The day after Ellen's graduation there might have been seen a
touching little spectacle passing along the main street of Rowe
about ten o'clock in the fore-noon. It was touching because it gave
evidence of that human vanity common to all, which strives to
perpetuate the few small, good things that come into the hard lives
of poor souls, and strives with such utter futility. Ellen held up
her fluffy skirts daintily, the wind caught her white ribbons and
the loose locks of her yellow hair under her white hat. She carried
Cynthia Lennox's basket of roses on her arm, and each of the others
was laden with bouquets. Little Amabel clasped both slender arms
around a great sheaf of roses; the thorns pricked through her thin
sleeves, but she did not mind that, so upborne with the elation of
the occasion was she. Her small, pale face gazed over the mass of
bloom with challenging of admiration from every one whom she met.
She was jealous lest any one should not look with full appreciation
of Ellen.
Ellen was the one in the little procession who had not unmixed
delight in it. She had a certain shamefacedness about going through
the streets in such a fashion. She avoided looking at the people
whom she met, and kept her head slightly bent and averted, instead
of carrying it with the proud directness which was her habit. She
felt vaguely that this was the element of purely personal vanity
which degrades a triumph, and the weakness of delight and gloating
in the faces of her relatives irritated her. It was a sort of
unveiling of love, and the girl was sensitive enough to understand
it. "Oh, mother, I don't want to have us all go through the street
with all these flowers, and me in my white dress," she had said. She
had looked at her mother with a shrinking in her eyes which was
incomprehensible to the other coarser-natured woman.
"Nonsense," she had said. "Sometimes you have real silly notions,
Ellen." Fanny said it adoringly, for even silliness in this girl
was in a way worshipful to her. Ellen, with her heart still softened
almost to grief by the love shown her on the day before, had
yielded, but she was glad when they arrived at the photograph
studio. She had particularly dreaded passing Lloyd's, for the
thought came to her that possibly young Mr. Lloyd might see her. She
supposed that he was likely to be in the office. When they passed
the office-windows she looked the other way, but before she was well
past, her aunt Eva hit her violently and laughed loudly. Ellen
shrank, coloring a deep crimson. Then her mother also laughed, and
even Amabel, shrilly, with precocious recognition of the situation.
Only Mrs. Zelotes stalked along in silent dignity.
"Don't laugh so loud, he'll hear you," said she, severely.
"It was that young man who was at the hall last night, and he was
looking at you awful sharp," said little Amabel to Ellen, squeezing
her warm arm, and sending out that shrill peal of laughter again.
"Don't, dear," said Ellen. She felt humiliated, and the more so
because she was ashamed of being humiliated by her own mother and
aunt. "Why should I be so sensitive to things in which they see no
harm?" she asked herself, reprovingly.
As for young Lloyd, he had, ever since he parted with the girl the
night before, that sensation of actual contact which survives
separation, and had felt the light pressure of her hand in his all
night, and along with it that ineffable pain of longing which would
draw the substance of a dream to actuality and cannot. He saw her
with her coarsely exultant relatives, the inevitable blur of her
environments, and felt himself not so much disillusioned as
confirmed. He had been constantly saying to himself, when the girl's
face haunted his eyes, and her hand in his own, that he was a fool,
that he had felt so before, that he must have, that there was no
sense in it, that he was Robert Lloyd, and she a good girl, a
beautiful girl, but a common sort of girl, born of common people to
a common lot. "Now," he said to himself, with a kind of bitter
exultation, "there, I told you so." The inconceivable folly of that
glance of the mother at him, then at Ellen, and the meaning
laughter, repelled him to the point of disgust. He turned his back
to the window and resumed his work, but, in spite of himself, the
pathos of the picture which he had seen began to force itself upon
him, and he thought almost tenderly and forgivingly that she, the
girl, had not once looked his way. He even wondered, pityingly, if
she had been mortified and annoyed by her mother's behavior. A great
anger on Ellen's behalf with her mother seized upon him. How pretty
she did look moving along in that little flower-laden procession, he
thought, how very pretty. All at once a desire for the photograph
which would be taken seized him, for he divined the photograph.
However, he said to himself that he would send back the valedictory
which he had not yet read by post, with a polite note, and that
would be the end.
But it was only the next evening that Robert Lloyd with the
valedictory in hand got off the trolley-car in front of the Brewster
house. He had proved to himself that it was an act of actual
rudeness to return anything so precious and of so much importance to
the owner by the post, that he ought to call and deliver it in
person. When he regained his equilibrium from the quick sidewise
leap from the car, and stood hesitating a little, as one will do
before a strange house, for he was not quite sure as to his
bearings, he saw a white blur as of feminine apparel in the front
doorway. He advanced tentatively up the little path between two rows
of flowering bushes, and Ellen rose.
"Good-evening, Mr. Lloyd," she said, in a slightly tremulous voice.
"Oh, good-evening, Miss Brewster," he cried, quickly. "So I am
right! I was not sure as to the house."
"People generally tell by the cherry-trees in the yard," replied
Ellen, taking refuge from her timidity in the security of
commonplace observation, as she had done the night before, giving
thereby both a sense of disappointment and elusiveness.
"Won't you walk in?" she added, with the prim politeness of a child
who accosts a guest according to rule and precept. Ellen had never,
in fact, had a young man make a formal call upon her before. She
reflected now, both with relief and trepidation, that her mother was
away, having gone to her aunt Eva's. She had an instinct which she
resented, that her mother and this young man were on two parallels
which could never meet. Her father was at home, seated in the south
door with John Sargent and Nahum Beals and Joe Atkins, but she never
thought of such a thing as her father's receiving a young man
caller, though she would not have doubted so much his assimilating
with Robert Lloyd. She understood that the young man might look at
her mother with dissent, while she resented it, but with her father
it was different.
The group of men at the south door were talking in loud, fervent
voices which seemed to rise and fall like waves. Nahum Beals's
strained, nervous tones were paramount. "Mr. Beals is talking about
the labor question, and he gets quite excited," Ellen remarked,
somewhat apologetically, as she ushered young Lloyd into the parlor.
Lloyd laughed. "It sounds as if he were leading an army," he said.
"He is very much in earnest," said the girl.
She placed painstakingly for her guest the best chair, which was a
spring rocker upholstered with crush-plush. The little parlor was
close and stuffy, and the kerosene-lamp, with the light dimmed by a
globe decorated with roses, heated the room still further. This lamp
was Fanny's pride. It had, in her eyes, the double glory of high art
and cheapness. She was fond of pointing at it, and inquiring, "How
much do you think that cost?" and explaining with the air of one who
expects her truth to be questioned that it only cost forty-nine
cents. This lamp was hideous, the shape was aggressive, a discordant
blare of brass, and the roses on the globe were blasphemous. Somehow
this lamp was the first thing which struck Lloyd on entering the
room. He could not take his eyes from it. As for Ellen, long
acquaintance had dulled her eyes. She sat in the full glare of this
hideous lamp, and Lloyd considered that she was not so pretty as he
had thought last night. Still, she was undeniably very pretty. There
was something in the curves of her shoulders, in her pink-and-white
cotton waist, that made one's fingers tingle, and heart yearn, and
there was an appealing look in her face which made him smile
indulgently at her as he might have done at a child. After all, it
was probably not her fault about the lamp, and lamps were a minor
consideration, and he was finical, but suppose she liked it? Lloyd,
sitting there, began to speculate if it were possible for one's
spiritual nature to be definitely damaged by hideous lamps. Then he
caught sight of a plate decorated with postage-stamps, with a
perforated edge through which ribbons were run, and he wondered if
she possibly made that.
"They are undoubtedly perfectly moral people," he told his aunt
Cynthia afterwards, "but I wonder that they keep such an immoral
plate." However, that was before he fell in love with Ellen, while
he was struggling with himself in his desire to do so, and making
all manner of sport of himself by way of hindrance.
Ellen at that age could have had no possible conception of the
sentiment with which the young man viewed her environment. She was
sensitive to spiritual discords which might arise from meeting with
another widely different nature, but when it came to material
things, she was at a loss. Then, too, she was pugnaciously loyal to
the glories of the best parlor. She was innocently glad that she had
such a nice room into which to usher him. She felt that the
marble-top table, the plush lambrequin on the mantle-shelf, the
gilded vases, the brass clock, the Nottingham lace curtains, the
olive-and-crimson furniture, the pictures in cheap gilt frames, the
heavily gilded wall-paper, and the throws of thin silk over the
picture corners must prove to him the standing of her family. She
felt an ignoble satisfaction in it, for a certain measure of
commonness clung to the girl like a cobweb. She was as yet too young
to bloom free of her environment, her head was not yet over the
barrier of her daily lot; her heart never would be, and that was her
glory. Young Lloyd handed her the roll of valedictory as soon as he
entered.
"I am very much obliged to you for allowing me to read it," he said.
Ellen took it, blushing. Her heart sank a little. She thought to
herself that he probably did not like it. She looked at him proudly
and timidly, like a child half holding, half withdrawing its hand
for a sweet. It suddenly came to her that she would rather this
young man would praise her valedictory than any one else, that if he
had been present when she read it in the hall, and she had seen him
standing applauding, she could not have contained her triumph and
pride. She was not yet in love with him, but she began to feel that
in his approbation lay the best coin of her realm.
"It is very well written, Miss Brewster," said Robert, and she
flushed with delight.
"Thank you," she said.
But the young man was looking at her as if he had something besides
praise in mind, and she gazed at him, shrinking a little as before a
blow whose motion she felt in the air. However, he laughed
pleasantly when he spoke.
"Do you really believe that?" he asked.
"What?" she inquired, vaguely.
"Oh, all that you say in your essay. Do you really believe that all
the property in the world ought to be divided, that kings and
peasants ought to share and share alike?"
She looked at him with round eyes. "Why, of course I do!" she said.
"Don't you?"
Robert laughed. He had no mind to enter into an argument with this
beautiful girl, nor even to express himself forcibly on the opposite
side.
"Well, there are a number of things to be considered," he said. "And
do you really believe that employer and employés should share
alike?"
"Why not?" said she.
Her blue eyes flashed, she tossed her head. Robert smiled at her.
"Why not?" she repeated. "Don't the men earn the money?"
"Well, no, not exactly," said Robert. "There is the capital."
"The profit comes from the labor, not from the capital," said Ellen,
quickly. "Doesn't it?" she continued, with fervor, and yet there was
a charming timidity, as before some authority.
"Possibly," replied Robert, guardedly; "but the question is how far
we should go back before we stop in searching for causes."
"How far back ought we to go?" asked Ellen, earnestly.
"I confess I don't know," said Robert, laughingly. "I have thought
very little about it all."
"But you will have to, if you are to be the head of Lloyd's," Ellen
said, with a severe accent, with grave, blue eyes full on his face.
"Oh, I am not the head of Lloyd's yet," he answered, easily. "My
uncle is far from his dotage. Then, too, you know that I was never
intended for a business man, but a lawyer, like my father, if there
had not been so little for my father's second wife and the
children--" He stopped himself abruptly on the verge of a
confidence. "I think I saw you on your way to the photographer
to-day," he said, and Ellen blushed, remembering her aunt Eva's
violent nudge, and wondering if he had noticed. She gave him a
piteous glance.
"Yes," she said. "All the girls have their pictures taken in their
graduating dresses with their flowers."
"You looked to me as if the picture would be a great success," said
Robert. He longed to ask for one and yet did not, for a reason
unexplained to himself. He knew that this innocent, unsophisticated
creature would see no reason on earth why he should not ask, and no
reason why she should not grant, and on that account he felt
prohibited. That night, after he had gone, Ellen wondered why he had
not asked for one of her pictures, and felt anxious lest he should
have seen the nudge.
"Well," she said to herself, "if he finds any fault with anything
that my mother has done, I don't want him to have one."
Robert stayed a long time. He kept thinking that he ought to go, and
also that he was bored, and yet he felt a singular unwillingness to
leave, possibly because of his sense that the visit was in a measure
forbidden by prudence. The longer he remained, the prettier Ellen
looked to him. New beauties of line and color seemed to grow
apparent in the soft glow from the hideous lamp. There was a
wonderful starry radiance in her eyes now and then, and when she
turned her head her eyeballs gleamed crimson and her hair seemed to
toss into flame. When she spoke, he was conscious of unknown depths
of sweetness in her voice, and it was so with her smile and her
every motion. There was about the girl a mystery, not of darkness
but of light, which seemed to draw him on and on and on without
volition. And yet she said nothing especially remarkable, for Ellen
was only a young girl, reared in a little provincial city in common
environments. She would have been a great genius had she more than
begun to glimpse the breadth and freedom of the outer world through
her paling of life. She was too young and too unquestioning of what
she had learned from her early loves.
"Have you always lived here in Rowe?" asked Lloyd.
"Yes," said she. "I was born here, and I have lived here ever
since."
"And you have never been away?"
"Only once. Once I went to Dragon Beach and stayed a fortnight with
mother." She said this with a visible sense of its importance.
Dragon Beach was some ten miles from Rowe, a cheap seashore place,
built up with flimsy summer cottages of factory hands. Andrew had
hired one for a fortnight once when Ellen was ailing, and it had
been the event of a lifetime to the family. They hereafter dated
from the year "we went to Dragon Beach."
Lloyd looked with a quick impulse of compassionate tenderness at
this child who had been away from Rowe once to Dragon Beach. He had
his own impressions of Dragon Beach and also of Rowe.
"I suppose you enjoyed that?" said he.
"Very much. The sea is beautiful."
So, after all, it was the sea which she had cared for at Dragon
Beach, and not the clam-bakes and merry-go-rounds and women in
wrappers in the surf. Robert felt rebuked for thinking of anything
but the sea in his memory of Dragon Beach; there was a wonderful
water-view there.
All the time they sat there in the parlor, the murmur of
conversation at the south door continued, and now and again over it
swelled the fervid exhortations of Nahum Beals. Not a word could be
distinguished, but the meaning was beyond doubt. That voice was full
of denunciation, of frenzied appeal, of warning.
"Who is it?" asked Lloyd, after an unusually loud burst.
"Mr. Beals," replied Ellen, uneasily. She wished that he would not
talk so loud.
"He sounds as if he were preaching fire and brimstone," said Robert.
"No, he is talking about the labor question," replied Ellen.
Then she looked confused, for she remembered that this young man's
uncle was the head of Lloyd's, that he himself would be the head of
Lloyd's some day. All at once, along with another feeling which
seemed about to conquer her, came a resentment against this young
man with his fine clothes and his gentle manners. Two men passed the
windows and one of them looked in, and when the electric-light
flashed on his face she saw Granville Joy, and the man with him was
in his shirt-sleeves. She saw those white shirt-sleeves swing into
the darkness, and felt at once antagonized against herself and
against Robert, and yet she knew that she had never seen a man like
him.
"I suppose he has settled it," said Robert.
"I don't know," replied Ellen.
"He sounds dangerous."
"Oh, no. He is a good man. He wouldn't hurt anybody. He has always
talked that way. He used to come here and talk when I was a child.
It used to frighten me at first, but it doesn't now. It is only the
way that poor people are treated that frightens me."
Again Robert had a sensation of moving unobtrusively aside from a
direct encounter. He looked across the room and started at something
which he espied for the first time.
"Pardon me," he said, rising, "but I am interested in dolls. I see
you still keep your doll, Miss Brewster."
Ellen sat stupefied. All at once it dawned upon her what might
happen. In the corner of the parlor sat her beloved doll, still
beloved, though the mother and not the doll had outgrown her first
condition of love. The doll, in the identical dress in which she had
come from Cynthia's so many years ago, sat staring forth with the
fixed radiance of her kind, seated stiffly in a tiny rocking-chair,
also one of the treasures of Ellen's childhood. It was a curious
feature for the best parlor, but Ellen had insisted upon it. "She
isn't going to be put away up garret because I have outgrown her,"
said she. "She's going to sit in the parlor as long as she lives.
Suppose I outgrew you, and put you up in the garret; you wouldn't
like it, would you, mother?"
"You are a queer child," Fanny had said, laughing, but she had
yielded.
When young Lloyd went close to examine the doll, Ellen's heart stood
still. Suppose he should recognize it? She tried to tell herself
that it was impossible. Could any young man recognize a doll after
all those years? How much did a boy ever care for a doll, anyway?
Not enough to think of it twice after he had given it up. It was
different with a girl. Her doll meant--God only knew what her doll
meant to her; perhaps it had a meaning of all humanity. But the boy,
what had he cared for the doll? He had gone away out West and left
it.
But Lloyd remembered. He stared down at the doll a moment. Then he
took her up gingerly in her fluffy pink robes of an obsolete
fashion. He held her at arm's length, and stared and stared.
Suddenly he parted the flaxen wig and examined a place on the head.
Then he looked at Ellen.
"Why, it is my old doll," he cried, with a great laugh of wonder and
incredulity. "Yes, it is my old doll! How in the world did you come
by my doll, Miss Brewster? Account for yourself. Are you a child
kidnapper?"
Ellen, who had risen and come forward, stood before him, absolutely
still, and very pale.
"Yes, it is my doll," said Lloyd, with another laugh. "I will tell
you how I know. Of course I can tell her face. Dolls look a good
deal alike, I suppose, but I tell you I loved this doll, and I
remember her face, and that little cast in her left eye, and that
beautiful, serene smile; but there's something besides. Once I
burned her head with the red-hot end of the poker to see if she
would wake up. I always had a notion when I was a child that it was
only a question of violence to make her wake up and demonstrate some
existence besides that eternal grin. So I burned her, but it made no
difference; but here is the mark now--see."
Ellen saw. She had often kissed it, but she made no reply. She was
occupied with considerations of the consequences.
"How did you come by her, if you don't mind telling?" said the young
man again. "It is the most curious thing for me to find my old doll
sitting here. Of course Aunt Cynthia gave her to you, but I didn't
know that she was acquainted with you. I suppose she saw a pretty
little girl getting around without a doll after I had gone, and sent
her, but--"
Suddenly between the young man's face and the girl's flashed a look
of intelligence. Suddenly Robert remembered all that he had heard of
Ellen's childish escapade. He _knew_. He looked from her to the
doll, and back again. "Good Lord!" he said. Then he set the doll
down in her little chair all of a heap, and caught Ellen's hand, and
shook it.
"You are a trump, that is what you are," he said; "a trump. So
she--" He shook his head, and looked at Ellen, dazedly. She did not
say a word, but looked at him with her lips closed tightly.
"It is better for you not to tell me anything," he said; "I don't
want to know. I don't understand, and I never want to, how it all
happened, but I do understand that you are a trump. How old were
you?" Robert's voice took on a tone of tenderness.
"Eight," replied Ellen, faintly.
"Only a baby," said the young man, "and you never told! I would like
to know where there is another baby who would do such a thing." He
caught her hand and shook it again. "She was like a mother to me,"
he said, in a husky voice. "I think a good deal of her. I thank
you."
Suddenly to the young man looking at the girl a conviction as of
some subtle spiritual perfume came; he had seen her beauty before,
he had realized her charm, but this was something different. A
boundless approbation and approval which was infinitely more
precious than admiration seized him. Her character began to reveal
itself, to come in contact with his own; he felt the warmth of it
through the veil of flesh. He felt a sense of reliance as upon an
inexhaustibility of goodness in another soul. He felt something
which was more than love, being purely unselfish, with as yet no
desire of possession. "Here is a good, true woman," he said to
himself. "Here is a good, true woman, who has blossomed from a good,
true child." He saw a wonderful faithfulness shining in her blue
eyes, he saw truth itself on her lips, and could have gone down at
the feet of the little girl in the pink cotton frock. Going home he
tried to laugh at himself, but could not succeed. It is easy to
shake off the clasp of a hand of flesh, but not the clasp of another
soul.
Ellen on her part was at once overwhelmed with delight and
confusion. She felt the fervor of admiration in the young man's
attitude towards her, but she was painfully conscious of her
undeservingness. She had always felt guilty about her silence and
disobedience towards her parents, and as for any self-approbation
for it, that had been the farthest from her thoughts. She murmured
something deprecatingly, but Lloyd cut her short.
"It's no use crying off," said he; "you are one girl in a thousand,
and I thank you, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. It might
have made awful trouble. My aunt Lizzie told me what a commotion
there was over it."
"I ran away," said Ellen, anxiously. Suddenly it occurred to her he
might think Cynthia worse than she had been.
"Never mind," said Lloyd--"never mind. I know what you did. You held
your blessed little tongue to save somebody else, and let yourself
be blamed."
The door which led into the sitting-room opened, and Andrew looked
in.
He made a shy motion when he saw Lloyd; still, he came forward. His
own callers had gone, and he had heard voices in the parlor, and had
feared Granville Joy was calling upon Ellen.
As he came forward, Ellen introduced him shyly. "This is Mr. Lloyd,
father," she said. "Mr. Lloyd, this is my father." Then she added,
"He came to bring back my valedictory." She was very awkward, but
it was the charming awkwardness of a beautiful child. She looked
exceedingly childish standing beside her father, looking into his
worn, embarrassed face.
Lloyd shook hands with Andrew, and said something about the
valedictory, which he had enjoyed reading.
"She wrote it all herself without a bit of help from the teacher,"
said Andrew, with wistful pride.
"It is remarkably well written," said Robert.
"You didn't hear it read at the hall?" said Andrew.
"No, I had not that good fortune."
"You ought to have heard them clap," said Andrew.
"Oh, father," murmured Ellen, but she looked innocently at her
father as if she delighted in his pride and pleasure without a
personal consideration.
The front door opened. "That's your mother," said Andrew.
Fanny looked into the lighted parlor, and dodged back with a little
giggle.
Ellen colored painfully. "It is Mr. Lloyd, mother," she said.
Then Fanny came forward and shook hands with Robert. Her face was
flaming--she cast involuntary glances at Andrew for confirmation of
her opinion. She was openly and shamelessly triumphant, and yet all
at once Robert ceased to be repelled by it. Through his insight into
the girl's character, he had seemed to gain suddenly a clearer
vision for the depths of human love and pity which are beneath the
coarse and the common. When Fanny stood beside her daughter and
looked at her, then at Robert, with the reflection of the beautiful
young face in her eyes of love, she became at once pathetic and
sacred.
"It is all natural," he said to himself as he was going home.