Two weeks passed and if I suffered from getting up too soon I was never
conscious of it.
Once or twice, perhaps, in the early days I felt a certain dizziness and
had to hold on for a moment to the iron rail of my bedstead, but I was
too much occupied with the tender joys of motherhood to think much about
myself.
Bathing, dressing, undressing, and feeding my baby were a perpetual
delight to me.
What a joy it all was!
There must he something almost animal, even voluptuous, in mothers'
love, for there was nothing I liked so much as having baby naked on my
knee and devouring its sweet body all over with kisses--putting its
little fat hands and even its little fat feet into my mouth.
There must be something almost infantile, too, for sometimes after I had
talked to my darling with a flood of joyous chatter I would even find
myself scolding her a little, and threatening what I would do if she did
not "behave."
Oh, mysterious laws of motherhood! Only God can fathom the depths of
them.
It was just as if sixteen years of my life had rolled back, and I was
again a child in my mother's room playing with my dolls under the table.
Only there was something so wonderful now in the sweet eyes that looked
up at me, that at certain moments I would fall into a long reverie and
my heart would be full of adoration.
What lengths I went to!
It was the height of the London season when baby came; and sometimes at
night, looking through my window, I saw the tail-end of the long queue
of carriages and electric broughams which stretched to the end of the
street I lived in, from the great houses fronting the Park where balls
and receptions were being held until the early hours of morning. But I
never envied the society ladies they were waiting for. On the contrary I
pitied them, remembering they were childless women for the most part and
thinking their pleasures were hollow as death compared with mine.
I pitied the rich mothers too--the mothers who banish their babies to
nurseries to be cared for by servants, and I thought how much more
blessed was the condition of poor mothers like myself who kept all that
sweetness to themselves.
How happy I was! No woman coming into a fortune was ever so happy. I
sang all day long. Sometimes it was the sacred music of the convent in
which each note, with its own glory of sound, wraps one's heart round as
with a rainbow, but more frequently it was "Ramsey Town" or "Sally's the
gel for me," which were only noisy nonsense but dear to me by such
delicious memories.
My neighbours would come to their doors to listen, and when I had
stopped I would hear them say:
"Our lady is a 'appy 'cart, isn't she?"
I suppose it was because I was so happy that my looks returned to me,
though I did not know it was so until one morning, after standing a
moment at the window, I heard somebody say:
"Our lady seems to be prettier than ever now her baby has come."
I should not have been a woman if I could have resisted that, so I ran
to the glass to see if it was true, and it was.
The ugly lines that used to be in my cheeks had gone, my hair had
regained its blue-black lustre, and my eyes had suddenly become bright
like a darkened room when the shutters are opened and the sunshine
streams into it.
But the coming of baby did better for me than that. It brought me back
to God, before whom I now felt so humble and so glad, because he had
transformed the world for me.
Every Catholic will know why I could not ask for the benediction of the
Church after childbirth; but he will also know why I was in a fever of
anxiety to have my baby baptized at the earliest possible moment. It was
not that I feared her death (I never thought of that in those days), but
because I lived in dread of the dangers which had darkened my thoughts
before she was born.
So when baby was nearly a fortnight old I wrote to the Rector of a
neighbouring Catholic Church asking when I might bring her to be
baptized, and he sent me a printed reply, giving the day and hour, and
enclosing a card to be filled up with her name and all other
particulars.
What a day of joy and rapture was that of my baby's baptism! I was up
with the sun on the morning appointed to take her to church and spent
hours and hours in dressing her.
How lovely she looked when I had finished! I thought she was the
sweetest thing in the world, sweeter than a rosebud under its sparkling
web of dew when the rising sun is glistening on it.
After I had put on all the pretty clothes I had prepared for her before
she was born--the christening robe and the pelisse and the knitted
bonnet with its pink ribbons and the light woollen veil--I lifted her up
to the glass to look at herself, being such a child myself and so
wildly, foolishly happy.
"That old Rector won't see anything equal to her _this_ summer morning
anyway," I thought.
And then the journey to church!
I have heard that unmarried mothers, going out for the first time after
their confinement, feel ashamed and confused, as if every passer-by must
know their shameful secret. I was a kind of unmarried mother myself, God
help me, but I had no such feeling. Indeed I felt proud and gay, and
when I sailed out with my baby in my arms I thought all the people in
our street were looking at me, and I am sure I wanted to say "Good
morning" to everybody I met on my way.
The church was not in a joyous quarter. It stood on the edge of a poor
and very populous district, with a flaunting public-house immediately
opposite. When I got to it I found a number of other mothers (all
working women), with their babies and the godfathers and godmothers they
had provided for them, waiting at the door.
At this sight I felt very stupid, for I had been thinking so much about
other things (some of them vain enough perhaps) that I had forgotten the
necessity for sponsors; and I do not know what I should have done at
that last moment if the sacristan had not come to my relief--finding me
two old people who, for a fee of a shilling each, were willing to stand
godmother and godfather to my darling.
Then the priest came out of the church in his white surplice and stole,
and we all gathered in the porch for the preliminary part of the
sacrament.
What an experience it was! Never since my marriage had I been in a state
of such spiritual exaltation.
The sacristan, showing me some preference, had put me in the middle of
the row, immediately in front of the priest, so what happened to the
other children I do not know, having eyes and ears for nothing but the
baptism of my own baby.
There were some mistakes, but they did not trouble me, although one was
a little important.
When the priest said, "What name give you this child?" I handed the
Rector's card to the sacristan, and whispered "Isabel Mary" to the
godmother, but the next thing I heard was:
"Mary Isabel, what dost thou ask of the Church of God?"
But what did it matter? Nothing mattered except one thing--that my
darling should be saved by the power of the Holy Sacrament from the dark
terrors which threatened her.
Oh, it is a fearful and awful thing, the baptism of a child, if you
really and truly believe in it. And I did--from the bottom of my heart
and soul I believed in it and trusted it.
In my sacred joy I must have cried nearly all the time, for I had taken
baby's bonnet off, I remember, and holding it to my mouth I found after
a while that I was wetting it with my tears.
When the exorcisms were over, the priest laid the end of his stole over
baby's shoulder and led her (as our prayer books say) into the church,
and we all followed to the baptistery, where I knelt immediately in
front of the font, with the old godmother before me, the other mothers
on either side, and a group of whispering children behind.
The church was empty, save for two charwomen who were sweeping the floor
of the nave somewhere up by the dark and silent altar; and when the
sacristan closed the outer door there was a solemn hush, which was
broken only by the priest's voice and the godparents' muttered
responses.
"Mary Isabel, dost thou renounce Satan?"
"I do renounce him."
"And all his works?"
"I do renounce them."
"And all his pomps?"
"I do renounce them."
The actual baptism was like a prayer to me. I am sure my whole soul went
out to it. And though I may have been a sinful woman unworthy to be
churched, I know, and God knows, that no chaste and holy nun ever prayed
with a purer heart than I did then, kneeling there with my baby's bonnet
to my mouth.
"Mary Isabel, I baptize thee in the name of the Father + and of the Son
+ and of the Holy Ghost.+"
Except that baby cried a little when the water was poured on her head
(as she had cried when the salt was put on her tongue), I knew no more
after that until I saw the candle in the godfather's hand (which
signified that my child had been made a Child of Light) and heard the
priest say:
"Go in peace and the Lord be with thee."
Then I awoke as from a trance. There was a shuffling of feet. The priest
was going away. The solemn rite was at an end.
I rose from my knees, put a little money in the plate which the
sacristan held out to me, gave a shilling to each of the two old
sponsors, took baby back into my arms, and sat down in a pew to put on
her bonnet and veil.
The spiritual exaltation which had sustained me lasted until I reached
the street where the other mothers and their friends were laughing and
joking, in voices that had to be pitched high over the rattle of the
traffic, about going to the house opposite to "wet the baby's head."
But I think something of the celestial light of the sacrament must have
been on my face still when I reached home, for I remember that as I
knocked at the door, and waited for the rope from the kitchen to open
it, I heard one of my neighbours say:
"Our lady has taken a new lease of life, hasn't she?"