Joyce had been horribly distressed when she knew that a child was coming. All the tenderness which had overwhelmed him at that news failed to reconcile her to the idea, though she hid some fear that was in her. It was the inactivity forced upon her at the end which hurt her most; that and her loss of beauty for a time. “No more dances!” she had cried. “No more flying stunts at Hendon. Oh, Bertram, what a colossal bore!”
He had been angry with her again (and now cursed himself for that temper) because she’d insisted upon still retaining her crowd of friends about her to the last. She’d made no secret of her condition, even to Kenneth Murless, and Bertram had resented that candour with painful jealousy, shrinking from the thought that any one but himself should be in possession of their sacred secret.
“It’s frightful!” he’d said. “It’s like exposing yourself in the market-place.”
“You’re ridiculous!” Joyce had answered. “Anybody would think you’d been brought up at—Peckham. In the early Victorian era. Do you think people don’t know?”
“Yes—but to talk about it to Kenneth Murless! That decadent waster!”
“A good friend of mine, whom I met long before I knew you.” So Joyce had said, calmly and cruelly.
He had been violently angry. . . . How could he ever forgive himself for such brutality now that Joyce lay upstairs, between life and death! Lord! . . . Lord! . . .
The supreme moment of fear came when for more than the twentieth time he listened at the door of his study, and heard again the horrible silence upstairs, following those still more dreadful sounds of the activity of strangers busy with his wife. Did this silence mean death? He asked the question between two frightful heart-beats. Then the door opened at the top of the landing and there was the rustle again of the nurse’s starched dress coming downstairs. Bertram went into his room and faced round as the woman came in after a tap at the door. It was the verdict of life or death.
“Is she all right?” he asked, failing to steady his voice.