“The proportion is small,” said the doctor.
Half an hour afterwards she spoke again.
“Does the child sometimes die?”
“Well, I've known it to happen, but only when the mother has had a shock—lost her husband, for example.”
She lay tossing on the bed, wishing for her own death, hoping for the death of the unborn child, dreading its coming lest she should hate and loathe it. At last came the child's first cry—that cry out of silence that had never broken on the air before, but was henceforth to be one of the world's voices for laughter and for weeping, for joy and for sorrow, to her who had borne it into life. Then she called to them to show her the baby, and when they did so, bringing it up with soft cooings and foolish words, she searched the little wrinkled face with a frightened look, then put up her arms to shut out the sight, and cried “Take it away,” and turned to the wall. Her vague fear was a certainty now; the child was the child of her sin—she was a bad woman.
Yet there is no shame, no fear, no horror, but the pleading of a new-born babe can drown its clamour. The child cried again, and the cruel battle of love and dread was won for motherhood. The mother heart awoke and swelled. She had got her baby, at all events. It was all she had for all she had suffered; but it was enough, and a dear and precious prize.
“Are you sure it is well?” she asked. “Quite, quite well? Doesn't its little face look as if its mammy had been crying—no?”
“'Deed no,” said Grannie, “but as bonny a baby as ever was born.”
The women were scurrying up and down, giggling on the landings, laughing on the stairs, and saying hush at their own noises as they crept into the room. In a fretful whimper the child was still crying, and Grannie was telling it, with many wags of the head and in a mighty stern voice, that they were going to have none of its complaining now that it had come at last; and Kate Herself, with hands clasped together, was saying in a soft murmur like a prayer, “God is very good, and the doctor is good too. God is good to give us doctors.”
“Lie quiet, and I'll come back in an hour or two,” said Dr. Mylechreest from half-way through the door.