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Updated: June 17, 2025
In vain the lady of fashion remonstrated; in vain she argued the matter; in vain she offered the girl-mother money; in vain, too, were the upbraidings of the astonished housekeeper and her assistant; nature would have its way, and the mother would have her child, and the contest of Gold versus God terminated, as all such struggles should, in the victory of God and Heart, and the French mother kept her child."
And as Uncle Tom's chosen path lay along hard, lofty ways that small boys could not follow, Fred had been placed by special privilege in Saint Andrew's to grow up into a happy boyhood, the pet and plaything of the house. He was eleven now, with the fair face and golden hair of his dead girl-mother, and brown eyes that had a boyish sparkle all their own.
"Go easy, go easy, the both of yous! but sure, they might be gone back already, and no one to have seen them, only meself!" he said in the same awed whisper. They peered in, for beyond the Candle were dusky spaces; yet its light was enough to show them two figures there; a girl-mother with her child, lying very still. Was she asleep, or.... She was so white and small!
Returning as a middle-aging widow, after an unhappy wifehood in Africa, she meets on the boat two persons, Captain Brangwyn, a young man, and a girl-mother calling herself Antonina Pisa. Hence the tears. Brangwyn she marries, doubtfully, half-defiantly, despite the difference in years between them; Antonina is taken as a companion and very soon developes into a sick-nurse.
All the Kanaques die. Then no more. The smile, and this instancing by the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair. The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the Marquesan. It would be strange if it were otherwise. The race is perhaps the handsomest extant.
As Celia came up to it, Susie was at the gate with the child in her arms, and the pale-faced girl-mother turned as if to avoid her; but Celia, with shyness in her soft, clear voice, said: "Oh, mayn't I see the baby? Mayn't I come in?" "Yes; you may come in, if you wish, if you want to, miss," said Susie, in her low voice, and after a moment's hesitation.
"When you lay on the sands of the beach in old Virginia and held my hand while I read to you, idly dreaming through that wonderful summer before our first-born came sailing into port from God's blue sea! You said I was beautiful then. And you were so tender and gracious in your strength. No other woman can ever be to you this first girl-mother." Her voice melted into a sob.
Cameron, she was admitted to the chamber and heard the plaintive pleadings: "Send for Sister Helen," until her motherly heart was touched, and as she sat with her son at dinner she spoke of the young girl-mother moaning so for Helen.
It was the same little room the girl had occupied for half that year, the same rag carpet, the same mended rocking chair which had come to grief in the cyclone, and the knitted tidy which the girl herself had made. With the hot tears running down her cheeks the girl-mother threw herself upon the bed and buried her face in the baby's wraps to stifle the cry she was afraid would escape her.
The baby's offence against society in coming into the world was forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul's desire was to continue that offence by preserving the life of the child. However, it soon grew clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured.
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