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What she saw doubtless touched the mother-heart in her. She caught the eye of the tattered urchin clinging to the pillar, and radiantly smiled on him. Then, probably thinking that the King was absorbing the attention of the great assemblage, she indulged in a little diversion.
Christopher was vexed with himself for so nearly breaking down before Elisabeth, and throwing the shadow of his sorrow across the sunshine of her path. He did not know that the mother-heart in her was yearning over him with a tenderness almost too powerful to be resisted, and that his weakness was constraining her as his strength had never done.
"Oh, dinna hit me!" and he jumped as the blows fell without slackening. "Oh, oh, oh! Mother, dinna' let him hit me ony mair!" roared the boy, while the grim, set face of the parent never relaxed, and the belt continued to lash the quivering flesh. Mrs. Sinclair, who by this time was crying too, feeling every blow in her mother-heart, began to fear this grim, cruel look on her husband's face.
It seemed during this time as if she had forgotten the faithful nurse who for years had willingly sacrificed the pleasures of her days and the sleep of her nights, to lavish upon the child of her anxiety all that her mother-heart still contained, which was naught save love. Els doubtless noticed it, but with no bitter or sorrowful thoughts. She and the beloved dying woman understood one another.
She would blanch when questioned, and close her lips fast, and never a word escaped them of what these visions of terror might be. How the mother-heart would have rejoiced could Lillian have divined that her child was well and happy, though affectionate in new ties while she languished in his absence!
And then at last " Madame Delphine ceased speaking, but went on diligently with her agitated fingers, turning down foolish hems lengthwise of her lap. "At last your mother-heart conquered," said Père Jerome. She nodded.
The awful possibilities of hell for herself and her children wrought the mother-heart to madness. The religious guides of the people used unsparingly the appeal to fear. The belief in witchcraft, which long had scourged Europe, broke out in a panic of fear and cruelty. It was a tragic culmination of the worst elements, superstition, malignity, ministerial tyranny.
She gathered up her baby once more; but when her eye fell upon its miserably short little gray tow-linen shirt and noted the contrast between its pauper shabbiness and her own volcanic eruption of infernal splendors, her mother-heart was touched, and she was ashamed. "No, dolling mammy ain't gwine to treat you so. De angels is gwine to 'mire you jist as much as dey does yo' mammy.
"I wonder why," his aunty said, "This little lad always comes here, When there are many other homes As nice as this, and quite as near." He stood a moment deep in thought, Then, with the love-light in his eye, He pointed where his mother sat, And said: "Here she lives; that is why " With beaming face the mother heard, Her mother-heart was very glad.
The baby was hers, by right, till that sad day of which she had not dreamed when she must restore it to its "folks," whoever and wherever they were. She would so restore it, though it break her heart; yet better her own heart breaking than that mother-heart of which the vender spoke.
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