[CHAPTER XLVI.]
WHAT THEY ALL SAID ABOUT IT.
And so Jim Fellows and Alice Van Arsdel were engaged at last. The reader who has cared to follow the workings of that young lady's mind has doubtless seen from the first that she was on the straight highway to such a result.
Intimate friendship—what the French call "camaraderie"—is, in fact, the healthiest and the best commencement of the love that is needed in married life; because it is more like what the staple of married life must at last come to. It gives opportunity for the knowledge of all those minor phases of character under which a married couple must at last see each other.
Alice and Jim had been side by side in many an every-day undress rehearsal. They had laughed and frolicked together like two children; they had known each other's secrets; they had had their little miffs and tiffs, and had gotten over them; but, through all, there had been a steady increase on Jim's part of that deeper feeling which makes a woman the ideal guide and governor and the external conscience of life. But his habit of jesting, and of talking along the line of his most serious feelings in language running between joke and earnest, had prevented the pathos and the power of what was really deepest in him from making itself felt. There wanted something to call forth the expression of the deep manly feeling that lay at the bottom of his heart. There wanted, on her part, something to change friendship to a warmer feeling. Those few dreadful moments, when they stood under the cloud of a sudden and frightful danger, did more to reveal to them how much they were to each other than years of ordinary acquaintance. It was as if they had crossed the river of death together, and saw each other in their higher natures. Do we not all remember how suffering and danger will bring out in well-known faces a deep and spiritual expression never there before? It was a marked change in the faces of our boys who went to the recent war. Looking in a photograph book, one sees first the smooth lines of a boyish face indicating nothing more than a boy's experience, but, as he turns the following pages, he sees the same face, after suffering and danger and death have called up the strength of the inner man, and imparted a higher and more spiritual expression to the countenance.
The sudden nearness into which they had come to the ever possible tragedy that underlies human life, had given a deep and solemn tenderness to their affection. It was a baptism into the love which is stronger than death. Alice felt her whole heart going out, without a fear or a doubt, in return for the true love that she felt was ready to die for her.
Those few first days that they spent mostly in each other's society, were full of the real, deep, enthusiastic tenderness of that understanding of each other which had suddenly arisen between them.
So, to her confidential female correspondent—the one who had always held her promise to be the first recipient of the news of her engagement—she wrote as follows:
"Yes, dear Belle, I have to tell you at last that I am engaged—engaged, with all my heart and soul, to Jim Fellows. I see your wonder, I hear you saying, 'You said it never was to be; that there never would be anything in it.' Well, dear Belle, when I said that I thought it; but it seems I didn't know myself or him. But Eva has told you of the dreadful danger I ran; the shock to my nerves, the horror, the fright, were something I never shall forget. By God's mercy he saved my life, and I saw and felt at that time how dear I was to him, and how much he was willing to suffer for me. The poor fellow is not yet fully recovered, and I cannot recall that sudden fright without being almost faint. I cared a good deal for him before, and knew he cared for me; but this dreadful shock revealed us to each other as we had never known each other before. I am perfectly settled now and have not a doubt. There is all the seriousness and all the depth that is in me in the promise I have at last given him.
"Jim is not rich, but he has just obtained a good position as one of the leading editors of the Forum, enough to make it prudent for him to think of having a home of his own; and I thank God for the reverses of fortune that have taught me how to be a helpful and sensible wife. We don't either of us care for show or fashion, but mean to have another fireside like Eva's. Exactly when this thing is to be, is not yet settled; but you shall have due notice to get your bridesmaid's dress ready."
So wrote Alice to her bridesmaid that was to be. Meanwhile, the declared engagement went its way, traveling through the circle, making everywhere its sensation.