“My chick, we really must go and play with Wilfred and James!”
“Oh, Mother! Ten minutes more! They’re quite happy. They don’t really want us, you know. Oh, Mother, just another ten minutes! Because, Mother—darling, dear Mother—in the inside of the very inside of your heart, you would rather read to me, wouldn’t you?”
“What? Read to a whipper-snip like you, when the poor little twins—I never heard of such a thing!” And Mother’s knees would give way suddenly and Laura, slipping to the floor, would be tickled till she squealed. And when she had had her ten minutes, full measure, Mother would recollect herself guiltily, and hurrying upstairs, be very, very kind to Wilfred and to James. But Laura, in dutiful imitation, would yet be glancing, ever and again, from Noah’s Ark and pat-ball, to watch the beloved face, and wait for a stray smile; and when it came her way, would whisper to herself in fierce, delicious exultation——
“But she’s my mother most!”
You protest? You think such jealousy, such ecstasy, unchildlike and fantastic? And if not impossible in such a baby, at least improbable and rather distressing? And you don’t believe children are like that? I can’t help it. You ought to be right, but you are not. Laura was ‘like that.’ An unpleasant child? If you please. But her mother never thought so. And if some premature instinct made her, young as she was, so proud and jealous of her place in her mother’s heart, the instinct was, at least, a sure one. For though many are to like her, and some to love, never in all her life will she be first fiddle with any one again.
Moreover her golden age was coming to its end. Not suddenly, with a hushed house and red eyelids and the definite, numbing ritual of carriages and handkerchiefs and hothouse flowers: not in a black day that would have yawned like a gulf between Then and Now, a cleavage, definitely unbridgeable, on whose further brink Mother would move ever more mistily, shrouded in hopeless glamour; but imperceptibly, tenuously, in an ever lengthening spider-thread of hope deferred.
For Mother had only gone away to get better! She was ill, because she had begun to wear little white shawls, although it was summer-time, and sat still so much, and did not pour away Nurse’s medicines any more. So Laura saved her sugar at tea-time for her mother, to take the taste away. There was a day when Mother cried. Laura had never known till then that mothers could cry. She held her head and tried to be grown-up and comforting, but she was secretly terrified, yet a little important too, because Mother would not let any one be called, but lay quiet against Laura’s shoulder, just as Laura had so often lain against hers. The next day, or week, or months, she could never remember how long it was, her lazy mother had breakfast in bed, and she was to be sent away to stay with Gran’papa Valentine. The twins were to be left behind. “Too young to understand,” said Nurse significantly to the parlour-maid. Understand what? She coaxed, implored, stormed, for an explanation. Why shouldn’t she stay, if the twins did? She had not been naughty—she had been good, good! Mother wanted her. Mother couldn’t want the twins without her. Mother always wanted her. And she wanted her mother—she wanted her mother——
She fought like a little wild cat while they dressed her, in a fit of passionate anger that shook her small body as wind shakes a bush, and that only her mother had ever been able to control. There was a wildness about it that startled even the stolid nurse, who could not guess at the foreboding, the desperation that underlay the paroxysm, and was, of course, as incomprehensible to the child herself as his own despair to the dog who watches you pack your trunk.
It was the friendly parlour-maid who came to the rescue with her cheerful——
“Now, Miss Laura, you won’t be let say good-bye to your ma if you can’t be good!”