A tap at the door. She thought it was the invader of her peace, and said “Come in” faintly. Then the door was pushed open, and a tottering little figure, so low down that Miss Susan, unprepared for this pygmy, did not see it at first, came in with a feeble rush, as babies do, too much afraid of its capabilities of progress to have any confidence of holding out. “Did you ever see such a darling, ma’am?” said Cook. “We couldn’t keep him not to ourselves a moment longer. I whips him up, and I says, ‘Miss Susan must see him.’ Now, did you ever set your two eyes on a sweeter boy?”
Miss Susan, relieved, did as she was told; she fixed her eyes upon the boy, who, after his rush, subsided on to the floor, and gazed at her in silence. He was as fair as any English child, a flaxen-headed, blue-eyed Flemish baby, with innocent, wide-open eyes.
“He ain’t a bit like his ma, bless him, and he takes to strangers quite natural. Look at him a-cooing and a-laughing at you, ma’am, as he never set eyes on before! But human nature is unaccountable,” said Cook, with awe-stricken gravity, “for he can’t abide his ma.”
“Did you ever know such a case before?” said Miss Susan, who, upon the ground that Cook was a widow, looked up to her judgment on such matters as all the rest of the household did. Cook was in very high feather at this moment, having at last proved beyond doubt the superiority of her knowledge and experience as having once had a child of her own.
“Well, ma’am,” said Cook, “that depends. There’s some folk as never have no way with children, married or single, it don’t matter. Now that child, if you let him set at your feet, and give him a reel out of your work-box to play with, will be as good as gold; for you’ve got a way with children, you have; but he can’t abide his ma.”
“Leave him there, if you think he will be good,” said Miss Susan. She did more than give the baby a reel out of her work-box, for she took out the scissors, pins, needles, all sharp and pointed things, and put down the work-box itself on the carpet. And then she sat watching the child with the most curious, exquisite mixture of anguish and a kind of pleasure in her heart. Poor old Guillaume Austin’s grandchild, a true scion of the old stock! but not as was supposed. She watched the little tremulous dabs the baby made at the various articles that pleased him. How he grasped them in the round fat fingers that were just long enough to close on a reel; how he threw them away to snatch at others; the pitiful look of mingled suffering, injured feeling, and indignation which came over his face in a moment when the lid of the box dropped on his fingers; his unconscious little song to himself, cooing and gurgling in a baby monologue. What was the child thinking? No clue had he to the disadvantages under which he was entering life, or the advantages which had been planned for him before he was born, and which, by the will of Providence, were falling into nothing. Poor little unconscious baby! The work-box and its reels were at this moment quite world enough for him.