"It's too late now to hammer that into her mind. He fell in love with her, as you say, because she was an ideal, and she has determined to remain his ideal until the end."
"Well, I hope George will keep his nerve, and, I may add, his capacity to feel anything. There is, I suspect, a limit to feeling for every human being. Some are able to stand more than others; but whenever the end of endurance is reached, each one takes his own way of escape. Well, give her my love, and tell her I'm ready to come whenever she wants me."
Walking with an effort that exasperated him, he left the house, descended the steps, and made his way slowly past the intervening front yards to the end of the block. At the door Jenny Blair met him, and he told himself, startled, that he had never seen her so lovely. "She looks as if she were in love," he thought shrewdly. "I wonder if she can have a secret fancy for John. You can't tell the way a woman feels by anything that she says."
"George was not there," he said, "but I was talking with John." He looked at her closely as he spoke, and it seemed to him, though his old eyes may have been mistaken, that her gaze faltered.
"Oh, were you?"
"She is still suffering a great deal from the ether; but he says everything has gone as well as they could expect."
"I am so glad. I know she will get well. She has so much to live for."
"Well, I hope she will always have that. Are you going out, my dear?"
"I promised Mrs. Birdsong I'd go over every day to see her canary. You remember Ariel? She keeps him upstairs in her bedroom, and she worries about leaving him when she is away. Servants are so careless. Is John there by himself?"
"He is going up to the hospital; but he said there was no hurry."
"After all, I think I'd just as well wait till to-morrow. I saw Berry give Ariel his bath and clean his cage this morning."
"Would you rather not see John alone, my dear? If you feel that way," he offered gallantly, "I'll crawl back with you, in spite of my toe."
"Oh, no." She laughed at the idea. "What difference does John make? But I can see Ariel just as well in the morning."
What did she mean? he wondered, as he followed her into the hall. Of what was she thinking? No matter. Whatever she thought now, she would probably think something entirely different to-morrow.
That night he slept brokenly and was wide awake with the dawn. As the sun rose, he lay motionless in bed and watched the elm branches mounting upward like the inner curve of a wave. Hours must pass before Robert would bring his early coffee, and he knew that he should not be able to drop back to sleep. Rising presently, he slipped into his dressing-gown and went over to the front window which looked down on the street. Though he still occupied the large corner room he had shared with his wife, there were days in summer when he wished for at least a single window that opened on the flower garden. True, there was a plot sown in grass, but too deeply shaded by trees, just below his side windows; but when he rose early, as he had fallen into the habit of doing, he preferred to sit in his wife's old chair with deep wings in the front corner. Erminia had been dead so long now that he had ceased to associate her with any particular chair. Though he thought of her frequently, and missed her presence more than he had ever enjoyed her company, her figure and even her features had faded gradually into a haze of tender regret.
Overhead, there was a pale aquamarine tinge in the sky, and long pulsations of light quivered up from the sunrise. On the earth, mist was dissolving; birds were cheeping; the rumour of life was awaking, now far off, now nearer, now in the house next door, now in Washington Street. As the light throbbed into his mind, he seemed to become, or to have been from the beginning, a part of the dawn, of the earth, of the universe. Girdled about by the security of age, he felt again that his best years might still be ahead of him. For the first time in his life, he might make the most of the spring; he might enjoy the summer splendour with a mind undivided by longing. His daughters, his daughter-in-law, Jenny Blair, his grandchildren, William—all these were dearer because they were no longer necessary. And dearer than all, though she, too, had ceased to be necessary, was Eva Birdsong. . . .
It was at this moment, while that quiet happiness was filling his thoughts, that his look dropped to the street, and he saw George Birdsong passing along the pavement on the way to his gate. For a single heart-beat, no more, the old man was shocked into wonder. Then, as quickly, astonishment faded. Florid, refreshed, invigorated by his escape, George glanced with a slightly furtive air at the houses he passed. A few hours later, after a cold shower and a hearty breakfast, he would return with replenished sympathy, no doubt, to Eva's bedside.
After he had entered his gate and disappeared behind the boughs of the trees, General Archbald sat plunged in meditation from which happiness had strangely departed. The world of good intentions had not altered; yet, in some inexplicable way, it was different. Virtue—or was it merely philosophy?--seemed to have gone out of it. "I wish Robert would come," he thought. "I'll feel better again as soon as I've had my coffee."
The sun rose in the heavenly blue; the birds called in the trees; and the vague discord of life, swelling suddenly louder, drifted in from the streets. With inexpressible relief, he found that the ripple had passed on, but the deepened sense of security, that tideless calm of being old, had not wavered. At eighty-three, he could still look ahead to the spring and the summer, and beyond the spring and the summer to the happiest years of his life, when nothing, not even life itself, would be necessary.
CHAPTER 7
It was the end of June before Mrs. Birdsong was well enough to leave the hospital, and then, after a few days at home, she went for a long visit to her uncle, Frederick Howard, who lived at the family place near Winchester. The morning before she left, Jenny Blair ran in with a little gift, and found her weeping in front of the oblong mirror on her dressing-table.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," the girl cried, with passionate sympathy. "Is there anything I can do?"
"Nothing, dear, nothing. You've been an angel." Turning away from the mirror, Mrs. Birdsong wrapped Jenny Blair's kimono, with the design of trailing wistaria, about her, and sank into a wicker chair by the window. "You are always giving me pretty things," she added, untying the package and taking out a nightgown of blue crêpe de chine, "but you ought to keep them for yourself."
"I'd rather you had them," Jenny Blair said, and she meant it. "I'd give you anything I have if it could do any good."
"It is too pretty," Mrs. Birdsong answered softly, while the tears welled up in her eyes, and she turned her face to the window.
In the neglected garden below the old perennials were blooming again. The grass had grown too high; but pink roses and larkspur and pale purple foxglove survived in the flower-beds, and a cloud of blue morning glories drifted over a broken trellis to the window-sill by which Mrs. Birdsong was sitting. Against the luminous warmth and colour her brilliant fairness looked worn and tarnished. Illness had left her cheeks drawn and haggard, and her skin, which General Archbald had compared to alabaster, was tinged with faint yellow on the temples and about the mouth. In the darkened hollows her eyes were veiled and remote, and when she lost animation, there was the flicker of some deep hostility in the blue fire of her gaze. Even her lips, touched carelessly with red, looked straight and hard, and her fixed smile seemed to change with an effort. Only the pure outline of her head and profile was as lovely as ever.