Neighbours on the Green; My Faithful Johnny

CHAPTER VII

We left town directly after this for the autumn holidays. The holidays had not very much meaning now that all the boys had left school, and we might have gone away when we pleased. But the two youngest girls were still in the remorseless hands of Fräulein Stimme, and the habit of emancipation in the regular holiday season had clung to me. I tried very hard to get Ellen to go with us, for at least a day or two, but she resisted with a kind of passion. Her mother, I am sure, would have been glad had she gone; but Ellen would not. There was in her face a secret protestation, of which she was perhaps not even herself aware, that if her duty bound life itself from all expansion, it must also bind her in every day of her life. She would not accept the small alleviation, having, with her eyes open and with a full sense of what she was about, resigned everything else. She would have been more perfect, and her sacrifice more sweet, had she taken sweetly the little consolations of every day; but nobody is perfect, and Ellen would not come. I had gone to Pleasant Place to ask her, and the scene was a curious one. The mother and daughter both came to the parlour to receive me, and I saw them together for the first time. It was about a fortnight after John went away. Ellen had not been ill, though I had feared she would; but she was pale, with dark lines under her eyes, and a worn and nervous look. She was bearing her burden very bravely, but it was all the harder upon her that she was evidently determined not to complain. When I told my errand, Mrs. Harwood replied eagerly. ‘You must go, Ellen. Oh, yes! I can do; I can do very well. It will only be for a week, and it will do you so much good; you must go.’ Ellen took scarcely any notice of this address. She thanked me with her usual smile. ‘It is very, very good of you—you are always good—but it is impossible.’ ‘Why impossible, why impossible?’ cried her mother. ‘When I tell you I can do very well—I can manage. Your father will not mind, when it is to do you good.’ I saw that Ellen required a moment’s interval of preparation before she looked round.

‘Dear mother,’ she said, ‘we have not any make-believes between us, have we? How is it possible that I can go? Every moment is mapped out. No, no; I cannot do it. Thank you all the same. My mother wants to give me a pleasure, but it cannot be. Go away for a week! I have never done that in all my life.’

‘But you think she can, you think she ought,’ I said, turning to her mother. The poor woman looked at her child with a piteous look. I think it dawned upon her, then and there, for the first time, that perhaps she had made a mistake about Ellen. It had not occurred to her that there had been any selfishness in her tearful sense of the impossibility of parting with her daughter. All at once, in a moment, with a sudden gleam of that enlightenment which so often comes too late, she saw it. She saw it, and it went through her like an arrow. She turned to me with another piteous glance. What have I done? what have I done? her looks seemed to say.

‘Two or three days,’ the poor woman said, with a melancholy attempt at playfulness. ‘Nothing can happen to us in that time. Her father is ill,’ she said, turning to me as if I knew nothing, ‘and we are always anxious, he thinks it will be too much for me by myself. But what does it matter for a few days? If I am overdone, I can rest when she comes back.’

Was it possible she could suppose that this was all I knew? I was afraid to catch Ellen’s eye. I did not know what might come after such a speech. She might break forth with some sudden revelation of all that I felt sure must be in her heart. I closed my eyes instinctively, sick with terror. Next moment I heard Ellen’s clear, agreeable voice.

‘I don’t want you to be overdone, mother. What is the use of all that is past and gone if I am to take holidays and run away when I like for two or three days? No, no; my place is here, and here I must stay. I don’t want you to be overdone.’

And looking at her, I saw that she smiled. But her mother’s face was full of trouble. She looked from Ellen to me, and from me to Ellen. For everything there is a beginning. Did she only then for the first time perceive what had been done?

However, after this there was nothing more to say. We did not see Ellen again till the days were short and the brilliant weather over. She changed very much during that winter. Her youth, which had bloomed on so long unaltered, seemed to leave her in a day. When we came back, from looking twenty she suddenly looked thirty-five. The bloom went from her cheeks. She was as trim as ever, and as lightfooted, going out alert and bright every morning to her lessons; but her pretty little figure had shrunk, and her very step on the pavement sounded different. Life and all its hopes and anticipations seemed to have ebbed away from her. I don’t doubt that many of her neighbours had been going on in their dull routine of life without knowing even such hopes or prospects as hers, all this time by Ellen’s side, fulfilling their round of duty without any diversions. Oh, the mystery of these myriads of humble lives, which are never enlivened even by a romance manqué, a story that might have been; that steal away from dull youth to dull age, never knowing anything but the day’s work, never coming to anything! But Ellen had known a something different, a life that was her own; and now she had lost it. The effect was great: how could it be otherwise? She lost herself altogether for a little while, and when she came to again, as all worthy souls must come, she was another Ellen; older than her age as the other had been younger, and prepared for everything. No longer trying to evade suffering; rather desirous, if that might be, to forestall it, to discount it—if I may use the word—before it was due, and know the worst. She never told me this in words, but I felt that it was so. It is not only in a shipwreck that the unfortunate on the verge of death plunge in to get it over a few hours, a few minutes, sooner. In life there are many shipwrecks which we would forestall, if we could, in the same way, by a plunge—by a voluntary putting on of the decisive moment. Some, I suppose, will always put it off by every expedient that despair can suggest; but there are also those who can bear anything but to wait, until slowly, surely, the catastrophe comes. Ellen wanted to make the plunge, to get it over, partly for John’s sake, whose infidelity she began to calculate upon—to (she believed) wish for. ‘He will never be able to live without a home to go to, without a woman to speak to, now,’ she said once, in a moment of incaution—for she was very guarded, very reticent, about all this part of her mind, and rarely betrayed herself. It is curious how little faith women in general, even the most tender, have in a man’s constancy. Either it is because of an inherent want of trust in their own power to secure affection, which might be called humility; or else it is quite the reverse—a pride of sex too subtle to show, in any conscious way—overweening confidence in the power over a man of any other woman who happens to be near him, and want of confidence in any power on his part to resist these fascinations. Ellen had made up her mind that her lover when he was absent from her would be, as she would have said, ‘like all the rest.’ Perhaps, in a kind of wild generosity, she wished it, feeling that she herself never might be free to make him happy; but, anyhow, she was persuaded that this was how it would be. She looked out for signs of it in his very first letter. She wanted to have it over—to cut off remorselessly out of her altered being all the agitations of hope.

But I need not say that John’s letters were everything a lover’s, or rather a husband’s letters should be. They were more like a husband’s letters, with very few protestations in them, but a gentle continued reference to her, and to their past life together, which was more touching than any rhapsodies. She brought them to me often, folding down, with a blush which made her look like the blooming Ellen of old, some corner of especial tenderness, something that was too sacred for a stranger’s eye, but always putting them back in her pocket with a word which sounded almost like a grudge, as who should say, ‘For this once all is well, but next time you shall see.’ Thus she held on to her happiness as by a strained thread, expecting every moment when it would snap, and defying it to do so, yet throbbing all the time with a passion of anxiety, as day after day it held out, proving her foreboding vain. That winter, though I constantly saw her, my mind was taken up by other things than Ellen. It was then that the children finally prevailed upon me to leave the Road. A row of cheap advertising shops had sprung up facing us where had been the great garden I have so often mentioned, and the noise and flaring lights were more than I could put up with, after all my resistance to their wishes. So that at last, to my great regret, but the exultation of the young ones, it was decided that we must go away.

The removal, and the bustle there was, the change of furniture—for our old things would not do for the new house, and Chatty, Heaven save us! had grown artistic, and even the little ones and Fräulein Stimme knew a great deal better than I did—occupied my mind and my time; and it took a still longer time to settle down than it did to tear up our old roots. So that there was a long interval during which we saw little of Ellen; and though we never forgot her, or ceased to take an interest in everything that concerned her, the distance of itself threw us apart. Now and then she paid us a visit, always with John’s letter in her pocket, but her time was so limited that she never could stay long. And sometimes I, and sometimes Chatty, made a pilgrimage to the old district to see her. But we never could have an uninterrupted long talk in Pleasant Place. Either Ellen was called away, or Mrs. Harwood would come in and sit down with her work, always anxiously watching her daughter. This separation from the only people to whom she could talk of her own private and intimate concerns was a further narrowing and limitation of poor Ellen’s life. But what could I do? I could not vex my children for her sake. She told us that she went and looked at the old house almost every day, and at the square window in which I used to sit and see John pass. John passed no longer, nor was I there to see. But Ellen remained bound in the same spot, seeing everything desert her—love, and friendship, and sympathy, and all her youth and her hope. Can you not fancy with what thoughts this poor girl (though she was a girl no longer) would pause, as she passed, to look at the abandoned place so woven in with the brightest episode of her life, feeling herself stranded there, impotent, unable to make a step—her breast still heaving with all the vigour of existence, yet her life bound down in the narrowest contracted circle? Her mother, who had got to watch her narrowly, told me afterwards that she always knew when Ellen had passed No. 16; and indeed I myself was rather glad to hear that at length No. 16 had shared the general fate, that my window existed no longer, and that a great shop with plate-glass windows was bulging out where our house had been. Better when a place is desecrated that it should be desecrated wholly, and leave no vestige of its old self at all.

Thus more than a year glided away, spring and winter, summer and autumn, and then winter again. Chatty came in one November morning, when London was half invisible, wrapped in mist and fog, with a very grave face, to tell me that she had met Ellen, and Ellen had told her there was bad news from John. ‘I can’t understand her,’ Chatty said. ‘I couldn’t make out what it was; that business had been bad, and things had gone wrong; and then something with a sort of laugh that he had got other thoughts in his mind at last, as she knew all along he would, and that she was glad. What could she mean?’ I did not know what she could mean, but I resolved to go and see Ellen to ascertain what the change was. It is easier however to say than to do when one is full of one’s own affairs, and so it happened that for a full week, though intending to go every day, I never did so. It was partly my fault. The family affairs were many, and the family interests engrossing. It was not that I cared for Ellen less, but my own claimed me on every hand. When one afternoon, about a fortnight after, I was told that Miss Harwood was in the drawing-room and wished to speak to me, my heart upbraided me with my neglect. I hurried to her and led her away from that public place where everybody came and went, to my own little sitting-room, where we might be alone. Ellen was very pale; her eyes looked very dry and bright, not dewy and soft as they used to be. There was a feverish look of unrest and excitement about her. ‘There is something wrong,’ I cried. ‘What is it? Chatty told me—something about John.’

‘I don’t know that it is anything wrong,’ she said. The smile that had frightened Chatty came over her face—a smile that made one unhappy, the lip drawn tightly over the teeth in the most ghastly mockery of amusement. ‘No; I don’t know that it is anything wrong. You know I always expected—always from the moment he went away—that between him and me things would soon be at an end. Oh, yes, I expected it, and I did not wish it otherwise; for what good is it to me that a man should be engaged to me, and waste his life for me, when I never could do anything for him?’

Here she made a little breathless pause, and laughed. ‘Oh, don’t, Ellen, don’t!’ I cried. I could not bear the laugh; the smile was bad enough.

‘Why not?’ she said with a little defiance; ‘would you have me cry? I expected it long ago. The wonder is that it should have been so long coming. That is,’ she cried suddenly after a pause, ‘that is if this is really what it means. I took it for granted at first; but I cannot be certain. I cannot be certain! Read it, you who know him, and tell me, tell me! Oh, I can bear it quite well. I should be rather glad if this is what it means.’

She thrust a letter into my hand, and going away with a rapid step to the window, stood there with her back to me, looking out. I saw her standing against the light, playing restlessly with the tassel of the blind. In her desire to seem composed, or else in the mere excitement which boiled in her veins, she began to hum a tune. I don’t think she knew herself what it was.

The letter which she professed to have taken so easily was worn with much reading, and it had been carried about, folded and refolded a hundred times. There was no sign of indifference in all that—and this is what it said:—

‘I got your last letter, dear Ellen, on Tuesday. I think you must have written in low spirits. Perhaps you had a feeling, such as we used to talk about, of what was happening here. As for me, nobody could be in lower spirits than this leaves me. I have lost heart altogether. Everything has gone wrong; the business is at an end: I shut up the office to-day. If it is in any way my fault, God forgive me! But the conflict in my heart has been so great that I sometimes fear it must be my fault. I had been low enough before, thinking and thinking how the end was to come between you and me. Everything has gone wrong inside and out. I had such confidence, and now it is all going. What I had most faith in has deceived me. I thought I never was the man to change or to fail, and that I could have trusted myself in any circumstances; but it does not seem so. And why should I keep you hanging on when all’s wrong with me? I always thought I could redeem it; but it hasn’t proved so. You must just give me up, Ellen, as a bad job. Sometimes I have thought you wished it. Where I am to drift to, I can’t tell; but there’s no prospect of drifting back, or, what I hoped for, sailing back in prosperity to you. You have seen it coming, I can see by your letters, and I think, perhaps, though it seems strange to say so, that you won’t mind. I shall not stay here; but I have not made up my mind where to go. Forget a poor fellow that was never worthy to be yours.—John Ridgway.’

My hands dropped with the letter in them. The rustle it made was the only sign she could have had that I had read it, or else instinct or inward vision. That instant she turned upon me from the window with a cry of wild suspense: ‘Well?’

‘I am confounded. I don’t know what to think. Ellen, it looks more like guilt to the office than falsehood to you.’

‘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.