Life and Gabriella Part 18

George was in a bad humour; he had been in a bad humour for weeks; and for this reason Gabriella had put off from day to day telling him that she expected a child in the autumn. All her efforts to soothe had merely exasperated him; and there were days when her presence worked him into a fit of nervous irritability. After four months of marriage prolonged boredom had replaced the pa.s.sionate tenderness of their honeymoon. Why this should be so she was too well-balanced emotionally to understand.

She saw only the outward evidences of change, of gradual disillusionment; and though at first she wept a little while she wondered, she ended by drying her tears and attributing his casual indifference and his explosive violence alike to some obscure disturbing condition of health. Every evening, except when there were guests, he spent at his club; he came to bed late, and his waking hour was filled with complaint about the number and the size of his bills. He treated these bills as if they had been gratuitous insults, as if they had leaped, without reason for being, out of a malign world to a.s.sail him.

As yet Gabriella had bought nothing; and she dreaded the time when her clothes would wear out beyond the hope of repairing, and she should be obliged to add another bill to the growing pile under the silver paper weight on the little white and gold desk.

But in the last few weeks even this anxiety had faded from her mind, for the miracle of life which stirred in her body had diffused its golden halo around every trivial incident of her existence. After days of physical wretchedness, which she had hidden from George, she sat one evening, utterly at peace, in front of the fire in the room which had been Patty's before her marriage. It was past midnight, and she was waiting for George to come home because she felt that she could not sleep until she had told him. In the morning he had been unusually gentle, and as he left the house, she had said to herself a little sternly that he must know about the child before the day was over. A secret consultation with her mother-in-law had strengthened her resolution. "Don't keep it from him another day, Gabriella," Mrs. Fowler had urged. "It will make such a difference. I shall never forget Archibald's joy when I told him George was coming. Men are like that about children, you know."

"Yes, I'll tell him to-night," Gabriella had answered; and sitting now in the rocking-chair by the fire, she began to wonder if George would be exactly like other men about children.

The house was very still, but even in its stillness it exhaled the nervous apprehension which she felt to be its living character--as if George's parents, sleeping two doors away, had dropped their guard for the night, and allowed their anxious thoughts the freedom of the halls until daybreak. And these thoughts, which had become like invisible presences to the girl, wandered up and down the dim staircase, where the lowered lights awaited George's return, invaded the drawing-room, filled with stuffy red velvet chairs, so like crouching human beings in the darkness, and even thronged about her threshold, ready to spring inside at the instant when George should open the door. While her fire burned brightly on the andirons, and rosy shadows danced on the white rug beside her bed, on the lace coverlet turned back for the night, on the deep pillows with their azure lining showing through the delicate linen of the slips, on her simple nightdress, in which the b.u.t.tonholes were so beautifully worked by her mother,--while she looked at these things it was easy for her to shut out the apprehensions of yesterday. But these apprehensions would come with George and they would not go until George left her again. The house with its heavy late-Victorian furniture, its velvet carpets which m.u.f.fled footsteps, its thick curtains which hid doorways, its red walls, its bevelled mirrors, its substantial and costly ornaments, its solid paintings in solid frames--the house and all that it contained diffused for Gabriella an inescapable atmosphere, and this atmosphere was like the one in which she had waited expectantly in her childhood for the roof to be sold over her head. Now, as then, she waited for something to happen, and this something was a fact of dread, a shape of terror, which must be ignored as long as its impending presence was not directly before one's eyes. But with the look she was familiar, for she had seen it in her mother's face as far back as she could remember. It was a.s.sociated in her mind with the need of money, with scant food, with scant fires, with a brooding and sinister hush in the house. With the knowledge of these things in her mind how could she hope that George would be glad of the child that was coming to them in the autumn?

And yet to Mrs. Fowler the news had appeared to bring no additional anxiety. She had seemed pleased rather than otherwise, mildly interested, animatedly sympathetic.

"I am afraid it will be very expensive," Gabriella had reminded her a little timidly, feeling frankly apologetic when she thought of all the trouble she must bring to the hara.s.sed and over-burdened little woman.

But into Mrs. Fowler's face there had come the look with which she was accustomed to receive the suggestion that her dinner parties were an extravagance. That economy which she practised so rigidly, which was so elastic to cover little pleasures and the minor comforts of life, broke like a cobweb when she tried to stretch it over larger needs and desires. The severity of her self-denial was directed entirely against the trivial and the unessential. With regard to the indispensable materials for happiness, she seemed to feel that she possessed an unquestionable right to enjoy them at any cost; and she had rea.s.sured Gabriella with an optimism which appeared perfectly genuine. After talking to her the girl had felt that she might allow herself to be happy if only George would change back into his old way.

Four months ago, at the beginning of her marriage, she had told herself that she needed only the daily intimacy of life to make her understand him. Now, after living with him, she felt that she was growing to understand him less every hour--that the relation which ought to have brought them spiritually closer, had ended by thrusting them to an incalculable distance from each other. Of the nervous reactions which he had suffered she knew nothing. All she saw clearly was that the widening breach between them would soon become impa.s.sable unless it could be filled by their new love for the child. The power to hold him must slip from her hands to the child's, and she was more than ready, she was even eager, to relinquish it. In the last few months her feeling for George had altered, and, though she was hardly conscious of the change in herself, her love for him had become less pa.s.sionate and more maternal.

The tenderness was there, but the yearning, the delight in his mere physical presence was gone. Like every other emotion that she had felt in the past, her love for her husband had become absorbed in the pa.s.sion, the longing, the delight with which she enfolded the thought of her child.

"I wonder if mother felt like this about me," she would say to herself, and the wonder was like a cord drawing her back to her mother and to her own babyhood. Then George would become strangely vague, strangely remote in her thoughts; and her mother would seem nearer to her than everything except the child under her heart.

But since her talk with Mrs. Fowler, who had shown her photographs of George as a baby, some in long clothes, some in his first short frock, with a woolly lamb in his hands, some in a velvet suit, with his l.u.s.trous curls falling over a lace collar, Gabriella had felt that she possessed a new understanding of her husband and of the imperative needs of his nature. The child quality in him, the eternal boy that he betrayed sometimes by accident, appeared to her now to be the salient attribute of his character. After all, because of this quality, which was at once his charm and his weakness, she could not judge him as harshly as she might judge another man, she could not demand of him the gravity and the restraint of his father, who had never been young.

"I ought not to have kept it from him. His mother is right. She understands him better than I do," she thought, as she looked at the clock. "If I had told him sooner he might be with me now."

Through the m.u.f.fled stillness of the house the sound of the opening front door stole up to her, and she heard George come in and stop for a minute to take off his hat and coat in the lower hail. Then she heard his footsteps move to the staircase; and while she listened she had a curious intuitive sense that it was not George at all, but a stranger who was coming to her, and that this stranger walked like a very old man. She heard him reach the bend in the stairs, and without stopping to put out the light, pa.s.s on to her door, which was the first on the landing. As he reached the top of the stairs, he stumbled once; then she heard his hand on the k.n.o.b and a fumbling sound as if the k.n.o.b would not turn. The door seemed to take an eternity to open, and while she sprang up with the clutch of terror at her heart, she felt again the sharp, agonizing premonition that a stranger was approaching her.

"George!" she called in a strangled voice, and waited, standing, for him to enter.

CHAPTER VII

MOTHERHOOD

At noon the next day Mrs. Fowler came into Gabriella's room and found her sewing beside the window which looked on a gray expanse of sky and street, where a few snowflakes were falling.

"Did you tell him, dear?" she asked, arranging a handful of red roses in a little alabaster vase on the desk.

No, Gabriella had not told him. She felt now that she should never be able to tell him, but all she said was:

"I didn't get a chance. How lovely those roses are."

Mrs. Fowler set the vase where the gray light fell on it, and then turning with empty hands from the desk, asked gently:

"Aren't you making a mistake, dear?" Her movements were like those of a character in a play who is made to fill in an awkward pause with some mechanical action.

"I couldn't tell him last night," replied Gabriella; "he was sick all night."

She was very pale, even her lips had lost their rich colour, and her eyes had a drawn and heavy look as if she had not slept. Without looking at her mother-in-law, she went on with her sewing, working b.u.t.tonholes of exquisite fineness in a small white garment. In her lap there was a little wicker basket filled with spools of thread and odd bits of lace and cambric; and every now and then she stopped her work and gazed thoughtfully down on it as if she were trying to decide how she might use the jumble of sc.r.a.ps that it contained.

"Gabriella," said Mrs. Fowler suddenly, after she had watched her a moment, "did anything happen last night?"

"Happen? No, what could have happened?"

"At what time did George come in?"

"About one o'clock. I sat up for him."

"Was--was anything the matter with him? Was he in any way different?"

"He was sick. He was sick all night." A look of disgust crossed her face while she stopped to wipe away a drop of blood from her finger. "I don't remember p.r.i.c.king my finger since I was a child," she remarked.

"You are keeping something from me," said Mrs. Fowler; and sitting down in the small chair by the desk, she leaned her elbow, in her full sleeve of violet cashmere, on the edge of the blotting-pad. She was wearing a morning gown made, as all her house gowns were made, after the princess style, and Gabriella could see the tight expanse of her bosom rising and falling under a garniture of purple and silver pa.s.s.e.m.e.nterie. Her hair, fresh from the crimping pins, rose in stiff ridges from her forehead, and her bright red lips were so badly chapped from cold that they cracked a little when she smiled. She looked as hard as granite though in reality her heart was breaking with pity.

"I want to help you," she said, "and I can't if you keep things back."

"I told you George was sick. I was up all night with him." Again a look of disgust, which she could not control, flickered and died in her face.

"But you oughtn't to have let him keep you awake. You need all the sleep you can get. When he comes in late he must sleep in the spare room across the hall."

"His things are all in here and he would come in to get them; that would wake me."

For a moment Mrs. Fowler hesitated while the struggling breath grew more irregular under the pa.s.s.e.m.e.nterie on her bosom. The ripe colour faded from her cheeks and her lips looked blue in the harsh light from the window.

"I think I'd better speak to George," she said. "He is spoiled and he always thinks first of his own comfort. I suppose it's the way we brought him up--but when he understands, he will be more considerate."

For the first time Gabriella laid down her sewing and, leaning forward in her chair, fixed her eyes, with their look of deep stillness, of wistful expectancy, on the face of her mother-in-law.

"Would you mind telling me if George was ever--ever wild about women?"

she asked, and though her voice was very low and quiet, her words seemed to echo loudly through the hushed suspense in her brain. It was as if every piece of furniture, every vacant wall, every picture, and every pane of gla.s.s, repeated the sound.

The pleasant smile on Mrs. Fowler's lips became suddenly painful. As if she were suffering a physical hurt, she put her handkerchief to her mouth while she answered:

"He was once--but that was before he fell in love with you. We hoped that you would be able to steady him--that marriage would make him settle down."

"Did he drink then?"

"A little--not enough to make him show it. I never saw him really show it but once, and then he was dreadfully sick. Was--was he like that last night?"

For a long minute, while she looked out of the window at the falling snowflakes, Gabriella did not reply. Then she spoke in a voice that was sternly accusing.

"You ought to have told me. I ought to have known." Her own wild pa.s.sion for George was forgotten. She felt only a sense of outrage, of wounded and stunned resentment, They had treated her as if she were a child or a fool. That she had been a fool she was not prepared to admit at the instant--and yet it was less than a year ago, that June night when she had watched George over the clove pinks while her heart melted with happiness. She had had her way, and she was already regretting her madness. "Is this what love comes to?" she asked herself bitterly as she watched the white flakes whirling out of the gray sky. "Is this what it all comes to in the end, or am I different from other women?"

Moistening her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, Mrs. Fowler smiled bravely, though there were tears in her eyes. "Archibald wanted to, but I wouldn't let him," she replied; "I hoped that you would make everything different. He was so much in love with you. I thought you could do anything with him."

Though her reasoning failed to convince Gabriella, it was sufficiently forcible to justify her in her own judgment, and with an easier conscience, she settled comfortably behind the impregnable defences of the maternal instinct. After all, she had only done what she believed to be best for her boy. She had not been selfish, she had not even been thoughtless, she had been merely a mother.