“Fred, tell me, how do you bear your life, not believing, or trying to believe, that God knows best, and orders all for our good?”
“Do you believe that, Alice?” he asked.
“I try,” she said; “oh! indeed I try hard.”
“That’s right,” he said gently; “it is the best comfort you can find.”
“But it does seem unjust,” she said. “Look at that little Louis, so strong and active, and then think of”—
“Well, well,” he answered, “Freddy has his own pleasures. I don’t know a happier boy.”
“That is true,” she said, with a smile through her tears; “he is very happy!” and then she sank again into her own thoughts, and forgot to notice that her question remained unanswered.
In a few moments they stopped at their own door; and Alice, flying upstairs to what was still called the nursery, was greeted by a rapturous shout, and clasped by two little arms that seemed as if they would never unclose to let her go again. And Alice, sitting on the floor while she removed her bonnet, had no mist of tears to dim her brown eyes, which were so much like Freddy’s own; she was the bright, merry playfellow, full of life and fun, and brimming over with wonderful and delightful songs and stories of all descriptions. Dr. Richards, too, brought only sunshine into Freddy’s nursery; he took off his pessimism with his overcoat, or left it bottled in alcohol on a shelf in his office; so there was really little wonder that Freddy was happy.
Who can tell just how it happened? Was it mere blind chance, or the outcome of a taint in the blood, due to some unknown ancestral sin? Whatever the cause, Alice Richards had been, as the phrase goes, “unlucky with her children.” The eldest had died in babyhood: and the boy, with his great, pathetic brown eyes and laughing, rosy mouth, would never walk; his little spine was all bent and distorted, and his lower limbs quite useless. He had suffered much already in his short four years of life, would suffer far more as he grew older. Dr. Richards knew this,—knew it so keenly that that other knowledge, that by scarce a possibility could Freddy live to be a man, was almost a relief by contrast. And the child was his father’s idol. Well might Alice ask how he could bear his life.
Yet there was plenty of merriment at that little dinner-table. Freddy was carried down between his father and John, the doctor’s “man.” There were rings on the sides of Freddy’s chair through which poles could be passed, and there were screws to tighten them, so that the transit need cause no jar to the little frame. John went first, not backward, for fear of a misstep, but with the poles over his shoulders; and the doctor came behind, keeping his end of the poles level with John’s. Freddy wore a little scarlet wrapper, embroidered with gay flowers, and concealing the poor shrunken limbs, from which any eye but his mother’s would have instinctively turned away. He had a small pale face, with a broad forehead set in rings of brown hair, large brown eyes, and vividly red lips. Sometimes, too, there was a bright spot of color on either cheek, and then one would almost have called him a beautiful child; but that sort of beauty was not a welcome sight to Dr. Richards.