The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

The steeliness of his resolves made his face almost alien. Eppie felt this unknown future, where he must fight alone, for objects in which she had no share, shutting her out, and a child’s sick misery of desolation filled her, bringing back the distant memory of her mother’s death, that suffocating sense of being left behind and forgotten; but, keeping her eyes on his prospect, she managed in a firm voice to question him about the arid uncle, learned that he was married, childless, had a house in the country and one in London, and sat in Parliament. He was vastly busy, traveled a great deal, and wrote books of travel; not books about foreign people and the things they ate and wore, as Eppie with her courageous interest hopefully surmised, but books of dry, colorless fact, with lots of statistics in them, Gavan said.

“He wants me to go in for the same sort of thing—politics and public life.”

“You are going to be a Pitt—make laws, Gavan, like Pitt?” Eppie kept up her dispassionate tone.

He smiled at the magnified conception. “I’ll try for a seat, probably, or some governmental office; that is, if I turn out to be worth anything.”

How the vague vastness shut her out! What should she do, meanwhile? How carve for herself a future that would keep her near him in the great outside world? And would he want her near him in it when he was to be so great, too? This question brought the irrepressible tears to her eyes at last, though she turned away her head and would not let them fall. But Gavan glanced at her and leaned forward to look, and then she saw, as her eyes met his, that the hard resolve was for her, too, and did not shut her out, but in.

“I’m coming back, Eppie,” he said, taking her hand and holding it tightly. “Next to my mother, it’s you,—you know it.”

“I haven’t any mother,” said Eppie, keeping up the bravery, though it was really harder not to cry now. He understood where she placed him.

Eppie was glad that it was raining on the last morning. Sunshine would have been a mockery, and this tranquilly falling rain, that turned the hills to pale, substanceless ghosts and brought the end of the moor, where it disappeared into the white, so near, was not tragic. Gavan was coming back. She would think only of that. She would not—would not cry. He should see how brave she could be. When he was gone—well, she allowed herself a swift thought of the Petit Trianon, its hidden refuge. There, all alone, she would, of course, howl. There was a grim comfort in this vision of herself, rolling upon the pine-needle carpet of the Petit Trianon and shrieking her woes aloud.

At breakfast Gavan showed a tense, calm face. She was impressed anew with the sense of his strength, for, in spite of his resolves, he was suffering, perhaps more keenly than herself. Suffering, with him, partook of horror. She could live in hopes, and on them. To Gavan, this parting was the going into a dark cavern that he must march through in fear. And then, he would never roll and shriek.

After breakfast, they hardly spoke to each other. Indeed, what was there to say? Eppie filled the moments in superintending the placing of fruit and sandwiches in his dressing-case. The carriage was a little late, so that when the final moment came, there was a hurried conventionality of farewell. Gavan was kissed by the aunts and shook hands with Miss Grimsby, while the general called out that there was no time to lose.