Saxe Holm's Stories / First Series

by Helen Hunt Jackson

Two weeks from the day of my conversation with her they sailed for Liverpool. The summer was to be spent in England, and the winter in Nice or Mentone.

Alice, the eldest daughter, a loving, sunshiny girl of twelve, was installed in her mother's room. This was Ellen's especial wish. She knew that in this way John would be drawn to the room constantly. All her own little belongings were given to Alice.

"Only think, Auntie," said she, "mamma has given me, all for my own, her lovely toilette set, and all the Bohemian glass on the bureau, and her ivory brushes! She says when she comes home she shall refurnish her room and papa's too!"

Oh, my wise Ellen. Could Emma Long have done more subtly!

Early on the first evening after John returned from New York, having seen them off, I missed him. I said bitterly to myself, "At Mrs. Long's, I suppose," and went up-stairs to find Alice. As I drew near her room I heard his voice, reading aloud. I went in. He and Alice were lying together on a broad chintz-covered lounge, as I had so often seen him and Ellen.

"Oh, Auntie, come here," said Alice, "hear mamma's letter to me! She gave it to papa in New York. She says it is like the sealed orders they give to captains sometimes, not to be opened till they are out at sea. It is all about how I am to fill her place to papa. And there are ever so many little notes inside, more orders, which even papa himself is not to see! only I suppose he'll recognize the things when I do them!"

At that moment, as I watched John Gray's face, with Alice's nestled close, and his arms clasped tight around her, while they read Ellen's letter, a great load rolled off my heart. I went through many dark days afterward, but I never could quite despair when I remembered the fatherhood and the husbandhood which were in his eyes and his voice that night

The story of the next twelve months could be told in few words, so far as its external incidents are concerned. It could not be told in a thousand volumes, if I attempted to reproduce the subtle undercurrents of John Gray's life and mine. Each of us was living a double life; he more or less unconsciously; I with such sharpened senses, such overwrought emotions, that I only wonder that my health did not give way. I endured vicariously all the suspense and torment of the deepest jealousy, with a sense of more than vicarious responsibility added, which was almost more than human nature could bear. Ellen little knew how heavy would be the burden she laid upon me. Her most express and explicit direction was that the familiar intimacy between our family and Mrs. Long's was to be preserved unaltered. This it would have been impossible for me to do if Mrs. Long had not herself recognized the necessity of it, for her own full enjoyment of John's society. But it was a hard thing; my aunt, the ostensible head of our house, was a quiet woman who had nothing whatever to do with society, and who felt in the outset a great shrinking from the brilliant Mrs. Long. I had never been on intimate terms with her, so that John and Alice were really the only members of the household who could keep up precisely the old relation. And so it gradually came about that to most of our meetings under each other's roofs, strangers were asked to fill up the vacant places, and in spite of all Emma Long's efforts and mine, there was a change in the atmosphere of our intercourse. But there was intimacy enough to produce the effect for which Ellen was most anxious, i.e., to extend the shelter of our recognition to the friendship between John and Emma, and to remove from them both all temptation to anything clandestine or secret. They still saw each other almost daily; they still shared most of each other's interests and pleasures; they still showed most undisguised delight in each other's presence. Again and again I went with them to the opera, to the theatre, and sat through the long hours, watching, with a pain which seemed to me hardly less than Ellen's would have been, their constant sympathy with each other in every point of enjoyment, their constant forgetfulness of every one else.

But there was, all this time, another side to John Gray's life, which I saw, and Emma Long did not see. By every steamer came packages of the most marvelous letters from Ellen: letters to us all; but for John, a diary of every hour of her life. Each night she spent two hours in writing out the record of the day. I have never seen letters which so reproduced the atmosphere of the day, the scene, the heart. They were brilliant and effective to a degree that utterly astonished me; but they were also ineffably tender and loving, and so natural in their every word, that it was like seeing Ellen face to face to read them. At first John did not show them even to me; but soon he began to say, "These are too rare to be kept to myself; I must just read you this account;" or, "Here is a page I must read," until it at last became his habit to read them aloud in the evenings to the family, and even to more intimate friends who chanced to be with us. He grew proud beyond expression of Ellen's talent for writing; and well he might. No one who listened to them but exclaimed, "There never were such letters before!" I think there never were. And I alone knew the secret of them.

But these long, brilliant letters were not all. In every mail came also packages for Alice--secret, mysterious things which nobody could see, but which proved to be sometimes small notes, to be given to papa at unexpected times and places; sometimes little fancy articles, as a pen-wiper, or a cigar-case, half worked by Ellen, to be finished by Alice, and given to papa on some especial day, the significance of which "only mamma knows;" sometimes a pressed flower, which was to be put by papa's plate at breakfast, or put in papa's button-hole as he went out in the morning. I was more and more lost in astonishment at the subtle and boundless art of love which could so contrive to reach across an ocean, and surround a man's daily life with its expression. There were also in every package, letters to John from all the children: even the baby's little hand was guided to write by every mail, "Dear papa, I love you just as much as all the rest do!" or, "Dear papa, I want you to toss me up!" More than once I saw tears roll down John's face in spite of him, as he slowly deciphered these illegible little scrawls. The older children's notes were vivid and loving like their mother's. It was evident that they were having a season of royal delight in their journey, but also evident that their thoughts and their longings were constantly reverting to papa. How much Ellen really indited of these apparently spontaneous letters I do not know; but no doubt their tone was in part created by her. They showed, even more than did her own letters, that papa was still the centre of the family life. No sight was seen without the wish--"Oh, if papa were here!" and even little Mary, aged five, was making a collection of pressed leaves for papa, from all the places they visited. Louise had already great talent for drawing, and in almost every letter came two or three childish but spirited little pictures, all labelled "Drawn for papa!" "The true picture of our courier in a rage, for papa to see." "The washerwoman's dog, for papa," etc., etc. Again and again I sat by, almost trembling with delight, and saw John spend an entire evening in looking over these little missives and reading Ellen's letters. Then again I sat alone and anxious through an entire evening, when I knew he was with Emma Long. But even after such an evening, he never failed to sit down and write pages in his journal-letter to Ellen--a practice which he began of his own accord, after receiving the first journal-letter from her.