“Surely you have no fault to find with that most gentle creature?”
“She is just a little too gentle for my taste,” replied Alicia, who usually took upon herself all expression of opinion, while Belinda fanned herself languidly, in an æsthetic attitude, feeling that her chief mission in this life was to sit still and look like la belle dame sans merci. “She is just as much too quiet as Miss Leland is too boisterous. I have no liking for pensive young women who cast down their eyelids at the slightest provocation, and are only animated when they are flirting.”
“The tongue is a little member,” quoted Mr. Colfox, taking up his hat, and holding out his hand in adieu.
He was very unceremonious to these fair parishioners of his, and talked to them as freely as if he had been an old French Abbé in a country village. It is needless to say that they valued his opinion so much the more because he was entirely unaffected by their wealth or their good looks. They were naturally aggrieved at his marked admiration for Miss Leland.
Those ripe months of harvest and vintage, July, August, and September, passed like a blissful dream for Martin Disney. He had snatched his darling from the jaws of death. He had her once more—fair to look upon, with sweet, smiling mouth and pensive eyes; and she was so tender and so loving to him, in fond gratitude for his devotion during her illness, so seemingly happy in their mutual love for their child, that he forgot all those aching fears which had gnawed his heart while he sat by her pillow through the long anxious nights—forgot that he had ever doubted her, or remembered his doubts only to scorn himself as a morbid, jealous fool. Could he doubt her, who was candour and innocence personified? Could he think for an instant that all those sweet, loving ways and looks of hers which beautified his commonplace existence, were so much acting—and that her heart was not his? No! True love has an unmistakable language; and true love spoke to him in every word and tone of his wife’s.
The child made so close a bond between them. Both lives were seemingly bound and entwined about this fragile life of Isola’s firstborn. Mr. Baynham had no reason now to complain of his patient’s want of the maternal instinct. He had rather to restrain her in her devotion to the child. He had to reprove her for her sleepless nights and morbid anxieties.
“Do you think your baby will grow any the faster or stronger for your lying awake half the night worrying yourself about him?” said the doctor, with his cheery bluntness. “He has a capital nurse—one of those excellent cow-women, who are specially created to rear other people’s babies; and he has a doctor who is not quite a fool about infant maladies. Read your novels, Mrs. Disney, and keep up your good looks; or else twenty years hence you will see your son blushing when he hears his mother mistaken for his grandmother.”
After giving his patient this advice, Mr. Baynham told his wife, in confidence, that were anything to happen to the little one, Isola Disney would go off her head.
“I’m afraid she is sadly hysterical,” replied Mrs. Baynham. “I am very fond of her, you know, Tom; but I have never been able to understand her. I can’t make out a young woman who has a pretty house and an indulgent husband, and who never seems quite happy.”
“Every woman can’t have your genial disposition, Belle,” answered the doctor, admiringly. “Perpetual sunshine is the rarest thing in Nature.”