Leave Her to Heaven (8 page)

E
LLEN'S possessive devotion to her father began when she was still a baby. They spent their summers at Bar Harbor, and as soon as she could walk, he took her down to the beach to watch him dig clams under the rocks at low tide, and he hauled aside great scarves of seaweed to show her the little crabs scuttling for cover, and when neap tides exposed a whole new world to view he helped her hunt for starfish and sea urchins.

This was before she was four years old, but already she thought him all her own; and one of her baby tricks pleased him and amused everyone else except her mother. If Mrs. Berent spoke of him as ‘Daddy,' Ellen would cry indignantly: ‘He's not your Daddy. He's mine!' This delighted him, and he was apt to snatch her in his arms and hug her hard.

When Ellen was four, Ruth came to live with them. She was Professor Berent's niece, his brother's daughter; and after her mother died, Professor and Mrs. Berent gave her a home and on her father's death two years later they legally adopted the little girl. Ellen, till Ruth's coming, had ruled the household, and from the first she resented her father's interest in this intruder. When Ruth was old enough to follow them down to the beach, Ellen fiercely rebelled, crying: ‘I don't want her! You're my Daddy! You're not hers! I don't want her!' He at first laughed in affectionate amusement at her jealous protests; but Ellen, if he insisted on bringing Ruth along, took every means to make her miserable, toppling her into puddles, tweaking her pigtails, bringing her sometimes to the point of tears. Eventually
Ellen's persistence outwore them all, so that Ruth stayed at home with Mrs. Berent while Ellen and her father resumed their long summer days together.

By that time she was old enough to go out with him in the dory to pull the half-dozen lobster pots which he kept set off their landing; and he taught her to swim in the icy water, and to sail the little dinghy. He was already dabbling with the collecting which would become his hobby. He began with shore birds, and the islands off the rocky Maine coast were his fruitful hunting grounds. Sometimes he and Ellen went off in the dory or in the sailing dinghy for two or three days at a time, taking a tent and bedding and supplies; and Ellen tended camp while he tramped the shores or sought the island ponds to find his specimens. As she grew older he took her with him to Newfoundland or to the Provinces to fish for salmon, or into the woods to try for a deer in the. fall. Their hours together were for her one long content.

These delights were interrupted when he began to spend most of each summer in Texas with Glen Robie; but when she was twenty and Robie invited Professor Berent to come to the ranch, she went west with him. The raw beauty and the bold colors of deserts blazing in the sun, snow-tipped mountains bright against the cloudless sky, parks and canyons carpeted with countless wild flowers and slopes clad in luxuriant forest green, intoxicated them both. They stayed, that first summer, two months at the ranch, and ten weeks the next.

The second year, as though he knew he might never come again, Professor Berent twice or thrice postponed their departure, revisiting over and over beloved scenes. The day before they were at last to depart, they rode far together, and in late afternoon they came to a spot which had always held for each of them a particular charm. This was an upland pasture shaped like a saucer and surrounded by a low wooded rim which shut off any view of loftier peaks either near or far away. Their horses moved at a foot pace out across the basin, and the sky was fair and blue.

‘It's like riding across the front lawn of Heaven,' Ellen said in a hushed voice.

‘It's beautiful, certainly,' he agreed.

‘When I die,' she declared, ‘You must bring my ashes and Swatter them here. Will you, Father?'

‘Why should you think of dying? You'll outlive me, you know.' He smiled, but there was no mirth in his smile. Able to interpret certain signs and symptoms, he had of late often contemplated his own death.

‘Then we'll exchange promises,' she urged with a sweet gravity. ‘If you die first, I'll bring your ashes here; and if I die first, you'll bring mine.'

For a moment he did not speak, and when he did, it was half-laughingly. ‘After I'm dead, Mother can decide what becomes of what's left of me!' he said, and lifted his reins. ‘Come along. We'll have to move if we want to make the lodge before dark.'

Ellen's engagement to Russ Quinton resulted, in oblique ways, from this moment in the high pasture with her father. That fall, as they had sometimes done before, they went into the Maine woods to try for deer, lodging in Quinton's cabin on a remote and lovely pond; and for the last few days of their stay, Quinton himself came unannounced to join them there.

He was at that time about thirty-five years old, a lawyer, a graduate of the University of Maine and of Harvard Law School, with political ambitions which, since any opposition was apt to provoke him to a venomous and uncontrolled anger that made him many enemies, were as yet unrealized. He and Professor Berent had met seven or eight years before, casually, as fishermen do, on the Mersey River in Nova Scotia. A mutual interest in trying to bring back eastern Maine rivers as salmon streams gave them a point of contact out of which grew a casual friendship, which Quinton, from the day he first saw Ellen, assiduously cultivated. He showered upon Professor Berent many favors — the gift of an occasional salmon or a basket of trout, a haunch of venison, a brace of ducks, the use of his hunting cabin — which it was impossible graciously to refuse, and which Professor Berent repaid by making Quinton welcome in his home.

Ellen was at the time in her early teens. Quinton taught her to
call him ‘Uncle Russ' and to let him kiss her when they met and when they parted. She accepted him at first as her father's friend, but as she approached maturity she realized that to be with her produced in him a flattering excitement, and with the precocity which resulted from her constant companionship with her father, she suspected that he was in love with her. When this fall he came to join them at his cabin she soon decided that he was trying to muster courage to ask her to marry him, and in a lively curiosity she helped the moment to arrive.

The event was disappointing. He said it would surprise her and perhaps frighten her to hear what he wished to say, but she was neither surprised nor frightened; and she bade him go on. He did so, haltingly; and when he was done, willing to prolong the game, she told him she would never marry anyone as long as her father was alive.

‘He needs me, and he comes first,' she said.

Quinton resentfully protested that her father would not want her to take such an attitude; but she told him: ‘It's not what he wants. It's what I want.' He persisted, and at last, roused by her coquetry, he caught her in his arms and kissed her. She enjoyed the sense of power it gave her to feel his shaken passion, and when after a moment he released her, stammering apologies, she said sweetly:

‘I'm not angry, Russ. I know men like to do things like that to girls; but I love my father too much to marry any other man as long as he needs me!'

In a sudden anger — she knew his high temper, had seen him storm at the guides — he demanded: ‘Do you mean you want me to just stand around waiting till he dies?' Then, at her reproachful silence: ‘I'm sorry, Ellen. I'm sorry I said that.'

‘I know you are,' she assented, and smiled forgiveness. ‘When you get mad, you blurt out things like a little boy!'

‘You drive me half-crazy,' he told her hoarsely.

Deliberately, she said: ‘Maybe that's why I like you. I do like you, you know, as well as any man I know.'

But then she saw the quick leap of delight in him, and, a
little dismayed by the emotion she had roused, she turned quickly indoors to join her father. Quinton had to follow her.

This was the last evening of their stay, and they sat long around the stove in the cabin and Quinton asked questions about New Mexico, and Ellen and Professor Berent answered him, each supplementing the other. It was Ellen who spoke of that high mountain meadow so near the sky, describing the beauty of the spot. ‘Father and I both loved it,' she told Quinton. ‘We agreed that we want our ashes to be scattered there when we die.' She was so accustomed to assuming that her own wishes were decisive that she did not remember Professor Berent had failed to join her in this compact; but her father did not contradict her. Changing the subject — perhaps it was distasteful to him — he said casually:

‘It's up in a region they call the horse parks, Russ, because some wild horses range there.' And he told Quinton how the old Spaniards brought the first horses to the Southwest, three or four hundred years ago, and thus stocked the whole vast region.

So he turned the talk into other channels; but Ellen, months later, at a time of need, would remember that conversation and use it for her own ends.

The following spring, her father died quietly in his sleep. Ellen had so long thought of him as her possession that not even his death shook her feeling of ownership. When Mrs. Berent, after the first gush of grief, began to plan that he should be buried in conventional fashion at Mount Auburn, Ellen with a jealous instinct to make every decision that concerned him, cried:

‘Oh, no, Mother!'

Mrs. Berent exclaimed in surprise: ‘For Heaven's sake, why not, I'd like to know?'

Ellen unhesitatingly found an answer. ‘Because that wasn't what he wanted! He wanted to be cremated, wanted me to take his ashes to New Mexico!'

‘New Mexico?' Mrs. Berent was astonished. ‘Why, that's the most outlandish thing I ever heard of! He never mentioned it to me!'

‘There were lots of things he didn't tell you,' Ellen said cruelly.
This was so true that Mrs. Berent made no effort to deny it. ‘Now you want him stuffed away underground in Mount Auburn, because that's what all your friends do with their husbands when they die; but Father wasn't like them! He'd hate being shut up to stifle in a grave.'

Her mother urged, near tears: ‘Why, Ellen, I simply can't believe it. He'd surely have told me. . .'

‘You mean you think I'm lying?'

Mrs. Berent sniffed in sudden anger. ‘I wouldn't put it past you! You never saw the day you wouldn't lie to have your own way.'

Ellen persisted; but Mrs. Berent was for once as stubborn as she, and Ellen tried to enlist Ruth's support. It was often possible to win the other girl by tender cajolery, but in this matter Ruth was firm. ‘I think Mother's the one to decide, Ellen,' she suggested.

‘But Ruth darling, I tell you Father said . . .'

Ruth smiled affectionately. ‘Are you sure? You know, Ellen, you're always apt to believe things happened the way you wanted them to happen.'

Their incredulity, coupled with her own secret memory that they were right, infuriated Ellen. It was bad enough to be called a liar; it was worse when the accusation was true. But, suddenly recalling that night in Quinton's cabin, she was sure she could make him support her, and she telegraphed him: ‘Father died yesterday. Please come to me.' She knew what hopes that message would arouse.

He came at once, and she met his train — this was the morning of the second day after Professor Berent died — and told her plight and demanded his corroboration. ‘Mother thinks I'm lying! ' she said. ‘But you heard Father say that he wanted his ashes taken out there. She'll have to believe you!'

‘Why, I remember you said something about it, but . . .'

‘No, no, it was he who said it,' she insisted. ‘Surely you haven't forgotten! It was the night you asked me to marry you.' She caught his hand. ‘You can't have forgotten that night!' She was so distressed and beseeching that he could not deny her; so
he told her he did remember, and — this was in the taxicab, on their way to her home — she clung to him, weeping with relief and triumph; and he cried, holding her close:

‘Ellen, darling, darling, your father doesn't need you now. But I do, I do.'

‘I know, Russ,' she agreed, heedless and unthinkingly. The future was unimportant, if she could bind him to her present cause. ‘But first I must do this last thing for him.'

When he confirmed her testimony as to Professor Berent's wishes, Mrs. Berent surrendered; but before Quinton went back to Maine, he had Ellen's promise that she would marry him in the fall. His grateful kisses neither pleased nor offended her. He was her ally against her mother, and for the moment this was her only concern.

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.'