CHAPTER IX
So far as women are concerned it has left me severely alone. Times out of number in the ambling course of these pages I have wished that it were otherwise. Now was ever the wish of a man more completely gratified than mine?
Suddenly to find myself with this child of a woman in my house, confined to my own bed, with such prospect before her is presented to my mind an attitude of incomparable bewilderment. Had the infant been placed in my arms then and there I should have known no better how to behave or what to do. For the first day I was as one who has lost his way in an elaborate maze. Turn which path I would, there seemed no way out of the business. I, whose knowledge of women was that which is attained at a respectful distance, had in one moment found myself, as it were, the expectant father of a child, with all his anxieties, all his apprehensions and alarms.
I had to learn to walk tip-toe in my room. Moxon being absent I was sent out for medicines, the prescriptions of which made me grow hot as I handed them over the chemist's counter. It is at times like these, I found, that a man realizes the utter littleness of his being. He is no more than a slave, attendant at the court of the highest monarch in the world.
A nurse was immediately sent for. Her deprivations of the previous days had made Clarissa's condition precarious. She could not be moved.
When I had explained everything to Perowne he nodded his head, then he scratched it.
"How are you going to explain it to the nurse?" he asked. "Some of these women are touchy creatures. They have their ideas of babies born out of wedlock."
"Do you mean to say she'd make it uncomfortable for Clarissa?" I asked.
"Of course, you need not explain anything," he replied. "There's no essential reason why you should. Let her suspect if she likes."
"And show her suspicions! My Lord! You ought to know the judgment of a virtuous woman who barely suspects her sister of folly. Do you think I'd let that poor child suffer all the thousand little stings and arrows from the tongue of a woman who imagines her sex has been outraged? You know what she'd say. You know the way she'd say it. Never with a word. No—by Jove—if she says Mrs. Bellairs to me, I'll say Mrs. Bellairs to her."