Bessies Fortune | Page 6

felt that,
for it, he owed her perfect allegiance, from which he never swerved.

CHAPTER II.
GREY JERROLD.

Just a year after the grand wedding at Grey's Park, there was born to
Burton and Geraldine a little boy, so small and frail and puny, that
much solicitude would have been felt for him had there not been a
greater anxiety for the young mother, who went so far down toward the
river of death that every other thought was lost in the great fear for her.
Then the two sisters, Hannah and Lucy, came, the latter giving all her
time to Geraldine, and the former devoting herself to the feeble little
child, whose constant wail so disturbed the mother that she begged
them to take it away where she could not hear it cry, it made her so
nervous.
Geraldine did not like children, and she seemed to care so little for her
baby that Hannah, who had loved it with her whole soul the moment
she took it in her arms and felt its soft cheek against her own, said to
her brother one day:
"I must go home to-morrow, but let me take baby with me. His crying
disturbs your wife, who hears him however far he may be from her
room. He is a weak little thing, but I will take the best of care of him,
and bring him back a healthy boy."
Burton saw no objection to the plan, and readily gave his consent,
provided his wife was willing.
Although out of danger, Geraldine was still too sick to care for her
baby, and so it went with Hannah to the old home among the rocks,
where it grew round and plump, and pretty, and filled the house with
the music of its cooing and its laughter, and learned to stretch its fat
hands toward the old grandfather, who never took it in his arms, or laid
his hands upon it. But Hannah once saw him kneeling by the cradle
where the child was sleeping, and heard him whisper through his tears:
"God bless you, my darling boy, and may you never know what it is to
sin as I have sinned, until I am not worthy to touch you with my finger.
Oh, God forgive and make me clean as this little child."
Then Hannah knew why her father kept aloof from his grandson, and
pitied him more than she had done before.

It was the first of October before Geraldine came up to Allington to
claim her boy, of whom she really knew nothing.
Only once since her marriage had she been to the farm-house, and then
she had driven to the door in her handsome carriage with the
high-stepping bays, and had held up her rich silk dress as she passed
through the kitchen into the "best room," around which she glanced a
little contemptuously.
"Not as well furnished as my cook's room," she thought, but she tried to
be gracious, and said how clean every thing was, and asked Hannah if
she did not get very tired doing her own work, and praised the dahlias
growing by the south door, and ate a few plums, and drank some water,
which she said was so cold that it made her think of the famous well at
Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.
"Your well must be very deep. Where is it?" she asked, not because she
cared, but because she must say something.
On being told it was in the woodshed she started for it, and mistaking
the door, was walking into a bedroom, when she was seized roughly by
her father-in-law, whose face was white as ashes, and whose voice
shook, as he said:
"Not in there; this is the way."
For an instant Geraldine looked at him in surprise he seemed so
agitated; then, thinking to herself that probably his room was in
disorder, and the bed unmade, she dismissed it from her mind, and
went to investigate the well, whose water tasted like that at Carisbrooke
Castle.
Half an hour in all she remained at the farm-house, and that was the
only time she had honored it with her presence until the day when she
came to take her boy away.
Not yet fully recovered from her dangerous illness, she assumed all the
airs of an invalid, and kept her wraps around her, and shrank a little

when her husband put her boy in her lap, and asked her if he was not a
beauty, and did not do justice to Hannah's care, and the brindle cow
whose milk he had fed upon. And in truth he was a healthy, beautiful
child, with eyes as blue as the skies of June, and light chestnut hair,
which lay in thick curls