snorings of the head of the house and his mother showed that they
were asleep, the young girls crept to where the Prince lay, and
covered him tenderly from the cold with straw and rags; and their
mother crept to him also, and stroked his hair, and cried over
him, whispering broken words of comfort and compassion in his ear
the while. She had saved a morsel for him to eat, also; but the
boy’s pains had swept away all appetite–at least for black and
tasteless crusts. He was touched by her brave and costly defence
of him, and by her commiseration; and he thanked her in very noble
and princely words, and begged her to go to her sleep and try to
forget her sorrows. And he added that the King his father would
not let her loyal kindness and devotion go unrewarded. This
return to his ‘madness’ broke her heart anew, and she strained him
to her breast again and again, and then went back, drowned in
tears, to her bed.
As she lay thinking and mourning, the suggestion began to creep
into her mind that there was an undefinable something about this
boy that was lacking in Tom Canty, mad or sane. She could not
describe it, she could not tell just what it was, and yet her
sharp mother-instinct seemed to detect it and perceive it. What
if the boy were really not her son, after all? Oh, absurd! She
almost smiled at the idea, spite of her griefs and troubles. No
matter, she found that it was an idea that would not ‘down,’ but
persisted in haunting her. It pursued her, it harassed her, it
clung to her, and refused to be put away or ignored. At last she
perceived that there was not going to be any peace for her until
she should devise a test that should prove, clearly and without
question, whether this lad was her son or not, and so banish these
wearing and worrying doubts. Ah, yes, this was plainly the right
way out of the difficulty; therefore she set her wits to work at
once to contrive that test. But it was an easier thing to propose
than to accomplish. She turned over in her mind one promising
test after another, but was obliged to relinquish them all–none
of them were absolutely sure, absolutely perfect; and an imperfect
one could not satisfy her. Evidently she was racking her head in
vain–it seemed manifest that she must give the matter up. While
this depressing thought was passing through her mind, her ear
caught the regular breathing of the boy, and she knew he had
fallen asleep. And while she listened, the measured breathing was
broken by a soft, startled cry, such as one utters in a troubled
dream. This chance occurrence furnished her instantly with a plan
worth all her laboured tests combined. She at once set herself
feverishly, but noiselessly, to work to relight her candle,
muttering to herself, “Had I but seen him THEN, I should have
known! Since that day, when he was little, that the powder burst
in his face, he hath never been startled of a sudden out of his
dreams or out of his thinkings, but he hath cast his hand before
his eyes, even as he did that day; and not as others would do it,
with the palm inward, but always with the palm turned outward–I
have seen it a hundred times, and it hath never varied nor ever
failed. Yes, I shall soon know, now!”
By this time she had crept to the slumbering boy’s side, with the
candle, shaded, in her hand. She bent heedfully and warily over
him, scarcely breathing in her suppressed excitement, and suddenly
flashed the light in his face and struck the floor by his ear with
her knuckles. The sleeper’s eyes sprang wide open, and he cast a
startled stare about him–but he made no special movement with his
hands.
The poor woman was smitten almost helpless with surprise and
grief; but she contrived to hide her emotions, and to soothe the
boy to sleep again; then she crept apart and communed miserably
with herself upon the disastrous result of her experiment. She