The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Gavan, with scientific scrutiny, diagnosed and observed while he soothed him or engaged his vagrant mind in games.

In his intervals of leisure he pursued his own work, and rode and walked with all his usual tempered athleticism. He did not feel the days as a strain, hardly as disagreeable; he was indifferent or interested. At the worst he was bored. The undercurrent of pity he was accustomed to living with.

Only at night, in hours of rest, he would sink into a half-dazed disgust, find himself on edge, nearly worn out. So the winter passed.

He was playing draughts with his father on a day in earliest spring, when he was told that Mrs. Arley and Miss Gifford were below.

Gavan was feeling dull and jaded. The conducting of the game needed a monotonous patience and tact. The captain would now pick up a draught and gaze curiously at it for long periods of time, now move in a direction contrary to all the rules of the game and to his own advantage. When such mistakes were pointed out to him he would either apologize humbly or break into sudden peevish wrath. To-day he was in a peculiarly excitable condition and had more than once wept.

Gavan, after the servant’s announcement, holding a quietly expectant draught in his thin, poised fingers, looked hard at the board that still waited for his father’s move. He then felt that a deep flush had mounted to his face.

In spite of the one or two laconic letters that they had interchanged, Eppie had been relegated for many months to her dream-place—a dream, in spite of its high coloring, more distant than this nearer dream of ugly illness. It was painful to look back at the queer turmoil she had roused in him during the autumnal fortnight, and more painful to realize, as in his sudden panic of reluctance now, that, though a dream, she was an abiding and constant one.

Mrs. Arley he knew, and her motor-car had recently made her a next-door neighbor in spite of the thirty miles between them. She was a friend with whom Eppie had before stayed on the other side of the county. Nothing could be more natural than that she and Eppie should drop in upon a solitude that must, to their eyes, have all the finished elements of pathos. Yet he was a little vexed by the intrusion, as well as reluctant to meet it.

His father broke into vehement protest when he heard that he was to be abandoned at an unusual hour, and it needed some time for Gavan and the nurse to quiet him. Twenty minutes had passed before he could go down to his guests, and he surmised that they would feel in this delay yet further grounds for pity.

They were in the hall, before a roaring fire, Eppie standing with her back to it, in a familiar attitude, though her long, caped cloak and hooded motoring-cap, the folds of gray silk gathered under her chin and narrowly framing her face, gave her an unfamiliar aspect. Her eyes met his as he turned the spacious staircase and came down to them, and he felt that they watched his every movement and noted every trace in him of fatigue and dejection.