CHAPTER XV
I remember that day very well. Ellen spent the day with me and with Alec, and we all three lay under the trees together and then Ellen went on a little tour of inspection. What she was doing really was saying “Good-bye” to the place that she knew and to us. Her eyes were bright and shining; I suppose she was thinking, “To-morrow I shall be where?—to-morrow I shall be who?—and these dear people who love me, what will they think? Not that I care!” She was so sweet to Alec that her loveliness melted his poor heart still further.
So sweet she was that, with one of those ironies of fate that are often more cruel than tragedy, Alec took this time to tell Ellen about the work he had decided to do. I can see him as he stood under the apple trees, the sun shining on his mane of hair, the brightness of his eager eyes contrasting with his self-consciousness, while we two girls stood there, each absorbed in her own affairs.
“I’ve looked all around life to see what I could do best—and I guess I know more about boys than anything else. I sort of know how they feel inside all the time. I don’t forget. So I’m going to teach ’em. Try and teach ’em the things they want to know most and that they knock their shins so trying to find the way to. They have a hard time. I had just one teacher—and he led me out of darkness; and that’s what I’m going to do. It’s a business, you know, that means trying to understand all the time. It’s a present to you, Ellen,” he added with his crooked, whimsical smile.
He was so anxious that we should see what he meant, and we were so polite and innerly so blank. Teaching grubby little boys seemed to us an uninspiring profession for a splendid youth like Alec. We couldn’t know how many years he had looked ahead. Alec and his gift to Ellen seem to typify man and woman. Man, who comes with his bright visions of the future, bestows the gift of his high dreams on girls who see nothing in them—and are polite. But Ellen was too heart-rendingly sweet that afternoon to seem anything but understanding. She was heart-breakingly gay.
After a while we went in together to Mrs. Payne’s house. She and Mr. Sylvester were standing in the drawing-room with their hands clasped, and Mr. Sylvester spoke and said, “We may as well tell these dear children first”; and Ellen’s little mother said, as shyly as a girl, “Mr. Sylvester and I have found very suddenly that we have always loved each other.”
He rejoined with his deep simplicity of manner, “Yes, quite suddenly we found out that we’ve been to one another as the air we breathe, and as the water we drink, and as the sun that shines.”
“And so, of course,” said the little mother of Ellen, “we will be married.”
She stood there violet-eyed, in her neat, little black dress, as slender as a girl, more girlish in her looks than many of us for all her forty years. I don’t think that any of the three of us had realized that people as old as Mr. Sylvester and Mrs. Payne could live in the land of romance and could fall in love. Like most young people in their early twenties, we imagined that this great gift of mankind was for us alone and that it never lightened up the hearts of those who had already lived and loved; but as these two stood, hand in hand, there rushed over all of us the feeling that they were just great children. The look of wonder was in their eyes; they had been living for so long close to the land of enchantment, and just now had stepped over its borders into its realization.