Chapter Eighteen.
It was not many weeks after her sudden and unusual attack of unconsciousness that Jill presented her husband with a little son. The small stranger appeared upon the scene rather too soon, and was delicate and puny in consequence, and a great source of anxiety to its parents. Jill, herself, was very ill for a long while after its birth, so that St. John had a trying and expensive time of it, the only beneficial result being that every minor worry was forgotten in the all absorbing one of his wife’s health.
After the child’s birth he wrote a brief note to his father acquainting him with the news. He considered it his duty to do so, though he neither expected nor hoped for any reply to the letter; and he was not disappointed; Mr St. John, Senior, might never have received it for all the sign he made, and Jill, being ill and low-spirited at the time, cried with annoyance to think that her husband should have written to him at all.
“He will only imagine that you want something out of him,” she exclaimed pettishly.
“Never mind what he imagines,” answered St. John, bending over the speaker’s couch, and touching the baby’s smooth cheek with his finger. “It needn’t bother us so long as we are satisfied that we have done what is right. You wouldn’t like to think that one day this little man might fail in his duty to his father, would you?”
Jill looked down at the wee, mottled face, and laughed softly, though the tears stood in her eyes still, and would not be blinked away.
“How absurd it seems,” she said, “to think that this will one day be a man. It’s so small and frail that I’m half afraid of it, Jack. And it’s dreadfully ugly too, isn’t it, dear? Not even you could call it pretty.”
“Never mind it’s looks,” St. John answered reassuringly. “They’re all putty-faced at first, you know. If he only grows up with but half his mother’s charm and goodness he’ll do all right.”
Jill laughed again; the extravagance of the compliment amused her.
“I hope he won’t grow up with his mother’s temper,” she said, adding with a mischievous look at St. John, “nor his father’s either for that matter; I’d like him to strike out an original line there, Jack.”
“Too late, I’m afraid,” St. John answered ruefully as the baby screwed up its face preparatory to howling. “He always yells for nothing just when we’re having a quiet chat.”
Jill sat up a little and rocked the child gently in her arms.
“He is jealous,” she explained; “he takes after you in that.”
“I think the less you say about it the better,” he retorted. “I remember some rather uncomfortable half hours spent on Evie’s account.”
She smiled, her face close pressed to the baby’s, her lips caressing it’s hair.
“How ridiculous it all seems now!” she exclaimed—“How small! What a pair of geese we were!”
“Yes,” he said, and he straightened himself and walked away to the window to hide the mortification in his eyes. His jealousy had been of a far graver nature than hers, and he did not like to hear it referred to even. He was very much ashamed of himself, and rather embarrassed by a generosity that forgave so quickly and entirely as Jill had done.
“Yes,” he repeated softly more to himself than her, “we were a pair of geese. How I wish we had found it out sooner than we did. What an infinitude of suffering it might have saved us both!”
The next important event in their lives, which took place as soon as Jill was well enough to walk to Church, was the baby’s christening. He was called John after his father as the eldest sons of the St. John’s had been from time immemorial. It was Jill’s wish that this should be, St. John, himself, having no idea on the subject. It was also Jill’s wish that Mr Thompkins should stand Godfather, and, upon being asked, the senior partner gave a somewhat reluctant consent. He was a practical, hard-working old bachelor, and babies were not much in his line, but he had an unbounded admiration and respect for this baby’s mother, so when she informed him of her desire very much after the manner of one conferring an inestimable favour he had not the pluck nor the cruelty to say her nay. The honour cost him a guinea in the shape of a christening present, but the guinea weighed lightly in the balance compared with the interest that he was expected to take in his Godson. Jill had a way of putting it in his arms, and watching him nurse it which not only embarrassed but annoyed him greatly; and sometimes St. John would come in and look on with a grin, observing the while that he was quite a family man, or something equally idiotic.
St. John was idiotic in those days. He thought so much of his ugly offspring, as the infant’s Godfather mentally called it, and spoilt as many plates in attempting to photograph it as would have served for all the babies that came to the studio in a year. Mr Thompkins groaned, but Jill laughed happily; this tiny link between herself and Jack seemed the one thing necessary to make her life perfect. Its advent had closed a chapter in their history and commenced a new one altogether brighter and happier than the last. The last had known Evie Bolton, and Markham; but now the name of the one was seldom mentioned, the other never. Jill had not seen Markham from the hour she sent him from her presence—neither had St. John—but a few days after the affair she had received a letter from him, just a short note of apology which ran as follows:—
“Dear Mrs St. John,—
“I cannot, I fear, convey to you my heartfelt sorrow at the indiscretion I was guilty of last Tuesday. I have been reproaching myself for my folly ever since. The fault was mine, as is also the loss. I made a mistake. Try to forgive me and to forget. I go abroad next week indefinitely. Goodbye.”
Jill offered it to her husband when she had finished reading, but St. John put her hand aside, and shook his head decisively.
“You know that that isn’t necessary between you and me,” he said reproachfully.
“I think he would like you to see it,” she answered.
He took it then and read it through; when he had done so he handed it back again with a grave half-troubled smile.
“Considering how I, myself, was mistaken,” he said, “I don’t think that I have the right to censure him at all.”
Jill tore the note up slowly, watching the fragments intently as they fluttered from her fingers. The knowledge that her husband had misjudged her was the bitterest part of all. And yet in her heart she did not blame him; she even found excuses for him, but the pain was none the less acute because she refused to admit its reason, though no doubt it was easier borne, and would be more readily forgotten.
“I am very much afraid,” she said gently, with a slight hesitation of tone and manner, “that I, also, must have been at fault to cause two men to make the same mistake. I don’t suppose that I have any right to blame him either. I think the wisest course would be to do as he suggests—forgive everything, and forget.”
And as St. John was of the same opinion the matter ended there, and if not entirely forgotten was at least never referred to between them again.