And when Clementina went to bed she wondered why she had railed at Quixtus all these years.
CHAPTER XIX
Clementina went to bed a happier woman than she had been for many a day. Distrusting the ministrations of the Chinese nurse, she had set up a little bed for Sheila in her own room. The child lay there fast asleep, the faithful Pinkie projecting from a folded arm in a staring and uncomfortable attitude of vigilance. Clementina’s heart throbbed as she bent over her. All that she had struggled for and had attained, mastery of her art, fame and fortune, shrank to triviality in comparison with this glorious gift of heaven. She remembered scornful words she had once spoken to Tommy: “Woman has always her sex hanging round the neck of her spirit.” She recognised the truth of the saying and thanked God for it. She undressed very quietly and walked about the room in stocking-feet, feeling a strange sacredness in the presence of the sleeping child.
She was happier, too, in that she had forgiven Quixtus; for the first time since she had known him she felt a curiosity regarding him, a desire for his friendship; scarcely formulated, arose a determination to bring something vital into his life. As the notable housewife entering a forlorn man’s neglected house longs to throw open windows, shake carpets, sweep down cobwebs, abolish dingy curtains, and fill the place with sunlight and chintz and other gaiety, so did Clementina long to sweep and garnish Quixtus’s dusty heart. He had many human possibilities. After all, there must be something sound in a man who had treasured in his mind the memory of her picture. Sheila and herself, between them, would transform him into a gaunt angel. She fell asleep smiling at the thought.
Clementina did not suffer fools gladly. That was why, thinking Quixtus a fool, she had not been able to abide him for so many years. And that was why she could not abide the fat Chinese nurse, who showed herself to be a mass of smiling incompetence. “The way she washes the child makes me sick,” she declared. “If I see much more of her heathen idol’s grin, I’ll go mad and bite her.” So the next day Clementina, with Quixtus as a decorative adjunct, hunted up consular and other authorities and made with them the necessary arrangements for shipping her off to Shanghai, for which she secretly pined, by the next outward-bound steamer. When they got to London she would provide the child with a proper Christian nurse, who would bring her up in the fear of the Lord and in habits of tidiness; and in the meanwhile she herself would assume the responsibility of Sheila’s physical well-being.
“I’m not going to have a flighty young girl,” she remarked. “I could tackle her, but you couldn’t.”
“Why should I attempt to tackle her?” asked Quixtus.
“You’ll be responsible for the child when she stays in Russell Square.”
“Russell Square?” he echoed.
“Yes. She will live partly with you and partly with me—three months with each of us, alternately. Where did you expect the child to live?”