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The Shadow of Life




The Shadow of Life

BY

Anne Douglas Sedgwick

AUTHOR OF "THE RESCUE," "THE CONFOUNDING OF
CAMELIA," "PATHS OF JUDGEMENT," ETC.

[Illustration: colophon]

NEW YORK

The Century Co.

1906

Copyright, 1906, by
The Century Co.

_Published February, 1906_

THE DE VINNE PRESS





THE SHADOW OF LIFE

[Illustration: colophon]

PART I




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 <DW72> 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 English