The Shadow of Life

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Mrs. Arley, fluent, flexible, amazingly pretty, for all the light powdering and wrinkling of her fifty years, came rustling forward.

“Eppie is staying with me for the week-end,—I wrench her from her slums now and then,—and we wanted to hear how you are, to see how you are. You look dreadfully fagged; doesn’t he, Eppie? How is your father?”

Eppie gave him her hand in silence.

“My father will never be any better, you know,” he said. “As for me, I’m all right. I should have come over to see you before this, and looked you up, too, Eppie, but I can’t get away for more than an hour or so at a time.”

He led them into the library while he spoke,—Mrs. Arley exclaiming that such devotion was dear and good of him,—and Eppie looked gravely round at the room that he had described to her as the room that he really passed his life in. The great spaces of ranged books framed for her, he knew, pictures of his own existence. He knew, too, that her gravity was the involuntary result of the impression that he made upon her. She was sorry for him. Poor Eppie, their relationship since childhood seemed to have consisted in that—in the sense of her pursuing pity and in his retreat before it, for her sake. He retreated now, as he knew, in his determination to show her that pity was misplaced, uncalled for.

Mrs. Arley had thrown off her wrap and loosened her hood in a manner that made it almost imperative to ask them to stay with him for lunch—an invitation accepted with an assurance showing that it had been expected, and it wasn’t difficult, in conventional battledore and shuttlecock with her, to show a good humor and frivolity that discountenanced pathetic interpretations. What Mrs. Arley’s interpretations were he didn’t quite know; her eyes, fatigued yet fresh, were very acute behind their trivial meanings, and he could wonder if Eppie had shared with her her own sense of his “horribleness,” and if, in consequence, her conception of Eppie’s significance as the opponent of that quality was tinged with sentimental associations.

Eppie’s gaze, while they rattled on, lost something of its gravity, but he was startled, as if by an assurance deeper than any of Mrs. Arley’s, when she rose to slip off her coat and went across the room to a small old mirror that hung near the door to take off her cap as well.

In her manner of standing there with her back to them, untying her veils, pushing back her hair, was the assurance, indeed, of a person whose feet were firmly planted on certain rights, all the more firmly for “knowing her place” as it were, and for having repudiated mistaken assumptions. She might almost have been a new sick-nurse come to take up her duties by his side. She passed from the mirror to the writing-table, examining the books laid there, and then, until lunch was announced, stood looking out of the window. Quite the silent, capable, significant new nurse, with many theories of her own that might much affect the future.

The dining-room at Cheylesford Lodge opened on a wonderful old lawn, centuries in its green. Bordered by beds, just alight with pale spring flowers, it swept in and out among shrubberies of rhododendron and laurel, the emerald nook set in a circle of trees, a high arabesque on the sky.

Eppie from her seat at the table faced the sky, the trees, the lawn. What a beautiful place, she was thinking. A place for life, sheltered, embowered. How she would have loved, as a child, those delicious rivulets of green that ran into the thick mysteries of shadow. How she would have loved to play dolls on a hot summer afternoon in the shade of the great yew-tree that stretched its dark branches half across the sky. The house, the garden, made her think of children; she saw white pinafores and golden heads glancing in and out among the trees and shrubs, and the vision of young life, blossoming, growing in security and sunlight, filled her thought with its pictured songs of innocence, while, at the same time, under the vision, she was feeling it all—all the beauty and sheltered sweetness—as dreadful in its emptiness, its worse than emptiness: a casket holding a death’s-head. She came back with something of a start to hear her work in the slums enthusiastically described by Mrs. Arley. “I thought it was only in novels that children clung to the heroine’s skirts. I never believed they clung in real life until seeing Eppie with her ragamuffins; they adore her.”