Читать книгу The Sheltered Life - Ellen Glasgow - Страница 7

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"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.

But at the end of the first year, his two daughters were still shrouded in mourning, and poor Etta's reason was almost despaired of; at the end of the second year, his son's widow failed in her endeavour and came with her only child to live in his house; and at the end of the third year, the fatherless little girl had twined herself about the roots of his heart. Even then, with three women and one little girl making a home for him, he had not relinquished the hope of his Indian summer of happiness--that patient hope of the old, so much less elastic and so much more enduring than the hope of the young.

Yet, in the end, this also was slowly strangled by life. By life and by the suffocating grasp of appearances. How could he spoil the lives of three women and one fatherless little girl? How could he bring his joy with the dove's eyes into a house which was already filled with these three women and one little girl tenderly making a home for him? If they had not been so devoted, it might have been easier; but love, as marriage had taught him (for his wife also had loved him before the end of their honeymoon), is responsible for most of the complications of life.

Jenny Blair was jumping up and down in his arms. "Grandfather, I've read a hundred and fifty pages. Don't you think you can pay me?"

"Pay you? What's that, darling? Well, we'll see, we'll see." Looking over her head, he said gently, "I hope you've had a pleasant day, my dears. Has your neuralgia troubled you, Etta?"

Etta smiled at him appealingly while she pressed her hand to her sunken temples. "It was bad this morning, but I took a headache powder, and that helped me."

"Poor child," he said, "poor child," for he sincerely pitied her. "Neuralgia must run in our family. Your grandmother used to complain of it when I was a boy. I remember to this day the red marks from mustard plasters on her temples, and then there was poor Margaret--"

He broke off with a sigh, for his only sister had been dear to him, though she had eloped, when he was a boy, with an Italian musician, who had turned out to have a wife somewhere in Europe. After she had run away, Margaret had vanished completely. He could still remember the despairing efforts his father had made to find some trace of her abroad, and the way his mother used to wake in the night crying because she had dreamed that her daughter did not have enough cover to protect her from the cold. In his early twenties, he had looked for her over Europe; but all he ever discovered was that she had died alone in some obscure lodging-house in Vienna. Well, well, poor girl, it was useless to deny that all the Archbalds were subject to intermittent flashes of nature.

There was, for example, the case of his great-aunt Sabina, who had publicly defied her Creator, in the early years of Virginia, and had escaped suspicion of witchcraft merely because she was related to all the best blood in the Colony. Then, too, there was Rodney, his brother--but Rodney's tragedy was far more modern in character. Instead of defying his Creator, he had quietly resigned from creation. But he was always, the General recalled, a quiet chap, and so, when he had put a bullet in his heart, he had left a scrawl that said only, "Shadows are not enough." Nobody knew what he meant. Crazy, they called him. Crazy, because after twenty-nine years of life, having exhausted alike the pleasures of love and the consolations of religion, he had found that shadows are not enough. Long ago, he might have been forgotten, as most unpleasant recollections are forgotten in the struggle for happiness, if Isabella's features had not preserved the shape of his fine Roman nose, the glowing dusk of his eyes, and the ivory space between the bold black curves of his eyebrows. And then, just as the General had become reconciled to the living memorial of Isabella's countenance, his granddaughter had shot up from an expressionless baby into a wilful child, who combined the doubts of his great-aunt Sabina with the eyebrows of Rodney and the pointed tongue of Erminia.

"Poor girl, poor girl," he murmured again, while he stroked back the straight brown hair from Etta's forehead. Then, in a more natural tone, he inquired, "What's become of William? Has anybody seen William?" For William, his English setter, demanded nothing of him, not even that he should feel a suffocating emotion when he was old and tired.

"I saw him come in," Jenny Blair said, still plunging up and down with her hands on the General's arm. "He must have gone back to ask Zoana for something to eat. He is very fond of Zoana."

"He eats too much." It was a relief to be able to laugh. "He is beginning to look middle-aged before he is six."

One November afternoon three years before (was it really that long ago?) he had met William, trembling and caked with mud, as he was dragged at the end of a dirty rope from his last ignominious encounter with quail. As a cure for gun-shyness, some blundering fool had peppered the dog's legs with bird-shot. That's the way with them still, thought the old man, searching his memory, there are many fools in the world, but the biggest fool of all is the fool sportsman who believes that a load of bird-shot will break a dog of being afraid of a gun. The free end of the rope was in the hand of a small coloured boy. Black as pitch, alert, wiry, nimble, it was queer the way that little negro persisted. William had been given to him, he had explained, and he was going to try some new way of breaking. His Pa knew a heap about curing bird dogs that were gun-shy.

"Wait a minute," the old man had said slowly. What, he wondered immediately afterwards, had made him say that. "Wait a minute," as if he had nothing more to do than stand in the mud of a red clay road and haggle with a negro urchin over a hunting-dog that was not only gun-shy but peppered with bird-shot. Very slowly, he had opened his pocketbook, and very slowly, after unfolding two one-dollar notes, he had handed them to the boy in exchange for the dog and the rope. What on earth--he had muttered under his breath, what on earth--and Cora didn't like dogs. Suddenly the moment had gone flat. Cora didn't like dogs. Long after the boy had pattered off down the red clay road, the General had stood there, with the dirty rope in his hand, waiting, in the midst of the autumn landscape, for a gleam of light to break into his mind. Cora didn't like dogs. And all the time William had looked up at him, from the other end of the rope, defeated, suspicious, utterly disillusioned. "No, I do not love human nature," the old man had thought, without irony and without emotion, while he bent over to ease the strain on the dog's neck.

That was the beginning of a satisfactory, though reticent, association. Unhappy memories had dampened the joy of living and extinguished sentimentality in man and dog. But Cora, who did not like dogs, admired, as she said, their fine qualities, and refused, as usual, to make a point of her prejudices. It may have occurred to her, as a simple way out of her troubles, that a dog, especially one that is gun-shy, is less upsetting in the house than a second wife, especially one that is young. No matter what happened, it is always possible, she had found, to believe the best and to trust that, sooner or later, with the help of a merciful Providence, the best may turn out to be true. As for the General, he had been obliged, for forty years, to bestow perfunctory caresses, and now, in his old age, he asked little more than the companionship that makes no demands. William, more soundly disenchanted, appeared, and perhaps was, contented to lie for hours at peace in the sunshine. Only, whenever he was taken into the country that first autumn, he would begin to tremble again at the sight of fields and woods; and then the General would take him in his arms and stroke his body, while Robert, the coachman, was ordered to return to the city. And again the old man would think, "No, it is true, I do not love human nature." Three years had gone by; yet even to-day the noise of a train or the faint far-off sound of a shot would awaken in William's nerves the old paroxysms of fear.

"And Isabella?" The General's manner was still playful. "Is she in the kitchen too?"

"She was here a minute ago," Mrs. Archbald answered, "but I'm afraid I said something that hurt her feelings. She went out. I think down to the stable." For an instant she hesitated, and then added with a significant look, "Don't you think, Father, it is time the work on the stable was finished?"

The General started, for he never missed a point in his daughter-in-law's strategy. "The Crockers will do the best they can," he replied. "I left it to them."

"I know," Mrs. Archbald assented. Then she said in a severe tone, "Jenny Blair, stop hanging on your grandfather. I told you not to worry him."

"I'm not worrying him, Mamma, but you said I might ask him. Grandfather, will you pay me for a hundred and fifty pages? They are dreadfully poky."

"We'll see, we'll see. If you are in urgent need, I suppose I'll have to do something about it."

"Oh, thank you, Grandfather darling." She took a step toward the door, picked up her skates, and swinging them in her hand, paused to look back over her shoulder. "Did you know the bad smell had come back?"

"Yes, I know, my child, but there's nothing to be done about that. Already it has gone, hasn't it?"

She wheeled round on the threshold. "I wish I could go down to the place it comes from. Do people live down there?"

"Yes, people live there. That is one of the wrongs of our civilization, that some people are obliged to live with bad smells."

"I wish I could go down there. I mean just to look."

"Put that idea straight out of your mind, Jenny Blair," Mrs. Archbald commanded with weary tartness. "I have trouble enough as it is."