The Heart's Country :: CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They might have gone on with their indiscreet friendship indefinitely, but they counted without themselves. They were caught up, both of them, in the fierce moving stream that sweeps and swings people out of the orbit that they have planned. It was impossible to both their natures, under the stress of what they were feeling, to wish to be guarded. The clandestine element in their friendship, slight though it was,—for Ellen’s little mother was taken into the secret, how could she leave her out; she needed to spill some of her happiness over on every one who came near her,—became very irksome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was clever in his arguments. Ellen writes:—

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

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

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

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