“You needn't talk to me,” said she—“you needn't talk to me, John Upham, when you won't have the doctor when it's your own flesh an' blood that's dyin'. I don't care what he's done. I don't care if he has taken the roof from over our heads. My child is worth more than anything else. He'd come if you asked him, he couldn't refuse—you know he couldn't, John Upham!”
John Upham's face was white; his forehead and his chin got a curious hardness of outline. “He won't have a chance,” he said, between his teeth.
“Let your own flesh and blood die, then!” cried his wife; but the fierceness was all gone from her voice; she had no power of sustained wrath, so spent was she. She gave a tearless wail that united with the child's in her lap in a pitiful chord of woe.
“Now, Laury, you know J'rome gave Minnie somethin' that helped her, and she seemed every mite as sick as the baby,” her husband said, in a softer voice. But she turned her hopeless eyes again upon the little, squalid, quivering thing in her lap, and paid no more heed to him. She let Jerome examine the child, with a strange apathy. There was no hope, and consequently no power of effort, left in her.
When Jerome brought some medicine in a spoon, she assisted him to feed the child with it, but mechanically, and as if she had no interest. Her sharp right elbow shone like a knob of ivory through a great rent in her sleeve; her dress was unfastened, and there was a gleam of white flesh through the opening; she neither knew nor cared. There was no consciousness of self, no pride and no shame for self, in her; she had ceased to live in the fullest sense; she was nothing but the concentration of one emotion of despairing motherhood.
She heard Jerome and her husband moving about in the next room, she heard the crackling of fire in the stove, the clinking din of dishes, the scrape of a broom, not realizing in the least what the sounds meant. She heard with her mind no sound of earth but the wail of the sick baby in her lap.
Jerome Edwards could tidy a house as well as a woman, and John Upham followed his directions with clumsy zeal. When the kitchen was set to rights Mrs. Upham went in there, as she was bidden, with the baby, and sat down in a rocking-chair by the open window towards the road, through which came a soft green light from some opposite trees, and a breath of apple-blossoms.
“We've got the room all redd up, Laury,” John Upham said, pitifully, stooping over her and looking into her face. She nodded vaguely, looking at the baby, who had stopped crying.
Jerome dropped some more medicine, and she took the spoon and fed it to the baby. “I think it will go to sleep now,” said Jerome. Mrs. Upham looked up at him and almost smiled. Hope was waking within her. “I think it is nothing but a little cold and feverishness, Mrs. Upham,” Jerome added. He had a great pitiful imagination for this unknown woe of maternity, which possibly gave him as great a power of sympathy as actual knowledge.
“You are a good fellow, Jerome, an' I hope I shall be able to do somethin' to pay you some day,” John Upham said, huskily, when they were in the bedroom putting that also in order.