Bessies Fortune | Page 7

upon his head. But he was strange to Geraldine,
and she was strange to him, and after regarding her a moment with his
great blue eyes, he turned toward Hannah, and with a quivering lip
began to cry for her. And Hannah took him in her arms and hugging
him to her bosom, felt that her heart was breaking. She loved him so
much, he had been so much company for her, and had helped to drive
away in part, the horror with which her life was invested, and now he
was going from her; all she had to love in the wide world, and so far as
she knew, the only living being that loved her with a pure, unselfish
love.
"Oh, brother! oh, sister!" she cried, as she covered the baby's dimpled
hands with kisses, "don't take him from me; let me have him; let him
stay awhile longer. I shall die here alone with baby gone."
But Mrs. Geraldine said "No," very decidedly, for though as yet she
cared but little for her child, she cared a great deal for the proprieties,
and her friends were beginning to wonder at the protracted absence of
the boy; so she must take him from poor Hannah, who tied on his
scarlet cloak and cap of costly lace, and carried him to the carriage and
put him into the arms of the red-haired German woman who was
hereafter to be his nurse and win his love from her.
Then the carriage drove off, but, as long as it was in sight, Hannah
stood just where it had left her, watching it with a feeling of such utter
desolation as she had never felt before.
"Oh, baby, baby! come back to me!" she moaned piteously. "What shall
I do without you?"
"God will comfort you, my daughter. He can be more to you than baby
was," the old father said to her, and she replied:
"I know that. Yes, but just now I cannot pray, and I am so desolate."

The burden was pressing more heavily than ever, and Hannah's face
grew whiter, and her eyes larger, and sadder, and brighter as the days
went by, and there was nothing left of baby but a rattle-box with which
he had played, and the cradle in which he had slept. This last she
carried to her room up stairs and made it the shrine over which her
prayers were said, not twice or thrice, but many times a day, for
Hannah had early learned to take every care, great and small, to God,
knowing that peace would come at last, though it might tarry long.
Geraldine sent her a black silk dress, and a white Paisley shawl in token
of her gratitude for all she had done for the baby. She also wrote her a
letter telling of the grand christening they had had, and of the
handsome robe from Paris which baby had worn at the ceremony.
"We have called him Grey," Geraldine wrote, "and perhaps, he will
visit you again next summer," but it was not until Grey was two years
old, that he went once more to the farm-house and staid for several
months, while his parents were in Europe.
What a summer that was for Hannah, and how swiftly the days went by,
while the burden pressed so lightly that sometimes she forgot it for
hours at a time, and only remembered it when she saw how persistently
her father shrank from the advances of the little boy, who, utterly
ignoring his apparent indifference, pursued him constantly, plying him
with questions, and sometimes regarding him curiously, as if
wondering at his silence.
One day, when the old man was sitting in his arm-chair under the apple
trees in the yard, Grey came up to him, with his straw hat hanging
down his back, his blue eyes shining like stars, and all over his face that
sweet smile which made him so beautiful. Folding his little white hands
together upon his grandfather's knee, he stood a moment gazing fixedly
into the sad face, which never relaxed a muscle, though every nerve of
the wretched man was strung to its utmost tension and quivering with
pain. The searching blue eyes of the boy troubled him, for it seemed as
if they pierced to the depths of his soul and saw what was there.
"Da-da," Grey said at last. "Take me, peese; I'se tired."

Oh, how the old man longed to snatch the child to his bosom and cover
his face with the kisses he had so hungered to give him, but in his
morbid state of mind he dared not, lest he should contaminate him, so
he restrained himself with a mighty effort, and replied:
"No, Grey, no; I cannot take you.