“Well, you see,” he explained, “it’s all over, isn’t it, forever? No matter what happens, Ellen is Roger’s, and why should I hang around and bay the moon? Elizabeth knows all about Ellen.”
“I don’t see how you can,” I repeated.
And then he said:—
“Roberta, it seems a wonderful thing to me that any one should care for me. How can I hurt a love that has been given to me? I care for her in a different way from Ellen and there is all truth between us.” Then he laughed. “It’s a funny thing; Roger loves no one, Ellen loves Roger, I love Ellen, and Elizabeth cares for me. By doing this I’m making the tangle less.”
That is all he would tell me at the time, but, being romantic then and still romantic, I have always thought that his chivalry and compassion had been skillfully played upon.
With a touching belief in the generosity of woman that is possible only in extreme youth, Alec effected a meeting between Elizabeth and Ellen at which I was present. All three of us were painfully polite and well behaved. Our cordiality was touching as we played to our dear Alec as audience. “But,” said Ellen to me afterwards, “isn’t it dreadful! why couldn’t he have chosen any one else! She’s sweet, of course; but think, Roberta, of that doll-faced thing as Alec’s wife.” While Elizabeth is reported to have said that on beholding Ellen she could hardly keep herself from exclaiming aloud, “Why, is that Ellen Payne!”
It was in midwinter that Mrs. Byington asked Ellen to visit her. She had often asked Ellen before, but there had been various reasons; Roger always preferred to spend the time with Ellen in the country. It seemed to me that in the days of her preparation it was like seeing a person come back to life. She has written:—
“I’ve been so homesick for you, Roger, that I felt like those people who die of homesickness in a far-off country. I feel as though I had been put away in a place where there was no air to breathe, and now I am to be let out into the sunlight once more, since you want me to come to you.”
Roger came back with her, but during the week she was away there was no entry at all. The visit was a time of confusion and excitement. Mrs. Byington gave her three beautiful frocks, more beautiful than anything she had ever seen, and it seemed to Ellen that she had met the whole city of Boston, and that she had been drowned in compliments. They seemed to her to have only just learned of her engagement, and she felt the weight of their curious eyes upon her, and realized that they turned from compliments to gossip, and Mrs. Byington, in the mean time, scarcely concealed her relief at Ellen’s presence and her pleasure at the impression Ellen had made. Miss Sarah told these things to my grandmother, having accompanied Ellen.
Ellen made one friend, a girl younger than herself, a cousin of Roger’s, who unconsciously played a part, since she put in Ellen’s hands the answer to so many riddles, the uncertainties that so tortured her.