Rapidly, now, Sarah completed her dressing. With a care strange to her, she tidied her hair, making a ribbon serve as fillet for it. And then, she threw open the shutters. The golden light swept in upon her face. Two heavy lines within each cheek, a furrow hinting on the forehead came out, as her mood faded before the day’s more real brilliancy. So Sarah tore off the ribbon. With a last effort, she returned to her hair. With her brush, she tried to bring back to it a show of wave and of resiliency. But her touch was heavy; and the opaque mass failed to respond. The woman who can feel no decoration in her hair is miserable. For here, in most women, lurks the aura of their desire to please. The sense of beauty there lifts the plain woman above a too stifling consciousness. The sense of failure, there, will weigh on the fairest woman like a pall. Sarah’s next move was the gesture of a housewife, stubbornly resolved not to become a dowd. Sighing, she smoothed out her skirt over her hips. And then, she went to look after Quincy.
As she entered the little room which had been Marsden’s, a flood of vague longing swept over her. She caught up the infant and strained him against her breast. Seated on his cot, she swayed widely to and fro, her child’s body warm upon her own. There was a bitter satisfaction in her embrace. With it, she had almost forgotten Quincy. He was, for the nonce, a mere luscious symbol of her dreary untempered life. He was to be hugged, to be felt, to be experienced.
She was holding him too tight. And he began to cry. In an instant, Sarah recalled the fact of her son. She held him now, carefully, tenderly. And the child’s crying ceased. She looked down upon his rosy, wrinkled face. She kissed his eyes—bright blue they were. She drew delight in cradling his dimpled fists in her own outdrawn hands. And then, she began to speak to him.
“Excuse me, dearest,” she said, “excuse me for everything. Excuse me, not only for having squeezed you so hard, but also for having given you birth.”
As she was silent, she wept. A deep sense of pain seemed to envelop them together. And in that sense, they became almost one, again.
“Quincy, my baby,—forgive me,” she whispered. She placed her wet face against his and held it there, waiting for his response. And so she remained—swayed in her uncharted feelings—agony and a sweet joy of life. And the strange conflict that swayed her rocked her child to sleep.
She placed him back between his covers and closed the door gently behind her. The spring in her heart was hurting her. She knew not what to do, where to go, in order to dispel this subtle restlessness. The children below were content without her. It was almost time to be cooking supper. But she felt nauseous at the prompting. In her own house, in her own hall, she stood, hesitant, palpitant, unnerved and ill-at-ease. What was come over her? She sought refuge, back in her room. She flung herself face down, upon her bed—as a girl might, and as no woman should need to. And there she lay, not thinking, scarcely feeling, luxuriously adrift in an element that was both hot and cold. But this could not last. She must start supper going; she must put Thomas and Adelaide to bed. She did.
Sarah went to her husband in the parlor. He sat at the table, roughly fingering a batch of papers. Business had gone better this spring. But it had failed to pace the stride of outlay. The drain of the Brooklyn Hospital had sunk Josiah deeper than ever into debt. And he was brooding. No word of kindness or of fellowship came from him, those days. The seeming purpose of fate to meet him and the rise in his affairs with always another blow appealed to the man’s instinct for irony. It was to him as if he were playing a game, playing it well, yet destined to go down before stacked cards. Everything seemed to point to an invidious combination. The very fact of his increasing business, with the gall it added, seemed proof to him that an Intelligence was at work against him. His strokes of fortune made him suffer, since they did no good. His wife’s serene behavior made him suffer, since his emotions balked at acknowledging or rewarding it. The fact of his power always to stem a tide, always to go on barely, made him suffer, since it prevented what in his mood had seemed a luxury—the final breaking-up, the sureness of an End.
As Sarah came in and took a rocker across the table, he lifted his head from his papers, glanced at her impatiently, and then plunged back into his scrutiny. And his behavior also made him suffer. For he craved to regain warmth for his wife; in hurting her he hurt himself with concomitant misgivings. He struggled hard against the new, indomitable habit of his heart, to couple Sarah with Quincy, and him with all the misery and sorrow that his coming had seemed to unleash upon them. But it was in vain. He could not battle against his growing nausea for all that was nearest to him. His mind might dilate with keenness upon the tribulations of Sarah, upon her strong humility, upon the puerile unfairness of his attitude. He could not mend that part of him which ruled him. He could not reach it, with all his reason. Always, this part within him flung him back upon the loss of his two favorite children, upon the accident to Marsden, upon the link between these misfortunes and his wife. And with his heart so turned, he could not divorce the association,—could not but regard Sarah with insuperable reproach.
Sarah was darning stockings. And when Josiah broke the silence her hands knocked nervously together. For she had been inured to his silence as the more bearable of evils. She gulped. Then she mastered her curious fright, set aside her work and looked up.