Etta, who had been lost to the world in the French language, thrust her book under the bedclothes and turned a dejected face on her father. Dangerous reading had been her only vice ever since the days when she had hidden under the bed to enjoy in secret a borrowed copy of Moths; but even Ouida had begun to seem stale—or was it immature?--in the twentieth century.
While he gazed down on his invalid daughter, the old man wished, and reproached himself for the wish, that Etta had been born with a little—a very little would suffice—of Isabella's attraction. If only sympathy were softened by the faintest shadow of luxury! There was nothing, he told himself, that he would not do, no sacrifice that he would not make, for her comfort. In one way, at least, she was closer to him, she was dearer than Isabella, or even than Jenny Blair; but it was a way that made him long to look somewhere else, that depressed him unbearably. Just as Isabella's defiance appeased some secret revolt, some thwarted and twisted instinct for happiness, so Etta revived in the flesh another and a defeated side of his nature. She embodied all those harsh and thorny realities from which he had tried in vain to escape. He had closed the door on ineffectual pity, and she had opened it wide. He had hardened himself against desire that is impotent, and she wore the living shape of it whenever he looked at her. Now, as he bent over and stroked her head, he felt for a moment that she gazed up at him with the incredible eyes of his own disappointment.
"Isn't it bad for you to read so steadily, my child?" he asked again, because he could think of nothing to add to the question.
"I have to do something, Father. I can't just lie here and think." Her long sallow face, with its opaque expression and imperfect teeth, was like a waxen mask which concealed every change of thought, every wandering gleam of intelligence. The jagged streaks from a menthol pencil had left a yellow stain on her forehead, and she had pushed back her pale brown hair until it hung in a straight veil to her shoulders. Some women, he reflected, appear to advantage in bed; but poor Etta was not one of these fortunate creatures. In all her clothes, after the temporary repairs achieved by Mrs. Archbald, she was sufficiently attractive for a woman who put no strain upon the fragile emotions of men. But prostrate from a severe headache, and too ill to submit to the simplest improvements, she was scarcely more appealing than some heartless caricature of feminine charms. Poor girl, poor girl, if only one were not so helpless against illness! For she was the victim of life itself, not of human or social injustice, not even of any system invented by man. No system could help her, not all the rights of suffrage piled on one another could improve a mortal lot that had been defeated before it came into the world. It might be possible—it was always possible, of course, to blame heredity; but Isabella, with the same inheritance, he reminded himself, was strong, handsome, magnetic, with a hearty relish for life. Had there been some secret flaw in his own nature, or in Erminia's open and innocent soul? We know so little of inheritance, he thought, we know so little of anything. Perhaps when we learn more . . . Perhaps, poor girl, he sighed, and turned away from the old spectre of impotent pity. . . .
Before Jenny Blair undressed that night, after she had put her lessons away, she took out the Japanese kimono and unfolded it on the bed. How exactly like a spring afternoon, she thought, with the blue sky shining through trailing clusters of purple wistaria! While she wrapped it delicately in white tissue paper and tied the package with blue ribbon, she thought with a rush of pleasure, "It is the prettiest thing I have, but I wish it were more beautiful still. I'd give her anything in the world I have if it could do her the least bit of good. If Mamma would let me, I'd give her my pearl and diamond pin." She longed to sacrifice herself for Mrs. Birdsong; she pitied her from the depths of her heart. "I couldn't bear to hurt her," she thought, "but how can it hurt her for me to feel this way in secret? Even he will never, never suspect that I care." Vaguely, she repeated, "I don't mean anything. I don't ask anything for myself. If only I may see him from a distance, even if we never speak a word, I shall be perfectly happy." This was all that she asked. And yet, though she had parted from him only a few hours before, she was already tormented by the longing to be with him again—to be with him again just for a moment! But the torment was less of pain than of a joy too intense for the memory to hold.
After she had opened the window, she tried to see beyond the intervening houses into the Birdsongs' garden; but there was nothing more than a pattern of darkness and moonlight under the moving branches of the old mulberry tree. Slipping out of her clothes at last, she tossed them in a heap on a chair and stretched her body, in its batiste nightgown, between the cool linen sheets, which were scented with lavender. Mamma had promised to let her wear nightgowns of pink crêpe de chine when she had her coming-out party; but cambric or batiste was considered more suitable for children and very young girls.
"Now I have something to think of," she whispered, as she clasped her hands on her bosom and gazed straight over the foot of the bed at the glimmer of moonlight and darkness beyond the window. "Now I can let myself really remember." Immediately, as if the phrase were some magic formula, she discovered that all she had to do was to let herself sink back into the luminous tide which ebbed and flowed through her mind. Not by thinking but by feeling, by lying very straight and still and feeling with all her heart and flesh, she was able to live over again the startled wonder and the burning rapture of love. "I never knew it was like this," she said under her breath. "I never dreamed life was so wonderful." And with the flowing tide of sensation, her pulses sang again in her ears, and the grasses and clover raced ahead of her into the future. Was happiness outside, at the end of the race? Was happiness roaming beyond the room and the house and the garden, through the darkness of the world and the universe?
All night, in a pause between waking and sleeping, she fled in circles through a dark forest, from a pursuer she could not see, though she heard the breaking of boughs and the crackling of dead leaves as he followed her. All night she ran on and on; yet no matter how far and how fast she sped, always she came again to the place from which she had started. Round and round in circles, and never escaping.
CHAPTER 5
When General Archbald came out of the house the next morning, he found his daughter-in-law waiting for him in the car.
"I couldn't let you go by yourself, Father. It will be a great strain on you, and besides," she added, with the anxious sweetness that never failed, he reflected, to stroke him against the grain, "I want to be there in case Eva should need me. George is so helpless."
"If you feel like that, my dear, you must not let me keep you from going."
"I shan't be in your way. While George is talking with you alone, I'll wait outside in the visitors' room."
As the old man stepped into the car, he glanced up uncertainly at the promise of rain in the sky. "There is no reason he should talk to me alone. I can imagine nothing that hasn't already been said. If we drive fast, we may get there ahead of the shower."
"Yes, I told Baxter. But one never knows about George. He has so little command over himself when he is really moved. I never saw any one give way so completely, though he tries hard to keep up when he is with Eva."
The General frowned. "That means, I suppose, that he will unburden himself to me. I don't want it," he said testily, "I won't have it. You'd better stay with him, Cora. You have more patience with people than I have."
"But didn't you promise Eva? That was one of the things she wanted to ask you."