As he lifted the shade he noticed that his hand trembled and that his head was unusually light. That massive sense of loneliness which the transition hour from darkness to day begets in the on-looker oppressed him with the force of an estrangement of hope. Such an impression had been produced upon him a hundred times by the breaking of dawn after a sleepless night.
He turned away and opened the door softly.
The night-lamp was still burning, but the beginning of the morrow washed with a faint grayness the atmosphere. The objects he had dwelt upon the night before were magnified in size, and in an instant the unpacked trunks, the rubber doll, and the bottles of medicine obtruded themselves upon his vision.
Mariana was still sitting as he had left her, waving to and fro the palm-leaf fan. He wondered vaguely if she had sat thus since midnight. Then he laid his hand upon her shoulder.
"Mariana, you must lie down." And as he stooped nearer he saw that the child was dead.
CHAPTER XVIII
For the next six weeks Anthony was forced to listen to the distracted self-accusations of Mariana. When the little white coffin had been carried to Greenwood and laid in the over-grown plot beside the graves of Algarcife's parents, to be shadowed by the storied urns that redounded to the honor of a less impoverished generation, Mariana returned, and, throwing herself upon the floor, refused consolation.
"I want nothing," she said—"nothing, nothing. What could comfort me?"
At Anthony's protestations of love and grief she lifted dull and scornful eyes, wherein the triumph of motherhood showed supreme over all other emotions.
"How can you know?" she asked, between tearless sobs. "You did not nurse her, and hold her in your arms night and day; you did not bathe her while she laughed at the bubbles; you did not put on her little dresses and socks. Oh, my baby! my baby! I want my baby!"