But as time wore on, Dr. Duncan put away his suspicions, whatever they might have been, and repented bitterly every unkind word he had addressed to his little wife. His solicitude for her evidently failing health made him more tender than he had ever been in his conduct towards her. He determined that no harsh word or slightest coolness of manner that might wound the delicate girl should escape him, however peevish or unreasonable she should become. For a great fear was weighing on him, lest her mind was on the eve of a still deeper darkening than before. He did all that he could to render her life cheerful, to make her surroundings bright and changing; but all seemed of no avail; the shadow was ever deepening; a pathetic melancholy possessed her which there was no dispelling.
At last he made a discovery which still more increased his anxious care.
His wife was about to make him a father.
He now humoured her every whim, and finding that his presence exercised a most soothing effect upon her, he devoted to her all the time he possibly could, attending to her with a loving watchfulness that did doubtlessly keep off the terrible calamity with which she was threatened.
She herself was conscious of this—she felt, when he was by her, that the brightness of his love stood between her and the impending shadow, hiding it for the time.
But when alone she would weep miserably at the awful fancies which she could not drive away. The shadow was gradually, daily, surrounding her. She felt that soon it would close in altogether upon her—she would be mad—there was but a slight partition to break down, and then her mind would die.
The long silence of Susan Riley terrified her. She knew that an evil eye was ever watching an opportunity for her destruction, and in her monomania—for her terror of the woman amounted to this—she attributed impossible powers of mischief to her malignant hate.
She had received two warnings from her enemy already, and she felt an intuition, a certain conviction, which she could not reason away, that there would be a third—that a last, cruellest blow would be struck which would prove fatal to her; and she would kneel down in her room and pray in tears and agony that the blow might strike herself alone, and not her husband and the little babe that was to be soon born into the world.
To her it seemed unnatural and dreadful that she who had once so nearly been a killer of babes should become a mother. Was it—she thought—the just vengeance of God that was about to visit her? Was she to have a child, only that it might be torn from her at once, only that her punishment might be the more severe in its remorse-awaking appositeness to her crime!