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Williams's dead sister, and that she had been born in Carnarvon, which still shimmered in her memory in purple and gold. Emmerjane was the drudge of the family, and I first saw her in the street at dusk, mothering a brood of her little cousins, taking Hughie by one hand and Katie by the other and telling Gwennie to lay hold of Davie lest he should be run over by the milk vans.
During the rest of that day I could think of nothing but Maggie's child, and what was to become of it, and next morning when Emmerjane came up she told me that the "young minister" was "a-gettin' it into the 'ouse." I think that was the last straw of my burden, for my mind came back with a swift rebound from Maggie Jones's child to my own.
Emmerjane, who had with difficulty been kept out of the room last night and was now rushing breathlessly up and down stairs, wished to hold baby for a moment, and at length out of the magnificence of my generosity I allowed her to do so, only warning her, as she loved her life, to hold tight and not let baby fall. "How'd you mean?" said the premature little mother. "Me let her fall? Not much!"
Three days after Emmerjane told me this story a great solemnity fell on our street. It was Saturday, when the children do not go to school, but, playing no games, they gathered in whispering groups round the house with the drawn blinds, while their mothers stood bareheaded at the doors with their arms under their aprons and their hidden hands over their mouths.
"Sleep, little baby, I love thee, I love thee, Sleep, little Queen, I am bending above thee." I dare say my voice was sweet that day a mother's voice is always sweet for when Emmerjane, who had been out of the room, came back to it with a look of awed solemnity, she said: "Well, I never did! I thought as 'ow there was a' angel a-come into this room."
Emmerjane, give her that glass of milk and water." I drank the milk just to satisfy them, and then held out my arms for my child. "Give her to me quick, quick!" "Here she is then, the jewel!" Oh! the joy of that moment when I first took my baby in my arms, and looked into her face, and saw my own features and the sea-blue eyes of Martin! Oh the rapture of my first eager kiss!
At length a letter came, and Maggie Jones trembled so much that she dared not open it, but at last she tripped up to her room to be "all of herself," and then . . . then there was a "wild screech," and when Emmerjane ran upstairs Maggie was stretched out on the floor in a dead faint, clutching in her tight hand the photograph which Owen Owens had returned with the words, written in his heavy scrawl across the face Maggie Jones's bastard.
Emmerjane, by her own urgent entreaty, carried baby as far as the corner of the Bayswater Road, and there the premature little woman left me, after nearly smothering baby with kisses. "Keep straight as a' arrow and you can't lose your wye," she said.
But there was one delicate impediment then my condition, which was becoming visible, I thought, to people in the street, and causing some of them, especially women, to look round at me. When this became painful I discontinued my walks altogether, and sent Emmerjane on my few errands. Then my room became my world. I do not think I ever saw a newspaper.
This was a still more terrible possibility the possibility that I might die and leave my child behind me. The thought haunted me all that day and the following night, but the climax came next morning, when Emmerjane, while black-leading my grate, gave me the last news of Maggie Jones.
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