Dr. Gresham joined Mr. and Mrs. Burt in the parlor. There they sat cowed
by fear. Something was wrong with Sylvia and Josiah junior who lay
upstairs in bed. The physician, with a broad glance, took in his
audience before he spoke. The couple sat in opposite corners of the
room--a square, colorless arrangement in false brocade, knick-knacks and
musty varnish. Sarah was on a cane stool which enabled her long back to
be as stiff and angular as possible. Her black hair was stringy over her
sallow face. She was only thirty-three. But her eyes, deep, grey blue
eyes with a wash of timidity and a fret of fever forever in them, showed
that once she must have been passionate and responsive. Josiah lay half
back in an armchair. Between his vest and his trousers was an hiatus of
blue shirt. His thread tie looked comical against the expansive bulk of
his body. His eyes were small, sheer, energetic. His mouth, also, was
small. But its regressive curl bespoke inertia. A day’s beard stood in
purple ridges upon his florid cheeks. He tapped the chair with stout
fingers--whose nails he invariably bit. Sarah tapped the carpet with her
house-slippers. Her feet had lost their shape.
“It’s as I feared: both of them have scarlet fever.”
Sarah caught her breath and passed a long hand over her forehead,
brushing back the hair. Her eyes half closed. Then, she looked at her
husband. He jumped up, his face tortured.
“We’ll spare no expense, Doctor! Tell Sarah jest what to do. I’ll
harness the buggy for the medicine.” He went toward the door.
“There’s one thing got to be done right off,” Dr. Gresham intercepted
him. “Your wife can’t nurse these patients and her baby too. You’d
better ride right over to Codgel’s Farm in North Harriet and take the
infant with you. Mary’s just good, I happen to know. She can wet-nurse
him till this is over. I’ll give you a short note. Mrs. Burt can stay
here then,--and attend to things.”
“Right away?” At last came Sarah’s stifled voice.
The doctor nodded. “This thing is nearly a week old.”
The danger to the other children rushed into the woman’s mind. She held
her panic. “I’ll get him ready.”
And husband and wife went together into the hall.
“I knew that kid meant bad luck,” growled Josiah as he marched toward
the kitchen. And as Sarah mounted the laborious stairs, he might have
heard, had he waited, lost in the slow thud of her feet on the steps, a
tiny sob--the stolen luxury of womanhood for Sarah, behind his back.
* * * * *
These were hard days for Josiah Burt.
Nature seemed to have given him a fixed capacity of love. Upon Sylvia,
his first-born, an overflowing measure had been showered. And to Josiah
junior went an equal quantity, held so perhaps by the impetus of his
name, which thereby singled out this son to be the recipient of his own
hopes and dreams. With Marsden, enough of his natural bent remained to
make an honorable showing. And the girls that followed, Rhoda and
Adelaide, were babies of such charm and irresistible persuasion that
they received a share of quite esthetic love in place of the now
low-running father’s instinct. With Thomas had come indifference; with
Quincy Octavus, so named for the fifth son and the eighth child,--since
Josiah nursed the belief that Quincy was a Yankee form of Quintus,--had
come revolt. All of the man’s paternity was lodged in his two eldest
children. And now, they lay in fever. All of the artist in him, which
once had gone to a fresh and gracious wife, centered now upon the two
baby girls whose hair and gleaming eyes made them famed in Harriet. And
when he thought at all of Quincy, it was as a harbinger of greater want
and worry, or as an eloquent reason for keeping henceforth aloof from
Sarah.
Josiah had the heart of a child--primitively brave and tender, cowardly,
and subtly, progressively savage. His children’s illness daunted him. So
he protected his lack-courage and his pained affection by added coldness
to his wife, whom he blamed explicitly for everything except the
weather, and by a really Gargantuan animosity for the infant who had
been sent sucking his father’s substance in North Harriet. Either the
bad turn of his affairs was responsible for Quincy, or he for them. It
mattered little. The dislike was engrained. Once that, it could easily
branch out with catholic perseverance to the woman that had borne him
and to all miseries that might happen after.
The upshot of the scarlet-fever was that both Sylvia and Josiah junior
died. And now, in this bitter respite, Sarah remembered her last-born
and brought him home.
His profession of surveyor was the sole source of income to Josiah’s
household. It was a steady, reasonable prop. But it made no provision
for unintermittent doctor’s bills, two funerals and the wet-nursing of
an eighth child. In most walks of life, it is more costly to bury a
child than to support it. The family was in debt. Josiah had sold his
horse and carriage; he had tried to sell an anonymous land lot near Red
Bear, Wyoming, which hope of minerals had tempted him to purchase ten
years before. At that time, he had been the prosperous, sanguine father
of two children, the husband of a wife with an amiable figure.
Stubbornness alone now kept him from letting the land lapse through
failure of tax payment. He had lost hope of it. But a bitter strain in
the man took pleasure in the irony of his remote, draining possession.
It served him as a reminder of past projects, as a quite literally dry
yet eloquent allusion to the downward grade which he fancied he had
traversed by a route measured with the coming of new babies and the
going of old hopes. Humor had a lodging in Josiah’s heart. And so it was
that, mortgaging his cottage, he paid his tax on the Wyoming plot, all
with a pinch of perverse amusement.
“We’ll save it as a burial ground for you and me, Sarah,” he remarked.
And when his wife did not smile at the jest, wincing only with the gall
beneath it, he was logical enough to know his pleasantry successful.
They sat in the parlor, that night of Quincy’s home-coming. The past
year of Sarah’s life was stamped upon her face; or rather it seemed to
have possessed it, to have wrung and tortured it into the very symbol of
that past year’s spirit. The final trial had begun with the first
stirrings of Quincy. Indeed, this mute yet shattering oracle within a
woman’s body is often a mark of agony upon her soul. At the end, is the
travail of the flesh. But often, that anguish comes almost as a balm,
when the soul’s misery and the mind’s labor have made her faint, to
revive in the pain of birth a quickened mother from what was an almost
lifeless woman, numbed with her foreboding. Such was the case with
Sarah. While Nature worked in her, she had loathed her function. The
long shadow of labor held her torpid, spiritless. The act of bearing
flung her once more into the light, into the living. It was as if she,
also, had been born. But the new throb in her breast, like that in her
child, was frail and hazardous.
And then had come the fever; the bearing off of Quincy beyond sight and
helping, almost beyond thought; the double loss; the sudden loom once
more into reality of this infant whom a cloud of fate had shut off from
the mother’s vision.
There, upstairs, he slept--isolated still. And Sarah, her elbows on the
table, gazed wonderingly across to the brooding figure of her husband.
The lamp-light reached out despairingly against the shadowed gloom. Its
yellow fingers touched scantly on Josiah’s face. Sarah followed it. The
folds of flesh were heavy and moist. The eyes were lost in their lids.
It was a sorrowful face. The lamp-light was of no avail save to display
it. And then,--the strangeness of her thought shocked Sarah: how should
lamp-light affect a heart? what was light? what was anything? why was
the dark uncomfortable, after all? Her mind groped upward toward her
baby. But she could not find him. When her mind went groping, always it
stumbled down upon Sylvia and Josiah junior. She would think of the
living; there came the dead. Why was this? Why did thinking of the two
who were buried seem like the warm glow of the lamp, and thought of her
last born appear like a vague depth lost in a shadow? It should have
been reversed--this figure. Yet so it was. And Sarah did not care for
shadows.
A half knitted garment was in Sarah’s hands. Listlessly she let it fall
in her lap.
In the table drawer were letters from Sylvia and “Jo”--scrawls to her
from the mountains, where last summer her husband had taken them, while
she remained in Harriet with the other children--and Quincy under her
heart. She took the letters, held them long and read them swiftly, again
and again, as if each time, in her too cursory way (the product of inner
conflict), she had lost a phrase....
The sweater for upstairs must be done, however.