“Off to prison she must go,
She must go, she must go!
Off to prison she must go,
(My fair Ladye!)”
The fiddle shivered and halted and the tune nearly broke. It seemed to him suddenly a rather cruel little game. It was not a game, really, but a memorial to a tradition—the tradition that the foundation-stones of London Bridge had been sprinkled with the blood of little children. The babies were right who treated it as drama and not play. Ever since the beginning of the world children had been martyrs in some cause, and in the little song was the sound of all that they had suffered through the years. When the fiddle jarred the enchantment halted, too, and into the red-haired baby’s face came panic fright. It was at that moment that Marget broke through the crowd and snatched it into her arms.
The babies tumbled about her as if she had struck them down, flung out of the magic, bewildered and alarmed. Some of them burst into loud sobs, and even above Marget’s voice came the red-haired baby’s cries. She hustled the crowd right and left with a fierce arm, that seemed mighty enough to push even the Squire’s carriage out of the way. Coachman and footman were already mere liveried backs, with a couple of crested buttons winking in the sun. “Making such a stir in front o’ folks’ doors,” Marget said, “and keeping the poor barns from their tea an’ all! It was a pity folks hadn’t summat better to do than to go dancing and singing like a German band. But there was no sense o’ decency in yon wastrel she and her husband had to keep. You might as well keep a dancing bear and ha’ done wi’ it right out!”
She reached Kit where he stood with a dropped bow, and caught hold of his arm with an angry pull. He moved mechanically at her touch, and was dragged away to the house without looking at her once. His head swam with the violent flow of her speech and the shrieks of the baby flung across her arm. Once he shrank, hearing a giggle out in the crowd. But the Squire thanked him by name as he went by.
It passed, of course—all that vast and returning storm which followed these mistakes, shaking the house like a powder-mill gone up, until the frightened neighbours hammered at the walls. He left behind him at last the shock and shame of that afternoon, forgetting it in the healing of his dreams. But for a time he kept a faint affection for the red-haired baby who had entered so passionately into his game, and at first it seemed to be attracted to him, too. It would clutch itself on to its feet by the help of his knee, and stand staring at him with great, demanding eyes, as if asking him for the magic they had made together in the street. It even tried to play the game by itself, mopping and mowing in its trailing skirt, but the fiddle never came to its aid, and very soon it ceased to ask. It forgot to lift up wondering, seeking eyes, by which even the dirtiest baby may win a heart, and became again the chief terror of the house. Always, that is, excepting Marget herself. But then Marget’s terror was on a plane of its own. The red-haired baby, at least, was human in its misdeeds, but Marget was elemental, inhuman as packing ice.
And yet, even after the link with the baby had gone, a touch of feeling for Marget stayed with Kit. He had had a glimpse of her while it stood in the gaolers’ hands, and the game had begun to harrow its little soul. Marget had looked as perhaps those other mothers had looked, as mothers always look in the grip of the great fear.... While he remembered it, he saw her with different eyes.
But even that attempt at sympathy went the way of the rest at last. Marget was as open-handed with her smacks as she was open-mouthed with abuse, and the red-haired baby came in for the hardest smacks of all. He watched long enough for that glimpse to come again, but it never did. He was one of those who make angels out of a passing smile, and even to Marget he looked to show a wing. But the feet of even his wandering trust had struck a blind alley at last, and, seeing the face of her daily life, he forgot the look that had made him drop his bow.