B00DRI1ZYC EBOK

  A smile came into David’s eyes, but it did not reach his lips. He looked profoundly sad, the doctor thought, but the shame that should have been in his face was not there. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I’ll go up to my wife.”

  — 2 —

  Sally was already drowning in sleep when David kissed her. “A very important baby,” she whispered, lifting her eyelids as though leaden weights pressed upon them. “The silver rose-bowl. Tomorrow.”

  “You can come in, sir,” said Mrs. Wilkes, standing flushed and dishevelled but triumphant in the door of the adjoining room, “and take a peep. Come quiet, now.”

  With a feeling of deadly lethargy David went into the dressing-room. His mind was divided between thankfulness that Sally’s ordeal was over and desolation because Sebastian had died. Had he lived, after reaching such understanding, their friendship would have lasted through their lives. As it was, in spite of Sally and the children, in spite of so many things, the loneliness of the journey appalled him. Yet he meant to take it. Looking down upon Sebastian’s face, so grimly satisfied in death, he had pledged himself to take it. “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go.” He had half-started so many times, turned back completely many times. He would not again. If he did not hold on this time his way would never again converge upon Sebastian’s.

  “ ’Ere you are, sir,” said Mrs. Wilkes, approaching him with a white bundle.

  David recalled himself to where he was and blinked stupidly at the bundle. When greeting his children for the first time he could never summon up the enthusiasm proper to the occasion. Just at first it was difficult not to dislike them for the time they’d given Sally; until they started to wail in that unbearably reproachful manner which to his morbid way of thinking put the whole blame for everything, the sorrows of their own adult lives included, upon himself. And they were so ugly. Meg had been puny and yellow, like a minute Chinese hobgoblin. Robin had been scarlet as a boiled lobster and bald as an egg. Both had looked a hundred years old, wizened and intolerably wise. But it had to be got through.

  “He’s all right, Mrs. Wilkes?” he asked cheerfully.

  “Finest child I ever delivered,” triumphed Mrs. Wilkes. “Tipped the scales at eight and two ounces. ’E’s all right, bless ’im, barring ’e’s a girl. . . .There now, sir, you’d better sit down. Tired right out, you must be, wot with one thing and another. Sit down in that chair and you shall ’ave ’er, the ducks. Asleep, she is. Nursing the child ain’t wot’s considered right these days, but that Nurse What’s-it, she’s downstairs making ’erself a cupper tea and wot the eye don’t see the ’eart don’t grieve for.”

  “Does Mrs. Eliot know he’s a girl?” asked David weakly.

  “Yes, sir. She don’t take it to ’eart. Just said, ‘Never mind. I’ll ’ave Christopher next time.’ ”

  David groaned within himself and sat in the chair indicated by Mrs. Wilkes. She gave him his daughter and went out of the room (tactful, delightful, unprofessional woman that she was) shutting the door behind her. David braced himself, parted the folds of the shawl and looked down upon a face like a flower. Slowly the baby opened her eyes and looked at him. He maintained forever afterwards, against great scepticism, that for a full three minutes her great violet eyes were not unfocused, but looked straight into his. All his exhaustion and lethargy left him as he gazed down into those astonishing eyes. He would not love another child as he loved Meg, that was not possible; but it was to this child, his daughter Christiana, that he would hand on whatever had been given to him of the genius that delights and enlightens the darkness of the world. He could not wake Sally to exult with him, but through the open door he could see her bright head on the pillow, and the golden light streaming into the room. The sky was flecked all over with gold clouds like feathers, as though wings protected the world. Sunset or sunrise, he had forgotten now which it was. The old house seemed to hold them both, and to hold, too, a welling up of freshness, as though it renewed its youth in the youth of this marvelous child.