Leave Her to Heaven

by Ben Ames Williams

  She expected to go to New Mexico alone to do her errand there; but this proposal Mrs. Berent flatly rejected, and with the invincible inflexibility to which weak people may by long persecution be provoked, she insisted that she too — and of course Ruth — would see her husband’s ashes to their last resting place. Robie, in response to Ellen’s letter, said business this year would keep him from the ranch till late June. He fixed a date for their coming, and hospitably suggested a fortnight’s stay. This would cause them to miss part of the summer at Bar Harbor, and Mrs. Berent fretted at this disturbance of her routine; but when Ellen repeated that she could quite as well go alone, her mother retorted:

  ‘Nonsense! I’m ready to do my duty! Of course, I’ve never been west of Philadelphia!’ Her tone confessed the confirmed Bostonian’s misgiving at venturing into the hinterland. ‘But I’m prepared for some discomfort, and I’m sure Mr. Robie will make things as easy for us as he can.’

  – II –

  During the weeks of waiting, while spring came to Boston and tulips bloomed in the Public Garden, Ellen refused to re-enter with Ruth and her mother their familiar ways, telling herself that by resuming their weekly attendance at Symphony, by going sometimes to the theatre or to the moving pictures, they proved themselves heartless and callous. She spent her time sorting her father’s papers and possessions. He had converted to his own use the topmost floor of their Boston home, putting a skylight in the roof, building moth-proof cabinets around the walls to hold his sets. She cleaned the scalpels and dissecting scissors and needles, put the spools of thread in their rack and the rolls of cotton on the shelf, set the jars of arsenic and of plaster of Paris and the tray of assorted glass eyes in order, labelled and put away some unmounted skins. She devoted long hours to this self-imposed task, and one day the glass jars of arsenic caught her attention. She took up one of them and poured a little of the white powder into her hand. For years the poison had been to her just one of the materials which she and her father used in their work together, but she remembered now that it was deadly stuff. If she swallowed even a little of it she would die; and she imagined Ruth and her mother finding her here lifeless, and she heard them say sorrowfully: ‘She loved her father so!’ Her eyes misted with wistful tears and she pitied herself profoundly — but she poured the arsenic from her palm carefully back into the jar and covered it again.

  A week before their prospective departure, Quinton came to Boston to see her. He arrived on Saturday, and suggested that they spend Sunday together. ‘I’ll hire a car and we’ll drive down to the shore,’ he said, and Ellen indifferently agreed.

  At the appointed hour he called for her, slick and shining, perspiring with delight, and she felt a brief distaste; but she took her place at his side. He drove to the tip end of Cape Ann. When they left the car to walk down to the rocks he produced from the rumble a magnificent picnic basket fitted with thermos bottles, paper plates and cups, plated knives and forks and spoons, and canisters for salt and pepper and sugar, with a compartment for ice, and neat aluminum containers for sandwiches. He showed her all these wonders with a pride which hid his misgivings.

  ‘Oh Russ, you shouldn’t!’ she said reproachfully. ‘It’s so extravagant!’

  ‘It’s a start toward furnishing our house!’

  ‘It’s a whole dining room in itself,’ she declared; but later, while they lunched on the rocks above the shore, she saw his almost miserly pride in this treasure. Maliciously curious to see what he would do, sweetening her coffee, she allowed the small sugar canister to escape from her fingers and roll off the ledge. It fell into a deep crevice among the rocks, and Quinton labored for an hour in a vain effort to recover it, moving heavy boulders, wetting his feet and staining his trousers with sea slime, while Ellen with her arm across her eyes lay baking in the sun. In spite of the fact that the kisses she had had to accept upon their arrival had rather irritated than pleased her, she resented his neglecting her while he sought so long to get back that absurd canister; and when she said they must go and he urged that they had had as yet hardly any time together, she said chidingly that he should have thought of that before.

  ‘But I couldn’t just let the sugar thing go without trying to reach it, he protested, so disturbed by this wasteful loss that she smiled and forgave him. So they stayed a little longer and she gave him enough of herself to make his head swim with dreams and sent him back to Maine a happy man.

  In due time thereafter, with her mother and Ruth, she started for New Mexico. Leaving Chicago, Mrs. Berent and Ruth shared a drawing room, and Ellen had the adjoining compartment. She retired early. Among the parting gifts from friends in Boston there had been a book called Time Without Wings, about which everyone — said Janet Mowbray, who had given it to them — was talking. On the first night out of Chicago, Ellen began to read this book, and in the morning when she went back to the observation car, it was under her arm.

  But Ellen was never much addicted to reading, and she presently fell asleep in her chair. As her grasp upon the book relaxed, it slid off her knee and thumped her foot and woke her from a dream in which she had been happy with her father; and in that dream he was young again, with fair hair, and merry, unwearied eyes. When now she woke, her father — or someone, to her sleepy eyes, incredibly like him as he had been in her dream — picked up the book and handed it back to her. Seeing his face, her throat constricted. She thanked him automatically, but after he resumed his seat across the car she watched him with a breathless attention. Her thoughts — and her eyes — remained fixed upon him till at last his glance met hers. He stood up, coloring with anger, and she realized that she had embarrassed him. To her apology, he muttered something and walked away; and she hastened to her mother, an eagerness in her which she made no effort to disguise.

  ‘Mother,’ she demanded, ‘Did Father have any relatives, brothers or nephews or anything?’

  ‘Of course! Ruth’s father, and another brother in Philadelphia; but he died ten years ago. For Heaven’s sake, why?’

  ‘Did that other brother have any sons?’

  Mrs. Berent said sharply: ‘I should hope not. He was a bachelor! What’s got into you?’

  Ellen said in a hushed tone: ‘There’s a man on the train who looks exactly the way Father used to look, enough like him to be related anyway.’

  ‘What of it? That’s not surprising! Your father was a perfectly ordinary-looking man.’

  Ellen’s eyes flashed with anger, but Ruth smilingly played peacemaker. ‘I always thought Father looked rather wonderful, Mother,’ she protested. ‘Ellen, point this man out to us if you get a chance, won’t you?’

  But Ellen, resenting her mother’s attitude, said coldly: ‘You probably wouldn’t see any resemblance. Neither of you saw Father with my eyes.’ She went into her own compartment and closed the door.

  Yet her thoughts dung to this stranger. She hoped to see him again in the diner, but he did not appear for lunch nor for dinner, nor when she frankly tried to find him was he in the club or observation cars. After Ruth and her mother were abed, she walked the length of the train, but her search was fruitless. Knowing he must be shut away behind some closed door, she wished to knock at every one, imagining him secret and alone, wishing to share his solitude. When, surrendering, she returned at last to her compartment and to bed, she lay long awake, crushed under a weight of loneliness because he was lost to her forever.

  But in the morning they left the train and Glen Robie was on the platform, and after the first greeting he asked Mrs. Berent: ‘Did you see Mr. Harland?’

  ‘Harland?’ she echoed. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Richard Harland,’ he said. ‘He’s the man who wrote that new book, Time Without Wings. He’s coming to the ... Oh, here he is now!’

  Ellen, half-guessing the truth, turned to look where Robie pointed; and she saw Lin and a tall young man coming toward them and felt as though a firm hand had gripped her heart. Her senses clouded dizzily, and when presently she was seate
d beside Harland in the touring car, her shoulder against his, she pressed her hands to her cheeks, thinking they must feel hot to her palms! All the surface of her body everywhere was tingling deliciously and frighteningly too. She was glad that Robie talked as he drove, so that she need not speak for a while. Her voice, she feared, might betray her, and when at last she dared turn to Harland with some careful, laughing word, she saw Ruth, sitting on his other side, look at her in wonder at her tone.

  – III –

  The fortnight that followed, at the ranch and then at Robie’s fishing lodge in the mountains, was for Ellen a time of breathless wonder, of longing almost insupportable, of suspense almost too keen to be borne. She was caught in a torrent of emotions so strange and new that she was at first bewildered and overwhelmed; a torrent so strong that she could not resist it.

  At first, instinctively, she sought to avoid Harland and the others too; and she took a horse every morning, disappearing sometimes for the whole day, returning only at dinnertime. But though she went alone, yet in her thoughts Harland was beside her. There was one day when she rode to a lofty outlook and secured her horse and sat for long hours on a bold rim high above a hidden canyon, basking in the sun, her eyes ranging unseeingly; and in her fancy she welcomed him there to share her solitude, speaking aloud, carrying on with him long conversations that were tinglingly impersonal and polite, rich with unuttered meanings. She lay for a while, her arms tight across her breast, her big hat shading her face against the sun, her eyes closed; and at every near-by sound she seemed to hear his step, imagined him coming ardently to seek her here.

  This complete and absorbed attention to everything a man did or said, this constant hope that Harland would turn to her, coupled with a breathless anticipation that was something like terror, was new in her life. Her devotion to her father had armored her against those hours of tremulous and unadmitted longings which almost any chance-met boy may provoke in a girl still in her teens, rendered intensely sensitive to masculine approaches by forces within herself which she has been taught she must not recognize. Once when Ellen was twelve there had been a senior at Tech who sometimes came home with her father to discuss a thesis upon which he was at work, and who for weeks seemed to her the most completely wonderful person she had ever seen, so that she dreamed of him both awake and asleep and gave him openly a youthful adoration which she was not yet old enough to conceal. But this keen awareness of Harland was at once less frank and more profound; for she had been incapable at that time of those reactions — a quickened pulse, a warm flush on cheeks and throat, a faintness, a soft readiness for surrender — which even the sound of Harland’s voice could provoke in her now.

  Hoping his thoughts might be drawn to her as hers were drawn to him, she wondered whether he knew from Robie their errand here; and she wished her habit of seeking the solitudes would provoke his curiosity, lead him to question her. She planned her answers, planned the very words in which she would tell him, wistfully, about her father; and she pictured the sympathy and the new understanding which would appear in his eyes as he listened. She played, without admitting it even to herself, the part of one silently enduring a hopeless grief; and she imagined him observing and conjecturing.

  But he made no approach to her; and when at breakfast one morning she saw an opportunity to suggest that they go together to seek turkeys, she seized upon it, hiding her eager hopes beneath a casual tone. He assented, and it was a flurry of soft panic, a delicious fear of what these hours alone with him might bring, which led her to say that they need not go till afternoon. All morning alone she blamed herself for that weakness. They might, if she had been bold, have spent the long day together. Till the lunch hour she waited in dread lest he change his mind, cancel this plan.

  Yet when the time came for them to start, she was — at least outwardly — perfectly composed. She led the way, sure that his eyes rested upon her as he followed close behind. She rode well, and knew it, and wished him to remark it. He did not speak, but she was as conscious of his watching her as though she saw his eyes.

  All her senses seemed on that ride together to be sharpened. The sky and the mountains had never been so beautiful, the odor of the sun-warmed pine spills upon the ground never so keen, the occasional bird song in the thickets never so liquid and clear and true. Even to watch the sliding shoulder-muscles of her horse as he breasted a steep climb or picked his way down an abrupt descent contented and delighted her. She had an extraordinary awareness of the life currents within her, and of Harland close behind, and of the solitudes in which they rode; and alone with him she felt a breathless terror which was half longing too.

  At the spot she chose they hid their horses in the wood and walked out to the middle of the park-like canyon floor; and she led him to a shallow grassy depression and bade him lie beside her. Then for a while they did not speak, and she lay with her chin on her hands, staring up the canyon, feeling her heart pound against the turf beneath her breast, not looking at him yet seeing every line of his profile and the bulk of his shoulders thrust upward by the position of his crossed arms, and feeling the length of him along her own, so near that a careless movement of her foot might have touched his.

  He spoke at last, some laughing word about the ant she brushed from her throat, and she found herself talking of her father; and though their talk was commonplace she felt in every word she spoke and in every word of his a quality of suspense, of overwhelming forces held for the present in abeyance yet which might at any moment break all bounds. She turned her head at last to look at him, and met his eyes, and he said he knew her errand at the lodge; and this knowledge on his part seemed to her to draw them close together, so that in an instinctive defensive gesture she looked away again. He spoke of his brother Danny. She had, as have many whole and healthy people, an innate repugnance for any sickness or deformity, so that she shivered slightly when he referred to Danny’s illness. Then she remembered that she knew so little about Harland, only his name and his work and that he had this brother who was crippled. It was even fearfully possible that he was married, and she found herself questioning him; and when he said he was not married she controlled her breathing so that he might not see her sudden relief. Then he spoke of her ring. She had for these days completely forgotten Quinton. She told Harland about him and added calmly:

  ‘But I will never marry him.’

  Until that moment she had not known this, but as soon as she remembered Quinton she knew it certainly and beyond doubting.

  From that quiet word of hers, she thought as she spoke, much might have followed; but then Harland saw turkeys coming, and at her direction, when the time came, he shot one. It was only wounded, and he had to run to dispatch it, and the unaccustomed exercise at these high altitudes exhausted him, and she wished to take him in her arms and cherish him, and forced herself to look at the turkey instead, and to speak, as though this were important, of the fact that a shot had cut its beard. Yet even then, on pretext of fetching the horses, she hurried to leave him so that he might not guess the tenderness which his distress had provoked in her; and when she returned with the animals she was controlled again. He was triumphant and gay and laughing and full of eager conversation, and she entered into his mood and they rode merrily back to camp. She thought exultantly that night that she would never lose what this day she had gained.

  Next morning before breakfast her mother announced — she had been lamed till now by the all-day ride from ranch to lodge — that she was ready to go to see her husband’s ashes sown across the high meadows. Ellen had almost forgotten this duty; but she welcomed it now as one welcomes the turning of the last page of a book, when another, full of promise, waits to be opened. She agreed that this should be the day; but when Harland and Lin and Tess planned at breakfast to ride to the horse parks, Ellen wished she might go with them, thinking that Tess was beautiful and that Harland might find her so. She could not change plans already made, but she was wretched all morning, her thoughts followin
g them jealously.

  On the ride up to the heights that afternoon, Mrs. Berent groaned and complained; for the way was steep and she was ill at ease in the saddle. Professor Berent’s ashes were in a sealed bronze casket which till now had been in Ellen’s charge, and which now, wrapped in sweater and slicker, rode at her cantle. When they came to their goal, she left Robie and her mother and Ruth sitting their horses together in the center of the basin, and rode out toward its rim; and at an easy lope, she began a wide circle around them, carrying the casket in the curve of her arm, lifting the ashes a handful at a time, letting them sift through her fingers as she rode.

  Then the pricking ears of her horse led her to look across to the trees that fringed the basin, and she saw the two children and Harland come there into view. Almost at once they drew back out of sight again; but to know that Harland was sharing this moment with her sharpened her emotional reaction, and — unconsciously dramatizing her own part — she put her horse to a faster gait, feeling Harland watching her; and she rode like a soldier on parade, eyes straight ahead, looking neither right nor left, sowing the ashes broadcast with a rhythmic sweep of her arm. When with the circle of the basin not half completed, she found the casket almost empty, she had a sense of anticlimax; but since no one could at a distance guess the deception, she continued that motion of a sower till, completing the circuit, coming back to the head of the trail, she saw the chance for an effective exit and plunged into the forest and was gone.

  She rode halfway back to camp before a new thought occurred to her, and she took a side trail to avoid the others and circled back to the heights again. If she did not return to the lodge for dinner, Harland — after their hour together yesterday — would surely come to seek her. She found the basin deserted, and on the highest point along its rim she built of scattered rocks a cairn where she bestowed the empty casket upon which her father’s name had been engraved. Staying there where she could overlook the open sweep below her, she waited for Harland to appear.