Miss Nash, the baby carriage in front of her, furrowed a way through
the traffic of the avenue, relatively scant in those days, and reaching
the safety of the other side passed within the Park. She was a trained
child's-nurse, and wore a uniform. England being at that time the only
source of this specialty, examples in New York were limited to the
heirs-apparent of the noble families. Between a nursemaid and a trained
child's-nurse you will notice the same distinction as between a lady's
maid and a princess's lady-in-waiting.
Having entered the Park, Miss Nash stopped the carriage to lift the
veil protecting her charge. He was already beyond the noises and
distractions of the planet in his rosy, heavenly sleep. Miss Nash
smiled wistfully, because it was the only way in which she could smile
at all. A superior woman by nature, she clung to that refinement
which best expresses itself in something melancholic. Daughter of a
solicitor's clerk and niece to a curate, she felt her status as a lady
most fittingly preserved in an atmosphere delicate, subdued, and rather
sad.
And yet when she looked on her little boy asleep she was no longer
superior, and scarcely so much as a lady. She was only a woman
enraptured before one of those babies so compact of sweetness,
affection, and intelligence that they tug at the heartstrings. She was
on her guard as to loving her children overmuch, since it made it so
hard to give them up when the minute for doing so arrived; but with
this little fellow no guard had been effective. Whether he crowed, or
cried, or kicked, or snuggled in her arms to croon with her in baby
tunelessness, she found him adorable. But when he was asleep, chubby,
seraphic, so awesomely undefiled, she was sure that his spirit had
withdrawn from her for a little while to commune with the angels.
"No," she confessed one day to her friend, Miss Etta Messenger, the
only other uniformed child's nurse among her acquaintance in New York,
"it won't do. I must break myself. I shall have to leave him some day.
But I do envy the mother who will have him always."
"It don't pay you," Miss Messenger declared, as one who has had
experience. "Anyone, I always say, can hire my services; but my
affections remain my own. Now this little girl I'm with while I'm in
New York, I could leave her to-morrow without a pang if--but then I've
got something to leave her _for_."
"And what does he say to things now?" Miss Nash inquired, with selfless
interest in her friend's drama.
Miss Messenger answered, judicially, "I've put it to him straight. I've
told him he must simply fix a date to marry me, or give me up. As I
know he simply won't give me up--you never knew a fellow so wild about
a girl as he is about me...."
The fortnight which had intervened between that conversation and the
morning when our little boy's story opens had given time for Miss
Messenger's affairs to take another turn. In the hope of learning
the details of this turn Miss Nash sought a corner of the Park, not
much frequented by nursemaids, where she and Miss Messenger often
met, but Etta was not there. Drawing the carriage within the shade of
a miniature grove of lilacs in perfumed flower, Miss Nash once more
lifted the veil, wiped the precious mouth, and adjusted the coverlet
outside which lay the mittened baby hands. Since there was no more to
be done, she sat down on a convenient bench to her reading of _Juliet
Allingham's Sin_.
In the scene where the lover drowns she became so absorbed as not to
notice that on a bench on the other side of a lilac bush Miss Messenger
came and installed herself and her baby carriage in the shade of a
near-by fan-shaped elm, bronze-green in its young leafage. Miss Nash
looked up only when, her emotions having grown so poignant, she could
read no more. She was drying her eyes when, through the branches of the
lilac, the flutter of a nurse's cape told her that her friend must have
arrived.
"Why, Etta!"
On going round the barrier she found herself greeted by what she had
come to call Etta's fighting eyes. They were fine flashing black eyes,
set in a face which Miss Nash was further accustomed to describe as
"high-complexioned." Miss Messenger spoke listlessly, and yet as one
who knew her mind.
"I saw you. I thought I wouldn't interrupt. I haven't very good news."
Miss Nash glided to a seat beside her friend, seizing both her hands.
"Oh, my dear, he hasn't----?"
"That's just what he has." Etta nodded, drily. "Bring your baby round
here and I'll tell you."
But Miss Nash couldn't wait. "He's all right there. He's sound asleep.
I'll hear him if he stirs. Do tell me what's happened."
"Well, he simply says that if that's the way I feel perhaps we'd better
call it off."
"And are you going to?"
Etta's eyes blazed with their black flames. "Call it off? Me? Not much,
I won't."
"Still if he won't fix a date...."
"He'll jolly well fix a date--or meet me in the court."
"Oh, but, Etta, you wouldn't...."
"I don't say I would for choice. There are two or three other things I
could do, and I think I'll try them first."
"What sort of things?"
In the answer to that question Miss Nash was even more absorbed than in
Juliet Allingham's sin. Juliet Allingham was after all but a creature
of the brain; whereas Etta Messenger's adventures might conceivably
be her own. It was not merely some one else's love story that held
her imagination in thrall; it was the possibility that one of these
days she, Milly Nash, might have a man playing fast and loose with her
heart's purest offering....