Before bedtime that night the baby (who had gone to sleep while she had nursed him when she had come home), awoke crying. She had taken him up and had offered her breast, but it had turned away as if sickened, and had continued to cry till, presently, it had doubled its little body together with a sharp scream and vomited till its breath was nearly gone. There had been a sour odour to the contents of its stomach that had struck terror to their hearts, and before morning Doctor Morgan was at its side. He had noted the leaden movements of the mother and calling John outside had questioned him regarding her. John, troubled at her indifference to him and the lifelessness of her attitude even toward the babe, had told him all he knew—as he understood it.
“Of course she boarded with them two years ago,” he had said in concluding, “but I don’t see that that needs to cut such a figure.”
“Were your wife and Mrs. Hornby great friends?” Doctor Morgan asked, studying John Hunter and puzzling over the evident mystery of the situation.
“Ye-e-s-s!” with perplexed deliberation; “that is, she liked her better than any of the rest of the neighbours around here. She wanted to go there last Sunday and I thought the baby wasn’t fit to take out. It looks now as if I was right.”
“Well, she’s had a shock of some kind, and if you don’t look out She’ll be down on our hands too. You’d better get a girl or let your mother do the work for a couple of weeks,” Doctor Morgan advised.
And John Hunter had looked faithfully for some one to take his wife’s place in the kitchen and had found what she had told him when Hepsie left to be true. In many places where there was no excuse given and girls were at home he had met with a sort of refusal which stung him to the quick.
Elizabeth rocked the baby with a mechanical dead sort of care. John was emotional enough to be badly broken up by the child’s looks, but Elizabeth’s unresponsiveness at such a time made of it a tragedy which he could not understand; he wanted greetings and discussion, and attentions showered upon him as usual, and they were not forthcoming. He could not understand what had brought this state of things to pass, but no more could he question one who was so evidently removed from present conditions. With a sense of forlornness he had never known, he fell on his knees by her side and laid his head against her arm, seeking comfort, and when she still did not speak, the fullness of his misery became apparent, and he got up unsteadily and left the house.
Slowly life and returning interest awakened in the child; still more slowly did the mother take up her threads in the web of living. The old routine was established, with a few exceptions. Elizabeth arose early and prepared breakfast before sunrise as before, the washing and ironing were as well done, but when she prepared to clean the kitchen floor the first washday after Aunt Susan’s death, she took the mop down from its nail on the back porch and used it as she had done that first winter.
John and his mother came in with the clothes basket as she started to wring out the mop to wipe the first corner finished.
“Hadn’t I better get down and scrub it for you with the brush?” John asked.