. Ledge is very quiet, but he's very sensible and he says there's quicksands all under us."

This statement caused another flutter of sensation.

"Can't you dam a quicksand? I thought it run just like water." Thus Joey Beall's fiancée from the back.

"No, you can't," said Pinkie. "I know."

"I'd be sorry to see the dam go," said Mrs. Wiley. "Cousin Catterwallis Granger looked to see it raise all the property around here."

"Drown all the property around here, you mean," said Mrs. Ray. "I thank heaven it's the Dam Commission and not me who'll have to adjust all that dam's going to drown before it gets done. Josiah Bates says he heard that they'll have to take up all the cemeteries from here to Cromwell."

"Why?" asked Pinkie.

"Why? Why, because no matter what powers a commission can hold over the living, no legislature can find a law for drowning the dead, I guess. They've all got to be moved and set out in rows again in a new place. Seems like I never will see the last of Mr. Ray's two wives! But I shan't have to pay for their new start in life this time, anyway."

"Where will they put them next, do you suppose?" said Mrs. Dunstall, referring to the cemeteries – not to Mr. Ray's former wives.

"I guess we'll all want to know that," said Mrs. Ray, turning her head as if she heard the train (the tension in the room was increasing momentarily, – so was the crowd). "I'm sure I wonder what will become of Mr. Ray. I never could feel that I really was done with him, and now it seems maybe I ain't. I wish they'd buy my three-cornered cow pasture for a new cemetery. Then I could cut his grass when I went to milk my cow."