CHAPTER XVII

“He’s gone away, and I have only learned about it by chance. Just by chance I heard Aunt Sarah saying: ‘As if it wasn’t excitement enough to have this happen yesterday, that young scallawag gets up and leaves me at a moment’s notice.’ Two of his friends came through, it seems, and Roger left with them. He left without sending word or sending me any message. He says he’s gone for a day or two only. Aunt Sarah says she would not be surprised if he never came back, but that can’t happen. How could it happen? Did he think that I had failed him so that he doesn’t want me any more, or that I lacked so in courage and in love of him?... Another day has gone and no word from him. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone in all my life and so cut off from all human help. I know it is wicked of me, but mother’s happiness hurts me. I want her to be happy, but oh! it hurts me to watch it. I wish I could go off by myself somewhere, and yetI know that there I will be worse than I am now, with a thousand small things to do to somehow fill up the days. Something must have happened to him. I watch myself like some other person for fear I shall seem sad for a moment, for if I do it will look as though I am not pleased about my mother. Oh! I hope that I won’t hurt their joy in any way. I wonder how women live who have to wait long for news of those they love. I seem to move around in the world, but I really do nothing but wait. Each time I see my aunt I think that she will have news of him; I’m grateful to her now if she only tells me he hasn’t come. When I am asleep, I’m still listening and waiting for him. Something must have happened to him, because he must want to see me as I do him. It seems to me that no one could hurt any one they loved as much as this and be alive.”

Here it was for the first time that Ellen tasted that bitter pain of women, waiting. It sometimes seems to me that this is an anguish in which we live and of which men know nothing. During the course of a long life everywoman passes so many hours of still agony when she must fold her hands and smile and wait. We cannot go out seeking the beloved, but must sit and wait until he comes. Like Ellen, when you have had a misunderstanding it is not yours to run generously forward; you can’t clap your hat on your head and say, “Here, I’ll make an end to this; I’ll go and find her.” No, you must sit waiting for the sound of his footsteps coming toward you; wait until your whole soul is tense; wait until each sound is part of this hope deferred. All women know this pain of waiting; and when our time of waiting for a sweetheart is over, the sons we love go out into the world, and again we can do nothing but sit still and wait for news of the travelers, wait for the little, scant messages of love which their careless hands pen to us in some casual moment. The long days pass and the letters don’t come, and still we wait. We sit and wait for our children to be born, through the long months, with the black certainty of the birth that may be death staring us in the face.

Some women get used to waiting. I thinkthat those who do have closed the doors of their hearts to the keener range of feeling, having suffered so much that they say to themselves, “Here, I’ll suffer no longer.” There are yet others who pass through the pain of waiting, going by this thorny, bleeding, silent road of doubt and pain to a higher acquiescence. It is a long way there, and the heart of us must weep much in silence before we can attain this glorified peace. I have known the spirits of women to snap like the overstrained strings of a harp, as they waited with smiles upon their lips.

I am sorry sometimes for all women, and most of all for the impatient, tender, and flaming spirits of young girls who meet this pain for the first time.

It is because we have all suffered in this way that the most generous among us run so eagerly to meet those whom they love. Having tasted this pain, we wish forevermore to spare others anything like it. The more shallow-hearted and, perhaps, wiser women, and those who are not children of light, having tasted it, use the anguish of suspense as a weapon in theeverlasting warfare between man and woman. But there is hardly a woman grown who could not echo the cry of Ellen when she wrote:—

“I do not dare to go out of the house for fear I might miss some word of him, and yet how can I stay in the house knowing my own thoughts? I wish to fill the gray horror of these empty hours with anything that the wayside will bring me; I want to go out and play with the children; I want to find Alec and walk with him. I try to remember just one thing—that some time to-day or to-morrow, or the next day, I shall hear something.This can’t go on forever; there has to come an end.”

I, with my eyes fastened on the romance of Mrs. Payne and Mr. Sylvester, had noticed nothing; the explanation that Roger had gone off for a few days with friends was enough for me; but it was Alec, with a keener vision, who had seen something wrong.

“What ails Ellen?” he had asked me.

“Why—what should?” I asked.

“Roberta,” said Alec, “is Ellen in love with Roger?”

“How should I know?” said I.

Alec looked down, kicking the dust before him with the gesture of a little boy.

“It would be natural if they cared for each other,” he continued. Then he suddenly flung out his hand and said, “If it’s so, he won’t ever make her happy.”

“Why, Alec, what do you mean?” I said.

“He’s only thinking about himself; he’s interested only in Roger Byington,” Alec declared with vehemence.

He filled these next days as full of himself as he could; making Ellen laugh at his fantastic goings-on as he pretended to be the bulletin which announced how far the gossip had reached. With his tender second sight he tried to hide Ellen from herself or whatever it was that was troubling her.

As Ellen said, the trouble couldn’t last forever, and the end came unexpectedly. While we were sitting in the orchard I saw Ellen’s hand go to her heart and her face change color; she sat still a lovely, quivering thing, with all the soul of her running out to meet Roger, and he advanced through the sweet clover, swishing at it with a little cherry wand that he had cut when walking. He had gone away a fairy prince—his only fault had been loving Ellen too much—and he came back a naughty little boy. Even I noticed the change in him. There was an arrogant, willful tilt to his head which belied the lightness of his disarming manner, and one which said: “First I’ll try to coax you into good humor, but beware of my stubbornness if you find fault with me too far.” He was the male that will not admit that he has faults.“Be thankful that I’m back at all,” was what his bearing implied; “and we’ll ignore also that I’ve been away, if you please.”

Ellen, poor child, had no idea of blaming him, any more than she had an instinct of hiding her emotions. Never once had she blamed Roger, even to herself, for going away, and at the sudden end of her suspense uncontrollable tears came to her eyes. Men have written books about the folly of the tears of women. Who knows it better than they, poor things? There are uncontrollable women, of course, who are as spendthrift with tears as some men of anger. Tears like these of Ellen’s are as unexpected and uncontrollable as a sudden storm, and I, knowing what it meant when Ellen cried, left them quickly.

Ellen wrote about it:—

“Oh, the unspeakable shame of having cried. I didn’t know I was going to; I haven’t cried since he has been away; I’ve only waited. He was sweet and tender with me, but he said whimsically: ‘You, too, Ellen! I’ve had many a tearful home-coming with my mother. Ifone stays away unexpectedly from women, no matter who they are, the first thing they do when you turn up again is to find fault with you or else weep over you.’ Then he held me out at arm’s length. ‘Ellen, you’re not going to make of me the sinner that repented.’ I don’t know what leaden weight I have in my heart; it seems all so different; it’s like a little, commonplace squabble. I’m always disappointing him; he has thought me different from all other women and I would so like to be, but I am just the same. He didn’t even refer to the cause of his going away. We talked of this and that and couldn’t find each other. He looked at me curiously two or three times and said, ‘Ellen, I thought I should never see tears in your eyes.’”

Here, indeed, was a shifting of base; they had been playing the higher harmonies that men and women play together; their spirits had been in perfect unison; even the tragic parting had had its undercurrent of understanding, and now here they were with their feet on earth; Ellen with homesick eyes forthe land of lost content and Roger with a little sneer that she should have let him see that she had no pride against him. Her absence of coquetry was her undoing. He knew now he could put her down or take her up at will, and her price was a few tears. Her spirit stood out in that moment of welcome, shining and naked, her little shy spirit, the reflection of whose light alone had been enough for Alec.

From the point of view of age, it is Roger for whom I am sorry, for with all courage and charm and ability and the swift, pulsing flow of life in him, life had tainted him already so that this ultimate gift of herself made him think Ellen too easy of attainment. The situation was one that had been repeated time and time again, sometimes by men and sometimes by women. Roger had had his naughtiness and his lack of consideration and his sudden and impatient vanishing out of a difficult situation treated by tears and reproaches. Poor Ellen, by her very innocence, had trodden a path of the emotion familiar to him, since his way out of difficulties had been a sudden impatient vanishing. If she could have only hadthe inspired sense to have taken his return in a matter-of-course manner, it would have piqued him, and again Ellen would have won; but how play sorry games like this with the best beloved? One of the sad things of love is that it is in absurd and trivial ways like this that it falls from its highest state and loses its radiance.

From the account of her journal they jogged along a few days at a slack-water; Ellen groping forever for Roger, Roger a little bored at the too-eagerly offered heart; their positions oddly reversed; Roger rather magnificently forgiving Ellen for having annoyed him.

Then suddenly into this doldrums of the emotions burst Miss Grant. A flaming affection is hard to hide. It shines like a light behind a closed door,—let two people walk ever so carefully. Now the eyes of one follow the other and the look is a caress; now some one intercepts an exchange of glances, and that exchange means, to any one whose heart has beat fast for love, a promise of everlasting devotion; you see a girl’s hand steal to her fast-beating heart, or the young man waitingfor her with that aching impatience of the young.

So gossip had begun about Roger and Ellen. Some one had seen them walking down the street so absorbed that they had seen no one else; another had noticed Ellen walking across the bridge to the mountain and Roger going before her. Little by little the people who had separately observed these things had talked together until between them they had pieced together from broken fragments the whole story, and then, like a picture thrown unexpectedly on the screen, the gossip of it came to Miss Grant.

I suppose she had gotten bits of it before, hints and innuendoes, of the kind people give who are too pusillanimous to face a woman like Miss Sarah with a point-blank question. The whole thing was focused one afternoon when she had said lightly to Mrs. Snow that she didn’t know where on earth Roger had passed his time in such a quiet little town.

“Well, Sarah, if you spent more time down at Emily’s, perhaps you’d know.”

To Miss Sarah’s hot, “What do you mean?”—

“I mean that wherever Ellen is, Roger’s apt to be, and no reason making such big eyes at me; a very nice sort of thing, I think it.”

Miss Sarah merely put on her bonnet and shawl and marched majestically down the hill. She found Ellen on the back porch, in the midst of a foam of ruffles she was hemming for her mother’s gown. She towered above Ellen, an avenging fate, whose gray curls bobbed on each side of her head.

“Ellen, what’s this gossip I hear about you and Roger?” she demanded. Before Ellen had time to reply, as though she read her confession in the color that mounted to her face, “How could you do such a thing, Ellen?” she fumed. “Don’t you know that Roger Byington came here to work and settle down; don’t you know that he has a marriage already planned? Don’t you see the position you’ve put your family in, that of snatching at the fortune of an old friend! A fortune that’s destined elsewhere, and that we were bound, you as well as I, to guard! You’ve been deceiving the whole of us!”

Ellen rose to her feet and faced her, her sewingstill in her hands, the blue ruffles around her white frock like a wave of the sea.

“I’ve deceived no one, Aunt Sarah,” said she, with a touch of sternness in her voice, and just here Roger appeared.

He had heard voices, and had heard his and Ellen’s names mentioned, and he had then seen Miss Grant storming down the hill like some aged New England Valkyrie and had followed her. He arrived in time around the side of the house to catch her last words, and the flaming anger that any one should scold his Ellen blew away forever the flatness that had for a moment assailed them.

He threw his arms around Ellen as though he would protect her from everything for all time. “Miss Grant,” he said, “the reason I’m here in this town is Ellen. I walked through here one time and I saw Ellen and talked with her for a few minutes by the roadside, and so I came back. No one else I’ve ever seen in life matters to me—nothing else but Ellen matters. Please remember that if I amount to anythingever, it will be because of Ellen, and if I fail, it will be because I have failed Ellen. Had I hadmy way Ellen would not have been here now with you; she’d be married to me.”

Miss Sarah confronts Ellen

SHE TOWERED ABOVE ELLEN, AN AVENGING FATE

Ellen wrote:—

“I don’t know what it did to me to have it talked about in the open. I felt as if I belonged forever to Roger, as though some way this outward profession of faith of his brought out and made positive everything that he had said and that I had felt, and that we truly belonged to one another.”

The old lady measured the young people with an angry gaze.

“Young man,” said she, “I consider you’ve abused my hospitality; you have put me and my brother and my whole family in a false light before your parents. You entangle yourself in sentimentalities with a married woman, you play false with your sweetheart, and when your father wishes you to reconstruct your life, you throw them both over and place me in the position of having seemed to connive at a marriage with my niece. I shall write your mother my disapproval by the next post, andif Ellen knew as much of your past history as I do, she wouldn’t take this sudden infatuation seriously, and if she had any dignity she would withdraw at once from this false position.”

“Your letter,” Roger replied with some heat, “will reach my mother somewhat after my own. When Ellen’s love for her mother overcame her better judgment and she refused to go with me, I wrote my mother on my return as I told her I would do; and now, permit me, Miss Grant, to withdraw from your house which will save your pride in this matter.”

It was an old-fashioned quarrel that Youth and Age indulged in, and Ellen’s journal gives more of it, full of stately words and innuendo and recriminations cloaked in fine-sounding periods, and I think both Roger and Miss Sarah enjoyed their own rhetoric heartily.

Mrs. Payne heard the noise of the combat, and when Miss Sarah realized that her sister had been, as she said, “an accomplice,” her indignation knew no bounds, though she admitted:—

“I’ll do you justice, Emily; you’ve so littlecommon sense that I don’t suppose for a moment you thought of anything but the sentimentality of this ill-governed young man and your Ellen. You didn’t, I suppose, for a moment consider that Ellen is not the sort of a marriage planned for him by his father.”

Mrs. Payne’s wide-eyed, “Why shouldn’t she be? Ellen’s so sweet and pretty,” collapsed the older lady’s anger like a pricked balloon, as nothing else could have done. Ellen’s picture of her is this: “Aunt Sarah flopped down, she didn’t sit, and gathered her draperies around her like a wounded Roman matron.”

Roger, at Mrs. Payne’s words, again put his arm around Ellen and laughed aloud. He adored their unworldliness. The bad little boy in him vanished; so did the man of the world who cannot bear generosity in the beloved. He spoke truly enough when he said all the best things in him ran out ahead of him to meet Ellen. He said to Miss Sarah gently:—

“You see, we really care for each other, Aunt Sarah, and I’m awfully sorry about putting you in a false position, but that doesn’t countvery much compared to Ellen’s and my happiness, does it? Please believe me when I tell you that your side of this never occurred to me and so I’ll take myself away to-night.” The moment of high-sounding periods was over.

“Hadn’t you better stay?” asked Miss Sarah. “Think of the talk, Roger.”

“I want talk,” he said,—“all the talk in the world; I would like everybody to know how I care for Ellen—I welcome gossip.”

“The way he laughed”—wrote Ellen—“made one feel the way Spring looks; I was so proud, and wondered more than ever what I could have done to have any one like Roger love me.”

During the days when they had been at odds with life, they had taken pains to have me with them; it was the first time that they had shown themselves eager for my company together. I had been confidante first for Ellen and then for Roger, and then again for Ellen, but seldom had I seen them both at once. Now, after this explanation with Miss Grant, theyunconsciously thrust me aside with no more regard for me than if I had been a withered flower. I was going to Ellen’s to help with the sewing. I had left her a little lack-luster, a little wistful; Roger had been sulky and inclined to cynicism; and now they swept down on me like a splendid young god and goddess, no longer making any effort to keep the town in ignorance; they took it in in a magnificent gesture, the way they looked at each other; shouted it aloud, and, as though to carry out in very truth the words he had spoken to Miss Grant when he said he would like to shout through the town that he loved Ellen, he took her hand in his when he saw me and swung it to and fro; and in my day such an action as this was one which would cause the quiet windows to bristle with interrogatory eyes. You might be perfectly sure that there would be quiet slippings through back doors and gossiping under grape arbors.

That evening I met Roger coming down the street and he stopped to tell me:—

“We’ve had it out with Aunt Sarah, and both Aunt Sarah and I have written to mymother. Now we’ll soon have an end to this shilly-shallying.”

“And if your parents don’t like it?”

“God help them if they don’t,” he said. “Any parents I have willhaveto like it.”

And there was so sinister a note in his voice that I shivered. Sometimes when he spoke there was a weight to a light word that seemed like a heavy wind.

It was not long before the town had more to talk about. Mrs. Byington, in her beautiful and fashionable clothes, was as conspicuous as though she had come riding in a palanquin. The city and country were much more apart in those days, and home-made patterns taken from some remote city ones were passed from hand to hand; dolls dressed in Boston still carried the mode somewhat; and in our honest village, loveliness was put by with youth, and lovely was the quality of Mrs. Byington. At fifty she was tall and slender, her hair a little gray, her neck graceful like a girl’s; she walked swayingly, and age was not a quality with which she seemed to have reckoned. With the changing years she had a quality as compellingas youth itself, and this without the slightest attempt at seeming less than her years.

Ellen writes:—

“Roger’s mother came to see me alone, and before her, so beautiful and soft, I felt as though I had been made yesterday. It happened that I opened the door for her, and I knew who she was and she knew me, for she said: ‘Dear child, I know you are Ellen; I wanted to come by myself.’ She looked at me with searching eyes that were a little sad, and all of a sudden I felt very sorry for her, for it must be very hard, when you have a son that you love, to learn all at once that his life belongs to some one else. We sat down and talked a little, and my heart beat so that I could hardly say anything, and I felt that I was very stupid, and that if Roger could be there he wouldn’t like the way I was acting, and all of a sudden she put her arms around me and kissed me, and said: ‘Dear Ellen, you are very lovely and very perfect, and, indeed, I knew you would be very “something” to send my wild Roger after you at such a rate. You love him very much,don’t you?’ I couldn’t speak, and only bowed my head; and she said, as though talking to herself rather than to me, ‘Poor child, it would be better for you if you loved him less; he would be more yours.’ I asked her what she meant. She thought a moment, and then said: ‘Perhaps you’ll never find out; you’re so sweet, Ellen; even Roger wouldn’t hurt a child.’ And for a moment I felt a little flaming anger at her for not understanding him better. I wanted to tell her that there was only sweetness in Roger for those who knew how to find it, but, of course, I didn’t dare. There was something in her tone that made a cold shadow fall over me.”

It seemed as though all difficulties were cleared from before them, when Ellen found herself face to face with what really was the first important issue of this time. After all, the things in love that count are not all the obstacles imposed on us from without. It is strange to me why people have always written of these rather than of those far more important moments, as when, for instance, one first seesthe beloved face to face as he really is. Love for a moment makes us transcend ourselves, and Roger was a brave lover, and Ellen had known nothing of him except Roger the lover, when suddenly she caught a new glimpse of Roger. She wrote:—

“I don’t know what I’m going to do—nothing I suppose. I’ve seen Roger angry with his mother. It was our last afternoon all together and she was talking very seriously with us. She said: ‘Your Ellen is very sweet, Roger. Keep her happiness, and if you play fast and loose again, you deserve all the unhappiness the world can bring you.’ She has wanted me to see him as he is, and has talked around the edges of this, and she said to me, ‘I came here wondering who you were, Ellen, and ever since I saw you I’ve been wondering what Roger will do to you in this new life of yours begun so sweetly.’ One time she cried out, ‘Oh! why do women have to marry men?’ And then she laughed at herself for saying it. Ever since she came Roger has been watching her. He’s had a critical attitude and is ready to find faultat a moment’s notice. It was as if the impatience of the whole week overflowed. What he said wasn’t so much. Oh! he kept within bounds before me, but the restrained anger of his manner was as though he had struck her, as though he had hurt her, as though the force of his anger would throw her from the room. She held up her head a little proudly, but she only said, as though to bring him to himself, ‘Roger, Roger!’ warning him, one would think, not to lose further control of himself. She spoke as if she were used to this wounding, terrible manner, a manner that gets its own way in spite of everything; and I stood there trembling inside, and I began thinking, ‘Who are you, Roger, and who am I?’ Now it is all at once as if I had an answer to why she seemed to pity me, as though she wanted to protect me from everything. All my instinct is to run and hide in some place where I shall hide from him forever. I know nothing of him or he of me.”

There comes a moment in the life of almost every one when, bewildered, for the first time they meet an everyday and faulty person in place of the beloved. Sometimes this is the beginning of a long disillusion; it is then that many find out that one has not been in love at all, but only in love with being in love. With young lovers one often calls this first glimpse the first quarrel. After marriage this slow torment of becoming accustomed to another personality in the body of the beloved is called the “time of adjustment.”

With Ellen this moment was a severe spiritual crisis. As she had seen concentrated in the last weeks only the lovable things in Roger, so in this one moment she had a vision of all in him that was inimical to happiness and peace. It was as if that blind, voiceless judge that sits deep within all of us and bids us love, hate, or fear, had been aroused to its depth, and its final judgment of Roger had been thathere was danger. Had there been any place to run to, she would have fled, but there was nothing to do but sit still. She dreamed at night that she saw his face savage in anger, heartless in its desire, and relentless in its will to get what it wanted from life; and since she could not leave home to run away from him, she ran from him spiritually.

When he came to see her next, he could hardly find Ellen in the inert and docile person who presented herself to his gaze. It was as though the glance he had given his mother and the tone in which he had spoken had been to her a prophecy of life to come. She saw him with that terrible clairvoyance that love gives; she saw clearly what her life in the hands of this other Roger would mean; and it seemed as if the very inner spirit of her struggled to free herself from his power.

I, personally, fear the shocks of the spirit as some fear physical pain, and instinctively I withdrew from the perversities of men, and I now look shudderingly back on two marriages which I might have made but for this warning bell which rang over the reefs of the spirit.

Her first movement had been one of flaming indignation; that burned out, leaving behind it the ashes of a dull, apathetic fear. When he asked her what was the matter and why, she told him she was afraid of him. He called himself a brute, he apologized to his mother, but she remained inert and docile, as aloof as a person who has been stunned by the spectacle of a great disaster, and, indeed, the flood of her emotions had ebbed back violently.

In despair Roger came to me.

“I’ve lost Ellen,” he told me. “We’ve awfully bad tempers in our family, and my mother didn’t understand that since I’ve known Ellen there are a whole lot of things in my life that I want to forget. The me Ellen knows is a different me from the one mother knows.”

He had never been as sweet to Ellen as he was now. She had seen before a brave lover who rushed everything before him and when he was refused anything would turn into a naughty little boy. Now he was a tender suppliant asking for mercy, confessing his sins and inventing sweet and touching things to do forEllen. I think the men of my day were crueler as men and warmer as lovers. A man like Roger possessed himself more of a woman’s mind and life than the men of to-day that I see around me seem able to do with their sweethearts. There was no little corner of her spirit that he did not wish to occupy, and to gain admission to her frightened little heart he made himself small and humble and appealing. Of the sincerity of his wretchedness and his repentance there was no doubt.

“If she were only angry with me,” he said to me, “but she’s afraid, Roberta. It’s a terrible thing to see her shrink from me. She doesn’t mean to be unkind. She told me in all seriousness, as if she meant it, that she thought it would be better for all of us if I left her now. Why, she’s my life, Roberta!”

I was profoundly touched, as who would not have been? Nor did I fail to repeat this to Ellen. I had told Alec what the matter was, for seeing Ellen listless and remote he had jumped to the conclusion that Roger had hurt her in some way, and in Roger’s defense I told him the truth and he put himself stolidly on the sideof Ellen’s instinct. Through one long day she and Alec went off together as they had when they were children, while Roger raged up and down. Ellen wrote:—

“We played, as we did when I was little, ‘Two Years Ago,’ and for one, beautiful afternoon I forgot how life can hurt. Just toward the end Alec cried out to me, ‘Oh, Ellen, why can’t I be older! Why couldn’t it have been I? I’d never have hurt you, I’d never have made you afraid of me.’ And I know that’s true, and I know, too, that poor Alec could never find a key to the place in me that could be hurt. There’s something wrong with women, for when once one has felt one’s pulse beat fast, one can never again be content with a sweet and kind affection. One must wish forevermore to drown one’s self forever and to let the waters of life sweep over one’s head, however bitter they may be.”

Already, though she didn’t know it, she was coming back to Roger. Every day he went to see her with some carefully thought-out littlegift. Every night he wrote her a letter which he sent by me, and she wrote in answer a letter that she didn’t send.

“I suppose [she writes to Roger] that we can only be cured of the worst hurts of all by those who have hurt us. Oh, please hide me from yourself! Oh, protect me! from this Roger, since I am so afraid of you that my whole spirit shudders away from you. Shield me from this, or let me go now while I yet have strength to leave you, or else make me forget forever how black life could be if I ever saw again the face that you turned then on your mother, and that yet was a part of you.”

There is nothing truer in the life of the affections than this, that the wound made by those whom we love can only be cured by them. One may be sick even to death, and yet the only cure can come from the one who has poisoned life for us. There is only one other way to cure the hurt, and that is to stop loving. That’s why a great many things become easier to bear as the years go by. We find men and womenphilosophically facing situations which formerly would have stopped all life for them. These are the dead of heart who have forgotten to care when they do this, and where one woman gains peace from a higher understanding of the man she loves, a dozen others find it by ceasing to love at all.

Ellen made her attempt at escape, and then came back because she couldn’t help it. The one person in the world who could have helped her was Alec. She was sincere when she told me:—

“If Alec was my brother, and had a home for me somewhere where I need not see Roger again, I’d go to him.”

It was her very docility and lack of resistance that maddened Roger. He told me:—

“Somehow Ellen has slipped out of my hands into a magic circle; she’s afraid of me. It’s as though she lived inside a crystal shell—I can see her and speak to her, but I can’t touch her.”

I, myself, was very much disturbed and moved by it all. There was Ellen who had burned in a fire of happiness, whose very look at Roger had been a caress, who seemed togive herself to him by the way she stood,—her arms relaxed as though all her body cried out to him to take her,—now lost in apathy; nothing that I told her affected her as far as I could see. After days of this, just as I was giving up hope, I met them one afternoon, swinging down the street toward me, with the air of a god and goddess recently let out of prison. Roger had Prudentia flung on his shoulder, and carried the child aloft as though she were a flag of triumph. All the explanation I ever had of the reconciliation was what I had then and there.

“He came down the street,” Ellen told me, “with Prudentia on his shoulder, and said, ‘Hello, Ellen,’ and I said, ‘Hello, Roger,’ and he put out his hand to me and I took it. Why, Roberta, aren’t you glad?” asked Ellen.

“She wanted more pomp and circumstance,” Roger jeered at me. “She wanted you, Ellen, to rush to my arms and say, ‘Roderigo, I forgive thee.’”

They went on; I heard their laughter down the street. That was all the thanks they gave me.

Ellen wiped the memory of their misunderstanding completely from her mind. If she had cared for Roger before, now she burned her bridges behind her; she swamped herself in her devotion to him. He stayed in our town until late fall, and during these months he seemed to want no other thing than the companionship of Ellen. The hours that he spent in work every day were their tragedy. In her journal Ellen prattled of a time “when they should be married and she could be with him even when he was working.”

“The world is full now,” she complained, “of closed doors and good-nights and good-byes.”

All the diverse and many-sided problems of marriage resolved themselves, in her simple mind, into one single meaning, and that was the continual presence of Roger. She passed the hours away from him drowned in the thought of him. Though at that time she wrotevery little in her journal,—she was happy,—she did write a series of little, good-night letters that were like so many kisses, fond and extravagant, the happy babblings of a perfectly happy heart. Meantime Roger was studying. It was the first time he had applied himself to work and found the power of his mind. In the quiet of this town he got into a tremendous stride of work and ate up books before him as fire licks up brushwood. They spent a great deal of their time together, planning his future and talking how great a man he was going to be. He had a gift of natural eloquence and loved an audience at any time. In that New England fall, when the crisp air is like wine and the hills are a miracle of color, Roger brooded over the picture of his own future, sketching outlines which he afterwards filled out. By letter he made friends again with his father.

Their engagement had been announced and Ellen was given the consideration which a good marriage brings one in a little village, a consideration which she didn’t even notice. Mildred Dilloway, in the mean time, had been—inthe homely New England phrase—“keeping company” with Edward Graham, and no one was surprised when it became known that they were to be married. Ellen writes in connection with this:—

“When I think of what a little fool I was at that time, I could beat my head against the door. If I could have but looked ahead a little, I would have had a little more sense. I needn’t have listened at all to Edward’s blitherings and been saved two years of discomfort. Edward himself told me about it. ‘Do not think, Ellen,’ he said, ‘that I’m unfaithful to the thought of you.’ ‘You couldn’t be,’ said I. ‘You’ll always be poetry to me, remember that,’ he told me. ‘I shall try to forget it,’ said I. I have never before wished to throw something at any one as I did then. It was easy to see that he was a little disappointed in himself that he could care for any one else after having made so great a fuss and mourned around so. I wish he would go away, because I hate to be forever reminded of the me that used to be. What if one should turn back intothe person that one was once? I wonder who the person is that I’m going to be. It will be a happy person or else I shan’t be alive; because if I have Roger I shall be happy, and if anything happens to him it will happen to me, too.”

At that moment in her life she could not imagine any other separation from him than that caused by some disaster. She hadn’t even faced the necessity of his leaving her when winter came. She knew he was going away, but she didn’t realize it. They drifted along, making more of a drama all the time of the inevitable good-nights and the inevitable separations. As Ellen wrote: “People who are in love should be endowed; there isn’t time for anything else.”

During this little perfect time life held its breath until Roger went away. The end came quite suddenly, with a peremptory letter from his father, who had a chance for him to enter a very well-known law office, under advantageous circumstances. While the shadow of separation was over them, it was like a cloud thatpasses near by and only bade the sunshine in which they stood more bright. She knew Roger was going, but she didn’t really believe it. She wrote:—

“I lived through months of learning to realize he was gone between the time he left and dinner. Mr. Sylvester was there, and for a time I had to put aside the selfishness of my own grief and I was glad to forget it in talking of one little thing after another, the way one does to stifle down the pain of the heart. I wanted to run after Roger and look at his face once more. I wanted to run after him and foolishly throw myself in front of the horse and say, ‘You can’t go.’ The part of me that talks was gay, because deeper than anything else was the wish in me to speed him joyfully and to have his last memory of me a gay and triumphant one. Time is a strange thing; all day it’s walked along like a funeral procession, and before this it has been going so fast that there has hardly been a chance to get a word in edgewise between the striking of the hours; and since Roger went it’s taken an eternityfor it to strike the next quarter. I’ve tried to comfort myself by going up to Oscar’s Leap, but my heart was so heavy that I could hardly walk all of the beautiful, weary way. I don’t like myself for writing like this, for I have him and he really loves me. The more I see people and listen to the things they say, the more I am sure that very few people really love any one, and those who do love are seldom loved in return. It must be a terrible thing to love and feel one’s self unloved. Now I’m going to get ready for my mother’s wedding and then get ready for mine, and while my mind tells me I must be good, my heart cries out, ‘Oh! Why can’t I trade off the useless weeks at the other end of my life for the weeks that would mean so much now!’ As he went away from me, I felt as though I were never going to see him again, and, indeed, this Roger and this Ellen will never see each other again. It seems to me that before he comes again I shall be made old by waiting, the days crawl past so slow and leaden-footed. I’ve said good-bye to this most beautiful time when I’ve said good-bye to Roger.”

At first he wrote her very often, but briefly. She wrote to him, in the intimacy of the letters she did not intend to send:—

“Your dear letters mean, ‘I love you, Ellen; I think of you; my heart goes out to you.’ Once in a while they say, ‘I thirst for you,’ but they tell me nothing of all the many things that I hunger so to know. I’d like to be able to see your life and know what time you wake up, what time you go to your office, and how your office looks, and which way it is set toward the sun so I could imagine you moving around, and you don’t even answer my little, discreet questions. I would like to know the faces of all the people you meet often and how you amuse yourself. I wonder have you lost Ellen in your big and fearsome city. Roger, I have times when I’mafraid, and I don’t know of what—just fear, as though the inner heart of me rang, ‘Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong,’ where my mind has nothing to go on. Roger, Iwaitfor each one of your letters as if I was afraid it wouldn’t come, and as if it were to be the last. I’mafraid. I don’t trust life as I did, and when I don’t trust life, I can’t find you; when I trust life, it’s as if when I shut my eyes I can put out my hand and touch you. But lately it is as though I wander around in the dark looking for you. I tell myself it’s foolish, but my heart won’t listen to the voice of reason. It is as though my confidence had been taken away from me, as though it had been a gift no one could touch with hands. My mother’s wedding doesn’t mean to me any more her happiness, but the day that you shall come back to me and give me back my confidence in life, and when I look on you again I shall know that everything is well in the world. I know that nothing has happened and that nothing can happen, but my heart knows differently.”

During the winter Alec came home from college every Saturday, walking over the mountain each Saturday afternoon for fifteen miles, and going back Monday morning by a stage that started at some unearthly hour, and carried passengers over to the nearest town to us through which a railroad ran in those days.

Various boys of those he had around him would straggle down the road to meet him, so when he came into the town on cold winter nights it was with an escort of red-nosed, red-tippeted and booted youngsters.

This was before any of the new forms of education for boys had even so much as stirred in their sleep, and the town agreed in considering Alec’s friendship with the youngsters a waste of time on both sides: the parents of the boys saying that they had something better to do—in filling the wood-boxes for instance—than to tramp out and get their toes frozenoff to meet Alec. Alec’s friends, on the other hand, wondered what he wanted with a “parcel of young ones.” It was only Ellen and myself who caught a glimpse of just what it was that Alec was accomplishing, when we also would walk out to meet him. Besides supplying them in his own person with a hero to worship, he drew them out and untangled their knotty minds for them; for the boy of ten and twelve was, in my girlhood, even more misunderstood and kicked about and generally at odds with life than he is now. Nothing was done to make his school days happier or the path of learning easier. Teachers, almost without exception, were the boys’ natural enemies. Almost all the communication boys had from older people in my day, besides religious instructions, were recommendations to get to work and to get to work quickly.

These snowy walks in the crisp air to meet Alec were the punctuation points of our lives, and the long, pleasant Saturday evenings that we spent together, with perhaps some of the other young people dropping in, were our greatest pleasure. I am sure Ellen’s house seemedto him the gayest place in the world, because we concentrated into those few hours on Saturday evening the gayety of the whole week, though Ellen did not have much time for “mulling,” as her aunt called it. Getting ready for her mother’s marriage meant not only the preparation of her clothes, but also the preparation of the whole Scudder house for its occupancy by Mr. Sylvester and Matilda, Flavilla, and Prudentia.

Ellen’s mood was not at all consistent with that of vague apprehension, and this warning note of her spirit she failed to listen to most of the time; as long as Roger’s letters came regularly, she lived in a shimmering world of imagination, writing to him all the things she dared, and then writing to him again all the things she was too timid to tell him. All the outward details of her life were constant and pressing enough, and very homely, most of them; while within she lived in a shimmering world of her own, her lovely garden inclosed of the spirit, into which she let no unkind breath blow; and so her love for Roger blossomed throughout the long months of thewinter. Then toward Easter came her mother’s wedding, which meant to Ellen Roger’s return. The Resurrection and Roger’s return came all together in Ellen’s mind.

When his letter came that told her he couldn’t leave his office at this moment, she could not at first believe it, any more than she could at first believe that he had gone away.

Alec was there, and he asked me shortly:—

“Why couldn’t Roger come?”

“He’s busy,” I said.

Alec gave me an odd look.

“One can do what one wants to,” said he.

He was one of those over whom Love passes a maturing hand. At twenty he had lost the young-robin look of expression, just as he had lost early the puppy aspect that a boy has before he has gotten used to man-size hands and feet.

“It’s hard,” he said, “to sit back and do nothing. It’s hard when you love any one as I do Ellen not to be able to get for her any of the things in life that she wants the most.”

“What does she want,” I asked, “that she hasn’t?”

“Well,” Alec reflected, “I can come to see her every week and Roger can’t.” He might have said: “I can spend my life on her and give her every thought of my heart and stand between her and unhappiness as much as I can, and Roger can’t.”

This was one of the few times that Ellen played make-believe to herself. I think she had to. It was only later that her straight mind said what Alec had said, “We can do what we want to.” She hid her own disappointment from herself, and life was good to her in that it gave her a great deal to do. Although in those days wedding journeys were very rare, Mr. Sylvester had an old friend, a minister, near Washington, who came up to marry them and they were to exchange pulpits, and so directly after her disappointment Ellen was left alone with the three Sylvester children. Matilda at this time was already eleven and she remarked gravely to Ellen,—“Ellen, we’ve all decided that you can be our mother. Of course we shall call your mother ‘Mother,’ too, and we shall love her like that, because we’ve made up our minds that it is ourduty,”—Matildawas very particular about duty,—“but you’ll be our real mother. I’ve done the best I can with the children,”—for thus did Matilda always refer to her little sisters,—“but our clothes are in a terrible state since Mrs. Gillig went away.” For the Sylvesters’ housekeeper had gone promptly after the announcement of her employer’s engagement. She had departed to the next town, where her relatives lived, saying that she was not going to stay around and be any one’s “kill-joy”; so with an occasional day’s work from Mrs. Butler and help from Ellen and me, they had gotten on as best they could.

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