Phases of an Inferior Planet Part 23

The baby lay upon its back, with half-closed, indistinguishable eyes, s...o...b..ring 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 guardians.h.i.+p 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 gla.s.s. 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 gla.s.s." 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 impa.s.sioned 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 hara.s.sed look crept into his eyes, and he frowned impatiently. Mariana's illness had entirely exhausted the small fund he had acc.u.mulated, 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 a.s.sault 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 a.s.sume. 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, rea.s.serted 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."

CHAPTER XVI

"I am getting old," said Mariana. She was sitting before the mirror, and as she spoke she rose and leaned forward in closer inspection. "This line," she added, dolefully, rubbing her forehead, "is caused by the laundress, this by the departure of the nurse, and this by the curdling of the baby's milk."

Anthony crossed over and stood behind her. "I would give my right arm to smooth them away," he said.

Mariana fastened the collar of her breakfast sacque and looked back at him from the gla.s.s. She did not reply. Not that she would not have liked to say something affectionate, but that she felt the effort to be pleasant to be physically beyond her. Her life of the last few weeks had taught her that demonstrative expressions are an unnecessary waste of energy.