The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“As for you,” he went on, “I sha’n’t, at all events, see you suffocating. You must mend alone, then, as best you can. Really, you’re not as tragic as you might have been.”

Then, after this salutary harshness, and before he turned from her to go, he added, as once before, “Poor darling.”

IX

RAINGER hardly knew why he had come and, as he walked up the deep Surrey lane from the drowsy village station, his common-sense warred with the instinct, almost the obsession, that was taking him to Cheylesford Lodge. Eppie had been persistently in his thoughts since their meeting of the week before, and from his own hopelessness had sprung the haunting of a hope for her. Turn from it as he would, accuse himself angrily of madness, morbidity, or a mere tendency to outrageous meddling,—symptomatic of shattered nerves,—he couldn’t escape it. By day and night it was with him, until he saw himself, in a lurid vision, as responsible for Eppie’s very life if he didn’t test its validity. For where she had failed might not a man armed with the strength of his selfless love succeed?

He had said, in his old anger, that as Gavan’s wife Gavan would kill her; but he hadn’t really meant that literally; now, literally, the new fear had come that she might die of Gavan’s loss. Her will hadn’t snapped, but her vitality was like the flare of the candle in its socket. To love, the eremite of Cheylesford Lodge wouldn’t yield—perhaps for very pity’s sake; but if he were made to see the other side of it?—Grainger found a grim amusement in the paradox—the lover, in spite of love, might yield to pity. Couldn’t his own manliness strike some spark of manliness from Gavan? Couldn’t he and Eppie between them, with their so different appeals,—she to what was soft, he to what was tough,—hoist his tragically absurd head above water, as it were, into the air of real life, that might, who knew? fill and sustain his aquatic lungs? It gave him a vindictive pleasure to see the drowning simile in the most ludicrous aspects—Gavan, draped in the dramatic robes of his twopenny-halfpenny philosophies, holding his head in a basin of water, there resolved to die. Grainger felt that as far as his own inclinations were concerned it would have given him some pleasure to help to hold him under, to see that, while he was about it, he did it thoroughly; but the question wasn’t one of his own inclinations: it was for Eppie’s sake that he must try to drag out the enraptured suicide. It was Eppie, bereft and dying,—so it seemed to him in moments of deep fear,—whose very life depended on the submerged life. And to see if he could fish it up for her he had come on this undignified, this ridiculous errand.

Very undignified and very ridiculous he felt the errand to be, as he strode on through the lane, its high hedge-rows all dusty with the autumn drought; but he was indifferent enough to that side of it. He felt no confusion. He was completely prepared to speak his mind.

Coming to a turning of the lane, where he stood for a moment, uncertain, at branching paths, he was joined by an alert little parson who asked him courteously if he could direct him on his way. They were both, it then appeared, going to Cheylesford Lodge; and the Reverend John Best, after introducing himself as the rector of Dittleworth parish, and receiving Grainger’s name, which had its reverberations, with affable interest, surmised that it was to another friend of Mr. Palairet’s that he spoke.

“Yes. No. That is to say, I’ve known him after a fashion for years, but seen little of him. Has he been here all summer?” Grainger asked, as they walked on.

It seemed that Gavan had only returned from the Continent the week before, but Mr. Best went on to say, with an evidently temperamental loquacity, that he was there for most of the time as a rule and was found a very charming neighbor and a very excellent parishioner.