A little later he resumed the subject. “I will speak to him; there seems to be no other way.”
When this proposition concerning me was broached to him, grandfather acceded to it without either enthusiasm or hostility, with an indifference that wounded me.
“I’d just as soon. It’s the same to me whether I take my walk alone or with some one.” (Naturally!) “Children ought to live out of doors. Study does no good. No more do medicines.”
Father no doubt had an interview with him at which I was not present, and the affair was decided. How would he act toward his new companion? He always treated my brothers and sisters and me, even the two youngest, like reasonable persons, though a little more interesting than others, lending to our remarks as much attention as to those of grown persons; but we had an impression that he couldn’t always tell us apart, and that he would cheerfully have dispensed with us all, which seemed to us an affront.
Why had father told mother that he was not quite satisfied? On the morning of my first walk with grandfather he was waiting for us at the door on our return. He inspected me, looking me over from head to foot, then, as if resolved, he took my hand and placed it in grandfather’s with a certain solemnity—as a reigning king might do, I thought.
“Here is my son,” he said; “I entrust him to you; he holds the future of our house.”
Grandfather received the precious trust indifferently, replying in a slightly sarcastic tone, thus at once putting the incident upon an every-day footing:
“Don’t worry, Michel; no one is going to rob you of him.”
I smiled, standing between the two. How could grandfather rob my father of me?
The smallest details of that walk are present with me now. And rightly, so great was its importance in my life. But everything is important when one is little. After a rain the drenched fields seem to draw nearer to one another, and the plants reflect the sunlight from all their pendant drops. My eyes, purged by illness, must have thus shone.