Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty Part 44

"How delighted they are with him!" she said when the door had closed behind them. "Doctor, isn't he an uncommonly handsome child?" she added with the adorable simplicity of perfect love. "I thought babies were not pretty at first."

The room was now kept still. The mother and child lay side by side, reposing from their night-long struggle for life. The mother looked steadily at the infant; the infant looked with equal fixity at the window: each gazed and wondered at an unaccustomed glory. In a few minutes both dropped to sleep, overcome by fatigue, and by novel emotions, or sensations. For three days a succession of long slumbers, and of waking intervals similar to tranquilly delightful dreams, composed their existence. When they were thus reposed they tasted life with a more complete and delicious zest. Lillie entertained her husband and father for hours at a time with discoursing on the attributes of the baby, pointing out the different elements of his glory, and showing how he grew in graces. She was quite indifferent to their affectionate raillery; nothing could shake her faith in the illimitability of the new deity. They two, dear as they were, were nevertheless human, and were not so necessary as they had been to her faith in goodness, and her happiness in loving. So long as she had the baby to look at, she could pa.s.s the whole day without them, hardly wondering at their absence.

"We are dethroned," said the Doctor to the Colonel. "We are a couple of Saturns who have made way for the new-born Jupiter."

"Nonsense!" smiled Lillie. "You think that you are going to spend all your time with your minerals now. You are perfectly happy in the idea. I sha'n't allow it."

"No. We must remain and be converts to the new revelation. Well, I suppose we sha'n't resist. We are ready to make our profession of faith at all times and in all places."

"This is the place," said Lillie. "Isn't he sweet?"

The grandfather knew a great deal better than either the father or mother how to handle the diminutive Jupiter. He took him from the pillow, carried him to the window, drew the curtain slowly, and laughed to see the solemn little eyes, after winking slowly, turn upward and fix themselves steadily on the broad, mild effulgence of the sky.

"He looks for the light, as plants and trees lean towards it," said he.

"He is trying to see the heavenly mansions which he may some day inhabit. n.o.body knows how soon. They get up their chariots very suddenly sometimes, these little Elijahs."

"Oh, don't talk so," implored Lillie. "He sha'n't die."

The Doctor was thinking of his own only boy, who had flown from the cradle to Heaven more than twenty years ago.

Aside from tenderness for his wife, Carter's princ.i.p.al emotion all this while was that of astonishment at his position. It cost him considerable mental effort, and stretch of imagination, to conceive himself a relative of the newcomer. He did not, like Lillie, love the child by pa.s.sionate instinct; and he had not yet learned to love him as he had learned to love her. He was tender of the infant, as a creature whose weakness pleaded for his protection; but when it came to the question of affection, he had to confess that he loved him chiefly through his mother. He was a poor hand at fondling the boy, being always afraid of doing him some harm. He was better pleased to see him in Lillie's arms than to feel him in his own; the little burden was curiously warm and soft, but so evidently susceptible to injury as to be a terror.

"I would rather lead a storming party," he said. "I have been beaten in that sort of thing, and lived through it. But if I should drop this fellow--"

And here the warrior absolutely flinched at the thought of how he would feel in such a horrible case.

Now commenced a beautiful reciprocal education of mother and child. Each discovered every day new mysteries, new causes of admiration and love, in the other. Long before a childless man or even woman would have imagined signs of intelligence in the infant, the mother had not merely imagined but had actually discovered them. You would have been wrong if you had laughed incredulously when she said, "He begins to take notice."

Of course her fondness led her into errors: she mistook symptoms of mere sensation for utterances of ideas; she perceived prophetically rather than by actual observation: but some things, some opening buds of intellect, she saw truly. She deceived herself when she thought that at the age of three weeks he knew his father; but at the same time she was quite correct in believing that he recognized and cried for his mother.

This delighted her; she would let him cry for a moment, merely for the pleasure of being so desired; then she would fold him to her breast and be his comforter, his life. They were teachers, consolers, deities, the one to the other.

Her love gave a fresh inspiration to her religious feeling. Here was a new object of thanksgiving and prayer: an object so nearly divine that only Heaven could have sent it: an object so delicate that only Heaven could preserve it. For her baby she prayed with an intelligence, a feeling, a faith, such as she had never known before, not even when praying for her husband during his times of battle. It seemed certain to her that the merciful All-Father and the Son who gave himself for the world would sympathize compa.s.sionately with the innocence, and helplessness of her little child. These sentiments were not violent: she would have withered under the breath of any pa.s.sionate emotion: they were as gentle and comforting as summer breezes from orange groves. Once only, during a slight accession of fever, there came something like a physical revelation; a room full of mysterious, dazzling light; a communication of some surprising, unutterable joy; an impression as of a divine voice, saying, "Thy sins are forgiven thee."

Forgiven of G.o.d, she wished also to be forgiven of man. The next morning, moved by the remembrance of the vision, although its exaltation had nearly vanished with the fall of the fever, she beckoned her husband to her, and with tears begged his pardon for some long since forgotten petulance. This was the hardest trial that Carter had yet undergone. To have her plead for his forgiveness was a reproach that he could hardly bear with self-possession. He must not confess--no such relief was there for his burdened spirit--but he sank on his knees in miserable penitence.

"Oh! forgive me," he said. "I am not half good enough for you. I am not worthy of your love. You must pray for me, my darling."

For the time she was his religion: his loving, chastening, though not all-seeing deity: uplifting and purifying him, even as she was exalted and sanctified by her child.

Her sick-bed happiness was checkered by some troubles. It was hard not to stir; not to be able to help herself; not to tend the baby. When her face was washed for her by the nurse, there would be places where it was not thoroughly dried, and which she sought to wipe by rubbing against the pillow. After a few trials of this sort she forbade the nurse to touch her, and installed her husband in the duty. It was actually a comfort to him to seek to humiliate himself by these dressing-maid services; and it seemed to him that he was thereby earning forgiveness for the crime which he dared not confess. He washed her face, took her meals in, and put them out, fed her with his own hands, fanned her by the hour, and all, she thought, as no one else could.

"How gentle you are!" she said, her eyes suddenly moistening with grat.i.tude. "How nicely you wait on me! And to think that you have led a storming party! And I have seen men afraid of you! My dear, what did you ever mean by saying that you are not good enough for me? You are a hundred times better than I deserve."

Carter laid his forehead in her gently clasping hands without speaking.

"What are you going to call him?" he asked presently.

"Why, Ravenel;--didn't you know?" she answered with a smile.

She had been calling him Ravenel to herself for several days, without telling any one of it. It was a pleasure to think that she alone knew his name; that she had so much in him of an unshared, secret possession.

"Ravenel Carter," she repeated. "We can make that into Ravvie. Don't you like it?"

"I do," he answered. "It is the best name possible. It contains the name of at least one good man."

"Of two good men," she insisted. "A good husband and a good father."

Her first drive in the pony carriage was an ecstacy. By her side sat the nurse holding Ravvie, and opposite sat her husband and father.

Presently she made the Colonel and the nurse change places.

"I want my child where I can see him, and my husband where I can lean against him," she said.

"I don't come in," observed the Doctor. "I am Monsieur De Trop--Mr. No Account."

"No you are not. I want you to look at Ravvie and me."

Soon she was anxious lest the child should catch cold by riding backwards.

"No more danger one way than the other," said the Doctor. "The back of his head goes all around."

"I dare say his hair will protect him; won't it?" she asked.

"His hair is about as heavy as his whiskers," laughed the Doctor. "He is in no danger of Absalom's fate."

The nurse having pulled up a shawl in rear of the little bobbing head, Lillie was satisfied, and could turn her attention to other things. She laid her slender hand on her husband's knee, nestled against his strong shoulder and said, "Isn't it lovely--isn't the whole world beautiful!"

They had taken the nearest cut out of the city, and were pa.s.sing a suburban mansion, the front yard of which was full of orange trees and flowers. A few weeks before she would have wanted to steal the flowers; now she eagerly asked her husband to get out and beg for some. When he returned with a gorgeous bouquet she was full of grat.i.tude, exclaiming, "Oh, how lovely! Did you thank the people? I am so obliged to them. Did they see the child in the carriage?"

"Yes," said the Colonel, smiling with pleasure at her nave delight.

"The lady saw the child, and said this rose was for him."

Accordingly the rose, carefully stripped of all thorns, was put into the dimpled fist of Ravvie, who of course proceeded to suck it.

"He is smelling of it," cried Lillie, with a charming faith in the little G.o.d's precocity.

"He is trying it by his universal test--his all-sufficient crucible,"

said the Doctor. "Everything must go into that mouth. It is his only medium for acquiring knowledge at present. If it was large enough and he could reach far enough, he would investigate the nature of the solar system by means of it. It is lucky for the world that he is not sufficiently big to put the sun in his mouth. We should certainly find ourselves in darkness--not to mention that he might burn himself. My dear, I am afraid he will swallow some of the leaves," he added. "We must interfere. This is one of the emergencies when a grandfather has a right to exercise authority."

The rose was gently detached from Ravvie's fat grasp, and stuck in his little silk bonnet, his eyes following it till it disappeared.

"You see he is an eating animal," continued the Doctor. "That is pretty much all at present, and that is enough. He has no need of any more wisdom than what will enable him to demand nourishment and dispose of it; and G.o.d, in his great kindness towards infants, has not troubled him with any further revelations so far. G.o.d has provided us to do all the necessary thinking in his case. The infant is a mere swallower, digestor, and a.s.similator. He knows how to convert other substances into himself. He does it with energy, singleness of purpose, perseverance, and wonderful success. Nothing more is requisite. In eating he is performing the whole duty of man at his age. So far as he goes he is a masterpiece."

"But you are making a machine of him--an oyster," protested Lillie.

"Very like," said the Doctor. "Very like an oyster. His existence has a simplicity and unity very similar to that of the lower orders of creation. Of course I am not speaking of his possibilities. They are spiritual, grand, perhaps gigantic. If you could see the inferior face of his brain, you would be able to perceive even now the magnificent capacities of the as yet untuned instrument."

"Oh don't, papa!" implored Lillie. "You trouble me. Do they ever dissect babies?"

"Not such lively ones as this," said the Doctor, and proceeded to change the subject. "I never saw a healthier creature. I shouldn't wonder if he survived this war, which you used to say would last forty years. Perhaps he will be the man to finish it."