The Pool in the Desert | Page 5

eyes; she should have all the compensation that could be. I
suddenly realized how ready I was--how ready!--to have her back. I
rebelled fiercely against John's decision that we must not take her with
us on our return to the frontier; privately, I resolved to dispute it, and, if
necessary, I saw myself abducting the child--my own child. My days
and nights as the ship crept on were full of a long ache to possess her;
the defrauded tenderness of the last four years rose up in me and
sometimes caught at my throat. I could think and talk and dream of
nothing else. John indulged me as much as was reasonable, and only
once betrayed by a yawn that the subject was not for him endlessly
absorbing. Then I cried and he apologized. 'You know,' he said, 'it isn't
exactly the same thing. I'm not her mother.' At which I dried my tears
and expanded, proud and pacified. I was her mother!
Then the rainy little station and Alice, all-embracing in a damp
waterproof, and the drive in the fly, and John's mother at the gate and a
necessary pause while I kissed John's mother. Dear thing, she wanted to
hold our hands and look into our faces and tell us how little we had

changed for all our hardships; and on the way to the house she actually
stopped to point out some alterations in the flower-borders. At last the
drawing-room door and the smiling housemaid turning the handle and
the unforgettable picture of a little girl, a little girl unlike anything we
had imagined, starting bravely to trot across the room with the little
speech that had been taught her. Half-way she came; I suppose our
regards were too fixed, too absorbed, for there she stopped with a wail
of terror at the strange faces, and ran straight back to the outstretched
arms of her Aunt Emma. The most natural thing in the world, no doubt.
I walked over to a chair opposite with my hand-bag and umbrella and
sat down--a spectator, aloof and silent. Aunt Emma fondled and quieted
the child, apologizing for her to me, coaxing her to look up, but the
little figure still shook with sobs, hiding its face in the bosom that it
knew. I smiled politely, like any other stranger, at Emma's deprecations,
and sat impassive, looking at my alleged baby breaking her heart at the
sight of her mother. It is not amusing even now to remember the anger
that I felt. I did not touch her or speak to her; I simply sat observing my
alien possession, in the frock I had not made and the sash I had not
chosen, being coaxed and kissed and protected and petted by its Aunt
Emma. Presently I asked to be taken to my room, and there I locked
myself in for two atrocious hours. Just once my heart beat high, when a
tiny knock came and a timid, docile little voice said that tea was ready.
But I heard the rustle of a skirt, and guessed the directing angel in Aunt
Emma, and responded, 'Thank you, dear, run away and say that I am
coming,' with a pleasant visitor's inflection which I was able to sustain
for the rest of afternoon.
'She goes to bed at seven,' said Emma.
'Oh, does she?' said I. 'A very good hour, I should think.'
'She sleeps in my room,' said Mrs. Farnham.
'We give her mutton broth very often, but seldom stock soup,' said
Aunt Emma. 'Mamma thinks it is too stimulating.'
'Indeed?' said I, to all of it.

They took me up to see her in her crib, and pointed out, as she lay
asleep, that though she had 'a general look' of me, her features were
distinctively Farnham.
'Won't you kiss her?' asked Alice. 'You haven't kissed her yet, and she
is used to so much affection.'
'I don't think I could take such an advantage of her,' I said.
They looked at each other, and Mrs. Farnham said that I was plainly
worn out. I mustn't sit up to prayers.
If I had been given anything like reasonable time I might have made a
fight for it, but four weeks--it took a month each way in those
days--was too absurdly little; I could do nothing. But I would not stay
at mamma's. It was more than I would ask of myself, that daily
disappointment under the mask of gratified discovery, for long.
I spent an approving, unnatural week, in my farcical character, bridling
my resentment and hiding my mortification with pretty phrases; and
then I went up to town and drowned my sorrows in the summer sales. I
took John with me. I may have been Cecily's mother in theory, but I
was