The Heart's Country

by Mary Heaton Vorse

“Once, when I was a little girl, I thought I was engaged because I thought I was in love, and I spent two years of my life in thinking that my life was dear to this man. I lived in a torment of doubt of what to do rather than hurt him. I could not bear to have any one live this way for me, and least of all you who have been the heart of life to me, and so before this happens to you let us say good-bye to each other as splendidly and gayly as we first met each other. Love does not come at any one’s bidding, nor will it stay, and I would blame no one in this world for ceasing to love, least of all the one whom I love. But I could not endure from you a cowardly drifting away from me, I could not bear to see you fear to face bravely a moment of pain, nor could I bear the dishonorable shiftiness with which some men loosen the bonds between themselves and the women whom they have loved.”

And under this page, which was written on good notepaper,—a true never-sent letter,—she had written: “Oh! if I had the courage to send this now!”

Then came Roger, triumphant and upstanding, his first pleaded case in his pocket, a splendid young prince again, as prodigal with apologies as he was with love. The miracle happened; they turned back the hands of time for a few days.

“He held me from him, the way he does, at arm’s length, and said: ‘Ellen, have you doubted me?’ What could I say to him? When I had courage enough to say, ‘What’s been the matter, Roger? Where did you go so I couldn’t find you?’ he only laughed and said, ‘I’ve been in the devil’s own temper.’”

This was the last time she fought against him. From this time on he loosed his careless hand and tightened the clutch of it over her heart until it bled, according to his mood. When she didn’t write him for a while he rushed to her, to see that his own was his own, and this was as much as any woman ought to have asked, so he felt. She wrote:—

“There’s one thing I’ve learned about you, Roger, when first I saw the other Roger, and that was if any one denied you anything, you loved to beg for it. As long as a thing denies itself to you, you must strive for it, and knowing this of you, it is a weapon that I can never use. If I played you as if you were a trout in the stream, played you until I reeled you in to me, tired and gasping, I might have held you in my hand always. Whatever I shall do for you in life, I shall never do anything that shows my love for you more, in that I won’t traffic with your love, and keep it for myself by playing a game with you. I make you this present, a real gift, as my aunt once said, and one that you won’t know about ever.”

So she wrote in the deep bitterness of her heart.

The wedding had been fixed for October and all the time there was one little song that sung itself to her: “When we’re married, then I can show him how I really care; when I’m with him, nothing will be hard for me, for it is suspense that kills.” For she trusted him as women must, in the face of disloyalty and carelessness.

In the early fall, after a season of silence, when she was too sick at heart even to write, he came. He had a deprecatory air. He came as one asking the favor of something which he ought not to have, and it was characteristic of him, with his intolerance of the disagreeable, that he should break the edge of telling Ellen, so to speak, by telling me first.

He had come to defer the wedding, and his reason for wishing to do so we found out later. I remember how he sat in my kitchen, his heavy, handsome profile silhouetted against the flaming, evening sky, his head swung forward. He lifted his face toward me with a sharp, impatient gesture, looked at me, and asked a question, to me inconceivable.