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Read Ebook: The Immortal Moment: The Story of Kitty Tailleur by Sinclair May Phillips Coles Illustrator
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Ebook has 588 lines and 12600 words, and 12 pages
"Well," he said, "what do you think of them?"
"I think they're adorable."
"Funny little beggars, aren't they? How did you get on with Janet?"
She told him.
"That's Janet's little way. To give you something of her own." He smiled in tender satisfaction, repeating the child's phrase.
"It's all right, Kitty. She's only holding herself in. You're in for a big thing."
She surveyed it.
"I know, Robert. I know."
"You're tired? Have the children been too much for you?"
She shook her head.
"You're not to make yourself a slave to them, you know."
She looked at him.
"Was I all right, Robert?"
"You were perfect."
"You said I was only a child myself."
"So you are. That's why I like you."
She shook her head again.
"It's all very well," she said, "but that isn't what you want, dear--another child."
"How do you know what I want?"
"You want somebody much nicer than I am."
He was silent, looking at her as he had looked at Barbara, enjoying her absurdity, letting her play, like the child she was, with her preposterous idea.
"You child, do you suppose I'd marry you if I didn't think you nice?"
"You might. You mightn't care."
"As it happens, I do care, very much. Anyhow, I wouldn't ask you to be a mother to my children if I didn't think you nice. That's the test."
"Yes, Robert," she repeated, "that's the test."
They rose and went back to the hotel. From the lawn they could see the open window of the children's room. They looked up.
"Would you like to see them, Kitty?"
"Yes."
He took her up to them. They were asleep. Little Barbara lay curled up in the big bed, right in the middle of it where her dreams had tossed her. Janet, in the cot beside her, lay very straight and still.
Robert signed to Kitty to come near, and they stood together and looked first at the children and then into each other's faces. Kitty was very quiet.
"Do you like them?" he whispered.
Her lips quivered, but she made no sign.
He stooped over each bed, smoothing the long hair from Janet's forehead, folding back the blanket that weighed on Barbara's little body. When he turned, Kitty had gone. She had slipped into her own room.
She waited till she heard Robert go away. The children were alone in there. The nurse, she knew, was in Jane's room across the passage. Jane was probably telling her that her master was to be married very soon.
She looked out. The door of Jane's room was shut; so was the door of the children's room through which Robert had gone out. The other, the door of communication, she had left ajar. She went softly back through it and stood again by the children's beds. Janet was still sound asleep. Her fine limbs were still stretched straight and quiet under the blanket. Her hair was as Robert's hand had left it.
Kitty was afraid of disturbing Janet's sleep. She was afraid of Janet.
She stooped over little Barbara, and turned back the bedclothes from the bed. She laid herself down, half her length, upon it by Barbara's side, and folded her in arms that scarcely touched her at first, so light they lay on her. Then some perverse and passionate impulse seized her to wake the child. She did it gently, tenderly, holding back her passion, troubling the depths of sleep with fine, feather-like touches, with kisses soft as sleep.
The child stirred under the caressing arms. She lay in her divine beauty, half asleep, half awake, opening her eyes, and shutting them on the secret of her dream. Then Kitty's troubling hand turned her from her flight down the ways of sleep. She lay on her back, her eyes glimmered in the lifting of their lids; they opened under Kitty's eyes that watched them, luminous, large and clear. Her mouth curled under Kitty's mouth, in drowsy kisses plucked from the annihilated dream. She drew up her rosy knees and held out her arms to Kitty's arms and smiled, half awake and half asleep.
Kitty rose, lifting the child with her from the bed. She held her close, pressing the tender body close to her own body with quivering hands, stroking the adorable little face with her own face, closing her eyes under the touch of it as she closed them when Robert's face touched hers. She was aware that she had brought some passionate, earthly quality of her love for Robert into her love for Robert's child.
She said to herself, "I'm terrible; there's something wrong with me. This isn't the way to love a child."
She laid the little thing down again, freed her neck from the drowsy, detaining arms, and covered the small body up out of her sight. Barbara, thus abandoned, cried, and the cry cut through her heart.
She went into her own room, and threw herself on her bed and writhed there, torn by many pangs. The pang of the heart and the pang of the half-born spirit, struggling with the body that held it back from birth; and through it all the pang of the motherhood she had thwarted and disowned. Out of the very soil of corruption it pierced, sharp and pure, infinitely painful. It was almost indiscernible from the fierce exultation of her heart that had found fulfilment, and from the passion of her body that yet waited for its own.
She undressed herself, and crept into her bed and lay there, tortured, visited by many memories. She gazed with terrified, pitiful eyes into a darkness that was peopled for her with all the faces she had known in the short seasons of her sinning; men, and the women who had been her friends and her companions; and the strangers who had passed her by, or who had lingered and looked on. The faces of Robert and his children hung somewhere on the outskirts of her vision, but she could not fix them or hold them; they were trampled out, obliterated by that phantasmal procession of her shames. Some faces, more terrible than all, detached themselves and crowded round her, the faces of those who had pursued her, and of those whom her own light feet pursued; from the first who had found her and left her, to the last whom she herself had held captive and let go. They stood about her bed; they stretched out their hands and touched her; their faces peered into hers; faces that she had forgotten. She thrust them from her into the darkness and they came again. Each bore the same likeness to his fellow; each had the same looks, the same gestures that defied her to forget. She fell asleep; and the dreams, the treacherous, perpetually remembering, delivered her into their hands.
She waked at dawn, with memory quickened by her dreams. She heard voices now, all the voices that had accused her. Her mother's voice spoke first, and it was very sad. It said, "I am sending you away, Kitty, because of the children." Then her father's voice, very stern, "No, I will not have you back. You must stay where you are for your little sisters' sake." And her mother's voice again--afterward--sad and stern, too, this time, "As you made your bed, Kitty, you must lie. We can't take you back."
She could not sleep again for listening to them.
It was morning. She dragged herself up and tried to dress. But her hands shook and her head ached violently. She stretched herself half-dressed upon her bed and lay there helpless, surrendered to the bodily pain that delivered her mercifully from the anguish of her mind.
She saw no one, not even Jane Lucy.
Outside, in the passage, and in the inner room she heard the footsteps of the children and their little shrill voices; each sound accentuated the stabbing pulse of pain. It was impossible to darken the room, and the insufferable sunlight poured in unchecked through the thin yellow blinds and plagued her brain, till the nerves of vision throbbed, beat for beat, with the nerves of torment. At noon she had only one sensation of brilliant surging pain.
She dozed and her headache lifted. When she woke her body was weak as if it had had a fever, but her mind closed on reality with the impact of a force delayed.
There was a thing not yet quite real to her, a thing that seemed to belong to the region of bodily pain, to be born there as a bad dream might be born; a thing that had been there last night among other things, that, as she stared at it, became more prominent, more poignant than they. And yet, though its air was so beckoning and so familiar, it was not among the number of things accomplished and irrevocable. It was simply the thing she had to do.
It possessed her now; and under its dominion she was uplifted, carried along. Her mind moved toward it with a reckless rocking speed, the perilous certainty of the insane.
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