in a village in the hills, and this big, brown, barbarous
creature, who, to do her justice, was full of handsome, familiar smiles
and coarse tenderness, was constituted nurse to Raymond Benyon's son.
She nursed him for a fortnight under the mother's eye, and she was then
sent back to her village with the baby in her arms and sundry gold coin
knotted into a corner of her rude pocket-handkerchief. Mr. Gressie had
given his daughter a liberal letter of credit on a London banker, and
she was able, for the present, to make abundant provision for the little
one. She called Mrs. Portico's attention to the fact that she spent none
of her money on futilities; she kept it all for her small pensioner
in the Genoese hills. Mrs. Portico beheld these strange doings with a
stupefaction that occasionally broke into passionate protest; then she
relapsed into a brooding sense of having now been an accomplice so far
that she must be an accomplice to the end. The two ladies went down to
Rome--Georgina was in wonderful trim--to finish the season, and
here Mrs. Portico became convinced that she intended to abandon her
offspring. She had not driven into the country to see the nursling
before leaving Genoa,--she had said that she could n't bear to see it in
such a place and among such people. Mrs. Portico, it must be added,
had felt the force of this plea,--felt it as regards a plan of her own,
given up after being hotly entertained for a few hours, of devoting a
day, by herself, to a visit to the big contadina. It seemed to her that
if she should see the child in the sordid hands to which Georgina had
consigned it she would become still more of a participant than she was
already. This young woman's blooming hardness, after they got to Borne,
acted upon her like a kind of Medusa-mask. She had seen a horrible
thing, she had been mixed up with it, and her motherly heart had
received a mortal chill. It became more clear to her every day that,
though Georgina would continue to send the infant money in considerable
quantities, she had dispossessed herself of it forever. Together with
this induction a fixed idea settled in her mind,--the project of taking
the baby herself, of making him her own, of arranging that matter with
the father. The countenance she had given Georgina up to this point was
an effective pledge that she would not expose her; but she could adopt
the child without exposing her; she could say that he was a lovely
baby--he was lovely