“Would you really, ma’am?” cried Pollie, delighted. “I thought you were so angry with me for leaving you.”
“No, Pollie,” Lucy answered, “I was not angry, and I am very sorry indeed if I seemed so. I was bitterly disappointed and vexed because I had not dreamed of your leaving, and it meant taking everything up in a different way from what I had thought. I was under a terrible strain too at that time, so that any added pressure made me cry out, and it may have seemed like anger when it was only pain.”
“I know that what I did didn’t look pretty,” Pollie admitted. “I’ve seen that since. But I was in a fine taking. I’d got it into my head there would be changes and that I’d be turned loose of a sudden, and I knew that it wasn’t every place that would suit me after I’d been so long with you and the master. And husband, after he knew more, he didn’t comfort me nor speak no smooth things. I said you were huffed at my marrying, and he thought that was unreasonable——”
“As it would have been,” interjected Lucy.
“But when it came out how you had been situated with the master going away, and how good you’d been to my sisters, when they were so weakly, then husband sang another tune. ‘Them that considers our families,’ says he, ‘we ought to consider theirs, leastways unless we’re such poor stuff that we must be always a-getting and never a-giving.’ And I’m sure I needn’t have been in such a hurry; he’d have waited a bit if I’d promised him, ’twasn’t his own changing he was feared of but mine! And we’ve never got rightly settled, and the poor baby’s suffered a good deal with the moving about, and me getting so tired and worried.”
“But it is a dear little baby,” Lucy said, stroking the grave little white face. “I am so glad to see it, Pollie. It is so kind of you to bring it.”
Pollie was tearful again.
“I’ve got a favour to ask, ma’am,” she said. “We’ve never hit on a name for him yet, and says husband to me, after he read that bit of troublesome news in the paper—‘I wonder if your mistress would let us call him after your master. It would show her that we did know who is good folks, though we didn’t always act like it.’ That’s the best of husband,” Pollie explained, wiping away her tears. “When there’s anything he thinks a bit wrong, he never puts it on ‘you,’ he always says ‘we.’ And says I to him, ‘I’ll go straight off and ask her, and if she thinks it’s too much of a liberty, I’ll ask if she’d like better that we named the boy after her son, little Master Hugh, God bless him!’”
Lucy’s own eyes were full of tears. She had taken the baby and was pressing it to her bosom.
“Call him after Charlie,” she sobbed. “Call him—Charlie. Charlie had Hugh named after my father—and now if Charlie—if——” she could not complete her sentence, but added with a great effort—“there will never be a Charlie Challoner of my own.”