“ELLEN! ELLEN!”
We were turning away from the pretty cage, in order not to frighten
the bird, pretty or not, when an oldish man, tending his fire at the
farther side of the wagon, gave us “Good evening!”
There is a small but ancient fraternity in the world, known as the
Order of Gentlemen. It is a grand old order. A poet has said that
Christ founded it; that he was “the first true gentleman that ever
lived.”
I cannot but distinguish some personages of far-off antiquity as worthy
members of this fellowship. I believe it coeval with man. But Christ
stated the precept of the order, when he gave the whole moral law
in two clauses,--Love to God, and Love to the neighbor. Whoever has
this precept so by heart that it shines through into his life, enters
without question into the inner circles of the order.
But to protect itself against pretenders, this brotherhood, like any
other, has its formulas, its passwords, its shibboleths, even its
uniform. These are external symbols. With some, the symbol is greater
than the thing signified. The thing signified, the principle, is so
beautiful, that the outward sign is enough to glorify any character.
The demeanor of a gentleman--being art, the expression of an idea in
form--can become property, like any art. It may be an heirloom in an
ancient house, like the portrait of the hero who gave a family name and
fame, like the portrait of the maiden martyr or the faithful wife who
made that name beloved, that fame poetry, to all ages. This precious
inheritance, like anything fine and tender, has sometimes been treated
with over care. Guardians have been so solicitous that a neophyte
should not lose his inherited rank in the order of gentlemen, that they
have forgotten to make a man of him. Culturing the flower, they have
not thought to make the stalk sturdy, or even healthy. The demeanor of
a gentleman may be possessed by a weakling, or even inherited by one
whose heart is not worthy of his manners.
The formulas of this order are not edited; its passwords are not
syllabled; its uniform was never pictured in a fashion-plate, or so
described that a snob could go to his tailor, and say, “Make me the
habit of a gentleman.” But the brothers know each other unerringly
wherever they meet; be they of the inner shrine, gentlemen heart and
life; be they of the outer court, gentlemen in feeling and demeanor.
No disguise delays this recognition. No strangeness of place and
circumstances prevents it. The men meet. The magnetism passes between
them. All is said without words. Gentleman knows gentleman by what we
name instinct. But observe that this thing, instinct, is character in
its finest, keenest, largest, and most concentrated action. It is the
spirit’s touch.
John Brent and I, not to be deemed intruders, were walking away from
the neat wagon at the upper end of the Mormon camp, when an oldish man
beside the wagon gave us “Good evening.”
“Good evening, gentlemen,” said the wan, gray-haired, shadowy man
before us.
And that was all. It was enough. We knew each other; we him and he us.
Men of the same order, and so brothers and friends.
Here was improbability that made interest at once. Greater to us than
to him. We were not out of place. He was, and in the wrong company.
Brent and I looked at each other. We had half divined our new brother’s
character at the first glance.
How legible are some men! All, indeed, that have had, or are to have,
a history, are books in a well-known tongue to trained decipherers.
But some tragedies stare at us with such an earnest dreariness from
helpless faces, that we read with one look. We turn away sadly. We have
comprehended the whole history of past sorrow; we prophesy the coming
despair.
I will not now anticipate the unfinished, melancholy story we read
in this new face. An Englishman, an unmistakable gentleman, and in a
Mormon camp,--there was tragedy enough. Enough to whisper us both to
depart, and not grieve ourselves with vain pity; enough to imperatively
command us to stay and see whether we, as true knights, foes of wrong,
succorers of feebleness, had any business here. The same instinct that
revealed to us one of our order where he ought not to be, warned us
that he might have claims on us, and we duties toward him.
We returned his salutation.
We were about to continue the conversation, when he opened a fresh
page of the tragedy. He called, in a voice too sad to be querulous,--a
flickering voice, never to be fed vigorous again by any lusty hope,--
“Ellen! Ellen!”
“What, father dear?”
“The water boils. Please bring the tea, my child.”
“Yes, father dear.”
The answers came from within the wagon. They were the song of the
bird whose nest we had approved. A sad song. A woman’s voice can tell
a long history of sorrow in a single word. This wonderful instrument,
our voice, alters its _timbre_ with every note it yields, as the face
changes with every look, until at last the dominant emotion is master,
and gives quality to tone and character to expression.
It was a sad, sweet voice that answered the old gentleman’s call. A
lady’s voice,--the voice of a high-bred woman, delicate, distinct,
self-possessed. That sound itself was tragedy in such a spot. No
transitory disappointment or distress ever imprinted its mark so
deeply upon a heart’s utterance. The sadness here had been life-long,
had begun long ago, in the days when childhood should have gone
thoughtless, or, if it noted the worth of its moments, should have
known them as jubilee every one;--a sadness so habitual that it had
become the permanent atmosphere of the life. The voice announced the
person, and commanded all the tenderest sympathy brother-man can give
to any sorrowful one in the sisterhood of woman.
And yet this voice, that with so subtle a revelation gave us the key of
the unseen lady’s history, asked for no pity. There was no moan in it,
and no plaint. Not even a murmur, nor any rebel bitterness or sourness
for defeat. The undertone was brave. If not hopeful, still resolute.
No despair could come within sound of that sweet music of defiance.
The tones that challenge Fate were subdued away; but not the tones
that calmly answer, “No surrender,” to Fate’s untimely pæan. It was a
happy thing to know that, sorrowful as the life might be, here was an
impregnable soul.
There was a manner of half command and half dependence in the father’s
call to his daughter,--a weak nature, still asserting the control it
could not sustain over a stronger. And in her response an indulgence of
this feeble attempt at authority.
Does all this seem much to find in the few simple words we had heard?
The analysis might be made infinitely more thorough. Every look, tone,
gesture of a man is a symbol of his complete nature. If we apply the
microscope severely enough, we can discern the fine organism by which
the soul sends itself out in every act of the being. And the more
perfectly developed the creature, the more significant, and yet the
more mysterious, is every habit, and every motion mightier than habit,
of body or soul.
In an instant, the lady so sweetly heralded stepped from beneath the
hood of the wagon, and sprang to the ground in more busy and cheerful
guise than her voice had promised.
Again the same subtle magnetism between her and us. We could not have
been more convinced of her right to absolute respect and consideration
if she had entered to us in the dusky light of a rich drawing-room,
or if we had been presented in due form at a picnic of the grandest
world, with far other scenery than this of a “desart idle,” tenanted
for the moment by a Mormon caravan. The lady, like her father, felt
that we were gentlemen, and therefore would comprehend her. She saluted
us quietly. There was in her manner a tacit and involuntary protest
against circumstances, just enough for dignity. A vulgar woman would
have snatched up and put on clumsily a have-seen-better-days air. This
lady knew herself, and knew that she could not be mistaken for other
than she was. Her base background only made her nobility more salient.
She did not need any such background, nor the contrast of the drudges
and meretricious frights of the caravan. She could have borne full
light without any shade. A woman fit to stand peer among the peerless.
We could not be astonished at this apparition. We had divined her
father rightly, as it afterward proved. Her voice has already half
disclosed her character. Let her face continue the development. We had
already heard her called by her Christian name, Ellen. That seemed to
bring us, from the beginning, into a certain intimacy with the woman as
woman, sister, daughter, and to subordinate the circumstances of the
life, to be in future suggested by the social name, to the life itself.
Ellen, then, the unknown lady of the Mormon caravan, was a high-bred
beauty. Englishwomen generally lack the fine edge of such beauty
as hers. She owed her dark fairness, perhaps, to a Sicilian bride,
whom her Norman ancestor had pirated away from some old playground
of Proserpine, and brought with him to England when he came there as
conqueror. Her nose was not quite aquiline.
Positive aquiline noses should be cut off. They are ugly; they are
immoral; they are sensual; they love money; they enjoy others’ misery.
The worst birds have hooked beaks; and so the worst men, the eagles and
vultures of the race. Cut off the beaks; they betoken a cruel pounce,
a greedy clutch, and a propensity to carrion. Save the exceptions, but
extirpate the brood.
This lady’s nose was sensitive and proud. It is well when a face has
its share of pride in the nose. Then the lips can give themselves
solely to sweetness and archness. Besides, pride, or, if the word
is dreaded, a conscious and resolute personality, should be the
characteristic of a face. The nose should express this quality. Above,
the eyes may changefully flash intelligence; below, the mouth may smile
affection; the cheeks may give balance and equability; the chin may
show the cloven dimple of a tender and many-sided, or the point of
a single-hearted and concentrated nature; the brow, a non-committal
feature, may look wise or wiseacre; but every one of them is only
tributary to the nose, standing royally in the midst, and with dignity
presiding over its wayward realm.
Halt! My business is to describe a heroine,--not to discuss
physiognomy, with her face for a type.
As I said, her nose was sensitive and proud. There might have once
been scorn in the curve of her nostril. Not now. Sorrow and pity had
educated away the scorn, as they had the tones of challenge from her
voice. Firmness, self-respect, latent indignation, remained untouched.
A strong woman, whose power was intense and passionate. Calm, till the
time came, and then flame. Beware of arousing her! Not that there was
revenge in her face. No; no stab or poison there. But she was a woman
to die by an act of will, rather than be wronged. She was one who
could hold an insulter by a steady look, while she grew paler, paler,
purer, purer, with a more unearthly pureness, until she had crushed the
boiling blood back into her heart, and stood before the wretch white
and chill as a statue, marble-dead.
What a woman to meet in a Mormon caravan! And yet how able to endure
whatever a dastard Fate might send to crush her there!
Her hair was caught back, and severely chided out of its wish to rebel
and be as beautiful as it knew was its desert. It was tendril hair,
black enough to show blackness against Fulano’s shoulder. Chide her
locks as she might, they still insisted upon flinging out here and
there a slender curling token of their gracefulness, to prove what it
might be if she would but let them have their sweet and wilful will.
Her eyes were gray, with violet touches. Her eyebrows defined and
square. If she had had passionate or pleading dark eyes,--the eyes that
hardly repress their tears for sorrow or for joy,--and the temperament
that such eyes reveal, she would long ago have fevered or wept herself
to death. No woman could have looked at the disgusts of that life
of hers through tears, and lived. The gray eyes meant steadiness,
patience, hope without flinching, and power to master fate, or if not
to master, to defy.
She was somewhat pale, thin, and sallow. Plodding wearily and drearily
over those dusty wastes toward exile could not make her a merry
Nut-Brown Maid. Only her thin, red lips proved that there were still
blushes lurking out of sight.
A mature woman; beyond girlhood, body and soul. With all her grave
demeanor, she could not keep down the wiles of gracefulness that ever
bubbled to the surface. If she could but be her happy self, what a fair
world she would suddenly create about her!
She was dressed in rough gray cloth, as any lady might be for a
journey. She was evidently one whose resolute neatness repels
travel-stains. After the tawdry, draggled silks of the young women we
had just seen, her simplicity was charmingly fresh. Could she and they
be of the same race of beings? They were apart as far as coarse from
fine, as silvern from brazen. To see her here among this horde was a
horror in itself. No horror the less, that she could not blind herself
to her position and her fate. She could not fail to see what a bane
was beauty here. That she had done so was evident. She had essayed by
severe plainness of dress to erase the lady from her appearance. A very
idle attempt! There she was, do what she would, her beauty triumphing
over all the wrong she did to it for duty’s sake.
All these observations I made with one glance. Description seems idle
when one remembers how eyes can see at a flash what it took æons to
prepare for and a lifetime to form.
Brent and I exchanged looks. This was the result of our fanciful
presentiments. Here was visible the woman we had been dreading to find.
It still seemed an impossible vision. I almost believed that the old
gentleman’s blanket would rise with him and his daughter, like the
carpet of Fortunatus, and transport them suddenly away, leaving us
beside a Mormon wagon in Sizzum’s camp and in the presence of a frowzy
family cooking a supper of pork.
I looked again and again. It was all real. There was the neat,
comfortable wagon; there was the feeble, timid old gentleman, pottering
about; there was this beautiful girl, busy with her tea, and smiling
tenderly over her father.