“Well, I’ll tell you what. You run up and eat your porridge and come down as soon as you’re ready; I shall make haste, too, and we shall get a good half-hour in the garden before I go out.”
Up again went Guy with hasty, willing feet.
“Nurse” (breathless hurry and importance), “I must make haste with my porridge. Father wants me directly to help him in the garden.”
Nurse winked hard at the fact that the porridge was gobbled. The happy little boy trotted off to one of the greatest treats he knew, and that day passed without calamity.
“I can see it will answer, and life will be another thing without Guy’s passions; but do you think, Edward, it’s right to give the child pleasures when he’s naughty—in fact, to put a premium upon naughtiness, for it amounts to that?”
“You’re not quite right there. The child does not know he is naughty; the emotions of ‘naughtiness’ are there; he is in a physical tumult, but wilfulness has not set in; he does not yet mean to be naughty, and all is gained if we avert the set of the will towards wrong doing. He has not had time to recognise that he is naughty, and his thoughts are changed so suddenly that he is not in the least aware of what was going on in him before. The new thing comes to him as naturally and graciously as do all the joys of the childish day. The question of desert does not occur.”
For a week all went well. Nurse was on the alert, was quick to note the ruddy storm-signal in the fair little face; never failed to despatch him instantly, and with a quiet unconscious manner, on some errand to father or mother; nay, she improved on her instructions; when father and mother were out of the way, she herself invented some pleasant errand to cook about the pudding for dinner; to get fresh water for Dickie, or to see if Rover had had his breakfast. Nurse was really clever in inventing expedients, in hitting instantly on something to be done novel and amusing enough to fill the child’s fancy. A mistake in this direction would, experience told her, be fatal; propose what was stale, and not only would Guy decline to give up the immediate gratification of a passionate outbreak—for it is a gratification, that must be borne in mind—but he would begin to look suspiciously on the “something else” which so often came in the way of this gratification.
Security has its own risks. A morning came when Nurse was not on the alert. Baby was teething and fractious, Nurse was overdone, and the nursery was not a cheerful place. Guy, very sensitive to the moral atmosphere about him, got, in Nurse’s phrase, out of sorts. He relieved himself by drumming on the table with a couple of ninepins, just as Nurse was getting baby off after a wakeful night.