Emmie now took down the few clothes she had seen on the hooks, with a vague idea that they required mending. She spread them out over her lap one by one, and passed her hand mechanically over the threadbare places where the black was green, over certain fringes about the holes, her heart feeling extraordinarily large and empty and silent. The rings on her cold hand glittered in the stroking movement, four rich rings with various stones, Gregory's gifts. Four—but she had five children.
She stretched herself suddenly on the bed with her face in the old coat, the chill of the room slowly seizing upon her as she lay. She prayed in a distant, half-conscious way, without the least illusion that such words could persuade any one, for God to unmake everything that had happened to her, to let her have died, and Dorastus too, at his very birth; for them to have both been lying in the remote Dutch God's-acre these many years. For one fleeting moment memory gave back to her perfect an impression never before recalled. She seemed to have been roused from a stupor deeper than sleep; her eyes dwelt without wonder on what she thought to be a cathedral, with colored windows ablaze—it dwindled, until it was a mere night-light glimmering. Then shadowy people placed a little bundle in her arms. She tingled as an instrument whose every string is touched, a coolness rippled from her head to her feet, she knew a state never known before or since, a sense of unlimited wealth, a tenderness ineffable, a trembling outgoing of all her being to this handful of life. She heaved a great, faint sigh, and with effort unspeakable bent till her lips were pressed as to a warm rose-leaf. She sank to sleep, weak unto death, but blissfully happy—waking stronger and in a different mood.
She wished she might not have waked, but been buried with her poor first baby in her arms, having ceased to be in the single moment wherein she completely loved it. Nothing that had happened to her since then seemed to her sweet; all was sicklied through by the consciousness of a crime gone before and daily confirmed, a woman's most monstrous, miserable crime—not loving enough. Nothing could make her withered, yellowed, cheapened life right now—she should have died at that moment. She said this over and over again to the powers that hear us, until all meaning had faded from it. She started, with a sense of something going out—she thought it must be the candle and she should be left in the dark. She sat up, frightened and freezing.
The candle was burning quietly. Then, as she scrutinized the shadows ahead, loath to stir, she became aware of her rings having grown loose, they were in danger of dropping off; of her clothes having grown loose, they let the cold in under them; she felt a prickling at the temples, as if it were the gray creeping through her hair; she felt her features becoming pinched and old, beauty dropping from them like a husk. She wanted to cry then with a childish self-pity, but no tears would come; she did not know how to start the flood that she longed for to relieve her. She felt that she could only have screamed.
She got up to rid herself of this congealment, and paced the room from corner to corner with sweeping black gown that told of the dusty things it had that day brushed.
Company had come to the man below; they were making a great deal of very jolly noise. The candle guttered drearily; a reek of warm cabbage climbed up the stairway to her nostrils. She looked up on hearing a soft tapping—the black sky-light was spattered with silver tears, like a pall.
She walked up and down, waiting and listening, everything taking more and more the quality of a dream wherein the most unnatural things grow ordinary. She had felt with a numbed sort of cowardly loathing that every moment brought her nearer to a black stream of realizing grief and remorse into which willy-nilly she must descend; but now it seemed in accordance with every known law that she should be here, destined to go on walking so forever, never arriving, nor anything ever changing. She heard herself say aloud in a light, indifferent tone, "He will never come. He will never come."
For a moment she remembered Gregory, whose image seemed to rise out of the dim past: Gregory in the warm light of the hotel coffee-room, where dinner was set on a little table for three, dinner with wine-glasses of two shapes, and fruit and confectionery in crystal dishes. The thought worked upon her as a sweet smell in sea-sickness. All that had to do with Gregory seemed of negative importance; let him wait and wonder and worry. She felt hard-hearted towards him and all prosperous things.
A burst of voices reached her through the floor; they were rough and hoarse, their mirth had turned to wrangling. It was so horribly lonely here! If they were suddenly possessed to climb the stairs, to burst in upon her! There was a crash of glass—she screamed; then a laugh—she shuddered—and the noise grew less. She breathed again, but, feeling her knees weaken, went back to the bed, and sat listening in fascination for the murmuring sounds to develop again into a quarrel.
Suddenly, without the warning of gradually approaching sounds she had prepared herself for, she heard footsteps just outside.