“That’s a beautiful mare!” screamed Cousin Lizzie to Mamma, trying to make herself heard above the wind. The Blows had come as Papa was trotting down the road, and stood with Mamma on the steps watching him galloping back.
“Full of spirits—nervous as a witch!” Cousin Sam shouted. “That’s the kind Victor likes.”
Papa tore into the driveway, Trusty yelping behind him, and flung up a welcoming hand to them just as the wind caught a little white shawl from his wife’s shoulders and flung it flapping into the mare’s face. As she swerved with a great buck, he shot into the air and fell headfirst on the road.
“God, his neck’s broken!” Sam Blow cried: and Lizzie began to scream, thin and high above the wind, like a rabbit in a trap. But no one paid any attention to her, for Margaret had gone crumpling down onto the steps.
In the last hour of Victor Campion’s birthday his son was born.
IV
One of the cherry trees in the garden was dead, and over it grew a wistaria vine, lavendar-blue, a heaven-colored tent. The long sprays of flowers fell down like a curtain, the light that came through was stained a lovely color, and there was a lavender-blue carpet of fallen petals on the grass. The bees in the wistaria made a sound like the sound in a seashell, only louder, but they never bothered the little girls. Old Toot said they wouldn’t, and they didn’t.
“Dem bees ain’ gwine bodder you, ’outen you bodder dem.”
Black Susannah brought the baby out, lying on his pillows in the big wash-basket, and left him under the wistaria where his sisters were playing. Fat little Lily tried to give him some of her bread and butter and sugar, poking it at his mouth, and he lifted his feeble voice in a mewing cry.
“Lily!” cried Maggie, outraged and important. “Naughty! You mustn’t give Baby things to eat! Was he frightened, then? Did he want his Maggie?”
She knelt by the basket smiling at little Victor; and in her old brown dress, with her thin face gentle and bright with love, she looked like the youngest shepherd, kneeling to worship the Baby who lay in a manger.
May came and knelt on the other side, putting out a finger for the tiny groping fist to close around.
“Look! He’s holding on to me! He loves me best because he knows I love him best!”
“You do not love him best!”
May affected not to hear, but said to the baby in a high small voice, copying Mamma and Aunt Priscilla:
“Diddun he know I loved him besty, besty, best? Diddun he then? He says, ‘yes,’ he knew!”
“You do not love him best!”
“I do so!”
“I love him best because I’m oldest, so now, miss! And, if you ever say I don’t, I’ll knock you down!”
Lily didn’t understand about the baby.
“Did Papa bring him from New York?” she asked; for she remembered the big parcel in the hall the day Papa came home. She and May had picked a tiny hole in the wrapping paper, feeling dreadfully guilty and as nervous as two mice, until suddenly a large eye stared out at them and they had fled in terror. It might have been the baby.
“Yo’ ma find him in de ga’den undeh a cu’ant bush,” Chloe told them; but May and Lily had looked for babies among the currant bushes every day since, and hadn’t found one, so they were beginning to doubt it. Aunt Priscilla said Dr. Chase had brought him in his bag; and Cousin Jennie Blodgett, who stayed with them while Mamma was ill, and let them dress up in her bonnet and shawl, and made them cup-custards that they didn’t like very much but ate politely, told them the stork had brought him, and showed them the stork’s picture in “Hans Andersen.”
Mamma said God had sent an angel with the baby to comfort them because Papa had gone to heaven.
There seemed to be a difference of opinion among the authorities.
Maggie was inclined to believe the Dr. Chase theory, for she had seen him go into Mamma’s room with his black bag; and later, lying awake on a tear-soaked pillow, she had first heard that little mewing cry. But, since Mamma thought it was God and an angel, she wasn’t going to tell her it was only Dr. Chase.
They thought at first little Victor would slip away like Victoria, Anna Louisa, Sophia and Adelaide. He was so tiny, so weak. Wrinkled and red as a poppy-bud, he lay wrapped in warm blankets, slept, woke to weep, and slept.
“We will both go to Victor,” said Mamma pathetically, propped among her pillows, while her tears fell into her bowl of arrowroot.
“Try just a spoonful of the wine jelly, love!” begged Cousin Jennie, with tears on her own cheeks.
“How can you ask me, Jennie?” Mamma’s eyes reproached her.
“For little Victor’s sake!”
For little Victor’s sake, she tried; and presently, somehow, the saucer was empty.
For little Victor’s sake, they would all do anything. He was the center of the household, the center of the universe. In April, a great fleet sailed down the river; further south battles were fought; presently summer added its heat to the fever that burned in the prisons; the sun set in melting pink and gold; the stars shone in the sky; but these things were unnoticed. Victor sneezed his first tiny sneeze like a kitten’s; he smiled his first smile; he was carried to church in his high-waisted, puff-sleeved christening robe that Mamma had embroidered all over with incredibly tiny flowers and leaves, and was given his father’s name. He was the man of the house, and his women
