The Heart's Country :: CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER VIII

The next few weeks there were very few entries.

Ellen was very bad at mathematics, and her uncle, who rarely left his seclusion to interest himself in her affairs and who merely enjoyed her personality, thought it would be a fine plan if this responsible young man should give his Ellen lessons. Mr. Grant was advanced in his theories concerning the female brain, which, he said, lost its vagueness and inexactnesses through a mathematical training. Ellen merely makes a note of this.

There are very few entries in her journal at this time, for she was playing with the great forces of life. God help us all! We didn’t know passion when it came to us, nor how should we? It was the warp on which were woven all our generous impulses, all our high idealisms, making in all the shimmering garments in which we clothed our fragile, newborn spirits. Ellen walked in a magic circle of her own ignorance, never dreaming of love or of being in love. So absorbed was she that it seemed like some one walking down a road that leads directly into a swift-flowing river, and not knowing that the river was there until one had walked directly into it. So close is the so-called silly moment of girlhood to the moment of full development, that when the change comes it sometimes takes only overnight. It was only a few pages, after all, that separated Ellen, who managed to do the minister’s dishes by pretending that she was his second wife, from the Ellen who wrote:—

“I don’t know how to begin what I am going to say. I thought everybody in the world must know what had happened to me. I thought my face must shine with it. I thought I must look like some one very different from myself,—like a woman, perhaps. I came home through Lincoln Field and squeezed myself through a hole in the fence so no one could see me. I came up the back way to my room and locked the door. My heart beat both ways at once when I looked in the glass, but I looked just the same as before I went out—as before he kissed me. I went downstairs and my hand seemed too heavy to open the door and go in where I heard their voices. I was afraid to go because I felt: ‘They will know, they will know!’ Mr. Sylvester and mamma and Aunt Sarah were there. ‘Where have you been?’ said mamma. And I could not answer. I felt I had been gone so long and so far. I could hear the blood beating in my ears, and when my aunt said: ‘I wish, Ellen, you would stand up straighter,’ I could hardly lift my head.”

Next day there is an entry: “I didn’t know we were engaged until he told me, ‘Why, of course, we are.’”

Thus simply does youth plight its troth. They had been together and he had kissed her, and so, of course, they were engaged. Of course, they were ready to fight the long battle of life side by side, and she who had given so much in her kiss had walked out past the doors of girlhood; through that one light touch she felt that her whole life must be then surrendered to the boy who had had the magic word for her. They decided to tell no one on account of their youth.

No sooner did this honest lad have my rainbow Ellen in his hands than he started in trying to make some one else of her. I read her journal that follows with a certain heartache because I was not blameless in this matter. I, too, wanted to take this gay and shimmering child and turn her into something else; trim her generosities and check her impulses.

Another thing that makes me rage is the fact that my knowledge of the lives of men teaches me that, had Ellen had one little affectation in which to clothe herself, her young lover would have been on his knees before her instead of being the pedantic young master. Ellen’s journal at this time varies from a thing glittering with life, from being drunk with the heady wine of being beloved for the first time, to a book of copy-book maxims, beginning with: “Edward says I must read—or do—or act—or mustn’t.” Poor young man! He wrote her decalogues by the dozen, and yet the tragedy of him is that he tasted her special quality and loved her while trying to kill it. The youth of Ellen and her high joy of living carried him along in spite of himself, though he always made Ellen pay for his happiness by lectures on the seriousness of life.

It was here that Alec began to perceive the place he had in her life. They had a game they played that they called “Two Years Ago,” in which they outdid their own childish pranks. Ellen remarks ingenuously:—

“I suppose that I ought to tell Edward how Alec and I rest ourselves from growing up, but there is no place in him to tell this to. I tried it with Roberta, and she just understood what it was about, but doesn’t see why I want to do it; and I don’t know myself exactly, except that I just have to.”

Then from one day to another Alec was sent West to an uncle and two weeks later, as had been planned, Edward left. He was to go away for a year and a half, and then come back and formally ask for Ellen’s hand. It shocked Ellen terribly that she missed Alec most.

Through all the year and a half that followed, Ellen never told me anything of what was in her mind, nor did she tell her mother, and here is the characteristic of their young girlhood that people seem to forget—this nameless reticence. So, alone, she went through the crucial thing that falling out of love always is. Another girl in her situation might have deceived herself, the idea of a grown-up lover was such a pleasant one to a girl of Ellen’s age. Ellen was unaware of the disillusion she was preparing for herself. She writes, appalled:—

“I don’t know what has happened to me, I can only describe it by saying I have waked up. I know now that I am not in love with Edward and I just understood this from one day to another. He has not done anything at all. He writes me just the way he always has. He hasn’t changed, so I suppose I am fickle and bad, and that I can’t trust myself, for if this wasn’t real, I don’t know what can be real, and yet I feel as though I had never loved him at all. I sometimes wonder if I should have become engaged to some other person if it had happened that some other person had kissed me.”

Write him of her change of heart she could not, for as time went on apparently the memory of her became dearer to the boy. Good and slow and pedantic, he yet realized what a lovely thing life had put into his hands, and he longed to keep it, and he communicated this ever-growing longing to Ellen. She so wanted to keep faith with herself and to live up to all the things about “one love and only one love” that books from all time have taught young girls they ought to feel. She felt a great need of talking about it with some one and could not bring herself to do it.

“If I could only tell some one and ask what to do, but it seems disloyal. Roberta wouldn’t understand and some way I don’t want to worry my little mother. Sometimes I feel as if I did tell her without saying any words, when I sit beside her and hold her hand and feel afraid. The other night we sat alone in the dark. The smell of honeysuckle vines was so sweet that I shall never smell it again without thinking how soft her hand felt in the dark. She said: ‘When I was your age, I used often to want to tell my mother things and didn’t dare. My mother was more like your Aunt Sarah.’ My heart beat so when she said this that it seemed as if she could hear it, but I only pressed her hand and kissed it. Then she said to me: ‘You have seemed a little absent-minded lately, my darling child; have you anything on your mind, Ellen?’ And I said in a low voice, and blushing,—and I took my face off her hand for fear she would feel me blush against it,—‘What should I have?’”

As I read her cramped little handwriting a sudden wave of shame creeps over me as though I had gone back; I remember her so well; I was so on the outside; I loved her so truly. Meantime, as every day shortened the distance that separated them, a certain dread encompassed Ellen; she visualized their approach one to another in this way:—

“It was as if I was standing still and he was standing still, and that the space between us was being shortened by little jerks, and each jerk was as a day that makes us come nearer and nearer. I don’t want to see him—oh, I don’t want to see him. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him—perhaps nothing. He will look at me kindly—oh, kindly and critically,—and then I shall be afraid; afraid of hurting him—afraid of him.”

A little later she writes again:—

“If I go on feeling undecided as to what I shall do, something will snap inside my head. I can’t feel so uncertain. He wrote to me lately, ‘Ellen, my life would be utterly worthless without you.’ I cannot ruin any one’s life, and my life is pretty worthless, anyway, so I am going to stand by my first promise, which is the only brave thing to do. Now that I have decided that, I feel at peace. I loved him once and my love will come back.”

She adds touchingly, “I have two weeks before he comes”; but these two weeks of respite were denied her. I was going down to Ellen’s when I met Edward Graham on his way there also.

“I’ve come to surprise Ellen,” he said. So it happened that it was I who went to her with the words, “Edward Graham’s waiting for you downstairs,” and wondered at the sudden ebb of color from her face.

Clyx.com