THE SHADOW OF LIFE

I

ELSPETH GIFFORD was five years old when she went to live at Kirklands. Her father, an army officer, died in her babyhood, and her mother a few years later. The uncle and aunts in Scotland, all three much her mother’s seniors, were the child’s nearest relatives.

To such a little girl death had meant no more than a bewildered loneliness, but the bewilderment was so sharp, the loneliness so aching, that she cried herself into an illness. She had seen her dead mother, the sweet, sightless, silent face, familiar yet amazing, and more than any fear or shrinking had been the suffocating mystery of feeling herself forgotten and left behind. Her uncle Nigel, sorrowful and grave, but so large and kind that his presence seemed to radiate a restoring warmth, came to London for her and a fond nurse went with her to the North, and after a few weeks the anxious affection of her aunts Rachel and Barbara built about her, again, a child’s safe universe of love.

Kirklands was a large white house and stood on a slope facing south, backed by a rise of thickly wooded hill and overlooking a sea of heathery moorland. It was a solitary but not a melancholy house. Lichens yellowed the high-pitched slate roof and creepers clung to the roughly “harled” walls. On sunny days the long rows of windows were golden squares in the illumined white, and, under a desolate winter sky, glowed with an inner radiance.

In the tall limes to the west a vast colony of rooks made their nests; and to Eppie these high nests, so dark against the sky in the vaguely green boughs of spring or in the autumn’s bare, swaying branches, had a weird, fairy-tale charm. They belonged neither to the earth nor to the sky, but seemed to float between, in a place of inaccessible romance, and the clamor, joyous yet irritable, at dawn and evening seemed full of quaint, strange secrets that only a wandering prince or princess would have understood.

Before the house a round of vivid green was encircled by the drive that led through high stone gates to the moorland road. A stone wall, running from gate to gate, divided the lawn from the road, and upon each pillar a curiously carved old griffin, its back and head spotted with yellow lichens, held stiffly up, for the inspection of passers-by, the family escutcheon. From the windows at the back of the house one looked up at the hilltop, bare but for a group of pine-trees, and down into a deep garden. Here, among utilitarian squares of vegetable beds, went overgrown borders of flowers—bands of larkspurs, lupins, stocks, and columbines. The golden-gray of the walls was thickly embroidered with climbing fruit-trees, and was entirely covered, at one end of the garden, by a small snow-white rose, old-fashioned, closely petaled; and here in a corner stood a thatched summer-house, where Eppie played with her dolls, and where, on warm summer days, the white roses filled the air with a fragrance heavy yet fresh in its wine-like sweetness. All Eppie’s early memories of Kirklands centered about the summer-house and were mingled with the fragrance of the roses. Old James, the gardener, put up there a little locker where her toys were stored, and shelves where she ranged her dolls’ dishes. There were rustic seats, too, and a table—a table always rather unsteady on the uneven wooden floor. The sun basked in that sheltered, windless corner, and, when it rained, the low, projecting eaves ranged one safely about with a silvery fringe of drops through which one looked out over the wet garden and up at the white walls of the house, crossed by the boughs of a great, dark pine-tree.

Inside the house the chief room was the fine old library, where, from long windows, one looked south over the purples and blues of the moorland. Books filled the shelves from floor to ceiling—old-fashioned tomes in leather bindings, shut away, many of them, behind brass gratings and with all the delightful sense of peril connected with the lofty upper ranges, only to be reached by a courageous use of the library steps.

Here Uncle Nigel gave Eppie lessons in Greek and history every morning, aided in the minor matters of her education by a submissive nursery governess, an Englishwoman, High Church in doctrine and plaintive in a country of dissent.

A door among the book-shelves led from the library into the morning-room or boudoir, where Aunt Rachel and Aunt Barbara sewed, read, dispensed small charities and lengthy advice to the village poor—a cheerful little room in spite of its northern aspect and the shadowing trunk of the great pine-tree just outside its windows. It was all faded chintzes, gilt carvings, porcelain ornaments in corner cabinets; its paper was white with a fine gilt line upon it; and even though to Eppie it had sad associations with Bible lessons and Sunday morning collects, it retained always its aspect of incongruous and delightful gaiety—almost of frivolity. Sitting there in their delicate caps and neatly appointed dresses, with their mild eyes and smoothly banded hair, Aunt Rachel and Aunt Barbara gathered a picture-book charm—seemed to count less as personalities and more as ornaments. On the other side of the hall, rather bare and bleak in its antlered spaciousness, were the dining-and smoking-rooms, the first paneled in slightly carved wood, painted white, the last a thoroughly modern room, redolent of shabby comforts, with deep leather chairs, massive mid-century furniture, and an aggressively cheerful paper.

The drawing-room, above the library, was never used—a long, vacant room, into which Eppie would wander with a pleasant sense of trespassing and impertinence; a trivial room, for all the dignity of its shrouded shapes and huge, draped chandelier. Its silver-flecked gray paper and oval gilt picture-frames recalled an epoch nearer and uglier than that of the grave library and sprightly boudoir below, though even its ugliness had a charm. Eppie was fond of playing by herself there, and hid sundry secrets under the Chinese cabinet, a large, scowling piece of furniture, its black lacquered panels inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Once it was a quaintly cut cake, neatly sealed in a small jeweler’s box, that she thrust far away under it; and once a minute china doll, offspring of a Christmas cracker and too minute for personality, was swaddled mummy fashion in a ribbon and placed beside the box. Much excitement was to be had by not looking to see if the secrets were still there and in hastily removing them when a cleaning threatened.

The day-nursery, afterward the school-room, was over the dining-room, and the bedrooms were at the back of the house.

The Carmichaels were of an ancient and impoverished family, their estates, shrunken as they were, only kept together by careful economy, but there was no touch of dreariness in Eppie’s home. She was a happy child, filling her life with imaginative pastimes and finding on every side objects for her vigorous affections. Her aunts’ mild disciplines weighed lightly on her. Love and discipline were sundered principles in the grandmotherly administration, and Eppie soon learned that the formalities of the first were easily evaded and to weigh the force of her own naughtiness against it. Corporal punishment formed part of the Misses Carmichael’s conception of discipline, but though, on the rare occasions when it could not be escaped, Eppie bawled heart-rendingly during the very tremulous application, it was with little disturbance of spirit that she endured the reward of transgression.

At an early age she understood very clearly the simple characters around her. Aunt Rachel and Aunt Barbara were both placid, both pious, both full of unsophisticated good works, both serenely acquiescent in their lots. In Aunt Barbara, indeed, placidity was touched with wistfulness; she was the gentler, the more yielding of the two. Aunt Rachel could be inspired with the greater ruthlessness of conscientious conviction. It was she who insisted upon the letter of the law in regard to the Sunday collect, the Sunday church-going, who mingled reproof with her village charities, who could criticize with such decision the short-comings, doctrinal and domestic, of Mr. MacNab, minister of the little established church that stood near the village. Aunt Barbara was far less assured of the forms of things; she seemed to search and fumble a little for further, fuller outlets, and yet to have found a greater serenity. Aunt Rachel was fond of pointing out to her niece such facts of geology, botany, and natural history in general as the country life and her own somewhat rudimentary knowledge suggested to her as useful; Aunt Barbara, on the contrary, told pretty, allegorical tales about birds and flowers—tales with a heavy cargo of moral insinuation, to which, it must be confessed, Eppie listened with an inner sense of stubborn realism. It was Aunt Barbara who sought to impress upon her that the inclusive attribute of Deity was love, and who, when Eppie asked her where God was, answered, “In your heart, dear child.” Eppie was much puzzled by anatomical considerations in reflecting upon this information. Aunt Rachel, with clear-cut, objective facts from Genesis, was less mystifying to inquisitive, but pagan childhood. Eppie could not help thinking of God as somewhat like austere, gray-bearded old James, the gardener, whose vocation suggested that pictorial chapter in the Bible, and who, when he found her one day eating unripe fruit, warned her with such severity of painful retribution.

The aunts spent year after year at Kirklands, with an infrequent trip to Edinburgh. Neither had been South since the death of the beloved younger sister. Uncle Nigel, the general, older than either, was russet-faced, white-haired, robust. He embodied a sound, well-nurtured type and brought to it hardly an individual variation. He taught his niece, re-read a few old books, followed current thought in the “Quarterly” and the “Scotsman,” and wrote his memoirs, that moved with difficulty from boyhood, so detailed were his recollections and so painstaking his recording of inessential fact.

For their few neighbors, life went on as slowly as for the Carmichaels. The Carstons of Carlowrie House were in touch with a larger outside life: Sir Alec Carston was member for the county; but the inmates of Brechin House, Crail Hill, and Newton Lowry were fixtures. These dim personages hardly counted at all in young Eppie’s experience. She saw them gathered round the tea-table in the library when she was summoned to appear with tidy hair and fresh frock: stout, ruddy ladies in driving-gloves and boat-shaped hats; dry, thin young ladies in hard-looking muslins and with frizzed fringes; a solid laird or two. They were vague images in her world.

People who really counted were the village people, and on the basis of her aunts’ charitable relationship Eppie built up for herself with most of them a tyrannous friendship. The village was over two miles away; one reached it by the main road that ran along the moor, past the birch-woods, the tiny loch, and then down a steep bit of hill to the handful of huddled gray roofs. There was the post-office, the sweet-shop with its dim, small panes, behind which, to Eppie’s imagination, the bull’s-eyes and toffee and Edinburgh rock looked, in their jars, like odd fish in an aquarium; there was the carpenter’s shop, the floor all heaped with scented shavings, through which one’s feet shuffled in delightful, dry rustlings; there the public-house, a lurid corner building, past which Miss Grimsby always hurried her over-interested young charge, and there the little inn where one ordered the dusty, lurching, capacious old fly that conveyed one to the station, five miles away. Eppie was far more in the village than her share of her aunts’ charities at all justified, and was often brought in disgrace from sheer truancy. The village babies, her dolls, and Robbie, her Aberdeen terrier, were the realities at once serious and radiant of life. She could do for them, love them as she would. Her uncle and aunts and the fond old nurse were included in an unquestioning tenderness, but they could not be brought under its laws, and their independence made them more remote.

Remote, too, though by no means independent, and calling forth little tenderness, were her cousins, who spent part of their holidays each summer at Kirklands. They were English boys, coming from an English school, and Eppie was very stanchly Scotch. The Graingers, Jim and Clarence, were glad young animals. They brought from a home of small means and overflowing sisters uncouth though not bad manners and an assured tradition of facile bullying. The small Scotch cousin was at first seen only in the light of a convenience. She was to be ignored, save for her few and rudimentary uses. But Eppie, at eight years old, when the Graingers first came, had an opposed and firmly established tradition. In her own domain, she was absolute ruler, and not for a moment did her conception of her supremacy waver. Her assurance was so complete that it left no room for painful struggle or dispute. From helpless stupor to a submission as helpless, the cousins fell by degrees to a not unhappy dependence. Eppie ran, climbed, played, as good a boy as either; and it was she who organized games, she who invented wonderful new adventures, all illumined by thrilling recitatives while in progress, she who, though their ally, and a friendly one, was the brains of the alliance, and, as thinker, dominated. Brains, at their age, being rudimentary in the young male, Eppie had some ground for her consciousness of kindly disdain. She regarded Jim and Clarence as an animated form of toy, more amusing than other toys because of possibilities of unruliness, or as a mere audience, significant only as a means for adding to the zest of life. Clarence, the younger, even from the first dumb days of reconstruction, was the more malleable. He was formed for the part of dazzled subjection to a strong and splendid despotism. Eppie treated her subject races to plenty of pomp and glory. Clarence listened, tranced, to her heroic stories, followed her leadership with docile, eager fidelity, and finally, showing symptoms of extreme romanticism, declared himself forever in love with her. Eppie, like the ascendant race again, made prompt and shameless use of the avowed and very apparent weakness. She bartered rare and difficult favors for acts of service, and on one occasion—a patch of purple in young Clarence’s maudlin days—submitted, with a stony grimace, to being kissed; for this treasure Clarence paid by stealing down to the forbidden public-house and there buying a bottle of beer which Eppie and Jim were to consume as robbers in a cave,—Clarence the seized and despoiled traveler. Eppie was made rather ill by her share of the beer, but, standing in a bed-gown at her window, she called to her cousins, in the garden below, such cheerful accounts of her malady, the slight chastisement that Aunt Rachel had inflicted, and her deft evasion of medicines, that her luster was heightened rather than dimmed by the disaster. Jim never owned, for a moment, to there being any luster. He was a square-faced boy, with abrupt nose, and lips funnily turning up at the corners, yet funnily grim,—most unsmiling of lips. He followed Eppie’s lead with the half-surly look of a slave in bondage, and seemed dumbly to recognize that his own unfitness rather than Eppie’s right gave her authority. He retaliated on Clarence for his sense of subjection and cruelly teased and scoffed at him. Clarence, when pushed too far, would appeal to Eppie for protection, and on these occasions, even while she sheltered him, a strange understanding seemed to pass between her and the tormentor as though, with him, she found Clarence ludicrous. Jim, before her stinging reproofs, would stand tongue-tied and furious, but, while she stung him, Eppie liked the sullen culprit better than the suppliant victim.

II

WHEN Eppie was ten years old, she heard one day that a boy, a new boy, was coming to spend the spring and summer—a boy from India, Gavan Palairet. His mother and her own had been dear friends, and his father, as hers had been, was in the army; and these points of contact mitigated for Eppie the sense of exotic strangeness.

Eppie gathered that a cloud rested upon Mrs. Palairet, and the boy, though exotic, seemed to come from the far, brilliant country with his mother’s cloud about him.

“Ah, poor Fanny!” the general sighed over the letter he read at the breakfast-table. “How did she come to marry that brute! It will be a heart-breaking thing for her to send the boy from her.”

Eppie, listening with keen interest, gathered further, from the reminiscent talk that went on between the sisters and brother, that Mrs. Palairet, for some years of her boy’s babyhood, lived in England; then it had been India and the effort to keep him near her in the hills, and now his delicacy and the definite necessity of schooling had braced her to the parting. The general said, glancing with fond pride at his niece, that Eppie would be a fine playmate for him and would be of great service in cheering him before his plunge into school. Fanny had begged for much gentleness and affection for him. Apparently the boy was as heartbroken as she.

Eppie had very little diffidence about her own powers as either playmate or cheerer: she was well accustomed to both parts; but her eagerness to sustain and amuse the invalid was touched with a little shyness. The sad boy from India—her heart and mind rushed out in a hundred plans of welcome and consolation; but she suspected that a sad boy from India would require subtler methods than those sufficing for a Jim or a Clarence. From the first moment of hearing about him she had felt, as if instinctively, that he would not be at all like Jim and Clarence.

He came on a still, sunny spring day. The general went to meet him at the station, and while he was gone Eppie made excitement endurable by vigorous action. Again and again she visited the fresh little room overlooking the hills, the garden, the pine-tree boughs, standing in a thoughtful surveyal of its beauties and comforts or darting off to add to them. She herself chose the delightful piece of green soap from the store-cupboard and the books for the table; and she gathered the daffodils in the birch-woods, filling every vase with them, so that the little room with its white walls and hangings of white dimity seemed lighted by clusters of pale, bright flames.

When the old fly rumbled at last through the gates and around the drive, Miss Rachel and Miss Barbara were in the doorway, and Eppie stood before them on the broad stone step, Robbie beside her.

Eppie was a lithe, sturdy, broad-shouldered child, with russet, sun-streaked hair, dark yet radiant, falling to her waist. She had a pale, freckled face and the woodland eyes of a gay, deep-hearted dog. To-day she wore a straight white frock, and her hair, her frock, dazzled with sunlight. No more invigorating figure could have greeted a jaded traveler.

That it was a very jaded traveler she saw at once, while the general bundled out of the fly and handed rugs, dressing-cases, and cages to the maid, making a passage for Gavan’s descent. The boy followed him, casting anxious glances at the cages, and Eppie’s eyes, following his, saw tropical birds in one and in the other a quaint, pathetic little beast—a lemur-like monkey swaddled in flannel and motionless with fear. Its quick, shining eyes met hers for a moment, and she looked away from them with a sense of pity and repulsion.

Gavan, as he ascended the steps, looked at once weary, frightened, and composed. He had a white, thin face and thick black hair—the sort of face and hair, Eppie thought, that the wandering prince of one of her own stories, the prince who understood the rooks’ secrets, would have. He was dressed in a long gray traveling-cloak with capes. The eager welcome she had in readiness for him seemed out of place before his gentle air of self-possession, going as it did with the look of almost painful shrinking. She was a little at a loss and so were the aunts, as she saw. They took his hand in turn, they smiled, they murmured vague words of kindness; but they did not venture to kiss him. He did not seem as little a boy as they had expected. The same expression of restraint was on Uncle Nigel’s hearty countenance. The sad boy was frozen and he chilled others.

He was among them now, in the hall, his cages and rugs and boxes about him, and, with all the cheery bustling to and fro, he must feel himself dreadfully alone. Eppie, too, was chilled and knew, indeed, the childish, panic impulse to run away, but her imagination of his loneliness was so strong as to nerve quite another impulse. Once she saw him as so desolate she could not hesitate. With resolute gravity she took his hand, saying, “I am so glad that you have come, Gavan,” and, as resolutely and as gravely, she kissed him on the cheek. He flushed so deeply that for a moment all her panic came back with the fear that she had wounded his pride; but in a moment he said, glancing at her, “You are very kind. I am glad to be here, too.”

His pride was not at all wounded. Eppie felt that at all events the worst of the ice was broken.

“May I feed your animals for you while you rest?” she asked him, as, with Aunt Barbara, they went up-stairs to his room. Gavan carried the lemur himself. Eppie had the birds in their cage.

“Thanks, so much. It only takes a moment; I can do it. My monkey would be afraid of any one else,” he answered, adding, “The journey has been too much for him; he has been very strange all day.”

“He will soon get well here,” said Eppie, encouragingly—“this is such a healthy place. But Scotland will be a great change from India for him, won’t it?”

“Very great. I am afraid he is going to be ill.” And again Gavan’s eye turned its look of weary anxiety upon the lemur.

But his anxiety did not make him forget his courtesy. “What a beautiful view,” he said, when they reached his room, “and what beautiful flowers!”

“I have this view, too,” said Eppie. “The school-room has the view of the moor; but I like this best, for early morning when one gets up. You will see how lovely it is to smell the pine-tree when it is all wet with dew.”

Gavan agreed that it must be lovely, and looked out with her at the blue-green boughs; but even while he looked and admired, she felt more courtesy than interest.

They left him in his room to rest till tea-time, and in the library Aunt Rachel and Aunt Barbara exclaimed over his air of fragility.

“He is fearfully tired, poor little fellow,” said the general; “a day or two of rest will set him up.”

“He looks a very intelligent boy, Nigel,” said Miss Rachel, “but not a cheerful disposition.”

“How could one expect that from him now, poor, dear child!” Aunt Barbara expostulated. “He has a beautiful nature, I am sure—such a sensitive mouth and such fine eyes.”

And the general said: “He is wonderfully like his mother. I am glad to see that he takes after Claude Palairet in nothing.”

Eppie asked if Captain Palairet were very horrid and was told that he was, with the warning that no intimation of such knowledge on her part was to be given to her new playmate; a warning that Eppie received with some indignation. No one, she was sure, could feel for Gavan as she did, or know so well what to say and what not to say to him.

She was gratified to hear that he was not to go down to dinner but was to share the school-room high-tea with her and Miss Grimsby. But in the wide school-room, ruddy with the hues of sunset and hung with its maps and its childish decorations of Caldecott drawings and colored Christmas supplements from the “Graphic,”—little girls on stairs with dogs, and “Cherry Ripe,”—he was almost oppressively out of place. Not that he seemed to find himself so. He made, evidently, no claims to maturity. But Eppie felt a strange sense of shrunken importance as she listened to him politely answering Miss Grimsby’s questions about his voyage and giving her all sorts of information about religious sects in India. She saw herself relegated to a humbler rÔle than any she had conceived possible for herself. She would be lucky if she succeeded in cheering at all this remote person; it was doubtful if she could ever come near enough to console. She took this first blow to her self-assurance very wholesomely. Her interest in the sad boy was all the keener for it. She led him, next morning, about the garden, over a bit of the moor, and into the fairyland of the birch-woods—their young green all tremulous in the wind and sunlight. And she showed him, among the pines and heather, the winding path, its white, sandy soil laced with black tree-roots, that led to the hilltop. “When you are quite rested, we will go up there, if you like,” she said. “The burn runs beside this path almost all the way—you can’t think how pretty it is; and when you get to the top you can see for miles and miles all about, all over the moors, and the hills, away beyond there, and you can see two villages besides ours, and such a beautiful windmill.”

Gavan, hardly noticing the kind little girl, except to know that she was kind, assented to all her projects, indifferent to them and to her.

A day or two after his arrival, he and Eppie were united in ministering to the dying lemur. The sad creature lay curled up in its basket, motionless, refusing food, only from time to time stretching out a languid little hand to its master; and when Gavan took it, the delicate animal miniature lay inert in his. Its eyes, seeming to grow larger and brighter as life went, had a strange look of question and wonder.

Eppie wept loudly when it was dead; but Gavan had no tears. She suspected him of a suffering all the keener and that his self-control did not allow him the relief of emotion before her. She hoped, at least, to be near him in the formalities of grief, and proposed that they should bury the lemur together, suggesting a spot among birch-trees and heather where some rabbits of her own were interred. When she spoke of the ceremony, Gavan hesitated; to repulse her, or to have her with him in the task of burial, were perhaps equally painful to him. “If you don’t mind, I think I would rather do it by myself,” he said in his gentle, tentative way.

Eppie felt her lack of delicacy unconsciously rebuked. She recognized that, in spite of her most genuine grief, the burial of the lemur had held out to her some of the satisfactory possibilities of a solemn game. She had been gross in imagining that Gavan could share in such divided instincts. Her tears fell for her own just abasement, as well as for the lemur, while she watched Gavan walking away into the woods—evidently avoiding the proximity of the rabbits—with the small white box under his arm.

The day after this was Sunday, a day of doom to Eppie. It meant that morning recitation of hymn and collect in the chintz and gilt boudoir and then the bleak and barren hours in church. Even Aunt Barbara’s mildness could, on this subject, become inflexible, and Aunt Rachel’s aspect reminded Eppie of the stern angel with the flaming sword driving frail, reluctant humanity into the stony wilderness. A flaming sword was needed. Every Sunday saw the renewal of her protest, and there were occasions on which her submission was only extorted after disgraceful scenes. Eppie herself, on looking back, had to own that she had indeed disgraced herself when she had taken refuge under her bed and lain there, her hat all bent, her fresh dress all crumpled, fiercely shrieking her refusal; and disgrace had been deeper on another day when she had actually struck out at her aunts while they mutely and in pale indignation haled her toward the door. It was dreadful to remember that Aunt Barbara had burst into tears. Eppie could not forgive herself for that. She had a stoic satisfaction in the memory of the smart whipping that she had borne without a whimper, and perhaps did not altogether repent the heavier slap she had dealt Aunt Rachel; but the thought of Aunt Barbara’s tears—they had continued so piteously to flow while Aunt Rachel whipped her—quelled physical revolt forever. She was older now, too, and protest only took the form of dejection and a hostile gloom.

On this Sunday the gloom was shot with a new and, it seemed, a most legitimate hope. Boys were usually irreligious; the Grainger cousins certainly were so: they had once run away on Sunday morning. She could not, to be sure, build much upon possible analogies of behavior between Gavan and the Graingers; yet the facts of his age and sex were there: normal, youthful manliness might be relied upon. If Gavan wished to remain it seemed perfectly probable that the elders might yield as a matter of course, and as if to a grown-up guest. Gavan was hardly treated as a child by any of them.

“You are fond of going to church, I hope, Gavan,” Aunt Rachel said at breakfast. The question had its reproof for Eppie, who, with large eyes, over her porridge, listened for the reply.

“Yes, very,” was the doom that fell.

Eppie flushed so deeply that Gavan noticed it. “I don’t mind a bit not going if Eppie doesn’t go and would like to have me stay at home with her,” he hastened, with an almost uncanny intuition of her disappointment, to add.

Aunt Rachel cast an eye of comprehension upon Eppie’s discomfited visage. “That would be a most inappropriate generosity, my dear Gavan. Eppie comes with us always.”

Gavan still looked at Eppie, who, with downcast eyes, ate swiftly.

“Now I’ll be bound that she has been wheedling you to get her off, Gavan,” said the general, with genial banter. “She is a little rebel to the bone. She knows that it’s no good to rebel, so she put you up to pleading for her”; and, as Gavan protested, “Indeed, indeed, sir, she didn’t,” he still continued, “Oh, Eppie, you baggage, you! Isn’t that it, eh? Didn’t you hope that you could stay with him if he stayed behind?”

“Yes, I did,” Eppie said, without contrition.

“She didn’t tell me so,” said Gavan, full of evident sympathy for Eppie’s wounds under this false accusation.

She repelled his defense with a curt, “I would have, if it would have done any good.”

“Ah, that’s my brave lassie,” laughed the general; but Aunt Rachel ended the unseemly exposure with a decisive, “Be still now, Eppie; we know too well what you feel about this subject. There is nothing brave in such naughtiness.”

Gavan said no more; from Eppie’s unmoved expression he guessed that such reproofs did not cut deep. He joined her after breakfast as she stood in the open doorway, looking out at the squandered glories of the day.

“Do you dislike going to church so much?” he asked her. The friendly bond of his sympathy at the table would have cheered her heart at another time; it could do no more for her now than make frankness easy and a relief.

“I hate it,” she answered.

“But why?”

“It’s so long—so stupid.”

Gavan loitered about before her on the door-step, his hands in his pockets. Evidently he could find no ready comment for her accusation.

“Every one looks so silly and so sleepy,” she went on. “Mr. MacNab is so ugly. Besides, he is an unkind man: he whips his children all the time; not whippings when they deserve it—like mine,”—Gavan looked at her, startled by this impersonally just remark,—“he whips them because he is cross himself. Why should he tell us about being good if he is as ill-tempered as possible? And he has a horrid voice,—not like the village people, who talk in a dear, funny way,—he has a horrid, pretend voice. And you stand up and sit down and have nothing to do for ages and ages. I don’t see how anybody can like church.”

Gavan kicked vaguely at the lichen spots.

“Do you really like it?”

“Yes,” he answered, with his shy abruptness.

“But why? It’s different, I know, for old people—I don’t suppose that they mind things any longer; but I don’t see how a boy, a young boy”—and Eppie allowed herself a reproachful emphasis—“can possibly like it.”

“I’m used to it, you see, and I don’t think of it in your way at all.” Gavan could not speak to this funny child of its sacred associations. In church he had always felt that he and his mother had escaped to a place of reality and peace. He entered, through his love for her, into the love of the sense of sanctuary from an ominous and hostile world. And he was a boy with a deep, sad sense of God.

“But you don’t like it,” said the insistent Eppie.

“I more than like it.”

She eyed him gravely. “I suppose it is because you are so grown up. Yet you are only four years older than I am. I wonder if I will ever get to like it. I hope not.”

“Well, it will be more comfortable for you if you do,—since you have to go,” said Gavan, with his faint, wintry smile.

She felt the kindness of his austere banter, and retorting, “I’d rather not be comfortable, then,” joined him in the sunlight on the broad, stone step, going on with quite a sense of companionship: “Only one thing I don’t so much mind—and that is the hymns. I am so glad when they come that I almost shout them. Sometimes—I’m telling you as quite a secret, you know—I shout as loud as I possibly can on purpose to disturb Aunt Rachel. I know it’s wrong, so don’t bother to tell me so; besides, it’s partly because I really like to shout. But I always do hope that some day they may leave me at home rather than have me making such a noise. People often turn round to look.”

Gavan laughed.

“You think that wicked no doubt?”

“No, I think it funny, and quite useless, I’m sure.”

After all, Gavan wasn’t a muff, as a boy fond of church might have been suspected of being.

Yet after the walk through the birch-woods and over a corner of moor to the bare little common where the church stood, and when they were all installed in the hard, familiar pew, a new and still more alienating impression came to her—alienating yet fascinating. A sense of awe crept over her and she watched Gavan in an absorbed, a dreamy wonder.

Eppie only associated prayers with a bedside; they were part of the toilet, so to speak—went in with the routine of hair-and tooth-brushing and having one’s bath. To pray in church, if one were a young person, seemed a mystifying, almost an abnormal oddity. She was accustomed to seeing in the sodden faces of the village children an echo to her own wholesome vacuity. But Gavan really prayed; that was evident. He buried his face in his arms. He thought of no one near him.

It was Eppie’s custom to vary the long monotony of Mr. MacNab’s dreary, nasal, burring voice by sundry surreptitious occupations, such as drawing imaginary pictures with her forefinger upon the lap of her frock, picking out in the Bible all the words of which her aunts said she could only know the meaning when she grew up, counting the number of times that Mr. MacNab stiffly raised his hand in speaking, seeing how often she could softly kick the pew in front of her before being told to stop; and then there was the favorite experiment suggested to her by the advertisement of a soap where, after fixing the eyes upon a red spot while one counted thirty, one found, on looking at a blank white space, that the spot appeared transformed, ghost-like and floating, to a vivid green. Eppie’s fertile imagination had seen in Mr. MacNab’s thin, red face a substitute for the spot, and most diverting results had followed when, after a fixed stare at his countenance, one transferred him, as it were, to the pages of one’s prayer-book. To see Mr. MacNab dimly hovering there, a green emanation, made him less intolerable in reality: found, at least, a use for him. This discovery had been confided to the Graingers, and they had been grateful for it. And when all else failed and even Mr. MacNab’s poor uses had palled, there was one bright moment to look forward to in the morning’s suffocating tedium. Just before the sermon, Uncle Nigel, settling himself in his corner, would feel, as if absently, in his waistcoat pocket and then slip a lime-drop into her hand. The sharply sweet flavor filled her with balmy content, and could, with discretion in the use of the tongue, be prolonged for ten minutes.

But to-day her eyes and thoughts were fixed on Gavan; and when the lime-drop was in her mouth she crunched it mechanically and heedlessly: how he held his prayer-book, his pallid, melancholy profile bent above it, how he sat gravely listening to Mr. MacNab, how he prayed and sang. Only toward the end of the sermon was the tension of her spirit relieved by seeing humanizing symptoms of weariness. She was sure that he was hearing as little as she was—his thoughts were far away; and when he put up a hand to hide a yawn her jaws stretched themselves in quick sympathy. Gavan’s eyes at this turned on her and he smiled openly and delightfully at her. Delightfully; yet the very fact of his daring to smile made him more grown up than ever. Such maturity, such strange spiritual assurance, could afford lightnesses. He brought with him, into the fresh, living world outside, his aura of mystery.

Eppie walked beside her uncle and still observed Gavan as he went before them with the aunts.

“How do you like your playmate, Eppie?” the general asked.

“He isn’t a playmate,” Eppie gravely corrected him.

“Not very lively? But a nice boy, eh?”

“I think he is very nice; but he is too big to care about me.”

“Nonsense; he’s but three years older.”

“Four, Uncle Nigel. That makes a great deal of difference at our ages,” said Eppie, wisely.

“Nonsense,” the general repeated. “He is only a bit down on his luck; he’s not had time to find you out yet. To-morrow he joins you in your Greek and history, and I fancy he’ll see that four years’ difference isn’t such a difference when it comes to some things. Not many chits of your age are such excellent scholars.”

“But I think that we will always be very different,” said Eppie, though at her uncle’s commendation her spirits had risen.

III

GREEK and history proved, indeed, a bond. The two children, during the hours in the library, met on a more equal footing, for Gavan was backward with his studies. But the question of inequality had not come up in Gavan’s consciousness. “I’m only afraid that I shall bore her,” he hastened, in all sincerity, to say when the general appealed to a possible vanity in him by hoping that he didn’t mind being kind to a little girl and going about with her. “She’s the only companion we have for you, you see. And we all find her very good company, in spite of her ten years.”

And at this Gavan said, with a smile that protested against any idea that he should not find her so: “I’m only afraid that I’m not good company for any one. She is a dear little girl.”

It was in the wanderings over the moors and in the birch-woods and up the hillside, where Eppie took him to see her views, that the bond really drew to closeness. Here nature and little Eppie seemed together to thaw him, to heal him, to make him unconsciously happy. A fugitive color dawned in his wasted cheeks; a fragile gaiety came to his manner. He began to find it easy to talk, easy to be quite a little boy. And once he did talk, Gavan talked a great deal, quickly, with a sort of nervous eagerness. There grew, in Eppie’s mind, a vast mirage-like picture of the strange land he came from: the great mountains about their high summer home; the blue-shadowed verandas; the flowers he and his mother grew in the garden; the rides at dawn; the long, hot days; the gentle, softly moving servants, some of whom he loved and told her a great deal about. Then the crowds, the swarming colors of the bazaars in the great cities.

“No, no; don’t wish to go there,” he said, taking his swift, light strides through the heather, his head bent, his eyes looking before him—he seldom looked at one, glanced only; “I hate it,—more than you do church!” and though his simile was humorous he didn’t laugh with it. “I hate the thought of any one I care about being there.” He had still, for Eppie, his mystery, and she dimly felt, too, that his greater ease with her made more apparent his underlying sadness; but the sense of being an outsider was gone, and she glowed now at the implication that she was one he cared about.

“It’s vast and meaningless,” said Gavan, who often used terms curiously unboyish. “I can’t describe it to you. It’s like a dream; you expect all the time to wake up and find nothing.”

“I know that I should never love anything so much as Scotland—as heather and pines and sky with clouds. Still, I should like to see India. I should like to see everything that there is to be seen—if I could be sure of always coming back here.”

“Ah, yes, if one could be sure of that.”

“I shall always live here, Gavan,” said Eppie, feeling the skepticism of his “if.”

“Well, that may be so,” he returned, with the manner that made her realize so keenly the difference that was more than a matter of four years.

She insisted now: “I shall live here until I am grown up. Then I shall travel everywhere, all over the world—India, Japan, America; then I shall marry and come back here to live and have twelve children. I don’t believe you care for children as I do, Gavan. How they would enjoy themselves here, twelve of them all together—six boys and six girls.”

Gavan laughed. “Well, I hope all that will come true,” he assented. “Why twelve?”

“I don’t know; but I’ve always thought of there being twelve. I would like as many as possible, and one could hardly remember the names of more. I don’t believe that there are more than twelve names that I care for. But with twelve we should have a birthday-party once a month, one for each month. Did you have birthday-cakes in India, Gavan, with candles for your age?”

“Yes; my mother always had a cake for my birthday.” His voice, in speaking of his mother, seemed always to steel itself, as though to speak of her hurt him. Eppie had felt this directly, and now, regretting her allusion, said, “When is your birthday, Gavan?” thinking of a cake with fifteen candles—how splendid!—to hear disappointingly that the day was not till January, when he would have been gone—long since.

On another time, as they walked up the hillside, beside the burn, she said: “I thought you were not going to like us at all, when you first came.”

“I was horribly afraid of you all,” said Gavan. “Everything was so strange to me.”

“No, you weren’t afraid,” Eppie objected—“not really afraid. I don’t believe you are ever really afraid of people.”

“Yes, I am—afraid of displeasing them, trying them in some way. And I was miserable on that day, too, with anxiety about my poor monkey. I’m sorry I seemed horrid.”

“Not a bit horrid, only very cold and polite.”

“I didn’t realize things much. You see—“ Gavan paused.

“Yes, of course; you weren’t thinking of us. You were thinking of—what you had left.”

“Yes,” he assented, not looking at her.

He went on presently, turning his eyes on her and smiling over a sort of alarm at his own advance to personalities: “You weren’t horrid. I remember that I thought you the nicest little girl I had ever seen. You were all that I did see—standing there in the sun, with a white dress like Alice in Wonderland and with your hair all shining. I never saw hair like it.”

“Do you think it pretty?” Eppie asked eagerly.

“Very—all those rivers of gold in the dark.”

“I am glad. I think it pretty, too, and nurse is afraid that I am vain, I think, for she always takes great pains to tell me that it is striped hair and that she hopes it may grow to be the same color when I’m older.”

“I hope not,” said Gavan, gallantly.

Many long afternoons were spent in the garden, where Eppie initiated him into the sanctities of the summer-house. Gavan’s sense of other people’s sanctities was wonderful. She would never have dreamed of showing her dolls to her cousins; but she brought them out and displayed them to Gavan, and he looked at them and their appurtenances carefully, gravely assenting to all the characteristics that she pointed out. So kind, indeed, so comprehending was he, that Eppie, a delightful project dawning in her mind, asked: “Have you ever played with dolls? I mean when you were very little?”

“No, never.”

“I’ve always had to play by myself,” said Eppie, “and it’s rather dull sometimes, having to carry on all the conversations alone.” And with a rush she brought out, rather aghast at her own hardihood, “I suppose you couldn’t think of playing with me?”

Gavan, at this, showed something of the bashful air of a young bachelor asked to hold a baby, but in a moment he said, “I shouldn’t mind at all, though I’m afraid I shall be stupid at it.”

Eppie flushed, incredulous of such good fortune, and almost reluctant to accept it. “You really don’t mind, Gavan? Boys hate dolls, as a rule, you know.”

“I don’t mind in the least,” he laughed. “I am sure I shall enjoy it. How do we begin? You must teach me.”

“I’ll teach you everything. You are the very kindest person I ever knew, Gavan. Really, I wouldn’t ask you to if I didn’t believe you would like it when once you had tried it. It is such fun. And now we can make them do all sorts of things, have all sorts of adventures, that they never could have before.” She suspected purest generosity, but so trusted in the enchantments he was to discover that she felt herself justified in profiting by it. She placed in his hand Agnes, the fairest of all the dolls, golden-haired, blue-eyed. Agnes was good, and her own daughter, Elspeth, named after herself, was bad. “As bad as possible,” said Eppie. “I have to whip her a great deal.”

Gavan, holding his charge rather helplessly and looking at Elspeth, a doll of sturdier build, with short hair, dark eyes, and, for a doll, a mutinous face, remarked, with his touch of humor, “I thought you didn’t approve of whipping.”

“I don’t,—not real children, or dolls either, except when they are really bad. Mr. MacNab whips his all the time, and they are not a bit bad, really, as Elspeth is.” And Elspeth proceeded to demonstrate how really bad she was by falling upon Agnes with such malicious kicks and blows that Gavan, in defense of his own doll, dealt her a vigorous slap.

“Well done, Mr. Palairet; she richly deserves it! Come here directly, you naughty child,” and after a scuffling flight around the summer-house, Elspeth was secured, and so soundly beaten that Gavan at last interceded for her with the ruthless mother.

“Not until she says that she is sorry.”

“Oh, Elspeth, say that you are sorry,” Gavan supplicated, while he laughed. “Really, Eppie, you are savage. I feel as if you were really hurting some one. Please forgive her now; Agnes has, I am sure.”

“I hurt her because I love her and want her to be a good child. She will come to no good end when she grows up if she cannot learn to control her temper. What is it I hear you say, Elspeth?”

Elspeth, in a low, sullen voice that did not augur well for permanent amendment, whispered that she was sorry, and was led up, crestfallen, to beg Agnes’s pardon and to receive a reconciling kiss.

The table was then brought out and laid. Eppie had her small store of biscuits and raisins, and Elspeth and Agnes were sent into the garden to pick currants and flowers. To Agnes was given the task of making a nosegay for the place of each guest. There were four of these guests, bidden to the feast with great ceremony: three, pink and curly, of little individuality, and the fourth a dingy, armless old rag-doll, reverently wrapped in a fine shawl, and with a pathetic, half-obliterated face.

“Very old and almost deaf,” Eppie whispered to Gavan. “Everybody loves her. She lost her arms in a great fire, saving a baby’s life.”

Gavan was entering into all the phases of the game with such spirit, keeping up Agnes’s character for an irritating perfection so aptly that Eppie forgot to wonder if his enjoyment were as real as her own. But suddenly the doorway was darkened, and glancing up, she saw her uncle’s face, long-drawn with jocular incredulity, looking in upon them. Then, and only then, under the eyes of an uncomprehending sex, did the true caliber of Gavan’s self-immolation flash upon her. A boy, a big boy, he was playing dolls with a girl; it was monstrous; as monstrous as the general’s eyes showed that he found it. Stooping in his tall slightness, as he assisted Agnes’s steps across the floor, he seemed, suddenly, a fairy prince decoyed and flouted. What would Uncle Nigel think of him? She could almost have flung herself before him protectingly.

The general had burst into laughter. “Now, upon my word, this is too bad of you, Eppie!” he cried, while Gavan, not abandoning his hold on Agnes’s arm, turned his eyes upon the intruder with perfect serenity. “You are the most unconscionable little tyrant. You kept the Grainger boys under your thumb; but I didn’t think you could carry wheedling or bullying as far as this. Gavan, my dear boy, you are too patient with her.”

Eppie stood at the table, scarlet with anger and compunction. Gavan had raised himself, and, still holding Agnes, looked from one to the other.

“But she hasn’t bullied me; she hasn’t wheedled me,” he said. “I like it.”

“At your age, my dear boy! Like doll-babies!”

“Indeed I do.”

“This is the finest bit of chivalry I’ve come across for a long time. The gentleman who jumped into the lions’ den for his mistress’s glove was hardly pluckier. Drop that ridiculous thing and come away. I’ll rescue you.”

“But I don’t want to be rescued. I really am enjoying myself. It’s not a case of courage at all,” Gavan protested.

This was too much. He should not tarnish himself to shield her, and Eppie burst out: “Nonsense, Gavan. I asked you to. You are only doing it because you are so kind, and to please me. It was very wrong of me. Put her down as Uncle Nigel says.”

“There, our little tyrant is honest, at all events. Drop it, Gavan. You should see the figure you cut with that popinjay in your arms. Come, you’ve won your spurs. Come away with me.”

But Gavan, smiling, shook his head. “No, I don’t want to, thanks. I did it to please her, if you like; but now I do it to please myself. Playing with dolls is a most amusing game,—and you are interrupting us at a most interesting point,” he added. He seemed, funnily, doll and all, older than the general as he said it. Incredulous but mystified, Uncle Nigel was forced to beat a retreat, and Gavan was left confronting his playmate.

“Why did you tell him that you enjoyed it?” she cried. “He’ll think you unmanly.”

“My dear Eppie, he won’t think me unmanly at all. Besides, I don’t care if he does.”

“I care.”

“But, Eppie, you take it too hard. Why should you care? It’s only funny. Why shouldn’t we amuse ourselves as we like? We are only children.”

“You are much more than a child. Uncle Nigel thinks so, too, I am sure.”

“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 manoeuver.

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.