Already, though she didn’t know it, she was coming back to Roger. Every day he went to see her with some carefully thought-out little gift. Every night he wrote her a letter which he sent by me, and she wrote in answer a letter that she didn’t send.
“I suppose [she writes to Roger] that we can only be cured of the worst hurts of all by those who have hurt us. Oh, please hide me from yourself! Oh, protect me! from this Roger, since I am so afraid of you that my whole spirit shudders away from you. Shield me from this, or let me go now while I yet have strength to leave you, or else make me forget forever how black life could be if I ever saw again the face that you turned then on your mother, and that yet was a part of you.”
There is nothing truer in the life of the affections than this, that the wound made by those whom we love can only be cured by them. One may be sick even to death, and yet the only cure can come from the one who has poisoned life for us. There is only one other way to cure the hurt, and that is to stop loving. That’s why a great many things become easier to bear as the years go by. We find men and women philosophically facing situations which formerly would have stopped all life for them. These are the dead of heart who have forgotten to care when they do this, and where one woman gains peace from a higher understanding of the man she loves, a dozen others find it by ceasing to love at all.
Ellen made her attempt at escape, and then came back because she couldn’t help it. The one person in the world who could have helped her was Alec. She was sincere when she told me:—
“If Alec was my brother, and had a home for me somewhere where I need not see Roger again, I’d go to him.”
It was her very docility and lack of resistance that maddened Roger. He told me:—
“Somehow Ellen has slipped out of my hands into a magic circle; she’s afraid of me. It’s as though she lived inside a crystal shell—I can see her and speak to her, but I can’t touch her.”
I, myself, was very much disturbed and moved by it all. There was Ellen who had burned in a fire of happiness, whose very look at Roger had been a caress, who seemed to give herself to him by the way she stood,—her arms relaxed as though all her body cried out to him to take her,—now lost in apathy; nothing that I told her affected her as far as I could see. After days of this, just as I was giving up hope, I met them one afternoon, swinging down the street toward me, with the air of a god and goddess recently let out of prison. Roger had Prudentia flung on his shoulder, and carried the child aloft as though she were a flag of triumph. All the explanation I ever had of the reconciliation was what I had then and there.
“He came down the street,” Ellen told me, “with Prudentia on his shoulder, and said, ‘Hello, Ellen,’ and I said, ‘Hello, Roger,’ and he put out his hand to me and I took it. Why, Roberta, aren’t you glad?” asked Ellen.
“She wanted more pomp and circumstance,” Roger jeered at me. “She wanted you, Ellen, to rush to my arms and say, ‘Roderigo, I forgive thee.’”