CHAPTER XIV

“When I was a little girl I was more afraid of the setting sun than anything in the world and now I know why, for I was waiting always for this moment to come, when the sun, red and round and menacing, set right before my eyes and I stared hopelessly and hopelessly into it, not able to move. I had that awful leaden feeling of wanting to move and not being able to, as though I had been quilting through the ages and listening to stories about Roger, a strange and distorted Roger, who was as infinitely far away from me as the sun, and yet that I must go to him. I knew he was there at Oscar’s Leap, and I felt as if he called my soulout of my body and my body suffered. I tried to tell myself that there was to-morrow. I tried to tell myself how foolish I am to be so broken in two that I must needs go and keep my word with this man that I’ve seen only twice in my life; but though I have only seen him twice, I’ve known him always, as I said before. There’s no friend as dear and close as he in all the world. Oh, beautiful day that I can never have! The things that we would have said to each other to-night, we will say them another time, but not in the same way. This day is lost to me and I can never have it back again.”

She tells this of the time when next she saw him:—

“It seemed to me as though he leaped at me, there was such gladness in his face, although any one across the street would have said he just walked. He said, ‘Oh, Ellen, Ellen!’ as he did before; and then, ‘I’ve been waiting ever since I saw you’; and then his face turned stern, and he said, ‘Ellen, whydidn’t you come? Are you like other women; while I’ve been away did that candid, little girl learn to hide herself and learn to be false to her word?’ I thought I should cry; tears came to my eyes; it seemed so cruel that at the very first I should fail him this way, and he saw how I felt and said to me, ‘Oh! don’t, don’t, dear.’ And for a little while we walked on in silence. ‘Where were you, Ellen?’ he asked me; and he stood still in the path and said: ‘Ellen, are you a coward? What chained you there? Didn’t you hear me calling to you from the mountain? Couldn’t you get up and walk out of the room? If you had gone and hadn’t come back, what would have happened?’ And then he looked at me in a way I shall never forget, and what he said I shall remember all my days, for so I am going to live. ‘Ellen,’ he said, ‘you and I in our friendship are not to be tied down by rules. Remember, courage opens all doors. Ellen, I threw away many things to clear the road that led to you. Let us keep on that way, Ellen; put your hand in mine and promise. We’ll walk to each other straight out of the open door, without fear,won’t we?’ When I got home, I am so foolish and I am so weak and merit his friendship so little, that I cried. I don’t now understand why it was that I stayed this afternoon.”

In this brave and heady fashion Roger began his wooing of Ellen. Just as his whole pose, forward swinging head and relaxed body, gave one the impression of one ready to make a forward rush at any moment and seize what it wanted, so was the action of his spirit. It was like the wine of life to my Ellen. They saw the sunset on the mountain together every night that they could, and he came down the pasture that led down from the hill, through the meadow, to the brook back of the Paynes’ house. About these things I knew, for Ellen needed a confidante. Love overflowed her, and this was no secret, little love which she carried shyly, a secret lamp by which to light her way, which she hid as soon as any one appeared; but this was a flaming thing, as hard to hide as a comet. It swept her up and out and beyond herself into that over-heaven that only the pure in heart can feel when they are in love.

It was only a very short time when she stopped deluding herself with any terms like “her dear friend”; for one of Roger’s great strengths, then and always,—and I think to this day,—was knowing exactly what he wanted, and taking the shortest way to it, and to get his desire he was splendid and ruthless, and beware to any one who stood in his way.

It was about now that she began the habit of writing what she called “Never Sent Letters”; for could she have been with him all the hours of the day, the day would yet not have been long enough for her, and they saw one another what seemed to them only now and then. She writes to him at this time:—

“What did I do with my time before I met you? The days that I’ve spent before you came have no meaning now to me, and now that I am away from you the only preparation is for you. Everything that I see, everything that I think, all my thoughts, I save them up and give them to you, tiny flowers from the country of my heart. I wonder how it is that you can love me ever so little, who have solittle to give to you who have so much, and the only bitterness that I know is that what I have to give you is so worthless. You say that you love the joy of life in me. I wish I could make all the joy I feel shine out like a flame. I wish that I could distill all the love I have for you into one cup and then give it to you that you could drink, for entirely and utterly I am yours and have been yours always and forever, and so shall always be until I am changed over into some one else. When I’m with you I don’t dare tell you these things for fear that I should drown you in myself. Take my life and do what you like with it, for without you it is a thing valueless to me.”

In this way was Ellen’s touching prayer answered—that when she loved any one she wished only to give.

For the time being everything else was blotted out for her; she had this measureless, sky-wide joy of giving herself and all day long, and all the time her spirit went out toward him in incense. Her days were lost in contemplation of the wonder which had happened.

“From the moment I leave him, I walk toward him,” she wrote—and in the interim between she went on apparently with life as before, and this woke in her a still wonder.

“It is so very strange to be doing the same things that I was before, but all the work I do for my mother, every book I read, every word I speak has a meaning that it hadn’t. It is as though my ear were at the heart of Life and I heard Life beat.”

I saw a good deal of her and so did Alec. Alec at this time was preparing to work his way through college. Even Roger, who treated the village youth with the kindly tolerance of a splendid young prince, treated Alec as an equal. Alec, of course, gave him the whole-hearted admiration that generous lad does a man.

He guessed Alec’s infatuation for Ellen, for Roger was one of those experienced gentlemen who feel far off any emotional flurry and he had paired all of us before he had been in town ten days, and that without having appeared to observe us. So much was he the over-masculine that nothing of this kind could come near him without his senses registering it. He could mention John Seymore’s name in a way to make me blush and make me wish to stamp my foot on the ground with outraged modesty. And as for Edward Graham, it was on his account that Ellen first learned the terribleanguish that love may bring with it, and she wrote:—

“I have learned how foolish I am and how weak. We were both at Oscar’s Leap looking down into the river. ‘I walked up and down the earth, Ellen,’ he said, ‘looking for you, and as I looked from one person to another I said, “No, that’s not Ellen,” and then I didn’t know your name. I feel that it’s strange of me that I should not have guessed it.’ ‘Didn’t you ever care,’ I asked him, ‘for any one for a moment?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘how could I? Once in a while I saw some one that looked a little like you and there I waited longer.’ ‘But people must have cared for you,’ I said. ‘Not really; some people make a game of things like that, Ellen,’ he said. And already I felt deeply ashamed, that though I am so much younger I should have been so foolish as to think I cared once. ‘And you, Ellen; you waited the same way for me, didn’t you? The people who cared for you, you knew weren’t me.’—And then I told him about Edward. He didn’t speak for a long time, and then he said: ‘Isn’t thereanywhere on the earth a woman so young and so sheltered that she doesn’t pass from one hand to another and snatch at love, and give a piece of herself here and a piece of herself there? But, Ellen, I thought you were different’; and the deep and bitter shame that rushed over me then I don’t think I shall ever forget. He asked me a great many questions, and when he found that I was so little when it all happened he forgave me. It seems wonderful to me that he should have waited.”

It seems wonderful to me, as I read this little, pitiful account, that Ellen with her straight, clear mind should have let herself be so bemused as to feel that something was wrong which her own inner sense had told her was not wrong, honest as she had always been with herself. She lived for the first time by another person’s standard for her. She had given him that most precious thing of all, her inner judgment of herself. It seems still more wonderful to me that Roger should have told her such a story, for he had had love-affairs a-plenty; but I think he was utterly honest in this, and inhis honesty lay his danger and his charm. New emotions, as they came to him, came with so overwhelming a force that they wiped out not only the old love, but the memory of it, and when he had fallen in love with the wild sweetness of Ellen the other experiences in his life seemed to him only an unimportant outburst of passion. Yet for her he had the Turk’s jealousy: he wished not only for the utter virginity of the body, but also for the virginity of the spirit to such a point that he had to make-believe that there had been no Edward in her life at all before he could “forgive.”

They had both imagined that they could keep their love a secret for a while until Roger should have done a certain amount of work.

“I want my parents to love the idea of Ellen from the first,” he told me, “and I’ve been so at cross-purposes with them that I want to get back into their good graces a little before I tell them.” And, indeed, for Roger to have rushed away to a tardy acquiescence of his father’s will and to reappear immediately with a bride, we understood would strain the patience of an irascible parent. Just how muchwe learned from Miss Sarah, whom we heard saying:—

“The boy really seems to have turned over a definite new leaf. Lucia writes that she has learned that Roger has not even once written to that woman, whose entanglement with Roger worried them all so. She’s been ill ever since he left, and it serves her right, too. A married woman of her age should have had better sense than to have let herself be carried away by an attractive youngster. Young rascal!—to go off on such a tangent when he was apparently just on the brink of making an ideal marriage. He and Emmeline Glover, you know, had been sweethearts for a long time when he got into this scrape.”

In such a way were Ellen and I enabled to piece out Roger’s life, and it apparently did not occur to her to make any comparison between herself and Roger; for in very truth the desire he had for her had swept from him all his former life until it seemed so paltry and meaningless that it was no desire of concealment that had led him to speak so lightly of both of these women. They had walkedacross his conversation with Ellen. Ellen had heard Roger’s side of these stories.

“This married woman of whom they speak,” she explained to me, “was a good friend of his and very much older than himself, but people are so evil-minded in this world. As for Emmeline Glover, he called her a sweet, little, silver-gray cloud, and another time, a graceful shadow.”

We realized, however, that some time should elapse before Roger should tell his parents of his new love, or they would think it a weak passing interest and fail to treat it seriously.

When his interest in a person flagged, he lacked the coxcombry that makes a man afraid that his lack of interest has broken a woman’s heart. Quite the contrary, he was apt to despise them for having shown affection for so light a cause. In the world of the affections he related nothing that had happened to him before to anything which was happening; each experience was fresh to him, a rising tide that had no memory of any other tide before.

They might have gone on with their indiscreet friendship indefinitely, but they countedwithout themselves. They were caught up, both of them, in the fierce moving stream that sweeps and swings people out of the orbit that they have planned. It was impossible to both their natures, under the stress of what they were feeling, to wish to be guarded. The clandestine element in their friendship, slight though it was,—for Ellen’s little mother was taken into the secret, how could she leave her out; she needed to spill some of her happiness over on every one who came near her,—became very irksome.

Roger told me that he longed to go down Main Street shouting: “I love Ellen and am going to marry her; I love Ellen.” And he would say with his naughty, little-boy look: “Whenever I hear Aunt Sarah”—for with what Miss Sarah called his usual impudence, Roger called her “Aunt Sarah” from the beginning—“talking about what a good boy I am and ‘high time, too’”—and here he mimicked Miss Sarah’s manner—“I want to say to her: ‘Don’t you know, you blind old fossil, that I’m here because of Ellen—Ellen—Ellen—Ellen, the gentle, that you presume to correct;Ellen, the joyful; Ellen, the glad of heart?’ One of the strangest things in life to me is the impudence of Age, that dares to presume to touch so lovely a thing as Youth, and especially the youth of my Ellen. I can’t stand it much longer, Roberta. Think of my knowing and submitting to my father’s standing between Ellen and me. He’s a wise old man, but he’s forgotten things more useful than any that he knows, and I know them!”

And, indeed, he seemed the incarnation of the splendid and arrogant Knowledge of Youth, and my heart beat that so splendid a youth should be Ellen’s; they seemed then God-appointed for each other.

Roger’s direct mind found a way out of the difficulty. They were at their favorite meeting-place, up above Oscar’s Leap, and looking out at the river which had turned to flame in the sunset light. Ellen tells about it:—

“‘Oh, Ellen!’ he said, ‘why can’t you put your hand in mine and walk out into the sunset with me? I often wonder why, when people love each other as we do, why they letanything stand in their way.’ And then he said: ‘Ellen, why shouldn’t we—why shouldn’t we walk out together, just you and me to-night?’ And I said, ‘Very well.’ ‘Come, then,’ said he; and he held out his hand, and if I had put my hand in his he would have come with me, but I thought then he was joking. He said, ‘Ellen, I’m not joking; I mean it. Would I joke of such a thing? Why should we waste one moment of what is so beautiful? You belong to me, Ellen, don’t you?’ And then he put his arms around me and kissed me so that I could hardly breathe, and said, ‘Ellen, do you belong to me?’ I could only hide my head on his shoulder and whisper to him, ‘Yes’; and he said to me, ‘Will you come with me, then, bad girl?’ And I said, ‘How can I?’ ‘Think about it, Ellen,’ he said; ‘think about it. I’ll give you this week to think of it in, and at the end of the week it’s one thing or the other. You come with me and be married or I’ll tell them all. Am I one to tiptoe around through life, hiding because a cross-grained old man who happens to be my father will oppose at first something he will in the end be glad of?’He was such a bad little boy as he said this that I laughed, though he shouldn’t speak of his father this way, I am sure, even though it is his father’s fault. It is a terrible thing when any one as sweet and as full of the desire to love people as Roger shouldn’t have been understood by his parents at home. His mother is very sweet, but she has never known how to get at him. All the mutinous things in Roger, and all the times when he wasn’t adjusted to life, should have been loved away and understood away. He said to me: ‘I’ve been good only since I have known you, Ellen, because no one has loved me before.’ People have loved me all my life, and Roger, who is so much fuller and better than I, has not had my chance.”

Here we have the tragedy that all mothers must face. Their sons, that they have brought up so tenderly and whom they have anguished over, bring all their mistakes to the beloved to be wept over. If you have worn a callous place in his spirit, the soft hand of his sweetheart will find it and she will grieve over it.

All girls are sure of two things: that they understand their men better than their very mothers do, and that they love them better as well; and every woman in the world, who is harrowing her soul over her little son that she is bringing up, may be sure that somewhere else in the world there is growing up a girl who is later on going to find any hardness or unkindness that she has left in his spirit. When she had known him six weeks, Ellen could have brought up Roger better than he had been. It was her first excuse for his willful idea. At first she didn’t take him seriously, but opposition was the food on which his will fed. His father said of him that there was almost nothing one couldn’t oppose him into. He thought out all the practical details. They could drive to the home of a minister he knew and be married at once and come back after two weeks.

“Oh! why,” Ellen wailed,—“why should we make them all unhappy when all you have to do is to work a month or two more?”

“Yes, and then a long engagement, and then a making of my way; I in Boston, Ellen, andyou here.” It was a moment of terrible conflict for her. She wrote one of the letters to Roger she didn’t mean to send:—

“Oh, my dear! I told you this afternoon and I want to tell you again in this letter how sweet this little hour is to me. It seems to be the sunniest place in all of life. The world seems to me to stretch ahead wonderful and splendid, and the great storms of Heaven whirling through the sky, and the lightning and the clouds, and I can hear in my ears the roar of cities and the big tumult of seas, and here it is so sweet. Why hurry away from it? Here it is so safe. The days of one’s life when one is a girl and loves one’s man are so few. Oh, don’t hurry me away. Here is sunlight, and out there where you want to go it seems to me darkness. I’m a little girl, afraid of the setting sun. I was afraid of it and yet I couldn’t help looking at it in its awful splendor. I couldn’t take my eyes off from it, as little by little it dropped down behind the mountain, so wonderful and so inexorable. My heart chokes the same way when I think of running off in the night withyou. Let’s stay here with our hands in each other’s and then quietly go out into life together without wrenching ourselves away from so many ties and without rending everything that links us to this life that we now live. Every bit of me, [she writes,] all my soul, all my heart and my mind, and all my body wants to go with him as he says, but oh! the needless hurt to them. When I said, ‘Oh! how could we take our happiness at some one else’s hurt?’ he said, ‘Listen, Ellen; the hurt is only temporary—just for a moment. Supposing we went to-morrow night and then we came back after two weeks married. My father, of course, will like you by and by—he just doesn’t want any one for me now; he wants me to go on working and I am working like a giant, and then we would be free to go where we want.’ Oh, it would be so easy! Nights I can’t sleep, and when I do I am always deciding and deciding over and over again. When I tell him to remember the talk that it will mean, he says to me: ‘Are you afraid?’ I tell him, ‘No, not for myself; but my mother will be left behind and there will be Mr. Sylvesterand my aunt all to bear talk, so we shall be happy.’”

It seemed as if it was an unequal battle, all the forces of love, and Ellen’s own nature even, waging a conflict with her little, soft heart. She grew pale under the strain. I noticed it, but I didn’t know the cause, for here was something that naturally she didn’t tell me, being allied with the forces of order as I was. She would have given him anything that she had to give, from her life on, but she could not bear to deal him out some one else’s happiness with a careless hand. For his lack of understanding in this she writes:—

“He’s never known what it is to have a home or people that you really love about you, or to be part of things.”

He was clever in his arguments. Ellen writes:—

“He fairly argued my soul from my body. He said to me, ‘Ellen, it is not as though theydidn’t want us to marry. It’s just better for us to go together right away. Why should we waste a blessed year of our lives?’ ‘How could I run the risk of being the cause of serious trouble between you and your father and mother?’ I said. ‘You’ll have to leave those things for me to judge,’ he answered. ‘How could I interfere with your work?’ He grew almost angry at me. Then he threw his arms around me in that way he has, as though he would fairly crush my life from me, and he said: ‘Ellen, Ellen, for my sake do it. I am not stable; I’m weak, and weak with violence. In you I found all the things that I haven’t, all the sweet and all the true things in life, the things that I’ve been just for a minute at a time, when I’ve been a good little boy. You don’t know me, Ellen. You’ve only seen the me that you made, but you can keep that if you want to. Don’t play with it, Ellen. It’s the most important thing in life for me to keep the me that you call out. I didn’t know I could be so happy in a quiet place. I’ve always asked of life more and more, more life all the time and life has meant action, adventure, anddanger, and all at once I find in you more life than anywhere else, and I don’t want anything but you. Ellen, how can you continue this way to me for an idea, a foolish, bad idea, a taught idea? That’s where you’re not true, Ellen. If you were true, you would just put your hand in mine and walk away.’ ‘If there was no one in the world but you, I would put my hand in yours and do whatever you told me, but I’m not just I alone,’ I told him. ‘Well, I am just I, just I, and frankly in need of you—and in need of you right away. Ellen, this conflict with you is destroying me. By to-morrow night you must have decided.’ I feel as though I had been shaken by a great wind. When I hear him crying to me, it seems as though he were crying for the safety of his soul; and yet there must be something hard in me, because I know that being without me for a few months more or less will not destroy a hard thing like Roger, and all the time my foolish and weak heart likes to pretend that it believes that this is so. But yet, how can I get the strength to tell him to-morrow night that I won’t do what he wants me to? Oh! it is torture unspeakable to beungenerous in any way to the one whom one loves. I can’t do it. I’ve got to go, not because I believe down deep in me any argument that he has given me,—I was strong as those against it,—but just because he wants me to, because I can’t help giving him whatever it is he asks.”

Thus goes the age-old cry. She writes to him:—

“Oh! my dear, why will you make me make you such a sad gift? Oh! my dearly beloved, must I give to you the peace of mind, even for a little while, of all those whom I have loved in the world; and yet, I know myself that when I give you this that I shall be glad of it. Now that I have decided, my heart sings aloud. Somehow all that they will suffer seems small to me and unimportant beside this great, sweeping gladness that I feel.... I feel the way that you feel, nothing matters except that we should be together. Every day that we spend apart is a day wasted—but I can’t think of the rest of it. It isn’t so hard—it isn’t so difficult, after all. We will come backand everything will be all right, although I feel when I say this as if it wasn’t I, and that what carried me along was the black current of a river on which I was floating, and that I had been floating on it for always, only thinking before that I could direct my poor, little boat. Now I know that it is something quite outside myself that’s swinging me on with the strength of this fast-rushing stream.”

I remember that day very well. Ellen spent the day with me and with Alec, and we all three lay under the trees together and then Ellen went on a little tour of inspection. What she was doing really was saying “Good-bye” to the place that she knew and to us. Her eyes were bright and shining; I suppose she was thinking, “To-morrow I shall be where?—to-morrow I shall be who?—and these dear people who love me, what will they think? Not that I care!” She was so sweet to Alec that her loveliness melted his poor heart still further.

So sweet she was that, with one of those ironies of fate that are often more cruel than tragedy, Alec took this time to tell Ellen about the work he had decided to do. I can see him as he stood under the apple trees, the sun shining on his mane of hair, the brightness of his eager eyes contrasting with his self-consciousness, while we two girls stood there, each absorbed in her own affairs.

“I’ve looked all around life to see what I could do best—and I guess I know more about boys than anything else. I sort of know how they feel inside all the time. I don’t forget. So I’m going to teach ’em. Try and teach ’em the things they want to know most and that they knock their shins so trying to find the way to. They have a hard time. I had just one teacher—and he led me out of darkness; and that’s what I’m going to do. It’s a business, you know, that means trying to understand all the time. It’s a present to you, Ellen,” he added with his crooked, whimsical smile.

He was so anxious that we should see what he meant, and we were so polite and innerly so blank. Teaching grubby little boys seemed to us an uninspiring profession for a splendid youth like Alec. We couldn’t know how many years he had looked ahead. Alec and his gift to Ellen seem to typify man and woman. Man, who comes with his bright visions of the future, bestows the gift of his high dreams on girls who see nothing in them—and are polite. But Ellen was too heart-rendingly sweet thatafternoon to seem anything but understanding. She was heart-breakingly gay.

After a while we went in together to Mrs. Payne’s house. She and Mr. Sylvester were standing in the drawing-room with their hands clasped, and Mr. Sylvester spoke and said, “We may as well tell these dear children first”; and Ellen’s little mother said, as shyly as a girl, “Mr. Sylvester and I have found very suddenly that we have always loved each other.”

He rejoined with his deep simplicity of manner, “Yes, quite suddenly we found out that we’ve been to one another as the air we breathe, and as the water we drink, and as the sun that shines.”

“And so, of course,” said the little mother of Ellen, “we will be married.”

She stood there violet-eyed, in her neat, little black dress, as slender as a girl, more girlish in her looks than many of us for all her forty years. I don’t think that any of the three of us had realized that people as old as Mr. Sylvester and Mrs. Payne could live in the land of romance and could fall in love. Likemost young people in their early twenties, we imagined that this great gift of mankind was for us alone and that it never lightened up the hearts of those who had already lived and loved; but as these two stood, hand in hand, there rushed over all of us the feeling that they were just great children. The look of wonder was in their eyes; they had been living for so long close to the land of enchantment, and just now had stepped over its borders into its realization.

“We see no reason for delaying our marriage long. We waited long enough; we’ve been close friends for eight years; and you, little Ellen,”—he spoke as though speaking to a little child,—“you have been already like a daughter to me and like a little mother to my children.”

“You’ll help me now, Ellen, won’t you?” pleaded her little mother; and it was as though they had changed places and Ellen were the older. But Ellen had them folded in her arms, kissing first one and then the other, and we all followed suit; and for once the stern conventions of New England reserve, which held in itsiron grip such sweet and simple spirits as Mrs. Payne and Mr. Sylvester, was broken through.

Now Ellen had a shining face, now everything had all been settled for her by Life. She could not possibly go away and leave her mother at such a moment, nor, of course, would Roger ask her this, and for a moment the light that swept over the country of her heart was dimmed by the quiet radiance of these two middle-aged people. Glad-footed she started off to her trysting-place, and what happened there was as though the sun had been eclipsed in mid-heaven, as though the solid earth had shaken under her feet. She ran to Roger with this precious tale of her mother’s happiness in her hands, sure that he would understand. She writes, almost with an unbelief in the fact that she had herself heard and witnessed:—

“He wanted me to go with him just the same! He came forward to me in that way that always makes me think of leaping flame and said: ‘You’ve decided to go, haven’t you, Ellen?’ And when I told him, he said, ‘That makes it simpler, doesn’t it? They’ll be sooccupied with themselves that they won’t care what you do. Hooray!’ And he laughed like a little boy. I said, ‘You don’t understand; now I can’t go; I can’t darken her happiness; my mother needs me’; and he stood before me, looking at me with eyes that burned with anger of his desire. ‘Ellen,’ he said, ‘decide now, the long engagement with its perils for you and for me; my good or their good; our happiness against a few stitches put in your mother’s clothes.’ I said, ‘I can’t go.’ He drew me to him and said, ‘Ellen, are you coming? You must come’; and I felt as if my soul was shuddering out of my body, as if he tore me in two, and part of me must go, and I don’t know what there was in my soul stronger than myself, because all of me never wanted to do anything more than to do his will, which was my will, too; but I had to say, ‘I can’t do it.’ I know now that there are a thousand things that make up this; Mr. Sylvester being a minister, it would hurt him to have his daughter—oh! what a sweet word—run away. All these things, all the tangled and manifold ways in which my life is woven into those belovedof me, and now a thousandfold more tightly woven than before into the life of this little place, all held me back where the inner, beating heart of me cried aloud to go. He stood there pleading, and he raged with anger; his words beat me down, shivering, like a heavy storm of wind and rain. The love of him drew me toward him, as flowers lift up their heads to the sun, but something deep down kept saying, ‘No, I can’t go. No, I can’t go.’ ‘Now, I know,’ said he, ‘at last how little your love is worth’; and then he pulled me to him and kissed me roughly, and again and again, and then almost threw me from him. ‘Good-bye, Ellen,’ he said; and I cried, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Oh, not far,’ he said; but I felt as if his spirit had gone to the end of the world, and he strode without me down the road. I am writing like one in a dream, because I can’t see and don’t know what’s going to happen to us, and I want to run out into the night and run to his house and cry under his window that I’ll go whenever he says, but then I know, if I did that, that at the last moment I would decide I couldn’t go.”

While Ellen was going through these hours of anguish her mother and Mr. Sylvester sat in my grandmother’s kitchen, a pair of helpless, middle-aged children, discussing how they would break the news to Miss Sarah Grant. They didn’t need to explain why Miss Grant would disapprove of their marriage; she would disapprove of it just as all the town would, for it was evident that if Mr. Sylvester was going to marry again it was his duty to himself and to his children to marry a “capable woman,” and you might as well ask a moon-ray or a soft breeze in the trees to be capable as Ellen’s little mother.

“I have suggested,” said Mr. Sylvester, “that we let Miss Sarah learn of it as we shall the rest of the town. A simple and efficacious way has occurred to me, Mrs. Hathaway, of informing all our friends,—I shall merely tell Mrs. Snow and Miss Nellie Lee and then nature will do the rest.” He was quite grave andsimple-hearted as he said this, but I know that Alec and I did not dare to meet one another’s eyes, for the good man had mentioned not only two of the most talkative ladies in town, but also two who had, according to gossip, felt themselves very capable of taking care of an incapable but godly man. Mrs. Payne, however, insisted that Mr. Sylvester should himself tell her sister of their engagement.

“My dear,” said Mr. Sylvester, “I trust I am a soldier of the Lord, but I confess to a feebleness in the knees when it comes to confronting Miss Sarah, for both of us have been a serious anxiety to her even in an unmarried state, and what shall we be now when my housekeeper has gone?”

“And, indeed, my dear, how do you suppose,” inquired my grandmother whose spiritual attitude had been one whose hands and eyes were both raised to Heaven,—“how do you suppose you are going to take care of the children?”

Ellen’s little mother considered a moment.

“I shall love them,” she replied after an interval.

Mind you, this statement was one of sheer anarchy in an age when discipline was the keynote with children and the superstition still flourished that one could not properly bring up a child without the rod.

“Yes,” said my grandmother, “I suppose you will love the holes out of their clothes and love their gingham aprons into being, won’t you?”

“I can depend upon Matilda a good deal,” considered Mrs. Payne; “but we have scarcely had time, dear Mrs. Hathaway, to think of the material side of the question, and the children adore Ellen.”

“And so, all together,” rejoined Mr. Sylvester, “we shall get along very well, but our only real trouble is the pain of breaking the news to Miss Sarah.”

“Well,” said my grandmother, with brisk sarcasm, “if that’s all that’s troubling you, I’ll tell her myself. I’ll go to her and tell her that there’s going to be a family consisting of two grown people, one grown girl, and three helpless little children, none of whom realizes that meals have to be got or housework done.”

“Or, indeed,” rejoined Mr. Sylvester, “where no one is occupied in anything but considering the lilies, how they grow.”

Upon this the two smiled at each other, for they both had the wisdom of the simple in their spirits. However, it was apparent to any one what a helpless ménage this would be with the strong hand of Mrs. Gillig, the housekeeper, removed from it.

The news of the marriage ran through the town the way fire spreads; from house to house it galloped, then it would seem to skip a space and then mysteriously break forth afresh, as though by spontaneous combustion, and their interested chatter hid Ellen from herself a little. She wrote:—

“All day I have been receiving calls and answering questions. A certain sort of vague envy has mingled itself with a more definite commiseration and there has been a great deal of affection mingled with everything. They don’t know. They all talk as though my little mother were a baby, and so she is. She’s a child of light. She has not grown up and shehasn’t made me grow up, and I hope I shall never have to, and I want to say to all the people, ‘Oh, you blind person, you blind person,’ when they speak in this half-patronizing tone of her. I want to say: ‘Don’t you know how much more she has than you? My mother is a happy person to live with; we are poor and our clothes are patched,—and sometimes they aren’t even patched,—and I suppose she’s a poor manager, but I am so glad she is because, when we do clean, it’s because we want to and not to fight it day and night.’ All through this day that’s been so busy, when people have knocked at our door on one pretext or another, I’ve been waiting. All day Roger hasn’t been to see me; it doesn’t seem possible that he can be angry at me or stay away from me like this; it doesn’t seem possible that he shouldn’t understand me. I’m going up to-night to Oscar’s Leap. It seemed to me that all the world had his voice to-day. Whenever I heard people talk far off, it seemed to me that I heard Roger; every time some one knocked on the door my heart leaped and I thought: ‘He’s coming at last.’ Twice Iwalked uptown looking for him, and once there was a real errand,—not a make-believe one like when I was a little girl and wanted to do something that took me up to Aunt Sarah’s; Aunt Sarah herself sent me, and how my ears were strained for the sound of his voice, and there was no sound at all in all the house. Then I did a thing that was very bold. I sat down at the piano and opened it and played and began to sing, hoping he would hear me, while I waited for the sewing for which Aunt Sarah had sent me. Then I heard footsteps on the stair and I knew that they weren’t Roger’s, but yet it seemed to me they must be—so much I wanted to see him that the very desire of my heart must call him to me—but no. I wonder what has happened; I wonder if he’s angry; I wonder if he’s hurt. I couldn’t even ask Martha a word about him; I had to keep my mouth closed. It is partly my fault that we have to skulk in this way. It seems a curious thing that Martha should know if Roger was in the house somewhere. But surely he couldn’t have been in the house or he would have come down when he heard me sing. Whyshould I feel ashamed at having tried to make him hear me? If I can go and call Alec from outside his house, why is it more wrong for me to go and call for the one whom I shall love all my days, and yet somehow I feel that I shouldn’t. There is some deep instinct in me that makes me know I was wrong.”

I suppose it was because of Ellen’s absorption in Roger that she failed to write an aspect of these days that stand out to me as one of the charming memories of my girlhood, for it so sums up our New England society of that day. My grandmother had performed the kind office of announcing the betrothal to Miss Sarah, and this good woman’s reply was characteristic.

“Well,” said she, “trust Emily to get into mischief when Ellen gives us a moment’s pause, and what irritates me the most, Sophia, is that I am not even allowed my just moment of anger. If I sulk, then there will be talk, to be sure, so I’ve got to go out and countenance this marriage of those ‘babes of grace’ as though it had been my fondest hope. I,forsooth, have got to go around and smile until my jaws are fairly dislocated to prevent the magpie chattering that there’ll be; but before my anger cools I’m going down to give Emily a piece of my mind. When you consider her refusing a decent, advantageous marriage, and then becoming sentimental at her time of life, it’s enough to make one’s blood boil.”

Miss Sarah eased her mind by making remarks like this to her sister and then said she:—

“Sophia Hathaway and I are going to bring our sewing and spend the afternoon, because you’ll see that half the town will be here to find out what’s happened.”

So there we were, my grandmother and I, Mrs. Payne, Ellen, and Aunt Sarah—a solid phalanx.

“We’ll answer,” Miss Sarah announced, “no questions except those asked us.”

Deacon Archibald and his wife were the first to call. The deacon came in cheerily, rubbing his hands.

“It was such a fine day,” said Mrs. Archibald, “that we thought we’d repay the many visits that we owe.”

“Yes, we are always so remiss in that,” chirped Deacon Archibald.

“Won’t you be seated? Take this more comfortable chair,” said little Mrs. Payne.

“The weather’s been fine lately,” remarked the deacon.

“A fine summer, indeed, for the crops,” agreed Miss Sarah; “the tobacco’s doing splendidly in the valley.”

There came another rap on the door and Mrs. Snow was admitted.

“I thought I’d run in just a moment to see if you had that mantle pattern,” she said.

Mrs. Butler, stiff with rheumatism, came next. A knock was heard at the back door and I heard her heavy breathing and her “Well, Ellen, I just ran over to return your mother’s hoe that Alec left at my house when he hoed my potatoes for me, but why he can’t take back the tools himself I can’t see. Has your mother got company; invited company, I mean?—because, Land Sakes! I canhearshe’s gotcompany. I’m not deaf.”

The question that they all longed to ask lay heavy in the air. It was good andbona-fidegossip that they had heard as coming direct from Mr. Sylvester himself, but so afraid is New England of making a mistake and of committing itself, that two other ladies had dropped in on an errand of one sort or another, or for calls, before Miss Sarah took advantage of a little pause in the conversation to remark:—

“I suppose every one of you here has come to find out if my sister is to marry Mr. Sylvester.”

There was a little, fluttering chorus of dissent.

“Nonsense,” said Miss Sarah, “I know what you wish to ask and what a bushel more will come to ask before the evening is over, and that’s why I’m staying here; and tell every one that you meet that we shall be happy to tell them ourselves that such, indeed, is the happy fact.”

Miss Sarah spoke with a large and grim geniality, for she always had the air of one who says, “Mankind, I am about to chastise you for your weakness, but I realize that I am human as well as you.”

Meantime my poor Ellen had heard in eachone of these knocks on the door Roger’s knock, and so she continued to hear the next day. She wrote:—

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