“There, but for the grace of God, goes Ellen Payne.”
Here was her prayer granted and understanding was given her. The final tragedy is not to be unloved, but to find out that one has loved nothing;—that within the shell of the body there is nothing to which we can give ourselves;—to have been cursed with the love of the shallow-hearted; and there is a deep torment, beyond the loss of death, which goes with the unknitting of two souls knit close together, strand by strand. Ellen could stand any cruelty that he gave to her and condone it, but she shivered back from this relentlessness that she had seen in Roger. As he came to her she said to him:—
“I heard you, Roger.”
His face was still set in anger.
“I gave her no cause,” he exclaimed angrily, “nothing but a little moonshine talk. When we’re married I shan’t be subjected to things like that.”
“We’re not going to be married,” said Ellen.
CHAPTER XXIV
During all my life long I have occasionally had, in times of stress, a recurrence of the spiritual nausea which I felt that night. When we drove home in the closed carriage Mrs. Sylvester was prattling like a girl about the beautiful party. Indeed, she had enjoyed the outward circumstance of things almost more than Ellen and myself, and Roger, making light talk with her, sat next to Ellen,—light talk that had its undercurrent of meaning that Ellen and I understood. The cab lurched noisily over the cobblestones, with which all Boston was paved in those days, so that Roger and Mrs. Sylvester had to raise their voices above the din. It was raining, and the yellow flare of the street-corner lamps was reflected in pools of eddying light from the damp pavements.
It seemed to me that we went on and on forever in this torment of noise and talk, and the smell of the wet spring night conflicted with the smell of the stuffy upholstery, and I suffered as though I was witnessing the physical pain of a tortured child. It seemed to me that the torment of the ceaseless, agonizing prattle of Ellen’s little mother, accompanied by the drunken lurch of the lumbering cab, would never stop, for all the time I knew that Ellen’s heart was breaking, and that the only thing that life could give her at that moment was darkness and rest. I knew this was the end as far as she and Roger were concerned.