Then a great cry was shattering all the glass in the house. The walls were falling. Flesh subsided only gradually upon the ridge of the spine, to be shocked further at sound of the midwife bouncing up the stairs like an indiarubber ball. She was a very tough small woman, it seemed, who proceeded to wrestle with life itself for the remainder of the night.
In the spare room the kindly lamplight had grown inordinately hard. Nothing was any longer hid, nor would the Brussels carpet muffle. The midwife had the woman sitting on an upright chair, from which her solid gown hung in long, petrified folds. Now that the agony had begun, the girl who had willed it was herself stunned into stone. The knot of her hands was carved upon her waist, as she stood in her corner and listened to doom writing upon a slate.
Only the midwife continued to move, round and about, with the resilience of rubber.
‘Hands on the arms of the chair, dear,’ she advised. ‘You would bless me for it, if you only knew.’
But the woman in labour shrieked.
A flow of endless time began to fill the room. Laura Trevelyan would have prayed, but found that her mind was stuck to the roof of her mouth.
Even the lowing beast was, in the end, stilled.
‘It is the head that is giving the trouble,’ Mrs Child remarked, as, her face averted in considerable delicacy of curls, she fumbled and bungled under Rose Portion’s gown. ‘If you are not an obstropulous little wretch!’
The mother was beyond caring as she drowned in that sea.
In spite of her stone limbs, Laura Trevelyan could have screamed with pain. Her throat was bursting with it. They would all be strangled by the darkness, she suspected, when a curious transformation of their faces began at last to take place. Their livid, living stone was turning, by divine mercy, into flesh. The shutters were slashed with grey. Its thin stuff lay upon the newspapers with which the carpet was spread.
It is moving, we are moving, we are saved, Laura Trevelyan would have cried, if all sound had not continued frozen inside her throat. The supreme agony of joy was twisted, twisting, twisting.
Then the dawn was shrieking with jubilation. For it had begun to live. The cocks were shrilling. Doves began to soothe. Sleepers wrapped their dreams closer about them, and participated in great events. The red light was flowing out along the veins of the morning.
Laura Trevelyan bit the inside of her cheek, as the child came away from her body.
‘There,’ said the midwife. ‘Safe and sound.’
‘A little girl,’ she added with a yawn, as if the sex of the children she created was immaterial.
The actual mother fell back with little blubbering noises for her own poor flesh. She had just drunk the dregs of pain, and her mouth was still too full to answer the cries of her new-born child.
But Laura Trevelyan came forward, and took the red baby, and when she had immersed it in her waiting love, and cleaned it, and swaddled it in fresh flannel, the midwife had to laugh, and comment:
‘Well, you are that drawn, dear, about the face, anyone would think it was you had just been delivered of the bonny thing.’
Laura did not hear. All superficial sounds were swallowed up in her own songs.
Later, she carried the baby through the drowsy morning to that remote room in which her aunt had chosen to do penance. But Mrs Bonner’s cap had slipped. Day had caught her dozing in a chair. She woke up. She said:
‘I knew I would not be able to sleep for the terrible noise. So I sat in the chair, and waited.’
‘And here is the baby,’ said Laura, stooping.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Aunt Emmy. ‘What is it?’
‘It is a girl.’
‘Another girl!’
Mrs Bonner lamented the boys she did not have, and whom, she liked to think, she would have managed and understood.
‘We must do the best by her, then,’ she sighed. ‘Until her future has been settled.’
As for the baby, she had but exchanged one room for another, or so it seemed. She was still curled, with her instincts, in the transparent, pink cocoon of protective love, upon which a vague future could have no possible effect.
Mrs Bonner searched greedily for some evidence of discomfort or sickliness in the sleeping child, of ugly dangers threatening it, but found no more than a bruise or two. Nature had favoured the baby that lay so unperturbed in Laura’s arms. Then Mrs Bonner looked in the latter’s face and was a bit afraid, as if she had been present at a miracle. She did not know what to make of it.
Nor did Laura attempt to explain her own state, even to herself. Those ensuing days she was exhausted, but content. They were the baby’s days. There was a golden fuzz of morning in the garden. She could not bring herself to tread upon the tender flesh of rose petals that were showered at her feet. To avoid this, she would walk round by another way, though it meant running the gauntlet of the sun. Then her duty was most delicious. She was the living shield, that rejoiced to deflect the most savage blows. Other pains, of desert suns, of letters unwritten, of the touch of his man’s hands, with their queer pronounced finger-joints, would fluctuate, as she carried her baby along the golden tunnels of light.
There was no doubt that the child was hers; nor did the blood mother protest, lying on her hot pillows in the shuttered, best room. Rose Portion took all for granted. She would receive the child and feed it at her breast whenever she was told. She would look from her distance at its crinkled face. It was obvious that she had paid the penalty for some monstrous sin, but not the most seductive religion, not even her own baby, could have convinced her the sinner is pardoned. So the flies stood transfixed on wiry legs in the corners of the baby’s eyes. So the wool lace on the backs of the chairs stared back with a Gothic splendour. All was marvellous, but sculpture, to the frozen woman. Her stiff mouth would not move. Her hands had reached the position of infinite acceptance.
Then the mistress would begin to frown for the maid’s omissions.
‘Look, Rose, at the flies on Baby’s face. Disgusting things! They could do her some harm,’ she would scold in true concern. ‘We must ask Mr Bonner to bring us a gossamer from town.’
She herself would take up the baby in its parcel of expensive clothes, and rock it in her arms, or hold it to her shoulder, to listen to its bubbles. The mistress was very soon appeased. She forgot her irritating maid on recovering her child. The young woman would glow and throb with the warmth of the baby, whereas the maid, on surrendering her share in its transparent life, was content to relapse into her own opaque flesh, in its dull shroud of days, into which she had been sewn by circumstance.
‘What will you call the baby?’ Belle Bonner asked her cousin.
‘I do not know,’ said Laura Trevelyan. ‘We must ask Rose.’
‘Poor Rose!’ said Belle.
‘Why poor?’ asked Laura, quickly.
Belle laughed. She could not say.
Since her return from the Pringles’, the tawny Belle was also changed. She was a lioness prowling in the passages. Laura had escaped, she felt, leaving her alone in the empty cage.
Laura, however, would often remember, and look back affectionately at Belle.
‘Let us go together,’ she tried now to make amends, and touched, ‘let us go and ask Rose.’
Belle smiled sadly, but did consent to come, at a distance.
‘Rose,’ began Laura, very kindly, ‘what would you like to call your baby?’
Rose, who had risen from her bed, but continued to sit in the cool room, waiting to recover her strength, did not hesitate.
‘Mercy,’ she said.
Belle laughed, and Laura blushed.
‘That is a modest name,’ replied Belle.
‘Mercy, and nothing more?’ asked Laura.
‘Nothing,’ said Rose.
She cleared her throat. She looked down. She would have been better left alone.