Chapter 4

"I--I can't tell."

"You told the King."

"He seemed to need it so."

"Don't I need it?"

"I--I can't tell."

He seemed discouraged, and as if he did not know what next to say. They strolled in silence over to where she had been standing the night before when the King spoke to her. From within the great house came the entrancingly sweet song of a world-famous soprano engaged to pour her liquid notes before the King.

Mary Alice stood very still, drinking it in. When it ceased, she stole a look up at the bronzed face beside her; the light from a window in her far wing of the house fell full on that rugged face, and it looked very stern but also very sad. Mary Alice's heart, which had been exultant only a short while ago, began suddenly--in one of those strange revulsions which all hearts know--to ache indefinably. This hour would probably be like those other brief hours in which he had shared her life. To-morrow, or next day, he would be gone; and forever and forever the memory of these moments on the terrace, with the stars overhead and that exquisite song in their ears, would be coming back to taunt her unbearably.

She made up her mind that before he went out of her life again, she would tell him the Secret; so that at least, wherever he went, however far from him the rest of her way through life might lie, they would always have that thought in common; and whenever it came to help him, as it must, he would think of her.

Timidly she laid a hand upon his arm. He had been far away, following the trail of long, long thoughts, and her touch recalled him sharply.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I--I want to tell you the Secret."

"I don't think I want to know," he answered, rather shortly.

"Why--why----" Mary Alice faltered. Her lips quivered and her eyes began to fill. "I--I must go in," she said.

He put out a hand to detain her, but either she did not see it in the dark, or else she eluded it; for in a moment she was gone, across the terrace towards the lighted French windows of the rooms of state.

How she managed to get through those next few minutes until she could find the Duchess and ask to be excused, Mary Alice never knew. All of her that was capable of feeling or caring about anything seemed to have left this part of her that wore the Duchess's lovely white gown and scarf of silver tissue, and to be out on the dark terrace under the pale star beams, with a tall young man who spoke bitterly. This girl in the sheen of white and silver to whom the King was speaking kindly, was some one unreal and ghostly who acted like a real live girl, but was not.

As she hurried along the great corridors towards her room in the far wing, Mary Alice felt that she could hardly wait to get off these trappings of state; to get back to her old simple self again and bury her head in her pillow and cry and cry. She wished with all her heart for Godmother. But most of all she was sick for home, for Mother, and the unchanging sitting-room.

"He" had seemed disappointed to find her here. And she----? Well! she was sorry she had seen him. In New York, where she had not even known his name, he had seemed to belong to her, in a way, by right of their common sympathy and understanding. Here, among all these people who were his people, who delighted to honour him, he seemed completely lost to her. . . .

After a weary while, Mary Alice got up and sat by the window, looking across to the main part of the great house and wondering which of the darkened windows was his and if he had dismissed her easily from his mind and gone comfortably to sleep. The early dawn breeze was blowing from the sea when she dozed into a brief, dream-troubled sleep.

XII

AT OCEAN'S EDGE

Only the gardeners and a few of the house servants were about when she went down-stairs, through the still house and out on to the terraces, towards the sea. She had hung the white and silver finery carefully away, glad to feel so far divorced from it and all it represented as she did in her gown of unbleached linen crash which she and Godmother had made.

"I'm like Cinderella," she reminded herself as she buttoned the crash gown, "Godmother and all. Only, her prince loved her when he saw her in her finery, and mine despised me. I suppose he thought I was a silly little 'climber' trying to get out of the chimney-corner where I belong. But I think he owed it to me to let me explain."

There was a cove on the shore whose shelter she particularly loved; and she was going thither now, as these bitter reflections filled her mind. The tide was ebbing, but the thin, slowly-widening line of beach was wet and she had to pick her way carefully. She was so mindful of her steps and, under all her mindfulness, so conscious of the ache in her heart, that she was not noticing much else than the way to pick her steps; and she had rounded the rocky corner of the cove and was far into her favoured little nook, when she saw that it was occupied. A man sat back in its deepest shelter, looking out to sea. He started when he saw her, and she looked back as if calculating a flight.

"Please don't go," he begged, rising to greet her. "I was unpardonably rude to you last night and it has made me very wretched. You have no right to pardon me, but I hope you won't go away without letting me tell you how sorry I am."

"I--it was nothing--I pardon you--I think I understand," said Mary Alice, weakly.

He shook his head. "How could you--who are so gentle--understand?" Mary Alice looked about to protest, but he silenced her with a commanding gesture. "I've been so much with savages that I've grown savage in my own ways, it seems. But--it was like this: You taught me a game, once. It was a charming game and I was glad to learn. But we could play it only twice, and then I had to go away. And after I went I--I was always missing the game, always wanting to play again. At what you called 'candle-lightin' time,' wherever I was--in strange drawing-rooms, on rushing express trains, on ships plowing the seas, sitting about camp-fires in the wilderness--I'd always seem to see that little, dim-lit room in your New York, and you kneeling beside me on the hearth-rug, with the firelight on your face and hair. I've always been a lonely chap; but after that I was lonelier than ever; I used to think I couldn't bear it. Then last night--how shall I tell you how I felt? I've comforted myself, before, with the dream that some day I might get back to New York, to that little room at candle-lightin' time, and find you again, and forget everything in all the world but that you were there and I was with you, kneeling on the hearth-rug and making toast for tea. And when I saw you, all white and silver glitter, talking to the King--the dream was gone. There wasn't any girl on the hearth-rug in New York; there was only another girl of the kind that always makes me feel so strange, so ill at ease. It was only night before last that I learned I am to go away again directly, to the Far East, for the Government; and I was so happy, for I thought I'd go the westward way and see you again in New York. Then, suddenly, I realized that you were gone--not merely from New York, but from the dream. And I was surprised into rudeness. That's all. But _please_ forgive me!"

"I told you I understood," said Mary Alice, "and in a way I did--not that the--the dream as you call it meant so much to you, but that you were disappointed to find Cinderella come out of her chimney corner and talking to the King. I know that when we have a person definitely placed in our minds, we don't like to have him bob up suddenly in quite another quarter and in what seems like quite another character."

"Not if that person has been a kind of--of lode-star to you, and you have been steering your course by--by her," he said.

Mary Alice flushed. "Now I think you ought to let _me_ tell," she began, with downcast eyes. And so she told: how she had come there, and how she had stayed, like the little mouse under the Queen's chair, and how glad she was to have seen from a distance a little of this splendour and great society, and how gladder still to hang her borrowed white and silver away and be done with it and all it stood for and go back to her gown of crash and her chimney-corner place in life, "which I can now see," she added "is the place for dreams and sweet companionship."

"And when I get back, will you be there?" he cried, eagerly.

"When you get back I will be there," she promised.

After that they sat and talked for long and long, while the blue sea sparkled in the summer morning sun. When, at length, they rose to go, there was a light that never shone on land or sea in his face and in hers. There had been no further promises; only that one: "When you get back I will be there." But each heart understood the other, and she rejoiced to wait further declaration of his love until he could, according to his tender fancy, make it to her as in his "dream come true."

On the beach as they strolled back, it was her eyes--shining with a soft, new radiance--that first caught sight of something; her fancy that first grasped its significance. "Look!" she cried. In a bowl-like hollow of a big brown rock, the receding tide had left a little pool of sea-water. "It's left behind--this bit of the infinite, unresting sea!" she said. "Who knows what far, far shores it's come from? And now, here it is, and the great mother-sea's gone off and left it."

He smiled tenderly at her sweet whimsy. "The great mother-sea will come back for it at sundown," he reminded her.

"Yes--yes"--perhaps it was the coming separation between the two that made her voice quaver so sympathetically--"the Infinite always comes back for us. But we don't always remember that it will! This is such a little bit of the great sea. Maybe it never was left alone before; maybe it doesn't know how surely the waters that left it behind will come back for it this evening. Maybe it's--it's lonesome. I--I think I know how it feels."

"And I," he said.

"Next time you feel that way will you remember this brown rock and the tide that is so surely coming back tonight?" she asked.

"Indeed I will," he told her.

"And so will I," she went on. "And I'll try to remember, too, that perhaps it was put here for us to see and think of when we need encouragement--just as, I dare say, we are left behind, sometimes, so that other lonely folk may see us and be reminded that----" She stopped.

"That what?" he asked.

"Why!" she cried, "it's the Secret! The more you live, the more everything helps you to believe the Secret and to feel the brotherhood it brings."

He looked guilty. "I don't deserve to know the Secret," he said, "after last night. But----"

"But I am going to tell you," she declared, "so when you're far away from what you love most, or when you're with people you think are different from you and do not understand, you can remember----"

"Yes?" eagerly.

"Just remember--and you've no idea how it helps until you've tried--that _everybody's lonesome_. That's the Secret."

End of Project Gutenberg's Everybody's Lonesome, by Clara E. Laughlin