We buried the child in the old Bland section at Hollywood, where a single twisted yew-tree grew between the graves, obliterated by ivy, of Edmond Bland and his wife, Caroline Matilda, born Fairfax. On the way home Sally sat rigid and tearless, with her hand in mine, and her eyes fixed on the drawn blinds of the carriage, as though she were staring intently through the closed window at something that fascinated and held her gaze in the dusty street.
"Does your head ache, darling?" I asked once, and she made a quick, half-impatient gesture of denial, with that strained, rapt look, as if she were seeing a vision, still in her face. Only when we reached home, and Aunt Euphronasia met her with outstretched arms on the threshold, did this agonised composure break down in passionate weeping on the old negress's shoulder.
The strength which had upheld her so long seemed suddenly to have departed, and all night she wept on my breast, while I fanned her in the hot air, which had grown humid and close. Not until the dawn had broken did my arm drop powerless with sleep, and the fan fell on the pillow. Then I slept for an hour, worn out with grief and exhaustion, and when presently I awoke with a start, I saw that she had left my side, and that her muslin dressing-gown was missing from the chintz-covered chair where it had lain. When I called her in alarm, she came through the doorway that led to the kitchen, freshly dressed, with a coffeepot in her hand.
"For God's sake, Sally," I implored, "don't make coffee for me!"
"I've made it, dear," she answered. "I couldn't let you go out without a mouthful to eat. You did not sleep a wink."
"And you?" I demanded.
"I didn't sleep either, but then I can rest all day." Her lip trembled and she pressed her teeth into it. "By the time you are dressed, Ben, breakfast will be ready."
Her eyes were red and swollen, her mouth pale and tremulous, all her radiant energy seemed beaten out of her; yet she spoke almost cheerfully, and there was none of the slovenliness of sorrow in her fresh and charming appearance. I dressed quickly, and going into the sitting-room, drank the coffee she had made because I knew it would please her. When it was time for me to start, she went with me to the door, and turning midway of the block, I saw her standing on the steps, smiling after me, with the sun in her eyes, like the ghost of herself as she had stood and smiled the morning after my failure. In the evening I found her paler, thinner, more than ever like the wan shadow of herself, yet meeting me with the same brave cheerfulness with which she had sent me forth. Could I ever repay her? I asked myself passionately, could I ever forget?
The dreary summer weeks dragged by like an eternity; the autumn came and passed, and at the first of the year I was sent down, with a salary of ten thousand dollars, to build up traffic on the Tennessee and Carolina Railroad, which the Great South Midland and Atlantic had absorbed. Sally went with me, but she was so languid and ill that the change, instead of invigorating her, appeared to exhaust her remaining vitality. She lived only when I was with her, and when I came in unexpectedly, as I did sometimes, I would find her lying so still and cold on the couch that I would gather her to me in a passion of fear lest she should elude the lighter grasp with which I had held her. Never, not even in her girlhood, had I loved her with the intensity, the violence, of those months when I hardly dared clasp her to me in my terror that she might dissolve and vanish from my embrace. Then, at last, when the spring came, and the woods were filled with flowering dogwood and red-bud, she seemed to revive a little, to bloom softly again, like a flower that opens the sweeter and fresher after the storm.
"Is it the mild air, or the spring flowers?" I asked one afternoon, as we drove through the Southern woods, along a narrow deserted road that smelt of the budding pines.