Part 2 (2/2)

Bessie had not realized how inglorious their meagreness would be, until Mrs. Grey, at the daughter's table, grew unctuously reminiscent about the mother's.

”Dear me!” Guy tried afterward to comfort the red eyelids and tremulous lips, ”do you want a table so full it takes your appet.i.te at sight?”

”I'm afraid I can't joke about disgrace!” Bessie quivered.

”But, Bibi dear, Mrs. Grey is simply behind the times. The _rationale_ of those enormous meals was not munificence, but that a horde of house-servants had to be fed at a second table.”

Certainly Guy and his good spirits were excellent company. And Bessie came of a race of women used to gay girlhoods and to settling down thereafter, as a matter of course, into the best of house-mothers.

But there was a difference between the domestic arts she had been taught as necessary to the future lady of a large household and the domestic industries she had to practise. Supervising and doing were not the same.

For her mother, sewing and cooking had been accomplishments; for her they were work. She had to do things a lady didn't do.

However, she was as fastidious about what she did for herself as about what was done for her. She was quick and efficient. People said Bessie Osbourne had the dearest home in town, was the best housekeeper, the most nicely dressed on nothing. You might know Bessie Hall would have the best of everything!

And when Bessie began to wonder if that was true, she had entered the last circle of disappointment.

The fact was that, after the first novelty, things seemed pretty much the same as before. Bessie Osbourne was not so different from Bessie Hall. She might have appreciated that as significant; but doubtless she had never heard the edifying jingle of the unfortunate youth who ”wandered over all the earth” without ever finding ”the land where he would like to stay,” and all because he was injudicious enough to take ”his disposition with him everywhere he went.” It was as if she had been going in a circle from right to left, and, after a blare of drums and trumpets and a stirring ”About--face!” she had found herself going in the same circle from left to right. It all came to the same thing, and that was nothing. Guy was apparently working hard; but, after all, in real life it seemed one did not plant the adepts' magic seed that sprouted, grew, bloomed, while you looked on for a moment. For herself, baking and st.i.tching took all her time, without taking nearly all her interest, or seeming to matter much when all was said and done. If she neglected things, they went undone, or some one else did them; in any case Guy never complained. If she did what came up, each day was filled with meeting each day's demands. All their lives went into the means and preparation for living. Other people--Or was it really any different with them? Nine-tenths of the people nine-tenths of the time seemed to accomplish only a chance to exist. She had heard women complain that such was the woman's lot in order that men might progress. But it struck her very few men worked beyond the provision of present necessities, either. Was it all a myth, then--happiness, experience, romance? Was this all there was to life and love? What was the sense, the end? Her dissatisfaction reproached the Cosmos, grew to that _Weltschmerz_ which is merely low spirits and reduced vitality, not ”an infirmity of growth.”

She constantly expected perfection, and all that fell below it was its opposite extreme, and worthless. She began to suspect herself of being an exceptional and lofty nature deprived of her dues.

Guy was a little disappointed at her prudent objection to children until their success was established. Prudence was mere waste of time to his courage and a.s.surance. And he believed, though without going into the psychology of the situation, that Bessie would be happier with a child or two.

”Oh, how can we do any more?” she answered, in her pretty, spoiled way.

”We're trying to cut a two-yard garment out of a one-yard piece now.” At least, she was; and so Guy was.

Well, it wasn't a great matter yet. It is not in the early years of marriage that that lack is most felt. And Bessie was not very strong; she never seemed really well any more. She developed a succession of small ailments, la.s.situdes, nerves. She dragged on the hand of life, and complained. The local physician drugged her with a commendable spirit of optimism and scientific experiment. But the drawl of the light voice with its rising inflection became distinctly a whine.

She got a way of surprising Guy and upsetting his calculations with unannounced extravagances. ”What's the good of all this drudgery? We're making no headway, getting nowhere; we might as well have what good we can as we go along.”

There was a negro woman in the kitchen now, and in the sitting-room one of the new sewing-machines. And Guy, who, so far, had been only excavating for the cellar of his future business house, was beginning to feel that good foundation walls were about to start.

But, even when peevish, Bessie had a way of turning up her eyes at him that reduced him to helplessness and adoration. And she was delicate! ”I know,”

he sympathized with her loyally, ”it's like trying to work and be jolly with a jumping tooth; or rather, in your case, with a constant buzzing in your head.”

The jumping tooth was his own simile. The headaches that had begun while he was soldiering were increasing. He had intermittent periods of numbness in the lower half of his body. It was annoying to a busy man. He could offer no explanation, nor could the doctors. ”Overwork,” they suggested, and advised the cure that is of no school--”rest.” That was ”impossible.”

Besides, it was all nonsense. He put it aside, went on, kept it from Bessie.

The end came, as it always does, even after the longest expectation, with a rush. He was suffering with one of his acute headaches one night, when Bessie fell asleep beside him. She woke suddenly, with no judgment of time, with a start of terror, a sense of oppression, or--death?

”Guy!” she screamed.

The strangeness of his answering voice only repeated the stab of fear. She was on her feet, had made a light....

He was not suffering any more. He was perfectly conscious and rational. But from the waist down he could not move nor feel.

The doctors came and talked a great deal and said little; they reminded them that not much was known of this sort of thing; they would be glad to do what they could....

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