Chapter III My First and Second
Sometimes a breath floats by me,
An odor from Dreamland sent,
Which makes the ghost seem nigh me
Of a something that came and went.
—James Russell Lowell.
I lunched with Tom and Jack the next day. It was an appalling function, driving me to the very verge of hysteria and destroying forever my belief in my dream theory. My first husband sat in his new high chair, pounding the table with a spoon, as if calling the meeting to order, while my second husband sat gazing at the baby with a fatuous smile on his handsome face that testified to his inability to rise to the situation. Behind the baby’s chair stood his nurse, evidently prepared to defend her prerogatives as the protector of the child’s health. Lurking in the background was the phlegmatic butler, no better pleased than the nurse at this experiment of Tom’s.
“That’s it! Go it, Horatio!” cried Tom, nervously. “Hit the table again, my boy. That’s what it’s for.”
“I thought that your idea, Tom, was to teach Horatio how to behave in public,” I suggested, playfully, still calm in the belief that I had been deceived in the nursery by a dream.
“But as you said, Clare,” argued Tom, “he’s very young. It’s really not bad form, you know, for a baby to pound a table with a spoon. Is it, nurse?”
“I think not, sir,” answered the nurse, pushing the high chair back to its place. The baby had kicked it away from the table while Tom was speaking.
“Isn’t he—isn’t he rather—ah—nervous, my dear?” asked Tom, glancing at me with paternal solicitude. “It’s quite normal, this—ah—tendency to bang things—and kick?”
“Perhaps he’s hungry, Tom,” I suggested, lightly. My spirits were rising. In the presence of the baby, whose appearance and manner were those of a healthy child something under a year in age, the absurdity of my recent incipient nightmare was so evident that I blushed at the recollection of my nonsensical panic. Reincarnation? Bah! what silly rubbish we do get from the far East!
“Of course he’s hungry,” assented Tom, glancing down at a bird the butler had put before him. “With your permission, nurse, I’ll give the youngster a square meal. How would a bit of the breast from this partridge do? It’s very tender and digestible—”
“How absurd, Tom!” I cried. “He’d choke!”
“He’s choking as it is!” exclaimed Tom, half rising from his chair. “Pat him on the back, nurse!”
“He’s all right, sir,” said the nurse, calmly as Horatio’s cheeks lost their sudden flush and he opened his pretty little eyes again. “You needn’t worry, Mr. Minturn. He’s in perfect health, sir.”
“Aren’t they queer?” exclaimed Tom, glancing at me, laughingly.
“Sir?” cried the nurse in pained amazement.
“I meant babies, nurse,” explained Tom, soothingly, motioning to the disaffected butler to refill his wine-glass. “But look here, Clare; you and I are eating and drinking heartily, but poor little Horatio is still the hungry victim of a dietary debate. What is he to have?—milk?”
The baby leaned forward in his chair, seized his empty silver bowl with a chubby hand, and hurled it to the floor.
“Horatio!” Tom’s voice was stern as he scowled at the mischievous youngster. I could not refrain from laughing aloud.
“Is that bad form, Tom, for a little baby?” I asked, mischievously.
“No,” answered Tom, repentantly. “I don’t blame you at all, Horatio. Your prejudice, my boy, against an empty bowl when you are both hungry and thirsty is not unnatural. Give him some bread and milk, nurse, or he’ll overturn the table. What a wonderful study it is, Clare, to watch a baby develop! Do you know, Horatio is actually able to grasp a syllogism!”
“Or a milk-bowl,” I added.
“Don’t interrupt my scientific train of thought,” protested Tom, gazing musingly at the child. “I saw his mind at work just now. ‘I’m hungry,’ thought Horatio. ‘There’s my silver bowl. The bowl is empty. There are bread and milk in the house. If I throw the empty bowl to the floor, my nurse will return it to me filled with food. So here goes! Q.E.D.’ Clever baby, isn’t he?”
It was at that moment I met the baby’s eyes, and a sharp chill ran down my back and found its way to my finger-tips. There was an expression in the child’s troubled gaze so eloquent that its meaning flashed upon me at once. If the baby had cried aloud, “What an amazing fool that man is!” I could not have been more sure than I was of the thought that had passed through his infantile mind.
“What’s the matter, Clare?” I heard Tom asking me, apprehensively. “Do you feel faint?”
“Not at all,” I hastened to say, turning my eyes from my first to my second husband. The former was eating bread and milk—reluctantly, it seemed to me—from a spoon manipulated by his nurse. That it was really Jack who was sitting there in a high chair, doomed to swallow baby food while he craved partridge and Burgundy was a conviction that had come to me for a fleeting moment, to be followed by a return to conventional common sense and a renewed satisfaction in my environment. Tom sat opposite me, smiling contentedly, while between us, at a side of the table, the baby perfunctorily absorbed a simple but nutritious diet, deftly presented to his tiny mouth by his attentive nurse. It was a charming scene of domestic bliss at that moment, and I realized clearly how much I had to lose by giving way, even intermittently, to the wretched hallucinations that my overwrought nerves begot.
“Just look at him, Clare!” exclaimed Tom, presently. “I tell you it’s an interesting study. It’s elevating and enlightening, my dear. To an evolutionist there’s a world of meaning in that baby’s enthusiasm for bread and milk. Here he sits at the table covered with gastronomic luxuries and actually rejoices in the simplest kind of food. You see, Clare, how well the difference between Horatio and myself in regard to diet illustrates Spencer’s definition of evolution as a continuous change from indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to definite, coherent heterogeneity through successive differentiations and integrations. Great Scott, nurse! What’s the matter with him? He’s choking again!”
“It’s nothing, sir,” remarked the nurse, quietly, as the baby recovered from a fit of coughing and resumed his meal. “But, if you’ll pardon the remark, sir, I think that he’s much better off in the nursery.”
It was not a tactful suggestion, and I knew that Tom felt hurt; but he maintained his self-control and made no further comment, merely glancing at me with a smile in his eyes. I realized, with a vague uneasiness, that open and active hostilities between baby’s nurse and Tom were among the possibilities of the near future, and it was not a pleasing thought.
“What does he top off with?” asked Tom, presently, grinning at Horatio, who had emptied his bowl and had stuck a fist into his rosebud mouth, as if still hungry. “Have you got an ice for him, James?”
The butler stood motionless, gazing fixedly at the nurse.
“What queer ideas you have, Tom!” I cried, to break the strain of an uncomfortable situation. “An ice would give him an awful pain.”
“Perhaps he’d like a Welsh rabbit, then?” growled Tom, crossly.
The baby seized a spoon and rapped gleefully on the table.
“Isn’t he cunning!” I cried, delightedly. “He’s happy now, isn’t he? I am inclined to think, Tom, that he’d rather have a nap than a rabbit.”
“Not on your life!” came a deep, gruff voice from nowhere in particular. I looked at Tom in amazement, thinking that he had playfully disguised his tones and was poking fun at me and the baby. But Tom’s expression of wonderment was as genuine as my own, while the nurse was gazing over her shoulder at the butler, who was eying us all in a bewildered way. Tom glanced at the nurse.
“Leave the room, James,” he said hotly. “I’ll see you later in the smoking-room.” Then, to the nurse: “Remove the baby, will you, please? Thank you for letting us have him for an hour.”
As soon as we were alone in the dining-room, Tom leaned toward me and said: “Shall I discharge James, my dear? He was most infernally impudent, to put it mildly.”
But the frightful certainty had come to me that the butler was innocent of any wrong-doing. Absurd as the bald statement of fact seemed to be, my first husband was the guilty man, and, struggle as I might against the conviction, I knew it.
“Give him another chance, Tom.” I managed to say, my voice unsteady and my tongue parched. “James was not quite himself, I imagine. I’m not well, Tom. Give me a swallow of cognac, will you, please?”
Tom, alarmed at my voice and face, hastily handed me a stimulant, and presently I felt my courage and my color coming back to me.