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.