THE DARKNESS BEFORE

When Lassie came back from that last walk to the Falls she went straight up to Alva's room, and found her lying on the bed, the faint light from the shaded window throwing a deep shadow upon her face and form. Her head and shoulders were a little propped up against the pillows, and her hands were clasped on her bosom instead of behind her head, as was her favorite position.

Lassie's eyes were shining and her heart was very full and happy with the bubbling joy of that bubbling joyous emotion which Youth in its ingenuous innocence, ignorance, and arrogance has elected to call "love." It had come very vividly to both herself and Ingram during their walk, and instead of discussing Alva's affairs, they had suddenly become more than ever keenly alive to their own. Ingram, conscious of good looks, good health, and a good income, had for some time faced the position very cheerfully and gratefully; but Lassie, conscious of no personal advantages at all equalling those pertaining to her demigod, was, of course, thrilled through and through. Certainly these be topsy-turvy days for chivalric standards, but perhaps a century later, people will quote with reverence from the stories of grandmother's experiences before grandpapa was finally secured.

Lassie was very happy. She felt sure that nothing so ideally beautiful and altogether remarkable as Ingram's speeches during the walk had ever been heard before. She was not engaged, but she was "as good as engaged." And before her dÉbut, too. Fancy the faces of the girls when she really announced it! She would be the first one of the whole set to be married! Life was nothing but vistas of joy. Ingram was absolutely going to take the same train that she did at six o'clock, and go two hours of the way with her. Oh!

And now she was back in Alva's room, standing at the bedside, looking down at her friend. Something in the other's lax position made her look more closely even in the semi-darkness.

"Your head is worse?" she asked, startled.

"No, dear," said Alva, and her voice rang strangely—like a low toned bell, chiming afar.

"Something has happened?"

"Yes, dear."

"Oh—" the young girl could not put the question.

Alva did not speak. Lassie felt her heart freezing harder every instant. It was always so, when one came within the circle of that greater existence. Part of the attraction of Ingram was that he was just so ordinarily human. Alva was never ordinary, and scarcely ever human. Oh, dear! Her lovely dream seemed suddenly slipping out to sea before this tremendous, quiet storm of resistless stress!

"You have had a letter?" she whispered timidly, at last.

"Yes, dear, and he is dead." Alva spoke quite steadily.

"Dead!"

"I had a letter from his friend—his doctor—the one who wrote for him. You were right in what you thought. He died last night, in the night, while I slept. He was unconscious when he died. He struggled first and suffered—while I was struggling and suffering, you remember—and then he grew still when I grew still, and then when I slept he slept and began to die, and while I still slept he died—that is—his body died."

Lassie sank down upon the bed beside her, took the clasped hands into her own, and burst into bitter tears, hiding her face in the four hands at once.

After a little Alva spoke again, still in the same low, ringing voice.

"It came so close that I did believe that it would be, but there are some dreams that may not be realized on earth. Mine was such a one."

Lassie lifted her head to look into her face; she was sufficiently accustomed to the dim light by this time to be able to see distinctly the pure and noble outlines, the large, tragic eyes. She felt herself crushed into speechlessness.

"He wrote me himself," Alva continued presently; "just the merest word. I read it. I read it twice. Then I sat still for a long, long time. Lassie," she pressed the girl's hands warmly, "it was good to think that I had shown my happiness to you, for no one will ever know that I was ever happy, now. Oh, it was so long that I sat here, thinking. I told you once, how, in the first day of my supreme joy, I went into the cathedral near the hospital and thanked God on my knees for all the past and made a vow to accept with courage all that might come to me, in return for that joy. I thought, as I prayed, that I'd go forth and gladly starve and freeze till I died, if it were the purchase price of such happiness. I am remembering that hour. I will not cry out, nor weep, nor say one word. I have had him; we shall be one again. My desire has always been only to be worthy him—to be worthy him—to be worthy him! And now I have the chance to prove myself so; and I will not fail,—though the heart in my body burst, my spirit will not fail."

Lassie was still, overawed.

"I had to search to be thankful at first," Alva went on, "but now I have found something to be very thankful for. I am so glad that it came before I had told my mother. She is spared. She will never know. Every one is spared except him and me, and we are strong—we can endure. We have endured. We can endure again."

"If you only could have gone and been with him!" wailed the girl, softly.

"Oh, how I have wished that! You don't know how I have wished that! It has been sweeping through me and rending me cruelly, but he did not wish it, or he would have sent for me. And I have tried never even to wish anything unless he wished it, too. You know how I have wished that I might have stayed there with him. But he begged me to go. They would not let me stay. I had to yield!"

"Shall you go as you planned, to-night?"

"No, dear, I want to stay here alone for three or four days, and then go home,—back to my duty to my parents, you know. I never meant to leave for long. Yes," she almost whispered, "I must hurry back home, forever."

"Never to return here?"

"I think, never. I cannot see how or why I should return."

Lassie's lips quivered. "And your house?" she whispered.

A long, sad breath passed over lips that did not quiver. "Ah, yes, my house," she answered softly; "I thought of going to it this afternoon, and then I could not. Dear little home nest,—there are nothing but happy thoughts there; all my best is there—unselfish dreams, devoted hopes, great aims, longings to make some one and every one glad."

She paused. Lassie leaned close.

"May I lie down beside you, Alva, and put my arms around you and hold you tightly, dear? It will be good-by, for you want me to go just the same, I know."

"Yes, dear, you must go. What time is it?"

"It's over an hour till the train. Let me hold you close, dear, I—I love you."

"Yes, Lassie, come; I'll be glad to have you. Your head will lie on my arm, and I shall like to draw you near as I might have drawn a little child, had life fallen out differently long ago."

Lassie crept up on the bed, clasped her arms about her and tried not to weep.

"You don't mind my talking of him, do you?" the woman asked, presently. "You know after you go I shall never have any one again;" her voice wailed desolate with the last words so that its very sound caused Lassie's sobs to renew their force.

"I don't mind anything that you want to do, Alva."

"It's storming in upon me what life was to have been. What does the world know of love? Love is something too great to comprehend. It costs blood and years and tears. It goes so deep that the very joy in it cuts like a knife. I knew that I was only to have had him a few weeks, that I should have to compress all that I felt for him into them. But what those few weeks would have meant! When to be quiet together was in itself all that we asked! When we should have had a library and a piano, and the gorge to look out over, and one another to talk to,—to be with!" She stopped—her breath failed her.

There was a pause, as if to let the tide of grief sweep up and out again.

"Oh, Lassie, we had waited so long and hopelessly," she went on finally, her sentences short and tense and broken. "I tried to be so patient. I tried so hard to do well with the bit of life dealt out to me. As much as I could, I followed in his path in the giving of my all to others and neither asking nor expecting for myself. I hoped nothing for us—nothing for us! And then I had to see him stretched out—crushed—maimed, and I had to live still, and smile into his eyes, and tell him that even that was more than I had deserved. And then came our dream—our precious dream—the promise of those few, sweet, perfect days! Oh, but why should I repine? I have been so happy. I have contemplated the heights, even if it was not given me to reach them."

There was another pause.

"Lassie, it is not my soul that is wailing; my soul is very strong and resolute. He left work undone and even this afternoon it came to me that that work was part of him and that in doing it I should do for him. If we could suffer annihilation in a good cause, we should survive in the cause. If I carry forward all that he held in heart, I shall continue to be one with him. I know it. I longed unutterably to be with him, to make his pain lighter, to share his hours at the last. I thought a great deal of our happiness, but I thought also of what he would teach me to do for the world. Oh, I can believe that he suffered last night. It was only the edge of the storm that brushed over me, but I know how I suffered. There are some men who cannot die, who are too sorely needed; and he was such a one. He did not want to leave his work."

She stopped, and Lassie felt the tide of grief rise full and ebb again.

"It wasn't love or marriage as the world understands it; but it was the supreme self sacrifice that my spirit cried for in consecration. I thought that I was to be greatly fitted for a great work."

Lassie whispered: "Perhaps you have been fitted."

"No. No! Heaven ordained that the sacrifice and the consecration should be greater than I had ever imagined. It ordained that he should pass away alone and leave me alone, too; and now it is left me to work out a new salvation. I try not to doubt, I do trust God completely. But I cannot see why—or how! Not yet. But, at any rate, the worst for me is come. I have touched bottom. Battle for me is past."

Then she rose from the bed, went to the window and let up the shade. The night of Nature's world, always full of potency, calmed her suddenly into another mood.

"It is snowing," she exclaimed; "that means that rain is falling on new-made graves." She came back from the window. "Lassie," she said, "my heart is broken, my future is crushed, and yet I feel so strong! It floods me fresh. I see now that wherever his soul passed last night, it must have passed in triumph—gone on to further work. I shall work, too. That is the legacy his letter left me—an intense desire to serve. How small I am, how great God is; all life's misery results from setting our little wills in opposition to His plan for our best. It is borne in upon me clearly; I recognize the fact well. Now when I leave this room next time and forever henceforth, so long as I live, I am willing with my whole soul to do whatever work there is laid out for me. I feel in my heart that no stumbling or even ridicule for stumbling can ever again cause me to falter. I have found Truth. I will be strong."

Lassie looked at her in wonder. The white look of unearthly radiance which men once knew as "Ecstasy" was indeed on her face now—on her pale, sad, worn face, filling it with a glow of wondrous resolution.

"Oh, Alva!" the girl exclaimed, and then, even as the exclamation left her lips, she was conscious of an upleaping of warm, human joy to think of the six o'clock train and Ingram's companionship. The higher plane was very high above her yet.

Alva pressed her hands to her eyes and face. "That was like a lightning flash, dear," she said; "oh, if I may only live by its light forever after. If only!" There was a brief silence; then,—

"I must pick up my things, I guess," the girl suggested.

"Yes, dear," Alva tried to smile; "yes, you must pick up your things. That's what life here means."

Lassie slipped into her own room. She was glad that Alva was quiet and that she could smile upon her again; it was truly what life meant to her. She was very little yet and very blind, and the angels might have been smiling meaningly and mercifully at one another over her pretty, childish head that hour.

But over Alva the Spirits of Heaven might have wept,—as they weep for any on earth who fancy that they have sounded either the depths or the heights of any design wrought out above.

Above is so far above, and we and all our hopes and joys and sorrows are so far beneath. So far beneath that radiant serenity which moves eternally forward in its fulfilling of the Divine Plan. His Divine Plan for the uplifting of all that He has made.