“Aye, she takes you for her mamma,” explained the nurse. “Every nice-looking, fair young lady, is ‘mamma.’ The poor little thing has no mother,” she added in a low aside. “Could you believe that any woman with a heart in her body, could desert that?”
‘That’ was still drowsy, and, lulled by the soft air and the distant band, had once more closed her forget-me-not blue eyes, and fallen asleep.
Letty realised that her self-control was slipping from her altogether, and with a hurried excuse of ‘letters,’ rose, and returned to her hotel. Each morning and afternoon, she sought out the ruddy-faced, brown-eyed nurse, with the smart white perambulator, and her efforts to ingratiate herself with an uneducated, chattering, kind-hearted woman, were almost those of a timid lover, seeking to propitiate his mistress. She was compelled to listen with averted face, whilst Smithson volubly related to her her own history—as reported and edited in the servants’ hall.
“The child is like her mother, they do say; anyway, in face. I never saw her—I’m a new-comer. He is very ordinary: an ugly blue-and-red sort of colour, and twenty years older than his wife. She was just a slip of a schoolgirl, and by all accounts it was not so much her fault—left alone for months in that great lonely barrack of a place. They say the day after she ran off, she repented and came back, and he just threw her out! No one knows the rights of the story,—or where she is now.”
Naturally these confidences were agonising to the shrinking listener, who stared out on the shining sea, and faint French coast-line, with a rigid profile; or bent down her head, to finger the flounces of Cara’s doll.
It was an indescribable relief when Nurse Smithson selected another topic, and disclosed to her companion in glowing terms, the glories of Sharsley, and the wealth of its master. She gave luxuriant descriptions of the park, the size of the grounds, the fame of the pictures,—but kept back the fact, that the house was almost closed, and that the shooting had been let. Then she interrupted her tale to exclaim:
“Well, I never did see a young lady so fond of children as you are,—miss, and the child has taken to you too! Some day, you will be having one of your own, I hope, and you will make a fine fuss with her, or I’m mistaken.”
Letty looked at her through blinding tears, then, startled by her companion’s gaze of speechless amazement, she hastily explained that “the glare of the sun on the sea was so dazzling, that it always made her eyes water!”