Chapter Twenty-five

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THE interview last recorded between Belchamber and his heir was to have momentous consequences for both of them. The principal gain was at first to the baby, as the immediate result was the dismissal of his neglectful attendants. Cissy, for her part, first delicately expressed surprise at Sainty's interesting himself in the matter at all, and then adopted the simple plan of refusing to believe a word against the nurse, whom she eventually passed on to another young mother, with as strong a recommendation as she had received of her, adding in explanation: "My husband took a dislike to the woman, and so, of course, she had to go."

Lady Eccleston was full of concern and astonishment. "I can't understand it," she cried. "Lady Quivers gave her the very highest character, and before that, she was four years in the nursery at Branches, first as nursery-maid and then as under-nurse, and I went to see dear Lady Olave myself, who couldn't say enough about her. I can't think she would really neglect the darling."

Sainty repeated his experience, and "Go and see for yourself," he said. "The child is ill-cared for; he isn't even kept clean."

Grandmamma went to inspect, and returned declaring the angel was as neat as a new pin. "You can't, no matter how careful you are, prevent their dear little chinnywinnies from getting a wee bit chapped if they dribble much," she said.

"No doubt he was clean enough after my unexpected visit," Sainty answered; "but I assure you I didn't find him so; his hands were dirty and nothing about him was fresh. I don't know much about babies, but I'm sure they ought not to smell so nasty. He was hungry and cold too, poor little chap! and left all alone to yell himself into a fit."

"Nurse declares she wasn't gone five minutes; she was dreadfully distressed that you should have found the child alone. I feel sure one can trust that woman; I can always tell by people's faces and the way they look at one; and Lady Quivers said she was so devoted to her last, and I know it was a very delicate little thing."

For once, however, her son-in-law was inexorable. "The woman may have been all you say when she came," he said; "but it is not surprising if the best of nurses grows neglectful when the mother sets her the example."

This was taking the matter to very unsafe ground, where Lady Eccleston felt that it behoved her to walk warily. "I can want nothing but the darling baby's good," she said hastily. "I hold no brief for nurse, and if you are dissatisfied with her, dear Sainty, of course she had better go, though I don't see what precautions we can take more than we did in getting this one."

It was Alice de Lissac who finally discovered a successor to Lady Quivers' treasure, and imported a pet lamb from her mother's bible-class at Great Charmington to act as nursery-maid.

Once the treasure was gone, the other servants abounded in evidence which more than justified her removal, though they would apparently have had no difficulty in reconciling their consciences to perpetual silence had she remained. It transpired that it was her frequent habit to administer  narcotics to her unfortunate charge, in order that she might fulfil evening engagements of her own, from which she had sometimes not returned till the small hours of the morning; yet when Sainty felt it his duty to impart this information to her new employer, he was very civilly shown the door, with profuse thanks, but a polite intimation that his interference was not required; from which he was forced to conclude that Cissy was not as exceptional among fashionable mothers as he, in his ignorance, had imagined.

He carried the child off to Belchamber, where he knew that Lady Charmington would keep a lynx eye on the new nurse and her acolyte, and where, indeed, it soon began to improve visibly in condition.

Since its mother seemed to be without the common instincts of the animal kingdom, he imposed it on himself as a duty to see that the poor little creature was at least warmed and fed, and not poisoned with drugs. The duty was at first rather a painful one, involving as it did a constant recollection of what he would fain forget; but, as the months went by, like other things originally taken up from the sternest sense of responsibility, it came to have for him a decided interest.

It has been somewhat cynically said that to be under an obligation to a man is the beginning of dislike; be that as it may, there is no doubt that any one to whom, in a world of frustrated effort, we have been able to do a tangible service, establishes thereby a distinct claim on our gratitude. "This," we say to ourselves with a pardonable glow, "is our work; here is something accomplished, some one better or happier for our existence." And it is impossible not to have a kindly feeling towards the person who has procured us such a pleasing reflection.

Sainty found his mind constantly running on his small charge; he dwelt with pleasure on the prospect of seeing it; he even began to make excuses for more frequent visits to Belchamber, where it was astonishing how often his presence and personal supervision seemed to be required.

In addition to the baby, there was now another person there on whom he had the pleasure of knowing he had conferred a benefit; he had rescued his brother-in-law, Thomas Eccleston, from the hated thraldom of the broker's office, and placed him with his agent, Mr. Danford, who was beginning to feel, as age stole upon him, the necessity for help in managing the huge property.

The good Tommy, his legs permanently gaitered, his honest pink face burnt to a healthy brickdust colour, and his hands hardened by much congenial outdoor labour, was as happy as a rabbit in a vegetable garden. To initiate this neophyte into his duties, and at the same time keep things smooth between Danford and the pupil in whom his jealousy could not but scent a possible successor, called for many visits from the master. Sainty made time for them gladly, half ashamed to admit even to himself how much the new tenant of his old nurseries had to do with his alacrity. It surprised him to find how eagerly his eyes would scan the walks and lawns for the distant gleam of white in the perambulator.

Week by week, and month by month, the little life was expanding and developing like an opening flower in the sunshine, and Sainty noted the changes, watching with reverent awe the miracle of the dawning intelligence. He brought wonderful toys, heads in fancy costume that could by a turn of the wrist be made to gyrate on a handle to a feeble lute-like accompaniment; wonderful parti-coloured acrobats in the attitude of St. Andrew on his cross, who shook their extended limbs with a great tinkling of bells; white, furry animals that emitted strange squeaks when pressed in the abdominal regions.

It must be confessed that the toys left the baby rather cold; sometimes he looked at them with solemn and contemptuous eyes, sometimes with an indulgent smile; more often he swept them from him with a downward sabre-cut action of the right arm. Whatever he did seemed to Sainty an indication of unusual capacity. He thought with a pang of fierce hatred---was it envy? was it contempt?---of the men who begot such marvellous beings, and grudged an occasional moment from their low toils or pleasures to glance impatiently at them and order them from the room. Of a mother who could bring forth a child and leave it to take its chance of life or death in the care of hirelings, he dared not trust himself to think at all.

A hunger of paternity possessed him. How he could have adored a child of his own! His own! Was this child not his own? To whom did it rather belong? the father who disowned, the mother who neglected it, or to him who had tended and cared for it, and was learning to love it? And the crowning wonder of all was that the child was learning to love him. It was not a merry baby---"a solemn, wise-like thing," the nurse called it---looking out upon the world with grave, mysterious eyes, and that peculiarly detached, far-off expression that belongs only to babies and cats; but at sight of Sainty the rare smile never failed to light up the little white face, the legs would jump and kick against the nurse, the arms held out for his embrace.

A baby's partiality has as little cause or meaning as its aversions, and it is as unreasonable to be flattered by the one as to be hurt by the other; but a man must be of a sterner temper than our poor Sainty to resist a certain mild elation when a little creature hurls itself into his arms with such confident self-surrender. To him, moreover, the novelty of the experience made it doubly dear. His mother had doubtless loved him in her own grim way, because he was her son; others, as his uncle, had pitied, or done their duty by him; others again might have paid him attention for what they hoped to obtain from him; but never in the course of his existence could he remember that any living thing had been simply attracted to him by the magnetism of his own personality; and no one can suspect a baby of any complexity of motive. So, when his coming was greeted with jubilant laughter and dancings and outstretched arms, a warmth crept about his heart, and he owned to himself with humble gratitude that out of what had seemed his greatest affliction had come the best happiness his life had ever known.

Of course he did not arrive at this height of devotion all at once; it was the growth of many months, and every time he came to Belchamber, the little tendrils wound themselves more closely round his heart. At the end of the session, he established himself there with a more joyful sense of home-coming than he had known for years.

To those who have experienced how rich in possibilities is the intimacy of a baby of six months, it were unnecessary to describe it; they who have not would hardly credit it, however cunningly set forth. There is something intangible about it that must necessarily evaporate in the mere attempt to put it on paper. Sainty fell into the habit of having the child almost constantly with him; often it slept on the sofa in his study, or in its perambulator under the great cedars while he read or wrote beside it and the sense of its nearness at once soothed and stimulated him; even if it woke, it was so gentle and quiet that it hardly disturbed his work.

He abandoned his little cart in favour of a larger open carriage in which the nurse and baby could accompany him on his drives. Not infrequently they would start by way of the dower-house, where Lady Charmington would be a willing addition to the party. Sainty and his mother were brought very close together by their common worship of the child; at no previous time, and on no other subject, had her son been in such constant need of the good lady's advice. Exactly what the baby had suffered at the hands of the "treasure" remained in doubt, but certainly its internal economy was none of the strongest, and many changes of diet had to be tried, which its two guardians discussed by the hour. Then it began to cut its teeth exceptionally early, with all the usual accompaniments of heaviness, loss of appetite, and restless nights. Without his mother's rocklike common-sense to lean upon, Sainty would have worked himself into a fever of anxiety; her experience of the frailty of his own early days was of inestimable comfort to him.

"I tell you, this child is a tower of strength to what you were," Lady Charmington would say. "I've been up night after night with you when you were teething."

"But was I as hot and restless as baby?"

"Hot and restless? I should think you were! twice as bad, and croupy into the bargain, which this child, thank God! hasn't a symptom of."

So Sainty took heart, and when, after a time, he was made to feel with his finger two tiny white points in the red gum, this also seemed to him an almost supernatural achievement on the part of one so young.

He had come to regard the precious infant as so entirely his charge, that he did not bestow much thought upon its recreant mother. Cissy had started on a round of visits at the end of the season, hardly going through the form of inquiring if Sainty thought of accompanying her. It was a shock to him to find how completely she had gone out of his existence, when she presently announced that she was coming to Belchamber; she had spent a day or two there, before going North, to get some country clothes and give her maid a chance to repack, but had not seen the baby more than two or three times, nor appeared to take any particular interest in what was being done for it. It never occurred to Sainty as likely that she would in any way occupy herself with the child or its relation to him; it was therefore no small surprise to him to discover, before she had been many days in the house, that it was a distinct irritation to her to see them together.

The first time she found it under the cedars with him, she inquired, with a perceptible shade of annoyance in her voice, where the nurse was, and why she hadn't taken it out.

"Baby generally spends most of the morning with me here if it's fine," Sainty said. "The doctor likes him to be in the open air as much as possible, and it gives nurse a chance to do various little things for him."

"Nonsense! it's her place to be with him; she'll get utterly spoilt if you do her work for her; she has got a girl in the nursery. If she can't manage, she had better have another. There's no earthly reason for you to do nursery-maid."

"I like having baby with me, and this woman doesn't neglect her duties; at least she doesn't leave the child alone, when he's not with me, like the one your mother got for him."

"You were always unjust about that poor woman. Ah! here you are, nurse. You had better take baby and walk him about. You shouldn't leave him here to worry his lordship."

"Begging your ladyship's pardon, my lord partick'larly wished for the child to be left with him," retorted the nurse, as she wheeled the perambulator viciously away, quivering with suppressed indignation.

"You see the results of your spoiling that woman," Cissy remarked. "If she's going to be insolent to me she'll have to go."

"No---by heaven! I'm hanged if she shall," Sainty burst out. "She's devoted to the child, and takes very good care of him, and he isn't very strong. It would be monstrous, after never giving him a thought from the time of his birth till now, if you undertook to sack the people who do look after him, because you considered they didn't sufficiently kowtow to you."

"It's precisely what you did to her predecessor."

"On the contrary, I sent her away because she neglected him, which was, no doubt, what gave you a fellow-feeling for her."

"Oh! well, don't let me interfere between you and your protégé. I don't even pretend to inquire what terms you are on with her; but I must confess I can't see what particular pleasure you derive from the constant presence of another man's child."

"Hush!" Sainty said, casting a swift, frightened glance around to see if any one was within earshot. "Be careful what you say. Remember the child is mine. He has got to be mine. Your remark was in your usual excellent taste, but on that particular subject you will have to forego the pleasure of wounding me. If you are so fond of reminding me that I am not his father, you will say something one of these days before others that you will regret."

It gave him a horrible sense of complicity to be obliged to entreat her discretion, a feeling that, bound by their guilty secret, let them hate each other as they would, they dare not quarrel. Probably Cissy was not less aware of this necessity than her husband, for though her object remained the same, she altered her tactics. She would try to keep the child from him by little underhand manœuvres, sending it out when she thought him likely to want it, and even going so far as to take it with her when she drove; but she did not risk another face attack.

Sainty, on his side, did nothing to provoke an encounter. He saw the child not less, but as it were by stealth, and this introduction of a slightly clandestine element into their intercourse only heightened his love for it. Not that it required any great exercise of tact or ingenuity to evade Cissy's notice. Lord Charmington would have fared ill had he been dependent on the fitful attentions of his mamma for care and comfort. Even the amiable desire to deprive her husband of his one pleasure could not make a domestic character of Lady Belchamber. She was much away, and when at home constantly surrounded by guests who absorbed her attention. It was only at rare intervals that she found any leisure to bestow on the separation of her husband and her child.

She had a trick of arriving when least expected, swooping suddenly into visible space like a comet, and, like a comet, followed by her train; though to speak of her appearances as comet-like gives a false impression of something periodical and calculably recurrent, whereas no one could foretell when Cissy might take it into her head to entertain a party, which seemed to be her only idea of the uses of a home.

Once, when he thought she was safely launched on a round of country-houses, Sainty had asked his old friend Gerald Newby, for whom she entertained no great regard, to pay him a visit. They were at tea on the lawn, when, preceded at a short interval by a heralding telegram, her ladyship descended on them with a few friends, and the announcement of a further contingent for the morrow.

Lady Charmington had come over from the dower-house, and Tommy had dropped in for tea and to play with his nephew, about whom he was almost as weak as Sainty.

No one looking at the group under the cedars would have guessed that he was witness of anything but the most delightful scene of domestic felicity. The stately ancestral home, the superb trees, the great stretches of smoothly mown turf, the young married couple with their baby between them, surrounded by all that wealth and great possession could give, the adoring grandmother, the loving uncle, the admiring friends, the glow of flowers, the cheerful, intimate little meal, all combined to make the picture complete. It appealed strongly to Newby, who beamed indulgently on the party.

"Our dear Sainty appears in a new and most amiable light," he said; "I am not accustomed to see him as Kourotrophos. It is the epithet applied to Hermes in his character of the child-tender," he added explanatorily to Cissy, who looked rather blank.

"I can't think why nurse doesn't fetch baby," that lady remarked; "or, for that matter, why she brought him down at all. I've always told her not to when any one was here. Whatever one may think of one's own children, one has no right to bore other people with them."

"I asked to see the child," said Lady Charmington, the light of battle waking in her eye.

"Mother had settled to come over before I knew you were coming," Sainty said quietly. "When I got your telegram it was too late to stop her, and as she had come on purpose to see baby, I couldn't refuse to send for him. No one need bother about him, he will be quite good with me."

"Dear little man!" said one of the ladies who had come with the fond mother. "I'm so glad you didn't stop him, Lord Belchamber. I love babies. I've been trying to think who he reminds me of. He's not a bit like you or Cissy."

"We think him like my grandmother----" Sainty began.

"I never could see that he was so like the duchess," Lady Charmington cut in.

"To me he's the image of Claude Morland," remarked the luckless Tommy.

There was a sudden hush that may have lasted some five seconds ere it was broken by Newby inquiring, "What has become of your charming cousin? I liked him so much, and hoped I might meet him here."

"We see very little of Claude now," Lady Charmington responded. "He never seems to come here. I suppose he finds other places more amusing. He was glad enough to come in old days."

"I fancy," said Sainty, "as the duke gets older that he is more dependent on him. He very seldom gets away."

He had, in fact, for some time been conscious that Claude came much less to the house than formerly, and was acutely aware of a like consciousness in Cissy, though each was careful to say nothing about it to the other.

"By the way, that reminds me." said Lady Charmington to Sainty. "I had almost forgotten. Alice de Lissac writes she is coming to her father for a little, and she is very anxious to see baby. May I bring her over some day?"

"Why should Claude remind you of Mrs. de Lissac?" Cissy asked with a little laugh, her desire to score off her mother-in-law getting the better of her prudence. "I never knew they had much in common."

"Only because Alice says in her letter they have seen a good deal of him lately. He seems to have been several times to Roehampton; and mother mentioned his coming in to see her one day with one of the girls."

"Morland's a deep 'un," ejaculated Tommy. "Shouldn't wonder if he was after one of the heiresses. Those girls'll have a devil of a lot of money. The mater was always egging me on to be civil to 'em. Do you remember the World's Bazaar, Cissy? Oh my!"

"I wonder if he can be thinking of Gemma," said Lady Charmington thoughtfully. "Alice doesn't say so, but----"

"It's not true," Cissy burst out; then, seeing awakened curiosity in several surrounding pairs of eyes, she added more indifferently, "I know Claude well enough to feel sure he would never be attracted by that black Jewess."

"He might be by her blond sovereigns," suggested Tommy.

Cissy became suddenly solicitous for the comfort of her guests. "I am sure you want to see your rooms," she said. "Wouldn't you like a bath after that dirty journey?" and swept them into the house.

"Cissy don't seem to fancy the idea of Morland being sweet on the dark lady," Tommy giggled. "She used to flirt with him herself once. I remember mater----"

"Tommy," said Sainty, "do, like a good soul, ask nurse to fetch baby."

He felt sick and frightened. The contrast between the appearances of life and the ghastly things that were so thinly overlaid by them suddenly appalled his spirit. Almost unconsciously he picked up the baby, and clasped it closely to him. It was on that same spot, and on much such an afternoon, that he had first seen Cissy five years before. With the clearness of a picture thrown on a screen, he saw her standing as she had stood that day with Claude beside her, her girlish beauty bathed in soft, golden light, and recalled the prophetic pang with which he had watched them turn away together under the baleful gaze of Aimée Winston. As he sat holding their child to his heart, the permanent dweller in his cupboard seemed to grin out at him with a more than usually fiendish malignity.