CHAPTER XXI

“I got their poor, little things unpacked [said Ellen] and got them their supper and put them to bed and Flavia patted my cheek and said, ‘Ellen, you’re so happy, that’s why we love you,’ and Prudentia said, ‘Yes, I love folks that laugh,’ and it came over me that for a while, anyway, I really am their mother—poor me, who knows so little about doing anything. Before I went to bed Matilda put her arm around me and said, ‘Oh! Ellen, I want togrow up and be capable and take care of father and mother and everybody, and I’ve been just as capable as I know how ever since Mrs. Gillig left. I’ve been so capable it makes my jaws ache, and I want to stop and be a little girl.’ And pretty soon Aunt Sarah came in to see how badly I had done everything and to grumble good-naturedly over my endeavors, and then Grandma Hathaway dropped in to see if I needed anything, and they went off together and left Alec and me alone, and the children in bed. And Alec never once looked at me as though he cared for me; he was only funny and told me stories, just as if he knew I couldn’t have borne affection from any one but Roger.”

So it was that Ellen hid from herself and from the pain that was in her heart. This was one of the few times she played make-believe with herself. She was afraid of her own doubt and afraid of her own thoughts, really afraid for the first time; for this is another of the painful milestones which most of us have to pass in the long and bleeding road of love—thefirst time that we are afraid to face our fears.

Ellen and her mother had been buying cloth for Ellen’s trousseau, and she had put it all by for her mother to begin on when her mother should be married. I was to help her, and so, of course, was Aunt Sarah.

In our days, girls mostly made their own trousseaux, and the richer among us had some seamstress engaged for a couple of months or six weeks, but friends helped one another, and one was supposed to go to one’s husband with linen enough to last a long time in life, and with good, substantial garments, suitable for various occasions in a gentlewoman’s life. Ellen had a poplin and a cashmere among other things, and when I came a day or two after her mother’s wedding to encourage her to begin on her own things, I found her on her hands and knees cutting.

“Why, Ellen Payne! What’s that you’re doing?” For instead of cutting out one beautiful cashmere garment she was cutting three little frocks. “Oh, Miss Grant!” I exclaimed, scandalized, to Miss Sarah, “Ellen’s cuttingup her blue cashmere from her trousseau for the children.”

Miss Grant adjusted her glasses and peered down at the patterns on the floor.

“Well, there,” said she, “you have Ellen. We’ll have Ellen Payne’s trousseau walking all over town on three pairs of legs, and rather than patch up their old things, she begins her new life by taking the very trousseau off her own back! Some would think you were self-sacrificing, Ellen, but I know you.”

Poor Ellen always remained the same, taking more pleasure in doing any one’s work than her own, and as she told me, “the soul of her sickened in patching up the clothes of those poor children any more,” and, besides, said she: “Everybody else has new clothes, and there’s no one on earth quite so proud as a little girl with a new frock.”

“But your own trousseau, Ellen,” I objected scandalized, because I had a proper sentiment for those things. Ellen was romantic, but seldom sentimental at all.

“Cloth’s cloth,” she replied briskly, “and goodness knows when I’m to be married andshall need it, and there’s one sure thing, they need new best dresses right straight away.”

They needed new best dresses and they needed new almost everything else, as Matilda had warned Ellen.

So here was Ellen with her hands full. In the day before the sewing-machine, when every stitch had to be put in by hand and there were no such things as ready-made garments, making clothes for a family was no light undertaking. No wonder, then, that we made our dresses of good stuff, intended to wear; and Ellen had not only to provide for the little Sylvesters garments, but for her own trousseau as well. The young ladies nowadays, who make themselves a few things and order and buy ready-made everything else, do not realize what an undertaking the preparations for a wedding used to be. It sometimes seems to me that there was as much difference in our serious preparation of our clothes and the way that girls prepare now, as there is in the way that we prepared ourselves spiritually. Ellen wrote:—

“The clothes that I am making mean my life, Roger. They are not dresses to me any more. There is one dress I know I shall never be able to put on without feeling my heart beat away the minutes slowly while I waited and waited and waited for your letter. There are some buttonholes made while it seemed as if my heart sang like birds. What do you think I am building with the things I dream of constantly, as I sit with the thought of you and sew on the clothes that I shall wear when we are at last together for always, for thinking is the way that one builds up or tears down the things of the spirit? I think I build rather solidly, and before I can be torn out of this house of my thoughts of you, I shall have to be pulled out in little pieces no bigger than your hand.”

She wrote this after she had seen him, for he came for a two days’ breathless visit, just as spring was breaking. He came back the bad, little boy, ready to sulk if he was scolded for not coming sooner. This time Ellen had only sweetness for him, no tears; she was so heart-brokenly glad to see him, but she wrote:—

“Where have you gone, Roger, and what’s become of that lovely, shining love that we had? The horizon has shrunken for us in a curious way. Where it used to be wider than that of all the world, and the heavens flung full of stars and a splendid wind ramping over everything, our love lives now in a little world full of small hopes and fears, a dwarfed place. I suppose all this means that I wanted to ask you when you were here, ‘What’s the matter, Roger? What has happened to your love for me?’ And I didn’t dare to because I knew that you would say, ‘Nothing.’ I know you would look at me as one who says, ‘Am I not here with you now? Don’t be a tiresome woman.’ When I said to you—and I said it half smiling—‘It’s a terrible thing how a man can eat up a woman’s life as you do mine, so I am all yours,’ you turned away as though you didn’t hear me. You made acknowledgment of a word that was only half kind. I write this to you which I would never say to you because if said to you it would be a reproach. I write to you since I have need of my soul talking to yours, and with no reproach in my mind, but to try andunderstand what it is that has happened. Before, had I shown you my heart that way, you would have caught me to you. Must I be careful not to give you too much of myself, Roger; must I pour myself out to you in small sips,—you who wished to drink of me, as though your thirst for me would never become quenched? It seemed to me that there were as many things to keep silent about while you were here as before we had things to talk about. We were always running into ghosts of the way we used to care, and yet you were so dear to me and sweet to me.”

Lovers forever have watched the affections ebb out bit by bit, and have been as powerless to stop the ebbing as the tides of the sea. This causeless change, this heart-breaking wintertime of the affections, is one of the hardest things of all to bear. When people quarrel they can “make up” again, but this slow alteration from life to death comes as relentlessly as age and seems as little in our power to change as age’s coming. It has been the anguish of lovers from all time.

All through the coming of spring and summer, Ellen had brooded over this change, wondering if it was her fault, measuring Roger’s affection and cherishing every little phrase of love which he put in his letters, every desire to see her, and magnifying them, and stitching all the while her doubts and hopes—hopes a little frayed and tarnished—into her wedding-clothes. There was a time when he promised every week to come, and every week there came a letter instead of Roger. He played fast and loose with her as it suited him, now coming to see her a splendid young prince, now leaving her without word for weeks.

It is an awful and bleeding thing when a woman realizes that the beloved has changed toward her and she doesn’t know the reason, and it is still harder to have given more of one’s self than has been wanted, and this Ellen did continually. Suffering herself, she wanted to spare Roger suffering.

So she lived along in that hope deferred that maketh the heart sick. Then all word of Roger ceased for a time. She wrote to him as she had always and then she wrote him a letter that she never sent, releasing him.

“Once, when I was a little girl, I thought I was engaged because I thought I was in love, and I spent two years of my life in thinking that my life was dear to this man. I lived in a torment of doubt of what to do rather than hurt him. I could not bear to have any one live this way for me, and least of all you who have been the heart of life to me, and so before this happens to you let us say good-bye to each other as splendidly and gayly as we first met each other. Love does not come at any one’s bidding, nor will it stay, and I would blame no one in this world for ceasing to love, least of all the one whom I love. But I could not endure from you a cowardly drifting away from me, I could not bear to see you fear to face bravely a moment of pain, nor could I bear the dishonorable shiftiness with which some men loosen the bonds between themselves and the women whom they have loved.”

And under this page, which was written on good notepaper,—a true never-sent letter,—she had written: “Oh! if I had the courage to send this now!”

Then came Roger, triumphant and upstanding, his first pleaded case in his pocket, a splendid young prince again, as prodigal with apologies as he was with love. The miracle happened; they turned back the hands of time for a few days.

“He held me from him, the way he does, at arm’s length, and said: ‘Ellen, have you doubted me?’ What could I say to him? When I had courage enough to say, ‘What’s been the matter, Roger? Where did you go so I couldn’t find you?’ he only laughed and said, ‘I’ve been in the devil’s own temper.’”

This was the last time she fought against him. From this time on he loosed his careless hand and tightened the clutch of it over her heart until it bled, according to his mood. When she didn’t write him for a while he rushed to her, to see that his own was his own, and this was as much as any woman ought to have asked, so he felt. She wrote:—

“There’s one thing I’ve learned about you,Roger, when first I saw the other Roger, and that was if any one denied you anything, you loved to beg for it. As long as a thing denies itself to you, you must strive for it, and knowing this of you, it is a weapon that I can never use. If I played you as if you were a trout in the stream, played you until I reeled you in to me, tired and gasping, I might have held you in my hand always. Whatever I shall do for you in life, I shall never do anything that shows my love for you more, in that I won’t traffic with your love, and keep it for myself by playing a game with you. I make you this present, a real gift, as my aunt once said, and one that you won’t know about ever.”

So she wrote in the deep bitterness of her heart.

The wedding had been fixed for October and all the time there was one little song that sung itself to her: “When we’re married, then I can show him how I really care; when I’m with him, nothing will be hard for me, for it is suspense that kills.” For she trusted him as women must, in the face of disloyalty and carelessness.

In the early fall, after a season of silence, when she was too sick at heart even to write, he came. He had a deprecatory air. He came as one asking the favor of something which he ought not to have, and it was characteristic of him, with his intolerance of the disagreeable, that he should break the edge of telling Ellen, so to speak, by telling me first.

He had come to defer the wedding, and his reason for wishing to do so we found out later. I remember how he sat in my kitchen, his heavy, handsome profile silhouetted against the flaming, evening sky, his head swung forward. He lifted his face toward me with a sharp, impatient gesture, looked at me, and asked a question, to me inconceivable.

“Do you think she is going to make an awful fuss?”

Here my long-cherished resentment toward Roger overflowed. No one could have been with Ellen as I had been without seeing the turmoil in which her spirit lived. She had grown thin and of a certain transparency as do those whose sufferings of the spirit affect their bodies profoundly. I knew there were long times when he didn’t write; I knew how she waited for his letters; I knew how seldom he came. I felt, in my wisdom, that she bore from Roger things I would stand from no man. I had learned, step by step with Ellen, that Ellen’s life and all her happiness were in careless hands and, in Alec’s language, that there was no country of the heart there for her. I looked at Roger with level-eyed disgust.

“Why, Roger,” I asked him, “don’t you break your engagement now, if that’s what you mean to do?”

To my point-blank question, he only stared at me.

“I don’t want to break it,” he said. “Ellen’s just exactly the kind of a woman I want for my wife,” he added.

“But in your good time,” said I bitterly.

He looked at me with his bold, laughing eyes:

“There’s a delight of life with Ellen that I can find with no one else. I know what she is, Roberta, a thousand times more than you. She’s the onlyaliveperson in the world, but since you put the words in my mouth, ‘In my own good time!’” He had completely recovered his good-tempered arrogance.

“I’d never stand from you what Ellen’s stood, and I hope she says good-bye to you now,” I cried.

It is easy for those not in love to place the limit to love’s endurance. It is fortunately not easy to keep these shallow promises to one’s self.

I am sorry that so much of what was most unlovely in Roger creeps into my story. At the time I had no patience with him, his undeniable charm and interest offended me as it kept Ellen bound to him. I wanted, as youth always does, people to be all bad or all good,and Roger would be neither of these things. I realize now that, faithful or unfaithful, he kept Ellen’s life full of him, nor could she escape his compelling personality. There are many men we should not quarrel with,—men who can so absorb us, like him of the ultra-masculine type, who have everything but pity and understanding of what they themselves haven’t felt. They are of all men the most attractive to women and they care the least about the individual. From now on she loved him always with a fear that he was waiting for her with a knife for her back. She wrote:—

“Oh, how much make-believe we have had! I’ve pretended that I thought it was nice for Roger to work, and he’s pretended to me that he wanted to work, but he doesn’t want me—that’s the real reason. When I wake in the morning, I feel my heart crying within me in the deep heaviness of my spirit before I can remember what’s happened, and then I remember that Roger doesn’t want me. He doesn’t want me and I can’t imagine life going on without him. I’ve always thought tofeel unbeloved would be the worst thing that could happen to me. I don’t know myself in this beggared person. Life seems so empty for me, and I go shivering up to Alec to warm my cold spirit at the fire of his affection. I look back at the time when I waited for Roger to come back to me, just three little days, and the touch of his hand still warm in mine, and think how happy I was then.”

A little later she became more accustomed to the idea and wrote:—

“Roger, I’m ashamed of how I felt, and I’m glad of one thing, that you know nothing about it. Have you seen me as I am, and is that why you no longer care as you did? I’ve been a cowardly, shivering thing, afraid of your letters even, afraid of what would come next. How can a man love so cowardly a woman? Why should I count and measure love for love, instead of rejoicing with you in your work? It is I that know nothing about love, since I can whine and since I can compare and contrast yesterday with to-day, instead of being gladthat you are alive and in the same world with me; and why should I care if, since you want to marry me, you have lost some of the first hot flame, a flame which burned us both? Are all women in life egotists that they can’t bear that the eyes of the beloved don’t rest on them every moment?”

There was very little use in her trying to hearten herself with brave words, for women know when a part of the life of the man they love belongs to them and when it doesn’t. Many of us live for years separated from the man we love, and know that his thoughts turn to us continually, that time and space are a terrible, practical joke played by destiny on mankind. There had been a moment in Ellen’s life when, whether he were thinking of her or not, there was no place in his life where she might not go, and now the foundation of a real affection was lacking between them, and that foundation is sincerity. In whatever way she tried to go to him she came upon high walls and barriers of silence, places in his spirit marked “No thoroughfare.”

“I know nothing about you, Roger; [she writes] I only know that things are going on that are hostile to me and to our love. I suppose, that you do not tell me what it is shows you do not trust me and that I’ve grasped too much and asked too much. I fight forever with an unseen adversary. I don’t even know if this adversary has a face or if it is a set of circumstances in your life, and I have nothing to fight with but my bleeding love for you, and what good is that to you unless you happen to want it? What thing is so worthless as an undesired love? Yet you made it, Roger, and you are responsible for it. It is like having a child and then finding it troublesome, letting it starve to death, to create a love like mine for you and then kill it. Women who love should never doubt. They should trust and trust in the face of dishonor and in the face of disaster, for distrust carries with it a bitter strength. A woman who trusts utterly is a woman who gives herself utterly, and then, when the blow descends from the blue, it also crushes her utterly, perhaps it may even kill her, but she has had that exalted peace even until the lastmoment. It’s all the difference between having one’s beloved brought home dead, who went out smiling, and having him die horribly inch by inch, before one’s eyes. It is better to have love killed than to have it tortured to death, and I would rather have had you say, in the midst of our deepest hour together, ‘Ellen, I’m going away and I shall never see you again,’ than wait as I do for you to tell me it’s finished.”

This was how Ellen’s spirit lived, racked and torn between its grave fears and its momentary and joyful hopes, while the day was passed in a thousand details of a house humming with children. As Ellen said herself, “The outer side of her life was living in sunshine and the inner side in darkness and doubt.” In town people said Ellen was working too hard over Mr. Sylvester’s brood, for she seemed at that time so frail that through the transparent shell of her one could see her spirit burning.

None of the family suspected that there was any misunderstanding between them, for Roger had a very kindly generosity. He was a manprodigal in the small acts of kindness, and was forever sending things for the children and for Mrs. Sylvester, whom he treated like an elder sister, teasing her and loving her. Miss Grant was the only one who had had occasional misgivings, and I learned from my grandmother that Roger’s family were not satisfied with his “goings on,” and that while he was being a success, his mother was worried over him, which made my grandmother remark:—

“I wish that young man had fallen from his horse and broken his neck before ever he set eyes on Ellen Payne. Old women like us forget that young creatures die of a broken heart now and again, and if they could only die! The best friend I ever had, Roberta, had all the youth and love killed in her and went on living like a dry, little automaton of a woman, and is living yet. Instead of the things she might have had,—children and a husband and a home,—she has just her own dried-up body, which is like a little birch tree struck by lightning; and the thing she thinks of most in life is the noise that the sparrows make in her elm trees.”

But I could not fear that a fate like that awaited my Ellen, for my memory of her then is a lovely frail thing, with a hand forever held out to Prudentia and Flavilla.

Prudentia when crossed stopped, as was her custom, to pray. She prayed in season and out of season and for everything, and it was against her father’s principles to stop her.

“How stop a child communing with her Maker?” he would argue, to which Ellen would reply with spirit:—

“She’s only communing with her own selfishness when she says: ‘Oh! God, send the boys home so Ellen can tell me a story.’”

For several of Alec’s youngsters hung around the old Scudder place a great deal, and accompanied Ellen on her walks, as though Alec had left her, in those boys, a bit of his protecting spirit.

Various important things happened that winter. The first was a deep surprise to all of Alec’s friends. He became engaged to his landlady’s daughter in the town where he went to college.

“How can you?” I asked him, “caring for Ellen?”

“Well, you see,” he explained, “it’s all over, isn’t it, forever? No matter what happens, Ellen is Roger’s, and why should I hang around and bay the moon? Elizabeth knows all about Ellen.”

“I don’t see how you can,” I repeated.

And then he said:—

“Roberta, it seems a wonderful thing to me that any one should care for me. How can I hurt a love that has been given to me? I care for her in a different way from Ellen and there is all truth between us.” Then he laughed. “It’s a funny thing; Roger loves no one, Ellen loves Roger, I love Ellen, and Elizabeth caresfor me. By doing this I’m making the tangle less.”

That is all he would tell me at the time, but, being romantic then and still romantic, I have always thought that his chivalry and compassion had been skillfully played upon.

With a touching belief in the generosity of woman that is possible only in extreme youth, Alec effected a meeting between Elizabeth and Ellen at which I was present. All three of us were painfully polite and well behaved. Our cordiality was touching as we played to our dear Alec as audience. “But,” said Ellen to me afterwards, “isn’t it dreadful! why couldn’t he have chosen any one else! She’s sweet, of course; but think, Roberta, of that doll-faced thing as Alec’s wife.” While Elizabeth is reported to have said that on beholding Ellen she could hardly keep herself from exclaiming aloud, “Why, isthatEllen Payne!”

It was in midwinter that Mrs. Byington asked Ellen to visit her. She had often asked Ellen before, but there had been various reasons; Roger always preferred to spend the time with Ellen in the country. It seemed to methat in the days of her preparation it was like seeing a person come back to life. She has written:—

“I’ve been so homesick for you, Roger, that I felt like those people who die of homesickness in a far-off country. I feel as though I had been put away in a place where there was no air to breathe, and now I am to be let out into the sunlight once more, since you want me to come to you.”

Roger came back with her, but during the week she was away there was no entry at all. The visit was a time of confusion and excitement. Mrs. Byington gave her three beautiful frocks, more beautiful than anything she had ever seen, and it seemed to Ellen that she had met the whole city of Boston, and that she had been drowned in compliments. They seemed to her to have only just learned of her engagement, and she felt the weight of their curious eyes upon her, and realized that they turned from compliments to gossip, and Mrs. Byington, in the mean time, scarcelyconcealed her relief at Ellen’s presence and her pleasure at the impression Ellen had made. Miss Sarah told these things to my grandmother, having accompanied Ellen.

Ellen made one friend, a girl younger than herself, a cousin of Roger’s, who unconsciously played a part, since she put in Ellen’s hands the answer to so many riddles, the uncertainties that so tortured her.

“Now I know all the things that tortured me so,” she wrote. “I felt that I was in Boston for some definite purpose that I didn’t know about, and the reason Katherine showed me, as though she had flung out a careless hand and pulled back a curtain, and I felt as though I had listened at Roger’s door. ‘Aunt Lydia was glad enough to have you come,’ said she. ‘Of course, we in the family have known of Roger’s engagement, even if he hasn’t talked about it outside, but since his quarrel with Mary Leckie, he’s been eager enough too.’ And her little careless words gave me a picture of all the things I didn’t know, but that I had felt, and as if to make it sure it seemed that Mrs. Byington apologized to me when shesaid: ‘Roger is making great strides at his profession; it is a compensation for many things to know that the man one loves is a man of great attainment.’ It is as though my heart had been dried up suddenly. I look back at the time when I could cry as a time of happiness. If he should love some one more than me, how could I blame him, but he has used me as a pawn in the game, to hurt some one he’s been unkind to, perhaps some one who loved him, too. What attainment of his can wipe out this cruelty? I saw the little look of triumph on his face when he saw his friends approved of me. Now what hope have I or where can I turn in this world? I have just one good little word to cling to—he said to me wistfully, ‘Oh! Ellen, why wouldn’t you run away with me?’ They say love is blind, but no man knows or excuses a man so little as the woman who loves him.”

She had not seen him alone when she wrote this, as Miss Grant accompanied them home. It was on Saturday afternoon, and they went walking on the road to meet Alec, that Ellenlearned her own heart. Roger was in a dangerous mood, kind on the surface, but underneath a mood that said: “Take me or leave me; I am as I am.” Perhaps he regretted burning his bridges behind him; perhaps he chafed at the restraint of the inevitable marriage. For once he was ready to draw the hidden things to the surface. Ellen wrote:—

“I know now who I am, and I know that I have no pride in the world and that there’s no place where I stop in my love for Roger; no matter what he does to me, I cannot leave him; no matter what happens, I ask only to be with him. We started out across the mountain. It was slushy underfoot and the cold, damp air whining up from the river. All the world looked sullen, and a sad little moon peered through a hole in the clouds. I felt inside as sad and cold as the world seemed. Roger walked along, his head thrown forward, looking into the dusk the way he looked at his mother. At last he said: ‘Did you have a good time in Boston, Ellen?’ And I knew he was questioning me as to what I had seen, throwing the door openon everything; and I had gone out with him, meaning to tell him what I thought and stand and fall by that. I said to myself a hundred times to-day, ‘There are better things in this world than happiness,’ but at his menacing voice I could say nothing. I looked down into the abyss of my need of him and there was no bottom to it. I felt that at a word from me he would quarrel with me, perhaps fling me away from him, and I didn’t dare say anything. After a long silence he said: ‘You look dispirited, Ellen; you’re never happy, are you, unless some one is telling you that you’re the Rose of the World?’ Tears burned behind my eyes, but I turned his challenge into a joke. In that moment I had seen what life would mean without him, and I saw it wouldn’t be life, that I am his at his own price—no matter what I must do, no matter what I must suffer, if he gives me faith or unfaith. I thought I had pride, but I know now that I ask for nothing but to stay near him at his own terms. I know there is nothing I would not do to keep him by my side, that the only thing intolerable to me is that he should leave me. There’s no little pride orself-respect left for me to wrap myself in any more. I walked beside him fighting back the tears, and it was like a deliverance to me when Alec came striding toward me, his head up, and his hair blowing in the wind, and I could blot out myself for a minute. When we got home, the three children were in the cold hall. Matilda and Flavilla were trying to make Prudentia come in, and Prudentia was praying, as she had been for half an hour, that I would come home. My little mother met me very shame-faced and said, ‘Dearest, see what I’ve found,’ and it was an enormous bag of holey stockings that she had put away to mend as a surprise for me, and had forgotten, and all the little details of life wrapped around me sweetly, but it’s hard to have every one good to me but the one whom I love.”

Love has its base places and its hideous slaveries of the spirit, but yet there is a certain comfort in utter abandonment. Ellen was like a man who has feared bankruptcy and who breathes again when he has at last actually failed; she had nothing to lose any more in herown spirit. She might lose Roger, but no other thing, for she now asked for nothing for herself. She had reached the lowest grade where one’s soul may live, when she knows there is nothing that one wouldn’t suffer at the hands of the beloved. Pride comes first—a blessed relief—between most women and such pain; but many women know something of the shame akin to it when they sacrifice their sincerity and their sense of truth rather than run the risk of a frown from the man they love.

The whole event had been one of unspeakable defeat and horror to Ellen; all that was fair and sweet in life to her turned black. There was no explaining away or excusing what Roger had done; she was too fair-minded to try. She saw the act in all its smallness, but it didn’t affect her want of him. During the next dark months she had all the pain of one who has been utterly abandoned by her lover, and she suffered, too, from jealousy and was ashamed of her suffering. Because she had told herself the truth about herself always, she had not even the disillusion that she was playing a fine and noble part. She only knew that it was novirtue of hers, but just a necessity for her to continue to spend herself endlessly for Roger. Her body, too, suffered pitifully, and she seemed to me to do nothing but wait for the meager words that Roger sent her.

Then happened in her heart that which I now know is the climax of the whole story. I knew nothing of it except that I knew that at a certain time Ellen grew happier.

She stopped waiting and became again master of her own soul, and the light of her spirit shone high again. She told me nothing, for things like this one cannot tell to another person. How can we tell another person of the rebirth of one’s own soul?

“I don’t know how to tell what has happened to me, [wrote Ellen,] but I know that I have come to the other side of suffering. I know it is as though I had been sitting at the bottom of a dark well, and suddenly, in the blackness of the sky above me, I saw a star and climbed out toward it. I know I shall lose this vision and go stumbling on, but sometimes it will come back to me; and I shall always havethe memory of it and never again can I be in the muddy darkness in which my spirit has lived. I sat awake all night thinking of Roger in a flooding tenderness of love and understanding, and I realized that in all this time I’ve only just been learning the first painful paths on the road of love. Whatever one gives sorrowfully isn’t love, nor does love fear; it asks only to understand more and more. As long as one has fear, one thinks of one’s self; as long as one is sad, one thinks of one’s self. Until one has learned not to say, ‘Give, give,’ one doesn’t know the meaning of love. So many sins are committed in the name of love continually and I will commit no more. ‘I love you’ has been a reason even for killing the ones whom we love, but for this one night I have had a vision of something that transcends love of self. Let me give and let me understand. Love must be either an equal exchange between equals or else a complete giving by one person, so let my giving be complete.”

So it was that from a woman ashamed of her own abasement, Ellen walked forth withhead up, meeting the difficulties that life put to her and turning them into sweetness. Roger felt this change in her. Lately all intercourse between them had been, on Ellen’s side, a silent questioning, and on his side, silent anger at her questioning; and the whole situation scarcely less strained than had they talked to each other. After having gone through the painful Calvary of love, the pain of waiting and the pain of doubt, and of trust misplaced and of jealousy, she had come through to the other side of grief.

Her high mood had made her see life so truly that an event which shocked the rest of us did not touch her, since she saw it in its true relation to Roger’s life, even though it again put off her wedding, violently and cataclysmally.

He came during the winter occasionally, looking rather haggard and gaunt and ill at ease with life, and he rested himself more and more on her breast as if trying further and further and with deeper confidence this unspeakable affection of hers.

Miss Sarah brought the news to our house, and she was agitated as I never have seen her.

“You may as well stay, Roberta,” she said,“because, after all, it may be better that you shall tell Ellen. No,” she contradicted herself, “no one shall carry my burdens for me.”

“What’s happened to Roger?” my grandmother asked; and I sat silent and trembling, pictures of a dead Roger in my mind.

“Roger’s father has turned him off; he’s been mixed up in some disgraceful gambling scrape. He’s been very wild this winter, poor Lydia writes me,—poor heart-broken woman. He escaped actual arrest only through his father’s influence.”

Little by little the whole series of events were made clear before my horrified young eyes. Country New England in those days was a place of rigid morals, nor were young girls taught to condone the frailties of men, and gambling at that time had a guilty and glittering sound. All our feelings, I think, were, how fortunate it should have occurred before Ellen’s wedding. When Miss Sarah told her, she said:—

“I know, he’s written me already,” but she didn’t add, “And I’ve written him to come to me.” She wrote:—

“When I got his letter telling me what had happened and releasing me, it seemed to me as if all the smouldering love in me for him burst into flame, and now, in the moment when every one’s turned on him, I am triumphantly and gladly his more than ever I’ve been. I feel as if I could stretch out my arms to him in the darkness and shield him from all harm and trouble. I feel as if I had been talking with him face to face, and that all this had burned away all those things that have been between us all this time. And he turned to me at this time with ‘I suppose you, too, Ellen, will want no more of me, but I wish, Ellen, I could say good-bye to you myself instead of writing it—you’ve been so true, Ellen.’”

So in the spring, two years after she first met Roger, Ellen went to Oscar’s Leap to await his coming. She loved the gallant bearing of him, for he came no broken penitent. He was no coward before the challenge of life; he loved the difficult and had a lovely joy in such battles.

“They kicked me out, Ellen,” he told her,“and I’ve kicked them all out. Now it’s me with my own two hands and my own two feet and you in the world. Why didn’t you tell me to do this before?” He loved the feeling he had of foot-looseness. He needed just one person to hold a hand out to him in the general wreckage of life, and his own woman had done this for him. When he got her letter, it seemed to him as though he had fallen to the earth only to spring up strong again.

This time Ellen’s whole family was against her, even to Mr. Sylvester, whose gentle nature always distrusted Roger. He had feared him from the first, having that gift of judgment of character that gentle and simple people often have. Ellen writes:—

“We had a fine scene, like that in a novel, at our house. Mr. Sylvester forbade Roger the house, and I flung myself in Roger’s arms and said that I would never leave him. Mother cried, and I could hear the children breathing at the keyhole and Prudentia praying in the hall. I suppose I should take it more seriously. I am sorry to be at odds with them, but whatdifference does it make to me, after all? I am glad just that Roger is back. If I could go with him now out into the world, I would put my hand in his and go, but the last thing he needs at this moment is a wife, and the first thing of all he needs is me. Now all my days of waiting have been paid for, now all my nights of doubt. If after this he should turn from me and love me no more, I should have had this and it would have paid for everything in my life. I can’t take Mr. Sylvester’s and my mother’s attitude seriously, because I know, as if I could read the future, that Roger will go out in the world and come back and be forgiven. I am wrong to be almost glad that it has happened, but it has made it possible for me to show him my heart, my poor bleeding heart, that has been silent for so long.”

Roger found work in a neighboring village and they met at the house of Ellen’s old friend, the peddler, or he took Ellen with him. During this time Roger flung from him again all of his life. He was one whom the confessional would have served well, for he could purge himselffrom all blame by telling everything and by passing to the innocent the burden of all his weaknesses. Now that life made some demand on him, the best of him shone out.

There was, to be sure, the making of a fine family scandal when it was discovered that Ellen was meeting Roger, but Ellen refused to quarrel; she refused to defend herself or do anything but laugh; and when I, rather scandalized at the lightness with which she took this whole situation, pointed out that her aunt was sulking and that her mother and Mr. Sylvester were sad, she replied with levity: “They’ll get over it.” During the long winter of silence and of forging her spirit into this flaming thing it now was, she had learned that lesson which is so difficult for youth, and that is that all things pass and that to-morrow brings peace to the bruised heart.

Her prophecy concerning Roger came to pass. After the weeks spent with her he went West, made friends with a friend of his father,—who had a lighter attitude toward Roger’s frailties, having had no opportunity to be tired out by them,—did well in pleading somespectacular cases, and came back, not the prodigal son, but triumphantly and gladly; then after his year of self-denial he plunged deeply into all sorts of amusements.

Ellen, during his absence, had kept closer and closer to her high mood. She knew that certain sorts of happiness were not for her with Roger, and that certain things he did and his moments of neglect and forgetfulness no longer wounded her to death. A month before her marriage she went to Boston again to buy her best things. Mrs. Sylvester had had a small legacy left her, and insisted that it must go to Ellen’s trousseau. I accompanied Mrs. Sylvester and Ellen. Roger was frankly relieved in his mind to have Ellen in Boston and the day of his wedding at last in sight.

“There was never a man,” he told me, “looked forward to his wedding with greater eagerness. I’m through with philandering, Roberta. No one knows more than I what Ellen has stood for my sake.”

I knew he was referring to a mild flirtation gossip concerning him which had come to Ellen and to me.

It seemed as if now nothing could come in their way and as if all was clear before them. Almost every detail was provided for when Ellen’s prayer that she had prayed day by day and day by day—“Give me understanding and insight”—received its supreme answer.

It was Roger’s temperament, and Ellen understood this, to fill the vacant places in his life with small love-affairs. At first she had suffered a certain jealousy and afterwards humiliation, and then dismissed it all as negligible, never thinking of it, as was natural, from the other woman’s point of view. This last vague affair had been with a young girl visiting from the South, who hadn’t known Roger was engaged, as he supposed she had. I noticed in the different places where we went a little, frail figure with a pretty, strained face, with eyes continually and irritatingly on Roger. His mother had said of him, “He’s not one who kisses and tells, but one who kisses and runs”; and he was avoiding her with his instinctive avoidance of the disagreeable. She was a foolish, suffering girl, like Ellen withoutpride, and even lacking the guard of Ellen’s reserve, haunting what she had thought had been her love for the balm of a single word which, though she had lost him, would make his memory sweet to her.

We were at a great party given by one of Roger’s relatives, in Ellen’s honor, two dazzled, little country Cinderellas, and for a moment had drawn ourselves apart to a recess of the big hall, and we saw Roger looking for us. The young girl hurrying across ran almost into his arms, and as they stood she cried out, in a little flowing voice, “Roger.” His face went white with anger and set itself into the lines that since then have been known as “his sentencing face.” He didn’t speak, but looked at her with quiet, cruel, and scornful eyes. There was silence between them, and she tortured the long white gloves that she held in her nervous hands, looking so frail that a breath might have blown her away.

“I’ve been trying to speak to you.”

“I think we said all that was necessary before,” he told her with the same cold, white scorn. He had been stopped in his search forwhat he wanted, and here was being made a scene that he had tried to avoid.

“I’ve been trying not to speak to you,” he said very quietly, “because I had nothing to say to you that could please you.”

Then tormented out of herself, she cried out:

“Roger, was there no reality of any friendship between us? Were you engaged all the time that I’ve known you?”

“There’s been nothing between us. What should there be? Just a moonshine of words,” he answered her. “I’ve been engaged three years. Do you wish anything else?”

She didn’t answer, but went away, a lonely, little, fragile figure, shivering as though struck with a great cold. He had had no moment of compassion; his instinct had been to crush her with as little pity as he would an annoying fly. In his ruthlessness he took even the past from her, not even leaving her the shadow of her romance for comfort. Ellen and I had both seen her wilt before him and the light in her eyes go out, and I felt Ellen’s hand shaking in mine as the girl had shivered, and she whispered in my ear:—

“There, but for the grace of God, goes Ellen Payne.”

Here was her prayer granted and understanding was given her. The final tragedy is not to be unloved, but to find out that one has loved nothing;—that within the shell of the body there is nothing to which we can give ourselves;—to have been cursed with the love of the shallow-hearted; and there is a deep torment, beyond the loss of death, which goes with the unknitting of two souls knit close together, strand by strand. Ellen could stand any cruelty that he gave to her and condone it, but she shivered back from this relentlessness that she had seen in Roger. As he came to her she said to him:—

“I heard you, Roger.”

His face was still set in anger.

“I gave her no cause,” he exclaimed angrily, “nothing but a little moonshine talk. When we’re married I shan’t be subjected to things like that.”

“We’re not going to be married,” said Ellen.

During all my life long I have occasionally had, in times of stress, a recurrence of the spiritual nausea which I felt that night. When we drove home in the closed carriage Mrs. Sylvester was prattling like a girl about the beautiful party. Indeed, she had enjoyed the outward circumstance of things almost more than Ellen and myself, and Roger, making light talk with her, sat next to Ellen,—light talk that had its undercurrent of meaning that Ellen and I understood. The cab lurched noisily over the cobblestones, with which all Boston was paved in those days, so that Roger and Mrs. Sylvester had to raise their voices above the din. It was raining, and the yellow flare of the street-corner lamps was reflected in pools of eddying light from the damp pavements.

It seemed to me that we went on and on forever in this torment of noise and talk, and the smell of the wet spring night conflicted withthe smell of the stuffy upholstery, and I suffered as though I was witnessing the physical pain of a tortured child. It seemed to me that the torment of the ceaseless, agonizing prattle of Ellen’s little mother, accompanied by the drunken lurch of the lumbering cab, would never stop, for all the time I knew that Ellen’s heart was breaking, and that the only thing that life could give her at that moment was darkness and rest. I knew this was the end as far as she and Roger were concerned.

We had our room together, and I felt like a stranger in a house of mourning. I knew that there was no comfort that I could give her at all. She hadn’t even tears with which to refresh herself, and all she said to me was: “Roberta, I’ve been stripped bare of leaves to-night.” This was a true enough picture of her. She had been a blooming flower, and now it was as if the frost of some inexorable and unseen winter had touched her and she was bare of leaves and blossoms.

I suppose I was the only one among all those who loved her who did not urge Ellen to reflect on her decision. There was so little to tell whenit came to it. Ellen’s reason was so little one of the usual causes for which an engagement may be dissolved, with the approval of a girl’s elders. Here was Ellen who had stood by Roger gayly, without even, apparently, a proper understanding of his dissipation; who had endured from him neglect, who had learned to school herself so that she was able to ignore his temperamental interests in other women; she, who had been without any end in her affections, gave the appearance to the outside world of having suddenly, for no reason, come to an end of her love.

In our town there was scant belief that Ellen had jilted Roger. Why do such a thing? “Aren’t they all as poor as church mice, and isn’t Roger as likely a young man as one would wish to see?” They clamored around me inquisitively.

There is no time when the human race shows itself in such beauty and in such heartless sordidness as in the time of grief. Then it is that the world we know turns strange faces upon us, and mean, low-lived men will show the gentle chivalry that one would expect only of angels,and delicate women, of chaste and gracious lives, will develop, before one’s eyes, hideous and ghoulish curiosity. Any one who has been through the death of those whom they love knows this, and still more it is true in the other disasters of life, where there is no ceremonial of grief. Death has dignity. Its august finality stops many a wagging tongue and many an unkind word. But oh, the other griefs of the spirit! One is shielded by no mourning; there is no protecting tradition to fold its arms about one; and one’s poor, shivering soul is left naked on the highway, afraid of the heartless curiosity of prying eyes.

The curious world has no mercy for a girl jilted by her lover. There is no sanctity to all this suffering, no privacy allowable, not a day’s respite from the inquisitive natures and prattling tongues. One must count one’s self very fortunate if one is allowed to care for the most bleeding of one’s wounds with a certain degree of decent privacy. And in our little town privacy was what was impossible for Ellen. I was for a while the center of the storm, for, to Roger, Ellen had been inexplicable; he hadnot been able to believe what had happened and came storming down after us.

“I can’t see him,” Ellen told me. “There’s no place anywhere in him to explain anything. You’ll see when you try and talk to him.”

I begged her, out of kindness, to see him once because he was terribly torn by what had happened. He told me that the sure foundations of life had rocked under his feet, and when I repeated this to Ellen, she shook her head.

“It’s not that,—he can’t bear that what’s been so his creature should defy him. He’s never had life say no to him before.” She said this without bitterness, and more as an older woman might of a boy she has brought up.

“Why won’t you see him,” I pleaded with her, “just for one moment?”

“I don’t dare to,” she told me. “Every habit I have says yes to him; every strand of my body cries out to him; it’s as if he had never been and I had died; and yet our bodies go on living and caring for each other. He doesn’t need me any more than he needs any one else. He needs no person, Roberta. Love and encouragement and companionship: the world isfull of it for him. Yet I need him and shall need him always, to the end of my days.”

Often it is that in the disintegration of a deep and long-lived affection, it is the instinct of the body to shiver away first, before the mind knows what has happened, but it is more dangerous when, in the full splendor of love, the blow has fallen and instinct still clamors for the beloved’s companionship.

But she wasn’t to be spared seeing him. They met by chance upon the street. I was with Ellen, and he began at once babbling forth the excuses he had said over and over to me. Because Ellen said there was no place in him to tell him what it was all about, he persisted in thinking that she had been outraged by his trifling again, with their affection, at the eleventh hour.

At last he went away, but he had the satisfaction of feeling that he had played the noble part. In the light of Ellen’s actions, what he considered his own small unfaiths, appeared as nothing.

Back to Index Next