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.”
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.