CHAPTER XX
Madge was a puzzle to Mrs Caffyn. Mrs Caffyn loved her, and when she was ill had behaved like a mother to her. The newly-born child, a healthy girl, was treated by Mrs Caffyn as if it were her own granddaughter, and many little luxuries were bought which never appeared in Mrs Marshall’s weekly bill. Naturally, Mrs Caffyn’s affection moved a response from Madge, and Mrs Caffyn by degrees heard the greater part of her history; but why she had separated herself from her lover without any apparent reason remained a mystery, and all the greater was the mystery because Mrs Caffyn believed that there were no other facts to be known than those she knew. She longed to bring about a reconciliation. It was dreadful to her that Madge should be condemned to poverty, and that her infant should be fatherless, although there was a gentleman waiting to take them both and make them happy.
‘The hair won’t be dark like yours, my love,’ she said one afternoon, soon after Madge had come downstairs and was lying on the sofa. ‘The hair do darken a lot, but hers will never be black. It’s my opinion as it’ll be fair.’
Madge did not speak, and Mrs Caffyn, who was sitting at the head of the couch, put her work and her spectacles on the table. It was growing dusk; she took Madge’s hand, which hung down by her side, and gently lifted it up. Such a delicate hand, Mrs Caffyn thought. She was proud that she had for a friend the owner of such a hand, who behaved to her as an equal. It was delightful to be kissed—no mere formal salutations—by a lady fit to go into the finest drawing-room in London, but it was a greater delight that Madge’s talk suited her better than any she had heard at Great Oakhurst. It was natural she should rejoice when she discovered, unconsciously that she had a soul, to which the speech of the stars, though somewhat strange, was not an utterly foreign tongue.
She retained her hold on Madge’s hand.
‘May be,’ she continued, ‘it’ll be like its father’s. In our family all the gals take after the father, and all the boys after the mother. I suppose as he has lightish hair?’
Still Madge said nothing.
‘It isn’t easy to believe as the father of that blessed dear could have been a bad lot. I’m sure he isn’t, and yet there’s that Polesden gal at the farm, she as went wrong with Jim, a great ugly brute, and she herself warnt up to much, well, as I say, her child was the delicatest little angel as I ever saw. It’s my belief as God-a-mighty mixes Hisself up in it more nor we think. But there was nothing amiss with him, was there, my sweet?’
Mrs Caffyn inclined her head towards Madge.
‘Oh, no! Nothing, nothing.’