The son and heir was a girl, and in the hope that she would be an heiress they named her after Patty’s Aunt Imogene, whose husband had recently died and left her a fleet of vessels in the Chinese trade.
For a time instinct and pride in the flattery of people who cried that the child was its mother’s own beautiful image gave the tiny replica a fascination to Patty. She played with it as if it were a doll, and she a little girl only pretending to motherhood.
But she tired of the bauble and turned the baby over to the servants. Her Aunt Imogene cried out against her:
“Nowadays women don’t take care of their babies like they used to when I was a girl. In the good old-fashioned days a mother was a mother. She was proud to nurse her children and she knew all about their ills and ailments. I had eleven children and raised all of them but six, and I would no more have dreamed of hiring a nurse for them than I would have I don’t know what. But these modern mothers!”
Criticism had no power over Patty, however. She admitted all that was charged against her and simply added it to the long list of grievances she had against her fate. RoBards often felt that this was cheating of the lowest kind. It left a man no means of either comforting distress or rebuking misbehavior.
As soon as the baby could be weaned from her mother to a nurse, Patty made a pretext of ill health and joined the hegira to Saratoga Springs, which was winning the fashion hunters away from Ballston Spa. She traveled with some friends from the South who brought North a convoy of slaves and camped along the road, preferring that gypsy gait to the luxury of a voyage up the river on the palatial steamboats, in which America led the world.
During that summer RoBards was both mother and father to the child, and Immy’s fingers grew into and around his heart like the ivy that embraced the walls of the house. He was bitter against his wife, whose fingers had let his heart slip with ease and indifference.
Yet, by the time Patty returned from taking the waters in the North, he was so lonely for her that their reunion was another and a first marriage. He found a fresh delight in her company and learned the new dances to keep her in his sight and out of the arms of other men.
By one of Nature’s mysterious dispensations, this girl with the soul of a flirt and a gadabout had the bodily fertility of a great mother. To her frank and hysterical disgust heaven sent her a second proof of its bounty, which she received with an ingratitude that dazed her husband—and frightened him, lest its influence be visited on the next hostage to fortune. If the child should inherit the moods of its mother it would come into the world like another Gloster, with hair and teeth and a genius for wrath.
But the child arrived so placidly that the doctor could hardly wring a first cry from him by slapping him and dipping him into a tub of cold water. And he wept almost never. What he had he wanted. When it was taken from him he wanted it no more. He chuckled and glowed in his cradle like a little brook. He gave up his mother’s breast for a bottle with such lack of peevishness that it was almost an act of precocious gallantry. They named him Keith after an uncle.