“Well,” said Tom, “I’ve set out to do my best and I’d like to give her a fair start in every way, even in her name, though there mayn’t be anything in it, but I’d like to do it. I suppose it’s time I should be having some object in life. I’ve never had one before, and I’ve been a useless fellow. Well, I’ve got one now by chance, and I’m bound to hold on to it and do what I can. I want her to have what chances I can give her on her side, and it came into my mind that Felicia——”
He stopped to consult the honeysuckle, as it were, and Jenny Rutherford broke in:
“Yes,” she said, “Felicia is the name for her, and it’s a beautiful thought——”
“Oh!” interrupted Tom, bestirring himself uneasily, “it’s a natural thought. She needs all she can get to balance the trouble she began life with. Most other little chaps begin it in a livelier way—in a way that’s more natural, born into a home, and all that. It’s a desolate business that she should have no one but a clumsy fellow like me to pick her up, and that there should be a shadow of—of trouble and pain and death over her from the first. Good Lord!” with a sudden movement of his big arm, “let’s sweep it away if we can.”
The thought so stirred him, that he turned quite around as he sat.
“Look here,” he said, “that’s what I was aiming at when I set my mind on having her things frilled up and ornamented. I want them to be what they might have been if she had been born of a woman who was happy and well cared for and—and loved—as if she had been thought of and looked forward to and provided for in a—in a tender way—as they say young mothers do such things: you know how that is; I don’t, perhaps, I’ve only thought of it sometimes——” his voice suddenly dropping.
But he had thought of it often, in his lonely back room one winter a few years ago, when it had drifted to him that his brother De Courcy was the father of a son.
Mrs. Rutherford leaned forward in her seat, tears rose in her eyes, and she put her hand impulsively on his shoulder.
“Oh!” she cried, “you are a good man. You’re a good man, and if she lives, she will tell you so and love you with all her heart. I will see to the little clothes just as if they were Nellie’s own” (Nellie being the baby, or more properly speaking, the last baby, as there were others in the household). “And if there is anything I can ever do for the little thing, let me do it for her poor young mother’s sake.”
Tom thanked her gratefully.