Often it is that in the disintegration of a deep and long-lived affection, it is the instinct of the body to shiver away first, before the mind knows what has happened, but it is more dangerous when, in the full splendor of love, the blow has fallen and instinct still clamors for the beloved’s companionship.
But she wasn’t to be spared seeing him. They met by chance upon the street. I was with Ellen, and he began at once babbling forth the excuses he had said over and over to me. Because Ellen said there was no place in him to tell him what it was all about, he persisted in thinking that she had been outraged by his trifling again, with their affection, at the eleventh hour.
At last he went away, but he had the satisfaction of feeling that he had played the noble part. In the light of Ellen’s actions, what he considered his own small unfaiths, appeared as nothing.
“Now you are gone [she wrote] I would call you back if I could, and I have to remember and say to myself that there is no one to call back. There is nothing in you that would hear the things that I wish to say to you, and yet you go on living and yet I must love you; and yet, forever and ever in the night, my heart goes out to you; and yet, when I walk along, I feel the touch of your hand, as though it were placed in mine. But the you that meant life to me never was, or died, perhaps, with your boyhood. He was there a little while and smiled at me, and all the time the real you was growing large and strong and killing that other whom I loved. But I have bound my life up in you, so what can I do, and where will I find comfort? I can have scarcely the comfort of a memory, for I have loved only a ghost in you. I envy those sad and haggard girls who have been deserted by their lovers. I envy wives who have been left with little children to care for, for they, at least, have had reality; they have been able to give all of themselves, and what they have known has been real. I wonder if I shall always have to bleed for you, drop by drop, and that while I bleed, my strength also goes? Everything talks to me of you. My hand stretches out for a pen and I must write to you, though you aren’t, and yet you are dearer to me than all the world besides. Where did the sweet soul of you go that I loved so well, and how can I live in a world where such things happen? I go out upon the street and hear people walking past and children playing and think with surprise, ‘Why, there are happy people in the world!’”
CHAPTER XXV
If the world has little pity for a jilted girl, how shall it have much understanding for any one who suffers after having voluntarily sent her lover away, especially when it was her obvious duty to her family to marry? So her world was not very kind to Ellen at a moment when she most needed their kindness. We do not often understand the sicknesses of the spirit; now we mete out to them the criminal indulgence that a foolish woman does to a wayward child, and now we treat them with bruising harshness.
During the summer matters were not so bad, because every one rather expected that Ellen would come to herself. My grandmother used to question me seriously if I were encouraging Ellen.
Even Mr. and Mrs. Sylvester, most unworldly people,—more unworldly, I think, than any one I have ever known,—had seen the children “enjoying advantages” through Ellen, for Ellen and Roger had planned a thousand things.
Matilda had wept openly when Ellen had returned, and said:—