“Yes I do,” said Mrs Primmins, dropping a curtsey; “and as fine a little rogue as ever I set eyes upon.”
“Poor, dear woman!” said my father with great compassion. “So soon too—so rapidly!” he resumed in a tone of musing surprise. “Why, it is but the other day we were married!”
“Bless my heart, sir,” said Mrs Primmins, much scandalised, “it is ten months and more.”
“Ten months!” said my father with a sigh. “Ten months! and I have not finished fifty pages of my refutation of Wolfe’s monstrous theory! In ten months a child!—and I’ll be bound complete—hands, feet, eyes, ears, and nose!—and not like this poor Infant of Mind (and my father pathetically placed his hand on the treatise)—of which nothing is formed and shaped—not even the first joint of the little finger! Why, my wife is a precious woman! Well, keep her quiet. Heaven preserve her, and send me strength—to support this blessing!”
“But your honour will look at the baby?—come, sir!” and Mrs Primmins laid hold of my father’s sleeve coaxingly.
“Look at it—to be sure,” said my father kindly; “look at it, certainly, it is but fair to poor Mrs Caxton; after taking so much trouble, dear soul!”
Therewith my father, drawing his dressing robe round him in more stately folds, followed Mrs Primmins up stairs, into a room very carefully darkened.
“How are you, my dear?” said my father, with compassionate tenderness, as he groped his way to the bed.
A faint voice muttered, “Better now,—and so happy!” And, at the same moment, Mrs Primmins pulled my father away, lifted a coverlid from a small cradle, and, holding a candle within an inch of an undeveloped nose, cried emphatically, “There—bless it!”
“Of course, ma’am, I bless it,” said my father rather peevishly. “It is my duty to bless it;—Bless it! And this, then, is the way we come into the world!—red, very red,—blushing for all the follies we are destined to commit.”