The Heart's Country

by Mary Heaton Vorse

“We see no reason for delaying our marriage long. We waited long enough; we’ve been close friends for eight years; and you, little Ellen,”—he spoke as though speaking to a little child,—“you have been already like a daughter to me and like a little mother to my children.”

“You’ll help me now, Ellen, won’t you?” pleaded her little mother; and it was as though they had changed places and Ellen were the older. But Ellen had them folded in her arms, kissing first one and then the other, and we all followed suit; and for once the stern conventions of New England reserve, which held in its iron grip such sweet and simple spirits as Mrs. Payne and Mr. Sylvester, was broken through.

Now Ellen had a shining face, now everything had all been settled for her by Life. She could not possibly go away and leave her mother at such a moment, nor, of course, would Roger ask her this, and for a moment the light that swept over the country of her heart was dimmed by the quiet radiance of these two middle-aged people. Glad-footed she started off to her trysting-place, and what happened there was as though the sun had been eclipsed in mid-heaven, as though the solid earth had shaken under her feet. She ran to Roger with this precious tale of her mother’s happiness in her hands, sure that he would understand. She writes, almost with an unbelief in the fact that she had herself heard and witnessed:—

“He wanted me to go with him just the same! He came forward to me in that way that always makes me think of leaping flame and said: ‘You’ve decided to go, haven’t you, Ellen?’ And when I told him, he said, ‘That makes it simpler, doesn’t it? They’ll be so occupied with themselves that they won’t care what you do. Hooray!’ And he laughed like a little boy. I said, ‘You don’t understand; now I can’t go; I can’t darken her happiness; my mother needs me’; and he stood before me, looking at me with eyes that burned with anger of his desire. ‘Ellen,’ he said, ‘decide now, the long engagement with its perils for you and for me; my good or their good; our happiness against a few stitches put in your mother’s clothes.’ I said, ‘I can’t go.’ He drew me to him and said, ‘Ellen, are you coming? You must come’; and I felt as if my soul was shuddering out of my body, as if he tore me in two, and part of me must go, and I don’t know what there was in my soul stronger than myself, because all of me never wanted to do anything more than to do his will, which was my will, too; but I had to say, ‘I can’t do it.’ I know now that there are a thousand things that make up this; Mr. Sylvester being a minister, it would hurt him to have his daughter—oh! what a sweet word—run away. All these things, all the tangled and manifold ways in which my life is woven into those beloved of me, and now a thousandfold more tightly woven than before into the life of this little place, all held me back where the inner, beating heart of me cried aloud to go. He stood there pleading, and he raged with anger; his words beat me down, shivering, like a heavy storm of wind and rain. The love of him drew me toward him, as flowers lift up their heads to the sun, but something deep down kept saying, ‘No, I can’t go. No, I can’t go.’ ‘Now, I know,’ said he, ‘at last how little your love is worth’; and then he pulled me to him and kissed me roughly, and again and again, and then almost threw me from him. ‘Good-bye, Ellen,’ he said; and I cried, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Oh, not far,’ he said; but I felt as if his spirit had gone to the end of the world, and he strode without me down the road. I am writing like one in a dream, because I can’t see and don’t know what’s going to happen to us, and I want to run out into the night and run to his house and cry under his window that I’ll go whenever he says, but then I know, if I did that, that at the last moment I would decide I couldn’t go.”

CHAPTER XVI

While Ellen was going through these hours of anguish her mother and Mr. Sylvester sat in my grandmother’s kitchen, a pair of helpless, middle-aged children, discussing how they would break the news to Miss Sarah Grant. They didn’t need to explain why Miss Grant would disapprove of their marriage; she would disapprove of it just as all the town would, for it was evident that if Mr. Sylvester was going to marry again it was his duty to himself and to his children to marry a “capable woman,” and you might as well ask a moon-ray or a soft breeze in the trees to be capable as Ellen’s little mother.

“I have suggested,” said Mr. Sylvester, “that we let Miss Sarah learn of it as we shall the rest of the town. A simple and efficacious way has occurred to me, Mrs. Hathaway, of informing all our friends,—I shall merely tell Mrs. Snow and Miss Nellie Lee and then nature will do the rest.” He was quite grave and simple-hearted as he said this, but I know that Alec and I did not dare to meet one another’s eyes, for the good man had mentioned not only two of the most talkative ladies in town, but also two who had, according to gossip, felt themselves very capable of taking care of an incapable but godly man. Mrs. Payne, however, insisted that Mr. Sylvester should himself tell her sister of their engagement.

“My dear,” said Mr. Sylvester, “I trust I am a soldier of the Lord, but I confess to a feebleness in the knees when it comes to confronting Miss Sarah, for both of us have been a serious anxiety to her even in an unmarried state, and what shall we be now when my housekeeper has gone?”

“And, indeed, my dear, how do you suppose,” inquired my grandmother whose spiritual attitude had been one whose hands and eyes were both raised to Heaven,—“how do you suppose you are going to take care of the children?”