The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

She made no gesture, no appeal. Her face was like a rock. It was only that deep endurance and, under it, that deep threat. Never, never would she allure; never draw him to her; never build in her cathedral a Venusberg for him. He must come to her. He must kneel, with her, before her altar. He must worship, with her, her God of suffering and triumph. And, the dying light making her face waver before his eyes with a visionary strangeness, stern and angelic, he seemed to see, deep in her eyes, the burning of high, sacramental candles.

That was the last he saw. In silence she turned and went. And what she left with him was the sad, awed sense of beauty that he knew when watching kneeling multitudes bowed before the great myth of the Church,—in silence, beneath dim, soaring heights. He was near humanity in such moments of self-losing, when the cruder myth of the great world, built up by desire, slipped from it. And Eppie, in this symbolic seeing of her, was nearer than when he desired or feared her. Beauty, supreme and disenfranchising, he saw. He did not know what he felt.

Far away, on the horizon, in the gloomy waste of embers, the sun’s deep core still burned, and in his heart was a deep fatigue, like the sky’s slow smoldering to gray.

VI

RAINGER had gone, and Gavan announced his departure for the next morning. The situation was simplified, he felt, by Eppie’s somber preoccupation. He was very willing that she should be seen as a gloomy taker of scalps and that his own should be supposed to be hanging at her girdle. The resultant muteness and melancholy in the general and Miss Barbara were really a comfort. The dear old figures in the tapestry seemed fading to-night into mere plaintive shadows, fixing eyes of sad but unquestioning contemplation upon the latent tragedies of the foreground figures.

It was a comfort to have the tapestry so reticent and so submissive, but, all the same, it made the foreground tragedy, for his eyes, painfully distinct. He could look at nothing else. Eppie seemed to stand, with her broken and bleeding heart, in the very center of the design. For the first time he saw what the design was—saw all of it, from the dim reaches of the past, as working to this end.

The weaving of fate was accomplished. There she stood, suffering, speechless, and he, looking at her, fatal shuttle of her doom that he was, felt under all the ashes a dull throbbing.

After dinner he smoked a cigar with the general, who, tactfully, as to one obviously maimed, spoke only of distant and impersonal matters. Gavan left him over some papers in the quiet light of the smoking-room and went to the library. Eppie, with her broken heart, was not there. The night was very hot. By an open window Miss Barbara sat dozing, her hands upturned with an appealing laxity on her knees, sad even in her sleep.

Eppie was not there and she had not spoken one word to him since those last words of the afternoon. Perhaps she intended to speak no more, to see him no more. Pausing on the threshold, he was now conscious of a slow, rising misery.