Ellen Glasgow - The Sheltered Life

It was at this moment, while that quiet happiness was filling his thoughts, that his look dropped to the street, and he saw George Birdsong passing along the pavement on the way to his gate. For a single heart-beat, no more, the old man was shocked into wonder. Then, as quickly, astonishment faded. Florid, refreshed, invigorated by his escape, George glanced with a slightly furtive air at the houses he passed. A few hours later, after a cold shower and a hearty breakfast, he would return with replenished sympathy, no doubt, to Eva's bedside.

After he had entered his gate and disappeared behind the boughs of the trees, General Archbald sat plunged in meditation from which happiness had strangely departed. The world of good intentions had not altered; yet, in some inexplicable way, it was different. Virtue—or was it merely philosophy?--seemed to have gone out of it. "I wish Robert would come," he thought. "I'll feel better again as soon as I've had my coffee."

The sun rose in the heavenly blue; the birds called in the trees; and the vague discord of life, swelling suddenly louder, drifted in from the streets. With inexpressible relief, he found that the ripple had passed on, but the deepened sense of security, that tideless calm of being old, had not wavered. At eighty-three, he could still look ahead to the spring and the summer, and beyond the spring and the summer to the happiest years of his life, when nothing, not even life itself, would be necessary.

It was the end of June before Mrs. Birdsong was well enough to leave the hospital, and then, after a few days at home, she went for a long visit to her uncle, Frederick Howard, who lived at the family place near Winchester. The morning before she left, Jenny Blair ran in with a little gift, and found her weeping in front of the oblong mirror on her dressing-table.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," the girl cried, with passionate sympathy. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Nothing, dear, nothing. You've been an angel." Turning away from the mirror, Mrs. Birdsong wrapped Jenny Blair's kimono, with the design of trailing wistaria, about her, and sank into a wicker chair by the window. "You are always giving me pretty things," she added, untying the package and taking out a nightgown of blue crêpe de chine, "but you ought to keep them for yourself."

"I'd rather you had them," Jenny Blair said, and she meant it. "I'd give you anything I have if it could do any good."

"It is too pretty," Mrs. Birdsong answered softly, while the tears welled up in her eyes, and she turned her face to the window.

In the neglected garden below the old perennials were blooming again. The grass had grown too high; but pink roses and larkspur and pale purple foxglove survived in the flower-beds, and a cloud of blue morning glories drifted over a broken trellis to the window-sill by which Mrs. Birdsong was sitting. Against the luminous warmth and colour her brilliant fairness looked worn and tarnished. Illness had left her cheeks drawn and haggard, and her skin, which General Archbald had compared to alabaster, was tinged with faint yellow on the temples and about the mouth. In the darkened hollows her eyes were veiled and remote, and when she lost animation, there was the flicker of some deep hostility in the blue fire of her gaze. Even her lips, touched carelessly with red, looked straight and hard, and her fixed smile seemed to change with an effort. Only the pure outline of her head and profile was as lovely as ever.

"It is nothing but nerves," she said presently, with a sob that turned into a laugh. "I sometimes think the nervous breakdown has been worse than the operation. It has left me more unstrung and at the mercy of everything that goes wrong. Doctor Bridges and John both say I'll be well again if I have patience—but it is so hard to have patience."

"You're getting well. You will soon be strong again," Jenny Blair answered, while her heart was wrung with emotion. "Let me turn down your bed. You have been up too long, and you look so lovely in bed with your curls on your neck. Have you noticed," she asked cheerfully, "how beautifully everything in the room matches your kimono?"

The colours of the room were blue and mauve, and the chintz curtains, faded by many washings, held a shadowy design of wistaria and larkspur. A flowered paper, worn but still bright, covered the sunny walls, and there was a coverlet of blue silk, a present from Mrs. Archbald, on the foot of the bed. The morning sunshine fell in a chequered pattern over Ariel's cage at the window.

Mrs. Birdsong shook her head, while her tears flowed over features so inanimate that they might have been carved in ivory. "I can't stay in bed all the time. I must use my strength. I am going away to-morrow, and I must use my strength," she repeated despairingly.

"It will be cool in the mountains, and you will soon begin to improve. Anybody would be weak after that long illness."

"Nobody knows, nobody knows what I have been through."

"But you're getting well. You're getting well, only you must be careful. The doctor told you to go very slowly at first."

While her arms enfolded her friend, Jenny Blair felt that she was aching with sympathy and compassion. How she loved her! Not for anything in the world would she betray her trust. It was true that she loved George, too (she had begun to call him "George" in her thoughts), in a different way—oh, so different!--but that wasn't her fault. She had not chosen to fall in love with him. Some winged power over which she had no control had swept her from the earth to the sky. Since it was useless to deny her love, she could only remind her conscience (near enough to the nineteenth century to make scruples) that she did not mean the slightest harm in the world. All she asked was to cherish this romantic love in the depths of her heart. "Nothing could make me hurt her," she thought passionately, "but it can't harm her to have me love him in secret." And, besides, even if she were to try with all her strength, she could not stop loving him; she could not destroy this burning essence of life that saturated her being. "When you can't help a thing, nobody can blame you."

Kneeling on the floor, crumpling her pink linen dress, with her arms about Mrs. Birdsong, and her hard young heart dissolving with pity, she said aloud, "You must get well soon. You must get well soon because there is nobody like you."

Within her arms, she felt Mrs. Birdsong relax and give way, as if courage had failed. She looked straight before her into the sunshine, and her eyes were like blue hollows in which the light quivered, sank, and was drowned. Yet even in despair, Jenny Blair thought, she was more vital than any one else. Though her radiance was dimmed and sunken, it infused a glow into the room, into the house, which borrowed life from her presence, into the summer wildness and stillness of the garden.

"I shall never be well again," she said suddenly. "Something tells me I shall be like this always."

"But you won't. The doctors all say that you will be well again."

"They say that, but I know better."

Jenny Blair kissed her hand. "Let me put you to bed. You are sad because you're tired."

"In a minute, dear. I'll go in a minute." Pushing the hair back from her forehead, Mrs. Birdsong sat up very straight and wiped a moisture like dew from her lashes. "Only let me get a breath of air. I must be in bed before George comes home. It depresses him terribly when he finds me like this. I know I am selfish; but, somehow, for the first time in my life, I can't think of anything but what I've been through. Self-pity is a contemptible thing," she added, with an empty laugh, and asked abruptly, "Has it turned very much hotter!"

"No, it has been hot all the morning. Shall I turn on the fan? I wish you could have gone away before this last hot spell. Poor Aunt Etta is feeling it dreadfully; but Grandfather doesn't seem to mind the heat as much as we do. Old persons don't suffer with heat, do they?"