CHAPTER XXI
My thwarted woman-thoughts have inward turned,
And that vain milk like acid in me eats.
Have I not in my thought trained little feet
To venture, and taught little lips to move
Until they shaped the wonder of a word?
I am long practised. O those children, mine!
Mine, doubly mine: and yet I cannot touch them,
I cannot see them, hear them—Does great God
Expect I shall clasp air and kiss the wind
For ever? And the budding cometh on,
The burgeoning, the cruel flowering:
At night the quickening splash of rain, at dawn
That muffled call of birds how like to babes;
And I amid these sights and sounds must starve—
I, with so much to give, perish of thrift!
Omitted by his casual dew!
—Stephen Phillips.
The next morning Anna was sent for to go to Mrs. Nichols, whom she had hardly seen since her return from Europe.
She found her sitting in her nursery with her two little children playing about her feet. She was near her third confinement, and in the shadow of her imminent peril and the heavy repose laid upon body and spirit by her condition there was an indescribable dignity about her which Anna had never felt until now.
Before she left, Mally, with wistful eyes, looked up to her, and said, timidly:—
“Anna, you love little children. No one that I ever saw takes mine in her arms as you do—not even I who am their mother.”
“Oh, Mally!” Anna cried, sharp tears piercing their way. “If that is true, it must be because my heart never stops aching for a child of my own. I know now that we shall never have children, and I try to be reconciled; but you can never know, dear, how I envy you.”
“Do not envy me,” Mally answered, her lips trembling. “You do not know what it means to sit here to-day and see the shining of the sun on the children’s hair, and touch their little heads with my hand, and smell those roses you brought, and yet think that to-morrow at this time I may be gone beyond breath, sight, the sun, the children—”
“Dear, don’t, don’t,” Anna pleaded; “you must not think so. You have been helped through safely before; you will be again. People always have these times of dread.”
Mally shook her head, but answered quietly:—
“I have never felt before like this, but only God knows. But this is why I sent for you: If my little baby lives, and is a perfect child, and I am taken away, would you, Anna, do you think you could—take my baby for your own, for always?”
“Oh, if I could!” and all Anna’s heart went out in the cry, and Mally saw the love which shone in her eyes and wondered at her strange beauty.
“I am sure you will come through safely as you have before,” she said, “but this I promise you, Mally,” taking her friend’s hand and holding it fast, “if you should be taken from your children, and they will let me,—I mean if my husband and his mother should consent, for I am not quite free, you see,—I will take your little baby and it shall be my very own, and I will be its mother while we both live, God helping me.”
A look of deep joy and relief in Mally’s poor pale face was full response, and the two parted with a sense of a deeper union of spirit than they had ever known before.
Early on the following morning, after a wakeful and anxious night, Anna hastened to the Nicholses’ home.
Mally’s husband met her with a stricken face, for a swift and sudden blow had fallen; her trial had come and his wife had died, hardly an hour before. There had been no time to send for Anna, although Mally had spoken her name almost at the last.
They stood together in the poor, gay little parlour which Mally had adorned with high hopes of the abundant life into which she fancied herself entering,—the young husband with his grief-wrung, ashy face, Anna with her heart melted in sorrow and compassion. While neither could speak for their tears, the faint wail of a little child smote upon the silence from a room within.
“The baby?” Anna asked under her breath.
A deeper darkness seemed to settle upon Nichols’s face.
“Yes, a boy. A fine little fellow, they say; but I feel as if I could not look at him. I have not seen him.”
Anna turned and left the room, and in another moment, in the dark inner room where she had sat with Mally in the sunshine the day before, she took Mally’s baby into her arms, and bent her head above it with a great sense of motherhood breaking over her spirit like a wave from an infinite sea.
She stood and held the tiny creature for many moments, alone and in silence, while joy and sorrow, life and death, passed by her and revealed themselves. Then she laid the baby down and went up to the room where Mally lay, white and still, with something of the beauty of her girlhood in her face, and the great added majesty of motherhood and death. On her knees Anna bent over the unanswering hand which yesterday she had seen laid warmly on the fair curls of her little children, and, in the hush and awe of the place, spoke again her solemn promise of yesterday.
After that she came down to the children and their father, and took quietly into her own hands the many cares which the day had brought.
It was late in the evening when Anna, exhausted and unnerved, returned home. She found Keith and his mother waiting for her in the library,—Keith hastening to welcome her with tender sympathy, Madam Burgess a shade colder than usual beneath a surface of suitable phrases of solicitude and condolence. She had been absolutely indifferent to Mrs. Nichols in life, and did not find her deeply interesting even in death. Furthermore, she always resented Anna’s spending herself upon that family, and in the present affliction she felt that flowers and a ten-minute call would have answered every demand.
If Anna had been steadier and less under the influence of the piteous desolation of the home she had left, less absorbed in her own ardent purpose, she would have realized that this was not the time or place in which to make that purpose known. If she had waited, if she had talked with her husband alone, the future of all their lives might have taken a different shape. But with the one controlling thought in her mind, forgetting how impossible it was for these two, not highly gifted with imaginative sympathy, to enter into her own deep emotion, she spoke at once of Mally’s request that in the event of her death she should take her baby; of her own conditional promise, and of her deep desire to fulfil it.
There was a little silence, chill and bleak, and then Keith said, in a half-soothing tone as if she had been an excited child, hurrying in with a manifestly impossible petition:—
“It was a very sweet and generous wish on your part, Anna; so like you, dear.”
Anna looked at him in silence, her lips parted.
Madam Burgess gave a dry cough, and partook of a troche from a small silver box which she carried in a lace-trimmed bag.
“Yes, as Keith says, my dear, it was a kind impulse on your part, but it certainly was a very singular action on that of your friend. She was probably too ill, poor thing, at the time to realize just what she was asking. I have no doubt you were quite excusable for giving her some sort of a conditional promise, considering all the circumstances. But you need have no sense of responsibility in the matter; infants left like that never live. It will only be a question of a few weeks’ care for any one.”
Anna turned her eyes from her mother-in-law back to her husband in mute amazement and appeal. They could not mean to deny her this sacred right! It was impossible. And yet a sudden sense of the incongruity of poor Mally’s baby in that house smote sharply upon her for the first time.
“If it had been God’s will that we should have had children of our own, Anna,” said Keith, in answer to her look, “we should have learned to fit ourselves to the many cares and responsibilities involved, I do not doubt, as others do; but it is very different to go out of our way to assume such cares, not ours in any legitimate sense. I think the question is more serious than you realize in the very natural and proper emotion which you are passing through in the death of your friend. We certainly could not ask mother to take this strange child, and all that would be involved in such a relation, into her house; and we are, I am sure, as little prepared to leave mother and break up our natural order of life,” and Keith smiled with kind conviction into Anna’s face. She rose slowly and stood with eyes fixed before her, and a strange light was in them, which her husband had never seen before.
“That is all perfectly true, Keith,” said Madam Burgess, as if to finish up the case against poor Anna; “and even if all this were not so, there would remain one insuperable obstacle to adopting this infant—an absolutely insuperable obstacle.”
“What is it?” asked Anna, very low.
“Blood, my dear. I believe in blood, and never, with his mother’s consent or approval, could my son give his name, and all that that means, to a child of alien stock. Never.” And Madam Burgess closed her lips firmly and folded her hands peacefully upon her grey silk gown with the consciousness of occupying a perfectly unassailable position.
Anna moved toward the door, a curious effect in her step and bearing as of one physically wounded, her head drooped slightly as if in submission, her eyes downcast.
When she reached the door, however, a swift change passed over her; a sudden energy and power awoke in her, and she turned, and, looking back at mother and son, her eyes flashing light, and a smile they had never seen before upon her lips, said quietly, but with slow emphasis:—
“You have decided this matter. You have each other; you are satisfied. I shall submit, as you know. Once more you have taken my life—its most sacred promise and its highest purpose—out of my hands. This time another life, too, is involved. One thing only you must let me say, I wonder how you dare!”
Facing them for an instant in silence, she turned, and went alone to her room.