[You will say at first, ‘A very old story!’ Nay, not so. A psychological study of what would really happen, if a familiar incident of early fiction were to occur in our century.]
‘Under no circumstances,’ said the surgeon, in a very decided voice, ‘will it be possible for Lady Remenham to take charge of her own infant.’
‘In that case,’ the Earl answered, somewhat downcast, ‘I suppose we shall have to look out for a wet-nurse.’
‘Of course,’ the surgeon replied. ‘You can’t expect the baby to live upon nothing, can you?’
Lord Remenham was annoyed. In the first place, he did not like to hear his son and heir — then two hours old — cavalierly described in quite ordinary language as ‘the baby.’ To be sure, the infant viscount exactly resembled most other babies of those tender years — or rather minutes. He was red and mottled and extremely pulpy-looking; and his appearance in no way suggested his exalted station. On the contrary, his face was marked by that comparative absence of any particular nose and that unnecessary prominence of two watery big eyes, which suggest our consanguinity with the negro and the monkey. But more than that, Lord Remenham was annoyed at this failure, on Gwendoline’s part, to perform the full duties of complete maternity which her husband expected of her. Remenham was only thirty, but he was austere and doctrinaire to a degree that would not have done dishonour to half a century. He had taken a first class in law and modern history. He was strong on the necessity for keeping up the physical standard of the race in general, and our old nobility in particular, through the medium of its mothers. With this laudable end in view, being a Balliol man himself, he had married a lawn-tennis-playing, cross-country-riding, good-looking young woman, Gwendoline Blake by name, the daughter of a neighbouring squire; and he looked to her to raise him up a family of sons and daughters of fine and sturdy old English vigour. That Gwendoline should thus break down at the first demand made upon her annoyed and surprised him. The race must be going to the dogs indeed, if even girls like Gwendoline couldn’t be relied upon for the performance of the simplest and most obvious maternal functions.
‘Have you anybody you could suggest as a nurse for Lord Hurley?’ Remenham inquired, in his chilliest voice. He wished to let the local doctor see he resented the imputation that the new viscount was a mere baby.
‘Most fortunate coincidence!’ the doctor answered. ‘I had a case last night. The very thing. She didn’t contemplate it; but I believe the poor girl would be glad of the extra money. Very destitute indeed, with nothing to depend upon.’
‘Married, I hope?’ Remenham observed, raising his eyebrows slightly.
The doctor pursed his lips. ‘We can’t have everything in this world,’ he answered, after a brief pause. ‘Wet-nurses, as your unaided perspicacity must have observed, spring chiefly from the class who become mothers before they become wives.’
Remenham gazed at him doubtfully. He had always a suspicion that the doctor was chaffing him. ‘Can she come here at once?’ he asked, with increased stiffness of manner.
‘Come here at once?’ the doctor echoed. ‘Why, it was only last night she was confined, my lord. You don’t expect Englishwomen to rival North American squaws, do you? No, no, she can’t come. The baby must go to her.’
‘For how long?’ Remenham faltered.
‘A month, I suppose. We are most of us human. At the end of that time the young woman, no doubt, can take up her abode here.’
‘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, black 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 current 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.
Three times a year ‘Mrs. Wells’ returned by permission to the castle, to visit once more her own lost darling. Lord Remenham was touched by her constant attachment to ‘Hughie,’ and even the Countess admitted in her cold way that ‘Wells had behaved throughout in the most exemplary manner’; there was no denying the reality of her attachment to her foster-son. But as little Lord Hurley reached seven and eight, Janet was aware of a painful element, which grew more and more marked in these occasional visits. It was clear each time that Hugh cared less and less to see her. To say the truth, these four-monthly outbursts of spasmodic affection on the part of a stranger distinctly bored the child. He didn’t care twopence himself about Mrs. Wells, whom he was told by his father he ought to love ‘because she was his foster-mother’ — a phrase which conveyed to him about as much information as if he had been told that Janet was his residuary legatee or his feudal suzerain. At first he merely felt the stated visits a vague nuisance; they interfered with his playing: but as time went on, he learned to hate them, and to shrink from being ‘slobbered over,’ as he expressed it, by a woman for whom he had not any feeling on earth save one of mild though growing aversion. At last, he flatly refused to see Mrs. Wells at all; and when Lord Remenham interfered, and insisted, in his honest, stiff-necked way, that Hugh must ‘show some gratitude to the woman who had saved his life,’ the boy showed it by receiving her with marked ungraciousness, and audibly exclaiming, in a voice of relief, ‘Well, thank goodness, that’s over!’ as she left his presence.
Had this happened when he was two years old, or even three, it would have broken Janet’s heart by its cruel irony. But happening when he was ten, it affected her far less poignantly than she could herself have anticipated. She had grown meanwhile to be fonder and fonder of Willie— ‘My own dear boy,’ as she now called him to herself; she took less and less notice, thought less and less meanwhile, of the arrogant young aristocrat whom she had brought into the world to be the Countess’s plaything. Willie was so sweet and good, and so deeply attached to her; while Hugh had rapidly developed what she could not but consider the haughtiness of his class, and seemed to think his real mother ‘like the dirt beneath his feet,’ as she said to herself bitterly. Moreover, she had another cause of grievance against the sturdy little viscount. He was strong and vigorous, with the robust constitution inherited from a peasant father and mother; while Willie, her own dear Willie, was weak and ailing, and often required her most tender nursing. When he was only two years old, indeed, he had a terrible attack of croup, which nearly carried him off; and as Janet sat up all night, with clasped hands and streaming eyes, watching by the couch of the other woman’s son, it came home to her all at once that to lose Willie now would be ten thousand times worse for her than to lose her own boy, the false Lord Hurley.
So things went on for several years: though after the little episode of ‘Thank goodness, that’s over!’ Janet went back no more on her formal visits to the castle. She wrote Lord Remenham a most dignified and sensible letter upon the subject — just a trifle marred by her housemaidenly handwriting. ‘I could not help seeing, my lord,’ she said, with simple eloquence, ‘on my last visit to the castle, that my dear foster-child no longer regards me with any affection. As that is so, much as it grieves me, I think I had better discontinue my visits. I love him as deeply and as dearly as ever; but I love him too well to desire to hurt him, by inflicting myself upon him when he doesn’t want me.’
Remenham read the letter aloud as a penance to Hugh; who responded with effusion, ‘Well, that’s one good thing, anyhow!’ He was deaf to his father’s expressions of regret that he should have so alienated the feelings of a good woman, who loved him. ‘What right had she to call me “my Hughie”?’ he asked, with warmth. ‘Why, Charlie says she’s nothing at all but a common lodging-house woman.’ Charlie was Hugh’s friend, a boy-groom at the stables.
Remenham felt this conduct on Hurley’s part so bitterly, that he actually went across to the neighbouring town to call upon Janet, and apologise to her for his son’s coldness. But he chanced on a day when Willie was ill and kept home from school. The boy’s delicacy struck him. ‘Is he often so?’ he asked, with a heart-pang.
‘Well, he’s never been strong, my lord,’ Janet answered truthfully; ‘having been brought up by hand, you know — it never does suit them.’ And as she spoke a sudden dagger went through her heart all at once, to think she should have starved that dear boy of the nourishment his father the Earl had bought and paid for — in order to feed that strong and healthy and ungrateful young aristocrat, her boy, Hugh Seymour Plantagenet, Viscount Hurley.
The Earl recounted it all at length to his wife that night. ‘Gwen,’ he said seriously, ‘we had no right to do it. I must provide better for that boy. I shall allow his mother a hundred a year for his education. He’s a most intelligent child, with excellent faculties; and I’m sure he’d do credit to any pains bestowed upon him.’
‘My dear,’ the Countess answered, ‘you shall do nothing so quixotic.’
The natural result of which was that the Earl did it, and said no more about it.
This princely allowance for her boy’s education stirred up in Janet’s mind a fresh ambition. Like all dwellers in the Thames valley, she knew well the name and the fame of Oxford. It loomed large in her eyes, as the metropolis of the river. ’Twas not so much as a great university, however, that Oxford appealed to her, but as a place where men lived and learned to be gentlemen — real waterside gentlemen, in white sweaters and red blazers and straw hats with banded ribbons. Oxford men came often to her lodgings in the summer — with the cardinal’s hat or the red cross embroidered on their jerseys, — and she recognised the fact that there was a Something about them. Why should not her boy, her own dear Willie, be sent to Oxford, and there manufactured into a real gentleman? Manufactured? Why, he was a gentleman born — and a nobleman too, if it came to that, and the real Lord Hurley! If she sent him to Oxford, she might undo some part of the terrible wrong she had done him long since in depriving him of his birthright — a wrong which, brought home to her now she loved him, was beginning to weigh upon her soul not a little; for with our peasant class, incapable of any broad abstract ideas, you must have a personal substratum of emotional feeling to work upon in every case, before there can be any real recognition of right and wrong in their wider aspects. It was a wild ambition, perhaps, for a lodging-house keeper to entertain; but there was a good grammar-school in the town, where the boys wore square college caps; and with Lord Remenham’s hundred a year, a great deal was possible. She would begin saving it up, for it was to be paid to her quarterly at once; and by the time her boy was of an age to go to Oxford, she would have enough to send him there — and to live herself in such a way as not to disgrace him.
Thenceforth she saved with the petty, penurious, argus-eyed saving of the lesser bourgeoisie. Not so far as Willie was concerned, however. For him, she spent all she could afford, to keep him neat and well dressed, and to let him associate with other boys who were fit companions for a destined Oxford man. Nay, more: hard as it was for her to refuse them, she took no more big schoolboys or Oxford men as lodgers in summer: no undergraduate henceforth should ever be able to say, ‘I know that man — I lodged with his mother a couple of years ago.’ Year after year she saved up, and sent Willie to the grammar-school, and dressed him well, and took every fond care of him. And year after year she loved him more and more, with the ardent love one lavishes on those for whom one has worked and endured and suffered. Yet ever amidst it all came the gnawing thought, ‘All I can do for him is as nothing now, compared to what I have taken from him. I deprived him of an earldom; and I can educate him, perhaps, to be a curate or a schoolmaster.’
As for Willie, he loved and admired his mother — as he naturally called her. He was fond of her and proud of her; for she was tall and handsome; she ‘held her head up’; and he could see how hard she worked to keep the family ‘respectable.’ He honoured her for that wish; for he had inherited the Earl’s conscientious, conventional, honest, doctrinaire nature. He was prouder of her by far than he would have been of the Countess. When he was getting to be seventeen, it began to strike Janet that her occasional lapses in grammar, though more and more infrequent as she got on in the world, were a source of pain or humiliation to her boy; and she said to him frankly, ‘Correct me, Willie, and explain why to me.’ He corrected and explained; and Janet, who was naturally clear-headed, sensible, and logical, understood and grasped the principles he expounded to her. She took pains with her English. As he got on at school — he was head of his class always, and took all the prizes, especially in classics — she felt still more of a desire not to shame her boy when he should go to Oxford; and with this intent she made him read her books, and read them herself — Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, the current novelists — so that she might at least avoid putting her foot in it when she heard them talked of. And being a woman of remarkable mother-wit and quickness, she found very soon, to her immense surprise, that she could talk of many such things a great deal better than some silly ‘real ladies.’
It was a glorious day when, soon after Willie was nineteen, her boy returned from a week’s visit to that marvellous Oxford one day, with the incredibly great news that he had won a junior studentship at Christ Church. (That is the name at ‘the House’ for what anywhere else would be called a scholarship.) It was worth eighty pounds a year, and, with Lord Remenham’s allowance, it would enable him to live like a gentleman at Oxford. Janet made a rapid calculation in her own mind. Yes, yes; she could allow him seventy pounds more herself, which would give him an income of £250; and yet, by expending all her little savings in one wild burst, she would be able to live at Oxford herself, in quiet lodgings, for three years, like a lady, so as not to disgrace him!
One thing alone poisoned her happiness in this hour of triumph. Willie added at last, with a touch of not unnatural pleasure, ‘And I beat some fellows from the biggest schools — from Eton and Harrow; amongst others, Lord Hurley.’
A stab went straight through the mother’s heart, or rather, the foster-mother’s — for it was not Hugh she was thinking of. ‘Will he go to Christ Church with you?’ she asked, trembling.
‘Yes, mother dear, but without a studentship.’
Strange thoughts coursed quickly through Janet’s head. That young aristocrat, her own son, might be rude to her dear boy. How much did he know? How much did he remember? It was fortunate she had left off going to see him at the castle when he was ten years old. Perhaps the whole episode might have faded from his memory. But the Earl would know. And the Earl might tell him.
At that moment, if she didn’t hate Hugh, at least she feared him. And such fear as hers was not far from hatred.
October term came. It was the hour of freshmen. And when Lord Hurley set out from the castle, his father (or rather his reputed father) said to him as his last word, ‘You know your foster-mother’s boy, young Wells, gained that junior studentship that you missed, Hurley. Be sure, my boy, for our sake, that you are kind to him.’
‘All right, father,’ Hurley answered, as he jumped into the dogcart which was to take him to the station. But he added to himself, with a smile, ‘Just like my father! Wants to make me polite to every deserving young cad who happens to interest him.’
Three days later Janet was walking down the High, with her boy in cap and gown, proud and delighted as she had never been before in that strange varied life of hers. It was a moment of pure triumph. All at once, from a window overhead, she heard a murmur of voices. They came from a first-floor window of a club of undergraduates, which was gay even then with flowers in boxes.
‘Why, that’s the woman we lodged with three or four years ago when we stopped by the river!’ — one voice exclaimed — the voice of an Oriel commoner. ‘How awfully odd! And she’s walking with a ‘Varsity man!’
‘Yes,’ a second voice drawled. ‘Devilish odd, isn’t it? That’s my old foster-mother, Mrs. Wells; and she’s walking with her son. He’s a protégé of my father’s; and he’s got a junior studentship at the House. Rum combination, ain’t it?’
Janet glanced at Willie. He had not a mother’s ears, like hers; and he had not heard them. He walked on smiling, unaware of this calamity.
Janet Wells went home to her lodgings that night in an agony of misery. The Nemesis of her wrong-doing had come home to her indeed. She was paying her penalty. To think there was a day when she fancied she would like to strangle her Willie, because he had taken Hugh from her! Why, she hated Hugh now! Hated him even more profoundly and fiercely, by far, than she had ever loved him. That baseborn son of a drunken soldier to scorn her own boy — her good, gentle Willie!
The drunken soldier’s son had deprived her Willie of his birthright and his earldom! And, worse than all, she had helped him to do it!
She did not undress that night. She lay upon her bed in her clothes, and tossed and turned, and moaned and suffered. It was irrevocable now — quite, quite irrevocable. If she went to Lord Remenham and told him her tale to-morrow, how could he believe her? it was all too stale, too strange, too romantic — and hackneyed romantic at that — for any one to accept it. People would say she had been reading the Family Herald tales; or that her head was full of Lady Clare and Lord Ronald. What on earth could be more improbable, at our own time of day, than a tale of a changeling? and who on earth would swallow it on her unaided evidence?
She had dispossessed her boy, and, more terrible than all, she had laid him open to Lord Hurley’s cruel condescensions — the cruel condescensions of the soldier’s bastard.
Early next morning she rose, dressed her tumbled hair carefully, made herself as neat as she could with a flower in her bodice, and despatched a hurried note to Willie at Christ Church. ‘Come at once,’ it said, ‘to your heartbroken mother.’
Willie rushed round, wondering. Then, pale of face and haggard of eye, Janet began to confess to him. She did not even sob: it was far beyond sobbing. She told him first what she had heard Lord Hurley say at the window the night before. Then she made a dramatic pause: ‘And that boy,’ she added, ’is my own son, Willie.’
For a second Willie thought she was mad. Then he looked in her face, her white, bloodless face, and saw she was speaking the truth under strong emotion.
‘How do you mean, mother?’ he gasped.
Janet told him the whole tale, simply, in a few strong words, with peasant brevity and peasant absence of self-justification. She had done it, that was all — for ample reason at the time; and now she was paying for it.
When she had finished she looked him in the face.
‘You don’t believe it?’ she cried defiantly.
He took her hands in his.
‘Dear mother,’ he said, ‘I believe it. I believe you always. You never deceived me. I believe it; and I am sorry — for one thing only. If I am not your son, you take from me a thing I valued most of all — for I was proud to be the son of such a mother.’
Those words repaid her for years of anguish. She strained him to her bosom. ‘My boy, my boy,’ she cried, ‘I have robbed you of your inheritance!’
‘The inheritance of your blood,’ Willie answered, ‘yes. The other, I don’t care about.’
She clasped him again. At least she would die happy.
‘What can we do?’ she cried. ‘Can I confess to Lord Remenham?’
He shook his head.
‘Oh no,’ he answered. ‘It would do no good. We should both be regarded as absurd impostors. Nobody would believe it — except myself. All the rest would think it was a foolish lie — and I had egged you on to tell it.’
She held him tight against her breast.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘I will hold my tongue. I will not again destroy your prospects.’
They sat together in her rooms all that day, for the most part in silence, holding one another’s hands in mute sympathy. On the stroke of midnight he left her, as he must, to return to college.
‘Good-night, dearest!’ he said, with a strange foreboding. ‘Remember, I do not blame you in anything. I understand all; and a French proverb says, “To understand all is to pardon all.”’
She kissed him hysterically and let him go at once, without one word of leave-taking.
By the first post next morning he received two notes from her. One was formal, and intended only for the inspection of the coroner. It spoke of nothing but sleeplessness, depression, narcotics. The other ran thus: —
‘My own, own Darling,
‘I do not wish to murder the son I bore. But if I remain alive I feel I must rush upon Hurley, wherever I meet him, and stab him. I am not even sure it is because he is my own child that I want to spare him — is it not rather because I do not wish people to say your mother was a murderess? So, good-bye for ever. Willie, my Willie, I have wronged you deeply; I will wrong you no more. They will think it was merely an overdose of morphia.
‘Your loving
Mother.’
The jury returned it ‘Death by Misadventure.’