“Oh! this one couldn’t have been starved. It was only two days in Brown’s place I hear. They do say its mother is a lady, and gave it to Sal with a hundred pounds in gold, and told her to get rid of it as soon as she liked. Sal went on the spree with the money, an’ that’s how she was run in. The neighbours said that child had not been long with her. Look! it’s a deal plumper than the others. They’re regular starved I’ll allow, but this ’un has queer ways. Now to give you an idear, the matron and me we had a friendly glass of punch last night after a ’ard day’s work, and the matron, she says to me, as how she’d like to see the children in the baby farming case, as there’s so much interest took in it you know, it made her curious, an’ so I brought her in to see ’em all a laying in their cots. An’ this ’ere one was awake, staring at us with all its eyes. So matron, she stoops an’ says, ‘Ow wazzums?’ an’ kisses it, an’ the cretur it makes a face at her, turns away its head, and pulls out a bit of blue ribbon as was on a doll I gave it, and makes signs to her to take it. Struck all of a heap she was. ‘Watever does it mean?’ sez she. ‘Wy take the blue ribbon,’ sez I, half jokin’, for I couldn’t believe it, and the objeck looks at me and nods three times very slowly, just as if to say ‘you’re right.’ It frightened me, it did.”
“’Tis your imagination, nurse, that’s wot it is.”
“Not it,” retorted the nurse. “Imagination don’t trouble me, so it don’t; but I see wot I see, and there’s no good a trying to persuade me different. That child is queer. Just look at it now a sucking its thumb and listening to every word we say, and taking it all in you’d think.”
Augusta, her scanty downy hair brushed, her nose and cheeks shining with recent ablutions, certainly had something weird about her, or so it seemed to both the women. Her eyes had an elfish intelligence that was startling. She looked as if at any moment she might speak.
That she understood was only too evident, for she obeyed every direction given to her when it was to her fancy. At times her efforts to find a voice, to tell all she knew, could not be mistaken, and inspired as much fright and pity as the inarticulate cries of the deaf and dumb.
“What is she doing of now?” said the subordinate suddenly.
Augusta had been looking at her fixedly until she attracted her attention, and when the eyes of the nurse and her assistant were fixed on the elderly infant, they saw she was making violent efforts to get up.
“What is it, pet? What is it now?” said the assistant soothingly. “What does my precious want?”
“I vow and declare,” said the matron, “that child is making signs as if she was writing. Look at her finger, do. She makes me nervous, she does. ’Tis no way for a baby like that to go on.”
“How old would you say she was, nurse?”