"Sheila, did you know?" repeated Ted.
Sheila shook her head. Lila had had orders never to take Eric out of the yard without permission. She had risked the disobedience, only too sure of her mistress's absorption. For Lila knew the secret of those afternoons; she had not been a confidante, but she had been a witness. Sheila realized all this now, as she faced Ted across the crib of their little stricken son. She realized that she had not known where Eric was because she had been engrossed in her work—and that not to have known, as things had come to pass, was criminal.
"Oh, how could it have happened?" cried Ted. And looking into Sheila's tortured face, sternness vanished from his eyes for an instant, and love and grief yearned toward her from them instead. In that instant speech came to Sheila and the truth rushed out of her.
"It happened because—because I was up in my room and didn't overlook Lila. It happened because I was up in my room, writing a story!"
It was as if she had bared her breast to a sword—and he could not plunge it in. In his turn he was silent; but his silence was scarcely easier to bear than the harshest upbraiding. He stood there, gazing at her, and she knew all that was in his mind, in his heart. And then, after a moment, he went out of the room, still without a word. When he came back, several hours later, he was very gentle to her, but Sheila knew, nevertheless, that his father's heart condemned her, condemned her as she condemned herself.
Together they nursed their son, with Mrs. Caldwell and old Lucindy to help them. And as Sheila watched her baby fight for the tiny flame of his life, her own heart, so much more burdened than Ted's, broke not once, but a thousand times! He was so small, so weak, so helpless, that little son of hers, and he suffered. That was what she felt she could not bear—that he should suffer. Even his death she could endure if she must, she who deserved to lose him. But his pain——!
As she went back and forth upon the ceaseless tasks of nursing, apparently so concentrated upon them, she was in reality living over days long past, the days before Eric's birth. Clear and practical as was her grasp of the present and all its necessities, she was yet obsessed by her memories of that time before her child's coming; by her memories of it and her penitence for it. In the beginning, she had not been glad. It was upon that, quite as much as upon her later carelessness in trusting Lila, that her agonized conscience fixed. How could she ever have hoped to keep her child—she who had not been glad of his coming? It all sprang from that. For if she had been glad enough in the beginning, the idea of writing would not have persisted with her; would not finally have led her to that negligence for which Eric might pay with his life.
She had not been glad in the beginning! Over and over that sentence shrieked through her brain: She had not been glad in the beginning! She had not been glad!
She never spared herself by reflecting that she had not been reluctant for motherhood until Ted had shown his antagonism to the work that was already the child of her brain, and Mrs. North had, from her different viewpoint, justified his attitude. She never conceded in her behalf that it had not even occurred to her, until then, to regard motherhood and art as conflicting elements, and that it was the shock of seeing them thus in her own life that had made her temporarily resentful of maternity. She never excused or exonerated herself by that ultimate joy of motherhood which had possessed her so utterly. She had not been glad in the beginning; later, she had not been glad enough to give him—her little, helpless son—all her life. How, indeed, could she hope to keep him now?
Over and over this she went; and all the while she kept on about her tasks, deft, skillful, terribly calm.