Part 3

But the intelligent infant had given himself up to an unpremeditated luxury of grief, and Elizabeth found herself in the unexpected position of a suppliant consoler. She begged her child to stop crying; she kissed the black and blue spot on his forehead and soothed him with soft murmurs and gentle caresses, and when finally he had sobbed himself to sleep in her arms, she bestowed the moist rosy little bundle on the couch, covering him warmly; then, with a parting pat and cuddle, sat down to her belated work on the spare-room curtains, feeling that she had been very severe indeed with her youngest child.

Richard was still rosily asleep and Elizabeth was hurriedly attaching the ruffles to one of the improvised curtains when Celia, with two buttons off her frock in the back and a broad streak of stove-blacking across her honest red face, announced "one nize lady."

Elizabeth sprang to her feet in sudden consternation at sight of the small square of white pasteboard with which Celia prefaced her announcement.

Mrs. J. Mortimer Van Duser was a distant relative of Samuel Brewster's, and it pleased her to be kind, in an imposing and majestic manner--entirely suited to her own imposing and majestic person--to his "little family," as she invariably termed it. Elizabeth had assured her husband on more than one occasion that she did not feel the least embarrassment in that august presence; but her heart still flew to her mouth at sight of the entirely correct equipage from Beacon Street, and she always found herself drawing a long breath of unconfessed relief when it rolled away after one of Mrs. Van Duser's infrequent visits.

When presently Mrs. Van Duser, large, bland and encased in broadcloth and sables, entered, she bestowed a gracious kiss upon Elizabeth's cheek, and seated herself in a straight-backed chair with the effect of a magistrate about to administer justice.

"I trust you received the little brochure I mailed you last week," was her initial remark, accompanied by a searching glance at Elizabeth's agitated face. "I refer to 'Anthropological investigations on one thousand children, white and coloured.' I looked it over most carefully and marked the passages I deemed particularly helpful and suggestive."

"Thank you, Mrs. Van Duser," faltered Elizabeth, "I did get the book, and I--was intending to write to you to-day to thank you for it."

"Have you read it?" inquired Mrs. Van Duser pointedly.

"I--looked it over, and--it appeared very----"

Mrs. Van Duser's steadfast gaze appeared to demand the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Elizabeth's eyes fell before it. "It was very good of you to--to think of me," she said.

"I think of you not infrequently," was the lady's gracious rejoinder, "and more particularly of your children, who are, of course, distantly related to myself. I cannot urge too strongly, or too often, the need of a scientific study of infancy and childhood as causally related to the proper functional development of your offspring."

"I am sure it is most kind of you," murmured Elizabeth, striving to kindle an appreciative glow. "But--I have so little time."

"You have all the time there is, my dear Elizabeth," chanted Mrs. Van Duser, in her justly celebrated platform tone; "and you should strive above all things to distinguish what is significant and essential from what is trivial and accidental." Her voice sank to a heart-searching contralto, as she added, "I have observed that you have time to sew trimming on your child's frock. What is trimming as compared with the demands of the springing intellect?"

Elizabeth blushed guiltily and murmured something unintelligible.

"Did you study the passages marked in 'Nascent Stages and their Significance,' which I sent you the week before?--particularly those on 'The feelings and their expression'?" asked Mrs. Van Duser, after a weighty pause.

Elizabeth drew a deep breath. "I--found it not altogether easy to understand," she said guilefully.

"For an untrained mind--no," agreed Mrs. Van Duser blandly. "I feared as much, and I have come this morning because I wished to go over with you somewhat exhaustively the points mentioned by the author, in order to compare them with your own more practical experience. I am about to present a paper before the Ontological Club on 'The Emotive States as factors in the education of The Child,' which I feel sure should prove invaluable to all thoughtful parents. I had intended," she added, with a mordant emphasis on the past tense of the verb, "to dedicate the brochure to you upon publication."

At this point in the conversation, and before Elizabeth had time to express her blended contrition, gratitude and appreciation, two hurriedly slammed doors and the clatter of small feet in the passage announced the return of the children from school.

Mrs. Van Duser's severe expression relaxed perceptibly. "How very fortunate," she observed. "I was hoping for an opportunity of studying certain phenomena at first hand. You know, my dear, I so seldom see children."

Elizabeth's tender heart was touched by the unconscious wistfulness in the older woman's eyes. But she sighed at sight of the gilt-edged memorandum book in the hands of her guest. She was familiar with the exhaustive methods employed by Mrs. Van Duser in the pursuit of knowledge.

"You will not, I hope, interrupt any normal procedure," that lady was saying in a sprightly tone, calculated to restore the depressed spirits of the younger matron to their usual level. "I should like--if I may--to observe the children at their luncheon, since the sense stimuli connected with the taking of food is exceedingly instructive as related to the cosmic consciousness."

"I shall be very happy to have you lunch with us," faltered Elizabeth, her thoughts busying themselves with a futile review of the contents of her larder. Then the door flew open and Carroll and Doris dashed in, breathless and eager, to precipitate their small persons upon their mother's lap.

"I was a _nawful_ good girl in kindergarten, mother!" announced Doris, dancing with impatience, "an' I didn't get run over, or anythin'. When can I go to the store an' spend all my money, mother? _When?_ Can I go _now_?"

"Doris, dear; don't you see Mrs. Van Duser? and Carroll----"

But the boy had already advanced politely, and was standing before the magisterial presence with a funny little air of resignation to the inevitable which forced a smile to his mother's serious lips.

"Can you tell me, my boy, why you experience pleasure at the sight of your mother?" demanded Mrs. Van Duser, gazing searchingly at the child through her gold-mounted lorgnettes.

"I--like my mother, better'n any body else," replied the boy, with a worried pucker of his smooth forehead.

"_Like?_" echoed his inquisitor, looking up from a hurriedly pencilled note. "And what, pray, do you mean by 'like'?"

"I mean I--love her, because she's the bestest person I know."

"Is it because she gives you food when you are hungry that you love your parent? Or can you give me another reason?" continued Mrs. Van Duser, ignoring the comprehensive statement advanced by the boy.

Carroll glanced doubtfully after his mother, as she hastily withdrew to look after the luncheon table.

"I--don't know," he stammered. "I guess I like her when I'm hungry just the same."

"C., aged eight years, unable to enumerate reasons for fondness of parent," wrote Mrs. Van Duser, with every appearance of satisfaction. "The reasoning faculties apparently dormant at this age."

"What are you most afraid of?" was her next question, accompanied by an ingratiating smile, calculated to disarm youthful timidity.

At this moment Richard, who had been peacefully asleep on the sofa, awoke, and becoming slowly aware of the majestic presence at his side, set up a doleful cry.

Whereupon Mrs. Van Duser noted neatly that "an unexpected visual impression evidently caused anxiety, without any assignable reason, in the normal infant R."

And when the normal infant scrambled down from the couch and retreated kitchenward under the careful supervision of his older brother, she observed further that "the dawning of the paternal instinct of protection was observable in the child C."

VI

The conduct of the children at the luncheon table was marked by such unexampled propriety of manner that Mrs. Van Duser was visibly disappointed. She could hardly have been expected to know that Elizabeth had resorted to shameless bribery in advance of the meal with a shining coin in each small pocket, "to be spent exactly as you choose," and that Richard was taking his food in the kitchen under the lax supervision of the Norwegian maid. Still the occasion was not wholly barren of material for a trained psychologist, as Mrs. Van Duser was pleased to term herself.

"The psychophysical processes," she observed learnedly, "should be closely observed by the wise guardian, in order to properly graft desired complications on native reactions."

"I am afraid I do not altogether understand," murmured Elizabeth, secretly grateful that her guest's preoccupation of mind rendered her oblivious to the blunders of Celia, as she plodded heavily about the table. "But I should like to ask you, Mrs. Van Duser, if you approve of--whipping children?"

Mrs. Van Duser dropped her pencil and focussed her piercing regard upon the wife of her distant relative.

"Decidedly not, my dear Elizabeth," she enunciated in her deepest contralto. "Corporal punishment brutalises the child by implying that a rational being is, or may be, on the level of the animal. It can be only too evident that if one treats a child like an animal, it will behave like an animal. I will send you an excellent pamphlet on the subject, which you will do well to study. In the meantime you should remember----"

Mrs. Van Duser stopped short, raised her lorgnette and stared hard at Doris. That young person had suddenly left her chair and was whispering in her mother's ear, in the peculiar, sibilant whisper of an eager child.

"I'm through of my dinner, mother," was wafted distinctly to the attentive ears of the guest. "An' I want to go an' buy daddy's 'fumery this minute. You said I might, mother; you said I might.--Yes; but _when_ is she going home, mother? _when?_"

Far from evincing displeasure the great lady displayed the sincerest gratification. "A most interesting example of ideation," she observed. "My dear Elizabeth, please explain the child's emotions, if you are aware of them. I fail to observe anger or dislike, or even--as might well be expected--awe. Why do you wish me to go home?" she inquired directly of Doris, who had retreated behind her mother's chair in pouting dismay.

Elizabeth experienced a hysterical desire to laugh; but she instantly repressed it. "You should explain to Mrs. Van Duser, Doris, that you spilled father's bay-rum this morning, and that mother said you must buy him a fresh bottle with your own money," she said soberly.

"I want to go _now_," whispered the child. "You said I might, mother; you _promised_!"

"Excellent!" exclaimed Mrs. Van Duser, writing rapidly in her book. "You really ought, my dear Elizabeth, to preserve a careful memoranda of these interesting mental movements of your offspring," she observed convincingly. "Every properly constructed parent should endeavour to so assist science. However crudely and unscientifically expressed, such records would prove of incalculable value to the student."

She turned to Doris with a complete change of manner. It was no longer the ontological Mrs. Van Duser, but the great lady from Beacon Street who spoke. "You have been very rude indeed, my child," she said sternly; "and little girls should never be rude; but I will take you with me in the carriage to purchase the toilet article referred to, and send you home afterwards, if your mother will permit."

As Elizabeth watched the flushed and triumphant Doris, departing in state in the Van Duser carriage, the jingling contents of her bank in her small pocket, she was conscious of a bewildering sense of failure. She had sincerely tried to impress a lesson of obedience and a respect for the rights of others upon the mind of her child, and, lo! the culprit was enjoying a long-wished-for treat!

The arrival of Miss Evelyn Tripp, in a hansom cab with a small much-belabelled trunk on top, successfully diverted her mind from this and other ethical problems. Miss Tripp's recent misfortunes had as yet left no traces on her slight, elegant personality. She entered quite in her old fashion, amid a subdued rustle of soft silken garments, a flutter of plumes and a gracious odour of violets.

"My dear!" she exclaimed, clasping and kissing Elizabeth, quite in the latest mode. "How well you are looking! Indeed, you are younger and far, far prettier than the day you were married! How vividly I remember that day, and I am sure you do! How I did work to have everything pass off as it should, and so many persons have told me since that it was really the sweetest wedding they ever saw! It hardly seems possible that it was so long ago. What! You don't tell me that great boy is Carroll! Come here and let Aunty Evelyn kiss you, dear. And Doris? She was such a dear, tiny thing when I saw her last. Oh, that is the baby; you say! No; Elizabeth--not that great child! Fancy! I declare I feel like a Methuselah when I look at my friend's children. I hate to grow old--really old; don't you know."

Miss Tripp paused to remove her plumed hat, while Elizabeth hastened to assure her friend that she really hadn't changed in the least. This was quite true, since Miss Tripp was of that somewhat thin and colourless type of American womanhood upon which the passing years appear to leave little trace.

"Oh, my dear!" sighed Miss Tripp, "I am changed; everything has changed with me, I assure you. Mother and I are obliged to live off air, exactly like wee little church mice. And I am simply worn to a fringe trying to economise and manage. I never was extravagant; you know that, dear, but now----. Well; I don't know what will become of us unless something happens."

"Something will happen, dear," said Elizabeth, more than ever warm-heartedly determined to make her friend as happy as herself. "Now I'm going to leave you to lie down and rest a little before dinner," she added guilefully, as she bethought herself of the various culinary operations already in progress under the unthinking control of Celia. "A friend of Sam's--a Mr. Hickey, chances to be dining here to-night; I hope you won't mind, dear. It--just happened so."

Miss Tripp turned to gaze searchingly at her friend. "You can't mean George Hickey--a civil engineer?" she asked.

"Why, yes; do you know him?"

"My dear; it's the oddest thing; but lately I seem to meet that man wherever I go. He is a friend of the Gerald Doolittles in Dorchester--you know who I mean--and spends a Sunday there occasionally; and when I was visiting Leticia Marston last fall, lo and behold! Mr. Hickey turned up there for the week end! I used to know him years ago when we were both children."

"Sam is associated with Mr. Hickey in a professional way," observed Elizabeth, with a careful indifference of manner. "He dines with us once in a while." She paused to listen, with her head on one side, while a look of alarm stole over her attentive face.

"What's the matter, dear?" inquired the unaccustomed Miss Tripp. "Do you hear anything?"

"No, Evelyn; I don't, and the silence is suspicious. I think I'll run down stairs and see what the boys are doing. Try and rest, dear, till I call you." And Elizabeth accomplished a hasty exit by way of the back stairs and the kitchen, where she was in time to frustrate the intelligent Celia as she was about putting the French peas over to boil an hour before dinner time. From thence she sought the sitting-room, where she had left her two sons amicably engaged in constructing a tall and wobbly tower out of building blocks. Carroll had vanished, and her amazed and indignant eyes lighted upon the person of her youngest son kneeling in a chair before the forbidden aquarium, over which he leaned in a state of rapturous oblivion of past experiences, his plump hands buried in the sand at the bottom of the tank, while the alarmed gold fish flashed in and out between the dripping sleeves of his freshly-ironed blouse.

"Richard Brewster!" she cried. Then wrath and a disheartening sense of the futility of unassisted moral suasion quite swept her off her feet. She seized the child and laying him across her lap in time-honoured fashion, handed down from a remote ancestry, spanked him with a speed and thoroughness not to be surpassed by Grandmother Carroll in her most energetic mood.

VII

Elizabeth was fluttering anxiously about the table in her small dining-room when her husband entered in his usual breezy fashion and laid a bunch of fragrant carnations before her.

"A finishing touch for your table, Betty," he said; and added with lover-like enthusiasm, "My! how pretty you're looking to-night!"

"I shouldn't think I'd look pretty after the day I've put in," she told him as she arranged the flowers in water. "Sam, Mrs. Van Duser was here to luncheon."

"No?"

"She came to ask me if I had read 'Anthropological Investigations on one thousand children, white and colored,' and I hadn't even looked at it."

"So you flatly flunked the exam; poor Betty!"

"Not exactly, Sam; I--told her I didn't quite--understand the subject."

"Ah, Machiavellian Betty! Did she tumble?"

"Oh, Sam! what a way to speak of Mrs. Van Duser. I was the one to tumble, as you call it. She graciously picked me up. Of course Doris was naughty, and Celia spilled cocoa on the table-cloth and passed everything on the wrong side. Then after Mrs. Van Duser went, Evelyn came.--She's up-stairs now, dressing for dinner. And--after that--I don't know what you'll think of me, Sam; but I--was nervous or something I think, and I--whipped Richard."

"You--what?"

"After all I've said about Marian Stanford, too! I just hate myself for doing it. But I had dressed that child twice all clean, and when I came down to see about dinner and found him playing in the aquarium _again_, Sam, dripping water all over the floor, and with his clothes soaked to the skin, I just seemed to lose all control of myself. I snatched the poor darling up and--and--spanked him as hard as I could. The strange part of it is that I--seemed to enjoy doing it."

Her doleful air of abject contrition was too much for Sam. He roared with irrepressible laughter. "Forgive me, Betty," he entreated; "but really, you know----"

"I understand now exactly why people whip their children," went on Elizabeth, descending into abysmal depths of humility and grovelling there with visible satisfaction. "I gave way to uncontrollable rage just because I knew I must take the trouble to dress the poor little darling again, and I couldn't think for the minute what flannels to put on him. So I revenged myself, in just a common, spiteful, vulgar way. No, Sam; you needn't try to make light of what I did. Nothing can excuse it!"

At that instant the misused infant, dragging a train of iron cars behind him, hove into view.

"Chu-chu-chu!" he droned. "Det out the way! Here tomes the 'spress train!" His cherubic countenance was serene and rosy; he beamed impartially upon his parents as he scuffed across the floor.

"Well," said his father, endeavouring (unsuccessfully) to view the matter in a serious light, "I fail to observe any signs of violent abuse or tokens of abject fear about the young person; I guess you didn't----"

"Hush, Sam! I hope he's forgotten it--the darling! Do you love mother, baby?"

"I'm a dreat big engine-man!" vociferated the infant, submitting cheerfully to his mother's kisses, "an' I love 'oo more'n a sousand million! Chu-chu! Toot-toot! Ding-dong!"

"How about the other young Brewsters?" inquired their father, with a twinkle of mock solicitude in his blue eyes. "Have they been pursuing the undeviating paths of rectitude, or have you--er--been moved to----"

"Sam, if you make fun of me about--what I did to Richard, I----" her voice broke, and she hid her eyes on his shoulder. "I thought," she said, "that it was my duty to tell you."

"I'm not making fun of you, little woman. Perish the thought!" and he kissed her convincingly. "I don't know what I should--or shouldn't do--if I had to cope with the young miscreants single-handed all day. Where is Doris, by the way?"

She told him about the broken bay-rum bottle, and described the scene at the luncheon table. "I was so ashamed," she concluded; "but what could I do?"

"Let me laugh again, Betty!" he begged. "That's too much, you know. Fancy our small Doris having the--er--audacity to stand up and audibly hint that Mrs. J. Mortimer Van Duser's room would be more acceptable than her company. I wish I'd been there to see and hear."

"Mrs. Van Duser said that it was a most interesting example of ideation--whatever that is," said his Elizabeth rather proudly. "She's writing a paper for the Ontological Club, and she's going to put all three of the children in."

"As what--Concrete examples of the genus _enfant terrible_?" he inquired cautiously.

Elizabeth was surveying her table with satisfied eyes. She did not appear to have heard his question.

"It may be hard work to take care of all that silver and glass we had for wedding presents, Sam," she said thoughtfully; "but on occasions it is useful."

"Yes; if the foreigner in the kitchen didn't too often turn our dancing into mourning by smashing it."

"I'm not going to let Celia wash one of these dishes," she told him firmly.

"Who is going to wash them?" he asked resignedly.

"I am--after Mr. Hickey's gone and Evelyn's in bed."

"'That means me,'" he quoted irreverently. "I'm a thoroughly house-broken husband, and you can depend upon me, Betty, every shot."

She flashed him a grateful smile. "Of course I know that, Sam," was all she said; but her eyes were eloquent of love and happy trust. "What do you think, Sam," she added irrelevantly; "Evelyn has known Mr. Hickey a long time already."

"So much the better for Hickey!"

"Yes; that's what I thought. You see, Sam, if--if anything should happen, it wouldn't be all our doing; and so in a way, Sam, I actually felt relieved when Evelyn said that she had met Mr. Hickey before. It is really an awful responsibility."

"What? to ask Hickey to dinner? He didn't seem to mind it."

"Don't be flippant, Sam," she said with dignity. "You know perfectly well what I mean. If Mr. Hickey _should_ fall in love with Evelyn--and I will say that she never looked more attractive than she does now--and if she should----"

He interrupted her with a hasty kiss. "I've got to go up and dress," he reminded her. "Don't you worry, Betty; if he should, and she should, then they both would; and all you and I would be required to do would be to buy them a clock that wouldn't go, or a dozen _pâté de foies gras_ implements--only let it be something useful. By the way, I see you've set the table for the children. Do you think that is--er--exactly the part of wisdom?"

"No, Sam; I do not. But I had to make it up to Richard someway, so I promised to let him have dinner with us, and Evelyn quite insisted upon the others. She thinks Carroll simply perfect, and she says Doris is the most fascinating child she ever saw."

"Well," he acquiesced, "they're the biggest and best half of the Brewster family, when you come to think of it, and Hickey always wants to see them when he comes."

Half an hour later Elizabeth was putting the finishing touches to her toilet, while the children, immaculate and shining, hovered admiringly about the dressing-table.

"Now remember, Carroll, you mustn't get to quarrelling with Doris about anything."

"I won't, mother; I promise."

"We're going to have ice-cream for dessert, and----"