CHAPTER LXIV
Wherein the Angel of the Annunciation enters into a Garret
As the chill grey of an April dawn crept across her silent garret, sweeping the frayed shadow of the night aside to join other lurking shadows in gloomy corners, Betty, in white night-robe, was awakened and sat up in bed, all in a strange wonder and alarm.
With unuttered timorous questionings, with delicious fears, out of the void she heard the first whisper of the annunciation of her motherhood. As the sea-voice carols ghostly refrains of mystic adventures within the music-haunted chambers of a sea-shell, so, to the hollows of her subtle ears, came exquisite murmurings that to her ecstatic fancy held the quick rhythmic breathings that are the sleep of a little child; and, of a sudden, her white body glowed and her dear breasts swelled at the dream-touch of infant-fingers—leaped to the greedy caress of infant lips. Her comely limbs shivered, fearful with a thousand fears; her whole being flushed hot—she was dumb with bewildering muteness before the majesty of the mystery of a new life.
Her eyes filled with tears.
Across the murk of the stress of life that is the dust-storm up-blown from the sordid details of living—across the dreary fog that is compact of the accumulations of vain strivings and failings and galling insolences—across the black clouds of the humiliations and the indignities that are flung along the path of womanhood under cover of the fulsome hypocrisies, there leaped, with rainbow brilliancy, the bright sign that gladness is the law, the night but the shadow of the light, that there is laughter in the firmament and gaiety and delight, and on the earth a splendid wayfaring.
She smiled through her tears.
She arose from her bed, and stood amazed. She saw visions.
The bare garret of her motherlessness swung away from beneath her exquisite feet, vanished in frantic vertigo from her ken. She put out dazed hands. And lo! as her wounded feet, climbing upwards always, topped the hill of her pilgrimage—the clouds lifted—she stepped into the garden of her kingdom. She heard a call, and she answered the call—stood at last at the threshold of the innermost sanctuary of the most holy place in the magnificent palace along life’s journey—the room where the children play. There, where were little arms held out to her, little hands that clung to her skirts, she sank to her knees—her ears deliriously a-riot with the patter of small feet, the prattle of child’s gossip, the laughter of the little gladsome ones. Her eyes were large with the vision of the coming years—bruises and small troubles and still smaller wounds she saw brought to her knees with childlike confidence in the certainty of balm.
She sobbed, and sank upon the bed.