In the bedroom was a cradle; in the adjoining room, dimly lighted and kept cool, was a coffin loaded with flowers. There was the awful presence of life and death. The infant turned its head and cried as a young woman bent over it, one hand pressing her breast as if she was restraining her breath, and touched its fair skin caressingly. The child’s tiny fist struck blindly at the air, and getting fairly awake he cried aloud. She drew back, pressing her hands to her face, sighing in her heart. The child blinked its blue eyes, and dozed off again. “Oh, God! Oh, God! not this! Not this, Oh, God!” She sat down, away from the man, her elbows on her spread knees, pressing her fingers into her cheeks, gazing at him, at the coffin, at the blurred mist of all this unreal reality. The man moaned, “Oh, God! Oh, my God!” She smiled bitterly, making a gesture partly of impatience, and with something of scorn. “Have you no prayers—for the dead?” “No.” “Dead! Oh, my God, dead!” “Hush, hush! Pray for the living.” “The living! The living? It is the fruit of death.” “What is death?” “My wife.” “Your child—lives.” “My life is dead.” “It is but born.” The woman looked at the pinched, faded face of the corpse. “The child is the soul of my death, and my death lives.” He stood beside her at the coffin. “This is death.” “Yes, this is death.” Her voice was as if it came from the tomb. “You loved her?” “You will love your child.” “My love lies there.” “Love is a terrible thing.” “It is life.” “Love is death.” “What do you know of love? Poor child, you have never loved.” “I was never loved.” “Ah, I was loved! Why do you weep? Who knows not love can smile at suffering.” She shrank from him. “Do not touch me, I pray you! Respect—the living.” “Yes, my child lives; does it not live? But oh, my wife! You cannot know or guess how a man loves.” “Ah, yes, I do—I do indeed.” “Then look at me. She was my life, my first real love.” “Oh, restrain your tears.” “You have never loved. She was all the better part of me, or bore the burden of the worse. She took me in growing manhood, she, only a tender girl. She leaned to my first embrace, “I, too, have loved. You do not know how a woman loves. The base of eternity was the love I builded on. I loved unspeaking, silently, as a woman must; but I loved, and I would have shared hell with the man I loved. I resisted, fought against it and he never knew. Yet I think he loved me once—is it impossible? I felt myself mastered by the generous and godly mind of a man; my weaknesses vanished in the potency of his strength. And he may have loved me—he may have loved me. “But I saw another woman’s love for this man. I knew the frail flower of her life was dying in the want of sustenance for her love.... No, I did not love her; a woman does not love so. Perhaps it was for pity of her, perhaps it was for love of him, that I was impelled to offer He was as a man waking from a dream. He took a step toward her, but she turned away. He looked at the waxen face of the corpse. “Ah, it is terrible to die; but what is it to live?” Herbert Atchison Cox. |