Phases of an Inferior Planet Part 24

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 shiny 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 shield 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,"

he said. "Go to sleep." He lifted the baby and went towards the door.

"You aren't such a black-hearted chap, after all, are you, Isolde?"

The baby cuddled against his shoulder, and he pa.s.sed into the next room, closing the door after him.

Mariana lay upon the bed and thought. Her eyes were wide open, and she stared fixedly at the ceiling, watching the fluctuations of light that chased across its plastered surface. It was a relief to be absolutely alone, to be freed from the restraint which the presence of another thinking ent.i.ty necessitated. She drew the shawl closer about her and pressed her cheek upon the pillow. The contact of the cotton was exciting to her fevered flesh. In the dim train of a.s.sociation it brought back to her an illness in her childhood, and she recalled her first sensations of headache and fatigue. They had come upon her as she was playing in an open meadow, and, before toiling to the house, she had stopped beside the reedy brook and knelt to drink, while the cool, fresh notes of the bobolinks sounded about her. She remembered it all now as she lay amid the noise of the city. The roar of the elevated road was silenced, and she heard the bobolinks again. She saw the emerald sweep of the wheat fields, undulating in golden lights and olive shadows. She saw the stagnant ice pond, with the overhanging branches of willows and the whir of the parti-colored insects. She smelt the pungent sweetness of the wild rose and the subtle odor of the trumpet-flower, glowing amid its luxuriant foliage like a heart of fire.

Then she raised her head and surveyed the room in which she lay. She saw the garish daylight streaming in a flood of dust and sunshine through the narrow window. She saw the lack of grace that surrounded her, emphasized by a crowd of trivial details. She saw the tall, painted wardrobe with its bulging doors and the bandboxes upon the top, the cheap bureau with its gaping drawers, and the a.s.sortment of shoes half-hidden under it. She saw her work-basket, overflowing with stockings to be darned and small slips to be mended.

With a stifled sob she turned from it all, pressing her face against the pillow. The heritage of yearning for vivid beauty and sharp, sweet odors surged upon her. "I can't be poor!" she cried, pa.s.sionately. "I can't be poor!"

But as the spring came, Mariana regained something of her old vigor, and it was in April of that year that Mr. Nevins painted the portrait which was exhibited some six months later, and with which began his rising fortunes. It represented her in the blue wrapper, holding the sleeping Isolde upon her knee, that soft and pensive stillness in her eyes.

Within a couple of months after its appearance, Mr. Nevins had received orders for similar portraits from a dozen mothers, and had taken his position in the art world as the popular baby specialist.

Mariana had enjoyed the portrait and the sittings. They diverted her thoughts from the groove of the ordinary and gratified to a small extent her social instinct. When it was finished, and Mr. Nevins no longer came, she relapsed into listlessness. It was the friction of the outside world she needed. Hers was not the nature to develop through stagnation.

In barren soil she wilted and grew colorless, while at the touch of sunshine she expanded and put forth her old radiance.

Anthony, watching her, would become oppressed at times with the thought that this thin and fragile woman, dragging through her irksome round of duties, anaemic and hollow-eyed, might by the magic of wealth and ease mature into a pa.s.sionate, lithe, and gracious creature, of which she was now the wraith--and yet which even now she suggested. For the furnace through which she had pa.s.sed, in robbing her of freshness and bloom, had been unable to destroy her vague and ineffable charm.

"She is a woman ruined," he said, bitterly, and he said it with a dull aching in his heart. To him Mariana, emaciated and unresponsive, was still the Mariana to be possessed and held with burning desire. The small clashes of temper, the long silences, the apparent indifference, had been powerless to weaken the force of his love. It was still indomitable.

One night, upon going to his room, he found her in her night-gown kneeling on the hearth-rug. From her breathing he knew that she was asleep, and it was a moment before he aroused her. In the dim light she resembled a marble figure of prayer, her cheek resting upon her hand, the lashes fallen over the violet circles beneath her eyes.

Beside the bed, the baby lay in its little crib, the restless fists lying upon its breast, a fine moisture shining like dew upon the infantile face. He stood looking at it, a thrill shooting into his heart. For the first time he realized with acuteness a positive feeling for the child--realized that it was his as well as Mariana's, that it had a claim upon him other than the claim of Mariana, that he was not only the husband of a woman, but the father of a child.

Bending over the crib, he touched with one finger the crumpled rose-leaf hands, with the soft indentation around the wrist as if left by a tightly drawn cord.

He smiled slightly. Then he crossed over and kissed Mariana. She opened her eyes, yawned, stretched her arms above her head, and rose.

"I have really been asleep," she said.

"You were so tired," answered Algarcife, and his voice was limpid with tenderness. "It kills me that you should work so, Mariana."

Mariana rested against him for an instant. Then she went to the crib, and, raising the baby's head, smoothed its pillow. As she laid it down again she pressed the cover carefully over its arms; then, throwing herself into bed, she fell asleep with a sigh.

CHAPTER XVII

With the closing session, Algarcife lost his position at the Bodley College. He had published, for a mere pittance, a series of articles upon the origin of s.e.x, and, as a result, he was requested to deliver his resignation to the princ.i.p.al of the inst.i.tution. A man holding such views, it was argued, was an unsuitable instructor for sixty-one young women. So the instructorship was transferred to a divinity student who was casually looking into science, and Algarcife was dismissed.

Upon receiving his dismissal, he descended into the street and walked slowly homeward. His first sensation was one of anger--blind anger against the blindness of the universe. It seemed incredible that a premium should be set upon commonplaceness, that modern civilization should demand of a man that he shape his mind by an artificial process after the minds of semi-savage ancestors. Was thought to be forever prostrate beneath the feet of superst.i.tion? Was all boldness of inquiry, all mental advancement along other than given lines, to be branded in the nineteenth century by the _odium theologic.u.m_ as it had been branded in the time of Bruno?

Then there followed a wave of personal bitterness which in its turn was succeeded by a flood-tide of indifference.

Going home, he found Mariana in nervous despair. The baby, who had been unwell for several days, had been suddenly threatened with convulsions.

Upon the doctor's arrival, he had predicted a dangerous teething, and had insisted upon Isolde leaving town before the beginning of hot weather.