The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

The pain that came for her was when,—pausing to gaze long into her face, printing forever upon his mind the wonderful memory of what she could look like, for him—he kissed her lips; it came in a pang of personal longing; in a yearning, that rose and stifled her, for other arms, other kisses; and, opening her eyes, she saw, an ironic answer to the inner cry, Gavan’s face outside, turned upon her in an instant of swift passing.

Grainger had not seen. He did not speak another word to her. The kiss upon her lips had been in farewell. He had had his supreme moment. He let her go and left her.

V

AVAN came up from the burn, restless and dissatisfied.

He had wanted solitude, escape; but when he was alone, and walking beside the sun-dappled water, the loneliness weighed on him and he had seemed to himself walking with his own ghost, looking into eyes familiar yet alien, with curiosity and with fear. Was it he or that phantom of the solitude who smiled the long, still smile of mockery?

How he wanted something and how he wanted not to want; to be freed from the intolerable stirring and striving within him, as of a maimed thing, with half-atrophied wings, that could never rise and fly to its goal. It was last night that had wakened this turmoil, and as he walked his thought turned and turned about those moments under the dazzling sky when he had found her hand in the fringes of her shawl.

He knew that there had been a difference in the yielding of her hand, as he had known, in his own helpless stretching out for it in the darkness, another impulse than that of childlike tenderness. It had been as if some deep, primeval will beneath his own had stretched his hand out, searching in the dark; and with the strange blissfulness of so standing with her beneath the stars, there came a strange, new fear, as though he no longer knew himself and were become an automaton held by some incalculable force.

Wandering through the woods in the hope of reëntering nature’s beneficent impersonality, he felt no anodynes—only that striving and stirring within him of maimed limbs and helpless wings.

There was no refuge in nature, and there was none in himself. The thought of Eppie as refuge did not form itself, but it was again in seeking, as if through darkness for he knew not what, that he turned to the house. And then, on all his tangled mood, fell the vibrating shock of that vision at the window.