University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.
“ELLEN! ELLEN!”

We were turning away from the pretty cage,
in order not to frighten the bird, pretty or not,
when an oldish man, tending his fire at the farther
side of the wagon, gave us “Good evening!”

There is a small but ancient fraternity in the
world, known as the Order of Gentlemen. It is
a grand old order. A poet has said that Christ
founded it; that he was “the first true gentleman
that ever lived.”

I cannot but distinguish some personages of
far-off antiquity as worthy members of this fellowship.
I believe it coeval with man. But
Christ stated the precept of the order, when he
gave the whole moral law in two clauses, —
Love to God, and Love to the neighbor. Whoever
has this precept so by heart that it shines
through into his life, enters without question
into the inner circles of the order.

But to protect itself against pretenders, this
brotherhood, like any other, has its formulas,
its passwords, its shibboleths, even its uniform.

These are external symbols. With some, the
symbol is greater than the thing signified. The
thing signified, the principle, is so beautiful, that
the outward sign is enough to glorify any character.
The demeanor of a gentleman — being
art, the expression of an idea in form — can become
property, like any art. It may be an heirloom
in an ancient house, like the portrait of the
hero who gave a family name and fame, like the
portrait of the maiden martyr or the faithful wife
who made that name beloved, that fame poetry,
to all ages. This precious inheritance, like anything
fine and tender, has sometimes been treated
with over care. Guardians have been so solicitous
that a neophyte should not lose his inherited
rank in the order of gentlemen, that they have
forgotten to make a man of him. Culturing
the flower, they have not thought to make the
stalk sturdy, or even healthy. The demeanor
of a gentleman may be possessed by a weakling,
or even inherited by one whose heart is not worthy
of his manners.

The formulas of this order are not edited; its
passwords are not syllabled; its uniform was never
pictured in a fashion-plate, or so described that a
snob could go to his tailor, and say, “Make me
the habit of a gentleman.” But the brothers
know each other unerringly wherever they meet;
be they of the inner shrine, gentlemen heart and

life; be they of the outer court, gentlemen in
feeling and demeanor.

No disguise delays this recognition. No strangeness
of place and circumstances prevents it. The
men meet. The magnetism passes between them.
All is said without words. Gentleman knows gentleman
by what we name instinct. But observe
that this thing, instinct, is character in its finest,
keenest, largest, and most concentrated action.
It is the spirit's touch.

John Brent and I, not to be deemed intruders,
were walking away from the neat wagon at the
upper end of the Mormon camp, when an oldish
man beside the wagon gave us “Good evening.”

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said the wan,
gray-haired, shadowy man before us.

And that was all. It was enough. We knew
each other; we him and he us. Men of the same
order, and so brothers and friends.

Here was improbability that made interest at
once. Greater to us than to him. We were not
out of place. He was, and in the wrong company.

Brent and I looked at each other. We had
half divined our new brother's character at the
first glance.

How legible are some men! All, indeed, that
have had, or are to have, a history, are books in
a well-known tongue to trained decipherers. But
some tragedies stare at us with such an earnest

dreariness from helpless faces, that we read with
one look. We turn away sadly. We have comprehended
the whole history of past sorrow; we
prophesy the coming despair.

I will not now anticipate the unfinished, melancholy
story we read in this new face. An
Englishman, an unmistakable gentleman, and in
a Mormon camp, — there was tragedy enough.
Enough to whisper us both to depart, and not
grieve ourselves with vain pity; enough to imperatively
command us to stay and see whether
we, as true knights, foes of wrong, succorers of
feebleness, had any business here. The same
instinct that revealed to us one of our order
where he ought not to be, warned us that he
might have claims on us, and we duties toward
him.

We returned his salutation.

We were about to continue the conversation,
when he opened a fresh page of the tragedy. He
called, in a voice too sad to be querulous, — a
flickering voice, never to be fed vigorous again
by any lusty hope, —

“Ellen! Ellen!”

“What, father dear?”

“The water boils. Please bring the tea, my
child.”

“Yes, father dear.”

The answers came from within the wagon.

They were the song of the bird whose nest we
had approved. A sad song. A woman's voice
can tell a long history of sorrow in a single word.
This wonderful instrument, our voice, alters its
timbre with every note it yields, as the face
changes with every look, until at last the dominant
emotion is master, and gives quality to tone
and character to expression.

It was a sad, sweet voice that answered the old
gentleman's call. A lady's voice, — the voice of
a high-bred woman, delicate, distinct, self-possessed.
That sound itself was tragedy in such
a spot. No transitory disappointment or distress
ever imprinted its mark so deeply upon a heart's
utterance. The sadness here had been life-long,
had begun long ago, in the days when childhood
should have gone thoughtless, or, if it noted the
worth of its moments, should have known them
as jubilee every one; — a sadness so habitual that
it had become the permanent atmosphere of the
life. The voice announced the person, and commanded
all the tenderest sympathy brother-man
can give to any sorrowful one in the sisterhood
of woman.

And yet this voice, that with so subtle a revelation
gave us the key of the unseen lady's history,
asked for no pity. There was no moan in it, and
no plaint. Not even a murmur, nor any rebel
bitterness or sourness for defeat. The undertone

was brave. If not hopeful, still resolute. No
despair could come within sound of that sweet
music of defiance. The tones that challenge
Fate were subdued away; but not the tones that
calmly answer, “No surrender,” to Fate's untimely
pæan. It was a happy thing to know
that, sorrowful as the life might be, here was an
impregnable soul.

There was a manner of half command and
half dependence in the father's call to his daughter,
— a weak nature, still asserting the control
it could not sustain over a stronger. And in her
response an indulgence of this feeble attempt at
authority.

Does all this seem much to find in the few simple
words we had heard? The analysis might
be made indefinitely more thorough. Every look,
tone, gesture of a man is a symbol of his complete
nature. If we apply the microscope severely
enough, we can discern the fine organism
by which the soul sends itself out in every act
of the being. And the more perfectly developed
the creature, the more significant, and yet the
more mysterious, is every habit, and every motion
mightier than habit, of body or soul.

In an instant, the lady so sweetly heralded
stepped from beneath the hood of the wagon, and
sprang to the ground in more busy and cheerful
guise than her voice had promised.

Again the same subtle magnetism between her
and us. We could not have been more convinced
of her right to absolute respect and consideration
if she had entered to us in the dusky light of a
rich drawing-room, or if we had been presented
in due form at a picnic of the grandest world,
with far other scenery than this of a “desart
idle,” tenanted for the moment by a Mormon
caravan. The lady, like her father, felt that we
were gentlemen, and therefore would comprehend
her. She saluted us quietly. There was
in her manner a tacit and involuntary protest
against circumstances, just enough for dignity.
A vulgar woman would have snatched up and
put on clumsily a have-seen-better-days air.
This lady knew herself, and knew that she could
not be mistaken for other than she was. Her
base background only made her nobility more
salient.

She did not need any such background, nor
the contrast of the drudges and meretricious
frights of the caravan. She could have borne
full light without any shade. A woman fit to
stand peer among the peerless.

We could not be astonished at this apparition.
We had divined her father rightly, as it afterward
proved. Her voice has already half disclosed
her character. Let her face continue the
development. We had already heard her called

by her Christian name, Ellen. That seemed to
bring us, from the beginning, into a certain intimacy
with the woman as woman, sister, daughter,
and to subordinate the circumstances of the
life, to be in future suggested by the social name,
to the life itself.

Ellen, then, the unknown lady of the Mormon
caravan, was a high-bred beauty. Englishwomen
generally lack the fine edge of such beauty as
hers. She owed her dark fairness, perhaps, to
a Sicilian bride, whom her Norman ancestor had
pirated away from some old playground of Proserpine,
and brought with him to England when
he came there as conqueror. Her nose was not
quite aquiline.

Positive aquiline noses should be cut off. They
are ugly; they are immoral; they are sensual;
they love money; they enjoy others' misery.
The worst birds have hooked beaks; and so the
worst men, the eagles and vultures of the race.
Cut off the beaks; they betoken a cruel pounce,
a greedy clutch, and a propensity to carrion.
Save the exceptions, but extirpate the brood.

This lady's nose was sensitive and proud. It
is well when a face has its share of pride in the
nose. Then the lips can give themselves solely
to sweetness and archness. Besides, pride, or, if
the word is dreaded, a conscious and resolute
personality, should be the characteristic of a face.

The nose should express this quality. Above, the
eyes may changefully flash intelligence; below,
the mouth may smile affection; the cheeks may
give balance and equability; the chin may show
the cloven dimple of a tender and many-sided, or
the point of a single-hearted and concentrated
nature; the brow, a non-committal feature, may
look wise or wiseacre; but every one of them is
only tributary to the nose, standing royally in the
midst, and with dignity presiding over its wayward
realm.

Halt! My business is to describe a heroine, —
not to discuss physiognomy, with her face for a
type.

As I said, her nose was sensitive and proud.
There might have once been scorn in the curve
of her nostril. Not now. Sorrow and pity had
educated away the scorn, as they had the tones of
challenge from her voice. Firmness, self-respect,
latent indignation, remained untouched. A strong
woman, whose power was intense and passionate.
Calm, till the time came, and then flame. Beware
of arousing her! Not that there was revenge
in her face. No; no stab or poison there.
But she was a woman to die by an act of will,
rather than be wronged. She was one who could
hold an insulter by a steady look, while she grew
paler, paler, purer, purer, with a more unearthly
pureness, until she had crushed the boiling blood

back into her heart, and stood before the wretch
white and chill as a statue, marble-dead.

What a woman to meet in a Mormon caravan!
And yet how able to endure whatever a dastard
Fate might send to crush her there!

Her hair was caught back, and severely chided
out of its wish to rebel and be as beautiful as it
knew was its desert. It was tendril hair, black
enough to show blackness against Fulano's shoulder.
Chide her locks as she might, they still
insisted upon flinging out here and there a slender
curling token of their gracefulness, to prove
what it might be if she would but let them have
their sweet and wilful will.

Her eyes were gray, with violet touches. Her
eyebrows defined and square. If she had had
passionate or pleading dark eyes, — the eyes that
hardly repress their tears for sorrow or for joy,
— and the temperament that such eyes reveal,
she would long ago have fevered or wept herself
to death. No woman could have looked at the
disgusts of that life of hers through tears, and
lived. The gray eyes meant steadiness, patience,
hope without flinching, and power to master fate,
or if not to master, to defy.

She was somewhat pale, thin, and sallow.
Plodding wearily and drearily over those dusty
wastes toward exile could not make her a merry
Nut-Brown Maid. Only her thin, red lips proved

that there were still blushes lurking out of
sight.

A mature woman; beyond girlhood, body and
soul. With all her grave demeanor, she could
not keep down the wiles of gracefulness that ever
bubbled to the surface. If she could but be her
happy self, what a fair world she would suddenly
create about her!

She was dressed in rough gray cloth, as any
lady might be for a journey. She was evidently
one whose resolute neatness repels travel-stains.
After the tawdry, draggled silks of the young
women we had just seen, her simplicity was
charmingly fresh. Could she and they be of
the same race of beings? They were apart as
far as coarse from fine, as silvern from brazen.
To see her here among this horde was a horror
in itself. No horror the less, that she could
not blind herself to her position and her fate.
She could not fail to see what a bane was
beauty here. That she had done so was evident.
She had essayed by severe plainness of
dress to erase the lady from her appearance. A
very idle attempt! There she was, do what she
would, her beauty triumphing over all the wrong
she did to it for duty's sake.

All these observations I made with one glance.
Description seems idle when one remembers how
eyes can see at a flash what it took æons to
prepare for and a lifetime to form.

Brent and I exchanged looks. This was the
result of our fanciful presentiments. Here was
visible the woman we had been dreading to
find. It still seemed an impossible vision. I almost
believed that the old gentleman's blanket
would rise with him and his daughter, like the
carpet of Fortunatus, and transport them suddenly
away, leaving us beside a Mormon wagon
in Sizzum's camp and in the presence of a frowzy
family cooking a supper of pork.

I looked again and again. It was all real.
There was the neat, comfortable wagon; there
was the feeble, timid old gentleman, pottering
about; there was this beautiful girl, busy with
her tea, and smiling tenderly over her father.