Chapter II: Part I: The Shadow of Life (2)

“All the more reason, then, for my having a right to amuse myself as I please. And I am a child, for I do amuse myself.”

Eppie stood staring out rigidly at the blighted prospect, and he took her unyielding hand. “Poor Elspeth is lying on her face. Do let us go on. I want you to hear what Agnes has to say next.”

She turned to him now. “I don’t believe a word you say. You only did it for me. You are only doing it for me now.”

“Well, what if I did? What if I do? Can’t I enjoy doing things for you? And really, really, Eppie, I do think it fun. I assure you I do.”

“I think you are a hero,” Eppie said solemnly, and at this absurdity he burst into his high, shrill laugh, and renewed his supplications; but supplications were in vain. She refused to let him play with her again. He might do things for the dolls,--yes, she reluctantly consented to that at last,--he might take the part of robber or of dangerous wild beast in the woods, but into domestic relations, as it were, he should not enter with them; and from this determination Gavan could not move her.

As far as his dignity in the eyes of others went, he might have gone on playing dolls with her all summer; Eppie realized, with surprise and relief, that Gavan’s assurance had been well founded. Uncle Nigel, evidently, did not think him unmanly, and there was no chaffing. It really was as he had said, he was so little a child that he could do as he chose. His dignity needed no defense.

But though the doll episode was not to be repeated, other and more equal ties knit her friendship with Gavan. Wide vistas of talk opened from their lessons, from their readings together. As they rambled through the heather they would talk of the Odyssey, of Plutarch’s Lives, of nearer great people and events in history. Gavan listened with smiling interest while Eppie expressed her hatreds and her loves, correcting her vehemence, now and then, by a reference to mitigatory circumstance. Penelope was one of the people she hated. “See, Gavan, how she neglected her husband’s dog while he was away--let him starve to death on a dunghill.”

Gavan surmised that the Homeric Greeks had little sense of responsibility about dogs.

“They were horrid, then,” said Eppie. “Dear Argos! Think of him trying to wag his tail when he was dying and saw Ulysses; _he_ was horrid, too, for he surely might have just stopped for a moment and patted his head. I’m glad that Robbie didn’t live in those times. You wouldn’t let Robbie die on a dunghill if _I_ were to go away!”

“No, indeed, Eppie!” Gavan smiled.

“I think you really love Robbie as much as I do, Gavan. You love him more than Uncle Nigel does. One can always see in people’s eyes how much they love a dog. That fat, red Miss Erskine simply feels nothing for them, though she always says ‘Come, come,’ to Robbie. But her eyes are like stones when she looks at him. She is really thinking about her tea, and watching to see that Aunt Rachel puts in plenty of cream. I suppose that Penelope looked like her, when she used to see Argos on the dunghill.”

Robbie was plunging through the heather before them and paused to look round at them, his delicate tongue lapping in little pants over his teeth.

“Darling Robbie,” said Gavan. “Our eyes aren’t like stones when we look at you! See him smile, Eppie, when I speak to him. Wouldn’t it be funny if we smiled with our ears instead of with our mouths.”

Gavan, after a moment, sighed involuntarily and deeply.

“What is the matter?” Eppie asked quickly, for she had grown near enough to ask it. And how near they were was shown after a little silence, by Gavan saying: “I was only wishing that everything could be happy at once, Eppie. I was thinking about my mother and wishing that she might be here with you and me and Robbie.” His voice was steadied to its cold quiet as he said it, though he knew how safe from any hurt he was with her. And she said nothing, and did not look at him, only, in silence, putting a hand of comradeship on his shoulder while they walked.

IV

Once a week, on the days of the Indian mail, Eppie’s understanding hovered helplessly about Gavan, seeing pain for him and powerless to shield him from it. Prayers took place in the dining-room ten minutes before breakfast, and with the breakfast the mail was brought in, so that Gavan’s promptest descent could not secure him a solitary reading of the letter that, Eppie felt, he awaited with trembling eagerness.

“A letter from India, Gavan dear,” Miss Rachel, the distributer of the mail would say. “Tell us your news.” And before them all, in the midst of the general’s comments on politics, crops, and weather, the rustling of newspapers, the pouring of tea, he was forced to open and read his letter and to answer, even during the reading, the kindly triviality of the questions showered upon him. “Yes, thank you, very well indeed. Yes, in Calcutta. Yes, enjoying herself, I think, thanks.” His pallor on these occasions, his look of hardened endurance, told Eppie all that it did not tell the others. And that his eagerness was too great for him to wait until after breakfast, she saw, too. A bright thought of rescue came to her at last. On the mornings when the Indian mail was due, she was up a good hour before her usual time. Long before the quaint, musical gong sounded its vague, blurred melody for prayers, she was out of the house and running through the birch-woods to the village road, where, just above the church, she met the postman. He was an old friend, glad to please the young lady’s love of importance, and the mail was trusted to her care. Eppie saved all her speed for the return. Every moment counted for Gavan’s sheltered reading. She felt as if, her back to its door, she stood before the sheltered chamber of their meeting, guarding their clasp and kiss, sweet and sorrowful, from alien eyes. Flushed, panting, she darted up to his room, handing his letter in to him, while she said in an easy, matter-of-fact tone, “Your mail, Gavan.”

Gavan, like the postman, attributed his good luck to Eppie’s love of importance, and only on the third morning discovered her manœuver.

He came down early himself to get his own letter, found that the mail had not arrived, and, strolling disappointedly down the drive, was almost knocked down by Eppie rushing in at the gate. She fell back, dismayed at the revelation that must force the fullness of her sympathy upon him--almost as if she herself glanced in at the place of meeting.

“I’ve got the letters,” she said, leaning on the stone pillar and recovering her breath. “There’s one for you.” And she held it out.

But for once Gavan’s concentration seemed to be for her rather than for the letter. “My mother’s letter?” he said.

She nodded.

“It was you, then. I wondered why they came so much earlier.”

“I met the postman; he likes to be saved that much of his walk.”

“You must have to go a long way to get them so early. You went on purpose for me, I think.”

Looking aside, she now had to own: “I saw that you hated reading them before us all. I would hate it, too.”

“Eppie, my dearest Eppie,” said Gavan. Glancing at him, she saw tears in his eyes, and joy and pride flamed up in her. He opened the letter and read it, walking beside her, his hand on her shoulder, showing her that he did not count her among “us all.”

After that they went together to meet the postman, and, unasked, Gavan would read to her long pieces from what his mother said.

It was a few weeks later, on one of these days, that she knew, from his face while he read, and from his silence, that bad news had come. He left her at the house, making no confidence, and at breakfast, when he came down to it later, she could see that he had been struggling for self-mastery. This pale, controlled face, at which she glanced furtively while they did their lessons in the library, made her think of the Spartan boy, calm over an agony. Even the general noticed the mechanical voice and the pallor and asked him if he were feeling tired this morning. Gavan owned to a headache.

“Off to the moors directly, then,” said the general; “and you, too, Eppie. Have a morning together.”

Eppie sat over her book and said that perhaps Gavan would rather go without her; but Gavan, who had risen, said quickly that he wanted her to come. “Let us go to the hilltop,” he said, when they were outside in the warm, scented sunlight.

They went through the woods, where the burn ran, rippling loudly, and the shadows were blue on the little, sandy path that wound among pines and birches. Neither spoke while they climbed the gradual ascent. They came out upon the height that ran in a long undulation to the far lift of mountain ranges. Under a solitary group of pines they sat down.

The woods of Kirklands were below them, and then the vast sea of purple, heaving in broad, long waves to the azure, intense and clear, of the horizon. The wind sighed, soft and shrill, through the pines above them, and far away they heard a sheep-bell tinkle. Beyond the delicate miniature of the village a wind-mill turned slow, gray sails. The whole world, seemed a sunlit island floating in the circling blue. Robbie sat at their feet, alert, upright, silhouetted against the sky.

“Robbie, Robbie,” said Gavan, gently, as he leaned forward and stroked the dog’s back. Eppie, too, stroked with him. The silence of his unknown grief weighed heavily on her heart and she guessed that though for him the pain of silence was great, the pain of speech seemed greater.

He presently raised himself again, clasping both hands about his knees and looking away into the vast distance. His head, with its thick hair, its fine, aquiline nose and delicately jutting chin, made Eppie think, vaguely, of a picture she had seen of a young Saint Sebastian, mutely enduring arrows, on a background of serene sky. With the thought, the silence became unendurable; she strung herself to speak. “Tell me, Gavan,” she said, “have you had bad news?”

He cast her a frightened glance, and, looking down, began to pull at the heather. “No, not bad news, exactly.”

Eppie drew a breath of dubious relief. “But you are so unhappy about something.”

Gavan nodded.

“But why, if it’s not bad news?”

After a pause he said, and she knew, with all the pain of it, what the relief of speaking must be: “I guess at things. I always feel if she is hiding things.”

“Perhaps you are only imagining.”

“I wish I could think it; but I know not. I know what is happening to her.”

He was still wrenching away at the heather, tossing aside the purple sprays with their finely tangled sandy roots. Suddenly he put his head on his knees, hiding his face.

“Oh, Gavan! Oh, don’t be so unhappy,” Eppie whispered, drawing near him, helpless and awe-struck.

“How can I be anything but unhappy when the person I care most for is miserable--miserable, and I am so far from her?” His shoulders heaved; she saw that he was weeping.

Eppie, at first, gazed, motionless, silent, frozen with a child’s quick fear of demonstrated grief. A child’s quick response followed. Throwing her arms around him, she too burst into tears.

It was strange to see how the boy’s reserves melted in the onslaught of this hot, simple sympathy. He turned to her, hiding his face on her shoulder, and they cried together.

“I didn’t want to make you unhappy, too,” Gavan said at last in a weakened voice. His tears were over first and he faintly smiled as he met Robbie’s alarmed, beseeching eyes. Robbie had been scrambling over them, scratching, whining, licking their hands and cheeks in an exasperation of shut-out pity.

“I’m not nearly so unhappy as when you don’t say anything and I know that you are keeping things back,” Eppie choked, pushing Robbie away blindly. “I’d much rather _be_ unhappy if you are.”

It was Gavan, one arm around the rejected Robbie, who had to dry her tears, trying to console her with: “Perhaps I did imagine more than there actually is. One can’t help imagining--at this distance.” He smiled at her, as he had smiled at Robbie, and holding her hand, he went on: “She is so gentle, and so lonely, and so unhappy. I could help her out there. Here, I am so helpless.”

“Make her come here!” Eppie cried. “Write at once and make her come. Send a wire, Gavan. Couldn’t she be here very soon, if you wired that she must--_must_ come? I wouldn’t bear it if I were you.”

“She can’t come. She must stay with my father.”

All the barriers were down now, so that Eppie could insist: “She would rather be with you. You want her most.”

“Yes, I want her most. But he needs her most,” said Gavan. “He is extravagant and weak and bad. He drinks and he gambles, and if she left him he would probably soon ruin himself--and us; for my mother has no money. She could not leave him if she would. And though he is often very cruel to her, he wants her with him.” Gavan spoke with all his quiet, but he had flushed as if from a still anger. “Money is an odious thing, Eppie. That’s what I want to do, as soon as I can: make money for her.” He added presently: “I pray for strength to help her.”

There was a long silence after this. Gavan lay back on the heather, his hat tilted over his tired eyes. Eppie sat above him, staring out at the empty blue. Her longing, her pity, her revolt from this suffering,--for herself and for him,--her vague but vehement desires, flew out--out; she almost seemed to see them, like strong, bright birds flying so far at last that the blue engulfed them. The idea hurt her. She turned away from the dissolving vastness before which it was impossible to think or feel, turned her head to look down at the long, white form beside her, exhausted and inert. Darling Gavan. How he suffered. His poor mother, too. She saw Gavan’s mother in a sort of padlocked palanquin under a burning sky, surrounded by dazzling deserts, a Blue-beard, bristling with swords, reeling in a drunken sentinelship round her prison. Considering Gavan, with his hidden face, the thought of his last words came more distinctly to her. A long time had passed, and his breast was rising quietly, almost as if he slept. Conjecture grew as to the odd form of action in which he evidently trusted. “Do you pray a great deal, Gavan?” she asked.

He nodded under the hat.

“Do you feel as if there was a God--quite near you--who listened?”

“I wouldn’t want to live unless I could feel that.”

Eppie paused at this, perplexed, and asked presently, with a slight embarrassment, “Why not?”

“Nothing would have any meaning,” said Gavan.

“No meaning, Gavan? You would still care for your mother and want to help her, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, but without God there would be no hope of helping her, no hope of strength. Why, Eppie,” came the voice from behind the hat, “without God life would be death.”

Eppie retired to another discomfited silence. “I am afraid I don’t think much about God,” she confessed at last. “I always feel as if I had strength already--I suppose, heaps and heaps of strength. Only--to-day--I do know more what you mean. If only God would do something for you and your mother. You want something so big to help you if you are very, very unhappy.”

“Yes, and some one to turn to when you are lonely.”

Again Eppie hesitated. “Well, but, Gavan, while you’re here you have me, you know.”

At this Gavan pushed aside his hat almost to laugh at her. “What a funny little girl you are, Eppie! What a dear little girl! Yes, of course, I have you. But when I go away? And even while I’m here,--what if we were both lonely together? Can’t you imagine that? The feeling of being lost in a great forest at night. You have such quaint ideas about God.”

“I’ve never had any ideas at all. I’ve only thought of Some One who was there,--Some One I didn’t need yet. I’ve always thought of God as being more for grown-up people. Lost in a forest together? I don’t think I would mind that so much, Gavan. I don’t think I would be frightened, if we were together.”

“I didn’t exactly mean it literally,--not a real forest, perhaps.” He had looked away from her, and, his thin, white face sunken among the heather, his eyes were on the blue immensities where her thoughts had lost themselves. “I am so often frightened. I get so lost sometimes that I can hardly believe that that Some One is near me. And then the fear becomes a sort of numbness, so that I hardly seem there myself; it’s only loneliness, while I melt and melt away into nothing. Even now, when I look at that sky, the feeling creeps and creeps, that dreadful loneliness, where there isn’t any I left to know that it’s lonely--only a feeling.” He shut his eyes resolutely. “My mother always says that it is when one has such fancies that one must pray and have faith.”

Eppie hardly felt that he spoke to her, and she groped among his strange thoughts, seizing the most concrete of them, imitating his shutting out of the emptiness by closing her own eyes. “Yes,” she said, reflecting in the odd, glowing dimness, “I am quite sure that you have much more feeling about God when you think hard, inside yourself, than when you look at the sky.”

“Only then, there are chasms inside, too.” Gavan’s hand beside him was once more restlessly pulling at the heather. “Even inside, one can fall, and fall, and fall.”

The strange tone of his voice--it was indeed like the far note of a falling bell, dying in an abyss--roused Eppie from her experiments. She shook his shoulder. “Open your eyes, Gavan; please, at once. You make me feel horridly. I would rather have you look at the sky than fall inside like that.”

He raised himself on an arm now, with a gaze, for a moment, vague, deadened, blank, then sprang to his feet. “Don’t let’s look. Don’t let’s fall. We must pray and have faith. Eppie, I have made you so pale. Dear Eppie, to care so much. Please forgive me for going to pieces like that.”

Eppie was on her feet, too. “But I want you to. You know what I mean: never hide things. Oh, Gavan, if I could only help you.”

“You do. It is because you care, just in the way you do, that I _could_ go to pieces,--and it has helped me to be so selfish.”

“Please be selfish, often, often, then. I always am caring. And just wait till I am grown up. I shall do something for you then. _I’ll_ make money, too, Gavan.”

“Eppie, you are the dearest little girl,” he repeated, in a shaken voice; and at that she put her arms around his neck and kissed him. The boy’s eyes filled with tears. They stood under the sighing pines, high in the blue, and the scent of the heather was strong, sweet, in the sunny air. Gavan did not return the kiss, but holding her face between his hands, stammering, he said, “Eppie, how can I bear ever to leave you?”

V

In looking back, after long years, at their summer, Eppie could see, more clearly than when she lived in it, that sadness and Gavan had always gone together. He had, as it were, initiated her into suffering. Sadness was the undertone of their sweet comradeship. Their happy stories came to tragic endings. Death and disaster, though in trivial forms, followed him.

With his returning strength, and perhaps with a sense of atonement to her for what he had called his selfishness, Gavan plunged eagerly into any outer interest that would please her. He spent hours in building for her a little hut on the banks of the brae among the birches: the dolls’ Petit Trianon he called it, as the summer-house was their Versailles. They had been reading about the French Revolution. Eppie objected to the analogy. “I should always imagine that Elspeth’s head were going to be cut off if I called it that.”

Gavan said that Elspeth need not be the queen, but a less exalted, more fortunate court lady. “We’ll imagine that she escaped early from France with all her family, saw none of the horrors, was a happy _émigrée_ in England and married there,” he said; and he went on, while he hammered at the pine boughs, with a desultory and reassuring account of Elspeth’s English adventures. But poor Elspeth came to as sad an end as any victim of the guillotine. Eppie was carrying her one day when she and Gavan had followed Aunt Barbara on some housewifely errand up to the highest attic rooms. Outside the low sills of the dormer-windows ran a narrow stone gallery looking down over the pine-tree and the garden. The children squeezed out through the window to hang in delighted contemplation over the birds’-eye view, and then Eppie crawled to a farther corner where one could see round to the moorland and find oneself on a level, almost, with the rooks’ nests in the lime-trees. She handed Elspeth to Gavan to hold for her while she went on this adventure.

He had just risen to his feet, looking down from where he stood over the low parapet, when a sudden cry from Eppie--a great bird sailing by that she called to him to look at--made him start, almost losing his balance on the narrow ledge. Elspeth fell from his arms.

She was picked up on the garden path, far, far beneath, with a shattered head. Gavan, perhaps, suffered more from the disaster than Eppie herself. He was sick with dismay and self-reproach. She was forced to make light of her grief to soothe his. But she did not feel that her soothing hoodwinked or comforted him. Indeed, after that hour on the hilltop, when he showed her his sorrow and his fear, Eppie felt that though near, very near him, she was also held away. It was as if he felt a discomfort in the nearness, or a dread that through it he might hurt again or be hurt. He was at once more loving and more reticent. His resolute cheerfulness, when they could be cheerful, was a wall between them.

Once more, and only once, before their childhood together ended, was she to see all, feel all, suffer all with him. Toward the end of the summer Robbie sickened and died. For three nights the children sat up with him, taking turns at sleep, refusing alien help. By candle-light, in Eppie’s room, they bent over Robbie’s basket, listening to his laboring breath. The general, protesting against the folly of the sleepless nights, yet tiptoed in and out, gruffly kind, moved by the pathos of the young figures. He gave medical advice and superintended the administering of teaspoonfuls of milk and brandy. That he thought Robbie’s case a hopeless one the children knew, for all his air of reassuring good cheer.

Robbie died early on the morning of the fourth day. A little while before, he faintly wagged his tail when they spoke to him, raising eyes unendurably sad.

Eppie, during the illness, had been constantly in tears; Gavan had shown a stoic fortitude. But when all was over and Eppie was covering Robbie with the white towel that was to be his shroud, Gavan suddenly broke down. Casting his arms around her, hiding his face against her, he burst into sobs, saying in a shuddering voice, while he clung to her, shaken all through with the violence of his weeping: “Oh, I can’t bear it, Eppie! I can’t bear it!”

Before this absolute shattering Eppie found her own self-control. Holding him to her,--and she almost thought that he would have fallen if she had not so held him,--she murmured, “Gavan, darling Gavan, I know, I know.”

“Oh, Eppie,” he gasped, “we will never see him again.”

She had drawn him down to the window-seat, where they leaned together, and she was silent for a moment at his last words. But suddenly her arms tightened around him with an almost vindictive tenderness. “We _will_,” she said.

“Never! Never!” Gavan gasped. “His eyes, Eppie,--his eyes seemed to know it; they were saying good-by forever. And, oh, Eppie, they were so astonished--so astonished,” he repeated, while the sobs shook him.

“We will,” Eppie said again, pressing the boy’s head to hers, while she shut her eyes over the poignant memory. “Why, Gavan, I don’t know much about God, but I do know about heaven. Animals will go to heaven; it wouldn’t be heaven unless they were there.”

That memory of the astonishment in Robbie’s eyes seemed to put knives in her heart, but over the sharpness she grasped her conviction.

In all the despair of his grief, the boy had, in answering her, the disciplined logic of his more formal faith, more clearly seen fact.

“Dear Eppie, animals have no souls.”

“How do you know?” she retorted, almost with anger.

“One only has to think. They stop, as Robbie has.”

“How do you know he has stopped? It’s only,” said Eppie, groping, “that he doesn’t want his body any longer.”

“But it’s Robbie in his body that we want. It’s his body, with Robbie in it, that we know. God has done with wanting him--that’s it, perhaps; but we want him. Oh, Eppie, it’s no good: as we know him, as we want him, he is dead--dead forever. Besides,”--in speaking this Gavan straightened himself,--“we shall forget him.” He turned, in speaking, from her consolations, as though their inefficiency hurt him.

“I won’t forget him,” said Eppie.

Gavan made no reply. He had risen, and standing now at the widely opened window, looked out over the chill, misty dawn. Beneath was the garden, its golden-gray walls rippling with green traceries, the clotted color of the hanging fruit among them. Over the hilltop, the solitary group of pines, the running wave of mountain, was a great piece of palest blue, streaked with milky filaments. The boughs of the pine-tree were just below the window, drenched with dew through all their fragrant darkness.

Eppie, too, rose, and stood beside him.

The hardened misery on his young face hurt her childish, yet comprehending heart even more than Robbie’s supplicating and astonished eyes had done. She could imagine that look of steeled endurance freezing through it forever, and an answering hardness of opposition rose in her to resist and break it. “We won’t forget him.”

“People do forget,” Gavan answered.

She found a cruel courage. “Could you forget your mother?”

Gavan continued to look stonily out of the window and did not answer her.

“Could you?” she repeated.

“Don’t, Eppie, don’t,” he said.

She saw that she had stirred some black terror in him, and her ignorant, responsive fear made her pitiless: “Could you forget her if she died? Never. Never as long as you lived.”

“Already,” he said, as though the words were forced from him by her will, “I haven’t remembered her all the time.”

“She is there. You haven’t forgotten her.”

“Years and years come. New things come. Old things fade and fade,--all but the deepest things. They couldn’t fade. No,” he repeated, “they couldn’t. Only, even they might get dimmer.”

She saw that he spoke from an agony of doubt, and he seemed to wrench the knife she had stabbed him with from his heart as he added: “But Robbie is such a little thing. And little things people do forget, I am sure of it. It’s that that makes them so sad.”

“Well, then,”--Eppie, too, felt the relief of the lesser pain,--“they will remember again. When you see Robbie in heaven you will remember all about him. But I won’t forget him,” she repeated once more, swallowing the sob that rose chokingly at the thought of how long it would be till they should see Robbie in heaven.

Gavan had now a vague, chill smile for the pertinacity of her faith. Something had broken in him, as if, with Robbie’s passing, a veil had been drawn from reality, an illusion of confidence dispelled forever. He leaned out of the window and breathed in the scent of the wet pine-tree, looking, with an odd detachment and clearness of observation,--as if through that acceptation of tragedy all his senses had grown keener,--at the bluish bloom the dew made upon the pine-needles; at the flowers and fruit in the garden below, the thatched roof of the summer-house, the fragile whiteness of the roses growing near it, like a bridal veil blown against the ancient wall. It was, in a moment of strange, suspended vision, as if he had often and often seen tragic dawn in the garden before and was often to see it again. What was he? Where was he? All the world was like a dream and he seemed to see to its farthest ends and back to its beginnings.

Eppie stood silent beside him.

He was presently conscious of her silence, and then, the uncanny crystal, gazing sense slipping from him, of a possible unkindness in his repudiating grief. He looked round at her. The poor child’s eyes, heavy with weeping and all the weight of the dark, encompassing woe he had shown her, dwelt on him with a somber compassionateness.

“Poor, darling little Eppie,” he said, putting an arm about her, “what a brute, a selfish brute, I am.”

“Why a brute, Gavan?”

“Making you suffer--more. I’m always making you suffer, Eppie, always; and you are really such a happy person. Come, let us go out for a walk. Let us go out on the moor. It will be delicious in the heather now. I want to see it and smell it. It will do us good.”

She resented his wisdom. “But you won’t forget Robbie, while we walk.”

For a moment, as if in great weariness, Gavan leaned his head against her shoulder. “Don’t talk of Robbie, please. We must forget him--just now, or try to, or else we can’t go on at all.”

Still she persisted, for she could not let it go like that: “I can think of him and go on too. I don’t want to run away from Robbie because he makes me unhappy.”

Gavan sighed, raising his head. “You are stronger than I am, Eppie. I must--I must run away.” He took her hand and drew her to the door, and she followed him, though glancing back, as she went, at the little form under the shroud.

VI

Robbie’s death overshadowed the last days of Gavan’s stay. Eppie did not feel, after it, after his avowed and helpless breakdown, the barrier sense so strongly. He didn’t attempt to hide dejection; but that was probably because she too was dejected and there was no necessity for keeping up appearances that would only jar and hurt. Eppie gave herself whole-heartedly to her griefs, and this was her grief as well as his. He could share it. It was no longer the holding her at arm’s length from a private woe. Yet the grief was not really shared, Eppie knew, for it was not the same grief that they felt. Of the difference they did not speak again. Then there came the sadness of the parting, so near now and for the first time realized in all its aspects.

Eppie gathered, from chance remarks of the general’s, that this parting was to be indefinite. The summer at Kirklands was no precedent for future summers, as she and Gavan had quite taken for granted. An uncle of Gavan’s, his father’s eldest brother, was to give him his home in England. This uncle had been traveling in the East this summer, and Gavan did not formally come under his jurisdiction until autumn. But the general conjectured that the jurisdiction would be well defined and tolerably stringent. Sir James Palairet had clearly cut projects for Gavan; they would, perhaps, not include holidays at Kirklands. The realization was, for Gavan, too, a new one.

“Am I not to come back here next summer?” he asked.

“I’m afraid not, Gavan; we haven’t first claim, you see. Perhaps Sir James will lend you to us now and then; but from what I know of him I imagine that he will want to do a lot with you, to put you through a great deal. There won’t be much time for this sort of thing. You will probably travel with him.”

They were in the library and, speaking from the depths of her fear, Eppie asked: “Do you like Sir James, Uncle Nigel?” She suspected a pitying quality in the cogitating look that the general bent upon Gavan.

“I hardly know him, my dear. He is quite an eminent man. A little severe, perhaps,--something of a martinet,--but just, conscientious. It is a great thing for Gavan,” the general continued, making the best of a rather bleak prospect, “to have such an uncle to give him a start in life. It means the best sort of start.”

Directly the two children were alone, both sitting in the deep window-seat, Gavan said, “Don’t worry, Eppie. Of course I’ll come back--soon.” His face took on the hardness that its delicacy could so oddly express. He was confronting his ambiguous fate in an attitude of cold resolution. For his sake, Eppie controlled useless outcries. “You have seen your uncle, Gavan?”

“Yes, once; in India. He came up to Darjeeling one summer.”

“Is he nice--nicer than Uncle Nigel made out, I mean?”

“He isn’t like my father,” said Gavan, after a moment.

“You mean that he isn’t wicked?” Eppie asked baldly.

“Oh, a good deal more than that. He is just and conscientious, as the general said. That’s what my mother felt; that’s why she could bear it, my going to him. And the general is right, you know, Eppie, about its being a great thing for me. He is a very important person, in his way, and he is going to put me through. He is determined that my father sha’n’t spoil my life. And, as you know, Eppie, my mother’s life, any chance for her, depends on me. To make her life, to atone to her in any way for all she has had to bear, I must make my own. My uncle will help me.”

The steeliness of his resolves made his face almost alien. Eppie felt this unknown future, where he must fight alone, for objects in which she had no share, shutting her out, and a child’s sick misery of desolation filled her, bringing back the distant memory of her mother’s death, that suffocating sense of being left behind and forgotten; but, keeping her eyes on his prospect, she managed in a firm voice to question him about the arid uncle, learned that he was married, childless, had a house in the country and one in London, and sat in Parliament. He was vastly busy, traveled a great deal, and wrote books of travel; not books about foreign people and the things they ate and wore, as Eppie with her courageous interest hopefully surmised, but books of dry, colorless fact, with lots of statistics in them, Gavan said.

“He wants me to go in for the same sort of thing--politics and public life.”

“You are going to be a Pitt--make laws, Gavan, like Pitt?” Eppie kept up her dispassionate tone.

He smiled at the magnified conception. “I’ll try for a seat, probably, or some governmental office; that is, if I turn out to be worth anything.”

How the vague vastness shut her out! What should she do, meanwhile? How carve for herself a future that would keep her near him in the great outside world? And would he want her near him in it when he was to be so great, too? This question brought the irrepressible tears to her eyes at last, though she turned away her head and would not let them fall. But Gavan glanced at her and leaned forward to look, and then she saw, as her eyes met his, that the hard resolve was for her, too, and did not shut her out, but in.

“I’m coming back, Eppie,” he said, taking her hand and holding it tightly. “Next to my mother, it’s _you_,--you know it.”

“I haven’t any mother,” said Eppie, keeping up the bravery, though it was really harder not to cry now. He understood where she placed him.

Eppie was glad that it was raining on the last morning. Sunshine would have been a mockery, and this tranquilly falling rain, that turned the hills to pale, substanceless ghosts and brought the end of the moor, where it disappeared into the white, so near, was not tragic. Gavan was coming back. She would think only of that. She would not--would not cry. He should see how brave she could be. When he was gone--well, she allowed herself a swift thought of the Petit Trianon, its hidden refuge. There, all alone, she would, of course, howl. There was a grim comfort in this vision of herself, rolling upon the pine-needle carpet of the Petit Trianon and shrieking her woes aloud.

At breakfast Gavan showed a tense, calm face. She was impressed anew with the sense of his strength, for, in spite of his resolves, he was suffering, perhaps more keenly than herself. Suffering, with him, partook of horror. She could live in hopes, and on them. To Gavan, this parting was the going into a dark cavern that he must march through in fear. And then, he would never roll and shriek.

After breakfast, they hardly spoke to each other. Indeed, what was there to say? Eppie filled the moments in superintending the placing of fruit and sandwiches in his dressing-case. The carriage was a little late, so that when the final moment came, there was a hurried conventionality of farewell. Gavan was kissed by the aunts and shook hands with Miss Grimsby, while the general called out that there was no time to lose.

“Come back to us, dear boy; keep your feet dry on the journey,” said Miss Rachel, while Miss Barbara, holding his hand, whispered gently that she would always pray for him.

Eppie and Gavan had not looked at each other, and when the moment came for their farewell, beneath the eyes of aunts, uncle, Miss Grimsby, and the servants, it seemed the least significant of all, was the shortest, the most formal. They looked, they held hands for a moment, and Gavan faltered out some words. Eppie did not speak and kept her firm smile. Only when he had followed the general into the carriage and it was slowly grinding over the gravel did something hot, stinging, choking, flare up in her, something that made her know this smooth parting to be intolerable--not to be borne.

She darted out into the rain. Bobbie was dead; Gavan was gone; why, she was alone--alone--and a question was beating through her as she ran down the drive and, with a leap to its step, caught the heavy old carriage in its careful turning at the gate. Gavan saw, at the window, her white, freckled face, her startled eyes, her tossed hair all beaded with the finely falling rain--like an apparition on the ghostly background of mist.

“Oh, Gavan, don’t forget me!” That had been the flaring terror.

He had just time to catch her hand, to lean to her, to kiss her. He did not speak. Mutely he looked at the little comrade all the things he could not say: what she was to him, what he felt for her, what he would always feel,--always, always, always, his eyes said to hers as she stepped back to the road and was gone.