There and Back | Page 4

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 hunger and thirst he had not invented, and did not understand. His mother had helplessly forsaken him, but the God in another woman had taken him up: there was a soul to love him, two arms to carry him, and a strong heart to shelter him.
Sir Wilton returned to London, and there enjoyed himself--not much, but a little the more that no woman sat at Mortgrange