"I do understand," Jenny Blair said eagerly, in an effort to overcome the feeling that more was expected of her than she was able to give.
"Do you, dear? Well, you will understand still better when you are older. You will know then that a great love doesn't leave room for anything else in a woman's life. It is everything."
"Everything," the child echoed faintly. Something, she knew, was required of her; but the exact nature of the demand she could not comprehend. With Mr. Birdsong, she had known immediately that it was nursing he craved, the maternal sort of nursing she gave her doll after she dropped it. So naturally had this response welled up in her heart that it had seemed effortless. In the warmth of her sympathy the years between them had melted like frost, and in spite of his bigness and splendour, he had become, for the moment at least, as dependent upon her protection as the battered doll she had cherished so tenderly because it had lost an eye and the better part of its hair. But vaguely, through some deep intuition, she realized that Mrs. Birdsong's appeal was less easy to satisfy. What Mrs. Birdsong craved was not nursing, was not even sympathy. She demanded more than the child could give, more even than she could grasp.
"I used to think I wanted to be a great singer," Mrs. Birdsong mused aloud in a bright reverie. "But that was before I fell in love. After that, I stopped wanting anything else." The needle flashed into the satin. "It seems absurd now, but when we were engaged, it made me dreadfully unhappy if he so much as looked at another girl. I remember crying half the night because Daisy Wallace threw him a white rosebud from her bouquet, and he stuck it in his buttonhole." A haunted look crossed her face and was gone as swiftly as the shadow of a bird in the air. Then, holding up the primrose-coloured satin, she asked with a smile that brought the glow back into her eyes, "Mother's rose-point bertha will look well on this, don't you think?"
"Lovely," Jenny Blair answered, and she longed to add, though she could not bring herself to form the words with her prim child's mouth, "You are like roses and lilies, you are like roses and lilies."
"I hope it will be becoming, because it has been so long since I went anywhere. I want people to see that I haven't lost my looks."
"Mamma says you are as beautiful as you ever were."
"That's sweet of her." She glanced round at the roses and delphinium and laughed softly. "What else do they say of me, Jenny Blair?"
Gazing up at her, Jenny Blair tried in vain to gather her thoughts, while her mind lay still as the garden pool and waited for the reflection of Mrs. Birdsong's beauty to sink down to its clear depths. And not her beauty alone but all the little graces that made her different from any one else in the world,--the airy fringe on her forehead, the wisp of curls escaping from the knot on the nape of her neck, the way the colour ebbed and flowed in her cheeks, the trick she had of catching her lower lip in her teeth and smiling as if she also knew a secret, the tiny brown mole at the point of her left eyebrow, and above all the flowerlike blue of her eyes beneath the shadowy dusk of her lashes. These were things, the child told herself, that she could never forget. These were things that made Mrs. Birdsong more surprising, more startling to look at than any one else. Everything fresh and lovely in the world was mingled with her image in Jenny Blair's thoughts. If you took her away, something bright and joyous went out of the garden and the June sky and the piping of birds.
"What else do they say of me, Jenny Blair?" Again the needle flashed into the satin.
The child pondered more earnestly while she tried to separate her mother's starched ideas from the soft confusion within. "They say that—that you gave up too much."
"Too much?" There was an edge to Mrs. Birdsong's voice. "But what is too much?"
This was deeper again than Jenny Blair was able to plunge. "Oh, well, everything," she answered, with the comforting vagueness of youth.
"Everything? Do they mean my gifts, I wonder? Yes, I suppose they must mean my gifts." She bit her lip, frowned, and paused over her sewing. "But how do they know that I could have done anything with my voice?" Then, after a brief hesitation, she laughed and said tenderly, "You poor little thing. I am talking to you as if you were your Aunt Etta. When they talk that way they are thinking that I might have made another great Juliet. I once posed as Juliet in some tableaux that were given for charity."
"I've seen the picture," Jenny Blair said eagerly. "Aunt Etta has one in her album. It used to be Mamma's, but she gave it to Aunt Etta because she felt so sorry for her in one of her bad attacks of neuralgia."
Mrs. Birdsong laughed. "Yes, there is one in every old album in Queenborough. That was in 1889, and the photographs look silly enough nowadays. But you may tell them—only, of course, you must not tell them anything—that you can never give up too much for happiness."
Her face was glowing now with that misty brightness. Then, while Jenny Blair watched, the change came in a quiver of apprehension. There was a swift breaking up, a floating away, of the joyful expectancy. She lifted her head; her right hand stiffened and paused; her eyes grew soft and anxious. "George is late again," she said, glancing round at the clock on the mantel-piece. "I wonder what can have kept him?"
Jenny Blair sprang to the defense. "Grandfather is often late. There is always something down at the office to keep him."
"Yes, of course, it is that." Mrs. Birdsong was apparently satisfied with the excuse. "He is working much harder this spring. He works entirely too hard when you think how little he makes."
The last sunbeams quivered and vanished and quivered again over the garden. It seemed to the child that the flowers lost the dryness of light and became dewy with sweetness. Mrs. Birdsong thrust her needle into the satin, carefully folded her work, and replaced the scissors, the spool of silk, and the emery shaped like a strawberry, into the top drawer of her sewing-table. A frown bent her winged eyebrows together, and in the dying light her features lost their vivacity and became as still and pale as if they were spun out of a dream. It was that lonely hour of day when Jenny Blair longed for a friend like Mr. Birdsong instead of a playmate with a sunny disposition like Bena Peyton.
Rising from her chair, Mrs. Birdsong listened attentively to a sound in the street. Then she nodded twice in the spirited way she had when she was pleased. "There he is now," she said, and immediately afterwards Jenny Blair heard a firm, quick step on the porch.
"Where are you, Eva?" a voice called eagerly, while the door opened and shut and a wave of summer floated into the room.
"I am in the library, dear, and Jenny Blair is with me. We've been anxious because you were so late in coming."
"A man stopped me," he answered, as he entered the library. Then the faintest change, scarcely more than a stillness, closed over his features. "You must not worry, Eva," he added. "I can't have you getting lines in your face." After holding her in his arms a minute, he turned his gay and smiling eyes on Jenny Blair. "So this little girl has been with you. Well, you couldn't find better company."
"She has helped me pick out a dress for the dance." Mrs. Birdsong put her arm round the child's shoulders. "We rummaged in the old chest for hours. I am going to wear that primrose satin Worth made for me in the 'nineties. You don't remember it, of course, but it will do very well with Mother's rose-point bertha and aquamarine earrings."