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"What nonsense. Of course I am not going to let you go alone."
She looked at him, buttoning the woolen cross-straps upon the cape as she did so; then she threw one corner back over her forearm and laid that hand on his, speaking decidedly.
"I'm going alone to meet her. You know what I asked you to promise when I came here a week ago, and you know that you gave me your word that you'd never interfere with me. Lassie is almost a stranger to you, and after you have learned to know her as a young lady there will come years for you two to talk together, but for me this meeting is something that I don't want to share. Don't say any more."
"But what will she think," he queried, "when she and you return together, and here sits a cavalier who didn't trouble himself to accompany one lady through the dark night to meet another's train?"
"She will think nothing, because she will not see the cavalier. When we come in, we shall go straight up-stairs."
Ingram more than smiled now. "Forgive me, Alva, but you and I are such old, such near, such dear friends, that I can say to you frankly, as I do say to you frankly over and over again, I don't understand you."
She laughed at that, and turned towards the door.
"I know – I know. I'm very queer, most awfully queer, in the eyes of every one. But I can tell you, as I tell them, that the worst of it is only for a little while. Just a few brief weeks and I shall be again, in most ways, a normal woman. A woman just like all the rest again," her back was towards him now, "in most thing – in most things."
"Never! You never have been like other women, – you've always been different from other women; you always will be."
"Have I? Shall I? Well, perhaps it's so. I'm rather glad of it. Most women are stupid, I think. Poor things!" she sighed.
He followed her as she moved towards the door, half-vexed, half-laughing:
"And men, Alva, and men. Are they all stupid in your eyes?"
She had her hand on the knob, and her great cape was gathered about her in heavy folds.
"Oh, Ronald," she said, looking into his look, "if you had any idea how fearfully stupid they seem to me. Often and often in the last three years. Even yourself. And ten years ago, when we were eighteen and twenty-five, I thought you so interesting, too."
He burst out laughing at that, – it wasn't in him to take her seriously enough to really mind her "ways" long.
"But what are we to do, when we are such mere ordinary creatures? And you know, my dear, that if the transcendentals like to muse on bridges by moonlight, some well-educated, commonplace individuals must build them the bridges first."
"Ah, there you go again. Yes, that's true. One should never forget that, of course. Particularly when talking with a man who uses a man's logic."
Then she opened the door, passed quickly into the hall, and let it close after her.
A lantern was resting on the floor outside, as if in waiting, and she picked it up and went at once into the night – a dark night through which the station lights and signals, red and yellow, sparkled brightly.
It was a brisk October air that filled that outer world, and the superabundant vitality of God's country came glinting, storming, down, up, and across earth, sky, and ether in between.
"This glorious night!" she thought prayerfully. "If one might only realize just all it means to be existing right now." She held the lantern behind her, and saw her shadow spread forth into space and fade away beyond. "The train isn't in the block yet," she thought, glancing at the signal; "that means minutes long to wait." Quickly she ran down the cinder-path beside the tracks, and entered the little station where a crowd of men lounged.
"Is the train on time to-night?" she asked one.
He shook his head. "Half an hour late," he said; "wreck on the road. Wheel off a car of thrashing-machines at Kent's."
"A whole half hour?"
"Well, I heard Joey Beall say they was making it up," said the man; "the station agent's gone home to supper, or you could ask him."
"Thank you very much," Alva said, and turned and went out.
The night appeared even fairer than before. Her eyes roamed widely. She thought for a minute of going back to the hotel and bidding Ingram come out with her, but then her own mood cried for relief from the labor of his companionship. We do not give our spirits credit for what they learn through adapting themselves to uncongenial companionship. Alva felt hers craved a rest. "I'll go out on the bridge and wait there," she told herself; "that will be the right thing, – to stand above the gorge and say my evening prayers."
So, stepping carefully over the switch impedimenta, she walked on, following the embankment that led out to the Long Bridge.
It is very long – that Long Bridge – and very high as well. I believe that the first bridge, the wooden one, was close to a world's wonder in its days. Even now the skilfully combined network of iron, steel, joist and cable seems a species of marvel, as it springs across the great cleft that the glacier sawed through several million layers of Devonian stratum several million years ago. I forget how many tons of metal went into its structure, but so intricate and delicately poised is the whole, that while trains roar forth upon its length and find no danger, yet does it echo quick and responsive to the light step of a lithe treading woman or even of the littlest child. On this night Alva, wrapped close in her cape, fared fearlessly out into the black beyond. The high braces and beams creaked all along its vanishing length, and she smiled at the sound. "I wonder if sometime, years from now, I shall return and walk out here again, and find the bridge crying me a welcome!" she thought; "I wonder!" A narrow, boarded way led to the right of the rails, and she was soon directly over the gorge. It was far too dark to see the ribbon of river hundreds and hundreds of feet below, or the steep picture-crevasse that encased the water's way. Beyond and below, to the left, she could have seen the windows of Ledgeville, had she turned that way, but she did not do so. It was the gorge that always claimed her, whether by day or by night, and now she leaned upon the steel guard and stared below. "I can see it plainly, even in the dark," she murmured to herself. "I can see every rock and eddy down there, the great curve of whirlpool, and the place where the water slides so smoothly off and then goes mad and foams below. It is all distinct to me. I remember the day that I first saw it, years ago, when – right here, where I stand to-night – he came to me for the first time, and we knew one another directly. And I shall see it just so plainly in the years to come, when it will never enter into my daily life any more, and yet will be the background of all my living."
She stood there for a long time, wrapped in the depth of her own thoughts. The shadows below seemed to shift and drift in their variations of intensity, and her eyes found rest in their profundity. "It's like drawing water out of a well when one is very thirsty," she said, at last, straightening herself and sighing; "it's unexplainable, but oh, it's so good, – the lesson of darkness and water and trees and sky. How grateful I am to be able to spell out a little in that primer!"
Then she clasped her hands and said a prayer, and as she finished the signal flashed the train's entrance within the block. That meant only two minutes until its arrival, and so she turned herself back at once. The crowd at the station had perceptibly increased and began now to surge forth upon the platform. Mrs. Dunstall was there and Pinkie, and Joey Beall and Mrs. Wiley, and Clay Wright Benton, and old Sammy Adams, and Lucia Cosby.
"Been out on the Bridge, I suppose?" Mrs. Dunstall said pleasantly to Alva.
"Yes; it's lovely to-night," the latter replied.
Every one smiled. They all felt that any one who would go out on the bridge on a pitch black night must be mildly insane, but they looked upon Alva as mildly insane anyhow. Mrs. Ray had many beside Ingram to uphold her opinion.
"It's her that bought the old Whittacker house and is putting a bath-tub in it," Joey Beall whispered to a man who was waiting to leave by the last train out.
"I know it," said the man; he was one of those men who never let Joey or anybody else feel that he had any advantage of him, in even the slightest way.
Just then the train charged madly in beside them.
Lassie, out on the Pullman's rear platform, preparatory to climbing down the steep steps the instant that it should be allowable, saw a well-known figure wrapped in a dark cloak, and gave a little cry of joy —
"Alva! Here I am – all safe."
Then she was enwrapped in the same dark cloak herself, for the space of one warm, all-embracing hug, her friend repeating over and over, "I'm so happy to have you – so happy to have you." And then they moved away through the little group of bystanders, and started up the cinder-path towards the hotel.
"I'm so happy to have you!" Alva exclaimed again, when they were alone. She did not even seem to know that she had said so before.
"It was so good of you to ask me! How did you come to think of it? And oh, Alva, what are you doing here, in this lonely place?"
"It will take me all your visit to properly answer those questions, dear; but I'll tell you this much at once. I asked you because I wanted to have you with me, and because I thought that you and I could help one another a great deal right now. And I am here, dear, because I am the happiest woman that the world has ever seen, and because the greatest happiness that the world has ever known is to be here in a few weeks."
Lassie stopped short, astonished.
Alva went on, laughing gaily: "Yes, it is so! Come on, – or you will stumble without my lantern to guide you. I'm going to tell you all about everything when we get alone in our room, but now, little girl, hurry, hurry. Don't stop behind."
So Lassie swallowed her astonishment for the time being, and followed.
The hotel stood on the crest of the hill above the station and the railway's path curved by it. They were there in a minute, and in another minute alone up-stairs in their room – or rather, rooms – for there were two bedrooms, opening one into the other.
"Why, how pretty you have made them," the young girl cried; "pictures, and a real live tea-table. And a work-stand! How cosy and dear! It's just as if you meant to live here always."
Her face glowed, as she absorbed the surprising charm of her new abode. One does not need to be very old or to have travelled very extensively to recognize some comforts as pleasingly surprising in the country.
Alva was hanging up her cloak, and now she came and began to undo the traveller's with a loving touch.
"Why, in one way I do mean to live here always, dear. I never am anywhere that I do not – in a certain sense – live there ever after. People and places never fade out of my life. Wherever I have once been is forever near and dear to me, so dear that I can't bear to remember anybody or anything there as ugly. The difference between a pretty room and an ugly one is only a little money and a few minutes, after all, and I'm beginning to learn to apply the same rule to people. It only takes a little to find something interesting about each. We'll be so happy here, Lassie; how we will talk and sew and drink tea in these two tiny rooms! I've been just feasting on the thought of it every minute since you wrote that you could come."
Lassie hugged her again. "I can't tell you how overjoyed I was to think of coming and having a whole fortnight of you to myself. Every one thought it was droll, my running off like this when I ought to be deep in preparations for my début, but mamma said that the rest and change would do me good. And I was so glad!"
Alva had gone to hang up the second cloak and now she turned, smiling her usual quiet sweet smile as she did so.
"It's a great thing for me to have you, dear; I haven't been lonely, but my life has been so happy here that I have felt selfish over keeping so much rare, sweet, unutterable joy all to myself, – I wanted to share it."
She seated herself on the side of the bed, and held out her hand in invitation, and Lassie accepted the invitation and went and perched beside her.
"Tell me all about it," she said, nestling childishly close; "how long have you been here anyway?"
"A week to-day."
"Only a week! Why, you wrote me a week ago."
"No, dear, six days ago."
"But you spoke as if you had been here ever so long then."
"Did I? It seemed to me that I had been here a long time, I suppose. Time doesn't go with me as regularly as it should, I believe. Some years are days, and the first day here was a year."
"And why are you here, Alva?"
"Oh, that's a long story."
"But tell it me, can't you?"
"Wait till to-morrow, dearest; wait until to-morrow, until you see my house."
"Your house!"
"I've bought a house here, – a dear little old Colonial dwelling hidden behind a high evergreen wall."
"A house here – in Ledge?"
"No, dear, not in Ledge – in Ledgeville. Across the bridge – "
"But when – "
"A week ago – the day I came."
"But why – "
Alva leaned her face down against the bright brown head.
"I wanted a home of my own, Lassie."
"But I thought that you couldn't leave your father and mother?"
"I can't, dear."
"Are they coming here to live?"
"No, dear."
"But I don't understand – "
"But you will to-morrow; I'll tell you everything to-morrow; I'd tell you to-night, only that I promised myself that we would go to a certain dear spot, and sit there alone in the woods while I told you."
"Why in the woods?"
"Ah, Lassie, because I love the woods; I've gotten so fond of woods, you don't know how fond; trees and grass have come to be such friends to me; I'll tell you about it all later. It's all part of the story."
"But why did you come here, Alva, – here of all places, where you don't know any one. For you don't know any one here, do you?"
"I know a man named Ronald Ingram here; he is the chief of the engineering party that is surveying for the dam."
"Is he an old friend?"
"Oh, yes, from my childhood."
Lassie turned quickly, her eyes shining:
"Alva, are you going to marry him?"
Her face was so bright and eager that something veiled the eyes of the other with tears as she answered:
"No, dear; he's nothing but a friend. I was looking for a house – a house in the wilderness – and he sent for me to come and see one here. And I came and saw it and bought it at once; I expect to see it in order in less than a fortnight."
"Then you're going to spend this winter here?"
Alva nodded. "Part of it at any rate."
"Alone?"
Alva shook her head.
Lassie's big eyes grew yet more big. "Do you mean – you don't mean – oh, what do you mean?"
She leaned forward, looking eagerly up into the other's face. "Alva, Alva, it isn't – it can't be – oh, then you are really – "
Two great tears rolled down that other woman's face. She simply bowed her head and said nothing.
Lassie stared speechless for a minute; then – "I'm so glad – so glad," she stammered, "so glad. And you'll tell me all about it to-morrow?"
"Yes, dear," Alva whispered, "I'll tell you all to-morrow. I'll be glad to tell it all to you. The truth is, Lassie, that I thought that I was strong enough to live these days alone, but I learned that I am weaker than I thought. You see how weak I am. I am weeping now, but they are tears of joy, believe me – they are tears of joy; I am the happiest and most blessed woman in the whole wide world. And yet, it is your coming that leads me to weep. I had to have some outlet, dear, some one to whom to speak. And I want to live, Lassie, and be strong, very, very strong – for God."
Lassie sat staring.
