One evening in March, Mr. Nevins gave a supper in his studio.
Anthony had come in that morning looking somewhat perplexed. "Nevins wants us to-night," he said to Mariana, "and I couldn't get out of it."
Mariana looked up eagerly from her practising. "Oh, it is the 'Andromeda,'" she replied. "He said he would celebrate it. So it has been accepted."
"But it hasn't been. It is the rejection he is celebrating. He told me so. I feel sorry for the fellow, so I said we would go."
"Of course we will!" exclaimed Mariana. "But I'm afraid he'll be gloomy."
"On the contrary, he has just come off a spree, and has a patch over his left eye. His hilarity is positively annoying. He and Ardly are smashing everything in their rooms. The pitcher went as I passed."
"Oh, it is his way of expressing feeling," returned Mariana, sympathetically. "Listen to this new air. It goes tra la la, tra—"
Anthony cut her short.
"My dear girl, I'm in an awful hurry. Would you mind being quiet awhile?" And he entered his study, closing the door after him. Mariana left the piano and sat with folded hands looking down into the street below. A fine rain was falling, and the streets were sloppy with a whitish slime. The women that passed held their skirts well above their ankles, revealing all shapes and varieties of feet. She noticedthat they carried their skirts awkwardly, with a curious hitch upon the right hip. They were working-women for the most part, and their gowns were neither well made nor well cut, but they walked aggressively, with an uneven, almost masculine, swagger.
Mariana yawned and sighed. She would have liked to go back to the piano and bang a march or some stirring strain of martial music, but she recalled Anthony's injunction and yawned again. She remembered suddenly that her practising had become uncertain of late, and that Anthony's objection seemed to lie like a drawn sword between her and her art. An involuntary smile crossed her lips, that she who had pledged herself to the pursuit of music had also given herself to a man to whom Wagner was as Rossini. She dwelt upon her changed conditions almost unconsciously. It was not that her devotion to art had cooled since her marriage, but that something was forever preventing the expression of it. That Anthony regarded it as one of the trivialities of life, she saw clearly, and there was an aggrieved note in her regret. To her, in whom the artistic instinct was bone of her bone and blood of her blood, the sacrifice of a professional career was less slight than Algarcife believed, and in the depths of her heart there still lurked the hope that in time Anthony's impassioned opposition to a stage life would wear itself out. When the moment came, she dreamed of a final reinspiration of the slumbering fires of her ambition. Now, as she sat beside the window, she became aware of the awakening. Once again she allowed her mind to hover above the distant future and to illuminate its neutral canvas with garish colors. In the future anything and everything was possible. Some weeks ago Signor Morani had sent for her and offered her tuition, and she had accepted. "If you achieve success you can repay me," he had said, adding, with philosophicintention, "If not, I shall have lost nothing that was my own."
Mariana, in a burst of gratitude, had wept upon his shoulder, and he had smiled as he patted her prostrate head.
"Remember," he said, "that you are an artist first, and a wife and mother afterwards, and you will succeed."
Sitting beside the window and staring at the expressionless tenements across the way, she laughed with soft insistence at the professor's warning. What a consuming force was love, that it had destroyed her old mad longing for the stage! Was it all love, or was it only the love of Anthony?
Then before her, in the train of her thoughts, the sentiments of her life were limned vividly, and she remembered the young highwayman whose picture she had seen. She saw the bold, Byronic countenance, with the shadow of evil upon the lips and the uncultured eyes. She recalled the blur by which the printer had obscured the chin, and she felt again the tremor with which she had awaited the sentence of the court. She thought of Edgardo, the romantic tenor, of his impassioned arias, and then of his fat and immobile face, of his red-cheeked German wife, to whom he was a faithful husband, and of his red-cheeked German children, to whom he was a devoted father. She laughed again as she remembered the tears with which she had bedewed her pillow, and the spasm of jealousy in which she had mentally attacked the prima donna. Last of all she thought of Jerome Ardly, as she had seen him upon the night of her arrival, sitting in indolent discussion of his dinner, theEvening Postspread out upon his knee. She experienced in memory the thrill which had seized her at his voice. She remembered how strong and masterful he had looked with the glow of heart disease, which she had thought the glow of health, upon his face. Then her thoughtsreturned to Anthony and settled to rest. To dwell upon him was as if she had laid her head upon his arm and felt his hand above her heart; as if she had anchored herself in deep waters, far beyond the breakers and shallows of life.
In the next room she knew that Anthony was at work, that he had probably, for the time being, forgotten her existence. The knowledge caused her a twinge of pain, and she went to the door, opened it, and looked in.
Algarcife glanced up absently.
"You don't wish anything, do you?" he inquired, and she saw that an irritable mood was upon him, "I can't be interrupted."
"It is nothing," answered Mariana as she closed the door, but she felt a sudden tightening of the heart, and, as she gathered up several loose sheets of music lying upon the floor, she thought, with a spasm of regretful pain, of the practising she had given up. "He does not know," she said, and a few tears fell upon the key-board.
That night, when she was dressing for Nevins's supper, she noticed that there was a faint flush in her cheeks and her hands were hot.
"We lead such a quiet life," she said, laughing, "that a very little thing excites me."
Algarcife, who was shaving, put down his razor and came towards her. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and she noticed that he looked paler and more haggard than usual.
"Look here, Mariana," he began, "don't talk too much to Nevins; I don't like it."
Mariana confronted him smilingly.
"You are positively the green-eyed monster himself," she said. "But why don't you say Ardly, and come nearer the truth? I was in love with him once, you know."
"Hush!" said Anthony, savagely; "you oughtn't to joke about such things; it isn't decent."
"Oh, it didn't go as far as that!" returned Mariana, with audacity.
"How dare you!" exclaimed Algarcife, and they flung themselves into each other's arms.
"How absurd you are!" said Mariana, looking up. "You haven't one little atom of common-sense—not one."
Then they finished dressing, lowered the lights, and went down-stairs.
Mr. Nevins greeted them effusively. He was standing in the centre of a small group composed of Miss Freighley, Mr. Sellars, and Mr. Paul, and the patch above his left eye, as well as his general unsteadiness, bore evidence to his need of the moral suasion to which Mr. Paul was giving utterance. In a corner of the room the "Andromeda" was revealed naked to her friends as well as to her enemies, and at the moment of Anthony's and Mariana's entrance Mr. Ardly was engaged in crowning her with a majestic wreath of willow.
He looked up from his task to bestow a morose greeting.
"We have invited you to weep with us," he remarked. "The gentle pronoun 'us,' which you may have observed, is due, not to my sympathetic nature, but to the fact that I have lost a wager upon the rejected one to Mr. Paul—"
"Who is also among the prophets," broke in Mr. Nevins, with a declamatory wave of his hand. "For behold, he prophesied, and his prophecy it came to pass! For he spake, saying, 'The "Andromeda," she shall be barren of honor, and lo! in one hour shall she be made desolate, and her creator shall put dust upon his head and rend his clothes, yet shall it avail not—'"
"Shut up, Nevins!" roared Ardly, seating himself at the table beside Mariana. "As if everybody didn't know that Mr. Paul's prophecy was obliged to come to pass! Did you ever see a pessimist who wasn't infallible as a soothsayer? It beats a special revelation all hollow."
"Please don't be irreverent," remonstrated Mariana. "I am sure I am awfully sorry about the 'Andromeda,' and I believe that if Mr. Nevins had taken my advice and lightened those shadows—"
"Or mine, and lengthened that thigh," broke in Ardly.
"Or mine, and shortened the fingers," added Miss Freighley.
"Or mine, and never painted it," in a savage whisper from Algarcife.
Mr. Nevins silenced the quartet with promptness. "Hang it all!" he exclaimed, crossly; "between most of your suggestions for art's sake, and Mr. Paul's suggestions for decency's sake, there wouldn't be a blamed rag of her left."
"On the contrary," commented Mr. Paul, "an additional rag or two would be decidedly advantageous."
Mariana raised her finger, with an admonishing shake of the head.
"Out upon you for a Philistine!" she said. "I haven't heard such profanity since I showed my colored mammy a 'Venus de Milo,' and her criticism was, 'Lor', child! nakedness ain't no treat to me!'"
Mr. Nevins laughed uproariously, and filled Mariana's glass, while Algarcife glared from across the table.
"I should like to paste that motto in every studio in New York," returned Mr. Paul. "It was the healthful sentiment of a mind undepraved by civilization."
"What a first-rate censor you would make!" smiled Ardly, good-naturedly—"the fitting exponent of apeople who see nastiness in a box of colors and evil in everything."
Mr. Paul bore the charge with gravity. "Yes, I keep my eyes well open," he responded, complacently.
Algarcife leaned across the table, and discussed woman's suffrage with Miss Ramsey. Mariana flushed and smiled, and glanced from Nevins to Ardly and back again.
Mr. Sellars, who had been engrossed by his salad, took up the cue.
"Oh, the world isn't to blame if we see it through a fog!" he said. "Excellent salad."
"Thanks," drawled Mr. Nevins, amicably. "I cut it up, and Ardly made the dressing. The cutting up is the part that tells."
"But why didn't you bring it to me?" asked Mariana. "I should have liked to help you." Then she raised her glass. "Health to 'Andromeda' and confusion to her enemies!"
There followed a wild clashing of glasses and a series of hoarse hurrahs from Mr. Nevins. After which Mariana was borne tumultuously to the piano, where she sang a little French song about love and fame.
Then Mr. Sellars sang an Irish ballad, and Nevins volunteered the statement that, after hearing Ardly, anybody who didn't mistake his nose for his mouth would be a relief.
"You don't listen," protested Ardly. "We have an excellent system," he explained. "We sometimes spend a musical evening, and when Nevins sings I look through the portfolio for my pieces, and when I sing he looks for his."
That night when Mariana went up to her room she was in exuberant spirits. In a whirl of energy she pirouetted before the mirror. Then she stopped suddenly, grew white, and swayed forward.
"I can't stand excitement," she said, and beforeAnthony could reach her she fell a limp heap upon the floor. Algarcife dashed into the adjoining room and returned with a flask of brandy. Then he undressed her, wrapped her in a dressing-gown, and, drawing off her shoes and stockings, chafed her cold feet. Mariana was too exhausted to protest, and allowed herself to be lulled to sleep like a child.
For several weeks after this she was nervous and unstrung. She grew hollow-eyed, the shadows deepened, and her sunniness of temper gave place to an unaccustomed melancholy. She had learned that a new life was quickening within her, and she experienced a blind and passionate fear of inevitable agony. She feared herself, she feared suffering, and she feared the fate of the unborn life. One evening she threw herself into Anthony's arms. "It is the inevitableness," she said. "If I knew that it might not happen, I could bear it better. But nothing can prevent it, and I am afraid—afraid."
Algarcife grew white. "I am afraid for you," he answered.
"And the child? We shall be responsible for it. The thought maddens me. We are so poor, and it seems to me that it is wrong. I feel as if I had committed a sin—as if I were forcing something into the world to fight with poverty and discomforts. It may even hate us for bringing it. I almost hope it will die."
"We will make it a happy child."
"But doesn't it frighten you?"
Algarcife smiled. "Not as much as you do, you bodiless bit of eccentricity."
"All the same, I feel as if it were a sin," said Mariana. "Mill says—"
Anthony laughed aloud and caught her to him. "So you are turning my own weapons upon me," he said. "For the sake of domestic harmony, don't quote Mill to me, Mariana."
In the autumn the child was born. Mariana, dissolved in nervous hysteria in the beginning, rallied when the time drew on, and faced the final throes triumphantly. For several months beforehand she sat and waited with desperate resignation. Her existence, hedged in by the four walls of her room and broken only by the strolls she took with Algarcife after night-fall, exasperated her resentment against social enactments, and she protested bitterly.
"A woman is treated as if she were in disgrace," she said, "and forced to shun the light, when, in reality, she is sacrificing herself for the continuance of the race, and should be respected and allowed to go about in a right and natural manner. I believe all this indecency started with those old scriptural purifications, and I wish it hadn't."
But when the days passed, her lamentations gave place to serenity of speech, and her expression became almost matronly. Dramatically she was stifling her æsthetic aversion and adjusting herself to her part.
When it was over, and she lay still and etherealized among the pillows, she was conscious only of an infinite restfulness. It was as if the travail through which she had passed had purged her of all capacity for sensation, and the crying of the new-born child fell upon her ear like the breaking of faint and far-off waves of sound.
From Anthony's caress she turned with a gesture of annoyance, and, in a vague association of ideas, shewondered if a man who had climbed from hell to heaven would be gratified by a draught of milk-and-water. She seemed to stand aloof and far off upon some ice-crowned summit, where the air was too rarefied to support the growth of human passions. She felt that she had become a pure intelligence, and that the appeal of her flesh no longer retarded her ascent. The elemental values of life were obscured by the shadows of indifference. Love existed only as an intangible and forced illusion, passion as a disease of the blood. While her still and inert body lay freed from pain, her mind was singularly strong and clear. The limitations of a personality seemed no longer to encompass her. She imagined she saw as God saw, sustained by pulseless repose, seeing, not feeling, the swing of the universe. She wondered if the time would ever come when she would descend from this altitude and take up again the substance of self, when her senses would again enmesh her.
Some one came across the room and laid a bundle upon the bed beside her, but she did not look at it. Then her hand was lifted and a glass put to her lips, and the faint odor of chloroform which hung about her faded before the fresher odor of digitalis. The child cried at her side, and the first sensation she felt was one of irritation.
"Take it away," she said, fretfully, and fainted.
With her returning vigor, Mariana's normal nature reasserted itself. The first day that she was able to sit propped up among the pillows she had the child brought to her, and looked at it critically, half in curiosity, half in tenderness.
"Did you ever see one with quite such a screwed-up face?" she inquired, dubiously, of the nurse who hovered about.
"Plenty, ma'am; most of 'em are like that—all puckers and wrinkles."
"It might be a thousand years old," continued Mariana, "or a hickory-nut." Then she added: "I don't feel as if it belonged to me at all. I don't care for it in the least."
"That'll come."
"I hope so," answered Mariana, "and I am sorry that it is a girl. It will have so much to bear. I wonder if I looked like that when I was a baby. I declare, it is positively green. What is the matter with it?"
"Just the shadow from the blind, ma'am."
The baby lay upon its back, with half-closed, indistinguishable eyes, slobbering over one red fist. It looked old and wizened, as if oppressed by the understanding that it had entered upon the most perilous of mundane transmigrations. It had cried only once, and that was upon its entrance into the predestined conditions. There was something almost uncanny in its imperturbability, suggesting, as it did, that it had been awed into silence by the warning finger of fate.
"Poor little thing," said Mariana. She leaned over it and stroked the smooth, round head, from which the soft hair was rubbing off, leaving it preternaturally bald. "What a mite!" She encircled it within the curve of her arm and lay looking up at the ceiling. "How strange it all is!" she thought. "It was only yesterday that I was a child myself—and now my first and last and only born is here alive." Then she frowned. It seemed inexplicable to her that women went on travailing and giving birth. That a woman who had once known the agony of maternity should consent to bear a second or third or fourth child struck her as ridiculous. She closed her eyes and laughed. Suddenly she felt a clammy clutch upon her finger and looked down. The baby's eyes were open, and it was staring straight ahead at the cloud of dustand sunshine that flooded the room. The red fist had left its mouth and fastened upon her hand.
Mariana smiled.
"Its eyes are blue!" she cried, "just like turquoises. Look, nurse! Oh, my dear, poor, ugly little baby!"
A rush of tenderness choked her words, and she lay silent and rapt, her hand responding to the weak grasp upon her finger. In some way she felt changed and tremulous. That invincible instinct of motherhood, which was a forced and abnormal product of her temperament, pulsed from her heart to her answering veins. She experienced in its fulness the sense of guardianship upon which rests the first intuitive recognition of the maternal responsibility. Her emotion welled forth to meet the appeal of the helplessness beside her, and she extended her fragile arm as if in the act of giving shelter. When Algarcife came in some hours later he found her lying asleep, her hand still upon the small, soft head of the child. In the noonday light the intense, opaline pallor of her face was startling.
In quick alarm he leaned over her, listening for the rise and fall of her breathing. It came softly, with a still insistence, like the ripple of a faint wind upon rose leaves. The heavy lashes resting upon her cheeks accentuated the entire absence of color, and the violet tones rising in the shadows of mouth and chin lent to her face the look of one in a trance or in death. It was as if the scarlet current in her blood had, by some necromancer's magic, been transfused from pale violets. Her gown was open at the throat, and he marked the same bloodlessness and hints of bluish shadows in her cold breast. He saw it also in the fragile curve of her uncovered arm and in the marble-like beauty of her hands.
"Mariana," he whispered.
She turned slowly towards him and unclosed her eyes.
"Give me something," she said; "brandy—a great deal."
He brought it to her and raised her on his arm as she drank it.
"I was dreaming," she said, fretfully. "I dreamed that I was falling—falling past the earth, past millions of worlds—past a great many apple orchards, and they were all in bloom. But, somehow, I never reached the bottom. There wasn't any bottom."
"You are stronger now?" he questioned, almost wistfully.
"Not a bit," returned Mariana, peevishly. "I am so—so—so weak." Then she laughed softly. "Do you know that brandy makes me think of my childhood, and a great goblet of mint-julep, with the crushed ice all frosted on the glass. My father was famous for his mint-juleps. I wish I had one now."
"Shall I make it for you?"
"Oh, it wouldn't be the same! I should never like one that didn't have the ice frosted on the glass." She grew weakly reminiscent. "Once, when I was a little child," she said, "I was dressed up in a nice white frock and red sash, and sent out on the sidewalk to play, and I grew tired and wandered off and got lost. I went a long way, and at last I came to the city almshouse. I was going up the steps when I looked into a bar-room across the way, and saw a gentleman with a very red face drinking a toddy. I went over and asked him if he were related to my father, and he said he supposed not, but he took me in behind the screen and sat me upon a table and offered me a taste of toddy, and I said, 'No, thank you. I have plenty of that at home.'"
Then she turned over and went to sleep, while Algarcife sat beside her and held her hand. His gaze ravished her with its fierce tenderness. His life and heart and brain seemed bound up and enshrined in thesleeping woman who lay in that death-like pallor, with the child at her side. He followed the sweep of the loosened and disordered hair that fell in a heavy braid across the pillow. He lingered, unsatisfied, upon the worn and emaciated face, in which there was none of the material beauty of flesh and blood. With an impassioned ardor he studied the defects of outline, the thin and irregular features, the hollows of the blue-veined temples, the firm and accentuated chin. Now there was none of that bewildering illumination of expression left, which in moments of intensity was like a fleeting search-light thrown across her face, forever changing in tone and color. She lay rapt and wan and pallid—a woman overthrown.
His glance fell upon the child in the hollow of her arm, and he bent to look at it. He was conscious of no feeling for it as his own, but of a general feeling of pity for it as a helpless animal. He supposed the other would come later, and in the meantime Mariana was sufficient.
Then, as he sat there, a harassed look crept into his eyes, and he frowned impatiently. Mariana's illness had entirely exhausted the small fund he had accumulated, and he knew that the next few years would bring a hand-to-hand, disastrous conflict with want. For himself he cared little, but for Mariana and the child he experienced a blind and bitter disgust at his own impotence. Working night and day, as he did, and preserving his hold upon the Bodley College, which was at best an uncertain reef, he knew that he could manage to wring from the world but a bare subsistence. He felt resentful of the fact that all his knowledge, all his years of study, all his scientific value would weigh for nothing in the struggle for bread against a moderate capacity for fulfilling the dictates of other men. This ruthless waste of energy exasperated him in its inevitable assault upon his theories oflife. He looked at his hands—thin and virile hands, with knotted knuckles and square-cut finger-tips—the hands of a nervous, impracticable temperament. Of a sudden he felt himself as helpless to contend with existing conditions as the baby lying within the crook of Mariana's arm. For an instant his natural irascibility of temper seemed to have overborne the bounds of his reserve. That extreme sensitiveness to minor irritants became painful in its acuteness. He saw in it the effects of the nervous exhaustion which followed in the wake of uncongenial mental work combined with the stress of financial worries, and withdrew the curb of will. For the moment he regretted his old life—regretted his freedom and the solitude which had surrounded him even amid the tumult of the city. He reproached himself that he had not allowed Mariana to live her life as it pleased her, unhampered by the obligations he had permitted her to assume. Then he recalled her as she came to him that September night, the letter fluttering in her hand, and it seemed to him that he was not wholly responsible—that something mightier than himself had manipulated their destinies. To his dark and embittered mood there appeared a certain humor in the thought that they were puppets in the hands of the grim comedian Time. And then the scientific tenor of his mind, which contrasted saliently with his nervous temperament, reasserted itself, and he traced in vague outline the inviolable sequence of cause and effect, upon which his own and the world's revolutions hung. Again he fortified himself with a philosophic acceptance of the authoritative "must" of those unconquerable forces which we call fate.
With a returning gentleness he loosened Mariana's hand and went back to his work.
When Mariana grew strong enough to wear a blue wrapper and sit in a rocking-chair beside the window, she began working upon dainty garments for the baby.With characteristic extravagance she embroidered a hundred roses upon a white carriage-robe which would probably not survive the first laundering. She made tiny bags for powdered orris-root, and scattered them among the tucked and ruffled cambric, and that faint suggestion of fresh violets was extended from herself to the child.
One day, Miss Ramsey, coming in on her way up-stairs, found her tearing up a linen petticoat to make night-slips for the baby, whom she had called "Isolde."
Miss Ramsey remonstrated. She had been a faithful servitor during Mariana's convalescence, and she felt that she had earned the right to interpose. "My dear Mariana," she said, "what are you doing? Cotton at ten cents a yard would do equally well."
"But I couldn't make the little thing sleep in cotton," answered Mariana, "and I haven't any money, so I cut up a few of my things. It must be well cared for. I really couldn't have a child that wasn't nice and clean."
Miss Ramsey smiled.
"Do you think," she asked, "that it would know the difference between cotton and linen? Besides, I've always heard that cotton was more healthful."
Mariana threaded her needle and bent her head.
"It is in the blood," she returned. "My grandmother couldn't bear to be touched by anything but silk. She lived upon her plantations and owned a great many slaves, and she could afford it. Everything, from her night-caps to her chemises, was made of soft white silk. I have one of her chemises, and it is all hand-sewed, with a fall of real lace around the bosom. My mother inherited the taste, and she never wore cotton stockings, even when she couldn't afford meat but twice a week. I am just like her, only she was proud of it and I am ashamed of it."
"But you have overcome it," said Miss Ramsey.
Mariana laughed.
"I can't. Anthony says luxury is bred in my bone, but then he doesn't even care for comforts. I believe he had just as soon eat turnip-salad on a plain deal table as sweetbreads on Irish damask."
"Life teaches us the pettiness of such things," said Miss Ramsey. "When one isn't sure one will get a dinner at all, one is not apt to worry about the possible serving. By-the-way, Mr. Nevins wants to paint the baby when it gets a little larger."
Mariana looked delighted.
"Of course he shall," she said; then she took the child from the nurse's arms and gave it into Miss Ramsey's. "Feel how light she is," she continued. "I know she isn't very pretty, but she is beautifully formed—nurse says so—and did you ever see one with quite so much expression?"
Miss Ramsey held it upon her knee, patting its flexible back with one timid hand. "I really believe it notices things," she said. "It is looking straight at you."
"Of course it does," Mariana answered. "Of course it knows its own blessed little mamma—doesn't it, Isolde?"
The child whimpered and squirmed upon Miss Ramsey's knee.
"Take it, nurse," said Mariana. "It doesn't look nice when it cries."
A week later Mr. Speares came, and was introduced to the baby as it lay in its crib. He leaned over it in the helpless inattention of a man who has a mortal terror of a human being during the first stages of its development.
"It looks very pleasant," he said, finally.
Mariana lifted the child and held it against her shoulder. Had Mr. Nevins seen her in her light-blue gown, with the soft look in her eyes, he would have seized the opportunity and used it to advantage.
"Look at her eyes," she said. "Is she like Anthony used to be?"
Mr. Speares examined it critically. "I don't observe it," he replied; "but I don't suppose its features are quite formed as yet. It will be easier to trace a likeness later on."
Mariana laughed and smoothed the long dress with her frail, blue-veined hand. "The nurse says it is like me," she returned, good-humoredly. "I say it is like Anthony, and Anthony says it is like the original primate."
"I am getting old," said Mariana. She was sitting before the mirror, and as she spoke she rose and leaned forward in closer inspection. "This line," she added, dolefully, rubbing her forehead, "is caused by the laundress, this by the departure of the nurse, and this by the curdling of the baby's milk."
Anthony crossed over and stood behind her. "I would give my right arm to smooth them away," he said.
Mariana fastened the collar of her breakfast sacque and looked back at him from the glass. She did not reply. Not that she would not have liked to say something affectionate, but that she felt the effort to be pleasant to be physically beyond her. Her life of the last few weeks had taught her that demonstrative expressions are an unnecessary waste of energy.
There was a rap at the door, and she opened it and took the milk-bottle from the dairy-man. After setting a cupful upon the little gas-stove, she raised the window and placed the remainder upon the fire-escape. "I am afraid," she remarked, "that I will have to try one of those innumerable infant foods. One can never be sure that the milk is quite fresh."
Anthony tied a cravat which was particularly worn, put on a coat which was particularly shiny across the shoulders, and went into the adjoining room to set the table. He boiled the coffee, took in the baker's rolls from a tray on the threshold, and put on a couple of eggs. Then he called Mariana.
She came, sat down at the table, and lifted the coffee-pot. She looked hollow-eyed and haggard, and her hand shook slightly. "I am so weak," she said, fretfully. "I can't get my strength. I just go dragging about."
Anthony looked at her in sudden pain. "If there were a speculating devil around who took stock in souls," he said, "I am sure we might offer him an investment. People are fools to think there is any happiness without money."
"Or any decency," added Mariana. Then the baby cried, and she took it up and brought it to the table, holding it upon her knee as she ate. Her appetite failed, and she pushed her plate away.
"The egg is so white," she said, pettishly, "I can't eat it." Then her voice choked. "I—I sometimes wish I were dead," she added, and went to pour the baby's milk into its bottle.
Mariana's strength did not return. As the months passed she grew more listless, her pallor deepened, and the shadows under her eyes darkened to a purplish cast. The incessant round of minor cares clouded her accustomed sunniness of temper, and her buoyant step gave place to a languid tread. It was as if the inexorable hand of poverty had crushed her beneath its weight.
Algarcife, coming in from his more systematic employment, would marvel vaguely at her unresponsiveness. His tenderness would recoil in pained surprise as he felt her indifference to his caress, and her long silences while he sat beside her. "Mariana," he would begin, "won't you talk to me?" and Mariana would rouse herself with a start. "But what is there to say?" she would ask, and sink back into stillness. It was, perhaps, impossible for him to understand that at such times she was but undergoing the inevitable reaction from long months of physical and mental suffering—that the energy which she had expended in supplying the drains upon her nature had left her incapable of further effort. He did not know that emotion with a woman is so largely regulated by nervous conditions, that complete exhaustion of body and mind is apt to repress, not the fund of affection, but its outward manifestations. In his passionate desire to shield Mariana, he had kept from her knowledge the financial stress into which her prolonged illness had plunged him. He had watched his growing indebtedness silently, and had reduced his personal expenses to a minimum while he sought to supply her with comforts. But from the immediate needs and anxieties of her own life he had not been able to guard her. The gnawing fears for the child, the nights when she awoke from needed sleep to lean over its crib and soothe it with lullabies, the weary hours in the day when she walked with aching head back and forth, he could not prevent, nor could he restore to her the health which she had lost. That the vein of iron which lay beneath the surface lightness of her nature had developed through responsibility, he saw clearly, but he also saw that she lived her life in apparent unrepining, not because of a rational acceptance of the order of things, but because illness and toil had for the time overthrown her æsthetic intuitions. To recall her as she had been during the first months of their marriage, white, fresh, and exquisite in attire, and then to look at her in a faded wrapper, her heavy hair disordered, her lips compressed, was to know that Mariana as she was to-day was not Mariana in a normal state. That it could not last, he knew. That with the first wave of returning vigor her longing for dramatic effects and the small requirements of existence would reawaken, he admitted unhesitatingly. She would grow vital again, she would demand with passionate desire the satisfaction of hersenses—she would crave music, color, light, all the sensuous fulness of life. And where would she find it?
One day, as he came in to luncheon, he found her playing with the baby, a flash of brightness upon her face.
He looked at her and smiled.
"It is company for you, isn't it, dearest?"
Mariana's smile passed.
"I don't have time to think about that part," she returned. "I am always working. When I've got her all nice and fresh, and laid her on the bed, she begins to cry for her bottle. Then, while I am heating the milk, she cries to be walked, and, by the time the bottle is ready, she is so red in the face she can't drink it, and she spills it all over herself. Then I begin and go through it all again."
"What a little beast she is," said Algarcife, surveying the baby with parental displeasure. "What a pity she isn't a Japanese! Japanese babies never cry." Then he grew serious. "I sometimes wonder how you stand it," he added. "Here, give me the little devil!"
Mariana rescued the baby's rattle from its throat and laid it in the crib. It screamed, and she took it up again.
"There is a good deal in having to," she replied.
Algarcife walked to the window and stood looking down into the street. His brow was gloomy. Suddenly he faced her. "Are you sorry that you married me, Mariana?"
Mariana did not impulsively negative the question, as he had half expected. She even appeared to consider it. Then she slowly shook her head.
"I should have been more unhappy if I hadn't," she answered.
"It would have been a confounded sight better if you had never seen me."
But Mariana put the child down and fell into his outstretched arms.
"No, no," she said; "but I am tired—so tired."
Anthony picked her up and laid her on the bed. Then he threw a shawl over her. "I am going to take an hour off and discipline your tyrant," he said. "Go to sleep." He lifted the baby and went towards the door. "You aren't such a black-hearted chap, after all, are you, Isolde?"
The baby cuddled against his shoulder, and he passed into the next room, closing the door after him.
Mariana lay upon the bed and thought. Her eyes were wide open, and she stared fixedly at the ceiling, watching the fluctuations of light that chased across its plastered surface. It was a relief to be absolutely alone, to be freed from the restraint which the presence of another thinking entity necessitated. She drew the shawl closer about her and pressed her cheek upon the pillow. The contact of the cotton was exciting to her fevered flesh. In the dim train of association it brought back to her an illness in her childhood, and she recalled her first sensations of headache and fatigue. They had come upon her as she was playing in an open meadow, and, before toiling to the house, she had stopped beside the reedy brook and knelt to drink, while the cool, fresh notes of the bobolinks sounded about her. She remembered it all now as she lay amid the noise of the city. The roar of the elevated road was silenced, and she heard the bobolinks again. She saw the emerald sweep of the wheat fields, undulating in golden lights and olive shadows. She saw the stagnant ice pond, with the overhanging branches of willows and the whir of the parti-colored insects. She smelt the pungent sweetness of the wild rose and the subtle odor of the trumpet-flower, glowing amid its luxuriant foliage like a heart of fire.
Then she raised her head and surveyed the room inwhich she lay. She saw the garish daylight streaming in a flood of dust and sunshine through the narrow window. She saw the lack of grace that surrounded her, emphasized by a crowd of trivial details. She saw the tall, painted wardrobe with its bulging doors and the bandboxes upon the top, the cheap bureau with its gaping drawers, and the assortment of shoes half-hidden under it. She saw her work-basket, overflowing with stockings to be darned and small slips to be mended.
With a stifled sob she turned from it all, pressing her face against the pillow. The heritage of yearning for vivid beauty and sharp, sweet odors surged upon her. "I can't be poor!" she cried, passionately. "I can't be poor!"
But as the spring came, Mariana regained something of her old vigor, and it was in April of that year that Mr. Nevins painted the portrait which was exhibited some six months later, and with which began his rising fortunes. It represented her in the blue wrapper, holding the sleeping Isolde upon her knee, that soft and pensive stillness in her eyes. Within a couple of months after its appearance, Mr. Nevins had received orders for similar portraits from a dozen mothers, and had taken his position in the art world as the popular baby specialist.
Mariana had enjoyed the portrait and the sittings. They diverted her thoughts from the groove of the ordinary and gratified to a small extent her social instinct. When it was finished, and Mr. Nevins no longer came, she relapsed into listlessness. It was the friction of the outside world she needed. Hers was not the nature to develop through stagnation. In barren soil she wilted and grew colorless, while at the touch of sunshine she expanded and put forth her old radiance.
Anthony, watching her, would become oppressed attimes with the thought that this thin and fragile woman, dragging through her irksome round of duties, anæmic and hollow-eyed, might by the magic of wealth and ease mature into a passionate, lithe, and gracious creature, of which she was now the wraith—and yet which even now she suggested. For the furnace through which she had passed, in robbing her of freshness and bloom, had been unable to destroy her vague and ineffable charm.
"She is a woman ruined," he said, bitterly, and he said it with a dull aching in his heart. To him Mariana, emaciated and unresponsive, was still the Mariana to be possessed and held with burning desire. The small clashes of temper, the long silences, the apparent indifference, had been powerless to weaken the force of his love. It was still indomitable.
One night, upon going to his room, he found her in her night-gown kneeling on the hearth-rug. From her breathing he knew that she was asleep, and it was a moment before he aroused her. In the dim light she resembled a marble figure of prayer, her cheek resting upon her hand, the lashes fallen over the violet circles beneath her eyes.
Beside the bed, the baby lay in its little crib, the restless fists lying upon its breast, a fine moisture shining like dew upon the infantile face. He stood looking at it, a thrill shooting into his heart. For the first time he realized with acuteness a positive feeling for the child—realized that it was his as well as Mariana's, that it had a claim upon him other than the claim of Mariana, that he was not only the husband of a woman, but the father of a child.
Bending over the crib, he touched with one finger the crumpled rose-leaf hands, with the soft indentation around the wrist as if left by a tightly drawn cord.
He smiled slightly. Then he crossed over and kissedMariana. She opened her eyes, yawned, stretched her arms above her head, and rose.
"I have really been asleep," she said.
"You were so tired," answered Algarcife, and his voice was limpid with tenderness. "It kills me that you should work so, Mariana."
Mariana rested against him for an instant. Then she went to the crib, and, raising the baby's head, smoothed its pillow. As she laid it down again she pressed the cover carefully over its arms; then, throwing herself into bed, she fell asleep with a sigh.
With the closing session, Algarcife lost his position at the Bodley College. He had published, for a mere pittance, a series of articles upon the origin of sex, and, as a result, he was requested to deliver his resignation to the principal of the institution. A man holding such views, it was argued, was an unsuitable instructor for sixty-one young women. So the instructorship was transferred to a divinity student who was casually looking into science, and Algarcife was dismissed.
Upon receiving his dismissal, he descended into the street and walked slowly homeward. His first sensation was one of anger—blind anger against the blindness of the universe. It seemed incredible that a premium should be set upon commonplaceness, that modern civilization should demand of a man that he shape his mind by an artificial process after the minds of semi-savage ancestors. Was thought to be forever prostrate beneath the feet of superstition? Was all boldness of inquiry, all mental advancement along other than given lines, to be branded in the nineteenth century by theodium theologicumas it had been branded in the time of Bruno?
Then there followed a wave of personal bitterness which in its turn was succeeded by a flood-tide of indifference.
Going home, he found Mariana in nervous despair. The baby, who had been unwell for several days, had been suddenly threatened with convulsions. Upon the doctor's arrival, he had predicted a dangerous teething,and had insisted upon Isolde leaving town before the beginning of hot weather.
"I am so miserable," said Mariana, moistening a towel to remove the traces of milk that she had upset upon her wrapper. "What can we do?" With a feverish gesture she brushed her heavy and disordered hair from her brow and shook her head helplessly. "Monday is the first of June," she added.
Anthony listened almost stolidly. When he spoke there was a dogged decision in his voice. "The money must be had," he answered. "God knows, I believe I'd steal it if I'd half a chance!"
"Then we'd all go to prison," remarked Mariana, ruefully, as she measured the coffee into the coffee-pot.
Algarcife smiled with a quick sense of humor. "At any rate, a livelihood would be insured," he returned. "Honest industry is the only thing that goes a-begging in this philanthropic century." Then, as Mariana returned to the baby, he drank his coffee in silence and went out. As a beginning, he secured an order to write hygienic articles for a Sunday newspaper. Then he called upon Father Speares and found that he was out of town, and even in his desperation was conscious of a sensation of relief at the thought that Father Speares was beyond appeal. But the sensation was reactionary, and, upon consulting the weather bulletin and finding that a change in temperature was expected, he wrote a letter, which he left at the clergyman's house.
"How is Isolde?" he asked of Mariana an hour later.
Mariana smiled and raised her finger warningly. "Much brighter to-day," she answered, "and sleeping sweetly."
Anthony bent over the crib, holding his breath as he watched the child. He noticed that she looked thinner; the blue veins showed in a delicate tracery upon theforehead, and the crease around the tiny wrists was less deep.
Mariana, serious and careworn, leaned upon the opposite side.
"What do you think?" she whispered.
"Only a little pale," he replied; "all children are when teething, I suppose."
They went into the next room and sat down, leaving the door ajar.
"The doctor was here again," began Mariana, playing with the folds of her gown. "June is the dangerous month—he says so."
Algarcife raised his eyes and looked at her.
"I wrote to Father Speares to-day," he said.
For a moment Mariana was silent, a flush rising to her brow. Then she rose and came over to his side, putting her arms about his neck.
"My poor love," she murmured. Anthony drew her down upon the sofa beside him.
"It was tough," he said, slowly, "but—how I hate to tell you, Mariana!—there is something else."
Mariana flinched sharply.
"Surely he has not refused?" she exclaimed.
"He is away, but the College has given me notice."
Mariana did not answer, but she grew white and her lips trembled. Then she flung her arms out upon the sofa and laid her head upon them. Her sobs came short and fast.
"Mariana!"
She lifted her head and choked back her tears, sitting cold and stiff beside him.
"If it were only ourselves," she said; "but the baby—what will become of the baby?"
There was a strained note of cheerfulness in Algarcife's voice.
"Don't cry," he said, laying his hand upon her shoulder. "I must get the money. Father Speareswill lend it to me. We will pull through all right, never fear."
Mariana rested her head upon his arm and looked up at him.
"How ill you look!" she said. "My poor boy!"
Then the baby cried, and she went back to it. As Algarcife rose from the sofa, he was seized with a sudden swimming in his head, and, to steady himself, leaned against the mantel. The objects in the room seemed to whirl in a tangle before him, and his vision was obscured by a vaporous fog, while a tumultuous ringing sounded in his ears. But in a moment it passed, and he was himself again.
"Biliousness," he remarked, and started out in search of stray journalistic work. He found it easier to obtain than he had supposed, and, with his usual precision of method, calculated that by working fifteen hours a day he might, provided the supply of work continued, make up the amount which he would lose with the loss of the Bodley College.
After a week of such work, he became optimistic in mind and correspondingly depressed in body. "If my brains didn't get so sluggish," he said to Mariana, "the work would be nothing; but caffeine will remedy that." And he returned to the use of the drug, silencing Mariana's remonstrances with a laugh.
"My dear girl, if I didn't take something to keep me awake, I'd fall asleep in my chair at ten o'clock, and the subscribers to the evening issue would never learn the hygienic value of regular hours and a sufficient amount of recreation."
"But you will wreck yourself," urged Mariana.
"Nonsense. This caffeine is going to take Isolde and yourself to the country."
"And you?"
"I—oh, don't worry about me! I am all right."
And he would begin work with a pretence of alacrity,keeping to it until drowsiness warned him of physical exhaustion, when he would pause, stretch himself, measure his dose of caffeine, and, lifting his pen, dog away until past midnight.
It was an afternoon shortly after this that Mariana came to him flushed and expectant.
"Signor Morani sent for me," she explained. "I left Isolde with a daughter of the laundress and went. He has offered me an engagement in a comic opera."
Algarcife started and looked up.
"It seems that the manager heard me sing one day when I was at my lesson. He liked my dramatic power, Signor Morani says. At any rate, one of his troupe has given out, and he offers me the part."
"But, Mariana—"
Mariana did not look at him, but went rapidly on, as if waiving possible objections.
"We need the money. It might take Isolde away—and it is a chance. I am so young, you see—and—"
"Mariana!" cried Algarcife, sharply. There was a note in his voice which caused her to shrink away as if he had struck her. "Mariana," he put out his hand in protest, "you shall not do it. I will not let you. I could not bear it."
Mariana tapped her foot upon the floor impatiently. "I believe it is a child's part," she said.
"You shall not do it," he said, passionately.
Mariana turned her eyes upon him.
"But the money?"
"Oh, we will arrange it. I will leave The Gotham and take a room down-town, and you and Isolde shall go."
"Very well," said Mariana, sullenly, and left the room.
The next few days brought a wave of heat, and Algarcife made arrangements to send Mariana and the child away. He gave notice at The Gotham, andsecured a room upon Fourth Street, and in spare moments assisted Mariana with the packing. Then there was some delay in the payment for the articles he had written, and Mariana's departure was postponed. "Get your things ready," said Algarcife, when the heat grew more intense and Isolde drooped. "The moment that the money arrives, you can start. It was due a week ago."
So Mariana continued her packing with nervous hands. She was divided between anxiety for Anthony and anxiety for the child, and she was profoundly depressed on her own account.
"If it wasn't for Isolde, I wouldn't go a step," she declared, standing before a trunk into which she was putting cans of baby's milk. "I feel as if I could weep gallons of tears—only I haven't time."
Miss Ramsey, who was rocking Isolde, smiled encouragingly. "The change will do you good," she responded, "and I am sure you need it. You are quite ghastly."
Mariana sighed and looked at herself in the glass. "I suppose so," she remarked, a little wistfully. "I might be thirty."
And she went on packing. "Of course we may not leave for weeks," she explained, "and yet I feel driven. The uncertainty is horrible."
But Algarcife, coming in at dusk, found her more cheerful. She kissed him with something of her old warmth, and talked almost animatedly while he ate his supper.
"I shall miss you so," she said, "and yet I do wish we could get off. Isolde has been very fretful all day, and is badly broken out with heat. She has just fallen asleep."
After supper Mariana went to bed, and Anthony returned to work. He had an article to do upon the moral effects of the bicycle, which was to be handed inin the morning, and this, with some additional work, would keep him writing far into the night. With a strong feeling of distaste he took up his pen, and his repugnance increased with every line. In a moment he rose, threw off his coat, and applied himself with dull determination. It was warm to oppression, and the noises of the city came distinctly through the open window. The elevated road grated upon him as if it were running along his nervous system, and he started at the shrill sounds which rose at intervals above the monotonous roar of the streets.
He had been writing some hours, and it was twelve o'clock when the door opened and Mariana came in. She was barefooted and in her night-gown. Her face shone gray in the lamplight, and there were heavy circles under her eyes. She spoke rapidly.
"The baby is ill," she said. "You must find a doctor. She can't breathe."
In an instant Algarcife had passed her and was bending over the crib. The child was lying upon its back, staring with a mute interrogation at vacancy. There was a purple tinge over its face, and its breath came shortly.
"In a moment," said Anthony, and, taking up his hat, went out.
Within half an hour he returned, followed by the doctor, a well-meaning young fellow, fresh from college and wholly in earnest.
He looked at the child, spoke soothingly to Mariana, wrote a prescription, which he himself had filled at the nearest druggist's, gave a multitude of directions, sat an hour, and departed with the assurance that he would return at daybreak.
"She looks easier now," said Anthony, with a nervous tremor in his voice. "It must have been the heat."
Mariana, with tragic eyes, was fanning the little,flushed face, crooning a negro lullaby which she had treasured from her own childhood. The wavings of the palm-leaf fan cast a grotesque shadow that hovered like a gigantic hand above the baby's head, and, with the flitting of the shadow, the wistful little plantation melody went on. Ever since the birth of Isolde, Mariana had sung that song, and it fell upon Anthony's ears with an acute familiarity, like the breaking of happier associations against a consciousness of present pain.
As Algarcife looked down upon the small and motionless body, he felt a sudden tightening of his heart. The infantile hands, with their waxen look of helplessness, caused him to draw his breath as he turned away, and to wonder how Mariana could sit there hour after hour, crooning the negro song and waving to and fro the palm-leaf fan.
And yet her figure in its pallid outline against the dim light was photographed upon his brain, and it was Mariana at that moment that he loved with the love more abundant, and that in the after-years he found it hardest to forget.
He saw her with the reddish glow from the night-lamp upon her profile, her drooping body in the shadow, the fixed look of pain upon her face softened by the look which fell upon the sick child. He saw the child lying mute and motionless, the wide eyes staring, the small hands folded, the soft rings of flaxen hair wet and dark with perspiration, and the moisture lying upon the fragile little chest which the gown left bare; and he saw it all shadowed and lightened by the wavings of Mariana's fan.
Beyond this he saw the homely and disordered room, the articles dropped hastily as if in the start of sudden anxiety, the half-packed trunk with the piles of clothes upon the floor beside it, the tiny socks with the impress of the feet just learning to stand, the battered India-rubber doll with the crocheted frock of bright-hued worsteds, and at Mariana's hand the medicines which the doctor had left.
All these things were one with Mariana and himself. They were the heritage of their marriage, the memories which must always be inviolate—memories that could be shared by none other, could be undone by no stretch of time. In that atmosphere of common pain, which is more powerful both to sever and to unite than the less trenchant atmosphere of joy, he felt his heart leap into an invisible communion with the heart of Mariana. At that moment he was conscious of an additional sense-perception in the acuteness of his sympathy. He returned to his desk and took up his pen. The articles must be finished, and yet between himself and the unwritten page rose the vision of the still room, the pallid woman, and the sick child. The wavings of Mariana's fan seemed to obscure the light, and in his nervous tension he convinced himself that he heard the difficult breathing of a dying child—his child and Mariana's.
He swallowed an added dose of caffeine and looked at the page before him. The last written words stared him in the face and seemed so alien to his present train of thought as to have emanated from another person. He wondered what that other person's completion of the sentence would have been.
"Optimism is the first duty of the altruist." What in thunder had that to do with the effects of the bicycle? And what beastly rot it was. One might as well state that to be comfortable is the first duty of the damned.
"Optimism is the first duty of the altruist." He wrote on with the feeling that he was existing as an automaton, that while his hand was executing the result of some reflex action, his thinking entity was in the still room behind the closed door.
But with the absence of personality his senses were rendered doubly acute, and he seemed to see the rhythm of the atmospheric waves about him, while his ears were responsive to every sound in the night without—hearing them, not in a confused discord, but in distinct differentiation of note and key. Once his gaze encountered the grinning skull above the mantel, and, to his giddy senses, it seemed to wink with its hollow sockets. He found himself idly wondering if the skull had caught the trick of winking from its former accompaniment of flesh, and was forced to pull his thoughts together with a jerk. Then there came one of those sudden attacks of vertigo to which he had become subject, and he laid aside his pen and closed his eyes. "Too much caffeine," he muttered. But when it passed he went on again.
As the day broke he finished his articles, placed them in envelopes, stamped and addressed them, and rose to his feet. He blew out the lamp, and the faint odor of heated oil caused him a sensation of nausea. Crossing to the window, he raised the shade and stood inhaling the insipidity of atmosphere which is the city imitation of the freshness of a country morning. Without, a sombre, neutral-toned light flooded the almost deserted streets. In the highest heaven a star was still visible, and the vaguest herald of dawn flaunted itself beyond the chimney-pots.
As he lifted the shade he noticed that his hand trembled and that his head was unusually light. That massive sense of loneliness which the transition hour from darkness to day begets in the on-looker oppressed him with the force of an estrangement of hope. Such animpression had been produced upon him a hundred times by the breaking of dawn after a sleepless night.
He turned away and opened the door softly.
The night-lamp was still burning, but the beginning of the morrow washed with a faint grayness the atmosphere. The objects he had dwelt upon the night before were magnified in size, and in an instant the unpacked trunks, the rubber doll, and the bottles of medicine obtruded themselves upon his vision.
Mariana was still sitting as he had left her, waving to and fro the palm-leaf fan. He wondered vaguely if she had sat thus since midnight. Then he laid his hand upon her shoulder.
"Mariana, you must lie down." And as he stooped nearer he saw that the child was dead.
For the next six weeks Anthony was forced to listen to the distracted self-accusations of Mariana. When the little white coffin had been carried to Greenwood and laid in the over-grown plot beside the graves of Algarcife's parents, to be shadowed by the storied urns that redounded to the honor of a less impoverished generation, Mariana returned, and, throwing herself upon the floor, refused consolation.
"I want nothing," she said—"nothing, nothing. What could comfort me?"
At Anthony's protestations of love and grief she lifted dull and scornful eyes, wherein the triumph of motherhood showed supreme over all other emotions.
"How can you know?" she asked, between tearless sobs. "You did not nurse her, and hold her in your arms night and day; you did not bathe her while she laughed at the bubbles; you did not put on her little dresses and socks. Oh, my baby! my baby! I want my baby!"
Then she would rise and pace up and down in a sudden frenzy of despair, clinching her hands at her own impotence, tearing her wounds asunder with remorseless recollections. It was as if she found satisfaction in thus inflicting upon herself the added agony of recalling the minor details of her loss—in voicing the keenest passion of her grief.
Algarcife, writing in the adjoining room and wrung by a tortured brain, would listen to her unsteady tread as she walked ceaselessly back and forth, until thesound would madden him with its pauseless monotony—and then would come that half-choked cry for reckoning with fate, "Oh, my baby!"
To his more self-contained nature the violence of Mariana's grief was like the searing of the bleeding sores in his own heart. To avoid that cry of stricken motherhood he would have given the better portion of his life—to have been deaf to that impulsive expression of a pain he felt but could not utter he would have damned his soul.
And when, during the first few days, Mariana gathered together all the scattered little garments, and brooded over them with the passion of irremediableness, he would cry aloud out of his own bitterness,
"Put them away! If you love me, Mariana, hide them."
But Mariana, in the selfishness of loss, would glance at him with reproachful eyes, and turn to stroke the rubber doll in its bright-hued dress, and the half-worn socks with the impress of restless feet.
In the night she would start from a troubled sleep with corroding self-questionings. "Make a light," she would say, fretfully, sitting up and staring into the gloom. "Make a light. The darkness stifles me. I can't breathe."
Then, when the flame of the candle would flare up beside her, she would turn upon Anthony the blaze of her excited eyes, and play upon the sheet with feverish fingers. The loss of sleep which these spasms entailed upon Algarcife was an additional drain upon his wrecking system, and sometimes in sheer exhaustion he would plead for peace.
"Mariana, only sleep. Lie still, and I will fan you—or shall I give you bromide?"
But the hot questions would rush upon him and he would answer them as he had answered such questions for the past six weeks.
"Was it my fault? Could I have done anything? Was it taken away because I didn't want it to come?"
"Mariana!"
"Do you remember that I said I hoped it would die? You knew they were idle words, didn't you? You knew that I didn't mean it?"
"Of course, my dearest."
"But somebody told me once that for every idle word we would be held to account. Is this the account?"
"Hush."
For a moment she would lie silent, and then, rising again, the torrent would come.
"Perhaps if I had not left the window open that first warm day. And I did not send for the doctor at once. I thought it was only fretful. Perhaps—"
"You could have done nothing."
"I did not know. I was so ignorant. I should have studied. I should have asked questions."
Then she would turn towards him, laying her hot hand upon his arm.
"Tell me that it was not my fault. Tell me—tell me!"
"It was not. It was not."
"But I want her so. I want to feel her. I want to feel her soft and warm in my arms. Oh, my baby!"
And so the summer nights would wear away.
But as time went on a reactionary lethargy pervaded her. Her vitality being spent, she was left limp and devoid of energy. For hours she would lie motionless in the heated room, the afternoon sun, intensified by the reflected glare of pressed brick, streaming upon her, and she would appear to be indifferent to both heat and glare. From Algarcife she turned with an avoidance which was almost instinctive. When he touched her she shrank into silence, when he spoke she met his words with lethargic calm. It was as if the demands he made upon heremotional nature became irksome to her when that nature lay dormant.
"I suppose I love you," she said one day, in answer to his questions. "I think I do, but I don't feel it. I don't feel anything. I only want to forget."
"Not to forget me, Mariana?"
Mariana shook her head impatiently.
"Do you know," she continued, "that the thought of feeling makes me positively sick? I haven't any left, and I don't like it in other people. I am tired of it all."
"And of me?"
"I don't know. I think not, but I oughtn't to have married you."
"Mariana!"
"It would have been much better. You said so yourself once. But love is so strange. It makes people do such absurd things."
Algarcife did not reply. There was resentment in the look he bent upon her. He had not learned that even a woman in love is not a woman always in love—that love, in common with all other conditions, is subject to the forces which attract and repel, and that its equilibrium is maintained by a logical adjustment of opposites. To him Mariana's alienation betokened a fundamental failing in her nature, and with the thought he experienced a dull anger.
"I have felt so much in my life," continued Mariana, "that my capacity for sensations is lying fallow. The lack of ice in my tea and the heat in my room are of more importance than the excesses of affection. Were you ever that way?"
For a moment Algarcife did not reply; then he said, "You are very uncomfortable?"
"Yes."
"When we leave The Gotham it will be still worse. That room on Fourth Street is hellish."
"No doubt."
"How will you stand it?"
Mariana interlaced her fingers with impatient weariness and yawned.
"I don't know. As I stand it now, I suppose. We are poorer than ever, aren't we?"
"Poorer than ever."
She fingered her gown softly. "I suppose I shouldn't have bought this mourning," she said. "What a pity!"
When Anthony had gone she went out upon the fire-escape and looked down into the street below. The cry of a vender rolling his cart of over-ripe melons came up to her, and she followed his figure with curious intentness. From some indefinable cause, the vender suggested Signor Morani to her mind, and she recalled his warning, as she had recalled it in a different mood that rainy evening over a year ago. She realized now that Anthony's objection to her accepting Signor Morani's offer was still a canker within her heart. There remained, and there would always remain, the possibility that had she overruled his objection and entered into the engagement, Isolde might have been sent from the city, and might now be playing in some country meadow. The possibility, facing her as it did in all its ghastliness, produced a gnawing remorse, as invincible as a devil's thrust.
Upon this followed the conception that her marriage had doomed to failure not only her own life, but Anthony's; and there came a passionate regret for the part she had played in drawing him from his isolated abstraction into the turmoil of life and its passions. She blamed herself that she had gone to him that night, carrying the letter in her hand. She blamed herself that she had not resisted the appeal of her love, and, with a sudden pang, she realized all that the change had meant to him—the book that remained unwritten, the treadmill of uncongenial toil, thephysical hardihood which was being slowly ground to dust. She realized this in its fulness, but with no determination of endeavor, no resolutions to battle more with fate. There was regret for the past, but there were no pledges for the future. The outcome was beyond her and beyond Anthony, this she knew. It was something to be left to the floodgates of hope that would be overborne by the press of time. In the lowered state of her vitality she felt almost indifferently her own inability to contest for larger measures of individual gain. She accepted destiny, and acquiesced, not in resignation, but in the apathy of one whom despair has drugged.