“Oh, they know well enough,” she snapped.
“Those nurses know, and there’s a pig
of a red-bearded doctor—I’d like to
poison him. Separating mother and child!
I’m going to find him, if only to show them
they are not so smart after all.”
In her anger she had lapsed into English. Harmony,
behind her curtain, had clutched at her heart.
Jimmy’s mother!
Jimmy was not so well, although Harmony’s flight
had had nothing to do with the relapse. He had
found Marie a slavishly devoted substitute, and besides
Peter had indicated that Harmony’s absence was
purely temporary. But the breaking-up was inevitable.
All day long the child lay in the white bed, apathetic
but sleepless. In vain Marie made flower fairies
for his pillow, in vain the little mice, now quite
tame, played hide-and-seek over the bed, in vain Peter
paused long enough in his frantic search for Harmony
to buy colored postcards and bring them to him.
He was contented enough; he did not suffer at all;
and he had no apprehension of what was coming.
He asked for nothing, tried obediently to eat, liked
to have Marie in the room. But he did not beg
to be taken into the salon, as he once had done.
There was a sort of mental confusion also. He
liked Marie to read his father’s letters; but
as he grew weaker the occasional confusing of Peter
with his dead father became a fixed idea. Peter
was Daddy.
Peter took care of him at night. He had moved
into Harmony’s adjacent room and dressed there.
But he had never slept in the bed. At night he
put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers
and lay on a haircloth sofa at the foot of Jimmy’s
bed—lay but hardly slept, so afraid was
he that the slender thread of life might snap when
it was drawn out to its slenderest during the darkest
hours before the dawn. More than once in every
night Peter rose and stood, hardly breathing, with
the tiny lamp in his hand, watching for the rise and
fall of the boy’s thin little chest. Peter
grew old these days. He turned gray over the
ears and developed lines about his mouth that never
left him again. He felt gray and old, and sometimes
bitter and hard also. The boy’s condition
could not be helped: it was inevitable, hopeless.
But the thing that was eating his heart out had been
unnecessary and cruel.
Where was Harmony? When it stormed, as it did
almost steadily, he wondered how she was sheltered;
when the occasional sun shone he hoped it was bringing
her a bit of cheer. Now and then, in the night,
when the lamp burned low and gusts of wind shook the
old house, fearful thoughts came to him—the
canal, with its filthy depths. Daylight brought
reason, however. Harmony had been too rational,
too sane for such an end.
