“Let me take him, papa,” she said.

But the father had no intention of giving up the child. Before he knew it, however, the boy had stretched out his arms to Hester and was out of his and into hers, and he was left to follow in distressed humiliation.

“He is too heavy for you, Hester,” he said. “Surely it is my fault. I ought to bear the penalty!”

“It is no penalty—is it, Markie?” said Hester merrily.

“No, Hessie,” replied Mark. “You don’t know how strong Hessie is, papa!”

But by and by Hester found, with all her goodwill, that her strength was not quite up to it, and was obliged to yield him to her father. It was much to his relief, for a sense of moral weakness had invaded him as he followed his children—he was rejected by his family and had become a nobody in it.

When at length they reached home, Mark was put to bed and the doctor sent for.

—Forty-Two —

Mother and Son

In the meantime Cornelius kept his bed. The moment her husband was gone, his mother rose and hastened to her son! She tottered across his floor, threw herself on the bed beside him, and took him to her bosom.

With his mother Corney had never pretended to the same degree as with other people, and his behaviour to her was now more genuine than to any but his wife. He clung to her as he had never clung since his infancy. He felt that, let his father behave to him as he might, he had yet a home. All the morning he had been fretting, in the midst of Hester’s kindest attentions, that he did not have his wife to do things for him as he liked them done. But now that Cornelius had his mother, he was more content, or rather less discontented—more agreeable in truth than she had known him since first he went to business. She felt greatly consoled, and he so happy with her that he began to wish that he had not a secret from her—for the first time in his life to be sorry that he was in possession of one. He grew even anxious that she should know it, but none the less anxious that he should not have to tell it.

A great part of the time when her husband supposed her asleep, she had been lying wide awake, thinking of the Corney she had lost, and the Corney that had come home to her instead. She was miserable over the altered looks of her disfigured child. The truest of mothers, with all her love for the real and indifference to outsides, can hardly be expected to reconcile herself with ease to a new face on her child—she has loved him in one shape, and now has to love him in another! It was almost as if she had received again another child—her own indeed, but taken from her the instant he was born and never seen by her since—whom, now she saw him, she had to learn to love in a shape different from that in which she had been accustomed to imagine him.