Edward Luttrell stood aghast.
"Margaret, what do you mean?" he ejaculated. "Vincenza's child is dead. This is our little Brian. You are dreaming."
He did not know whether she understood him or not, but a wild light suddenly flashed into her great, dark eyes. She dashed the child down upon the bed with the fury of a mad woman.
"You are deceiving me," she cried; "I know that my child is dead. Tell me the truth; my child is dead!"
"No such, thing, Margaret," cried Mr. Luttrell, almost angrily; "how can you utter such folly?"
But his remonstrance passed unheeded. Mrs. Luttrell had, sunk insensible to the floor; and her swoon was followed by a long and serious relapse, during which it seemed very unlikely that she would ever awake again to consciousness.
The crisis approached. She passed it safely and recovered. Then came the tug of war. The little Brian was brought back to the house, with Vincenza as his nurse; but Mrs. Luttrell refused to see him. Doctors declared her dislike of the child to be a form of mania; her husband certainly believed it to be so. But the one fact remained. She would not acknowledge the child to be her own, and she would not consent to its being brought up as Edward Luttrell's son. Nothing would convince her that her own baby still lived, or that this child was not the offspring of the Vasari household. Mr. Luttrell expostulated. Vincenza protested and shed floods of tears, the doctor, the monks, the English nurse were all employed by turn, in the endeavour to soften her heart; but every effort was useless. Mrs. Luttrell declared that the baby which Vincenza had brought her was not her child, and that she should live and die in this conviction.
Was she mad? Or was some wonderful instinct of mother's love at the bottom of this obstinate adherence to her opinion?
Mr. Luttrell honestly thought that she was mad. And then, mild man as he was, he rose up and claimed his right as her husband to do as he thought fit. He sent for his solicitor, a Mr. Colquhoun, through whom he went so far even as to threaten his wife with severe measures if she did not yield. He would not live with her, he said—or Mr. Colquhoun reported that he said—unless she chose to bury her foolish fancy in oblivion. There was no doubt in his mind that the child was Brian Luttrell, not Lippo Vasari, whose name was recorded on a rough wooden cross in the churchyard of San Stefano. And he insisted upon it that his wife should receive the child as her own.
It was a long fight, but in the end Mrs. Luttrell had to yield. She dismissed Vincenza, and she returned to Scotland with the two children. Her husband exacted from her a promise that she would never again speak of the wild suspicion that had entered her mind; that under no circumstances would she ever let the poor little boy know of the painful doubt that had been thrown on his identity. Mrs. Luttrell promised, and for three-and-twenty years she kept her word. Perhaps she would not have broken it then but for a certain great trouble which fell upon her, and which caused a temporary revival of the strange madness which had led her to hate the child placed in her arms at San Stefano.