Deep Summer by Gwen Bristow Page A

and then her mother had sent her with jelly or flowers to the home of some friend with a new baby, and the women always seemed happy and proud, but occasionally there were women in Connecticut who had died having children. She did not know what it was that killed them. Probably they hadn’t been well to begin with, and that ought not to bother her, for she had hardly ever been ill in her life. But it did bother her just the same. If Gervaise would only come back she could ask her about it. But Gervaise did not come again. Walter Purcell came often, riding a horse over the forest trails, and one day he called Judith into the front room and asked if there was anything she needed that Gervaise could send. Judith shook her head. “But I should like to see her,” she said.
    “I’m sorry she can’t come to you,” said Mr. Purcell. “She asked me to tell you, because you might think she did not care about your mother’s being so ill. But she is in her third month, and it takes three hours over these trails and longer if it has been raining. I won’t let her come. The jolting might kill her.”
    Judith nodded. “It’s all right. Thank you for being so good to us.”
    But as she watched him go she felt alone and frightened. She envied Gervaise in her big house thronged with servants. And Gervaise had had a child before so she knew what to expect. Judith envied her that too.
    Tibby asked her one day, “Miss Judith, is you standin’ behind a baby?”
    It was a moment before Judith grasped what she meant, and when she did she exclaimed, “Don’t you say anything like that to my father. He’s got enough to worry him.”
    Tibby said: “Yassum,” and went off mumbling, but the next time Philip came over she said to him, “Mr. Philip, you got business to take dat young un home and ease her bones.”
    But Judith would not go. By this time it was August, and she suspected her mother could not hold out much longer. Catherine was tossing and talking in broken words, and her father wandered about the house and fields, so worn and silent that Judith found his grief harder to bear than her mother’s delirium. There was little she could do beyond smoothing the pillows and trying to cool the fever with wet cloths on Catherine’s forehead, but even this was of little use, for it was still deep summer and there was no really cold water to be had. Before the end she sent a field-boy for Philip and asked him to stay at Silverwood with her. He stayed, but he seemed strangely inadequate for such a time. Philip was pained and bewildered, like a child, before a crisis against which his own vitality was helpless.
    Just before she died the wild fever look went out of Catherine’s eyes and she asked for Mark. Judith brought him, and waited in the front room with Philip and Caleb. After a little while Mark came out, closing the door softly behind him. He said nothing, but went out to the gallery, walking heavily, and Judith thought for the first time that he looked like an old man. She knew it was over, though he had not said so. She wondered what he and her mother had said to each other in those last minutes, and knew she would never be told; already she had learned that after two persons had been husband and wife there was something between them that nobody could violate. After a moment she put her hand in Philip’s and they went together out to the gallery. Caleb followed them and stood in the doorway.
    Mark sat on the step, his forehead resting on his hands. Judith went up to him softly, laying her hand on his head, and feeling how strong and stiff the hairs were under her fingers. Mark did not look up. He only said:
    “In this soft country there’s not even a stone to mark her grave.”
    Judith’s breath caught in her throat. Philip put an arm around her. She thought how strange it was that though tears usually came to her so easily when there was only slight reason for them she could not cry now.
    The slaves pegged together a