Southern Lights and Shadows Part 4

She was delayed in her return, growing more and more anxious at the thought of his anxiety. When she boarded the south-bound train, she went down the aisle, looking for a seat, with her short steps hurried as if it would get her home sooner.

Mrs. Grey leaned over and motioned her, and as she sat down, looked critically at the bright eyes and pink cheeks. "You certainly do look well nowadays, Bessie."

Doubtless Bessie's color was partly excitement and rush.

"Oh, I'm well," absently.

"Funny kind of dyspepsia, wasn't it, to be cured by eating around, the way you have to do."

"Oh, dyspepsia!" The nettles brought back her attention. People needn't belittle her troubles! "I still have that dyspepsia. But if you had to be as busy as I, Mrs. Grey, you'd know that there are times when nothing but sudden death can interfere." Even Mrs. Grey's p.r.i.c.kings, however, were washed over to-day by Balm of Gilead. "Still, it has come to something. The company has given me Cincinnati for my territory."

"Really?" Not that Mrs. Grey doubted her veracity. "Well, you always did succeed at anything you put your hand to. It has been the most surprising thing! You know, I tell everybody, Bessie, that you deserve all the credit in the world for the way you have taken hold." Bessie stiffened; neither need they sympathize too much! "A girl brought up as you were, who always had the best of everything." _The best of everything!_ The familiar phrase was like a bell, sending wave after wave of memory singing through Bessie's mind. "And still I never saw any one to whom the wind has been so tempered as to you: when you were sick you could afford it, and now that it's inconvenient--Things always did seem to work smoother with you, and come out better, than with any of the rest of us."

Bessie sat looking at her, and, in the speech, saw her own petulance of a moment before--any number of her own speeches, in fact, inverted, as things are in a gla.s.s. Indeed, Mrs. Grey had held up a reflector. Bessie had met herself. And she saw herself, as in a mirror-maze, from all angles, down diminis.h.i.+ng perspectives, from the woman she was to the girl she had been.

She had been quite unconscious of the slow transformation in her habits of thought. It is so in life. One toils up the thickly wooded hillside, intent only on the footing, and comes suddenly on a high clearing, overlooking valley and path, defining a new horizon.

"I never had the best of everything, Mrs. Grey," she said. "n.o.body has.

Every life and every situation in life has its bad conditions--and its good ones. I haven't had any more happiness--nor trouble than most people. It strikes me things are pretty equally divided. We only think they aren't when we don't know all about it. We see the surface of other people's lives, not their private drawbacks or compensations. There are always both.

But other people's troubles are so much easier to bear than our own, their good luck so much less deserved and qualified! With all I had as a girl I didn't have contentment. And now, with all I lack, I don't know any one with whom I'd change places."

What was the use with Mrs. Grey?

But alone, the thought kept widening ring after ring: How little choice there was of conditions in life; how fortune tends to seek its level; how one man has the meat and another the appet.i.te; and another, without either, can find in the fact the flavor of a joke or chew the cud of reflection over it. Of the three, Bessie thought she would rather be the one with the disposition. But that could be cultivated. Look at hers! Circ.u.mstances had started it in a sort of aside, but she would take the hint.

The cure for dissatisfaction was to recognize one's balance of good.

Guy was watching for her at the window. She was half conscious that he looked unusually haggard, but there were so many other thoughts at sight of him that they washed over the first.

She swung her reticule. "It's all right!" and she ran up the walk, a most feminine swirl of progress. She got to him breathless. "I've found a house that will give you its German correspondence to translate and write, and it won't be so much but that you can do it as you're able, within reason. Now, sir!"

For a minute it seemed as if Guy's whole body was alive. The weak and shaken invalid still had something of unconquerable boyishness in the lift of his head and the light of his eyes. "Good! That will do for a start."

The old spirit, to which hers always answered. If she didn't believe he would actually do something worth while in the end! Then promptly, of old habit, he thought of her. "Bibi! You took your time for that."

"Not all of it, in good sooth, fair lord." She spread out her skirts, lady-come-to-see fas.h.i.+on, and strutted across the room. "Mrs. Osbourne has a new 'job' and a 'raise.'" (Incidentally Mrs. Osbourne had never before been so advanced in her language.)

"Bully for you!" he shouted, so genuinely that she ran back to him and shook and hugged his shoulders. How she _liked_ him!

"What a thorough girl you are, Bibi!"

"Oh, and to-day I've been laughing at myself; as silly as I used to be, counting so much on a mere change of circ.u.mstances. Of course something unpleasant will develop there too. But at least the harness will rub in a different place. On the whole, it will be better. Guy, do you know, I have just gotten rid of envy and discontent, and that without endangering ambition. I'll give you the charm; it's a sort of cabalistic _spell_--the four P's--Occu_p_ation, Res_p_onsibility, _P_urpose, and _P_hilosophy."

"Yes," he said, "the most worth-while thing in life is to feel you are accomplis.h.i.+ng something--doing your work well and getting proportionate returns."

The tone touched her. "Poor old Guy!" so generously congratulatory of her flaunted advantages. How stupid she was! Poor Guy! her pretty creed scattered at a breath like a dead dandelion-ball. Envy she had disposed of, but what about pity? What had he to make up? "The idea of my talking of happiness, with you caged here!"

"Perhaps that was the point of it all," he said, "to give you your chance."

"That would be a beautifully humble thing for me to think, now wouldn't it?" Yet she had once complained that the point of it all was to interfere with her. "And so sweetly generous. Your chance being--?"

"To serve as a means of grace to you?" He smiled. "I am glad to be of some use--and honored to be of that one!" he hurried to add, elaborately humorous.

But what she was noticing was the flagging effort of his vivacity. Her half-submerged first impression of him was coming to the surface: he did look unusually haggard. "You haven't been good while I was away. Now don't tell stories. Don't I know you? No more storms, Guy!" she warned.

His eye evaded hers. "I am seriously questioning whether you ought to make this change. All your friends are here."

"Oh, as to that! There might be advantages in working among strangers. Mrs.

Grey fairly puts herself out to let me understand that she is a friend in need!" She reined herself up, recollecting, but too late. "Oh, Guy, don't mind so for me. Why, the South is full of women doing what I am, only so many of them are doing it--without--the Guys who never came back!"

"Lucky dogs!" subterraneously. Then, seeing her apprehensive of a second flare-up of that volcanic fire: "So gentlemanly of them, too, Bibi. How can those few years of love be worth a life of this to you?"

"Those few years? why, Guy! of love? Is that how _you_ feel?" Her eyes filled; her whole face quivered. "Oh, Guy--be willing for my sake. I never knew what love could mean until lately."

His grasp hurt her knuckles. "Yes, dear, I have seen. It's very sweet. It's the mother in you, Bibi, and my helplessness. Of course! What could a woman _love_ in a dependent, half-corpse of a no-man?"

For a moment she was too surprised to speak. She stared at him. "What a notion! and it isn't true! You never were any more a man than you've been through these two dreadful years." She sounded fairly indignant. "And for my part, I never appreciated what you were half as much."

"Love doesn't begin with a _P_," he remarked to the opposite wall.

"But what do you suppose the _purpose_ was?"

"Love?"

"More. _You_."

"You never told me." That strange voice and averted face!

"How should I fancy you wouldn't know? I had never thought it out myself until just now. It has simply been going on from day to day, as natural and quiet as growing--" A bewildering illumination was spreading in her mind.

"Look here, young man"--she forced his face around to see it,--"what goblins have you been hatching in the night-watches?" The raillery broke.

"Dear, is that what has been troubling you? Is there anything else?"

He looked at her now. "Anything else trouble me, if I really have you, and a chance to do a little something for you?"

It was their apotheosis. They had never known a moment equal to it before; could never know just another such again. In a very deep way it was the first kiss of love for them both.

Bessie came back to herself with that sense of arriving, of having been infinitely away, with which one drops from abstraction.

Where had they been in that state of absent mind?

It was as if they had met out of time, s.p.a.ce, matter.... And as she thought of his words, in the light of his eyes, pity too was qualified, and that without endangering helpfulness. He, too, had his balance of good. Yes, things squared in the end.

Her creed was quick. The scattered dandelion seed sprouted all around her.

Pap Overholt