More than that terminated. After two children were born, there were no more: that profound living music came to an end also. And perhaps one of the deepest desires of his nature was for that kind of long union with his wife and for many children: perhaps the only austerity in him was an austere patriarchal authority to people the earth and to bequeath the inheritance of it to his seed.
When she had ceased singing to him soon after marriage, she had begun to sing to herself—habitually during this half-hour of proximity. The sound took up a fixed abode in his ear as there is a roaring in a seashell. He could hear it miles across the country; it was the loudest sound to him in this world—that barely audible self-conscious singing of his wife.
During this interval also she addressed her commands to the maid in tones lowered not to disturb him. He could not hear the words, but there was no mistaking the tones! What beautiful, eager, victorious, thrilling tones—over a dish of steaming vegetables—over a savory toast! They forced him to be reminded that the nature of his wife was not a brook run dry; its leaping waters were merely turned away into another channel. Only when she spoke with him did the cadence of her tones sag; then all the modulations ran downhill as into some inner pit of emptiness.
It was impossible for him to believe that the occasional chuckle and cackle of the maid during these whispered colloquies grew out of aspersions winged at him—at the hungry ogre, middle-aged, almost corpulent, on the other side of the wall; at the species of advanced gorilla, poorly disguised in collar and necktie and midway garments; and with wool and leather drawn over his lower pair of modernized walking hands! Yet the truth was undeniable that when dinner was announced and he went in, the maid, standing behind her mistress's chair, fixed her gaze on him with fresh daily delight in understanding or misunderstanding the wretchedness of the household.
The first time he had ever seen this maid was one evening upon going in to supper. They were expecting guests, and his wife wore an evening gown. As he seated himself, he became aware almost without glancing across the table that something novel had arrived upon the scene—something youthful yet as immemorial as Erebus. Behind the glistening whiteness of his wife's bust with its cold proud dignity, there was something sable—birdlike—all beak and eyes—with a small head on which grew a kind of ruffled indignant feathers. He tried to take no further notice of the apparition, but could not escape the experience that several times during the meal he rescued his biscuit as from between the claws of a competing raven.
In the course of time, as this combination of black and white refused to dissolve and rather coalesced into a duality holding good for meal hours, he felt impelled to characterize the alliance—to envisage for his own relief the totality of its comic gloom. So he called it his Bust of Pallas and his Nevermore. And his Nevermore, perched behind his Bust of Pallas at every function, fixed her dull stupid eyes on him in unceasing judgment. He was never quite persuaded of the human reality of her; never fully believed that she reached to the carpet: and he never got up from the table to see whether she cast a shadow on the floor; but he knew that it was the fowl's intention to cast whatsoever shadow it carried about with it upon him.
She had become a critic of his domestic relations. This servant, this mal-arrangement of beak and eyes, with bare brain enough not to let plates fall and not to dangle her fingers in scalding water nor singe her head-feathers in the oven—this servant of his arraigned him in his humanity! And if this servant, then all his servants. And if all his servants, then all the servants of the neighborhood. The whole Plutonian shore croaked its black damnation of him. Of him!—the leading citizen of his community, its central vital character who held in his keeping the destiny of a people! He had a vision of the august assemblage of them uplifted into the heavenliness of an African Walhalla—such as is disclosed in the last act of the Tetralogy—all gazing down upon him as a profaning Alberic who had raped the virgin Gold of marital love.
On a near peak of especial moral grandeur, his Nevermore stood in her supernal resentment of his wife's wrong. For whatever Nevermore was not, at least, she was woman. And what woman fails to espouse any wife's dignity except the woman who supplants the wife? (Not even she; for if ever in turn her hour comes, her first outcry is, 'I might have known.')
Dr. Birney did not have three hours for this morning's business, then, but two hours and a half; and forthwith beginning, he took from his breast-pocket a small book and transferred from it to a large diary his notes of visits to patients on the day preceding. This soon done, he was ready for the main work.
It was now the closing week of the year when according to custom he posted the year's books; for he was his own secretary. By New Year's Day his accounts were about ready and new books were opened.