The child, although evidently a little frightened, had so entirely lost her self-control as to be unable to restrain the bursts of laughter which now followed each other, peal upon peal, as she danced about the room in a perfect ecstacy of glee.
The mother’s face turned first pale and then red, as she followed the motions of the child with her eye, until at last, with the expression of an infuriate tigress, she sprang to seize her. The child was too quick for her, and with the agility of a monkey, darted from beneath her grasp; and still shrieking with laughter, was pursued around the room—leaping the furniture with an airiness that defied pursuit—which her strange, wild laugh yet taunted.
The woman, after exhausting herself in vain attempts at catching her, sank upon the lounge—and at once, in a whining, fretful voice, commenced to pour upon the head of the child, the most inconceivable and galling epithets. So long as this tone was held, the child held out in defiant spirit, either of sulking obstinacy, or of harsh and irritating laughter, and to every reiterated question from the angry mother—“What are you laughing at? What do you mean?”—she only clapped her hands and danced more wildly to her elfin mirth.
The mother now changed her tone of a sudden, in seeming hopelessness of carrying her point by storm. She began to sob violently, and turning with streaming eyes towards the child—
“You—you tre-treat your poor mother very cruelly to-day; I am dying to know what it is you mean; but you will not tell me! Please, dear, come and tell poor mother why you laugh, what it is you mean, and what you know about this letter?—for I am sure you know something—do tell poor mother, and she will forgive you all! Come, dear child!” and she reached out her hand as if to clasp her to her bosom.
The child, who seemed to have no intellectual comprehension of the meaning of all this, but to have taken a purely impish delight in watching the confusion and puzzle of her mother, in regard to the letter at first, and then instantly, when she flew into a rage, to have answered in a monkeyish and hysterical rage, on her own part; now at once, with equal promptness, and with the common instinct of young animals, responded to the tender inflections of the maternal voice.
Dropping her whole previous manner, she instantly sprang forward and knelt at her mother’s side. The mother did not speak for some moments, but silently caressed her, placing her hand frequently on her head, the top of which she fondly stroked with a tenderness that seemed to linger there. She drew the child’s face to hers too; and although she seemed to kiss it frequently, it might have been observed that she breathed deep and heavy exhalations upon different portions of it, which she only touched with her lips.
The effect was magical beyond any power of expression. The hard, ugly, animal lines of that child’s face, which had been writhed and curled but a few moments before, in every conceivable expression of most ignoble passions, at once subsided into the meek and suppliant confiding of that inexplicable and most tender of all the relations known to the animal world, mother and child!
“Dear, why did you not tell me what you knew about this letter before?” said the mother, in a tone as musically reproachful as if she dallied with her suckling babe. The child buried her head in her mother’s bosom, and after a silence of some time, during which her mother industriously stroked the top of her head, she looked up, and in a sly, bashful tone exclaimed—
“I did it just for fun, to try how writing love-letters went—I copied the verses from a book, in your hand, and sent them to him as yours!”