“You haven’t dressed? You told me to order the car for four.”
“I don’t want to go to the garden party, Tom. I’m sick of functions.
London gets hotter and hotter--and dustier and grubbier--and all the
people we know grow stupider and stupider every day!”
“I’m blowed!” But Tom Gaylor was inured to surprises of various sorts
from his wife.
“I want to go home--to Dorset. I want to go now, Tom.”
“You do! Right! That suits me down to the ground. Best Christmas
present I’ve had since I was six. London _is_ abominably stuffy just
now, if you ask me; and garden parties never were my dying request;
invention of Satan, I call ’em. I’m your traveling companion with all
the heart in the world. When shall we go? Next week? I don’t suppose we
could manage to-morrow--or Monday--could we, Ivy?”
“I want to go now.”
“To-day?”
“Now.”
“Well--I _am_ blowed. Always were a decisive girl though, weren’t you?
It’s now we go. Wait till I find a hat, and tell Jones to tank up good
and plenty. It’s a goodish distance my lady wife is taking me, and not
too many dumps to get good Mex this side of Winchester. We can just
about make home for nine o’clock dinner, if we don’t get run in for
speeding. You’d better ’phone Mrs. Clegg or Briggs or there won’t be
any dinner. I don’t forget the one-course banquet of dried haddock and
egg sauce they gave me the last time I blew in unexpected. Got a few
people dining here to-night, haven’t we? You sit down and write them a
few untruthful telegrams while I negotiate Jones. Shall we take your
maid with us, or send her by train?”
“I don’t care who goes with us, if only we can start now. And we’ll be
off a good deal sooner if you talk a good deal less!”
“Mrs. Gaylor, the rest is silence. What about tea? We can get it at
Winchester! Jolly decent tea there last time.”
“None this. Sandwiches and a thermos. Ring that bell. I am not going to
stop at Winchester or anywhere else. I’ll be ready in exactly fifteen
minutes; see that you are, and that Jones is--petrol and all.”
“Madame, I shall in all my best obey you.”
“Do get along and do it, then!”
“Right!” And Gaylor made for the hall and Jones, laughing and flinging
another apt Shakespearian tag at Ivy as he went. He was riotously glad
to be going home. The rabbits would be thick as fleas, melons and the
last peaches dead ripe--and the geese eating their heads off.
* * * * *
In their Dorset home the battle began which Mrs. Sên had foreseen
was inevitable, but which Lady Snow had believed was already lost; a
terrible silent battle between Ivy herself and her old rankling sore
and humiliation on the one side, and on the other a little dark-skinned
baby and mother-love.
At first Gaylor thought that it was “coming all right.” Ivy spent long
hours with her baby, in the house and in the gardens; and watching
them, when Ivy did not know that he was near, he saw Ivy--several
times--cuddling the little dark face to hers, picking its tiny fingers
apart, counting its toes; once he saw the young mother laugh at her
child, and the baby gurgled and grinned in delightful return.
It was a bonnie baby, delicately fat, dimpled, ready to smile at a
hint, perfectly willing to lie on its back by the hour and stare
straight up at nothing in a grave friendly way. It would grip your
finger with the grip of a determined rosebud petal, it snatched at
trinkets, did its best to swallow its own doubled fist, adored the
absurdest faces you could make at it, chortled and shook with amusement
when you tickled it under its very soft chin, listened appreciatively
when you whistled or sang or made the most gruesome noises. It loved
bright colors, cooed to the sunset, held out its hands for every flower
it saw. It never cried, and it had the three deeply marked wrinkles on
each wee wrist which the Chinese call the bracelet of lifelong good
luck. In short, it was a baby that would have been proclaimed and
adored in any courtyard from the Jade Gate to Shanghai.
Ivy was happy and natural--for a time; then the revulsion came.
She avoided her child.
Her eyes grew haggard and hard.
She took to sitting alone, far off in the garden, or locked in her own
room. Touching her pillow by chance in the dark, Gaylor felt it wet.
Twice when he woke he felt that she had not slept. More than twice he
woke in the night and missed her, and found her pacing up and down in
some other room in the dark.
Baby had lost the first round. Prejudice and old hurt pride had proved
stronger than love and womanly instinct.
Gaylor longed to say something, do something--but what? For the life
of him he couldn’t think what to say or to attempt; and fearing to
blunder, shy of the subject too, he left it alone and was abominably
worried--perplexed at a twisted situation as only a man, and an English
man at that, can be. And he was miserable--not with any quantity or
quality of misery approaching Ivy Gaylor’s own--but quite as miserable
as any mere man who is trying manfully to do his best ought ever to be
made.
Mrs. Sên had been right--the little baby pulled its mother, but it
could not prevail. She knew now that she loved it; but it could not
comfort her. She revolted and rebelled for it and its future as for
years she had for her own and for herself. The more she saw it, the
more she shrank from it. The more she yearned over it, the more she
recoiled.
The sight of her child--the sound of its voice--became a torture.
Gaylor was not surprised when his wife said defiantly one night at
dinner, “I am going back to London in the morning.”
“We’ll go by car?” was all the comment he made.
“Unless you’d rather stay here and shoot--and farm.”
Tom smiled. “I’d much rather go with you.”
His wife’s eyes fell to her plate.
She wished very much to say, “thank you” nicely, partly because she
cordially thought he deserved it, partly because the servants were
there--but a lump jumped in her throat and made her mute.
Except that he asked presently, at just what hour she would like to
start, their going was not mentioned again until he went to her the
next morning to ask if she were ready.
“Quite,” Ivy said; and she already wore hat and coat and gloves.
Her husband looked at her with a longing in his eyes that she
understood--and ignored.
“I won’t be long,” he said. “I’ll just have a look at the kiddy.”
Ivy nodded indifferently and made no motion to follow him to the
nurseries.
Gaylor went very slowly, hoping in spite of himself that Ivy would come
too just for a minute or two.
But she did not.
He was gone longer than she had expected, longer than he had intended;
and when he came down Ivy had left the house, and was waiting for him
in the car.
“Dear,” her husband said, taking the door of the car from the servant’s
hand into his own, “Baby is ill--looks pretty queer to me, and nurse
is frightened too. I don’t suppose it’s much, but I’ve ’phoned for Dr.
Brand, and I think one of us ought to wait and see what he says. I
won’t go--not till Brand’s been here anyway, if you don’t mind.”
“What a bore!” She tried to speak indifferently, but her face had
blurred instantly. “She never has been ill before, has she?”
“I never heard she was,” the man said awkwardly. Neither its father nor
its mother knew much about how their baby had been most of its tender
little life. Probably it had not been ill before; the most competent
nurse scarcely would have failed to send word of any ailment more
alarming than hiccups.
“I suppose we’d better stay,” Mrs. Gaylor said grudgingly, “until the
Doctor has seen her,” but her husband felt her arm tremble as he drew
her coat off in the hall. And Ivy Gaylor slipped her hand in his, and
went up to the nursery with him. Tom had been afraid she would not go
there. He almost had half feared she might go on to London as she had
planned.
The man loved his wife better than he understood her.
At midnight Ivy’s unwanted baby died in her arms.
Long after the little body had stiffened they could not take it from
its mother.
And the old physician, watching Ivy Gaylor, drew Gaylor aside, beckoned
the nurse to him, and said, “We must not push her now. We must not
thwart Mrs. Gaylor in anything. This is going to half kill your wife,
Mr. Gaylor. It may kill her. She will never get over it. Some mothers
are stricken so at the loss of a child--not many, but some are. I have
seen one or two in my own practice; I know the signs. Mrs. Gaylor will
need infinite care and patience--and, above all tact. _We_ cannot help
her. There is nothing we can do but wait.”
Something leapt at Gaylor’s heart that was not all pain or grief.
“Please go,” the mother said presently without looking up, and they
left them alone--the girl-mother nursing her dead child.
For a long time the mother was as motionless as her baby.
Then--she pressed it to her a little closer, bent her face over it,
and kissed it again and again, washing the little yellow face with her
tears, washing her baby for burial.
Ivy tore her gown apart and pressed the tiny hands, ice cold, yellow
baby hands, against her bosom.
Between her agonized sobs Ivy crooned to her little baby.
The Chinese baby had won.