by Grant Allen
‘What sort of cottage?’ Remenham asked. He disliked this arrangement.
‘Very clean and nice. The child could be brought round at frequent intervals to see Lady Remenham. There is no time to be lost. We had better see her and arrange with her immediately.’
Remenham gave way. He gave way under protest; but still he gave way. Thingumbob’s food and Swiss milk seemed to him greater evils than this proposed arrangement. Gwendoline ought to have been able to take care of the child herself; but seeing she wasn’t — well, he must needs fall back upon an efficient substitute.
He accompanied the doctor to the young woman’s cottage. He was an honest man, who acted up to his convictions; and where anybody so important as Viscount Hurley was concerned, he would not trust to the services of any intermediary. He saw the young woman himself — Janet Wells by name; a very good-looking young person, strong, tall, and vigorous; just the sort of girl whom, on any but moral grounds, one would desire to intrust with the keeping of one’s children. He asked her a question or two, with doctrinaire stiffness, and was astonished to find she resented some of them. However, though she was at first most averse to giving up her own baby, to which she attached an enormous importance— ‘and very properly too,’ Remenham thought, ‘for the instinct of maternity lies at the root of race preservation’ — she was at last bribed over by promises of money into accepting the charge of the infant viscount. It was further arranged that the noble baby should be brought to her, well wrapped up, at once, and that her own plebeian infant, for better security of the high-born child, should be conveyed away forthwith, to be brought up by hand at a married sister’s, lest the mother should be tempted to share with it the natural sustenance duly bought and paid for on account of Lord Hurley.
As soon as they were gone, however, Janet turned to her mother. ‘Mother,’ she said firmly, ‘I won’t send my baby away — no, not for any one’s.’
‘What will you do, then?’ her mother asked. ‘They’re sure to ax what’s become o’ it.’
Janet reflected a minute or two. Then she said in a tentative way, ‘We could borrow Sarah Marlowe’s baby, and keep it in the house till they fetch the lady’s. Then we could send it away by their men to Lucy’s, and tell them to watch, if they liked, whether any other baby ever came back again. Sarah Marlowe could fetch her own from Lucy’s to-morrow.’
‘If I was you,’ the mother said, ‘I wouldn’t cast no doubts upon it.’
‘That’s true,’ Janet answered feebly. ‘Just send Sarah’s baby away to Lucy’s without saying nothing about it.’ And she dropped back on her pillow in a listless way, adding nothing further.
So it came to pass that when little Lord Hurley arrived, squat nose, mottled arms, red face, and all, there were three babies in the cottage instead of two; and when the third, which was Sarah Marlowe’s, was sent away under charge of Lord Remenham himself to the married sister’s, Janet’s and the lordling remained in possession, to fight it out between themselves as best they might as to their natural sustenance.
That evening, Janet submitted to have her own baby fed upon Somebody’s food, while she nursed the interloper as if it were her own. But all the time she felt like a murderess. How dare she deprive that child she had borne of its divinely-sent nourishment! Her heart — a mother’s heart — turned sick within her. Come what might, she would nurse her own baby, she vowed internally, not the Countess’s. She revolted against this unnatural and cruel diversion.
In the dead of night, therefore, when all in the house were asleep, she arose tottering from her bed, and approached the two cradles. Babies are much alike; her own and the lordling looked so precisely similar that even she herself, but for the clothes, could hardly have discriminated them. Hastily and with trembling fingers she tore off the sleeping young aristocrat’s finery — he wore a trifle less of it at night than by day — and also undressed her own red little bantling. In two minutes’ time the momentous transformation was fully complete. The Countess herself could not have told her own child, as it lay there and slept, from the cottager’s infant.
Once done, the substitution cost no trouble of any sort. Next morning Janet saw the baby — her baby, in its borrowed finery — washed and dressed and duly taken care of; while she took little heed of the lordly changeling in its poorer garb, as her mother fed it in a perfunctory way out of the bottle. Somewhat later in the day, indeed, she looked at her mother queerly. ‘After all, mother,’ she said, blinking, ‘there’s something in blood. I think the little lord looks more of a baby nor mine does somehow.’ And she smiled at her own child, in his stolen plumes, contentedly.
‘He’s a proper baby, that he is,’ her mother admitted, not suspecting the substitution.
‘I was thinking,’ Janet put in, ‘that perhaps it isn’t safe to keep my baby in the house now at all. They might make a fuss if they were to find it out. Since this one’s come, and I’ve begun nursing him, he seems to belong to me, almost. Suppose we was to send my own to Lucy’s, to be brought up by hand. It ‘ud be kind of safer like.’
The mother acquiesced, not sorry to see that unwelcome intruder, as she thought it, stowed safely out of the way. So that very night, the real little Lord Hurley was ignominiously despatched by private messenger to the married sister’s; while the false Lord Hurley, just as red and as mottled, stopped on with his mother in his appropriated feathers.
For ten months, at home and at the castle, Janet nursed her own baby honestly and sedulously. She wasted upon it the whole of a mother’s affection. Gradually, when she began to realise what she had done, it occurred to her that perhaps she had not acted for herself with the supremest wisdom. At first, her one idea had been the purely instinctive and natural one that she wanted to nurse and tend her own baby — not another woman’s. But, joined with this prime instinct, there had also been present more or less to her mind another feeling — the feeling that her baby had as good a right in the nature of things to wealth and honour, and uncomfortably belaced and beflounced baby-linen, as any other woman’s baby. The pressure of these two ideas, acting unequally together, had led her in a moment of hysterical impulse to exchange the two children. Now the exchange was once made it satisfied her very well — while she could keep her own baby. The question was, How would things stand when the time came for her to part with it?
In due course it came about that the two infants were christened. Lord and Lady Remenham had Janet’s child admitted into the fold of the Church with the aid of a bishop, and a considerable admixture of those pomps and vanities of this wicked world which they simultaneously and verbally abjured for it. Janet herself, as by office entitled, brought the baby to the font, where a Countess held it, while a Marchioness assisted her in promising on its behalf a large number of things, which nobody very seriously intended to perform for it. The child was enrolled as an infantile Christian under the sonorous names of Hugh Seymour Plantagenet, which in themselves might be regarded as slight guarantees that the pomps and vanities aforesaid would be duly avoided. As to the Countess’s son, he was baptized at the parish church of the village by the curate. Sister Lucy held him at the font, and abjured for him, with far greater sincerity and probability, all participation in the sins of the great world, from which Janet’s action had effectually cut him off. As for a name, Plantagenets being out of the question, he was cheaply and economically baptized as William.
Thus those two began their way through the world: the cottager’s unwelcome baby as the heir of an Earl; and the Countess’s son as the illegitimate child of a discredited housemaid.
While the ten months lasted Janet was happy enough. She had her child with her, and she had assured its future. But as the period of wet-nursing drew towards a close, and there was talk of weaning, a terrible longing began to come over her. Must she send away her baby, her own dear baby, now she was just getting to love it far better than ever? — now it ‘took notice’ so sweetly, and returned her smile, and looked up into her eyes with those big, blac
k eyes, that recalled its father? It was too, too cruel. The neighbours had noted that, while Janet was nursing the little lord, as they thought, she had taken small note of her own neglected baby, sent away to be brought up by hand at her sister Lucy’s. ‘’Tis that way always with love-children,’ they said; ‘partic’larly when the mother hires herself out a-wetnursing. She don’t want none of her own. Her heart is all set on the baby she’s suckling.’ Janet heard them as in a dream, and smiled to herself with a strange, sad smile, half superior knowledge, half regret and remorse; not indeed for her act, but for its coming consequence. ‘She knows the baby’s a lord,’ the neighbours said, ‘and she don’t want none of her own love-child after it.’ Not want none of her own, indeed! It was because it was her own that she couldn’t bear to part with it, though she knew it was for the child’s best: she had secured its future. But what was its future to her — if it must be taken away from her and made into a lord, never to know its own mother?
Nevertheless, fight against it and shrink from it as she might, the time came at last when her baby must needs be taken from her; or rather, when she must leave it, for from the end of the first month she had lived at the castle, well cared for and waited upon, and treated in everything as such an important person as Lord Hurley’s wet-nurse deserves to be treated. But now Lady Remenham’s orders were absolute — that woman who was stealing her baby from her, under pretence of its being her own: the child must be weaned within a fortnight, and Janet must leave the castle for ever.
The dark day came. With a horrible sinking Janet prepared to go. The baby clung to her, as if it knew what was happening. She tore herself away, more dead than alive. Lady Remenham admitted she was very fond of the child. ‘Fond of the child, Gwendoline!’ Lord Remenham exclaimed, with greater truth: ‘her conduct has been most exemplary. We owe her a debt of the deepest gratitude. My only feeling is that I’ve sometimes had qualms of conscience, when I saw how completely we had perverted — or shall I say diverted? — her natural instincts. I’ve felt at moments she was centring upon Hugh affections which should have been centred upon her own poor wronged and neglected baby.’
‘You’re always so absurdly conscientious,’ Lady Remenham replied, with her flippant air. ‘We’ve paid the girl well for it.’
‘Her? Yes, her. But not her child,’ Remenham answered, with his deeper sense of equity. ‘Her child, from whom we’ve bribed her against her will by our offer of money. And the more she has grown to love our baby — which she has undoubtedly done, Gwen — the more have I felt my indebtedness to her infant. I shall provide for that child.’ And Remenham, who was a man with a conscience, did provide for him decently. The Countess laughed at him. She did not know she was laughing at him for making due provision for their own baby.
Remenham had his way, however. He was a quiet, forcible man. He provided Janet with a lump sum down, in ready money, which he placed at a bank for her; and he took a lodging-house for her in a Thames valley town, neither too near nor too remote — near enough for her to keep touch with her parents (‘Which is essential,’ he said, ‘to keeping straight with women of her class’); yet far enough away for her to call herself ‘Mrs. Wells,’ without much fear of contradiction by her neighbours. ‘You have now a chance, my girl,’ he said, with his superior and condescending kindliness, ‘of retrieving your position. Behave well, and some good young man of your own class may still make honourable love to you.’
But Janet was so overwhelmed with distress at leaving her child — the child for whose future she had provided so fatally — that she cared little just at present for the good young man, or the honourable love he was still to offer her. Her whole being for the moment was summed up in wounded affection for the child of the worthless creature who had got her into this trouble, and then basely enlisted in order to desert her. And the sense that she had brought this second bereaval upon herself by her foolish action only made her grief more poignant. She felt no particular remorse for her betrayal of Lord Remenham and his countess — most young women of her class are not built for such remorse, — but she suffered agonies of distress at the loss of her baby.
‘You’ll have your own little one back again now,’ her mother said to her, the first evening, while preparations for the move were being made in the cottage.
Her own little one! Janet’s heart gave a start. She had hardly even thought of that other baby — the Countess’s baby — the baby at Lucy’s. She supposed she must have him back.
‘Oh, I’ll get him in a day or two,’ she answered listlessly. ‘But he’ll never be the same to me as — as the dear little thing I’ve been nursing for my lady.’
Her mother gazed hard at her.
‘’Tis strange,’ she said; ‘’tis always so with foster-mothers. It seems as if love went out of one with the mother’s milk. If you nurse another woman’s baby you get fonder of it, they say, nor you would of your own. ’Tis no use denying it. The good Lord has made us so.’
Janet rose from her chair and took refuge in her own bedroom. There, sobbing low to herself, as one must do in a cottage, lest one’s sobs should be heard through the thin partitions, she rolled and cried, hugging herself wildly at the deadly irony of it. Love any other child better than her own dear baby! Why, she hated the very thought of having that other one back. How could she endure to bring it up? And, then, to think of the long years through which she must go on pretending to love it!
However, for fear’s sake and the neighbours’, there was nothing for her to do but to take back the child that had been christened William, and to make believe to her mother that she took some care of it. So she brought it away from Lucy’s, and carried it home to the cottage, while preparations still went on for the move to the lodging-house. Her first thoughts of it were almost murderous. Bring up that brat — that puling child of Lady Remenham’s — that boy that had dispossessed her of her own dear pet! — no, no, she could not do it. For a week or two she would pretend to take care of it, for form’s sake; ‘but there’s plenty of ways,’ she thought, ‘you can get rid of babies a long way short of strangling them. There always comes turns when you can hardly nurse ’em through, with the best care you can give ’em. Neglect ’em then, and you’re soon enough free from ’em.’
However, the first night baby Willie came home, she undressed him and tended him as she had tended Hugh Seymour Plantagenet, her own lordly babe — tended that Countess’s brat who had hitherto been accustomed to the tender mercies of Lucy’s bringing up by hand, in the precarious intervals of her dairy work and her charge of her own five half-starved little ones. Baby Willie took to the new nurse instantly. In her heart Janet despised the unclassed little lordling. Accustomed as she was to her own noble Hugh, with his exquisite baby-linen, his beautiful cradle, and his embroidered coronet, she thought small things indeed of the poor wee changeling, who had been brought up by hand in a labourer’s cottage and swathed in such clothes as she had provided beforehand for her own unwelcome, unclassed infant. Nevertheless, she had acquired at the castle a certain fastidious way of taking care of a baby; and, mechanically at first, by the mere routine habits of the English housemaid, she went on taking care of the Countess’s brat with the same solicitude she had been accustomed to lavish upon Hugh Seymour Plantagenet.
Little by little a curious feeling began to come over her. Every night and every morning she looked after baby Willie, and did for him all the things she had been accustomed to do in the night-nursery at the Earl’s, for the reputed Lord Hurley. And even as she did them she was dimly aware that they afforded her a certain curious consolation and comfort in her bereavement. Having lost her own baby, for all practical purposes (by her own act, yet unwillingly), it pleased her at least to have some other child upon whom she might continue to expend those motherly cares which were at first an instinct, and had now come to be a habit with her. Even so, people who have lost a child of their own often wish to adopt one of corresponding age, not to break continuity in the curren
t of their feelings. When Janet first had to give up her own baby, it is true, she hated the very thought of being compelled to tend that child of the Countess’s. But after a week or two of the other woman’s baby, she found the comfort of having still a child to think about so great and so consoling, that not for worlds would she have relinquished the pleasure of tending it.
Meanwhile, the move to the neighbouring town had been made, and Janet had taken up her new position in life as mistress of a lodging-house. Before her baby was born she would have thought that position a very ‘grand’ one, and would have felt afraid of actually ordering about a servant of her own; but ten months at the castle had wrought a vast difference in her point of view: she was accustomed there to be petted and waited upon; a footman in silk stockings had brought up her meals to the day-nursery, for she had received in every way the amount of consideration that should naturally be paid to Lord Hurley’s foster-mother. So she found it ‘rather a come-down in life,’ as she said, than otherwise, to go straight from being waited upon by lordly flunkeys to receiving orders for dinner from casual lodgers. However, being a tall young woman of some grace and dignity, she gave a certain importance to her new position, and was treated as a rule with considerable respect by the better class of her visitors. Her plain black dress, her slight affectation of widowhood, and her undeniable care and attention for her baby, impressed them with the idea that Mrs. Wells, as they called her, was ‘a most superior young woman for her station.’ And in point of fact Janet had been well grounded in fundamentals at the village school, and made ‘a lodging-house lady’ as good as the best of them.
Her rooms, for the most part, were full in summer with waterside visitors, though half empty in winter, when the season was dull; but with what she made by them, and what Lord Remenham allowed her, she managed to live in a style which her new class considered extremely comfortable. Meanwhile Willie grew on, and, to her own great surprise at first, Janet found herself constantly more and more attached to him. The child was with her all day; she taught it to walk, to talk, to dress itself; if it had been her very own, it could hardly have been much nearer to her. Gradually she felt it was filling the place in her heart that her own dear baby had once better filled; and though she shrank from the recognition of that fact, far more than she had shrunk from the first substitution, it forced itself upon her, whether she would or not, from month to month, with increasing distinctness.
