“I can’t know if you don’t tell me,” he said, sulkily, stung by the germ of truth in her words. “Why don’t you let Davie come up to me?—you ought to have sent him up as soon as you knew I was here.”
Rosina threw open the door again with a jerk, and leaned over the kitchen stairs. “Davie,” she bawled, “stop that dreadful noise, and come up at once, do you hear? Your father is dying to see you.”
The painter bit his lips. An irrelevant memory rang in his brain with a Russian accent. “I do not like this word, dying.” The face of Eleanor Wyndwood swam up on the cabbage-scented air. The patter of Davie’s feet was heard, toddling up the stairs.
The child stumbled shyly into the room, the tin whistle clasped distrustfully to his breast—a pathetic, anæmic little figure with flaxen curls and big gray eyes that easily brimmed over with tears. He wore serge knickerbockers, and the rest of him aped the sailor, picturesquely enough. The child paused near the door, clutching his mother’s skirt.
“This way, my little man,” said Matthew, smiling encouragingly from the green sofa that sprawled across the centre of the room. “Come to your daddy.”
“Go to the gentleman, dear,” said Rosina, with withering sarcasm.
But the boy hung back, clutching her skirt and his whistle tighter.
“Don’t be afraid, Davie. I won’t take your whistle from you—don’t you remember, I gave it you?” He held up a piece of Rosina’s home-made cake. Thus adjured and enticed, Davie moved cautiously forward, waves of returning recollection agitating the wee wan face.
A lump swelled in the father’s throat as he surveyed the weakling. The poor child suddenly appeared to him the scape-goat for an unholy union. Life had taught him from what fount of sacred love children should spring.
While he was hoisting the child on his knee, responsive to that strong appeal of feeble creatures, but with no specific stirrings of paternity, Davie wistfully held up his disengaged hand for the cake, which he grabbed as soon as it came within range of his little arm. His mouth was too preoccupied with cake to return his father’s kiss, to which he submitted passively.