The message—Mother Carey’s—referring to this difficulty, had reached him at the house, his wife’s, in Eaton Square, whither he, it was understood, had, on business grounds, preceded his lady’s return from abroad by a few weeks. That was, actually, a mystification, a suppressio veri; for Mrs Dalston was at the moment installed in comfortable but obscure rooms at Kennington, where she was scarcely arrived before she was delivered, a little prematurely, of a male child. But so far was this fact from being allowed to interfere with the fiction of her absence, that particular pains had been taken by Mark to procure his wife’s confinement in the house of a doctor, a friend of his, who could be fee’d into any silence, or bought into any intrigue where irregular services were required. To all practical and moral intents, Mr Dalston was never so remote from his lately wedded bride as at the moment when he stepped from her bedside to do an infamous act upon her child. But even then there was enough sentiment in his gaze to make the fortune of a mid-Victorian picture.
The young mother’s reason had never fully returned to her since that poignant grapple, four nights ago, with the great and astonishing secret. She was sound, unhurt from the contest; but her faculties slept in a sort of exhausted abeyance. She was very white and still—incurious—not greatly troubled: so far things were fortunate. And here was the enwrapping fog for a final cloak, or pall.
As Mark stepped softly from the room, closing the door, a rather livid-faced, stale-smelling young man in a black frock coat and black peg-top trousers, revealing frowzy white socks beneath, accosted him whisperingly.
“Well, sir; all in train?”
Mark nodded, smiling.
“All in train, Blague. It’s really a providence, and your conscience may sleep sound to-night—as sound as she’s sleeping in there. Don’t wake her—don’t let her wake, rather—to a sense of her loss, you comprehend, till I return.”
“Quite so. The vis inertiæ—the vegetation of a sensitive plant, no more; we will see to it. The business shall not miscarry through us, sir, depend upon it.”
“That’s right. You sha’n’t lose by this little divagation in our plans, rest sure of that.”
He put his finger to his lips, and tiptoed down to the hall, where stood a pallid-faced young woman in a shawl and poke bonnet, gently rocking a bundle in her arms. She looked at the husband gravely, questioningly; but she was silent. The poor thing, in fact, was helpless under his dominion. Those dark eyes and ambrosial whiskers, with the cleft chin between, had, in a few days, brimmed the measure of her romance. Engaged for nurse to Mrs Dalston, she was fallen a slave to the lamp of a brighter magician than duty.
The two entered a “growler” of the ancient dimensions, and the fog lapped them up. Jogging its apathetic course through the smoke, as it seemed, of a vast glimmering conflagration, the squalid vehicle gained at length the Clapham Road, and drew near its destination. Then the pale little nurse spoke for the first time.