And through the night her eyes burned, and she felt that the darkness fell like a weight on them. She longed even for Miss Bentley or the Polack girls’ overdressed Madonnas.
V.
HOPE AHEAD.
“Only the saints and the feeble-minded suffer gladly.”
Emma tossed restlessly that night. Once the cinder flare leaped upon her walls, staining them with a flickering orange glow. This incident emphasized to her mind the horrid blackness that had lately fastened on their household.
She awoke very early next morning in the final, nervous way that worried people dread, and sat huddled on the floor of the lean-to in the still, sunless cold. Jarlsen’s loud talk echoed in the empty kitchen, but she knew she could not wake him with her voice. The thought recurred to her with all the force of discovery that, waking or sleeping, the voices of this world were dead to him.
Black would return to-day. It was odd to call this hour to-day. The noontide that would bring Black again to Soot City seemed very different from any dim time of loud agonies like that which makes the dawns of the sore-hearted.
To-day she would also be paid the “blast money,” part accident insurance and part Jarlsen’s savings. The anticipation of this pleased her until she moved into disordered kitchen and saw the chairs as Bowa and the others had left them, and smelt the lamp that was a survival of the courting days she had prized. Then she groaned.
For a moment the idea of bringing out the leather barber’s apron and the keen razors, as a tacit contradiction to any report of her wealth, seemed a clear inspiration. But with Quarry and Wavering Jim to talk, she knew all delicate denial to be useless.
She opened the house and sat along the narrow doorsill, her back to one jamb, her knees drawn up and fixed against the other. As the sun came up, the cinder flare crept in a stealthy flush along the earth and lost its power in the heavens as the day grew bright.
At last the cold stung her hands, and the sun chased the shivers down her back, so that she went again into the house, forgetting that an hour since she had loathed it. Quarry was with Jarlsen, who clamoured on, asking questions whose answers he could not hear.