His mother’s deceit stupified him, he felt shamed, deeply shamed, but after a while that same recognizable feeling of relief welled up in his breast and drenched him with satisfactions. After all what could it matter where a person was born, or where one died, as long as you had your chance of growing up at all, and, if lucky, of growing up all right. But this babe had got to bear the whole burden of its father’s misdeed, though; it had got to behave itself or it would have to pay its father a hundred pounds as damages. Perhaps that was what that queer bit of poetry meant, “The child is father of the man.”
His mother swore that they were very good and clean and kind at the workhouse, everything of the best and most expensive; there was nothing she would have liked better than to have gone there herself when Johnny and Pomony were born.
“And if ever I have any more,” Mrs. Flynn sighed, but with profound conviction, “I will certainly go there.”
Johnny gave her half the packet of peppermints he had bought for Pomona. With some of his saved money he bought her a bottle of stout—she looked tired and sad—she was very fond of stout. The rest of the money he gave her for to buy Pomony something when she visited her. He would not go himself to visit her, not there. He spent the long intervening evenings at the library—the odd-eyed man had shown him a lovely book about birds. He was studying it. On Sundays, in the spring, he was going out to catch birds himself, out in the country, with a catapult. The cuckoo was a marvellous bird. So was a titlark. Donald Gower found a goatsucker’s nest last year.
Then one day he ran from work all the way home, knowing Pomony would at last be there. He walked slowly up the street to recover his breath. He stepped up the stairs, humming quite casually, and tapped at the door of their room—he did not know why he tapped. He heard Pomony’s voice calling him. A thinner paler Pomony stood by the hearth, nursing a white-clothed bundle, the fat pink babe.
“O, my dear!” cried her ecstatic brother, “the beauty he is! what larks we’ll have with him!”
He took Pomona into his arms, crushing the infant against her breast and his own. But she did not mind. She did not rebuke him, she even let him dandle her precious babe.
“Look, what is his name to be, Pomony? Let’s call him Rasselas.”
Pomona looked at him very doubtfully.
“Or would you like William Wallace then, or Robert Bruce?”