show a
feeling, or express a thought, or make even a tremulous step from one
pair of loving arms to another--an altogether helpless little bundle,
but nevertheless one who had already altered the existence of the
cottage and its inhabitants, and made life a totally different thing for
them. Can I tell how this was done? No doubt for the wisest objects, to
guard the sacred seed of the race as mere duty could never guard it,
rendering it the one thing most precious in the world to those to whom
it is confided--at least to most of them. When that love fails, then is
the deepest abyss of misery reached. I do not say that Elinor was happy
in this dreadful breaking up of her life, or that her heart did
not go back, with those relentings which are the worst part of every
disruption, to the man who had broken her heart and unsettled her
nature. The remembrance of him in his better moments would flash upon
her, and bear every resentment away. Dreadful thoughts of how she might
herself have done otherwise, have rendered their mutual life better,
would come over her; and next moment recollections still more terrible
of what he had done and said, the scorn she had borne, the insults, the
neglect, and worse of all the complicity he had forced upon her, by
which he had made her guilty when she knew and feared nothing--when
these thoughts overcame her, as they did twenty times in a day, for it
is the worst of such troubles that they will not be settled by one
struggle, but come back and back, beginning over again at the same
point, after we have wrestled through them, and have thought that we had
come to a close--when these thoughts, I say, overcame her, she would
rush to the room in which the baby held his throne, and press him to the
heart which was beating so hotly, till it grew calm. And in the midst of
all to sit down by the fire with the little atom of humanity in her lap,
and see it spread and stretch its rosy limbs, would suffice to bring
again to her face that beatitude which had filled John Tatham with
wonder unspeakable. She took the baby and laid him on her heart to take
the pain away: and so after a minute or two there was no more question
of pain, but of happiness, and delicious play, and the raptures of
motherhood. How strange were these things! She could not understand it
herself, and fortunately did not try, but accepted that solace provided
by God. As for Mrs. Dennistoun, she made no longer any pretences to
herself,