The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

It was of Eppie she wrote: of her overwork—they thought it must be that—in the winter, of the resultant fragility that had made her succumb suddenly to an illness contracted in some hotbed of epidemic in the slums. They had all thought that she would come through it. People had been very kind. Eppie had so many, many friends. Every one loved her. She had been moved to Lady Alicia’s house in Grosvenor Street. She, Aunt Barbara, had come up to town at once, and the general was with her.

It was with a fierce impatience that he went on through the phrases that were like the slow trickling of tear after tear, as if he knew, yet refused to know, the tragedy that the trivial tears flowed for, knew what was coming, resented its insufferable delay, yet spurned its bare possibility. At the end, and only then, it came. Her strength had suddenly failed. There was no hope. Eppie was dying and had asked to see him—at once.

A bird, above the window open to the dew and sunlight, sang and whistled while he read, a phrase, not joyous, not happy, yet strangely full of triumph, of the innocent praise of life. Gavan, standing still, with the letter in his hand, listened, while again and again, monotonously, freshly, the bird repeated its song.

He seemed at first to listen quietly, with pleasure, appreciative of this heraldry of spring; then memory, blind, numbed from some dark shock, stirred, stole out to meet it—the memory of Eppie’s morning voice on the hillside, the voice monotonous yet triumphant with its sense of life; and at each reiteration, the phrase seemed a dagger plunged into his heart.

Oh, memory! Oh, cruel thought! Cruel life!

After he had ordered the trap, and while waiting for it, he walked out into the freshness and back and forth, over and over across the lawn, with the patient, steady swiftness of an animal caged and knowing that the bars are about it. So this was to be the end. But, though already he acquiesced, it seemed in some way a strange, inapt ending. He couldn’t think of Eppie and death. He couldn’t see her dead. He could only see her looking at death.

THE early train he caught got him to London by eleven, and in twenty minutes he was in Grosvenor Street. He had wired from the country, and Miss Barbara met him in the drawing-room of the house, hushed in its springtime gaiety. She was the frail ghost of her shadowy old self, her voice tremulous, her face blurred with tears and sleepless nights. Yet he saw, under the woe, the essential listlessness of age, the placidity beneath the half-mechanical tears. “Oh, Gavan,” she said, taking his hand and holding it in both her own—“Oh, Gavan, we couldn’t have thought of this, could we, that she would go first.” And that his own face showed some sharp fixity of woe he felt from its reflection on hers—like a sword-flash reflected in a shallow pool.

She told him that it was now an affair of hours only. “I would have sent for you long ago, Gavan; I knew—I knew that you would want it. But she wouldn’t—not while there was hope. I think she was afraid of hurting you. You know she had never been the same since—since—“

“Since what?” he asked, knowing.

“Since you went away. She was so ill then. Poor child! She never found herself, you see, Gavan. She did not know what she wanted. She has worn herself out in looking for it.”