“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.