“It is so very strange to be doing the same things that I was before, but all the work I do for my mother, every book I read, every word I speak has a meaning that it hadn’t. It is as though my ear were at the heart of Life and I heard Life beat.”
CHAPTER XIV
I saw a good deal of her and so did Alec. Alec at this time was preparing to work his way through college. Even Roger, who treated the village youth with the kindly tolerance of a splendid young prince, treated Alec as an equal. Alec, of course, gave him the whole-hearted admiration that generous lad does a man.
He guessed Alec’s infatuation for Ellen, for Roger was one of those experienced gentlemen who feel far off any emotional flurry and he had paired all of us before he had been in town ten days, and that without having appeared to observe us. So much was he the over-masculine that nothing of this kind could come near him without his senses registering it. He could mention John Seymore’s name in a way to make me blush and make me wish to stamp my foot on the ground with outraged modesty. And as for Edward Graham, it was on his account that Ellen first learned the terrible anguish that love may bring with it, and she wrote:—
“I have learned how foolish I am and how weak. We were both at Oscar’s Leap looking down into the river. ‘I walked up and down the earth, Ellen,’ he said, ‘looking for you, and as I looked from one person to another I said, “No, that’s not Ellen,” and then I didn’t know your name. I feel that it’s strange of me that I should not have guessed it.’ ‘Didn’t you ever care,’ I asked him, ‘for any one for a moment?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘how could I? Once in a while I saw some one that looked a little like you and there I waited longer.’ ‘But people must have cared for you,’ I said. ‘Not really; some people make a game of things like that, Ellen,’ he said. And already I felt deeply ashamed, that though I am so much younger I should have been so foolish as to think I cared once. ‘And you, Ellen; you waited the same way for me, didn’t you? The people who cared for you, you knew weren’t me.’—And then I told him about Edward. He didn’t speak for a long time, and then he said: ‘Isn’t there anywhere on the earth a woman so young and so sheltered that she doesn’t pass from one hand to another and snatch at love, and give a piece of herself here and a piece of herself there? But, Ellen, I thought you were different’; and the deep and bitter shame that rushed over me then I don’t think I shall ever forget. He asked me a great many questions, and when he found that I was so little when it all happened he forgave me. It seems wonderful to me that he should have waited.”
It seems wonderful to me, as I read this little, pitiful account, that Ellen with her straight, clear mind should have let herself be so bemused as to feel that something was wrong which her own inner sense had told her was not wrong, honest as she had always been with herself. She lived for the first time by another person’s standard for her. She had given him that most precious thing of all, her inner judgment of herself. It seems still more wonderful to me that Roger should have told her such a story, for he had had love-affairs a-plenty; but I think he was utterly honest in this, and in his honesty lay his danger and his charm. New emotions, as they came to him, came with so overwhelming a force that they wiped out not only the old love, but the memory of it, and when he had fallen in love with the wild sweetness of Ellen the other experiences in his life seemed to him only an unimportant outburst of passion. Yet for her he had the Turk’s jealousy: he wished not only for the utter virginity of the body, but also for the virginity of the spirit to such a point that he had to make-believe that there had been no Edward in her life at all before he could “forgive.”
They had both imagined that they could keep their love a secret for a while until Roger should have done a certain amount of work.
“I want my parents to love the idea of Ellen from the first,” he told me, “and I’ve been so at cross-purposes with them that I want to get back into their good graces a little before I tell them.” And, indeed, for Roger to have rushed away to a tardy acquiescence of his father’s will and to reappear immediately with a bride, we understood would strain the patience of an irascible parent. Just how much we learned from Miss Sarah, whom we heard saying:—
“The boy really seems to have turned over a definite new leaf. Lucia writes that she has learned that Roger has not even once written to that woman, whose entanglement with Roger worried them all so. She’s been ill ever since he left, and it serves her right, too. A married woman of her age should have had better sense than to have let herself be carried away by an attractive youngster. Young rascal!—to go off on such a tangent when he was apparently just on the brink of making an ideal marriage. He and Emmeline Glover, you know, had been sweethearts for a long time when he got into this scrape.”