The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

N looking back, after long years, at their summer, Eppie could see, more clearly than when she lived in it, that sadness and Gavan had always gone together. He had, as it were, initiated her into suffering. Sadness was the undertone of their sweet comradeship. Their happy stories came to tragic endings. Death and disaster, though in trivial forms, followed him.

With his returning strength, and perhaps with a sense of atonement to her for what he had called his selfishness, Gavan plunged eagerly into any outer interest that would please her. He spent hours in building for her a little hut on the banks of the brae among the birches: the dolls’ Petit Trianon he called it, as the summer-house was their Versailles. They had been reading about the French Revolution. Eppie objected to the analogy. “I should always imagine that Elspeth’s head were going to be cut off if I called it that.”

Gavan said that Elspeth need not be the queen, but a less exalted, more fortunate court lady. “We’ll imagine that she escaped early from France with all her family, saw none of the horrors, was a happy émigrée in England and married there,” he said; and he went on, while he hammered at the pine boughs, with a desultory and reassuring account of Elspeth’s English adventures. But poor Elspeth came to as sad an end as any victim of the guillotine. Eppie was carrying her one day when she and Gavan had followed Aunt Barbara on some housewifely errand up to the highest attic rooms. Outside the low sills of the dormer-windows ran a narrow stone gallery looking down over the pine-tree and the garden. The children squeezed out through the window to hang in delighted contemplation over the birds’-eye view, and then Eppie crawled to a farther corner where one could see round to the moorland and find oneself on a level, almost, with the rooks’ nests in the lime-trees. She handed Elspeth to Gavan to hold for her while she went on this adventure.

He had just risen to his feet, looking down from where he stood over the low parapet, when a sudden cry from Eppie—a great bird sailing by that she called to him to look at—made him start, almost losing his balance on the narrow ledge. Elspeth fell from his arms.

She was picked up on the garden path, far, far beneath, with a shattered head. Gavan, perhaps, suffered more from the disaster than Eppie herself. He was sick with dismay and self-reproach. She was forced to make light of her grief to soothe his. But she did not feel that her soothing hoodwinked or comforted him. Indeed, after that hour on the hilltop, when he showed her his sorrow and his fear, Eppie felt that though near, very near him, she was also held away. It was as if he felt a discomfort in the nearness, or a dread that through it he might hurt again or be hurt. He was at once more loving and more reticent. His resolute cheerfulness, when they could be cheerful, was a wall between them.

Once more, and only once, before their childhood together ended, was she to see all, feel all, suffer all with him. Toward the end of the summer Robbie sickened and died. For three nights the children sat up with him, taking turns at sleep, refusing alien help. By candle-light, in Eppie’s room, they bent over Robbie’s basket, listening to his laboring breath. The general, protesting against the folly of the sleepless nights, yet tiptoed in and out, gruffly kind, moved by the pathos of the young figures. He gave medical advice and superintended the administering of teaspoonfuls of milk and brandy. That he thought Robbie’s case a hopeless one the children knew, for all his air of reassuring good cheer.

Robbie died early on the morning of the fourth day. A little while before, he faintly wagged his tail when they spoke to him, raising eyes unendurably sad.

Eppie, during the illness, had been constantly in tears; Gavan had shown a stoic fortitude. But when all was over and Eppie was covering Robbie with the white towel that was to be his shroud, Gavan suddenly broke down. Casting his arms around her, hiding his face against her, he burst into sobs, saying in a shuddering voice, while he clung to her, shaken all through with the violence of his weeping: “Oh, I can’t bear it, Eppie! I can’t bear it!”

Before this absolute shattering Eppie found her own self-control. Holding him to her,—and she almost thought that he would have fallen if she had not so held him,—she murmured, “Gavan, darling Gavan, I know, I know.”