The Heart's Country :: CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIII

That afternoon we were all quilting at our house and Miss Sarah was pleased enough to give an account of her guest.

“I’ve had a long letter from Lucia Byington,” she said to my grandmother, “explaining that precious scapegrace of a son of hers, but I can tell Lucia she might have spared herself the pains. The minute I clapped my eyes on him I knew all about him, having known his father and mother. He has all her charm and her willfulness, with the iron will and talent of his father. I suppose, because I’m an old maid, I can’t understand why a man can’t bring up a high-metaled son, exactly like himself, without being at odds with him. But there! He expects his son to start where he’s left off, with all the sobriety and solemnity of an aged Solomon. And why people like Lucia and David should expect not to have trouble with their children, I don’t know. And as for David, he fights his own youth in the boy. Now the time had come for Master Roger to stop skylarking over the earth; he was holding out; leave town he wouldn’t. They had words; he slung a knapsack on his back and went off, and wasn’t heard from for a week, and then came back as meek as the Prodigal.”

You may be sure that Ellen and I had our ears wide open to this story, knowing as we did why it was that Roger had suddenly become the docile son. We were so self-conscious that our eyes did not dare seek one another’s, and we sewed together the large, gay squares of patchwork with the precision of little automatons.

My grandmother spoke up:—

“Well, Sarah, I half dislike having your stormy petrel in our little town. I saw him this morning, and he seemed to me a restless-looking bird. He’ll be turning the silly heads of our girls next.”

“Let me catch him at it, or them, for that matter!” cried Miss Sarah. “He’s here for work, and not to worry me with such-like goings-on! You may be sure that his family have had trouble enough with him in such imbroglios already.”

We had tea early and did the dishes and fell to our quilting again. I noticed Ellen becoming more and more abstracted until finally Miss Sarah said:—

“Well, Ellen, try to bring your mind back to your work. Years haven’t taken your habit of ‘wool-gathering’ from you.”

Ellen wrote about this:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the time being everything else was blotted out for her; she had this measureless, sky-wide joy of giving herself and all day long, and all the time her spirit went out toward him in incense. Her days were lost in contemplation of the wonder which had happened. “From the moment I leave him, I walk toward him,” she wrote—and in the interim between she went on apparently with life as before, and this woke in her a still wonder.

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

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