Part 24 (1/2)

There was a rap at the door, and she opened it and took the milk-bottle from the dairy-man. After setting a cupful upon the little gas-stove, she raised the window and placed the remainder upon the fire-escape. ”I am afraid,” she remarked, ”that I will have to try one of those innumerable infant foods. One can never be sure that the milk is quite fresh.”

Anthony tied a cravat which was particularly worn, put on a coat which was particularly s.h.i.+ny across the shoulders, and went into the adjoining room to set the table. He boiled the coffee, took in the baker's rolls from a tray on the threshold, and put on a couple of eggs. Then he called Mariana.

She came, sat down at the table, and lifted the coffee-pot. She looked hollow-eyed and haggard, and her hand shook slightly. ”I am so weak,”

she said, fretfully. ”I can't get my strength. I just go dragging about.”

Anthony looked at her in sudden pain. ”If there were a speculating devil around who took stock in souls,” he said, ”I am sure we might offer him an investment. People are fools to think there is any happiness without money.”

”Or any decency,” added Mariana. Then the baby cried, and she took it up and brought it to the table, holding it upon her knee as she ate. Her appet.i.te failed, and she pushed her plate away.

”The egg is so white,” she said, pettishly, ”I can't eat it.” Then her voice choked. ”I--I sometimes wish I were dead,” she added, and went to pour the baby's milk into its bottle.

Mariana's strength did not return. As the months pa.s.sed she grew more listless, her pallor deepened, and the shadows under her eyes darkened to a purplish cast. The incessant round of minor cares clouded her accustomed sunniness of temper, and her buoyant step gave place to a languid tread. It was as if the inexorable hand of poverty had crushed her beneath its weight.

Algarcife, coming in from his more systematic employment, would marvel vaguely at her unresponsiveness. His tenderness would recoil in pained surprise as he felt her indifference to his caress, and her long silences while he sat beside her. ”Mariana,” he would begin, ”won't you talk to me?” and Mariana would rouse herself with a start. ”But what is there to say?” she would ask, and sink back into stillness. It was, perhaps, impossible for him to understand that at such times she was but undergoing the inevitable reaction from long months of physical and mental suffering--that the energy which she had expended in supplying the drains upon her nature had left her incapable of further effort. He did not know that emotion with a woman is so largely regulated by nervous conditions, that complete exhaustion of body and mind is apt to repress, not the fund of affection, but its outward manifestations. In his pa.s.sionate desire to s.h.i.+eld Mariana, he had kept from her knowledge the financial stress into which her prolonged illness had plunged him.

He had watched his growing indebtedness silently, and had reduced his personal expenses to a minimum while he sought to supply her with comforts. But from the immediate needs and anxieties of her own life he had not been able to guard her. The gnawing fears for the child, the nights when she awoke from needed sleep to lean over its crib and soothe it with lullabies, the weary hours in the day when she walked with aching head back and forth, he could not prevent, nor could he restore to her the health which she had lost. That the vein of iron which lay beneath the surface lightness of her nature had developed through responsibility, he saw clearly, but he also saw that she lived her life in apparent unrepining, not because of a rational acceptance of the order of things, but because illness and toil had for the time overthrown her aesthetic intuitions. To recall her as she had been during the first months of their marriage, white, fresh, and exquisite in attire, and then to look at her in a faded wrapper, her heavy hair disordered, her lips compressed, was to know that Mariana as she was to-day was not Mariana in a normal state. That it could not last, he knew. That with the first wave of returning vigor her longing for dramatic effects and the small requirements of existence would reawaken, he admitted unhesitatingly. She would grow vital again, she would demand with pa.s.sionate desire the satisfaction of her senses--she would crave music, color, light, all the sensuous fulness of life. And where would she find it?

One day, as he came in to luncheon, he found her playing with the baby, a flash of brightness upon her face.

He looked at her and smiled.

”It is company for you, isn't it, dearest?”

Mariana's smile pa.s.sed.

”I don't have time to think about that part,” she returned. ”I am always working. When I've got her all nice and fresh, and laid her on the bed, she begins to cry for her bottle. Then, while I am heating the milk, she cries to be walked, and, by the time the bottle is ready, she is so red in the face she can't drink it, and she spills it all over herself. Then I begin and go through it all again.”

”What a little beast she is,” said Algarcife, surveying the baby with parental displeasure. ”What a pity she isn't a j.a.panese! j.a.panese babies never cry.” Then he grew serious. ”I sometimes wonder how you stand it,”

he added. ”Here, give me the little devil!”

Mariana rescued the baby's rattle from its throat and laid it in the crib. It screamed, and she took it up again.

”There is a good deal in having to,” she replied.

Algarcife walked to the window and stood looking down into the street.

His brow was gloomy. Suddenly he faced her. ”Are you sorry that you married me, Mariana?”

Mariana did not impulsively negative the question, as he had half expected. She even appeared to consider it. Then she slowly shook her head.

”I should have been more unhappy if I hadn't,” she answered.

”It would have been a confounded sight better if you had never seen me.”

But Mariana put the child down and fell into his outstretched arms.

”No, no,” she said; ”but I am tired--so tired.”

Anthony picked her up and laid her on the bed. Then he threw a shawl over her. ”I am going to take an hour off and discipline your tyrant,”