This had not been all the adventure, nor was this the end of it. To tell the story in Ellen's own words:--
"Alec and I were picking currants at Aunt Sarah's when I heard a voice behind me, and I never knew before what it meant when I read in books, that 'their hearts were in their mouths.' I thought mine would beat its way right out of me and lie thumping at my feet when I heard a voice say: 'Oh, here are my little friends from Erin's Isle.' I suppose it is because I am very bad that it never occurred to me until that minute that fooling a minister, by pretending to be the peddler's children, was not right, especially when it was Alec's and my singing songs in what we made him believe was Gaelic that made him buy so many more things. I wonder if all people who do wrong only feel badly when they are found out? I turned around and I thought I should fall, for my mother was with him, and Aunt Sarah and uncle and our own minister. Uncle Ephraim had not heard what he said, and now, 'Permit me, Mr. Sweetser,' he said, 'to present my little niece, Ellen, Mrs. Payne's little daughter, and our neighbor, Master Alec Yorke.' I saw him wondering if we really could be the same children, because, while we were playing that we were the peddler's children, we had taken off our shoes and stockings to make ourselves look like wild Irish children, and had succeeded very well, indeed. I thought for a moment that perhaps he wouldn't say anything, but Aunt Sarah's ears were open. 'What was that? Did I hear you say "your little friends from Erin"?
Have you seen these children before?' This was an awful moment.
'These are the same children that came with the Irish peddler to my house.' 'Ha! Ha! I knew that those children were gone for no good, Emily, and that they were strangely silent about their exploits,' Aunt Sarah said. 'Do you mean,' said Uncle Ephraim, 'that my niece and Horace Yorke's son made believe to be the children of a drunken, Irish peddler, and thus appeared before you?' 'Not only that,' said Mr. Sweetser sadly, 'but they sang to us in Gaelic.' 'Gaelic,' snorted Aunt Sarah; 'never a word does she know of Gaelic. I have heard her making up gibberish to the tunes that that peddler sings on his way.' Here Alec acted extremely noble, though it annoyed me very much, and I am sure that I am a very ungrateful girl that it did annoy me. He spoke right up and said: 'Mr. Grant, it is all my fault. It was I who thought of being children of the Irish peddler and I who suggested that we hop on his cart. I should take all the blame.'
There was not one word of truth in this, for we had often ridden with the peddler before, and the idea of playing that we were his children was my own, and without thinking I told them so.
'Let us say no more about this childish prank,' said Mr.
Sweetser. 'These children have shown real nobility, the little lad in desiring to shield Miss Ellen and Miss Ellen in not permitting herself to be shielded.' Well, I knew that we should have more of it and plenty later, and we did when Aunt Sarah came ravening--there is no other word to use for it, though I know it is not polite--down to our house. It all oppressed me very much, even though Alec whispered: 'We can make-believe we are being persecuted by the Philistines.' I know I have disgraced the family, but I shall never understand why riding with the peddler should do this. If our family is any good, it should take more than this. Uncle Ephraim and Aunt Sarah have said that I am really too old to act as I do. When I answer, 'But if I act so, doesn't it show that I am not too old, Aunt Sarah?' she says: 'Mercy, my child, as tall as any flagpole and with legs like a beanstalk, you've got to be acting like a young lady. We can't have young women of our family getting a ridiculous name.' This means that I must give up Alec. 'Why you want that child around all the time is incomprehensible to me,'
said my aunt. 'You are a good head higher than he is.' People are always measuring things in length and breadth. How can one measure one's friends by the pound? Roberta agrees with them.
She thinks I am giddy, and feels that she must be good for me. I love Roberta more than any other earthly being beside mamma, but when Roberta tries to be good for me, I am so wicked that I try to be bad for Roberta, and can very easily be so."
This episode stopped the free skylarking with Alec. As you have seen, it was explained to Ellen that since she was fourteen and nearly a young lady, she must behave as such. When I think how many lovely spontaneities have been offered on the sad and drab altar of young ladyhood, I could weep, as Ellen did. Alec's suggestion that they were being persecuted by the Philistines did not comfort her, and little Mrs. Payne said sadly:--
"Your aunt and uncle are right, Ellen, and I suppose I'll have to punish you to satisfy them, but I can't help knowing that you must have had a perfectly wonderful day, and they are few in this world.
Don't let your punishment cloud your memory."
CHAPTER VII
Look back and see if you can remember when it was you drifted from that part of the river of life that is little girlhood to that time when you recognized that you were grown up, and the eyes of men rested on you speculatively, interestedly, and your parents foreshadowed these things by an irritating watchfulness that you did not understand. The picture of Ellen that comes to me oftenest is one of her progress through the streets, her hair in an anguished neatness, from her desire to escape Miss Sarah's critical censure, her skirts longer now, and behind her perpetually screeled the three motherless babes of our not long widowed minister. He was a middle-aged man, ineffectual except for some occasional Gottbetrunkener moments. From my present vantage-point I now recognize him to be one of the brothers of St. Francis by temperament. He had a true poetic sense, and Ellen would go to his house for the purpose of washing dishes and helping about, performing her labors with the precision which she had only for the work of other people, her own room, to my anguish, being a whited sepulcher of disorder, outwardly fair to the glance of her Aunt Sarah, while dust lay thick in every unobservable spot. It was I who kept her bureau drawers in order.
She writes:--
"I just can't waste a minute indoors. I don't know why grown people have so many things to do. When I get married I am going to live in a tent and have just one cupboard where I keep everything, with doors that can't be seen through. Roberta wrings her hands, but she would wring them more if she knew that I have from earliest childhood learned to sleep quietly in my bed as it takes less time to make it when I get up. And mother doesn't care one bit more than I. I am so glad. She so frequently says: 'Ellen, this is too sweet a day to cook'; and we eat bread and milk all day, and don't even light the stove, though there have been moments when I have been glad that there is a big kitchen in which they are always cooking, up at my Aunt Sarah's. We would get things done much better if it were not for reading aloud, but so frequently mother finds things she wants to read, and then we go on, but not on and on like Mr. Sylvester and I. We began reading poetry the other day--how shall I tell it? And he read and I read, and he read and I read, until we understood everything we were reading, the very heart. We felt as if we had made the poetry--just knowing it for ourselves, and it was us. By pretending I am Mr. Sylvester's second wife sent by the Lord to take care of his motherless children, I find I can do housework very well, for me, though I feel rather guilty when I look at him, for I know that even he might be exasperated at the thought of me as his second wife. But one has to do something."
Some weeks later this occurs:--
"Now I have learned to work so beautifully and have done so well, besides taking care of the children and then baking, I feel it isn't fair not to do it at home. Oh, how hard it is to do work for one's self. I know I should think I am doing it for my mother, and when I was very little I used to pretend that I was a poor child who supported her mother; but the little silly pretenses of childhood are now impossible for me since I am so much over fifteen."
It was at this time that we began to be allowed to go to the young people's parties, because with us there was no fixed and rigid time when girls come out. They went when their legs were long enough and when they had learned to fold their hands properly in their laps and sit with decorum, which with Ellen and myself occurred somewhere toward sixteen. Ellen writes of one of these parties:--
"I am sitting waiting to go. I have a new pale-blue dress with little ruffles--little, tiny ruffles. Aunt Sarah is disgusted that mother put so much work into my dress because it isn't practical, when we need so many things, for her to waste her eyes. And it is true, but oh, how much more fun it is to work on ornaments than useful things, and parties are like ornaments. I think they are like jewels, and a great, big, enormous party, with lights and flowers, like one reads about in books, must be like having strings of pearls. All I hope is that I will act politely, and not show how pleased I am, because if I did I should shout and sing. My Aunt Sarah said: 'Ellen, please, my child, don't make me feel as if you were going to burst into flame or perhaps slide down the banisters.' And, indeed, I often look in the glass and wonder that I can look so quiet and unshining."
It was in this high mood that Ellen met Edward Graham. I know now that he must have been an honest lad, square-cornered, solid, with an awkward, bearish, honest walk, nice, kind eyes, and a short mop of wiry, glinting curls as his only beauty, which fitted his head like a close-clinging cap, stopping abruptly instead of straggling down unkemptwise, as hair is apt to do, on the back of his neck and temples. It was Ellen who noticed this and wrote about it. He must have been not over one-and-twenty, but he was instructor at the academy in chemistry and mathematics.
Well do I remember hearing this conversation at the other side of a vine-trellis at this party. In her low, pensive voice Ellen was saying: "I lived by the sea; it was in my veins. The noise of its beating is in my heart. One cannot live inland when one has been a lighthouse-keeper's daughter."
Rage and anger surged in me, for Ellen had made but three visits to the sea in all her days, and one of which occurred when she was too small to remember it. As you may gather from this, her father had not been a lighthouse-keeper. I stamped my foot; a little-girl _mad_ feeling came over me. I took my saucer of goodies and my cake firmly in my hand and went to confront her then and there. She had talked so beautifully about truth and life that very afternoon.
I couldn't do it. The little sarcastic remark that anger had invented for me died still-born. She was too lovely; something almost mystically beautiful radiated from her whole little personality. "I am so happy," she seemed to say. "Let me stay happy one moment more."
There was always about her this heart-rending quality. It was not until I could draw her by herself that I spoke to her, and then my remonstrance was gentle.
"You must tell him the truth," I insisted kindly.
And Ellen wrung her hands and said:--
"Oh, Roberta! you make my heart feel like a shriveled-up little leaf; you make me feel like a bad dream, like when you find yourself in company without your clothes."
But I repeated inexorably:--
"You _must_ tell him."
I can see her now drooping up to him and the appealing glance of her large eyes. Presently I saw him take both her hands in his, and then she came toward me, her feet dancing, a glad, naughty look in her eyes. She answered my glance of inquiry with:--
"He asked me why I told him what I did, and, since I was telling the whole truth, I answered, 'I wanted awfully to have you like me.'"
That, you see, is what I got for interfering with my friend and torturing her.
CHAPTER VIII
The next few weeks there were very few entries.
Ellen was very bad at mathematics, and her uncle, who rarely left his seclusion to interest himself in her affairs and who merely enjoyed her personality, thought it would be a fine plan if this responsible young man should give his Ellen lessons. Mr. Grant was advanced in his theories concerning the female brain, which, he said, lost its vagueness and inexactnesses through a mathematical training. Ellen merely makes a note of this.
There are very few entries in her journal at this time, for she was playing with the great forces of life. God help us all! We didn't know passion when it came to us, nor how should we? It was the warp on which were woven all our generous impulses, all our high idealisms, making in all the shimmering garments in which we clothed our fragile, newborn spirits.
Ellen walked in a magic circle of her own ignorance, never dreaming of love or of being in love. So absorbed was she that it seemed like some one walking down a road that leads directly into a swift-flowing river, and not knowing that the river was there until one had walked directly into it. So close is the so-called silly moment of girlhood to the moment of full development, that when the change comes it sometimes takes only overnight. It was only a few pages, after all, that separated Ellen, who managed to do the minister's dishes by pretending that she was his second wife, from the Ellen who wrote:--
"I don't know how to begin what I am going to say. I thought everybody in the world must know what had happened to me. I thought my face must shine with it. I thought I must look like some one very different from myself,--like a woman, perhaps. I came home through Lincoln Field and squeezed myself through a hole in the fence so no one could see me. I came up the back way to my room and locked the door. My heart beat both ways at once when I looked in the glass, but I looked just the same as before I went out--as before he kissed me. I went downstairs and my hand seemed too heavy to open the door and go in where I heard their voices. I was afraid to go because I felt: 'They will know, they will know!' Mr. Sylvester and mamma and Aunt Sarah were there. 'Where have you been?' said mamma. And I could not answer. I felt I had been gone so long and so far. I could hear the blood beating in my ears, and when my aunt said: 'I wish, Ellen, you would stand up straighter,' I could hardly lift my head."
Next day there is an entry: "I didn't know we were engaged until he told me, 'Why, of course, we are.'"
Thus simply does youth plight its troth. They had been together and he had kissed her, and so, of course, they were engaged. Of course, they were ready to fight the long battle of life side by side, and she who had given so much in her kiss had walked out past the doors of girlhood; through that one light touch she felt that her whole life must be then surrendered to the boy who had had the magic word for her. They decided to tell no one on account of their youth.
No sooner did this honest lad have my rainbow Ellen in his hands than he started in trying to make some one else of her. I read her journal that follows with a certain heartache because I was not blameless in this matter. I, too, wanted to take this gay and shimmering child and turn her into something else; trim her generosities and check her impulses.
Another thing that makes me rage is the fact that my knowledge of the lives of men teaches me that, had Ellen had one little affectation in which to clothe herself, her young lover would have been on his knees before her instead of being the pedantic young master. Ellen's journal at this time varies from a thing glittering with life, from being drunk with the heady wine of being beloved for the first time, to a book of copy-book maxims, beginning with: "Edward says I must read--or do--or act--or mustn't."
Poor young man! He wrote her decalogues by the dozen, and yet the tragedy of him is that he tasted her special quality and loved her while trying to kill it. The youth of Ellen and her high joy of living carried him along in spite of himself, though he always made Ellen pay for his happiness by lectures on the seriousness of life.
It was here that Alec began to perceive the place he had in her life.
They had a game they played that they called "Two Years Ago," in which they outdid their own childish pranks. Ellen remarks ingenuously:--
"I suppose that I ought to tell Edward how Alec and I rest ourselves from growing up, but there is no place in him to tell this to. I tried it with Roberta, and she just understood what it was about, but doesn't see why I want to do it; and I don't know myself exactly, except that I just have to."
Then from one day to another Alec was sent West to an uncle and two weeks later, as had been planned, Edward left. He was to go away for a year and a half, and then come back and formally ask for Ellen's hand. It shocked Ellen terribly that she missed Alec most.
Through all the year and a half that followed, Ellen never told me anything of what was in her mind, nor did she tell her mother, and here is the characteristic of their young girlhood that people seem to forget--this nameless reticence. So, alone, she went through the crucial thing that falling out of love always is. Another girl in her situation might have deceived herself, the idea of a grown-up lover was such a pleasant one to a girl of Ellen's age. Ellen was unaware of the disillusion she was preparing for herself. She writes, appalled:--
"I don't know what has happened to me, I can only describe it by saying I have waked up. I know now that I am not in love with Edward and I just understood this from one day to another. He has not done anything at all. He writes me just the way he always has. He hasn't changed, so I suppose I am fickle and bad, and that I can't trust myself, for if this wasn't real, I don't know what can be real, and yet I feel as though I had never loved him at all. I sometimes wonder if I should have become engaged to some other person if it had happened that some other person had kissed me."
Write him of her change of heart she could not, for as time went on apparently the memory of her became dearer to the boy. Good and slow and pedantic, he yet realized what a lovely thing life had put into his hands, and he longed to keep it, and he communicated this ever-growing longing to Ellen. She so wanted to keep faith with herself and to live up to all the things about "one love and only one love" that books from all time have taught young girls they ought to feel. She felt a great need of talking about it with some one and could not bring herself to do it.