“Stop that noise this minute, you naughty boy! Don’t you see your poor little brother is going to sleep?” in a loud whisper. The noise was redoubled, and assisted by kicks on chair-rungs and table-legs. Sleep vanished and baby broke into a piteous wail. This was too much; the Nurse laid down the child, seized the young culprit, chair and all, carried him to the furthest corner, and, desiring him not to move till she gave him leave, set him down with a vigorous shaking. There were days when Guy would stand this style of treatment cheerfully, but this was not one. Before Harriet had even noted the danger signals, the storm had broken out. For half-an-hour the nursery was a scene of frantic uproar, baby assisting, and even little Flo. Half-an-hour is nothing to speak of; in pleasant chat, over an amusing book, the thirty minutes fly like five; but half-an-hour in struggle with a raging child is a day and a night in length. Mr. and Mrs. Belmont were out, so Harriet had it all to herself, and it was contrary to orders that she should attempt to place the child in confinement; solitude and locked doors involved risks that the parents would, rightly, allow no one but themselves to run. At last the tempest subsided, spent, apparently, by its own force.
A child cannot bear estrangement, disapproval; he must needs live in the light of a countenance smiling upon him. His passion over, Guy set himself laboriously to be good, keeping watch out of the corner of his eye to see how Nurse took it. She was too much vexed to respond in any way, even by a smile. But her heart was touched; and though, by-and-by, when Mrs. Belmont came in, she did say—“Master Guy has been in one of his worst tempers again, ma’am: screaming for better than half-an-hour”—yet she did not tell her tale with the empressement necessary to show what a very bad half-hour they had had. His mother looked with grave reproof at the delinquent, but she was not proof against his coaxing ways.
After dinner she remarked to her husband, “You will be sorry to hear that Guy has had one of his worst bouts again. Nurse said he screamed steadily for more than half-an-hour.”
“What did you do?”
“I was out at the time, doing some shopping. But when I came back, after letting him know how grieved I was, I did as you say, changed his thoughts and did my best to give him a happy day.”
“How did you let him know you were grieved?”
“I looked at him in a way he quite understood, and you should have seen the deliciously coaxing, half-ashamed look he shot up at me. What eyes he has!”
“Yes, the little monkey! and no doubt he measured their effect on his mother; you must allow me to say that my theory certainly is not to give him a happy day after an outbreak of this sort.”
“Why, I thought your whole plan was to change his thoughts, to keep him so well occupied with pleasant things that he does not dwell on what agitated him.”
“Yes, but did you not tell me the passion was over when you found him?”