“If I do not mind!” Heather repeated, wonderingly.
“Yes, sweet—my child!” and, with the colour mantling in her cheeks, Bessie went into the next room, her bedchamber, and brought thence a baby—a great, staring, fat baby—with pink feet, and arms that looked as though cord had been tied tightly round the wrists, so deep were the rolls and wrinkles of flesh, so high the mountains and so deep the intermediate valley.
Is it necessary for me to describe what followed during the course of the next ten minutes? What woman is there who does not know exactly how Heather took the little fatuous-looking lump of mortality to her heart and cried over it; who cannot conceive how Bessie, sitting on a low stool, gazed at the meaningless features of her child, which cooed and clung to Heather, and dabbed its fists in her face, and crowed with delight at the sweet eyes bent upon it, and kicked in an ecstasy of infantile excitement at all the notice “mamma’s company” was taking of mamma’s autocrat.
Of course there was weeping. Heather could not so soon forget her own first-born as to forbear shedding tears at sight of Bessie’s baby; and then Bessie cried, and, finally, the autocrat yelled, which ebullition of feeling did more towards restoring the mental equilibrium of the two ladies than one of the Church homilies or a charge from the Archbishop of Canterbury could have done.
And still Heather asked no questions, while Bessie, having brought in her boy’s cradle, sat rocking him to sleep. Mrs. Dudley, spite of that child, the mean lodgings, the tangible wedding-ring, refrained from cross-examination. In an earlier part of this story, it has been stated that Squire Dudley’s wife knew when to keep a discreet silence, but it has not been stated that she frequently did not know when to speak.
She was sensitive to a fault; and so now, though she felt dying to know, and Bessie sat longing to tell, there ensued a silence which the latter at length broke with—
“Heather, why is it that you have never reproached me? how does it happen you had not a single hard word—nothing but love, and tears, and kisses for me, who repaid your kindness with such bitter ingratitude?”
“My darling! why should I reproach you?” Heather answered. “What am I that I should be hard upon you, however it may be?”
“And how do you think it is, Heather?” asked her friend, turning from the child, now fast asleep; “what is your opinion about the matter?”
“I would rather not form any,” was the reply.