The Heart's Country :: CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXII

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 cares for 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, is that Ellen 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 me that 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, scarcely concealed 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 she said: ‘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 Ellen learned 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 open on 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 or self-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 her own 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 no virtue 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 have the 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 with head 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 what difference 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 himself from 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 some spectacular 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.

Clyx.com