In brief, little Samuel, at the age of quarter before three, had noted with a curious eye that Matilda, the brown hen, had one egg that differed from others. It was hard, white, shiny; it had nothing of the soft, pale-brown, pleasant egg-color the other eggs had. One day he took it out of the nest to consider it. He put it on the barn floor. There was a hammer near at hand. Samuel liked hammers. With the hammer, he struck the china egg once, twice, thrice. Nothing happened. Curious! He then put one of the pleasant egg-colored eggs on the floor. He struck it but once, and his whole world dissolved into a filthy chaos not to be borne. Overwhelmed with remorse and bad-egg juice, he fled in terror to his mother. He wept so long and earnestly that she considered him punished enough.
As for the spectacles, there was an evil deed for you! His grandmother had set her spectacles on the tall mantel-shelf, just under the picture of sorrowful flowers made from the hair of young and old. Most of the flowers were black, or white, or brownish drab. Samuel did not like the picture, but the spectacles had always interested him. He dragged a chair to the mantel, and by heroic climbing, reached them. He seldom broke things, his motions being accurate, and he came down to earth with the spectacles unharmed. What to do with them? And there was grandmother’s lace cap, too. How about Ajax, the sheep-dog? Not without difficulty, but without mishap, Samuel was forcing the glasses upon Ajax, when help came to the good dog, and in the person of the master of the house. At the sight of the woe-begone spectacled animal, and the lace cap, no longer what it once was, Samuel’s father had laughed so loud and long that both parents agreed that punishment would be inconsistency itself.
But now, with little Samuel sitting defiant on his work of art, a picture of insubordination, punishment could no longer be delayed. The mother put her arms around her husband’s neck. “Oh, remember how tiny he is, Abel,” she wailed. “I shall stay in the kitchen till it’s done.” She ran into the cold, dark kitchen, where she knelt in anguish, an ear against the keyhole.
The father, alone with his offspring, was agitated too. His hands were so strong! Surely, in a better world than this, a better way could be found. How was he to know how much he ought to hurt his own child? He groaned as he picked up the boy, slipped down those absurd and shapeless breeches, and with firm hand directed toward the infirm, time-honored spot, administered chastisement. A shriek of surprise and anger, a burst of sobs, then silence. The woman at the keyhole could bear the shriek and the sobs, but not the silence. She bounded into the room, and clasped the insubordinate one to her heart. In truth, even the dog Ajax was disturbed by that homely scene of punishment; the hair on his shoulders stiffened, and he made an evil noise in the back of his throat. Of all those present, the cat Pharaoh alone remained unmoved, detached as the Pyramids themselves, in a stony indifference to human woe. Pharaoh, though in a sense connected with the origin of the trouble, washed his paws of it, and kept his calm.
Silent tears ran down Samuel’s cheeks, from which, as the mother saw with terror, the dazzling rosy color had now quite faded. The Nancy in her died; only the Annunziata was left. Oh, what if, what if?—But her alarm was needless. Samuel had the proud blood of survivors in his veins. Not for nothing was he a Vermonter born. Welsh seers and Norman craftsmen and Scottish covenanters had stubbornly watched his cradle; his fair substance had come all the way to Vermont from old Rome via Bunker Hill. The father brought from the adjoining bedroom the child’s woolly nightgown, ugly and comfortable and orange-dyed. He warmed it before the blaze. As the parents undressed the culprit, they noted, with an almost guilty surprise, how much smaller he seemed now that his blue tunic was off. The father held the boy in his arms before the fire, while the mother, kneeling, wiped away the soundless tears welling continually. No word was spoken. At last the father carried the dusky orange cocoon into the bedroom, and set it in its crib, and covered it gently. The mother, worn out by the artist’s birthday, crept away to bed, leaving her husband to console himself with his violins, if he could.
That hour with the violins was always very dear to Abel. As he busied his hands with their beautiful bodies, his soul lost itself in happy reveries in which Samuel played no small part. Annunziata also shone, in rich, incredible rainbow robings from foreign looms, and with the wealth of foreign continents on her neck and fingers; from the first moment when he saw her, he had been mad about her touch of foreignness; he had seen it as a sure amulet against the encroaching hated drabness of New England milltown life. It was Annunziata who had set his spirit free. He always called her Annunziata in those golden visions; never Nancy. And sometimes he thought it odd, indeed, that in his violin hours, when wife and child were away, safe in a dreamland of their own, he felt and cherished their existences even more deeply than when they were at his side.
But to-night he had no joy in craftsmanship; he stared helplessly at the scrolled neck-piece in his hand. “The little shaver!” he muttered. “He took it like a soldier. The little shaver! Damned if I’ll do it again, in a hurry.” Then he smiled that sudden whimsical smile of his. “But perhaps he’ll be damned if I don’t! Queer world.” He was startled to find that for the first time in his life, his violins had no interest for him; he put away his veneers and glue-pot. He could not wait any longer; he must see for himself whether those silent tears had ceased.
Samuel in his crib lay very quiet, eyes wide open, tears still coursing into the collar of his orange nightgown. The perplexed father decided to meet the situation with jocularity. “Say, laddie, aren’t you going to shut those peepers?” And the child, as before, answered with what was uppermost in his mind, “None done, papa!”
A long time the parents lay in their great square bed, saying nothing, but each guessing at the other’s thought. Annunziata was trying to be Nancy, as Vermont expected, and Abel was seeking to be Providence for his all. At last he stretched out a cautious hand toward the crib, to find that the child also was awake. Without more ado, he lifted Samuel into the big bed, and there the parents cherished the child between them, until the small body relaxed in the pleasant warmth. Next morning, when the carver went to his work, Samuel was still sleeping, as rosy and peaceful as if he had never known either insubordination or punishment.