“You mighta tooken us along.”
“Can I go next time anybody dies? ’Tain’t fair the baby gets all the fun.”
Inside the door, the manner that belonged to an occasion was unceremoniously doffed. Sympathy along this particular block of the East One-Hundreds never interfered with life’s practicalities. Dolores Trent received no invitations to sup with her neighbors—expected none, since any superfluous scraps could be served very well for breakfast.
Uneasy in the emptiness of the three rooms which for so long had represented home to her, she settled at the oak desk beside the window with intent of searching the close-printed want columns of an evening paper. But at first she could not see to read.
In this chair her father had struggled over the translations from which their livelihood had been eked in those better moments when the drug to which he was addicted would permit him to work. That, of course, was before he had lost the position through inaccuracies which made the firm intolerant of trying her as substitute. In the corner to the right squatted the couch upon which he had wasted into that pallid, unresponsive thing so lately consigned to the ground, despite her terrified efforts to stay his departure and to recall him, once he had gone. How strange, how confusing to be alone, like a flower cut from its bush and thrown to the wind! It seemed as though she, too, must wither and die.
Over him toward the last had come a change which already was dear to her memory. Always gentle with her, intermittently zealous in an ambition to train her mind for some worth-while future, he had become obsessed by an anxiety over her which dulled him to the crave for poppy paste, hitherto his controlling love and hate. It was something to remember that, improvident though he had been in life, paupered though he was leaving her, his distress over her fate in these last days had conquered his desire for the drug. In the dusk, his last words seemed again to rasp in her ears.
“You have beauty and innocence, my girl. Please God a good young love may protect you on your way!”
Although her eyes burned, no tears relieved them. Although her heart near burst with longing to assure him how, above other children, she had been grateful for his affection, no whisper passed her lips. She could not reach him now. Merely pitiful was her regret over the diffidence which had kept her from telling him that, from her earliest understanding, she had recognized his right to resent her; had appreciated, on that very account, his tolerance.
But she must not regret. That would weaken her when most she needed strength. Had she not done the best she could? In her life-long defense of his habit, in the protectorate over him which had been her chief concern from childhood to this early maturity, had she not shown him that she worshiped him for forgiving the crime she had committed in being born—in making that brutal exaction of a life for a life?
The poppy paste she never had criticized, realizing that it had entered his life at the beginning of her own, when the young mother who had died to give her birth lay stark, for the first time unresponsive to his adoration. On that first night of her existence, as often he had told her, he had chosen her name as a sort of epitaph. Grief.... Grief.... That was what she had meant to him.