“Then you know,” said John, “though that was not how they told me. They say she remembers nothing about the little boy. She declares she never had any child; that he is a little boy who was invited to play with Duke; and that Frogmore took a fancy to him and adopted him. Letitia, it’s the most wonderful thing I ever heard of, and very exciting to people in our position. Do you hear me? What do you think? Was such a thing ever heard of, that a woman should forget she had a child? I never heard of such a thing. Do you think——?” He looked at her with eyes full of excitement, full of awakened anxiety, and a hundred questions. John Parke was not a clever man; he had never pretended to be: but he had boundless faith in his wife’s cleverness, and he brought her this extraordinary question with an unhesitating confidence in her power to draw something out of it that would be somehow to his advantage and that of the family. He fixed his eyes upon her with all the fervor of a question of life and death.
“Oh, I know that,” cried little Duke. “Aunt Mary is Mar’s mother, ain’t she, mamma? But she says she never heard of him. She says she don’t know him. And she’s his own mother! I laughed till I thought I should have dropped. Fancy mamma; Aunt Mary! And Mar laughed too,” the boy said; but added in another moment in a subdued tone, “He was going to cry, but I made him laugh. He’s a very little thing; he doesn’t always see the fun.”
Neither of his parents paid any attention to Duke, though they let him have his say. But John Parke, who had never taken his eyes from his wife’s face, standing over her waiting for her decision on the question he had put before her, now touched her on the shoulder, recalling her to herself and what he had asked. “Eh?” he said interrogatively. “Letitia—don’t you think——”
“No!” she said suddenly, when this little by-play had been twice repeated, “I don’t. Nothing can be made of it. A child born in this house in everybody’s knowledge; put in the papers—as public as if he had been a prince. No! Don’t ask me what I think. There’s nothing to be thought or said on the subject. She’s mad; that is all.”
“But they all say she is not mad—and she says she never had a child. She ought to know,” said John. “Who should know if she doesn’t. Letitia, when I think—if it hadn’t been for her, you and I would have been coming home here; we should have had everything. And what if, after all, there’s been some mistake, some delusion. Frogmore—poor old fellow, I wouldn’t say a word against him; but he was prejudiced. If she says he adopted the boy—— Well! She ought to know——”
“Don’t be a fool, John Parke,” cried his wife. “Frogmore was proud of him, as you know. He hated me. He would never have married Mary Hill but to have his revenge on me. Do you think I don’t feel it, her set up in my place? And wouldn’t I turn that brat to the door if I could, oh! without a moment’s thought. But I’m not a fool,” said Letitia. “The woman’s mad—she doesn’t know what she’s saying. There’s dozens of witnesses to prove it if she denies. The doctor and the nurse and all the servants in the house, and her mother, and—we needn’t go further—myself. John Parke, don’t be a fool. You’ll never get the better of her in that way.”
“All the same,” said John, who had recovered the first dismay caused by her contradiction while she went on speaking. “All the same, I think it’s worth fighting—with the mother at your back.”
“The mother!” she said, with contempt. “She’d go raving mad in the witness-box, and that would be fine proof for you. Why, the child was born before all the world, so to speak, like the heir to the crown. You might as well fight the one as the other. Oh, it is not for any love of them, you may be sure, that I speak!”
“I don’t understand you, Letitia,” said John. “I’d fight it to the last, if it was any good, but as for turning the child out of doors or so forth as you talk in your wild way——”
“You would leave me to do that,” said Letitia, with a snarl, “and so I should, and never think twice either of him or his mother. Duke, what do you mean staring at me like that? You don’t understand what we’re talking about. Run away and play. Go to the nursery or wherever you live when you’re here.”