Some of Us Are Married/Child of the Heart
CHILD OF THE HEART
I HAD been out of the hospital a month, and had taken the children from St. Mary's Home and was settled with them at last in the few rooms I'd hired on the ground floor of a poor cottage at the end of the town, before any consciousness that I'd had another baby came to me; and then it was in a sudden, odd kind of way.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed, my gown partly off and my hair hanging down over my shoulders—I was as thin as a rail—feasting my eyes on my four little ones rolling a ball on the floor; my big boy, Louis, who was eight, and Pauly and Marie and three year-old Catherine; no one, not if they were worth millions, could have had grander children! with their beautiful, clear, rosy skins, their blue eyes and light wavy hair, and their lovely sturdy legs. They were all fair like me; their father was French and dark. When I took them out people's eyes always followed them; they had a way of walking like him, with then- shoulders thrown back and their heads held high, as though they came of the lords of the land, instead of having only a workingman for their father.
And while I sat there now looking at them, I found myself with my arms folded as if I were holding Some thing; and I rocked to and fro with that feeling of a little round head on my bosom … and it came over me that I had a baby and didn't know where she was. And the thought was as sharp and terrible as a cut with a knife, so that I gasped with the pain and ran out of the room. But in a minute it was gone. That was the only way that I remembered, for well over a year, at odd times like, when I least expected it, when I found myself rocking and crooning, with empty arms, to the baby that wasn't there.
But for the most part of the time I never thought of her at all; I had given her away before I ever felt that she was name. It was all like a bad dream.
It was this way, you see: When Antoine,—I had married him at seventeen, out of the high school,—my lovely, brown-eyed, merry, warm-hearted Antoine, fell from the scaffold—he was a builder—he was dead, they say, before he touched the ground. But I never saw him again after he kissed me good-bye that morning, when I didn't know it was for the last time. It was three weeks before the baby was born, and I went sort of wild with the longing to see him once more, just once was all I'd ask! And with that was the thought, drumming over and over in my mind, how I was ever to earn a living for the children with yet another to hamper me. It didn't seem now as if the one that was coming were mine; all feeling had been killed in me.
When I talked to the matron at the hospital she was very kind. She told me she knew of some good people who would be very glad to have the baby and bring it up, if I were willing to give it away entirely. And it seemed, in my weakness, as if a great weight had been taken off my mind—only I cried, I didn't know why. I was so ill afterward that everything was a haze. They told me the baby was a little girl. I never even saw her, to realize it; I seemed, as I looked back, to have been conscious only once, propped up with pillows and seeing a strange gentleman with black eyebrows looking at me. I heard him say: "What eyes she has!"
Then somebody asked: "Are you still willing to give away the child, Mrs. Blanchet?"
And I said "Yes," and I signed a paper with the pen they handed me. Then I went down and out again for a long time.
Antoine had belonged to a benevolent order, and their money buried him and kept me for a while after I got back. Mrs. Hallett, the clergyman's wife, wanted me to keep the two younger children in the Home and send Louis and Pauly to a farm in the West.
"And in that way," she said, "you will be free to learn to do something worth while." She was one of the nicest ladies, and one of the least understanding I ever knew. She never seemed to think with her heart.
I looked pretty weak and thin, but I knew I'd make out some way. Why, it was life for me to touch and handle the darlings and bathe and dress them; it was like taking in life at my fingers' ends. Miss Lily, though she hadn't any children of her own, understood!
I went out for day's work at first, sending the children to school and running back at lunch time to give them a bite, if I went without my own; but after a while I got a little trade at home. I did up curtains and laces and fine dresses. One lady told another about me.
But one day, when my tall, pretty Miss Lily came in from the Settlement to the room where I was smoothing out a lace collar in my fingers, she kept looking at me while she talked, and all of a sudden she got up and took the collar from me and held my hands close in hers.
"You poor thing!" she said. "What is the matter?"
For a moment I couldn't speak, and then I said in a whisper:
"It's Antoine's—it's my husband's birthday. If I could only see him once more—it's all I'd ask, ever.… Just once! You see, I didn't know it was for the last time when he went out of the door."
Well, that very afternoon I was taking back a bundle of laces, as it happened, alone; I usually had one of the children with me—when you haven't your husband you have to hold on to a child's hand; it's like linking you here to him where he is, above.
And down the road from the big house on the hill into which the new rich people had just moved, came a nurse in a cap and a long white apron, and a long, flying-back dark cloak. She was pushing a white wicker baby carriage. There was an eighteen-month baby sitting up straight inside, with pink bunches of ribbon on either side of her cap, her little hands beating the pink, lacy coverlet, and as she came nearer I looked straight into Antoine's big brown eyes, his eyes with the long, curling black lashes, and the dark, curved eyebrows with the little upward twist to the corners; Antoine's dark curls were on her forehead, his dimple at the corner of her mouth, that little mole of his in front of her left ear, and as she smiled at me—for she smiled!—the little red lips went up at one corner just as his had done.
I knew, and it was as if my heart turned over within me; I knew, past anybody's telling me, that this was my own child.
I'd promised the things and I hurried on with my legs shaking, and the earth and sky whirling around me.… I couldn't think at all. But as I came back over the hill I caught a glimpse of the carriage in the pine grove by the lake, and I turned off down there and dropped myself on the other end of the bench on which the nurse sat. The baby was asleep—but she was my child.
"That's a beautiful little girl," I said. My voice sounded strange.
"Yes, everybody says that," she answered, straightening herself up and as I saw, wild to talk to someone, the way all nurses are. "But it's a lonesome job taking care of her, though I'm well paid. She's brought up modern and hygienic!"
"What's that?" said I, without taking my eyes off that little sleeping face.
"You're never allowed to talk to her or play with her, because it interferes with her developin' herself; and out of doors, she has to be winter and summer, day and night; she sleeps in a crib on the porch with curtains that's drawn if it rains or snows, because she's delicate like her mother—that's why I have her out here under the pines. They have the grandest doctors for her. We have a trained nurse now that's like a eagle, she spies on you so fierce; everything goes by her word. It would make your heart ache sometimes to see the mother look at the child when she's brought into the house and longing to have it for a while to herself, and to kiss it and fondle it, and not daring to."
"Why not?" said I, turning hot and cold.
"It's not hygienical," said the nurse, going on like a mill stream. "The baby's never allowed to be near other children, for every one of 'em's contagious but her; and no chanst do I get to see my own friends for fear of the germs I'll be bringin' off 'em. If the head nurse knew I was talkin' to you she'd fire me. The father, maybe he has other notions, but he's that crazy about the mother he'd do anything in life to please her. The child's to go to the finest schools and learn all languages, and travel in kings' countries, and if she's after having what they call a genious she's to use it in any way she fancies, op'ra singin', or play-actin', or marryin' a prince. Every night when himself comes in the first thing he says is:
"'And how is our little Toinette to-day?' She's christened Antoinette after her mother."
Antoinette! Did you ever in your life hear anything like that? I fell to trembling worse than ever. My head was swimming with all the talk of "her mother," and "her father"—Antoine's child! She opened her eyes and looked up at me, and I got up and ran home before I should scream, and when I got there I sat on the side of my bed, and rocked and rocked—I wanted to hold Antoine's little girl tight in my own arms, to kiss her, to feel her mine. Why, it was just as if he had sent her to me from out of heaven!
The next day I went up to the matron of the hospital in the city, but I got nothing from her. My baby was legally the child of other parents who loved her and I had no right to her any more. She wouldn't even tell me their name, but she started and changed colour when I told her that I knew it was Carrington. Oh, I knew well they'd never give her up! It roused something wild and fierce in me. I went home clean beat out, and the next morning I couldn't raise my head from the pillow, and my big nine-year-old boy Louis came to my bedside and said:
"You just stay in bed, Mummie,"—that was what they called me,—"and we'll bring your breakfast in to you." And so they did. My children were all the handiest little things! They were like Antoine that way! There wasn't one of them, not even little Catherine, who couldn't fry an egg or turn a pancake or make a piece of toast; they cooked for each other often, and it was pretty to see their fair little faces, so wise and eager, over the pan.
Well, I got so that whenever I saw the baby carriage going over the hill to the pines, I'd let everything else go and start up the hills to the pines, myself. And every time I looked into the brown eyes of my baby my heart jumped so I thought Rose must hear it. She was glad to have me to talk to for a few minutes. Toinette grew to know me, and clapped her hands. She had the dearest little voice. She would talk to the toys in her lap, the dolly and the Teddy Bear, and stretch out her hands to the birds and the squirrels. But I never dared to touch her; I didn't know what I might do or say if I touched her. For oh, beautiful as she was, she hadn't the look of the child that's warmed and fed by love; she wasn't hardy, for all her grand nursing.
Once I got a little cap of hers to clean, the darling little cap, with the pressure of her head in it. And when I took it back I saw Mrs. Carrington.
She was a slender lady, with all sorts of lacy things falling over her gown; she had pretty, fady blue eyes, and a little half smile around her pale mouth, and something drooping, yet sweet, about her as if she knew everyone was going to be good to her; you couldn't help wanting to yourself. In one way I liked her, and in another I hated her.
I had been taken up the back stairs to a small room, and as she took the cap out of the paper she said:
"You have done this very nicely. Step in here and I will give you some more of my baby's things to do up!" She opened a door as she spoke, and I walked after her into the nursery.
It was the most wonderful room I had ever been in; it was full of broad windows, and everything in it was a satiny, creamy white, the floor, the furniture, and half the walls the upper part was all pictures in blues and greens and pinks and yellows. There were a great many playthings, dolls sitting on chairs or lying in beds, and all sorts of animals.
"It is a pretty room, isn't it?" said Mrs. Carrington, as if I had spoken, and smiling as if she were pleased. "You see there's no bed; my baby sleeps on the porch outside her nurse's room." She walked over to the cupboard and took out a couple of lace coats. "I will give you these to do up. Ah, here comes my baby now!" And sure enough, the little thing ran in,—Rose and the trained nurse, the stiffest thing! behind her,—turning her sweet eyes on me.
"She's a lovely baby," I said. My voice sounded thick in my ears, but the lady didn't notice.
"It's time for her bath, ma'am," said the nurse, "before she has her supper."
"Oh, dear, it's always time for something!" said Mrs. Carrington, smoothing the baby's hair; but she didn't kiss her, Rose was right there. "So many rules and regulations for my darling!"
As we left the room I looked back to see a door opened to a little white porcelain bath beyond, and a white weigh-scales, and what not, all fit for a little princess.
"You have children?" she asked.
"Five," I said.
"Five," she repeated, but not as if she really heard me. "You must have your hands full. I have only one, you see." She smiled proudly, yet wistfully, too, and my heart suddenly ached for her. She took out her purse and paid me the quarter for the cap. She was so sweet and gentle, it puzzled me what it was I missed in her.
Her husband came in just before I went; he was a tall man, with heavy black eyebrows and a straight mouth. When he stopped still he seemed to stand very quiet, without an eyelash moving, and I knew that he was the man I had seen in the hospital.
I heard him say, "Who is that?" And his wife's voice answered: "It's Mrs. Blanchet from the village. She's doing up some things for Toinette."
I turned at the foot of the stairs to see him smiling at his wife, and he looked quite different. But if I had needed to know any more, I knew it then.
And, oh, my child was well off; she had all the care that money could buy, there was no lack there—though there was a lack.… But if I couldn't have her openly for my own, I could at least feast my eyes on her every day, and for once, if for once only, I would have her secretly for my own—I had a plan.
When I got home, I can't tell you how poor and bare and dark my rooms looked, no place for her! The children ran to meet me, helter-skelter, their hair flying, and I kissed them and listened to their talk, and got the supper and put them to bed.
And when they were fast asleep I went to the cupboard and took out fresh white covers for my bureau and the table, and I got all the candles I had and stuck them in candlesticks or anything I could find, and put them on the mantel and on the table below it, and I hunted some flowers out of the garden, tall, pearly white and golden flag lilies, and set them in between the candles. 'Twas somehow to me as if my little dark bedroom was to be made like the High Altar. And when all the village was still, and the lights mostly out, only for the rising moon, I lighted my candles and went my way silently up the hill, a dark shawl over me. The house was built on a slope and the porch where the baby slept, that was the second story from the front, was not far above the ground in the back. With a bench and a box from the area way I managed to get to the top of the brickwork and then climbed over the stone railing, and pushed aside the screen. Oh, my God, there lay my little Antoinette, her face white like a flower toward the moon, the dark curls brushing her cheek.
I slipped my arms under her—she was in a sort of white woolly sleeping bag—and lifted her to me, so gradually that she didn't know that she was being moved. And still holding her close on one arm I managed slowly to edge myself over the railing again and reached the ground, and went swiftly, yet holding her steadily, down the hill. But of a sudden she stirred and opened her eyes and began to whimper. The voice of her! I was mad with joy. And the feel of her! "You darling! You darling!" I whispered. "You're with Mummie now, you're with Mummie" And when she heard my voice she stopped crying and put her little hand to touch my face. And so we came into my altar room, all set with the candles and the pearl and golden lilies, and my baby raised her head and stretched out her arms and said, "Pretty, pretty!" Oh, the darling, the darling! And I took off all the things she was bundled in. And then I went and waked the sleeping children and said:
"Come and see what Mummie has for you!"
So they came stumbling out one by one, Louis and Pauly and Marie and Catherine, the hair falling over their sleepy eyes, and then they all screamed at once and ran forward.
There on the table, in the midst of the flowers, with the altar lights behind her, stood my baby in her little white shirt, with her lovely bare arms and neck, her bare legs and dimpled feet, her head with the brown curls thrown back, and her big brown eyes shining solemnly; but at the sight of the children's faces she began to laugh, her red lips parting to show the tiny white teeth.
"Oh, Mummie, is it an angel?" cried Marie.
And I said, "Yes, she's come down to play with you."
And then I set her on the floor and they all danced around her, she laughing with delight and plucking at them, and each one had to touch and hold her, her little pink toes curling up when they kissed them. Oh, she knew her brothers and sisters that she was born to, and that I had cheated her of! When I looked in the glass I didn't know myself, my cheeks were so red. When I packed them off to bed again I said:
"Mind you, there's not a word to pass your lips to any living soul about our little angel. Remember that, Louis, and Marie, and Catherine, and Paul."
Then I put out all the lights but one and took my baby into my own narrow bed with me. I kissed her from her curls to her little warm feet, and she went to sleep, sighing and cooing with content, as I kissed her—she was mine, mine, mine!
I lay awake while she slept so as not to lose a minute of her. I can't tell you of my joy and my pain. God lets love hurt us so much, doesn't He! But before it was light, and oh, the dawn comes so early in the spring!—I was up the hill with her, still sleeping, in my arms, and put her in the crib on the porch outside of the room where the trained nurse slept—I'd outwitted her for all her training!
But after that, if I'd thought I'd be satisfied I was mistaken; I wanted my baby more than ever. I kept watching to see Rose wheeling the carriage over to the pines, and then I'd leave everything and run.
How is it that you can't keep what you're thinking out of the world? My children never told about that night when I stole their little sister for them; small as they were they never told. But one evening Louis began to cry, sobbing, with his face in his hands turned away from me, and though I asked him why, he wouldn't speak. Children are so much wiser than we. Sometimes I was afraid of Louis. It isn't what you do or say, it's your thoughts that you can't guard, that slip away from you, and find their way into the minds of others. It seemed to me that people began to look strangely at me.
One day I met Mr. Carrington in the town, and Rose didn't come to the pines the next day or the next, or the next. The day after that, Miss Lily came in for a China crepe shawl of her mother's. She'd brought a chocolate apiece for each of the children—sweet thing, the mother's heart of her!—and they'd thanked her prettily, they had nice manners, and she said, looking at Marie: "Do you know, Mrs. Blanchet, Mrs. Carrington's little girl always reminds me of your children, though her colouring is so different! She has the same way of holding her head, and there's something in her smile. She's such a dear little thing; I'll miss her when they go."
"When they go!" I repeated, staring at her.
"Yes, they sail on Saturday. Mr. Carrington has business in France, so they're going there to live. Mrs. Blanchet, you really must not work so hard, you look terribly!"
"Oh, I'm all right, Miss Lily," I said.
Going away, going to take my child away, and to France, her father's country!
That night I went up the hill, it was black dark with o moon, and I crept over the railing of the porch and stole my baby once more.
So I brought her home to have her in my arms for the few hours that I might—and what I would have done or not have done the night decided for me.
It rained. The heavens opened, and the waters fell down in torrents; the thunder crashed, the lightning flared; the drops rattled on the roof with a noise so loud and continuous you couldn't hear yourself speak, and the wild wind hurled them at the window panes so that they were like to break; did one storm seem as if it would die down, another followed it. The children were frightened and came running out of their beds to me—little Toinette cried; I had to walk the floor with her. I couldn't have taken her back again if I would. And I was frightened at what I'd done—and afraid of Mr. Carrington—but I knew I'd have done it all over again.
It was seven o'clock, with the children up and the rain stopping at last, that Mrs. Barns, a woman who lived above me, put her head in at my door, and says:
"Have you heard the news? The Carringtons' baby has been stolen! She disappeared in that awful storm last night. Ain't it terrible!"
"Stolen!" said I, with a quick glance behind me. The children were all in the inner room. "Have they—any clue?"
"I don't know. Mr. Carrington was away last night, but they've sent for him. Mrs. Carrington is wild."
It was all only what I expected to hear, and yet—there's such a strangeness in it when bad things come true!
But I went back to the children when she left, with the baby running around among them on the floor and laughing, her little head thrown back and her eyes, Antoine's big brown eyes, shining. She ate all her breakfast of bread and milk with the rest. She had a look about her she'd never had before, the look loved children have. The others had their breakfast and went to school—only Louis looked at me strangely. And after I bathed the darling in the green tin foot-tub, and dressed her in some old things of Catherine's, I was waiting all the time for the moment to come when she'd be taken from me.
And it came! When I heard that knock on the front door I opened it to Mr. Carrington.
He was alone. He strode in, his face black and stern, and when he saw the child in my arms he put out his and pulled her from me, though I tried to hold on to her. I screamed, and he said sternly: "Why not? She's mine. Oh, I knew where to look for her all right! I've been watching you ever since I recognized you at the house. Now I want to tell you, you've got to stop this game. You won't make anything by it."
"Make anything by it?" What did he mean? "But she belongs to me!" I stammered.
"She belongs to my wife and myself," he said. "You can be sent to prison for stealing her. Don't you know that? If we weren't sailing to-morrow morning I'd have you put where you couldn't do any more harm. Your child! What kind of a mother were you to give her away? What kind of a mother are you now to want to take her from all the comforts and luxuries of life, with everything to make her good and happy when she's growing up, and drag her down instead to"—he glanced around—"this! If you were to die, what's to become of her? Do you want her to go to the poorhouse? You're a wicked, selfish woman, and when you talk of mothers—you don't care whether you break her true mother's heart or not!"
He saw her sleeping bag and picked it up from a chair and wrapped it around her all wrong, like a man does, and strode out the door with her in his arms, and off up the hill, me hurrying along behind him, wringing my hands as I went. I saw people staring, but I took no heed. Once he looked back to see me following; the baby was laughing at me over his shoulder. I went into the house after him to where Mrs. Carrington was sitting in her drooping laces, and she gave a cry when she saw the little thing in her husband's arms and ran and snatched the child to her.
"Oh, Hubert! I knew you'd find her, I knew Why" She stopped, for she saw me, my hair in wisps against my face, my lips twisting, and my hands twisting, too, against my apron.
"What eyes she has!" she said, drawing back as if in terror. She turned questioningly to her husband, and he nodded.
"'Twas as I thought," he said. "This is the woman. You'd better go," he ordered, not roughly, but I knew I had to obey. Yet first.…
"Madam," I said, "it's only a word I have to speak. Your husband's been telling me how cruel I was to give my child away, and how cruel I am to want her now, cruel to you, and to her. I'd tell you what I went through before she came, if I could make you understand all my trouble—if I could make any one understand what it is to have your husband die and leave you! And it's true all Mr. Carrington says—I'm selfish to want her—yes—if she were my baby alone I'd give her up to you again, yes, I would!—But she's her dead father's child, too! She's a part of him, come back from heaven to me. There's something in me that's stronger than I—God put it there. And I can't let her go; I can't, I can't, I can't!"
I had fallen on my knees with sobbing. "You may take her away to the ends of the earth, but you can't take her from my heart's longing, and it will come between you and her till I die!"
I heard the lady's voice saying, "Oh, Hubert!" as if faint-like, and somebody picked me up, and I found myself at home more dead than living.
Late that evening a carriage stopped by my gate, and Mr. and Mrs. Carrington got out. He had my baby in his arms.
His wife was clinging to him, very white, but cold and proud-looking. "We have come to give you back the child," he said in that stern voice of his. He put up his hand imperiously. "Don't speak, please. My wife and I have made up our minds. My wife feels that knowing of Toinette's parents makes a great difference in her own feeling of possession—the thought of another living mother is unpleasant to her. And she is very tender-hearted." His voice broke a little; that the man loved his wife was plain to be seen! "To think of your longing for the child would take all her own pleasure and comfort away. So we give Toinette back to you.—Wait! One thing is to be clearly understood: One such trial is enough. We will never take the child back under any circumstances. You are never to make any appeal to us!" His voice wasn't as hard as his words. He was looking at his wife.
"Never!" I whispered, but I only looked at the lady; our eyes hung on each other for a moment. I tried to say, "May the Lord bless you," and she came close to me, and I put up my lips, and we kissed each other, as if we might have been sisters, each so sorry for the other.
Then they left me with my darling child, Antoine's and mine.… "Mummie, Mummie!" she cried, and patted my face with her little hand.
But wouldn't you think it strange? That other woman loved the child, yet she never sent one of the baby's little clothes down to her when they left. Christmas or a birthday, since, never anything has come. Kind she was, but I knew from the first that she hadn't the real heart of a mother!
Sometimes I'm frightened that I won't be able to work as hard as I ought. Louis says:
"Mother, I'm going to begin and earn money soon for my little angel sister," for I'd told him all. But oh, will she judge me when she grows up, and finds what I've kept from her?