He came during the winter occasionally, looking rather haggard and gaunt and ill at ease with life, and he rested himself more and more on her breast as if trying further and further and with deeper confidence this unspeakable affection of hers.
Miss Sarah brought the news to our house, and she was agitated as I never have seen her.
“You may as well stay, Roberta,” she said, “because, after all, it may be better that you shall tell Ellen. No,” she contradicted herself, “no one shall carry my burdens for me.”
“What’s happened to Roger?” my grandmother asked; and I sat silent and trembling, pictures of a dead Roger in my mind.
“Roger’s father has turned him off; he’s been mixed up in some disgraceful gambling scrape. He’s been very wild this winter, poor Lydia writes me,—poor heart-broken woman. He escaped actual arrest only through his father’s influence.”
Little by little the whole series of events were made clear before my horrified young eyes. Country New England in those days was a place of rigid morals, nor were young girls taught to condone the frailties of men, and gambling at that time had a guilty and glittering sound. All our feelings, I think, were, how fortunate it should have occurred before Ellen’s wedding. When Miss Sarah told her, she said:—
“I know, he’s written me already,” but she didn’t add, “And I’ve written him to come to me.” She wrote:—
“When I got his letter telling me what had happened and releasing me, it seemed to me as if all the smouldering love in me for him burst into flame, and now, in the moment when every one’s turned on him, I am triumphantly and gladly his more than ever I’ve been. I feel as if I could stretch out my arms to him in the darkness and shield him from all harm and trouble. I feel as if I had been talking with him face to face, and that all this had burned away all those things that have been between us all this time. And he turned to me at this time with ‘I suppose you, too, Ellen, will want no more of me, but I wish, Ellen, I could say good-bye to you myself instead of writing it—you’ve been so true, Ellen.’”
So in the spring, two years after she first met Roger, Ellen went to Oscar’s Leap to await his coming. She loved the gallant bearing of him, for he came no broken penitent. He was no coward before the challenge of life; he loved the difficult and had a lovely joy in such battles.
“They kicked me out, Ellen,” he told her, “and I’ve kicked them all out. Now it’s me with my own two hands and my own two feet and you in the world. Why didn’t you tell me to do this before?” He loved the feeling he had of foot-looseness. He needed just one person to hold a hand out to him in the general wreckage of life, and his own woman had done this for him. When he got her letter, it seemed to him as though he had fallen to the earth only to spring up strong again.