A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-Day Part 62

But the office brought him into contact with a great many medical men, one after another. He used to say to each stranger, with an insidious smile, "I think you once attended my cousin--Lady Ba.s.sett."

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

SIR CHARLES and Lady Ba.s.sett, relieved of their cousin's active enmity, led a quiet life, and one that no longer furnished striking incidents.

But dramatic incident is not everything: character and feeling show themselves in things that will not make pictures. Now it was precisely during this reposeful period that three personages of this story exhibited fresh traits of feeling, and also of character.

To begin with Sir Charles Ba.s.sett. He came back from the asylum much altered in body and mind. Stopping his cigars had improved his stomach; working in the garden had increased his muscular power, and his cheeks were healthy, and a little sunburned, instead of sallow. His mind was also improved: contemplation of insane persons had set him by a natural recoil to study self-control. He had returned a philosopher. No small thing could irritate him now. So far his character was elevated.

Lady Ba.s.sett was much the same as before, except a certain restlessness. She wanted to be told every day, or twice a day, that her husband was happy; and, although he was visibly so, yet, as he was quiet over it, she used to be always asking him if he was happy. This the reader must interpret as he pleases.

Mary Gosport gave herself airs. Respectful to her master and mistress, but not so tolerant of chaff in the kitchen as she used to be. Made an example of one girl, who threw a doubt on her marriage. Complained to Lady Ba.s.sett, affected to fret, and the girl was dismissed.

She turned singer. She had always sung psalms in church, but never a profane note in the house. Now she took to singing over her nursling; she had a voice of prodigious power and mellowness, and, provided she was not asked, would sing lullabies and nursery rhymes from another county that ravished the hearer. Hors.e.m.e.n have been known to stop in the road to hear her sing through an open window of Huntercombe, two hundred yards off.

Old Mr. Meyrick, a farmer well-to-do, fascinated by Mary Gosport's singing, asked her to be his housekeeper when she should have done nursing her charge.

She laughed in his face.

A fanatic who was staying with Sir Charles Ba.s.sett offered her three years' education in Do, Ra, Mi, Fa, preparatory to singing at the opera.

Declined without thanks.

Mr. Drake, after hovering shyly, at last found courage to reproach her for deserting him and marrying a sailor.

"Teach you not to s.h.i.+lly-shally," said she. "Beauty won't go a-begging.

Mind you look sharper next time."

This dialogue, being held in the kitchen, gave the women some amus.e.m.e.nt at the young farmer's expense.

One day Mr. Richard Ba.s.sett, from motives of pure affection no doubt, not curiosity, desired mightily to inspect Mr. Ba.s.sett, aged eight months and two days.

So, in his usual wily way, he wrote to Mrs. Gosport, asking her, for old acquaintance' sake, to meet him in the meadow at the end of the lawn. This meadow belonged to Sir Charles, but Richard Ba.s.sett had a right of way through it, and could step into it by a postern, as Mary could by an iron gate.

He asked her to come at eleven o'clock, because at that hour he observed she walked on the lawn with her charge.

Mary Gosport came to the tryst, but without Mr. Ba.s.sett.

Richard was very polite; she cold, taciturn, observant.

At last he said, "But where's the little heir?"

She flew at him directly. "It is him you wanted, not me. Did you think I'd bring him here--for you to kill him?"

"Come, I say."

"Ay, you'd kill him if you had a chance. But you never shall. Or if you didn't kill him, you'd cast the evil-eye on him, for you are well known to have the evil-eye. No; he shall outlive thee and thine, and be lord of these here manors when thou is gone to h.e.l.l, thou villain."

Mr. Richard Ba.s.sett turned pale, but did the wisest thing he could--put his hands in his pockets, and walked into his own premises, followed, however, by Mary Gosport, who stormed at him till he shut his postern in her face.

She stood there trembling for a little while, then walked away, crying.

But having a mind like running water, she was soon seated on a garden chair, singing over her nursling like a mavis: she had delivered him to Millar while she went to speak her mind to her old lover.

As for Richard Ba.s.sett, he was theory-bitten, and so turned every thing one way. To be sure, as long as the woman's glaring eyes and face distorted by pa.s.sion were before him, he interpreted her words simply; but when he thought the matter over he said to himself, "The evil-eye!

That is all bosh; the girl is in Lady Ba.s.sett's secrets; and I am not to see young master: some day I shall know the reason why."

Sir Charles Ba.s.sett now belonged to the tribe of clucking c.o.c.ks quite as much as his cousin had ever done; only Sir Charles had the good taste to confine his clucks to his own first-floor. Here, to be sure, he richly indemnified himself for his self-denial abroad. He sat for hours at a time watching the boy on the ground at his knee, or in his nurse's arms.

And while he watched the infant with undisguised delight, Lady Ba.s.sett would watch _him_ with a sort of furtive and timid complacency.

Yet at times she suffered from twinges of jealousy--a new complaint with her.

I think I have mentioned that Sir Charles, at first, was annoyed at seeing his son and heir nursed by a woman of low condition. Well, he got over that feeling by degrees, and, as soon as he did get over it, his sentiments took quite an opposite turn. A woman for whom he did very little, in his opinion--since what, in Heaven's name, were a servant's wages?--he saw that woman do something great for him; saw her nourish his son and heir from her own veins; the child had no other nurture; yet the father saw him bloom and thrive, and grow surprisingly.

A weak observer, or a less enthusiastic parent, might have overlooked all this; but Sir Charles had naturally an observant eye and an a.n.a.lytical mind, and this had been suddenly but effectually developed by the asylum and his correspondence with Rolfe.

He watched the nurse, then, and her maternal acts with a curious and grateful eye, and a certain reverence for her power.

He observed, too, that his child reacted on the woman: she had never sung in the house before; now she sang ravis.h.i.+ngly--sang, in low, mellow, yet sonorous notes, some ditties that had lulled mediaeval barons in their cradles.

And what had made her vocal made her beautiful at times.

Before, she had appeared to him a handsome girl, with the hardish look of the lower cla.s.ses; but now, when she sat in a sunny window, and lowered her black lashes on her nursling, with the mixed and delicious smile of an exuberant nurse relieving and relieved, she was soft, poetical, sculptorial, maternal, womanly.

This species of contemplation, though half philosophical, half paternal, and quite innocent, gave Lady Ba.s.sett some severe pangs.

She hid them, however; only she bided her time, and then suggested the propriety of weaning baby.

But Mrs. Gosport got Sir Charles's ear, and told him what magnificent children they reared in her village by not weaning infants till they were eighteen months old or so.

By this means, and by crying to Lady Ba.s.sett, and representing her desolate condition with a husband at sea, she obtained a reprieve, coupled, however, with a good-humored a.s.surance from Sir Charles that she was the greatest baby of the two.

When the inevitable hour approached that was to dethrone her she took to reading the papers, and one day she read of a disastrous wreck, the _Carbrea Castle_--only seven saved out of a crew of twenty-three. She read the details carefully, and two days afterward she received a letter written by a s.h.i.+pmate of Mr. Gosport's, in a handwriting not very unlike her own, relating the sad wreck of the _Carbrea Castle,_ and the loss of several good sailors, James Gosport for one.

Then the house was filled with the wailing and weeping of the bereaved widow; and at last came consolers and raised doubts; but then somebody remembered to have seen the loss of that very s.h.i.+p in the paper. The paper was found, and the fatal truth was at once established.

Upon this Mr. Ba.s.sett was weaned as quickly as possible, and the widow clothed in black at Lady Ba.s.sett's expense, and everything in reason done to pet her and console her.

But she cried bitterly, and said she would throw herself into the sea and follow her husband.

Huntercombe was nowhere near the coast.

At last, however, she relented, and concluded to remain on earth as dry-nurse to Mr. Ba.s.sett.