Down-stairs the evening passed as evenings usually did when Harriet
and Austen were alone. There were not even the varyings from parlour
to front door that the heat seemed to necessitate for the rest of the
neighbourhood. Front porches are sociable things. The Blairs' was the
only house on the street without one.
The evening passed with the brother and sister at opposite sides of
the black, marble-topped table in the long parlour, she embroidering
on a strip of cambric with nice skill, he quickly and deftly cutting
the wrappers and pages of papers and magazines accumulated in his
absence. To undertake just what he could do justice to and keep
abreast of it, was the method by which he accomplished more than any
two men, in business, in church affairs, in civic duties, for the man
took his citizenship seriously. Both brother and sister had been
raised to economy of time, yet sometimes she mocked at herself for her
many excellencies and sometimes sighed, while he--
At ten o'clock Harriet rolled her work together and said good-night,
ascending the crimson-carpeted stairway with the unhurried movement of
an Olympian goddess; that is, if an Olympian goddess could have been
so genuinely above concern about it.
Her room, a front one on the second floor, had a look of spaciousness
and exquisite order. She moved about, adjusting a shade, setting a
gas-bracket at some self-imposed angle of correctness, giving the
sheets of the opened bed a touch of adjustment.
It was the price paid for the free exercise of individuality. Already,
at twenty-six, ways were becoming habits.
These things arranged, she passed to the adjoining room, from to-night
given to Alexina. Turning up the gas, Harriet glanced about at Nelly's
disposition of things, then moved to the bed.
Whatever were the emotions called forth by the relaxed little form,
softly and regularly breathing against a battered doll, or by the
essentially babyish face with the fine, flaxen hair damp and clinging
about the forehead, the Blairs were people to whom restraint was
second nature. Whatever Harriet felt showed only in solicitude for the
child who had thrown aside all cover. But as she drew the sheet and
light blanket up, her hand touched the smoothness of a bared little
limb. It brought embarrassment. She had but once before touched the
bareness of another's body, and that her mother's, and in death.
Was it shame, this surging of strange hotness through her?
The refuge of a Blair was always action. She stepped to the bay of the
room and drew the shutters against the night-wind.
Between the windows stood the bureau. Harriet paused, arrested by a
daguerreotype in a velvet case open upon it. The child must have left
it there. She sat down and laying the picture on her knee, regarded
it, her chin in her palm.
It was the face of the father of the sleeping child, dead less than a
year, for whom his sister was wearing this black trailing in folds
about her.
And looking on his face, she recalled another, exquisite in pallor,
with shadowy lashes, the face of Molly, who ten months after
Alexander's death had married again; who not only married but gave up
her child. Had it been the purpose of Alexander to test her for the
child's sake? She had been given her third and the child the same,
with Austen as executor and guardian. In the event of Molly marrying
again, she had been given choice. She might relinquish all right in
the remaining third and keep the child, or by giving up the child
could claim the portion. And the estate was large. In ten months Molly
had chosen.
And yet, thinking of these things, Harriet bade herself be just, chief
tenet in the Blair creed. Was she so certain Alexander had been
altogether unhappy in his marriage? May not compensations arise out
of a man's own nature if he cares for the woman? For Harriet no
longer asked why her brother had married Molly. She knew, knew that
the thing called love is stronger than reason, than life--some even
claimed, than death. Not that she knew it of herself, this calm,
poised Harriet, but, watching, she had seen its miracles.
And out of this, Alexander may have drawn his compensation, for,
stronger than the hourly friction of his daily life, stronger than the
hurt of outraged conventionality, thrift, and pride, stronger than the
jealousy which must have often assailed him, had not love survived in
Alexander to the end, love that protected and concealed Molly's
failings from his own people?
Suddenly, over Harriet swept the breath of roses coming into an open
breakfast room and she saw a stern-lipped man lift, enfold a
child-woman to him for a moment, and as fiercely put her from him and
go out.
Harriet, breathing quickly, put her brother's picture back, and going
to the bed, lifted the bar and drew the sheet again over the child.
Then she stood looking down. What manner of little creature was this
child of Alexander and Molly?
Glancing about to assure herself all was in order, she put the light
out, and, with hand outstretched against the darkness, moved to the
door, when there swept over her again the vision of Molly clinging to
Alexander, and again she felt the surrender of the man, the fierce
closing of his arms, and again she was shaken by his passion.
And even after she reached her room and sat down at her desk to the
ledger of household accounts, it came over her, and she paused, her
hand pressed to her hot cheek.
But that a little creature had cried itself to sleep in the next room
she did not dream. She would have cried herself, had she known it,
she, to whom tears came seldom and hard. But she was a slow awakening
soul, groping, and she did not know.