Joyce of the North Woods Part 18

"What is it?" she turned a steady glance toward the bed. She did not intend that Joyce should be exacting. Women were apt to be unless the nurse was rigid. "Do you want anything?"

"Oh! Isa is that--my baby?" There was such a thrill in the voice that Isa was at once convinced that Joyce was delirious.

She was going to have her hands full. A mere baby, to Isa, was no cause for that tone, and the glorified look.

"I guess there ain't any one else going to put in a claim for him," she replied with a vague sense of humorously calming the patient.

"Him!" Joyce's tears again overflowed. "Did you say 'him' Isa?"

"There, there! do be still now, Joyce, and take a nap. You won't have any too much time for lazing. You better make the most of it."

"It's a boy. Oh! It seems too, too heavenly. _My_ little boy! Isa, is--is--he beautiful?"

And now no doubts remained in Isa's mind. She must pacify this very trying case.

"'Bout as beautiful as they make 'em," she said slowly, and tried to remember what was given to patients when they became unmanageable.

"Does--does he look--like--" the words came pantingly--"like the picture in the other room?"

Isa was sitting opposite the door leading into the living room, and her eyes fell, as Joyce spoke, upon the Madonna and Child.

Then, in spite of her anxiety and weariness, Isa laughed. The entire train of events since her arrival the day before had appealed to her latent sense of humour.

"Oh! exactly," she answered and rolling the baby in a blanket she strode over to the bed, and placed him hastily beside Joyce.

"There," she said soothingly; "now lay still or you'll hurt the little beauty. I'm going to fix something comforting to drink."

She was gone. In the mystery of the still room and the early morning, Joyce was alone with her little son!

As she felt, so all motherhood, as G.o.d designed it, should feel. Before the acceptance of the wonderful gift, motherhood stood entranced. Fear and awe hold even love in abeyance. Into poor, loving, human hands a soul--an eternal soul--was entrusted. No wonder even mother-love held back before it consecrated itself to the sacred and everlasting responsibility.

Joyce only dumbly felt this. All that she was conscious of was a fear that her joy, when she looked upon the blessed little face, would kill her, and so end what had but begun.

A new and marvellous strength came to her. She raised herself upon her elbow and reverently drew the corner of the blanket from the tiny head.

Suddenly the birds ceased singing. The June morning was enveloped in a black pall. The ominous stillness that precedes an outburst of the elements held breath in check.

Joyce was perfectly conscious. In the hideous blackness she saw her baby's face clear and distinct, and with firm fingers she tore the wrappings from the small body--she must see all, all.

Misshapen and grim in its old, sinister expression of feature, the baby lay exposed. The face was grotesque in its weazened fixity; the little legs were twisted, and the thin body lay crooked among its blankets. The big eyes stared into the horrified ones above them as if pleading for mercy. The sight turned Joyce ill.

"In spite of all," the stare seemed to challenge, "can you accept me?"

In that moment when the bitter cup was pressed to motherhood's lips, Joyce received the holiest sacrament that G.o.d ever bestows. In divine strength she accepted her child. This little, blighted creature would have no one but her to look to--to find life through. All that it was to receive, until it went out of life, must come first through her. Should she fail it?

With fumbling and untrained hands she drew it to her, and pressed it against her breast. With the touch of the small body at her heart, the dawn crept back into the room, and from afar the birds sang.

With all her striving, poor Joyce had not eliminated from the baby's life the inheritance of others' sins. He had come, bearing a heavy load of disease and deformity. All that was left for her to do now, was to lift the cross as she might from this stunted and saddened life, and walk beside him to the farther side.

The poor, little wrinkled mouth was nestling against the mother-breast.

Instinct was alive in the child. Joyce laughed. At first tremblingly, then shrilly. Suddenly she began to sing a lullaby, and the tune was interrupted by laughs and moans.

Higher and higher the fever rose. Isa Tate, beside herself with fright, screamed for help, and for days Jude Lauzoon's house was the meeting place of Life and Death; then Life triumphed, and people breathed relievedly.

"A homely young-un often makes handsome old bones," comforted Isa. Now that Joyce was creeping back from the dangers that had beset her, Isa felt a glow of pride and interest. She was an honourable diploma to Isa's skill as nurse. In the future, Mrs. Tate was to feel a new importance. She was a.s.suming the airs of a woman who has learned the market value of her services. Tate was to reap the effect of this later.

"Oh! It doesn't matter much with boys," Joyce answered, indifferently.

"A girl would have been different."

"That's a sensible way to look at it," Isa agreed. "I often think that a man with good looks has just that much temptation to be a bigger fool than what he otherwise would be. It's one agin 'em whichever way you take it. They don't _need_ looks. They gets what they wants, anyway, and if they are side-tracked by their countenances, it's ten to one they will get distracted in their aims, and make more trouble than usual.

"Now that I hark back, the only men as I can remember that amounted to enough to make you willing to overlook their cussedness, was men as had a handicap in looks.

"There was Pierre Laval's brother Damon. He was born with twelve toes, twelve fingers--two extry thumbs they was--and four front teeth.

"He certainly was the most audacious ugly young-un I ever set eyes on. I wasn't much more than a girl, to be sure, when I saw him first, but I went into yelling hysterics, and took to my bed. Pierre was handsome--and, you know how he ended? Damon, he gritted his teeth--and in his case he could do that early--and made up his mind to make good for his deficiencies--if you can say that 'bout one as had more rather than less than Nature generally bestows. Land! the learning that child was capable of absorbing! Hillcrest School just sunk into him like he was a sponge. When he got all he could over there, he just walked off as natural as could be, without a cent to his name--and they do say, so I've heard, that down the state they set an awful store by his knowledge of stars and moons and such-like. And Mick Falstar, cousin to Pete--"

"Never mind, Isa." Joyce looked wan and nerveless. These tales only accentuated the agony she felt whenever she was forced to concentrate her thoughts upon actualities.

When she was left to herself, she was beginning to regain the power of ignoring facts and living among ideals. She was growing more and more able to see a little spiritual baby at her breast--a beautiful child.

And with that vision growing clearer she felt her own spirit gaining strength for flights into a future where this little son of hers, borne aloft by her determined will and purpose, should hold his own among men.

Surely, she thought, G.o.d would not cripple mind, body and soul. G.o.d would be content with testing her love by the twisted body. The mind and soul would be--glorious!

Day by day, the young mother, creeping back into the warm, summer life, watched for intelligence to awaken in the grim little face; the first flying signal of the overpowering intellect that was to make recompense for all that had been withheld.

The misshapen body was always swathed in disguising wrappings; even the claw-like, groping hands were held under blankets when curious eyes were near. Isa had won Joyce's everlasting grat.i.tude by holding her tongue regarding the child's bodily deformity; and the Hillcrest doctor, who had been summoned when the fever grew, did not consider the circ.u.mstance important enough to weigh on his memory when once the payment for his services was, to his surprise, forthcoming.

But the sad, little old face with its fringe of straight black hair!

That must be public property, and its piteous appeal had no power beyond the mother, to stay the cruel jest and jibe.

"Say, Jude," Peter Falstar had said in offering his maudlin congratulations, "what's that you got up to your place--a baby or a Chinese idol? That comes of having a handsome wife, what has notions beyond what women can digest."

Jude did not take this pleasantry as one might suppose he would. His own primitive aversion to the strange, deformed child made him weakly sensitive. He recoiled from Falstar's gibe with a sneaking shame he dared not defend by a physical outburst.

"He ain't a very handsome chap," he returned foolishly, "don't favour either father or mother--hey?"

Gaston overheard this and other similar witticisms, and his blood rose hot within him.

The cruelty and indelicacy of it all made him hate, where, heretofore, he had but felt contempt.

He realized most keenly that in his lonely life among the pines the few interests and friendships that he had permitted himself were deeper than he had believed.

Jock Filmer, during the closer contact of daily labour, had become to him a rude prototype of a Jonathan. They had found each other out, and behind the screen that divided them from others, they held communion sacred to themselves. They read together in Gaston's shack. They had, at times, skimmed dangerously near the Pasts that both, for reasons of their own, kept shrouded. After one of these close calls of confidence, they would drift apart for a time--afraid of each other--but the growing attraction they felt was strengthening after the three or four years wherein an unconscious foundation had been laid.

Then Gaston, too, realized that he had banked much upon the marriage he had brought about between Jude and Joyce. In saving himself from temptation, he felt he had sacrificed the girl, unless he could bring into her life an element that would satisfy her blind gropings.

To argue that in saving himself he had saved her, was no comfort. He had not been called upon to elect himself arbiter of Joyce's future. No; to put it baldly, in his loneliness he had dabbled in affairs that did not concern him--and he must pay for his idiocy.