"Written Down."

Hastings Standard, Issue 77, 25 July 1896, Page 4

"Written Down."

A LOVE STORY

Thry hnd both tasted of the world's loin lint - and found in it an ache almost insupportable. That was beyond the hills of many yesterdays and before they had seen each other's faces. Between restlessness and recklessness they had set out to try if loneliness in a strange country had fewer heart-pangs than in one familiar. And they both sailed south on the same ship. Then it was that they first saw each other, and it seemed to both from that day that they had lived and been lonely and come away for this one thing only. They were neither of them people whom the other passengers noticed much. She was a small, slender thing, with eyes neither blue nor gray, but something perfect between, an unsymmetrical mouth and nose, and hands that had a nervous clinging way about them. He was sun-tanned, very thin, about 85 years old, and his clothes were quite noticeably shabby. Little discoveries about each other were continually going home to their hearts—-neither of them was seasick. The both took salt with their porridge instead of sugar. They were both fond of bacon for breakfast and marmalade for tea. Even.- night for a space they trod the vessel's deck, alone, and then, leaning against the side, gazed through the star-dust into the worlds beyond, or into the seadepths to mysteries and fancies and longings—somewhere. Once —it was at breakfast she pushed away her cup, and his eyebrows went up. " Neither hot nor cold," she explained, smiling. "Like the church of the Laodicean s." he said. >fter that lip-lan-guage came to them. He learned that she had just come away from the grave of her father, and she that the only home in the world to which thought of his could fly was in Sussex churchyard, where his young sister slept. Then the sympathetic cord around them tightened. She told him she was a governess, and was going out to Australia because there were so few of them there, and London was quite full. And he told her that he was a clerk and was going to Australia because he had heard the beginning of the way into the world lay there. After that they began steadily to forget that they had been lonely. There was a beauty in the thought that they two stood on the steps of the world with never a third to watch or know. It raised them over the shouldi'is of those other happy ones of many loves. At I'-t. in the silence of one nighttime. when the waves were slushing about this, their one home, they stopped together to gather in the harvest of all those sweet, slow, magnetic days, to feel how perfect a plan was this of the great Piece-mover's, and to wonder how all the world-atoms, since first there was light, had moved so grandly on their paths that these their two ways should falls so faultlessly together at last. " I might have taken another boat," she said, " or you might never have come out at all." But his eyes were serene. " It was meant to be," he said. " From the beginning of the world God meant there should be a You and a Me. It was written down. Think what a difference it would have made in the plans of the whole world if we had not loved each other! Some one else would have loved you. You would have loved some one else. One might as well imagine how the world would get on without the moon." For a while they looked at life just as it came to them day by day. Then their perspective grew longer. They gazed as far forward as a year. " By that time," he said, " I shall have the little home all ready. There will be a sofa and two armchairs. And there must be a little garden for you to run through to meet me in the evenings. Do you see it all ?" She saw through a rosy haze, even to an antimacassar over the armchair. " If it is in the plans of the world that we are to live in that little house in a year," she said, " I suppose we shall. It would upset all things if wo do not. But suppose it is written down that we do not for two years '?" He folded his arms round her and nodded over the water. " I am strong," he said, " and where we are going there is work for everyone. Can you wait a year?" But she laughed at a year, and told him, in a stumbling, simple way with her lips and eyes, that she could wait till all the years of her life should be gathered into a sheaf and there was no longer any days to be lived—if he could wait, too. A year dropped away, slowly, halt- j ingly, as if every now and then it were \ hesitating whether not to run back a lew months and start quite young again. But it would have altered the plan of things too much, so it just kept dragging on. In Sydney there was a little nursery governess. She had an attic bedroom and a schoolroom on the third story. She taught the children every day, and bathe them every night. On Sundays she went to church twice, and every Tuesday and Saturday afternoon she gave up to darning socks. She did not grumble, but on the night of her birthday she made an entry in her diary to "the effect that she missed the ideality of life, some- . She had a bundle of letters and she tfcd them up with blue ribbon. Many people who have " missed the ideal " do the same. They were all in the same hand-writing and all dated from a New South Wales inland town. All of them were tender and spoke of life in the kindly, patient terms of one not long triad. Most of them were philosud—" So, after all, I

| in the Plan of things, little Waiter, we are not to rent that house this year. I had net thought it would be. so long as next year till our move. But don't loo!; backwards. We are only down that Ave may get up." His letters cheered Iter wonderfully. After one such .-Le had heart enough to have prj'g over all the baskets of socks in Sydney. But three more years fled. She was a nursery governess still and she received £'26 a year. On her last birthday she had written in her diary that she could not understand life. But she drew much strength every morning Jrom a small volume of Marcus Aurelius. " If one thinks one is happy, cne is happy," she would say, and be surprised that life and happiness could be so simple. But she could not make that one other happy by merely imagining that he was, so she shut her eyes to such possibilities for herself. He wrote now : "At times I cannot help wondering at the seeming improvidence of Providence. There i.s so much work in the world I could do well, and yet it misses me, or I miss it." Then he was receiving £75 a year, for every hour of his life from morning early till late. At Eastertime he took a second-class holiday excursion ticket and travelled a whole night through to see her. To her quick eyes he looked different —older. There were many lines on his face. His face was thinner. She did a swift calculation—he was almost 40, and she was 25. She gave him weak tea in the school-room, and thick bread-and-butter. " You are not altered," he said to her ; " only your eyes are grown older. Dear God, for a room like this, and a warm hearth-stone by which to set you !" She remembered once how lie had wished for the little house and garden. She had been living up to that for four years. Thenceforth she thought only of a one-roomed home with a chimney-corner. " They have 15 rooms in this house," she said, " and this is the ugliest and least liked, I think. They would be surprised if they heard you." He went away again, and the dust of many to-days dropped into their lives but could not cover the thought of that brief holiday. She was a woman with a wonderful capacity for details, and here lay much of her contentment. For four years now she had studied advertisements telling of " small" or "genteel" suburban houses. For four years her charges had taken frequent constitutionals where such houses mostly were, and she had eyed them half-affec-tionately, half shamefacedly. They were, every one of them, palaces of the earth to her. Now, her imagination dealt in rooms. There was ideality almost in the limitation. No hall to wander in, no back-room to smoke or study in. It was like walking " under one umbrella " instead of in a tarpaulined street. She had red curtains at the windows, a shelf for his books, a resting-place for his pipe. But the - years dragged on—three more of them. Now he wrote, " There was a time when I thought of all the opportunities in life for each man. Now I think of all the men in life for each opportunity." : She remembered then that he was more than 40; recalled the lines on his face, the bend of his shoulders, the little that was not gray of his hair. After her 29th birthday, she wrote in her diary, " Time is taking from us what Eternity can never pay back. Once the thought hurt that we could never be young together in life. Now there is a fear that presses harder. We shall never be old together. We shall live no life together at all—but letterlife !" She put away her bright ribbons—never very many. She was so eager to stand there at his hand —30 if he was 30, 40 if he was 40, 50 when he should be 50. A strangely progressive conservative piece of loving womanhood. Another Easter-time he took a second-class single ticket to Sydney, and travelled through the night to see her. She gave him weak tea, in the schoolroom, once more, and thick bread and "butter. He watched her hands as she pushed the darning away, her eyes with their home-look in them. " The waiting has tired you, little woman," he said, " but we won't look backward too much. Do you remember when I longed for a room like this to put you in "?" She wondered then if he had outlived that wish. She said, " I have been here ten years, but am leaving now. The schoolroom party is going to school." " That is well," he said, watching her. "It is written down that we be married next week. We must not disturb the scheme of things even for your trousseau." And the glory of that minute was such that eternity could hold no greater, though he was 45 and she was 80. They were married the next week. He had £l3O a year, and his life was not insured. But found a little house with a scrap of a 'garden in front, and they put into it two armchairs and a sofa. The morning after the wedding she went down the path to the gate, holding on to his arm. And a neighbor smiled to see him kiss her so tenderly. For the prettiness had gone from her face, and his hair was gray. " We've beaten old Time at last," he said ; " the best of all life is the growing old together, little comrade." And he went away into the city dust and noise. In the evening she ran down the path to meet him, as they had settled it all so comfortably ten years before. Last evening they had hardly finished being young, they were so glad and gay. Tonight they were to start to grow old together. The homeliness o! the

thought brought the song to her lips. The neighbor who had smiled at the morning kiss came i:p. He told her that he had had news, hut she almost laughed at him. There was no bad news in the world for her now. Nothing but a saining, glorious good. She smiled at him gently. " Your husband," he said, has met with an accident. It was a lift—there was some bungling———" She gasped—" He is hurt "—and her face grew grey. But the neighbour shook his head. "He is—dead," he said, kindly, judging the sharpest hurt should fall first. And so they did not even grow old together. But perhaps that was all Written Down, too. —Lilian Turner.