Young
as she still was, the first exquisite softness of the expanding life was
gone; things harder, stranger, more inexplicable than any which those
who knew her best had yet perceived, seemed now and then to come to the
surface, like wreckage in a summer sea.
* * * * *
The opening door disturbed these ponderings. The nurse appeared,
carrying the little boy. Lady Tranmore took him on her knee and caressed
him. He was a piteous, engaging child, generally very docile, but liable
at times to storms of temper out of all proportion to the fragility of
his small person. His grandmother was inclined to look upon his passions
as something external and inflicted--the entering-in of the Blackwater
devil to plague a tiny creature that, normally, was of a divine and
clinging sweetness. She would have taught him religion, as his only
shield against himself; but neither his father nor his mother was
religious; and Harry was likely to grow up a pagan.
He leaned now against her breast, and she, whose inmost nature was
maternity, delighted in the pressure of the tiny body, crooning songs to
him when they were left alone, and pausing now and then to pity and kiss
the little shrunken foot that hung beside the other.
Pages:
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172