A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-Day
would have borne them with resignation; for this motherless wife loved
her husband with all a wife's devotion and a mother's unselfish
patience. Let this be remembered to her credit. It is the truth, and
she may need it.
Her own yearning was too deep and sad for fretfulness; yet though,
unlike her husband's, it never broke out in anger, the day was gone by
when she could keep it always silent. It welled out of her at times in
ways that were truly womanly and touching.
When she called on a wife the lady was sure to parade her children. The
boasted tact of women--a quality the narrow compass of which has
escaped their undiscriminating eulogists--was sure to be swept away by
maternal egotism; and then poor Lady Bassett would admire the children
loudly, and kiss them, to please the cruel egotist, and hide the tears
that rose to her own eyes; but she would shorten her visit.
When a child died in the village Mary Wells was sure to be sent with
words of comfort and substantial marks of sympathy.
Scarcely a day passed that something or other did not happen to make
the wound bleed; but I will confine myself to two occasions, on each of
which her heart's agony spoke out, and so revealed how much it must
have endured in silence.
Since the day when Sir Charles allowed her to sit in a little room
close to his study while he received Mr. Wheeler's visit she had fitted
up that room, and often sat there to be near Sir Charles; and he would
sometimes call her in and tell her his justice cases. One day she was
there when the constable brought in a prisoner and several witnesses.
The accused was a stout, florid girl, with plump cheeks and pale gray
eyes. She seemed all health, stupidity, and simplicity. She carried a
child on her left arm. No dweller in cities could suspect this face of
crime. As well indict a calf.
Yet the witnesses proved beyond a doubt that she had been seen with her
baby in the neighborhood of a certain old well on a certain day at
noon; that soon after noon she had been seen on the road without her
baby, and being asked what had become of it, had said she had left it
with her aunt, ten miles off; and that about an hour after that a faint
cry had been heard at the bottom of the old well--it was ninety feet
deep; people had assembled, and a brave farmer's boy had been lowered
in the bight of a cart-rope, and had brought up a dead hen, and a live
child, bleeding at the cheek, having fallen on a heap of fagots at the
bottom of the well; which child was the prisoner's.
Sir Charles had the evidence written down, and then told the accused
she might make a counter-statement if she chose, but it would be wiser
to say nothing at all.
Thereupon the accused dropped him a little short courtesy, looked him
steadily in the face with her pale gray eyes, and delivered herself as
follows:
“If you please, sir, I was a-sitting by th' old well, with baby in my
arms; and I was mortal tired, I was, wi' carring of him; he be uncommon
heavy for his age; and, if you please, sir, he is uncommon resolute;
and while I was so he give a leap right out of my arms and fell down
th' old well. I screams, and runs away to tell my brother's wife, as
lives at top of the hill; but she was gone into North Wood for dry
sticks to light her oven; and when I comes back they had got him out of
the well, and I claims him directly; and the constable said we must
come before you, sir; so here we be.”
This she delivered very glibly, without tremulousness, hesitation, or
the shadow of a blush, and dropped another little courtesy at the end
to Sir Charles.
Thereupon he said not one word to her, but committed her for trial, and
gave the farmer's boy a sovereign.
The people were no sooner gone than Lady Bassett came in, with the
tears streaming, and threw herself at her husband's knees. “Oh,
Charles! can such things be? Does God give a child to a woman that has
the heart to kill it, and refuse one to me, who would give my heart's
blood to save a hair of its little head? Oh, what have we done that he
singles us out to be so cruel to us?”
Then Sir Charles tried to comfort her, but could not, and the childless
ones wept together.
It began to be whispered that Mrs. Bassett was in the family way.
Neither Sir Charles nor Lady Bassett mentioned this rumor. It would
have been like rubbing vitriol into their own wounds. But this reserve
was broken through one day. It was a sunny afternoon in June, just
thirteen months after Mr. Bassett's wedding--Lady Bassett was with her
husband in his study, settling invitations for a ball, and writing
them--when the church-bells struck up a merry peal. They both left off,
and looked at each other eloquently. Lady Bassett went out, but soon
returned, looking pale and wild.
_“Yes!”_ said she, with forced calmness. Then, suddenly losing her
self-command, she broke out, pointing through the window at Highmore,
_“He_ has got a fine boy--to take our place here. Kill me, Charles!
Send me to heaven to pray for you, and take another wife that will love
you less but be like other wives. That villain has married a fruitful
vine, and” (lifting both arms to heaven, with a gesture unspeakably
piteous, poetic, and touching) “I am a barren stock.”
CHAPTER XIV.
OF all the fools Nature produces with the help of Society, fathers of
first-borns are about the most offensive.
The mothers of ditto are bores too, flinging their human dumplings at
every head; but, considering the tortures they have suffered, and the
anguish the little egotistical viper they have just hatched will most
likely give them, and considering further that their love of their
firstborn is greater than their pride, and their pride unstained by
vanity, one must make allowances for them.
But the male parent is not so excusable. His fussy vanity is an
inferior article to the mother's silly but amiable pride. His obtrusive
affection is two-thirds of it egotism, and blindish egotism, too; for
if, at the very commencement of the wife's pregnancy the husband is
sent to India, or hanged, the little angel, as they call it--Lord
forgive them!--is nurtured from a speck to a mature infant by the other
parent, and finally brought into the world by her just as effectually
as if her male confederate had been tied to her apron-string: all the
time, instead of expatriated or hanged.
Therefore the Law--for want, I suppose, of studying Medicine--is a
little inconsiderate in giving children to fathers, and taking them by
force from such mothers _as can support them;_ and therefore let
Gallina go on clucking over her first-born, but Gallus be quiet, or
sing a little smaller.
With these preliminary remarks, let me introduce to you a character new
in fiction, but terribly old in history--
THE CLUCKING COCK.
Upon the birth of a son and heir Mr. Richard Bassett was inflated
almost to bursting. He became suddenly hospitable, collected all his
few friends about him, and showed them all the Boy at great length, and
talked Boy and little else. He went out into the world and made calls
on people merely to remind them he had a son and heir.
His self-gratulation took a dozen forms; perhaps the most amusing, and
the richest food for satire, was the mock-querulous style, of which he
showed himself a master.
“Don't you ever marry,” said he to Wheeler and others. “Look at me; do
you think I am the master of my own house? Not I; I am a regular slave.
First, there is a monthly nurse, who orders me out of my wife's
presence, or graciously lets me in, just as she pleases; that is Queen
1. Then there's a wet-nurse, Queen 2, whom I must humor in everything,
or she will quarrel with me, and avenge herself by souring her milk.
But these are mild tyrants compared with the young King himself. If he
does but squall we must all skip, and find out what he ails, or what he
wants. As for me, I am looked upon as a necessary evil; the women seem
to admit that a father is an incumbrance without which these little
angels could not exist, but that is all.”
He had a christening feast, and it was pretty well attended, for he
reminded all he asked that the young Christian was the heir to the
Bassett estates. They feasted, and the church-bells rang merrily.
He had his pew in the church new lined with cloth, and took his wife to
be churched. The nurse was in the pew too, with his son and heir. It
squalled and spoiled the Liturgy. Thereat Gallus chuckled.
He made a gravel-walk all along the ha-ha that separated his garden
from Sir Charles's, and called it “The Heir's Walk.” Here the nurse and
child used to parade on sunny afternoons.
He got an army of workmen, and built a nursery fit for a duke's nine
children. It occupied two entire stories, and rose in the form of a
square tower high above the rest of his house, which, indeed, was as
humble as “The Heir's Tower” was pretentious. “The Heir's Tower” had a
flat lead roof easy of access, and from it you could inspect
Huntercombe Hall, and see what was done on the lawn or at some of the
windows.
Here, in the August afternoons, Mr. and Mrs. Bassett used to sit
drinking their tea, with nurse and child; and Bassett would talk to his
unconscious boy, and tell him that the great house and all that
belonged to it should be his in spite of the arts that had been used to
rob him of it.
Now, of course, the greater part of all this gratulation was merely
amusing, and did no harm except stirring up the bile of a few old
bachelors, and imbittering them worse than ever against clucking cocks,
crowing hens, inflated parents, and matrimony in general.
But the overflow of it reached Huntercombe Hall, and gave cruel pain to
the childless ones, over whom this inflated father was, in fact,
exulting.
As for the christening, and the bells that pealed for it, and the
subsequent churching, they bore these things with sore hearts, and
bravely, being things of course. But when it came to their ears that
Bassett and his family called his new gravel-walk “The Heir's Walk,”
and his ridiculous nursery “The Heir's Tower,” this roused a bitter
animosity, and, indeed, led to reprisals. Sir Charles built a long wall
at the edge of his garden, shutting out “The Heir's Walk” and
intercepting the view of his own premises from that walk.
Then Mr. Bassett made a little hill at the end of his walk, so that the
heir might get one peep over the wall at his rich inheritance.
Then Sir Charles began to fell timber on a gigantic scale. He went to
work with several gangs of woodmen, and all his woods, which were very
extensive, rang with the ax, and the trees fell like corn. He made no
secret that he was going to sell timber to the tune of several thousand
pounds and settle it on his wife.
Then Richard Bassett, through Wheeler, his attorney, remonstrated in
his own name, and that of his son, against this excessive fall of
timber on an entailed estate.
Sir Charles chafed like a lion stung by a gad-fly, but vouchsafed no
reply: the answer came from Mr. Oldfield; he said Sir Charles had a
right under the entail to fell every stick of timber, and turn his
woods into arable ground, if he chose; and even if he had not, looking
at his age and his wife's, it was extremely improbable that Richard
Bassett would inherit the estates: the said Richard Bassett was not
personally named in the entail, and his rights were all in supposition:
if Mr. Wheeler thought he could dispute both these positions, the Court
of Chancery was open to his client.
Then Wheeler advised Bassett to avoid the Court of Chancery in a matter
so debatable; and Sir Charles felled all the more for the protest. The
dead bodies of the trees fell across each other, and daylight peeped
through the thick woods. It was like the clearing of a primeval forest.