CHAPTER LXXVII.ABOUT THE LITTLE BOY.
Three weeks after the wedding, George De Marke and his wife were established in the home that had been his father’s. For the first time in his life, he had learned the particulars of a domestic drama, which had cast his infancy under the influence of that miserable Frenchwoman, whose sins had at last centred into the meanest and most grinding of all vices.
A little week before, this man had deemed himself an isolated being, with no one to love or cling to, except the brother, whose happiness he had resolved to witness, and then become a wanderer again. Now he was at home, settled for life under the roof of ancestors whose very existence had been unknown to him. His mother, whose insanity had taken a gentle and more poetic turn since the death of her enemy, as if even from the distance she had felt the atmosphere of her life relieved of its poison, hovered around him caressingly and with pleasant smiles, for she fancied the husband of her youth had come back again. She no longer shrunk from the picture, which had been returned to its old place on the wall; but would talk to it forhours, evidently substituting its inanimate features for those of her son when he was away.
But there was still a shadow upon the life of that young couple: the memory of a child, that had perished, and for which there was forever an unsilenced yearning in the mother’s heart. The proof of its death was so vague, that sometimes wild dreams of its existence forced themselves upon her; and these feelings she had imparted to her husband.
One day De Marke had just left Catharine alone in the library, with the sashes of the great bay-window open, when two women came by on their way to the front of the house. One was Mrs. Louis De Marke’s servant, who had disappeared the night after the wedding, and the other a comely little Irish woman, whose face Catharine instantly recognized. She sprang up with an exclamation of pleasant surprise and ran to the window.
“Mary Margaret—Mrs. Dillon!”
Mary Margaret and her companion turned, and came toward the window.
“Oh! is it there ye are, me darlint?” said the good-hearted woman, “with yer husband to the fore, and no thanks to anybody. Faix! but I’m glad to get a sight of yer beautiful countenance agin, and I’ve com’ all the way down here to give ye a taste of happiness that ye haven’t dreamed of. What do you say, darlint, to a child of yer own, just the beautifullest crathur?”
“Hush,” said Catharine, bending from the open casement, and reaching out her hand to Mary Margaret. “This is a cruel subject to jest on!”
“She isn’t joking, not she,” said Jane Kelly; “I’ve brought her down here, just to strengthen what I have to say, and what I never would have said on earth, ifhethere hadn’t proved to be another woman’s son. If that old Frenchwoman had been his mother, he might have searched till doomsday, and never found the little fellow after all.
“Catharine Lacy, I was your nurse at the hospital; I took the living child from your bosom, and placed the dead baby of Louisa Oakley in its place. You were raving, and did not know it. Don’t look so white and so frightened. I had an object. The old French fiend paid me for putting your child out of the way. I did not murder for her money; but I changed the infants, and reported yours dead. More than this, I changed the numbers and names over your cots, and that is why you are registered as dead, and buried, instead of the other.”
“But the child, my child!” cried Catharine.
“Mary Margaret took it to nurse.”
“Mary Margaret!”
“Yes, yer ladyship,” said Mrs. Dillon, “I mothered the little crathur, all unbeknowst that it was your baby as I was doing for. Ye had the darlint in yer own blessed arms, more’an onest, and the most beautifullest sight it was to see yez together, like the blessed mother of Christ pictured out over the holy altar, with the hivenly baby in her two arms—amin!”
“But the child, my child! Where is it? who has got it now? My own, own child.”
“It’s a’most forenant ye, this blessed minit, yer ladyship. Down in the purty house, behint them trees, a-playin’ in the garden, as innercent as a young rabbit. Didn’t I just see the mark of the holy cross, as red as a ruby, which the angels left on his temple—”
Mary Margaret broke off suddenly, for Catharine had left the window. In another moment they saw her flitting across the lawn, and under the elms. She was out of sight long before the last sentence was finished.
“Let’s go after her,” said Jane Kelly. “I want to see their hearts torn in giving him up.”
But they had hardly crossed the lawn, when Catharine came back, walking rapidly, with little Edward in her arms.She rushed by them, raining kisses on the child, and hurrying on, went panting and breathless into the presence of her husband, his grandparents, and Elsie.
“George, George, take him—take him, he is our child, yours and mine—our own, own child. Grandfather, grandmother, mother, thank God! thank God! for it is our son, that was lost and is found.”
There was some reluctance on the part of Mrs. Louis De Marke to give up all claim on the child she had loved as her own. But all this was compromised in the end by little Edward himself, who divided all the hours of his bright life pretty equally between the old mansion and the Italian cottage during the first year. After that he proclaimed a determination to give up the cottage altogether, for his other mamma had just taken in a mite of a girl-baby that was always crying, and hadn’t sense enough to walk alone; if she was going to keep that little thing, he meant to live at grandfather’s and nowhere else.
THE END.
THE END.
THE END.