The child was born, a boy, strong and lusty--to Jeremy the incarnation
of miraculous wonder. That the thing was alive, with legs and arms and
feet and hands, and could utter sounds, which it did with much vigour,
made demands almost too great on his credulity.
"What is he like?" asked Barbara.
This was a poser for Jeremy. For the pink brat was like nothing on
earth--save any other newborn infant.
"I think," he said hesitatingly, "I think he may be said to resemble
Cupid. He has a mouth like Cupid's bow."
"And Cupid's wings?" she laughed. "Fie, Jeremy, I thought we had born
to us a Christian child."
"But that he has a body," said Jeremy, "I should say he was a cherub.
He has eyes of a celestial blue, and his nose----"
"Yes, yes, his nose?" came breathlessly from Barbara.
"I'm afraid, my dear, there is so little of it to judge by," said
Jeremy.
"Before the summer's out I shall be able to judge for myself," said
Barbara, and terror gripped the man's heart.
The days passed, and Barbara rose from her bed and again sang and
laughed.
"See, I am strong enough to withstand any operation," she declared one
day, holding out the babe at arm's length.
"Not yet," said Jeremy, "not yet. The child needs you."
The child was asleep. She felt with her foot for its cradle, and with
marvellous certainty deposited him gently in the nest and covered him
with the tiny coverlet. Then she turned to Jeremy.
"My husband, don't you wish me to have my sight restored?"
"How can you doubt it?" he cried. "I would have you undergo this
operation were my life the fee."
She came close to him and put her hands about his maimed face. "Dear,"
she said, "do you think anything could change my love for you?"
It was the first hint that she had divined his fears; but he remained
silent, every fibre of his being shrinking from the monstrous argument.
For answer, he kissed her hands as she withdrew them.
At last the time came for the great adventure. Letters passed between
Jeremy and Mr. Hattaway of St. Thomas' Hospital, who engaged lodgings
in Cork Street, so that they should be near his own residence in Bond
Street hard by. A great travelling chariot and post-horses were hired
from Bullingford, two great horse-pistols, which Jeremy had never fired
off in his life, were loaded and primed and put in the holsters, and
one morning in early August Jeremy and Barbara and the nurse and the
baby started on their perilous journey. They lay at Reading that night
and arrived without misadventure at Cork Street on the following
afternoon. Mr. Hattaway called in the evening with two lean and solemn
young men, his apprentices--for even the great Mr. Hattaway was but a
barber-surgeon practising a trade under the control of a City
Guild--and made his preparations for the morrow.
In these days of anæsthetics and cocaine, sterilised instruments,
trained nurses and scientific ventilation it is almost impossible to
realise the conditions under which surgical operations were conducted
in the first half of the eighteenth century. Yet they occasionally
were successful, and patients sometimes did survive, and nobody
complained, thinking, like Barbara Wendover, that all was for the best
in this best of all possible worlds. For, as she lay in the close,
darkened room the next day, after the operation was over, tended by a
chattering beldame of a midwife, she took the burning pain in her
bandaged eyes--after the dare-devil fashion of the time Mr. Hattaway
had operated on both at once--as part of the cure, and thanked God she
was born into so marvellous an epoch. Then Jeremy came and sat by her
bed and held her hand, and she was very happy.
But Jeremy then, and in the slow, torturing days that followed, went
about shrunken like a man doomed to worse than death. London increased
his agony. At first a natural curiosity (for he had passed through the
town but twice before, once as he set out for the grand tour with
Doctor Tubbs, and once on his return thence) and a countryman's craving
for air took him out into the busy streets. But he found the behaviour
of the populace far different from that of the inhabitants of
Bullingford, who passed him by respectfully, though with averted faces.
Porters and lackeys openly jeered at him, ragged children summoned
their congeners and followed hooting in his train; it was a cruel age,
and elegant gentlemen in flowered silk coats and lace ruffles had no
compunction in holding their cambric handkerchiefs before their eyes
and vowing within his hearing that, stab their vitals, such a fellow
should wear a mask or be put into the Royal Society's Museum; and in
St. James's Street one fine lady, stepping out of her sedan-chair
almost into his arms, fell back shrieking that she had seen a monster,
and pretended to faint as the obsequious staymaker ran out of his shop
to her assistance.
He ceased to go abroad in daylight and only crept about the streets at
night, even then nervously avoiding the glare of a chance-met linkboy's
torch. Desperate thoughts came to him during these gloomy rambles.
Fear of God alone, as is evident from the diary, prevented him from
taking his life. And the poor wretch prayed for he knew not what.