Ellen Glasgow - The Sheltered Life

Then, suddenly, while her whole being vibrated, a shudder jerked through his muscles, and she was left there, alone and abandoned, as his arms dropped from her body. From the horror in his face, she knew, before she spun round, that Mrs. Birdsong was looking at them out of the dusk in the library. Frozen, expressionless, grey as a shadow, she smiled through them and beyond them to the empty horizon. For an instant time paused. Then she said in a voice that was as vacant as her smile, "George, I want you," and turned slowly back into the room. Without a rustle, as soundlessly as she had come, she turned away, and was sucked in by the twilight.

"No! No!" Jenny Blair cried, and flung out her hand, as if she were pushing aside a moment too terrible to be borne. She was alone and deserted in space. Without a word to her, without so much as a look, George had followed his wife into the house. "No! No!" the girl cried out again, thrusting Mrs. Birdsong's smile back into the dusk, into the nightmare of things that could not have happened. Breaking from the trance that held her, she ran down into the garden, far down by the old lily-pond, and circled round and round, like a small animal that is looking for the hole in a trap. Round and round, and always back again to the place from which she had started, as she had fled in one of her old dreams that she had never forgotten. After a few minutes of violent flight, she sank down on the ground behind the mulberry tree, crouching in the shadow and straining her ears for any sound from the house. In the centre of a vast loneliness, she listened to sudden noises from the street, to the long reverberations of crashing things within and without. Then, abruptly, the rattle of crashing things, of falling skies everywhere, stopped. Except for the tumult in her mind, and the distant sound of motor cars, the garden was as still as if it waited for the coming of thunder. The dusk was sultry with vapour, and a tarnished light was burning far down in the west. Presently, while she lay there, this light stole into her mind, and everything in her thoughts was discoloured, while that evil odour poured up from the hollow below and tainted the air. "Nothing has happened," she said aloud, sitting up in the damp grass. "Nothing has really happened."

A lamp flashed on, then off and on again, in the house. She saw a figure pass and repass the library window, and she thought, "That is John. John will know what to do." An instant later, the figure came to the door and she heard her name called sharply. "Jenny Blair! Are you out there, Jenny Blair?" The voice was so unlike John's that it might have been a stranger calling her name in a tone of distracted impatience.

Rising from the ground and pressing her damp skirts about her legs as she walked, she went across the grass and out of the dusk into the square of light on the porch. For the first time, she felt that she was shivering and that her knees and elbows were twitching. The passage from the dimness into the light seemed to strip her stark naked. She felt her clothes torn away and the illumination pricking her flesh.

She had expected to find John waiting for her; but when she reached the house, he had turned back into the library. As she crossed the threshold, he looked over his shoulder and said, "There has been an accident. I am trying to get your grandfather. There has been an accident," he repeated in a smothered voice, as if he were struggling to cry out in his sleep.

Her steps dragged into the room, and stopping before she looked round her, she thought, "I know what I shall see." But, at first, when she raised her eyes, she saw only the dead ducks on the desk and the table. One pair had slipped to the floor, with the bit of green ribbon holding the outstretched necks together. Drops of blood were still in the beaks, as if they had been nibbling, and the heads rested on the sweeping lace flounce of Mrs. Birdsong's tea-gown. With an effort, pressing her eyeballs, Jenny Blair looked at Mrs. Birdsong, who sat very erect, and gazed, with her fixed smile, into the twilight beyond the window. Her face was so vacant that her expression and even her features were like wax. The waves of her hair clung to her scalp; her skin was as colourless as the skin of the dead; and her eyes and mouth were mere hollows of darkness. On the rug at her feet the ducks were huddled together over George's gun, as if she had just kicked them away.

While she stared at the splotches of dried blood on their breasts, Jenny Blair heard herself thinking, "She killed him. And he will have blood on him. When I look, he will have blood on him." Her eyelids were as heavy as lead, so heavy that she could barely lift her lashes. Turning slowly, she looked, and there was blood on his lips. Fallen slightly against the desk, he lay back in the Windsor chair, and seemed to watch her with the look of helpless reproach he had worn so often in life.

After an eternity, she still stood there. She had not thought; she had not felt; she had simply stood there and stared at the flecks of blood on his lips. John was speaking to her, she knew, as if she were deaf or an idiot, repeating over and over words without sense, without meaning. "He shot himself. It was an accident. Do you hear what I say? It was an accident." Then she saw that her grandfather was looking down on Mrs. Birdsong, was stooping over to lift her. How he got there, when he came in, she did not know. One moment there was nobody, and the next, her grandfather stood looking down on Mrs. Birdsong.

"Cora wasn't at home," she heard him say, "but I've sent for her." And, in a louder tone, as if his throat hurt him, "It was an accident." There was fear, there was despair, in his voice. "But how could it have happened? How was it possible?"

Then John's answer, low, intense, determined, "It did happen. It was an accident."

As if the hammered phrase had released some spring by which she moved and thought, a spasm shuddered through Jenny Blair's mind. Dropping into a chair, she threw back her head and began to scream with the thin, sharp cry of an animal caught in a trap.

"Stop that!" John called angrily. Crossing the room with a stride, he seized her and shook her into silence. "Stop that noise! General, can't you make her keep quiet?"

Turning away from Mrs. Birdsong, the old man spoke in a wandering tone, with an effort to separate his words as he uttered them. "Don't be brutal, John. The shock has unnerved her. Remember how young she is, and how innocent." Stretching out his old arms, he added gently, "It is too much for you, my darling. You had better go home and wait for your mother."

Springing to her feet, Jenny Blair stared at him with eyes that saw nothing. Desperately, as if she were about to run round and round in the same circle, she flung herself into his arms.

"Oh, Grandfather, I didn't mean anything," she cried, as she sank down into blackness. "I didn't mean anything in the world!"

THE END