To my mind, it is a great pity that children are not children for ever—that the pretty baby-boy by Sant, all rosy and flaxen and blue-eyed, should ever grow into a great angular pre-Raphaelite hobadahoy, horribly big and out of drawing. But neither Edward nor Mary nor, above all, Mrs. Arundel were of this opinion. They were as eager for the child to grow up and enter for the great races of this life, as some speculative turf magnate who has given a fancy price for a yearling, and is pining to see the animal a far-famed three-year-old, and winner of the double event.
Before the child had cut a double-tooth Mrs. Arundel senior had decided in favour of Eton as opposed to Harrow, and was balancing the conflicting advantages of classical Oxford and mathematical Cambridge; while Edward could not see the baby-boy rolling on the grass, with blue ribbons and sashes fluttering in the breeze, without thinking of his son's future appearance in the uniform of his own regiment, gorgeous in the splendid crush of a levee at St. James's.
How many airy castles were erected in that happy time, with the baby for the foundation-stone of all of them! The BABY! Why, that definite article alone expresses an infinity of foolish love and admiration. Nobody says the father, the husband, the mother; it is "my" father, my husband, as the case may be. But every baby, from St. Giles's to Belgravia, from Tyburnia to St. Luke's, is "the" baby. The infant's reign is short, but his royalty is supreme, and no one presumes to question his despotic rule.
Edward Arundel almost worshipped the little child whose feeble cry he had heard in the October twilight, and had not recognised. He was never tired of reproaching himself for this omission. That baby-voice ought to have awakened a strange thrill in the young father's breast.
That time at Dangerfield was the happiest period of Mary's life. All her sorrows had melted away. They did not tell her of Paul Marchmont's suspected fate; they only told her that her enemy had disappeared, and that no one knew whither he had gone. Mary asked once, and once only, about her stepmother; and she was told that Olivia was at Swampington Rectory, living with her father, and that people said she was mad. George Weston had emigrated to Australia, with his wife, and his wife's mother and sister. There had been no prosecution for conspiracy; the disappearance of the principal criminal had rendered that unnecessary.
This was all that Mary ever heard of her persecutors. She did not wish to hear of them; she had forgiven them long ago. I think that in the inner depths of her innocent heart she had forgiven them from the moment she had fallen on her husband's breast in Hester's parlour at Kemberling, and had felt his strong arms clasped about her, sheltering her from all harm for evermore.
She was very happy; and her nature, always gentle, seemed sublimated by the sufferings she had endured, and already akin to that of the angels. Alas, this was Edward Arundel's chief sorrow! This young wife, so precious to him in her fading loveliness, was slipping away from him, even in the hour when they were happiest together—was separated from him even when they were most united. She was separated from him by that unconquerable sadness in his heart, which was prophetic of a great sorrow to come.
Sometimes, when Mary saw her husband looking at her with a mournful tenderness, an almost despairing love in his eyes, she would throw herself into his arms, and say to him:
"You must remember how happy I have been, Edward. O my darling! promise me always to remember how happy I have been."
When the first chill breezes of autumn blew among the Dangerfield oaks, Edward Arundel took his wife southwards, with his mother and the inevitable baby in her train. They went to Nice, and they were very quiet, very happy, in the pretty southern town, with snow-clad mountains behind them, and the purple Mediterranean before.