There and Back | Page 4

fascinated by its ugliness.
Without absolute deformity, the child was indeed as unsightly as infant
well could be.

"My God!" he said again--for he had a trick of crying out as if he had a
God--"the little brute hates me! Take it away, woman. Take it away
before I strangle it! I can't answer for myself if it keeps on looking at
me!"
With a glance whose mingled anger and scorn the father did not see,
the nurse turned and went.
He kept staring after her till the door shut, then fell back into his chair,
exclaiming once more, "My God!"--What or whom he meant by the
word, it were hard to say.
"Is it possible," he said to himself, "that the fine woman I married--for
she was a fine woman, a deuced fine woman!--should have died to
present the world with such a travesty! It's like nothing human! It's an
affront to the family! Ah! the strain will show! They say your sins will
find you out! It was a sin to marry the woman! Damned fool I was! But
she bewitched me! I was bewitched!--Curse the little monster! I shan't
breathe again till I'm out of the house! Where was the doctor? He ought
to have seen to it! Hang it all, I'll go abroad!"
Ugly as the child was, however, to many an eye the first thing evident
in him would have been his strong likeness to his father--whose
features were perfect, though at the moment, and at many a moment,
their expression was other than attractive. Sir Wilton disliked children,
and the dislike was mutual. Never did child run to him; never was child
unwilling to leave him. Escaping from his grasp, he would turn and
look back, like Christian emerging from the Valley of the Shadow, as if
to weigh the peril he had been in.
As tenderly as if he had been the loveliest of God's children, the woman
bore her charge up staircases, and through corridors and passages, to
the remote nursery, where, in a cradle whose gay furniture contrasted
sadly with the countenance of the child and the fierceness of her own
eyes, she gently laid him down. But long after he was asleep, she
continued to bend over him, as if with difficulty restraining herself
from clasping him again to her bosom.
Jane Tuke had been married four or five years, but had no children, and
the lack seemed to have intensified her maternity. Elder sister to lady
Lestrange, she had gone gladly to receive her child in her arms, and had
watched and waited for it with an expectation far stronger than that of
the mother; for so thorough was lady Lestrange's disappointment in her

husband, that she regarded the advent of his child almost with
indifference. Jane had an absolute passion for children. She had
married a quarter for faith, a quarter for love, and a whole half for hope.
This divinely inexplicable child-passion is as unintelligible to those
devoid of it, as its absence is marvellous to those possessed by it. Its
presence is its justification, its being its sole explanation, itself its
highest reason. Surely on those who cherish it, the shadow of the
love-creative God must rest more than on some other women!
Unpleasing as was the infant, to know him her own would have made
the world a paradise to Jane. Her heart burned with divine indignation
at the wrongs already heaped upon him. Hardly born, he was
persecuted! Ugly! he was not ugly! Was he not come straight from the
fountain of life, from the Father of children? That such a father as she
had left in the library should repudiate him was well! She loved to
think of his rejection. She brooded with delight, in the midst of her
wrath, on every word of disgust that had fallen from his unfatherly lips.
The more her baby was rejected, the more he was hers! He belonged to
her, and her only, for she only loved him! She could say with France in
_King Lear_, "Be it lawful I take up what's cast away!" To her the
despised one was the essence of all riches. The joy of a miser is less
than the joy of a mother, as gold is less than a live soul, as greed is less
than love. No vision of jewels ever gave such a longing as this woman
longed with after the child of her dead sister.
The body that bore was laid in the earth, the thing born was left upon it.
The mother had but come, exposed her infant on the rough shore of
time, and forsaken him in his nakedness. There he lay, not knowing
whence he came, or whither he was going, urged to live by a