Anna Lombard, page 219 by Victoria Cross
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d times a day, "What should I do?"
For herself, she seemed completely to have forgotten all that she had begged and entreated of me before the child was born. All the arrangements that had been made for its care and future home, far from Anna, I canceled without consulting her. She never alluded to them. All the frenzy of hate she had expressed to me in shamed whispers, seemed like something I must have heard in a dream. The child's actual presence had effaced, apparently, all those months and the feelings that belonged to them, as if they had never been.
One day, when a little over a month had passed since the birth of the child, I was sitting in my study at work, when she sent down for me and asked me to come to her. I went at once with my heart beating. It was possible, I thought, that the first abandonment of maternal love was past, and she wanted to take me back into her thoughts and life. Perhaps I had been unjust and impatient in my judgment of her. If, in the first blindness and intoxication of her love, she had passed me over and neglected me, it was wholly natural and to be forgiven; but now it was over, and she had remembered me.
With hope in my eyes and heart, I knocked gently at her closed door, and in answer to her gay "Come in "I entered, and all the hope died out. She had, apparently, been dressing the child, for the room was littered with lace and linen and veils, and the child itself was supported by cushions in its bassinette, and sat up like a doll in a yoluminous cloud of muslin. With her head half-turned backward to the cradle, she came to the door and took my hand and drew me over to it.
"Look, Gerald; doesn't he look lovely in his new clothes? Isn't he a darling?"
I stood silent and rigid by the cot. "What a bitter thing is jealousy! And that first deadly sip of it that we take from the cup, generally held to our lips by the hands we have loved and trusted till then that is the worst moment. That surpasses in pain the tragedies and open warfare that may c