"Have you waited long, Grandfather? I am so sorry." Through the web of sun and shadow, she flitted in her long blue dress over the tender grass in the park. Her face was flushed with the bloom of spring; her eyes were shining with sunlight; her moist red lips, which had a sullen droop when she frowned, were parted in a smile of contrition.
He drew out his watch. "No, it is early yet. You came just at the right moment. I must have been dozing."
Looking down on her, he felt suddenly bowed, he felt flattened out beneath the pressure of age. Before she came he had been tranquil, detached, confirmed in disappointment; but now he was aware, with an aching regret, of his withered flesh, of his brittle bones, of his corded throat, of the pouched skin and bluish hollows under his eyes, of the furrows between his jutting eyebrows, and the congested veins in his nose. "I am too old," he thought, "but an hour ago, on that green bench, I was young. I was beyond time, and I was young. Is this impression more real than that one? Is the fact more living than the idea?" Then holding tight to his stout ebony walking-stick, he threw up his head with the bridling movement of an old race horse. The chief thing was to govern one's faculties, to keep control of one's thoughts. At eighty-three, it did no good to have a buried poet pop up from the depths and caper gallantly on the frozen surface of pretense. After all, nothing mattered very much, not even the rambling mind of the old. In another decade he would know more, or perhaps less, of the nature of reality.
"Hadn't you better take my arm, Grandfather?"
"No, thank you, my dear. I'm still able to walk alone."
"Of course you are. But the pavement is so rough. Anybody may stumble on this pavement," Jenny Blair added in the tactful tone of her mother.
"Well, it's true my legs aren't what they used to be. If you could give me a new pair of legs, I'd be as sound as I ever was."
Yes, she was a dear little thing. Even her wildness, which he deplored, was the natural craving of youth for delight. In a few years she would probably fold her wings and settle down as her mother had done before her. Next winter, when she was eighteen, she would be presented to established society in Queenborough; and Mrs. Archbald had already decided that, after a reception in the afternoon to mature ladies of consequence, a fancy ball, which provided unlimited opportunities for dressing up, would be more amusing than the conventional coming-out party.
But, with that ancient perversity which is called modern by the elderly in every generation, Jenny Blair rejected both Queenborough society and the fancy ball. Instead of conforming to habit, she declared vaguely but passionately that she wished to go away to New York, or even to Paris, and be something different. A great many girls, she insisted, were being something different even in Queenborough, and she had determined to share in their efforts. She was not quite sure what she wished to be; but she was inclined to think that she might become an actress. Bena Peyton, who was trying to write for magazines, would go with her, and they could perfectly well take a little apartment and live comfortably, with one coloured maid, on the money their mothers saved from presentations to Queenborough society. Naturally, Mrs. Archbald, who had hoped for a second blooming from her daughter's formal introduction to parents and aunts and cousins of boys and girls she had played with all her life, was annoyed and displeased; but her father-in-law showed an astonishing sympathy with the revolt of youth. True, his prejudices were on the side of society; but he had been always, he was fond of saying, "a believer in not doing the things one did not wish to do."
Walking now by Jenny Blair's side, he remembered the time when he, too, had longed to go away and be different. But much experience, and especially long waiting, had taught him that there is no place in the world where one can be different from one's self. Places, like persons, he observed to William, who had paused to examine the smells about the roots of a tree, vary chiefly in the matter of climate. Warm or cool, an altitude or a plain; but no spot on earth contains the natural resources of happiness. Take Washington Street, for example. In Washington Street, where elegance had once flourished and fallen, only the disfigured elms still struggled to preserve the delusion of grandeur.
But it was useless to regret. It was useless to sigh for the plumed hearse of one's ancestors. And even the old families that were driven away by a taint in the wind were sufficiently near to rally on occasions of sorrow or threatened disgrace. Tides of soberly dressed persons still ebbed and flowed wherever white flowers and purple ribbon muffled a door-bell; and less than a decade ago the entire connection of Goddards, supported by the friends of the family, had contrived to outflank suspicion in the famous murder of Breverton Goddard. Everybody, even his relatives, believed that the nephew (General Archbald couldn't think of his name now) had shot Breverton in a quarrel over the uncle's wife, who was thirty years or more too young for her husband. Gossip had buzzed on as loud as a deafened ear; but the Goddards, who were connected with all the best people in Queenborough, had united in the heroic pretense that plain murder was pure accident. By force of superior importance, they had ignored facts, defended family honour, shielded a murderer for the sake of saving a name, turned public execration into sympathy, and politely but firmly looked the law out of countenance.
Less than a decade ago; yet could any family connection, the old man asked himself, win so complete a conquest to-day? Or, indeed, any conquest at all? People, even the best people, were more selfish now, and fought only when their material interests were menaced. Though the present was softer than the past, he couldn't see that it was an improvement—except in the way one could turn on a bath or a light, or warm one's self through and through instead of merely toasting one's front or back by a fire. Certainly, it seemed to him, the young were more insolent and the old more exacting. Wildness there had been always, and would be always, he supposed, only the vague wildness of Jenny Blair lacked, he felt, both dignity and direction. To be sure, as Jenny Blair was too apt to retort, we were living in the twentieth century, and ideas were modern. Modern, yes, but there had been modern ideas in every age, not excepting the long ages that were probably arboreal.
"Grandfather," Jenny Blair said in a low voice, "I met Mr. Birdsong, and he looked so dreadfully tired. He hasn't had any sleep for three nights. Is that because Mrs. Birdsong is in danger?"
The General sighed. "Yes, she is in danger, my child, but we must hope for the best."
"Don't you believe she will get well?"
"I hope so, my dear."
"Wasn't she the most beautiful woman in Virginia, Grandfather?"
"She is, my child, the most beautiful woman in Virginia—or anywhere else."
Jenny Blair sighed. "It must be lovely to be so beautiful."
"You, my dear, are pretty enough."