Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/62

54 day measuring the advancing tide,) saw a queer-shaped cart or van drive up to the side door, and a woman with divers bundles alight and go in. About an hour after, Madame Jacobus came out to him, a woollen shawl over her head, and stood beside the garden-fence with him, pulling the heads off the dead hollyhock-stalks as she talked.

"I've a story to tell you," she said, her voice thick at first, and her face hot.

"Eh? About yourself, Charlotte?" The Captain's small eyes kindled with curiosity, and he pushed a log for her to sit down. "Go on, my dear."

"About ourselves,—M. Jacobus and me,"—with another pause.

"I perceived," said her father's friend, preparing for the confession of some imprudence, "that your married life has been peculiar: modelled after the ideas of young people, I suppose."

"I do not know," she said, absently. She balanced herself more comfortably against the fence, and went on with her story with a quiet unconsciousness that balked Lufflin's intention of censure.

"We have been poor in the two or three years just past," she said,—"wanted enough to satisfy even his favorite Saint-Simon's theory. My husband is no"

"Financier?" gently suggested the Captain.

"No. He could beard the world in defence of an idea; but for bread and butter, ah-h! I'm rougher! I ought to have been the man for that! About a year ago he was offered a chance to go with a geological party to Brazil. I was glad of that. The air and sights of our close court were killing him. I wanted to finish some work I had to do, and then"

She stopped; a scarlet flush broke over her neck and face.

"Yes, child?"

"God was very good to us,"—in an almost whisper. "Six months after my husband left home, He gave us another child."

"You never told me this," cried Lufflin, aghast.

"I never told Jerome," quietly. "I put my baby out to nurse, where it could breathe air, and not poison,—not far from here. I have left it there since. May-be it was wrong," said poor Charlotte, hiding her face in her hands, with a happy laugh. "It was a whim, I know. I may have wronged him, but I had a fancy to give him his home and his child both upon this Christmas day."

The Captain gasped, took a fresh bit of tobacco, but said nothing.

"There is no more to say,—but you want to see the baby?" suddenly.

"Certainly, Charlotte, certainly,—see the baby!" And the old Captain followed her, glancing about him in a mild imbecility of astonishment.

"God bless my soul!" he broke out at last. "The idea of springing a house and a baby on a man in one day! It assuredly is, child, the most unprecedented whim"

"Yes, yes,"—dodging suddenly into a room, and bringing out a bundle of white linen and wool. She stood in the passage by a window, the red evening light falling about her.

"It's a boy," she whispered, lifting off the covering. "He is very like little Tom,"—an inexpressible awe on her face.

"Yes," said the Captain. He had meant to say a few sensible words to bring her to reason about this matter; but, instead, he took up the little white foot thrust out of the blanket and kissed it sheepishly, looking askance at the woman's figure and face bent over the child, beaming with a rare and tender beauty.

They said little after that. The mother stood playing with her baby, touching its cheeks and chin until it laughed. She forgot Lufflin was there, I suppose. Her soul seemed to be in her fingers, her pure passion to envelop the mite of flesh as the weak sunshine did herself, and to hold it in life. There was something in this wife-and-mother-love which poor Lufflin did not understand.

"Well, well," he said, "I'll go now. God bless you, Lotty! You'll let me have a share in this young fellow here,