He stumbled slightly, and Baxter caught him under the arm and helped him into the house. Why did old men (women were different) dislike so much to be helped? In other civilizations, where manners were more gracious, old age was regarded as an honourable condition. But in America, even in the South, the cult of the immature had prevailed over the order of merit.
"Is there anything I can get for you, Father?" Mrs. Archbald persisted. "Would you like a dose of aromatic ammonia?"
"No, my dear, nothing whatever. All I ask is to lie down for an hour."
"You must go into the library. I'll shut the doors and keep every one out. Nobody shall disturb you till lunch."
"How did she stand it?" Jenny Blair and Isabella asked together.
"Wonderfully. She stood it wonderfully," Mrs. Archbald replied. "Of course she is gravely ill, and she will be sick from the ether; but John said they felt very hopeful."
"Oh, Mamma, I am so glad," Jenny Blair cried happily. "When do you think I may send her my kimono?"
"Not yet, darling. Not for a week at least. She is too ill to enjoy it. Now, your grandfather wants to rest. All this has been a great strain on him. He must be left perfectly quiet in the library."
While she spoke she was gently pushing them away and leading her father-in-law to the deep repose of his sofa. After she had placed him comfortably and had tucked the softest pillows under his head, she stood looking down on him with anxious concern. "Isn't there something else I can do, Father?"
The old man struggled up. "I'd better go to my room, Cora. I must get into my old slippers." For the pain had returned in his joints, and he felt that no torture could exceed the red-hot twinges of gout.
"Jenny Blair will bring them, Father. You mustn't get up. Jenny Blair, find your grandfather's old slippers in his closet. If you don't know them, ask Robert." Kneeling on the floor, Mrs. Archbald unlaced the old man's shoes and drew them off gently. "Is that better? Put your feet up. No, don't worry. Not a soul is coming into the room."
He breathed a long sigh of relief. "It's the right foot. I could stand the left, but the right foot is too much."
"I know." She stood up with the shoes in her hand and gave them to Robert when he brought the well-worn slippers. "Wouldn't you be more comfortable if you loosened your collar?"
He shook his head stubbornly, shrinking from so serious an infringement of habit. Though it was commendable to rebel in one's mind, it was imperative, he felt, to keep on one's collar. "No, my dear, no. As soon as I've rested, I'll go upstairs and brush up a bit." When he had glanced at the staircase, the flight had seemed to him endless. "I couldn't have made it," he murmured to himself. "Not with this pain, I couldn't have made it."
"Remember, Etta and I are on the back porch," Isabella was saying while Mrs. Archbald closed the green shutters of the French window. "The sun has come out and the air feels like summer. If you need anything, call me. The children have gone to play in the park, and I am going to make Cora lie down until lunch."
But Mrs. Archbald could not rest in peace until she knew that her father-in-law had been properly restored to himself. After leaving him for a minute, she returned with a glass of milk and a beaten biscuit, and he ate and drank to oblige her, while she watched him with a solicitude that failed now to annoy him. "You are a staff to lean on, Cora," he said, humbly grateful.
"Aren't you feeling better?"
"Yes, my dear, I'm feeling better."
"Are you sure you wouldn't like Jenny Blair to sit with you?'
"No, I can rest easier by himself. William is here, isn't he?'
"Yes, he is here." Looking up at the mention of his name, William thumped his tail and moved nearer. "If you need anything, don't get up to ring. Isabella is just outside the window."
After a last sympathetic pat, she took up the glass and plate from the table, and went out of the room with her springy step. Through the door into the dining-room and the open French window, he could catch a glimpse of the flickering sunshine in the garden. A watery green light filtered into the room, and the familiar objects appeared suddenly to be swimming beneath the waves of the sea. Outside in the trees birds were calling, and now and then he heard the lowered voices of Etta and Isabella. This was the homely texture of life, he thought presently, woven and interwoven of personalities that crossed without breaking, without bending, without losing their individual threads of existence. A good pattern, no doubt; but what of those who cannot be blended into a design? He had always been alone; he had always been different; yet he had not, except in periods of shock or strain, been unhappy. Unsatisfied, he had been, but not unhappy. Was this because unhappiness is as rare as happiness? Was the natural state of mind merely one of blunted sensation, of twilight vision? For he had had what men call a fortunate life. Only in war had he been hungry and cold. Impoverished, he had been after the war, but not actually famished, not actually shivering. His greatest sorrow had been, he supposed, what all theologians and many philosophers would describe as a moral victory. In other ways, he had prospered. He had had a just measure of those benefits for which revolutions are made, and yet he had not been satisfied. "But my life has been better than most," he murmured, thankful for the comfort of his slippers, as he sank into a doze.
An hour later he awoke with a sense of elation, of extraordinary well-being. "I've had a good nap," he thought, with his gaze on the watery green light drifting in through the slats of the shutters. "I feel rested." Part of his exhilaration may have been only freedom from pain, for the throbbing had died away in his joints; but there was something more, he told himself, than simple bodily ease. His mind, too, was eased of its burden. "Eva is over the worst," he mused; and yet there was more even than swift relief from dark apprehension. It was as if the April wind had blown through his thoughts and scattered living seeds over the bare places. Now and then in the past, especially in his youth at Stillwater, he had known this sensation in sleep, the sudden breaking off of a dream so blissful that the ecstasy had brimmed over into his life. "It is a good world," he thought drowsily, while consciousness sifted slowly in flakes of light through his mind. "I shouldn't wonder if my best years are ahead of me." Released from wanting, escaped from the tyranny of chance, he might settle down into tranquillity at the end. For age alone, he perceived, striving to grasp this certainty before it eluded him, is capable of that final peace without victory which turns a conflict of desires into an impersonal spectacle. "Yes, I shouldn't wonder," he repeated, "if my best years are ahead."
After another doze, he found himself thinking, "How attractive Jenny Blair looks in that blue dress with the white collar. Like a little girl playing that she is grown up." He saw the heart-shaped oval of her face mirrored in the greenish haze from the shutters—the rose-leaf skin, the short blunt nose powdered with freckles, the yellow-hazel eyes rimmed so strikingly in black lashes. If one asked nothing more than young innocence! Then the girl's face melted into the swimming light. He turned his head on the pillows and thought, with patience born of rest, that he must keep in touch with George for the next few days. He would go over to see him this afternoon. Perhaps Cora had asked him to drop in for lunch or dinner. Some men preferred to be alone; but George disliked solitude. Well, he would do what he had promised; he would stand by George until Eva was out of the hospital. And not only because of his promise. For he was fond of George in his heart, though he perceived as plainly as the sternest moralist could have done that George was deficient in character, in the kind of endurance that Cora so aptly called staying power. In place of character, he harboured a collection of generous instincts. A proof of weakness, no doubt; yet nothing in General Archbald's experience had astonished him more than the height that human nature sometimes attains without a solid foundation. A character like granite, he had observed, may prove as unprofitable to virtue as a succession of fine impulses. For it was true that character became warped quite as frequently as impulses ran wild.