Ellen Glasgow - The Sheltered Life

"Eva has risen above that. She could rise above everything except George's unfaithfulness. I believe," Mrs. Archbald continued shrewdly, "that what isn't love in her is the necessity to justify her sacrifice to herself—perhaps to the world. To have given up all that—and she really believes that she gave up a career in grand opera—for anything less than a great passion would seem inexcusable. That is at the bottom of her jealousy—that and never having had any children. Of course she can't understand that showing jealousy only makes matters worse. Though she has never opened her lips on the subject, I believe she is worrying herself to death now over George's fancy for Delia Barron. Delia isn't bad at heart, but she will flirt with a lamp-post."

Etta wiped her eyes. "Do you suppose it is true that George has been keeping Memoria? Why, Memoria has done their washing for years."

"Oh, Etta, I try not to think of that."

"But wasn't he taken ill in her house, and didn't Eva have to go to him because they thought he was dying?"

"No, that was another woman. She wasn't coloured, but she was worse than Memoria. I don't care what anybody tells me, I always insist that there is good in Memoria. She has had a hard struggle to bring up her three children, and she has taken devoted care of her mother ever since she was paralyzed. I've never seen any sense in trying to put the blame on the coloured women, especially," she concluded crisply, "when they are so nearly white. Memoria has always worked hard, no matter who keeps her, and I never saw a better laundress when she takes pains. Father always complains if I let anybody else do up his shirts."

"I wonder why those mulatto women are so good-looking," Etta sighed again. "It doesn't seem right."

"Well, I don't know. Perhaps it is some sort of compensation. Your father says that Memoria has noble bones. Of course no man would stop to think that she gets her upright bearing from carrying baskets on her head. Jenny Blair, I thought you'd gone out to play," she said in a sharper tone, as her daughter ran in from the hall.

"I was going, Mamma, but I saw Grandfather coming, and I waited to ask if he will pay me for a hundred and fifty pages. Joseph Crocker says I do need a new pair of skates. He can't make this roller roll any better."

"Well, your grandfather is coming in. You may ask him. But, remember, he isn't so young as you are, and I don't wish you to worry him."

"I won't, Mamma. I saw Mrs. Birdsong, too, and her face is like a pink heart. Joseph says it is like a pink heart on a valentine."

For an instant Mrs. Archbald appeared almost to give up. While she put one hand to her brow, the artificial smile on her lips trembled and dissolved in a sigh. Then, collecting herself with an effort, she patted the stiff roll of her hair, and adjusted her slightly bulging figure to the severe front of her stays. "I don't know what to do with you, Jenny Blair," she said sternly. "You no sooner get an idea into your head than you run it straight into the ground. Now, ask your grandfather, if you choose, and then run out to play before the sun begins to go down."

"The room is too close," General Archbald said while he stooped to receive the embraces of his daughter and his daughter-in-law.

At seventy-five, he was a tall, spare, very erect old man, with features carved into nobility by tragic experience. Beneath the thick, silver-grey hair, the eyebrows were still dark and beetling; the eagle nose was still betrayed by the sensitive mouth under the short grey moustache. Only his eyes, with their far inward gaze, were the eyes of a man who had been born out of his time. In his early years, before the War Between the States, he had lived much abroad; yet everywhere, even in his native Virginia, he had known that he was not a part of his age. The clock was set too far back, or, perhaps, too far ahead. But he could not make himself feel as the people about him felt; he could not bring himself to believe the things they believed.

For thirty years he had been a good husband to a woman he had married by accident, because, after a country dance from which they had stolen away alone, they had been caught out in a sleigh until the end of a snowstorm. How often, he reflected, with sardonic amusement, had poor Isabella's tragedy occurred in the past! To save appearances (what had his whole life been but saving his own or some other person's appearance?), he had proposed the next morning to a comparative stranger; and to save appearances (though she had been in love with another man), she had accepted him. To save appearances, they had lived amicably together, and more in duty than in passion, they had brought three well-appearing children into the world.

The son, a handsome and engaging fellow, had been killed in a fox-hunt; but his widow, a woman with a genuine gift for managing people and events, occupied Richard's room in his father's house and Richard's chair at the table. Though she had been as good as a right hand to him, the General was fond of saying, she was the only person left in the world, since God had removed his wife, whom the old man not only respected but feared. For the last two years, while her presence brightened his home, the hardest battle of his life had been fought to a finish between them. With all his frustrated youth and his aging rebellious soul, he had longed to marry again. He had longed to seek and find his one brief hour of delight, and she had stood in his way. Mild, charming, implacable, with all the secret malice of destiny, she had stood in his way. Even when he had found the love he desired in his age—a slim, nunlike woman, young but not too young to be companionable, smiling up over her Prayer-Book in Saint Luke's Church—he had felt that his longing was hopeless because his daughter-in-law was the stronger.

After a heartbroken youth (for he had known tragic passion), after thirty years of heroic fidelity in an age when marriage was an invisible prison, he had been obliged to sacrifice that fading glimmer of happiness. Supported by his daughters, who demanded that he should be faithful to a wife he had never loved, supported by public opinion, which exacted that he should remain inconsolable for the loss of a woman he had married by accident, his son's widow had stood, small, plump, immovable as the rock of ages, between him and his desire. Thirty years, and God alone would ever know what those years had meant to him! Not that he had wished for his wife's death. Not that he had failed in the obligations of marriage. But in that shared confinement of thirty years, in that lifelong penalty he had paid for an accident, for a broken sleigh, for being caught out in a snowstorm, there had been flashes of impulse in which he had asked himself, "How long shall I be able to live like this?"

Yet he had endured it. For thirty years, day and night, waking, sleeping, in sickness and in health, having children, as married persons are expected to do—for thirty years he had sacrificed his youth, his middle age, his dreams, his imagination, all the vital instincts that make a man, to the moral earnestness of tradition. Well, he had lived through it. He had lived through it until, at seventy-one, just as he had reached the turn in a long life when a man, if he has been prudent, still retains vigour enough for a last flare at the end—just as he had reached this turn in his life, Erminia had died, and release had come like a blow.

She had died, and immediately, so unreasonable are the ways of the heart, he had been overcome by regret. Almost to his astonishment, he had felt her loss, he had grieved for her, he had reproached himself bitterly. Lying in her coffin, with that defenseless smile on her lips and a wisp of tulle hiding her throat, she had appealed to his tenderness more deeply than she had ever appealed to his passion. In the days that followed, he had suffered as a man suffers who loses an aching limb. But regret, he discovered before six months had gone, is not among the enduring realities. "When the year is over," he had told himself, meeting his daughter-in-law's brimming eyes with a shiver of apprehension, "Even if I wait until the year is over, I shall be still young enough to find a little happiness at the end." Already, though he had been a faithful husband, he knew where happiness might be found. He had seen the nunlike figure and the dove's eyes of a joy that was young, and yet not too young to be companionable to restful age. Well, a year, even at seventy-one, is not everlasting.