VIII
ButMrs. Blaydon grew neither better nor worse and they remained at Trezevant Place. And when Moira was a year and a half old a fresh sorrow visited her mother. So rapid and unforeseen were the steps by which it came that Ellen scarcely realized what was happening.
To her, indeed, the child seemed to acquire new marvels of goodness and beauty every day, but she imagined it was only her mother’s pride that made her think so. She was not the sort who would boast of the deeds of her offspring.
Then she grew aware that others shared her interest. More and more, in particular, she found the child, when she came to look for her, in the company of Aunt Mathilda, even in that lady’s arms, most happily at home and warmly welcome.
“It is going to be very improving for Moira,” was her thought, and she realized with a pang that she had been reading Hugo’s book for more than a year now, and was not yet halfway through it.
Mrs. Seymour’s brother was among those who noticed her partiality for the baby.
“Look,” she said to him one day, with enthusiasm, holding out one of the child’s tiny pinkhands, “how remarkably made they are. She’s the same all over. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a perfect baby.”
Blaydon laughed, thereby eliciting a brilliant response in kind from Moira. The vibrations of his big voice had tickled her young flesh.
“Well, Mathilda, the broadest road to your heart is still a pair of hands. I remember your telling me that poor old Ned first got you with his.”
“Hands and feet,” she replied. “I don’t mind anything else but they ought to be beautiful.”
A few days afterward he came upon her in the garden, again with Ellen’s daughter.
“Que voulez-vous,” she was saying, “que voulez-vous, ma p’tite? Voulez-vous maman?”
The soft syllables seemed to please Moira’s ears, for she was mirthfully bubbling things that sounded not unlike them. As Blaydon stepped out he thought his sister a little apologetic, but she did not put down the child.
“The little thing wandered out here while I was reading,” she said. “She quite seems to follow me about.”
“You don’t find it annoying?” he asked.
Her reply served notice upon him that she had caught his note of irony.
“Oh, no.... I’m not such a busy woman as all that.”
He glanced at the book she had been reading.It lay flung face downward with both backs spread out on the table, “Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard.” Blaydon recalled the story and somehow connected it in his mind with his sister’s essential solitude—her dependence upon his own family for affection.
“I suppose,” he pursued, the thought forming suddenly from nowhere, “that you are going to adopt her?”
Mathilda looked up sharply. She pretended to detect in his words more of approval than of inquiry and replied as though he had offered a suggestion.
“You’re not serious, Sterling?”
Blaydon’s intuition surprised him. He had struck fire, where hardly more than a joke had been intended.
“Why not?” he asked, with a good-natured shrug.
“It seems cruel, somehow,” she replied. Her tone was as detached as though she had said, “it seems too green,” of a dress-cloth.
“I can’t quite see that. Mothers are proverbially unselfish—”
“She would have to be brought up with your boys, Sterling. Have you thought of that?”
He had not thought of that and there was more to Mathilda’s remark than banter. As if to influence his reply, the youngest boy, Robert, three and a half, scampered past them and climbed upona favourite seat, between two clipped boxwood trees, chattering to himself and grinning across at his father as if to say, “I dare you to come and get me!” But Blaydon ignored him for the moment. He did not know that Mathilda’s mind had gone all over this matter of adoption, and that the question she had just put to him, in spite of its unconcerned air, was really a crucial one with her. Upon his feeling about it would depend a great deal, yet this did not imply that she felt herself bound to accept his decisions. There were scores of things that she might do if the whim possessed her, in spite of him. Blaydon was aware of this, and though he did not know how much she had thought about the child, he was inclined toward caution. She was a good sister—a better mother, he honestly believed, for his children than their own.... When he answered it was with a laugh that had the effect upon Mathilda of some one opening a door she wanted to go through.
“Well, I don’t know,” he went on, slowly. “I suppose that Ellen is a fixture anyhow, and young cubs are more likely to fall in love with a really beautiful Cinderella than just a handsome cousin. That is if the child is beautiful. How on earth can you tell anything about them at that age?”
“You can tell the day after they are born,” snapped back Mrs. Seymour. “I would venture to sit down and write the lives of your two sonsto-day, and I shouldn’t be far from the truth, barring death and accidents.”
“So?” he asked, “and have I anything to fear?”
“Oh, no, they’ll come back to the fold, even as you did!”
Her look was one of benevolent sarcasm and he grinned. There were many things worse to remember than the pretty women of his younger days. But he had come back to the fold ... that was true, and it was not so pleasant after all. Change would be kind. He reached over and touched the blond head of his boy, who was sitting on the tiles now at his feet.
“Poor old Rob, she’s got you catalogued,” he said, and the talk of adoption stopped. Neither of them had taken it seriously—Jennie, unmentioned, remained insurmountable. But Mathilda had entered her wedge, without an effort. Being intensely feminine, circumstances moved toward her, not she toward them, an achievement that resulted from indicating definitely first, then vaguely opposing, everything she wanted.
Blaydon lifted his boy to his shoulder and walked through the house to the drawing room windows. He talked little more than monosyllabically to his children and had a great way of stilling their excited glee, when he wanted to, by the tone of his voice. As they stood at the window he wished that his gaze could go on over rollinghills to the horizon. He wanted these boys to grow up with horses and vigorous sports; to see them framed against green earth and wide skies. He wanted them to draw in their early appreciations from the bare soil of their own land. Somehow that now appeared to him a spiritual necessity of which he had had too little himself, and it was the leading ambition that possessed him after a life of sophisticated pleasure.
A week later Mrs. Blaydon died. It was as though the new direction of their thoughts had penetrated to her intuitively and left her without strength to battle further.
It was not long before Blaydon felt free to go ahead with his plans. But the speed with which Mathilda proceeded to execute hers surprised and even shocked him. She did not go directly to Ellen. Instead she consulted Dr. Schottman, and readily gained his partisanship. It was from Schottman that Ellen first heard of Aunt Mathilda’s intentions toward Moira....
For the life of her she could not tell at first whether she was happy or miserable at the suggestion. In one moment she rejoiced over the good fortune of her daughter; in the next she experienced a sense of terrible deprivation and loneliness. She was not so sentimental as to minimize the extent of her renunciation—to hope that some crumbs from the table of Moira’s affection would fall to her. It meant a thorough transfer of parenthoodand a ruthless blotting out of the truth. One of Mrs. Seymour’s reasons for adopting the child at once, as she explained to Schottman, was that the boys were young enough to grow up none the wiser. Ellen did not deceive herself. Moira would never know her, never think of her except as a servant.
She recalled sorrowfully the two happy prospects she had brought with her into that house, “Moira will love me when she is grown up, and we will do so many nice things together,” and “Who knows, some day Moira may have a father....” But Moira would never have a real father now through her, and Moira would never love her in the sense she had meant. A gleam of comfort crept in the chinks of her hopeless speculation.
“If Moira should learn about this, much, much later—years later when it could do no harm—about how I have given her up, she would love me all the more!”
But the stray gleam crept out at once, leaving her mind darker than before. Moira would never know, never understand anything of all she had gone through. She buried her face in the pillow. In the middle of the night she suddenly started up, feeling frantically about the room for she knew not what. Was it affection, love, just the touch of something familiar? For Moira, of course ... but what a fool! Moira was gone,even the crib was gone. She was alone, absolutely alone, for the rest of her life.
As she stumbled back to her bed, her hand encountered the big volume of “Les Misérables.” She caught it up and held it to her breast. The book had grown to be a symbol for her of their life together in fabulous years to come. Now those years were dead. The book was no longer necessary, no longer had any meaning.... Ellen put it away in one of the drawers of her bureau. She would never have to read in its pages again. It would be better if she did not, better that the gulf between them should widen rather than diminish.