GWEN’S duty-forced efforts to comfort her father, were incessant, and
rather tragic; he said very little and worked his usual number of hours
conscientiously at his latest work, but the best part of him was away.
His head bowed a little more every day, his step fell a little more
heavily, his eye lost a fresh spark of life; he was following his wife
in his patient, well-bred manner, with neither cry nor moan.
Sudden fits of half compunctuous duty would now and again seize upon
him, and remind him that he had a daughter who also knew sorrow, then he
would pursue Gwen softly, and catch her, no matter how inconvenient it
might be, and ply her with questions on embarrassing topics. Gwen was
very gentle with him and used to do him small services with a curious
shy anxiety that had a touch of motherliness in it.
One day late in August Mrs. Fellowes was sitting down for a brief rest,
when to her astonishment Gwen was announced, she had never sought her of
her own accord since her mother’s death.
She sat down now quite naturally, and looked round the room with a
pleased smile.
“Ah! you have altered that bracket, it used to be in the other corner!
And the piano, I hardly know if I like it there—I believe I do. I wonder
why my tea is never an atom like yours, is it the cream, or the cups, or
what?”
When she had drunk her tea she put the cup down and said suddenly, “I
would like to go to Strange Hall next week, will you come with me?”
“Next week!” repeated Mrs. Fellowes.
“Yes, I know this sudden move looks rather insane, but I have been
thinking it over for some time. The child is Humphrey’s, it has a right
to be born in the home of its father, and—and—I cannot go without you!”
“I shouldn’t dream of letting you, my Gwen, only you took me by
surprise. Mary will go too, of course, but what about your father?”
Gwen looked disturbed.
“I don’t know. Do you think my going or staying will make much
difference to him?”
“I do, dear, a very great difference, but he will think as I do, now you
have spoken, that you are doing right. When we are away John will be
with him every moment he can spare.”
“As if I didn’t know that!” Gwen said. “I will tell him to-night.”
To the amazement of them all, Mr. Waring, as soon as he had grasped the
situation, rose to it in a quite remarkable way; the proceeding on
Gwen’s part struck him as most fit and proper, and he braced himself up
to support her. He also announced his intention of accompanying the
_cortège_.
In the first shock of his resolve Gwen winced; the fact of carrying him
in her train and on such an errand brought a spice of ludicrousness into
the affair that seemed to her ghastly.
The day before they started she surprised him in the study, grasping in
one hand a heap of manuscript in her mother’s pretty hand-writing and
reading with knit brows a copy of Chavasse’s “Advice to a Mother.”
This was too much for Gwen, she escaped to her room, and cried and
laughed, and cried and laughed again in a perfect paroxysm of grief and
piteous amusement.
It was in the end quite a toss-up as to Gwen’s ever seeing her baby at
all, she hovered so long on the borders of death. Her silent lonely
enduring anguish had shattered her more than any of them had guessed,
and then, as ill-luck would have it, the first sound that struck on her
ear when consciousness was coming back was the shrill shriek of her
lusty boy.
She shuddered down again into the regions of darkness, and it was only
after two distracting hours that they got her back among them.
Day after day she held the child and pondered over it; she was very
gentle, and ate and drank in an absent way all that was given her, but
she hardly spoke at all, some leaven was working in her.
“Then this haunting, sweet-bitter pain is motherhood,” she thought, the
first day she was up, as she watched the sleeping child gobbling a red
fist, “and it’s for this that one half the women in the world live and
brood Madonna-like over their infants, with that awful peace in their
eyes which takes the commonness from the most common of them! Goodness,
what wouldn’t I give for just the merest knowledge of that motherhood
that rests and broods and commands the world! That painted wretch
downstairs is teeming with it, and—it’s bitter, it’s terrible, to want
your mother as I want mine now, to teach me the meaning of motherhood!”
She stood up, and leaned forward over the baby.
“If this feeling grows much more in me I shall go mad,” she murmured, “I
am not quite sane now. Baby, my own little baby, can’t you help me, to
be in absolute touch with the beautiful mysterious things that are the
crown of womanhood? Seemingly not,” she said turning away, “with all
your warm sweetness. I believe I have a fair understanding of this part
of a mother, I could make a fool of myself over the tiny thing there, I
could—Oh!—Mother, mother! Can I never forget you over my hands! Must a
new heartache spring up every hour? Is there rest nowhere?—Ah, Humphrey,
if only I weren’t myself and you weren’t just you, I’d set off this
minute and find you!—Certainly I am mad, and here are Mrs. Fellowes and
Mary upon me!”