“The superintendent will telegraph to Hampstead, and if that child has got such a thing as a distracted parent a-looking for it everywheres, that parent will be down herein a jiffy!”
Not in a jiffy, but in a neat dogcart did the owner of that poor innocent turn up, as if the gift of prophecy had descended on Cheevers, and before two hours was past.
A genteeler-lookin’ young couple I never did see; him junior partner in a City firm of shippers, and her his young wife, married to him but eighteen months. And the story of how she lost that baby, deliberate and by her own act, as told to me, by her own lips with streaming eyes, was as here set down.
Says she, huggin’ the baby, till you’d ha’ thought she’d ’a squeezed it to death, but that mothers have a way of doin’ these things—“Mrs. Cheevers, I do assure you it’s nobody’s fault but my own, and to my shame, be it said.
“My dear Alfred,” as was her husband, “knows, that before I married him I had literary ambitions, and had nearly written a whole novel,” says she, “when our marriage made me break off at the end of the second volume.
“At first, with one thing and another, I had no time to take it up agin,” she says, “yet still the cravin’ to win glory by my pen, was in me, so to speak. An’ when baby was six months old, which happened a week ago, a longin’ came over me,” she says, “to go on with that story.
“So I laid in a store of pens and ink and paper, unbeknown to Alfred, and began. But my ideas refused to flow. I could not remember the endin’ of them people in the story, try how I would. And this very afternoon as ever was, I made up my mind to give up the ideas of a literary career and sink into contented obscurity.
“So, quite calm and resigned, I wheeled out the baby in her perambulator for an airin’, an’ just about the high part of the Heath I stopped for a rest. If you’ll believe me, Mrs. Cheevers—I’d no sooner sat down, than the whole thing came back upon me like a flash of thunder. I felt, as if I should die if I didn’t go home and write it all down.”
“And you did go?” I says, quite petrifacted with surprise, “and left your baby!”
“I forgot all about her,” says the young lady, beginning to cry again. “How such a thing could happen, I don’t know. But happen it did. I never thought of her till I walked in at our own garden-gate—and then I flew back like the wind. But she was gone. And now that I’ve got her back—as I don’t deserve to, being such an unnatural parent as to abandon my own child—I’ll burn that novel, as soon as I get home.”