The shock of finding her baby gone, together with the removal from Dorset Street, in her weak state brought on another faint; and when the carriage stopped before the house in the vicinity of Belgrave Square, Edith lay unconscious in the arms of her mother, who carried her up the steps and into the large airy room, where for a time they were to stay until she had decided upon her future course, and her daughter’s health was restored. In a few weeks at most they should move again, Mrs. Fordham thought, but in this she was mistaken. Edith did not rally; the fainting fit was succeeded by a low nervous fever, which lasted for so long that the hedge roses were in blossom, and the breath of early summer was stealing in at her window when she was at last able to walk across the floor.
“Now, mother,” she said one morning, when for the first time in months she was dressed and sitting up. “Now, you must go for baby; go to-day,—will you,—or shall I send some one else?”
She spoke decidedly, and Mrs. Fordham, who felt that there was a change in her daughter, and that henceforth their relations to each other must be different from what they had heretofore been, did not oppose her, but answered, readily:
“I will go myself;” and an hour later she stood again at the door of —— Street Foundling Hospital. She was a clergyman’s widow, she said, and had come to make inquiries concerning a child named Heloise, which was left there some time in January. Could they tell her anything about it?
They could tell her, and they did, and with a throbbing of the heart and a relieved expression on her face, she started home, where Edith was waiting for her.
“Where is it, mother?” was the question asked eagerly.
“Edith, baby is dead. It only lived three weeks, they told me. It was born, it seems, with some affection of the heart, which, under any circumstances, would have ended its life in a short time, the physician said. It had every possible care, and died with little or no pain. I was particular to inquire about that, as I knew you would wish to know. There, there, my child, don’t take it so hard,” and Mrs. Fordham laid her hand on the bowed head of the sorrowing girl, who was weeping passionately. “It was wrong perhaps to take it from you, and I am sorry now did it. I thought then it was for the best, for a baby would be in our way. Forgive me, Edith, and let us bury the past forever.”
She stooped to kiss her daughter, in whose mind there was no shadow of doubt that what her mother had told her was true. Her baby was dead, and though she mourned for it truly she knew that it was far better off in heaven than in that hospital, with only strangers to care for it; and gradually, as the days went by and she felt her strength and health coming back again, the sense of loss and pain which at first had weighed so heavily upon her, began to give way, and more than one of the lodgers in the house noticed and commented upon the great beauty of the young girl, whom they sometimes met upon the stairs or saw sitting by her window. They knew the grave woman dressed in widow’s weeds was Mrs. Fordham, and as the young girl was her daughter they naturally supposed her to be Miss Fordham, a mistake which the mother took no pains to rectify; while Edith, who had suffered so much, began to feel an utter inability to oppose her own will to that of her mother, and when the latter said to her, “It is not necessary for you to explain to others that your name is not Fordham,” she passively acquiesced: and thus none of the lodgers ever heard the name of Lyle, or dreamed of that grave across the sea at Schuyler Hill, or the dreary room in Dorset Street, and the scenes enacted there. All these were buried in the past, and there was nothing in the way of Mrs. Fordham’s plans, except, indeed, the means to carry them out.
Once the mother had hoped much from her daughter’s voice, which was a fine contralto of great power and compass; but that hope was gone, for on the dreadful day when, with the fury of a tigress, Edith had invoked Heaven’s curse upon her mother if so much as a hair of baby’s head was harmed, it seemed as if a hand of iron had clutched her throat with a remorseless grasp, which had for a time deprived her of her powers of utterance, except in a hoarse whisper. At intervals, even now, she felt the grip of those fingers, and would start suddenly with a sense of suffocation, which soon passed away, and left her breathing free as ever. But the glorious voice did not come back, and though she sometimes sang some sweet, low song, her voice was very weak, and a musical education, so far as singing was concerned, was of course out of the question; but for all other branches the best of teachers were procured, and Edith, who possessed a fondness for books, progressed so rapidly as to astonish even herself, while her mother would have been perfectly content but for one little annoyance which haunted her continually, and which increased with every succeeding day. Her finances were fearfully low; nor did she know where aid was to come from.
Since leaving Dorset Street she had assumed a mode of life far above her means, and she was seriously considering the propriety of taking lodgers herself instead of being lodged, when fortune sent in her way a kind, simple-hearted old man, with less of brains than money, as was proved by his offering himself to Mrs. Fordham, whose comely face and dignified bearing attracted his fancy, and who accepted him at once and became Mrs. Dr. Barrett, with a pleasant home in a quiet part of London, and money enough to supply every comfort of life, as well as some of its luxuries.