Once more her attitude towards him had changed. She no longer felt the timid passion of the first months after her marriage, but she also no longer felt that sinister dread and foreboding which had succeeded it. She looked upon him less as her husband, inspiring alternately love and terror, than as the father of her children. She saw him, so to speak, through them. She loved him because they were his as well as hers. She spoke less of "I" and "he," and more of "us," "we," and "ours."
All the same she was bitterly disappointed when the following year another boy was born. She sobbed into her pillow, and even Reuben's delight and little Richard's soft kicks against her breast, could not comfort her. In fact she felt secretly angry with Reuben for his joy. He did not think of her and what she wanted. He thought only of his dirty old farm, and that dreary, horrible Boarzell.
As time wore on, and her hopes were once more roused, she became quite obsessed by the idea of having a girl. She thought of nothing but the little frocks, the ribbons with which she would tie the pretty hair. She pictured the times she and her daughter would have together, the confidences they would exchange—for old Mrs. Backfield grew more and more silent and unreceptive, and her neighbours were not of her mould. They would tell each other everything ... she had dreams of an impossible little pink-and-white girl like a doll, with golden curls and blue eyes and a white muslin frock. In her dreams she would stretch out her arms to this ached-for child, and would wake sobbing, with the tears running down her face.
Then, at last, after experiences which had had boredom added to their pain by repetition, she murmured—"What is it, mother?"—and a real, breathing, living, crying, little girl was put into her arms.
§ 6.
The positions of husband and wife were now reversed. It was Reuben who sulked and gloomed, looking at the baby askance, while Naomi moved in a daydream of peace and rapture and desire satisfied. She was too happy to care much about her husband's disappointment. She would never have believed it if anyone had told her in the first weeks of her marriage that she could have a joy and not mind if he did not share it, a child and not fret if he did not love it. But now her child sufficed her, or rather she had learned the lesson of wives, to suffice herself, and could love and rejoice without a comrade.
She had forgotten the Arabellas and Mariannas of the Keepsake, and the baby was called Fanny after Naomi's own mother, whom she dimly remembered. Fanny became the centre of Naomi's life; she was not as healthy as the other children, and her little pains and illnesses were all so many cords drawing her closer to her mother's heart. Though she required twice as much attention as the boys, Naomi never fretted or grew weary, as she had sometimes done in the service of the other little ones—on the contrary, she bloomed into a new beauty, and recovered the youthfulness she had begun to lose.
Strange to say, Harry, who had paid little attention to the earlier babies, seemed drawn to this one. He would hang round Naomi when she had her in her lap, and sometimes gingerly put out a hand and stroke the child's limbs. Naomi could not bear that he should touch her; but he amused Fanny, so she tolerated him. He had fallen into the habit of many half-witted people and occasionally made strange faces, which though repulsive to everyone else, filled Fanny with hilarious delight. Indeed they were the first thing she "noticed."
"Oh, the pretty baby! save the pretty baby!"—Harry would mutter and shriek, and he would wander about the house crying—"Save the pretty baby!" till Naomi declared that he gave her the shivers.
"Keep him out of the way, can't you, Backfield?" she said to her husband.