Part 12 (1/2)

Josephine broke in upon my rhapsodies over my grandson to say again, for about the fiftieth time during the last year:

”To think, Fred, that though you saw him face to face, you never realized that your magnificent unknown was merely Harold Bruce, whom you had seen and shaken hands with under our roof time and time again.

I laugh whenever I think of it. You gave me a fright that day, when you told me that you had run across Winona in the company of a mysterious stranger, which I haven't fully recovered from yet, in spite of the fact that everything has turned out so well. I dreamed that night that she had married a professional gambler, who cut her throat in the course of the first six months because the dear child refused to aid and abet his nefarious schemes.”

I replied, meekly, for the fiftieth time, something as to the agonies I had undergone for several years in trying to distinguish one young man from another when they had presented themselves at my house in stereotyped evening dress and done me the honor of squeezing my hand so hard that it was evidently in mistake for the hand of one of my girls.

But though my plea has a sardonic look, the words were spoken on this day of days--even as Josephine's were spoken--with an air of gentle, joyous reminiscence, as though, which was indeed the case, we found delight in reviewing again and again the details of the great happiness which has been granted to us in the marriage of our beautiful daughter to one worthy of her.

We drove up the long avenue of tall, stately pines, and found her sitting with her husband and their little hostage to fortune enjoying the glorious mellow suns.h.i.+ne. The tiny monarch sat in his wagon playing with a handful of autumn leaves which his father, with proud paternal indifference to the immaculate surface of the silken carriage blanket, had bestowed upon him. I now became the rival--the successful rival--of the rustling autumn leaves. At my instigation his mother freed him from his equipage and a little anxiously yet resolutely laid him in my arms. I dandled him, I chirruped to him, I hummed to him, I encouraged him to gnaw my watch and to claw my mustache, and presently I began to toss him up in my hands and let him down again.

”Be careful, Fred,” said Josephine, warningly; and I saw a shadow of solicitude cross my daughter's face, though she was plainly doing her best to seem unconcerned.

”Pooh,” I answered. ”I tossed up all my own babies in this way year in and year out, and not one of them ever got a scratch. I'm not going to begin by letting my precious grandson fall. Am I, little lamb?”

Thereupon, by way of showing what an adept I was in the art of baby tossing, I shot him upward with self-confident impetus. To be sure, my hands never really left him; they followed him as he ascended and as he came down. Still, pride, the traditional precursor of falls, stood me in bad stead, as it has stood others before me. Just as my precious grandson was descending for the third time, one of my wrists seemed to turn or give way, destroying thereby the admirable balance maintained by my hands, and, quick as thought, Master Baby slipped from my grasp and tumbled to the ground.

A horrible wail of mingled pain and fright, which wrung my heart-strings, welled from the lips of the little lamb, as mother, father, and grandmother rushed to raise him, knocking their own heads together in the process. Harold, white as a sheet and with a son-in-law's curse, as I imagined, trembling on his lips, succeeded in picking him up. I could discern that my grandson's bald little head was dabbled with blood. His mother evidently perceived the same, for she cried, with the maternal fierceness akin to that which we are taught to a.s.sociate with a tigress protecting its young:

”Harold, give baby to me, and run for the doctor.”

Why is it that at the most solemn and serious junctures of life thoughts wholly irrelevant to the occasion will arise without our bidding and thrust themselves into disconcerting prominence? I was not positive that I had not maimed my grandson for life, though I agree that his stentorian yell had relieved my solicitude a trifle.

Certainly, it was a moment of cruel torture, which should have precluded every other consideration from my brain than concern for the hapless infant and harsh self-reproach. And yet, as Winona finished speaking, I made the imp of a reflection that she was sending for a doctor in spite of Christian Science, and that the scales of hallucination had fallen from her eyes at the wail of her own flesh and blood. I was even tempted for an instant to hazard the suggestion that, as there is no such thing as matter, there could be nothing the matter with baby, but I bit my tongue in the throes of my disgust at my involuntary levity.

Harold had sped down the avenue like an arrow, but scarcely had he disappeared before the gory streak which dabbled my poor little victim's brow, and which had seemed to my heated imagination almost an arterial outburst, yielded to the whisk of a pocket-handkerchief.

Although he still yelled as if his heart would break, I was beginning to reflect that, barring the very slight scratch on his forehead, he was more frightened than hurt, when Josephine suggested, like a true grandmother, the possibility of internal injuries.

My heart began to throb violently once more, and my mouth to taste dry, but Winona came to my rescue.

”Mother,” she exclaimed, in a tone of stern impressiveness, ”it is of the utmost importance for baby's sake that you shouldn't think anything of the kind, for by thinking that he has any internal injuries you might, or I might, or father might cause the darling to think the same.

We ought all to think that he has nothing the matter with him, and then he will soon cease to cry. Come, let us all think of other things and take our minds off baby. Don't even look at him.”

We hastened to do as we were bid. I began to whistle cheerily, and turning my back on my precious grandson, called Josephine's attention to the beauties of the landscape in a series of philosophic utterances.

As for Winona herself, she was Spartan enough to restore the little lad to his baby-carriage, and to busy herself in reflecting whether the spot of blood on her robin's-egg blue morning wrapper would wash out.

Within three minutes more Master Baby had ceased to sob, and was playing contentedly again with the rustling autumn leaves, when the regular pract.i.tioner who, it seemed, lived close by, arrived with Harold at full trot. Winona rose to receive him with a sweet smile, and said, with her old serenity: ”Baby is quite well, Doctor. We all applied Christian Science principles to his condition, and he finds that he was in error to suppose that he was really hurt. Thank you so much for coming.”