There and Back | Page 5

hunger
and thirst he had not invented, and did not understand. His mother had
helplessly forsaken him, but the God in another woman had taken him
up: there was a soul to love him, two arms to carry him, and a strong
heart to shelter him.
Sir Wilton returned to London, and there enjoyed himself--not much,
but a little the more that no woman sat at Mortgrange with a right to
complain that he took his pleasure without her. He lived the life of the
human animals frequenting the society of their kind from a gregarious
instinct, and for common yet opposing self-ends. He had begun to
assume the staidness, if not dullness, of the animal whose first youth

has departed, but he was only less frolicsome, not more human. He was
settling down to what he had made himself; no virtue could claim a
share in the diminished rampancy of his vices. What a society is that
which will regard as reformed the man whom assuaging fires have left
an exhausted slag--a thing for which as yet no use is known, who
suggests no promise of change or growth, gives no poorest hint of hope
concerning his fate!
With the first unrecognized sense of approaching age, a certain habit of
his race began to affect him, and the idea of a quieter life, with a
woman whose possession would make him envied, grew mildly
attractive. A brilliant marriage in another county would, besides,
avenge him on the narrow-minded of his own, who had despised his
first choice! With judicial family-eye he surveyed the eligible women
of his acquaintance. It was, no doubt, to his disadvantage that already
an heir lay "mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;" for a woman who
might willingly be mother to the inheritor of such a property as his,
might not find attractive the notion of her first being her husband's
second son. But slips between cups and lips were not always on the
wrong side! Such a moon-calf as Robina's son could not with justice
represent the handsomest man and one of the handsomest women of
their time. The heir that fate had palmed upon him might very well be
doomed to go the way so many infants went!
He spread the report that the boy was sickly. A notion that he was not
likely to live prevailed about Mortgrange, which, however originated,
was nourished doubtless by the fact that he was so seldom seen. In
reality, however, there was not a healthier child in all England than
Richard Lestrange.
Sir Wilton's relations took as little interest in the heir as himself, and
there was no inducement for any of them to visit Mortgrange; the
aunt-mother, therefore, had her own way with him. She was not liked
in the house. The servants said she cared only for the little toad of a
baronet, and would do nothing for her comfort. They had, however, just
a shadow of respect for her: if she encouraged no familiarity, she did
not meddle, and was independent of their aid. Even the milking of the
cow which had been, through her persistence, set apart for the child,
she did herself. She sought no influence in the house, and was nothing
loved and little heeded.

Sir Wilton had not again seen his heir, who was now almost a year old,
when the rumour reached Mortgrange that the baronet was about to be
married.
Naturally, the news was disquieting to Jane. The hope, however, was
left her, that the stepmother might care as little for the child as did the
father, and that so, for some years at least, he might be left to her. It
was a terrible thought to the loving woman that they might be parted; a
more terrible thought that her baby might become a man like his father.
Of all horrors to a decent woman, a bad man must be the worst! If by
her death she could have left the child her hatred of evil, Jane would
have willingly died: she loved her husband, but her sister's boy was in
danger!

CHAPTER II
.
_STEPMOTHER AND NURSE._
The rumour of sir Wilton's marriage was, as rumour seldom is, correct.
Before the year was out, lady Ann Hardy, sister to the earl of Torpavy,
representing an old family with a drop or two of very bad blood in it,
became lady Ann Lestrange How much love there may have been in
the affair, it is unnecessary to inquire, seeing the baronet was what he
was, and the lady understood the what pretty well. She might have
preferred a husband not so much what sir Wilton was, but she was
nine-and-twenty, and her brother was poor. She said to herself, I
suppose, that she might as well