Christians Mistake | Page 5

they being old enough not only to understand this, but previously taught; as most people are so fatally ready to teach children, the usual doctrine about step-mothers, and also quite ready to rebel against the same?
The step-mother likewise, what could she do, even had she recognized and felt all that the children's behavior implied?
Alas! (I say "alas!" for this was as sad a thing as the other) she did not recognize it. She scarcely noticed it at all. In her countenance was no annoyance--no sharp pain, that even in that first bridal hour she was not first and sole, as every woman may righteously wish to be. There came to her no sting of regret, scarcely unnatural, to watch another woman's children already taking the first and best of that fatherly love which it would be such exquisite joy to see lavished upon her own. Alas! poor Christian! all these things passed over her as the wind passes over a bare February tree, stirring no emotions, for there were none to stir. Her predominating feeling was a vague sense of relief in the presence of the children, and of delight in the exceeding beauty of the youngest.
"This is Oliver. I remember you told me his name. Will he come to me? children generally do," said she in a shy sort of way, but still holding out her arms. In her face and manner was that inexplicable motherliness which some girls have even while nursing their dolls --some never; ay, though they may boast of a houseful of children-- never!
Master Oliver guessed this by instinct, as children always do. He looked at her intently, a queer, mischievous, yet penetrating look; then broke into a broad, genial laugh, quite Bacchic and succumbed. Christian, the solitary governess, first the worse than orphan, and then the real orphan, without a friend or relative in the world, felt a child clinging round her neck--a child toward whom, by the laws of God and man, she was bound to fulfill all the duties of a mother--duties which, from the time when she insisted on having a "big doll," that she might dress it, not like a fine lady, but "like a baby," had always seemed to her the very sweetest in all the world. Her heart leaped with a sudden ecstasy, involuntary and uncontrollable.
"My bonny boy!" she murmured, kissing the top of that billowy curl which extended from brow to crown--"my curl"--for Oliver immediately and proudly pointed it to her. "And to think that his mother never saw him. Poor thing! poor thing!"
Dr. Grey turned away to the window. What remembrances, bitter or sweet, came over the widower's heart, Heaven knows! But he kept them between himself and Heaven, as he did all things that were incommunicable and inevitable, and especially all things that could have given pain to any human being. He only said on returning,
"I knew, Christian, from the first, that you would be a good mother to my children."
She looked up at him, the tears in her eyes, but with a great light shining in them too.
"I will try."
Poor Christian! If her hasty marriage, or any other mistake of her life, needed pardon, surely it might be won for the earnest sincerity of this vow, and for its self-forgetful, utter humility--"I will try."
For another half hour, at her entreaty, the children staid, though Letitia and Arthur never relaxed from their dignified decorum farther than to inform her that they were sometimes called "Titia" and "Atty;" that their nurse was named Phillis; and that she had remained in the carriage because "she said she would not come in." Still, having expected nothing, the young step-mother was not disappointed. And when the three left, Oliver having held up his rosy mouth voluntarily for "a good large kiss," the sweetness of the caress lingered on her mouth like a chrism of consecration, sanctifying her for these new duties which seemed to have been sent to her without her choice, almost without her volition; for she often felt, when she paused to thing at all, as if in the successive links of circumstances which had brought about her marriage, she had been a passive agent, led on step by step, like a person half asleep. Would she ever awake?
When Mrs. Ferguson, re-entering, ready with any amount of sympathy, found the young step-mother kissing her hand to the retreating carriage with a composed smile, which asked no condolence, and offered no confidences, the good lady was, to say the least, surprised. "But," as she afterward confessed to at least two dozen of her most intimate friends, "there always was something so odd, so different from most young ladies about Miss. Oakley." However, to the young lady herself she said nothing, except suggesting, rather meekly, that it was time