Ewing's Lady

by Harry Leon Wilson

Ben strolled forward to the baggage car, humming lightly, and, with the bored air of a man creating diversion for himself, laid listless hands on the trunks as they were unloaded. He was whirling one of the heaviest of these to the waiting wagon when Ewing fell on him with a glad shout. Ben paused briefly, balancing the trunk on a corner, glanced up with moderate surprise, and spoke his welcome.

"Oh, that you, Kid? Howdy!" He resumed his struggle with the trunk, blind to the other's outstretched hand, and when Ewing thereupon hissed at him, "You damned Mexican sheep herder!" he allowed pleasure to show but faintly in his face. But when he was seized by the collar, hurled half across the platform, and slammed brutally against the wall of the station, he protested with pleased annoyance as he picked up his hat, "Aw, quit yer foolin', now, Kid! I got to hustle them trunks." He was sufficiently refreshed by the attack, however, to sing to himself as he labored. And when the start was made he insisted that Ewing should drive. Ben sat in the rear seat. He wanted to look at Ewing's back for five hours.

The sick woman, in another and easier conveyance, rejoiced that she was going still farther into the peace of her last refuge. As they left the brown-floored valley and began to climb the mountain road, she was glad that the green walls closed in behind them; glad of every difficult ascent; every stream forded; every confusing turn of the way. She was hiding herself, cunningly insuring the peace of her last hours.

She was troubled now only by Virginia, who hung upon her with an agonized solicitude. But she promised herself to wear this down by her own cheerfulness and expressed certainty. Virginia would see her peaceful, hopeful, happy; she would become used to the idea of her wasting; and the actual going out would come gently to her as something fit and benign. Life so abounding as Virginia's could not long droop under the shadow of death.

Made at home in the lake cabin, she still felt the world rushing back from her as had the fields rushed by when she looked from the car window. And she rested in this. Affairs went on about her, plans were made, talk of the future or of the day; all went by her unheeded, save for a blurred and pleasant effect of swiftness. Outwardly she was serene, languorous, incuriously placid. Inwardly she thrilled with a luxury of inertness. She had loosed herself in the ebbing tide, and she folded her hands and smiled from this with the assured indolence of one who knows that some earned reward will not long be delayed. The slow-paced even life was a balm to her, the gathering about the table at mealtimes, the evenings in the studio, when her sister played or talked with Ewing; when she could lie still on the couch and try to make herself forgotten, regretting only the short dry cough that racked her night and morning and brought her to the minds of the others.

She had thought that she could adjust herself, after a little, to the new look in Ewing's eyes, knowing as she did its secret spring. It was a look of blind acceptance, of unquestioning adoration—and mingled with it was a maddening pity. But there flashed from him, too, at times, a look of purpose and assurance, steady, secret, determined. She detected this chiefly when he glanced up to her from his drawing. He had brought with him a story to illustrate for the Knickerbocker, and he was, at last, to finish that series of Western scenes for the same periodical. And he had flown to this work with a frantic haste, with the look, as he bent over the board, that seemed to say: "This is for you. Be patient with me, it will soon be done."

When the work did not claim him he stayed by her side, watchful for service, jealous of Virginia for little acts he might not himself perform. His eyes seldom left her, she thought, though she could not long endure their look, and she knew that he read this evasion of hers in the light of what Teevan had told him. Through all his devotion there was a gentle aloofness, a constant withdrawing, as if he knew that he must never come close.

She had laughter and tears again for this when she was alone, though there were times when, in her weakness, her wild craving for the fullness of what she might not have, she would have told it all in one surrendering cry to him but for the eyes of Kitty Teevan. They were always upon her now—Ewing had hung the portrait in the studio—holding her with passionate entreaty, the mother pleading for herself in the son's memory. She could never tell him, she knew, under those eyes. She must live out her few days in content with that wondrous thing his own eyes revealed for her. She thought it comic and tragic and beautiful. One night she dreamed that she was not to die, and woke in horror of what his belief would then mean. But morning restored her serenity, and she reposed placidly again on the unquestioned sureness of her going.

Best of all times she liked the late morning and midday, when she could be alone in the sun-heated nook out of doors and give her body to the warmth. She knew it was a primal, sensuous pleasure, but she surrendered to it; turned and bathed writhingly in the sun flood, feeling herself transparent to it. And the pleasure had its reverse side. Autumn came presently in these upper reaches; a less splendid autumn than would set the Eastern woods ablaze with flaunts of gold and scarlet, but an autumn more eloquent of death, the faded yellow of the aspen groves, broken but rarely by some flaming shrub that only emphasized the monotone. This, the unending, lifeless yellow, and the dead green of spruce and hemlock—a false green, she felt, with its tale of ever-living—made a coloring of nice symbolism for her state.

Had she felt the need of a death's head at her sun feast, this neutral, denying flatness would have sufficed. The end had come home to her. It was her unseen familiar, voiceless, but ever present, with a look unhurrying but constant.