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ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD 197
between them—" Dr. Firmin, I would die rather than be beholden
to you for anything," she said, with her little limbs all in a tremor,
and her eyes flashing anger. " How dare you, sir, after old days,
be a coward and pay compliments to me ; I will tell your son of
you, sir !" and the little woman looked as if she could have stabbed
the elderly libertine there as he stood. And he shrugged his
handsome shoulders : blushed a little too, perhaps : gave her one
of his darkling looks, and departed. She had believed him once.
She had married him, as she fancied. He had tired of her;
forsaken her; left her—left her even without a name. She had
not known his for long years after her trust and his deceit. " No,
sir, I wouldn't have your name now, not if it were a lord's, I
wouldn't, and a coronet on your carriage. You are beneath me
now, Mr. Brand Firmin !" she had said.
How came she to love the boy so ? Years back, in her own
horrible extremity of misery, she could remember a week or two
of a brief, strange, exquisite happiness, which came to her in the
midst of her degradation and desertion, and for a few days a baby
in her arms, with eyes like Philip's. It was taken from her, after
a few days—only sixteen days. Insanity came upon her, as her
dead infant was carried away :—insanity, and fever, and struggle
—ah! who knows how dreadful? She never does. There is a
gap in her life which she never can recall quite. But George
Brand Firmin, Esq., M.D., knows how very frequent are such
cases of mania, and that women who don't speak about them often
will cherish them for years after they appear to have passed away.
The Little Sister says, quite gravely, sometimes, " They are allowed
to come back. They do come back. Else what's the good of little
cherubs bein' born, and smilin', and happy, and beautiful—say, for
sixteen days, and then an end ? I've talked about it to many
ladies in grief sim'lar to mine was, and it comforts them. And
when I saw that child on his sick-bed, and he lifted his eyes, I
knew him, I tell you, Mrs. Ridley. I don't speak about it ; but I
knew him, ma'am ; my angel came back again. I know him by
the eyes. Look at 'em. Did you ever see such eyes ? They look
as if they had seen heaven. His father's don't." Mrs. Ridley
believes this theory solemnly, and I think I know a lady, nearly
connected with myself, who can't be got quite to disown it. And
this secret opinion to women in grief and sorrow over their newborn
lost infants Mrs. Brandon persists in imparting. " I know
a case," the nurse murmurs, "of a poor mother who lost her
child at sixteen days old ; and sixteen years after, on the very day,
she saw him again."
Philip knows so far of the Little Sister's story, that he is the