Here my long-cherished resentment toward Roger overflowed. No one
could have been with Ellen as I had been without seeing the turmoil in
which her spirit lived. She had grown thin and of a certain
transparency as do those whose sufferings of the spirit affect their
bodies profoundly. I knew there were long times when he didn't write;
I knew how she waited for his letters; I knew how seldom he came. I
felt, in my wisdom, that she bore from Roger things I would stand from
no man. I had learned, step by step with Ellen, that Ellen's life and
all her happiness were in careless hands and, in Alec's language, that
there was no country of the heart there for her. I looked at Roger
with level-eyed disgust.
"Why, Roger," I asked him, "don't you break your engagement now, if
that's what you mean to do?"
To my point-blank question, he only stared at me.
"I don't want to break it," he said. "Ellen's just exactly the kind
of a woman I want for my wife," he added.
"But in your good time," said I bitterly.
He looked at me with his bold, laughing eyes:
"There's a delight of life with Ellen that I can find with no one
else. I know what she is, Roberta, a thousand times more than you.
She's the only _alive_ person in the world, but since you put the
words in my mouth, 'In my own good time!'" He had completely recovered
his good-tempered arrogance.
"I'd never stand from you what Ellen's stood, and I hope she says
good-bye to you now," I cried.
It is easy for those not in love to place the limit to love's
endurance. It is fortunately not easy to keep these shallow promises
to one's self.
I am sorry that so much of what was most unlovely in Roger creeps into
my story. At the time I had no patience with him, his undeniable charm
and interest offended me as it kept Ellen bound to him. I wanted, as
youth always does, people to be all bad or all good, and Roger would
be neither of these things. I realize now that, faithful or
unfaithful, he kept Ellen's life full of him, nor could she escape his
compelling personality. There are many men we should not quarrel
with,--men who can so absorb us, like him of the ultra-masculine type,
who have everything but pity and understanding of what they themselves
haven't felt. They are of all men the most attractive to women and
they care the least about the individual. From now on she loved him
always with a fear that he was waiting for her with a knife for her
back. She wrote:--
"Oh, how much make-believe we have had! I've pretended that I
thought it was nice for Roger to work, and he's pretended to me
that he wanted to work, but he doesn't want me--that's the real
reason. When I wake in the morning, I feel my heart crying
within me in the deep heaviness of my spirit before I can
remember what's happened, and then I remember that Roger doesn't
want me. He doesn't want me and I can't imagine life going on
without him. I've always thought to feel unbeloved would be the
worst thing that could happen to me. I don't know myself in this
beggared person. Life seems so empty for me, and I go shivering
up to Alec to warm my cold spirit at the fire of his affection.
I look back at the time when I waited for Roger to come back to
me, just three little days, and the touch of his hand still warm
in mine, and think how happy I was then."
A little later she became more accustomed to the idea and wrote:--
"Roger, I'm ashamed of how I felt, and I'm glad of one thing,
that you know nothing about it. Have you seen me as I am, and is
that why you no longer care as you did? I've been a cowardly,
shivering thing, afraid of your letters even, afraid of what
would come next. How can a man love so cowardly a woman? Why
should I count and measure love for love, instead of rejoicing
with you in your work? It is I that know nothing about love,
since I can whine and since I can compare and contrast yesterday
with to-day, instead of being glad that you are alive and in
the same world with me; and why should I care if, since you want
to marry me, you have lost some of the first hot flame, a flame
which burned us both? Are all women in life egotists that they
can't bear that the eyes of the beloved don't rest on them every
moment?"
There was very little use in her trying to hearten herself with brave
words, for women know when a part of the life of the man they love
belongs to them and when it doesn't. Many of us live for years
separated from the man we love, and know that his thoughts turn to us
continually, that time and space are a terrible, practical joke played
by destiny on mankind. There had been a moment in Ellen's life when,
whether he were thinking of her or not, there was no place in his life
where she might not go, and now the foundation of a real affection was
lacking between them, and that foundation is sincerity. In whatever
way she tried to go to him she came upon high walls and barriers of
silence, places in his spirit marked "No thoroughfare."
"I know nothing about you, Roger; [she writes] I only know that
things are going on that are hostile to me and to our love. I
suppose, that you do not tell me what it is shows you do not
trust me and that I've grasped too much and asked too much. I
fight forever with an unseen adversary. I don't even know if
this adversary has a face or if it is a set of circumstances in
your life, and I have nothing to fight with but my bleeding love
for you, and what good is that to you unless you happen to want
it? What thing is so worthless as an undesired love? Yet you
made it, Roger, and you are responsible for it. It is like
having a child and then finding it troublesome, letting it
starve to death, to create a love like mine for you and then
kill it. Women who love should never doubt. They should trust
and trust in the face of dishonor and in the face of disaster,
for distrust carries with it a bitter strength. A woman who
trusts utterly is a woman who gives herself utterly, and then,
when the blow descends from the blue, it also crushes her
utterly, perhaps it may even kill her, but she has had that
exalted peace even until the last moment. It's all the
difference between having one's beloved brought home dead, who
went out smiling, and having him die horribly inch by inch,
before one's eyes. It is better to have love killed than to have
it tortured to death, and I would rather have had you say, in
the midst of our deepest hour together, 'Ellen, I'm going away
and I shall never see you again,' than wait as I do for you to
tell me it's finished."
This was how Ellen's spirit lived, racked and torn between its grave
fears and its momentary and joyful hopes, while the day was passed in
a thousand details of a house humming with children. As Ellen said
herself, "The outer side of her life was living in sunshine and the
inner side in darkness and doubt." In town people said Ellen was
working too hard over Mr. Sylvester's brood, for she seemed at that
time so frail that through the transparent shell of her one could see
her spirit burning.
None of the family suspected that there was any misunderstanding
between them, for Roger had a very kindly generosity. He was a man
prodigal in the small acts of kindness, and was forever sending things
for the children and for Mrs. Sylvester, whom he treated like an elder
sister, teasing her and loving her. Miss Grant was the only one who
had had occasional misgivings, and I learned from my grandmother that
Roger's family were not satisfied with his "goings on," and that while
he was being a success, his mother was worried over him, which made my
grandmother remark:--
"I wish that young man had fallen from his horse and broken his neck
before ever he set eyes on Ellen Payne. Old women like us forget that
young creatures die of a broken heart now and again, and if they could
only die! The best friend I ever had, Roberta, had all the youth and
love killed in her and went on living like a dry, little automaton of
a woman, and is living yet. Instead of the things she might have
had,--children and a husband and a home,--she has just her own
dried-up body, which is like a little birch tree struck by lightning;
and the thing she thinks of most in life is the noise that the
sparrows make in her elm trees."
But I could not fear that a fate like that awaited my Ellen, for my
memory of her then is a lovely frail thing, with a hand forever held
out to Prudentia and Flavilla.
Prudentia when crossed stopped, as was her custom, to pray. She prayed
in season and out of season and for everything, and it was against her
father's principles to stop her.
"How stop a child communing with her Maker?" he would argue, to which
Ellen would reply with spirit:--
"She's only communing with her own selfishness when she says: 'Oh!
God, send the boys home so Ellen can tell me a story.'"
For several of Alec's youngsters hung around the old Scudder place a
great deal, and accompanied Ellen on her walks, as though Alec had
left her, in those boys, a bit of his protecting spirit.