Ellen Glasgow - The Sheltered Life

"Only to lop off decayed branches. It might, however, be worth more if Joseph is able to convince Isabella that she married above her."

"Oh, I haven't told Isabella! She would only make fun of it and ask me to spend the money on little Erminia's teeth. But I'm doing it all for Erminia. Isabella is so lacking in class feeling that Erminia is sure to have too much of it. When she grows up she may want to join the 'Daughters of the Barons of Runnemede' through her father's line. The world moves that way."

"Yes, I've noticed it in other matters, particularly in the profession of law."

"It is strange, though, about families," Mrs. Archbald observed, as she rose and swept up the spools and scraps from the desk. "I mean the way they go down and come up again. Every one thinks the Crockers' family history has been most extraordinary." Small, bright-eyed, very erect, she stood with her work-bag in her arms waiting to help him to his feet.

"After all, we're stronger than I thought, Cora. I feared that noblesse oblige had been exhausted by Breverton Goddard. It is still true, however, that the only real test of importance is to fly in the face of it."

"I know you think it ridiculous, Father, but there is little Erminia--"

The old man smiled at her perplexity. He knew her mind as well as she knew it herself, perhaps better, and he had often wondered how so good a woman could have so little regard for truth. There wasn't a kinder person on earth; but if she ever spoke the truth, it was by accident, or on one of those rare occasions when truth is more pleasant than fiction. Not that he distrusted her now. Her documents were in order, no doubt, and the deception in this particular instance resided, he suspected, in record or even in genealogy. No, it was the way her higher nature lent itself to deceit that amused his intelligence while it exasperated his conscience. Had it been her lower nature, he thought whimsically, one might become more easily reconciled. But because she was charitable and benign, her dissembling became, in some incredible fashion, the servant of goodness. How much innocent pleasure had she conferred, how much painful embarrassment had she relieved! Even when she had stood between him and happiness, he had never doubted that she was ruining his old age from the noblest motives. Yet what is goodness, he asked himself, with a flash of penetration, and how do we recognize it when it appears? If it exists at all, pure goodness must be superior to truth, superior even to chastity. It must be not a cardinal but an ultimate virtue.

Rising very slowly, as if his joints were brittle, he balanced his weight without taking the hand Mrs. Archbald stretched toward him. From the centre of the floral design, William looked up and thumped his tail three times on the carpet. He also had grown stiff in the joints, and he realized that, since the dinner hour was approaching, the separation would be only a brief one.

"Shall I call Robert?" Mrs. Archbald asked, and her tone was full of solicitude.

"No, I can manage the stairs by myself. He is probably waiting for me. All I need to make me young again, my dear, as I've told you so often before, is a new pair of legs." He crossed the room, and holding firmly to the back of a Queen Anne chair, looked round at her. Was there something he had forgotten? Or did his slowness mean that he was too tired to walk upstairs by himself?

"Father," her voice was cheerful but pleading, "won't you let me call Robert?"

"No, my dear, there is nothing the matter. Only," his brow wrinkled in annoyance, "I remembered that I'd forgotten to ask after Etta."

"She had a bad morning, poor thing, but the doctor gave her codeine, and that relieved the pain in her head. I told Clayton to take her dinner up a little early. She so often feels better after she eats something. Doctor Pembroke thinks her headaches come from sinus trouble, and he is treating her every day."

"I'll stop to speak to her as I go by."

"Wouldn't you rather wait till after dinner? You will feel stronger then."

"Well, I'll see. I'll see." Yes, she was right—she was usually right—he needed the unfailing solace of food. After dinner, he would feel braced, he would feel replenished in courage.

As he reached the head of the stairs, Jenny Blair, in a new dress of rose-coloured chiffon, ran out of her room. "Aren't you coming down, Grandfather? I thought I was late."

"In a minute, my dear. Run ahead."

"I wish our house had a place downstairs where you could wash your hands and brush your hair. The Peytons have one."

"Well, I don't envy them. I like where I've lived and the ways I'm used to. I don't mind the stairs, but I miss the feeling of my old velvet jacket." And he thought, as he watched her flitting down the stairs, "The child grows prettier every day. That rose-coloured frock gives her the glow she needs." Soft, starry-eyed, with a centre of inscrutable mystery, she slipped away from him, while he said to himself, "The poets are right. Nothing in life is so precious as innocence."

Glancing through Etta's half-open door, he saw that she had pushed aside her dinner-tray, and was reading a book with a yellow cover by the light on the candlestand.

"Don't you find that reading makes your head worse, my child?" he asked, pausing a moment.

Etta, who had been lost to the world in the French language, thrust her book under the bedclothes and turned a dejected face on her father. Dangerous reading had been her only vice ever since the days when she had hidden under the bed to enjoy in secret a borrowed copy of Moths; but even Ouida had begun to seem stale—or was it immature?--in the twentieth century.

While he gazed down on his invalid daughter, the old man wished, and reproached himself for the wish, that Etta had been born with a little—a very little would suffice—of Isabella's attraction. If only sympathy were softened by the faintest shadow of luxury! There was nothing, he told himself, that he would not do, no sacrifice that he would not make, for her comfort. In one way, at least, she was closer to him, she was dearer than Isabella, or even than Jenny Blair; but it was a way that made him long to look somewhere else, that depressed him unbearably. Just as Isabella's defiance appeased some secret revolt, some thwarted and twisted instinct for happiness, so Etta revived in the flesh another and a defeated side of his nature. She embodied all those harsh and thorny realities from which he had tried in vain to escape. He had closed the door on ineffectual pity, and she had opened it wide. He had hardened himself against desire that is impotent, and she wore the living shape of it whenever he looked at her. Now, as he bent over and stroked her head, he felt for a moment that she gazed up at him with the incredible eyes of his own disappointment.

"Isn't it bad for you to read so steadily, my child?" he asked again, because he could think of nothing to add to the question.

"I have to do something, Father. I can't just lie here and think." Her long sallow face, with its opaque expression and imperfect teeth, was like a waxen mask which concealed every change of thought, every wandering gleam of intelligence. The jagged streaks from a menthol pencil had left a yellow stain on her forehead, and she had pushed back her pale brown hair until it hung in a straight veil to her shoulders. Some women, he reflected, appear to advantage in bed; but poor Etta was not one of these fortunate creatures. In all her clothes, after the temporary repairs achieved by Mrs. Archbald, she was sufficiently attractive for a woman who put no strain upon the fragile emotions of men. But prostrate from a severe headache, and too ill to submit to the simplest improvements, she was scarcely more appealing than some heartless caricature of feminine charms. Poor girl, poor girl, if only one were not so helpless against illness! For she was the victim of life itself, not of human or social injustice, not even of any system invented by man. No system could help her, not all the rights of suffrage piled on one another could improve a mortal lot that had been defeated before it came into the world. It might be possible—it was always possible, of course, to blame heredity; but Isabella, with the same inheritance, he reminded himself, was strong, handsome, magnetic, with a hearty relish for life. Had there been some secret flaw in his own nature, or in Erminia's open and innocent soul? We know so little of inheritance, he thought, we know so little of anything. Perhaps when we learn more . . . Perhaps, poor girl, he sighed, and turned away from the old spectre of impotent pity. . . .