It was most pleasant, being asked
by everyone, even by General Byington, how it felt
to be a grandmother. “Oh! ho, ho!”
Mrs. Morris’s unutilized dimple kept itself
busy to the point of positive fatigue.
Even more delightful was it, when
the time came round for the totality of her sex-the
only sex worth considering-to call and see
the babe and mother, to hear them all proclaim it
the prettiest infant ever seen, and covertly pronounce
Isabel more beautiful than on her wedding day.
In a way she was; and particularly
when they fondly rallied her upon her new accession
of motherly practical manner, and she laughed with
them, and ended with that merry, mellow sigh which
still gave Ruth new pride in her and new hope.
But another source of Ruth’s new hope was that
Arthur, who had written to the bishop and resigned
his calling the day after Mrs. Morris’s little
namesake was born, had at length withdrawn his letter.
“It is to your brother we owe
its withdrawal,” said the bishop, privately,
to Ruth.
She beamed gratefully, but did not
tell him that, after the long, secret conference between
her brother and the rector, Leonard had come to her
and wept for Arthur the only tears he had ever shed
in her presence. Now Leonard had found occasion
to go West for a time, though he still held his office;
and Arthur was filling the rectorate almost in the
old first way. On some small parish matter the
rustic vestryman with the spectacled daughter came
to Arthur’s library in better spirits than he
had shown for months, and by and by asked conjecturally,
“I-eh-guess you don’t
keep any babies here you’re ashamed to show,
do ye?” and held his mouth very wide open.
The infinitesimal was brought.
“Well, I vum! Why, Miz.
Winslow, I don’t believe th’ ever was a
pretty baby so puny, nor a puny baby so pretty!
Now, if it’s a fair question, I hope y’
ain’t tryin’ to push in between this baby
and the keaow, be ye?”
“No,” laughed Isabel.
“I’m not that conceited. I should
only be in the way.”
“Well,” he said as they
parted, shaking Arthur’s hand to the end of his
speech, “I like to see a baby resemble its father,
and that’s what this ’n ‘s a-tryin’
to do, jest ’s hard ’s she can.”
So went matters for a time, and then,
while the babe began to fill out and lengthen out,
Isabel showed herself daily more and more overspent.
The physician reappeared, and spoke plainly:-
“And if your cousin down South
is so determined to have you at her wedding, why,
go! Leave your baby with your mother; she’s
older in the business than you are.”
But the cousin’s wedding was
weeks away yet, and Isabel clung to her wee treasure,
and temporized with the aunts and cousins in the South
and with her mother and Ruth at home, until the doctor
spoke again.
“Let’s see,” he
said to Arthur. “This is November, baby’s
five months old. Send your wife away. Put
her out! Something’s killing her by inches,
and I believe it’s just care o’ the nest.
We must drive her off it, as I drove Leonard Byington
off,-which, you remember, you, quietly,
were the first to suggest to me to do.... Coming
back, you say,-Byington? Yes, but
only for a day or two,-election time.”
It did not occur to the doctor that
Arthur was secretly keeping his wife from going anywhere.
The night Leonard came home the old
pond, for the first time in the season, froze over,
and through Giles’s activities it was arranged
next day that Martin Kelly, Sarah Stebbens, Minnie,
and he should go down there after supper and skate
by the light of fagot fires made out on the ice.
Giles piled the fagots; but at a late moment,
to the disgust of Giles and Minnie, the older pair
pitilessly changed their minds, and decided they were
too old to make such nincompoops of themselves.
Minnie would not go without Sarah, for Minnie was
up to her pretty eyebrows in love with Giles, as well
as immensely correct; and so there, as it seemed,
was the end of that.
At tea Arthur told Isabel he was going
for a long walk down through the town and across the
meadows, and would not be home before bedtime.
Isabel approved heartily, and said Sarah would stay
near the sleeping babe, and she would spend the evening
with her mother. She and Arthur went together
as far as the cross-paths in the arbor, and there,
in parting, he clasped and kissed her with a sudden
frenzy that only added one more distressful misgiving
to the many that now haunted her days.
She found her mother alone. They
sat down, hand in hand, before an open fire, and had
talked in sweet quietness but a short while, when a
chance word and the knowledge that this time they
would not be interrupted made it easy for Isabel to
say things she had for weeks been trying to say.