It was in the end quite a toss-up as to Gwen’s ever seeing her baby at all, she hovered so long on the borders of death. Her silent lonely enduring anguish had shattered her more than any of them had guessed, and then, as ill-luck would have it, the first sound that struck on her ear when consciousness was coming back was the shrill shriek of her lusty boy.
She shuddered down again into the regions of darkness, and it was only after two distracting hours that they got her back among them.
Day after day she held the child and pondered over it; she was very gentle, and ate and drank in an absent way all that was given her, but she hardly spoke at all, some leaven was working in her.
“Then this haunting, sweet-bitter pain is motherhood,” she thought, the first day she was up, as she watched the sleeping child gobbling a red fist, “and it’s for this that one half the women in the world live and brood Madonna-like over their infants, with that awful peace in their eyes which takes the commonness from the most common of them! Goodness, what wouldn’t I give for just the merest knowledge of that motherhood that rests and broods and commands the world! That painted wretch downstairs is teeming with it, and—it’s bitter, it’s terrible, to want your mother as I want mine now, to teach me the meaning of motherhood!”
She stood up, and leaned forward over the baby.
“If this feeling grows much more in me I shall go mad,” she murmured, “I am not quite sane now. Baby, my own little baby, can’t you help me, to be in absolute touch with the beautiful mysterious things that are the crown of womanhood? Seemingly not,” she said turning away, “with all your warm sweetness. I believe I have a fair understanding of this part of a mother, I could make a fool of myself over the tiny thing there, I could—Oh!—Mother, mother! Can I never forget you over my hands! Must a new heartache spring up every hour? Is there rest nowhere?—Ah, Humphrey, if only I weren’t myself and you weren’t just you, I’d set off this minute and find you!—Certainly I am mad, and here are Mrs. Fellowes and Mary upon me!”
CHAPTER XLI.
About a month after her child’s birth, an urgent message came from Strange’s steward to Lady Strange. He was very ill and must see her.
She drove to his house and found him dying, and infinitely concerned that he could not deliver up his stewardship into his master’s hands. He was a man who had always rather suffered from a hypertrophied conscience, and perhaps he exaggerated the importance of his office, and the impossibility of getting anyone to follow him in it; at any rate he impressed Gwen a good deal, and rather put her on her mettle.
After reviewing the situation, she came to the conclusion that if no one else could keep things straight she would undertake to do it herself. As she took off her things, a new complication struck her; to do this she must be on the spot, and how would that suit her father?