On reaching the landing where was his study door, Salome turned to look at him before ascending further. Her face was white, her eyes red with weeping. Wondrously beautiful in colour and reflected light was her ruddy gold hair bursting out from under the crape bonnet above her pallid face.
She said nothing, but waited expectantly, with her brown eyes on his face. He received the look with imperturbable self-restraint, opened his door, and without a word went into his study.
Salome’s bosom heaved, a great sob broke from it; and then she hastily continued her ascent. She had made her final appeal, and it had been rejected.
Mrs. Cusworth had died worth an inconsiderable sum, and that she had left to Janet, as more likely to need it than Salome.
And now that the last rites had been paid to the kindhearted, if stupid and illiterate old woman, who had loved Salome as her own child, Salome turned to her baby to pour forth upon it, undivided, the rich torrent of her love, gushing tinged with blood from a wounded heart.
There exists a sympathetic tie in nature and in human relations of which Philip had never thought—that between the mother and the babe. And now the wrong done to the mother reacted, revenged itself on her child. The little one had been ailing for a while, now it became seriously ill. The strain to which Salome had been put made itself felt in the weak frame of the infant that clung to her breast. Salome would allow no one to nurse her darling but herself whilst its precious life was in danger, and the child would, on its part, allow no one else to touch it. It sobbed and cried and demanded of its mother infinite patience and pity, unwearied rocking in her arms and hugging to her heart, a thousand kisses, and many tears, words of infinite love and soothing addressed to it, soft sighs breathed over it from an utterly weary bosom, and earnest prayers, voiceless often, but ever ascending, as the steam of the earth to heaven.
For awhile, care for the babe excluded all other thoughts, devoured all other cares. Through the long still night Salome was by her child; she did not go to bed, she sat in the room by its crib, sometimes taking it on her lap, in her arms, then, when it was composed to sleep, laying it again in its cradle. She heard every stroke of the clock at every hour. She could not sleep, she could but watch and pray.