After a heartbroken youth (for he had known tragic passion), after thirty years of heroic fidelity in an age when marriage was an invisible prison, he had been obliged to sacrifice that fading glimmer of happiness. Supported by his daughters, who demanded that he should be faithful to a wife he had never loved, supported by public opinion, which exacted that he should remain inconsolable for the loss of a woman he had married by accident, his son's widow had stood, small, plump, immovable as the rock of ages, between him and his desire. Thirty years, and God alone would ever know what those years had meant to him! Not that he had wished for his wife's death. Not that he had failed in the obligations of marriage. But in that shared confinement of thirty years, in that lifelong penalty he had paid for an accident, for a broken sleigh, for being caught out in a snowstorm, there had been flashes of impulse in which he had asked himself, "How long shall I be able to live like this?"
Yet he had endured it. For thirty years, day and night, waking, sleeping, in sickness and in health, having children, as married persons are expected to do—for thirty years he had sacrificed his youth, his middle age, his dreams, his imagination, all the vital instincts that make a man, to the moral earnestness of tradition. Well, he had lived through it. He had lived through it until, at seventy-one, just as he had reached the turn in a long life when a man, if he has been prudent, still retains vigour enough for a last flare at the end—just as he had reached this turn in his life, Erminia had died, and release had come like a blow.
She had died, and immediately, so unreasonable are the ways of the heart, he had been overcome by regret. Almost to his astonishment, he had felt her loss, he had grieved for her, he had reproached himself bitterly. Lying in her coffin, with that defenseless smile on her lips and a wisp of tulle hiding her throat, she had appealed to his tenderness more deeply than she had ever appealed to his passion. In the days that followed, he had suffered as a man suffers who loses an aching limb. But regret, he discovered before six months had gone, is not among the enduring realities. "When the year is over," he had told himself, meeting his daughter-in-law's brimming eyes with a shiver of apprehension, "Even if I wait until the year is over, I shall be still young enough to find a little happiness at the end." Already, though he had been a faithful husband, he knew where happiness might be found. He had seen the nunlike figure and the dove's eyes of a joy that was young, and yet not too young to be companionable to restful age. Well, a year, even at seventy-one, is not everlasting.
But at the end of the first year, his two daughters were still shrouded in mourning, and poor Etta's reason was almost despaired of; at the end of the second year, his son's widow failed in her endeavour and came with her only child to live in his house; and at the end of the third year, the fatherless little girl had twined herself about the roots of his heart. Even then, with three women and one little girl making a home for him, he had not relinquished the hope of his Indian summer of happiness—that patient hope of the old, so much less elastic and so much more enduring than the hope of the young.
Yet, in the end, this also was slowly strangled by life. By life and by the suffocating grasp of appearances. How could he spoil the lives of three women and one fatherless little girl? How could he bring his joy with the dove's eyes into a house which was already filled with these three women and one little girl tenderly making a home for him? If they had not been so devoted, it might have been easier; but love, as marriage had taught him (for his wife also had loved him before the end of their honeymoon), is responsible for most of the complications of life.
Jenny Blair was jumping up and down in his arms. "Grandfather, I've read a hundred and fifty pages. Don't you think you can pay me?"
"Pay you? What's that, darling? Well, we'll see, we'll see." Looking over her head, he said gently, "I hope you've had a pleasant day, my dears. Has your neuralgia troubled you, Etta?"
Etta smiled at him appealingly while she pressed her hand to her sunken temples. "It was bad this morning, but I took a headache powder, and that helped me."
"Poor child," he said, "poor child," for he sincerely pitied her. "Neuralgia must run in our family. Your grandmother used to complain of it when I was a boy. I remember to this day the red marks from mustard plasters on her temples, and then there was poor Margaret--"
He broke off with a sigh, for his only sister had been dear to him, though she had eloped, when he was a boy, with an Italian musician, who had turned out to have a wife somewhere in Europe. After she had run away, Margaret had vanished completely. He could still remember the despairing efforts his father had made to find some trace of her abroad, and the way his mother used to wake in the night crying because she had dreamed that her daughter did not have enough cover to protect her from the cold. In his early twenties, he had looked for her over Europe; but all he ever discovered was that she had died alone in some obscure lodging-house in Vienna. Well, well, poor girl, it was useless to deny that all the Archbalds were subject to intermittent flashes of nature.
There was, for example, the case of his great-aunt Sabina, who had publicly defied her Creator, in the early years of Virginia, and had escaped suspicion of witchcraft merely because she was related to all the best blood in the Colony. Then, too, there was Rodney, his brother—but Rodney's tragedy was far more modern in character. Instead of defying his Creator, he had quietly resigned from creation. But he was always, the General recalled, a quiet chap, and so, when he had put a bullet in his heart, he had left a scrawl that said only, "Shadows are not enough." Nobody knew what he meant. Crazy, they called him. Crazy, because after twenty-nine years of life, having exhausted alike the pleasures of love and the consolations of religion, he had found that shadows are not enough. Long ago, he might have been forgotten, as most unpleasant recollections are forgotten in the struggle for happiness, if Isabella's features had not preserved the shape of his fine Roman nose, the glowing dusk of his eyes, and the ivory space between the bold black curves of his eyebrows. And then, just as the General had become reconciled to the living memorial of Isabella's countenance, his granddaughter had shot up from an expressionless baby into a wilful child, who combined the doubts of his great-aunt Sabina with the eyebrows of Rodney and the pointed tongue of Erminia.
"Poor girl, poor girl," he murmured again, while he stroked back the straight brown hair from Etta's forehead. Then, in a more natural tone, he inquired, "What's become of William? Has anybody seen William?" For William, his English setter, demanded nothing of him, not even that he should feel a suffocating emotion when he was old and tired.
"I saw him come in," Jenny Blair said, still plunging up and down with her hands on the General's arm. "He must have gone back to ask Zoana for something to eat. He is very fond of Zoana."
"He eats too much." It was a relief to be able to laugh. "He is beginning to look middle-aged before he is six."
One November afternoon three years before (was it really that long ago?) he had met William, trembling and caked with mud, as he was dragged at the end of a dirty rope from his last ignominious encounter with quail. As a cure for gun-shyness, some blundering fool had peppered the dog's legs with bird-shot. That's the way with them still, thought the old man, searching his memory, there are many fools in the world, but the biggest fool of all is the fool sportsman who believes that a load of bird-shot will break a dog of being afraid of a gun. The free end of the rope was in the hand of a small coloured boy. Black as pitch, alert, wiry, nimble, it was queer the way that little negro persisted. William had been given to him, he had explained, and he was going to try some new way of breaking. His Pa knew a heap about curing bird dogs that were gun-shy.