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