CHAPTER XXV
THE BREAKING OF ANOTHER DAY AND WAY
Alva slipped into her cape, and drawing some fur up round her throat, set swiftly forth upon the Long Bridge—for the last time, she told herself.
The snow was falling fast, but not thickly as yet, and she had it in her heart to steal under cover of the fast-approaching twilight to her house, and look upon that also for the last time. Her sorrow was too deep to leave any room to mourn the background of her dream, but the background was consecrated by the dream and she longed to stand once more close to those walls, even if only to sob her heart out alone under the rustle of dead leaves, amidst the fast deepening snow.
There was in her that awful strength that saves one's reason in the first shock of the otherwise unbearable. Years were ahead and yet her heart did not shrink; endless gray duties stretched between their mile-stones, but to her it mattered not. Nothing mattered, she told herself over and over. Life would go on, other lives in especial would go on; their demands would be hers to meet, their cares and troubles, their joys and sorrows would be hers to reflect, but to her personally nothing would—nothing could—matter more. Her unseeing eyes looked out over the gorge; the matchless beauty, for the preservation of which her dead love had fought so hard, came to a blind market now; she could not see, she could not feel, for her life and all that makes life worth living was over.
So she swept on, her dark cape fluttering wide like wings on either side of her steady swiftness. The snow crystals clung to the wool and quickly starred its night with stars, but she saw no night except her own, and noted no stars. "And yet I must not give way too much," she thought suddenly, with a quick stabbing sense of proving unworthy; "if I am what I have told Lassie that one should be—if I am what one who has truly loved should surely be—I shall be strong and live resolutely as he lived, even though I have been so crushed. Pain could not crush his spirit; shall sorrow crush mine? I will be strong."
The letter which she had brought out with her came to her mind then, and she paused and read it. It was from the surgeon and told her what she had lately mistrusted,—that there had never been the slightest chance of moving him, that she had been sent away as a child is banished from a painful scene, and that she had been beguiled as a child is beguiled. She did not resent the truth, she was too big to resent such a truth; but she felt freshly mournful, and the home that was to have been seemed to fade utterly out of her consciousness, leaving her with no desire to ever see it again.
But there was another sheet within the envelope. She took that out, too. It was printed—in a hand that trembled. Her heart contracted as she saw the crooked lines,—so much ran deep between them.
Alva:—I have struggled. I shall not give up. I believe sometimes God has given a new body to serve a needed end. I cannot go. I must come back. Not for your sake. But for theirs—for the sake of those who will never know. If I come, help me again. For you and for me help is the only bond. I am not sure that there is any other that endures. Not in this present world of ours.