There & Back by MacDonald, George, 1824-1905

"I see!" said the baronet, with a laugh that was not nice, having in it no merriment, "the creature is a monster!--Well, if you think I am to blame, I can only protest you are mistaken. _I_ am not web-footed! The duckness must come from the other side."

"I hope you will remember, sir Wilton!"

"Remember? What do you mean? Take the monster away."

The woman rearranged the coverings of the little crooked legs.

"Won't you look at your lady before they put her in her coffin?" she said when she had done.

"What good would that do her? She's past caring!--No, I won't: why should I? Such sights are not pleasant."

"The coffin's a lonely chamber, sir Wilton; lonely to lie all day and all night in!"

"No lonelier for one than for another!" he replied, with an involuntary recoil from his own words. For the one thing a man must believe--yet hardly believes--is, that he shall one day die. "She'll be better without me, anyhow!"

"You are heartless, sir Wilton!"

"Mind your own business. If I choose to be heartless, I may have my reasons. Take the child away."

Still she did not move. The baby, young as he was, had thrown the blanket from his face, and the father's eyes were fixed on it: while he gazed the nurse would not stir. He seemed fascinated by its ugliness. Without absolute deformity, the child was indeed as unsightly as infant well could be.

"My God!" he said again--for he had a trick of crying out as if he had a God--"the little brute hates me! Take it away, woman. Take it away before I strangle it! I can't answer for myself if it keeps on looking at me!"

With a glance whose mingled anger and scorn the father did not see, the nurse turned and went.

He kept staring after her till the door shut, then fell back into his chair, exclaiming once more, "My God!"--What or whom he meant by the word, it were hard to say.

"Is it possible," he said to himself, "that the fine woman I married--for she _was_ a fine woman, a deuced fine woman!--should have died to present the world with such a travesty! It's like nothing human! It's an affront to the family! Ah! the strain _will_ show! They say your sins will find you out! It was a sin to marry the woman! Damned fool I was! But she bewitched me! I _was_ bewitched!--Curse the little monster! I shan't breathe again till I'm out of the house! Where was the doctor? He ought to have seen to it! Hang it all, I'll go abroad!"

Ugly as the child was, however, to many an eye the first thing evident in him would have been his strong likeness to his father--whose features were perfect, though at the moment, and at many a moment, their expression was other than attractive. Sir Wilton disliked children, and the dislike was mutual. Never did child run to him; never was child unwilling to leave him. Escaping from his grasp, he would turn and look back, like Christian emerging from the Valley of the Shadow, as if to weigh the peril he had been in.