More Bed-Time Stories

by Louise Chandler Moulton

As I said, Mrs. Grant was still in a state of mind not to be satisfied without her husband's admiration. She would not have fallen short of his ideal of her for any thing; she would, at least, seem all that he desired her to be. She was quick enough to understand that he would think less of her if he saw her unwilling to keep the baby, so she smiled on him with what cheerfulness she could summon, and treated the matter as settled.

Thus the child, which was nobody's, grew up in the Grant household. She had been six months old, apparently, when she came there, and by midwinter she began to totter round on her little feet, and to say short words.

But no one ever taught her to say papa or mamma, those lovely first words of childhood. What had nobody's child to do with such names?

It might have seemed strange to most people that Julia Grant did not love this little thing, so thrown upon her mercy in its tender babyhood. But, despite theories, all women are not fond of children. Every woman is, perhaps, fond, in a blind, instinctive way, of her own; but the more heavenly love which takes all children in its arms and blesses them is not by any means universal.

The most powerful trait in Mrs. Grant's character was a silent, unobtrusive selfishness. The whole world revolved, to her thought, about her. Rains fell, dews dropped earthward, winds blew and suns shone for Julia Grant. She had consented with secret reluctance to keep the child, and from that moment a root of bitterness and jealousy had sprung up in her heart. If her husband had thought much of her comfort, she used to say to herself, he would not have wanted to put all this care upon her.

She was quite ready, therefore, to be jealous, and to feel as if something was taken from her every time he tossed the little one in his arms, or called it a pet name; and after a while—not at once, for he was naturally the most unsuspicious of men—some instinct revealed this to him, and made him, lover of peace as he was, very chary of manifesting in his wife's presence any especial tenderness for the little stranger within his gates.

But summer and winter came and went, and with their sun and shade nobody's child grew on toward girlhood. She had a great deal of beauty, of a shadowy, delicate kind. She was seldom ill, but she was a very frail-looking child. The quick, changeful color in her cheeks, the depth of feeling in her dark eyes, the tremulous curves about her mouth, all indicated an organization of extreme sensitiveness; a nature to which love would be as the very breath of life, but which was too shrinking and timid ever to put forth any claims for it, or make any advances.

For ten years she was the only little one in the Grant household. Their affairs prospered, they grew richer every year, as if nobody's child had brought a blessing with her; but it was a constant source of bitterness to Mrs. Grant that they were laying up for strangers, or perhaps for this waif, whom no one else claimed, and who seemed likely to remain in their house for ever, like some noiseless, unwelcome shadow.

But at last, when the child had been for ten years her unwelcome housemate, to Mrs. Grant herself was given a little baby girl, God's messenger of love, as I think every child must be, to every mother. Never had baby a warmer welcome. The preparations made for her were worthy of a little queen, and she opened her eyes on a world of love and of summer.

But perhaps no one, not even her mother, lavished upon her such a passion of devotion as the poor little waif, nobody's child, who had never in her life before had any one whom she dared to caress. Perhaps her devotion to baby touched Mrs. Grant's heart; at any rate she saw that she could trust the little one to her without fear, and so nobody's child became a self-constituted but most faithful nurse and body-guard to this other child, whom loving hearts were so proud and glad to own.