‘Guilt—to the office!’ Her face blazed up at once in scorching colour. She looked at me in fierce resentment and excitement, stamping her foot. ‘Guilt—to the office! How dare you? How dare you?’ she cried like a fury. She clenched her hands at me, and looked as if she could have torn me in pieces. ‘Whatever he has done,’ she cried, ‘he has done nothing he had not a right to do. Do you know who you are speaking of? John! You might as well tell me I had broken into your house at night and robbed you. He have anything to blame himself for with the office?—never! nor with any one. What he has done is what he had a right to do—I am the first to say so. He has been wearied out. You said it once yourself, long, long before my eyes were opened; and at last he has done it—and he had a good right!’ She stood for one moment before me in the fervour of this fiery address; then, suddenly, she sank and dropped on her knees by my side. ‘You think it means that? You see it—don’t you see it? He has grown weary, as was so natural. He thought he could trust himself; but it proved different; and then he thought he could redeem it. What can that mean but one thing?—he has got some one else to care for him. There is nothing wrong in that. It is not I that will ever blame him. The only thing was that a horrible doubt came over me this morning—if it should not mean what I thought it did! That is folly, I know; but you, who know him—put away all that about wrong to the office, which is out of the question, and you will see it cannot be anything but one thing.’
‘It is not that,’ I said.
She clasped her hands, kneeling by my side. ‘You always took his part,’ she said in a low voice. ‘You will not see it.’ Why did she tremble so? Did she want to believe it, or not to believe it? I could not understand Ellen. Just then, from the room below, there came a voice singing. It was Chatty’s voice, the child whom she had taught, who had been the witness of their wooing. She knew nothing about all this; she did not even know that Ellen was in the house. What so natural as that she should sing the song her mistress had taught her? It was that which Ellen herself had been humming as she stood at the window.
‘Listen!’ I said. ‘You are answered in his own words—“I will come again.”’
This was more than Ellen could bear. She made one effort to rise to her feet, to regain her composure; but the music was too much. At that moment I myself felt it to be too much. She fell down at my feet in a passion of sobs and tears.
Afterwards I knew the meaning of Ellen’s passionate determination to admit no meaning but one to the letter. She had taken him at his word. In her certainty that this was to happen, she had seen no other interpretation to it, until it was too late. She had never sent any reply; and he had not written again. It was now a month since the letter had been received, and this sudden breaking off of the correspondence had been so far final on both sides. To satisfy myself, I sent to inquire at the office, and found that no blame was attached to John; but that he had been much depressed, unduly depressed, by his failure to remedy the faults of his predecessor, and had left as soon as his accounts were forwarded and all the business details carefully wound up: and had not been heard of more. I compelled, I may say, Ellen to write, now that it was too late; but her letter was returned to her some time after. He had left the place, and nothing was known of him there; nor could we discover where he had gone.
CHAPTER VIII
This little tragedy, as it appeared to me at the time, made a great impression on my mind. It did not make me ill; that would have been absurd. But still it helped, I suppose, to depress me generally and enhance the effect of the cold that had hung about me so long, and for which the elder ones, taking counsel together, decided that the desire of the younger ones should be gratified, and I should be made to go to Italy for the spring. The girls were wild to go, and my long-continued lingering cold was such a good excuse. For my own part, I was not willing at all; but what can one woman, especially when she is their mother, do against so many? I had to give in and go. I went to see Ellen before we started, and it was a very painful visit. She was still keeping up with a certain defiance of everybody. But in the last two months she had changed wonderfully. For one thing, she had shrank into half her size. She was never anything but a little woman; but now she seemed to me no bigger than a child. And those cheerful, happy brown eyes, which had so triumphed over and smiled at all the privations of life, looked out from two hollow caverns, twice as large as they had ever been before, and with a woeful look that broke one’s heart. It was not always that they had this woeful look. When she was conscious of inspection she played them about with an artificial activity as if they had been lanterns, forcing a smile into them which sometimes looked almost like a sneer; but when she forgot that any one was looking at her, then both smile and light went out, and there was in them a woeful doubt and question which nothing could solve. Had she been wrong? Had she misjudged him whom her heart could not forget or relinquish? Was it likely that she could give him up lightly even had he been proved unworthy? And oh, Heaven! was he proved unworthy, or had she done him wrong? This was what Ellen was asking herself, without intermission, for ever and ever; and her mother, on her side, watched Ellen piteously with much the same question in her eyes. Had she, too, made a mistake? Was it possible that she had exacted a sacrifice which she had no right to exact, and in mere cowardice, and fear of loneliness, and desire for love and succour on her own part, spoiled two lives? This question, which was almost identical in both, made the mother and daughter singularly like each other; except that Ellen kept asking her question of the air, which is so full of human sighs, and the sky, whither so many ungranted wishes go up, and the darkness of space, in which is no reply—and the mother asked hers of Ellen, interrogating her countenance mutely all day long, and of every friend of Ellen’s who could throw any light upon the question. She stole into the room when Ellen left me for a moment, and whispered, coming close to me, lest the very walls should hear—
‘How do you think she is looking? She will not say a word to me about him—not a word. Don’t you think she has been too hasty? Oh! I would give everything I have if she would only go with you and look for John, and make it up with him again.’
‘I thought you could not spare her,’ I said with perhaps some cruelty in my intention. She wrung her hands, and looked piteously in my face.