The Heart's Country :: CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XV

I remember that day very well. Ellen spent the day with me and with Alec, and we all three lay under the trees together and then Ellen went on a little tour of inspection. What she was doing really was saying “Good-bye” to the place that she knew and to us. Her eyes were bright and shining; I suppose she was thinking, “To-morrow I shall be where?—to-morrow I shall be who?—and these dear people who love me, what will they think? Not that I care!” She was so sweet to Alec that her loveliness melted his poor heart still further.

So sweet she was that, with one of those ironies of fate that are often more cruel than tragedy, Alec took this time to tell Ellen about the work he had decided to do. I can see him as he stood under the apple trees, the sun shining on his mane of hair, the brightness of his eager eyes contrasting with his self-consciousness, while we two girls stood there, each absorbed in her own affairs. “I’ve looked all around life to see what I could do best—and I guess I know more about boys than anything else. I sort of know how they feel inside all the time. I don’t forget. So I’m going to teach ’em. Try and teach ’em the things they want to know most and that they knock their shins so trying to find the way to. They have a hard time. I had just one teacher—and he led me out of darkness; and that’s what I’m going to do. It’s a business, you know, that means trying to understand all the time. It’s a present to you, Ellen,” he added with his crooked, whimsical smile.

He was so anxious that we should see what he meant, and we were so polite and innerly so blank. Teaching grubby little boys seemed to us an uninspiring profession for a splendid youth like Alec. We couldn’t know how many years he had looked ahead. Alec and his gift to Ellen seem to typify man and woman. Man, who comes with his bright visions of the future, bestows the gift of his high dreams on girls who see nothing in them—and are polite. But Ellen was too heart-rendingly sweet that afternoon to seem anything but understanding. She was heart-breakingly gay.

After a while we went in together to Mrs. Payne’s house. She and Mr. Sylvester were standing in the drawing-room with their hands clasped, and Mr. Sylvester spoke and said, “We may as well tell these dear children first”; and Ellen’s little mother said, as shyly as a girl, “Mr. Sylvester and I have found very suddenly that we have always loved each other.”

He rejoined with his deep simplicity of manner, “Yes, quite suddenly we found out that we’ve been to one another as the air we breathe, and as the water we drink, and as the sun that shines.”

“And so, of course,” said the little mother of Ellen, “we will be married.”

She stood there violet-eyed, in her neat, little black dress, as slender as a girl, more girlish in her looks than many of us for all her forty years. I don’t think that any of the three of us had realized that people as old as Mr. Sylvester and Mrs. Payne could live in the land of romance and could fall in love. Like most young people in their early twenties, we imagined that this great gift of mankind was for us alone and that it never lightened up the hearts of those who had already lived and loved; but as these two stood, hand in hand, there rushed over all of us the feeling that they were just great children. The look of wonder was in their eyes; they had been living for so long close to the land of enchantment, and just now had stepped over its borders into its realization.

“We see no reason for delaying our marriage long. We waited long enough; we’ve been close friends for eight years; and you, little Ellen,”—he spoke as though speaking to a little child,—“you have been already like a daughter to me and like a little mother to my children.”

“You’ll help me now, Ellen, won’t you?” pleaded her little mother; and it was as though they had changed places and Ellen were the older. But Ellen had them folded in her arms, kissing first one and then the other, and we all followed suit; and for once the stern conventions of New England reserve, which held in its iron grip such sweet and simple spirits as Mrs. Payne and Mr. Sylvester, was broken through.

Now Ellen had a shining face, now everything had all been settled for her by Life. She could not possibly go away and leave her mother at such a moment, nor, of course, would Roger ask her this, and for a moment the light that swept over the country of her heart was dimmed by the quiet radiance of these two middle-aged people. Glad-footed she started off to her trysting-place, and what happened there was as though the sun had been eclipsed in mid-heaven, as though the solid earth had shaken under her feet. She ran to Roger with this precious tale of her mother’s happiness in her hands, sure that he would understand. She writes, almost with an unbelief in the fact that she had herself heard and witnessed:—

“He wanted me to go with him just the same! He came forward to me in that way that always makes me think of leaping flame and said: ‘You’ve decided to go, haven’t you, Ellen?’ And when I told him, he said, ‘That makes it simpler, doesn’t it? They’ll be so occupied with themselves that they won’t care what you do. Hooray!’ And he laughed like a little boy. I said, ‘You don’t understand; now I can’t go; I can’t darken her happiness; my mother needs me’; and he stood before me, looking at me with eyes that burned with anger of his desire. ‘Ellen,’ he said, ‘decide now, the long engagement with its perils for you and for me; my good or their good; our happiness against a few stitches put in your mother’s clothes.’ I said, ‘I can’t go.’ He drew me to him and said, ‘Ellen, are you coming? You must come’; and I felt as if my soul was shuddering out of my body, as if he tore me in two, and part of me must go, and I don’t know what there was in my soul stronger than myself, because all of me never wanted to do anything more than to do his will, which was my will, too; but I had to say, ‘I can’t do it.’ I know now that there are a thousand things that make up this; Mr. Sylvester being a minister, it would hurt him to have his daughter—oh! what a sweet word—run away. All these things, all the tangled and manifold ways in which my life is woven into those beloved of me, and now a thousandfold more tightly woven than before into the life of this little place, all held me back where the inner, beating heart of me cried aloud to go. He stood there pleading, and he raged with anger; his words beat me down, shivering, like a heavy storm of wind and rain. The love of him drew me toward him, as flowers lift up their heads to the sun, but something deep down kept saying, ‘No, I can’t go. No, I can’t go.’ ‘Now, I know,’ said he, ‘at last how little your love is worth’; and then he pulled me to him and kissed me roughly, and again and again, and then almost threw me from him. ‘Good-bye, Ellen,’ he said; and I cried, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Oh, not far,’ he said; but I felt as if his spirit had gone to the end of the world, and he strode without me down the road. I am writing like one in a dream, because I can’t see and don’t know what’s going to happen to us, and I want to run out into the night and run to his house and cry under his window that I’ll go whenever he says, but then I know, if I did that, that at the last moment I would decide I couldn’t go.”

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