Phases of an Inferior Planet Part 22

"Shut up, Nevins!" roared Ardly, seating himself at the table beside Mariana. "As if everybody didn't know that Mr. Paul's prophecy was obliged to come to pa.s.s! Did you ever see a pessimist who wasn't infallible as a soothsayer? It beats a special revelation all hollow."

"Please don't be irreverent," remonstrated Mariana. "I am sure I am awfully sorry about the 'Andromeda,' and I believe that if Mr. Nevins had taken my advice and lightened those shadows--"

"Or mine, and lengthened that thigh," broke in Ardly.

"Or mine, and shortened the fingers," added Miss Freighley.

"Or mine, and never painted it," in a savage whisper from Algarcife.

Mr. Nevins silenced the quartet with promptness. "Hang it all!" he exclaimed, crossly; "between most of your suggestions for art's sake, and Mr. Paul's suggestions for decency's sake, there wouldn't be a blamed rag of her left."

"On the contrary," commented Mr. Paul, "an additional rag or two would be decidedly advantageous."

Mariana raised her finger, with an admonis.h.i.+ng shake of the head.

"Out upon you for a Philistine!" she said. "I haven't heard such profanity since I showed my colored mammy a 'Venus de Milo,' and her criticism was, 'Lor', child! nakedness ain't no treat to me!'"

Mr. Nevins laughed uproariously, and filled Mariana's gla.s.s, while Algarcife glared from across the table.

"I should like to paste that motto in every studio in New York,"

returned Mr. Paul. "It was the healthful sentiment of a mind undepraved by civilization."

"What a first-rate censor you would make!" smiled Ardly, good-naturedly--"the fitting exponent of a people who see nastiness in a box of colors and evil in everything."

Mr. Paul bore the charge with gravity. "Yes, I keep my eyes well open,"

he responded, complacently.

Algarcife leaned across the table, and discussed woman's suffrage with Miss Ramsey. Mariana flushed and smiled, and glanced from Nevins to Ardly and back again.

Mr. Sellars, who had been engrossed by his salad, took up the cue.

"Oh, the world isn't to blame if we see it through a fog!" he said.

"Excellent salad."

"Thanks," drawled Mr. Nevins, amicably. "I cut it up, and Ardly made the dressing. The cutting up is the part that tells."

"But why didn't you bring it to me?" asked Mariana. "I should have liked to help you." Then she raised her gla.s.s. "Health to 'Andromeda' and confusion to her enemies!"

There followed a wild clas.h.i.+ng of gla.s.ses and a series of hoa.r.s.e hurrahs from Mr. Nevins. After which Mariana was borne tumultuously to the piano, where she sang a little French song about love and fame.

Then Mr. Sellars sang an Irish ballad, and Nevins volunteered the statement that, after hearing Ardly, anybody who didn't mistake his nose for his mouth would be a relief.

"You don't listen," protested Ardly. "We have an excellent system," he explained. "We sometimes spend a musical evening, and when Nevins sings I look through the portfolio for my pieces, and when I sing he looks for his."

That night when Mariana went up to her room she was in exuberant spirits. In a whirl of energy she pirouetted before the mirror. Then she stopped suddenly, grew white, and swayed forward.

"I can't stand excitement," she said, and before Anthony could reach her she fell a limp heap upon the floor. Algarcife dashed into the adjoining room and returned with a flask of brandy. Then he undressed her, wrapped her in a dressing-gown, and, drawing off her shoes and stockings, chafed her cold feet. Mariana was too exhausted to protest, and allowed herself to be lulled to sleep like a child.

For several weeks after this she was nervous and unstrung. She grew hollow-eyed, the shadows deepened, and her sunniness of temper gave place to an unaccustomed melancholy. She had learned that a new life was quickening within her, and she experienced a blind and pa.s.sionate fear of inevitable agony. She feared herself, she feared suffering, and she feared the fate of the unborn life. One evening she threw herself into Anthony's arms. "It is the inevitableness," she said. "If I knew that it might not happen, I could bear it better. But nothing can prevent it, and I am afraid--afraid."

Algarcife grew white. "I am afraid for you," he answered.

"And the child? We shall be responsible for it. The thought maddens me.

We are so poor, and it seems to me that it is wrong. I feel as if I had committed a sin--as if I were forcing something into the world to fight with poverty and discomforts. It may even hate us for bringing it. I almost hope it will die."

"We will make it a happy child."

"But doesn't it frighten you?"

Algarcife smiled. "Not as much as you do, you bodiless bit of eccentricity."

"All the same, I feel as if it were a sin," said Mariana. "Mill says--"

Anthony laughed aloud and caught her to him. "So you are turning my own weapons upon me," he said. "For the sake of domestic harmony, don't quote Mill to me, Mariana."

CHAPTER XV

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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sociation of ideas, she wondered if a man who had climbed from h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sions. She felt that she had become a pure intelligence, and that the appeal of her flesh no longer r.e.t.a.r.ded her ascent. The elemental values of life were obscured by the shadows of indifference. Love existed only as an intangible and forced illusion, pa.s.sion 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 encompa.s.s her. She imagined she saw as G.o.d 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 alt.i.tude 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 gla.s.s 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 rea.s.serted 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."