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‘Where is your step-mother, my poor angel?’ Natalya asked in a half whisper.

Becky’s forehead gloomed in an ugly frown. Her face became a woman’s again. ‘One o’clock the public-houses open on Sundays,’ she snorted.

‘Oh, my God!’ cried Natalya, forgetting that the circumstance was favouring her project. ‘A Jewish woman! You don’t mean to say that she drinks in public-houses?’

‘You don’t suppose I would let her drink here,’ said Becky. ‘We have nice scenes, I can tell you. The only consolation is she’s better-tempered when she’s quite drunk.’

The infant’s wail rang out more clamorously.

‘Hush, you little beast!’ Becky ejaculated, but she moved mechanically within, and her grandmother followed her.

All the ancient grandeur of the sitting-room seemed overclouded with shabbiness and untidiness. To Natalya everything looked and smelt like the things in her bag. And there in a stuffy cradle a baby wrinkled its red face with shrieking.

Becky had bent over it, and was soothing it ere its existence penetrated at all to the old woman’s preoccupied brain. Its pipings had been like an unheeded wail of wind round some centre of tragic experience. Even when she realized the child’s existence her brain groped for some seconds in search of its identity.

Ah, the baby whose birth had cost that painted poppet’s life! So it still lived and howled in unwelcome reminder and perpetuation of that brief but shameful episode. ‘Grow dumb like your mother,’ she murmured resentfully. What a bequest of misery Henry Elkman had left behind him! Ah, how right she had been to suspect him from the very first!

‘But where is my little Joseph?’ she said aloud.

‘He’s playing somewhere in the street.’

‘Ach, mein Gott! Playing, when he ought to be weeping like this child of shame. Go and fetch him at once!’

‘What do you want him for?’

‘I am going to take you both away–out of this misery. You’d like to come and live with me–eh, my lamb?’

‘Rather–anything’s better than this.’

Natalya caught her to her breast again.

‘Go and fetch my Joseph! But quick, quick, before the public-house woman comes back!’

Becky flew out, and Natalya sank into a chair, breathless with emotion and fatigue. The baby in the cradle beside her howled more vigorously, and automatically her foot sought the rocker, and she heard herself singing:

‘Sleep, little baby, sleep,
Thy father shall be a Rabbi;
Thy mother shall bring thee almonds;
Blessings on thy little head.’

As the howling diminished, she realized with a shock that she was rocking this misbegotten infant–nay, singing to it a Jewish cradle-song full of inappropriate phrases. She withdrew her foot as though the rocker had grown suddenly red-hot. The yells broke out with fresh vehemence, and she angrily restored her foot to its old place. ‘Nu, nu,’ she cried, rocking violently, ‘go to sleep.’

She stole a glance at it, when it grew stiller, and saw that the teat of its feeding-bottle was out of its mouth. ‘There, there–suck!’ she said, readjusting it. The baby opened its eyes and shot a smile at her, a wonderful, trustful smile from great blue eyes. Natalya trembled; those were the blue eyes that had supplanted the memory of Fanny’s dark orbs, and the lips now sucking contentedly were the cherry lips of the painted poppet.

‘Nebbich; the poor, deserted little orphan,’ she apologized to herself. ‘And this is how the new Jewish wife does her duty to her step-children. She might as well have been a Christian.’ Then a remembrance that the Christian woman had seemingly been an unimpeachable step-mother confused her thoughts further. And while she was groping among them Becky returned, haling in Joseph, who in his turn haled in a kite with a long tail.

The boy, now a sturdy lad of seven, did not palpitate towards his grandmother with Becky’s eagerness. Probably he felt the domestic position less. But he surrendered himself to her long hug. ‘Did she beat him,’ she murmured soothingly, ‘beat my own little Joseph?’