Ellen Glasgow - The Sheltered Life

"Well, you'd better bridle your nature, my dear little girl. You'd better bridle it tight before it runs away with you."

"Does it run away with you?" she inquired curiously.

Again he laughed, but this time the melancholy had passed out of the sound. "It is always running away with me."

"Then why don't you bridle it?"

"I'm not strong enough. Unless you bridle a roving nature in the beginning, it is obliged to get the better of you."

"And then what happens?"

"Trouble. That's what happens. Trouble and more trouble and still more trouble."

She sighed deeply, for she felt very sad—almost as sad as she had felt just before she came down with scarlet fever. "If you told Mrs. Birdsong, wouldn't it be a help?" she asked presently. "Aunt Isabella says she is helpful in trouble." Instinct warned her that she had left the firm, safe ground as soon as she had reached it, and was floundering helplessly in some primitive element. Though she had had sufficient experience with ruffled occasions, she felt inadequate to deal with obscure upheavals of conscience.

"Your Aunt Isabella is right," he said after a long silence, and his voice sounded thick and agitated, as if something alive and hurt were struggling inside of him. "I married an angel." Then, abruptly, another and a very different exclamation burst from him, and she watched the genial ruddiness stream back under his smooth, fair skin. "By George, I'm always forgetting that you are only nine years old. There's something so sympathetic about you."

Sympathetic! This was almost too much. While her heart fluttered with joy, she turned her eyes away in an embarrassed glance at the horizon. The last flare of sunset stained the whitewashed wall of the prison, and a soft mulberry-coloured dusk floated up from the hollow. Sympathetic! She rolled the long delicious word on her tongue.

"I feel, too, that you can be trusted," Mr. Birdsong continued earnestly, pronouncing each syllable very slowly and distinctly, as if he were trying to impress its importance upon her mind. "I feel that we would never, never give each other away."

"Oh, never, never!"

"Nothing could make us tell, for instance, about this afternoon."

"Nothing. Not—not wild horses."

"Even after you're grown up, we'll still have our secret."

"Always. Nobody shall ever know. Even if I live to be a—a thousand, I'll never tell anybody."

"Well, that's what I call loyal," he answered, and the strain seemed to relax in his voice. "You're a friend worth having, and no man has too many of them at my age. The best part of it is that you are sparing your mother, because she would be distressed to know how near you were to being hurt."

Slipping down from the pile of lumber, Jenny Blair put her hand into his warm and comforting clasp. A wave of adoration surged up, and it seemed to her that she was drowning in a kind of exquisite torment. Never before had she felt this yearning rapture, not for her mother, not for her grandfather, not even for Mrs. Birdsong, who was as beautiful as a dream. No, this was something new in the mingled ways of love and admiration and a strange sort of homesickness. Until this evening, she had always loved Mrs. Birdsong best, but now, she told herself, Mr. Birdsong was first of all, or at least the very next to her mother and grandfather, who were both trying at times, but must be loved because they were unable to be happy without her.

"Well, we'd better be going in now. I'll take you to your corner," Mr. Birdsong said, squeezing her hand.

"I think I'd better slip in the back gate. The alley is right over there."

"We'll cross here, then. If your mother asks you where you've been, what will you tell her?"

"Maybe she won't ask, but I can say I fell down and hurt myself because my roller-skates wouldn't roll right."

"You fell down and hurt yourself. That's right, and it's true."

"Oh, yes, it's true."

The flushed sky was paling into grey, and waves of silver-purple twilight flowed into Washington Street.

"Well, good-night, little girl." The gay and charming smile illumined the dusk for a moment; the grey eyes laughed; the caressing lips brushed her cheek. "You're a trump sure enough, and we'll always stand by each other."

Captivated afresh, she gazed up at him. "Oh, yes, we'll always stand by each other."

The back gate opened and shut, and she ran into the dim garden, where the light from the street drifted down through the faintly stirring boughs of the old sycamore. She could see the silver bole of the tree, and the glimmer of the rose-arbour at the end of the grasswalk. Then, as she sped by, the sound of whispers reached her, and she slackened her pace. "I mean honestly," said a deep voice that she recognized. "You know I mean honestly by you." Then a long, low, despairing sigh, and Aunt Isabella's plaintive notes, "But you don't understand, Joseph. You don't understand--"

Flitting on, while Aunt Isabella called sharply, "Is that you, Jenny Blair? Your mother has been worrying about you," she ran up the back steps and into the house. They might keep their precious secret, she told herself, for she had one now of her own that was far more important. From this evening, as long as she lived, she would have a part in that mysterious world where grownup persons hide the things they do not wish children to know.

"Well, my dear, we were growing anxious about you," remarked her grandfather, who was alone with William, she saw thankfully, in the library.

"My roller-skates tripped me again, Grandfather, and I fell down. You really will give me the money to-night, won't you?"

"I suppose I'll have to, my dear, I can't have you tripping up and bumping your head. Does it hurt?"

"It did dreadfully. And, Grandfather," she asked in a lower tone, "is it true that only bad people live in Penitentiary Bottom? Don't any good people live there?"

"Yes, my child, good people live wherever there are people."

"Is Memoria good, Grandfather?"

"Yes, Memoria is good. She is a good laundress and a good daughter."

"I know who is good too. Mr. Birdsong is good."

"Yes, George is good," the old man answered. "He is a good friend and a good sportsman. Now, you'd better run upstairs. Your mother has been worrying."

All that cloudless June afternoon Jenny Blair watched Mrs. Birdsong make over a satin evening gown from the puffed sleeves and bell-shaped skirt of the 'nineties into the more graceful style of the twentieth century.

"Will you waltz at the party?" she inquired hopefully, while her admiring gaze wandered from the primrose-coloured satin to the rainbow hues of the garden. On Thursday evening there was to be a dance at Curlew, the country home of the Peytons, and Jenny Blair had been invited to spend the night with Bena and watch the illuminated fountain from the upstairs porch of the nursery.

"Only the first and the last waltz with George," Mrs. Birdsong answered, with her brilliant smile, which began in her eyes and wavered in an edge of light on her lips. Beyond her head, with its lustrous waves of deep bronze, the open window framed a climbing pink rose and a border of sky-blue delphinium.

"She is like roses and lilies," the child thought in a singing refrain. "She is like roses and lilies together—roses and lilies." Gliding into prose, she continued, "But I like Mr. Birdsong best. I like him best because we've a secret together." With the thought, an airy bliss was spun like light, like the bloom of pink roses and larkspur, over the bare places within; and a little bird that lived there in a blossoming tree sang over and over, "I know a secret! I know a secret!" She had only to shut her eyelids very tight while she plunged far down into herself, below the whirling specks and gleams that floated before her eyes, and the extraordinary delight of that evening on the pile of lumber, with Mr. Birdsong holding her hand, would rush over her and sink into her depths, as if it were all a part of the sweetness of June. "I know a secret! I know a secret!" piped the strange little bird, flapping its wings, and everything became different, everything became more real and living and splendid.