The interview last recorded between Belchamber and his heir was to have
momentous consequences for both of them. The principal gain was at first
to the baby, as the immediate result was the dismissal of his neglectful
attendants. Cissy, for her part, first delicately expressed surprise at
Sainty’s interesting himself in the matter at all, and then adopted the
simple plan of refusing to believe a word against the nurse, whom she
eventually passed on to another young mother, with as strong a
recommendation as she had received of her, adding in explanation: ‘My
husband took a dislike to the woman, and so, of course, she had to go.’
Lady Eccleston was full of concern and astonishment. ‘I _can’t_
understand it,’ she cried. ‘Lady Quivers gave her the very _highest_
character, and before that, she was four years in the nursery at
Branches, first as nursery-maid and then as under-nurse, and I went to
see dear Lady Olave myself, who couldn’t say enough about her. I _can’t_
think she would really neglect the darling.’
Sainty repeated his experience, and ‘Go and see for yourself,’ he said.
‘The child is ill-cared for; he isn’t even kept clean.’
Grandmamma went to inspect, and returned declaring the angel was as neat
as a new pin. ‘You can’t, no matter _how_ careful you are, prevent their
dear little chinnywinnies from getting a wee bit chapped if they dribble
much,’ she said.
‘No doubt he was clean enough after my unexpected visit,’ Sainty
answered; ‘but I assure you _I_ didn’t find him so; his hands were dirty
and nothing about him was fresh. I don’t know much about babies, but I’m
sure they ought not to smell so nasty. He was hungry and cold too, poor
little chap! and left all alone to yell himself into a fit.’
‘Nurse declares she wasn’t gone five minutes; she was dreadfully
distressed that you should have found the child alone. I feel sure one
can trust that woman; I can always tell by people’s faces and the way
they look at one; and Lady Quivers said she was _so_ devoted to her
last, and I know it was a very delicate little thing.’
For once, however, her son-in-law was inexorable. ‘The woman may have
been all you say when she came,’ he said; ‘but it is not surprising if
the best of nurses grows neglectful when the mother sets her the
example.’
This was taking the matter to very unsafe ground, where Lady Eccleston
felt that it behoved her to walk warily. ‘I _can_ want nothing but the
darling baby’s good,’ she said hastily. ‘I hold no brief for nurse, and
if you are dissatisfied with her, dear Sainty, of course she had better
go, though I don’t see what precautions we can take more than we did in
getting this one.’
It was Alice de Lissac who finally discovered a successor to Lady
Quivers’ treasure, and imported a pet lamb from her mother’s bible-class
at Great Charmington to act as nursery-maid.
Once the treasure was gone, the other servants abounded in evidence,
which more than justified her removal, though they would apparently have
had no difficulty in reconciling their consciences to perpetual silence
had she remained. It transpired that it was her frequent habit to
administer narcotics to her unfortunate charge, in order that she might
fulfil evening engagements of her own, from which she had sometimes not
returned till the small hours of the morning; yet when Sainty felt it
his duty to impart this information to her new employer, he was very
civilly shown the door, with profuse thanks, but a polite intimation
that his interference was not required; from which he was forced to
conclude that Cissy was not as exceptional among fashionable mothers as
he, in his ignorance, had imagined.
He carried the child off to Belchamber, where he knew that Lady
Charmington would keep a lynx eye on the new nurse and her acolyte, and
where, indeed, it soon began to improve visibly in condition.
Since its mother seemed to be without the common instincts of the animal
kingdom, he imposed it on himself as a duty to see that the poor little
creature was at least warmed and fed, and not poisoned with drugs. The
duty was at first rather a painful one, involving as it did a constant
recollection of what he would fain forget; but, as the months went by,
like other things originally taken up from the sternest sense of
responsibility, it came to have for him a decided interest.
It has been somewhat cynically said that to be under an obligation to a
man is the beginning of dislike; be that as it may, there is no doubt
that any one to whom, in a world of frustrated effort, we have been able
to do a tangible service, establishes thereby a distinct claim on our
gratitude. ‘This,’ we say to ourselves with a pardonable glow, ‘is our
work; here is something accomplished, some one better or happier for our
existence,’ And it is impossible not to have a kindly feeling towards
the person who has procured us such a pleasing reflection.
Sainty found his mind constantly running on his small charge; he dwelt
with pleasure on the prospect of seeing it; he even began to make
excuses for more frequent visits to Belchamber, where it was astonishing
how often his presence and personal supervision seemed to be required.
In addition to the baby, there was now another person there, on whom he
had the pleasure of knowing he had conferred a benefit; he had rescued
his brother-in-law, Thomas Eccleston, from the hated thraldom of the
broker’s office, and placed him with his agent, Mr. Danford, who was
beginning to feel, as age stole upon him, the necessity for help in
managing the huge property.
The good Tommy, his legs permanently gaitered, his honest pink face
burnt to a healthy brickdust colour, and his hands hardened by much
congenial outdoor labour, was as happy as a rabbit in a vegetable
garden. To initiate this neophyte into his duties, and at the same time
keep things smooth between Danford and the pupil in whom his jealousy
could not but scent a possible successor, called for many visits from
the master. Sainty made time for them gladly, half ashamed to admit even
to himself how much the new tenant of his old nurseries had to do with
his alacrity. It surprised him to find how eagerly his eyes would scan
the walks and lawns for the distant gleam of white in the perambulator.
Week by week, and month by month, the little life was expanding and
developing like an opening flower in the sunshine, and Sainty noted the
changes, watching with reverent awe the miracle of the dawning
intelligence. He brought wonderful toys, heads in fancy costume that
could by a turn of the wrist be made to gyrate on a handle to a feeble
lute-like accompaniment; wonderful parti-coloured acrobats in the
attitude of St. Andrew on his cross, who shook their extended limbs with
a great tinkling of bells; white furry animals that emitted strange
squeaks when pressed in the abdominal regions.
It must be confessed that the toys left the baby rather cold; sometimes
he looked at them with solemn and contemptuous eyes, sometimes with an
indulgent smile; more often he swept them from him with a downward
sabre-cut action of the right arm. Whatever he did seemed to Sainty an
indication of unusual capacity. He thought with a pang of fierce
hatred--was it envy? was it contempt?--of the men who begot such
marvellous beings, and grudged an occasional moment from their low toils
or pleasures to glance impatiently at them and order them from the room.
Of a mother who could bring forth a child and leave it to take its
chance of life or death in the care of hirelings, he dared not trust
himself to think at all.
A hunger of paternity possessed him. How he could have adored a child of
his own! His own! Was this child _not_ his own? To whom did it rather
belong? the father who disowned, the mother who neglected it, or to him
who had tended and cared for it, and was learning to love it? And the
crowning wonder of all was that the child was learning to love _him_. It
was not a merry baby--‘a solemn wise-like thing,’ the nurse called
it--looking out upon the world with grave mysterious eyes, and that
peculiarly detached, far-off expression that belongs only to babies and
cats; but at sight of Sainty the rare smile never failed to light up the
little white face, the legs would jump and kick against the nurse, the
arms be held out for his embrace.
A baby’s partiality has as little cause or meaning as its aversions, and
it is as unreasonable to be flattered by the one as to be hurt by the
other; but a man must be of a sterner temper than our poor Sainty to
resist a certain mild elation when a little creature hurls itself into
his arms with such confident self-surrender. To him, moreover, the
novelty of the experience made it doubly dear. His mother had doubtless
loved him in her own grim way, because he was her son; others, as his
uncle, had pitied, or done their duty by him; others again might have
paid him attention for what they hoped to obtain from him; but never in
the course of his existence could he remember that any living thing had
been simply attracted to him by the magnetism of his own personality;
and no one can suspect a baby of any complexity of motive. So, when his
coming was greeted with jubilant laughter and dancings and outstretched
arms, a warmth crept about his heart, and he owned to himself with
humble gratitude that out of what had seemed his greatest affliction had
come the best happiness his life had ever known.
Of course he did not arrive at this height of devotion all at once; it
was the growth of many months, and every time he came to Belchamber, the
little tendrils wound themselves more closely round his heart. At the
end of the session, he established himself there with a more joyful
sense of homecoming than he had known for years.
To those who have experienced how rich in possibilities is the intimacy
of a baby of six months, it were unnecessary to describe it; they who
have not would hardly credit it, however cunningly set forth. There is
something intangible about it that must necessarily evaporate in the
mere attempt to put it on paper. Sainty fell into the habit of having
the child almost constantly with him; often it slept on the sofa in his
study, or in its perambulator under the great cedars while he read or
wrote beside it, and the sense of its nearness at once soothed and
stimulated him; even if it woke, it was so gentle and quiet that it
hardly disturbed his work.
He abandoned his little cart in favour of a larger open carriage in
which the nurse and baby could accompany him on his drives. Not
infrequently they would start by way of the dower-house, where Lady
Charmington would be a willing addition to the party. Sainty and his
mother were brought very close together by their common worship of the
child; at no previous time, and on no other subject, had her son been in
such constant need of the good lady’s advice. Exactly what the baby had
suffered at the hands of the ‘treasure’ remained in doubt, but certainly
its internal economy was none of the strongest, and many changes of diet
had to be tried, which its two guardians discussed by the hour. Then it
began to cut its teeth exceptionally early, with all the usual
accompaniments of heaviness, loss of appetite, and restless nights.
Without his mother’s rocklike commonsense to lean upon, Sainty would
have worked himself into a fever of anxiety; her experience of the
frailty of his own early days was of inestimable comfort to him.
‘I tell you, this child is a tower of strength to what you were,’ Lady
Charmington would say. ‘I’ve been up night after night with you when you
were teething.’
‘But was I as hot and restless as baby?’
‘Hot and restless? I should think you were! twice as bad, and croupy
into the bargain, which this child, thank God! hasn’t a symptom of.’
So Sainty took heart, and when, after a time, he was made to feel with
his finger two tiny white points in the red gum, this also seemed to
him an almost supernatural achievement on the part of one so young.
He had come to regard the precious infant as so entirely his charge,
that he did not bestow much thought upon its recreant mother. Cissy had
started on a round of visits at the end of the Season, hardly going
through the form of inquiring if Sainty thought of accompanying her. It
was a shock to him to find how completely she had gone out of his
existence, when she presently announced that she was coming to
Belchamber; she had spent a day or two there, before going North, to get
some country clothes and give her maid a chance to repack, but had not
seen the baby more than two or three times, nor appeared to take any
particular interest in what was being done for it. It never occurred to
Sainty as likely that she would in any way occupy herself with the child
or its relation to him; it was therefore no small surprise to him to
discover, before she had been many days in the house, that it was a
distinct irritation to her to see them together.
The first time she found it under the cedars with him, she inquired,
with a perceptible shade of annoyance in her voice, where the nurse was,
and why she hadn’t taken it out.
‘Baby generally spends most of the morning with me here if it’s fine,’
Sainty said. ‘The doctor likes him to be in the open air as much as
possible, and it gives nurse a chance to do various little things for
him.’
‘Nonsense! it’s her place to be with him; she’ll get utterly spoilt if
you do her work for her; she has got a girl in the nursery. If she can’t
manage, she had better have another. There’s no earthly reason for you
to do nursery-maid.’
‘I like having baby with me, and _this_ woman doesn’t neglect her
duties; at least she doesn’t leave the child alone, when he’s _not_ with
me, like the one your mother got for him.’
‘You were always unjust about that poor woman. Ah! here you are, nurse.
You had better take baby and walk him about. You shouldn’t leave him
here to worry his lordship.’
‘Begging your ladyship’s pardon, my lord partick’larly _wished_ for the
child to be left with him,’ retorted the nurse, as she wheeled the
perambulator viciously away, quivering with suppressed indignation.
‘You see the results of your spoiling that woman,’ Cissy remarked. ‘If
she’s going to be insolent to me she’ll have to go.’
‘No--by heaven! I’m hanged if she shall,’ Sainty burst out ‘She’s
devoted to the child, and takes very good care of him, and he isn’t very
strong. It would be monstrous, after never giving him a thought from the
time of his birth till now, if you undertook to sack the people who _do_
look after him, because you considered they didn’t sufficiently kowtow
to _you_.’
‘It’s precisely what you did to her predecessor.’
‘On the contrary, I sent her away because she neglected him, which was,
no doubt, what gave you a fellow-feeling for her.’
‘Oh! well, don’t let me interfere between you and your _protégée_. I
don’t even pretend to inquire what terms you are on with her; but I must
confess I can’t see what particular pleasure you derive from the
constant presence of another man’s child.’
‘Hush!’ Sainty said, casting a swift, frightened glance around to see if
any one was within earshot. ‘Be careful what you say. Remember the child
is _mine_. He has got to be mine. Your remark was in your usual
excellent taste, but on that particular subject you will have to forego
the pleasure of wounding me. If you are so fond of reminding me that I
am not his father, you will say something one of these days before
others that you will regret.’
It gave him a horrible sense of complicity to be obliged to entreat her
discretion a feeling that, bound by their guilty secret, let them hate
each other as they would, they dare not quarrel. Probably Cissy was not
less aware of this necessity than her husband, for though her object
remained the same, she altered her tactics. She would try to keep the
child from him by little underhand manœuvres, sending it out when she
thought him likely to want it, and even going so far as to take it with
her when she drove; but she did not risk another face attack.
Sainty, on his side, did nothing to provoke an encounter. He saw the
child not less, but as it were by stealth, and this introduction of a
slightly clandestine element into their intercourse only heightened his
love for it. Not that it required any great exercise of tact or
ingenuity to evade Cissy’s notice. Lord Charmington would have fared ill
had he been dependent on the fitful attentions of his mamma for care and
comfort. Even the amiable desire to deprive her husband of his one
pleasure could not make a domestic character of Lady Belchamber. She was
much away, and when at home constantly surrounded by guests who absorbed
her attention. It was only at rare intervals that she found any leisure
to bestow on the separation of her husband and her child.
She had a trick of arriving when least expected, swooping suddenly into
visible space like a comet, and, like a comet, followed by her train;
though to speak of her appearances as comet-like gives a false
impression of something periodical and calculably recurrent, whereas no
one could foretell when Cissy might take it into her head to entertain a
party, which seemed to be her only idea of the uses of a home.
Once, when he thought she was safely launched on a round of
country-houses, Sainty had asked his old friend Gerald Newby, for whom
she entertained no great regard, to pay him a visit. They were at tea on
the lawn, when, preceded at a short interval by a heralding telegram,
her ladyship descended on them with a few friends, and the announcement
of a further contingent for the morrow.
Lady Charmington had come over from the dower-house, and Tommy had
dropped in for tea and to play with his nephew, about whom he was almost
as weak as Sainty.
No one looking at the group under the cedars would have guessed that he
was witness of anything but the most delightful scene of domestic
felicity. The stately ancestral home, the superb trees, the great
stretches of smoothly mown turf, the young married couple with their
baby between them, surrounded by all that wealth and great possession
could give, the adoring grandmother, the loving uncle, the admiring
friends, the glow of flowers, the cheerful, intimate little meal, all
combined to make the picture complete. It appealed strongly to Newby,
who beamed indulgently on the party.
‘Our dear Sainty appears in a new and most amiable light,’ he said; ‘I
am not accustomed to see him as Kourotrophos. It is the epithet applied
to Hermes in his character of the child-tender,’ he added explanatorily
to Cissy, who looked rather blank.
‘I can’t think why nurse doesn’t fetch baby,’ that lady remarked; ‘or,
for that matter, why she brought him down at all. I’ve always told her
not to when any one was here. Whatever one may think of one’s own
children, one has no right to bore other people with them.’
‘_I_ asked to see the child,’ said Lady Charmington, the light of battle
waking in her eye.
‘Mother had settled to come over before I knew you were coming,’ Sainty
said quietly. ‘When I got your telegram it was too late to stop her, and
as she had come on purpose to see baby, I couldn’t refuse to send for
him. No one need bother about him; he will be quite good with me.’
‘Dear little man!’ said one of the ladies who had come with the fond
mother. ‘I’m so glad you didn’t stop him, Lord Belchamber. I love
babies. I’ve been trying to think who he reminds me of. He’s not a bit
like you or Cissy.’
‘We think him like my grandmother--’ Sainty began.
‘I never could see that he was so like the duchess,’ Lady Charmington
cut in.
‘To _me_ he’s the image of Claude Morland,’ remarked the luckless Tommy.
There was a sudden hush that may have lasted some five seconds ere it
was broken by Newby inquiring, ‘What has become of your charming cousin?
I liked him so much, and hoped I might meet him here.’
‘We see very little of Claude now,’ Lady Charmington responded. ‘He
never seems to come here. I suppose he finds other places more amusing.
He was glad enough to come in old days.’
‘I fancy,’ said Sainty, ‘as the duke gets older that he is more
dependent on him. He very seldom gets away.’
He had, in fact, for some time been conscious that Claude came much less
to the house than formerly, and was acutely aware of a like
consciousness in Cissy, though each was careful to say nothing about it
to the other.
‘By the way, that reminds me,’ said Lady Charmington to Sainty. ‘I had
almost forgotten. Alice de Lissac writes she is coming to her father for
a little, and she is very anxious to see baby. May I bring her over some
day?’
‘Why should Claude remind you of Mrs. de Lissac?’ Cissy asked, with a
little laugh, her desire to score off her mother-in-law getting the
better of her prudence. ‘I never knew they had much in common.’
‘Only because Alice says in her letter they have seen a good deal of him
lately. He seems to have been several times to Roehampton; and mother
mentioned his coming in to see her one day with one of the girls.’
‘Morland’s a deep ‘un,’ ejaculated Tommy. ‘Shouldn’t wonder if he was
after one of the heiresses. Those girls’ll have a devil of a lot of
money. The mater was always egging me on to be civil to ’em. Do you
remember the World’s Bazaar, Cissy? Oh my!’
‘I wonder if he can be thinking of Gemma,’ said Lady Charmington
thoughtfully. ‘Alice doesn’t _say_ so, but----’
‘It’s not true,’ Cissy burst out; then, seeing awakened curiosity in
several surrounding pairs of eyes, she added more indifferently, ‘I know
Claude well enough to feel sure he would never be attracted by that
black Jewess.’
‘He might be by her blond sovereigns,’ suggested Tommy.
Cissy became suddenly solicitous for the comfort of her guests. ‘I am
sure you want to see your rooms,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like a bath
after that dirty journey?’ and swept them into the house.
‘Cissy don’t seem to fancy the idea of Morland being sweet on the dark
lady,’ Tommy giggled. ‘She used to flirt with him herself once. I
remember mater----’
‘Tommy,’ said Sainty, ‘do, like a good soul, ask nurse to fetch baby.’
He felt sick and frightened. The contrast between the appearances of
life and the ghastly things that were so thinly overlaid by them
suddenly appalled his spirit. Almost unconsciously he picked up the
baby, and clasped it closely to him. It was on that same spot, and on
much such an afternoon, that he had first seen Cissy five years before.
With the clearness of a picture thrown on a screen, he saw her standing
as she had stood that day with Claude beside her, her girlish beauty
bathed in soft golden light, and recalled the prophetic pang with which
he had watched them turn away together under the baleful gaze of Aimée
Winston. As he sat holding their child to his heart, the permanent
dweller in his cupboard seemed to grin out at him with a more than
usually fiendish malignity.