Gretchen: A Novel

by Mary Jane Holmes

Taking her on his lap and kissing her rosy cheeks, he began to narrate to his grandmother all that had been done, and told her that Mr. St. Claire had said that the woman was French.

"And if so," he continued, "baby must be French, too, though she does not look a bit like her mother, who is very dark and not—well, not at all like you or Mrs. St. Claire."

Then he told of the trunk which the baggage-master had taken to the park, and of what it contained.

"The woman's clothes were marked 'N.B.'" he said, "and some of the baby's—such a funny name. Mr. St. Claire said it was French, and pronounced 'Jerreen,' though it is spelled 'Jerrine.'"

"That is the name on the child's things in the bag," Mrs. Crawford said.

"Of course it is baby's, then," Harold replied; "but I shall call her Jerry for short, even if it is a boy's name, and so, my little lady, I christen you Jerry;" and kissing the forehead, the eyes, the nose, and the chin, he marked the shape of the cross upon the face upturned to his, and named his baby "Jerry," and when he called her that she laughed and nodded as if the sound were not new to her. She was a beautiful child, with complexion as pure as wax, and eyes which might have borrowed their color from the blue lakes of Italy, or from the skies of England when they are at their brightest.

"I wish she could talk to me. I suppose she must speak French," he said, as he was trying in vain to make her understand him. "Don't you know a word I say?" he asked her, and her reply was what sounded to him like "We, we."

"That's English," he cried, delighted with her progress, but when he spoke to her again, her answer was "Yah, yah," which seemed to him so nonsensical that after a few attempts to make her say "yes," and to teach her what it meant, he gave up his lesson for the remainder of the day and talked to her by signs and gestures which she seemed to understand.

Whatever he did she did, and he saw her more than once imitating his grandmother's motions as well as his own, to the life.

Late in the afternoon Mr. St. Claire came to the cottage, curious to see the child, who, at sight of him, retreated behind Harold, and then peered shyly up at him, with a look in her great blue eyes which puzzled him on the instant, as one is frequently puzzled with a likeness to something or somebody he tries in vain to recall. In this instance it was hardly the eyes themselves, but rather the way they looked at him, and the sweep of the long lashes, together with a firm shutting together of the lips, which struck Mr. St. Claire as familiar, and when, with a swift movement of her little hand, she swept the mass of golden hair back from her forehead, he would have sworn that he had seen that trick a thousand times, and yet he could not place it. That she was the child of the dead woman he believed, and as the mother was French, so also was she. He had once passed two years in France, and was master of the language; so he spoke to her in French, but she made no reply, until he said to her: