Three weeks later, Pete took his wife home in Cæsar's gig. Everything was the same, as when he brought her, save that within the shawls with which she was wrapped about the child now lay with its pink eyelids to the sky, and its fiat white bottle against her breast. It was a beautiful spring morning, and the young sunlight was on the sallies of the Curragh and the gold of the roadside gorse. Pete was as silly as a boy, and he chirped and croaked all the way home like every bird and beast of heaven and earth. When they got to Elm Cottage, he lifted his wife down as tenderly as if she had been the babe she had in her arms. He was strong and she was light, and he half helped, half carried her to the porch door. Nancy was there to take the child out of her hands, and, as she did so, Pete, back at the horse's head, cried, “That's the last bit of furniture the house was waiting for, Nancy. What's a house without a child? Just a room without a clock.”
“Clock, indeed,” said Nancy; “clocks are stopping, but this one's for going like a mill.”
“Don't be tempting the Nightman, Nancy,” cried Pete; but he was full of childlike delight.
Kate stepped inside. The fire burned in the hall parlour, the fire-irons shone like glass, there were sprigs of fuchsia-bud in the ornaments on the chimneypiece—everything was warm and cheerful and homelike. She sat down without taking off her hat. “Why can't I be quiet and happy?” she thought. “Why can't I make myself love him and forget?”
But she was like one who traversed a desert under the sea—a vast submerged Sahara. Over her head was all her life, with all her love and all her happiness, and the things around her were only the ghostly shadows cast by them.
IX.
The more Kate realised that she was in the position of a bad woman, the more she struggled to be a good one. She flew to religion as a refuge. There was no belief in her religion, no faith, no creed, no mystical transports, but only fear, and shame, and contrition. It was fervent enough, nevertheless. On Sunday morning she went to The Christians, on Sunday afternoon to church, on Sunday evening to the Wesleyan chapel, and on Wednesday night to the mission-house of the Primitives. Her catholicity did not please her father. He looked into her quivering face, and asked if she had broken any commandment in secret. She turned pale, and answered “No.”
Pete followed her wherever she went, and, seeing this, some of the baser sort among the religious people began to follow him. They abused each other badly in their efforts to lay hold of his money-bags. “You'll never go over to yonder lot,” said one. “They're holding to election—a soul-destroying doctrine.” “A respectable man can't join himself to Cowley's gang,” said another. “They're denying original sin, and aren't a ha'p'orth better than infidels.”
Pete took the measure of them all, down to the watch-pockets of their waistcoats.