Bessies Fortune | Page 7

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. I am tired, too."
"Is you sick?" was Grey's next question, to which his grandfather replied:
"No, I am not sick," while he clasped both his hands tightly over his head out of reach of the baby fingers, which sometimes tried to touch them.
"Is you sorry, then?" Grey continued, and the grandfather replied:
"Yes, child, very, very sorry."
There was the sound of a sob in the old man's voice, and Grey's blue eyes opened wider as they looked wistfully at the lips trembling with emotion.
"Has you been a naughty boy?"