In a Mysterious Way

by Anne Warner

"You'll go back and forth across the bridge often then, won't you?"

"When I'm married, you mean?"

"Yes, when you're married."

"My dear, fancy what a joy Mrs. Ray will be to us. I shall go for the mail expressly so as to tell all that Mrs. Ray said to me when I went for the mail." She paused and smiled and sighed. "Lassie, I wish I were strong enough not to mind one thing. I know so well—so very well—just how it will look to every one,—above all to my parents, who are to be driven half mad, even though I shall only ask a few months' freedom, in return for all my life before and after. I wish that I might be spared the sharp, keen realization of all that."

Lassie's eyes sought hers quickly. "But you have a right to do as you please, Alva."

"Have I, dear? It seems to me sometimes as if I were the one person who had no right to do as she pleases, not even in that which concerned her most. You know that every one thinks that if a woman marries with a prospect of years of happiness taken or given, she is justified in going her own way. Any one would feel that, would understand that view. I never could have done that, because my life was too heavily loaded with burdens and responsibilities; and his was the same. It was because we were so hopeless of happiness for so long that we do not cavil over the wonder of what is offered us. Because if it had come in the form that it comes to others, we must have refused it. It did come to us in that form, and we did refuse it. It was only when it returned in a guise that the world calls tragic, that we could accept it for our own."

"Yes, Alva, I understand," her tone was a cry, almost.

"Lassie, remember one thing, and don't forget it during any of these hours that we shall spend together. If I read life by another light than yours, it isn't because it was natural to my eyes. Once I might have recoiled even more than you did, when I first told you. God's best purposes for humanity require that we recoil from what seems unnatural. But there are exceptions to all rules, and in return for two human lives freely offered up on the altar of His world, He gives, sometimes, a few days of unutterable happiness to their spirits. Lassie, he was big, he was splendid; you know all that he was as every one else does. If I had been young, if I had been ignorant enough to dare to be selfish, and if he had been young and ignorant enough not to know how necessary he was to thousands,—why, then, we might have been happy in the way that two people out of a million sometimes are. But we had gone beyond all that, or else we passed beyond it the instant we realized; at any rate, we knew too well that I was bound hand and foot on the wheel of my life and he was bound on his. We had to set our faces in opposite directions and go on. Straight ahead. The world for which we sacrificed ourselves will never even be grateful. The world could not have understood why we should make any sacrifice; the world generally disdains those who do the most for it. Isn't that so? If you tell any one in these days that your first duty is to do right by your own soul, and that that means doing what is best for all other souls, they stare. If I say to you that I could bear to live alone and he could bear to live alone, because we both knew absolutely that we had had centuries of one another and should win eternity united, you'd stare, too."

"I wouldn't quite—" faltered Lassie.

"Don't try to, dear; only think how it is to him and to me now, when we are to have this short, this pitifully short space of time together—to have to take it in the face of such an outcry as will be made. When I creep back into life again, with my heart broken and my dress black always from then on, I shall be so notorious, such an object of curiosity for all time to come, that my friends will prefer not to be seen in public with me. When I think of my home-going to tell them, my very soul faints. My father abhors any form of physical deformity; what he is going to say to my marrying one who is so maimed and crushed that he can not use his right hand, I can't think. And then there is my mother, to whom sentiment and religion are alike quixotic. What will she say?"