“We’ll spare no expense, Doctor! Tell Sarah jest what to do. I’ll harness the buggy for the medicine.” He went toward the door.
“There’s one thing got to be done right off,” Dr. Gresham intercepted him. “Your wife can’t nurse these patients and her baby too. You’d better ride right over to Codgel’s Farm in North Harriet and take the infant with you. Mary’s just good, I happen to know. She can wet-nurse him till this is over. I’ll give you a short note. Mrs. Burt can stay here then,—and attend to things.”
“Right away?” At last came Sarah’s stifled voice.
The doctor nodded. “This thing is nearly a week old.”
The danger to the other children rushed into the woman’s mind. She held her panic. “I’ll get him ready.”
And husband and wife went together into the hall.
“I knew that kid meant bad luck,” growled Josiah as he marched toward the kitchen. And as Sarah mounted the laborious stairs, he might have heard, had he waited, lost in the slow thud of her feet on the steps, a tiny sob—the stolen luxury of womanhood for Sarah, behind his back.
These were hard days for Josiah Burt.
Nature seemed to have given him a fixed capacity of love. Upon Sylvia, his first-born, an overflowing measure had been showered. And to Josiah junior went an equal quantity, held so perhaps by the impetus of his name, which thereby singled out this son to be the recipient of his own hopes and dreams. With Marsden, enough of his natural bent remained to make an honorable showing. And the girls that followed, Rhoda and Adelaide, were babies of such charm and irresistible persuasion that they received a share of quite esthetic love in place of the now low-running father’s instinct. With Thomas had come indifference; with Quincy Octavus, so named for the fifth son and the eighth child,—since Josiah nursed the belief that Quincy was a Yankee form of Quintus,—had come revolt. All of the man’s paternity was lodged in his two eldest children. And now, they lay in fever. All of the artist in him, which once had gone to a fresh and gracious wife, centered now upon the two baby girls whose hair and gleaming eyes made them famed in Harriet. And when he thought at all of Quincy, it was as a harbinger of greater want and worry, or as an eloquent reason for keeping henceforth aloof from Sarah.
Josiah had the heart of a child—primitively brave and tender, cowardly, and subtly, progressively savage. His children’s illness daunted him. So he protected his lack-courage and his pained affection by added coldness to his wife, whom he blamed explicitly for everything except the weather, and by a really Gargantuan animosity for the infant who had been sent sucking his father’s substance in North Harriet. Either the bad turn of his affairs was responsible for Quincy, or he for them. It mattered little. The dislike was engrained. Once that, it could easily branch out with catholic perseverance to the woman that had borne him and to all miseries that might happen after.