Phases of an Inferior Planet

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

He brought it to her and raised her on his arm as she drank it.

"I was dreaming," she said, fretfully. "I dreamed that I was falling—falling past the earth, past millions of worlds—past a great many apple orchards, and they were all in bloom. But, somehow, I never reached the bottom. There wasn't any bottom."

"You are stronger now?" he questioned, almost wistfully.

"Not a bit," returned Mariana, peevishly. "I am so—so—so weak." Then she laughed softly. "Do you know that brandy makes me think of my childhood, and a great goblet of mint-julep, with the crushed ice all frosted on the glass. My father was famous for his mint-juleps. I wish I had one now."

"Shall I make it for you?"

"Oh, it wouldn't be the same! I should never like one that didn't have the ice frosted on the glass." She grew weakly reminiscent. "Once, when I was a little child," she said, "I was dressed up in a nice white frock and red sash, and sent out on the sidewalk to play, and I grew tired and wandered off and got lost. I went a long way, and at last I came to the city almshouse. I was going up the steps when I looked into a bar-room across the way, and saw a gentleman with a very red face drinking a toddy. I went over and asked him if he were related to my father, and he said he supposed not, but he took me in behind the screen and sat me upon a table and offered me a taste of toddy, and I said, 'No, thank you. I have plenty of that at home.'"

Then she turned over and went to sleep, while Algarcife sat beside her and held her hand. His gaze ravished her with its fierce tenderness. His life and heart and brain seemed bound up and enshrined in the sleeping woman who lay in that death-like pallor, with the child at her side. He followed the sweep of the loosened and disordered hair that fell in a heavy braid across the pillow. He lingered, unsatisfied, upon the worn and emaciated face, in which there was none of the material beauty of flesh and blood. With an impassioned ardor he studied the defects of outline, the thin and irregular features, the hollows of the blue-veined temples, the firm and accentuated chin. Now there was none of that bewildering illumination of expression left, which in moments of intensity was like a fleeting search-light thrown across her face, forever changing in tone and color. She lay rapt and wan and pallid—a woman overthrown.

His glance fell upon the child in the hollow of her arm, and he bent to look at it. He was conscious of no feeling for it as his own, but of a general feeling of pity for it as a helpless animal. He supposed the other would come later, and in the meantime Mariana was sufficient.

Then, as he sat there, a harassed look crept into his eyes, and he frowned impatiently. Mariana's illness had entirely exhausted the small fund he had accumulated, and he knew that the next few years would bring a hand-to-hand, disastrous conflict with want. For himself he cared little, but for Mariana and the child he experienced a blind and bitter disgust at his own impotence. Working night and day, as he did, and preserving his hold upon the Bodley College, which was at best an uncertain reef, he knew that he could manage to wring from the world but a bare subsistence. He felt resentful of the fact that all his knowledge, all his years of study, all his scientific value would weigh for nothing in the struggle for bread against a moderate capacity for fulfilling the dictates of other men. This ruthless waste of energy exasperated him in its inevitable assault upon his theories of life. He looked at his hands—thin and virile hands, with knotted knuckles and square-cut finger-tips—the hands of a nervous, impracticable temperament. Of a sudden he felt himself as helpless to contend with existing conditions as the baby lying within the crook of Mariana's arm. For an instant his natural irascibility of temper seemed to have overborne the bounds of his reserve. That extreme sensitiveness to minor irritants became painful in its acuteness. He saw in it the effects of the nervous exhaustion which followed in the wake of uncongenial mental work combined with the stress of financial worries, and withdrew the curb of will. For the moment he regretted his old life—regretted his freedom and the solitude which had surrounded him even amid the tumult of the city. He reproached himself that he had not allowed Mariana to live her life as it pleased her, unhampered by the obligations he had permitted her to assume. Then he recalled her as she came to him that September night, the letter fluttering in her hand, and it seemed to him that he was not wholly responsible—that something mightier than himself had manipulated their destinies. To his dark and embittered mood there appeared a certain humor in the thought that they were puppets in the hands of the grim comedian Time. And then the scientific tenor of his mind, which contrasted saliently with his nervous temperament, reasserted itself, and he traced in vague outline the inviolable sequence of cause and effect, upon which his own and the world's revolutions hung. Again he fortified himself with a philosophic acceptance of the authoritative "must" of those unconquerable forces which we call fate.

With a returning gentleness he loosened Mariana's hand and went back to his work.