For days terror racked Emma and Naomi. Each of them prayed, secretly and passionately, begging God to spare the life of the man who became suddenly the only possession in the world which they cherished. And out of their fight there was born a kind of hostility which made their earlier distrust of each other fade into oblivion. There were hours and days when they scarcely addressed each other, when it seemed that the slightest disagreement might hurl them into open warfare. Mabelle was always in the house, moving about, comforting Naomi and exasperating Emma by her sloppy ways.
Indeed, the perpetual sight of Mabelle and her squalid overfed brat in her neat house filled Emma with a distaste to be equaled only by such a calamity as the discovery of vermin in one of her beds. But she found herself suddenly delivered into Mabelle’s hands; for Mabelle was the only person who could “do anything with” Naomi. If Emma approached her, she grew tense and hysterical. And it was, of course, impossible to think of ridding herself of both: you couldn’t turn from your home the woman who was to be the mother of your grandchild.
Mabelle she hated, too, for her passionate and morbid absorption in the subjects of love and childbirth; she seemed to Emma to stand as a symbol of obscenity, who must as such have tortured her brother Elmer. She was a symbol of all that side of life which Emma had succeeded in putting out of her mind for so many years.
But there was one other person who had the power of calming Naomi. This was the Reverend Castor, who, since Naomi’s condition prevented her from appearing in the choir, came himself two or three times a week to comfort her and inquire after her husband. Except for Mabelle, he seemed to be Naomi’s only friend.
“He is,” she told Emma, “a very sympathetic man, and he reminds me of my father. He is just the same build and bald in the same way.”
The Reverend Castor had a beautiful voice, low and mellow and filled with rich inflections which Mrs. Wilbert Phipps had once spoken of as an “Æolian harp.” He could have had, people said, a great success as an Evangelist, but he was so devoted to his bedridden wife that he would not leave her, even for such a career. The church, they said, was indeed fortunate to keep him, even though it was at the price of his own misfortune. Words of condolence and courage spoken in the rich voice had a strange power of rousing the emotions. Once or twice Emma had come upon him sitting in the twilight of the parlor talking to Naomi of illness and faith, of death and fortitude, in so moving a fashion that the tears came into her eyes and a lump into her throat. And he was a good man—a saint. One felt it while talking to him. He was a man who believed, and had devoted his whole life to the care of a sick wife.
Sometimes Mabelle lingered long after the hour when she should have been in her kitchen preparing supper for Elmer. There were in the Reverend Castor’s voice intimations of things which she had never found in her own chilly husband.
As Naomi’s time drew nearer, the conversation of Mabelle grew proportionately more and more obstetrical.
They compared symptoms and Mabelle’s talk was constantly sprinkled with such remarks as, “When I was carrying Jimmy,” or, “When Ethel was under way.” She even gave it as her opinion that Naomi, from the symptoms, might be having twins.
She appeared to have a strange, demoralizing effect upon Naomi, for the girl came presently to spend all the day in a wrapper, never bothering to dress when she rose. And Emma discovered that for days at a time she did not even trouble to take off the metal bands which she used for curling her long, straight hair. The two of them sat all day long in rocking-chairs while little Jimmy, who was beginning to walk a little, crept from one piece of furniture to another. He had already ruined one corner of the Brussels carpet in the parlor.