Household by Florence Stevenson

She had cheered up mightily at the birth of Richard Anthony, a darkhaired, blue-eyed bouncing baby, who, Richard smiled, was the image of himself. Now 16-year-old Richard, called Tony, was already displaying a strong sense of responsibility as became his heir.
    Catlin had been full of hope for the child she conceived only two months after she bore Tony, but she lost it during her third month, muttering about Molly again. It was after that miscarriage that she began to put on a little weight, he remembered. She gained more after her next baby was born dead, and she fell into a depression which seemingly could be appeased only by food. She was, however, only pleasingly plump at Kathleen’s birth. Their first daughter had been a scrawny, three-pound infant, but he had another smile for the tawny-haired, golden eyed beauty she was at only 14. Catlin cheered up mightily, and while she did not lose the weight she had gained after Kathleen’s birth, she was still beautiful and happy with her two adorable children. He would have been pleased, he recalled, if she had had no more lyings-in. Unfortunately it seemed that he had only to make love to her once for her to conceive. Before the births of Colin, twelve, and Juliet, ten, one child had been born dead and the other survived only until his first birthday. But why could not Catlin, like himself, have been satisfied with the four lovely children who had lived? Colin and Juliet were the equal of their older brother and sister—the boy dark and handsome, the girl fair, blonde and the image of her mother with her huge blue eyes and sylph-like slimness. He shuddered, praying that Juliet would never balloon out like the near-monstrosity that lay beside him.
    As slender and willowy as Catlin had been when they first met, she had become a caricature of that ethereal beauty. Her lovely eyes and straight little nose were minimized by her enormous cheeks. At least four chins augmented her own, and from the size of her belly it was hard to believe that she was not expecting triplets!
    It was not only the loss of her looks that depressed him. It was the superstition that seemed to rule her life at present. As often as he had told her that it was ridiculous to imagine that these children were born under a dark star and destined for misery, Catlin refused to believe otherwise. She had told him that that damned figment of her imagination, the banshee, had said as much. Moreover the creature had, she insisted, come to wail on their castle battlements to the neglect of her Irish haunts.
    Thinking on it, it seemed incredible to him that he could have married a woman who saw portents in stones, brooks, trees, animals, birds and, as for the moon, sun and stars, not a day passed that one or another was not giving her cause for alarm.
    Of recent years, she had spent hours on her knees in the old partially ruined chapel, which had been a storeroom until she refurbished it with her damned Papist crosses, statues and paintings. If he had not waxed so adamant, she would have installed a resident priest as well! Even so, she was always after him to bring one in—and always for the same reason. Ever since the death of her last child, she had believed herself doomed and damned by her participation in the revels at Medmenham.
    “’Twas an altar for evil, I was,” she had cried as they had put the little coffin containing the remnants of Mahon, their late son and last infant into the family crypt in the churchyard. “It’s damned I am and my children, too.”
    He had done his best to convince her that what she had observed had been naught but a cleverly designed mask along with winds which had probably been churned up by some sort of gigantic bellows. He spoke to deaf ears. Catlin’s one answer was to point out the loss of six children, tragedies she blamed on the terrible moments when she inadvertently had participated in that Satanic Mass. There was no convincing her that she had been victim rather than