Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/203

 196 white handkerchief, is the balia or wet-nurse. She is usually a peasant woman from some of the villages clustered like nests on the Apennines. She sends out her own baby to nurse, and comes down to Florence to seek the situation of balia. She looks much older than she is, at first sight, for she is so brown, and constant exposure to sun and air has made her skin coarse and freckled; but her features are pretty, and the face has a kind and gentle expression.

She absolutely dotes on the little baby who has replaced her own. Her patience with it is exemplary. The baby is the real Moloch (vide Dickens), to which everything else must be sacrificed. It must never be thwarted or contradicted. Strict disciplinarians, who would commence infantine education from the cradle, would be frantic at the indulgence she shows her charge.

The baby chooses her to sit on the ground, she does so; the baby will roll on the grass, it does so; the baby will have her shoulder knots, they are taken off. This is very injudicious, no doubt, but the fault is compensated by untiring good humour, unvarying patience, unswerving gentleness. In my opinion, systematic and constant indulgence does less harm than spasmodic and uncertain petting; and to trust an uneducated person with the repression of, or opposition to, a child’s temper is a dangerous experiment.

A balia is eminently a person of one idea, and that idea is concentrated on the baby she nurses; she thinks of nothing else,—lives, moves, breathes, for that alone. She is paid in proportion more than other servants, but the troublesome fancies of wet-nurses in other countries she ignores. She eats and drinks as usual, and no double allowance of porter, wine, or tea is required. In cases of infantine illness she is devoted and indefatigable, but easily frightened, and apt to despair on small provocation. She covers her face with her apron, and sobs. She is hopeless, and calls on the Madonna. The beginning and end of her philosophy is to kiss and to cry.

I remember seeing one of these women once, when the child she was nursing had a serious illness. It was thought it would die, and it was necessary to tell her of it. Her despair was touching. It was disinterested grief for the loss of her nursling, and not for the loss to herself. At the same time, when she could articulate, there was something so pagan and barbaric in her ejaculations, that it was quite ludicrous to hear her. She reproached her saints with the cruelty of taking such an “angelino” into Paradise, and expostulated on the injustice to herself, after she had taken such care of the child, had dressed it so neatly, and above all, had washed it every day! Such merit as the last deserved a different catastrophe, and was the hardest thought of all. Her patient love, her day and night watchings, and surrender of herself in every way to the well-being of the infant was natural to her; but washing it every day was an extraordinary good work, and should have ensured reward. Her affection for her foster-child is lifelong, and I have seen a balia speak to a bearded man in a general’s uniform with the same tone of tender blandishment with which she must have addressed him as a baby in her arms. The foster-brothers and sisters have also a tie with the child their mother has nursed, which is mutually acknowledged, and rarely set aside. She is very obliging, too, and when she is at liberty, will help with the other servants, and do anything she is asked. Such faults as can be found in her must be considered as proceeding from her ignorance. She is untidy and thoughtless. With all her painstaking she does not dress the child committed to her care with the taste and comprehension of finery of an English nurse, but that may be excused when one remembers how strangely wrapped and swathed are the babies she is used to, and that all these frills, and laces, and feathers are incumbrances, in her opinion, rather than ornaments.

She is never so happy as when the child, disrobed of all its pomps and vanities, is held in her arms, and is drawing its little life from her own. She rocks herself gently backwards and forwards, and hums in a low tone, with that beautiful musical intonation of her country which is universal in all classes. The simple melody harmonises well with that soft cooing gurgle with which the supremely happy infant occasionally interrupts itself. Both faces, that of the nurse and of the child bear a look of dreamy, absorbed felicity. At length the little “forestiere” baby breaks off and turns, and opens its blue sleepy eyes on the vivid dark countenance bending over it. The contrast in type and colouring is most strange and picturesque. It has often made me think (with a slight variation of Campbell’s pretty line “Morning led by Night”) it is “Morning borne on the breast of Night.”