“All day I have been receiving calls and answering questions. A certain sort of vague envy has mingled itself with a more definite commiseration and there has been a great deal of affection mingled with everything. They don’t know. They all talk as though my little mother were a baby, and so she is. She’s a child of light. She has not grown up and she hasn’t made me grow up, and I hope I shall never have to, and I want to say to all the people, ‘Oh, you blind person, you blind person,’ when they speak in this half-patronizing tone of her. I want to say: ‘Don’t you know how much more she has than you? My mother is a happy person to live with; we are poor and our clothes are patched,—and sometimes they aren’t even patched,—and I suppose she’s a poor manager, but I am so glad she is because, when we do clean, it’s because we want to and not to fight it day and night.’ All through this day that’s been so busy, when people have knocked at our door on one pretext or another, I’ve been waiting. All day Roger hasn’t been to see me; it doesn’t seem possible that he can be angry at me or stay away from me like this; it doesn’t seem possible that he shouldn’t understand me. I’m going up to-night to Oscar’s Leap. It seemed to me that all the world had his voice to-day. Whenever I heard people talk far off, it seemed to me that I heard Roger; every time some one knocked on the door my heart leaped and I thought: ‘He’s coming at last.’ Twice I walked uptown looking for him, and once there was a real errand,—not a make-believe one like when I was a little girl and wanted to do something that took me up to Aunt Sarah’s; Aunt Sarah herself sent me, and how my ears were strained for the sound of his voice, and there was no sound at all in all the house. Then I did a thing that was very bold. I sat down at the piano and opened it and played and began to sing, hoping he would hear me, while I waited for the sewing for which Aunt Sarah had sent me. Then I heard footsteps on the stair and I knew that they weren’t Roger’s, but yet it seemed to me they must be—so much I wanted to see him that the very desire of my heart must call him to me—but no. I wonder what has happened; I wonder if he’s angry; I wonder if he’s hurt. I couldn’t even ask Martha a word about him; I had to keep my mouth closed. It is partly my fault that we have to skulk in this way. It seems a curious thing that Martha should know if Roger was in the house somewhere. But surely he couldn’t have been in the house or he would have come down when he heard me sing. Why should I feel ashamed at having tried to make him hear me? If I can go and call Alec from outside his house, why is it more wrong for me to go and call for the one whom I shall love all my days, and yet somehow I feel that I shouldn’t. There is some deep instinct in me that makes me know I was wrong.”
I suppose it was because of Ellen’s absorption in Roger that she failed to write an aspect of these days that stand out to me as one of the charming memories of my girlhood, for it so sums up our New England society of that day. My grandmother had performed the kind office of announcing the betrothal to Miss Sarah, and this good woman’s reply was characteristic.
“Well,” said she, “trust Emily to get into mischief when Ellen gives us a moment’s pause, and what irritates me the most, Sophia, is that I am not even allowed my just moment of anger. If I sulk, then there will be talk, to be sure, so I’ve got to go out and countenance this marriage of those ‘babes of grace’ as though it had been my fondest hope. I, forsooth, have got to go around and smile until my jaws are fairly dislocated to prevent the magpie chattering that there’ll be; but before my anger cools I’m going down to give Emily a piece of my mind. When you consider her refusing a decent, advantageous marriage, and then becoming sentimental at her time of life, it’s enough to make one’s blood boil.”
Miss Sarah eased her mind by making remarks like this to her sister and then said she:—
“Sophia Hathaway and I are going to bring our sewing and spend the afternoon, because you’ll see that half the town will be here to find out what’s happened.”
So there we were, my grandmother and I, Mrs. Payne, Ellen, and Aunt Sarah—a solid phalanx.
“We’ll answer,” Miss Sarah announced, “no questions except those asked us.”
Deacon Archibald and his wife were the first to call. The deacon came in cheerily, rubbing his hands.
“It was such a fine day,” said Mrs. Archibald, “that we thought we’d repay the many visits that we owe.”
“Yes, we are always so remiss in that,” chirped Deacon Archibald.