‘Hang the baby—take me to my wife,’ he commanded.
‘She’s here, sir,’ Kate answered, opening the door on some one’s calling out, above the noise, that she was to come in.
It was Mrs. Colquhoun’s voice. He recognised it, and drew back quickly.
No—he’d be hanged if he’d go in there and meet Catherine in a nursery, with the nurse and the baby and Mrs. Colquhoun all looking on. But he didn’t draw back so quickly that he hadn’t caught a glimpse of the room, and seen a bath on two chairs in front of a bright fire, and three women bending over it, one in white and two in black, and all of them talking at once to that which was in the bath, while its cries rose ever louder and more piercing.
Absorbed, the women were; absorbed to the exclusion of every wish, grief, longing, or other love, he thought, swift hot jealousy flashing into his heart. He felt Catherine ought somehow to have known he was there, been at once conscious of him the minute he set foot in the house. He would have been conscious of her all right the very instant she got under the same roof; of that he was absolutely certain. Instead of that, there was that absorbed back, just as though she had never married, never passionately loved—every bit as absorbed as the other one’s, as Mrs. Colquhoun’s, who was an old woman with no love left in her life except what she could wring out of some baby. And whether it was because they were both in the same attitude and clothes he couldn’t tell, but his impression had been the same of them both—a quick impression, before he had time to think, of a black cluster of grizzled women.
Grizzled? What an extraordinarily horrid word, he thought, to come into his mind. How had it got there?
‘Shut that door!’ called out Mrs. Colquhoun’s voice above the baby’s cries. ‘Don’t you see you are making a draught?’
Kate looked round hesitatingly at Christopher.
‘Come in and shut that door!’ called out Mrs. Colquhoun still louder.
Kate went in, shutting it behind her, and Christopher waited, standing up stiff against the wall.