When they arrived at the house Aaron left Mr. Moss in the room below, and ran up to ascertain if Rachel had been disturbed. She had not moved since he last quitted the room, and an expression of profound peace was settling on her face. His own child lay white and still; a heavy sigh escaped him as he gazed upon the inanimate tiny form. He closed the door softly, and rejoined his friend.
"I will not stay with you, Cohen," said Mr. Moss; "you will have enough to do. To-morrow you must get a woman to assist in the house. You have the fifty pounds safe?"
Aaron nodded.
"I have some more money to give you, twenty-five pounds, three months' payment in advance of the allowance to be made to you for the rearing of the child. Here it is, and here, also, is the address of the London lawyers, who will remit to you regularly at the commencement of every quarter. I shall not leave Gosport till eleven in the morning, and if you have anything to say to me I shall be at the Salutation till that hour. Good-night, Cohen; I wish you happiness and good fortune."
Alone with the babe, who lay on the sofa, which had been drawn up to the fire, Aaron stood face to face with the solemn responsibility he had taken upon himself, and with the still more solemn deception to which he was pledged. For a while he hardly dared to uncover the face of the sleeping child, but time was precious, and he nerved himself to the necessity. He sat on the sofa, and gently removed the wrappings which had protected the child from the cold night, but had not impeded its powers of respiration.
A feeling of awe stole upon him; the child he was gazing on might have been his own dead child, so startling was the resemblance between them. There was a little hair upon the pretty head, as there was upon the head of his dead babe; it was dark, as hers was; there was a singular resemblance in the features of the children; the limbs, the feet, the little baby hands, the pouting mouth, might have been cast in the same mold. The subtle instinct of a mother's love would have enabled her to know instinctively which of the two was her own babe, but it would be necessary for that mother to be blessed with sight before she could arrive at her unerring conclusion. A father could be easily deceived, and the tender age of the children would have been an important--perhaps the chief--factor in doubt. "Surely," Aaron thought as he contemplated the sleeping babe, "this is a sign that I am acting rightly." Men less devout than he might have regarded it as a divine interposition.
The next hour was occupied in necessary details which had not hitherto occurred to him. The clothing of the children had to be exchanged. It was done; the dead was arrayed as the living, the living as the dead. Mere words are powerless to express Aaron's feelings as he performed this task, and when he placed the living, breathing babe in the bed in which Rachel lay, and took his own dead child to an adjoining room and laid it in his own bed, scalding tears ran down his cheeks. "God forgive me, God forgive me!" he murmured again and again. He knelt by Rachel's bed and buried his face in his hands. He had committed himself to the deception; there was no retreat now. For weal or woe the deed was done.
And there was so much yet to do--so much that he had not thought of! Each false step he was taking was leading to another as false as that which preceded it. But if the end justified the means--if he did not betray himself--if Rachel, awaking, suspected nothing, and heard the voice of the babe by her side, without suspecting that it was not her own, why, then, all would be well! And all through his life, to his last hour, he would endeavor to make atonement for his sin. He inwardly acknowledged it now, without attempting to gloss it over. It was a sin; though good would spring from it, though a blessing might attend it, the act was sinful.
His painful musings were arrested by a knock at the street door. With a guilty start he rose to his feet and gazed around with fear in his eyes. What did the knock portend? Was it in some dread way connected with his doings? The thought was harrowing. But presently he straightened himself, set his lips firmly, and went downstairs to attend to the summons.