Part 26 (2/2)

De birds an' de b.u.t.terflies a-peckin' out its eyes, An' de po' little thing cries: 'Mammy.'”

As Algarcife looked down upon the small and motionless body, he felt a sudden tightening of his heart. The infantile hands, with their waxen look of helplessness, caused him to draw his breath as he turned away, and to wonder how Mariana could sit there hour after hour, crooning the negro song and waving to and fro the palm-leaf fan.

And yet her figure in its pallid outline against the dim light was photographed upon his brain, and it was Mariana at that moment that he loved with the love more abundant, and that in the after-years he found it hardest to forget.

He saw her with the reddish glow from the night-lamp upon her profile, her drooping body in the shadow, the fixed look of pain upon her face softened by the look which fell upon the sick child. He saw the child lying mute and motionless, the wide eyes staring, the small hands folded, the soft rings of flaxen hair wet and dark with perspiration, and the moisture lying upon the fragile little chest which the gown left bare; and he saw it all shadowed and lightened by the wavings of Mariana's fan.

Beyond this he saw the homely and disordered room, the articles dropped hastily as if in the start of sudden anxiety, the half-packed trunk with the piles of clothes upon the floor beside it, the tiny socks with the impress of the feet just learning to stand, the battered India-rubber doll with the crocheted frock of bright-hued worsteds, and at Mariana's hand the medicines which the doctor had left.

All these things were one with Mariana and himself. They were the heritage of their marriage, the memories which must always be inviolate--memories that could be shared by none other, could be undone by no stretch of time. In that atmosphere of common pain, which is more powerful both to sever and to unite than the less trenchant atmosphere of joy, he felt his heart leap into an invisible communion with the heart of Mariana. At that moment he was conscious of an additional sense-perception in the acuteness of his sympathy. He returned to his desk and took up his pen. The articles must be finished, and yet between himself and the unwritten page rose the vision of the still room, the pallid woman, and the sick child. The wavings of Mariana's fan seemed to obscure the light, and in his nervous tension he convinced himself that he heard the difficult breathing of a dying child--his child and Mariana's.

He swallowed an added dose of caffeine and looked at the page before him. The last written words stared him in the face and seemed so alien to his present train of thought as to have emanated from another person.

He wondered what that other person's completion of the sentence would have been.

”Optimism is the first duty of the altruist.” What in thunder had that to do with the effects of the bicycle? And what beastly rot it was. One might as well state that to be comfortable is the first duty of the d.a.m.ned.

”Optimism is the first duty of the altruist.” He wrote on with the feeling that he was existing as an automaton, that while his hand was executing the result of some reflex action, his thinking ent.i.ty was in the still room behind the closed door.

But with the absence of personality his senses were rendered doubly acute, and he seemed to see the rhythm of the atmospheric waves about him, while his ears were responsive to every sound in the night without--hearing them, not in a confused discord, but in distinct differentiation of note and key. Once his gaze encountered the grinning skull above the mantel, and, to his giddy senses, it seemed to wink with its hollow sockets. He found himself idly wondering if the skull had caught the trick of winking from its former accompaniment of flesh, and was forced to pull his thoughts together with a jerk. Then there came one of those sudden attacks of vertigo to which he had become subject, and he laid aside his pen and closed his eyes. ”Too much caffeine,” he muttered. But when it pa.s.sed he went on again.

As the day broke he finished his articles, placed them in envelopes, stamped and addressed them, and rose to his feet. He blew out the lamp, and the faint odor of heated oil caused him a sensation of nausea.

Crossing to the window, he raised the shade and stood inhaling the insipidity of atmosphere which is the city imitation of the freshness of a country morning. Without, a sombre, neutral-toned light flooded the almost deserted streets. In the highest heaven a star was still visible, and the vaguest herald of dawn flaunted itself beyond the chimney-pots.

As he lifted the shade he noticed that his hand trembled and that his head was unusually light. That ma.s.sive sense of loneliness which the transition hour from darkness to day begets in the on-looker oppressed him with the force of an estrangement of hope. Such an impression had been produced upon him a hundred times by the breaking of dawn after a sleepless night.

He turned away and opened the door softly.

The night-lamp was still burning, but the beginning of the morrow washed with a faint grayness the atmosphere. The objects he had dwelt upon the night before were magnified in size, and in an instant the unpacked trunks, the rubber doll, and the bottles of medicine obtruded themselves upon his vision.

Mariana was still sitting as he had left her, waving to and fro the palm-leaf fan. He wondered vaguely if she had sat thus since midnight.

Then he laid his hand upon her shoulder.

”Mariana, you must lie down.” And as he stooped nearer he saw that the child was dead.

CHAPTER XVIII

For the next six weeks Anthony was forced to listen to the distracted self-accusations of Mariana. When the little white coffin had been carried to Greenwood and laid in the over-grown plot beside the graves of Algarcife's parents, to be shadowed by the storied urns that redounded to the honor of a less impoverished generation, Mariana returned, and, throwing herself upon the floor, refused consolation.

”I want nothing,” she said--”nothing, nothing. What could comfort me?”

At Anthony's protestations of love and grief she lifted dull and scornful eyes, wherein the triumph of motherhood showed supreme over all other emotions.

”How can you know?” she asked, between tearless sobs. ”You did not nurse her, and hold her in your arms night and day; you did not bathe her while she laughed at the bubbles; you did not put on her little dresses and socks. Oh, my baby! my baby! I want my baby!”

Then she would rise and pace up and down in a sudden frenzy of despair, clinching her hands at her own impotence, tearing her wounds asunder with remorseless recollections. It was as if she found satisfaction in thus inflicting upon herself the added agony of recalling the minor details of her loss--in voicing the keenest pa.s.sion of her grief.

Algarcife, writing in the adjoining room and wrung by a tortured brain, would listen to her unsteady tread as she walked ceaselessly back and forth, until the sound would madden him with its pauseless monotony--and then would come that half-choked cry for reckoning with fate, ”Oh, my baby!”

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