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 aesthetic 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, she wondered 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 dust and 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 the sleeping
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 of life. 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."