Ceremony of the Innocent (31 page)

Ellen was amazed. “I don’t understand what you mean, Auntie. There’s nothing we can ‘do.’” Was her aunt hinting what Kitty had hinted? “I’m a married woman; I am Jeremy’s wife. This is our child, and I am so pleased that he is happy over it.”

May cried, “Children are a curse! It is terrible to have them!”

As Ellen was always assailed by fear of what his child would do to her husband, she turned pale. But she said sturdily enough, “Not everybody feels that way. Jeremy doesn’t.” She thought to herself, with compassion, that her poor aunt had never been able to please her own husband that way, and she tried to take May’s hand again but was repulsed.

“What will you do with that—that child?” said May, thinking of her sister. “Where will you go?”

Ellen’s beautiful face became blank. “Why, this is my home, Aunt May. I won’t go anywhere else. Jeremy and the doctor have already engaged my nurses—”

But May interrupted her wildly. “He’ll throw you out when he knows!”

Ellen’s confusion grew. “But he’s known from the beginning, Auntie. Why should Jeremy throw his wife and child ‘out’?”

“Men are all alike! It’s all love until they get a girl in trouble. Then it’s out with them!”

Again Ellen was amazed. “But, Auntie, I am not ‘in trouble.’ I am a married woman. And Jeremy is my husband, and this is my home.”

May was sick and trembling. She struggled to focus her eyes on her niece, but overshadowing that brilliant face was the face of the beloved sister, Mary. “We can’t stay here any longer.” She paused, then saw Ellen clearly. She began to stutter. “We should never have left Wheatfield and Mrs. Eccles. I warned you, Ellen.”

Now the iron that lay so far beneath Ellen’s gentleness and innocence momentarily emerged. Her voice was still kind and patient, but she said, “I think you are unwell, Auntie. I’ll call Miss Ember,” and she stood up. May grasped her hand, and the thin twisted fingers were feverish.

“You never listened to me, Ellen! You were always willful and determined on your own way, and look what has happened to you, as I knew it would. Ruin.” She cried again for her bare little room in Mrs. Eccles’ house, where she believed she had been safe, and at peace. Nothing was “right” in her present world; all was chaos and uncertainty and suspicion of fate, and the conviction of catastrophe.

Ellen said with great quietness, “I am not in ruin, Auntie. I am the happiest woman in the world. I adore Jeremy; he is, as it says in
Romeo and Juliet
, ‘Lord, lover and friend.’ That is how I feel about him. I know he loves me, too. Why else did he marry me? No one forced him to do that. He came for me in Wheatfield, and took me away from misery and hopelessness and gave me—bliss. I never told you all that I felt in Mrs. Eccles’ house. The misery and despair. The blackness of my existence. I’ve tried to tell you, but you refused to understand. If for nothing else I would love Jeremy, that he took me away from there, and married me.”

But May was hardly listening. “You can say all that about a lady who was so good to us? Gave us shelter when no one else wanted us?”

Then Ellen spoke her first harsh words of anyone: “She is a hateful woman, Mrs. Eccles, as bad in her way as is Mrs. Porter!”

She was immediately stricken by guilt and felt quite ill. She turned towards the door but again May grasped her. “Mrs. Porter! What can she possibly think of this—this—She’ll never speak to you again, Ellen, and it is all you deserve. The shame—”

Ellen said through lips cold and stiff, “She already knows. I wrote her a month ago.”

“And what did she say in return?” May leaned eagerly towards her niece.

“You know very well she wasn’t—pleased—by our marriage, Aunt May. But she answered, not me, but Jeremy. He never showed me the letter, but he did say that she hoped for a grandson.”

“He never showed you the letter! I wonder what she really said!”

“It doesn’t matter in the least to me, Auntie. Jeremy and I have each other. And there will be—our family.”

Now she went to the door, but before she could open it May exclaimed, “Have you thought of the pain, the agony, every woman has? And women often die when they have children!”

“I don’t intend to die, Auntie.” Ellen was moved, believing her aunt was concerned for her. “The doctor says I am very healthy and should have no trouble at all. Pain? I’ve heard of it, but nothing is too painful if it pleases Jeremy. Now, I must really go. We are having a few guests. Do try to rest, dear Aunt May. I know this must be a shock to you, and you’ve always been afraid for me.”

She opened the door. Miss Ember had already retreated to a discreet place in the hall. Ellen said to her, “I think my aunt, Mrs. Watson, needs you, Miss Ember. Maybe an extra one of those pills which quiet her sometimes. And a very light supper, if you please.”

Without waiting for the woman to reply—she had spoken very firmly, which was also new for her—she went down the stairs in the bright spring evening. Her knees felt somewhat weak. She had been more disturbed by her aunt’s inexplicable remarks than she had known. Cuthbert was entering the lower hall from the library. “Mr. Porter, Mr. Francis Porter, is calling, madam.”

Ellen felt a new vehemence and impatience. She had wanted to consult Cuthbert about the dinner—one of the few she would be giving until after her confinement—and she was suddenly very tired and wished to lie down. She hesitated on the stairs. She would have run up again if she had not known that Francis must have heard Cuthbert.

“Very well,” she said with an unaccustomed weariness in her young and lovely voice. “Please bring us sherry and biscuits, Cuthbert.”

Francis had not visited her for a month and she had hoped that he would not again, and when she had known that hope she had been ashamed and again guilty. She remembered, too, that Jeremy had defeated Francis in three more cases. She went into the library smiling, but the smile was less radiant than usual.

He was standing near the library fire, and he turned when she entered, and she held out her hand and greeted him as shyly as always.

“I have been away, dear Ellen,” he said, certain she had missed him. “That is why I haven’t called in so long.” He still spoke to her with that kind condescension of his, but this time she heard it and resented it.

“Please sit down, Mr. Francis,” she said. “It is getting chilly after the nice warm day, isn’t it?”

He heard the unusual note in her voice, and frowned slightly as he sat down. It was unlike Ellen to be “presumptuous,” and suddenly unaware of her lowly class. He waited until she had seated herself, then sat down near her.

“Did you miss me at all, Ellen?” he asked.

Ellen said, “Miss you?” and she spoke with a kind of wonder But immediately she thought herself discourteous and once more was guilty. “I—I did think—I have been very busy, Mr. Francis So many things. Time passes so fast, doesn’t it?”

“Especially when you’re happy?” His voice was pouncing.

“Yes,” said Ellen. Something was wrong but she did not know what. She only knew that she wished he would leave so that she could lie down. She had still not told Jeremy of these visits, and had hoped that she need never tell him, if Francis remained away.

She watched Cuthbert pour the sherry from its gold-and-crystal decanter, and was conscious that her head had begun to ache. “I am very happy. And you, Mr. Francis? How have you been?”

He had always thought Ellen considerably stupid. Was it possible that she was unaware of his three defeats at the hands of that brute of a husband of hers? But naturally, his cousin knew that she understood very little of the world in her blandness and ignorance. She is a woman, he thought, but she has never matured. Is that part of her charm? Why did he sicken for her when he was away from her—this beautiful young servant?

“I have been very well, Ellen,” he said with formality. “My aunt, Mrs. Eccles, sends her regards.”

“That is very kind of her,” said Ellen. “Please give her mine also.”

Francis was taken aback. Ellen was being impertinent again, and he was deeply annoyed.

“I also saw your mother-in-law, and Mr. Porter, when I had occasion to visit Preston two weeks ago.”

Ellen was silent. She sipped her sherry and looked over the rim of her glass at him. He thought she was pretending to be inscrutable. What airs she had learned! Then Ellen was studying him and she was thinking: Did Jeremy’s parents tell him of our child?

She said, “How are Jeremy’s parents?”

“Well enough,” he said in a tone of kind severity. “They are still hurt by Jeremy’s—disaffection.” He added, “Disaffection? You know what that means, Ellen?”

Ellen could not help smiling. “My tutors are very good, Mr. Francis. And I have always read very much from the time I was a young child. Yes, I know what disaffection means. It’s not Jeremy’s fault. He has—approached—them several times. If they choose to keep their distance that is their own affair, isn’t it?”

She waited for his next remark. Then she saw that he had not been told, and she was mortified and distressed. Or was it that gentlemen did not refer to these things to ladies?

“He is their only son, their only child, and naturally—”

It was Ellen’s headache which made her answer with a little sharpness, “Naturally what, Mr. Francis?”

“You must know that they hoped that he would marry the young lady in Scranton, Ellen.”

“One can’t help disappointing people sometimes, can one, Mr. Francis?” The full blue tea gown she wore enhanced the intense brilliance of her blue eyes, and they were sparkling though she was not smiling.

His pomposity, always evident, had become more so over these months. His self-control, usually very strong, suddenly was swept away and he leaned towards Ellen and said, almost blurting, “Your welfare has always been of the utmost concern to me, Ellen. You must know that.”

She weakened, remembering again how kind he had always been to her, and she wondered why she had been so acerbic to him, and the guilt was upon her. She said, “Yes, Mr. Francis. I’ve always known. I’m really very grateful.”

He saw that he had “reduced” her again to her proper position, and was pleased. She leaned forward to him to offer him the salver of biscuits and her gown drew tightly about her and he knew what he had not known before. He thought, for an instant, that he would be violently ill, there and then in that warm firelit library.

“Is there something wrong, Mr. Francis?”

He could only mutter in a thickened voice, “No. No, not at all, Ellen. It is just that I’ve been very busy myself, and this was an unusually warm day.” Sweat had come out on his forehead; he could feel its trickling and stinging.

Ellen stood up and opened the window near him a little wider and looked down at him with solicitude. She was so close to him that he could smell the scent of her young body, and her eau de cologne, which was of a light sweet odor. He could feel the warmth of that body, its innocent sensuousness, of which she was not aware. He wanted to seize her, to hold her, to weep on her breast, which he saw was much fuller now. He wanted to tell her of his sense of her degradation, of his longing, of his love, and desolation. He trembled with that desire.

“That feels much better, thank you, Ellen,” he said.

She drew her chair a little closer to him and said, “You gentlemen often work too hard. I sometimes tell Jeremy that. It makes me very anxious. Perhaps you need a rest. Jeremy and I—after—I mean, this summer, we are buying a house on Long Island, for the summertime, and I hope he will rest then for a while.” Her eyes were a blue shine in the rising dusk.

The desolation was an anguish in him; he experienced a loss almost too terrible to endure. He knew now that he had always secretly hoped that his cousin would tire of Ellen very soon—that womanizer!—and that she would come to him for comfort and shelter.

“That will be nice,” he muttered incoherently. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. Ellen was filled with that old weakening contrition. She had hurt his feelings in some manner, and he had been good to her and her aunt. She said, “Mr. Francis, you do not look well at all! Would you prefer some brandy?”

“No. No, dear Ellen. It has been so warm—”

But she stood up and went to him and put her gentle hand on his forehead. It was hot and wet. She bent over him, scrutinizing his face. Her eyes were full on him and he saw the pupils dilating anxiously. It was too much for him. He put his arms about her waist and drew her down closer to him and kissed her mouth over and over, passionately, while she stood, dazed, in his embrace, her lips parted in astonishment and some fear. She tried to release herself but his grip was too strong.

“That is a very tender scene,” said Jeremy Porter from the threshold. “How long has this been going on, if I, a mere husband, am crude enough to inquire?”

Ellen and Francis both started. Ellen pulled away from Francis, and Francis stood up, white and trembling. They both looked at Jeremy in the doorway, stupefied. His face was tense with anger and his eyes were gleaming in the dusk. When Ellen could recover herself she went to Jeremy, but he put her aside with some roughness and looked only at his cousin, who still could not speak. Ellen took his arm.

“Jeremy!” she said. “Mr. Francis was taken a little ill, and I was trying to help him, to see if he had a fever.” She could not understand her husband’s very apparent rage; she thought it was because he had found Francis here. “I am so sorry—I should have told you before. Mr. Francis sometimes comes to see me—he knew me before you did, Jeremy. He has always had my welfare at heart—”

“I haven’t the slightest doubt,” said Jeremy, still not looking at her.

Francis finally could speak. “It is not what you think it is, Jeremy.”

“And what am I to think, a strange man clutching my wife?” His voice was one Ellen had never heard before and she was frightened more by the tone than the words, which she could not comprehend at all.

“I should have told you,” she repeated. “But I knew—I thought—that you did not really like each other, and Mr. Francis suggested—”

Now he looked at her. She could not endure his stare, and shivered. “What did Mr. Francis suggest, my dear?”