CHAPTER XLII.THE ADOPTED SON.
The next day Mrs. Dillon stood at the ferry at Randell’s Island, looking wistfully back toward the spot where she had just left the ewe lamb of her flock. Her face was red with weeping, and from time to time she lifted up a corner of her shawl and wiped the drops from her eyes. Little Terry set up a pathetic howl, as the boat which had brought them over put back on its return voyage. Mary Margaret had no heart to chide him, but turned sorrowfully away, grieved to the soul as few mothers would have been.
And there sat poor little Edward where he had been left, like a lost babe in all that wilderness of young life; all alone, and yet surrounded by so many. The very size of the nursery building terrified him. The crowd of strange faces hushed his grief into dumb silence. The nurses seemed like enemies that intended him some bodily harm, and from whom he would run away the moment their backs were turned.
The child looked up to impart these thoughts to his foster-mother, and she was gone. He searched wildly around; his innocent eyes grew large with affright; his mouth and chin began to quiver; and his poor little hands were pressed hard down upon the bench where they had seated him. That baby-struggle was a pitiful thing to witness. That tiny form, taking up its first battle of life, with no weapons but its terror and its tears, was touching beyond description.
When he saw that she was gone, and that he was quite alone in that forest of human beings, the wild eyes began to fill, his face flushed, and sobs of home-sick anguish heaved his chest. A group of little orphans, who had learned to keep their sorrows in silence, cast shy glances at him fromthe benches; while he, with a child’s instincts, looked wistfully at them through his tears, expecting the sympathy which they felt but could not express.
A nurse came toward him filled with kindly interest, and in her motherly way strove to soothe him.
“What is the matter, little one? don’t take on so!” she said; “don’t cry, that’s a dear.”
“Mammy, mammy! I want mammy!” pleaded the child, stretching out his little arms, but folding them over his face, and turning his back as she would have taken him up.
The nurse had many other cares, and left him to his grief. When she came back again, he was gazing out through the window with heavy eyes, and a look so heart-broken that she made fresh effort to console him.
It would not do. The child only asked for his mammy, answering everything with the same pleading look, and the same home-sick cry.
At night, when stretched upon the straw bed in the infant’s dormitory, with a strange child resting on the same pillow, still and orderly, with its sorrows hushed down into a dreary content, little Edward lay sobbing in the stillness. The presence of so many children, filling the room with the monotonous breath of their slumber, frightened away sleep.
The moonlight, as it stole in through the windows, revealing the range of cots with the pale forms upon them in fitful gleams, made him think but the more yearningly of home. Everything was cold, purely clean, yet full of desolation to the child. He dared not cry; the stillness and expanse of the room—vast compared to Dillon’s cabin—held him in awe. Vague ideas of something strange that was to happen, made his eyes gleam out large and wildly in the moonlight. There he lay, that poor, wakeful child, holding his breath, and swallowing his sobs in vague terror of the very life with which he was surrounded. Then the stillness was broken by rattling sounds in the wall, and thepatter of tiny feet along the floor. The rats, which haunt all public buildings impudently, as if they possessed an elective right to municipal plunder, were out on a midnight revel in the ceiling, and commenced chasing each other across the spotless floor.
Poor little Eddie heard the sound with a thrill of terror. His limbs shook, a low cry broke from his lips, and creeping forward he clung, shivering, to the other little child, more fortunate in its power to sleep, that lay in the same cot.
But, no, the child was used to these noises and would not awake. With those trembling arms clinging to him in wild terror, and those brown curls, damp with tears, falling over his face, the child slept on, leaving the poor stranger more desolately alone from his slumbering presence. He had become used to the vastness and the midnight noises, and could not feel the baby-heart fluttering like a wounded bird against his side.
And this night was a type of many that the boy spent in his new home. He would not be comforted; his eyes were always heavy or filled with pitiful tears; his little heart pined with a tender, yearning hunger for the friends who seemed hundreds of miles away. Grief was tenacious with him. His cheeks grew white as snow; there was always a troubled quiver on his baby-lips if any one spoke to him; but the noise of his sorrow was stilled, and so those who had charge said kindly to one another,—
“Poor thing, it is the homesickness; he will soon get over it.”
But weeks passed, and Eddie did not get over his homesickness. He grew pale and quiet, but that sensitive baby-heart was desolate as ever. Visitors were, in those days, only admitted to the children once a month, consequently Mary Margaret did not see her child during these weeks of anguish.
One day, when the little creature was becoming dreamilypassive, a strange gentleman and lady entered the baby’s nursery as they passed over the institution. They were both young and of singularly aristocratic appearance. Certainly there was nothing in the lady that reminded you of Mary Margaret Dillon, but the heart sometimes finds strange likenesses. When Eddie looked up, the lady’s back was toward him. She was about the size of his nurse; this must have been all, but it was enough.
The child let himself down from his seat and ran toward the lady, his bright eyes flashing, his hands extended, and his soft brown curls all afloat.
“Mammy, mammy, take me,” he cried, making ineffectual leaps to reach her arms.
The lady turned her face—a beautiful face, in nothing like Mary Margaret’s, save that it was bright with kindly surprise.
The child dropped his eager hands with a look of pitiful disappointment that touched her to the soul.
“Who is this?” she said, as the little creature crept, broken-hearted, back to hide himself among the other children. “Tell me, what poor child is this that mistakes me for his mother?”
She blushed as she spoke, and turned her eyes shyly from the look of half interest, half of amusement which her husband turned upon her.
“Come here, darling, let me talk with you,” she said, following the child. “Tell me your name.”
She held out her arms, smiling, and with a glow upon her face, “Come!”
The boy glanced upward to her face. His eyes filled with light; his lips parted, and eying her with the shy look which we meet in a frightened rabbit, he held up his arms, laughing for the first time in weeks.
The lady snatched him eagerly to her bosom. In an instant his arms wreathed themselves lovingly around her neck, and his cheek lay against hers.
“Strange, isn’t it, that he should take to me so suddenly?” she said, pressing the pretty face closer to hers, and giving it a sidelong kiss. “Isn’t he pretty?”
“Yes, and no?” answered the husband, laughing. “He would be a little heathen if he did not take to you; and he is beautiful as one of Raphael’s cherubs.”
“And so loving,” rejoined the wife, with a pleading glance. “What a pity to leave him here!”
The husband looked gravely from the lady to the child. In his heart he thought her like one of Raphael’s Madonnas, only no painted child was ever so lovingly beautiful as the orphan she held.
“Couldn’t we?” pleaded the lady, softly with her lips, most eloquently with her eyes.
“It is a serious business,” answered the husband, still gravely, and with a sort of sadness.
“But we have none of our own, and our home is so large?” The cloud deepened on her husband’s face.
“I know it,” he said; “this thought of adopting a child takes me painfully.”
“He looks like me enough to pass for ours,” said the lady, blushing scarlet as the words left her lips. “I mean he has the same colored eyes and hair, and—and—”
“Yes,” thought the gentleman, “they are alike; it would be a pity to disturb the picture.” How pleadingly his eyes look out from under those curls, the same rich brown, with a gleam of gold in it. How came the little fellow so like my wife? But he only said very seriously, “Put him down, Mattie, we will talk it over at home!”
The lady saw that he was in earnest, and attempted to unwind the child’s arms from her neck. But the little fellow cried out,—
“No, no, mammy, mammy!” all in a tremor of affright clinging closer, and raining wild, sweet kisses upon her face. This was a kind of eloquence that neither the gentlemannor lady could withstand. The homely but pathetic cry of “mammy,” ran like a thrill of music through the young woman’s heart. Her eyes swam in a tearful mist; her cheeks flushed with the hidden sweetness of a word never applied to her before. She had no power to force the child away, but drew him closer and closer to her bosom.
“Let me take him!” said the husband, with a troubled smile.
He reached forth his arms. Eddie lifted his head and eyed him with a sidelong glance, while he loosened one arm from the lady’s neck, and clung closer with the other.
“Come, my little shaver, and see what I’ve got for you.”
The boy bent slightly forward, and at length allowed himself to be taken, searching the gentleman’s face earnestly all the time. But when a motion was made as if to place him on the floor, the gentleman found his neck suddenly encircled by those two loving arms, and the little, tearful face was laid confidingly on his shoulder.
“Take me home—take me home,” pleaded the sweet voice.
“Couldn’t we take him home and decide after?” pleaded the lady, with gentle feminine tact, “It will be a pleasant visit for the poor child, if nothing more.”
“He seems bent upon it,” answered the gentleman; laughing, and rather pleased with this half measure. “I think you could hardly get him from me yourself, Mattie.”
The lady only laughed. She had no desire to weaken the effect already produced by the caressing helplessness of the little orphan, by claiming more than an equal share in his preference.
“Well, then, let us go,” she said, in haste to have the child all to themselves.
“First, let us inquire about him. Perhaps he has parents or friends to interfere. In that case, you know, it would be out of the question.”
The young wife looked very grave at this, and the cloud of anxiety did not leave her face till it was ascertained at the superintendent’s office that Edward was an orphan, his father unknown, if living, and his mother’s death recorded in the hospital books at Bellevue.
Thus accidentally, and almost from an affectionate caprice, this poor human waif was taken from his home in the nurseries; and when Mary Margaret came with her eager love on the visiting-day, leading little Terry by the hand—who was the bearer of a great orange for his foster-brother—the child was gone.
This was a terrible blow to the good nurse. But when she heard that Eddie had gone off with an undoubted gentleman and lady, and that a splendid private carriage had waited for them at the ferry, she was, to an extent, consoled, though this was all the positive knowledge the laws of the institution allowed her to obtain.
As for little Terry, he broke forth into a vociferous fit of crying, and for some minutes his plump and freckled cheeks were inundated with tears; but he, too, found a source of consolation in the big orange which now belonged entirely to himself, and which he devoured incontinently, skin and all, while seated on the wharf waiting a return of the ferryboat which would convey himself and his mother back from their disappointing visit.