"I know that, Grandfather. I love you and Mamma better than anything in the world, but I must live my own life."
"Don't forget that your mother has given up her life to you. She has had only you since your father died."
"Yes, I know she has been splendid. Only now she has forgotten how she felt when she was my age, before she had Father and me to fill her mind."
"If she has forgotten, I haven't, my dear. She wished, like every other inexperienced creature, male or female, man, animal, bird, or fish, to live her own life in her own way. Only circumstances, or nature, if you please, took a hand in the situation, and settled matters by making you and your father her life."
Jenny Blair listened respectfully until he had finished. Then she repeated all that she had said before he began, and continued with energy, "There is no use in Mamma's making me come out next winter in Queenborough. I want to go to New York and study to be an actress. That is the only thing in the world I want to do. You know yourself that you wouldn't like to give up your career and be a wallflower at dances. Especially if you didn't like boys and were not a girl who made the right sort of appeal."
"Nonsense!" the General exclaimed. "Stuff and nonsense! You'll make the right sort of appeal quick enough if you start going. But you cannot imagine, my dear little girl," he added, with a sense that he was reciting the part of a creed in which he had ceased to believe, "how many temptations there are in the world to-day." Well, that was the way parents had always talked, no matter what they believed; and though he had long ago discovered that temptation may wriggle like moths into the tightest family cupboards, he reminded himself that, in training the young idea, moral precept is less inflammable than historic example.
"But don't they get into the home too, Grandfather?" Jenny Blair asked in a tone of wistful sincerity which robbed the question of pertness.
"I suppose they do, my child. However, your mother will never consent to your going away and living alone."
"But so many girls are doing it now. It isn't as it used to be when Mamma was young. Things are different now. Nobody objected to Sally Burden's going to New York to study."
That was true on the surface. Conventions were less exacting, no doubt, than they used to be. But Sally Burden, he reflected, was plain, and there were three other Burden girls who were handsome—or at least handsome enough. Plain daughters had been a problem even in the ages of chivalry, and a very little talent had often covered a multitude of physical defects. His grand-daughter, however, was not plain. Though her unfinished appearance might not satisfy an Edwardian taste, she measured up, he felt, to the less elevated standards of our democracy. Many modern faces, he reminded himself the next instant, had this unfinished look, especially the faces of very young women, before years or experience refined the edges and deepened the plastic impressions. Modelled too hastily, he thought, so hastily that neither joy nor sorrow has had time to sink through the flesh into the spirit.
"Well, there's time enough to think it over," he heard himself saying. "Here is the hospital, and I suppose I'd better go up alone. Will you keep William out in the yard? No doubt you'll be able to find a bench somewhere." They had reached a long drab building, the exact colour, he thought whimsically, of convalescence, flanked by a sickly row of evergreens. Down the steps a young nurse was hurrying on eager though aching feet in white canvas shoes.
"There's a yard for patients to walk in. I'll wait for you there," the girl answered, slipping her fingers through William's collar as they entered the hospital. "If it's about her will," she added, "I'm afraid I'll have to wait a very long time. People are always so slow about wills."
"No, this has nothing to do with her will. But if you get tired waiting, you'd better go home without me."
"Oh, I'll wait, darling Grandfather. Only I hope those poor evergreens haven't anything catching."
Glancing down on her, a moment later, as he was borne upward, he thought wistfully, "How much in a man's feeling for women depends on whether they are coming toward him or going away? When a man is young, every woman seems to be moving in his direction. When he is old, he realizes that they are all moving away. That is why, I suppose, they appear, like everything else in life, to diminish with time."
CHAPTER 2
Through the window he saw a mist of green and the dying flare of the sun.
The white iron bed had been rolled into the middle of the room, and Mrs. Birdsong raised herself on the pillows, as he entered, and held out her hands. Fragile hands they were, a little too thin, a little too worn. Strange how much sooner hands aged than faces, especially delicate hands that have been roughened by work. She was wearing, over her white nightgown, a wrapper of lace and blue silk the colour of her eyes when she smiled. Her hair had slipped from the ribbon that held it back from her shoulders, and a single loose curl hung over a bosom which was still queenly even when unconfined. As pure as alabaster, he thought, gazing down on her. Yes, it was true even now. There was no woman to compare with her in the formless immaturity of the rising generation.
"I have been waiting for you," she said eagerly. "Oh, I am so glad you have come."
For an instant, while he watched her, it seemed to him that the lost radiance of youth shone in her face. Never had she been more lovely, more flamelike, than she looked since suffering had burned its way through her flesh. Then, with her clinging hand in his grasp, he found himself wondering if this animation were really so natural as it appeared. Had they given her drugs? Or was it fever that glowed beneath her transparent skin? But his eyes were old eyes, not to be trusted. They still looked at life through the iridescent film of a more romantic age. The young laughed at him now, as the young always laugh at their elders. As he himself had laughed at the light morality and the ponderous etiquette of the eighteen fifties.
"I should have come at any hour, day or night, if I had known you wanted me." His voice quivered, and something within his breast fluttered and sank down like a tired bird. He could see now, as the glow left her face, all the faint lines traced by sorrow or anxiety about her eyes, and the deeper impression between her finely arched nose (the nose of a goddess, they had said in the 'nineties) and the rich curve of her mouth. Yes she was yielding, however gallantly, to the slow deposit of time.
"I know you would," she answered, smiling again.
Suddenly it was borne in upon him that she smiled so brightly because it was easier to smile than to weep. While his heart seemed to pause, he told himself that it was wrong to think youth died until age was dead also. A moment before he had thought that love, with its torment of pity and despair, was over. He had thought of it as a light that is blown out. He had thought of it, except in moments of rhapsody, as utterly ended in time. But he felt now, without knowing why, that this was a mistake. Nothing was over. Nothing was ended. No, it is not true that love dies, he mused, borne upward on the winged curve of Victorian faith—of that morning belief in the rightness of life, the essential goodness of God. "No, it isn't true," he repeated. "After all, I am a Victorian at heart, and even when the Victorians doubted the existence of God, they still believed in His goodness."
The trembling had passed now. A little rest was all that he needed. Old arteries were as inelastic as old habits. But the sinking back on belief, on some confident affirmation of life, rippled in flashes of energy through his mind. If only the smile would not twist in pain on her lips. When her smile faded, the lines between nose and chin tightened austerely, and her mouth, like ripe fruit in moments of happiness, looked suddenly pinched and straight. He remembered that some persons (his daughter-in-law was one of these) insisted that Eva Birdsong was close. But how could she have lived at all, he demanded, if she had spent herself lavishly? It was true that she was more saving, more sparing, than Cora. Yet he, for one, could not blame her. If ever a woman had an excuse for saving, for nagging—If ever a woman had an excuse--