And Lali? How had the night gone for her? When she rose from the child’s
cot, where her lips had caught the warmth that her husband had left on
them, she stood for a moment bewildered in the middle of the room. She
looked at the door out of which he had gone, her bosom beating hard, her
heart throbbing so that it hurt her--that she could have cried out from
mere physical pain. The wifedom in her was plundering the wild stores of
her generous soul for the man, for--as Richard had said that day,
that memorable day!--the father of her child. But the woman, the pure
translated woman, who was born anew when this frail life in its pink and
white glory crept out into the dazzling world, shrank back, as any girl
might shrink that had not known marriage. This child had come--from
what?--She shuddered now--how many times had she done so since she first
waked to the vulgar sacrilege of her marriage? She knew now that every
good mother, when her first child is born, takes it in her arms, and,
all her agony gone, and the ineffable peace of delivered motherhood
come, speaks the name of its father, and calls it his child. But--she
remembered it now--when her child was born, this little waif, the fruit
of a man’s hot, malicious hour, she wrapped it in her arms, pressed its
delicate flesh to the silken folds of her bosom, and weeping, whispered
only: “My child, my little, little child!”
She had never, as many a wife far from her husband has done, talked to
her child of its father, told it of his beauty and his virtues, arrayed
it day by day in sweet linen and pretty adornments, as if he were just
then knocking at her door; she had never imagined what he would say
when he did come. What could such a father think of his child, born of a
woman whose very life he had intended as an insult? No, she had loved
it for father and mother also. She had tried to be good, a good mother,
living a life unutterably lonely, hard in all that it involved of study,
new duty, translation, and burial of primitive emotions. And with all
the care and tearful watchfulness that had been needed, she had grown so
proud, so exacting--exacting for her child, proud for herself.
How could she know now that this hasty declaration of affection was
anything more than the mere man in him? Years ago she had not been able
to judge between love and insult--what guarantee had she here? Did
he think that she could believe in him? She was not the woman he
had married, he was not the man she had married. He had deceived
her basely--she had been a common chattel. She had been miserable
enough--could she give herself over to his flying emotions again so
suddenly?
She paced the room, her face now in her hands, her hands now clasping
and wringing before her. Her wifely duty? She straightened to that.
Duty! She was first and before all a good, unpolluted woman. No, no, it
could not be. Love him? Again she shrank. Then came flooding on her that
afternoon when she had flung herself on Richard’s breast, and all those
hundred days of happiness in Richard’s company--Richard the considerate,
the strong, who had stood so by his honour in an hour of peril.
Now as she thought of it a hot wave shivered through all her body, and
tingled to her hair. Her face again dropped in her hands, and, as on
that other day, she knelt beside the cot, and, bursting into tears,
said through her sobs: “My baby, my own dear baby! Oh, that we could go
away--away--and never come back again!”
She did not know how intense her sobs were. They waked the child from
its delicate sleep; its blue eyes opened wide and wise all on the
instant, its round soft arm ran up to its mother’s neck, and it said:
“Don’t c’y! I want to s’eep wif you! I’se so s’eepy!”
She caught the child to her wet face, smiled at it through her tears,
went with it to her own bed, put it away in the deep whiteness, kissed
it, and fondled it away again into the heaven of sleep. When this was
done she felt calmer. How she hungered over it! This--this could not be
denied her. This, at least, was all hers, without clause or reservation,
an absolute love, and an absolute right.
She disrobed and drew in beside the child, and its little dewy cheek
touching her breast seemed to ease the ache in her soul.
But sleep would not come. All the past four years trooped by, with their
thousand incidents magnified in the sharp, throbbing light of her mind,
and at last she knew and saw clearly what was before her, what trials,
what duty, and what honour demanded--her honour.
Richard? Once for all she gently put him away from her into that
infinite distance of fine respect which a good woman can feel, who has
known what she and Richard had known--and set aside. But he had made for
her so high a standard, that for one to be measured thereby was a severe
challenge.
Could Frank come even to that measure? She dared not try to answer the
question. She feared, she shrank, she grew sick at heart. She did not
reckon with that other thing, that powerful, infinite influence which
ties a woman, she knows not how or why, to the man who led her to the
world of motherhood. Through all the wrongs which she may suffer by him,
there runs this cable of unhappy attraction, testified to by how many
sorrowful lives!
But Lali was trying to think it out, not only to feel, and she did
not count that subterranean force which must play its part in this new
situation in her drama of life. Could she love him? She crept away out
of the haven where her child was, put on her dressing-gown, went to the
window, and looked out upon the night, all unconscious that her husband
was looking at her from the Square below. Love him?--Love him?--Love
him? Could she? Did he love her? Her eyes wandered over the Square.
Nowhere else was there a light, but a chimney-flue was creaking
somewhere. It jarred on her so that she shrank. Then all at once she
smiled to think how she had changed. Four years ago she could have slept
amid the hammers of a foundry. The noise ceased. Her eyes passed from
the cloud of trees in the Square to the sky-all stars, and restful deep
blue. That--that was the same. How she knew it! Orion and Ashtaroth, and
Mars and the Pleiades, and the long trail of the Milky Way. As a little
child hanging in the trees, or sprawled beside a tepee, she had made
friends with them all, even as she learned and loved all the signs of
the earth beneath--the twist of a blade of grass, the portent in the cry
of a river-hen, the colour of a star, the smell of a wind. She had known
Nature then, now she knew men. And knowing them, and having suffered,
and sick at heart as she was, standing by this window in the dead of
night, the cry that shook her softly was not of her new life, but of the
old, primitive, child-like.
‘Pasagathe, omarki kethose kolokani vorgantha pestorondikat Oni.’
“A spear hath pierced me, and the smart of the nettle is in my wound.
Maker of the soft night, bind my wounds with sleep, lest I cry out and
be a coward and unworthy.”
Again and again, unconsciously, the words passed from her lips
‘Vorganthe, pestorondikat Oni.’
At last she let down the blind, came to the bed, and once more gathered
her child in her arms with an infinite hunger. This love was hers--rich,
untrammelled, and so sacred. No matter what came, and she did not know
what would come, she had the child. There was a kind of ecstasy in
it, and she lay and trembled with the feeling, but at last fell into a
troubled sleep.
She waked suddenly to hear footsteps passing her door. She listened. One
footstep was heavier than the other--heavier and a little stumbling; she
recognised them, Frank and Richard. In that moment her heart hardened.
Frank Armour must tread a difficult road.