“No, indeed he’s not. Nothing of the kind.”
“He’s not a circus child, is he?—there’s some say he is.”
“It wouldn’t be so surprising, with all his antics generally. But the real truth is, he’s a foundling—that is to say, illegitimate.” Fru Egholm uttered the last word with a certain coldness, but a moment after sighed compassionately.
“You don’t say so! Well, now, I never did....” Madam Hermansen sat rocking backwards and forwards in ecstasy, and as she realised what a grand piece of news she had got hold of, a silent laughter began bubbling up from her heart.
Fru Egholm looked at her in some surprise, and, uncertain how to take her, bent over the cradle and busied herself with the child.
“Why, then, Madam Danielsen was right, after all,” said Madam Hermansen. “But who was his mother, then?”
“Well, to tell the truth, she was a fine lady, and married a professor after—and that’s a strange thing, seeing what a plenty of honest girls there are about. She must have been a baggage, though, all the same, to get into trouble like that.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Madam Hermansen, patting the hairpins that jostled each other in a knot of hair about the size of a walnut. “And his father?”
“Oh, a scatter-brained fellow. Government official, they called him, but he was a painter—an artist, you know—besides, and I daresay it was that was his undoing in the end, when he led the girl astray.”
“But I thought the doctors at the Foundling Hospital were under oath not to tell who the parents were?”