Ceremony of the Innocent (23 page)

Jeremy glanced at May, who was sunken in a gray and exhausted reverie, her plate almost untouched. “Certainly,” he said. “In a few minutes.” He put his hand over Ellen’s and a charge of something powerful and beautiful rushed between them, an empathy which suddenly made them one.

He courteously rose and bowed when the ladies indicated that they wished to retire. He hoped, he said, that they would be pleased with the quarters which had been assigned to them. Accompanied by Cuthbert, they left the room, but at the last Ellen’s blue and luminous eyes smiled at him with ardent love and trust Mrs. Eccles was exceedingly pleased with her small and luxurious suite. The one for May and Ellen looked out upon the Avenue, and was larger and even more sumptuous. May was now completely stunned. A maid came in to turn down the silk damask bedspreads, to unfold the puffed quilts, and to draw the golden satin draperies. May watched her in a humble and apathetic silence, though once she made an ashamed and protesting gesture when the maid swiftly unpacked their two small bags and hung the dreary and wilted clothing in a vast mahogany wardrobe all carvings and gilt handles and embellishments. A steam radiator hissed warmly; the sounds of traffic below reached the room in a subdued blur of sound.

“Isn’t it all too wonderful, too unbelievable?” asked Ellen in a soft ecstatic voice. She gazed about her with innocent and almost childish glee.

“It’s not for us,” said May. There were heavy gray lines of weariness and confusion and denial and pain about her eyes.

But Ellen said, with that deep gentleness of hers, “I’ll get your pill, Auntie, and a glass of water—from this beautiful crystal bottle here on the table—and you will sleep well, and cozy, too.”

May began to cry. “I want to go home,” she said, sobbing drily. “I want us to go home. Please come home with me, Ellen, please.” She reached out and took the girl by her round forearm and raised a desperate and pleading face to her. All the feeble dauntlessness she had occasionally felt some years ago had gone. All the stubborn tenacity and determination of her kind had dwindled with her increasing pain and incapacity. But she still had the pride of her class, the obdurate pride of her “place,” which was at once a defense and a defiance.

Ellen said in a quiet contented voice, “I am home, Aunt May, home at last.”

She began to undress, carefully stroking out the long gray flannel skirt, the cheap imitation-leather belt with its brass buckle, and the cotton blouse, now stained with soot. She hung them up, and sniffed the cedar-scented interior of the wardrobe with pleasure. May watched her in a prolonged silence, and between those intent glances she also gazed about the room. She could not bear the splendor.

Then she said, “Ellen, there’s something else. Have you ever thought what you are doing to Mr. Jeremy, you marrying him?”

Ellen looked at her aunt over her shoulder, in astonishment.

“I don’t know what you mean, Auntie.”

“Ellen, dear, think again, remember, you are only a poor servant girl, born to be a servant, by God’s will. And he’s a gentleman, and rich. You don’t know anything, Ellen. You’re as ignorant as I am. You’re out of place here, and in his life even more, my poor little girl. He has important and wealthy friends; think what they will say about him and how they’ll laugh at him, and he’s a very proud man, you can see that. They’ll make him ashamed, they’ll make him realize—Ellen, if you—if you—like him, you won’t marry him, for his sake. You will rise above your own selfishness. Don’t make a man like him miserable, Ellen, and you’ll make him miserable and ashamed if you marry him. You can’t do this thing to him, Ellen, you just can’t, not if you care a fig about him. It isn’t fair.”

This was an aspect Ellen had never considered. She stared blankly at her aunt and her face slowly paled and became rigid. May leaned forward eagerly from where she sat on the voluptuous bed, for she saw Ellen’s expression and her hopes rose.

“He’ll go far, Ellen, as Mrs. Eccles has told us over and over. Maybe even to Washington. Or at least Governor. That is, if you don’t marry him. But people’ll think, big people, that if he could bring himself to marry a little servant, a nobody, then he isn’t the man for them, and they’ll turn away from him and find a man with better sense. Don’t you see, Ellen? He’s the kind that wants to do great things, to amount to something. And you’ll be standing in his way, dear, and he’ll come to hate you, and himself, too. How could you possibly be his hostess? Even if he gets a tutor for you? You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

Ellen sat down on her own bed and dropped her head on her chest. She said, “Aunt May, you truly think I could hurt him, by marrying him?”

“Oh, yes, dear! I’ve talked to Mrs. Eccles, she is a wise woman in this world. And she said, ‘Poor Ellen, she will find out when it is too late.’ I know you don’t like her, but she knows this world, and she is sorry for you and Mr. Jeremy.”

Sudden waves of desolation and anguish rushed over Ellen. Compared with this agony, the misery of her short life was as nothing, not even the past four years. How could she live without Jeremy, how could she go away and never see him again? Her throat became thick and breathless, and she gasped. But—how could she ruin his life by marrying him, by making him a pariah among his powerful friends? Love had taught her his strength, his ambition, his force-fulness. She had recognized these things instinctively. He would never be satisfied to be obscure, a mere pedestrian lawyer, not even if he was rich. Was she a barrier to his nobler and more distinguished life? Would her love for him eventually be nothing, and only a smothering of his aspirations? Would he be despised? Yes, it was very possible.

But I can’t live without him, she thought, in her suffering. Then another thought came: But how dare I stand in his way? What am I, compared with him, Jeremy, my darling? I am nothing. He is all there is.

May was watching her acutely. She saw Ellen despairingly run her hands through her hair with such violence that it fell about her in rippling folds and heavy lengths. May did not consider herself cruel, and a destroyer. She loved her niece; she sincerely believed that she could save Ellen from wretchedness, from the torment of “rising out of her station in life.” Had she not taken Mary away from the man who had wanted to marry her, that John Widdimer? Had she not truly saved Mary from such a disaster? It was sad that Mary had died of sorrow and childbirth, and that Mr. Widdimer had been killed by a horse. But better that than a lifetime of grief and dissension and ultimate unhappiness and sorrow. In the end both of them had attained peace, even if it was in the grave. May, like many of her kind, believed that as the grave was always the fate of man it was better than laboring in regret and fevered affliction. Her entire life had been centered on hymns and aphorisms about death and cemeteries. Though no longer religious, she was convinced that the grave was superior to existence. Whenever she had had leisure she had haunted graveyards, sighing sentimentally, and touching stones with a wistful hand. Her girlhood had been full of paeans to death, and one of the songs she remembered most lovingly had proclaimed: “Cradle’s empty, Baby’s gone!”

Had Ellen died when Mary had given her birth May would have had a singular consolation, a sentimentality to remember, to cherish, with deep luxurious sighings and uplifted tearful eyes and hushed confidences to acquaintances. But Ellen had not consented to die with her mother. Unknown to her simple self, May had unconsciously resented this robust defiance, this determination to survive. Now, unconsciously again, she even more resented Ellen’s prospect for happiness. In some way it was not “proper.” Ellen had robbed her aunt of a dismal reason to live, herself, with tender memories. She had robbed her of emotional riches. Ellen had no way of understanding the complexity of her aunt’s motivations. She sat, drooping, on her bed, a tragic figure of devastation.

May felt victorious and uplifted, and her sadness was almost sexually exciting. Misfortune, and its wailings and panoply, was the supreme dignity of the poor.

“Let’s go home tomorrow,” she pleaded. “Back to Wheatfield, on the train, back to Mrs. Eccles and her lovely house. We were so happy there.”

“Happy?” murmured Ellen. “I wasn’t even alive.”

She contemplated her whole dolorous life, her famished longing for love, for protection, for contentment, for a little beauty, a little surcease, a little quiet, a little privacy. She had never understood the resignation of such as her aunt, the self-righteous acceptance of wretchedness and poverty. She did not know that there was a perverse satisfaction in this, a sensual gratification, a sense of importance in being selected for submission to ordained fate. Once she had dimly guessed this, and it had outraged her. Jeremy had recognized in her an iron of the soul, a refusal to be cowed by circumstance, though in her youth she had not recognized this herself. She only knew that her very spirit had stiffened at May’s servile platitudes, and rebellion had made her smart. But that very rebellion had filled her with remorse and penitence, for she had hurt May. The girl’s thoughts became black and whirling and chaotic, suffused with her growing anguish.

“I haven’t long to live, Ellen,” said May piteously. “For your sake and mine—let’s go back where we belong. We are poor and simple people; it never does to try to get out of our place.”

Ellen was saying over and over in herself, in a stricken convulsion: No, I can’t hurt him. Jeremy, Jeremy. He took pity on me and tried to help me. How can I repay him with ruin? Jeremy, Jeremy.

She stood up, trembling and distraught. Her hair fell about her white face and quivering cheeks and lips. But she said quietly enough, “Did you take your pill, Auntie?”

May, knowing her victory, nodded almost with cheerfulness and placation. “Yes, dear. And now let’s go to bed and go home tomorrow. It’s all settled, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Ellen, and helped her aunt undress. For a single moment, watching her niece, May experienced a pang. The girl looked like death itself. “Yes,” said Ellen again. “It’s all settled.”

At peace at last, and sighing deeply, May fell instantly asleep, and Ellen stood by her bed, watching the lines of pain recede on her aunt’s face. What was her own life worth compared with her aunt’s tranquillity and Jeremy’s triumphs? Nothing. Exhaustion suddenly swept over her, exhaustion of the spirit and the mind, and the awful hollowness of prostration struck her middle and made her dizzy and weak. She was forced to collapse beside her aunt’s bed; she leaned her head against the mattress, powerless to move for a long time.

The baroque room was filled with bowls of late roses and chrysanthemums and ferns, and the scent made Ellen retch as she half lay beside May’s bed. The rumor of traffic reached her; now it sounded like a diabolical chorus, mocking her. The satin draperies at the windows swayed a little; they had the shapes and distortions of agony. The very furniture taunted the girl creaking over and over, “You do not belong here. You are an intruder—in his life. Run away!”

May began to snore under the influence of the narcotic. Ellen pushed herself to her feet. She mechanically rolled up her hair. She put on her flannel skirt and blouse, her hands feeling thick and clumsy. Then, without a sound, she left the room and climbed up the five flights of stairs to Jeremy’s suite, her face set and passionless and full of resolution, for all the bending of her knees under her, and for all the icy sweating of her body. It had not occurred to her to take the elevator. There was a jeering in her mind, “Beautiful daughter of Toscar!” She uttered a faint sound of self-contempt.

C H A P T E R   11

JEREMY PORTER WAS SITTING in his small library, in his silk night-shirt and a magnificent Chinese robe of black and gold, and sipping a nightcap, when he heard the knocking on the door. He glanced at the ormolu clock over the mantel and saw it was after eleven, and he wondered who was there. Cuthbert had left an hour ago. Rising and stretching, but wary, Jeremy went to the door and cautiously opened it on its chain. Then he exclaimed, “Ellen!”

He removed the chain and flung the door open and reached for the girl and took her cold hands and pulled her into the room, disbelieving and excited almost unbearably. Then when she was in the room he saw her deathly pallor, her wide eyes, her roughly tumbled hair, and he felt the moisture on her palms and saw the trembling of her colorless lips.

“What is it, love?” he asked, and drew her against him. She did not resist. She even lay against his chest like one who had been terribly wounded and must rest a little. He smoothed her hair and held her and knew that she was nearly fainting. She was heavy in his arms and her head had dropped and he could not see her face now. But his arm, about her very slender waist, could feel its vibrations, strong and uncontrollable, as she fought down her inner weeping. He became alarmed. He took her to a chair and forced her down in it, then he knelt beside her and again took her hands and held them tightly, warming them with his own. “What is it, my darling?” he demanded, and his voice aroused her from her crouch in the chair, the feeble turning aside of her head.

She looked at him and he saw the naked anguish in her eyes. Her white face seemed polished and taut as marble, and it had the calm of despair and renunciation.

She spoke with that calm, which was also lifeless as well as resolute. “I am going away tomorrow, Jeremy, back to Wheatfield, with my aunt.”

He frowned, and the frown was formidable. “So?” he said. “May I ask why?”

“Because I can’t marry you, Jeremy.”

He stood up and lit a cigarette very slowly and carefully. She watched him, and could feel a wild tearing and splintering in herself. He was a stranger to her now, someone she had never known. She only knew that he was coldly and blackly enraged, and she shivered. Everything in the room became acute to her, and threatening, the walls of books, the little fire, the lamps, the thick carpets. The paneling gleamed at her with hostility. The ormolu clock struck and it seemed to her that it was tinkling derision.

Then she saw that his dark eyes were fixed on her, no longer with love or desire and understanding. They were the eyes of an enemy, a prosecutor. Yet he spoke quietly enough. “You haven’t told me why.”