Page:What will he do with it.djvu/778

768 Take the infant. Doubtless in your own country you can find some one to rear it at little or no expense, until the time come for appeal to your father-in-law, when no other claim on his purse remains."

Jasper assented with the insouciant docility by which he always acknowledged Gabrielle's astuter intellect. He saw the nurse; it was clear that she had nothing to gain by taking the child to English relations so poor. They might refuse to believe her, and certainly could not reward. To rid herself of the infant, and obtain the means to return to her native village with a few hundred francs in her purse, there was no promise she was not willing to make, no story she was too honest to tell, no paper she was too timid to sign. Jasper was going to London on some adventure of his own. He took the infant—chanced on Arabella;—the reader knows the rest. The indifference ever manifested by Jasper to a child not his own—the hardness with which he had contemplated and planned his father's separation from one whom he had imposed by false pretexts on the old man's love, and whom he only regarded as an alien encumbrance upon the scanty means of her deluded protector—the fitful and desultory mode in which (when, contrary to the reasonings which Gabrielle had based upon a very large experience of the credulities of human nature in general, but in utter ignorance of the nature peculiar to Darrell) his first attempt at imposition had been so scornfully resisted by his indignant father-in-law—he had played fast and loose with a means of extortion which, though loth to abandon, he knew would not bear any strict investigation;—all this is now clear to the reader. And the reader will also comprehend why, partly from fear that his father might betray him, partly from a compassionate unwillingness to deprive the old man of a belief in which William Losely said he had found such solace, Jasper, in his last interview with his father, shrunk from saying, "but she is not your grandchild!"

The idea of recurring to the true relations of the child naturally never entered into Jasper's brain. He considered them to be as poor as himself. They buy from him the child of parents whom they had evidently, by their letters, taxed themselves to the utmost, and in vain, to save from absolute want! So wild seemed that notion that he had long since forgotten relations so useless existed. Fortunately the Nurse had preserved the written statement of the singer—the letters by Mrs. Vance and Frank—the certificate of the infant's birth and baptism—some poor relics of Sophy's ill-fated parents—manuscripts of Arthur's poems—baby-caps with initials and armorial