‘I wish he was dead, and me too!’ she said, looking coldly at Michael. ‘I think you might have put us both out of the way, Dr. Langstroth, if you had had as much kind feeling as people talk about.’
Michael told Eleanor that the child must be removed from Ada’s vicinity. Therefore, while the latter remained at the farm, in Mrs. Nadin’s care, Eleanor charged herself with the baby, and took it and its nurse into her house. She could have devised no surer means of healing the wounds, sweetening the bitterness, soothing the angriness of her own thoughts. The utter helplessness of the child, the terrible circumstances of its birth, its clouded future, appealed irresistibly to her nature. She grew to love the little creature with an intensity which surprised herself. She hushed it to sleep in her arms, or interrogated its large mournful eyes as they stared upwards, with long, vacant gaze into her absorbed face. And in this occupation she had time to ponder over all that had happened, and to try to shape her course in accordance, not with the dictates of anger and passion, however just, but with the laws of mercy and forgiveness. The helpless figure in her arms, whose warm and clinging dependence seemed to make everything more human and more endurable, softened her, calmed her, so that sometimes she spoke to Michael of what had happened, and of what might happen, with an insight and a depth of thought and feeling which surprised him, ready as he was to credit her with all manner of goodness and nobleness.
Her great desire, during the period in which the boy was under her care, was to get a marriage performed between Otho and Ada. Thorsgarth was not an entailed property, though it had always been the practice in the Askam family to arrange it and the succession to it as if it had been. If Otho and Ada were married, and he could be forced to do justice to this child, though he could never give him the name he ought to have borne, yet much evil would be removed, and great sorrow and heart-burning averted.
Strange to say, the difficulties in the way of this scheme arose, not with Otho, but with Ada. When the latter was well enough to leave the farm, Eleanor brought her to her own house, since Ada utterly refused to go home, saying she would kill herself if they took her there.
Through Gilbert, she and Michael had word that Otho was subdued, cowed, and changed; that it had become a sort of superstitious wish with him to have the marriage legalised. This gave hope to Eleanor. But Ada, when questioned, merely said, with profound melancholy, and profound indifference, ‘What does it matter? If he married me fifty times, he cannot give me back any of the things that made me happy. I do not care what any one thinks or says. Father says he will remove from here, and let me live with him. That will do as well as anything.’
So firmly was she planted in this mind, that after a time they ceased to press it upon her, trusting to time to work a change. At the end of March she was still at the Dower House, seeing only Eleanor, Michael, and her father, who sometimes came to visit her. Mr. Dixon was a broken man now. His wife’s anger took a different shape from his; she would have had him sell his business and retire altogether from a place where they could never hold up their heads again. But the poor old man was not thus to be torn away from his child, or from the place where she was. Mrs. Dixon indignantly refused to see the baby; but her husband frequently stole up to the Dower House of an afternoon or evening, creeping timidly into the room where his daughter sat, and taking a place beside her. And here he used to nurse his little grandchild upon his knee, trying to disguise from Ada the delight he could not help taking in its looks and ways, as, when he had once or twice called her attention to them, she had looked at him and at the child, too, in a strange way, of which Eleanor took more notice than he did; and, warned by Michael, she was ever on her guard. But it was not written that Ada was to fulfil her lot in any way such as they sometimes dimly dreaded. Her thoughts strayed within her darkened mind, and as she saw the spring outside breaking around her, and beheld also the looks and gestures by which Michael and Eleanor sometimes betrayed, amidst all the gloom, that they loved, and were happy, Ada might have cried also—
‘Oh, dark, dark, dark, amidst the blaze of noon!’
Most likely, the intelligence of a certain order which her woe seemed to have developed in her, read their fears, and smiled at them. They thought she planned nothing for the future, any more than she revived at any sign in the present; but in this they were mistaken.
CHAPTER XLI
‘LET ME ALONE’