Jeannie sat down again in the rocking-chair.
“Oh, but the responsibility!” she sighed. “We all share it. I believe so much of the happiness of one’s life depends on the happiness of one’s babyhood. The first glimpses of consciousness are what make the temperament.”
“He has a good chance, then.”
“It is a crying shame if he doesn’t,” said Jeannie. “It is the easiest thing in the world to make that child crow with delight. If you laugh, he laughs. Oh, we mustn’t talk so loud. We’ve awoke him.”
Jeannie slipped softly to the side of the cot and began crooning a little baby-song:
“Black grow the blackberries,
Cherries are red,
But golden are the curls
That grow on baby’s head.
“All the ladies in the land
Come to see the show,
But baby went on sleeping
And baby did not know.”
Jack watched her intently, and a sudden thrill of passion throbbed in him. There was something in the sight of the girl bending over the baby and crooning in that low voice that stirred all his nature. Her exquisite fitness there, her absorbing joy in the young thing was a flash of revelation to him. Her dormant potential motherhood suddenly became divine and real to him. Every vein in his body seemed to have sent all the blood it contained in one great bound to his heart, and it stood still on the top of its beat. A long-drawn breath hung suspended in his lungs, and it was as if every particle of the warm, brisk air of the nursery was bubbling intoxicating fire. The next moment all that was within him bowed and fell and worshipped.
That moment of incorporeal existence must have been short, for Jeannie had not got to the end of the second silly little verse when he was aware of himself again, like a man who has come round after an anæsthetic, feeling as if he had travelled swiftly from very far away. But he did not come back to his normal consciousness; the world he awoke to was different, and Jeannie filled it.
Almost simultaneously the nurse came softly in, and Jeannie got up quietly.