A Soldier of the Legion | Page 9

he could, but I couldn't forget. The lynx-face, with
the yellow eyes and red hair like mine, haunted me. I began to dream of
my child being born like that--a girl, deformed in the horrid, mysterious
way that you could only feel. I could never go to sleep again on a night
after the dream. I suppose I looked pale; and he worried, and the
doctors advised the country. We had some friends who'd just come
back from the Loire, and they told us about a wonderful château there
that was to be rented furnished. It belonged to an old family named de
la Tour, who had lost their money. They had a romantic, tragic sort of
history that interested us, especially Jack, so we went to see the place.
There were vineyards badly cultivated, and a forest, and some shooting,
too; and we took it for a few months. But we hadn't been there many
weeks when a telegram came to Jack from Edwin Reeves. Edwin acted
for him even then. It was important, on account of some business, for
Jack to go home. He would have answered that it was impossible, but I
said, why not go? I was safe, and he could be back in a month or five
weeks. I had old Anne Wickham with me, and she'd been my nurse
when I was a little girl, you know, and my maid afterward, till she died.
You can remember her."
Max could. As a very tiny boy he had been almost afraid of old Anne
Wickham, because his nurse was afraid of her: also because she had
glared at him critically, mercilessly, with her great eyes in dark hollows,
never smiling kindly, as other people did, but seeming to search for
some fault in him. Now, suddenly, he understood this gloomy riddle of
his childhood.
Rose Doran, beneath her veil, did not wait for any answer, or wish for
one. She hurried on, only stopping now and then to sigh out her
restlessness and pain, making Max bite his lip and quiver as if under
the lash.
"We had a Paris doctor engaged, and a trained nurse," she said. "They
were to come weeks before I expected my baby. I don't know how
much Jack was to pay for the doctor--thousands of dollars; and Jack

thought to be back in a month before, at latest. But one day I caught my
foot going downstairs, and fell. We had to send for the village doctor in
a hurry, and Anne had to remember all she knew about nursing. The
child was a seven months' baby--a girl. And she had a face like mine,
and like 'Bella Donna,' and like a lynx. There was just that look of
deformity I had dreamed--mysterious and dreadful. I hated the creature.
I couldn't feel she was mine and Jack's. She was like some changeling
in an old witch tale. I couldn't bear it! I knew that I'd rather die than
have Jack see that wicked elf after all his hopes. I told the doctor so. I
threatened to kill myself. I don't know if I meant it. But he thought I did.
He was a young man. I frightened him. While he was trying to comfort
me an idea flashed into my head. It seemed to shoot in, like an arrow. I
begged the doctor to find me a boy baby whose mother would take the
girl and a lot of money. I said I would give him ten thousand dollars for
himself, too, if he could manage it secretly, so no one but he and Anne
Wickham and I need ever know. At first he kept exclaiming, and
wouldn't listen. But I cried, and partly by working on his feelings and
partly with the bribe that was a fortune to such a man, I persuaded him.
Anne helped. She would have done anything for me. And she knew the
Dorans. She knew Jack could never feel the same to me, as the mother
of that impish girl.
"The doctor knew about a young woman who had just had a child--a
boy. He'd helped bring it into the world a night or two before. She was
the wife of a private soldier who'd been ordered off to Algeria
somewhere. They'd been married secretly. If she had money she would
have followed him. But they were very poor. The man was mixed up
with the romance of the de la Tours; he belonged to the branch of the
family that had gone down. They were called Delatour, but every one
knew their history. The doctor thought the girl would do anything for
the money I'd offer--and to get to Algeria. He managed the whole thing
for me, and certified that my child was