Yes, it was possible, he found, to admire George's quality while one disapproved of his conduct. A little later, after lunch perhaps, he would go over for a word with him. A little later, but not now while the birds sang in the trees and the scent of lilacs floated in from the garden. A vague shadow crossed the shutters of the French window, and the still air of the room was stirred by ripples as noiseless as the reflection of leaves in a pond. There was a breathless laugh, broken off on a pulsing note, like the call of a bird. Jenny Blair, that was her laugh. Had he ever laughed so musically, even when he was young, even before he knew what life is? What life is at best, with its ceaseless toil, its frustrated desires, and its meagre rewards.
When he called that afternoon, George had gone to the hospital, and only John Welch was at home.
"I'm on my way to see her now," the young man said, turning from the hall into the library, which opened on a porch at the back of the house. "Of course she doesn't need me. She has Bridges and Adams; but I feel better if I am within call."
"Then don't let me keep you. She has stood it well, hasn't she?"
"Yes, she has stood it well, though she is too sick now from the ether to feel anything else. If you don't mind missing George, I'd like to talk to you. There is no hurry."
"No, I don't mind missing George. That is the least of my regrets. But I cannot keep on my legs." He sat down in the Windsor chair by the desk, and stared with a fixed frown through the door of the porch. The back yard, which had once been a flower garden, was running wild with unmown grasses and weeds, and several old lilac bushes were in bloom by the steps. It was a pity the garden had been allowed to go to seed; but the Birdsongs were in straitened circumstances as usual, and they had not been able to afford a gardener since the death of Uncle Abednego. Few old gardens were left in Queenborough nowadays; yet he remembered the time when every well-to-do house in Washington Street was enclosed in borders of roses or evergreens.
The house, too, looked shabby, he observed, withdrawing his gaze. Only persons who never read would call the room in which they were sitting a library. True, a few broken sets of books filled the lower shelves of the rosewood bookcases; but odd pieces of china, mostly of the Willow pattern, were arranged behind the glass doors at the top. Newspapers or light magazines littered the fine Sheraton table in the centre of the room and George's big mahogany desk by the back window. There were curtains of wine-coloured damask, faded by age and use into silvery purple, and a grey-green Axminster carpet with rubbed places. In one corner, between the desk and the door, a small cupboard was open, and he could see George's leather coat and golf-clubs, and, on a rack above, the guns and bags that were used in the shooting season. George was a famous shot. Every year he spent a part of November shooting ducks at a place on James River, and nothing else in life was important enough to interfere with this annual engagement. Since his game-bag was as open as his mind or heart, Mrs. Archbald often remarked that her butcher's bill was pared down to the bone every autumn.
"Is your sciatica troubling you again?" John asked, with sympathy, as he lighted a cigarette. "I had hoped you were rid of that for the summer."
"Worry brings it back, I believe; but my gout is worse at this minute. I had to come over in my old slippers," he added ruefully, as he glanced down at his right foot. "I see nothing ahead of me but a diet of bread and water." Then he asked abruptly, wondering if it could be the absence of Mrs. Birdsong that extinguished the brightness in the room and made even the flowered chintz look wilted, "I suppose you can't be sure yet?'
"Not perfectly sure, but the trouble was more serious than they thought it would be."
The General winced, "Poor girl, poor girl, she struggled too hard not to give up." For a moment, while he tried to distract his mind, he sat brooding in silence, with his eyes on the blue-and-white Willow plates on the top shelf of a rosewood bookcase. Why, he pondered, did women put china in such unsuitable places? No man would arrange a row of plates on end in a bookcase. Bare shelves would appear better to a masculine eye. "Well, I had my hands full—at least Cora had her hands full with George," he burst out at last; for he was very tired; his foot pained him; and the best years of his life, to which he had looked ahead so happily a little while before, were still far out of sight.
"I don't doubt it." John's tone was curt. "I sometimes think the whole trouble is too much George. George is not a restful person to live with. Nor, for that matter, is romantic love restful."
"She adores him, and she has always been his ideal, ever since she was a slip of a girl."
"That is a part, the larger part probably, of the trouble. Think what it must have cost her to keep up being an ideal for more than twenty years! You may talk about keeping up socially, but it doesn't touch the effort of keeping up emotionally. She must have known, too, in her heart, at least, that George wasn't worth it."
"You can't deny, after to-day, that he gives her the best that is in him. We ought not to ask more than that of any man."
"Perhaps not. But when the best in a man pulls one way and everything else pulls another way, the only end is catastrophe." He shook his head impatiently, while the light on his flaming crest and his sharply pointed features gave him the look of a crusader. His face held manliness and sincerity and rugged authority. To be sure, there were persons who distrusted his advanced, or as they insisted radical, opinions. Not only had he become a Socialist in an age when Socialism was still considered dangerous, but he held equally unsound views of suffrage, religion, and the scheme of things in general. The names they called him in conservative Queenborough were not meant to be flattering. However, names are only words in the end; and the old man, who had been called by many different names, though never by the right one, in his own youth, could no longer be frightened by labels. Even names with stings in their tails were only stinging words. "My generation felt about social injustice," he thought. "John's generation talks about social injustice; and perhaps, who knows, the next generation, or the generation after the next, may begin to act about social injustice." Not that it mattered to him now, for that throbbing had begun again in the joint of his toe.
"Tell George I came over," he said, rising heavily to his feet. "I suppose you will find him at the hospital."
"I don't know. She doesn't like to have him about when she is sick. Did you notice how unnatural she became the minute he entered the room?"
"I saw that she made an effort to seem bright and cheerful."
"The strain told every time. I watched her pulse, and finally I asked him to stay out of her room as much as he could."
"Well, it's hard on him too. After all, he doesn't want her to make an effort. He'd much rather she'd be natural. I believe he is perfectly sincere when he says it doesn't make the slightest difference to him how she looks."