The Shadow of Life

PART I
I, II, III, IV, V, VI.
PART II
I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII.
PART III
I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X.

Copyright, 1906, by
The Century Co.
———
Published February, 1906


THE DE VINNE PRESS

THE SHADOW OF LIFE


PART I

THE SHADOW OF LIFE

I

LSPETH 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