When Rhoda’s baby was born, Mrs Berry had, unknown to her daughter, written to Frederick Walcheren to inform him of the event, and ask him what he intended to do to remedy the wrong he had inflicted on her child. His answer was that, much as he regretted the unfortunate termination to his friendship with Rhoda, it was out of his power to remedy it, as he was just about to be married to another woman. He enclosed a cheque for a hundred pounds, with best wishes for the girl’s health and happiness, and hoped she would forgive him for the unintentional injury he had done her.
Some people in the position of Mrs Berry would have said that Mr Walcheren had done ‘the handsome thing’ by her daughter, and that she was lucky to have got so well out of the scrape. But Rhoda’s mother thought differently. She enclosed the cheque in another letter and sent it back to Frederick Walcheren, with an intimation that she could support his son without his help, and that she wanted no hush money for her daughter’s misfortune. But she warned him that the curse of Heaven was on his marriage, and that it would come to no good, nor he either. When Frederick received this letter, he was on the eve of running away with Jenny Crampton, and, full of hope as he was, it still had the power to make him feel uncomfortable. But he had paid no heed to it. Rhoda Berry, in his estimation, was only a girl who had thrown herself into his arms, and he thought a hundred pounds was very handsome pay for his amusement. If the old woman wouldn’t take it, that wasn’t his fault.
But he remembered it afterwards. He told both his cousin Philip and Father Tasker that, whilst he was bending in agony over the remains of his wife, he fancied he saw Rhoda Berry gibing at his misery, and rejoicing in it. It was the very last thing that poor Rhoda would have done; she had loved the vaurien too well to take any pleasure in what troubled him, but his conscience told him he deserved her scorn, and so he fancied she gave it him. Poor Rhoda did not have a very good time with her mother after her baby’s birth, for Mrs Berry could not forgive her for having so totally disregarded all her warnings against the trouble that loomed in the future for her. There was not another girl in Luton, she declared, who would not have declined the London situation after what she had told her, but her daughter thought less of her prophecies than strangers did. Had she not laid the cards for her the very evening before she left home, and did she not warn her, as plainly as she could speak, to beware of a gentleman with dark eyes and hair, who would promise her all sorts of fine things, but would leave her with a curse upon her back. And hadn’t everything come to pass just as she had foretold, and wasn’t the curse sleeping in a cradle at their feet that moment, in the shape of a little boy, as black as a crow?
It was the end of November by this time. Poor Jenny had been laid for months in her untimely grave, and Frederick Walcheren was hard at work studying for his ordination. Rhoda Berry had returned to her work of straw-plaiting at Luton, and everything went on the same in the cottage where her mother lived—except for the little child, and her subdued spirits.
‘Come! Rhoda,’ exclaimed Mrs Berry tartly, but not unkindly, ‘there’s that brat of yours crying again. Take him up, do! Nothing’s good enough for him, I suppose, as it wasn’t for his father before him! My gracious! I believe he grows uglier and uglier every day. You’re as unlike as light and darkness. The child’s a perfect nigger!’
Rhoda did not make any retort. She was a fair, slender girl of about nineteen, with blue eyes and yellow hair, a very elegant young woman in appearance, but of a sad countenance. She raised her youngster in her arms and kissed him fondly. He was certainly unusually dark for so young an infant, but bore unmistakably Frederick Walcheren’s features and complexion.
‘Have you heard the news?’ said Mrs Berry. ‘Mr Jenkins has come in for five hundred pounds by the death of an uncle in Australia that he never remembers to have heard of. Mrs Jenkins is half out of her mind with joy. She couldn’t believe me last week when I told her there was money on the road for them. She said there wasn’t a creature in the wide world that it could possibly come from. But I’m always right. The cards never fail me, never. There’s Fanny Benson pronounced out of danger this morning, notwithstanding all the doctors’ verdicts. I met her mother in the street just now, and she says she’s wonderful; been sitting up in bed and eating rice pudding. Why, when Mrs Benson came to me last Thursday, crying her eyes out because the doctor had said there was no hope, I told her it was all nonsense, and there was no death in her cards, nor nothing like it. I wish you’d let me lay the cards for you, Rhoda. It’s ages since I’ve done so.’
‘No! no! mother,’ cried the girl, shrinking backwards. ‘I would rather not, really!’
‘But why not?’ asked Mrs Berry, who was very proud of her gift of second sight, and could not bear to hear it discredited. ‘You know how right they came before you went to London. If you’d followed the cards then, you’d never have had that young crow upon your lap now. And I’ve never laid them for you, with your own cutting, since. Don’t you believe in them, Rhoda?’
‘Oh, yes, mother. Perhaps it is because I believe in them so much that I don’t care to see them laid for me. Troubles come soon enough without our knowing them beforehand. And if you were to tell me anything unpleasant—that I should lose my baby, or have some other trouble—I don’t think I could bear it, mother, not just yet. I’m so eaten up with disappointment already.’