Myra, The Child of Adoption: A Romance of Real Life

The windows were all open, but shaded fold after fold with muslin transparent as dew drops, and snowy as the drifts of a summer cloud. The floor was spread with East India matting, and in a corner of a chamber stood a couch shaded with clouds of delicate lace and clad in snow white even to the floor—a great easy chair, covered with chaste dimity, stood close by the bed, and further off a miniature couch, snow white also, save where the soft rose tints of an inner curtain, light and silken, broke through the waves of snowy gossamer that flowed over it. Upon the pillow of this pretty couch lay a bouquet of flowers tied loosely by an azure-colored ribbon, and more beautiful still a sleeping infant, with one tiny hand resting like a torn peach-blossom, on its little bosom and its sweet lips parted smilingly, as a bud uncloses to the warm sunbeam. There, in its snowy nest, with the fragrant flowers sending their breath in and out through the misty draperies, and half smothered in delicate lace, lay the beautiful infant; and a little way off, upon the larger couch reposed another being in the first bud and bloom of womanly beauty, not asleep, but with her large eyes wandering tenderly toward the infant, and from that to a bouquet of orange-blossoms and moss-roses that, feebly clasped in her delicate fingers, was yet falling apart and dropping its blossoms over the counterpane.

An air of gentle languor lay upon this young creature, and there was something more than that affectionate tenderness with which a mother regards her young child, in the look that she, from time to time, cast upon the slumbering infant—a shade of sadness, that but for her feeble state, might have taken the strength of passionate regret, seemed ready to break from her eyes in a flood of tears, whenever they dwelt longer than usual upon the babe. But when her grief was ready to break forth, she would allow her eyes to droop toward the flowers that seemed to have some pleasant association connected with their fragrance, and a sweet smile—not the less sweet that there was sadness in it—would part her lips while a faint sigh floated through them.

All at once the infant began to nestle in its crib, and opening its large brown eyes, turned them upon the recumbent female. As if her tears lay so near the surface as to require only this motion to set them flowing, the young mother, as she encountered the infantile glance, shuddered faintly, and large drops gathered in her eyes, and fell one by one over her full but pale cheeks.

“I must not look at it, I must not learn to love it so,” she murmured, turning her head away, and shading her tearful eyes with one hand. “Ah! why should I, a mother so young, and with a husband like him, always find every feeling, every impulse shackled as it springs from my heart? Why was there no one to shield my youth from the blight, that I feel, too surely, will cling around me to the end?”

The infant began to cry, and there came into the room a colored woman, tall and with that superb luxuriance of form that so frequently characterizes the dusky-hued woman of the South. She approached the crib and took the child in her arms, hushing it with a sort of cajoling attempt at tenderness, that seemed to annoy the young mother not a little.