Lady Farrington shook her head sadly.
‘If you know, and will not speak, you may do the child irreparable harm. No matter. It is sufficient for the present that he is mine; that he passes into my keeping; that I am free to lavish upon him the whole of my pent-up yearning affection. The rest will come—all in good time. Heaven bless you, Herbert, and prosper you, and bring you some day to your own.’
She kissed the bewildered boy repeatedly, shook hands with his father and mother, and then left the place.
‘I don’t like it, I don’t; blowed if I do,’ said the Sergeant. ‘It ain’t fair on the youngster, it ain’t—to give him over to that crack-brained old idiot! Why, you may tell she is mad by her talk and her ways. Maybe she’ll fatten him up and eat him; or perhaps she’ll turn him into a Papist or a Frenchman. He shan’t go.’
‘You’re a fool, Larkins! But it’s more my business than it is yours after all. And where’s the harm? Doesn’t she promise fair enough, and ain’t these notes a pretty certain proof that she is all above board? We won’t lose sight of the boy—not altogether. We’ll stipulate that we are to see him sometimes, and then he can’t go far wrong. But you hold your tongue, that’s what you’ve got to do. None of your blabbing or gossipping about. If they ask you what’s become of Herkles, why say he’s got into the Duke of York’s school, and won’t be back for ever so long.’
‘I wish he had. I could see my way then. But I can’t now, and it beats me how you can take it all so coolly.’
The honest Sergeant was chiefly concerned as to the little chap’s future prospects. But although he was not a man of keen intelligence or of suspicious nature, he was also a little exercised as to the strangeness of the whole affair. He might explain the lady’s conduct by calling it eccentricity or madness, but he could not quite understand the part his wife had played.
He would have been still more perplexed had he returned unexpectedly from the canteen that evening after all the children were in bed. He would have found his wife engrossed with the treasures of a little box which she had emptied on her lap. A few gilt buttons, a lock of fair hair, a bow of ribbon—that was all.
Yet she wept bitterly as she kissed them again and again, and restored them one by one to the sacred box reverentially, as though each was a relic in her eyes.