Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/345

 330 “But she went?”

“She went; there was no stopping her. She packed her things in one large trunk, burning all her letters and papers, and left on the morning of the tenth of March; I well remember the day, it was on a Friday. On the next day, the Saturday, I was out with some friends, country people who had come to London for a few days’ pleasuring. They were at an inn near the Strand, and nothing would do but I must go and breakfast with them, which they had made me promise to do, and I went out early, before the post was in. When I got home at night there was a letter from Miss Beauchamp, asking me to go to her, for she was ill at South Wennock. I took the night-train, and when I arrived I found the baby was born—the least child nearly I ever saw. I was very angry with her, my lady; I could not help it: and she had endangered her life for nothing, as may be said, for when she got to South Wennock, her husband was away.”

“Away?” interrupted Lady Jane.

“So she said. And by a slip word she let drop, I thought he was a surgeon, but I was not sure. I took the baby away with me that same evening. I could not stop, for, as ill luck would have it, my husband was coming home on the Monday, sick. She told me to have the baby baptised, and to name him ‘Lewis'—and it occurred to me that it might be the name of his father. I took the liberty of adding George to it, after my husband.”

There was a long pause. “Did you know she went by the name of Crane?” asked Lady Jane.

“She told me in her letter to ask for her by that name. I inquired of her, after I reached South Wennock, whether it was her real name, and she laughed and said, no more real than Beauchamp, nor half so much so; it was a name that her husband and young Mr. West were very fond of calling her, partly because she had a peculiar way of arching her neck, partly to tease her. Some gentleman, named Crane, to whom she had an aversion, used to visit at the Wests', and, to make her angry, they would call her by his name, Mrs. Crane. She said it had never struck her that she should want a name for South Wennock until she was close upon the place, and then she thought of that one—Crane; it would do for her as well as any other, until she assumed her legal one, which she supposed she should now soon do. I found great fault: I said she ought to have assumed it and been with her husband before the child was born; and we had quite words. She defended him, and said it would have been so, but for the child’s coming before its time. She charged me not to write to her, not to communicate at all with her, until she wrote to me. We had nearly a fight upon another point: she wanted me to say I would be paid for the child; I steadily refused it. It was a boon to me to have the child, and I was at ease in my circumstances. My lady, I took away the child, and I never heard one word from her, good or bad, afterwards.”

“Never at all?”

“Never at all. My husband was at home with a long illness, and afterwards removed to Paisley, where he had a good situation offered him. Some friends took to our house at Islington and to the carpets and curtains, and there I left a letter, saying where we had gone, directing it ‘Mrs. Crane, late Miss Beauchamp.’ It was never applied for.”

“And you never wrote to South Wennock?” cried Lady Jane.

“I never did. I own I was selfish; I was afraid of losing the child, and my husband he had got to love it as much as I did. I argued, if she wanted the child she would be sure to apply for it. Besides, I thought I might do some mischief by writing, and I did not know her real name or address.”

“But what could you think of her silence?—of her leaving the child?”

“We thought it might arise from one of two reasons. Either that she had gone abroad with her husband to America, or some distant colony (and she had said something about it in the early days when she was first at my house), and that her letters to me from thence must miscarry: or else that—you must pardon me for speaking it, my lady—that she was not married, and shrank from claiming the child. I did not believe it was so, but my husband used to think it might be.”

Jane made no reply.

“Anyway we were thankful to keep him. And when my husband died last spring, his care in his last illness was more for the child than for me. I sold off then, and determined to come to South Wennock: partly to hear what I could of Mrs. Crane; partly to see if the child’s native air would do him good; he had never been strong. I never shall forget the shock when I got here and heard how Mrs. Crane had died”

Poor Jane thought she should never forget the shock of the previous night, when told that Mrs. Crane was Clarice Chesney.

“What I can’t make out is, that her husband has never been heard of,” resumed Mrs. Smith, breaking the pause of silence. “I—I am trying to put two and two together, as the saying goes, but somehow I can’t do it; I get baffled. There’s a talk of a dark man having been seen on the stairs near her room that night; one