Ellen Glasgow - The Sheltered Life

John Welch had dashed in for a moment to pull her plaits and ask some of the silly questions boys consider amusing. But he had gone out almost immediately to play baseball in a vacant lot; and she was happily alone again with her friend.

"Don't you like John, dear?" Mrs. Birdsong was spreading the width of primrose-coloured satin over her knees, and while she asked the question she picked up a pair of shears from the mahogany sewing-table by her side.

Jenny Blair pondered deeply and decided to be impersonal. "I never could abide boys," she answered.

"I know. They are rather trying, but John is different from most boys. He is very considerate. I sometimes think," she added, with a touch of pride, "that nobody in the world is so considerate of me as John is."

"Not—not more than Mr. Birdsong."

"Oh, George—well, yes, of course I was not thinking of George. But John is an unusual boy. Your grandfather thinks he has a great deal of character."

Grandfather would think that. It sounded exactly like him; but Jenny Blair was not interested in character, and was inclined to skip it whenever she saw it approaching, especially in books, where, she had learned from tedious experience, it was apt to interfere with the love story. So she merely folded her hands and repeated primly, "I never could abide boys."

Yes, it was true, she liked Mr. Birdsong best, she assured herself. For she shared no secret with Mrs. Birdsong, who would never, she felt certain, drop the bright, gauzy veils of her manner. Beautiful as she was, you could never come really close to her. In spite of her deep sparkle, her rippling vivacity, which flashed and glimmered and scattered like the spray of the Peytons' illuminated fountain, she would never in adventure, in any peril, give her secret away. Always, even upon a pile of lumber, gazing with her blue eyes at the sunset, the glow of her loveliness would come, in some strange way, between her and life.

"I'm glad we picked out this yellow satin," Jenny Blair said presently, starting all over again in her company voice. They had searched in the cedar chest for a dress that Mrs. Birdsong could make over to wear to the dance, and after much indecision, they had chosen a gown she had worn to a ball in the 'nineties. Now, while she ripped, turned, cut, basted, and stitched the shimmering folds, she talked more to herself than to the attentive child of the glorious occasions when she had reigned as a belle. Though she was only thirty-four, with the wild heart of youth still unsubdued, her voice borrowed a pensive note, as if the triumphs of the past had receded into the vague brightness of memory. "I wore this dress at a ball given in honour of Lord Waterbridge, the great English general. That was five years after our marriage, just before we lost the money George's father left us. Then I still had my evening gowns made in Paris."

"Did you dance with Lord Waterbridge?"

"We led the march together, and I danced the minuet with him when the ball opened." Lost in reverie, she paused an instant, while the needle with its shining thread trembled above the billows of satin, and her radiance melted into the iridescent bloom of the garden.

Yes, her grandfather was right, Jenny Blair thought, no one was ever so beautiful. No one was ever so beautiful—only—only she still loved Mr. Birdsong (here she shut her eyes very tight) best of all. "And when you waltzed with Mr. Birdsong did everybody stop and watch you?" she asked, clasping her hands in rapture. "Did everybody stop and watch just as Mamma says they used to do?"

"They used to do?" The animated voice dropped so softly that it was like the fall of a leaf. "Yes, they used to watch us when we danced. People had more time then. They were less eager to do things themselves. I was the impatient one, but nowadays they think me too slow and old-fashioned. They tell me I am old-fashioned because I never dance round dances with any one but George. Never since the evening we became engaged, and that was at a ball, have I ever waltzed with another man." She broke off, turned her eyes to the garden and murmured wistfully, "When two people really love each other, they ought to be sufficient to themselves. Nothing else ought to come between, nothing else ought to matter. You don't understand me, but you will some day. You will when you fall in love."

"I do understand," Jenny Blair said eagerly, in an effort to overcome the feeling that more was expected of her than she was able to give.

"Do you, dear? Well, you will understand still better when you are older. You will know then that a great love doesn't leave room for anything else in a woman's life. It is everything."

"Everything," the child echoed faintly. Something, she knew, was required of her; but the exact nature of the demand she could not comprehend. With Mr. Birdsong, she had known immediately that it was nursing he craved, the maternal sort of nursing she gave her doll after she dropped it. So naturally had this response welled up in her heart that it had seemed effortless. In the warmth of her sympathy the years between them had melted like frost, and in spite of his bigness and splendour, he had become, for the moment at least, as dependent upon her protection as the battered doll she had cherished so tenderly because it had lost an eye and the better part of its hair. But vaguely, through some deep intuition, she realized that Mrs. Birdsong's appeal was less easy to satisfy. What Mrs. Birdsong craved was not nursing, was not even sympathy. She demanded more than the child could give, more even than she could grasp.

"I used to think I wanted to be a great singer," Mrs. Birdsong mused aloud in a bright reverie. "But that was before I fell in love. After that, I stopped wanting anything else." The needle flashed into the satin. "It seems absurd now, but when we were engaged, it made me dreadfully unhappy if he so much as looked at another girl. I remember crying half the night because Daisy Wallace threw him a white rosebud from her bouquet, and he stuck it in his buttonhole." A haunted look crossed her face and was gone as swiftly as the shadow of a bird in the air. Then, holding up the primrose-coloured satin, she asked with a smile that brought the glow back into her eyes, "Mother's rose-point bertha will look well on this, don't you think?"

"Lovely," Jenny Blair answered, and she longed to add, though she could not bring herself to form the words with her prim child's mouth, "You are like roses and lilies, you are like roses and lilies."

"I hope it will be becoming, because it has been so long since I went anywhere. I want people to see that I haven't lost my looks."

"Mamma says you are as beautiful as you ever were."

"That's sweet of her." She glanced round at the roses and delphinium and laughed softly. "What else do they say of me, Jenny Blair?"

Gazing up at her, Jenny Blair tried in vain to gather her thoughts, while her mind lay still as the garden pool and waited for the reflection of Mrs. Birdsong's beauty to sink down to its clear depths. And not her beauty alone but all the little graces that made her different from any one else in the world,--the airy fringe on her forehead, the wisp of curls escaping from the knot on the nape of her neck, the way the colour ebbed and flowed in her cheeks, the trick she had of catching her lower lip in her teeth and smiling as if she also knew a secret, the tiny brown mole at the point of her left eyebrow, and above all the flowerlike blue of her eyes beneath the shadowy dusk of her lashes. These were things, the child told herself, that she could never forget. These were things that made Mrs. Birdsong more surprising, more startling to look at than any one else. Everything fresh and lovely in the world was mingled with her image in Jenny Blair's thoughts. If you took her away, something bright and joyous went out of the garden and the June sky and the piping of birds.