Heather, however, never spoke; there was something the matter with her she could not have put into words; there shot a pang through her heart such as had never disturbed it before, and involuntarily almost she stretched out her arms towards her little girl, who struggled into her mother’s embrace in spite of Bessie’s teasing efforts to detain her.
“Well, Miss Lally, you’ll see whether I will shake down cherries for you to-morrow! If any one had told me, I would not have believed you could have deserted poor Bessie. You promised to be true to me for life. You are a deceitful little monkey, and I won’t love you a bit.”
In answer to which Lally rejoicingly first slapped Bessie’s cheeks, and then pulled her hair, and finally offered her mouth, so full of sweetmeats that she experienced a difficulty in closing it, to the end that they might kiss and be friends.
“No, I won’t kiss you, indeed,” said Bessie. “I won’t kiss an uncertain little puss who is everybody’s Joe.” Whereupon Lally declared in a voice choked with sentiment and sugar-plums, “Se isn’t bodies Joes.”
All this time Heather kept silence, holding the child tight as she could to her heart.
The sun had set, and as their faces were turned from the west, it seemed to her that they were walking out of the light into darkness.
She never said to the child, “Don’t you love me, are you not mamma’s pet?” for she could not, at the moment, have borne to draw a comparison between Lally’s attachment for Bessie and Lally’s attachment for herself.
If Heather had a sin, it was inordinate affection for that child; if it can ever be criminal for a mother to love her first-born too much, then Heather was a grievous wrong-doer. She loved her son, but she loved Lally more; loved the absurd little girl who, though christened Lily, had grown up as unlike one as can possibly be imagined; so unlike that, not to offend the unities, it had been unanimously decided, in family conclave, that Lily should be changed to Lally.
“Lily, indeed!” sneered Mrs. Ormson; “an orange lily, perhaps.” But the red hair, that would curl in “shilling curls,” as Bessie said, was dearer to Heather than her boy’s darker locks, and she loved every inch of the child’s body—the fair freckled face, the sunburnt arms, the plump little neck, the restless feet—with a love which was terrible, as all great affection is, in its intensity.
“It was sinful,” Mrs. Ormson declared, “the way in which Heather spoiled that child!” But if this were so, there were other sinners in the house besides Mrs. Dudley, for Lally was the pet and plaything of every man, woman, and child about the place; unless, indeed, it might be her father, who, reversing all ordinary rules, concentrated what affection he had to spare for any one on his son, whom he made, as Bessie unhesitatingly informed him, “a disagreeable little pest.”