“You take my advice as a sensible man,” said the surgeon. “It is, first, if you value the child, to give it more sun and air; it wants it. Sun and air are more than beef and bread. If the little chap were not as black as a hedgehog, curled up there at your back, I should say it was bleached like sea-kale. It won’t do, Shone. The child now must be brought up upon another system; that is, if you desire it to live and be healthy and happy—unless you have insured its life, and want to get it under ground altogether, so as to pocket the insurance money.”
Evans turned as blank as he could, considering the grime on his face. His jaw dropped.
“But wherever am I to put him?” he asked.
“Now, I have been wanting to see you about this for some while,” said the surgeon, who was a thoroughly good-hearted man, and who valued and admired Shone. “There is Shian Thomas, the dressmaker, as good and steady a wench as I know. She is very badly off. She has been caring for her poor little crippled sister for several years. Now the child is dead, and she has had heavy expenses, what with doctor’s bill—mine, you know——”
“Ah!” said Evans, “I know better than that. You were never hard on the widow or the orphan. What is hard, is to get you to take anything for your trouble when folks are in need themselves.”
“Well, well! there was the funeral and the mourning,” said the doctor, laughing and colouring at the same time. “Now Shian [Jane] mopes for the loss of her sister, and I am sure—I am as sure of this as of anything—that if you confided the young shaver to her, it would be good for her, good for the child, and”—he said the last words as he turned away—“in the end might be good for you.”
Evans walked on his way meditatively. He did not act at once. He waited a day or two. But as the acquisitiveness of the babe became more pronounced, he resolved to put it beyond temptation, where it could not devour coals; and so he arranged with Shian Thomas that she should look after his child at such time, day and night, as he was at work. But as soon as ever he returned from the pit, whether in the very early morning before dawn, or whether in the afternoon, he was to reclaim the child and carry it home with him. He would not be in the house without it; but he brought himself to admit that now it was advisable, if not necessary, that it should no longer go down the pit with him till, as he said, “he comes of age and takes it upon himself.”
He undertook to make a small payment to Shian for her trouble, which was of assistance to her in her then straitened circumstances.