But another story of found jewels was to be added to the parson’s stock. He had bent his long back for about the eighteenth time, when such a shimmer as no glass or silica can give flashed into his eyes, and he caught up the diamond out of the dust, and it fitted exactly into the little black hole.
Miss Kitty uttered a cry, and at the same moment Miss Betty, who was farther down the road, did the same, and these were followed by a third, which sounded like a mocking echo of both. And then the sisters rushed together.
“A most miraculous discovery!” gasped Miss Betty.
“You must have passed the very spot before,” cried Miss Kitty.
“Though I’m sure, sister, what to do with it now we have found it I don’t know,” said Miss Betty, rubbing her nose, as she was wont to do when puzzled.
“It shall be taken better care of for the future, sister Betty,” said Miss Kitty, penitently. “Though how it got out I can’t think now.”
“Why, bless my soul! you don’t suppose it got there of itself, sister?” snapped Miss Betty. “How did it get there is another matter.”
“I felt pretty confident about it, for my own part,” smiled the parson as he joined them.
“Do you mean to say, sir, that you knew it was there?” asked Miss Betty, solemnly.
“I didn’t know the precise spot, my dear madam, but——”
“You didn’t see it, sir, I hope?” said Miss Betty.
“Bless me, my dear madam, I found it!” cried the parson.
Miss Betty bridled and bit her lip.
“I never contradict a clergyman, sir,” said she, “but I can only say that if you did see it, it was not like your usual humanity to leave it lying there.”
I’ve got it in my hand, ma’am!
“Why
He’s got it in his hand, sister!”
cried the parson and Miss Kitty in one breath. Miss Betty was too much puzzled to be polite.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“The diamond, oh dear, oh dear! The Diamond!” cried Miss Kitty. “But what are you talking about, sister?”
“The Baby,” said Miss Betty.
WHAT MISS BETTY FOUND.
It was found under a broom-bush. Miss Betty was poking her nose near the bank that bordered the wood, in her hunt for the diamond, when she caught sight of a mass of yellow of a deeper tint that the mass of broom-blossom above it, and this was the baby.
This vivid color, less opaque than “deep chrome” and a shade more orange, seems to have a peculiar attraction for wandering tribes. Gipsies use it, and it is a favorite color with Indian squaws. To the last dirty rag it is effective, whether it flutters near a tent on Bagshot Heath, or in some wigwam doorway makes a point of brightness against the gray shadows of the pine forest.
A large kerchief of this, wound about its body, was the baby’s only robe, but he seemed quite comfortable in it when Miss Betty found him, sleeping on a pillow of deep hair moss, his little brown fists closed as fast as his eyes, and a crimson toadstool grasped in one of them.
When Miss Betty screamed the baby awoke, and his long black lashes tickled his cheeks and made him wink and cry. But by the time she returned with her sister and the parson, he was quite happy again, gazing up with dark eyes full of delight into the glowing broom-bush, and fighting the evening breeze with his feet, which were entangled in the folds of the yellow cloth, and with the battered toadstool which was still in his hand.
“And, indeed, sir,” said Miss Betty, who had rubbed her nose till it looked like the twin toadstool to that which the baby was flourishing in her face, “you won’t suppose I would have left the poor little thing another moment, to catch its death of cold on a warm evening like this; but having no experience of such cases, and remembering that murder at the inn in the Black Valley, and that the body was not allowed to be moved till the constables had seen it, I didn’t feel to know how it might be with foundlings, and——”
But still Miss Betty did not touch the bairn. She was not accustomed to children. But the parson had christened too many babies to be afraid of them, and he picked up the little fellow in a moment, and tucked the yellow rag round him, and then addressing the little ladies precisely as if they were sponsors, he asked in his deep round voice, “Now where on the face of earth are the vagabonds who have deserted this child?”
The little ladies did not know, the broom-bushes were silent, and the question has remained unanswered from that day to this.
THE BABY, THE LAWYER, AND THE PARSON.
There were no railways near Lingborough at this time. The coach ran three times a week, and a walking postman brought the letters from the town to the small hamlets. Telegraph wires were unknown, and yet news traveled quite as fast then as it does now, and in the course of the following morning all the neighborhood knew that Miss Betty had found a baby under a broom-bush, and the lawyer called in the afternoon to inquire how the ladies found themselves after the tea party at Mrs. General Dunmaw’s.
Miss Kitty was glad on the whole. She felt nervous, but ready for a renewal of hostilities. Several clinching arguments had occurred to her in bed last night, and after hastily looking up a few lines from her common-place book, which always made her cry when she read them, but which she hoped to be able to hurl at the lawyer with a steady voice, she followed Miss Betty to the drawing-room.
It was half a relief and half a disappointment to find that the lawyer was quite indifferent to the subject of their late contest. He overflowed with compliments; was quite sure he must have had the worst of the argument, and positively dying of curiosity to hear about the baby.
The little ladies were very full of the subject themselves. An active search for the baby’s relations, conducted by the parson, the clerk, the farm-bailiff, the constable, the cowherd, and several supernumeraries, had so far proved quite vain. The country folk were most anxious to assist, especially by word of mouth. Except a small but sturdy number who had seen nothing, they had all seen “tramps,” but unluckily no two could be got together whose accounts of the tramps themselves, of the hour at which they were seen, or of the direction in which they went, would tally with each other.
The little ladies were quite alive to the possibility that the child’s parents might never be traced, indeed the matter had been constantly before their minds ever since the parson had carried the baby to Lingborough, and laid it in the arms of Thomasina, the servant.
Miss Betty had sat long before her toilette-table that evening, gazing vacantly at the looking-glass. Not that the reflection of the eight curl-papers she had neatly twisted up was conveyed to her brain. She was in a brown study, during which the following thoughts passed through her mind, and they all pointed one way:
That that fine little fellow was not to blame for his people’s misconduct.
That they would never be found.
That it would probably be the means of the poor child’s ruin, body and soul, if they were.
That the master of the neighboring workhouse bore a bad character.
That a child costs nothing to keep—where cows are kept too—for years.
That just at the age when a boy begins to eat dreadfully and wear out his clothes, he is very useful on a farm (though not for these reasons).
That