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Page 21
"It depends," said Miss Batchelor, a little maliciously. (Really, the
woman was impossible, and such a hopeless fool!) Miss Batchelor's
habitually nervous manner made her innuendoes doubly telling when they
came.
"Well--he's very small. Just feel how small he is."
Instinctively Miss Batchelor held out her hands for the child, and in
another moment he was lying across her arms, slobbering dreamily.
He was not quiet long. He stretched himself, he writhed, he made himself
limp, he made himself stiff, he threw himself backwards recklessly; and
still Miss Batchelor held him. And when he cried she held him all the
closer. She let him explore the front of her dress with his little wet
mouth and fingers. He had made a great many futile experiments of the
kind in the last two days. Of those three worlds that were his, the world
of light, the world of sleep, and the world of his mother's breast, they
had taken away the one that he liked best--the warm living world of which
he had been lord and master, that was flesh of his flesh, given to his
hands to hold, and obedient to the pressure of his lips. Since then he
had lived from feeble hope to hope; and now, when he struck upon that
hard and narrow tract of corduroy studded with comfortless buttons, he
began again his melancholy wail.
"Poor little beggar," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson, "he can't help it. He's
being weaned. Don't let him slobber over your nice dress."
Certainly he had not improved the corduroy, but Miss Batchelor did not
seem to resent it.
"Can't you nurse him?" she asked.
"No," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
"I don't believe it," said Miss Batchelor to herself. "She isn't that
sort. It's the clever, nervous, modern women who can't nurse their
children--it all runs to brains. But these little animals! If ever there
was a woman born to suckle fools, it's Mrs. Nevill Tyson. She's got the
physique, the temperament, everything. And she can give her whole mind to
it."
"What a pity," she said aloud, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson laughed.
"I don't want to nurse him; why should I?" said she. She lay back in
her attitude of indifference, watching her son, and watched by Miss
Batchelor's sharp eyes and heartless brain.
Heartless? Well, I can't say. Not altogether, perhaps. Goodness knows
what went on in the heart of that extraordinary woman, condemned by her
own cleverness to perpetual maidenhood.
"How very odd," said she to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
To herself she said, "I thought so. It's not that she can't. She
_won't_--selfish little thing. And yet--she isn't the kind that
abominates babies, as such. Therefore if she doesn't care for this
small thing, _that_ is because it's her husband's child."
To do Miss Batchelor justice, she was appalled by her own logic. Was it
the logic of the heart or of the brain? She did not stop to think. Having
convinced herself that her argument was a chain of adamant, she caught
herself leaning on it for support, with the surprising result that she
found it easier to be kind to Mrs. Nevill Tyson (a woman who presumably
did not love her husband) when she took her leave.
I am not going to be hard on her. To some women a bitterer thing than not
to be loved is not to be allowed to love. And when two women insist on
loving the same man, the despised one is naturally skeptical as to the
strength and purity and eternity of the other's feelings. "She never
loved him!" is the heart's consolation to the lucid brain reiterating "He
never loved me!" I did not say that Miss Batchelor loved Tyson.
So the baby was weaned. He did not howl under the process so much as his
father expected. He lost his cheerful red hue and grew thin; he was
indifferent to things around him, so that people thought poorly of his
intelligence, and the nurse shook her head and said it was a "bad sign
when they took no notice." Gradually, very gradually, his features
settled into an expression of disillusionment, curious in one so young.
Perhaps he bore in his blood reminiscences, forebodings of that wonderful
and terrible world he had been in such a hurry to enter. He was Tyson's
son and heir.
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