‘Take it!’ cried Mrs. Anderson, with sudden energy; and when the white bundle had been removed from her knee, she clasped her second child in her arms. It is not often that a mother gets to love an adopted child in competition with her own; but during all this past year, Kate had appeared before her many a day, in the sweet docility and submission of her youth, when Ombra was fretful, and exacting, and dissatisfied. The poor mother had not acknowledged it to herself but she wanted those arms round her—she wanted her other child.
‘Oh!’ she said, but in a whisper, ‘my darling! I can never, never tell you how I have wanted you!’
‘Here it is!’ cried Ombra, gaily. ‘Mamma, let her look at him; you can kiss her after. Kate, here is my other secret. Light the candles, Maryanne—quick, that your mistress may see my boy.’
‘Yes, my lady,’ cried Maryanne, full of awe.
A little laugh of unbounded happiness and exultation came from Ombra’s lips. To come back thus triumphant, vindicated from all reproaches; to have the delight of showing her child; to be reconciled, and at last at liberty to love her cousin without any jealousy or painful sense of contrast; and, finally, to hear herself called my lady—all combined to fill up the measure of her content.
Up to this moment it had not occurred to Kate what the other secret was. Mrs. Anderson felt the girl’s arms tighten round her, felt the sudden leap of her heart. Who will not understand what that movement of shame meant? It silenced Kate’s very heart for the moment. This shock was greater than the first shock. She blushed crimson on her aunt’s shoulder, where happily no one saw her. Her thoughts wandered back over the past, and she felt as if there was something shameful in it. This was absurd, of course; but it was some moments before she could so far overcome herself as to raise her head in answer to her cousin’s repeated demands.
‘Look at him, Kate!—look at him! Mamma will keep—you can have her afterwards. Look at my boy!’
Ombra was disinterring the baby out of cloaks and veils and shawls, in which it was lost. Her cheeks were sparkling, her eyes glowing with happiness. In her heart there was no sense of shame.
But we need not linger over this scene. Kate was glad, very glad, to get free from her duties that evening—to escape from the dinner and the people, as well as from the baby, and get time to think of it all. What were her feelings when she sat down alone, after all this flood of new emotions, and realised what had happened? The shock was over. The tingling of wonder, of pleasure, of pain, and even of shame, which had confused her senses, was over. She could look at everything, and see it as it was. And as the past rose out of the mists elucidated by the present, of course it became apparent to her that she ought to have seen the true state of affairs all the time. She ought to have seen that there was no affinity between Bertie Hardwick and her cousin, no natural fitness, no likelihood, even, that they could choose each other. Of course she ought to have seen that he had been made a victim of, as she herself had been made a victim of, though in a less degree. She ought to have known that Bertie, he whom she had once called her Bertie, in girlish, innocent freedom (though she blushed to recall it), could not have been disrespectful to herself, nor treacherous, nor anything but what he was. She owed him an apology, she said to herself, with cheeks which glowed with generous shame. She owed him an apology, and she would make it, whenever it should be in her power.
As for all the other wonderful events, they gradually stole off into the background, compared with this central fact that she owed an apology to Bertie. She fell asleep with this thought in her mind, and, waking in the morning, felt so happy that she asked herself instinctively what it was. And the answer was, ‘I must make an apology to Bertie!’ Ombra and her mysteries, and her new grandeur, and even her baby, faded off into nothing in comparison with this. Somehow that double secret seemed to be almost a hundred years old. The revelation of Bertie Hardwick’s blamelessness, and the wrong she had done him, was the only thing that was new.