A few moments later the child, as though stirred by some prescience, began to whimper and make little struggling movements—Phoebe had died as simply as she had lived, and as secretively.
CHAPTER IV
THE DISCOVERING OF NICKY
There followed for Ishmael a time when the sordidness inseparable from a death in a civilised country made of everything a hideousness, and he was aware of a rising tide of irritability in himself that he found it difficult to keep within the decorous bounds of the subdued aspect required from a newly-made widower. Later, after the funeral was over and life at the Manor had somewhat settled down again, with the incongruous addition of a nurse, he began to feel that unkind touch of the ludicrous which accompanies the position of a young man left with a baby on his hands. He was ashamed of this feeling and tried to suppress it, but it was there nevertheless. It ceased to twinge when Vassie came down, her husband with her, to pay him a visit—partly because, he guessed, it was to see that all was being done for the baby's welfare in such a masculine house that she had come.
Vassie was resplendent, and if she did not love her husband ecstatically she was intensely proud of him. She had become an enthusiastic Radical, and talked of the rights of the people as to the manner bred. Ishmael suppressed a smile, feeling himself completely the embodiment of opposite views, and liked her husband in spite of it. He was just not quite a gentleman—a little too vivid, too clever, too emphatic; but that he would go far even the Parson believed. Ishmael was grateful to the pair for coming, and never asked Vassie why she, who held such socialistic views, had not come to stay when Phoebe was alive.
Afterwards he realised the chief debt he owed to Vassie was that she first opened his eyes to the delightfulness of his child. One evening of winter he happened to come in earlier than usual, at the sacred hour of the bath, and Vassie promptly pounced on him and made him come up to the room she had arranged according to her modern ideas—the modernity of '69—as a nursery. A fire leapt in the grate from behind a thing like a wire meat-safe that Ishmael had never seen before and that had never been considered necessary to keep him or his brothers from a fiery death. Before it was spread a creamy-hued blanket, on which stood an oval bath from whose lip a cloud of steam wavered up, the incense of this ritual. Vassie sat beside it, a towel over her knees, and sprawling upon it, its bent legs kicking in the air, its tiny fists clutching at everything and nothing with the instinctive grasp of life, lay the baby.
James Nicholas Ruan—so called after his uncle and the Parson—was a little over three months old, just the age when a baby begins to be attractive even to a male observer.
Ishmael watched him as Vassie skilfully dipped and dried him, turning him about on her lap to dust the powder into the interstices of his tiny person, and, far from resenting this as an indignity, he seemed to think it all a huge joke. Yet the jollity of him, his sudden smiles and his clutchings and wavings, all seemed addressed to himself alone—part of some life he alone knew, some vision he alone could see. As he was soaped and patted, and powdered and turned, there was always the air about him of a being really supremely independent of everyone; although his body seemed so helpless one got the impression that his soul was thoroughly aloof, untouched. When he laughed at the efforts of the grown-ups to please him it was a sublime condescension, that was all. When something failed to please him he was recalled to the things of this world and set up a loud wail, which filled Ishmael with anxiety, though Vassie and the nurse remained unaccountably calm. The baby evidently was of their opinion, because he left off wailing with the suddenness with which he had begun, and finally was tucked into his cradle and fell soundly asleep, one tiny hand flung palm upwards upon the pillow by his head after the manner of babies from time immemorial.
Ishmael, though he had first held aloof and then been terrified when Vassie insisted on his taking the fragile little body in his arms, had yet felt a thrill go through him when he did so. It was not possible for a man to have the feeling for the land that he had and not both crave for a child and feel a deep-rooted emotion at its possession. Yet it was more than that, he told himself, when he felt the warm little body utterly dependent on him. He had taken him up before often enough, but never in the intimacy of this evening, which held the quality of a shrine.
He showed nothing of what he felt, but that evening, after Vassie and her ever-talking husband had settled themselves in the parlour, he went up again to the nursery and told the nurse she could go downstairs for a little while. Then he crossed over to the cot and, drawing back the curtain, looked down at the little morsel lying asleep in it. This was his son, this small rosy thing, his son that would one day walk his land beside him and would eventually take it over as his own. This was flesh of his flesh as no wife could ever be, and soul of his soul as well.